Daily misery

Just finished this book by Scott Rosenberg. Many software developers will be able to relate their working experiences with Chandler, I am sure.

Anyway, here’s a notable quote from the book.

“When people ask me when something will be finished, I respond, ‘It will be ready sooner if you help.’” - Richard Stallman.

Boy can I relate to that.

Just when I thought I couldn’t be more ashamed with the recent conducts of my country, Malaysia, they came out with another brilliant idea to safe keep the nation’s peace and harmony.

After all, it is the nation’s peace and harmony we are talking about here. So as all good citizens should and would prepare to do, hereby I am submitting my registration application.

Name: Alvin Woon
DOB: March 31st 1982
State: Sarawak
Town: Sri Aman
Website URL: http://www.alvinwoon.com/blog
Describe your website (in less than 100 words): I write a wide variety of topics here in Daily Misery. Sometimes it’s about my life, my work or the cute blondie I just met a couple hours ago. Once in a blue moon, I like to write about politics, especially when it concerns my beloved country, Malaysia. I may write critical and negative stuff, you know, just to keep the check and balance going. But I won’t hesitate to commend my country when it rightly deserves it, although I find such occasions hard to come by lately. Most of the times, I would detail my blog posts with proper linguistic explanations and constructive point of views, but it’s just me playing politics there. Almost all the time, all I want to do is to ask my bigot multi-racial government to suck my balls and sod off treats everyone equally and that they are the ones who are killing the peace and harmony they so publicly try to protect.

And I’m really really sorry for taking more than 100 words here.

I hereby agree that if any of my blog entries causes harm to Malaysia’s peace and harmony, I shall be detained under the ISA act, without any access to councils or lawyers. I am also aware that torture is a major part of an ISA detainee’s daily life. : Not checked

update: Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi “has shot down a proposal to order local bloggers to register with the government, saying existing laws are enough to deter Internet users from posting malicious content”.

Linus’ Law according to Eric S. Raymond.

One of my friend once told me depending on situation, that is not always the case. Ever heard of the phrase ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’? :)

“Good design is not just about being pleasing to the eye, but about working within the confines of the materials and technology at hand and making compromises where need be. Few designers (especially ‘print’ designers working with web developers) appreciate being told that their work requires revisions because of a technical impossibility, and that’ll never change. But the mark of a mature designer is not just one who’s willing to compromise and adapt when rendering their work in the real world, but one who’s responsible enough to police themselves.”

-Todd Dominey

I stumbled across a weird IE 7 bug while working on a map project.

#test{
z-index:1;
}
#test{
z-index:0;
}

gecko browsers -> z-index = 0
IE 7 -> z-index=1

I’d tried putting all kind of stronger selectors, even !important and still IE 7 won’t overwrite the precedent z-index value.

to update Safari to the latest webkit. The fact that it fixes a whole lot of javascript bugs is alone a strong enough reason to do so, for me at least :).

Update: Never mind, it was my code that was making the havoc. But I still stand by my plea though. Here’s another one that I found while working on the same map project. Apparently long is a reserved keyword in the current Safari’s JS engine. It’s not in the latest webkit.

But it’s probably not a well-known bug (some might call it a feature) unless you’re working on some kind of geo-data project where long normally refers to longitude.

For all the art fans in SF, California, you might want to go to this expo.

Father and Daughter - a short animated film by Michael Dudok De Wit. Moving and sad.

Heartache alert.

I have been using this little site to help me debug mobile user interface. It’s nothing but a simple iframe with html, but it works, especially if you just want to test UI in different mobile screens resolution.

The res. options are based on dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide.

It’s about 100 meters from where my apartment building is. It came as quite a shock since this is a relatively low crime area.

I’m fine so don’t worry. :)

I can’t stop laughing.

A couple went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. They had been fighting over the last couple of days but hey, everyone needs to eat. A minor fight broke out again before the dishes arrived. Exact reason remained unknown, or too petty to be bothered with. It wasn’t exactly the most pleasant meal.

Towards the end of the meal, the girl broke off her fortune cookie with little interest. She then smiled, probably after reading the words of faux wisdom, uncovered from within the many broken pieces of the crispy cookie.

It says:

Do not dwell on the differences with your love one…try to compromise.

She passed along the message from cupid to her boyfriend. They both exchanged smiles. They both fought for the bill. They both left with arms around waists.

I wish my arm was around her waist. But my story branched out on the last part to the dark realm where everything ends up not too well, or remains unchanged.

She returned all the things I ever gave her the next morning.

Looks like it’s time to turn on the answering machine again.

because…

• we can’t say no when THE woman proposes marriage. (yes, I know technically we can but you get my point…)
• if my wife is richer than me, I can but are not supposed to get even a tiny teenie portion of her financial asset when we get divorced. Poor Nick Lachey.
• we don’t have Victor’s Secret.
• it’s not ok for us to talk about our feelings, how terminally sad it may be.
• last but definitely not least, we are always wrong.

Of course, none of these can win in an argument with women because they carry the ultimate trump card - ‘we carry your little human inside us for 9 months and we have to push it out off our vagina and all you do is stand by the bed side with tears coming out of your sappy eyes saying ‘mygawwddd, that’s my little baby’, or not even that!’

Really, don’t even bother to try to counter that argument. You will just end up making yourself look really bad. Like really really bad.

Although you can always say ‘pregnant woman is the most beautiful thing in the world’ to score some points among them.

You know you want it. No it doesn’t make you less of a man.

Thanks to Adam Betts, you can customize the color of the famous duck. I even prepared the photoshop file for this pinky version.

Go grab it.