What The Toot! » Internet

Malaysia IS a country?

khensthoth — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:38 +0000

I can almost imagine what goes on in the minds of people who made those searches:

Hmm.. Malaysia? Vaguely familiar name. Let’s see which country it’s in..
Oh wait.. You mean to tell me Malaysia IS a country?

Seriously? 165,000,000 results for “Malaysia is in which country”?

Also note Malaysia is/is not an Islamic state

Also interesting is the Islamic state search results. 3.93 million results for “Malaysia is an Islamic state” versus 1.03 million for “Malaysia is not an Islamic state”. I have less faith in Malaysia now.

Cost and Completion Date of the Penang Second Bridge

khensthoth — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:00:47 +0000

October 10 2009 4:32 PM (16:32), BERNAMA News:

Bridge will be ready before 2013

October 10 2009 6.19 PM (18:19), TheStar News:

No, it's April 2013 and bridge is apparently spelled Bbridge.

It’s amazing how much news can change within 2 hours.

I decided to see how much the reported cost and anticipated date of completion of the Penang Second Bridge changed throughout the year, from 2003 to 2009. So I went through all the news source here and here, filtered the similar and obviously wrong ones, and plotted a beautiful graph:

Compiled from various news source from 2003 - 2009

Interestingly it was not too long ago in 2005 that Samy Vellu said the second bridge is not economically viable. Anyway, following the trends of the two graphs, we should be seeing further increase in cost and expected completion date. I shall be looking forward to April 2013 – I don’t remember the last time a Malaysian government mega-project was on-time and under-budget.

Dear The Malaysian Insider Webmaster

khensthoth — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:27:02 +0000

Dear The Malaysian Insider Webmaster,

I like your online news portal very much. You provide me with up-to-date news about Malaysia and I enjoy reading the many columnist from both sides of the political divide a lot. In fact, the commentaries and opinions are where I spent my time the most, while I usually just glance through the news headlines and click “Mark all as read” in Google Reader. The news your website provide is, on rare occasions, ever-so-slightly-tiny-weeny biased, which is already a vast improvement over the traditional mainstream media in Malaysia.

However, for the longest time the RSS feed for your news items has been… dysfunctional, to say the least. Take a look for yourself:

Repeated news item. Screenshot from my Google Reader

The arrows point to repeated news items. This happens, at the very least, on a daily basis. Sometimes a headline would be repeated up to three times.

I don’t know the cause of it nor if you knew this problem existed. If you didn’t, this is me informing you. Suffice to say that if you were doing that to increase your pageviews to your website and by extension the online advertisements, it is failing – because this problem is absolutely annoying. The repeated news item in your RSS Feed only encourages me to nonchalantly glance through the feed, and makes me more “trigger-happy” with the “Mark all as read” button than I already am.

So, dear webmaster of The Malaysian Insider, please fix this. Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
WhatTheToot!

What is easier to understand than Google Wave?

khensthoth — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:24:16 +0000

I was very excited when Google Wave was announced, so excited, in fact I grabbed the 1 hour 20 minutes video of the Google I/O conference from YouTube. Partly because Google Wave has such an ambitious goal of replacing email and online communication, it is quite complicated – Google needs to design the protocol and the software, as if each is not complicated enough on its own.

Google Wave is so complicated that many video has surfaced online to explain what it is, and a lot of them is from Google itself. One of the better, funnier non-Google ones is this:

Yet, there are still a lot of people who find Google Wave hard to understand – which is whyI had a good laugh when I found this parody website. Well, apparently a lot of wisdom can be gained from such a simple site. For example:

Men are easier to understand than Google Wave

Women - definitely not so.

Google Wave pwned Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

Considering Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is not without it’s fair share of online criticism and ridicule, one should perhaps look at one of his ambitious, noble, still-unimplemented initiative – the Healthcare Reform.

Healthcare Reform? Too hard to understand.

It’s interesting to note similar amount and percentage of people find Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and his Healthcare Reform Bill easier to understand than Google Wave. I suspect these two are the similar group of people, that is to say, people who actually understood the Healthcare Reform Bills more than Google Wave are the people who find it easier to understand why Obama won awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

… coz’ I certainly do not understand.

How do people find our site?

khensthoth — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:00:16 +0000

After a long hiatus, this series is back. This post, however, will just be a short one, serving as a teaser of things to come.

Seriously F-up

Let’s see where this visitor came from then:

IP blurred for his sake.

The Verizon hostname and the browser language flag should be a dead give away – that is to say, the visitor is an Amerifag (to use his/her choice of language), more commonly known as Americunt (Yes, it’s an Internet lingo). The IP address indicated that the visitor is from a small town in north-eastern United States.

It’s a little ironic that the keyword search landed on a category page for racism, as if his God was trying to lead him there. That should teach him/her a lesson or two about respect, xenophobia, and homosexuality.

More importantly though, I didn’t know one could find this site on the first page of Google Images search results using the keywords “allah is fag”. What that American visitor was trying to find, in Google Images no less, about THAT though, continues to baffle me.

Astrology to gain legal recognition in Kelantan.

Hean — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:37:59 +0000

Kelantan plans to table a bill which will give legal recognition to Astrology. It has been reported by The Star that this bill on Astrology will be used to determine the direction of the Kaabah.

Astrology to gain legal recognition.

“The move by the Kelantan government can be seen as a hit in the face to the modern understanding of Astronomy, or even the use of GPS,” said WhatTheToot Advisor on Scientific Affair, Toot.

However, there are others who celebrate the move by the Kelantan government. “It is time Astrology is given the recognition that it deserves. The day the bill is passed is the day of celebration for all Astrology activist!” said WhatTheToot Advisor on Supposed-Crazy-Beliefs, Toot.

It should be noted that WhatTheToot advisors are really the same person. Toot suffers from multi-personality disorder which is a disease which causes many people to say one thing, but act another way.

- Reported by WhatTheToot Mythology Believer, Toot.

¥1.5 million = RM750 million

khensthoth — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:35:31 +0000

I read the Metro North news of TheStar everyday to find local news regarding Penang. Last week I saw something of interest.

Oriental-style city proposed

Amidst the good news, however, I found something really really depressing:

¥1.5 million = RM750 million

I know the value of the Ringgit is not much, and in fact is gradually decreasing, but I didn’t know it’s at such a fast pace. Apparently, ¥1 is equivalent to RM500 now. At this rate, we are going the way of Zimbabwe.

Seriously though, what is the point of having an editor in a newspaper if such mistake are not apparent to them. Luckily the Chinese daily got the figures right.

When Hell Freezes over in Melbourne, Literally

khensthoth — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 19:22:21 +0000

I just upgraded my operating system to the latest beta of Ubuntu Karmic Koala to test it and have fun with it. Overall, it has turned out to be a fine release so far. As part of my upgrade however, I thought I would change the way I use computer and access applications, which is why I install Gnome Do and enabled Docky. Here’s how my current desktop look like:

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta with Docky

Anyway, one of the docklets included in Gnome Do is the weather docklet, which allows me to see the current temperature and a six day forecast of the temperature and the weather conditions with just a click. So, there I was checking the forecast when I was extremely shocked to see this:

Yes, it's that cold.

If that’s not immediately clear to you, have a look at Docky alone.

Doomsday on Friday

Yes, it’s going to be -5572°C in Melbourne this Friday. Even colder than theoretical absolute zero, in fact exactly -5298.15°C colder. Hell is freezing over Melbourne literally. Come to think of it, how is a low of 5°C and a high of 5572°C even be possible?

On second thought, I decided to refresh the weather data to see if there is any glitch:

Now THAT'S cold

Immediately the temperature dropped 29°C. For other days, Melbourne will be expected to enjoy weather in commonly experienced in Antarctica.

On the bright side, at least it’s going to be “just” -1747°C on Friday. Yay.

P.S.: The only graphic editing done was cropping the pictures.
P.P.S: Still, how is a high of -1747°C and a low of -26°C even comprehensible?

I CAN HAS WEBSITE?

khensthoth — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:52:37 +0000

Well, in a truly Malaysia Boleh fashion, Malaysian are greeted today by the news that Rosmah Mansor now has a website. The Malaysian Insider even graced it by putting a screenshot of the website:

Rosmah Website Up

Immediately, in the back of my mind, this keep popping up for some reason:

Cheezburger lolcat

Oh wait, something seems to be wrong. Nothing a little GIMP can’t fix.

Website Lol-person

Ah. Much better.

The typical Malaysian humour kicks off in the comment section:

written by Chris Chong, August 04, 2009
Malaysians can now get up close and personal with Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor, the Prime Minister’s wife”

Why would anyone want to do that?

written by Newchief, August 04, 2009
what a joker this is. she should instead be like mahathir’s wife who tries to be out of the lime-light when her husband was on the pm throne. instead, this rosmah wasted no time to publicise her self IN FULL … what a waist we have….HA…HA…HA.

More importantly though, who is she to use the resources from the Prime Minister’s Office? Why should taxpayer pay for her website bandwidth and server cost?

Only in Malaysia…

Dear DAP Penang Webmaster

khensthoth — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:09:19 +0000

Dear DAP Penang Webmaster,

Firstly, as one of your strong state you are governing as at today, your website is, in my honest opinion, totally inedequate. Apart from a few photographs, a few YouTube videos, and some online polls, it is essentially only a blog, with a lot of the content originating from blogs of other Penang DAP leaders. Honestly, if you want to be a blog aggregator, you would be better off utilising a “planet” software like this, this or this. In fact, you should implement a Planet Penang DAP to aggregate all the blogs from the different politician together in one place.

Anyway, I digress too much. This post is not about the content on your website per se. If you want inspiration on what to do with your state website, just refer to the many websites of political parties around the world. I do, however, want to talk about my freedom. You see, this is what I see on your website:

Firefox 3.0.12 on Ubuntu 9.04

Being in the minority who chose to use a totally free (both gratis and libre) browser (Firefox 3) and operating system (Ubuntu 9.04), I thought it might just be my particular system. Thus, I decided to use a more mainstream browser in a more mainstream operating system to see what I presume you want your visitors to see when they visit your website:

Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP3

Everything seems to be in order, which is why I decide to see how well other browsers in Windows XP would do. To my disappointment, this is what I see:

Firefox 2.0.0.20 on Windows XP SP3

I then decided to conduct a series of test, and the following result is as such:

Firefox 3.5.1 on Ubuntu 9.04

Safari Browser on iPhone OS 2.0

Opera 9.64 on Ubuntu 9.04

If you have not noticed a pattern, let me inform you. You see, both Internet Explorer and Opera browsers are proprietary software, which means they do not release their source code to the general public for inspection. They both use proprietary layout engine. Safari browser is proprietary as well, but they use the open source WebKit layout engine. Similarly, open source browser Firefox uses open source layout engine Gecko. I consider myself a open source movement supporter, and a proponent of open source software. While I do not have a deep hatred for proprietary softwares and companies, I do avoid them whenever I can.

It dawns upon me that a party who champions social freedom and equal rights requires me to use a proprietary browser and a proprietary layout engine just to view the website. This seems like a huge irony to me. Thus, DAP Penang Webmaster, please fix your website!

Sincerely,
WhatTheToot!

Great Nokia Advertisement

khensthoth — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:01:31 +0000

I pride myself on having a 19″ LCD screen with a resolution of 1440 x 900, Of course, in this age of information overload and 22″ and above screen, that screen size is not adequate, which is why I value my screen real estate very much. Imagine my horror when I visit Gizmodo (Australia) and see this:

F*ucking Nokia N97 Advertisement

What the hell were they thinking? From my browser user agent, they are perfectly capable of knowing my operating system, my browser, and my screen resolution. Why the hell then would they want me to imagine viewing Gizmodo content through the small screen Nokia N97 when I am sitting in front of my computer with my huge ass screen?

To make matters worse, I decided to do some calculation:

Making matter clearer

The actual Gizmodo content has been reduced to a meagre resolution of 930 x 578. Great! In fact, taking into account the various title bar, status bar, menu bar and scroll bar, the advertisement effectively take away a cumulative 726930 pixels from me. That’s 56.1% of my screen resolution!

I have to say this is a great marketing idea though, since it creates brand and product awareness. Now I am fully aware of how much I hate Nokia N97 and aware that Nokia has sucky advertisement. Oh, and Gizmodo Australia? Shame on you. No wonder I prefer the US version.

It’s 2 a.m. …

khensthoth — Sun, 31 May 2009 07:59:16 +0000

What else? Of course it's time for anal sex.

I found the above image while wasting my time surfing in Digg. It seriously made me laugh out loud. Some of the comments are equally as funny:

That cracked me up.
Who has anal sex on schedule, really? – GamerGrllz

there are fish involved as well? - Cowboychrissy

I confess..that’s my graffiti. What can I say? It’s what I do @ 2:00 AM… - angrykeyboarder

On another issue, I still have no idea what the billboard is trying to advertise.

Great Nokia Advertisement

Study Smart, Not Hard: Counting Skill Not Needed

Hean — Sun, 10 May 2009 09:13:11 +0000

With exam coming in a few week’s time, and shit load of assignments due before the study break, I started to wonder what some people’s been harping about, study smart, not study hard. Anybody who knows me would probably agree that I’m a lazy bum who stays in front of the computer too much. So I google “what does it mean by study smart?” and clicked in the first link, to www.studysmartnothard.com.

A quick scroll through the website, (yeah, I’m too lazy to even read all those good advice) and I stumbled upon this:

So may I add, Myth # 6 (or 7, whichever you prefer), you DON’T need to know how to count to make a website, to write a book. Certainly, you don’t need to know how to count to tell other people how to Study Smart, Not Hard!

Of Racist Comments

khensthoth — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:31:54 +0000

This has been in my bookmark folder collecting dust. How a innocent blog post about a YouTube video turned into a racist commentary is beyond me, but take a look at some of the comments.

Click to see larger image

Unfortunately, those are just excerpts. There are even more racist content in those comments. The worst, however, has got to be this:

Click to see larger image

That was reproduced in whole, and is seriously fucked up. A Google search of the so called secret society revealed that there are at least 148 other instances of this comment appearing, as of today. Worst, all the results seem to show that the content are exactly the same, which means people copy and paste the such brainless comment 148 times on the Internet. Who with a sane mind would do that, I have no idea. Which blog owner in a right mind would approve those comment, or not delete them, is totally incomprehensible to me.

No wonder some people unsheathe their keris. He might be too angry after reading such comment not too long ago, hence the inappropriate behaviour.

P.S.: No, this blog does not condone racism. Yes, this blog likes to make fun of him.

The Truth about Live Chat

khensthoth — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:08:16 +0000

There are some websites out there that offers Live Chat, whereby you can speak to a someone and ask for help or assistance on the website or on the product. Of the few websites that offer this service I know of, eBay is probably the most well known.

Some websites only offer Live Chat on office hours, probably suggesting a more localised, averagely-paid support guy, or some extremely efficient receptionist attending the Live Chat. What intrigued me, was how some companies are able to offer this 24/7, no matter where you are. This services are great, albeit a little slow.

I have always suspected one word: Outsourcing. Specifically, another word: India. India is like the IT support outsourcing heaven. It used to be just in India, but now they are out conquering the world, spreading the Indian-being-IT-guy culture to every nooks and cranny of the world. Call your local IT-related hotline to confirm.

My doubt has always been suppressed by the fact that these support guys and girls have inherently English names, like Monica, like Peter, like Todd. Yes I know they could lie, but c’mon, Todd man. It’s so damn tooting English, so English I wouldn’t think twice if he told me he was from England.

However, my suspicion was confirmed when I was having problems connecting to my website. I went to my webhost’s website and click on the link for Live Chat, and in 2 minutes I was speaking to someone live. Sure enough, he has a ultra English name – Jerold King. I told him my problem and I guess he must have went to my website to have a look.

Instantly, my website statistics recorded the hit. Guess where the hit is coming from?

Yup. India.

Shortly after the image above was recorded, “Jerold King” said that he had tried to access my website several times using several browsers. That LIAR!. My super cool damn accurate webstat said he visited once, using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 2000. Another webstat revealed more detailed information, even noting that he is from Software Technology Parks of India.

Lesson learned:

Most 24/7 Live Chat people are from India
They lie about their names
They even lie about what they did to help you

Did I mentioned he needed at least 8 minutes to check my website once?

Don’t ever trust them.