And yes, on Cars. Dad came around one day with mum asking about plans for our next new family car. Despite all his talk on Renaults previously, he was considering the 2006-2007 1.6L Mitsubishi Lancer which is going for a dirt cheap $43,000 with COE at C&C, which is close to half of how much we paid for our current 1.5GLi Toyota almost 10 year ago with it’s COE expiring in a few years time. To dad, “a car is a car which gets people from point A-B and B-A, any other questions asked? and no, we do not need a convertible….”

This decision came about after serious considerations whether into continuing maintaining our 9 year old car which will needs an expensive overhaul for inspection soon or just scrap it and get a new one after this Chinese New Year? I suggested the standard Subaru Impreza 1.6 going at around the same affordable price. But as dad as dad, who had previously worked for Subaru and always bragged about how good their flat fours are, amazingly did not want to own a Subaru this time! And neither would be a Toyota, Hyundai, Mini, Volkswagon, Ford, Datsun (and the list goes on…) as he had owned them all first hand before, even before I was born! and wanted something different this time. But didn’t he own a Mitsu before when I was a kid?, “”that previous one was a resale”, he said… *collapse*

Another contender in the sub $43,000 priced car would be the 2nd most common car in Singapore – The Nissan Sunny 1.6L, (with the Lancer in Third and the Toyota Corolla in First). But if my eyes don’t fail me the new 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer is really pretty though, it’s like a cross between the old Mitsu Gallant and Volvo front styling, totally niffy. The thing I heard that variants starts at 1.8L up to the 2.4L in the 2008 Lancer EVO X. So the $43,000 price tag might not stay especially for a 1.8L.

However, realistically speaking, I actually do not need a car, it’s more of a want – something that almost all guys will spend on their first contact with big bucks. Even if one may argue driving a car allows you to take the shortest possible route to your destination (in my case most school and town), thus saving time. But if I get to drive one to school, the shortest route I will be taking is the exalt same route my bus takes me to school everyday. Same for town and such, it just IMPOSSIBLE to find a parking lot in the city – Let be wasting at least 30mins to even an hour waiting or trying to look for one, where all I need is a short bus trip from home to town and back.

In the Singaporean context, the car functions more of a social status as our very commendable network of public transport fully substitutes it in terms of it’s basic function relating to personal transport, contrary to other larger countries. Furthermore, with bus lane rules are getting stricter with dedicated lanes as well & so are rising fuel prices & taxes, pollution & stricter emission controls, things don’t look good & does not justify the perceived “good”.

Furthermore, we can fully exploit the opportunity cost of the money saved from buying a car – we can do alot with it like investing it or use it to fund further studies, so as mum hinted occasionally.

Though one can argue that a car is an invaluable resource at times of critical need and emergencies, I guess that only comes out of the blue where the true value of owning a car really shines. But there are vehicles called “Taxis” as well. Mmmm

Well I can’t deny that if I can afford it, I would still buy a car, in fact I was torn between the support for green cars, namely the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid, but the price ($80,000-$100,000) cannot justify itself where I can get another equivalent sized saloon of the same capacity at even less than half the price.

Besides that, I always have a soft spot for convertibles as well. For the record, the 800,000th Mazda MX-5 ($90,000) has recently rolled out of the factory, maintaining in the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest selling most affordable 2 seater convertible. For me, a 2007 BMW E93 Cabriolet Hardtop Convertible 325i ($200,000) is what I can realistically dream for.

Despite the sun coming out quite nicely these days, the whether and ambient temperature is still holding out nice and cool in my area. In fact so good I do not even need to sleep with regular air-conditioning on for a few weeks! Morning temperatures are around 25 Degrees Celsius (readings from my desk clock), with rather frequent strong breezes threatening to slam doors around the house. Cool, but just wonder how this weather will hold out? Just hope it’s not a by-product of global warming…

Had been catching up on dated chores since my last paper on Tuesday – Engineering Mathematics III was easy with a careless mistake on partial fraction threatening to set my maximum score at 98/100. Personally after going through the post exam paper again with my classmates, we more or less came out with a model answer sheet for all the solutions in the paper allowing us to calculate our expected score for the paper. Seemingly, 98/100 is the lowest I can ever go…

Talking about chores, had been doing ALOT of packing and cleaning up the last few days, therefore not even having any blogging time in my hands. It’s namely sorting up my past semester lecture notes and organising them into binders for archiving *and forget. The rest will go into the paper recycling bins near my home. I won’t exactly say that I have a recycling obsession, but it’s just a way of life I guess – Little things you can do on your part for the environment like cutting down on plastic bags used at NTUC Fairprice or declining wrappers or carriers for small items in shops. But ironically, that doesn’t quite go for me when it comes to cars and POWER (taking about C02 levels….). I guess as the saying goes – “penny wise, pound foolish”.

And now, the news…

First say of ITP starts tomorrow for all SP second year students, wishing everybody all the best!

Site Updates
As part of my planned holiday chores, spent time over the last few days revamping and fixing up parts of the site. The videos page now has the videos streamed from youtube and google video, so no hassles to download them for viewing anymore, freeing up alot of server space for the site as well. Did some miscellaneous cleaning up of the site’s core code for W3C compliance, with the exception of IE7.0 screaming at every single “error” it encounters – code with Firefox breezes through with ease and speed.

The portfolio page is also revamped with a new look and updated sections, noticeably the interactive mouse overs and the quotation request form, which I’ve spent the last 3 whole days altogether coding and testing. Personally I think it looks fabulous with the exception of some more code tweaking in the background to speed up browsing in some areas.

Email contact code
Powering the quotation request page of the portfolio section is an email contact form. It’s very hard to find good free email programs are all very basic, they are either cgi or simple php files with basic functions and userablity. So I decided to write a whole custom contact form scratch and put it up for testing on the pages:

Little basic run down on of the contact code.
One PHP file is used for input, verification and submission. In other words, it basically calls itself back with an identifier when there are any error(s), preserving all the submitted field data and not having to retype the form again. It’s like and instant redirection back to the form if a user misses out and required fields, unlike conventional forms which will “tell the user to go back and fix the problem”. I personally find this user-friendly aspect lacking in most free code which depends on browser back button and cache to retrive back field information which does not always work. A success submit will yield a success message and the done option to close the form altogether.

Success Message	Sent Email Format

Moreover, the form even lists down the errors in a numbered list with the missing field boxes highlighted so that the user knows where to go from there. Other features include:

• Active hover tooltips for fields which requires explanation
• Optional no direct access to form itself (against spam bots)
• Auto loading of different custom form field templates for different categories
• Field conditions (e.g. if “others” is specified it’s required to specify)
• Valid email checking
• Antispam fields with image verification
• IP, referrer and client browser logger
• Able to log requests in a log textfile or database
• Mail sent through PHP mail() or SMTP

The whole software comes in 3 files, with the main PHP file weighing in with 500 lines of code, coupled with a .js file for the javascript tooltips and a CSS stylesheet for form styling.

I will leaving the form to run on the site testing before looking to release the contact form under a GPL. Also after I go about cleaning the source code and making it more modular as it is currently hardcoded to fit some specific form fields my site is currently using. Come worse to worse if I am unable to do so, I will just release the code “as it is” for ya all coders to pounce on and start dissecting.

With all the hype and publicity on Windows Vista going on in Singapore, I guess I can only commend on the efforts MS Singapore is putting into promoting the OS. However in that limelight, definitely the main selling point and MS broke in sales will tell you that it’s “safer”, “more secure”, “looks fabulous” and has “excellent media PC functionalities”. What they WON”T tell you though are the horrible benchmarks, system requirements and how slow it is compared to previous versions of Windows.

Anyway as the saying goes “a sucker is born every second” & “people will pay for it just because it looks good, lest functionality”.

Courtesy from Tom’s Hardware (You can read the full article here), all benchmarks ran on high-end Intel Core2 Duo systems with 2GB DDR2-800 RAM, 300Gb Harddisk space & ATI X1900XTX 512 MB GDDR3 GPU, let me just share some findings:

This does not justify the significant need for an upgrade. Furthermore so just as you think about putting the greens on Vista now, this is when it gets interesting – don’t think that holding your purchase now will solve all the bugs now. Think about it – unlike handphones, such that we can “wait out for the price to drop” or “new firmware updates in the next release”, the Windows Vista DVD is available pre-packed in default content, the next big DVD update you will get is a service pack (similar to XP SP2) which we won’t be seeing too soon, maybe over a year or so.

Everything will be patched through the naive windows update. In other words, having to install Vista now or later won’t be a difference, it’s just another PC in the Vista Bandwagon doomed with slow software, praying that Microsoft & their partners brings and fixes up compatibility and performances through new driver and software support.

And not only that, Vista look almost a clone to Mac OS X, now what Bill Gates have to say when poised with that question on CNN?

“NO NO NO!” Hahahaha!

Vista Pricelist
Oh and not leaving this out, for ya price hunters, here are the following rates for the respective versions of Vista after a SLS store roundup:

Main OS (OEM DVD Edition)
Vista Home Basic Edition – $145
Vista Home Premium Edition – $185
Vista Business Edition – $229
Vista Ultimate Edition – $309

MS Office 2007:
Home and student 2007 – $189
Office Basic 2007 – $269
Office Small Business Enterprise – $369
Office Pro 2007 – $489

Attila Vista Baby!