Have not really been running alot lately, not to mention even varying my areas of runs this month even if I tried putting myself on the tarmac too. But nevertheless got up my lazy bum for to get some runs done during this hectic period of Chinese new year, not to mention all the calories and fast food taken in from the various tidbits and goodies on top of the chalets I’ve been attending over the past week.

So it’s good to get back in the run, especially to many who raised their concerns whether am I still doing the running event list again for this year, fret not, the front page running events list has been updated as well, with almost all the major running events in Singapore all listed till end of this year. I only could not get confirmed details for the following events: NewBalance real run and Mizuno wave run, but based on the experience with their past 3-4 races, the dates stated there are rough estimates for the event during that quarter of the year, and it always on a Sunday! No word whether is there a Mizuno Mount Faber run this year as well.

As you may know I am a frequent visitor to the Alexandra Park Connector Running Route, with the route spanning from the Queenstown Extension all the way to Zion road. It’s amazing how interlinked and close our routes are- a 15mins drive from Bukit Merah to Great world (excluding parking time) can be done in a 25mins walk if you know the route. Today I will be covering the River valley extension of the Park connector with few more photos added to this wonderful city running route

River valley connector from Domain21

View from Zion road

The few nice views of the area

This part branches out an additional 600m of running flat track from the River Vallery end of the park connector, bringing us around the backyards of most HDB and condo suites littered all along the canal area. The thing about this extension is the lack of children playgrounds as mentioned in my queenstown review, but the route is definitely more shaded and covered with trees than most other part of the park connector route itself. There are not many man-made hut shelters lined along the route- only stone benches, though you can always seek shelter at the nearby HDB void decks in case of inclement weather.

The tarmac terminates at the Singapore boys brigade HQ and Great world city, where you can always make a U-turn or chow to your heart’s content at the Zion Road hawker food center whiel you are still there.

And now to update my untouched accumulative mileage listed, from 33.62km last month:

I always remembered the date 27th Feb being the release of the semester results, but I was too busy with work, projects, running and university application(s) to even remember it now- As naive as it sounded, I simply just went “huh?” each time anybody reached me about my results when I am out today, having to apologize to everyone who called up as I have not checked it yet, only till late today when I can log on to do so.

Logged into the SAS and checked it this evening. Being a pure FYP semester for me, there isn’t so much glitter as compared to my last- Just some very few humble grades this semester. So here’s the result: *dodges tomatoes & taupoks*

Final Year Project: Dist
Co-Circular Activities: Dist (333 Points)
NAPFA: Gold

I am not sure of the CCA part result being out so soon, is the CCA component a grade given in the whole Poly level? That is one I simply not sure about.

Nevertheless, there we have it the last of the results out for my time as an active student in Singapore Polytechnic. Though we had unofficially “graduated” I guess I will still be seeing myself quite occasionally in and out of school, especially with the alumni club where I can still can make use of the track, gym and swimming pool whenever I am around the area. Also especially helping out my lecturers and possibility being a mentor for my course juniors in the CIE “Alumni club”.

Well this is not totally new, but rather original in it’s sense, especially if you’ve worked in help lines before just love the split personalities of call center people.

Now please hold. Beep!

Was around NUS last week to submit my application, my 3rd time in fact. Only this time I wasn’t as anxious about it as what I did many years back, having been rejected 2 times in a row. Seeing all the first timers there all lost in the admissions makes me wonder how naive I was back then.

Looking back
It just makes me wonder and reminds me how harsh this world of applications are, together with why we use grades as an indicator for education in the first place. I’ve seen rejection and appeals all to the dumps, to other spectrum where college admissions boards actually coaxing top students and locking their application firmly into their university as if their lives depends on it. I’ve seen confused faces of students graduating with grades so low, they do not where to carry on from. It’s all just part and parcel of this phase in life again, the crossroads.

You may know me an a Cambridge Advanced (’A’ level) grad who studied Physics, Economics and Further Maths when I was in middle-high who was ironically unable to enter any local university due to my grades, but was strangely welcomed openly into Australian universities such as Monash, RMIT to name a few- but all not my cup of tea especially having to do foundation, not to mention very expensive indeed.

The dollars and cents - Scholarships
I learnt alot during my term in Poly, particularly exposing me more to the commercial world of education, it’s apparent that Scholarships is mainly the answer for something which not only can flourish your portfolio with but breeze you through without paying for your semester fees at all. After all university fees are not cheap either.

Crossing the borders
Let be saturated Australia, I’ve always known and recommended that overseas education elsewhere is the edge for an individual. This is in contrast to what I used think- stubborn about studying overseas. However, that is where I come to learn that mindsets have to change together as expectations and possibilities grows. Known is the bombastic prestige you get from studying overseas, but heck that’s not what I am in for, neither was I ever egoistic in school about my grades. After all the nail which sticks out gets hammered. It’s the exposure which is deserving.

Globalisation? Thats broad.
For me, a scholarship is the answer again, so I applied for the DSTA scholarship last month hoping I can sponsored to study. I am really looking forward to study engineering in my shortlisted universities, namely Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University or the Imperial College London as part of my attempts to globalise.

What I need is a deserving education to feed my passion for designing and inventing contraptions to change and make the world a better place to live in. So if I do not sound much like Obama reassuring change you can believe in, it’s more of a quality factor I personally believe in- quality education. Only time will tell will I create another invention better than my last.

A person who fails to plan plans to fail, even with contingencies- If all else fails, well at least I was NUS admissions last week- I would be able have a place in NUS doing a double degree (Hons) hopefully under their bond free scholarship. Only that there won’t be the edge.

The MM annual dinner and dance cum 50th anniversary celebrations was held last week at Raffles town club on the 15th (Feb) of this month. It’s not a poly-wide event but rather one for the school itself in mark of the long way the SP’s school of MM had came around. The event started with a reception where we can mingle with our old lecturers and catch up on times. The ballroom is decked with about 32 tables with seating planned by the organizers themselves- It comprises of an even mix of tables consisting either all students or staff.

They did quite a good job in keeping the guests entertained throughout the dinner. In fact there was never a dull moment that we would even have time to get on the food- There were lucky draws conducted throughout together with OMG performances by lecturers, not to mention pop quizzes such as guess the song, etc. There were contests put up for the best dressed male and female where turns out much into a battle for prize where they were pitted with humorous stage up tasks to get the best response from the audience haha.

Inside the rather small Ballroom

The food spread

Each table gets a birthday cake lol!

As mentioned, the crowd consisted of an even mix of students and lecturers, though the guy to girl ratio is a little bit off given the nature of engineering duh (now wait till we see the accountancy school dinners!). My table was a Muslim table with only 3 Chinese in the table of 10, so we Chinese were literally served like an al-la carte menu individually while the everybody had their servings off the rotating platter on the table (platter servings are so for all non-mixed tables). This came very much as a blessing in disguise despite the small Chinese portions served to us- we had more variety and able to share the food with our Muslim friends! The bad is no red wine is served on our table only sparking juice duh!

I got a pair of Jetstar Asia Tickets to KL from the lucky draw which I won’t see myself using at all. Just when we thought desserts are enough, The event ended with a MM birthday cake for each table- talking about down to details for the event haha!

The lowdown of the 2 biggest blog advertisers in SEA - Advertlets and Nuffnang
Well ads do contribute alot to the running cost of my websites. I know not everyone like ads to be shown on the sites they visit- they slow the loading of pages, give errors and sometime intrude and even block/distort content you are reading. But fret not on this site as I always have my readers and visitors welfare at heart. The ads I use here are non intrusive ones, specifically brought about by picked third party blog advertisers such as Advertlets and Nuffnang.

True that you earn much lesser than handling the ads yourself, especially for most layman who know nuts about impressions, targeted ads and click fraud. But if hassle free ads, targeting and delivery of ads is your cup of tea, then it’s worth the bucks they are paying for, for your time and space.

Different selling techniques
Nuffnang is a Singaporean blog ad company, the so-claimed the first in the SEA. Backed by a well-off family, it is run by a local businessman Ming. They deliver targeted ads based on the choice and requirements of advertisers, one campaign lasting one week each, you can earn typically from $15 to $100 ($20 is the norm for the majority) weekly depending on your blog band categories by your website’s traffic. You can get multiple campaigns a week, allowing you to earn more for your space and time.

This method offers the best targeted ads in benefit for the advertiser as each website is given the ad mostly on a case by case basis. The lowdown is that the selection process is usually very very painstaking, not to mention very manually intensive as well. Most bloggers and blogs I visit who support Nuffnang end up having no ads for months, displaying Ads directed right to Niffnang’s site like sushi tattoos for promotional reasons. The better blogs get the ads and often results in a form of discrimination for lower traffic blogs- Unless you get at least 10 thousand unique visitors daily, you are quite out of making anything much here. It’s more like a big boys’s game. Advertlets on the other hand (A Malaysian blog ad company managed by Josh Lim) display ads on your site the moment you put their code up, depending on your website traffic you can earn from few cents to hundreds a day. Though you can’t possibility make much as few cents can be peanuts or “coffee money”, the thing is that you are still being paid to put their code on your website, which an come as an incentive or acknowledgment to your efforts, especially to blogs with low traffic for putting their ad code up in the first place. They do offer cost per click as well, on top of impression based earnings.

Nuffnang better is handling payments
What I can commend on Nuffnang is how fast their payment are- one month is all it takes upon cashing out for the cheque to be delivered to your doorstep. Advertlets on the other hand completely redefines efficiency- Their payments are painfully slow I have not received a single cheque from them since I cashed out last November. I may give and take being a Malaysian company who need to send cheques over the border, but 2 months is the most anyone can take. Payments “still processing” after 4 months till now is simply unacceptable. Possibly made worst by their recent blunder. Knowing that many blogger I know do get paid by Advertlets, this is not a balent accusation of them not paying but just crap if you want to do business do it right, especially with sensitive issues such as payments!

Will update more on my personal findings on these 2 companies.

On the internet, I guess everyone is no stranger to spam and I believe neither is any of us is a fan of one. Spam always plague webmasters and our websites, finding difficult to balance the exposure of our emails so that we can still reach out to our intended audiences, but not extent of spam bots reaching us even beforehand.

I’ve been creating websites for more than 10 years, favoring bit of live with spam day in and out in comments and emails sent from form contact. The thing is no matter what you do, spam in inevitable. The bright side is that there is an array of methods which can employ to reduce spam you receive, let be on comments or form submissions through email. Here are few of my favorite useful techniques I’ve developed and picked from others as a webmaster, compiled in quick pointers: (The pointers here assumes that you have a a certain degree of knowledge of HTML form elements). inline

Whats more a way to end the Poly semester but with a reunion chalet with my old class of 25. However, just like many others during the vacation, it’s the time to work prior to enlistment to the army or university. Despite all these, many Cheers going tout to many who took the time off to drop by the chalet, during the BBQ, especially to catch up on the times since our class where stream into different diploma streams almost 2 years ago.

Yea unhealthy food!

Starting the fire

Few of those who managed to drop by

There was ample of BBQ food for all, even last 2 nights. But contrary to plans, didn’t managed to get any free KFC fast food from a classmate of mine who happens to work there too. They always have plenty of “leftovers” they say where they bring back for all to chow, looks like this time is an exception. But hey at least we do not have to feel guilty from all the excess calories!

Visit to old Changi Hospital
It was a full moon on our first night, and what other better way to pass the midnight but at the old CGH, well this time it’s not as dramatic as the visit one of my friends did previously with 25 groups of 2 raiding the area. The place bring back alot of memories of scenes from silent hill, not to mention freaking my friends out after raiding the various floors of the old military hospital which served largely during the war before converted to a civilian one, with it come it’s tales of the mortuary and war torture chamber. Nope we did not see anything, but we did kinda freaked out a group who was visiting the area before us on their exit.

Stairwell just like from silent hill!

Who is going in first?

Many of the ruins and vandalism

Everything is largely pitch black in there, you can’t see your hands in front of you. but thankful to the full moon night vision is excellent in there with the exception of my camera cum torch unable to snap pictures of anything more than a meter in front of it. Soon, funny I found myself leading the group everywhere, with me going in first into all kinds of rooms and manholes. But I am no stranger to dark places and love them especially in jungles and built up areas during my reconnaissance days in the army. The thing which freaks people up is mostly the mind where you can build up tension then thats where people start to imagine things- the girls are expert at that!

The view from the roof top is excellent, coupled with the seasonal wind, the view over to neighboring islands to Johor with the sea in front of your, lit by the moon is breathtaking.

The highlight was definitely supper at Changi Village, not to mention giving some our our sua-kuo friends how the red-light business goes on at Changi Village carparks. Then there was the 8km over walk back to the pasir-ris chalets - in slippers!

The last night is spent at Pasir Ris park with lots of more long walks and fun at the playgrounds. Then theres the excellent sea breeze there, very calming, peaceful and makes you want to savour every moment and reflect on life there.

Thats all I have on this chalet here. Time to get some rest!

Well just when you thought EA (aka old ruins of westwood) is totally done calling 2008 with the FPS “Tiberium” looks like they have something else up their sleeves with a new sequel to the largely popular Red Alert series. We’ve seen C&C 3 adn Kane coming up previously, so we can technically and most expectedly see Red Alert next in the rotation for a sequel.

Many old time gamers will know Red Alert as part of the Command and Conquer series which took the world by storm and redefined real time strategy since the mid 90s. Red Alert was a classic which we can only reminisce on but will never set our hands on playing given what Red Alert 2 (RA2) can offer in terms of graphics and eye candies.

However RA2 did not quite get the package right in a rather non-catchy and as immersive story line delivered in the classic RA1 series. Coupled with the fact that it simply takes no brains to complete any new C&C title on hard released since the late 90s. I hope EA won’t disappoint with this new title, presumably too, their answer to Blizzards up and coming Starcraft 2.

More info and larger cover shot of what you can expect in this comoing April’s edition of PC gamer here.

Wishing everybody there celebrating Chinese New Year today a very happy CNY 2008 and the Lunar new year of the Rat! It’s the time of the year where you not only get to stuff yourself silly with bak kua, pineapple tarts or turning orange from all those excessive mandarin oranges, it’s also a period to meet up and catch up with everyone, let be some of my distant relatives who I only get to meet “officially” like once a year.

I believe everyone’s all stuffed with their reunion dinner, let be in a restaurant or at home with your family, relatives or friends. I had mine with my family yesterday and will be having another at my grandparents where all my relatives and cousins will be meeting up.

The rat year is also my Chinese Zodiac year as well too. And yea so ya… all the ratty goodness for all!

Prior to upgrading my site and making it more code efficient, I always had a problem of integrating Wordpress and Gallery together seamlessly and call functions from each program without any conflicts. By nature, unlike gallery 2 (G2), gallery 1 do not have a naive system in support for templates - sticking to html “wrappers” which you can add custom code to as the name suggest, wrap your site’s HTML code around the gallery so that it appears integrated with your current site layout.

So why use an older version of gallery (G1) instead of the newer G2? There are many advantages of using Gallery1 instead of the database driven gallery2, namely because of the avoidance of large dependence of databases and slow loading of pages gallery 2 have on my site compared to 1.

Given this issue, previously all my Wordpress Wordpress functions within my photo gallery pages are called out through various strategically located and placed iframes, though cross-browser safe, it’s not the ideal way to display content. Ideally, all content should be rendered and shown on a single page with minimal redundant frames which can possibility slow down load timings and opens up more areas of inconsistently which could be avoided in the first place.

This issue is widely raised in both the Wordpress and gallery forums but with little avail, with even veteran users there concluding:

I decided to look into the integration issue (again), also as part of my the scheduled site revamp and attempts to solve the problem. A Google gave me a possible solution as highlight by Ron on his blog:

What he meant was including the Wordpress functions “blog-header.php” right in the gallery header/footer wrapper template files using a server-side include should solve the problem. However, that will never work even if the included file and path are correct, the functions will never be able to be called.

Ron solution then came about with including the functions right into the gallery core file itself (util.php) with the following code added right at the top of the file:

Which worked for him, presumably be that he is running Gallery 1 with Wordpress 1.2 and below (that was a dated blog post by Ron too).

For me doing that will give me a “gallery has not been configured” error page, which apparently is a big problem highlighted by few who gave feedback on Ron’s blog post as well, but not addressed till now too. Going further into the topic it goes to show that this problem is only evident for all versions of Gallery1 to present and versions of Wordpress 2.0 and below. I am running Wordpress 1.5.

Dissecting the code, it seems that including the Wordpress headers in the util.php files do allow you to call functions within all gallery pages, but a conflict due to common configuration paths to each program confuses gallery with the Wordpress config directory, therefore being unable to find it’s own configurations and thus reverting to it’s “unconfigured state”.

So the final solution is a simple fix to tell both Wordpress and gallery what directories do they belong to, this is done but manually defining the GALLERY_CONFDIR and ABSPATH variables for each. Add these following code to your util.php located in your gallery root folder depending on where your Wordpress and Gallery installations are.

And the problem will be solved! In the example, I have my Wordpress install in a “/blogs” folder from the root, similarly, the Gallery install takes a “/gallery” folder from the root, please change the code paths to suit your install.

Remember to paste that code into any new install of gallery 1 as util.php will be overwritten with each new install.

Please mind the sawdust, the site is currently under a 3 day upgrade where few areas of the site will be upgraded and code re-written. These are few of the various addons planned for the site for a more Web 2.0 layout.

• Integrated photo gallery is now database driven
• Lightboxes for photo previews
• More user friendly shoutbox with reply and possibility AJAX powered
• Integrated tooltips throughout the site
• Wider layout for 1024 horizontal widths
• Several code rewrites and optimization for fast loading

The photo gallery is currently completely inaccessible at the moment, please bear with it.

In the meantime if you are seeing any images of layouts out of place, well nothing to be alarmed!