Ian On The Red Dot

I had an idea for something, something which I had been procrastinating since last year to get started.

Within two hours, I got the app up and running, thanks to Heroku. Amazing ease of deployment.

The 1st of October.

I guess the experiment begins…

I have very strong opinions about issues. Especially issues about Singapore.

There is never a class gathering where our conversation doesn’t swerve, crash and burn into the topic of governance in Singapore. Sometimes it is because my friend drove the car into the wall, sometimes I supplied the alcohol to the driver, sometimes someone else threw a banana peel.

However it happens, it happens.

And at the end of every discussion, someone would say,

“You should be a politician.”

It is the ultimate indication that my friend(s), my classmate(s) disagree with me – usually not because they have an informed opinion but because well, that’s how things have always been, and they don’t see why things need to ever be different – and if I feel so strongly about change, I should be a politician to convince others (not them) that change should happen. I’m being shooed away because they don’t want to think about such matters.

Why?

Governance, my country, the way our lives are controlled, influenced and manipulated by the state are just too important things to be left to politicians.

These matters should be a cause of concern for every citizen.

Every citizen should have informed opinions based on analysis and understanding about these matters and not depend on opinions formed because some demagogue swayed their hearts or some thug beat their bodies into submission.

Convince me your path is right as I try to convince you to take this walk with me. Let’s not abdicate the carrying of the torch for this dark journey ahead.

How we want our country to be, how we want our lives to be lead, the legacy we want to bequeath our children should not (only?) be decided or led by politicians stuck in ivory towers.

It should be decided by citizens. Daily.

Because these are our lives, this is our country and they are our children.

I hope, for the day, when these discussions end with someone turning to me and saying,

“We should all be citizens.”

The problem with democracy is that the average human has no desire to learn, no capacity to understand and no stomach to pursue truth.

All humans are pathetic self-interested creatures with a tendency to grab short-term gratification as opposed to work for long-term satisfaction.

Yet, we want to convince ourselves we can trust these people to make an informed decision in choosing the best among those who ostensibly want to serve our best interests as a people.

If the individual human is self-interested, how can the aggregate be any better?

Everyone thinks the alternative to a democracy is communism.

No.

The alternative to no democracy could be no government.

But, yes, the tragedy of the commons and what not.

Difficult questions without a doubt.

Democracy isn’t the only choice and neither is communism the only other choice.

Say you are writing a Twitter application, and the results from Twitter are returned using the JSON format.

Your application is written to be hosted on GAE.

You need:

from django.utils import simplejson
content = simplejson.loads(result.content)

&

{% for status in content %}

{{ status.text }}

{% endfor %}

Thanks to the awesome Nadnut, I scored an invite to Johnnie Walker’s Jet Black Party. It was an awesome night of great drinks and even better company.

The event was held at ‘One on the Bund’ housed in the refurbished Clifford Pier.

The highlight of the night was drinking the delectable concoctions created by 4 world-class mixologists.

After I had finished my A-Levels, I started considering applying to a bunch of tier-2 American universities and top Canadian universities. The memory of which American universities I did apply to is hazy (if I had applied at all) but I remember clearly applying to 4 top Canadian universities. 3 replied offering places for courses I was interested in.

I didn’t accept any of the places.

The main reason was cost (which is why it was likely I didn’t apply to any of the American universities).

My mom used emotional blackmail to get me to stay:

“You’ve been in NS for 2.5 years. Now is time to stay with the family and not run off to some foreign country”*

* Above is paraphrased. My mom’s emotional blackmail skills are way better than the words above will give her credit for.

My dad had two points:

1. I had already got into NUS, and NUS was good enough.
2. It was cheaper to study in NUS, after all, the government was giving a grant and studying overseas would stretch the family finances at that point.

I’m not going to go into how students are able to work while overseas to cover part of the cost and expenses.
I’m also not going into the debate about the (perceived) value of an overseas degree from a foreign university versus NUS’s.

What I want to talk about is the messed up mentality of my generation’s parents when it comes to considering costs and benefits.

And I will do it will a very simple example.

My generation’s parents are more likely to take a loan of $50,000 to buy a car then take a $50,000 loan for their child to study overseas in a foreign university.

And when they do, it is usually because the child couldn’t get into a local uni.

I think the decision on whether to take a loan should be independent of the fact that a place in a local uni has been secured and whether a grant is given.

How the C/B analysis should be done is like this:

Cost of NUS (after considering grants) versus Benefits of studying in NUS.
Cost of studying overseas (possibly helped covered with part-time income) versus Benefits of studying overseas.

Benefits of studying overseas / Benefits of studying in NUS (>|=|<) Cost of studying overseas (possibly helped covered with part-time income) / Cost of NUS (after considering grants)

Instead of:

Cost of NUS (after considering grants) (>|=|<) Cost of studying overseas (possibly helped covered with part-time income)

Benefits of studying in NUS + absence of addition cost (>|=|<) Benefits of studying overseas.

Thinking too much in absolutes instead of relative.
Following how it is socially more common to take a loan to buy a car than to pay for an overseas education.

I really hope my generation will overcome this mental block for our kids.

1. New Clusters
2. Atas in the heartlands
3. Foreigners in our midst (Lost In Translation)

The material is there, scattered. Time to start organizing.

find com -type f -exec md5sum {} \; >> out.txt

Copy the out.txt file to the other directory.

md5sum -c out.txt | grep -v OK

The reason why this was needed:

SmartSVN failed on me. The working copy was shown to be the same as the trunk copy, and while the trunk copy showed it was at the latest revision, the working copy wasn’t. So the wrong file was deployed. The solution was to re-checkout the code after nuking the whole directory. Only then would SmartSVN show the latest trunk copy (and working copy).