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My letter.. It is still work in progress…
Suggestions welcome. I will send in this on Saturday night.

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A “pass” is not a “qualify”

I refer to “A right, not a privilege” by Mr Chen Zhaoguang.

Firstly, there are many other mediums through which education can be pursued. Pursue of education is a right, no doubt, but having a place in local Universities however, isn’t one.

Mr Chen mentioned that a having a meritocratic education system “does not mean that we cannot cater to all who qualify for university entry in a cohort”. I would like to point out that if a student is unable to get into a University, it is only because he or she does not qualify for it.

It is certainly not a fault of the University or the Government not doing enough to take in more students. Already, my girlfriend and her schoolmates have to sit on the floor during most of her lectures in NUS due to lack of seats.

I think the reason why there is so much debate about whether local University admission is an “entitlement” or a “privilege” is because many Singaporeans have a mistaken understanding about the word “qualify”.

Local Universities accepts application from anyone who passes the A’ Level. But, does that equate to “qualify”?

For example, MS KOH HWEE CHOO, who had written in to ST Forum earlier last month, mentioned that although her son “achieved four H2 A-level passes, A for GP and B for Project Work”, he was unable to get a place in the University. This shows that despite passing the A Levels, Ms Koh’s son does not “qualify” for a place among the local Universities.

In today’s highly competitive situation, having a “pass” in the examination does not mean a “qualify” when it comes to local University admission. There are also cases of students settling for a degree that they totally dislike or could not do well in, because they do not qualify for the degrees they have interests in. I agree this is cruel, and does not fairly recognize students who has non-academic interests or talents. However, this is to be expected as it is the limitation of the meritocracy system that we have all happily embraced.

When I was in Junior College, I had a hard time juggling between school work and my non-academic interests in IT and business, leading to many Fs in my examinations and threats from the school leaders about the possibilities of being retained. I ended up shutting down my websites to concentrate on the A’ Levels, and managed to “qualify” for SMU. And at what cost? Today, I am still struggling to rebuild my sites to its former more than 10000 daily visits.

My scenario could be a thing of the past, if instead of calling for more enrolments in local University, Singaporeans call for an education system that recognizes both academic and non-academic achievements equally. That way, future Singaporeans, regardless of their forte, would be able to pursue their interests much greater height with lesser obstacles.

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An email from the Science Club…

Notice the time the email is sent out, and the time of the event…

A case of planning an event and then forget about telling people about it until the last minute?

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An internal email sent out to all students…

SECURITY ALERT - THEFT OF LAPTOPS

Campus Security has received reports of laptop thefts recently. This week, there were four cases which had occurred in NUS canteens during lunch hours. In these cases, the victims had left their laptop on the seat in the canteen while they went to buy food. When they returned, their laptops were already missing.

This second email was found on Zitseng

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Like many others I was very thrilled by the release of Google Chrome, and download it right away to test it out. The user experience was simply wonderful and clean, and I especially like the icongito mode that allows me to view porn shop for online gifts without letting my girlfriend knowing. I also like the fact that the title bar is done away with totally, replacing it with tabs, giving the web alot more screen area. Loading is very fast, and it supposedly will not crash the entire program even if one of the tabs freeze or crash, as each tab is actually a program by itself. However, one day of using it and I have already experienced various problems.

Despite promise, it freezes and all the tabs become unaccessible
I have around 5 tags open and I was visiting the Ultimate Ears website in one of the tabs, where the menu is made in flash. The entire site became frozen. Thinking that other tags will work, I click on the other tabs, and to my surprise, I couldn’t switch to them. ALL THE TABS froze. The same thing happened when I was watching a video on youtube. It seems that the shockwave plugin is not that stable yet, and when it freeze, the entire browser including all its tabs become frozen. This sets me to wonder, when more plugin support is implemented, will one single plugin freeze the entire browser?

Tab caption did not update itself
See this screenshot:

Even though I was at the Jaben Forum page, the caption of the Tab belongs to the tab on its right.

Source viewable on the “New Tab” page
I like the “New Tab” page very much, which lead me to do abit of investigation. When I try to right click and view source the page, it doesn’t work as the menu for viewing source is disabled. However, they forgot to disable the view source option from the “Developer” menu, and I was able to view the source of the “New Tab” page in its full glory:

Notice also the very interesting comment:

This page is optimized for perceived performance. Our enemies are the time
taken for the backend to generate our data, and the time taken to parse
and render the starting HTML/CSS content of the page. This page is
designed to let Chrome do both of those things in parallel.

1. Defines temporary content callback functions
2. Fires off requests for content (these can come back 20-150ms later)
3. Defines basic functions (handlers)
4. Renders a fast-parse hard-coded version of itself (this can take 20-50ms)
5. Defines the full content-rendering functions

If the requests for content come back before the content-rendering functions
are defined, the data is held until those functions are defined

The guys behind chrome has resorted to “dirty tricks” to make Chrome seem faster than it really is when loading the “New Tab” page which contains a hell lot of javascript.

View-Source: Exploit
If you are using Chrome right now, click on this link. You will notice that I can actually create links that when you click on it, will cause Chrome to launch its source viewer instead of the regular browser window. While this by itself is not a big deal (may even be the intention of the developers to work this way), there is a chance that this may eventually lead to bigger problems (maybe a bug in the source viewer), and you get infected with viruses or malwares.

That is all I have for now, but who knows more problems/bugs may surface. Granted, Chrome is only a Beta, but this beta, despite its many innovations, has lower quality than many other betas from Google.

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