Tonight, I finally managed to get to see a movie at the rooftop cinema – something i’ve been wanting to for ages – since i found out about it.
(sorry about quality – taken with my phone)
The movie we watched was Repo Man – good 80′s style bad flick, love it. We picked a good night for it too – 30 degrees while the movie was showing, clear quiet night. was great.
Gonna check out a heap more yet with Fear and Loathing, Cassablanca, Zoolander, Dr. Strangelove & footloose coming up!
Can’t wait!
Took friends who were here from interstate to Sunny Ridge for strawberry picking & icecream.
This was my first time at a strawberry farm – was fun to pick them all. The weather was good too – it wasn’t too hot so we could stay out for a while – but the flys were deadly 
Either way – for $8 you get 500grams worth – pretty good value.
Their strawberry icecream is also to die for! highly recommend going out there. I wanted to bring some back – but i forgot to bring the ice packs
I’ll have to visit again 
You tell me!
Just did a web-check-in for my return flight home – and noticed this.
If you can’t read, it says “www.BarcodeTools.com For Evaluation use Only!”
Hilarious – Just Hilarious – they haven’t even paid licence fee’s for the software on their website. No wonder they’re low cost!
While Google are attempting to be smart by offering DNS services to the globe – this will result in poor perfoamance for users unless they shape things up very quickly!
All CDNs (Content Delivery Systems), including Google, use DNS to decide where to send users to a webpage.
The decisisions done by the CDNs is based on the location to your ISPs DNS server(s). The CDN will look at the DNS servers that are querying its hosting servers, see the latencey and reliability of paths it has from its caches or clusters to that DNS server and pick the closest and fastest cache for that DNS server.
What are Google doing wrong then?
-They don’t have geographic DNS servers.
When I do a query of popular news website hosted by Akamai (another content delivery network), www.news.com.au, I should expect to be directed to a server close to me, this isn’t the case.
C:\Documents and Settings\Tom>nslookup www.news.com.au 8.8.8.8 Server:Â google-public-dns-a.google.com Address:Â 8.8.8.8 Non-authoritative answer: Name:Â Â Â a1273.g.akamai.net Addresses:Â 58.27.186.113, 58.27.186.104 Aliases:Â www.news.com.au, www.news.com.au.edgesuite.net C:\Documents and Settings\Tom>
Now, this couldn’t be so bad could it? Well, yes it could! Lets compare it to the DNS resolution from the ISP.
C:\Documents and Settings\Tom>nslookup www.news.com.au Server:Â P1-REMQIP01-P.p1.com.my Address:Â 122.255.96.148 Non-authoritative answer: Name:Â Â Â a1273.g.akamai.net Addresses:Â 63.150.131.157, 63.150.131.200 Aliases:Â www.news.com.au, www.news.com.au.edgesuite.net C:\Documents and Settings\Tom>
And now lets compare latencey results:
Google Results:
Reply from 58.27.186.113: bytes=32 time=244ms TTL=51
ISP Results:
Reply from 63.150.131.157: bytes=32 time=98ms TTL=55
I won’t go into how TCP Windowing will affect performance here – but the latencey figures should be enough to show!
Google’s FAQ talks about them using Anycast routing to direct you to the closest server, but they’re only announcing the ranges (8.8.8.0/24 and 8.8.4.0/24) out of their US network, so any user reaching them will _have_ to go to the USA which will result in poor performance for the CDNs.
There is also the problem that it takes a quarter of a second to reach the USA from other parts of the world – which also will result in poor performance.
I would have hoped Google should know better than advertise it as something to speed up browsing for users and that they should understand the protocols better.
About 2 hours drive from KL (or 1.5 if you have a local driving ) is an elephant sancturay in the middle of nowhere!
There is no entry fee, though you’re encouraged to give a donation based on the number of people there. We ended up giving RM50 for the 3 of us – still great value.
Because of heavy rains – we didnt get to bathe with the Elephants in the river, but we got to feed and ride on them.
The feeding was a little un-nerving, but OK once you’ve done it a few times.
Riding was interesting – without a saddle. Was easy enough to stay up though, the ride was very short – just a 15m lap.
One amazing thing was all the elephants stepped in time – they swayed together! Like they were dancing together.
If you’ve got a spare day – recommend finding a tour guide to take you up here
Its like Ultra-HD!
Dodgy webcam shot – but, I can see now!
We hired some bikes to cycle around the east coast park in Singapore – you can cycle up and down the coast line from Changi to the city.
The bike hire is quite cheap – they’re not in the greatest condition and helmets aren’t compulsary.
The paths are speed limited to 15, which is probably ok coz its hard to push the bike past that.
At first – you might think it’s crazy to ride a bike in singapore in the heat – but it was quite nice, there was a coastal breeze and was very refreshing.
One thing you won’t miss is the boats off the coast of Singapore
Arrived in Singapore today (2nd December) and met up with the gang for some Bah Kut Teh, to compare to the Malaysian style.
The Doughy looking things – these are great for dipping in the soup (when it arrives) to soak up the flavour and devour!
The BKT was differnet style – lots of small dishes, while in M’sia.. it was all thrown into a big pot.
Out came the little dishes one by one.
The clear soup – was very peppery. The dark soup was much tastier, much more similar to the version I tried in Malaysia – but not as good.. hehe…
There was not much left over on the table and smiles all round – so a good meal in any case. Price was still acceptable when devided by 7 – but still more expensive $ per RM compared to M’sia.
Either way, I enjoyed this meal and the company