This news must be a bit old but nonetheless I bet most of us Malaysians dunno about it and also, it is an interesting news for the rest of the world. Our own homegrown artist, Erra Fazira will be acting in a Hollywood movie directed by Sameet Baadkhar, a Bollywood director. Erra will be paired with the infamous Hollywood actor, Christopher Atkins. The title of the movie is 'Hidden'.

The filming will begin in the middle of June and is set to hit the cinemas next year. Some of the scenes are shot in Kuala Lumpur. Erra's role in the movie is a widow with a kid named "Dian" while Christopher as a writer. They would eventually get married and a lot of unexplainable event happen after their marriage.

Read more about it here (malay language).

Modbus anyone ???

written by Antabax | 4:17:00 PM | | 0 comments »

Anyone ever heard of Modbus ? Basically, Modbus is a communication protocol developed by Modicon systems. It is a way of sending information between electronic devices. The device requesting the information is called the Modbus Master and the devices supplying information are Modbus Slaves. In a standard Modbus network, there is one Master and up to 247 Slaves, each with a unique Slave Address from 1 to 247. The Master can also write information to the Slaves. It is typically used to transmit signals from instrumentation and control devices back to a main controller or data gathering system. Modbus is transmitted over serial lines between devices. The simplest setup would be a single serial cable connecting the serial ports on two devices, a Master and a Slave.

Ok now, the thing is, my boss asked me to analyze this VB program that he gave me. It is used to send data from the master (pc) to the slave and also to receive data from slave to the master. I was like err wtf ?? I never learn anything about it even in MMU. Frankly speaking, I know nothing on communication thingy using VB. He said after I managed to understand it, he will ask me to do stuff that are related to this Modbus thingy. OMFG !! I guess I'll try to understand Modbus first before I say to my boss, "Sir, don't give me things that are so freaky and weird like this. Please give me some other stuff to do please."

To know more about Modbus, you can click here and here.

Today is my first time to see our boss, Mr. Wong. He just came back from Alor Setar, Kedah. He instructed me to install Visual Studio 6 (finally) and asked me to familiar myself with it before doin a documentation on how to install and use it. With all the free time I have, I managed to create a simple calculator limited to only two operands. The background colour will also change everytime the user click on an operation.


























Note that this is just a simple calculator and everyone with zero knowledge can do this if they take the time to learn VB. I've uploaded the program incase anyone want to try it. You can download it here.

Peterpan - Menghapus Jejakmu

written by Antabax | 8:43:00 PM | | 49 comments »

You guys ever heard of Peterpan ? The band that are making waves here in Malaysia, Singapore and their own country, Indonesia. This video that I found in YouTube is their latest offering and it does sound nice. The models involved is their own band members and Dian Sastrowardoyo. She is one of the reason you should watch this video. She is too cantek (beautiful, pretty) and cute. Enjoy guys !

Peterpan - Menghapus Jejakmu

Terus melangkah melupakanmu
Belah hati perhatikan sikapmu
Jalan pikiranmu buatku ragu
Tak mungkin ini tetap bertahan

Perlahan mimpi terasa mengganggu
Kucoba untuk terus menjauh
Perlahan hatiku terbelenggu
Kucoba untuk lanjutkan itu

Engkau bukanlah segalaku
Bukan tempat tuk hentikan langkahku
Usai sudah semua berlalu
Biar hujan menghapus jejakmu

Terus melangkah melupakanmu
Belah hati perhatikan sikapmu
Jalan pikiranmu buatku ragu
Tak mungkin ini tetap bertahan

Perlahan mimpi terasa mengganggu
Kucoba untuk terus menjauh
Perlahan hatiku terbelenggu
Kucoba untuk lanjutkan itu

Engkau bukanlah segalaku
Bukan tempat tuk hentikan langkahku
Usai sudah semua berlalu
Biar hujan menghapus jejakmu

Lepaskan segalanya
Lepaskan segalanya

Engkau bukanlah segalaku
Bukan tempat tuk hentikan langkahku
Usai sudah semua berlalu
Biar hujan menghapus jejakmu

Nanananana
Nanananana
Nanananana
Nnananana
Nanananana
Nanananana

Another Day, Another Problem

written by Antabax | 8:08:00 PM | | 3 comments »

I went to eat just now (evening) with 4 of my friends at this food court in Cyber Jaya near a bus-station (bus-stop or bus-stand, whatever lah). The popular term for that place is 'terminal'. We always eat at this 1 particular shop. Being the lazy bum we all are, we managed to wait for ½ hour before we start to order our food. And the most unexpected thing happen. The shop's worker refused to take our order because we ordered 5 dishes. “Banyak sangat la, susah nieh” she said (It's too many, hard to proceed). We were like wtf ? Of all the times we had lunch or dinner there, this kind of things still can happen. #%@&^$. She said there were too many orders and if we still want to order, we need to wait for some time. But it's rare for a shop to reject a customer's order unless the ingredient needed dah habis (is not available, finish). We had no problems before especially during lunch hour where people flock there and order. But this evening, I think the most should be around 4-5 orders and still they don't want to take our orders.

The thing is, we were so frustrated because we sat just beside the shop so that we can easily order from them plus the shop is just beside the beverage stall. After that incident, we kept on waiting until some other shop's waitress walk by and we just order from her. Another 10 minutes wasted. Haih. I guess we should stop eat there, maybe for atleast 1-2 weeks because as a nice guy, I couldn't boycott the shop (hey, its near the beverage stall, duh). Nevermind lah, there must be another reason for that incident and after 1-2 weeks, it should be gone from my otak (brain) like usual.

A very basic BASIC calculator

written by Antabax | 4:29:00 PM | | 3 comments »

Finally, on the 3rd day of my training, I managed to figure out the calculator thingy. The coding looks something like this :-
(A short note, it is just a normal direct code hence a beginner's style)


Dim a As Single, b As Single, d As Single
Dim c As String, z As String

Print ""
Print "A simple 2
input Basic Calculator by Azmeer"

Do

Print ""
Input "Please choose a number : ", a
Input "Please choose another number : ", b
Print ""

Print "Choose an operation from the list below"

Print "1. Add"
Print "2. Subtract"
Print "3. Multiply"
Print "4. Divide"
Print ""


Input "Your choice is : ", c


If c = "1" Then
d = a + b
Print "The result of addition is: "; d
End If


If c = "2" Then
d = a - b
Print "The result of subtraction is: "; d
End If


If c = "3" Then
d = a * b
Print "The result of multiplication is: "; d
End If


If c = "4" Then
d = a / b
Print "The result of dividing is: "; d
End If


Print ""
Print "Would you like to calculate again ?"


Print "1. Yes"
Print "2. No"
Print ""


Input "Your choice is : ", z


If z = "1" or z = "Yes" Then
Print ""


ElseIf z = "2" or z = "No" Then
Print ""
Print "Press any key to EXIT"
Exit Do


Else
Print "Invalid choice entered"
Print "Press any key to EXIT"
Exit Do
End If


Loop
Sleep


Its been 1 year over since our Prime Minister's wife, Datin Seri Endon Mahmood passed away. The exact date is on Oct 20, 2005. The cause of it was purely because of breast cancer and she suffers from it for almost 2 years. I pity so much for our PM because the country has a lot of problems especially corruptions and politics and he sleeps at night thinking of it all alone. But now, the PM has announced that he will marry a widow that goes by the name of Jeanne Abdullah. I hope that he will achieve a better life after this. Congratulations.


Jeanne's Info

Name : Jeanne Abdullah
Age : 53
DOB : 29th July 1953
POB : Kuala Lumpur


For more info, click here and here.

MYM Dota All-Stars Tourneys

written by Antabax | 1:13:00 PM | | 0 comments »

From the Meet Your Makers website, they are currently hosting/planning 2 Dota All-Stars tournaments. One is the MYM Prime Defending #6 (a continuation of the Prime Defending Series) and a new tournament called MYM Prime Nations #1.

For the MYM Prime Defending, any team can join from any country provided that they already registered at the MYM website. Then, the teams will divided into 4 groups according to their locations in the world.

The MYM Prime Nations on the other hand is an invite-only tourney where the best players of DotA countries face each other for the win (FTW !). There will be 20 countries participating in this tournament and currently, 2 spots left for any countries that are not invited yet (Singapore is invited but not Malaysia, wtf ?)






For more info, click on the links below:

MYM Prime Defending #6 (Sponsored by Sennheiser)
MYM Prime Nations #1

Dota All-Stars 6.44

written by Antabax | 11:00:00 AM | | 1 comments »

The latest version of the ever popular Dota-Allstars (Defense of the Ancients) is out now. Below is some of the changes icefrog made to the latest version.

Heroes :

* New Scourge heroes : Dark Seer, Pit Lord, and Undying





* New Sentinel heroes : Storm Spirit, Templar Assasin, and Sacred Warrior





Misc :

* Various minor terrain improvements requested for league play
* Rewrote some item manipulation code to fix some exploits

Item :

* Wards -> Reworked Observer and Sentry wards again
* Tango -> Price from 80 to 90

Cosmetics :

* World Tree -> Added a new model
* Chat messages now show hero name
* An announcement is now made when a tower is denied
* Camera now moves to the throne/tree when it dies. Added 1-2 second delay before scoreboard appears to show the death animations

Various fixes :

* Fixed the desync bug that happens when observers leave a game, causing some other players to disconnect
* Fixed a bug that caused sprout trees to sometimes respawn trapping the hero again
* Fixed Shockwave from hitting wards

Read more here.
Check heroes here.

The basic of BASIC

written by Antabax | 3:17:00 PM | | 0 comments »

Not much happened today in the office except that I've learned the basics of basic, lol ? The Visual-Basic uses the Basic language as it's main language. Example to say Hello World! in c++ is something like this:-

cout << ”Hello World”;


But in Visual-Basic it looks like this:-


print “Hello World”


and it doesn't need the ; to end a line and a simple declaration using strings will look like this:-


Dim a As String, b As String, text As String

a = "Hello"
b = "World"
text = a + " " + b + "!
Print text

To compile the coding, I need to find an easy, fast, free and suitable compiler on the net. Its quite hard to find because almost everyone is using Visual Studio (Visual Basic 6 or Visual Studio 2005). I finally found a compiler that is still under development/support. It is called FreeBASIC. It is a typical MS-DOS application. Not that hard to use because the guide on their homepage is quite straight-forward. But for a typical MS-DOS app, u need to type to get things around and the mouse hardly have any function here.


Currently, I am trying to code a simple calculator involving only 2 integers, A and B with 4 operations that is add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It involves loop, declarations and the input and print function. If I managed to do this, then I can say 'takde hal' to the basic of basic, lol.


Translation
takde hal = no problem(s)


Read more about Basic here.
Download FreeBASIC here.

The first day of my practical, Monday, 4th of June, was not that bad. When I first arrive at the office, it was around 8:35 AM. I am suppose to arrive there at 8:30 AM or earlier. Luckily the boss, the one who appointed us trainees, is not around. A girl staff (Ee-Sun, software engineer) arrive shortly after and welcome me and the others to the company. My first task was to fill up the employment form (as an industrial trainee) and the Non-Disclosure Agreement form. Then after settling down at my table, another staff (Kuhan, r&d) , a guy this time, came in and greet us. We were then told to wait for Mr Aizat (system engineer) to come and brief us about the company. Later we were assign to a specific task that best match our skills. The choice was:-

  1. C-language / Embedded Visual-C / Visual C

  2. Visual-Basic / Embedded Visual-Basic

  3. Web Programming / VB Script / ASP / Java Script

It was obviously clear that I am only familiar with the option no 1 minus the embedded thingy. Later on I decided to take the challenge and choose option no 2 which I have never put my hands on before. It was claimed easy by some, so I might just have a go on it. Soon after that, our last task for the day is to format the pc and install Windows 2000 and Open-Office. We were reminded that for the first week, we need to learn/recap our task that we were assigned to because they might be a test on it this friday. Back to school I guess.

A Spare Change

written by Antabax | 4:24:00 PM | | 4 comments »

Normally at this hour, i would be sleeping on my comfortable bed or maybe still playing game and refuse to sleep. Other than that, maybe I’m at my campus (MMU) attending my lecture. But now, things have changed. Haiyoh. Now, I’m at this building called ‘No.3440′ where my industrial training’s office is located at. I work now and no more of those studying spree or godly gaming especially during my work time from morning (omg!, 8:30 am) to evening (6 pm, ouch!).

The company where I’m doin my practical is called Epeteknik. At first, I thought this is just a small company with few softwares in the making because the staff consist of only 3 people, 1 chinese girl with the post Software Engineer, 1 indian guy involve with the R&D and lastly 1 malay guy with the post system engineer. Boy am I wrong. This company make it’s own hardware (around 5-7 inventions) and the software to control and retrieve data from it. Cyberjaya is just their system branch where their main branch is at Shah Alam where all the hardwares is created.

Their projects currently involve with water. Cool eyy ? Things like rainfall, tsunami, water flood, water pressure, and the likes. Their latest project is at the Bakun dam. From their station, they gather the data and their client can retrieve it on the net with their pc/pda and they can also retrieve it by using handphone. They can miss call the system or just sms it and in like 5-10 mins, they will get the data requested. All this, the hardwares and softwares, is made in Malaysia. Errr Malaysia boleh ?? You bet.

Now I’m stuck with visual basic for the whole week. Eventhough some claims that the language is easy, a guy like me who never did any visual basic programming, found it hard. Hope I can pull this off and better equip myself for this “change” that will go on for atleast 4 more months. GG.

Get to know more about Epeteknik here.