I am Haris!

I got my copy of Modern Warfare 2!

2009-11-12T10:06:00.001+08:00

My copy of Modern Warfare 2 arrived by courier yesterday, and I managed to plow through the campaign in one night. It was on regular though. It was short, but it had plenty of action and twists. I especially loved the part with the snowmobiles. Going downhill felt great!

I tried to get on the PSN to play online, but the Modern Warfare 2 servers were having problems. Lets hope they fix that soon. [UPDATE: It looks like they fixed it. I played for a couple of rounds. I sucked, as usual.]

I tried to play split-screen with my brother but they did that 16:9 split-screen thing instead of just a line down the middle, so the viewing area is really tiny on my 24" monitor. At first it was kind of a problem, but we moved closer and we got over it.

Baldur's Gate Trilogy on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Linux

2009-11-09T08:00:00.009+08:00

I had been feeling the itch to play Baldur's Gate again. To my eternal shame I've never actually finished either Baldur's Gate or its expansion and sequel. I found this guide and managed to install and play Baldur's Gate using the Baldur's Gate Trilogy (BGT) mod on my Linux box. BGT is a mod that makes it so that all Baldur's Gate games are played as one giant epic continuous game. It starts at Candlekeep and I suppose it ends wherever and whenever Throne of Bhaal ends. Since I've never actually finished it I don't know for sure but the idea is intriguing.

The installation was successful and I've played it for a bit. There are a couple of issues though:

I can't seem to put it into windowed mode
It sometimes hangs when I quit while actually in a game. I usually get out of this by doing a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and going back to the gdm.

I haven't run across anything else so far. I'll update when I do.

So here's what I did:

First things first, make sure you have a copy of the original Baldur's Gate, it's expansion: Tales of the Sword Coast, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, and Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal. You have to have all of them. If you don't, I suggest getting the Baldur's Gate 4-in-1 boxset.
Make sure you have the following packages installed: mmv, tofrodos, and wine. If you don't have them or you are unsure just execute the following command:
```
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential mmv tofrodos wine unrar-free unzip
```
Execute
```
$ winecfg
```
Under the "Audio" tab, make sure that only the box labelled "OSS" is checked. Click OK.
Download and save winetricks into a folder in your PATH. Execute:
```
$ ./winetricks directplay
```
Download Mos Pack and extract the source code somewhere. I extracted it into /home/haris/src/mospack. Execute:
```
$ cd /home/haris/src/mospack
$ make -f makefile.unix
```
This will create the executables mospack and mosunpack
Move, copy or create symlinks for the resulting mospack and mosunpack in a folder in your PATH.
Install Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, and Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal. Make sure you install everything. I installed Baldur's Gate at /home/haris/games/baldursgate and Baldur's Gate 2 at /home/haris/games/baldursgate2. When you see these folder names in this post just change them to match where you installed the games on your system.
Then, if you need to, download the appropriate patches for Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 from Bioware's site and install those too.
Download Baldur's Gate Trilogy-WeiDU and extract it into your Baldur's Gate 2 folder. The current version is 1.08.
Download bgt_linux.rar and also extract it into your Baldur's Gate 2 folder
Download the Linux version of WeiDU. Unzip it into a folder in your PATH. Personally, I extracted to a new folder and added that folder to the PATH. Whatever you choose to do, switch to whatever folder you extracted it to and execute:
```
$ tolower
```
Change to your Baldur's Gate directory and execute tolower:
```
$ cd /home/haris/games/baldursgate
$ tolower
```
Change to your Baldur's Gate 2 directory and execute tolower:
```
$ cd /home/haris/games/baldursgate2
$ tolower
```
Still from your Baldur's Gate 2 folder execute:
```
$ ./bgt-linux/bgt-linux
```
When prompted, type in the location of your Baldur's Gate install. In my case this is /home/haris/games/baldursgate.
Wait.
After the installation is done, put in your Baldur's Gate 2 CD and type:
```
$ wine baldur.exe
```

Enjoy!

Adapted from BGT in Linux (Successfully I think) by lodgey
References: DirectPlay Games at Wine wiki

I want to be a ✭Rockstar Scientist✭!

2009-11-08T04:05:00.000+08:00

We went to Penang for a couple of days and saw Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in 3D at Gurney Plaza. I think Gurney Plaza's GSC is the only cinema with 3D within an hour of my place so there's not much of an option. We had great seats too: last row center so the viewing angle was 90°-ish. It was awesome.

And the movie itself was great, too. I don't particularly know who wrote the screenplay or directed but he/she/they nailed it in my opinion. I especially loved the fast cuts of Flint Lockwood describing his actions when he's doing science. I also loved the posters little Flint had in his bedroom, specifically the Tesla poster.

Going in, I only knew that Bill Hader and Anna Faris were the main characters. I didn't know that Mr T was in it. Nor did I know that Neil Patrick Harris voiced Steve the monkey.

The jokes were good, too. Some were obviously targeted at the kids in the audience. But there were more than enough geeky/nerdy ones in there to satisfy me. Hell, they had Bruce Campbell, Mr T and Neil Patrick Harris. I am well-satisfied.

The 3D was used to great effect. As my brother said: this is a disaster movie. There wasn't a lot of things flying out of the screen, but the depth perception lends a bit more oomph to the destruction that is happening. That said, it isn't necessary to have watched the movie in 3D to enjoy it. It is plenty good enough to stand on its own.

Dragon Age: Origins — No top down view. No spell-casting while paused. I am a sad panda

2009-11-05T02:40:00.005+08:00

Playing on the PS3 after finishing the PC version, I felt hamstrung by the console interface. In combat, it replaces the expandable ability bar and hotkeys by mapping spells and abilities to the face buttons. You get two sets of commands and can alternate between them with R2 (or right bumper for the 360).

Tactical combat is sadly stripped down for the consoles. In the PC version, you may use a handy top-down viewpoint of the battlefield. You can maneuver the camera above the characters on the console, but it doesn't scroll in and out. It's also more difficult to command characters to take specific positions on the battlefield, and I couldn't cast spells while paused. This really takes away from the combat -- it's a shame that console players again don't get the options that PC players enjoy.

via 1up.com

I was very much looking forwards to playing Dragon Age. But after reading that, I'm a bit bummed out. Getting it for Windows is not really an option because I don't run Windows anymore. So the PS3 is my main gaming outlet.

Why do console games get "simplified" interfaces/control schemes by default? It's not like I can't plug in a USB keyboard and mouse on my PS3 and game away. I understand that it might be an unfair advantage in multiplayer games. But this is single-player AND multi-platform. A keyboard and mouse control scheme and its attendant advantages should at least be an option for games like this.

Failing drives annoy me

2009-11-03T06:48:00.004+08:00

I had a surprise when I upgraded the netbook to Karmic. It installed a SMART monitoring tool by default and it reported that my hard drive is failing. I did not experience this when I installed Karmic on my laptop but that was a clean install, not an upgrade. I did a search on Google and discovered that many are experiencing this and it is apparently a known bug. So this is the output of sudo smartctl -iA /dev/sda (install smartmontools first):

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     TOSHIBA MK1652GSX
Serial Number:    29AGF4FCS
Firmware Version: LV020J
User Capacity:    160,041,885,696 bytes
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   8
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Tue Nov  3 06:21:31 2009 MYT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000b   100   100   050    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  2 Throughput_Performance  0x0005   100   100   050    Pre-fail  Offline      -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   100   100   001    Pre-fail  Always       -       1129
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       10235
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   050    Pre-fail  Always       -       147
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000b   100   100   050    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  8 Seek_Time_Performance   0x0005   100   100   050    Pre-fail  Offline      -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   088   088   000    Old_age   Always       -       5027
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0033   253   100   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       240
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       34
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   096   096   000    Old_age   Always       -       47116
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       63 (Lifetime Min/Max 23/68)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       138
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
220 Disk_Shift              0x0002   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       108
222 Loaded_Hours            0x0032   089   089   000    Old_age   Always       -       4505
223 Load_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
224 Load_Friction           0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
226 Load-in_Time            0x0026   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       334
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0001   100   100   001    Pre-fail  Offline      -       0

I have since discovered that SMART is not monitored by default in Jaunty so it's not a surprise that there were no warnings. I have no idea what the reallocated sector count was pre-Karmic, but I think that the hard drive was already going bad — there were signs even though it was mostly running fine. And the numbers does seem to indicate that it is genuine rather than a bug. After thinking it over I am leaning towards prudence and simply replacing the netbook's hard drive and buying an external enclosure for it in order to use it as portable storage. It's probably for the best.

That said, I'll take note of SMART beforehand the next time I do an upgrade to Karmic.

UPDATE 3/11/2009 11:21 p.m.: Upgraded another computer from Jaunty to Karmic. Zero problems.

Lesson from TV: It doesn't pay to become Good

2009-11-02T17:21:00.001+08:00

I saw the latest Dollhouse episode just now and it made me feel sad for Topher. Supposedly he is an amoral genius, but he is now starting to have questions about what is right and wrong. This will not end well for him.

Switching your alignment to Good is, ironically, almost never good. Just switching is never enough. You feel the Need to Atone™ for your past misdeeds. This need, if left uncontrolled, can lead you to doing Stupid Things™. Eventually, if your supposed "sins" are perceived to be severe enough, it will Drive You Crazy™.

Switching to Evil on the other hand, is almost always good. You stand to gain obscene amounts of power, and with power comes happiness. The key is of course to Never Overextend™. Learn where the limits of your abilities are and curb your ambition to match. Many who have fallen to Evil failed to observe this simple rule and paid for it.

This is a lesson I learned from many hours of watching TV and movies and I bestow it upon you.

Meat hands

2009-10-28T16:29:00.002+08:00

I knew there was a reason I am a carnivore. Now I'm hungry.

Good-bye, Geocities!

2009-10-26T23:28:00.006+08:00

Ah, Geocities! Where would we be without your free website hosting those years long gone? Probably at this very same place. I mean, there was Tripod, Angelfire, Fortunecity, among others. But Geocities was my first.

In honour of Geocities shutting down, xkcd redesigned its website to commemorate the truly horrible design we had back then — not that this blog is much of an improvement :p But at least nothing is blinking.

A moment of silence, please …

Arrogant Linux elitist

2009-10-26T04:04:00.003+08:00

The t-shirts I ordered a week ago from Jinx.com arrived yesterday. The "Arrogant Linux Elitist" tee is totally rad!

Embedding a wave in a blog post

2009-10-15T23:10:00.012+08:00

~~I used Embeddy to generate the code to embed the wave below. Lets see if this works.~~

UPDATE: Looks like it works for me, but I haven't been able to share the wave with public@a.googlewave.com so I'm assuming you guys can't see it.

UPDATE 18/10/2009: I moved the embed off the blog because the thought of putting the javascript call into the blog template itself disturbs me.

Puteri Umno apparently wants to increase movie piracy

2009-10-15T07:59:00.000+08:00

Apparently Puteri Umno wants to ban "horror, mystical and superstitious" movies. Why? Obviously, because "such films can weaken the faith of Muslims in the country". Apparently it was passed without debate, too.

I am sorry MPAA, if this nonsense ever becomes law, I'm afraid that many Malaysians will have to pirate your movies if we want to see it at all.

Full text:

KUALA LUMPUR: Puteri Umno wants the Government to ban the production of “horror, mystical and superstitious” movies, claiming such films can weaken the faith of Muslims in the country.

The movement also wants the authorities to empower the Islamic Development Department (Jakim) to take action against such productions.

The call was contained in one of the motions that were passed without debate at the movement’s general assembly on Wednesday.

“In view of widespread screening of movies with ghosts, superstitious and mystical elements, we urge the Government to empower Jakim to ban their production as they do not carry any positive message, but instead may destroy the faith,” it said.

The movement also called on the Government to issue a similar ban on all foreign movies of such genres.

It said film producers should concentrate on producing films of different genres that could serve as lessons, rather than show horror and superstitious ones which might not even deliver the intended messages.

It added parents must provide religious education to children to ensure that they would have strong faith to avoid from getting influenced by such negative elements.

I'm wave-ing!

2009-10-14T23:45:00.000+08:00

Now what?

International week is upon us bleh

2009-10-07T20:01:00.000+08:00

I think we've won all our games since the loss to Manchester City and that can only be a good thing. There were questions about how we performed in a game or two but we still won those games.The 6–2 home win against Blackburn Rovers is a great bookmark to put in our streak as we go into yet another week of international football.

Lets hope the boys come back to the club fairly intact.

That last game in particular underlines just how important Fabregas is to us. He had four assists and one goal. The solitary goal that he was not involved in came after he was subbed out — it was a great shot by Bendtner by the way. This also netted me 38 points in my fantasy football team because he was captain BWAHAHAHA!!

Happy International Day of Blasphemy!

2009-09-30T00:01:00.013+08:00

Happy blaspheming, infidels! :D

EDIT: the post felt incomplete without a link to my favourite blasphemous webcomic: Jesus and Mo.

I bat-caved

2009-09-24T11:35:00.002+08:00

After saying that Batman: Arkham Asylum is only worth a used buy, I went ahead and bought it anyway. I've always been weak to such temptations.

I blame the multiple times I played the demo, figuring out more Batman-like ways to take out the bad guys. I've lost count of how many ways those last five inmates can get incapacitated :D “What would Batman do?” is the question to ask yourself when you play the game.

Another factor that convinced me to buy the game is the availability of DLCs. The Joker DLC is already available on the Malaysian PlayStation Store. I hope the rest will follow too.

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is bad

2009-09-23T09:27:00.001+08:00

I found this video clip through @scriptmunkee on identica.

ACTA apparently allows governments “to access [the content held on a person's hard drive] for no specific reason whatsoever”. If questionable material is found on your device, it may be confiscated, and destroyed. I'd like to ask though: how would they verify ownership of any given file on said device? It is probably easy if I bought all my music through iTunes and I just have to log on to my account to prove ownership. But even that takes some time.

But what if I rip my CDs and they're hundreds of miles away? Do they have the local police go through my CD library at home one by one to verify that I own these songs? And what about free media? It seems pretty likely that unless you have nothing on your device, you're pretty much fucked and you will end up getting a criminal charge laid against you if you're searched.

This is not good.

Sharing a network connection with a PS3 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha 5

2009-09-16T20:46:00.011+08:00

Has this always been in Ubuntu? Was it in Jaunty? I don't know (UPDATE 7/10/2009: Yes this feature is available in Jaunty) but sharing my laptop's internet connection with my PS3 is trivial in Ubuntu Karmic. My laptop connects to the internet via Wi-Fi and I am connecting my PS3 to it using an Ethernet cable. Now, the PS3 does have Wi-Fi but at least in my case it is spotty at best.

How to share a network connection on Ubuntu Karmic Koala?

Right-click the network manager applet. Click on Edit connections.
Select the connection you want to edit. In my case this is "Auto eth0"
Go to the "IPv4 Settings" tab and select the method: Shared to other computers. Click "Apply: and close the Edit connections menu.
On the PS3, under "Network Settings" choose "Internet Connection Settings".
Select "Easy" and let the PS3 set everything to automatic. You can set the specifics if you want, but then you probably won't be reading this :p
Save the settings, and you're done!

I see a large improvement in terms of latency and speed compare to letting the PS3 connect to the wireless access point on its own.

Our second loss. It's confusing, really!

2009-09-13T01:52:00.003+08:00

I can't quite process the match Arsenal just had.

We lost 4–2.

Adebayor has revealed himself to be one of the absolute lowest-of-lifes.

Rosicky's back.

That we went behind first and never got the lead is the primary reason we lost in my opinion. Except for the first, every goal we conceded were results of very, very effective counterattacks. And the way we conceded that first goal was painful: a freekick headed onto the post by a blue-shirt but went in off Almunia's face. Painful. After we conceded we sort of tuned out of the game. Sloppy passes, giving away balls cheaply, but the opposition didn't threaten too much then. We ended the first half 1–0 with hardly a shot on target.

Whatever the manager said during the break must have worked well because we started to make the blue-shirt keeper work for his pay. At round the 50th-ish minute, Denilson was subbed out for Rosicky. He seemed to have recovered well. He played the pass that enabled Robin van Persie to score the equalizer.

Things started to get ugly from then on. A certain blue-shirt apparently tried to slam his studs onto van Persie's face. No action was taken by the referee.

We still had a hold on the match though but not for much longer. Twice Clichy was tackled and lost the ball on the attack and our defence failed to cope. And "boom!" we were down 1–3. The third goal annoys me especially. To celebrate, the same blue-shirt who apparently tried to maim van Persie ran across the length of the pitch towards the Arsenal fans. Classy[!]

Then they got another goal through yet another counter attack and we were down 4–1. We kept trying to get more goals though. van Persie had shots saved or came off the bar. Rosicky managed to make it 4–2. But scoring 3 goals in 5 minutes is always going to be difficult.

I guess we played well enough in the second half at least but the fact that we got behind first meant that we were always chasing the game. First, for the equalizer and when we did equalize, for the win. They took advantage of this and scored goals and we have to address it. Also Rosicky is back and both he and van Persie has scored and that looks promising especially in light of the rest of our fixtures this month. Go win the next one!

Bittorrent on Ubuntu

2009-09-11T00:49:00.002+08:00

I am out of ideas trying to get a proper bittorrent client on Ubuntu.

See the thing is: I like rtorrent. It's simple, it's text-only. With some scripts you can even add directory monitoring, queuing and even moving completed torrents to it. What's not to love? I simply can't get it to run through my OpenVPN tunnel though. Because of my ISP, torrents are not really torrents without going through some sort of obfuscation. They're more like drips. And "bitdrips" is just dirty.

I've tried the default bittorrent client on Ubuntu: Transmission, but it feels inadequate to me. I can't queue up multiple torrents and support for things like proxies is weak in my opinion. And Deluge seemed to crash – or at least, become unresponsive – often. I also couldn't get it to use the OpenVPN tunnel. Not reliably at least. I thought it worked for a bit with Deluge but with the unresponsiveness …

So I turned to something that I know for sure worked: µtorrent. I know, I know it's not open source, and it's not "Free as in Freedom". Hell it doesn't even run in linux (without wine)! But it works for me.

I would like to go open source with this but I can't seem to get the other clients to work right. Any ideas?

I think I'm done fiddling with the blog

2009-09-06T23:54:00.000+08:00

So the final URL is blog.qedx.com. I made qedx.com and www.qedx.com redirect here when opened in a browser. I also made it so that both redirect to myOpenID using .htaccess when used as an OpenID. The URLs of the posts made during the past month should also now redirect to their new permalinks.

It's like magic! Did I say I love mod_rewrite?

I'd like to say here that I'll stop fiddling with the blog from now on. Well … I'll stop fiddling with stuff involving URLs and domain names. Maybe …

Why we can't have nice things

2009-09-06T14:52:00.000+08:00

Disgusting.

gwibber 2.0

2009-09-05T12:01:00.000+08:00

I've used gwibber in the past but because it kept crashing on me, I dumped it for twhirl. The new gwibber 2.0 seems to have fixed that issue. At least, I haven't experienced any crashes so far. Your mileage may vary.

So what's new in 2.0? Well the sidebar thing is new. I prefer this sidebar with trees layout compared to the tabs in the old gwibber. I would run out of space for new tabs, and I don't like to scroll horizontally. It just feels more natural to me to scroll vertically.

Another new thing is the search box up top. When you search for something, a new stream appears under 'Search' in the sidebar. You can also drill down to filter the search results by service. I do have a complaint though: searches take a while to load. This is probably because of my ISP more than any fault of gwibber but it is still a bit annoying. Probably related to this bug.

Closing the sub-streams in the sidebar can get a bit frustrating. Either they take their time to go away, or I'm just not clicking at the right spot most of the time. The icon is pretty big. Ctrl-W works fine though. Does this happen to anyone else?

If you're running Ubuntu you can get gwibber 2.0 by going to the gwibber-daily PPA and follow the instructions there.

It's not the cow, stupid!

2009-09-04T20:27:00.008+08:00

Stop making me plant my face in my hands everyday! First, it was our Home Minister defending the so-called "cow-head protestors" …

“They are not getting off scot-free. They felt victimised and feel that there is another valid explanation on their part. There was no intention on their part to cause racial divide. They, the organisers, who are sitting left and right of me, didn’t even know that somebody was going to bring the head of the cow during that demonstration.”

Of course the very next day, he changed his mind!

Those responsible for bringing the head of a cow during the Aug 28 protest at the Selangor state secretariat building should be charged in court, said Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein.

He ordered the police to proceed with further investigation and take stern action against those responsible.

“The police have identified the individuals involved," he said in a statement Thursday.

And now, Khir Toyo is saying that the whole thing is a "misunderstanding over a stupid animal."

Are they missing the point deliberately or are they just that dense? The main issue here are the protesters threatening violence and bloodshed in the name of their race and religion. The cow's head issue is, while disgusting, also secondary.

By focusing on the animal instead of the gross acts of the people, I think that they are trying to belittle the issue in hopes of sweeping it quietly under the rug. It is insulting that they'd think we'd fall for it.

And then there are the people who think that there are too many Hindu temples in Malaysia.

Disappointing result, but we'll get over it

2009-08-30T03:19:00.003+08:00

Well, we got handed our first loss of the season. Looking at the bright side: at least it wasn't to a newly promoted side.

It was going so well too. I may be biased but we dominated the first half. We took the lead later on when Arshavin put a beautiful long-ish distance shot pass the keeper. Just before the goal we had a valid penalty claim when some red-shirt clattered into Arshavin in the box but it was not given. Overall we ended the half on a bright note.

The second half too started brightly. Arshavin ran into the box from the left and played the ball to van Persie for a tap-in but it was saved. And then it all went wrong. They got a penalty when a red-shirt fell over Almunia's outstretched arms. I am still not convinced that it wasn't a dive — it looked like he was falling long before there was any contact with Almunia. But apparently a keeper cannot stretch out his arms when trying to take the ball off a player's feet, except for when he can.

1–1 then. Nothing we can't deal with.

But a few minutes later Diaby scored. An own goal. It's bizarre really. Some red-shirt whipped in a ball across the penalty box (was it open play, or freekick? I can't remember) and it looked like he deliberately headed the ball behind him but not high enough to go over the bar. Maybe he misjudged his position, thought he was higher up the pitch, or something. *sigh* And just like that we were behind.

We had chances to level the game but nothing came. And to be fair to Diaby, he tried very hard to make up for his mistake. In the very last minute, we had a van Persie goal ruled out for offside and Arsene was sent off. I am not sure why he was sent off. Maybe he said a bad word that offended the officials' delicate ears. The red-shirt fans were a disgrace though, but that's nothing we don't already know.

Aside from those two moments I believe we were the better side overall. We threatened to score every time we had the ball and defensively we were solid-ish. It got a bit shakier when we went behind but that was always going to happen when you're chasing an equalizer. Diaby needs to get his defending training up though. An own goal like that should never happen again. I am satisfied with our performance but pissed at the result.

Now we've apparently got two weeks of boring internationals to go through and our players will probably come back all injured. Stupid internationals.

Never compromise

2009-08-28T23:46:00.004+08:00

Yup. What happened was appalling but now the ISA is useful? "Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon."

That tweet by @andrewkjs pretty much sums up my position on the protestors threatening violence over the construction of a Hindu temple.
My complaint about them is strictly about their threats of bloodshed — which is evil and just plain uncivilized. In my opinion they can gather and voice all manner of vile, hateful things about anything to their liking without threatening or actually doing violence. Just let them be prepared to accept that others will have differing opinions and may voice them just as loudly. That is what freedom is about.
Calling for their detainment under the ISA would be blatant hypocrisy.
They do seem well prepared with their professionally-printed banners and wireless mics though. Not to mention a dead cow. I wonder what an investigation into who supplied these items would turn up?
And what the hell is up with this?

“Khalid Ibrahim wears a mask of a Muslim, but in truth he is a liberal. PAS stands to lose out as a result. I voted for PAS as well as Khalid in the past elections,” Mahyuddin claimed.

Is there something wrong with being a liberal? Is it against Islam somehow? Can you not be Muslim and liberal at the same time?