Yahoo Mail gets bigger

Yahoo Mail is planning to increase its mail storage somewhere around this May. Read the news here.

This is obviously a direct competition against Gmail who has storage space of 2.83 Gb and counting. If only they could increase the size of the file attachment... that would be helpful. After Yahoo Mail, could it be Flickr to be next in line to get an upgrade? Sounds possible to me.

heavy user?

I read this news today and chuckled...

Getting Net savvy
Finding a life on the Net

....Other findings from the survey include:

- Students and working professionals constitute most users, with students 23 per cent more likely than average to be heavy users (people who spend more than three hours online per day).

- Home followed by work or school are the two most common points of access for heavy users at 77 per cent and 73 per cent respectively.

NST 28 March 07

Heavy users were defined as people who spend more than 3 hours online. I think I will fall under the category of extremely heavy user ;) since most of the assignment, info searching etc were accomplished using Internet. In fact, the first thing in the morning I will be online to check for news and weather forecast. If only there were widespread of cheap broadband in Malaysia, there will be more people willing to use Internet as part of their daily life.

akhirnya siap...

At last, I managed to finish the draft. A lot of changes were made in the result section and I need to rewrote the whole discussion. Changing the result section requires me to recheck all those numbers and calculation. At the moment, I am tired of seeing those numbers again. In statistics, if you change one small figure, it will affect the whole calculation. Chain reaction. I will be waiting for the reply from my supervisor and hopefully, there won't be any major changes required.

draft

My supervisor asked me to send full draft on Tuesday morning. That is yesterday. Thus, I spend most of my time last weekend to write it. A full draft contains all the necessary things of a completed project; abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion and references. It was quite busy in the past few days. Bear in mind that my supervisor would like to publish this project in a medical journal. It was a tough job to do.

I only managed to complete it by early Tuesday morning. There are literally hundreds of mistakes and non-sense rambling in my writing. If you see me blogging or commenting at other blogs, that indicate I was stuck at writing :). I have no experience in writing an extremely long (my definition of long is something that is more than 5000 words) assignment before and to expect me to write something for publication, that is even more challenging.

This evening, my supervisor send me the edited version of the draft. There are many red marks in it and it requires significant improvement. I have to do additional literature review. Expect me to be extremely busy again. That does not mean I will stop blogging temporarily anyway ;)

p/s: let us pray that Intan can find her thumbdrive.

keywords

It is common for people to use search engine to search for info. Most of the new visitors to this blog arrived via google and yahoo. It is interesting to see what kind of keywords they search for. For the uninitiated, I am using Google Analytics to analyse all the web traffic data. The top keyword of this week is surprisingly 'Siti Fatimah Mukhtar'. I think this refer to the post I wrote here.

There were 16 searches about her. It is strange since in the post, the only word about her name was in the news snippet I pasted from NST.

Just to let you know, the top four keywords in 2006 were 'kembara di bumi melbourne', 'tunku kurshiah college', 'saladin animation malaysia' and 'xifu algebra'. Compare this with the top four keywords in this year (up until today); 'kembara di bumi melbourne', 'xifu and the algebra', 'cerpen faisal tehrani' and 'aliya murshida fotopages'.

current wallpaper - Seasons

It is almost time for the season to change. The Daylight Saving Time is also around the corner. Hence, the decision to choose wallpaper based on 4 seasons B).

As usual, I checked my favourite website that always shows elegant and beautiful wallpapers. This website should be one of your bookmark / favourites coz it is simply great :).

Here are few wallpapers that I found which kind of related to the seasons.

I choose the last picture as my current wallpaper. The other pictures is reserved according to the relevant season. If I have ample time, I might try to do something like this one.

For more great wallpapers, please visit Vladstudio.

a b c d e f sampai z :)

Being tagged by aie, so here is the list...

A is for age: 24

B is for beverage of choice: tea

C is for career right now: student.

D is for your dog's name: I hate dogs

E is for essential item you use everyday: laptop :). It is hard to imagine my life without a computer.

F is for favorite TV shows at the moment: House MD and Heroes.

G is for favorite game: used to play tennis but now...almost nothing...computer game leh kira tak ;)

H is for home town: Kuala Kangsar, Perak.

I is for instruments you've played/play: cannot remember anymore, the last time I played an instrument was in primary school since I have to learn Music as a subject.

J is for favorite juice: apple juice.

K is for whose butt you'd like to kick: I don't want to kick anyone just in case my kick is strong enough to kill somebody ;)

L is for last restaurant you ate at: Bismi since it is close to the home.

M is for marriage: still single. Don't ask me when I will get married since I don't have any candidate at the moment

N is for your full name: 4 words. My name is quite common.

O is for overnight hospital stays: twice. once when i was 5 years old. diagnosed with fever and stay for one week. Next, got a dengue fever and hospitalised for one week at the age of 12.

P is for people you were with today: housemates

Q is for quote: cannot think of anything at the moment

R is for biggest regret/mistake: fighting with my younger brothers.

S is for status: full time student, part time web designer

T is for time you woke up today: 6.10 am.

U is for the underwear your wearing right now: Change question yer....U is for the unknown: I used to hate every music and songs and only start to like few songs that have good message in it (this does not necessarily mean nasyid only). I like a song more because of its lyric rather than the rhythm.

V is for vegetables you love: almost all veggies I can eat.

W is for worst habit: I am a bit obsessive on kitchen cleanliness. I like to clean the kitchen as much as possible.

X is for x-rays you've had: banyak sangat. tak terkira dah.

Y is for yummy food you ate today: I have not taken my dinner yet.

Z is for zodiac sign: Leo.

news snippet

WORLD No.1 Roger Federer crashed out of the Pacific Life Open Masters Series today (AEDT) losing his second round match 7-5 6-2 to unseeded Guillermo Canas of Argentina.

from here

If I'm not mistaken, this is the second time Federer lost in this year. I guess he have to start all over again to continue his winning streaks.

KOTA BARU, TUES: Siti Fatimah Mukhtar has every reason to be proud of her achievements.

She is the best student in the state in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia examination with 18As. The daughter of a bank officer scored 17 1As and a 2A.

NST 13th March 07

Today the result of SPM is out. As usual, there will be several students who will achieve more than 15 As. Congratulations for them :).

Within the past few years, the academic achievement in SPM is progressively focussed on how many As you scored in the exam. I still remember during my days at high school, it is quite common to see many students took only 9 or 10 subjects. And achieving 9 or 10 As is already considered as excellent.

Today, if you only get 10 As in SPM, it is only the average. People will tend to look for people who scored more than 12 or 13 As. Ridiculous. This is absurd. Even though you get 20 As (speaking of the extreme), it will not guarantee your success in the university at all. The number of As will only give you higher chance to get scholarship as long as you excel in the co-curricular activities too.

Why the students should waste their time learning additional subjects that may not be relevant for their future? I think they should used that time to enjoy their youth. Life does not revolves around academic only.

The people in the Ministry of Education should educate the parent about this matter. The current trend is not healthy and will lead to many students become obsessive-compulsive with the academic only. After all, life is all about balance and life itself gets shorter and shorter every day ;)

expanding words

My research is now almost at its end. The dateline to submit the final thesis is on mid of May. That means I have roughly less than 3 months. At the moment, I have typed 3000 words and the word limit is 10000 words. It is bit hard to reach that word limit now. I guess I' not used to it yet. The last time I have to do a written assignment was in semester 3, I think. That is quite a long period indeed and I think my writing skill need to be polished up. It will take sometime to get used to typing.

On the other hand, I have managed to understand the concept behind multiple regression analysis and have finished analysing the data. I just need to confirm this with a statistician in case there is another simpler concept to be used. Epidemiological statistics is a bit weird to understand...relative risk, odd ratio and few type of hypothesis testing, Type 1 error, Type II error, Mann-Whitney test etc....I guess advanced statistics is not something that I like. Fortunately, I just need to use STATA for any analysis :)

additional note: while surfing for t-test, i found this sentence :D

This test was described by W. S. Gossett, who first published it under his regular pseudonym "Student" (although I don't know why he used a pseudonym, perhaps it was a good idea given the pain and suffering this test has caused students ever since).

from here

STATA

STATA is a statistical software commonly used by researcher to analyse their data. I have been using this software since last week. This software is based on command that used word such as 'if' 'or' 'and' etc. Below is the screenshot. I was calculating the incidence rate of my variable of interest. It took me few hours to understand the syntax (the arrangement of command word) and I have to prepare mock database just to ensure that I did the right thing.

There are three things that I need to analyse for my data. I have done 2 and only left with one more. The last one is a bit tough and probably need to refer statistician or medical statistic book.
After I am done with this statistics, I can hopefully finish my thesis within few weeks :). This is afterall, the second last stage in research.

Robot bloggers

From www.fareastgizmos.com

NEC has created a robot that can blog. You just chat to the robot and the robot themselves will find the suitable music, video, pictures and other multimedia and blog it. Cool. More from here

For someone who is too lazy or busy to type at the blog, this may help them. If only those robot can understand everyday conversation....that would be extremely useful. Just tell the robot to do the laundry, clean the house, wash the car etc...wouldn't that be cool B)

Of star, moon and the sun...

And thus We gave Abraham [his first] insight into [God's] mighty dominion over the heavens and the earth - and [this] to the end that he might become one of those who are inwardly sure.

Then, when the night overshadowed him with its darkness, he beheld a star;., [and] he exclaimed, "This is my Sustainer!" -but when it went down, he said, "I love not the things that go down."

Then, when he beheld the moon rising, he said, "This is my Sustainer!"-but when it went down, he said, "Indeed, if my Sustainer guide me not. I will most certainly become one of the people who go astray!"

Then, when he beheld the sun rising, he said, "This is my Sustainer! This one is the greatest [of all]!" - but when it [too] went down, he exclaimed: "O my people! Behold, far be it from me to ascribe divinity, as you do, to aught beside God!

Behold, unto Him who brought into being the heavens and the earth have I turned my face, having turned away from all that is false; and I am not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him."

[Al-An'am : 75-79]

jalur lebar

Jadikan Internet mampu milik – Najib

PEKAN 3 Mac – Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak berharap teknologi-teknologi telekomunikasi baru diperkenalkan agar penggunaan Internet termasuk perkhidmatan jalur lebar lebih murah dan mampu digunakan oleh lebih ramai pengguna di negara ini.

Timbalan Perdana Menteri mengakui kadar caj Internet di negara ini lebih tinggi berbanding beberapa negara maju dan teknologi baru yang lebih kos efektif perlu diperkenalkan.

Beliau berkata, kadar penembusan Internet di kalangan masyarakat negara ini adalah 14 peratus dan 2.5 peratus lagi terdiri daripada pengguna internet jalur lebar.

Jumlah itu katanya, adalah jauh lebih rendah jika dibandingkan teknologi lain seperti telefon bimbit yang mencecah penggunaan sehingga 86 peratus di kalangan penduduk negara ini.

‘‘Komunikasi teknologi maklumat (ICT) seperti Internet perlu dijadikan mampu milik agar tidak wujud jurang digital di negara ini.

Utusan Malaysia 4 Mac 2007

Sesiapa yang tinggal di luar negara pasti akan mendapati perbezaan yang ketara perkhidmatan internet yang disediakan di Malaysia dengan negara-negara maju lain. Di Australia, ada pelbagai syarikat yang menawarkan perkhidmatan internet jalur lebar dan persaingan di sini agak sengit. Mereka sanggup mengiklankan perkhidmatan internet di TV pada waktu perdana. Walaupun internet jalur lebar di Australia masih belum setanding dengan Denmark atau Korea Selatan, ia masih jauh lebih hebat dan berdaya saing dari internet di Malaysia.

Suasana monopoli di Malaysia pada umumnya membantutkan usaha memajukan perkhidmatan internet jalur lebar. Kerajaan seharusnya melakukan sesuatu untuk mewujudkan budaya persaingan sepertimana yang berlaku di dalam industri telefon bimbit yang berkembang pesat sejak beberapa tahun lepas. Bayangkan kehebatan persaingan industri telefon bimbit sehingga pelajar sekolah menengah mampu memiliki kad pra-bayar :).


Statistik internet jalur lebar di Australia.