Go Comic! Today (2)

I will personally say this is a normal scene in Malaysia if you ask me. The hygienic issue of the food that is. Or 'Halal' the way Moslems see it. Often when I decide to get some meals during outings, it is disturbing to know that I cannot solely depend on the 'Halal Certificates' one restaurant put up on their front desk in a very nice wooden frame. The fact that this country has Jakim to monitor all food processing operations doesn't comfort me the way I should've felt towards food hygienes in this very own country due to obvious reasons (Restaurant operator generally like to take this Halal Status for granted)...aih...

Then you could always hope that it's halal. Yeah, a kind of street gambling I think....heh!

That's my opinion.

You can have yours.

Anak Kutip

On the way balik kampung hari tu, aku stop kejap kat R&R nilai untuk makan tengahari. Pilih ade satu kedai melayu nih. Tgk papan tanda dia bertulis

"..dimiliki oleh Aisyah binti Pungut.."

Kelakar pn ade, simpati pn ye jugak.

Bayangkan kalau si pemilik kedai tu tinggal kat Negeri Sembilan. Waktu kecik-kecik dulu kalau ade neighbour or jiran tetangga kampung tanya dia ;

"....Ekau nih anak sapo?...."

Mesti la die kene jawab;

"...Eden anak Pungut..."

Kesian.....anak pungut... (;

50 glorious years!

Lamaaaaaaaaaaaanye aku x update blog aku yang bertemakan orange dan black nih...kekeke! Let's see what's new in blogger? Oh, now blogger saves ur drafts automatically! Great! But do you know what's greater? Our country will be celebrating its 50 years of independence despite of some 'cakap-cakap' from a minority group who claim the freedom of speech to themselves...aih...and most of them use the blog to get their 'barking' heard! These bloggers ( smer ade, malay, indian, chinese, iban, kadazan, jawwwa, mat salleh, singaporeans pn ade... you name it!) are mostly full time bloggers and these guys really have the capabilities to influence people through their writings I can say.

People would appreciate if these kind of individuals could really step out to at least show their faces (but I bet they wouldn't) rather than critizing the country ruling sytem, slamming the ruling government (as if these critics know how to run a country ...) condemning the King....blah blah. I hope they're just more than talk the talk, and walk the walk.

You know, they keep complaining what they don't have...well they complain so much that they fail to recognize and appreciate what they've actually possessed. They fail to enjoy the one thing which to 'some' (read millions of people at the other part of the world ) is too far from reality - Freedom and Peace.(<---'Freedom' and 'Peace' are already 2 things...heh!) Sure, I can understand If they talk about all those stuffs, complaining about this and that. Sometimes they get mad when they face difficulties in life, but hey...you tell me who doesn't have problems? So what if you have difficulties living in Malaysia. Everyone does! Get over it! I personally think we're very lucky to live such a wonderful life here...Thus, in conjunction with Malaysia's 50 glorious years of independence, I'll post some articles that you might able to digest and appreciate. E-passport pride of Malaysian technology by Azura Abbas NST.


Two years before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, the United States immigration inspectors came across something they had never seen before — a passport with a chip embedded in it.
It was a Malaysian passport, which carried a digital photograph and fingerprints of the holder.The world’s first electronic passport, it baffled the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) and its laboratory staff, said author and consultant Neville Cramer.At the time, he was still serving as special agent in charge of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, under the US Department of Justice."Inspectors came to me and said this passport is the finest thing we have ever seen. The best in the world," he said in an interview.

Then two jetliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, hijacked by men who used fake passports to enter the US.The Sept 11 attacks triggered a desperate search by governments around the world for the right technology to make travel and identity documents more secure.

In 2003, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) set new standards for passports, including the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchips.The Malaysian RFID chip, which allows contactless operations of smart cards, was developed by local MSC-status company Iris Corporation Bhd.Despite concerns that the chips could be cloned, information encoded into Malaysian passports has so far remained secure. Digital keys stored on each chip made such duplication and forgery impossible, according to a company statement last year.Iris has gone on to supply its technology for smart cards and passports to a number of countries, including Turkey and New Zealand.But almost a decade after Malaysia launched its e-passport, the US, which issued its first e-passport early last year, is still trying to get it right.Cramer, who headed the first INS field test of Malaysia’s e-passport, believes that the US should adopt Malaysia’s technology."To this day, (the US) has not done it right. The chip stores a photo of the holder but not his fingerprints. It is mind-boggling that they have not utilised (Malaysian) technology fully," said Cramer, on a recent visit here to meet Home Affairs Ministry officials.


Since retiring in 2002, Cramer has written a book, Fixing the INSanity, on some of the causes of America’s immigration problems. He has also started a consultancy called Immigration Enforcement Solutions.When Cramer first came here for the INS field test, the team he led ordered 19 machines to read Malaysian passports. Within a week, they saw for themselves how well the passport’s security features worked.A man had presented a Malaysian passport, but the reader showed a woman’s face in the digitised photograph contained in the chip, he said.The photograph on the physical document had been replaced, but the one stored on the chip could not be tampered with."He confessed that he bought the forged passport from a smuggler." Sadly, Malaysia lost the chance in 2003 to help set world standards on e-passports, he said."The government should have gone to the UN, which oversees the ICAO, to tell everyone that Malaysia has already done it."Malaysians are not getting the credit for what they have accomplished."Partly, it’s because European and American technology giants cannot accept that a small country like Malaysia had beaten them to it."So they downplayed what Malaysia has," said Cramer.


Indeed, Malaysia is well ahead of the rest of the world. E-passports, he said, are the only way to speed up clearance times at immigration points and border controls, especially with air travel on the rise around the world."The world has to start embracing the use of e-passports."



Wait for another inspiring article!

Wishes for This Month

Quoting from Yusuf Islam Spiritual Song "Your Mother"

Who Should I give my love to,

My Respect & My honor to,

Who should I pay good mind to,

After Allah?

And Rasulullah?

Comes your Mother.

Who next?

Your Mother.

Who next?

Your Mother.

And then Your Father...

-Extracted from Bukhari & Muslim-

Utmost gratitude to all the teachers I'd been learning from.

Teacher Mala and associates, SKJ3 Bangi, SAS dan lecturer2 di UTP nih...

*p/s: Klw nk wish jgak biarlah btol2 tepat pade tarikhnya, bukan mcm aku yg dh terlambat nk dekat seminggu dh nih...Paling bagus, hargailah mereka2 ini setiap masa, x perlu tunggu Hari Ibu atau Hari Guru utk menyatakan appresiasi anda terhadap mereka. Chewah...cakap mesti nk gempak je aku nih kn? kn? Xpela..aslkan mesej itu sampai.

Renung-renungkan la...Selamat Beramal~ <----(Sounds familiar? (; )

Kekeke!

EDX 19

EDX 19, which stands for Engineering Design Exhibition, the 19th, is a platform where all qualified 3rd Year Studnts' Engineering Team Projects (ETPs), Final Year Stdnts' Projects (FYPs), including various inventions from UTP's lecturers, are exhibited for public. Simply said, it is an engineering design exhibition lah!

So basically there are 3 categories:

1 Final Year Projects (FYP)

2 Final Year Design Projects (FYDP)

3 Engineering Team Projects (ETP)

all of which to be won.

PRE-EDX

Me and my 5 other teamm8s, who come from various engineering programmes-Chemical, Electrical, Civil and Mechanical Engineering Programme- competed in the pre-EDX in the ETP category, and weren't looking forward to get through to the next round. Reason being, we'd failed during the demo and our protoype sucks! It was so screwed-up that one of the evaluators bluntly commented,

" You've got good idea, but you've failed it! "

..and immidiately left our group standing dumbfounded, leaving us with no chance to defend or at least justify our theory.

Surprisingly enough, 5 days later, my team was listed as one of the qualified groups for the 19th EDX...Huahua...!! We've never figured out, till today, how that was made possible.

THE DAY

Ok, so my team was miraculaously qualified for this 19th exhibition. Of course, like any other team, we'd to put in 'additional' efforts to our project so that no one can disparage our idea during the exhibition. We had to build new prototype by adding some improvement features, we carried out a demo to produce our own video simulation, and some other fixing.

Our group proposed a boom for oil spill cleanup by utilizing human hair as the main component. Ngehehe...some of you may say "Yuck..disgusting!". I know some of you would, I can tell because some of my teamm8s had the same perception towards human hair...thank God they didn't object the idea along the way completing this project....ngehehe..

What we did was actually making the hair into 4cm x 4cm packets as shown in the fig.

Know that human hair does not actually 'absorb' the oil. Instead, it 'adsorbs' the oil.

And we put a lot of these hair packets inside the boom (see figure below) that we have designed in such a way that it increases the efficiency of the adsorbency of the hair packets.

The Boom(...tgn sape la tue..kekeke!)

To increase the efficiency of the adsorbency of the hair, we figured out that by stirring, the amount of oil absorbed is increased by a margin of 50%. So, how do we incorporate the concept of stirring in our boom? We had to install a center blade inside the boom as you can see in the following figure.

View from inside the boom

The center blade provides rotations in the boom to stir the mixture of oil and sea water. The mechanism of the boom is more or less described in the following figure.

Click picture for larger view

The 2nd model ready for simulation.

And for the sake of EDX, we had to carry out some tests for our simulation video. A very simple one.....Now notice the difference of the quality of the water before and after we applied our boom.

BEFORE

AFTER A WHILE...

AFTER

Tadaaaa...! Kesan minyak degil hilang! Kekekeke!

So, we'd managed to increase the efficiency of the application of human hair in our project. Too bad, we left the EDX empty handed. We didn't win any of the award offered which are:

1 Best ETP design

2 Best FYP Design

3 Best FYDP Design
4 The most innovative award
5 Peoples' Choice Award

But overall, I believe our group did a very good job. Well done to my teamm8s.

The Fellas: Bulat, Ucop, Aku and Pekro (and the other 2 girls; sorry no photos of them-I haven't asked the permission to post their pic)

To be continued.......