Facets of Darren Sim

I’m currently sitting in the B2 Hall of the UN ITU Conference centre in Geneva. Some really cool stuff being discussed now on Public Private Partnership (PPP).

Once word of wisdom I learn and heard during this conference is “take projects with clarity” instead of just going into the projects themselves.

I believe the common mistake that many IT companies make is to just dive into a project without getting enough clarity, which I think is one of the primary causes to many project failures today.

I went out with LL in the evenings for dinner. We met at Bugis, went to buy my hairspray and proceeded in search for our dinner.

Count us lucky or what? We actually saw a rainbow en-route to dinner. WOW!

LL’s happily snapping away (not noticing that I’m snapping too. Haha)

At this point we haven’t had dinner yet. So you can imagine how long we spent rainbow chasing… Haha… I thought this mosque was really majestic, especially under the illumination of the lights under the evening skies.

We finally arrived at the fish hotpot place at about 7ish and the queue, you bet, was really long. But guess what, the queue started from nowhere and ends at no-where. I was pretty fortunate to find a queue (which looks the most decent) and had the restaurant staff entertain us. We were immediately led to a seat within 5 mins! WOW!

Best of all was another group was chased from that seat for us and the uncle told them that we waited very long… Haha… I wanted to be honest, but I guess it would do injustice to his kindness right? And thereafter, he came back and chatted with me, and patted me on the back as though it’s a gathering of old buddies. LL was shocked and thought I knew him that’s why we got the seat so fast, but if my memories don’t fail me, it’s my first encounter with him. Haha…

Finally the food comes! YUMMY!

This place is located right across the Textile Centre at Mohd Sultan road. Enjoy!

Finally, here’s the steamboat.

It was a long long long day at the NDC. As some might have noticed, I do have a protruding lower jaw and a inbalanced teeth alignment. I was in consultation with the Orthodontist in the morning taking the molds of my mouth and the x-rays for the potential braces. A whopping 5 varients of xrays in total. WOW!

By the time I was done with the Ortho-consult, it was almost lunch and was asked to come back in the afternoon to see the Maxillofacial surgeon for a consultation for the Orthognathics treatment. He was a very nice guy. Senior, sturdy and very polite. I shall not discuss the surgical plans here since it sounds pretty gross even for myself. I’m still digesting it… Urp!

After the entire procedure, I went to look for a friend of mine who is a senior practitioner there to get some insights and advice. By the time the whole process is completed, it was already 5ish. @_@!

I guess god had it all planned. I have an event at 6ish at the Old Parliament house to attend, the InfoComm Live session where Yahoo’s MD will share on entrepreniership.

As usual, the stroll there from MRT will take me past some landmarks which looked especially majestic during the evenings…

The Fullerton Hotel (I want to hold my wedding here)

Scenic view of the architectures along the Marina Bay stretch

Exhibition of the late Chinese Emperor Kangxi at the asian civilisation meseum. Shall try to give it a visit if time allows. =)

The Old Parliament has been a familiar place for me. It brings back alot of old memories indeed! It’s where I spoke in the first even Remix conference in Singapore. It’s also where I attended a Gala event hosted by Minister Lim Swee Say and the Book Council.

So the show begins. Mathias shared with the Audience alot of about his “war-stories” and gave a very factual advices for budding entrepreneus on how they can go about to grow their enterprises. This event was attended by many industry veterans like Prof Desai of SMU and IDA’s CEO.

One interesting discovery I made on the way back home on the MRT is the new LED indicators in the trains.

Well, you can guess which stop I was at eh? haha…

Best of all, it indicates which side the door is opening. A great innovation from SMRT indeed!

I was at the IDA Infocomm Scholarship this afternoon at the Suntec Convention center and got the privelege to meet up with some old friends and also learn about the what the scholarship program has in stall. As it ended pretty early ahead of time, I had about 2 hours to kill before another meeting.

Since I had the DOME card, I thought of simply hanging out at the DOME outlet at Marina Square. Lady luck seemed on my luck and I was able to withness some live casting work going on.

Ok.. So here’s my gorgeous computer and my awesome cup of Ice-cream Mocha. Sinful indeed!

I have been making my way to work recently via the MRT train and have noticed sometime amiss, on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. When the train comes near Tiong Bahru, it appeared that the track was really shaky and the train had to stop for some 30 secs before proceeding again.

On Wednesday night, as I was on the way back from LL’s place at about 9-ish and was about to take the MRT home only to some great dissapointment. I guess this is the first time that I personally experience a MRT breakdown. When the train arrived, I was eagerly waiting for the doors to open so that I could be on my way home, but apparently, the doors do not seem to work.

It kind of persisted for some ten to fifteen minutes and the crowd seemed to be building up. Eventually the train moved one cabin forward and it seemed that it is now able to open the doors.

But…  Only the inside one.

I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the entire station or just one train, but when I look across the platform, the train heading towards the opposite direction is also unable to operate the doors to open.

Almost 20 minutes have passed by and the crowd seemd to be building up like swarm of bees, flooding the entire platform. Many seniors are beginning to grumble and have been discussion what happened to “kill time”.

The SMRT employees decided to manually open the doors via a keyto allow trapped passengers out of the train. I also learned from a friend that this issue is persistent at the Raffles Places station. In the end, the door as can see, is left open till the next train arrives.

By this time, I’ve lost patience in the wait and decided to travel by bus instead. To my surprise, the SMRT did not actually attempt to perform any customer recovery and crowd control by advicing the passengers on what happened and alternatives or how long this might persist. They also did not seem to refund the SMRT far (although trivial) to passengers who decided to take bus instead.

I believe that the SMRT could have done better in providing a better customer service & experience.

Am I outdated or is this something totally new?

I was at Raffles City for Dinner with LL after collecting my jeans at Levi’s, and guess what! When I was about to send her back I was looking for the train towards “Boon Lay”.  However,  I could not seem to find it. So I thought… “Maybe Jurong East then lahz!”

To my surprise (after a couple blinks), there’s 2 new stations added after the Boon Lay Station, namely Pioneer and Joo Koon. I believe that these two stations are definitely very new and I swear I did not see it on the board last week. Even a check on SMRT’s website showed that the last station is Boon Lay. WOW!

My computers have been serving me well for the one plus year and I’ve not reformatted it since. One pleasant surprise after reformatting is that I noticed the change in the MSN Messenger user interface. It has become alot cooler looking…

The Main Messenger Window

Customization of the Entire User Interface

The new Chat Window. Noticed the red/yellow borders around the images? Those now depicts the status.

Today marks the total defence day in Singapore, the exact day which Singapore fell to Japanese in the Second World War when Singapore was still a British Colony.

I believe many who serves/works in a Government Organization would have heard the total defense message by the respective ministry heads during this day. At MINDEF, Minister Teo reminded servicemen about the global threats facing us today and what total defence means for us as a nation.

We visited the Lee Kong Chian National Library on Friday where were learned about some of our founding fathers’ humble beginnings.

An especially interesting architecture which caught my eyes along the way was this really unique building along BUGIS.

Some really interesting spots within the National Library which really forms a great milieu for sipping an aromatic cup of latte and reading a book.

I’ve been very KPO about what girls think about their dream guy and had been asking many of my female friends over time for the past years and I thought that this was the right time to share more about it, since it’s really close to Valentine’s Day.

So here it goes….

1. Romantic
2. Smart
3. Understanding
4. Good Dress & Fashion Sense
5. Fun to be With
6. Humourous
7. Thinks about the future and has a good career/future prospect
8. Give her a sense of Security
9. Honest
10. Gentlemanly
11. Gives her freedom to do make friends and have her personal space

Please comment on the post if yu’ve more to add.. =)

As many who are in the field of IT would have heard of hash and MD5, gone are the days. A group unofficially known as the MD5 Collision Inc demonstrated that they discovered a way to fabricate a rogue certificate copied from a legitimate one they bought from Verisign, the world’s largest issuer.

So let’s first talk about the MD5 hash algorithm. This is an over 10 years old algorithm developed by MIT to generate digital signatures. However, under Moore’s Law where computing power doubles every two years, this algorithm would be obsolete by now.  In fact, in 2004, a Chinese professor from the Shandong University in China revealed that she’d broken the algorithm. Something that the MD5 Collision also standby, where in their attempt, had tried to do so with more than 200 Sony Play-stations being wired together.

So if you’re intending to use any Hash algorithms, be sure to make a switch to SHA1 or SHA 2 (which is distinguished as SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512), which is well supported in the Microsoft .NET Framework since at least 2.0.

• http://www.obviex.com/samples/Code.aspx?Source=HashCS&Title=Hashing%20Data&Lang=C%23 (Most Recommended)
• http://islab.oregonstate.edu/koc/ece575/04Project1/Nelson/NetSHA.htm
• http://www.csharpfriends.com/Articles/getArticle.aspx?articleID=344

One implication that this obsolete algorithm bring about was the controversy where VeriSign still uses MD5 to generate their certificates. However, as of  today,  this sites I visited which employs the Verisign certs have all been in SHA1. To identify the algorithm used to sign a particular certificate, simply click on the “Pad-Lock” icon to view certificate details. After you’ve done so, just click on the Details Tab and you’d see the algorithm.