Pi has always held a special place in my heart and probably yours as well. When people ask me to pick a number between 1 to 10, I always pick Pi (or sometimes the square root of two), which hasn’t made me the life of many parties.

And there’s an entire community of Pi lovers like me out there–people who are just fanatical about calculating pi to the trillions of digits? With just the first 40 digits of Pi we’ll be able to calculate the circumference of our galaxy with an error that is smaller than the size of a proton, so calculating PI to trillions of digits is quite superfluous. So why then do people do it?

Last weekend I had an issue with my hosting provider, WPWebHost.

I switched to WPWebHost 2 years ago, and recommended them because they promised wordpress hosting at an affordable rate. Wordpress hosting is where the hosting provider would support wordpress specific features, e.g. help troubleshoot plugin and theme issues, perform nightly backups, and offer ‘higher availability’ for Wordpress sites. If you’re still wondering what Wordpress is, take a look at one of my previous post.

My latest experience with WPWebHost has left me wondering if indeed this was actually Wordpress hosting or just regular hosting in disguise. I’m now wondering if I should stay with them.

Was my server really getting the 99% uptime promised by WPWebHost? Nope. Did I get the Wordpress Specific support that help identify theme and plugin issues? Nope. Does WPWebhost cost more than regular hosting from other providers like GoDaddy, Dreamhost and my previous provider NearlyFreeSpeech? Yup. So why I am still with them? Read more to find out.

Below is the full un-redacted transcript of my email correspondence with WPWebhost–I’ve left out the customer service agents name because I believe they have a right to privacy. However, nearly every time I sent an email, a different rep would respond making the whole conversation very messy and difficult to keep track off. Some emails were left out to simplify the flow.

There’s a highway they want to build from Damansara to Puchong–called Kidex, and just like any other highway before, people are understandably worried about the construction. This excerpt from the KL-Chronicle details the causes of anxiety:

[box icon=“chat”]Kidex will be constructed over heavily built-up residential areas in Petaling Jaya and will pass very close to schools, houses and places of worship. It will pass just 5m away from two schools – Bukit Bintang Boys Secondary School and Sri Petaling Primary School. Its distance from the Tun Abdul Aziz Mosque in Section 14 is listed as 7m and from St Paul’s Church as 18m. Houses in parts of Sections 2, 4, 7 and 8 will be just 10m from the highway

And so, when Kidex had their townhall last week, a group of protesters showed up to voice their displeasure–as should be allowed in a democratic society. Kidex claimed they had conducted a survey that proved that the majority of the people wanted the highway, this was hotly contested by the Say No to Kidex committee, who contended that the survey wasn’t ‘authentic’.

The video below (from Malaysiakini) has a great interview with the secretary of the Say No to Kidex committee outlining their points of contention on the survey by Kidex. (starts at 1:10)

1. The initial Kidex survey of 300 respondents--of which 73.4% were agreeable to the building of the highway. 2. The Say No to Kidex committee did their own survey on 20 different locations, including the Mosque, Schools, and the resident associations of the areas affected by the highway. 3. Say No to Kidex can't comment on how many people they've engaged but can confirm it was more than 300. 4.Hence the public perception of the initial Kidex survey is negative. 5.The list of the initial 300 respondents has not been shared--as it was confidential. 6.The survey was conducted by a Ph.D in statistics, but this survey itself was funded by Kidex. 7.The next survey as planned by Kidex would have 2000 respondents.

Teachers day was last Friday, and I thought it would be good to make a small post in tribute to an interesting teacher I had in form 4.

Imagine a 200 pound man, with a thick moustache, carrying intimidating rotan, and wore nothing but Chairman Mao style Bush-coats everyday–that’s Mr. Vijay, and he thought me Additional Mathematics.

Mr. Vijay was interesting in many ways, including the wrestling stories he’d tell in class, but for all my years in school I only remember a handful of lessons, and none more vividly than the time he thought me the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss during us lesson on arithmetic sequences.

The story is certainly fiction, similar to that of Newton discovering gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree–but that is irrelevant, what’s relevant is how I remember it, and as my tribute to one of my teachers, I’d re-tell the story here.

Here goes.

Once upon a time, there lived a boy named Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Even while still in elementary school, Carl was already a maths genius, and like all other geniuses was a bit of a nuisance in class. So one day to shut Carl up, his teacher gave him an ‘important assignment’–he was to calculate the sum of all numbers from 1 to 100. i.e. 1+ 2+ +3 +4….+100. The idea was that this would keep Carl busy for the remainder of the lesson

However, Carl came back very quickly with an answer of 5,050!!

How did Carl do this?!!

But when I tell people I drive a Prius, I get a sneer and look that suggest I must be a bumbling idiot, you know the one where their face wrinkles up near the nose. People ask the usual mileage questions (5Liters/100km if you’re curious), and make some oft-remark about the design–but then they end with the question that’s really a statement–isn’t it slow?

The Prius can easily top 110km/hour and still get better mileage than the much smaller Ford Fiesta. There isn’t a single highway in this country where you can legally do more than 110km/hours and hence  any car that can do 110km/hour can’t be slow.

So why is it, that people make such a fuss that an Ookla study concluded that our average broadband speed is slower than Cambodia–when the average of 5.48Mbits/second is still fast enough for every online service imaginable.

I’m a tech geek, and I’m happy with my 5Mbps connection from Unifi.

At 5Mbps, I can download content faster than I can watch it–anything faster is excessive.I can watch Netflix in HD (maybe not 1080p, but good enough), I can watch youtube without lags and I can listen to any podcast, radio channel or spotify without a hitch.

And I wouldn’t enjoy these services more even if I had a 10Mbps or 100Mbps connection. Trust me 5Mbps is fine.

So what’s the big deal with the connection speeds, that our friends over at the MCMC had to release an official statement. There are some issues with broadband in Malaysia, but speed isn’t one of them. Here are the top 4 things we can do to improve broadband in Malaysia which doesn’t include speed.

1. Fill a glass half-full with water
2. Drop a couple of ice-cubes into the glass
3. Measure the water level before the ice melts
4. Measure the water level after the ice melts

Now compare the water level before and after the ice melted, and you’ll find them to be the same. So if melting ice doesn’t increase the water level in your glass–why do melting ice-caps raise the sea-levels of the earth?

We are all a single species, all of us share a common DNA, so common that if yours changed by a mere 2% you’d be a chimpanzee.

We share one atmosphere, from which we breath the same air–not just with other humans alive today, but those of past times as well. In fact, every breath you take contains a slither of air from the breadth of everyone else–who has ever lived. I stand in awe, when I realize the air in my lungs now was also in the lungs of Julius Caesar as he was stabbed to death.

"House of Cards is really big in India, I discovered," Spacey told reporters at the International Indian Film Academy Awards which took place in Tampa, Floria – the first time they’ve been held in America. "Except isn't it funny that Netflix doesn't exist there yet. Which means that you're stealing it.”

I’m gonna be honest here. Kevin Spacey is one of my all time favorite actors, from his brilliant work in Usual Suspects and American Beauty, to his legendary performance in the House of Cards series–this guy can do no wrong.

This is how fast your connection on AWS in Singapore is when connecting to a Singaporean server. Not much different if you repeat it, but I was surprised the ping was still 2ms, I expected to be just 1 (or even less).

WTF is a bitcoin? There’s much ado over the digital currency and many people struggle to understand what it is. In fact, even I haven’t fully grasped the fundamental nature of how it works–but then again I don’t know how the banking and fiat currency system work, yet I still use it.

In essence, there’s been a huge amount of really technical literature written about bitcoin, but most of it is long–really long, and unless you’re prepared to spend a few hours and some mind-numbing amount of effort to digest it, I took it upon myself to distil my knowledge of bitcoin so that you have at least a working knowledge of it.

So here’s bitcoin explained.

Don't think of it as a currency

On the other hand we have precious commodities like Gold. Gold isn’t regulated by any one central government or bank. The value of Gold is purely a result of the supply and demand in the marketplace, and just like any other precious commodity, part of that value lies it is rarity. It’s rare, and mining it is complex business, so the supply of Gold into the market is controlled by natural consequences.

Gold is valueable because it has value–a currency is valuable because a government says so.

So the best way to think of bitcoin is to treat it as digital gold rather than digital currency.