It was a fantastic trip. Had tons of fun snorkeling, kayaking and swimming. Being a shutterbug, I took over 600 photos. Probably 70% usable only. Ended up with a tan and slight sun burns.

Stay tuned for photographs. Update - photos uploaded to flickr.

Check out the depth-of-field and bokeh - absolutely superb. These were shot on my way back after getting the lens. Shot at an arm’s length. 30mm is considered standard zoom on cropped sensors so it’s like having a 50mm on a full frame. The wider angle compared to the fast 50mm primes is much more useful than expected.

A few observations:
1. Shooting wide open is a bit soft, but good enough
2. Stopping down to f2 is about enough to get better sharpness
3. Low light performance is amazing@f1.4
4. Build quality is good
5. Bokeh is so gooooood

Oh, and f1.4! Freaking 1.4!

Hmmm…

Decided. Enough is enough.

My antivirus program decides that I’m like an idiot and insists on running on a Friday afternoon during weekdays. Policies or not, it’s NOT fun when you’re in the midst of coding and everything comes to a screeching halt because an AV scan is running. The particular one I’m talking about is Symantec Antivirus v10, which can use up to 50% or more and suck up hundreds of megabytes of RAM when it’s running. It’s fair enough that I run the AV auto-protect all the time but why force a full system scan down my throat? I KNOW how to take care of my computer and I’m observant enough to notice any unknown services running in the background. So why?

Anyway, here’s a sweet way to kill off the stupid service - go to your Services and stop it. Then restart it so you get auto-protect back up. The full scan won’t run again. Killing it via task manager or the excellent ProcessExplorer didn’t work, even after granting full access to the process and escalating myself to Administrator. Dang.

Got pissed off earlier because the IT department started to force a 10 minute screen saver with password lock on all company laptops. Luckily, editing the registry quickly allowed me to disable the screen saver.

Really, what’s with these noobs trying all this nonsense? Maybe it’s because of the virus that infected the whole network and brought it down for 3 days a few weeks back? Which I might add was probably caused by sloppy checking by the IT department people themselves when issuing old laptops which was running ancient AV software. Probably even had expired licenses hence no live update available. Masking their mistake with a blanket-wide drastic measures - typical.

But not really effective.

Edit: Oops, looks like I didn’t mention the service - it’s rtvscan. To kill it, stop Symantec Antivirus service. Don’t forget to restart it less you wanna run Windows without an Antivirus program. Not smart. Unless of course, you use Linux for real work and Windows is just for your games

Firefox 3 has officially been announced as the fastest browser when compared to Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.5 - an amazing feat considering Opera has always been the fastest browser (see ArsTechnica). I can easily attest to this as I have all 3 installed at my desktop at home and it’s always been Opera > IE 7 > Firefox 2. I stuck with Firefox 2 as my main browser nevertheless because of its amazing plug-ins and the added security. Occasionally I fire up Opera just for kicks and I use IE7 for badly designed websites that needs it. A more interesting note is that the author over at Wired.com has a multitude of plug-ins installed as well and he mentioned that they work on Firefox 3.

Needless to say, I’m downloading it right now.

Courtesy of the folks over at LowYat.net, a street shoot was organized last Saturday. No agenda, no theme, just pure fun. The weather was on our side that day (at least till 4 pm). It started at 9.30 am at Chow Kit monorail station. The route is from Chow Kit to Coliseum, then Sultan Abdul Samad building and Dataran Merdeka but I had to stop half way due to my schedule.

The picture I chose to display on this post is of significance to me - it shows a level of racial harmony that the Malaysian people enjoy, even after the recent unpredictable general election. Politicians will be politicians, always playing the race card to benefit their own agenda but here shows the true spirit of the Malaysian people.

More are up at flickr.