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Singapore Road and Traffic Design Need Improved

Singapore has a special electric traffic tolling system - ERP. I need pay twice from my home to office. The charge is about $4 every day, not cheap! With all the money collected, the road can certainly improve better than now. Some examples - If you drive south from Upper Bukit Timah, you can easily miss the PIE . The road diverge before PIE and the sign to PIE is posted after the road is diverged. If you are in fast lane, you will miss it! Now driver further to AYE, you see the sign leading to AYE, you begin to accelerate so you can merge into expressway traffic. suddenly, there is a sign "Yield". It is not AYE yet, but a road parallel to AYE with traffic from right coming. What you can do is brake hard and stop. The sign is also very poorly posted. Most sign on expressway is located on the right, some are hiden under the tree. Most of time, the large size trucks are on that lane which totally block the view of the road sign from fast lane drivers. You better study the map

新加坡概况

新加坡 , 源于 1819 年英属贸易殖民地 . 1963 年加入马来西亚联邦 . 1965 年 8 月 9 日独立 . 地理位置介于印度尼西亚和马来西亚之间 , 北纬 1.22, 东经 103.48. 面积 692.7 平方公里 . 热带气候 . 潮湿闷热 , 雷阵雨多 . 最高点 Bukit Timah 166 米 , 最低点新加坡 0 米 . 新加坡人口 4,425,720. 人口增长率为 1.56%. 本人口平均寿命为 81.62 岁 . 其中男性为 79.05. 女性为 84.39. 人口中华人占 76.8%. 马来人占 13.9%. 印度人占 7.9%. 语言以华语 , 英语 , 和马来语为主要的交流语言 . 国家设有总统 , 总理内阁 , 议会 , 高等法院 . 总统任期 6 年 . 总统任命内阁主要成员 . 议会由 84 位议员组成 . 任期 5 年 . 执政党是人民行动党 . 新加坡 2004 年 GDP 为 1209 亿美元 . GDP 增产8 .1%. 人均 GDP 为 $27,800. 外汇黄金储备 1128 亿美元 . 新加坡做为世界最繁忙的海运港口之一, 与美国, 中国, 台湾, 日本, 韩国, 泰国, 和邻近国家有着密切的贸易往来. 译自 © CIA Online Publications Phttp://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/sn.html

Secret Mark - BOM in UTF-8 text file

You open a text type file (.txt, .log, etc). You know it contains some Chinese or Japanese characters. You open it and it looks a mess. Is this file damaged? Maybe not. You can change the file suffix to .html, and open it within your favorite browser. Change the character encoding to utf-8. You may be able to view it. So what is wrong? The file is encoded in UTF-8. It needs hints to the view application such as Notepad to open it as UTF-8, not ASCII plain text. The hint is BOM (Byte Order Mark). For UTF-8, the BOM is "ef bb bf". When you save a file in UTF-8 in Windows Notepad, it actually inserts this BOM at the beginning. In case you generate this file in other ways, you can insert the BOM on your own. putc(0xef, traceFile);putc(0xbb, traceFile); putc(0xbf, traceFile);

Monitoring server status with mrtg and snmp on Red Hat 9

This doc shows how to setup SNMPv2c and MRTG on Red Hat 9 Server. Thanks to O’Reilly Press ( http://www.oreilly.com/ ) Essential SNMP (ISBN 0-596-00020-0). NET-SNMP 1. Remove old SNMP package and install the latest net-snmp package from http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/ . Select SNMPv2c by now 2. Generate snmpd.conf, and put it under ~/.snmp or /usr/local/share/snmp 2.1. Use /usr/local/bin/snmpdconf 2.2. Create manually 3. Start /usr/local/sbin/snmpd 4. Test with snmpwalk server –c public_community OID E.g. snmpwalk x.x.x.x –c public system snmpwalk x.x.x.x –c public .1.3.6.1.2.1.1 Pleas refer to the SNMP MIB-II OID Tree. [root] [ccitt(0)]—[iso(1)]—[joint(2)] [org(3)] [dod(6)] [internet(1)] [directory(1)]—[mgmt(2)]—[experimental(3)]—[private(4)] [mib-2(1)] [system(1)]—[interfaces(2)]—[at(3)]—[ip(4)]—[icmp(5)]—[tcp(6)]—[udp(7)]—[egp(8)]—[transmission(10)]—[snmp(11)] 5. Create script to start/stop snmpd service in /etc/init.d MRTG 1. Install libpng from http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/ 2. Y

Cheque (Check) in Singapore

Bank checks in Singapore are referred as “cheque”. In Singapore, anybody may take cash out of a local cheque. The common practice is to cross out the words “or bearer” on your cheque. Then only the payee can cash the cheque. Another convention is to cross the cheque with two parallel lines on the top left corner. A crossed cheque only issues the payee money after bank transaction. Nobody can take cash immediately out of a crossed cheque.

Phone card and IDD Call in Singapore

There are lots of phone card and IDD service providers in Singapore. Among them are Starhub IDD 008, 018, Singtel, MediaRing. We used to call China by phone card. It is about 2c per minute, and quality is not bad. Unfortunately the card we use are getting worse and worse. The number is 63 475 475 Go! card. It just likes throw $10 into trash, and make me so frustrated not only because of the money but also the times we tried, and call quality. I am going to give Starhub IDD 018 a try finally.

12" Apple PowerBook

I bought a 12" Apple Powerbook when it is on sale at Campus. It is very cool looking laptop. All mental round frame, with the dazzling Apple logo. The Tiger is stable and beautiful. It comes with most daily utilities with the OS - iTune, QuickTime, DVD Player, Xterm, Safari, Mail, SSH, iPhoto, iMovie, ... It is a very decent laptop for US $1000. Yes, that is what I paid! It also has some problems. Let me name a few: After just bought 3 months, the hard disk is broken! Luckily the laptop is in one-year global warranty. I was at Singapore at the time, and they replaced it for free. Nice. It takes times to adjust the display if you switched from Dell Wintel laptop. The LCD display on 12" PowerBook are fuzzy, not sharp enough. The recent release version has a better LCD display . The amber light in front is a little bit annoying especially in the dark, it is too bright! Oh, the back vent of PowerBook is really sharp, be careful! It can hurt you. Of course, the MS Office for Apple