Minn Myat Soe :: His Notes

Last week, I went to a branch to open XtraSaver account. As usual, their personal banking consultant asked me if I wanted to open their Supersalary account. I said no and told him I just wanted XtraSaver account. Then he tried to open an account for me, and suddenly he had to see his manager for some verification. About three minutes later, he told me that the burmese are disallowed to open an account. Well, they were not supposed to tell me this, and they had a right to disapprove my application without giving any reason. But it was good to hear their reason for the reject.

I just left the bank, and checked online website to see if they have any written information about this. I couldn’t find it and I sent them an email inquiring about account opening, stating my nationality and residential status.

A few days later, a girl called me and asked me to open an account at Six Battery Road. I was surprised, and she arranged me an appointment with the staff at the branch.

It was my fault I didn’t check thoroughly with her, and I blamed myself for trusting Standard Chartered Bank again. This time, I wasn’t told the reason, and I was only told due to some policies. It might the same reason. I’m not interested in their policies. All I know is Standard Chartered Bank just wasted my time and resources. The bank doesn’t seem to have connections/communication between their departments. Although I wasn’t allow to open the saving/checking account, he asked me if I was interested in Fixed Deposits. Huh. I’m done with that bank. I also should warn the nationality of Myanmar should not be wasting time going to the bank and open an account.

I understand that the burmese people can be rejected by any US or Europe financial institutions due to sanctions. If this is the case, my enquiry should be returned with negative reply so that I wouldn’t waste my time going to the standard chartered bank.

These days, something relates to software platforms that perform distributed computing on a cluster, catches my attention, and this led me to:

• Hadoop/Hbase/Pig and
• Mapreduce/Sawzall/Bigtable

Hadoop platform is just the open-source implementation of Google’s Mapreduce.

I think the most basic ingredient for the this platform is distributed file system. Basically MapReduce framework works in two steps, it Maps and then it Reduces. At the end of the workflow it writes the output to a distributed file system (GFS for Google or HDFS for Hadoop). GFS is proprietory to Google, and it’s implemented in userspace as opposed to be in kernel. Please find Google Research Publication for GFS here.

Some people say that the implementation is low-level and some tried to add more layer to original implementations. For example, Facebook layered Hive on Hadoop engine.

MapReduce framework is supposed to handle huge amount of data, so in general we will need a data structure that can hold/process this amount of data comfortably. Google implemented BigTable, and HBase is the open-source alternative from Hadoop.

I think I’ll look into Hadoop (Java implementation) and Qt Concurrent (Qt C++ implementation) of MapReduce.

Last.fm’s bashreduce look interesting, too.

I just found an article titled “Myanmar Insights”, on a blog. The author seems to be a singaporean. Here are some of his comments:

• most people sarongs (both men and women)
• costs US$1500 to own a sim card (excluding mobile phone and calling charges)
• limited imported cars; all mainly recycled & non-aircon
• The buses are like lorries which ferried many
• Myanmar uses two currencies; US and kyats (they’ve 2 exchange rates – official vs black mkt)
• There are 3 seasons (dry & hot, wet & hot, dry & less hot – unfortunately we went in the hottest season
• Yahoo, hotmail & gmail are prohibited
• Women use grinded tree bark on their faces as a form or sunscreen/ makeup (see below)
• Many speak English, and they are known to be hardworking people
• School fees costs US$1/ month in one of the unis
• Blackouts are a way of life
• Many children run along roads with a baby in hand to ask for money
• Precious stones/ gems are one of the natural resources (incl sapphire, jade, emerald, etc)

And finally his conclusion:

on a last note, this trips highlights the contrast of lifestyles in singapore vs myanmar…which appears stark to me. and i hope many of us (including myself) dont have to lose it to appreciate our country (govt setup, infrastructure, etc)

Despite these comments, there are people who did enjoy travelling to Myanmar =)

There are a lot of places you can look for tips for web designers. This might be the summary, and it describes how you can simply use CSS to create stylish look-and-feels. I am really in love with lightbox effect.

If you are looking for Open Source alternatives for your commercial packages, this might be it. You will never know what you do with those Open Source software.

There’s a show room for Ajax and DHTML scripts, that we can be used in our works. If you like nifty corners, you will also be impressed by spiffy corners.

This is how we can integrate Gmail into our daily lives. And IMified just makes our instant messengers more applicable and useful.

I also found Backpack from IMified banner, which has many features that Gmail has been missing.

Backpack is a simple web-based service that allows you to make pages with to-do lists, notes, files, and images. Backpack also features a Calendar and Reminders that can be sent via email or to your cell phone at predefined times.