Friday, March 28, 2014

RazakSAT revisited.


 

RM142m RazakSAT faulty after just one year, says federal auditor

By Shannon Teoh
October 24, 2011

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 24 — Malfunctions barely a year after the RM142 million RazakSAT satellite was launched caused it to take 1,328 unusable mapping images that were inaccurate by up to 37km, the Auditor-General’s report showed today.
The report made available today said state-owned Astronautic Technology Sdn Bhd (ATSB), which operates RazakSAT, lost RM10.89 million in 2009, of which RM7.7 million went towards insurance premiums for the faulty satellite.

“The operational lifespan of RazakSAT is three years. But the RazakSAT satellite failed to function fully on August 30, 2010, a year and sixteen days from launch date,” Auditor-General Tan Sri Ambrin Buang wrote.
The Auditor General added that the remote sensing satellite was designed to “capture images within 1km accuracy” but “an image of an area in Sungai Buloh and Subang missed by 37km and captured Kuala Selangor.”

As a result, 1,328 high-resolution images could not be used for the project’s stated objective of providing remote information for land development, forestry and fish migration.
ATSB had promised to deliver images from the satellite, touted as the world’s first remote sensing satellite launched into near equatorial orbit (NEqO), last year but have yet to release any pictures.

Its orbit allows RazakSAT to revisit some parts of Malaysia every 90 minutes, instead of once every two weeks as is normal with sun-synchronous optical satellites.
The Auditor-General said that ATSB, which built the satellite with a RM141.8 million government grant, had made corrections to the satellite but only reduced the level of error by between 2.4 and 22km.

The report said efforts to improve RazakSAT’s accuracy were terminated in December 2010 and “the payment to ATSB was settled for a RM650,000 discount from the total project price of RM5.96 million.”
“Based on the feedback from ATSB, the RazakSAT satellite is a research and development project and not a commercial project,” the audit added.
ATSB’s website calls the RazakSAT project a “cost-effective high resolution imaging system for Earth observation specifically for a small satellite (weighing) less than 200kg”.


Saturday, March 22, 2014

How to win a buy-election .


Just three maybe for some, four ingredients are necessary to certainly win a by-election. Let's take a quick tour to success and riches beyond your wildest dreams !
Incidently today is also the Kajang buy-erhhh....by-election !

First it is money, plenty of it. With money you can have a grand display to showcase your pompousness in having large mug-shots on screens and posters of yourself plastered all over town, reminding people that 'you da man' they must vote as you have the power to also buy off macai's or parasites to surround you everywhere you go. An air of importance is invested as paid macai's also double as cameramen and reporters ! Better still if these macai's were the local hoods. They will also have local authorities and enforcement in their payroll. Money buys new paved roads, drainage and public services....and of course the "shady" entertainment, no ? And many more will flock around you with vested interests and big dreams to realise into riches.

Next comes the solid back-up.With an entire legion of unholy people who have in their own time also used this strategy and are now in commanding positions themselves backing you, what can go wrong ? Their 2sen imput in helping you to reach their ranks, even if it is in a "junior" level means you will still count as in numbers. They need each other for back-up. Numbers and in packs makes one powerful, whether for the greater good of the voters or for themselves, who really cares, anyway ?

Then its scandals. Look for juicy shit ( any kind ) and skeletons in the closet of your opponent. For the right price you can have an army of keyboard trolls digging into the dirt of your opponent....even if it is completely fictitious or engineered, because with just days to the by-election your opponent will not have the pleasure to rebut your attacks and precious time will be wasted. A slander charge in court will take a long time, and by then you're comfortably numb and an already elected representative where nobody can touch you then. Remember your solid back-up is there for you, right ?

And the last ingredient is of utmost importance for any candidate in every by-election. The voters. There are voters  who vote out of fear and in the uncertainty of what the future may hold for them. They live ( in their own terms) in a comfort zone and are shit scared to rock the boat. Even if their lives are at times on the outskirts of poverty. Then there are the morons. These idiots will vote for anyone who'd throw scraps their way and promise them the moon and the sun. They will also be quick to influence others around them to think in their shallow and herd mentality way...not that they have any opinion of their own, as they are morons, see ? 

So it comes down to these above recipe that one has to master and muster-on to succeed in pulling off a by-election ! 

One word of cautioned advice to the voters though. 
One should vote for change and with their heads and not their hearts. God knows how fucked-up their miserable lives are on all matters they decided with their hearts in the past and in so many instances.

Shalom and beware the stooges who come bearing gifts ! 

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Guardians of the Forest.

Please watch this docu-film. I can relate myself to some of the lovely people/friends who brought this documentary to your screen. For starters, great job Mary, Alan and Antares ! Cheers !

Thursday, March 13, 2014

The New York Times

World                                
                                                    

Amid Search for Plane, Malaysian Leaders Face Rare Scrutiny

SEPANG, Malaysia — Malaysia’s governing elite has clung to power without interruption since independence from Britain almost six decades ago through a combination of tight control of information, intimidation of the opposition and, until recently, robust economic growth.
But worldwide bafflement at the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has challenged the country’s paternalistic political culture and exposed its coddled leaders to the withering judgments of critics from around the world.
Civilian and military leaders on Wednesday revealed that they had known for the past four days, but did not publicly disclose, that military radar had picked up signals of what may have been the missing aircraft. It appeared to be flying on a westerly course sharply off its intended flight path to Beijing.
If the radar readings were from the missing plane, it could mean a radical reinterpretation of where it ended up. And it was only under a barrage of intense questioning on Wednesday from a room packed with reporters who had arrived from many countries that officials acknowledged that the last recorded radar plot point showed the jet flying in the direction of the Indian Ocean — and at a cruising altitude, suggesting it could have flown much farther.
Malaysia’s defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, faced many questions at a news conference Wednesday.
MANAN VATSYAYANA / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
That raised the question of why the information had not been released earlier.
“The world is finally feeling the frustration that we’ve been experiencing for years,” said Lee Ee May, a management consultant and a former aide to a Malaysian opposition politician.
Ms. Lee said she was embarrassed when the country’s defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, the scion of a powerful political family, rejected a reporter’s assertion on Wednesday that the search for the airplane had been disordered.
“It’s only confusion if you want it to be seen to be confusion,” Mr. Hishammuddin said at a news conference that unfolded before an international audience.
Video | Malaysia's Radar Blip Examined Malaysian authorities examined whether a military radar detected Flight 370.
Relatively free from natural disasters and other calamities, Malaysia has had little experience with handling a crisis on this scale. It is also an ethnically polarized society where talent often does not rise to the top of government because of patronage politics within the ruling party and a system of ethnic preferences that discourages or blocks the country’s minorities, mainly ethnic Chinese and Indians, from government service.
Ethnic Malays, who make up about half of the population, hold nearly all top government positions and receive a host of government preferences because of their status as “sons of the soil.”
Authoritarian laws have helped keep the governing party, the United Malays National Organization, in power — and an ascendant opposition in check.
The day before Flight 370 disappeared, the leader of the opposition, Anwar Ibrahim, was sentenced to five years under a sodomy law that is almost never enforced. Critics called the case an effort to block the opposition’s rise at a time when the governing party’s popularity is waning.
Then on Tuesday, a court convicted Karpal Singh, another opposition politician, of sedition, a law enacted in colonial times.
“We call it persecution, not prosecution,” said Ambiga Sreenevasan, a lawyer and the former head of the Malaysian Bar Council.
The government is accustomed to getting its way, and the crisis surrounding the missing plane is holding officials accountable in ways unfamiliar to them, Ms. Ambiga said.
“Malaysians have come to accept that their leaders don’t answer questions,” she said. “When you are not seriously challenged in any meaningful way, of course you get complacent and comfortable.”
For a relatively prosperous country of 30 million people that is less well known internationally than neighboring countries like Thailand and Singapore, the government’s confused efforts at finding the missing jetliner are an awkward and undesired appearance on the world stage.
The crisis has led to introspection about why the government has appeared uncoordinated and unable to pin down seemingly basic facts about the missing flight.
Officials insisted for three days that baggage was removed from the flight before takeoff when five passengers did not board. But the country’s chief of police on Tuesday said that was false: Everyone who checked in boarded the plane, he said. No explanation was given for the conflicting accounts.
Ibrahim Suffian, the director of the Merdeka Center, an independent polling company, said the response to the crisis had underlined a lack of precision both in government and in the society over all.
“There’s a tolerance for a lack of attentiveness to detail,” he said. “You have a tendency of not asking so much and not expecting so much.”
The crisis also highlighted a lack of competence in government that Mr. Ibrahim said was related to a deference to authority and reluctance to take initiative. “There’s always been a kind of wait-for-instructions-from-the-top attitude,” he said.
Yet amid the criticism of the rescue efforts there was also an acknowledgment that the plane’s disappearance was so unusual that perhaps no government would be fully prepared for it.
“This is almost a unique situation,” said Ramon Navaratnam, a Harvard-trained economist and a former Malaysian senior civil servant. “Anyone would be caught off guard.”
For now, the Malaysian authorities are stuck in the unenviable position of hearing many questions but having few answers.
“They have never faced pressure to perform like this,” said Ms. Lee, the management consultant. “But now international eyes are on them, and they have nowhere to hide.”

More In World

  1. On news programs and in chat rooms, aviation experts and the less informed tried to explain how a modern jet like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 could disappear without a trace.
  2. The relatives and friends of the passengers of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are hungry for news of their loved ones, but little has come.
  3. One mystery surrounding the lost Malaysian jet concerns the plane’s transponder, which apparently stopped functioning about 40 minutes into the flight.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Mimicking P.Ramlee....in times of trouble !

This is an alternative form of SAR (search and rescue) we Malaysians are contributing to locate the mysterious disappearance of Flight MH370 since March 8th 2014.

Is this Raja Bomoh (shaman) officially contracted and paid to do this "mumbo-jumbo" and even invoking the name of the Almighty,  in the concourse of our International Airport for the world to see ? (scenes from movies of the  maestro, the late P. Ramlee himself, are attached for "coincidence" effect) Heck, the place is crawling with foreign journos and looking at the "suits"  these guys are in, they sure are hoping to be "accidentally shot" in their best attire by the foreign media.

It is 5 days since the disappearance of Flight MH370 which vanished into thin air, an unexplainable mystery that has got the whole aviation industry and highly trained experts scratching their heads. Many countries are still racing with time in the hope of locating the plane's whereabouts and the 239 people aboard. Modern satellite and communications equipment can be dumped into the rubbish bin IF these guys (shamans or locally known as bomohs) can locate MH370 first.
In the meantime the rest of us can only offer a prayer and maybe hope for a miracle.....i.e. if you do believe in it. 
(Read the latest here)

Monday, March 03, 2014

Welcome to Malaysia, where anything can be "kautimed" !