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Team No. 1 is No. 1...

From left: Chong, Ju, Sofia and Lee Quan .... GO GO GO

The long awaited DHL Hunt 2007 finally came. This time it was called the East Coast Treasure Hunt, from Cyberjaya to Cherating. This hunt was organized by Malaysia Hunt Club (COC: Baskaran) Registration was open in November. We had no idea we were the first team to register. So therefore we were Team No. 1 (GO x 3). Briefing and collection of goody bags was on Friday evening. Due to the lack of time to prepare for this hunt, wrong T-shirt sizes were distributed to most of the teams. Funny, they considered CH as female, giving him a baby-T shirt, which was too small. Thanks to Sofia, she managed to get a normal sized T-shirt for him. Briefing time, Sofia, Lee Quan and me were already excited for the next day. We were all ears and jotted down all his sample questions and answers hoping to get some "tips" for hunt day.
Hunt day, CH and I went to fetch Lee Quan at her place and headed to the office. Sure enough, we were late and were the last few cars to arrive. COC gave the final briefing and a group photo session and we were ready for flagged off. Chuan Yew was there to flag all the cars. When it was our turn, he criticised our team saying, you are team no. 1 but you are late, then CH sheepishly replied, ya we were a bit late today, hahaha... After flagging off, we stopped a while to solve the puzzle and to look through the route and treasure questions. We were practically the last car to leave the area.

Heading for Damansara Utama via LDP, we tried to start cracking the treasure questions (4 of them). I guess all of us were still not warmed-up. At that time we only managed to crack treasure 1 and 3 partially, the Cintan mi goreng and Lot100 Mango. We decided to make our first stop at Tesco Puchong to look for treasures but were disappointed as we did not manage to get anything out from there. At that time we were getting a bit worried, as we did not want to leave Klang Valley without securing all the treasures.

We arrived DU , the area looks familiar, I was there for Sun Hunt. The first question was pretty straight forward
Q: First question for you to try,
If there is cure for everybody, then we can go in to buy
A: ALLin Pharmacy

We sort of breeze through the first 13 Questions in Klang Valley, after that we decided we had to seriously get the treasures or else we are in deep trouble. We went to a few 7 Eleven, searching for Lot100 Mango only to find the gummy and sweet type. Nothing of like a hose or cylinder as mentioned in the question. We decided to try our luck again in 7 Eleven, both Lee Quan and I will run out of the car to go get treasures. And this time she spotted the Lot100 Mango tube which matches with the treasure question description. She was excited when she saw it, but had to hold her excitement as there were other teams in the 7 Eleven as well, both of us waited patiently until they left, bought the treasure and ran back to the car happily. This boosted our team's confidence a bit. Still no sign of the Cintan mi goreng 80g.

Next destination, Karak. While driving Lee Quan and I were trying to crack treasure 2 and 4. First line of treasure 2 goes like this:
Find the nyonya who will not have questions,
we were trying to find another name for nyonya then out of the blue the word nona came out, then sure enough it did match the description, nyonya without questions is without the y y = nona.
Next line was: Totally mixed and doubled within the mission

nona = nano, doubled = nano nano.
Following line: Look for the celebrity crop, as it's our passion
celebrity = star
crop = fruit
Star Fruit flavor.

After buying the Nano Nano Star Fruit, both Lee Quan and I ran back to the car, while CH and Sofia were trying to crack treasure 4. The first line goes something like that, "Perhaps a flipping male together for the item, as I hear it better". CH was wondering male = man, flipping = toss, so sounds like mentos. Yes it's mentos. Mentos variant with less than 10 in net. Then both of us ran back in to the Petronas station to look for Mentos, we found the Mentos Power Gum, net 9g. Secured 3 treasures and leaving Klang Valley. We are still wondering, where to get the Cintan Mi Goreng 80g?? The team decided, it's just going to be a waste of time to continue stopping at petrol kiosk or 7 eleven as this item cannot be found there. We tried to be positive, hoping we will find it at our next stop, Karak.

We continued with the hunt in Karak, there were a few shops in Karak, this time, Lee Quan and I got down from the car and decided to split in finding our last treasure. I went into this dingy looking shop to look for the last treasure. I was so happy, at last we found the last treasure that has costs us so much time. I double checked the label to ensure it was 80g. Quickly paid for the item and ran back to the car. The team was delighted we had secured all treasures as each treasure carried a weightage of 6 points compared to the route questions which only carries 2 points.

Cintan Mi Goreng Ala Indonesia 80g

By then, weather began to change and through out the journey approaching cherating was mostly rain. We were quite fortunate in a sense, that when it was time to solve route questions, there is no rain or just slight drizzle. Heavy rain and some traffic did slow us down after reaching Kuantan. Chong was constantly keeping a close watch over time not wanting us to be behind time. The journey from Kuantan to Cherating was quite a funny one. We were all constantly looking at the time and calculating the remaining mileage left to cover. There were quite a number of lorries which has slowing us down. There was this lorry, carrying sawn timber and moving rather slow. Chong was having difficulty overtaking this lorry because the road was narrow and there was on coming cars. Then at one stretch, there was this herd of cows resting by the road side, and suddenly 2 of them started fighting. Seeing this, the lorry ahead of us slowed down and this gave us the opportunity to overtake it. Ah... see even the cows had helped us in our journey as we laughed in the car. We arrived at the finish point 5 minutes before the 9 hours duration. Sofia our navigator ran down to submit the answer sheets and treasures.

Parked the car and checked in. The organizers made a mistake by labelling Chong as a female and assigned him to share a room with Lee Quan. How funny. That must be the reason why, during briefing day, he was given the female sized T-shirt. Chong and I had a rest, it was indeed a very long journey, but filled with fun, excitement and laughter.

Dinner was ready at 8 pm, but the food was lousy. They went through the Answer presentation. We made 3 mistakes, but then I was confused on the last question, couldn't really remember whether I wrote the answer in full. So I told the team, I think i did not write it in full, so we made 4 mistakes. I was feeling awfully guilty at that time while they were announcing the winners starting from 25th position. We knew this hunt would be very competitive with 2 teams from the recent Sun Hunt open category finishing at 4th and 5th placing respectively. At last it was the top two positions. The COC mentioned that one team scored 92 points and the another team scored 94 points. We kept thinking we scored 92 points but in actual fact it was 94 points. When the results were announced we went up the stage but I was wondering did we finish 1st or 2nd. I looked at the enveloped that was handed to me, it was blank in the front, then I looked behind, it was indeed 1st. Ah... I really couldn't believe this. We were all so happy and stunned at the same time. Thank you team, for a job well done. It was all good team work.

Sun Motor Hunt 2007

What an eventful Saturday, to tell you the truth, I only managed to find enough energy today to pen my experience for this hunt. I was really excited and looking forward to this hunt, so called the mother of all hunts. And am so lucky I managed to find a team as early as August. You must be thinking I am so kiasu hehehe... But one person I would like to thank for helping me get a team is Michael Pang. Thanks Mike for helping me out in the Solo Hunter program. Without you, I would not have found Chew, Gim Lee, and Siow Lyn.

Well, I decided to take half day off to attend the briefing. My first sun hunt, I decided not to miss it. Briefing starts at 6 pm. And the earliest time I can leave office is 5.30 pm. I know I can't make it on time because of the distance from the Science Centre. Actually that half day, really had something to do with one of the treasures during the Sun Hunt. As I was driving home and passing by Puchong, I decided to have my lunch at the food court at Puteri Mart. While waiting for my food I noticed, someone drinking the Wong Lo Kat drink :)

Hunt day, we decided to meet up at Lyn's place and off we went to the Science Centre. When we arrived there, there was a long queue of cars ahead of us, our team was like nearly the last few cars to arrive. We flagged off at 8.04 am, and headed for Uptown Damansara and Damansara Jaya (Atria area) for Leg 1. Leg 1 was rather interesting, no tulips at all. We had to identify which sector we were based on the picture clues given. There were 8 sectors in Uptown but only 6 sectors are used in the hunt. The first 11 questions were at Uptown. We spent quite a lot of time, still trying to answer all the questions. By 10 am, we had to listen to mix fm for the first treasure clues. We felt that the DJ read the question like a bullet train. We could hardly grasps what he was reading and it was done. So we had to watch out for the 2nd and 3rd time when it comes on air again. This time we managed to grap what was being read and worked on trying to solve the treasure. By 10.30 am, we decided we have to move on to Damansara Jaya for the remaining 4 questions for Leg 1 as we were running late on time. At Damansara Jaya, we went through the sectors quickly and headed for the Leg 1 submission at the McDonald's drive through at Sunway. While heading there, we started looking at the treasure questions, as we did not have time to look at it before that.

Submitted Leg 1 around 11 am. Took our lunch package and try to figure out what treasures to buy. With all this rush, it was hard to think properly. It was like your brain was in a mess :)). I decided to head for the Caltex station nearby to get some ideas what to buy. Didn't really help either. So headed for Leg2's first destination, Pusat Bandar Puchong and Bandar Puteri. While on the way there, we managed to crack some of the treasures and decided to start buying them at Puchong. At that time, we only figured out the Wong Lo Kat and the Pilot G-2-07 pen. The other treasure was either the Kit Kat or Timeout, and Tong Garden but dunno which variant to purchase. We finished the Puchong area around 12.30, with 2 hours to finish time (without penalty). Next destination PJU, the journey there was rather unpleasant as we were caught in a bad jam. It took us more than an hour to reach the destination. After that the last destination was Wangsa Maju area near the check-in point, Royal Selangor Visitor Centre. When we arrived Wangsa Maju, our time was eating into the penalty time. We decided to take the gamble 5 more route questions in trade of 6 penalty points. We were very fortunate as Wangsa Maju was Chew and Gim Lee's territory. Thanks to Gim Lee for her superb navigation skills, we managed to bypass some traffic and solved all 5 questions. Credit should also be given to Chew who drove like Lewis Hamilton to the check-in point. And also Lyn for running to the finishing line like we were in the Amazing Race :)). We checked in at 3.03 pm, 1 minute before disqualification. That was a close shave. It was stressful for the last 5 questions but we made it. It was all worth the effort.

We received 6 penalty points, and finished at 25th position. I really had a good time and was so happy we made the cut for the top 50. It was indeed a wonderful experience, my first Sun Hunt.

What is Memory Leak?

I have been assigned this task to create a new API for an application to access to grab data from a global repository. Actually there is nothing special about this API, it was just a simplified version of the existing API the application was using, just that too much unnecessary data was returned which had an impact on its performance.

After making the changes and doing the benchmarking there was a performance improvement of more than 100%. Sounds good eh... Then comes the endurance part, where the API is used constantly with a stable load for a period of few days and monitoring the memory utilization during this time. Monitoring work begins, first few hours looks good, no increase in memory usage but after that the memory increased gradually after a day. So I presented this findings to my colleague which was managing this "product". She said a memory leak occured for this new API. I was thinking to myself, how could this be, this is an existing piece of code modified to be better and there's nothing new about it. If this is a problem, then the current one running in production is also in trouble. I didn't want to argue, so I checked my piece of work properly to see whether I left out anything. It looks ok, nothing missing. She mentioned that the production one is running fine and was tested to be OK previously. So we decided to load the old API to test, the same results were returned.

Uh... so now what is the problem, she decided to consult the experts in performance tests, it seems like the garbage collection was not efficient enough to perform it's job on time. Therefore causing memory not in used, not released back to the system. After doing forced garbage collection, the memory utilization was back to normal :) Well, I am happy, I learnt something new on Memory management for software applications. It was worth all the trouble and difficulty doing this test.

Definition of Memory Leak, this is a snippet from Wikipedia:
"In computer science, a memory leak is a particular kind of unintentional memory consumption by a computer program where the program fails to release memory when no longer needed. This condition is normally the result of a bug in a program that prevents it from freeing up memory that it no longer needs.

The term is meant as a humorous misnomer, since memory is not physically lost from the computer. Rather, memory is allocated to a program, and that program subsequently loses the ability to access it due to program logic flaws.

As is noted below, a memory leak has similar symptoms to a number of other problems, and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program source code; however many people are quick to describe any unwanted increase in memory usage as a memory leak, even if this is not strictly accurate."

Assunta Alumni Summer Hunt 2007

We girls were excited after no hunt activity for a month. We were all raring to go. This time it was the Assunta Alumni Summer Hunt 2007. As for me, things had not been good since Saturday :(. I had a fall at the car workshop while servicing CH's car. Had to get his odometer fixed for the company's hunt in December. I sort of hurt my ankle. Then at night, I was having a bout of migraine attack. Grrr...didn't sleep well at all. Woke up at 5.40 am. Had a light breakfast and I was off to Sofia's place to lead her to our meeting point. We reached SMK Assunta a little bit past 7. The girls had some light breakfast and at 8.19 am, we flagged off. Things seemed to go wrong after we flagged off. No thanks to me, being the navigator, we lost our way after driving for a few kilometres. How embarassing and I was panicking. We decided to back track, and thanks to Lee Quan, she said she would take over the navigation while I be the passenger. We were back on track :) I apologized to the team for letting them down.

The rest of the journey was cracking our head and straining to look at all the signboards. There were 35 route questions - 30 normal questions and 5 bold question, and 4 treasures. The second last question was the hardest. It goes like this:
Q: Upright cover perhaps
A: Purple Star Group

When we reached that sector, there were already a lot of hunters there trying to crack this Q. As for us, still green in hunts, we got it wrong. hahaha... We just gave a tembak and drove back to the finishing point.

After submitting the answer sheets and treasures, we had to do a challenge. The challenge was counting grapes. I was like huh... we had to guess the number of grapes displayed, I don't know how many points we got for that challenge. There were 177 grapes. We only guessed it as 110. So was quite way off from the actual figure.

We had lunch and had to wait about 2 hours before the Q & A session. It was a tiring wait despite TOS having some games, eating the apples to kill off time. When the results were announced, we did not finish in the top 15, so no prize to bring home. The only consolation was winning RM 120 petrol voucher from BH Petrol for the lucky draw.

It was indeed a nice hunt and I felt that the team have improved from the previous hunt. Next stop, Sun Hunt on Nov 3.

How time flies

It's about a year since I tendered by resignation to leave APIS and rejoined in July this year. What a turbulent year it has been. It all started with me feeling bored as there was no projects for more than a year. The thought of venturing out and trying new stuff drove me to look for a new job. The job just came quite fast. I still dunno why I took all the trouble to secure this job. It was not that easy actually. First, I had to go through an interview followed by an exam to develop a sample application. And I passed and was offered the job immediately. Actually I still think I did a rash decision to take up that position. The package was rather attractive. Because of that, I may have lost my bearing. Moreover, the head hunter was also rather impatient, she wanted the deal fast, only gave me 2 days to decide whether to take up the offer or not. I felt a bit "cheated" from this aspect. So off to KLCC. It was a real nightmare for me. I had to wake up so early in the morning and leave home by 7 am. A big difference from the usual time I need to wake up for work. Driving to the LRT also takes around 40 minutes if the traffic is ok. The next big challenge was fighting for a place in the LRT. It is really packed early in the morning. I felt like I was going for war. By the time I reach the office, I am already a bit worn out. Going home proofs to be another challenge. The LRT at KLCC is packed again and the drive back from the LRT station to home is jam jam jam all the way. All in all, so much precious time is spent on travelling back and forth to work. After a few days there, I began to ponder, is this what I want?? After working there for about 2 weeks, I decided enough was enough and I left without a job :(

The next few months proved to be some challenge looking for another job. I did get a few offers, but this time, I was really cautious on what I am going to get myself into. After about 5 months being a housewife, I took up the offer from a local vendor based company. I was based at Putrajaya, working on a government project at the PM's department. Working there was another big nightmare. Don't want to elaborate too much on that.

My rescue came, when my ex-boss from APIS asked me whether I'll be interested to come back. Without hesitation, I took the offer to leave the current hell hole I was in.

Actually looking back the time when I was a temporary housewife, it didn't seem so bad. Doing all the housework, getting afternoon naps, monitoring stocks and occasionally cook. But the bad part is, you have less social life and can't simply spend money as you wish compared to when you are working.

Timeout Challenge VII

Going for my first TOS motor hunt. I was feeling excited even before the hunt. My team mates were feeling the same too. One of them even thought the hunt was a week earlier. Another team member which had to work on night shift took half day off, to get some sleep before heading off to Malacca. That goes to show how keen we are on treasure hunting.

The day before was briefing day. Lee Quan and I were nearly the last team to arrive for the briefing. We were caught in such a bad jam it took us nearly 1.5 hours to reach the National Science Centre.

Hunt day, flag off was at the Regalia Business Centre car park. We were caught by surprise there were 2 legs for this hunt. Leg 1, walk hunt just a short one with 5 questions. We managed to finish that fast and headed off for the Sungai Besi highway to start Leg 2. When we arrived there, we sort of got confused with the roads and was practically lost even before Leg 2 was started. We decided to call TOS to ask for directions and actually we were just beside the answer for Q1. It was really funny, asking TOS we are now at Country Heights, are we at the right place. The guy on the other side, was like uh uh ... dun really know how to answer us as it was the answer for Q1. After we figured out that was answer for Q1 we burst out in laughter and continued our journey. It was quite smooth sailing until the part where the questions were positioned at the wrong tulip. Being novices, we hard some problem and did not know how to answer and decided to skip it and move on without realizing the answers were actually at the next tulip.

We reached the finishing point without any penalty. Results were announced but we did not win anything. I am not too disappointed as we are all still new and took this as a learning opportunity and to have fun at the same time. Our next stop will be the Assunta Hunt also by TOS on Oct 28.