2005 Ending Soon

Like the title said, 2005 is ending soon.. in about 4 days. Wow. this is really fast...

Barely 4 days after Christmas, shops have all switched from playing Christmas carols to New year songs... Walk around some neighbourhood shops and you will see red -- literally. Chinese New Year Decorations have gone on sale in most shops...

Did I mention stress?? Seeing all these only reminded us how close it is to New Years, not to mention Chinese new year... There is a list to do, and on the top of that list is "spring cleaning" up the house!!

2005 could be said to have been very eventful, not to mention busy as well..
Below are some events classified into their related categories....

PERSONAL:

For starters, it is my secondary 4 year and thus, the 'O' Levels which is over now. Currently still sweating, waiting for results..
Problems also plagued this year, with unexpected bums in my studies which has cauesd un-necessary dilemmas.

This year also saw the unexpected outburst of the public due to the NKF saga (news article ) which I have blogged in an eariler post. Well the level of outcry only goes to show the level of trust which we have placed in all Voluntary Welfare Organizations.

Singapore:

Besides that, there was the execution of an Australian national which was caught smuggling drugs through our country..(news article ).... It escalated into a calls for boycott of our country's products and services by a small group of people. This really put the ties of the two countries in a test. This matter is not going to be put to rest so quickly as it had really split the Australians into two camps -- Those for and those against capital punishment. This case was also closely monitored by other countries especially Bali which has arrested 9 others for drug related crimes, better known as the "Bali 9" (news article).

The Education seen in Singapore has also changed, with more flexibility in admission to tertiary education. One example would be the Direct School Admission (DSA) which allows schools to accept pupils based on other qualifications other than the academic performance.

Global:

On the global scene, there has also been fresh attacks by terrorists which has revived old memories of past attacks as well as input new ones... Will this ever end?? No one knows...

China and Japan's ties were also in the rocks, with fresh protests to Japan's Prime minister's visit to the war shrine which honours class A criminals together with other war heros...(news article)... Ties are seen as improving.

Internet / Web Tech:

On the web technological front, there has been new trends in the current web. Long gone were the days of static content and slow internet connection. More and more people are connected these days. With the high proliferation of the internet, users are becoming more demanding. There has been talks on the current trends and many has come to classify the current generation of net as "Web 2.0".

Web 2.0 speaks of new trends like podcasting, blogging. It also includes new technologies like Asynchcronous Javascript and XML (AJAX), Ruby on Rails , new web APIs which promises a rich user experience. We also see guidelines from the World Web Web Consortium (W3C) becoming more deep-rooted in web development as web designers now starts conforming to markup standards. Because of this, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) and other standards dependent languages like XML can be implemented more easily.

Websites are now built using a combination of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Flash, Actionscript or even XML, mimicking desktop functionality and behaviour while taking away the pain of updating webpages for developers. AJAX has also lightened the load on servers reducing the amount of bandwidth consumed. Languages like javascript also make use of the Document Object Modal (DOM). Knowledge in this areas of development, which was once a bonus has now becomed a neccessity. Already, jumping between site areas fast are now deemed dull. Fading into new pages offers a much more pleasant experience.

Tags: Computers and Internet, Blogging, Internet, Personal, Weblog Life