Post Graduate Education Fair (PGEF) 2010

The 12th Post Graduate Education Fair (PGEF) will be organized by AIC this coming April 2010. The event is freely open to public.

 

 

 

PGEF 2010 will be taking over the entire Mid Valley Exhibition Centre with more than 100 exhibitors from various countries including Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, United States of America, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, India and of course, Malaysia.

 

The event details are as follow:

Date: 16-18 April 2010
Time: 10am ~ 7pm
Venue: Mid Valley Exhibition Centre (KL)

 

The 9th Malaysia Career & Training Fair (MCTF) 2010 will also be held at the same time and adjacent venue together with this PGEF '10.

 

Click here for more information about PGEF 2010.

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• The Top 10s in Universities Ranking on the Web (Jan 2010 Edition) by Webometrics

Money flowing out of Malaysia at an alarming speed

Money is flowing out of Malaysia at an alarming speed! Despite the "denial syndrome" of some local economists trying to find reasons and tell us to keep cool and ignore the alarm, the immediate question is still intact: How to reverse the flow as soon as possible? Can a solution be found in the New economic Model?

Issue 795 of The Edge Malaysia printed edition for the week of 1-7 March 2010 has a striking headline of "Reversing the Flow" for its cover story. I see this as a follow up report after UBS economist Jon Anderson's report titled "Malaysia - Another Bizarre Story". In fact, there was already a Special Report in Issue 789 of The Edge Malaysia titled "Malaysia: How Bizarre?" responding directly to Jon's report, which you can read its online version here.

Publicly available data from Bank Negara reveals it is no doubt true that Malaysia has, in the recent years, been squeezed by double outflow of money from:

• Slowdown in foreign direct investments (FDI) to the country
• Surge in investments to overseas by local companies

While some pointed the excuse for the sharp plunge of Malaysia's forex reserves in 2009 to the global recession, the 2nd opinion argued that during the same period, neighbouring economies in Thailand, China, Taiwan, Singapore,  Hong Kong, etc. were all in fact enjoying an upliftment in forex reserves!

Local companies going out of the border and invest in overseas could be viewed as a good sign from certain angle, as it shows the growth and competitiveness of the companies, as well as reaping benefits to the shareholders upon success. However, some has observed that most of the money invested in overseas remains at overseas, and not bringing back to Malaysia, yet. This is not good to the development of local economy. This kind of overseas investment also impacts the local job market, as the investment and business development activities might create job opportunities abroad, but not locally.

At the same time, we saw recently some well-known tycoons sold off their local business which they have developed for decades, and invest the proceeds overseas. Is this a migration move that never come back? Not a good sign either.

I am not an economist, but as a small investor, I care about the economic weather very much. As a worker, I also care about the local industry and job market growth trend. So, I am very keen to know how the government will respond the issue and reverse the flow as soon as possible, before it is too late.

Adding virtual desktops to Windows with VirtuaWin

Most Linux users are very familiar with virtual desktops (a.k.a. workspaces), which enables you to organize your opened applications in more than one desktop that you can switch over from one to another using hotkeys or mouse clicks.

Though virtual desktops feature is not bundled in MS Windows OS, its availability in the form of 3rd party software, either free or commercial, has been around for many years. Microsoft also provides a virtual desktops Powertoy called Virtual Desktop Manager (MSVDM), which many find it is slow, lack of functionality, and not performing as good as the 3rd party counterparts.

If you are looking for an open source virtual desktops for Windows, Virtual Dimension used to be a popular and good one, but its development seems to have ceased around 2005.

The virtual desktop I'm using now is VirtuaWin. It is free and licensed under GPL version 2, and latest release is Version 4.1 dated 09-09-2009.

VirtuaWin has been around since 1999. It can run in all version of modern Windows OS including Win 95, Win 98, Win ME, Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP, Win 2003, Win Vista and Win 7.

It is very lightweight, fast in desktop switching, modular with features expandable by loading more modules into it. It even has a portable version which doesn't need any prior installation to use.

VirtuaWin is very easy to install and run. By default, you will get 4 virtual desktops (2 x 2) which you can navigate by pressing Ctrl-Alt together with one of the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you don't like this hotkey setting, you can always change your preference in its setup.

You can increase or reduce the number of virtual desktops by configuring its Desktop Layout, up to a maximum of 20. The more virtual desktops you use, the more amount of memory will be consumed.

With VirtuaWin, now you can use, for example, one desktop for web browsing, one desktop for graphics editing, one desktop for document writing, one desktop for network monitoring, ... this is of course more organized than cluttering all of them in a single desktop in Windows.

If you are a developer, and find any feature lacking in VirtuaWin, you can in fact make the feature by yourself using the VirtuaWin module SDK. Being open source and modular, the feature list of VirtuaWin is believed to be able to expand unlimitedly with the support and contribution from the developers community.

In fact, some of the fancy features in other virtual desktops software has been made available to VirtuaWin via module contributions.