Obama's visit to Hiroshima

On 27th May 2016, Obama visited Hiroshima and made a speech there. There are two groups that are opposed to his visit. The first is those who think that Obama should not show sign of acceptance of Japanese war aggression/atrocities. The other one is those who will loose if Obama's real objective is achieved.

Let's look at those who think that visiting Hiroshima is a sign of accepting Japanese war aggression/atrocities. During WW2, Japanese embark on war aggression, by invading Korea and China then declare war on the Americans. In the process, millions of people are killed, many as a result of Japanese brutality.

There are a lot of Japanese atrocities that was committed during the war. The following are just some of the notorious ones.

1. The rape of Nanking.
2. The Bataan Death March.
3. The Sandakan Death March.
4. Death Railway
5. Laha Massacre
6. Banka Island Massacre
7. Palawan Massacre
8. Wake Island Massacre
9. Tina Massacre
10. Sulug Island Massacre

In Singapore, they committed the Alexandra Hospital Massacre and  Sok Ching Massacre. Those whose family are affected will have hard time coming to terms with their losses.

Hundreds of thousands of American soldier died during the war with Japanese notably in Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Some were captured and then murdered. It is no wonder some Americans are totally again the reconciliation act of Obama.

Japanese government did issue apologies a number of times. However, it is generally accepted that the apologies are not enough or have been overturned by later government. The following are signs that Japanese government did not really mean what they say.

1. The total denial of Nanking Massacre.
2. The continuous visit to Yasukuni Shrine by Prime ministers and cabinet members.
3. The denial of Comfort women.
4. The whitewashing of History books.
5. The lack of visit to the site of atrocities.
6. The total silence of unit 731 experiment apparent with American immunity grant.

The American support of Japan during the Cold war and current Chinese assertion emboldens the Japanese's attitude against a total unreserved apology. Germany have done it long ago.

It is understandable that any sign of conciliatory acts by American president is a tabloo. Obama is the first one after 71 years of silence.

After noting the points of those against, there is a need to look at the opposite camp (those who accept Obama's visit).

Obama's visit aims at the total elimination of Nuclear weapons. He want to use the occasion to  drive home the message. His aim is not to show apology to the Japanese about the bombing. Many understood his intention. Even the Chinese and South Korea government (the two countries who suffered the most) have a muted objection.

Anyhow, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one act of mass murder by American. They can't deny the fact. Whether it is right or wrong is still under ongoing debate. At least American President did acknowledge the fact and pay respect to those who died as a result of the act (without being apologetic). Will Japanese prime minister ever do that?

Self-esteem or Approval-Seeking

Self-esteem according to Merriam Webster is "a feeling of respect of yourself and your ability". Approval seeking is a child's behavior to look toward parents' approval.

There have been numerous people who encourages self-esteem. Without self-esteem you cannot be yourself. You end up being just living on peoples' view instead of being yourself.

We were brought up by our parents. Often we look for the approval of our parents when we do something. Our acts were built entirely on this relationship. When we grow up, we tends to bring this behavior with us. We surround ourselves with people who approves us and we get upset when people disagrees with us. There are even people who thinks that they are nothing without other's approval.

These two views are totally on opposite ends. It is bad if you end up in either extreme. It is, therefore, important to know how to balance between the two ends. On the one hand you should not be governed by other's view. On the other hand, without others' feedback, you won't know whether you are too cocky or arrogant. The difference is whether you value yourselves better than others' valuation.

My personal view is that you should be yourself first then gauge whether you have gone overboard in being yourself. For example, there are some trending going on. Do you follow the trends so as to be on line with others or you based on your judgement that the trending does not suits you thus does not follow. Just because others do it does not means that you should do it. Obviously, you won't get to be inline with others but at least you can be yourself. You may even lost friends who insists you follow the trend.

When you do things differently, others will start to oppose you. You will have to first examine your acts to see whether the thing you do is right. Self-examination is the first step to prevent yourself being in the wrong. Often it is just gray area which it is not wrong either way. There are areas which is difficult to say whether it is right or wrong especially when it deals with somebody with authority.

In conclusion, do not be just followers. Have a mind of your own if you have already examined yourself whether you are right in doing so. Obviously, you could be wrong.

Don't just based on the opinion of others around you. Seek opinion from knowledgeable people/source who are known to be doing the right thing. If you have done your homework and still thinks that it is right then by all means stick to it till someone proves you wrong.

Kindness?

Two consecutive days I saw kindness.sg promoting "kindness".  The Singapore Kindness Movement was formed in 1997. Its aim is "to encourage Singaporeans to make a positive commitment to gracious living through simple acts of kindness."

The aim is nothing but perfect. So it seems. Look at the whole page ads below.

What has it to do with kindness? The picture practically say that you are not kind to snap a photo of people misbehaving. Insteads you should confront the person. The real kindness is to show a photo of people giving up their seats to the needy.

This photo portrays the same message. You should not take photo. Instead you should confront the angry man. A show of empathy to who? The waitress or the angry man? The wordings in the photo says you can "stand by", "watch", "take a video" or "step in and try". Which action shows empathy? The last one? It is practically asking people to confront the angry man. Should this photo be showing empathy towards the server and not to scold her?

It keeps saying "Kindness" yet it points to bystanders and say that they should act. By acting it is equal to "kindness"?  I don't know what's wrong with the mind of the organization. It is advocating everyone to act in confronting wrong doers as if bystanders are experts in that area while it by itself says nothing about themselves telling the wrong doers that they should be gracious and do what is right.

The two photos actually show the adverse message. It is saying you should not take photos/videos neither should you do nothing. Is it wrong to do what they try to dissuade? Are we a confrontational society? If it is not handled properly it may well hurt the peace maker's feeling or make the situation worse. Is it not better to educate the wrong doers rather than the bystanders?

Taking a photo and post online is a bad thing? It is not graceful? Many people do not want to directly confront others. They try to vent their dislike by posting such bad activity online. The action by itself is not really a correct thing to do but it could be the only way many people try to show their dislike.

By posting online, the public will be aware of such event and thus avoid being the center of attention. This is far better than trying to talk to individuals to solve the issue. Would you want to do bad things in public knowing that your bad act may be shown to the whole world? I do agree that it damages the wrong doers image. A graceful/kind person should not have done that in public in the first place.

Most public figures faced the same issue. They have to ensure that they do not do wrong in public otherwise the whole world will knows about it. Why then should individuals be exempted. You did it in public and people capture/record and show it in public. There is nothing wrong to that. The only thing I strongly disagree is to have paparazzi style of stalking people to capture their embarrassing moments. That is totally evil.

EU has passed a law to have "rights to  be forgotten". That is a good thing. At least it gives people who did wrong in ignorance/rage to be given a chance to be forgotten. That is what I called "graceful society". Maybe kindness.sg should advocate this act to be passed by parliament instead.

Pain in the Ass

Decades ago while I was studying in Baptist Seminary, a Professor said that I have a gift of teaching. I did not have tertiary education neither did I complete the Seminary course. So am I still qualified to be a teacher? Most Christians will says that it does not matter whether I got a paper qualification. But I have a strong feeling that the "teaching" may be a non academic one.

As life goes along, I slowly realized that I have a knack of finding fault with everything. Take the example of my former church. The group was led by a missionary pastor. They need to have a place to worship so they joined one of the member's church. Since it is a Chinese speaking community. The English speaking group have no problem remaining a closed group. As time goes, the group did not really become big enough to expand out but the missionary pastor wanted to "plant" a church and move on so he encourages the group to split from the mother church to become an independent church. Obviously, the whole group thinks it is alright except myself. Ultimately, they moved on. My name was removed from the mother church registry but I did not actually join the new church thus becomes a wondering Christian.

I joined a group but find the organization lacking in its activity. They seems to treat the activity as a duty so only builds close relationship with the pioneers. New comers were left with having to join them or fend for themselves. I pointed out some oraganization event issues in my post a few times and was brushed off.

In FB, I used to point out that some of the posts were inappropriate. At times I even have a long "conversation" with individual. Most of them just suggest that I take it as is. however, I don't think that a wrong should be accepted. The most prominent "conversation" is about PCN. There are so many discrepancies yet there are people who just tell others to shut up and live with it.

In the internet there are so many posts that did injustice. Take for example. there was a comment that "a woman should wake up a sleeping man sitting on a priority seat so that he could give up the seat for a pregnant lady instead of posting a picture shaming him".  There are a few things that weren't right.

1. The author did not take into consideration that the lady may not be the assertive/confrontational type. 

2. He also did not take into account that by taking the picture of the lady taking the picture, He also failed to do what he said she should do.

3. By saying that Singapore is a "Civilized country" bring us to laughter. If it is true then there will not be opportunity of people taking pictures to shame individuals. There is even a dedicated site "Stomp" to show them. 

4. He should rally the community to be more caring rather than shaming her trying to get things right.

5. What he did is to shut the mouth of those who point out wrong. It is like asking the prople to close their eyes and say that the world is beautiful.

News about a woman who sexually abused an underaged were not charged with the appropriate law. It is understood that the law should be impartial to both male and female offenders. However, if the law somehow become partial due to the language it uses, then it cannot be applied to another sex. Some netizen insists that the judge is wrong. These people judge the judge on moral issues. However, the judge must not be influenced by citizen's moral value otherwise how could the judge be impartial. It is up to the judicial department to work it out.

Advertisements are every where. Do you notice that some advertisements are not correct?

I have started a FB page "Windows into Life". It is a page where I voice out things that are not correct. I do include things that are nice and good to make it a more balanced page. Obviously, it will be "stomping" people.

I don't really care what people think about myself. If they don't like me let it be so. I am a loaner. I do not need people to support me so that I can feel good. I my end up dying alone. Well, I rather be at peace with God than at peace with men.

Well, do I insist that I am right and harassed people to change? No. That is not what I am aiming for. I did not insist that they amend their ways. My duty is to point out not to guide. 

My motto is "If you insists that you are right, you stopped reasoning". If some one is able to point out that I am wrong and have the correct reason, I will apologize and retract my words. In this world there is no absolute right or wrong. In that case I am merely stating my point. It is up to you to accept or reject.

Some may say that I am judgemental. No. I do not judge. Only God judges (Matt 7:1-3). I point out the facts and state it. You judge for yourselves. There is nothing personal against the person or things.

Nobody likes to be told that they are wrong. That includes myself. So a person who goes everywhere and start correcting people, that person is really a pain in the ass. That's me. I point out because I care. Would you?

Web Based JS Charts again.

Constricting web based charts is quite a simple job. Using SQL statement to pull a summary of the data, structure it according to the requirements of the JS Chart and there is the charts. On the previous post, I have mentioned the use of Rgraph (http://jnhiew.blogspot.sg/2016/04/javascript-charts.html) to achieve the purpose. This post is to show how it could be done.

First lets start with constructing the data. The format of the data is [0,1,2,3,4,5,6].

The SQL to get the data will be

SELECT SUM([yourvaluecolumn]) AS mysum,[yourfield] FROM mytable WHERE [yourcondition] GROUP BY [yourfield] ORDER BY [yourfield]

The PHP code to extract sqlite data is as follows

$db= new SQLITEDatabase('sqlitedb');
$query = $db->query('[your query statement]');

The result will be an array something like below

123, 'abc'
456, 'def'
789, 'ghi'
1012, 'klm'

To extract the array, use the following
$csv = "[";
$csvkey="[";
while ($data = $query->fetchArray(SQLITE_NUM){
   $csv.=$data[0].",";
   $csvkey .= "'". $data[1]."',";
}
$csv = rtrim($csv,",")."]";
$csvkey = rtrim($csvkey,",")."]";

The RTRIM command is to remove the last comma.

In the javascript replace  the "data:" and the "labels;" line with

data:<?php echo $csv; >,
labels::<?php echo $csvkey; >,

The above is only for simple charts with one set of data. If the data is required for multiple bar or multiple line chart like showing the set of data in groups by month, then the format is different for "data". The "labels" will remain the same. The format of the data is like

[[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9]]

Before you do anything, you must extract the labels from the database. The reason is that there will not be a data result if the field value does not exist for a particular month causing the number of columns become variable. Furthermore, it is impossible to predict the labels without first extracting it before hand. Therefore, the first thing to do is to extract a label list and an 0 initiated associative array that includes all the labels.

$csvkey="[";
$csvary=array();
$qlabel = $db->query('SELECT DISTINCT [yourfield] from mytable order by [yourfield]');
while ($data = $qlabel->fetchArray(SQLITE_NUM){
   $csvkey.="'".$qlabel[0]."',";
   $csvary[$data[0]]=>0;
}
$csvkey = rtrim($csvkey,",")."]";

The SQL will be

SELECT SUM([yourvaluecolumn]) AS mysum,[yourmonth],[yourfield] FROM mytable WHERE [yourcondition] GROUP BY [yourmonth],[yourfield] ORDER BY [yourmonth],[yourfield]

The format of the result will be

123,  'March', 'abc'

PHP code will be as follow

$dta=array();
while ($data = $query->fetch(SQLITE_NUM){
   if (!isset($dta[$data[$data[1]])){
      $dta[$data[1]=$csvary;
   }
   $dta[$data[1]][$data[2]]=$data[0];
}
$data2="[";
$key2="";
foreach ($dta as $key=>$value){
   $data2.="[";
   $key2.="'".$key."',";
   foreach($value as $k2=>$v2){
       $data2.=$v2.",";
   }
   $data2=rtrim($data2,",");
   $data2.="],";
}
$data2=rtrim($data2,",")."]";
$key2=rtrim($key2.",");

Replace the two JS as before.

data::<?php echo $data2; >,
labels::<?php echo $key2; >,

Add an extra option to the option in JS. It will be shown as legends.

key::<?php echo $csvkey; >,

Obviously, there are times when there is a need to do multiple stacked bar group by month. I will leave it to you to figure out. Hint:- Third level array.

Javascript Charts

After playing with Filemaker charts and found it limiting in its use, I decided to change to Web based charts. The first concern is what language to use. PHP has been used to do a lot of things for me thus it is the only choice.

The idea is not to create graphics charts from PHP. It will take considerable processing and data transfer size. Therefore, client side charting is the choice. Javascript is the only scripting language on a browser that does not require plugin so it will do.

The last thing to consider is what type of graphics to use to draw the chart. I have used SVG before to create charts. It is nice but I would like to make use of HTML5 canvas element to do it instead. So I finally settled with canvas graphics.

PHP can talk to javascript via AJAX. I too have done it before but the chart I am doing is not real time dynamic data. Thus, PHP is used to create javascript code. There isn't much javascript code to generate to create a chart if you use a javascript chart module that is easily available.

There are plenty of Javascript charts available. Some offer 90 plus type of charts. Since the requirement is probably just Line, Bar, and Pie, The consideration is to get the smallest size module to do the simple work.

Most popular Javascript charts is actually using HTML although the name is Javascript Chart. They even use ".js" as file name. I find it troubling as they actually requires access to the remote site to get the JS source. It also uses "crossorigin" links to JS source. The worst of all is that even the JS file cannot be downloaded locally. Three of the most popular JS chart module I tried cannot even be run on local directory.

I did a considerable search around internet and finally settled with Rgraph. It is a true JS library module and can be downloaded to run locally. The graphic is simple and not as elegant but it works.

The user JS to generate a charts is very simple. You can see it as below

    var pie = new RGraph.Pie({
        id: 'cvs3',
        data: [4,8,6,3,5,2],
        options: {
            shadow: true,
            shadowOffsety: 7,
            shadowBlur: 25,
            strokestyle: 'rgba(0,0,0,0)',
            labels: ['Henning','Louis','John','Pete','Lucy','Fred'],
            clearto: 'white',
            variant: 'donut3d',
            labelsSticks: true,
            labelsSticksLength:25,
            radius: 100
        }
    }).draw();

All you need to do is change the "data" and the "labels" option. Getting PHP to generate the two parameter is very easy.

Construct the data in the appropriate format in php and use the following line to replace the data line in JS.

data:<?php echo $data; ?>,

The other change is the Labels line

labels:<?php echo $label; ?>,

That's all. The chart will come out beautifully.

If you want to get the chart to be much more interactive and vibrant, the Rgraph documentation will show you very much more options to set the graphs. Below is a picture of a donut pie chart from the Rgraph examples above.

Filemaker Chart vs Web Javascript chart

Recently have issues with Filemaker chart thus have to switch to web based charts. There are quite a number of similarities and oddities. The following is the comparison.

Filemaker	Web
Uses tables	Uses variables
Forms data from table with data pre fetched from SQL result	Forms data direct from SQL result
Charts Preformed	Charts can be defined at run time
Number of legends fixed	Number of legends determined from runtime
Max number of legend fixed	No Max number of legend
Max number of data rows not fixed	Max number of rows not fixed
Titles, X,Y labels prefixed	Determined during runtime although can be prefixed
Chart type prefixed	Chart type can be changed runtime
Interactive chart	Interactive chart
Data values can be displayed	Data values can be displayed
Number of chart types limited	Number of chart types depends on the module writer. Some can have 90 plus chart types
No time lapse display of chart data	Have time lapse display of data
Charts module fixed	Can practically create the chart from scratch.
Not resizable during run time	Can auto resize or changed during runtime
Color prefixed	Color changeable during runtime if needed
Options setting prefixed	Options totally changeable runtime.
Events trigger not available	Events trigger available depends on module writer.
Chart data can be added/removed runtime	Chart data can be added/removed runtime
Must use Filemaker to view chart	Charts can be rendered in any web programming language that can work with javascript and have a graphics display capability.
Expensive.	Can be totally free.
Charts formed by fix app setting	Plain javascript text setting.
Easy to do even with novices	A big learning curve especially when you create chart from scratch
Standardized	Way too flexible until it is scary

You can see that Filemaker charts are for easy creation but is fixed in most features. It is not flexible at all compared to Web Javascript charts. Both caters to specific group of people and interest.