Thursday, May 14, 2015

Central Depository Account (CDP) and MAS Bonds

Disclaimer
Whatever written is purely my own opinion and should not be taken as professional advice as I do not have any professional training in this field. However, please do read it any way, and give me feedback about my opinion.
To know more about me, please take a look at the post about my profile.

Hi,

CDP account is an account for you to keep your portfolio of stocks, bonds and many other stuffs.
This account is owned by the government and you can only have one of it. You do not require to close it either if you already have it as it is better to have it than not to have it.

So why do you want to make this CDP account?

Simple. So that you can buy MAS bonds.
As stated in their website, one of the things required is a CDP account, as well as a bank account with the participating banks.

In this site, it states the benefits of this bond and more details could be found in the news everywhere.

How do you make a CDP account?

The next most important question: how to make a CDP account?

Firstly, this account is a pain in the ass to make. You would require to be physically there to sign the form in front of the officers. Hence, postage is out of the way.
Secondly, if you were to make the CDP account with CDP themselves, you will have to visit during office hours, which is also a problematic thing.

So the next best way to do it is to open with a Securities Company.
A Securities Company is a company who provides a trading platform for you to buy and sell stocks. In that process, they would earn commission from your transaction.
If you tell them you want to open a Securities Account, they would first ask you for CDP.
Tell them no and they will start to help you apply for one as well.
Some examples of Securities Companies are Maybank Kim Eng, Ocbc Securities, Lim and Tan Securities, Philips Securities etc.

Among them all,
I find it easiest to open your CDP with OCBC securities.
This is because a call to IOCBC would tell you that you may open an account at most OCBC branches. And the best part about OCBC branches is that they have long operating hours, as well as Weekend banking.

So for people who are working, my suggestion is to open with them to get your CDP started up.

Once you get your CDP, remember to ask for your online services of CDP by calling them! Then you would receive your online banking pin, and your ONEKEY. This is so that it would be easier for you to track what you have in your CDP.

As for trading, most Securities charges a basic of $25sgd commission for trades in Singapore Exchange, a 0.275% clearance fee, a 7% GST and 0.0325% SGX trading fees. This seemed like a small number, but if your contract value is high, its pretty substantial.
So, before you trade, you would need to know when and if it is possible for you to break even the transaction fees and still make a profit.


Regards
Benjamin Chai

My personal profile

Hi,














My name is Benjamin Chai and I am born in 1989.
I graduated with a 2nd class Lower Division in Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering from NTU, Class of 2014.
While i specialised in Embedded systems when I was in school, I am currently working in the Government Sector in the field of Infocomm Infrastructure. I previously work with a Systems Integrator whereby my key role is to be a website developer and Infrastructure Engineer.

I have several interests, which includes studying newest technology gadgets and playing with them if my budget allows, taking photographs with my phone and DSLR, and in the latest of them all, to read up on financial products be it insurance or trading news.

I do not have any professional financial knowledge and whatever I know about them are all stuffs i read about online!
Hence, please be patient with me and do point out my mistake should I have made any.


I do have some computer knowledge due to my technical training in it, but again, I can be wrong and I would gladly make amendments if you are willing to point it out to me.


You may know more about me both personally and professionally by visiting my social media platforms.
I do not accept random friends, so if you want to know more, please drop a message beforehand!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chai.benjamin
Google+ : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BenjaminChai/posts
Linkedin: https://sg.linkedin.com/pub/benjamin-chai/91/55/6b7


Regards
Benjamin Chai



Sunday, March 22, 2015

2 months and onwards

Hi,

So i have been in a relationship for 2 months already(19/1/2015) and i must say, she is godsent.
I do whine a lot about her sucking up all my time and energy because she is currently still searching for a job, but that does not mean I am unwilling to do so!

This post is definitely not a PDA post to share about how much I love her or how much she loves me, but it is to share about what are the more interesting happenings between us, which i hope to document.

- The NTUC FairPrice Shoppaholic
Every.Single.Date.
We will end up at the supermarket for a short walk. Be it JP, Joo Koon, AMK or Toa Payoh. We never fail to go there. But apart from these, we end up at pretty much all other supermarkets in all other shopping centers(Giant, Cold Storage). I guess soon enough, she will start to pull me to Sheng Shiong, and there is one just 1 block away. And oh, did i mention she LOVESSSS Diaso and i have a hard time getting her to leave which brings me to.....

- The NONSTOP Shopper
Now, since she loves to go shopping, it just meant that there are times where i have to shop with her
until i miss my train or we reach home damn late.
So i ended up trying to stop her from her crazy obsession.
By leashing her. with her scarf.
She will run away from me and i will try to throw the scarf that is tied into a small ring over her head to leash her. Upon leashing, i will try to drag her out and we end up like comedy in the shop (Daiso especially) I guess whoever review the security tape would be laughing at this 2 crazy couples always pulling and pushing around the shop.


- The precious moments 
Though 2 months is pretty short, we went through quite a bit of festive season together. Vday and CNY were all in the month of Feb.

* We 上船(NOT 上床) together (RSS ENDURANCE AND NOT SOME EXCITING CRUISE)

* We visited a few temples together (Buddist Relic, Mahabodi and the one that is near Mahabodi, and i want to go Phor Kar See and the Si Ma Lu Bugis temple with you together soon)

* We went for a swim at Pioneer that theme park public swimming pool. (ended up doing stupid stuffs instead of swimming)

* We 荡秋千(with me being the slave dog pushing her fat ass) together at AMK park.

* We walk about NTU and watch stars(our favourite passtime) whenever we have nothing exciting to do.

* We watched 2 movies together so far, and they are pretty bad and end up we both sleep through the movie.

* We took long bus rides and MRT rides together( some are not by choice since she stays in Pioneer and every other places are far from there) This is a precious moment because she will lie on my shoulder and its damn blissful lor.

* We gym once together. it was horrible, but oh well...

* We cooked carbonara together once. Technically, I COOKED IT.

*WE ATE A LOT OF SHIT TOGETHERRRRRR

I think we did a lot more, but I cant remember all of them now.

More to come!!!


Regards
Benjamin Chai

Monday, March 9, 2015

Autowiring (Java Spring Annotations)

Hi,

Autowiring is a very useful function in Java annotation and Spring
http://java.dzone.com/articles/why-you-should-use-springs

So the key points to note when doing Autowire is:
- it cannot be a new object.

- you might need a setter function if you are wiring a particular variable.

- you can pass the autowired object by reference, but it will only be a read-only. hence if you are passing a DAO, you can only get read-only database access, and cannot write back to database.

- you are required to declare the autowired object in your application-context.xml (beans.xml)


More guides on autowiring:
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/spring/spring_autowired_annotation.htm

It is indeed difficult to understand, but damn useful to use.


Thursday, December 25, 2014

Diamond no Diamond? (earring)

Hi,

I know it is pretty stupid to buy a expensive gift for just a girl you like. She ain't my girlfriend, nor is there a chance that she will become my girlfriend (she rejected me by saying I am a nice guy, but let's be friend. Ironic isn't it?)
My friends scolded me for scaring the shit out of her and putting invisible pressure on her. And they also cursed that why am i spending such money when i could use it to treat them to a big feast.

But I don't really regret my decision. I didn't buy it because it is diamond; i bought it because i think it suits her. But that's not the reason of this blog post.

So, when buying a earring, i learnt a few stuffs.

The price range is insane. The cheap ones are going for 90cents a pair, while the real diamond real gold stuffs are going at 4 digits.

So what are the considerations you look at when buying a earring for a girl?

They are:
type of metal
type of precious stone
laser cutting
budget

Earring

It may sound pretty stupid talking about metal for an earring.
The cheaper versions are all made with plastics. But if you were to buy something that looks nice, it has to be metal.

The issue with metal is that there are so many bloody type of it.
Cosmetic metal- where it is just some cheap metal. If the wearer is allergic to metal, she would throw such cheapo earring away after wearing just a few times. Such earrings are usually in the cosmetic jewelry department where they are inexpensive and fairly ugly.

Surgical Steel - The name of it sounded awesome. But to me, it is just stainless steel. It may be slightly less allergic prone, but you cant be sure. They are after all, steel. They have a nice metallic color to it. Honestly speaking, i skipped these range totally since they are not really that cheap and their design looked ugly.

925 Silver-  Such silver are pretty and can be expensive. Their design are usually with some precious stones that are not diamond(diamond is high budgeted). Being 925, they are said to be good for people with metal allergies. Their price range are pretty good too, and they looked nice! But silver will never win its counterpart, which is known as...

Gold- Of course, gold is the best type of metal. But do not misunderstand me when i say gold here. I am not talking about the color, but talking about the metal itself. The normal yellow gold that we know of is seriously ugly, despite being the type of gold that worth the most money. 
White gold and rose gold is the most common for making earring. They are a pretty color and they are known to be the best type of metal for people with allergies. Well, they are in fact the only type of metal worthy to be paired with diamond! If you ever looked at any diamond earring, they are always paired with White gold or rose gold, or gold itself.


Then going to stones,
Precious Stones are pretty cheap usually, since they are pretty trashy and is only there because it is pretty.

Diamond, however, is in a league of its own. Forget about clarity and cutting. I do not have such large budget to look at stuffs like that. But I would like to bring out a point that there are in fact 2 types of diamond, man made or natural. Man made stuffs would always be cheaper than natural stuffs. And of course, contrary to popular belief, diamond aren't THAT expensive.
100++SGD would get you a pretty diamond earring coupled with White Gold or Rose Gold, and they claimed that those diamond are REAL ones, not man made.


So in combination,
When you go to the jeweler, they would first ask you, "Diamond, No Diamond?"

If you said "No diamond",
They would show you a range of earrings with either precious stones, or laser cut.
Their range is fair affordable, with some of them being less than 100SGD.
My point is is to focus more on the laser cut.

Laser Cut looked damn good under those blinding lights inside the jewelers' shop. This is because the white gold does shine bright like diamond when coupled with strong lights. However, upon looking closely to it, it is nothing comparable to a real diamond shine. The price is good, but if you really want something that shine, diamond should be the stuff you look at.

Comparing to Swarovski crystals, diamond are still in a higher league on its own. And the crystal earring i so wanted to buy was a part of a earring and necklace set. So I didn't buy it.

So once you decided that you have a more than 100SGD budget, I suggest you get a diamond earring. They are a lot more nicer than 925 silver with precious stones, or White and Rose Gold with coloured precious stones. But that's totally personal opinion!

But if budget is less than 100SGD, diamonds are out. I suggest White gold or Rose gold with a nice pattern, but NOT with laser cutting. Because although they shine bright, they are still not diamond and hence it looked fake. Of course you can buy other types of metals, but i guess Gold would always outshine the rest of those precious metals.

Lastly, the good thing about buying diamond is that you get a certificate of authenticity. This is kind of like you get a warranty of the stuff you bought. I think it is a warranty of 6 months or a year. I can't remember anymore. And, while the warranty is usually a receipt, if it is a gift, you can request for the certification to be printed without the price of the item. That way, your recipient will not know how much does the stuff cost!( this is particularly important to me to reduce the invisible pressure on the girl i like)

My conclusion about earring is that, it looked damn good when you hold it on your hand or in the box. But when it is being worn, I guess it is too small to be noticed by anyone. I am not sure about others but i really doubt i would notice such a small item placed on the ears, unless i have the chance to be THAT close to her.
But then again, being a gift, i guess i don't want to give a trash that she wouldn't wear due to allergies or due to it being out of her style. So with that in mind, I chose one that suits her best(based on how i perceive her).

Jeweler's Service

The next interesting thing stuff that I learnt about buying diamond is that the way you present yourself will determine how much enthusiasm you received from the salesperson.

While hunting for this particular present, i wore several outfit and went to several branches of jewelers. They are mostly the same few brands, some being the sister branding of their more premium range and bla bla bla. If the jewelers are selling the more high end precious metals and diamond, their salesperson would be wearing suits, else they would be just wearing some shirt.

When walking into the shop with polo tee and cargo pants, the service i got was quite lukewarm. It isn't that bad considering that they totally gave me a condescending "Hi Sir, how can I help you" when i walked in wearing t shirt and shorts with slippers.

But when I walked in with shirts and pants, they served me with more enthusiasm and the disappointment on their faces are a lot more when I walked out with no purchase.

So i guess, the saying of we are what we wear stays true. Dressing up does give us more confidence and gain more respect from people despite being empty vessels.

Don't judge a book by its cover doesn't work in the society i lived in.

I guess I couldn't get over the fact that i was once rejected by a girl for being too fat to even fit into her dreams.
Well, i do hope the monitoring of Mi Band will make me lose some weight so i can chase this current girl better.(she did say that no one else is chasing her hard, but that doesn't mean she won't run away herself )

Hope is the theme of my Christmas, but i lose more hope in christmas day itself than the whole year combined.

Regards
Benjamin Chai


The 20SGD pacer

Hi,

Priced at $19.99, the Mi Band is touted to be a direct competitor of FitBit and Jawbone. While the other 2 are in the range of $100+, I only have the budget to buy a Mi Band and play with it.

Looking at its specs published on its official site, Mi Band is supposed to last 30 days. It is supposed to trace your daily movement and track your sleep. But I guess the most important part of it is that it vibrates when you have an incoming call! This particular function would ensure that no more phone calls are missed!
http://www.mi.com/sg/miband/

Basic Information
Mi Band from Xiao Mi
Asus ZenFone 5 2GB ram 16GB memory

To go into more details,

Battery Life

Upon using it for 6 days, the battery life is still healthy at 79%. If we do the math, its 21% for 6 days, which means it should last for approximately ~30 days.

The issue here is that, although the Mi Band battery does well, your hand phone battery wouldn't last if you just leave your bluetooth on all day to sync automatically.
And you would require your Mi Band synced to get the band to vibrate when there is a phone call.


Sleep Tracking

One interesting stuff the Mi Band does is sleep tracking. I have no idea how it does it, but the main issue here is, so what if you know about your quality of sleep? How can you improve it or what can you do with these information? Well, for myself, I guess the answer is to sleep more, and to exercise more so you can sleep better.




And for how accurate it is?
Can't prove it either! 
But it is pretty cool to post it on facebook, and people will start asking what app are you using to get these data. So if you are an attention whore, get this before the craze die down!
You will get many comments regarding your sleep pattern!


Fitness Tracking (pacer)

This is the main function of it. To trace how much have you walk. I tried shaking the device hopefully it detects a step taken. But apparently, it is pretty well calibrated and only count a step when one is really taken. The calories burnt was pretty depressing, given that I did walk 10000 steps a day.



But oh well, I do know this thing won't produce enough motivation to make me feel like walking more!


Good or Bad?

It is an inexpensive toy to play with. However, some considerations are required.
Firstly, despite being an English app, there pretty much stuffs still in chinese, albeit being not really important.
Secondly, it is pretty useless, apart from it being able to vibrate when there is a call and being a wearable alarm clock. The vibration would not be enough to wake up a sleeping log (me), and it doesn't vibrate for long since touching it would disable the vibration(my pillow touches it and it stop vibrating) 
So if you do not have many people calling you(foreveralone people like me don't really need it), and the alarm feature is not useful to you, this is not a product for you!

Thirdly, its support for IOS. It is built to compliment the MiUI or XiaoMi phones. So naturally, for IOS, there is only a Chinese app for it. You better be able to understand chinese before buying this.

Fourth, DO NOT LOSE YOUR USB CHARGING CABLE. I have no idea where can I get a replacement and apparently XiaoMi don't sell them either. So i guess you dump the whole set if you lose the charging cable. TAKE GOOD CARE OF IT!

Personally, it is just an inexpensive toy that i wear in hope to motivate me to do more sports. Granted, I have fewer missed calls, but I don't really have much calls to begin with. Wearing it for long time also makes you uncomfortable if you are not used to it. It causes my phone to die faster due to the bluetooth being on. It doesn't really affect me since i hide in office or home with power plugs charging my phone constantly.


Lastly, 6 days of usage doesn't give a very good insights of the product.
So i guess if i could be disciplined enough to wear it for 30 days, I would post another review on this!

20SGD? can buy and play lar. But not a necessity, and not really that awesome.
It's more of the uselessness of the use case, less of the product. I must say the product quality is good!



Update: 22/03/2015
I bought a total of 4, one for personal use and 3 other for other people. Of these 4, 3 are required to be sent back to service center due to being unable to connect. I must say, i am deeply disappointed with the quality. But hey! its only 20 dollars and it have 1 year warranty!
And as of today, my band is broken(the little hook that allows u to slot it in), and to buy a replacement, it costs me $9.90sgd at Comex, or $3.90 from some Carousell seller.
Battery life is godly. 25days and its at 70+%. seemed like if you do not check the damn damn every other seconds, its damn good!



Best Regards
Benjamin Chai

Friday, December 5, 2014

The Proxor Test

Hello,

So my nightmare just ended during Wednesday where we sat thru the 6hours grueling programming test, and despite practicing long and hard, majority of us gotten a Proxor 3 rating, which is not that bad, but just meant we are just entry level programmers.

So what is Proxor?

http://www.proxor.com/

This is a set of test designed by some university professor to test real world software developers to see if they can really code, or are they just there to get the fat paycheck by smoking through.

Being in a company which uses Java as our core languages, we were asked to do the pilot test to help evaluate if this is a good tool for our company to use for recruitment.
We were given a preparation code which were almost identical to the test questions. There are a total of 13 questions, of which 4 will end up as our test questions.
http://www.proxor.com/page/howtoprepare

So after much preparation, I am glad to say that we have compiled some of the solutions. They are able to pass the Junit provided, but I believe that in order to do well in, you must be able to identify all the possible error situations like special characters and wrong inputs etc.
The code efficiency also do matter in my opinion.

There is no proper comments inside the code, but a benreadme.txt are provided for most of the questions.

Do read the READMEFIRST, then inside each question, read the readme to know what is the question about.
if it is not clear enough, a video to show how the output should be is here. (the link provided inside the readme is outdated)
http://www.proxor.com/page/solution


b3n's answers and brochures for Proxor
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/t2aoaapm07z8urn/AACO3uX_zcXwEazomx7X6fqfa?dl=0

I am not sure if I have infringed any rights or not, but if i did, do send me an email to tell me about it and I will be sure to remove it immediately!


Last but not least, while it is still in pilot trial run, I believe that this would be a useful tools to differentiate a good coder from a mediocre ones, as well as to provide certain feedback on how you can further improve your coding standards and skills. But more can be done to make the results give more details on your strength and weaknesses in coding!



Regards
Benjamin Chai

Proxor answers
Proxor test
Proxor Java
Proxor Pilot Test
Proxor Test Solutions