1988-1989 : Born and stayed in Cambridge, England.
1989-1993 : Back in Malaysia, attended Kindergarten
1994-2000 : Primary School in Sekolah Kebangsaan Taman Megah
2000-2001 : 6 months in John Witherspoon Middle School, Princeton NJ, USA
2001-2004 : Secondary school, Form1-4 in SMK Taman SEA
2004-2006 : Form 6 (A-Levels) in Millfield School, England.
2006-???? : Undergraduate studies at Harvard College, MA, USA

My name is Ng, Hoong Ern (I’m Malaysian Chinese) and I was born in 1988. I studied A levels in the Millfield School, United Kingdom (Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Music and Music Tech).

[Update August 2006] Well well well, guess what? I am now on my way to Harvard College in the US, what a pleasant suprise and a blessing! It won’t be easy, no, definitely not. But at least I have friends, parents, relatives, God, and others to guide me along this path!

[Update November 2006] And of course, now I’m at Harvard, doing my Undergrad studies.

I believe in a God who loves us, who loves me personally, and you as well, in a way that we can never understand. Because of love, He came down to earth in the form of a man – Jesus Christ, so that we may be saved, and be able to have a relationship with Him. He is the reason why we exist, and the reason to exist.

I enjoy playing music (Piano/Trombone/Drums/Guitar/Bass/etc), studio recording & music technology (see http://studio.graceabundant.com/), and technology (computers, web technology, etc)

If you want to know more about me, feel free to contact me.

Qualifications

Academic : PMR (2003), SATs (2005), A-Levels (2006), currently concentrating in Computer Science for Undergrad studies at Harvard College.

Music :
Piano Grade 5 ABRSM (1999), Piano Grade 7 Trinity (1999), Piano Grade 8 ABRSM (2000), Trombone Grade 5 ABRSM (2006).
Theory Grade 5 ABRSM (2000), Theory Grade 6 ABRSM (2002), Theory Grade 7 ABRSM (2003), Theory Grade 8 ABRSM (2004)

Experience in: Computer Tech (I’m a CompSci major, and I also work in Tech Support, and am well versed in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux [Debian based]), Web Design & Hosting (HTML, XHTML, CSS, in addition to running some servers), Studio Recording, Composing, Arranging, Orchestration, Music occasions, DIY Speaker building. (Visit http://studio.graceabundant.com)

This site, purpose

What is the purpose of this site? I would call it a blog, more specifically, it has been a PERSONAL blog. But I plan to change that (as of July ’05) by writing things which outsiders would find useful. As a ‘mathemusician’, you can see that my banner has a treble clef with a “Pi” at the bottom. You can also see the Greek symbol “Sigma” to the left. The first characters of the four
words spell “OPUS”, which means work, and may be associated with classical music. “Products” signifies the math multiplication, not me selling products. “Unreal Subtraction” signifies subtraction in the unreal number plane, complex numbers. My purpose is to bring together music, sound, physics and maths and to find their correlations.

This site, technical

Centered around WordPress. . Scripts based on PHP (and a little Perl), structured in XHTML1.1 + MathML 2.0 (Now served as HTML 4.01 Strict though). Server used to be located in Malaysia, on my own DSL-served Apache server. However, I decided to move it to a US-based hosting service (BlueHost) – which is easier for me these days.

History of Hoong Ern’s Site(s)

In June 2003, Whatchamacallit was born. Hosted under balder.prohosting.com which provided 50MB of storage, my site resided there in static html form. Web development was done with the program “Macromedia Dreamweaver”. Layout was using tables, images by Macromedia Fireworks (used right until the latest web development). Visitors were quite scarce, and I soon
lost interest in updating the site regularly (It was troublesome because all the pages were static). But the biggest factor which caused this site to cease being was the huge amounts of advertistments placed by the host.

The solution? Either pay, or home host. After some thinking, I decided to go along with home hosting. Sure, it wouldn’t be as fast and good as a paid host, but at least I could gain some experience from doing it. The issue of the server being on 24/7 was slowly resolved, although now it still remains an issue during thunderstorms. The other issue of connection was a
big problem. How does one serve pages on a 128kbps connection? You may have noticed that the pages load slowly. The connection has now been upgraded to 256kbps, but obviously that is a tinny speed. Who knows, if I get more visitors, I may upgrade! It all depends.

On January 2004, server software was installed and configured, DNS entries were made at DynDNS.org and the first page was served from my server. Hence hoongern.ath.cx was born. Scripts soon started to appear, and the first layout using FRAMES was designed. Blogging software used was CuteNews. Also, I now started to switch to ‘hand-coding’, basically writing every single bit of code myself. No programs involved. Of course, my code waslargely un-compliant with web standards (which I knew naught about) and obviously, I knew not of the frames debate.

Because of server uptime issues, hoongern.ath.cx remained largely inactive and as a development server until March ’04. I decided to try my hand at blogging again, this time with proper scripts and a better mindset. The site grew VERY slowly, and soon I got rid of my frames design and dived into HTML+CSS. Of course, validator.w3.org was unknown to me. Designs still remained messy, font tags were used, no proper structure, but well, it was a learning experience. I also started picking up PHP

April ’04 – July ’04 were the most productive times of my entire webdev life. Many posts, not many comments, decent amount of posts in the chatbox (which I modded heavily to prevent people spamming under my name). Unfortunately, my website would be affected by my leaving to UK to further studies. Time there was forbidding, and the creator started to drift away from
its creation. Of course, visitors begin leaving then. Thus gone was the peak in the website.

During a break in May ’05, I came across this thing called XHTML. Unsure what it was, and with no proper research, I assumed that it was a ‘future and cool HTML’ and promptly started changing ‘>’s to ‘/>’s. I had no idea what XHTML really was. It validated with w3.org, so, I thought, hey man, I have proper XHTML! Only that I was serving it as HTML, which defeated
the entire purpose of XHTML (Whose purpose was what, anyway?).

When I returned to UK, I started doing research on web standards, mainly from w3.org, The Autistic Cuckoo and 456 Berea Street (see links). I was amazed by the insights given about XHTML, and then I turned the total opposite – XHTML is evil? But I couldn’t manage my website from over there, so I decided to wait and give it more thought. Meanwhile, the site wasn’t doing great, maybe because of a password protection system I put on to keep spammers out. But it affected the traffic a lot, I think. Only about 20 visitors in 3 months.

After more research, and some thought, I decided to revamp my website. I would serve XHTML+MathML properly, and HTML to Internet Explorer. CuteNews would be changed in favour of MovableType or WordPress, a cleaner design would be used. Hence you are seeing
the result now, 3 years after I delved into the tip of the web iceberg. Accessibility would still be an issue on my site, which I will try to sort out, and there is still A LOT about web standards which I don’t know, and I’m probably making lots of errors. But please bear with me. Thanks a lot

[Update 2008] hoongern.ath.cx has changed to blog.graceabundant.com, and is now hosted in America =)