Multi Monitor Madness

For those who have found the joy in working with multiple monitors here are some FREE applications that I just can’t live without:
Multi-Monitor Taskbar: Adds a task bar on the non primary displays, a window title bar button to move the windows and keyboard shortcuts to move windows to other displays.
Multi Monitor Mouse: At the flick of keyboard shortcut / mouse click move your mouse to the next display instead of having to drag the mouse all the way cross boundaries. Especially useful for those laptop touchpad users!

Wish there was a way to integrate the 2 and with the user editable shortcuts but these will do for now. May the multi monitor force be with you.

GTDTiddlyWiki

GTD Tiddly Wiki is a GettingThingsDone adaptation by Nathan Bowers of Jeremy Ruston’s Open Source TiddlyWiki. The purpose of GTD Tiddly Wiki is to give users a single repository for their GTD lists and support materials so they can create/edit lists, and then print directly to 3×5 cards for use with the HipsterPDA

In a few words it’s a to-do list managed in a single, editable, saveable (is that a word?) HTML file. Doesn’t work in Opera though =( But at least it’s nice, simple and portable. Trying to get my Getting Things Done (TD) on and organise my life just a little bit better….

Debugging comas

So far today I have run into 3 comas using Visual Studio.NET

  1. Stepping through code and there it goes comatose on one any command (takes a long time for it to finish the task)
  2. Trying to stop debugging but the whole UI is frozen (can’t press the stop button nor use the keyboard shortcut)
  3. Starting a debug session and waiting for debug window to open (debugging ASP.NET project)

At least given time the patient does wake up from the coma but it annoys me. A LOT. But worse is the recurring coma the system has been having is trouble with the Master Browser such that “\\server.ip.address.urls” will not resolve for a looooooooong time resulting in one server not being able to retrieve the data it needs from the other server resulting in Epic fail.

Atari 2600 Controller

So what happens when you decide to take out your old Atari 2600 console with the intention of playing it only to find that the controllers don’t work? Make your own controllers of course! So I spent like 30 minutes looking for parts in Brunei. What I needed was 5 buttons (4 for direction and 1 for the fire button). We really need a good place to buy electronic parts like these in Brunei. Recommendations anybody? Anyway I found them and Batu Bersurat at the toy shop opposite Ayamku, I think it’s called Little ‘M’ Children but I could be wrong. I did my research on the controllers on Chinese New Year’s Eve (BTW Happy New Year everybody) and found it all documented online here. But I got my documentation the hard way.. With a multimeter and my own serial port connectors. That was one of the reasons I got 2 hours of sleep that night/morning. Anyway photos to come later. I need to sleep I have work in a few hours and some Android lurking to get back to too

Updates:
The original Atari 2600 controller opened up: nice simplistic circuit with the common ground and I tried to keep the same wire colour convention but I didn’t have a white so I used gray instead.

Colour | Pin # | Function
-------+-------+----------------
White  |   1   | Joystick Up
Blue   |   2   | Joystick Down
Green  |   3   | Joystick Left
Brown  |   4   | Joystick Right
       |   5   | Left Paddle
Orange |   6   | Fire
       |   7   | +5v
Black  |   8   | Ground
       |   9   | Right Paddle


Male connector on the Atari itself, controller uses female connector soldered as show below
Top view:

Bottom view:

Top view of controller:

Bottom view of controller (wire wrapped and soldered):

Now all I need is a box to put it in….

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Wrapping around an Eclipse

While playing around with Android I found out that Eclipse has no word wrap feature! It’s annoying but there is a plugin extension addon feature for it here. However it does not label the wrapped lines properly: the wrap line is considered as a new line not an extension of the previous one and it has not been updated since it’s first release in July 2006. How much longer do we have to wait for a ‘simple’ word wrap?

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Chinese New Year – Open House

On the 2nd day Friday 8th February 2008. If you need to address contact me anyway you can. It’s supposedly all day but I would think 1000-2200 would be better. I can’t promise you food (because I don’t know what my mom has planned) but I think I can promise you a still messy room if you dare to look…

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Repetitive Strain Injury

RSI on Wikipedia

So I’ve been having a slight pain/tingling in my right wrist for the past day and being reliant on my keyboard to do my work it is worrying. Something I picked up from Computer Related Repetitive Strain Injury:

While you are actually typing your wrists should not rest on anything, and should not be bent up, down, or to the side

Keep your arms & hands warm. Cold muscles & tendons are at much greater risk for overuse injuries, and many offices are over-air-conditioned.

There’s a few things I didn’t know. So it looks like I’m going to go find something like the A4Tech A-Shape Nature Keyboard. Over the past few months I’ve been trying to work right, the posture, keyboard height, monitor height and such but I think the pain is in my right wrist in particular possibly due to a lot of FPS games as well with all the mouse movements. So with my back issues now I have a wrist issue.. Aaaaah life, nice to see that you (well kind of myself actually) have been giving me quite a few challenges over the past few weeks. But as I remember telling a friend of mine after a sermon back in Singapore: “Goliaths will fall”. Yes they will (and will that I’m just had one of those ‘flashbacks’ of mine where I’ve seen this scene before in a dream. Deja vu? That’s for sure…)

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The roller coaster of life : up and down we go

1 John 4:7-8

7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love

1 John 4:19

We love because he first loved us

1 Corinthians 13:4-7

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

What we know and what we believe and what we really believe and what we do can all be different. We learn from our mistakes. I’ve just made a mistake that could be one of the biggest in my life. When angry some people kick a fuss, swear, break things: I keep quiet, because I know what I say will be out of emotions and reacting rather than responding. So my mistake came with reacting. There was a attempt to salvage what was done but I know it’s hard and what I did was severely inadequate. Keep those emotions at bay: let them loose and it’ll wreck havoc.

Life is funny how we try to be the type of person we envision. When you fall short of that or even find yourself becoming the person you never ever wanted to be like what do you do with yourself? Life is hard. Crying in despair can be inevitable. But life is full of learning. It’s amazing how I feel it’s hard to trust people yet here I am typing some of the things going on in my mind right now available to ‘anybody’. Friendship, or the type I envisioned, was something I never really got a hold of. One big mishap here, one act of trust betrayal there and many times of me staying closed and here we are today. We all have our hangups but yet we all still have to face life in its entirety. When things go wrong what do we do? I’ve been through the phase of moping around feeling sorry for yourself and being depressed. I’ve been there before and that achieves nothing except for self pity and a feeling of worthlessness. What we need to do is, hold on to our securities – and hold on tight.
Proverbs 3

5Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.

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