What a few days, what a few months….

A visit from Senior Pastor Derek Hong from my Singapore home church, COOS has so far been a great experience. Fallen way off the saddle in the past few months and I guess an atmosphere of familiarity and ‘security’ from days gone past of my days in Singapore has given me that extra push I need to get back on the saddle and head back on the path of the straight and narrow. Struggles in life, commitments in life and just life itself throw you many curve balls that you just can’t hit out of the ball park and all so often it seems that its just that nobody really understands: nobody there. I guess thats my problem. If I’m difficult to get along with “I’m sorry” but I’m far from perfect when it comes to building relationships. Sometimes I see myself as the stereotypical nerd with the thick rimmed glasses that isn’t popular and doesn’t mingle well. Well actually that basically my life in my secondary days. Time and time again you try to trust people and some how they let you down, not to put anybody down but we are all human and we all make mistakes. So you tend to shy away from people knowing that they’ll let you down. Yes I miss the days in Singapore when things seemed much ‘easier’ with more support from like minded people but life isn’t a bed of roses. We go through trials and tribulations to strengthen us for what else is to come. Well what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Too much things floating around in my mind. I better go to sleep if I want to get to KOOL in 6 hours…

A few links providing good reading and listening material:

  • God Is Not As Interesting As My I-Phone or Harry Potter
  • Welcome to Ocellated: “Well, essentially, it’s about science and faith”
  • The Daily Audio Bible: Listen to the Bible in a year

    • Blogged with Flock

    Ponderings of the mind

    I wonder why I find it so hard to be happy for others. I know they deserve it but I cant help be feel jealous. A part of me knows I will not or even can not be like them and so it comes down to the ‘superiority’ of others vs ‘inferiority’ of me. This is something I’ve been tackling alot in the past few months. I keep asking myself what can I offer to others when I feel inadequate in so many levels. I know everybody has their talents and they need to be nutured with time and determination and purpose. I feel time just slipping away wondering where my days have gone. Wondering what I’m doing with my life when I know there are more important things out there. Deliberate and conscious actions need to be taken. Call this a cry for help or call this a cry of desperation but whatever it is, it’s a cry for change. Something has to go…

    Blogged with Flock

    WinTabber

    If you ever wanted to have tabs for applications that dont support them? Well with WinTabber you can.. in a way

    What is WinTabber ?
    WinTabber is tabmanager that can add tab support to almost any window under windows 2000/XP. Working with tabbed windows works faster and efficiently.

    Basically it gets rid of the title bar of any window you currently open and puts it in the WinTabber application as a tab. You can move through tabs in WinTabber using your mouse or the Ctrl+Tab (or Ctrl+Shift+Tab) shortcut most of us would be used to if you used any tabbed application before (e.g. Opera, Firefox). You can open multiple WinTabber windows to organise different windows but you can’t put a WinTabber window as a tab in another WinTabber window. Tabs can be released to restore it as a window on its own. A good application to help you remove some clutter from the taskbar and boost your productivity.

    Blogged with Flock

    101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed

    Source
    Is it sad that I identify with some of them?

    …
    6. Your source code control system is a series of folders on a shared drive
    …
    9. You start considering a new job so you don’t have to maintain the application you are building
    …
    84. All performance issues are resolved by getting larger machines
    …
    100. You have been 90% complete 90% of the time

    P.S 1st Flock post because I am lazy to go to the WordPress dashboard. Laziness is good and expect to see more Tumblelog-esque entries

    Blogged with Flock

    Tags:

    Fedora 7 package-less without the Internet?

    Ok so I decided to install Fedora 7 on my desktop after receiving an email regarding my post on getting the SMC 2862W-G wireless USB dongle working on Ubuntu. Go through the installation and setup, and everything seems pretty polished and from what I’ve heard of Fedora (previously Fedora Core) product line. During the installation I purposely stupidly left out some packages thinking that I would try to install them later to see how package installation is without an Internet connection. Besides if I don’t have my wireless driver compiled and loaded how can I get online right? (the router is upstairs and I am NOT lugging my desktop upstairs)

    System installed and booted up first thing I did click the “Applications” menu, and I see the “Add/Remove Software” so thats where I go. It prompts me for my password and then I see the application starting and then a nice error message informing me that it is “Unable to retrieve software information”. Fair enough, I’m not online so it can’t connect to the repositories. There is a “Details” section which displays the nice message of “None”. So I click on the “Ok” button of this error dialogue box and *poof* the whole application just closes. So how am I supposed to install packages?

    I see “Software updater” in the “System Tools” menu and I try that. Same problem. Search online and I get this post. Currently I am reading through trying to familiarize myself with this different side of Linux that I had yet to venture into. I could just use rpm to install some stuff but dependency hell just like dpkg in Debian based distros arise. But fact of the matter is why can’t they just enable installation of files from the CD by default? There is 2.7GB worth of packages in the DVD which is useless to those trying to learn how to use Linux and all.

    Found this post that enabled me to update via the GUI installer, pirut, but not via the command line yum. Being curious I got on IRC and join #fedora and asked them about it. One guy asked if I could use rpm and after a bit of dependency annoyances (as with any manual package installer e.g. dpkg) I managed to install one of the dependencies for gcc. So I tried using pirut again and got the same exception as I got for yum. Man this is bad. Yes there are some working fixes that I’ve read, such as copying the packages from the DVD to the hard drive but I want to use the DVD which has shown that it could work with pirut.

    I think David said it best in the post from the 1st link above:

    Prominent Linux distributions have greatly improved that software installation and update process over the last decade. Both Debian-derived and RPM-based distributions now have good support for accessing large repositories of packages over the internet. If you have good internet access, then you don’t really need the distribution CDs or DVD after the initial install. But I wonder if the emphasis on installation over the internet has seems to have reached the point that distributions are neglecting installation of packages from CD/DVD. I hope that ability doesn’t disappear. Although fast internet connections are widely available now, it’s still quite possible to find yourself without one. And many DSL providers set monthly data limits, so it’s sometimes preferable not to download packages that you already have sitting on a CD or DVD.

    Is that too much to ask for?

    Application of the Day?: SUPER

    SUPER: © Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer. In other words an application that lets you convert videos from 1 format to another. After being mentioned on DL.TV episode 177 I did some searching on it and found a complaint saying that it is in violation of the GPL and LGPL. Despite an odd complaint of this software installs spyware and doesn’t cleanly uninstall. Initially I was wary of the program but after seeing it on Softpedia with the 100% free award which states the following:

    Softpedia guarantees that SUPER 2007 build 22 is 100% FREE, which means it is a freeware product (both for personal and commercial use) that does not contain any form of malware, including but not limited to: spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.

    So that calmed me until now. I should do some testing on the software, I will try do so if I have the time and if I’m using Windows. But despite the controversy I have to say that it does work flawlessly. Simple drag and drop, select output format, click encode (leaving the defaults on) and it starts encoding the file.
    Use with caution

    Application of the Day: Winmerge

    Winmerge: a sweet application with great keyboard shortcuts to let you compare and file differences and merge them. Allows merging into existing file but is only for Windows (well I guess you could guess that from the name). KDiff3 is a good alternative with cross platform support (Windows, Linux, Mac, Un*x) but when saving the merged file it prompted to save as a new file not an existing file. I had over 50 files to merge today so I didn’t want to manually file each file and save them individually.

    A reason for keyboard users to hate Macs

    Have been playing around with a Macbook the past few days as my dear got one for a pretty great deal and I as a very keyboard-centric user am finding it frustrating. When I use any laptop I usually never have an external mouse attached as I feel it breaks my flow and I rather use the touchpad or the Pointing Stick (strange enought I prefer the pointing stick as my fingers never leave the keyboard) despite that I may be slower (but I will use an external mouse for extended works that require a mouse, e.g. graphics editing and gaming). Understandably some keyboard shortcuts are changed to use the Apple command key (or whatever it’s called) but it gets plain annoying. One of the biggest annoyances is here.
    Basically in the file manager application, Finder, when you highlight a file or application and press Enter, thinking it would open or execute the program like it does in Windows and Linux (well from my experience of typical Linux file managers, i.e. Konqueror, Nautilus, Krusader, Xfce File Manager), you are in for a rude awakening. Finder thinks that you want to rename the file. Great, so how do you open the file? Command-O or Command-Down. Like what the heck, why do you need to press 2 keys to open something. Okay maybe it’s to prevent accidentally opening something, but at the expense of having to press 2 keys to open something ALL the time? Please, come on Apple. Other commands like copy and paste use the command key instead of the control (Ctrl) key and since the command key is just left of the space bar it makes your fingers do some unfamiliar gymnastics that you would rather avoid.
    Apparently this guy gave up his Mac Mini over 2 years ago just because of issues like this on a Mac. A good read for anybody going over to the Mac side. I still can’t get over the single mouse button and sometimes for a right like I have to press command click or Ctrl click. Perhaps I was mistaken but I think it was in Finder when I have to press Ctrl-click to bring up the Right click menu but in Word for Mac it was Command-click. Aaaahhh enough of the rant, and back to work I go….

    BAICT – Brunei Awareness of Information and Communication Technology

    Another technology centric event another technology (which means computer) fair at the Mall in Gadong.
    Take a look at the schedule (thanks Brunei Daily Diary)

    Thursday, June 7
    9.30am: Registration & arrival of invited guests & media.
    10.00am: Arrival of guest of honour Yang Berhormat Pehin Orang Kaya Seri Dewa Major General (R) Dato Seri Pahlawan Haji Awang Mohammad bin haji Daud, Minister of Culture, Youth & Sports.
    10.00am: Recital of Doa
    10.45am: Opening Speech by BAICT 2007 Event Manager / Official launch & Traditional performances
    11.00am: End of opening ceremony
    8.00pm to 10pm: The Mall Treasure Hunt

    Friday, June 8
    3.30pm to 5.30pm: Colouring Contest for Kids
    8.00pm to 10.00pm: Fineworks Studio Local Artiste Performances

    Saturday, June 9
    1.30pm to 5.30pm: Fineworks Studio Local Artiste Performances
    8.00pm to 10.00pm: Musical Shows by Students & Teachers from PJC Virtuoso Music School

    Sunday, June 10
    3.30pm to 5.30pm: Musical Shows by Students from Expression Music School
    8.00pm to 8.30pm: Lucky Draw for all Customers
    8.30pm to 10.00pm: Musical Shows by Students & Teachers from Expression Music School

    Now tell me how the events such as Musical Shows fit in with being aware of ICT. From what I saw just now (them bringing in the equipment) it was just a normal musical performance not some Gameboy wielding music making guy. I went there looking for a couple of SD cards, but not the typical cheap generic slow SD cards but the type with faster read and write speeds. They didn’t have any at all. They are just selling the cheapest stuff to attract people and get some cash. I want to see something different. I want to see something different like how to have proper document standards that are interoperable. Speaking about interoperability I ran into an issue today. A logo was sent from to my dear today and it was in an Excel file. She opens it with Excel for Mac (not sure which version) and it displays nothing, just a blank spreadsheet. Another person tried it and couldn’t view it either (not sure what OS or application used, but I think it would be safe to say some version of Excel on Windows). So I try Open Office Calc on my Linux box and viola, there the logo is in all it’s glory. So on she goes to create the handbook and when all is done she saves it as a Word document. She asks me to keep a backup so I do and try opening it in Word 2003 on Windows XP and in place of all the images (except 1) is the text “QuickTime and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture. In Open Office it just shows a black block.

    If Microsoft has problems trying to get it’s own applications to view the file properly how can you ever be sure that any document you pass around can be viewed by the receiving party?

    • What happens if you can’t get QuickTime and the TIFF decompressor?
    • What if you don’t know what the heck QuickTime or a TIFF decompressor is?
    • What if you don’t have Microsoft Office?
    • What if you don’t have that particular version of Microsoft Office which the document works with?
    • What if I don’t have the money to buy the software needed to open the document? (okay honestly in places like Brunei where software piracy is all too common, this is a non-issue for those who don’t think it’s wrong to go down to the local pirate store and pick up a copy not caring whether the proper people are getting the cash)

    Why can’t I just have a single document format that I can read with an I don’t have to worry about?
    Well you can with the OpenDocument format. OpenOffice.org is a free office suite that supports ODF as well as Microsoft Office formats. Though it may not be perfect for viewing documents created in Microsoft Office, it is a tool that should be more widely adopted. In steps to bridge the digital divide this should be one of the first taken so as not to make technology only for those who can afford to buy an office suite that costs more than an operating system. That’s another reason to love projects like the OLPC.

    Start living a Free and Open Source Software life with Open Standards today (ok that sounds corny but I’m too tired to think of something else right now). Well at least its not as weird as the host of Go_Open (those who have seen it will know, and if you havent go download a few episodes, though a bit old it’s interesting and informative). Think I should go find some of those episodes on the CD/DVDs that I burnt it on and be a little nostalgic remembering my University days….