** Updated at 13:11:39 on 2005/10/18 **
Yep you got that right. Slept at about 6 this morning after spending all night programming for my FYP. Slowly learning MSVC++ and MSeVC++. Slowly but surely. The application is almost done but there still a lot to learn. Speaking of programming… I found this great site on programming tools; IDE’s, compilers and other stuff. Link courtesy of Digg of course ;-) So woke up at 8 to go to HR2002 HRM class. 2 hours of sleep and just had my dinner so I’m feeling quite full and awake, waiting to go to sleep.

Got this in a mail from linuxNUS. Its about NUS‘s IVLE. Quite a long read for me so I’m kind of lazy to read it so I’ll just leave it here for people to read.

Just installed Serious Sam 2 demo. Dont think I’m going to play it yet. I hope I dont :P Anyway had CS2106: Operating Systems midterm today. 30 MCQ’s, 70 minutes, 15% of the final grade. It was ok, but I personally don’t like MCQ’s because the examiner can’t really see if you know what you are doing or not. MCQ’s with explanation now thats something to do. I believe I did have a quiz like that for EE2010: Systems and Controls and I believe it is a good thing. It shows that you know your stuff as well as some answers can help you along the way if you really dont know what the question is asking for :P Anyway for anybody planning on doing Operating Systems please do try to take it in the 2nd semester. Roland Yap who teaches it this semester seems to make things less enjoyable compared to raving reviews of Hugh Anderson I get from anybody who he teachers. Actually I did attend his lecture once, 1 year ago before I dropped Operating Systems due to a module planning disaster. It was enjoyable which is sadly unlike Roland Yap’s teaching style. Maybe its just me, but I just don’t like it. He tends to mumble off things and his lab questions take a lot of time to decipher what he wants and also he tends to go too slow.

Anyway I think I’ll stay up for Tiramisu on Channel 5. Hmmm “Whose Line is it Anyway” on at 0200 tomorrow. Who knows maybe I’ll naturally wake up at 2 so I can watch it :P Tomorrow is my usual free day most likely spent on EE4214 Real Time Embedded Systems project which is a pain. The hardware doesnt seem reliable and sometimes it just conks out. Anyway perhaps let me go finish off my FYP PDA application. Have a nice week people and catch up on your sleep. And good luck studying for exams =)

EE4214 is stealing my sleep. But some progress is being made. Weekened reserved for FYP work. Well if you havent heard the new video iPod is out. Cool device. Costs too much for me but more importantly I dont have any use for it. I wonder how much $$$$ Apple’s going to get from it, I bet its a whole crap load :P

On the gaming side.. Quake 4 coming in on the 19th and Serious Sam II is out but doesnt seem to be coming yet. Games I want to play but have no time to :( Guess I’ll have to wait till exams are done.

Micro NES: another cool project on the todo list :P

On to FYP work. Enjoy your weekend people. Oh yeah one more thing I just remembered. Friend of my got engaged last week. Mr Ong Ed Red congrats and have a happy life with Christina ;-) Got to catch up with you some day.

** Updated at 23:39:07 on 2005/10/09 **
Free TV online (courtesy of Digg). Currently watching American Free.tv. Its an old comedy but hey its still free tv. 320×240 running very smoothly. No skips as of yet but then its 0530 in the morning :P
Been up doing FYP programming. Finally got a break through :D That was good. Funny thing was I slept at about 7 till 9 last night and I’m still not feeling that sleepy.
Had my dose of Digital Life TV and Diggnation. Still waiting for
TWiT though. Signs of a TechTV (Wikipedia entry) fan :P
I guess I should get some sleep. Got more project work to come later. Life in the final year. Great…. :P But happy. But tonnes of work. But want to explore more. But no time. But time to sleep I guess.
Night people

** Updated at 17:57:35 on 2005/10/09 **
Take a look at this

Check out the main site here

All I can say is that people really need to be educated properly. “All other browsers must also be removed from your computer.”. What the freaking heck man. Internet Explorer is one of the causes of virus infections and malicious software. Almost any other browser are much safer than Internet Explorer. Get educated people. Knowledge is power.

Now back to knowledge building in MSVC++….

And Im finding myself looking more and more about memory management and stuff. Just find it so interesting. Annoying in the sense that I’m getting lots of segmentation faults but its fun and interesting.
Anyway back to work :P

Doing my FYP work with the TV on in the background. WWE on now and the dialogue is like what the heck man… its pathetic…

Obtained here

Just sad… so sad. But just couldn’t resist posting it.

Waiting for my uCLinux image to be transferred to the uCgardener board for EE4214 Real Time Embedded Systems. The module has a lot of potential but they expect too much I think. They expect you to know Linux before hand. Well we probably would if they had a module on that which I believe would be just as useful as CS1101C: Programming Methodology.
The good thing about this module is that I am learning a bit more about Linux slowly but surely.
FYP is going so. I think MS VC++ MFC GUI is nice but I dont like the fact that a lot of things are hidden from the user. I feel that Java GUI programming is where its at. It intuitive and thats without a GUI GUI builder :P
Been watching go-open since I’ve torrented both volumes. 1.34GB and 13 episodes. It’s all about open source software. So bits of the program are interesting to listen to but the host act gay-ish to me.
Ok looks like the image is done downloaded and program. Back to work. Enjoy the coming week people. And looks like I might go and see ET :D

Get your copy here.
Been silent for quite a while, too busy caught up with school work but just had to break the silence which such good news story.
Now I just wonder how the web statistics will change. Yes I know lots of people use Firefox and many still will. Extensions offered by Firefox are indeed a great thing but for me Opera’s overall integration inclusive mail, IRC and torrenting is good for me so I’m sticking to Opera.
Anyway… back to work…. aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! Mid semester break coming to and end soon :P And still lots to do

And its been up and down since then. Tuesday night I couldnt get my X windows to work with Xorg. And I realised I installed the 2.4 Linux kernel instead of the 2.6 kernel. So I tried updating to the 2.6 kernel. Downloaded several different 2.6 kernels but they all didnt work: all hung on the boot screen, the part where it said “booting to kernel” or something like that. Yesterday (or rather I should say this morning, EARLY in the morning) I’ve made progress and now I have my GUI =D Only problem is that the resolution is 1024 by 768 NOT the native 1280 by 800 that my new laptop has (yep its a wxga screen, didnt really want 1 but the deal for the rest is just too good to miss and I’ll accept its ‘flaw’ of a wxga that I dont really like)

Anyway today is software freedom day and people from The NUS Linux User Group are giving out free Ubuntu CDs at outside LT27 from 1145am onwards! The new world of Linux. Exciting and interesting but I dont really have the time to be exploring too much into it. Its been 2 ‘sleepless’ nights just trying to configure and learn about Linux. No regrets in terms of learning, but regrets in time being taken away from my projects, especially FYP. But I guess thats my nature. See a problem fix. Must fix……

Tell you the stupid thing that happened today. Woke up at 9, 2 hours before my tutorial so I decided to sleep for an hour more then get ready to go to class. So I sleep and by the time I get up I feel like I’ve slept for a long time and go look at my clock. 11 o’clock!!! DOH!!!! Tutorial starting!! I forgot to switch the alarm on… I set the alarm to 10 but I didnt switch it on… doh…

So I rush to class, luckily it’s at Science which is pretty close, get there and switch on my laptop. Or rather say I tried to switch on my laptop. Didnt boot… Didn’t know what was wrong so I just took out the battery and plugged in the power and it worked. Kind of freaked me out, just been 1 day and its already spoilt. Luckily it wasnt so I thought… Switch on and the touchpad doesnt work.. Thought it was because of some application I uninstalled or removed from start up to clean my system to no load unnecessary junk. So I tried system restoring and that didnt help. I even reinstalled windows and that didnt work. I kind of gave up at about 9pm. Then I accidentally but the computer on standby. Then I wanted to switch it off. So I turn on the computer and play around with the touchpad just for fun, and I see the mouse cursor move!!!!! Then it just stopped again and didnt work. Repeated recovering from system standby and the same thing happened again.

It was then it hit me, there was a disable touchpad Fn key. Pressed the combination and viola, it worked. Man…. ‘Wasted’ day worrying that the laptop was screwed :P I hate touchpads :P Give me my nipple. That didnt have any funny thing like this. The funny thing was that even after a system recovery (from the recovery disk) the touchpad was still disabled. So basically there is some low level firmware / hardware keeping the status of the touchpad. The worse thing was there is NO indication of it whatsoever… except for the fact that the touchpad didnt work… :P Anyway I know now. Stupid touchpads…

Anyway things to do today. SLEEP… Been up all night configuring because I finally managed to install a 2.6 kernel, just had to add the ‘noapci’ boot flag in the install. Linux is fun if you have the time to explore. Which I honestly think I do not really have. I just hope I can get this resolution to 1280 x 800 then I can start my slow move to Linux. Trying to install Steam and try Counter-Strike Source on Linux :P New lappie has 64mb X700 =D

Have a nice day people. I’m sleepy :P

** Updated at 4:37:23 on 2005/09/03 **
Rudely awakened this morning by a phone call. I was wondering who could it be so ‘early’ in the morning. It was a guy saying that my laptop is ready for collection :D Then… He called again about 10 minutes later saying that I cant collect because this is my 2nd laptop purchase and that I have to get a letter from the Computer Centre. He said I have to go to the Computer Centre for them to delete the software in my laptop. WTH! Why should they have to do anything with my old laptop, I’ve formatted it several times and don’t even have any NUS software on it. Anyway any software downloaded from Web shopping still needs to be on the network to run, at least thats how it worked with Matlab that I downloaded off there. Pathetic and stupid policy. NUS Computer centre you suck

Forgot to mention. Thanks to NUS’s 5 day week the Computer Centre is closed. NUS you suck too