machinehead

Forwarding X in snow leopard

2011-06-23T19:51:00.000+10:00

Just picked this up from a blog http://blog.carldr.com/ as I needed to forward GUI apps over SSH.

The answer was just to replace localhost with 127.0.0.1.

Start Terminal from utilities
run "startx" in the terminal
right click on the dock (my recent fav trick) run "xterm" from Applications menu.

The next are commands to run in the xterm.

xhost +
ssh -R 6000:127.0.0.1:5000 myserver

Now, you can run your GUI app

I still have habits to do the xhost +, sometimes it's just conditioning and I'm not even sure if the commands are useful.

themes for mac terminal application

2011-06-19T20:30:00.000+10:00

I can't believe that I've been using mac's terminal all this while and i didn't know that if you right click the icon on the tray of the app that is already open or select from the drop down for new window you get to select a different theme of window.

My favorite is "homebrew", reminds me of my old terminals feel with the semi transparency and green font.

smarter home

2011-06-19T20:22:00.000+10:00

well, it's not quite home automation, but i've upgraded my home systems. Here's a bit about what it does now. It's a lot simpler now not to mention easier to setup.

The brain
-----------
The core system now lie within a mac mini snow leopard server attached to the living room PC. I got one direct from apple store. it's very cool and not to mention cheap. ideal for home use. it's a home theater pc as well as running all the other IT services, i.e. DNS, DHCP, VPN and some other misc Apple stuff, like website, wiki, podcast and mail.

It monitors all the other network equipment, network attached storage (NAS), all in one printer, cameras and wireless access points. Essentially, I VPN to the box and through my secure VPN access all the other home systems without the messiness of having to NAT individual ports. It also adds another layer of security for remote access.

DHCP and DNS also helps each connected device find each other better that it would if I relied on the DHCP/DNS services of the internet router. I just needed to configure the DNS to accept recursive queries from "none" to "192.168.1.0/24".

The DHCP scope is of course in that case 192.168.1.x (just make sure it's after the range you want to reserve for static IP addresses like the servers or security cameras. I created static maps to the printers, so that in case they were moved around they would still be able to do DHCP.

Productivity
--------------
The mac mini provides remote login via VNC for windows and screen sharing on the mac clients. So that means on whatever device I happen to be on, i can always access the screen and applications on the mac mini. That also acts as a remote control if I have the TV on and too lazy to reach for the bluetooth keyboard and wireless mouse.

If the kids kick me off the TV, I just move to the next computer and carry on where I left off. I have a Canon PIXMA wireless printer which I think I enabled bonjour. So that means wireless scanning and printing is available without wires to another portion of the house (e.g. the messy study), leaving the sleekness outside.

As you may notice when you check out the snow leopard server mac mini is that it doesn't have a DVD rom. Well I have a mac book pro, so that means I use remote disk sharing, but i think the need for DVDs are slowly decreasing. Which brings about the next point on home entertainment

Media Systems
---------------
From the rule of only having one TV in the house, that's slowly changing with the availability of TVs these days. It seems everyone is giving away TVs and there is absolutely no value in second hand televisions.

I bought a 32in LED tv a while back and it's really done a pretty niffy job to date. Well, since then it's been joined by an Akira LED (although it doesn't look LED) and the Samsung 40in LED smart tv.

There are several ways to watch the same media in different rooms on different devices. obviously the first step would be to convert the DVDs to a playable file and copying it onto a shared storage, e.g. NAS. From there most network media players can access file shares and play xvid.

Remote access
------------------
The iphone 4 works great as a remote to a mac mini especially with no issues with tunneling through a linksys router. couple that with mocha vnc, it's like a remote desktop without having to expose the remote access from the internet.

it also lets you do whatever that you can do as if you're on your home network.

Summary
-------------
Well, I guess there wasn't any home automation like turning off the lights after you leave the house, but that's just good habit to turn off everything you don't need and there shouldn't be any cooling the house before you come home either, that's just not friendly. well, is leaving a mac mini on throughout the day any better? Well, it's better than a full blown PC or server and you also do use it when you're away. so there.

let me know if you think this is any smarter.

install sugar crm on centos

2011-06-04T03:49:00.000+10:00

Just some notes from the install into a fresh default install of centos with sugarcrm 6.2. I'm sure I missed out quite a lot of bits, but i'll add more over time. These are the additional packages to install for php and mysql

yum install mysql
yum install mysql-server

add repo

/etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Testing.repo

[c5-testing]
name=CentOS-5 Testing
baseurl=http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://dev.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-testing

yum upgrade php
yum install php-mysql
yum install php-mbstring

the rest of the install should be as the other documentation

Are cloud services really that great?

2010-05-26T11:11:00.000+10:00

I just went to a Salesforce Cloud 2 event yesterday and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed.

The sharing session was to introduce a collaboration platform, an application developer platform and CRM tool. What's new you might ask? I'm not sure, but I guess it's a just a software company expanding. No doubt, the technology and tools were pretty good, however so are most things out there now.

Marc Benioff just went on a Microsoft bashing session using Apple computers, etc. Through my mind I was wondering if this is out of the frying pan and into the fire.

What I would have liked to hear is how well salesforce will integrate with everything else, how open it is, but that never came out. So it's just another Oracle and Microsoft?

free anti virus software for windows 7

2010-04-27T21:14:00.000+10:00

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 9.0
http://free.avg.com/ww-en/download-avg-anti-virus-free

Avira Antivir
http://www.free-av.de/en/trialpay_download/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_antivirus.html

Microsoft Security Essentials
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx

Avast Home Edition
http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download

I wonder why all the names start with A ?

PC Toolkit

2009-12-23T15:38:00.001+10:00

Tools to download

sysinternals http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

File Shredder - http://www.fileshredder.org/

Eraser - http://eraser.heidi.ie/

CCleaner http://www.ccleaner.com/

Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva

CPU-Z http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

Truecrypt - http://www.truecrypt.org/

Command line

horrible efficiency and touch screen fury

2009-12-18T01:03:00.001+10:00

Try loading this site http://vepexp.microsoft.com/thenewefficiencySG

It's takes so darn long to load for my maxonline ultimate plan.

The menu and navigation sucks too. Anyway once you're in. Here was one thing i saw before i gave up. Cost savings is way too painful. Hardly efficient.

Note on Avanade Catalog Win Touch 7 - did you see the lag on the touch screen? Urgh! I can just imagine a person or myself at the screen in a shopping mall whacking at the screen in anger.

Ok, I'm a person who hates the iphone because it just doesn't respond to my fingers and that just drive me nuts. Still I am happy with my Samsung i780 because it gives me the qwerty option.

More on touch screens, I've tried some drum kit program on a HP touch screen PC and that massively sucks, maybe it's fun for a non musician, but you'll never be able to keep any beat. Probably just a shop gimick. But it totally put me off the HP touch screen.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

CPF quiz

2009-12-18T00:44:00.001+10:00

IM$avvy Financial Literacy Quiz

Looks like a survey disguised as a quiz. The questions are basic and/or CPF rule specific and you can sort of guess what the "correct" answers are whether or not you actually do that.

Hence, I'm a "guru". Yah right.

setting up simple samba on centos 5

2009-10-20T16:50:00.002+10:00

Here is the quick and dirty way to get your samba file share. I did this on my VM for easier file transfers

1) system-config-securitylevel - select SAMBA

2) vi /etc/samba/

These are the lines I uncommented and modified. # and ; are commented out.

workgroup =

netbios name = test-l1

security = user

passdb backend = tdbsam

[public]

comment = Public Stuff

path = /home/samba

public = yes

writable = yes

printable = no

3) smbpasswd -a

= your linux/windows username

4) /etc/init.d/smb reload

5) vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport 137 -j ACCEPT

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport 138 -j ACCEPT

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 139 -j ACCEPT

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 445 -j ACCEPT

installing live messenger 9 on windows server 2008 64bit

2009-10-12T19:10:00.004+10:00

Well I'm back to windows 2008 again on my desktop and one of the annoying things about the server version of vista is that it prevents the installation of things like Live messenger.

To get Live messenger 9 and all the other good live stuff;

1. Downloaded the Live messenger 8.5 MSI file from this link WLMessenger85.zip

2. Install the MSI file.

3. Download the Live 9 client "wlsetup-custom.exe" from Microsoft as normal and install

I'm guessing the MSI doesn't do a check of version of windows before installation, and the live client just does an upgrade if one program already exists.

getting a command prompt using ssh to dns-323 funplug

2009-09-29T17:15:00.002+10:00

Oddly, the answer is this:

5784468

That's what you type into the bizarre ash promptless window to get a prompt

If you don't know the context of this post, after you install funplug on your dns-323, this is after you setup your NAS for SSH access.

start a command window
telnet your DNS-323 ip address
/ffp/start/sshd start

dns-323

2009-09-28T14:25:00.005+10:00

The DNS-323 already comes with a bittorrent client these days, but here is how to extend the use of the NAS for other jobs.

These are the more practical uses for funplug:

remote administration of the nas (openssh, dns-utils)
web server (lighttpd)
distributed filesystem (glusterfs)
media server (mediatomb)

How to get started

Step 1. download funplug and funplug.tgz from http://www.inreto.de/dns323/fun-plug/0.5/
Step 2. copy both files into Volume_1
Step 3. reboot
Step 4. telnet your DNS-323

Ports used in the DNS-323 using iana as reference

printer 515/tcp spooler

netbios-ssn 139/tcp NETBIOS Session Service

www 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP

ftp 21/tcp File Transfer [Control]

https 443/tcp http protocol over TLS/SSL

microsoft-ds 445/tcp Microsoft-DS

telnet 23/tcp Telnet

netbios-ns 137/udp NETBIOS Name Service

netbios-dgm 138/udp NETBIOS Datagram Service

ssdp 1900/udp SSDP

plysrv-https 6771/udp PolyServe https

cutting IT costs

2009-07-17T18:21:00.003+10:00

After watching the day the earth stood still on DVD, I decided to write about cutting cost and of course recycling and how we can stop killing the earth and hopefully the holes in our pockets.

Let's set some ground rules for IT.

1. IT is ruled from business needs. Exception: There are IT business out there and these guys are thriving, because businesses need IT or rather buy IT. There is a difference between needing IT and buying IT which I hope to cover later.

2. IT is viewed as a cost to the business. Exception: Unless they start a shared service center and start charging other departments, but that's still funny money.

3. IT is expensive and difficult to quantify. Exception: This is normally comparative, but even comparatively, the figures are all fake, so don't believe the sales people.

So with those 3 rules in mind, we can tackle how to reduce this unfounded cost for the following business functions:

Emails - reduce cost by moving to a service provider if not get a service provider and bargain to death
Office software - reduce cost by using free versions of office or google docs, apps, etc. Microsoft office isn't really that expensive as well depending on scale, but it's only good when you can pick up the phone and ask Microsoft where the print button is, otherwise, it's the same value as Open Office.
LOB apps - this gets a bit varied and not a one size fit all solution. Depending on the complexity of the application, we are normally set in the limitations of the software. This means that the problem lies within the software. All I can say is prevention is better than cure. Make sure you get the right application so that you do not have to undo the extensive damage and commit to all that extra $$$ you don't even know you're spending.
Helpdesk support - larger organisations might need this and you get someone to run by and help, the ideal answer to save costs is not to do this, transitioning to that state with service management.
Infrastructure - everyone says virtualisation, I say just turn what you don't need off and also organise your machines, centralise where you need to centralise and distribute where you need to distribute. Utilise desktops as nodes where there is less criticality, etc. What works at home, works at work. VMs are also useful for specific purposes of course, at the moment mostly for development work.
Backups - some people say you can't stinge for a proper backup. I agree, but there are multiple ways you can do backups and save those dollar. Software: most backup software is already included in the operating system or even given free, e.g. rsync, DFS, etc. Hardware: buy good value storage and organise your data. Practise Information Lifecycle Management and age your data.
Office IT supplies - do not burn CDs, keep everything in soft copy and use virtual clonedrive if you need to use an ISO. Do not print, read off the screen and bring your notebooks to meetings. Use natural light when you can and leave work early to go home :)

Hopefully with these points to all the different aspects of your IT, we can reuse and recycle while saving those bucks. And if these pointers do reduce those bucks, you would have quantified it as well as a saving on your P/L.

Windows 7 review

2009-07-16T19:12:00.001+10:00

I've installed windows 7 RC again. Not the beta on a VM, but a real machine. I figured, I'll run it through the workstation test.

So far the results of the tests are (for windows based OSs)

1st place: Windows 2008 Server / workstation
2nd place: Windows Vista 64 bit ultimate / home premium - strictly for media center purpose, which is important.

Pros and cons of Vista

Let's revise the pros and cons of Vista before we proceed with Windows 7. And I mean pros and cons, because after using Windows for so long, I can't determine if it's a bug or a feature.

1. Time to boot

Yes, vista takes ages to boot, but after it does, don't shut it down. simple solution. Yes, we don't know where everything is, but it's a searchable

2. Driver problems

No salvation there, I bought a mac to solve that problem, but I still kept the vista 64bit ultimate windows desktop for my xbox media center extender. Now that PC has broken sound, but that's another story and I don't think I'm going to bother fixing it, although I am starting to question the use of the machine, since I hardly use the media center extender these days.

3. Lots of software

Sure, plenty of windows software out there that is 32bit and still installs into the Program Files (x86) directory. Compatibility mode is alright and there are tools to help developers determine if the OS can run the application (ACT).

4. All round good stuff

So, if there is anything you learn about Windows, it doesn't play well with just about anything. you need to go look for some logo somewhere, but since machines are just about self sufficient and you really don't need to plug anything in, e.g. usb midi interface, it's a safe and fun computer to use.

Verdict on Windows 7

And if you think I spent all this time talking about Vista for no reason, that's because, all the niffy stuff I like about Vista is in Windows 7. The boot time is great in windows 7 but it was good with XP for the first few months also, so I'm not holding my breath. So while using Windows 7, I do get all the vista flashbacks, so I can't say there is much of a change other than the boot time and response. Maybe it's like the iphone 3g 'S' thing.

What I did to get it off the ground:

Installed, and it was pretty quick, CD image didn't work though, so had to use another cd. Ok, that worked, decided to install cloneCD so I can load my software ISOs.

It's a funky non certified driver but Vista dealt with that. Windows 7 went all crazy and kept restoring itself to before the driver was installed and it also took out my ethernet card, so i couldn't get back on the network.

After a few reboots, mad clicking and selecting rubbish, I left it powered off for a week or so before I started again at a wireless access point and started patching it. (yes wireless still worked for some reason)

I've installed all the essentials things that most people will install and more, windows live messenger, firefox, office, visual studio, sql server 2008 and yes, it complains and its a series of weird patches to get it going. In fact it's still going. I need to update to all the SP1+ before it can be used.

So while I wait for my visual studio sp1 to be downloaded and my sql server 2008 install (still launched and waiting for requirements), I can conclude that while it's a flashy operating system, it's not for the weak hearted. Debugging is still necessary and there will be times you find yourself very lost.

I would recommend that you take this time to consider ubuntu or the mac os for personal use, or if you have limited or work requirements, this is still a good OS to use and I'll stick with it after all the pain I went through.

how many ways to blog

2009-07-16T18:34:00.001+10:00

I'm trying to blog from flock now. It's a firefox based browser with preloaded add-ons intended to make my life easier. I think it's great however it shouldn't be used on public computers or shared computers, because of all the auto logon stuff that happens in the background.

Still the best features is that I can drag my photos from picasaweb from the webpage into the upload tool and it will be plonked into facebook, photo bucket or flickr. So it does improve productivity provided you already have some sort of personal workflow.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

"Idiots" guide to using manual mode on DSLR

2009-05-27T00:16:00.003+10:00

Step 1: Observe the amount of light around you to set ISO

ISO 200 - 400 : outdoors or (flash photography which is not described in this post)
ISO 800 + : indoors or night shots without flash

Step 2: Know your light meter

The trick of photography is light. it's just to adjust the amount of light that comes through the lens. Looking through the lens is like looking through a HUD, other than the focus ring, you will see a light meter. it indicates if it is too bright or too dark.

the answer is simple, keep it in the middle. To do this, the 2 things you can change is the aperture and the shutter speed. you just toggle with the 2 until you get the meter indicator in the center.

Which one you do first depends on your personal preference. This is how I do mine.

Step 3: Set Initial Aperture

I first set my aperture to the largest which is the lowest number, e.g f2.8

Step 4: Set Initial Shutter speed

Depending on my focal length, I set my shutter speed to the same as the focal length. This is a setting that in longest possible to not have camera shake.

Step 5: Increase Aperture or Shutter speed

Ideally you will notice that the photo is overexposed from the light meter. You can take a test shot to be sure. If it is underexposed, go to Step 6*.

Otherwise, you have a choice to increase your depth of field by increasing your aperture, or if the object wouldn't sit still, increase your shutter speed. Do this until the light meter is centered and the photo is just right.

Step 6* (optional): Increase ISO and shorten focal length

I can increase my ISO and repeat Step 5.

I can also adujst my focal length (if possible) from 50 mm to 18 mm and slower my shutter speed to 1/20. This will work if the object is not moving.

how technical is photography

2009-04-17T14:14:00.002+10:00

The thing I realise is about technical people is that they love their digital SLR cameras. The question I have is how much of it is art and how much is technical.

Sure, there is the technical aspects of photography, balancing the iso, aperture and shutter speed. Picking the right lens for the job. For tech guys, it seems like, what's the fastest shutter speed, what's the lowest aperture,

Maybe art comes in the form of "what is the job?". It's not about taking a photo of an object, landscape or person. I think there always need to be some story which makes the photo successful.

If someone can answer the question on why is Singapore so hard to shoot, my answer is that's it hard to capture a perfect city. It's way too boring and hardly flawed. Not to mention the excessive cloud cover that makes everything even more boring.

Well, I haven't been blogging here, but I've started a new photo blog as well just to remain creative.

http://melvenphoto.blogspot.com/

Kraftwerk gig

2009-01-18T02:13:00.003+10:00

I'm sure these robots wouldn't find it offensive to take pictures of them while the song was going. The band was off stage for a change of clothes and the gig still went on.

Pros:

Classic analogue tones with German precision. Great gig which makes you want to either get a new synthesizer or a Audi A4

Cons:

Some songs\sounds sounded like they came from a kiddy Casio keyboard demo song.

difference between the home and the enterprise

2008-11-29T21:03:00.005+10:00

This post tries to compare how the home is similar to the work place.

Somehow most people are impressed with the amount of IT stuff i have in my home. To be honest, it used to be more impressive with a full height rack and all my mounted equipment.

Since marriage and children, its scaled down to a 9U rack with the simple contents of:

1. cable modem
2. wireless router
3. cat6 patch panel
4. 16 port switch
5. network attached storage

The rack nicely tucked away in the store room out of site. My machine count has scaled down considerably as well.

1. Windows Vista Desktop - Media Center, Games, Vmware, etc
2. Mac book pro laptop - my main "workstation"
3. Boring work laptop with office apps
4. Xbox 360 and Wii

So in terms of space, it doesn't take up a ton of space as its just these 2 visible computers most of the time. However, this excludes my multiple mixers, audio interfaces, synths, guitars, amps, speakers, mics, effects pedals, drum kit and PA system. Which of course is another story.

So going back to the story about how the home is similar to the enterprise. In fact I believe the home is the smarter enterprise.

For infrastructure, described by my equipment list, it shows a concept of a front end and back end. Front end being where all the user interfaces are (laptop and desktop) and the back end (network and storage) which are neatly tucked away.

Notice, I didn't put the "servers\services" in the backend. Basically I think that data or information is the most important. Applications, services and servers have upgrades and change, these are destructable. Data doesn't change, it gets migrated.

There are examples of business functions and how they work in the home:

Finance and Human resources - Online Banking, Open Office Suite to collect and compile data, Yahoo\Google email groups, Google sites, for publishing of policies and Spreadsheets for controlling payroll.
Sales, Marketing, Advertising and Media - Blogs, Google sites, Myspace, Facebook. Email groups.
IT Department, Your kids, which you will realise is more of a cost that everyone likes to spend money on without producing tangible results. Also collaboration software like Skype and Internet Messengers or other voIP providers.

So, the facts are that, there isn't explicit costs in setting up IT infrastructure in the home. There are concepts like outsourcing to different service providers leaving you to only manage content. There also isn't a huge cost involved and there is also high availiability with "cloud" computing. As long as our internet service provider doesn't muck up. Even then, we have mobile broadband as an alternative backup connectivity or our DR site being our parents place.

My conclusion is that there is almost no difference between a home and the enterprise. Sure there may be more users, but there also a lot more ways to go around the problem.

Since we are getting so good at managing IT at home, why is it still a problem in the enterprise?

The answer is in the question. Management which is the highest cost to the business and the most ineffective. Machines, functions and services are just tools and the problem always lies between the keyboard and the chair.

Best OS for PC laptops - Ubuntu

2008-11-29T14:13:00.002+10:00

This post is inspired after fighting Vista during my years as a "Microsoft" consultant. Now that I am no longer bound in M$ space, I've bought a mac book pro and also been downloading different distros of Linux for my other machines. Of course, my desktop will still run Vista Ultimate because of windows media center and my Xbox 360. No i'm fair, I think Windows still has its place.

But the focus is on the best OS for laptops. I've just installed Ubuntu 8.1 and I have to say, I'm really blown away. I've also downloaded Fedora, but based on the install size of Ubuntu, I think I'm going to keep it on Ubuntu. Its so easy to use and everything works, no fighting with drivers, etc. Which is the massive thing about Vista, the reason why you need 30+ days to activate your version of Windows if probably because you expect it to break within that stated time, and yes, it always does. I will need to install my laptop at least 2 - 3 times to get the right install for Windows. Jeez, if Windows was headed to the open source and stability of Unix way, it is certainly doing a great job making it difficult to install like the early distros of linux.

I'm not sure whether to say whether Vista is a easier system to use if you're a total computer idiot. However, if you're a computer idiot, any operating system would not make a difference

So, basically if you want a laptop operating system that you don't want to spend too much time fixing. Try Ubuntu, just kill your windows partition altogether, who needs it?

Just when you think its safe to use Vista

2008-11-22T16:17:00.002+10:00

Well, as I dropped my occupation as a consultant for microsoft stuff, I might as well complain a bit about my own pangs for using Vista.

I've been using Vista for quite a while now on various desktops and laptops, and its failed me several times and somehow always saved itself after some re-install or patch or issue. To be honest, I really started to like to use Vista, its stable, simple and effective minus the initial setbacks.

Initially it couldn't burn ISOs. Actually it couldn't burn anything at all, everytime you put in a CD it asks if you want to format it. Even non blank CDRs. You need to google and dig out some special software, The best I've seen is ISOrecorder. That of course worked after a re-install with a later build.

After the CD burning drama, it couldn't recognise all my devices, so I had a pile of peripherals lying in a corner of a room. Even after device drivers were created for some devices, I've already moved on to the 64 bit version of Vista and the whole driver saga continues. I still can't use my Sony Net MD with 64bit Vista. I'm probably going to try to VM the software and drivers. I actually solved the driver issues by buying a mac, at least all my peripherals are usable now.

Still Vista is great for corporations because it is cheap, easy to manage and control. Its stable, lets the laptop sleep properly and lets you surf the net and check emails. The enterprise version or business versions are good enough.

I have even moved to Windows 2008 64 bit for workstation and was very pleased with the results. Since then, I've downgraded back to Vista Ultimate for media center as the Hauppage HVR-1100 WinTV does not work with Windows 2008. But there was one thing I've done different from just fighting vista. Next to my Vista desktop is my Mac Book Pro!

Google sites

2008-11-06T01:01:00.001+10:00

Here's a great alternative to sharepoint if collaboration needs to be deployed quickly without the microsoft mess.

sites.google.com

The only downside is the 100MB quota. Have no time for blogger now. Goggle sites is rocking.

Photos from Samsung i780

2008-06-26T17:45:00.003+10:00

For someone who uses a digital SLR most of the time, the camera is really disappointing, but its just as bad as all camera phones, even the crappy 5 mega pixel ones.

Indoor close up shot using normal mode

Night shot of the Yarra river using night mode

samsung i780 gps software

2008-06-26T16:23:00.002+10:00

Since I've got my Samsung i780, I've been mucking around the with GPS function, since its the only new feature that my previous now dead phone did not have.

I got the phone for $388 from Starhub, with another 2 year contract. The phone came with its own third party GPS software, Navfone.

Navfone

Its not too bad, just is really horrible about warning you about ERP in Singapore whether or not it is active.

I also called Navfone support twice to try to get the phone setup as the instruction manual wasn't too informational. Eventually I got it working.

The irritating factor of the software is that everytime you want to use it, you have to specify the port the GPS is on.

Tom Tom with port splitter

Unfortunately Tom Tom would not work without the port switcher software activated. Thats the real pain factor. You need to turn on 2 applications to use the GPS even though Tom Tom looks a lot more user friendly than Navfone, the concept of initiating the use seems rather consistent or even more problematic in port splitter

From a user perspective I actually feel that port splitter actually turns on the GPS so the battery runs out faster even though you are not using Tom Tom as it activates the GPS port.

Google maps

My favourite software at the moment, the only con is that it requires broadband, i.e. the HSDPA connection always on. The fine tuning with the GPS is also useful and it does not need any funky port splitter to activate the GPS either.

It doesn't give you driving instructions, but you don't need to buy maps. If you are travelling, you probably wouldn't be driving and walking around the city with google maps is great for getting you back to your hotel.

I suppose if you have some good data plan and have a phone charger handy, using the GPS is very useful and fun to use to.

installing skype on 64 bit fedora core 6

2007-10-25T22:38:00.000+10:00

The skype download from http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/linux/ assumes that Fedora is 32bit.

For a 64 bit install and if you do not want to download the standalone version and move files to the various directories (which I think is too complex and difficult to maintain), you can download the required 32 bit rpm from the following site. http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/6/i386/

nas-1.9-1.fc6.i386.rpm
libsigc++20-2.0.17-2.i386.rpm
qt4-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm
qt4-x11-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm

Simply in similar order (nas is a pre-requisite for qt4-x11)

rpm -ivh nas-1.9-1.fc6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh libsigc++20-2.0.17-2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh qt4-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh qt4-x11-4.3.2-1.fc6.i386.rpm

After you have done this, rpm -ivh the Skype RPM downloaded from the skype site. I used -nodeps initially, but with the required RPMs, you should not have to do this.

MSI P35 Platinum and Adaptec 19160 SCSI cards

2007-10-10T22:08:00.000+10:00

I've just upgraded my PC. Upgrades tend to be a bit tricky as mostly its trying to merge old with new.

One of my prized old parts is my old Adaptec PCI SCSI adapter which runs my SCSI drive. Instead of using the SCSI drive as a dedicated music disk like previously, I thought about using as my boot disk for Windows XP. I also had 2 x 320 GB SATA drives which I wanted to use as raid 0 data disk.

The problem with this drive setup was when XP was installed and booted, it never detected the 2 x SATA drives in raid mode. I also noticed in BIOS mode, the raid adapter configuration screen (Ctrl-"I") never appeared.

After moments of rebooting, I caught a glimpse of a line that said, "not enough space...". Hitting the Ctrl-A key during booting of the SCSI card, I disabled the SCSI bios and selected to not boot Bios and still scan SCSI bus to detect hard drives.

And it worked, but only boots from the Intel SATA raid drives.

Now I am forced to use Vista because Vista already has raid drivers in-built and XP needs a floppy on install and I was too lazy to carnage another box for that reason. No floppy drive works for me.

Here are the components of the new machine:

MSI P35 Platinum with Intel Core 2 E6550
Gigabyte 2600XT 256 DDR4
2 x 1 GB 800 mhz DDR2
1 x Adaptec SCSI 19160 U160 card
1 x 73GB SCSI HDD
2 x 320GB Western Digital SATA drives
Antec Sonata II case

Vista Performance 5.2 with the Intel Core 2 E6550 being the slowest at 5.2. Howszat!

Cure Singapore 01/08/07

2007-08-01T23:36:00.000+10:00

I'm wondering if anyone noticed Bob changing the words in Never Enough to "Singapore baby" instead of "Japanese baby".

I think the last time I watched the cure was in 1994 in Melbourne. This gig was I think longer if my foggy memory works and they played tons, making it real value for money at $60 bucks an hour for the $180 buck free standing tickets.

And jeez, I've never seen so many camera phones in action. Sometimes they were really irritating. Lest to say I took a picture too :P. But at least I didn't stick it someone's face to frame and zoom for 5 minutes. Here's how a quick 2 second lift and snap looks like.

Jet concert - Fort Canning

2007-07-25T02:39:00.000+10:00

This is the second time I'm watching Jet, first somewhere in the Valley in Brisbane. Still as entertaining and not so full on. Quite a chilled out gig. If you watch them, drink lots of beer.

Taken ‎"Tuesday, ‎19 ‎June, ‎2007, ‏‎1:25:30 PM"? Hmm, that didn't make any sense, maybe the phone's timezone is off again. Silly windows mobile.

Well, I had the phone serviced and flashed the ROM with Windows Mobile 6 sometime after this shot was taken.

2nd youtube post

2007-07-17T01:22:00.000+10:00

Recorded in Brisbane using my Korg N5 and computer sequencer. This features pictures taken of the National History Museum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DKOXwANgUE

Naturally when I say recorded, I mean its written then as well. I just record whatever improvisation comes to mind at that time.

google desktop and pidgin to the rescue

2007-07-15T16:16:00.000+10:00

My windows machine is now Vista.

Why? After the failed installation of Office 2007, installed as an upgrade from Office 2003, I was unable to create any more charts in Excel. Apparently there is no fix for this and no matter how many un-installations and installations of Office you do after that, or muck with the registry files, its not going to come back to life.

The solution, backup your data, reformat and install Vista. The vista performance index of my Dell Latitude D620 N series is 3. Although it is quite capable of running all the Aero stuff. that gave me a bit of a headache, so I set it to max performance and put all the classic features.

So far, the major downsides to Vista apart was with the live search (which of course doesn't find anything) and also live messenger. Coincidentally, both tools have the word Live in it, so maybe its the same bunch of people with another different installation of windows.

Anyways, not going to go through the whole hassle of another re-install, I decided to use 2 things that I know works. Google desktop to replace Live search and Pidgen (formally Gaim) for Messenger. At least Google desktop gives some responses rather than just hang on indexing and Pidgen does more than just MSN.

Although I expected massive compatibility issues, so far its been good, I'm using the 32 bit version. Oh, and yay, I can actually create an Excel chart now.

First youtube post - shimmering

2007-07-11T22:30:00.000+10:00

This is actually the name of a default patch on my pod xt live effects pedal. I was testing it out and recorded this while I was at it.

The photos were taken from a nature walk further down from the gold coast at Burleigh heads. For a nature walk, there was sure a lot of rescue craft about, lifeguards, boat and even a helicopter. Must be rather safe if the sharks don't get you first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj_GjDmbn0g

firefox 2 and java on fedora core 6

2007-06-24T09:44:00.000+10:00

To install Firefox 2 and JRE 6 on FC6, I downloaded both the self extracting files for both Firefox and JRE. The correct version of JRE to use is the i586 version as it contains the plugins directory needed for Firefox.

Installing Firefox2

Download the self extracting file and extract the files into some program location, I used /usr/local/firefox.

# mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/binfirefox_1.5

Try launching via terminal. To fix the libstdc++ error refer to this link, basically the steps are

# yum provides libstdc++.so.5
# yum -y install compat-libstdc++-33

After that is done, click on the browser shortcut and it will prompt you to look for the new firefox executable, select the new firefox file, i.e. /usr/local/firefox/firefox.

To install the JRE;

Go to the JAVA directory
# cd /usr/java/

Copy the file you downloaded from Sun to the JAVA root dir for extraction.
# cp /home/username/Desktop/jre-6u1-linux-i586.bin ./
# sh jre-6u1-linux-i586.bin

Create the softlink for Firefox
# cd /usr/local/firefox/plugins
# ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_01/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so libjavaplugin_oji.so

using openvpn via an ssh tunnel via http proxy

2007-05-25T16:21:00.000+10:00

This is how to use openvpn via an ssh tunnel via http proxy on windows to create a network route between 2 LANs or for you to access your office computer directly from home.

I'm using Windows at the office and Linux at home. You will need Openvpn 2 and putty for this. This is theoratical and should not work, however for some reason you decide to try this and have it work, Let me know. However if you publish your openvpn service on port 22, this should have no issues. Just skip the following ssh step.

To start ssh tunnel with putty. make sure that the http proxy is configured with a keepalive and in the SSH section create a new rule that uses L1194 localhost:1194

The server command you can run on your linux box at home:

openvpn --port 1194 --proto tcp-server --dev tun --comp-lzo --ifconfig 10.1.0.2 10.1.0.1

The client command you run on the workstation in the office is:

openvpn --remote localhost 1194 --http-proxy your.proxy.name 8080 proxy.txt --http-proxy-timeout 5 --dev tun --proto tcp-client --ifconfig 10.1.0.1 10.1.0.2 --comp-lzo

This creates an additional IP address. Test with a ping. Although TCP is not recommended, its still the easiest to setup.

OS upgrade

2007-05-06T20:01:00.000+10:00

Although its been a month or so since I received my AMD 64 3200+ and DFI LANparty UT nF3 Ultra-D from a friend, I'm still only setting it up and breaking it in.

One of the first few questions I tried to figure out was what operating system are I going to load in it or rather what was the best OS around to use on it. So, I decided to try a few after buying a few more parts for it.

I bought a ASUS AGP Nvidia 7600 GS Silent (no fan) and a couple of 320GB SATA drives with the Gigabyte 550W power suppy and centurion 5 case with 1GB PC DDR 400 memory.

The first OS I decided to try was Vista, after all it was the latest and greatest right? Well, it installed no problems, and I even liked the new Windows movie maker that can with it. Yes, some "WOW". My PC scored a 4 on the Vista performance scale. Not too bad, with the CPU having the lowest score of 4. And more WOW, the sound didn't work. Yes, there were no drivers for it and when I went to the Vista site to look for audio support, it turns out that Vista had very bad support for soundcards, in fact it virtually didn't support much at all, like anything slightly fancy is totally out and you can basically forget about surround sound.

Ok, so I decided to go back to old faithful, this time I was brave and decided to try the nvidia on board RAID 1. I dug out a old floppy drive from my retired PII and loaded the drivers. Yay! Sound at last. Hmm, the odd thing was the computer seemed rather unstable. crashing, etc, but of course I ignored it and played Dawn of War, Dark Crusade with high detail and 1024 x 768 graphics. It seems that with slower CPUs and higher end graphics card, the detailing can be set high with lower resolution, my guess is that the CPU has to process more objects and the graphics card only puts in the detail. Alas, a whole bunch of dodgy stuff happened again, and the most irritating thing about XP is that it refuses to tell you the real problem. It blue screened on boot continuously and I had to get down and dirty to fix it.

I looked in the bios and reset everything to factory default and started to configure it again. I tried different installation media and alas, the RAID floppy died. Well, I could install without the raid, but I decided to do something different.

The final selection of OS, Centos 5 vs Fedora core 6. I managed to download both the distributions from ftp.oss.eznetsols.org using cygwin ncftp. I installed Centos first succesfully after a couple more bouts with the BIOS and hard drives. I disabled the RAIDto avoid confusion and unplugged my third drive on the SATA 3. This I gathered from the error messages on /dev/sdc. See why can't windows let you know stuff like that.

Centos 5 is flash, and I mean cool. Its changed some core concepts from Centos 4, but basically its all quite capable for a newbie to get a hold of and start using immediately. I'll have to consider it definately one of the greater advances in Desktop/Server operating systems. I used the Logical Volume Manager and was suprised how easy it was to add space and extend an existing logical volume over additional drives. The security might be a bit hard to get a handle with Selinux. If you were an end-user, it would be a no brainer. It really does protect. Once you want to start creating your own servers, e.g. SAMBA, you might encounter some issues with it. I just set it up as Permissive to get some idea on what it was trying to do initially.

Alas, for bleeding edge, I will have to go with Fedora core 6. I'm downloading the x64 DVD iso as I write this blog and I have a feeling that this will most likely stay on this machine if nothing really bad happens again. If "touch wood" something does, I guess you can't go wrong with Centos 5. It really does ROCK!

skating for charity

2007-04-20T01:55:00.000+10:00

http://www.charitybnb.com/

I've signed up for this year's Charity Bike and Blade. So far the most interesting comment I've heard so far is how can anyone skate and bike at the same time? Shouldn't it ought to be called the "Bike or Blade"?

Unfortunately, I can say I have actually ridden a bicycle with my skates on in my earlier days so that might actually justify the name although I'm doubt the bikers are planning on doing the same.

Still, 400Km on skates. We do not do the full skate distance unfortunately, its relay skating :(. Seriously what else can a retired and frustrated skateboarder and aggressive skater do but just skate casually for longer distances? Watch the X Games?

5 months left for training. Enough time to reprogram my brain for speed/distance skating? Stay tuned and find out.

the network is the game

2007-04-19T00:44:00.000+10:00

I've just discovered Sun's gaming strategy which is probably a bit slow, but I think it was an easy thing to miss which is my excuse. The games (non Sun Java) that get noticed have large product launches and snazzy graphics, fast computer requirements and heaps of advertisements and some freebies (which the high price of the game probably pays for).

However, according to Sun, "the network is the game". Sounds familiar? Because they also say "the network is the computer". I bet if they had to do something else like refrigeration, they would most likely say "the network is the fridge".

To Sun, games are java based and have generally bad graphics. Its almost back to the stone age to start at the beginning, but it does make sense as these games can be addictive and I do know a couple of people who play these Java games. Not everyone can rely on a keen sense of instincts and reaction times which are what all these fast paced action games are. And these games are sometimes better thought out for logic.

Still, most people still tend to fall prey to marketing and fancy boxes. (e.g. I just bought the Kane edition metal box for C & C Tiberian wars). Fancy graphics is what I like, Hollywood special effects and watching massive battles which I can control. Still Supreme Commander is another computer upgrade and I might actually give that a miss. :(

So a reliance on fast computers isn't the way to go either as its basically a selfish act for people who can afford expensive consoles and workstations. *drat*

I think Sun's key strength is portability and usability on all platforms. Yes the company that tries too hard to play well with others. Where as their competitors just tell you to suffer and pay the price of their bad design by trying to get faster computers that are never fast enough. (bad code)

In this demanding world, although going back to basics is necessary, it seems that the money generators is the gaming population that needs the fancy graphics and gore. For the record, I think THQ's Dawn of War does a pretty good job at keeping the graphics descent and playability on mid range machines possible.

Check out these websites for the java stuff.

http://java.com/en/levelup/index.jsp
http://java.com/en/games/

Songs I've listened to in 2006

2007-04-05T00:52:00.000+10:00

Some songs I've listened to and liked this last year, can't remember all, but here is a few.

The Hives - Hate to say I told you so
Muse - new born
Rush - Summertime blues (Feedback cover)
unkle - Nursery rhyme breather
Franz Ferdinand - Take me out
Black Rebel Motocycle Club - Love burns
Depeche mode - Pain that I'm used to

Favorite album: DM - Playing the angel

Other bands to listen to:
Mars Volta, Porcupine Tree

why 5900 is so popular

2007-03-28T00:10:00.000+10:00

5900 according to the world's port standards belong to VNC.

Its just nasty that MS tries to take over that port from such a old, useful and beloved application.

In fact I'm not sure what memo went out, but both remote desktop services as well as virtual remote control actually both use the port as well. So thats even another conflict within the same platform. This means that remote access to your workstation and your virtual server services are not able to run in harmony until you change the detault ports.

So I am guessing that 5900 is actually the global remote access port and that all "remote" applications should use it with the only limitation is that you can't use 2 of any application at the same time without changing ports to non standard ports.

Yuck Yuck Yuck.

On the point of non standard ports, I asked a network administrator why do people change their ports to use non standard ports. The answer as I heard was for security reasons.

And then I asked. whats the point when any hacker can still run a port scan and find out what services you are running and it would be more of an administrative hindrance when managing firewalls.

Connecting to the windows 2003 console from XP

2007-03-07T20:50:00.000+10:00

Microsoft documented (my comments in brackets):

To connect to the console, administrators can choose one of the following methods:

Use the Remote Desktop Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in

(Download from god knows where and super near impossible to find from the microsoft site)

Run the Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.exe) program with the /console switch.

(Easiest to use but its through cmd or via "Run"on the start menu. E.g. mstsc /v: /console)

Create Remote Desktop Web Connection pages that set the ConnectToServerConsole property.

(hmm? Clearly very well documented as that was about all that was mentioned, just use the previous example. Its almost like another hidden feature in XP like netmeeting.)

New year gadget list

2007-03-05T20:32:00.000+10:00

With the chinese new year and all, here are my recent additions to my road warrior gadget list.

O2 Zinc Mobile

Feedback & Review :
This is similar to the Dopod 838 pro. Its got all the base functions and even a more logical and compatible headphone jack. Size and Dimensions are identical on looks. I compared them side by side and the Dopod might actually be a tad heavier.

I actually got this as a Starhub promotion to get a free can of abalone. As its a new phone, most people would base whether to get it on the reviews. So far from what I read about the reviews, most reviewers are only phone users and not PDA/computer users. One such review mentioned that the phone can be only be used with a stylus. "Duh", there is a slide out keyboard and keyboard shortcuts makes this PDA real quick and easy to navigate and use without a stylus unless for web browsing.

The sluggishness of the OS is comparable to most new Nokias and windows smartphones. The price to pay for functionality. I had one person make the file explorer speed comparision and told me it was faster than the Dopod too. I can substantiate that to be true without first hand experience.

Conclusion:
Definately a great purchase and I'm not disappointed at all with the phone or the abalone.

Microsoft Zune (with compliments from Microsoft)

Feedback & Review :
Who can argue with a freebie from Microsoft and yet another surprising one at that. Ok, I haven't really used it other than install the software and watch the bundled video and music.

Its much lighter than my 80GB iPod video and only has 30 GB. However, it does come with radio that only has settings for North America, Japan or some other country and not Singapore or anywhere in Asia for that matter. Still the radio works and even shows the station name on the display after it auto tunes.

I have no idea how the wireless works, but it is meant to stream to an Xbox 360. Hmm, is it a sign to get one of those?

Conclusion:
Its a descent MP3 player no doubt and hasn't crashed yet. If you can live with itunes to sync your iPod and Apple's strange file directory storage, this device shouldn't bother you that much. I might write more once I actually start using it more.

Dell Latitude D620 (Core 2 1.66 ghz, 100 GB 7200 rpm HDD and 2 GB 667 mhz ram, nVidia NVS 110M)

Feedback & Review :
As far as picking a mobile workhorse, you can't really go too far wrong with a Dell latitude, not like I had much of a choice from work distributed machines. A good thing about these latitudes are the catch that holds the screen to the rest of the machine.

I'm sure I'll think of something else eventually. The D620 actually makes more sense than the D820 just based on weight and battery life. the D820 was a pain to carry around especially if you wanted good battery life, the 9 cell battery was a killer.

With all enterprise distributions of windows, they somehow always forget to cater for dual core laptops which made me have to replace the ntoskrnl.exe and hal.dll files with the dual core versions during safe mode. Make sure you reboot twice in safe mode for effect. Also make sure you go to the bios and set your hard disk for performance / "noisy" mode.

Conclusion:
I wouldn't buy it, and I didn't :)

Personally, a laptop of my choice is probably still a mac book pro or an alienware machine. I do realise those are heavy, but if its a personal machine, how often will you honestly need to lug it around?

Back in town again

2007-03-05T16:51:00.001+10:00

IMG_1628, originally uploaded by melvenchok.

Using the default lens on my Canon 350D from Sofitel viewing the Chinese New Year celebration fireworks.

Source of freeware

2007-02-03T20:48:00.000+10:00

If you are on a budget and want a new piece of software to tinkle with. Freeware is your thing. Its like shopping at the $2 shop, only its more a $0 shop.

Most freeware sites tend to be plagued with ads and all kinds of stuff. Here is a link to a magazine sites that highlight useful freeware archive.

http://www.netguide.com.au/

Of course there is always download.com which I used to use and also not forgetting your local ISP mirror. Its good to know whats there and quick to download.

Desktops have higher ROI than laptops

2007-01-21T11:40:00.000+10:00

When choosing between a desktop and a laptop, based on my personal past experiences my desktops seem to last a lot longer than my laptops. The max life span of a laptop I ever got out was 2-3 years. Most of them died or died, fixed and died again. Texas instruments (my first ever P133), Acer, Compaq, Apple, IBM, Dell. No laptop fared too far different from each other although some better than others.

In terms of performance, after each year, most softwares (especially games) have more demanding system requirements. Not to mention the new release of windows which appears more sluggish than the last.

In contrast, the lifespan of desktops seem to last a whole lot longer, the max so far is 10 years and still counting for my Intel PII 333mhz which I plan on retiring this year. My workstations are a AMD XP 2000+ 1.7 ghz (3 years old) and an Intel PIII 667 (6 years old) and both are still going strong.

So far, I've mostly built my own machines rather than relying on production line models. Its so much easier to replace and upgrade according to your own requirements as all the parts are pretty much standard for the computer enthusiast. In the case of laptops, even if the parts are replaceable, its definately more difficult for the average person to do especially when most notebook manufacturers have all sorts of weird designs.

The only real reason why I still use laptops is for work. Basically if you put them into the same class as your mobile phone or PDA, you wouldn't be disappointed.

(laptops shouldn't be called laptops anymore when its not possible to put them on your lap these days without burning a hole in your leg. I think the official term now is notebook computer)

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

2007-01-15T22:36:00.000+10:00

Decsions may come naturally to gamers. Dark or light side depending on what force powers you want. In reality, decisions are based on shades of gray and most people's unwillingness to change. The self inflicted predicament of humanity.

If anything marketing has taught us. Ideals, dreams and aspirations can be purchased with cold hard cash. And if you are determined enough, you can also buy the more expensive model.

Personally, how would you choose between a black hole society and vast area of nothingness. I would imagine both attibute to the same bland side of the coin without anything to offer on the other side.

As you can imagine, I'm listening to Morrissey now. Alas, today is a happy happy day.

Who buys AGP these days?

2007-01-04T22:00:00.000+10:00

Oddly enough, I've thought about who would want to get high end AGP cards when motherboards these days are all PCI-E 16x. Well today I answered my own question.

I picked up the Gecube AGP 8x Radeon X1300 (from Radeon 8500) for my Socket A AMD 2000+ (1.7 ghz) as well as the Antec Sonata II "Quiet" case to solve some heat and Vista compatibility issues to future proof this machine. Vista didn't like the Radeon 8500 for all its fancy OS X and X11 copied GUI.

The case was quite impressive and came with a heffy great 450W power supply (upgrade from a 230W power supply) to power the AGP graphics card, but didn't seem to take the temperature of mainboard according the sis sandra who reported that temperature should be below 50 degrees. I'm guessing farenheit. I feel better that my drives are not next to the power supply now, but it still looks like a bigger CPU cooler is in order if I want to run this as a media PC in the future.

How much is too much?

understanding object orientation concepts

2007-01-02T20:00:00.000+10:00

When I was in uni, I had issues with object orientated languages. Mostly because of my prior procedural training in COBOL and C. Hence Java was a pain. The hardest part of OO was having to deliberately erase what you already know about procedural languages.

Thankfully, my occupation only required system administration skills. After downloading and installing the Eclipse IDE, I decided to give OO another shot. Thanks to time, I've totally forgotten how to code hence its almost like starting fresh.

Believe it or not, it all makes sense to me now, also being able to see the benefit not only from a programming persepective, but also from a business and process point of view. If anyone had issues with configuration management for application maintenance, extracting classes and objects can potentially define your configuration items (CI).

Of course the granularity can be determined on how far up or down the hierachy you want to go. So in esscence, the terminology and approaches aren't too far different.

I suppose another explaination of object orientation from a musican's point of view can be done with the association of Apple's garage band application. Sounds categories are like the classes and the actual sound objects are associated with each class, similar to directory structures, except that each object can inherit attributes from different classes.

e.g. a electronic beat is both has drum class attributes and electronic class attributes.

How easy is that?

Singapore internet disaster day 4

2006-12-29T10:41:00.000+10:00

Well it looks like most web traffic is redirected now and I can finally access singaporean sites whereas I was unable to do so even yesterday. It looks like traffic was redirected through US and Europe instead of running through Taiwan to get to Australia.

Jeez that took a while. Oh, wait. singtel website is still broke. I guess I have to try again tomorrow.

Internet disaster in Singapore

2006-12-28T11:24:00.000+10:00

Internet access in Singapore took a blow yesterday and I'm annoyed because I am having troubles connecting to Singaporean sites.

Here are the associated news, however I can't view the channel news asia news as that is hosted in Singapore

Internet access in Singapore severely affected by Taiwan earthquake - Channel News Asia
Earthquake disrupts Internet access in Asia - ITworld.com

I would think this is really bad for business considering how important the internet pipe are to businesses and gamers :).

It is probably about time that some people started looking at better redundency for internet connectivity.

Suggestions for internet disaster recovery and redundancy if anyone is paying attention.

Mirrored offshore hosting for news, financial and other critical sites.
Satellite based internet for inbound connections. (used a lot in outback australia)

free games for the holidays

2006-12-22T19:00:00.000+10:00

Here's a pretty good link that will keep those LAN parties going.

Cnet's Gratis gaming

Merry Xmas

N2O

2006-12-16T16:48:00.000+10:00

If a picture paints a thousand words, this might probably describe what I have been up to.

today's playlist

2006-11-15T21:55:00.000+10:00

london suede - can't get enough
underworld - dirty epic
new order - True Faith
orbital - Halcyon
BRMC - love burns
death in vegas - dirt

which muppet are you?

2006-11-13T20:23:00.000+10:00

The continuation of the star wars personality test, here's the link to the muppet personality test.

Well this is my results and I can say I'm somewhat not suprised.

You Are Gonzo the Great

"Is something burning in here? Oh, it's just me."

You're a total nutball who will do anything for attention.

The first to take a dare, you'll pull almost any stunt.

You're one weird looking creature, but your chickens don't mind!

The Muppet Personality Test

ftp scripts without passwords

2006-11-06T21:07:00.000+10:00

As old as ftp is, i'm sure its still a very common method of file transfer in most interfaces.

Here's how to write a simple ftp script on unix or windows without having to worry about those passwords.

Using EOF

Probably the most common is to use the EOF (end of file) method. Its important to know that there cannot be any spaces in front of the last 'EOF' line.

ftp -nv hostname << EOF
user USERNAME PASSWORD
cd directory
prompt
passive
asc
mput filename.*
bye
EOF

Using .netrc

The other method of saving passwords for multiple scripts is to use a .netrc file which can be created in the user's home directory

$ cd $HOME
$ vi .netrc

add the following line into the file

machine login password

$ chmod 500 .netrc

You should be able to ftp without prompts. to test, just type

$ ftp

you should be logged in. the downside is that this forces you to log in as that specific user. However lets face it, if you're still using ftp to move stuff around, this shouldn't bother you one bit.

Personally, I would recommend that sftp or scp be used instead. pub key management is so much more convienient.

north lakes, actually playing

2006-11-04T15:53:00.000+10:00

Here is a screen capture of the video footage. DVD release probably in a couple of years or so.

One of the few instances where drummer dave is actually visible.

why you so kayu?

2006-10-20T17:47:00.000+10:00

Sometimes we use words so often, we forget what it actually means. I recently used the word Kayu, but when asked to translate it, I wasn't quite able to give a literal translation.

And appalingly, bablefish did not contain the malay-english translation. Anyway after a bit of searching, I realised that Ka yu mean wood in berhasa indonesia.

However in Singaporean context, it basically means silly. I suppose when someone said you have a wooden head, it generally means that you are pretty dumb. I suppose the next evolution of the word has changed its meaning yet again when in football, an own goal is scored. we say , "goalie ka yu" also suggests that was some bribing involved in that goal as well apart from being rather silly.

So there you have it. the effectiveness of common language and how the years have made a simple line so descriptive.

A singlish guide can be found here. Its not as detailed, but does cover some of the more basic words.

Power failure - day 3

2006-10-09T19:12:00.000+10:00

I've just purchased a new antec smartpower 350w power supply for my pentium 3 for $70. A bit of an overkill you might say.

Well my machine is up and running again, so i guess it paid off. It's meant to be a quiet power supply that uses only one fan during low utilisation and 2 only if it really needs it. However since boot, I noticed that the 2nd fan just kept on spinning. That makes me wonder exactly how much power i'm using to power this machine.

Maybe it has something to do with the asterisk tdm pci card, 2 network cards, 2 hard disks, 1 cd writer, floppy, usb wifi dongle and soundblaster live platium with live drive. hmm.

i'll be thankful once this monster gets migrated to the garage where it should be. Meanwhile, I will have to bear with its hrmmm, hrmmmm sounds. The loudest part being the internal hard-disk enclosure.

yikes, a power failure ?

2006-10-08T17:10:00.000+10:00

Not quite sure why my power supply died over the weekend, woke up on the saturday and realised there was no internet connectivity, only to walk to my linux router and discover that the green power light was blinking and there was no loud drone like it normally used to give.

I had to repatch my workstation directly to the adsl modem in the garage. Gee I love my centralised patch area. No hassles of carrying computers around.

Well, i guess thats the end of the power supply. stay tuned to find out what happens next.

Ideal resolutions

2006-10-06T20:48:00.000+10:00

Since I picked up the dell latitude d820 laptop with nvidia quadro nvs 120m. I made sure that the laptop display was as maxed out as it could be.

After using various different resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 on a 15.4 inch LCD display. I decided that the only useable resolution that doesn't make you totally blind is the 1680 x 1050.

Although I did manage to use 1920 x 1200 for the longest time until my wife complained she was going blind surfing, i suddenly realised that going slightly lower still allowed great productivity space without having to sit 6 - 10 inches sometimes.

As i mosly make assumptions on whats on the screen, it didn't affect me that much, however maybe its time to revisit some emails :P.

As for a desktop, just max out your monitor. With 1680 x 1050 now, I guess i wouldn't be able to vnc my desktop without scroll bars ;)

copying an oracle database in 4 steps

2006-10-02T22:39:00.000+10:00

I'd see if i can do this in 4 steps

Step 1) on the target database, SQL> alter database backup control to trace;

Step 2) copy the trace file and modify to specify the new database name and the first line of the sql file and all lines after the create controlfile statement
CREATE CONTROLFILE REUSE SET DATABASE "NEWNAME" RESETLOGS

Step 3) Copy cold back datafiles minus temp file and control file.

Step 4) Make sure that the last 2 lines of the trace file is run

SQL> ALTER DATABASE OPEN RESETLOGS;

and also make sure that the temp tablespace is created which also happens to be the last line in the trace file

Here is a proper how-to link if my steps didn't make sense: http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/paa/obe-mdb/html/DB_CPY.htm

Gig at North Lakes

2006-10-01T23:50:00.000+10:00

the venue: the white tent next to the lake was the stage.

while waiting

We played though the sunset next to the lake which was quite nice. The sunset took approximately 30 mins and so did the gig.

SOA the new legacy

2006-10-01T10:26:00.000+10:00

SOA is probably the most hyped topic at this point in time. Its probably right up there with utility computing and virtualisation. I suppose this means identity management has taken a bit of a step down until the next terrorist attack.

The move to service orientated archtecture seems a popular adoption of most critical system business still running on their stable legacy systems. The reason for this mostly being that its in a modular in stucture and easier to manage. Financial institutions with their most arcane technologies would find this highly desirable as it is then possible to stage out the development stages and control cost and scope with the proper management.

Its funny how the currect hype topics seem to link so closely with one another and seem to compliment each other rather than contradict each other as much. My belief is that the reason why its so out there is to hide the limitations of the inherant problems with SOA. Scalability and performance. N recently mentioned performance issues of java and how incredibily memory hungry it was. My prompt reply was, its still dependant on the designer and its hardware scalable.

Its true that java isn't the most efficient language on the block, however the limitations can be minimised by throwing more hardware at it with the gamble that the development costs will still be cheaper than sleek C code.

So there's it. Another corporate conspiry similar to selling sugar separately from lemonade.

i have lost the ability to read

2006-09-29T18:37:00.000+10:00

I think one of the by products of the internet generation is the lost of ability to read.

Lets face it. there is so much junk out there that after a while you get ignore the bulk of it, or start reading 3 words and make up the rest of the article or email.

I have to admit out of the 50 - 80 emails I get a day from my 3-5 mailboxes, I probably only read like 5 and that is like . This means that I only read less than 10% of my emails. I mostly just read the title and quickly decide if it is spam or not.

The same with web surfing, and new program interfaces. if it isn't immediately intuitive its probably not worth using.

So who do you think needs to be improved, the creator or the user?

tabbing in IE 7 - continued

2006-09-28T12:53:00.001+10:00

Well, I ought to correct my previous post. IE 7 does allow you to keyboard shortcut between tabs now since I finally upgraded my browser due to a corrupt application data directory which refuses to fix itself.

Apparently its ctrl tab to move forward following the windows standard. and to go back? Its some finger dexterity which is ctrl-shit-tab.

I suppose it does make some sense to use the right hand to hold the shift if you do need to go back, but I can't say that is second nature to me yet.

How do you beat ctrl page up and page down? thats just so cognitive.

windows sshd with cygwin

2006-09-19T19:45:00.000+10:00

Apart from using remote desktop or vnc, its good to have a secondary backup method of communicating with your windows machine.

When you install cygwin, make sure you select openssh. this installs both the ssh client as well as the server.

To setup the server there needs to be a couple of really simple steps.

Right click My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Environment Variables.

Click the "New" button to add a new entry to system variables: variable name is "CYGWIN" variable value is "ntsec tty" without the quotes

also add ";c:\cygwin\bin" to the end of the existing PATH variable. To test this start cmd from the command line and type "bash -l"

To setup sshd as a service, just type "ssh-host-config"
"privilege separation be used", answer yes
"install sshd as a service", answer yes
When the script asks you for "CYGWIN=", your answer should be ntsec tty

Basically its like yes to everything and after that type "cygrunsrv --start sshd" or "net start sshd" to start it off.

you can test it by typing ssh localhost on your machine. Make sure you have your windows firewall to allow inbound ssh traffic.

d: drive is /cygdrive/d , e: drive is /cygdrive/e , etc.

how to setup vtun tunnel via ssh

2006-09-14T19:45:00.000+10:00

install vtun

Download the vtun installation rpms (for centos)

wget http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/lzo-1.08-4.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm
wget http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/vtun-2.6-0.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

# rpm -ivh lzo-1.08-4.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm
# rpm -ivh vtun-2.6-0.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

/etc/vtund.conf on client

options {
port 5002; # Connect to this port.
timeout 60; # General timeout

# Path to various programs
ppp /usr/sbin/pppd;
ifconfig /sbin/ifconfig;
route /sbin/route;
firewall /sbin/ipchains;
ip /sbin/ip;
}

work_to_home {
passwd password; # Password
type ether; # Ethernet tunnel
device tap1; # Device tap1
up {
# Connection is Up

# Assign IP address and netmask.
ifconfig "%% 10.1.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0";
# Add route to net 192.168.0.0/24
route "add -net 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.1.0.1";

};
down {
# Connection is Down

# Shutdown tap device
ifconfig "%% down";
};
}

/etc/vtund.conf on server

options {
port 5002; # Listen on this port.

# Syslog facility
syslog daemon;

# Path to various programs
ppp /usr/sbin/pppd;
ifconfig /sbin/ifconfig;
route /sbin/route;
firewall /sbin/ipchains;
ip /sbin/ip;
}

# Default session options
default {
compress no; # Compression is off by default
speed 0; # By default maximum speed, NO shaping
}

work_to_home {
passwd password; # Password
type ether; # Ethernet tunnel
device tap1; # Device tap1
proto tcp; # UDP protocol
compress lzo:1; # LZO compression level 1
encrypt yes; # Encryption
stat yes; # Log connection statistic
keepalive yes; # Keep connection alive

up {
# Connection is Up

# Assign IP address
ifconfig "%% 10.1.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0";

# Add route to net 10.2.0.0/24
route "add -net 131.242.216.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.1.0.2";
route "add -net 203.9.184.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.1.0.2";

# Enable masquerading for net 10.2.0.0.0/24
# firewall "-A forward -s 10.2.0.0/24 -d 0.0.0.0/0 -j MASQ";
};

down {
# Connection is Down

# Shutdown tap device.
ifconfig "%% down";

# Disable masquerading for net 10.2.0.0.0/24
# firewall "-D forward -s 10.2.0.0/24 -d 0.0.0.0/0 -j MASQ";
};
}

creating connection script for client

Some of this only needs to be done once. The last ssh command creates the sshd tunnel for vtund

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth0/proxy_arp
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth0/forwarding

iptables -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE -t nat

vtund -n -f /etc/vtund.conf work_to_home localhost &

ssh -L 5002:localhost:5002 user@server

help with unix scripts

2006-09-12T10:07:00.000+10:00

To define date and time

DATE=`date '+%y%m%d'`
TIME=`date '+%k%M'`

using awk

LIST=`awk '{print $1}' file`
for OBJECT in ${LIST}
do
echo OBJECT
done

the default awk uses a space, using other separators, use a -F

calling sqlplus

sqlplus -s /nolog </dev/null
connect / as sysdba
set echo off embedded on feedback off heading off linesize 120 pagesize 0 recsep off verify off termout off
EOF

calling ftp

ftp -nv 147.132.19.52 < user userid password
prompt
asc
get file
bye
EOF

mail alerts

mailx -r "reply.to@host.com" -s "Subject" mail.to@host.com < file_contents

using varibles from command line

#!/bin/sh
# Example script to copy files to different hosts
# Assumes same user is on all other servers

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
echo "\nUsage: script file [newfile]\n"
exit 1
fi

file=$1
echo $file | grep -q '^/'
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
file=$PWD/$file
fi

if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
newfile=$2
else
newfile=$file
fi
thishost=`uname -n`
user=`id -un`
hostlist="host1 host2"

if [ ! -f $file ]; then
echo "\nCannot copy $file (doesn't exist?)\n"
exit 1
fi

# Copy the file to all the (other) hosts

echo Copying $file to $newfile
for host in $hostlist; do
if [ $host != $thishost ]; then
echo "Copying to $host:"
scp $file ${user}@$host:$newfile
fi
done

irritants of the internet

2006-08-26T22:01:00.000+10:00

This week has been a virus, spyware worm and trojan week to both friends and collegues. Maybe its a prelude to the new VISTA, Virus Infected Spyware Trojan Adware, but anyway, at least the awareness that the default windows XP is a magnet for irritants.

Which makes me semi glad that I reinstalled my notebook with SUSE 10.1 with vmware running windows instead. *phew*

Anyway, i think the winning windows security combination is a personal firewall, antivirus client, spyware/adware cleaner and popup blocker like the google toolbar. Jeez thats 4 things that don't come prepackaged.

Wow. I know my next machine is going to be a mac again maybe, but still those dual core AMDs look tempting. hmmm... games...

more wiki tips

2006-08-11T00:02:00.000+10:00

Since I've recently realised that my blog may have been a bit technically skewed, here is something techie the non techie folks can appreciate.

This wiki does cover a lot of things people have to do in their day to day lives.

http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page

For the music lovers, take a look at the music section http://www.wikihow.com/Category:Music

Just when you think there aren't any good websites anymore when the whole internet is filled with spam, this basically proves otherwise. Its entertaining. I think it's another wiki hit. Enjoy.

why tabbing in firefox is better

2006-07-27T21:11:00.000+10:00

I probably wrote something about browsers previously, but everytime I surf the web, I get so incredibly frustrated with bad browsers due to non compliant web sites.

In my opinion, and possibly for some others, the new IE7 doesn't even come close to the latest Firefox 1.5. Mozilla has adopted concepts like tabulated browsing and evening went the extra step to allow you to drag tabs in order and also use shortcut keys.

Since I've moved to Safari and promptly lost my mac, I can't see myself going back to IE other than the fact that some webpages are still built only for IE compatibility.

For all you IE lovers, if youre still running IE 6 and considering using IE7 just so you can use tabs, its not your only option. Yahoo toolbar does come with the additional tabs function just to add more clutter to your browser menus.

This will be good for now, until MS adds IE7 to the next bundled patches for automatic updates. Til then, the choice is yours again.

singapore radio

2006-07-19T18:15:00.000+10:00

Another improvement i noticed on this front is the increase in radio stations. Here's a pretty good "lembek" channel to listen to. Lush 99.5 - http://www.lush995.sg/

Sticking to my favourite classical stations, Symphony 92.4 - http://www.symphony.sg isn't bad at all.

spoilt by choice

2006-07-15T12:42:00.000+10:00

With some time away, I started to think that Australia was catching up in the IT space. However on returning, I realised that Singapore is still far ahead and cannot be overtaken on IT consumerism.

There's way too much choice and selection of products and at a pretty competitive prices.

The would be several reasons why Australia would not be able to catch up. Consumer behavior and poorer distribution channels.

Consumer behavour can be altered with increased immigrants wanting the technology they are familiar with, but the increased price of moving stuff around the country and labour will still lead to higher prices.

installing firefox 1.5.0.4 on centos 4.3

2006-06-27T22:26:00.000+10:00

Well, i'm sure there are a hundred different ways of doing this. I believe you can even download the rpm from somewhere, but I decided to download it directly from mozilla.

Visit http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/index.html and it will have the download link. The program comes in a form of a tar.gz file.

This means after you download it, you need to run the following command in terminal.

$ tar xzvf firefox-1.5.0.4.tar.gz
$ su
# mv firefox /opt/
# cd /usr/bin/
# mv firefox firefox-1.0.7
# ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox firefox
# cp /opt/firefox/firefox /opt/firefox/firefox-1.5.0.4

I'm quite sure this isn't the best way of doing it, but it works. It shouldn't get stuffed up with any patching as well and should be easy enough to recover.

If anyone knows a better way, please feel free to correct me.

coldplay concert 23rd Jun 2006

2006-06-26T17:56:00.000+10:00

A pretty good concert, looks like most people replaced lighters with light from mobile phones. Only managed to see one guy with a lighter during the whole event. Lots of camera flashes as wel.

I need to upgrade my phone's camera. VGA just doesn't cut it anymore. Anyway here's it again with the lights on.

psc 2510 install on centos 4.3

2006-06-25T10:36:00.000+10:00

If you have the full installation of centos, there is actually very little to do to establish printing and scanning for the HP PSC-2510 printer.

Setup printing:

Plug in the printer and turn it on. A dialog box should pop up and you just need to select (HP | PSC 2500 series) as the connected printer

If you launch the (applications > system settings > printing) application you should see the printer.

Setup scanning:

start a terminal window and su as root
$ su -
# ptal-init setup -v

follow the prompts, this works for network as well, but in my case my connection is just usb.

Probe for USB-connected devices ([y]/n)? y

Probing "/dev/usb/lp0"...
Found "psc 2500 series"

# exit
$ xsane

This runs xsane which is the scanning application

centos 4.3 install - yes again

2006-06-19T22:09:00.000+10:00

After my failure to install a new kernel, I realised that the LVM default install wasn't any good. So I decided to try again.

This time, i did a manual disk setup and created one /dev/hda1 for the / install with about 7.8 GB, enough for the install and other source files if required.

/dev/hda2 for swap twice memory for 1538 MB. And the last /dev/hda3 for /home

to speed up the mp3 process just run this

# rpm -ivh http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/xmms-mp3-1.2.10-11.1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

It downloads and installs in no time.

my oracle dba past

2006-06-19T18:56:00.000+10:00

I was trying to look up an old friend with google with no luck and just decided to do a search on my name as well. I discovered this new link. Apparently someone actually found my script useful and posted it at this forum. Cool.

http://www.dbaclick.com/forums/archive/48/9798.html

iptables cheats

2006-06-13T15:30:00.000+10:00

Can't remember iptables commands and what youre doing? Its easier to modify the default saved configuration instead of trying to write your own ipchains especially if you do not do this on a daily basis.

step 1: find your iptables config file.

Use "locate iptables | more". This should give a listing of anything related to iptables. Normally this should be in the /etc/sysconfig/ directory

step 2: change your rules using vim

centos: /etc/sysconfig/iptables
openwrt: /etc/firewall.user

and run:

centos # /etc/init.d/iptables restart
openwrt(i think) # /etc/init.d/S45firewall restart

The good news is that in most cases now, the default firewall does give an example of a tcp port and udp port. and openwrt gives a commented version on forwarding ports. e.g.

WAN=$(nvram get wan_ifname)
### Port forwarding
iptables -t nat -A prerouting_rule -i $WAN -p tcp --dport 22 -j DNAT --to 192.168.0.2
iptables -A forwarding_rule -i $WAN -p tcp --dport 22 -d 192.168.0.2 -j ACCEPT

Note that in this case, the port forwarded does not require the port to be open on the WAN interface. As it means that it will accept on the WAN

Alternatively, here's some iptables commands and basics to get you going. This is basically all I know and I managed to survive somewhat.

probably the 2 commonly used tables is nat and filter. By default it is set to filter so when listing existing firewall rules, you only need to do this:

# iptables -L --line

It is important to note that iptables works in a sequencial way, that means it looks at rule 1 before it looks at rule 2. I've recently started using --line which is really vital if you want an easy way to view what you want to insert to where. e.g. iptables -I INPUT 2 -j ACCEPT --dports 22 -p tcp

To view the nat (network address translation) table

# iptables -L -t nat --line

One of the more important entrys for this table is probably the masquerading for network sharing.

# iptables -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE -t nat

I guess it does look intimidating, but it really isn't when it dawns upon you as in how the logic works.

if you have finished using iptables -I to create your rules, use "# iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables" to make sure your changes are saved.

More examples:

iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT 8 -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

iptables -D RH-Firewall-1-INPUT 9

yum updates using a proxy

2006-06-13T15:22:00.000+10:00

I did this for centos, but I'm sure its usable on anything that uses yum.

create a new file for dag repo in /etc/yum.repos.d called dag.repo

Find your local ISP mirror. I think both pacificnet and optus does mirrors. Here is what the file should look like.

name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/dag/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

After creating this file, you can run the following commands to complete the update.

# export http_proxy=http://proxy:port[dag]
# yum update

fwbuilder and checkpoint firewall

2006-06-09T16:23:00.000+10:00

Is it me or are the two interfaces rather similar? When I first installed fwbuilder on windows xp, i thought this looks rather familiar. I know I've seen this before.

Suddenly it dawned on me that that was how checkpoint firewall looked on the solaris firewall box. Ooo.

Anyway, its something worth checking out especially if you have a linksys router, although it is still an overkill.

http://www.fwbuilder.org/

enterprise ready cent os - the install

2006-06-04T22:00:00.000+10:00

This weekend, I decided to blow away fedora core 3 and install something supposed to be more stable and enterprise ready. Part of the reason was also to do with another disk reshuffle and I've been finding an excuse to swap my creative live drive with my cdrom. the SDPIF cable was blocking the tray from opening properly. So why not just do a new distro upgrade as well.

Being familiar with redhat, I didn't think it would be that much of a challenge. Well, needless to say there were a couple of hickups. The first one being I had the install DVD and my machine didn't have the DVD rom. So off I went to download the 4 cd's.

After the installation, it refused to boot failing at the boot loader. I decided to stick to defaults and use the suggested LVM with root and swap. I modified the LVM to include a bigger mount for /home. As I was going to change my distro if things go sour.

After the machine booted sucessfully with the recommended disk partitions, I stuck in my backup harddrive and it didn't seem to boot properly. Anyway, by that time I was too tired and decided to reboot for the heck of it and go to sleep.

The next morning to my suprise, I saw the login screen of centos waiting for me. In glee, I decided to log in only to realise that it was unnaturally slow and it popped an error saying that it can't find itself in its host that will cause gnome to act weird.

I couldn't even start a terminal, but somehow the machine came back to life when i used system-config-network to disable the eth0.

Great, now I got a terminal. I decided to modify the hosts file and resolve.conf. I even decided to specify the IRQ for each network card so as I dont confuse it. The config all looked fine, but my network was still broken and I couldn't even ping my gateway. Hmm, broken network card?

So I rummaged though my spare parts and found another 3com network card. I pulled the machine apart again. After the card was changed, the machine didn't even boot to bios. Argh. Ok, I swapped the previous card back. Made in Ireland vs made in Singapore.

Whoo Hoo, it booted and network works for some strange reason. Maybe all it needed was a reboot.

Anyway, what do you do first after you install centos?

Download and install xmms-mp3 from

http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/xmms-mp3-1.2.10-11.1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

Yes, the compiled binaries for RHEL 4 works for Centos 4.3 as well. Yay, joy. my machine now plays my mp3s.

Another one down and tons more to go.

disks and file systems

2006-05-30T19:00:00.000+10:00

Seems like hard disks have been quite a popular topic for me recently and there are a few things I've actually learnt in the process. Things like chosing filesystem formats, disk recovery and raiding. It all started with my recent disk upgrades which forced me to start doing stuff again.

Here's what I learnt.

Fact 1: Hardware SATA raid on your motherboard is actually software raid on the bios.

Fact 2: Disk performance can be determined by quite a few factors, the easy things to do without getting into tweaking your kernel is to ensure that you have the right cables. Check that SMART is enabled (through the BIOS) and your DMA is on.

Here are some useful commands

# smartctl -a /dev/hda
# hdparm -d /dev/hda

Fact 3: Choose the right filesystem and stick to it. Easiest to use this as a default install as well. I think most Redhat install types use EXT3. Although other filesystems might be better for different purposes, running different filesystems will add additional load to different modules rather than just use one for all filesystems. (unless you have a high powered computer, then it might not be an issue or use XFS for video editing or large file manipulation). I'm just going to stick to EXT3. I tried using reiserfs and it really impacted the SMB file share on that mount.

Fact 4: the ntfs module doesn't seem to be included in most default distribution installs. You have to download it from http://www.linux-ntfs.org/

Boozy milkfish

2006-05-28T01:22:00.000+10:00

Decided to do something funky with my linksys router. Installed milkfish. Not sure how it works yet, but was tramatic after I flashed the rom and lost my internet connection. After a while, I realised it was the modem and not the router :P

Anyway, its "fixed" now.

http://wiki.milkfish.org/index.php?n=Boozy.StepByStep

new sata drives

2006-05-13T16:57:00.000+10:00

It has been an unbelievable week trying to figure out how to install windows XP on my machine without a floppy disk drive. This was because I decided to upgrade my hard drives on my windows box to a pair of 300GB Maxtor SATA disks on raid 0.

After googling, i found a guide on pcstat that seemed to make sense, except that the cd writing software required to burn a img boot file which wasn't based on a 1.44mb floppy.

After 7 days, 4 CD-Rs and lots of pain later, its installed. I actually gave up and plugged my floppy drive out of my linux box to lend the windows machine for the installation.

After the install, I've never seen my AMD XP 2000+ boot so fast. I loaded up the required office setup cd's to do its thing, after it did get slower, but I think it was faster than the last time. Got to go through the whole process to tune it again.

Its ridiculous that my work's setup cd installed some stupid antivirus software that is password protected that wouldn't let you unintall it. Argh.

Now, I can say that my amd is going to be as souped up as it can get. specs are:

AMD athlon xp 2000+ (1.7 ghz)
2 x 512MB RAM (266mhz)
2 x 300GB SATA disks in raid 0 (150m/s)
PCI firewire card
ATI Radeon 8500 (dual display)
Dell 24in wide screen Display
Philips 17in Display
M-audio Projectmix i/o (soundcard)
Yamaha msp5 (speakers)

Pretty cool, and I'm sure its going to stay that way for a while.

boo hoo - i sold my ibook

2006-05-09T22:20:00.000+10:00

I have to admit, i'm relatively disorientated at this point. I didn't realise how important my ibook was. I suppose the thought that I have 2 more machines at home and that can effectively last me through the rest of the year at least.

But, its all the little things you do that you dont realise is specific to machines. Like I do all my wordprocessing and spreadsheet work on my mac. I think using my PC is great, but I just dont know where to put the files and I just ended up trashing one months worth of work by accident.

ARgh! I'd need to rethink my workflow and strategy all over again, before I start doing stupid things and time is running out as more work piles up.

Food for thought, do you make your computers revolve around your work or do you force your work to revolve around your computers?

Which one are you?

Test your broadband

2006-04-23T15:45:00.000+10:00

Here are a couple of links you can use to test your connectivity speed.

http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

http://www.zdnet.com.au/broadband/speedtest.htm

mommy, i want a blade

2006-04-22T21:04:00.000+10:00

This statement can possibly be one of the more inevitable aspects of our lives, as computers become more and more embedded into our lives.

Kids of 3-6 yrs getting on internet explorer and visiting http://www.abc.net.au/children/ on their own. Its a pretty good website that is guranteed to entertain any toddler. Slightly frustrating for adults, but the kids seem to like it.

At ages 12 to 14, they will probably want there AMD CPU with a kick ass 3D accerator with wide screen high res screen to play proper games on. I'm sure their game console will be hooked up to the monitor as well. (plasma?)

Once they get to 16, instead of a car, they will go "mommy, I want a blade. I've got a school project and I want to see if my experiments will work." Make space in the garage and haul in the server rack with 10 TB in some storage array and a 2-4 node cluster?

Who knows maybe kids just want a frisbee and a yo-yo.

is wireless the wave of the future

2006-04-22T14:27:00.000+10:00

As I sit in my room coiling 20+ cables that didn't quite make it into the new setup. I keep thinking of all the people who try to convince me that wireless is the way to go.

Its not that I totally do not believe everything should be wired, but I've seen so many issues with wireless technology.

Here's a brief breakdown of cables i have. Power cables, 1/4 in, TRS, XLR, midi, USB, firewire, DVI, component, VGA, RCA audio, CAT5, SPDIF, etc. Right, so lets make all this wireless. How much bandwidth can you put into the air and not get conflicts in frequencies. I believe the air is polluted enough. I can't even get a good large file transfer with 802.11g without my neighbour accidentally disconnecting me. Speed rules doesn't it and everyone wants broadband which you can't get at this point with wireless.

Contrary to what my wife thinks, I dont really like cable messes. Sure, I'd like to clean it all up. I actually like the idea of multi purpose hub based fiber cable that does all protocols including power.

Yup, how about fibre channel hook up every home and have personal junction/firewall boxes to each household. Each rooms has a couple of fibre sockets that provide energy through high powered lasers. Maybe by then 30% of the earth population will already be living in space due to taxation reasons, i.e. no tax or tax benefits in space.

Back to the point. wireless at present should be used for wifi surfing, mobile phones and television remote controls.

Troubleshooting isn't really easier too. Give me a cable anyday.

kernel compilation - part 1

2006-04-12T19:11:00.000+10:00

i'm sure this is going to be a multi part series. one of the more basic things that been around for ages and most out of the box solution people dred. I think its something to be tackled headon for in the quest for computer adulthood to get past the delinquent years.

The first question I will ask as a out of box type of guy is, "Is this an art or science, skill or attitute?"

Going back a few years, kernels used to be so easy to compile, I remembered running make xconfig on redhat 4 or 5 and there really wasn't that much too choose. looking at all the configs now. its a real killer you wouldn't even want to type make config.

So that means it needs patience. patience = attitude.

Art or science? pull out that techno dictionary and start reading. Finished reading? Ok, no disregard half of what you read, mostly the parts you dont understand (this assumes you got the right attitude). Alternatively, pull apart the hardware you have. inventorise what you have on a piece of paper and make the right choices on what you really need on your machine. So as there is some procedure for this, it can be considered a science and sciences can be learnt. Hurray!

Before everyone falls asleep again, I shall end part one. in fact i wanted to write a blog titled "sex and kernel compilation" or just called "sex" to get people to read about kernels.

Moving into the next few parts, I will hopefully get to the parts why doing this is good for you hopefully in an identifiable benefits statements.

projectmix i/o

2006-04-11T10:14:00.000+10:00

Its arrived and i've been mucking around with it for a few days now. Its rigged up and i've retired my Tascam US-428 and Fostex 4-track.

Test 1: Plays mp3 - Sounds great. I'm not sure if its my imagination, but it does sound great via my reference monitors which sometimes had some noise from the connectors of the 4-track.

Test 2: HUI controls work with sequencer. This is the first time I'm using pro tools so I'm not sure how the jog wheel works at this point. Right now I'm getting frustrated with markers and not navigating correctly. It doesn't have the intuitiveness of cubase, which works great and its good having all that inputs on the firewire bus instead. No issues with how the jog wheel works there.

Test 3: Changing setup while computer is running. The moral of the story is do not when any audio application is running. My computer had a history of audio driver blue screen's before so I'm not sure if its just this machine, but good to know that i can turn on of off the audio interface to change modes and not reboot.

Important notes:

I bought protools 6.8 and realised that its not compatible, however you can download the full protools 7.1 software from the m-audio site and use the same key to start it up.

australian fedora mirrors for yum

2006-03-26T11:09:00.000+10:00

After a rather bizarre disappearance of the optusnet mirror, i decided to use the pacficnet mirror instead. These are the sites that i use for the repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d

I would suggest you make a copy of your current files before you change the links.

dag.repo
baseurl=http://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/freshrpms/dag/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/dag/

fedora-updates.repo
baseurl=http://redhat.pacific.net.au/fedora/updates/$releasever/$basearch/

fedora.repo
baseurl=http://redhat.pacific.net.au/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/os/

IBM water cooling racks

2006-03-20T19:05:00.000+10:00

Real funny coz i sat through a ibm blade presentation today and at the end they were introducing the water cooled server racks. (oddly enough was an idea i had 5 years ago).

Anyway, i mentioned it looked quite cool and all it was missing was the blue neon lights. I didn't think anyone else found it hilarious because i didn't get any laughs.

Maybe its just a gamer thing. Boy do I feel misunderstood.

Blades are cool and everyone should own one chassis. The big blue is still boring but, in the case of boring machines that have totally compatible parts whether or not they are required (like the thinkpad and AS400 keyboards), they have done it again.

Blue neon lights will solve it all! Big blue even. how can they not go for it? Its a sure winner.

Nigel Kennedy wasn't bad

2006-03-19T10:19:00.000+10:00

Well, to be honest i went for the concert not expecting too much so it was better than I expected.

It was good that he didn't only play 4 seasons doing a couple of his own compositions and a bach piece. He just zipped through 4 seasons without talking too much which I thought was refreshing from his standard verbal dieorrea. Not to mention the football kicking thing made it more a cheap act. He should find alternating acts.

On a whole, I thought the concert reminded me too much of the pet shop boys gig due to a oldish woman bouncer that flashed her torchlight at me when i was trying to get a picture of the hall with my lousy no flash phone. And Nigel wasn't even playing! In front of me people were using flash cameras and they wouldn't even getting hauled off.

So Nigel if you ever read this. I thought your playing was very expressive and playing more jazz other than strangers in the night would have been better, but I'll blame the QLD orchestra for that.

Skype TV

2006-03-19T10:00:00.000+10:00

Here's a more bizarre way of watching network video with only one tv tuner card i've recently accidently found out.

1) Install the new skype program with video on all your source and target machine.

2) on the machine with the tv tuner card, make the video source

3) make a call between the machines and enable video on the one with the tv tuner

There wasn't that much lag for full on television. Picture quality wasn't that good, but watchable. The disadvantage was that audio can be heard on both ends while watching and channels can't be changed with skype. I'd recommend VNC for that purpose which you can initiate the call yourself as well.

palm tungsten c review

2006-03-13T21:00:00.000+10:00

Well, after 3 years of using my palm tungsten C, i think i should be able to give a rather accurate on how this pda has faired and whethere it can be considered good ROI.

For starters, the reason why I got it in the first place was more emotional than logical. Not to mention, there wasn't a lot of time spent in the decision making process. And it all started when I accidentally stepped on my bag in my bedroom one night breaking the screen of my palm Vx and didn't realise it until the next day.

I wanted a replacement and quick to distract me from the pain, hence buying the most expensive and newest palm at that time. Here is the list of things I found really useful all this while. I gave each factor some stars, max score is 5 stars, i.e. *****.

Wifi - **
(really depends on where you work)

What i really wanted was wifi, working in school campus for the first year made it all worthwhile. The school also had pptp vpn and that was great too. I was able to do quite a lot during meeting while not using a laptop or anything bulky.

After I left that workplace, i found a lot less uses for the PDA, I could use it at home, but the inability to do a wireless sync didn't help. It doesn't support WPA as well which is the new security setting most people are using these days.

Qwerty keyboard - *****

I totally forget how to write in graphiti anymore, although my normal handwriting can be commonly mistaken for fowl scratchings.

Compute power - *****

I've absolutely no complains about how fast this PDA is. I think its also mostly to do with the palm OS as well. Performance might be related to how many apps you can run at the same time and i've never really had a good performance experience with windows mobile edition.

Document syncing - **

Documents-to-go comes in the factory preset, Yay! considering how many times I had to hard reset it. But, whats it doing to my Mac? Creating multiple versions once it detects any changes are made? Ok, so this isn't really a bad thing, but some housekeeping is definately involved. Also gets some error messages

SD-card - ***

One of the coolest things i've ever done was to take an SD card from someone's digital camera and copy the files directly to my PDA. I've only done it once, but I have to admit, it felt really good doing it. Right now, the SD card reader is broken :(.

Versa mail - **

I dont know where did the versa mail advertising come from, but i've never been able to sync it with my outlook mail and contacts dont sync either. I think 3rd party software is probably required. I just use it to download my gmail via POP. cool unless you already marked that email as read.

Service - ***

I've sent my PDA back twice and I'd need to send it back again because of the SD card reader fault. They aren't too bad. The first time I sent it back, they gave me another repaired one saying there's something funky with the first gen one that I have.

Summary

In comparison to other generic PDAs, the tungsten C is a great PDA, however I would say its overpriced and less featured than I imagined it. It's firmware isn't that upgradeable to the current standard to support bluetooth and proper wifi.

I think its still very usable and i'm hope it has a very long life span to come, regardless of the limitations. The simple things like the qwerty keyboard was a winner, but its not back lit which makes the PDA useless in no light conditions (since I turned off graphiti on screen).

easy peasy lemon squeezy

2006-03-06T20:31:00.000+10:00

I cannot explain pompous people. I am sure the world is filled with people that are going to put you down as often as they can to prove they are better.

I would think most people would expect it by now, but somehow we still seem a little shocked when it happens. If there was any explanation of teenage life, it would be to prepare us from these scenarios.

Maybe it's God syndrome. Maybe because you have the rights to alter people's directory permissions or work in an area where monkeys may feel challenged, does it make you feel more superior than other monkeys?

I maintain my professional face as I laugh inside at the childish ignoramus of the deliberating ape.

"Obiwan has taught you well, but ..."

s/pdif audio rocks

2006-03-05T11:13:00.000+10:00

Ah, the simple things in life. I dont know why it didn't occur to me earlier, but I finally put a s/pdif cable which i had spare for a while and put it between my old creative live drive and cambridge speakers.

And it sounds great.

There was now a clear distinction in different audio channels when i listen to music and I dont think its my imagination.

So points to note. Since most MOBO comes with spdif outputs, it will definately be worthwhile to get speakers that have it as well. Secondly, good old stuff really do have long life spans.

"new" internet explorer?

2006-02-15T23:55:00.000+10:00

I had a quick go at the new beta internet explorer a few days ago. initially i thought i was using firefox with some funky skin due to the tabulated feature which looked like it had more bells and whistles.

My conclusion, if you can't beat them, join them, which looks like the path Microsoft has decided to take. Safari and mozilla have been using tabulated browsing and its pretty much become a trend for most surfers. Not to mention, you dont get confused at which instance of IE is hogging the most resources when firefox has only one process instance.

I would think that internet explorer is still a very popular browser because of shoddy developers who do not code for compatibility and only preview in internet explorer. Maybe that has changed, but its the way I remember it.

terminology and the befuddlement of english

2006-02-14T19:30:00.000+10:00

The occupational hazzard of anyone in information technology. I believe that this plague is so rampant that you are probably already infected and may not even know it. This plague is "terminolgy" aka "jargon".

For example, it is evident when a manager says, "please explain this in a language that I will understand", of which it never really happens and the person walks away with another pre-consieved issue. You hardly hear an engineer ask the manager "tell me this in a language I'll understand." My assumption on this fact is that the engineer probably doesn't care what the manager is saying to begin with, either that there is nothing of value that really can be contributed.

Management or marketing speak is as deadly and contagious as technical speak. In this day and age where mutual understanding is of utmost importance, given racial or cultural differences, we should enforce the fact that people need to speak clearly rather than try to muddlefuddle each other.

The next time someone tells you to explain in simple english, tell them to paraphrase in vulcan.

is nigel kennedy any good?

2006-02-14T18:00:00.000+10:00

I just received my tickets for nigel kennedy who's coming to brisbane to play four seasons yet again. Ah, the pangs of being a star only known for a specific work that I hope isn't his best.

If you are a rock star, at least you get people like who look like they are enjoying themselves throughout the song, not sitting there staring blankly.

i suppose the problem with classical musicians is that everyone keeps quiet so screw ups are more obvious. But then again, he can always say its his version of it isn't it?

got to listen to those mp3s again so i'd know how to whistle along.

You can't really tell how good performers are these days, because no matter how crap they are, since people pay a whole ton, you know they already want to have a good time, so a standing ovation is natural. Where's the trill in that?

All time worse band concerts: Bush at the monash auditorium melbourne (they really suck and have abosolutely no respect for the audience even in the small venue.)

Better off listening to the album band: Placebo at brisbane convention hall. I truely expected better.

Will find out if old nigel joins the list next month.