machinehead

In my earlier post about Mac OS X, I was going to suss out gentoo for . What I have discovered that, gentoo still does not have as many applications as compared to fink at this point. The list of avaliable packages are listed in this webpage. http://packages.gentoo.org/archs/ppc-macos/stable/ If you plan on using more applications, I would probably suggest using fink instead. Via the command line, installing applications is just as easy. "# fink install package" If you have already installed X11 for darwin, you might realise that the fink X applications may not like it very much, I'm guessing the X11 for darwin is not a full featured X server. To get past this, I just moved the darwin X11 files so that I wouldn't lose them in case I happen to need them again. # mv /etc/X11 /etc/X11_old # mv /usr/X11R6 /usr/X11R6_old

Back from a holiday at Cairns. Yes, it was great, but seriously going back to my natural habitat after being out in the bush for a couple of hours can be a rather harrowing experience. People fear change, but they embrace holidays. Most find it a way of escaping the "real" world. They joke about how they like to maintain a permanent holiday, but I doubt they seriously mean it though. Some might survive a couple of years the most, but at some point of time, they will probably want to start doing something more along the lines of what they left behind. So if you ask me whats the best thing about holidays other than the experiences? Its the fact that you know it is going to end and thats what makes it a plesant experience. Simply because you know it can't last forever. Of course there are different aspects to how true this statement is. You can join a tour from hell and each minute can be excruciating pain. I can vaguely remember a tour I've almost sucessfully blocked fr...

Its instinct how we try to change people. "I love you for who you are, now change". I've been relatively happy with windows since I've discovered cygwin. What that does is that it puts a linux bash and other commands into windows cmd. This means that I dont feel lost once i run cmd. How often have you typed "ls -l" in a dos prompt? The great thing now is that i can do crazy things like "dir | grep file". Thats one reason why I like Mac OS X. You wouldn't feel lost, or should I say that lost. Its not exactly like the user friendly Linux enviornment that allows you to do tons of stuff in many different ways. And it doesn't have that many open source applications and not known to be as friendly to them as well. There has been a few projects to port linux apps to mac os. I've been trying some since, fink included. As that was a long time ago, I can't quite remember the reason why I needed it, but I have a feeling it had something to d...

Just on the topic of standards, I need to mention one asI think it's amazing, as it is able to summarise and effectively deal with the problems of most organisations. I've heard people say that "Our problems are different. We are in a very challenging situation at the moment. This is a very tough implementation." Believe it or not, there is an idiots guide out of any situation. Check out these links to find out more. Everything is defined and desired outcomes very beautifully illustrated. The concepts are easy and you do not need to rely too much the experts ;) http://www.itsmf.com/index.asp http://www.itilcommunity.com/index.php I think this to be an example of developing a culture of technology and not culture vs. technology. Long live the Queen?

I love standards and I think everyone should too! Coming from a generation of the marketing era where everyone is differentiating and niche marketing, there just isn't the common ground for people to communicate with each other. In fact, there is an additional layer of intepretation that needs to be developed just to overcome this concept of being special. Firewire, I-Link or IEEE 1394 for the other losers who couldn't patent a name for themselves, we all know are the same thing now, but think about all the marketing dollars that went into us making us realise that it is the same thing after all. Think about how many times the guy at the shop has to repeat himself about this. Can that have been prevented? The answer is "Yes, but why should I?". The ones who patent the name have a "differentiated" product when though it is the exact same thing as the next. The next question, should big organisations, like microsoft for example, play well with others? Why, of ...

The problem with wishlists is that they constantly change due to need. Hence the problem of saving for wish lists become even more of an issue. In the last 15 or so years in my life, I've kept a wish list of items and some of these items are still there since then, but happy to say that the bulk of the items are now gone. The days where the bulk of the list was amps, guitars and stompboxes are no longer here and the equipment have also all gone. The one item that eludes me in a good synth. Although I had my Korg N5 for the last 6 years and has fuelled great sweeps and pads, not having multiple effects channels for midi channels really kicks the butt when you programing in multi mode. Right now, I'm having to record each track to wave so I get each channel with the associated midi effect. I've outgrown my 15 year old fostex 4-track and currently using it as a mixer. It would have been crazy to keep boucing tracks. My lucky sequencer now is Cubase LE. Although I bought Cubase...

Generally I can understand why in most deliberations, the common outcome is how futile life is, as illustrated in the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. It really doesn't matter how much you do or how exciting most adventures are when youre always in the middle of it and don't see the big picture. Pretty much like the bug in the rug concept. Would you suddenly take pride in being a hyper intelligent robot when you've always been a hyper intelligent robot? Apparently not. Maybe someone who isn't a hyper intelligent robot would say, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if i was a hyper intelligent robot?" If there isn't already this version of the meaning of existence, I think it can be added to the list. "I do not know, therefore I am". Ignorance, the driving force of civilisation. The ones that admit it, learn and evolve, the other than don't live in relative bliss and die anyway.

I didn't know those green bushes would have white flowers before they popped up.

This friend made me start a blog. I created an account so I can post comments on his blog and meanwhile decided to put some thoughts down. http://futilityoflife.blogspot.com Oddly enough I realised that another friend started his blog as well on saturday. http://fruitllama.blogspot.com I mean I know blogging was popular but this is getting a bit nuts.

Is virtualisation the next wave of true computing or just the recent hype that technologist are throwing at system buyers? Why are we all jumping to believe that its the way things should be implemented now? Back to the earlier post, less than 2 years ago, open source and linux wasn't a viable option and now it is. Virtulisation isn't mature technology, if youre talking about pseudo virtualisation, then maybe, but definately not on the enterprise level. So what makes virtualisation more popular than open source, or have we learnt from our mistakes and suddenly willing to take any risks? I think its commercialisation as in how much money can you make from it. Industry is still driven by vendors isn't it? Mature commercial virtualisation has massive overheads. A couple of examples is that it does not handle resources effectively as what essentially happens is that you are running one operating system on top on another. To get things into perspective of system performance, you...

Natively, this is not possible, but I did it anyway to get around a faulty disk with bad sectors on a notebook. Step 1 I used knoppix live distribution to boot the machine since the whole previous OS was corrupted by the disk anyway. Step 2 Next, I started the guessing game on how much of the disk I didn't want. Ok, its not that graceful, but i didn't want to spend like 2 hours scanning to look for bad sectors. Although one of the things I would do is to try to find them later. I spilt the disk to 2 x 20 Gb partitions and left some out of that for swap of the 2nd partition. fdisk /dev/hda (d)elete (n)new partition (p)rimary partition (n)new partition (p)rimary partition (w)rite partition and exit *optional as this gets blown away in disk druid anyway. Just leave some room for swap. Traditionally, its 2 x RAM available. (n)new partition (p)rimary partition After exiting the fdisk tool. You have created partitions, but not formated them. I wanted a journalised file system so i fo...

Thats my band. These guys are people I work with in the office even :) The missing drummer and tired basist.

All i can say here is that we used to be over on where the lights were. Would you prefer looking out at the lights or being right smack in them? I'd prefer the latter.

This post is a tribute to all you singaporean linux geeks out there. You will definately have strong feeling about this post, either good or bad. Blog search "linux singapore" and you might come in contact with this article http://fossplanet.osdir.com/Article6702.phtml which links to http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1512589723;fp;2;fpid;1 dated 03/08/2005 15:11:17 Ok, so this is is real recent right? Beat this comment. "The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) Technology Group has positioned Linux as a medium term technology bet, which means one to three years to mass adoption." Read on for more marketing. For those new to linux this might actually mean something good to you, but for those who already know linux and the culture that developed it. Its basically putting it into a box and sticking a label on it. Well looking on the bright side, to some extent there is some focus on it now, although it doesn't sound right how its being brought ...

"Harness your true potential!" Like one of those talks people pay tons of money to hear. In fact this line is so good, that I'd have to say it again "Harness your true potential!" Now that we are in the mood to roll up our sleves and put all our little machines to good use. fine print (please check with your partner if there are any areas you can use as there may be an obscene amount of equipment that will emerge after our excercise) Like all good excercises, start planning. Here's a guideline. 1) inventorise your machines, give them names, they will thank you for it. 2) Identify what software or services you will need to run and on what operating system. 3) roughly decide which machine is going to be for what. 4) choose your flavour of operating system. all kinds of different distributions and versions of linux or windows and possibly mac os. Inventorise In my case, i've got 1 x portable (ibook), 1 x linux server, 1 x workstation/gaming machine. Just th...

Face it, re-installations are a pain. However, its always a chance to put the best of plans into place and then find out how your plans ended up in the mess. Well, all wasn't lost so far. The original plan was to software raid 1 (2x 120GB disks) the installation. Of course, greed took the better of me and i decided, i'd just use one whole disk as a separate data mount and if i need to backup, cron an rsync between disks. at least I'd have a bit more room to play with. But like that is ever going to happen. Data issues, sigh. Unknown to most people, they normally have at least a terabyte of drive space lying around the house. Think about it. How many computers do you have. How many external firewire, usb drives do you have. Have you recently upgraded and have a couple of disks lying somewhere. And we haven't even started looking at optical media yet. Sometimes, I feel like just getting a NAS with at least a terabyte and not having to worry about it for a year, and I sti...