randome note to self

modestneeds.org

2008-08-03T21:58:00.000-07:00

washing a car on a sunny sunday afternoon, cleaning the house, pullin weeds, ..., these are small happiness.

while reading this month's fortune magazine, i read more of small bits of happiness under the title 'Saving Lives, One Rent Check at a Time'.

this is similar to the movie 'pay it forward' i watched a while back. i was astonished that keith taylor, who had a modest teacher's income of $33,000/yr would save and give $350/mo and that now runs a full organization called Modest Needs.

my rather lame excuse for not doing enough charity in donating my time nor cash is that so many of these non-profit organization nowadays smell fishy. that with all these event organizers and such, you will be forced to donate a lot and only small insignficant amount will actually go toward the needs and the rest are wasted on paying for the event organizers and the staffs' pocket. that, instead of inspiring, enraged me and put me to despair.

i'm not a fully committed member yet, but i'll read up http://www.modestneeds.org/help/grants/ to see if this is something i can commit, and that something that will help me (feel better about the world i live in and feel better about myself), as well as be of service to those in a short term jam.

so i'm bookmarking now, and can look this up any time in future.

wow, fortune magazine actually has an article about non-profit/charity organization? that's quiet impressive and pleasant surprise to me.

keeping 1 assertion per testcases in RoR

2008-05-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

I'm rewriting badly written unit test at the office.

first, using MVC for RoR, unit test mirrors models/, checking the validity of what goes into database and data types allowed. and much of what's handled in controllers/ go to functional tests. Then there are view tests that often goes into unit/ and some of full regressions in scenario based that goes into integration tests area.

the ones i had to rewrite, there were much of controllers validations, for example. and, each testcases with like two dozen assert this and assert that. so how can you tell when you run 12 testcases and out of 75 assertions 3 fails? how to you analyze and how do you put it in matrix? and, how do you know if assertion failure triggers cascade affect for the rest of assertions in testcase or not?

as tedious as it may seem, do setup and teardown repeatedly, and put one assertion per testcase. say if you put assertion for an account's email existing, in next testcase where you use same account, make a note either to yourself or on the comments that email existance check is already done and that you move on the format of the email. not if it's used for login or not, but just enter different possible email addresses, like with non-alphanumeric characters, or in localized address, or ones entered without domain, or ones that are very long.

i like the one i careated for account testing, which still has whole lot more roon to add, by the way, and i'm excited to add more testcases here, and also to build whole suite of'em ground up!


require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../test_helper'

require 'test/unit'

class AccountTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
    def setup
        super
        @account = create_testacct
    end

    def teardown
        acct_cleanup
    end

    def test_new_acct_have_a_unique_username
        @account = create_testacct

        assert_not_nil @account.unique_username

        acct_cleanup
    end

    def test_cannot_create_acct_with_email_not_having_domainname
        assert_raise(ArgumentError,"accttest is not a valid email address.") do
            @account = Account.create_by_email("accttest")
        end
    end

    def test_cannot_create_acct_with_email_not_having_domainname2
        assert_raise(ArgumentError,"accttest is not a valid email address.") do
            @account = Account.create_by_email("accttest@")
        end
    end

    def test_cannot_create_acct_with_email_having_bad_domain
        assert_raise(ArgumentError,"accttest is not a valid email address.") do
            @account = Account.create_by_email("accttest@testdomain")
        end
    end

    def test_cannot_create_acct_with_email_having_only_domainname
        assert_raise(ArgumentError,"accttest is not a valid email address.") do
            @account = Account.create_by_email("@testdomain.com")
        end
    end

    def test_new_acct_not_activated
        @account = create_testacct
        set_default_password

        assert !(@account.activated?)

        acct_cleanup
    end

    def test_activate_method_makes_new_acct_active_acct
        @account = create_and_activate_testacct

        assert @account.activated?

        acct_cleanup
    end

    def test_activate_acct_without_password_fails_with_correct_error
        @account = create_testacct

        assert_raises(Error::HumanReadable, "You must set a password before we can activate your account!") do
            @account.activate()
        end

        acct_cleanup
    end

    def test_cannot_create_acct_with_existing_email_address
        @account = create_and_activate_testacct
        assert_raise(AccountModule::AccountExistsError,
                     "There is already an account with this email address, please try a different one.") do
            @account2 = create_and_activate_testacct
        end

        acct_cleanup
    end

    private
    def create_testacct
        @account = Account.create_by_email("accttest@localhost")
        @account.save!

        return @account
    end

    def set_default_password
        @account.password = "test123"
    end

    def create_and_activate_testacct
        @account = create_testacct
        set_default_password
        @account.activate()
        @account.save

        return @account
    end

    def acct_cleanup
        @account.destroy
    end
end

if i were yahoo exec i'd have taken microsoft's counter offer

2008-05-03T20:55:00.000-07:00

wow, was i busy or what? no postings in 2mo?

okay, i've been paying attention to micro's courting of yahoo, and yeah i thought initial offer was on lower side than i'd like. but counter offer's pretty decent.

first offer was at $29, which i wouldn't have liked myself, but at $33/share yahoo walked again. wanted $37. even steve balmer says it's no fun courting the princess-like yahoo. heh.

i wouldn't mind $37/share for my little bits of shares, what some 100-200 shares?
but i'd gladly take $33.

i worry my yhoo will plunge into lower $20s again. sigh*

like fellow yahoo share owners, like yahoo execs, i'm too greedy to wash my shares at some $20 odd per share.

hmm... should i knock on balmer's front step and offer my tiny bits of shares? heh.

free domain registration at register.com until 3-25-08

2008-03-19T00:21:00.000-07:00

register.com sent me email saying 'til 3-25-08 i can register 1 domain for free up to 1 yr, providing i claim i am a small biz and i confirm i have right to register domain on behalf of my small biz.

hmm... now the dilemma sets in. do i want .com or .org? what name to register? and what will i do with it?

heh. it's a happy dilemma.

finally on skype. yet another IM to keep up with

2008-01-21T00:42:00.000-08:00

I started with AIM, moved into YIM and tried MSN IM then on google talk. It certainly takes a good IM manager, to be logged on all of them, and to maintain the account. I've signed up for MSN IM a few times since the first AIM I got on in '98, work related. Ah, those pre-'98 days when I was oblivious of all these, and of ICQ and IRC.

I've not bee on AIM more than once two or three months, and not much on IRC either.

well, google talk isn't enough now I'll have to use skype, again for work related.

so I went to skype site and downloaded rpm for my FC 6, and of course the PGP key isn't verifying. looked up and followed the steps to add skype.repo and all. when it didn't work out, I had to download the binary, installed and now I'm running into trouble with dependency issue. libqt, libsigc, ...

some blogs say i should copy the libraries from previous version, 1.4.0.9x instead of 1.4.0.118. that looked aweful complicated, and skype didn't have older version available, anyways. instead I downloaded beta version, skype 2.0 and after the install, and after copying binary 'skype' to /usr/bin and copying 'sounds/' and 'avatars/' to 'usr/share/skype/', now I'm on skype. ready for next conference call.

skype on FC6 works, but still not as conveniently as if i was on mac or windows, not quite yet.

macbook air, small enough for me?

2008-01-15T16:17:00.001-08:00

macworld 2008 keynote announced 'macbook air'.

macworld has historically been apples' new product announcement platform, announcing iPhone, iPod, ..., all the popular commodities that many teens and 20-somethings wouldn't know how to live without.

I got my Sony Vaio X505 back in 2005, for christmas, and have been happy with it's light weight. having been leisurely shopping for replacement for my Vaio X505, I had my eyes peeled watching the keynote via online video and reading the spec from apple's website. 3lbs? it's definitely much lighter than conventional macbook or macbook pro. and, of course, it's from apple, afterall.

still 3lbs? that means my bag would be heavier by 1+ lbs.

hmm... i'll have to wait and see. anyone rushing out to buy macbook air yet?

chm viewing with chmox or kchmviewer

2008-01-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

'sudo yum install kchmviewer' worked on my FC 5 desktop, and chmox dmg download and install works on leopard mac os x.

seems like many files are in .chm format in addition to .pdf, so good to update my environment on laptop and future desktop.

legacies remembered, through musical and through 'kennedy center honors'

2007-12-26T22:42:00.001-08:00

jersey boys at last. wanted to see this since i first heard about in sf 3 yrs ago
Originally uploaded by speattle

Brian Wilson, Diana Ross, Steve Martin, Leon Fleisher and Martin Scorsese are honored during "Kennedy Center Honors" on CBS.

This reminded me of recent visit to "Jersey Boys", a musical based on 50-70's pop group 'Four Season'.

Less dramatic, maybe a little, than Jersey Boys, it was nice to see someone like Yo-yo-ma on the stage versing Leon Fleisher's life story, and funny to see someone re-acting Steve Martin's comedy. It seems like a lot of toughts were put in to organizing this, and many volunteered(?) to perform. A young aspiring pianist playing in tribute to Leon was also pretty mesmerizing and made me ashamed of my lazyness in practice.

Something that made me think, of these two occassions: value of talent! I usually don't believe in talent but more so on hard work. But would these great artists be great artists with perserverance alone? Maybe the passion, and that 1% that makes differences against other artists would be their god-given talent? If so, what would be my talent? Heh, ouch...

Maybe the vocab. 'talent' is some special quality not common in general public, like me, thus my justification for lacking talent. I'm a mediocre at drawing/painting, at music, at computers, at math, at finances, ...

maybe my talent is just being mediocre good at things? lol.

anyways, it's pretty amazing how some people can listen to a tune and can identify, play along and even improve what he/she heard.

I really enjoyed "Jersey Boys", and now I can appreciate 'Four Season's music with insight. And, now the "Kennedy Center Honours" helps me realize I shouldn't give up on a boring things like new year's resolution. If someone like Diana Ross was determined, and loved singing at age 15, and carried through all the black-and-white-TV era through 70s and 80s, ...

Don't need to be honored at Kennedy Center myself, but "wouldn't it be nice if ..." i had no regret with my life when I look back at what I have accomplished?

^^

checkin out gentoo 2007

2007-12-26T20:20:00.001-08:00

checkin out gentoo 2007
Originally uploaded by speattle

not so much by choice, but i got to learn to install and setup gentoo on intel based mac mini for ruby on rails app.

partitioning, installation, package installation with emerge, ..., it's been quite painful 4 days.

i had to use mac mini, because that was only hardware available to me, and duh, i started with 10.4 without boot camp. that was my stumbling block. once i grabbed leopard installation that came with bootcamp, partitioning got easier.

oh, also partition it as windows partition, then change it to linux using 'fdisk /dev/sda' when in gentoo shell.

i had downloaded gentoo 2007 livedvd but for some reason it didn't like looking up '/dev/sda' to kick off the installation.

after about 2-3 failed attempt and about 2 complete reinstall from mac os, i sorta got wised and attempted to chmod /dev/sda* from root as livedvd took me to X windows as gentoo user. That didn't help, but now i know not to panic, as i can sudo as gentoo user without password.

still with no success at install, i had to opt for minimial install cd, and as i've not done gentoo install before i'd be reading gentoo handbook and wouldn't know the instruction. now that i do understand, it's pretty easy instruction to follow; explaining the steps that followed by exact command line to enter.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?full=1#book_part1_chap1 is bookmarked for me now, along with http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_Mac_Mini.

i'm in the middle of adding packages via emerge now.

still am not familiar with raiserfs, but am glad to know gentoo can be loaded to mac mini.

although it didn't work out livedvd logging in as gentoo and taking me to X window desktop was nice. after following minimal install i'm logged in to shell for emerge update, and got to locate X window/desktop packages to install to get ack into the Desktop as nice/fancy as gentoo user's was when i booted from DVD.

oh, it was nice i made note about rEFit earlier in blog, i had to look it up when partitioning from Mac OS X.

things to remember: network scanning tools, and painful ror select tags

2007-11-12T16:25:00.000-08:00

i literally spent half day on using select_tag with options_for_select using ror.
ouch.

in theory

<%= select_tag 'table_name[field_name]', options_for_select([array of options list],'what is inserted in table table_name field field_name as value') %>

to get the select list showing up w/ prepopulated data.

why spend whole half day?

hmm... well, the field i am trying to pre-populate have mysql db table with type enum. i think that's why it's not working for the category i am building. works for 'os' which have data type as string works after a few try. should i add '.to_i' to get the enum map to the integer value of the list? how stupid it feels. continue on hacking.

so far it works for:

<%= select_tag 'testtable[target_os]', options_for_select(["", "Windows", "OS X", "Linux"], @testtable.target_os) %>

and

<%= select_tag 'testtable[target_browser]', options_for_select(["", "Firefox", "IE", "Safari", "opera"], @testtable.target_browser) %>

with

@testtable = TestTable.find(params[:id])

in my controller's class method.

Oh, i also better not forget how to use ss and nmap.

'ss -l' in most cases and 'nmap -A -T4 hostname' tells me what ports i am using. not sure if it's weather or just banging my head of this select_tag, but it took me forever to remember these two. Actually I had to ask around for ss. What a monday...

belkin n1 wireless router and derek: he knows all the latest toy

2007-11-12T13:55:00.000-08:00

I can imagine Derek with leopard, or latest iPhone, or even with new guitar hero. But when I found out about Belkin N1 with UI for thoroughput speed on gizmodo and forwarded link to Derek, he messaged me back with his blog: http://5thirtyone.com/archives/842 instantly.

He's already reviewed it way way back, and got lots of feedback.
OMG, does he like know all the latest toys, regardless of platform and regardless of realm? As long as it's new, technology related, and cool?

I am so lame, thinking I'd ask him to get one and check it out. I should know better.

learning AJAX stuffs: testing javascript with JSSpec

2007-11-08T13:05:00.001-08:00

Roland forwarded me http://jania.pe.kr/aw/moin.cgi/JSSpec
it's neat.
heh, it's also done by a korean guy.
i'll have to give a try and get me some silly screenshot of me screwing up on it.

chasing leopard, ..., caught up on rmagick at least.

2007-11-01T04:28:00.000-07:00

when i first got into ror(ruby on rails) earlier this year getting the system configured w/ ruby, rails, gem, and rmagick in particular was a pain, on my fedora core desktop.
then came along ubuntu's easy install guide followed by fedora core(5, 6 and onward)'s easy to install, with all those '*-dev' packages that contain all the libraries.

rmagick, in short, is imagemagick/graphicsmagick package for ruby-on-rail that ror developers use a lot.

well, with my environment setup nicely, and not being a heavy mac user i only enjoyed stuffed animal leopard at local mac sotres and didn't bother with mac os update. getting a bit too old to be caught up in flurry of hypes.

well, derek is a cool guy and he waited on the line on last friday to get leopard copy, along with free t-shirt, and installed it. now it comes with ruby, rubygem and rails, but not with rmagick or mysql. when he had no success and couldn't get his work done (for having clean installed the whole system on his mac book), i got volunteered in this morning. i mean yesterday morning. i spent good 5hours solid chasing gtk, librsvg and imagemagick-devel that may or may not exist. with gtk, the dependencies were about as greek to me as the gtk package itself. requires pango then requires cairo, but it reality gtk requires pango with cairo support. and then there is question of incompatible pkgconfig. what do you mean pkgconfig is too old? leopard is been out less than a week....

anyhow, i can't let rmagick defeat me, so i picked up a leopard copy and spent good 2+ hrs getting it on my precious mac mini, the one with dual boot partition of fedora core 6. why 2+ hours? takes about 45minutes, and i did it twice, because i messed up playing with boot camp and few other configs. with the install my rEFI bootloader is blown away. my linux partition is still there, but no bootloader to let me start with linux partition. sob, sob, sob... since boot camp is only compatible with windows os, and i have no room nor wish to delete current linux partition and reinstall(i actually was using my inux partition right up to the point i started inserting leopard dvd in, for installation).

unlike earlier the day i actually searched for rmagick installation how to, and got lucky.

http://pastie.caboo.se/72596 actually works.

some of urls didn't work so i had to manually download it. but steps are golden. i skipped ruby, rubygem and rails. i also used 'sudo gem install rmagick' instead of doing tar source install.

but it works.

i did 'cd rails/test/; script/console; require 'RMagick' ' and it worked. only took me what about 2+ hours, and another hour to copy over the list of tar files and instruction for derek?

yay...

thanks Josh Goebel. you saved me my sanity.

now i still gotta figure out why readline doesn't compile and why mysql server doesn't start from boot.

worst of all, i gotta figure out my dual boot.

but now i can sleep, finally, at 4am, for having rmagick working on my new shiney leopard os.

and, i can see some cool desktop features on leopard. through my sleepy slanted eyes.

pkgs i needed:
* pcre-7.4
* lighttpd-1.4.18
* freetype-2.3.4
* libpng-1.2.22
* jpegsrc.v6b
* tiff-3.8.2
* libwmf-0.2.8.4
* lcms-1.17
* ImageMagick-6.3.6-4
* ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11 (when untar, goes to fonts dir instead of ghostscript-fonts dir)

steps from my home>Downloads folder terminal shell:
tar xvf pcre-7.4.tar
cd pcre-7.4
./configure --prefix=/usr/local CFLAGS=-01
make
make install
cd ..
tar xvf lighttpd-1.4.18.tar
cd lighttpd-1.4.18
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-pcre=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..
tar zxvf freetype-2.3.4.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.3.4
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..
tar xvf libpng-1.2.22.tar
cd libpng-1.2.22
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..
tar xvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar
cd jpeg-6b/
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
echo $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..
tar xvf tiff-3.8.2.tar
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install
cd ..
tar zxvf libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
cd libwmf-0.2.8.4
make clean
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
tar xvf lcms-1.17.tar
cd lcms-1.17
make clean
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
tar xvf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar
mkdir /usr/local/share/ghostscript
mkdir /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
cp fonts/* /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/.
tar xvf ImageMagick-6.3.6-4.tar
cd ImageMagick-6.3.6
export CPPFLAGS=/-I/usr/local/include
export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-static --with-modules --without-perl --with-quantum-depth=8 --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
make
make install
gem install RMagick

does it work? yes:
so far it looks okay on irb:
mac-mini:~ user$ cd rails/test/
mac-mini:test user$ script/console
Loading development environment.
>> require 'RMagick'
=> []
>>

with a trace or without a trace?

2007-10-04T23:14:00.001-07:00

Without a trace new season began. Like 'Law and Order: Criminal Intent', it's got a lot of brain work and foot work. I am somewhat okay with CSI:NY with new york being the location, but don't like other CSI for their being too much of fancy and flash labs and equipment usually not available for cops. Not even in real life, let alone in fantasy. I've not yet caught up with '24' although the author is from nearby in Washington state. While watching new 'My Name is Earl', and 'Without a Trace' and hoping for someone to post streaming video of new 'Law and Order:Criminal Intent' i was on dealscatcher.com and saw this sudoku on toilet paper and had a hearty laugh. So write it on sudoku paper while you know what and use that paper? What if you don't finish solving the sudoku in time?

work hard, drink hard @ netfilter workshop

2007-09-12T02:31:00.000-07:00

I didn't attempt attending Linux Kernel Summit in Cambridge, UK. It's way way above my head. Netfilter workshop guys were nice to let me sit in their some 30 members panel and I'm glad to be in it and yet have to admit it's still way above my head. Eric's maintaining live blog with each sessions so I stop typing like crazy writing notes w/ all these keywords for netlink, netfilter, iptables, tracking, conntrack, HA, ... and am trying to listen in to the discussion. It's not a tutorial, it is about as intense as netconf headed by core contributor of linux netdev. Eric's live blog is at: Netfilter Workshop Résumé.

Another thing I've been busy, taking advantage of excellent wifi bandwidth @ hosting company, Astaro, is uploading photos from Cambridge, London, Paris and Karlsruhe/Durlach. I usually use the tool for iPhoto on Mac, so I attempted manual upload which I have not done in over a year. Ouch! uploading over 200 images manually, 6 at a time? Soon, I got impatient and went to flickr's tools section and learned about jUpload. Only downside was requirement for latest Java SDK, which I had to go to http://java.sun.com, download, and do the link for /usr/bin/java. That took extra 1/2hour but boy am I glad now that jUpload is doing all the photo uploading work. It took mere 1/2hour to upload my photos from punting in Cambridge, some 60+ photos. Yay...

Harald is supposed to have moved on from netfilter maintainership to do openMoco, but he's real sharp with questions, feedback and practically leading discussion. Between Patrick and Harald, the past two days' discussions are running real tight and intensely.

Of course, Astaro and Patrick,currently maintaining netfilter and works for Astaro as a contractor, is putting some fun stuffs like drinking, bowling and stuffs in between discussions. Beer glass seem to be twice the size of what i see in U.S. pubs and I see guys drinking 4-5 glasses w/o showing it at all.

Well, in Akihabara group members would disappear in numbers when passing different electronics shop. In Karlsruhe a few members would disappear when passing different pub house. ROFL. Like it was in Australia, or in UK, discussions are heated and long and drinkings go on until midnight. Amazing but true, these guys would get up at 7am following day and show up eagerly by 8am. ^^

vnc server and vncviewer, side by side

2007-08-26T02:40:00.001-07:00

after updating ubuntu on sony vaio x505 from edge to feisty, everything's hunky-dory. updating from edge to feisty, however, was ugly and messy. somehow the ide2 doesn't get recognized thus, update via CD-ROM was impossible, and had to do update over net, with a bit of cheatin'. anyhow, once feisty was on the machine and thus ruby was to latest available version of 1.8.4, i just followed http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu and rubygems and rails installation was easy. so was rmagick installation. i think people often forget to do 'apt-get install ruby1.8-dev' before 'gem install rmagick'. compared to having spent good day or two to ge t rmagick working by downloading .tar on fedora core, then something not working and try to download again using yum, and now having two downloads to deal with, ..., etc., it was less than 10minutes 1-line experience that's pretty pleasant. should i have started with yum install of rmagick in the first place? well, that's what we call a learning curve i guess. now i know better to get 'ruby*-dev' when installing 'ruby*' and now i know 'yum install rmagick' or 'apt-get install rmagick' can be relatively painless and easy.

this inspired me to make vnc working between my laptop and mac mini converted desktop with fedora core 6. i had the server setup but was keep getting connection issue from laptop when using 'vncview host:port'. duh me! i had to be told maybe vnc port is not open on the server? alas, when i fixed that, i'm on my mac mini's fedora core from my ubuntu laptop, right next to the server or a few blocks down the cafe.

it's fun making a good progress on things, and pretty inspiring.

fur elise (lotus elise)

2007-08-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

i finally bid adieu my devotion to mini cooper of last 3 years.

my new love?

went to tully's in ballard after a nice dinner at a korean restaurant named 'yet-gol' to help digest a big dinner, and there it was. nice and curvey, and tiny and shining, even at late 9pm darkness i could spot it right away parked right outside lombardi.

heh, i wasn't the only one. the girl in the passenger seat of the car was getting lots of questions from a few guys hanging around. not often a girl will have to let a car get the spotlight on friday night, but i must admit it's worth it and i bet she'd not mind the car stealing the attention.

came home and searched wiki and google, to see lots of racing photos and decided elise II is the one i like, and maybe now i have a reason to drop by on next auto show.

mi-re-mi-re-mi-ti-re-do-ra~~~ i play 'fur elise' for the cute new lotus elise II. ^^

railsconf 2007 so far

2007-05-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

no digicam photos developed yet.

here's notes i was taking at sessions, and a few interesting links i start collecting:
railsconf 2007 presentation slides

pastie for ror snippets

the railsway webpage/blog

and a guide to testing the rails
and few others, of course.

Intro to Test-Driven Development for Rails ¶
Ruby ¶

* User Stories
* Customer Acceptance Tests
* Test Driven Development
* Refactoring
* Pair Programming
* Demo/Exercise
o demo: http://pastie.caboo.se/62413
o excercise to do: http://pastie.caboo.se/62420
o exercise answer sample: http://pastie.caboo.se/62421
* Tools: Test::Unit, RSpec, Flexmock, Mocha

Rails ¶

* Demo/Exercise : was out of time

Full-stack Web App Testing with Selenium and Rails ¶

* kind: selenium on rails, selenium rc(remote control, for ui testing via http)
* pivotal lab doing presentation
* about 1/2 the room uses selenium now, of a coulpe hundreds folks in the room.
* selenium rc features
o runs in the browser, executes app in frame, use javascript, goes all the way to the server and back, complementary to jsunit, cross-platform testing in a single test run
o ex: ==> rake selenium:test
o ... it runs, checking servers, time, schema, and building testcases ...
o demo via web, http://localhost:4000/selenium-server/core/... captured via digicam
* selenium rc architecture: launch
* selenium rc architecture: run test
* os/browser: win, linux, mac and firefox, ie and safari
* slow-lenium: you can run fast and slow suite
* gotchas: disable transactional fixtures, reload fixtures before every run, ...
* Q&A
o only 1 QA?
o => still prefers selenium rc, for cross platform browser driven testing
o what kind of tests?
o => integration, acceptance, ui, smoke tests

Taking Rails Tests to the Next Level ¶

* Q&A or BOF style. no notes.

Adding Tests to Legacy Rails Apps ¶

* test coding: write app, write test, run test, refactor test, run test, write more app
* run: rake and/or individually with 'ruby test.rb'
* rake stat vs. rcov
* autotest: because sometimes our tests can run themselves
* continuous integration
* fixtures: ugliness, ar_fixtures, use mocks, fixture senarios
* zentest: controller & model tests, more (useful) assertions
* focus on the bugs (don't write test for test's sake)

Heckle: Take Your Tests' Lunch Money (combined with Adding Tests to Legacy Rails Apps) ¶

* mutation tester : quotes from sneakers movie, something like 'break in to make sure the pace isn't break-in-able'
* like pen-testing/fuzzing
* how's it fit into the testing stack?
* "RSpec/Test::Unit is your safety belt. RCov is your airbag. Heckle is your helmet, neck brace and full fireproof suit."
* use Heckle to do the fire-proof kind of test, after basic unit, functional and integration tests are done.

Fixtures: Friend or Foe ¶

* yml files
* example of convulated fixtures,
* fixtures :listings, :address, ...
* quotes of many 'i hate fixutres'... : complexity!
* grievances: namespacing, brittleness, validation, contamination
* workaround:
o use activerecord, helper methods -- solve validation problem. but not all the problems
o go mock- and stub-crazy -- straight to method. no data mining, manipulation. other problems
o in-memory database
o transactional fixtures -- ex) self.use_transactional_fixtures = true
o preload all fixtures (from Rails Edge)
* my solution:
o ->fixtureScenarios
o http://code.google.com/p/fixture-scenarios
o ->testing your scenarios

[rails_root]
+- test/
scenario/
brank_new_user_test.rb
experienced_user_test.rb

* -> cleans up after itself
* -> backwards compatible

*Q&A

* can fixtures be loaded in specific order?
* => not yet. patch's in to fix this.(in terms of foreign key). as for scenario loads in run time it's from root down on the tree, rails_root->test->scenario->...
* =>rake supports, as is. rake test:scenarios, rake

* revisit grievances
o check namespacing, brittleness, validation, contamination, and performace gets yellow flag instead of green flag like others.

[RAILS_ROOT]
+-test/
+-fixtures/
+-brand_new_user/
+-users.yml

* reference/contact
o tom@rubyisawesome.com
o http://rubyisawesome.com/ (blog)

Sat Keynotes: Bring Ruby to the Enterprise. Not the Other Way 'Round
==============
Cyndi Mitchell

enterprise (good & bad) continue to move to ror

railswork,
mingle,
thoughtworks

Sat Keynotes
===============
Tim Bray

how many from startup? about 1/2, how many from large/non-startup? about 1/2, how many service providers and consultants? less

how many migrate from java? largest, how many migrated from microsoft env? 2nd large, how many migrate from php? about 3rd large.

oreilly's booksale chart: java, ..., ... (photo taken), from last night's keynote

pragmaticstudio.com/donate

sun's hardware & approach

some of his experiences, in business consulting for sun

-> java will never go away, php will never go away. thus, what about integration between these different languages/platforms with ror?

his solution -->java: platform, language, ..., thus, jvm can run java, ruby, javascript, php and others...?

a good practice: REST

web architectural references:
=>architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures by roy fielding, thesis
etc.

example of MS webcam ad.
ad says '1 touch blogging', if on MS's blog, not everybody's on it
-> atom publishing protocol

conventional wisdom:
java: compute performance, tooling
php: web scaling, ease of use
rails: time to market, maintainability

Is Ruby Ready for Corporate IT? and Behind Mingle: ThoughtWorks Studio's Collaborative Project Management Tool ¶

* mingle demo. no notes.

Big Stinky Piles (of Data) ¶

* mingle's edloan product related. usage of rftp demo. no notes.

RESTful Modeling with ActiveRecord ¶

* RESTful
* Modeling
* ActiveRecord?
* Vonnage was facing a software problem, identified SOA as architecture of choice and improved hardware scaling and development scaling
* Solutions We Found
o -> text over HTTP, forget SOAP, we like to be dirty, allowing for diverse development and implementation, use right tool for the right job, not the tool everyone else is using
o ->rails for rapid prototyping of applications
o 2 components required: backend and frontend
* RestResource? Summary
* Rest Resource serves as the back end or service solution
* maps a RESTful interface on top of ActiveRecord? objects
* exploits ActiveRecord? model relationships
* XML Examples
o ==> XML example for rendering
o demo:
* post game highlights:
o simple protocol, simple application, DRY, ...
o open source
* resources du jour
o http://del.icio.us/vonage_railsconf_2007

ocean's 13 coming soon

2007-05-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

june 18th is when ocean's 13th is coming to theatre.
sad as is that shrek 3 preview isn't coming to my town, but am super looking forward to june when daniel brings his 12 crew plus one mystery member.

spiderman 3 seem somewhat more interesting than past 2, the 2nd one was a bit of sleeper. friday night was sold out, wonder if the fever's died out a bit by now.

naver blog to save

2007-04-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

syndrome, 신드롬
[무한도전] 야외 촬영 ^^ -- nice craft!

is flickr choking?

2007-04-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

it took me more than 5 minutes to upload flickr photos from my mac, and I asked someone working at yahoo and say the 3 photos i uploaded are just fine. so, the upload did work, huh?

i did try to login from my browser and it failed. annoyed, i moved onto my windows with ie, then windows with firefox, linux with firefox, ...., etc.

finally, i left my last login window at the blank white page with the loading circle thing running like the squirrel in a cage and left for dinner. that was an hour ago. i can get to any other sites just fine, just like this blogger.com. i still am not loggin onto the site.

maybe i should take a nap and come back. yawn!

what's happened?

justice for all -- commissioner steps in for unsportsmanlike conducts

2007-04-14T14:07:00.001-07:00

not fully 24hrs since Bernier of Sharks got hit from behind, with full malice intent and no accident, NHL suspended the Nashville player who hit Bernier during friday's game 2. Finally, justice. Too bad nothing's done for Cheechoo's hit from game 1 other than that game's suspension. Still, maybe this will make Nashville to play by the book, and lift Shark's morale that they can play clean and sportsmanlike and still win.

respect for NHL commissioner. looking forward to the game 3, clean and fair!

this old house.... live!

2007-04-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

i'm watching this old house, boston version of a house near the airport.

and, am hearing the footstep and motor sounds upstairs, of window installers who showed up 9:30am prompt.

within half an hour the bedroom windows are out, and the livingroom one's half way out. they brought their own ladder with platform to work on 2nd floor bedroom and livingroom. they got their wood cutting unit at the front porch, and the motor sound is sweet sound of getting argon gas for double-pane.

oh, boy! i got 'this old house' seattle version going on in my own house.

giggle* giggle*

i do try to stay out of their way, but also am sneaking around with my portable camera, dying with curiosity. let's see how the house is aired with new windows and sliding deck-door at the end of the day, as they promoised...

don't hate ya IRS no more.

2007-04-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

davem made me sit down thursday night, against my kickin and screamin...
for that dreaded tax return deadline, not extended far enough to april 17th.

well, i've done it like 80% already at the beginning of february, stopping as soon as i found out i get no return and need to pay about a grand or so. no need rushing paying, was the idea.

a few of forms from CDs and other small investment interests, like oh! i didn't know i paied foreign stock tax of $20 to various countries last year that i didn't know.

sitting for 10minutes about missing forms here and there, and whining and chasing the paper i didn't place well, I was done with it and used e-filing at abut 1am this morning before I went sleep.

duh, what do you expect, it's friday the 13th. i should be just glad it's done.

i post-poned checking email as long as i could, and was midly surprised and massively glad when the email confirmed both state and federal took the tax return. phew~~~

no sending in, no nothing, just let them take money out of my bank account and deposit to the same account, still short of cash but at least no worries about any federal agents knocking on my door.

i did all the follow-up clicking, and i'm glad to say i'm completely done!

hey IRS, ain't no more scare o' ya!

oOOoo wee. hey, i got the whole weekend ahead o' me. ^^

firebug for firefox

2007-03-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

ah, my ignorance is being lifted, one layer at a time.

i'm about to download firebug i learned about yesterday.

help debug javascript, css, html and ajax stuffs for FE development. good thing to know.

late bloomer to YouTube -- thanks to the detective Goren

2007-03-28T01:53:00.000-07:00

It's been over a year since YouTube took sensational debut and remains darling, bought up by Google, and is on a trial for being too popular. The very reason I statyed away from this popular portal for video sharing.

While looking up Google's Test Automation clips, I accidentally stumbled on Youtube, and voila, there are so many of short clips of Law and Order: CI with different music choices, many I do dearly like so, as music video clips and a few full length episode!

I spent hours clicking through, listening to beattles, linkin park, ..., and watching endless clips of episodes I'm so familiar with. ^^ oops, it's almost 2am, time to go to sleep? or one more clip to view. maybe i should start making my own music video to upload. there are sooooo many, it's good thing I don't need to get up at 7am to go to work.

Dell and 19"

2007-03-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

Dell may be setting new trends in commonly used LCD size to be 19".

Dell Small Business has the Dell Dimension C521 Athlon64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+ System + 19" E197FP Analog Flat Panel LCD Monitor for $479 + free shipping. Thanks Dancancook.

Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+
Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
48X CD-RW/ DVD Combo Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE Integrated Graphics GPU
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
1 Year On-site Economy Plan
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell 2-button USB mouse
19 inch E197FP Analog Flat Panel

Not quite two weeks after Davem got himself an Intel machine w/ 19" deal(which, of course he upgraded to 22"), Dell posted new deals.

Is it like 'Deal or No Deal'? I told him to wait 'til like 4th of July, as I got a rather fantastic deal over christmas, putting myself out of business on putting hardware together. Dell's Athlon Duo 64 with 19" LCD, 1gig memory and 160gig disk with free shipping for like $450 or so was pretty sweet.

As usual, he didn't have patience of Jobs, and insist on fulfilling his instant gratification. Like a week after he got his new system, I'm on stealdeals.net to look for any brookstone coupons and I see Dell's C521 with 19" and 1gig and all the thing I got over christmas for $479 again.

Didn't really let me take off monitor for more discount, but this still is a good deal.

of course, banana republic's 40% off and free shipping stuffs and old navy's 2 for 1 deal didn't really escape my eyes.

shopping! shopping! they really know how to squeaze and torment you with the deals.

fixing mousy fedora core 5 bug

2007-03-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

after an overbearing 2months without mouse cursor and embarking 2nd fc 5 system (dell w/ dual partitioning being done to share with windows vista), i finally caught up and googled around in search for an answer.

after a few different posting, all pointed to comment #20 of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=182517.
basically /etc/X11/xorg.conf need to be updated:
adding:
## fehlender cursor, hwcursor off rhb#182517
Option "HWCursor" "off"

to

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nv"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge"
EndSection

to make it:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nv"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "nVidia Corporation C51 PCI Express Bridge"
## fehlender cursor, hwcursor off rhb#182517
Option "HWCursor" "off"
EndSection

i was about to be good at sensing where my mouse was pointing to without seeing the cursor points, but seeing it doesn't bother me either. necessary, indeed, is a mother of invention, or in this case a mother of fixing

can userdir and virstualhost coexists? on apache2.2?

2007-02-27T14:23:00.000-08:00

i've not configured apache all that much, even in 1.3.

and yesterday was probably first time i looked up httpd.conf since apache2.2 debutted.

i spent whole day trying to make a lousy 'UserDir public_html' bits working. First I had to check userdir module is loaded or not, and then added UserDir directive and ... bits.
I've also googled a lot to read up on troubleshooting, and followed all the suggestions on directory permission, groups, user permission, ...
After trying to make it work for about 5-6hours straight was quiet frustrating.

this morning, per coworker's suggestion, i tried to get virtualhost configured. making port to listen, and add ... took less than 30minutes to work.

Someone mentioned that maybe UserDir doesn't work because Virtualhost is active. I've not seen that on Apache's wiki/documentation.

Anyone got UserDir on Apache2.2 working? with Virtualhost also configured?

Ma'an, how do you make that work?
Heh...

forced upgrades -- ubuntu and blogger

2007-02-23T10:23:00.000-08:00

Google once was known for it's being 'beta' everywhere, and now the reknowned 'beta' is busily scrubbed off. After weeks and months of warning, I finally am forced to what they call upgrade. That means I must use google account. Heh.

Not sure the benefit nor compromise with this change as yet. (Aside from this 'Labels for this post' I see visibly on new blog posting UI).

On the other hand, I've had Ubuntu on my notoriously anoraxic(I mean thin) Sony Vaio Laptop. It originally came with WinXP, got switched to FC 2 within days and stayed with FC 2 past two years, with a bit of kernel updates here and there and other package updates. Other than Atheros wifi card giving me troubles now and then, inside firewalled network with essid/phrase, I was okay with FC 2. I actually enjoyed not getting so many of those 'you have new packages to upgrade ...' messages as FC progressed to version 3, then 4, then 5 and now is at version 6 and backward compatibility to FC 2 seem fading away.

So I was finally ready for FC 6 upgrade now that all the initial release bugs seem to have been fixed. FC 6 download is in DVD and ubuntu on CD and that's how the decision from FC 6 upgrade got changed to ubuntu upgrade. I'm slowly getting used to my new desktop setting. At first, I didn't see what the buzz is about this thing called ubuntu. Well, I still am not jumping out of my seat to advocate ubuntu over any other flavours of linux. I used to get real irritated about admin->networking pop-up to get wifi and ethernet working. And, that I can't go to /etc/sysconfig/networking-script/ to change the config setting. it's at /etc/network/interfaces. A creature of habit pampered by no upgrades for a few years, the switch isn't quiet as easy. And, wifi at the downtown office still doesn't work. :( Bah! Maybe it's my atheros, maybe I got incorrect essid and phrase.

I'm too lazy to switch back to familiar FC so I'm here to stay.

opal in sydney, ruby (on rail) in seattle?

2007-01-24T21:00:00.000-08:00

i've learned a thing or two about taihitian black perl when vacationing in taihiti/bora bora a few years back, and learned a thing or two about opal while in sydney for lca2007; i like boulder opal and black opal for the dark & deep blueness more than the white shiney opal of other kinds, i learned.

back in seattle, i got a chance to have somewhat not-so-in-depth(mainly due to my lack of knowledge) discussion about ruby on rail and ajax. I, of course, googled ruby on rail and got forwarded to o'reilly's olamp.org site to read up on ruby, the language, and rail, the framework to house ruby and mysql on windows. hmm... ruby seem very high level language, and mysql on windows with all the odbc crap being taken care of by rail seem interesting.

of course i just got back from lca2007 where i saw someone like dave jones giving a demo on how many useless cycles of application/user layer system calls there are, and i bet making things easier for the developers on rail would create more of these extra system calls. heh. shrug...

i googled again and found watir, web application testing in ruby, or something like that? pronounced water, is what the web page says. i should try to play with both ruby on rail and watir. i also found this rather interesting website called opensourcetesting.org, listing many automation tools, like sourceforge.

something new everyday, i guess.

sneezing w/ sunburn?

2007-01-18T21:14:00.000-08:00

hope it's not lca tradition.
as of tuesday morning i have slight sore throat, and as of wednesday afternoon i have sniffling and light headedness.

last year in dunedin, new zealand, there was some bad stomache flu sort of virus that someone picked up from christchurch and i heard it was nasty; many toilet drivers...

not sure if vigorous tour schedule on sunday, i got like 4 band-aids on my poor toes after 10hr walking, or if it's that fabulous speaker dinner on captain cook cruise that lasted late well past 11pm on monday, but sad truth is i got a cold. *cough* *cough*...

mmm... funny part of this is that walking around saturday and sunday, with rigorous application of sun block lotion every 15minutes, gave me much sun burn, on face, on scalp, on shoulder and on legs and the sun burn started peeling already.

laugh or cry? the cold is mild, and sun burn doesn't hurt (just itches). so i guess i can laugh it off? a cold in the hot summer of january in sydney! sun burn in january when it actually snows back at home!

hahaha

linux.conf.au sessions so far -- 2

2007-01-17T16:51:00.000-08:00

okay, it's thursday, almost noon. and i crashed and burned badly. "The Hao of testing" had a homework section and I didn't know and when I was supposed to start download gmp and its patch to follow along, i should've quitted. Some one whole lot more advanced and clueful next to me, however , was coaching me to go to ubuntu patch download site to get the package, apply the patch, and also to apply Hao patches from the homework wiki site, http://lca2007.linux.org.au/HaoHomeWork, and I couldn't say no. So I sat through for about 40minutes, downloading, compiling and frentically looking for the source that the tutorial session speaker was going over, and I heard Quantas, United and even KAL fly over my head, and I had to admit my ignorance and bail out. A big ouch! but then again, so many more have walked out before me, that maybe ... mmm... maybe it was more stupid to be sitting in on something I got no clue whatsoever. Nothing wrong with the course, just that I was clueless other than the session description mentioning that it's a tutorial on how to test kernel. Heh.

I sat through Davem's Netchannel talk and Simon's Kexec talk, about as clueless, but less in pain of being and looking every bit stupid as I was. heh.

back to tuesday's kernel mini-confs. Through Peter Chubb's session I also took notes to checkout some source control tools like cogito, Mercurial and quilt. Never knew of quilt to go w/ CVS, and never knew cogito to go with git, so something to search on wiki.

he also talked about debugging, with magic sysRQ key, kernel debugger and 'wolf fence' technique, of which I ony know the last, put lots of 'print' statement before and after. :)

After lunch was divided between linuxchix track, "Demystifying PCI" with Kristin Carlson Accardi, Rusty's "Wesnoth for Kernel Hackers (and everyone else)", and kernel hacker's panel. Heh, from PCI session I got out the basic concept for what 'driver' and 'bus' means, and thanks to Peter's session earlier I did read through /usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation for PCI, so things made more sense. And, of course I now use lspci. heh.

i didn't go to sleep that late, yet i missed Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's 9am session in auditorium on wednesday. shame on me! how do these geeks who drink 'til the whee hour of the night wake up promptly to go to these 9am session? i dunno.

luckily, i made it to Jonathan Corbet's "The Kernel Report" in full, and wide awake too.
After much internal debate, I decide to be a good gal and crashed another session before lunch. "Electronics with Linux" with James Cameron. Yup, he began w/ self introductory of no I'm not a director of Titanic bits. funny funny... I liked his demo of how he worked on night light and door bell that he designed and made himself. I particularly liked the idea of the door bell having 'how many rings you missed while you were out' idea, and the fact that i might play with pcb myself one day; hmm... maybe not at home, even with a full insurance. ;p
but the poor visitor w/ no clue as to the fact that he's used fire alarm to incorporate into his door bell? heehee. that gave me many many silly ideas while seated.

his main topic was on testing network bandwidth for OLPC, the cute old mac like white sub-laptop with green rabbit ear for antenna and hand-held. :) cute! It's pretty funny to see a big man like James holding it up to his ear to show how he tested the ping sound while walking away from the other laptop. like a giant in fairy tale, with big bearded and all. huhu. Anyways, he made it look rather simple and fun project to volunteer for a thing like that and people asked some silly and some naughty questions. someone asked if the wireless coverage had any differences day time and night time and he made a face as if he'd been too afraid in the night to go out. lol. in any case, he demonstrated that he could just run a ping on one machine, walk away or drive away from it while holding the other one, to get the idea as to how this wireless coverage would work, sometimes having a tree or other objects in between, and sometimes leaving it on the car and sometimes taping the access point to the ladder. I had much fun, and I see how this conference is encouraging for hobbists alike the professionals.

linux.conf.au sessions so far

2007-01-17T13:27:00.000-08:00

this year's conf runs from monday 'til friday, ending promptly with the penguin dinner.
meaning, there'll be no circus of shaving, ^^ for poor Rusty who's just allowed to grow his facial hair again.

weather on sunday was up to it's reputation, giving me sun burn with all that sunblock lotion. heh, a sun burn in january. had breakfast in coogee beach, took ferry to the zoo for a few hours, and hung out in downtown/chinatown for the rest of the afternoon until we met up with Kay's sunday party at the Opera House Bar. Took off early around 9:30pm to make it to the monday/tuesday adventure at 6am, but obviously didn't wake up for it.

monday and tuesday were mostly miniconfs, each of conference room setup as a track for one topic. there were debian, GNOME, education, embedded, mySQL, research for monday and debian, GNOME, Education, gaming, kernel, postgreSQL, openoffice and linuxchix for tuesday. Hmm... one too many tracks for a single person to go to. And, wednesday is when the full session began.

i like the bag for linux.conf.au 2007, it fits my laptop perfectly fine and is a size of a purse.

i began monday with Jonathan Oxer's "Escaping Image Storage Hell", and learned immediately one of more popular topics of the conference this year, virtualization!

his slides should be available at http://jon.oxer.com.au.talks and started with a brief description of storage options and how the virtualization oes work in current models. he used some humour describing the name xim(xen image manager) that it rhymes with vim, to state 'xim with vim', haha. His xim works for build and clean removal and other basic fuctions and he's still working on synchronization of virtual machine images and is still researching with rsync and unison, and on things like configuration.
unlike me many of the attendees were active player in the fields, or have been paying enough attention to come up with all sort of comments and suggestions. what a lively panel for the first session of the conference, and a mini-conf session it was too.

then, i thought i might checkout this "A solar powered blue-tooth enabled, embedded video capture device" by Jamie Honan, mainly because I'm a sucker for this 'solar power' bits and 'embedded' another keyword that buzzed my attention. it was more of a demo and sharing session and i enjoyed immensely. Jamie is an active bee watcher it seems, so he was trying to come up with a way he could monitor and study his bees and bee hives. He began a session with a thing or two about bees and went on to describe each of the parts and generations of progress as he surveyed and added different devices. I've seen a few solar-powered devices for home appliance at Fry's but was still a little too timid to do anything with any yet; solar-powered lights for lawn or solar panels to charge up the car and things like that. Jamie had brought a few of his devices and let people discover his bluetooth device, and also showed the small solar panel mounted to the steel pipe and described what gave him difficulties and such. it was a quite motivating session.

university cafe were pretty nice and inexpensive, and were open to feed us, some 600+ attendees at the conference.

there was no question and no arguments about skipping Keith's 2pm session, even as it was titled 'TBA'. Unlike last year, I'm not surprised that he gets to work on the slides 3 days before coming to the conference, and yet come up with topics that everybody cramms the room to come hear about.

Jetlag finally hit me, and I don't really remember anything from 3pm until I was hungry waiting for the speakers dinner bus to transport us all to Captain Cook's cruise. It wasn't until 8pm that we got on, but there were ice cream shops and pie shops at the pier, so ...

Tuesday morning was a bit tough, I wanted to crash Kernel track and also wanted to checkout linuxchix track, not to mention gaming. I started the morning with Peter Chubb's "Speeding up Kernel Development" where I got reminded to go back to the basic, read /usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation for things, and other neat tips like -> google for LXR on other online documents, -> use distcc and ccache to help speed up the compilation, and tune the machine for faster compilation (use SMP, better than multi-core) and things like that. He also mentioned to use ccache -C to compile if there's any assembly code changes to be picked up during the compilation.

a few perks of 16+ hours flying

2007-01-13T07:12:00.000-08:00

Haven't yet grown wings, and am not a fool enough to consider myself neither Peter Pan nor Superman.

With much of disadvantages health-wise, I do like flying, do like going to airport, even if it's to the other side of hemisphere, half world around, with much time zone changes.

To my surprise, time rolled fast enough so that lca2007 which I thought would never come and didn't think I'd ever see has yet come again. Week of Jan 15, 2007.

After much rains and much sunshines, the snow began wednesday afternoon and continued 'til much later through the night, leaving a few inches of snow on my lawn. My previous experiences in SF and in Busan leaves me with much wonder and awe at this sight. Also leaves me with a bit of worry, as I've seen what it does to traffics and power systems, from christmas' blizzard.

We left little after noon, to catch 4:30pm flight, getting to the airport by 2pm, with all the precautions taken; toilleteries in clear bag, pack everything into carry-on bag and cookies for 2 hrs at Sea-tac and another 2hrs at LAX. Some research saved us fees as monorail to the airport isn't quite there yet, not until 2009, and left us with airport shuttle, bus, taxi or airport parking as options and we got this $5.95/day option for this place in sea-tac, less than a mile away from airport with free shuttle to the airport.

As much as I hate to admit, upgrade to business class is worth every single dime, for that long 14hour flight. A quick lunch at Sea-tac's newly renovated food court area, watching planes take off and land, and chatting with some stranger(s), a Horizon mechanic with much tales to tell for this time, kills 2 hours easily, and premium status due to much of flights in 2006 saves me the long wait line at TSA X-ray station. Getting to LAX, getting upgrades, getting food and all is just fine, with an unexpected surprise, seeing Comet McNaught with bare eyes.

Maybe I've not caught up with current events lately, though I'm sure I did. And, maybe I'm no astronomy geek, but I'd no idea about it, and it made the flight to LAX a lot more unique and cool, even without any upgrades to first class. I was lucky to be sitting on the right side of the plane, getting a full view. How tiny it looks. Would I have been able to see it on the ground? I doubt, seeing how tiny it is hundreds and thousands feet up in the air. above the cloud, the sunset looks glowing red, and there are a few stars visible in a size of dots way way above the sky, and in the midst of red glowingness is a small dot with a long tail, about an half inch long to the dot-to-blob size comet. Thanks to the flight attend distributing newspaper article xeroxes and pilots exlpaining, and thanks to be sitting on the right side of the plane, I got to see and learn much about McNaught, a pretty cool event.

LAX to Sydney, the 14hour flight to start at 9pm, of course got delayed 30min before boarding and another 30min-1hr after seating. How did I survive all this? And, 14hours of flying? Heh, service for business class and the leg space is pretty phenominal. I can arrane the seat and the leg supporter extension to make it almost vertical, maybe about 5-10 degrees off?, position to rest my leg and lay my head to sleeping position. 2-3 meals they serve are better than some of fine restaurant meals I've had, and definitely nothing to compare to the economy class meal. I got orange juice served upon seating, dinner composed of appetizer, warm roll, and steak dinner, along with dessert. warm nuts were also served for snacks and hot drinks were served in a real tea cup, and napkings were not paper but cloth, and warm towel also a real towel not paper one. I did sleep through midnight snack, but I knew to be better prepared for breakfast, from the experience I had with the dinner before. It's a pretty big meal, all tasty, thus don't eat appetizer as if it's a meal itself! Flight attendants are pleasant, and movie access and individual reading light, with things like toothbrush and toothpaste, not to mention all the special toilettery stuffs from H2O(facial cleanser and water sprayer).

Having had some bad flight experiences before, including that one time for 12hour flight from London where the guy in front of me in regular economy class having pushed his seat backward for the entire flight while the little girl behind me screamed, cried and kicked my seat, this is about as close to heaven as it gets.

McNaught and upgrade! Maybe it's a sign how much fun lca2007 would be. ^^

who buys anything at full price anyways?

2006-12-31T13:53:00.000-08:00

past two weeks have been a pure bargain madness, especially with DVDs, dress clothes and computer products.

when I finally accepted I'm in microsoft-land, I tried my best to revive my home-built old pentium desktop I put together back in 1999 and failed, thus turned to good old Dell. with Christmas in the middle, it took 6-business days to deliver, but I'm happy w/ this new dimension C521 series AMD box with 1gig RAM and 80gig HD with 19-inch flat panel, all for under $450, with free shipping. hmm.... merry christmas to me?

not that my bank account needs any diet nor wouldn't my credit card mind getting a well deserved holiday breaks, I have discovered premium outlet in marysville on about half way home to seattle from mt. baker. a big ouch! there's calvin klein, borders, banana republic, gap, not to mention coach, tommy hilfiger, nine west, aldo, and even restoration hardware outlet. oh, my... of course the stores are jammed, but at some 30-40% discounts on every thing, and getting a blouse at banana republic for like $15 and nine west dress shoes for $29? heh.

well, the worst part is this incredible DVD discounts I'm still addicted to. All started with Best Buy having those $14.99 DVDs for Television Series, which got me landed on 2 Seinfelds and Friends' 1st season. Since the DVDs on sale were Seinfeld season 5 and 6, where I was still missing season 4, I started hunting Amazon, overstock.com, bestbuy, target, you name it I hunt it. That led me to discover that for a short period of time Murphy Brown's first season was at $8.50 but to get free shipping for $25 plus total amount, I had to click through each and every TV series that Amazon had listed. Oh, my.... what have I turned into? After much shopping I have bought Seinfeld 4 at $19 at Target, then Dawson's Creek season 6 for $14.95 at Best Buy again, which made me anxious about missing season 3, 4 and 5. Ultimately I've got me Seinfeld 4-6, Friends 1-3, Dawsons' Creek 3-6, Married with Children 1-4, Will and Grace 1-2, and Law and Order Criminal Intent season 2, total of 17 box sets, all within last 2 weeks, both at store and online. that's like more than $300, with pathetic excuse that they were all like some 50-70% discount.

shame on me....

heh, but thanks stealdeals and dealnews, for all those saving tips! ^^

okay, okay, i need to update my FC

2006-12-13T05:42:00.000-08:00

I'm still stuck in the dark age of FC3.

Recently I needed to update Firefox from 1.0.7 to 2.0, so I lazily thought of updating with rpm.

I stumbled on http://people.redhat.com/caillon/RPMS/fc7/ while googling, and when I try to heck the site by substituting 'fc7' with 'fc3' the infamous 404 not found surfaced.

My ethros driver is still from '05, giving me grief with corp wifi access with WEP, and I can't even update my browser? heehee...

I'll bravely try to rpm -i on firefox 2.0 for fc7, but maybe it's about time I do some updates.

houses are not the only ones with 'TLC(tender loving care)' I guess. my good old laptop(s) and desktops need my TLC \^^/

well equipped with treo 700 and highlander hybrid

2006-12-09T00:50:00.000-08:00

picked up treo 700 p at downtown yesterday, and signed my life over for 2007 highlander hybrid tonight.

shopping, indeed, is a lot of work. panting*

i've not had palm in like almost 5 years, and certainly wasn't a color one. 650 seem to be the current model, and 700 is the latest that verizon and sprint have been advertising on newspaper. 700 w is for windows OS and 700 p is for palm os. can take a photo with camera phone, so creating addressbook is a lot more interesting. i declined to get the internet for $15 a month extra. The helpful salesman told me I can probably download google map and/or MS map for free using bluetooth, and NFL; hmmm... do i look a big football fan? anyways, yet to play with it and discover more features. so far i'm still not all that used to with keyboard layout and the button-like keys on keypad.

after not having driven for almost 2 years, getting a car took some emotional toll. test driving itself got my neck and shoulder stiff enough as is, especially since i've never driven suv before.

i've been trying to be environmental friendly, to get hybrid over ever-so-tempting cutie mini (cooper), and yet i didn't know i could actually drive an suv. the toyota dealer that came to yahoo dealer this summer had shown me the 4wd with gps color map and how smooth the drive is that i've been reading up specs and competative analysis against ford escape, mercury mariner, and lexus against highlander for some time.

the dealer at the lake city dealership assured me of many color & feature choices on the phone, and i just was gonna do the test drive and shop around. well, these car dealers have reputation for being a good seller, and well, i'm a pretty good sucker. some other interesting features of the car included seat heater and the seat adjuster, to forward & back, and up & down, and the angle of seats. i'm sure i'll find out more. when I narrowed down to 4wd and gps as requirement, the color options decreased rapidly. i got to test drive a nice metallic ocean blue color that i liked against white, black and silver color options i got. but none had both 4wd and gps. the floor manager guy did place a few phone calls and got the black color model. the only silver they had, on display, was already sold and i was told that the owner actually waited 3 months and is getting it delivered this weekend.

when i was asking for 2006 model, hoping for better price and better availability the salesman almost bursted into laughter. he showed me on his computer screen that there are 2 model left and one is in rural california and the other in idaho. hmm... and when he told me the price, and no discount and 5.9 apr, i was like 'noooo way!' well, there are lots highlander but not many highlander hybrid, and reasonable selection of highlander 2 wd but not that many 4wd, selection of gas-powered highlander but not that many hybrid, and practically none with gps package on the car. so my color option ran out fast. the black one actually required the transfer from other lot, and either i take it or could wait 3mo myself for the right configuration and right color which i couldn't afford.

with a bit of negotiation, with a bit of waiting, and a bit of paperwork let us out with down payment check written and signing my life away. will pickup the car tomorrow afternoon, and will get the gps training; learn to follow the gps direction and drive ever so huge suv.

saw grey's anatomy and seinfeld season dvd sale on newspaper ads, but i think i sunk enough money down past few days as is.

oh well, watch out people! i'll be on the road soon.

lost - camera! come home, missy camera

2006-12-05T13:34:00.000-08:00

it's been exactly a month since i saw camera the last time.

wasn't lost in snow covered mountain like that poor family who got lost in southwest oregon for 9 days.

still, i should post 'lost camera' on mil cartons and on polls every corner.

i've had that camera for 2 years, and i admit i drooled over other new cameras and over the latest model that is supposed to be water-proof.

i am sorry camera! just come home....

p.s. while looking for my digicam, pentax optio 5, i found my old old camera that i didn't have heart to toss out. still good to use, but i got no films. heh.

no mas for shopping?

2006-11-26T10:55:00.000-08:00

using hispanic movers who don't speak almost no english meant i learn a few words of spanish myself.

one phrase i heard all day last friday was 'no mas?' and 'no mas!', and that means "no more". heh....

in afluent modern society 'no mas' might apply for holiday shopping. all friends and relatives already have necessities and some of extravagant toys as well.

this year ps3 and wii seem popular, and of course i have been shopping for hybrid car myself. hmm.... that adds up 'shop for myself', ba-humbug!!! but, holidays are for sharing and giving. lol.

i remember people camping out at best buy from midnight stroke of thanksgivings for black friday specials on news from last year, and how some people stood outside macy's at 3am for their special black friday opening at 7am. oh! my.... didn't know people were that diligent.

after seeing downtown macy's parade at 8:45am and thowing frozen bodies in downtown mall i couldn't help but search 'black friday deals' on google when i got home and saw stealdeals and dealnews and few other sites with emphasis on black friday deals.

heh, i got seinfeld season 4,5 and will & grace season 1 on the way and friends season 1 in my dvd player, all at whopping discount of $14.99 each and will & grace at $9.99. best buys had after thanksgivings special i couldn't even say no.

lcd tv's at best buys, frys, any and every electronics store seem super popular, and i am still shopping for $25 or more and free shipping buddy for my murphy brown season 1 from amazon; at $8.50 for whole season of murphy brown, i'm losing sleep browing amazon for something similar.

deals, deals, deals. looks like we got ourselves a big casino out there. at fry's i had to slap my own hand to say no to sandisk 1gig memory card at $9.99 for my camera; wouldn't it be darn convenient to not have to bring a charger to go on a week vacation? and at ikea, i also had to drag myself out after a swedish cookie at $0.99 mainly because i didn't need anything.

about every stores i walked into, with a few exception of fred meyer and costco, this weekend's shopping was for instant gratification of much of unnecessary items and none practical. heh...

no more shopping, no more shopping!

yeah, i'm clipping sunday paper's coupons, but i'm really not buying anything (ehem!).

baby turkey legs

2006-11-23T12:40:00.000-08:00

one of my favorite food at renaissance fair is big turkey drumstick that could easily feed a family of four.

it's heavy and i just carry it aroud all day long nibbling it.

when the smallest turkey at the grocery store was 10lbs, which means it'll last until next june in freezer with turkey soup, turkey jerkeys, turkey in curry, turkey pie, ..., etc., we opted out of having a big turkey on thanksgivings table.

after shopping around much, the best option was 2 turkey legs wrapped in meat section.

2 turkey legs, 1 box of stove oven box, a bit of celery, some raisons, a can of yams, a can of cranberry sauce. phew.... i dunno how people did from scratch, and i dunno how mums cook for family of 10s and 20s of relatives and friends.

in an hour of time that turkey leg in oven will be cooked.

any cooking tips? heh.

since i didn't know turkeys are supposed to be cooked in any special ways, i just preheat the ove to 350-degree, add some leaves for flavour, butter, some orange juice since that's only fruit juices i got, also for flavour, some liquor from cabinet, some water, and dunked in the legs after buttering'em up. i added chopped celery and some raisons into stuffings foil box before pouring in hot water and also put into oven to be cooked for 30min.

^^ happy happy thanksgivings.

to everybody,
and to the body of the two turkey legs our stomache are adopting!

p.s. burning yams pot was not intentional. just too much tasks for mindful housekeeper, to feed so many ... lol.

Idiot A-da-da

2006-11-21T22:53:00.000-08:00

I've been digging some old boxes and re-reading post-war existentialism short-story pieces lately.

Ha, too busy to read literatures, I guess.

Some of these short stories are like wine, sipping and savorying the tangy and sweet-bitterness of life.

Idiot A-da-da(Baek-chi A-da-da) is a story I would like to remind myself some times. Equivalent asian cultural literature in English would be madame Pearl S. Buck's 'The Mother.'

A-da-da is an idiot girl, who is a mute and is clumsy born to a middle class family with pride, and her parents and family were somewhat ashamed and annoyed with her effort that usually ends up disasteriously. Her name's A-da-da because that's what she utters, and when she wants to help w/ kitchen work she sets fire under rice pot or breaks rather nice dishes and her mother usually chases her away half in tear and usually with big broom to beat her as she chases A-da-da away. When she was of age, her parents gave a lot of money to nearby poor man with a mother to support in order to marry her off. At first, the poor mother and son welcomed A-da-da, for bringing such wealth to the family, but soon also got irritated with her. They got rich, with fine clothes and no longer hungry, and she was of no help at field work nor at household work, and was always getting in the way and they were ashamed to have her shown to the neighbors.
A-da-da was soon sent back to home from husband and mother-in-law, and instantly became sore sight to her mother, who's now got an idiot daughter who also got abandoned by in-law. A-da-da's mother was annoyed to have her around, and was ashamed that she had an idiot daughter home sent back from in-law.
It was very harsh life for A-da-da once she's sent back home from her husband who regularly beat her and yell at her, and one day a neighborhood man talked sweet to her and she fell in love. They promised to run away together and got on a boat when he showed her money wrapped in his cotton towel, enough for them to rent a small house and small field. His logic was that he's too poor to get himself a wife with dowry in traditional sense, but if she ran off with him he'd have a wife and they could work together to have own home and fields to work together and raise family; she's idiot, but is strong and would not run away from him nor demand much from him.

Alas, A-da-da being an idiot her entire life flashed before her, and she remembered how her husband and mother-in-law was nice to her with large sum of money sent to them at first that turned into regular beating and yelling at the end. It occured to her that the reason she got turned away from husband and get abused at her mother's house is due to this evil thing money. Her instinct tells her that this man would also turn against her because of money, and she unwrapped cotton to toss money notes into water that dissolves.
The man jumps into water to save, but the notes melt faster than he can do anything. When he jumps back onto the boat, his red eyes look mad and he picks a rock, anything in his sight, and stabs A-da-da's head, until she bleeds to death. Slowly as her hurting head spills warm blood and she dies with her eyes open she assures herself it's money that is turning this sweet man into a mad man killing her.

How stupid she is....
And yet how sharp she is...

How many of us are acting like A-da-da, I wonder? A little bit like her at some time, I suppose.

Nothing we do is right sometimes, and our judgements are flowed.

It's just being human?

I tell myself I'm nothing like her, but why would I re-assure myself in the first place?

Money, greed, mis-judgement of situations, and human relationships.

I'm watching 'Good Bye Solo' and the drama deals with this topics in a bit more details, with about 7-8 different characters each with own share of worries and life burdens. Luckily nobody dies with someone pounding on their heads with rock. All of them are wisen up and it's happy ending.

Stories that makes me think, think in once in a long long while....

Can't be that bad!

Now, I'm off to hunt Hemingway's story, a story that begins with smell of death being compared to trash dump site. heh.

consequences of pissing off big guys

2006-10-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

so, i was watching ducks vs. oilers hockey game and the highlight of the game was pronger facing oilers and oilers fan. the announcer guy said 'i am from the area, and folks there don't forget...' meaning pronger will have this 'please trade me out of edmonton to say anaheim...' tag on his back for the rest of his career. there were oilers fans showing jersey number 44, pronger's old number, with big red circle and diagnal line across it, the sign of banning, sprayed on it.

for the same token, we are witnessing what happens when you piss off oracle badly enough. heh. redhat bought jboss up, and paid in its stock heading down from its good 30plus a share and as if that's not bad enough, oracle's out to get redhat for stealing jboss away from its acquisition list.

should that be a lesson for north korea not to piss off the great united states? lol. last summer north korea's been begging for attention with nuclear test threat, and got no attention whatsoever. so it fired away its test, and now it's got attention from united states alright. america is vowing to just wipe out the country. oh my... and it's getting bad attention from the rest of the world as well. makes fidel castro look an angel, not?

anyways, just made me wonder if it's good thing to piss off big guys and stand up or it's just stupid.

time will tell. we'll see how pronger's career pans out, how redhat fights back to oracle (or not), and if there will finally be unification of two koreas, peacefully or not.

what lesson does it teach me? heh, i'm chicken. stay out of conflict, and be a giant myself. that's the lesson.

remembering sun linux

2006-10-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

it's no eulogy, as i am assuming sun linux still is in existance?

hmm... isn't oracle linux the same thing as what sun linux was a few years back?

sun microsystems tried something similar, its CD with general purpose server had sun logo on the top but everybody said it's redhat linux stripped.

heh, i guess that will take out a bit of fume I had toward Oracle.

guess the only reason Oracle forces Redhat stock tumble, and attention from wall street is because it's big, rich and has track record of hostile take over, of sorts.

hmm...

ghosts of christmas should visit, mmm..., some business folks?

2006-10-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

We're still hearing about sentencing of Enron, and how Intel gets sued from AMD, and how Microsoft and Google fight legal battles in socialistic european continent.

Like gulf war is somewhat like verterans talking about wrold wars, vietnam war and korean war, the story of how Microsoft rose above all comeptition from 70s, 80s well into today seem just a storybook fairytale.

Oracle enters, after its drama to buyout peoplesoft, now it's after RedHat.

Funny, how RedHat's exec. mention that Oracle wouldn't backstab, and how what Oracle is doing is a fair competition. And, how Oracle chief insists their practice is fair and ethical.

What business ethics school did he go to?

When I first hear the rumor about Oracle wanting to build own distro, that sounded much better than the drama I read about its hostile takeover of peoplesoft and how employees of peoplesoft tried together to save the company from evil take over and losing; watching star wars without all the starships, heh. Then I hear about Oracle wanting to support Ubuntoo, which still isn't crossing any business ethics. Since Oracle World 2006 opened, my opinion is deteriorating faster than redhat's stock sinking.

What? Is Oracle a Walmart of tech section? Is this how Microsoft became the giant evil it is today? When the articles go fly with how Oracle will support redhat at discount price, that sounded pretty unethical and I wondered if it's legal. I wondered, mainly because I wasn't sure. That's a dirty tactic, but that's how a lot of business are.

When I read fine lines and finally learned how Oracle's announcing its own linux, which isn't, that's down right sick. So, it'll wait for Redhat to release a new release, get the sources & patches, then strip any Redhat related texts, repackage it and sell it as its own linux OS?

Hmm... So if I walk into someone's driveway and steal a BMW, take it to nearest bodyshop to get it re-painted and put a new license plate I had, then the car is mine?

If I walk into someone's grape vineyard, steal lots of grapes, and put them into my ranch's boxing to sell, then I get to claim I grew them?

Oracle sure makes Google an angel, as until a few days ago all people talked about were how Google is going to crush Yahoo and yet their tactics weren't half as dirty as Oracle's.

What will Oracle say if mysql downloads Oracle's binary, reverse-engineer it, and strip any Oracle licensing from source, to re-package and sell it as its own database and tell everybody so.

Is this a legal thing?
If so, that'd make me depressed.

Christmas spirits should leave poor Scrooge alone for a year and visit redwood city this winter.
I can't believe I'm witnessing the sort of dirty business I only heard of as things of past or things happening far far away

speedy sharks, not gonzalez...

2006-10-21T13:39:00.000-07:00

3 weeks lagging cold means a lot of quality time at home, either in bedroom or livingroom.

that also means watching lots of hockey.

sharks, having played like 6 games(or is it 7?) so far, and having lost only 1 is pretty impressive.

even if that means no parker playing and fighting the way a decent hockey game ought to be...

one thing impressive about sharks is speed, this year.

watching 2 home games, tuesday oct. 17th and thursday oct.19th against lone star and red wing, it was pretty exhilirating. within less than 30seconds i'll see puck flying from one end to another, shot being made to the goal, blocked then sent back to the other end.

watching following coyote's vs. king's game made me wonder if i was watching some recorded game from 90s, slow slow and slow as ever.

sharks and penguins and blues are pretty interesting teams to watch for this season.

wow, what does hybrid hard disk mean?

2006-10-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

came across: " Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive Exposed", http://www.tfot.info/content/view/83/59/

well, actually it was posted on slashdot.

a hybrid hard disk? a hybrid car means mixing gasoline and electricity in running a car, and reducing emission and gas burning for cheaper fuel and better air control.

what does a hybrid hard disk do? other than to sound cool?

will there be more hybrid coming out? hybrid monitor? hybrind desktop? hybrid laptop? hybrid ... human?

at the rate new and better size HD come into the market, i'm a bit scared to purchase a HD. what if I buy a gig today and find out that in 2 weeks that's old and cheap and there's 5gig ones for the same price I bought 1 gig HD?

the photo of hybrid HD looks slick, and flash memory usage sounds cool.

i'm ignorant of hybrid expansion in computer hardware market. will have to read more and research more, to be somewhat better informed.

just was a pretty shocking thing for me to note today.

reviving jane austin: "Darcy's Story" by Janet Aylmer

2006-10-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

By some random luck, I learned that there's a book titled "Darcy's Story", Darcy being the famous character from Jane Austin's "Pride & Prejudice".

Austin's book is from author's view with close examination of the main character, Elizabeth Bennett's reasons and emotions.

This new book by author Janet Aylmer is from Darcy's perspective, at how Lizzy's family approaches his friend and himself, and how he reacts to things blossoming.

I've not yet had a chance to read it yet, as I found out only 30sec. ago myself.

Being a big fan of Jane Austin and having been some what bored with reading some random books here and there, I'm intrigued.

note to self to check this book out when going to Stacey's or Borders by new Bloomingdale in downtown.

halloween special : truly loved?

2006-10-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

i'm a lovin person, and yet people's been running at the sight of me, and cry when i offer a hug.

it's not quiet halloween yet, and i never do dress scary.

having a bad cold for 3 weeks, and coughing like crazy (my joke is: i'm building 6-pack ab with all the exercise my stomache muscle is getting), heads do turn at my cough sounds and i can't resist but to offer a hug.

how many takes my hug? not many... mmm, make it almost none.

headache and fever are mostly gone after first week, persistant cough remains and marking it 3 week come this weekend. pneumonia? possibly. bronchitis? maybe...

i've been walking around crying 'maybe i am dying'...

nobody yet buys it, just avoids my friendly hug and just smiles and walk away.

geez, i guess halloween started early for me this year: cough or treat!!!

today's slashdot: IT and Divorce?

2006-10-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

mmm... i read slashdot? nuh...

anyways: "IT and Divorce"?(http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/13/060201&from=rss) makes me wonder...

christmas isn't here yet, and christmas carol isn't due for another month or so. and i just watched 'click' with adam sandler and once is enough.

any so many comments too. oh my...

duh, imap over ssl uses port 993

2006-10-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

my ignorant got tested again when i reconfigured my ssh tunnel to use imap instead of pop, to get into company's vpn.

i've spent quite a few times, first trying with imap.companyname.com with port 110, then with suggestion from company's mailinglist i switched over to 993. yet, it didn't occur to me that 993 is imap port over ssl.
duh,
as soon as an in-house consultant clicked thunder bird's account configuration window's checkbox for ssl connection, i'm fetching some 7000 emails.

yike.

heehee, next is re-setting email filters to folders properly. i hear many bemoaning about it at the office, too.

new laptop envy and bloglines addiction

2006-09-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

at Netconf '06 Herbert was showing off his tiny laptop, it's even slimmer, tinyier than my Sony Vaio X505, only like 1.5kg?(I think my 1.8lb is like 3.2kg...).
To fuel my envy more Jamal and Harald went out and bought a few of tiny laptop themselves, smaller keyboards and screen size, but certainly half my Vaio in weight at Akihabara.

I wasn't able to take my Vaio, stuck with bricktop Dell that weight more than 5lb, i think it's one of those 7lb cheap-o.

oh well, I'll leave. either my shoulder will be muscular or will hurt more.
heh.

lately i gave in to bloglines and gave a try. With my addictive nature(well, i'm no gamer, but a korean nonetheless...) I subscribed to about 2 dozen, and if I forget or am too busy to check for two days, each grows up to like 200. sigh... A new boss for me. gotta check and flush the bloglines RSS feed every two hours. almost like feeding a newborn infant.

^^

is end to the greed possible?

2006-09-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

those who were fortunate(?) enough to hear my endless rants about the seller to my latest home would know, .......

i have to admit i'm sick of the greeds.

i would not deny that i have a streak of greed, who wouldn't want to get more for less and be fat with cash reserves anyways.

they sold a house in a nice neighborhood at the going rate for the neighborhood, but they've not kept the house up to the standard of the neighborhood. oh well, i'll eventually come to stop ranting.

or just rant about different folks, differnt thing.

recently there are so many articles about how big corporates put effort to save a few bucks here and there. Know of any company? How about whole united states of America? Public companies are subject for either buyout or privatizations, look at Ford, look at Yahoo, look at Apple, ...

What I am sick of is 'where is all the fun?'

Youtube is having fun, and so is myspace. Give them a few years, and like google it'll turn into evil, and in no time it'll become one of those once great now turned struggling company like Sun Micro.

Sigh*

What I see happening is, people lost fun and gained greed in the course of some sparkling success.

Is success truly evil for us?

I hope not.

Nonetheless, how do we balance greed with fun?

Will google also go south like Yahoo? Will HP turn into Enron?

Everybody's too busy spying, lying and cheating.

:( Though only a few, I did buy Sirius stock at the news of Howard Stern signup, bought Redhat when it hit $30, and bought goog at $450 with forecast for $600.

So I'm being punished, to certain extent, myself.

No grief here. You are only supposed to invest with extra cash anyways.

Will America, will the world survive this new era of greed?

People! let's turn off light, shut off water faucet, and don't stuff up refrig only to empty it straight to trash can. Stop buying shirts and shoes when closet is already bursting.

I'm no Greenspan, but I am beginning to be seriously worried. Where is the world going to? ...

truly lost in translation

2006-09-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

somehow i stumbled upon gnome & mozilla korean project site.

the korean romanization, 그놈 & 모질라 look real funny.

ought to have more dignity left in english.

uhahaha, i'm laughing all the way.

a week in korea, and netconf progress in tokyo

2006-09-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

my usual busy weeks have taken 'express' line past 2 weeks, as I've been having a sort of working vacation. to attend netconf '07 this week, and take advantage of being in east asian sphere, i took 2 weeks vacation. some extra work i picked up, however, have no vacation and i actually got more work assigned due to their pre-scheduled events.

2 weeks ago friday, i left light-heartedly from sfo, flying like 12hrs to Incheon Airport. crossing the time zone line, we arrived on saturday afternoon, slept in seoul to head out to a big hiking somewhere south west of country. returning on tuesday evening, we were back in busy metropolitan for the rest of the week. calling friends out, shopping, eating, Seoul was non-stop from 7am we wake up until 11pm we return to our serviced apartment. and, trying to check email, reply IM, and check in some work in betwee outing and before going to sleep and first thing waking up.

on sunday morning we headed back to Incheon to fly over to Tokyo, to Simon's Shinjuku apartment. He and Chizu were nice to let us stay at their apartment for a week, and after cooling off the sweats from walking in hot weather with suitcases we headed out to Chizu's old hangout to eat a nice thai curry in area called shimokitazawa, a college town. monday was Ghibli studio visit and harajuku field trip day; anime museum and street full of people dressing like anime character. Thanks to Chizu we discovered 'cheese ramen' in ebisu, and I was tempted to buy myself a nice anime dress in harajuku too. Kiddyland and Snoopy near Shibuya and Harajuku were just awesome too. We also went to more of local hangout, a 'secret restaurant' in Shibuya. Tuesday was reserved for Tsujiki at 6 in the morning and sumo watching all afternoon.

with work demand, and with sightseeing demand i am almost about to get sick. heh.

that didn't stop me from sneaking out from conference today to lunch with Chizu and Nancy near Chizu's work.

wed, 9/13, was first day of conference, at UDX in Akihabara. since we felt time constrant past 2 years for having only 2 days, we reserved 3 days this year. wednesday's speakers didn't take more than allocated 1hr, but this heped everyone to relax a little and interject with comments and questions. there are total 18 of us, me being only the ignorant one, it was interesting to see a speaker addressing what he's been focusing on and receiving floods of suggestions, comments and questions from folks specializing in slight different field. Saw David and Rusty running to whiteboard and turn on the light to draw diagram to assert their point. It was also funny when Miyazawa-san, one of sponsor speaker, gave his presentation of implementing a RFC and say he didn't understand the RFC fully himself as certain of words in RFC weren't available for his english-japanese dictionary. hohoho~~~

thurs, 9/14, is running a little slower, with more open discussion. So far, face-to-face discussions are pretty useful.

i start re-work on my presentation. bite my lip! hmm.... 아자,아자, 파이팅!(aja-aja-fighting!!!) to myself.

A Long day hike on Wolch`ul Mountain

2006-09-07T04:46:00.000-07:00

As if I could forget the 8 hour hike through Sorak mountain's trail to Daech`ongbong last october, that made me limp in pain for 3 full days, I got talked into a hike through Wolch`ul mountain in search of suspension bridge in mid Jolla-namdo, about an hour away from Province's port town Mokp`o again.

Upon arriving Seoul on saturday evening, we bused into Seoul, rested for the night and started early on sunday, at 7am to catch the high speed rail KTX at Seoul Railway station. Lucky for us, we could leave clothing suitcases at the service apartment's lobby for 2 days until tuesday, and were able to start our trip much lighter, just with a few clothings, umbrella in case rain storm hits, a few water bottles, and of course heavy bricktop laptops. A true backpakers. We were hoping to catch 7:25am express train and were dully notified we have to go to different train station for Honam-bound trains. Who knew... And, that the next KTX train for Gwangju would be 9:35am. With 2 hours left, and only 2 subway stations away, we indulged on Dunkin donuts we didn't quiet finish, walked around the station a bit for sightseeing, got held up by father-and-daughter team of Jahova's witness with broken english and some homeless begging for money. The station designated for Honam-province bound trains, Yongsan, had very elaborate station attached to mall, movie theatres, 4 stories of food court, and outdoor concert center. We spent about an hour walking around, buying some ginsaeng drink bottle popular in Korea, and drooling over some sushi houses and other numerious restaurants. We end up buying a few cheese burgers from Lotteria, Korea's own fastfood hamburger chain. The train left the station promptly, and our 3hour long express train ride began. From what I understand, slow train or slow bus would take some 5-6 hours, so 3 hour ride at speed over 300km/hr is a world class transportation. At such a high speed, I could use laptop just fine and didn't fear spilling drink at all. With 2 or 3 tvs per train car, and clean toilet at the end of each car and kitchen car, KTX is a pleasant ride. Slight expensive compare to other slower mode of transportation. Gwangju is capital city of Jolla-namdo province, south west province of South Korea, surrounded by many little islands and Yellow Sea. At 12:20pm when we arrived at the train station, we rushed out and got into a cab for 4000-won(like $4 usd) ride to express bus terminal within 10 minutes. We were lucky and caught bus bounded to Yong-am just as it was ready to pull out. About an hour and 20minutes ride, stopping about 3 other smaller country side, we arrived Yongam, at the foot of Wolchulsan.

Making a reservation from America, we assumed Wolchulsan Spa Resort, the only one listed on hotel reservation website was at the entrance of the national park. We learned fast that there wasn't much to do nor to buy snacks around Yong-am bus terminal, and our hotel was about 5minutes drive away from bus terminal and about 10minutes from each end of the park entrance. Having arrived and checked-in before 3pm, a little too late to start a hike but too early to sleep, we took local city bus for fare of 850-won(about $0.85 usd) per person to get to the bus terminal and took another bus that goes to the one end of the park, Do-gap-sa buddhist temple area. Like any park entrance areas, there were about 10-15 small eateries, more exciting that hotel vicinity, so we were hoping to get some jang-o-goo-i(fresh water eel bbq) that's famous locally or some cheap bi-bim-bap(vegetable & meat mixed with rice). We ended up eating Dak-do-ri-t`ang(Chicken soup). Amazing thing was that the owner goes back of restaurant upon order, kills a chicken without any equipment by simply twisting its neck, and would take feather off and cook. Eating a whole chicken is a big task for 2 people. Since we were open for experiencing local food, and most of the eateries at that area had chicken menu in variety, so we gave in and opted to order an item we weren't familiar with. It's like chicken stew with potatoes and other vegetables that's spicy. It wasn't nice of them to charge us for rice bowls, after such an expensive meal, but it was very tasty and we enjoyed it enough not to be sulky about it. As we were joking about the big portion of food, well suited for 4-5 people, we ate about 40percent of the chicken soup pot, and saw 3 of restaurant workers sitting and eating our left over when we revisited to ask for direction 5minutes later. The meal was hearty, and we were pretty happy. Since there are only 2 bus stops a day for the park, 9 in the morning and 4pm the one we took up to the park, we had to take a taxi which costed us 10,000-won(410 usd) to get back to the hotel. It was still not quiet 6pm and we were getting bored; no internet was available, too. So we walked down to B1 level where hotel's famous spa was located. We quickly learned that as hotel guest we'll get a free voucher a day, so we tried it and the place was organized as women's sauna and men's and I accidentally followed into men's and quickly came out; the lady at front desk gave me a look as if she wonders what korean I must be not to know the sauna configuration. Inside, it was somewhat awkward to be going to a public bath, but different tubs with different herbs, mineral, and temperature were truely impressive. I spent about 20minutes, jumping from one tub to another.

On monday morning, we took 7:30am bus to bus terminal and took the 9am bus headed to the other end of the park entrance, Ch`on-hwang-sa-ji. On sunday we didn't realize, but 7:30am bus was packed with little kids getting to school and local elders getting to downtown for hospital visits. We bought korean style lunch box, a container of rice and another container with pickles, and a bottle of water with a can of coffee to start our long journey. What we didn't realize was how unprepared we were in terms of water, we were just excited to have the mountain to ourselves as weekend hiking warriors all left town on previous evening. I also had mixed feelings with fear about going across suspension bridge, like donkey in animation movie Shrek.

It took about an hour to get to the suspension bridge, and my knees were already shaking. The trail was so steep and had so many big steps I was out of breath within first 10 minutes, huffing and puffing and constantly nagging for water. I was cajoled and coaxed into getting to the suspension bridge and that afterwards we might turn back to come down the way we started. The view was awesome and I realized after crossing bridge that climbing down the way I came up would be real difficult. I was told by a few hikers we encountered that continuing and coming down to Do-gap-sa would be easier on my leg. So we marched another hour and half to the Ch`onhwang-sa peak, tallest in the park, and it was an adventure in itself again. There were some very narrow passages between rock that would be difficult for any big person, and there were areas of reeds and bamboo and areas of slippery rocks. When I only had 0.1 km left until the peak, I thought I'd sit and cry and ask for helicopter rescuers if possible. At the top we shared lunch box, I got some sun block cream from another guy arriving at the top at the same time, and we even bummed some water into our almost empty water bottle. With me sweating and barely moving my feet, some climbers with sympathy had given us water here and there and so we got to have extra bottle worth of water. I was truly shameless taking candies and water from strangers. Heehee...

After lunch, for about an hour, I marched rather swiftly;powered by lunch and anticipationg to be off mountain as fast as I could. It was yet another 6km to go, easy or not. After first 30minutes of power walk, where I practically ran like those ancient martial man with skill to walk half the country in one day as if they can walk on water, I started to slump. And we were about half bottle left on small water bottle, and sun was pretty hot. We passed a group of Americans coming from the other side of the park as well. About an hour away from bottom of our destination, as we were about to pass out, we ran into some creek and without a hesitation we bottled up and drank up. At the bottom of the park was a huge buddhist temple and we were back at the eatery area from the day before at 5:30pm.

A quick bite at potatoe pancake and cab to hotel to dip into hot spring spa, we were ready for a feast of locally grown eel dishes next to the hotel.

If it wasn't for the spa, I may not wake up and walk about at all the next day. ^^

8 plus hours of hike was a long one, but view definitely was breathe taking.

landing Incheon

2006-09-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

after almost 12hrs flight, plus 3 meals(2lunches and 2 snacks that felt like 3 meals) and less than an hour worth of shut eyes later, I am in Seoul.

friday's flight at 1:30pm meant flee the house 10am, run to BART to get to airport, get through TSA search, and be inside international flight boarding area by 11:30am killing time.

line at Sushi house was long, and I made a joke "we're in Tokyo already" as I pulled my chair in to let people get through;the table was so tiny my leg was almost at the other end of the table when I did so.

some sushi, latte and useless magazines later the flight was boarded and left SFO on time.

it was actually good to catch some boring movies I was too uninspired to go see but had mental note to rent sometimes; MI3, over the hedge, Da Vinci Code, ... these movies were played 4 times over during the flight and I wish I had gut enough to ask attendants those private movie selections on airline magazine that look interesting but was sure to be off limit for economy class people like me. ah! first and business class people would be able to pull the chair to actually lay down, not hurting neck left and right. at $550/person upgrade to business class? no way with my own money. I could do millions of things with that. oh! poor me.

first lunch was a standard meal, and after already eating early lunch at 11:30am, it was not all that appetizing. half way through, not quiet at intl time zone change we got a snack box with a tiny cup noodle bowl, water, and a cookie in it. I thought that was 2nd lunch mentioned on boarding pass, and this time I gladly consumed when an attendant poured hot water for us. Then like less than 2hrs to the destination I learned there's that 2nd lunch coming. Hmm... honestly, where do I put all this food?

I did try to enjoy myself with random movies and some korean language TV on in-flight entertainment, magazines and newspapers and knitting a scarf. Thankfully I survived my usual landing-earache quiet nicely. I just took an advil right after 2nd lunch, dozed off a bit, and chewed gums madly the last 15 minutes of landing.

Well trained from last october's trip, we hustled through custom zippy-dippy quick, changed all our cash at luck of finding good exchange rate(during the best back in late 90s $1 could earn as much as 1600-won, those days are gone; bad for us and good for Korean economy. we got $1 to 992-won, which seem better than what a bank in America would give), getting a rental phone for only 3000-won a day, hopped on 602 bus headed to downtown Seoul. all within 30minutes.

traffic was bad once we got into Seoul, but it wasn't quiet as bad. Poor David constantly complained how sick he felt; eat less airplane food and sleep more! We got off little after 7:30pm, walked for 10min to check in. Got some toothpaste, shampoo, water, and a roll of korean style sushi-roll called 'Kim-bap'(literally seaweed rice) to share back at hotel.

time to do some work; at hotel's high rate of 10,000-won a day internet service! :(

i dozed off a little, and after 3 hours, am up again. trying to get through email, do the updates.

enough time to doze off again in KTX later the day!

2:45am in Seoul, iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit's sunday.

embark on voyage

2006-09-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

sept. 1 1:30pm is time of flight.

pack as light as possible. sleep as well as possible. relax!

could pack lighter, but it's not the usual i can't fit any more. checked.

it's already sept. 1 and i'm not asleep yet.

relaxing?

ooooooooh, and waaaaaaaaaaaah.... i'm excited!

\^^/

an old man buddha?

2006-08-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

an old man buddha?
Originally uploaded by speattle.

this is one of two fav. exhibit at asian art museum from my visit today.

at different angle i kinda got different impression.

that's what is special about art, isn't it? the artistic interpretation value and literal value of what one sees or touches or hears, ...

i first saw this sculpture as a wise crack old man. then as someone sitting very comfortable. then as someone wise.

i forgot what i heard from audio tour, but i like how the photo did turn out to be.

one that makes you ponder and think, and one that makes you nostolgic. this sure makes me think of the tour de museum today.

thinker buddha, in jade(one of my two fav. exhibit at sf asian art museum)

2006-08-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

thinker buddha, in jade
Originally uploaded by speattle.

this is one of two my fav. exhibit from today's visit to asian art museum.

the light was well done, and it is rare occassion where both bare eye and camera caught nice visual effect.

and, sentimental one too.

according to the audio tour desc., it's one of few rare jade sculpture of buddha and that the period would be when buddha was in transition before enlightment when he was fasting a lot and thinking a lot subjecting his body to pain to understand deeper thoughts.
heh, if i subject myself to hunger, my hunger gets deeper and not my thoughts.

this is one of few photos i think i can stare at forever.

seeneng's photo of sun reflected on beach from his bakers beach visit also is like that. glazing sun on ocean at sun set.

the lighting on this buddha piece makes it like special affect in movie.

wonder what he was thinking, i mean meditating...

ear ache

2006-08-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

could be the stress, could be the frequent flights.

my ear, both of them, aches.

with frequent trips to mountains and some flights, that's more or less standard altitude ear aches.

very unpleasant, and worse if i don't sleep well for a few nights before.

with gums, some water, chewing stuffs, and lots of talking to people sitting next to me or looking out the destination outside the window, i do try to manage. sometimes pop a few pain killer as well.

what does bother me is this weird pinch on outter ear lobe on right ear that's been bothering me for like 3 days in row.

doctors usually examine ears and might send me to either internal medicine or skin doctor who'll just dismiss.

if i go to chinese herb medicine doctor, they might try to show how my ear lobe's nerve is linked to some organ in stomache area or respiration area to tell me i'm sick elsewhere. last time i got treated by one, i had bruised my left foot and the guy stuck needle on my right hand between fingers and some more needle in my neck.

it's not constant, but it hurts pretty bad like someone stuck needle or some thing got pinched/folded sharp.

:(

not enough time to solicit docotrs.

sob, sob, sob...

trial for jury, not trial by jury

2006-08-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

my selfishness and busy life prevented me from enjoying the full drama of jury duty friday.

i've been summoned a few times, but this was absolute first time i had to show my face at the court for jury duty. even my school field trip to the court house was in oakland, thus make it my first time ever at san francisco district court house.

first off, it was super entertaining event.
second, it's super time-consuming event.
third, it's somewhat ...hmm... how do i say it politically correct?... hmm... i guess i just blurt it out, that's it's somewhat inefficient.

i'm getting on flight next friday, so that was supposed to be my ticket to get off the hook easy and fast. so i thought i might as well enjoy the show until i get dismissed, until my anxiety and fidgity almost killed all my nerve around 3pm when I start fiddle with my hands and keep bouncing my feet around making small noises.

so to tell the story, let's start at the top of the hour.

about 2 weeks ago i got the jury duty summon paper in mailbox, for monday 8/21 and that i had to call friday before after 4:30pm to know whether to come, to be dismissed or be put on-hold. i assumed i'd be just dismissed, like last half dozen times, so i just mentioned it to my colleagues and manager without much concern.
friday afternoon says checkback on monday, monday 4:30pm it says checkback on tuesday, on tuesday to checkback on wednesday, ..., so on thursday when i saw on sfgov.org that says 'show up 8:45am' i didn't really believe my eyes and i wasn't quiet prepared.

8:45am show up, so naturally i was fashionably late, getting off bus at the corner of 6th and bryant at 8:46am. I was worried stiff I might be led into jail for contempt of court for a few minutes of tardiness when i saw a long line of people at the entrance of the courthouse. Obviously it's not Macy's and it's not labor day sale yet. It turned out that the court had summoned all the 2 dozen groups of 40 people to the court house on friday, before next week's batch, that's like some couple hundred people trying to sqeeze into the court house metal detector and bag search at once.

The lady who walked around the line with speakerphone blasted that the line was indeed for jury and that once we get through the securty we should get to 3rd floor for jury lounge and check in.
It wasn't until like 9:30 when I finished getting through security and to check in.

It was like human flea market, so many people talking, cutting in lines, eating, laughing, and hustle&bustle.

I kept walking up to the jury lounge clerk asking 'shouldn't i be dismissed?' with my flight reservation stub. And, the clerk amiably told me to ask judge both times; guess clerks there are used to people pestering them with petit annoyances like this?

Anyhow, pocket search for having cell phone in pocket and a lousy cup of machine coffee that wouldn't dispense any cream nor sugar later it was 10 to 10 when I discovered by sheer luck that there were people using internet with laptop. I was supposed to be called in at 10am, but I thought if free wifi was available maybe the court house wasn't so bad. wifi was available, it just wasn't free. wasn't that expensive, $6 for the day, but if i'm sitting around for 10minutes and will be dismissed promptly by judge, was it worth it? It was much much later I found out it would have been worth it whole lotta.

at 10 past 10am we there were some 70-80 of us named to go to 2nd floor. At the door of courtroom i realized i was to attend a criminal court session. wow, how impressive.

i've faithfully been watching court and legal drama and read about every single one of john grisham's books so i thought i knew much and i was eager to see the evil criminal and fast paced and super fancy trial. i could almost feel the rush.

it took another 15min on roll call and stupid this and that and another 5minutes for the small lady in her 40s or 50s show up and sit down as a presiding judge.

as i anxiously sat on 3rd row on right side of the court seating to be dismissed and set free, there was this guy sitting on 1st row of left side seating that stirred up the crowd with his 'excuse me...' as he approached the bench that almost made the cop in court room to get up in reflex, to stop the guy. It turned out that he's got outstanding felony charge and he didn't think he should sit like rest of us and wait for turn to be dismissed.

Well, it took a bit of drama but he did get dismissed when we returned from recess an hour later. I thought why would the guy want to proclaim to every strangers in the room about his felony charge? Well, that's him, I guess.

It was shocking to know a dark colored lady sitting on left side of the table facing judge in black suit was a defendant in criminal court. she doesn't look like a vicious killer nor manipulative con artist, nor deceptive spy. oh well, that shows how naive i can get.

she was charged with some minor dismeanor, that would charge up $400 fine and record, that she's fighting. Oh my... I've seen people buying dress more expensive than $400. If I didn't know that I might have endured next 4hours a little better.
some 80 peoples' whole day sitting around listening all kind of silly things so she might be acquitted of felony charge and $400 fine?

I didn't say what my father usually say on things like this; give them a fair trial and hang'em. It's a joke. And, there's no need to talk about hanging anyways.

It was more like hanging civilians with exceptionally long jury screening.

if a businessman spent this much of screening in running his business or if an engineer spent this much time design and spec-out the product, we might get a perfect world. judge, defense attorney and proscutor had a paper binder with seating charts of 18 prospect jurors slots drawn as a big box with slots and used sticky notes to put juror's notes, profiles, questions, red notepad for concerns and alarms and yellow ones for other notes.

i was pretty intrigue to see that note taking, and also court clerk writing down everything spoken in her shorthand. these are the details court drama always seem to dismiss.

then the full drama began. 18 prospect jurors were selected and seated, and judge ordered the rest of us to have a piece of paper and a pencil to write down answer to what judge ask/address to these 18, to recite when one of the jurors get bumped out and an open seat is to be yours. like it's a blessing. ho, hum... maybe it is so for some.

there was this ex-security guy i thought would surely be dismissed, with his silly and pompous talk and acts but he didn't. there was this guy who told judge how biased he is about the subject it took no time for judge and both lawyers to dismiss him. one of those power wheeler & dealer at big company who talk his way out of unprofitable work like this. sigh*
and, there was slight mental case here and there, divulging personal information nobody in that room need to know.

the judge was fairly humourous, detailed and patient. also was pretty sharp to laywers sneaking in the same questions twice or putting words into the mouth of juror. that part was really like in the movies.

the judge recessed for lunch at noon until 1:30pm and that is when she allowed people to approach bench, one at a time, to explain why one should be excused from previlege of serving as jury. haha... one lady from jury got dismissed for economic hardship, and another guy that was sitting next to me for both economic hardship and childcare issue. sucker!

when i went up, i realized my flight reservation may or may not do the trick, so i gave her two reasons. one was the business trip flight and the other that i might have medical case because i have low blood pressure and sitting 8hrs a day for this might make me faint. she didn't buy that. i was already feeling pretty claustrophobic and stuffy with lightheadedness and faint hunger, but i wasn't gonna fight for it. when i gave up on going out for lunch and returning to face security i headed up to the jury lounge, it was already 12:30. with some trouble with laptop's internet connection, and another cup of machine coffee, it was 12:50. why bother with internet for 10min? so I went to wait for the court session to open. wasn't until 1:15 when we were allowed in, way way after both lawyers and defendent got allowed in at 1:05. so much for requiring us the prospective jorors to be prompt.

around 2 is when the judge let laywers to drop jurors from the seats, start refill and interrogate some more and let go some more, until they have 12 jurors and 2 alternates.

doctors got dismissed, people who vocalized being victim of some related crimes recently got dismissed, a chinese lady who's been living in san francisco for 30years got dismissed on basis of her poor english(oh! come on!) and so on. and there wasn't that promised recess every one and half hour at 2:30pm as the court wasn't really in session promptly at 1pm.

when i thought i might get up and dance and jump up and down, then stab myself to death with suffocation and boredom, at 3:10 was when 14 jurors got locked and judge released rest of us and also proclaimed recess.

so many questions, so many that if i was seated in one of those 18 i'd be tossed out at that first round of dismissal. and, to check-out at 3rd floor jury lounge, wait on long line and show the bar-coded stub.

lawyers, defendents get through security without wait, and is allowed in to court room without wait, and it's jury who wait and hurdle through lines and do check-in and check-out with bar codes? for someone's minor misdeameanor that would easily be corrected with a few spanking, some community service and small fine?

it was like what i often hear about early immigration processing line, treated like some luggage. hmm....

i call it trial for jury, not trial by jury.

on practicality level i'd say it's poor and not fair for jury.

on entertainment and education level, it was pretty intriquing. if i was just staying home watching ceiling, i wouldn't mind going through the whole process and watch the case being tried. for a minor case like this, i may not feel so guilty, it's not like that murder trial for famous people somewhere far away. and, who knows i might learn enough to write like john grisham, cheesy crime suspense. ^^

space saver microwave finally starts saving space

2006-08-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

It's amusing to see someone playing rock, scissor, and paper and one tells the other, "I'm gonna give a rock so you do scissor." This can be analyzed in two way, that either the first person is playing a trick and will switch to paper, or will stick to his word and give a rock. Odds are? It's sad that this kind of tactics are at every corner of modern life. Is this deal a real deal? Any hidden fees? Any fine prints? What's the gimmick?

Having the space saver microwave sitting in living room taking more space instead of saving space for over a month certainly made me skeptical. I carefully shopped and compared 5 different microwave before making the purchase, and carefully followed the instruction to drill the holes just in right place and all.

It was a heavy 60lb piece of metal, which does attribute to the difficulty of the task. Nothing I see at homes with wall mounted microwave hinted the sucker should weigh so much, but the one that arrived certainly did weigh 60lbs.

After me and Dave struggling and cursing for several tries we gave, I finally started scanning craigslist and phone at least two dozens handyman before we got someone to agree to come over last night around 7pm for an easy job.

I was stressed that the contractor would tell me the metal plate to hold the microwave on the wall is not aligned correctly that he'll take it off to drill more holes to the wall and all that. That would certainly take more time than 2hrs the contractor gave as his minimum hour and would worry me in rainy season with bunch of holes in my kitchen.

The guy who came over was pretty cool. He had all his tools, and used his common sense to look up our place without calling me at every corner of the street as I expected. 2 bags full of drill bits, power tools, level, and such. Yeah, I felt maybe we do have a professional (heh if any newbie contractor's starting out, get yourself lots of well-used tools to fool someone like me). To my amazement, he didn't take down the plate, and 3 of us working together we got it up in less than 30min. Oh yeah! Horray~~~ He got himself underneath the microwave, his head above the stove and facing up to the microwave, while I'm helping hold the microwave and its cord, and telling Dave to hold the microwave and tilt it forward to as much as 45 degree angle until he could secure the bottom back of microwave to be sittin on the metal plate's slots. All 4 of them securely went in, then they pushed microwave back to the wall to secure it with screws from top cabinet above.

How neat was that!

we spent at least 10hrs, drilling, lifting the heavy microwave up to the wall and taking it down, and ...
And, it takes easy 30min to get it up. Oh! my...

We gladly paid him for 2hrs, and got his number. Aussie man Rob is the man! Does his work, for a small job, and is well... friendly and helpful too. What can a small time self-remodeler ask for?

I went back to kitchen several time for no reason last night, just to see how it fits well into the top cabinet above the stove. Phew... finally about 1/5 of kitchen remodel is done. About $500 for cabinet pieces we picked up and assembled ourselves and installed ourselves, and $300 for microwave itself, and $100 for Rob to help us put up.

Took the depression out of daunting task of kitchen remodeling. Now living room is larger by 30x20inch the microwave tookup, and kitchen will also be as we throw out the old microwave sitting on the counter next to sink.
Can't wait to start axing bottom cabinet to install the new ones. Baby steps, works!

remotely interested in remote desktop

2006-08-14T14:19:00.001-07:00

something somehow forced me to evaluate remote desktop server and remote desktop client on windows.

i have a window desktop with outlook and IE at work, but have sufficiently been operating with mac os and flavours of linux and a few attempt at solaris for years.

i must say remote access on windows is okay. vpn, remote desktop, source control and content control, ...., well as long as one can afford buying all these software, it's not half so bad.

well, i got a laptop fell on me, so that evens my bias toward linux, the one where I spend money on hardware and maybe $2.00 getting installation CD/DVD burnt.

as i'm playing around with remote access from windows client to windows server, and have been using vnc for linux to linux access at random, i'm now ambitious to learn cross platform remote access.

the answer i get is vnc.

will have to try it out.

somewhat tired and sleepy, but maybe one day i can remotely access from my dream too. 'til then, just keep trying.

it's nice to know dot com bomb hasn't really ended much of internet industry. web 2.0 is springing, ipv6 isn't all that far in the future, wifi strength is getting better and now the remote access also would be a piece of cake.

nice!

15min sightseeing of the city on monday morning

2006-08-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

Most of us barely wakeup on monday morning, with sips of coffee, and cold stream of shower on head...

So I missed 7am bus, and was waiting for 8am bus on Van Ness and Grove, near city hall.

Barely awake I was, with this morning's Examiner in one hand, and shuffling small latte and bearclaws I bought on the other. The divider lane on Van Ness right in front of city hall seem a little overcrowded with officers, with a police car on each side parked in the middle of street with siren light flashing.
I was a little too sleepy to let it deter me away from my coffee and morning paper, but soon noticed fire truck, ambulance and more police on site. And, I could barely see someon laying on the ground, in between polices' leg.
Could some homeless person be knocked out on the street, while asking for money? Could this be an early morning hit&run?
It was a little too quiet for that sort of accident.

Then someone waiting for the bus as well started explaining to others waiting for the bus, who just came approaching the bus stop.

The guy came from city hall direction, toawrd the opera house, try to open the door to get in and failed, and went on to the middle of street and start banging his head, either on the cement street or on the metal rod that were put on the center divide.
The spectator also added that he presume the guy on the street must come from the courthouse, just a block away from city hall.

Who knows. That I'm sure was inconvenient of hundreds of morning commuter on monday morning, and since it only involved the guy laying on the street, that explains low key performance from cops watching him while ambulance arrives.
At 8am on monday morning, tho? That's a bit too much.
Wouldn't court house be barely opening?

I'm sure I'll see more about it on evening news, as no more than 30sec. flash.

As the bus I was in left the hectic site, and moved toward Market, I saw kissing of two gay guys parting at Van Ness Muni stop. Which isn't uncommon on San Francisco standard, but this and what saw earlier the day aren't so much a routine if I drove just half an hour outside the city.

To make the morning amusement heightened, there were more interesting scenes waiting for me as bus crossed Market and was near the Smart&Final store, right before the 101 entrance; a street person with his street cart and a skate board, and his dog dancing to his radio boom music while playing with meatless bone. The guy made a few attempt to pull the cart while holding the dog's leash and skate at the same time. It didn't seem such an easy task. The dog, when he was let go, would dance merrily, then pickup the bone and would be docile next to the homeless guy. Don't think he received much of training but the dog was well tamed and would sit or walk without much command, a small and cuite dog that seem well cleaned for a street dog, also not too fat nor too lean. They seem to be enjoying their early morning, when I saw anoterh street person stop the guy asking for some of his belonging, from the cart where the music box stood for a short a while.

Then the light changed, and bus moved on, to join the rest of traffic on 101 and thigns got just blend again.

8:05 am until 8:20am, that short 15min provided much to look at, much to ponder about. And, did I mention it's only monday morning on some uneventful August morning?

Maybe that's what the city living is. Eventful at every minutes and seconds, on any given day.

state of kimchi or state of IT book market?

2006-08-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

With a few rather nice independent book stores in & nearby SF going out of business, and with me start to look into more technical books inluding linux kernels and ever so popular .NET, I couldn't help but to do a bit of googling(it's officially a word, now, I hear) for 'IT books,computer books, market, sale, analysis'.

Nowadays everybody blogs, and sometimes obsessively, whether on his/her own blog, or as a commentator of some one else's blog.

First, I was pointed to Tim O'Reilly's personal & company blog, tim.oreilly.com way back from 2002 and 2003, with numbers, pie charts, ...

Then, I got to Apress's company blog that gave a few numbers, mainly comparison between Apress, Xrox, Oreilly and few other competitors' sales within last 4-6months.

I have to admit I'm not familiar with Apress as the publisher. That shows I've not been reading new books much, and that shows I've not paid much attention to the books in windows platform, #C or .NET or ASP. I'm pretty impressed with Xrox, at their speed of getting interesting & well written books published timely. O'Reilly is just O'Reilly, it's just been there for as long as I can remember, when I first typed '#!/usr/bin/perl' without knowing I was using perl4 or perl5;and couldn't have cared less.

It's nice to see that people are willing to post marketing analysis and crunch the numbers for public, and it sure is humorous to see Tim O'Reilly himself posting comments on Apress' blog, numerously, too.

As old saying, know thy enemy and know thyself and thy shall conquer 100 out of 100 battles?

The fact that I could fish some of data that would have been expensive, secretive in past makes me wonder. This just reminds me about one of NPR radio broadcast where some book publisher analysts give list of best seller book titles, and how the title of book affects a potential buyer's split second decision of whether to take it off the shelf to take home or not.

Geez, and here I thought book writing was all about writing skills, passion and creativeness.

I see many blogs begin with 'state of onion' or something like that. I ain't no shrek and never did like how spicy it is. Heh, I prefer kimchi!

my state of kimchi: I decree I shall dig up more on this book marketability. I wouldn't be writing best seller 'devil wears prada' or 'da vinci code' any time soon. but, it's a joy to find out how things are done, how the formula works out. hacking hacker books... hmmm... and, nope, i ain't no hacker!!!

three strikes you are out, three bars you're in network

2006-07-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

spent a few minutes this afternoon walking around withing a few feet in search of cellular phone's bar. was expecting a phone call, yet i know there usually is a phone with red diagnal line on my phone from my cube. that's translated as no service. i can barely hear the phone ringing, but as soon as i pick it up the call hangs with 'no service...' message displaying.

knowing i'm expecting the phone i walked out and walked about staring at the phone, neverminding anything on the ground i might trip over.

i used to laugh at phone commercial, yet i realized i was doing exact the scene from the phone commercial. walk two steps forward and get a small bar, then two more steps forward to get 2nd bar, and yet two more steps from that point lose the 2nd bar i just obtained. walk back, and it doesn't come back and walk a step to the left and there it is again. it took me a full two minutes to secure a spot that has three service bars displaying, ensuring a reliable and audible service.

sigh* when i switched over from sprint to t-mobile, i thought the services were better. last 2 years, it's been deteriorating. about 6-8months ago i could actually make a phone call using cellular phone from my cube, which i sadly can't.

of course, i'm not a phone freak. except to call general contractors or dispute credit card bill, and to answer occasional rings, i make like less than 1 or 2 phone calls per month.

but this still is sad. limited service area, and walking around in search of cell phone service bar.

wonder why the phone bill does go up, if the service area is being reduced.

time to shop for new phone service plan? or just give it up all together?

oh well, oh well...

netconf 2006 is coming~~~

2006-07-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

there are much heat wave and much rain and wind everywhere, making sizzling summer a bit of a travel hazard.

well, that's not the main reason but Netconf 2006 detered from previous July travelling and will be in Sept. This time in the heart of Tokyo's Akihabara. For those in US and familiar with Fry's, think of blocks and blocks of Frys, that's what Akihabara is like.

Well, will we be able to confine the attendees within the conference room?
Maybe the session topics and fancy attendee list would do the trick. Last year Thomas Garf's graph set new height in visual presentation; heck, I didn't understand half what he said but I remember such cute lines and dots in animation. Who will present what, and what will that lead in terms of development for next 6months? The dates and attendee list increases, to accomodate past events' constraint in time of two days with about 1-1.5hr per presentor.

I'm looking forward to learn how to integrate Usagi rabbit (Usag is like a rabbit/hare in Japanese, literally) and Mashimaro the mutant rabbit Netconf adopted as mascot.

3 days in Tokyo locked up with super geeks. Davem asked me if I can make myself useful w/ a slide or two myself. I joked saying maybe I can teach these bunch of foreigners basic Japanese, for their evening out to Akihabara the toy store. Seriously I need to hit the wall hard with my head, to make something useful out of this. Think, think, think.......

spare the air, spare the air conditioner

2006-07-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

SF Bay area kicks w/ 4th spare day of the year on 7/17 monday.
Which is cool. I can ride caltrain instead of my free alternative on highway 101 that takes forever.

Wouldn't be surprised, as I personally eyewitnessed temperature shooting high, up to 111 and 115 around vacaville and placerville valley on the way home from Tahoe on sunday.

Still, at this rate I might catch a cold, so hot outside and so cold inside the air conditioned building.
Achooo~~~
sniff~~
sniff~~

if silicon valley companies are spamming "we will shutdown light from 4pm-7pm... blah" to save electricity in the hot day of "spare the air" day, couldn't they also lower the air conditioner just a tinsy bit?

wearing sleeveless inside and winter coat outside should only occur if I walk intoa nice warm home from snow blizard cold of alaska, not the other way around.

another day of shivering inside the office only to sweat to death on way out to lunch and commute home. how perfect! (not!)

lesson with partitioning intel-based mac for linux installation

2006-06-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

in order to run bootcamp, do not partition the disk into mac os and linux.
i'm spending a good half an hour to unpartition. have 100gb disk, partitioned into 50/50.
if i run bootcamp, running on mac's****** partition, there's like nothing left on mac os partition and linux partition will stay a void.

waste of time? or lesson fee for trying to get linux on mac mini?

still a long way to go. i'm getting a little impatient now.

more attempt at linux on intel based mac mini

2006-06-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

from reliable source(ehem), i got notified that updating iMacFWUpater(firmware updater) to 1.0.1 and installing bootcamp for winxp, then downloading fedora core 6 for x86 test run 1 on dvd burn would do the trick. well i've already partitioned mac's hard disk so i might start with firmware update then fedora core 6. if it doesn't work, then i'll install bootcamp and give another try at fedora core 6.

wahoo~~~

maybe it'll work.

would be pretty neat if it works as easy as that.

invisialign baby babble

2006-06-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

So i finally picked up my invisialign on friday.
(don't ask me to pronounce slashdot, i pronounce it swashi duh. oh! my)

A month or so ago when I went into dentist's office to pick it up, I found out that impression had imperfection and that there was no invisialign. Instead I spent 3hrs sitting in dentist's chair, almost ripping my mouth while Dr. Ganji tried to get impression mold of my upper & lower teeth, about 10-15 tries each.

Went in for 10min invisialign pickup actually turned into 45min, struggle to learn to put the container on and off my teeth, and Dr. Ganji putting some holder on teeth to keep the guard stay on. He told me to use sonic care to brush the guard, and the goal was to wear it 20hrs a day 7 days a week, for 2 weeks and go to next set of guard. For next year and half. Hmm...

Unlike braces I had to wear, that had metalic base station put on my crown and wires running through them, this is a clear plastic thing in shape of my teeth outline, plus a bit of bend here & there to mold my teeth to reshape.

I've been wearing it since friday 9am, with about average of 18hrs a day. Sort of annoying, and does hurt my teeth a little, as my teeth are being pulled according to the guards' shape.

So far it's ok. But I talk like a baby or a grandmother. I got picked up for carpool this morning, and half the time the lady who picked me up says 'What did you say?', 'Excuse me?'....

And, I forgot the guards container case at home. Eating lunch, taking out the guards, cleaning up the guards, and talking in the meeting,...,
fun, fun, fun....

And, I will have it for next 18months+.
Lucky me... *sigh*

bridget to the rescue --- oops, i've done it again.

2006-06-18T01:09:00.000-07:00

oops, and major oops.
not britney spear's slutty song.
i've just done my usual turn bad into disaster performance again.
after 3 weeks of anxieties, panic, and pure madness of trying to get washer fixed for tennants, i gave up and started shopping. online shopping delivers in 2-3weeks, and would cost me about $1500, and possibly tax, shipping and installation.
naturally i turned to craigslist, and made an appointment to see someone with a compact washer/dryer combo unit on moving sale.
the guy showed me a demo, killed some time with witless joke while washer finished the shortest time consuming cycle, with water pipe and power cords, and all that stuffs.
relieved to have found a working washer/dryer, i abused already ill david to carry the unbelievably heavy (it's so tiny yet so heavy, oh my) down 2 stories on steps with the seller guy. i insisted i carry the washer down myself, and they both laughed and wouldn't let me. two of them struggled to get the washer down to the ground level, so i believe they were quiet right not to let me carry it.
getting the washer in to the unit, unhooking the non-functioning appliance, putting in the new unit and checkin, ..., phew it was easy to kill 3hrs on a fine saturday afternoon.

feeling quiet accomplished and confident of my fine work, i enjoyed the evening until i got an emergency call almost 11pm at night. oh, my god! for some reason water faucet to washer has been leaking since 4:30pm when i left the loft, and HOA crew had to knock on the tennants door notifying them that leak from washer damaged the garage, both B1 & B2 and that the guy turned off the water for good.

what have i done?
this ranks one of my top rated crisis. of course i have plenty crisis in life time, so it's ranked top, super top ranked crisis, along with when i first got my speeding ticket and when i first got my first IRS audit. at this rate i might hit heart attack soon.

would i severely be penalized by HOA? would tennants want to sue me? what have i done? oh, my god....
i rattled, rattled, and called back the tennants about 5 times within 10 minutes, to the point my tennant actually had to calm me down and tells me not to come over at 11:30pm night, and call back HOA on monday to take care of the issue with HOA and not to worry about washer for them too much.
how sweet.......

it's been about 2hrs since the last phone call, and i'm still about to die with shame and fear.

of course, poor david had to put his stomache flu aside to help me from an offer to drive me to the loft to just comfort me and assure me nothing's wrong. ^^ how nice...

so as i'm not driving down to the loft on saturday night at midnight, and still not knowing how to shake off jitter-bug, i stick "Bridget Jones Diary" into dvd. well, I searched a few dvd, and 'runaway bride' and 'bridget jones diary' had to fight over the most loser character spot to compete to make me feel better.

oh, why me... oh, why me...
now i'm struck with newly found agitation that i'd probably have to look for a new washer/dryer option, or just have some one fix it for me, someone professional this time.

oh, my...
it's gonna buy me lots of scolding from HOA management lady, and lots of shedding on checkbook.

dear god, i hope bridget looks loser enough in 2hrs movie time.

when will i learn, i wonder. oh, dear me!

cosmetic surgery for slashdot

2006-06-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

I've known of slashdot's new design, yet I've been busy with this and that to check it out 'til now.

So the color, and 3 columns are the same, list of articles are the same, ...

some of round tabs look different, fonts and tightness of articles inside box look somewhat different, not to pin-down the size, font-face or anything as I'm too clumsy to have taken notice in the first place.

i can buy the redesign, safe within earlier design yet giving a slight different look. and, is it supposed to load faster, too?

no complaints from me, as it's not any slower nor any pink(like on april fool's).

flixster, and tear-jerker father's day

2006-06-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

I just got invited to flixster, and unwittingly I clicked the link to site, and was stuck for almost half an hour. very very addictive. i've reviewed about some 200 movies with clicks on star, and i had to literally force myself to get off of that site.

Open! Open! I'm in that Mervyn's commercial where people are glued in front of store door shouting "Open! Open!"

------------------------------------------------------------

on another note, my father's day gift arrived home safely it seems.

Appa can write an email. Should I be impressed or just be sad and miss him lots?

oh well....

guess that's our movie! oh! happy father's day.

reservation of 'stupidity'?

2006-06-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore's been more than generous on criticizing Mr. Bush, with numerous books and speeches such as 'Stupid White Man'. But then again, as I was walking past "Well Lighted Place for Books" on the way to work this morning(I think in my dazed & dozed self) I saw "Stupid White Man" a book not written by Moore but written about Moore.

Hmm.... I wouldn't say it never occured to me, but it was sorta interesting.

If I was to search a book database with a title, 2 of them will come up, 1 with author Michael Moore and another with desc. of Moore.

As muchas Bush draws a lot of criticisms, there has lately been some editorials pointing out that Bush's accomplishment is often shadowed by criticisms on him that are less than important, such as his stuttering, fumbling, and lack of sensibility in speech.

In any case, people sure like this word 'stupid white man'. Hmm... does this mean stupidity in whitemen are common or does this mean it's so rare that there's need to emphatically point out?

Just a silly joke that rhymes in my head.

quality! quality!

2006-06-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

it's a laugh when my parents talk about good old day.
when gas price was dirt cheap, it was safe to walk around, the job was for life time, ..., etc.
but then again, they didn't tell me wage was also dirt cheap, issues on racism, religions, gay&lesbians were about as backwarded as 16th century, and there was no cure for cancer, ..., etc.

my foreign friends always complain how america's greatness is over-rated, and show great patriotism with this world cup event et all. Yet, they flock at a chance to tour or immigrate to the U.S.A.
hmm.... am i missing something here?

anyways, once I start thinking of things from both side of the thin wall that separates the sides, I start drive myself crazy. It is a question of chicken and egg.

Often times I drag my IT background into day-to-day activities inadvertently. ordered microwave online, for easy delivery and to default on state tax. I happen to live on 3rd floor without elevator, and what does the delivery guy do? He drops the damn thing in between first and second floor and flees the scene as soon as he obtains delivery receipt signature. Leave it where he left? Or pick it up myself and break my back (& possibly the ordered item at the same time) pushing it and pulling it up to 3rd floor? A slight exaggeration I admit, and I wasn't home to suffer through it, but I just couldn't help exploiting over low quality of outsourcing and low quality of services nowadays.

Am I getting as old as my parents or am I becoming as foreign as my foreign friends?

To make my already skeptical mind in worse state, I looked at the receipt of Sears Repairman who showed up a day too late, with about 45min too early of his notice. There was a mal-functioning washer machine. After calling one too many local repairmans listed on craigslisted, Sears Repair department was contacted, given last friday 1-5 as window the repairman shows up. I called to the repair center to learn that I'm on #8 of total 8 services scheduled. At 4pm I get a call saying he'll be at 6pm, and at 6:05pm I get a call saying he can't come and reschedule. I can't take a day off from work every day and still have my job, so I ask someone else to let the repairman on monday and explain the problem, ..., etc. I call Sears again to learn I'm #8 of total 11 services, and get a promise the repairman will call 1hr prior to showing up. The repairman calls around 2pm, about 1hr ahead of expected show-up time, and I relay the message. The repairman shows up around 2:15pm, to declare there's nothing wrong with the washer machine other than operators using it. Oh well, so I ask him to write down his discovery in detail for me in his receipt. When I came home to see the receipt! No 'Sears' print, and the date is scribbled 6/16/06. Hmm... it's 6/12/06, so he flew to future to repair it and turn the time back? Oh, my. And, there's no name of repairman, description, ..., nothing. Just says 'service, all checks out ok... $113', about $45 more than advertised $69 per diagnosis.

That's what I call state of fine service. Of course I'm being sarcastic.

Should I go on with Home Depot paint mixer guy who royally screwed up my orders twice?
First, I take him 2 cans of flat white base with colors I want, and he tells me that's wrong brand of paints only to bring those that are used for doors and windows with shines in it.
When he is pointed out, he acts up and then now he's giving me 2 cans of same colored paints instead of 2 separate colors as original request was.
Do I fight with this guy? Or just give up?
And, why is he the one fuming with green clouds, and pushing aside my orders 'til last just because he's corrected?

I'm not fuming...
More so in dispair.
Where's this world coming to?
Why are people more concerened about better pay, but not willing to perform better?

Just thinking about things that just make absolute no sense to me, and makes me sad to witness how quality of service continues to decline....

Still am searching for the other side of the story, helplessly battling against myself that there's a good reason for all this. Oh, well...

worldcup, mmm... what are we talking about?

2006-06-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

barista lady at beantree finally remembers i want latte in the morning, not mocha, and all of sudden stock market's pushing upward. hohoho...

finally learn to say 'no' to sweet sweet donuts(my favorite ones are the glazed/chocolate buttermilk ones, and there were plenty) at bean tree, and eating dry bagel, without cream cheese. :D maybe my one-size-too-small dress would appreciate this.

while toasting bagel, i couldn't help notice a large crowd by tv, airing worldcup france team is playing about half-way in.

today there's france team playing switzerland?, and brazil team playing, and of course underdog of 2002 south korean team playing. everybody's buzzed up on brazil and france team, as i can see many sitting around tv at every cafeteria corner with laptop.
no wonder many companies invested so much on putting their ads around the fields at the stadium.

who says american are disinterested in worldcup, now that USA team lost a game?
i couldn't tell from the crowds i see at every sports bars in town, and at every cafe with espn.

oh well, ...., go! mmm... somebody? most likely 'go brazil' for many soccer fans.

:D i've watched the game italy won, england won, and ... i might as well be worldcup literate now.

can't believe how olympic in greece was such a flop, when seeing worldcup stadium packed and every tv being tuned to the soccer game.

go! worldcup!!!

more twin frenzy

2006-06-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

while i'm on the roll for twins, happy birthday to olsen twins.

whaaaad? only 20? hmm....

was i ever at the tender budding age of 20?

run around everywhere

2006-06-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

June!
A month for busy Gemini, to go every direction and do everything.

Busy with lingering taxes from April(both income tax and property tax), some weird interim ballot on June 6th(Hmm... 6+6=06 thing didn't deter the california election, interesting), went to Larry's 1st annual pig roast that reminded me of Hawaiian vacation long ago, with pig roast dug out from earth and hula dances during the feast. And, a day trip to point reyes for a quiet beach getaway along scenic coastal california highway, finishing Jackie O's biography, a stab on Stephen King's deliciously horror fiction titled 'Thinner', reading a few of Bernenke's books that arrived, ...

This, while going to 8-5 job every day, and while tearing apart the kitchen to install cabinets and over-the-range microwave with exhaust fan, trying to get a washer machine for tennants with about two dozens phone calls and reading three dozens websites to learn all the appliance vocabularies, ..., phew~~~

It certainly is a busy month.

The weather, is not yet decided that i's June, affecting much of summer & fair business folks, and stocks' definitely been under the weather; I was stupid enough to leave an open order of goog at $450/share for 2 shares, and ibm for $78.75 ofr 9 shares when good was at like $480/share and ibm $80/share, just to wake up next morning that my open order got excuted and that stocks been tumbling down, down, down the spiral staircase to $380/share for good and $77/share for ibm.

Can't belive June's not gone a half way yet. ^^

Got a lot more damages to make, as I spent whole afternoon last friday reading O'Reilly's aadvanced perl programming to make friends with 'swig' and 'perl Tk', which does work, for my surprise amusement; maybe my own tetris, ms. pacman or sudoku wouldn't be much of a dream.

Hope sun does return, to bring sunny california back to rather seattle-like bay area. with my head spinning at current rate, tho, can't tell I notice the weather much, tho.

will there be cloning of the twins? making me busier by folds, as a quadriplette?

learning Bernanke

2006-05-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

It's been a while Fed.Chair's seat's been handed down from Greenspan to Bernanke.

With a lot of personal items at hand, fixing kitchen, getting over cold, cheering for Sharks, and work, ..., etc., I've sort of watched Bernanke's movements from a far.

Afterall, he's been raising interest rates as expected so far, and not much else is new, in my radar.

Stock's been dipping low since late last week, and continued to yesterday, monday, and I walked around moping: if tech. and commodities are down because of soaring oil price, then why are energy sector, such as Chevron, down?
Stocks bounced rather handsomely today. Personally, the explanation for all these ups and downs are way beyond my speculations and knowledge.

I've asked naver.com in vain more about Bernanke, thinking naver.com may be number one search engine and portal in Korea, but what would it know about this less well-known chairman, who's not even a Korean.
Well, naver.com does know, and Bernanke's got an impressive working history. Oh, my... Shame on me.

I've got directed to all his publications, and teaching careers, and other stuffs.
Well, I'm even ordering two of his books from Amazon as we speak.

Would it teach me to know if Fed'll raise interest or not? Would it teach me which stocks perform better or not?
I doubt it.

But it'd certainly get me a few more vocab. and concepts, with examples of how economist analyze past and current economic situations. Maybe it'll also help me to make more informed judgement on this Greenspan-replacement that verdict is still out on.

yawn, I certainly need another coffee. Eh, 9:30am? it still feels like 6am to me...

I lost shoes and Hannan/Smith lost stick

2006-05-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Usually monday's the day after sunday, when people return to windowless office after a golden weekend to recover from weekend fun.

With Sharks' domination on ice and win on sunday evening's game, and all other Cinco de Mayo celebration, not to mention beautiful weather to enjoy, there were much to recover from on monday, and I slumped all day. Sleepy with headache that didn't get cured by espresso nor gym workout, nor work itself, I dragged my tired feet, cranky all day long.

Then, there was 'monk fish stew with bean sprouts(A-goo-jjim)' dinner that was like super spicy, super hot, and super super a lot (ready to feed like 7 people?), that finally woke me up at 5:30pm.

With my belly about to burst, eager to get to sharks tank on time, we rushed off from downtown SJ parking lot on San Pedro street, when my left thong lost balance, I tipped toward left, then the strap on my shoe broke lose. *Agh*, not when I'm in a hurry to get some latte and get to sharks tank early enough to see any pre-game activities...

Quick thinking Davem dragged me to nearby Walgreen, about 2 blocks down, and I got $5.99 slipper for the night. Ouch! How did I wear this when I was kid? How do people wear this slipper with strap hurting in between toe so much?
Heh, we were both in a hurry to get to sharks tank to join the rest of sharks buddies, and to get a glimps of players before the game started, so whatelse to do but to disrobe Davem of his somewhat-wet(???) socks and use it as buffer between my poor hurting feet and new pair of slipper.

All that got made up in the game. It was just exploding, endless entertainment, with Joe finally scoring his first post-season goal, as well as seeing Ville continue with his wicked checks, and Kyle's flying butt check, which made him fly off the ice for a few split seconds.

Two funniest things were a) Sharks on penalty kill for 5-3, where both Hannan and Smitty's stick broke and Kyle & Toskala were only ones on ice with a full stick in hand. OMG! I don't know how did those guys, Scott Hannan, Mark Smith and Kyle McLaren, pulled that 40seconds. I dearly wished I had a camcorder to capture the moment. another silly/funny moment would be b) Oilers players were all off ice as 3rd period ended, and refs decided there's still 3 seconds remaining in the game, after Sharky came out with the flag, audiences did all the screaming, Sharks player ready to celebrate, and hardly any Oilers player were on ice. All the Oilers player had to be brought back to ice for 3 seconds face-off, to be sent back to the lockerroom. How silly.

Anyways, it was highly entertaining, and I'm sure many are sorry not to go to Edmonton to watch the game. A funny line I picked up: Oilers -> Soilers, heh maybe because they're farming country? Someone had wrote that on paper used for rally.

things that used to work...

2006-05-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

flickr on mac used to create a set for me as I do batch upload of photos from iPhoto. as of a few months ago, I've been waiting about a day or so and get irritated, stop the upload window, go to flickr website to create photo sets manually. it was super cool that there's batch upload, and that on top of it i could create photoset of uploaded photos. now that i'm spoiled with such feature, it not working is very annoying...

what happened? have no idea. my mac is same mac, and i didn't hear anything about flickr's software changing to disable such feature.

oh well...

on the same note, i've sort of given up on 'chage time & date' feature from blooger.com.
saw someone else complaining about it on one of my mailinglist. huhu, glad it's not just me, but still baffles me.
guess neither of us will get to the bottom of it, as there's not really a customer support for it.
it works on freebsd 4.x with mozilla 1.7x, but not on windows, mac or linux, with IE, safari, mozilla, ...
i can live with it for now.

hmm... what else is broken out there? must be plenty...

blogging, blog spams, RSS and advertising online

2006-05-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

Had to delete yet another annoying blog spam, advertising online diploma.
tsk, tsk...

I've been meaning to just use RSS feed to collect all the news from different publishers and blogs.

but, alas, then what about the click-rate on webpage/blogs?
that made me wonder. Many techie companies that offer RSS feed also offer advertisement banner display as well. so how do they plan to generate revenue?

well, i guess business folks at those company have ways to get around it?

that's way above and beyond me!

nonetheless, i'm curious.

cloning superman

2006-05-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

back in '90s there was a tv show 'lois & clark: new adventure', a spin-off story of superman.

one of key thing that was happening in the show was that the villan constantly try to find a weakness of superman, challenge superman, or clone superman as his own slave.

obtainig of superman's hair for DNA sample for cloning was a big deal, and a lock of hair was displaed in a vacuum glass tube before the experiment begins.

what a joke... haha.

after vaccuming the house just a few days ago, i was attacked by more of hair blobs in livingroom and bathroom and resorted myself to use lint remover, to chase down about 2 handful of hair, maybe some 200 strains of hair locks?

does this mean i get to clone about 200 of me easily? yike...

that was a funny thought.

amazing i still have not gone bald yet, at the rate so much hair falls off and float around the house.

don't really see why villan in superman made such fuss getting a lock of hair, seeing how so much hair do fall out everyday as is, annoying me to no end.

oh boy, can't wait to go home so i can chase down more of hair, to dream up cloning and to conquer the world... well, assuming i'm as invincible as superman ever was, that is. heh.

human floor sweeper powered by kidney stone

2006-04-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

phew, what sunday!

davem had yet another kidney stone attack, equally as painful as was last friday's.

i got to read up on some blogs and websites to learn what it is, and what the effects are, and basically pain is often compared to women in labor, and is said relatively harmless. hmm... i thought i didn't like labor pain, but i certain don't approve of it now.

he was in no mood for a joke, but i did tell him i'd not have swept floor if i'd known he'd go sweeping floor with his hands and knee the way he's been crawling around.

oh well, bad bad me....

reminder to myself to drink more water. ^^ run to restrooms are much more pleasant than runs to ER.

hat trick for marleau

2006-04-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

tuesday and thursday have been busy, with sharks playoff game western division quarter finals against Nashiville Predators. waking up friday morning against 6am alarm was close to impossible, after the game ending at 10:20pm and a ride home to arrive at 11:30pm, to check emails, soup in kitchen and all, to go to sleep around 12:30am.

still, the good vibe and energy is good.

i guess that's what keeps Sharks play hard and tough, against the injuries and being tired.

listening to Jack Johnson's soothing music or Louis Armstrong's golden jazz, and trying a few easy yoga breathing and stretching, friday may just make out ok, now that Sharks are on the gun to get near that Stanley cups.

pretty inspiring.

was quiet busy at sharks tank, juggling the white towel to wave, foamy hand, and cheechoo whistle to blow, not to mention my small digicam to record the event. 4 items and only two hands, yet I didn't complain at all. Loud fans, cranky fans, crying babies, all are alright when we're on a winning streaks.

Marleau got himself 3rd playoff hat tricks in 3rd period, and of course I abandoned 4 items on my both hands to fetch a hat from pocket to throw at ice myself. I doubt mine made it all the way to the ice, but that's also alright.

The feeling that you're in a winning team, and you're contributing and also improving your own skill is a nice feeling. heh, I wish my life and work was like that, too.

Pretty inspiring.

Joe and other team mates were also very enthusiastic about Marleau's scoring cannon gun performances.

Maybe Nabby also is positive and is enthusiastic, instead of being bitter to be out of playoff workout?

Don't see some of old timers and my favourites, such as Fahey and Parker, but maybe they're happy to be in a winning team?

Since Joe showed up last November, Marleau's position as leading scoring player and captain's position has been a bit unstable. All media and fan attentions shifted greatly toward Joe & Cheechoo combo.

It's nice Marleau got to work through those dramatic situations, and it's nice to see how Sharks as a team, and Wilson as coach handle what could be an ugly situation into a solid team. Yay, Rissmiller for staying in NHL and scoring playoff goal (as vs. to being sent back to Cleveland), and horray for the lead singer of talking tree with bleeched peacock streaks (Mark Smith).

It is confusing about the tough and unstable position one retains in major league sports team, as one get rewarded and punished with number of games playing, minutes on ice, and to be on 1st line, 2nd line, or being pushed to 3rd or 4th, and worse yet, being sent to minor league or being traded, and this also is true in any other professions.

Sharks, and captain Marleau's handling what could be stressful situation and not acting out like a diva is impressive and something I think I can learn from.

Focus on what's important! For hockey players, being on ice and being in the game, I guess. For me? heh....

hat trick for Marleau! and, we're going to get Stanley cups... Back to chinatown to buy more cheap hats ^^

yoga for yogi me

2006-04-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

dang!

when was last time i got this many hours sleep?
went to sleep around 1am, and though woke up a few times for water and bathroom, i barely got up at 11:30am.
that's like more than 10hrs.
hmm....

with some feet massage, and lots of sleep, it does feel pretty good, no headache, no pain in feet or elsewhere.

yawn~~~

while watching hockey on laptop, i did some stretching, put legs together and press my upper body down to get stretching on leg and back. i actually felt the pain on my left foot ball, which i guess is a good thing.

my feet feel pretty light, and veins don't pop out so much.

i've been told to checkout yoga so often, and went to my sister's yoga session a few times. stiff as a corpse is the verdict.

maybe i'll have to checkout some yoga steps, for my feet, and stiff spine.

a mid-year new-year's resolution? maybe. should try to keep it going more than just 3 days, tho.

paypal phishing scam

2006-04-22T22:47:00.000-07:00

if i didn't hear much about it, i'd have been fooled. not on april fool's day, and not a fool, i avoided giving my info on false email notification.

on my yahoo mail i got notification from paypal saying i paid for someone's cell phone for some $300.

having had a problem with credit card theft, i panicked for a second, and clicked on the 'repute the payment' link and started typing in my login info. oops, i hope this isn't too much of a problem, but i did login. would my login be used against other phishing scheme? omg...

but i did think twice and stopped putting in my address, email and credit card information.

thank god, twice over.

i exited the program, went to paypal website to login, and check my account. no activity within past few days. phew...

so, there wasn't any false charge on my credit card through paypal.

it's so tricky, so authentic looking. i hope it doesn't happen to too many folks, and i hope not too many people get tricked by it.

wonder when will we be free of these scary phishing schemes.

innovate, innovate and invent

2006-04-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

more and more vc(venture capitalists) and more ipo of startup news are looming.
and jobless rate hit low enough to give somewhat of a boost to sagging economy/stock market.

recently i joked about my 2 possible patent ideas, and enjoyed a good laugh.

first was setting a timer/clock on hair setter, which is already in use though not so visible to someone like me. 2nd is having ipod battery to be rechargeable/swappable(like many cell phone batteries are), which i was told would already be patented and well known to apple.

hmmm...

and, there are a few ajax classes posted on mailinglist, with a few good url references.

it's almost like being back in 1999 or 2000, for both valley and for me personally.

what is latest thing? what can be innovated? ... and so on...

of course, i know my own limit, but it sure is good to have some things to learn about, and new ideas to put to the test.

so what else is out there that seem new and upcoming other than ajax? i will have to keep my eyes peeled and ears open and watch out for the neew wave. wow, am i learning to surf? hoho...

tgif for dr.ganji

2006-04-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

phew...
a 15min checkup and pickup of invisialign guard turned into more than 2hrs of work.

about 2-3 weeks ago i went in and did impression for invisialign guard stuff and was given a call/appointment to pick it up.

oh well, after bragging to coworkers and friends, it was a slight disappointment to hear that the last impression wasn't really good and that I need to get new one done.

seeing how Dr. Ganji was busy as is, that was fine, it's friday afternoon and there's not much to be worried about at the office(which turned out to be not so true upon arriving back to laptop full of emails and IM messages), I sat down and played along.

the first time, the tray wouldn't go in. my mouth wouldn't open as wide. so tried smaller one, and now it's hitting my jaw muscles too tight and wouldn't get a good impression. so after playing for a while, he finally poured in the colorful molds that would harden in my mouth to get teeth impression.

it took almost 2hrs and about 3 tries for top and about 5-6 tries for bottom trays. of course edge of my lips are sore, with all that tearing. heh. prepping the tray, sticking in my mouth for 5 minutes, cranking it out and take a look, some frown then try yet different size & shape of tray. then, repeat the process all over again.

it surely was exhausting process. i was starting to fall asleep in that 5min of mold curing, and I was suprirsed tht Dr. Ganji and his assistant wouldn't lose temper over it. heh. the very last of bottom tray was a pleasant surprise. we've both given up the hope by then and were more than wiling to go through the next round of setting up the tray and sticking it in to my mouth.
what a save...
i had to offer him 'congratulations' on his long awaited success.
we even had some discussion about shape and depth of my teeth arch and how jaw is laid and its muscles affect the setup.

tgif, tgif, i wouldn't be surprised if he goes home to get some cocktail to wash out that headachesome 2hrs.

in another 4 weeks, i'll get to see my invisialign guard. for sure, this time. ^^

tgif for me, too, i guess.

tsk,tsk, on Yahoo's Amazing Disappearing Mail Servers

2006-04-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

slashdot's 4/13/06 article, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/13/1949236, featured "Yahoo's Amazing Disappearing Mail Servers".

with upcoming 4/18/06 earning report, this makes me ponder which news is more pertinant to decide the future of yahoo.

the article title is catchy, and is also fairly to the point.

i've seen complaints on local groups mailinglist as well as have experienced myself some troubles with my y!mail. but, it's different when seeing on slashdot with wide audiences.

will y!mail kick back and make a come-back the way sharks did?

i've been keeping my y!mail since haydays of '97 when i was still living at home w/ mom&dad.

oh well, let's see what candygram would do for y!mail. (tho... personally i'm a chicken and would wait for a while 'til i switch over to candygram myself).

emacs still puzzles me much, especially for multiple buffer works

2006-04-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

had some 200 html files to edit, for a simple cut&paste image url redirect.
some simple html editor like homesite had no problem handling it, when I had to use it at one of the previous work.

i know how to open up multiple buffers/windows in emacs, and i know how to do replace-string in a given buffer. the problem is i wanted to do it on all 200 files/buffers without having to go through all 200+ html files.

after a few meager attempts and fanatically looking up online references, I ended up relying on some 10-15lines of perl to slurp up file names from directory and do regex replace.

I've grown so used to using emacs, and yet sometimes it annoys me I can't seem to do a simple task like that.

too profound for me, yet, i guess.

rain continues to pour and sharks on 6th spot for final play off

2006-04-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

i got so used to warm dry winter earlier the year that wearing sweather makes my arm itchy.
yike.
sky must have a big hole in it, cuz how else would one explain this pour after pour of rain?

can't believe it's April, well about half way into April, too.

but sj sharks' success in conquering final play off spot, 8th of western division, and continue march toward to do better is awesome. they have some 3-4 plays left until the season is over, and it seems like they'll be in final play off for sure. seeing how they were on the bottom of standing earlier the season, and was having roller coaster ride up and down the chart, i was a bit worried.
yay! sharks...
maybe cheering for sharks in the shark tank will make the rainstorm oblivious.
but i do home it stops before may and june comes.

rock&roll and price of fame

2006-04-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

it's April 4th already, and it'a raining hard as if it's back in November.
pouring, pouring, until my paper-bag I brought lunch in is soaked through.

music keeps me entertained, tho.

I have to admit that one of recent album 'Monkey Business' is mildly amusing. And, of course if one goes to Sharks game as much as I have done past few years, one can't miss the players' mp3 player displayed during game intermission as an advertisement. Be it a heavy fighter Scott Thornton or responsible captain Marleau, the singing group 'Social Distortion' frequents the list. Huhu, monkey business toward social distortion...

ah! my 20gig ipod is getting fat and may soon run out of space, now that i'm adding some coldplay, miles davis and les miserable as well as some random 80s pop to my mp3 collections as well.

Bar-roid, that's what SJ Mercury's reporting one of fan sitting near 1st base made the sign of, to imply Barry's usage of Steroid: Barry + Steroid = Bar-roid.

sigh...

too much time spent on it. too much money spent on it. too much energy wasted on it.

of course players shouldn't reply on performance boosting steroid, for honesty as well as for health reason. but, why are we so obsessed with scandals of famous people?

sports world do seem about as cruel and harsh as political or world of hollywood.
for the sake of game, coach Wilson makes some inhumane sacrifice at times when picking players, such as not letting Boston native Jim Fahey playing at a game against Bruins in Boston to let another rookie play. Or letting Pat Rissmiller play means putting Grant Stevenson out of play.

Oh well, let rock&roll play and just get another day rolling...

mac mini conversion progress

2006-04-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

so following OnMac.net Wiki,
1st: enter Mac OS X install disk as was instructed
then: reboot with C down. that was tricky. tried with Ctrl key down and it didn't do nothing.
so tried again with letter 'c' down and it takes me to mac boot up window

2nd:as instructed, after the language selection, i didn't see 'Utilities->Disk Utilities' and had to wonder a bit. it turns out that 'Utilities' is one of windows option on top left corner with pulldown where I could select 'Disk Utilities'.

3rd: clicking on split button, and format available includes 'unix' so i created 2 split partition and click on 'partition' button to get the partitions of disk formatted correctly. so far so good.

--------------------------------------------

ok, partitioning is done.

now, i have to search for a new reference for loading linux boot loader, instead of winXP's xom.efi.
here's reference i found: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/007may05/features/mac-mini/

----------------------------------------------

ok, the above page is for old mac mini, for ppc architecture...
phew...

so, more retries with boots, and it fails. for about 10 times straight. tried fedora core for i386 CDs, fedora core for i386 DVD, rescue CD, and more, and I'm getting no where.
I even retried putting in Mac OS X DVD which boots for install, so there's nothing wrong with pressing 'c'.

i dived back to reference look up, and here they're:
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/linux/
and
http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page

these are the guys who actually succeed installing linux on intel-based mac.

so, it's my turn to mimic them.

wish me luck!

awesome wiki

2006-03-31T12:15:00.000-08:00

i was pretty surprised to read http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/HOWTO
wiki on installing non-macOS on mac mini already?

there are some downside to this web2.0 stuffs, for example if i was to accidentally lose 50page worth blog or email before clicking submit/send button.

but, it grows much better than weeds, just awesome.

five fingers and five toes

2006-03-31T11:44:00.000-08:00

this is last note from mac mini core duo before the surgery.

counted and see that it works fine for past 3+weeks, so i give blessing to get dual boot with fedora core.

ironically, but not surprisingly, it was my sister's birthday yesterday.

many events to celebrate. ^^

so, dr. frankensteine is at work and we'll see what happens to mac mini.

with 2gig memory and 100gig disk space, it should handle the dual installation without any problem, is the assumption.

should search music share blog

2006-03-29T11:45:00.000-08:00

annual big event, my sister's birthday, is coming up soon.
would make a silly april fools or painful tax filing deadline forgetful, heh.

can't get her a home baked cakes but, i did think hard & long to get her something she might find useful.

afterward, as I'm listening to some manhattan jazz & 80s' music, in particular AHA's "Take On Me" i wish i could send her these for her birthday as well. but then again, i'll spend forever at mailroom, huhu.

maybe there's some music share site w/ privacy i can get both of us signed up to share music. with all these legal issues against music download sites from music industry, one can never be careful. but, i will have to make time to investigate, so i wouldn't have to worry about mailmen breaking cd i compile. ^^

sony vaio x505, ready for trips

2006-03-21T16:04:00.000-08:00

when i got it 2 christmas ago, vaio x505 came with winXP and since then, it's been home to fedora core 3, soon to be upgraded to newly released fedora core 5.

for the longest time, through my lazyness and ignorance, the thin laptop wasn't able to play any video clips, which frustrated me to take it to daily commutes from sf to south bay, nor to long flights across continent to some conferences.

last week, i finally put my foot down, and spent some time, trial & erro method with reading up articles online.

after a few attempts, i became more familiar with reading for audio devices from /dev, or from lsmod, and what audio card came with vaio as pcmcia. i've also tried creating the audio user & group, most likely in redundancy, and downloaded a few tools including alsa-mixer, tried to recompile audio kernel modules for latest kernel installed on the laptop.

recompiling or creating user/group were not necessary, and lsmod/dmesg and reading through log indicates that device is located properly. some gnome problem to get the sound volume control, or any audio/video tools to open up got fixed. everything seem fine, and i can open mplayer for video output, but no sound.

i've tried to launch alsa-mixer as was mentioned on some online articles, to no avail.

finally i ran into http://www.csanyi.net/wiki/space/x505+linux+install today, and it just was matter of turning on or off external amplifier or headphone using checkbox. hehe.

now i'm set for daily commutes & long drive/flights.

still left homeworks are AVI conversion to MPEG and DVD burning on mac.

and, setting up mac mini for the best usage.