Rotterdam IV

Bought a pair of Adidas running shoes over the weekend. It's about time, since my Nike Skylon was literally falling apart after 5 years and I really needed to get rid of the no-shoe excuse to procrastinate from running. My New Balance 1023 was also 1/2 size too small, resulting in awfully painful toes after 5 minutes of running/walking.

It has ClimaCool to keep your feet cool and Pro-Moderator to prevent over-pronation, even though I am flat-footed, I don't over-pronate, at least judging from the wear pattern of my shoes. Anyway, I'll be fitting in my support insoles.

Take a look! Gimme your comments if you have any.

Fedora Core 6

Fedora Core 6 arrives on 2006-10-24, 14:00 GMT

Enuff said!

Aztech V500DS

Skype Gear has this review of the dual-mode Skype0DECT combo from Aztech. Interested parties can approach me.

As with all Skype ‘dual mode’ phones, this phone gives you the choice of either using Skype or your regular phone line to make calls. If you have more than one handset, you can even use Skype to make a call whilst your son/mother-in-law/partner/cat/goldfish is calling using the landline.

One inaccuracy though. The phone in the picture and the description in the article is actually a HS315-S1, which uses a USB dongle attached to the PC installed with Skype software. The V500DS has Skype built-in.

Here's the press release.

IPPT/Cardio/Shoes

IPPT

Had to retake my IPPT before my birthday, failed running as usual. Booked a test for August 8 at Maju Camp. Really need to work on cardio every two days and strength conditioning in between. Crunches, pushups, lunges, and stair-climbing are in order.

Cardio

Took a tumble while jogging today, it happened near the end of my 20 min run. The running track had ruptured where a tree root had grown underneath. My foot caught on the protruding section of track as it was taking off.

Landed first on my right hand (badly scraped) and rolled over on my left shoulder (bleeding but the skin did not break). The guy next to me just took one glance and went back to minding his own business. (So much for caring Singaporeans, I guess.)

Getting up, I examined my now bleeding right palm and looked over my scratched left shoulder, brushing off the sand and gravel on my left arm.

Deciding that the little bleeding was not going to kill me, I decided to complete my intended 20 minutes on the track. I managed to run another round, sprinting past the accident spot until the end of the straight stretch, by which my stop watch was at 21 minutes.

I didn't really expect that I can keep jogging for 20 minutes straight, but I guess slowing down the pace helps. I would try to extend it to 25 minutes and then to 30 minutes the next two times.

Shoes

Got a new pair of Hush Puppies (at 20% discount). Being highly traumatised from my experience with tight-fitting shoes (those that feel fine when you first wear them and then kills you near the end of the day), I was extremely skeptical when the salesgirl gave me size (EUR) 41 and even suggested that I try 40!

I agreed that 42 was too large, but I still have reservations about size 41. They feel and walk fine in the shop, but I really don't know what will happen after I have been wearing them and walking around for the whole day.

She managed to sell me a box of shoe cream/grease for polishing my new shoes (because I asked). I hurriedly paid for the items and got out of the shop before she started to sell me socks, insoles, etc.

After comparing with my existing pair of Polo shoes, the Hush Puppies are SLIGHTLY larger. Hope this pair of Hush Puppies wears nicely.

Commencement

Phew! Finally graduated from the Master's program! I was presented on the first day of Commencement week. Security was airtight. MM Lee and PM Lee where present. Their arrivals were not announced.

I would say they overdid the programme. The graduands had to sit through 3 hours of proceedings for their 10 seconds of exposure on stage. The bulk of the time was taken up by talks, accolades, and lectures by VIPs, and a choir presentation. (I want to go toilet!)

Me, right after the ceremony. (Courtesy of Matty)



Class of SMACS2005/2006.




With Juliana and Esther after collecting our SMA certificates.

Graduation

SMA Spring 2006 results are out; this is my best semester ever, including my undergraduate days. Will successfully graduate with my MS(CS) on July 6, 2006.

I've managed to achieve a respectable overall result for the whole course. Have something nice to embellish my resume with as well - a nice surprise. The effort I have put in has been worth it. I hereby thank my family and relatives for their support, encouragement and tolerance during this past year. Thanks also to all the classmates who have so selflessly rendered their assistance, participated in discussion, provided encouragement, etc. Do we only get to meet in the classroom and not outside?

Will post photos of the commencement ceremony when I get the chance.

Starting work on July 10, 2006. But I wanna watch the world cup finals!

Finally some good news. Record profits in many known years, a step in the right direction. Despite the shortcomings (which still exist) we are going somewhere. Keep it up!

P.S. Just don't forget the bonuses. :)

Deliverance

hallelujah! Finally SMA is over. (On May 19th in fact.) We have submitted our last report on Parallel Computing on the 25th, and along came a huge sense of relief.

It's a wierd feeling, like hysterisis ... transitioning from highly strung to slack in an instant. The feeling takes some getting used to.

Going to take a well deserved break this June. Colleagues please do not ask me to return to work yet. Lemme enjoy my fleeting moment of tranquility before being drawn into a vortex of dates and issues.

Meanwhile, travel buddies anyone? London, Paris, Rome?

Have ... to ... run ...

From yester-year

It's been a long time!

Left: Mug shot taken for ECE291 class.

Right: River crossing during army.

Many things

Sophia biaomei gave birth today by C-Section. Damien Oh weighs 2720g at birth. Welcome to the world. Congrats Sophia & Anson.

Another revelation: Miss Good biaomei changes bf again. Quite impressive though, while never short of suitors, the last one lasted 4 years. 4 years of Tiffany's and what not... sigh. Her mum seems to like this new one.

Reviewing my posts since the beginning of this blog, I'm surprised that I actually wrote quite a lot in the beginning during 2003. Then came 2004, 2005 and into 2006, the number of posts dropping year after year.

Then again most of my posts are small snippets of everyday life, not the kind of thought-provoking, philosophical commentaries to be expected of a top notch author. And recently I had to commit atrocities like posting my geeky security logs, leave a failed attempt at inserting chinese characters (???) on the blog, writing about past entries ...!!!

Alright, I am supposed to be busy this past year. My relatives have been commenting why this course is taking so much out of me. Blame it on the SMA tradition of raising the bar ever higher. I just hope I can find enough in me to bring me through this one more month. Grrr.....

Got a call from IHPC... dunno what they want me for. I'm even supposed to prepare reference letters!

You just have to look longer ...

I simply have to blog about this. The best solution for remote (and local) development and debugging.

For Java, we have Eclipse. I would like to use Eclipse for C/C++, but alas, the quality of Eclipse/CDT is way lacking. In comes BVRDE

I could have found this a year ago if I had searched a few more pages of Google. This just shows that my Google skills are still not up to scratch

Give BVRDE a try!

Lyrics - 岁月留情 - Jacky Cheung

Ever wonder why, when you SSH into your Unix/Linux workstation and view manpages, use curses applications, etc, the display seems to be garbled?

This is because of a font misunderstanding between your terminal program (mine is PuTTY) and the ncurses package. Ncurses now uses UTF-8, so make sure your terminal program is set to interpret the incoming character set as UTF-8 instead of the default ISO-8559-1. In Putty, this should come under Window->Translation in the settings dialog for a configured session.

March 25

I've caught up with the hype and installed Fedora Core 5 (released March 20). Thanks to LUGS, the Averse mirror is back up. I lent my DVD to someone else, and so wrote the boot image to a thumb drive, booted from it and did a network installation from my other machine, on which I have mounted the DVD ISO on a webserver.

After a few false starts (not enough space for upgrade, cannot find repository data, etc), I finally got the installation process underway and went to sleep, and by morning, it was done! Not bad for 3-4 hours work.

Looking forward to trying out Xen on it. There is a lot to keep up with since much has changed since Redhat 9!!!

I'm getting keeping the filesystem of RH9 which I have painstakingly built-up over the months in a separate directory. I can chroot to the RH9 directory, mount proc, mount --bind /home ... and all should still be fine! I hope, since I have not tried it out.

Need to reinstall a lot of things, like updatedd, rlocate, etc, gosh.

Try out the OpenWRT source code! It is cool!

TELEWORD Solver

Wrote a teleword solver just for fun over the chinese new year.
TELEWORD
Works with IE for now. Yet to find out why Firefox doesn't.

Connection Marathon

Managed to connect for 503 hours straight. Need evidence? Look here:

End of Semester, Starting a New Phase

We had our last final Machine Learning examination on Thursday morning, and we had lunch at steamboat after that. Here are the satisfied faces after the very fulfilling meal. (Never judge how much a person can eat by his/her build - another lesson learnt)

I'm not a big fan of steamboat buffets because I can never eat so much. But well, this is the end of the semester after all, what we have been looking forward to for four months. Phew.

When are we going for karaoke? Sorry that I 'duahed' everyone the last time ... I really slept too late. Next time just go there and start without me, I'll catchup. Apologies again. :)

Also bought a cool aluminium hard disk enclosure (at Storage Studio, slightly overpriced) and DVD-RW drive (a $69 bargain at VideoPro's new showroom).
Too bad the 250GB capacity hard disks are out of stock. The perils of shopping close to the weekend, and during X'mas season at that. I'll try again on Saturday, after I sort things out in school.

Started my first day (orientation) of internship at Encentuate on Friday. Feels wierd becoming an intern especially after working for five years already. Man, it has been that long! It is quite cool to experience how another company operates, it opens up a whole new perspective, very enriching experience. Apparently my project is quite highly sought after, not to mention being quite expensive too (cos of the equipment involved). *Pressure*.

Got a pair of Creative 1700 headphones, not too shabby, heh ... has a long 1m extension cable.




Wow, I'm spending a lot of money. :P:P

Went browsing around at Best Denki, looking at DV Camcorders. There was a guy promoting JVC models, but he was enthusiastic enough to discuss esoteric features like Canon's (and Sony's) AV-DV passthrough with me, although, like virtually all salespeople I have talked to, had no idea what I was talking about at first. This one is good though, he was patient enough to listen, and really understood what I was saying.

The new Canon DVD camcorder did not have the passthrough function, apparently, so he kindly let me plug the power into one of the DV tape models to browse through the menu screens. I finally found the setting "AV-DV recording (on/off)" while in VCR mode. Sweet success!

Also saw the spare battery for my wireless headphone at Best Denki, but it costs a whopping $30, so I decided against it for now. Need to amortise the spending.

Plan to go back to school Saturday morning to clean out the waste paper, scan handwritten notes and burn stuff to DVD.

USB2.0 drives finally works on my Linux machine! Had to use a 2.6.12 kernel. USB development has stopped on the 2.4 series of kernels, so even the 'latest' 2.4.30 cannot make it.

Made a Knoppix 4.0.2 LiveCD a few days ago and booted from it. Viola, the USB drive worked with the EHCI-HCD driver! Wonderful! But I've been afraid of migrating to a 2.6 kernel, which is rather unfamiliar territory. Since I am running a RedHat9 system, even though I have already heavily patched to keep it up-to-date, the system and some initialization files (namely /etc/rc.sysinit and /etc/modules.conf) also need some tweaking to get them to support a 2.6 kernel.

Instead of trying to compile a 2.6 kernel myself (which takes a terribly long time, by the way, even on my Pentium4 3GHz with HyperThreading), I just copied the kernel and modules from the Knoppix CD's Live filesystem! Guess what, it actually works! (Well, but not without some adjusting of configuration files of course).

For those who are in the same boat as me, here are some useful links.


http://thomer.com/linux/migrate-to-2.6.html
http://kerneltrap.org/node/3106
http://www.mobydisk.com/techres/linux_2.6.1_kernel.html
http://www.linux-sxs.org/upgrading/migration26.html

The Knoppix 2.6.12 kernel has now replaced 2.4.30 as the default kernel in my Grub configuration.

Found this new NDAS technology while looking for an external drive enclosure http://www.ximeta.com/technology/ndas/index.php, looks rather promising since it includes both USB and NDAS. NDAS skips the overheads of TCP/IP and CPU processing, even allowing RAID configurations and unlimited expansion options. It comes standard with Gigabit Ethernet too (you can't do any fast file transfers with Fast Ethernet anyways)! The case by Sarotech is going for S$179, seems a good buy. A 250GB drive is also going for the same price ... hmmm cheap cheap ... but getting both will set me back by another $400! Not to mention that I need to get a replacement DVD writer.

Hmm ... I'll make this my X'Mas wish list! :P

Bummer!

Wasted a lot of time today doing anything but work. This is very destructive. No one who expects to succeed would lack this kind of discipline.

Heard this from the prof while watching AI lecture video ... "Eating your own dog food..." what does it mean?

It means to use your own software that you write on a daily basis, just like your end customers would. Joel's Definition

Finally cleared my Machine Learning lectures! The next one will be out pretty soon, and there is still so much homework and readings to catchup on.

Ganbatte!