Sunday, January 31, 2010

A Good Day for Cuppa

I cook quite frequently, but so far have not blogged about it, until now. I cooked my lunch and completed it with a cup of aromatic Vietnamese coffee.

Brown rice. No, I don't like to use rice cooker.



Rice, veggie, and cajun fish. Kind of healthy meal ;)


After the meal, I made my self a cup of coffee, using a unique coffee filter and coffee powder brought to me by a Vietnamese friend

Pre-warmed mug


Put the filter on top. This filter can make about 7 ounce of coffee in one shot.



The coffee that I used


After adding water a few times, the mug is full. I added milk powder and sugar.

I love my cuppa :)

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Good Post

I came across a good, touching article written by someone to commemorate the decease of his good friend. The writing is though a bit disorganized, it is genuine.

The article is here.

Have a nice weekend to all of you.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

OpenSolaris Updated

I have updated my system from snv_110 to snv_131. The changes so far seem positive, the user interface is more slick, and all my CIFS exports are intact.

Here is output of `uname -a`

SunOS opensolaris 5.11 snv_131 i86pc i386 i86pc


I still love Solaris.

As a side note, Debian/kFreeBSD is coming out in a month's time. It is the standard Debian distro, with the FreeBSD kernel (Should be the one from Debian 7.2-1). Even though this release doesn't support ZFS yet, I do think it is a good start, and I will check it out in due course.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

What Else?

I have been busy programming the user interface for iPhone for the past few weeks. Not today. I feel tired, and the usual emptiness when I step back from myself far enough and see nothing except work, and more work. Where are the self fulfillment, what is this kind life for? To work like hell to buy the stuff promoted on TV?

Friends around me, especially most female high school friends, are happily married. You can really feel time flies when the term 'bf' no longer means 'boyfriend', but 'breastfeeding' instead.

Now the online forum is filled with how to breast feed as well as how many oz of milk powder one should use. I do think getting married and having a family is a fantastic experience and everybody should go through, but one can easily totally immerse oneself into the mundane chores of housework, until when we look up, there are so many things that we should have done but didn't.

I am sitting here and typing, hoping to brainstorm what I actually want, or put in other words, what my goals are. As many self-improvement books will tell you, you gotta to have a goal in order to know what to do. But none of those books will tell you what you should do, and trust me, many of people don't. They just follow what everybody is doing and this process partially is more or less pass down from our ancestors and partially is based on our internal biological clock.

Where am I going from here? This is a good question, and I hope to have a good answer for it soon.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Why busy?

I did say I have more free time, but my new-found free time is quickly drenched by work, or more specifically, the new iPhone project I am heading. I already have the basic user interface working, and the next is to get a complete system up and running.

Will be busy until Chinese New Year....

Thursday, January 14, 2010

More Free Time

Now I have quite a bit of extra time for me to do some reading and thinking.

Life, goes on...

Friday, January 08, 2010

Thought of the Day

This week is a memorable week, first of all I whipped out an iphone user interface in 3 days, starting from no knowledge on Mac OS X and iPhone at all. I feel quite proud of myself. :P

Next, in some posts back I mentioned I was interviewing with a big company, and yesterday it got back to me telling me I didn't get the job, mainly because I told them I neither want to relocate to US, nor to change job in Singapore. Actually I had a very painful struggle when thinking about relocation to US. What can I do there? Getting too close to her will most probably make me lose control again, so I figure it is much safer for me to stay in Asia. Of course, if she wants me to be there, it is a different story, but I don't see it is viable for me to explore this possibility at this juncture.

Back to iphone development, I found out Mac OS X is designed reasonably well, with most of the APIs I encountered so far are well-though of. In fact, the development platform on my iMac is very closely knitted with iPhone to the extend it is just a snap to download the application and test it on the hardware. Impressive, no wonder their share price is sky-rocketing. :)

Friday, January 01, 2010

Year of 2010

Today is first day of 2010 and Cuppa wishes everyone a GREAT year ahead!! :)

I am now sitting in office with a cup of warm water in hand, typing my blog. No doubt today is a public holiday and the whole office is empty. I still choose to go to office for two reasons:

First I want to meet a deadline on Jan 6, and this deadline was only known to me 2 days ago. However this time I take up the challenge voluntarily. The reasons behind this leads us to the second reason why I wanna to work...

The platform is on Mac OS X, and in fact I am asked to develop an iPhone application. For this purpose, my boss bought an iPhone, an iMac, paid for my Apple developer network subscription, and got me a reference book.

As you may recall, I have been a standard Linux fanboi for sometime, always extolling the virtue of open source and how pretty Linux is. However after many years of tinkering with the Linux (10+ years, count it) and a full year of kernel development, I found out Linux is just still acting like a young, angry teenager at puberty, with ad-hoc, and often messy appearances. What I mean is its evolution has not been stabilized to the point developers can actually invest time and energy on developing something, without worrying the investment would go south in the next few releases. A lot of features have no documentations, and even documentations exist, they are either outdated, or down right wrong. And we are talking about a time span of roughly 10 years. Having said all these, I am not turning my back to Linux, in fact, I am typing this blog on my Ubuntu machine. What I plan is Linux development will be put on backseat for sometime while I am exploring the mac. I think I have pretty much enough of Linux after seeing the state of its kernel, and messing around with the kernel will be something I don't really enjoy doing in the near future.

Back to Mac platform, I have been thinking to explore it for a long time, but until recently I have no much motivation to jump in due to the steep prices. This time I am given a real world requirement and all development tools free, I really have no reason to let the opportunity slip pass me.

So far, I have been playing with xcode, the Apple IDE, and the rest of development suite. These applications are quite easy to use and so far I am trying to wrap my brain around objective C, which is a superset of ANSI C with support for objects and messaging.

Still reading...