Shutting down...

This blog is gonna to be closed to public soon. The initial intention for me to set up this blog no longer holds true, and i have other priorities in my life now. My understanding is most readers of my blog are in my facebook friends also, therefore keeping in touch shouldn't be a problem. If you are not, please do shoot me an email with your ID, and i will add you promptly.

Feeling of Whiskey

I have a friend who describes the feeling of drinking whiskey: "While sipping Whiskey, long forgotten scenes, memories, like the snowflakes in the snow globe, slowly rise in mind, and eventually sink to nowhere"

I like this quote.

你对我说我们只是擦肩而过....

My Secret

As my dear reader, I am going to divulge a long-hidden secret to you, right here, right now:

I got up at 6am more than once in a month, and I slept at 12am the day before.

For those who know me well, this is surprising.

Can this considered as a secret, actually not really, but I just want to add some suspense as I have so much time to kill from now until my work hours.

Getting older? Maybe, a good thing I guess as I will have more time for myself...

Rent or Buy?

Here is a handy web-based calculator to help calculating the cost of owning/renting a property:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calculator.html

Much more convenient than a lot of PC or iPhone applications :)

Scroll Back in FreeBSD Console

The FreeBSD console works quite differently from Linux: under Linux, you press Shift+Pg-Up or Pg-Dn to access the console buffer.

Under FreeBSD, it is different. Press 'Scroll-Lock' or 'Pause/Break', and the system will enter scroll mode and the blinking prompt will disappear. At this time you can use arrow keys or Pg-Up Down to maneuver the scroll buffer.

The only thing lacking for my FreeBSD system is the sound output.

FreeBSD, Fully Loaded

Now my FreeBSD system is fully up: ZFS is running, Samba configured, Openoffice installed.

Hence FreeBSD is my latest toy, and I believe I am gonna say good bye to OpenSolaris from now on.

FreeBSD is not for the faint of heart, especially those who don't know or don't want to use command line. I installed FreeBSD from the CD version, and when it was first loaded, there was basically nothing in the box - no X, not even bash.

However the BSD ports system is a charm to use, as long as you have broadband, it is much more user-friendly than OpenSolaris, and can even beat Ubuntu hands down.

Here are some basic stuff:

Suppose you want to install firefox, you have two choices: install the pre-compiled one, or compile and install from source.

1. Precompile Binary

There are multiple sources for precompiled binary packages, the easiest way is to issue:

pkg_add -r firefox

That is it. If the system can find firefox, it will be automagically installed.

If the package is not available at the default location, just google around and you should be able to get most of the popular packages pre-compiled.

2. Compile from Source
In the '/usr/ports' directory, software packages are divided into their functional group, e.g. editor, audio, news, etc. Inside those folders will be folders for individual software packages.

Taking the firefox example, we can get it from '/usr/ports/www/firefox', change directory there, and issue:

make install clean

The above command in effect will download, compile, and install the package (effect of 'install'), while the 'clean' command will remove all the intermediate files.

Do note I highly suggest you always try to install pre-compiled binary, and only if you cannot find the pre-compiled binary, or the binary doesn't suit your need, then you roll your own stuff. Compilation is a _long_ process. I did that for OpenOffice, the machine ran for 4 hours non-stop, to the point I gave up and downloaded the compiled version (just google around).

FreeBSD I am

Here I am, after slotting in the new 160GB hard drive and downloaded FreeBSD 8.1.

This time it boots well, so well that I am now typing on firefox on KDE on Xorg on FreeBSD8.1

Although I am still configuring my Samba share, but to my delight, my data in ZFS can be ported to FreeBSD without much issues.

Once everything is well and smooth. I will install FreeBSD to my 500GB OpenSolaris drive, and wave OS good bye.

So be it, after 3 years. At least I still have my ZFS. :)

FreeBSD 8.1 Released

I am gonna give FreeBSD another try because OpenSolaris is so dead now. I have a spare hard drive, so it won't hurt much for me to experiment a bit.

Release notes for FreeBSD 8.1 is here.

Banks and Competition

Recently US government has launched some initiatives to limit financial institutions from doing high-risk investments and also fined some of those who are responsible for the financial crisis.

In response to the fines and regulations, some banks said they would increase the fees for most of the items which were free before the legislation. In other words, the banks pass the expenses to consumers.

Is there anyway to counter what the banks are doing?

I think yes, the US government can set up a bank that doesn't charge consumers all those fees imposed by commercial banks. In order to compete, the banks will have to reduce or abolish all the fees altogether.

I think this will work :)

My Next 400 Posts

I have stopped blogging for a while. My last post was written on June 20, and coincidentally, it is my 400th blog post so far. Four hundred is not a small number to me, and I feel amazed I can write that many stuff.

Actually I do have some technical stuff that I wish to blog about. For example recently I am tinkering with PCSC (PC/Smart Card) daemon, and I managed to solve the issue whereby it runs properly on my iMac and not on the macbook. 

I guess I will need to organize my thoughts before I can resume my normal rate of writing. But heck, I think this will happen soon. :)

 

祝我生日快乐

On Being a Boss

I am damn pissed today by a colleague. The story is like this: I have been engaged in a project that needs this guy's involvement, lets call him 'A'.

As how a typical project goes, our project suffers changing requirements. Initially we thought to give the application a specific feature, but when the customer reviewed the app, they decided to remove the feature.

Now the problem is A refused to make the changes, saying that I can do work-around at my end. Yes, I do agree I can do the work around, however this is not the way you work. As an sub-ordinate, you can propose your ideas, but the final decision lies with the supervisor. As long as the request is within the job scope, you must comply.

Today I got a heated discussion with A, and to the end, I think the only way to proceed is to replace him.

You may say I am extreme, however do note, when I made a decision, I, not my sub-ordinates, to bear the consequences. So, as a sub-ordinate, what you do is to tell me the resources needed for a particular task, and the options available, but if I choose something that may go against your will, please just do it. I need your full cooperation.

Feel free to make your call, when you are in my seat. Thank you.

To Blog or Not To Blog

It is quite rare for me not to blog for more than one week, and here I am. My last post was on May 30.

Should I continue?

Time will tell.

OpenSolaris Crashed!

Updated:
Edited title from 'OpenSolaris Clashed' to 'OpenSolaris Crashed'. Thanks Lim for pointing out that mistake. :)

Last evening my OpenSolaris box fell inside a reboot loop, right after I chose the BE image to boot from, the machine rebooted itself, and this loop continued ad infinitum.

The first reaction I had was suspecting my system drive went dead. So I booted using a 2009.06 CD, trying to see if there is any disk rescue utility. Nope, there is none.

Trying to import the zpool that housed my data:

$pfexec zpool import -f dpool

It worked, so my data was fine. *phew*

But problem appeared when I tried to import the zpool with my root:

$pfexec zpool import -f rpool

*System rebooted*

I nearly made the conclusion the drive was dead, but to further nail it down to hardware problem, I went ahead and installed a new copy of OS.

Everything went smoothly!! The system boots up properly again and again. Hey, I had a software issue.

Now I kind of suspect why 2010.04 never came out. The kernel has a very latent bug that will silently corrupt the system to total boot failure.

I guess I will use snv_111b for now, or until I can install FreeBSD...

Office Life

Office life is turning a bit hectic ever since I started the new project. Now I am managing a guy while writing code myself. Management is always no fun.

Today my colleague was giving quite a bit of harsh words to one of his subordinates. My colleague's tone was irritated and I overheard fragments of raised voices "You can't tell this to the customers! We must find a work-around."

It seems his man was giving him some headaches by telling him the problems, instead of the solutions. Today a headhunter emailed me about an opportunity for a European company. I replied and now waiting to see how it goes.

On Security

I am reading an article on security hashing, and when the authors mentioned the reason why one type of hashing is better than the other, here is what they said:

Bcrypt was invented by two smart guys and PHK’s was only invented by one smart guy. That's literally twice the smart

Think about it. Twice the smart, how elegant, how measurable, and how exact. Even though there is a word 'literally', but I still think this reason is really funny.

If this argument ever makes sense, then we must say Google products have a lot of smart. :)

On FreeBSD

I mentioned I would take a look on FreeBSD, indeed I did. However my journey was not a smooth one. In fact, the installation process was hung in the middle at the screen prompting for language. I tried both the amd64 and generic i386 images, all to no avail. I guess I will wait for awhile for the next FreeBSD...

Promise

I watched Corpse Bride again. Like Victor in the movie, I also made a promise, and I am still keeping it. So please tell me, is this a good idea...?

OpenSolaris Starts To Suck

OpenSolaris 2010.4 is supposed to come out as now already 2010.5, but this doesn't happen. Both OpenSolaris.org and Oracle have been mum on this issue. Given OpenSolaris is not in active development, and FreeBSD does support ZFS, I am thinking to convert to FreeBSD once for all.

The new FreeBSD 8.0 seems very promising, and I will download it for a spin in the very near future.

The Need to Write

I was away for project for a few days last week, and while staying in hotel, I wanted to blog, but the network connectivity was problematic.

Here I am, sitting here and blogging again. I don't think I am really super-motivated to blog, but at least I can write something.

Project management is tricky, technology is hard, but comparatively the human factor is much harder to manage and fathom.

A lot of times, a decision is not made on technology ground, but more on political, or business considerations. How to balance all these different forces, while maintaining my basic conscience on technology, is a challenge to me.

Sleepless

These nites I couldn't sleep well, many thoughts race in my mind.

My work life is getting busier, but I will leave those issues on other posts.

Just tired, and some heartache in late nite...

Project Management

Recently I am more involved in project management. Unlike last time in my previous jobs where I only managed (and allowed) to talk to sales and marketing people, this time I am talking to real customers, and other collaborating partners.

It is an eye-opener because now things no longer clear-cut as in science or technology. Here, human is the overwhelming factor, and how to anticipate and deal with fellow human beings is easier said than done.

Sometimes I am quite exhausted in endless meetings to talk about some very trivial stuff. I will give myself some more time to decide if this is what I wanna do.

Blog, blog, and more blog

I have not blogged for sometime due to heavy work load. I am involved in another project which involves multi-sites. As usual, it gets messy and a turf fight is imminent. Tired...

Another Fishing Trip

As you can see, I went to another fishing trip, and this time I got a small fish. The bad news is the fish swallowed the hook deep down its stomach, and our operation to extract the hook failed...

When I looked at the little fish, I was thinking what the girl told me. I was wondering what she would have done if we were on the beach then. Would she stop me from fishing, or at least, would she ask me not to use mini hooks so that little fish wouldn't swallow the hooks and got harmed?

I will say the only way to save the little fish on Singapore beach from my predating hook is for the girl to accompany me on my fishing trips. In other words, she is indirectly hurting small animals because of not accompanying me to fish. This argument is logically unsound, but it is a rock-solid politician talk. Yeah, I should go for more politicking ;)

Time to Sit Tight

Recently an MNC approached me, and the first phone interview the lady threw me a bunch of C++ questions.

I was stumped, because I really seldom used C++ on embedded devices. So I was not so sure. I told her the truth and got a reject letter soon after.

However this also marks my determination to conquer C++ properly. This time I am serious. I must fight against my laziness inertia, and s - t - u - d - y....

Fishing, Reloaded

I just bought a fishing rod and wheel. Start to fish again.

I stopped fishing for 10+ years, believe it or not, solely because a remark "The fish is innocent why you want to fish it?" by a girl. Maybe she just said without much thoughts, but for that, I really didn't fish until recently.

Why I resume fishing now you may ask. To de-stress I guess. I am damn stressed. The last fishing trip yielded nothing. My colleague got two small fish though. We released those fish back to the sea. Sometimes I feel I am also a fish trapped in an invisible aquarium...

Cat fish

A very small fish, with big mouth

OpenSolaris Updated

SunOS opensolaris 5.11 snv_134 i86pc i386 i86pc

I think this is the OpenSolaris 2010.03, but whatever it is, it is snappier, faster, and more responsive. I haven't explored the library inside yet.

Live Somewhere Cheap

I came across a blog post by an author Patrick Rothfuss. His fan asked him for a piece of advice for new writers. His answer, in my view, is candid and refreshing: live somewhere cheap.

Actually his answer rings true for anybody who wants to start their own business, be it writing a new novel, or a new piece of software. By controlling expenses carefully, you can survive longer and hopefully by that time, your competitors have all dead due to short of fundings, or your product has matured enough to be marketable.

Living costs in Singapore are getting more and more expensive. It's time for me to hunt for somewhere cheaper.

.

[Quoted] Your high IQ will kill your startup

This is an article which I find really interesting, the original URL is here. I shamelessly copy-and-paste it here so that I have a copy in case that site is down. All the credit goes to the original author.

In 2004 I was in Brazil, walking down the hill in Lapa to get some lunch. I was with a friend who I had met in the hostel I was staying - his name was Ofer. We were having a meta discussion about intelligence, and what role it plays in success.

Then out of the side of the road stepped a man. He was holding a knife in one hand and a bottle in the other hand. He spoke to us in fast portugese, clearly asking us to hand over the things we held. I stood there, not very sure what to do. Ofer started speaking quickly to the man, telling the man not to rob us.

What you have to know about Ofer is that he had been an Israeli soldier. He hated violence of any form, but he knew how to be violent.

The man threw the bottle on the floor and it broke into pieces, he picked up the bottle and lunged at us. I ran off, and Ofer stood there and dodged the man, all the while talking to him. The man attacked several times, and each time Ofer just moved aside.

Then finally, Ofer kicked the weapons out of the guys hands, punched him, and he fell. He then told me to run, and we ran down the hill to the restaurant.

We sat there and he continued what we had spoken about. He said: That demonstrates what I mean. The man with the knife did not know how to use that knife. If he had been as trained in knife fighting as I was in hand combat, he would have been able to destroy me. But he had a tool that he felt gave him an advantage, but it's nothing compared to a person who has no tool, but has worked to develop what he has.

Intelligence is like a knife. If you are intelligent, you are at a clear advantage against people who are not intelligent. But if you are intelligent, and another person is not as intelligent, but the other person is willing to train harder than you, the other person will very quickly overtake you in ability.

How your intelligence will destroy you
People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don't have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school - and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.

And that's where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible.

Let me tell another story. In 2007, I had dinner with the father of my girlfriend in Paris. He is currently a vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world. He is a jewish french immigrant from Morroco - he came in the 70s to France with no money and no connections, and he made it up to become Vice President, even though he studied to be an engineer.

I asked him: How did you do it? How did you start from being an immigrant to become executive material? He told me: I got this far because I'm intelligent. He continued: But there were many many people as intelligent as I am who graduated together with me. They are still engineers right now. The difference between me and them is that when I arrived, I knew that I did not have family here in france, I did not have connections. And I knew there were a lot of other people as intelligent as I was, and who had all these advantages. The only way to be successful then would be to gain a slight advantage over them - I had to work and train harder than they did, I had to get to know more people than they did, I had to learn more about more things that they did.

We started off equals, but at some point all the effort I put in started to pay off, and where they stopped improving themselves, I continued, and I got better and better. Where they were afraid to try new things because they would fail, I tried and I got better and knew more, till I was good enough for the job I hold now.

How this relates to you
Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail. This believe in your own inherent ability is what will kill your startup. Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you.

So don't believe that the brilliance of your idea is what will make you successful. What will make you successful is when you are out there every day, doing something new, challenging yourself, trying new methods, studying new ways, having a lot of small failures, then getting better every day.

End of Chinese New Year

Today marks the end of Chinese New Year, and it is also the valentine's day for Chinese (for the race, not limited to China).

I got slight flu today, after playing badminton, I just stayed home for the whole day. Not really interested to get out to face the hot sun. Read news and learned there was an earth quake happened hours ago, and there were Tsunami warnings to all the neighboring countries.

The world is messy, need to appreciate every day.

Everything comes to a halt

The long holiday is going to end soon and I am back from my holiday.

These two weeks were not exactly relaxing because I had to work on the house chores alone. Trimmed the grass, mopped the floor, washed the car porch, and cooked meals.

On top of that, my parents were constantly having problems with the computer, and the culprit was the crappy Seagate hard disk: it just died a few months before it is 5 years old. Luckily Seagate still covers the warranty and I just sent it back for repair. This is so far the second failing Seagate disks that I have had, while there are a few more similar cases happened to people around me. Way to go Seagate!!

The issue that lingers in my mind this few days is not Chinese New Year, but the incident of of Joe Stack piloting a plane into the Texas IRS office.

First of all, I am not a supporter of violence, and I fully disagree with what he did. His action would only kill and harm the poor employees who have no relationship to his plight.

What set me thinking is this: when a country like US is hit by suicidal attacks done by foreigners, the knee-jerk reaction is labeling those people as terrorists. Those people are against the US government, therefore by definition, they oppose freedom, peace, liberty and whatever shit the government claims to represent. Now, an American killed himself by similar method, and I observe the mainstream media try to isolate this case as 'abnormal' and starts to portray him as lunatic.

If you believe what the media tells you, then you should stop reading this blog. Go watch TV, watch the news, and feel really good that American government has freed the poor people in middle east (but got thousands of American soldiers killed, oops, we must sacrifice something to achieve greatness, right?), serves you well (but don't get sick, because you still have to pay, and pay dearly), and has your interests in mind (Who cares if you are jobless or poorly paid? But we must save the rich bankers! Bail them out with your money, and let them take obscene amount of bonuses at year end, hey banks are very important for the country).

I can't believe how a fine country like the States can rot in this way, and the more amazing thing is: the people are still abiding!

What do you expect us to do then, you may ask. Good question. As I stated earlier, violence is not the answer.

There are two options you can consider. The first is to exercise your suffrage, write to your representative and tell that person your thoughts. However I recognize this option is usually futile because you need a number of people who are rational, who can think independently and won't follow the crowd. If you look at people around you, you will find a lot of them have NO brain activities. All they know is watching TV, having sex, and having sex again.

For example, try to ask "What is your goal in life?", and I bet you will get answers like "I want iPhone", "I want LV", or "I want to look like Lindsay Lohan".

And this brings us to the second method: Vote with your feet. Explore a country that you like, get a permanent residentship (PR), stay there for a while, and convert to the citizen there if you really like that country. If Stack had considered this option, he would leave the country, started a business in countries with relatively liberal tax policies like Singapore, or Hong Kong, most likely he would avoid the frustration of the IRS treatments, and could live longer and happier.

Really, I recall a saying by a management guru that goes something like "when a good manager meets a crappy company, more often than not the company will win".

In other words, when your house is on fire, your first reaction is to put out the fire, but if that fails, will you grab a chair and die together with the house?

Same goes for a messed-up country and a smart person. Run like a cat.

P/S: I heard the term patriotism, well, patriotism is bi-lateral, the pre-requisite is the country loves you and treats you well. Go figure.

12 Minutes

It is 23:48 now, 12 more minutes to Chinese New Year. Sound of fire crackers carpets my surroundings, gives me an illusion as if fire cracker can still be legally sold here. 

As usual I am waiting for the new year, because I know I will be waken up by the fire crackers at midnight anyway. I am here, blogging. My parents are downstairs watching tv and do some last minute preparations.

I just finished reading a book about human body's natural healing power. It claims human bodies will only be healthy when the pH is more on the alkaline side. If the body is acidic, that is where all the sickness comes from. And where can we get alkaline body pH? Organic veggies, and fruits. The firecrackers are very distracting. I will end my blog here. 

Have a good rest my friends. :)

Free Time, Free Time

This is a lazy afternoon. The sky is clear after a mild drizzle sometime back. Cars are zooming non-stop at the road outside of the house. Chinese New Year is coming, and today is the last working day for most office droids.

This year my family will have an early reunion dinner, on the 29th day of the lunar calendar, which is today. This is because every year at the eve of CNY (i.e. the 30th day), there are many interesting TV programs, but because of the reunion dinner, my parents would always be too busy to watch. This year the plan is to have the meal earlier, and on the new year eve we could relax and do whatever one likes. Good plan. :)

I am on my way to fully relax myself, and have concluded it is not a good deal to get myself stuck in front of the computer screen as what I used to do (but i am still blogging!). 

Now if PC and TV are out, what should I do then? The first plan is to try to do things I seldom do:  A few days I ago, I tried again to clear the cabinet filled with my college stuff, and for some unknown reason, I flipped the diary I wrote then, and that page was about one fine day when I was on duty at HKN lounge, and mak went in to buy a bottle of juice. Here it went all the memories got stirred up..., I knew she did it on purpose that day, I knew this was long time ago, and I know my chest is still painful now, damn the silly mak, and damn the silly me who still can't let the past go... Defeated, I hope next year I will finally have courage to clear those things away.  Yesterday, I dug out a Chinese detective novel and found it was pretty interesting. Today, I saw the GEB lying around in the book shelf. Hmm, maybe I should re-read this book? 

Another thing that concerns me is where I should go from now on? Start my business, or continue to work as an employee? My mom suggested I should get a girl and settle down, well, as if I am buying a chewing gum from grocery store... 

Festive Season

Cuppa is now back home for Chinese New Year. Would like to wish everybody who celebrates this festival a Happy Chinese New Year!!!  

新年快乐！！

What a girl wants?

I saw the following post at Facebook, with title "43 things a girl wished her boyfriend knew", it reads quite all right, though I am not sure if all of these are true.

I need inputs from female readers out there. :)

#1 When you break her heart, the pain never really goes away.

#2 When she misses you, she's hurting inside.

#3 When she says it's over, she still wants you to be hers.

#4 When she walks away from you mad, follow her.

#5 When she stares at your mouth, kiss her.

#6 When she pushes or hits you, grab her tight & don't let her go.

#7 When she starts cursing at you, kiss her and tell her you love her.

#8 When she ignores you, give her your attention.

#9 When she pulls away, pull her back.

#10 When you see her at her worst, tell her she's beautiful.

#11 When you see her crying, just hold her and don't say a word.

#12 When you see her walking, sneak up and hug her waist from behind.

#13 When she's scared, protect her.

#14 When she lays her head on your shoulder, tilt her head up and kiss her.

#15 When she steals your favourite jacket, let her keep it and sleep with it for a night.

#16 When she teases you, tease her back and make her laugh.

#17 When she doesn't answer for a long time, reassure her that everything is okay.

#18 When she looks at you with doubt, back yourself up with the truth.

#19 When she says that she likes you, she really does more than you could understand.

#20 When she grabs your hands, hold hers and play with her fingers.

#21 When she bumps into you, bump into her back and make her laugh.

#22 When she tells you a secret, keep it safe and untold.

#23 When she looks at you in your eyes, don’t look away until she does.

#24 Stay on the phone with her even if she’s not saying anything.

#25 Don't let her have the last word.

#26 Don't call her hot, but gorgeous or beautiful is so much better.

#27 Say you love her more than she could ever love you.

#28 Argue that she is the best girl ever.

#29 When she's mad, hug her tight and don't let go.

#30 When she says she's OK, don’t believe it, talk to
her about it, because 10 yrs later she'll still remember it.

#31 Call her at 12:00am on special occasions to tell her you love her.

#32 Call her before you sleep and after you wake up.

#33 Treat her like she's all that matters to you.

#34 Don't ignore her when she's out with you and your friends.

#35 Stay up all night with her when she's sick.

#36 Watch her favorite movie with her or her favorite show even if you think its stupid.

#37 Let her into your world.

#38 Let her wear your clothes.

#39 When she's bored and sad, hang out with her

#40 Let her know she's important.

#41 Kiss her in the pouring rain.

#42 When she runs up at you crying, the first thing you say is; "Who's ass am I kicking today baby?"

#43 After she reads this, she hopes one day you'd read it too.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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....

More Free Time

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

Life, goes on...

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. :)

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...