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).