失くしたものすべて 愛したものすべて この手に抱きしめて 現在は何処を彷徨い行くの

Looking at everything that I've lost
And almost everything that I've loved
I'll hold them all tightly in my arms
Wondering where I am, so please tell me where to go

This stanza has always struck deep. Why, I do not know. But these days it seems to be pretty close.

Where do I wander off to now, holding in my arms all I've lost and loved?

Sometimes, don't you, well I don't know about you, but I do, wish .. Why can't I be a tad more popular? A tad more sophisticated? Have fifty billion friends in my Facebook? If person A can be so popular, why can't I be?

But of course, you know, deep down, that you're not that kind of person. Not the kind to maintain tonnes of friends, to say hi to everyone ... etc.

There is a Fortress of Solitude (not Superman's!), constructed long ago, during the Dark Times™, it has been years. Cracks are showing.

Too tired sometimes to think of walking alone. But we all do. Those who say they have friends, god etc are merely deluding themselves. At the end of it all, we are alone.

掌上明珠，去了哪儿?

It has gone, first, curled up in a corner, sad, as what Lu Ru Ping said (in the TV series), let me hide in a corner to lick my wounds, like an animal (well something like that). But now it has died.

Poor little sad thing, it'll never come to pass.

The Fort is failing, and there precious Angel who'd come has stayed away.

Can't keep like this for long.

XP.. BAH!

More of my angst filled posts..

Just when I clicked publish post, Resurrection BSOD-ed. WTH? Seriously.. What's WRONG with @*&%@$). My office Mac has been running forever (needing periodic reboots of course) but no kernel panics at all (except for once or twice but that was when I was writing my own nubby driver).

Stupid windows...

WTB more stable OS.

LOTRO and how not to do software

Well needless to say I'm hardly the definitive source for application design and stuff like that, but after using tonnes of applications, I think I'm qualified to say something.

.Net sucks. Simple.
The code looks quite interesting but somehow the framework does crazy things to your system.

Case in point, LOTRO. When it was released as a trial, I thought, hey! Finally the LOTRO trial! Now I can try it out and see if I should bother plonking down the cash for it or stick to WoW and wait for WAR.

Upon installing...

Hmm... it needs .Net..? Well sure I guess.

*installed* .. etc .. rebooted

*presented with login screen*

WTH? I thought I had Resurrection configured to log in automatically...? .. No matter... *updated the registry to allow auto login, rebooted. Ah that's fine..

Well, it's NOT fine now, auto login has kinda become a random flag which is CLEARED by some mysterious process or whatnot =_=

And it's all thanks to LOTRO (well, granted it's probably the .Net framework, but it was the main cause as to why .Net got to my system in the first place).

Speaking of LOTRO... It just smacks of unfinished. I can see UNFINISHED! UNFINISHED! screaming around. Granted, I didn't spend a lot of time at it, for the simple fact that it wasn't engaging at all.

1. Characters - ugly, the facial expressions are a hoot though
2. Camera - weird sluggish feel
3. Movement - buggy..? I set up auto run to target (or click to move, whatever it's called), basically my character was supposed to run to the target I clicked on and start swiping it. However, it didn't do that.. I'd click on my target, watch my toon run to it... and overshoot... I had to click again to get him back to whack the target. And it wasn't as if my target moved a fair bit during the time it needed for my character to get there. What gives?
4. Movement - weird jumping animation, for some strange reason, the animation sequence looks really weird, clipped when your character is jumping. The arm flailing just kinda .. skips to the next frame, like a badly drawn cartoon, and when you jump in a jump (ie press jump while in the air), the animation gets slightly weird.

Bah

That's it for LOTRO then.

Tried out WAR during GC-Asia, looks, feels good. High hopes for it!

Of broken dreams...

So there I was, wandering around bugs during lunch, when I went by the kiddie section, which was selling little girl dresses... You know, those princess like ones with the frills.

And I couldn't help but think, how many little girls wore those dresses, looking all innocent and wholesome, with hopes pinned upon by proud parents, and how many of these dreams were broken.

Kinda morose huh.

Then I wandered past the toy section and peeked in.

A Pokeball on sale. Supposedly you're supposed to (somehow) open the plastic ball and a little stuffed pokemon will appear. The pokemon had a rabbit like face, and looked kinda sad.

Next up were Power Ranger SPD toys. This time their intelligence levels had gone even lower; their uniforms had huge numbers on their chests, in case they forgot their designations I guess.

Why do they make such totally insipid toys?

I remember reading a long time ago, that some kids, mostly from western stories, have this little chest at the foot of their beds, a hope chest of such.

I made one too, put in all the stuff I didn't want to remember and tossed it into the sea, never wanting to see them again. From time to time though, it rises, like a rotten corpse, bloated from the sea, floating, never truly wanting to be put down.

Oh well, such is life I guess.

MSN

Well after a harrowing 2 weeks+ of counting packets and parsing bytes .. finally managed to fix my stupid 04 packet error. Now display pictures and emotes can be downloaded perfectly! woot.

MSN's a pretty well designed protocol imo, each client maintains 2+ connections. 1 main one is to the notification server which will send msgs when ppl invite you to sessions, change nicks, add you, etc. While the other one is for chatting. So if you ever tested and wondered why your initial message to someone is always slower, well that's cos both clients are negotiating with a session server for a session!

Heh.

Wanted to blog about other stuff one .. but mysteriously all is forgotten as I sit here.. So I shall just blog the last thought I had before opening this tab...

I have a friend .. well someone who's on my MSN list but I don't talk to at all... she prob doesn't even know who I am now. Anyways, she has a nick "Everytime I look up at the sky at night, I wonder if it's the same stars we're seeing"

Just feel like msging her and say, well, if you're looking at the same position at the same time every night, you're seeing the same stars. However, as the year passes by, the stars will slowly shift, so the same stars you see in Jan - June will be different from July - Dec. Somewhat like how you see Orion in the beginning of the year and Scorpio in the end of the year.

But I guess it doesn't sound as 'romantic' as the message huh.

Come to think of it, her nick reminds me of those rubbish you see in cheap bags/T-shirts which say something like "Time is memory" or some crap like that.. Sounds deep but actually doesn't make sense.

Maybe she took it from there =p

Blogs and blogs

It's back to the "Season" again! Currently setting up a website for my guild ^^ KRP!

Wordpress looks pretty good.. thinking of moving this blog over to Wordpress.. But it means I (somehow) need to port the data over and such .. But the wordpress themes look so yummy.. /tempted.

Chinese software... pui!

So, I've been looking at QQ these few days, for the uninitiated, QQ is a China made IM which apparently is taking China by storm.

Looking at the application... you can really see the differences in design methodology by the East and West. Western design ie Apple, go for the minimalistic approach. Things are described in as few words as possible. More emphasis is on presentation rather than features.

Eastern design is completely opposite. It's features features and more features. Just a visit into QQ's website, or any other Chinese websites and you'll know. It's text upon text upon text upon text. Just a look at it and you'll go @_@, unless you're China Chinese I guess.

The application itself borders on spyware. Upon installation, I suddenly had many 'extra' programs like news, firewall, doctor something or other .. Weird things were popping on my system tray. Alerts I didn't need.

Clicking on the system tray icon yields a pseudo Windows start menu (they designed as thus) with even more menu entries than your Windows start menu.. Clicking on those yield MORE menus..

Urgh.

You can't even do offline messaging (it seems). Every other feature seems to be a paid service. I tried to use one of my own pictures as an avatar and it told me, Sorry! You must be a QQ user (ie paying, non leech) to have your own avatars. wth? In the meantime I'm stuck with funky heads as my avatar.

And the QQ number thing is SOOOO ICQ era. Guess China Chinese can remember numbers better than us... They are pretty smart too, letting you buy special QQ numbers, like birthdays and such. Enterprising.

Convoluted and ugly. The only saving grace is possibly the penguin mascot.

Oops I did it again..

..

Yes in a span of 2 days, I've snapped .. 2 .. erm .. straps. I just reach over .. lean over, bend over... and hear this sickening piak sound, and -_-... bah.

So many things to think about these days

The Product™
The Product's™ Table
$$
and some other stuff
/zzz

Well checked my std account, had more $ than I thought there was, which is good.. although it's still too little =\

Need to save/earn more!!

And so..

So today, I (finally) audit (so to speak), the server logs. The Boss™ charged me to pull out pictures from The Product™ so after doing it, I was just looking through the server logs.

And discovered an oddity.

The timestamps were wrong. -_-;

I was going zomfg?! And did a quick check. As expected, it was logging everything under CST. /sigh.

So I call over CK, erm oei, you know your program logging the date and time wrongly or not?

Then he said he just follow server time. Which is a fair assumption, after all, if a program can't depend on OS time, then how? But hah! He didn't check! Even though I set the server time to SGT already, for some reason Java does not inherit it (not all the time) and will run at CST, which was the server's original configuration.

So, since astartes, the logs have been going under CST time .. urgh. Grr, did you not try and see? Urgh.

So well, if who's going to fix it in the end? .. most likely me. Cos I can apparently write scripts /eye roll

.....

Also I found out that his migration was incomplete -_- Logged images weren't completely copied over from the old directories to the new ones.

Looks like I'll have to do that too -_-

/sigh

What is a programmer?

programmer, n:
       A red eyed, mumbling mammal capable of conversing with
inanimate monsters.

....

Grr..

Told bvo about it before, about this dude, we'll call him CK, who has been rather .. irritating. -_- There was once, where I was doing work, and up he rolls, and asks me some question.

I go.. .. erm .. Well, definitely there's a way to solve this problem, but I'm not sure how .. er .. *click on FF* *google abit* errm...

He sits there for abit, and then rolls back to his place without saying anything. Leaving me to go wtf?

He also has this bad habit of coming up to my place and just stand there and stare at my screen. Leaving me to go .. erm .. yes? Wth are you doing staring at my screen? I don't stare at yours, don't stare at mine. Got pretty thing there izzit? Usually I just endeavour to ignore him.

So today, I'm reading stuff and thinking about stuff, and he suddenly IMs me. Where is XYZ (where XYZ is an object (programming stuff lah))? I'm :@ immediately. I mean... the source code is THERE. The API is THERE. Not that obvious, but it's THERE. And you have CTRL+F or even better, import the whole thing into an IDE and it'll probably hot link the definition to the declaration. Or just install grep, windows version and look for it yourself. WTH are you doing asking me a question wherein you can easily find the answer yourself!?

I hate answering questions like that.

But .. well I just answer it, and I get silence back. Not even a word of thanks.

Are CKs all like that? So annoying. Want very much to just /ignore the person, but not possible lah.

GRRR.

Edit: Yes.. I know, information sharing and stuff. But this is not even a hard question. You're a programmer. I'm sure you have tools, or at least know how to LOOK. It's not difficult. Even windows search can search for words in text files. So stupid. Grr. Next time maybe I should just reply with www.google.com, or best, "Dunno".

The Penguin

The Penguin

by Rob Flynn
and
Jeramey Crawford


Once upon a term'nal dreary, while I hack'ed, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten code--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a beeping,
As of some one gently feeping, feeping using damn talk mode.
"'Tis some hacker," I muttered, "beeping using damn talk mode--
Only this. I hate talk mode."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak semester,
And college life wrought its terror as the school year became a bore.
Eagerly I wished for privledges;--higher access I sought to borrow
For my term'nal, unceasing sorrow--sorrow for a file called core--
For the rare and radiant files of .c the coders call the core--
Access Denied. Chown me more.

"Open Source," did all mutter, when, with very little flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Penguin of the saintly days of yore.
Quite a bit obese was he; having eaten lots of fish had he,
But, by deign of Finnish programmer, he sat in the middle of my floor--
Looking upon my dusty term'nal in the middle of my floor--
Came, and sat, and nothing more.

Then the tubby bird beguiling my sad code into shining,
By the free and open decorum of the message that it bore,
"Though thy term'nal be dusty and slow," he said, "Linux be not craven!"
And thus I installed a new OS far from the proprietary shore--
The kernel code open but documentation lacking on this shore.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"

Much I marvelled this rotund fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help believing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird in the middle of his floor--
Bird or beast sitting in the middle of his cluttered floor,
With such instructions as "pipe grep more."

But the Penguin, sitting lonely in that cluttered floor, spoke only
Those words, as if its soul in that instruction he did outpour.
Nothing more did he need utter; understood did I among that clutter--
Understood his command as I could scarcely do a few moments before--
I typed as furious as was willed me, understanding just a minute before.
Again the bird said "pipe grep more!"

"Amazing!" said I, "Penguin we will conquor the world if you will!
By the Network that interconnects us--by that Finn we both adore--
We'll take this very world by storm!" For now grasped I what he'd meant,
The thing I do while searching /usr/doc/* for that wond'rous lore--
Those compendiums of plaintext documentation and descriptive lore.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"

And the Penguin, never waddling, still is sitting, still is sitting
In the middle of my room and still very cluttered floor;
And his eyes have all the seeming of the free beer I am drinking
And the term'nal-light o'er him glowing throws his shadows on the floor;
And this OS from out the shadows that is pow'ring my term'nal on the floor
Shall be dominating--"Pipe grep more!"

It's been a while..

...since I last posted. Yeah I know been feeling lazy =p

Anyways uploaded my Vietnam pictures into my Flickr (finally). Tagged them and such, and jUploadr crashed -_- So did it again and it's uploading now. Huzzah!

Too lazy to talk about the trip, except it was fun! Fun! and FUN! And I'd go again.

And also, instead of being 'typical' tourists and buying all the touristy stuff (like bargain items (for SGians)), we bought lots of .. toiletries.. hehe.

Anyway feeling poet-y today, so here's 2

Popped into my head in the toilet (cough cough)
Is this poetry?
May it be two verses or three,
As long as it will rhyme,
And stand the test of time.


And another one for R's picture:
Sought by many, found by few,
He waits in his lair, feathered wings coated in morning dew,
Spawned from the blood of creature most hideous,
He stands, tall and strong, regal form so beauteous,
Pegasus, who arose from Medusa's blood,
Shall aid Kratos and turn Zeus' tears into a flood.

For his cloud pic

Somehow the haiku mood is gone, and the general ABAB poems that I usually write. Never really wrote the AABB type before.. Heh.

Must learn to write better poems and haikus. So far most of my haikus suck =p

Vietnam!

Leafing house in 40mins! lalalal~!

Quotes

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Love is something you do, not something you feel."
- Gordon Atkinson

"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat."
--Confucius

(too cheem)

"The only thing high-definition television will do is provide sharper pictures of the garbage."
- George Carlin

(too true)

"Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else."
- Donald Knuth

"Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire."
- Yeats

"Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the beginning you're Dopey and Bashful. In the middle, you are usually sick (Sneezy), tired (Sleepy), and irritable (Grumpy). But at the end, they call you Doc, and then you're Happy."
- Ronald T. Azuma

"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers."
- Larry Niven

"Who needs horror movies when we have Microsoft?"
-Christine Comaford (PC Week, 9/27/95)

Toma!

My precious Toma .. in shwup while playing "We all go down together"
Quite a nice song.. doesn't quite make sense (to me) but it's still nice =p

No umbrellas this time though! Just トーマ ... sigh .. *goo*

Installing Love

Found this on a forum =p

INSTALLING LOVE

Tech Support: Yes, .. how can I help you?

Customer: Well, after much consideration, I've decided to install

Love. Can you guide me though the process?

Tech Support: Yes. I can help you. Are you ready to proceed?

Customer: Well, I'm not very technical, but I think I'm ready.

What do I do first?

Tech Support: The first step is to open your Heart. Have you

located your Heart?

Customer: Yes, but there are several other programs running now.

Is it okay to install Love while they are running?

Tech Support: What programs are running ?

Customer: Let's see, I have Past Hurt, Low Self-Esteem, Grudge

and Resentment running right now.

Tech Support: No problem, Love will gradually erase Past Hurt

from your current operating system. It may remain

in your permanent memory but it will no longer

disrupt other programs. Love will eventually

override Low Self-Esteem with a module of its own!

called High Self- Esteem. However, you have to

completely turn off Grudge and Resentment. Those

programs prevent Love from being properly

installed. Can you turn those off ?

Customer: I don't know how to turn them off. Can you tell me

how?

Tech Support: With pleasure. Go to your start menu and invoke

Forgiveness. Do this as many times as

necessary until Grudge and Resentment have

been completely erased.

Customer: Okay, done! Love has started installing itself. Is that

normal?

Tech Support: Yes, but remember that you have only the

base program. You need to begin connecting to

other Hearts in order to get the upgrades.

Customer: Oops! I have an error message already. It says, "Error

� Program not run on external components " What

should I do?

Tech Support: Don't worry. It means that the Love program is set

up to run on Internal Hearts, but has not yet been

run on your Heart. In non-technical terms, it simply

means you have to Love yourself before you can

Love others.

Customer: So, what should I do?

Tech Support: Pull down Self-Acceptance; then click on the

following files: Forgive-Self; Realize Your Worth;

and Acknowledge your Limitations.

Customer: Okay, done.

Tech Support: Now, copy them to the "My Heart" directory. The

system will overwrite any conflicting files and begin

patching faulty programming. Also, you need

to delete Verbose Self-Criticism from all

directories and empty your Recycle Bin to make

sure it is completely gone ! and never comes back.

Customer: Got it Hey! My heart is filling up with new files. Smile is

playing on my monitor and Peace and Contentment are

copying themselves all over My Heart. Is this normal?

Tech Support: Sometimes. For others it takes

awhile,but eventually everything gets it at the

proper time. So Love is installed and running. One

more thing before we hang up. Love is Freeware. Be

sure to give it and its various modules to everyone you

meet. They will in turn share it with others and return

some cool modules back to you.

Customer: Thank you, God.

Jung's Personality Test. .. rather, yet another personality test

ISTJ - "Trustee". Decisiveness in practical affairs. Guardian of time- honored institutions. Dependable. 11.6% of total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

shwup - photo sharing

It's raining!

Try it here!

Map of Online Communities

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png

Sucky Singnet

So last month dear ISP Singnet sent a snail mail to me. Congratulations! In an effort to serve you, our distinguished customer better, we're going to bump up your 1.5mpbs connection to 3mpbs! For free! You don't need to pay a penny more! (Rephrase mine)

Contrary to nubs, who would rejoice and say yes! Omg! Singnet is the greatest! I was instantly aware of problems ahead, thanks to a similar move made by Starhub last year when I was on cable.

So the end of the month came and I got bumped up to 3mbps.

Any difference?

No.

Well there is... surfing became really slow. Just last week I would take 1 minute to render a wiki page on Firefox. Some pages are completely unloadable, giving the connection reset, or (in IE's case, a blank white page). Other websites have suffered a similar fate, having numerous connection reset messages, which I have to press refresh a few times to get it to connect to properly.

Oh you say, why not just use the proxy? It's faster and it loads the pages!

But it's dumb. I cannot type "google" into Firefox with the proxy set up. It would just give me a "Page not found .. not in proxy blah page".

Filed a complaint to Singnet. Wiki is like, well the basic basic access... If I can't even go to Wiki ....

Well lets say I'm perfectly aware of when my contract with them expires.

Of boys and men

So today, I learnt that a long time friend of mine transferred servers. Well this fact was not entirely unexpected, and logically it's a good move for him (for me too). However, the way it was done, and the way it ended... Would be lying if I said I didn't feel meh about it.

It started out as a disagreement, with me ending up ignoring him for a bit. It was a bad run, and I felt bad as my abilities were called to question. As a healer, it always feels bad when someone dies, whether through my own negligence or his own nubbishness. But anyways, so he sends a message about "this is my last msg to you" etc etc. And well, even though I apologised and threw the ball into his court, he didn't respond. Well so there, can't expect me to keep messaging him and stuff right? I have my own ego and pride too.

Actually, come to think of it, he reminds me of.. .well, me. Well past me. In the past I would do that too, once the gates were slammed down, that offending person would be thrown out of the Court (so to speak). Contacts, phone book .. etc would be erased and thrown out.

Good thing I've evolved since then, time and experience make good temperance. Lost a dear friend due to that, and that will always eat at me <_<. One of the people I cared about .. she tossed the ball into my court and I didn't return it... Well, fact was I didn't know how to do it, was too prideful then. Sigh.

So yeah, he reminds me of past me. At least I've evolved.

Granado Espada ... or the name no one can pronounce

So .. I picked up this game the other day ............ sigh come to think of it, lemme blog it to t9b...
Work never ends..

Stats stats and more stats

Have been hit by the stats fever recently. On hindsight, damnit I should have put it in way earlier, that way I can get even more information on The Product™. But I guess, better late than never, right? Just TODAY. Yes today, dumbass, it finally hit on me to set up a conversion goal for Google Analytics.

Hopefully I'll have some results in soon. Google Analytics if fun actually, looking at all the data amassed. I've added one to my blog too, sadly the visit rate is so low, heh, less than 10 so far! Tsk. Looks like I must blog about more interesting things huh, to get readership up =p

One stat that GA doesn't seem to have is the time of a visitor's visit. I have numbers, I have time.. but mysteriously, for the life of me, I couldn't find an entry for time of visit... Sigh, had to cross reference with Apache's logs.. seems like the most time people visit The Product™ (assuming SG time I hope..) is 20-01 .. guess I'll try, if I can, to run The Product™ around these times and hopefully catch a few people...

The Flash

The Flash
Originally uploaded by Kurayami no Tenshi

Good ol' chicken wing helm!

Servers and more servers

So today, BU shipped off an email instructing me to set up the new Server for The Product™. Egad, setting up yet another server.. So after lunch, I switch into server admin mode and start opening up my ssh connections to Astartes, the new server (I named her! ^^)

Whenever I go into "install" mode, I go into super multi threaded mode. Like when I finish installing XP on Resurrection and start installing drivers and software. Internally I immediately start to pipeline the entire process.

Graphics card? Check. Ok while installing that I'll install Winzip. While installing that I'll install WinRAR too.

Ok graphics card is done, install sound card. Install Java in the meantime too .. etc etc

Same goes for Linux servers. Redhat is my least liked distro, but it is my most used one -_-; After installing three servers with the same information, (well did 2 others in my old job but blah) I've come to the conclusion that all Linuxes are different beasts -_-

The first thing I do on Astartes is to check out the Apache (httpd) version. Hmm 2.0.54, *checks Gimli (the current server)* Ok. same version, Gimli's one is a tar.gz install though .. *thinks* .. well RPMs are fine I guess.. I'll just keep the 2.0.54 RPM.

*typeity type*
MySQL 4!? Wth.. *google* Ah, MySQL 5 rpm.
*typeity type* wget ....
Ok while that's downloading..
I need Tomcat ...
Oh I need stuff from Gimli too ... *typeity type*
*typeity type*
.. Damn php 4!? .. /sigh.. *googles for php*

Ok, need to configure httpd... Ok where the hell is httpd.conf. Nothing a locate can't accomplish.
Whoa.. wth. So many things inside this configuration file. Okay.. I'll just follow my little ol' documentation here.

Hmm .. I need jk_mod. Fine .. *google* Blah, no updated binaries. *downloads source*
./configure --with-apxs
It appeals to my inner geek somehow when I see text from ./configure to flying past the screen. True, no one can read what it's saying at that speed, but still it looks cool.

Finally installed and configured everything. All right, JKMounted the appropriate directories. Httpd should forward these requests to tomcat...

*opens the page in FF*
403.

.. Wth??

*peers at config*
Looks right ..
*types in direct url*
Page renders.
.. -_-;

After spending fruitless hours trying to figure why Apache wasn't forwarding the correct directory to Tomcat... I decided, screw it. Lemme just get a tgz version. Downloaded Apache 2.2 tgz and installed, copied the conf file from Gimli.. compiled the plugins .. and it worked like a charm -_-

DOWN WITH RPMS!
-_-

Bah. Well this post seems rather fragmented and techy .. heh. It happens when I install servers <_< nothing more exciting than seeing your scp file list.

Still need to set up cron jobs on monday .. zzzz
Actually I can do that now .. hmm ... guess will do it tomorrow.. If I remember the IP, heh.

Virus!

So .. last week, my sister's computer fell sick ...

Viruses are insidious nowadays, secretly copying stuff into your most secret folders and disguising themselves as legitimate applications. Through the course of slapping the evil virus out of the system, I learnt several things.

1. Task Manager is stupid. Why show only the executable? Is it so hard to have one more column showing the path of the file? That way you can immediately know whether that svchost.exe is the real McCoy or not.

2. Outpost Firewall is the best.
After clearing out several of the evil spyware, I discovered there was one more ... the most powerful of all. It was autostarting Internet Explorer on startup, in invisible mode, attempting to access two URLs: happy8888.3322.org and happy10000.3322.org, based in Korea (hosted by an IIS server). It was also hijacking, or disguising, or somehow causing IE to be listening on fifty billion ports.
I immediately clamped down access to that site, and Explorer too, which was also being used to visit that site.

3. Autostart Explorer is uber.
It took a long while to find the mysterious process which was autostarting IE. I peeked into the registry, into the start menu .. win.ini .. didn't see it at all. However, fortuitously, I happened to stumble on this application - Autostart Explorer. Though it seemed to be an old app, it listed down EVERY application which autostarted with Windows. Peering at the list let me to discover an odd application which was being auto started.
Deleted it, and voila! Fixed.

Phew.

Sigh still, the most secure measures don't count for crap when users are being dumb.

Developing Websites

Well, since I'm handling The Product's™ webpage, it's my job to make sure it looks/works fine in most browsers.

Sadly however, it never seems to be the case. Many a time have I cursed the programmers of IE and wished I could take an M16 and stormed Richmond.

A webpage update cycle would be something like this, R designs the website L&F (Look and Feel), slices them up in good ol' Photoshop and ships them over to me. I add in all the logic and jazz that makes the website tick. Many a time, these "jazz" thingies cause things to go screwy.

*peer at website in FF* Hm looks good, font sizes are ok, table cells are fine. *fires up IE in VMware* argh!! *faints*

As GPB can attest, by his work of art - Bear out of Cage (or is he? View in IE and FF to see the difference!), web development is shitty. Browsers all render pages in their own quirky way. Code which works on browser A doesn't work on browser B. Formatting which looks good on A looks like crap on B.

Also, in testing the website, I decided to install Netscape 8.1 (well it's on the VMware, not like it's going to taint my machine). The first impression of Netscape's home page was how shitty it was. To me, it looked totally cluttered and too texty, and surprisingly, the browser wasn't at the forefront of the page (unlike Firefox). Installation took ages (when compared to installing Firefox), and when I fired it up, I was surprised to see a splash screen. Wth? Browsers need a splash screen? To me, the time a browser needs to load should be too short for the need of a splash screen.

So anyways, after staring at the splash screen for a bit, Netscape 8.1 finally chugged open. I haven't used Netscape since the Browser War Era™ and the first impression I had was omg it's so cluttered looking. Well, it could have been the skin I chose, for I chose the "newer" looking one (which wasn't the standard template), but still, it looked so cluttered. Buttons and text everywhere.

Since I was going to test Java on it, I ignored all the ugly stuff and navigated to the website. Initially, I thought since Netscape was based on Mozilla (well, the dialogue boxes looked totally the same too -_-), it should be able to handle Firefox-like XPIs. Sadly, that wasn't true. Stupefied, I even took a gander at Java's website on it, and it too, failed to install the Java plugin for Netscape. The "Search for plugins" feature didn't work either. GG Netscape.

On a rather unrelated, but still somewhat relevant note, I was working on the website the other day, adding cookies and stuff, and was printing out an alert in javascript to find out if my code was working. It's a simple alert, it just goes alert(some state) which hopefully renders to true. When I tested it out in IE7, I had a shock (come to think of it, should I be shocked at anything about IE?).

Zomfg. Wth? Why does it render a simple alert box into such a hideous looking dialogue box? And this is IE7 on Vista, supposedly snazzy and leet with their uber Aero interface.

In contrast, let us look at Exhibit B, an alert from IE6 on XP, well granted this screenshot is taken from my home machine which has skinned XP to look like OSX >:D

Still, if you may observe the dimensions of the box, and the size of the warning icon. It is so much in proportion compared to the one from Vista. Seriously, who designed that crap?

... That's all for this episode. Stay tuned for more adventures in .. Developing Websites™ ... *da da dum*

Haiz

This has been a pretty busy month, STUN is a continual head banger, now that I've found out why it didn't work reliably (wag54g sucks), things are better now, but it's still pretty far, need to think of a reliable UDP protocol.

Simply put, TCP on UDP. Haha.

Not going to be easy, especially with flow control, acking ... sigh.

Been dabaoing work home too, there's just not enough time to do STUN, so I generally dabao home and do. Been feeling a bit slackish today though, guess will just play GoW. After all, did slides till 1am yesterday. Think need to add more slides, about the packets I send from client to server...

Bvo was saying she was reading the last three entries and she couldn't understand what I was writing, heh is my writing that bad? =p Don't explain enough? Heh guess should try harder.

R was asking today, oei why today like so sad one, yesterday was like sunshine liddat, today is like back to the usual haiz haiz self.. Which is true, been sighing alot. It's just in my nature to sigh I guess, heh. But there's a big stone in my heart and it's probably going to take some time to grind it down.

On the bright side, it's a security flaw in the H2H protocol, have to rework the protocol bit and patch the kernel, then I should be fine ...

Still feel sad, glad to have DA around, dear precious DA, always around when I need someone most. Although sadly these few months I've kinda lost contact with him, he's still around me. Hopefully he'll never leave, don't know what I'll do without my precious DA.

Hacked 3!

Bah. Anyway.
Heh, the event has left me in a somewhat good mood (why, i don't know,
since i have to make a house call to fix it), guess it's cos i've been
overwrought, stressed, and rather emo these days.
Still... Haha. So funny. Tragic but funny. Hopefully can fix before
10 though. Haha *snicker* so hilarious

Hacked 2!

Bah. Damn mobile gmail, limited in mail size. Anyways, that bugger had
changed the password of my login account and root.
Urgh.
Why? I hear you ask, isn't linux supposed to be secure? Well, when you
have the password the same as your login name and root password...
Heh... On hindsight i should have changed root. It's been the norm for
root to have the same pass (for user friendliness!) But haha as you
can see, it wasn't a great idea.
On the bright side, it's made me smile (maybe snicker) all the way home

Hacked!

Twas a routine day (ie banging head on STUN), i was scping (sending)
files to R's linux which i installed for him on sat when suddenly the
comp kept denying me access. Wrong password.
Nani? I peered at my caps lock. Nope. I sent the files to
Resurrection. Worked. Hmmm that could only mean one thing!
In my other terminal window, i quickly typed 'who', the results
confirmed my suspicions. Besides Resurrection's and coy's ip, there
was a mysterious one from aol! And that bugger had changed the
passwords!

It's rawer than sashimi .. but it works!

After two weeks of getting STUNned, finally managed to let 2 port restricted NATs talk to each other!

For the uninitiated, STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs), is a protocol to discover information about a client which is trying to connect to a server using UDP. Coding up the STUN server (a very ultra basic one) wasn't extremely difficult, after using the API from jStun, sadly they didn't have server code =p.

The hard part however, was getting the clients to talk to each other. Went through a major refactor early in the stage of development as I was sending really messy datagrams to the server, either a discovery object or strings. Really bad. So I looked at it, and refactored everything to send serialised packets of a special datatype which I defined.

Once that was firmed up, it was time for P2P! .. The concept isn't hard, simply send UDP packets from client A to client B (and vice versa) until the NAT opens up but in practise mine never happened <_< I even ran Wireshark to look but it didn't seem to be responding properly =\

Finally today! Managed to do it, right now server communication and client - client communication are using the same port though, not what I envisioned earlier, but if it works, it works huh.

Still extremely raw and buggy though, as I said, it's raw-er than sashimi .. but it works!

RAWR!

Stunned by STUN

Sigh, is there no end to Stun?

Finally implemented a (buggy and nubby) STUN server. Had to rework the entire message passing side as I was just using nubby strings to pass messages. Now it's passing data via serialised objects. However, once I was done, I came to the rude realisation that it doesn't work on my Mac. Sigh, on hindsight, maybe should have realised it sooner ._.

Iptables, the firewall used by OSX, is symmetric, and therefore is unable to be STUNned. Therefore, my intranet client connection code cannot work if the initiatee is iptabled. Also found out that my server won't be able to send that client any messages. It's fine on a non iptabled machine, but not for OSX. Gah.

Sigh, now it's back to the drawing board. Not sure how to do it now, was thinking of a strategy where the clients connect to the server via TCP, then connect with each other via UDP.

Naturally, that won't fix the iptable problem, but if in the event the clients aren't able to connect to each other, at least I still have a TCP pipe connected to the server which will enable the server to do message relaying. Mai hiam bei pai?

Sigh having a headache now.. think too much liao. If Skype can do it .. but no .. Skype probably had networking engineers banging their heads against the problem.. there's only me here, and only a month max. Did a short peek at msn using my firewall, it's not true p2p. Cop out! It all goes through the server.

Sigh.

Superhero Dating Quiz!

DA and I had the same results -_-.. Cookies! Cookies I tellst you!

做人

做人... a nebulous term.

Today a friend confronted me on some issues, saying I didn't tell him things while he told me things. Allow me to illustrate for the benefit of the gentle reader.

Players: A, B, me
Others: C, D, E

The Script:

A, B and me are friends. A+me is closer though.

So one day B tells me things about C&D, which C told him. Which were not supposed to be luan luan say. The things B said are lost in the haze of memory, but it's not extremely exclusive information. ie can be derived or learnt from C himself.

So over a certain weekend, henceforth known as The Weekend™, something happened to C&D involving E.

C told A what happened, and A told me.

A also mentioned not to say it to others, even B. Pretty bad fallout from The Weekend™, so it's not really something which you really want to go around saying.

So anyways when B and me were talking, B was asking for information but I didn't give (well .. did think of giving, but decided not to betray A's trust, so didn't say).

And today B talked to C and found out what happened during The Weekend™ (or at least, C's version), so B comes to me and harangues me for not telling him, since he rightfully infer that since A knows, I must know.

B's point is since he has told me lots of stuff he wasn't supposed to say (but not extremely private), I should reciprocate, and that I tell everything B tells me to A, so why cannot tell him.

Felt like telling B this. I practise ACL (Access Control List), I don't tell everyone everything, nor anyone everything. A has higher ACL levels and therefore I tell A most of everything, and that B, while a good friend, does not approach the ACL level of A. And furthermore, A say cannot say.

But didn't in the end, don't want to hurt B's feelings (.. men -_-) and don't want B to be :@ with A or even more hurt as A said cannot say..

Blah.

At the very most then never talk to B anymore I guess ... More Silent Hunter time!

A rose by any name would smell just as sweet

Amazingly, I have to start blogging for my work. -_-; Never thought it'd come to this, so now I have to think of a name. Kinda hard when you try to... Want it to be different from my usual avatars and thought it should be related to the subject material: Games.

So how? Hmm... I've had some ideas, but they are all either taken (in the blogger universe) or sound weird. Ideas ranging from gamechic, gamechiq, t9b, onegreenmushroom (sadly, greenmushroom was taken), player1, 1UP..

So far the leading contenders are t9b and onegreenmushroom. Thought of milk&nuts, but it loses meaning without the &.

Send help!

Of STUNS and Stunners

Packet of Work for the week: Create STUN server.

And STUN clients.

Gah. So far the STUN server is up, after much teeth gnashing. A very simple barely interactive client set up, after even more teech gnashing.

So right now I have 2 clients, one is Resurrection, behind your typical linksys router, and the other, my work comp, which is behind some Symmetric NAT thingy. Which is BAD, as STUN supposedly doesn't work on it :S

So far what I've managed to do is to get both clients to talk to each other through the server, "talk" being a rather grand term here as the server is merely getting a message from a client and echoing it to all the connected clients.

Been trying to go to the next step but it's not really working. Always get ICMP unreachable and Address binding exceptions.

Gah.

Egads. How huh. I already port+1 liao leh, why still liddat!?

-_-;

More teeth gnashing tomorrow. I will not be defeated by such a problem!

Need to ninja another client for connection too .. sigh!

Finally tiny sock no more

For months, tenshi has been living in a sock too small for him ..

Showed it to bvo + ad during dinner and they made the sock become normal sized again >_>

Bah, how would I know it got all rolled up and such!?

Socks aren't supposed to roll up! It didn't look rolled up to me! I turned it inside out and it still didn't look rolled up! <_<

Once there was a screw

Once there was a screw, who was as shrewd as can be.
It left me one morning like a shrew, and left me in a spew.

本当に？

Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?

:S

shwup!

The new version of shwup is out!

Shwup is a Java based application which allows you to let the world (fellow shwuppers) see your pictures! You don't need to worry about them keeping your pictures too as it never gets saved to their harddisks. Also, it will react with any music you are playing (somewhat like a visualiser).

New features this month consists of an anonymous chat feature and bluetooth, just to name a few.

Check it out at www.shwup.com

Requires Java5 and above.

Send to your friends! <_<

Gah!

Grrr! Never going to use gmail's java app. Was typing up a nice long
entry and it crashed Snooks! Urgh! Precious words! Gone! Sigh... Shall
attempt to garner the strength to write them again... Soon. Grrr!

Mobile!

Since i apparently only feel like bloging when i'm away from my pc,
guess will do it via Snooks then. Character limitations though.
Stay tuned for part 2! And tonnes of small posts :-P

I hath returned! (Part 1)

Back!

Been away for pretty long huh ^^; Been busy and lazy to blog =p

It's been a great week, flying so far away, heh. UA sucks though, food is sucky, service is meh .. inflight entertainment tends to 0. Good things I brought tenshi otherwise would have fainted.

But first things first I guess, time to start blogging about the trip! <_<

Kudos to G and Hogy who woke up early(!!) (in Hogy's case) to come see me off. Sorry didn't have much time to entertain, the stupid security check took so long. Then the flight was delayed for half an hour! Due to some electrical fault. Was so worried that it'll cascade down and cause me to miss my 2 other flights, but thankfully, everything went fine ^^

The 2nd leg of the flight was on a 747, and it has 0 inflight entertainment. Well unless you consider the mass projection screen playing Happy Feet blocked by fitty billion heads to be entertainment. Good thing I brought tenshi. Should have brought The Book, but didn't thanks to Someone :^)

Landed @ LA after the super long flight. Hate long flights zzz. Knees always feel so sore after. Asked the information counter for Terminal 6, and was hauling ass there. The internal flights are pretty cool, kinda friendly. If there's anything to say about American/Western education, it's making people more friendly and outspoken. After 1 hrish of flying, finally landed .. 3rd plane of the day -_-; and went to sortie (out!). Came down the escalator and saw him <_<

Tuscon is an interesting place .. it's like Tatooine <_<.>_> Was fun sitting in a convertible too, too bad it's too hot most of the time, and there's no relief from trees nor clouds! Poor skin ;_;

(Sidenote: Pretty disjointed entry, don't have my thoughts well organised now =p)

Dang have to do work now!

Gah! Part II inc <_<

USA!

Zomg! Going to fly off tomorrow! Exciting!

/afk!

The best line today ..

Is .. "Your money is being spent , but I don't need to tell you"

^_^

Yes yes .. it's been years since I last posted.. Can't be helped, have been super busy with lotsa work since the last post. The project's been ramped up and there's lots of things to be done as we're making a release every week.

Even had to cater to a custom order during the CNY period. They wanted to demo our app to the HP dudes @ USA and the Vista laptop the VP was bringing didn't have the proper audio interfaces. Therefore there was a snap decision to create a WMP plugin to interface with the app, just like how the OSX's one is handled.

And of course who has to do it?

Yours truly of course, since the OSX's one is mine .. heh.

Windows COM programming totally sucks. For some reason the constructor and destructor (FinalConstruct and FinalRelease) were being called more than once, even though the template's tooltips said it was a one time initialisation. Damn COM objects! Damn C++! Anyways finally managed to whip out in record time a WMP plugin .. from 0 COM knowledge. Not too bad huh /flex

During that period, I learnt how sucky Vista is.

First was WMP11. To install a plugin in WMP9 and 10, you could just go to Options and go to the plugins tab and click add. But for WMP11? No..... even though the plugin page says you can add plugins, there's no add button. The help file's stupid too. Just says you need to be an admin to add plugins, but doesn't tell you how.

After some research, managed to find out how to install a BLOODY plugin. It's back to the usual "regsvr32" crap. Way to go for a "GUI" based OS. But that's not all... When I tried to register my plugin, it gave me an obscure error 0x008..something or other. Some googling told me that it was a permissions problem, that I needed to be admin to do the operation.

So I peeked at my User account. Sure thing, I was admin. OK, so I realised I needed sudo. Well.. okay, that's fair. *nix + OSX work that way too, even if you are logged as admin, you'll still have to sudo if you need to do some special stuff. The problem now was... how the heck do I sudo in Vista? Naturally "sudo" didn't work. -_-

Finally managed to get it to work. How? Open Explorer, go to Windows\system32, look for cmd, right click and choose run as admin. WTF? That's so stupid. In any *nix system, all you need to do is type "sudo". In OSX, all you need to do is type "sudo". Why isn't there a way to easily switch to super user mode in Vista? Why must I navigate all the way to system32, right click and choose run as admin? The entire session is now admin. If I forgot and left it and went to the toilet, some malicious dude could do evil stuff to the OS. Vista is so.. freaking.. dumb.

Oh .. WMP11 is dumb too. How do you add plugins to iTunes? Simply copy the file to the plugins directory and restart. Voila! How do you add plugins to Winamp? Simply copy the files to the directory and restart (could be wrong there.. rusty!). Why in the 9 freaking hells do I have to be SUPER USER and run a COMMAND LINE PROMPT to add in a simple plugin? WMP9 > WMP11 there. And at least update your UI and your freaking help files to reflect that.

Pbbt.

Also, whoever who thought up the stupid user authentication thing ought to be shot. Twice. No. Fitty billion times. This ad from Apple most accurately sums it all up.

To copy a file (that is, my dll plugin) to a "protected" place like C:\program files\windows media player, I have to authenticate. Again, fair enough. I have to do that on a *nix/OSX box too. However, the BIG BIG BIG problem is that it's modal.

Process: Click file -> Drag file to explorer pointing to protected folder -> Dialogue box appears telling me I have to yada yada yada give confirmation -> Click ok -> Screen flashes (the first time it happened I went oO? Comp crash?) -> Annoying modal box appears asking me to confirm. During this period I can do NOTHING until I continue/cancel.

Problem? Yeah. Totally. For OSX, which I use the most often besides XP, a (ONE) dialogue box appears, and I just enter my password and I'm done. If I'm doing other stuff or another application wants my attention, I can just leave that dialogue box there until I want to deal with it.

Vista is so super secure. I can't copy a file from a network drive to a protected place. When I do that action, a dialogue box appears telling me that I have to give confirmation, which I click ok (or continue. w/e), then this box appears telling me that I can't do that .. blah blah. Look. If I want to copy a file. COPY it! Or just say no on the outset. What's the point of popping up that dumb dialogue box if you're going to stop me later anyways? 1 more click for me.

Replacing a file in protected folders.

To replace a file, I have to go through 3 dialogues. 1: Do you want to replace? Copy? Cancel? Copy and rename the original file? (At least I think that's what it is. Kinda remember that there was a 4th option). THEN it pops up the dialogue again, then tat modal thing.

-_-

The worse part here (what? You mean there's worse parts to all that clicking on continue?) is the copy/replace/cancel option. In OSX, it's a simple Continue or Cancel. This one has an ultra big dialog box with pretty icons and lotsa text telling you what will happen if you Replace, what will happen if you copy .. etc etc. Dude. I don't need that information. Provide a ? or tooltips if you want. Don't make it appear all the time.

Odd.

When you cancel a delete on a file, you'd expect it to be a no-op right? The OS just stays silent if you click cancel. However, for some gay mysterious reason, that's not the case for Vista.

Deleting a file in a protected folder.

Click delete -> Click continue -> Click cancel on annoying modal box -> A file progress window appears (for you XP users, it's somewhat like that window that appears when you copy many files, a little icon and a progress bar with a cancel button). The first time it happened, I was going wtf? Didn't I click cancel? Well yeah apparently it's a "cancel" action. Apparently, the file is ... sent to the recycle bin when I clicked on delete (or something like that), so when I click cancel at the last step, it needs to restore it.

It's not extremely stable too. The business edition test machine I was using died 2 times while I was testing. The first time it died silently. I just left it to idle while I did stuff on my Mac. Turned back, and it was dead. Not the normal kind of dead, it was massive graphics corruption kind of dead. Think of copying the picture of 1 window and pasting it everywhere on the screen. (Actually kinda worse but it's the closest I can think of). And it was doing NOTHING.

Bah.

Vista is so gay. Of course, one may argue that I was doing "power user" stuff, copying files from protected places, etc. But it's just showing how annoying it is. I've done this on XP, done this on OSX, nothing at all. I don't need an OS to keep asking me dumb questions on annoyingly big dialogue boxes.

Pretty sure I'm not going to get a Vista. If I were to get one, it's purely for games. WTB more OSX games! Thinking of switching to the OSX platform. Would be great if I could get it running on Resurrection though, seems to be alot of hoops to jump through though. Shimatta!

And to continue ...

And I was planning to do other stuff on that weekend!

Hairdressers ... spring cleaning ............


T_T

gone.

SIGH.

At least I guess .. I spring cleaned Resurrection..? ........... EXCEPT FOR THAT @($*&@( DOUBLE BOOTING PROBLEM.

And the hdd problem, I'm too scared to even plug in my WD to wipe it clean. Was thinking of just taking out all my drives, plug it in, and use the XP installation disk to delete my partitions, can't even secure erase it from Norton.. SIGH

Ayam Alife!

Been a long while since I posted .. Have been busy with work and stuff. Had a traumatic weekend when I went home .. Flipped on Resurrection, and she couldn't boot! Gah! She couldn't even hit bios. Kept rebooting. :S

Started pulling stuff out and trying to boot. Finally pulled out the mobo and tried to boot... no dice. *severely traumatised*

Decided to bring in the mobo the next day to RMA... SIGH.

Met R and went down to SLS to RMA the mobo, he went to the office while I went to SLS. Then when I got there, the dude said actually mobo must/should RMA at the distributor, otherwise dunno when they will fix (duh?) But good thing the distributor was coming down in the afternoon so he could bring another one for me to change.

So went back to the office and did some work, closed some bugs, added some bug notes while waiting.

Finally at long last, I got my new mobo and went home to hook her up. Before I encased her into Resurrection's metal shell, I tested her to make sure that she could boot. You know, the good ol' insert the screw driver in a specific locations. Hooked her up and lugged the heavy metal casing back. Powered her on and lo Windows finally started.

All was fine and dandy until she started crashing really badly.

It would be like *chat on msn* *hear some ... dropping sound* and Resurrection will chug to a halt. She was even starting to hang at chkdsk -_-;; at that point, I was reaching @($&*@*(!! state. WTF was happening?!? Then errors like "unknown hard error" started popping up.

....

Severely traumatised, I formed several conclusions
1: Most obvious, hdd xX
2: The new mobo has a new revision of the ACHI driver, it could be that.

So I decided to reinstall windows.

...

Windows setup takes like a few gazillion years to load -_-. Upon startup, it loads like fitty billion drivers which you've never EVER seen before. QLogic? Nani? SCSI? Just load the ones I need lah, the rest just load on demand! <_<

At first I decided to be lazy and do a repair, after grinding through a yellow progress bar which purports to be "checking your disk", it ended with a "Setup has repair errors in your disk, press F3 to restart" message. Which I dutifully did (not that you have much of a choice)

After getting into setup .. again .. zzz... I tried to repair again, it went through the yellow progress bar, and ended with a "Setup has detected that your drive is corrupted and blah, Setup cannot continue" -_-

So I decided (was just banging my head against a wall) to reinstall windows clean

After grinding through setup again (more times than mentioned!), I finally reached the install windows screen. Selected that I want - install windows in c, delete current windows... It did the Yellow Progress Bar (AGAIN!) and deleted my windows :O zomg! .. Then it *gasp* started to install windows .........

However ...... at driver.cab, it suddenly bailed on me with this message "Setup cannot copy driver.cab from the cd.. make sure blah blah file there blah" .. I was fainting. Don't tell me my CD died too!? .. I tried both Xps that I had but no dice, finally had no choice but to reboot ....

.. And grind through setup .. again.

This time it couldn't even detect my primary disk -_-

Went through setup ......... again.

Detected C. D and E (which were separate partitions on the same physical disk) were listed as UNKNOWN.

Nonetheless, tried to install windows into C. At 97% of the Yellow Progress Bar, it bailed on me again. This time it was d3d8.dll which couldn't be found.

After some teeth gnashing (this time it's pretty apparent that it's not media fault)..

Went through setup ......... yet again.

This time it managed to detect all my partitions, and installed ......

It even managed to boot into the GUI part of the installation! Zomg!

... Tried to install East Asian language, halfway through the grinding .. it died.

I've nv seen Setup @ GUI side bail so spectacularly before, but it did. I finally did the wise thing and gave up.

Went and got a new harddisk, a Hitachi Deathstar 500GB the next day. Installed everything fine.

However, something odd happened when I plugged in my old primary disk (which is a WD 320GB) to save my data. My ACHI bios couldn't detect my Deathstar! :O But it managed to detect my WD fine. .. -_- After clearing CMOS, it finally detected both drives and booted. Once in windows, I quickly arranged for my sweet sweet data to escape into the Ark. (Maybe I should rename one of my partitions that). It was a painful journey, imagine the torrential rain, pouring down into the waterlogged muddy land, with your data, gray with mud, struggling to make it across. The ones who had gone over screaming for their companions to get to safety. After several breakages in connection (which brought down the file transfer but not windows, thankfully), the pertinent data managed to get Saved. Finally. The rest had to be jettisoned.

You'd think all would be well at this point, but strangely .. it seems that after this, the mobo's starting to have difficulty in detecting my Deathstar -_-, my 250 Hitachi is still reliably detected -_-.

At this point I decided (not very wisely) to flash the bios of my mobo, to hopefully fix this "bug". This is my first and last time flashing a gigabyte board. The windows flashing application is extremely poorly written. There's some threading issues around. When it's making the ftp connection to download the new bios, the gui hangs.. -_-; When it's doing the MOST IMPORTANT job (the sole reason for its existence!), the GUI hung. You know how traumatic that is!? Updating the bios of your mobo's one of the most :S things to do, pull the plug, windows hang .. and it's dead.

So finally, thankfully, the application didn't die, and I rebooted. Instead of a friendly bios screen, this screen appeared.

Scanning BIOS from Harddisk . . .

Nani?! The power button started winking at me at this point. After sitting around for a moment waiting for THINGS to happen, I decided to just restart the damn thing. When she restarted (fingers crossed!) she went into the Dual Bios (which gigabyte always trumpets about) selection screen and said "Updating bios" ... .... .. and completed.

Hurrah?

Well.

I booted into windows, the second before the Welcome screen was to appear, Resurrection did a hard reset. THEN windows booted up perfectly. -_-

Seriously!?

Neither did the flash fix my "can't detect Deathstar 500" problem too.

So now I have 2 problems, unreliable detection of Primary Deathstar and 2 boots to get into windows.

Just (hopefully) fixed the first problem. My mobo has 2 raid/IDE controllers, the ICH8R and the Gigabyte one. Previously I've been using the ICH8R, so now I've plugged both my drives to the Gigabyte controller (note to self, when I reinstall windows I'll have to plug them back to ICH8R, cos that's the one I have drivers for.. I could try getting the gigabyte ones I guess ..... sigh)

So far so good. Detection's much faster on the Gigabyte controller than ICH8R.

However, my windows still has the double booting problem -_- Not sure how to fix it. Not really keen to reinstall windows.

On the bright side, at least it's ... automated.............?

GAH!


/wail T_T

It's official

I take 10 mins to get from my work place to cathay. Was thinking of
taking a bus but am glad that i decided to walk instead. Typing this
on snooks whilst i wait.
Saw my earlier post for a sec before i left. Lol such a long ass one.
It may sound extreme, but i didnt temper my words, nor did i write
everything which should have been said. Tend to forget stuff. Heh.
Where do i wander off to now, holding in my arms all i've lost and
loved. Dunno why it strikes a chord in me. Damn reach word limit liao.
Bah

Where do I wander off to now

May be a little late to be posting this, since it's already nearing the end of January, but mm it's been simmering in my mind for a long time, so better late than never?

~Reflection~

All in all it has been an interesting year, lost and gained, lost and loved, more wanderings and ponderings.

I suppose after half a year in muvee, I think I can say that it's a good decision muving on. Why? Met more "grown" up people, my old place had 2 categories, the Boss Units (BU) and Peon Units (PU), and all the PUs were of my level, around my age, similar experiences. The BUs were nice but they were hardly around, and we only talked much on official capacities. Hardly would I think of meeting them after office hours for muvee outings or dinner etc etc.

Pretty mysterious given that they are all around my age.

Then there's processes, the processes here are better.

And then there's BUs, my BU is a nice guy. Need anything? Go buy and let me sign. Need off? No need to give leave form first, you sms me and poof first, come back then let me sign. He's a good guy ^^;

TL R is also not too bad, introduced drinks! and other funky stuff. Pool buddy too heh.

Also at least bonus is not too bad <_<

And now they changed 13th mth to contractual means every year will def get 13mth bonus! Woot.

Of course, not to say the old place is bad, if I had stayed, would have had more power and influence. heh ^^

Also, coming here has given me a new perspective on things. It's been a little difficult to reconcile them with the present configuration though, still need to mull through alot of stuff.... Damn I thought of alot to write during my lunch @ Macs earlier but now dunno how to start, heh.

Gah after toilet break and other misc stuff, lagi worse, dunno how to start. hmmz

Hmm Lets start off like this. I'm challenging myself on the preconceived notions of right and wrong. Things one should do, and things one shouldn't do. (eww sounds tacky). I have a friend who started dating a french dude. Her parents went ballistic. Can't you get an SG dude?! He's FRENCH! He's bad! He'll definitely want to have sex with you and blah. Things were bad and in the end she struck out on her own, living in another uncle's spare flat. (great to have relatives sometimes).

Had a talk with her sometime back and what she said was she learnt something new (well SBU (super BU) 1 told her.

If they can't handle the truth, don't tell them the truth.

And, one answers only to oneself. Naturally it's not saying you do whatever you want, but do it within limits. Like if you feel it should be done, it's what you really want, go ahead and do it. Life experiences are for yourself to learn. If you've done everything in your power to let the people who are worried for you to be at ease, and they still try to make things difficult for you, that's too bad. You can't be responsible for what they feel even after you lay your cards on the table. What's important is what you feel.

Hmm seems odd to be written out like that. Not the best structuring.

Like the friend with that guy. Her parents go He's bad and such, but they haven't even met him. They just assumed he was bad. She however, wants to experience it for herself (he seems pretty good, working in accenture and stuff). I have trust in her that she won't pick up some bad egg. If it fails, she will at least walk away of having the lost and loved experience (lolz so tacky).

Aiyah dunno how to say it lah. But you know what I mean. If you don't then ..

I came to this theory earlier at lunch. For those who are getting squashed by their elders. NO! Can't do this! It's BAD! Cos I KNOW! Is it really true? Have they experienced the same exact situation with the same conditions? Guess it's easier to put it this way.

It's like hiring an applications programmer to program a game. Sure, a game IS an application on the surface, but deep down the model is pretty different. Most applications are event driven, they don't need to extremely performance oriented ie you don't need to squeeze out every single ounce of processing power. A variable which ranges from 1 - 128 you declare as an integer in an application is fine, but it will have to be declared as a byte in a game. The application programmer can provide insights and maybe some experience to the budding programmer, but the best person to solve the problems would be the budding programmer himself, for he'll learn from his mistakes. Besides, he's the one in the hot seat.

Damn I sound fragmented.

Like for example, buying a car. She(tm) says no don't buy car, blah blah. Buy one with your hubby blah blah. But seriously, the choice is mine and my own. Wouldn't it be good to learn about how to maintain a car? The responsibilities of loans and money handling? The different activities you'd do with a car? Naturally I wouldn't be buying a car now, simply doing a survey and some future planning. So overreactions like that are silly. I KNOW it'll be a burden on finances, it's a slow bleed now, with a car it'd be a hemorrhage. So definitely I'll be smart enough to decide whether I want to take on the responsibility of getting one.

Tsk.

I was questioned on the issue of leaving (vague alert!) the unit. What I felt about it if X left. At that time (and now) my response was if X thinks it's right, thinks leaving will give X more opportunities, a better life, sure. For I cannot provide the same level of care X would get if X left, nor can I guarantee it. However I was informed that this was not the "correct" answer. (well at least that's what I inferred), and the proper answer was NO! But I cannot say NO fairly. As mentioned earlier, if I cannot guarantee it, who am I to stop you from taking steps to achieve what YOU want, to make YOU happy?

Well now apparently, the one who provided the correct answer has some experience now and is apparently singing a different tune. Oh well, don't care. I still stand by what I think.

Then there's another issue, about how good a guy is when he has "plans". We'll date for X years, if ok after that then get married. Is that how it should be? It sounds so bloody mechanical. Yet it was lauded. I'm still of two minds about it. Naturally it's good to have that eventual goal in mind, but ... to state it out so flatly? Hmm

I was spying peering at this chick's blog a few days ago, her bf proposed to her. Aww so sweet. He had his friends over to help sing song/say stuff/can't remember though. If I were the gf I'd have been -_-. Why did you have to involve friends? Are you afraid I'd say no? Then looked at the pictures of the flat and everything

Is that all it is? Maybe not ready to settle down, but somehow feel that's not the life for me. It feels so .. typical. Of course, I'm unique, just like everyone else, but I've always been atypical, I've done my fair share of odd things, gone the odd path, will probably keep doing it though. Heh.

I thought about what L said when he saw the utube vid about that guy. When the hosts asked him why he wanted to get married, the reasons were "I'm not getting any younger... she's a nice girl.." L was saying Why isn't the answer "Because I love her .. etc etc" (paiseh can't remember word for word). Maybe he's shy .. but hmmm

Reading sgbrides forum has given some perspective too, there are those who marry for the sake of marrying. Why in the past me and my gf were talking about stuff like this too .. Hopefully the guy can make $$, look ok, treat me super good, then ok liao. But is this it? Would a guy with lesser $, tiao jian do? Someone you care about deeply? Hmm

What's really important at the end of the day? To say, I've lived in a condo! I've 3 mercs, 2 bmws? Thought of this resume hogy and I found on the backpacker's lodge comp @ KL some time back. That dude is a certified backpacker, he travels around the world, applying for short stint jobs to tide him through for his next hop.

At the end, he might be a poor churchmouse but he'd have travelled widely. Sure, you with the condo and stuff would probably have done the same, but your vision of would probably be that of resorts, golfing clubs while his would be closer, more to the grass roots. In the end, which is what you want?

Huh apologies for sounding fragmented, multitasking as I type heh. Didn't come out exactly the way I want it though.

I've also been faulted for the choice of career. Hey, if you listened to me like that chick in some random neighbour's house who listened to her sis and did accounting, you'd be indispensable and earning lots of money. It's like hallo? Am I interested in accounting? Who the hell cares if YOU have been an accountant before. Yes, they are important, yes some of them earn lots of money, but that's THEM. I'm ME. And .. why not you be a teacher! Like your sis, stable .. blah blah. See above answer *roll eyes* Gah Makes me angry. What a fking idiot.

Guess the final message for the day is this: Let me (general term) choose to do what I want. Provide the red flags when necessary but experience cannot be taught, it must be earned. And, I cannot be responsible for how you feel. If I've fulfilled my responsibility of furnishing as many details as possible and you still cannot accept it, do not hold me responsible for what you feel. I cannot control what you feel.

Ponder

Been a long time since I updated <_< heh. Have been busy about stuff @ work and @ wow. The race is on to hit 70 and I'm half way there .. should hit 70 in a few weeks time, then it's back to gear farming, rep grinding.. etc.. But I also have to level Sef up to 70 too, been having withdrawal syndromes about him.

Still feeling abit meh these few days, been thinking about some stuff. An analogy I've gotten from my readings around is this ..
From sgbrides: Hubby wants IT everyday, wife says no! So after some time hubby turns to pr0n and mayhaps chat up chicks on the net.

...

Hmm.. odd analogy, but the basic basic basic thing is in it. Nothing to do about ITs! It's more of asking until become 8-) then /form new party. Yeah I suppose that's it. Of course I tried the putting myself in others shoes thing, but there's no ways about it. It's just ... meh. Not something I'd say.

Kinda same (well samish different) with a recent party we had at the office, the nub organiser (who incidentally came from the same sec school as me) organised a treasure hunt for the "in crowd" of muvoids. Well, I believe the ones involved definitely had fun, but there wasn't anything for the "!in" crowd to do. Which is kinda a failure imo. I've always had the "leave no one behind" mentality, so it didn't quite jell well.

But come to think of it .. do ppl know? Do they appreciate? Leave no one behind .. but does the person care in the first place? Probably not worth the effort, cos when you think of things that way, you'd like people to think of you in that way too, but that's not a fair burden to place on people. It's back to the expectations part. So well, screw it. You do your thing. I'll join party if it benefits me.

So it's kinda a quandary.. On one hand, you want to treat ppl fairly, but once you do it, you expect to be treated the same way, even though it's not a fair onus to place on others (I think ..). So best is just adopt the same protocol as others adopt towards you I guess

Hmmmmmmmm

Pretty vague post .. but I get like that sometimes ^^;

It's HERE!

Yeah! TBC is finally out .. popped by on 16th to Suntec to pick it up .. Was envisioning long queues, many people, hawt events, was wondering hey! will there be some cute guy standing beside me in the queue waiting to get BC? Haha

So .. when I finally got there and took the escalator down, I peered down and saw ... no queue. Peered at the people milling about ... There was nothing 'grand' about it, just 1 stage with a board saying "ONYXIA CHALLENGE!" -_-; So I popped by, collected my BC, walked around abit .. "ONYXIA CHALLENGE" is apparently some corrupted memory - bingo game where you cover your little card wtih 16 spells/abilities with stickers, and when Glenn Ong (who probably doesn't know what Onyxia is) announces the spell/ability (ie GO: CORRUPTION!), you're supposed to scratch out that square .. first one who gets 5 correct is supposed to scream "ONYXIA DOWN!" and get a prize .. doh.

I went home.

Installed BC, had dinner, bathed, blah, and logged in .. wasn't much of a trouble.. heh. Although the last 2 days I played, the server had to be restarted for some issues .. I wonder how Bliz tech support goes.. DAMNIT! We have a problem! .. Soln? Restart server! Keep restarting till it works!

Sidenote, been abit wishy washy and hmm weirdly wired these few days.. Dunno what's come over me. <_< Weird. And no .. it's not The Kurse ..

Well .. I did it

Yep, after all the procrastination, the mulling over ... finally took the plunge so to speak and did it.

Was a little unsure afterwards .. after all, this is the first concrete step taken, and boy does it feel weird. Lotsa scenarios crop up, things that may or may not happen ... All the little itty voices saying "Zomg it's WRONG!"

But there's one tiny voice that says .. go go! <_< It'll be fine! Kitto ok!

1 sole flame in the teeming darkness.

Well, we'll see what happens. There is always fear of the unknown.

In other news ......

Realised that I can't write anymore .. or rather, no more stamina <_<. Was filling out some equipment loan forms yesterday for R and The Hand™ felt a bit tired and the pen felt foreign ... Gah, what happened to stamina!? What happened to The Hand™ which could write reams and reams for compositions?! Wth! ;_;

In other other news ....

Finally got my first(!) credit card ever. The DBS Mastercard doesn't count! It's a debit! It's a Capitaland card by DBS, got it cos felt that since work so near bugs junc and go there quite often, will be able to get some discounts ... Anyways now already forgot the offers, need to go read em up again.

In other other news....

Where's my precious!? My dearest 天使.. ;_; We've drifted so far .. I wonder why ... Don't leave me here like that <_< Don't withdraw from my life like that T_T

Heroes

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Lovetoy!

You tease me,
oh please me,
i want you to be my lovetoy,
come near me, don't fear me,
i just can't get enough of you boy.

It's a Neu Ear!

Haven't posted for a while, was blog surfing my fellow denizen's blogs before I felt the pang of bloghood. Well, time to make an entry!

Have been busy last week with the Ad-venture. Rented a TT for 2 days to refamiliarise myself with running down civilians driving. It wasn't too bad ..

Car 2 days: 110$
Fuel: 40$
Cashcardo: 17$
Fine!?: 20$

Yeah coupon fine :S Forgot about the overnight parking thing starting at 1030 so I didn't put enough coupons to cover that one. Appealing though, see how it goes. Heh, but all in all it wasn't that expensive for the Ad-venture.

Initially, I thought I wouldn't know how to go anywhere, but managed to drive around a couple of places.

Upon collecting the TT on Wed, drove down the TPE with Bvo. Car handles okay, but sadly doesn't have enough power. Definitely not one of my NFS cars. It also had the tendency to veer to the left -_-;

After reaching Yishunish, we thought it would be time to U turn and get to NTU to pick up GPB for lunch, after getting lost being momentarily misplaced for a bit, we managed to trundle to NTU to meet GPB. Sadly, although Bvo spent quite a number of years stuck in NTU, she seems to be a wee bit .. unnavigationist about the place. I blame the pasta.

Had lunch at Jurong Point after picking up GPB (not supposed to ferry pets, but there you go) and walked around for a bit. Sigh really miss the old days of bumming around being a uni student. Can sit around at odd hours in odd places (well not odd but odd for that time) and talk/bum around. After that, drove GPB back to NTU and drove Bvo back to her kampong then set off for Bukit Merah.

Why the roundabout way? Could have gone straight from NTU to Bukit Merah then Bvo's Kampong.

Answer? Cos Bvo is shy 8-) Can't even store her somewhere while I go ex coy @ Bukit Merah to say hi to the expeons there. So had to travel all the way back to the East, and travel back to the Central. Psst!

Showed them shwup and they were rather impressed but it, but think have to do abit more marketing to get them to spread it round, heh. Had some technical problems running it initially, first was non updated drivers for the embedded Intel graphics drivers (PC), and next was the Mac Mini's user wasn't admin. Yeah yeah, writing to root is horrible, going to have to fix that soon.

Left around 6 to pick up R from the office. Got abit lost momentarily misplaced for a moment when I missed the turn to AYE. It was a bloody long queue anyways. Instead I headed on straight, and trusting in the Force, found myself beside SGH and going towards Funan via Chinatown. Back in familiar territory, I had no problems navigating to Bugs and scooped up R (who was playing pool when I got there -_-) and drove back.

However, on the way back we decided to make a detour to East Coast Park for abit, R said he knew of a nice spot, and despite the rain, I made the turn and we went there. Sadly it was raining pretty heavily when we reached so we could only sit in the car for abit while waiting. It's the far sorta end of ECP, off a narrow road, near the beach. I stopped behind this Nissan March looking vehicle and both of us started munching on the titbits R bought when we made a short stopover.

In the car, R told me he saw a couple stop at his terrace house last time in the wee hours to engage in .. activities. He chased them off with his room light, but they travelled a few houses down and reengaged. He then took out his bike, cycled sloooooowwwly towards the car and stopped at the driver's side until the girl noticed and looked up (from her erm .. ministrations to the guy). Then he cycled off nonchalantly. Tee hee.

So finally the rain stopped and we hopped out and went to the beach and stood at the breakwater. Nice place, *scribbles notes* more places to bring someone too! ^^;

When we headed back to the car, I noticed the car in front of mine had moving people inside it (well I knew there were people inside already). Walking nearer to it, we could see that it was a couple in the hot grip of passion. Apparently the chick was sitting on the guy (driver)'s lap and they were kissing. Naturally I paused for a bit while passing by them to ogle observe scientifically.

People these days! Tsk tsk!

Sent R home and went back for munchies. Nice parking if I may say so myself.

On Thurs, woke up early and drove to R's place to pick him up. He so buay paiseh, wed night msg me: So when are you picking me up? Doh!

Anyways, drove him to the office, waited for him to 'check in' and headed to Funan for breakfast.

Immortal Dialogue while reversing into parking lot:

Me: Still rusty at parking ah me.
Me: *peering into mirrors and reversing* I have a hard time being straight
R: *gag*
Me: Ack!

.. -_-

Doh! <_<; Naturally I meant I had a hard time straightening the car when parking (A).

After having breakfast, shipped R back to the office and called up GPB but he was busy >:E Tried calling H but he had some nubby meeting at RP so couldn't go there for lunch, so decided to go back up to TPE and explore abit, but while driving up, saw the exit for Changi Village and decided to head there instead.

Spent nearly an hour at Changi Beach. Walked up and down it. No one for kilometres! Well kinda. Unfortunately the beach was quite dirty <_< Quite an interesting place though. Called up R and arranged to meet him for lunch. Drove back down to office (lolz) and picked him up.

Me: So go where?
R: Go orchard loh
Me: Okay ah, how to go you know right?
R: Ya ya go lah.

*Drive*
*at orchard boulevard*
Me: Oei where are we going huh?
R: eat pasta la
Me: Okay lah, where huh.
R: Orchard Hotel there, you turn there ...

..
R: Maybe we should go Great World.
Me: Huh? GW? .. ..

*reach GW*
R: Maybe we should have gone to xxxxx
Me: -_-

Anyways, after lunch, shopped around abit before shipping R back to office (doh). Left .67$ in my cashcard. Heh, good thing the orchard cbd wasn't up, otherwise $$ liao. Cashcards should be allowed to go into -ve man, after all, we have that 2$ deposit! >:E

Both R and I agreed (and most likely other people too) that cashcards are an abomination. There's hardly any real usage for them. All its uses are all artificial. We could have used our contactless ezlink cards to pay fines, go cbd areas etc. Still have to mess with this nubby cashcard thing which is totally useless.

Anyways, afterwards drove back home and parked and took a nap. Went back to the office ( DOH!) cos the CEO was buying drinks @ Brewerks and definitely cannot miss that! Got yet another place to bring someone to liao.

All in all this Ad-venture wasn't too bad, not that expensive and it proves a point. Hehe. Maybe do it biannually or as a on need basis. But got car is sibei shiok ;_; Wtb car! <_<;

So anyways it's back to work again .. no PH until Feb CNY.. Sigh!

Finally sent The Email. Waiting for response.....

Attention shoppers!

A(n) Jelly Stor.

Pencils. That is all.

Pelmont City .. or the City of Eternal Night

Finished NFS: Carbon today (well not everything is unlocked, but career is done!).

The final mission took many tries, and I still have a sore thumb from hammering on the accelerator. To defeat a boss, you have to run a canyon race with him. A canyon race is made of 2 parts, the 1st part has you behind the boss, and you'll have to keep within 100 metres of the boss as the both of you twist around the canyon. If you get too far away for > 10 seconds, you'll lose. If you manage to overtake for more than 10 seconds, you win. The closer you stick to the boss's car from start to the completion of the race, you'll get more points. Hmm odd sentence, but then again I'm partially distracted .. watching Family Guy =p

Anyway, in the 3rd case, once the first run finishes, the same race will take place, but with you this time in the lead, and the boss's car following you. If he gets more points than you did on the earlier run, you lose.

Naturally if you fall off the canyon you lose.

Anyways I did that for more than half an hour. Finally managed to defeat the boss. Phew.

Carbon is one of the best NFS games I've played so far. Much better than UG 1 and 2, heh. UG 2 sucked actually. So far my favourite NFS games are Porsche Unleashed and maybe NFS 2, heh. However one of my favourite racing games is still Mercedes Racing. Forgot the exact name =p but it featured only Mercs and had really nice tracks and challenges. Remember racing down the professional race tracks and nice scenic places. UG racing can get dull sometimes as the city scape flashes past you all the time =p

Hmm Come to think of it maybe I should dig up my Merc racing again, heh.

Anyhoo, what struck me since the days of UG, was that Pelmont City was creepy. I drive, and drive, and drive ... but I never see the light of day. Nor do I see any pedestrians around. There's nubby cars around like white Toyota Corollas, but no people walking around at all. Such a cold lonely city shrouded in eternal night!

Haiz, graphics card's still acting up. Sigh, dunno what's wrong with it, maybe I should just buy a new one, make it an Nvidia this time. No more @(*&$(@ ATI. Grrr. =\ Don't even feel like RMAing it .. sigh, but maybe I should. Sigh.

Bah, poor thumb <_< Need to recover after all that wild driving =p

Jacket potatoes tomorrow (hopefully!)!

In other news, have to email CTC within this week <_< Time is short.

This week should be exciting ^^

Inc TT! Soon!