skywalker's blog

Sooooo tired...

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 09:01:14 -0800

Tired. Fatigued. Exhausted.

Very tired.

Extra-fatigued. Extremely exhausted.

Madness. Craziness. Insanity.

(It's been non-stop work since ~end-Oct, even went to school on Saturday AND Sunday for the third consecutive week. The pressure's insane. Though not till breaking point. Yet.)

When Thursday night comes, I'm gonna take a few days rest to clear my mind. And do the things I like. =) A mini-break before the upcoming exams.

Survey on Intellectual Property rights, Peer to Peer and piracy

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:58:42 -0700

To all who happen to stumble on my blog,

-- edited; done already --

Please help me fill in this survey. It's on intellectual property
rights, P2P and piracy. (26 questions total; won't take more than ten
minutes.)

Note: There is a bit of Singapore focus here and this is a group project.

Thanks!

Edit: The survey is done and there were 218 respondents. Many thanks to all!

Javascript for presentations

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:09:15 -0700

Anyone knows how to create web presentations using Javascript easily without writing chunks of code? Dreamweaver?

A good example is one of Brendan Eich's presentations.

Thoughts on latest Air Mozilla Live.

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:33:06 -0700

I happened to bump into Air Mozilla, a free Mozilla TV channel the other day and something just stirred me. They mentioned that they were hiring, and that half of their employees are all around the world, with the other half situated at Mozilla HQ, at Mountain View, California.

What is Mozilla? Yes, it's something that grew out of Netscape when it was open sourced just before the turn of the century. And the browser that is used by around one in five around the world, Firefox, is their main product. And this is a testament that open source can stand up to the might of Redmond, eating away at the market share of Internet Explorer at the rate of a few % per month (may vary). The work of hundreds, or even thousands of engineers, contributors, college people, professors etc. culminates in this wonderful product. Yes, no software can truly be without bugs, as Mitchell Baker, head of Mozilla Corp once said. But the focus is on creating something small yet lightweight and powerful enough to be customized to anyone's liking.

Now the thing is... Mozilla will hire anyone with the passion, skills or the community spirit (of course not just anyone, they still have to go through selection process) if they have not contributed before. But if they are regular contributors already for a period of time, then there is just the administrative work, and the occasion meeting at odd hours if you happen to live on the other side of the world.

The opportunity is there. It is definitely there. It is how willing we are to abandon our thinking of the traditional workplace, throw away conventional thinking about timezones and start working on some project with some other just-as-passionate people millions of kilometres halfway around the globe. All it takes is a few years of dedication. This is the new way of working in the IT industry.

I now write this in the hope that I can fulfill my dreams, something within me that was ignited the moment Thunderbird was born. That would be the first half of 2003, or rather 4.5 years ago. Whether I can fulfill that dream still remains a possibility, but steps have been taken to inch closer to that dream. The mental preparedness to attend meetings in the middle of the night here in GMT+8 is there already.

*writes this after watching Air Mozilla Live at 5AM local time. Still remembers when Asa was too caught up with IRC that he didn't really pay attention to Dan. And Mitchell's "flippant" description still lingers. And oh, the last question really was quite stunning. For all those who were there, this is nth10sd signing off. And this post will be cross-posted to all my blogs, including my course blog. This is a good example of how the people, listed below, can get together from places from all around the world and work and collaborate on a technology product together. No matter whether you are in Amsterdam or Singapore or Mountain View. :)

cheers go out to (in no particular order) Amsterdammer, Asa, sethb, davida, tomcat, marcia, sp3000, mcsmurf, reed, and any others whom I may have inadvertently missed out.

-----------
reed: "your answer is in the FAQ."
nth10sd: "Whoops. OK."

Changed to Dreamweaver CS3 from Nvu

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:49:18 -0700

That's right, after getting Adobe CS3 I have started using Dreamweaver on the Mac instead of Nvu, which can be quite a pain due in part to its unmaintained codebase and lack of a universal binary.

Thus, you may be seeing different code being posted from Sep 07 onwards, but validation still passes, and what you see with web browsers should remain the same.

So far, Dreamweaver seems a charm, the lack of crashes and CSS problems which had plagued me should now be a thing of the past.

My -other temporary course- Blog

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:33:40 -0700

I will be posting some of my thoughts on this blog:

- inaccessible - (Edit: permissions not granted)

To avoid cross-posting, views on InfoComm Technology (or more generally computing in our lives) will be posted there. I *occasionally* have some long posts when I feel like expressing more of my views. (But that's what blogging is for, isn't it? ;-) )

Plagiarising... myself??

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:25:39 -0700

There has been a lot of talk in my university about plagiarism; if found guilty a zero is awarded on that paper. Using some sophisticated software, they prowl the net on search of clues that any student is plagiarising and not using their own effort.......

Now my question niggling in my mind is this: What if I were to post something on The Rumbling Edge, and in turn it gets transmitted and quoted throughout the web, be it automated RSS feed sites or user-submitted content on websites or forums, then me making use of what I say on TRE in my paper that I hand up to the university for assessment? Their software will most definitely pick this up and accuse me of plagiarism from the internet.

No.... wait.... Plagiarising who? Me? Is it a crime to get accused of plagiarism of yourself?? I infringe the copyright of.... myself??? I get charged for copying... my own words?

Now this is something I better clarify before 4 years down the road I get charged for plagiarism of myself for my Honours project... Hmmmm The Rumbling Edge could be one I suppose...

Note: I'm not condoning plagiarism here. It's just the zero score bit, and the need to appeal (and fork out money) the result, when deep down in your heart you've done nothing to deserve this, merely rewriting something you post on the web into your university homework. And being accused of plagiarism from the internet when the source is from..... yourself.

Back to normal life... and Football Manager

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 09:05:41 -0800

Finally, everything settles down, I have a job, TRE is up and running again...

Back to Football Manager. Playing as Eastleigh (Smallest stadium at start in England in the lowest playable league, Conference South), on the issue of parent clubs, I got Bournemouth as my first one after I had won promotion to Conference National. After 2 seasons in mid-table obscurity, I decided to sever my ties with them as I thought I could get better parent clubs. Imagine my happiness when I was offered:

Charlton

Arsenal

Chelsea

No questions asked. I jumped at the Chelsea chance. They would pay me 31k (Massive in Conference National terms) as part of the annual partnership. And offer their players over for 1st team exp. But the first and only player rejected. (*sob* he was worth 2.9m pounds in the reserves)

The potential is there though. How many Conference clubs can have a Premiership club as their parent club in FM? Much less Chelsea... Purely financial reasons, not that I particularly support them or anything. I am a Shearer fan, and always will be.

FYI, I've been playing FM since the days of CM 97/98. It's the only game I ever play now, esp since I have a MacBook now.

NDP 2006

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 18:53:22 -0700

Firstly, cheers to Firefox's 200 millionth download and Thunderbird's 30 millionth download since 1.0 release! And now SFX has 183,110 Firefox advocates already!

Finally, NDP 2006 is over! What a logistics nightmare!!! It has been an absolutely great show though, with the last show at the Singapore National Stadium ever. I'm proud to be part of it. The fireworks were absolutely fantastic. I have never seen them up close as I did on that day. Did'ya know, the spirit of watch fireworks live is different from watching it in another medium, like television or something like that. The same goes for soccer matches as well.

After our army evaluation exam in the first half of this year, and the passing of National Day on 9 August, our main events this year have finally been over. With some more minor (but may be major) stuff coming up, everything look poised for "graduation" by the end of the year, finishing my army obligations.

It's been a long, hard, suffering, enduring journey. But when we look ahead, there's light at the end of the tunnel. The grass is always greener on the other side, or so I think. But I always remind myself that once we reach there and step on the grass a few times, the grass will die and that patch of land will turn brown. Thus, the grass may not be always greener there. The future may have its own difficulties lying ahead.

The reception of Thunderbird release notes have been great as well. I recently released 1.5.0.5 and 2.0a1 ones and they were extremely well-received. I certainly believe that for a great product to be successful, there must be great background support.

I do hope that my work on the The Rumbling Edge for these two years will help me get a computer-related job in the Information Systems sector, even though as of now I am only "A" Level qualified and have not a single certificate. I certainly have self-acquired knowledge on HTML, Javascript, CSS, Bugzilla, FTP and relations with both end-users as well as developers. This, I'm sure, bodes well with my path towards that job.

So, employers, any takers? Though I'm not available till end of year, and I have half a year then before I enter National University of Singapore to work and gain experience. :)

Some news

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 16:30:45 -0800

Finally another blog entry... Everything's been going well, the changelogs been well-received, visitor arrivals are increasing as more people get interested in Thunderbird and/or its development. It's been amazing that 1.5 yrs have passed and I am still as interested as ever to work on The Rumbling Edge. Honestly, this kind of opportunity only comes by once in a while.

HTML Validation Problem

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 07:46:15 -0800

I've had this problem for some time with firefox affiliate code:

Original:
*ttp://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&id=234&t=204

Changed:
*ttp://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&amp;id=234&amp;t=204

This concerns XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation that causes errors. I am not sure whether the change would be better for the overall community though. I am of the opinion that I am not the only one affected by this basic HTML coding alternative.

Anyway, I have decided that Google Adsense is the way to go. The Rumbling Edge will begin display these ads soon, but they will not be obtrusive to the site. The current functionality of the site will continue as planned. This will not impact the updating of the site in any way. Thus, a donation button won't be around anytime in the near future. Additionally the search function has been changed to Google after problems with the original one.

I think this is a fair compromise, after a long period of consideration.

Edited.

Google Adsense or Paypal button in TRE?

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 22:11:58 -0700

I myself am not a very good fan of ads, but currently I do TRE purely on the basis of voluntarism. I have not been considering putting ads on the page because since I am hosted on the mozillaZine server, there is no hosting cost involved for me, so TRE will mostly remain ad-free in the future unless as a last resort, as I am an ad-hater as well. I have read of stories regarding Google Adsense and while not all are bad, the returns will probably be insignificant for my kind of site.

Thus, people have been asking if a donation button would be better for the services that I provide for the community. Personally, I'm not in this for the money, as I see it as a way to improve my web publishing techniques. With about 150,000 visitors in slightly more than a year for the first year, I think this is a good way for growth in the developers area since TRE is more inclined towards developers as opposed to end-users.

What do people think? Will people donate to convince me to update TRE more often? Basically there is the question of the number of donors there are for me to justify the addition of the donation / paypal button. Is it worth it? Should I do it? I am still undecided on a donation button for the moment.

P.S.: TBE = The Burning Edge, bleeding edge info for Firefox

TRE = The Rumbling Edge, bleeding edge info for Thunderbird:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/rumblingedge

100 million

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:28:23 -0700

Wow, 100 million has been reached. That's a fantastic job! whats next, 150 million, here we come! and this is in less than a year, before 1.5 release final even comes out. can opera beat this??

juz filed another 2 bugs in bugzilla today, 313433 and 313434, but hai~ 313433's marked a duplicate. seems like i never searched hard enough before filing though.

Reflections

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 19:21:56 -0700

Hurray! I got promoted 3 days ago to LCP. Finally something
for
recognition. But with great power comes great responsibility. My free
time will be even more limited.

Hmmm. With great power comes great responsibility. I stare at the
destruction of New Orleans, in the US, the only superpower left, by
Hurricane Katrina. 80% of the city underwater. Have they neglected
their own cities/people too much? The verdict is for you to decide.

87 million downloads of Firefox. When will we hit 100 million?

Hooked on Gentoo

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 01:39:02 -0700

Wow. Its been several months since i last blogged... those days it was
50 million FF downloads, now going to smash the 80million ceiling.
Thunderbird has hit 10 million. anyway, life has been great so far, got
myself a new processor Sempron 3000+, the last and best one for the
socket A platform, plus a 6600GT Leadtek graphics card to replace my
aging Ti4200, now runs Doom3 at 42fps in both windows and linux.

From 2400+ to 3000+, compiling time has run down. I am a Gentoo fan and
since I started on linux seriously in the latter half of 2004, the only
other distribution I touched was Knoppix, good for troubleshooting
problems. Long ago I watched my brother do Red Hat 9 and watched in
amazement as the [OK]s prevalent during the Sysvinit bootup flashed
onscreen one after another. Anyway in my own linux venture I did plenty
of research as I was looking for new things to do after setting up the
Rumbling Edge. For Knoppix it wasn't a specialised distro on installing
into the hard disk-kind. For rpm distros like Mandrake, SUSE and
Fedora, there was rpm-hell. For Debian there are few up-to-date
versions of stable softwares available for the then stable
branch Woody if I'm not wrong. For Gentoo there was the pain
of installing thru Text-typing, and the ridiculous times taken for
installation (or so I thought). Ubuntu was then in its infancy.

I decided to go for a source-based installation and try to venture away
from binary ones as Windows was. Bumped into Portage, the BEST package
management system in the open source world, maybe rivalling FreeBSD's.
The first system I tried was a 2400+ amd athlon xp to install 2004.3
which was newly released then. Took me 7 days to get the basic
system functions up, inclusive of compiling time from a stage1
installation (no fault of gentoo, fault was on a noob like me then).
The second time I reinstalled using a stage1-on-3 installation, time
reduced to 48 hrs to get into a working Gnome environment. Now after
the 3000+ upgrade, it flew down to 32hrs. Openoffice went from 7 to
5hrs and Firefox from an hour to half of that. But the time tradeoff is
worth it over a binary distro. I control what my computer has, the
insides of everything fstab, hdparm, xdm, gpm, xterm, nano
everything self-learnt. Recently tried Vidalinux 1.2 based on Gentoo,
but it sucked big time and i flew back to text-based installing. Then
it was tiring. Now, its fun, but only because i read the documentation
thoroughly (printed out the entire 2004.2 handbook to be read as a
story book, then adapted for 2004.3 later) and even when i didn't, even
i posted on Gentoo forums for help, the community was more than willing
to help. With a great documentation, a great community, a great
distribution, what more could I ask? The only thing thats keeping me
away from having Gentoo permanent is games like FM2005 and Pro
Evolution Soccer 4, Cedega based on WineX is up-and-coming, but my
dualboot Redmond cum Gentoo rig is here to stay. In short, I have no
regrets going to Gentoo, having read the numerous rpm-hell problems
pple were facing on rpm-distros. apt is also good from what i heard, on
debian, but then i was (and am still) hooked on source-based ones
already.

Gentoo's my best venture into a new genre of the computing world: open
source. I haven't been proficient enough in my programming skills to
truly hack Firefox or Thunderbird on a full-time basis, but I certainly do know about GCC
and all the advantages 3.4.x offers over 3.3.x. I guess the
latest-and-greatest policy works in every aspect of gentoo except the
compiler. Their stable/unstable/hardmasked separation for different
levels of users is magnificently well-thought. Now compiling proggies
is a piece of cake. (Only on linux side though.)

My dream computer would be AMD Athlon64 X2 4000+ with >1 Gb ram
for compiling stuff.. But a dream's a dream now. Probably it'll be true
next year-end. or the following year. On a side note, i
should never try installing Gentoo on old systems. It'll take
forever. Maybe compiling would take a few weeks? That would be painful.

emerge sync && update-eix && emerge
-vuD --newuse world && emerge depclean
&& revdep-rebuild && etc-update
hmmm oops I'm in Windows... :)