I’ve recommended it to others even though there’s no benefit for me.

But I have a problem and a few others have the same problem too.

But you won’t make the patch for us because you have other more important things to attend to.

You said if we want that feature, we should code it and submit a pull request for it.

So I coded the patch, learned how to work with GitHub, submitted a pull request.

Other people who shared the same problem were happy.

Days go by and yet there’s no response from you.

I wondered if there’s a problem with my solution so I tried to propose an alternative.

But you said the original solution was fine, just be patient because you guys have real lives too.

Weeks later, still no response.

And now, I sit here wondering why did I even bother in the first place.

Just a small rant.

When I was a kid, hi-tech gadgets in movies amaze me.
The fact that it’s fictional, disappoints me.

Thanks to his vision and Apple, I get to enjoy a “futuristic” life while I’m still alive. The things they do should be the standard to be called innovation.

Light and powerful computers with a pretty user-interface.

A touch phone that reminds me of my schedule, communicate, stay up to date with the news, write notes, listen to music or watch a video. All this while on the move.

These 2 gadgets have become an important part of my life. Helping me to stay organized, learn new things, and earn some income.

A part of me feels that Apple will no longer be as innovative as when Steve Jobs was still around. Another, hopes that I’m wrong.

And I do hope I’m wrong.

I have not found a reason to dislike it so far.

If I really have to squeeze some out, it would be Firefox. But that is probably not Apple’s fault. (Firefox 6 hangs when I try to browse my history and other random moments). Or when you go into time machine mode, it slows down maybe because of the space effects in the background.

With SSD, everything works very fast. Startup, shutdown. Starting up software, etc.

With a 7-hour long battery life, it’s long enough for me to keep working until I’m satisfied. On my previous laptop, I had just a bit more coding to do but forced to stop because of low battery after 2 hours.

Thanks to the long battery life, I stopped shutting down. Just close the lid and next day, resume from where I stopped.

The keys are comfortable to type on. The touchpad is more sensitive than most other laptops I’ve worked with. The gestures are handy.

Love the thin size, light weight and aluminium body. Makes it amazing how they can pack 7 hours of battery life into such thin space.

Best of all, you don’t have to worry about device drivers. Apple has them all covered.

On Windows, I would have to go to every website of every device on my PC/laptop and download the latest drivers, BIOS/firmware for them if I want the best performance or bug fixes. On a Mac, the “Software Update” program will handle everything.

My previous laptop seems to have a bluetooth problem. After I updated the BIOS, it stopped booting up and Dell had to send someone down to replace the motherboard. Another problem is the USB port. It becomes ultra slow when you try to transfer a large file to a portable harddisk. I’m sure it’s not a power issue.

But it’s just 2 months. Let’s see if I can find any more problems with it.

Because you might be browsing for a new sound card at the stores but can’t remember if you have any available PCI slot to use.

You might come across an article one day that claims that a batch of SSDs are faulty, and you end up having to open up your PC to find out the serial number of your SSD to see if you’re affected.

Keep them stored on your phone and dropbox so it’s easily accessible.

A folder of links to your hardware’s details on their manufacturer’s website is useful to keep too. So you can easily check for any new BIOS updates or look up specs.

Digital copies of receipts and warranties too!

In case something spoils and you want to know as soon as possible if it’s still covered under warranty.

And to save yourself from turning your house upside down to find the receipt of your purchase made years ago, always keep them securely together in a folder at a fixed location.

I named it Prishe. Still looking for a pretty wallpaper of Prishe!

Not to mention my current laptop’s weight is beginning to annoy me. Maybe I’m getting old and weak D:

And this runs on SSD too! With up to 7 hours of battery life!

My current Dell m301z laptop boasts of 5 hours of battery life but the most I could ever squeeze out of it is 2.5 hours.

I once tried to update the BIOS for m301z and it resulted in an unbootable laptop. I had to go through a long phonecall and process before they would send someone down to me and replace the motherboard.

There’s a problem transferring data to my portable USB harddisk, it slows down to a crawl. I’m afraid of updating to the latest BIOS because of what happened.

Then recently, I started exploring the Linux world and found it pretty productive.

Things like running find and sed as a single command (piping) to search and replace text in a config file for 20+ websites.

Using grep to search for .php files infected with malicious iframe scripts.

And since Mac OS X is built on Linux, why not get one in order to learn more command line stuff?

It’s a good thing I waited till Lion got released. Because back then when I wanted to get a MacBook Air, there wasn’t any mention of a new series using the i5 CPUs.

So when the new i5 MacBook Airs started going on sale in Apple’s online store for Singapore, I snapped one up immediately.

When the DHL guy delivered it to me, I opened the box, took out the actual MacBook Air box and held it high with my left hand and played the Zelda “item get” / “item fanfare” sound from my phone with my right hand. It just had to be done.

I’ll post an update again after a few months of use.

Used “top” to see running processes, “tail -f access_log” to watch accesses to my websites. Updated the iptable to block access from a specific IP address that’s been making requests to wpad.dat on one of my servers.

And now, running a long command to update the MySQL username and password details in .php files for a website with many subdomains.

I don’t have the patience to go through every subdomain in an FTP client to update those details so I googled a bit and requested root access to the server and ran:

find . -name \*.php -type f -exec sed -i ‘s/\$MYSQL_PASSWORD = \”oldpassword\”/\$MYSQL_PASSWORD = \”newpassword\”/g’ {} +

It’s probably not the best way but it’s the only way I can find at the moment.

What it does is to go through all files and folders, and their subfolders in the current directory (I’ve already navigated my way to the www/ dir), look for files with the .php extension, and execute the sed command on those files.

The sed command then looks for the string $MYSQL_PASSWORD = “oldpassword” and replaces it with the new string $MYSQL_PASSWORD = “newpassword”. I could omit the $MYSQL_PASSWORD string but the previous person in charge had used the same string for the username and password.

The first time I ran the command to update the username, I did not specify a file extension and the command took about 10 minutes to finish. It was then I found out that there were log files that are about 1.6GBs in size.

The second time I ran it, I specified .php and it finished in less than a minute.

That was fun.

I’ve been wanting one for a long time. But the prices were too high at that time. Now that the Intel 320 series, 120GB SSD costs $315, I grabbed one quickly.

I’ve been on RAID 0 for a few years. Using 2 WD Raptors 36GB 10k RPM. Which gives me 72GB as my C drive.

After installing the OS, FFXI, I’m only left with a little bit of space for 1 or 2 more games. And games nowadays take up many gigs of space.

Which is why if I ever want to get an SSD, it will have to be at least 120GB. Back then, you’d need to pay SGD400~500 for such an SSD.

Right now, I’m restoring Windows 7 over the network. I bought an Ultimate edition because someone was selling it cheap. This edition allowed me to backup over the network to another computer which I have running 24/7.

Here’s a few things I learned today.

When I set my motherboard’s SATA ports to RAID mode, there was an extra long delay as the motherboard detects the drives at each bootup. Now that I’m on a single SSD, no reason to use RAID mode anymore. So I set my SATA ports to AHCI.

My DVD rom uses SATA, and I wasn’t able to boot up through it. This is when I learned that you need to set it to IDE mode if you want to access your SATA DVD rom drive outside of the OS.

So I finally got to boot up Windows 7 from the DVD. Selected repair, and after a few dialog boxes, I was able to access the shared folder on my other computer which contains my system image and backups.

Not sure if I missed out anything, when Windows 7 started up the network, it connected to my network in 100mbps mode and not 1gbps. Thus, the restoration process is taking a long time. :(

I bought a new PSU last night too. A CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 600W, for the 80+ Gold rating in efficieny. This is for my 24/7 computer in hopes of cutting down the electricity consumption.

Updates:

After the restoration was done, Windows 7 would crash on bootup if the SATA port is set to AHCI.

I set the SATA port to IDE and it booted up fine. Then googled around and found this fix:

1. Startup “Regedit
2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / CurrentControlset / Services
3. Open msahci
4. In the right field left click on “start” and go to Modify
5. In the value Data field enter “0″ and click “ok”
6. exit “Regedit”
7. Reboot Rig and enter BIOS (hold “Delete” key while Booting

Source

A friend of mine decided to try the sleep button on her keyboard.

Something weird happened at this point which I could not remember, all I know is from this point on, her PC wouldn’t shut down after selecting the shutdown button on Windows 7.

It would shutdown and after 1-2 seconds, boot up again by itself. Only way to shut it down is to press and hold the power button, but no one should have to do this to shut down their computer.

I got her to install remote software for me to login and check her power settings. Everything seemed fine. Even tried resetting BIOS settings to factory defaults.

It just so happened that we were planning a lan party at another friend’s place so I got her to bring down her computer so I can check after the games.

Since there’s nothing else to try on Windows, and even resetting the BIOS didn’t help, I first tried reinstalling the OS.

Didn’t fix the problem.

By now, it’s already 7am and it’s starting to get bright outdoors and I’ve run out of ideas.

All I could do is stare at the motherboard.

My eyes looked around, admiring the circuit patterns and electronic components.

Then my gaze fell upon the motherboard’s CR2032 battery.

*takes out battery, set my alarm to ring in 15 minutes, nap*

*alarm rings, puts in battery, boots up computer*

Shutting down…

Shuts down…

Silence…

2 seconds passed….

5 seconds passed…

10 seconds passed…

Fixed!

Since the battery is used by motherboards to save configuration settings, my guess is the sleep signal on the keyboard triggered something on the motherboard, which by only taking out the battery, will force it to forget all settings.

Let’s start with the story of my company’s NAS.

It’s a QNAP TS-201 with 2 150GB harddisks configured in mirror raid. When the disks have less than 10GB space, it will emit a beeping sound like every 10 minutes and I’ll have to clear it’s “Recycle Bin” to free up space.

When you delete files on a NAS, it gets deleted instantly unlike deleting files on your desktop where it goes to the recycle bin first.

So I sent in a request for some new 1TB drives to upgrade to. Spent my weekend upgrading it because that’s when no one needs access to it.

When Monday came, I got a report that excel was creating .tmp files when saving the document and they weren’t deleted when the excel file is closed. When I tried to delete the .tmp files manually, the files disappear but reappear when the page is refreshed.

Thinking it was an access issue, I SSH-ed in and set ownership to Guest, group to Everyone, chmod777 every file but it still didn’t work.

Then I decided to try SSH into our second NAS which is used only by my department. I compared the folder structure of both NASes and see that there’s a missing “Network Recycle Bin 1″ folder on the upgraded NAS.

To fix this, I logged into the web administration panel of the NAS, went to the Network Recycle Bin page, the checkbox that enables this feature is already ticked, so all I did is just click the save button.

I checked the folder structure and see that the folder has been recreated.

Tried to delete a file and it worked.

Case solved.

Then after I started working and could afford one, I didn’t buy because the laptops back then were heavy, bulky, slow, ugly and still expensive.

Fast forward a few more years, there’s a lot of good laptops now but because there’s so many choices, and it’s so much trouble to compare all of them, I gave up.

And at this time, I don’t know if I will make good use of it even if I have one. So I borrowed a laptop from work to use. I went to a StarBucks outlet, ordered coffee and went on to catch up on articles that I’ve accumulated through the people I follow on twitter and stored at Read-it-Later.

It proved to be a good experience. I could focus on my what I want to do and not get distracted by that silly MMORPG I’ve installed on my home computer. Most importantly, there’s air-con. It can be so warm at home I don’t feel like getting work done.

And now, after much research, I’ve decided to go with a Dell m301z. It costs SGD $1199 (USD $870).

• It’s within my budget.
• Acceptable screen resolution, touchpad design and keyboard layout.
• Has bluetooth so I can tether to my iPhone and surf the net.
• Has good battery life. Easily lasts me 2-3 hours.
• A dual core 64bit CPU with virtualization support so I can try out MacOSX on a VirtualBox.
• 4GB ram.

So far it’s working really great. Everything’s smooth despite not having a dedicated graphics board. I don’t need one because I don’t intend to game on this laptop.

I wanted a dual core 64bit CPU with 4GB ram because I know I’ll be running lots of apps as I do development work on my personal website projects.

It comes installed with Windows7 64bit Home Premium. And we all know Windows 7 is the best OS Microsoft has made since the 3.1 days.

Yesterday and today, I spent 2 hours at Burger King getting all the things I’ve wanted to do, done. I’ve organized and synchronized my browser bookmarks between 2 computers at home, 1 at work and this new laptop.

I’m also done setting up apache/mysql/php so I can start working on a new version of Tarutarutimes-Online.

Just 2 days and I know that my money has been well spent. I just love this laptop! I named it Kanojo (Girlfriend in Japanese) after the female character in Houkago Play. In the 4-square comic, she doesn’t have a name and is just referred to as “Kanojo”. Sort of like “The Girlfriend”.