/home/shakir

Just a quick and boring one;

My cellular network data monthly bandwidth allocation is to run out soon as I've been teethering the connection from my phone to my lappy since the first day I'm here in Kota Kinabalu.

Was not able to use the lappy's WiFi, and so I tried to fix my lappy's WiFi by swapping the WiFi card (suspecting the one installed was broken),

but in the end I figured out the real problem was that I disabled the mini-pci slot of the lappy (the slot where the WiFi card is installed) in the BIOS to reduce battery consumption of the already broken lappy's battery. I also disabled Intel's Speedstep and that solves the problem of the 5 year old lappy not being snappy.

/* written in 2010-06-25 */

It's lunch time here at this offshore oil platform, but I don't feel like eating. It's not that I don't like the food (in contrary actually, and more on this in later posts), but it's because of my work here. I'm here with my team to install some wireless sensors at a machine in a remote platform and to create a wireless link so that the engineers here at the mother platform can do online monitoring of the machine and analyze the data gathered from the sensors. It's a pilot project that we hope if successful will be extended to other machines and platforms. After working on things for almost a week, earlier this morning, all the pieces finally came together and we can now declare our job here complete. I feel full without eating

It's my first time doing a project on an oil platform, and all the sensors we've been installing was something I never interested or had my hands on prior to this project. The wireless link we've created of around 50 kilometres air distance was the first for me as well as during my previous employments, we've only done 20 kilometres at most and the link was not even as stable as this 50 kilometres link (which using the same equipments and settings, I'm confident that we can achieve more distance quite effortlessly).

I initially joined in as a wireless consultant, but they later managed to persuade me to quit my previous job to work on this project full time. Even though on paper I'm the project manager for this project, I've been helped a lot by my team members in the project management part, as they have been doing offshore projects for quite some time already. Our small team of an old-time telecommunication antenna installer, 2 experienced electricians, a sensor expert, and a general helper managed to finish the installation process in less than a week, though the initial plan was to finish it in 4 weeks. I was very nervous before for doing it for my first time, with people I never knew and in an environment where everything must be done right. Thank God for everything.

The next boat to Kota Kinabalu will be in 2 days from now, and I need to go act busy now as I don't want to look like enjoying my stay here while other people are busy at work. . Till my next post, cheerio.

Just a quick post on what I use for some simple web development projects;

1. Web Developer Toolbar
   • It's actually a Firefox plugin that has plenty of useful tools. My favorites among other are Disable Cache, View Style Information, Display Ruler, Resize Window… I can say I love and use most of the features it has.
2. Firebug
   • It has some powerful features (though sometimes redundant with Web Developer Toolbar) to view, edit, debug, monitor CSS, HTML, and Javascript. It support plugins to make it even more powerful, and useful.
3. Vim
   • It's a powerful text editor with many useful features; too many to be listed here. The keybindings are just superb, and the screenshot is displaying split screen support.  It's perfect for text editing while on remote shell connection.
4. Screen
   • Screen is useful for creating virtual terminals and the ability to somewhat do session management. I can easily create virtual terminals, switch between them, and detach when I am to log out from a remote machine. When I get back to the machine, I can attach back to the previous Screen session, and I can continue with where I have left.
5. Multiple desktop support
   • Most Linux desktop environment supports multiple desktops. In my case I'm using Gnome which I set to have 4 desktops (or maybe it's called workspace). Other than this one desktop,  1 is set for me to work on Gimp and the graphic stuffs, another for non-work-related stuff such as Pidgin, Skype and my jukebox. Your preferences might vary.

These were not on the screenshot, but were actually in the setup;

• Linux
  • Most if not all the mentioned softwares are native Linux application. Not compulsory.
• Firefox
  • It's a web browser that supports the plugins mentioned.
• Multiple, big monitors
  • I am using 2 * 22" monitor, with effective resolution of 3360*1080. Can't imagine working on a 1024*768 screen anymore.

In general, I found it very useful to have a big workspace. Big monitor screens with high effective resolutions coupled with multiple desktops are just perfect.

What is your setup for web development?

Been quite occupied lately, and these are part of the reasons why;

They are for my wireless project, though most of them are for what I consider as for RnD only. The list doesn't include my previous orders, and quotes are all in USD. Please click on the image for more details.

I'm a happy man now that I can just order what I want to play with, though surely I must come up with outputs to justify the cost

Just a quick one to share:

Another day in the office and I needed to calculate the tariff (tax of my imported goods) I need to pay for my wireless parts order. I opened up Google and typed this:

(30% of 2100)usd to myr

and Google instantly give me the result:

(30% of 2100) * U.S. dollar = 2 168.14479 Malaysian ringgits

Cool. Thank you Google

I was in a placement test when during the oral session the interviewer asked me, "Why did you sign up for this?", and I answered, "It's just a thought". Yup, it was just another boring day in the office that I suddenly thought, hey, I wanna sign up for an English course. And so I asked around and ended up calling British Council Malaysia for the next available placement test, a proficiency test to determine which offered course and level can I enrol for.

Ok, that's obviously not me on the library card, but my particulars are printed on the other side of it.

The course I registered for was Business English Intermediete Orange, where Orange is one of the 4 available tracks in the course. In this track, I'm expected to be going through the following lessons:

Topics: Trade, Ethics, Innovation

Skills: Negotiating, Problem-solving, Presentation techniques

Language: Conditions, Narrative tenses, Passives

Writing: E-mails, Letters

Since I'm gonna be doing it part-time, it's gonna be a 10 weeks of twice a week classes, one and a half hour each for me. The class will start the first week of January 2009, and from that day in that 10 weeks period, I won't be available on Tuesday and Thursday. The class starts at 8:00 PM and British Council Malaysia is somewhere near KLCC though, and so I'm still good for early dinner invitations