I’m on my travelling spree, from Kuantan, Penang, and then to Miri for some site visits. It’s only my second day now but I’m already missing my 4 months old baby at home, and my other baby, which is my wife of course, sigh!

Gmail is my favorite email client, that I use it for all my email accounts. It’s web based, and package features that other email clients don’t have (or at least not as good) such as its labels and spam filter. It somehow doesn’t have GPG support to sign and encrypt email.

This is where Firefox and FireGPG come to help. FireGPG is a Firefox extension that features contextual menu giving access to several GPG functions, and brings GPG features to the GMail webmail interface.

To use it, one must first have GPG working on the machine, and Linux user can refer to GnuPG while Windows user can refer Gpg4win to get started.

Once the installations are complete and GPG keys are created, Firefox should have these (working) options when composing emails;

I was at Kelantan a while ago, and have uploaded photos of my visit to my online photo gallery. Find them here.

Line numbering is a very useful feature in a text editor, especially for programmers. Being a full feature text editor, Vim also have it supported, but not enabled by default.

To enable it, simply add this line to /etc/vim/vimrc or ~/.vimrc

set number

or just type

:set number

while you’re already in Vim.

Enabling syntax color highlighting will add colors to the editor when editing in vim, but that’s not all as there are actually many color schemes to choose from.

The scheme can be changed by issuing :colorscheme <color> while in vim’s command mode. <color> can be rotated and autocompleted by pressing the tab key.

To permanently enable blue colorscheme for example, add the following line to /etc/vim/vimrc or ~/.vimrc

colorscheme blue

The tool to be used for creating the ISO image is dd, a low level raw data copying and conversion tool for Unix based systems. Obviously as in the command below, two options are needed for this purpose; if for the input file, and of for the output file.

sudo dd if=/dev/cdrom of=mycdrom.iso

To verify and probably to use the image at later times, simply mount the image with loop option.

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 mycdrom.iso /mnt

Though dd can also be used to burn ISO images (guess how easy could it be), the proper way to do it is to use cdrecord. The command below will verbosely show the burning process to the cdrom device with burnfree option enabled;

sudo cdrecord -v  dev=/dev/cdrom driveropts=burnfree -data mycdrom.iso

The steps above are actually helpful to backup OS / driver CDs and DVDs as there’s no need to worry of scratched discs, and to have everything organized in one place. Hard drive space shouldn’t be an issue nowadays, but if it is, try to apply some compressions to ease the problem.

I currently have the following books that I would like to just give away;

Anyone interested can contact me.

I’ve just installed the latest Kubuntu (Hardy Beta), and among other things that I notice is that bash-completion doesn’t work. The cause of the problem is simply because bash-completion is not installed by default!

And so I just install it;

sudo apt-get install bash-completion

and it restores order of my shell user experience..

I was to handover my laptop to someone else, and so I deleted my Linux partitions, leaving just Vista. I however forgotten to fix the MBR, leaving the system unbootable as it stuck during GRUB loading.

I then boot the system with Vista’s installer DVD, hoping to use the old trick by going to the command prompt (available under the "Repair your computer"  menu after booting up with the DVD) and run the command

fdisk /mbr

but it complain that fdisk is not a recognized command (another way of saying the program is not installed, or not in the path). With that I try another program,

bootrec /FixMbr

reboot, and the problem is no longer there.

Thank you Microsoft

"I’m not sure". That was the answer my wife gave me when we were on our way to the medical center just now. And if she asked me, I would have answered the same. Maybe we have both mastered the art of being in control, and calm

We are now in the labor room, as my wife is actually to deliver our first baby, expected to be a boy.. I’ve been getting calls from my closest relatives reminding me what to do, and to be calm, while in my head I have it that I’m more prepared than what I thought I would be, and people are actually much more worried than we are ourselves.

I now hope (pray) that my mother-to-be wife will safely deliver our baby, for her to go through this process pain-less-ly (did I hear epidural?), and for them to be both healthy later on..