Archive for April, 2006

Google Calendar: Love at first sight

Written on April 14th, 2006 by
Categories: Information Insemination

Trying google calendar now, and all that I can say is that it’s a very cool piece of software. As usual, it’s another beta software from google, but people around the world enjoy using their software. This might just be the same as in FLOSS, where software with version < 1.0 and beta releases, being used everywhere, from desktops to servers and datacenters. Software are moving from being standalone, networked application, and now many are migrating to the web. This is what Tim O’ Reily define as Web 2.0..

What I like about the calendar, apart from being simple and ajax based (like few other google products), is that it allow people to actually share the calendar with others, with few access level. Could this be Microsoft Exchange killer? Who knows..

Posted in Information Insemination | 5 Comments »

Digger resurrected :)

Written on April 13th, 2006 by
Categories: Information Insemination, Nerd Public Journal?

We were having some DNS problem at the office, and that brings me to realize that I dont have the appropriate tools to troubleshoot it. While looking for the program dig, I performed this

shakir@herugrim ~ $ sudo emerge dig
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "dig".
shakir@herugrim ~ $ sudo emerge -s dig
......output truncated.....

I couldn’t find the program I was looking for, but I found this:

*  games-arcade/digger
      Latest version available: 20020314
      Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
      Size of downloaded files: 96 kB
      Homepage:   http://www.digger.org/
      Description: Digger Remastered
      License:    as-is

What’s so good about it? It was among my favorite game when I was 11 (that was 1992 @ standard 6 if I’m not mistaken. Don’t ask me about my age vs school’s class at that time, it’s complicated). Some of you might have come across the game. At that time I have a Commodore with MCGA display, and it came with 360 kb 5 1/2 " (HD) floppy.

That reminds me of my past experience with computers;

Standard 6: First PC (commodore, with Intel 386)
Form 1: First PC with harddisk (47 MB). Comes with MS Windows 3.1
Form 3: First laptop (Pentium 120). First virus attack (anticmos.b). First pc formatting (installing Windows 95). First internet experience
Form 4: Assigned as Pengawas PSE (Pusat Sumber Elektronik). Mirc addiction, server room physical break-in and first time with Windows NT 3.5 administration. First HTML book (RM75 was a lot when I was just a student). Game addict (warcraft, mortal combat)
Form 5: First to hear / see Linux. Remote shell registration. Frequent visitor to www.hackers.com, and printed the GtmHH (Guide to mostly Harmless Hacking), but hardly understand anything Just another wannabe / noobe. Mirc scripting. Got a QUE’s Javascript thick book.
Matriculation: Nothing much but bringing the laptop to the college just to play games. StarCraft addict.
First Semester: Took Computer Science – Networking at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The rest is boring.
Second Semester: Bought an RM 4500 pc (PTPN + loans with friends). Installed Mandrake 6.
Fifth Semester: Class group assignment; setup Linux network + servers (FTP, mail, dns, web, etc2).
……. the later might not be interesting to share.