I took both EX200 (RHCSA) and EX300 (RHCE) exams recently, and all I got was these 2, emailed

I took my nephew for a short trip to Gunung (Mount) Lambak last weekend.

We were there to climb up the mountain, invited by a friend, which also joined our climb. 

It started to rain as we reached the top, and so we took an alternative route back, which is supposedly a lot easier than the one we took to go up. We don't want to injure ourselves falling down the steep and slippery slopes.

On our way back, we found a dirt bike left un-attended.

We later noticed that there's a group of people down the hill, and joined them.

The group was actually stuck there with their dirt bike, as the unexpectedly rough terrain became slippery after the rain. Making matters worse, the already exhausted chaps even ran out of drinking supplies.

We helped them for a bit, before continuing our journey.

It didn't take us long to finish the whole track, but we really enjoyed our trip. I'll sure come back, because my trip there was not just about climbing up Mount Lambak, but were to discuss things with my friend over there, which has not finished…

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If you've been following my blog, you'll know that I've been doing WiFi projects for fun and profits (here, here, here, here). While I'm more into web development nowadays, I still have some the equipments at home, which I believe is still good for few more projects.

5GHz parabolic and grid directional antennas

Single Board Computers (SBC)

5GHz, 2.4GHz, and 900MHz radios

Omni-directional antennas

These equipments are high-powered, which if based on the following path loss calculator, could deliver 54Mbps speed even for a distance of 1000km. 

Path loss clculator

Realistically, it'll be hard to achieve that speed with that distance (due to some factors of course), but if your requirement is a lot less than that, I can help you achieve it. 

If you are interested in playing with these wireless equipments, or have some projects that could make good use of them, please let me know. It could think the following (but not limited to) uses of them;

• Inter-building/office networking
• Community WiFi

p/s: The Single Board Computers are by itself interesting, because apart from to be used as Wireless Router/Access Point, with 4 mini-pci ports, 2 ethernet ports, 1 CF Card slot, and Linux installed, the possibility is just endless.

I quit photography quite a while ago, and I think it's time to convert all the RAW image files that I have to JPEG, and eventually delete all the RAW files.

For that I created a script to help me effortlessly do the conversion;

#!/bin/bash
 
IFS=$'\n'
 
for i in `ls`; do
        cd $i
        pwd
        mkdir jpeg
        ufraw-batch –out-type=jpeg –out-path=jpeg/ –compression=100 –overwrite *.NEF
        cd ../
done

The script requires you to have ufraw-batch, which is included in the ufraw package. If you're using Ubuntu/Debian and don't already have it installed, run the following command;

sudo apt-get install ufraw

I went to Putrajaya Challenge Park last weekend with 2 friends from work to try wall climbing. It was our first time, and I sure will do it again.

The video below is for my first climb. We moved on to more challenging walls afterward.

If you're in the Klang Valley area and want to try it out, Google Map can show you the way.

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OK, this blog post is a bit boring. You can't blame a guy who has not been doing it for a very very long time, right?

I did a Google search of myself, and the result would suggest that I'm a programmer. The thing is, my day job is not a programmer.

My work normally revolve around Linux and server related stuff, and nothing much on programming. Is it time for a change?

The hacktivist group Anonymous has announced that they'll target Malaysia due to over-censorship.

The following is the transcript of the video.

Greetings, Malaysia, We have seen the censorship taken by the Malaysian government, blocking sites like The Pirate Bay, and WikiLeaks. Malaysia is one of the world's strictest governments, even blocking out movies, and television shows. These acts of censorship are inexcusable. You are taking away a basic human right. The internet is here for freedom, without fear of government interference. Do not think that no one else notices. Your structured government has done the talking, and we hear loud and clear. Let this be an announcement to all your people. This is a sign, a warning, and an opportunity to listen to ideas above your own. In a way you are being stubborn. But how will this help anyone or your country. We fear that if you make further decisions to take away human freedom. We are obligated to act fast and have no mercy. For rules were meant to be broken. And corruption was meant to be washed away and forgiven. Now we will wash your corruption away so be prepared. Take this as a favor.

 

As a Malaysian myself, I was at first wanting to comment on this but the group seems to have everything summarized in the video. Well said.

Now, to wait for the judgement day, 15 June 2011, 19:30 GMT…

This is a World Blood Donor Day 2011 post

It's this time of the year again, and it's the World Blood Donor Day. Celebrated every 14 June worldwide, this year's theme is More Blood, More Life.

I'm writing this post from The National Blood Centre Malaysia after donating for my 89th time. We are having a little bit of celebration here, and I get a lot of freebies to bring home. It all doesn't matter anyway because I'm here just because I enjoy coming and feel good after each donation. I try my best to come here every 2 weeks to donate blood plasma and it's also one way for me to break free from my work, slow down on life, and get myself relaxed for a little while.

By law, you can't sell your body part even after you're dead. In Malaysia, donors in return get hospital benefits, vaccinations, full blood screening, and surely on every donation get served with light meal and snacks. Some countries however (and in a big country like the United States of America, it varies between states) 'compensate' donor's time with some cash, and some people take this as one way to earn some extra income. For any reasons however, it's always a good thing to donate blood; if you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for others. Who can tell if one day the coin flipped and you're on the receiving side of blood donations?

To end this post I would like to take this chance to wish everyone a happy World Blood Donor Day 2011, let's all  donate more blood, and save more life.

While waiting for someone at KLCC recently, I naturally go to the nearest bookstore to fill my time, which in that particular case was the Kinokuniya bookstore. In there, I go to some of my favorite sections, and couldn't find a book to buy. That's because I already bought most of the bestselling books in these sections.

To just have a book to read in the next hour or so, I execute my not so random algorithm in choosing a random book, which is to pick any book with the word 'bestselling' on the cover. I ended up buying the book 'It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be' by Paul Arden.

It's a good book by itself, but there's just one problem; I already have that book in my current collection. I didn't notice that until I flip open the first page. It's not the first time that such thing happened to me, and there's no telling that it won't happen again in the future.

That however is a good news for anyone who want that book, and I'll just give it away for free. If you're interested in the book, say so in the comment section below, via Facebook, twitter, or anything. If after a week you're the only person interested in having the book, I'll make an arrangement to have it couriered to your preferred address. If there's more than one interested person, I'll figure out how to pick just one person. You can also suggest how if you have some brilliant ideas.

The book itself is not really expensive, so this deal is preferably done with somone not too far away from where I am to be practical. I also have quite a number of books that I finished reading, and might make similar offer later. Till then, tell me if you're interested with this one!

On February 2011 Google started to roll out a major update to their ranking algorithm to improve their search engine results, called the Panda Update. Named after a Google engineer, this update is aimed at low quality sites in general, with some content farm reported to be the most affected. Quoting Google Webmaster Central blog;

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

While the update started on February, Google has only rolled out the update to all their English-language users on mid April. During that period of time, my content-based website, TechRecipes, doesn't seem to be negatively affected by the update. In fact, visitors to the website was slightly increasing. Only after 12 April however (the day that Google rolled out the update globally), the visitors dropped significantly.

Being a technical how-to site, most of the visitors come from the Google search engine. With the sudden and significant drop of traffic from Google, I call the result as devastating. Due to server outage, TechRecipes has recently been de-indexed by Google. Different URL structure due the migration from WordPress to DokuWiki platform could be the cause that the site's PageRank dropped 2 level not too long ago. I'm still working on bringing the site back to life, and I don't think I can afford to revive it from 'dying' again.

Since yesterday however, I see that TechRecipes has started to get back Google's traffic. I didn't do any significant changes to the site the past week (other than updating it's contents of course, which I occasionally do), and I can only hope things will only get better over time. Until now, I still don't know what temporarily caused the problem. 

So, what about you? Are your websites affected by Google's Panda update?