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When someone actually said that I’ve been tagged, the only thing that came to my mind at that time was WWE (though I dont really watch it). After I’ve learned that what she meant was just to copy and paste the questionaires and have it posted in my blog (with my own answers for sure), here’s my short entry to that.

1)What is the total number of books you own?
Most of my books went MIA, and I don’t really keep records of what I own (and who borrow my books). I can say it’s over a hundred, and if it is to include comics that I use to collect, then the number counts to over a thousand.

2)What is the last book you bought?
As in previous blog, I bought 10 books at once and haven’t bought myself any new ones afterward. And among these 10, I don’t know which one goes last to the counter when I actually bought it.

3)What is the last book you read?
I finished reading The Search, a business book by John Battelle.

4)What are you currently reading?
If it’s a book, then my answer would be the MySQL book that I recently bought. Taking some time since it’s not just for read, but also to try what it contains. But I actually read online contents a lot more than books, but I’m not sure if it counts in this ‘book’ tag.

5)What are the 5 books that mean a lot to you?
1- Al-Quran
2- Tafseer
3 - Can I skip this part?

6)What book(s) do you wish to buy next?
Whatever that I might find interesting when I’m at the bookstore.

7)What book(s) have you owned for so long but never read them?
Some ‘jawi’ based books that I actually pay attention to the one giving the lectures rather than the book. Bought the books since the lecturer request everybody to personally have the books, and didn’t read it since I’m not good with ‘jawi’.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Can only think of 2 for now;
1. Bro Adli; borrowed some interesting books from him and I believe he has a lot more in his collection.
2. Bro Shaiful; he has a library at home, but now since he’s at cardiff pursuing his PhD, I don’t know what books has he added to his collection.

9) Your books collection in one picture:

 

 

A collection of mostly unpopular and boring computer books, which fails to attract people to borrow them and in the end, being safe from missing at other people’s hand as most of it’s counterparts..

 

 

Newer and oftenly used books has their own places, not on this shelves and not shown here for some reason

A bit off-topic:
Some 5 months collection of scrapped papers, which I believe were part of my reading, to be sent to the recycling centre. Recycle, keep the environment safe for us, and our childrens.

p/s: Buy original books. Don’t make illegal copies. I have this on the wall at home, and I can make copies of it for whoever interested

Most of the friends that i have (you included?) gave excuses when being asked to donate blood. They start saying this and that for me is not true at all;

• It’s painful

When being asked if they should apply a little tranquilizer to the injection point or not during the process by the nice lady in charge of me, my answer has always been no.

• I might get AIDS

They can afford disposable stuff, so leave your worries behind. Until they think spending RM400-RM700 for each donor during plasma and platlet transfusion is expensive and start reusing their stuff, then you’re out of luck.

• I’ll be gemok

I’m a frequent donor (as frequent as twice a month, as I’m an apheresis donor) and hey, look at me!

• I need blood, not to donate

You’re a qualified donor just by weighting 48kg and above

Most of us won’t think of things till it hit them in their heads. People around us are needing blood, and you or your loved ones might be next. Be pro-active, donate blood today.

These links can help you to get started:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_donation
• http://pdn.gov.my/faq.html
• http://pdn.gov.my/panduan.doc

p/s: Chicken don’t donate blood

It has been mentioned by bro Adli in his blog and last nite we had another meeting, though most of the group members are still on with their holiday. It was supposed to be a lightning round but since there were not many people around Yomud started with some extra heavy rain apart from just the lightning with over an hour of motivational stuff (not really OSS related though). It was later followed with some kernel patching stuff and followed by my eclipse and subversion story telling.

These are shots from some of the sessions that we just had.

Some wi-foo in action

Rosli and his gadget.

Yomud explaining CARP (not carp the fish)

During the previous Aidil-Adha public holiday, I managed to finish reading the book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transform Our Culture. It shocked me myself that I finished the 300 pages book in just 4 days, that by that time I was also busy with raya and stuff too. .

Google is a company that for me is unique, in the sense that it was established by the time the internet bubble burst, valued USD 3 Billion in just 5 years, different ways of running the business, and many more to list. It’s the fastest growing company in history, and as for today, the stock price for google is USD 412 per share, a 400% increase in just a year. It doesn’t even hurt it’s founders and CEO that now they are paid USD 1 for their monthly salary (previously it was USD 250,000 per month for the founders) as they can get more by selling fractions of their stock, which valued few billions just for each of them.

It’s interesting to read how the company actually get started, how do they actually run the business until where it is now. Another good read is Paul Graham essays, which is good to open up the mind of some of us.

Initially I was also looking for the book titled The Google Story, but during my 2 weeks visits to both kinokuniya and MPH, it was running out of stock and doesn’t seem to be available in the nearest time neither. Along with the book I also grabbed these general topic and mini books for my light readings:

 

Except for the Linux Pocket Guide that I finished reading in just a day, I’m not sure myself if I’ll ever finish reading the books. Not to mention the other books that are already in my colllection… I’m currently into the MySQL book, and hope to finish it in the nearest time. Gambatte shakir!

In just a month, we Malaysians celebrate 3 new years; based on the Gregorian, Chinese and Hijri calendar. Chinese New Year will be on this 29 January while Awwal Muharram would be on the 31 January. The 2 days CNY holiday that also falls on Sunday will be brought forward to Wednesday, making it a total of 5 days of break. With the previous New Year and Christmas, Malaysia really is a wonderful country when it comes to public holidays. Hooray for that.

This orange is nothing related to CNY but I got this from someone few days back. It’s a special orange as it tastes really good, or perhaps just because the someone who gave it to me was special, but the best part of all, it’s actually an "orange within orange". This photo save my words;

Happy New Year to all…

It has been sometime that I’ve been working with the ecollege project now, and I’ve come to think that I need a meachanism to effectively have a revision history for the project. Previously what i did was to copy the working directory to the backup/revision directory something as the following:

$ cp -r /project/working/directory /project/backup/directory/<date>

It’s not really smart, but I’ve been practising it since I was doing my bachelor degree, and was good enough for assignments that even till now I’m promoting that method for my juniors. Well, at least it’s better for the students than having no versioning system at all where at one time when they screw up with the code they just couldn’t get to the previous working codes. I wonder myself what’s the percentage of university and college students that actually keep snapshots of their works as they are working on it..

Based on reviews and comparisons in the internet, I decided to go with subversion over CVS. Subversion plugin for Eclipse is subclipse and it can be found here. Subversion also has a great online book that have everything to get started, up to the advanced topic. 2 hours after knowing subversion, I’m already good to go with my eclipse + subversion, and here’s subclipse in action on my desktop:

The complete tutorial will be available in my wiki site.

As the Gentoo Linux on Inspiron 6000 series is longer than expected, I’ve created myself a wiki page, and the guide on getting gentoo to work with Inspiron 6000 will be continued there.

The wiki page will hold the more technical side of me, and this blog should balance it with my other sides..

My Inspiron 6000 comes with ATI X300 graphic’s chipset, and some might come with intel graphic’s driver, depending on how do you customize your order.

Starting from Radeon 9200, ATI had closed it’s graphic chipset’s specification, making it hard for linux developers to develop drivers for it. Users with later models will onlly get 2D acceleration using the normal drivers.To get DRI and/or 3D acceleration to work, I’m aware of two options:

1. get the open source driver from r300.sourceforge.net, or
2. use the proprietery driver from ATI itself.

Though naturally I would promote open source, but since the r300 project hasn’t come out with a stable release yet, and installing the proprietary driver with gentoo is a snap, I go for the later option. Gentoo portage system make things really easy when it comes to installing packages;

1. Configure kernel: Kernel configuration need to be as the following

Loadable Module Support --->
[*] Enable loadable module support
[*]   Module unloading
Processor type and features  --->
[*] MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support
Device Drivers --->
Character Devices --->
<*> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)
<*> Your_AGP_Chipset_Here
[ ] Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)

2. Emerge/install the ati-driver

# emerge --sync
# emerge ati-drivers

3. Switch to the ATI OpenGL libraries

# opengl-update ati

4. Configure

fglrxconfig

The fglrxconfig will ask for questions regarding your system, and in the end it’ll produce the /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Here’s my xorg.conf file just in case you couldn’t get yours right.

If thing goes well, we should get "direct rendering: Yes" when running the glxinfo command;

# glxinfo | grep rendering
direct rendering: Yes

Optionally we can test the performance by running glxgears

$ glxgears

Last weekend I managed to try GCC 4 on my Gentoo box. My inspiron 6000 comes with Pentium M, but with gcc version of <3.4, I can only use pentium3 optimisation flag instead of pentium-m, whic is not very nice. My Pentium M 1.86 outperforms Pentium 4 2.8 (ht) by 40% in a test program compiled with pentium3 (my laptop at that time) and the Pentium 4 desktop compiled the same program without cpu optimisation. Later when we tried it with -march pentium3 and -march pentium4 respectively, my Inspiron 6000 + gentoo was just 3%-5% slower than the Pentium 4 2.8 running SuSe That gives the idea that this is not just for fun but might as well give performance benefit at the end. Driven by that, I wish to see if my machine can outperform the much higher clocked Pentium 4 when compiled with gcc 4 and get the pentium-m flag to work.

Methodology:

Currently my gentoo is installed with GCC 3.3.6. With gentoo upgrading the compiler and glibc was easy. First of all, unmask the to be installed gcc and glibc version.

#emerge binutils glibc gcc

#gcc-config -l
[1] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6 *
[2] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardened
[3] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardenednopie
[4] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardenednopiessp
[5] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardenednossp
[6] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4
[7] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardened
[8] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardenednopie
[9] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardenednopiessp
[10] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardenednossp
[11] i686-pc-linux-gnu-4.0.2

#gcc-config i686-pc-linux-gnu-4.0.2

#emerge -e system && emerge -e world

#gcc-config i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4
#emerge -e system && emerge -e world

I’ve been a happy user of wordpress for quite some time now, but until recently that I feel like having some photos in my blog, I got my mind mixed. Wordpress is a nice blogging tool, but the default editor is not wysiwig and for almost the same reason, picture/photo files need to be uploaded separately and later hyperlinked through the HTML editor within wordpress.

Since I’ve been living with HTML for almost 10 years now, wysiwig editor is not really an issue. It is however that I felt inconvenient with the upload and hyperlink stuff, that I started to think for an alternative. It’s not to switch to other blog engine but to have an editor that I can use it to upload my graphics/ photos, and wysiwig as an added bonus. Maybe I’m just too used to joomla way of doing this, and so I think it would be nice to have the same feature in wordpress too.

Joomla uses TinyMCE editor as it’s default editor. I, however, personally prefer fckeditor, and by that I started searching for fckeditor for wordpress. fckeditor is an online wysiwig editor that is much similar to Microsoft Word, except that it runs in my favorite browser, firefox, and other browsers as well. I can’t wait to see it to have a save buton that I can save my work in .doc (or actually .odt) format. If previously there were rumours that google will be developing web based word processsor, then fckeditor might be in google’s next-to-buy list.

My quick search lead me to, which later bring me to. Installation was a snap, and everything works well for me, though many people raises issues in the forums. I just followed the installation manual directly as in readme.txt provided along with the zip file.

1. Unzip the chenpress.zip file, and you will have a "chenpress" folder containing all the ChenPress files.
2. Upload the "chenpress" folder and its contents to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Move the folder "UserFiles" to your website’s root (http://www.example.com/UserFiles), and set the properties of the folder and its subfolder to 777.
4. Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for ChenPress.

For more information however you can refer to this page. Here’s a snapshot of fckeditor in action:

Update: 20051229
I am now using wordpress 2, which already has a simple wysiwig editor by default. It is simple indeed and I just don’t like the upload option at the bottom of the page, and so I’ll just stick to my fckeditor..