Archive for January, 2007

6 more months left in NS

Published
by
Zz85
on January 25, 2007
in NS and Updates
. 0 Comments

Some updates from camp’s life

1. Awarded Best Soldier in SAF Ammunition Command for month of Oct 06

Best Soldier Award

Well, the whole story about this award supposed to be another post, but anyway here’s what happened in short.

My outgoing OC looked for me when I was on off, through the telephone asked me to prepare a presentation at a conference for commanders.

After giving my speech, CO asked a write out regarding my defining moments.

Basically this was a chance I could recall my learning experience and memorial moments in NS and to thank all those who have helped me one way or another.

2. Promoted

after being a Corporal for about a year

Old Rank
Old CPL Rank to…
[okay the circle thing above the rank is a formation badge, which I backstitched (handstitching’s another topic) not that well unfortunately]

New Rank
3SG (3rd Sergent) Rank.

$103.40 Shopping Spree

Published
by
Zz85
on January 14, 2007
in Bloggin and Interesting Stuff
. 0 Comments

at Queensway IKEA plus $16.20 taxi back home, with the help of my father and cousin to carry the stuff up to our home.

Ikea Stuff

Includes,
Tall Shelf $29 FLARKE N BOOKCS
Super Pinkish $35 SNILLE CHAIR
4 90cents Bokis Book-Ends
Zip-able Strikt Cd box with Lid
Simple Lyclig box with lid
Simple Fixa Tool Box - 3 Sharp Trojka nn Scissors
Black with Zig-zag OMSORG SHOEHORN
5 White FLYT MAGAZ Holders
5 Brown Coloured Lingo Magazine File Holder

A little shopping therapy feels good.

More Linux Downloads

Published
by
Zz85
on January 14, 2007
in Technology and linux
. 0 Comments

Ok, even if you are not a linux fan, downloading (and uploading) them is a good use of your unlimited broadband internet connection. (about 400MB to 4GB for each)

Here’s are few interesting distros worth (which I never mentioned before) mentioning since I tested them on my recent linuxs downloading.

* MPX Live CD
MPX live CD - MPX: The Multi-Pointer X Server
MPX is a hack which allows multiple mice and cursors to be used together on the same screen and window. Its pretty cool to add on extra mouse to use them together.especially when a new usb mouse nowadays is such affordable product. The Live CD is modified from Ubuntu Drake.

* Sabayon Linux 3.2
Sabayon is a Italian desert consisting of eye yolks and well this explains the nice yellowish wallpaper for this live gentoo DVD. Here’s a showcase of several cutting edge linux technology.

Beagle, the search everything as you type, not snoppy but linux’s version of Apple’s spotlight create in Mono is integrated in the “start button”.

Beryl, is the eye candy like Mac’s EXPOSE, or Vista lookinglass, provides 3D desktop switching, plus customisable visual effects when dealing with windows.

Gentoo notorious for its compile times, Sabayon provides a compile free installation for you to try out gentoo. While you can try to see how much more speed you get in gentoo, you can then start to find out if you like using portage - install applications using emerge and see if you love compiling and optimising.

* Arch Linux
“a lightweight and flexible linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple”. A interesting distro with their philosophy to make linux simple and fast. It solves many problems that is evident in other distro, and downside is that you have to learn more about linux, and feel the barebone shell with its package manager “pacman”.

Their official packages optimized for the i686 and x86-64 which seems to be good community backing for easy updates, installations, yet are fast and stable builds to run the best out of your hardware.

* Accelerated Knoppix
Germany and Japan being the advanced countries who build maglev (Magnetic levitation) trains, here are the combinations of what they can do for linux. Knoppix, one of the or maybe earliest Live CDs around, uses Debain and KDE. This German project have introduced many to linux and its applications, and save many windows installations with its all-in-one-problem-solver-CD.

The special thing on its CD or DVD, is that its compressed so, much more can be placed inside the CD, extracted on the fly when you boot from it. 2GB of stuff on a normal CD, and 8GB on a normal DVD, so the downside is that it seems slower to boot up from it.

Comes this Japanese project who notice that there’s a pattern when accessing the compressed filesystem. They create a profiler to examine that, then rearrange so that the CD can be read sequentially too increase its boot times. The result, Accelerated KNOPPIX, which boots up half the time of knoppix live CDs, and from what I tested, in 1 min times. Downside, you got a customised japanese version of knoppix, but if you understand icons and shell, its not a problem.

* ?Ubuntu
I think I’ve mentioned Ubuntu before although I’m not sure. Started by the first African in space, making vast improvements on Debian, to provide a desktop usable to everyone, great community support, and ships to you if you wanted the CDs. new flavors are out, Kubuntu for KDE environment, Xubuntu for slim, resource friendlier XFCE desktop, Edubuntu for educational purposes.
The latest is 6.10 nicknamed “Edgy Eft”, not so bleeding edge and stable many have commented so 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” is their recommended. Unless you are waiting for their next release for “users wanted goodies” in March or April this year, make a fresh installation somewhere to test its Upstart feature in 6.10, which many users report 30+ seconds boot timings, a reason less to switch over.

Welcome 2007, Goodbye 2006

Published
by
Zz85
on January 11, 2007
in About Me
. 0 Comments

The moments of time at the end of the year is usually brings me joy plus a little sadness as I step into a new year. I usually hold no regrets, but this time I felt a little different. Perhaps I was optimistic, naive or too carefree previously, but the end of 2006 felt a little disappointment, knowing that there were mistakes I’ve done, better decisions which I could made.

Nevertheless, 2006 is still a year to be remembered for me. Here are…

My Memorable Events and Achievements in 2006

Army
- Awarded SAFAC’s Best Soldier for Oct 2006
- Posted to DCC
- Hold appointments of Guard Commander, COS, Key Orderly, OA..
- Contributed, presented and won several WITS projects.
- Took part in NDP 2006

Family
- 1st tour trip to China

Personal
- 1st Wisdom Tooth extraction
- Completed Vertical Marathon
- Completed Half Marathon
- My 21st birthday and my party.

Resolutions? Yes I’ve considered a little. Though, new year resolutions always seemed
“Meant to be broken“, and Diminish and forgotten as time goes by.

At least I did something different and smarter for 2006. I wrote them in as a draft titled “My 2006 Resolutions” in my blog (but like many of my posts-unpublished), so they won’t be forgotten. For some of these resolutions I gave expectations that they needed more than 1 year to complete, in a way I didn’t break my resolutions, and in another way I didn’t accomplish them.

Some of My Resolutions for the 2007?

Spend more time with God - Read the Bible & Pray!
Love my family - and my friends, and myself.
Keep running - Try duathlon, finish at least another half-marathon.
Improve survival - Learn cooking, housework chores, craftsmanship and other basic skills
Don’t be a loser - Be motivated! Accomplish more.

Be Renewed!

ping? pong! (# see footnote)

Published
by
Zz85
on January 8, 2007
in Updates
. 0 Comments

Its been over 2 months, from the last year since I posted any new stuff on my blog. Welcome back!

I have a more or less the usual excuses for that my long absence from blogging. Here’s the excuse list

Reason #4. Server downtime

No idea why sometimes the pages loads too slow or the server fails to connect I may be planning to revamp my entire blog, upgrade the wordpress engine, create a design myself, move and host it on my server located at home.

Reason #3. Occupied with tons of end of the year and new year events

End and the start of year have no lack of festive seasons and activities in army, church or home.
In camp, usual work & duties continues.. In december I had 2 weeks of advance training course.
Then after that, was about a week sent overseas with my family
When I’m back, it was time for caroling and christmas and..
the cycle continues..

Reason #2. Series of computer tragedy
The irony that I’m always helping others fixing their computer problems, I never get the to solve my own.

Lately I threw out my pentium 3 pc, but I still left with tons computer debris. motherboards and other computer junkies are left lying around with a slight hope of electric life sprinkling in them or waiting to be “basketed”.

My main personal and working system, pentium 4 2.8ghz ht starts to load windows slow (which means really slow.. worst than my pentium 3 could boot up windows xp). ram problems, northbridge fan problems.. and when i think i got them fixed.. strange noise from my 160gb sata harddisk even after formatting. well, im using xubuntu (a debian, xfce, ubuntu type of stuff) on a old 40gb maxtor hdd (at least on a 80pin ribbon cable) to type this.

Reason #1. Plain laziness and impatience

Well, I could have used some other computer, login from somewhere else. But no, I thought my environment then on my pc was the best customised and didnt attemp, even when i would create an entry anywhere else on planet even though it was so.. technically possible.

Anyway here goes a post to break my silence, hopefully this would drive me out of my reason #1 keep going..

(btw the post is titled ping pong, well not that it has to do with table tennis but i remembered irc servers would “ping” clients which reply “pong” to show that they are alive — yes i’m still here. )