Archive for the 'Interesting Stuff' Category

Nodame Cantabile のだめカンタービレ 交响情人梦

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on July 5, 2007
in Interesting Stuff and Music
. 1 Comment

It is rare that I come across a drama or anime that is attractive, exciting, and addictive that promotes classical music.

Nodame Cantabile

Cantabile - In the style of singing.
Nodame - the name the main character, Noda Megumi calls herself. She’s a piano major in a music academy, has a special talent for playing yet unable to read scores well and has other disorderly behavior (like me??? >_< ). She falls in love with Chiaki Shinichi, another talent and main character who aspires to be a conductor.

The stories revolve around them, their friends, school and orchestra friends, and of course, nice classical music.

Available in Manga (Comics), Live Action (Drama), Anime (animation aka Cartoon) and DS (game) editions.

I'll be nasty and drop a little temptation here.

Nodame Cantabile Episode 1 from Veoh.com

More info from Wikipedia.com and D-Addicts Wiki

Btw to those I loaned the music related japanese drama “live” and anime “piano”, if you can them, please return to me.

GPS, You Got Me Locked On

Published
by
Zz85
on April 26, 2007
in Interesting Stuff and Technology
. 0 Comments

Buying the receiver.
While my “thoughts cells” war over each other whether to buy the GPS Receiver, my urge decided to put an end to the fight by heading down to Eastgear to buy the product, days before I went to Malaysia for a short trip.

The downsides I thought initially-like why I need to pay few hundred dollars just to tell me where to turn left or right in Singapore- weren’t too bad. At least I bought the receiver at a bargain. Since I reasoned I do not own a PDA therefore having no need for the software, the Boss gave me a special price of $99 (dollars less than the priced they offered at the IT fair).

About Global Positioning System
From “I know where I am `anywhere from this world`”, to spying tracking devices seen in movies, or high tech waypoint tracking anti-terrorism attack tactics in the game Rainbow Six: Rouge Spear -these are a reality with GPS. Basically GPS has a network of satellites hovering round the globe, broadcasting data down to earth. What a receiver does is it picks up these data, perform some mathematics on them, and let you know your whereabouts. Not so complex like a device communicating with outer space, almost works like a radio receiver. That’s is why these devices could last 10 hours on 2 hours of battery charging.

Usage
Some good things about having a Bluetooth GPS receiver are its processor is dedicated for GPS processing, and you can share the receiver among different people on different platforms (eg. Laptop, PDA, Smartphones..)

I tried running it on a PDA (not mine) with MapKings which is pretty nice looking and good. Forgoing buying MapKings, you could try the malsingmaps, the free community contributed GPS garmin-based maps covering Singapore and Malaysia. There you get instructions to make the garmin software work with non-garmin bt receivers.

Smartphones (Symbian based) aren’t left out. Nokia released Smart2Go, which they acquired last year, for free this month. IMO, Smart2Go is a pretty good GPS software (for S60 3rd Edition, N and E series phone users can use them. There’s a version for Windows Mobile too), and they provide maps covering countries almost everywhere on earth. Its features include 2d/3d views, poi(place of interests-landmarks, parking..), routing, (and if you pay for) detailed maps and voice navigation. Smart2Go is also actually the software which they named Nokia Maps for N95 (known for its GPS support and smartphone features). Well nokia had a free GPS software called NRC - Nokia Sports Tracker, although very data based, very usefully and perhaps a Garmin Forerunner replacement.

Well, there are other interesting commerical GPS software for smartphones but I’ll not mention them. You can read up SmartCOM GPS, Route 66, AGIS Navigator.

As for myself with a pitefully S40 j2me phone, I have my fair share of j2me applications to test and will be reviewing them shortly.

Beep beep beep… Satellite connection disconnects.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Published
by
Zz85
on April 18, 2007
in Interesting Stuff
. 0 Comments

Or OCD for short.

A recent “Help Me Help My Child” documentary shown on Arts Central was on 2 separate cases of 2 kids from different background with this disorder.

My short review..

One was about 7 years old who kept “hearing” a voice in his head, and he thought he would kill himself and his family.

Another was a teenager, but was obsessed with tidiness or perfection. That made it hard for others to live or interact with him.

Both were brought to see a psychiatrist by their mothers, but its wasn’t that easy even though the psychiatrists were specialised in this field.

Both had to over cover come their anxiety, and it seemed it both cases, the psychiatrists gave them confront their own anxiety by place more anxiety on them, until they could accept it.

It was nice to observe that in these families, their parents were very patient to them, and tried to talk to them about their behavior or illness. This was in contrast to my thought that parents would just lash out at these children in their frustrations.

Ubuntu Tweaks (Part 2 - Repository and Packaging)

Published
by
Zz85
on March 8, 2007
in Interesting Stuff, Ubuntu, WebLinks and linux
. 3 Comments

Continued from Part 1 of my series on Ubuntu tweaking.

When I first planned to run Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft”, many reviews on the net showed that not everyone is happy, some whom might think its not edgy enough, some who had their systems broken because they tried to upgrade.

Remember one of my reason I installed Ubuntu? The nature of Ubuntu and its community makes it easy to use, customise and repair the system. In this post, I would show ways to play with your ubuntu system- using apt, guides on the net, and using some other packaging or unified installation software.

Ubuntu

Apts
Apt (Advanced Packaging Tool) was perhaps the reason why many chose Debian. The Ubuntu repositories could then be the very reason that others like me chose ubuntu. Apt-get, Aptitude are very useful and powerful commands to play with. However after trying Ubuntu Synaptic Package Manager for time, I love it for these reasons:

- It has a gui (Graphical User Interface) for those who wouldn’t even touch a shell.
- Its really easy to add, disable, delete sources
- Easy to find, mark and install many packages at one go
- Download packages simultaneously, with ability to resume, making downloads faster
- Notifies you of updates and easy to access via its tray icon.

Even now I use Synaptic a lot and recommend it, apt-get and aptitude are still as important and good to learn and use. Read about aptitude versus apt-get

Finding Ubuntu Repositories
Having nice repository sources is perhaps all you need for a long time. Using these packages, I find that it is even easier to search and install software compared to Windows.

1st, you can uncomment the less official but supported ubuntu sources from /etc/sources.list or preferably do so in Synaptic. Next try out source-o-matic a Ubuntu source.list generator which produces a source list based on selection of criteria you chose. Ubuntu geek has a source list for Edgy Eft which is worth taking a look. Lastly for sources, for the more adventurous, I would recommend Treviño source list which including many packages compiled by him.

Other Debian Packages
Automatix is an Automated GUI installation script which installs the common software people demands. Read here as their official site seems down.

When using lots of “super-cow powers” apts, dun forget they are basically Debian packages. Finding and downloading debian packages is a very simple way to install applications. See GetDeb - Click And Run - Software Portal

Other Packaging
One of Apt/Deb uses is that they are a solution to dependencies. However, it is not the only solution around. Many package management exists for other distros - portage (emerge) for Gentoo, packman for ArkLinux, rpm for Redhat… There are some which are distro independent.

Klik, its another innovative web-based click and install software manager. From its webpage, “Klik strives to be the easiest way to download and run software, without installation”. I love the way you install Klik, with at most 2 lines (in user mode without the dollar signs):


$ sudo apt-get install binutils libstdc++5 rpm gnome-about # for (k)Ubuntu
$ wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh

Autopackage - Easy Linux Software Installations for both users and developers. “Autopackage doesn’t need to be downloaded or installed. When you install your first package, Autopackage will install itself automatically.” Check out their package listings

Zero Install system is a caching network filesystem, to make software installation completely automatic. This decentralised installation systems has been made to work with the Rox Desktop

Lastly, if you were to experiment building from sources, you would like to work with the command, esp. tar, cvs, svn, git. CVS (Concurrent Versioning System), SVN (Subversion), GIT(distributed revision control file system project) are also repositories system at a different level.

CheckInstall is a software which helps you keep track of installations done using make install, and creates distro based uninstallations like dpkg on debian.

Welcome to the addictive world of Linux software.

LilyPondTool updates

Published
by
Zz85
on February 22, 2007
in Ideas, Interesting Stuff and lilytool
. 0 Comments

I’ve distracted long enough to be lost from the lilypond and lilytool world.

Was surfing round the lilypond mailing list web archives I found several updates interesting enough to share.

Bert, the creator of LilyPondTool, created a new webbie for LilypondTool at http://lilypondtool.organum.hu/

Bert now has his own blog over at http://briffid.blogspot.com/

LilyPond 2.10.19 and 2.11.19 are available for download. From what I can see, the installation is much simple on linux than before with its installer script, and I see ample windows builds (Wait till I buy vista before windows again). As usual new features keep coming in.

LilyPondTool 2.10.4 released Seems it has many new features including

LilyPondTool 2.10 demo is released demonstrating some of the most exciting features -instant errorchecking, instant help, instant point-and-click). See more cool demos

There’s this new webpage called A-Play was first seen here then mentioned as a shell for lilypond and discussed more over here Now, I don’t really get the entire idea of how to use it, but I already had the idea of how it should be used before I ever seen of this.

(This paragraph contain random thoughts)
In no way to suggest bad for lilytool in anyway, but I feel the web platform would be the way really for lilypond to reach out to the masses. I mean, what can be harder than opening a web browser compared to installing >10mb of stuff. Normal users would most likely seen a web browser 10x more than file editor, which cuts down lots more learning curve for interface alone. Graphical interface could be easily implemented in html too. Expert users can use a textarea with autosave feature enabled, providing a portability around the world. Syntax highlighting, indentation can be done with a iframe. Shortcuts can be added to keyevents. Snippets can be drag and drop or provided via menu or toolbars. Combined with good server side support to store, render and process, and server/browser communication using AJAX to provide seamless integration between user and machine, it seems only good can come out from this. Well of course this is another of my wild imaginations, although I think its not fairly difficult to implement, not many people who can implement will do it, but perhaps an employee or someone in his 20% time might do it for fun.

Lastly I glad that even LilyPond’s “boss” Hans-Wen has openly supported LilyTool as a “official recommended tool”. Kudos to Bert! Well, as this point of time I can’t wait to open my development tools like Eclipse and start coding goodies for LilyPondTool, but not yet. Got to install a running copy of jEdit with its plugin first. Then settle lots of other stuff I needa do, followed by keep a cool head to not to rush, keep the ideas and program well.

Slow and steady wins the race.