Reading

I haven't read a good fiction for a long time. It was the 'usual resistance' (tm) like I'm too busy, I have no time, I've got better things to do and stuff. But last week I've finally decided enough is enough. I've got to get a more balanced and less (much less) critical view of my life. So I picked up a book at Carrefour for 5 Ringgit (LOL... even then I didn't want to invest too much into something which I considered as 'a waste of my time'). The book was 'Isle Of Joy' by Don Winslow. It was only 296 pages but took me a week to finish. Just last night I've finally finished it.

The book is about a Private Investigator by the name of William Withers who was assigned as a body guard for the young presidential hopeful Senator Joe Keneally. Things went wrong and the Senator's girlfriend got killed and everyone was trying to pin it on Withers. With his cool charm and sharp wit he handled it all. The book started off pretty slow at first. But once it picked up pace it was a very nice read.

But what I actually liked most was the effect of reading the book on me. I haven't exercised my imagination for quite a long time. And to see the action in the eyes of my mind (as compared to the eyes in my head), it was great. It made me more relaxed as my mind loosened and didn't grip too much on whatever problems I was working on. And I think this is actually important and rather than being a 'waste of my time', it was a pretty 'good use of my time'. Not sure when I might just pick up another random book to start reading, but I'm hoping it'd been soon.

Testing out Chromium

Finally I had time to install the AUR version of Chromium from the Chromium linux build. And it is running ever so sweetly on my Arch Linux... :D Been waiting for this for such a long time. Now it's not even close to being complete yet but it is usable enough for just normal browsing the web. The biggest thing not done yet? Flash... Yup.. No youtube or even fancy in browser multiple file select upload for flickr. Not yet anyway. But apart from that it's GREAT!!! :D

Of course I had to try the standard fare. Gmail & GDocs of course works flawlessly. I was even able to login to Maybank2u (yup.. full https here baby. Not like if you run it under wine). And facebook works too. Normal browsing of web pages and planets of course work. Even dragging out the tab works. That was very-very cool. Only thing is that if you have 2 windows open, and one of them have only 1 tab, don't drag that single tab out to the next window. It would not close it gracefully yet and crash the whole thing. Bookmark manager doesn't seem to show anything for now (I guess not implemented yet). But you can already import all your bookmarks from Firefox. And that's good enough for me to make this the browser of choice for normal web browsing. Of course Firefox would still be my favourite for dev work mainly because of Firebug and of course in Firefox you can watch youtube.. :P

Some of the other quirks that I can really feel is the whole dragging text and middle click paste and all doesn't work. But that's pretty minor. You can still right click copy paste. All in all it's pretty fast pretty nice looking. Good job Google (as if they need me to tell them that.. :P).

Buildout with python2.4

I've got to write this down before I forget. With the newer distros, python 2.5 or 2.6 is the default python version of choice. But plone and zope currently still use python 2.4. And if you want buildout goodness you have to get buildout working with python 2.4. So if you're on ubuntu, first install these packages:

python2.4
python2.4-dev

And then google for ez_setup.py. Download it. Then run in your terminal:

abdullah@codebase:/$ sudo python2.4 ez_setup.py

That would install the 2.4 version of easy_install. Then to install buildout you just have to do like so:

abdullah@codebase:/$ sudo easy_install-2.4 zc.buildout

That would install buildout into your system. And then inside your plone or zope folder run:

abdullah@codebase:~/taskmanager$ buildout init

That would create a local instance of buildout for you to run specifically for your app. All eggs will be downloaded into that folder and would not pollute your system. To run the app specific buildout just do a :

abdullah@codebase:~/taskmanager$ bin/buildout -vvvv

That would run the local buildout. I just like it very very very very verbose.. :P

update: Sarogini found a link which deals with the problem of developing plone on ubuntu 9.04 in a more comprehensive manner here.

More browsers

As a web application developer, one of the more annoying things that have to be done is to test out workflow and permissions of the system, thus requiring to login as one user, do a certain action, then login as another user, do whatever action that other user can now do. This is extremely tedious if you are only using 1 web browser since even though you can open many windows or many tabs, they will share the same cache and thus login only 1 user per site. So I like installing many web browsers and running them at the same time being logged in as different users.

Usually I like the other browsers pretty light because I just need the basics. So the alternative browser of choice is usually epihany. But recently I stumbled upon this article which talked about the midori web browser. I immediately installed it and tried it out. It is very fast and very light. Flash sites like youtube works. Even heavy ajax sites like gmail, gdocs and facebook works. And most importantly, maybank2u works too.. :)

So now I've got a new favourite alternative browser..

Things have been happening

A lot of things have been happening lately. This week tops it off with the MSC Open Source Conference (mscosconf). I was there for only 1 day (monday) but really felt the open source scene was coming alive here in Malaysia. Open Malaysia blogged about it already. And since I wasn't involved very much with it, I'll just leave it at that I am very happy with the overall direction we're going in Malaysia in regards to open source and hope that it will only get better and better (prep yourselves for foss.my 2009 and MyGOSSCON 2009.. Coming soon and it's gonna ROCK.. :D )

I was lucky enough to also be around for the lauching of OSDC.my dinner. Tun M was there and everything (first time I've seen him 'live' in person so that was fun). I'm not sure yet exactly what's the direction that osdc.my is going to take. Again I hope it would be successful at gathering the strength of all the various open source developers community we have here in Malaysia (you know, the whole single straw and many straw thing).

I was also fortunate enough to be able to join this month foss.my meetup at MSC Malaysia Cybercentre - Incubation Centre, KL Sentral. Talk about google's use of python by Anthony Baxter. That was very fun. Yay for python.. \o/ Shame that I was pretty tired and blur blur at that time till I wasn't able to ask any questions or participate much in the discussions. But it was still great fun.

So now it's already the end of the week. I'm taking some time out for a while writing out this blog and just chillin out. Things have been pretty hectic lately and I fully expect things to get much more worse before it get better.

/me praying for the best...

Installing OpenOffice 3.1.0

Finally there is a need for me to actually install the latest version of OpenOffice.org. To do it first install the ppa by adding the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

And then you need to get the key for that ppa by running the command:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xd2bb86e0ebd0f0a43d4db3a760d11217247d1cff

After that a quick update to update the list of packages:

sudo apt-get update

And then I actually had to remove my old OpenOffice manually because it refused to upgrade it when I ran:

sudo apt-get upgrade

So to remove the old OpenOffice I did:

sudo apt-get remove --purge openoffice.org

And only after that I installed it again:

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org

Now it's ready to be tried out. Hope it all works.

p/s: Yeah. I'm still on Hardy. You should change that for you ppa if you are using intrepid or jaunty.

Just some thoughts

April 24th was the date of my last post. That means I have officially missed last week. Didn't post anything at all. So in the end it's lucky when I actually get to write something once a week. At least that would keep my writing skill in practice.

So what have I been up to all this time? Well, around two weeks ago I actually got to try KMS (kernel mode setting). High resolution terminal from the beginning FTW!!!. No flicker at all when logging into X and it even seems a whole lot faster too. But in the end I opt out because it requires acceleration to be enabled and when I do that, my poor onboard 915 display card just couldn't cope with anything beyond 2048x2048. I needed 2300x800 to stretch over two monitors to be able to work productively so I had to disable it.

Apart from that there wasn't much else about open source that's worth while mentioning. Oh yeah... there was the buzz about the MSC Malaysia OSCONF 2009. You can check it out more here and here. Kinda ironic for me actually the whole thing. Because (and this is from my personal point of view since working at oscc) I was first exposed to Open Source conference by the government of Malaysia with MyGOSCON 2007. Then there was the very cool and very happening community conference Foss.my 2008 (which was held just a few days after MyGOSCON 2008 - the second government conference). And now coming into the ring, conference by the business community.. jeng.. jeng.. jeng.. OSCONF 2009. And the community seems to be buzzing about geekcamp too around that time. So looks like the open source scenario in Malaysia is coming alive with activity. I like this.. :D Change is coming.. :)