High-Tech Rojak

Welcome to the future... At least that's what we've been told since I was just a small boy. I remember at school we were given assignments to write about what we think Malaysia would be like in the year 2020 because back then we had a "Vision". We'd write things like flying cars (eh.. we're working on that now... no wonder...), robots, computers and things like that... And so here we are.. in the future.. watch out for that flying skateboarder... But in a very real sense, we are way more advanced than 20 years before. I remember in school, me and my friend would wait till everyone is asleep before we'd play warcraft together because we'd have to connect using modems and in the daytime someone always pick up the phone. And also I think the charges were cheaper at night. I remember having 4 megabytes of RAM was a huge deal. And downloading mp3 took days. I remember riding the bus to KL and the only way to cool down was to sit beside the open window.

Last week I've written about my personal updates and I mentioned that nowadays I'm listening to audiobooks while I'm commuting to and from work. I'd like so share about some of my experience listening to the audiobooks and some titles I've personally enjoyed a lot. I use audible to listen to audiobooks. Listening to audiobooks is of course very different than actually reading a book. The main difference being that you can't read at your own pace, it would be at the pace of the narrator. And your enjoyment of the content is also very much dependent on the narrator almost as much as on the author. A great book can become quite boring if the narrator just keep on droning flatly through. And a boring book can be become great when the narrator can read it so enthusiastically that it become infectious. So in some ways, buying an audiobook is a bit more riskier than buying a book. Another difference is that with books, you can very easily skim through again to find so

I haven't written a lot lately. It's mostly because I haven't got a lot to say that was important enough for me to spend time and write it out. I think that's probably a mistake. I should probably write more just to practice writing and to be more articulate. So I'm trying out a new schedule where I try to write something out at least once a week. I'm going to think of something to write every week and use the whole week to write bits and pieces of it until I can get round to putting it all together to be published on Wednesday. And since this is the first time I'm doing this and I haven't prepared anything for this week, I figure I'll just try something easy like sharing my own personal updates this year. So it's almost the end of 2019. It has been quite a roller coaster ride for me. Just last year, the Pakatan Harapan formed a new government after the 14th General Election in 2018. Ever since then, well.. life has been pretty much the same.

Finally solved a very big problem for me... How do I render a page in spring framework that uses the thymeleaf templating engine? The string most probably will come from the database. After long hours of searching and trying, I've got it. First I've got a clue from this particular stackoverflow question . But following an example from there got me an error about class not found for ognl.PropertyAccessor. That solution was found here . So here's how I finally done it... First thing is to create a service where that service can be used wherever you need it in your spring app. @Service public class PortalService { private TemplateEngine templateEngine; private final static String TEMPLATE_LOCAL = "US"; private TemplateEngine getTemplateEngine(){ if(null == templateEngine){ templateEngine = new TemplateEngine(); StringTemplateResolver templateResolver = new StringTemplateResolver(); templat

Stumbled on this nice online learning site for kotlin, the Kotlin Koans . Haven't gone through the whole thing yet, but will soon.

Does your browser saying that your website is insecure make you sad? But you don't have the funds to buy a certified ssl cert makes you even sadder? Well... fret not because now there is a solution for YOU.... Check out https://letsencrypt.org/ It's free, yes, free as in free teh tarik kind of free... And from there, you can find the link for the client, certbot...  https://certbot.eff.org/ Just choose your web server, your server os... and follow the instructions.. it even detects all the domain name you have configured for your server.. awesome easy... So.. don't be sad... be secure... let's encrypt...