High-Tech Rojak

I've been wanting to get an android phone ever since I gave up on WebOS ever reaching our shores. And especially since working in a big locked down corp I really need a way to escape into the virtual world and hence I've wanted the Nexus One, then the Desire then the Desire HD for a long, long time.. I've signed up for the Digi 2 years contract (heh.. I've been a happy user of Digi for more than 3 years already, so I don't reckon I've got anything to lose) at the Digital Lifestyle Expo at KLCC. And so after a week of using it here's what I think of it. I LOOOOOOOOVE IT!!!! :D Okay.. now that is out of the way, let's be a little bit more objective here. First, what do I like about the phone. I like the big screen. It's huge and makes reading the internet and stuff a real pleasure. But of course there's a price to pay. I also like the 8MP camera. It takes nice pictures and I think extremely nice videos. I like that it can do 3G (yes.. been using t

I had a problem. I'm developing using grails but my constraint is that I have to use a legacy ms sql database that was created by importing data from excel to access to ms sql. Thus the tables do not have any id field or primary key. And not only that, once I've done my work on my pc, and I do a full dump onto the server using MS own "SQL Server Import and Export Wizard 2008" it does not retain the identity property of the id field (that's auto-increment for all you lucky mysqlers). So when grails try to create a new record it fails. So so sad. But after a few days of depressive wanderings I decided to be a man and solve this. So here's the script in full, of how you would automatically create an id if the table does not have it yet, and if already has, will do the whole recreate process to make the id an identity again. Hope it would benefit someone. declare @tablename varchar(1000),@importnew nvarchar(1000),@addconstraint nvarchar(1000),@dropold nvarchar(100

It's been 3 weeks since I've started my new job at a big corporation. Transition into this new job was not easy and even now there is still a lot of pain of adapting. The biggest source of the pain? WINDOWS!!! T.T Being a big corp, it's almost a requirement that your reliance on all things microsoft has to be solid and deep rooted. Of course we have open source equivalent for most of the stuff but the pressure is on for me to perform and to present some tangible results as soon as possible thus I barely had time to put some basic best practices in place. But finally after 2 days of googling and tweaking, I've got a small pc running ubuntu server serving trac for ticketing and serving out our main mercurial repo. We don't even have the basic infra yet and still management says "these are things are nice to have, but you need to deliver those reports soon. Our deadline was last month". Then when starting to do development, I start to see how deep the rabbit

Just came back from having a holiday with the family at Lumut. It was quite an ad-hoc decision to follow my parents to Lumut on the family day of their respective companies. So they have already left for Lumut since last friday evening, we didn't even start to get ready till saturday morning. By around 11 am we were already on our way. Looking it up on google maps, estimated time of 3 hours 23 minutes means we should arrive there just about a little bit late for lunch. That was our initial hopes. Once we were on the road, we didn't exactly know which way to go. And even though I've looked it up more the less on google maps before, I didn't bother much about it because I thought my brother knew the way. Well, we were supposed to get off the highway at Bidor. We didn't realize that till we called our father a little after we just passed the Tapah exit. So we had little choice but to exit at Gopeng. And we got lost more within the maze of village roads and mark less la

Finally decided to install the latest version of Ubuntu on my laptop. I tried the upgrade through Update Manager path. Left it to run and by the time I came back from work, I booted to blank screens. The Grub works but that's basically it. So I booted into Windows, downloaded the CD iso and burnt it and did a completely fresh install. This went much more smoother. Everything worked out of the box for my Acer 4810TG Timeline. Wireless, sound, everything that I usually use (Haven't even tried out the webcam since I've never used it). But then yesterday something strange happen. There was no more volume and chat applet on the panel. So had to search for how I would reset it to the default and found it here . Basically the steps involve: 1) gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel 2) rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel 3) pkill gnome-panel That's it and it all came back to normal default. Nice. One thing I've got to mention is about the placement of the windows controller. At

Recently a friend of mine asked me to help him develop a small web application to be run on a tomcat server. So that would mean I have to develop the application using Java, which I have not used ever since my student days. But because the requirements were pretty small, I took up the challenge just for the opportunity to learn something new. The system was meant to capture the answers of a questionnaire and calculate the score they got. Then display back the past scores. It's pretty small involving just CRUD and a small amount of business logic to calculate the scores. Could probably be done in a bit over an hour if using tools I'm already familiar with like CakePHP or Django. But with Java, it was a completely different story. My experience with CakePHP when developing MyMeeting made me quite reluctant to ever not use a framework ever again. Unless it's just a small trial program to understand a new language, it's better to use a framework. In the framework usually th

ROCK!! Ubuntu really rocks!! I've spent quite sometime even getting the wifi of this acer timeline 4810tg to work in archlinux, but in ubuntu 9.10, even the live CD was able to detect and use it. But that's not the best part. The best part is that I've finally got my Samsung SCX-4300 to work in Linux.. Wooohooo!!! Followed the steps shown here . Installed the samsungmfp stuff from repo and walah.. scanner up and running. Oh.. and don't worry about the printer. It was detected and able to be used almost without any effort. Sweet.. :) now I guess I'll need to buy a new toner for it, it'll be under heavy use from now on.. :D

It seems I haven't written anything for quite a long time. In regards to tech, there wasn't much to write home about lately. I've tried out a bit of android programming (ok, actually only got to the point of running the SDK examples on the emulator.. :P), I've dabbled a bit more with django and learned how to create form generated from the models, and of course learned a ton of things about plone. Currently my focus is more on attempting to port PloneMeeting over to be used on Plone 3. Still learning a lot more about this. I'm very excited about Plone 4. It's fast and it runs on Python 2.6. And that's basically it for tech more the less. Apart form that, the current state of the country is pretty messed up if you ask me. I can't talk about it without feeling depressed. So I'm not going write anything about it here. It'll make me even more depressed. On a happier note, my new house is almost ready to move in. Just have to unpack and organize all t