Well, this is a test post from a BlackBerry - not sure if it will work.

Called up M1 a couple of days ago and changed the APN from mobilenet to sunsurf and performance has improved a lot. Trying to see if it works better with Wordpress.

When doing some simple programming, I like to use the Vim editor instead of using a full-blown IDE. It's a good editor but I want to use it more efficiently. Some of the things I customise for myself are:

• auto indentation - this is a must for programmers
• tab size - to indent I use the tab key but different applications represent the tab character with different number of spaces; I like mine to be 4
• I like my colours to be different

I've finally got around to buying a new desktop for home use. Nothing fancy, but because I want the best bang for my buck, I've put off the purchase for quite sometime now. Being an IT guy, of course I chose to have my system assembled from the shops in Sim Lim Square instead of a PC vendor.

So, like any decent programmers/IT specialist will do, I analysed my requirements first. My needs are simple:

1. It has to be at least dual core - I run VMware so nothing less than a dual core for me.
2. It cannot be an overkill - I've seen too many instances where money is really put to waste. (Raise your hand if you've heard someone bought a quad-core processor to do word processing.)
3. Plenty of hard disk space and running SATAII but must also support IDE drives,
4. It must be supported by Linux and be able to run Compiz/Compiz Fusion.
5. I prefer Gigabyte motherboard - been using it since my first desktop and never had any problems with it.

With my requirements listed carefully, I settled for Gigabyte motherboard GA-G31M-S2L, which has Intel GMA 3100, Realtek 8168B PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller, I specifically mentioned these two components because they have been my biggest worry if I were to use Linux.

In openSUSE 10.3, there is no readily available solution (that I know of) that lets a user print to PDF. The closest thing there is to that is a PostScript (PS) file. Fortunately there is a easy way to convert PS files to PDF. There is a command called ps2pdf which does exactly that. Its usage is very straightforward as well:

ps2pdf document.ps document.pdf

How much simpler can that get?

Installing fonts has been somewhat of a neglect in Linux. Although I haven't checked, it seems that recent distributions of SUSE Linux has made it GUI-friendly.

Nevertheless, being a console guy, I believe it's better to know a more reliable way to make things work that is more 'portable' (i.e. work in other distributions as well).

So for fonts, the most straightforward way I know is to copy the font into your personal directory's hidden font folder e.g. /home/coder/.fonts

After having done that, the next step is to then make the font available to your applications. This can be done with the command:

fc-cache -fv

That's all there is to it!

I've always read that installing an operating system, regardless of Windows XP or Linux, on a SD card in the Eee PC is possible. But I haven't got the chance to prove that - until now.

Ever since I've started listening to the Security Now podcast, I've grown a lot more security- and privacy- conscious (which is a good thing). From the podcast, I've learnt that one of the easiest thing you can do to protect yourself on the Internet is to disable cookies by default, and allow only those from domains that you trust to be stored on your computer.

Being a Firefox user, I disabled cookies by default and set up an exception list to allow only hosts that I trust. Over time, this list has grown quite a bit. For whatever reason if I lose this list (either through an upgrade or a different computer), it can be quite inconvenient to redo the list again. Fortunately, I've found a way to back up the list.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I sometimes have trouble using the mksusebootdisk script make the thumb drive bootable. In a recent endeavour to install openSUSE 10.3 onto the Eee PC again, I encountered the same problem. This time though, I was in a rush for time and simply refused to do the whole process from formatting the file system (till this date I still have not figured out what is the cause of the problem).

To extract the contents of a RPM file, you need the rpm2cpio and the cpio tools. Use them this way:

rpm2cpio name_of_package.rpm | cpio -tv

This will extract the contents of the RPM file.

In the previous post, I described how to create the installation thumb drive. After creating the installation thumb drive, the next step, of course, is to use it to install.