25 posts tagged with "personal"

It was supposed to be a headline-worthy cooperation between the world’s arguably most popular tech blog and a Singapore startup. Now it’s all going downhill. Why and how it came to this stage nobody will know for sure, as Arrington puts it, “Ultimately there are two sides to every story…”

But, if it were the case as Arrington described, the “shareholders” deserve this ending. Why squander away a chance to launch a product in a larger market by leveraging on a famed tech blog’s name and instead choose to have the whole of a much smaller pie? If greed was really the cause, I hope Arrington wins the suits against Fusion Garage.

But Fusion Garage deserves a chance to voice their side of the story. Maybe we’ll get to see something on Straits Times to hear from them what exactly transpired. I hope it’s not because they are unable to produce the software – I really look forward to a successful Singapore tech startup make good internationally.

The Facebook game Animal Swapping has caused me much anguish in my bid to best everyone. Now, I’m only third place. It took me a long time to get there and recently I’m reminded why I don’t want to play it anymore.

Some time into the game, I always encounter this error where two animals will overlap and that makes it difficult to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if it’s due to me using Linux, but it’s a good excuse to say why I can’t be first =P

When I was writing my post “Setting a Static IP Address in Ubuntu“, I encountered a strange problem.

In the post I was describing the location of of a directory and it contained the following:

/ etc/network

Notice that there is a space between the word “etc” and the preceding forward slash? If I were remove the space between these two characters, I will get the following error message when I preview or publish the post:

Method Not Implemented

POST to /wordpress/wp-admin/post.php not supported.

I don’t know if this is an isolated incident or a WordPress vulnerability. I wonder if anyone else has encountered this problem.

Just recently I had to set up a few workstations for developer work. I installed them with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I had originally installed them with 9.10 (Karmic Koala) but for some bloody reason, Eclipse, both Ganymede and Gallileo, don’t work on Koala. Anyway, that’s another story for another time.

So the workstations are used for Web development, each has to have a static IP address. Being a small outfit, we don’t have a DNS server. Therefore we need to set each machine’s IP address as static. I thought that it could easily be done with the Network Manager tool in the menu bar, but I was wrong.

The server holding the project files for the e-learning application that I’m developing just died on me today. The cause of the server dying is the insertion of a faulty RAM chip. What flabbergasted me was that the chip was idenfitied as faulty before. Why my colleague knowingly placed the RAM into the server I don’t know. I haven’t gotten a chance to ask.

The result of that action was that the server could not boot up. In fact, the problem was so different from what I’ve encountered before that it didn’t even occur to me that RAM could be the problem. The CPU was supposed to be a headless node that our developers access over the network to the repository and the wiki. What tipped me off was that the CPU was not reachable even after turning on. Network cable seems fine, and are connected at both ends properly. The system was working fine the Friday last week. Then I connected a monitor to the server to try to resolve the issue. Strangely, what came up on the monitor is an image that is akin to static noise you see on TV (during the analog days).

A few days ago, I had to set up a mail client to retrieve mail from a hosted Google mail account. Setting the mail client should be a very simple affair that can be done in a few minutes. I never imagined it would take me more than 10 minutes to get it working.

Monitors just ain't what they used to be. I remember a time when all I need to know is that if a monitor supports 1024 by 768 resolution, it's good. If it stayed only in 800 by 600, then it's bad.

Times have changed! With HD, 1080P, DVI, HDMI, and what have you, it can be confusing. The Real Deal podcast from CNET has an excellent episode on monitors. CNET's monitor expert, Eric Franklin, is on this episode to talk about monitors and what you need to know about modern monitors.

If you are thinking of buying a TV that you might want to connect up to your CPU or laptop, check it out as well.

Now that I've got my BlackBerry working fine, it's time to get it to work its magic. This, and the previous post, are made with my BB Bold.

A little bit of background on my Bold - I got it from M1, one of three telecom providers in Singapore. It comes with two flavours of BlackBerry plans: a S$30 plan with a data limit of 4 MB and a S$60 plan with unlimited data.

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.

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.