Rojak Coder

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have KDE and Compiz-Fusion installed on openSUSE 10.3 running for some time now. Some time ago, I encountered a strange problem where the ALT-F1 key combination does not bring up the menu any more. Also the I don’t know what I did to cause this but I managed to solve it thanks to the openSUSE wiki.

So apparently Gmail knows I’m Chinese. Or so I think. In the past when I log out of Gmail, it will say “Please wait…”  Recently, perhaps through some heavy-duty data mining, it told me to “请稍等…” (Chinese for “please wait”) instead. I thought that I had turned some settings in Firefox to display Web pages in Mandarin or I revealed through my emails that I’m Chinese - in which case that would be a serious case of privacy invasion, I think.

And all of a sudden, it now speaks to me in English again. I thought it was a mistake on Google’s side. Turns out, it is!  Another guy (Joe Shaw) who has entries in Planet SUSE’s blog aggregator also has a similar problem. Well, mine is seemingly resolved now. Hopefully Joe’s get resolved soon too.

Tip: If you are observant, you will see that when you try to login to Gmail’s site, the login page is SSL-secured. Once you log in though, the page is not  transmitted through SSL. If you want to keep your connection SSL-secured, you have to login with this address:

https://mail.google.com

instead of http://gmail.com

Basically if you specify right at the start that you want SSL connection, Gmail will keep that for you.

This is one of the most amazing video of nature I have ever seen. Over the years I’ve watched countless nature documentaries, many of which are on the savanna with the lions, buffaloes, giraffes, and elephants roaming free. This video clip from YouTube below beats them all.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve installed the reCAPTCHA plugin for Wordpress today. The whole process is very simple - took me less than 15 minutes. Simply follow the instructions on the download page. I like reCAPTCHA because not only does it help to prevent comment spam, it helps digitize books as well. I don’t know how it works exactly but the basic premise is that words are scanned from books and used in the pictures for reCAPTCHA. How the system tells whether the entered words are correct or not, I don’t know. All I know is it works and that’s good enough for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I finally got around to doing my own blog. All along I had wanted to create the software for my blog. I’ve had that idea for nearly half a year now, I think. Considering that in these six months, the development of my personal software for the blog has been less than ‘progressive’, I decided to simply use one of the open source blog software out there. Realistically speaking, the Wordpress blogging Web application that I’m using now is definitely better than what I can do in my spare time, which isn’t a lot.

I figured that with my spare time, I can do/learn something else rather than create a blogging software when such a great one has already been created.

I’ll be using this blog to ‘document’ my experiences in IT and, some thoughts. My interest in IT lies with Linux and programming. You can read more about my other interests in the “About page” when I update it.