武士道精神

July 15th, 2006 at 4:27 · Filed Under Chinese, Karate · Comment 

刚和朋友闲聊过。谈及有没有试过使用空手道防身和它的实用性时，我们讲到有关武士道精神。

我认为空手道『型』的修练和随着年龄的增长和家庭安全责任感可培养武士道精神。

胆量会随着年龄一起增长。当家庭安全责任扛在肩上时，胆量也会增加。练习空手道『型』的要素之一，要如临大敌，身历其竟。一个人的年龄增长和家庭安全责任感能协助发挥这一要素。

把生命置之度外，随时付出生命保卫家人的安全的武士道精神能大大协助发挥空手道『型』的一击必杀。

当然，这是不简单的。这需要很多长时间的修练。

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Screensaver as Desktop on Mac OS X

July 15th, 2006 at 0:56 · Filed Under Computing, Mac OS X · 3 Comments 

This is awesome. Run your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper on Mac OS X. Type the following in your Terminal window:

% /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/\ Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/\ ScreenSaverEngine -background

Be amazed and enjoy!

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Ada UK Conference 2006 Goodies

July 15th, 2006 at 0:02 · Filed Under Ada, Conferences, Software Development, Technology · Comment 

I found some goodies about Ada 2005 here. If you are interested to learn about Ada, it is certainly worth peeping.

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Bushido

July 14th, 2006 at 20:33 · Filed Under Karate · 2 Comments 

Just after a chat with friends. We talked about effectiveness of karate-do and if I had applied karate-do in real life. We talked about Bushido as well.

When one is getting older with the responsibility of family safety, practicing kata will cultivate the spirit of Bushido.

One’s courage will increase when getting older and bearing responsibility of family safety. One of the important criteria in practicing kata is that one must practice it as though in a real life fighting with real enemies. The age and responsibility will aid this practicing criteria.

The willingness to sacrifice one’s own life in order to protect one’s family can help a person to ultimately harness the spirit of Bushido and the lethal techniques of kata.

Of course, this is not easy. Understanding of kata, lifetime commitment and persistent training is necessary to achieve this state.

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Successful propagation of florist gloxinia

July 13th, 2006 at 23:31 · Filed Under Flowers and Plants, Gardening, Photography · 3 Comments 

Florist gloxinia or Sinningia speciosa is tough to propagate.

4 months ago, I tried to make 4 propagation by cutting a fresh leave and inserted the leave with its tuber into a pot of moist soil. Watered to keep the soil moist. After 4 to 6 weeks, the leave turned yellow than brown and died.

Do not throw away the dead leave. Roots could have grown at the tuber in the soil. It will take quite some time to grow into a plant. Only 1 out of 4 propagation was successful.

Here is the photo of the newly propagated plant I took today.

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Housework

July 13th, 2006 at 23:15 · Filed Under At Home, Dmitry, Family · Comment 

Dmitry helped to do some housework today. He was helping to clean the TV set. It had not been cleaned for some time. The screen was full of their handprint. He gave it a sparkling shine. Well done!

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A drawback of AdaCGI

July 13th, 2006 at 14:55 · Filed Under Ada, Computing, Software Development, Technology, Web · Comment 

The AdaCGI is a nice Ada interface to CGI (Common Gateway Interface) to create an Ada application that can be invoked by HTML servers.

I am using AdaCGI to develop a mission-critical web application. However, I find that AdaCGI is unable to many things. One of the important features missing is that it can’t do redirection as in PHP:

do_redirect ( "index.php" );

I am not sure if there’s a way to do that in Ada/AdaCGI. I hope I will never need to code in PHP.

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CT images

July 13th, 2006 at 13:05 · Filed Under Ada, Call Me a Geek, Computing, Mac OS X, Medical, Software Development, Technology · Comment 

After many months of hacking and research, I finally got my Ada code to parse DICOM file structure and display a coronary CT image.

The Ada code is still far from perfect. I hope I can get it to work better before the end of the year. Nevertheless, the effort has paid off.

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Ada 2005

July 13th, 2006 at 0:52 · Filed Under Ada, Call Me a Geek, Computing, Software Development, Technology · Comment 

After installing gcc-4.2 on my iBook, I am now having an Ada 2005 compiler in my tools collection.

One of the interesting new features caught my attention. Ada 2005 now supports new 32-bit character type, Wide_Wide_Character. The source code itself can have extended character set as well. That means a whole Greek and fractur character sets are available for identifiers. For example:

π : constant := Pi;

This feature will help making a lot of my codes more readable.

I found an interesting article while I was reading about Ada 2005. This article is about successful uses of Ada 2005 in deeply embedded systems.

Here is the article in pdf.

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Xcode 2.3 and gcc-4.2 (Ada)

July 13th, 2006 at 0:33 · Filed Under Ada, Call Me a Geek, Computing, HOWTO, Mac OS X, Software Development · Comment 

I have finally decided to update to Xcode 2.3 and gcc-4.2. There is not much information about how to install except from the MacAda mailing list. So, I decided to post the How-To here.

Here are the procedures:

  1. Uninstall previous Xcode installation by 
    $ sudo perl /Developer/Tools/uninstall-devtools.pl
  2. Restart the computer
  3. Download and install Xcode 2.3
  4. Download and install gcc-3.3 Ada compiler from MacAda
  5. Download and install gcc-4.2 Ada compiler
  6. Unzip and untar the gcc-4.2 package with 
    $ tar -zxvf fsf-ppc-gcc-4.2.0-20060429.tgz

    or

    $ tar -zxvf fsf-i686-ada-4.2-20060409.tgz

    depending if you are using PowerPC or Intel Mac.

  7. Move the directory ada-4.2 to /usr/local
  8. Download and install Ada Plugin for Xcode and follow the instructions.

I tested Xcode by compiling some projects and it is great. But I still cannot manage to build Ada dynamic library with it. It looks like some problems with the flags. Here’s the error and warning messages I got:

warning -L: directory name (/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/darwin/default) does not exist
unknown flag: -Wl, -single_module

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A friend from Iran

July 12th, 2006 at 3:16 · Filed Under Karate · 2 Comments 

A new friend of mine joined our training at Bukit Beruang this evening. His name is Hadi from Iran and has a black belt in Kyukoshinkai.

I came to know him from MMU karate club before I resigned from my previous karate association (read my article). He is studying in MMU. He had an argument with the instructor there over different philosophy and ideas. I met him again two Sundays ago at Jaya Jusco and invited him to join our training.

I enjoyed having him in my class. He is a person who likes to share his knowledge with others. The way he trained in his country was very different from the way Malaysian training karate-do. I can see the culture shock between him and MMU karate club.

I had heard a lot of complaints and bad comments about Hadi while I was still going to MMU for my training before I resigned. One of them was intense fear because of Hadi’s Kyokushinkai training was full contact kumite. The attitude there can never accept an open minded person and that’s not the correct mentality for a person who train in karate-do.

Indeed, I have enjoyed talking about karate with Hadi. I hope he will come for the training often.

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Retiring

July 11th, 2006 at 23:56 · Filed Under At Home, Family · Comment 

I guess I am going to write the last post for today. It is raining heavily with some thunders. After tucking 2 dinos to bed, I feel quite tire and sleepy tonight. Last night was rough.

Actually, I was thinking of updating some software on my iBook and working on my project. But I think it will be good to retire early tonight.

Hoping tomorrow will be better.

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Daddy, I want Crazy Frog.

July 11th, 2006 at 22:39 · Filed Under Dmitry, Family, Music · Comment 

Dmitry has asked me to get him the Crazy Frog Hits album.

Today, he asked for it again. I feel so sorry that I don’t have the time to go shopping because we were busy getting sick from last week until today. I guess that will take another couple of days to have everything stabilized.

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Dinos are recovering on track

July 11th, 2006 at 22:02 · Filed Under Dietrich, Dmitry, Family, Medical · Comment 

What a relief to see both dinos are recovering on track. Activities in the house is slowly regaining its normal atmosphere.

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Am I Cyberchondria?

July 11th, 2006 at 13:04 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Days in My Life, Family, Hacking, Medical, Technology, Web · Comment 

Cyberchondria is a colloquial term for hypochondria in individuals who have researched medical conditions on the internet.

In my earlier post, Digital addiction, I mentioned about developed special skills using Internet to do some or any kind of research. I learned to use the Internet to learn about people’s diseases and medication 6 years ago when my second elder sister, Angie, was first diagnosed of stage-4 breast cancer.

I could remember that I had read about children doses for my medication on the product pamphlet. The drug is called Cough-en Linctus by Xepa-Soul Pattison. I gave a dose of 2.5ml to Dmitry early this morning at 0335. He had some good sleep after taking it. Cough-en is the most vile cough medicine ever created by man – it could knock out an elephant cold.

When I woke up this morning, I quickly searched the Internet for Cough-en and Pseudoephedrine. I learned a lot about Pseudoephedrine and I was quite shocked about its side effects.

I used to take a drug called Clarinase whenever I was down with Sinus or nose allergy. Anyone of these could make my day and Clarinase had been effective on me to reduce my symptoms.

Of course, I don’t simply take any medication. I like to learn about any medical condition before or after seeing a doctor.

I hope I will not become psychosomatic.

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