Problem still persists

June 30th, 2008 at 22:28 · Filed Under Autos, WTF · 1 Comment 

WTF! I spent around RM1,000 for the repair and although my car is more powerful than before after replacing a new flywheel but the problem still persists. I will have to wait until Thursday because I am going to KL to conduct an Ada Workshop. Now, I am suspecting the problem is caused by the valve gap. The knocking sound during under-powered acceleration is still audible.

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Working at Honda?

June 30th, 2008 at 13:12 · Filed Under At Work, Autos, Blogging, Critiques · Comment 

I was working at Honda’s Showroom (KAH Motor) while I waited for my car to be repaired since 0830 this morning. One thing Honda has done right is the 3S (Sales, Service, Showroom) Center. They provide free drinks, Astro and WIFI for customers. The waiting area is very comfortable and cozy. One thing lacking is insufficient seats.

It was great experience to do my work at Honda’s showroom. I have a lot to prepare for the Ada Workshop tomorrow.

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Press Conference Against MMU’s Imposition of IT Service Fee

June 30th, 2008 at 10:09 · Filed Under Conferences, Critiques, Education, WTF · 2 Comments 

(Repost)

After a successful imposition of library fee, now MMU grubs for more! The latest announcement that MMU is planning to impose an annual IT service fee of RM100 from each student starting this trimester has exasperated everyone. Complaints are heard everywhere. But look, the Finance Division can’t hear you; the President can’t hear you. The voice of SRC alone is too soft. Now we need to borrow the foreign force to amplify our voices!

There will be a press conference held at DAP Dun Ayer Keroh Service Centre on this coming Thursday. Press and media will be present at the conference.

Date : July 3, 2008
Time : 12:30PM
Venue : 63-2, Jalan DB1, Taman Bukit Beruang Indah, 75450 Bukit Beruang. (Same row with US Pizza, second last lot)

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反对MMU收费新闻招待会

June 30th, 2008 at 10:09 · Filed Under Conferences, Critiques, Education, WTF · Comment 

（转帖）

MMU强收每位学生RM60的图书馆费还不够，居然还得寸进尺想再收取每人RM100的IT服务费，岂有此理？消息一放，怨声四起。但是，在网站上叫骂，有用吗？MMU的高层可晓得你对他们的不满？单靠SRC替我们请愿，有用吗？我们有近两万人的学生，为何只靠那几十位？我们自身的权利，应当由我们自己争取，而不是单靠SRC，因为到底付钱的是我们。试问SRC能为我们承担吗？ 现在让你站出来发言的机会来了。这个星期四在Ayer Keroh区民主行动党服务中心将有一项新闻招待会让MMU学生有机会发表有关课题和其它不合理的课题。多家媒体将出席这项招待会。

日期：3/7/08

时间：12:30PM

地点：63-2, Jalan DB1, Taman Bukit Beruang Indah, 75450 Bukit Beruang. (和US Pizza同排, 最后第二间)

(English version here)

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Blame, blame, blame?

June 26th, 2008 at 21:32 · Filed Under Autos, Days in My Life · 1 Comment 

I asked a foreman to take a look at my car. I told him about the problems and then we took my car for a spin. After that, he checked the engine oil and the transmission oil. He told me I was using the wrong oil for transmission. The oil should be red in color and he suspected the wrong oil caused the problems. I was very sure that I used the right oil as my car is a CVT (Continuous Variable Transmission) and uses CVTF (Continuous Variable Transmission Fluid) by Honda. I had seen the oil myself before and I remembered it was light golden yellow in color.

I did not agree with his opinions and I decided to take my car back to Honda’s workshop. I would rather spend more to make sure the car had proper maintenance and if Honda people screwed up, then I could jumped on them, screw them and rip them into pieces because they caused me to spend so much and yet the problems were not solved. So, decided am I.

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Something is wrong with my car

June 23rd, 2008 at 10:14 · Filed Under Autos, Days in My Life · 1 Comment 

The problems are becoming more obvious recently. Sometimes, it is difficult to kick-start my car even though the engine is still warm and the battery is in good health. My car sounds weird and the engine performance is deteriorating. I sent my car to the authorized Honda workshop for inspection and had my ECU reprogrammed on June 4. The problem came back after a few days and became worse. I decided to take it to authorized Honda workshop again for inspection.

According to the technician, something called “Flywheel” was causing the problems and it had to be changed. The flywheel and labor would cost me RM638 and RM350 respectively. It was so expensive and I decided to seek second opinions elsewhere.

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A great Sunday morning

June 22nd, 2008 at 23:31 · Filed Under At Home, At Play, At the Movies, Blogging, Days in My Life, Eating Out, Family · Comment 

Yesterday, we took two bicycles to the town for repair. I hadn’t been using the bicycle carrier since 2006. In the evening, we took the bicycles to the park. After dinner, we went home and the weather seemed like to rain. Actually, I thought of taking the kids and the bikes to the park again the next morning. But it started to rain before midnight. We changed the plan, no bike but jogging at the park.

This morning, the weather was so cool because after the rain and was perfect to go fill up the gas tank. So, we all woke up early and went to the petrol station to fill up the tank. After that we went to the park followed by breakfast.

We went to the old part of Melaka China town near by the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple for dim sum. This restaurant is Melaka most famous and oldest dim sum restaurant and one of the very few pioneer. My dad used to bought us buns and glutinous rice in lotus leaf. They were delicious 30 years ago as I could remember. That was one of the bad dim sum we ever had. Actually, the taste not too bad at all but certainly was not a good one. The service was very bad and not really kids- or baby- friendly. We quickly had some and left. When checking the bill, it was quite expensive. I will definitely not recommend that dim sum restaurant.

Forget about the bad experience at breakfast. Anyway, we all enjoyed very much today. At night we watched movies at home.

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Ada Obsession

June 17th, 2008 at 21:25 · Filed Under Ada, At Work, Blogging, Call Me a Geek, Software Development, Web · Comment 

Well, well, well. Kazeserver alpha RC1 has to be delayed due to some design issues and I am rewriting most part of the software so that the source can be understood easily. For the past two weeks, I was troubled by the old design but I have got a new picture now.

Isn’t Ada code easy to understand? Well, yes. But I was using a lot of Unbounded_String in records which made my code hard to read and understood. While Unbounded_String is compatible with database operation, it lacks the understandability and readability if compared to String (1 .. 10) for example.

Today, I am totally obsessed in Ada and am feeling the strongest Ada obsession after a couple of years. The feeling is still burning. If my Ada obsession keep burning, I believe I can release KazeServer for alpha testing before of June. Hopefully.

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Snow Leopard

June 15th, 2008 at 11:31 · Filed Under Computing, Mac OS X, Technology · Comment 

The Snow Leopard (Uncia uncia) sometimes known as ounce is a large cat native to mountain ranges in Central Asia from Afghanistan to Lake Baikal and Eastern Tibet. Snow Leopard normally weights 35kg to 55kg and slightly smaller than Leopard.

Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the next version of the world most advanced operating system with a smaller footprint compared to its predecessor, Leopard. Snow Leopard will take full advantage of 64-bit and multi-core technology to the height.

Since Apple introduced Mac OS X in 2001, thousands of new features have been implemented and introduced. In Leopard, the ability to take advantage of multi-core and 64-bit addressing have opened up new dimension in desktop computing. Virtualization becomes possible. New features such as Time Machine automatically backup the Mac hard disk without user knowing.

Snow Leopard, to be released a year from now, is going to be smaller than Leopard but more powerful. Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the foot print on hard disk, using less disk space, freeing them for more music, photos and videos.

Snow Leopard fully makes use of 64-bit addressing to increase the RAM size to the theoretically 16TB, 500 times more than what is possible today. “Grand Central” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard brings unrivaled multi-core support and capabilities to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speed, drives performance faster in today’s modern processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. The result: more powerful applications at faster speed.

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Increased productivity

June 14th, 2008 at 1:18 · Filed Under At Home, At Work, Blogging, Days in My Life · Comment 

After solving the post-commit hook script problem (read here), I am a happy software developer again. I am able to receive post commit emails to help me keep track of changes in my development work. I have been experiencing the same level of efficiency and productivity before this problem struck me.

I guess I am happy of the whole week of activities and I am signing off to bed.

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Gourmet Chocolates

June 13th, 2008 at 23:11 · Filed Under At Work, Blogging, Food, Gifts, Marketing · 1 Comment 

I love chocolates! Recently, I craved for chocolates because of the increased brain activities. Chocolate is the favorite food while I am working on computers. Besides providing more energy for my brains, I love the way it melts in my mouth. LA has baked some chocolate cookies last week and I almost finished them.

I found a site which sells delicious gourmet chocolates. Gertrude Hawk Chocolates is made of fresh and finest ingredients. It is dedicated to create the best gourmet chocolates which include dark chocolate and other mouth-watering, delicious Chocolate Smidgens, caramel-dipped apples, gourmet summer taffy and many more.

Gertrude Hawk Chocolates also provide gift giving service. Their beautifully gift-wrapped assortments and pre-made gift baskets add more values to your gift-giving needs. Besides, you can also create your own personal gift with their Create-a-Basket program.

Hmmm… I wish to receive a Gertrude Hawk Chocolates gift basket.

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Dmitry is slowly becoming independent

June 13th, 2008 at 22:50 · Filed Under At Home, Days in My Life, Dmitry · Comment 

We have been co-sleeping for years. When Dominik arrived, I have to move out of our room to make space for him. Last year, it was time for Dmitry to sleep in his own bedroom. We bought a double decker for him and Richie but it had not been used for a while until recently. Read more

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Dmitry doing dishes

June 10th, 2008 at 13:45 · Filed Under At Home, Days in My Life, Dmitry · Comment 

After the lunch, Dmitry offered to take my dishes to the sink and started doing dishes. Read more

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My message to our dearest Prime Minister

June 9th, 2008 at 23:01 · Filed Under Blogging, Malaysia, Social · Comment 

Here’s a message I have sent to our dearest Prime Minister at Warkah Untuk PM. I hope he is personally reading all the messages and really put in efforts to ease our burdens and also make changes. Read more

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Subversion client hangs after post-commit

June 9th, 2008 at 16:29 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Hacking, Linux, SCM · 1 Comment 

I had been hit by this problem since I setup Subversion on Ubuntu in January. The svnserve was properly invoked on Ubuntu server but whenever any svn client was trying to commit something back to the server, the client would hang for hours before it prompted an error: “Connection reset by peers.”

I searched all the Subversion and Ubuntu forums but could not find any solution to my problem. In the past months, I tried to identify the source of the problem and even tried many solutions suggested by people on these forums but the problem persisted. I had been committing to svn server with post commit email notification turned off and lost quite a number of post commit message. I used to keep track of changes by these email notification.

Yesterdat, I was trying my luck again and I accidentally noticed sendmail and sendmail-mta were called after commit. A look into syslog confirmed that sendmail process was put into sleep by some unknown reason. Failing to identify the cause, I removed sendmail and related packages from my Ubuntu server and installed Exim4. It is claimed to be easier to installed and configured than sendmail. The problem diminished after I got exim4 up and running. Now I am able to receive post commit email notification after every svn commit. Every commit takes a few seconds to complete after this. Problem resolved.

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DocBook Publishing – Output to HTML

June 6th, 2008 at 23:24 · Filed Under At Work, Documentation, Linux, Software Development · 3 Comments 

I learned about DocBook last year and found it a great tool for technical documentation. It is a XML based semantic markup language. The DocBook is originally intended for computer hardware and software documentation but it is great for other documentation purposes.

I have been working on some documentation, new and converting existing from Lyx to DocBook. With DocBook, I am able to publish the contents easily to many formats, namely TEX, text, pdf or HTML. I had been trying to output some of my DocBook documentation to HTML.

This afternoon, I have finally succeeded to publish to HTML. I installed some DocBook packages on Ubuntu. Here are the packages you need to get DocBook going:

  1. docbook
  2. docbook-xsl
  3. docbook-xsl-doc
  4. docbook-xsl-doc-html
  5. docbook-xsl-doc-pdf
  6. docbook-xsl-doc-text
  7. xsltproc
  8. and optional xalan and fop

To output your DocBook document to HTML, simply this:


$ xsltproc --output paper.html \
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/docbook.xsl\
paper.xml

You can turn on chapter and section numbering by setting chapter.autolabel to 1 and section.autolabel to 1. To include the chapter number in every sections, set section.label.includes.component.label to 1.


$ xsltproc --output paper.html \
--stringparam section.autolabel 1 \
--stringparam section.label.includes.component.label 1 \
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/docbook.xsl \
paper.xml

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Abrupt price hike of fuel

June 6th, 2008 at 10:53 · Filed Under Blogging, Politics, Social · 2 Comments 

One day after the price increased, there are many fingers pointing to our PM Pak Lah. Many people including politicians and the honorable retired ex-PM, Mahatir are blaming the Pak Lah and his administration. Politicians are taking this opportunity to tarnish Pak Lah image and hopefully to quickly impede him.

IMHO, the abrupt increased of fuel prices has good reason that we should consider and support. The sudden increase of prices by as much as 40% will force citizens to be more thrifty. Malaysians have been pampered with low fuel prices for so long. As you can notice (if you really pay attention), many people go to grocery shops which are very near their home by cars. These shops are in within walking distance. This is just one of the example.

By forcing Malaysians to be thrifty and less travel unnecessarily, we can save more precious natural resources and emit less pollutants. The change of lifestyle is going to take place sooner or later as we know our oil production is going to cease in 2014. That is just 6 years away.

The people from our neighboring countries such as Singapore has been benefited by the fuel subsidy. It is the time to stop benefit them. The subsidy is to be enjoyed by our citizens but not others. It is very messy to handle this issue.

One day before the increase, there had been news about the price hike. But people treated it as rumor because there was no announcement on TV news channels. But Sharir said in the TV interview that things would change tomorrow. That’s the indication from the government. Again, IMHO, I think Pak Lah and his administration are quite smart in handling this situation. First, they sanction the sales of petrol. No sales to foreign vehicles within 50KM radius from the border. Kedah responded with a full ban on entire state. The ban was to deter foreign vehicles to fill up their tanks before the price hike. Smart strategy.

The government has sent enough signals to every citizens but no one took it seriously. Another indication is that one or two days prior the announcement, fuel tankers were busy refilling petrol kiosks. Did anyone notice that?

Although most of the Malaysians dislike Pak Lah and his administration, but we need more intelligence to address and to helm through this crisis. The fingers pointing is just another dirty strategy by some politicians trying to out throw Pak Lah.

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Are we having another economy crisis?

June 5th, 2008 at 23:42 · Filed Under Blogging · Comment 

Do you remember 1997 world economy crisis when currencies were speculated? Now, we have another round of economy crisis. Only this time, foods are speculated after oil. If we look back in the history, we can easily spot a pattern of this crisis. Almost every 10 years, we will face one round of crisis.

It is quite interesting to look at these facts and start speculating what will be the next thing be speculated in another 10 years to come.

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Food prices are going up

June 5th, 2008 at 23:16 · Filed Under At Home, Blogging, Days in My Life · 1 Comment 

Today, I could notice traffic volume had decreased quite substantially at some busy junctions. Tonight, when we were out to grab some groceries, we noticed the streets were quieter than usual. Guess this is the after effect of fuel price hike.

M has been advising us to stock up some food items with long shelf life. After reading news and considering Wall Street has begun to speculate on food prices, we decided to start stocking up some food items especially rice. I made some analysis based on Geography. The south-western monsoon season is approaching. The rice planting and harvesting season will end soon when the monsoon comes. Looking at the situation in Myanmar that was hit by typhoon Nagis, the future for rice supplies does not look optimistic to me. In addition, the price hike of diesel (RM1 per liter) has prompted transportation company to increase their transportation cost by 38%! This cascading effects will cause food prices to increase again very soon.

Just now, I grabbed 8 bags (80kg) of rice. That will last us for 16 months. Tomorrow, I am going to grab some more rice again for my mom.

Another good reason to stock up essential food items will be reducing the trips to hypermarket thus saving petrol.

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Best Wishes to Michal and Monika

June 4th, 2008 at 23:54 · Filed Under Blogging, Days in My Life, Family, Friends · Comment 

Today, my best pal from Poland, Michal got married with Monika. We received their invitation to their wedding party on a plane flying from Poznan to Kornik. We regretted that we couldn’t join their ceremony and party. Here is our best wishes to Michal and Monika.

Congratulations!

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