There is no particular topic for this blog post but I just want to share with you one of my favorite rock song, “November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses.

It’s November and at this time of the year, the beginning of North-Eastern monsoon, brings a lot of rains. No word in the Webster can describe the mixed feelings of listening and smelling the rain together with the music. If you are somewhere so happened to have rain outside your window in the month of November, turn up the volume and watch the rain outside.

Perhaps you want to share with me your feeling?

The new OSX operating system 10.7, code-named Lion, was officially released by Apple, Inc. on July 20, 2011. In astrology, it was just two days before the Sun begins occupying Leo from July 22 to August 22. And I ordered my iMac and received it before the Sun leaves Leo.

In astronomy, Regulus or Alpha Leonis is the brightest star in Leo constellation. In Chinese, it is known as 轩辕十四, the Fourteenth Star of Xuanyuan. Regulus is also one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Together, with Eta Leonis (a fourth-magnitude star), they mark the lion’s heart.

My new 27″ iMac is a top range CTO model and will be the power horse for my works which include software development, some photography and design works. It is also the most powerful personal computer I have ever owned/purchased. Thus, Regulus is the best and most beautiful name for my new iMac.

Pluto will be passed down to my wife and kids after the data has been completely migrated to Regulus and a stable working environment is established.

What is Object-Oriented?

Object-oriented technique organizes software as collection of discrete objects incorporate with data structures and behaviors. Take a software that keeps records of professors and students in a university for instance. Both professor and student are person. These three entities – professor, student and person are objects. A person has data structure such as name, gender and date of birth to make things simple. Both professor and student share the same data structure of person. A professor has employee number, salary, and room number. And a student has student number, courses and grades. Both professor and student have different behavior: to lecture and to learn respectively. We can let professor and student to inherit the same data structure and behavior from person. Person is superclass. Both professor and student are subclass. Now both professor and student can derive data structure and behavior from superclass person but at the same time, both can preserve their own data structure and behavior as professor and student respectively.

Multiple inheritance is where a subclass inherits from more than one super class. One of the most common problems with multiple inheritance is symmetry. Let subclass D inherits from superclasses B and C which inherit from another superclass A. This is called symmetric multiple inheritance.

Multiple inheritance is rather problematic at linguistic level. Many object-oriented programming languages support multiple inheritance and solve the problems in such a way that usually they cause surprises to their users. In the above example, the operations in A can be derived to B and C and overridden in any other ways by any one of them in D.

Ada provides different approach to implement multiple inheritance by simply not allowing user to get into such problem in the first place and to force the user to break the symmetry.

While I slip deeper into my software design, symmetric multiple inheritance occurs. I have two classes A and B where both of them inherit from object List.Node. Another subclass C inherits both superclass A and B. Ada forces me to break the symmetry by letting C to have a direct inheritance from A plus indirect secondary inheritance of B.

package List is
   type List is limited private;
   type Access_List is access List;

   type Node is tagged private;
   type Access_Node is access all Node'Class;

private

   type Node is tagged record
      Previous : Access_Node;
      Next       : Access_Node;
   end record;

   type List is limited record
      Head    : Access_Node := null;
      Tail       : Access_Node := null;
      Current : Access_Node := null;
      Count   : Unsigned := 0;
   end record;
end List;

   type A is new List.Node with private;

private

   type A is new List.Node with
      record
         Id   : Integer;
         Str  : String ( 1 .. 20 ) ;
      end record;

   type B is new List.Node with private;

private

   type B is new List.Node with
      record
         Precision : Float;
      end record;

   type C is new A with private;

private

   type C is new A with
      record
         Magic : B;
         Plate   : Integer;
      end record;

Although the automation of software update and restart is convenient most of the time, it can be quite an annoyance when you are in the midst of works, where the reminder window keeps popping up.

To avoid this annoying pop-up, you can run software update in Terminal (command line) and restart your Mac as you wish, using the following command:

 sudo softwareupdate -i -a 

This is also convenient for managing software update remotely over slow Internet connection. Logging in via ssh instead of remote desktop will reduce the high bandwidth requirement and yet still get the job done.

Among all I was reading, there was one that caught my attention, the one that I paused all my activities, and let it touch deeply into my heart. I can’t help to shed my tears.

This is the most beautiful and touching commercial I’ve ever watched. Besides the artistic and beautiful photography, the video portrays how beautiful life is and how fragile it can be. Take a moment off your work (yes, I know you are busy) to watch this video. I bet and I hope it will make you realize how beautiful our lives are.

Enjoy!

This is the new “wear your seatbelt” ad the UK is doing – started by a man not hired to do it, but because the cause is important to him, he came up with this idea, and now it’s being hailed across the world as a ‘beautiful’ commercial. And now the video has become so popular with the general public that people are forwarding it to friends/family on their own so quickly that it has spread all over the world in a very short time.

You can watch here too.

For the past two weeks, I had been bugged by a silly tiny bug in one of my codes. Things weren’t moving at all. They were all still and my progress in a software project was stagnant. Before the bug was identified and removed, I could not move on to other tasks as they were highly dependent on the unit testing of that particular buggy code.

Yesterday, I finally managed to debug it and deducted 5 tasks. In actual fact, I only completed one task but deleted four. The four tasks which I deleted were no longer applicable because I completed one task which was dependent on the other four. I deleted them because they became obsolete.

So, yesterday, I completed one task that would allow me to complete more tasks today. In other words, imagine that we were traveling on a time machine to yesterday, it would be: today I completed one task and tomorrow I will be able to move on to other tasks. Confusing, isn’t it?

For a software developer, someday he/she will write many lines of code, perhaps a thousand. But someday, he/she will only write just one line of code or perhaps none. When the productivity is only one line of code for a day, is it too low? It is not. Sometimes, that single line of code will serve as a connector to many pieces of code together. That one single line that software developer has produced today, will allow many tasks to be completed tomorrow.

Praise yourself if you have got only one task done today because you will complete more tomorrow. The caveat, however, is that you do not make this an excuse for not having done so much today.

In my design, I break down the HTML template into header, body and footer so that I can reuse the common codes in header and footer. That means, all the body templates are without <html> tag. This missing <html> tag disables the syntax-coloring feature of code editor, leading to a more laborious code reading.

Before this, I had gone through every line of html source code in the template file umpteen times. This “obscure” bug, if not removed, would throw a monkey wrench in my works. I browsed the Internet and read articles in hope that I would get some clues. So, I was reading a few articles about Extensions in Safari 5. Extensions are not really impressive to me as I do not need to add missing functionalities to my browser. Safari itself is more than enough for my daily browsing activities. Somehow, my curiosity had driven me to enable the Develop menu in Safari 5. After activating it, I noticed some debugging tools in the menu. I enabled the web inspector by selecting Show Web Inspector in the Develop menu (Figure 1) then navigated to the web page I wanted to debug. To use these debugging tools, the Develop menu must first be activated. Here is a simple guide to enabling the menu.

Figure 1

Safari 5 immediately detected two error messages as shown in Figure 2. These two errors were easily corrected. After removing these unmatched </div> tags, my web page still did not show up properly with the intended layout.

Figure 2

Then I selected the Elements tab and it showed me the page source in debugging mode as shown in Figure 3. I instantly spotted the <div class=”data-base-layer”> tag which was supposed to be in the <div id=”container”> tag.

Figure 3

I clicked on the little grey triangles in the left pane to expand the <div id=”container”> tag and the <form> tag. There were two <div class=”data-base-layer”> tags (labelled as “1″ in Figure 4) and the one in label “2″ was supposed to be right after them.

Figure 4

I checked the source file again and they seemed to be in the correct place. Further investigation finally reviewed that there were two very tiny typos lurking somewhere within the second <div class=”data-base-layer”> tag as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5

The web inspector in Safari 5 has helped me to identify errors effortlessly. If only I had such inquisitiveness two weeks ago, I would have saved so much time and efforts in debugging my HTML codes. An proverb says: “Curiosity killed the cat.” It is not always true, at least in this case. I will say: “Curiosity saved the donkey.”

Mine is a 32GB Black iPhone. The specifications can be found on Apple website so I am not going to repeat them again here. I used a sleek Nokia 6300 before this so it took me some time to adapt to the bigger/wider iPhone. This is not really a problem to get used to, actually. So, let’s put aside the physical differences.

I had been looking into various smart phones by Nokia and Sony Ericsson before I settled for Nokia 6300 almost two years ago. Well, nothing is comparable to iPhone as I find today.

On the 4th day, I had already got a chance to take my brand new iPhone into action. I completed a task outside and needed to go back to my home/office. I usually made payment to my suppliers at the bank. Then I would go back home/office to scan and email my suppliers before they could send me the goods. This usually would happen a few hours later or in the evening because I have the habit of being cost-effective when running errands outside. With iPhone, I snapped a photo of the bank transaction slip with its built-in 3 megapixels camera and emailed the photo to my supplier immediately. By the time I stepped out the bank, my supplier had called me and confirmed receipt of the fund. Everything was done on the iPhone at the bank.

While the competition in smartphone market is mounting with Google’s Nexus One and Android enabled phones with attempt to take down iPhone, nothing has come closer to the 3 billion downloads of iPhone apps at Apple’s App Store.

I am using quite a number of applications for productivity and I find them all useful. I am able to check my schedule and make appointment, follow my to-do list, review some documents (PDF, graphics etc,) which my co-workers and I shared. More, I can email, facebook and tweet anytime, anywhere with the iPhone (the list goes on.) These tasks are a little over killed on a MacBook I can say.

When my dad was in the hospital a few months ago (I still had not had my iPhone then), I had been in and out of the hospital with my backpack. It was quite annoying trying to find a good spot where I could sit down, open up my 13″ MacBook and connect it with a 3G broadband. Sometimes, the seat had been taken by patients’ relatives. Most of the time, my MacBook and I became the attraction of bored people sitting around me. Some nosy people would peep at my screen. Checking and replying business emails had became a difficult task as my privacy was invaded. It was like houseflies buzzing around while you were eating your chicken pie. Were you able to enjoy anyway?

With iPhone, this scenario has changed a little bit. I am still able to communicate and do some light tasks without the need of my MacBook and houseflies peeping. I can add, modify or delete appointments and contacts on iPhone and sync with my Macs via MobileMe. I am also able to update my to-do list and sync with my Macs via WiFi later when I am home.

As a software developer, I spend most of my time at the keyboard spewing codes other than blogging, emailing, facebooking and tweeting. I would rather save this coding task on my Macs if there is any code editing app available for iPhone. When I am not at my desk, I would want to follow up with tasks like the reviewing of drawings/images (icons, logo etc), design and technical documents on iPhone.

The iPhone is handy during short discussion sessions (less than 15 minutes) with co-workers and clients. A relatively large MacBook would look clumsy in this situation.

I can also use iPhone as a remote controller to navigate Keynote presentation slides using Apple’s Remote. This app makes me look more professional (and well, cooler) when presenting because I need not walk to my MacBook to press a key every each time I want to change the slide. I can do it on my iPhone.

Well, the list goes on and on so long you have not run out of imagination of  how to utilize your iPhone. I would never go back to Nokia or Sony or anything else except iPhone.

Well, I admit that I was wrong. I am developing a cloud/web-based MIS (Medical Information System) which enables patient to be able to view certain information and interact with the clinic/doctor from anywhere. Likewise, it also provides doctors greater mobility and still are able to care for their patients while they are away.

After reading articles (on Apple’s website) how iPhones help hospitals in the U.S. to provide better healthcare at lower cost, I decided to build the MIS with iPhone support. I based my decision on these reasons:

1. Ease of use. I have been toying/using around with an iPod Touch for a few months and I find that it is easy to navigate/use. iPod Touch is essentially an iPhone without the phone. You get what I mean.
2. Beautiful UI. Apple is well known for its brilliant UI (User Interface) in Mac OS X and iPhone OS. Nothing else comes closer to it.
3. Security. All applications must be approved by Apple and be signed with license keys issued by Apple. Apple’s iTunes Store is the only place to download applications. I can be rest assured  to have less (or none) headache about spooky applications from unreliable sources. Of course, there are jail broken iPhones which do not play by the rules but I am not too worried about that.

So, I went ahead ordering one last week. Last night, I went to Maxis center to collect my 32GB Black iPhone. It is such a beauty.

Give me a couple of weeks mingling with it and I promise you I will write about my experience.

Heredity, diet and health condition can affect a young woman’s menarche. This is something most parents with growing young daughters have overlook. Diet plays a very important part in young women especially teenage girls. Many teenage girls despite of having their menarche years earlier, neglects or intentionally limit their dietary intakes for body slimming purposes. This ignorance can seriously affect their reproductive system.

One most interesting fact I learned about menstruation is the term “Nightlighting”.

The word “menstruation” is etymologically related to “moon”. The terms “menstruation” and “menses” are derived from the Latin mensis (month), which in turn relates to the Greek mene (moon) and to the roots of the English words month and moon—reflecting the fact that the moon also takes close to 28 days to revolve around the Earth (actually 27.32 days). The synodical lunar month, the period between two new moons (or full moons), is 29.53 days long. — Wikipedia

In some traditional societies without nightlighting believe that women ovulate in full moon and menstruate in new moon. There are studies in both humans and animals where artificial lighting at night does alter the menstruation cycle. While none of the studies have suggested the lunar phase affects the ovulation cycle, bright light exposure in the morning stimulates more regular cycles.

Research also suggested that sensitivity of women’s cycles to nightlighting is related to nutritional deficiencies of certain minerals and vitamins. Again, balanced and healthy diet is utmost important to women’s health.

Ok. I am lazy. I have been using rsync to sync folders I am working on between my Macs. I have been using command line scripts in Terminal for almost two years and finally I have gotten lazy over the task.

The thing is, I need to execute the scripts in Terminal every time I want to synch my folders. Of course, I could simply use cron to automate the tasks at specific time but I ran the risk to cause havoc between the folders on different Macs. It is best not to cron the task.

So, I learned up AppleScript and after a ten-minute hack, I wrote a nice AppleScripts to do the job. It is quick and dirty.

set debug to false

with timeout of (30 * 60) seconds
	tell application "Terminal"
		set Window_Title to "Sync Documents"
		set Rsync_Cmd to "rsync -acrtv --delete
			/Users/username/Documents/
			username@xxx:Documents"
		set output_doc to do shell script Rsync_Cmd
		choose from list paragraphs of output_doc with prompt
			"Result:" with title Window_Title with empty
			selection allowed
	end tell
end timeout

Copy the script to ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder and save it as “sync documents.scpt”. Then launch Script Editor to edit username to your login name and xxx to your Mac IP address or computer name. This script will sync your Documents folder under your user home directory. To execute this AppleScript, at Finder, click on the script icon on the menu bar and select the script to launch.

rsync uses ssh. If you have not setup a password-less ssh login, you will need ssh-askpass in /usr/libexec. Unfortunately, it does not ship with Mac OS X. You can get it at Joe Mocker’s weblog.

One plain reason for me to pick up Objective-C again recently is to develop Cocoa and Cocoa Touch applications for the Macs and iPhone (and iPod Touch). Trying to having nonpartisan mind after so many years of using Ada (and away from C/C++ and variants) is a difficult task to comprehend. As an individual Ada developer (having my own opinion) I am finding C/C++ very compromising in many ways, for instance, readability of codes and safety. Although Objective-C has many improvement over C/C++, it is still lacking what Ada offers.

By syntax, Objective-C is still very much like C. A few obvious clues to tell if it is an Objective-C are the use of #import, instead of #include; the @ sign; the Smalltalk-like message passing syntax and several others.

The #include statement in C/C++ has many drawbacks. One which seriously affecting compilation efficiency is the repeating includes of same header files. With #import, header files are included once only throughout entire compilation.

One deadly pitfall I have encountered so far is the way Boolean type is implemented in Objective-C. C supports Boolean data type, bool, which takes on the value of either true or false. Objective-C has similar data type, BOOL, which is 8-bit number that takes on YES as 1 and NO as 0. If you unwittingly assign a 2-byte integer to a BOOL type, the result can be catastrophic. Only the lowest byte will be used for the value of BOOL. If the lowest byte is zero, for example, 4608 which its hexadecimal value is 0×1200, BOOL will be zero or NO.

Ada’s strong-typing disallows this to happen and thus saving, possibly countless hours of debugging. Personally, I like neither bool nor BOOL. I prefer Ada’s Boolean.

Unlike the dreaded C++, Objective-C does not support operator overloading and multiple inheritance. In Ada95, a restricted form of multiple inheritance is supported. In Ada2005, multiple inheritance is supported by new form of type called the interface type, similar to abstract tagged type with no components.

The idea is to design different programs with advertisements and messages interleaved among documentary and his own educational videos for playback on different days of the week. And the most important thing is to allow the doctor himself to easily update his educational videos and advertisements anytime as he wishes from his new 24″ iMac.

After I installed Apple TV a few days ago, I realized it did not have movie playlist. After Googling for a while, I wasn’t alone. Here is a blog entry with the same problem. And I found out the Apple TV Software Update 2.3 allows movie playlist in iTunes to be seen on Apple TV. I downloaded the 2.3 update this afternoon, and after I activated the movie playlist in Apple TV settings, it is now able to play the movies in the playlist as desired.

I pondered why Apple did not ship Apple TV with new software update 2.3. It was released in November 2008. About the Apple TV software update can be found here.

Almost a month after Nik was born, I suffered from retina detachment and had to undergo a surgery to repair it. That was myself experiencing the first surgery of my life. The experience was really awesome and I had some mixed feeling.

This afternoon, I had to test out some equipment in the OT while the doctor was performing laparoscopic surgery. Like the second experience, I had to put on the surgical gown and mask before entering the OT. Only this time I was with the doctor.

That's me in surgical clothing

Although the laparoscopic surgery was not invasive, it was thrilling enough to witness the live performance before my own eyes. At least, it has proven I have a strong stomach up to this level.

Back to the serious stuff. The purpose of the test was to make sure the process could be streamlined with Mac computers. Before this, the doctor’s assistant would have to push a rather big and clumsy caddy with PC, a LCD monitor and some other equipment from consultation suite to OT prior to every surgery. By using a Mac, they would no longer need the chunky caddy. A MacBook snugged nicely into a carrying bag together with the little device would perform the tasks.

The following photos showed the chunky caddy and my MacBook.

Chunky caddy and the Potato Computer (PC)

The sleek and sexy MacBook

It seems like a good head start for me. Everything I planned for today seems to be smooth sailing although I am having one problem which I do not know why it happens. I guess I will need to toy with it and/or hack it to learn why it isn’t behaving as it supposed to be. If everything is running perfect before end of this month, I will acquire an iPod Touch to proceed further. This will be my first wish on this very first day of 2009.

If you have noticed, I post less starting October. Perhaps some of you are wondering why. Yes, you are right, I am busy working on my research and the thesis. Please continue to check my blog regularly and all comments are welcome. I will check and reply comments and will write new posts when time and ideas sneak in. I will be writing selectively rather than random thoughts.

Thank you for your patronage.

I have to verify their works using Mathematica on Mac OS X for data modeling. But there is a problem with this software. It does not have a built-in function of Butterworth low-pass filter so I need to build one.

The gain G(ω) of an n-order Butterworth low pass filter is given in terms of transfer function H(s) as:

where ω_c is break frequency.

The Mathematica code with break frequency normalized at 1 rad/s:

butterworth[w1_, w2_, o_] = 1/(1 + (w1/w2)^(2*o));

LogLinearPlot[
 Evaluate[Table[
   10*Log[10, butterworth[w1, 1, order]], {order, 5}]], {w1, 0.01, 100},
  PlotRange -> {-100, 0}, PlotPoints -> 100, ImageSize -> 400]
Export["butterworth.jpg", %]

Plot of the gain of Butterworth low-pass filters of the n-order 1 through 5.

I dug out my collection of conference proceedings yesterday afternoon, hopefully I could find some inspiration. Obviously, I haven’t.

While I regaled them with fascinating true facts of Ada, I could see various reactions on their innocent and ignorant faces. Almost half of them gave an expression of “What is Ada going to do with my project?”, “What is Ada? Never heard of it.” or “Ada is old technology and is unpopular.” It was years of experience telling me not to waste too much time with such audiences. I quickly skimmed through some technical facts which they wouldn’t understand and continue regaling them with some interesting facts.

Finally, I had come to the end of the talk. It was the questions and answers session. No one had asked any questions except a girl who asked me about C# after the talk session was over. I explained to her the benefits of Ada over C# but she said she would have to start all over again. Again, my instinct told me not to waste time with such attitude and I turned my focus onto the two students whom I am supervising now. I continued with them a discussion of their project.

Unlike a couple of years back, I was too over-enthusiastic about Ada. I would talk regardless of audience reactions. After a few talks and a seminar this year, I find that I have changed. My enthusiasm is parallel to audience reaction.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I quickly identified the cause and rectified the problematic logic in the program design. One down and many to do. One of the other critical problem is that KazeServer will get over with initialization and execute even without the MySQL server is running. A serious bug though.

Another 3 more days to release Alpha RC1 and yet so many problems and unfinished parts. I feel the release will have to be postponed then.

One of them is the gnat Ada compiler issue on Ubuntu Hardy Heron or 8.04. Hardy comes with gnat-4.1 with a number of packages not added. Without these packages, I can’t build AWS-2.3. So, I have to roll out Alpha RC1 on Mac OS X until Ubuntu Intrepid or 8.10 with gnat-4.3 is released (hopefully with gnat-4.3 by October). I have another option which is I have to move to Debian Etch with gnat-4.1 but including the libaws-2.2.

libaws-2.2 is a pre-built library for AWS on Debian Etch. I am developing using gnat-4.4 and AWS-2.3 on Mac OS X. Moving to Debian Etch means I am downgrading the version of gnat and AWS and I feel a little skeptical about it. This is one thing I hate most, version inconsistency among the Linux distro.

After talking to my friends on this matter, it looks like I have few choices but to target on Mac OS X for the moment considering the tasks of installing and get the Debian Etch up and a whole lot of uncertainties in gnat-4.1 and AWS-2.2.

KazeServer is a web-enabled membership management system that allows registered members of an organization to login to review their membership data and other membership related transactions or records. KazeServer is developed 100% with Ada and AWS (Ada Web Server). The application itself is a web server. No web server, e.g. Apache, is needed to run KazeServer. It is a totally stand-alone independent application with a built-in web server (AWS).

On March 5, the talk at UTAR was the worst as if I was talking to walls or stone sculptures. The students were acting very rude by ignoring my talk. They were doing their assignment at the computers instead of listening to my talk. The talk was rescheduled to another venue which was in a computer lab. Nonetheless, I wrapped up the talk quickly. I skipped many parts to take it to the end and at the end of the talk, no one had asked any questions. I asked them some questions instead and of course, they did not know to answer. Obviously, they did not pay any attention at all.

In contrary, the talk at MMU on February 25 received better responses from the students.

I was a Nokia user before switching to SE because I read about how seamlessly SE K700i syncs with Apple’s Mac OS X applications via Bluetooth. The SE K700i is a very nice phone with many features I love about. One of them is K700i can be used as a remote control for Apple’s Keynote presentation software. The control is via Bluetooth as well.

Soon when I realized it was not in my waist pouch, I quickly dialed the number using another phone. The phone had been switched off. Total silence. It’s gone! A phone which has been my friend for almost 3 years is now gone.

I went back to the outlet after taking Dmitry from school and the staffs told me they didn’t see it. Disappointed.

I am kind of thirsty for more GPS data from delivery or trips to alien places. Anymore delivery? It is kinda fun. It is like treasure hunting, or tracking down a location. It is really exciting and fun!

This morning, I hacked some codes to provide a rather informative post commit email notification. All are done except the check in will stall. It takes a long time (and possibly hang!). I have yet to fully test before I begin my development project again.

More pictures and story here.

We wish all our friends and family a Merry Christmas, Happy Winter Solstice, Happy New Year and best of health.

Ganbatte kudasai!

I met with a challenging and look impossible task. How to make a bouquet of flower to stand without a container/vase and not to let any instrument visible in the photo? It would look like as it floating in the air.

I had to improvise a little stand to support the bouquet vertically. I loved the challenge and finally solved the problem.

Today is a happy day for me. She got a great start and I received a great lesson from Gandalf.

Thanks, Gandalf!

This portable duplex scanner, ScanShell 3000DN, can scan double-sided document in one pass. Its portability and weighing at 0.59kg make it easy to tuck along on any business trip. Besides scanning documents, it is also useful to scan business cards.

ScanShell 3000DN plugs into any USB2.0 port. The scanner does not require external power supply. It can scan any documents and save to PDF or any of the following graphic formats: BMP, JPG, TIF, PSD, PCX, PNG or TGA.

When I am on business trip or visit project sites at universities, I need to scan some documents during most of the visits. I also like to scan business cards of whom I met so that I can keep organized and I am not afraid to misplace those valuable contacts. Perhaps I should put this in my wish list as this year Christmas present or may be include it in the budget 2008!

But being a perfectionist is an advantage. A perfectionist is very good at detailed works and usually will not satisfy when the result is not finer than the expectation. This could send most people on their nerves and become mad.

I came to Cartridge Finder and found the cartridges for HP 810C DeskJet without any effort. CartridgeFinder.com‘s user friendly interface lets you easily figuring out which cartridges are required for more than 10,000 different models of printer, copier, and fax machines.

This site also searches PriceGrabber.com’s merchant listings to find you the best deals to save you time and money.

This will be the first Uechi-Ryu Zankai dojo to be opened in Malaysia and I feel a little too much of pressure after I decided to open the dojo. I have been teaching karate in a community hall at Bukit Beruang every Saturday evening. Sometimes, the training is interrupted by functions at the hall although I’ve reserved it. They give higher priority to functions rather than sports.

I was thinking it would be better to have a place of our own so that the training would not be interrupted. And it would be nice to have a decent place to receive visitors who are interested in our training.

I hope the dojo will go well and begin to prosper.

After a successful hack to receive a server-push JPEG stream from a video server (more story here), the next challenge for me was to display the JPEG in a GUI window.

I have been trying to get Carbon binding to work with gnat 4.3 on xcode but I am forced to abandon it for a while. I switched my target to GtkAda which will require X11 on Mac OS X. One plus side is that my application will be platform independent if I use Gtk/GtkAda. That means my application can be compiled and run on Linux, Solaris and Windows with the platform-independent GUI. More business may be and hopefully.

I was working to get GtkAda to work on my Mac since yesterday but I had corrupted some of the files I installed with Fink. Fortunately, I have a backup (actually I copied) on my MacBook but I guess I won’t need it anymore since the Gtk+2 and GtkAda are working on my Mac Mini. I will delete the copy on my MacBook later and install it with the working Gtk+/GtkAda.

I spent the entire morning and noon to write a single window, stripped down application to display the JPEG image I downloaded using the application I worked on earlier. I could not get the result. After many hours of hacking, I finally got it to work!

It is so rewarding to see it happens and I have got a good dose of adrenaline today. The feeling is difficult to describe. So it is difficult for other people to feel the excitement and the rewarding state of mind I am into.

The next challenge is to write an experimental application to continuously receive multiple streams of JPEG images and display them in multiple frames in a window, the last and toughest task with parallelism involving socket and GUI. After this, comes the serious software development by integrating all these experimental applications into a nice GUI application.

I can see clearly now but my right eye has defects due to the retinal detachment. I see straight lines not straight at all. The perfect straight line that my right eye sees appears to be crooked. I asked my doctor if there was any chances for it to heal completely, his answer was, “Perhaps, but the chances are very tiny.”

I guess I will have to bear with this disability for the rest of my life. One thing that soothes me is that, my short-sightedness on my right eye has been reduced half. It was -6.5 with astigmatism of 25 (I am not sure the quantifying unit for astigmatism) on both eyes. Now, my right eye is -3.5 with astigmatism of 100.

I have to wait for another 5 weeks for the right eye to settle down before the optometrist can quantify my right eye correctly.

We discuss mainly on the svn commit guidelines, Ada coding standards and document formats. We have yet to choose either ODF or LyX. The discussion is fruitful and we begin to see a software development process emerging.

It is tiring but fun!

Training for transition is being conducted with careful planning and most of the students were not aware of the transition until they have been informed a couple of weeks ago. When they received their new gomon last week, they were surprised and excited. I am happy to see the transition is bearing fruits. Thanks to my working experience while I was working as a consultant in transition to Ada (see my blog here).

The preparation for demo has some hitches. The preparation training coincides with school’s mid-term exam following a 2 weeks break starting tomorrow. What a wrong timing!

The rest, I have been tied up with work, family and not so much of my training. I got the chance to train a little when I teach the class.

I am glad that I can use my SE experience to enhance the team. Although I have a head on both technical and management shoulder, I prefer development to management. But somehow, I quite like management once in a full moon. What an ironic interest in contrast!

Now, I am off to define a SVN commit guidelines for our team. The document is one page in length at this moment and I hope to finish at least some outlines by end of the day. This will be the first piece of such work (due to limited time for me to sit down and write) and I wish I can share it on my blog to benefit not only our development team but also some people. I will ask permission from my employer to post the guidelines. So keep your fingers crossed.

Sed is the ultimate stream editor. If that sounds strange, picture a stream flowing through a pipe. Okay, you can’t see a stream if it’s inside a pipe. That’s what I get for attempting a flowing analogy. You want literature, read James Joyce.

Anyhow, sed is a marvelous utility. Unfortunately, most people never learn its real power. The language is very simple, but the documentation is terrible. The Solaris on-line manual pages for sed are five pages long, and two of those pages describe the 34 different errors you can get. A program that spends as much space documenting the errors than it does documenting the language has a serious learning curve.

You can read more about Sed here.

My project uses a thick binding of PostgreSQL/MySQL called APQ. APQ is a project by Warren and I helped to host it at my server. See my post here. The configure and make process are not really stable which I think is due to various version of MySQL and the Linux tools such as sed.

To build APQ, first, two MySQL include files, errmsg.h and mysqld_error.h need to be parsed. These files contain MySQL error codes and they need to be parsed and translated into Ada syntax. This translated Ada code will be inserted into apq_mysql.ads.

However, this parsing and translation process are not working correctly as they supposed to be. When I look into this problem, I found a peculiar abnormality. The parser uses sed. When I built APQ on Mac OS X, FC5 and Solaris (Intel), the result in apq_mysql.ads is not consistent on these different OS.

After I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.9, the parser refused to work with some error messages which I think caused by sed. I was mingling with the configure script until this hour. Suddenly, something struck my mind. Why do I need to mingle with configure? The problem is the parsing and it deserves the highest priority. The build configuration does not perform a thorough check of the environment but it still works fine at this point. So, I moved my priority to write a parser in Ada to solve the parsing problem. This light shed on me at this whee hour in the morning and I was really too tire to continue working on the parser.

I have a handful during the last week of the Dog year because of my new job and the cross-training in karate. My sensei in Okinawa requested me to write my training journal for him two weeks ago and I could not find time for it. I may post less often but I will find some time for it.

With today’s availability of powerful microprocessor such as AMD and Intel 64-bit processor, SGI’s hardware has become too expensive too invest and maintain. Another reason is the difficulty to find tools such as gnat Ada compiler. The download site usually provides out of date version that makes maintaining the consistency of compiler versions across other platforms difficult.

This decision should have been made long time ago. A lot of time and resources had been wasted in maintaining existing software and development of new applications. Our clients’ decisions to migrate to Opteron and Mac OS X based platforms have also contributed to this decision. We expect zero or next to zero porting problem because we are using portable technologies such as Ada, GTK+, GtkAda and OpenGL. This decision enables our development to focus on both Opteron (Solaris and Linux) and Mac OS X platforms.

I was introduced to him to help solving his problem couple weeks ago. I quoted him my web hosting packages which obviously are much cheaper than his current hosting service. In terms of dollars, my price is higher. He is complaining that I am quoting much higher price than his current hosting service. I explained to him about the bigger capacity of web space and the benefits of managed hosting service. He agreed with that but still insisted the price was too high.

I don’t know what to say anymore. Perhaps, I am not a good salesman when come to deal with people like this stingy man. I hate this whole process. Unfortunately, this is the business and I have to live with it.

It is tough to be on my own as a developer and a sales person. I enjoy developing more than sales.