China’s proven world class competency

April 13th, 2008 at 13:20 · Filed Under Ada, China, Computing, Humanity, Linux, Software Development, Web · Comment 

During the snow hazard in China this February, the Chinese government had successfully managed the natural disaster and crisis with much professionalism in such a short period of time. According to an unconfirmed source, the Chinese government managed to develop a Disaster Management System in just 5 days. 75 software engineers from the Chinese military worked around the clock for 5 days to bring up a web based Disaster Management System to collect, manage, disseminate, coordinate, and to provide command and control to the military disaster relieve team during the recent snow hazard.

The system was developed using Ada, AWS (Ada Web Server) with a little of PHP and Perl. The system deploys a MySQL database running on Linux. The system is hooked up to air-borne SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) for real-time acquisition of landscaping information in snow hazard affected area to help assessing the damage of rail ways, roads, housing and forest. The Chinese army engineering company was dispatched by the system to areas in need of assistance.

I have yet to receive further details of how the system works and probably will not. Anyway, that shows the Chinese ability and responsiveness in dealing with natural disaster. Hail China!

Tags: , , , , ,

Open Source and School Works

April 12th, 2008 at 22:34 · Filed Under Computing, Humanity, Philosophy, Social, Software Development, Technology · 3 Comments 

The increasing buzz about the omnipotence of Google and Open Source projects has left us wondering, what do students do with their research and course assignments today?

The Internet has become a huge reservoir of knowledge since the past two decades. The use of this knowledge has widen the gap in students thinking about traditional working environment, processes and ethics as well as their awareness of copyright laws and humanistic behavior and obligation. Unfortunately, many youngsters studying in local colleges and universities are not well aware of the pitfalls of using such information and open source projects.

With many years of software development (in both closed- and open- source) and research experience, I am able to quickly identify a genuine work or an adaptation of works from other people. I have seen many copy-and-paste work by students and even received copy-and-paste (exact copy-and-paste and adaptation) works by students applying for internship.

During a FYP judging 3 days ago, I had encountered a project which a student had adapted someone’s work as his own. With two simple questions, I established a firm “confidence” of plagiarism. The abridged story goes:

Read more

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tunnel X from Gutsy to Leopard

April 4th, 2008 at 22:08 · Filed Under Computing, Linux, Mac OS X · 5 Comments 

I have been tunneling X from Linux to Tiger for almost two years without any problems and happy with it. After upgrading to Leopard, a disaster struck me. I was unable to access my Linux applications on my Ubuntu box. I used to do it with Tiger without any problems. When I ssh tunnel X from Gutsy to Leopard, I had keyboard problem. When I pressed some keys on the keyboard, I got numbers and some weird characters like close windows and minimize windows.

The problem lies within Apple’s new X11 in Leopard. The keyboard is not properly mapped after establishing the X tunnel. After searching the web and Ubuntu forum, I found a solution:


% ssh -X username@gutsy
% xmodmap -pke > ~/.keymap
% gnome-panel 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null & xmodmap ~/.keymap

Just do xmodmap map once will do. After that, ssh into Ubuntu and invoke gnome-panel.

Tags: , , , , , ,

HOWTO - SCIM and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

October 22nd, 2007 at 11:57 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Computing, HOWTO, Hacking, Linux · 13 Comments 

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10Ubuntu 7.10, code named “Gutsy Gibbon”, has been released. I just finished upgrading from Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Gutsy Gibbon. The upgrade (downloading, unpacking, removing, installing, configuring and cleaning) took about 6 hours to complete.

The upgrade was smooth and without any problems except it broke my scim. I have exhausted the search on Internet for a fix but was disappointed. So, I tried to experiment with a few methods based on the information I had on the Internet and came up a work around for this problem.

Referring to my Chinese Input HOWTO here, I assume you have installed scim in Feisty Fawn (7.04) and later upgraded to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10).

  1. Goto System -> Preference -> Sessions. Delete the “Input Method” as created in my previous HOWTO.
  2. Uninstall and install again scim and all suggested packages.
  3. Click on menu: System -> Preferences ->Sessions
    • Click Startup Program Tab then [New] button.
    • Name: Input Methods
    • Command: scim -d
    • Click [OK] button
  4. Logout and login again.
  5. Go to System -> Administration -> Language Support
    • Select your language(s) support. In my case, Chinese and Japanese.
    • Check the box at the bottom, Input Method, to activate complex characters input. Apply, uncheck it, apply and check again and apply then quit.
    • Restart Language Support to make sure the box is checked.
  6. Logout and restart your system.
  7. Login and launch any application, e.g. gedit or Terminal. Right click and select “Input Method” and check “SCIM Input Method”.
  8. Now click on the “Input Method” tray icon on the top left of your screen to choose your desired language support and input method.

Now, you should be able to switch input method in some applications such as Terminal or gedit. It still does not work on every applications such as Open Office. To activate scim for every applications, use the command line (or Terminal):

  1. Check your locale: 
    
$ locale | grep LANG=

    The answer would be something like below, which is in my case:

    
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  2. Now, with the following command, insall scim-qtimm and tell your system you want to use scim for your input method in your locale: 
    
$ sudo apt-get install scim-qtimm
$ im-switch -z en_US -s scim
  3. Logout and login again and start Open Office. You should now able to select your input method in every applications.

This should also work (with instructions from my previous post here) if you have a fresh installation of Gutsy Gibbon. Please let me know if this works for you.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Why I like Ubuntu?

October 12th, 2007 at 17:27 · Filed Under Blogging, Call Me a Geek, Computing, Linux, Software Development · Comment 

Since I switched to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 on Spetember 26, I have been working on Ubuntu with a multitude of tasks including test compiling some Ada source codes of previous project, working on my latest Ada project, blogging, surfing, downloading torrents and many more. I personally find Ubuntu is really an OS for the human.

Unlike many other Linux favor such as Caldera (now SCO), SuSE, RedHat; it has come out of competition neatly. Based on Debian, it has a better packaging of software packages which makes installation and upgrading software components very easily and almost without hassle. The only hassle I see is when downloading some large files during a slow connection or heavy Internet traffic.

The auto-upgrade is the feature I like most in Ubuntu. It works seamlessly and the new software components are well tested before the release. I had had my system corrupted when I was using SuSE and not so long ago on FC5 (Fedora Core). Causing a lot of valuable data and time. What can I say? So far, so good!

The software update is also very frequent. This always keep my system up to date with the latest release of Ubuntu’s software components. Well done!

The other neat feature is the easy activation of SCIM, a Smart Common Input Method for all Unix-like OS for inputing complex character sets like Chinese and Japanese. This gives me another platform of choice when updating my blog and other websites (blogs) with Chinese and Japanese characters. I will write about how to activating SCIM later.

I hope Ubuntu will be the Linux for my secondary working platform.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,