V4

Movedhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2005-06-12T14:53:00.000-04:00

I am moving my blog to a new home.

http://slingkid.blogsome.com

Google Hardware

2005-06-01T11:29:00.000-04:00

The hardware that powered Google in the early days.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990209043945/google.stanford.edu/googlehardware.html

Khloe on a tree

2005-05-23T20:13:00.000-04:00

Khloe on a tree
Originally uploaded by slingman.

This is the free spirited Khloe. Always bouncy - just like Tigger!

Joel on Software - Book Reviews

2005-05-21T23:03:00.000-04:00

Here is a list of books recomemeded by Joel Spolsky. I will make an effort to read everyone of them.

Joel on Software - Book Reviews

SINGAPORE FOOD RECIPE OF HAINANESE CHICKEN RICE

2005-05-21T22:35:00.000-04:00

I sure do miss the food in Singapore and Malaysia. There is not a single chinese restuarant in Ohio that sells Hainanese Chicken Rice.

I found this recipe on the internet - and I tried it out.

I usually don't have much interest in cooking - the best I can do is fry an egg and prepare an instant noodle meal. But my craving for chicken rice was strong and so I decided to cook a meal of Hainanese chicken rice.

It was pretty successful - of course it is still far from the taste of the "real" thing - but I am pretty satisfied.

Yum Yum.

The ONE Campaign

2005-05-21T16:56:00.000-04:00

Just saw this on TV today. Let's get involved. Let's beat AIDS, Starvation and extreme poverty in Africa.

The ONE Campaign

MSN - Music is offering buy 1 get 5 free

2005-05-20T00:11:00.000-04:00

Bought this really old song "We are an offering" by Chris Christian from his album Mirror of Your heart. My buddy used to have this on cassette, way before the days of CDs and mp3 - boy, that must be ancient! I love this song and listening to it now just brings back memories of Hwa Chong Hostel. Kenneth I do miss you wherever you are.

I am totally amazed at how a song, a smell, a sight, a touch can trigger so much memories from the past.

Get Your 5 free songs

Google gets Personal

2005-05-19T23:34:00.000-04:00

Google allows you to personlize your google search page.

http://www.google.com/ig

Life Lessons from playing jigsaw puzzle

2005-05-19T00:18:00.000-04:00

My family has been playing jigsaw puzzles for the past week - we treat this as a family project. We have finised 2 puzzles already - a 100 piece puzzle and a 300 piece puzzle.

As I was trying to fit the pieces - a few thoughts occur to me

1. A single piece of puzzle may seem pretty insignificant but without it the picture is not complete. Wow. That in itself is a life lesson. Don't we sometimes feel that our lives are insignificant? But God has a purpose for each of us - we are the missing links to the complete picture.

2. We cannot determine if a piece is going to fit unless we actually try to fit it in. Life is like that too - we need to be bold to try. Only by trying we will know if "it fits".

Mind Map

2005-05-19T00:11:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading Tony Buzanâs How to mind map.

Mind Map is a different way of taking notes. Instead of just the normal memo style with sub-points. Mind Map actually uses a tree-like mechanism. You place the central idea in the middle of a blank piece of paper and you start branching out from there. It also encourages you to use different colors and pictures to represent ideas. MindMap is all about Imagination and Association.

For e.g. Letâs say Fruit is the central idea - so you write Fruit in the middle of the paper. You then draw branches out from the middle. Letâs say you think of Apple, Orange and Pineapple. You will draw 3 branches out. You will write Apple on 1 branch, Orange on another branch and finally Pineapple on the last branch. With Apple, you might think of apple-juice, apple-pie, apple-picking. So from the Apple branch, you then draw 3 more branches out.

I found an open source software FreeMind.

Try it and see if MindMap might help you.

Installing Suse on Virtual PC on OS X

2005-05-16T01:46:00.000-04:00

Download boot.iso from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current/boot

Boot Virtual PC from boot.iso

Pick installation, and pass these parameters

linux26 install=ftp://195.135.221.132/pub/suse/i386/current

Virtual PC on OS X does not automatically resolve ftp.suse.com - that's why we have to pass the IP address on the installation line

If installing on Virtual PC on Windows - we can pass

linux26 install=ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current

apt-get and redhat

2005-05-14T17:03:00.000-04:00

Another tool that is similar to yum is apt-get

http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/redhat/9/apt/

Why would you need yum and apt-get?

Sometimes the yum repository may be older than apt-get or vice versa, so if you cannot find a package in one, maybe the other one may have it.

Easiest way to install mono on Redhat

2005-05-14T12:41:00.000-04:00

This is the easiest way to install mono on Redhat.

1. Download Redcarpet (Get the rcd and rug packages)
2. Open a terminal window (you need root permission)
3. run rpm -ivs rcd-package.rpm
4. run rpm -ivs rug-package.rpm
5. Follow instructions from go-mono.com

Yum and Redhat 9

2005-05-14T12:22:00.000-04:00

Here are some things I learnt about installing Redhat 9 on Virtual PC.

Color-Depth

1. Make sure color depth is set to 16 during installation. Virtual PC does not work well with a color depth of 24.

Getting Updates

After installation, I use Yum to get all my updates. Download Yum from here. Make sure you get the yum.conf file from the site and put it in the /etc directory.

Run yum update to get all updates for Redhat.

Getting Sound to work

After installation, Sound won't be configured.

1. Use yum to install sndconfig. (Run yum install sndconfig)
2. Configure Sound in Red Hat Linux 9.01.
Log into Red Hat Linux.
2. Start a terminal session, click the ‘Red Hat’, System Tools, then Terminal.
3. Type su and press Enter.
4. Enter the root password and press Enter.
5. Type cd /sbin and press Enter
6. Type ./sndconfig and press Enter.
7. Introduction: Press Enter.
8. Probe Results: Press Enter.
9. Card Type: Select Sound Blaster 16 and press Enter.
10. Card Settings:
a. I/O Port: Select 0x220 and press Tab.
b. IRQ: Select 5 and press Tab.
c. DMA 1: Select 1 and press Tab.
d. DMA 2: Select 5 and press Tab.
e. MPU I/O: Select 0x330 and press Tab.
f. Press Enter11. Sound Card Test: Press Enter

NOTE Sound volume may be very low, adjust speakers accordingly.

12. Test Result: Press Enter if sound was heard, if not, Tab to select No and press Enter.NOTE If no sound was heard, the most likely cause is lack of volume

13. File Exists: press Enter to overwrite the existing config file.

14. Type exit and press Enter to exit the root console.

15. Type exit and press Enter to exit the standard console.

Getting monodevelop to work on Suse and Redhat

2005-05-12T00:28:00.000-04:00

I installed Suse 9.2 and Redhat 9 on Virtual PC. My first goal was to setup a mono development environment. I just could not get MonoDevelop to work if I download the latest development builds. I had to use the last stable release 1.0.6 to get it to work. I googled around but no one else seems to be having the problem. Monodevelop would start but when I tried to compile it, it will sit there and spin. This happens on both the Linux machines - so I am pretty sure monodevelop is just not compatible with the latest mono release.

The second thing I tried to do was to embed gecko using gecko-sharp into a mono program. This worked on Suse 9.2 but not on Redhat. I spent a full day hacking around the Redhat box to see what was the problem. I kept getting an error where it says that "gtkembedmoz" was of smaller size than GtkBin. What?

After googling around, I finally found out that the version of mozilla that shipped with Redhat 9 was compiled with GTK 1 where gecko-sharp only works for mozilla compiled with GTK 2. Who would have guessed that?

So I downloaded a version of mozilla compiled with GTK 2 and deleted the previous mozilla version and voila - it worked.

And also, I had to manually set the enviroment variable MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME for it to work too.

Skype me

2005-05-09T19:22:00.000-04:00

For my friends overseas. Get Skype and let's hook up. Skype allows you to talk free over the internet with excellent quality.

Install Skype

And look for me under the name "slingkid"

Linux, mono and glade

2005-05-09T19:14:00.000-04:00

I spent the most of last week installing, uninstalling and hacking Linux. I found out last week that it would be nice if we had a Linux version of our software. We currently have a version for Windows XP and Windows 2000 and another version for Mac Os X.

So I was the lucky one assigned to the job of creating a Linux version of our software.

I have never done any work on Linux. I used Sun's Unix while in school running on SPARC stations. And I worked briefly on HP Unix while I was with Checkfree.

So here I go, exploring if mono might be a good choice for our software. I see 2 major hurdles here - the first is to try to play our Quicktime movie compressed using Sorenson 3 on Linux. The 2nd part is to get Gecko (the Mozilla engine) to work using Mono.

User Interface Design for Programmers

2005-05-07T16:43:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed this book a lot. Joel Spolsky does a great job in conveying some of the simplest truths about good UI design. Very refreshing.

Dragon

2005-05-07T16:30:00.000-04:00

This is one of Kaleb's art pieces for the school year.

Free MP3 player

2005-04-28T13:06:00.000-04:00

I am going to try this out - see if I get a free iPod. Basically, this is how it works. Go to mp3players4free.com via the link below. Sign up for an account and pick your gift, complete 1 of their offers and refer 5 other people to do the same thing. Most of the offers require you to pay something upfront, but it does seem reasonable. The blockbuster trial seems good - pay $9.99 for the first month and you can cancel after that.

http://www.mp3players4free.com/default.aspx?r=358441

Free Stuff anyone?

2005-04-27T18:56:00.000-04:00

I have always been suspicious about getting free stuff. But looks like Duncan got his free Flat Screen.

Below are some tips from him.

Tips if you are interested in getting something free for yourself...

I would seriously consider the sites from OfferCentric (they usually end in 4free.com) because they often have cash money as an option, which is great if none of the prizes appeal to you. Then, I would probably shoot for one of the ones with very few referrals required. This is a hard one to figure out in some cases, because they usually don't tell you how many referrals are needed until after you sign-up. A couple of ones that seem good to me are

the mp3/wma player site (5 referrals needed),
the psp site (5 referrals), and

(on the Gratis side, which are the original sites like this)

the free ipod shuffle site (only 3 referrals) or the classic ipod site (5 referrals).

There are other sites of course, but I group anything above 5 or 6 referral links as long-shots... you'll really need to work (and trade, and bug, and ...) to get enough referrals for a site like notebooks4free.com (18 referrals!!), freedesktoppcs.com or pvps4free.com (both of which are 10 referrals).

Nant, subversion and automated build process

2005-04-25T11:21:00.000-04:00

Joel Spolsky has an article about Daily Builds. I finally had time this past week to implement an automated build process for the project I am working on.

These are the tools used:

1. Nant
2. cdrtools - mkisofs, cdrecord
3. SvnTasks

I love Nant. It was easy to learn and it is very flexible. For those of you who are familiar with makefiles, Nant replaces makefiles with 100 times more flexibility. It provides standard tasks like copy, delete, different tasks for compiling files, mail and etc. If you do not find a certain task, you can always create a custom task in .NET. And all you have to do is to drop the dll into Nant's bin directory.

We use Subversion as our source control. Nant does not provide a Subversion Task for updating the project. I would like the build process to start by fetching the latest code from Subversion.

I use TortoiseSVN for interacting with Subversion. TortoiseProc.exe can be used to run commands on Subversion on a command line. Initiatially, I created a exec task in Nant to just execute TortoiseProc with a command of update. The problem is that TortoiseProc would return 1 upon exiting - that throws Nant off - Nant thinks that an error had occurred in the exec task.

A better solution was to create a custom task - and thanks to Arild, he has a .NET wrapper that wraps all the Subversion calls. And he created SvnTasks which I could just plug into my build process.

The build process starts with

1. fetching code from Subversion
2. clean all .objs and .exe
3. Build all related dlls and executables
4. Obfuscate dlls and executables
5. Build the msi installer
6. Copy files to deploy directory
7. Burn installer on a CD
8. FTP new files to AutoUpdate Server

Feels like February

2005-04-24T20:47:00.000-04:00

It snowed the whole of today in Columbus, Ohio. Isn't it Spring already? I wonder.

I used to complain a lot about how terrible the weather in Columbus was. I still don't think it is great but I think I am beginning to accept it. I am beginning to appreciate it and give thanks for it. It is really, really true that life is about 99% perspective and 1% reality.

After moving to Orlando last year and moving back to Columbus this year - I have realized that there are some very good things here in Columbus, Ohio. The weather is just part of life - why fight it?

So here I am appreciating snow near the end of April - I am thankful I do not live in Alaska.