Saturday, September 30, 2006

Journey called Life... (Part 30: User-friendliness and Efficiency)

In my experience with both Windows and Linux softwares, and through browsing of many many forums, especially this one, I had come across many discussions about how un-user-friendly linux distributions are because some of them requires us to use the command line to do our jobs.

Being the curious type, I had used both types of operation (via command line and the point-click method) to do the same jobs. What I had found out is that, while the point-and-click method is definitely more user-friendly, it is also the slowest way of doings things. depending on the operation, I can make my way using the commend line up to 5 times faster than when I am pointing and clicking around the various menus and dialog boxes that pops-up. That is, of course, due to my familiarity to the operation of the system and my typing speed (okok, I AM trying to make myself look great here, so don't bother =p). Example, it's much easier and faster for my to go the terminal within Linux and type

sudo aptitude install supertux

then press enter and input my password rather than to click on system-administration-synaptic package manager, input my password, then search for supertux. Afterwards I have to mark it, and click apply. I know most of you won't understand this, but the number of steps speaks for themselves.

That is the reward of me finding different ways to do the same job rather than "following the masses" and do it like how everyone did. There are many many shortcuts that we can make use of but invisible to us even though it's just standing right in front of us. I'd admit that I am also one of the people that are in the group.

But for once, we need to start think out of the box and think creatively on how to resolve any situations that arises for us to confront. Like in the above example with command line and point-and-click comparison, I had managed to find another way around my problem by using the very method that scarey people away from linux. That's the joy of doing research, it's the joy of solving problems by the way that most people won't even dare to touch with a ten foot pole...

There are always more than one way to solve problems, can you see it?

cheers~

seehua
*Let's create a world full of LOVE~
note: Enjoying the song xiang shui bai he through my linux based media player/organizer, Listen

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Realisation Part 5: Overjoyed :)

hohohoho...yay~~!!!...Gold medal for pharmacy table tennis team...yay~! hehe...so so happy we won the finals in IMU Cup on tuesday with a clean score of 3-0. Was not expecting at all for such clean winning...thanks to our female single player, our hero of the day...:) Semi-finals was the most exciting match with the Sem 3 medics, winning by a close 3-2 score. The stress when i was playing the mixed doubles was indescribable la, but the joy of winning the match was even more over-whelming! Never felt so victorious before la...all the effort put in for the trainings, sacrificing of personal time, study time, rest time, sleeping time, dinner time, and all the sweat and blood (hehe..exaggerating) are all worth it:)


How true is the saying, we reap what we sow :p

On another happy note on reaping what we sow (hehe), i just got back my biosci lab reports, and wow, it proves that all the sleepless days and nights and headaches struggling and rushing through the 4 super long reports (10 pages and above) are worthwhile too! Hehe..rewarded 24/25 and 22/25 for two of them, still waiting for the other two to be returned, but it's enough to make me happy :) (coz it's relatively higher than the rest >.< ) ;p

While enjoying the triumph of this week, i do realise the joy is not gonna last i.e impermanance, so i'm gonna enjoy it now, hehe:)

Tonight is the closing for the IMU Cup, have cheerleadings and prize giving ceremony...hehe...gonna have a great time tonight...yay, get to receive the first medal from IMU ;p
haha..there goes another day for studying :p

oh well, class test on monday and i have not studied for it!:p

Friday, September 22, 2006

Journey called Life... (Part 29: Being Here and Now)

I had been for the past 2 days alone in my place over here in Aalen, doing things which I enjoyed the most. I.e. Reading tons of stuffs to find out how to go around this and that problem when using my linux, reading up ReCom for a bit of debates, reading up on the latest news, writing entries to my long forgotten blog, sleeping, listening to music, downloading stuffs, cleaning up my computer, talking to the teddy bear, and missing someone who is very dear to me...

Ah, the joy of being able to just settle down and enjoy every moment of our lifes. Maybe you guys out there might want to give this a try. Take a break to do the things that you like to do most, and you will find that life have a lot to offer to you other than eat to work or work to eat=)

But then again, we can also being right there when we are doing our stuffs/jobs, just do it without going and worry about stuffs that we can't change anyway...

Anyway, this is just the calm before i have to buck up for the next busy semester. Lucky for me that there are no class on fridays. I might go and visit Buddhist temples in Germany la, making use of the Bahncard 50 that gives me the 50 % discount when I take the trains to anywhere.

For the mean time, I just continue reading up on stuffs and enjoy the music being player through my computer now=)

To the all of you out there, gambatte ooo...in whatever that you are doing now...till next time, *tata~

seehua
*Let's create a world full of LOVE~

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Journey called Life... (Part 28: of friends and friendships)

For the last week I had been at my friend's place in Aachen, visiting and get myself to go around places in Germany other than my place of study, Aalen and to get some fresh air, after locking myself up in this small town for the last 3 months before I got back to Malaysia.

Aachen is a nice city which is just at the right size, not too big and not too small. There are a lot of places to visit in the tow n itself, and the foods there are fantastic as well. I got to eat some authentic tasting wan tan mee and one of the best fried rice that I had ever tasted. And most importantly, I had learned some very important lessons on friends and friendship.

All this while i had always been very 'ke qi' with my friends. That means, I was really reluctant to accept favours from them, and when I do, I will find lots of ways to repay them. I had always been like that for a long long time. But on the other way around, I was never too hesitant to help people out whenever it's needed. Staying over here in Aachen with my friends there had given me a good lesson.

Being friends is never too much about giving and receiving, but about the feeling of friendship and that there are are friends out there that will accompany each other through the times. Friends are always there are for you through think and thin, through the hard and good times. And also to accompany each other to face the things to come...

Well, the most important thing I've learnt during this trip is that although we may be with our very bad flaws, our friends will accept and live with it. Small actions like accompanying each other to do a lot of things can go a long way to make our lives a very meaningful one...

To my friends out there, I wish you all well and happy always, and when I meet you all once again the next time, hopefully that you are still happy as always... =)

seehua
*Let's create a world full of LOVE~

experiments and me...

The one thing about me is that i love to experiment with new things, expecially things related to technology.

For a measure, you can have a look at my own computer and my pda phone and count the amount of softwares that are still in beta* status. The list will be as follows:

1. Firefox 2 beta 2
2. Microsoft Active Sync 4.5 beta 2
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 RC1**
4. Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 beta 2
5. My own PDA phone is running on a hacked version of ROM build by the friendly guys at www.xda-developers.com.

I don't know why do I like to be at the cutting edge of things, but I think I like the thrill of breaking things and find a way to fix them, or find some ways to work around them. I love to get to know how things work from the smallest nuts and bolts to the whole assembled complete system. I am the one who will read a manual lots of times that I can repeat every word from the front page to the backcover, and then still want to go find out about additional ways to get more juice out of the system.

Perhaps this is the reason that I am able to maximize the capability of my own computer and PDA, running it the way I want it to, that to me is one kind of success.

But then, after I had maximized my usage of the system, I will go look for new ways to experiment. Right now, I am experiment with various distribution of Linux operating system. There are a lot of ways to customize the system, from the very core to the looks of it. In fact, in the future, after I learn how to program, i might even take a look into the source code of the applications running under linux and see what i can do to make it even better.

I think I had just made myself look really like a geeky kind of person right now...haha...nvm, that's who I am anyway. I used to play with lots of legos when i was really young, the time when I was still studying primary school in Brunei. I can still remember the first set of lego bought for me by my parents as a present for being top in the class. It was a Lego technic version of a truck, complete with it's own suspensions and steering wheel. Not much for a starter, but still lots of fun with nevertheless.

Several months later my father brought back one whole pail of Legos taken from someone who don't want it anymore. boy I was thrilled. I used to play with it for long periods during my holidays and managed to build a lot a lot of things from it, and learning a whole lot about gears, how things should fit together so that it is at it's strongest, what happens in a suspension system, how pistons are fitted together in an engine, and a lot more from it alone. There was one time that I was so engrossed in building my own car from lego that i spent one whole afternoon building it without doing anything else. I ended that day with a headache due to concentrating too much on the project.. =p but still, i did successfully build a car that had it's own steering, suspention, hood, doors etc etc etc all on my own...YAHOO.... =p

Yea, experimentation on things had been part of me all along, and brings along lots of thrills and fun with it...

ok, I am done with this post, time to test using debian linux...heh heh...
till my next post, *tata~

metta

seehua
*Let's create a world full of LOVE~

*beta means software which are feature complete softwares that are being tested to look for bugs and fix them

**RC means Release Candidate

Monday, September 11, 2006

I installed Linux without having to go to the console!!

hehe...Super happy now. All the 9++ hours waiting for my Suse Linux 10.1 download to finish was really worth it man. I got it running and it boot into it's gui without having me to go into terminal to add a line to a cryptic file. Now that's a first...opensuse, thanks... haha... keep it up team.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Howto: browse the internet safely

Helo to all. This post is kind of a kick off for my new series in this blog. If it do gets better, i might just make a new blog based on it. For now, i am just going to give you all advices on a field where i had done so much research but still have a lot more to learn, computing.

To kick it all of, the first topic is about security.

We all know that the internet is a dangerous place to go without a good set of protection tools, especially if you are using Microsoft© Windows® series of operating systems. With so much news on more and more exploits discovered and exploited out in the wild now, there is no better time to be concerned about these issues. Your own precious data might be released in the wild, and used against you in various ways. The most notable way is your stolen credit card number being used to buy hell of a lot of things through e-bay orany other online shopping sites. Then the next time you check on your credit card usages, to your horror, you find that you have a debt amounting to millions.

ok, that's just one senario that might happen. Yes, I know most of the people who will frequent this blog don't do as much online shopping as I do, but there WILL be usages for your personal infos and passwords. So it's always better to be on the safe side rather than to be sorry.

Here are some simple steps that you can do to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of online fraud.

1. Whenever an e-mail comes to your inbox and asks for your private information or details on e-bay/bank/paypal accounts, ignore it. They are most probably phishing e-mails sent out by people with bad intentions who wants to get their hands on your private data. If you are in doubt, call or e-mail the representatives of the institutions involved.

2. If you are using Windows operating system(any version), make sure you protect yourself with at least an antivirus and antispyware programs. If you can't afford to buy the licences from the big guns (Symantec, Mc Afee), there are a lot more antivirus vendors out there like AVG, Avast, Anvira and some others that will offer you decent protection without slowing your computer to a crawl. As for antispyware protection, you can get decent scanners from Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Spybot search and Destroy, and Windows Defender. Remember to update the programs often, and scan your system once in a while.

3. Remember, the worst link in the chain is the human that is operating the system, i.e. yourself. It's at the outmost importance that you adopt safe-internet practices.

-Don't just forward everything that comes into your mailbox, especially those which are likely
to contain frauds and false news. It will only serve to spread panic. If you want to verify the
authencity of these mails, you may surf to www.hoax-slayer.com to get a accurate info on that particular topic.

-Don't store sensitive passwords (bank login details etc) within your browser. Always log in manually from the front page of these pages by typing in the username and the passwords yourself, and not storing it in the internet browser's cache. Laziness will cost you a bomb in this case, so don't be lazy here.

-Don't do your critical transactions using a public computer(school computer labs, libraries, cyber cafes etc.). You'll never know that the computers have keyloggers installed or not. So like always, it's better to be safe than sorry.

So here we are, some simple to take steps to ensure that you can surf the net safely. There are a lot more steps to take of course. But for now, these will suffice to make your internet-surfing experience relatively safe and enjoyable. So, until the next time I post another entry in this long unupdated blog, take care always there yah...

*tata~

metta

seehua
-Let's create a world full of LOVE =)

Friday, September 08, 2006

Fairness?

We can hardly speak of moral in relation to creatures we systematically devour, mostly singed but sometimes raw. There are men and women who practise horse love, dog love, cat love, bird love. But these very people would take a deer or a calf by it's neck, slit it's throat, drink the blood straight away or in a pudding, and bite off it's flesh. And who is to say that a horse they cherish is nobler that a deer they feed on? Indeed, there are people who eat cats, dogs and horses but would use a cow only as a work animal and the dogs to protect them and their properties.

D.Runes
Handbook Of Reason

Sunday, September 03, 2006

New Topics

From now on I might add on topics from my own interests to the topics there are already in discussion here...

They might include computer troubleshooting tips that i might had found out along the way while i am experimenting with various softwares and operating systems.

And some simple reviews of softwares will be included as well...

happy reading everyone =)

metta

seehua
Let's create a world full of LOVe=)

Return of the ghost

After being off the radar for the last few months, yup, i am back to Germany now...

Time to say hi to all of you out there... having fun?

hope you do, but don't forget about work yah...

kinda sleepy now, maybe I am still stuck in Malaysia mentally... hehe.. but don't worry, I will be ok here...

Just want to say hi to you all:

Hello to all!!!

hehe...that's all from me this time... *tata~

metta

seehua
Let's create a world full of LOVE =)