Musings of a Daydreaming Wanderer

My last day of work was on Friday, and I treated my close colleagues to lunch @ Sun Plaza Delifrance. Bad experience with the food there because they did not deliver the correct food for a vegetarian colleague. I left my workplace slightly earlier before knock-off time to go to my company HQ in Alexandra. When I reached there at 5:15pm, sadly, office was closed, so have to go on Monday. So much for “Human Resources”. Will miss my colleagues there. Suddenly, for some strange reason Westlife songs suddenly become nice.

Went out for dinner with some of my army friends at Jack’s Place at Marina Square yesterday. Reached MS slightly ealier, and chatted for a while with Peiling, Jamie and Xiping, from my old workplace as they happened to be there for a street netball competition. Wish them all the best in their endeavours. Most probably the last time I see them in person, though.

Bought the D-Link DNS-323 NAS from the PC Show (temptations, temptations…), and currently figuring out how to set it up. The strange thing is most people buy a NAS and then get stumped figuring out how to configure it. Even then, assuming you have the technical skills to do it, you will also need to consider the following factors:

1. What is the primary use for this NAS? Power-savings? Storage? Sharing?
2. How to secure the box? Which network shares to create? What users/groups will be created?
3. What is the backup strategy? JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 1? “Off-site” backup on top of RAID 1?
4. Any disaster recovery procedures? What do you do in case of hard drive failure, or worse, NAS hardware failure? Will you use an UPS with the NAS?

Right now I am on a different kind of problem - I don’t have any hard drives to spare (since the manual states that plugging any drive in will result in the drive being formatted), and I’m currently imaging data off one of my hard drives for use in the NAS.

Well, after a hectic schedule in May, I am now finally leaving my current workplace for one nearer to my home in 2 weeks’ time. Will miss the times spent here, and the interaction with friends and fellow colleagues there.

The last month has been extremely tiring, as the school assignment workload was very heavy, and coffee is the staple drink in the morning for the last two weeks of the month. Added to that, the job interviews at different places, and the crazy stuff that I have to do at work is enough to make one feel very frustrated and stressed. On a brighter note, Battlestar Galactica is now shown on Arts Central, but I think borrowing DVDs from the library is faster than waiting one day a week for the show to run, and even then there are censorship issues.

My PSP died on me last week, I’m not sure when though. I took it apart and read through a few guides and found out that my PSP’s power switch seems to be spoilt, and on top of that, the backlight fuse is spoilt. Right now, I’m using a Pandora’s Battery to power on my PSP, with the help of despertar del cementario v5, and a custom configuration file for timemachine that will boot the NAND when I don’t press any button on power up, and Despertar del Cementerio v5 when I press the left shoulder trigger button. Until I get the switch or power board replaced, I have to rely on taking out the battery and putting it back in to power on the PSP.

Nothing much to write about this week. My intensive lectures are finally finishing, and now that I have slightly more time, I can finally start on my school assignments, which are piling up very fast.

I read with disgust at the recent “technology” news reported in the local papers. Movie files containing viruses/trojans? What a joke. It’s more of the media player being poorly coded rather than the movie file.

Went for a BBQ on Saturday night at my friend’s place in the Hillview area. We talked about our experiences in life, had alot of food, and reached home near 1 am after sending home a few of my friends.

I finally decided to take the plunge and modify my K800i’s firmware, since the 1 year warranty is near expiry. I added custom light effects, display driver and camera driver to the internal filesystem. So far the light effects and display driver are fine and are a big improvement from the original one. Now I’m left to test the camera driver, as there isn’t much incentive for me to take pictures with my phone. Will need to upgrade the EROM as well so that I can load a newer firmware rather than just modifying the current one.

Well, this week my PSP’s arrived from the States (just the system and the charger only), and I’ve flashed a custom firmware onto it, and at the same time while flashing the firmware for my two other colleagues at work, I bricked one, which I recovered back successfully (much to the disappointment of him). It wasn’t as scary as I thought, probably due to the maturity of the tools and packaged applications to do the flashing easily. Got a 4GB Sandisk Memory Stick Pro Duo with a 2-in-1 USB transfer and charger cable and a black slip-on case with strap at Comics Connection at Woodlands. Total cost: <$200 Singapore dollars. Currrently I’m playing Patapon and Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core. got I got to play with my colleague’s Dell x50v and flashed it to Windows Mobile 6. Seems that WPA-PSK is buggy in the current latest ROM, so he’ll probably have to use a third-party client to connect to a WPA-PSK network.

At work, it’s really been a horrible week, especially with the future rollout of the new in-house web-based “helpdesk” system, which I think is going to waste even more of my working time handling beureaucratic nonsense blindly thrown by the management. Additionally, I feel more and more like a personal assistant to someone on top of my own duties. This has got to stop.

Finally after a year’s worth of deliberation, I have started to work on the Macs at my workplace - firstly I needed to find the best Macs, which are the Power Mac G5s, and did a full clean install on the Mac, followed by the software updates and whatever the school can get for free and has already purchased. The initial plunge was a little bit difficult, but I eased into the Mac’s interface by using the help system to look for keyboard shortcuts. My overall impression - very easy to use and pleasing on the eye. The only bad thing is that it is getting addictive - the more I use the Mac, the more inclined I am to continue using it. And before any fanatical Mac user complains about the picture, let me explain - I’m using QEmu to run Windows in fullscreen mode when I took the picture, and later on found out that Windows runs like a snail, and subsequently trashed QEmu and the disk images.

One thing I learnt from this is that you can “cheat” the Adobe CS3 Production Premium installation complaint of not enough RAM (1GB for Mac, and 2GB for Windows) by “borrowing” RAM from another Mac/PC and then installing it, after which the RAM can be replaced back. Another gripe about CS3 is that the Premiere Pro, Soundbooth and Encore cannot be installed on a PowerPC - thankfully their replacements can be easily found with iLife (iMovie HD, GarageBand and iDVD). The disk image takes up about 20GBs, and hopefully when I do the cloning from a G5 to a G4, it boots. Hopefully I’ll have some time to write an article on how to do disk cloning in Mac someday.

There wasn’t really anything much happening last week, besides from the fact that Team Singapore visited my workplace. Although I got the chance to eat clean food (cornflake and blueberry & wheat cereal with milk and fruits) for lunch, the entire school was thrown to chaos. In the end, some of the netballers had to clean up the library before they leave, and so they helped out the few poor councillors who were there in the library on duty for that day in mopping the floor, wiping the tables and clearing up the leftovers.

Had a gathering on Saturday - nearly all of the guys from my platoon came down to eat at Chong Pang Market in the afternoon. Had a bowl of fishball noodles and TY2PS (汤圆 $2 花生汤). Sadly, we all forgot to take pictures before we left, if not, it would have been nice to happen across the photo one day and remember the good times.

Due to the Chinese New Year celebrations at my workplace this Wednesday and the 2-day holiday on Thursday and Friday, I had to clear a lot of work on Monday and Tuesday, so that on Wednesday I could relax and basically do nothing.

I made a reservation for my name on an ice-cream stick with one of the students’ classes on Monday and collected it on Wednesday. Also tried out chocolate fondue at the Chinese New Year bazaar, where classes set up their booths to sell stuff. Wanted to buy lime ice-cream from one class but they were sold out. Sad. Saw another class doing a remote-control car racing track and the person with the best timing got a soft toy as a prize. Beside the stall was an empty booth, and some crazy students from one of the CCAs that were supposedly on “duty” to take video clips and pictures of the event tried to sell freshly-dug rocks from the school grounds.

After the event, some of the students asked me out for a bowling session at Orchid Country Club,  so I agreed. Got a lift to Northpoint Shopping Centre from a colleague and as usual, the students were late by 45 minutes or so. I took a walk around the shopping complex while waiting for them, and bought a $69 Kingston 4GB Class 4 SDHC card (which I feel I was ripped off), and a $2.22 T5 screwdriver so that I can ‘zhng’ my PDA, as the internal backup battery is spoilt, and the battery latch problem as well.

After finally meeting up with the students and taking the shuttle bus to OCC, we played one match there, while I ate my $5.50 curry rice. Not bad for someone who rarely bowls, I spared one rack and striked two. However, I ‘longkanged’ two as well, so overall my placing was 3rd out of 4 players.

I left OCC via the shuttle bus at about 2.30pm, and bumped into another student I know at the bus-stop. Since she was waiting for the rest of the students (who are waiting for a car driven by the aunt of one of the students), I accompanied her until they reached the bus-stop. They accompanied me in turn to wait for 852 at the bus interchange, since I wanted to see the route that 852 travels to reach Bukit Batok, and reached home at about 3.50pm.

As usual every year, went to visit relatives on 初一, and slacked at home on the second day, trying to figure out how to finish my university assignment. The most irritating part about the software is that there are not many tutorials which are updated to use the latest game engine, and also the documentation in the help file does not help much. If I can’t even figure out how to code properly, then what will become of the rest of the course, and my team? This does not bode well for everyone.

Finally, I went to Mrs Wee’s place on Saturday, and got tricked by the weather in coming to her house early. However, arriving early was good - Mrs Wee highlighted that her son’s computer has a problem whereby it will automatically power off by itself randomly. I suspected that the thermal paste between the CPU and the heat sink has dried up, so I tried running Orthos Prime and SpeedFan to monitor the CPU temperature. Once it exceeded 72 degrees, it powered off by itself. By this time, my secondary school friends had arrived, so I put the thought of going online to check the specification for the thermal limitation for the AMD Athlon 64 till I get home.

After the visit at Mrs Wee’s, we went to West Mall for our dinner at Mayim. Thanks to the Chinese New Year goodies eaten at Mrs Wee’s we only ate about $10 worth of food. After the dinner we headed to The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for coffee, while three of my friends went up to get tickets for 功夫篮球. We chatted for quite some time until it was 15 minutes till the movie started, and headed up to the cineplex. Overall it wasn’t such a good movie. Although direction, pacing and story were good, there’s too many subplots, which the movie failed to close, and thus, I felt that it was a bit rushed.

Hopefully, next week I won’t be so busy, as the major assignment due date is approaching, coupled with the irritating lab-based assignments for another module. Its going to be an important week as well, as my future job prospect is going to be decided. What a way to start the Lunar New Year, eh?

Last week, I cloned 40 tablet PCs for use - however great the tablet is, it doesn’t work because of the poor wireless infrastructure at my workplace, the wireless Zerg rush ultimately caused a few access points to hang (since they’re not enterprise grade access points), and thus required manual resets. I always push the point that no matter how fast is your computer or how good is the software, rule number one is to have proper infrastructure in the first place - a few rooms here are not set up properly for power and network access points, thus giving us headaches in setting up computers for the various departments.

I’ve also managed to do a GUI-based comparison script which takes in a CSV file with usernames and compares them to the Active Directory server - I’ve managed to get the comparison working, now I’m left with the user home directory comparison and reverse comparing the Active Directory users with the CSV file to see if there are any unused accounts not deleted on the server

These few days are so calm, it feels like its the calm before the storm - alot of my university assignments are due next week, and I have not even finished them all -this means that my Chinese New Year will probably be burnt on doing the assignments.

Seems that I’m more or less confirmed to go in as an ICT Executive by my new workplace…problem now is to prepare the letters to be sent to HR and colleagues at my current workplace.