High-Tech Rojak

Reading

2009-07-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

I haven't read a good fiction for a long time. It was the 'usual resistance' (tm) like I'm too busy, I have no time, I've got better things to do and stuff. But last week I've finally decided enough is enough. I've got to get a more balanced and less (much less) critical view of my life. So I picked up a book at Carrefour for 5 Ringgit (LOL... even then I didn't want to invest too much into something which I considered as 'a waste of my time'). The book was 'Isle Of Joy' by Don Winslow. It was only 296 pages but took me a week to finish. Just last night I've finally finished it.

The book is about a Private Investigator by the name of William Withers who was assigned as a body guard for the young presidential hopeful Senator Joe Keneally. Things went wrong and the Senator's girlfriend got killed and everyone was trying to pin it on Withers. With his cool charm and sharp wit he handled it all. The book started off pretty slow at first. But once it picked up pace it was a very nice read.

But what I actually liked most was the effect of reading the book on me. I haven't exercised my imagination for quite a long time. And to see the action in the eyes of my mind (as compared to the eyes in my head), it was great. It made me more relaxed as my mind loosened and didn't grip too much on whatever problems I was working on. And I think this is actually important and rather than being a 'waste of my time', it was a pretty 'good use of my time'. Not sure when I might just pick up another random book to start reading, but I'm hoping it'd been soon.

Testing out Chromium

2009-06-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Finally I had time to install the AUR version of Chromium from the Chromium linux build. And it is running ever so sweetly on my Arch Linux... :D Been waiting for this for such a long time. Now it's not even close to being complete yet but it is usable enough for just normal browsing the web. The biggest thing not done yet? Flash... Yup.. No youtube or even fancy in browser multiple file select upload for flickr. Not yet anyway. But apart from that it's GREAT!!! :D

Of course I had to try the standard fare. Gmail & GDocs of course works flawlessly. I was even able to login to Maybank2u (yup.. full https here baby. Not like if you run it under wine). And facebook works too. Normal browsing of web pages and planets of course work. Even dragging out the tab works. That was very-very cool. Only thing is that if you have 2 windows open, and one of them have only 1 tab, don't drag that single tab out to the next window. It would not close it gracefully yet and crash the whole thing. Bookmark manager doesn't seem to show anything for now (I guess not implemented yet). But you can already import all your bookmarks from Firefox. And that's good enough for me to make this the browser of choice for normal web browsing. Of course Firefox would still be my favourite for dev work mainly because of Firebug and of course in Firefox you can watch youtube.. :P

Some of the other quirks that I can really feel is the whole dragging text and middle click paste and all doesn't work. But that's pretty minor. You can still right click copy paste. All in all it's pretty fast pretty nice looking. Good job Google (as if they need me to tell them that.. :P).

Buildout with python2.4

2009-06-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

I've got to write this down before I forget. With the newer distros, python 2.5 or 2.6 is the default python version of choice. But plone and zope currently still use python 2.4. And if you want buildout goodness you have to get buildout working with python 2.4. So if you're on ubuntu, first install these packages:


python2.4
python2.4-dev

And then google for ez_setup.py. Download it. Then run in your terminal:


abdullah@codebase:/$ sudo python2.4 ez_setup.py

That would install the 2.4 version of easy_install. Then to install buildout you just have to do like so:


abdullah@codebase:/$ sudo easy_install-2.4 zc.buildout

That would install buildout into your system. And then inside your plone or zope folder run:


abdullah@codebase:~/taskmanager$ buildout init

That would create a local instance of buildout for you to run specifically for your app. All eggs will be downloaded into that folder and would not pollute your system. To run the app specific buildout just do a :


abdullah@codebase:~/taskmanager$ bin/buildout -vvvv

That would run the local buildout. I just like it very very very very verbose.. :P

update: Sarogini found a link which deals with the problem of developing plone on ubuntu 9.04 in a more comprehensive manner here.

More browsers

2009-06-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

As a web application developer, one of the more annoying things that have to be done is to test out workflow and permissions of the system, thus requiring to login as one user, do a certain action, then login as another user, do whatever action that other user can now do. This is extremely tedious if you are only using 1 web browser since even though you can open many windows or many tabs, they will share the same cache and thus login only 1 user per site. So I like installing many web browsers and running them at the same time being logged in as different users.

Usually I like the other browsers pretty light because I just need the basics. So the alternative browser of choice is usually epihany. But recently I stumbled upon this article which talked about the midori web browser. I immediately installed it and tried it out. It is very fast and very light. Flash sites like youtube works. Even heavy ajax sites like gmail, gdocs and facebook works. And most importantly, maybank2u works too.. :)

So now I've got a new favourite alternative browser..

Things have been happening

2009-06-05T06:18:00.001-07:00

A lot of things have been happening lately. This week tops it off with the MSC Open Source Conference (mscosconf). I was there for only 1 day (monday) but really felt the open source scene was coming alive here in Malaysia. Open Malaysia blogged about it already. And since I wasn't involved very much with it, I'll just leave it at that I am very happy with the overall direction we're going in Malaysia in regards to open source and hope that it will only get better and better (prep yourselves for foss.my 2009 and MyGOSSCON 2009.. Coming soon and it's gonna ROCK.. :D )

I was lucky enough to also be around for the lauching of OSDC.my dinner. Tun M was there and everything (first time I've seen him 'live' in person so that was fun). I'm not sure yet exactly what's the direction that osdc.my is going to take. Again I hope it would be successful at gathering the strength of all the various open source developers community we have here in Malaysia (you know, the whole single straw and many straw thing).

I was also fortunate enough to be able to join this month foss.my meetup at MSC Malaysia Cybercentre - Incubation Centre, KL Sentral. Talk about google's use of python by Anthony Baxter. That was very fun. Yay for python.. \o/ Shame that I was pretty tired and blur blur at that time till I wasn't able to ask any questions or participate much in the discussions. But it was still great fun.

So now it's already the end of the week. I'm taking some time out for a while writing out this blog and just chillin out. Things have been pretty hectic lately and I fully expect things to get much more worse before it get better.

/me praying for the best...

Installing OpenOffice 3.1.0

2009-05-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

Finally there is a need for me to actually install the latest version of OpenOffice.org. To do it first install the ppa by adding the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

And then you need to get the key for that ppa by running the command:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xd2bb86e0ebd0f0a43d4db3a760d11217247d1cff

After that a quick update to update the list of packages:


sudo apt-get update

And then I actually had to remove my old OpenOffice manually because it refused to upgrade it when I ran:


sudo apt-get upgrade

So to remove the old OpenOffice I did:


sudo apt-get remove --purge openoffice.org

And only after that I installed it again:


sudo apt-get install openoffice.org

Now it's ready to be tried out. Hope it all works.

p/s: Yeah. I'm still on Hardy. You should change that for you ppa if you are using intrepid or jaunty.

Just some thoughts

2009-05-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

April 24th was the date of my last post. That means I have officially missed last week. Didn't post anything at all. So in the end it's lucky when I actually get to write something once a week. At least that would keep my writing skill in practice.

So what have I been up to all this time? Well, around two weeks ago I actually got to try KMS (kernel mode setting). High resolution terminal from the beginning FTW!!!. No flicker at all when logging into X and it even seems a whole lot faster too. But in the end I opt out because it requires acceleration to be enabled and when I do that, my poor onboard 915 display card just couldn't cope with anything beyond 2048x2048. I needed 2300x800 to stretch over two monitors to be able to work productively so I had to disable it.

Apart from that there wasn't much else about open source that's worth while mentioning. Oh yeah... there was the buzz about the MSC Malaysia OSCONF 2009. You can check it out more here and here. Kinda ironic for me actually the whole thing. Because (and this is from my personal point of view since working at oscc) I was first exposed to Open Source conference by the government of Malaysia with MyGOSCON 2007. Then there was the very cool and very happening community conference Foss.my 2008 (which was held just a few days after MyGOSCON 2008 - the second government conference). And now coming into the ring, conference by the business community.. jeng.. jeng.. jeng.. OSCONF 2009. And the community seems to be buzzing about geekcamp too around that time. So looks like the open source scenario in Malaysia is coming alive with activity. I like this.. :D Change is coming.. :)

Configuring webdav and effective user in plone-buildout

2009-04-24T00:29:00.000-07:00

If you installed Plone 3.x from their universal installer, there is a default buildout.cfg provided. Edit this to installed cool additional packages and just run `bin/buildout`. It will download whatever you need and then ready to be up and running again. The buildout will override your zope.conf so if you want any settings to persist in your zope.conf it should be put into your buildout.cfg.

Inside the buildout.cfg there is section for client1 and client2 if you installed the default cluster settings. So to configure the effective user for client1 (so that root can start the instance) you should add:


effective-user = plone

in the client1 section. And inside client2 section you can just add:


effective-user = ${client1:effective-user}

so that you don't have to edit at 2 places later. And do you want to enable webdav with that? Then just add:


zope-conf-additional =
                       enable-ms-author-via on
                       <webdav-source-server>
                       address localhost:1980
                       force-connection-close off
                       </webdav-source-server>

in the client sections. All done.

The art of writing

2009-04-14T19:21:00.001-07:00

I've always considered myself more of a coder than a documenter (if there is such a word). I like writing codes but I hate writing about them. I do write about it once in a while in a blog or something if it's something especially hard and I might have to refer about doing it again but usually I'll just file it in my head as "ooooh.. I can look it up later if I REALLY need it". So some of the stuff that I really hate to write up are user manuals and requirement specs.

Now I've been burned enough times to know that requirement specs are really crucial to a successful software project. If the user does not know what they want, then you'll soon be sucked into the black hole of "user wants" pretty soon and it would take a whole lot of thick face justifying yourself just to save your sanity much less the project. But even then, I'm still very much unmotivated to do it. One of the reasons is that it is so bland and boring. Boring to write, boring to read. And finally nobody would refer to it. But recently I read that you should strive to make it enjoyable to read. Maybe even funny. And I was awestruck. A funny user requirement specs, that'd be awesome. :)

If you know me personally, I think you'd agree I try very very hard to be funny. Is it difficult to be funny? Hmmm.. I practice a lot and still sometimes it's just flat out come out flat. So I guess it's pretty hard. But you know what's even harder? Just becoming consistent in the discipline of writing. Ok.. maybe for me at least, being consistent in being disciplined in anything at all.. :P

I have this blog right here, and I retain the rights to say whatever I want on it, and I could practice my writing skills every single day if I wanted to, but I know that would never happen (yeah... I hear your sighs of relieve for not needing to read my rants everyday). Because I know I'd never be able to stick to it. Maybe once a week, maybe, but anything more than that would be nigh impossible.

You know what's another funny thing about writing in blogs? I used to write without a care in the world because I know nobody is going to read it. But since I know people know of it, and read it, and some even kind enough to leave comments in it, my mindset changed. I write as if I'm writing for an audience. Oh I know it's all my fault, that it is all in my mind, but I can't help it. That's how I feel about it. I don't think it's a bad thing, only that it sometimes makes me take a longer time to write it up. I think more about the words and composition, think more about how the references have to be right, think more about making it acceptable. So in the end, all the speed you get practicing touch typing for hours and hours becomes moot because you just sit there in front of the monitor for 5 minutes to write a single sentence. Of course once the idea comes rampaging through you're glad you can type pretty fast, but most of the time, you're no faster than a 'hunt and peck'er. Oh well... that's all for now I guess. See you again next week, same time, same place.. ta.. ta.. :D

Joke's on you

2009-04-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

I'm a Fedora ambassador, I recommend people to use Ubuntu, but I myself use Arch Linux. I'm not sure what that makes me.. :P But I love using Arch. It is lean, mean and geared towards the more tinkering inclined in the sense that almost everything is default and you have to hand configure yourself... with a text editor :D

So it was really sad for me last week to read that they are going to drop support for the i686. For a whole week I was contemplating which distro would I go to now? I really like Arch's way of a rolling update. Not waiting for a certain dateline but get the newest thing as soon as it's ready. But after reading that news I am concerned because I don't think my laptop support x86_64 (Haven't tried it yet though, but it's a really old laptop). And not only that, if one day I am fortunate enough to get myself a netbook of my own, I doubt those small atomic chips support 64bit either. So where should I go? My choice was 2. Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't tried the latest (Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10) but heard they have quite a lot of great new stuff. Fedora 10 even boots faster too. I'm still contemplating...

Then today I read this news. I was dumb struck. It's all an april fools joke? Wow.. they even mentioned about it in the forums and everything. I really thought it was real. But I'm glad it's not... :D So now I can be rest assured I can still use my favourite distro for quite a long while to come. I'm such an idiot.. :P Kudos to all the Arch Linux dev for pulling off such a convincing trick. And next time I'll be more careful to wait for a few days to confirm news heard on the 1st of April.. :D

So finally I guess the joke's on me.. :)

Starting a script after NetworkManager

2009-03-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

I need to access a VPN. But to be able to start the VPN I need a network connection. How to know when NetworkManager has already created your connection? By refering to here, you can add scripts into the /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d to be run by network manager everytime an interface go up or down.


#!/bin/bash

IF=$1
STATUS=$2

if [ "$STATUS" = "up" ]; then
    /etc/rc.d/openvpn start
else
    /etc/rc.d/openvpn stop
fi

So that openvpn will start straight away whenever any interface (IF) has the status up.

Lesson learned

2009-02-18T16:15:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just wonder, am I an idiot or just stupid. Last night was so bad I feel I've got to write something about it so that I'll never forget and repeat the same mistake again.

Yesterday was my birthday, and my lovely wife decided she wants to take me out for dinner. When I asked where, she asked me to choose. My first mistake, I didn't decide something that I KNOW would be good. I'm not a choosy eater. I eat almost anything that's halal (almost.. things like tapai and tempoyak have a way of making me not really want to eat them.. :P). So anything like going to Nandos, Kenny Rogers, Pizza Hut, McDonanlds or even the Utama restaurant at Desa Serdang would have all been good. But I was undecided. Rather than picking something I know I like I said 'Why don't we drive around at Bangi and see what might be good to eat?'. And since she's adamant about me choosing the place she accepted the idea. Why I didn't choose anything that I already know I'll like? I have no idea.. Maybe wanted something different?

So anyway we ended up going to this restaurant called 'Selatern & Western'. I saw the shop around a year ago and it was pretty empty then but of course that shop lot just opened so maybe there wasn't much customers yet. But when we came there yesterday it was pretty empty still, that should have sent me a warning like a shot to the head. But did I heed that warning? Oh no.. I thought lets give it a chance... (maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist?).

Then when we decided to order my wife asked our waiter "What's the oriental squid?" and guess what his answer was? "I don't know. I've just worked here. Sometimes reading the menu even I don't know what's on it". I should have walked out there and then. I really should have. So after looking up at the menu I decided to order Set B (it was something like siakap 3 rasa, ayam goreng kunyit, kangkong belacan, tomyam) but the set was for 2 pax. There was 4 of us. So I said to the guy we want portions for 4 pax but only 1 fish. Lucky my wife persuaded me to go check out the order again at the kitchen because that guy didn't understand a thing and might have actually gave us everything double (including 2 fish rather than 1). So much bother. At that time the realization of my mistake started to dawn but I was too chicken shit to walk out since I've already ordered.

Then the food came. The food wasn't all that good. And the worst part was that the watermelon juice was already turning a bit sour. Uh oh.. My heart was breaking. My poor wife basically wasted her money completely. None of us enjoyed the food. Fatimah even threw up because she chocked on a piece of chicken (granted that's our own fault for giving her too big a piece but we didn't realize it then because we were kinda depressed by then). And by this morning we all had stomach ache.

What a night.. :(
Happy birthday to me.. happy birthday to me.. happy birthday damn lucky guy with a nice wife.. happy birthday to me...

Running dosemu in Ubuntu Intrepid

2009-01-11T03:13:00.000-08:00

dosemu is a great little program to use to keep all those old legacy dos programs you might still use running even in this modern day and age. But in Ubuntu 8.10 (or Xubuntu 8.10 for that matter), running `dosemu` right after installation will give a


LOMRAM mmap: Invalid argument
Segmentation fault

error. Based on the steps written here, you need to edit (with sudo of course) the file '/etc/sysctl.d/90-low-memory-access.conf' (the file might not exist yet, so just create it if it doesn't exist) and add in the line:


vm.mmap_min_addr=0

and then run


sudo invoke-rc.d procps start

Then you are all set. Now you can even run those old dos games of your misty youth or even some old dbase accounting programs if that's what you're into.. ;)

Oh yeah.. and another thing, printing works almost out of the box. Configure your ubuntu box with a default printer and even 'shift-print screen' will work. How cool is that? :D

Tabs in urxvt

2009-01-10T07:31:00.000-08:00

Finally had it with opening with so many urxvt windows, I finally googled for 'urxvt tabs' and found http://princ3.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/unicode-terminal-with-tabs-support/. It is only a minimalistic tab (you can't move it around or anything) but it's all that I need. Just run 'urxvt -pe tabbed' and you're good to go. Press Ctrl-Shift-Down Arrow to create a new tab, Ctrl-Shift-Left and Ctrl-Shift-Right to move to previous and next tab. Simple.

As the Arabs see the Jews: His Majesty King Abdullah, The American Magazine, November 1947

2009-01-09T07:06:00.000-08:00

This e-mail was forwarded to me from a friend. It is most enlightening
considering the current situation in Palestine.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi guys,

In light of the recent Gaza invasion by the Israeli Armies, I would
like to share with you a letter originally written by King Abdullah,
grandfather to King Hussein, the present King of Jordan.

I have decided in my conscious mind to forward this mail to you
regardless your religion, nationality nor creed.

This piece of thought provoking letter is rather long to read, having
read it myself I find that it is absolutely worth more than your
average tea time. This Article is sourced from
<http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/kabd_eng.html>

*******************************************************

Summary

This fascinating essay, written by King Hussein's grandfather King
Abdullah, appeared in the United States six months before the 1948
Arab-Israeli War. In the article, King Abdullah disputes the mistaken
view that Arab opposition to Zionism (and later the state of Israel)
is because of longstanding religious or ethnic hatred. He notes that
Jews and Muslims enjoyed a long history of peaceful coexistence in the
Middle East, and that Jews have historically suffered far more at the
hands of Christian Europe. Pointing to the tragedy of the holocaust
that Jews suffered during World War II, the monarch asks why America
and Europe are refusing to accept more than a token handful of Jewish
immigrants and refugees. It is unfair, he argues, to make Palestine,
which is innocent of anti-Semitism, pay for the crimes of Europe. King
Abdullah also asks how Jews can claim a historic right to Palestine,
when Arabs have been the overwhelming majority there for nearly 1300
uninterrupted years? The essay ends on an ominous note, warning of
dire consequences if a peaceful solution cannot be found to protect
the rights of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine.

*************************************************************************

"As the Arabs see the Jews"
His Majesty King Abdullah,
The American Magazine
November, 1947

I am especially delighted to address an American audience, for the
tragic problem of Palestine will never be solved without American
understanding, American sympathy, American support.

So many billions of words have been written about Palestine—perhaps
more than on any other subject in history—that I hesitate to add to
them. Yet I am compelled to do so, for I am reluctantly convinced that
the world in general, and America in particular, knows almost nothing
of the true case for the Arabs.

We Arabs follow, perhaps far more than you think, the press of
America. We are frankly disturbed to find that for every word printed
on the Arab side, a thousand are printed on the Zionist side.

There are many reasons for this. You have many millions of Jewish
citizens interested in this question. They are highly vocal and wise
in the ways of publicity. There are few Arab citizens in America, and
we are as yet unskilled in the technique of modern propaganda.

The results have been alarming for us. In your press we see a horrible
caricature and are told it is our true portrait. In all justice, we
cannot let this pass by default.

Our case is quite simple: For nearly 2,000 years Palestine has been
almost 100 per cent Arab. It is still preponderantly Arab today, in
spite of enormous Jewish immigration. But if this immigration
continues we shall soon be outnumbered—a minority in our home.

Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your
state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already
we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews.
We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more.

Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should
even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America
take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them,
but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but
because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands
of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or
Brazilians or whatever.

Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our
entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the
equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country,
over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to
that?

Because of our perfectly natural dislike of being overwhelmed in our
own homeland, we are called blind nationalists and heartless
anti-Semites. This charge would be ludicrous were it not so dangerous.

No people on earth have been less "anti-Semitic" than the Arabs. The
persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the
Christian nations of the West. Jews, themselves, will admit that never
since the Great Dispersion did Jews develop so freely and reach such
importance as in Spain when it was an Arab possession. With very minor
exceptions, Jews have lived for many centuries in the Middle East, in
complete peace and friendliness with their Arab neighbours.

Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and other Arab centres have always contained
large and prosperous Jewish colonies. Until the Zionist invasion of
Palestine began, these Jews received the most generous treatment—far,
far better than in Christian Europe. Now, unhappily, for the first
time in history, these Jews are beginning to feel the effects of Arab
resistance to the Zionist assault. Most of them are as anxious as
Arabs to stop it. Most of these Jews who have found happy homes among
us resent, as we do, the coming of these strangers.

I was puzzled for a long time about the odd belief which apparently
persists in America that Palestine has somehow "always been a Jewish
land." Recently an American I talked to cleared up this mystery. He
pointed out that the only things most Americans know about Palestine
are what they read in the Bible. It was a Jewish land in those days,
they reason, and they assume it has always remained so.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is absurd to reach so far
back into the mists of history to argue about who should have
Palestine today, and I apologise for it. Yet the Jews do this, and I
must reply to their "historic claim." I wonder if the world has ever
seen a stranger sight than a group of people seriously pretending to
claim a land because their ancestors lived there some 2,000 years ago!

If you suggest that I am biased, I invite you to read any sound
history of the period and verify the facts.

Such fragmentary records as we have indicate that the Jews were
wandering nomads from Iraq who moved to southern Turkey, came south to
Palestine, stayed there a short time, and then passed to Egypt, where
they remained about 400 years. About 1300 BC (according to your
calendar) they left Egypt and gradually conquered most—but not all—of
the inhabitants of Palestine.

It is significant that the Philistines—not the Jews—gave their name to
the country: "Palestine" is merely the Greek form of "Philistia."

Only once, during the empire of David and Solomon, did the Jews ever
control nearly—but not all—the land which is today Palestine. This
empire lasted only 70 years, ending in 926 BC. Only 250 years later
the Kingdom of Judah had shrunk to a small province around Jerusalem,
barely a quarter of modern Palestine.

In 63 BC the Jews were conquered by Roman Pompey, and never again had
even the vestige of independence. The Roman Emperor Hadrian finally
wiped them out about 135 AD. He utterly destroyed Jerusalem, rebuilt
under another name, and for hundreds of years no Jew was permitted to
enter it. A handful of Jews remained in Palestine but the vast
majority were killed or scattered to other countries, in the Diaspora,
or the Great Dispersion. From that time Palestine ceased to be a
Jewish country, in any conceivable sense.

This was 1,815 years ago, and yet the Jews solemnly pretend they still
own Palestine! If such fantasy were allowed, how the map of the world
would dance about!

Italians might claim England, which the Romans held so long. England
might claim France, "homeland" of the conquering Normans. And the
French Normans might claim Norway, where their ancestors originated.
And incidentally, we Arabs might claim Spain, which we held for 700
years.

Many Mexicans might claim Spain, "homeland" of their forefathers. They
might even claim Texas, which was Mexican until 100 years ago. And
suppose the American Indians claimed the "homeland" of which they were
the sole, native, and ancient occupants until only some 450 years ago!

I am not being facetious. All these claims are just as valid—or just
as fantastic—as the Jewish "historic connection" with Palestine. Most
are more valid.

In any event, the great Moslem expansion about 650 AD finally settled
things. It dominated Palestine completely. From that day on, Palestine
was solidly Arabic in population, language, and religion. When British
armies entered the country during the last war, they found 500,000
Arabs and only 65,000 Jews.

If solid, uninterrupted Arab occupation for nearly 1,300 years does
not make a country "Arab", what does?

The Jews say, and rightly, that Palestine is the home of their
religion. It is likewise the birthplace of Christianity, but would any
Christian nation claim it on that account? In passing, let me say that
the Christian Arabs—and there are many hundreds of thousands of them
in the Arab World—are in absolute agreement with all other Arabs in
opposing the Zionist invasion of Palestine.

May I also point out that Jerusalem is, after Mecca and Medina, the
holiest place in Islam. In fact, in the early days of our religion,
Moslems prayed toward Jerusalem instead of Mecca.

The Jewish "religious claim" to Palestine is as absurd as the
"historic claim." The Holy Places, sacred to three great religions,
must be open to all, the monopoly of none. Let us not confuse religion
and politics.

We are told that we are inhumane and heartless because do not accept
with open arms the perhaps 200,000 Jews in Europe who suffered so
frightfully under Nazi cruelty, and who even now—almost three years
after war's end—still languish in cold, depressing camps.

Let me underline several facts. The unimaginable persecution of the
Jews was not done by the Arabs: it was done by a Christian nation in
the West. The war which ruined Europe and made it almost impossible
for these Jews to rehabilitate themselves was fought by the Christian
nations of the West. The rich and empty portions of the earth belong,
not to the Arabs, but to the Christian nations of the West.

And yet, to ease their consciences, these Christian nations of the
West are asking Palestine—a poor and tiny Moslem country of the
East—to accept the entire burden. "We have hurt these people
terribly," cries the West to the East. "Won't you please take care of
them for us?"

We find neither logic nor justice in this. Are we therefore "cruel and
heartless nationalists"?

We are a generous people: we are proud that "Arab hospitality" is a
phrase famous throughout the world. We are a humane people: no one was
shocked more than we by the Hitlerite terror. No one pities the
present plight of the desperate European Jews more than we.

But we say that Palestine has already sheltered 600,000 refugees. We
believe that is enough to expect of us—even too much. We believe it is
now the turn of the rest of the world to accept some of them.

I will be entirely frank with you. There is one thing the Arab world
simply cannot understand. Of all the nations of the earth, America is
most insistent that something be done for these suffering Jews of
Europe. This feeling does credit to the humanity for which America is
famous, and to that glorious inscription on your Statue of Liberty.

And yet this same America—the richest, greatest, most powerful nation
the world has ever known—refuses to accept more than a token handful
of these same Jews herself!

I hope you will not think I am being bitter about this. I have tried
hard to understand that mysterious paradox, and I confess I cannot.
Nor can any other Arab.

Perhaps you have been informed that "the Jews in Europe want to go to
no other place except Palestine."

This myth is one of the greatest propaganda triumphs of the Jewish
Agency for Palestine, the organisation which promotes with fanatic
zeal the emigration to Palestine. It is a subtle half-truth, thus
doubly dangerous.

The astounding truth is that nobody on earth really knows where these
unfortunate Jews really want to go!

You would think that in so grave a problem, the American, British, and
other authorities responsible for the European Jews would have made a
very careful survey, probably by vote, to find out where each Jew
actually wants to go. Amazingly enough this has never been done! The
Jewish Agency has prevented it.

Some time ago the American Military Governor in Germany was asked at a
press conference how he was so certain that all Jews there wanted to
go to Palestine. His answer was simple: "My Jewish advisors tell me
so." He admitted no poll had ever been made. Preparations were indeed
begun for one, but the Jewish Agency stepped in to stop it.

The truth is that the Jews in German camps are now subjected to a
Zionist pressure campaign which learned much from the Nazi terror. It
is dangerous for a Jew to say that he would rather go to some other
country, not Palestine. Such dissenters have been severely beaten, and
worse.

Not long ago, in Palestine, nearly 1,000 Austrian Jews informed the
international refugee organisation that they would like to go back to
Austria, and plans were made to repatriate them.

The Jewish Agency heard of this, and exerted enough political pressure
to stop it. It would be bad propaganda for Zionism if Jews began
leaving Palestine. The nearly 1,000 Austrian are still there, against
their will.

The fact is that most of the European Jews are Western in culture and
outlook, entirely urban in experience and habits. They cannot really
have their hearts set on becoming pioneers in the barren, arid,
cramped land which is Palestine.

One thing, however, is undoubtedly true. As matters stand now, most
refugee Jews in Europe would, indeed, vote for Palestine, simply
because they know no other country will have them.

If you or I were given a choice between a near-prison camp for the
rest of our lives—or Palestine—we would both choose Palestine, too.

But open up any other alternative to them—give them any other choice,
and see what happens!

No poll, however, will be worth anything unless the nations of the
earth are willing to open their doors—just a little—to the Jews. In
other words, if in such a poll a Jew says he wants to go to Sweden,
Sweden must be willing to accept him. If he votes for America, you
must let him come in.

Any other kind of poll would be a farce. For the desperate Jew, this
is no idle testing of opinion: this is a grave matter of life or
death. Unless he is absolutely sure that his vote means something, he
will always vote for Palestine, so as not to risk his bird in the hand
for one in the bush.

In any event, Palestine can accept no more. The 65,000 Jews in
Palestine in 1918 have jumped to 600,000 today. We Arabs have
increased, too, but not by immigration. The Jews were then a mere 11
per cent of our population. Today they are one third of it.

The rate of increase has been terrifying. In a few more years—unless
stopped now—it will overwhelm us, and we shall be an important
minority in our own home.

Surely the rest of the wide world is rich enough and generous enough
to find a place for 200,000 Jews—about one third the number that tiny,
poor Palestine has already sheltered. For the rest of the world, it is
hardly a drop in the bucket. For us it means national suicide.

We are sometimes told that since the Jews came to Palestine, the Arab
standard of living has improved. This is a most complicated question.
But let us even assume, for the argument, that it is true. We would
rather be a bit poorer, and masters of our own home. Is this
unnatural?

The sorry story of the so-called "Balfour Declaration," which started
Zionist immigration into Palestine, is too complicated to repeat here
in detail. It is grounded in broken promises to the Arabs—promises
made in cold print which admit no denying.

We utterly deny its validity. We utterly deny the right of Great
Britain to give away Arab land for a "national home" for an entirely
foreign people.

Even the League of Nations sanction does not alter this. At the time,
not a single Arab state was a member of the League. We were not
allowed to say a word in our own defense.

I must point out, again in friendly frankness, that America was nearly
as responsible as Britain for this Balfour Declaration. President
Wilson approved it before it was issued, and the American Congress
adopted it word for word in a joint resolution on 30th June, 1922.

In the 1920s, Arabs were annoyed and insulted by Zionist immigration,
but not alarmed by it. It was steady, but fairly small, as even the
Zionist founders thought it would remain. Indeed for some years, more
Jews left Palestine than entered it—in 1927 almost twice as many.

But two new factors, entirely unforeseen by Britain or the League or
America or the most fervent Zionist, arose in the early thirties to
raise the immigration to undreamed heights. One was the World
Depression; the second the rise of Hitler.

In 1932, the year before Hitler came to power, only 9,500 Jews came to
Palestine. We did not welcome them, but we were not afraid that, at
that rate, our solid Arab majority would ever be in danger.

But the next year—the year of Hitler—it jumped to 30,000! In 1934 it
was 42,000! In 1935 it reached 61,000!

It was no longer the orderly arrival of idealist Zionists. Rather, all
Europe was pouring its frightened Jews upon us. Then, at last, we,
too, became frightened. We knew that unless this enormous influx
stopped, we were, as Arabs, doomed in our Palestine homeland. And we
have not changed our minds.

I have the impression that many Americans believe the trouble in
Palestine is very remote from them, that America had little to do with
it, and that your only interest now is that of a humane bystander.

I believe that you do not realise how directly you are, as a nation,
responsible in general for the whole Zionist move and specifically for
the present terrorism. I call this to your attention because I am
certain that if you realise your responsibility you will act fairly to
admit it and assume it.

Quite aside from official American support for the "National Home" of
the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist settlements in Palestine would
have been almost impossible, on anything like the current scale,
without American money. This was contributed by American Jewry in an
idealistic effort to help their fellows.

The motive was worthy: the result were disastrous. The contributions
were by private individuals, but they were almost entirely Americans,
and, as a nation, only America can answer for it.

The present catastrophe may be laid almost entirely at your door. Your
government, almost alone in the world, is insisting on the immediate
admission of 100,000 more Jews into Palestine—to be followed by
countless additional ones. This will have the most frightful
consequences in bloody chaos beyond anything ever hinted at in
Palestine before.

It is your press and political leadership, almost alone in the world,
who press this demand. It is almost entirely American money which
hires or buys the "refugee ships" that steam illegally toward
Palestine: American money which pays their crews. The illegal
immigration from Europe is arranged by the Jewish Agency, supported
almost entirely by American funds. It is American dollars which
support the terrorists, which buy the bullets and pistols that kill
British soldiers—your allies—and Arab citizens—your friends.

We in the Arab world were stunned to hear that you permit open
advertisements in newspapers asking for money to finance these
terrorists, to arm them openly and deliberately for murder. We could
not believe this could really happen in the modern world. Now we must
believe it: we have seen the advertisements with our own eyes.

I point out these things because nothing less than complete frankness
will be of use. The crisis is too stark for mere polite vagueness
which means nothing.

I have the most complete confidence in the fair-mindedness and
generosity of the American public. We Arabs ask no favours. We ask
only that you know the full truth, not half of it. We ask only that
when you judge the Palestine question, you put yourselves in our
place.

What would your answer be if some outside agency told you that you
must accept in America many millions of utter strangers in your
midst—enough to dominate your country—merely because they insisted on
going to America, and because their forefathers had once lived there
some 2,000 years ago?

Our answer is the same.

And what would be your action if, in spite of your refusal, this
outside agency began forcing them on you?

Ours will be the same.

How open source changed my world view

2009-01-07T16:14:00.000-08:00

I have been using open source software almost exclusively for more than 3 years now. And quite frankly I am very comfortable using it. And not only that but I like seeing how open source software have improved so much in those 3 years. Leaps and bounds ahead. I nearly laughed myself silly when I first saw Windows Vista at Low Yatt and people were looking at it and going "oooh.. aah.. so 3d.." We had compiz even long before that.. :P

Last year I went into one of those now very rare pirate software shops. And looking at the abundant choices of games available I find that I have changed my world view. It used to be that whenever I looked at all those lovely games I'd think "Oh man.. my computer could never run that. I need more RAM, I need a better display card, I need to upgrade my CPU!!!". But this time I didn't even think about that. In fact I was absolutely not interested in the games at all. All that crossed my mind was that "My OS can't even run these". :P

I know we have wine and cedega and all, but there are so many more interesting things to learn and discover in the open source world that I can't even bother to spend time getting games to run, much less play them till finish. And actually if I HAD time I would have spent it making my own games anyway. But I don't have that much time for now.

And then once in a blue moon someone would ask me to install a pirated Windows on their computer. I hate it when this happens. Because especially since Microsoft started with the marking of "Your version of Windows might be pirated" when they update, people tend not to update. But then that would cause more problems because they would be exposed to all kinds of exploits and problems. I just wish these people would just move on to Linux and forget all these problems. No more trying to download drives because they lost the CD's a long time ago problem, no more have to reformat because computer starting to slow down problem, no more lost data because of virus problems. Just no problems. Either that or learn about computers yourself enough till you don't need me to install the *&$!@*#&! pirated Windows for you. Or buy an original one if you really need your Windows fix.

All said and done, I no longer beleive that Windows is easier than Linux. My world view has changed permanently and I think it has changed for the better.

First post for 2009. Wohooo!! \o/

A year to remember - 2008

2008-12-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

I have spent at least 10 minutes thinking of an opening for this blog post. And no matter what I write it just doesn't do justice. 2008 was probably the most meaningful year of my life. Full of cherished memories and new experiences. There was a lot of very high highs and some very low lows.. And I'd like to think it all made me a better person today. So what happened in the year 2008?

Fatimah... :) My daughter was born on 14th January. Since she's my second child, there wasn't as much anticipation and anxiety as Muhammad. But there was still a lot. And we even had a false alarm a few weeks before. Now she's almost 1 year old and she's already babbling baby talk. Babbling a LOT of baby talk. It's so cute.. :) Sometimes even when times are really trying, just looking at her smile makes it all okay. But of course when she's crying, and double that with her brother.. fuh.. fuh.. :P

My wife's grandmother passed away on 21st June. It was a pretty big blow on my wife as they were very close since her grandmother was the one that raised her up. It was on days like this I missed the days of doing my own thing with Abdullah Solutions. I would have given myself a week off just to be with my wife no question asked. And actually I almost did but of course that ate away most of my emergency leave reserves.

But for most parts things happened around OSCC. And mostly it had something to do with mymeeting. My talks about mymeeting continued. So after the first one given at the MyGOSSCON 2007, there was a seminar at Putrajaya, Miri, Langkawi, Terengganu. At all those seminars I had to talk about mymeeting. Mostly I do not like to travel and leave my family behind. So I really didn't want to go to Miri, Langkawi and Terengganu. But the big boss insist and finally I just tag along. I'm glad I did. Especially for Miri and Langkawi. At Miri we stayed at the Marriot Hotel and the food was EXCELLENT. Actually that's my most memorable thing there. Having roast lamb even at breakfast. OMG!!! And Langkawi was super fun with the whole gang there. I've never been to Langkawi before so even the cable car ride and the trip to the mangrove forest shall be cherised memories forever.. :D
And of course mymeeting also won AIPA (Anugerah Inovasi Perkhidmatan Awam) award. We submitted it for AIPA and APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Award) actually and both of them caused a lot of late nights and the big boss treating us for dinner. But finally it paid off once mymeeting won AIPA. It would have been great if it won APICTA too but that might be a little bit out of our league for now. So finally I'm able to write, one of the developers of an award winning system, in my resume.

Then there was MyGOSSCON 2008. Ugh.. had a hard time calling some of the speakers assigned to me. But in the end it was okay and all went pretty smoothly. But after MyGOSSCON, came the most AWESOME conference I had ever been to. FOSS.MY.
Again I was invited as a speaker for mymeeting. Because I didn't have enough time to prepare anything beforehand (I deciced I can't use the slides for the OSCC seminars as they were all for the government post. It would have bore the pants off the participants from the community). So I made some last minutes changes and turned it into sharing the experiences we had learned in developing mymeeting rather than just a boring intro to mymeeting. Foss.my was awesome and it's very enjoyable to meet like minded people who loves open source. Even got to know some of the international speakers (Pia Waugh and Pamela Fox especially). Got me all revved up about contributing more for the local open source scene. It was great.

Overall I enjoyed 2008 and I like to thank all the people who made it special, my family, the app team (Eavay, Saro, Nuhaa and Mr Foong), all the staff of OSCC, all the organizing team members of foss.my and all the people who has made a diffence. Thank you all. Thank you.

Laptop Reborn

2008-12-26T16:05:00.001-08:00

snapshot-20081227
Originally uploaded by Abdullah Zainul Abidin

Maybe it was the limited 512MB ram, maybe it was the rather slow Celeron 1.5 GHz processor, maybe because I didn't spend time tweaking it, whichever way it was my old laptop was really crawling under Fedora 9. Hearing that Fedora 10 is so much faster I was kind of tempted to try it out. But when I think back I haven't got much time to upgrade and tweak my laptop all the time, I decided to just go the bare minimum way. I decided to go back to Arch Linux. Back home.. :) It'll take some time to get it exactly right, but I know once it's exactly how I like it, it can stay that way for a very very long time but still updated due to Arch rolling release life cycle.

So I wanted something light. Very light. If possible no Gnome or KDE. So that's what I've got myself.. :D Installed xorg with Openbox. Fuh.. now finally my laptop loads under 1 minute again. In the end my desktop consist of openbox for window manager, wicd as network manager, docker as a dock manager, lal as clock in the dock, volwheel for a mixer, pcmanfm as the file manager and urxvt as a terminal emulator.

Learned quite a few stuff too while looking for the lightest software to run. One of them being audacious. I hate xmms. But I don't want to install amarok or even rhythmbox neither due to their rather heavy kde and gnome reliance. So after googling through the arch linux forums I found audacious. It uses gtk+ so selecting which files to play looks very good but still kept very lean and mean.

Another suprising discovery was wicd. I wanted a good network manager. I must admit gnome-networkmanager spoiled me a bit and I don't really want to have to go through the whole iwlist and iwconfig route anymore. Again the arch forums gave a hint about wicd. The interface is drop dead ugly compared to gnome-networkmanager but it works quite well. It automatically detects wifi ap and connects to them once the profile has been created. And since most of the time it just sits in the dock so you forget about the ugly interface after a while. At least till the next time you have to create another profile.. :P

I found out even the gnome-terminal has spoiled me a bit too. Now xterm looks pretty ugly to me. The fonts are so retro. I want beatifully rendered anti-aliased fonts. Again the arch forums and wiki came to the rescue and pointed me in the direction of rxvt-unicode. It can do a lot of other stuff apart from anti-aliased font (like unicode, transparency, and lots of other stuff) but I don't really need them all that much. I just need to be looking at smooth curves all the time. That's all... :D

So finally now my laptop is able to load up fully in under 1 minute and running everything I need to do my job, even mysqld and httpd. I'm happy.. till next time.. ;)

No Sound From Dell Inspiron Mini using Ubuntu

2008-12-21T06:33:00.000-08:00

Bless my mom. Even after a few weeks of using ubuntu on her Dell, she didn't realize that it cannot produce any sound at all. Recently my father was complaining about the windows on his Dell too, so he too wanted me to install ubuntu on it. Since now I've got a little bit more time on my hand, I wanted to do a proper job with all the codecs and flashplugin installed and everything.

But after installing flash, going to youtube I realized, "Hey, this thing is not making any sound at all". So after much googling, I came to find out that I have to add the following line to the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file:


options snd-hda-intel model=dell

Once I've rebooted there was a new option in the mixer(Speaker). Just have to max that up and finally we have sound.. foss ftw :)

MyMeeting, Ubuntu Netbook and other stuff

2008-12-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of things happening for the past month or so until I've been so busy I didn't get the time to update my blog properly and even if I had the time I'd rather use it to sleep to get back my energy. Anyhow things are much calmer now and let me take this opportunity to say a few things.. :)

First off the bat, MyMeeting has won an AIPA (Anugerah Inovasi Perkhidmatan Awam) and it was awarded by The Pak Lah himself (some people call me Pak Lah too but this is the real Pak Lah, the one that's running this country. I don't wish to run this country.. :P) at the AKSA (Anugerah Kecemerlangan Sektor Awam) 2008 on 27th November 2008. Check out some of the pictures of the OSCC booth on that day here.

I guess I'm pretty proud that it won that award. Now I can write on my resume, one of the developers of an award winning system.. :) LOL.. somehow I like the sound of that.. :P Whichever way it is, it has drawn quite a lot of attention to MyMeeting. And finally we get feedback from users.. Yay.. \o/ And thus why I've been so busy. MyMeeting has been developed quite a lot since then and finally I think I can be truly proud of it. Most of the features that I've been saying it has but wasn't actually implemented is now implemented.. >.< You can check it out at the MyMeeting trac.

Apart from that, quite recently (as in around 3 weeks ago), I've bought for my parents Dell Mini Inspiron 9. So one for my father, one for my mother (using their money of course.. :P). The funny thing was that my mother's mini just kept on having problems. It wouldn't shut down properly so suddenly you find that it's battery has been completely drained. It sometimes wouldn't detect the mouse. But my father's one was a-okay. My mom asked me to fix it. What was my answer? "You know you wouldn't have this problem if it was running linux rather than windows xp :P"... So she agreed to let me install Linux on it.. \o/

So I went out to buy an external DVD drive (I know there's ways to install it using usb pendrive and all but I need an external DVD drive anyway.. :P) and promptly installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it. I've read that because the SSD have limited amount of write cycles you should limit the amount of writing to it as much as possible. So rather than formatting the hard disk with an ext3 that has journaling (and thus more writes for every file operation) I opted to use ext2. Some people would also suggest not to have a swap partition as there would be lots of writes there too. But I've read somewhere else that most of the time you don't use enough memory to require a swap if you've got 1GB of ram (which the Dell Mini has) and thus wouldn't use it even if it's there making it okay to create a swap partition. But I didn't create a swap partition because what's the point. If you want to create a swap partition for suspend and stuff you need to create it at least 2.5 times larger than your amount of RAM. The Dell Mini has only 8 GB of real estate. After installing Ubuntu you're left with only around 5GB (compared to only 3GB with bare windows). 2.5GB would take away half of the available space. So forget suspending this baby. Better just shut it down. Googled for Ubuntu netbook and followed the instructions written here. Made sure to add maximus and netbook-launcher to the list of programs run at start-up (System->Preferences->Session for those who doesn't know).

The verdict. After over two weeks of using it, my mom loves it.. :D Now she's not embarrased when she try to boot up the netbook in front of her friends it doesn't boot. Or when she tries to connect the mouse it doesn't work. It just works and it's interface is lovely. And then it happened... My wife asked me to install it on her EEEPC too.. :) Her EEEPC was still using the original custom Xandros which greatly limited the amount of software (and even drivers) available for her. So I went and installed it. And because it has a 20GB SSD, there's plenty of space to create the swap partition (which I did). So just like I suspected it now boots a lot slower than the original Xandros (but still much faster than any kind of windows xp installation.. :P) but at least now she's running the latest software and drivers. There's a whole lot more issue with the EEEPC actually and I've still haven't got the internal mic to work yet. But at least bluetooth doggle should work (actually I haven't tried it yet.. :P).

Fuh.. this has turned into a longer post than I thought. So I'll just end it here. If you're a PHP developer (especially if you're a CakePHP developer) please check out MyMeeting and who knows, maybe you can contribute something. If you're not a developer but you know how to install web apps (php, mysql stack) try installing mymeeting and see whether maybe your organization can use it. If not give us a feedback on why and maybe we can make it happen.. ;) If you're neither of that but you know someone who is, tell them about it.. :)

Alrighty then, till next time...

Leon: The Professional -- Shape Of My Heart

2008-12-13T12:31:00.000-08:00

He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn't play for the money he wins
He doesn't play for respect
He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of a probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance

I know that the spades are swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

He may play the jack of diamonds
He may lay the queen of spades
He may conceal a king in his hand
While the memory of it fades

I know that the spades are swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

And if I told you that I loved you
You'd maybe think there's something wrong
I'm not a man of too many faces
The mask I wear is one
Those who speak know nothing
And find out to their cost
Like those who curse their luck in too many places
And those who fear are lost

I know that the spades are swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Great movie. Thanks to BuffaloSoldier for pointing it out. :)

Get only the second column of output

2008-11-16T22:55:00.000-08:00

Little bash script which took me quite some time to figure out:


svn status | grep ? | awk '{print $2}'

Will get rid of the status field and that can be used to add to svn.

Food first post

2008-11-13T16:30:00.000-08:00

My blogs' name is High-Tech Rojak but I don't recall ever talking about food. So here's a first. Just recently I got some free time and finally got to cook the pasta I've bought for ages. So here's an account of how it went down.. :)

Okay. That's the thing I cooked. I have no idea what it's called. At first I was thinking of buying the ribbon ones, then my wife looked at the colorful spiral ones and said "why not get these? they're more colorful" and so we got them (yes, we know nothing about pasta.. :) So I boiled it, actually put some salt and oil into the water so that they won't stick, drained it and tadaaaaa, you'd get the above. I remember once I tried to cook macaroni and I didn't drain it after boiling it, it filled up the whole pot. LOL... Learned my lesson.

Next up the sauce. Like I said we don't know anything about pasta so here's the ingredients we prepared.
Yes ladies and gentleman. Instant pasta sauce all bottled up and ready to go. Some dried up basil also bottled up. Some onions and garlic. Hahahaha... The sauce is "traditional" lagi tu.. So yes, it's about as authentic as I can get it till I learn to do better. So on the color spiral packaging mentioned about frying some onions, garlic and capsicum. Since I didn't have any capsicum, garlic and onions would have to do. So into the frying pot.Once the smell has risen (how DO you say "bau dah naik" in english ?) you can just dump in the sauce. Stir it around a bit. Put water into the bottle and add that to the pot too so that nothing gets wasted. Once it start boiling dump in the minced meat (apologise for my vegetarian or non-cow meat eating readers, the following pic is rather graphical.. :P ).

It doesn't look very impressive. Well, stir it up some more. Add diced vegetables. Add some salt (actually I overdid it with the salt >.< ). But in the end...
Tadaaaa... Looks pretty good eh.. :) A bit salty I know.. But still edible enough that we went to sleep with a full stomach and even got enough for breakfast. I didn't do the whole pasta thing again but eating the sauce with bread is really nice. Fuh.. Now I'm hungry again.. >.<

foss.my is AWESOME!!!

2008-11-09T16:47:00.000-08:00

Lol.. I can't help but keep on writing awesome in big capital letters.. AWESOME!!! :D

That was the most awesome weekend that I have ever had. It's monday and I still feel the high.. >.<

There was so many great things about it and a lot of people have written about it. Here is just some of my thoughts and what I'd like to highlight (and can read back this entry in the future and feel the awesomeness again):

First impression when I just arrived was that the whole atmosphere was so cool. Everyone was friendly and down to earth. There was no special separation between any vip and the other participants or anything. Maybe I've just been to too many government conferences but I love this atmosphere and attitude.

Then I remember when Collins mentioned special thanks to the sponsors. First one he mentioned was Microsoft and all was quite. As soon as he said Mozilla, WHOA!! Everyone clapped and cheered. And so was for Mixi, Bytecraft, Inigo and APIIT. LOL!! I felt sorry for the Microsoft rep there but at least they didn't boo or anything. I guess we're polite. Makes me so proud.. :)

The Raj 'Dylan' strumming the "The Times They Are A-Changin' " song on his guitar. To tell the truth there was a few hiccups and most of the audience didn't know the song (yours truly included :P). But I thought it was great. Great for 2 things. One is the fact that "Hey, there's a guy who came forward and played his guitar at this conference.." and two is I find the lyrics very appropriate to how I feel about this conference. The fact that they was able to pull of this conference just shows that the foss community here is getting stronger and better and this could really be the sign of "Times They Are A-Changin'".

Yoon Kit gave the opening keynote about the "Format Wars". There wasn't any keynote from APIIT as scheduled. Then it was my talk. Hmmm.. I think it went well despite the slides was just prepared a few hours before the talk. Could have been better if I had prepared earlier but with MyGOSSCON and all that's pretty much the best I could do. There certainly was more interest from the audience than normally from government conferences. Even on Sunday there was still some of the participants come up to me to talk about mymeeting and cakephp. Love it. Hope I stirred up enough interest in MyMeeting to get even more feedback and participation from the community. I better buckle up too and make sure MyMeeting gets better and better all the time.

Then it was Google Summer of Code 101 by Raj 'Dylan' Kissu. Awesome talk. Wish I was still a student. I would certainly try my luck in getting into the Google Summer of Code. The opportunity to learn, the money incentive (4500 USD is a lot of incentive ;), the experience in getting involved with Google. After that Kaeru presented the Orca talk because En. Rahim wasn't able to make it. It was great.

I stayed awhile for the Navigating the Commons talk but in the middle of it decided I'd rather go to the fosschix session. I missed the main presentation by Pia (until now I still regret it..) but it was great. Just chatting about how to make the working hours more family friendly so that the ladies can get more involved in IT. Love it.

Lunch had McChicken. To tell the truth it was nearly enough for me. But I didn't come for the food anyway so I don't mind.

Then listened to Toru about OSS at mixi.jp. Cool dude. Way cool.. :D you know how you read comics and all and you think, wow.. the japanese people are so cool. Well.. he's even cooler.. >.< Loved his style of presentation. Relaxed and walking around everywhere. I think if they have given him a clicker he might have actually walked of the stage and just talk and talk.

Then went to a "Birds of A Feather" session on python. Kaeru and Bakhtiar were great. Talking about things which I haven't even heard of before.. :P Even gave me some new ideas I can try out with my projects. Programming in firefox. Sounds cool.

Then end of day 1 with Pia's keynote. Almost the same as the one she gave at MyGOSSCON but with a bit of modification. Why do open source? "Fun, Work and making the world better". Great. Got me all revved up to contribute more.

Then off to the speakers dinner. Great to be able to mingle with great people. But actually I was soooo tired I wasn't able to take full advantage of the opportunity. But it was fun nonetheless..

Day 2 was full of awesomeness too. I actually didn't read the schedule and thought it would start like day 1 at 9 am. But actually it was scheduled to start at 10am. I was an hour early and apiit was noisy with a taekwondo competition downstairs.

Keynote by Ditesh was again proof of how awesome he is.. :D Highlighted things which a lot of us didn't know of before. All the contributions of the community which we wasn't even aware of. Actually he gave almost the same talk at MyGOSSCON but now it was a bit modified to be more cool. :P

Track session began and I was torn. I had no idea whether I wanted to listen to Toru on memcached or Kamal on git. In the end I decided on Kamal and again I must say this dude is one heck of a great speaker. Now he got me all excited on using git. I'm already using svn, hg, bzr. Now git pulak.. :D

Followed by James Morris talk on kiosk mode in Fedora. Looks great. Reminds me of Juzt-Reboot card which I used to have. Do whatever you want. As soon as you restart the computer is restored into it's original pristine state. Would be great to be used in computer labs at school or libraries.

Then off to fosschix. Pamela Fox is so cooool.. :D There was so many people that we had to move to a bigger room. And Pamela just sat on the table talking about webdevedu. Awesome.

Lunch. And it is confirmed, python is used a LOT at google... :D Pamela is into languages too. Asked about the Malay language and all. Awesome.. :)

SaaS and PaaS? I had no idea what that was until I heard the talk by Jerome. Software as a service, Platform as a service. It's the wave of the future and it is happening now. Hmmm.. MyMeeting as a service? Maybe one day.. :P

Then OLPC talk by Pia. The thing I remember most about the talk? Pia raised the XO high above her head and dropped it.. 0_O wow... it still work. That thing was built to be abused. :P Wonder whether it can take on Muhammad.. >.< But seriously I want to get on to developing on it. Got some ideas of creating local content to learn. And I've got two beta testers at home. :P

HTML 5 and google gears was presented by Pamela. WOW!!! Can't wait for it to be properly supported by mainstream browsers. It's seriously cool stuff. I know how l33t it is to be able to do complex ajaxy stuff right now, but soon those complex ajaxy stuff have to be standard fare and html 5 will help a lot in making that come true.

Lightning talk... My first ever. And what do I remember most? Couch surfing by the totally awesome dude.. :D Lol.. wonder whether I might actually do that one day.. :P

Keynote: Makkal Sakti by Jaya Kumar. Yeah!! Very cool. Run, study, redistribute, modify. The four freedom.. :D All men are created equal.. :D

Then wrapping it up with all the speaker, crew and volunteers in front. Toru said it best when he mentioned "The world needs more love".. :D

Foss.my was AWESOME!!! and I hope to be there next year (especially if it's at a beach.. ;)

MyGOSSCON 08 is over..

2008-11-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

Alhamdullillah finally MyGOSSCON 08 is over. InsyaAllah life will soon return back to normal.

It is sometimes funny that when you talk in real life, face to face, you tend to forget or leave a lot of things out because you just missed it. So when you come back from the meeting only then do you realize the things that you really wanted to say. Happened to me after dinner going back home from oscc tonight. So I just want to say it here to get it off my chest.

First and foremost, I want to congratulate the superb maestro Mr. Marzuki. He has done a great job conducting the implementation of MyGOSSCON 08 from beginning to end. I was there and saw how much and how bad the problems he had to face, and even more amazingly how he overcame them with his trademark off handed coolness and kept his everlasting charm. **power** **power** /me doing the firdaus salute.

Second of course a big thank you to the lovely Eavay for her excellent work in leading the development, design & maintenance of the MyGOSSCON 08 website and also for developing the plspeakers product for our intranet so that we can easily manage our speakers data. Personally I think that handling the speakers (something that I was actually officially responsible for, at least some of the speakers) has been made much easier with that product. And I think having a better infrastructure to actually work together and collaborate with in one of the primary reasons why I feel MyGOSSCON this year is a whole lot more easier than MyGOSSCON last year.

Thirdly of course a big thank you to all of my team mates in SC1 (Shima, Razlina and Yana) and not forgetting the head honcho Mr Nicholas for all of their help and support in calling up the speakers and chair person. It wasn't easy but finally we got through it all (well, almost all.. ;). And later on MyGOSSCON itself eavay joined SC1 too and helped a lot. Another round of thank you to eavay. .. \o/

Fourthly a big thank you to all the OSCC staff. It wasn't easy but finally we pulled it through, together. This thank you even includes ex OSCC staff the foss advocate extraordinaire kaeru. I can't help but think of him as I saw the awards for the OSS Case Studies given out to the winners. And thank you also Mr Firewall ;). It was tough I know. So to kaeru, kak siti, stanly, suria, Mr Jacob, Mr Foong, saro, nuhaa, cikgu, hisham, indhran, gopi, Mr Fauzi, e-jat, eric, achik, ella, kak aida, coreen and nadia, thank you all.

Lastly thank you too all the speakers (especially those who I had to contact, please forgive me if I was ever rude or intruding) for their time and cooperation, thank you too to all the MAMPU staff and MEP staff who made MyGOSSCON 08 the success that it was. It was GREAT!!

~~~

Come to think of it, there is no way I could have thought of all of that on my feet ad hoc before dinner just now. So oh well, I need to improve some more.. :P