I just had an orgasmic chilli high at The Chilli Rush. I came to know of the outlet through colleagues and given my attraction to all things spicy, my interest was piqued. The outlet serves pretty good food at ordinary … Continue reading
January 27, 2012
Who can forget Hitchens iconic phrase: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence”? He’s easily one of the most prominent intellectuals and accomplished orators of the 21st century. Yet, it has been recently, in the … Continue reading
I’ve been hiring developers for a number of years now. Jobstreet is generally the go-to hiring portal. Here’s the resume of the median candidate I find on Jobstreet: Name, race and religion (apparently, race and religion matter enough to employers … Continue reading
Been evaluating products for the last couple weeks. Here are some observations: Have videos that show the product at work. I can only read/watch so much marketing talk (it’s always the same talk). Show me videos and give me the option … Continue reading
In 1967, a cabin fire in Apollo 1, scheduled to be the first manned lunar landing program, killed all three cabin members. Gene Krantz, most famously known as NASA’s flight director during the Apollo 13 manned mission, responded to the … Continue reading
Note: This is a long read, but if you make it to the end, I’d appreciate your comments Google+ is the latest social offering from Google. It was launched end June, and has had a rapid ramp-up with an estimated … Continue reading
Console logging object’s is straightforward in Node.js. A basic console.log(object) works well in printing out member variables and functions of an object: var obj = { "name": "ditesh", "age": 13 }; console.log(obj); // Outputs { name: 'ditesh', age: 13 } … Continue reading
Today was Bersih’s peaceful rally in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. Approximately 50,000 Malaysians turned up to support Bersih’s call for free and fair elections, despite water cannons, tear gas and mass arrests by the police. There have been many videos … Continue reading
“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and … Continue reading
I was trying to figure out how to implement the UIDL command as part of a POP3 daemon I am building using Node.js. UIDL is an optional command in RFC 1939, but many POP3 clients use it in the leave-message-on-server … Continue reading
January 25, 2012
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| A blue British Shorthair. Image via Wikipedia |
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| A handsome blue bi-color British Shorthair by Pamela Lanigan |
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| Imakatz Emerald Nymeria of Montel at 2 months old exploring her new home |
The next day I found out Nymeria kept on sneezing so I brought her over the breeder's place again and this time was given some medicine for her sneezing and was given shots of antibiotics.
Nymeria is a very gentle kitten. She never refuses her medicine. She's very calm. Those supposed to be one of British Shorthair traits but I understand every cat is unique, as they have different personality. But I love her anyway. She's very amusing to watch! Now the ringworm on her face and ears are recovering. Her eyes are starting to turn to copper. She still on her medicine for sneezing. Sadly the ringworm has spread over to her other body area (base of tail, below her left arm and on her right shoulder). But it's not fatal, she'll grow bigger and stronger and it will heal over time so I'm not that worried.
I have to mention Lizzie and Bibi since they are the reason why I love cats. I never liked cats since I was small. That had to do with me watching cats spraying anywhere in the house and their behaviour that seemed like they never listen! But then I started reading on cats behaviour and society, and then everything made sense. I understand more now how they behave like they do. And it has made me appreciate them more.
Bibi came to us when his mother gave birth to all his siblings in our garage space. Mak noticed the family first around our bamboo tree but didn't get them into the house. They lived outside of the house until they were about 3 or 4 months old. And because of that, they suffered alot of illnesses and so we brought them to see the vet. They were 3 of them but only Bibi survived. His left eye was punctured with something when he was very little. His left eye is permanently blind since then. He's such an active cat! But he's an indoor pet now.
We got Lizzie last year when she was 4 months old. She is such a gentle giant. Mains Coon falls under big cat category, just like British Shorthair. She was so playful as a kitten. She loves to play catch and run with Bibi. Now that she's an adult, she's abit more reserved and cautious. I think that's a Maine Coon trait. They are like the models on the runway.
Especially now that she has little kittens to take care of, she's abit more serious now. It turns out that Lizzie is such a good mother!
We love our cats
It's fun learning their character and different personalities. As I said before, each cat is unique. And because of that, we just love them all.
Bibi and Lizzie
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| Zaliaf Lizzie of Montel - our brown tortie Maine Coon |
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| Bibi - first cat, he's a household cat. We love him! |
Bibi came to us when his mother gave birth to all his siblings in our garage space. Mak noticed the family first around our bamboo tree but didn't get them into the house. They lived outside of the house until they were about 3 or 4 months old. And because of that, they suffered alot of illnesses and so we brought them to see the vet. They were 3 of them but only Bibi survived. His left eye was punctured with something when he was very little. His left eye is permanently blind since then. He's such an active cat! But he's an indoor pet now.
We got Lizzie last year when she was 4 months old. She is such a gentle giant. Mains Coon falls under big cat category, just like British Shorthair. She was so playful as a kitten. She loves to play catch and run with Bibi. Now that she's an adult, she's abit more reserved and cautious. I think that's a Maine Coon trait. They are like the models on the runway.
Especially now that she has little kittens to take care of, she's abit more serious now. It turns out that Lizzie is such a good mother!
We love our cats
It's fun learning their character and different personalities. As I said before, each cat is unique. And because of that, we just love them all.
I have just found this and it is very helpful!
http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/catstut6.jpeg
So Nymeria is either brown tortie with white OR cinnamon tortie with white.
http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/catstut6.jpeg
So Nymeria is either brown tortie with white OR cinnamon tortie with white.
Recently I downloaded 2 video files which is actually a video file splitted into two for faster upload by the uploader. To merge them on Linux, we can use the command cat like this:
cat video1.mkv video2.mkv >> video.mkv
And it took seconds to complete merging. Now I can watch the video in 1 file.
Have fun!.
cat video1.mkv video2.mkv >> video.mkv
And it took seconds to complete merging. Now I can watch the video in 1 file.
Have fun!.
January 24, 2012
Recently, my cooker updated perl packages and it broke all of drak* family especially drakconf and net_applet. net_applet is the network manager for Mandriva in applet form. I can also use draknetcenter. Now the problem is I cant open net_applet and knetcenter due to this error:
/usr/bin/perl: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libDrakX/auto/c/stuff/stuff.so: undefined symbol: Perl_Gthr_key_ptr
So how do I connect to wireless AP? I dont know how to use iwconfig to connect to such AP or can I? After googling, I found a solution: wpa_supplicant.In Mandriva, I just have to run this command (as root):
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &
If you have setup the connection before with draknetcenter, you dont have to edit the file wpa_supplicant.conf. If not, you have to manually edit the file to suit your environment. it is heavily documented.
Then you have to run dhclient to get IP address from the AP or other dhcp server:
dhclient wlan0
wlan0 is my wireless interface. Please change it according to your environment. I bet the broken packages will be updated sooner so that I can use net_applet again.
Have fun!
knetworkmanager is a Network Manager for KDE4. It is hated or liked by users and usually not in between. I personally like it although it has its fair share of bugs. But I like Mandriva's net_applet more. It is stable and more reliable. It is prefered by many Mandriva users. However, if you are stuck with recent problems (bug?) of perl in Mandriva Cooker like me, you are forced to use command line of wpa_supplicant or iwconfig or using gui application like knetworkmanager.
In Mandriva, you can change which network manager control the wireless connection by changing the option in net_applet or you can manually change in file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0. If you want knetworkmanager in control of it, you just have to change this line to yes:
NM_CONTROLLED=yes
If you see the error when running Perl shell, you need to install Term::ReadLine::Perl.
That's all there is to it. Have fun!.
That's all there is to it. Have fun!.
This post is for testing purposes only. Please <<ignore>> it.
posted with Bloggeroid
January 22, 2012
I just read that about 100,000 most likely Malaysian Facebook accounts have been cracked. Well their passwords are available for all to see in pastebin. Upon checking, I only saw a little over 75,000 since the third file has been compromised. From that sample, I quickly derived that the most popular Malaysian passwords are:
- 123456
- sayang
- brokenheart
- 123456789
- rozaliqa75
- effaluve
- akucintaallah
- zzz999
- pradeebkumar123$%
- 12345678
The least popular ones in that sample set include having spaces, hashes, brackets, and more. So there are some secure ones!
Using one’s phone number seems to also be popular. Sometimes appending or pre-pending a string (like a name) to it. Using birthdays seems to also be quite common, sometimes also appending or pre-pending a string like a name to it.
And for those wanting to “further analyse” the dataset yourself, I just quickly used standard Unix tools, and you can do it too.
grep "Password:" part_* | awk -F":" '{print $3}'| sort | uniq -c |sort -n
Pipe to less, use head/tail, etc.
Related posts:
- Malaysian politicans need to focus on the economy, not power plays
- Pompous Malaysian Minister discourages immersion in Western-created sites such as Facebook, Twitter
- learn2scale – what’s up with Malaysian news sites? Will the cloud work for them?
Paul Graham recently published a new request for startups titled Kill Hollywood. It is definitely worth reading. The motivations behind such thoughts are clear. Filesharing is not killing the movie & TV industry.
“What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people.“
Better ways to entertain people. This thought has been sitting in my head for the last couple of days while I’m just a stones throw away from Hollywood & have a pretty good view of the Hollywood Hills from outside my window. The RFS goes into more detail about games, apps, the possibility that exercise might take over, but to think broadly and figure out where the entertainment of folk are going to in the next twenty years.
The studios are making less profits because the way Hollywood is structured. This is why Sarah Lacy says to kill Hollywood, you’ve got to learn their game. Someone like Ryan Kavanaugh is using math to beat Hollywood at their own game — you may have seen Relativity Media, and that’s the company who’s funding many successful movies today. Sarah Lacy sums up the content game that will help us win against Hollywood fairly well:
“The lesson: Eyeballs aren’t equivalent to one another. For Hollywood to be killed, the Internet needs to focus on a metric other than eyeballs. It’s not about mass, it’s about good. That’s absolutely anti-YouTube and anti-Farmville and any other content which we expect to be rapid, mass and disposable. Disposable content isn’t bad, it’s just not everything. And as long as that’s all that the Valley is putting out, we won’t kill Hollywood.”
There is an experience of going to the cinema in where I am happy to pay USD$12 or RM25 for a seat. In the USA I believe in the ratings system, but in Malaysia where I watch most of my movies I feel cheated by the censorship board. But I still go and spend cash because there’s an experience. However I’ve noticed my TV & movie watching habits have changed — I wrote about how I consume Hollywood in 2011. I believe that in Malaysia (and most of Asia), one is forced towards looking at content via filesharing. Because Hollywood hasn’t grown up and they believe in making money from regions, delaying releases by regions, etc. Traditional models.
Of late I’ve quite enjoyed watching the Sundance channel on cable. On Friday in the USA Today, Robert Redford, founder of the channel and the film festival had this to say: “With the new technology creating all the voices and noise from bloggers and tweeters, it’s chaos,” Redford says. “Where are you going to get the real truth with so many loud voices barking? I look to documentaries as almost investigative journalism.”
That covers a set of genres. But independent films rarely cover comedy, action, etc.
People get entertained by different things. At different times. Some days a romantic comedy makes sense. Some days a chick flick is all that gets you going. Then you’ve got days when action is all you crave. And the list can go on…
So what are better ways to entertain people? Games? Interactive movies? How does everyone get paid fairly when you get away from the big studios? Do production costs then go down when you bypass them?
This is why people love the Cheezeburger Network. Or 9gag. These are new ways for people to entertain themselves. However the metric there is eyeballs and the content is disposable. People need substance to entertain them. I once said that paying $10 for Plants vs Zombies provided me with a lot more entertainment on my iPad than going to maybe 2-3 feature length movies.
I’m still thinking about different ways for people to consume media. Different ways for people to sink their time in. And I presume I’ll be thinking about this for long.
As an aside, don’t assume that independent media folk get “new media” either. Classic examples in Malaysia would be Nasi Lemak 2.0 and Relationship Status. Nasi Lemak 2.0 stars the controversial Namewee, who not only made the movie on the cheap (independently), he went on to getting it in cinemas and also at the same time did the entrepreneurial thing of in tandem getting it showing on cable TV. This subsequently got his movie pulled from the cinemas in question, rather abruptly. He disrupted the cinemas and the cinemas reacted in their traditional methods to pull his movie. But even today, you can’t buy a DVD or download a digital version… Even if you’re willing to pay for it (I know I am). More recently, Khairil M. Bahar made Relationship Status; however still with the traditional model of going to the cinema. No DVDs. No downloadable digital version. Its worth noting that I’d pay RM35-40 for a digital download (though I don’t think that might be everyone’s price point – experimentation needs to happen clearly).
Its sad to see that even young independent film producers aren’t moving where their audience is moving to. They’re thinking like studios are thinking. They need to be disrupted. After all, these Malaysian producers are forgetting that there is such a large portion of the Malaysian diaspora spread across the world whom are unlikely to step into Malaysian cinemas anytime soon. Imagine a day when I can read a review about the show, then automatically click on a link that allows me to either stream the movie now or download a copy. If it is a service that has my credit card details on file, this is a seamless process; if its individuals, I just checkout via PayPal, and am either seeing the movie on my TV or waiting half an hour or so for the download so I can pop it on my iPad.
Back to the drawing board. There are better ways to entertain people. There are better ways for consumption of media & content.
Related posts: