iphoting's Sink

Today, something rather bizarre happened. While I was ordering coffee, I felt like having a hot coffee as the environment was rather cold there and drinking something warm would feel good. Little did I realise, I made an order for an iced version instead, without even realising the thought inconsistency. I was offered a packet of sugar which I promptly refused as my drink to come is cold.

It was only when my coffee arrived that I realised that the coffee is cold and that I actually wanted hot coffee instead in the beginning. All these happened within the span of 20 minutes.

This is really bad; I’m severely sleep deprived and still jet lagged. I shall have a sleeping pill tonight and hope that I don’t wake up at 4 am tomorrow morning again, as it has been the last 4 days.

If this still doesn’t help, I need to find a way to reset my Circadian rhythm, fast.

I’m freaking myself out these days as I realised that I can hardly conduct a coherent conversation without pausing too much to think of the appropriate word to use for expression. This is kind of strange as I always believed that my train of thought is based on any language that I have access to. I have thus discovered that it is not entirely so. I can actually think of an idea or concept and not have the words or language to express it without intensive thought.

This isn’t a good ORD present.

Not to mention, I seem to be losing control of my thoughts as they speed past so fast that I hardly know what I just thought about. Not to mention the absentmindedness and really short linguistic memory. It also seems to have a side-effect of causing insomnia. Feels like the mental degradation that I’ve started experiencing since Sec 2. Could it have been OM training that once stretched my mind and that the lack of it now which is causing this mental dystrophy?

Another costly by-product of NS.

With my logical reasoning out-of-control at time, emotional management goes haywire. Things that I don’t have to consciously deal with starts to come in and pile up. Then, my mood gets awfully affected. I’m glad I don’t have the urge to drowning myself in alcohol as it’s an unfortunate positive feedback loop. Imagine feeling depressed and one keeps consuming depressants?

Drives me nuts.

Maybe all the above are just side-effects of my trip to Australia. We had really poor sleep cycles as we were subjected to 26-hour shifts to maintain 24-hour manning of the place. In addition, during the off-shift periods, the only time when it is possible to sleep is during sun-down timings. Coupled with a horrible, narrow and short cot bed, sleep quality is no make-up to the deprived sleep.

Back in Singapore, I still have “Jetlag”, wanting to sleep at 8 pm (10 pm), waking at 4 am (6 am) the next day. I’m trying my best to readjust my sleeping hours by sleeping later, hoping to wake up later, but so far it isn’t successful. I still wake up at ~4 am. I believe that I’m sleep deprived to some extent.

Mental service injuries?

I think my action plan for the next few months immediately after my ORD would be to engage more in thinking conversations or witty games (which I missed since school ended). Maybe (re)learn a language? German or Japanese looks easy enough. I’ve got all the necessary reference materials in my shelf already. In addition, I think musical (re)development would help in some obscure way — I shall give my piano and guitar some good tickles.

Then I was wondering, would rearranging a new bookshelf for my overflowing pile of books help? It sounds pretty fun and would make things a magnitude neater. Hopefully driving some order back into my subconsciousness.

Emotionally, running back into the embrace of our Heavenly Father works all the time. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.

I’ve been doing a comparison between the iPhone and Android platform for quite sometime and have come to an interesting conclusion that not many people seem to have seen.

Before I begin, I shall list some of the key differences between the two platforms and then proceed to demonstrate some parallels to formerly failed or failing platforms.

iPhone is best known by its 100, 000 application strong App Store, closed and managed eco-system, but balanced by very powerful and easy to use SDK. Interface-wise, it’s the first to pioneer large-scale finger only screen manipulations, with a very polished and unified UI. Flicking the screen to scroll a list were rare when the iPhone was first introduced and it brought a revolutionary change in smartphone UIs, and so did pinching. It has a seamless sync capability powered by iTunes, only seen previously on iPods, and formally inspired by Palm’s very own HotSync.

Android on the other hand is like the dialectic twin to the smartphone solution. It also has an app store but it’s open for listing quite freely. Applications are not signed nor controlled — a user can choose to install anything he wants with no restrictions. That’s where the similarities end, if any. The platform offered by Google is rather generic, leaving much of the integration work to the hardware makers. There’s no out-of-the-box sync solution provided by Google’s Android, leaving each hardware maker to come up with their own, and possibly incompatible sync solutions. Also, they are forced to create UIs for their phones for better hardware integration. This leaves each hardware maker to come up with their own set of UI design and philosophy, diluting the visual identity of the Android platform.

Another side-effect for having hardware makers integrate the OS into the phone is that new Android versions from Google cannot be pushed down to consumers immediately, compared to the iPhone OS updates. Individual hardware makers have to reintegrate the OS with their hardware before they can, if they choose to, release to their customers.

With that, the iPhone eco-system reminds me of the formerly glorious PalmOS platform (v4), albeit with tighter application quality requirements, but better development SDK. Unified interface across all applications, large developer community, and that every piece of software written for the PalmOS works on all PalmOS devices. It’s like a Mac, in a handheld form-factor.

Android however, reminds me of the now fractured and declining Symbian platform. With S60 and UIQ3 interfaces as the main branches, applications are largely split between the two due to different display UI philosophies and input capabilities. Although the Android claims to have a JavaVM as a base component, the varying types of input methods and screen capabilities increases the coding complexity for any piece of software. Without direct vertical integration from the OS maker, Google, customers will have a hard time getting the OS in their phones upgraded should the hardware makers choose to give up on them. It reminds me of the Windows Mobile OS and the PalmOS with no upgradability, requiring the purchase of new hardware to stay current in software — it puts customers off.

From the way the two platforms are positioned, I can tell that Apple is marketing the iPhone as a full-fledged miniature computer, while Google is positioning the Android as a software development platform for hobbyists and hackers to tinker around with.

The future I believe thus would lie in the iPhone platform.

“A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.”

My trip overseas was difficult, not in terms of unfamiliarity with the terrain or conditions as I’ve been there before, but in terms of my mental health. Being trapped in the desert with such boredom, having hardly anyone to converse with intellectually almost drove me into the abyss.

Fortunately for me I could still think logically and that wireless internet connection was available via social engineering and thus I remained sane. Reading is hardly possible as the conditions were not suitable — I did finish half a book though.

Even through all these, I felt God with me, carrying me through with his Love; the joy in Him is my strength.

Now, I’m glad I’m back.

The song by Hillsong, You Hold Me Now, reveals his Glory and His new Kingdom.

On that day when I see
All that You have for me
When I see You face to face
There surrounded by Your grace

All my fear is swept away
In the light of your embrace
When Your love is all I need
And forever I am free

Where the streets are made of gold
In Your presence healed and whole
Let the songs of heaven rise to you alone

No weeping, no hurt or pain
No suffering You hold me now
You hold me now
No darkness no sick or lame
No hiding You hold me now,
You hold me now

In this life I will stand
Through my joy and my pain
Knowing there’s a greater day
There’s a hope that never fails

When Your name is lifted high
And forever praises rise
For the glory of Your Name
I’m believing for the day

When the wars and violence cease
All creation lives in peace
Let the songs of heaven rise to you alone

No weeping, no hurt or pain
No suffering You hold me now
You hold me now
No darkness, no sick or lame
No hiding You hold me now,
You hold me now

For eternity
All my heart will give
All the glory to Your name

No weeping, no hurt or pain
No suffering You hold me now
You hold me now
No darkness no sick or lame
No hiding You hold me now,
You hold me now

Contrary to what many people say about learning how to park in Driving Schools with poles, I believe it is quite useful in grasping the principles and concepts of how to park a car. Having learnt the basics of using poles which act as imaginary lines from the ground where you can see through the passenger windows, you can then apply and imagine lines from various objects that demarcate the outline of the car parking lot.

For vertical parking, no explanation is required. The headlights / pillars can represent outer poles of the training lot. The techniques used in parking is still the same. It works for any type of car, big or small, and any type of lot, as long as it can fit the car reasonably.

Parallel parking, on the other hand, is even easier. Just take the headlights and taillights of the vehicles between the lot as poles and apply the same technique. It will definitely work, as long as you remember the principles to the techniques.

I was glad that my private instructor gave me time to learn parking via the first principles. He gave me the broad concept of where to look at what and left the finer details of correcting mistakes to myself to pick up. He didn’t tell me how to fix bad parking due to turning mistakes — he let me figure out myself.

It all turned out very useful when I was looking for a parking space around SingTel ComCentre to get my mother’s iPhone repaired. The building’s carpark was full and there fortunately was an empty parallel parking lot in front. The last time I parked in a parallel parking lot was in my instructor’s car, taking my practical test. The car was different then, the lot was more spacious, and the situation was less stressful. Naturally in a single-lane, bi-directional road, cars from both directions will pile up when anyone attempts to parallel park along one of the lots. When car piles, the stress naturally increases.

No way I’m going to let them agree with what the probationary plate meant — n00b driver.

I followed the first principles from what I’d learnt 5 months ago and it worked flawlessly.

My mother was impressed. So was I. It was my first try outside the driving circuit after all and I didn’t cause an embarrassing road-block.

It’s been nearly two years since my enlistment and I’m glad that I’m on my last mile. Throughout these 2 years, some people would claim that it has been a thorough waste of time, others would say that it’s an experience of a lifetime.

I’ve experienced a fair share of both claims and can testify that 50% of the outcome lies in my hands. There are certainly some sights to behold, trials and tribulations to endure, friends to be made, time to be wasted, problems to be solved, along the way of ORD.

The trick to your time being wasted is to make good use of the time when people are wasting your time. Although I am working in an organisation that prides itself for being timely and decisive, people are routinely late for meetings. I fit books in my iPod Touch or paperbacks in my side pocket. If I were to forget or be bored by rumbling drones, I’ll take out my mobile phone and look up the latest from Reuters and Google Reader. Of course, having the secret to prevent people from wasting your time should mean that you’ll be mindful of taking up the time of others.

Another trick to a time waster in another context is that people would insist that you do certain things using primitive and time consuming methods. I’ve learnt to give equally lengthy forecast of completion, use modern methods, and use the time saved to do my other more important things. I’d learnt this cool trick from one of my school teachers.

That’s the gist on the time savers I’d learnt and employed.

As my work moved into the HQ, time wasters are no longer the biggest enemies. The new and powerful word in use is Politics. Putting it upfront, I thoroughly hate it. Navigating through the minefield of politics is a skill to be learnt and polished in any office environment.

I’ve learnt how to smile when you’re boiling furious, make friends and be friendly toward deadly enemies, capture and understand the nuances of intent and sentence structure in instructions, reading the truth of smiling lies, and most despicable of all, cleaning up after people’s defecation. Sometimes I wonder, am I working too much and hard for what I’m paid? Then again, it’s the price for the development of alternative mental faculties.

On the other hand, I’ve learnt a lot more about myself that I could ever have. I’ve noticed that my subconsciousness is like a sponge, soaking up everything around me — the good, the bad, and the ugly, slowly assimilating collated information into my behaviour.

I avoid certain people only because I don’t want to pick up their traits.

As with all politics, I have to deal with lies, half-truths, and white-lies. Knowing how to distinguish between them is important as it gleams significant information which can be of great use.

Lies are rather easy to detect from non-compulsive liars. What’s written in body language books aren’t very useful, as I believe, every person has ‘fingerprint actions’ when he’s about to lie. Taking reference from an obvious lie, one can capture the ‘fingerprint’ and hence match it to whenever it occurs again. To be especially effective in finding the truth and to identify lying, use binary questions while watching out for the ‘fingerprint’.

Nevertheless, I will sorely miss my fellow mates whom I’ve met in one way another, having tried my best to know (and make friends with) as many of them as possible.

Yesterday, I was given an interesting problem to tackle.

We were given a bunch of laptops, 8 of them to be exact, already cloned but missing almost 15 GB of important user-end data. There’s no way to re-clone all these machines, as the source image is not available to us. The only way is to copy the 15 GB of files to each machine, no two ways about it. The 15 GB of files lie on a 500 GB external USB harddisk. I have Ethernet cables and 2 Ethernet switches.

The big question is how?

Of course, copying from the harddisk onto each laptop one after another, manually, or via Sneakernet, is the favourite answer, but no. I can only call that desperate, physically constrained, or intellectually apathetic.

I’m a person who loves processes, systems, and automation. Having to copy a bunch of files serially and manually, and onto so many computers repetitively is unacceptable, especially when you have to rinse and repeat a whole 8 times. Suffering a little pain to get any infrastructure up, just to let it copy automatically painlessly is what I’m looking for. 先苦后甜.

Out of ideas, I pinged a few people via sms, “Hey, what is the most efficient way to transfer 15 GB of data onto 8 different laptops, without cloning.”

Portable Harddisk / Sneakernet, Samba CIFS were the few answers that came in. Someone suggested copying from one to two, two to four, four to eight, but that’s too tedious and not scalable, equipment wise. But what if the media used is the Ethernet?

I probed further, “multicast network solutions?”

“BitTorrent”. Bingo. Thanks to cflee for that great suggestion! That’s the term and I knew it would certainly work. I did read up on the BitTorrent protocol some time back and am quite disappointed that this didn’t occur to me earlier. He also mentioned that uTorrent provides a built-in tracker, and that there’s a handy guide available.

Spent 10 minutes reading through and successfully managed to give it a trial within my home network between 2 computers. Conceptually, a prototype has been demonstrated and there’s no way it can fail the next day.

Spent the following morning with a few co-workers digging up rarely used networking equipment and proceeded to wire-up the machines. The two 4-port switch cum wireless APs were miserable — they only leave us with 6 usable LAN ports. The other 2 machines had to do with 802.11G wireless. It’ll work, but just a little slower. I was hoping to complete this whole ordeal before the day is to end, i.e. 5.30 pm, and go home on time. After all, copying 15 GB from the portable harddisk onto one of the laptops already took a grand total of 60 minutes. If I had to do this serially and linearly, it’ll take no less than 8 hours. Portable harddisks are rare too, especially for filesizes that huge.

I configured the DHCPd and got the whole network running nicely and proceeded to install uTorrent on all the machines (skipping the rubbish, ad-supported nonsense). That took hardly 10 minutes as Samba CIFS came into play. It’ll be cool if there’s a automatic install distributor but I’ve not got time for it.

Created the initial seeding torrent according to the guide and that process took almost 15 minutes. Thousands of tiny files, coupled with gigantic files, whatever you can imagine, the limits of the filesystem are being tested here.

Started the seed on the tracker, turned on ‘Initial Seeding’ while I distributed the newly created .torrent to the rest of the machines.

Changed back to standard Seeding once all the machines have entered the swarm.

Thinking about the 8 hours that I would have to take, going by the conventional advice, I grinned and went on to do other work, while giving my forecast of completion to ‘End of the Day’.

The seeding started at around 9 to 9.30 am. I drove out to buy breakfast for everyone and came back at around 10.30 am.

I took a peak at the progress and I got a shock of my life.

All the wired Ethernet clients are now seeding! 100% download complete! With only the 2 miserable wireless clients left struggling with the slow connection. I exchanged the wire and wireless connection with 2 other computers and I saw the download speed race to the roof.

12.2 MB/s. It works out to ~100 Mbps.

Every 30 seconds, the download speed will slow a little and a uTorrent would pop a warning at the status bar, “Harddisk overload 100%”. Wow, a solid harddisk LED.

I’m impressed.

Darned. I thought the transfer would take the whole day, giving me time for a well deserved break, but little did I know, the transfer had completed before I even had lunch!

So, now you know. BitTorrent is extremely efficient in one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one distribution tasks. As long as the overhead of installing and running uTorrent on every machine is well distributed and / or paid for, this is an extremely useful piece of software to add into any sysadmin’s arsenal.

Some other hidden benefits of BitTorrent are that it is resumable, repairable, distributed (many to many, any seeder / peer can enter or leave the swarm without much disruption nor require any human rectification), lightweight (300k installer), and automated (once past the initial start, and handles disconnections gracefully).

Really, BitTorrent has its legitimate use as above, quod erat demonstrandum (Q.E.D.).

I might have mentioned this before but I’ll do this again.
Spanning Sync is a awesome app at its 3rd version. What this application / service does is that it seamlessly syncs between your iCal and Google Calendar; Address Book and Google / Gmail Contacts.

As I sync all my personal mobile devices with Sync Services on my Mac, all my contacts and calendar entries flow from my iPod and mobile phone and to my Macbook automatically and beautifully, both ways. I have lived with this setup for a long time before my switch to Google Apps as I handled my mail on my own server.

With the dwarfing amounts of spam coming into my mailbox, to the tune of ~40 pieces a day (which works out to ~1000 pieces a month), my SpamAssassin setup was starting to fall behind. My once always clean Inbox started to fill up with false-negative spam pieces despite my dedicated training programme for the Bayes classification system. Having to spend a few minutes daily, looking at spam and repeatedly deleting rubbish is an inelegant chore; I bit the bullet and migrated over to the Google Apps hosted mail solution. Then, it was still in beta and there wasn’t a paid enterprise service yet, but the spam filtering system is top notch. Much better than Yahoo Mail and Hotmail combined. I had to admit, my SpamAssassin setup did a great job of filtering out more spam than Yahoo and Hotmail services then, but Gmail does spam management better.

With the move to Google Apps, all my contacts and events are no longer integrated into Gmail / Google’s interface. There were times where I clicked on the To: link and was looking forward to selecting a recipient from my Address Book, but I was disappointed. There is no link with my Mac OS X Address Book! Apple did come up with Gmail sync with the iPod Touch but it is still flaky.

In comes Spanning Sync and the missing link is solved. I now have my contacts and events, everywhere, updated and synchronised seamlessly. What elegance!

I did try out Spanning Sync previously, but then, the sync was flaky and duplicate entries in Google Calendar were quite common. 2 versions later, the algorithms became way more matured and I can trust it to do its job, with my hands off.

So, they’re currently running a promotion, giving out $5 promo codes and a $5 referral bonus. If by any case you do intend to get a subscription or a life-long license, use this link to save $5 or this promo code, KQR9TP, to be entered upon checkout. After which, for every friend you refer, you’ll get to save $5 also.
Full disclosure: I paid for a 1 year subscription to this service.

Something very good to watch if you haven’t already done so. It might change your life.

It’s the technological revolution.

And the ignorance.

I spend much of my time, fixing broken documents sent my way, commonly due to users misusing Word Processing features, manually doing what the processor can do automatically. There are times where I see people spent no less than 2 hours, trying to get their document formatting into shape, just because they didn’t let automation do their jobs.

I shall list a few very common usage scenarios, how people do it the wrong way, and how it should be done, efficiently.

Paragraph Spacing
The first I’ll start off with is ‘paragraph spacing’. Ideally, after every press of the enter key, a gap is formed before the next line, as follows:-


However, most people would just press enter twice, producing the ‘same’ effect. This will create consistency issues across a huge document and unsightly gaps at the top of the page would be seen when an empty paragraph spills over to a new page. Then, we’ll see the user, manually and arbitrarily deleting the empty paragraphs to work-around this problem.

The ideal solution would be to use the ‘paragraph spacing’ configuration parameters under the Paragraph Formatting dialogue.


Indentation
The next significant time waster is paragraph indents. Users would want to move their paragraph in and spam their tab key at every protruding sentence. This is where a disaster awaits when the paragraph is amended.

Here’s what I mean:-


The best practice way to do that nicely is to use the indent buttons:-


Keeping with the Next Paragraph
Sometimes, certain paragraphs, such as headings, list introducers, and titles, must logically follow the next paragraph and cannot be the last item before text flows off to the next page. Users tend to work-around this by creating unnecessary empty paragraphs (by pressing enter) right before the header, hoping to push it down to the next page. This might seem to work, but when text above is amended, stray blank paragraphs will start to pollute the document, increasing the amount of clean-up one needs to do before printing.



My recommended solution is to enable the following option (under Format -> Paragraph) for all headings and titles:-


This way, the headings and titles will stay on the same page as the next paragraph. This can also be applied to table headings if you don’t want your first header row to be alone at the end of a page.

Styles
If you’re a web designer, think of Styles as cascading styles sheets for your text documents. They inherit their parent styles and helps unify the formatting structure of your document with less clicks. In Microsoft Word, the ‘Normal’ style is used as your baseline style which all body text in your document would take dressing from to have a default look; it is intuitively named ‘Body Text’ in OpenOffice Writer.

Then, there are ‘Heading 1’, ‘Heading 2’ and all other levels of headings you’ll need in a generic and simple document.

However, if you happen to create the documents that I have a hand in, you might have to deal with numbered paragraphs with alternatively numbered child paragraphs. This way, the Bullets and Numbering feature can work hand-in-hand with the Styles capability of the word processor to relieve you of tedious formatting.



All the paragraph numbering and sub-paragraph numbering is automatically generated. The only buttons you need to click on is the indents button which assigns the paragraph a particular ‘level’. The exact details on how to set this style up is left as an exercise for the reader. I would leave the following screen shots below as hints.



This concludes my brief gripe about word processor misuse. In a future post, I might talk about version control and document management.

There’s this new social service concept that is quite interesting and it’s known as Aardvark. It is basically a question to answer matchmaker. You ask Aardvark a question and it sends your question to people within your social network (facebook, etc) that are on Aardvark. The people your question gets to has matching interests with your question, allowing the answers to your questions more focused and appropriate.

Schematically:-


I think this service has great potential and utility. Check it out!

From the passengers’ point of view, driving has always been safe and easy, up until I have become a driver myself. Most of the time, passengers have no access to the minds of the driver while he is driving.

Over the past month, I have had thoughts such as, “that was close!”, and “a little more and I’ll crash”. Driving is, in my opinion, rather dangerous if the driver was distracted. Personally, I believe that as drivers, we go though many close shaves from accidents. The fact that an accident happens is because both parties reacted too slow or is not responsible enough in avoiding a crash. Oh course, there will be drivers who pass the burden of safety to other drivers by driving recklessly and carelessly.

I’ll always be on a look out for dangerous drivers and stay far away from them. They are an accident waiting to happen.