Work

“What do you use two monitors for?… You mean your mouse cursor can move from one screen to another?!”

It’s a rather common question I face when friends see my computer setup. I don’t blame them for asking thus. After all, whenever I did a dual-monitor setup at work to improve my productivity (while reducing Alt-Tabbing), I get a collection of interesting questions too!

Here’s how my secondary desktop at its idle-state looks like with iTunes playing a random track:-

You’ll see DesktopLyrics (with GimmeSomeTune, an automatic lyrics fetcher), iTunes, EarthDesk, and Things as permanent residents in this secondary-screen estate.

Other times, I have Google Chrome running on the bottom-right of the screen with 4 tabs, one for Facebook, another for Gmail, then Munin, and the last for Torrentflux. Safari is still my main browser but I use Chrome for these few site due to its stability and resilience to crashes. The Adobe Flash plugin crashes all the time, so will intensive AJAX sites. I’ll explain why Safari is still my main browser on the Mac in another post. I also use this screen to watch YouTube (in Chrome) or videos.

On my main desktop, I run something called iCalViewer which overlays my iCal calendars over my desktop wallpaper, with events represented by boxes all racing towards the finishing line, i.e. the time now—visit the product page for a good visualisation. This is also the place where I have my primary focus, for reading or for writing. All references go to the secondary screen on the right.

With the invention of widescreen (16:9) monitors, I now partition the screen area to 2 virtual areas. The standard 4:3 area for work, and a tiny vertical 4:9 strip for all other notifications and communication windows. Never under-estimate what this 4:9 vertical strip of space can do, as it has saved me countless of Alt-Tabbing actions and ‘situation awareness’.

I put my various contact-lists (Adium and Skype), Growl notifications, and chat-windows in this vertical space. Only Adium (and countless other non-official IM clients) can consistently and compactly display a chat window into a 4:9 space while retaining usability and readability. This means, the chat-window consists of only a one-liner text entry box and fills the rest of the vertical space with conversation—no formatting toolbars and fancy-feature buttons (think Google Talk client). With tabs right below the text entry box, I can switch between conversations with a click or key-press. Application-specific floating toolboxes or palettes live in this space too.

Another reason why I keep my workspace and web browser in the 4:3 layout and not filling the entire 16:9 widescreen is because of 2 main considerations.

Firstly, according to screen-readability and eye-tracking studies by Google, reading habits of most people are only concentrated on the top-left vertical column of the screen. In short, the eyes prefer travelling in small vertical motions rather than large horizontal distances. This also explains why newspapers typeset text in columns as our eyes have less horizontal travelling to do.

Secondly, most webpages are designed with the resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels in mind, a 4:3 aspect ratio as a lowest common denominator. Stretching the browser window too much horizontally either stretches the site horizontally unnecessarily or that there will be unsightly and uneconomical empty spaces surrounding the site content.

So as to reduce strain on my eyes, I restrict most windows to a 4:3 size ratio unless the application design requests otherwise (Adobe Photoshop is a prime 16:9 example).

This also explains why whenever I’m browsing or navigating for files in Windows or any other application for that matter, I restore (un-maximise) the window, resize it to 4:3 size ratio and turn on ‘Detail View’. I locate stuff way faster by just looking downwards compared to scanning left-right-down, left-right-down.

In fact, I have personally observed the reading efficiency of Windows-users who habitually maximise windows, regardless of the display aspect ratio. Sad to say, their bad-habit negatively affects their productivity. It’s nothing scientific but it’s highly amusing.

Of course, all these window arrangements can only be achieved consistently on the Mac as Windows has amnesia when it comes to remembering windows positions and sizes. This also explains why Windows-users have to habitually maximise their windows—it is the only reliably and quick method to get windows into predictable (and familiar) positions and sizes.

So please, when you’re on a Mac, don’t be frustrated that the green ‘maximise’ button doesn’t work as you’d expected. It’s not meant to! Don’t be lazy but to just position and resize the window into a 4:3 size ratio and the application will remember it; yes, both size and position. If you’re unfortunately on Windows, like I am during working hours, don’t fret—some applications will remember window size and positions; just adjust for those that don’t. If you value productivity, that is.

I was glad.

Having been in Australia for 3 weeks, I haven’t been doing much physical training as the conditions, i.e. dust, sand and all, are extremely bad for my asthma. Upon touch down, I must take my IPPT before ORD-ing in just 7 days.

Today is the day I cleared it finally in the far west; To God be the Glory.

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.

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.

Having been in my appointment for more than a year, I’ve finally been schedule to go for a course this week to become more “intelligent”. This course will last for four weeks, conducted somewhere near the Discovery Centre, with very poor accessibility from my house.

Long hours and weekend homework, feels much like school with tight deadlines.

My apologies for lagging updates and responses as I’ve been staying in to take advantage of 7 am reveille.

Somedays back, one of my co-workers popped this mathematical question for us to think about. It is fairly simple but complex for our minds. Anyway, here’s the question:-

5 . 5 . 5 . 5 . 5 = 24
Replace the . with any of the following operators: +, -, *, /. You may add brackets anywhere in-between the numbers or operators.

There are many solutions, have fun!

In my work place, there’s this phrase which is very commonly used: “小事不要烦我，大事老板不在。” Translated in English, it basically means not to consult me with small matters; as for big matters, my boss is not around and I can’t make decisions.

These are the middle managers that my organisation trains people to be. Fine by me, but good luck to the future of this organisation.

Here’s a nice song, Hallelujah performed by Jeff Buckley.

Yesterday, we had some free gifts in the form of brand new uniforms that are of a lighter shade of green.

We spent quite some time looking at each other exclaiming, “hey, you look different!”.

I’m glad that I’m finally back from southern Taiwan. I was there on an assigned overseas exercise and I managed to meet quite a few NSmen there. The reason why I love overseas exercises is that I get to meet and live with ‘intelligent’ people from all walks of life for a few weeks.

Having little real-world experience, learning from these NSmen can be an eye opening experience as they share with us their work and past experiences with this organisation. Within the short stint, many of them have infused their common sense and efficiency into our work processes, leaving with us some cool Microsoft Access files (to automatically generate passes with serial numbers) and various useful Microsoft Excel macros to make our bean counting jobs easier.

Moreover, I finally got to see people using real-world skills, solving unreal problems. Seeing them thoroughly annoyed by the organisation which created all the problems in the first place, namely inefficiency, poor leadership and management, makes me very amused. In fact, it’s quite funny hearing them whine and grumble about the ridiculous lack of directions some people are giving.

Particularly, I’d met a total of three NSmen whose work involves working with computers and technology intimately – ERP consultant, computer engineer and a programme design manager. Other professions range widely from civil engineer to bankers to marketing.

These are the times where NS is interesting.

Here’s an antithesis on what the organisation that I’m in stands for. It also explains the resignation rates.

As a bonus, he demonstrates the sacred art of presentation.