Monthly Archives: April 2009

Normal Scheduling

★ Posted on at 08:42 pm ★

homecookedfood

Vyanne was inspired today to cook Chinese food after picking up the book I was reading a while back on Why Chinese Don’t Count Calories.

I’ve never been able to take great food pictures as my apartment has crummy halogen light that’s warm but leaves shadows on all the crockery. It’s unlike what you see in food magazines, where there is a soft, non directional white light on all the food. It also helps to have nice textured cloths and backdrops to accentuate the food on display. Heh, something to invest in when I do find a new place to stay.

So to avoid the usual pitfalls I have with taking pictures of a group of food, I decided to give each dish an individual portrait and made it into a collage. Heh, a little more effort on the post processing side but this is one of the few food pictures I have that I really like.

From the top left and going clockwise, eggs with spring onions and tomato. Next is the pork rib soup, then you have kung pow chicken, for lack of an English name. Lastly, there is snow peas with shimeji mushrooms and shrimp.

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Back to the usual scheduling of regular posts. I’ve been a geek with all my posts on computing and soccer of late.

The weather knob has suddenly turned over the weekend, with temperatures now bordering around single digits during the night. It’s become much colder and everyone is feeling chilly, and it makes one susceptible to all the ailments of cold weather.

Was over at cousin’s fiance’s place in Bundoora for the weekend. It’s generally pretty cold in the suburbs in Melbourne but we were fortunate to have central heating on at night so it was a pretty comfortable stayover. Heh, had a nasi lemak and satay party the following afternoon so helped out a little with preparing the food. Food was great but no pictures!

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I’ve lost some steam with my web page redesign. It’s currently stuck in limbo as I’m not quite happy with my design and I don’t really know what to do to fix it. So I might start from scratch again, although what I’ve done over the last month is still semi fresh in my mind, and would make it easier to have another stab at doing it.

* * *

Heh, was roaming around the city the other day with Vyanne and we both popped into Myer and David Jones, just looking at the items on display. I was over at the fridge section and oogling at all the shiny stainless steel fridges. I feel that one shouldn’t skimp on big items such as these as you practically use them for a decade or more, so even if the initial price tag hurts, it more than makes up for it with the satisfaction you get from using it for many years to come. I look at the poor, tiny fridge at home that is always packed to the brim and I can’t buy more when I’m at the market because there is no place to store the stuff (although now that winter is nearing, the kitchen counter works just as well for preserving fruit and vegetables).

So my thoughts are even if I have to save a few dollars here and there, I’d pay for a proper refridgerator, washing machine and other household appliances. Heh.

* * *

Heh, it’s a pretty interesting week ahead, with the Champion’s League semifinals on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. Will be flying off to Sydney on Thursday night and spending the weekend there. Haven’t even planned our trip yet on what we’d be doing. It will mainly revolve around eating I suppose.

Setting up Ubuntu

★ Posted on at 09:19 am ★

ubuntu 9.04

Here’s how I setup my Jaunty Jackalope install on my Eee PC. It’s strange looking at this screenshot on a 24″ screen on my desktop computer. The Eee’s 8.9″ screen crams a lot of pixels into that tiny space.

I personally like the simplicity of the GNOME interface, and I haven’t tried KDE but I don’t think I need that much eye candy. I know xfce would run better on my Eee (or better still, Openbox) but it’s balancing between functionality and performance.

* * *

Heh, the weekend arrived and after dinner with my cousins (cousin and boyfriend back from Mildura for the weekend), came home and set about setting up Jaunty Jackalope on my Eee.

I have a spare 4GB flash drive sitting around and just downloaded the latest version of Unetbootin, and used that to setup a live CD (or live USB stick in this sense) for Ubuntu. That took a few minutes and I just plugged the USB stick into my Eee and booted into the Ubuntu desktop.

I went straight to the install icon on the desktop and followed the instructions to setup. It’s fairly straightforward and the only thing I configured manually was the partition and file system settings. I have a root directory, a home directory and a boot directory (4GB for the first 2, and 99MB for the boot directory). I wanted to keep Windows on my Eee PC so I just installed Ubuntu on the SD Card sitting on the Eee. I also changed the ext2 file system to the newer ext4 file system (supposedly better performance and allows you to save file sizes of up to 1 exabyte, not that I will ever have such a humongous file).

The installation took about 10-15 minutes, only because the SD card write performance is nothing to write home about. Once the install was done, booted right back into Ubuntu. Startup time has improved significantly. Where it used to take over a minute from the power button to the login screen, now it boots in under 30 seconds (I didn’t count, but it sure feels fast). This alone makes it a viable alternative to boot into Ubuntu as opposed to Windows when I need a quick hop onto the Internet.

Configured wifi, and just changed the default brown theme to the one as per the screenshot above. Resized the fonts so that I get more screen real estate, although many would argue I’d need a magnifying glass to read text so small.

Started up Firefox, installed Foxmarks to get my bookmarks list. Started up Pidgin so I could start chatting with friends. Heh, lots of programs installed out of the box, so it makes the experience quick.

Also made some tweaks to the /etc/fstab file to disable journalling on my Ubuntu install, just to reduce the amount of writing onto the disk to preserve its lifespan. I just follow whatever instructions I glean from the Internet as I don’t know how much of an impact it has and I’m just following it based on other people’s advice.

I also tweaked the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to fix up the boot menu so Windows can start from the GRUB boot menu. The convolution here comes from Windows only being smart enough to start from the MBR of the drive where it resides on and Ubuntu is currently situated on the 3rd drive in the BIOS menu. Didn’t manage to get it to work when I was using 8.10 but after deducing what the lines I was supposed to add meant, I got it working. Basically when you pick Windows from the boot menu, it does a swap of partition IDs so that Windows will think the drive it’s on is the main boot disk.

* * *

This was all done the night before and this morning I wanted to type this post out just to journal my experience setting up Jaunty on my Eee. Decided I’d try it as a multimedia device by copying some MP3s over to my USB disk. Plugged it in and I hit my first wall.

Due to licensing term and conditions of Ubuntu, anything that is not quite open source doesn’t get installed by default. This means all the codecs to decode music and video files. So I startup Firefox to get some solutions. A few command lines later, the system is now slowly updating all the required codecs to play almost everything under the sun.

It’s a minor inconvenience for me, but it would probably make life a bit more difficult for people who just want to enjoy their media and can’t do it immediately (not that it’s very straightforward in Windows as well, but it’s just a one click download for a codec pack and you’re off)

* * *

A few more minutes before my codecs finish downloading and I can probably try to play a music file for the first time.

Mmmm.. smell pancakes. Back to this later!

One Idea to Another

★ Posted on at 10:29 pm ★

pipis with xo sauce on noodles

Haven’t had any food pictures in a while. Also haven’t taken many pictures since the Mildura trip. Well, not any pictures worth posting anyway. The above are pipis in XO sauce on noodles. Chinese restaurants prepare the quickest and simplest but delicious meals.

* * *

Banging this post out on Ubuntu 8.10 which is installed on my SD Card on my Eee PC. It feels very different compared to 9.04 now that I’ve tried it as the older version of Ubuntu seems to lag substantially on the Eee. I didn’t feel any noticeable lag while I was trying out the latest version. The final version of 9.04 should be out by tomorrow evening and I’ll probably download the Netbook Remix version (UI is optimised for the small screens on netbooks) and give it a spin on my netbook. Will try to make it dual boot with the default Windows partition although I still haven’t figured out how to edit it to get the correct code in the boot menu. It’s all to do with the complexity of Windows being on the main SSD but the SD Card will become the master device with the SSD becoming the slave when you swap the boot partitions. Heh, or something like that.

* * *
It’s nearly been half a year since I’ve been working again. A little less restless than before, and contributing to the organisation. Lots more of it is starting to make sense now and a new business analyst has just started this week. Providing a little training and it’s not as rigid as when I started my first job, where I recall having my notebook jotting down instructions and trying to follow them to the letter. It took me a few months to realise that the world wouldn’t implode if you did it in your own way and most times, I had a more efficient way of doing things.

Shifting through the different divisions at work and having had a chance to work at the different portfolios gave me insight into how they work and what elements are more important than others. Also learning about human characteristics as I have more interaction with a more diverse crowd. It is interesting to see how people respond to situations differently when presented with a scenario. It makes me wonder about myself and how I’d deal with situations.

* * *

Still comfortably warm this time of the year. It’s getting darker earlier these days but it doesn’t feel any colder. Well, the weather is strange like that. You don’t quite feel it until suddenly one day you can’t just dress in your shorts and t-shirt anymore and not feel chilly inside out.

* * *

Putting a little more cash into the stock market. There’s a wealth of information out there on how to manage your personal finances and I’ve been reading up every now and then. Put some cash into index funds, which replicate the ups and downs of the stock market as it is a basket of stocks weighted according to their actual amount on the stock exchange. Less risky than investing in individual stocks (I’ve seen bank stocks fall and rise by 50% in the last few months) but also having less potential gain. Well, return is relative to risk in that the higher your expected return, the higher you need to have an appetite for risk. I’m personally pretty risk adverse, but looking at current interest rates (3.5% for cash savings), it might help to put some into stocks, which can have capital appreciation over the long term.

Warren Buffett’s words of wisdom. “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”. It does make sense, as when people are letting go of their stocks, prices go down, which make them cheaper to buy, however, one will have fear that it will go down more and shun the market. When markets go up, people become paranoid of losing out on the bandwagon and jump in only to find out they have bought it at a higher price than they should have and make losses when the market loses confidence and starts selling.

It’s a pretty volatile market at the moment, where investors are trading on sentiment and I’ve noticed the news with amusement that when stock prices go up, people warn that we haven’t seen the worst of it. When prices tumble, there are reports of positive factors in the economy that could stimulate growth.

I feel it’s good to put together a personal portfolio of investments just for your own future. The first few times I put money into stocks I broke out in a cold sweat, fearing for the worst. Heh, but wetting your feet is the first step to getting familiar with it and if you don’t make mistakes you will never learn how to become better.

* * *

On a side note, that 4-4 match between Liverpool and Arsenal was most spectacular, even if I only watched the goals between the two teams. Should have got up as I intended to earlier to watch it.

* * *

Heh, enough banter for tonight.