Yay. I finally turned 18. I now can flaunt my ID in Australia, since its always needed for doing most things.

And a Happy Mother's Day... Yes all you /.'ers, go wish 'em if you already haven't.

Well, what have I been doing...

• Been really slack. Wanz's birthday was on Saturday night (okay, Sunday), and I've still not edited and uploaded the pictures for general web viewing. Its so unlike me.
• Fixed a sound card driver on a Windows 95 box, that was more or less built-into the motherboard by AST computers. Boy, Google really does help - this involved opening up the ancient AST casing (its a Pentium 120!) and reading out the markings on the sound chip. Productive.
• Tuteman, software written by some Business/Economic folk at Monash is a bitch to work under Windows 2000. Read the documentation, and realised that it required Service Pack 2.

  Whats worse is that when the software decided to crash because SP2 wasn't installed, it didn't even prompt with an error message. It just halted and the window closed. Where's the error handling in that? I promise to write better software.

  Well, after applying the "Critical Updates" and then getting the actual SP2 for Terrie, she was up and running by about half past midnight. Not bad :)

• And today... Woohoo. Came home after a haircut. Seemingly, Carrie got a box for FREE from some rich kid that doesn't know much about money and economics. Was a PIII 866, with a 14GB hard disk, and 128MB RAM (with monitor and stuff) all for free... Gosh. Anyways, the hard disk was supposedly problematic, and the OS failed, so thats why it was thrown out.

  No worries, byte to the rescue. Formatted, did a scan for bad clusters, marked stuff bad, and proceeded to install Windows 98. And here again we face soundcard problems. Gosh. Why can't people just have their driver disks handy? Well can't blame Carrie, it was the dodo that threw the machine out.

  Fixed everything up, installed Office too. And guess what? The network card drivers were missing. And there was no box/manual/etc... Under Linux, this would have been a breeze (it's a standard PCI ne2k card). But under Windows, it meant painful searching for a network driver. It was finally found, and all was well.

  Registered the card on the network, and within minutes, Windows was up and running, surfing the web. Excellent. Now to fix the dratted sound. The PC Chips motherboard had a built in sound card, that had no drivers for it (tried using standard AC 97 ones, and it was a no go). Having a manual or CDROM around would have been handy, but that was not an option. The ex-owner also had a Sound Blaster Value card or something lying around, popped that in and tried to install the drivers. Conflicts, etc... and guess what? The integrated sound worked.

  'Twas already 1am, and Carrie isn't much into great sound. So left it at that, assembled up the casing, and boy golly, we have a working PC, that arrived basically as junk. Oh, did I mention the dust that was on the disk, and the video card? Initially, the video card would go all quirky because the dust was interrupting the contact pins... A quick blow did the trick.

Think that's about the adventures I should pen down. Boy, if I actually penned down all the PC's I fixed around the halls, I think the next computer advisor here'd be me. :)

In no way a threat to the current RA :)

Last I penned anything was April 23rd... Gosh thats been a long time. April 24th was the Dress Up, pay $4 night and get pissed.

Several problems with that:

1. Drinks didn't last very long
2. I was denied my drinking rights after two drinks

I'm underage. So what? I become 18 in a couple of weeks. Everyone at the halls know I drink. So whats the big idea of snipping my tag, and giving me the $2 tag?

This is me bitching. Where's my refund? Where were my rightful drinks? If you sneak into a bar, and you're underage, they let you stay. Why must it be different here?

Won't really be mentioning names... but I've got people marked in this Hall. Boy should they watch their backs....

Not sure how geeky this is supposed to be... But this survey things on other blogs don't seem bad...

Which Ally Mcbeal star are you?

I tried another one...

Click here to take the test!

Okay, enough of that now... And I realise, Slashdot doesn't support inline graphics. A terrible waste IMHO... So the first link tell's me I'm "John from Ally McBeal", and the second link says I'm "Natural Bubble Tea". Wow.

Its no wonder I don't blog.... I just can't keep up with the updates! Argh!

On the 13th (saturday), saw Time Machine, and had fun at Chadstone... Dinner was at the Pancake Parlour, which has the best pancakes.

On the 15th, went to see Panic Room since it was Raj's birthday. Came home at about 11.58pm, and had to run to another birthday shower - Julian's birthday this time. Gosh, that was a miracle I made it. Took lots of photos.

On the 16th, we had a Cultural Carnival rehearsal. We did a skit on Russia. Props and all done till about 1.30am.... Not bad.

On the 17th, we had the Cultural Carnival dinner... And we won. The Russian skit won! We rock. Which meant we had dinner together the next day...

Come the 19th, dinner was at Kim Chi, nice Korean food. Recommended place to eat IMHO.

The 20th was another Chadstone day, watching The Scorpion King, with The Rock and Kelly Hu. Okay, Kelly Hu is the bomb, she rocks okay. Pretty as heck (yes, geeks like girls too.. doh!). Had dinner right up the Dandenong Ranges, at Credos - great Italian food...

Fixed a PC that night too. Celeron 1Ghz, 256MB RAM, Win2k. Rock on, finished everything by about 3am. Came home, and was told to do some e-mail header reading by a friend. Slept at 4am. Nothing new.

Today, spent most of the day sleeping... And of course, I cooked for the first time in my life! Made some sort of chicken stir fry, rice, and two eggs. Thats a great improvement for me. Excellent stuff.

And why am I blogging today? Finally? Because I remember I have a blog... Just passed the URL to a friend. Doh. Ah well, good night, got a 9am'er today, and its nearly 1am.

P/S: That was a week of no coding ;-)

Right, finally got my off my lazy arse, finished with all the coding for the week, refreshed after the holidaying I had last week, I met the end of my time schedule, and handed in the review on the very last day it was due.

I've been using the great software from Cesinc for ages... So this is a reasonably biased review. But who cares?

Read the review at none other than PDAbistro.com.

I tell you, I dream of the day we can do things totally wirelessly. Access the Internet from the shitter, on your Handera PDA, and IRC and ICQ from there, instead of say reading an e-book or something.

The day is near. WLAN technology is taking up to new heights... And I'm getting excited. UCSD bus riders make speedy Net connection was an article that got me thinking and I realise that I'm not far away from being wired in a wireless world.

In Malaysia, I already used to get on the Internet while commuting on the LRT or on a bus, via my Palm and my cell phone. Long gone are the days of IR, where line-of-sight would be required - heck, now they have Bluetooth, and my phone can reside happily in my pocket!

What can be better than that? A fast WLAN connection at 2.4mbps! Alas, that I'll have to wait for.... I know I have to wait for it. In Malaysia, a couple (or is it one?) Starbucks outlet has WLAN access in it at the moment - one.

And here in Australia, WLAN is still slow to take off. Monash still is in the stages, planning to have WLAN over its Clayton campus, and target completion date would be 2002-2003. So, thats still quite a while to wait for it.

As for Malaysia, I can only dream...I doubt it'll exist anytime soon.

Why am I not at UCSD? ;-)

Okay, okay, getting something straight.

When I write, timezones are based on Australian time. I'm located in Melbourne, remember?

And if and when I do go back to visit Malaysia, the timezone changes again. Slashdot's timezone is US standard time... So when references to time are made, they're accurate to what I see on my clock, on the bottom right hand of my screen.

To show how geek I am, I decided to even paste the coordinates to my place of stay ;)

S3754.432' E14508.371' - 99m elevation (± 7m accuracy)

Yay!

So, can we just code and code and code in a day? It all started at about 1am yesterday. I started coding for a Perl prac - some recipe system. Wrote most of the code, and zonked out.

Go to the prac class, debug it, found out my code didn't work for everything. Fine, modify, and it worked. Thats Perl for the day. Come home and get greeted by some C coding.

Not any C coding. Some C code, where we're meant to modify some code by our lecturer. The code is just horrendous - now I will learn to comment my own code from now on. Heck, I couldn't even figure out how to compile the freaking thing! Everytime I compiled a file, or even just made object code out of it, the linker would complain of some error, or missing function. The code out of the box was broken.

Nevermind, I think I still finished it and we'll see how the results show up... Its 2am now, I will hand this in at 10am, and I got back at about 1am from a couple of drinks with some friends. How fun.

But that wasn't all the coding I managed to do today. I was productive! I wrote an IMEI decoder in Perl as well, over tea, with Handera and keyboard at the park. Now, all I need are the first 8 digits of all you guys IMEI numbers. No security hazard for you, just punch *#06# and give me the first 8 digits. Its rather simple.

Besides, I'll add you to a contributors list or something. Now, I've got to slap the code up somewhere... Watch this space for more =)

I finally got me an account on /.. This after hanging around the great site since '98.

Why the sudden change? Why the sudden acceptance of a portal? For one, it could have something to do with me being on the Internet for all the day now that I'm in a uni and the Internet line is just sweet.

But I've never been a portal person. I've always thought that registering an account and actually, customising your stuff will be cumbersome. I guess I was wrong.

Reading Slashdot now is heaps more fun. Everything is customised. I get a journal (ala blog). I don't have to code up some PHP to blog at my personal site. Neither do I have to go some site offering free blogs either.

At least I finally made the switch in 2002. April 2002 will always be remembered as the day I got myself a /. account. (If only this were April 1st :) )