Today mark another milestone for Canonical’s Linux distribution, Ubuntu, with its’ ninth release dubbed as “Intrepid Ibex” or if you prefer the number, just Ubuntu 8.10 is suffice. You can read about the release note here. Among the changes are:

• Comes with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5 / X.Org 7.4, Pidgin 2.5, and GIMP 2.6 (among many other packages).
• Native 3G support.
• Refined default theme.
• Dynamic Kernel Module Support (some reading here).
• Comes with a special ATI driver for providing the X.Org 7.4 support.
• Inclusion of Live USB Disk Creator.
• Refined BulletProffX.

If you’re not into Ubuntu yet, you can download it from Ubuntu’s site. If you’re upgrading, a simple guide can be found here (check your release version first). Currently I’m using the network upgrade method since I already have version 8.04.1. But since my local broadband connection kinda sucks , it seems the upgrade process will took 2 years to complete But for those who’re not in the rush, you can always request a free cd through Shipit.

Petaling Jaya, 1 September 2008 – As a result of the significant 20% excise increase, and taking into consideration the consequent impact of sales tax, trade margins and the higher than normal inflationary impacts on our own cost base, as global tobacco, paper and fuel costs have all increased by double digit amounts, British American Tobacco Malaysia has revised its cigarette prices.

The new cigarette prices, which will be effective Monday, 1st September 2008, are as follows:-
 • Dunhill Fine Cut 20s range RM 10.00
 • Dunhill D360 20s range RM 9.40
 • Dunhill King Size 20s range RM 9.00
 • Dunhill King Size 14s range RM 6.50
 • Kent King Size 20s range RM 9.00
 • Pall Mall Plain 20s RM 9.40
 • Pall Mall King Size 20s range RM 7.50
 • Pall Mall King Size 14s range RM 5.50
 • Pall Mall King Size 25s RM 8.20
 • Benson & Hedges King Size 20s RM 9.00
 • Benson & Hedges King Size 14s RM 6.50
 • Perilly’s 100s 20s RM 7.70
 • Perilly’s King Size 20s range RM 7.50
 • Perilly’s King Size 25s range RM 8.20

Source: British American Tobacco Malaysia

My Take
Since it’s really a predictable move, I’m not surprised at all. At some point I would say it’s a good move because the intent is to discourage people from continuing the smoking habit. But, on the other hand, is it effective? Each year we see increases, but does that stop the habit significantly? From my personal experience, no it does not. People will seek for alternatives (be it legal or not) and to be honest really…the solution to remedy the smoking problem is always not laying on money, it’s the attitude (and hunger, lust, craving for it…hehehe true smokers know what I’m saying ). Will I stop? Maybe in the future but surely not because of price increases

PETALING JAYA: Starting Wednesday, users with pirated copies of Microsoft Corp’s Windows XP Professional operating system (OS) on machines that are Internet-capable could find their computer displays going black and with no screen icons visible.

There are 8.6 million users of Win XP Pro in Malaysia and about three million are expected to suffer the “blackouts,” according to Microsoft Malaysia.

To continue working, the user would need to reset the machine’s desktop background. Everything will return to normal. But when 60 minutes are up, the black screen will reappear and the user must go through the whole process again.

Source: TheStar Online

My Take

Well, I don’t know if this step only apply to Malaysian user but I have little doubt Microsoft will even stop there. Expect another fuss coming from either Microsoft or the *ehem* *ehem* community. You can read the full article by following the given url and evaluate everything yourself. I suddenly remembered a quote from Jurassic Park movie which sound something like “Nature will find it’s way” and seeing how Windows XP is still very popular, I kinda can see Microsoft latest move will end in vain (remember WGA¹ anyone?). I’m not praying it to happen though; just predicting

Owh….don’t make that gloomy face ; isn’t this the best time to jump to Linux?

There are a couple of things that I still remember till this day. Being a delinquent myself, most of my school days been filled with the routine of in & out meeting my disciplinary teacher, En. Ajis. I’m not going to brag about that; it’s something that I’m not proud of (but not regretting it either ). So I just list out some of the moment that I truly remember from my old school days (in no particular order):

• Our first headmaster was Tuan Hj. Ahmad Wagiman; a very straight & serious guy. Whenever I remember about him, I can’t stop thinking about Wataniah. Because he somehow related to it (ex-army or maybe just a volunteer trainee) but surely at some point interacting with him, you will be wondering whether you’re a soldier or student. Respect him a lot nonetheless.
• Beside the headmaster, we have En. Nasuha b. Paiman as Penolong Kanan Akademik (Senior Assistant of Co-curricular Activities) and Tuan. Hj. Osman b. Ahmad as Penolong Kanan Hal Ehwal Murid (Senior Assistant of Students’ Affairs) along with a couple of handful teachers. Including the headmaster and his assistant, I can’t remember exactly how many first batch teachers we had but surely not more than 12. Okay consider this fact to prove my point; we don’t have a Pendidikan Islam’s (Islamic teaching) teacher so we skip almost half of the year’s syllabus then we also have one very bright Chemistry teacher but since there are no student to learn it (yet) she had to teach English; and top it all with the fact that all students know all the teacher’s name. Hey…even our En. Nasuha remember all of our name (179!!! ) including our father’s name and hometown .
• Since our school is a new school, we can’t escape from been bugged by “the creature from the other world” (ghost and the likes ). I even have some experience on it and it’s up to the point that I actually can have conversation with them!! But till this days I keep telling myself that it was all just an illusion (being a child and been left to stay at the hostel is pretty tough ) but once in a while, I do can feel them though. Scared the shit out of me
• Being the first batch student, it’s our ultimate responsibility to structuring the school. Each week, we manually putting the chair and table to each classroom, washing classroom become a norm, planting some tree, drawing some mural on the wall, putting the big goal post on the football field, etc. But mainly, we do cleaning chore every week (or is it every days ). Also, just across the road, the Sekolah Sukan Bandar Penawar² is in the process of development; all the dust from the construction site tainted our school. Ha…now you know why I’m confused whether we do the cleaning each week or each days
• Being about 50km from Kota Tinggi, the nearest town is Bandar Penawar (about 6-8km I guess). But…Bandar Penawar is a dead town (I’ve heard it’s better nowadays though). As far as I can remember, they got only 1 or 2 restaurants/grocery stores. But fortunately, our school is also near Desaru³; so most parents that came visiting their child went there for picnic along with their child.
• We don’t have any science equipment, so for a long while, we’re only learning science based on textbook and whenever the textbook mention experiment, our teacher would just ask us to imagine it in our head
• Strangely enough, most of the first batch students is from Johor. Only a couple few from other states. Must be fate alright~~~
• Before we come up with the name “SAKTI”, many suggestion arise. Just to name a few including SEMASKOTI, SEMASKOT, or even the plain SMSKT. Kinda glad it’s SAKTI…can’t imagine the humiliation that we would receive if we choose SEMASKOTI

That’s all about it I guess. Sure have a lot more but I do think it all will end up relating to my darker side. To sum it up, I can’t believe 12 years had passed already; like the usual saying…it seems like yesterday But we keep moving aren’t we? All the memories will be remembered because it’s not too excessive to say that our batch help building SAKTI. However inappropriate we might be in the past, it’s undeniable that we grow with SAKTI and somehow we proud of it. Long live SAKTI and happy anniversary

Story
Well, the story start in the usual way; the same as the previous iteration. If Star Wars were famous for their “from the galaxy far far away” scrolling text introduction style, IMHO, Mummy had their own by telling a little bit history about the villain in a form of flashback (kind of story telling). It all start by portraying Jet Li as the Emperor Han doing the usual conquest and killing spree to gain more power. He buried his enemies under the Great Wall and he even master all the five elements (supposedly related to he can use those elements in magical way ) His lust for power come to even greater height by seeking immortality. Thus, he instruct his most loyal soldier, General Ming to find way to immortality for him.

Literally, General Ming found it by asking help from a witches Zi Yuan and both of em’ continue to search at some sacred library. In the process of searching, they both fall in love and since the Emperor also had interest in Zi Yuan, General Ming can be considered fucked up at this point. Both of em’ return to the palace and Zi Yuan present the Emperor the spell book containing the spell to immortality. She then cast the spell to the Emperor after he promise to let her and General Ming live together. But both of em’ playing tricks really; the Emperor in the end broke his promise, kill General Ming, tried to kill Zi Yuan, Zi Yuan revealed that she actually curse the Emperor and his soldier by turning them into terracotta statues, and she escape the palace.

The story then go onwards to 1947. A little bit introduction on how the young Alex O’Connell found the Dragon Emperor’s Tomb, then he found the Emperor in its terracotta form and after some hiatus, bring him back to Shanghai. The previous protagonists Rick and Evelyn O’Connel enjoying their retired life in Britain (although they seems not doing so). One day, the British government want them to carry some relic (Eye of Shangri-La) back to Shanghai as a sign of good faith. They did bring the relic back to Shanghai, encountering Jonathan (Evelyn’s brother) & Alex but in the end like Jonathan said, “You guys are like a mummy magnet!!!“, shits happen and the adventure kick in.

Cast
I strongly want to state here that I miss Rachel Weisz in this movie. It’s not like her replacement Maria Bello was not good, but honestly, apart from the action scene, she failed miserably. I also begin to miss Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo). But knowing the fact that Jet Li would never do a martial art movie anymore after Fearless, I can forgive him for not doing much action on this movie. Beside, he doesn’t need to move much considering the fact he got his terracotta army and his 5 element magic. Jonathan (John Hannah) is as hilarious as usual, and Rick O’connell (Brendan Fraser) kinda feel out a little bit. Clearly he doesn’t have strong chemistry with Maria Bello. Alex (Luke Ford) kinda doesn’t represent the Alex that I know on Mummy Return but maybe he become like that after living separately with his parents. Who knows eh…child complex stuff.

Conclusion
Well…how should I say this. Happy? Not quite. Disappointed? Hell yeah. I guess the first mistake of this iteration is the exclusion of Rachel Weisz. The feeling of the tense to save the world also is not there. Compare this; an army of mortal (Medjai) vs horde of Anubis’s army and the undead vs terracotta army, which one brings more tense? Come on…nobody care if the undead been killed..they’re dead already. I also can’t stop myself from thinking, after all this thousand of years, Zi Yuan never care to really kill the Emperor…it took her 2000 years to try the kill. I don’t mind all the other small details because this is a fiction, it’s to be expected. But it seems, the production took that fact for granted; until up the point of keep reusing the old plot (eg: after thousand of years, the Emperor still have a follower that would do anything to resurrect him, even fighting yetis ). To conclude it all, out of 5 I gave 2.5. Enough said…

There is already an official guide on how to properly upgrade your wordpress (and it’s painless), but let me tell you how I do it. First, I determine all my changes that I made previously with the original release (hack, mod, etc) and I’m pretty sure all the changes been made hard coded, so as long as I don’t delete/replace those files, it should be okay. Most mod/hack that I made is on the theme files (*.php or *.css); so I would be very careful handling “wp-content” folder.

Next, I compare my “wp-config.php” with the new version named “wp-config-sample.php” to see if there are any changes at all. A little changes I suppose, so I just follow the new structure/format by copying my old settings to the new files and renamed the “wp-config-sample.php” into “wp-config.php” Then, I just followed the official guide. Backup database, change the name of “wp-include” and “wp-admin” by adding the suffix “_backup”, and lastly copying all the new WordPress 2.6 files over the old ones (exclude the “wp-content” folder. It seems “wp-content” only contains few files which I’m very sure I already updated those files; no harms done for not copying them over.

Then running the blog off the browser, login to admin, and database update page appeared. Just press upgrade, and a few moments later, voila…it’s done. Now, I just need to see if everything work as before. Since I use K2 theme (with external style), I encounter a few hickups but not that hard to solve. I just play some check-uncheck and save; done. Also, I notice some “image missing” error on my blog and I just realize, that some of my image didn’t exist in the “wp-include/images” folder. Luckilly, I have em’ in my old folder (wp-include_backup). On the plugins department, no appearent problem at the moment and I’m glad…Really painless.

DB Upgrade

PS: Well, it seems the upgrade do brake something. Sometime my sidebar act a little bit funny than usual. Sigh~~guess I have to wait for the next version of K2.

UPDATE: Head on to K2 official site, the update to comply with the 2.6 had been released.

The song of the PV is Gravitation by Angela. It’s the opening of an anime series called Heroic Age. To be honest, mecha type of anime is really not my cup of tea. Most of the time it’s just coincidence, not that I specifically look for it; since I like the song, it’s the main reason why I keep watching Heroic Age until the end . Well, enjoy the song, although I personally do have high hope for the PV to be a little bit different…still not bad though