Then, the same behavior happened in Terminal. This is where I realize the common behavior. You know, when you press delete on an empty prompt, you get a bell. The default is the audible bell. When I change it to the visual bell, sluggishness disappeared.

On Messages, I had the default sound effect setting when messages are received or sent.

Boy was I right. In the log /var/log/system.log there were a bunch of these:

May  3 22:30:57 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Actions: Couldn't create SystemSound from /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff
May  3 22:31:07 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Unable to find a sound action ID for /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff  errorResult: 268435460
May  3 22:31:07 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Actions: Couldn't create SystemSound from /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff
May  3 22:31:17 ADYMAC iChat[66352]: [Warning] Unable to find a sound action ID for /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/Received Message.aiff  errorResult: 268435460

These are when I tried to change the system bell using the System Preferences application.

May 11 01:45:55 adymac System Preferences[44495]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound
May 11 01:53:22 adymac System Preferences[44678]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound
May 11 01:58:20 adymac System Preferences[44678]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound
May 11 01:58:25 adymac System Preferences[44678]: Error 268435460 setting AlertSound

And so I tried a lot of things, including logging out then in, inspecting the file permissions, and also ran the verify permission utility on the hard disk using Disk Utility. Nothing worked.

Finally, I saw that there was one process called coreaudiod

_coreaudiod    45197   0.0  0.1  2453172   5228   ??  Ss   Fri02AM   0:10.52 /usr/sbin/coreaudiod

And so I tried killing it:

$ sudo killall coreaudiod

And as expected, it respawned itself and all audio effects were now working. Sluggishness and the dreaded rainbow wheel are gone.

Googling after, I saw that people mentioned that this may be a bug, and killing coreaudiod is only a workaround not the solution.

Come to think of it, it also caused unnecessary delay when making screen shots using the Command-Shift-4 key combination.

I hope this can save you some time.

Related Articles

• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Fri, February 17, 2012 -- Mac Messages Beta
• Fri, December 9, 2011 -- Sparrow and Shortmail
• Sat, April 23, 2011 -- Shrinking VirtualBox Disk Images
• Sat, February 12, 2011 -- Mac OS X: Modifying Stubborn Files Transferred From Windows

Sluggish iChat, Messages, Terminal, and Others in Mac OS X Lion originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sat, May 12, 2012.

If you’re a seasoned Linux SysAdmin, you’ll miss LFTP. It’s a really powerful FTP client. Yes, you can also install it using MacPorts or Fink but right now, this is much quicker for me.

Here’s how I built LFTP 4.3.6 on my MacBook Pro. For the record, I’m on 10.7.3

Prerequisite: Apple developer tools (Xcode)

1. Download The GNU Readline Library (The library that came with OS X will not work). This is how I built Readline 6.2:

$ cd /where/readline/was/extracted
$ ./configure --prefix="/usr/local" --disable-shared && make && sudo make install

This will build a static library and install in it /usr/local

2. Make sure the library (libreadline.a) was built successfully in /usr/local/lib

3. Download LFTP and build it:

$ cd /where/lftp/was/extracted
$ CXXFLAGS="-O0 -Wall -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti -fno-implement-inlines" \
LDFLAGS="-Xlinker -search_paths_first -L/usr/local/lib" \
CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" \
./configure --with-openssl --disable-shared --disable-nls
$ make && sudo make install

In the lftp configure line, the “-Xlinker -search_paths_first” is necessary so that the linker will not prefer the system shared /usr/lib/libreadline.dylib to the static libreadline.a we just compiled.

The final binary will be installed into your /usr/local/bin/lftp and if your build was successful you should be able to run “lftp” and get the prompt:

lftp :~>

My LFTP version:

LFTP | Version 4.3.6 | Copyright (c) 1996-2012 Alexander V. Lukyanov
 
LFTP is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
 
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
 
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with LFTP.  If not, see <http: //www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
 
Send bug reports and questions to the mailing list lftp at uniyar.ac.ru.
 
Libraries used: Readline 6.2, Expat 2.0.1, OpenSSL 0.9.8r 8 Feb 2011, libiconv 1.11, zlib 1.2.5

Good luck!

Perhaps some of you arrived by searching for “error: ‘rl_kill_full_line’ was not declared in this scope”. Yep, the above steps should help you.

Related Articles

• Fri, August 6, 2010 -- SMTP Smart Host Setup for Postfix in Snow Leopard
• Thu, February 9, 2012 -- VirtueMart Custom Login Module in Joomla!
• Sat, January 7, 2012 -- Leverage Browser Caching
• Fri, December 9, 2011 -- Sparrow and Shortmail
• Sat, April 23, 2011 -- Shrinking VirtualBox Disk Images

Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sat, May 5, 2012.

For the record every time I try *61*XXXXXXXXXX# the automated voice response is “harap maaf, anda tidak mempunyai akses ke nombor ini”. I think it’s related to a protection so that users can’t simply forward to any number. Protection is good only if there are procedures to follow to make a feature useful. Not in this case.

I created a ticket in the My Support section in myUniFi only to be closed by X1012121 – it’s not even a real name. The ticket was closed without any explanation whatsoever. Nada. Nothing. Nil.

So what they put in their Microsoft SharePoint website Phone (Voice Features) page doesn’t work. At least for me. If you can see any instructions on adding custom phone numbers to the forward list, do let me know. I might need new spectacles.

As a matter of fact, I created a ticket a week earlier about something else and although I specifically asked to be emailed, they called. Maybe the text on their system is too small to read especially the “Preferred communication” field. I don’t know. The annoying thing was that the person kept calling and calling and calling when the call was not picked up.

When the call is not picked up, please call later.

If you’re not going to fully support your value added services, you might as well not offer them at all. I am fully satisfied with the Internet service, but since there are “FREE” added service I thought I might utilize it. Now that I know they don’t work, I’m unhappy.

One thing that really bothers me is that I think they don’t really have an SLA with customers, and KPI to fulfill. Closing tickets without any reason is unacceptable by any standard, not even in inter organization support services.

I will never understand why TM work like this… and I know this post will not mean anything to them. I am just disappointed. Having some exposure on how they do stuff, I think they can do better and generate more profit than now but the mentality is just beyond me.

Malaysia boleh?

Related Articles

• Thu, December 9, 2010 -- TM UniFi Downtime: Exercise Your Rights
• Sun, January 22, 2012 -- Crocs Malaysia Warehouse Sale
• Sun, April 17, 2011 -- Selangor No Plastic Bag Every Saturday
• Sat, February 26, 2011 -- If You Want to Be Selfish, Do it Smart
• Mon, February 7, 2011 -- Tak Nak – Really?

UniFi Phone Call Forwarding originally appeared on Romantika.name on Thu, February 23, 2012.

Installation is straight forward but you will be warned that the machine will need to be restarted. After installation, the spanking new icon will appear in the dock. The rightmost icon in the screenshot, not the middle one.

After installation (and configuration with your iCloud account), the familiar iChat UI will appear. Alongside with a new “iPad inspired” message list. Messages will continue to work with the existing accounts, just with additional features. As you can see in my screenshot my Google Talk (Jabber) account works fine.

I really wanted to know whether old messages from the iPhone will be imported. They were not. Which is no big deal. I’m not sure whether some background sync will happen while I use it. I’ll update if it does that.

I sent a test message to a buddy, Nazham:

At the same moment, my message and his reply appeared in both Messages for Mac and the iPhone. This is what Apple meant by “Start an iMessage conversation on your Mac and continue it on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.”.

I love it.

Knowing Apple, Mountain Lion might be the only OS X I can upgrade my 2010 MacBook Pro with and I hope the price will be more or less like Lion.

Until next time, happy computing.

Related Articles

• Sat, May 12, 2012 -- Sluggish iChat, Messages, Terminal, and Others in Mac OS X Lion
• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Fri, December 9, 2011 -- Sparrow and Shortmail
• Sun, May 1, 2011 -- Problems Saving Alerts in MyProfiles
• Sat, April 23, 2011 -- Shrinking VirtualBox Disk Images

Mac Messages Beta originally appeared on Romantika.name on Fri, February 17, 2012.

I was helping a friend-client to accomplish redirection to the same page after logout.

Here’s the basic code that you need to have in a module with the Jumi extension:

< ?php
    $user=& JFactory::getUser();
    if (!$user->guest)
        echo '<a href="index.php?option=com_user&task=logout&return=Lw">Logout</a>';
    else
        echo '<a href="index.php?page=account.index&option=com_virtuemart">Login</a>';
?>

The code above will redirect users to the root or uppermost level of the website.

Let’s say that your website is http://www.yourwebsite.com/ and your shopping page with VirtueMart is installed at a subfolder http://www.yourwebsite.com/shop/

The question is simply where you want your user to end up after logging out. If you need your users to end up at http://www.yourwebsite.com/ then you’re good to go. If you want your users to be redirected to the shop or a thank you page, here’s where you need to be a little creative.

You need to replace that “Lw” in the logout link to a different string. “Lw” is the base 64 representation of the character “/”. So this means that the user will be redirected to / which is http://www.yourwebsite.com/

A solution I came out with:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

< ?php
    $redirect_to = '/shop/';
    $user=& JFactory::getUser();
    if (!$user->guest)
        echo '<a href="index.php?option=com_user&task=logout&return=' . base64_encode($redirect_to) . '">Logout</a>';
    else
        echo '<a href="index.php?page=account.index&option=com_virtuemart">Login</a>';
?>

So only line 2 needs to be changed. Let’s say you want users to be redirected to http://www.yourwebsite.com/thankyou.html here’s how you will change line 2:

2

    $redirect_to = '/thankyou.html';

If you’d like your users to simply be redirected to the same page where they clicked the logout link, here’s what you should do to line 2:

2

    $redirect_to = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

That’s simply it. At first, I totally forgot that I can use PHP’s base64_encode so I ended up confusing my friend with an online encoder so that he can replace the “Lw”.

One annoying thing that I wasn’t able to solve is the login page always displays the error message:

Error: You do not have permission to access the requested module.

I think Joomla! is trying to load VirtueMart too early and I can’t make it go away. Looking at the Internet a lot of other websites has this message displayed. If you know how this message can be removed without hacking the CSS or source code, please let me know and I’ll give you credit.

References:

1. http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=88802#msg290906
2. http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1457876

Related Articles

• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Sat, January 7, 2012 -- Leverage Browser Caching
• Sat, December 24, 2011 -- Let Apache Compress Your Website
• Fri, December 9, 2011 -- Sparrow and Shortmail
• Fri, August 6, 2010 -- SMTP Smart Host Setup for Postfix in Snow Leopard

VirtueMart Custom Login Module in Joomla! originally appeared on Romantika.name on Thu, February 9, 2012.

Back in 2009 or 2010 we went to a Crocs warehouse sale in Ikano Power Center in Damansara. It was held in an empty unit next to the IT hypermarket at the top floor. We bought 5 pairs – two for myself and three for my son.

I bought myself an Olive Baya, and a Black Trailbreak.

For my son we bought him a Green Baya, a Batman Cayman and a Crocs Electro.

For other models than the Baya, links are from other websites as they no longer exist on the official website. Maybe they have been taken off production or something.

The purpose of this post is to make sure that if there is any more warehouse sale in the future, and if you’re going, you better thoroughly check the shoes you’re buying.

A few days back, my son was having trouble to put on the Crocs Electro on his left foot. That was weird, and at first I had a silly thought that his left foot has grown more than his right foot. I was surprised to see that the shoes, although marked with the same size, had the left one smaller than the other.

I don’t know how this happened but I’m not happy. Lucky for us we realize this before his feet were bruised more. It is not my intention to accuse anything at anyone but I have to admit that I am disappointed. Knowing Malaysia, we can’t return the shoes especially since it was bought in a warehouse sale. Heck, we can’t even return them if we buy them at retail price.

And of course, living in Malaysia I’m not excluding the possibilities of foul play. It’s how most businesses make maximum profit anyway…

You can see more pictures in the full post.

So, this is a call to all Crocs fans out there in the beautiful country of Malaysia, be careful.

Related Articles

• Sun, September 27, 2009 -- Secret Recipe at The Curve Damansara
• Fri, July 24, 2009 -- Italiannies Sunway Pyramid
• Thu, January 22, 2009 -- Economy Crisis Hits Malaysia
• Sat, February 26, 2011 -- If You Want to Be Selfish, Do it Smart
• Thu, December 9, 2010 -- TM UniFi Downtime: Exercise Your Rights

Crocs Malaysia Warehouse Sale originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sun, January 22, 2012.

Some people told me that their ISP or hosting provider requested that they upgrade the hosting plan or subscribe for more bandwidth. Since this site doesn’t have that much traffic, I wouldn’t know.

However recently I was able to help on a website which has a lot of visitors compared to this site. Around 14-18 visitors per minute on a working day and the bandwidth usage was very high, more than a gigabyte per day.

For the website, I saw that there were many requests for images (photos). The images aren’t that big anyway, around 100KB each but the amount of request made it significant.

Armed with knowledge of mod_expires, I added the following clauses to .htaccess while hoping that the server has the module installed. The following configuration is minimal, and Google Pagespeed actually suggests for 1 week.

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
        ExpiresActive On
        ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2 hours"
        ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2 hours"
        ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 2 hours"
        ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2 hours"
        ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 2 hours"
        ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 2 hours"
        ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 2 hours"
</ifmodule>

Although I know why Google Analytics set its expiry to 2 hours, it’s kind of amusing since the suggestion comes from another Google product. Oh well I am allowed to be amused right?

So let’s get to the results. Here are the bandwidth graphs from both days. I enabled mod_expires at around 6PM on 5 January 2012.

We can’t really see the difference by looking at the graphs. Google Analytics shows that there are at least 200 more visits on 6 January 2012. The numbers? Here you go:

At least 400MB were saved by this technique. You can actually put specific settings for each folder in your website. For example 2 hours is nice for cosmetic images which may need to be changed frequently but not for photos. For example if you run a photography website, you can even make your photos to expire in 1 year!

What mod_expires does is actually telling the browser that the resource (images) will expire on a specific date. It’s flexible enough to set the date from the access time. Here is the link to the official manual page for mod_expires.

Please be careful to note that this is not a quick solution for the lazy. You must think hard enough to set the proper amount of time before the images expire otherwise normal users will not see your changes or updates to the image until the cache on their browsers expire!

Good luck!

Related Articles

• Sun, March 1, 2009 -- Image Hotlink Protection
• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Thu, February 9, 2012 -- VirtueMart Custom Login Module in Joomla!
• Sat, December 24, 2011 -- Let Apache Compress Your Website
• Fri, August 6, 2010 -- SMTP Smart Host Setup for Postfix in Snow Leopard

Leverage Browser Caching originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sat, January 7, 2012.

The problem with that approach is that when you upgrade WordPress you have to manually add the line into index.php, and the technique does not improve loading time for administration pages.

Compressing is done on the fly by Apache, and it helps improve loading time because your browser receives smaller files. While some browsers were broken (they do not know how to handle compressed content), today’s browsers are much more efficient.

If your webhost allows you to add your own .htaccess then you can use this technique. Please note that you can do this for any type of website, not limited to WordPress.

<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
     AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
</ifmodule>

As simple as that. The directive above will ask Apache to compress text, html, xml, css, and javascript files before sending them to the browser. We don’t compress images because we don’t save much on image compression plus it will be too stressful for Apache.

You can use Firebug or Chrome to actually verify whether your content is now zipped. You might have to clear your browser cache first otherwise the files will not be requested from the server. You should look for the content-encoding header and it should say “gzip”. To satisfy yourself, you might want to capture the size of the page (there should be a column for that) before and after you add the directives into .htaccess and you should be able to see a significant reduction in size.

If you don’t see gzip then the possibilities are either your webhost does not allow .htaccess or mod_deflate is not installed on the server. To see whether or not mod_deflate is installed on the server you can remove the 1st and 3rd line in .htaccess and refresh the page. If it’s not installed then you will see an error.

For Joomla! users, there’s an easier way to do it in the Global Configuration section:

Simple eh?

For WordPress, one might argue that they can change the parameter gzipcompression in the semi hidden configuration page http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/options.php but I tried it in WordPress 3.2.1 and it did not work. I read in WordPress forums, they removed this feature because Apache can handle it much better.

Go ahead and try it out. Your visitors will be thankful.

Related Articles

• Thu, February 9, 2012 -- VirtueMart Custom Login Module in Joomla!
• Sat, January 7, 2012 -- Leverage Browser Caching
• Fri, March 6, 2009 -- RegisterFly Resurrected as RegFly
• Sun, March 1, 2009 -- Image Hotlink Protection
• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion

Let Apache Compress Your Website originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sat, December 24, 2011.

I use a lot of email, and by a lot I don’t mean 10 emails per day. No joke. The features of Apple Mail 5.0 are actually enough for my daily use but it does feel a little bit sluggish with 5 IMAP accounts.

Recently, I signed up to Shortmail via my Twitter account. The idea is nice. 500 characters max per email, straight to the point.

While casually browsing through my Twitter stream last night I saw people talking about setting up Sparrow to access Shortmail and sending attachments via Dropbox.

I was thinking, Shortmail is short, Sparrow is light. Combining them together should be nice… and since all of my email accounts are now running via IMAP, why not give Sparrow a try with Shortmail before using it for serious communications.

I downloaded Sparrow through the website to try it out, instead of buying it from the Mac App Store for $9.99

I was pleased that it only asked for my email address and password so I entered my Shortmail account details. It was nice. Shortmail’s logo was displayed on the screen. But it took ten minutes to sync my 3 messages. I don’t know what it was doing and I’m not sure whether the waiting time is caused by Shortmail servers or Sparrow itself.

One thing I hate the most is how markup is displayed in the preview lines in Sparrow. It’s not in Facebook’s email but markup are there for the first 2 emails.

I can understand if there are glitches in Shortmail as it’s still fresh but I don’t expect glitches from Sparrow. I wonder how long it would take for it to sync my gigs of emails from other email accounts. I can’t even imagine and I can’t afford to waste so much time.

Looks likes it’s going to be a while before I am convinced to try Sparrow again. I am glad I didn’t rush to buy the app for $9.99 in the Mac App Store. For now, I’m leaving it to AppZapper to cleanup!

Update 16 December 2011 11:15 AM GMT+8

Less than an hour ago, I received a shortmail from Shortmail telling me that they are working on a new version of their IMAP service that should make a difference. This is great news for those who prefer using Shortmail service via regular email clients. From @Shortmail‘s timeline I can see that they are responding to many users about improving the IMAP service.

Keep up the good work! By the way, my Shortmail address is romantikaname [at] shortmail [dot] com

Thanks for the shortmail! This is nice, and it shows that you are serious about what you do!

For the record, I was more disappointed with Sparrow displaying ugly markup on the preview pane.

Related Articles

• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Thu, February 9, 2012 -- VirtueMart Custom Login Module in Joomla!
• Sat, April 23, 2011 -- Shrinking VirtualBox Disk Images
• Sat, February 12, 2011 -- Mac OS X: Modifying Stubborn Files Transferred From Windows
• Sat, February 12, 2011 -- Starting Subversion Service on Demand in Mac OS X

Sparrow and Shortmail originally appeared on Romantika.name on Fri, December 9, 2011.

I have heard about issues with customer support before but the truth is we’re all humans and we’re hard to be pleased. From the customer point of view, there will always be something wrong with every provider. Agree?

One thing I’ve always liked about companies in the UK and US is that they usually reward their existing customers well. Since my friend is already an O2 customer, he’ll get £5.00 less per month and the connection fee of £25.53 is waived.

In Malaysia, being a long time customer of the largest communication companies like company T (since forever) and company M (since 2003), I’ve received no benefit whatsoever when signing up for new services.

From my observation, most companies abroad don’t mess with download speed. They offer flat speeds, same for everyone and just change the max download limit or provide other value added service like static IPs. Honestly when there are too many speed options to choose from it’s not easy to make a decision.

O2 Broadband provides 20M speed for all three packages, and only the first basic package is capping download at 20GB which makes sense for the price. Unlimited downloads for other packages. Nice.

As a not so direct comparison, I’m currently on a basic package with 5M speed and 60GB max downloads. 5M speed is already sufficient, but the max download cap is not so.

In the end I suggested my friend to take the second package, “The All Rounder” so that he can download as much as he wants. And since he’s already an O2 customer for more than 2 years, he’ll get 6 months free broadband.

Customer loyalty. Rewarded.

Related Articles

• Sat, August 14, 2010 -- Maxis Transparent Proxy is Causing Problems to Developers
• Thu, August 5, 2010 -- Maxis SysAdmins Are Rookies?
• Fri, March 6, 2009 -- RegisterFly Resurrected as RegFly
• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Thu, February 9, 2012 -- VirtueMart Custom Login Module in Joomla!

O2 Broadband. Customer Loyalty. Rewarded originally appeared on Romantika.name on Wed, November 30, 2011.

Now that I have a son, he is also suffering from the same issue. Living in a Meleis community it’s really hard. We’re always suffering from sleep deprivation due to the noise generated by inconsiderate people.

Noisy mufflers from modified cars, loud maids, and insanely long renovation noise are what we have to go through every day.

It’s Hari Raya Korban and for some unknown reason they decided to tie up a cow in front of my house. Both of my neighbors, left and right, aren’t home. I think they went back to their hometown for Hari Raya.

When I reached home last night I was shocked to see the cow. I thought of releasing the cow or killing it before morning so that they will not make any noise in the morning, slaughtering and cleaning the cow. But I didn’t. I used my brain.

I am sympathetic to the cow as it has to stand in the rain the whole night. I wonder whether Muslims are supposed to do that. I have always thought that the cow to be sacrificed needs to be pampered and taken care of properly before the ceremony. But hey, they are not simply Muslims. They are Meleis. Right?

I prayed that they will just move elsewhere for the actual killing of the cow. But in the end – they didn’t. They didn’t use their brain. They killed the cow in front of my home when the resident’s association president home is just a few homes away, and the RM1.2 million house has a huge yard. Why the RM1.2 million house? I think he’s paying for one part of the cow. They could have done it there as we’re on the same road stretch. So they dig a hole They didn’t even bother to dig a hole so all the blood went into the drain clogged with dry leaves and a lot of people came, laughing, shouting, and kids crying. So why did they choose to do it in front of my house? I have no idea.

In the end we all only got like 4-5 hours of sleep and we feel like shit. Those Meleis, just drove away grinning with their meat. Perhaps they are full of satisfaction from killing a cow and they think their korban is accepted.

This is why people always prefer to do korban at the masjid or surau. It simply makes sense.

But hey, everyone else does not understand as this is not a common problem. Kids will be so tired after a day at the daycare, and parents go to sleep after sex. Who cares about the kids. Fathers will go to sleep after a hard day’s work, and so do mothers who prioritize their work before the kids.

Maids take care of the kids. Which is insanely funny. Maids are supposed to take care of a house and not kids. Kids should be taken care of trained nannies. I hope that these parents will be sent to the old folks house when their kids grow up.

I am not looking for any sympathy. But I am looking for a support group, if any. It’s hard in Malaysia where people are generally selfish and the only interest for everyone is to make themselves look good. They’ll hide their problems and weaknesses as long as people respect them and think that they are cool.

You decide on what term you want to use for these people. You decide. I’m sick and tired. My only prayers is to be able to leave this area and live somewhere else, where people are much considerate to problems of others.

By the way, Meleis think that the older they are the more they deserve to be respected regardless of how they behave. Meleis also think that if it’s Islam related, everybody will understand. Well guess what, Islam doesn’t teach people to just do what you like and everyone will be OK with it. That, I am sure.

It’s damn hard for people to care about others these days. We just want to be left alone.

Popular Posts

• Thu, January 1, 2009 -- SpongeBob SquarePants
• Wed, November 15, 2006 -- Miami Ink
• Fri, August 10, 2007 -- WordPress Plugin: Collapsible Archive Widget
• Wed, May 2, 2007 -- WordPress Plugin: Random Posts Widget
• Wed, January 31, 2007 -- Plugin: Import New Blogger To WordPress

Sleep Issues & Noisy Meleis originally appeared on Romantika.name on Mon, November 7, 2011.

I found this https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~craig/utility/flip/, downloaded the PPC binary and used it happily for a while.

That is until I upgraded to Lion. I am not an expert in Mac OS X yet, but since Lion took away Rosetta and PPC codes away I got this:

Launch of "flip" failed: the PowerPC architecture is no longer supported.

The “file” utility gave me this:

flip: Mach-O executable ppc

Since I have the old Xcode installed on my machine, I thought I’d try and build it since the source code (a single .cpp file) is provided at the URL above.

Here’s how I was able to build it:

g++ -ansi -O3 -o flip flip.cpp \
-I/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1 \
-I/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/include \
-I/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1/x86_64-apple-darwin10 \
-L/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib && strip flip

The three -I provided it with the include paths, and the -L provided the libraries for the binary to link to. To run the compilers, you need to add them to your PATH: /Developer/usr/bin

Now flip runs well:

Usage: ./flip [-t|-u|-d|-m] filename[s]
   Converts ASCII files between Unix, MS-DOS/Windows, or Macintosh newline formats
 
   Options: 
      -u  =  convert file(s) to Unix newline format (newline)
      -d  =  convert file(s) to MS-DOS/Windows newline format (linefeed + newline)
      -m  =  convert file(s) to Macintosh newline format (linefeed)
      -t  =  display current file type, no file modifications

And “file” recognizes it as:

flip: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

If you have the new Xcode 4.1 (the one that Apple just released for free in App Store), you might need to change certain paths. You’ll have to look at the errors and adjust your parameters.

I am not sure whether my development tool paths were removed as a result of Lion upgrade, but I am currently downloading Xcode 4.1 to the machine. Let’s see whether it’ll automatically set the INCLUDE, LIB, and add the development tools into my PATH.

If it does, then compiling might even be as easy as:

g++ -ansi -O3 -o flip flip.cpp && strip flip

Good luck!

Popular Posts

• Thu, January 1, 2009 -- SpongeBob SquarePants
• Wed, November 15, 2006 -- Miami Ink
• Fri, August 10, 2007 -- WordPress Plugin: Collapsible Archive Widget
• Wed, May 2, 2007 -- WordPress Plugin: Random Posts Widget
• Wed, January 31, 2007 -- Plugin: Import New Blogger To WordPress

Compiling flip on Mac OS X originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sat, July 23, 2011.

Here’s the same text I posted in Facebook and Mudah:

Nikon D50 kit (with 18-55mm lens)

Shutter Count: ~17636
Purchased on 1 August 2006

Great camera for beginners, and 2nd body for slow moving or static subjects. Tough body, no defect in function. Complete box, including *expired* warranty card and manuals.

Reason for selling: upgrade.

I love this camera but I am unable to bring 2 bodies out, and it has been sitting in the dry box for more than a month. Such a waste for a such beautiful body.

COD/view in Cyberjaya/Putrajaya only. You may request other areas if reasonable.

Serious buyers only please. Send me an email: ady at romantika dot name

Sorry, I don’t dare to ship internationally. If you want it shipped to other states, I might be able to consider it but you’ll need to cover the shipping cost.

Here’s a link to the public Facebook album (visible to everyone) containing this camera and other used items for sale.

Popular Posts

• Thu, January 1, 2009 -- SpongeBob SquarePants
• Wed, November 15, 2006 -- Miami Ink
• Fri, August 10, 2007 -- WordPress Plugin: Collapsible Archive Widget
• Wed, May 2, 2007 -- WordPress Plugin: Random Posts Widget
• Wed, January 31, 2007 -- Plugin: Import New Blogger To WordPress

Used Nikon D50 Kit For Sale originally appeared on Romantika.name on Thu, May 5, 2011.

When you’re driving or having a meal, it’s convenient to know whether the email is from your boss, is an important alert from a system dying somewhere, or just your friend saying hi.

I’m not saying that you should procrastinate replying emails from friends, but those kinds of emails are just not worth crashing into the road divider or choke on chicken bone or something. Joking.

There might be some other tweaks or tools but I decided on MyProfiles. That’s the best I can find.

It works fine until one night I turned the phone into silent mode (via hardware switch) and the alert sound still played! I was surprised. At first I thought that I forgot to disable the alert override (Override Silent) item but I was wrong. It’s stuck at ON no matter how many times you try.

Override silent is a useful feature, trust me but I don’t want all of my alerts to sound all night long.

The quickest way I found was to edit the configuration directly. The configuration file is at: /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.intelliborn.myprofiles.plist

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>allAlerts</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>alertDuration</key>
			<integer>1800</integer>
			<key>alertId</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>alertInterval</key>
			<integer>300</integer>
			<key>alertVolume</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>displaySummary</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>filterMailboxesArray</key>
			<array>
				<string>EmailAccount1</string>
			</array>
			<key>global</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>ignoreRingerState</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>mailToMeOnly</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>name</key>
			<string>COMPANY</string>
			<key>repeatAlert</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>sound</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>soundPath</key>
			<string>/System/Library/Audio/UISounds/sms-received2.caf</string>
			<key>type</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>vibrate</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
		</dict>
	</array>
</dict>
</plist>

You’ll need to change the key to 0, near the line:

			<key>ignoreRingerState</key>
			<integer>0</integer>

I don’t know how to restart the daemon as this is not a springboard app. I also don’t know whether restarting the springboard will take the new configuration.

So what I did was just launch MyProfiles again and then tried to edit the alert configuration. What I found out was that the configuration for override silent is untouched and even if I play around with it, it still won’t change from the new state I manually entered in the XML file. I also restarted the engine just to be sure.

But hey, it worked and when in silent mode the alert no longer play any sound.

* To do this you need to have SSH enabled on your iPhone/iPad. Hey if you’re using MyProfiles that means you have jailbreak your device anyway…

Related Articles

• Fri, February 17, 2012 -- Mac Messages Beta

Problems Saving Alerts in MyProfiles originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sun, May 1, 2011.

For her birthday we decided to do some IKEA hacking project. She will design and I will make it. As an artsy crafty person she designed things very easily but as someone who has only done woodwork in high school, it’s a proven challenge for me.

We decided to use 4 LACK side tables code 901.616.73 measuring 56x56cm and 1 VIKA AMON table top code 501.622.26 measuring 150x75cm. Total cost for this project including screws and brackets was RM240 (around US$80 at that time).

First, the LACK tables were assembled normally by screwing the 4 legs onto the top according to IKEA’s manual. They are arranged by the wall to see how they look:

As I have never worked on wood before, it proved difficult for me to find supplies of brackets and suitable screws to put the project together. I finally found some usable parts at a local DIY store. To attach 2 LACK on the same row together, I used 2 L shaped flat metal piece. I didn’t manage to take a picture after attaching them but you’ll be able to see it in the following picture.

Here’s a picture after they have been attached. Note that at this moment the top row and the bottom row aren’t connected yet as I wanted to be able to easily attach the huge VIKA AMON top first.

Here’s a view on how 2 LACK on the same row are attached using the L flat bracket. The red 3M tapes you see are just used to make sure the LACK tables stay put on the VIKA AMON table after I made the measurements.

The top is attached by screwing the tables from below, using 2.5″ wood screws with washers. It wasn’t an easy job because LACK tables have paper support inside and are hollow. I used 8 screws to fix the top.

After I was satisfied with the attachment strength it was time to attach the bottom row of the LACK tables. Ransacking through my IKEA box I found flat brackets from GORM so I used them at what supposedly to be the behind of the table (facing the wall).

A useful tip here is to offset a little from center when driving the screw near the LACK table top as you might hit the original screw that holds the feet together. You don’t want that, those screws are heavy duty. I broke a bit on my power drill.

At the legs of the inner side, I used L metal brackets to attach the top and bottom row together.

Here’s the (almost) final product. We plan to have some gypsum board covering for the sides and back but we are yet to find (and decide) on where we should get the supplies.

While we’re at that maybe we’ll look for nice wallpapers to cover the side and back boards.

Well that’s it. I hope you enjoyed reading.

Related Articles

• Wed, February 25, 2009 -- Get Your Pipes Fixed
• Mon, August 4, 2008 -- Pull Down Ladder @ Fold Ladder @ Attic Ladder

First IKEA Hacking Project: VIKA AMON and LACK originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sun, May 1, 2011.

A couple of months back I also made a clone of my HP NX9010 hard disk, a Seagate Momentus 80GB drive using the dd utility and attach it to the same virtual machine. I don’t have a lot of time at hand so this will enable me to selectively back up the files on that drive, when I have some free time. I use that old laptop to play videos for my child.

After some time, the Windows Server 2008 VDI grew up to 11GB and the Momentus VDI stayed at 74GB because dd was copying it bit by bit. I needed to free up more space. My target was the Momentus VDI because it’s huge and I have already deleted (backed up) a lot of files in it.

As their name suggest, they are dynamically expanding so they will not shrink themselves. In VMware, you can easily stumble upon the “shrink” button in the tool. In VirtualBox, we need to use the command line utility VBoxManage.

It’s as simple as:

VBoxManage modifyhd Seagate\ Momentus\ 80GB.vdi --compact

*VBoxManage is run on the host machine, while the virtual machine is powered off (not suspended).

Running it without any preparation work will shrink the VDI a bit, too insignificant to even notice.

And so I used SDelete to zero all the unused space on the VDI, and ran VBoxManage again. SDelete needs to be run inside the virtual machine while it’s running.

sdelete -c d:

I managed to get the 74GB VDI to shrink to 23GB. Now that’s a significant reduction in size.

Still, I was greedy. I wanted to know whether fragmentation has any effect on the shrink-ability of the VDI. So I went into the virtual machine, ran defrag, ran sdelete, then I executed VBoxManage to compact the VDI.

Below was my final result. From 74GB to 5.1GB I was fully satisfied. I was also able to shrink the 11GB VDI that contains the OS to 9.7GB.

If you have questions/suggestions/feedback, please leave a comment.

Related Articles

• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Fri, December 9, 2011 -- Sparrow and Shortmail
• Sat, February 12, 2011 -- Mac OS X: Modifying Stubborn Files Transferred From Windows
• Sat, February 12, 2011 -- Starting Subversion Service on Demand in Mac OS X
• Fri, August 6, 2010 -- SMTP Smart Host Setup for Postfix in Snow Leopard

Shrinking VirtualBox Disk Images originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sat, April 23, 2011.

While I am in agreement that we need to do something about the pollution and improving the environment, I think this campaign hasn’t been properly thought of.

Retailers everywhere are now taking this campaign into their own benefit. They will save a significant amount of cost in plastic bags. How can we be sure that the money will indeed go to the Corporate Social Responsibility program? A lot of retailers don’t even include the purchase of plastic bags into the receipt. How do they keep track?

Note that Malaysia is a developing country, with undeveloped minds. Some retailers are blindly following this campaign without any use of the brain.

The latest complaint I have is at Papier Love, a local craft retailer at The Curve Damansara. They sell fragile paper products, and they refused to provide any plastic cover. They don’t sell them either. If you know arts and crafts well enough you will know that scrapbook papers are thin and very fragile you can’t even put them in plastic bags. They must be inserted into special plastic cover or sleeves to protect them from being crumpled. In this case the salesgirl cum the cashier didn’t use her brain well and it caused dissatisfaction.

We will never step our foot into that shop again and we will make sure friends won’t too. The brainless girl also looked down at customers when she was repeatedly saying that the piece of paper costs RM8 per piece as if it’s too expensive. My poor wife who is also a craft enthusiast didn’t say anything but that’s the power of assumption from someone who is not good enough to work in retail. We spend an approximate cost of RM1,000 per year for craft products and they will not get any part of that.

For the record, our favorite arts and craft stores are Art Friend in The Gardens Mid Valley and Craft Haven in One Utama Damansara. The staff are always helpful and friendly with a smile (and lots of details). I am not into art and I know nothing but they have never once alienated me and I always feel welcome when I enter their stores.

Another brainless no plastic bag event is at Famous Amos in Amcorp Mall. I was struggling with holding my child (who wanted the cookies in the first place) and when I asked for a plastic bag, the Bangladeshi refused to give me one. That’s one inconsiderate staff there.

What about IKEA?

Hey, IKEA has been imposing no plastic bag so much earlier than the campaign. Nobody really made a fuss about it because IKEA has though of it well enough. They provide good parking with spacious loading area, and the enormous shopping carts can be pushed to the loading area. Plus, their products are big and you can actually hold them without the need of bags. Some products can’t even be put in plastic bags because they are huge.

So, IKEA’s fine.

All images are copyright of the Government of Selangor. If you want them removed, email me.

Related Articles

• Thu, February 23, 2012 -- UniFi Phone Call Forwarding
• Sun, January 22, 2012 -- Crocs Malaysia Warehouse Sale
• Sat, February 26, 2011 -- If You Want to Be Selfish, Do it Smart
• Mon, February 7, 2011 -- Tak Nak – Really?
• Thu, December 9, 2010 -- TM UniFi Downtime: Exercise Your Rights

Selangor No Plastic Bag Every Saturday originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sun, April 17, 2011.

I would like to share problems that I encountered and how to fix them. Well, I only had 2 problems so far. These are not encountered while upgrading this blog you’re reading.

The first was the problem with no post on the main page. Depending on your theme, it might say, “Sorry no post matching your criteria”. Just after an upgrade, it’s scary to think that all posts are gone. But yeah I still have my backup.

Before you blame WordPress and jump to Blogger or such, you need to check whether you have disabled all of your plugins. Most often plugins are the reason errors occur after an upgrade. In each release, API and functions changes and while WordPress developers try to avoid backward compatibility issues, some of them are just inevitable.

The culprit for my problem was a sticky post plugin. In haste, I deleted all traces of the plugin on the server and in my local disk. Additionally I was working on another machine so I can’t recall the name of that plugin right now.

This was an upgrade from version 2.6. I heard that an upgrade from 2.6 to 2.7 will also produce the same problem by this plugin.

Sometimes, people do get totally blank page. The smartest thing to do is to enable WP_DEBUG in wp-config.php

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

While this line is not available in pre-3, it’ll work if you add it.

It’s also beneficial for the plugin issue I mentioned above. That’s how I found out that there’s a SQL error produced by that plugin.

The next problem I encountered was related to the database version. This might be published somewhere in WordPress documentation but I failed to find it. WordPress 3.1 requires MySQL 4.1.2 and above.

This was a manual upgrade from WordPress 2.8.4 via FTP. The good thing is that the public facing site was still working fine. I was just unable to access the administration dashboard.

By the way, my hosting provider has dedicated database servers with MySQL 4.0 – 5.0 options. 4.0 has been obsolete and this particular blog being upgraded was the only one using 4.0. So all I had to do was:

• Create a new database in the 5.0 server
• Export from 4.0 into a SQL file
• Import into 5.0
• Run the normal database upgrade screen

And everything was hunky-dory. It’s interesting to see that there are less total rows, and the addition of wp_commentmeta table:

Database for 2.8.4

Database for 3.1

If you are on normal cheap hosting with MySQL on the web server itself, you’re out of luck if the server only has MySQL 4.0. It’s time to move away.

So that’s it. Since there are a few more blogs in the upgrade process I might add more findings in this post as I come across them.

Related Articles

• Sat, December 24, 2011 -- Let Apache Compress Your Website
• Thu, April 22, 2010 -- WordPress Plugin: Basic Facebook Social Plugins
• Thu, December 25, 2008 -- Adding More Sidebars to WordPress Themes
• Thu, August 28, 2008 -- Blogging Frenzy
• Thu, August 28, 2008 -- Subscribe To Comments

WordPress 3.1 Upgrade originally appeared on Romantika.name on Thu, March 3, 2011.

Detecting that there’s a car on that lane, the traffic light turned green for the car but the car didn’t move. There is no car turning right from the opposite direction so it’s obvious who triggered it. So, everyone intending to go straight (on both directions) had to wait for the right turn lights to change. Precious 3 minutes wasted.

If this queue jumper did not illegally take that lane, the lights wouldn’t have changed to green at all for right turn and will immediately change to green for those going straight.

The driver is XX and I think an MMU student judging from the age and the final destination. Perhaps there is no sensor enabled traffic light in the place where the driver comes from.

If you really want to be notorious and inconsiderate on the road, please do it right. It’s sad how people like these usually think that they are cool to do that but and do not realize that they have made a fool out of themselves. And not to mention, endangering others on the road.

Always be considerate. And no, driving 10km/h is not being considerate either.

By the way people, if you are in Cyberjaya for any reason at all please be careful on the road. Taxi drivers and students alike tend to speed with no reason, turn without signaling, and make illegal U-turns. Pedestrians usually walk and cross the roads like they are invincible or something, I don’t know why.

Related Articles

• Mon, February 22, 2010 -- Queue Jumper BJV2290
• Sat, April 4, 2009 -- Queue Jumpers WLH 9953, PEM 3331, BJJ 3914 & UPM Bus
• Wed, February 25, 2009 -- Queue Jumpers Beware
• Sun, January 22, 2012 -- Crocs Malaysia Warehouse Sale
• Wed, May 19, 2010 -- Some Tips For Fresh Grads

If You Want to Be Selfish, Do it Smart originally appeared on Romantika.name on Sat, February 26, 2011.

However the link for help pages redirected me to this page: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/featured/index.html, which I think is a mistake because it’s for “Local Featured Listings”.

Nevertheless, we thank you Yahoo! for a great service.

Related Articles

• Sat, May 5, 2012 -- Build LFTP on Mac OS X Lion
• Thu, February 9, 2012 -- VirtueMart Custom Login Module in Joomla!
• Sat, January 7, 2012 -- Leverage Browser Caching
• Sat, December 24, 2011 -- Let Apache Compress Your Website
• Fri, December 9, 2011 -- Sparrow and Shortmail

Good Bye MyBlogLog originally appeared on Romantika.name on Thu, February 24, 2011.