simple and nice

I might be offline for a few days starting tomorrow. My streamyx connection will be moved to the new office, so it would take a few days , according to TMNet guys the new office would get internet connection. Hopefully it won’t take too long and I really hope the connection at the new office would be as good as now. Sometime I would get 100KB/s++ speed which is quite good for a 1MB connection and almost no single drop in a few days. So now I’m doing some preparation to ‘jack-off’ :).

Ian Bicking blogging about something different today, the subject of mass transit. With our government trying to push for better public transportation, I found this subject to be interesting (for me to blog about it). Even city such as Chicago still got problem with their public transit system:-

People often say “we need a good transit system like in New York or Chicago”. I don’t know the NYC transit system well, but I can say without a doubt that Chicago mass transit sucks. The traffic sucks too, as does parking, so the mass transit is relatively less sucky than elsewhere. But it still sucks. Please don’t use us as a model.

Then he pointed out about Personal Rapid Transit:-

PRT is an automated transportation system where passengers ride in 2 to 4 person vehicles on elevated guideways non-stop from where they started all the way to their destination. The guideways provide a network not unlike our current system of freeways except that the vehicles on the guideways are all computer controlled. This allows optimum use of the time and space, (no traffic jams, no accidents) and all merging and exiting to off-line stations is handled automatically.

Sounds like a pretty good idea. It’s still far away to get here (it’s not even implemented anywhere in the world) and for now we just hope that they would add more routes to the current LRT system in KL and me could just hope that LRT system would be a reality here in JB. Hey they mentioned about it in paper sometimes ago ! :)

Yes, yesterday was my last day at Bytecraft. I made the decision to leave a month ago and I’m glad that finally I’ve come to the decision. I start working at Bytecraft at the first day of Ramadhan last year, so it’s been a year since then. I have quite a fascinating moments working there and learned a lot of thing. Most of the people who I know, and knew my decision to leave said that one year is a very short amount of time for you to gain real experiences. As for me, one year is enough and it’s time for me to face the real world. Still don’t have any specific plan, and I’m not looking for any new job, for now.

The good things is, I still got access to almost all the infrastructure (email account, subversion server, project site, development server etc). Also got a very nice gift from my boss, Martin Fowler’s book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, thanks Han !

The Internet is full of politics. Good reading from kerneltrap. read it here.

After using php for so long, I'd just noticed that in php:-

$a = 'something';
$GLOBALS['a'] = 'another thing';

is actually the same thing. Checking back the documentation, it's clearly stated that,
Note: $GLOBALS has been available since PHP 3.0.0.

An associative array containing references to all variables which are currently defined in the global scope of the script. The variable names are the keys of the array.

This is a 'superglobal', or automatic global, variable. This simply means that it is available in all scopes throughout a script. You don't need to do a global $GLOBALS; to access it within functions or methods.
damn ... shame on me !! I spent an hour debugging my code when somehow I overwrote my globals variable and things start to break. Maybe I should use some convetions for all my globals in the future. Something like $GLOBALS['_this_is_global'], the underscore will clearly indicated that it is a global. this why we need namespace :(

look's like I got a lot of new stuff when firing up my browser tonight. Firstly, farid told me about OpenLazlo, some kind of web developement platform running on top of jetty which is a Java HTTP Server and Servlet Container (from what I read on the site). A quick glance on it, the idea look's interesting

I used esd on my arch box without any problem but after doing pacman -Syu last night, something went wrong with esd. The sound is bad and I don't know why since everything just fine before. I tried to switch the sound output to OSS and ALSA and both are working fine. Searching on arch forum and esd documentation doesn't help much. So I'd try to play with esd command options.

Esound version 0.2.35
Usage: esd [options]
-v --version print version information
-d DEVICE force esd to use sound device DEVICE
-b run server in 8 bit sound mode
-r RATE run server at sample rate of RATE
-as SECS free audio device after SECS of inactivity (-1 to disable)
-unix use unix domain sockets instead of tcp/ip
-tcp use tcp/ip sockets instead of unix domain
-public make tcp/ip access public (other than localhost)
-promiscuous start unlocked and owned (disable authenticaton) NOT RECOMMENDED
-terminate terminate esd daemon after last client exits
-noterminate do not terminate esd daemon after last client exits
-nobeeps disable startup beeps
-beeps enable startup beeps
-trust start esd even if use of /tmp/.esd can be insecure
-port PORT listen for connections on PORT (only for tcp/ip)
-bind ADDRESS binds to ADDRESS (only for tcp/ip)

Possible devices are: hw:0 (C-Media PCI CMI8738)

I try esd -r 22100 but nothing different. then I try with esd -d hw:0. To my surprise, the sound is back to normal again ! :) . I don't really know what's the real problem but as long as it's working ....

Quitting job is never that easy. I've faced it. After a very long thought, I made a decision to leave and end up getting a counter offer from my company - asking me to stay. I got all the sweat and nice things every employee want to hear from their respective employer, on how valuable they are to the company and letting us go will be a huge blow to them. I think I've already made my mind ..

If the first time you feel like your company cares about you is when you tell them that you could be leaving, it was time for you to leave anyway.

yeah ... I'm going home tonight, balik kampung. for a few days till monday next week, I'll be offline. in the mean time, taking a chance to install plucker on my system.
python PyPlucker/Spider.py -f myfile home.html
will grab all the webpage listed in the home.html and save it as myfile.pdb, ready for viewing on my palm devices. nice to have this while at my home town where's no Internet access available (no pc) ;)

update:
python PyPlucker/Spider.py -M 2 -f myfile home.html
-M will specify the depth path that Sipder.py will use to navigate through the links.

Just finished installing wordpress on this new hosting account I subscribed sometimes ago. just wanna test this hosting features but maybe I'll start blogging back ... ;)