Colin Charles Agenda

After visiting the Canadian embassy to get myself a visa yesterday (yes, I’m going to Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) – see you there?) I decided to take a trip to Low Yat, and the surrounding area to take a gander at computer hardware out there.

I ended up picking up a bunch of disks and external casings, and a USB webcam (cheapest Logitech, I wonder if it’ll work with Linux – RM80 down, the salesman looked at me funny when I said Linux, but I have faith). Then I decided to scour the place for Microsoft Windows XP Starter Edition. To my dismay, I found it for sale, nowhere.

The cheapest I was going to get was a RM300 copy of Windows XP Home. However, most of the retailers were quite happy to point me to the RM5 pirated copy of Windows XP Professional.

These pirate shops also sell Fedora Core 1, Ubuntu PowerPC edition, and more, for RM15/CD. I wonder why Linux costs more than Windows?

It brings me back to thinking about Software Freedom Day (maybe last year or the year before) where Aizat, Khairil and Ditesh stood at Low Yat and distributed free CDs, that were Ubuntu based. After all, Canonical do ship it for free, why not give it away for free?

Malaysians love free gifts, and a Live CD, that can be installed and distributed, for free, just sounds like a winner.

Or more likely a dress code is daft. This is Malaysia. Its a tropical country. Be thankful I’m already wearing a pair of jeans and donning my “I’m Feeling Lucky” Google t-shirt.

Wearing sandals, should very much be allowed. Bloody hell, so should I being in a pair of shorts. Beware, those that want to visit the Rum Jungle (nearby KLCC). Be warned. Stay away from it.

(in the end, the bar opposite, a certain Poppy got a lot of money from us last night)

After years of abstinence, I actually loaded Windows XP Home on my Thinkpad. Reason really being I found my recovery disks from IBM, and figured that I might as well pop the Windows license back on it, so that I can experiment with this OS that’s oh-so-popular.

Man, Windows took the better part of the afternoon to get installed. If that’s not bad, it rebooted only like four times. Its funny how the whole install happens in FAT32, and then to make my life miserable, it converts it to NTFS on its final reboot. Why?

Installing all the updates, and getting up to Service Pack 2, took the remainder of the afternoon. One thing I’ve found interesting, and a must install is: Google Pack. For good protection from all those Windows virii, AVGFree seems to make the most sense. And OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is just out, and is the smallest download of all the OSes it would seem.

Then I reboot to find that Windows XP SP1 support ends on October 10th 2006. I believe there are some benefits to becoming genuine (or Microsoft is trying hard to sell me that). Its a good thing the upgrade to Service Pack 2 just takes time (in the form of a download) and is also completely free.

Now to figure out backups…

I was just reading a text on effective communications, and there was something interesting I noted. With different values and backgrounds all over the world, a lot of things happen (use of colloquisms, etc.) with regards to people understanding each other. When there’s face-to-face meetings, there’s also non-verbal communication to keep note of.

It turns out in South Africa, they call it Ubuntu (we’re much more familiar with its “humanity for others” meaning by now, for sure). They value collective efforts in solving issues that impact the members of the community. And if you’re ever face-to-face with a South African, limited eye contact often shows respect and humility (this is similar with Japan, its polite). In the Western world though, we need eye-contact for confidence purposes, and to show that we’re sincere.

Its also worthy to note (yes, this post had a point) that on the MySQL 5.0 downloads page, there exists Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) downloads. Its the first time there are DEBs there.

Sure, its best to just sudo pat-get install mysql-server, but that also effectively means MySQL has recognized DEBs, and with Ubuntu at that. Its LTS as well!

Because Tomboy doesn’t run superbly well on OS X (where are those magical native GTK bindings on OS X?), I decided to give VoodooPad Lite a twirl, after reading one of Rui’s posts. And I’m mighty impressed.

When it came to searching, it seemed like the full version was the only thing that supported searching thru the entire “wiki” file. However, with the wonders of Spotlight, I figured that’s one feature you don’t actually require, as Spotlight indexes the contents of the files, and you’ll get searches just beyond the titles or a single wiki page.

My spelling when I’m doing fast typing, and multitasking (like being on the phone) tends to be a little erroneous. Spell checking is important, especially if I’m taking down notes/ideas/thoughts. So, Preferences -> Options -> Check spelling as you type is something you definitely want ticked.

When I copy a link from my news-reader (NetNewsWire) I can’t actually paste it in VoodooPad Lite for some absurd reason. It only pastes the title text (i.e. what is between the link and the </a> tag). This seems fairly useless, so I filed a bug report accordingly. If you use Paste with Current Style however, it works (but the shortcut isn’t Mac+V, its Alt+Shift+Mac+V).

And my dry spell with the lack of music has ended. The music stopped playing in my ears on the 6th of February, 2006, the day I saw my first hung man.

I now have a 2GB iPod Nano, its all black, and I’ve just transferred quite a bit of music to it. Its rather pleasing. This also means that I can finally start looking into having the drive to maintain gtkpod again (thanks Noa for taking care of it in my absence).

OK, this was a few weeks ago. For what its worth I also did get a hard case, to protect my Nano from scratches. I’m using my old pair of earbuds. What’s interesting is that my Belkin Bettery Pack for iPod seems to work on the Nano. I wonder if this is intended or bad things may happen?