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Music: Universal language

Tạm biệt Y!360: Rồi thì cái ngày này cũng tới. Không khóc, không buồn, bình thản, im lặng, chắc vì Dory đã biết trước, đã chuẩn bị trước từ lâu rồi. Rồi thì nó cũng tới... Mọi người chắc đang lục đục chuyển nhà, người thì viết blog từ biệt, người thì download blog archive để upload lên wordpress, có người thì lại đang chờ Yahoo giúp xóa đi những kỷ niệm mà chính họ còn không dám delete. Chắc chỉ có Dory và bé Gấu là backup blog từ cả năm về trước. Ngẫm thấy mình rảnh thật, bỏ ra cả tuần viết cái chương trình sao lưu Y!360, cuối cùng Yahoo còn làm tốt hơn mình. Thôi thì coi như trau dồi kiến thức Java...

Một người bạn của Dory viết trên blog từ biệt Y!360 rằng bạn ấy đã từng giữ lại "từng đoạn chat trên YM, save từng tin nhắn trên mobile, giữ cả những mảnh giấy chuyền tay nhau vội vàng trong giờ học"... Dory cũng từng như vậy, để rồi bây giờ không biết phải xóa đi cái nào, thôi thì xóa hết vậy.

Tính là quên đi rồi, nhưng cuối cùng vẫn đọc lại bài viết về ngôi sao cô đơn, về nhạc của Mayumi Itsuwa, về thứ 6 ngày 13 tháng 1, rồi ngày 13 tháng 2, nghĩ lại sao thấy mình... ngu thật. Có chuyện đơn giản thế mà cũng không làm ra hồn.

Thế là lại lục đục đi kiếm cái blog của 2 chúng ta. Nói thật, kiếm không ra. Thế là nó vĩnh viễn đi vào quên lãng. Cũng tốt thôi.

Còn cái theme archive nữa. Mà thôi, làm gì còn Y!360 nữa, backup nó mà làm gì... "Thời oanh liệt nay còn đâu"...

Rồi thì có bài viết về ngày đầu tiên mà Dory chính thức có mặt trên internet (i.e. ngày mà cái server online lần đầu tiên). Ngẫm sao mà bây giờ mình vô cảm thế. Sao lúc đó Dory có thể bỏ ra hàng giờ chăm chút cho nó, hy vọng rằng nó sẽ tạo thêm vài CONNECTION, mà bây giờ chỉ còn mỗi bot vào thăm nó thôi. Bạn DOP nói đúng, Dory sẽ không viết nữa, dù là My Opera hay là CMS hay là Facebook. Mà thật ra thì Dory cũng đã không viết gì trên 360 từ lâu lắm rồi. In a sense, I was disconnected a long while ago.

Jeanny~!

Monday June 8, 2009 - 12:27pm (ICT) Permanent Link | 2 Comments
WTH?: ...and I thought CS department professors are all geeks.

Saturday January 24, 2009 - 04:06pm (ICT) Permanent Link | 3 Comments
Boot, Baby... Boot!: Simple, Light, Incredible, Temporary Autonomous Zone

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What can you do with 30MB?

Winamp? maybe. Realtek soundcard driver? nah, it's 75MB. Nvidia driver? 90MB. Yahoo IM? yuck, it's 50MB. Opera? maybe. MS Office? no way.

How about a whole operating system with drivers for sound, video, ethernet, wifi, full usb, synaptic, media player, office suite, a general purpose IDE, firefox, chat client, plus a handful of system tools all inside a nice gui with desktop composition that is also fast and uses less than 64MB of ram?
(no freaking way)

Think again.

When I heard of a 30MB BusyBox distro I immediately thought of a black, ugly commandline interface without any editor, even nano (like the distro that Paragon Partition Manager 9 uses. Heck, it's even 40MB).

I was wrong.

I was looking for a small, fast-booting linux distro to do diagnostic/file recovery/partitioning/grub config editing/etc and so far none ever booted below 30 seconds although DSL is very close to that. But DSL doesn't have NTFS support and is VERY ugly with fluxbox. I decided to give SliTaz a spin on my T61. I downloaded the 20081231-cooking version and put it on my usb stick.

It works.

And it's quicker than anything I've ever seen before.

Imagine: plug your USB drive in, wait for the BIOS to boot it (which takes about 5 sec), wait for the kernel and initrd to load (1 sec), take the USB stick out and watch your computer flies! Everything is loaded into ram and the whole process from there was not even 15sec until I have the desktop (and by "desktop" I mean no service loading in the background, no HDD grinding, CPU is idle, etc. not like the big cheater namely Microsoft).

I quickly checked task manager. 50MB ram usage total! To think about it, 30MB of which is the filesystem already.

So I have my JWM desktop, native resolution (1280x800x24), some desktop effect, fullscreen font antialiasing - something that other tiny distros don't have, a nice wallpaper and a beautiful panel.

I was very surprised to see Firefox in this distro. Even DSL with a budget of 50MB didn't have it. Geez, it's Firefox 3.0.4. Believe it or not, Firefox fired up in 2 seconds!

Inside the Menu I found my favorite IDE - Geany. They also have some code template, which is nice, BUT... After playing around, the only thing I found missing is a compiler (lol). They should have included gcc and leave out Geany, I can always use vi - Leafpad (notepad equivalence - or not quite) also has syntax highlighting. Maybe the kernel headers are just too big. I don't know. Anyway, I can at least use Geany to edit the config files and html's, but it's like using a flamethrower to light a candle.

An (even bigger) surprise is that sound works! And AlsaPlayer plays mp3 also and not just ogg!

Among other included apps are cTorrent client, gFTP, SCPbox, PDF viewer, SQLite server (!), GParted, ISO mastering and burning tools, XArchive, GPicView, mtPaint, screenshot, Alsaplayer, CD ripper, mhWaveEditor and tools to mount drives, configure networking, hardware info, boot log, task manager, etc.... all inside this tiny 30MB initrd.

They have an option to install SliTaz to the HDD and make use of the tazpkg package management. I choose not to, since having everything run from RAM means there is no penalty for a slow harddrive and on-the-fly modification to everything on it, including SliTaz itself.

But tazpkg is nice, and if you're familiar with apt, it's a breeze to use. From there you have aroung 1GB of different packages to choose from. I will have to learn to remaster this thing and include gcc or even a jdk, then this will be my favorite developement environment.

Comparing to other distro, DSL is versatile but still ugly; Puppy has many nice puppets and runs on ramm too but is slow; Machboot doesn't want to boot from a usbstick and doesn't have much to offer, PUD+LXDE is fast (of course not as fast) and full-featured, but is big and still buggy. SliTaz is the very first system with a WM to shrink below 30MB and still offer that much usability. This distro is still young and evolving, and I should expect big things from it in the future. Yes I am thinking of full featured computers the size of a cigarette pack. Or SOCs. SliTaz resource usage is really comparable to mobile device OSes.

Not to mention, SliTaz really lives up to its name and is my favorite minidistro so far.

Sunday January 18, 2009 - 04:11am (ICT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Entry for November 21, 2008: I read this excerpt from this website (Linux is not Windows). It touched me. I had this very conversation with a friend long ago when I was a kid.
A: I wanted a new toy car, and everybody's raving about how great Lego cars can be. So I bought some Lego, but when I got home, I just had a load of bricks and cogs and stuff in the box. Where's my car??

B: You have to build the car out of the bricks. That's the whole point of Lego.

A: What?? I don't know how to build a car. I'm not a mechanic. How am I supposed to know how to put it all together??

B: There's a leaflet that came in the box. It tells you exactly how to put the bricks together to get a toy car. You don't need to know how, you just need to follow the instructions.

A: Okay, I found the instructions. It's going to take me hours! Why can't they just sell it as a toy car, instead of making you have to build it??

B: Because not everybody wants to make a toy car with Lego. It can be made into anything we like. That's the whole point.

A: I still don't see why they can't supply it as a car so people who want a car have got one, and other people can take it apart if they want to. Anyway, I finally got it put together, but some bits come off occasionally. What do I do about this? Can I glue it?
B: It's Lego. It's designed to come apart. That's the whole point.
A: But I don't want it to come apart. I just want a toy car!
B: Then why on Earth did you buy a box of Lego??

.............................................................................
The article is really good.

Friday November 21, 2008 - 09:51am (ICT) Permanent Link | 3 Comments
My new baby!: After days of waiting, I am finally with you!!!!! I'm so happy

(Song of the day: Beautiful ^^)

I have been watching its price goes up and down. I have seen its problems discovered on its way to perfection. I've seen it offered with SuSE Enterprise installed. I've seen it as the last laptop with XP. I have been dreaming about it. Gosh. It's literally a dream come true.

It's a 14in ThinkPad T61.

I got this baby from craigslist. It's not a bad deal at all! $700 and I have:

-= Taking the palmrest out first =-

Touchpad is made in China . Well, I only use it for scrolling. I love the trackpoint and will use the trackpoint only.

Top left corner, under the fan is the Merom T7250 CPU. This one is in no way the best. It even under performs my Athlon64 X2 4600+. But I had stopped caring about topping CPU speed 3 years ago already so this is not a problem. Contrary to what most people think, CPU is not a deciding factor in everyday computing speed anymore. Hard disk drive is. It is currently the bottleneck of most systems.

Next to the fan assembly (which I didn't take out because I don't have thermal paste on hand) is the lame modem and the Atheros wireless card. Actually, the wifi card is one major inspiration for me to look for a Thinkpad. It runs perfectly under any linux distro with an open-source driver. And the card is perfect for packet injection too! (for cracking into wifi AP's :">)

Middle, at the bottom, under the touchpad is 2 sticks of DDR2-667, 1GB each. This guy upgraded the machine with a Kingston stick, not bad. Bottom right is the 200GB, 7200rpm Hitachi HDD in its caddy, next to the motion sensor (not seen). I'm a little bit surprised, as normally when someone builds a ThinkPad they often choose 80GB or 120GB HDD at 5400rpm. The 200GB, 7200rpm upgrade is quite expensive, $180 more (btw, Lenovo website shows that this machine is shipped with that harddrive, it's not something he put in later).

The grey-ish material everywhere under the machine's black skin is not plastic. It's not steel or aluminium also. It's Thinkpad's unique magnesium alloy rollcage, which acts as both the machine's skeleton and armor. As you can see there's heavy protection around the harddisk and the ultrabay. Extra reinforcement is also put around the PCcard compartment where your left hand rests. This reminds me of my friend's XPS: An innocuous push of my hand on the palm rest when getting up would sure ruin the HDD (yes, I heard that poor screeching sound of the disk heads on the platters).
To some people, Thinkpads aren't sexy to look at, but they are built like tanks and have quality guts.
And if you don't believe me....

Yes I weight 160lbs.
More about the Rollcage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXMAL-lWQBM

The DVD writer fits perfectly into the case and works very quiet. It's always nice to see a laptop that has traditional slim trayload optical drive and not slot-loaded. The main thing I hate about slot-loading is that I can't use my mini CDs, especially the one that has Hiren on it. The bay drive is hot-swappable, although I do not have any other baydrive to use with. I think I'll go buy a bay adapter for a 2nd HDD. And oh, disc burning doesn't fail when I accidentally moved the machine (XPS users know what I mean).

Ah, the legendary Thinkpad keyboard.

The laptop looks so beautiful from behind . Protruding from the back is the 7-cell battery (the standard 4-cell wouldn't stick out like that). The battery offered me around 4 hrs running time in XP with Intel's CPU Power Management turned off (that feature shuts down the CPU clock when not in use). CPU PM caused a high pitched sound from some of the capacitors around the CPU. With CPU PM on I have 4 hours and a half, but I cant stand 4hr and a half of squeaking so I turned it off.

The T61 has 2 air vents! No wonder it runs so cool . 3 USB ports total (the other one is next to the bay) is not a lot but still much better than only one on my old T22.

The recovery partition is intact. I backed it up then performed a factory recovery which took 3 hours with many reboots. The recovery process is so nice it let me choose which component to restore and thus saved me a lot of time uninstalling them later.
To my (big super) surprise, I was welcomed with a blank Vista Home Premium desktop with only the trash can. I was expecting a big mess. This is the first laptop I saw that doesn't have eBay, Vongo, eMusic, Yahoo Browing Annoyance (cough – I mean Enhancement) suite, online stores, Office trial, Norton AV trial, MS Works, SlingPlayer, WildTangent and all those crapware. My Add/Remove program list after recovery has only 9 items on it and 6 of them are drivers (compared to 3 full pages of craps I had to uninstall on my HP desktop). Even the ThinkVantage suite is broken down into components and I was able to choose which one to install. This is just so nice.

Vista is using more than 1GB of ram running idle so I decided to install XP.

Planning and partitioning the harddisk:

30GB to Vista, 25GB to XP, 20GB to Leopard, 1GB to GrUB + sysresccd + Paragon PM, 2GB to Backtrack3, 2GB to Helix, 20GB to Ubuntu, 20GB to Kubuntu, 20GB to some *nix I will install later, 4GB at the end for Linux swap, the rest to a software-download-data partition that will be shared among OSes.

I managed to put XP SP3 which took another 5 hours. 1 hour is to figure out how to slipstream the sata hdd driver onto the installation CD, 30 min for installation, 5 min to setup GrUB (for multiboot), 2 hours installing all the drivers from Lenovo website, and the rest are tweaking.

GrUB!

Installation of Ubuntu is a breeze. Everything just snaps into place, no messy installation of drivers and settings are imported without any problem from my desktop. The whole process took less than an hour.

Since it took me sinificantly less time to setup Ubuntu than I thought, I decided to install Kubuntu right now. Since my T61 doesn't use nvidia graphic, KWin flies!And Plasma workspace looks better than ever. (see my blog about KDE4)

Mac OSX Leopard! I used Kalyway 10.5.2. Got lots of problem setting up this one. The installation process itself took 2 hours, and after another 2 hours of googling I still couldn't make wifi, USB and hotkeys to work. Ironically, webcam and bluetooth works right out of the box and I am offered to have my picture taken to put on the login screen. DVD burning also works.

I have to admit that Mac's look is so perfect. It's clean, simple and efficient yet beautiful. Something that Mac4Lin could not do.

I do not know much about Mac's internal but it has to be very efficient. It boots up and shuts down super fast! It took less than 15sec since I choose the GrUB entry to be presented with Finder desktop with no more disk/cpu activity. Remember Vista continues to grind the disk 2 minutes after you have your desktop. Windows is so lame compared to Mac. Shutting down took 6sec!

I find taking pictures of the Thinkpad is not an easy task. It's so black (and cool!) it screws up the camera's metering when taken against brighter background. No wonder all Thinkpad's ads have dark or completely black backdrop.

My love

Sunday November 16, 2008 - 12:55pm (ICT) Permanent Link | 2 Comments