Sadness

In the past 2 mths, I’ve severed friendships with 3 people. I wonder if my threshold for shortcomings and disappointments have been lowered.

Tricks of the Traits

A trait of the people in this country. The tendency to profile, compare and make assumptions or judgemental comments.

Case 1:

Me to Colleague A: “Hmm looks like a good camera, I should check it out.”

Hours later, a comment is made to me by Colleague B: “Hey I heard that you’re looking to buy a new camera. Wow, the others are saying you’re spending your bonus before even getting it”. 

Case 2:

Whilst eating lunch, I choke on a piece of spicy rendang, gulped down my drink and then ate whatever I could left on the plate. 

Comment from Colleague C:”Can’t take the spice huh? I think you’ve been in a western country for far too long”

Huh? Since when did not being able to take spicy food have to do with being in a western country? Did anyone ever think that perhaps I just generally can’t take spicy food?”

Another rather intriguing trait about the local populace is the inerrant knack to profile and compare. While discussing modes of transport and route to work:

Case 1

Colleague A: “Hey where do you live?”

Me: “I live in B suburb”

Colleagues A’s eyes widen: “Ohh private house??”

Me: “Nah govt housing”

Colleague A :”Oh. I didn’t know they have govt housing there.” 

I swear I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

Colleague B:” Hey which school did you go to?”

Me: “Er..why?”

Colleague B: “I just want to know lah”

Me: “Er…a school in the east. Why?”

Colleague A: “Ohh which school in the east”

Me: “SP school”

Colleague B: “Ohh alot of the students there have rich parents”

Me: “?!??!”

So they like finding out where you live and which school you attend so that they can profile your family income level. It’s a common thing here which I’ve seem to have long forgotten.’

Here’s a final one that a friend said to me the other day:

Friend A: “So which company do you for now?”

Me: “Blah Inc”

Friend A: “Wow so good (Singlish). You must be earning alot now”

It’s disturbing how the local populace uses this to gauge how well you’re doing or to compare their lifestyles to yours. Fucking irritating.

My return to the land of ’smallness’

So am I still the ‘quitter’ or the ‘prodigal son’ who has returned and ‘learnt the error’ of his ways.

Installing DVL

Installing DVL as a VM is not too difficult if you follow the instructions here

1. Launch vmware fusion and select a new installation. I chose Linux,
and a linux 2.6 kernel.

2. Once you’re in DVL or BT, drop to Console and start making three partitions – fdisk /dev/sda

3.  Within fdisk, issue the following commands to do this.

n
p
1
enter
+100M
a
1
n
p
2
enter
+1024M
t
2
82
n
p
3
enter
enter
w


The w command within fdisk will write your changes to disk.

Do the following to make an EXT3 filesystem.

mke2fs -j /dev/sda1
mke2fs -j /dev/sda3
mkswap /dev/sda2
swapon /dev/sda2


This will make sda1 and sda3 ext3 filesystems and enable swap on sda2.

Now cd to /tmp and do the following.
mkdir boot
mkdir bt2
mount /dev/sda1 boot
mount /dev/sda3 bt2


Next: in the install GUI of BT/DVL, install to /tmp/BT, and select REAL install. That should be it!

Dual Boot – Leopard and Ubuntu

I chose to run Windows as a VM but OS X and Ubuntu ready for my work.

1. Install Boot Camp Assistant and get Boot Camp to partition for you.

2. Next install REFIt, then do an enable.sh

3. After the partition process has been completed by Boot Camp, it’s time to install Ubuntu.

4. Boot up with Ubuntu Live CD, go through the normal steps but select Manual at the Partitioning screen. By default /dev/sda3 is the chosen partition for installs.

5. Install to /dev/sda3, and when you get to the bootloader section, select /dev/sda3 as where Linux should boot to.

6. Reboot and REFIt SHOULD detect the linux partition.

I’ll do another entry on updating the ATI drivers the next time. CBB to do it now.

Partitioning in OS X

While preparing to triple boot my MBP, I had problems resizing the Mac OS partition. It kept complaining about resizing errors. What I did:

1. Boot up in the Leopard DVD

2. Select Disk Utility -> Repair permissions -> attempt resizing

It worked!

Check this out http://sudan.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?t=594298

The Chapter in My Life Entitled Melbourne

Moving is harder then I thought it would be…

When can I afford one of these…

…without having to take a loan!?

Do you Gentoooooooo?

Finally got it running after much prodding from P. Many thanks for that!

I actually feel more encouraged to get my arse back to doing some development

work and security stuff again.

The assinine thing about it was that this wasn’t as troublesome as the Gentoo

of 2004.

That was then, and I ran Stage2 without any problems.

It was a bitch trying to get it working but once it compiled and working, you’d generally wouldn’t want to touch it anymore.

This time with the new LiveCD,  it was easier yet more difficult. Remember not to use Python TK flags!!

X11 Forwarding over SSH

Ok I know I’m abit late over this X11 Forwarding. Two things to remember:

1. It definitely was easier over Windows with Putty. I had to download a X-Win32, run it on my PC, then ensure Putty had X11 Forwarding enabled. Once I logged in through Putty, all I did was do a startx or any X app, and it would fire up.

2. Over OS X was abit more troublesome, X-Darwin sans XFree86 had to be installed. Once that was done, ensure that you do an ssh -X -l asd blah@haha.com before launching an X driven app.

Of course ensure that under /etc/ssh/sshd_config, you had X11 Forwarding Yes enabled.

If everything works…well some of it. It should look like this:

(I gotta fix that ATI module problem!