This morning I was grumpy, perhaps because I skipped an unappetizing canteen breakfast, or perhaps because the hourglass was hounding me across all applications and terminals. Regardless, I was grumpy.

We all know that the only cure to grumpiness is lolcats, or something similarly humourous (inanity isn't mandatory, just easier to find .. it is after all the net's lowest common denominator, having beaten porn sometime early this year ). Googling for 'Grumpy at work' brought me to: "Grumpy is Good: Industrial Market Trends". This summarizes some articles and research in late 2006 and early 2007, and re-presents the finding that:

Recently I've been messing around with a way to easily read books from Project Gutenberg. JuicyBooks is the work-in-progress.

It's in alpha at the moment, so your comments and suggestions are welcome! If you have comments or suggestions, please send them to juicydata at gmail dot com.

Current features include:

• More than 200 works of classic literature and science-fiction,
• Bookmarks - set bookmarks while you read, for easy reference,
• Notes - take notes as you read.

To start with, I've collected most books on the Harvard Classics reading list, and all from the PG sci-fi collection.

Misc: [more]

Breaking with the tradition of franchising popular comics by producing their video games, Capcom and D.C. Comics are teaming up to do the reverse.

The titles set to be immortalized in ink and paper are the best selling series': Resident Evil, and Devil May Cry.

We're quite used to seeing comic and graphic novel heroes and protagonists make their way onto our entertainment systems, but it's not so common to see our jumping, dodging, fighting and shooting entertainments break free of the console. Console to film transitions have been made with mixed successes. Some examples are Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat. Console to legitimate comic? I can't think of any (fan fiction doesn't count here, sorry).

Misc: [more]

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is well on the way to abolishing exercise. They've managed to simultaneously boost both endurance and weight-gain resistance in sedentary mice by permanaently activating the genetic switch "PPAR delta". Could this be an efficient, effective way to stave of obesity and it's associated side-effects in the future?

Mice were given "GM1516", and "AICAR". "GM1516" activates (or emulate activation of) the PPAR delta gene, and "AICAR" to activate "AMPK", a metabolic master regulator (to emulate exercise).

Gentoo: [more]

When updating my gentoo box, I kept running into:

[blocks B     ] net-dns/avahi (is blocking net-misc/mDNSResponder-107.6-r5)
[blocks B     ] net-misc/mDNSResponder (is blocking net-dns/avahi-0.6.22-r1)

Suggested solution

After I posted this, an Anonymous visitor has kindly suggested that emerging kdelibs with the avahi use flag is sufficient, and this was seconded by another Anonyjuicer. Great stuff!.

echo "kde-base/kdelibs avahi" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -pv kdelibs
emerge kdelibs

Original workaround

If the above doesn't work for you, you might like to retrace my original steps:

net-misc/mDNSResponder

Gentoo: [more]I became curious about an ASCII Dungeon Keeper - like game called Dwarf Fortress, on the weekend. From forum discussions, and the games website, it looks quite complex and quirky. I had to try it out. I'm running it under wine, on my Gentoo box. Turns out we need OpenGL support in wine for this to work...

My first roadblock was that there's no source (that I could see), and just Windows and Mac binaries. Of course, I expect Wine to come to the rescue.

I was quite surprised, then, when I found that it needed opengl, despite (from the screenshots) being text-graphic based.

Programming: [more]

Today I used a couple of bash commands, a small C++ program, and ImageMagick to add borders to images to get them into the 3:2 ratio of 4R. I need them at this size because I don't want them auto-cropped, and I want them photo printed (via snapfish).

All my images are in one directory, and they're all jpgs (with extension .jpg). They're mostly different sizes and shapes, portrait and landscape.

The identify command from ImageMagick lets us query the resolution of the image, and writes the result to stdout:

identify image.jpg

results in:

image.jpg JPEG 1224x1632 1224x1632+0+0 DirectClass 8-bit 610.512kb

being printed in the shell.

We need just the name, and the resolution, and we need this for all images in the directory:

Food:: [more]

It's difficult to find a good caesar salad in Singapore, so I tasked myself with the creation, from scratch, of a yummy Chicken caesar. Here's the end result:

Misc: [more]

On June 10, 2008, TED.com won three Webby Awards, with an acceptance speech of "Millions watching lecturers' who knew?". They won 'Best Visual Design - Function', 'Best Navigation/Structure' and 'Podcasts'. Congratulations TED.com.

TED logo
From the TED.com site: "TED began in 1984 as a conference devoted to the converging fields of technology, entertainment and design. Over the years, the scope has broadened. But the formula remains the same: Gather the world's leading thinkers and doers; offer them four days of rapid-fire stimulation. The result? Unexpected connections. Extraordinary insights. Powerful inspiration."

Misc: [more]

For a good number years, I've used a bluebottle.com email address, for all manner of things including website registrations, job applications, and personal correspondence.

While it lasted, it served it's purpose well. It was a free POP3 email account, before the big guns entered the arena (i.e. GMail).

As of the 20th of June, 2008, the free service will be discontinued, and I'll no longer have that address. Update your address books to use my gmail account, or bob AT juicydata DOT com.

I'm not happy about this, but I kinda understand (running a free service is always tricky). I would have appreciated more notice ( only 10 or so days notice was given ).

Au revoir bluebottle.

Drupal: [more]
The new version of the ScribeFire Firefox extension integrates image uploading to Drupal based blogs. This is great! I'm using fewer photos and images than I should, purely because my previous methods were awkward (through the Drupal web interface).
A while ago I was looking for a blogging tool, something I could use to avoid my blog's web interface. I tried a few, and was briefly hooked by Drivel, but eventually found my way back to Drupal's builtin.
Back then I tried ScribeFire also, and was disappointed by either my inability to configure, or it's lack of support for Drupal image uploads. Now it works!
ScribeFire also helps you to promote your post, with quick links to submit your post (or a review of your post) at Mahalo, Propeller, Reddit, Facebook, Digg, Ma.gnolia, Fark, StumbleUpon and/or Newsvine.

Food:: [more]
Shabu-shabu at TomTon (1)

We met some friends at TomTon, at Clarke Quay, last night. We sampled most of the menu, making our way through:

• Black Pig, seafood, prawn and sour plum roll katsu (katsu => fried, breadcrumbed),
• Shabu-shabu,
• Udon shabu,
• Sashimi rice bowl, and
• Ginger-pork hot-pot.

It was all very yummy, the specialty Black Pig katsu, and Black Pig shabu-shabu a highlight. I enjoyed the sour-plum roll katsu, definitely try these.

Gentoo: [more]
By enabling the HostInfo plugin in awstats, you get an extra column in the 'Hosts' table, which pops up a whois query when clicked.

awstats whois column

The whois record contains information like the organisation's name and address that owns the IP, the country, and contact details of the admin(s).

To get this working in awstats (to add this 'Info' column):

• Uncomment (or add) the

  LoadPlugin="hostinfo"

  line in the awstats config file for the domain of interest.

• Make sure the Net/XWhois Perl Module is available. On gentoo:

  emerge Net-XWhois

Programming: [more]

I always have trouble finding the reference for this, and the correct syntax. First, the scenario:

You have a std::map< CCustomClass , Value >. You can only use this if we know how to order the CCustomClass objects. You need to use (at a minimum), the syntax:

	std::map< CCustomClass , Value, CCustomClassComparitor > mapMyMap;
	

and provide the CCustomClassComparitor like so:

	struct CCustomClassComparitor {
	bool operator() (const CCustomClass &lhs, const CCustomClass &rhs) const {
	return lhs.flavour < rhs.flavour;
	}
	};
	

Food:: [more]

Check out my most recent kitchen creation, the Juicy Data 3 Cheese Beef Lasagna. The time spent cooking was well worth it. I googled for a lasagna recipe, and kind of blended a few together.

Key ingredients: Beef + onion + garlic , herbs, ricotta, mozarella, parmesan cheeses, lasagna sheets, time.

Enjoy the photos!

Lasagna recipe

Click to zoom. Here's my recipe.

Misc: [more]

You might be familiar with the linux mount-time option to supress writing access times back to the filesystem. A similar, but lesser-known switch is avaible on your Windows installs. Urban legends passed around the shadowy enclaves of clandestine BOFH meetings claim between 3% and 8% throughput improvement. YMMV! Your mileage may vary.

The disabling option readily available on linux is a flag noatime and can be specified in the -o part of the mount command line or in fstab.

Command-line usage:

mount -o noatime /dev/hda4 /media/video

As an entry in /etc/fstab

/dev/hda4 /media/video ext2 noatime,defaults 0 1

You can acheive similar supression of access time recording in NTFS, in Windows NT up to XP, by setting the registry key:

Misc: [more]
I hung my first piece of art today! I learnt how to use a hammer drill, identify a masonry drill-bit, and kinda how to hang a painting.
This is a painting by local (Singaporean) artist Michelle Tan. I believe it's name is "Beyond nothing".
Here are a couple of photos:

1) The hole in the wall, the screw in the sleeve in the hole in the wall.

HolesAndScrews

Misc: [more]

Drivel on an Eee PC, running debian

Preamble
A month or so ago I looked briefly at offline blogging apps (or journalling programs, if you prefer). I found Scribe-Fire (a ff plugin), and Blogger, and a couple of other standalones. None of them really worked for me. In these apps' defense, at the time I may have been expecting too much.

This is my first post using Drivel... hopefully all will go smoothly, and you'll enjoy more juice queued up from public transport, from the WiFiDark areas and TXed when I surface :).

Let's see how it goes.

Misc: [more]

I've been generally unsatisfied with RSS readers. A few posts back I mentioned Raggle, which is good (though text-based, and not for all). Raggle is still good, but I'm wanting more.

Enter The Owl!

RSSOwl codename Boreal is soon to be released. I tried out version 2.0.0 Milestone 8, and it's looking pretty good.

Misc: [more]

I recently bought an Asus Eee PC, the 4GB version, with slightly upgraded RAM. I'm chuffed. debian logo: The Debian logo.

I wasn't so happy with Xandros, or perhaps what Asus had done to it; the default flavour of linux installed on the Asus Eee PC, though.

Goodness of Xandros:

Misc: [more]

So, the nerd-world is somewhat ablaze with talks of lack-of-integrity from Mr Jobs' minions. Apparently, the TimeCapsule (herein referenced as iShaft Q1 2008) ships with a consumer-grade HDD, when it's touted as serving up a Server-Grade backup solution.
Gruntzooki: Antique steamship clock

Let's play Apple's advocate:

""

Misc: [more]

Perhaps we got to Japan a month or two too early... the cherry blossom trees along the river in Meguro, Tokyo, would have been in full bloom, a hanging carpet of pinkness. As we saw, in winter they're barren and bleak, having shed all non-essentials for the winter.

Deciduous cherry blossoms

Food:: [more]

Welcome to Juicy Cookery. Here we have JuicyData's traditional recipe for Fettucine Carbonara.

It's a creamy sauce, with subtle hints of bacon, garlic and onions. The quantities depicted here serve around 4 normal-ish humans. If you're cooking for 40 humans, increase tenfold.

Target: The fruits of your labour should look like this:

Carbonara ready!

Pictoral recipe: (I like the recipe in a scratchpad like this.. helps so you can amend as you cook):

Misc: [more]

On his last day at bat, on his last appearance at the WACA as an Aussie International Cricket representative, on his last swagger with the team, Adam Gilchrist does what he does best. He smashed some balls.

But it didn't stop there. His wicket-keeping turned out to be as superb as his time-at-bat was sensational.

I remember a few years ago, as Mr Gilchrist was just coming into the scene, as a predominantly one-dayer, he seemed very up-startish. He kept smashing. He was unstoppable, a veritable over-the-fencing machine! I like to think that he revitalised cricket amongst my generation, giving it that extra zest, or oomph, that us MTV generation needed.

His last game saw him saving the team from defeat, earning a century from around 120 balls. That's a nice run-rate, right there.

Strength and honor!!!

Misc: [more]

Thanks to Ajay for this awesome find!

After putting together countless PCs, after suffering all the nics, abrasions, and head-trauma that goes along with building your own PC, I'm thinking maybe it's time to trust someone else to fill the slots.

This is where www.googoo.com.sg comes in. I haven't used this service yet, but it looks pretty cool.

Please drop a comment here if you've tried / used this service. It looks cool, and we should support it if it's worthy!!

Optimism bob:

Man, gone are the days I'm forking out $15 for a taxi home from SimLim, a sore shoulder from carting my new toys/junk, the abrasions and war wounds from stuck IDE power cables. These guys look real competitive, they deliver free, and you can shop while reclining. Awesome.

Misc: [more]

JuicyData took a little break over CNY (Chinese New Year, or Lunar New Year). Look forward to some new juicy content, over the next few weeks. juicy offering

The current year is year of the Rat. Last year was a Pig (particularly auspicious though, it was actually Golden Pig). Here's a small offering to a Chinese Buddha. Juicy gourd?

I've done most of my hang-bao (ang-pao) giving and collecting this year I think (hope). And I've eaten my fill of cakelets, nibblies and sweets. There's still 8 or 9 days left in the CNY celebrations, happy Year of the Rat!

Misc: [more]

Link: http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html

This table is huge! It's a well compiled list of applications, by fine-grained categories, in Windows and Linux.

Next time you're at a party, and someone asks you: How do I run this application in Linux? You can tell them to go to juicy data, and then to linuxrsp.ru.

No but seriously, this list is very useful for planning transitions, but it does seem a little optimistic. I'm not sure, for example, that TuxRacing is quite up to the same standard as Need For Speed.

Some categories seem a bit dated also. When was the last time your boss was pushing you for that ASCII art? Perhaps it's high time to retire the category: "Program for ASCII-drawing".

Bonus Round!!!

Link: http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php

Misc: [more]

Plant Plague

We've got a citronella plant, which is awesome at keeping away mosquitos, but also seems to be good at being diseased.

Does anyone recognize these white, round, oily looking little things? Perhaps they're aphids?

If you have an identification, or suggestion, please comment :). I'm hoping that this is normal, and non-detrimental to the shrub.

Misc: [more]

Link: http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.htm

This is a little old, but it's good to resurface these things now and then.

Google search for the significance and / or philosophy / culture of this book. Cory wittingly published this simultaneously in the formats:

a) traditional dead-tree,

b) creative-commons, multi-format, share-disperse-be-free.

I'm exagerrating (b) here, but, his experiment is interesting, and paved the way for his work / ideas over the last few years. When you read boing boing, it's good to keep this history in mind. Crazy lefties changing the world under us! :)

-- end rant , start review --

Misc: [more]

It's official. There's to be more hobbitses, and their controller will be: Guillermo del Toro!

Guillermo del Toro's history reads: Cronos - Mimic - The Tequila Gang - Espinazo del Diablo - Blade II - Hellboy - Laberinto del fauno, El.

His trade mark is insects, or insectology. There ya go.

Guillermo del Toro may be currently working on Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. And he has a photographic memory and his father was kidnapped in 1997 (returned after ransom).