MLai - Reflecting my Life

Yesterday had me moving forward in my project. Completing another section and completing another one today. As far as I can see, all the importing/exporting should be finished tomorrow - as in my stored procedures are complete. I still have to run through a few records which have errors with the head of the project to know what to do with them. I had spent all last night trying to get Generals to work, to no avail. I beleive its to do with my router and my connection. Sometimes it connects, but drops out. Other times it just wont connect and today, it would not connect at all. I’ve been playing with my ports and still haven’t been able to connect. Maybe an re-install might solve my problem.

I had my sister come visit me to buy me lunch (I turned 20 today). We went to Bill’s which is owned I beleive by Bill Granger, a chef who’ve I’ve seen many books from. I had the corn fritters which was very nice. It’s not like me to not have meat during a meal, but this was an exception. The only strange thing that has happened over the past couple days, would be when installing Adobe Creative Suite 2, it asks you to restart your computer and the installation will continue afterwards… it blue screens… This has happened two out of two times so far. I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Written by Milton Lai

On saturday, I had my / friends birthday dinner. We share the same birthday. Falling on tuesday, the weekend was the way to go. We headed to Tamanas on Top in Newtown. Indian Food. Not a great fan, unless it’s lunch time. Surprisingly it was quite nice. We ordered the Tamana’s Banquet. Very nice entre. The mains… I think I will stick to butter chicken. The rest of the flavours weren’t up to my taste. That part was not so great, but still filling. Good servings of sides. Not a place I would go back to anytime soon. Following that, we headed to Karaoke in Strathfield. Not much of a singer, and was quite tired. I managed to wake up at 8 on saturday after sleeping at 3 - watching Heroes. Definately not enough sleep.

During the day, I headed to Autobahn to get an antennae adapter for my new head unit since it seemed to be a european plug instead of the normal plugs. I also ordered a strut bar which should come in some time this week, or early next week. Just can’t wait! I then headed to my cousins place, where we went out to tune my car audio system. It now sounds a whole lot better. It works together a lot better than the JVC. To me, it’s starting to sound like my counsins system, who has spent more than I have. I did get myself a softboard from my friends which, is about 150cm, so I’ll see how that works for me, since I am about 174.

Today, woke up with a call from my brother wanting me to go over to give him a hand lifting his television so he could prop it up a bit. Quickly came home to some much wanted sleep. Woke up and finished watching Heroes to the latest episode and picked up my mate and headed to a mate who, back in the day, we all used to be a close nit trio, but groups change. We hung about his place, followed with some Hungry Jack’s and some gaming. Starcraft - Broodwar was the game to play 10 years ago? Well it was in 2000 - not sure when it actually came out though. Good memories.

Written by Milton Lai

Just a quick upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Head here: http://wordpress.org/development/2007/01/ella-21/ for more info.

Written by Milton Lai

Well isn’t this one going to be a long write up. I have been quite busy lately with work, work and more work, and of course, my latest task - Heroes. So of course today is Australia Day and its a time where all aussies invite their family and friends over for a BBQ. Today just wasn’t one of those days. Instead, it was spent shopping, with my cousin. Of course it was planned that we head out for a jog, but ended up at Chatswood Westfields. This got bad to worse as I entered J.B. Hifi and purchased, what I thought was a bargain. Of course, it was a bargain. I wouldn’t buy anything unless it was. So that notion landed me with a brand new head unit for the car. The Alpine CDA-9855R was the item and it is oh so beautiful. Top of the range CD player for Alpine - it has the most… I think I could go on for days. So anyway, got home and installed it. It only took about 30 minutes, to rip out the old one and throw in this one.

Of course, I still don’t know all the features of it, but I guess a quick lesson in car audio. When you have a system with amplifiers and subwoofers, you don’t want to tweak the music too much. Personally, and many people will say the same thing, to keep all settings flat. So don’t play with the equalisers. Do your crossover adjustments, depending upon the person, around 80 for the sub, 80 for the fronts and 125 for the rears. The aim of the game is to have good quality of music. I have a good set of splits for the front, 3 ways for the rear, 4 channel amp powering all for speakers, 2 channel amp bridged for the subwoofer. Still plently of room for improvement when I can afford it. The new head unit does have digital crossovers and time alignment. You tend not to play with these too much, but having the digital crossovers allows you to fine tune the music. It is a bit difficult with a knob on the amp that has a scale from 50hz to 500hz. Who is to know where 125 is? So small things like this make a difference.

What I will be missing is the use of my new’ish 12 disk cd stacker, and the front aux in I had in my JVC. Guess I will need a proper CD wallet now that I can’t have 12 cd’s in the back ready to play. There are couple names that come to mind who may be after this combo. You lose some, you gain some. My car now sounds completely different. Something that I will have to get used to and tweak to my liking. When I say different, I do mean better. AND one problem. Its aerial adapter is not your standard adapter. I require an ISO/JASO antennae adapter to fit my car. So currently no radio. I’ll be heading out to Autobahn tomorrow morning to see if they have any, well shop all day to find it.

On tuesday, the highlight would have been the call for “All wardens please man the emergency phones”. This was followed by a loud howling noise. This was all mentioned in the safety induction, but I had to experience it for myself. So I walked out into the centre of the building. The windows were open (automatically) and there were fans blowing at the top of the building. This would create a draft to suck out all the smoke if there was a fire. The fans were so strong, and created such a difference in pressure that when you opened a door out into the “open” it would be quite difficult to open the door. It was found to be dust from the construction site next door that covered the smoke detectors (so it thought the room was full of smoke) and started the emergency procedures.

So on wednesday i had my ‘big’ meeting with one of the leading scientists who has an interest in what I have been working towards. This involved my boss and a couple testers of the system. It was nearly two hours, and personally I felt there should’ve been more progress. This is because normally I am used to have decisions made during meetings, but there weren’t any. More of a discussion, where points were made, but nothing stuck. A disappointment, but brings out some confidence in me and in what I’m doing. It had me working on the remaining tables for the following day. Help desk problem we had was a computer that had Powerpoint 2003 installed and it would crash when typing (editing) data in a file that wass “too big”. The person (and many others) use powerpoint to make posters. The file was from one of her students, and when she starts to edit any of the information, Powerpoint would hang, cpu usage was 0, disk usage was 0, and it would return to normal after 20 seconds to 2 minutes. So when she creates a file, it is fine, until it reaches a certain size (of which we think about 1 meg) and it will start to hang. We uninstalled and reinstalled office and we encounter the same thing. So that was the head scratcher for the week. We havn’t formatted as yet, hoping that will solve it, but the lady has a few deadlines coming up in the next week and needed her computer. So when she’s away, we’ll be tearing it apart, trying to sort out why.

That problem started on wednesday and we returned her computer on thursday. I spent most the day working on the exports from the filemaker database. There were 300 more entries into the database. Coincidently, well more annoyingly, the date format (which exports as a string) changed from ‘3/3/06′ to ‘3 Mar 06′. I was running my populate file, and I started getting errors, and I look back at the export and I see these stupid date formats! It ran me up the wall why they would change how they entered the data half way through. Of course I solved it quickly and moved back onto the other tables. Finished them quite quickly before the end of the day. I compiled 4 times, the first with an error. I ran the populate file 3 times, and it was done. I feel as though I’m getting the hang of created stored procedures. They are becoming second nature.

I have, during these past few days, been watching the newest prison break episode and started watching Heroes. I am currently up to episode 8, so 5 more to go until I’ve caught up. It’s a great watch so far, pity I didn’t start watching it last semester when my uni mates were watching it. Then again, I would’ve had to wait most of my summer break before I could get the latest episode.

Written by Milton Lai

So it seems I’m catching a cold. Seems like I started feeling like this on saturday. So anyway, arrived at work to an email from the boss to have a meeting at 1:30 today for 2 hours… So i had been working on the binary code sets and cursors, and started working it out. Got to a point where I KNEW it was nearly there, but something was missing.

So had the meeting and had the boss guide me in the right direction. He was looking at my filemaker export and i had ^K and ^] within the tab-delimited file. So removing the Ctrl-K was simple enough, but hitting ^] in vi would load up telnet. After a few more commands, he seemed to have just typed in ? and hit enter. So the screen started scrolling really fast with random lines of code followed by something like “function not found”. So no idea whats going on. Tried to kill what was running, but it wouldn’t stop for nearly a minute. So then we thought nothing of it and continued for another minute or so, until we got a message mention something about process not available.

From this point we were not able to login. So we checked the processes and we had 10000 processes running. Tried killing the ones which were created by my boss… being nearly all of them, but they just kept growing. 10 minutes later it hit 23000 processes and nothing we did would stop it. Removing the user of the process, using the kill and pkill command did nothing. Ended up restarting our server. Getting the server back up 15 minutes later, we looked at what we did. Hitting ? in telnet meant that it was running the wildcard ? and there were 3 files in the directory, one of which was an executable with more question marks inside the executable and so was running an infinite loop. Even though all telnet sessions were closed, the file continued to run, which is very strange.

So that took up my whole 2 hour meeting. After that, i figured out how cursors and binary sets work, and finished what I had been doing. So tomorrow I shall see whats next on the list.

Written by Milton Lai

Past few days have been very long and very sore. Sore of course from capoeira which only means I worked hard during the class. It has been a long time coming - should be fine by tomorrow. So starting on friday, had work as usual, quieter day than usual. Finally given the priviledge of having the super-user password. Scary thought, that now I CAN damage the database and anything to do with it. So using it with great caution. Spent most the day on help desk and staring at my monitor trying to figure out binary code sets and using cursors in stored procedures. Still can’t figure out the cursor bit - long story. So this week, I’ll be having a meeting with a gentleman who wants the software for which I am doing the data conversion for. Thats on wednesday. Until then, i will have more meetings with the boss, hoping that everything I have done so far, is correct or along the right lines.

Yesterday had a wedding on a scorcher of a day. Started at bride and grooms places, with tea ceremonies, then off to the Royal Botanical Gardens for the ceremony, some quick location shoots, and the reception in Chinatown. Here are some pics:

So this one, I like, due to the vandalism work done to the sign (theres another sign one this week). I guess I was trying to show the “real”ness of the wedding

This one is from the reception, a simple capture between the cake and glasses

This one I just saw and had to take. The more reflections the better. Was using the car.

This one is another one i like. Feels like something is missing, but the sign is great “keep moving” is what i’m getting at

So another great wedding and there are more at http://www.vlphotography.com.au/weblog .

Today, woke up hot and sticky. My room being a sauna since its carpeted, no air conditioning and too many appliances plugged in. Was able to get out of the house at 1 and went with a friend to parramatta westfields and shopped. Havn’t been there in a while, its quite big, but nothing interesting to buy. As the shops closed, we headed back to his place to another few rounds of Generals, before I retired to come home to blog and sleep. Its still too hot to sleep.

Written by Milton Lai

So after my misadventure last week (not being able to find the place), I got myself a phone number and found it. Lead my Kim Cheng from Bantus in Perth, it was a great night. I havn’t been to capoeira classes in over a year. It was great to get back into it. Those people from Perth of course call things slightly differently than what I was used to, but got straight back into it. Started at 7 and finished two hours later. I know tomorrow I’ll be very sore and I can already feel the blisters on my feet.

So I spent yesterday looking at something new from the boss, which I didn’t quite understand until today. He outlined it over the phone call and we had a 5 minute meeting about it today. It relates to binary code sets and how they are used in stored procedures. I’ve already encountered normal code sets, but these binary are pretty similar. Apart from this, since i’m on IT help, my time has to be dedicated to answering the phone and helping the rest of the building. One very strange thing, which still cant be solved is, someone was sending an email to ‘everyone’ which is a distribution list. We have a size limit being 20Kb. This email consisted of 6 lines of text and a signature. When saved in notepad, it was 9Kb, but it would not send, and it bounced. This was sent through Outlook. Sending through our webmail client, it was fine. On receiving the email through outlook, it says the file size is 10Kb. So still dont know why, especially since another ‘everyone’ email was sent shortly after by someone else. Something to ponder about until it happens again.

Another strange thing also, relating to Office X on macs. Basically, if you open a text file, type in some text, highlight it, go to edit > copy. Then you open up excel and click on a field and go to edit > paste, paste will be void. Hitting apple + v wont do anything either. It just seems to not have copied. Way around it was to open excel first, in which case it works. The way I solved it, since the people who were using it were used to their “process”, meant that I had to install office 2004 which solved the problem.

Written by Milton Lai

So past couple days have been a bit rough. Well more busy, since on monday two people were away and so, because it was my first turn for IT help. It’s even better when everyone comes in at around 9-9:30 and you get calls at 8:20. So yesterday had a little chat with the boss about exactly what he wanted from what I was doing. Got the objectives sorted and have been working on it since. If the boss comes in tomorrow, “we” have a meeting about what has been going on with this project since the people who are interested in it want to see and discuss plans. At the present time, my boss should be looking at my code and my results. I’m sure all criticism will be constructive. We shall see tomorrow.

Guess one note to make from the past couple days is that whenever using Dreamweaver, when you hit enter, or decide to go to a new line, Dreamweaver will place that text in paragraph tags. The problem for some people is the final output, with huge linespacing - especially in tables. So whenever you can, try to use breaks instead of paragraph tags - unless of course they are paragraphs and you want the larger gaps.

Remember the LG - LW50 i was talking about with the longest battery life, well, last week it came in, and asked to hit f1 to continue - being a harddrive problem with bad sectors. So we had the lovely priviledge of backing up the ladies data. Windows couldn’t boot, so used a UBCD to boot up, and another note, if copying files that have errors use command prompt. “xcopy “tartget folder” “destination folder” /e/s/c/h” should do the trick. Copies all files, including hidden, and if it encounters errors, it will continue. So instead of explorer saying “corrupt data, cannot continue” it will copy what it can and continue. At least you dont need to try copying the remainder of the folder after the corrupted file. So using this command allowed us to back up everything. It would however stop copying once every 5 minutes or so, and by chance, someone from downstairs had a computer problem, came up, tried to plug in his laptop, and accidently pulled the powerpack from under the dying laptop, and gave it a kick start. So it seemed that the hard drive was in fact dying and tapping it would make it work again. The tapping was more like hitting. Everytime we hit it, it would make the most horrible sound. Like two ceramic disks scraping against each other. With some determination, it copied, but we are yet to find out how much of her data is corrupted.

Watched the Pursuit of Happyness after work today. Was a great movie, although the movie could have been more dramatic. When I say dramatic I mean emotional. There were bits in the movie where you could tell they tried to make it sad. It worked, but there could’ve been more done to the movie to make it a more emotional watch - a better watch. Nonetheless, it was a great movie. You may need to see it to understand what I’m saying, but this ain’t a review but rather my opinion - not much of a movie buff.

Written by Milton Lai

Yesterdays wedding was fantastic. Great to get out again. Started at 12 and finished just after 10. Here are a few photos from yesterday:

from where I was, and with the lens I was using, it was a bit hard to get what I was after but I do prefer this:

Simple, and looks great. Next is a simple capture from martin place. You’ve got to love the buildings in sydney.

This shot just shows the “wideness” of the fisheye. My 12mm Tokina can fit a whole table as well, with the warp factor a lot less, but if you can tell, i was right next to the woman in the bottom right.

There are of course more pics (by me as well) at www.vlphotography.com.au .

So finishing this wedding, I headed to a mates place where I spent most the night in his pool. Quite refreshing and relaxing. I havn’t had time to do that in years - to just sit around and chat with mates. Was a good night of conversation. Ended the night with my driving Penny’s car home (its an automatic, love driving auto’s since I drive a manual) - driving everyone else home on the way back to mine. The head unit still has problems, problems which I havn’t been able to figure out, but I do think its to do with cogs being loose. Who knows until I open it up.

Slept in today and work up to a day of Generals. Going a bit blind staring at the monitor for too long. Got the chance to watch the latest episode of the O.C. and the prison break recap episode “The Road to Freedom”. Great watch.

Written by Milton Lai

So past 2 days of work have been ok. There has been a number of problems with everyones computers. All not being related, but just receiving quite a few number of calls. Can’t remember too much about yesterday apart from finishing slightly early, hoping someone would be free to do something with. Instead, heading to J.B. Hifi in Parramatta to have a look at head units for my car. It’s been about 1 and a half years, nearly two, since I installed my JVC KD-G615 which has been operating quite well and has good sound coming from it. I do however want a head unit with crossover adjustments and possibly time alignment. I know that top of the range equipment has higher/better quality parts and has very few settings for you to change - so to listen to the original recording rather than too much treble or too much bass, to enjoy what the artist/recording company want you to hear. Nevertheless, I’ve went to look, but J.B. Hifi didn’t carry the models I wanted to look at from Alpine. I’m looking at Alpine, Kenwood and Clarion. Problem is that if i want the crossover adjustments, they only seem prevalent in the highest models in both the CD Player range and DVD Player range, which is very costly. So, can only keep looking or hope for a bargain on eBay.

Today at work, a problem I noted and should take note of is that Symantec Anti-Virus 10.1.1 does not work with Eudora on Mac’s IF the settings alias is running off a shared volume - we encourage this at work because everything on the network is backed up - so your emails are always backed up. I am still unsure of why this happens, but at work, Symantec has been modified to not update past 10.1.0 which solves the problem.

The project I’ve been working on, is moving along, slowly. I’ve slowed down / stopped because I’m not quite sure how to continue yet so just waiting for the boss. I’m getting quite used to using stored procedures now and have been playing with the data I exported and fixing up mistakes made within the FileMaker export and managing the information correctly - as it should be. I do believe this is a lesson for me to get my head around the database architecture of the business - possibly working on other projects. There was a mention of meta-data a couple weeks ago, which I’m still not sure of.

Finishing work earlier than usual, got home, had dinner, and had a request from Penny to uninstall/install her car audio since the family is selling the old car and getting a slightly more reliable car ( Sera to a Camry ). Stupidly, I didnt check if my toolbox was in the car when I left home, so called Chris to get it from my place and bring it over. So spent an hour ripping out her head unit, amplifier and subwoofer. Spent another 30 minutes figuring out how to remove the old head unit in the Camry. Then spent the next 4 hours figuring out which wire was which (I will post an installation guide later), for the head unit and installing the head unit. It had a problem before I touched it, which was, it has a mechanical face which slides down to allow the cd to come out as well as tilt at different angles - this doesn’t work anymore / didnt work before. So the head unit is in, and still have the amplifier and subwoofer to go. Oh and the rear speakers. So just need the next free day to set that all up. Finishing up we headed to Krispy Kreme for a midnight snack before heading home.

Can’t wait for tomorrow!!! First wedding of 2007!!! Photos will be up as soon as I can - most probably Sunday though.

Written by Milton Lai