MLai - Reflecting my Life

Blog has just been updated to version 2.5.
One thing that caught my eye has been a gallery feature which I believe has been around for a while, but is more accessible now.

Written by Milton Lai

A couple weeks have gone by now, so just a quick summary, and yes I am still trawling through the photos I’ve taken over the past little while to upload and I’ll be in front of the computer this weekend - doing assignment work - and so, WILL be uploading them.
So I’ve moved desks now at work, and all the developers (all 3 of us) are really cosy now in our really really warm room. I’ll grab a photo soon to put up here.

Long weekend - didn’t do too much there. It was filled up with friday - playing games, saturday - went to uni for some group work to make sure we were all on the same page before we go off and do our individual parts - hopefully having a final document which meshes really nicely - followed by games, sunday - lovely wedding, although was very VERY long. It was a great day for a wedding and we have some really nice photos, monday - Easter Show.

Simple of the girls

Father of the bride checking the Eels game (favourite team)

So for the first time, I turned up to the easter show EARLY. I’ve normally turned up in the final few days of the show after all the competitions and stock is gone and so its been a bit bland. This year, it was great! I guess I’ve missed out on a whole lot every other year since I finally had time to see quite a few things that I never knew about like the Horticultural pavilion and was able to see the woodchopping (womens) and also judging of a few of the animals - making a special mention to the Llamas.

Thought this one was kind of funny:

Womens woodchopping final:

A couple from the fireworks that night:

The rest of the week has really just revolved around a little Kai Taylor Sloane, my newest nephew! He is just adorable - I was a bit too young to appreciate my other niece and nephew when they were born. So I spent thursday afternoon NOT going to uni, and headed out to grab myself a video camera for my sister - Sony DCRSR45 which is a 30Gb HardDisk recorder. Its a great size and it saves on tapes and DVDs, but it will require a lot of HD space to store all the videos. I haven’t yet used it, but I’m sure I will soon.

Since then, its been the weekend, and mine has been spent at work, doing uni work. I was supposed to write some reports up yesterday, but found my databases subject a lot more interesting and so I started that. I’ve found out now that its not so hard and quite fun. So yesterday and today I’ve spent doing this assignment, and I would say I’m nearly done writing my procedures but still need to make a start on the documentation. One thing that has stumped me, has been my inability to run an update query with a variable inside the update statement. Now I was thinking it was very straight forward, and its something I might need to sleep on since I’m still not able to sort it out!:

i_average := 0;
if a_average.count > 0 then
for i_averageID in a_average.first..a_average.last
loop
i_average := i_average + a_average(i_averageID);
end loop;
i_average := i_average/a_average.count;
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(i_average);

a_average.trim(a_average.count);
end if;
update local_RM16 set volume = i_average;

But when I change i_average to 10, it will update everything to 10 - the query is not the proper query but simplified so I could make more sense of it.

EDIT: so it seems like the update statement is REALLY wrong. I did think about the type of update it was and I knew I would have to fix it later on, but didnt realise it would create me such problems so early on. It was stupidly overwritting the data and so it appeared as though nothing was happening when in fact it was doing just fine. All is well at the moment and assignment is nearly done!

Written by Milton Lai

Thats been the biggest thing this week - buying my plane tickets to Europe - Syd to Copenhagen and London to Syd. Thats set of the last week of July and coming back the second week of September. Yes this means that I wont be attending uni next semester since I would have missed about 5 weeks of it by the time I get back.

Uni is starting to grow on me. Basically the whole night time class thing is really bad, but it isn’t so bad when I get to program (even though its on friday nights). Well I got through the week just fine, just 11 or more to go!

This weekend, no weddings, so it was more of a relaxing weekend than any others. I got started on my databases programming subject on saturday, some tennis with my cousin and the rest of the time, I may have been playing games. Sunday was a travel expo at darling harbour. It was a great place to go to grab the phonebooks of brochures I got - something which I will SLOWLY sift through when I get the chance - hopefully in the next few weeks. I’m just starting to get an idea of which places I should go to, in what order, and how to get from place to place.

Apart from all the excitment, work project - next release is nearly done, well about to be handed over to the users for testing tomorrow, so thats a really good thing, then onto some PHP work for a couple of weeks.

Written by Milton Lai

(Written last week) First week of uni started last week and I’ve had a few problems with enrollment and which submajor I wanted to study. So on Friday night, I had Distributed Databases class which went on for way too long. Afterwards was spent at my cousins place checking out, and drooling over his ADSL2+ connection which off the ozbroadband test website, with the TPG mirror, would download at 1.67MB/s! I ran the same test at home (though through the wireless) and with optus cable, I achieved .. 246kB/s

After that, cousin was after a new Desktop, so I spec’d up the machine for him, and it ended up being the same as mine, apart from the 3.0Ghz chip as well as a Leadtek 8800GT graphic card (which looked so much nicer than mine - physically, since I haven’t yet seen its performance - but I’m sure its a whole lot better than mine.) That was saturday, Sunday was spent…. yes, I had a wedding. Lovely sweet couple, I’ll upload photos later today when I get the chance. Last week, was uni, uni, uni, horrible uni. Well, the .NET classes and the Database programming class weren’t bad, but the IS Methodologies was really bad.

I would have to say my weeks this semester are a bit crazy. Full time work, with uni on Tuesdays from 6-9, Thursday 2-6:30(there is a break) and Friday 6-9. I ended up going to watch Paranoid Park on Wednesday night with Lucas - wasn’t such a good movie to take him too, one reason being it was hard to understand (it was confusing for me to watch), and the cinematography was really tied down to the story line, which he wasn’t a big fan of. It was a pretty good movie, although I thought i twas a bit long for a 85min movie.

Friday was spent watching Grinspoon at UNSW RoundHouse! It was entirely my taste in music, but it was a great end to the week. Saturday, beautiful day for another wedding, with the video guy keeping me going throughout the day with numerous occasions catching him with his lens cap on, watching him stuff his face with both food and alcohol and also watching him stand in the middle of the aisle in the church.

Sunday, was the last day Lucas is in Sydney. Having been here for 3 months now, and spent 2 months studying English at TAFE, I would say his level of English is a whole lot better than mine. We spent yesterday at Taronga Zoo, since he hadn’t been, and the late afternoon at Coogee beach relaxing. It’s a bit sad to have him go, and I hope he ends up coming back here after his studies in a few years.

At work, new desks came in, now the office is a whole lot smaller, door is behind me again, so not such a good thing, bit to complain about, but nothing I can really do at this time. Too much to do this week, I just hope uni doesn’t get the better of me. Pics to come later in the day hopefully

Written by Milton Lai

I plugged in my old IDE hard drives from my old machine and wanted to copy all the data across to my 2TB drive. Dragging and dropping left me with errors of corrupt files and so my command line trick is to use XCOPY.

So you would normally navigate into the directory you wish to copy from cmd and type: “xcopy *.* “D:\destination\” /s /e /c”

Now I’m not too sure why I use the s in the parameters and possibly you could do without it, but what it does is copy all the data from the directory you navigated into to the destination directory, including subfolders and files (hence ALL) but it continues if it hits and error (for example a corrupt file and therefore is unable to normally copy the file). In the case, the file is still not copied, but at least you can the look back at the history and check out which file and try to salvage the file.

The problem I just had was I received an “Insufficient Memory” error, which is related to the filename (including drive letters and folders - pwd if you may will give you this in unix) is more than 254 characters. To get around this - either find the file and change its name - but this may not solve it completely since there might be more files - in which case, install xxcopy. This program works just the same as xcopy and has no limitation to the length of the names.

Written by Milton Lai

Just a video of the best parkour practitioners in Australia (and NZ). Enjoy!

The downloadable MOV file is available at http://mlai.org/videos/ .

Written by Milton Lai