firefox 3.6 beta 2 crashing again

I had problems with Firefox 3.5. Many times it crashed when I tried to tag friends in facebook. (I have more than 4000 friends in the list.)

Then, I decided to upgraded to Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 (code name Namoroka). It went fine. Now, it has moved to beta 2 and it crashes again with facebook. It happens frequently. I guess, I am switching to other browsers. Oh well...

Backup Mac: Time Machine or ...

Let me start by confesing that I rarely backup my Macbook. That said, I occasionally use Time Machine to backup my Macbook to an external disk using USB. This morning it failed because the disk is full. There's only 33.2 GB left on the disk, while my Mac needs 93.1 GB.

Last month I bought a 1TB disk. It's a WD Mybook. It came with a nifty backup software. I actually don't use that software. I use the disk as a normal disk and just copy files and folders that I need to backup to that disk. It is a tedious task. Now, it got me thinking, which backup strategy should I use?

1. Backup with Time Machine
2. Backup with software that came with my Mybook
3. Just copy files and folders that need to be backed up

Suggestion?

One (book) down, more to go

I have just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers" book. Phew... It's a good book, just like his previous books; "Blink" and "Tipping Point". I should've finished reading it sooner but all the busy work that I've got slowed me down. I am glad it's done. (I hope you don't think that I feel reading is a chore.)

Now, the next step is to pick a book from my to-read stack. Apparently, picking the next book is not easy. So, last night I took 5 books and started skimming those books. None wowed me. (Perhaps I was just too tired.) So this morning I brought another book with me. In the end I just read a few paragraphs from various book.

Arrrggghhh. I should be able to pick one book and read it! I'll do it as soon as possible. I have to do it to clean my to-read stack (which is impossible since I receive new books faster than I manage to read them).

Arrrggghhh...

New search engine: duckduckgo.com

Just found out that there is a new search engine, duckduckgo.com.

And what better way to test it than searching your own name. ha ha ha. And the result is ...

Back to School (Work)

Well, holiday is (officially) over. Tomorrow we're going back to school or work. It feels so short.

There are so many things that I wanted to do, but couldn't get it done during the holiday. I wanted to read lots of books, papers, articles, ... I wanted to re-learn coding (computer programming). Sharpening my skills. Alas, time went so fast.

I did not regret it though, since I did get some things done. At least, relaxing :) Hey, that's also important, right?

Now, I am putting that things to read back to the shelf (of things to read).

Dark Side of Creativity

I thought creativity is all good. After listening to some TED's presentation, I realized that creativity has a dark side.

Once creativity has visited you, you are doomed forever. For the lack of creativity can send you to dark paths. Paths that you didn't think you will thread upon.

You just have to have creativity. Gotta have... You life depends on it. I am not joking. You can find the number of (creative) people that have died because they think that they don't have creativity anymore.

I didn't realize this. Now, it's too late...

Yummy ...

[seafood lamien @ banquet, singapore]

What happened to Formula 1?

I have not watched Formula 1 closely for a year (or two?) and was surprised to hear that there was a scandal. I was in Singapore and heard it on the news. The incident happened in Singapore last year! Whoa ...

So, now, I am searching the internet for more information about this. If I understood correctly, Nelson Piquet was asked to crash his car so that Alonso would win. The thing is, I didn't know the situation. Why would Alonso win? So what if the safety car was out? What was his position at that time? Could somebody direct me to a more detailed article elaborating the situation?


[A Ferari display on Orchard stree. I took this picture before taking an F1 simulator test drive, a game acutally. Ranked far below the best driver :) ]

Copyrights of old articles

How long can an article be copyrighted?

I was looking for an article of a journal. It is published in 1971. I cannot access (download) the article from the journal's web site. This makes me think, how long does the journal have the "monopoly" of that article?

Can't get getrusage working

We are trying to measure the amount of resources needed to run our program, written in C. Looking here and there, I found getrusage (2). So, yesterday I tried to write a simple code:


#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>

int main(){
int y[100][100];
struct rusage *resource;
int x;

x = getrusage(0, resource);
printf("x = %d\n", x);
printf("errno = %d\n", errno);
return(0);
}


The result was not great. getrusage returned -1. According to the man page, non zero return value means it fails. The value of errno is 14.

What went wrong? Anybody?

Is there a better way to measure the amount of resources (memory, CPU, time) needed for a program? [Right now, I am looking at dtrace. Would it help?]

Presentation Preparation

I've got (too many) presentation invitations. So, I do quite a bit presentations. Maybe, it is even my main job :)

One thing people don't realize is that the amount of effort and time that I have to put preparing for the presentation. Some people think that I can use old presentations and can just wing it. Apparently, each presentation is different. I still need to modify the presentation. Some times the presentation only requires minor adjustment, other time (most of the time) I have to create a new presentation. Whether it is minor or major modification, it still takes time. The very least, I usually spend 1 hour preparing for the presentation.

Tomorrow I am giving a presentation. It's a 30-minute presentation plus questions and answers. So, it's one hour. Give and take. I already spent more than two hours preparing it. Oh well ...

Indonesia Independence Day - 17 August

Tomorrow, 17 August, is our independence day.

There are many events in our community to celebrate this. Mostly, they are sports, fun competition (lomba makan kerupuk, panjat pohon pinang, anybody?) and outdoors gathering.

That should be great! To bad I don't have photos :(

Long live Indonesia.

No picture today

I have a personal project, in which I plan to take picture(s) from the same spot. The picture looks like this.



I enjoy watching the picture, the environment. It is great. Especially, if the weather is great and it shows in the picture. It sets my mood.

For the last couple of days, the weather was not great. It was kinda gloomy. So, I didn't take the picture. I didn't want to have gloomy days. This morning, it is also gloomy. Sigh ... I need my sunshine.

So, no picture today.

Hurting

When you hurt someone, you actually hurt yourself.
So, my apology to whoever I hurt.
I didn't mean to do it.
(I never intentionally want to hurt somebody.)

Backing up personal (junk) files

I had a quiz the day before yesterday. One of the questions was "what do you if you are bored?" One of the answers was "defrag disks" (or something like that). I didn't realize that this might be true. Yesterday I did defrag my disks :) and right now I am trying to organize (junk?) files.

I have so many images (photos) taken with my digital camera and my cellphones. Sometimes to get one good image, I took multiple images. What do I do with the ones that I am not using? There are also files that I thought I might read, but not right now. (And perhaps never?) On top of that there are audio files and so on.

What's the best way to back these files up? Some people told me to use DVD. I don't trust DVDs. I have had bad luck with them. Scratched a little and there goes my files down the blackhole drain.

Right now I am backing up with external HD. I don't know if this is cost effective. (On top of that, I don't use backup programs. Plain copying files is what I do.)

Some people suggested backing up through the network. There are backup services out there (adrive.com is an example). But, my network is so slow. Backing up 50GB probably takes forever.

Other ideas?