Generations upon generations, like waves upon waves
Transferring culture and knowledge, the path forward is paved
What many do not realise, self awareness is key
With chains that bind you, the next generation, you may free.
Archive for May, 2009
Thoughts on life
Saturday, May 16th, 2009Late Night Meetings: 2
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009Having another late night meetings, and reminiscing back 9 years ago. Back then, I had a palm pilot with a foldable keyboard, and tried to get work done by connecting to my handphone (i believe it was a Sony Ericsson T68i) via infrared, sending and checking emails/sms using the built in email app in Palm
Fast forward 9 years. Now, I’m having an IBM Thinkpad X200 running Ubuntu 9.04, with a Singtel Mobile Broadband, connecting to the internet through the 3.5G network, accessing my emails thro Zimbra web interface, IM’ing on Pidgin.
Jaunty on my X200
Saturday, May 9th, 2009Ubuntu recently released their latest operating system, Ubuntu 9.04, also known as Jaunty Jackalope. I have been running it for the past 2 weeks on my Thinkpad X200, and I must say that I have been thoroughly impressed - more so than any other releases I have experienced so far. Top few things that impressed me:
- Amazing suspend and resume stability: I have been using it for the last 1 week with no reboots, only suspending, and resuming. And because I run around quite often, I typically suspend and resume about 4-8 times a day. And for 5 full days, the laptop didn’t freeze up on me. Wireless kept on working, applications, bluetooth, sound… you name it. I had to terminate Firefox twice in this 5 days cos it was taking up too much memory - i typically have about 60 opened tabs.
- Mobile Broadband: I was stuck in a meeting one evening, and xiaobai was using Singtel Broadband. Out of impulse, I decided to just plug it into my USB slot. To my absolute astonishment, a dialog popped up asking me Country, which I selected Singapore, and then it went on to ask me to choose M1, Starhub or Singtel, which I selected Singtel. And.. viola!
That was 3 days ago. I have just gone and bought my own Singtel Laptop Broadband package, and below are the screens:
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- New Applications: There are quite a lot of new applications available on Jaunty Jackalope. Amongst which are
- UNetBootin : Allows you to easily create bootable thumbdrives.
- BlueProximity: A very cool application that pairs with your handfone and locks/unlocks your laptop based on the distance of your phone from the laptop
Well, I am curious how the next version of Opensolaris will be like, especially now that Oracle has bought over Sun - if its on schedule, it should be this month.
Late night meetings
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Its been quite a while since I’ve had long late night meetings with clients. Just finished one. Sure brings back memories back to 2001 days. And this one is pretty memorable in the sense that we had 4 projectors projecting different screens all at the same time, of which one was a mindmap so that we can decide and change the IA on the fly and make a decision there and then. 
Learning and Curiousity
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009I always believe that curiosity is one of the core characteristics that one needs to cultivate if he/she wants to thrive in the digital medium, and thought I’d just point out a small case in point that I personally experienced 15minutes ago.
I was just clearing my emails, and this being a Sunday evening, I just happened to have a *little* more time on my hand and decided to do some simple analysis of one of the usual email marketing newsletter I receive rather than sending it straight to the thrash. Selecting the “Show Original” option on the right-click menu, i noticed a few email headers that I didn’t recognise
- List-Unsubscribe
- X-List-Unsubscribe
- X-Unsubscribe-Web
None of these email headers were those which I’m personally familiar with. A quick check with Google shows up the following interesting articles:
- http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/list-best-practices.htm
- http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/list-email-headers.htm
Apparently these headers are specified in RFC 2369
Going through the intro of this RFC, tells you that these headers are optional, but meant to extend the functionality of list managers and their respective functions.
Quite a bit of things that you learn in 10minutes of quick research, all because of the curiosity of examining the email message body. So now, I can learn more about what the latest technical implementations are, what other people think about email best practices, from their point of view, both technically, and from a messaging angle.
Always be curious. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn this way.