July 26, 2003
Not quite a swagman
Between getting organised to leave, I've been doing things like meeting Denis, Karl and Sam (who's visiting from Paris) for coffee and chat. I even met Rhex the other day too, he's really rather cute. I realised only yesterday that my blog reading habit has been completely overthrown by the fact that my feed reader was gone when my computer died ... Anyhow, packing is done (except for this machine). See you from France. ;) Posted by sniffles at 02:50 PM | Comments (2)

July 24, 2003
Twisty Twistier
And so I was stuck in the office waiting for the police to come to take a report, wondering idly if Apple was going call me within the next hour to confirm that I can pick up the rented PowerBook from the computer store down the street (while the Mac Clinic whisks my lemon laptop to Apple's own techies), when he turned up with lunch ... and a camera. Another. My colleague said later, "Wish I had a camera for the look on your face." You who are the light that I see by, the voice that I could only echo in my songs; you, who give me colour, rhyme and soul — je t'aime tellement. My colleague said, "Duct tape it to your body." Instead, we locked it in the server room so no one could get to it until I take it home. Posted by sniffles at 03:00 PM | Comments (7)

Twistier
I hope whoever stole my camera (yes, the new one) is happy they have done so. Posted by sniffles at 07:10 AM | Comments (8)

July 22, 2003
Twist

This is one of the first images I took with my new camera. :) My only complaint is that it is a bit noisy, otherwise, it's a dream to shoot in manual mode — you can manually focus and control the shutter speed, aperture, white balance and exposure metering without having to go through a menu interface.

If I owe you email or if I seemed particularly silent recently, it's because I'm leaving for France on Saturday, my mailbox has been exploding ever since the announcement that Netscape is no more (I used to have it aliased as 'nutscrape' on my university DEC account), I have a couple of deadlines to meet before I fly, and also because my PowerBook still isn't back. Hopefully, things will be back to what passes for normality soon.

Posted by sniffles at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2003
Makan
If you haven't been over to look, Wena has written about some of the kinds of "kuih" that you can find in Kuching. (You might have to scroll down a bit; her permalinks don't appear to work on a post-by-post basis.) There have been many occasions I've tried to explain what "kuih" is to my non-Asian friends, and have failed :) Sometimes you eat it for breakfast, sometimes for afternoon tea (or at least, in my family) after a siesta, or sometimes for supper. Wena is also kindly sending over some sambal laksa. If there is only one sambal laksa manufacturer on Green Road, I think I know the one ... my mother used to buy from them directly. They are actually off Green Road, somewhere in the innards of the residential area. My geographical memory of the place is so blurred now that I'm not entirely sure which street it is on. I don't think the packaging has changed after all these years! Posted by sniffles at 02:14 AM | Comments (6)

July 15, 2003
World through a broken camera

Appropriately blurry, given the future ahead: AOL Cuts Remaining Mozilla Hackers (but Mozilla will continue) and Microsoft loses lucrative Munich deal to rival Linux. (Merci, Karl.)

Posted by sniffles at 05:32 PM | Comments (6)

Kodak gods don't like me either
So, as you would have it, my beloved camera chose to die yesterday. I'm not sure if it's worthwhile getting it fixed, so we'll see ... I'm not having much luck, am I? Anyway ... food on the brain. I've been trying for many years to advocate the inferiority of more well-known Penang Laksa compared to Kuching Laksa, or Sarawak Laksa (thanks, Boris), but given that most people are not aware of Borneo, it's a bit of an uphill fight. I've seen a fair few tourist maps which only have Peninsula Malaysia, conveniently leaving out the two East Malaysian states and other territories which geographically make up about half the country! (Okay ... that was a while ago, admittedly.) Posted by sniffles at 08:59 AM | Comments (2)

July 13, 2003
Lost

Fresh antipasto: Asphalt sunday.

It's funny that I can go for days without reading email/blogs and all the usual geeky things, but without my PowerBook the sense of withdrawal is nagging to the point of annoyance.

I'd spent the last few days drooling over Wena's food blog. There's something wonderous about rediscovering food that I've left behind ... and after that, comes the urge of trying to reproduce it without quite the same ingredients. Montreal has a great deal of Asian ingredients — mostly from Japan, India, Thailand, Vietnam and a decent variety of sauces and delicacies from China. I haven't yet found things uniquely Malaysian, however, and that's a bit of a disappointment. Heck, there is currently no Malaysian restaurant in Montreal, but I can hope, can't I?

Posted by sniffles at 09:39 PM | Comments (8)

July 10, 2003
Apple gods don't like me
So, the PowerBook didn't boot again this morning. Or rather it kinda booted, but it didn't give me any indication that it was booting except emitting a timid disk-spinning whine. The techie thinks it's not "waking" properly, so my PowerBook is in a coma and being tended to at the Mac Clinic. At 4 a.m. this morning, a cop car chase was screeching and blaring around the neighbourhood. This makes no sense to me — why, at 4. a.m. in the morning when there are no cars on the road, do they have to blare their sirens full blast? At 5 a.m., a machine which sounded like a chainsaw orchestra started up in the building that's under renovation just behind mine. At 5:30 a.m., someone on my floor banged their door shut, three times. At 6:30 a.m., trucks started pulling into that building behind, machinery started whining ... So, given that the computer and I are going through a temporary separation to settle our differences, the morning papers might not be updated for a few. You could say I've had better days. Posted by sniffles at 01:07 PM | Comments (3)

July 09, 2003
Audio CDs and OSX

Some time after I got my PowerBook, I noticed that my combo drive had a problem with reading audio CDs. It was somewhat bizarre — it could read data CDs and DVDs fine, it burned fine, but slipping in an audio CD brought up a complaint that OSX was unable to mount the volume. Given that I rarely read audio CDs, I had no idea if my drive was faulty from the beginning, or that a software update had caused something to misbehave. Digging around on the Web yielded no practical advice.

So the mystery remained ... until today.

My PowerBook refused to boot properly this morning. Several restarts with various key combinations weren't helpful — my screen remained black and a CD that I'd unwittingly left in the drive — thinking that it should be okay for the trip into work — would not eject. Cursing Apple for excluding a manual CD eject mechanism, I brought it into to the Mac Clinic (whose service is much better than their Web site), and the technician managed to get my screen to respond with a couple of ordinary reboots, as far as I could tell. (You know how it is — it works when the helpdesk or service centre technician touches it, even if they might not be doing anything different from what you have been — I say this as a helpdesker, as well as a helpdeskee ...). And so I told him about the weird problem my drive was been having with audio CDs, in case he had any ideas.

On an educated hunch, he created a new user, and slotted in an audio CD. It mounted. So, logically, he concluded there was something strange with my user account settings, and recommended that I copy out my files and recreate my user account.

No small task, given the amount of things I do on this computer. It has taken me all day, and by dinner-time practically everything was working again, I'd almost gotten everything customised back to what it was — I was careful to only move the essentials ... but I wasn't quite careful enough.

Copying some files back to "Library/Preferences/" somehow caused the combo drive to stop mounting audio CDs again. Given that I knew what I had been modifying ... a little bit of investigation yielded this: the silly little audio CD bug was caused by a file named "CD Info.cidb" found in "Library/Preferences/" within my home directory. I renamed the file to something else so that it would not be detected, and voilà ... my combo drive works.

Blimey, is all I can say.

Posted by sniffles at 11:16 PM | Comments (4)

July 04, 2003
Geek-friendly
Him: Did you want an ice cream? Me: Nah, I can't type while eating an ice-cream. Him: (laughs) Me: It's true! Ice-cream isn't geek-friendly. Him: What about a kind of shape you can suck? Me: Yeah, but you still need something to hold it, maybe something you can hang off your ears so you can still type. Him: Hmm ... Me: On second thoughts, a kind of ice-cream extension to iSight could be good ... Posted by sniffles at 01:27 PM | Comments (5)

Friday morning random thought
Why are cars made of such unforgiving materials? Maybe it was the light of the morning as I was sleepily making my way to work in a daze, I couldn't help but notice that all vehicles have hard bodies, the trucks and cleaning machines and what-not roll by much too noisily, beeping, screeching, growling ... It seems ridiculous that in the narrow streets of the city (where there are at least as many pedestrians as cars) that we have tough-bodied boxes on wheels that have the potential to fly past 100km/h, which should realistically move at 50km/h given the layout of inner city streets and the concentration of people; the potential for hurting people could be high, if drivers are careless. Do we need cars with hard bodies? If we have city cars of softer material which can be durable and withstand weather conditions to a degree ... Walking down the street I had visions of cars with chassis made of inflatable balloons. No need for crumple "zones", we could crumple everywhere. Wear your airbags on the outside, you might just bounce a little bit if you collide — if your bags burst when you hit something, you're driving much too fast. It wouldn't hurt anyone quite as much if you are a bit too slow to brake. Okay ... so surrealist logic doesn't quite wash. Forgive me, it's nearly the weekend. Posted by sniffles at 09:22 AM | Comments (4)

July 03, 2003
Link ball
Tim Bray discusses using HTTP for Web publishing (ta, Karl). Troubles centering content in CSS? An example for horizontal centering, and Denis has an example that also centers content vertically, which could be useful for styling small divs. Other things plaguing the brain: ECMAScript Language Specification, an image rollover example, and IMAP vs. POP. Recently, same-sex marriages have been made legal in Canada, and even more recently, gay and lesbian couples have been awarded the same legal rights as married couples in the UK (note that in this case it's not the same for heterosexual couples, because apparently they have the option of getting married ...). I'm just wondering, when will we see advertising — be it television or not — reflect this facet of change in society's view on relationships? Posted by sniffles at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2003
The meta post
"What have you been up to?" I have been: * working * sleeping more than usual * reading * not writing enough * trying to write * coding * hanging out on IRC * bopping till my back hurts at the jazz fest I also had a birthday, but I don't see the big deal about birthdays given that I'm getting older every second. :) YULBloggers meet tonight — usual place, usual time, usual cow. Posted by sniffles at 02:55 PM | Comments (0)