Ignorance rears its ugly head again. This time on Eric S. Raymond. I used to respect the dude for his advocacy of Open Source software and its movement. But his posts with regards to Islam in general is just filled with hate and broad generalization based on what the little things in Islam he's been exposed to. It disgusts me and I do take offense, especially since it comes from someone whose voice is heard by thousands. But then again, I don't blame him. It's those fuckheads who slammed the planes into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon last September 11 who's at fault. They did not liberate anything or anyone by doing that but rather tarnished the image of Islam and caused further oppression to Muslims everywhere.

Made a day trip down to JB today for Raida and Abon's wedding reception. Semoga bahagia berkekalan ke anak cucu hingga ke akhir waktu. Pictures are available here.

Listening to: John Mayer - St. Patrick's Day

Several news sites are reporting that a 2km wide asteroid, named the 2002 NT7 is on a potential earthbound collision on Feb 1, 2019. Impact velocity has been estimated at 28 km/sec and has enough potential to wipe out a whole continent and cause global climate changes. The proper trajectory of the asteroid hasn't been calculated in a reliable manner as yet and the margin of error from initial calculations have been described as, "large, several tens of millions of kilometres." So, carpe diem till 2019?

Listening to: Stakker Humanoid - Humanoid

Spoonfork (respect!) wrote about the recent experience he had on interviewing potential recruits. Let's just say I've been in his shoes before and also at the other end of stick so middle fingers to management indeed. He was also kind enough to point out some potential exploits on this site. Just the kind of kick in the behind I need to get around to fixing things around here.

Speaking of exploits, here's a cartoon strip that might relate to geeks out there. While still on the subject of funnies, here's video of a boy band that never made it.

Michael Schumacher was crowned the 2002 Formula One World Champion and a five time Formula One World Champion, equalling the record set by Juan Fangio Manuel back in the 1950s, when he took the chequered flag at the Magny Cours circuit today after a thoroughly entertaining and exciting race. Kimi Raikkonen raced superbly throughout the race and a mistake with just five laps to go costed him what could have been his first ever Formula One Grand Prix win. It was also good to see Mclaren back in form when Raikkonen and Coulthard took 2nd and 3rd positions in the race. We could all use some excitement and entertainment in the races rather than just seeing the Ferarris winning it all without much fight.

Hmm... Dunno what's been up with Brinkster lately but this particular server where my website is hosted on has been throwing some nasty ODBC errors when people try to access the site lately. Seems to be pervalent when connecting from JARING. I'm guessing it's due to the caching servers but then again, the error messages it's spitting out show different thread numbers each time. So, in all honesty, I just dunno what gives. No changes have been done to the backend code that's powering this website. I'm just as stumped.

Okay. So I admit - certain times when I just can't afford to wait for everybody else to do something, I just go ahead on my own and do it. That was the case when I went to see Men In Black 2 right after work just now. All my colleagues and friends I called can't and don't want to go watch it today but I can't afford to watch it later so I ended up watching it alone (come to think of it, perhaps it's payback time 'cos the shoe was in the other foot last time :P). Anyways, the movie's great! Frank the Pug was undoubtedly the show stealer with his wit, heck, even more than Will Smith himself! Wish there was more of Lara Flynn Boyle to see though! Hubba hubba! Major droolage! :P~~~ My only complaint about the movie is that it's short, just about an hour and a quarter (though it doesn't feel like it). Also, I wish they'd expose less of the movie in the previews, gazettes, making of, etc. 'cos I felt like I know most of the gags already and didn't leave much surprises in the movie itself. Just my RM0.02...

Listening to: Aisth - Warm

For a lack of better thing to do on a weekend, I decided to take a trip down the memory lane in a rather unconventional way. I gathered all the photo albums that I have and started scanning the pictures in. This will be my personal project for the next week or two at the rate I'm going. I got 300+ pictures in already and I'm hardly 1/3 through. It's interesting to see the progression of my earlier youth (Heh! I reckon that I'm STILL in my youth! Bwahahahaaa!) from the infant years to toddler years to primary school years to secondary school (highschool to you Yanks!). I just got around to reaching the earlier part of my college years. The bulk of it will be the time spent at Purdue as I figure that there's about 1000+ pictures from that period alone.

Just figured out why PowerDVD refuses to work everytime I install the scanner software on my machine. Stupid ASPI. If you get an ASPI error when starting your DVD player software after you've installed a scanner, just re-install your DVD player software. Just a quick tip there that I thought I'd share with you. My machine's Win2K setup is hunky-dory again. Time to Ghost it now in case it gets messed up (and it almost always will :P).

And speaking of DVD players, Homer Simpson says "Hack your DVD player!" (site of origin is here under DVD Q&A). Long live, Homer! Whoohoo!

A quick birthday shoutout to Shareena, by the way! Many happy returns, you! ;)

Heheh! I didn't know that I actually have much of an audience for this website and for the first time someone actually commented that I haven't been updating this site for two weeks! So the site's updated now with some of the stuff I've been writing during the offline period. :P

Oh yeah... Happy Birthday too, Adik!

I spent almost the whole day today trying to to get Windows XP to work satisfactorily on my home machine and I came to the same conclusion that I did some time ago: It just can't. My main motivation is to actually get rid of Windows 98 that is still residing on my machine (it's currently dual booting along with Windows 2000 Professional). I have that solely for running some games and also FastTracker 2.08 to compose those occasional songs (if and when inspiration strikes). Windows XP still cannot handle FastTracker 2.08 properly (it's a DOS based program actually) despite making it run in Windows 95 compatibility mode and I have yet to come across a decent Windows based MOD/S3M/XM tracker program. On top of that, I also realized that a bare installation of Windows XP on my machine already takes up 1.3GB of hard disk space. Contrast that with my installation of Windows 2000 Professional complete with applications such as Office 97, Photoshop 4.01, CoolEdit Pro, etc. etc. (they're rather dated, I know. But still functional for what I need to get stuff done) which uses the same amount. This upgrade attempt has made me realize one thing again for sure, if it ain't broke and if you can do what you need to do comfortably with the current set up, stick with it! I still reckon Windows 2000 Professional to be the better operating system than Windows XP for my PC. My laptop is currently running Windows XP as the main operating system as I've found that Windows XP just works great on it. On the same note, the laptop is also running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows .NET Server and FreeBSD but that's more for the purpose of doing development work. Still, for what it's worth, FreeBSD has my vote anytime as the best operating system on the i386 platform.