I was inside my newly bought 85% down king size quilt this morning, enjoying the warmth whilst it lasted before I had to get up. I decided to check my email. This has been a usual habit lately. I would check the time. Decide whether or not to get up. After sleeping in a while longer I would proceed to check my email…whilst in bed…on my iphone. I would then read through my emails and then sleep in a bit longer before jumping out of bed, putting on the nearest clothes as soon as possible and followed by hitting on the power button of my computer. And yes…I’ve actually been turning OFF my computer before I sleep. I no longer leave it on to upload torrents. My ratios on private trackers are high enough for me not to.

Today I had around 7 new emails in my inbox. Two were from Facebook, one was an Optus bill (grrr), one from Ebay, one career centre job offering me a cleaner job (thanks USYD) and another was from a person reading my blog asking help to setup Virtualbox to boot into his Ubuntu partition.

Not very exciting at all.

I did the usual morning things…you know…getting the call of nature, scavenging for food etc…and proceeded to launch Firefox. I found lately that Firefox would lag when I’m playing Zynga Poker on Facebook. It would use up over 300mb of ram (out of the 4gb that’s available) and take up 40% CPU…even after closing all other tabs. It’s probably flash that’s the culprit. Anyway, checking my blog I discovered 7 new comments. 4 were spam *shock* and 3 were genuine, two of asking for help regarding Virtualbox. 1/3 of my site traffic is a direct result of the Virtualbox guide. I’ve found that it’s currently linked by a Sun employee and some High School in the States. I wish they’d donate some money for my efforts =P Speaking of which, my site needs to be renewed in September.

The other comment was from ~Materix01. He somewhat reminds me of what I was like back in High School. Now I feel old all of sudden. I’ll probably revamp my “About me” page to include more information.

But yes, exams are coming up soon. I’m getting somewhat cocky about it. The ISYS quiz should be a piece of cake…especially since it’s open book. The AI quiz shouldn’t be too hard either. I don’t want to sound mean…but our lecturer’s competency is sub-par to say at best. Still no news of our results to our Assignment…with only 4 days left till the exam. She had it during our last tute but wanted to “revise” the marks once again…refusing to show us our preliminary results. In every slide that she’s posted up there is always at least 1 spelling mistake. Logical mistakes are also common in her slides. Okay I’ll probably stop ranting about my lecturer now. I’m sure she has her reasons. The only exam I’m somewhat worried about is the Project Management course. I’ve lost 13% already. To put it into perspective, 13% is twice the amount I’ve lost in my other subjects combined. Yup…that’s how badly I’m doing in Project Management…(or you can say it’s how well I’m doing in the other subjects ).

I have two sources of procrastination. Playing poker and/or watching Star Trek. Yes…I sometimes do both at the same time. Looking forward to the break, I plan to go drinking after exams, party to go to, concert to attend (Jay Chou) and snows. Somewhat concerned about the snows trip…I absolutely hate the cold. Also planning on buy a Canon IXUS 100 IS. I recently purchased Logitech G51 speakers from Ebay for $142.50 (including postage). I really don’t need it…I have no idea what brought me to do it…but yes I should receive it in 2 weeks time, hopefully.

Anyway, I should probably get back to studying for my exams.

One thing that has frustrated me for MANY MANY years is the fact that Firefox does not allow you remember the username/password for WebCT. I cannot express how annoying this is. Opera was able to do it fine why can’t firefox?!

Usually I’m fine with just typing in my password and my relatively weak password to get access to WebCT. But today I really couldn’t be bothered any more. Did a bit of searching on the Internet and realised that it really isn’t Firefox’s fault that it doesn’t remember the password, it’s todo with the way that WebCT is written.

Okay so how do you get Firefox to remember the password?

1. Press ctrl-b to open up your bookmarks in firefox
2. Drag and drop this LINK into your bookmarks
3. Open up the login screen to WebCT
4. Click on the bookmark you just saved
5. Type in the your username and password and firefox should give you an option to Remember it!!!

If you want to extend your password manager capabilities take a look at Secure Login

Note: The above method will work for any website that does not want you to remember the password.

Edit 07/06/09:

If you’re annoyed at WebCT logging out after 10 minutes of inactivity you can simply get Firefox to reload the webpage every 5 minutes. It’s not so elegant but I guess it works.

References:

From Bookmarklets

The last time I invoked that function was after my last HSC exam. Two and a half years later it looks like I’ll have to call upon it again…

When Uni started there were heaps of people comparing Uni exams to the HSC. I still remember one person describing Uni as being two hscs in a year. Uni exams are nothing like the HSC.

The HSC is only important if you seek to enter a decent Uni, in a degree that’s extremely hard to get into. Yes, I still have sour grapes over the HSC,  why do people do Comm/Law (apart from the image of being rich that’s been embedded in their minds since they learnt how to talk by their parents who failed to achieve that “dream”)?

Doing well in the HSC isn’t important at all but I think that the ability to do well in the HSC affects your ability to do well in other areas greatly. If I didn’t do well in the HSC, I probably wouldn’t have taken as much care in my results at Uni.

Lately I’ve been thinking of the future. What are my plans? What do I see ahead of me? Well in the short-term I have several exams coming up and I really would like to get HD’s in 3 out of the 4 subjects. Definitely possible.

In the next year or so I expect to be doing Honors and hoping to reach first class honors. I need a WAM of at least 80 in my honors year for First Class. Anything after graduating is such a blur. I don’t know what my plans are. Do I really wanna just jump straight into work? I’m really not the “backpacking” type but…there’s so much of the world I haven’t seen! (Yes…I sound like some arts student)

There’s also soo many things I do not know. It’s absolutely amazing the amount of technologies that’s out there! Gah, I want to be fluent in C#, VB.net, JS, Ruby and php. I also want to earn J2EE certification, perhaps even a CCNP.

But for now…

Life 2009.6.4 (r262:71605, June 4 2009, 21:08:50) [AZN v.1337 1024 bit (x1024)] on Wong09
Type “copyright”, “credits” or “license()” for more information.

****************************************************************
Personal firewall software may warn about the connection IDLE
makes to its subprocess using this computer’s internal loopback
interface.  This connection is not visible on any external
interface and no data is sent to or received from the Internet.
****************************************************************

Umbilical 1.0.1
>>> import life
>>> from life import hsc
>>> hsc.toggle_hsc_mode()
>>> print hsc.hsc_mode()
True
>>> exit()

You know how there’s always that person who you always see but whom you never talk to? When you do meet it’s sorta awkward.

Happens to me all the time. I remember second year uni, there’s this guy that I ALWAYS “meet” as I walk towards the station. It’s probably okay if it’s a busy street but most of the time there isn’t more than 5 people walking on it during the morning. We would always just walk past each other. The thing was I noticed him even when it wasn’t that street…sometimes I’d be early and bump into him as I enter the station. Weird.

I guess it’s also true back in High School. You always see the same people in other grades but you never talk to them, when you finally “meet” them, it’s always like “Oh hi, you’re that guy that’s in the year above/below me!” It becomes even more creepy when you have no idea who they are. I was with my brother at his Swimming school and one of the instructors just approaches me and asks if I go to High. I realised he was in the grade below me but I have no clue who he was…never seen the guy in my life if you ask me.

Today, it was one of those days where I finally spoke to this person who I’ve been seeing ever since UNI first started. This girl was EVERYWHERE…(realised she did the same degree as me so that explains a lot). We were in the same lectures and tutes and be walking the same path, but we never utterd a word to each other. We finally introduced each other today and she was like “Do you do <insert subject here>? Cause I’ve never seen you before”. I can’t say that I wasn’t a bit offended, or maybe I’m just a tiny bit too observant. At least it wasn’t awkward.

On a side note, I managed to get embedded images working in my html chatlog to email converter!!! I realised that in Python there’s actually an Email module &gt;.&lt; Is there anything you don’t have python?!

I’ve also been fixing up entries from my old blog, if a particular entry is “broken” or looks “wrong” let me know kthnx.

Fanmail count is now 3.

@Angel Lam, No I do NOT have a GF, why don’t we meet up sometime?

What’s with people and using their high beam? I get so pissed off when the person behind me has their high beam on. I literally can’t see shit behind or on either side of me. It gets more annoying when it’s a red light. The light bounces nicely onto my rear and side mirrors directly into my face.

It happened to me twice today, once driving to Auburn RSL and again on the way back. If you have broken headlights, please go fix it before driving on the highway with your bloody HIGH BEAM. I honestly felt like changing lanes just to get behind them and flash them couple of times with my uber high beam.

That said, today’s AI lecture was about finding centroids, and something about how it can be used for image compression.

And our AI assignment results is still yet to be released. I’ve asked her twice over two consequtive weeks and she said “Next week” on both occassions. Just got an email from her saying that it’ll be released next week…our final week of UNI…that said…when will our Assignment 2 (that’s due tomorrow) be marked? At the current rate it’ll probably be marked after the exams are over…which leads to the question of when the exam will be marked.

On a side note, I’m getting A LOT of traffic from facebook. It’ll be more exciting if I can find out for sure who actually visited. From what I gather, somebody clicked my link from Jason’s and/or Terry’s profile page.

Oh also, some of you may have noticed the BIG FAT “DONATE” BUTTON.

If you have money…feel free to give it to me. If you have a job that’s paying more than $20 an hour on a part-time/casual basis…hire me!

Yes I’ve been unemployed for 3 months now, that’s a loss of around $5000. Man…I wish I had that money right now.

I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do for I dunno…8 months now? I finally have all the entires from WCEXO exported to my Wordpress blog. I’ve had nearly 800 comments from that blog. Too bad the exporter that I used doesn’t include names and I can’t be bothered going through all those comments and manually adding names.

It has lots of great stories/memories of my High School years. I may not have lots of pictures and what not but I do have my words. Looking back…or shall I say reading back on what I wrote before I’ve realised that I was such a…noob. (And yes…in another 4 years I’ll look back upon these entries and say the same thing)

But yes, I do encourage you to flick some of the old archives and pick out something to read, you might laugh (hopefully not at me). I’ve been having a somewhat dry spell lately when it comes to blogging. I find it amazing that within my circle of friends I’m still one of the few that still do it.

If you have any ideas on what I should write about, drop a comment and maybe if you’re lucky, I might write about it…you might even get a mention.

Quick and dirty guide on setting up pop3 for the new USYD Uni Mail.

Please see this post for updated version

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today I’ll be releasing the RC of the Classic Chatlog to Email Converter

For you to use this you must satisfy the following conditions:

• That chatlogs you want converted must pre-date Messenger Plus 3.0 or whatever version that was released prior to June 2006
• You must have python installed (preferably the latest stable 2.x version)
• You must have chardet installed
• You must install Thunderbird

Todo:

• Threading for even faster performance!

Wishlist:

• Automatic uploading to your email account

I actually have a WORKING unicode supported script for HTML chatlogs, however, I’ve yet to get the emoticons/handwriting pics working but you’ll probably see a release some time soon in the future.

Instructions:

1. Move all your pre-June 2006 messenger plus chatlogs to a folder
2. Place the script inside the folder
3. Double click to run the script
4. A file called “Chatlog” will be created
5. Move that file to <Path to thunderbird preferences>\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\Mail\Local Folders
6. Open up Thunderbird and drag drop the chatlogs to an email account that supports imap

Download

Edit 22/11/09
Ubuntu 9.10 uses the new grub 2 as its boot-loader thus this article would not work for 9.10. I am currently in the progress of getting 9.10 to work under Virtualbox.

This tutorial would no longer be supported. Any comments regarding support will be ignored.

If you want to get 9.10 working please READ THIS ARTICLE

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I recently got Windows 7 and Ubuntu running in a dualboot. However, since I’m using more of Windows now I figured I should probably find a way to run Ubuntu inside my Windows. VM’s are great, but it’d be better if I can actually boot into my existing Ubuntu partition. So I searched the web and kept on finding tutorials on how to boot existing XP partitions inside Windows. So I decided to extrapolate from those tutorials and work my way through it. I’ll be writing how I did it here.

Before we begin, you should have a dual boot setup. I will NOT be showing you how to setup a dual boot, if you need help plenty of other guides out there.

Step 1: Creating a grub boot iso

The grub iso file will allow you to specify which partition to boot into.

1. Boot into Ubuntu
2. We create the folders and copy the necessary files to setup an iso
   Run the command:  cd ; mkdir -p iso/boot/grub ; cp /usr/lib/grub/*-pc/stage2_eltorito /boot/grub/menu.lst iso/boot/grub
3. Configure your ~/iso/boot/grub menu.lst file to boot your target OS (in this case Ubuntu). Remove the “savedefault” option from your target entry if it exists.
4. We now create the bootable iso file
   Run the command: cd ; mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o grub.iso iso
5. Move the iso to a location that’ll be accessable by your Windows partition

Step 2: Creating the .vmdk file

This creates a file which tells Virtualbox what partition to actually load as the harddrive. Unfortunately, unlike VMWare Workstation, Virtualbox does not support a GUI interface for selecting RAW hard disks as the “virtual hard drive”.

1. Boot into Windows
2. cd into the directory you installed virtualbox
3. We find the partition number that needs to be mounted
   Run the command: VBoxManage.exe internalcommands listpartitions -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive1
   (where 1 is the number of the hard drive ubuntu is installed on. E.g. Master should be 0, you’re second hard-drive should be 1 etc…The output should be something like:

   Number  Type   StartCHS       EndCHS      Size (MiB)  Start (Sect)
   1       0×07  0   /32 /33  1023/254/63        902023         2048
   5       0×83  1023/254/63  1023/254/63         49677   1847346543
   6       0×82  1023/254/63  1023/254/63          2164   1949086188

   In this example, my Ubuntu partition is number 5 and the swap is number 6

4. We now create the VMDK file with the given information
   Run the command: VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename C:\path\ubuntu.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive1  -partitions 5,6 -register

Step 3: Setup Virtualbox

Now everything should be ready to setup Virtualbox. Create a new virtual machine. Select the .vmdk file we just created as the hard drive and mount the grub.iso file we created at Step 1. If everything was successful Ubuntu should boot up nicely.

DONE!

If this has helped you in any way, please take the time to drop a comment! If you have any problems, just post a comment or send me an email through the “Contact me” page.

References:

Boot an existing XP (Physical HD) install with VirtualBox

Originally my hard-drive crashed. So I decided to install Windows 7 beta, just to give it a spin. I loved it. Never have I ever gotten used to an operating system so quickly before. Everything just worked.

I promised I would install Ubuntu 9.04 beta when it gets released but it just had too many known issues so I decided to wait until the full version gets released.

I installed Ubuntu today and now I’m running it. To be honest, I don’t enjoy it. The screen feels so much smaller. It’s amazing how the looks of an operating system can actually make your monitor feel small. Windows xp makes my monitor feel HUGE, Ubuntu on the otherhand makes it feel tiny. It also hurts my head a bit just staring at it. Everything is so jagged.

Coincidentally, Windows 7 rc also got leaked today.

So this is what I’m going to do.

Format my computer again. Install Windows 7 rc and then just VM ubuntu. I’ll stick in some more ram so the VM can get some decent amoutns of ram.

Hopefully I haven’t used up considerable amounts of bandwidth setting up Ubuntu.

But yes. Microsoft, you have won me back.

I’ll probably wait until later tonight before downloading/installing the RC. Don’t wanna use up any more bandwidth setting up my OS.