All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. It was the December holidays, stretching all the way to January at least before the start of the upcoming Lent university term. With Portal, Skyrim, and TF2 boring me out these days, why not get back onto some RPGs like World of Warcraft? Well as you should know, World of Warcraft (WoW), despite it’s launch since 2004 is still the most widely played massively multi-player RPG in the world (though some SWtoR fans would argue otherwise).

So it’s $15 a month to head back into Azeroth at least for the holidays, for a month. Paying to play a game, could be a turn off for many. I was initially skeptical of paying too. But later do I know paying does has it perks as it not only provides a much better mature gaming experience not only in support and game uptime, but sieves out casual trolls and kids you usually see on free-to-play games, not to mention flame-bait and trolls.

So what did I do within the period of a month? Leveled up 3 toons with a cumulative total of 200 levels, now that is quite alot of (anti-social) time. That also means exploring the worlds and various (and revamped) expansion zones I missed out over the years. I never quite got to the current level cap of 85, not seeing the need to level up so quickly, so technically I actually had not touched the Cataclysm zones as of yet, despite starting on it already on my ass-kickin’ Worgen Death Knight.

Dragons in Northend

Chilling out over Stormwind

Exalted in Orgrimmar

With the start of Lent around the corner in a few weeks time, it’s time to put all my toons into deep freeze till the upcoming summer holidays at least. Not to mention considering gearing up my characters for the new level-90 cap when blizzard releases the Kungfu- touting pandas on the new Azeroth southern continent in the upcoming “Mist of Pandaria”. But not of course till we get “Heart of the Swarm” or the long delayed Diablo III on the next Starcraft/Diablo franchise.

Surprising, with the exception of a number of local British students I know here in the university, no Singaporeans studying here plays WoW at at. Not only that, some do not even know about the game, let be any PC or Xbox game titles I know at the back of my head released within the last 5 years. So for WoW I usually end up playing with my friends in the States anyway, with almost all of my toons on US servers.

I know you must be screaming “NERD ALERT” right now, yea but it’s a “problem” either the poor Singaporean kids here, I hope this is not what you get with ultra nerdy students coming from top schools and Junior Colleges who “take pleasure by studying”. That is really sad, but the fact is this is the stereotypical image of various top Singaporean JCs, just study study study- Not even any extra-curricular activities or nothing about heading to a pub to chill for the night or a game of pool after a long day of work. Of course that is another huge area to debate about what I define as a “balanced and healthy” college life. I mean hey! college life is literally one of the best times of your entire life. I definitely wouldn’t like to look back at my college days and see myself remembering just only all the studying as a socially-inert study-bot.

That would be really, really sad.

It interesting that such technology and capability already existed ages ago, but no one seemed to put it all together for the consumer. Apple seem to always get that right, this time they are doing it again with a new slate tablet computer called the iPad.

At first glance, it looks like an over sized iPhone, which the distinctive bezel, form factor and home button. It’s not running the full workstation-capable version of OS 10 contrary to much speculation, but rather a portable-enhanced version of OS 10 which is largely similar to the interface on the iPhone, for a larger screen. It comes in 2 favors, Wi-Fi or one with additional 3G in 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB capacities on flash drives.

The fun device seems to cater for a void in the market which tries to be neither on both ends, namely a phone nor a work-capable computer. If you need an, it will only truly shine for it’s wireless capabilities and size, so it will be wise to get the one with 3G. Otherwise, it will just be a regular slate with no noticeable selling points. To me, the iPad seem to fit into the market for people looking to have a device around the house for quick access to emails and the internet, but not much one being a full-fledged computer, something which might rival the iMac or iBook. So technically it’s in a class of it’s own filling the void between the iPhone and the iMacs.

Though multi-touch may be a selling point, capacitive touch screens are good for gesture based commands and navigating menus. Not exactly that impressive for writing, something a tablet must be good at. Capacitive touch screens are just simply something notorious for precision. Moreover, I don’t see a need for a slate, being a tablet user myself for almost 5 years, having used on screen digitizers (wacom penabled screens) on convertible slates as well as traditional pen based drawing tablets (intuos4) from wacom, I find the lack of precision of the screen a big turn down for a promising product- It is just not as practical as I’ve expected it to be too. In short, the precision offered on dedicated tablets is very important and is something I don’t see the iPad fitting well into my needs as a student who needs to use a tablet for lectures as a student, let be precise enough to take down notes or do drawings accurately on.

The iPad is after all, a fun product not intended for work. Like, the iPod touch bigger brother. An expensive toy.

Hardware-wise, it does bags 10 hours of battery life. But big no nos will be the lack of a user-replaceable battery and a small resolution XGA screen- You can’t really call the slate an internet machine with a screen resolution of 1024×768! The 1Ghz A4 processor of the iPad is adequate, despite not being as speedy as most mainstream tablets on the market now. This apple designed processor is largely tailored to the basic needs of the device and OS, thus would be adequate for the basic functions it aims to serve, don’t expect it to be much of a production computer though.

The really cool thing I like about it is that it can run literally all iPhone apps on it out of the box, so that will allow many users to port over from existing iPhone platform and also establishing a good base for the new product to grow on.

I can’t deny that the device is indeed very pretty, but it will never be powerful enough to be justifiable to do descent work as a proper computer or for school, etc, yet too big to conveniently carry around as a portable device. It’s trying to be something, but not really found it yet. Anyway, with apple aggressively promoting the iPad SDK since it’s launch, it will be fair however to give it some time for iPad dedicated apps to grow on it where it’s functionalities can be truly realized. But for now, and for me, I will be putting my money for the next gen iPhone maybe coming out in June, that will be a better choice.

Video of the iPad at the click:

I had this problem with iTunes previously, but solved the problem by reverting the program, so I am posting this here in case anyone who experienced the problem on a same setup can get a solution here.

After updating iTunes on my PC to the spanking new 9.0.2 64-bits to suit my current system platform, I kept getting numerous errors whenever I try to install new apps on my phone. The system will just fail an app install each time and will demand a phone restore each time I plug the phone back into the sync cable. Bad!

Also, what you will get from iTunes will be a myriad of irritating, yet not very helpful error messages only the person who wrote the program knows about. I mean who knows error codes man? So much for user friendly apple software!

Seemingly, the programs are not installed at all on the phone, but with the icons showing on the springboard. True enough, launching them will crash you back to the homescreen. iTunes will simply just hate your iPhone (Latest firmware 3.1.2) and treat it like some foreign virus, demanding it be cleansed with a restored backup each time after plugging your phone into your PC.

I’ve heard about file permission errors in the iTunes music directory. Sometimes, R-clicking on your iTunes music folder C:\Users\username\Music\iTunes and unchecking “Read only” under “Properties” will help.

In the end, it turned out that it’s an iTunes program error with the 64-bit version. Apparently, the latest iTunes 9.0.2 64-bit does not work on my setup running Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate. Force installing (the installer will recommend you to install the 64-bit version) the 9.0.2 iTunes 32-bit version makes everything work like a charm.

I came across this problem when doing some word processing on my new installation of Office 2007 on Windows 7. If you are running the final release build of Windows 7 (build 7600) and Office 2007, you may have this problem of being unable to use your mouse to click on text or click-drag the right scroll bar. Closing your Word window will result in an App crash. Even after many restarts, running the Office diagnostics (no problems) and having the latest Office updates do not seem to work either. My add-ons do not seem to affect the situation enable or not, so the problem will lie mainly on word’s core.

A quick fix which worked for me till Microsoft releases an official fix is to revert the office registry settings back to the default value, (well despite my Office install being still largely set on default). That means renaming the current registry values to an alternative backup value so that word can re-create the registry values again.

Click start and under run, type “regedit” (start -> Run-> enter “regedit”). The registry editor will pop up and navigate to: CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office. From there, do the following:

Make sure that word is closed when doing this. After that start word and you should be able to click on text and drag the scroll bar using your mouse. Unless if you are really sure of what you are doing, do create a registry backup before altering any values on the editor, do this at your own risk. But if anything crops out, you can always rename your registry values back to the original values.

With my university term starting in October, it’s very much shopping time to get the gears and stuffs in preparations for my departure. Shopping is good therapy, well, not until you see the bill!

The choice of my desired system was much of a personal debated topic as well. The story started with this quad core desktop which I currently use as my primary computer, but it won’t be something I would see lugging all the way, let be shipping with my books to UK for use in the dorms. It will be too much to handle, let be to move around if I have to switch rooms between semesters. So the logical choice will be a laptop, which brings us to another problem- There is currently no laptop I have which has as much computing power as my desktop, the solution? Get a new laptop? What laptop? well!

After much searching and re-searching, I finally come to choose few desktop replacement laptops which I will using for my whole university term of 4 years till I graduate- namely the Alienware M17x (which gave me mixed feelings about it’s exclusivity when it was made available in Singapore now, though I planned to get it while in UK), the Clevo/Sager NP9850 (or the Core i7-940 based NP9280) and IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad W700. These babies are not so much your average laptop, with 17″ screens and weighing about 5kg- not much the proper definition of “portable” but beats lugging 20kg of steel and monitor around as well. Anyway this laptop will be based in my room as a personal system where it will be permanently mated to the wall socket. I will be using my current lighter Fujitsu tablet for lectures and tutorials.

The IBM Thinkpad is cool because it has a tablet built-in which is cool for illustrations or a quick doddle, but is not compared to a dedicated tablet which I already have. Though you can the bells and whistles such as Quad core processors, workstation graphics and DDR3, the W700 is expensive, let be overpriced- about $9000 fully loaded with not much graphic options as well. And yes, there is no Macbook pro which can satisfy my computing requirements, so I am leaving that completely out.

The Alienware however, appeals to me through 5 main points- Price, performance (it’s claimed to be the fastest laptop in the world at the moment), gamer orientation, X-factor and support is backed by Dell, which I say is superb. What’s more it has freaking cool lighting and doesn’t look like a laptop my dad would use. So for a laptop which is as or even exceedingly powerful than my desktop, I feel there is a need to turn to the “all-powerful”:

I am only having gripes to forgo the Sager NP9280 with the i7 processor, as that is truely proper desktop processor but it’s just a shame that laptop do not offer SLI or a blu-ray writer, what’s more it looks ugly.

Mmmm it seems that once you put your foot in quad cores and 1200p HD screens, you will never own a system lower than that. The laptop specified at the following costs about $5500 including GST. I have yet confirm prices through phone with Dell but it can be roughly $300-$500 cheaper by ordering through phone than online.

Frankly speaking $5500 is a considerable sum at a go. But after some consideration of this being my primary system for daily use with school, projects and maybe work, it’s quite a bargain for what I can possibility achieve with it. So do I consider this much of an investment rather than a purchase?

Can’t wait to get my hands on this.

Following the upgrade of the site, I’ve successfully integrated gallery2 with wordpress 2.8, able to call wordpress functions within gallery itself and maintain your wordpress sidebar. This was not previously achievable with gallery1 considering that some wordpress and gallery share some variables which needs to be redefined to avoid conflict, with this new setup I am glad to say that problem do not exist now.

True there are other plugins for wordpress such as WPG2. WPG2 looked promising, as it allows you to call and display photos in your posts as well, but it’s too evasive for just the simple need to integrate gallery into your wordpress theme. What’s more WPG2 requires users to disable URL rewrite which messed up my permalinks and my old gallery URL structure, too much of a hassle.

All what needs to be done is just the ability to call any wordpress function within gallery and maintain the same layout as your blog through all gallery’s pages. Though this is a simple mod, surprisingly, there had not been any well documentation on the internet integrating them together, so I will just write one here for anyone looking to do the same.

Step 1- Including the wordpress header
For starters, we need to include the wordpress header in all of gallery’s pages, we do so by including it in main.php found in your gallery’s root folder. You can include it anywhere by lets do it at the top of the file.

In main.php find:

Then add at the bottom add the path to your blog header file, you can omit “wordpress/” or otherwise in the require path if your blog is on your site’s root:

Step 2- Including your wordpress template
Next with your chosen gallery template to modify, (I will recommend one which you can choose from the gallery’s website which reassembles closely your current theme, then you might only need minimal tweaks to suit the stylesheet your site’s layout) open the theme.tpl file and you will notice that the file follows the typical layout of a html file with html, body and their respective closing tags as well.

Due to be launched on the 5th of May and the first of it’s kind in the world, Dell Swarm by Intel and Dell is an online ordering portal targeted at students and value hunters alike. So it works like a mass order system we usually see taking “lobangs”, only that this time, you are dealing the lobang directly with the supplier. You start by picking the laptop you would like to purchase, which is the “Buy” part, so you are the first buyer to join a Swarm and you’ll enjoy a price lower than dell.com.sg’s best discounted price (after cash rebates). So say your starting price is $899 SGD. You enter and the price drops so $854 SGD.

Dell swarm 2009 site main page

The swarm page

Keep in touch with social networking or SMS

Here comes the good part, for every member you comes in and joins your “swarm” you will get a lower price for every member which comes in, so say after 8 members joined your swarm, the prices drops to $809 SGD. To reach the maximum discount, you can grow the Swarm by Sharing with your friends through social networking sites and functions, such as facbook, tweeter, etc.

When you’re ready to join the Swarm, click on the Buy button, register and the website will contact you once the Swarm ends and the price is finalised. This happens once the limit of 15 buyers or 72 hours is reached.

For users not ready to buy yet. You won’t be left out either with a range of monitoring services available, you can also choose to follow your choosen Swarm through updates via email and SMS.

To test drive the site, visit http://dellswarm.com/sg/ and log in with the following information (Prices shown in beta site are placeholders only.)

Read more about the new spanking new website on the click:

Am updating all scripts on my servers as I type along in this blog post, there is quite much updating to go, I guess I just sneak an update here. After much investigation of the previous hacking attempt in my last blog post, it seems that the DoS problem narrows down to a vulnerability in the roundcube webmail program, so if you have that running on versions before 0.2.1, please do an update.

In layman’s terms, what the hackers did is to exploit a code injection vulnerability in Roundcube towards Apache which causes it to eat up so much resources that it forces Apache run a safety shutdown to terminate the script, thus explaining those sudden SIGTERM disabling all your server’s webservice. But once that happens, it will unable to start itself up again as a Apache is “still” running the service and using the ports, thus resulting in a denial of service.

I’ve updated all my servers and did a full rootkit scan, currently all is running fine and A-OK. (Keeps fingers crossed). Oh yes, do note that roundcube-0.2 requires PHP 5 to run.

I guess, the cool thing about being your system administrator is that you get you get to learn all kinds of shit which comes thrown at your server.

Mmm don’t know should I try to install PHP 6 on my development server, I am sooo liking their new date functions.