Wish all of you a very good Happy New Year 2007!

Goodbye 2006, hello higher toll, petrol and any-rates! *sniff*

p/s: For those who keeps on creating resolutions and “new goals” on every new year, just stop doing that and forget it! Why bother waiting till the new year to start something? Why don’t start it right there and then? :D

If any of you watched a J-drama called “akihabara@deep“, this is a tribute to all of you!

I’ve been told, quite a number of times, that I have a strange sense of entertainment. While I do think it is a little bit strange, but it never occurred to me that it is so strange that people are so bothered about it - even when I did not bother them at all.

One of the things that I find entertaining is driving. No I’m not really much of a car geek, but the driving experience in KL is indeed entertaining - ESPECIALLY when there’s traffic jams. Yes, I find traffic jams very entertaining. Some of my colleagues frowned upon the idea of me traveling via LDP every day back and forth from Cyberjaya to Damansara Heights. They will eek at the sight of the congestion of the traffic, especially at the Sunway toll gate.

Here’s where the fun starts - you’ll see human behaviors. Most of the time they’re impatient to go through the toll. Trying to get ahead of everybody and reach their destination as fast as they can. Wow I never recalled people that is THAT eager to pay the toll and come to work - most of the time people tries to avoid tolls and work! During this haste, there’s still entertainment. On a very lucky day, I get to see how a Proton Wira got stucked with a small lorry by the sides, thanks to the fact that both are trying to cut into lanes but do not want to negotiate (give way) to each other. They effectively blocks two tollgate lanes just like that. Of course, they then get out of their vehicles and start blaming each other. (more…)

Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

I really loved this line. Taken from cnn.com’s TIME : Person of the Year - You

I've been using Opera lately and noticed that for certain sites (like deviantArt, PhotoMalaysia and Maybank2U), it can load the page almost rapidly, while Firefox 2.0 takes a while to load it. I'm left with some pondering on why such phenomenon happens. It is no doubt that Opera have one of the fastest rendering engine for websites.

Then it occurred to me - Firefox pipelining tweak! Last time I didn't bother to tweak my Firefox to cater for pipelining because I was using a GPRS connection, with a limited bandwidth. Now that I have a very nice house mate who let me use his Streamyx (this is a 512kB/sec DSL service) for no charge, I've decided to try this one small trick.

To begin, create a new tab in Firefox, and type the following in the address bar: "about:config".

You will then see a long list of configuration items for Firefox, most of these are very crucial to the browser's stability, so try not to mess around with them if you have no idea what they are for. Now key it "pipe" at the "Filter:" section on top, you'll see three items listed:

network.http.pipelining (false)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (4)
network.http.proxy.pipelining (false)

What you have to do is to make each of these like the following

network.http.pipelining (true)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests (8)
network.http.proxy.pipelining (true)

Close and restart Firefox. Now try to surf around and you will notice that on sites with a lot of images/items, it will load much more rapidly. This trick probably already being discussed since Firefox 1.x but often people forget about it, so here it is as a recall :)

Note: This post is a little back-dated. It was in my draft for a while and I didn't have time to finish it then.

On Oct 27th (that is around a few days after Raya or Eid ul-Fitr), me and Shiro planned to meet one of our 'colleague' (the quote marks because we consider him as a colleague, but we never met him, as we're sort of his colleague in some online community). After a thorough thought (yeah, you know how hard it is to decide where to eat sometimes) we decided to make it easy - meet at the Pizza Hut @ Suria KLCC.

I arrived first, and since I don't want us to wait further for the food later on, I decided I should start ordering right away, so we can immediately munch when everyone arrives. (more...)

I had this phenomenon for a few days - I couldn't send out any mail with the web-interface, my pop mail client won't connect without crashing (I'm using Evolution Mail). Uploads to my blog, imageshack, GMail attachment or any other web-based upload doesn't work at all.

Most of the time, the website does not respond at all after clicking the Send/Upload button. GMail has more courtesy, it told me "Oops! Error 007/008 .... ". Lookup at GMail help page suggests that either GMail is down or connection problem. GMail is not down. So must be my connection.

I'm clueless. And for good 3 days, I almost gave up on Linux (again). Then a few things hit my head - DNS and MTU (more...)