Faisal Left Us to be with the LORD at 0945am today. My sincerest condolences go to this family and fellow friends. Faisal, you will always be in my heart and in my prayers. God Bless You… May you have eternal happiness in the Presence of the LORD.
IJNIP
Amen
I just recieved news last night that a friend of mine was involved in a serious car accident. The car skidded out of control whilst overtaking, flipped twice, hit a lamp and then crashed into a tree. Out of 4 people, 2 were killed instantly as they were flung out of the car. The driver sustained serious, but not life threatening injuries. My friend however lost his right leg, as it was crushed and had to be amputated, and after hours of brain surgery is in a coma. Doctors say that if he pulls through, he will be brain dead. His parents came from indonesia to send him home to the LORD today… We were not the closest of pals, but we did have good times together. We partied hard together during exeat, smoked, drank, and even talked sometimes. In school regardless of the difference in social circles, we’d always greet each other like we were bossom buddies. He was a good man, a talented basketball player, and a great friend to many. Whatever he lost in his short stature, he regained in his huge heart. I dont know if this is fitting, but this verse called out to me when i was praying for him.
“Do not forsake me O Lord; O my God, be Not far from me!
Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation!” Psalm 38 : 21-22“Yea, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for you are with me; Your rod and your staff, they comfort me” Psalm 23:4
I apologise to my muslim friends for quoting the bible in this instance as my friend is a muslim himself. Following this incident it dawned on me how short life is… Also how unfair it is…
May the mercy of the LORD be upon his soul, may he have met HIM face to FACE and that HE may have pardoned him.
IJNIP
Amen.
Faisal, if you ever can read my mind, or this blog… I’ll miss you Bro… I will be praying for you regardless what happens… Goodbye and Party on my brother…
EDIT 13:12hrs
My juniors have told me that today he showed signs of reaction by twitching his fingers or something like that. His father has decided that he will wait instead of pulling the plug today. There is still hope in his heart, and there is now hope restored in mine. Thank you for your prayers…
Looks like the warmongerers in Israel are pretty much suicidal, not to mention reckless towards the safety of its citizens. Yesterday, Israel fired a missile at a mosque at the wee hours of dawn to assassinate Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (who really does look like Saruman IMHO). The man who was more for negotiating peace between the warring “nations” was literaly blasted to smithereens. Who on earth sends a military helicopter to launch a missile at a virtually blind, paraplegic, wheelchair-ridden man?
Israel that’s who.
An eye for an eye best describes what hardline militants are probably thinking right now. The world shall now watch all hell break loose. Retaliation will be the order of the day.
Yassin, says a Palestinian professor, will kill more Israelis dead than he did when he was alive. [The Guardian]
I’m slowly trying to divorce myself from Microsoft and overdependancy on their software. But somehow along the way, I’ve kinda hit a stumbling block notably with email clients.
For the unitiated, email clients are programs you use to check your email. Hotmail, yahoo! mail, Hushmail and the like don’t count as the messages are physically stored on a server in the land of far-far-away™. Clients are normally used to access POP mail like Uni email accounts ect. but technically you could use email clients to access (free) webmail like Outlook Express does with Hotmail.
I previously used Outlook Express to check my university mail. So far so good, I had no immediate problems then. However, the problem lay in archiving my mails. First of all, OE stores emails on some obscure folder in the C: drive under %usrprofiles%. Wahey, formatting and reinstalling stuff and the subsequent archive restoring was a pain in the bum indeed. It doesn’t help that the built-in import/export facility sucks ass. You can only import from a limited number of pre-installed programs on your computer. If you asked me, descriptively it is more like “migrating” than importing!
Oh well, in the search for a suitable replacement I tested Thunderbird m0.5 (Firefox’s trusty standalone mail-client sidekick from Mozilla), Eudora 6.0.3 and PMail 4.12a. To be honest, none were suitable replacements for OE. They all had shortcomings in one department or another. I’ll elaborate…
Thunderbird, has not even reached version 1.0 yet. It has still many bugs to iron out and even more features to add. The import facility sucked balls too. You could only import from PROGRAMS like OE did. It didn’t help that my OE archives were in propretiary MiKrO$oFT .dbx format (which really, REALLY sucks balls). So I trashed TB because thought it could function as a mail client, it didn’t go very far in getting my existing mail sorted out.
Mail client deux started out alright… until I realised that the whole she-bang was ad-supported. Eudora’s functionality was OK-lar... but not fantastic. It didn’t scream “use me!” at all. The import facility also sucked balls. Note to everybody reading this (if this ever means anything to you lah): Stay away from OE as you are going to lose your archives eventually when you migrate away from that devil spawn of a program!
Last but not least, PMAIL. Man Uni uses PMAIL on its clusters and stores mail on each user’s P:/ drive. OE did a wonderful job at keeping my P Drive pristine as by default, the “keep messages on server” option isn’t ticked. Meaning? You get to read emails at home, but not anywhere else. Lose the emails on your computer and voila… no more email archive! Anyhoo, I had PMAIL running on my box for a bit and though it took quite a while to set everything up (like importing .dbx files into .mbx files) I guessed things were alright… but were they?
I still lose out on archiving my Hotmail account. Which REALLY sucks. So it’s back to OE it is!
Moral of the story: When Bill Gates has your life grabbed by its balls, its going to take a hell of alot of effort to shake the bugger off. Note to self: Must email university to get HTML accessable mail ala Imperial College & UEA!
So what email client do YOU use?
EDIT 15:10pm: Solution to archiving? Use OE like usual, but then create a batch file with instructions to copy all *.dbx files from the %AppData% folder to an archive folder residing somewhere in D: Then use dbxconv to convert all the files to .mbx format which is easily exportable. Repeat and rinse as necessary. Email me or leave a comment with your email if you are wanting a sample of what the import.bat file looks like. End of story! Hmm… now to try and vbasic hack this functionality into OE itself…
OK, I’m link whoring right now but I’m bored. Plug from thatsjustnotright.com (THE ultimate blog) and from sensibleerection.com (the UBER-blog)
TURN UP YOUR VOLUME WAAAAAAAAYYYYY UP!
(I especially like Dr Dorian from Scrubs bit. Abso-fucking-lutely hillarious! Wish Dr Cox was innit though. The advert would never end.)
FOR MEN
(In further support of comment #7 that anime-watchers are horny)
It has been known for many years that sex was good exercise, but until now nobody had made a scientific study of the caloric content of different sexual activities. Now after “original and proprietary” research, we are proud to present its findings.
REMOVING HER CLOTHES:
With her consent….12 Calories
Without her consent….2187 Calories
OPENING HER BRA:
With both hands….8 Calories
With one hand….12 Calories
With your teeth….485 Calories
PUTTING ON A CONDOM:
With an erection….6 Calories
Without an erection….3,315 Calories
POSITIONS:
Missionary….12 Calories
69 lying down….78 Calories
69 standing up….812 Calories
Wheelbarrow….216 Calories
Doggy Style….326 Calories
Italian chandelier….2,912 Calories
Mexican cartwheel…..2,912 Calories
ORGASMS:
Real….112 Calories
Fake….1,315 Calories
POST ORGASM:
Lying in bed hugging….18 Calories
Getting up immediately….36 Calories
Explaining why you got out of bed immediately….816 Calories
GETTING A SECOND ERECTION:
If you are:
20-29 years….36 Calories
30-39 years….80 Calories
40-49 years….124 Calories
50-59 years….1972 Calories
60-69 years….7916 Calories
70 and over….Results are still pending
DRESSING AFTERWARDS:
Calmly….32 Calories
In a hurry….98 Calories
With her father knocking at the door….5218 Calories
With your wife knocking at the door…. 13,521 Calories
Waaaaaayyy cool. Now for the link pimping: Ani’s Weblog..
Friendster just upgraded their security settings. You can now set what degree of “friends” your public profile will be available to. Guess that will help cut down the number of incessant stalkers on the network. But it really does help if you choose not to put up photos of yourself that make you look like you’re topless.
But have you heard about kawanster? Its basically Friendster clone put (obviously) in a Malaysian context. But what makes kawanster stand out is the features it has. It’s also got a personal blog system, kinda like the message board. Its currently implementing an SMS system too so that you can sms friends right off the bat from the website itself. But it’s still in BETA though.
Now for the coolest feature. Have I mentioned that you can see how many times your profile has been viewed? Well, you can actually see WHO has been viewing your profile. You even get a link back to their profile. So now you can trace all those leng-chais and leng-lois who might be interested. And all those stalkers in between too. Heh. Give it a shot and watch your ego go through the roof.
Wahey! Finally installed Mandrake Linux on my computer. I had previously thought of downloading the new 10.0 Community Edition off the ‘net but decided hell no, I ain’t going to wait for more than 24 hours to get the stupid thing downloaded. Besides, I had already RC1 of Mandrake 10.0 off suprnova.org. Took my chances and guess what? Hardly any upgrading… in fact, NO upgrading needed! I had contemplated downloading it on a university cluster machine, but my impatience took the best of me hehe!
I had to repartition my Windows partition to split it into 5 parts: 5GB for WinXP and the rest for /root, /home and swapfile partition for Linux. Reformatting Windows was another mechanical exercize, but I didn’t mind. It was 6 months since my last reformat anyway! Mandrake installation was a doddle, althought I had to resort to loading up the “expert” installation at the command prompt to get my USB mouse to work. Hmm, methinks that this is a feature already present on 10.0CE, so it could just be my that installation that was a bit screwey. Installing LILO hung once on me, but it could have well been the CD I was using was not burnt properly. My advice would be to make sure that you verify the integrity of the ISOs you burn to ensure this doesn’t happen which I obviously didn’t do heh. Oh, and install CE if you can off www.distrowatch.com. Apparently their list of mirrors is better than www.linuxiso.com
Selecting the modules to install was quite the pain in the bum. OK, sure I’ve got 3 CDs on me, but to a normal user with no inkling whatsoever on what he wants installed on his new linux box, I can bet you ppl will be pretty suprised to see that the programs that they expect to be installed on the first word “go” would not be there. I had to go back to settings to reinstall the GIMP, Samba, LinNeighbourhood, Apache + MySQL + PHP + Perl so other than that things were alright. I didn’t even have to mount my other HD Partitions, Mandrake had already done this for me on /mnt. I still find it bloody irritating that Linux cannot write to NTFS partitions!
Now its off to get NICE fonts installed (not that the current ones are sucky anyway…), nice THEMES installed and to get antialiasing to work on Mozilla Firefox! It’s bloody irritating surfing the web on Linux cuz the default WinDoZe fonts are just not present! You have to settle for sub-standard, 4th-on-your-list fonts that had no intention of being displayed. Example, the font “Georgia” degrades to “Sans Serif”. THAT SUCKS! Also, getting used to the “installation” procedure for Linux takes some time. Sure I’ve got my tar.gz file here… but where in god’s earth should it go? /root/programs or /home/zaaba/programs ? Conventionalism is certainly taking a back seat here but I’ll get used to it soon enough!
Lesson #1.
Never, EVER write a long post without saving in-between.
XP will fuck up whever you least expect it.
Damn you XP, you’re convincing me even more to make that plunge into Linux!
If you are a half-decent computer buff you might have a few games or so lying around. That arrangement might be great if you only had one machine you played your games on, but what if your itchy trigger-happy fingers need their dose of frantic button-mashing elsewhere?
As it stands, s50 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows you to make lawful backup copies of your games. It doesn’t even matter if the game’s licence agreement prohibits you from doing so. Peculiarly, this privilege does not extend to music CDs and DVDs in the same manner, ostensibly with the rationale that retro games are harder to come by. Finding a duplicate 10 game years down the road will be a much harder feat to do compared to music and films. Just take a look at the stock HMV carries: you will probably never find games that are more than ten years old. Contrast this with Led Zepp & Co, immortalised within plastic jewel cases crooning digitally remastered old songs of rock’s virulent history.
Now the newly passed Copyright And Related Rights Act 2003 which came into force on 31 October 2003 makes it illegal by virtue of s296Z for consumers to circumvent copy protection methods game publishers use on their discs. So, while CDPA 1988 grants you a statutory right to legally make backups, if in the process you use or publish any methods to get around copy-protection to obtain your backup, CARRA 2003 says you’re breaking the law.
That’s a bit like being stuck in a rut innit? It doesn’t help that state-of-the-art copy-protection mechanisms are all the rage nowadays thanks to the RIAA.
This catch-22 situation however only applies to game publishers that specifically employ copy-protection onto their software. But since there is no legal way to circumvent copy-protection, publishers are therefore purposely depriving you the consumer the legal right to obtain a game or program backup for yourself hence rendering their very efforts illegal.
So where is my DVD burner?
—-
First published in SLUM vol1 2004; (C) MULS 2004
Resources:
Best wishes go out to Safia the monkey who turns 20 today. Don’t overuse your new keyboard and use it as something to cuddle at night. You just might lose it in the tornado-ridden room you own!
When Reza @ Zaaba isn’t at his computer, he attempts to read the pile of law books that continuously collect dust on his shelf. Out of town guests at his house will not be complete without a trip to Sadaf, whom in his opinion serves the best value for money Kobeda with rice (Its 3 with a free drink!). A trip to a curry house will never be complete without a Rubicon purchase. Zaaba’s poison ranges from mango to guava, with a slight inclination for the former.
Though 21, he still bears the handcuff scars from being bundared on his 19th birthday.
This website is his doing and undoing. Take nothing you code stealing biatches. Though you lot are very welcome to learn from the CSS!
Things were about to become pretty stagnant around here until CWan decided to blog. Whee!
I’ve been keeping myself busy with several new projects of mine. None which include reading more mundane books about boring English law and revising for my seminars. Typical.
First up was the MULS Website. That stands for Manchester University Law Society. It runs on Wordpress and valid CSS and XHTML. Took me one day to code the bastard, but one year of procrastination to actually get it done. Now all it needs is a nice gallery (which I am still putting off!).
Next, was figuring out how to install Firefox on my uni network drive. Well, actually its installed there already, but getting the my personal profiles to load up when I run the program is another different story. You see, Firefox creates a default profile and setting folder in WinXP’s %userprofile% folder but the Uni system deletes the data after I log off. Now if you’re wondering what those squiggles mean, it’s actually a windows shortcut. Try Start > Run > %userprofile% and you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, if you can make any sense out of this post, you’re very much welcome to try installing Firefox on a removable disk. I can’t figure it out yet, so until they iron out some recognized bugs, I’ll resort to running Firefox in the following fashion: Start > Run > "P:FirefoxFirefox.exe" -p to boot the profile manager to point it in the right direction. Au contraire I could just go to myhq.com and be done with all of the above mess :)
I’ve been experimenting with Linux! Well, FYI, that demon-spawn WinXP is still sitting on my computer and I’ve taken enormous considerations to actually contemplate deleting my boot partition and replacing it with a Linux one. Nothing’s struck my fancy just yet, but if I were to go Linux and ditch the Micro*cough* plague that is upon (most of) us I’ll probably go with Mandrake. RC10 is sitting on my HDD, courtesy of Suprnova.org kekeke… Tried Lindows already; the whole commercial feel to it made me feel it was Bill Gates’ evil twin trying to sell me the software. And Knoppix was cool to see how versatile Linux was. It almost bought me there… but not quite!
What’s making me consider the switch? Try guilt. With all the bittorrent plugs this site has, go figure :)
PS: I big, big shoutout goes to <3 Rozanna who did a marvelous (and daunting first time) job at installing a 256MB stick of RAM ALL BY HERSELF! (With adequate motivation over the phone from moi of course hehe LOL)
Just finished watching Matrix 3, again.
Had nothing better to do. Doesn’t seem like there’s much else better to do these days.
Kinda sad that my life is currently as stagnant as it can be.
But that’s my choice, a choice that I will never understand.
Know thyself ? Bah…
