Gooverlap

I was just using Google search like every day when I suddenly noticed that the email address normally shown in the upper right corner wasn't mine or anybody I know, and I never use web history. I wonder what could have caused this?


Been insanely busy since coming back from Singapore. My boss retired and the new boss who is still getting his feet wet are asking a lot of us to do new things that the old boss never asked us to. Such as giving monthly PowerPoint presentations of our work progress. I bet I could drive everyone to sleep with my presentation.

Singapore trip

Took a much needed break in Singapore for four days last weekend. The weather was beautiful during the day and the evening, and it rained every single night to cool things down.


I haven't been to Singapore in many years. The last time I was there, I felt Singapore was ahead of Thailand technologically and culturally roughly 5-10 years. This time I felt Singapore was ahead of Thailand about 2 bajillion years.

To keep this post somewhat on topic for this blog, I visited both Kinokuniya (huge!) and Borders, but I didn't buy any books since I already have enough backlogged reading to do, and I didn't want to have an overweight luggage on the way home.


This is also the first time I carried my new Panasonic LX3 camera on a trip. The LX3 is such a great little camera. (All three pics in this post were taken with the LX3.) It's much much easier to pull out than my Canon DSLR, which I did also bring on this trip. Having such an easily accessible camera allowed me to capture gems such as this:

Windows 7 RC

Microsoft released Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) as a free download yesterday.

Everybody and their dogs rushed to download it...

Windows 7 x64 installed in VMware Fusion.

The most boring OS X user

I'm such a boring person. After using OS X for two seconds, I took out the colorful background and replaced it with a single plain color, moved the animated dock to the side to get more vertical space, got rid of all the iLife apps from the dock, and set up keyboard shortcuts so I don't have to keep using the touchpad so much.

The thing that throws me off the most about OS X is how much reliance there is on the mouse due to the lack of shortcut keys to reach the menus or buttons directly. e.g. in Firefox for Windows, if I want to go to the web search box, I can use the shortcut key of ctrl-K, or the IE-style ctrl-E, but if I don't remember those keys, I can easily press Alt-T (Tools), then either press S for Web Search or use the arrow keys to pick from the menu.

The second type is if the menu has no direct shortcut key, e.g. Firefox for Windows again, if I want to go to the Add-ons menu. I can do Alt-T (Tools), then A (Add-on). On the Mac, I would have to use the mouse since there's no shortcut key for Add-ons. Yes, ctrl-F2 can open the menu, but it doesn't open to a menu item directly, and then to open a menu item, space bar has to be pressed. For that many keystrokes, I might as well go for the mouse in the first place.

I did use a Mac long when I was in school, but I thought that with all the evolution in usability and operating system theory, plus OS X is a Unix-based OS, I should be able to do things faster by pairing the keyboard and the mouse.

The second thing that threw me off was OS X applications were not compatible between versions of OS X! That would explain why my OS X using friends were always explaining to me that Windows has compatibility problems. But for OS X, older versions of applications simply do not work or do not work correctly with newer versions of the OS, so when you're forced to upgrade your apps, there are no compatibility issues!

And while starting to type this blog entry last week, I suddenly noticed that the mouse pointer disappears while typing. After a few days of searching, I still haven't been able to find a way to change this setting. This also explains why I see a lot of Mac users "shuffle" the mouse whenever they pick it up.

One other annoyance I noticed is that holding down the shift key to select files in the Finder doesn't work as expected. If I overshoot my file selection, I can't press the opposite arrow key to deselect the last selection. Pressing the arrow keys always selects files from the original cursor location when you first held down the shift key. Incredibly annoying.

Oh, and my biggest problem with switching to OS X? Whenever I encounter a problem or something that I don't know how to do. I hit Google to look for answers in public forums, and almost always, legions of Mac fanboys would reply with things like "If you don't like the way OS X behaves, go back to Windows!" or "It's the Mac way! Learn to deal with it or go back to Windows!" I could always find others asking similar and legitimate questions, but was never able to easily find solutions or answers to my problems.

Mac warranty

I shouldn't normally talk about warranties in a blog called ivoidwarranties, but my 3-week old MacBook's MagSafe adapter cable developed a crack. I took the photo on Friday, and today the crack seems to have lengthened. I took the adapter back to the service center ran by the shop that I bought the MacBook from, and all they said was, "This is not covered under warranty."

Where is the legendary Apple service I heard so much about? I've used many other Apple products in the past without any problems, but this is my first Mac, and I'm not happy.

You don't mess with the zoLAN

The fridge place actually hired to look after their computers. I guess they were happy that I saved their referigerator. After their IT guy left to join the high profile consulting company, they decided not to hire a full time IT support personnel, so they asked me to go in once in a while to check out their server and do maintenance job. They gave me a good offer so I accepted.

Unfortunately, the economy being bad as it is, I never got paid for months. I didn't mind that much, to tell the truth, since I got to learn a lot of new and fun things at that site. They have a huge server inside a huge server rack that could probably support a company 100 times their size. I asked their general affairs person why they have such a beast. She just looked at me blankly and said, "Oh, IT said we needed it and so we bought it." I feel so bad that my two new Core 2 Quad servers I built last year to run Windows Server 2008 cost less than the UPS they use to feed their server.

So, after fixing the fridge problem, my next job turned out to be something that I caused myself. When I went to examine the server (by the way, it's a Dell PowerEdge with a quad-core Xeon) I found that it had dual LAN jacks, but for some reason only one LAN cable was plugged in. I looked at the Windows setting, and sure enough, one LAN device was disabled.

That was strange, so I tried enabling the LAN device, and it seemed to work fine. The Broadcom server LAN has an option for bonding the two LAN devices into a team, so I did that, and plugged in a second LAN cable. Everything seemed to work fine, so I just scratched my head and left.

The next morning they called me and said none of their drafters could run their drafting software. The software has a license module that runs on the server. I tried to remote login to the server, and found that I can't even reach the server. After some minutes of quickened pulses and hair pulling, I figured out the problem.

It turns out that when the LAN team was created, it will take the MAC address of the LAN device that's initialized first, so the MAC address would be chosen randomly from one of the two LAN devices. (This is according to Dell documentation.) But later on when I tested, it would always take the MAC address of the second LAN device, which was the one without a LAN cable plugged in. So when I plugged in the LAN cable and created the team, the MAC address of the server changed, so it got a new IP address from the ADSL router (which was why I couldn't remote access it! But good Lord, the domain controller was in DHCP mode!!) and the license manager, which is locked to the server's MAC address, failed to run. So I just pulled out the LAN cable and let it be.

And oh, the Dell actually has a dual-gigabit LAN. But it's plugged into a little desktop switch.

I still wonder to this day if the previous IT guy was actually doing his job to the best of his ability, or if it was all a big joke to him.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I finally got paid! In fact, the amount that I got paid was just a bit over what I paid for the MacBook less than two weeks ago, so this is almost like getting the Macbook for free. They still owe me money according to the original contract I signed with them, but I'm happy for now.