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Counting down for Saturday…

Mean while, the induction letter seriously take such a long time. I’m getting abit restless already. As much as I dreaded the working life, especially when everybody who is working is telling stories which are not at all inspiring; I have a very big reason for me to get my work flowing.

And the reason is…

Hoobastank - The Reason

Of the completely unrelated story, I gotta upgrade my Mac to OS X 10.5.8 in order to use GIMP, the graphic software but after reading a whole lot tutorial and forum, I guess I’ll scrap the idea. It is too troublesome and too risky, this Mac is too new to be spoilt.

So, I’ll still use whatever free apps I could except GIMP. Waiting for the Photoshop to finish download and hopefully it runs well.

My camera’s CF card is still a mystery. I don’t know how to make it kiss with this Mac. Weird. Nevermind, I’ll force both of them to kiss later.

Can’t wait for Saturday! Somebody is coming.

Went KL for the first time with family.

2 people, same place, yet didn’t meet up. Stress.

Father and sons time.

Thanks Mum for this, even thou I gotta pay back. Stress x 2.

Now I gotta figure how to convert the CF card into Mac compatible. Sigh. Meaning once I use Mac, I can’t change it back to the Windows one? Haiyo. Somebody be my sifu can or not. Auntie Z2 not helping nih, she busy.

Got my Mac yesterday.

Well, the reason I would purchase a Mac is just like why other people. If you are unsure about that, you can try to ask around. Haha.

Basically for me it is more like, venturing into something new. Life is interesting and plus I’m FREE now, so it is better to pick up something new, learn something more exciting and hopefully, it does functions like what other people says - better than Windows.

But after a day of playing with this, and I’m finally getting some micro-enlightenments. Other than that, it is still a total disaster.

For example,

1. The ‘delete’ button is actually ‘backspace’.
2. The ‘right-click’ on the mouse becomes ‘2 fingers on trackpad + click’.
3. No ‘End’ & ‘Home’ buttons.
4. Lots of ‘Command’, ‘Option’ & ‘Control’ buttons.
5. Installing program is so simple, until you can’t believe that it is installed.
6. The ‘Scroll faster’ part of the touchpad becomes ‘2 fingers scrolling’.
7. iTunes sucks. It always duplicate the songs that I pull into it. And sometimes refuse to recognize some of the songs.
8. Hassle to format my external hard drive into Mac compatible platform. Don’t know how to do it yet.

Besides these disasters, I’m totally loving,

1. The Expose. Like, come on man, who doesn’t love the Expose.
2. The Space. Totally understand why they invented this, and totally fall in love with bring up windows from left, right, up & down and repeat it infinite times.
3. Everything looks too cozy. I think something get lost somewhere and I don’t know where it is but heck, I’ll find out later.
4. In sync with iPhone. Now my Mac has all my contacts and calendar!
5. The calendar is again a very nice application to use
6. Still figuring out the dashboard, too little things there, I would love to make it explode with stuffs.
7. Love the Adium app. If you are using a Mac, go get it! It is free, and it has this LRT sound that it makes when people sign in to their IM. Is like directly after the sound, you can say ‘Next station, Masjid Jamek’. LOL.

I think I’ll blog until here for today. My card reader kong-ed so I can’t download any pics from the CF card. Sigh. Lotsa old friends in town these few days. Can go out yumcha more often :)

Disk Partition for External Hard drive.

Sometimes I would like to write some tutorials to remind myself about the problem I face and how I solved them. Sometimes I even forgot about it after sometime!

Well, just bought a portable harddisk today. 320Gb. Nice white one. Lazy to take picture today so will upload it up here next time.

Problem: I wanted to make a partition on the hard disk but despite the tutorials that I could find online, I can’t seem to make it happen.

Solve:

1. Plug in the harddisk.
2. Right click on My Computer and goes to Manage.

3. You will see the Computer Management windows now.
4. On the left bar click on Disk Management.
5. At this time, you will probably see your external harddisk appearing on the main area down there.

My problem: For me, the status of my harddisk appear to be ‘healthy’. With this status, I couldn’t create a partition. In order to do that.

1. Right click on your external harddisk and press ‘delete volume’
2. With that, the drive will appear ‘free space’.
3. Right click again and press ‘delete partition’.
4. And now your disk will appear as ‘unallocated’.

With this, right click on the disk and press ‘New Partition’. A partition wizard will pop up and guide you thru the process. Try to name your disk with the alphabet preferably more than ‘M’.

The failure to do so will result in another problem.

I didn’t do that. I ticked the option of not allocating an alphabet for the drive.

Problem: I finished creating 2 partitions for my harddisk but I couldn’t see them on My Computer.

Solve,

1. Go back to the same Disk Management window.
2. Right click and choose Change Drive Letter.
3. Allocate an alphabet preferably more than ‘M’.

Finally. Enjoy the new disk space.

This is a tech post, feel free to read on your own will.

It had been some time since I have my iTouch but this problem seems to be quite frequent and I would like to post it here on how I solve it, and hopefully to remind myself when I face this problem again.

Problem: You installed iTunes but when you double click on the application, an error message pops up and you can’t use your iTunes at all.

Overview of the problem: With my limited computer knowledge, I think it is something to do with the QuickTime player in the computer. Most probably you already have a QuickTime player which mess up with the iTunes, creating the error and problem.

Solve:
You might need these few programs before you start, I’ll explain why later. You are suppose to have “Windows Install Clean Up”, “Unlocker” and the latest version of iTunes.

Before you start doing anything, scan through your list of programs that you have in your computer to determine whether there is any program associated with QuickTime. For me, the main culprit is the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack (QuickTime is one of the many application and codec included in this mega pack).

So, you should proceed by uninstalling the application which is associated with QuickTime, in my case - K-Lite Mega Codec Pack.

Later on

1. Download  “Windows Install Clean Up” and run it. Delete the QuickTime program from the list.
2. Go to C:ProgramFilesQuickTime and delete all the whole folder. If you are running QuickTime associated program in the background, an error message will pop up saying that it is impossible to delete the program. Install “Unlocker” and try again. This time, a window will pops up and prompt you to delete that file, if it is still unable to do so, click ‘delete file in the next reboot’. Reboot your PC.
3. Go to C:WindowsSystem32 and look for QuickTime files by pressing “Q”. Delete all the files which have the quicktime name on it.
4. Reboot, and now install a fresh copy of iTunes.

If you follow the steps properly, you shouldn’t have any problem running the program now. Reinstall the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack and uncheck the Quicktime sections when you are going through with the process.

That’s all. Good Luck!

iTunes :)

Well, yea.. it is reanimated, after a major surgery of brain transplant. Duh! I seriously don’t know which monkey hair on me makes me feel like formatting my hard disk. And after that, I can’t install the Windows! Further format and diagnostic tests using Windows boot disk revealed that the disk is damaged. Another 3 times of attempt to format it made me sure of my diagnosis.

Solution: WHAT ELSE? Get a new hard disk!

It is a painful solution as I’m currently damn broke. I spent all my hard-earned Paypal money on this. Imagine, most of us final year students are trying to sell their computers, and I’m here upgrading it, not once, but twice!

First was the 520mb Radeon graphic card.

And now this 250Gb Seagate SATA hard disk.

Sigh. But hell, I had already live 2 days without computer and I’m so sure I just need to get this fixed!

Trust me, my mood is even more gloomy than today’s weather.

Another picture while walking through the short cut to the hospital this morning. Damn sad!

And I spent another 1500rubs on this SATA Seagate 250Gb hard disk (made in China). That fella didn’t sell the wires and I got to buy them in another shop for 25rubs! Grrrr…

Nah you can see the two generation hard disks down there. One is grandpa, one is grandson. Well, it is a SATA, so the speed is almost twice faster than my old PATA hard disk and I have double storage capacity as well.

The old PATA hard disk. I think I’ll try to make use of it again when I think my com is stable enough. Maybe there is some bad sectors inside that can be repaired.

I tried to back up as much files as I could. But I still lost my font which I put on my pictures. The above pictures now have different signature but I decided to settle with the bar code one. Hehe. Any suggestions? I failed to find the previous font, forget how it is called.

Hopefully my computer doesn’t crash anymore!

It is definitely faster and louder and better now. But, at the cost of my $$. Sigh.

Familiar with those icons up there? If you still can’t remember seeing any of them, look at my right sidebar and you will see another 2 similar icons near the header. These are the feed icons. So, what is feed and how to use them? 

My experience with feed is pretty straight forward. I have the problem which actually is exactly why feed is needed and created. Most of us like to blog hoop, visit friends’ blogs, and sometimes, we see some really attractive and nice designers’ blogs and what we do? We bookmark them!

But, sooner or later, you will notice that you end up with a very messy bookmark list, with tons of blogs that you don’t know what they are about and which one has been updated and which one was not! Well, everybody would wanna view blogs that has the latest entry, and it would be a waste of time to go back to the same blog to find that the blogger didn’t update his blog!

And to solve all these problems, feed is created!

The concept is pretty easy. Let’s start with the email feeds. You subscribe to the blogger’s feed (like the one on my sidebar stated ’subscribe by email’), and after filling in your email and double approving it from your account, you’ll then get an email everytime I update my blog. That easy!

But, if you subscribe to 10 bloggers and most of them update daily, you will end up with a full inbox most of the time. Getting frustrated?

Try a feed reader machine. For me, my choice is Feeddemon. Well, there are a lot more programes out there which can do the similar job but my friend recommended me this, and now I recommend you this.

You subscribe to a blog using the reader. When you click the feedicon which is publish on blogs who syndicate the feed, a new window will pop up and ask you whether you would like to subscribe to the blog using the programe or not. Proceed with some easy instructions and you become one of the subscribers of your chosen blog.

The picture up there shows some of the blogs that I had already subscribe to. By using the program, I can choose to view all those updated post and can even open a browser tab on that program to load the webpage and leave a comment when I want to. Everything becomes more organized and you can easily keep track of what you have read and what you didn’t. It is like reading the newspaper, instead of loading each blog.

The concept is pretty easy and it can certainly make your bookmark list a lot better. Will blog about how to syndicate a feed for bloggers next time (hopefully not too long from now). Have fun subscribing!

This is the problem that I faced and found another easy solution on the web.

Problem:

MSN doesn’t open/start/respond when I click the icon. Nothing happen. But if you assess the task manager, you will see msnmsgr.exe in the processes and bytes are sent and received all the time.

Solution:

Plug out the power supply of my router and plug it in again.

Walaaa. A ridiculous troublesome problem solved. Until now, it is still working properly. Hopefully it works fine from now on.

I had encounter this problem since the very first time I started posting on wordpress. It is really troublesome. When I try to write a new post, the page freezes, and sometimes need to wait up to few minutes to wait for the ‘write’ page to finish loading. Sometimes it even end up not responding and my whole computer freezes together with the browser.

It makes posting a new blog very hard. I tried to find solutions on the help page and couldn’t really get one few days back. But today, when I went searching again, I got my problem solved!

Now the ‘write’ page loads normally. No more freezes!

The thread is here. If you experience the same problem. Read it and hopefully it solves your problem as well. All you need to do is replace one of the wp-admin file to the new one that you can find by reading the thread I linked here. Enjoy!

P/s: I found out that the new .php file in the write post do not have comments enabled. So the solution is kinda half way to what I want as we of course want our readers to leave comments.

P/s: The even newer solution is by using the new google browser - Google Chrome. So far, it is working well for me, and no more freezes in ‘write’ post.

P/s:

Final Solution! (11 Nov 2008)

Try to get your ‘write a post’ page loaded no matter how long it takes, let it run on itself. When finally it finished and everything is stable, scroll down the ‘custom fields’ and click to expand it. You will see a big list of your previous post that you imported and etc. Try to delete all of them. I know it takes a long time to sit and just keep on clicking delete but when it is all done, your ‘write a post’ page will be definitely faster!