Fitter happier.

Yea, there has been a lack of update. I was busy with WebLogic, and Devin.. oh well, he only writes material that meets a certain literary and relevancy standard and he is not that prolific. Lol. Guess you’ll never find him writing anything that will be tagged as rant 😛

Few things happened last week..

Weblogic completed:
Am done with the project last week, which is cool. Haven’t gone through the UAT session with the users yet, so until they say “All’s good”, guess I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed. Weeee!!!!



I lost my handphone:
Yes, my cheap handphone. I can’t believe someone would want to steal it. I bought the handphone for about 300 – 400 bucks, so am surprised that someone would be so keen to steal it. How much does it worth really? 2 small packets of weed? Am not bothered about the phone. Well alright, I am bothered, because it costs money. But what I care the most is the data inside the phone. My contacts, my messages, heck I even have a few audio clips of my cat purring recorded with that phone. Oh well. Fuck you, thief.

Medical checkups:
I had a couple of medical checkups performed last Tuesday and Thursday. Last Tuesday I got all wired up for the holter monitoring test. It was something like a 24 hours of ECG (electrocardiogram) to monitor the electrical activity of my heart. I couldn’t take showers during the procedure because it’ll damage the device. So yeah, am pretty happy with the fact that I don’t have to shower and not feeling guilty about it. Am just plain lazy sometimes.

And last Thursday, I got up very early in the morning and headed to the General Hospital to get my brain checked. It was a quick EEG (electroencephalography), prolly around 20 minutes where I had to blink my eyes numerous times, with bright light flickered directly on me for a few minutes and inhale/exhale profusely for 5 minutes which was tiring since am asthmatic. And oh my, I looked horrible with my hair glued on with all the wires. And I looked even worse after the guy pulled them out. I looked like a woman who is trying too hard to impress a guy by applying extra hair gel. You know the type of hair gel that will make your hair hard and stiff? Gah. I hate it.

I’ll be getting the results this April. I hope everything will be fine, since am always fine, and anyway I agreed to go through all of these medical procedures because my sister told me to. Nothing serious.



FreeBSD upgrade:
Yeah, finally! Upgraded to 7.1. I did it last Saturday, and I was thinking to update this blog on Sunday, but guess what, the update went fine until suddenly I failed to start the X server. Hmmm.. now that’s weird, because this was not the first time I did a FreeBSD upgrade, plus, this was just a minor version upgrade, so what could go wrong? Building world, kernel and installing them went perfectly well. I didn’t forget to run mergemaster, the machine booted up well. Spent a day changing the theme, and all of the sudden it failed (yeah, ironically it failed after I spent the whole day beautifying my desktop, why didn’t it fail sooner?). I realized that it failed just after I ran portupgrade to upgrade my Opera and Firefox. Probably the modules are not synced, am not sure.

I spent the next 48 hours running portupgrade numerous times, until I finally decided to rebuild perl, xorg and xfce4. But to my surprise it failed. I reinstalled my xfce4 and its gang one by one, so they’ll all run on the same version. Reboot the machine and voila, am back. Still, some of my installed packages are broken, so I had to fix them.

So they say, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. I could’ve just stick to FreeBSD 7.0 and save the 48 hours from the agonizing pain of troubleshooting my machine. But seriously, it was worth it. The performance is so much better, XFCE 4.6 is brilliant with more new features and yes fellas.. flash 9 works 🙂

He got engaged:
Yes, he finally got engaged. AmazingCongratulations.

Back them up.

I learned my lesson the hard way. Last 2 years I bought a 120gb WD hard drive and used it for about 6 months before it suddenly died on me. 6 months, it was still covered by the warranty, but I chose not to return it for an exchange of a new one. I have tons of data inside but out of all data, I just need prolly around 30% of it. The rest, I can say goodbye with tears in my eyes. I still have the hard disk, kept nicely inside my wardrobe. When I have the chance, I’ll bring it back to live!

I love Maxtor hard drive. I still have one old Maxtor hdd that I’ve been using for almost 8 years running. In fact I used to have 2 of them. One has failed, but it is completely acceptable since it has served me for over 6 years.

Currently at work am preparing backup scripts for some servers. I find that backing up the entire directory of windows virtual machine is kinda annoying. Am thinking of what would be the best way to shutdown windows without using the force flag? Urgh. I wish I can just init 0.

At home I use a simple script that I wrote to backup directories. Basically what it does is it checks the content of both source and target directories, and any files/directories that are not available at the target location will be copied, creating a duplicate copy of the original directory. It’ll also generate a log (diff.log) to record what files that have been copied over. I use it to backup log files, nothing in giga size.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

SOURCE=”$HOME/personal/script/cmp2dirs/diffmv/cmp2″
DEST=”$HOME/personal/script/cmp2dirs/diffmv/temp”
sSOURCE=`echo $SOURCE | awk -F/ ‘{print $NF}’`
sDEST=`echo $DEST | awk -F/ ‘{print $NF}’`
DATE=`date +”%v”`

echo “Directories comparison on $DATE” >> diff.log

diff -rq $SOURCE $DEST >> diff.log

s1=”Directories comparison on $DATE”
s2=`sed ‘$!d’ diff.log`

if [ “$s1” != “$s2” ]; then
sed -n ‘/'”$date”‘/,$p’ diff.log > copy.out

echo “Directory(s)/file(s) copied from $sSOURCE to $sDEST:” >> diff.log
f1=`sed -n ‘/^[Only in ]* /s///;s/:.///p’ copy.out`
f2=`sed -n ‘/Files/s/^.*Files.(.*) and.*$/1/p’ copy.out`

IFS=’
‘
cp -vR $f1 $f2 $DEST >> diff.log

else
echo “Directory $sSOURCE is unchanged since yesterday.” >> diff.log
fi

echo >> diff.log
echo “—————————————————————” >> diff.log
echo >> diff.log

exit

The output of diff.log will be something like this:

Directories comparison on 15-Nov-2008
Only in /home/od/personal/script/cmp2dirs/diffmv/cmp2: white space 2
Directory(s)/file(s) copied from cmp2 to temp:
/home/od/personal/script/cmp2dirs/diffmv/cmp2/white space 2 -> ./temp/white space 2
/home/od/personal/script/cmp2dirs/diffmv/cmp2/white space 2/wsp -> ./temp/white space 2/wsp

—————————————————————

Directories comparison on 16-Nov-2008
Directory cmp2 is unchanged since yesterday.

—————————————————————

Directories comparison on 17-Nov-2008
Only in /home/od/personal/script/cmp2dirs/diffmv/cmp2: ghi
Directory(s)/file(s) copied from cmp2 to temp:
/home/od/personal/script/cmp2dirs/diffmv/cmp2/ghi -> ./temp/ghi

—————————————————————

I felt something different when I turned you on just now.

There is something wrong somewhere with the button but I couldn’t figure out what it is.

I do take free stuff.

Finally managed to get the flash-plugin to work on Opera. I recently installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my lappie replacing FreeBSD 6.2 to fulfill the training’s requirement I attended last week (but ended up I used the desktop provided). So back to flash, it was pretty annoying to get it working on Opera. I don’t remember having this kinda problem back when I used Edge. Even linux-opera’s flash plugin works out of the box in freebsd.

The solution is, use flash 7, it’ll work like a charm. Forget about flash 9.

Several times I was asked why do I use unix/linux and not windows. Most of the time I’d give them the easiest and fundamental answer – it’s free.

Logically, why would anyone opt for something that is expensive, when there are better products that come for free? It never really came across my mind before that one wouldn’t use linux because it’s free until I read this article. Funny, weird, but somehow it does make sense afterall.

On a different note, I tried vixta on my vm. First try and it didn’t work out well. Some of the buttons weren’t functioning, but yea it does look like vista. Prolly it behaves like one too 😛