Was prepping a new banner inside PictBear, while browsing WordPress plugins. Then it was only WordPress plugin and theme browsing. I guess I spent my quota of attention in the working hours and saved none when I am home.

My fingers got itchy and installed a few themes, and here we are with a new look. The itch didn’t wear off, so there I was again in the plugins section, not founding what I wanted after a few trials. A short trip to mother Google landed me with Facebook Connect Plugin for WordPress, and the itches went away. There are still a few styling glitches with the theme that I will look into, but not tonight.

I did also installed WPtouch yesterday, so hopefully faster and slicker browsing for Android/iPhone/BlackBerry visitors. Next would be to move Facebook photos back to the site probably?

Tell me what you think. Other than the bare header :).

Good night.

The screenshot series continues with yet another medieval shot, taken on 2002-12-10. I think this is one of the shot I taken to be sent to #mozilla regarding their rendering bug. Was a green PHP coder back then. Using Notepad!!! (Nah …)

It was when Firefox was Phoenix, and it was at a very beta level. IE5 was quite a stable and capable browser (at the time). Notice the lack of CSS dashed border support, escaped HTML character misrendering, and the box sizing difference (this one still prevails, as CSS2 still does not dictate exactly on inclusion/exclusion of border width, and there you are, browser quirks).

Desktop goodies like BeOS-like window theming and icons are as always my defaults.

Another screenie around the same period. Was doing localization for LeechGet, and Yahoo Messenger custom BeOS theme aka BeMessenger.

Found the above screenshots on my previous blog’s development archive, along with tons of other treasures. I have created at least 5 blog application prototypes that have never seen public usage (other than niji.sytes.net). At least one of it was properly planned (named it “cri”, for “shout” in french), had a templating engine, database abstraction, and was inspired by WordPress when they were just a small player back then. Other stuffs in the undone code archive were 2 uploaders, 1 image uploader, 2 chatboxes. All still there frozen in the zip.

―――昔の俺以上に、頑張ろう。

Fourth in the series, and already ran out of screenshots that can be shared without major censorship :((

This time, it’s not a full screenshot, but only a browser screen on nacchi (Windows XP) VNC’ing to hyde (FreeBSD) and inside hyde, ssh’ing to istana (OpenBSD). The date should be 2003-07-20 (or so says the file modified timestamp). I am still searching the Black Chii (from Chobits) wallpaper inside my archives, since its quite rare to find a good Chobits wallpaper nowadays.

For those who noticed, the hostname for hyde was mikity.systes.net, since I ran out of the free hostnames at No-IP back then. Please do not be taken away by my naming sense; it’s a tradition where you put your favorite character/person/singer/artist name as the host name. Remember that if you care for your machine, the machine will love you back :D Hehehehe. Other than なっち, ミキティ and hyde, my current machine is (黒川)智花. The ultimate machine should be (宮崎)あおい, but there is yet a machine I own worth the name. And my car is (大崎)ナナ, with a matching license plate of 707.

OK, you can vomit now.

Today’s post goes further back a bit to 2004-05-21. FreeBSD 4.10-PRERELEASE running Fluxbox on Istana (Dynabook G4PME, PentiumIII 1.0GHz). The laptop was my main “lab” after getting a Celeron 2.2GHz machine (先代valkyrie, now a family PC back home). Not a lot, but it was flippy fast for normal usage and doing class work. There were weeks of daily kernel and world building, tweaking the kernel options to load only the options that is needed. Boot time to a usable Fluxbox desktop was under 10sec (skipping FreeBSD boot menu, going straight to startx). Had a hard time waiting for the sound card driver to work, helping the driver developer to test with success.

Regarding the windows inside the screen; aterm was my favorite terminal emulator, with good multibyte support and pseudo-transparency; emacs console mode editing a homegrown rss fetching script; and X-Chat hanging around #freebsd and #fluxbox.

I had another machine running OpenBSD on a very worn PentiumII 233MHz, which may show up in a terminal window somewhere in the coming screen shots.

Another old screenshot taken on 2004-7-17. This should be about a few days after Valkyrie was born. This is one of the most congested desktops I ever had. Samurize widgets from upper-right clockwise: TV EPG listing, weather forecast & resource bar, more resource info, 2ch thread title, nboombox log (DIY web chat at niji.sytes.net) and Apache httpd log.

This is one way of adding the permalink of the post inside the contents of your WordPress feed, with minimal damage, by changing the theme files, instead of directly changing WordPress’ files. Basicly this method overrides the string used by WordPress, since we cannot define a custom feed template through themes because the feed templates are not included in WordPress theme structure.

This method fetches the permalink of the post and uses the add_filter function to prepend the contents of the feed. Add the following lines to the functions.php of your theme.


/* START : azamshul.com feeds */
function insertPostLink($content) {
global $wp_query;
$postlink = post_permalink($wp_query->post->ID);
$content = '(Go to the full post at <a href="'.$postlink.'">azamshul.com</a>)<br/><br/>'.$content;
return $content;
}
/* uncomment if you want to perform the same for the excerpt (short description) */
/* add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertPostLink'); */
add_filter('the_content_rss', 'insertPostLink'); /* the_content_rss deprecated in WordPress 2.9 */
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'insertPostLink'); /* WordPress 2.9 and above */
/* END : azamshul.com feeds */


See the changes in action on this site’s feed.

Mostly a self-note. Might be useful to others who googled for this.

*Updated, for WordPress 2.9 and above, where the_content_rss was replaced by the_content_feed.

Here goes the first of screenshot series. Taken on 2005-02-26 (A full 5 years ago!), on Valkyrie (my main machine until last year). Picked up the wallpaper from deviantart and bluntly added some depressed statements. Desktop icons are from BeOS icon set, and the I forgot the XP theme name. Desktop widget is from a DIY text-only (plus weather icons) settings for Samurize. Was into R.O.S.E Online (the icons labeled 薔薇 for Japan servers, and plainly Rose for US) at the time, on both US and Japan servers.

My NIC throws the message as in the title when trying to change the MAC address through ifconfig.

It’s a wifi adapter.

It’s on my mobile phone.

Yes, I have shutdown the adapter when changing it.

Yes, I’ve tried ip link set command too. It executed successfully, but the MAC still stays.

Even after putting on 3 different custom ROMs and tried all googleable resource, my NIC is still with the old MAC address.

I am just short of checking out the codebase and recompiling the kernel driver with the necessary flags turned on.

Need another machine to run native linux, since my main machine has gone “production” running “critical” (ehem, vidcap) application, so I can run VMs on off-load time.

Reminds me of mainframe timesharing. ((No, I am not that old. Just imagining the hardships of our forefathers))

Or cloud.

成也風雲，敗也風雲

As posted before, I always install/extract the programs that I use on Windows to a customized folder. Currently I am using the folder structure as follows:

D:\
+ apps\
+ audio
+ devel
+ dtv
+ games
+ image
+ net
+ office
+ sysutils

My criteria of choosing an application lies in the following priority: free, lightweight, customizable. So most, if not all of the apps in here are free, most of them are lightweight, and customizable if it needs be.

Here are the current list of the applications on my machine:

D:\apps\audio\

• ac3filter
  Because ffdshow’s ffmpeg ac3 just don’t cut it. More control over the output, especially SPDIF passthrough.
• besweet
  For that time where you want to juggle between audio formats
• foobar2000
  Customizable audio player for Windows. Defaults are a minimalist player in all aspects and also can be a full fledged audio player with skins, lyrics, viz, etc if you wish. Have been using it for more than 6 years.
• lame
  Lame Ain’t (an) MP3 Encoder. Putting all LAME stuffs under here; the commandline executable, ACM and DirectShow filter in here. Needed for AviSynth/VirtualDub/BeSweet
• mp3tag
  The best MP3 tag editor. Excellent support for UTF8/UTF16/native encodings of most ID3 versions. Scriptable with powerful string and file processing actions.
• oggcodecs
  Well, Ogg codecs. Some people swears by it. Here for those occational Ogg format and also other exotic codecs (FLAC, Theora etc)
• powertabediter
  A part time rock star needs to read tabs.

D:\apps\devel\

• androidsdk
  The latest addition to my apps. One of the folders that I cd to quite frequently lately :)
• apache2
  Explanation is not needed for the most used Web server.
• eclipse31
  Used for personal projects on the DoCoMo Star API until last autumn, where I just lost interest.
• eclipse34
  My main Eclipse runtime (at home).
• jmeter
  A load testing tool, quite handy at times to simulate load, and for some quick (one-time) web or JDBC automation.
• mysql
  MySQL database. Mainly just for WordPress nowadays. Working on flatfile databases more these days
• netbeans
  Was trying out Netbeans for J2EE development. I guess Eclipse has bitten me deep, and there is no reason to learn another IDE to do the same thing.
• nginx
  Proxy, load balancer. The slimmest, fastest of all.
• php
  Used for WordPress development and other random projects
• python25
  Was an avid pythonista and still have some old scripts that I didn’t bother to replace.
• soapui
  A tool that should be used by all developers working with SOAP
• virtualbox
  Mainly used to test unstable applications inside a controlled environment. Also, instead of the usual benchmark tests, running make buildworld inside a virtualized FreeBSD is more fun.

D:\apps\dtv\ (*most of these tools need prior knowledge correct settings)

• bondriver_pt_st
  BonDriver, er, driver for the PT2. Used by most other apps in the dtv folder
• epgdatacap
  The no fat, ninja tool for video capturing EpgDataCap for BonDriver. Scheduled captures, scheduling by EPG keyword, EPG data downloads (from the airwaves), actions for pre/post capture.
• epgdataviewer
  EPG viewing and collaboration with EpgDataCap
• tvtest
  Again, a no fat entrant; a digital broadcast viewer program

D:\apps\games\

• dxwnd
  Used to use this to play Starcraft in a windowed mode. Pending deletion
• umineko_ep1
  Umineko no naku koro ni: Episode 1 … Didn’t have time to finish this, maybe some other time. Maybe.

D:\apps\image\

• irfanview
  Image viewing program. Another application from years back, and still using this. Like foobar2000, there is yet a new replacement for this genre.
• mangameeya (Unofficial page)
  Another image viewing program, specializing in comics/book scans. Development has stopped, and no official redistribution of the program.
• pictbear
  The only image editing program that I can really use. Photoshop/Gimp is just too “good” for me

D:\apps\net\

• filezilla
  A good enough FTP client. Used to favor SmartFTP, which had the most features that I needed and the small footprint, but it went payware.
• firefox
  Have been using since this was named Phoenix. Better standards compliance than IE, lesser footprint than Chrome when opening more than 15 windows or so, and the extensions (I love FireBug)
• janestyle
  I type more in 2ch than in IM m9っ(￣ー￣)ﾆﾔﾘｯ
• negies
  A network monitoring tool, and also a lightweight firewall with throttling feature, fitering by address, port, program etc.
• pidgin
  One IM program to rule them all. Using it for my Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger.
• smiledownloader
  Nicovideo and Youtube downloader. Small, simple and does the job well.
• thunderbird
  Used to be my main mailer until GMail came. Still using it for the mail archives.
• utorrent
  Sometimes I download Linux, FreeBSD ISO’s, LOL

D:\apps\office\

• ooo
  You don’t need to pay for a full office application suite. OpenOffice has it all. Another old entry. I still have an old StarOffice CD from PCFair 1999, but I started to actually using OpenOffice in 2002 for courseworks etc.
• sumatrapdf
  A free, light PDF viewer, with good multibyte encoding support. Previously FoxIt was my favorite, until it get bloated.

D:\apps\sysutils\

• 7zip
  Why pay for WinZip/WinRar when you can have it all with 7zip? ….. OK, no RAR compression :)
• daemontools
  Sometimes I mount Linux, FreeBSD ISO’s, LOLx2
• defraggler
  Needed a customizable defragmentation tool, and this cuts it just well. Quite fast too.
• dvddecrypter (Wikipedia page)
  The ultimate tool to backup your DVD’s. Development stopped and ImgBurn picked up where it left, but there are some features you just can’t get from other tools. :)
• frhed
  A hex editor. You don’t use it everyday, but for that moment when you just need to change this few bytes inside the DLL.
• imgburn
  A CD/DVD backup and burning program. Just enough feature for 98% of all your burning/backup needs.
• jdk142, jdk150, jdk160
  Sun Java Development Kit 1.4.2, 1.5.0, 1.6.0 respectively. I am half Javanese :)
• sakura
  A powerful, lightweight, feature-rich tabbed text editor. Has all that you expect of from a programmer’s editor like syntax highlighting, grep, text formatting, and macros. Japanese only.
• siren
  A file renaming tool, with support for ID3 tag in MP3s, EXIF tags in JPEGs etc. I like to keep my photos untouched by photo management programs (Picasa, Flickr, LightRoom etc) named by date and time, and Siren just fits nicely.
• tightvnc
  The fastest VNC of its kind. Basicly I keep all my services (video capturing, web server, utorrent) running automaticly, but there are times that you have to change some settings, and you are not on localhost.
• unlocker
  A cure to one of Window’s file locking perks. This program releases the lock from the locking process to the file that you are moving/deleting. Very handy.
• usbdeview
  Lists all USB devices and all drivers whether it is in use or not. Using this to check for driver problems, uninstalling invisible drivers.
• winsplit
  WinSplit Revolution is a window management tool. I am running dual FullHD (1920×1080) monitors, and this program helps arranges windows to predetermined position and size, trough hotkeys.

D:\apps\video\

• avisynth
  AviSynth is the secret of video encoding automation. Using this to encode my recordings for archive, and also the occasional video transcoding.
• ffdshow
  The FFDShow-Tryout codecs have enough filters to play most videos through DirectShow.
• filter_manager
  RadLight DirectShow filter manager. You can readjust filter priorities with this tool.
• graphedt
  One of the useful tools from the DirectX SDK. Can be used to check the rendering routes (DirectShow filters) for a particular video, or manually render a file through a specified filter arrangement.
• gspot
  AVI codec information viewer. Shows you the codec information and video/audio properties of a video file. Useful to view the properties of a faulty AVI file
• mpc
  MPC-HC, the lightweight media player for windows, mimicking the classic Windows Media Player. You can use the internal filters or depend on DirectShow filtersfor rendering. This is my main video player.
• virtualdub
  An AVI video editing and encoding software. Hardly using this now, but somethimes there are some videos that you want to crop, recompress or restream, and this does the work fine.
• vlc
  Videolan Client, another video player. Used to be my favorite, and am using it on Ubuntu and FreeBSD. Even used it on BeOS. A truly multi-platform application that I like (alongwith Pidgin), and you don’t have to worry about codec/DirectShow filters availability. Currently it stays as my secondary player, since MPC does not plays directly from ISO’s. Nothing wrong, just that it takes a little bit more memory and CPU than MPC
• xvid
  My favorite codec. It plays on a lot of devices/players, and it’s free.

It’s been a great while since my last post. Since I have most of my audience in Facebook, I didn’t find the material fit for public consumption to post here. At least to make it worth the domain name registration, here goes another post.

Being a Windows user most of the time for the last 15 years, there are some things that I grow to dislike regarding the application/program management.

First of all, it’s the “Program Files” folder itself. Maybe it’s just me, but coming from DOS 2.1, when Windows 95 came with LFN (long filename) support, having to workaround the space inside a command is a big WTF. I guess *NIX guys will feel the same too. Even so, the name is too long.

Then came the lack of categorization. It’s probably enough for an office PC to have just Office and an antivirus software installed inside the folder, but in a home PC, or for a person who works with a bundle of software tools, where having 20 or so other programs installed are a norm, it makes more sense to categorize (or customize) the applications either by type or functional usage.

Next are installation and packaging. Since the beginning until now there has not been a single elegant way to package an application, install it, and easily remove it without leaving any residue.

My partial solution to all this is, to use a folder “apps” with functional subfolders inside it, like “audio”, “video”, “sysutils”, etc, so that I can find the application folder much quickly, and plainly, just looks more neat. Furthermore, the “apps” folder is on a separate partition than the system partition (C:), so that I can reuse the application throughout multiple Windows formats.

I have been using this method since 2000 and probably dodged a lot of hassles and time lost when reinstalling Windows. Some of my apps even still hold its settings and data from that period.

If there are any of you starts mentioning, note that this is a grunt from a user coming from when PortableApps.com is there. I like the PortableApps idea, but I’d rather manage my apps on my own.

Next post will be on what is in my application folder.
お楽しみに （n‘∀‘)η　　ﾔｧｰｯﾎｫｰ

Let the pics speak for themselves first :)

Build myself a PC instead of spending on a LCD TV. Aimed for a small-medium sized, silent and powderful HTPC, and the results are quite near to my ideal.

Building the PC costs me 2 trips to Akihabara (which was free) on Saturday (May 9th, 2009) and a dislocated arm (j/k). Unpacked everything in the night and started fitting everything the next Sunday morning. Must be lucky that there were no hiccups at all during the assembly process. Everything just fits in nicely and the first power-on was perfect. Installed Windows XP Pro SP2 Japanese and boot time was under 20 seconds, after the 5th restart and hard disk defragmenting. Parts specs and review follows.

Specifications:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EG45M-UD2H Rev 1.0
• CPU: Intel Core2Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz, 6MB L2 Cache)
• RAM: CFD DDR2 800MHz 2x1GB (4-4-4-12-2T)
• HDD: Seagate ES.2 ST3500320AS 500GB (32MB cache)
• Graphics: Gigabyte GV-N96TSL-1GI nVidia 9600GT DDR3 1GB
• Optical Drive: OEM AD-7200A Black(Drive by Sony/NEC)
• PSU: Enermax EPR425AWT 450W 80-plus Certified
• Case: Silverstone SUGO SST-SG01B-F (Black)
• Monitor: I-O DATA 21.5″ Full HD X22BKR
• Keyboard: Filco Zero ASCII-layout
• Mouse: Logitech Wireless Trackball

Processing power are middle-class with a bottom-end quad-core Intel CPU and a slightly performance-oriented DDR2 ram from CFD. The hard disk is also a reliable a silent Seagate ES.2. Although there is already a full HD capable G45 on-board graphics, I opted for a full 9600GT for a more smoother full HD playback and the occasional Spore time-waster. I chose this board from Gigabyte for its fanless design, which fits into my silent and powderful criteria. It even performs as good as than it’s active cooled brother, but on a lower temperature, thanks to the huge heatsink and pipes. (see Tom’s Hardware review conclusion)

The hardest choice is to choose the casing to fit in everything neatly. Shortlisted a few cases and seek wise postings from real buyers on the web. Finally I settled to Silverstone’s new revision SUGO-series. This makes it a V2 for Silverstone, as my previous case was also from them (and the same color too). The selling point for this case is the almost cube uATX form, but can fit a full-size graphics card with adequate openings for good air flow and heat management. The PSU sits not more than 2cm above the stock CPU heatsink/fan, so an aftermarket heatsink that can fit in would be hard to come by. 2 intake fans (above the graphics card sucking air from behind, and in front of the HDD rack sucking air from the side) are there by default. After fitting in everything, there is actually ample free air flow on the motherboard, and the side ventilation are quite good with holes from front to back. Cables coming out from the PSU, however, cramped between the the PSU and the optical drive, but this a non-issue since it does not block any heat flow to and from the main parts.

The whole system was black in color, so I decided to give a black-related hostname to it. Since my last PC was also an all-black system, some candidate names are already on my mind ie nero, darknyte, kurosuke (1st choice actually) etc. But it sounds too gay, so I name it to something I would adore. Searched my memory for black-related anime characters, but nothing that I favor came up. The one that managed to pop up is Kurokawa Tomoka, one of my favorite 3 actresses (the other two is Miyazaki Aoi and Yoshitaka Yuriko). So “tomoka” it is.

There is however a few stuffs which are not in the plan. First, the PSU is quite a hit to the pocket at Y13,000. If this is just a pure G45 uATX machine, then I would definitely go for some low-middle class no-name PSU. But since I decided to fit in the C2Quad and the 9600GT, having a stable and sufficient power pack is becoming a necessity. The 80plus marketing also had me buy into their gig. But the result is a quiet PSU and solid (purported) performance, so I hope this is a good choice.

Secondly is the mouse. Having used to a very good Microsoft Trackball Explorer mouse for more than 7 years, I am all for trackballs. Sadly there wasn’t any from Microsoft camp at Yodobashi, and I am left only with Logitech. Actually I already dropped the trackball and put a normal big sized mouse was on my list instead. After 10mins in the mouse corner, I decided that trackballs are the one for me indeed. Actually there was no mouse that really interested me that day, so I picked the best of the rest. Once I put it into use, it felt really awkward when being used on the floor; with the arm on a higher lever than the mouse. And the right click button was a bit too far to the back. It felt just OK in the shop, so I guess the feel would change when it is on a proper table.

Now to get a proper working table and chair. Still undecided on whether to get a half-height table or a full one.