Month: December 2007

Office reading

Do you know Liturgy of the Hours (or Divine Office)?

Click here to read detailed information: link.

I like a software: Universalis. And you can also read the daily readings on the website.

But the different locations have different reading, so the reading might not be same as your place. For Malaysia, I think the nearest is US calendar of the website. Because some places celebrate Ascension on Sunday, some Thursday.

[1/1/2008]
I forgot to said that, I like the “Reading” from Office Reading. Because most of the readings were written by saints. And from the reading, we can know a lot of their spiritual knowledge.

Website colour hurting your eyes?

Do you find that some websites background colour is hurting your eyes?

You can solve this problem by installing Greasemonkey or Stylish if you are using Firefox. If you are using IE, then you need to install Trixie. I personally do not install Trixie.

Then, install the “user styles”:
Black text on white background or Light text on black background

If you are using Maxthon instead of IE, MyStyle is the solution.

I think Catholics should know this

I am conservative. But I think this is important for Catholics to know, especially male teenagers and adults. I suggest to read the whole article (link).

The whole article is quite important. It is about a common mortal sin. But I like the following quote:

Holy Communion is a very private thing – and no one should ever feel compelled to receive Holy Communion: no matter what the circumstance. It is most inappropriate to ask another “why did he not receive communion?”
(From: http://www.newjerusalem.com/bepure.htm)

Note: Because the background colour is not comfortable, if you are using Firefox and installed with Greasemonkey or Stylish, you can install Black text on white background or Light text on black background.

Toshiba Satellite M200: Audio and modem drivers

Sorry for some visitors looking for the other drivers, because I did not notice that some visitors asked about the other drivers.

For the audio driver, I installed from my Toshiba laptop. So I don’t know where can find the correct driver. So, I found that Softpedia provides similar driver version. You can try the driver.

For the information, the audio driver I installed is:
Realtek High Definition Audio
Date: 3-1-2007
Version: 5.10.0.5377
(Info showed by using DriverMax)

For the modem driver, I also installed from my Toshiba laptop. I also don’t know where to find the correct driver. I think Toshiba website provides the driver. Link.

For the information, the modem driver I installed is:
TOSHIBA Software Modem
Date: 11-28-2006
Version: 2.1.77.0
(Info showed by using DriverMax)

Actually I want to upload the driver. However, I don’t know where are the correct sites for uploading. And also don’t know whether uploading the driver will against the license or law or something else.

Hope the links I provide will help.

Note: If anyone has tried the drivers, please post your comment of the result. So that others will know the drivers are correct or not.

[6/1/2008]
Since the audio (or sound) driver doesn’t work, I post another article about this. Read more.

流水不腐 Flowing water does not rot

I like this chinese idiom: 流水不腐, which means “flowing water does not rot”.

This is a basic phenomenon. If the water can flow, the water sure be clean. This idiom can be applied to many circumstances.

The drain need to be unobstructed, so that the water can flow, and the drain will be clean.
We need to allow the air of the room circulate so that we have enough oxygen.
We need to go to toilet, so that the our organs will be clean, and we will not sick.

For me, this idiom also points out that I need to practice my skills always, so that my skills will not be dull. Just like an old man need to use his brain otherwise he will become dull. We often said that, if we don’t use our brain, our brain will get rusty.

Right, if a machine we don’t use it, it will get rusty. You might also say, the machine will have longer life span if we seldom use it. Since you have the machine, why don’t just use the machine so that the machine becomes useful? Since you have the skill, why you want to waste it?

Besides that, in the spiritual perspective, we need to do spiritual practice frequently so that our spiritual life will not be rotten.

Linux review

[This is also an article from the previous blog.]

After a while dealing with Linux. I have learnt many things.

There are too many distributions of Linux. It is hard to choose. I have tried LiveCD. It is nice to use LiveCD. Because, if you got the pendrive or external harddisk and the computer BIOS is able to detect USB, then you are able to boot in the pendrive or external harddisk LiveCD through BIOS. However, the pre-requisite of the pendrive or external harddisk is that, the file system need to be FAT. This is because a program syslinux is only able to modify the boot sector in FAT, ext2/3, but not NTFS.

There are a lot of LiveCDs, for rescuing computer, auditing computer and else. However, the most I prefer is SLAX KillBill edition. Because, using SLAX, you can add other tools in it, especially when you are using portable drive (pendrive or external harddisk). Besides that, you can also save the configuration. Therefore, though it is LiveCD, it works well for customisation. And for KillBill edition, it provides Win32 emulator. Even an auditing LiveCD – Ophcrack – also uses SLAX as its base.

However, SLAX KillBill edition cannot read Unicode. This makes me disappointed. Maybe I am stupid that I don’t know how to setup chinese reading in SLAX KillBill. Since it is not usable enough to install chinese reading and writing, and cannot modify the setting but only save configuration (because it is LiveCD), I would like to choose an alternative. The alternative that provides modification of the system, read/write chinese, usable and else. Then I try to search for the Linux distribution with harddisk installation. Then I found Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is very great with its usability if compare with other Linux I have experienced (though not much). Besides that, it is easy to install with GUI. And the installation can be fit into 1 CD.

However, I found something very disappointed. First, it is easy to install tools/applications, but not in the way I want. Because the installation mostly through internet. That means without internet, you cannot install the downloaded applications. Maybe because I am a newbie, that is why I found that is is really hard. Next, many time I found that there are open source applications. Then I tried to download and install in Ubuntu. Though I can compile it, but there are still something make the applications incompatible. That means, though open source is platform independent, it is still not compatible to every distribution of Linux.

Next, I found that Linux is not compatible with NTFS. Which I means, Linux cannot write to NTFS, but only read. Luckily, there is a compatible program for Ubuntu called “ntfs-3g“, however, though I installed it, I can only detect one drive and one NTFS partition, actually I got 2 drives and several NTFS partitions.

Next, since I found that LiveCD is so great it can be booted whenever it goes only if the computer BIOS can detect USB, then I try to make my Ubuntu become portable. However, it fails. It is because different computer has different drivers, therefore, it is not compatible to the computer. But I think, in future, there will be a portable OS.

Lastly, though Linux is very great, if you really want to change from Windows to Linux, then you might lost a lot of entertainment. This is because many games are written for Windows platform. Though Linux has games, there is no large games. This is because most of the programs run in Linux are open source. For games, if open source, then how can they earn money.

Todo: Next, I plan to install Windows to my external harddisk, to see whether it can be portable or not.

God the Greatest Programmer

[I like this article I wrote, I posted it at my previous blog. So, now I copy it to here.]

In the beginning, I dislike programming. This is because I felt that for creating AI (Artificial Intelligence), robots and else is something arrogant. Because men will think that they are intelligent beings that can create intelligent things. Even the movies like “Matrix”, “Terminator” and else show that what the human created will dominate the human being. It indicates that the human have the intelligence to create something greater than themselves, the human are more intelligent than the Creator.

However, as I learn through programming, the more I learn, the more I like. It is because I found the sweetness of programming and how great He is.

If we are doing Computer Graphic (CG), we will deal with lighting, ambient, material and other else. But whatever we create, we are only simulating the real world. You can see the reflection of sunlight from the river. I don’t think what you create will better than the real world.

Now, imagine that you are going to create a program or a game such as “The Sims”, or even greater. Then you want to create a virtual world. Then you choose a programming language. Then you create an earth in 3D form, because you feel that earth is the main environment of the virtual world. You might use OpenGL to create the 3D objects. Then, you feel that it is empty for the background. Then you use your programming language to generate the array of the heaven. Maybe you just using texture mapping to map your bitmap file at the background. Or if your computer has enough memory, you can also create the each star as 3D object. How similar is this work with the Creation of the world.

When you create your virtual world, how do you write your program? Imagine that, you need to add light to your virtual world, what will you do? You might write a function, named “HaveLight()”. So, you call the function “HaveLight()”, and your virtual world will have the light.

Function, a very important component in programming, a very important component in mathematics, a very important component in our lives. Even in philosophy of mind, there is a philosophy called “functionalism”.

In programming, functions are written in programming language. How great is a programming language, because you can write many functions, many programs as long as you have the algorithms.

Let us see how God created the world. God said “Have light”, then the world “have light”. And, if we read the bible, we know that the Word of God created the heaven and earth. And we create the world using the “programming language”. Besides that, from the bible we also found that “what is visible came into being through the invisible”. The real world which we can see is created by through the Word that we cannot see; the virtual world which we can see is created through the “programming language” that we cannot see.

The technology is developed fantastically today. Is the development of the technology of this world by chance or by fate? Before the existence of programming language, the bible already talks about the creation the world through the Word of God. There is nothing to be surprised that what we do today is only imitating the Creator. Because the bible said that humans are created according to the image of the Creator. Therefore, what the programmers do is nothing special.

Note: These are only my personal perception about this world.

Humble heart

I was an altar server (I use “was” because I do not serve mass as altar server like before anymore). One main thing I learn from the Guild of St Stephen (Archconfraternity of St Stephen) is: Humbleness. I like this virtue, because it is opposite to pride.

Humble should come from our heart that we truly admit our lowliness. It is not, we pretend to be humble so that everybody like us. It is, we truly act humbly even everybody dislike us.

For an altar server, especially when we serve mass, it is very important to be humble. We should work “behind” to help the priest celebrate the mass. We should not show off ourselves during the mass. We should not attract the congregation to look at what were we doing.

Why we need to be humble as a Christian? The King was coming as a servant, the God became Man. This is how humble works. As an altar server, one should serve instead of be served. As Christians, this is what we should follow.

"Language Bar" and "The language bar"

This is an XP annoyance. I don’t know how does it comes out. The problem is, when I righ-click the task bar, and choose “Toolbars”, there shows “Language Bar” and “The language bar”.

I also not sure how to solve this problem. But what I have done already solved the problem. That is, I disable “The language bar”, which also disable the real “Language Bar”. Then I enable “Language Bar” again, and this time no more “The language bar”. And I restart XP. And fixed it.

I want to state that, before I found 2 language bar, there shows double taskbar. If I open an application, the taskbar will display duplicate applications. I restart the Windows, the problem is disappeared.

Weird.