<tuppa>  I thought you have a child process pigeond
<pigeon> tuppa: yeah, forked the child process... but not exec yet...

Gotta love free and *good* wifi.

Unfortunately for anyone who has subscribed to my rss feed, your reader will probably see all old posts appearing as new ones. I apologies if this causes any troubles.

I’m at Kao Hsiung Intl airport RCKH right now, waiting for my flight to VHHH, using their wireless provided by HiNet (which is like the best network in Taiwan).

So, what to do next… download some LCA 2007 videos? apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade? ;)

Hmm… doh! Flight delayed a bit… oh well… more coding time…

And on the first day arriving Taiwan, the news has got my attention on her again, being she was seriously injured in a car crashed and was in a deep coma. After less than 2 days of emergency treatment, she passed away.

Being in Taiwan when this happened has made me feeling even more real and close to this incident, as if it’s something I should really be concerning about. Guess that’s the power of the news channel on TV, which was continuously showing updates of her status.

As a GWG lover, I guess this photo has become a collector’s item now…

Staying here for three weeks or so, till just a little after the chinese new year, then heading to Hong Kong for a week before going back to Sydney.

It isn’t as cold here as I was told. In fact there were days which were considered hot (>20°C).

Food is great here as usual. The Taiwanese style fried chicken, all-you-can-eat hotpot, lamb hotpot, mini hotpot (yeah, lots of hotpots, even though it’s actually pretty hot now), seafood, steak, all sorts of ice tea and drinks, you name it. Not only they’re bloody good they’re also bloody cheap. We also went to the end-of-the-(chinese-)year (Wei Ya) dinner of a relatives’ company, which was absolutely awesome.

There’s also nite markets, and some minor random sightseeings and (window or not) shoppings.

I’ll keep uploading new photos here.

I got there sometime just before 11 I think. Weather wasn’t very good and quite windy from time to time, but it was very comfortable as I was definitely not sweating, a lot better than one of those 37 degree weekends (which was the week before). It was very crowded, with a lot of families with kids and everything.

So I was pretty much standing and walking around for over 6 hours, taking photos, watching flying demos and aircraft displays. It’s absolutely good fun if you love planes. For me maybe it was too much of a warbirds and fighters show, but still very enjoyable. There were aerobatics, formation flying, attacks demo, helicopter joy riding (which I didn’t do, it wasn’t free :P), also some R/C aircraft and gliders displays. F-111, Hornets, Hercules, Boeing 707, Vampire, Tiger moth, and many many more…

I took almost 300 photos in total, though most of them look pretty dark and dull due to the weather. And to satisfy my panorama need, I’ve taken a 360° panorama view at the base at the end of the day.

Note to self:

• Need better camera for this kind of show, a DSLR with like a 30x optical zoom lens would be great :)
• Hang around at the end of the day when almost everyone are leaving, perfect time for taking even more photos wherever and however you like, without the extra random people.

My RAAF airshow 2006 album is here.

The next day, we got up rather early in the morning and headed up to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, where the reception took place at the Carrington Hotel in the evening. We got there around 11 something. And we decided to just look around, as we’d never been there before.

Brett asked me to help being the interpreter for various parts of the night, including translating some of the speeches to and from Mandarin. I still think I didn’t do the job good enough, partly because I was only told to do some of the translation on that night and on the fly. Especially the last one when I accidentally mixed in an English phrase my Mandarin ;) It was a good and rather entertaining experience though.

Rob Levin, aka lilo, was hit by a car while riding on his bike. After being in the ICU in a coma for a few days, he passed away on the 16th September.

For those who don’t know, he is the founder and the head staff of freenode. Now what’s funny is I myself do not know this fact until today. I know lilo on freenode IRC, as we all do. I’ve talked to him a few times. He’s normally on some of the channels I join, such as, IIRC, #handhelds.org.

I know he’s a staff of freenode all along because he’s the “oper” on the IRC network, and he’s always the one who does all the announcement. He has also helped me once recovering a channel password. He’s friendly, helpful, polite, and patient. I guess this is how nice he is, but not someone who goes “do you know who I am?” :)

We have definitely lost a hard-working and precious person to freenode and the free software community.

Apparently he’s still online right now…


> /whois lilo
i=levin freenode/staff/pdpc.levin * :Rob Levin
#mythtv-users #handhelds.org
Whoops, I've stepped away. For URGENT freenode help (channel flooding, trolling users, network problems or access issues), please email my pager at 4iiygyvs<freenode.net . It's my job and I'm happy to respond. For ROUTINE issues, please see http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#gettinghelp.... Please take a look at my personal blog when you get a chance: http://spinhome.org .... Thanks!
is identified to services
End of /WHOIS list.

> /msg nickserv info lilo
Nickname: lilo << ONLINE >>
Registered: 12 years 35 weeks 1 day (7h 17m 28s) ago
Last Seen Address: i=levin>freenode/staff/pdpc.levin
Last Seen Quit Msg: “bbiab”
Email Address: levin@freenode.net
URL: http://blogdun.us/
Nickname Options: NoExpire, AutoMask, UnFiltered, AllowMemos, MemoNotify, MemoSignon

At the same time I did some “sightseeing” around, and checking out one of my favorite buildings, currently the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101. Then I noticed the difference (pretty obvious) between the satellite images from GMap v1 and v2. The one from v1 is in fact newer than v2. The one in v2 is still being built!

GMap v1

GMap v2

Once again, thanks everyone who has taken part in this very special moment. Our parents, relatives and friends, those who came and those who couldn’t make it.

Very soon we’ll be finishing our wedding website, where you will find photos and other information of our engagement and wedding.

Regardless of the critics on the book and how people not being happy about what David might have written and described, I enjoy it very much. It’s almost like I’ve been visiting Horowitz myself when I’m reading it. Especially when there are things mentioned which I have actually watched or heard, such as the concert in Moscow, and the Last Romantic. I truly feel the presence of Horowitz within all the words in the book.

At the same time, it was a great thing to fill my brain everyday with music and piano materials. In the morning I found out what Scriabin and Chopin were like in those days. Later on I learnt about how Horowitz picked his cadenza for his Mozert concerto No. 23 in A Major. And then read about how aristocratic Rachmaninoff is and the the difficult time he had.

The conversations between Horowitz and David are the kind of conversations that I lack these days. I remember I have done similar things with my last piano teacher, Claudia. Despite the fact that her musical and piano knowledge is at a much higher level than mine, we do have the same level of passion towards the piano. We could talk about and share a lot of things we know, all the time. Those were really great times I had.

I also did feel sympathy for David in a lot of ways. It’s certainly not easy to accompany with someone for a long time. And anyone could imagine it would even be harder with the Horowitzes. And I have to say I appreciate this book and David for sharing his experience with the maestro of the piano.

Next, I guess I’ll get more books on piano, and I’m sure I’d enjoy as much.

My gf brought me to the Chikan Tower this time. I thought, excellent, that’s where I used to see from an online webcam. And so I rang my friend Robert to get onto the webcam site and capture a shot for me. Thanks Robert again! That was really cool and fun I think :)

More random photos of the trip at hk/tn 2005…

Potential spoilers if you haven’t read the book yet, but here is some of the quotes that I found amusing…

“We lost them for the time being,” she said, “but we won’t last another five minutes if we stay in this car.”

So steal a different one, Langdon mused, now that we’re criminals.

Langdon chuckled. “No more false than that of a mathematical cryptographer who believes in the imaginary number ‘i’ because it helps her break codes.”

Oh well, and now I’ve moved onto another Dan Brown’s book, the Digital Fortress.

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Thanks :)

Now what I need next will be some real pigeons…

Singapore is hot and humid, but I didn’t complain at all, cos I like hot. Excellent and cheap food there. Now I miss the chicken rice a lot. Almost everywhere is very well organized, and clean, of course. I will definitely go there again…

And so I’ve hacked my photo album script a bit again to do thumbnails. Have a look at the photos of my Singapore trip.

Also, finally, put up some photos from my Taiwan/Tainan trip last year.

Project deadlines at work as usual. It was still pretty good time though. And I got 18 cans of Lipton tea for the X’mas kringle thing. And they’re all gone already!

I’ve moved again. Well just the next road down. The move was sort of quick and easy without any significant drama. (And of course, we hired removal people to do it this time. I have to say they’ve done a pretty good job.)

So, just what can you do with an ipaq running Linux? Well, while I was packing all my stuff including computers, I managed to get bpalogin (a Telstra Bigpond cable login client) running on my ipaq. It was easy. I compiled it for strongarm and that’s it. Another thumbs-up for Linux and open source software. So with all my main computers packed and unplgged, I was still able to get online. I took a picture too :P

Click it for larger version

Coding… hadn’t really got time to do much.

I got at least 5 different patches from people all around the world for the gtk2/gkrellm2 port for bfm. I have to apologize for not doing anything with bfm at the moment. Hopefully in a few months time I will be putting together another release.

I was trying to get some sort of chinese inputing on my ipaq and it wasn’t that easy. I hacked xkbd a bit and got to the point so it is showing the changjei keyboard layout. However at that time Xft and Freetype weren’t cooperative enough to work perfectly on the ipaq. I’m pushing this off a bit and will deal with it later :P

I was playing with Evas again and getting my head around with its smart object. I started off with this Evas Staff widget. Hopefully I can write some useful programs using this in the future.

Also, I’ve joined the GPE gang and started working on gpe-irc, an IRC client (obviously), together with a few other developers. I’m mainly dealing with the backend stuff.

Hmm I’ve written a quick perl script to do english-to-engrish translation. If you don’t know what engrish is, visit engrish.com.

Piano… My piano tutor has found a better job, but it’s in Kaohsiung. And so she went back to Taiwan which means I’m now teacher-less :( Still, I’m keeping up with my piano every now and then. I’ll probably look for another tutor a bit later.

A bit of credits here for my piano tutor. Claudia, she’s very good at piano and music. And I guess she understands me a lot too in terms of my knowledge of piano and music. She knows what I’m good at and weak in. She knows what, where and how I’ve been thru piano and music. And so she’s done a very good job in guiding and teaching me. Not to mention we both share the same level of enthusiasm and passion towards piano and music. We can basically just sit there and talk all about piano non-stop.

Yet I have to see if I can find another tutor like that :)

(as a matter of fact, I’ve bought this poster at the end :D)

To me, Tainan is a bit like Taipei, with less people. Comparatively, Kaohsiung is a bit more crowded than Tainan (I was in Kaohsiung for one afternoon). Night markets in Tainan are brilliant. I went to two of them. Even though they’re all similiar, I spent quite a lot of time there eating and playing. I’m quite sure I’ll want to go for them again in the future.

Also lots of thanks to my gf’s parents and brothers. Thanks Roy for driving us around on the first day. And also others for bringing me to all those different seafood. And of course, thanks a lot to my gf too :)

Food and stuffs… YUM…
“Paper-fishing”

Next week I will be heading off to Taiwan to spend some time with my gf, followed by a couple of days of staying in HK.

If you love piano, watch it, buy it!

I think I’m going to buy its soundtrack soon. :)

More at new beetle

Oh, my desk is in! So once I’ve done all my unpacking/fixing/moving stuffs around, I can go back to all my wonderful coding/hacking mode, hopefully… :)

The next thing I really need is a nice and big desk…

Anyway, yesterday, finally got cable modem installed, all done and running smoothly. Excellent. Plus just by chance I met a friend of mine whom I used to see her like only once a year only. I guess it’s a nice day :)

They are:

Karen’s Gallery – My mum started taking some drawing courses and you can find her works there.

Snoopy Centre – Go and be amazed with her *HUGE* amount of Snoopy collections.

She made these two websites by herself. So don’t praise/blame me for anything :P

Able to put up the newly hacked mozilla jar file for 0.9.8, with a diff file, so from now on, hopefully, you can just patch mozilla yourself.

Rest time…

Haven’t done much lately. I did some coding on the plane with my ipaq. It was fun. And also thanks to Carmen for accompanying me on the flight so that it didn’t get too boring :)

Also, another big “doh!”. It turned out that Rachael had her flight back to San Francisco just about half an hour before mine, so I rang her up and we were able to have this little gathering at the airport, at the actual gate for getting on the flight. We both rang Maggie and had our last minute talk, too.

The bad thing was, I realized at least after a week that, I had my digicam with me at that time and I just hadn’t taken a photo. I mean, how often do you have a friend meeting you at the flight gate without any arrangement? Ok everyone, say “Doh!”.

Put up a little hack I’ve done to mozilla’s interface, and you can find it at this <mozilla> section.

And now, I have a damn long todo list with almost 10 different apps/things/stuffs to do. Let’s see…

I want to say, “Thou shall not kill pigeons…”, and “Thou shall not kill… without a shoutgun… (In Quake)”. =)

ScummVM is just plain cool (For those who don’t know, it allows you to play those old Lucasarts games such as Monkey Island and Indiana Jones). Check out my screenshot running 3 games at the same time. bbrox/Lionel got it running on the ipaq too. Some nice screenshots at his page. Also he got midi music working on Linux too.

I got my Netwinder box. And it’s running Debian now! Sweet… Check out photos at netwinder. Also thanks Rasterman for letting me pulling his Netwinder developer edition apart too.

Bubblefishymon 0.4, it tells time now! Check it out at bubblefishymon.

Hmm, the driver floppy included doesn’t have the linux driver anyway. :\ Oh well, with that SCSI card, I finally can use my old 4-tape drive.

And on this special day, someone special had made it even more special. I guess it doesn’t really matter to this special one that much, but it means a lot to me, really. Thanks, thanks and thanks… truly…

And, thanks for your present too. I love having present that I can really make use of. Really handy gadget, makes me feel like a real crazy hacker now. :P

This morning at my work, a pigeon flew to the window, and was trying to stay at the edge. Probably trying to get in too, but those windows are not those you could open. The edge is too small. It then flew to another window, another edge. Same thing. All it was doing was basically waving its wings continuously in order to stay on that edge. After almost 2 minutes, it flew away…

And I was telling myself. It’s a sign… it’s trying to tell me something… Let’s see what that something will be…