ITCOW [L]

Athletes?! Nowadays, everyone’s exercising it seems. I’m moving my thumb and typing this. I’m actually an athlete too?

The media has over glorified as to one reader recently wrote to a local papers mentioning about the over glorification of computer gaming guys (and gals) who won money, going for some bigger competition (they call it the Championship). It’s like USD$30k for each player for their year long contract. A dream job for some but how many “fatal1ty” do we have? How many actually makes it for long with this as their full time job with more and more product endorsement that makes people actually stays away from the product. Surely the products sell with the endorsement?

Kids, stay in school, play your games, yes please do, but stop dreaming to go “pro”. Truth be told. Who’ll be impressed you wasting a year of your life playing “professionally”? Depending what you’ll be interviewing for. A computer engineering kind of job? Something in the financial market? I think you’ll fit in best selling computer gaming gears but if that your dream job? Maybe Mr. Salesman.

If companies are serious about endorsing their players, the contract would not be allowing the players to continue studying or working while they meet their commitments to the contract. It’s as good as throwing the money away.

Gaming in Singapore local context is over rated. pro or not, studies first. How many “Fatal1ty” are there or will there be in Singapore and for the matter, the world?

The recent media coverage of local gaming as a sports is of poor taste. Yes, many singapore and overseas companies wanna tap into this billion dollar industry but with the media covering every little gaming convention, competition, news, snippets even, it is overwhelming and parents who grew up not knowing what the hell a mouse if for do not and may not know the actual dollars/ cents value versus future of their kids to any form of gaming.

The media local and international must not over glorify the players as athletes. Computer Gaming is not a sport! What sports has so much obese and unhealthy with caffine filled brain, lack of sleep and puffy eyes “athletes”? What sports will allow you to play non stop and eventually DIE FROM IT? Have the people who dream of going “pro” forgotten the guy who died from over laying?

A recent article in Wired offered a glimpse into the real life of sponsored full time gamers from non other than world renowned Korea. It’s much like National Service on whole new level. No online messaging, practice, practice practice! You sleep together, eat together and i suppose shit and bath together even. It’s regimental and harsh with little than expected returns.

Going “Pro” is what i have heard a lot recently due to the holidays, kids are all around eateries, public transport fiddling on their PSP with their love ones/ parents/whoever close by. What’s the point of leaving home then when you want to play games wherever and whenver on your PSP? I counted 7 PSP players in a single MRT cabin on my way home today. That’s only the PSP, there’s the other camp of NDS players. How many of such Pro turn peasants can survive later after their “glory days”? When the sponsors and companies stop sponsoring them? Yes, you can game till you’re 60, 80 years old at what cost or pay?

Real Pro athletes goes into coaching the next generation of medal winners. Can gamers go down that same path?

I bet every single dollar that even Fatal1ty will end sometime. Do you think he does not think of his future? No pain no gain. Forbes article http://www.forbes.com/technology/200…2provideo.html

No pressure?! and relax when he plays. Do the math. Will an army who do not train under pressure and are relax all the time win wars? NO they will not! Bring that down to a more individual level, you don’t jog or train and you take your yearly IPPT, do you pass? Of course no.

So the crux of the whole discussion. Put off a year to game than studies. O Levels. Wendel was in DeVry University in Kansas City before he quit. Compare him to his peers 5 years from now. Who will have a steady income, ability to provide should his peers choose to start a family? At around 26 years of ago, 5 years time will be his 31 birthday and if then he woke up, with his million dollar dried up, endorsement of products gone, the coming of the next “Fatal1ty” whose younger by then compared to him, faster, better and earning and winning more. He’ll be with nothing to fall back on and oh, no Degree either, he quit DeVry Uni remember?

So not even a O level to pursue further studies, it is possible. I personally do not even have a N level cert, let alone a O but it has made me know as compared to my peers, my career advancement is hindered and I have already hit the real upper ceiling of my pay scale that even a degree holder will not hit after working for the same number of years. I was lucky but in reality, how many times lucky can you get?

Till the next Wendel comes along in Singapore with a backup degree to fall back on, forget going Pro and don’t consider yourself “sporty” from doing electronic games.

Payment after payment, I really feel like giving up on my books from Amazon.com

19 Oct 2007 – Books Order – Total cost $69.34USD

19 Oct 2007 – Send Invoice to Vpost USA

23 Oct 2007 – No reply from Vpost USA, reminder mail sent

2 Nov 2007 07.30am – Amazon.com confirmed item shipped.

8 Nov 2007 07.04am – VPost asking for payment – – SGD$44.78, paid.

8 Nov 2007 10.08pm – “Items received at vPOSTUSA Shipping Centre” invusa@vpost.com.sg again, saying parcel received for shipping but

“Due to insufficient information, we are not able to match your package(s) against your invoice(s) you had submitted to us (please refer to the above table). We need the following assistance from you:1. Email us your invoice at invusa@vpost.com.sg or fax at 68413982, if you have not done so

2. Reply to us which of the above package(s) is associated with the invoice(s) you have submitted to us. For example, Package Box No (F9999) is associated with Invoice No: 123456789

3. If your merchant has provided you with the tracking number for sending your package to the US Shipping Centre, please email us the tracking number of each package to faciliate the matching of your package(s).

4. Please ignore this email if you had already emailed us your invoice. We shall have your invoice updated soon to match to your indicated package”

god damn it! i resend the invoice again on 9 Nov 2007 12.19am, exactly the same!!!

12 Nov 2007 9.01pm – “vPOSTUSA Invoices received and entered, We wish to inform you that we have successfully updated the following invoice(s) into our system on 12/11/2007″

12 Nov 2007 – More payments?! WTF, whatever, SGD$10.63 paid

If I ordered from Amazon.com and paid everything, it’ll be “Shipping and Handling: USD$24.95

Vpost has since charged me SGD$44.78 + SGD$10.63 = $55.41

It actually cost more, takes longer and VPOST interface sucks big time! Payment after payment, I had a hard time tracking my items I eventually gave up!

Don’t use Vpost unless you really ordering things from some online store that refuses to ship to Singapore!

17 Nov 2007 – 1st book received…where’s the rest?

What the fuck is the use of having a password on files you want to share? It’s just dumb as it’s eventually when someone actually have it on a non password stream/BT to share to the rest of the world and or someone actually repacking it up and redistributing it as a whole file.

It isn’t even a movie or TV show bittorrent file I am talking about. I know those files get this kind of treatment all the time to drive temporary traffic to these guys website using the excuse of what? To protect their privacy and the downloader’s privacy.  What nonsense? It’s like those forums where you actually have to click on “Yes, I’m above 18 years old” to register or tick on the 3 screen longs “Agreement” to pass that time wasting page. Anyone below 18 years old know they have to click to bypass that and or putting a tick to agree. What’s the point then? Protect the website hosting that actual forum? It’s not even porn sites, from technology forums to just some talk shop.

So back to the password-ed BT files. If the CIA or FBI or any organisation that wants to catch the seeder/ person providing that file, do you think they do not have the brains or technologies to like, guess your passwords? No wonder people say people are dumb…I an google and found a actual RAR file cracks in seconds. Organisations that are trying to get these people most probably have something of miltary grade and can crack the password if they can’t get the passwords from the “Instructions” which was provided in my rar file. It typically tells you to:

1. Go to this webpage, some dumb page that may not even load for the matter.

2. Enter your email address, with bold underlined text saying it doesn’t have to be your email address. It’s like WTF?!

3. On the next page, there’ll be green text, that’ll be your password oh and or some puzzle fun, take the first 2 characters, add that to _ _ U P I D. hmmm, let’s see. oh yes. It’s stupid.

So what’s more efficient? SPAM to get traffic to their sites? I do not know why they want traffic to their site in the first place when people will be providing bogus email address in the first place and any simple javascript checker for forms will only detect if there’s a dot (.), a com, a net or .org or whatever with a @ and something, anything before the @.

And by the way, I was downloading a lesser known Linux distribution I saw on Distrowatch and found a BT seed on Mininova through Google.

I made a switch and I am lucky it was “a”, not a few. I switch over to 1and1 for one of my domains. I’ve been with Namecheap for 7 years and over the years and my now defunct hosting business, registered close to 2800 domain names through them. oh, those were good times.

Reading through a lot of print and download magazines (oh I know what you think but no, it’s legal and I use and pay for Zinio), 1&1, with 2 pages splashes of advertisments are eye catching to say the lease.

I gave them a try with one domain that was about to expire anyway on Namecheap.

I’ll tell you. Stick to namecheap if you are with them. Why?

All the followings are based on my geographical location, Singapore with ISP Singnet.

- Nameserver, DNS whatever people are calling it these days gets updated IMMEDIATELY. You change the DNS, refresh the dot.com domain, it points immediately to the new web server.

- Reminder services for expiring domains. This was a life saver and still is.

- Great A-I-O, all in one, GUI web interface for administration of all domains you own. Imagine the nightmare I had when I had to transfer the said 2800 domains to a new web server by editing their DNS to my new web server. Back then, namecheap already has although not as good as the current one, single change interface which you can choose to do to any domains you wish. Time saver!

- $8.88USD, well, not so long ago…as now their price went up slightly but it’s industry wide. It’s now USD$9.29 per domain.

- Reactivation of domain. It just works! Others may be providing it already but Namecheap allows me to activate domain that some ex-customers couldn’t make their mind up about! Expiring soon then expired only then they make up their mind, I had 30 days to entertained these people, expired + 30 days, nothing I can do any more.

and now, a community forums.

So, if you’re with Namecheap already, stick with them. Do post any comments of any other domain registrar you know of and your experience. Was it as good or was it bad?

Spell it with a “s” or a “z”, it doesn’t matter. It’s somewhat the way of the future, it’s not new and it sure does save money and space.

What difference and impact does it actually will make for the average home users? What about small to medium enterprises? servers?

This very page you are reading runs off a normal PC, an AMD AM2 processsor at 1.8Ghz (3000+ in AMD speak)with the ram, harddisk all that and on a virtualised Fedora Core 7. See the specs.

I run off another 2 more copies of Redhat Linux 9 and Fedora Core 6 off the same machine for testing. Making all 3 of them boot up and running at the same time is sluggish but nothing adding a few more strips of ram can’t fix.

It’s a good tool. For testing of applications, how the web server will behave before you actually implement the changes. Testing how your web pages or blog will behave before committing the final changes on the production servers. I ran Vista for 2 weeks and jumped back to Windows XP SP2 immediately early this year, the drivers support were really bad and software I need up and running never seemed to work. It’s improved quite a bit, I virtualise a copy of Vista on another machine to test out software I’ll be in need of. It has improved but not time for the full switch as of yet.

Want to try out Linux all along and heard all the talk about how it can revive your old PC hardware that are slow and old? Don’t waste your time. Linux itself even, has moved past a lot of that and you can experience and learn faster with it’s GUI, though needs little effort to run, will not be pleasant if your PC is not up to it.

One of the most popular distribution out there now, Ubuntu, try it out on a virtualised environment. You don’t even have to install it. Try out the “live-cd” edition. No installation required, run the virtualisation software of your choice (VMWare is a good start – start the “server” edition. It’s free, register for 10 or whatever the number of machines you’ll need keys for.)

Big boys are getting into the game. Microsoft. It’ll get a lot more interesting to what they can offer.

So, companies interested. What can virtualisation offer you? Check out their higher end product and explanation of their Infrastructure 3 here. Sit back and just view on (direct linked) Youtube.

Uptime is more and more of concern even to small business from selling of products through their webpages to offering of online customer support. Uptime is everything. Virtualisation can help a lot in that.

Hardware failure? Not a problem, move the virtualised operating system running your OS with all the bell and whistles properly configured over to another server, boot it up and it’s ready to go.

System crashes! Retrieved the backup copy of the virtualised OS, boot it up. Back in business then spend time troubleshooting what went wrong on the old copy. Some coding you did?

Consolidate the few racks of machines you have into just a few more powerful servers running the same apps/ OS/ others. Space are expensive in this part of the world…

A good plan is all you need to prevent all these from happening and the downtime will forever be the time that is needed to boot up the machine. Not recalling tape from an offsite vendor + frustration of getting put on hold + travelling time of the vendor to your office + going to the wrong building to meet you + restoring the tape + kicking all the changes back and actually rolling back the changes.

You don’t need a really powerful PC, you just need a lot of ram as you can see. Give it a try, your home PC bought anytime within these 2 or 3 years would be able to do it.

The truth. Your PC will not be able to take 1Gbps even your network is 1Gbps in speed. Oct 16 2007’s Digital Life, 58.3MB per sec attained on a demo Fibre to the Home network, Hong Kong broadband network staff did just that speed while a ADSL 6Mbps did 621KB transferring a full DVD of SDaving Private Ryan.

Why? Theoretically harddisk speed for one. We have in the past ATA100 then ATA133 then there’s SATA then SATA 2.0, 100Mpbs, 133Mbps, (we’ll ignore the buffer to host and buffer to the actual disk where the data is stored) 1Gbps and 3Gbps respectively.

I personally run a BF07288285 with no RAID as the OS disk and here’s what the speed is like:

They run off the Asus P5WDG2-WS PCI-X slot on a LSI 53C1010 like so:

Why bother about the network speed then? Hardware devices is still keeping pace and bottlenecking data transferred to them. I still think static IP address is the key. Back in Sept last year, here I spoke about this and it is still not achieved. Why is it that hard to allow home users to actually have static IPs at reasonable prices? Why the deflections from Singapore’s telcos? It could be:

- Market Demand – Who’s willing to pay and how at how much is price considered reasonable? For one, $300SGD a month is not reasonable.

- Abuse – Subscribers abusing their static IP. It’s a double edged sword. Subscribers know that. Tying them to their static IP address and on top of that, the modem’s mac address to the phone line, depending the technologies used, will actually stop a user from doing stupid or illegal stuffs?

- Upload Speeds – I would love 1Gbps seconds downloads but would love at least have that speeds UPLOAD speeds. It’s no secret people do run home web servers serving their web page, blogs, photos or whatever Web 1.0 or 2.0 apps they may be trying or developing. Being able to serve these files faster will be great. So give my 500Mbit/Sec upload please!

- Industry “Frown” – What will datacenters around Singapore and Asia think? If more and more users can actually host their servers from home with small companies maybe even hosting their servers from home or their companies? Balancing risk and the money involved (or rather, savings involved), having a 24 hour air con space partitioned out from an office space, remote IP Camera monitoring, water leakage, electrical surge monitoring systems (opensource based!) to monitor their say, 3 racks of 42U servers. Effectively cutting away this segment of the market from these datacenters.

- Government Bodies – Think all the 3 letters and the first up will be HDB. Rules about having such equipment (read: Racks) in HDB flats?

What ever it is, 1Gbps but the good stuffs are mostly overseas as of now. Contents contents contents! We hear this all the time and still, no local company has proven a killer app that will make a user surf around in Singapore using his super fast 1Gbps lightning speed connection. If he’s still surfing overseas, bottlenecking and eventually, cancellation of plans or downgrade of speeds, we’re back to square one.

Migration from Geeklog to Wordpress is a MUST! Move on! Don’t support people with hidden agenda(s)!

Read this on how to migrate.

No if you’re thinking of Outlook even with all it’s patches from Microsoft
and not even to their 2007 or older 2003 versions. The SPAM filter out there and
you can ask anyone who has used it before, is Gmail. The highly popular web mail
from Google that striked the Internet one day offering One Full Gigabyte of
webspace and has grown to more Gigabytes since.

It’s safe to say, a lot of people are having their own domain, if not domains
nowadays, it’s cheap to own your own name now anyway but the kind and amount of
SPAM coming into these mailboxes are overwhelming. I’ve setup most of my POP3
accounts to be retrieved by Gmail and I can access all of them from one
interface, GMAIL style.

Read about Mail Fetcher

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?&answer=21288

Diligently ticking and clicking Report SPAM also does help yourself in
reducing SPAM so, do yourself a favour, do it.

10 Reasons to buy a DSLR
here.

and my own reasons how to use treat your DSLR!

1. Do not use a DLSR with just the basics like setting it to auto and
shooting it all the time with that settings, if that’s what you want, get a
point and shoot cam, not a DSLR. You just wasted your money.

2. Learn everything you can with the DSLR you have bought.

3. Do yourselves a favor, get an external flash unit.

4. Kit lenses are great to start with, try loaning some lenses to learn and
you’ll get more creative.

5. Invest in a good bag damn it! You just spend so much on a DSLR, you can’t
afford a bag?

6. Invest in a good tripod. It doesn’t hurt to own a few, just like bags!
Each for it’s own occasion.

7. Get rechargeable batteries for your flash. Good ones only please.

8 Clean your cam and lens often. Cleaning kits are cheap!

9. Remember to bring your CF or other media when going for a shoot. hey hey,
you’ll be suprise!

10. Get a good (and often cheap) UV protector for all your lenses.

more? soon maybe….

This is actually a post I made at Clubsnap
forum but i guess it’s good info for the few bags i have. Just to share.

i used both lowepro and recently gotten the Curmpler 7 million.

The lowepro (i think it’s the 140AW) was a bit of a tight fit but just nice if
it’s just flash, 350D and EITHER the sigma 10-20mm or sigma 18-200mm. can fit
both but it’s tight and looks damaging to the equipment. Of course, you can add
pouches from lowepro.

the Computertrekker of course for those trips to office before a shoot as i need
my laptop. it can actually fit 2 laptops depends how you pack them. i can fit my
VAIO V505MNP on top the camera in a laptop pouch and a HP NC 6320 in the laptop
compartment. Sometimes, i need both laptop for work/ leisure.

Now with the 7 million home, it’s good to be able to bring everything as you can
see below, the sigmas 18-200, 10-20mm, 50mm f/1.8, 550EX flash, 350D body, CF
cards etc. It’s stylish and won’t scream “i have a DSLR” in my bad when
overseas. Do note also, the 7 million is the only one with the shoulder strap
thing. it makes a lot of diff and it sure if more comfy.

K13 gave me and a friend a good price (>$150) for the 7 million, my friend
gotten the 6 million with a Gitzo monopod. Some argue that Crumpler’s camera
bags are simply over priced, yes it’s expensive but for the colors (unless you
want the more common and boring black from Lowepro), cushioning and looks, it’s
well worth it. Their bag’s system makes a lot of sense, bring your gear in
another bag, fit them into the crumpler and carry it yourself to have a feel if
it’s really needed.