Apr 30, 2005 Comments Off
People’s deepest secret shared via postcards sent to Frank Warren, who runs PostSecret, then scanned and posted on the blog. Some are thought provoking, some are sad, some are funny, some are creepy. You can share your deepest secret that you haven’t shared with anyone by creating a postcard (image and secret) and mailing it to PostSecret, see this posting for more information.
Apr 30, 2005 4
These are my URL ABCs:
I use Mozilla Firefox as my web browser.
Apr 30, 2005 6
My close friends in Sydney treated me a nice birthday dinner at Hurricane’s Grill, Bondi Beach. My initial expectations were high due to various comments given by my friends regarding this restaurant. It turned out that the food and service was, overall, excellent. I had the “Ribs and Steak” which consists of a half-rack of grilled pork ribs and a 200gr steak. I also ordered creamy mushroom sauce, which was very rich and creamy, I think everyone liked it. I had been warned about the generous portions served at Hurricane’s, but I can usually eat a lot. I was given a choice of pork or lamb, but I was not in the mood for lamb. I was a little bit disappointed with the steak though, it was nice, but together with the ribs it’s like comparing driving a 1995 Toyota Corolla (which was a good car when I had it) and driving my friend Fernando’s Toyota MR2 Spyder. I wish I had ordered the Portuguese chicken instead of the steak, the chicken was full of flavour and tender. The ribs was the best ribs I’ve ever had, better than Tony Roma’s. We also ordered ceasar salad and onion rings which were not bad, but not really that special in my opinion. I had a Crown Lager to wash off the delicious pork ribs. The price tag is a little bit too expensive for a student like myself, but at a “mere” AU$35 for a huge and delicious portion of ribs and steak and a quality beer, it is a bargain for most working Australians. Plus, there’s a beautiful beach right across the road.
An interesting thing I found when I was looking for the restaurant’s website to put in this post is that Hurricane’s Grill is an EPSON Australia customer. One of the top results in Google led me to a PDF document in EPSON Australia’s website describing the system that the restaurant had commissioned from EPSON Australia to be used for POS, kitchen order and receipt printing. The restaurant waiters also use handheld devices to take orders from the patrons, which I presume are linked via a wireless network to the kitchen’s ordering system. The restaurant’s main objective for having the system was to minimise the time from taking orders to serving the orders to the tables. I have seen this kind of system being used in a Wagamama restaurant when I was in London around July 2003, so it’s not a new concept to me. But it’s still an intriguing idea for a business opportunity. :D
Hurricane's Grill 130 Roscoe Street, Bondi Beach Sydney NSW 2026 Australia Website: http://hurricanesgrill.com/ Reservations: +61 2 9130 7101
Apr 30, 2005 2
I finally read this article (which had been sitting for a long time in my thick pile of printed “read-later” articles) from Apple Developer Connection about XMLHttpRequest which plays a major part in AJAX, which has been discussed a lot lately in the web development area and is used by popular services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Google Suggest and many more.
Maybe I should have named this category “Things I Learned Yesterday” since I usually post after midnight.
There are still a lot of people who are so naive and believe everything they got from the Internet or from forwarded emails, especially urban-legend or scarelore kind of stories. I hate those.
CeBIT Australia exists and it will be held from 24 to 26 May 2005 at Sydney Exhibition Centre in Darling Harbour. I’ll be there if I don’t have any exams or anything like that during that time. Free online registration.
Need to put less ginger and more salted fish for my spicy eggplant with minced pork.
A second look on iSCSI and iSCSI on Linux, and a first introduction to Vinum Volume Manager after reading a Slashdot post about Firewire storage.
There are several available options for backup solutions that are POSIX ACL aware, including using star, proper backup program like Arkeia, patched NFS (out-of-the-box with SuSE), rsync with ACL patch, etc. Info from this post, googled after answering a mailing list post.
“IT Research Methods” is such a boring and useless (at least for me) subject. It’s hard to force myself to do the assignments for this subject. I wouldn’t have taken the subject if it weren’t mandatory. Oh, what the hell, might as well make something useful out of it since I’ve already paid for it.
Evolution 2.0.x doesn’t provide an alarm for contact items such as for contact birthdays and anniversaries. I haven’t looked at the source code yet so I don’t know how hard it is to implement this. It’s surprising since I thought many people would have wanted this useful feature.
Apr 26, 2005 1
Runlevels in Gentoo are meaningful names instead of numbers. However, underneath they are still numbers, and the mapping is done in /etc/inittab. The symlinks are in /etc/runlevels.
l0:0:wait:/sbin/rc shutdown
l1:S1:wait:/sbin/rc single
l2:2:wait:/sbin/rc nonetwork
l3:3:wait:/sbin/rc default
l4:4:wait:/sbin/rc default
l5:5:wait:/sbin/rc default
l6:6:wait:/sbin/rc reboot
This is different than what I was used to (Red Hat and Fedora). In RH or Fedora, runlevel 3 is the default runlevel with no X, and runlevel 5 will start X and a graphical login manager like gdm. In Gentoo by default the graphical login manager is started at boot when the xdm service is added to the default runlevel with rc-update add xdm default.
As you see from the snippet of my /etc/inittab above, runlevels 3, 4 and 5 all map to the default runlevel. So if I wanted to make runlevel 3 and 5 behave like RH or Fedora, I could change the map for runlevel 3 to, say, console and then create the console directory in /etc/runlevels then start adding the services I want to start in the console runlevel with rc-update add ... console, minus xdm of course.
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