ronny.haryan.to

I tried indoor rock climbing today. And it was really fun. Too bad I was not in a top notch shape, so it was harder for me to climb compared to my friends. My arms are really sore now, couldn’t lift a spoon or hold a pen properly. But I will definitely try rock climbing again.

Today I learned basic safety for rock climbing, how to wear and adjust the harness, how to use the clips, what a belayer is, etc. I’ll probably get a book in getting started in rock climbing.

Like they said, life is short, we should “play” more. Next up, winter deep sea fishing in July. *crossing fingers*

I have always wanted to write informative and comprehensive articles based on what I have learned. But being the Great Procrastinator™, most of the times I couldn’t be bothered enough or do not have the time to write longer than two sentences max. So I thought, “Hey, why not just write it down anyway, and stick it together with the other things I have learned today, and call it ‘Things I Learned Today’?” So there it is.

After all this is what web logs were really meant for originally, writing logs on the web.

The first entry is probably longer than the expected average TILT post length because I had some time to spare today.

I decided to combine the items together in one post instead of splitting them into separate posts. It’s not about the length, there’s nothing wrong with short posts. It’s just that I feel that I could include more interesting stuff in the combined post which would otherwise not be included because they might not have been “blogworthy” by themselves.

1. SMART hard disk monitoring, emerged smartmontools, and set smartd to run in the background. (Via Slashdot)

2. The Vigenère Cipher, I knew this from my cryptography class so it’s just refreshing my memory. (Via blogwalking to Mr. GBT)

3. Next time, put more breadcrumbs for the stuffing. (Via cooking roast turkey)

4. X.org X11 transparency and shadowing is still not stable, e.g. glxgears caused X to crash even with AllowGLXWithComposite enabled. (Via Gentoo Wiki)

5. AUD 1 = IDR 7,500++, and rising. (Via Yahoo! Finance)

6. There’s a Japanese pr0n model/actor named Anna Ohura, not to be confused with Anne Ahira. (Via a dream I had the other night. As if I’d tell you.)

7. A soda can and chocolate can be used to make fire. (Via Boing Boing)

8. The notorious TBE managed to screw up my Firefox, again, after an upgrade. I had to make a backup of my Firefox profile, delete the extensions directory and reinstall all of my Firefox extensions. It was strange that after I reinstall TBE it was working fine again. So I stuck with it, for now… but one of these days…

9. I finally know what Podcasting is about. I’ve heard about it for so long but I couldn’t be bothered to look it up in Wikipedia or Google until this morning. (Via blogwalking to Priyadi)

10. There’s a Wiki clone written in Ruby called Instiki that seems to be recommended by some people. Not in portage yet, so I haven’t bothered trying. (Via Nat)

My Linguistic Profile:

• 50% General American English
• 25% Yankee
• 20% Dixie
• 5% Upper Midwestern
• 0% Midwestern

From: What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Note: I don’t speak American, but I have a bit of a Canadian accent which is pretty much similar to American. Now my English accent is a mix of Canadian and Australian.

I was looking for a way for CVS to send email whenever someone commits something in the repository. It’s possible by editing the CVSROOT/loginfo file and specifying a handler script. The script can basically do whatever with the information, including sending emails.

I came across a post talking about utilising the CVS loginfo file, but with a twist. It outputs to RSS instead of emails. Clever.

I modified the script to work with our work environment. Nothing major. But it got me learning Ruby. This was my first “fling” with Ruby. And I love it.