Zit Seng's Superwall

The Linux kernel admits to being dazed and confused, but tries hard to continue. Unsuccessfully. One of our server died. We looked at the screen, and were amused enough that everyone (who had a decent camera phone) took a picture of the screen. The kernel spat out in its logs: “Dazed and confused, but trying to continue;  Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?” Alright, the server wasn’t really important after all, hence its death was only noticed like over 3  months later.

I fail to be wowed by Steve Jobs latest product announcement, the all new iPad, which is supposedly so revolutionary that it creates a new product category. I guess it still does deserve its own product category, but it is nowhere so revolutionary that the media had hyped it out to be. The name itself doesn’t even sound interesting. In fact, I’m already reading a bunch of jokes about the name even before I finished watching Steve Job’s keynote video.

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I recently bought a D-Link DCS-2121 wireless network camera. It’s a camera that connects to the network directly, records video to a network storage, emails or uploads video/snapshots of detected motion, and provide real-time video monitoring through its embedded web server. As these cameras get smarter and smarter, more functions are integrated into it. It’s pretty handy to implement a simple remote video surveillance system just about anywhere you need.

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In less than 24 hours, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple is expected to unveil a new hardware product category at their special Media Event. It’ll be a product announcement so major that it is being compared to the likes if the iPhone launch in 2007 and Macintoshes moving to Intel processors in 2005. We’re talking about a new product category rather than simply another new product, and it has been reported that Steve Jobs was heard saying the Apple Tablet “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

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One of the best things that Apple had introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Time Machine. It’s a no-brainer backup utility that “just works”, and furthermore, one that people will actually use. While Time Machine works great with a direct attached storage disk (internal or external firewire/USB) or Time Capsule, it wouldn’t readily work with other network attached storage. If you want to backup “over the network”, Apple wants you to buy their Time Capsule hardware. But there are fixes to get around that.

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My not terribly old 320GB Seagate hard disk thought it has worked hard enough, and complained through its S.M.A.R.T. interface about overheating, so I decided it was time to buy a new hard disk so that I can pre-empt potential problems. I learned that hard disks are awfully cheap nowadays. It wasn’t too long ago that my Maxtor OneTouch Plus cost over $230. I know, that’s an external disk and there are some overhead costs with casing, interface, power, etc. But hey, it seems an internal hard disk of 1TB size costs just a little over $100 nowadays.

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This is a UOB ATM encountering a “system problem”, spotted recently at a crowded shopping centre in Singapore. The machine is basically a PC running a flavour of Windows. I’m just trying to figure out what Windows it is, and I’m guessing it’s probably Windows 2000. I’m slightly familiar with these things, so it is not surprising to me that they run Windows, even a fairly outdated version of Windows. In fact, I still wouldn’t be all too surprised if they ran OS/2.

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It looks like SingTel Mobile has mucked up again. In the late afternoon, I found that my mobile phone had no signal. After rebooting, it seemed to be okay. So perhaps it was my phone. Then my colleague noted that he had no 3G data connection on his SingTel Mobile line. Later in the evening, for much of my trip home, my phone again had no signal at all. When it did, it had no data. Eventually, I got to find out that people have been calling me and were not able to get through. The callers were not on SingTel Mobile network and they got a network busy message calling my phone.

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So, the inevitable question came when I had to re-install Linux on my PC. The PC isn’t new, but I got a new hard disk, and my old Fedora 7 was too old that the current latest Fedora 12 wouldn’t detect as a installation it would upgrade from. I don’t mind a fresh installation of Linux. It seems like a good idea to start afresh rather than let years of upgrades accumulate cruft. So, what will it be: Fedora or Ubuntu?

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I’m sad to say, Linux still isn’t quite ready for newbies. Although I only had a few simple struggles with my latest Fedora 12 installation, I cannot imagine how a computer newbie is going to handle such challenges. Granted, Linux is probably more suited for the “power user”, many people in Linux-land try to evangelize the idea that Linux can be used by just about anybody. To this end, I think Linux might be going in that general direction, but it’s still a long way getting there.

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