Tuesday June 15, 2004 
MCWong
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MCWong
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| Blah! MCWong |
Tuesday June 15, 2004
(2004-06-15 20:20:20.0) Permalink Comments [2] esc Esc ESC ... No I'm not trying to get out of 'vi' insert mode. Esc in support services world I'm in reads: Escalation. Bad news for most people, good news for me, I've got a job! It's actually gratifying, no kidding. Unlike engineering projects that get axed all the time, all customer cases must come to a close, eventually, hook or crook, and therefore escalation too. Closure is a good thing. You sleep better, or you try to sleep it off and forget about it... either way, I slept. ;-) It does, unfortunately, get to you sometimes. Especially when you get to explain "fixed, unverified". What kind of a fix is that? "I think I can solve world hunger! But I can't prove it ..." More so when it grabs all your time trying to explain why it's unverifiable, to the point that you couldn't blog! Now that's a sin. The reason for my "unverified" absence at Blah! "What do you mean you can't fix 'freeing free xxx panic'?" That take quite an effort to explain, simply bec. you can't be too convincing when each time you repeat (and repeat and repeat), it always ends with the sentence, "however, we can't reproduce it so we cannot be sure if it will not happen again." Although probability says lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, Murphy's says otherwise. Since we can't prevent for sure a ufs quietly messing up meta structures, at the least, try not to panic. [See SRDB70770] It's not going to do much good if you run only 1 app on 1 file system, but the system stays up! You can still use it as an egg boiler. Good 'ol ufs is too fragile to begin with. I remember studying about file system strucutre; inodes, direct blocks, indirect blocks, and that's college, wholly 2 decades ago! [Disclaimer: I'm 21!] Desire to buffer i/o opens up whole new opportunities to mess up in ways that's untraceable. By the time you see it (panic or otherwise), it's too late, since it probably happened some time ago. What gives? Let ufs R.I.P. We have zfs, if you have to go Sol 10 just for it, it's probably worth it. I have yet to take a test drive, but I will, and probably give me something else to blog about too. (2004-06-15 00:01:02.0) Permalink
Thursday June 10, 2004 Slingy Singapore? I prefer Kopi-C. It should be obvious enough that I'm in Singapore... duh! I have a Singapore category up there! Do you know here's Sun Asia Pacific's headquarters? Ok, big deal. Geography 101... Pull out a world map, let's start with some landmarks... Australia should be easy to find, just go "down under". Move up, the bunch of big and small islands is Indonesia. Go left and up, you find Malaysia and then Thailand. Great, you just missed Singapore... :( It's that dot somewhere there. So what's up with Singapore Sling? It's not the national drink for sure, but pubs and hotels make tons of money out of tourists who are generally told, it's a "must try". [sneaky] Singaporean drinks Tiger Beer and Kopi-O, or Coffee-black. That brought up an interesting topic, "Kopi". A mutant of transliteration of transliteration (yes twice) and somehow it is generally the only way to order the strong, dark and sometimes lethal wake-me-up from your local "Kopi-tiam" (coffee shop). "Kopi" obviously sounds like "coffee", and it is, but Singapore actually writes "Kopi" on menus. There is no word in Chinese for "coffee". So when coffee was introduced to China, the words are simply transliteration of "coffee". When a Chinese "hookien" pronounce "coffee", it became "kopi", due to dialectic accent. Good proportion of Singapore Chinese are hookien, and of course Chinese is not written in latin characters, but Singapore is English speaking, so born "Kopi". [???] Logical? So Kopi-Tiams serves Kopi, but Delifrance, StarBucks and Spinellis serves "coffee". "O" as you have guess by now, is hookien for "black". Here's a run down on the variations in case you happen to drop by one of these days: Kopi, the default configuration is coffee with condensed milk (or sweeteners), no sugar added, or needed. Kopi-O, is Kopi with sugar, no milk, no creamer. Kopi-Gau, is Kopi thick, although less water, but same volume at no extra cost. You wonder what's the catch? No catch, as long as you can drink that stuff! Kopi-C, is Kopi "silky" (I think), which means Kopi with evaporated milk and sugar. Kopi-Bing, is Kopi-on-ice, no skates or costumes. :)
Now the advanced version:
Kopi-O-Gau, you can translate this by now.
And as always, there's the exception to the rule: Kopi-Gosong, as in Kopi "plain", no sugar, no milk. The real Coffee - Blank! Ok, black; and "gosong" is Malay word for plain. How's that for a mutant menu. (2004-06-10 08:07:06.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Wednesday June 09, 2004 One could never miss or resist clicking on the link to our premier blogger MaryMaryQuiteContrary. Afterall, being fixated at the top of the "Most Popular Weblogs" roster, and with 3 times plenty hits as the 2nd in line, the self-mutiplying effect is just fascinating. To new bloggers or just surfing-bys, "What's this really popular blog?" Mmm... *click*. Ka-ching! Hits += 1. Classic lesson on marketing. Build a brand name, get to the top, keep your customers, the new ones just follows. It helps too where there's bells and whistles, i.e. lots of pictures, stories, and my gosh, a contest with real prizes! And ships! How do you beat that? After all, it's Duke the stuffed one.
Mary knows her market well, being a marketing person. (Shhhh, being new here, I looked her up in NameFinder. ;-))
Now how does one dislodge a market leader? Not that I have the urge (or believe I could) but you can't deny the thought. It's like, how do you out-sell M$? Clearly a great product alone doesn't do it. Unix is clearly more rebust, scalable and not to mention, secure. Usability-wise, Mr. Jobs had it covered. But the Windows empire is still there. Take a page from IBM PC clones war in the 80's. Long long ago in a galaxy far far away... clones sold at fifth of the price still make good profit, the clones fester, killed the IBM PC. The fact that you got here is probably bec. of the cloned blog title "MaryMary...". 8-) I must admit, it's a conspiracy, but I prefer the term "Experiment". [tongue-in-cheeks] (2004-06-09 09:09:09.0) Permalink Comments [3]
How could you not like children? Ask me that question a year ago and I would say, "how many ways would you like the answers?" But now, how could I not like children? Look at this cutie cute cute baby baby... ahem... btw, that's my daughter, she's turning 1 year old this month. Even my mother submitted that I was not the children-kind-of-person; even when I, was a child myself. I was may be 7 or 8, a tidy, I should say "pristine", toy crate was an obsession. Every toy was in it's box, and every box has it's place in the crate and all was in harmony. Btw, I am the youngest of four so absolutely no one touches my toy box. Except of course, the "guest". When mother says, go "play" with your little friend! Gasp, my worse nightmare! I wished she meant hide-and-seek. They're just like "guest" accounts, password is always "welcome", they log right in and head straight for the confidential and proprietary. The worse was the phrase "Go play with", which was always taken as an implied "take ownership" permission to what they want and trash as they see fit! I wonder what happened to that toy crate? You should see my cubicle today. Everything got it's place alright, which is just about anywhere that fits, or not. Ok, mostly not. It's not gonna get me any cleanliness award from Workplace Resources but I can find my stuff. Afterall, I need to keep up with the image of an engineer. Parenthood does strange things to people. I couldn't imagine how I would take care of my own children which is may be why we waited so long before having our first. But now, just can't ever seems to spend enough time on my new obsession! (2004-06-09 03:03:03.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday June 08, 2004 Blah blah blah... Blah, blah blah blah? Blah blah. Blah! The all encompassing, ubiquitous, blah. Google search blah returns, "... about 2,670,000"; soon 2,670,001? The choiced mocking where no word could, it's blah. I have no idea where the word originated but then who cares. Dictionary.com defines blah: "Worthless nonsense". But isn't "worth" subjective? The title choice for my first blogging experience may be cliche. Hey, I need a username to get my blogs.sun.com account; pressed with anxiety of what am I gonna write about, the first thought, "blah blah blah"! [lightbulb] There you go, no framework, no boundaries, no agenda. So welcome dear readers; here's my blog, and you be the judge of worth and sense. (2004-06-08 08:08:08.0) Permalink |
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This picture was taken with an old digital camera that I had for 4 years now; and what a pleasant surprise! It actually looked really good! I was on my way back from lunch and figure that it would be nice to post a picture of Sun Chai Chee office. It was a hot day (as always in Singapore), but it turned out to be a perfect day for photography.
This building used to be the Central Post Office! Yep, all mails came here! Being previously factories, the inside had unusually high ceilings for a cubicle laden office. That turn out to be REALLY nice, because the whole place look bright despite the cubicle dividers. No claustrophobia.
You are warned!
Ah! Home sweet home.
