How to enable FreeBSD/Xorg on iBook G4 with ATI Radeon card

This is just for my personal notice but if it can also help the others configuring FreeBSD/Xorg on the old iBook G4.

Please refer to this page and this page.

The important thing here is:

1. Run sysctl hw.ofwfb.relax_mmap=1 as root.

2. Add the "AllowEmptyInput" "off" option in the xorg.conf generated by running Xorg -configure (after running the above command).

The best singer ever

Long time never post, and what just made me feel the urge is not new year, not tech gadgets, not programming and not work or future or career. It is just a song. A song all know and love for so many years.

我只在乎你 - You are what I care about

時の流れに身をまかせ - Let yourself loose with the flow of time

- by Teresa Teng

So many times I listened to this song, but this is the first time I actually paid attention to the lyrics. Besides the perfect singing performance by Teresa Teng, tribute should be sent to the music composer and the lyrics writer, too. If you happen to understand both Chinese and Japanese, you will soon find that the lyrics are in sync, they have the exact same meaning no matter it is Japanese or Chinese. This is very rare in translated cover songs afaik. And the lyrics are so soft and so full of subtle feeling that perfectly expresses the feeling of women when in love. Everything blends in so nicely and perfectly.

Then, I went on to listen to the same song covered by other singers, but no one actually reaches the same level. Personally feel that they paid too much attention to showing their good voices and singing techniques, but forgot the fact that this song gotta be sung from their hearts.

Lastly, I would like to quote the Chinese sentence appears first on the Japanese version of the video above.

There is this sound that you do not need to deliberately remember, because you never forgot.

Create PDF Forms with OpenOffice

Emm.. it has been a long long time since I last posted so I guess most of my readers has left this site already :P So have to write something to pull them back.

Well, the title says it all. Did you know that you can actually create PDF forms, the ones with interactive fields that your users can fill in Adobe Reader (but cannot save), with OpenOffice?

The fact is I have been looking for a cheap, or free solution (Adobe Acrobat is costly, my friend). I didn't expect it to be so near. All the while I know you can create PDFs with OpenOffice but never thought that you can create fillable PDFs with it. So, in my quest for the cheap solution I found out that Adobe actually opens up the specifications of the PDF format online for free. While reading through the specs I was wondering why nobody has ever made something for it. And it suddenly got into my mind, would OpenOffice have already supported this?

And YES!

Here is how you do it. Not something difficult but I think OpenOffice should advertise on it more :)

Hope this helps.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year!

I don't care what day is it now. I just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

New Year often gives us hope. But what about a New Day? Isn't that as important as a new year? Or perhaps it is more important.

I remember reading an article that said, we should live each day through as if that is the only day we need to live. Just imagine, how often do you decide to do something in the beginning of the year but quit a week later? If it is just one day, perhaps everyone can do it then :-)

New Year! New Year!

Shanghai Trip

Went to Shanghai to join a friend's wedding party from 23 - 28 October. This is my first trip to Shanghai and also my first time became the best man. It was sure a busy day. Here I once more wish them Happy Wedding and Happily Ever After (^ ^)

Some photos of architectures:

Statue watching over a building

Pagoda of ancient time

Relaxing :)

Another pagoda of ancient time

Sunset reflection

Sunset reflection II

Sunset reflection on a lake

Photographer taking picture of sunset reflection

A Web CM (which is also a clock)

PC Maintenance Tip 2: Keep your PC clean

Many times, people complains that their computer runs slower than it has been running before. And here are a few common reasons:

1. Disk fragmentation
2. Bloated registry database

So, today I would like to introduce a few tools which I personally are quite useful in fixing these problems. No guarantee though :P

• Auslogics Disk Defrag
  A defragmentation tool which is better than the default one that comes with Windows.
• Auslogics Registry Defrag
  Yes, it is right. Registry can be defragmentationed, too :D
• CCleaner
  This helps you clean temporary files and also the registry.
  WARNING: Backup before you clean your registry.

By the way, I think the best sequence to run these software is: CCleaner -> Registry Defrag -> Disk Defrag.

Enjoy.

Computer Addiction ... the reversed way

It seems that the worrying role in the computer addiction issue has been reversed recently. It used to be mostly parents worrying about their children but now it is the other way round.

This made me think about one question: would it be less addictive if you grow up with it since young? Or the other way round? Anyone knows of such research?

PC Maintenance Tip 1: Connection Boosting

If you are interested in the technological terms, check out Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU), Time To Live (TTL) and TCP Receive Window (RWIN). Of course you can tweak these settings in Windows registry, but it is not recommended to edit the registry unnecessarily. Therefore, download a tool like TZ Connection Booster and let it do the tweaking for you.

It is generally believed that good connection can be achieved by setting MTU to 1500, TTL to 64 and have a reasonably large RWIN value. However, you should experiment with various different values, for example, I think I get the best performance at MTU:576, TTL:64 and RWIN:130000+.

The above settings would affect the overall network performance of your system. But some firefox tweaking might help in improving your web browsing experience, too.

Moving back to dotkoyi.blogspot.com :D

Hi, long time no see on dotkoyi.blogspot.com.

According to my last post, I have moved my blog to dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, which was hosted on my home server, but why am I still posting here? The simple answer is: I have moved back to blogspot.com :P

The longer version of the answer is that, I moved house. In this new house, I switched my Internet provider from ADSL to Cable, which unfortunately caused some trouble with publishing my own server. The real problem is yet to be found out, I just need to have a channel to write :)

Below you can find some old posts which I have posted on dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, in case somebody missed them :P

A lover too confident

This post was originally posted on dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, which is my home server on 20 January 2008. This home server has to be taken down due to some technical reasons.

I bought an iPod Classic 80GB last Thursday. The guy in the shop asked me whether I was using a Windows PC or a Mac machine, and said that this iPod only works on Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X more recent than 10.4.x. I said, “OK, but I have both types of machines so it shouldn’t be a problem.” or at least so I thought, although my iBook G4 is still running Panther which is version 10.3.x. I thought there might be some incompatibilities or lack of functions, but the basic functions should work well under Linux or Panther. But I was wrong. Apple did something to the new iTunesDB file in iPod making it impossible to work with other players except iTunes, and even Panther can’t handle iPod anymore COMPLETELY! I just couldn’t get it. If it works with iTunes in Windows XP, what is preventing it from working under Panther??? Disappointed

However, I was lucky that the team at gtkpod (an open source iPod management software in Linux) had managed to reverse-engineered the problem and made iPod working again under gtkpod. Now I have been playing around with my new iPod for a few days with the help of newly compiled libgpod, gtkpod and gpodder, although I feel there are something wrong (I have only used an iPod Shuffle 512MB) so I don’t really know how other models of iPod should work :-P) like the not showing of covers and played podcast episodes don’t get sync’ed correctly with gpodder/gtkpod, I can still live with it

Once again I have to say a big thanks to the open source world

And I have felt much disappointment in Apple. I am still somehow OK if they only block out other players but they have gone too far by blocking out their own OS, too. Those who know me know that I am a big fan of Apple’s products, but now I feel like being betrayed by someone I loved Sigh.

Happy New Year!!! (^^)

This post was originally posted on dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, which is my home server on 4 January 2008. This home server has to be taken down due to some technical reasons.

Wow it is year 2008! How fast. Here I would like to wish my family, all my friends and all the people a Happy New Year and a fruitful year to come

I used to make new year resolution in my blog, …, ok, only once in year 2006. Oh no, I think I haven’t improved much since then (^^!).

Anyway I think I have somehow managed to realize some of them in certain degree, and my priority for this year changed a bit. So, here I go.

1. Don’t give up easily.
2. Be patient and take things slowly.
3. Be nice to the others from my heart.

Having a lot is just like having none, so this is it. (^^)

Hope that this will be a great year for all of us.

A Christmas Tune

This post was originally posted on dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, which is my home server on 26 December 2007. This home server has to be taken down due to some technical reasons.

Merry X’mas everybody!

Err… I wouldn’t try this with my board, though (^^!)

A long wait…

This post was originally posted on dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, which is my home server on 1 December 2007. This home server has to be taken down due to some technical reasons.

Just bought a new 320GB external USB hard disk from the Internet and it was delivered in the afternoon. The last one I bought was about 3 years ago. Since then data has been growing and recently I couldn’t even defrag it since Windows complained that it has too little free space left. So, time for a new one I thought (or a new filesystem without the need to defrag and acessible from all major OSes?). So here it is.

I have been spending the whole afternoon just for moving data from the old to the new one, so I would have my personal stuff on one and work-related stuff on the other. And I noticed something funny regarding the time needed to move data.

First, I moved some 40GB worth of files, which consist of some individual 2GB files (smart reader would recognize this as the consequence of using FAT filesystem which can only handle 2GB per file at most). And surprisingly, it didn’t take a very long time. Now, I am moving about 3GB of files, consisting variable file sizes which are comparatively small. And the time it took has already exceeded that of the 40GB worth of 2GB files. Well maybe this is not something new to find out about and rather predictable, I didn’t know the difference would be so big.

10 Career-killers to avoid

This post was originally posted on dotkoyi.hobby-site.org, which is my home server on 25 November 2007. This home server has to be taken down due to some technical reasons.

This is the first post I have since I moved my blog from Blogspot.com to here. This article from the career section in Computerworld tells about what you should watch out for if you care about your career path, especially in the IT sector. I just want to keep this link as a reminder to myself and at the same time to share it with you. See ya next.

Please update your bookmark

Hello fellow readers, I hereby announce that dotkoyi has been moved to the following URL hosted at my home server (^^)

http://dotkoyi.hobby-site.org/

From now on, all updates will be added to the new site. However, I will leave this site active in case there are any troubles with my server at home.

Happy New Year (^^)

Some nice songs

A long-time-no-see friend sent me a link of a nice song, which led me to this site which provides a collection of more nice songs :-)

To all my friends: I know sometimes when I am too stressed with my work load, I will be very down and this might cause you a bad time dealing with me :-P I am sorry about that and really appreciate you guys being there. Thank you. - from a sometimes-not-so-friendly friend ;-)

For those who are in hunt for a job!!! Must read!!!

Oh... I absolutely know that I should be doing work now. But this article would certainly help those looking for jobs, this would include many of my friends and juniors. So, let's find out how to answer interview questions properly. I don't know if this works in Japan, too, but I think it would at least impress the interviewers in a good way :-)

10 types of programmers you’ll encounter in the field

Ya, I totally agree that working at work is more productive than surfing the Internet, but I can't ignore this article. Again, only for programmers, don't say I didn't warn you. Emm... I think I fit in the following types:

• The Evangelist
• The Code Cowboy
  

Eating makes you full faster than not eating...

Found a funny article which claims that working at work improves productivity. This must have been conducted by some frustrated managers who see their employees walking or talking around each day in the office not doing what they are supposed to do. Of course I totally agree with it. Perhaps working is 100% more productive than doing research like this, too. :-P