Fancy a 4 days 3 nights vacation at Club Med Kani Maldives or Laguna Bay Redang with your 3 best buds?
Steps:
Click the image below for more information. This is NOT a paid advertisement and I don’t receive anything for this post. Seriously.
Hell I wish I am eligible for this promotion 😉
It has almost been a month since I wrote my last post. I’ve been busy, yes. Busy enough that I didn’t have the chance to write.
I have been away to the United States and back. While there I was tired more than normal simply because of the commute to work and the different weather conditions. I’ll post some pictures from Boston in the next posts.
Back to the collection of US Visa in Wisma MCA in KL. The procedure is there is not that cumbersome. One quite important thing if you want to spend the littlest time there is to come early. 2.30pm is considered early for next-working-day pickup of the Visa and your passport (if you are picking up a Visa applied weeks ago you can come in the morning). The US Visa office have a lunch break time (compared to UK Visa office which is closed at 3pm with no lunch time).
Anyway, when you arrive at Wisma MCA you have to register at the lobby – mention that you want to go to VFS. The “receptionist” will swipe your card at the computer and produce a slip. Once you reach the floor, you’ll report to the security guard and form a queue at the corridor in front of the office. I was the 5th in line. Write your name and contact number at the back of the yellow card you obtained at the embassy.
Your turn in the queue is important as this is the order they will call you once you are in the office. I was out after 5 minutes the office started processing. They were quick.
Try not to bring a big bag or important things as you’ll have to leave everything outside. Just like when you were in the embassy you’ll have to switch off your handphone here too.
The bottom line is to be early. At least half an hour before the office opens. I guess this applies the same if you come in the morning. It’s important if you want to spend 30-40 minutes max there. Believe me, the line was very long.
If you are planning to go to the US for any reason whatsoever, do consider confirming your trip as soon as possible so that you have ample time to get your Visa.
Consider this: you have to go pay your Visa fees (RM440) at Alliance Bank at least one day before scheduling for an interview at this website. You will also need to pay RM27 for the processing fees by VFS. That is 2 days being used just for scheduling an interview. To my surprise a lot of people are applying for US Visa and this is a concern because it this will effect the earliest date available for an interview. This can be 2 or 3 days, or even a week from the day you schedule the interview online. And then, the completed Visa (and your passport) can only be collected the next business day at the VFS office.
Be sure to check your checklist.
Continue reading US Visa Application
I was looking for information on getting an International Driving Permit when I arrived at the new JPJ Portal. I am not sure if the portal was “developed” by a third party contractor or internally but I have a hunch that says it was built externally.
There may be other Government portals that are built on top of Open Source solutions but JPJ is obviously using Joomla. What’s worst is that the keywords used in the portal are insanely irrelevant. Obviously MP3 is not at all related to Road Transport Department!
I am not saying that it is wrong to use Open Source projects to cater for Government sites but I think if this project is external, JPJ is getting ripped off.
Changing topic to the International Driving Permit, it’s easy to get one. All you need is a passport sized photo, copy of your NRIC, copy of your driving license, and RM150. Your driving license must be valid for at least 1 year after the date of IDP application. This is also a rip off since in return I get a hand-written card with some thin paper pages in it with a few languages. I would feel ashamed to show it to the cops if I were stopped by them in a foreign country. Seriously.
A friend of mine mentioned that you don’t need an IDP if you are staying less than 3 months in the United States. I tried to find information on that but to no avail. Anyone?
3 days ago I was alerted by my DNS-O-Matic script that my IP has changed. Usually I don’t care much because the script will do its job in updating my dynamic IP. One interesting thing is that I usually get IPs beginning with 60 but now I am receiving IP beginning with 124.
I am not sure whether TMNet acquired a new IP block from IANA or something. Anyone has any news about this?
Nevertheless, nothing has changed with the speed. It’s still snail-paced. 😉
I’ve been wanting to change my permalink structure for a while now but I was afraid to lose pageranks on some of my pages. However since I realize that I have been penalized and none of my page have ranks anymore, I’ll just change it.
But there is another issue that you should be worried about if you change your permalink: incoming links from other blogs / sites. They will be rendered unusable.
I used to use /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ (Day and name) as my setting. After a while it looks ugly and long with so many numbers. https://blog.adyromantika.com/innotek-virtualbox/ looks much nicer than https://blog.adyromantika.com/2008/04/26/innotek-virtualbox/.
The issue here is that we want the latter to still work.
There is a simple remedy to this problem. You can edit .htaccess file to add some rules to rewrite your old permalink structure to the new one. The rule I will explain below will redirect the page to the new permalink.
The default .htaccess looks like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | # BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </ifmodule> # END WordPress |
Continue reading Changing WordPress Permalink While Still Maintaining Accessibility
It has been a while since I last heard anything about WiMAX plans for Malaysia. Well, from the news in The Star I gather that this problem is not specific to Malaysia.
The WiMAX Forum who provide standards and certification is now focusing on the US roll out. While some expert argues that the number of equipment needed for Malaysia is not as many as in the US, we still have to wait for them if we want best interoperability between providers.
My take is that I am willing to wait for it to become close to perfect. I want something reliable, and cost does not matter much. I’ll pay as much as RM500 per month for a stable and reliable service with good coverage. Currently, 3G or “wireless broadband” services provided by local telcos are not reliable. Not that it’s anyone’s fault – it’s the technology itself.
How much would you pay for a good WiMAX service?
As usual, click on Continue reading for the original news just in case the original source has been removed.
I was really reluctant to upgrade my WordPress version because I have so many custom plugins to create many widgets. I was just afraid that they might break and I have to spend a lot of time to repair them. My colleague Shahrulazlan has been trying to get me to upgrade my installation for a while now
However today after a few hours of learning Linux HA I need some WordPress to ease my mind.
Upgrading this blog on my development copy is a breeze. I have to admit I had to upload 3 times because of some MAC encoding problems. For some reason after checking in the files to subversion and doing an export, the files are all encoded in MAC encoding. And the result was catastrophic.
The final result is beautiful. I really love the new UI and features such as permalink editing while in write mode, and version checking for plugins. I have yet to test the auto-update feature, though.
No regrets. If you are still using 2.2 or 2.3 series do consider an upgrade. You’re missing a lot.
This upgrade also provide an opportunity for me to test my plugins. I am happy to announce that they both work well on 2.5.1.
During the course of my daily work, I sometimes need to run multiple OS at once. I used to rely a lot on VMware to run Debian and CentOS on my Windows notebook. The problem with the free VMware server is that it is damn slow, and at startup it takes a few minutes before the VMware authentication service finish working.
One day during a nicotine session my friend Haidir asked me “why don’t you use VirtualBox?”. Oh man! I recall bumping over some articles about VirtualBox in magazines but I guess it slipped my mind.
Starting from that day, bye VMware and hello VirtualBox!
I am surprised on the feel of VirtualBox – it is too light to be a fully functional virtualization product. But it is.
Comparing directly to VMware server (free version) VirtualBox does not introduce any kind of lag at all to my machine. CPU usage never reaches 100% with normal usage of the guest boxes:
I loooooove the shared folder feature. Sure, you’ll have to compile kernel modules for the virtualbox functions but it’s easy and you can always remove gcc and make later if you want.
A little note about networking, is that when you use only NAT networking with the host you will be able to do a “port forwarding” setup from the host (so that when you access a particular port on the host you are accessing the guest). Look for it in the documentation.
"C:\Program Files\innotek VirtualBox\VBoxManage" setextradata "CentOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/CentOSHTTP/Protocol" TCP
"C:\Program Files\innotek VirtualBox\VBoxManage" setextradata "CentOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/CentOSHTTP/GuestPort" 80
"C:\Program Files\innotek VirtualBox\VBoxManage" setextradata "CentOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/CentOSHTTP/HostPort" 80
In the commands above a port 80 on host is forwarded to port 80 on guest. Cool feature. However I want to demonstrate a hidden problem that might help some of you out there.
On my machine, IIS is running on port 80 (don’t ask me why). Meaning port 80 can’t be used by VirtualBox anymore. This will cause the virtual machine to crash when it tries to activate the network interface:
(I purposely captured along the JIT message, normal users might see a normal Send Error to Microsoft dialog).
VirtualBox will display the virtual machine status as “Aborted”:
What you can do next is decide on which port you really want to use on the host. In my case I can simply stop IIS on my host machine if I really want to use port 80.
This is neither a big issue with VirtualBox, nor is a critical defect – it’s just a bit annoying. Perhaps next versions can detect used port before powering on the virtual machine 🙂
But then again, I am using this for my personal work and learn environment. For serious use and production, you might want to consider vm ware hosting for a more reliable solution.
As you can see I have just been granted with some room to breathe. 3 full posts in a row is a lot for my schedule, and hopefully more coming to this blog.
To my plugin users who have requested for enhancements and bug fixes, thanks for your patience. Work shall commence soon on upgrading the plugins.
I am currently in love and coding some personal projects using Eclipse PDT with the Zend Framework as foundation. Unit testing is accomplished using PHPUnit.
I love the ability of Eclipse to be extended with plugins so that I can have intelligent code completion and integrated subversion client. To my surprise, Eclipse runs very well on my seasoned 4 years old notebook.
I am a learner by practice so late last year I tried to penetrate the Ruby team at my company. However I didn’t make it because of company re-organization so requisitions were suspended (or something like that). I guess Ruby and I was just not meant to be together.
Zend Framework really helps a lot in building applications really quick minus the bells and whistles of nice graphics. I am incompetent when it comes to creating nice graphics with Photoshop. 🙁
I am relatively very new to the MVC concept but I am very comfortable with it. It was just recently that I realize the importance of unit testing.
I must grab the unit testing concepts very quickly because I have just moved into a new role as a release engineer for a week. 🙂
On another development, I was also doing some Flash ActionScript 2.0 a couple of weeks ago and experimented on the XMLSocket object. The Flash movie connects to a server, and since I needed threading I decided to use Java. Eclipse is also superb with Java codes since I think it was originally meant to be a Java IDE.
Signing off.
I was casually cruising at a friend’s blog when I saw his post about the Shutdown Day. It’s just a simple experiment to see how many people in this world can live a day without their PC.
I joined the site, and will definitely turn off all of my notebooks on that day. My servers will remain online, of course 😉 but I will not be accessing them.
Interested? Please go to http://shutdownday.org
Oh yes, on that day I have not much problem because I will be celebrating my birthday! I have also received two early birthday present from my better half. One in the news contained in the previous post, and the other one is a secret I will only reveal when I am better at playing it.
Believe it or not I can now feel the aging process creeping into my life. Body functions aside, I am seeing things from the psychology point of view. These days it is incomplete if I don’t watch or read the news. I wake up early even on the weekends. I cry when I read life stories in Reader’s Digest – especially the ones that involve fatherly love.
Having no experience of having a real father, I have always been scared of the commitment of being a father. Last week 2 tester sticks yelled at me saying that I should now be prepared to be one. I know this day will come, and I am glad it did.
I am beginning to feel changes in my life. It’s kinda an automatic thing.
One thing that amazes me the most is that when I went out for dinner at Alamanda earlier, I feel that kids I saw were cuter and more adorable than ever before. This is very amazing because I used to dislike kids and think that they are annoying.
I am worried, but I am very happy. I may not be jumping with joy like most first time fathers do (I was raised in an inexpressive family) but I am very happy.
God, please give me strength to go through life. I really want to be a good father.
This is the first time in my entire 29-years of life that I actually encounter real rain inside a shopping mall. After being disappointed that Sri Ayutthaya is no longer operational, we went to Rasa food court to have lunch. It was actually my wife’s birthday.
While we were browsing magazines at the newsstand, rain started to pour at a spot near us. It got even worst and started to spread to all the roof joints. I managed to capture a video minutes after the unfortunate event started. Even though you can’t see the water pouring from the roof, you can hear the sound, some water on the floor, and people running.
It was lucky for Alamanda management that the center roof didn’t leak or even worst collapse as there was an event by the Ministry of Federal Territory. Otherwise the Chief Secretary would have been soaking wet 😉
Going to other areas of the mall we found that the worst victim was Clarks shoe store, followed by Quicksilver, Guess, and Yamaha Music Store.
Clarks (the ceiling ripped off and a torrent of water fell through):
Quicksilver (a small leak but the amount of water was indeed significant):
Yamaha Music Store (lucky for them no water leaked inside the store itself):
I also managed to capture another video where water was leaking along the window of the Guess shop.
It’s an unfortunate event, but I guess after this Alamanda management needs to be executing more routine checks on the building to prevent it to happen again. Indeed, it was a very heavy rain but it should have not happened.
I wonder whether this will change the intention of potential tenants to do business at Alamanda. I noticed that Burger King and Cold Storage are opening soon…
I have finally received my first AdSense payment since 2005. It’s not much but certainly a very good motivational factor to keep on blogging and making efforts to build websites.
Since I opted for Western Union payment, it was actually a breeze. Filled a form and within 15 minutes I was holding cash in my hands 🙂
