Teonator

Once again, another anime festival was held at Suntec. And again, together with Giliam and her sis, we swarm into. Before went into battlefield, I filled myself with a big St. Louis pork ribs at Plaza Singapore. No bad but just a little bit too sweet to me.

I pre-registered for a 2 days pass a month ago but I only went there one day. Too lazy to go again on the next day even there is my lovely May’N mini concert.

This is the entrance of AFA 08 where the crowd started.

Just around the corner, I saw Kon from the Bleach. It will be cuter if getting a kid to put on those. Nice angle! o_O

Yeah, I love you Haruhi. “A shy pose please!”… I was stoned and looked at one of the phonographer. -_-” Come on, don’t be so pervert guys!

Animax is 1 of the main sponsor of this festival.

Say cheese to pretty!

Interesting to look at this if you have time to fool around.

She is proven herself “useful” to show how big the model is. Below is the Gundam Exia cosplay. Ya, the right hand side is costumed version, as you can see it is a little be “fat” or “out of shape”.

Unexpected doujin booths have appeared in this event with I always thought in Japan.

Shana want a melonpan here. Oishii desu?

The Mospeada does bring back a lot of memories.

Code Geass is another anime must watch for this year. Of cause the cosplay is nice too.

Gundam. A lot of Gundams.

Super duper cute Nendoroid and Tachikoma from Good Smile Company.

LaMB storyboarding from Yasufumi Soejima. You can get his autograph on the limited poster that day.

Overall, this festival is better than then previous “toy fair” that I attended few months ago. By the way, it seems like locals don’t feel the pinch of economy crisis at all. People still spend like… well you know. This makes me feel like the news is bullshitting all the time or just people already get used to such lifestyle?

Again, I buy nothing for myself even though the figurines are so tempted and adorable. Looks like my angel wins again.

描写未来，人类早已因新种病毒灭亡，剩余的人类因而捨弃了肉体，以人体数据(META-Body)化储存入的量子伺服器(Quantum Server)里。而因为人类的数据太过庞大，所以每半年就要Reboot一次。这时所有人的记忆就会被倒回到初期，除了已觉醒的的人类，Celebrant，除外。

由于人类完全是数据资料，要在现实世界里活动，只能藉由人形机械，才能在虚拟世界里操控现实的战鬥，有点类似骇客任务(Matrix)。虽然此动画内如Gundam等有人形机械与战斗场面，但这些并非此片重点。

此动画是继攻壳机动队(Stand Alone Complex)之后，被埋没的科幻动画钜作。也许这部动画并不是很受欢迎的主要原因，是用了许多相当艰深的概念，如Quantum Physics，甚至是许多哲学上的思辩，需要另一种更深层的思考，如生命的存在价值。结局方面，也有让观众想象空间，比起其他老套结局一幅大合影来得好。

总结，这是一部适合愿意动脑，物理资讯哲学神话融合的作品，能接受丰富的架空世界的人观看的动画。本人强力推荐，而在落笔前，送上此作迷人动听的片尾曲 “Little Goodbye リトルグッバイ” MV。

Last weekend was my first attendance in open source conference, FOSS.my 2008. I traveled all my way from Singapore during the midnight 12:30AM and reach Kuala Lumpur in morning 5:30AM. It was very tired, I swear! But, I was so exciting and can’t wait to see it.

We got awesome speakers in this conference. We got Jaya Kumar - one of the great Linux kernel contributor, Toru Maesaka - one of the memcached developer, Pia Waugh - the director of OLCP Austrialia, Pamela Fox - one of the Google Map API developer and much more.

Who say no chick in OSS? Dare you say it again!

Aizat Faiz talked about building the awesome Jabber Bot.

Toru Maesaka unveiled the scene behind mixi.jp and talked about memcached.

Pia Waugh presented us with the OLPC, deployments and communities.

I got my first hand on experience with OLPC. Pia Waugh said we can request a unit of this little machine. To try, to develop, and to hack.

Our cute little penguin grab away a OLPC just because of her reason “I want!” 囧

I really enjoyed and learned a lot from this conference. I begin to feel like contributing to the open source rather than just being a user or bug reporter.

There is a BarCamp next month in JB. I will defintely attend it.

There are a lot of people who interested in trying out Linux on Earth. What holding them back is mainly because they can’t live without Windows. There are several ways to get your hands on Linux:

1. Show no mercy. Kill the Windows on your machine and load it with Linux. This is the most brutal and bold move. I bet most people will not “survive” under this circumstance.
2. Make love not war. Peacefully co-exists with Windows under one “planet”. Partition your hard drive and install both Windows and Linux on your machine. Switching between them when booting the machine.
3. Leeched Windows blood like parasites. By using virtual machine, we can install and run Linux inside the Windows, both of them simultaneously but both will suffer from “imbalance nutrition”.

The second method contains the risk of wipe out your Windows but now there is a improved and safer of this method. Wubi is a installer that allows you to be hassle free installing Linux Ubuntu.

Wubi will creates a file that isolated itself as a virtual partition of Linux in Windows and you can only see it as a large file. It also adds an extra option to let we boot Linux. If you feel like Linux is not your cup of tea, then you can just go to uninstall it anytime. This is really a painless process and who interested on Linux is highly recommended to try.

Still remember I was toying with AWS? A while back, I tried database replication on AWS with the most common implementation, one database server maintains the master copy of the database and additional database servers maintain slave copies of the database. This divides the database reads from one or more slaves and database writes to master, which can results in a large performance advantage due to load sharing. The instructions of set up MySQL database replicaiton are below.

The Master
First we have to enable networking for MySQL, and MySQL should listen on all IP addresses, therefore we comment out these lines (if existant).
/etc/mysql/my.cnf

#skip-networking
#bind-address = 127.0.0.1

Beside these, we also have to tell MySQL for which database it should write logs, which log file it should use. These logs are required by the slave to monitor the changes on the master.

/etc/mysql/my.cnf

log-bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log
binlog-do-db=sampledb
server-id=1

Restart MySQL after the editing:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Now we log into the MySQL as root and create a user with replication privileges:

GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO 'slave_user'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Again, in MySQL shell, we run the following query to obtain master status:

USE sampledb;
FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;
SHOW MASTER STATUS;

Write down the information as we need it for slave. Similar result will show something like below:

+---------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| File          | Position | Binlog_do_db | Binlog_ignore_db |
+---------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| mysql-bin.009 | 123      | sampledb     |                  |
+---------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The Slave
On the slave we first login MySQL. We have to create the database and loaded the data from master:

CREATE DATABASE sampledb;
LOAD DATA FROM MASTER;

Then we have to tell MySQL on the slave that it is the slave, that the master is 192.168.0.100, and that the which master database to watch of.

/etc/mysql/my.cnf

server-id=2
master-host=192.168.0.100
master-user=slave_user
master-password=password
 
master-connect-retry=60
replicate-do-db=sampledb

Then restart MySQL:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Login to MySQL again and perform following commands:

SLAVE STOP;
CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='192.168.0.100', MASTER_USER='slave_user', MASTER_PASSWORD='password', MASTER_LOG_FILE='mysql-bin.009', MASTER_LOG_POS=123;
START SLAVE;

I been using VirtualBox to deploy virtual machines on my Windows machine since a significant memory upgrade. VirtualBox is suprisingly easy to used if compared to VMWare and it just fit to my basic needs.

Access the web server from the guest on host is pretty straightforward but not the other way.

In my scenario, my host OS is XP and the guest OS is Ubuntu. First, we go to the XP host and open a command prompt, and configure the port forwarding in the VirtualBox installation directory, as follows:

cd C:\Program Files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox
VBoxManage setextradata MyUbuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/HostPort" 8888
VBoxManage setextradata MyUbuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/GuestPort" 80
VBoxManage setextradata MyUbuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/Protocol" TCP

This simply arbitrarily assign port 8888 of our host XP to forward connections to the guest Ubuntu’s port 80, which is the default port for HTTP connections.

Having done that, we now turn on our guest Ubuntu and use our web browser on host XP to browse http://localhost:8888/. Alright, now we got a local web server to play with.

We can also allowing SSH connections from the host OS to the guest OS as follows:

cd C:\Program Files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox
VBoxManage setextradata MyUbuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2222
VBoxManage setextradata MyUbuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
VBoxManage setextradata MyUbuntu "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP

Whenever people are talking about Amazon. Most of the people will say “Ya, the online bookstore right?”. But now beside the online store, Amazon also offering a series of web services, Amazon Web Services or AWS in short.

The infrastructure services that are offered:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Amazon SimpleDB
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Recently, my job required me to look into EC2 and S3. We need to design a scalable architecture of new web application. It is worth to take a deep look into them.

EC2 is about scalable application deployment. This service allows you to create virtual machine or instance  and run your web applications.  In layman’s term, it allows your to rent and run your web applications. What interesting is the service provides manageable compute capacity of applications through its simple web service interface. It is “elastic” because you can scale your applications based on your demand. It charged as low as $0.10 by hourly basis on each instance. Of course there is different charges on the data transfer usage as well. Presume that you do not own a servers farm, multiple machines or any similar infrastructure, EC2 is relatively flexible and cost-effectiveness to scale your application during high or low traffic usage. Sound good huh? But there is a main drawback of EC2. It is an image which means no permanent data will be stored. If something goes wrong on the hardware, power failure, or anything that you could possible imagine, then your data is gone. There is where S3 comes in to solve the problem.

S3 is a online storage service. It claimed to gives the developer the same scalable data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its business. Amazon charges $0.15 per GB a month.

I will start to setup up and run some applications on EC2. I will post more about the findings on AWS.

这是一篇从朋友转寄的电邮的分享。

许多人认为婚姻中有问题是因为彼此的差异太大，但是我却发现，我们不可能找到一个与我们没有很大差异的人。

就拿我们家的两个儿子来说，他们有完全相同的原生家庭和成长背景，甚至类似的基因组合，个性却是南辕北辙。

哥哥细心、谨慎、内向、凡事深思熟虑，弟弟开朗、活泼、大方，却常丢叁忘四，所以要找到与我们没有很大差异的人，几乎是不可能的。

有趣的是，在谈恋爱时，我们往往会被与我们性格相反的人所吸引，这可能和「同极相斥异极相吸」的物理定律有关。

例如：活泼外向的会喜欢冷静思考的人，动作敏捷的会欣赏慢条斯理型的，还有最让我不解的，是精打细算的人，最後往往会配上花钱大方的人。

这似乎是上帝的美意，让我们在婚姻中能彼此互补，透过夫妻间的差异，使我们成为更丰富、更宽广的人。

差异是平衡

有位年轻妈妈抱怨说：「我先生常破坏我辛苦帮孩子建立的生活规範，诸如：我把孩子一天的生活作息都安排好，几点该做什麽事。晚上九点应该是上床时间，可是先生因为加班，有时九点多才回家，那时孩子已经上床，但是还没睡著，先生就会高兴地大声说：『我们去吃宵夜吧！』孩子们便大叫：『耶！』兴奋地从床上跳起来，跟著爸爸出去了。结果因为太晚睡，第二天早上起不来，上学差点迟到。」

很明显的，这位太太是做事中规中矩很有计划的人，一切都要按照时间表进行才觉得安心。而她先生很可能是比较放松、随性、享受生活的人。

我对这位姊妹说：「你们夫妻真是天作之合，我相信有一天你们的孩子长大之後，他们回顾童年，最快乐的回忆可能不是每天按照妈妈所规划的时间表作息，而是在心不甘情不愿地上床後，忽然爸爸回家宣佈：『我们去吃宵夜吧！』这样意外的惊喜。妳的孩子绝对需要像妳这样的母亲帮助他们过有规律的生活，但他们也非常需要偶尔不按牌理出牌的爸爸在严谨的生活中，带来一些调剂与乐趣，你们夫妻在性格上的差异能让彼此有更平衡的家庭生活。」

差异是祝福

有智慧的人会把配偶与我们不同的地方看为特点而非缺点，它是上帝给予的祝福，来弥补我们的不足。即或对方真的有品格上的缺失，也能成为上帝手中的工具，来帮助我们成长。当我读圣经「哥林多前书十叁章」保罗对於爱的描述时，我想到若
配偶完全符合我们的心意，那爱就实在无法彰显。

若他没有任何让我不愉快的地方，我又怎须恒久忍耐？

若他没有得罪我的地方，我又何需以恩慈对待？

若他没有任何恶行，我就不须做到「不计人的恶」；

若我的配偶很完美，可能我还无知地觉得自己是很懂得爱的人。

上帝的美意就是要我们在和一个与我们有极大差异的人相处时，去学习接纳、欣赏，和感激双方的差异；

而在看到他有软弱或缺点时，能学习捨己、饶恕、忍耐、恩慈和宽容。

婚姻中若有任何衝突或不愉快，原因不是差异太大，而是因为我们的自我中心，要求别人顺著我们的意思。

衝突提醒我，是我需要改变与成长；

我们不是要去换一个没有差异或处处顺著我的人，而是学习欣赏差异，改变自己成为更成熟、更懂得付出爱的人。

接纳差异是真爱

我常会弄丢东西，而先生却很会找东西。

有一次，我找不到家的钥匙，而丈夫正好出差到国外，更离谱的是我竟然断定它是被住家附近的工人偷走了，所以打了长途电话给丈夫，他还一再地要我确定是否真的没有掉在家的某个角落。

我很肯定地说：「绝对是放在脚踏车的篮子被偷走的！」

经过讨论之後，只好决定更换所有大门的把锁，为了安全起见，我们还换了当时最贵的一种，花了将近四千块钱。

丈夫出差回来後，不死心地在家寻找那串钥匙， 他伸手进入我那有好几个口袋的皮包中，左摸右掏，接著我吃惊地听到一串钥匙的叮噹声，那遗失的钥匙竟然一直都在我的皮包里！

我实在羞愧地无言以对，立刻低下头想：「你骂我吧！你要怎麽数落我，我都配得。」

但他竟笑嘻嘻地说：「这件事一定有神的美意，我们住在这里几十年，旧的锁早该换了，换的好！」

他没有因我们的差异。 他精明、我糊塗，而责备或嘲笑我。那一天从他身上，我看到什麽是爱。很棒吧！

我觉得不管是不是夫妻、情人 甚至 家人 朋友；应该说的是 人与人之间的相处都要有一种“雅量”

与大家共勉之。

他们一般说来长相普通（长得太帅的通常当不了好人），个性温和且忠厚老实，往往有一项特殊的专长和技能，好比说是会修计算机，有设计专长，学问渊博爱读书… 等等，但是在与陌生人交往时显得有点害羞。

有些好人热心助人，在同侪团体之间是大家都乐於来往的对象，不过只要一遇到漂亮的或自己喜欢的女生，好人马上就变成哑巴。他们的原则是，人与人之间本来就应该好来好去，特别是对他们有点友善的人，更是要加倍奉还。

我们通常说的好好先生，就是他们。

好人和同性来往时，一点问题也没有；但是遇到自己喜欢的女生时，麻烦就来了。他们的交友範围不算广，所以能够认识的女生，可能就是同班同学，同事，或者是参加一些社团认识的朋友。

他们喜欢的对象，也不至於要怎样地国色天香，但是基本的姿色是不可少的，通常都必须具备甜美的笑容，礼貌的态度，以及一开始时对好人的和善。

好人搞不清楚这个和善是这个女生的天性（是的话加分，非追不可），还是对他有好感（那开玩笑，更要追了）。

也许，她就是他那个命中註定的女孩也说不定… 好人这样幻想著。

一开始的时候，好人觉得，那位女生对自己不错，所以他当然要对她的好给与适当的回报，甚至更多，因为大家好来好去是他的信念，更何况是一个自己欣赏，还很有可能进一步发展的人呢？

於是，他和女生开始频繁地来往，一起走路进教室（进办公室），下课（下班）後有时一起喝个咖啡，除了业务往来外通个电话，诉说一天上课或上班的心得… 。

女生偶尔有什麽事情需要他的帮忙，或需要他提供一些讯息甚至劳务等等，他都义不容辞地尽全力满足她。

因为在他的心里，这除了是朋友之间的互相帮忙之外，更是他好好表现的机会；做多了，一定可以打动她的心，每一次的帮忙，对好人来说，就是一种付出，他似乎已经可以看到两人在不久的将来，手牵手，相互依偎，互诉情衷，亲亲我我的景象了。

好人的幻想持续增温… 。

但是，事情不是这样的！

几个月後（有些只有几个礼拜後），随著他们两人的接触越来越频繁，他对她的渴望也越来越深，就在好人觉得跟她成为男女朋友的机会越来越高的时候，突然一切都不一样了。

好人不知道自己做错了什麽，不过很明显地，这个女生突然开始「怪」了。

以前她的电话，每打必接，现在却常常没有人接；以前聊天聊个半小时或一个小时都是家常便饭，现在讲个两分锺她就有事得掛断电话；以前传简讯给她的时候，写过去的简讯越温馨，她的回传简讯读起来也越温暖，

现在传简讯过去，就像石沈大海，响应的比率趋近於零，顶多就是告诉他，他的邀请她无法赴约；以前聊MSN的时候都有聊不完的话，每次下线前都还难分难捨，现在她在msn上的响应语句越来越简短，不仅不会再主动打招呼，响应语句还大幅缩水，通常就是用「嗯」、「嘻」、「呵」之类的语句来打发人，看起来的感觉就像是在说︰「我不想跟你多说话，麻烦你找其它人好吗？」

好人开始纳闷︰「到底怎麽了？」「到底发生了什麽事？」「我是不是做错了什麽？」

他很想打电话过去问个明白，但是对方好像老早就知道他想问什麽一样，永远不让他有机会把那个问题提出来。

其实，他根本也不敢问﹗因为他知道，如果真的追问下去，传说中的「好人卡」就要发到自己手上来了。

他也不是没有接过卡，但是总不能从十六岁开始想交女朋友，就一直收卡收到现在吧？（二十岁，叁十岁，四十岁… No！）

渐渐地，她甜美的声音，变成了他的梦魇，他再也不敢拨电话给她了。

他也曾经安慰过自己，是不是自己太主动了点，吓到对方了？是不是她需要更多的时间，才能接受自己的感情？

是不是她想考验他的热情和决心，现在放弃的话一切的努力就白费了… 。

替她想了那麽多，但是一个冷冰冰的，从自己心底深处发出来的声音,不断地有如魔音穿脑般地告诉他自己：

我被发卡了！我被发卡了！！我被发卡了！！！他可以短暂地麻痹自己，但是他骗不了自己啊﹗

然後，几个月後，甚至几年以後，他又遇到了一个心仪的女孩子。

他小心翼翼地，希望上次的情形不要再发生了。

但是，他彷彿被诅咒了一般，一切情形就像鬼打墻一样，不断地重演。

有时候，他都可以预测女生要开始不接电话，不回传简讯，不上MSN了。

他变得越来越不敢打电话给女生，也越来越不敢对女生献慇勤，更不要说对女生进行邀约了。

因为，一开始的交往越温馨，之後的回忆也越痛苦。

有些好人选择自暴自弃，让魔鬼占据他的心，开始对女生进行心里和行为上的报复。

他决定不再对任何人付出真心，只要有女生的表现有点像他以前遇到的「发卡机」，他心中的警铃马上响起，要嘛选择立刻放弃，要嘛决心周旋到底，但是满脑想著就是仇恨，以及最後「把」到人家之後，要如何把她甩掉的计谋。

他失去了爱别人的心，也放弃了享受爱的权利。

也有些好人决定默默地承受没有人爱，持续「收卡」的日子。

因为他们相信，好人到最後一定是有好报的，总有一天，会有一个命中天女出现，和他相守一生。

果不其然，那个人最後出现了，但是通常都是相亲认识的对象，两人一认识，就是看彼此合适不适合结婚而已。

他感受不到那份对爱情的悸动，有时候还要忍受对自己老婆过去的猜忌。

什麽猜忌呢？因为，他这个条件不错的结婚对象，有时在不经意的时候，会透露出她最後为什麽选择他的原因。

通常都是看他经济有基础，做人忠厚老实，是个可以结婚的对象等等；她说她不想再蹉跎光阴，也不想再遇到那些懂得甜言蜜语，风趣自信，但是自己无法掌控，会让自己痛苦不已的男人。

听到女人的抱怨，好人的感觉是五味杂陈的。难道他永远就是女人感情失败後的备胎吗？难道女人对他的青睐，一定只能发生在中年以後吗？

他并不是想对这个彼此尽夫妻义务的婚姻生活抱怨，但是总有那麽一丝丝的遗憾，为何他的爱情，没有在年轻的时候到来？

如果可以选择的话，他宁可像自己的老婆一样，尝过爱情的酸甜苦辣，然後最後选择一个，自己觉得最适合的对象结婚，而不是像个爱情世界里的小学生，感情的世界一片空白…