Posts

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I’m Officially a Debian GNU/Linux user now!


Debian Logo

I’m announcing now that Debian has become my official GNU/Linux distro. Previously I’ve use Mandrake (my first distro) as my official GNU/Linux distro, then Slackware, and finally SuSE. Fedora Core 4 actually was on my candidate list as my next official distro because it’s spiffy package management system, but in the end i chose Debian over Fedora.

Debian is more flexible than Fedora because I can download only one CD out of 12 CDs to perform complete installations. Well, people might argue that Fedora can do the same, but the way Fedora did it wasn’t obvious. And you apparently have to end up downloading the entire 4 CDs, which turn out not enough to fully enjoy the distro (Fedora people assumes that most people code in Java, and put a lot of java things inside the CD)

Well, Debian is a nice distro for me, it isnt too bloated, easy to configure, and it has a good package management system. I like Debian.

p/s: I’ve installed countless of other distros before this, but the “official” status is only given for distro that i use for my production purposes and usually meant to last more than 9 months on my pc.

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Merdeka Songs

Bendera Malaysia, Jalur Gemilang

The National Day is around the corner! And I can see advertisement around for the National Day although based from my observation, it certainly less exciting than the previous year, but it’s National Day nevertheless.

Which brings me to a quest to find patriotic and National Day related-songs. Well after spending almost an hour searching for those songs on governments servers (*.gov.my), I finally came up to a conclusion, the Malaysian Government did not host any of the songs!!!! Or at least they make it hard for an average user to find it, and i do mean very hard…

Well I do found those songs scattered around the Net along with a good description about it, but none of them are from an Official government site.

Maybe some people will think “hey, it’s not a big deal, everybody knows the National Song”, or “Why are you complaining about this? Government have done so much… (insert typical politician-like speech here)”.

To me it’s just plain weird, just weird, that Malaysian government have a lot of *.gov.my site, but none of them seems to offer National Song/Patriotic to download. So what’s the use of all those ICT infrastructures are for?

Which brings me to another question, how would people know the official Negaraku song sounds like right now? I maybe not sensitive about it’s tempo, etc.The song have been officially altered before, but I’m still listening to different version of the National Song through the various radio stations, tv station, etc. How can I be sure which is the “Standard”.

Is there a standard copy of the song? How can I obtain it, economically and practically speaking? How can you be sure that the National Song distributed by non-governmental site have not been altered (tempo, rhythm, etc) ?

One more point, Malaysia is a federation consisting of 14 states and each state have their own unique state-song. Aren’t you curious about this state songs? How does it sound like?

Well here’s the collection of Patriotic/National Songs I’ve collected through the internet. But be advised, none of it came from Official Government website :

  1. Negaraku v1 (Instrumental)
  2. Negaraku v1
  3. Negaraku v2 (Metal)
  4. Negaraku v3 (March)
  5. Jalur Gemilang
  6. Keranamu Malaysia
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Configuring BSD as an average Home-user OS

Yup, you read that right, today i’ve finished configuring my FreeBSD 5.4-Releaseas an average home-user box.

Previously, I had only a minimal FreeBSD 4.6 (includes gcc) inside my pc to test out my apps before releasing to public, and I’ve no intention of using it seriously because I’m so used to GNU utils instead of BSD ones.

I’ve considered doing this as a challenge for myself, I’m getting bored of testing various GNU/Linux distro that i’ve decided to use FreeBSD seriously for a change.

Well, what would i do? Having installed a barebone FreeBSD system made me thinking, what should i do now?. Firstly, I jot down things that i like to do mostly with my pc, work from there.

That kind of thinking narrows down to coding with c, self-taught php-class, movie player (mpeg4,dvd capable), music player (mp3 player), cd-writing, p2p, and of course internet connection.

FreeBSD Xwindows environment setting change a bit from the last time i use it. Seems that now I need to configure xdm manually, which is not my area of expertise, Luckily the FreeBSD Handbook came in handy in these situation, although i had quite a bump at setting up my desired WM.

Next stop, was setting up my internet connection using PPPoE (that’s Streamyx broadband), which again left me clueless. I know that I can connect to the internet quickly by enabling dhcp-client, but hey, that’s not quite fun for me. Luckily, the “/etc/share/examples/” directory have the ppp.conf sample which I merrily configured my internet connection.

After i’ve settled up the internet connection, everything else is a piece of cake. I’ve surf the web for the Freebsd ports collection and install all things that i required there, again I only have minor hiccups here where I had to use “cvsup” to download things that i cant acquire from pkg_add command.

All in all, it was fun experience setting up FreeBSD box for my average home-user need. I cant wait to start using *BSD now for a change. ;)

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StudioTraffic downfall?

I’ve stumbled upon my long-time irc contact today, whose also a StudioTraffic user. Suprisingly, he’s complaining in his blog about StudioTraffic poor quality of service and low-response time lately.

He also states in his blog that, if this trend continues, StudioTraffic might just be another Ponzie, and announce that he’s going to withdraw from the scheme, quite unbelievable!! I’m talking about a guy who advocates ST for so long and have almost a hundred of referral membership under him!!! Well, something really Bad ™ must have happened…

What about you? Do you have any positive opinion about StudioTraffic lately?

p/s: StudioTraffic is a surf-for-money program which requires you to leave your browser windows open while surfing the internet. You commision will be paid according to your money invested in the program.

References :
MyInvest.us

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Redirect (301 Permanently) without using .htaccess

Want to redirect your website to another place but can’t create .htaccess file?

Well this might be a solution to you, if your webhost supports server site php scripting.

The codes below will tell web-client (including search bot) that your website have been Moved Permanently to a new location and redirects them to a new location

The PHP version :
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header ('Location: http://newdomain.com/');

The ASP version :
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location",\ "http://www.newdomain.com/"

What’s wrong with META Refesh tag? Well, firstly, it isn’t supported by all web-client (including bots). Secondly, the search engine will ignore the META Refresh tag and stops indexing your webpage.

By sending server response code 301 Moved Permanently, will inform that your website have been moved to another location and search bots will note that and index the new location instead. :)

p/s: This tip is useful in an event you can’t create a .htaccess file in your webhost.