Welcome to the phishbowl with a net!

I am a strong believer of constant personal improvement.
Improvement of my thoughts, behaviour, habits and such.

Doing that, I ask myself questions and most importantly seek answers.

To date, this has not changed, but it definitely has changed me. Ultimately resulting a constant change of personality ever so slowly.

Though a programmer, I study human behaviour out of interest for as long as since I had supposedly had my hormones raging as part of growth.

Although I am able to realise my mistakes when I make one due to conscious being (yes I study my own behaviour too), I finally have a question which I could not have answered without a good friend. Good not so ol’ Gary.

I have decided not to go into details about it in a public blog.
But along talking to him, I derived a possible answer for my question (it’s more of a problem actually).

After a large part of my lifetime spent on questioning and answering, I had amassed I would say quite a large pool of knowledge. I assume that everyone would be as knowledgeable as of that. And I had to inch up further. It is what drives me towards gaining greater knowledge.

I figured I was wrong. But it ends at that.

What I do just draws my expectations higher and higher as I go.
A perfectionist.

So I asked Gary, “Is my expectation of people… really that high?”
“It has always been my bro.” he replied.

I felt happy. Mainly not because I had the answer.

I just watched a full season of Chuck and I think it’s really great!

It really gave me the emotional roller coaster ride. And being able to feel how both Chuck and Sarah feels, it adds up to it even more.

One of the episode, “The Truth” has a great ending song. It is by The Eels - That fresh feeling.

I really cannot wait for the next season to be out. I enjoy the show as much as House!

You don’t have a clue
What it is like
To be next to you

That fresh feeling
This is that fresh feeling

I had a fresh Ubuntu Hardy Image installed into Amazon’s EC2.

It’s fast cool and all (I mean both Hardy and EC2).

One particular problem I faced with the Ubuntu was the ‘locate’ command.

Upon executing the ‘locate’ command I encountered this error:

“locate: can not open `/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db’: No such file or directory”

The remedy:
$updatedb

Almost always run updatedb before you run locate. It really makes a difference.

I’m a little late for this, but just to show my support…

$apt-get moo

        (__)
        (oo)
   /——\/
  / | ||
 * /\—/\
    ~~ ~~

….”Have you mooed today?”…

Recently I have been reading a lot of new scientific discoveries. I call it improvement by ‘deproofment’.

I’ll just name some of what I could remember.

The cognition of dogs and many other animals are MUCH more capable than we thought.

Consuming too much anti-oxidants MIGHT cause the body to stop/reduce production of it’s own natural anti-oxidants.

Today I read: Drinking 8 glasses of water a day does not improve your health. “In fact, drinking large amounts of water, actually and surprisingly, tends to reduce the ability of the kidney to function as a filter.”

There are many more studies proving the studies of the pasts are actually either “baseless” or “wrong”. I cannot recall them at this time of writing.

But the statement of improvement is only true IF the LATEST findings are true.

But then again, could the latest findings be ‘deproofed’ in years to come? We shall see.

The next time someone says something is good for you, or that something is indefinitely stupid, “think again”.

I was browsing around PS3 games and found this title irresistible to share.

Check it out man!

Part 1

Part 2

This game from Media Molecule is a a brand new genre (as far as I know). I will definitely buy this title the moment it releases =D.

The video in this link has a higher resolution. Make it full screen and enjoy.
http://www.mediamolecule.com/games.html

So I decided to use JDOM to parse XML for XMPP replies for my current project. In order get a Document object out of JDOM I had to use the SAXBuilder to build it.

Eventually, I realised the build() method only accepts an InputStream, URL, URI… just not an XML created from the String object. Well I needed that function.

Hence I went home and finally figured out how to convert that String into an InputStream.

I’m putting it up here so I could access it from my office and also share it with people having the same problem who might have a hint of a viable solution here. Use at your own risk though.

Here goes:

public InputStream convertToInputStream(String str)
{
InputStream inputStream=null;
try
{
inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(str.getBytes("UTF-8"));
}
catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}

return inputStream;
}

Change the encoding to suit your needs.

One up for my util package!

It seems I keep encountering blog-able events while I’m crossing the road at T-junctions.

So I was crossing the road.

As I waited for the red man to turn green, there were several other people around me; a quick guess would be 10 or more.

It was just a boring wait…

Until a young girl starts talking to her dad (So loudly that everyone could hear the conversation. The dad kept silent the whole time. You might get a clue as to why…).

“I’ve got not enough time!”

“From now, I ONLY have 16 weeks to the ‘O’ levels!”

“I’ve ONLY got time to finish 16 assessment books!”

*Green man*

I experienced the quietest road crossing in a crowd; ever.

As I went about updating the Ubuntu servers since I had not much mood to code on a Monday morning, I came across a perculiar error.

I used the command line by the way so I am not sure of what Gnome might do. Gnome might have fixed this problem with automated commands.

So I ran and update with ’sudo apt-get update’.

Then I came across an error which, evidently on a Google search bother lots of people using Ubuntu.

>> W: GPG error: http://security.ubuntu.com dapper-security Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG
>> 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key
>> W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

I ran the update again since it says so. Somehow, not too surprisingly, the same error output displayed. I admit sometimes running the update again helps. But this time, it’s persistent.

I tried changing servers from jp.archive.ubuntu.com back to sg servers (I use jp servers because they are so much faster than sg ones!). Get the same error output, and changed it again to archive.ubuntu.com itself. Still same error output.

So I did a Google, it seemed to me that the gpg keys have a cache.

So here comes the solution.

’sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::http::No-Cache=true’

<insert phrase that geeks use to describe the disappearance of a bug here>

Fried ‘chic’!