Blog from the Loft

Yes. I got one. Spent total of six and a half hours. Worth it? Yes. Weather was nice, a little hot but not too much. Apple staff were very nice. Especially Alex — She worked the line. Gave out (free) water, candy, went to get sunblock and more candy, even picked up a pizza for [...]

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Michael Faraday’s lectures at the Royal Institution in London - “The Chemical History of the Candle” :
A candle is beautiful. “Beauty means not the best-looking things, but the best-acting thing.” A candle is beautiful because its functioning elegantly and efficiently rests upon a wide range of universal laws. The heat of the flame melts the [...]

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It is also fun to see what cellphones are used in different countries. As my plane taxi into the Hong Kong airport, I looked over across the aisle and the occupant pulls out an iPhone, switched it on and proceed to check the weather. I had to ask — Your iPhone works in Hong Kong? [...]

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I have been using the text mode emacs up to now. On Windows (yikes!) I uses the xemacs with windows extension, which is pretty nice. Quick googling found me Carbon Emacs. It has been updated, universal binary and Leopard. Highly recommended !

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I have lots of spammer breaking this blog and submitting comments. They are all held for moderation (i.e. delete). But deleting them using the wordpress admin interface manually is painful. Sometimes I let the comments build up, and then I end up having too many of them in the system. The admin interface cannot [...]

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My love of electronics and computers, which defined my career, can be traceback partially to having a electronic building block toy when I was very young. Back then, we do not have Snap Circuits. The toy/kit that I had was more powerful and less user friendly. You can only buy that kit as a specialty [...]

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I have a form that contains a dynamic drop down. The content of drop down 2 is dynamic depending on the selection on dropdown 1. Pretty standard stuff. I hook a function to dropdown1’s change event, and load, using ajax/json, the dropdown2 with data retrieved from the server. I use the pretty simple lines of [...]

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*Updated*: This is the link to the official instructions (too late).
The replacement power supply unit arrived from Infrant. There are no instructions accompanying the unit. So I started to look around the NV+ to see how I can open it up and perform the replacement:
1. Take out the disks after labeling them. I think [...]

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If there is one piece of hardware that you don’t want failing, it will be a RAID disk array. After loosing a ton of media files, twice, I invested in a serious RAID box. The Infrant Technology NV+. It costs close to $2000 by the time I filled it with 1.5Terra bytes of redundant disk [...]

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I have been running a zwave controlled lighting at home for almost a year now. It’s great. Leviton recently entered the market with their own switches and controllers. They look good enough that I am going to swap out the old switches and install more new ones using Leviton devices. However they seems to have [...]

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