Denzel Washington is a bad-ass walking across post-apocalyptic America, wielding a bad-ass sword, cutting up cannibals addled by BSE. A man on a mission, to carry the last surviving copy of the King James Bible to a divinely inspired location, while an evil mastermind endeavors to obtain the book for his diabolical ends.

Feels a bit like Blade during the few action sequences. But mostly, the world feels like Fallout, I almost expect the Brotherhood of Steel to step in at one point to save the day… Oh wait, that DID happen in the end…

The world is very well crafted. Through bits and pieces of conversation, the history and nature of the apocalypse was revealed without the use of clumsy plot narratives. There is a touch of the divinity in the story, but it was done delicately yet with a powerful impact.

Gary Oldman’s greed for power was also very nicely done. His understanding of humanity’s vulnerability to religion and his desire to twist it for his ambitions is really reminiscent of how the Roman church ‘invented’ the papacy to rule over kings. (Right. I’ve been reading a thing or two about the political history around the time of Christianity’s birth, but that’s another rant.)

In the end, the story is fine, and you can almost forgive the anti-climatic ending. I can even forgive the plot holes, like how did the girl know how to drive? Or, in a wasteland where even shampoo is scarce, how did that same girl find a pair of Levi’s that hugs her legs so perfectly? It’s just not possible!

Still nothing.

A few products were highlighted for testing:

OCS Inventory

Played with this before. Open source. Installs an agent on the clients, and a server will gather all the necessary info. Runs PHP I believe.

NetSupport Manager

Installs an agent. I find the 30mb agent rather cumbersome to install. But it gives you something superior to RDP (Remote Desktop) or VNC. Able to get a lot of device info. But lacking reporting tools.

SpiceWorks

Commercial, free, ad-supported software. In theory, you install it on one terminal, and that terminal will run a network scan across your network. When it encounters a device, it’ll attempt to connect via SSH, WMI, SNMP etc, using profiles that you create. It’ll gather a butt-load of data, and send it to an online server, from which you can generate a bunch of very useful reports.

In theory…

The problem, Microsoft doesn’t make it so easy. First, there’s the Window’s Firewall.

netsh firewall set service remoteadmin enable

This will poke a hole in the firewall to let the necessary request come through.

Then there are other requirements. Like, no blank passwords allowed for WMI!? WTH? And this was not documented somewhere?

But that’s not enough… Cos there’s a registry key in WinXP machines that will FORCE all incoming requests to log in as Guest, even when you’ve got an administrator account and password. And, then obviously Guest is disabled by default. So you’ll keep getting Error Code = 0×80070005, and ACCESS IS DENIED, until you’ve spent 1-2 hours reading through a ton of forum threads.

To make it work:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\ForceGuest

Set this to 0, and finally you can connect via WMI. Test this like so:

wmic /user:username /password:yourpassword /node:remotemachine systemenclosure get serialnumber

If this works fine, then SpiceWorks should work fine…

Still, this entirely defeats the purpose of SpiceWorks’ uber-convenienceness… If I still have to hunt down every piece of desktop/laptop hardware out there to run these changes to enable SpiceWorks to connect… then I might as well be installing an agent-based inventory system to give me more features.

But the most important point here: MicroSoft sucks! The left hand is handicapping what the right hand is doing. That random ForceGuest registry entry took me hours to dig up, after having exhausted checking WMI privileges and firewall privileges etc etc…

Oh… And to make the same work in Windows 7 and Vista:

Add this into the registry:

[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] 
"LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy"=dword:00000001

And run one of the following in CMD as Administrator,

netsh firewall set service remoteadmin enable
netsh advfirewall set currentprofile settings remotemanagement enable
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="windows management instrumentation (WMI)" new enable=Yes

There are 101 other reasons that can make WMI fail. But these are the barest minimum that’ll work on the default installations I’ve found.

Still, it’s not the kind of book I would budget my limited time on. But I took enough trouble to download the audiobook.

So a man is born with a genetic disorder that makes him randomly pop out of the normal stream of time, arriving as naked as the Terminator. Thus he had to develop survival skills early, learning to steal and pick door locks to get clothing and food cos he doesn’t know how long he’ll be stuck.

Then he meets his future wife in the past. How creepy is a relationship between a middle-aged man and a pre-teen girl? So his future wife knows him years before he even meets her in real time. The entire relationship takes place like this, in and out of time. Fantasy romance. Plenty on the romance. Light on the fantasy.

The write basically used the time travel as a gimmick, and tried to engineer many unusual scenarios to tell the couple’s romance.

Slow moving tale. Early on it tried to be all Sophie’s World, discussing causality and pre-determination or some such lameness. The story climaxed at the same time the time-traveller popped his future wife’s cherry.

Downhill and boring after that. If that were even possible.

He dies in the end. There, that’s the gimmicky ending. I’ve just saved you hours of boredom.

I got an invite to participate in the beta testing of the best thing to happen in PC gaming this millennium.

Took a while to download. Then, I had some problems playing on Battle Net.

But no worries. With a little help from ‘friends’, I can toss in a simple AI and play single player games just to try out the game.

It’s still gonna be Zerg, Terrans and Protoss. Some familiar units and abilities are still there. A lot of things have changed.

Terran

Supply Depots can lower themselves underground or pop up at will. Thus becoming essential defensive structures. Able to block off a choke point completely, yet lower themselves out of the way for your own army to walk through. Evil.

Air transport is now a Medivac too. Nukes are built in Ghost Academies. Upgrades allowing buildings to pump out 2 units at a go. Command Centre upgrades include a gun turret. Robotech Valkyries transforming to provide both air and ground support. A new giant mecha, the Thor, stomping around like a Warjack. Battlecruisers shoot much faster now. Then a unit that can throw out mini gun turrets…

Protoss

Gateways can turn into Warpgates, which warps in new units almost instantaneously to any spot covered by a pylon or a warp prism. There’s a 15sec cooldown, but that’s still much faster than building the unit via the Gateway. Zealot rushes are still scary. But no more Reaver drops. The Mothership isn’t anywhere as scary as the alpha preview video Blizzard shared with us in the early days of SC2’s development.

Zergs

Zergs is a whole new creature! Creep Tumors to spread the creep all over the map. Hydralisks now an advanced build; more expensive to maintain, but powerful. Brood Lords shoot funky ammo. Infestors can burrow and move, and shoots out Neural Parasites that controls an enemy unit for 10seconds. How fun is it to parasite a Protoss probe and quickly get it to build you your own Nexus, so that you can start building both Zerg and Protoss forces? Think cloaked Hydras…

Not sure how Zerg will deal with air superiority… The few games played, Zerg’s anti-air seems lacking. But ruling the ground with swarms of Zerglings is terrifying. Extremely fast buggers, annoying hit and run attacks.

It’s unlikely that I’ll ever play much on Battle Net. Will definitely work through the single player campaign when the game launches. Although, should put some effort into the beta to demonstrate enthusiasm, so that they’ll keep me in the list for future betas >.>

One week of Android training, and 2 weeks of CNY holidays in Victoria, Oz. Did exactly 5 days of actual work, and got a month’s pay. How sweet is that?

Took off to Melbourne on 13th Feb in the afternoon. Arrived in Melbourne in the dead of night of a Sunday morning. Not the most pleasant 8hrs on the cramped AirAsia X flight. And the BBQ chicken wasn’t much good.

Spent the two weeks in Australia between my sister’s apartment in Melbourne city, and her rural posting at Foster. I’ve already seen the city in my previous visits, around year 2000. More excited about Foster. Scouted out the area using Google Maps, and the aerial view of the landscape there is just amazing.

Achievements Unlocked:

Visited just a few of the amazing spots at Wilson’s Promontary, like Squeaky Beach, where the sand is so fine it literally squeaks when you walk over it.

Visited Tidal River, walked around the wetlands.

Hiked up Mount Oberon, 547m above sea level.

Hiked 10km to Sealer’s Cove, and back on the same day.

Shot a wallaby and a koala bear at Morwell National Park.

Saw Agnes Falls. Toora Wind Farm. Whelshpool. Sandy Point.

Drove around in my sis’ Honda Civic, which was kinda lame cos the speed limit is NEVER above 100kph. What’s the point? And with 2 back-seat drivers and 1 passenger criticizer. It’s not the most ideal driving experience. But I survived.

Managed to auction my Pentax K10D off on eBay. Didn’t get the price I was hoping for, cos there were a few similar sales just the week before. Still, I managed to sell it for almost exactly what I paid for it second hand.

Upgraded to a Pentax K-7. ^_^  Much glee~~~

Shopped at Bunnings and found a random piece of gear that will be useful for the random repairs or dismantling that I often inflict on my gear. Got a cheap siphon feed airbrush that will be suitable for spraying varnish and similar toxic stuff. I *heart* Bunnings….

And now it’s back to hot and muggy KL.

1.5 weeks here and it feels as if months had passed. The holiday a distant dream.

Has anything improved in KL in my abscence? Well, a number of politicians have walked a few weeks closer to their grave. Silver lining in everything…

It’s a black box. Comes with 4x 500MB SATA harddisks. Different flavours of RAID 0, 1, 5, or 10. 2x Gigabit LAN ports. 2x USB ports, which you can use to plug in an external harddrive / thumbdrive to share it via the NAS, or plug in a printer and the Terastation will run as a print server too.

Power it up. Hook it up to your network. Do the networking voodoo. Sacrifice a white dove or two. And you’ll have 2 Terabytes of NAS (Network Attached Storage) on your network.

That’s enough to siphon all the multimedia content from your desktop, notebook, home theatre entertainment PC, and iPod over, without even making a dent to the capacity. Unless like me, you’re running multiple units of high capacity harddrives on the desktop… I might be able to fill up half of this thing.

It’ll even run Bit-Torrent and help you fill up the vacuum.

Very cool gear.

But kinda pricey. And the higher capacity models are exponentially more expensive.

Which is why my boss had the brilliant idea to buy the 2.0TB version. Then buy 4x 1TB SATA harddrives separately. Swap out the 500MB from the box, and getting the 4.0TB version for less.

What he ended up with was a large brick with cool lights and fan noise.

Then it became my problem….

Apparently, removing all the drives at once generates some bad error. The OS (there is one) expects to find an array of disks in the box, and failing to find them, it even fails to boot up properly. Downloaded and did a lot of shit to make the thing boot, by way of some serious voodoo, I got the BIOS to boot via the LAN etc. Couldn’t see a way to reflash the firmware or rebuild whatever’s necessary back onto the new harddisks.

Found a guide on rebuilding a TeraStation. But this is a crap load of work. Basically, this is for the case if you’ve got a RAID-5 array, and you don’t have 2TB of external storage to back up your existing shit. What the guide does, is basically breaking the RAID-5 by taking a drive out and replacing it with a new one. Let the RAID rebuild the array, taking 10+ hours easily. Repeat this 3 more times until all the old drives are swapped out. And THEN, telnet into the box, INTO the Linux OS inside, and run the commands to manipulate the disk partitions to discover the extra 2TB you just upgraded.

I got as far as downloading the Java, running the ACP Commander, and gaining Shell access on the Linux box. It’s quite exciting. At least I didn’t have to look for a hacked firmware of the correct version, take a leap of faith, and attempt to root the firmware.

But there MUST be an easier way. I’m stepping into this device blind. Reading stuff here and there was slowly putting the puzzle pieces together, but I still can’t be sure what and how exactly this thing  works.

Fortunately, I came across this easy way to upgrade a fresh Terastation with no existing data on it.

Distilling it down…

I put back 3 of the original 4x 500MB harddisks back into the box. 1 of the drive has the new 1TB harddisk.

Switch On. Delete the RAID-5 array, so that it doesn’t waste hours rebuilding an array that’s got no data on it at all. So the system just sees 4 HDs, and one of them is new.

Select the new disk, and format it with the XFS file system. Maybe in the formatting, it built some information onto the partition somehow. It’s voodoo, so I’m only speculating.

Finish formatting. Switch off. Remove another disk, swap in with another 1TB disk. Switch On. Format.

Repeat until all 4 disks have been swapped.

Whooooop~!! A Terastation 4.0TB is born. Now create a new array to flavour.

The trainer was a young man from India, and the venue is at this shitty old place in town: McOrange Institute. The venue had serious plumbing issues, failed airconditioning, a 30yr old elevator that didn’t work half the time, and indescribable odours haunt various corners of the building. We had to move the training over to our own campus. But overall, the training was fun and informative. Although the pace of the teaching had to match the pace of the slowest student, so I felt that many higher level stuff was never covered.

But at the end of the day, our ally managed to procure a unit of the Nexus One for our department for use as our development phone. I was quickest to grab hold of the unit, and had been hogging it all to myself for almost a whole week.

This is the first time I am using a phone costing this much. It’s not technically available in Malaysia, but I’m on the newsletter list of a trader who imported a couple of units from HK. It’s available in the US for US$529. The guy over here sold the Nexus One at RM2400 each.

A simple looking phone. Doesn’t look too flashy, but the big shiny touchscreen already gave me an R+J moment…

HTC manufactured. 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Android 2.1. OLED display. Capacitance multi-touch screen. Thin and solid.

The moment everyone else got done looking at its shininess and tested out the camera… I commandeered the unit and lost no time tossing my SIM card and SD Card in. So, in the order of things I tested…

#1 Multimedia:
I want to know how my music and audio book will sound. The multimedia uses the crappy ringer speaker. Volume leaves much to be desired. Quality will obviously be crap too. Even at full ringer volume, I don’t hear the phone ring in my pocket.

#2 Phone:
Comes with 2 mics. One on the back, one on the bottom. Noise cancellation. But can’t speak for how well it works. Signal reception does seem to be a little bit worse than my Nokia. Loses signal occasionally underground.

#3 Wifi:
Grabs a signal and starts working very fast. Very easy. Just works. And once there’s wifi…

#4 GMail:
Log in GMail, and everything else starts working. Mail starts coming in. GTalk starts working. Even the picture gallery starts to grab everything I’ve uploaded onto PicasaWeb. My Contacts list starts filling up.

#5 FaceBook:
Log in this one, and my Contacts list fills up to the brim with everyone’s email addresses.

#6 Market:
Once you’ve logged in a Google account, the Marketplace opens up for you. Head right there and browse thousands of free apps that downloads and installs easily onto the phone. Lots of useful and show-offy stuff like Google Sky Maps. And a Sudoku game is practically a must. No good, free Kakuro game yet though…

#7 Web Browsing:
Flash support. SUCK ON THAT, iPhone! Everything is smooth. But there’s no multi-touch in Android 2.1. Some patent issue. Apple wants to hold exclusivity to the interface. Just like what they did with the iPod shuffle wheel and UI a while ago.

But with an OTA (Over The Air) update that happened on Friday afternoon, the multi-touch function is suddenly enabled! The hardware is there all along. Pinch zooming and other gestures now available.

#8 Battery:
Takes an insanely long time to charge. About 5hrs for a full charge. It depletes about 50% in 7hrs. Hardly enough, especially with the myriad of things you will want to do with it when you’ve got a web connection. But on the plus side, the battery is replaceable. There’s another inconvenience: you need to remove the battery every time you swab out the SD Card. The slot is on the inside of the device. Pain.

#9 Keyboard:
Not very pleasant to use. The predictive text and such helps a fair bit. But it requires much more concentration to type messages on this as compared to a T9 input. And tapping out long URLs are a particular pain, if you accidentally touch the Search or Back button and lose all your hard work and have to start over again and again…

#10 Voice Input:
There’s a handy little mic button on the keyboard. Tap, and speak into the mic. Voila, voice to text! But it uses the internet for this. Very clever, using off-device processing and database resources to do this. And it’s so responsive that you don’t actually realise that your voice was just digitally encoded, pushed into the internet, parsed by a giant datacenter somewhere, crunched through a very good algorithm, the results matched to a database, and the results pushed back through the internet and back onto your keyboard. It’s like being able to eat French fries that was fried in France and freighted over, that still tastes as good as MacDonald’s French fries. On the down side, this doesn’t work when you have no internet access. And it also censors vulgarities. “Asshole” comes out as “####”.

#11 The Mouse Clit:
I’m inventing a rude name for the tiny trackball interface, to see if the name will catch on. Male rodents have had their genitals maligned for much too long, so I figured there should be equal opportunity for the other gender. Besides, it’s quite apt, descriptively. It’s a little nub at the bottom of the phone that serves little purpose. There isn’t a way to adjust the sensitivity of the clit, and when trying to move the cursor around a line of text, the clit moves it way too slowly. But I can appreciate why such an interface is still very much needed for accurate cursor movements. Cos you can’t use a stylus on this screen, and fat fingers can’t poke exactly where you need things to go. But the sensitivity needs to be very much better for it to be useable. Also, it serves to protect the shiny screen cos it keeps the screen off the surface if you put the phone facedown on a table.

In summary, this is a fine fine tool. Especially if you’re willing to pay for 3G broadband access, so that you can use all the cool shit everywhere you go. All the truly neat stuff needs the net. Very cool to sip coffee with friends, and be able to MSN when everyone starts talking about work.

I want one. But not at this price.

The name of the phone is an obvious reference to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep which got made into the Harrison Ford movie, Blade Runner. In the story, the Nexus 6 is a series of bio-engineered androids made for off-world work. Does Google think it can get that far with five more iterations of its phone?

Then it broke.

When attempting to connect to the HyperV via the remote management console, I kept getting, “You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer.”

After a bit of troubleshooting, I finally found out that the password to the HyperV machine has expired.

Change the password on the HyperV server. Change the password on the remote management machine. (Remember that the username and password of both machines have to match, if you’re not using Active Directory.) Reboot both computers. And they work again.

Now… something else has broken my KnowledgeTree install. How do I want to fix this?

2nd January, 2010.
CheeKidd & Charis’ wedding. Am the ‘co-coordinator’. Which means I run around clicking mice and queueing music while claiming too much credit for involvement in the wedding. It was an amazing garden wedding and there was perfect weather. Lots of old classmates showed. The event really deserved a bigger chunk of InsaneSquirrel instead of just a small blurb in a list… Maybe later.

3rd January, 2010.
Sent parents off to the airport.

4th January, 2010.
Met up with SoonYee, an ex-colleague from ABRIC. Interesting fella. Claims to have run a Starcraft Academy in the old days, employing deep mathematics to train a clan of undefeatable Starcraft cadets. Discussed a potential online business.

5th January, 2010.
Kuan from Kuantan, posted in KL for a month. Dinner.

6th January, 2010.
Was supposed to watch The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. Was FFK-ed.

7th January, 2010.
Settled a dinner-debt with WeiYin from UM. And then, a second dinner with Ted at Jln Imbi. Primary school classmate from Brunei. Have only seen him one other time in the last 20 years maybe. He’s fixing his visa so that he can work in Italy stitching designer bags. Had a long chat about the impending dominance of China, and discussed the viability of various contingency plans in case our society devolves into anarchy. It will appear that knowing Chinese medicine and TaiChi will improve the odds of survival. Had to miss a farewell dinner with a colleague even. Figured that the 2.5 decade old classmate was the rarer event.

8th January,2010.
Me time on a Friday night. That’s one evening to myself all alone.

9th January, 2010.
Second attempt to watch Imaginarium with Suan. Couldn’t catch a movie cos she couldn’t catch a train. Then dinner with gamerz.

10th, January, 2010.
Guilted into skipping Kempo in favour of church. Then an afternoon with Moses looking at the 720p HD documentaries that he has been downloading but I can’t copy off of cos they’re such freaking large files!!

11th January, 2010.
My K10D isn’t reading my 16gb SD card. A little panicked, so went out to buy a new SD card. Luckily the issue was that 16gb card, and not the camera. *Phew* And while reading at Borders, I was buzzed by an unexpected call asking for help how to fix the strap on a brand new Canon 1000D.

12th January, 2010.
Dinner with the Technical Marketing Manager of Gigabyte. Another old pri school classmate from Brunei~!! What were the odds? He’s moved to Taiwan since forever, and was in KL to promote motherboards to the local techie media. Again, dinner in Jln Imbi and lots of talk.

13th January, 2010.
Third attempt to watch Imaginarium. Kuan made an excuse how seats were two rows from the screen, and went and bought tix for Old Dogs instead. Crap.

14th January, 2010.
SoonYee again. Portions at Williams have gotten bigger…

15th January, 2010.
Dinner with colleagues.

And January STILL has a lot more in store! This Saturday, an NJC-ian from S’pore days, whom I’ve not seen in 15 years, will be dropping by KL.

THEN, a roadtrip to Malacca on Sunday.

Oh, let’s not forget to mention the mountain climbing on Saturday too….