New Hard Disk for PowerBook

Thanks to the PC Fair in KLCC last week, my PowerBook G4 had gotten a new 160GB hard disk. I’m installing all of the stuff into the machine now improvements in hard disk technology had made my PowerBook to load up faster, reacts more zippily, operate more silently with less heat.

I’ve also doubled the existing size of the hard disk. However, I haven’t been able to recover any of my old data yet. This reminds me of the importance of backing up. Even though I can now surf in the toilet again, I’m heart-sick that all of my precious data is still lost.

PowerBook’s Dead!

My PowerBook’s harddisk crashed today. My electronic life has come to a grinding halt. Not only have I lost the documents that I had started writing more than 15 years ago on my old 486, I’ve also lost all of my precious photos which I had taken since a decade ago when I got my first digital camera.

Sure, I have some backup here and there. But nothing as comprehensive and complete as what I have stored in my trusty, or so I thought, PowerBook. It is indeed a very dark day for me today.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- leaked!

Either it is one of the best marketing campaign or a big dent on the purported USD 20 million security that has been spent by Bloomsbury:- the latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked to the Internet four days before it is supposed to go on sale on the 21st July 2007.

Someone has photographed (yes, photographed) all of the pages of the book and has posted ALL of them, not on the torrent networks, but on the World Wide Web! See here and here. Someone later downloaded all of them, divided them into chapters and started seeding them at PirateBay.org. That process took almost 3 hours but the effort produced a PDF file that contained all of the scanned images in the correct order and sequence.

The purported leak has also revealed the table of contents as shown below:-

One
The Dark Lord Ascending

Two
In Memorandum

Three
The Dursleys Departing

Four
The Seven Potters

Five
Fallen Warrior

Six
The Ghoul in Pajamas

Seven
The Will of Albus Dumbledore

Eight
The Wedding

Nine
A Place to Hide

Ten
Kreacher’s Tale

Eleven
The Bribe

Twelve
Magic is Might

Thirteen
The Muggle-born Registration Commission

Fourteen
The Thief

Fifteen
The Goblin’s Revenge

Sixteen
Godric’s Hollow

Seventeen
Bathilda’s Secret

Eighteen
The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore

Nineteen
The Silver Doe

Twenty
Xenophillius Lovegood

Twenty-One
The Tale of the Three Brothers

Twenty-Two
The Deathly Hallows

Twenty-Three
Malfoy Manor

Twenty-Four
The Wandmaker

Twenty-Five
Shell Cottage

Twenty-Six
Gringotts

Twenty-Seven
The Final Hiding Place

Twenty-Eight
The Missing Mirror

Twenty-Nine
The Lost Diadem

Thirty
The Sacking of Severus Snape

Thirty-One
The Battle of Hogwarts

Thirty-Two
The Elder Wand

Thirty-Three
The Prince’s Tale

Thirty-Four
The Forest Again

Thirty-Five
King’s Cross

Thirty-Six
The Flaw in the Plan

Epilogue

I’m going to strain my eyes to read this tonight!

What are you doing right now?

Imagine a website that publishes everything that you do, every second of everyday. Imagine that your information to this website can be gathered via the phone, web, instant messaging or e-mail. This is the premise of Twitter.com, a social networking/web 2.0 (pick your own favourite jargon) web service. I’ve created an account and so far I have submitted 9 entries- 2 via SMS to a UK Orange number.

It is a pretty easy setup with very low barrier of entry for any company that intends to replicate the same model. All one needs is a web journal publishing engine that is integrated to a content database. It is also quite easy to build the engines to obtain information from web forms, IM, e-mails and SMSes.

I first read about Twitter in Wired Magazine (in fact there are 2 articles- one on the creator of Twitter, Evan Williams and one on the phenomenon) and forgot about the name all together. I recalled it was “Tweet” or something like that. Anyway, I stumbled on it again today when I was googling away at work to find ways to increase international SMS traffic.

For the uninitiated, Evan Williams is the kajillionaire who created and later sold Blogger to Google. Seeing that the barrier of entry is relatively low, what is the business model for Twitter anyway? What does it hope to achieve? Don’t get me wrong, I love the service- it’s fun and addictive at the same time. It serves critics to know that Williams was probably laughed at on the on-set when he created a website to publish peoples web logs about themselves. Now, he’s probably laughing all the way to the bank- or not. Why don’t we head down to his twitter to find out?

The US Trip Photosets Are Ready!

After a month of “post-processing” the photos, our US Trip Photosets are ready for public viewing on my Flickr site. 

They are divided into 4 sets:-

The Statue of Liberty II

Click here for the complete New York photoset.

Niagara Falls

Click here for the complete Buffalo photoset.

DSC_0889.jpg

Click here for the complete San Francisco photoset.

Near the stars

Click here for the complete Los Angeles photoset.

Cleaned up the site

After adding on gunk for the past months, I’ve cleaned up the sidebar and the layout of this blog.

Gone are the GoogleAds, Bloggers Unite & Richard Dawkins Foundation buttons. New stuff include a page on Photography and also a new one page about me, myself and I.

I’m thinking of changing the theme for this site so it will look better.