Thursday, 27 March 2008

New World

Half the holiday has passed but I still haven't started doing the 3000-word essay and the programming project. I don't know what makes me keep procrastinating, but I just keep doing that. Whatever, I decided to wipe out everything on my hard drive and install only Ubuntu on it. This seems a great fresh academic start. Yeah, it does.

Having gone through the normal installation process, I followed two articles on Ubuntu configuration. They are,

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Gutsy#How_to_get_Mouse_over
_preview_of_MP3_files_working
and
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Edgy
The reason why I used the second reference which is an out-dated version of Ubuntu is that it's more detailed than the first one and most of the tricks still work on the lasted distribution. I've been through heaps of configs, but I just want to note some of them which I reckon are worth noting.
I followed a post to get all my hardware up and running last time I installed Ubuntu 7.10. So I scouted it out again at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=107505. Two tricks in this post helped me a lot. One is how I can get rid of the black screen when I use Alt+Fx to switch to console screen. The way is to change the parameters 'splash quiet' in grub config file into 'verbose'. As you can see, this sacrifices the great boot screen, so i reckon sooner or later I'll solve it in a perfect way. The other thing valuable to me in this post is how to set my Ati x1700 graphic card up. It'll be a piece of cake when you follow the easy steps described in there.

When I was installing mplayer and another user application whatever the name is, I got an error message from apt-get:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mplayer: Depends: libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.18.3) but 1.18.2-0ubuntu1 is to be installed
E: Broken packages

What confused me was that i've got a newer version of libpango(which is 1.18.2-0ubuntul here) but but it didn't work and did require the older one. Well, this wasn't just for mplayer. Wtf, what's the point of having a newer version of libpango? I didn't bother downgrading the package because I didn't know how to do it. I googled it and found someone resolved the problem by directly installing the specified version after finding out that he couldn't remove the current package. Okay, why not give it a try? I downloaded 3 deb files and installed them but it was fucked up when I installed the .dev package for libpango. However, the other two files were installed successfully. I tried installing mplayer again, this time I got a massive output which made me feel really shitty. Okay, I aimlessly opened Synaptic Package Manager and it popped up a window saying that there was a broken package on my system(must be libpango). Then I located it and removed it without any difficulty. Excited, I visited apt-get again and this time it didn't complain anything and mplayer install is ongoing while I'm logging this. So in conclusion, don't take everything in other dudes' posts for granted because you have different system setup and things may differ when running on two different operating systems.

And at last, here's the instructions on how to install mplayer and the corresponding codecs:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/install-mplayer-and-multimedia-codecs
-libdvdcss2w32codecs-in-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon.html
However, this doesn't work with .rmvb files. Last time I installed Ubuntu, I tried all the possible packages to make it working with .rmvb files but I forgot to wirte it down. But right now, I can't be bothered to scout it out, since I don't have any new movies download at the moment. LOL!

This blog post looks a bit of mess. But...well, screw it! This is just for self reference.

60 Earth Hour, take part in it!


On March 31 2007, for one hour, Sydney made a powerful statement about the greatest contributor to global warming – coal-fired electricity – by turning off its lights. Over 2.2 million Sydney residents and over 2,100 businesses switched off, leading to a 10.2% energy reduction across the city. What began as one city taking a stand against global warming caught the attention of the world.

In 2008, 24 global cities will participate in Earth Hour at 8pm on March 29. Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the simple steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference – from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty, to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.

Tuesday, 25 March 2008

Stay passionate! Stay awake!

I'm determined to use Java in ACM this year, so it's probably going to be tough for me because i have to learn a brand new programming language as well as doing heaps of bloddy assignments. Well, this could be called an appetizer since i haven't relaly done anything meaningful since i graduated from high school. And i really want this to resurrect myself and start doing what I always dreamed doing. By the way, it's nice to know Laurel, who is most probably going to be my co-worker or partner henceforth.

Stay Passionate! Stay awake! Stay creative! I think the criteron for becoming successful is that one ends up finding himself the kind of person he would like to be.

Friday, 21 March 2008

revelation

Many Chinese people are fucking weird!