February 18, 2010
It’s been another very long silence for me, having not written a blog for many months, a year almost. Luckily C is keeping this blog site alive by writing every now and then. A lot had happened since. Firstly, I am now in Zurich, Switzerland and have been here for the past three months. I took up a job here hoping that this could be a nice change for C and me. Well, within a month of moving here, I just did not feel right at all. This place is too manicured, everything is overly organised, to the extent that it makes me feel claustrophobic. Not to mention that the city is absolutely boring and the supermarkets lack varieties.
All these merely make me want to go home more each day. I love Malaysia, for what she is and whatever her flaws are, this is my home, yesterday, today and tomorrow. England was something that was more or less imposed on me, and yet I try to make the most out of it, I like her history, culture and I probably know more about England than I do about Malaysia at this point in time. Simply because you are surrounded by the news, the tv programmes and there is just too much information forced on you. If you are not brain dead, you will surely learn something, the society is generally more intellectual and the competitive side of me prevents me from being ignorant.
The same cannot be said about living in Malaysia though. Information is suppressed, one could easily forget about politics or any intellectual arguments whatsoever. We are a nation that is obsessed with food and possibly a cup of ‘kopi’ with friends at the ‘mamak stall’ talking about nothing significant, it all revolves around food. In fact, that is the culture we breed and the products of such a culture is that even when abroad, many Malaysians do not have high awareness about social problems, politics and generally things that happen in their societies. When asked what they miss about Malaysia – food, family and friends. Take that away and there is nothing that stops a Malaysian from going abroad, and in fact, that is what has been happening. I can’t say on behalf of other races, but being Chinese by ethnic origin, some of my Malaysian friends abroad are driven by money and career prospects abroad. They go where their careers take them to. There is no allegiance to any country and Malaysia as a home can be substituted. Patriotism is not something that rings any bell to Malaysians, or perhaps Malaysian Chinese. They can’t wait to prove that they have done much better without the burden of being a Malaysian, they take pride in being not very Malaysian. They are different, they are the creme-de-la-creme that have made it on their own, they are successful. Or is it really? Is that how one defines success?
It is extremely disappointing to know such Malaysians. There is no patriotism, there is no sense of wanting to contribute to the country. There was almost an element of hatred and distaste of their nationalities and the shame that the government has brought upon them. To such Malaysians, I can only express my distaste against them. I do not disagree that they may have some causes to be angry about the current state of Malaysia. However, I believe Malaysia can do without a few snobbish pseudo-Malaysians, in fact, I can’t wait for them to become non-Malaysians. They have no rights to claim to be a citizen to this beautiful country. One that does not appreciate the beauty of Malaysia does not deserve any claims to be linked to Malaysia. The country needs someone that cares, someone who cares enough about her to make a difference and tries to make a difference rather than being an aloof by-stander pointing fingers at others. My dream would be to see a united Malaysian community, all fighting for a better Malaysia, not for religious purposes, not for racial benefits, nor for any selfish reasons, but for every child of Malaysia for a better future for all. On that day, I will stand proudly on ‘tanah Malaysia’, the day when Malaysia is truly independent, from corruption and from domination by the elitists.
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February 4, 2010
Purchased an additional domain for our travel business. Not entirely convinced that it will drive more trafic to our website, but since it is freed up recently, and it costs peanuts to buy, why not 
Bought the domain from godaddy.com, because I have seen them everywhere, and they sell domains a fraction cheaper than any other domain sellers I can find. But I must say that buying a domain is getting more confusing nowadays. They have a price for the domain, and then they have a host of add ons that cost money, like domain privary, business registration, autorenewal etc. And there are at least 5 or 6 checkboxes that I need to tick or untick to save my mail box from being spammed by email newsletters, promotions etc, both from them and third parties. I have bought from Yahoo and 123-reg before, and the process as I remember was a little more hassle free.
After purchasing the domain, I proceed to transfer the domain to my hosting provider. Gosh goodness I am back to something I am back to an interface I am more familiar with. Now I am just waiting for the domain transfer to complete which can take up to 48 hours.
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January 20, 2010
There are already plenty of tutorials which will show you how to set up FedOne Google Wave server to federate with Google’s sandbox version of wave server for developers. I’m not going repeat them here. However I will highlight this one which I found most useful, follow by some of my own observations, during my endeavour.
In a nutshell, you first need to set up an XMPP server, as the FedOne wave reference server is implemented as an external component to the XMPP server. The XMPP server you should be looking to install needs to be XEP-0114 compatible (with Jabber Component Protocol). I’m using OpenFire, but there are others that you can use too like ejabberd.
Before you install the XMPP server, perhaps it is worth knowing beforehand which platform you are planning to run your servers on (e.g. Windows or Linux), and whether you want both the XMPP and FedOne wave servers to run on the same machine. Personal experience told me that it is very slow running servers or clients from Windows command prompt. And you need to run the FedOne wave server using the Windows command prompt. Just to give you an idea, compiling FedOne wave server on Windows command prompt took me more than 5 mins compared to less than 1 min on Linux terminal. If you are interested in looking at screen dumps from the FedOne wave server real-time, then that will slow down the performance of your wave client too. I have run text-based wave console client on Windows command prompt as well and again it is very slow. I almost see no live character transmission coming from the wavesandbox! It is that bad. I guess if you are not playing with the console client then you are probably okay. But in any case for development purposes I would not recommend installing the FedOne wave server on Windows.
Next you set up the FedOne wave server. As far as I can remember this is pretty straightforward. I set mine up on a separate machine from the OpenFire XMPP server. But you can run both on the same machine. After setting up the FedOne wave server, you can test your wave server using the console client that comes with the server package.
Your FedOne wave server is not ready for federation yet. You need to first add some DNS records to your DNS server, as is explained in this wiki. Basically you want external users or servers to be able to find your Fedone wave server via DNS. Note that this exercise is more straightforward if your DNS is maintained by third party DNS service provider like DynDNS. Otherwise it can be a pain hosting your own DNS server, particularly if you don’t have full access to or own everything like your domain, firewall, gateway, and requiring authorisations from IT staff etc. If that is the case, it will be wise that you also understand the requirements of the wave server for federation before proceeding with the DNS set up, as that might save you some time.
Once you have set up the DNS records, you can check if they are working correctly by using dig, a command line tool for querying DNS name servers for desired DNS records. For example here is how to check if the SRV records for your XMPP service has been set up.
# dig +short -t SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.example.com
And the response for my case is:
10 0 5269 wave.example.com
If your FedOne wave server is on a private network and needs to use Network Address Translation (NAT) to communicate with the outside world, you will need to set up port forwarding for port 5269 from your gateway to your FedOnewave server, and of course, open a hole on the firewall of the gateway for that port 5269 too. You can check if all these are working by initiating a telnet session to your wave server:
# telnet wave.example.com 5269
When you are connected, key in something and press enter, you will be informed that the connection is now closed by the foreign host, which is what you would expect.
Finally you have the CA certificates to sort out before you are allowed to federate with Google Wave sandbox server. Note that the sandbox server does not accept self-certified certificates so you will have to get one from a third party. Certificates issued by StartSLL are accepted by the sandbox server and it is free, for up to 1 year. It works well for me, apart from the inconvenience of applying for a certificate too soon (one day after I bought a domain). They require that your domain to be active for at least a couple of days (for my case I got mine when I applied 2 days later). If you don’t own the domain, you need to find out who has access to these emails accounts: postmaster@example.com, hostmaster@example.com and webmaster@example.com. Because StartSSL will only send authentication code to one of the above three email addresses, to confirm that you own the domain. If your service provider owns these addresses, then you may be in for a tough time. Quicker to just buy your own domain for a few quid a year if you are only planning to try out FedOne wave server or do development work for federation. Here is a wiki on how to get CA-issued certificate and how to check if the certs are all ready to go.
That’s it, you should be able to fire up your FedOne wave console client and add users/developers with Google Wave sandbox account. If you don’t already have a sandbox account, it may be a good time to apply now, while you are setting up the rest of the stuff, as who knows how long it takes before you are given one.
Hope you all find this blog useful.
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December 24, 2009
It’s incredible to think about it now that we can get access to the information almost anytime anywhere. Before iPhone it was still a pain in the arse. And iPhone has really exceeded my expectations. Today I was still able to use MSN to keep in touch with W while I was waiting for a coach to the airport. And I can make free phone calls using Skype via the free wifi service provided by the coach. Now as I am waiting at the airport for my flight, I made another free call to my brother in Malaysia, who is incidentally using iPhone too. Then of course I’m blogging here in the meantime too. On top of that I can check my Facebook to see what my friends are currently doing on Christmas eve. Enough said, and I think I can spend a lot of time on my iPhone! Merry Christmas all!
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The doctor had no problem making a measurement of her size, at 6.1cm, which is tiny! And I was amazed to see her move, and turn around like a baby already at such young “age”! Her heart beat is visible, almost feel like it is about to burst out from her tiny body! I’m very happy, as she looks healthy, and looks every bit like what a foetus should look like 
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