I think you are seeing Abdullah and Haris in the planet now. It's slow and steady, but I'm hoping to bring OSCC and also .gov.my into our growing local FOSS community. Only good things happen, when everybody starts becoming part of the FOSS community, learning from each other and sharing best practices. Expect more good things soon.

Morning in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Been trying to find another 20hrs somewhere during the week to do various things such as additional consulting work, community work, development, building Inigo etc. without affecting current day job and also family time.

Nike always does these cool ads. A while back, they did this ad where they showed a bunch of people swimming, running, shooting hoops etc. Right at the end of the ad, they showed somebody waking up and hitting the alarm clock. The point? That before you even wake up, all these guys are already working hard.

So recently I've tried to adjust to be awake about an hour earlier. That gives me 5hrs per week. If it works well, I'll try pushing it to two hours next week.

As some of you may know (if you have LinkedIn), that I recently joined OSCC. I'm only there to work mostly on the awareness side and also updates to some of the guidelines. As with MyGOSSCon, you should expect continued support for local FOSS SMEs and academic instituitions. As usual, nothing on this blog represents any official views or position of OSCC.

Before university, I took Design (graphics, interior, industrial) as an A-level subject for 2 years. It was the class that I felt most comfortable in, and I loved working on a large workspace in a creative environment. So it was a dream of mine to be able to work at home in a studio like this,

Copyright natebeaty - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0

I had a glimpse of the dream for the past 2 years, and now seeing a cubicle again, I'm working towards going back to it permanently in the near future.

There is a room length extension of the table on the left actually, which was for some traditional materials, but currently has computer junk on it which I need to reorganise.

http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/Day1.html

I blogged this a while ago, but it's something I come back to often. angch pointed this to me when I was struggling to find words to explain, why some developers seem to do the same things without reflecting on whether things could be improved or done differently in a better way. Why people with 3-5 years in the IT industry we were interviewing can have worse quality and less knowledge than an intern.

This can actually be mapped into other domains, not just IT since these days a lot more of us are working in a knowledge/information environment.

• Packer: Server is unstable. Let's reboot it each night.
• Mapper: Why is it unstable? Let's find and work on a solution so it doesn't.

With regards to total quality management,

"The packer corruption is to regard the job as ticking the boxes as quickly as excuses can be found to do so."

It's frustrating when you're in this kind of environment, where people just don't care about the bigger picture. We will just hit our figures somehow, quality and long term effects be damned. That's not what the target figures are there for. Unfortunately this kind of environment is usually the norm and not the exception.

Managed to catch a documentary that hits home a point I've discussed with some people around me thinking along the same lines.

"The Hubble telescope project was something, that was worth it to me to spend 10 years of my life working on."

I think "Years of a my life" is a damn good measure when evaluating your long term goals. It puts things into perspective, and makes you realize just how little time you have to achieve them.

Playing DVDs was not an issue, but I found problems doing DVD backups, dvdrip basically hung and tzcat went crazy. Looking for command line, I found dvdbackup. Still no go, finally I found out that you needed libdvdcss form this blog post.

Funny that this is not in repositories, but you need to run a script to install it. FreeBSD has this in ports by the way.

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

And it'll fetch and install a deb package.

Usually when we mention TPM, it's Technology Park Malaysia, but in this case it refers to "Technology Prevention Measures". Of course these have been proven time and time again to be broken. So what do they do? Evil big media (through US government) have already pushed for these laws to be implemented in Malaysia.

This is something I keep spreading awareness of.

By downloading that library and making a copy of a "legally bought" DVD, you can report me to the police and under Malaysian law I could be sentenced to jail for 5 years, fined RM100,000 or both (as I recall). If Malaysia signs an FTA with the US, they want similar laws to be more inclusive with stiffer punishments. They (US government and their local proxies) actually compared drug penalties (death) with copyright penalties, and say it's too light.

By making a backup of a legally bought DVD for my daughter, so that she can continue seeing her favourite shows even if she scratches the original DVD, her dad can be sent to jail for 5 years! Am I that harmful to Malaysian society to be locked up for making a copy of Elmo's Favourite Songs?

Citizens define the laws, by electing law makers. Are our law makers representing the rights of citizens in this case or the interests of powerful foreign media corporations?

In the US most of the elected lawmakers are on the side of corporations. I wonder if local elected MPs are willing to look after the interests of Malaysians for IPR related issues whether they are from BN or the opposition.

I still need to boot into a FreeBSD partition on my laptop to do some FreeBSD specific things now and then, which you can't do in a virtual environment.

Setting up FreeBSD to dual boot with Ubuntu (or any other Linux with grub) is simple.

1. Install FreeBSD in a primary partition (slice) and leave some space free for your Ubuntu install during the fdisk part of the installation.
2. Install Linux in remaining space, and install grub boot loader (usually the default)
3. Boot into Ubuntu as it doesn't autodetect FreeBSD partition, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst (or grub.conf on some other distros) and add the following,

title           FreeBSD
root            (hd0,0,a)
kernel          /boot/loader