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Leveling up. New laptop, new technological platform Microsoft SharePoint

Suddenly I recalled my younger days sitting in front of the computer playing my favourite game “Unchartered Waters”

A merchant cum pirate cum explorer role playing game. Depending on your choosen character, you start off with with a small miserable ship, the only thing of which you could do with it was to travel from Lisbon in Portugal to Seville in Spain, trading Salt from Lisbon with Porcelain from Seville.

However with each trade if done properly you gain more capital to trade in bigger bulk. Somewhere along the way you gain enough capital to buy yourself one of those floating bastions call Venetian Galleons and then of course you get it modified for the high seas. Once that is done, the ports the world over awaits. Haha!

Recently real life has been starting to resemble this RPG game I was playing since young. The trading side at least, less the adventure side.

Suddenly, running out of capacity and processing power on my current laptop, I bought myself a new one with more memory and processing power than what I currently have. Spent more money than I usually would on anything mechanical.

Well the system specifications are correct and now the microsoft pre-requisites are as they should be. Seems like I am now ready to move into deeper waters. Bon Voyage. 😛

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Capitalism : A love story

I just saw the greatest love story ever on Capitalism. It is a must watch, extremely satirical, but accurate and information giving us a good overview of why the US is in the state it is in today.

It is puzzling sometimes wondering how come humans do not conform to the normal behavior of natural predators. It was ever reported that lions, tigers and wolves normally leave their prey alone once they are done with their meals.

Are we really cursed with the inexplicable drive towards converting every known resource on earth into dollars and cents? What the hell is wrong with us?

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Converting of Windows Word Document to PDF

This is necessary mainly for business documents where you only want to allow the other part read only ability, and don’t want the other party to be editing any contents of the document.

I was trying the PDFCreator printing client for a while. However this client seems to fail when dealing with much larger clients.

Thereafter I switched to using PDFOnline.com service. This service is not very stable. If you are using the new version, it crashes all the time. However you will still need to go through the new version experience the crash before you could get to the old version.

I tried primopdf.com after that. The result was horrendous. The site’s engine did not take into account the possiblity of versioning within the winword document. I ended up having the original unedited version of the document.

I have tried http://www.freepdfconvert.com/ it is working fine so far. The only exception experienced was an inexplicable note attached to one particular page of the document. Perhaps I should raise this issue to the service provider and have them improve their service to make it even better.

Then again imposing systems on reality, is like catching water with a net, exceptions will always bound to occur.

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Why money?

Recently I have been spending alot. More than what I have budgeted for per period time. In reflection though these spendings are not really derived from needs or necessity but seriously due to the lack of answer for this fundamental question? On good food and tonns on books.

Why the hell am I still wasting time working and making money? Seemingly I have made enough money for a long while a year or more perhaps given my predictable spending habits. Any extra money is but just some figures sitting in the bank account.

It seems money as a compensation for effort spent on work is just not really enough past a point.

Even though having spent way more than I should on what I dont really need, I still felt that something fundamentally was missing. I literally walked half of Singapore on foot the other day just searching for that missing answer. Dropped off a bus at fort canning park and slowly made my way on foot to Mount Faber and thereafter on foot back to Clementi traversing through the southern ridges. At some points in time, I did feel as though I could almost grasp at the abstract thing i was searching for however always it remained elusive.

The day after though when I just so happened to step into the National Geographic shop in Vivocity, I was totally blown away. Coming to a wall at the far end of the shop staring back at me was a huge map on the world on the wall, with each and every country and territory clearly demarcated one beside the other. Lying around the place too were photos and books on the exploits of fellow adventures to parts of the world hidden from most.

Yes! This is and remains the only reason as to my motivation for working my ass of making money. Alena’s living expenses aside. Without this goal of traversing the world overland or by boat, life becomes truly meaningless, despite the tonns of money to be made.

That night I made Alena a proposal. We must go to India and journey from the southern parts to the northern parts just south of the Himalayan region, if not Bhutan, Nepal than Kashmir. To go I must!

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Installation of Sharepoint

After talking with Satheesh for a while, i have decided that I should install Microsoft Sharepoint and attempt to play around with the technology to familiarize myself with it for future hacks.

Sadly my laptop could not support it. Ouch! The minimal requirement is a IIS 6.0 which means a Windows XP 64bit. Mines a Windows XP 32bit. I prefer this versus the Windows Vista which is currently in the market.

Meanwhile I guess I will be either shopping for a laptop or a desktop.

Am looking at something like the below

  • Minimum 2 Ghz
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 320 GB HDD

Once acquired this should be a good developement environment powerhouse to deal with this mamoth microsoft technology.

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Configuring Internet Explorer 2008 for Sharepoint

Recently we met a problem displaying the Explorer view of share point on the internet Explorer of windows 2008. This is mainly due to the fact that Desktop Experience is not enabled by default on the Windows 2008 server. Once you have enabled it, the Explorer View of SharePoint should work perfectly

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Configuring Singtel Broadband router to host web server

Just last night in an attempt to once again familiarize myself with networks, I started experimenting with my SingTel BroadBand Router.

I basically connected this laptop of mine to the network and logged into the router’s web interface. Next, I assigned this laptop of mine to the Demilitarized Zone aka DMZ.

Doing this thus puts my laptop in front of the firewall that protects my home’s LAN from external intrusion.

My Laptop gets assigned a new IP address and a new default gateway. Next I rebooted my laptop.

Once done, I could started my web server. During the instance if any one knew what was my IP address, He or she could have accessed my webserver.

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Email client configuration POP vs IMAP

The other day I provided Mel from Winter in Venice instructions on how to configure their mail client. Their mail server was on google. Their mail client were configured using POP.

Apparently most of them are attempting to check their emails from multiple places, sometimes from their computer in their office, sometimes from their computer at home, sometimes from their black berry hand phone. One requirement which I was not priorly informed of.

Just now, right after I finished my event with Ivy and I received an “urgent” call from her. Seems like alot of people are coming to me with “urgent” issues recently, most of the time small escalations actually. Having listened to her problem, I decided to head home and do some research over the internet.

As a result of my research I chanced upon this article on the protocol IMAP and the protocol POP.

Apparently if you are using POP, after you have read the mail once from the mail server, the next time you attempt and reading from the mail server from another client, this current mail no longer gets downloaded.

IMAP does exactly the opposite. Even if you have downloaded and read a mail from the server, the next time you attempt to use a different mail client to retrieve mails from your mail server, the same mail will get downloaded again.

Thus that explains the differences which I understand between IMAP and POP thus far.

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Eternity be damned

On and off, I do join some folks for jamming sessions. Once in a while during those sessions, I do suddenly find myself caught in some songs where there were just 3 to 4 chords maximum that just kept on cycling mindlessly one after the other.

Such occasions are a real torture to the soul, most especially when you ran out of new ideas what to do over those re-current chords. The torture is especially acute when you know that there outside this 4 chords are a whole universe of chords to explore.

Lately observing the people around me that have entered the work force. It seems their daily lives are imposed strictly within the limits of those 3 to 4 metaphor chords. From an outsider’s stand point, life seemed unbearably tasteless, in a sense tortorous.

I suddenly recalled from one of my lectures in Computer security how random numbers one after the other are created. Random numbers in computing are articifically created through the segmentation of an extremely large prime number. Within the domains of the prime number, all occurances appear random. However once past the pre-specified domain, a pattern starts to appear and becomes painfully apparently

Example:

13 expressed in binary will be 1110111100110010001110

We take a section of 4 places each time at an increment of 1 place per interation

1: 1110
2: 1101
3: 1011
4: 0111
5: 1111

…

23: 1110

On iteration 24th we get 1110 which is exactly simlar to 1

What has first been interesting has started suddenly to become boring, unpredictable and uninformative (Law of Anthrophy) Each additional iteration becomes less and less significant.

Translating it back to every life, we start to live more and more like machines losing our souls to the daily toils of live all for this false sense of security, the need to modulate back to iteration 1, once all available iteration within the set has been exhausted.

Exploring the exceptions available within our limited environment, I suddenly found that though my life has been rather random thus far, it has started to modulate back unto itself. It is starting to get really boring.

The possible solutions I could think of are either to getting myself into a new environment or seriously attempting at getting myself old and senile way ahead of my time.

The first seems pretty hard, with Alena serving as the drag, chaining me to this limited set of permutations with her inherent god be damned need for security and predicability. The second seems highly impossible, considering the fact I am no from the medical field by training.

Perhaps a third then. I think I should quietly slip away once all work has been settled for the year. India looks pretty foreign and exotic a place to explore. Perhaps I should even volunteer myself to work there in one of those NGO venues. That’d be a nice change of sets.

Imagining a existance that last for eternity, where all possible permutations has be tried and exhausted, life be really tortorous that way. Thankfully, we dont live forever.

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Security or imprisonment?

I finished my assignment with Ivy where I was playing the role of the zombie. It was late, I walked towards Singapore River, buying myself a pack of beedi along the way. The wind was blowing. The night was restive

I sat down by the river where I lighted my stick. Sitting there by the river, I relapsed into a thoughtful mood.

I imagined myself a orphan with no kin in this world and no home to return to, surviving by etching out a living on the streets with my wits. Today was one of those fortunate days where I managed some penny in my pocket. This evening I will not go hungry. Puffing away on my beedi, I smiled to myself. Was such a life a sad and miserable one or was it one free from the shackles of kinship?

I seeked further into this imaginative world of mine. Such a person must indeed feel terrible loneliness at times, however such profound sense of loneliness must be intermittenly mixed with a deep sense of peace, a peace which is hard to be found when bounded by ties and kinship but only in solitude. To live this life perhaps demands a great fortitude then. Such a life must perhaps be one that is bitter but yet at the same time sweetness, one that must be very beautiful indeed.