Fevers are your friends

People don’t like the feeling they get while having a fever. But did
you know that fevers are you friends? Many people assume that the fever
is directly caused by the virus and thus must be a bad thing. In fact
it is not. I believe the most surprising fact is that you don’t want to
eliminate fever. It appears that the right thing to do is to control
it, so that it doesn’t rise above 42 degrees Celsius, and to keep it
there until one feels better. Read more about it here.

Why am I suddenly telling you this? The simple answer: I got a nasty
cold/flu (I still need to figure out this one it is). Thanks to Jawaad
for inviting me to spicy BBQ on a cold day (messing my throat up while
my immune system is down).

- SwordAngel

Bad Software Design Revisited

Here’s a partial explanation to the problem I experienced: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890413. Microsoft never fails to entertain me.

- SwordAngel

Bad Software Design?

After hearing about the “Apple philosophy” from Skrud, I have come to
realize that, at times, Microsoft really sucks in rather stupid ways.
Consider the explorer, which is pretty much the core of Windows as far
as user experience is concerned. I have had plenty of bad experience
with it (i.e. every time I have to do Ctrl+Alt+Delete to see that the
damn program is not responding). Most of the time, it really is a
matter of bad implementation, of honest bugs left in the program; and
the computer either crashes and stops responding. This kind of problem
is common among many software programs and one should not be too harsh
on the programmers because debugging is really a tough, tedious, and
tiring job. Today, however, I am really angry and frustrated. I
reformatted my laptop’s hard disk and reinstalled Windows. Everything
went pretty smoothly until I started accessing my desktop’s hard disk
through WiFi. I tried to map the shared folders into network drives and
the laptop started hanging. Not only did Windows Explorer and the Start
menu stop responding, but other programs also froze. It took me 3 hours
to realize that the root of the problem was not on my laptop (I would
have been really pissed off anyway, if that was the case, since I was
trying to fix my laptop to begin with). It turned out that my desktop’s
wireless network card started delaying and accumulating signals for
batch transmission as power saving mode was activated. As such, all the
requests from my laptop were responded very very very very late. As
soon as I turned off the power saving feature of my desktop’s network
card, everything worked fine again and my laptop came back to life.
Here’s a question I want to ask those software engineers at Microsoft:
did you design explorer to hang and wait for the network folder
response single-threadedly? Can’t you think of a better design where
the user of one machine does not have to suffer slow response due to
the fault of another machine?

- SwordAngel

Geek Problem of the Month

It’s that time of the year again, where school has just started and you
realize your computer is totally messed – the hard disk is full of
garbage, important software stops working, or one of your RAM slots
just got fried, etc., you name it. In my case, the Java runtime on my
laptop is the problem. About two weeks ago, the Java runtime ceased to
communicate with the Internet. I can’t update Eclipse or NetBeans, and
I can’t use applets in my browsers. I reinstalled the Java runtime to
no avail, so I decided it’s about time I back up things and cast the
ultimate spell of recovery: reformat and reinstall Windows.

Well, I figure that, while I’m at it, why don’t I repartition the hard
disk and install Ubuntu Linux too? After all, I’m a geek and
dual-booting Windows+Linux would make me look more 1337. The only thing
that’s bugging me now is the inability to use “PPP over WiFi” (instead
PPP of Ethernet) in Linux. I need that for my DSL Internet connection.
I have searched in many forums, asked many users of Linux and Ubuntu,
and have learned no solution. I know that usually people just configure
the router to do the authentication and to share the Internet
connection; but since my ISP is very generous and allows multiple
logins, I want to take advantage and get one public IP for each
computer on my network instead of sharing one public IP among the
computers. So here it is, the Geek Problem of the Month: how to set up
PPP over WiFi in Linux. Here’s a hint: using the pppoeconfig and
rp-pppoe utilies is not good enough (otherwise I wouldn’t post this
problem up here anyway, right?).

- SwordAngel

Where is my RSS or ATOM feed?

Now that I think about it, I really wonder why I have not switched to
another blog host. I mean, I paid for a Lifetime membership and I don’t
even get to publish RSS or ATOM feeds. Many of my friends have been
wanted to subscribe to this blog through RSS feed and couldn’t find
one. Should I switch?

- SwordAngel

New activity

I have started learning tai-chi (taiji quan) Sunday mornings. The style
I’m learning is the Yang’s 108-step form. It’s fun and inexpensive
(only 10$ for permenant membership and 35$ for ten lessons of 1 hour 15
minutes). The reason I like taiji is because I can practice it
anywhere, without any equipment (unlike other sports). The literature
even says that you can practice taiji while lying down or walking,
because what’s important is not the actions, but rather your
consciousness of your own body, the flow of vital energy (the qi).
The practice postures that you see is only the “frame” that
allows beginners to more easily exercise their consciousness and flow
of qi. This is one of the mysteries in Chinese culture that I would
like to understand and experience first-hand.

- SwordAngel