Deafening Silence, salsa with alsa.

After so long I decided to install and enable alsa support on my debiana. And for non-gnu people, Debiana, is actually a Debian distro--(I give all my pc a name, since I'm a lonely person and giving them women names is an excuse for my reclusive lifestyle)

After uninstalling aumix, and installing alsa-utils and most of alsa stuff, i still had no sound on my debiana. I then realise that I had to run alsamixer to crank up the volume a little. After that things was working fine for my xmms and mplayer. Of course I had to change their configuration to use alsa now.

However, I noticed some applications still had problems. I then found out that applications like firefox and gaim are oss applications. Hence, I had to install something call alsa-oss, an alsa wrapper for oss applications.
How easy that was, with just a quick apt-get install, and i tried running my gaim again. Still, I get no sound. I then realise that since I'm using enlightenment, maybe i need to use esd. Quickly I installed esd (enlightenment sound daemon), run gaim, went to preferences and force it to use esd. And wala, debiana can talk again. Sexy, I also tried running some flash animation sites on firefox, to test for sound. Beautiful, things is just working again, in fact better. Now I can salsa with my alsa.:)

Google gives out 1 million Euro, Not!

The normal routine for most of us early in the morning as we sit down on our chairs are:
1) Turn on the PC/Laptop
2) Check Office Mail
3) Check personal Mail
4) Reply all Mails.
5) Lunch
6) Come back from lunch.
7) Go through what we did at 2,3,4 again,
8) and finally work, if there is any:)

Well today, as I got into my office, I turned on my laptop and start to open my office mail. And then i got this interesting email...that says I have won 1 million Euro. Usually, I won't even bother, but the email was written in a very professional way and have tremendous amount of detail put in it. Here is snippet of the mail that I got....

FROM:LOTTERY COORDINATOR,
INT. PROMOTIONS AND PRICE AWARD DEPARTMENT
GOOGLE. New Avenue 12900 kd .
RESULTS FOR CATEGORY "A" DRAWS

Congratulations to you as we bring to your notice, the results of the
First Category draws of E-MAIL LOTTERY organised by GOOGLE INT. We are
happy to inform you that you have emerged a winner under the First
Category, which is part of our promotional draws. The draws were held
on 28th of March 2006 and results are being officially announced today
25th of April 2006. Participants were selected through a computer
ballot system drawn from 2,500,000 email addresses of individuals and
companies from Africa, America, Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East,
and Oceania as part of our International Promotions Program. Your e-
mail address, attached to ticket number 675432890044/376, with serial
number 2200-33 drew the lucky numbers 1-0-11-44-03-22 and consequently
won in the First Category.

It almost got me excited for about 10 seconds, but 1 million Euro is too far fetch and that made me to do a quick search on google. What I found was that this email is already registered as a scam on scamdex. And poof, there goes my vision of buying myself a 13k VIAO, a bangalow house and a BMW:)

So if you get this email too, don't get excited. Being gullible is not what you want when it involves money:)
Pesanan Khidmat Masyarakat.:)

Thinking with other people's mind

I have not been blogging lately. Mainly, I was busy trying to live my own dreams, writing software and exploring my creative mind. Thinking that somehow, someday, my life was destined for something so much greater than becoming an underpaid researcher trying to solve Malaysia's economic woes by creating tremendous value of research that could possibly bring Malaysia into a new age of technologically advanced country. Yeah right. Well, even superman have the right to dream right. So why not I. But all the technical thinking stretch the left side of my brain a little bit too much, and it starting to give me a terrible headache. So, I'm taking a relaxing time meditating on my right side of my brain with light reading.

They say that “Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.” So last weekend I decided to buy another book by Jim Collins, the author of the famous book Build to Last. Well that and as a MPH member, I get a 20% discount on books on the red carpet.:) After reading Build to Last, I now know that Visionary Companies was created by normal people like you and me. And I have disregard the common dogma that a Visionary company are created by super affluent people, by charismatic leaders, by geniuses or by politically connected people or sons and daughters of politician--although this is still hard to be disregarded. In fact, most of the Visionary companies are created by timid, technical people who just loves what they were doing and wanted to create a better world for all mankind, and of course womankind.

So the book I got was Good to Great. This book is based on 5 years of research and it is a sequel to Build to Last. Well, it addresses the common dogma that Visionary companies started of with underdog leaders who made the company great and it remain great for more than 50 years to become a visionary company. But what about companies that are not so great now? Will it ever be a Visionary company. I mean will good companies like DRB-Hicom or Mimos end up to be able to change themselves from being Good to Great, and eventually a visionary company. Highly doubtful but I hope the book might show me some ideas about how to make it great....and eventually a Visionary company, or will it just remain a vague vision.....and never end up to have its "ary--(as for visionary) anytime in its existence.