DP | @ekhoophotography - Don't Panik

Blog upgrade, Tras house visit posted

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:17:19 -0500

Just spend the last two evenings running around the nearby park and more. Looks like I'll need to ramp it up if I'm going to be fit enough for the Yellow mountain in April. Anyways, just managed to upgrade Serendipity to 1.5.2. I've been slacking on this and DP was running on a 1.3.x build for quite a while. Anyways, it upgraded in like 10 minutes so everything looks fine.

I've also just posted photos of the Tras OA children hostel on our ministry blog over here.

Popcorn Hour C-200, a brief review

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:10:00 -0500

What do you do when you start getting a large collection of movies, videos, music and photos? Shuffling around DVDs or audio CDs gets old very fast and if your house is fully wired, you definitely want to also pull content off your PCs, Macs, NAS boxes, USB sticks, internet, whatever. I went with the Popcorn Hour C-200 since my workplace has a couple of their A-200 and S-210 store front units. I chose the C-200 because it had the ability to put in a BD player or two hard drives (2.5" and 3.5").

I've had the C-200 for about 3 weeks now. In a nutshell, the C-200 is still not ready for prime time. It's still too rough a product, doesn't do what it advertises on the box (Yet!). There's pending firmware updates though but that should not be the case for a shipping product. You advertise 10 functions and it should deliver all 10 functions. Firmware updates are good and can bug-fix, polish-up or add new features but to back-fill functions it suppose to do when shipped is wrong. It, however, works for people who are willing to live with the rough edges, quirks but the ability to play a large set of media types. Tested firmware version is 02-01-091113-19-POP-408-000 (19 November 2009). There's a new version released last week but I haven't had chance to upgrade yet.

Poor viewing angle and distance

Here's a summarized list of what works, what needs a bit of work and what doesn't work.

What works:
- Plays almost everything I threw at it. That includes AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, WMV, MP3s, JPEGs, MKVs and even complete DVD ISO images.
- Playing media off the hard drive, USB sticks or portable disks work perfectly.
- Good quality playback (can't test the audio properly since I don't have a good audio receiver) but HD content looks awesome. Anything less than 720P pales in comparison now.
- USB ports front and back along with HDMI interface

What needs a bit of work:
- Gigabit ethernet connection seems flaky and unstable. Wired it to a 100mbps switch and it was faster to transfer data across. Go figure!
- Interface is still on files. While that may be the underlying structure and may be used for the technical users, content should be the primary means of the UI. Why should you navigate to the videos folder on your disk and then into the folder named Transformers_HD and then select the appropriate MP4/MKV file to play? Give me a catalog of movies, songs and photos, not a directory structure!
- File-based interface means using it as a jukebox is also quite poor. No shuffle, no selection of genre, artist, etc.
- Photo support and slideshow support is again also poor out of the box
- One or two AVI files had problems and required some patching/fixing in VirtualDub. Not a big issue if you're the one ripping/extracting your own videos.
- Stability. Lock-ups on network hiccups or corrupted videos/images/music is more frequent than it should (I've to hard reboot the unit 5 times so far)

What doesn't work:
- The remote is too laggy. Anything over 100ms is noticeable and the lag can be as long as a second. Don't know if it can be fixed in firmware.
- Size. While the need to be able to accomodate a Blue-ray drive and 2.5" hard drive is good, there's a helluva lot of empty space inside.
- The network services is terribly slow and buggy
- The display panel is totally not viewable/readable from a distance greater than 2 feet.

Conclusion, it's expensive for what it does along with all the rough edges. At this price point (USD 299), I'd expect a much more refined product. Would I buy one again if I had the choice? Not really. I'll probably build a HTPC next

An iPhone Problem

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:07:55 -0500

What happens when you break your phone. I mean shatter. Well, whether its covered by warranty or not, you'd definitely want it fixed pronto. In today's mobile, connected, internet world, how is one suppose to have no phone for four to six weeks?

Well, that's exactly what happened to me. With a broken four month old iPhone 3GS, Maxis' reply was simple. It'll be fixed for RM600 to RM700 and you'll get your phone back within six weeks. I'm not sure how certain (I've friends who have had Maxis take up to 8 weeks to get their iPhones fixed) the six weeks was gonna be but it was 5 weeks and five days too many. I expect a 48-hour turnaround at any time for a critical device like this. Otherwise, they better stop billing me anyways.

The broken glass piece

What to do? I put the word out on Twitter and @thebackpackr came to the rescue (via @zilch) to recommend an excellent iPhone repair specialist (well, he certainly qualifies) and I got my phone fixed (glass replaced with an original part) within two hours. If you'd like to contact him, he's on the Low Yat forums here : http://bit.ly/aZtNVe

Good as new!

Home Wiring

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:37:03 -0500

24 Cat 5e cables and more...

Wanted to post this much earlier but didn't have the time to. When it was time to replace all the old wiring in my new home, it made sense to lay enough cable drops to various rooms and areas in the house. I used Cat 5e cabling because I had a box of it lying around. Cat 6 would be better but no point throwing a thousand feet of good cable away. A few hiccups happened for the wiring contractor conveniently forgot to add a drop near the kitchen and dining so those areas will need to be wireless now and means they can't get Satellite TV either via Cat 5. All cables were home-run (star topology) into my "home office" room. I didn't want a standard Rack occupying the space so I turned Ikea-hacker. An Ikea PS cabinet was modified with my dremel tool to mount a 24-port patch panel and patch block to distribute phone lines. Since I had a DSL link, I patched all phones behind the DSL splitter which makes things cleaner.

Ikea PS. Just what is needed!

Data-links were patched to a Linksys (Cisco Small Business) SRW2008 managed gigabit switch which in turn is fed off my dual-WAN Linksys RV042 VPN router. Also connected is a DLink DIR-655 wireless router and a Netgear 10/100 8-port POE switch to power my IP cameras distributed around the house. It all fit somewhat nicely into the Ikea PS cabinet with space for two Belkin power strips fed off an APC UPS with extended run battery. That'll give an approximate three hour runtime for my cameras, broadband and network during a power outage.

Improvements? I'll need to add a few more cable drops for IP cameras sometime this year and since my NAS will be coming soon, I'll probably need another patch panel. I've three data ports in each room, that makes 9 plus my "home office" has 4 ports so I've already used 13. My living room and common area has another four ports so that goes to 17. I've 3 POE ports outside the home (to be increased to 5) so that's 20. My phone line distribution ends up take another three so I'm effectively out of ports! The picture below is not the latest one as I've added a modified shelf to hold my router to make space for a 16-port 10/100/1000 switch below and will be color coding the patch cables for easier maintenance soon.

Cabled up and running!

BTW for those interested in laying their own Cat 5 or 6 cables to connect to Telekom Malaysia's demarcation point such as a telephone pole, here's a quick guide depending if your cables are new or not. Newer cables are usually color coded. Mine are blue/white and white/blue and typically, you'll use the same matching blue/white & white/blue center pair in the Cat 5 cable. The good thing about Cat 5 is that you can carry more phone lines on the same cable using another pair (up to 4) so your one single Cat 5 cable can then be split internally (hence my patch block & patch panel) to multiple incoming phone lines and devices (fax, line 1, line 2, etc). Typically, white/blue (white cable with blue stripes) is the positive cable but do verify with a voltmeter to be sure. In older areas sometimes the color is red and green where green is positive. If you have all black cable, a ridge (feel for it) marks the side of the twin cable that's the positive wire.

p.s. Sorry for the photo quality -- all taken with my iPhone

New Year 2010 Cell Group BBQ

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:24:02 -0500

Lots of great food, good company, cooling weather thanks to the earlier rain and you've got the making of a great time!

These Pork burgers are beep awesome!

Here comes the KL Chan Ceramah Series...

For the photographers: all shot on a 5D Mark II with a 24-105mm lens. Aperture was mostly f/5.6 with shutter speeds ranging from 1/100 to 1/800 with RadioPoppers and high-speed sync flash 2x 580EX IIs and a 430EX II.

Windows Se7en :) & Metro-E

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:25:46 -0400

While Malaysian broadband is lacking in more ways than one can count, there is yet hope. A certain monopolistic company and their terrible service is all most of us have but if you can actually afford it, SDSL is much better considering the guaranteed transfer speeds compared to best-effort. Best effort in boleh-land is probably equivalent of try-lah. You'll probably encounter download speeds as fast as 100kb/second to about 1kb/second. Yes, it's that variable. Come to think of it, Malaysian traffic is similar. I can take anywhere from 15 to 100 minutes to get to work!

There's yet another option - Metro Ethernet. Yes, many cities in Korean and Japan have high speed Ethernet broadband connections while our fancy broadband is still stuck at the mostly same speeds it launched with seven years ago! Paneagle has it's Metro-E in select buildings and areas and if you can afford it, a certain monopoly's broadband becomes dial-up! This is a 5Mbps Metro-E link.

Check-out my simultaneous download of Windows 7 from the MSDN site and yes, I'm still in Malaysia! Here's the info on my IP address:
IP address: 202.169.29.70
Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per ns01.paneagle.com.my.]
ASN Name: PANEAGLE-MY-AP (Paneagle Communications Sdn Bhd, Metro-Ethernet & Internet Access Provider, Malaysia)
IP range connectivity: 1
Registrar (per ASN): APNIC

Clearing the closet - for sale!

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:33:37 -0400

It's really amazing how much junk one can accumulate over the years. Instead of having a garage sale, here's a list of things I have that you can take for a tiny bit of cash. I'm not putting a price on the items but a reasonable offer will always be considered!

Mega-list-of-items (single units unless stated):
- Seagate Hard drive 200Gb SATA
- Seagate Hard drive 40Gb SATA
- Western Digital Hard drive 320Gb, SATA
- Western Digital Hard drive 500Gb, SATA
- Western Digital MyBook 640Gb FW/USB/SATA
- Seagate 4Gb Type II (CF) microdrive
- 1Gb DDR2 SODIMM (Notebook RAM) (4 pieces)
- Transcend 133X 2Gb Type I CF
- Sandisk Ultra II CF 1Gb (2 pieces)
- Sandisk Ultra II 2Gb SD (2 pieces)
- Canon EF75-300 IS f/3.5-5.6
- Wacom Intuos Serial port tablet, 9"x12" (A4) size (USA adapter, can be used with 220-110V converter)
- SMC 7004VBR 10/100 Broadband Router with 4-port ethernet port
- Epson R290 Inkjet printer, including 1 complete unused ink cartridges
- HP OfficeJet 5510 Fax/Copier/Print/Scanner, Color inkjet.
- Dell E1705 Widescreen LCD Monitor
- Logitech cordless desktop 110 (Mouse & Keyboard)
- Asus A8N-VM mainboard with Athlon64 XP2 3800, no ram
- DLink DWA110 USB Wireless adapter (2 units)
- Dlink 4-port KVM Switch
- Dlink DCS-950 Network camera
...
heh, I'll update this if I find more stuff

More odds and ends

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:30:28 -0400

Well, there's lots of photos to process is one thing but there's also a ton of other work from my real job to the garden to the house. Oh well, short post... since a photo is worth a thousand words (cheapskate, a few thousand maybe).

Mini 9

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:18:00 -0400

Managed to snag a good deal for a Dell Mini 9. It comes with a solid state disk and 3G card. The only problem with it is that I'm so far unable to connect to Maxis with it. It does however register with the Maxis UMTS network. Of course it's quite clear that Maxis sucks to some extent. I, however, did not know that their customer service (and technical support) people are that incompetent. Anyways, after about 6 calls and talking and explaining that my 3G Connect card (by Option NV) works fine but the Dell 5530 HSPA WWAN adapter doesn't connect me to their super-fantastic, ultra-high speed (100% sarcasm) broadband network, they finally resolve to tell me to pay a visit to their Maxis center in KLCC or Gardens Mid-valley. Oh joy! I'll end up going tomorrow to Gardens Mid-valley since I've to do lunch anyways with a client there. DiGi - the smarter choice is beginning to sound like the better choice (or even Celcom).

Ikea-itis and the vanished weekend!

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:42:50 -0400

When I got into the office this morning, and was making my coffee brew, a colleague asked me "How was your weekend?". A very ordinary question, to which I think many ask that out of habit and not because of genuine interest. Anyway, my response was "What weekend?"

Friday started with a frantic trip to Ikea to ensure that we get all our stuff for the house. Of course, I was also migrating WebAperture the next day so I had to start the file replication (there's gigabytes of data) on Friday as it take a couple of hours to finish plus I had to do verification. Anyways, off to Ikea for dinner and a frantic rush through the store to get things such as my new work area desks, bookcases, and storage racks. Looking at the size of the bookcases and the desks plus the fragility of the glass doors, we decided to split the load and come back on Saturday.

To cut the story short, by the time Saturday rolled in, we've had the second trip and lunch and the assembly started. Well, it didn't end until Sunday evening. Of course we took time out to have a simple dinner, go to Church on Sunday morning and did some groceries too.

Truck load #1

Truck load #2

My fave tools, and enough to assemble everything from Ikea.

Look, no need to refer to the instructions!

Wireless Security

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:48:06 -0400

From experience (and analyzing the airwaves), quite a number of people ignore security when they get their wireless networks setup. Well, all that security is inconvenient I suppose but do you know how far your wireless access point or router transmits to? This is more apparent in a condominium or apartment setup where you not only have neighbors beside you, you also have to worry about neighbors above and below you. At one point, before I moved to a house, I could pick up networks three floors up. While the signal strength is not good, breaking into it was simple was it used WEP and a five character password.
More than half my surrounding networks at that point had no security! and worse still, many still had their default linksys, dlink or belkin setup IP addresses, usernames and passwords! I taught someone a lesson by changing his wireless router password and within a few days, the router got setup with WPA.
WPA itself is not invulnerable and I've successfully got into a few WPA networks around my condo unit with BackTrack because their WPA passwords were nothing more than simple strings like "linksys" or "mynetwork".
Anyways, after I got my soon-to-be-replaced Belkin wireless router up, I went around my house with inSSIDer and kismet. What you see below is inSSIDer's scan of my neighborhood. First thing I normally do is to lower the transmit power to ensure my router doesn't broadcast further than my main gate. My Belkin router doesn't do that but it's going to be replaced in a few days so no worries. Secondly, to ensure good connectivity, you make sure there's no channel overlaps. You can see my hopefaithandlove network all by itself on channel 1. You also can see most other networks have none (gasp!) or purely WEP security. Finally, I normally make the WPA2 key long enough. My method is to pick a favorite verse from the bible. If you want tighter security, don't leave spaces, substitute occasional numbers for alphabets, and perhaps throw in a Greek or Yiddish word in the process! Better still if you have more resources, go with WPA-Enterprise with a Radius authentication server... client certificates, the works! Ah, a totally different ballgame. For me, I stick to WPA2, put my wireless on a separate VLAN so that if someone gets into my wireless network, all they can do is get to the internet. Not good but better than having the ability to hit my main PC or File server.

Sun-set

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:10:24 -0400

Oracle finally buys Sun Microsystems after Big Blue gets the shakes and drops the deal. Any problem there?

Yes, MySQL. The big open-source database that has been the backbone of many a web site (millions actually) has been Oracle's big pain. Why? Because most of Web 2.0 is on MySQL, not Oracle. Now that Oracle gets its prized Java and Sun's Hardware biz, what happens to competitor numero uno?

Who knows, but heck, I'm concerned as many of the MySQL team has already quit and I'm sure more will follow.
Here's some web links on this issue:

New Server

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:15:13 -0500

If you're reading this, you're on the new box... a 2.6Ghz Xeon.
I'll post something interesting later when I get some time.

Moving House... (server actually)

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:30:52 -0500

Don't Panik - Eugene's Delicious Blog will be moving house shortly.

We're moving to a spanking new server! So what does this mean?

This site may not be accessible during that time. What time? Well, I've not decided yet but it should be soon, like this weekend or next! But I'll make an announcement. Emails to me may fail to be sent, bounce or disappear completely.

Stay tuned!

Day One, many years later

nospam@example.com (Eugene Khoo) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:06:42 -0500

As people grow older, they tend to forget and in some cases, try not to even remember their own birthdays. Maybe it's the reminder of our mortality and human beings. Three-score and ten, or four-score years if we have the strength is the span of human life. Perhaps even worse this year with all the gloom and doom people around and the economic mess the world is in doesn't make things any easier.

As this junction in time, there is an unexplainable feeling of richness and wealth. It's not because I make a big paycheck every month. It's not because I've a big bank account. It's actually kinda empty. I'm not debt-free, in fact, I'm almost working for the bank. I feel rich because of what I have. Not what I couldn't have. Not what I want to have. This new year, many Chinese consulted geomancers, did things that will help usher in a Bull run in the year of the ox... some sort of prosperity wish. I did neither. I have what the Lord has promised and His promises are sufficient for me. My darling love of my life and my little home on a small patch of lawn. Good friends, here and some thousands of miles away. This is richness beyond measure. Surely as the Lord says, I will bless you till your cup overflows. Some people have lots of things. I think I've lots of joy and happiness. Heh, even mastercard can't buy you that. So like the lyrics in Matt Redman's song goes, Even on the road marked with suffering, Blessed be the name of the LORD.

Equally priceless and all the more richer, is the ability to be a blessing to others. That's legacy. "Yes, oh Lord, establish the works of our hands" and like the Psalmist in Psalms 90 says, what kind of legacy are we building with our lives. I think I did good here if you read what the members have said. I'm humbled and grateful, amazed and glad that somehow, in this big, big world of ours, I made a little difference in a few people. That is legacy.

Happy Birthday to me and now, let's get on with this legacy business!