My GZ250 motorcycle vs Honda Pilot SUV mileage stats

Very interesting figures I've gathered for the whole year.

Honda Pilot SUV
Total Mileage for 2008: 6,443.00
Total Gallons purchased: 361.7
Total Gas purchased for 2008: $1,275.66
MPG from total mileage and total gas purchased: 17.81 (A)
Ave MPG from each calculated fill-up: 17.48

Suzuki GZ250 motorcycle
Total Mileage for 2008: 2,330.20 (X)
Total Gallons purchased: 44.4
Total Gas purchased for 2008: $166.37 (Y)
MPG from total mileage and total gas purchased: 52.48
Average MPG from each calculated fill-up: 47.66

Ave gas price for both vehicle purchase: $3.915/gal (Z)

So, if I never purchased a motorcycle, then the purchases I would have carried over to the SUV is

X/A = 499 (J)
J*Z = $1953.585 (K)
K-Y = $1787.22

(I hope I got all my computations right, please correct me if not)

That's an extra $1787.22 gas purchase for me. I'd been riding this bike for more than 2 years. The gas purchase alone has paid for the bike and total insurance for 2 years already (yep, this is one of the cheapest 250cc bike out there). So, from here on, all the $$$ I'll be saving are out of that bike-purchase... it's the real savings.

Fedora 10 at home

I eventually ended up installing Fedora Core 10 in Irene's tablet pc. So far it is stable and I didn't encountered any problem compared to my previous installation of Fedora 9. Wireless setup is so easy. Only problem is, I was using 64-bit encryption method althroughout the house and Fedora 10 doesn't support it so I have to change my router and every PC to use WEP 128-bit instead. Other than that, everything else works fine.

gOS ... the Good OS?

Looks like there's another flavor of Linux running around, and this one has escaped my attenti0n for quite some time. gOS is based on Ubuntu 7.10. It combines the most of the feature I'd been installing in my Fedora box for years (wine, AWN, OpenOffice, etc). I will give this a try on my PC later this week.

For more information, go to their website at http://www.thinkgos.com/gos.php

My Test Engineering project page

I'm starting to create my own Test Engineering project page. Draft (and final URL) is available at http://test.johncruise.com/

OpenOffice... version 3.0 is out!

I just finished setting up both my PC's with OpenOffice (my Linux PC and my Windows PC). I'm totally impressed. I can't believe Sun is giving this application for free. I don't know how long Microsoft Office will survive because of OO... but one thing is for sure, people are moving away from MS Office once they found out that they can get exactly the same features within OO for free!

Since it was released (yesterday 10/13/2008), the openoffice.org server received too much traffic due to the demand of that product that they were struggling to keep it up. They have to minimize the homepage in such a way you don't have to click too many links and display too many pictures thus minimizing bandwidth.

Get it while it's hot!

boost libraries... again

I keep forgetting about boost libraries. I just ported some of my home grown c++ source codes into linux and went berserk compiling because of boost. I have to upgrade boost from source since yum install cannot find it in the repo (well, not all of them anyways).

Anyways, after adding those using configure and make commands, everything works.

Looks like I'm going to have a real challenge porting my other varnamespace class. Hope I get this right so I can release it to the community as well.

Starting wxWidgets in Linux

I finally able to setup my Fedora box to install Code::Blocks and wxWidgets. It took me a while to figure out where to put wxWidgets and how to set it up -- since I have the root access, I just run "./configure && make && make install" and the header files+libraries went to the usual default and built-in directories. This means, I don't have to setup special parameters inside Code::Blocks.

After all those things, I installed wxFormBuilder. I then created my first GUI projects in wxWidgets under Linux environment and run it without any problem. I even tried installing it to another linux box (FC9) and found out that I needed more of those wxGTK libraries. After installing those as well, it runs without any problem in that other linux box too.

I'd been planning to create a generic hardware manufacturing test application years ago but I could never push through with it after a few months of development. Maybe I'll try to take another stab at it and later release it in the open source community.

Lower insurance rate

I moved to Geico now (from AAA) with my motorcycle insurance. Now I'm only paying $97/year down from $126. Pretty good deal.

Testing PicasaWeb embeds

This is just another test to see how embeds from PicasaWeb would look like.

The picture below was taken from BearValley last December of 2007.

Testing YouTube embeds

Just performing more test with this blog.

The video is another one I took going to work. I have to cut the first 8 minutes since I will exceed the 10 minute limit video upload in YouTube.

Test post part deux

This time, using email with pictures attached.

Test email post

Just trying out simple text post to blogger using email.

And now we are back to blogspot

Unbelievable. This people at RTCHOST.COM are just ignoring their loyal long time customers. My FTP connection has been down for quite some time now. They are not even answering the inquiries I have been sending them via their website. The email support (support@rcthost.com) are useless... emails are bouncing back. Now, I have no choice but to be back at blogspot.com. Unfortunately, I can't post files (limitation of Blogger). I'll be looking for a way to get around this by going through another hosting.

Telnet Client for wxWindows

I'd been looking for telnet client that is compatible with wxWidgets. When I mention wxWidgets, I would assume that you know I am not using CAsyncSocket/CSocket from MFC, and I am just using the equivalent wxSocketClient class.

I'd been looking around... found some codes but too complicated to use. This telnet client I have was taken from the first one I made long time ago (again, home-grown-made-by-myself... straight from the RFC).

I was able to login to our linux box using this and also in our terminal server (Cyclades, now Avocent). All I need to do is to replace all regular expression libraries from using GRETA to using wxRegEx. I only tested this in Windows. I'm pretty sure it won't work in Linux since I have part of the codes that uses Windows API (PeekMessage/TranslateMessage/DispatchMessage... maybe more).

I'll be releasing this to the wxWidgets forum for further help improving it, once I finish with my own code cleanup.

Hey Squid!

I've just finished setting up squid on my fedora box. Now it acts as my proxy server so browsing from our all of our wireless machines are a just little bit faster since the http pages are being cached on to my server instead of over the air wireless. I've already did comparison/bench mark testing and one of the streaming site I go to now loads faster and I don't get that crazy "Buffering..." message every 5 seconds anymore.

First change oil

I just did my first oil change to my bike. There were instructions over the net (http://www.gz250bike.com) and it is so easy to follow. This is something that would usually cost me around $110 (labor alone is $85 + oil + oil filter). Of course, this self-change-routine just took out $85 off the equation. I'm really loving my cheap and small bike.

Fedora 9 has been released!

Fedora Core 9 has been released. I'm going through the release notes again and upgrade instructions to make sure I don't miss anything. I probably wait a week and read more feedbacks how people upgrade their existing FC8 system. Being a guinea pig is no fun. Hopefully, everything is alright.

wxWidgets + wxThread

This is just my 2nd week of using wxWidgets and so far I was able to create complicated application with GUI, regular expression, ftp, and multi-threading. I'm seeing the downfall of MFC when this project gets enough marketing. I have to test out all this new things I'd been learning in Linux as well. I'd been creating deamon applications in Linux for a long long time now but I want to create my very first GUI app in Linux too.

New Job

2 weeks ago, I jump shipped to another company. It's my old company actually... Brocade. After more than 2 years of hard labor at NetApp, I realized that my future is going nowhere. I'm not really looking forward to any promotions or anything similar. I just wanted for the department to realize the value I have been contributing (myself and the team I am working with). The thing is, even though we have been doing "above and beyond" work such as providing tools for everyone to easily query the test information at different remote sites even though it is not needed, it always goes unnoticed to anyone outside our team. Our department VP only has his obviously favorite people he rewards for doing the things that they are supposed to be doing and calls it "above and beyond" job. If you don't belong to the Customer Support team, Escalation Engineers, Technical Support Engineers, Professional Support Engineers, and similar teams... your work will not be rewarded nor noticed. For all the time I'd been there, all reward-type programs our department made are designed to work for those type of people. If you belong to the other groups, you don't even stand a chance to get that large piece of the pie during profit sharing. What do they do anyway? They just go to the site and talk to the customer to try analyze the problem the customers are seeing. But due to the 24-hour limit that our director has implemented, those TSE/PSE/EE are forced to close the ticket by just replacing the whole system with brand new units. Everybody congratulates them for fixing the problem. Bonus/rewards are awaiting them. But did they really fix the problem? No. The problem was patched. Where is the problem now? It's sitting in the UPS/FedEx trucks going back to NetApp where we will try to test to see what the problem is. Out of the whole system they sent back including the filer, shelf, 14 hdd, esh modules, pci-x/e cards, etc that was sent back, most of the times 90% of it are tested to be as good units. In many cases, we found out that a FRU is the one that trigged the whole system to be down. What a waste of time in our part, and a waste of money for shipping all those hardwares back.

Also, many times I tried to work with cross platform teams, such as sustaining and diags team, to correct some issues -- for example fan problems with legacy products, test hole problems with compression cards, some unexplainable test that we are required to run, etc. Unfortunately, even with the "data" I have supplied the team which unmistakably show what we have as an actual problem or something that really needs to be worked on... nobody would take it seriously.

Venturing with wxWidget as my new C++ programming tool

I'd been experimenting with wxWidget lately and looks very promising. It's actually a library just like boost. But this one provides a bunch of GUI classes plus more. We are thinking about using this in the new project I am working on.

Like what I said, this is just a library. Fortunately, it works with many free compilers including MinGW and Visual Studio 2008 Express.

Waiting for Fedora Core 9

I'm highly anticipating FC9 to be released this coming May 13. Most of the applications that I use often are going to be upgraded to this new version. I know I can easily do 'yum update' for each of those apps but most of the time, there are small quirks that I need to fix in able to have them fully work (most of the time is disable some repo because of some conflicts with the files I am updating). So why bother updating it one by one when I can do an overnight fresh install? That saves me all the trouble. Data file? I have them on a separate HDD which I auto-mount in my fstab file, so not much impact there.

As a developer, of course I wanted to see the latest gcc. I wanted to see what is new in Firefox 3 too. I just updated OpenOffice to 2.4 today in my Windows PC and I heard that they will package FC9 with it as well (I'd been having fonts problems with 2.3). I'm having some fan and shutdown problems in one of my FC8 PC. I'm hoping the new kernel and drivers would somehow fix this. (I'm not even sure if this is a driver problem or a real hardware problem... ahh... wishful thinking)

Multibillion dollar company, licensed to have spending spree?

This is funny. A guy at work was asking me why our team decided to use SQLite. Here's a quote from his email:

"We are a multibillion dollar company, and can readily afford well established and well supported databases. Do we want to build important aspects of our business on experimental software without clear support?"

First, the guy was not clearly doing his research about SQLite. It has been used by many embedded products, applications, and OS. Some of this applications includes Adobe Air, Mozilla Firefox, Ruby Rails, Google's Android, OpenOffice, Symbian OS, Mac OS X (starting with 10.4), and Apple iPhone among others. Actually many RedHat-type linux distro are now shipped with SQLite as a standard package. If it is not stable, it would never be considered to be shipped with those OS.

Without clear support? He missed this link.

The bottom line is... 1) not all expensive software equates to better or stable or well established software; and 2) Being efficient does not (and will not) always equates to having to buy an expensive software. If that is true, I want to see "all" our servers run Windows Server installed with IIS instead of, you know, those crappy, cheap ass and free Linux which majority of the company uses including our company. Yeah, Windows is so efficient that you can run it for 2 years without crashing/hanging/slowing down. Suuuuuurrrrreee.

While we're at it, why save money trying to send jobs oversees? We have alot of "well established and expensive support center, manufacturing sites and plants, software house" over here in the US. We are a multibillion dollar company and we can afford them right?

Boy I hate to see that guy do my taxes.

Updating Fedora 6 to Fedora 8... take 2

I've used another route to update my Fedora box. This time, using the old fashion way... via DVD setup disk. I'd been having problems with the installation hanging exactly in the "Checking dependencies..." message window. Tried to do it multiple times and it hangs exactly t the same position.

Anyways, googling around, I found a bug filed from Fedora website itself (Bug #372011) and it explains there that the hanging is usually caused by the users (me) with packages installed from other repositories that cannot be resolved. Yup, I did that. Guilty as charged.

So going with their solutions, the moment I saw the window that says "Install/Upgrade...", I pressed tab, added the text "updates=http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/updates-f8-yumloop.img" and hit ENTER... it went passed that hanging stage.

At the time of this writing, it went pass copying the file to the HDD and it is now preparing transaction from install source. Hopefully, overnight it will successfully install everything and upgrade all my packages specially OpenOffice ang GIMP (my most commonly used apps aside Firefox). Updates later...

Update #1: 1250 packages needed to be installed/updated. Looks like I have to really leave this PC overnight. At least it is in the process of the "actual" installation itself.

Update #2 (final): well, everything went well (the install process, that is). When it boots up, the only noticeable problem was that missing running application panel plus the workspace switcher and date/time panels. I have to do more yum upgrade and found some packages that cannot be upgraded so I have to disable the freshrpm repo and run yumdownloader+rpm to manually update those packages. Once everything is updated again via yum, the panel went right back and now, all my applications are up-to-date.

Symbolic links in Windows XP?

Yes, there is an existing tool that lets you create directory symbolic links in Windows XP. You will have to download the resource kits compatible to XP (the one I downloaded was a resource kit from Windows 2003 which supports XP also). Once installed, you will have a command available called linkd. Its syntax is:

linkd <source> <destination>

It's not what they sound to be if you are coming from a Linux environment. To put it simply, it is reversed... the source is really where you want to put the symbolic link and the destination is the original directory you want to link into. Again, if you are used to 'ln', just reverse the parameters and you are all set.

I've tried it and seems to work ok. When you issue the 'dir' command, type will be listed as <JUNCTION> instead of <DIR>. Well, as long as it functions and treats it as a real symlinks, I am not complaining.

VisualStudio 2008 convertion

Since our projects are starting to slow down, we decided to migrate to VisualStudio 2009 (AKA VisualStudio 9). We've fixed the errors discussed before and now my colleague is running some sanity test in 1 product just to make sure that nothing breaks. Of course, the first problem we saw was that it is not loading properly. He said something about running .NET 3.5 instead of the old 2.0, then it hits me. Maybe there is a new redistributable files needed. Indeed, there is. Just go to Microsoft website and search for "Visual C++ redistributable 2008" which we did and that fix that loading problem. Now the whole test is running to make sure all our libraries and functions are running as expected. Hopefully by tomorrow we will be able to decide if we can convert all our development PC from using VS2005 to VS2008.

Windows' Remote Desktop Sharing client in Fedora

I'd been searching for this since Fedora 7 and last night, I came upon a post regarding tsclient. It was the perfect solution for what I was trying to achieve. And best of all, it's in Fedora's repository. Just do sudo yum install tsclient and after the installation, it will be installed under Applications->Internet and named Terminal Server Client. Once you open it, just fill up all the information you would normally put in there and make sure the protocol to use is RDP (I'm guessing this stands for Remote Desktop Protocol).

Visual C++ 2008 Inconsistencies

It maybe our fault -- I haven't fully read the MSDN article -- but some of the old syntax we were using in our programs keeps on getting errors. This is specially true with template functions like below:

template class myclass
{
...
typedef std::vector::iterator iterator; // ERROR here
...
};

Now, it should be changed like the following to compile properly:

...
typedef typename std::vector::iterator iterator; // OK
...

That fix was found by my colleague.

Anyway, that is pretty weird. I need to read more. I don't remember this seeing in the new C++ ISO standard (C++0x). But then again... I might have missed it also. I have that bad habit of skipping things that looks boring to read.

Update: yeah, typename is needed now. GNU c++ (g++) seems to compile ok, although I'm using that version that came in with Fedora 6 (yeah I know, there is Fedora 8 now)

Visual Studio 2008 is now out in the wild!

I'd been waiting for this for a while. Visual Studio 2008 has now been released. They claimed to have better performance with this new version. Not that much interested with the other package though... we mainly use Visual C/C++. I'm wondering how much of the C++0x ISO standards have made through this release (if ever there was a plan to do so in the first place)).

For those who doesn't need all the features plus don't have the budget for it, they also released the Visual Studio Express 2008.

Fedora update from 6 to 8... failure

Unfortunately, I'd been using some applications that conflicts some other apps that I needed also. That's why when I run the yum update command, a lot of them cannot be upgraded (like for example, vlc conflicts with some modules that xmms and ffmpeg uses like faad2). So, that leaves me to a total re-installation of Fedora 8 over my existing master boot record HDD. I guess it's ok since I never save any data to that same hard disk. I have 4 HDD in my PC and I made sure that the data gets saved on a different volume.

Fedora 8 is out!

I'm a big fan of Fedora Core project. That is what I am using at home (of course I still use my other PC with Windows XP loaded due to some applications that only work there). I'd probably will start upgrading my PC tomorrow. Hopefully, everything will turn out smoothly.

XSL + PHP + RCTHOST = Formatting Disaster

I'd been trying to make the XSL and PHP work under my hosting site but I couldn't seem to get the thing working. It turned out that XSLT is not configured with their version of PHP.

To archive or not to archive?

I'm trying to decide if I need to archive or not. Seems like my "unlimited" space was dropped from rtchost. Not sure why, but might as well live with it. For the meantime, I set the total posts to be display to 50. That should be enough for now.

Welcome to my website!

Well, I'm just trying out Blogger again to see if it integrates well with my new PHP template.

By the way, the tags doesn't work well so click at your own risk :-)