spoonfork

all this talk about equity ownership. it's always about the malay, chinese and indian. what about "The Others"? you see, even though i'm a bumiputera*, i belong to a category remote from The Holy Trinity. we are called The Others. yeah, i'm one of The Others. fear me.

* one thing i've learned about the word bumiputera in my six years' experience staying in KL and PJ is that over here, the general perception (especially among the chinese, and i'm sure among malay themselves) is that bumiputera refers to the malay. in fact bumiputera == malay. back in kuching it was different though: all the bumiputeras (malay, iban, bidayuh, kayan, kenyah, and all the ethnic groups) are thus so, bumiputera. so, over here, when i told people that i'm a bumiputera, i quickly added "i'm not a malay bumiputera" once i they raised their eyebrows.

listening to: dj spinbad - bdp / south bronx

dear l33t readers,

i'm writing a (currently simple) ruby script that posts random values to html form variables, and checking the results. each value may give different results. so what i want to do is calculate the difference between the results so that i can group them together. to do this, i perform a post with defined values and set this as a baseline to be used as a comparison for the next post (the result of the first post is sort of like a 'signature' for the web page). and then i start posting data, and calculate the difference with the initial baseline. this can be done by levenshtien distance. unfortunately, my test scripts runs extremely slow*, and i have no idea on how to speed up the operation (one way is to use curl and use my ruby script to calculate the distance).

i can continue with this, but i'm wondering if there are better alternatives. so got one?

* it runs slow simply because i'm comparing tons of strings... maybe i should just strip the html tag...

trainings sucks, especially if you're giving one, and your students come from windows background (or what i call "double-click" environment). it's sad, and it's very frustrating teaching them, or rather, telling them what to type.

and i have the bad luck of giving back to back trainings in which using the command-line is a must. what i observe is this:

when it comes to typing commands on the command-line (in bash for example), they're just freaking s.l.o.w. it is as if they've never typed before. how hard is it to type: cd /etc/init.d?

the command: many just don't seem to grasp the concept of command. commands are very simple (for example: cd, ls, ps, make, make) and after each command, there must be a space. so when i say "okay now you type cd dot dot", they type "cd.." resulting in command not found. this happens so many times, even after two or three days doing the same thing.**

so what is wrong? are most people coming from the windows environment are so freaking alien to the command line? is opening up a shell and typing commands so difficult that it become mental shock to them?

i don't know. i don't have the answer. even with clear slides with all the commands highlighted, they always get it wrong.

inability to grasp the simple concept of commands is one, another is the navigating directories: cd .., cd /usr cd /var/log, cd /etc/, cd .. they're just lost. and yes, all the necessary introductions have been given, but yet...

i need a solution because if all of my trainings are gonna be like this, i'll end up hanging myself on a taugeh tree...

** no point saying "cd space dot dot" because there will be some that will type "cdspace..". i'm not kidding.

i've been looking for a simple, web-based document manager, and most have features that i don't need such as:

revisions and controls
workflow control
security and access control
multiple users with multiple roles

furthermore, the web-based ones do not scan for files in a directory, you need to add them to the system one by one, which is time consuming and not productive. so i wrote one that fits my needs:

scans a directory, and insert the file's information to database
does not require any file uploads
* file categorization is done via "tags"

screenshots: 1, 2, 3

grab it here. the html is a bit raw (i'm not a html dude )

usernames and passwords captured during hitbsecconf2006 are here.