Our Boundaries

This one taken from thoughtful blog of Eric Sink [http://www.ericsink.com/]

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Just inside the gates of heaven, St. Peter sits at a desk checking people in.

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

The man at the front of the line says, "Lutheran."

Glancing at his clipboard, Peter says, "Room 33. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

The process repeats itself with the next person in line:

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

Person #2: "Catholic."

Peter: "Room 17. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

The next person moves to the front of the line with a look of curiosity on her face.

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

Person #3: "Methodist."

Peter: "Room 54. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

Person #3: "Why do you keep telling us to be quiet as we pass room 6?"

Peter: "Because the Baptists are in room 6, and they think they're the only ones here.

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More on his thought about this here: [http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Boundaries.html].

So, have you been out of your boundaries?
If you never done so, how could you absolutely positively sure that you are now in the right place?

A bit late, but better than never!

I finally understands what π (pi) really is!
(Hmm, do I?)

Poor me.


(the nice image is taken from wikipedia.org)

What is it so bad about lying?

Click on the title link to see the whole blogpost.

A quote:
"What is so bad about lying? We currently live in a culture that cumulatively lies our asses off on a nearly daily basis. We lie to get out of trouble. (I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t realize how fast I was going.) We lie to avoid doing something we won’t enjoy. (I’d love to go to your party; it’s just that I already made plans.) We lie to get attention (Oh man, I am feeling so sick today) and we lie to get people to like us. (I love your new haircut!)"

A very intriguing question to me, too.
If the world is now full of liars, why do we keep telling our children (and therefore lying to them), that they should not lied?

I think I have an answer, but I'm curious,
what do you think on this matter? please kindly write your thoughts in the comment.

Ubuntu Bug of the Day

I've just found out that Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn Herd 5) is completely uninstallable in a laptop with 250MB of memory. Its "Scanning disk..." dialog may be a nice coffee time companion, but it sure is a pain in the b?tt for users trying to install the beast.

This is a __very__ disappointing experience for me. Even Debian and Slackware could be installed easily nowadays.

The main source of problem seems to point to Ubuntu's decision of making the Installer and the Live CD into one CD and did not provide any installation mode at boot time. This forces user to install from inside Live CD's desktop and thus limiting installable system.

I know Ubuntu's great once you installed it, my desktop is doing fairly fine with it since 5.04 released.

So, to Ubuntu developers, and to Mark Shuttleworth,
I really hope that you'll consider the rest of us in this part of Earth who still need to use "low-powered" computers.

Orang-orang hebat ada di Indonesia

Kemarin hingga tadi pagi, aku baca soal bapak Ali Alatas.

Salah satu orang Indonesia yang bukan hanya Bagus dalam rupa dan tutur, namun juga sikap dan ilmu. Beliau termasuk orang yang tetap dihormati di Indonesia selama pergantian masa terjadi di negeri ini. Beliau juga salah satu orang Indonesia yang dihormati dan disegani oleh dunia internasional.

Prestasinya? mungkin sudah tak terukur lagi.
Jasa beliau sungguh berlimpah, mulai dari membantu memulihkan citra Indonesia, hingga membantu proses perdamaian dan rekonsiliasi negara-negara lain.

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Tadi malam aku juga liat Chris John di acara tv yang format acara-nya ku gak ngerti. Chris John-nya sich aku tahu, walau baru kali itu aku lihat bagaimana ia pribadi.

Chris John sungguh punya banyak hal yang membuat manusia menjadi manusia. Rendah hati, ramah, luwes, meski juga tampak kekuatan dan keberanian terpancar dari dirinya.

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Mereka berdua adalah sedikit dari manusia-manusia langit yang ada di bumi Indonesia.

Cahaya yang bisa menembus mendung paling gelap sekalipun.

HALOhybrid

This one is yummy.

Another great innovation from the Company (warning: flash required).

Though, I’ve been thinking and asking for something like this since the first launch of simPATI.

Nice to know it finally realized.

About tech support

Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame, blog about the best tech support he had so far on his wonderful blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Mar-01.html

Reading his experience, I'd agree that's how tech support, or customer supports center in general, should perform.

a Database Design Software

Making software is a hard job. Making a good software is harder.

Making a good software that works right instead of blowing apart is even harder. Making a good software that works right and maintainable is __unbelievably__ hard.

Joel even once said that "Good software takes 10 years. Get used to it".

Now, at the heart of this huge task, there is at least one poor person who has to turns all specs, requirements and design documents to code that works. You might imagine what kind of pressure this poor person feels.

So, for this person, a good helper utilities, editors, compilers, IDEs, or maybe a nice comfortable chair and desk (that could also work as a bed) will be highly appreciated. With a better editors (such as vim!), "syntax errors" would be spotted earlier and would prevent nasty bugs that may later became very impossible to track.

One of the tools that is really helpful in the process of creating a database-backed software is a database design software. And for the last weeks, I have manage to found a _very_ good database design software that suits my needs perfectly. It is called DbWrench from Nizana system (http://www.dbwrench.com).

DbWrench can do lots of nice things for me, it manage to "reverse engineer" my databases perfectly. You change something from inside the database server itself? No problem, DbWrench can synchronize the changes. What if you do changes inside DbWrench? Well it will help you to "forward engineer" the changes to the database server.

DbWrench has support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL and MS-Access databases. And it also has this very-very nice diagram relationships editor. If that's not enough, the diagram is also exportable to PNG or JPG. A perfect tool for helping not only in database designing and application development processes, but also in documentation processes.

Only downside of it, is that it is not (yet?) a free/open source software, it's build using Java (which might costs you extra memory, but hey, your memory is more important, right?) and the license costs quite a bit. But if you work on a software development company that needs a good database designing software or in badly need for such a tool, then DbWrench is highly recommended.