Ahfook’s Story

Inspired by this post, I came out a way to round down a decimal number to nearest 0 or 5 in MySQL.

For example: 1.27 -> 1.25, 3.23->3.20

MySQL code:

SELECT TRUNCATE(value * 2, 1) / 2;

In one of my previous posts, I’ve mentioned about Quantum Big Foot hard disk that we used 10 years ago. Today when I cleaned up my my old stuffs, I’ve found my old Quantum Big Foot hard disk (together with some old PC peripherals). So I snapped this photo below, to show you the Quantum Big Foot hard disk, in case you have never seen one before.

At left, Quantum Big Foot hard disk, 2.1GB, manufactured in 1997, at right, Maxtor hard disk, 20 GB, manufactured in 2002 (this is the standard size of today’s hard disks).

ps. Quantum sold their hard disk technology to Maxtor at 2000, but at 2006 Maxtor was acquired by Seagate.

10 years ago, end of March, 1998, I started to step in to Information Technology field, with the commencement of my college course at APIIT Kuala Lumpur. Until today, a lot things had happened, especially in IT field that changes almost everyday. Let’s have a flashback on how IT field looked like 10 years ago:

• We connected to Internet using TmNet or Jaring dial up connection, the speed was 36.6 kbps, downloading a 3MB MP3 taking up around 30-45 minutes, if the line dropped in middle of download, we needed to start all over again
• Winamp was the main MP3 player, because the Windows 98 built-in Media Player couldn’t play MP3
• Xing Mpeg was the main VCD player, because… same reason with above
• Obviously, we were using Microsoft Windows 98… XD
• Chinese Star and NJStar were the main tools we needed to view and write Chinese characters
• Yahoo! was the top search engine, Jerry Yang was the proud of Chinese
• Hotmail was not belong to Microsoft, providing 2MB mail space
• Netscape was the top browser, but Internet Explorer was taking over, until now Netscape is died
• ICQ was the hottest instant messenger
• We searched and knew friends from mIRC, then we met them after chatting for few times
• Forums were generally known as BBS (Bulletin Board System) that time
• You could earn quite good money with simple and plain HTML-designed web pages
• There were damn a lot of Titanic-themed websites
• Mobile phone was an expensive accessory, I couldn’t afford to own one until my first job. At 1999 when Nokia 3210 launced, it was a hit, we borrow classmates’ 3210 phones to play the popular Snake game, tried to record down our own highest score in them
• Scanner was the important tool to produce a photo’s softcopy, because digital camera was a luxury accessory (actually did anyone has one at 1998?)
• Display card, sound card, modem, network card were not part of motherboard
• All cards were plugged on motherboard’s PCI and ISA slots, while expensive VooDoo 3D card plugged into AGP slot, which only available on expensive motherboard
• Creative sound blaster 16-bits sound card was damn popular
• CD burner was expensive
• Quantam BigFoot hard disk with the width of 5.25″ was popular, having a 4.3GB hard disk was already hugh
• We were using EDO RAM, 64MB RAM was amazingly big
• Imbi Plaza was the main point for IT gadgets

Previously I had big problems with comment spamming in my blog. The moron spammers sent rubbish comments in to my comment box even though my blog is not famous at all =.=

To maintain the tidiness of my blog, I set the setting that all comments to be held for moderation before appear on the blog, and I’ve even installed an anti spam plug-in (with text in the image) to prevent spam. However these spam robots are too smart to guess the image text and manage to get through. It was a nightmare to clean up the rubbish everyday, and my blog readers cannot have their comment being viewed immediately after submitted.

At last, I tried Akismet that installed together with WordPress. After getting a API key from WordPress.com, I started to use Akismet to assist me to deal with the moron spammers. After few weeks, I’ve found out that Akismet does a very good job on fighting spam. Now I just need go into the blocked comments to check whether Akismet has blocked the wrong comments accidentally. Fortunately Akismet didn’t kill a comment wrongly, so far.

Now I decided to set the new comments to be visible directly after my readers submitting their comments, because I can rest assure that no (or may be only little) spam comments can get through Akismet

After weeks of trial and error… Finally I have my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) connected to Internet

Installation of Ubuntu 7.10 was extremely easy, but getting it online was a nightmare to me, but thanks to Google, I finally have it online, downloaded MP3 codec, and writing my first blog post in Linux environment…

Testing mp3 codec in Linux:

It’s 2007-12-13 07:00am now…