2011 in review: The Year It Get Too Close For Comfort

For a long time geeks like me tend to hide behind the scene when it comes to politics, unlike the US there is no law like the DMCA in Malaysia. We Malaysian don't see often see a law pass that directly affect IT industry here. Until this year, suddenly we have Computing Professional Board bill.

Which you can find a lot more online, but in short it is about regulate programmers that involve in Critical National Information Infrastructure. Which the list provided is too vague for comfort.

So what I hope to do next year, involve more somehow. What this year have shown us, ignorance and apathy can bite. Not all law have an open day that we all know, like the CPB. So law can be passed under our nose, and it will bite, and bite hard.

p.s Not including my own post on the Computing Bill, because it have quite a lot of inaccuracy

2011 in Review: Awesome Book

Books I have read in 2011

1. Makers by Cory Doctorow
2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
3. Make Magazine not book, but still
4. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, have still a whole set of Baroque Cycle, still try to finish it
5. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
6. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
7. Anathem, Neal Stephenson
8. Javascript the Quick Reference, Douglas Crockford
9. Make Magazine
10. Arduino Bots and Gadgets, that actually belongs to hackerspacekl
11. 
    

2011 in Review: Achievement Unlocked

Just a list of stuff being done in 2011

• Python on android with SL4A
• Programming the arduino for The Great Hackerspace Challenge
• Scraping govt websites for hoping to the Open Data Project
• Writing software for a robot
• Pickup a new python web (micro)framework
• Opening up data with scraping knowledge
• More linux skills on diff and grep
• using android for work
• rooting android and use cyanogen
• know why pdf is evil
• and use elasticsearch(which I didn't blog yet)

Some of the cool one anyway. 

Copy and Paste on GNU Screen

So recently I finally found out how to do copy and paste on gnu screen, previously I just do a drag on a mouse.

So copy and paste on gnu screen,

- ctrl-a [ 

- move to the first character of the string to copy, press enter

- move to the last character of the string to copy, press enter

- now to paste, press ctrl-a ]

p.s kina ashamed that it take me so long to figure out =.=

Rooting HTC Desire HD on 64bit Linux Mint

One reason why I have been resisting rooting my phone is because of the old way of rooting the HTC Desire HD. Best illustrated by the wiki on cyanogen mod. Essentially a many step process, of copying file, downgrade, copy file, reboot, and reboot.

Recently I have discovered Advanced Ace Hack Kit, basically these guys already automate everything as a 1 step process, if the firmware need to be downgrade it, will do it. But here is the big catch, it is a 32bit binary, and I installed a 64bit linux.

Thankfully mint, which essentially built on top of ubuntu(which in turn debian) have ia32-lib, which have 32bit version of library for 64bit OS. Just install it.

And read the manual, it is inside the package along with all the tools needed, unzip, and read the manual inside it. It covers everything, you need. There will be a quiz in the end ;-)