Jan Leow's Blog Page

Baby sick and down with fever

Baby sick and down with fever. Sounds like he got sore throat too when his voice was rather raspy. I also caught him making a slight cough. I guess it just one of those days when baby gets sick. The weather was pretty hot. My mom-in-law was having difficulty giving him water, well you know children nowadays can be difficult especially when they are having too much fun they tend to forget about eating and drinking till they are feeling very hungry!

Anyway he was down with fever and I could see then he has lost his strength and energy. On top of that, he didn't have much appetite either which will weaken him further. Probably the sore throat will make it difficult to even gulp down his milk.

Tried to sweat out the fever but that made him feel very uncomfortable. Only thing left was the liquid paracetamol medicine which did help to bring down the fever rather quickly.

Children really hate taking medicine and you will need to be rather quick on your hands to shove the medicine into baby's mouth. They know it is medicine time when they see you pour that horrible tasting pinkish liquid. And this baby of mine will shut his mouth real tight and you need to find a way to get his mouth open and when it is open, you have to be quick about it!

Anyway, my wife has got a very lengthy business presentation tomorrow. Since I have no appointment set, I guest I will be the designated parent to bring sick ol' baby to see the pediatrician.

Can't seem to install statusnet

Ever since Bluehost wasn't so friendly to my statusnet script and wordpress bad plugins causing server spike in their hosting server, I shifted my personal blog and other web projects to another web hosting company. I still wanted to experiment with Statusnet but now try as I might, I couldn't get it to install. I wonder what is wrong. I even downloaded an older version of Statusnet, but it was no go. All I got was 500 internal server error.

Granted the hosting was very cheap. I think Anjung Cafe Hosting is the cheapest paid hosting that I have ever come across. Of course the cheapest would be free hosting but that is a different class altogether. Nobody can provide free all the time, they need an income to maintain their hardware and provide for themselves too. Funding must come from somewhere. Even bloggers also need funds, it takes time and effort to research and write. Some small measure of returns via advertisement to fund for domain name and web hosting and a little extra for a treat now and then isn't asking too much, no?

Anyway, I wanted to experiment with Statusnet but it just wouldn't install. Mayhaps will have to try it on another web hosting company and see if I get the same error or whether it would be smooth sailing. Could be the way the Apache / Linux server is configured. Since I'm just renting the hosting space at such low cost, cannot expect too much from it lah! (update: yep, I could install it on other web hosting, so definately Anjung Cafe Hosting is missing some plugins, so no Statusnet installation here for now.)

Will have to find time to blog about the various Malaysian web hosting that I research on while looking for an alternate to Bluehost and looking for hosting space closer to home. Especially for those who want lower cost hosting at good value, no need to go so expensive like Exabytes with the unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. Although my personal blog has a lot of website traffic it is still within range of
the cheaper web hosting.

For now, I think I better not waste too much time trying to get my experimental Statusnet installation to work. I'm rather behind in my more serious web posts.

Sometimes work feels just like in Dilbert comics

Dilbert Comics meeting with incompetent manager

Sometimes work life can feel like the Dilbert Comics. Like when the top management wants you to grow the business in a certain x percentage. Ask you to take initiative to build new products but when you did find something they disallowed it citing that it is not company policy (whose? Boss or company?) or profit too small (have many small ones and it will grow!) or job too risky (no risk, no profit, my dear!).

Feel Good to Finish but Weather went from Good to Wash Out!

The NTV7 feel good run went pretty well for me. Completed the 7 km course at 52 minutes, would be 50 minutes if not including the jam during the flag off.
The cloudy and breezy weather was great for the run but eventually the rain came down after I have completed it. The rain was dampener for the carnival. Now holding out under a canopy waiting for the rain to clear before collecting the goodies bag and ciao.
One of my uncles was nowhere to be seen will have to look for him after the rain stops.
Meanwhile just keeping my cool under the canopy for this NTV7 Feel Good Run. Yeah!

Bypassing DNS Block of TM Streamyx

Recently I noticed there was lag whenever I tried to access internet. I guess the recent government directive to Streamyx and other ISP providers in Malaysia in an attempt to use DNS block has resulted in a slower internet access. Such DNS blocking is futile as it was very easy to bypass DNS block.

The Malaysian government went against their promise (perhaps even illegal since it went against the MSC Malaysia Bill of Guarantee) of giving its citizen unrestricted access to the internet and instructed Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to block off certain sites. So much for freedom of information. The reasoning behind it was to fight against piracy and against illegal file sharing sites. That’s the overt reasoning, I should think there is also a covert conspiracy to also shut off opposition website as well too since they did get a hammering during the 2008 general election as the opposition used the internet media to voice out their opinion thus making the current coalition losing so many Parliament seats that they are now so desperate to get back their 2/3 majority.

Firefox 5 breaks Google Toolbar

The latest Firefox 5 update inadvertently broke the Google Toolbar. Frankly the version 5 came too fast in the wake of Firefox 4 which broke the Delicious bookmarking plugin.

Since I have several PC's, looks like i'm not going to update the rest of my PC's to Firefox 5 until Google comes up with an updated plugin.

--- [update 27/6/2011]

Found this thread in Mozilla support. By using this compatibility reporter extension, you could make Google Toolbar to work with Firefox 5. I gave it a try and it works! It also made my Trend Micro toolbar working in Firefox 5 too! Nice fix!

And finally I gave the Delicious toolbar a go too, and voila! It works! No need to wait for update from Delicious. Anyway, with the breaking of Delicious I found a better bookmarking service from Xmarks.com. Since I still got many bookmarks in Delicious, I guess I will be keeping both service for now.

The Google Toolbar 7.1.20110512W version works in Firefox 5.0 by using the Compatibility Reporter extension.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/

Reinstalling my Windows

I guess my office PC Windows was getting way to cranky and it was time to blast it to smithereens and reinstall Windows again. It had a good run of 3 years but now it is like a wheel that is no longer round giving a very rough ride whenever I was using it.


The reinstallation was a tedious process. Although reinstalling windows was quick taking only a couple of hours. Putting back the necessary software like Microsoft Office, the various browsers, anti-virus, and various tweaking, configuration, updating… while still doing sales work at the same time is really complicated!


This time round I figure I won't be using the POP3 for my email and use the alternate IMAP instead so that wherever I may be whether at home, at work or on the road I will see the same email logging in either with Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Linux Evolution, Android phone or just logging in via Webmail.


However my current office web hosting company do not have IMAP but I did set up an alternate email storage in Google App using a sub domain. So I will try this for awhile. The only problem with this method is that all my outgoing email will have the "…send on behalf of…" which makes the email headers looked kinda ugly. Tried several options but still ended up with the ugly headers. Well no choice, google wanted to make sure spammers won't spoof their email address when using the gmail email system. Only way to avoid it is to send via the original account, but I won't be able to keep the outgoing email in the Google App account. Will just have to see which way to go about it.


Meanwhile it has taken about two days of installing back the necessary software. There may be some other less often used software that were not installed. Well if I need to use them I will install them, so in the meanwhile, my Windows reinstallation is breezier and faster when all the gunk has been cleared out from the PC with a clean install. So no more blue screen of death and warning messages of not shutting down my PC properly. Yes!