Category Archives: General

Living frugally

General

If you live in USA, you may find this post useful:
Websites for the frugal

For all others – the key is in the “little things”. A can of Coke, a pack of cigarettes, a chicken burger, a pack of chocolate – those add up to quite a big sum in the end of the month, believe it or not.

Don’t be mistaken – you may think it’s easy to give them up; but try to actually not doing it instead.
Good luck ! (you’ll need it)

Fairtrade

General

After reading news like these, now I try to buy Fairtrade products whenever I could.

Today I bought chocolate drink from them instead of from Cadbury, and their banana instead of Del Monte’s.
I wish that there are more of their products.

If you can do it, please do buy Fairtrade products.
It may be nothing / cause you only very little inconvenience – but it makes difference to others not so fortunate.

Intellectual Property

General

“…standing on the shoulder of the giants”
— Linus Torvalds in his biography, attributed to Isaac Newton.

The quote above means to be able to utilise others’ achievements in order to make progress. It’s the reverse of “reinventing the wheel”.
Great scholars and inventors of the past benefited from this greatly.

However, international patent laws are set to stifle this – the system enable the rich & greedy to acquire large number of patents, thus disabling others from basing their work on it:
http://economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3376181

Worse, the patent applications are flooding the patent offices, so the overworked staff are granting it even to the ridiculous ones.

An example is the notorious hyperlink patent, owned by British Telecom. Even though Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t patent this invention of his, BT applied for patent for it instead – and got it.

Somebody may commented that you can always challenge a patent – the problem is, the process is not doable to most people.
It takes time, and most of the time, a LOT of money.

So the big corporations are getting away with it. And the rest of humankind just have to enjoy this new kind of slavery – ideas slavery.

Interestingly, America was able to flourish due to the lack of patent system:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/technology/14NECO.html

Ideally, the solution is to abolish patent.
But, with current condition, this will just make the big boys to copy the small fishes’ innovations, and kill them with advertising and cheap price brought by mass production.

For now, the solution probably is to set the fee of patent application variably, depending on the applicant’s last year income. And then the patent may not be transferred to other party.
This way, patents will become affordable to the poor (but creative), and will stop the big corporations from putting a burden on the system.

The world we live in today

General

The following is such an excellent summary of the world we live in today:

…On that note, f*ck America (or more specifically its government). It has ceased to care about any person without a million dollar pocket book. The laws of America now exist to enslave its poor and empower its rich.

Although, the sad part is that the comman man is just as responsible as anybody else for this outcome. We have empowered them through our complacency and utter lack of regard for anything other than what is on our damn televisions every night. We have been enslaved to technology, and as a result those that produce that technology own us all. Especially, now that what we see on television (our defacto standard for the propogation of our culture) tells us that men have to be ignorant fools who are only interested in football, sex, gadgets, and being retarded with their friends to fit in. And women just have to buy everything including a perfect body to do the same. We are trained to be submissive idiots, questioning those who are otherwise.

Oh well, at least we still have our sweet… sweet capitalism. At least we have a choice of where we buy things. You know ma & pa shop down the street or Wal-Mart up the street for 70% less (which coincidentally enough is all you can afford now that you work there). Good thing McCarthy came along and kept us from falling into the hell hole of desperation that is communism.

And at least we still have our voice in our government. You know our solitary occasional whispering voices, compared to industries full time lobbyists. I am perfectly satisfied with all of my governmental representatives are you ;-). So when’s the next civil war?

Source:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129665&cid=10817291

Vacancies on MessageLabs

General

There are 3 job opening at MessageLabs, a very well known company providing corporate email services.

The interesting thing about them is that they are willing to accept non-UK/non-EU citizen !
So if you’ve been wanting to work in UK – here’s your chance.

The vacancies for now are:
# Perl Junior Programmer
# System Test Engineer
# Software Engineer – Security

Click on “more” below for the details.

Continue reading Vacancies on MessageLabs →

How to upgrade your Yahoo email account to 1000 MB

General

Are you burning with envy, seeing your friends and their 1GB Gmail account? Well you can stop doing it now, since you can have it yourself with Yahoo. Here’s how:

  1. You must already have an email account with Yahoo. This may still work if you don’t have one already but I haven’t tried it myself. To sign up, just head over to http://mail.yahoo.com
  2. Go to http://cn.mail.yahoo.com
  3. You’ll see a page in Chinese. On the top-right, enter your username on the top textbox, and your password on the textbox below it.
  4. Right under the textboxes are 2 buttons. The top button is to login to your account, the second is to upgrade your account to 1GB. Naturally, you’ll want to click the second button.
  5. The next page will be shown with a button in the center. Click that button.
  6. It’ll try to install an update assistant, allow the install to finish.
  7. Another page will show up, in the middle there’ll be 2 textboxes next to each other.
  8. Enter your username in the left textbox, and your password on the left textbox. Then click on the left button.
  9. A page will show up, click the button in the middle.
  10. Presto – your Yahoo email account was just upgraded to 1 GB

Now if you logon to your account as usual (via http://mail.yahoo.com), you’ll see that indeed the limit is now 1GB.
Enjoy 🙂

note:
Since I can’t read Chinese, I don’t know if there’s any catch to this offer, other than the installation of the update assistant. So far so good, but as usual, YMMV.

credit: This post is a translation of a forwarded post from Anny in MIFTA forum.

WordPress: notifikasi via email bagi komentator posting

General

Selama ini, saya agak malas memberi komentar di berbagai blog yang ada karena sulit untuk memeriksa respon balik dari komentar tsb.

Padahal, sebetulnya banyak posting di berbagai blog yang sangat menarik untuk menjadi bahan diskusi. Cuma ya itu, saya tidak punya cukup waktu untuk secara periodik memeriksa kembali semua komentar2 yang saya tinggalkan (apakah sudah ada komentar baliknya).

Terimakasih kepada Benny, sekarang blog ini sudah memiliki fasilitas tersebut.

Jika Anda memberi komentar di blog ini, dan memilih option “Ingin diberitahu kalau ada komentar baru untuk posting ini ?”, maka Anda akan diberitahu via email setiap kali ada komentar baru di posting tersebut.

WordPress: SubscribeToComment plugin
WordPress: Daftar plugin yang tersedia

Valid XHTML 1.0

General

Tadi pagi mencoba memeriksa apakah situs ini sudah valid sesuai dengan standar XHTML 1.0 :
Hasil validator W3C untuk harry.sufehmi.com

Ternyata pada saat tersebut belum, dengan pesan kesalahan:
“Error: non SGML character number 133”

Penyebabnya ? Ternyata 3 buah titik (…) di posting ini yang menyebabkannya. Aneh ?

Ternyata, ada penjelasannya disini:
SGML Error 133

Entah kenapa 3 buah titik tersebut berubah menjadi “elipses character” :-/ tapi setelah meng-edit posting tsb dan kembali mengetikkan 3 buah titik, kali ini lolos validasi XHTML 1.0

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke

Nikmat kentut

General

Manusia memang sering lupa dengan berbagai kenikmatan yang dia dapatkan 24 jam sehari, non-stop. Atau malah kadang melecehkannya.

Tadi siang tiba-tiba perut sakit karena ada angin yang terjebak, tidak bisa keluar
Minta ampun sakitnya… 😀

Akhirnya setelah nongkrong sekian lama di WC, keluar juga.

Dulu malu kalau kentut, sekarang bersyukur luar biasa bahwa masih bisa kentut.. he he 🙂