Sigh… I’ve been slacking in churning out videos and posts… And what have I been working on?

A lot of project management! And some programming.

I’m currently heading the projects division at Integricity Corporation and there’s always so much going on, especially around this time of year when all clients are trying to launch their new sites.

We’ve probably launched 10 different projects in the last month, with one that was just launched tonight! We welcome Louis Pang’s refreshed blog to the blogosphere - much more intuitive with a whole lot of new functionality! Louis is a good friend, and probably one of the most sought after wedding photographers in Malaysia (and by many from abroad too!). All the best with the new blog, Louis Pang Studio!

What else have I been busy with? Well… here’s a sneak peak at an Integricity-owned project that will revolutionize the dining experience for Malaysians. It’s called TheQguides, and it’s not out yet… but will be very shortly. A teaser is on the website here. I can’t show you more, but here’s a brief glimpse of what’s being birthed in our labs…

As such, I’ve been rather tied for time. BUT, just to let all of you know… I have swung to the dark-side. I am now the owner of a hand-me-down Macbook Pro from my wife. She has got a new-fangled Macbook Pro, but I’m happy with what I have now. There’s much to learn, but I’m getting there. I’ll share more info soon on the learning process and how a PC is different from a Mac.

Oh, the pain of relearning shortcut keys! GRRR…

Thanks to a posting by Cindy Tham of The Nut Graph, I found out about this government website that has “atrochers engrish” - honestly, it is sooo bad. And I am positive my 12 year old cousin can write better.

To capture and archive the state of affairs for you, here is what the site says… My favorite sections have been italicized.

1. What is NRD’s website?

NRD website is abbreviation to official web National Registration Department. NRD website make major world to information and national registration department service through Internet.

2. Why this website been created?

Latterly, information and service majority National Registration Department has been prepared by online and NRD website been created to provide convenience to the public find information and service that are provided.

3. Whom were allowed surf and use this website ?

Generally, this website could be achieved by all society. However, there were some information and service that need registration.

4. What is privacy policy for this website? Am I been recorded or not?

All access and your use up on this website shall not be recorded. To further information, please visit to ‘Privacy Policy And Safety Policy’ in bottom of each page.

I am still reeling in shock from it. It’s a given that most Malaysians weren’t brought up speaking English at home, but how can a NATIONAL GOVERNMENTAL WEBSITE have such atrocious copy?! You’d think they could hire someone to proof-read it first. But honestly, this typifies the average Malaysian government website - if only they’d hire Integricity! Here’s the website for an entity parked under the National Bank of Malaysia - AKPK that Integricity worked on. A world of difference, eh?

And I haven’t even begun to critique the usability of the website yet! The design leaves MUCH to be desired. It has spinning bullets on the left! No kidding! I can rate it akin to my first website that I launched in 1995! And I most definitely should not mention the flashing text, or the visitor counter, or the pixellated map that was scanned from a brochure of Putrajaya.

Sigh… no further comments your honor.

Oh, if you do want to view it first-hand, go ahead… it’s here.

Has anyone encountered FireFox freezing up when accessing Gmail? It seemed to happen quite often for me, and I realized the common site being accessed was always Gmail. Too much Ajax happening in the background?

Perhaps this will force me to upgrade from FireFox 2.0.0.16 to the new spunky FireFox 3?

If this is happening to you, a suggestion by a certain amanda on troublefixers.com was to clear the browser cache by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Del. I’m not sure when you do this - AFTER it freezes once, then restarting FireFox, or to just do it periodically?

Man, what a busy time it has been… So much work, too little time, clients chasing us all the time (oh, hello darling clients!)

I started out The Backpackr project to see how far it would get and it’s been great fun. We fell a little short on unique visitors hitting our site, but made up for it in video views on YouTube. I’ll reveal our stats next week.

For now, I’m off for a cruise with my wife Grace (who runs Integricity Visuals and Wedding Story together with her business partners). It’s actually a work assignment from a client of hers who is coming up with a movie, and needs certain elements of the ship captured in photos and videos - so that it can be used in digital 3D recreations… amazing, huh? And of COURSE Grace can’t do the assignment alone, so she needs an adept assistant who will also share a cabin with her for cost saving reasons!

Woohooo, so Superstar Gemini, here I come… It’s not a long trip though… 3 days and 2 nights, SNORT! Let’s see… we leave on Saturday at 2pm, spend a night out at sea while heading down to Singapore, have a full Sunday on board, then disembark at 9am on Monday! WHERE’S MY 24 x 3 HOURS? It’s only 43 hours on board, not even a full TWO DAYS. Someone from the marketing team should learn how to count the hours.

Anyhow, it’s gonna be exciting, and here are two videos I found on YouTube that show what the Superstar Gemini is all about. Quality is a little crap, be warned…

Alright, I’ve got to go pack in our 2 camera bodies, flash lights, Panasonic AG-HVX202 HD video camera, notebooks, data storage drives, etc… oh yes, some clothes too, I guess…

This is called a “Gipsy” show - doubt it’ll be playing when we’re on board, but looks fairly cool.

Okay, we’re not going on the Superstar Virgo, but here’s their promo video. I hope we’ll get something like that!

By now, I presume you have assembled your PC hardware and are just raring to try your hand at installing the Mac OS. This tutorial follows on from Part 1 - Choosing the parts - do watch it first if you haven’t assembled your machine.

Your parts may be different from what I’ve prescribed, and it’s alright. You may have success with what you have already, but in the event you do not, then go watch the video and buy the recommended parts.

Other resources that are handy while building your hackintosh are as follows:

• Choosing the parts
• Bios settings before installation
• OSx86 Project
• InsanelyMac

If you have questions on building the Hackintosh, feel free to post them here. I’ll try my best to help you out.

Music credit: Robert Jakob

THIS TUTORIAL IS BASED ON THE ASUS P5K PRO MOTHERBOARD.
YOUR SETTINGS WILL DIFFER IF YOU ARE NOT USING THE SAME HARDWARE.

Before you commence the installation of the Mac OS on a PC, there are some settings in the BIOS you’ll have to configure. As your PC boots up, hit the key that is stated which takes you into BIOS - it’s normally the [DEL], [F1] or [ESC] key that will work for you.

(It’s amazing… this guy, Michael Stevens set up a page on most BIOS types and what key to press. Check it out here.)

Anyhow, once you get into BIOS, follow each setting to the “T” and you’ll be assured that your Mac OS installation will work. I used the Leo4All installation, it will work for others too, I’m sure.

ASUS P5K PRO BIOS MAIN TAB

(Read more…)

Now that you’ve got your blog installed, what do you do next?

You don’t want your blog to look like a plain Jane one, so get cracking, and select a happening design theme, download it and install. Here’s an introductory chat about themes and plugins.

This clip does not cover the process of installing themes, but here’s a video clip by Steve Dougherty that illustrates in step-by-step form how to do it.

As for installing plugins, you could take a look at a step-by-step guide I’ve written on how to do so. It’s really dead easy.

Alright, have fun exploring WordPress even further!

Plugins for WordPress are created to enhance your site and add extra functionality to it. For instance, you might want to have the ability to allow your readers to rate your posts, or to create an image gallery, or get WordPress to do your laundry (yeah rite!).

Most plugins are free - a good place to start downloading them from is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Step-by-step walkthrough to install a WordPress plugin

1. Download the plugin you wish to install. Unzip it on your machine.

2. Open your FTP client (Filezilla - highly recommended, and free!)

3. Connect to the hosting server (your webhost should have given you the FTP information, or else shoot them in the foot)

4. Once connected, look for the wp-content folder, double click on it. Then look for the plugins folder - that is where you will transfer the downloaded plugin to. Double click on the plugins folder and you should at least see “akismet” which is a default plugin supplied by WordPress.

5. Upload the directory that was created when you unzipped the plugin earlier. You can right click on it, and select Upload.

6. Once uploaded, we need to log into the WordPress administrative Dashboard and click on Plugins in order to activate it.

7. In my case, I’m installing a plugin I bought for USD1 called Ajax Comments. As such, look for the header Inactive Plugins, and hit the Activate link.

8. That’s it, really. But for some more complex plugins, you may have to configure them further. Click on the Settings tab which is on the administrative Dashboard and you’ll see the name of the plugin that you installed. Tweak to size, and Save!

Today is a sad day for Malaysia. We are currently witnessing a deterioration of our government on many fronts, and this has now extended to the freedom that we Malaysians enjoy on the Internet.

The problem - the government now selectively limits what site we are allowed to access and directs the Internet service providers (ISPs) to abide accordingly. As of the 27th of August 2008, access to a prominent and controversial blogger’s website - Raja Petra’s Malaysia-Today.net was blocked.

An initial investigation showed that the DNS servers for our national ISP ceased to point to the right location, which was puzzling as it has never happened before.

Soon after, MalaysiaKini reported the following snippet.

What does the MCMC really stand for anyway? I decided to take a peek at their manifesto, which is extracted from their website.

So… which part of “promoting access to communications and multimedia services” do I enjoy? Perhaps I should reword it to “promoting access to SELECTED communications and multimedia services”. And also, “Ensuring consumers enjoy THE GOVERNMENT’S choice and a satisfactory level of services”.

Or even better, read the MSC Malaysia Bill of Guarantees (which my company Integricity has obtained) which the government is promoting. Point number SEVEN specifically says, “Ensure no Internet censorship”. What then does this mean for us? We can endorse one thing and yet do another? Malaysia tentu boleh (Malaysia surely can).

What will be next? Blocking of freedom to Michael Backman’s website because he condemned Malaysia in his article “While Malaysia fiddles, its opportunities are running dry“? Are we afraid that Malaysians will wake up and realise, “crikey, this country is horrible!”? Too late - those who do, already DO!

Rather, should we not focus our time and energy on improving the nation, rather than wasting precious time and energy on fictitious story-telling in the press, as we have witnessed lately (which are a lot better than some fairy tales I heard as a kid)?

“Selamat pagi, Malaysia” and “sila bangun dari lena” (good morning, and please awaken) - let’s realise that blocking Internet access is not going to work.

After all, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to circumvent this amateur block by using the following methods as listed on Integricity’s blog.

Apple & Intel inside

As part of my exposure to the world of Macs, I decided to try a project that is fairly publicized on the Internet - to build a Hackintosh. This is essentially building a computer system with regular PC parts that you can pick up from your local computer store, but installing the Mac operating system on it.

This effectively provides you with a full functioning Mac that could even be more powerful than their native Macs, and most importantly… AT A LOWER COST! (I paid less than USD600 for this Core 2 Quad machine - not including the monitor)

Stay tuned for the next part of this series that details the operating system software installation process.

Summary of computer components used

• ASUS P5K Pro motherboard
• Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz (Q6600)
• NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT graphics card
• 2x 2GB DDR2-800MHz Kingston RAM
• Pioneer SATA DVD-ROM
• 250GB SATA hard drive
• A regular casing with a good power supply

Music credit: Sunset (Ken Verheecke), Farranos no Frevo (Camerata Brasileira)