Wil Tan

Life’s too good and I find myself playing nethack again. First I tried looking for it in my FreeBSD VM, I thought they used to distribute it in the default installation… nevermind I found Rogue and was playing it for a while. Then I went to download the windows version of nethack so I can play it without having to fire up VMWare.

I’m now using the IBMGraphics option, which looks pretty darn good! I’ve also managed to get PuTTy to display the IBM line drawing characters properly by going to the “Translation” item, select “CP437″ under Character set translation and select “Use font in both ANSI and OEM modes”. Also, I needed to use “Courier New” or “Lucida Console” fonts with the “Central European” script to make it look right.

.. after a long period of silence. During this time, Bubble has flown back to Singapore, and we have settled into our new rented apartment in Guildford. Today, the technician finally came to install our phone line and we can get on the Internet via 56k modem! Being offline for 2 weeks is utterly painful, but at the same time kind of therapeutic. I almost failed the online course for not participating for too long.

We snapped some photos of the new place, will post them up once they are developed. Getting used to Guildford and the surrounding areas. We are quite far from the Sydney city centre by the standards of most international students, but we have Parramatta, which is only two stations away.

Moving time. V busy. Go away.

Tried out both YahooPOPs 0.5 and MrPostman to download my mails to my Mozilla Mail. After much difficulties, I finally managed to do it, and have decided to stick to MrPostman.

My experience with YahooPOPs was less than satisfactory (due in part to the fact that I tried to download 1000 messages all at once and the speed of download seems to have triggered a temporary block from Yahoo, giving me corrupted messages), so I moved on in search of a better alternative.

At first, I refused to try MrPostman based purely on the fact that it is a Java app. To this end, I must applaud the MrPostman team for making the installation so seamless – it’s a true-blue installer, no need to copy the Jar file somewhere and setup your own ugly shortcut to run java on it! It feels almost like a native Windows app.

Email Vault is a program that works with Mozilla Mail client to store your mails into a relational database (Postgres) and file your mails under multiple categories instead of folders (without duplicating the message).

Incidentally, some months ago I did conceive an idea to create an email consolidator and scribbled some notes on my trusty old sketch pad. Guess what I called it? Mail Vault!! I never really thought about using an SQL database, but there was a requirement to have a super-efficient backend mail store (not excluding the possibility of an SQL DB). The main goal Mail Vault is to import all your mails from various sources (mbox on a unix account, yahoo mail, outlook express mails, etc.), at the same time removing the duplicates. It would also have a super-intuitive interface (yet to be defined that allows you to perform complex query on your mails. But I didn’t get round to persuing it.

Later on, I found Zoe, which sort of does what I wanted to do. I tried to use it but it didn’t work out. Maybe I should give it another try.

We finally sold the car yesterday… (see previous post). For A$500!!! You think it’s cheap? Some people even had the guts to offer me $250, think again.

Came back from a Brahma Kumaris Raja Yoga Meditation part I weekend retreat in the Blue Mountains, still very excited from the revelation of Soul Consciousness. We’ll be going for part II of the course on 2nd April, more soul food!

OK, done. I’ve got it all sorted out. The official list:

* Advanced Functional Programming
* Software Implementation
* Computer Networks and Applications
* Graphics and Contemporary Society (GenEd, web-based course)
* Cyberspace Law (GenEd)

I got lucky yesterday and got into the Graphics course (it was previously shown in the system as “closed”). Cyberspace Law… hey, Why Not!?