Thursday, October 30, 2008

Deleting Temp Files

Copy down the command lines below and save it as a batch file.
It should clean your pc of temporary files. This includes caches and cookies.
It is especially useful if you are facing low virtual memory.
Not much but it does help a little.


@echo off
echo cleaning in progress
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.tmp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*._mp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.log
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.gid
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.chk
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.old
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\recycled\*.*
del /f /s /q %windir%\*.bak
del /f /s /q %windir%\prefetch\*.*
rd /s /q %windir%\temp & md %windir%\temp
del /f /q %userprofile%\cookies\*.*
del /f /q %userprofile%\recent\*.*
del /f /s /q "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\*.*"
del /f /s /q "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temp\*.*"
del /f /s /q "%userprofile%\recent\*.*"
echo it is done!
echo. & pause

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Converting DVD to VCD

My friend asked me to help her convert her karaoke DVD to VCD. Since I'm not an expert on videos/audio, I ask my sister whom I consider expert in this cause she is doing the converting all the time. Just for backup.

I also asked my friend and he recommended me to use WinDVD(buyware) which I found huge, more than 100MB.
My sister recommended DVD decrypter and AutoGordian. (Freeware)
Another friend recommended AnyDVD by Slysoft(shareware).

After much searching I found this to be quite good.

First I need to rip the dvd to .vob. I used AnyDVD for this. Created more than 3GB of files in my hd.

Then I have to convert the files to avi using AutoGK.

Finally to convert to VCD, I used WinAVI(Shareware). The program puts a HUGE text in the middle of the VCD asking me to register it and remove the text from the video files created.

Monday, October 20, 2008

I'm a Celebrity!

OMG! I'm a celebrity. It happens when I just happen to have nothing to do, so I just submitted my photos I have to the website of the Vogue magazine. Using some old photos that I have taken during my Installation night. Fat chance I thought to myself but what the heck. Just try la.


And one thing that is puzzling me is why Victoria Beckham has my photo. I wonder where she gets it from. I don't care anymore. I'm FAMOUS!!! Its great!!
Hahaha....



*Note*
Actually it is not my photoshop skill. I just use the site from Photofunia.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Footprints in the Sand

www.footprints-inthe-sand.com
This is one of the earliest poem that I've read about the Lord. I saw it in a bookmark sold in a church more than 10 years ago. I thought it is the most beautiful poem I have ever read.

Now that i found out the author, I'm going to put the link here.

Footprints in the Sand


One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.
Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.
In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.
Sometimes there were two sets of footprints,
other times there were one set of footprints.

This bothered me because I noticed
that during the low periods of my life,
when I was suffering from
anguish, sorrow or defeat,
I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord,
"You promised me Lord,
that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during
the most trying periods of my life
there have only been one
set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most,
you have not been there for me?"

The Lord replied,
"The times when you have
seen only one set of footprints in the sand,
is when I carried you."

Mary Stevenson

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Starcraft Multiplayer VPN Setup

Here I am assuming that
i) Starcraft is installed in your computer.
ii)IPX is installed.

First, install a VPN software first. Here I am using Hamachi. It seems that the latest version does not work with starcraft. I have to use Hamachi version -1.0.1.5-.

Note: Enable all the services. Disable the firewall. Don't update!

After that just play Starcraft as you normally do. If you encounter the problem of cannot join network, try this:




Goto Network connections and properties of the lan
card that your using to N/W. Goto IPX/SPX properties
and assign locator numbers. eg 000001 on computer
one, 000002 on the second.............. This resolves
the issue of cannot join network.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Don't Neglect Sabah

Just read an article. I'm posting it here because I'm wondering how many of us had this kind of experience as a teacher?
This is written by a doctor but I think teachers and doctors are the two professions that understands this. When they are posted to the interiors that is. If not they would think that the world owes them a place. It is when they are posted to somewhere that they never been, will they eyes be opened.


Another Doctor | Sep 8, 08 5:11pm
I refer to the Malaysiakini article Kota Marudu needs more than wireless Internet.

I read Dr Hams letter and cannot help but agree with many of his
observations. I worked in Sabah for over seven years as a house officer and medical officer. After my housemanship, I was sent to Ranau to serve in the district hospital. What Dr Hams described in Kota Marudu is not something isolated to that district alone in Sabah. It is an often repeated story in the whole of Sabah.

My first introduction to the poverty in Sabah came during my first months there, when a sweet 70- year-old lady from Kota Marudu was sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital with deep jaundice. She lived alone in a small village off Kota Marudu and noticed the jaundice about a month before.


She had no money for the taxi fare and so waited a month to sell off her chickens to have enough money to pay RM50 for the transport to Kota Marudu Hospital. She had to walk two miles to get to the road to get to the taxi.

Having been born, bred and educated in Peninsular Malaysia, I was shocked. When she arrived, she was septic and had a gallstone lodged in her common bile duct. The stone was duly removed but she was found to have a heart problem that required a pacemaker. We arranged for her to get a permanent pacemaker but she refused.


When I pressed her for her reason, she told me that she couldn't afford to buy batteries for the pacemaker, having sold off her chickens. Once I explained to her that the batteries would last for years and we would provide them, she agreed to the pacemaker.


Ranau town itself has roads and is on the main highway between Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu. It developed primarily as a result of the Mamut Copper Mines in the district. However, highway in this context means a two lane road with frequent landslides and potholes, with a two-hour drive to Kota Kinabalu.


Outside Ranau, transportation becomes a problem as tarred roads disappear to become gravel or crudely marked logging trails. Anyone who has worked in Sabah would have the same stories to tell, of extreme poverty and poor transportation.

During my 2 years in Ranau, I've heard and seen it all, patients with cerebral malaria, a condition unheard of in Peninsular Malaysia, coming in after 48 hours to the hospital from places like Kaingaran and Karagasan, with relatives having to push the 'pirate taxi' through the mud, spending RM50 on fare during the monsoon season, the equivalent of 2 months income, this too when petrol was only around RM1.20 a litre in Ranau.

Patients having to delay treatment for life threatening conditions because a bridge washed away along the trail (I won't even call it a road) to Tambunan. Emergency surgery such as caesarian sections, appendectomies and even ectopic pregnancies had to be performed in our little district hospitals by Medical Officers with little more than 4 months housemanship experience.


Medical emergencies such as myocardial infarctions, which in Peninsular Malaysia would be managed in a Coronary Care Unit setting, had to be managed in the district hospital level. I'm grateful however, that my staff in that hospital were the best I've ever had the pleasure of working with and were dedicated enough to want to make a difference in their patients' lives.

But poor transportation does not only affect the access to healthcare. Having no roads to be able to transport their agricultural produce for sale means that these people are stuck in a never ending cycle of poverty.

At most, some of them get RM20 to RM50 by selling their produce to middlemen to be sold at the monthly tamu or market at prices that are perhaps only 10 percent of the value of the goods. These innocent people are also preyed upon by traveling cloth merchants, mostly foreigners, who offer them 'easy payment schemes' to buy cloth for clothes, and when they cannot pay for the cloth and the interest accumulates, they end up having to marry their daughters to these men, who often have wives back home in Pakistan.

One of the cases I could never forget was of the family who came to Ranau Hospital just as I was leaving, a family who had failed crops, were hungry and unable to get food. The father collected some toad eggs and fed them to the whole family in a desperate attempt to stave off hunger. When they arrived at our little emergency room, one of the children were dead and two passed away within 10 minutes of arrival in our casualty unit due to poisoning.

Education is a problem in parts of Sabah outside major towns like Kota Kinabalu at the moment. Many children would be lucky to be able to get to a school or even afford to get to one. Most of my patients outside Ranau were lucky to even have a primary school education and a vast number of women marry in their teens.

I've had 14 year olds delivering babies in Ranau, most of them have never ever stepped foot in a school. The education level is so poor that many women feed their children condensed milk thinking that it's better than breast milk.

But at the heart of it all, these mothers want the best for their children but are not empowered with the knowledge to help them. Major towns in Sabah have electricity courtesy of the Sabah Electricity Board, but smaller villages have either diesel generators or rely on candles or lamps when night falls.

How can children study in these conditions? Like many doctors in the
districts, I had to learn Dusun to communicate better with these patients who could speak little else.

Forty five years after the formation of Malaysia, the promise of a better life for these poor Dusun, Murut and Rungus patients in the districts of Sabah is a pipe dream at best. How can our politicians claim to have brought development to the state and have neglected these poor people, many of whom still wear the cheap t-shirts and caps given free by political parties from many elections ago.

How can I claim to be proud of Putrajaya with it's beautiful bridges and lamp posts and the Petronas twin Towers when our fellow Malaysians in Sabah are so neglected?

The cycle of poverty and illiteracy one sees in the districts in Sabah brings despair to the heart. Eradication of poverty must tackle the real issues of education and transport and not just handouts to poor people.

By all means, declare Sept 16th a public holiday, but remember it in it's real context, where we made a promise to our brethren in Sabah and Sarawak to treat them as equals in Malaysia, and give them the development they've been long denied.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Bus trip from Miri to Sibu

Had a tiring day today.

Yesterday was the Division E Humourous Speech Contest. Alice won the contest so she will be representing our club to Bali this November. I'm proud of her. Congratulations!!!

Woke up early this morning. Can't sleep well. Took my shower then had breakfast with my uncle. He went and pick me up at Dynasty Hotel.

Then he sent me to the bus terminal at around 8.15 a.m. Wanna take the 8.30 bus but the 2 buses was full. So I had to take the 9.00 am bus to Sibu.

Freesia express. It was an old air-conditioned bus. The bus started off at 9.00 am, right on time. Before that, there were a few JPJ officers checking on the bus.


The trip took almost 8 hours. They used the old road. Maybe the driver want to pick up the people along the way. It often stopped along the way to pick up people. We stopped for toilet break at Batu Niah, then Bintulu and lastly Selangau.

On the way, the kid that was sitting on the same row as me vommitted a number of times. He is about 2 years old and he keeps on wanting to eat and drink.
Eat then vomit. Eat and vomit again. Greedy kid. :) The smell was nauseating.

Anyway we finally arrived in Sibu at 4.45 pm.

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Basic Tools

Here are a few tools that is a must have in my pendrive:

1. Process Explorer2 - Kill unwanted process and virus.
2. Autoruns2 - Disable all the startups to make the pc boots up faster.
3. TCP view - To make sure there are no trojans opening any back door.
4. Netcat - Swiss army knife for the pc.


Must have software!
1. Antivirus - AVG/ NOD32
2. Adaware by Lavasoft
3. Registry Editor- Because most virus disable the registry editing.I used the one by Lavasoft.


Then there are a few tools that is nice to have.
1. Resource Editor - ResHacker/XNResourceEditor/ eXeSc641
2. Hex Editor - XVI32
3. Text Editor- Notepad2
4. Ip Scanner -
5. Photo Editor - from Windows 98. Much easier to use than those in win XP

Starcraft & Counter Strike

Haven't played Starcraft for a very long time. It has been my favourite games during my university days. With Counter Strike. I really miss those days when we would shout to our neighbours just so that we could have a game against each other.

It was then one would hear all the swear words coming out from both our houses. Those who didn't know us will think that we were having a fight. But if they stayed long enough to listen, they will know that we were in one of our games session.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Computer keeps Rebooting / Ntdetect failed.

A friend just ask me for help with her laptop. It keeps on rebooting. And I mean that it doesnt even shows the windows loading. It just keeps on repeating the bios screen.

And then when I look carefully, just before it reboots, I saw for less than a second, the word Ntdetect failed. I googled it and found a solution. Simple. Took me less than 5 minutes to solve it.


Run XP repair.
Type in:
COPY X:\i386\NTLDR C\:
COPY X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:\
where X is the drive letter for your CD drive.
Remove the CD and type exit.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Selamat Hari Raya

Just want to wish all my friends a Happy Eid Mubarak.

Went visiting today. Started at 10 to an open house beside a mosque near SK Deshon.
First house, Mohd Lee at Kampung Jeriah. Quite far away from Sibu town. It is just a small kampung house. Built by himself I think. There is no ceiling, just newly built zink roof. Somehow makes me think of a story in the Bible. About a story of an old lady who gave a few copper coins. Meaning those who have not much but are willing to give their all.

Luckily his house is in the kampung. With a lot of animals and plants. Chicken, ducks, fishes, bidin, jagung, noni, breadfruit, durian, ubi, etc.

Then we went to Kak Siti's house nearby. A new double-story terrace house. And then go to Siti Azzyati's place in Sungai Bidut. Got lost along the way. There is one road there with lots of lane with the name Hock Seng, Hock Chung, Hock this and Hock that until I went Hock Chuan!!! Chinese kampung.

After that we went to Cikgu Azman's house in Bandung. The last house is Hajah Maria, Lot 63 Kampung ...

Then went to my school teacher's house with Madam Kong and family.