Narrowband.org

We kicked-start the year with our new baby - it has four wheels and was codenamed ‘flying Myvi’. We took delivery of the car in the first week of January, after having waited for *drumrolls, please…* … more than seven months (a record). It was also the year I celebrated my 2nd singlehood anniversary (going on 3rd pretty soon). I can’t believe it’s been so long, as everything still appears fresh in my mind. It seems like only yesterday we went out for our first date.

Then I was introduced to Toastmasters by some friends. Before long, I signed up to be a member and have since spoken 7 times, not including impromptu speeches (some of which were terrible!). Participated in a contest once. Made a complete fool out of myself on stage. I wish I didn’t remember this. I vowed to go on a hiatus and concentrate instead on my university projects. Things are looking much better now though, and I hope to finish my 10th speech by February next year.

My three-week semester break was a memorable one. The Spirit of KL competition saw hundreds of teams made up of mostly foundation, first and second year students. We were among the older ones there (final year, at that!). Made many new friends and had lots of fun. And the fact that we took home the grand prize of RM10K plus handphones and vouchers simply made it all the sweeter.
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I sometimes do alot of image processing and one of the problems I encountered was changing multiple filenames quickly. It’s fine if you have 5, 10 or even 20 files but what about more than a thousand?

Sure, we could leave the filenames alone but sometimes there are photos that turn out bad and you’d just want to remove them. When that happens, the filenames inside that folder are no longer in a ‘perfect’ numbering order.

The usual method of using “F2″ in Windows XP is not feasible either, because it introduces spaces and brackets (picture.jpg, picture (1).jpg, picture (2).jpg) which are not internet-friendly. Spaces will be converted to “%20″ and the ( ) brackets will be converted to “%28″ and “%29″ respectively. This means that ‘picture (1).jpg‘ will become ‘picture%20%281%29.jpg‘, which is very messy if you asked me.

I want to have my filenames appear like ‘pic01.jpg‘, ‘pic02.jpg‘, etc. This utility helps you to do exactly just that. You can remove and/or add characters to your filenames as you like. In this example, I have removed the first two characters (letters “I” and “M”), and added a prefix ‘pizza’. You can also replace a string - it’ll produce the same result. For example, replacing the string ‘IMGP’ with ‘pizza’ will result in ‘pizza6236.JPG‘, ‘pizza6237.JPG‘, etc. Next, comes the most important part - numbering.

In this example, I chose put the numbers behind so I selected ‘Suffix’. If you’d like the sequence to increase by more than 1, just change the ‘Incr.’ (increment) value. Usually, that won’t be necessary for most use. If you have more than 9 files, you’d probably want to add some ‘padding’.

A padding of ‘3′ should be used if you have more than 99 files. ‘Padding’ simply inserts zeros in front of your digits for proper sorting. In this example, I’ve used only a fraction of the features included in the program. It’s capable of doing much more, actually (the interface is laden with buttons!).

Once all the settings have been done, simply click ‘Rename’ and your filenames will be renamed accordingly - within a blink of an eye. I renamed more than 1000 files and it took less than 2 seconds. Version 2.4.1.0 (latest, released last month) can be downloaded for free at the BRU downloads page (~650Kb).

I hate it when some people really think that they are above the law (or are the law, for that matter).

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[Edit: WTH there was a typo in the title and I didn’t realize it. I’ve corrected it, permalink updated] Remember the SJ10K run? Today (almost 2 months after the event) I received a huge envelope from The Star. When it reached my house the envelope was already folded here and there. I thought the content - whatever it might have been - must have been equally crumpled as well. I opened it and saw my certificate.

I finished in the twoooo-hunnndreddd-andd-*catches breath*-fooorrtyy-seccooooondd place… (Boy, what a mouthful!) Such a big number I wonder why even bothered recording, lol. But it’s interesting to know lah. Yeahh… I took about 3 minutes less than an hour to complete the 10km race. Even so, I ran until ‘red-lining’ my ‘engine’ already. Really respect those fit, big-timer uncles who ran like as if it was their routine morning jog. Gee…

We exchanged gifts in the office last week. And I actually took home something about 10 (that’s t-e-n) times bigger than what I had brought there. We’ll get to that later. About a coupla hours ago, I was at a special Christmas-themed Toastmasters meeting and yes - you’ve guessed it - we exchanged gifts too. [Note: There are about 15 photos. But given the current internet speed, I’ve made this post ‘narrowband-friendly‘ (pun intended)].

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Seriously. It’s a day when everybody’s broadband was screwed by the earthquake in Taiwan. We thought that there was some problem with our router, so we restarted it. Several times. At least 5 clients had called to complain about a service outage, and that their webmail was not working. The same thing happened to us. Our tech support guy had been busy the moment he stepped into office. After some troubleshooting, we figured that it might not have been our problem after all. So we called Tmnet.

They said that there was a tsunami and that some international links were damaged off Taiwan. We went like “Oh..”. I did hear about an earthquake but I didn’t think it disrupted internet connections. Strangely enough, some news sources only mentioned ‘earthquake’, but no tsunami. Some other sources said that a 3-foot high tsunami had hit the Philippines. Whatever the case, we internet users suffer. US-based sites were hardly accessible. Google, though, seemed almost unaffected.

Still, most of Google’s search results were inaccessible. As for Google News, exerpts from each result have been very helpful. I got most of my updates from there. Anyway I dread to think how long more this ordeal is going to last. Crawling on the net is so frustrating.

Ok. For some reason the import-export business does not like me. Or my blog. Whatever. I’m just gonna skip that part and start afresh. More on that later. Meanwhile please accept my apologies for having removed previous comments. (Aww it’s not like I had posted dozens of entries). There were 4 comments left on the latest (now irrelevent, hence removed) entry - last I checked. Then as I was working on my site, I put up a spartan home-made “404 - Page not found” page. I wonder how many of you caught a glimpse of that.

Right now I’m having this phobia of installing plugins. Yes, believe me. Plugins are not at all fun when they screw things up. Or maybe it’s just me who needs all that tech knowledge. You see, yours truly isn’t all that techified, actually. Bugger now I miss blogging on a free hosting. At least I didn’t need to care much whatever happened behind-the-scenes. I heard about wordpress being idiot-proof and powerful and all that. Well true enough, when I was on wordpress.com (the free wordpress hosting everybody loves), it exhibited every ounce of those qualities.

Then came the itch. A paid hosting. Or ‘upping a notch’, as some would call it. After much deliberation, I did some survey and began booking my favorite domain. I’d have used *.com if it hadn’t been taken. *.net too. And I also began thinking about the things I would do with my site. No I shan’t disclose any details about that. Meanwhile it’s just a blog - something I’ve been doing since October 2004. After a good two years of blogging, I’ve finally come to the land where all bloggers would love to come - if it weren’t for the fee that’s tagged with it. I paid *coughs coughs* for a 2-year hosting - Enough to set up an online business and take on Google.

Right. I’m just kidding. I can’t do that anyway. At least not until I figure out how to properly import posts from a wordpress blog, to another wordpress blog, damn it. (Strange enough the guys at wordpress.org didn’t see this coming). The Technosailor plugin worked like a charm. But somehow the presence of my older (imported) posts was screwing up my comment system. Ok enough about me and my wordpress. I feel so freakin’ n00b-ish talking about these things.

And oh, if you’re wondering, my old, beloved wordpress blog is here. At least there is still a reason for me to go back again. I mean my old entries are there, in case I wanna reminisce, you know ;). You could always drop by too, *if* you’d like. Here’s a toast to my new site. *Yaaam-seng..*. And one more for the first post on narrowband.org. Ever. Yeah.