Thong Kuah's blog

If like me, after a long week at work, you find yourself typing in a ubuntu terminal: sudo chown mail /[I’ll explain why later] Then you are in for a whole heap of trouble, because, inexplicably, sudo now does not work, instead, it complains about /var/run/sudo not owned by uid 0 (root), but by uid 8, which I presume to be the user mail. By the way, all contents of folder ‘var’ is now under the dominion of the unholy ‘mail’ user. Worst, you can’t use sudo to magically set our good friend root where it belongs. I racked my brains for ways to make sudo work, from using a different file other than /var/run/sudo, to making sudo run as a different user other than root. None of them worked. I can’t run as root either…. or could I? Then I realised, I can go into Ubuntu Recovery mode and it will give me terminal access as root. chown -R root:root var/And my problem is solved! ps. you want to know why i did that kamikaze command. There was a ‘mail’ folder that was locked, and i was trying to chown it to my user. Bad move!

Well, first day at work today, starting at MSD. Today was mostly spent getting to know everyone and setting up and installing my development environment. OK, one nice pic of Muffin to end this post:

It has been a nice trip over to Melbourne. Yi Wen and I spent six days there, mainly sightseeing and enjoying the free rides on Melbourne’s tourist shuttles and trams ;). A bunch of pictures are now available on my photoblog. Enjoy!

Using CPanel, WHM, shell Access (or plesk), DNS Prerequisites: Shell Access (or ability to edit the httpd.conf)DNS editing accessWildcard DNS abilityPHP!* We use www.domain.tld as an example. Modify to suit. First, make sure that your www.domain.tld works as normal Second, enable wildcard DNS by (various means, depending on your interface). But you should see something like * 14400 A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your NS ip address (should be the same as the one in the www A record) Third, change/add the ServerAlias directive in your httpd.conf file to something like ServerAlias *.domain.tld You should see now that all addresses, *.domain.tld will be redirected internally to www.domain.tld Last, use Php’s $HTTP_HOST command and explode and you’re done!

ONCE upon a time, there was a small Kingdom in the South Seas. It was a peaceful place where many peoples of many different colours lived together. By and large, they were happy. There was plenty to eat in this Kingdom and there were lots to do. Some of the people liked to dance, some liked to sing, some liked to tell stories. A few even did all three. And of course there were many who liked to watch those singing, dancing and telling stories.

Wow, I accidentally hit F7 and Firefox turned into an annoying monster that has its own mind. Yes, press F7 and your up or down keyboard buttons behave differently when you are scrolling! It scrolls line by line, with a cursor (much like Word) instead of scrolling smoothly like a normal web page…. Tip, it’s called ‘Caret Browsing’ ….So blo*** obscure

Well, I have been involved in some new ventures and restarting some old ones. Check it out: www.edoodle.co.nz - an old hobby of mine, which will soon launch a website for artists soon.http://www.elvis.ac.nz/brain?ThongKuahwww.wen.co.nz A new website for my gf’s art gallerylittlearty.blogspot.com Surprise! Gosh, life is busy!

I’ve always hated the way Malaysian bloggers write about this concept of race: So, given that I accidentally have this treasure trove of data, I might as well perform some analysis on it. Methodology: open up pdf file (Acrobat reader: and search (whole word only) Limitations: Ignores context of the word being counted Note: the pdf file refers to the “surprise comments” made on my blog, all about politics, which I will post it up when I find a file server to upload it to. Number of comments: 12 Word - Number of occurrences Neutral words: Race(s) - 15 Words I hate being used: Indian(s) - 8 Chinese - 12 Malay(s) - 65 Subtotal - 85 Words I much prefer: Malaysian - 21 Well, looks like the hated words still win! Mind you, the discussion wasn’t uncivilized at all, at first glance. It seems that we are so ingrained with this mentality. I wonder who else cringes when they hear the hated words being said?

I have any comments on my blog sent to my gmail. This fine morning, I woke up and saw this bunch of comments! Imagine my surprise? Where did all this traffic come from…. Then I realised the comments did not really make sense. They were talking about politics instead of about wises.co.nz. But they were from Malaysia and Australia and NZ. Blogger comment mixup?

Is it the weather or something? I’m not normally so pissed off (pardon the expression), but when did posting something become so difficult all of a sudden? The ol’ Books and More down at Lambton Quay was a good friend of ours, with extended opening hours and nice staff, who helped YOU out. My first step was greeted by this wall that stopped me from entering the Post shop from the streetside. So I had to go to the side alley to enter. Alright, something’s changed….Not just that, the staff seems to have changed as well. So, I wanted to send something to the South Island, which I remembered as costing about $18. But hey, the staff weighs my package and says that it is $25.00?! I do a double-take. “Are you sure? I remember it was 18 dollars." “When was that?" “About two months ago." “Well, I’ve been here two years and I’ve never heard of that,” intoned the staff member. She then proceeds to offer me a choice. Either this ($25) or normal post with no tracking. No resolution of the customer’s concerns. What insolence, I thought. What happended to the customer is always right. But that’s alright. What happended next is makes that pale in comparison - absolutely unforgivable! So, I beat a retreat and went to grab a NZ Post brochure, and aha! I found the price list: “Wait a minute, it says here $15.40. Can I have my parcel sent now, please?" “Err, what is this Economy parcel?" Gosh, they don’t even realise about this Economy price, when the previous Books and More staff knew about it. What followed was a mess of staff not knowing about prices and products that the company has. That price seems to need a sticker and cannot be processed using the computer but they have run out of the Economy stickers! In the end, I had to walk to another branch where they had the stickers. The other branch was way more helpful. I don’t think I am going to visit the Lambton Quay Post Shop anymore, sorry. They are just too stuck-up. Later on, I took the same brochure from another branch, but it had different prices, and it has no Economy category no longer. The prices must have changed and the categories too, our two year old staff couldn’t remember it? Staff should be updated about new prices and products, not rely on what the computer system says. So, now I see how price is important to good marketing. You need to have logical prices and staff needs to be able to communicate that properly, otherwise, customers just get angry about sudden price changes. Staff also needs to be able to suggest alternatives if they do not know and help the customer out, not offer ultimatums.