June 2008 Archives

I haven't been writing as I've been playing an online game called Second Life from Linden Studios. It's an online version of what seems almost similar to Electronic Art's "The Sims"... with a few exceptions.

The most obvious reason why would you want to play this game, is the fact that it has the potential to allow you to earn real money. The money you earn in-game can be converted into real US Dollars. As up to date on the Linden currency market, the ratio of game currency to real US Dollar is on a ratio of 267:1. Thinking back, the amount to earn is almost like the golden era of Malaysia's currency exchange level... back in the days where it used to be 2.7.

Yesterday, the community organizers in Kampung Kolopis organized a Tadau Kaamatan (Harvest Festival) to which the opening ceremony was attended by Yang Berhormat Tan Sri Bernard Dompok. The event lasted approximately two days in total.
Although the state (official) Tadau Kaamatan was on May (30th-31st), local festivals held by smaller villages can be organized day, even weeks after the official date.

If you have one of these Sony Ericsson K8xx Series phones (I've successfully tried K800/K810/K850) and should the focus LED light seems to bother you when taking a picture or you just don't like having the LED to fire up before taking a snapshot, there is a trick to simply take a snapshot (with flash) - without having to use the focus LED.

I was doing some crawling on CNN's Technology site, having a good read on some articles before I call it a night... and I got to watching this video article about Twitter by Jessi Hempel in the CNN's Fortune section.

The bittorrent client, Azureus Vuze (previously known as simply: Azureus) is a popular freeware bittorrent client used by many bittorent users worldwide.

Vuze is a technology developed to allow users to share, view and publish DVD/HD quality content through the use of bittorent technology. However, the Vuze user interface (UI) can become quite a resource consuming hog for your PC. This article will talk about changing the user interface back to the classic 2.x version.

After 6 weeks of suffering system crashes, hangs, permanent graphic glitches, anything and everything about this PC getting on my nerves - the unwanted stress finally got to me... and after a long period of procrastination, I eventually did something about it.

Recently, the government lifted subsidies over gasoline. They did it abruptly and the hike happens to be the highest recorded in Malaysian history. Despite the public's dissatisfaction over how the government dealt with the global price hikes, one thing is still for certain... we still need to find ways how to efficiently use and conserve gasoline.

Petrol price hikes in Malaysia has been implemented today (5th June); within days of the government announcing the increase of prices in gasoline and diesel that was supposed to be implemented in August!

Rumors of the price hike had started after noontime, and was officially announced through television and radio throughout the nation sometime past lunch. The hike results to an approximate of 41% increase, resulting in petrol officially priced at 2.70/litre (increase of 0.78 compared to yesterday's 1.90) and diesel, 2.50/litre (increase of 1.00 and was previously 1.50)... the price is believed to rise again from 3.0-4.0 reaching August this year...

Monday 2nd June 2008, Adobe announces the release of Adobe Acrobat 9.

The major highlights of this particular version is that Acrobat will have integration of a wide variation of online content such as Adobe Flash, video, audio and 3D objects into one compressed PDF file. This feature is mostly beneficial to authors of e-books in distributing their online books with digital multimedia content... a much more organized method for authors to display multimedia content in their PDF documents for readers (in other words, everything is in one file) - without the fuss of having the reader lose focus from the document to search the content elsewhere.

The software also features live collaboration in PDF documents through Adobe.com to establish communication to all readers using the free Adobe Reader software... I find this feature would prove most useful in remote learning establishments like remote learning university programs where the author/lecturer can ensure all readers are on the same page in discussion during a live conference thats taking place.

Full press release news of their flagship product can be found here.

Main link to the Adobe Acrobat family site, here.