The first thing that I did when I needed to access the Internet through one of the PCs in the PC Pool of RWTH Aachen is to transform the German keyboard to an English keyboard. This is usually the first thing that people do when they are faced with foreign keyboards that their fingers are not accustomed to. The operating system used in each of the PCs in the PC Pool is GNU/Linux Debian 4.0.

While developing the logger for GNU/Linux Anywhere USB Controller (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/awusb/), I needed to know the length of the UDP packet to be read so that I could do `malloc()' with the appropriate size. Aproposing for `datagram length' and googling for `how to get the length of a UDP datagram' didn't return any result. But, I found the answer when I tried `man 7 udp'.

While developing the logger for GNU/Linux Anywhere USB Controller (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/awusb/), I created the following function that will store a `FILE *' into a global table for a later retrieval:

static int
save_open_file (FILE *log_file);

I thought I could take the name of the file through `FILE *' or its fd (file descriptor) using a libc (C library) function like `fstat'. But, I was badly mistaken.

Last month my employer asked me to find for a free software compatible x86 laptop with the best bargain. So, based on my previous experience, I offered him Asus EEE PC 1000HE and A*Note. But, those didn't satisfy him since Asus was too slow for development works (e.g., compiling programs) as a result of using Intel Atom, and A*Note's warranty period was too short. So, I said to him that we had to find a laptop equipped with Intel chipset (Intel 3D graphics accelerator is free software compatible) and Atheros wireless card (Intel wireless card is NOT free software compatible). A week ago, my employer called me up to help him check the components of a laptop that he was interested in buying. All was okay, so in the evening he asked me to set up a GNU/Linux Ubuntu 8.04 on the laptop. How surprised I was knowing that the laptop is Acer eMachines because previously I had ever tried the laptop out and it hung when playing an ogg movie titled `Experience ubuntu' in directory Examples of the home directory.

Yesterday at the client site I got a report that one of their Windows XP machines kept restarting all the time. I had known for sometime that the machine was problematic because of heavy viral infections. So, I was reluctant to fix it. At the same time, the important PC that hit an interesting problem as described in http://kerneltrap.org/node/39213 got a blue screen when it was restarted or shutdown. Okay, I would have just let it be like that if the blue screen only had appeared during shutting down. But, after I installed a NIC card for bridging two subnetworks, I got a blue screen everytime I logged in as one of the users.

On Thursday (August 06, 2009), my colleague called me up saying that an important PC at the client site for having external communications got a problem with the Windows XP mechanism to detect whether a particular Windows XP is an authorized or unauthorized copy (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy). Specifically, althought the Windows XP installed on the PC is an authorized copy, the mechanism insisted that it was not. Since I don't deal with a proprietary system, I have no idea on that kind of matter, and so, my colleague called Microsoft up. On the following day, the computer couldn't be logged in because everytime Windows XP started, the following error message appeared just before the login screen was displayed:

Developing a C API that deals with writing to external provided buffers, I was wondering whether or not I should include parameter buffer length when the length of the data to be written to the buffer is fixed and known in advance from the documentation of the API.

At the end of the final semester of my undergraduate study at Swiss German University (http://sgu.ac.id), I looked for a company that was committed in harnessing Free Software (http://gnu.org) to create IT solutions. Just before the graduation ceremony, the faculty of Information Technology held a career day presenting five companies. The first was an international insurance company looking for salesperson, the second was an old local IT solution company specializing in banking system with Java, Cobol and RPG as the primary programming languages, the third was a local Microsoft Gold Certified IT solution company, the fourth was an international company specializing in providing IT solutions for aeronautical industry, and the last one was Infi-nity Solution. It was really a blessing from Father in Heaven to find Infi-nity Solution just before my graduation ceremony since previously I had been looking for such a local company in vain.

About three weeks ago my employer asked me to shrink the swap partition of a GNU/Linux Ubuntu 8.04 system so as to gain several gigabytes for the root filesystem. After resizing, hibernation failed in a way that although the hibernation process was without any error, turning on the machine again didn't resume the hibernated state. After resizing, the swap space still had enough space for hibernation for sure, and the UUID for the swap space in `/etc/fstab' had been adjusted as well. Just last Friday my employer tried again to solve this problem by googling for information. After a while I got a call, and this time my employer and I found the culprit. Having such an employer is so much fun!

Now that I'd got another chance to develop a C application, whenever I crafted a header file, I always wondered whether the header file needed to include another header file such as stdio.h when there was a function prototype in my header file that spelled `FILE *'.

After successfully finding an x86 laptop that is compatible with free software: ASUS EEE PC 1000HE (http://kerneltrap.org/node/17096), I got another order to find an x86 laptop that was bigger (preferably 14.1 inches laptop) and cheaper than ASUS EEE PC 1000HE. So, I went searching for one. After trying some tight-budget laptops that I dismissed because their wireless cards (e.g., Broadcom or newer Ralink cards) or graphics accelerators (e.g., new SiS chipset) were not compatible with free software, I landed on an A*Note 12.1 inches laptop whose vital devices were mostly free software compatible (fingerprint reader and built-in modem are nonvital for me).

Attending an international conference on telecommunication as a speaker, I got a bagpack as a souvenir. Everything was okay but its zippers. They were faulty as one of them shown in `01 - The Faulty Zipper.jpg'. I really should have checked its zippers when I received the bag. Anyway, with some patience I always succeeded in closing the zippers. But, they were really annoying just like when you use proprietary software. You just cannot modify them to make your life easier, and they are demanding more and more control to be taken away from you (e.g., Windows Defender and Genuine Advantage). After six months, a hacker came telling me how I should fix those faulty zippers.

I have black sport shoes with laces that I use daily. One day one of the holes through which the lace makes a loop was torn. So, I had to sew the tear. I bought a black thread used for jeans that should be strong enough and got a tiny needle from my sewing tools so that it could penetrate the shoe easily as well as making many tiny unspotted holes instead of few big ones that would destroy the shoe for sure.

One day my sibling asked me to help him buy a laptop. So, my brain immediately worked to find one that was compatible with free software. I remembered that Ali Gunduz has ever posted in gNewSense-user mailing list that Asus EEE PC 701 and 900 are compatible with free software except for its BIOS (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2008-12/msg00122.html). But, my sibling insisted to get a higher one: Asus EEE PC 1000HE. Ali Gunduz mentioned in the post that higher EEE PC model might not be equipped with a wireless device that was compatible with free software. So, I went to take a look and it turned out that ASUS EEE PC 1000HE is equipped with Atheros wireless card, which is free software compatible. Now let me give a review on this laptop.

Ever since the time I started to fiddle with GNU/Linux Ubuntu 8.04 in October 2008 at http://infi-nity.com, I had been wondering as to how I could reduce the opacity of the windows.