Alvin Lai

On my way back home, I've stumbled on the podcast of Steve Job's commencement address at Stanford university while scanning through for a song.

For the 15 minutes waiting for the bus, I went through his speech again and I thought it would be useful for me to jot down the salient points of his inspiring speech.

Here's it. I hope to make a difference like what Steve has done with his life and I believe you can if you'd like to, too.

1. Connecting the dots

   • Follow curiosity and intuition
   • Find out what's facinating, beautiful and subtle
     • Might not have any direct practical application
   • Impossible to connect the dots forward
     • Believe that God has a way for you
     • Trust in something, believing that the dots will connect down
       • the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart
         • even if it leads you off the well worn path
           • that will make all the difference

2. Love and Loss

   • Still love what I do. Rejected but still in love. Start over.
   • Getting fired - heaviness of being successful replaced by
     • lightness of being a beginner again
       • Less sure about everything
     • Freed and enabled one of the creative periods of his life
   • Awful tasting medicine but the patient needed it
   • Sometimes life hits you in the face with a brick, don't lose faith
   • Only thing that kept him going was that he loved what he did
   • You got to find what you love
   • True for work and lovers
     • Work gonna fill up large part of life
       • Only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe what is great work
       • Only way to do great work is to love what you do
     • Keep looking and don't settle
     • As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it
     • As with any great relationship, it gets better and better as the years go on

3. Death

   • "If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you'll most certainly be right"
   • If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?
   • And if it's no for too many days in a row, I need to change something
   • Remember that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool that I've encountered to
     • help me make the big choices in life
   • Almost everything - all external expectations. pride, fear of embarrassment or failure
     • All fall away in the face of death
     • Leaving what's truly important
   • Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking
     • you have something to lose
   • You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart
   • No one want to die
   • Death is the destination we all share
   • Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life
   • Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking
     • Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice
   • Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition
     • They somehow already know what you truly want to become
       • Every thing else is secondary

Early morning hitchhiking road, the kind you would find yourself hitchhiking on - if you're so adventurous

Stay young, stay foolish.

Recently, Lihao has a few friends enquiring about switching to a Mac, who ask what's so great about switching to another Operationg System, other from familiar WindowsXP.

Mike has a list here with the top 10 reasons after his initial switch FOUR years ago (even longer than yours truly!).

Finally its here!

Remember playing quake or counterstrike and having to pull out the cool console/terminal ingame to type in some commands to change a game level or something?

Something like this.

Now there's Visor that brings that to the Mac desktop! Check out my screenshot!

Sweet!

You can bind a shortcut key to call it up with a nice transition effect with customizable delay.

The nice thing is Visor automatically hides when u click on another application, so it doesn't get in your way.

And of course it retains the session/remembers what you typed even after it hides so you can resume work after recalling it.

Get rocking with Visor here!

Was thinking of getting a cat, but after this, I realise it can get a little heart breaking..

What's with Safari these days? It's been pissing me off with the ever frequent beachball (Mac OSX's equivalent of the busy hour glass).

The last straw came when I had to forcefully terminate whilst working on some AJAX scripts.

I turned to Camino, a mac specific browser based on the same Gecko rendering engine that made Firefox famous for its accuracy in rendering webpages.

Specially created for the Mac, Camino is tightly integrated using native Cocoa.

The only thing that you might miss from Safari is probably Sogudi, a plugin that allows you to do instant wikipedia searches like "wikip manhattan project" or google searches with "g steve yang".

A quick google search provided the answer.

Here's it:

Just open Show All Bookmarks, add a new Bookmark, for instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

and assign a keyword. Like "wp". Then, type wp Camino in the location bar, et voila!

Enjoy!

Whenever I recommend the Mac or OSX as a replacement for Windows for their workstations, friends would undoubtedly agree that it is way better in many aspects, right up till they come to the point of gaming.

While I agree that it doesn't support the full plethora of game titles Windows does, it certainly sports the more popular titles like Warcraft fav

With the introduction of the Apple Macbook, the replacement for the iBook (don't confuse this with the Macbook Pro, the Powerbook replacement), you would probably have heard that it is one of the fastest laptops you can get right now for $1.7k (education price).

Very much like its elder brother the Macbook Pro, it just falls short of graphics with an Intel integrated graphics chip which borrows heavily from the main system RAM, inevitably hindering gaming performance in graphic intensive games.

But there seems to be a glimmer of hope for you folks out here content with playing slightly older games like Warcraft and Quake 3 - just by increasing RAM.

Check out this Macworld article MacBook gaming: A graphics concer, and maybe A maximum look at a mini Mac, part two while you're at it too.

Oh yea! It feels good to work in the middle of 2 monitors again!

No more neck cocking :D

Apparently not :/

Again, the only way to eject the DVD was by accessing openfirmware, holding CMD+Alt+O+F at start.

What's a Cocoa Application? You might ask.

To put it simply, its a Mac Application!

Followed Apple's Introduction to Cocoa Application Tutorial Using Objective-C in getting started.

In the introduction chapters, it says that Cocoa programming is object oriented and makes use of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, which is nothing new to me since the wonderful Ruby on Rails is also based on MVC.

Then off I went in creating a new Currency Converter cocoa application project in XCode2.2..

Once that was done, it was down to creating the GUI interface with Interface Builder.

Interface Builder is wonderful I tell you.

Not only can you drag and drop window components like checkboxes and textfields ala Delphi style!

it also has very very sweet alignment guides which awesomely snaps in place nicely.

Assigning Labels to have it snap in line with the TextFields is also just as sweet.

And talk about micro positioning.

Enabling TextField focus changing via tabbing is also just as easy via a control dragging and clicking some checkboxes in the Inspector. You have to try it out on your own!

Next up was to create the CurrencyController controller duh and the Currency model.

When it was time to specify how the specific Models (A Currency class which specifies data), Views (The GUI Components like TextFields) and Controllers (The CurrecyController class which is the business logic) communicate with something something new to me called Outlets, it became a little fuzzy, but you can easily accept it as some sort of message passing mechanism like MPI in Parallel Programming.

Then coding the actual controller and model classes..

After that was done... Build time!

As excitement got the better of me, I made some mistakes, but thankfully XCode was smart enough to pinpoint the exact lines with errornous code.. Great!

Finally done!!

And a raw sense of achievement ensued.

For all you mac fans out there itching to get a Macbook Pro but have the noise and whine problem stop you - it seems that Apple has things fixed with the latest SMC Firmware update.

Got my hand to installing Bootcamp!

Here's a short summary of my (excitement packed and horror filled) experience with installing Windows XP (Yes Microsoft Windows!):

Whilst downloading the bootcamp installer, and updating the mac mini via Software Update to the latest version, I've searched and found a firmware update for the Mac Mini..