FarmVille Helper Beta is nearing the time where it will be released to public. But until then, please have a look at the following sneak preview first, if you ever interested in it ;)

The login screen. The overall look shares the same theme as TagMe! Control Panel. Well, why reinvented the wheel if you have the working one already lying around to be used.

Upon logging in, this will be the home screen that you will see,

where you can delete your account information as you wish. The same as TagMe!, timezone field is the most important one as all the planting sessions time will revolve around this.

You can add the planting session by selected the seed that you use, as well as the date and the time that you finished with the planting sessions.

All of you planting sessions can be viewed and managed from this screen. Guessing when your crops will be fully grown is the thing of the past. Now you can precisely know when to login to your FarmVille Farm to harvest your crops.

FarmVille Helper has already been released to public

Register one here

• 2 Comments

Below is the current configuration if the HDDs on my PC. Having only 6 SATA ports on the motherboard, this is basically the max HDDs that I can have (the other 2 ports used by DVD-ROM and DVD-Writer). The WDC 320GB is used as system drive, and the other 3 are for storing various files that I have.

But just before I went back for Hari Raya leave last time, my system HDD is having problem. I works OK for an hour, then suddenly the HDD stops spinning, and after rebooting the PC, the Windows installation is corrupted. Then I reformat the HDD, reinstall Windows, but same thing happened.

Oh dear. It seems that the hard disk is unusable anymore. So I decided to make the Seagate 320GB as the system drive (after discarding Western Digital 320GB). But I also need a replacement, so it means it’s another trip to Low Yatt, and I’m getting a new 1TB Seagate SATA2 hard disk. Well, this is my first hard disk with the Tera size ;)

Then I put the hard disk at the removable HDD enclosure,

and slot it in to the HDD bay. I love my chassis for this feature ;)

Then it’s another round of Windows installing again. But the hair pulling situation that arise after that is, the same thing still happened. It’s not the hard disk problem then. After several round of diagnosis, the power cable converter is the culprit. Turn out that the molex pin is bit loose, and it doesn’t supply power to the hard disk. Darn!

I put back the original Western Digital 320GB hard disk, then I pack up my PC again. Wow. It looks really dusty in the photo. Well, the mesh design of the chassis really acts as cat’s fur filter. LOL.

Then what to do with the 1TB Seagate hard disk one? Like a bright bulb hovering my head, I just have another idea. With my portable hard disk crashing event that happened recently (which I lost all of my office email), I really need to have a peace of mind when storing backup of my files. Straight away I’m thinking of getting this D-Link DNS-232 NAS (Network Attached Storage) device (review is here).

I will use the RAID 1 hard disk configuration for data mirroring. But this not going to happened so soon. I guess I have to wait for the bonus time, which is around 3 months away.

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The day that I’ve been looking forward for since Monday, the day that I will “balik kampung” for the coming Hari Raya. As what I told Marts last time, the “duit raya” spread photo is a must. Hehe..

My sister’s daughter happened to be at my mum’s house when I arrived. And this is my sister’s youngest daughter. I’ve been noticing that she quite like new technology too. And who else to run after than this uncle of her who like gadgets. At this moment, she keeps asking a lot of questions about my Canon 40D DSLR.

Anyway, my sister’s daugthers are getting early duit raya this year as they will be celebrating it at Johor (my sister’s husband hometown) and Singapore, and only back to Kelantan the week after.

After berbuka, my nieces just ask me to join them playing fireworks. The photo of them in their glory just before the event started. Hehe. I just can’t believed that my sister’s eldest daughter will be taking SPM already this year.

Night photography is quite challenging without tripod, and I happened to forget to bring it back this time.

Quite a fun activity on my first day balik kampung, except for the 3 phone calls that I received from office about the crisis of one of the project. Hehe

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I’m kinda miss my old blog template at blogger.com. One of the signature that I have for that blog was a seasonal flash header, and the Hari Raya one was the one that I like most. So I have put that header up again at my old blog, and you may view below, if you would like to know what’s I’m talking about ;)

http://mohdimran.blogspot.com/

And just to spread the joy of this festive season to this blog as well, below is the flash that I use as the header last time.



Autoplay is disabled. Right click on the movie, and choose Play

I’m going to make this post sticky, until the day of raya itself. I’ll be going back to my hometown in 4 days time. Just can’t wait!

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After almost 1 week I’ve been playing with FarmVille, I quickly realize that things can get really messy especially remembering when to harvest. Since each crops has different lifetime before it can be harvested, it ended up us having to manage several mini sessions of plowing and seeding, and having to keep checking so that the fully grown crops are not wilted, especially those that are having short lifetime.

In the game, when you hover the mouse on the crop, you will see the percentage of the grow progress displayed. But it doesn’t tell you on how long it will take before the crop is fully grown.

The formula to calculate the percentage of the Grow Progress can be derived as follows.

And to work out the time when the crop will be fully grown (i.e. End Time), the following formula can be used.

But often, we lost track of when that particular crop was first being planted (i.e. Start Time). Since we know the progress, lets rearrange the Grow Progress formula like so.

Now, lets substitute the Start Time in End Time formula with this, and I will have the following.

With this, now I can calculate the estimated time when my crop will be fully grown by time cost that it required for the crop to fully grown, the progress of grow and the current time when I’m looking at the progress.

Even though it’s workable, but this kind of chores easily tire me up. The problem with me is, when I’m addicted to something, I started to have an obsession with it if things are not efficient. It would be great if someone out there created a program that allows us to manage this. After looking for a while, I didn’t come across anything like it. So why not created one myself? Hhmm.. Sound like a good idea :D

So introducing, My FarmVille Helper. This is just a simple web application that I created using PHP and host it on my hosting account. The way that it works is, every time I start doing a new planting in FarmVille, I will record that session of what seed that I plant, and the date and time that I start the planting.

And I can track all of my planting sessions at this summary page. It will show the info of my crop plantations

• What kind of seed
• Date and time that I start planting
• Time cost for the crop to fully grown
• The date and time when the crop will be fully grown
• The remaining time before the crop will be fully grown
• The percentage progress (this will be the same as what shown in FarmVille)
• The remaining time before the crop wilts (after it fully grown)

The UI is still shabby at the moment, but it does what it suppose to do. That’s what I call getting organized ;)

FarmVille Helper has already been released to public

Register one here

• 21 Comments

I’m not really a big fan of Facebook’s applications. Usually, when I receive requests or invitations from other to try any app, I just ignore it. Well, having so many apps installed at my page gives me headache. I like my facebook to be clean, with only the essential default apps running.

The one app that I see most often is FarmVille. I don’t give it any attention until only recently, where most of my friends are keep talking about it. So I guess, why not try this, and see what the buzz is all about. If I don’t like it, I can remove anytime.

So after sahur today, I started my farm. There’s a tutorial when you first start your farm with 2 of the blocks are ready to be harvested. Learning curve of this game is not that steep. I get the hang of it just after 15mins playing around with it. Then things get excited as my level expanded, and more and more seeds available to be planted. I get addicted with this in no time. I usually take a nap after sahur, but not today, and I even almost miss my Subuh prayer. LOL.

The main idea for this is to get profits from the plantation that you do. Therefore, you need to choose which crops that will give you most profits. At the level where I’m at, the following seeds are available to be purchased.

Quickly looking at the list, Artichokes seems to be the most profitable one, and Strawberries should be avoided as it gives you less profits, but is it? The cost of the seeds and also the time cost (how long before it can be harvested) is part of the equation too. Putting this simply, below would be the formula to use to work out the profits that you get per day.

Using the formula, the daily profits for Artichokes will be

and the daily profits for Strawberries will be

It’s interesting to see that Strawberries will give you more profits. Even though we can only sell Strawberries for 35 coins, but the cost to get seeds is cheaper, and also it can be harvested in 4 hours time. Meaning in a day, you can plant and harvest strawberries for 6 times.

Putting all of these together, I have produce the profits table below for the different kind of seeds. Since I’m at level 6 now, I only have information up to Artichokes only. Perhaps you can help me filling up the empty cells in in the table. Just simply tell me how long it will take for the seed to fully grown, as well as for how much coins that it will sell for. Looks like for now that I would need to plant lots and lots of Pumpkins to maximize my revenues.

Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	1	15	10	4	35	60
	1	15	25	46	88	25.04
	1	15	35	69	115	22.61
	1	15	15	23	63	34.43
	4	15	40	46	121	34.43
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	5	15	30	8	68	69
	6	15	70	92	204	31.04
	7	15	45	12	96	72
	8	15	20	2	46	132
	8	15	60	46	135	31.3
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	9	15	75	69	207	40.7
	10	15	55	10	98	67.2
	11	15	75	46	198	56.35
	12	15	70	23	162	80.35
	14	15	50	6	85	80
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	15	15	95	46	242	68.87
	15	15	75	23	159	72
	16	15	65	16	160	120
	17	15	50	4	91	156
	18	15	130	92	348	52.96
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	19	15	85	23	270	177.39
	20	15	100	8	173	174
	20	15	120	46	254	62.09
	21	15	135	69	345	67.83
	22	15	110	12	200	150
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	23	15	120	16	243	162
	24	15	150	69	380	74.78
	25	15	135	23	315	172.17
	26	15	80	6	136	164
	27	15	140	46	388	121.57
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	28	15	105	10	191	170.4
	29	15	75	4	117	162
	30	15	180	69	449	88.35
	30	15	160	46	384	109.04
	31	15	165	8	238	174
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	32	15	190	23	381	183.65
	33	15	205	92	528	80.35
	34	15	170	12	268	166
	35	15	200	46	473	134.61
	35	15	195	23	369	165.91
Seeds	Needed Level	Plow Cost	Seeds Price	Time cost (in hours)	Selling Price	Profit per day
	36	15	175	10	258	163.2
	37	15	220	16	357	183

1 day is counted as 23 hours in FarmVille

• 7 Comments

Maxis has a new packages line up for its Mobile Internet.

From the list of packages above, there’s no more RM99 unlimited use mobile internet. The same with the data package that comes with iPhone, when you use more that the allowed quota, the additional usages will be charged RM0.0005/KB. So let say you reached the monthly quota, and you download an MP3 of the size 5MB.

5MB = 5000KB
5000 x RM0.0005 = RM2.50

That’s expensive. And the very famous question that I keep receiving from others is, how to check how much bandwidth that I have used. The answer is very simple. You can’t check. Maxis doesn’t have that facility. Maxis is doing daylight robbery by charging the excess usage by not providing any utility for the customers to check their bandwidth consumptions.

• 8 Comments