Knowing that I have non-utilized 1TB hard disk makes me an uneasy. I better use that for something. Last time, I did mentioned that I’m thinking of getting NAS. Well, I do get one today. And I bought another the same Seagate 1TB harddisk. So here are my new D-Link DNS-323 NAS and 2 Seagate 1TB hard disks.

Here are the contents of the box of D-Link DNS-323 NAS – The enclosure itself, power cables, network cable, documentations and CD-ROM.

Looking at the unit, you will see this big and bright instructions on how to open the front panel.

Well, lets remove the label, and this is how the front panel looks like. Plain simple, with just one on/off button .

And this is the back panel. Power slot, gigabit LAN slot and USB slot. Well, the USB port is not for you to connect your external hard disk, but rather your USB printer as it can also act as printer server. But didn’t I mentions that DNS-323 is running on Linux? There’s a forum here on how to load USB driver into the kernel that enables external disks to be able to be mounted to this USB port.

As stated earlier, it’s quite easy to remove the front panel. No screw driver needed. Upon opening the front panel, you will see 2 hard disk slots.

Here are my 2 1TB hard disks, ready to be slot in.

And again, no screw needed to install the hard disks. I just need to push the hard disk in it clicks,

and walla, both of the hard disks in.

Lets connect it to the router, and lets power it up. My D-Link router has finally died after serving me for 3 years. Temporarily using the Aztech router. Was thinking of investing on a gigabit router in the nearest future.

This is my first time setting up RAID array ever. So I have a little learning curve at the beginning, but everything went really smooth. The hardest part of this exercise is deciding which hard disk configuration to use. The first options is to use RAID 0 configuration, where you’ll see the performance of the drive, and the coolest thing is, you’ll get 2TB of hard disk space.

The other option is to use RAID 1. With this configuration, you’ll only get 1TB of hard disk space, but there’s an added guarantee to the data lose as the data are mirrored on both of the hard disk. In case one of the hard disk fails, you just need to replace the failed hard disk, and the data will be synchronized again across the 2 hard disks.

So which one I choose? It’s so tempted use RAID 0 configuration. And there’s a lot of discussion saying that RAID 1 is not really necessary for home use. But in the course of my life, I’ve experience several daunting moments already with data lost due to crashed hard disk. So I settle down to RAID 1 configuration.

• 6 Comments

Since I first join High Definition World, the quest of getting myself equipped with HD peripherals has begun. I’m all set with playing Blu-ray media, and I’m all set with playing downloadable HD media too.

The only area that I haven’t moved to HD is my gaming area. So behold, the third installment of the entry about me getting high definition, and behold, my new Xbox 360.

But why Xbox 360 and not PS3 Slim? Well, if you live in Malaysia, you know why ;) Anyhow, here is my new Xbox 360 out of the box with all other thing inside the box.

I like white colored gadgets and black colored gadgets equally. White colored gadget has its own distinct appearance too.

Going HD, of course it has the HDMI port on the back.

Hhmm.. What a sexy thing to look at. The Xbox 360 unit with the wireless controller.

The only drawback of getting wireless is, you need to power the thing with battery. And with the things that you will use for hours, the battery will drain just too fast. So I’m investing a little in buying rechargeable battery for the wireless controller.

So there you go, my HD experience is complete for now, and will last until I started craving for PS3 Slim, which I think will be soon (it almost bonus time!)

• 10 Comments

When designing My FarmVille Helper App, I want to make it as generic as possible, where the user can customize every aspect of how the automation should be executed. The easier way to do is to allow user to enter the pattern of how the mouse movement should be, depending on how the farm is laid out. So this blog entry with explain on how this pattern system works.

When working on the blocks of land in FarmVille, the direction of how to traverse the mouse always either to the right or to the left. To traverse to left, use the command l, and to traverse to the right, use the command r. And to apply the action to the block, use the command x.

Let’s take above for example. Here, we are traversing to the right, and there are 4 blocks of land. The command for this will be

rxxxx

Please note that the direction command only needs to be called once. The application will remember the last direction that we set.

In the above example, we are traversing to left, and there are 4 blocks of land. The command for this will be

lxxxx

We can also traversing vertically, either upwards (use the command u) or down (use the command d). The vertical commands only will be executed once, and the application won’t remember like what we have for r and l earlier. Confused? Let’s see an example.

Let say I want to traverse my lands like below.

If I give a command of rxxxxdxxxx, what this will do is the mouse will traverse 4 blocks to the right (i.e. rxxxx) then go down by 1 block (i.e. d). What about the last xxxx? Like I said earlier, d and u commands are executed only once, so xxxx after d will not traverse 4 blocks down, but instead it will still traverse 4 blocks to the right. Remember, the application will remember your last used horizontal command (i.e. r or l). So, the correct commands for the above is

rxxxxd
lxxxx

The next thing that I want to explain is how to handle gaps between block on My FarmVille Helper App. But before that, let see how gaps look like in FarmVille.

The smallest gap that you can make between 2 blocks of land is 1/4 of the size of 1 land block. Meaning, for 1 block of land, there will be 4 gaps in between. Gaps can be entered by specifying the direction of the gap that you want to have (i.e. r, l, u or d) followed by the denominator of how many gaps you want. l1 mean 1 gap to the left, r3 means 3 gaps to the right, d5 mean 5 gaps to the bottom etc. Let’s look at an example.

The command for the above traversal will be

rxxr1xxd
lxxl1xx

Pay a close attention to the command that I underline below for the 1 gap to the right at first row, and 1 gap to the left at the second row.

What about vertical gap? Let’s look at the following example.

The command for the above traversal is

rxxxxd1
lxxxx

Pay a close attention to the command that I underline below that denotes having gap of 1 downwards.

Let’s look at another example. The second block of the second row is not really a land block, but it’s a decoration. So, there will be gap of 1 land block here. As stated previously, 4 gaps will be equal to 1 land block.

So the command for the above traversal is

rxr5x

Why r5? There’s another gap after the monster decoration, thus making total number of gaps is 5.

Let’s look at more complex example. Can you work out how the commands for this will look like? Try first, then check with my answer below just to make sure that you get the concept of this ;)

The command for the above traversal will be

rxxxxr1xd1
lxl5xxxd
rxxxxr1xd
lxl1xl8xd
rxr8xr1x

Easy stuffs huh!

When you enter those command in the application, you will see the mouse movement, and it does nothing. This is good when setting up for the first time so that you can make sure that the mouse pointers are traversing correctly through all of your land blocks. And, when you are ready for some action, you can specify what you want to do. Below are the available commands that you can use

move (default)
plow
seed
harvest

Usually, when you are doing these actions manually for real, there’s a delay between your mouse clicks. So can also specify how long that the program have to wait (in milliseconds) between mouse clicks. The command to use is

p200

which denotes that you want to pause for 200 milliseconds between mouse clicks. p200 is usually enough, but if you have a lot of things on your farm, or computer is slow, you might need to try and error the value that works best with you. You will understand this better towards the end of this blog entry.

Now for the ultimate test. Below is how my farm looks like at the moment (hehe) and I have already put an arrow on how the traversal should be done (click on the image to see bigger version). Try to work out on how the commands will look like, and compare the one that you work out with my answer below.

The command for the above traversal will be

p200
seed
rxxxxr1xxxxr1xxxxr1xxd
lxxl1xxxxl1xxxxl1xxxxd
rxxxxr1xxxxr1xxxxr1xxd
lxxl1xxxxl1xxxxl1xxxxd1

rxr1xxxxr1xxxxr1xxxxr1xxxxr1xxxxd
lxxxxl1xxxxl1xxxxl1xxxxl1xxxxl1x

Finally, let’s see this in action. Click the play button below to play the movie. The loading speed can be slow at times. If it slow, just pause the video after you click the play button, and let it download the rest of the movie first before continue playing it again.

So, when the software will be available to public? To be honest, I don’t know. There are still a few more tweaks that I’d like to do. It will be priced at USD99.99 per download. Just kidding. It will be free. So stay tuned ;)

• 2 Comments

After revealed about a week and half ago, now I have a working prototype for My FarmVille Helper App already.

GUI is still shabby, but the functionality behind it is 95% completed, where the remaining 5% is for the little minor tweaks that I’d like to do. There are 4 main components to My FarmVille Helper Help. Click below to find out more.

• Crops automation
• Animals automation (blog entry is coming soon)
• Trees automation (blog entry is coming soon)
• Mouse automation (blog entry is coming soon)

• 4 Comments

When it only feels like yesterday that I first laid my hand on Gmail, there’s the next thing from Google which I believe will change how people look at communication and collaboration – Google Wave.

I get to know about Google Wave sometimes end of May 2009, which I straightly request an invitation. Google Wave was first made available to public on 30th of September. After patiently waiting for so long, finally I received invitation to preview Google Wave. Yippe!

Google Wave supported in Google Chrome, Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5 web browser. If you are using Internet Explorer, you need to install Google Chrome Frame first.

Well, this is my very first wave that I write in Google Wave. There’s just too much things to write about Google Wave features here. Just watch this video to get the idea about what Google Wave is.

The next thing that came to my mind is, will Google Wave works on iPhone? Well, not yet. But wait. There’s a link down there that asks me to go ahead if I want to continue accessing Google Wave at my own peril.

Surprisingly, Google Wave does load up on iPhone. Let’s look at the first wave that I wrote earlier.

Nice. It loads up too. But one thing that I noticed, it takes quite long to load, and my iPhone feels like freezing at a time. This is I guess when the faster processor of iPhone 3GS is required. At this very early stage, the Map Gadgets Extension is loadable on iPhone.

Lets view the welcome note wave that I got. Bummer! The YouTube video extensions is not loadable here.

“Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with”. I have 8 invitations that I can give out, which 2 have been reserved already. So, I have 6 invitations left to be given out now. If you are interested, just buzz me at the comment section. First come first basis.

Please remember to fill in your email when leaving the comment so that I can send you the invitation. No worries. The email that you left in the email field is not viewable by others.

Nov 16 2009, 4:38pm:
Sorry folks. All invitations were given out already.

• 11 Comments