Volatile Yard 挥洒自如 Write anything I want to write...

My kid likes to press the 'Eject' button of my DVD drive (or, to be precise, my *previous* drive) to open and close the drive's door. Recently he learned from observing how to put VCDs into the drives and watch them on my Ubuntu-powered computer! However, he still did not know how to use it properly, and I suspected that he had accidentally put some CD attached with some dirty sticky things and that spoiled my DVD drive! The drive was still usable, but whenever you wanted to eject the CD inside, the tray did not eject properly, and somehow almost all CDs put inside will be badly scratched when you eject them and rendered them unusable!

Luckily I found the problem early and only 3 CDs became victims. The DVD drive was already 3-year-old if I am not mistaken and suffered from some minor problems. So I decided to spend RM85 to buy a new one. Oh wait! I also need some program to lock the door of the drive to prevent similar tragedy! I tried to google some good Linux software for this but failed to find one. No choice, I finally delved into the Linux kernel's ioctl() for CD/DVD drives and wrote my own program to do the job. I did it and here it is. It's GPLv3-ed so get it if you need.

To lock the computer when it boots up, I add the following line in /etc/rc.local:

/usr/local/bin/cdlock

Of course, this loose safety control is not tight. If my kid discovers that

• he can perform a "zero-day attack" which lasts for about half a minute before the execution of cdlock during boot up, or
• he can simply issue cdunlock to unlock the door, (Update: The Unix's file ownership and permission can be used to protect against this. In Ubuntu, a CD drive's device file (under /dev/) has ownership root:cdrom and 660 permission. A user can use cdlock/cdunlock on a drive if and only if he is a cdrom group member.)

then the magic is gone. But when he discovers the loopholes someday, I think he should be smart enough to use the drives properly then.

I better write down some things I want to do this year. Human beings tend to get lazy without targets. People always find 10 targets for such things, not less and not more, don't know why. So I try to do the same here, in no particular order:

• Work out more, be healthier. I stopped practicing Yoga for some time since I was too busy last year. I just went to renew my membership card early this month. Have to start before my body getting too 'rigid'.
• Organize my belongings properly. I like to keep things. But over the years I have learned to throw or donate the things I really don't need. I have organized a lot of them recently, but there are still a lot of them yet.
• Produce a human-digestible English text-to-speech rules and learn them. This needs some explanations. I just want to improve my English pronunciation with this 'hard' but probably systematic way. I don't know how this sounds but I'll probably explain this more later...
• Revive my analytical thinking by playing chess games. I played Chinese chess often in my secondary school more than ten years ago. While I was not a very strong player, I played reasonably, played blind chess too, understood the intentions of most moves in others' games, and enjoyed the intensive thinking to figure out a good move. However, I played less and less after that, and my brain is getting rusty! I cannot play blind chess now as I cannot remember even one position well! I could see a lot of things when I saw a chess game position, but my brain is quite blank now if you show me one! So I need to start playing some games this year, with humans or computers. I need to clear the rusts in my brain to revive my analytical thinking.
• Extend my solar system simulation program to be able to calculate the positions of all planets and Pluto in our solar system. My program is now able to calculate the Earth and moon positions well. After the extension I can use my program in many areas.
• Extend my program for Astrological charts. When my program is able to calculate planet positions, it is just a step away from producing Astrological charts. Astrological interpretation? Not sure. If time permits, I may study it and see how much I can do.
• Read at least ten new books. Any book less than 100 pages is not counted.
• Write a program to help earn some money, if I am lucky! This is a secret but totally legal project. Keep it for myself at the moment!
• Write computer-related articles for general public. Hope to write some articles, probably related to the free software stuffs, for the general public.
• Organize this home page better.

Somebody tried to scam me over phone two days ago. These people earn their livings by cheating, and are totally hopeless!

I'm using a DiGi postpaid package only for registered companies. Two days ago I got a call to my mobile phone from a phone number 'Withheld', meaning that he has hidden his phone number. That alerted me a bit. I picked up call.

He said something and I only managed to catch a phrase "DiGi". I would say that the English pronunciation of the guy was quite lousy, so I couldn't catch the sentence much. That alerted me again: Some operator from DiGi can't even speak average English? This is rather abnormal in Malaysia. (Of course I didn't blame DiGi, because I suspected and later confirmed that he was not from DiGi. More about this later.) So I asked "Sorry?", and he immediately asked me in Chinese, "How about speaking in Chinese? Do you speak Chinese?" Asked me as if he changed the language for me. Anyway I said ok.