Visit to NEWater plant in Bedok

We visited the NEWater plant in Bedok today as part of an initiative to bring about awareness of things uniquely Singapore.

NEWater is about recycling used/waste water into water that can be used again, either in the industries or even for subsequent drinking. The waste water is first processed to rid it of big particles and other unwanted elements somewhere else. Then it is sent for ultrafiltration to remove the larger remaining particles. Reverse osmosis is then used to extract the water out, and then it is sent for sterilisation using ultraviolet light.

Recycling our waste water reminds me of the stillsuits in Dune, in which the body's water is recovered and made ready to drink again. Frank Herbert, author of the series, really had good ideas on how to recover precious water from the environment. Another example is the windtrap, which tries to recover water from the air. Science fiction may one day become fact, though it may still be years before we see them.

Busy busy busy

So much to do, yet so little time...

Sometimes, life just throws everything at you at one go. Now I know how a clown feels juggling many many balls... you have to try to watch all of them, keep enough attention on each just long enough to keep it from dropping, yet not long enough that you ignore the rest.

Farewell, fair winds and following seas

Today, we bid farewell to someone who was with the organisation for 30 years, contributing in his own ways to improve the organisation and bringing about transformation to the way we work. Thank you sir, for all your service these years, we will carry on the fine tradition from here onwards!

San Diego Apr 10

I was at San Diego for a week on work, but also managed to squeeze in some time for sightseeing. The main attraction was USS Midway (more on that later) but I managed to meet up with an old friend, so a Mexican dinner.

Ever had a fried ice cream? I had one. It was ice cream wrapped in egg and cereal, deep fried for 2 minutes.

On to USS Midway. I had the fortune of having a tour guide that served 4 tours totaling 8 years onboard (yes, that's my old friend) so he was able to not just bring me around the aircraft carrier but threw in stories that no one else knew about. Like the CO was not relieved of duty after the carrier was hit by a merchant hit. How his stateroom has a carpet and a TV. Sneaking up on the Soviet coast during the Cold War.

Here's a view of San Diego from the island of the carrier.

A view of the flight deck, with an assortment of aircraft that served the US Navy.

The enormous laundry... imagine washing clothes for 5000 people.

The galley where food is served, and the all too familiar metal trays.

The forecastle where the anchor is.

Plus the "toothpick" used to turn/untwist the anchor cable.

Casualty power cables...

Sliding stairs. The sides of the stairs can be folded down to form a slide, very useful when you need to slide things up and down the stairs, such as a stretcher with a casualty onboard.

A wonderful tour, an eye-opener, and all because I had a great tour guide.

Fedora 12 on new laptop

I finally managed to install Fedora 12 on my new laptop. It dual boots into Fedora 12 and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Laptop specs:
Toshiba Satellite A505-S6040
Intel i7 720QM
6GB RAM
Nvidia GT330M with 1GB VRAM

The main problems installing Fedora 12 were the installation itself, USB, wireless and video. Let's tackle one at a time.

The first problem is with installing. Video is a problem, so I had to choose the installation option to install with a basic video driver. The next problem was with USB, could't get it to work, so I ended up having to use the touchpad instead of a USB mouse. But that should see you through the installation from a DVD.

To solve the USB problem, after installing, I added the following to the kernel parameters (in /etc/grub/grub.conf):
acpi=noirq

For wireless, Fedora 12 doesn't support Realtek RTL8191 (the wireless for the laptop), so I downloaded the Linux driver from Realtek (as of today, the latest is the one for RTL8192SE). Then all I needed to do was to (as superuser) make and make install (after uncompressing the tarball). However, everytime you have a new kernel, you will need to redo this until kernel support for the RTL8191 is in place.

Last was Nvidia video. I followed the instructions here to install the proprietary drivers. But that was not enough. The system kept hanging. I searched the forums and found that I need to add the following line under the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Option "UseEvents" "False"

There are some other good tips on installing Fedora 12 that you can find here.

So now I am back to being a Linux user!

By the way, these instructions should work for most Toshiba A505-S60XX especially since they share common hardware. Good luck!

Edit: For computers with Intel processors having more than 3GB of RAM, you will need to add "iommu=soft" to the kernel options to prevent X11 from hanging.