Minimizing NTFS Corruption In C: Drive

Nothing terrifies me more than to receive a message from the Windows XP operating system telling me that one of my disks needs to be checked for consistency upon booting up. I have received no less than 4 of these messages this year alone, and it always happens on the C: drive. Files and/or directories will get deleted everytime when this happens. To restore the deleted files from my backup, I will first have to look in the corresponding "WinLogon" event in Event Viewer. The list of deleted files/directories are all there. I have been lucky so far as only noncritical files were deleted - Windows is still bootable in all cases. I always do a graceful shutdown of Windows before turning off the power to my computer. So this is something that should not be happening.

Switching To Zoundry Raven From Scribefire

I have made the switch to Zoundry Raven (or Raven) as my offline blog editor of choice. In fact, I have been composing and posting my blogs with Raven since 21st September 2013.

I was using Scribefire Classic (a version that is no longer supported) on Firefox version 3 previously. I have been happily using it for about 14 months until I had problems inserting "Amazon Affiliate iframe" ads. There were other minor limitations that I have encountered previously in Scribefire Classic but I have always been able to figure out a way round them. Unfortunately there is none that I could find with these "Amazon Affiliate iframe" ads. Upgrading to Scribefire Next/Chrome would be the most logical choice but regrettably there are just too many shortcomings with the later versions - and some are really odd ones. There have been no fixes and development to Scribefire since 2011. So Scribefire Next/Chrome is a no go for me.

Raven is not perfect either. Like Scribefire, it appears to have been abandoned and its support forum has gone offline. But luckily, Raven's code is available online as it is open-source. I have peeked at the code (I have a background in computing by the way) and found the Python code to be well designed, written and easy to follow - much better than Scribefire's. I do have to put in more effort at times as I am still new to the Python programming language. And I made my first fix about a month and a half ago.

My Picture Uploads To Picasa Web Got Modified

The same picture file. One gets uploaded to Picasa Web (picture above) and the other to Flickr (picture below). Can you see the difference?

The picture that was uploaded to Flickr looks identical to what I have on my computer. But my upload to Picasa Web was not. It got modified somewhere during the upload. It became brighter and as a consequence it looks grainier, and it looks terrible. I was horrified! Definitely not what I wanted.

Picture Of A White-Throated King Fisher Up-close

I participated in the 2012 and 2013 MYGB (My Garden Birdwatch) bird count. And now, I am hooked on bird watching. Any sound that a bird makes (a chirp, a hoot, a tweet) or the ruffling of leaves in the trees now thrills me. I cannot help myself each time when this happens. I just have to take a peek outside hoping to confirm what I have heard is indeed what I have guessed; or just to take a snapshot; or simply just to admire them. Indeed, I have even identified a number of birds that I never knew existed in my neighbourhood. They were always there but I just wasn't looking.

My Online Shopping Experience At Lazada Malaysia

I bought a Nikon Coolpix L27 digital camera online at Lazada Malaysia last month and what a great bargain I had. I actually saved at least RM70 compared to the next best price that I could find, either online or in local stores. The price paid includes an 8GB Panasonic SDHC memory card, a case and 2 AA sized alkaline batteries. Things went quite smoothly on the whole. I placed my order on September 15th 2013 and I paid online via debit card. I received my camera 3 days later via the local courier company GD Express. All items were packed neatly in a 18cm x 17cm x 11cm cardboard box. I think I could have received my package a day earlier if not for the public holiday on 16th September 2013.

Zoundry Raven: Preventing Double Line Spacing In Blogger.com

I have to enable the "Remove Newlines" option, found in the "Account Manager" dialog box, when publishing my blog post to Blogger.com. If I do not, I will get double line spacing between paragraphs.

Zoundry Raven: Inserting Amazon Affiliate "iframe" Ads

The offline blog editor Zoundry Raven converts my Amazon Affiliate "<iframe><iframe/>" tags to "<iframe/>" upon publishing my blog posts. As a consequence, my Amazon Affiliate "iframe" ads do not get displayed correctly when viewed from the Opera desktop and Opera Mini web browsers, and perhaps on other web browsers too. What puzzles me though is that Raven displays these ads correctly while editing - albeit the ad must be inserted at the end of a blog post and no editing is allowed in the "Design" tab after these ads have been inserted. I wonder why?

The Problem

After having successfully installed the development environment, I went about searching and digging into Raven's source code and I managed to narrow down the problem to the 4Suite XML processing library that Raven uses.

For any XML tags containing empty element (elements are the text between the opening and closing tags), the tag will be represented as a single tag ended with a slash in 4Suite. Amazon Affiliate "iframe" ads have empty elements and hence, self-terminating "iframe" tags upon publishing.

My Work-around

To enable me to insert these "iframe" ads, what I did is to filter my blog post through uTidyLib just before publishing so that any invalid HTML tags generated by 4Suite will be corrected by uTidyLib (uTidyLib is just a wrapper for TidyLib, and TidyLib is just a library version of Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy, a program that fixes invalid HTML markups). To achieve this, I added 3 extra lines of code (enclosed between "# ---- START ----" and "# ---- END -----" in the code below) to the function _transformContentForPublishing in the file "zoundry\blogapp\services\pubsystems\blog\blogpublisher.py".

Ginger And Turmeric - The Best That I Have Ever Grown

I am so happy. Since moving them into the shadow of my house in April this year, I now have the healthiest and loveliest ginger and turmeric plants - the best that I have ever grown. The leaves are lusciously green with abundant foliage attached to thick stalks and shoots. And as an added bonus for me, the plants on some pots are beginning to bloom too.

I have been planting ginger and turmeric for about 8 years now after been inspired by a local TV documentary that I saw back then. My success have been mixed previously. Direct sunlight and ginger is actually a bad combination (likewise with turmeric as it is a plant that belongs to the ginger family). But I did not know about this until recently. Previously, I have always assumed wrongly that I had problems with the soil whenever I get ailing looking plants. I tried adding additional fertilizer and this obviously did not help. It is only later that I realized, through my own observation and confirmation from Google searches, that ginger and turmeric must be kept away from direct sunlight.

My wife loves home grown ginger and turmeric. And I like growing them. They are some of the easiest thing that I have ever grown as they do not require much care. The only pests that I can see so far are grasshoppers and garden snails, but that is not something that is unmanageable. I used to plant them in the ground, but these days, I only plant them in pots so that I can move them around easily when the need arise. I only water them like once a day at around noon - lazy me. I also mulch the top soil in the pots with garden clippings to minimize weeding.

I will need to find a new place soon for my ginger and turmeric plants as the sunlight is slowly creeping nearer and nearer towards the house as we head towards the end of the year. The sun swings from the Northern to the Southern sky between the June and December solstice, and then back again from the Southern to the Northern sky between January and May. Some sunlight is already touching the outer and top leaves on some pots at noon.

Setting Up Zoundry Raven's Development Environment

When Push Comes To Shove

The offline blog editor Zoundry Raven self-terminates my Amazon Affiliate iframe tags. It converts my <iframe><iframe/> tags to <iframe/> upon publishing my blog posts. And my Amazon Ads do not get displayed correctly when viewed from the Opera web browser. I reported this issue at Zoundry Raven's Open Source website, but I received no reply. I tried accessing the Raven's support forum but it seems to have gone offline. So the only thing that I could do is to install the Raven's development environment, peek at its source code and try to fix this problem myself, if possible.

Displaying Amazon "iframe" Ads Without The Scroll Bar In Scribefire

As I have mentioned previously, a scroll bar will appear when I place an Amazon "iframe" ad in Scribefire Chrome for Opera, resulting in the ad not being displayed as it should while editing, and indeed after publishing, while in "Edit Visually" mode.

After having gathered enough courage to peek at Scribefire's source code, I am glad that I have found a fix to this problem (see Note 1 below on extracting the source code from the Scribefire Extension file "scribefire-4.oex").

This is what I did to remove the scroll bar. I appended additional parameters to line 964 in the file "events.js" - they are actually just parameters found in the code given by Amazon that were not defined in this line. Below is how the line looks before modification:

extended_valid_elements : "iframe[title|width|height|src|frameborder|allowfullscreen]",

My modified line now reads: