Today's the first day of school. Mr EU say I should be very enthusiastic about this, since it's (hopefully) going to be my last "first day of school", but somehow I can't find any shreds of enthusiasm anywhere.

I've bought a new coffee machine for linuxNUS, from the new MegaCourts in Tampines Avenue 9. Extremely cheap too, only $39.90. The staff said it's on sale because the whole place is new, if that statement makes any sense. Anyway, I unenthusiastically went to school early to test out our home made gourmet cappuccino. Rather nice actually.

This semester's lessons are strange. My first lesson is on computer networks. The lecturer is a Nokia researcher based in Finland. Pet topic: wireless technology applications. Hence, instead of the expected basics of computer networking, the module is going to be a primer on wireless technology application. Seems interesting though, especially since his final exam has a weightage of only 50%.

Statistical physics this semester is wildly different. The professor comes in, reads out the module information copied from the NUS bulletin, then reads out the table of contents from the textbook, and ended the lecture. Total time for lecture? 20 minutes. Well, he did say he had not prepared for the module yet, but 20mins?!? I really pity those who came to school just for this lecture...

Spent some time searching for a good mailing list that can run off a user directory, and found this gem along the way.

Lurker digests emails from designated mailing lists and displays them nicely in a threaded forum-style html page. Like a forum, one can start a new thread, reply to posts, file attachments, and many more. Neat huh?

The only caveat seems to be the dependency on mimelib (kde 3 package), which the developers provided. libmime needs to be statically linked during compilation. Additionally, posting to the "forum" will fire up the computer's default mail client to send an email to the list. This might be a problem for computers on public access.

Installation instructions can be found at http://lurker.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/lurker/lurker/INSTALL. FAQ at http://lurker.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/lurker/lurker/FAQ. Download from Sourceforge.

If this works as promising as it looks, the linuxNUS forums and mailing lists will have a new look.

Just saw one of the funniest game videos on YouTube: College Saga! Directed, acted, choreographed, etc by Mark Leung...

Quote:
"Once upon a time, when Earth was still a beautiful place, an evil force came to turn all living things into Vegetarians. Three students from suburban Massachusetts would step up against this catastrophe... to end Vegetarian Supremacy. Mark, Jesús, Maria and their foes would make amazing personal discoveries as the two forces clash. And so began the ultimate saga about friendship, heritage, sex and explosions."

Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4

Mark Leung's Website, where you can download the clips and wallpapers.

Okay, enough laughing, time for me to sleep...

This is embarrassing. First, I keep thinking "Wireless@SG" is "Wireless@3G" (I wonder if it's because I'm dyslexic), then I can't connect to the network in Linux!!

I was in Velocity Mall (the renamed Novena Square) with MH, after a brief visit to IRAS. We went to the tcc outlet there to while the time away till dinner. I hauled out my laptop, determined to have a try at the Wireless@SG network. BTW, TCC allows you to use their power outlets free of charge.

(In case you are wondering, Wirless@SG is a new island-wide wireless network. And the best thing is: it's free!! There are some concerns about the utter lack of security, but I'll pass this for now...)

So, I inserted my wireless card, and went to tinker at the commandline:

$ iwlist eth1 scan
$ iwconfig eth1 essid "Wireless@SG" ap any commit
$ iwconfig eth1

And the card doesn't link to the Wireless@SG network at all. Can't set the ESSID. Tried to restart the card, specify the ap, escape the "@" with "\@", checked the man pages, but nothing works. Okay, connected to another network called "home1" instead.

MH suggested I try doing it in Windows. It worked. Sigh.

I feel so noob. Sigh.

Does anyone know how to get it to work?

One of my friends sent me a job advertisement yesterday, on Linux/Solaris high performance network cluster management, and application deployment. Suddenly, I'm caught in a fix: I have never played with Solaris, or done anything with network clustering, but the job looks very interesting. I seem to have the other pre-requisites though, except maybe the graduation problem. Should I try?? This came so out of the blue that I wasn't mentally prepared at all.

And yes, the job is at Science Park, so I'll be around the same place again... Same few vegetarian stalls...

Name: Koo Jun Hao
Email: junhao82 deleteThis (at) jmarki dot net

Professional Objective

To constantly upgrade my skills so that I am able to administrate an IT infrastructure
securely and effectively.

Education

Aug 2003 – July 2007: B. Sc. Computational Science (Physics), National University of Singapore

Jan 1999 – Dec 2000: GCE 'A' Levels, Tampines Junior College

Jan 1995 – Dec 1998: GCE 'O' Levels, Anglican High School

Professional Experience

July 2007 – Present: Bioinformatics Network Analyst, National Cancer Centre Singapore

Major Responsibilities:

1. Revamp IT infrastructure to increase security, user accountability and streamline user workflow
2. Document infrastructure deployment and track issues/changes
3. Day to day monitoring and maintenance of file servers, storage systems, email servers, application servers, and backend infrastructure servers
4. Centralised system monitoring, configuration and deployment using mainly open source tools
5. Periodic backups of research data and user directories

Project Details:

July 2007 – Present:
1. Design, procure, deploy, troubleshoot, and maintain IT infrastructure under a research laboratory
• Apache web server for Trac wiki documentation and issue tracking
• Nagios infrastructure monitoring on RHEL5, Solaris 10 and Windows 2003 applications and servers
• Puppet centralised configuration management on Solaris 10 and RHEL5 servers
• Kickstart and Jumpstart centralised installation system
• Local mirroring of updates and packages for RHEL 5 and Solaris 10
• Vmware Server virtualisation as testing environments
• Document infrastructure set up and changes
2. Design, procure, deploy, troubleshoot, and maintain data storage infrastructure under a research laboratory
• 15 Terabytes SAN on Solaris ZFS for storing research data
• Active-Passive Samba file servers for file sharing of research data and user directories over Microsoft Active Directory environment
• Active-Passive NFSv3 file servers for file sharing over Unix environment
• Active-Passive Netvault disk-to-disk-to-tape backup servers for backing up research data and user directories
3. Design, deploy, troubleshoot, and maintain email infrastructure under a research laboratory
• 25 users Zimbra primary email infrastructure
• Postfix secondary email server
• BIND 9 DNS servers
• Linux firewall for DMZ security
4. Various improvements to streamline/facilitate user workflow
• Windows 2003 application servers to share common applications through Terminal Services
• Google Apps for calendaring and intranet
• Preliminary desktop support to resolve simple problems.

July 2008 – December 2008:(collaboration between Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore and National Cancer Centre Singapore)
1. Design, and propose new High Performance Computing Cluster for computational biology research
• 20 compute nodes RHEL general purpose cluster
• Platform LSF scheduler
• 10GE cluster network interconnect
• Suitable for common computational biology applications like Maq, Plinks, Blast, etc
2. Design, and propose new data storage system for High Performance Computing Cluster
• 30 Terabytes high performance NAS for data file sharing and user drectories
• 30 Terabytes offsite disk-to-disk backups

May 2009 – Present:
1. Plan and execute research laboratory relocation to Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School
• Migrate users to new Duke-NUS environment
• Negotiate VPN remote connections back to National Cancer Centre Singapore
• Migrate research data to Duke-NUS infrastructure
• Handover infrastructure at National Cancer Centre Singapore to new team

August 2005 – June 2007:System AdministratorlinuxNUS

Major Responsibilities

1. Set up, administer and maintain web server hosting Opensource @ NUS
2. Maintain applications on shared hosting servers for linuxNUS website
3. Set up and maintain test servers
4. Troubleshoot systems during events
5. User support on mailing lists, etc

Other Project Experience

August 2005 – May 2006:Vice-President, linuxNUS

Major Accomplishments

1. Founding member of linuxNUS
2. Organise outreach events to advocate Linux/FOSS to NUS students: Software Freedom Day 2005, Opensource Day 2006, monthly meetups, awareness talks.

August 2004 – August 2005: Vice-President, NUS Computational Science Society
August 2005 &nash; August 2007: President, NUS Computational Science Society

Major Accomplishments

1. Organise regular society gatherings for members
2. Organise field trips to research institutes
3. Participate in departmental Open Houses
4. Spokesperson for students to school management and vice-versa

Interests

Linux/Unix system administration, System security, Virtualization, Storage, Networks

Professional Community

linuxNUS, Executive Committee Alumni Member (August 2007 – Present)

After 2 days of writing, rewriting, and reviewing, version 3 of my resume is finally done. Now I'm drained, mentally and emotionally.

Writing resumes is such a tough thing to do. It must be eye catching in both format and details, but not so eye catching so as to seem like a braggart. The most relevant or important stuff should be first, followed all the way down to the least relevant/important, but it should be simple enough for everything to go in at the first glance. And the worst part is, everyone has different ideas of how these is done. Sigh...

My previous resumes look so cluttered and irrelevant now. Will my present resume look like that years or even months down the road? I wonder...

Okay, time to do my homework...

Whoa! Saw this on digg, managed to dig out the website: http://nearingzero.net/.

Just woke up for 9am lessons. And I seem to have dreamt of myself writing, rewriting, reviewing, editing my resumes, the entire night... Oh man...

Resume writing is freakingly stressful... And someone told me a few days ago, "Well, the first is the easiest". Arrgh....

Oh man, what a timing. I was tapping out my cover letter when Harish Pillay sent this to the LUGS mailing list.

Disturbing...

Found these on the web... Check them out!!

Cool... Kev just introduced me to Kooldock, a fast clone of the Mac OSX dock.

Adding of applications is by either adding the application, or copying the application's .desktop file to the kooldock preferences directory. Automatically hidden till the mouse is at the bottom edge too! Very intuitive, responsive and well, kewl...