theworldisgrey

My wife and I were married on November 23rd. But due to immigration requirements and other issues, we haven’t yet had a reception. The reception will be April 5th, 2008 at Cokato City Hall. More details here.

Models may seem to have an easy job. All you have to do is look pretty for the camera right? After going through a day of prewedding photos, I can say that its quite tiring. The day started at about 7am with makeup and a test photo shoot in the garden at Vita’s parents house.

Afterwards we got into a car, and went to the University of Indonesia. We did about 3-4 different sets. A couple by the lake, and a more casual set in the grass.

From there we went to the Betawi Cultural Village. Indonesia is made up of many different cultural groups, Betawi is one of the smaller groups which settled around the area now known as Jakarta. After a lunch break at a local restaurant (Had Soto Betawi, basically chicken soup Betawi style), we did a few more photo sets.

Although distance wise our next location wasn’t very far, it took us about two hours or so to get there with all the traffic we ran into. It was getting pretty late in the day when we finally got to Kota Tua (Old City). We managed to get a few more sets done in the fading light, before we finally called it a day.

We had quite a bit of fun although it was quite tiring and hot. We had a pretty big set of costumes ranging from casual to formal, and from traditional/historical to modern. Photos from that day are in the Gallery on this site.

We spend most of the day today taking care of errands. First stopping at the bank to take care of the rest of the photographers fee. Then going to a couple stores to see if we could find a new washing machine for Vita’s mom. We didn’t decide on one yet. We went to Carrefour to get Vita some luggage for her trip to the US. Then we took a break for lunch at Fish and Co in Cilandak Town Square (CITOS). CITOS is a mall, thats almost all restaurants. Good for those who have trouble deciding what to eat. Afterwards we stopped at home, then went to get a haircut at a salon in Depok.

I arrived today at Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta Airport. Getting the Visa and going through immigration was for the most part really easy. One of my bags was one of the last onto the luggage carousel. With 2 arriving flights, alot of people were going through customs, creating quite a jam of people, luggage and carts. All in all, it took me an hour to get out of the airport after landing.

From there, I met Vita and her brothers. On the way to her families house, we stopped in Kemang to visit a money changer, and a store caring international food, Kemchicks. Due to counterfieting they tend to be very picky about the type of bills they accept. For US currency, to get the best exchange rate, the bills need to be new $100 bills, and only those starting with a serial number in the F series. Although on the other hand the difference isn’t significant. 1 USD to 9000 IDR vs 1 USD to 8900 IDR. Roughly 1% less.

From there, we went to Vita’s house. After talking with her family and relatives for awhile, my jet lag started to catch up with me and I called it a night.

Tip: Visa on Arrival can be purchased for 7 or 30 days at the airport for $10 or $25 respectively. If the line is long, there is another counter across the hall that sometimes has a shorter line.

The flight from LAX to TPE was pretty uneventful. I did see the in flight entertainment system was running Linux from the segmentation fault screens that happened to a couple of the passengers.

Taipei airport has showers at the transit hotel, which after traveling for 20 some hours, it was refreshing.

For the flightlog:

• MSP -> LAX - 757-200 - N528US
• LAX -> TPE - 777-300ER - B-16705
• TPE -> CGK - A330-203 - B-16306

The flight from MSP to LAX was rough, turbulence almost the entire way. I’m not afraid of flying, but turbulence always makes me nervous.

Right now its about a 6 hour wait until the flight to Taipei, so I guess its time to start exploring.

My goal is to this time better document my trip to Indonesia for the few that regularly check my blog. There are few good direct flights between Minneapolis and Jakarta, and also relatively cheap. So my flight will involve 2 airlines and 2 stops. First flight, MSP to LAX, and flying on Northwest Airlines.

Leaving this next weekend (Oct 20th) to Indonesia. Hopefully this time I’ll be a little more active with getting travel logs up. On this trip, we will be having photos taken by RDj. Kaoy Photography. We will be having a ceremonial wedding Javanese style. (We probably wont be doing everything part of the tradition, but most of it) Then we have a short little honeymoon planned at the Kemang Icon. After all thats done, we will be returning to the US together.

There will be some wedding and reception stuff planned for the US side, but we haven’t really started with that yet. Will post more about that later.

Normally when you upgrade a motherboard, the general wisdom is that you should at the same time reinstall your OS. For me this is a pain, since it usually takes a couple weeks before everything is back to how it was before I started the upgrade. So when I upgraded my older Athlon 64 set up, to a new Intel Core 2 Duo, I really wanted to avoid the necessity of reinstalling Windows. I did manage to do it, but there are some caveats to be aware of:

• Before you start, back up all of your data, just in case this doesn’t work for your situation.
• Especially if you use an onboard network adapter to connect to the internet, make sure you have a copy of the drivers for the new hardware. This usually comes on a CD with new hardware.
• Before you start the upgrade, remove old motherboard and display drivers. Since the display drivers are usually dependent to some extent directly on the motherboard, this saves from possible problems.
• Before you start windows back up for the first time, make sure your system clock is set correctly. If not, you wont be able to get into the OS to install the new drivers without reactivating. With the correct clock, it will give you 3 days to reactivate windows.
• Since you wont have working USB hubs, you may need a PS2 mouse/keyboard or a converter.
• If you do try to upgrade without the old drivers, you may not be able to fully load windows, or at least not with normal boot. Safe mode or VGA mode may work.

Ajax or otherwise known as Web 2.0 has taken the web development world by storm in the last couple years. Everyone wants their site to be use Ajax or to be Web 2.0. Even if they don’t really gain any benefit from it. But with this, there are two different ways to use Ajax that need to be clarified.

The common applications that have been associated with Ajax, are sites like Google mail or maps.  While very useful for a designing a site like that, may have its problems. Spiders cant parse JavaScript, and any indexable content will be unaccessible if you design your site as a one page style application. This is fine for certain applications, like Google mail or maps and Flickr orginizr. Since these sites are purely user oriented.

I think a distinction needs to be  drawn between total ajax applications, and applications that use ajax with parts of the interface with certain features. Take a look at Flickr, its organizer is an Ajax application, sort of one page, that uses JavaScript to provide a lot of functionality. The rest of the site is organized in separate pages. More of the tradtional web development approach. But it does on each page, use Ajax based features to provide ease of editing and manipulation of photos.

Development of the first style is pretty simple. Much of back end only provides data in some kind of a transport format (text, JSON or XML). Most of the development then would be focused on the front end. Here the boundaries between the different domains of development are clear.

When I’ve used Ajax, due to the importance of search engines being able to index certain pages, I’ve gone with the Applications using Ajax. In this style of development, many of the development domains are not so clearly seperated. Some of your front end UI is generated with your back-end (PHP in my case), while the rest is generated with the help of JavaScript. So some of the back end code generates JSON for Ajax parts, while other parts generate HTML for the general page layout.

There are also performance issues to consider, while Ajax applications load all the code at once, and only trade data back and forth.  Applications using Ajax have to load the toolkit or framework on every page. Looking at some sites, the JavaScript framework itself can be over 100k. Even though its likely cached, it still has to load and process it on every single page load. This is one reason why I tend to use Dojo over other JavaScript frameworks or toolkits. I can load only what a particular page requires. And the bootstrap is very small (25k).

I still have yet to find a development paradigm for Applications using Ajax that works well. Not to say there isn’t one. I just haven’t found one I’m happy with. Right now I have methods to have PHP output in JSON or HTML depending where its used. The business rules behind the output generation is encapsulated in classes, as much as possible. Though the boundaries are sometimes a bit mushy. On the UI side, I develop a framework based on Dojo to auto load on each page. This provides common widgets or UI components that I can make use of on each page. Then on top of that, I build widgets that drive the functions or features for that specific page.