Sorry about the lack of updates recently. For the site work, I have completed the site user management. The home page of this functionality is using the new paged items list directive, and it was awesome and working as expected. I am currently working on the site links management pages to test the localized re-usability of this directive function. It is going to be awesome.

Another cool thing I did is that I created my own Ubuntu setup ISO. It is based on the tutorial from this site. It took an hour, and in the end, the newly generated ISO really works. That was exciting. The only problem is that once it is installed, it sets the GNOME desktop as the default session. And I packaged the XFCE, but I have to use the drop down on the login page to specify the XFCE desktop. Other than that I didn't install the xfce terminal so I can't install or uninstall anything. But the steps do works. My goal is to package a minimal set of software for an OS and then I can install anything on top of this minimal stage. This is something that seems to be impossible 10 years ago. Now, with all the available info. It is almost achievable.

I am making this quick update so that I won't wait for another 9 days to post something here. Just trying to keep writing for this site a good habit. First, let me just tell you this, if you search "Han Sulu" in google, and this site will not appear on the list. not the first page, not the first 100 page. This is expected. The Admin site of this blog uses self generated SSL cert which will be invalid for Google. They have a good security measure and marks this site as unsafe. Hence it lows the rank for this Blog site. If you search "Han Sulu" in Bing, Yahoo and Duck Duck Go, they all display this blog site as the top result on the first page. I don't play according to Google's rules, so I don't really care about the ranking on Google. Using a self signed SSL saves $100 a year, which is nice for me. Note that, if you search han-sulu.com, it will be displayed in Google search results. So it is still visible in Google.

I did a lot of customization of my Linux desktop. I will write a blog post about it. It will feature some detailed steps how to change the looks of the desktop with lots of screenshots. I just have not found the time to do it, especially with screenshots. It will be available in the next 5 days or so. No plan to create another codeproject tutorial yet. The Desktop customization would be a lot of fun. So please stay tuned.

I was trying to write a good update. But there is not much to say. I was distracted with Linux. One thing that was super awesome with, is the ability for user to customize the looks of the desktop. So I did that for a couple days. I didn't spend all the time doing it. But I did for fair amount of time. I spent the other free time with the rewrite of this blog engine.

Customize the desktop. Here is what I did: First, I got the source code for PolyBar. And I got the application compiled and installed. Then came the configuration. I got a few things added to the bar. But, I cannot add the wireless status, and alsa audio. They were not supported in XFCE. It was a dead end. The application is very cool. I just can't use it. I gave up on that.

Then I started customize the XFCE panel. It took a while to get it transparent as I liked. The problem is with the confusing configuration. After changing it, I had to log out then log back in to see the panel is transparent. Then I changed the wall paper for the login screen. It was very easy to do. There is a login window application in the system category that can easily do it. I got a good wallpaper for the login screen, then another one for the main desktop.

Another cool thing I have discovered is the power up and power off screen/animation. I didn't like the default one, so I installed a spinning circle for it. Apparently I can download the file then customize the boot up and boot down process with the new one. Finally, the docking bar. Plank is not working as I expected, so I did my research, and I found XFCE DockBarX. It was better than Plank. And allow many customization for me to pick a look I like. Functionality wise it was better. I can popup more than one instance of the same process and pick the window to bring it to the front. I like this the most.

For windows decoration, I have downloaded many application icons sets, and many themes. And switching them is pretty easy. But it can be very confusing. There is the Appearance application and the Window Manager. In order to get consistent looks, in both applications the same theme has to be selected. Or one will see inconsistent windows decorations. Such configuration process is confusing. Now I know how to do it, customizing the desktop will be doable.

I have made huge progress with my Blog Engine project. For my previous version, which is this application you can see now, there is a big problem with the paged items list. For the new version, I have designed a reusable page list that can be rendered with different list (list view or table view). I know there is the UI-Grid. That thing is cool. Yet I believe my design is more flexible. Yay!

I just want to make a quick note here. Yesterday I scored a small victory. It is about AngularJS directive. One issue I had before is that there is no send message back to the parent control from the directive. One good way to do it is to pass a method that is part of the parent control to the directive and have the directive call it. It is easy to do this when the method does not have any parameters. The real challenge is to pass parameters from the directive to the method so that the parent control can receive the parameters and use them.

I had a rough idea how this is done, and have done it once. So I set out to do this again, and within half an hour, I was able to get it to work. Then I left to play some FFXV. It was great that some small effort and it works out. Then again it is not a surprise that it works, everything is simple now once I have learned enough knowledge about AngularJS. I will make another tutorial about this, and post it on CodeProject.

I installed Manjaro Linux on my old laptop for a reason. I want to be able to compile the CyberOS source code. The installation of Manjaro Linux is very pleasant. But the screen resolution was horrible. The old laptop has the screen resolution of 1366x768. The desktop environment looks blurry. Then I installed a bunch of things like Plank docking, and GIT. Then I started installing the QT development libraries.

First I compiled the libcyber-system. It was successful. At that point I knew I was on to something. I used GIT to clone the master branch of the libcyber-system to my local and compiled the source based on the command on the git repo page. And it worked. Next, I cloned the cyber-terminal repo (master branch), and the compilation was rough, I had to add two more libraries. Then the compilation goes through. And I ran the application. It look CyberOS themed. Yay. The same day, I tried to compile cyber-launcher, and cyber-dock. Both requires no more new libraries. I was not able to run Cyber-launcher by itself. But, when I successful run cyber-dock I was able to see cyber-launcher work with it.

All the build was done by cmake, and I can install these built applications into /usr/bin. And they can be launched from any directory. All these are done with QT. It is not something I am familiar with. So I decided to learn how to use QT development library. My goal of the rest of the year will be - getting to the point that I can make some contribution to the Cyber OS project. It is a long way to go. I hope I won't give up this goal.

Three years ago, I made a huge mistake with my old laptop. I didn't realize it until yesterday. Four years ago, I turned off the WIFI of my old laptop, the one with Windows 7 Ultimate, and ultimately becomes very slow. It was FN + F11. I guess I was intentional, but I forgot about it. When I realized the internet was gone, I thought some weird power surge knocked it off. I went off and bought a USB WIFI modem, installed it and used it ever since.

So how I did realized my wifi device on my laptop is turned off by some key stroke? Well, it is a long story. I decided it is time to install a second laptop with Linux. And I used the old laptop. It has 203 GB of a second partition. It took a while for me to boot it with a USB (that is another long story. I was tired and made a few mistake, which made the process long). Once I boot it, I was facing an old nemesis - no network. The build in WIFI device is not working, the USB plugged in WIFI device is not working either. I searched Google with another PC for answers why the USB one is not working. There is no clear answer. There are a couple pages showed some commands that displays the status of network devices, and some suggested that the build-in device has to be turned off in order for the USB one to work. But no idea how I can do it. One of the commands showed that the WIFI is turned off, and is blocked by hardware. That hit me like a lightning. Did I turned off WIFI like three years, and not realizing it? So I looked at the keyboard and try to find the key that can turn off/turn on the WIFI device. And it was FN + F11. I hit them simultaneously and thought it was a long shot. What happened next took me by surprise, both WIFI devices, the build in one and the plug in one started show me all the networks available to join. Seen this, I just laughed. This is the most ridiculous thing ever happened to me for the past four years. Wulong!

I unplugged the USB device, and joined the WIFI for my home and installed the Manjaro on my old computer. It seems to be more stable than Linux Mint. Anyways. all my problems with Linux Mint was from the upgrade of 20.2 and a higher version of Linux Kernel. And the issue comes and goes. To make it stable, I boot it up every time. Then shut it down at the end of the day. Recently few days, it has been fairly peaceful and I got quite some work done. For suspension, I would first lock the desktop, then suspend and close the laptop. But after waking up, the unstable-ness would come after 2, 3 days. It is annoying but I can tolerate it. So I just boot up and shut down. Works well.

Finally I moved into the new house. It was under months of renovation. A lot of money was spent. And the deadline for the project to be done was pushed back several time and to my amazement, everything finished 3 days before moving in. I mean the major things. The kitchen door still don't have a lock. And the basement needs a lot of wall painting. But we moved in successfully.

The day before we moved in, I was cleaning up my Windows 7 PC, Windows 7, what a junk. I defragmented the PC a few times, It was still slow. I used an open source tool try to move the files and data together and making the free space as much as possible, so that I can free up a large chunk of space to make a bigger second partition, It was not able to. That was frustrating. I gave after one try. It took hours. I had 208 GB as a second partition, I am thinking putting the Manjaro Linux on it and play. Arch Linux had a lot of fun thing going on and I like to check it out. And it would be fun to have two boxes so that I can run some server client setup, which would be most interesting. I am just extending my horizon on open source to a new level.

I have been using Linux Mint 20.2 Uma for a few days. And it is finally stabilized. When I first installed the upgrade, I saw a few issues. The biggest one is that somehow I installed the generic kernel 5.11.0.XXXX. After install it, I figure it would be best to restart the PC. And it bricked. The error was the kernel's signature was invalid and I couldn't boot. This surprised me a bit. Lucky for me, there were older version of the kernels in the advanced boot section. I choose the top one and boot it without any problems.

I took a look at the kernel I just installed in the Update Manager (under menu View -> Linux Kernels), the latest version was unsupported. I had no idea how I got it installed. Somehow it got pushed by the Update Manager. It might be some awful repository I added just before I got the notification for the latest kernel upgrade. Anyways, I was able to uninstall the bad one and find another version 5.11.0-22 which support ends on Feb 2022. It worked, no problem. A day or two later, another upgrade ups it to 5.11.0-25. This is as latest as I can get with Linux Mint. But the trouble it got me into almost made me throw away Linux Mint and install Manjaro Linux.

I got a couple more updates. And installing updates on Linux was so easy. It is an amazing experience. I had the "privilege" (sarcasm) to install Windows 10 service pack. What a lousy experience it was. The service pack took 2 hours to download. Then it failed pre-install check. Then it has to be downloaded again, then it stopped at 15%. Then on the third try, I was able to push it all the way through. All took 2 days (16 working hours) to complete. Then another two upgrades with numerous reboots to complete. It was not pleasant. Afterwards, it caused all kinds of problems for me. Even though Linux Mint had some issues (not minor issues), but I can comfortable live with them.

One issue (with Linux Mint and XFCE desktop) I still have not find a solution is that, I close the laptop lid and it can wake up and show me desktop within 2-6 hours unattended. If I leave it close for longer like 8 to 10 hours. I can see the login page but after logging in, the desktop is a black screen. I tried CTRL + ALT + F1 and CTRL + ALT + F8 or something, with no luck. The only work around I can find is suspend the laptop then close the screen. This will leave the laptop suspended as long as possible and wake up properly. So it becomes my routine to click the suspend button under the power section, seeing the physical power button blinking, then I can close the screen. I will expect the laptop will wake up properly. Nothing is perfect.

I learned a few things recently while using Linux. First, I was able to get my old Huawei phone to capture videos and pictures using network connections. That was very easy. Next, I installed DropBox plugin with Thunar File Explorer. This was a bit tricky to setup because I have already 3 devices all interconnected. This Linux computer was the 4th and was unable to connect. I had to drop an old PC from the pool so that my current PC will connected. And the performance between my phone and this Linux PC was very good. The files are appearing on all devices seemingly immediate.

I tried to install Virtual Box for running CyberOS, but the repository and install was just not working. I tried several times and didn't work. I switched to Qemu-KVM, and the installation process is just two commands, one for QEmu-KVM, the other is for Virtual Machine Manager. And it worked almost instantly. There is however some weird things going on with the VM when I run it. I think it was CyberOS, not QEmu-KVM.

The worst was with Warpinator. The file sharing open source application for Linux Mint, and for Android. When I first installed it on my Moto G7 Power. It didn't connect with the Linux PC. Then I uninstalled and re-installed three times. They didn't work. Finally I realized that I need to open the port 42000 for the Linux PC. I closed the ports when I tightened the security of it. In order to get this to work, I have to open the port. So I did that and it still didn't work. As last resort, I restarted the PC and restarted Warpinator on both devices and magically they connected. The trick is that once I change the firewall setting. I have to restart the firewall service so that it can pick up the configuration change. And the user experience with this is really awful. Drop Box was way better when sharing files between devices. I think I will stick with Drop Box for now and use Warpinator as a backup process. All I need is something I can push files from one device to another with ease. Drop Box is fine for now.

Rewriting the blog site is going fine. I added a "Wait..." popup to the application. Also the one existing functionality I have moved over using ES6 syntax was working as well. Three days of hard work is paying off nicely.

It is been a while (11 days) since my last update. I was not sitting idle for all this time. I have posted two blog posts of things I have recently learned. Those are fun. One of them is regarding how to add application configuration to JDBC session for Spring. And the other is regarding enabling CSRF for Angular with Spring. They are interesting problem to resolve. And they gave me a lot of pleasure.

I also started the new project of migrating the existing code for this blog site to the new project. I mentioned earlier that I have had the services layer and data access layer all migrated, I am in the process of doing moving the code for the Admin project. This is a slow and painful process I have to redo almost all the front end coding using the latest ECMA6 script syntax and latest AngularJS code. One baby step at a time. The new syntax needs some time to get used to. Yesterday, I was able to get a "Hello World" displayed on the page using all the new syntax. I am definitely making progress.

I also got The Last of Us for PS4. And started playing it. It was a totally different experience. This game is not open world. So I had to move to specific point and trigger the progress of the game. But the game play was fairly exciting. Right now, because of the spare time work brings so much joy, I didn't even play the game during the weekend. I still think about playing games, but not as much desired as before. Completing Dragon Quest XI really lowered the urge. I tried to replay Horizon Zero Dawn, but I don't feel the same interest of grinding from beginning to end.

I copied all my blogging site code to my new Java project. And managed to get the services sub project and repositories sub project compiled, and integrated into my new web project. Next, I did an upgrade with the new knowledge I have acquired, such as using DB as session storage, and making all tables UTF-8 compatible.

Then I run into just one tiny problem. I use DB as session storage, and JDBC session access through injection by annotation. The only way to set the max session duration is by hard coding the timeout value as a constant and pass into the annotation. I don't want this. What I want is setting the value in the configuration file and pulling the value during startup from this configuration. And there is no way of doing this with annotation based dependency injection. I took a look at the source code from Spring, and found a way. I can take the current code base from Spring and add my own code to take the configuration values from the configuration values from database. The coding took two nights, and I made a mistake of taking the wrong code base so I had to rewrite the whole thing. In the end it worked as expected. I was pretty happy everything work out the way I have imagined.

I was playing Death Stranding. It was pretty fun. I was thinking of playing Days Gone. But that game creates too much adrenaline. It makes me harder to fall asleep. And I also got Final Fantasy XV for PS4, and The Last of Us. I think I will play the latter a bit just to get a feel what it is about. There are a lot of fun time ahead.

There is not much going on. I spent a lot of time on the new house. Order some new window screens, and a shower door. There are a lot of repair work. The old fridge is busted. The lawn is huge. Every time, it took a long time to clean all up, and so exhausting. Air conditioner is leaking water, and had someone to check and there is no problem. But wasted some money. The car had a leaking issue with the air conditioner line. Very expensive to fix it correct. I have done nothing but paying money. And the only joy was to go to the store buying some parts to make the house a little better.

The code project tutorial is done and online for a while. I am currently taking a break and doing my next site. What I am doing is copying old code from this site, then repackage it with new knowledge and making a better site for the next one. This will take a long time. I am planning the next code project tutorial. The next one will be the move-able popup modal with bootstrap, and JQuery UI. This will put my tutorial to total 39. And I will try to get the tutorial to 40 this year. After this tutorial, the next one will be the Electron.JS tutorial. This will put my tutorial count to 40. I am running out of ideas to make tutorial.

Linux Mint is great. I had numerous updates installed. The update install is quick and easy. Occasionally, I had to restart. But the reboot is also quick. This has been a pretty good experience, unlike the same experience with Windows. I also work out how to use IP Web Cam with my old phone, and it can transfer the video stream to Linux and capture as video file. I guess Life is not as boring as I thought.

I clean the gutter of the new house. That was fun. I bought a pretty awesome ladder that can extend to 18 ft. Then use it to get to the roof. The roof was very steep. Moving around took a lot of energy. I used a long snow remover to dusting the dirt of the gutter. There is a gutter shield installed, so the removal is pretty easy. It took two hours, but it was well worth the time. The gutters looked like haven't been cleaned for at least 18 months. I am glad that a right tool (the ladder) was there for me to do what I have to do.

The new tutorial is almost ready. It took me at least a month to plan and do this. Dragon Quest XI certainly delayed this process considerably. Then I realized my assumptions and conclusions are wrong. So I spent a couple nights to redo the sample application, which I think is well worth the time spent. If I continued with the wrong assumption and conclusion for the tutorial, it might damage my reputation. It is best to do something right. But if occasion slip up and cause some minor damage. I am OK with it.

I gotta talk about how I got the internet service working at the new house. Sign up the service was pretty easy to do via an online form. Then I can link the new account to my existing account. I bought a new modem (so that I don't have to pay rent fee). With an existing WIFI router, I was able to hook up the service within minutes. The trouble come when I tried to activate the service. And it has to be done via the mobile app. And I was not able to get the new account on the mobile application. Turned out that I have to switch the new account as the default account, then it would finally show up on the mobile app. And I was able to activate it. Took two days because I have to commune to the new place and I don't do it every day.

I am almost finished with the tutorial on how to handle the unexpected session expiration and getting login page instead of meaningful JSON object. Then I realized that my assumption and design is all wrong. The tutorial will probably be published here as a blog post. It will not be published to codeproject.com. It will probably tarnish my reputation.

Now I have to go back to the drawing board, and redo the tutorial with the new design. It will be better than what it was. Anyways, I will finish the existing tutorial, and get started with this new one. All these are pretty much research and knowledge accumulation. So the work done is not waste.

The house renovation is going as expected, there are unexpected bumps. Went on for a vacation. The air conditioning on the big car seems to be an issue. I think I can fix it with a new air filter. And I had no idea how close the Atlantic ocean front is so close, 2 hours of drive and it is there. I saw a lot of sand fleas and dead horse shoe crabs. And even saw Dolphin swimming near the coast. It was nice, but tired after two days of vacation. I had several sun burn, the worst one was on the top of my feet. So itchy. I don't like vacation. No personal time.

The vacation is over. I am going to write another tutorial. This time it will be somewhat practical. It will solve two problems related to session and login in an AngularJS application. I spent a few days on the design of the application. Hit a road block. Before I fell sleep on that night, I found a solution, and it worked. I am going write the tutorial.

After Dragon Quest XI, I started the game Death Stranding. It was a great looking game. I think I liked it better than Days Gone. Oh Days Gone, I am looking at a new update of 35 GB. I have not completed the download of this update yet. After it is done, I will try again with it. Last time I played, I was able to do the motorcycle run and catch the bad guy. It is a tough game. Death Stranding is different, It looks exotic. And I was thinking of going back to Final Fantasy XV. It looks like interesting after Dragon Quest XV. I just don't know if I have the spare time for it.

Well. I better start with the new tutorial. All these tutorials, I am slowing building all the knowledge for the next cool thing. And it is going really great.

Dragon Quest XI, I finally finished it on 4/19/2021. Turned out that the final Boss is easy to beat once I used a trick to lower its attack and defense. And I spent so much time crafting all the perfect gears, weapons, and getting the right aid stuff. In the end, I didn't have to get the best of the best gears (like the supreme sword of light, or the spears, etc). All the party members' health never dropped below 200, and A couple omni health fixed right up. This game is so additive and I spent so much time on it. Now I can hang it up. I will not touch that console for a while.

I picked up another bad habit, reading books. Recently, I have discovered the joy of reading Stephen King's books. First I finished the book "Later". Then I finished "Everything's Eventual". Now I am reading "Hearts in Atlantis". Before all that, I was reading his "On Writing". If you want to understand his writing, this book is a must-read. Once you get through this, then you can get some new perspectives when reading his stories. I admit that it was very joyful reading his work. This fever (of enjoying books) is going to be for a while before it would go away.

I mow the lawn at the new house twice. It was tough the first time. But the second time, it was tedious, but fairly easy. The tough part is the slope side of lawn. On the second time, when I did the slopes, the engine oil got into the fuel line and white smoke came out. Afterwards, it had some leaking. Now it is fine. I won't use the mower on the slope, I will use the trimmer to do the lawn. That was a good lessen learned. I enjoyed the lawn mowing.