It’s important because according to this article (USATODAY.com - CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character), it’s a window to your character. Maybe waiter is too specific - it’s how you treat anyone that is not of a higher position that you are. It’s normal for us to act all goodie-goodie when facing a superior. So if you feel you need to know someone, just see how they treat seemingly less important people.

Reflecting after I read the article, I couldn’t agree more.

If open-source software is your thing (it should be, stop pirating ), then you’ll tend to be like me - downloading OSS stuff quite frequently. Usually, OSS comes from sourceforge.net. But sourceforge is only a website, it doesn’t provide downloads. Insteads, it directs you to a list of mirror servers for the actual download. So how do you make sure you get the fast download speeds? Easy actually, choose the closest server to you. But there’s a catch, you’d have to balance it with countries that are known to be fairly broadband capable.

What do I mean? Take for example me, being in Malaysia, there are 3 mirrors from nearby countries - Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, etc (countries in Asia). Nearest mirror would be either Singapore or Indonesia, but neither could beat Japan (which is compartively farther than either). This is logical since Japan’s is the most broadband capable out of the 3. Hence, my choice of mirror server for the past year or so has been Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s server (Ishikawa, Japan).

If you’re in Malaysia and downloads open-source software frequently, try that server. I often get 50Kb/s downloads.

Ok, before you go shouting junk (which tends to be associated with free), check out the list first. Some are awfully good. I’ve downloaded a few myself and some of them were already used on my computer. The list is segregated into categories such as security, multimedia, etc.

Originally read from Popurls.

I want a Freeware Utility to … 450+ common problems solved : eConsultant

PalmInfocenter has written a review of the more affordable cradles for the T5/TX. Two are from Brando )which has really excellent customer support). I own a plain-vanilla T5 cradle and am very happy with it. For a more detailed review of the Brando music cradle, there’s a review over at TamsPalm as well (check out my earlier post for a link).

Brando also sells some other stuff (screen protectors, USB gadgets, PDA cases, stylus, etc.) so if you’re interested, here’s the link to their website.

Looks like after the recent big deal of Red Hat acquiring Jboss, another one might just be happening. Oracle plans to come up with an OS of their own. Quickest way to do this is of course, buy one. Novell seems to be pretty strong in enterprise Linux so this rumour is not impossible. Why am I posting about this? Because the company I work for is a partner of Novell. Don’t know how this is going to affect us though…

Read more @Neowin.net - Oracle says may launch own Linux version.

How To Encrypt BitTorrent Traffic · TorrentFreak, torrents and more is an article that P2P users should find handy. Already ISPs are clamping down on Torrent traffic (nevermind that P2P apps are the killer app for broadband). This is true even in Malaysia. Lately, I’ve noticed that Torrent downloads in my house is usually <10Kb/s which is very slow indeed. Perhaps time I encrypt Torrent traffic myself.