khairul-syahir.com

I was born and raised into an average family, and 10 years ago when other kids were playing those Digimons that cost RM30 each I could only watch in envy. No way my parents would buy me one of those. Those are for rich people.

When money doesn’t come easily into your pockets, and when you have to work hours upon hours just to have a taste of a little bit of leisure that money can bring, you learn to appreciate it better.

And now that I have quite a fair amount of income from my freelancing work (and donations from all you wonderful Graphene theme users), the question of money and happiness began to creep into my daily ponderings in the shower and elsewhere. I began to see how easy it is for people to fall into the trap of continuously striving to make more and more money, once they have a little sip from the cup.

Money is certainly not the root of all evil as the King James Bible would have it, but it certainly is a root to a lot of evils. And I think the major error that many people did (and still do) is that they strive to continuously increase the amount of money they have, without any specific goals or objectives about what to do with that money. When you fall into that trap, boy are you in trouble, for then money would never ever bring you happiness. It will bring you lots of evils instead. Continue Reading

When it comes to the free WordPress themes, the best-rated themes are often the least user-friendly of the bunch.

Atahualpa theme's rating in WordPress.org

I had to work with the Atahualpa theme last year, for a project that didn’t last very long. And the first time I saw the code and tried to make modifications to it, my immediate reaction was “What a mess. What a total mess.”

The theme’s code structure is way different from the usual WordPress theme’s code structure, the structure that the default theme that comes with standard WordPress installation uses. Because I am familiar with that structure, seeing a theme with a code structure such as Atahualpa’s is out-of-the-wordly experience.

And yet this theme is one of the highest-rated theme in the official WordPress.org theme repository, rated by 446 users at the time of writing. How could a theme like this be so user-unfriendly? Continue Reading

Many of us would have not one, but two or three or even more separate email accounts. Is there an easier way to manage them all without logging in to each one of them and checking for new mails one by one?

There is! The magic software is called an email client. And in this post, I’m gonna show you how to use one free, open-source email client: Mozilla Thunderbird.

PS: This is my first ever video tutorial

Toss a coin in front of your friends and ask them what are the chances you get a head rather than a tail? Fifty fifty would most likely be the answer.

The coins that are doomed to suffer for 1000 years

But is it? Toss the same coin a hundred times, would you get 50 heads and 50 tails? You’d have to be very lucky to get that. Toss the same coin again for another 50 times, would you get heads and tails in exactly the same order as your last 50 tosses? If you were to toss the same coin again for one more time, would you be able to predict with absolute certainty which side of the coin you’ll get?

Obviously your next 50 tosses won’t yield heads and tails in exactly the same order as your last 50 tosses, nor can you say with absolute certainty which side of the coin you’ll get on your next toss. This is all trivial. We say that the toss of a coin acts randomly.

But is it really random? Now suppose that we are now living in the year 3010. Imagine that a thousand years from now, all the scientists and engineers and mathematicians in the world have endeavoured on a millennium-long project to model every single aspect of a coin toss. Continue Reading

I designed, coded and developed my very first WordPress theme a year ago, for use on my blog. I did consider to make it free for public use back then, but I also wanted my blog to be unique, so I held that idea back. Now that khairul-syahir.com is already in version 3, and it has got new fancy clothes to put on, there’s no more reason to not release my first theme to the public domain.

khairul-syahir.com-v2 WordPress theme repackaged as Graphene

My first theme was originally named khairul-syahir.com-v2, for lack of better name, I know. But then again I think it is customary to name the WordPress theme that you’re gonna use only for one site with the name of that site. There’s really no incentive to do otherwise, and picking a good name is no easy task as well. It takes a few days of intermittent pondering in the shower to come up with one. Continue Reading

This winter holiday I finally got a chance to go to the ski area in the central part of New Zealand’s North Island, the Whakapapa (pronounced ‘fa-ka-pa-pa’) Ski Area. Didn’t get the chance to try skiing or snowboarding though, gotta do that another time. There were 10 of us and the ski/snowboard rental was pretty expensive. I’m gonna come back again one day and take the proper ski/snowboard lessons!

The snowman that we built. Borrowed that cap from my friend when my ears started to go numb.

For someone who comes from a country with hot-and-humid climate all year round, the ski area with snow all around was really, really cold. Touch your skin against the snow for a just a few seconds and you feel the burning sensation already, literally.

I got to experience that first hand when we had to perform the prayers at the ski area and I didn’t have any cap to cover my head, so I had to put my forehead on the snow during one of the parts of the prayers. And yes, spreading snow on your arms and face and feet for the ablution wasn’t exactly something you wanna do repeatedly either.

But it was a really fun excursion, and we built the biggest snowman that day. Truth is, we didn’t see anybody else making any other snowman, so apparently it was just us who bothered to make one! Heck, that was the first time we got to play with snow for some of us, and we weren’t gonna leave without at least leaving a decent snowman. Continue Reading

Just a year ago, about this same time of the year, I designed and coded my very first own WordPress theme to be used with this blog. That was my first ever WordPress theme developed from scratch. It was a big learning experience for me, figuring out how to code the new design into a fully working WordPress theme.

To be able to create your own WordPress theme, you have to be familiar with at least three types of codes: XHTML, CSS, and PHP. I had quite a firm grasp already on the first two, but I know little of PHP, just enough to get me started. Back then, I was unfamiliar with how the WordPress theme works, so I spent a lot of time reading tutorials on the web, learning how to do it as I go along. Back then, it was quite a big learning experience for me.

And now, after a year, I coded my fourth WordPress theme, the khairul-syahir.com-v3. It was a big learning experience back then, and it’s still a big learning experience now.

The Related Posts and Social Sharing feature has been integrated fully with the new khairul-syahir.com-v3

Continue Reading

Anyone involved in web development would know that whatever website you develop would be useless without publishing it online on the web. That’s the heart of the web hosting industry’s business – hosting websites on servers so that people around the world can access the websites through internet. It is therefore a crucial part of any web development business, be it huge companies or individual freelancers.

Because setting up own servers is expensive and is simply not financially viable for almost all web development studios (and freelancers), the most cost-effective and simplest way is to just subscribe an account with a web hosting company – companies whose business is simply to set up servers and host websites. This, of course, comes at a fee.

Web Hosting Dissected

There’s typically three types of web hosting package: dedicated server, virtual private server (VPS), and shared hosting. Dedicated server is often the most expensive, as the web hosting company dedicate one whole server to just one particular hosting account. It’s like renting a computer with blazing fast internet connection to host large number of websites or websites with huge disk space and bandwidth requirements. VPS comes second in terms of price, offering much of the features of a dedicated server, but instead of dedicating one whole server to just one account, several accounts are allocated to one server with restricted server resources for each account – less disk space, less bandwidth, less memory. However, you would typically still have the administrative features of a dedicated server with a VPS, like shell access (executing commands on the server through command line interface) and determining most, if not all, server settings. Then comes shared web hosting, which is the cheapest of all. This is because there’s even less disk space and bandwidth allocated, less memory, and a host of other restrictions apply, so that the web hosting company can allocate one server to as many shared hosting accounts as possible. With shared hosting, you will be so lucky to be able to find one that allows you to even play with the server’s settings. Continue Reading

These are select few photos from the trip, retouched using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

If you want the full-sized version of these photos, ask!

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