yowkee essential

Changes

I didn’t write any things for months. Bad habit — procrastination, laziness hit me ever since Chinese New Year. Just a loosing on the end of consicious for one week, it could easily ruined whatever good habit you are building in progress. A good lesson to learn.

Of course, it isn’t just purely about consitently blogging. My emotion is down and up for the past month, and been thinking a lot about my job. Also, the hosting of this blog is changed from ICDSoft to Dreamhost. I saw many blogs promoting about Dreamhost, with its looking good feature vs pricing trade-offs, I switched. However, it isn’t as stable as I thought. I’ve even experienced out of connection of my blog because of the wrongly installation/configuration of PHP in the host (sounds ridiculous, a system admin simply changed the configuration which broke the clients’ web?). It’s now obvious to seen that many promoted Dreamhost due to its huge rebate rewards, and the key complains to Dreamhost could be concluded as:
* Lack of stability (system setup, connections…etc)
* Notorious CPU usage limit: it provided tremendous bandwidth for its hosting, but once users exceed the CPU percentage limit, users’ sites were taken down without proper notice.

This sounds bad. However, I decided to stay for a longer while to test it out. After all, this is the first post of my blog after switch hosting for 4 weeks. I do like its big storage, SSH access and the hosting of unlimited domains.

Changes, it’s the time for changes. Co-incidentally, usually when you’re thinking of changes in your life, you’d also encounter many others things, people or events changed around you. I thought a lot about my job and flip back-n-forth between stay and leave. Changes would probably come pretty soon. Come to that later.

Happy Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is approaching. Wishes all Chinese a happy and prosperous new year ahead! It’s the year of the dog.

I was quite unlucky lately. Just two days before Chinese New Year Eve, I had the stomach inflamation. Diarrhea and vomitting — I can’t remember when’s the last time I vomit, bad feeling. So I was weak through out whole day yesterday and luckily some friend could drive me back to home town in this CNY eve — it’s the traditional family should gather together in CNY eve.

Anyway, the good side and also the bad side, I couldn’t enjoy all the traditional food this round.

All England Badminton Semi-Final 2006

It was an amazing run for Malaysia men double on quarter final, which all three pairs had advanced to the semi-finals yesterday. It’s such a breakthrough for our men double youngster, would have been something to do with the new coach Rexy. Good job, Rexy!

Chong Tan Fook-Lee Wan Wah advanced into the final today with beating compatriot Mohd Fairuzizuan Mohd Tazari-Lin Woon Fui 15-8, 15-7. While in other court, the agressive attacking pair Mohd Zakry Abdul Latif-Gan Teik Chai was down 14-17, 9-15. They’ve been leading with 14-5 in the 1st game with Zakry’s lots of tricky shots. However, it could be anxious to end the game, or their brain just went blank — lost focus, the inexperienced pair allowed their opponent to come back from 9-points gap. And they didn’t ever request to take a break in this period! Anyway, it then replicated the 2004 final of Tan Fook-Wan Wah versus Jens Eriksen-Martin Lundgaard Hansen. Tan Fook-Wan Wah would have the chance to revenge on their lost on 2004.

The amazing Eriksen, he is already 36 and can still play such an intense game in the competetive All England. That probably would never occurred in Men Single as MS surely required tougher stamina. Peter Gade is an good example, he was surely out of stream in his 2nd/3rd game with Lee Hyun Il, which Lee has an easy win with 3-15, 15-8 15-1. I was really hoping to see Peter’s challanging the title again. But what could you expect? When a player was so exhausted and the normal rhythm was gone, age count!

Lee Chong Wei, yet again can’t beat Lin Dan outside of Malaysia courts. But it was so close this round! In the first game, Chong Wei was playing like his game with Lin Dan at World Championship last year — no confidence, slow foot work, weak smash. I was then feeling like argh…gonna lost again. And then the real Chong Wei was back. Starting from 2-8 in the 2nd game, he morphed into a different person — patient set up, speed running, smooth cross-court net play and smash. The fast and furious play getting him the 2nd game (15-10), then all the way leading to 13-6 in the third game. There’s no happy-ending for M’sian fans, Lin Dan’s switching gear and boost up to come back from 6-13 to 13-13, 14-14; and eventually took the match, to storm into final.

What a pity! Lee CW was called as Kampung Champion (could only win title in Malaysia) by some of badminton fans. But I bet to differ, to really look at his result at various open tournament. He used to live up to his world ranking. That he mostly only lost to top ranking players (e.g. Lin Dan, Taufik). Without his stable performance, his world ranking won’t climb up to the top three.

While IBF (International Badminton Federation) is going to change to 21-points (credit without serving) format around March this year. God seem wanted to shows why 15-points (credit only with serve) game was fun to watch: the ability of coming back from big points-gap and creating drama of the game. There seem to have happened a lots in All England 2006: Eriksen-Lundgaard’s game from 5-14 to 17-15, Lin Dan’s 6-13 to 17-14, Chong Wei’s back from 10-14 to 17-14 in 2nd game with Chen Hong in QF….etc. Those were the holding-breath moments, you wouldn’t forget when you’re following it — and then you’d love the game!

Reading Summary

Sleep deprivation has some impact on me. I am trying to be an early riser starting last week. It’s nice to wake up early everyday, but the keep popping-up night activities didn’t do a help on the need of sleep. Coffee keeps me awake, I probably need one of this. Out of juice to write anything, here’s the stuff I am reading-on:

• Mark Pilgrim takes a hard look at the recently released Photocast of Apple iPhoto 6 — which spikes critics from the RSS community, and wondering does Apple do understand the standard?

To sum up, the “photocasting” feature centers around a single
undocumented extension element in a namespace that doesn’t need to be
declared. iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the
first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It ignores
features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements
features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95% of
RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong.

• On the other hand, this shows a good rectification of UI improvement on disabling the annoyed MiniStore on iTunes 6.0.2 — the MiniStore is turned on by default, displaying at the bottom panel of your music library.
• Paul Graham: How To Do What You Love. I hit some bottleneck in works lately and been pondering for what I actually want to do. Definitely a must read for me.
• Charles Petzold’s talk at NYC .NET developer group: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
• Code as Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves

Technorati's front page's changes

Instead of just listing the “Top Search This Hour”, Technorati is now offering the list of Top Search and Hot Tag at its front page. It’s a minor step forward by Technorati. But it’d sure slowly changing blogger’s habit, pay more attention to Tag, Tag and Tag. With more accurate tagging and your blog posts got more attention.

What’d be my wished feature on Technorati? I hope it’d separate tagging by different language and providing search based on different languages, this should have boost blogging to the other level world wide.

Digg/Pligg/SpyMy

I found SpyMy via Jeff Ooi. Initially feeling it’s great that someone is making a similar Digg service for Malaysia, which was long expected. People who following the web trend among blogosphere would find Digg is the good solution to your flooded feed aggregators. Digg’s success is mainly due to its users’ posting and voting features, and other “cool” Web 2.0 characteristic, in layman terms it provides more interaction to users. That’s also why its users are mostly computer geeks and youngsters, and people tends to compare it with Slashdot

But I was disappointed while surf over to SpyMy and notice the similar interface. Take a looks at the screenshot of SpyMy, Pligg and Digg, do you think this is something we should do?

Web 2.0 service like Digg or reddit is US-centric and articles posted mostly only interested to geeks. So there’s big potential to expand to other more specific areas. To segment the market for Digg-alike web service, I could think of following potential fields:

• Region-interest: it has been lots of web portal focusing on region’s interesting news/events/activities. And these portals are all lacking of the interaction to allow users to vote for their favor posts or commenting. Good target to apply digg-alike service.
• Different language: it could surely see that users stick with the web with the language they’re most familiar. A Malay-only or Mandarin-only users posted/voted service should have potential.
• The other “niche” fields like shopping, books, movies, musics, even technology specific to Linux, Windows, Gadget…etc for the particular interested group of people

So and so, there are plenty of areas to explore and deploy the idea. Nevertheless, the key point is, you could copy the idea and develop your own version — but not copying the exactly same web behavior (the flow of the web service) and user interface! Let’s do porting and expanding, not copycat.

Validate Web 2.0

The guys at 30 Second Rule create a Web 2.0 Validator at their spare time. It's created with Og/Nitro in 30 minutes! Now it seem pretty reasonable to judge Web Two-Ooh sites by whether they're using some rapid development tools like RubyOnRails. Ha ha.. Not really. But this is a fun validator to play with.

I type in delicious and it got only 7 out of 42 rules (note: the rules are set by users, Web 2.0 is users-oriented, remember?). The following is the current set rules:

1. Is in public beta?
2. Uses inline AJAX ?
3. Uses python?
4. Uses the prefix "meta" or "micro"?
5. Is Shadows-aware ?
6. Uses Google Maps API?
7. Refers to mash-ups ?
8. Has favicon ?
9. Mentions startup ?
10. Attempts to be XHTML Strict ?
11. Uses Cascading Style Sheets?
12. Appears to be web 3.0 ?
13. Mentions Less is More ?
14. Refers to the Web 2.0 Validator's ruleset ?
15. Mentions Dave Legg ?
16. Appears to use AJAX ?
17. Appears to be built using Ruby on Rails ?
18. Makes reference to Technorati ?
19. Refers to VCs ?
20. Refers to Flickr ?
21. Mentions Nitro ?
22. Links Slashdot and Digg ?
23. Mentions Ruby?
24. Mentions Cool Words ?
25. Appears to use MonoRail ?
26. Has prototype.js ?
27. Creative Commons license ?
28. Uses Semantic Markup?
29. Refers to web2.0validator ?
30. Refers to del.icio.us ?
31. Uses microformats ?
32. Refers to Rocketboom ?
33. Actually mentions Web 2.0 ?
34. Use Catalyst ?
35. Mentions RDF and the Semantic Web?
36. References Firefox?
37. Appears to over-punctuate ?
38. References isometric.sixsided.org?
39. Validates as XHTML 1.1 ?
40. Mentions 30 Second Rule and Web 2.0 ?
41. Uses the "blink" tag?
42. Appears to have Adsense ?

I wonder what's the "Cool Words" in rule 24, thought there would have rule on "support REST URL", but no. Anyway, enjoy the story behind the development, have fun playing with it.

Wikipedia is 5 years old

Wikipedia turns 6 5 years old on January 15, 2006. The famous information resource on the web has served billions of query over the years, despite its accuracy and credibility was under fire a few times over past few months. The issues raised mostly related to people modified entries related to them, or false/fraud information. That including Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, edited his own biography around 18 times, everybody-known podcaster Adam Curry’s edting of Podcasting entry, and the false claim on JFK murder.

Wikipedia, which based on the open source collaboration software — Wiki, allows anyone who read the web adding, editing and voting for entries’ removal. That brings the never-ending debate about its credibility and accuracy of information. What’s people really worry about?

• Without knowing the authority behind the article, there’s always a chance something is missed out


• EVERYBODY could create the history. That made people worry

However, the physical encyclopedia in the real world, which has a team of experts proof-reading, made mistake too. Taking out the controvesary related to human and history, Wikipedia did a very good job on most other items — especially on those objective fact and information of technology. For years, it’s always my 1st or 2nd choice when I meet any unknown term (the other one is Google). Even come to history, does it so scary that it might bend the “official” history a bit? History is used to be the stuff controlled by authority — and Wikipedia is the pen given to people. What’s more important, it’s the transparency it guaranteed. Think about how web surfers found out all the details people’s editing their own biography? Because Wiki, as a collaboration and documenting web service, it keep everything in version control. So the Wikipedia users get to see the changes over time, if they do spend the time to dig through.

Wikipedia is in fact considering to start applying editing only by users, lock most of the text to anonymous. With the transparency of the process, I still have the faith to it. My favourite tool.

Feed2Podcast

I blog about PODZINGER yesterday. It turned audio into text and archiving them. On the contrary, if you want to give your blog a voice, try Feed2Podcast.

You give Feed2Podcast a RSS feed, and it’d turn it into a Podcast. In other words, the web service use text-to-speech technology to read your blog feed to your subscribers. It’s a totally reverse conversion service to PODZINGER. One particular difference is, bloggers might not mind their voice to be converted into text and read/search, but getting a generated tune to read the text they wrote?

If you don’t mind the less-human tune to read your text out to the readers, try it out!

PODZINGER

PODZINGER is a Podcast search engine. Ever since podcast joined the world of weblogging, I’ve been wondering would there be such a service archiving the audio, analyzing/indexing the audio content. PODZINGER uses the speech recognition from BBN Technologies — transferring audio into words/text and archive them.

From the returned search result, users could directly subscribe to the podcast to their iTunes or Yahoo! podcast. Or download the audio to your local drive. It claims to have the feature to play the audio straight to the spot of your searched words. But right now, clicking the play button seems always getting the alert message of slow connection or files not found over there.

The search is pretty effective and accurate, though I don’t think it has enough podcasts being archived. It’s a good web service worth looking forward to.