yowkee essential

The scream on Streamyx

I've been trying a few times today to access Dinesh's site. Apparently, it's still down. Later I learned that his blog is actually hosted with his 1.5Mbps SDSL line from Telekom, which is dead over the past 30 hours. Again, that's our "great" service from the monopoly DSL broadband provider. Their broadband product Streamyx has been going through frequent disconnection, failed DNS, failed international routing, always-slow connection.....etc, and they even have to offer once one month rebate, and once 14 days rebate for Streaymx customer.

I am the Streaymx subscriber too. I've been trying to spend less time on tmnet.streamyx because you'd scared by all the rants from its customers. The side effect is, once your connection is good, you dare not to do anything on it. No tuning this and that, no disconnect, even no reboot! That may be a bit exaggerate. But that's how a user feel about the service, especially for non IT literate users. You could sense how good the service is.

My streamyx has also gone through frequent disconnection, very slow connection, going no-way to International site....it's really annoying and would sometimes drive you to mad if you are working on something. So, I was pretty envy the Streamyx Support team's courage when they post this announcement [via Screenshots] and this :D.

My streamyx is still surfering with some weird routing problem. For example, www.nba.com could resolved by DNS but you could never reach there in your browser. I am forced to use several proxy to cope with that.

The Changing of the Guard -- A Survey of Malaysia

It's no more a news and pretty outdated. I would just like to post it here for my own memory.

At first, The Economists published a series of articles analyzing what's happening in Malaysia. The series, titled "The Changing of the Guard – A Survey of Malaysia", contained 9 articles, written by Christopher Lockwood. It is published at Apr 5th issue of Economist. Then weeks later, it brought attention to Barisan Nasional leaders, particularly Acting Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Defence Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak. They started to hit out The Economist, stating what the survey said isn't true and it humiliate Dr Mahathir. Other Barisan Nasional leaders voiced out to support them, the issue has been getting more and more attention and running all over the medias recently.

I wasn't sensitive to such "political" issue. I knew this from blogs (Screenshots and Transitions) since blog reading has been my center of information gathering. If your only information source is local media, take these advice:

1. Read at least MalaysiaKini
   
2. Read these excellent Malaysian's blogs: Screenshots, Transitions, alphaque. It would be more out there and once more people is brought to blog, you get more chance to hear different voices.
   
3. Do your study. Get a chance to read The Economist's article in this case, do your judgement, don't simply follow leaders.

I can't comment the matter because I don't read the articles yet. What I got on Economist online was The changing of the guard, which is the first article in the series. The rest in the series are The greening of Malaysia, A tale from Terengganu, Anwar Ibrahim's long shadow, The slaugher of sacred cows, The big clean-up, Keeping up with the neighbours, An effusive welcome, A qualified success, which are premium content of Economist required subscription or payment. From what I have read at first article: The changing of the guard, which talk generally about the
post-Mahathir scenario. Based on what he perceived, the quality of the infrastructure, the money spent on big projects (KLCC, KLIA, MSC), not in fact impressed. Though, he did mentioned: "Malaysia, in short, has achieved remarkable successes, but there is reason to worry that they are not yet solidly bedded down, and they certainly owe more than they should to tough government action.".

Yeah, there is criticism. But it isn't as bad as humiliation. Is it really that big deal in the rest of the series? Our BN leaders has been used to state we shouldn't bother western media. Should they bother now? Or should all media being banned once there is critism on us? Look, people come, doing research/analysis, publish what they have learned and their opinion. That's what media do. Sometimes there is political rationale behind the story, sometimes don't -- it's just an article. However, I can't really comment until I do read the whole series. Meanwhile, I have chosen to keep an eye on it by reading these:

Screenshots

• Economist April 5 edition:
  What took Pak Lah and Najib 3 weeks to respond?
  
• Pak Lah now wants apology from Economist.By the way, Dr M will be back soon.
  
• Economist issue: Najib up-staging Pak Lah
  
• A race to show who could be more loyal to Dr Mahathir?
  
• Economist: Chun Wai does't read it either
  
• Economist: No apology to Malaysia; latest issue delayed.

Transitions:

• Chapter by chapter commented by Oon Yeoh
  
• Another comment on the issue:

  "From the magazine's acknowledgements of those who helped them with the story, it is clear that they spoke to a very large number of known opponents of Dr. Mahathir and the government," Pak Lah says. "These critics, who include opposition party leaders and pro-opposition media people, never have anything good to say about us anyway. Only a few of the people acknowledged by the writer are either neutral or pro-government."

  My thought: Could you deny these are also people who got influence in certain area? They do represent large or small part of Malaysian.
  
• Government leaders continue to whack the Economist
  
• Revisited on The Economist's articles
  
• Comment on Wong Chun Wai's column (The Star)

A search on The Star with "Economist": news of Economist issue.

Check out how local media handle this issue. I didn't see any view point from Economist in local media except anger of BN leaders making all the headline. The only exception, MalaysiaKini did bring the issue back to The Economist and have the author's words on it. That said a lot of providing multi-angles view of issue.

RSS moving forward

A group of pundits are going to work on the current RSS 2.0 spec, particular Sam Ruby. Check out his blog on Namespace Proposal, RSS not just for syndication anymore, Ghost of RSS past and Future of RSS. Lot of discussion going on, read and take an eye on it though I ain't knowledgable on RSS to contribute yet.

Busy day. All I could do is ping, read, and point to.

Amazon and Blog?

Google already bought Blogger. What sort of idea would be out with Amazon and MovableType? - Six Apart met with Jeff Bezos. This is for good, in my opinion.

Can't access to DiveIntoMark

Is Mark's blog went down in the past 12-14 hours? I was not able to access it. It might be some routing problem of my Internet access.

However, just checked, it's there. Glad to see it back online.

SARS Blog

Apparently there is much better coverage and brilliant blog about SARS in Malaysia. Screenshots, a blog of columnist Jeff Ooi (who is also the founder of USJ.com.my). He blogged a lot about War on Iraq and SARS, which also made his blog being popular. How ignorant am I not noticing his excellent blog? :) With his blog as a starting point, to Malaysiakini columnist Oon Yeoh's blog, and towards many other Malaysians' weblogs. Wow...it's really something new to me. I didn't really know there are so many of M'sian blogs out there. It's great. Blogosphere is great but we sometimes do need to get around neighbourhoods to have a feel of home.

The other blog, Wangjianshuo's blog, covers what happening in Shanghai, China. I am sure that are lots of blogs about SARS in Shanghai, mostly in Mandarin. Wang Jian Shuo's blog shows you how a day like in Shanghai while it's under the threat of SARS.

SARS "Index" Update

From Malaysia local paper:

Reported deaths, by country and worldwide:

• China (mainland): 131
  
• Hong Kong: 133
  
• Singapore: 22
  
• Canada: 21
  
• Vietnam: 5
  
• Thailand: 2
  
• Malaysia: 2
  
• Philippines: 2
  
• Taiwan: 1
  
• [Worldwide: 319]

Reported cases of probable infections, by countries with highest numbers and worldwide:

• China (mainland): 2,914
  
• Hong Kong: 1,543
  
• Singapore: 199
  
• Canada: 142
  
• [Worldwide: More than 4,800]

There are new probable cases found almost everyday. Sarawak (Malaysia) has new cases these few days. SARS cases found and probably spread in a hospital in Taiwan... Though WHO's latest outbreak report shows situation in Vietnam stay stabled, no underreporting of SARS cases in Shanghai, it's still no good in Shanghai and Hong Kong SARS progress. People still suffer the fear and try to move away from affected cities (Shanghai, Beijing). Malaysia is better in term of number of cases. However, the fingerpointing between Health Ministry and media revealed that people didn't really trust the ability on risk management of government. We keep hearing rumour and find people don't really trust the news announced by our government. Is it normal because of the critical outbreak, so people tend to guessing and spreading rumour? Or mainly it's just we lost the confidence on how our government handle the previous outbreak of Dengue and Nipah disease? Building trust is important, how you stand up and taking critial action ASAP, it'd calm people down and reduce the damage to the least.

Time reports on financial effect of SARS:

The financial toll, meanwhile, is already catastrophic. Economists predict that China and South Korea could each suffer some $2 billion in SARS-related losses in tourism, retail sales and productivity. Japan and Hong Kong stand to lose more than $1 billion apiece, and Taiwan and Singapore could lose nearly that much. In Canada, meanwhile, J.P. Morgan Securities Canada estimates that Toronto is losing $30 million a day. All told, says WHO, the global cost of SARS is approaching $30 billion.

More:

• SARS Info Center
  
• SMH's reporting on SARS
  
• Graph: Chain of transmission among guests at Hotel M -- Hong Kong, 2003 [Article]
  

TopicExchange

The Internet Topic Exchange, an implementation of Ridiculously Easy Group Forming concept, powered by Trackback, providing a centralized tracking of discussed topics/subjects/ideas. The idea is like: you post in your blogging tool, attach it to a topic/subject, public it somewhere, and ping the centralized place (e.g. TopicExchange), then users could have a list of discussed posts in their view. Better yet, linking this to blogging tool, blogger read the list of posts on certain subjects while blogging (via XMLRPC, SOAP).

It's still stage of experiments. You get new things everyday in Blog. Cool.

Font Bitch of Microsoft Html Help file (chm)

Almost all the technical books come with an electronic version in attached CDROM nowadays. Their eBook format most likely falls under PDF, HTML or CHM. I got a few eBooks in Microsoft Html Help format (extension of .chm). It's a pretty nice format though you could only execute it under Windows. With proper designed CHM file, you got the easy navigation options of contents, index and search. That's good, it is opened faster than PDF so I used to open CHM file for searching. Instead, it's quite a standard help file format now for numbers of Windows application.

But, most of the chm files I got has the average small font size. And I CAN'T change the FONT SIZE. That's annoying! It's not really you can't change the font size. When I first notice there is no option allowed me to change font size. Thinking of it's Microsoft product, then it must be using IE to view their archived/encoded html help file. So I change the View->Text Size to largest, hoping that it take affect on the chm file opened later. NO, it didn't work. Then, google it. Search with "Html Help font size", or "Microsoft Html Help..." won't do you good because that's more famous html help: HTML Help by The Web Design Group. "CHM Font size" get me what I wanted. Yes, it did link with IE. Despite changing the View->Text Size in IE, you need to hold down Ctrl and roll your mouse scroll wheel to change the chm file font size. If this also didn't work, or you're still stick with the traditional mouse, you got to do it the hard way: find some tool to decompile the chm file, it's just archived of group of html files. Change the font setting and using the chm authoring tool to re-compile it.

Further search shows Microsoft Support site has an article instruct how to add a Font Button in chm file toolbar, which allow users to change the font size of the content. Therefore, please, if you are a Windows developer constructing the help file for your application, or you are the publisher who decide to put the ebooks in chm file format, DO add the Font Button. That saves pain in the ass.

TypePad, top story of blog world

As many have blogged, the MT for non-geek users coming soon: TypePad. Six Apart should have done this much earlier. I am sure there are lot of users out there long for this hosted, installation/hassle free version of Movable Type, after hearing so many good things about it.

NBA Playoffs 2003, 3rd game of Spurs:Suns (99:86)

Spurs is now leading with 2:1. I like Suns. Looks, they have determined Marbury, Shawn Marion, backed from injury's Hardaway, and Rookies of the year Stoudemire, what an EXCITING team!! But they do need over-average, hot play, as what they did at the first game of playoffs with Spurs, else there is no way of advance to the next round. With 4 star players, powerful center is really what they lack of? Check out the rebound of this game: Spur 51, Suns 35. It means a lot to such a team.

Off-topic: It is difficult to get permenant link on tradictional news site. I can't easily find a permalink to Rookie of year 2003 in www.nba.com. This is really different than blog convention. High end media should learn and copy from Blog.

Users want to be in control

Low-End Media for User Empowerment>>

These technical issues will pass away with time. Within ten years, most users will hopefully have broadband, and user interface standards for websites will likely stabilize, making advanced features easier to operate.

Still, low-end media will remain a favorite because of one fundamental factor: it lets users control their experience. The Web exists to provide instant gratification. Users place their hand on the mouse and decide where to go. The easier it is for users to get exactly what they need, when they need it, the more satisfied they will be.

How many website managers need the education to learn about web usability? Low end media is a clear win over high end, complex media. As Jakob noted in his latest Alertbox, the key processes where users wanted to be in control: Reading, Finding relevant content, Authoring. It helps a lot to have a clear layout for users to read and navigate. It boost your website performance if it has less annoying and distracting multimedia on your web. Your website would be more reachable if Googlebot likes it. And good and easy authoring tools attract more writing, it means a lot to community website.

So, is weblog kind of low end media which wins? Yeah, sure. Blog community has excellent authoring tools. Most of the blogs providing clear and simple navigating. And google do like blogs, there are times the top search result come with blogs instead of those official websites. With brilliant blogger like Mark gave excellent guide on accessibility, blogs are more sensitive and friendly to users with disabilities.

The key problem is that's so many ignorant manager out there highly depend on design agencies, vendor -- who pushes whatever "happening" technology and whatever design tactic to increase earning.

Not a blog day

I am so tired day, physically and mentally lassitude. Partly because of the late slept last night, and also the annoyance of what happen in the office. You would be bothered by lots of things when you worked in a big corporate. The work assignment, political fighting, increment/promotion issues....Damn the bureaucracy

Double entries of Trackback?

I just noticed that when you accidentally post your blog entry twice (it did happen especially when you use blog client, e.g. w.bloggar), it cause the double entries of other's trackback. And if you delete the duplicated entry, it didn't reflect to your citing blog.

I don't really know how trackback in MT works. All I do is just enable the feature, it will ping to whatever URL you put in your post and generate the trackback. Obviously there is no one "rollback" feature, where you delete your post, it "ping" others to throw the trackback as well...

Trackforward: Information Survey on Salon/Radio Blogger

via Dave Johnson -> Scott Rosenberg -> Dave Pollard's 6 questions survey for Salon/Radio Blogger. Here's the 6 questions he asked if you don't bother to browse over:

1. How do you publicize your blog?
2. What do you like/dislike about the existing Salon/Radio features?
3. What additional functionality is needed in Salon/Radio?
4. How do you decide what to read and what to blogroll?
5. What's your advice to newbie bloggers?
6. How do you gauge the success of your blog?

What's your answer? Just applied the questions to your favor weblog system. Here's mine:

Q1. How do you publicize your blog?
To be accessible to public, Google always come to be first choice. So I go to add an entry to Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). There are quite a few search engines using ODP's directory. All I have to do is just add my blog to it and wait. The next step would be adding blog url to blog monitoring service, e.g. Daypop, Blogdex. MT has the feature to ping weblogs.com for the blog updating. Just have to enable it.

Q2. What do you like/dislike about the existing MT features?
I like the customizable, hackable of MT though I don't know about Perl. There are lots of resources regarding how to hack around MT on net, and growing MT-plugins ready to use. However, MT isn't quite friendly to non-geek users. I hope there would have more themes design of MT availble on net, then you could just copy-n-paste on your index/stylesheet template to change the looks of your blog.

Q3. What additional functionality is needed in MT?
Hmm...So far I am happy with it in these 3 weeks usage. Can't think of any enhancement yet. Could it be that perfect?

Q4. How do you decide what to read and what to blogroll?
This is an easy one. My preference go to technical blog. Any blog talks about good technical stuff would be blogrolled by me. And blog-to-blog recommendation also play key part to blogrolling.

Q5. What's your advice to newbie bloggers?
What's my advice? I am the newbie blogger who need the advice. Generally I'd noticed there are good articles blog about blogging, e.g. living web, write better blog. Go read them. Familiar with your blog tool would help a lot. So be use a good tool with great support and community, like MT.

Q6. How do you gauge the success of your blog?
I just started it. And as most others, it's justified by personal satisfication and having fun :-).

Off-topic 1: Why do Radio has to use numbering in blog url? Isn't that ugly and against usability?

Off-topic 2: Good to find good reading through blog-to-blog, it's trackforward, not trackback.

SQSH

I forgot to mention sqsh. It's a tool designed with intention to replace isql for Sybase. There are a few key applications in our company use Sybase. So it's my everyday tool. Sqsh could be built in most of the Unix system. And it could be executed under Windows with Cygwin library. Why is it my favourite tool? It provide a shining feature where isql can't compete with (if you have to work in command line env): sqsh could pipeline your SQL query with your shell. It's common to use the following usage:

sqsh> select * from tableName

sqsh> go > tablename.txt


sqsh> sp_help

sqsh> go | grep favortable

sqsh> select name from person

sqsh> go | grep simon | sort | uniq

sqsh> select......

sqsh> go | myfilter.sh | more

You could do the post-processing, filtering of your SQL query result with quick customizable shell script. Or just some quick-n-dirty hack. It's just too much useful compare to the plain old isql. You should try it if you're still frequently query your Sybase database with isql.

Command Line Fun

John Gruber is enjoying the command line fun with running PHP, enhanced "rm", appswitch in his Mac OS X box.

I am an UNIX guy, but most of the times the machine I used at the work installed with Windows. Although I am quite happy with the GUI of Windows, I tends to spend more time to put my hand on keyboard instead of mouse. That's the joy brought from Cygwin to me. What is Cygwin? Cygwin is an UNIX environment for Windows. And it come with lots of powerful tools ported from Unix. Better yet, it has a friendly setup wizard nowadays. The setup allow you to install directly from Internet or local. All you have to do is just select the wanted packages/softwares, it would fix it up for you, no dependency hassle! Back to old days of Cygwin B18, B19 version, there always problems of figuring which version of library to install and what extra libraries needed. Now you don't have to worry, what we need to do is act like an plain normal users. The setup works like a charm!

It's good to have tools like gawk and cURL. I got many simple scripts done in AWK or PHP to process lots of files. What's the choice you have in Windows? The old DOS batch file scripting? VBS/WSH? Thank God I got Cygwin and the tools come with it. Shell scripting is more fun then and tools like grep, awk, cURL, even php/perl/python just simply work! They get the jobs done.

The Blog Stock Exchange

I just got my blog listed. Oops, even though I just started to learn about the BlogShares. It is going to go live in 7 days!! The share would be reset and users' cash would be brought forward. That means you gonna sell as lot as you could to enjoy the beta benefit. :-)

Too bad, don't think I got any chance to sell my shares as the blog started only for 1 to 2 weeks. I am still wondering anybody read the blog or not?

Blog nervosity

I bet lots of people having the similiar experience when they starting their blog. The blogger care about their blog statistics: how many eye balls have been brought over here? How many hits per day? Do I get the trackback? Anybody come to drop a comment, please.... Well, that's usual. One would only get motivated while what's he/she doing get the feedback. And no matter the feedback is either positive or negative, it encourage the bloggers (in terms of more pleasure to blog or more anger to yell back :-).

I used to check frequently on my site statistics on first week of blogging. It made no points though I can't resist to. That I called it Blog nervosity. As 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web suggested: write for a reason, write often/tight.... There are tons of good tips/suggestion out there to help you write good weblog. However, with understanding that not everyone could make good blog, I would always take Relax as rules no. 1. Yeah, just relax and forget all the rules. Say what you want to and be quiet when you feel not like to. Easy.

SARS Crisis

Second SARS death in Malaysia confirmed. The most concerned thing of people now is the "SARS Index", which indicated how many "probable SARS cases", "suspected SARS cases" and number of people quarantined. The fear is widely spreaded. I felt pretty tensed while I was in my hometown (Johor, soutern area of West Malaysia) and watching Singapore TV. There is news about SARS progress around every 15 minutes on TV. Watching them didn't get me learn more about the disease, except nervous.

War is _almost_ over. We really hope this SARS outbreak could be over very soon. I wonder should my friends and I still go to Lang Tengah for our May trip, as planned two months ago. All we could do is wait-and-see.

SARS Information:

• WHO SARS site
  
• Unprecedented collaboration pinpoints new coronavirus as cause of SARS
  
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  
• Local paper: China raises SARS death toll by six to 92
  
• SARS Information Poster
  
• SARS Blog
  

MT Localization

I setup my Chinese Blog using MT with zh_TW encoding. It is not actually zh_TW encode, but utf-8 (Unicode) encoding of zh_TW language (Traditional Chinese). MT Localization team did a good work (also help from Jedi). All I need to do is to download the zh_tw.utf8.pm archive and the graphs/icons. Put them into proper places (zh_tw.utf8.pm at $MT/lib/MT/L10N, lang-zh-tw graphics folder put under images). Then create an user whose language preference is zh_tw. It's done.

It suppose should be done as everything works well, from displaying proper language and icons, to posting your articles in utf-8 encoding. But the text messed up after you posted! I have tried setting browser encoding to utf-8, zh_TW. All didn't work on posting. Or it might work after you first posted, displayed properly while you viewing your site. But the text display while you edit the post, is scrambled. The utf-8 charset was manually changed in main index template instead of setting MTCharset in mt.cfg. I use the same MT system to manage 2 blogs in different language, that might be the cause.

I am wondering why not trying other software. b2 looks pretty nice. I've installed it in my Windows and trying it out. It is written in PHP, which means it's more hackable to me (I don't know Perl).

What's your Winer Number

That's definitely a way to make famous people more popular. Guess we'd going to have 2 more acronyms in blog community, where WN stand for Winer Number, and EWN stand for Extended Winer Number. Check it out at Mark's post.

I couldn't really following what happened when I read Mark's Enough already. It should because I am not a regular reader following all the happening regarding RSS. Until reading this, and Winer Number. I do sense something about Dave over some posts on mailing list/forums. I was just among others, initially reading lots of his articles/blog when getting to blog world. And then surf away. As first knowing Blog, one thing I always complained about scripting.com was why it took so long to load. I also found weird of own webserver implementation of Radio Userland, and its unfriendly outliner/scripting environment -- I thought it was because I never used Mac then. MT come to rescue...

Mark really got the good sense of humour. Why is he acting like this? He explained. You could check Kevin Burton's experience as well. :)

Swimming

I went to swimming this evenning, as a starting point to fight with my fat tummy. Just hope it could be back to how it's look like 20 months ago. I was 68KG then, and I am 76KG now. It feel terrible to have a fat body, especially the feel of you can't work out anything on it.

I do play badminton once a week. The game is pretty tense, it helps a lot to burn calorie. But not the storable fat. Thus I guess it's time again to get back to swim. Swimming is nice, you got a feel that you are JUST belong to yourself while you swim. Nothing could distract you and swim, there is only thing happen at the time. That's great. I really like it (though I got lazy to drive through the massive traffic jam, in order to reach the swimming pool).

Post & Publish in w.bloggar

The feature "Post & Publish" of w.bloggar doesn't seem working with MT. I used to click Post&Publish while I was using BlogBuddy to post to Blogger. In Blogger, "post" means to add your post into your blogger database; "publish" would publish your post to where you host your blogger site (mostly through FTP). To me that's the reason why "Post & Publish" didn't work on MT. MT is hosted where the XML-RPC located and I have set the default post status as "Publish" instead of "Draft". So, clicking "Post" on w.bloggar just simply work for me.

[Update] I am wrong. I have the impression that the Post&Publish didn't function for MT because it keep showing time out while I was trying at home yesterday. Heck, my careless. It did work! "Post" would only put the post into MT database, even though you have set the default post status to publish.

Dano: New Blogger

I forgot where I saw it in my morning blog reading. The new Blogger come to release soon. What's new and what would have been broken with the old version? Check out its FAQ. Here's a quote from preview release note:

Known Issues at Time of Preview Release

• API: applications using the current version of the Blogger API (e.g. AudioBlogger) will not work with Dano blogs. We will be creating a solution to allow these applications to use the new version of the API.
  
• Active FTP: publishing your Blog via FTP will not work if your webhost only supports active FTP (those users needing active FTP access had been relying on the pro1.blogger.com publisher). While Dano currently only supports passive FTP publishing for external sites, we will also plan to introduce sFTP.
  
• Contextual help is not complete and not yet available in LoFi.
  
• Profile editting is not included.
  
• Mail-to-Blogger is not working in Dano.
  
• Filtering by draft posts is not enabled.
  
• Limited template set will be expanded
  
• Caching problem with View Blog tab: this tab does not get refreshed until a new post is made i.e. template changes will not be reflected here until post publication (although template preview will show these changes). You can work around this problem by changing your browser's settings to always check the current page against the cache.
  
• Save Post dialog presents confusing options: clicking away while a current post is being written will prompt with a Save Post dialog. Clicking OK will save the post, clicking Cancel will not.
  
• Team invitations: can only invite 3 team members at a time. This interface will be improved.
  

Win32 Blog Clients for MT

I am searching for a blog application running under Windows, allow me to post to my weblog without going to the web. Yeah, the web interface provide the portability and it's good I could use it anywhere as long as Internet is accessible. But we lazy people just always like to use the some little rich-interface tools of the environment. From MT's manual of describing using XML-RPC implementation with existing tools, I got these options:

• w.bloggar
• BlogApp
• BlogLet
• BlogBuddy
• Jericho

BlogApp is only for Mac OS X and BlogLet is a service for provide subscription of your blog via email, so these two are out of options (My home PC running WinXP so I got to use something run on Win32). The experience with the rest is as following:

BlogBuddy
Installation of BlogBuddy is easy: download the archive, unpack and point it to where you want to install. When you first running it, you'd get the following screen:

The interface is pretty obvious, go to Tools->Options, set your MT username/password. Then go to "Remote site" tab, type in your host at Host name, and input the location of your mt-xmlrpc.cgi at Endpoint. It is done, next to go to "Blogs" tab, click the "Update Blogs" button and you get blog information loaded. You could start to add new post or getting existing post for editing. (You would need to set the proxy setting if your Internet access have to go through proxy)

BlogBuddy has a simple and easy-to-use interface. But there is no option to specify the category of post. It didn't offer much help on HTML syntax except adding link and formatting your text to bold/italic/underline.

w.bloggar
w.bloggar is a freeware blog tool supports Blogger, b2, MovableType, Nucleus, BigBlogTool, BlogWorks XML, Blogalia and Drupal blogs. Indeed, most of these systems implement Blogger API (MovableType implements Blogger and metaWeblog XML-RPC API). It seem Blogger API has been de facto standard of blog XML-RPC API.

w.bloggar give users a standard Windows setup program to install it, and it come with a default English spell checker. BlogBuddy is using The Stuffed Dog's service to provide spell checking. The first running of w.bloggar would ask you to setup your blog account:

Then the setup screen pop-up for you to input the key information. It has a pretty clear instruction for MT users. Select "MovableType" from Blog Tools, give your blog an alias name. Just follow the sample given in the config box, set your host and location of mt-xmlrpc.cgi. As BlogBuddy, it is done after you set the key information (your username/password, hostname, xml-rpc cgi). You could start enjoying remote posting/editing your blog!

Jericho
At the time when I download Jericho, there is only source code provided and you need Ant to build it. I download Ant, install it, then type "ant gui" at the place where I unpack Jericho to. It start building Jericho and bring up Jericho GUI after build has been done.

At first, you have to choose a service, the option is either Blogger or Manila. Select Blogger, then input your username/password on login screen, put the Server to "other" (else it would point to the default blogger.com server). The next screen you are required to input the full path of your mt-xmlrpc.cgi (e.g. http://www.yourserver.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi if your mt-xmlrpc.cgi is put under /mt). Again, once these key information given, it's done and the blog roll. :)

I am sure there are more tools out there could achieve the same thing I needed for my MT blog. But I guess it's enough by just taking look on these 3 blogging client. Jericho is running reasonably in my PC, though its interface is a bit too plain. BlogBuddy is nice but I need the category feature. In other words, w.bloggar suit my need very well: it has category feature, with more functions supporting HTML syntax, and a nice-looking UI. At this time, w.bloggar is version 3.00.0139, BlogBuddy is version 0.5, Jericho also version 0.5. Checking the development log showing w.bloggar is more agressively developed.

In short, my choose go to w.bloggar!

Old vs Current vs Next Web

While I was playing around with CSS, learning a bit about XHTML, I got the exact same feeling as Sterling Hughes. As he noted: I want my web back. Isn't these technology supposed to be more obvious to human? I don't know. I am a long time C/C++ developer and ever developing with Java/VB. It's easy for me to start HTML coding (as nature as other programmer or non-programmer) without keep following the standard and trend. Maybe it's because of the non-concentration on this web technology, where I still pretty much stay at the old client-server and Unix programming world. Or maybe it's just the same stuff where vendors' implementation/own benefit collide with the standard, then causing all the mess....

Even though, I still prefer the current going with CSS/XHTML/XFORM...but I wonder how many web developers out there have adopted it? More than 50%? I 've got a feel of like C++ communities, where one of the gruop focusing on all pragmatic issue regarding their product, without knowing much of deployment of C++ template/generic programming; and other group focusing much on the standard compliant, complicated semantics issue (it take how many years for one C++ developer to understand most of the its semantic?), and the exciting template experiments.

Whatever it is, choose what are you comfortable for. Let the market decide by itself.

Messenger Spam

Ever since I got my DSL broadband installed at home, there are spam coming and pop-up as normal message box. It never show up as I was doing something, mostly when I didn't off the PC and came back from work, something as following show up:

What the heck?! A simple click to let it go away as I first seeing it. It come more and more recently, then I start paying attention to what "it" said. Realizing it's sort of spam via Windows default messenging service, I have to say spam is really everywhere. They tried as hard as they could and never give up. But what's wrong with their mind, don't they do some marketing? As the example above, sending some IP located in Malaysia and offer property renting?! Come on, use your brain, spammer. May the bad luck always with you!

My home PC running WinXP Pro, disable the Messenger service at Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services and change its Startup Type to manual could solve the problem. Well, I never need to type "net send somebody" in order to communicate with someone at home :).

Mozilla Phoenix/Minotaur Renaming

Phoenix, the Mozilla browser project which is a redesign of Mozilla browser component, has been renamed to Firebird. And Minotaur, the clone of Mozilla Mail/News component, is renamed to Thunderbird.

The renaming of Phoenix was needed due to the legal issue, which the name against trademark of Phoenix Technologies (a BIOS maker). It seem a obvious change from name Phoenix to Firebird. Unfortunately, the name "Firebird" was taken by an Open Source RDBMS Engine. The Firebird DB is a continue development of Borland Interbase Database since Borland released Interbase 6.0 source code to Open Source community.

There is no legal issue against the name chosen. But I took it as unhealthy to Open Source world. Although there is little or even no cross over of two community, it did bring confusion. Mozilla is a pretty high profile project nowadays, and whatever its application group take would surely affect other application's territory. Naming is always difficult, more difficult while there are more people involved in decision making. And whatever name you choose, there might have dozen application out there in SourceForge taken the same name. However, it would still be better to survey the market and politely query other group's opinion before taking the conclusion.

Backup of the blog

I wonder could I ask my hosting company to config the my.cnf of my MySQL DB, then to setup a Master/Slave replication between their server and my home PC. I got DSL broadband at home, so it sounds feasible at my side. Is this a good way to backup the blog entries? Or we have to manually export the entries periodically?

Talk about MySQL replication, Jeremy Zawodny has posted the slides of his presentations in recent MySQL Conference. I got to start study it from his talk.

Auto-acronym

While busy on adding this little and that little tricks on MT template, it might be good to blog on them too. Acronym is apparently a good way to save typing and release your reader of scratching head in figuring out what these weird capital letters really mean.

ManiacalRage has a pretty clear instruction on automate the acronym formatting in MT's template. You have to get the useful MTPerlScript and MTMacro from Brad Choate. Then to construct a template module for macros by yourself, or grab an example in instruction above and modify it. Applying the MTMacroApply on the entries...More could be applied and extended in further deployment. But you get it, that's the beauty of MT! Lots of plugins and ready-to-use tools out there for MT community! And all you have to do just do a simple search, grab the tools, follow instructions and phew...your wanted feature is there!

MTEntriesFooter

There is no calendar for blog navigation, so it's obvious to put the link to the previous entry at the bottom. I first trying put extra MTEntries tag for MTEntryPrevious link (In fact, I have to admit not realizing whether it should be "previous" or "next" -- next blog entries or the one before the posted...). It's an obvious thought that MTEntries would recursively putting your post, so doesn't sound right to have a "previous post" link inside it. After everything is done, out of curiousity, I went searching in the manual. Bingo! There is MTEntriesFooter, which serve what I really wanted. Here's the quote from MT manual:

A container tag: the contents of this container will be displayed only if this entry is the last entry listed in the container. This could be used, for example, to link to the preview entry's archive page from your index page

Another category "MT-tricks" is added. Guess figuring how to add more than 5 categories would be my next target...

OK, what's up?

Check out the last entry! When is it written? It's almost 2 months ago. What happened to me?

Reading blog is a everyday thing to me. Yet I haven't fire up the engine to use to blog writing. For my past experience with a Userland Radio powered blog and Blogger blog, they all stopped after several months. Then I decided to spend the effort getting a domain and hosting for myself, and for this blogging. What so big deal about the blog? There's million blogs out there and why I so care about my (English) writing skill, layout of the site...etc...

Maybe I should just take it easy, things go easy when you relax and just follow your sense. The page is ready now and I try to put down more of my thought :).

Without knowing much of CSS, I insist to try designing my own layout of the blog and utilize CSS. That's nice! I have lots of fun over last whole week playing around with CSS and reading output of all these genius:

• glish's CSS Layout Techniques
  
• The Layout Reservoir
  
• css/edge
  
• A List Apart: Not Dead
  

Thanks for all these brilliant effort, therefore I could skip the W3C CSS Spec :P.

The design is going on. The next step would have to read Mark's Dive into Accessibility. It's a great learning experience, may the great source with me.