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May 31, 2003

MovableType 2.64 Released

Movable Type version 2.64 released. Checking on its full change log, it’s basically a bug fix release to fix bug on comments, Trackback, notification, stylesheet…etc. The new version replace RSS 0.91 template with RSS 2.0, which is a good move. The Clean default stylesheet’s has been changed so you needn’t to scroll to view full content in IE.

Since I was just complaining about some problem regarding Trackback auto-discovery, can’t resist to upgrade my blog to version 2.64, hoping it could solve the problem. The change log didn’t specify clearly what it has fixed of Trackback auto-discovery problem.

It’s a bit tedious to FTP over and uploading those changed files (I used the upgrade version). Nevertheless, it works! I also don’t have to run any script to upgrade from 2.63 to 2.64.

May 30, 2003

A micro-payment experiment

Two weeks ago, David Appell, a full time freelance science writer, start an experiment if he could raise $200 from contribution from his readers, he would publish his investigation of Sugar Association’s pressuring WHO on its diet study.

That’s interesting. Some would obviously think this guy is crazy and his study not even worth the spent of 5 bucks. Some just raise the hand, take the money out of pocket: count me in! Of course 5 dollars is just what you spent to get any single magazine, where you probably only interested in one or two articles inside. If his essay is thoughtful and valuable, why not? That’s a pretty good path to independent journalism.

In Malaysia, RM5 would easily settle a lunch. People here don’t seem value information (or, knowledge?) that much though. The economic model is different. But I wonder if some good writer want to offer an article for RM 0.50, would anyone consider to take it?

David’s experiment outcome seem quite encouraging. He got $370 within 24 hours. And up to May 23, he’d received $425 so far. There are people care and interested in reading about sugar, diet and politics. He got the market, well done.

May 29, 2003

How do you justify usability testing?

There is no silver bullet. It takes years for software industry to develop methodology to improve software development process. Then it came the debugging skills and understand the important of testing.

It’s always about design choice, nobody is going to be right at the first design. Thus the testing pay off, and the sound methodology ensure the better outcome.

These are the questions asked to Jakob Nielsen:

His answer. Although it basically talk about UI design, I feel it could apply to lot of fields of softwares. So I would know what to answer if boss asking what to justify unit test…

TrackBack auto-discovery problem?

It seem the TrackBack auto-discovery didn’t work properly. I was able to send the ping by just including other MT site’s permalink. I suppose it grab the external link and extract the trackback ping URL, then send the ping. But it didn’t function now. I did turn on and off the features back then to avoid duplicate ping. Would that make it mulfunction? Don’t think so.

Right now, I got to remember to copy other’s trackback URL and paste into the box labeled “URLs to ping”. To me it’s tedious, not friendly.

MSC Trustgate sack its chief scientist

I was reading Start In-tech and went through this article: The pro and his con. To my surprise that is somebody could make up such brilliant credential and thought he could last with that. Isn’t he too smart? The quoted paragraph shows the credential made up by Michael Chong

He had doctorates in digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasting from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); in microelectronics from Cornell University; in manufacturing from the University of Lausanne; and in electrical and computer systems engineering from University of Oklahoma.

This was in addition to MBA and MSc degrees from two Australian universities.

He had worked as executive vice-president for Disney World Technologies, was senior vice-president at Digital Equipment Corp, a vice-president at Aaron Spelling Productions, and a systems coder at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre.

He was then hired as chief scientist by MSC Trustgate to design and develop a DMS. How the fraud was being found? In Tech did a check on his credentials while asking for an interview with him. Then the finding was sent to MDC, which partly owns MSC Trustgate. And at more or less the same time, the company has suspected him while they found his knowledge isn’t reflect what he claimed. To end of the story, he admitted the fraud and surrendered the programming work, yet MSC Trustgate didn’t take legal action against him.

The story sounds pretty familiar. I recalled to read sort-of the same event years ago. First to check on Screenshots, Jeff did blog about this, his reader wrote to him and it seem the guy isn’t doing this for the first time:

The email writer claimed Michael Chong had only one PhD when his Singapore-based dotcom hired the con-artist in 2000 as CTO under similar circumstances: The CTO was leaving. A replacement is needed. IPO was in the works. …

The writer said his company filed a police report in Singapore and admitted that it should have done the same in Malaysia since “he was hired in KL to go to Singapore.”

Wow…it seem there are more stories, but nope, this isn’t what I rememberred. It got to be some cases regarding Singapore dot com company.…later with further searching, I got it:

Internet got your footstep. May be company should adopt the habit to do some search on somebody whom they’re going to employ. Or may be they should check if the person got a blog. Would it make sense?

Search Engine of Blogland

Weblogs.com and blo.gs have been center of the blogworld that most of the weblogs would ping them upon a new entry posted or updated. With the ping-centered list, and RSS auto-discovery, the blogland are ready for RSS specified indexing and search engine.

So did Google ready for it? Would there a new tab “RSS” added to the existing search tab in google? Or a “rss:xxxx” searching syntax enhanced in web searching? What made a difference to generally search on Google with searching in Blogland? Think about this: you have just watched the Champions League final of Juventus v.s. AC Milan. Feeling excited and want to talk about it, and you ain’t member of any forum/community, what could you do? Go search on blogs! Find someone who blog about it and some blog with the comment system. That’s the value of a blog-centered searching system, it’s about ordinary people. You got to wonder what ordinary people think about an event after you read or tired of the major news media (well, news.google.com ain’t human at all)…

What’s the choice we have of RSS search engine?

May 28, 2003

Personal Domain Name for Malaysian

[via Screenshots] The registrar of the .my domain, MYNIC, is going to launch a new domain category under .my TLD by this July. They have published a public consultation paper (note: pdf) to ask for public’s comments on the not yet decided personal domain name. There is even a poll running at MYNIC website for the voting of new domain name (the voting seem didn’t function at the mean time). From the poll result, .me.my is getting the most vote among others (.name.my, .nama.my, .nam.my). My preference would be .name.my since it sync with TLD .name.

There are currently 6 categories under country code TLD .my: .com.my, .net.my, .org.my, .edu.my, .gov.my and .mil.my. None of them could be registered by individual but organization. So the new domain would be a clear acknowledgement to the request of individual eligible domain.

May 26, 2003

More blog rolling

Martin Fowler has a blog now. Nope, he didn’t call it a blog, it’s a combination of blog and Wiki. It’s bliki. And via him, more my favour authors’ blog discovered: Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt and others who use the same blogging tool RubLog. RubLog is developed with Ruby. Dave and Andy are both authors for The Pragmatic Programmer and Programming Ruby. Both are excellent technical books, one would definitely benefit you no matter you are start learning how to program or you got years of experience (read: it’s pragmatic); the other one would be the best buy if that’s the only book you’re going to buy for learning Ruby. I was once enthusiastic for Ruby’s elegant and neat structure.…less time to pratice it later though

Reading regularly only a few blogs (check my right blogroll column), it might be time now to survey and get a decent RSS reader/aggregrator for my increasing blog reading. Guess it’s good to link more blogs too, that I’d get more chance to read good article, bigger possibility to know more people, and getting more popular?

Sneezing

Oh, no.…I can’t stop sneezing.…I used to have light nose allegy, and really really hate it!! Remember I was sick a fews day ago, here it come again…

Interview

About 1 month+ ago, I was pretty fed up with my working environment. I thought why not start my job search engine again, after 2 years engaged with this company. Well, then I went to Jobstreet and submitted a few job applications, without keeping much hope. Why? Because it seem I didn’t stand much chance with age over 30, because younger programmers are cheaper, because you ain’t get a manager position if you aren’t a manager yet.… In Malaysia, you didn’t much chance if you want to stay technical-focus/oriented and maintain your salary growth path.

And one month passed, last week that’s one response came suddenly. So I went for interview this evenning. The office looks good, bright and quiet environment, probably it’s due to off office hour. We didn’t go into details since the interviewer telling me it’s just a brief interview to know about candidates and they would shortlist suitable one for second round.

I asked him how he judged who is the suitable candidate since most of the resume looks quite similar? The interviewer is a kind and honest guy. He said obviously a properly written resume would get his eye balls first. There are tons of job application sending through email nowadays and worse, they’re all looks alike, they use job agency’s formatting (e.g. Jobstreet). It’s hard for a company to do resume filtering and profiling, and diffcult for them to know how good you are in particular area. Said for technical strength, everybody has the I-have-to-push-myself attitude and putting high score on everythings he/she could possibly handle/study or even just heard about. That’s how the current technical job market scenario.

However, it ain’t easy to skip away the hassle. Most of the applications still come with the same formatting and you couldn’t simply ignore them. Applicants still stand a chance to get interviewing. That’s how I get it. The guy said working experience is prioritized for such senior position. That’s great (but in my mind, I was wonder: well, it’s luck). For technical job, what I most worry is being interviewed by someone who couldn’t judge how good you are, instead of just depend on the submitted CV, which, probably happened in 8 out of 10 cases. While you are in that situation, what the heck possibly the interviewer could differentiate better among good? By document writing skill? Promoting skill?

What’s the morale? In short, if you want to find a job, you’re still obligate to prepare a resume properly, try to stay easily noticable by your targeting company is always the first step. Be cool, be nice, and prepare well for interview. And then, just wait for your luck. Yes, I am still believe it’s about fortune anyway after reading lots of article about smart interviewing.

May 25, 2003

Some things going on in Google

I think Jeremy is right. When I was back from trip, I found my site getting lots from hits from Google, even I haven’t blogged for 6 days then. And that’s because of my blog entry before Matrix Reloaded. On about 17/May to 21/May, it was the first link coming out in google no matter you’re searching for understanding/explaining/what’s happen in Matrix Reloaded (well, it seem lots of people don’t get what the hell happening in the movie).

I was surprised with that even though I was blogging about Animatrix (the anime series about Matrix). But then starting 22/May, the page never showed up again with same searching term, not anymore the first result. I then wondering it might due to lots of movie review of that movie was out and so they got higher ranks. Nope, not really, I found a few days later that googlebot seem treating my blog as the traditional static web pages rather as Blog?! Google is seem in a progress to take effort to remove blog from its search. It now showing your main blog URL instead of individual archive even you specifically search for that. Well, you could get away from that if you blog long enough in web. If you are new then probably google think it’s good enough to cache all but only display your main entry page.

Is it a smart move? Let’s wait and see what google is going to bring to the web, even it is pressure from commercial aspect.

May 22, 2003

Illness

I am sick again. In fact, never get well since back from Lang Tengah trip. I miss the healthy day.…you miss it especially you don’t feel well over a week, realizing how important health is. And when you ain’t feeling well, nothing you’d gonna be interested. No caring of my job, don’t feel like blogging, not even surfing Internet.…All you could do is take medicine, rest, and wait.

May 21, 2003

Jeff Ooi's blog moved

Glad to see Jeff Ooi’s blog moved from a blogspot URL to his own domain jeffooi.com. His blog is an great alternative to traditional paper if you’re interested in Malaysia news. Even Malaysiakini has put an front page link to his blog.

Great, he is now using MovableType as his blog system instead of blogger.com. Smart move, Jeff.

May 20, 2003

Back from trip

I was back from a trip to Lang Tengah late Sunday night. It’s nice to relax in the holiday week. No, it’s not that relax though. I got to drive 3 hours back to home town for my friend wedding banquet starting May 14, gathering and have fun in his traditional Chinese wedding ceremony the next day. And then rush back to Kuala Lumpur and flight to Lang Tengah on May 16. The schedule was a bit tight, and snookering, it’s all you get in such an isolated island (really hope I got an scuba diving license, that’d interesting to spend 3 days just diving around the island).

The worst thing came to me is I was sick the second day of the trip. My nose is very sensitive to dust, and now I found it’s been sensitive to dirty water too.

So, nice to be back. I did enjoy the feel of you-don’t-have-to-do-anything except staring at the sea, having a coffee around at the same time. I was just exhausted to come back at late night. But it was lucky I’ve taken the Monday’s off. Then, rest to recover from flu, catching up with all the blog reading (no blogging though), and got a wonderful chance to watch “The Matrix Reloaded” without crawded people. Yeah, I am happy and re-energized.

May 14, 2003

Lack of sleep

When you got stack of jobs need to be finished, you are running out of time, nobody around offer the help, even worse, you’re lack of sleep, your brain dead, what could you do? Well, the only thing I could do is just RELAX. That’s important, if you can’t make it, you’d be easily be fought down by the tension. Nevertheless, not sleeping enough really kill me, I am no more young that could stay clear and bright with less than 6 hours sleep.

It’s the holiday week in Malaysia. TodayTomorrow (May 15) is Wesak day, which celebrated by Buddhists. It marks three momentous events in Buddha’s life - his birthday, enlightenment, and achievement of Nirvana. And tomorrowtoday (May 14) is also another publilc holiday: Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday. We would go to Lang Tengah for a 3 days trip (starting May 16), guess it’s a nice to enjoy beach and sun again…

May 12, 2003

Before Matrix Reloaded

Kid staring at monitor,

Somebody tell me.
Why it feels more real when I dream than when I am awake
How can I know if my senses are lying?

There is some fiction in your truth,
and some truth in your fiction.
To know the truth, you must risk everything.

Who are you?
Am I alone?
…
You are not alone.

The whole world is now waiting a few more days, for Matrix Reloaded. Before this, to be warmed up, I watched Animatrix — The Matrix Anime. Yes, it’s cool and fascinating, you got to have the feel of re-understand Matrix. It is a series of Anime short films, showing stories of Matrix, explaining what happened before Matrix. The Animatrix was directed by Japanese, Korean and American famous animators, combining of both cool Anime and creativity.

I used to be fan of Japanese Anime/comics, so it’s just match my style. Andy and Larry Wachowski’s writing is still enjoying. If you still don’t get “What is the Matrix?”, go watch their “Second Renaissance Part I & II”. Well, then cross your finger, the Matrix, is coming soon.

Related:

Comments (6)

May 10, 2003

CSS Zen Garden: The beauty of CSS

[via Simon Willison], the css Zen Garden seriously take CSS into the field of pretty web page design. Based on the sample html code, the Zen Garden brings you several beautiful design by applying different stylesheet, to demonstrate what can be accomplished visually through CSS–based design.

It’s cool. You want some beautiful, cool web design, yes, CSS could do it too. Check it out for yourself. At the current moment, they have 6 designs available: tranquille, Salmon Cream Cheese, stormweather, arch4.20, Blood Lust, deep thoughts.

[Note: the “Blood Lust” seem having the worst browser compliance. I doubt if any of these work under any legacy browsers. As usual, it ain’t easy. Check out the feedback on mezzoblue, who created the css zen garden]

They encourage participation, if you want to test your css skills:

Download the sample html file and css file to work on a copy locally. Once you have completed your masterpiece (and please, don’t submit half–finished work) upload your .css file to a web server under your control. Send us a link to the file and if we chose to use it, we will spider the associated images. Final submissions will be placed on our server.

May 09, 2003

The possible cause of SARS Death - Severe immune reaction

While some of us have becoming insensible to SARS because it is a everyday not-surprising news now, it’s still good to learn more about this virus instead of over react to those SARS news.

There is misery of why SARS seem more attackable to age 20-40 youth, and those supposely with strong immune system like doctors, nurses (they deal with virus everyday). Dr Klaus Stohr, the WHO chief scientist for SARS, said the medical study in Hong Kong indicated that over-reaction of immune response, might be the cause of SARS death. As reported at The Straits Times, Singapore, Klaus said:

In the first week…the virus is replicating mainly in the upper respiratory tract, causing high fever and dry cough. But in the second week we see an over-reaction of the immune response, and in 20 per cent of cases that leads to very severe disease

The other report at NewScientist.com on severe immune response kill SARS victim:

An excessive immune reaction appears to be the fatal factor in patients who die of SARS, according to medical data from Hong Kong. The best estimate of the fatality rate of SARS is rising steadily and so understanding how the disease causes death is critical to finding the best treatments.

Scientists have also discovered that the SARS virus can remain viable for at least 24 hours after being deposited in a droplet on a plastic surface - a simulation, for example, of an infected person coughing on to the wall of a lift.

I was wondering why doctors and nurses seem easier to be infected by SARS, they should more used to disease than ordinary people. The hospital is full of disease and working everyday more or less stregthen your immune system. There are people around keep saying strong immune system is the only way to fight to SARS. That isn’t necessary true though it’s a good thing. In contrast, the study of the scientists doesn’t suggest we should maintain a weak immune system.

Further reference:

Comments (2)

Blog refactoring

Again, I was playing around with some MT plugins this morning. The permalink was changed to link on blog entry’s title instead of the date/time of posted, link on title seem more intuitive to most people. Kalsey’s SimpleComments is a good idea and I’ve seen quite a number of blogs using it. It combine both comments and trackbacks, treat all as “comments” to the topic. Kind of simplifying, I like it. However, without try to have a complete understanding of the SimpleComments tags, I’d just do some copy-n-paste, tuning a bit. Then it’s what this blog being now. It’s simpler now. Great.

Guess I’d better take some times to think about category and date based archives. I couldn’t care less to just let all entries of one particular category or month show in one page, that’s pretty too long.

May 08, 2003

Programmers' mental food: 08 May 2003

Paul Graham: The Hundred-Year Language

Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

Robert C. Martin: Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages? (comments)

Bill Venners: Can Static and Dynamic Languages Live in Harmony?

Bruce Eckel: Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing

The production time of software developers is critical for your software competency. That’s why better tools developed in order to help programmers to code more interactively, to modeling ahead by test planning. CPU cycle is sacrificed, but doesn’t matter, it’s cheap. It’s a well worth trade-off. The future would strengthen more on this and more experienced programmers tend to switch. Nope, lots of programmers already borned scripting…

Ken Arnold: Are Programmers People? And If So, What to Do About It?

Artima.com: A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

  1. Don’t Live with Broken Windows
  2. Orthogonality and the DRY Principle
  3. Good Enough Software
  4. Abstraction and Detail
  5. Building Adaptable Systems
  6. Programming Close to the Domain
  7. Programming is Gardening, not Engineering
  8. Tracer Bullets and Prototypes
  9. Programming Defensively
  10. Plain Text and XML

Zempt: Blog client for MT

Zempt, a multi-platform blogging client for Movable Type. I couldn’t find it at my last survey of blogging client. Look at the “features” :http://zempt.com/features/ it has and since I am using Movable Type, Zempt is sure a better choice than w.bloggar. Its Extended Entry, Category, Comments support seem really attractive to me :^). Can’t wait to try.

Zempt is created by Kalsey and Bill Zeller, take a look at what Kalsey said about it.

Mozilla 1.3.1 and 1.4b Released

Mozilla 1.4 Beta (Release Note) and 1.3.1 (Release Note) are out. Mozilla 1.3.1 was released to restore XPI functionality for Mac OS X users. In addition, initial implementation of Mozilla Midas, rich text editing controls, is included in 1.3.1.

Notable new features in 1.4 beta:

Mozilla has been my main web browser since version 1.2 (I am rarely using other browser such as Opera or IE after version 1.3, except for testing purpose). It has come to significant stage to be considered to replace IE since it rendered HTML better (showing prettier page, in my opinion), and hardly crashed. The only defeat is that it’s still out of those IE-specified designed websites.

My sister is doing publishing works with Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator. Last week she faced an IE problem after process some korea fonts related projects: all web pages displayed scrambled in IE, looks like korea fonts, but not. Uninstalling all the Asian fonts, upgrading IE6 to SP1 (with auto-upgrading in WinXP), all couldn’t work! Not bothering to search on MS support, I just introduced and installed Mozilla 1.3 for her. It works like charm! And definitely it isn’t hard for an IE user to switch over.

PHP Presentation Slides

Via PHP Everywhere, PHP slide-shows of recent conference have been posted at PHP Presents. The presentations are provided in formats of HTML, Flash 5 and PDF. John Lim’s favourite was High Performance PHP, and he learned something there to change his scripts.

PHP Everywhere contribute a high quality database library ADODB to PHP world, and they have a pretty nice product phpLen. ADODB has been great help to me on some of my projects, it works as a generic database access layer which avoid the hassle to go into different database details. I like ADODB and learn a lot from it. So if he could learn something from the slides, I could sure learn more.

Comments (1)

May 07, 2003

TheEdge: All Talk, No Action

TheEdge Daily published an article Open source: All talk, no action yesterday. Local open source people are pretty upset with the article carried by Sharmila Ganapathy, which it came to a conclusion that:

Still, the lack of open source adoption among the private sector in Malaysia indicates that most companies have, for now at least, decided it does not meet their business needs. That will, no doubt, be greeted with relief by Microsoft.

I couldn’t agree with the security issue mentioned in the article. But no points to go into that. Besides, it’s good to see Ritchie Lim’s deployment of Linux+PDA solution to their business need. And indeed it’s a cost on training of Open Source which some of the companies scared of (But isn’t Windows + MS Office need training too??)

You don’t see any statistics or data analysis showed in the article, except words from Open Source evangelist Dinesh Nair, Ritchie Lim — head of IT of Yeo Hiap Seng Bhd and Chu Hong Keong — CIO of of HSBC Bank Malaysia Berhad. These people either explained what Open Source is about, talk about their implementation experience, and address some of the issues of Open Source. It’s rather realistic and positive, in my opinion. So how’s the author came to the conclusion that “most companies have, for now at least, decided it does not meet their business needs”?! It sounds ridiculous if you could conclude this with just the perception of the low adoption rate of Open Source in Malaysia.

Nobody is going to argue about the adoption since it’s intuitively a fact at the current moment. But as Dinesh noted in his weblog, there are certain achievement by local Open Source group, and Yeo Hiap Seng’s take of Open Source approach as an example, that showed the successful implementation of Open Source. Just as other development area, Malaysia is way slow in IT deployment. We’ve used to buying intellectual property from others instead of creating ourselves. Despite of Open Source products, you could rarely see the proprietary softwares fully “made in Malaysia” too (yeah, there are great softwares, but it’s too few compare to other country).

I bet 80% of IT managers heard of Open Source, at least at the local forums/conferences held by big corp like IBM. But what would they said? “Open Source, No support.…no security (sounds pretty unsure)…who want to take the risk? I feel comfortable in what I have/am now…leave me securely in my wonderland lah…” This isn’t all of the cases, but you’d know if you’ve ever worked in some of the big corporate here.

Related stories could be found at Screenshots , Alphaque: Action Talk , Poor quality of tech journalism in Malaysia .

May 06, 2003

End of Iraq war, where's WMD?

U.S. president George Bush has announced end of major Iraq combat .

I didn’t tend to blog about war. But I am curious to know where is the WMD ? Although it’s more important on rebuilt of Iraq after war, it’s logically to have its end from where it’s started. A search of WMD at Google News shows the question marks on the issue. Did Saddam have WMD? Would U.S. give an answer on that?

I thought it’s a good thing to take down Saddam, for Iraq people. However, is WMD just an excuse? Can’t resist to know.

An unconfirmed blog entry at Derek ’s site.

It's all about abstraction

We have the programming language evolution starting with machine code, then assembly language to C, Pascal, Fortran; from there it keep going to C++/Java/Smalltalk/C#, VB/Delphi, and the alternative like function language gone along the parallel path. All it shows was a path to have higher and higher layer of abstraction, which help human being’s brain to perceive a more structural modeling. It works, in terms of better understanding or implementation.

So it’s all about abstraction. CSS is an abstraction. While people being tired of spaghetti markup codes, CSS was brought into the picture. It’s intuitive. These people, who design webpages, code it, understand and reading the markup tags, need a better way to think abstractly. CSS just make life easier, you could have think ahead to draft a better model of the design, better control of the style, reusable elements…

I used to be late on what’s the happening topics. I was just aware of the recent arguing of to CSS or not to CSS, which started from JWZ on his CSS is BS . Lots of people argued over what traditional presentation tags could do (especially table layout design) and CSS can’t. CSS do have the drawback because of different browsers’ implementation and bugs, so you’d be easily to be depressed while you want to get the required layout by CSS. I ain’t a web designer sleep with HTML/CSS everyday. I started learning CSS a few months back and do experience the same frustration with layout design, why_it_work_here_not_working_there browsers problem. But I’d still stand on CSS side. Why? Because it’s a better way to design. We’re not talking about one or two page design but a whole website, where you got to wondering about the consitency across all the pages, architecture, process flow. CSS provides big help because it’s one step further, it’s an abstraction of web design.

CSS can’t be a silver bullet though. It did facing the problems that:

  1. unconsistency of browser implementation, lot of bugs waiting to be catched up
  2. hard to learn. CSS is difficult? No, not the basic CSS at least. You could easily learn about basic rules of CSS in 10 minutes, then you got all your H1, H2, H3, p tags having the same font family. But when it come to more advanced level, where you have to cope with layout/positioning and even tricks to hide certain CSS from certain browsers, that’s pretty hard part.

Hard to learn shouldn’t be an excuse to web designers. However, the world of web/HTML isn’t only involved with professional web designers. We have application programmers or even DB administrators have to deal with HTML occasionally. We have ordinary people wanted to have their own web publishing. There are tools (e.g. Blogging tools, CMS) to help on web publishing, but ain’t force/help on CSS usage. In all these cases, cope with standard implementation and various bugs or tricks is just too annoying and people tend to give it up, back to easier table layout design. And that bring more satisfaction because you get exactly what you want! Technique to do proper presentation layout like table would live long since whatever works would stay.

Come on guys, why so picky on table vs CSS? Just use table at appropriate place (e.g. simple tabular data), use CSS for the overall design and control.

I find no perfect solution though. CSS is still the direction. Everybody could have their own choice, but please stick to it since you’d benefit in the long run. Maybe we shouldn’t be rush, at the end of day, CSS doesn’t look so hard at all, as long as you don’t learn all the dark side of browsers in one single day.

Further reading:

MT-Textile

Follow-up with yesterday's validation of my blog, I've been asking for a text formatting option which could handle HTML special characters (for ISO 8859-1). Searching with HTML special char or HTML entity names didn't give me any good for MT solutions. After browsing through MT-plugins , and further searching, yeah, MT-Textile come to my solution.

MT-Textile is a port of original Textile project of Dean Allen. What really great is its integration of MT configuration. It'd just appear as an option of the text formating (add on to None and Convert Line Breaks), and allow you to set it to default option. In other words, it means I couldn't use client blogging tool like w.bloggar to enjoy the feature. It doesn't matter, I am using w.bloggar mainly for little helpful feature to encode links, format font....with MT-Textile, there are sweet little shortcut to achieve the same stuff. Even better, it put your hand stay on the keyboard :).

Just to quote some basic usages which I'd frequently use of Texttile:


In addition to MT-Textile, John Gruber's Smartypants transform straight single quotes, double quotes, dashes, three consecutive dots to "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities. I got it installed too.

I start realizing how powerful and helpful is MTMacro , what a great job Brad Choate has done. He got lots of great MT plugins. Thanks for the effor, Brad! Hint hint, whenever I am looking for some MT plugins solution, go for Brad first.

May 05, 2003

Markup Validation

Reading Mark's today post Why we won't help you remind me to validate my blog. And yes, validation always reveal problem. It is helpful and fixing some of the bugs I never thought it should have.

Nice. Hey, so I could proudly put the validated icon on my main page...No, not yet, there's still problems. There're special characters in my page couldn't pass the validation. For example, & should be input as &, whitespace as  , " as ". Gosh, should I remember all these characters to make my post? Else it couldn't be validated?!

There is default Text Formating on MT to convert line breaks or not. Would there has a convert HTML special characters or not function? Or some plugins? Anybody got a clue?

[update] I got to re-edit a few times to make the special chars displayed correctly. The pre tag didn't work either. The solution must be somewhere as this problem has been fixed years ago. Got to get off my lazy butt and do some study...

May 04, 2003

Link Fest: May 4th 2003

Slow day, traditional Sunday to spend on shopping. I got some links-n-read:

Jeremy Zawodny: Revisiting FreeBSD vs. Linux for MySQL

MySQL doc: FreeBSD Notes

Kalsey: Related Entries Plugin
Kalsey: Related Entries Revisited
Simon Willison: Experimental feature: Related entries
inluminent: Related Entries Redux and Implementation
It sounds like an pretty interesting feature to be implemented. Should try it someday (till I got enough entries :-)

C++ days numbered? : the debate of should C++ go away soon, this sort of arguing come now and then

May 03, 2003

MyKad, government-backed multi-application SMART card

About two months ago, my wife's handbag was snatched away by 2 motorists (this has become a serious threat to women walking in the streets of KL, it happened e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e). She had to apply for all losted cards like I/C (Identity Card), driving licenses, all ATM/Credit cards.... We have her I/C applied and two months later, she got her new I/C -- which is our Malaysia's proud chip-enabled I/C MyKad. We have the perception that, since we are going to have both personal information and driving license info stored into the chip of the one and only one card, we should wait for the new I/C and then to apply for the losted driving license.

It turned out that JPJ (Jabatan Pengangkutan Jalan -- Road Transport Department Malaysia) didn't think the same way. We arrived there this afternoon, she got the ticket for queuing up, being instructed to take photo and have her new I/C photostated. What the heck! Why do we need to take photo and photostat a new generation I/C, which supposely having all the info securely stored in a chip? And shouldn't the database have the data already?

With doubt, we still spent the extra money for photo and photostat. Wait patiently and an hour later, we learned that, you could ONLY apply for the lost driving license of the old type, then to apply again to merge the old driving license into your chip-enabled, smart I/C. She got the driving license, and it's almost come to off of office hour, which means, if you want to convert the license, come again next time.

Why the extra process? Isn't it just straight logic you could have I/C and driving license in your MyKad while you're applying for new? What a pain! As a victim, you got a paid leave to apply new I/C, the other leave for driving license, and then some day later you got to merge this together because we have this proud chip-enabled I/C. And we are in process of upgrading all magnetic bank ATM card to chip-enabled bank card. Some days later we got to merge this to I/C, AGAIN. God, when are they going to think INTEGRATION ahead?! Or at least some simplified processes?!

Comments (1)

Update on Dinesh/alphaque, Streamyx

Alphaque is back online, their premium 1.5Mbps SDSL Streamyx connection was down for 80 hours. The reason is ridiculous. As Dinesh said,

The problem ? Apparently one of the jumper cables in the MDF room in our building was not plugged in, thus causing the disconnection. Now, access to this MDF room is solely under Telekom Malaysia's control. Not even building management nor maintanence can get in, and the entire room is theirs. If a jumper cable was not plugged in, then it must have been some fuck up by their technician. Perhaps someone came in to get some work done on Tuesday, and either kicked the cable off, or pulled it out and didn't put it back in again.

Could you believe this? That's how TMNet service their premium customer and they don't even apologized for that stupid mistake. No exchange problem, neither whatever technical issues, just a cable unplugged! I laugh full mouth when I read it.

Meanwhile, I finally got Dinesh's update on his MySQL benchmarks, which I was waiting for after reading he gonna to implement a terabyte sized MySQL DB. The result is amazing, with proper tuning, a terabyte sized MySQL could still get minisecond range query latencies and thereotical max 4,000 queries/second. The benchmark was done on a dual CPU, 4GB RAM Asus 1U rackserver, running FreeBSD. The lesson:


Thanks for the sharing, Dinesh.

May 02, 2003

SARS less severe in young children

The study and observation shows that children with SARS are less infectious and having milder symptoms than adults. In the report of New Scientist, paediatrician Tai Fai Fok said:

"They tend to have all kinds of viral infections," he told New Scientist. "Antibodies may cross react with the SARS virus giving some kind of protection."
The second hypothesis is that the children were spared because their immune systems are still only developing. "In adults much of the lung damage in SARS is due to the body's own immune reaction to the virus," Fok says. However, he stresses that both hypotheses are purely speculative at the moment.

This might relieve a bit the worry of most parents.