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July 21, 2003

Depressing

I haven’t been blogging lately because I was depressing, hanging nowhere and get bored with everything related to Internet. My depression come once in a while, sometimes without reason. It could be due to some events, or may be it’s just part of my personality.

Nonetheless, I would like to force myself to keep blogging, even just paste some dummy links would do. My previous blogging ceased when something unpleasant happened. I was just too easy to let go and escaping, on anything.

I would like to try. It’s a good habit to regularly posting to blog, so as a very suitable pratice for my discipline.

Comments (1)

July 18, 2003

The Trouble of Google

Steven Johnson has been digging for Googleholes. As many has complained, Google search turn out to unrelevant information, such as searching “apple” would get you the Apple company. Or cases as Steven pointed out, the search result seem commercial oriented, that put a search on flowers, the top 5 would be some flowers stores…

Steven got a point on these issues:

You can’t really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the “group mind,” but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn’t speak for everybody.

That’s very true. You can’t expect Google would be your encyclopaedia* or *dictionary. It’s aggregration of, web, after all. The PageRank works and it’s Google’s nature to follow the rules, instead of comment on people’s hyperlink. If you depend on Google to do research, bear in mind of the side-effect.

Mind you, it’s about the web, not the reality, not always the truth.

Comments (5)

The new Clie PEG-UX50

Here’s come the new CLIE (Translated to English). The PEG-UX50 sure is the latest Palm device, as it have both WiFi and Bluetooth built in. As any latest gadget would do, it got a digital camera too.

The PDA has somethings different:

Sony has always come out with some elegant design with their CLIE PDA. And it’s pricey too. Take you have to pay RM1000 to RM1800 for any Palm with either wireless capability, how much would it cost if it combine both? But without doubt, it’s an answer to those always wondering “why isn’t there a device integrate all the hot features?”. Integration, no innovation. I couldn’t believe the default RAM capacity is 32MB. What could you do with 32MB? Palm PDA nowadays is no more the same as 2 years ago. You could still run a lot of application with 16MB but not storing. It ain’t enough to store images, MP3, eBooks, dictionary…etc. So why not make it 128MB, after all you have merged the expensive wireless capacity?

Related news: Palm Infocenter — Sony Japan Unveils the Clie UX-50

July 17, 2003

Yahoo plan to buy Overture

Google is a partner of Yahoo, that it provide searching technology to. In other way, Google is the rival of Yahoo. Google has dominated the search engine world and its advertising energy keep growing. It’s kinda on-and-off partnership between them.

Yahoo’s recent action shows their intention to revive their search engine. First they acquired Inktomi to improve the searching algorithm. And now they plan to buy Overture. Both Inktomi and Overture have been more direct competitors to Google. Either Yahoo is stand up to fight with Google, or they are trying to create more profit from selling search business. Anyhow, with Yahoo’s buying and MSN’s join into the field, a worth-to-monitor show is coming soon in search engine world.

July 16, 2003

An iPod offer

Here’s the deal, if you could redesign Ben Hammersley’s site (and work across LazyWeb and Book of Blog), and if your design is the best among others, he would buy you an iPod.

It’s a cool idea to bring brilliant design to your blog.

AOL laid off 50 Mozilla Hackers

AOL, mother company of Netscape, cut the remaining Netscape staffs who working on Mozilla web browser. Is this something related to the Microsoft’s settlement with AOL months ago? Then AOL suddenly found it isn’t justified to support the development of Mozilla?

The laid-off is sad for the people involved, there are still jobs out there for these smart people and some would continue the commitment towards Mozilla development. The impact would be more on the Mozilla group, because Netscape isn’t paying developers to develop Mozilla anymore. According to CNet News

The layoffs come as the loose Mozilla.org group, which had overseen the open-source development efforts of the Mozilla browser, transforms itself into a nonprofit foundation. The foundation is funded in large part by a $2 million donation from AOL and $300,000 from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor.

Mitchell Baker, who will be president of the new Mozilla Foundation, said the group would use part of its seed funding to hire “a core group of people,” which would include project managers and “key technical contributors” to the open-source project. Some of those people are expected to come from Netscape’s ranks. A broad group of independent volunteers and staffers at other companies are expected to continue working on the open-source browser effort, however.

It’s time to cut the link between Netscape and Mozilla, it’s time for some group to stand up and promote Mozilla for end user (which the role Netscape used to play).

Impact of Price Control?

[via Aisehman] What’s the impact if Malaysia government insist to appy Price Control Act on CD, VCD, DVD and computer softwares? As this The Straits Times news pointed out, our government might be in breach of WTO agreement on intellectual property rights:

Lawyers also argue that by forcing copyright owners to lower prices, the government could be in breach of a World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement on intellectual property rights.

The agreement makes it clear that no signatory should do anything that would ‘unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the right holder’.

The Straits Times understands that the United States is looking into whether Malaysia is breaching its commitments under WTO or any other agreement by making CDs and VCDs price-controlled items.

And software vendor like Microsoft and BSA are worried about the price control would open a back door to Singapore and Thailand users. As

it is perfectly legal for consumers to buy licensed software from abroad for use in their home countries.

MDC compiled the feedback of local companies which related to digital product and voice out a “No”. The local legal experts have the same worry :

Meanwhile, legal experts said that the imposition of price controls in certain cases could contravene Malaysia’s obligations under international trade agreements to which the country has acceded.

These include the Asean Free Trade Agreement (Afta), and those related to Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

“Price control is normally used to control prices of essential items such as meat and vegetables,” said Benjamin J. Thompson, an intellectual property (IP) lawyer with law firm Sharizat, Rashid and Lee.

“This is the first time it’s being applied to digital products.”

May be our government would like to do it our own way, but please do more analysis before making decision.

July 15, 2003

Weblog Metadata for download

NITLE Blog Census is another metablog that find as many weblogs as they could, crawling and store them. They licensed their works under Creative Common licence. You could get their full database over here, as well as the URL and metadata of known weblogs.

This is nice and generous! It save months of hard work if you’re going to do some weblog analysis. They have crawled over 623,416 weblogs (across all languages), which should be good enough to be based for your topology study or any sort of discovery. Download the data, put your creative on it.

Moreover, based on the data, they have a statistic of market share of weblog tools. Market share of standalone tool like MT is way behind blog hosting service like blogspot.

PDF Usability

Jakob Nielsen has a rant of PDF usability on his latest AlertBox. These are the very true problems quoted from his article:

I hate to view PDF file in a browser window. It’s slow to launch the reader, the navigate bar is confusing, and it’s crash-prone. Always remember to right click on the PDF link and save it, or configure your browser to save it instead of open it with Acrobat Reader. The other annoying thing is, everytime you open a PDF file, you got to adjust the font size if you gonna view it on screen, because it’s designed for PRINTING.

If PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, why there’re still a lot of publishers use PDF for ebooks in attached CDROM? Aren’t they encourage printing of the ebooks when readers already hold the dead-tree copy? I would prefer CHM, for the indexing and search (chm format got the font issue too.

Taxi Driver's comment

I was in this taxi, the driver speaks very good English. He said:

Tell you honestly, 9 out of 10 taxi pass by, that’s only one good taxi driver. But 99 out of 100 passengers are BAD CUSTOMERS! They are always picky on the direction you choose: “Hey, why you take this way…” That was once the charge was RM4.90. I told the guy I really don’t have any shilling at that time. He insist to get back his 10 cents! End up I have to give him back one ringgit, by losing 90 cents. All they want is money, money, money.…sigh…And those passengers wearing nice shirts, shining ties ROBBED me with a knife, twice!!

He went on to mention he has only 8 dollars in pocket, but the nice looking young guy robbed him. Well, the ridiculous city. 99% are bad? No, I am a reasonable passenger and not the only one. He didn’t hear my grunt though. It is pathetic. I’d seen some unreasonable passengers , who treat taxi drivers like an enemy (‘coz of mouth-to-mouth bad reputation); there are also quite a number of taxi drivers cheating on their meter, or took you to the wrong way. It’s just difficult to build trust between taxi drivers and passengers, especially in KL. Somehow if we do think a bit of each other, reminding ourselves that we’re both just people trying to survive in this big city, thing would go easier.

Relax, life is tough.

I'm Back

I have a break from blogging. I didn’t intend to do that though I like it :).

To put the recap: we drove to Ipoh for my sister’s father in law’s funeral. Coming back to KL, I brought my parent a 2 days KL trip. What others I did? Shopping, shopping and more shopping, watching T3 (hence the title), surveying digital camera, driving and more driving, all these exhausted activities distracted me from blogging/Internet.

While I was not blogging, I felt guilty of let the blog frontpage hanging for 4 days. And when I didn’t read blog, I am uncomfortable, feeling like I haven’t finished something I should have before going to bed.

All additive stuff is drug. So do Internet, so do blogging.

Meanwhile, Project Petaling Street v1.5 has officially launched! You could link to PPS if you are a Malaysian and you have a blog. More details here. I didn’t contribute much to the beta testing (shame on me), mostly because of my low spirit and personal events. The beta test is well done. Congrats, Aizuddin.

July 10, 2003

Adam's stand on RSS

Here’s how Adam Curry voice his objection to (N)echo project: he would pay $10K to spread among aggregrator developers, for who to adhere RSS 2.0, and kick NEcho out of view.

Why is he doing this? Simple. He is economically hurted by the project. He spent $10,000 to get pre-listed feed on Userland Radio. And hence his investment and commitment on the RSS. And then he speack out with the same trick to object to the new format.

Come on, Adam. We read your blog not just because of the default feed on some aggregrator or your fame (though I agree it’s a smart marketing). It’s your writing, and you, who to be known/accessed by your writing, to attract readers to your blog. The aggregrator world ain’t going to leave out NEcho just because some objection. It won’t reduce the effort on developing the new format either, so if you (aggregrator developers) don’t support it, you are left out, you lose your customers. As a user, there’s nothing to lose, you got your choice, all the time.

Thinking of buying a Palm

I want to buy a Palm. Yea, a PDA, and Pocket PC is totally out of choice due to number of applications running on it. Moreover, Palm application is more friendly, try it and you’d know. My Palm experience is limited to playing around with Handspring Visor Deluxe 2 years ago. It was used mainly for some application development and testing purpose then, so I don’t really ever use Palm day in and day out. Anyhow, such a small and stylish gadget could do me a great favor, in a particular field — DISCIPLINE. There are so many times I forgot things to do and I always want to jot down some random thought, regularly monitor my spending, time management…enough reasons for it.

Here’s come the survey..nope, I am lazy and tired, and hate to surf around to check out which’s good which’s bad — and then confusing myself (always end up to confusion). My choice is limited to a few latest Palm PDA (Tungsten series, Palm Zire 71 or some Sony CLIE models) since Palm seem to be on the edge after their Tungsten series (so Handspring is out. And btw, they’ve been merged with Palm). Blog rocks! I just checked Aizuddin’s survey, compare of Palm Zire 71 and CLIE SJ33, and his review of Palm Zire 71, I have almost made up my mind. Palm Zire 71 would be the choice. Feel good of how helpful is blog.

At last, the only problem is, I am greedy. A Palm, or a decent digital camera? No decision yet. (No budget for both).

Comments (2)

July 09, 2003

PPS Goodies

I have been taking a break from blogging, being stuck with some personal events and ponder over my career. To catch up my blog reading with surfing PPS, wow, there’re lot of well written pieces. I got a long list to read, and notice some thought provoking blog:

CIA

Jeff got an idea to set up a CIA, where CIA stands for Citizens’ Intelligence Agency — similar to MIT Media Lab’s GIA. The mission is to provide an information repositary of individuals/organization/corporations related to government, and setup a secured channel for citizens to submit government related issues/information.

This is an good idea, though controversial. In one hand, it’s a channel for citizens to have a clear understanding of how the people we vote for run the government. There are so much policy/procedure/execution of government where we don’t really how it is being decided or executed. Increasing transparency is definitely a good point and nobody would against. But that brings up a few questions:

Considering the organizations outside of government: Keadilan, DAP, PAS, NGO, Malaysiakini…etc, the source of intelligence input might not be a problem. It might even play a better role to monitor government than the major media. Verification? I have no idea on a reliable verification mechanism.

ISA and OSA are law our govenment applying. There’s just no way you’re going to take easy on it. But there’s always boundary. It would be critical on the accuracy of information submitted. That’s why the important of verification.

Go take a look on the discussion, it’s well worth being posted on the issue.

Water Off My Back

Najah is making a note to herself: “NEVER GIVE INTERVIEWS TO JOURNALISTS”. She blog on her experience of how the paper media screwed what she said, which, either misquoted, out of context or viewpoint being bended. Her rant getting intense responses, where other people commented on different angles of view from journalist, the editing process, or personal experience. An interesting read. :-)

[update] Here’s a personal press of Najah again :).

Sad

I heard enough bad news today. This morning, I was told father of my brother in law passed away today. Then at the afternoon, I got a SMS — telling me on the decease of a friend’s dad.

It’s a sad day, hearing all these news, and the failed operation? of conjoined twins Laleh and Ladan Bijani. In their last letter, they said:

Both of us have started on this journey together and we hope that the operation will finally bring us to the end of this difficult path, and we may begin our new and wonderful lives as two separate persons.

Nobody could really imagine how they actually gone through all these years. I take my hat off to them, for their courage. And may them rest in peace.

July 07, 2003

Making money with Blogging

Are you wondering on blogging for buck? Here’s a chance: Blogging Network. These people are paid to write! It basically is a subscribing idea where you need to sign-up an account to read all the blogs, and paid by monthly or yearly for your subscription. How’s the blogger get paid? Half of the readers’ subscribing fee is divided between the writers they read.

I am not sure how’s the idea working out. Back to the dotCom era, there’re implementations of micropayment mechanism for popular writers who used to publish on paper or books. But it didn’t succeed and Internet users were just too used to free stuff. May be blogging activity could achieve it, when there are more good writing and pepole more used to blog reading.

Would I write better if I was paid? I doubt it. Somehow I’m trying my best and hoping my writing get improved day by day.

Would you pay to read your favourite blogs? Guess it’s OK for me, there’re brilliant writers out there. And it’s like paying for magazines. I don’t read magazines nowadays, I read the web.

July 06, 2003

New Streamyx Package

TMNet Streamyx got a new package of downstream 512Kbps and upstream 128Kbps. The basic package of 384/128 for residential customer cost RM88/month. And you got to pay extra RM40 for the higher bandwidth (512Kbps). Is it because they’ve done some marketing survey, which imply customers required higher bandwidth? Or they’re preparing for soon-coming wireless broadband competition?

As a subscriber of the basic 384/128 package, I am pretty OK with the bandwidth. But I can’t tolerate with the low quality of network connection, there’re network problems once per few months. The 24/7 Streamyx has been running for almost one year, and yes, they’re improving. Did it come to a reliable stage already? Its network seem quite OK recently, except the DNS. However, I just can’t have the faith on TMNet, for its bad record.

July 03, 2003

Be friendly to Googlebot

[via Simon Willison] Scribbling.net’s useful tips on:

This is something less known:

Webloggers: use the meta tags to help the Googlebot index only your permalinks, not your constantly changing front page. To do this, use

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” >

on your front page and

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” >

on your posts’ permanent locations.

In fact, most weblogs didn’t use frame, flash or DHTML (major blog tools don’t use these stuff by default); and most bloggers maintain meaningful title of pages and links. If you start your blog with blogging tool like MT, your blog has been friendly to Googlebot. Scribbling.net has more tips to be more understandable by Googlebot, a recommended read.

Related Google information:

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Google Toolbar 2.0 (Beta)

I went over to Google Toolbar to grab the Toolbar 2.0 Beta. The one I am having on my IE toolbar is version 1.7, but too bad it didn’t has an option “Update Google Toolbar” to auto-checking latest version and help users to shift over. Instead, I heard good word about the new version, then I have to go search in Google to get where is it, and then download, install it.

What’s good about this version, even it’s beta? It has these new features:

What’s the impact it brings? I am sure lots of people using Google Toolbar, because Opera has the Google search bar, and Mozilla has the easy access to Google search in navigation bar, to gain easy access to Google in IE — you’re left with the option to install Google Toolbar. Then now you have the easy to use popup-blocking by Google Toolbar. Considering the number of people who able to block pop-up window, you, the Webmaster of ads-heavy sites, should you still keep your pop-up Ads strategic? Don’t the rate of people seeing your Ads drop tremendously?

Who gain the benefit? If the popup Ads didn’t work, where did you think you would go to put your advertisement? Would Google benefit from this?

Anyhow, the pop-up blocking is a good implementation, the feature definitely is helpful.

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What [ ] Are You?

Some of my friends never feel enough with just one interesting quiz.

[via theOtaku.com: Guru, Anime Quiz]

[via Quizilla!]

Yes, I’m boring.

Price Control Scheme on Software

Bernama: Gov’t To Fix Prices If There’s No Cooperation From Industry

The government has no choice but to fix the prices of computer software, compact discs (CDs), video compact discs (VCDs) and digital video compact discs (DVDs) if the industry does not cooperate in determining the price control scheme for these products.

The Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry is going to meet with industries this Thursday to discuss price control for these products. Government decided last week to categorise these products as controlled items under Price Control Act 1946.

But what do they mean by “no choice”? I personally don’t understand how they could apply a price control scheme on softwares. It sounds like they’ve never studied the industry before voice out the decision. Just because it plays hard on pirates, then it’s “no choice” to fix the prices?!

Let’s looks at these items that going to put under price control scheme. We’re here talking about products regarding music, movies and computer softwares. They are more or less sort of intellectual products, not just some manufacturing items. And it’s sure the industries would oppose the decision, it cut their profit margin smaller or worse, making lost. On my personal opinion, here’s my though on the feasibility of implementing price control on these items:

I am not saying that software development is creative art but movies/music creation isn’t. For movies, there’s a mature market and VCD/DVD is the side-products. And either CD or VCD/DVD has a recognized stable market price to follow, and you could work on that if some kind of control has to apply on it. To talk of softwares, it is a big category — inside there price is varied, effort can’t be measured in a single way; even though most softwares could be develivered in a CD. It could be workable if government’s intention is to put price control on certain softwares (e.g. Microsoft Windows/Office).

Dinesh has his thought on Software like chicken rice and We just don’t get it !

July 02, 2003

No, I will not fix your computer

No, I will not fix your computerSometimes I would just wish to wear this. I would like to say: “Hey, it ain’t my stuff. Leave me alone!” Some people, they just don’t understand you need some foundation in order to understand some higher level stuff. And they’re so lazy that don’t even googled themselves or do some pre-study. Worse is, it’s their daily jobs. I like to help non-IT literary people. But I can’t keep helping IT colleagues to explain on some basic knowledges (repeat again and again), answering lots of scripting syntax problem (like I am a walking dictionary). But I actually just google, and showed them (of course, teach people fishing instead of just giving fish).

Well, enough grumbling. They are nice people and my good friends. In fact, I realize it isn’t easy to change one’s personality (me too). Most of the times, I would just accept. If it’s bothersome, a bit grumbling could cure. :-)

Comments (2)

High Pressure of Personal Guarantees

[via Joi Ito] As Joi pointed out, an article in The Japan Times reported praticing of personal guarantees could be a significant cause for high suicide rate in Japan. And there are 30,000 suicide cases a year in Japan. I was shocked! 30,000? There may be some tend to suicide again after being saved from suicide, but 30K is still a very high figure.

How about Malaysia? According to a Google Answer: Prevalence of Depression in Malaysia and this “speech” given by Chua Jui Meng, the suicide rate in Malaysia is about average 3 per 100,000 population. Let said Malaysia has estimated about 22,662,365 population, then it would be average 680.

Back to the personal guarantees, it goes like: Bank giving loan with personal guarantor —> thing goes bad —> the guarantor can’t paid —> life destroyed, friends/relatives left, everything changed, depressed —> people commit suicide. Most of these cases are bank taking personal guarantees for corporate loan from the businessman or his/her family. Is it also a common pratice in Malaysia? I don’t really get it. How a bank assess individual credit? By bank account balance? By reputation (celebrity)? Like our gold medal bowler Shalin’s case? There are lot of small to medium companies in Malaysia. And some of them do get bank loan by personal guarantees, especially when bank manager want to hit their target or when you are a good friend of the manager.

We’ve seen a few cases happened on Sports celebrities, their personal guarantees brought them bankruptcy. Is this a good pratice? Should bank give corporate loan by person guarantees?

The Blogger Code

In the old days, I used to keep my geek code in .signature of my Unix Id or email signature. I’ve losted it ever since my Unix account closed (or email losted? can’t remember though). I missed it but I am no more consider myself as a geek, not bother to own the other one.

So, geek has the geek code, it’s obvious that blogger has the blogger code. You need to manually compose your geek code by following the instructions (as Dinesh pointed out, there’re actually several geek code generator — this online generator and this console application). But to generate your blogger code, you need only to go through the survey, identify the most closed description of what kind of blogger you belong to, there you are, your blogger code generated. Moreover, to these mythical code, there’re decoders (and this)

Here’s my blogger code:

B5 d t+ k+ s+ u f i o x- e l c

Comments (4)

Mozilla 1.4 released

What’s the big deal of this latest stable release of Mozilla? The 1.4 branch would replace the 1.0 branch as the stable development base, which also means Netscape would adopt it as the base for Netscape web browser. In fact, they have done it, Netscape 7.1 is based on Mozilla 1.4. Alright, may be there isn’t anybody would care about Netscape. But with this changes, they are actually more advanced than IE now. Switch to Mozilla if you’re still using Internet Explorer, read my call on Mozilla switch, and part 2, part 3.

Here’s the new features quoted from its release note:

July 01, 2003

A brief guide to ping PPS

Here come the PPS 1.5 Beta. Starting today, there are close to 20 testers would start to ping over PPS main page with their blogging entries. Watch out for PPS and you could easily keep posted of these Malaysian bloggers.

PPS is using TrackBack feature provided by Movable Type. Thus, for fellow testers, there’re basically two ways for you to ping PPS (which means, send a brief info for PPS to list your blog entry’s URL/extract):

  1. If you didn’t use MT, nor your blogging system has the ping/trackback feature, you have to use a public pinger: Registered as a member, and then go to PPS’s public ping form. Just fill in the form and submit, you’re done. The detailed instruction has been given in Aiz’s email.
  2. For MT user, a simple guide is illustrated below.

A simple guide for MT users to ping PPS.

  1. First at all, you have to know what URL to ping. Aiz has published the trackback URL in PPS Beta mailing list. Noted down the URL. It’s important.
  2. Logon to Movable Type
  3. You could either manually ping PPS or configure your MT to automatically ping PPS once you post a new entry.
  4. For manually ping, click “New Entry”, after you’ve done your writing, paste the trackback URL at the box labeled “URLs to Ping”. Click “Save”, then MT would send a trackback ping to the URL.

    URLs to Ping

  5. To automate the ping process, click “Categories”.
  6. For the category you would like to automate the ping, edit the category attributes.

    Edit category attributes

  7. Paste the trackback URL to box labeled “TrackBack URLs to ping”, which fall under Trackback Setting->Outgoing Pings. If you would like all your post auto-send a ping to PPS, you have to configure this setting on all your categories. (Note: In other word, if you don’t have categories at all, you can’t automate this ping process)

    Outgoing Ping

  8. Once you configure the categories attributes, that’s it, leave it there and MT would do the ping for you. If you would like to be in control which post to ping, choose the manual way and be remember to paste the trackback URL when you’re going to save a new entry.

That’s it. Enjoy.

Comments (8)