yowkee essential

Communication

Tim Bray: Explosion!, Stamp out Creativity Now, Escaping and Learning

Dave Winer: Tim Bray is worried, Dave Winer is angry

Sam Ruby: No Inventions

Random talk in a sleep

After week of being sick, I am now suffering from low spirit. May be I should have taken a break, from work, from blogging, from programming.…away from computer, away from TV…

Oops, but I have just joined the PPS 1.5 Beta project. I am a late-comer to the core team, so it’s good to start with the beta test. Watch out for it, the project has attracted many smart people, and sure it’s enjoyable to read them.

The new syndication format design exercise is well worth monitoring. I have no any big projects on hand ever since my department having a re-org few months ago. But soon I might take up a new challange on some new development, and work with new group of people. The ongoing discussion gave me lots of inspiration.

MySQL Fulltext Searching

MySQL Fulltext Searching explained how to add the fulltext index and enable fulltext searching in your MySQL tables. The author, Joe Stump, use blog-related tables as his example of implementing fulltext searching, interesting. With adding fulltext index to your MT tables, plus some php code, or just MT-SQL, you could have an advanced searching engine to replace the original MT search engine. Sound good. Would try it later.

Quick Links, Jun 28

since1968 interviewed Jeffrey Zeldman.

First International Moblogging Conference. Of course, it’s at Tokyo, Japan.

Google Adsense: read Tim Bray and Russell’s experience of it. Quite a way to earn some cash if you’re sorta Internet celebrities.

Tim Bray got some thought of Wiki.

Simon Willison: The new RNIB site in CSS

Another buzz? SOA. Michael Champion: SOA: One acronym to bind them all?. I keep hearing this SOA at a local BEA Weblogic conference weeks ago. It doesn’t bring any new stuff in term of technology. Instead, in my opinion, it’s just a marketing term to link business to Web Services.

TestDox, part of AgileDox project, creates simple documentation from the method names in JUnit test cases. Looks interesting.

Mark Pilgrim: Don’t use UserLand’s validator

Relief, away from illness

I can’t believe I still have to take pills after sicked for one whole week. It goes from diarrhea, disease converted into fever and headache, then it seem OK. I went back to Office and then the fever is back. The next morning I felt totally alright, and the fever came back again at afternoon. And then again, and again.

This is terrible, you won’t like it when coming back and forth between healthy and fever. Doctor said:”It’s OK, it isn’t dengue, not SARS either, just fever”. So that’s it, end the story. I got two full days rest and finally this Saturday I am fully recovered, except the muscle-ache at the shoulder, which came with overslept.

Now I have the determination for my plan of weight control — swimming, jogging, badminton…Healthy is everything, you bet.

Apple Fame

One thing that always puzzle me, are most bloggers Apple fans? Check out these metablogs:

• Popdex - Apple powermac stay at the first of popularity index, Apple Panther/iChat AV/iSight at 3rd, 4th and 6th
• Blogdex - Apple powermac news stay within top 5
• Daypop - PowerMac, Panther, iChat AV occupied the top 3 positions.

Whenever there is any news from Apple, it would sure getting lots of attention in blogland. Isn’t Apple just having 10% share of the computer market, or less? That’s weird. But that prove they are in fact really selling innovation, building reputation, selling images, selling brand… It’s amazing to look what they’ve achieved.

Or could it be just most of the bloggers using Apple? I don’t get the statistics. I’d rather guess may be there are lots of admirers too. I have to admit I am just one of them. I really want to own a Mac ever since Mac OS X released (well, it’s just way too expensive, if you earn a living in Malaysia). And of course it’s always cool when you’re holding a Powerbook/iBook, handing around in happening places within cities. Well, that’s how we people think, and that’s what Hollywood wanted people to think. Didn’t you see there’s always just Apple in movies?

OK, movies doesn’t mix with reality. I don’t judge movie by the computer they used. And yeah, I feel I like it, the Apple Power Mac G5.

How to build and sell your shareware

From Steve Pavlina, CEO, Dexterity Software:

• Zero-Defect Software Development
• Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals
• If No Independent Developers Are 100 Times Smarter Than You, Then Why Do Some Get 100 Times the Results?
• Basic Negotiating for Fun and Profit
• Networking Without the Cables
• If You’ve Tried Everything Imaginable And Your Product Still Won’t Sell, Here’s What You’re Missing
• How to Get More Sales for Less Work
• How to Permanently Increase Your Sales by 50% or More in Only One Day

Joel on Software:

• Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It
• Mouth Wide Shut
• Converting Capital Into Software That Works
• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

And, Successful Shareware, Sanford Selznick’s The Do’s and Don’ts of Shareware, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

I noticed there’re so many websites out there telling you how to sell your shareware, and basically these websites providing you some middle-man or marketing services (btw, most of their pages suck). So, did shareware programmers do marketing? I guess so, at least the success one do.

Syndication Reloaded and Revolution

Sam Ruby started a Wiki on The Conceptual Model of a Log Entry. On the issue of proposed new syndication format, which I presume it would be more than just syndication, there’s a Roadmap to New Log Format. The idea is to develop a new syndicate format, where it’s

• 100% vendor neutral
  
• implemented by everybody,
  
• freely extensible by anybody, and
  
• cleanly and thoroughly specified.

I am positive on the move. To me, vendor neutral is the key point. I’ve wondered why RSS didn’t standardized as like SOAP did. It’s something should done long time ago, before it goes out of control. I think a new syndication format is at least good for following reasons:

1. Standardization
   Standardization give a chance to explain syndication in-depth, in a less-confusing way, and more-specified. Besides, it looks like different versions of RSS could be claimed by different group by people. And though it isn’t sound a big deal to most RSS developers, it brings confusion, argument and sometimes FUD. Technically speaking, we really need a well-explained specification.
2. Too many variants
   The current RSS world is just messy. There are too many different versions. And when you come to RSS, you have to know which side you’re going to stay: which one support date/time? to use or ? put my entity encoded HTML in or ? what is that GUID?… There are so many choice and most people depend on their blogging tools to generate one for them. It was worse that different tools generate different version of RSS, and not all of them generate validated RSS! So, putting on the effort for new log format, might be good to be out of this mess.

Alright, it looks good. It hasn’t been named. No matter what it would be named, how about compatibility? Is the new format going to be backward-compatible? What if it’s a totally new stuff and not backward compatible? Would all the blogging system vendors supporting it? Would users switch? I don’t know. I think vendors would be happy to support it if there’s a clear instruction to interpret/compose the syndication, and it’s more extensible and interoperable. On users side, to give enough time, people who didn’t switch would be out-numbered and force to switch.

I don’t know. I’m just being positive.

[update] More reading:

• Mark Pilgrim: Echo chamber, A fresh start?

• Sam Ruby: Forward motion, Road Map, Linkage, permaLink or unique ID?

• Blogger support, Six Apart support

• Tim Bray: Why are we doing this?, How to Identify a Log Entry

• Dave Winer: The lizard brain of RSS, A gentle introduction to the RSS controversy, Post IDs

• Simon Willison: More thoughts on RSS

• Inside the Pie: RoadMap, NameIt, PermaLinks, TimestampVsCreationDateTime, DublinCore, SyntaxConsiderations

Google AdSense

Google is extending its Adword service to outside of Google. You could now put google’s text Ads on your own website. The text ads shown on your site would of course target to your readers, as how they always do in their search engine (noted it’s their main income). Go subscribe to Google AdSense if you’re interested.

Blogger? Sorry, the door ain’t open yet. Check out Tristan Louis’s experience! on that. Guess if Google want to do it, they’d try it on the new blogger.com first (or the current blogspot?).

[Update] Aaron Swartz got an application to let you have a feel what ads would Google AdSense put to your page. Try it.

Sleeping Days

I’ve been sick for two days. When I was sick, all I want is health. Nothing else could compare to your good body. The virus infection start from diarrhea, then convert into headache, fever. Feeling weak with fever, and then sleep, sleep, and sleep…

Of course there wouldn’t anybody interested in this, just to keep my blog at least once a day. :P

Quick links, 23 June 2003

My Visit to SCO

‘Head First Java’ Author Interview. Lots of juice on teaching and learning.

Interview with XP Founder Kent Beck

Joe Celko: Tree in SQL, A Look at SQL Trees, Nested Set Model of Trees, Part 2, Trees in SQL — Part II

I’ve just bought Alan Cooper’s About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, hope I would spend more time on reading (instead of additic to blog reading).

High Availability is NOT Cheap

If you’ve ever claimed 24×7x365 availability of your server, and you think it’s easy because you setup the database replication and keep the uptime for certain length of time, you’re wrong. That isn’t about high availability, that’s called lucky. I have met people who thought with current cheap and powerful intel server, plus free softwares (may be MySQL replication), they could easily achieve 24×7x365 (and of course they aren’t aware of all the exhaustive details of power/data/connection availability, it’s not even get to testing yet).

Go read this, Jeremy quoted Michael Conlen’s well written and easy to understand response of high availability (in MySQL mailing list).

Harry Potter

What’s so special on 21st June 2003? It’s the day available of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the Book 5 of Harry Potter series.

My wife is fan of Harry Potter. We went to One Utama, with the intention to shop at IKEA, and of course, checking the availability of the Book 5. But end up she was disappointed. The book is in hardcover! It is thick and heavy. I wonder how possibly you could read it on the bed. Holding the book and reading is just simply a torture to your wrist, but then it isn’t comforable to read it on a desk because of the thickness.

So, is this still a book designed to be read by children? Parents must be training their weak wrist to give bed time reading to their children.

PPS Calling for BETA Testers

Project Petaling Street is now looking for 20-30 beta testers to help testing the blog-tal system. If you are a Malaysian bloggers, or even non-Malaysian who live in Malaysia, come to join the party! The details is illustrated at Volume of Interactions

We are looking for a cross-section of Malaysian bloggers (or non-Malaysians living in Malaysia are also invited to apply) to make up this team. When you email us your application to be a BETA tester, please include the following information:

• Full name (real name please, no pseudonyms)
• Email address
• Your blog name
• Your blog URL
• Age
• Gender
• Location (you can be a Malaysian living overseas, no problems)
• What type of blogging tool you use? e.g. Movabletype, Blogger, LiveJournal
• In a word or two, how would you describe the majority of the content of your blog e.g. current/affairs news, personal journal, technology
• Approximately how long have you been blogging i.e. we want a cross section of new and long-time bloggers - the new version has some technical aspects that we want to make sure everyone of all levels of blogging experience and technical capability will be able to use

All appllications should be written to beta@aizuddindanian.com. The application closing date is 26 June 2003. Successful applicants will be informed 28 June 2003. BETA testing will commence 30 June 2003 and last for 7-14 days, depending on how long it takes to iron out all the bugs.

PPS aimed to aggregate Malaysia blogs into a single space, come and join, make your voice heard and make PPS a better place.

History of RSS date formats

Mark Pilgrim: History of RSS date formats. As usual, Mark’s great essay is clear and resourceful. It’s really helpful on remember how’s it come to today’s argument on pubdate v.s. dc:date.

When there’s people writing guideline on RSS, pointing the confusing parts, there’s still confusing RSS feeds (as Simon pointed out there’re some feeds that have a pubdate element use ISO8601 date). I don’t get it. Did these people hand-code their feed? Or did it generate by some legacy tools? How to fix those bugs in tool generating bad-formed XML? Getting 99% RSS feed upgraded, so aggregator don’t have to parse at all cost? The development of all these XML formats went through what HTML has been there, the difference is there are less players (browser) in HTML world.

More:

• Simon Willison: Letting off some steam
• RFC822, RFC1123
• W3C: Date and Time Formats
• Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML

The Blog Celebrity

We have Scoble’s listed A-List Bloggers, and the most influential blogs. These are the celebrity of blogland. They wrote influential pieces, inspired people, hinting the direction of where to go, definitely these are the blogs worth to note of.

Albeit admiring what they’ve achieved, it’s just too difficult for most of us to simulate, at least for me. I’ve been pondering how to attract more people to read my blog, and to generate more conversation. But I couldn’t care less 2 months later. To me, blog is about personal publishing, which have a loose definition of what should you publish (it’s personal anyway). People who wrote great essays pull eye balls over, blogger blog on breaking news/heat events of course get the attention, bloggers who having specific expertise on certain topics attract the fan groups, bloggers treat blog as their diary has the supporting of friends… There are so many scenarios, and all I could say is, the personality made the difference.

So, don’t follow leader. You got your own footstep. My English writing skills isn’t good, but it’s improved over 2 months blogging. I blogged over several categories, may be it’s time to try consistently blogging on some certain topics…

Wait, when I was writing this, I suddenly it isn’t sound logic to go from blog celebrity, come to my reviews of my blogging. I am just curious to how they’re doing it, and at the same time, telling myself to improve my writing…

[update] Err…I shouldn’t blog when in sleep, just damn tired after few hours shopping.

The Hulk

If you think this is just another spiderman-style, based on comic’s movie, you are wrong. You would not only get excitement over all the actions in the movie, you’d get more.

Ang Lee, the Taiwan director who directed The Hulk make the difference. I’ve just seen the movie. To sum all my feel, I enjoyed it very much. Let alone the special effect, the story itself is good. Bruce’s existence is full of conflict. And Lee’s way of controling the rhythm of the movie keep you concentrate all the time. He shows you the contrast of human’s weakness vs fear of the power, the doubt and loneliness of Bruce… And to talk about the computer-simulated Hulk, it was amazing. Perhaps some of the scene would let you feel un-natural, but what really important is: it made the Hulk human. It is so great that a glance of Bruce, his staring, his anger.…all presented so nicely. That isn’t much speech but you got it, that’s call acting.

Ang Lee is no doubt one of the best directors in the world. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is his most famous movie before The Hulk. I’ve seen all the Chinese movies directed by him and sure like all of them. He’s just kind of always able to find the balance between art and popularity.

To recall my memory of Hulk, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the comics, except the TV drama showed at 80s.

Oon Yeoh quit

It come in a sudden. Oon Yeoh’s weblog, Transitions — the Malaysia’s first media weblog, closed today with his announcement

So, why am I quitting? No, it has nothing to do with the Special Branch breathing down my neck (they’ve got much bigger fish to fry). Nor have I been paid a million bucks to shut up (how I wish!). And no, I’ve not done a “Farish Noor” and quit writing because of criticisms from Malaysiakini readers (if I were that sensitive, I would’ve quit writing in February).

I’m afraid the actual reason is a lot more down to earth: I’ve taken up an exciting (it is to me, anyway) new journalism job with another media company. I’m not at liberty to reveal details right now but suffice to say, you definitely haven’t heard the last from Oon Yeoh. To quote Arnold: “I’ll be back” (albeit on a different platform).

Why did joining the other media company has to do with the quit? I don’t quite get it. To me, a blog is a blog and it’s owned by you, you could stay with it no matter you’re moving to any where. If that’s because Malaysiakini did the hosting, switch to others. If it’s something to do with the new company’s policy, well, that’s the other story.

Anyhow, hope we could see Oon Yeah back to the blogland soon. We’d miss his valueable writing. To think of this, that isn’t many Malaysian journalists having a blog, did they?

Jave.net embrace blog and Wiki

It isn’t news anywhere, just that when I last visited java.net, I didn’t notice they got a blog and Wiki! And of course, their RSS.

Sun seems want to do somethings big with java.net, at least pushing it to center of Java community. It’s late better than never. Good to see the constructive strength.

James Gosling got a blog, so did Daniel Steinberg. I don’t get why the others bloggers aren’t listed under weblogs subdirectory. The directory of blogs looks weird to me. Did they support Trackback/pingback? Nope.

By the way, here’s a cute Java is Everywhere animation (higher resolution).

MSNBOT

Jeremy blog about the crawler from Microsoft. So far I didn’t see its footstep at my log yet. There’s an anonymous posted to Dave Winer’s blog saying:

They have Google in their crosshairs. They are trying to replicate every feature of Google in the next year, and have tie-ins with the next version of IE (including a ‘search’ box right on the browser toolbar that by default points at MSN Search) and in Windows Longhorn (the Search function in the shell will have an Internet option that will go to MSN by default). They made a build-vs-buy decision in the last few months (in fact they made an informal offer to purchase Google, which was refused).

According to him, MSN Search is currently depend on Inktomi and LookSmart. And MSN Search got $150m in profit last year! Wow, looks like the targetted Ads do rocks for them. Inktomi has been bought over by Yahoo, it’s significant for the software giant in Redmond to build their own crawler.

It’s glad to see they start taking the step. If they long ago trying to simulate Google, MS users wouldn’t be suffered from their support site and MSDN search. And for years we’ve been used to rely on google to search issues related to Windows, like site:support.microsoft.com IE6 Sp1, site:msdn.microsoft.com SOAP… what a shame of Microsoft!

The uncensored comments

More and more bloggers being concern over the abuse of comments. There are flame war, personal attacks, spams happened in people’s personal blog. And just because the owner of blog openly welcome for discussion, it doesn’t mean you could play over the rules. There’s always boundary, abusing would only bring the mess and hurt. Think about the old days of usenet.

Jeff decided to suspend the conversation feature of his blog, because:

I had meant it for privileged interactive conversations among intellectuals. But this privilege has been taken for granted, and abused.

Instead of engaging each other in mature, intellectual discourse, many have used it to promote hatred among friends, among Bangsa Malaysia.

We can do without all these.

The way of discussion among people could lead to mess and ugly, especially while involving politics. OldKopiTiam (note: in Mandarin) is a good example if you remembered how many excellent articles have been there in old days.

May be Trackback should be used more often for conversation, you got to have a blog to communicate.

Funkidator

[Via Sam] Check if your RSS feed is funky or not!! Mine is most definitely funky, and it smells bad. :D

Modarated comments in MT

Jeff asked if there’s a way to moderated comments post to MT blog. I did a search and found a hack at Edith Frost. I don’t intend to moderate the comments here, so far the number of comments isn’t make sense for that. So I do a test at my local MT site, and it works! It’d be good to blog it as a note to myself.

The hack basically prevent MT to rebuild the blog entry once a comment posted. So the post commented would still mailed to you, but it wouldn’t showed on the entry until you rebuild the entry. To apply the patch, comment out the following 6 lines of code in /lib/MT/App/Comments.pm:


#$app->rebuild_indexes( Blog => $blog )
# or return $app->error($app->translate(
# "Rebuild failed: [_1]", $app->errstr));
#$app->rebuild_entry( Entry => $entry )
# or return $app->error($app->translate(
# "Rebuild failed: [_1]", $app->errstr));


However, if you’re using default MT index template, which popup a window and called MT/mt-comments.cgi to retrieve comments of the entry, the comments would still show up. To disable the javascript popup, one of the way is to change following template:


<MTEntryIfAllowComments>| a href="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTCommentScript$?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>" onclick="OpenComments(this.href); return false"><MT_TRANS phrase="Comments"> comments (<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a>
/MTEntryIfAllowComments>


to

<MTEntryIfAllowComments> | <a
href="<$MTEntryLink$>#comments">Comments
(<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a>

Be warned, you have to rebuild the page after read and approved the comments, but rebuilding might cause duplicate ping to others if your blog ping (Trackback) other MT blog.

Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby’s approach is to put up a comment policy and annotate on the un-welcomed comments (most of the time a <del> tag was applied on the flame phrases).

Reading, Random RSS links

I try catching up on reading of what’s happening in RSS World.

Mark Pilgrim: How to consume RSS safely, Mark’s little prank showing RSS exploit and advice on 10 HTML tag stripping.

Some background: RSS Validator ContainsScript, Minimize the use of HTML in descriptions, Thinking about RSS, RSS Best Practices, More on evolvable formats, What is an RSS description?, rss output

Simon Willison: Safely consuming RSS: RegExps don’t cut it

Sam Ruby: Don Box’s RSS Profile, Don Box’s original post.

Dave Winer: I read a piece yesterday about SixApart and their standards compliance. Interesting, but they do RSS in a funky way.; funky

Sam Ruby: Funky RSS?. RSS flame war?

Aaron Swartz: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Specs

Dave Winer: Why I said Movable Type’s RSS support is ‘funky’. (Let’s get ready, now, Next step in syndication technology)

Chris Sells proposes an additional element for CommentAPI. Sam Ruby’s blog on it: 1, 2, 3. Joe Gregorio’s take

Sam Ruby: Anatomy of a Well Formed Log Entry

Mark Pilgrim: The Ws of weblogging

Tim Bray: Pie

My eye hurt…and my brain explode… I should back to listen more Leonard Cohen.

I listen to music, then sleep

Don’t really have the courage
To stand where I must stand.
Don’t really have the temperament
To lend a helping hand.

Don’t really know who sent me
To raise my voice and say:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.
…

The Land of Plenty, Leonard Cohen.

Related entries and related blogs

In addition of a log of web activities, personal thought, weblog is also a communication tool. Sometimes when we blog a story, it didn’t end up just in a blog entry, it would be illustrated in several entries, in a day or over several days. I feel it’s interesting to find relationship between entries to entries, blog to blogs. So I grab the RelatedEntries mt-plugin and relatedFromWaypath and wrap them into my individual blog entry. You would see a box entitled “Related entries in yowkee essential”, which point to the other related posts in this weblog. And the other box, titled “Related blogs from Waypath”, using Waypath blog search engine to list down other people’s blogs that might related to the post.

Here’s the reasons I’m doing this:

• Good to see relationship the blog entries I post. Think about when you’ve posted over a few hundred entries and you can’t remember what ever happened six months ago, the related entries might bring surprise.
• Introduce your blog readers to explore more of your blog. It’s an added value to your readers on providing more related information (well, that depends…I’d just be positive :)
• Link more to other’s blogs, keep more chance to connect to others.

Simpletracks

Simpletracks, another creative work from Kalsey. It offers you to manually ping MT-powered blogs with filling up the form here. By giving Trackback URL, your blog name, entry title/URL, you got the Trackback feature of Movable Type. The trackback client provides an alternative to bloggers (e.g. Blogger.com users) who need the trackback feature, albeit it doesn’t yet sound friendly. (well, if you could bear with the hassle to fill up the form once you wrote a single post)

The implementation/solutions are available for a while, it’s just blogging service providers like Blogger.com or LiveJournal didn’t adopt it. May be it could start with blogging client (e.g. w.bloggar, blogBuddy) to implement the trackback client, for broader adoption.

For people looking for PHP implemention, you could get it from Dinesh’s pingMT.

A way to add RSS feed to your blog

If you are using blogging service like Blogger or hosted your blog in place where you aren’t allowed to do some scripting (which means, you can’t use some solution required PHP, Perl …etc), you could still add a RSS feed to your blog through BlogMatrix.

If you don’t know what is RSS, check out this essay. What’s the benefit RSS brought to you? It basically providing a subscribing service to readers of your blog. There are now millions blogs available in blogland, and people just don’t have enough time to point their browser to all favourite blogs one by one. By using some RSS-aware program, they would be able to subscribe to these blogs and selectively choose to read their interested stories. By providing RSS, you open more option to your blog readers.

How to add RSS feed to your blog, via BlogMatrix
What’s illustrated here is a simpler way to generate a RSS feed to your blogger-powered blog, without signing up to BlogMatrix. (You could still register in BlogMatrix, that you could get your own blogroll and easier access to the information of your added blog).

1. Add your blog to BlogMatrix so it would be crawled/monitored by BlogMatrix. Go to http://www.blogmatrix.com/join.
2. Follow the instruction, click the “Next” button, then fill in your blog URL, your email, your relationship with the blog (you could submit other’s blog too), and choose I did not use the Template Rewriter. (Template Rewriter is the extra step to help BlogMatrix better parse your blog, learn about it here) Click “Next” to go to next step.
3. You don’t need to fill in the XML/RSS, because our purpose is to rely on BlogMatrix to create one for you. On the content, I suggest to choose Complete content. It would benefit more users of RSS readers.
4. Come to the last step, you could simply click the “Finish” button, or fill in descrition of your blog, more information of your blog such as country, state, city…etc. The more information you give, the easier BlogMatrix would identify your blog.
5. At last, there is a message telling you the blog has been added to BlogMatrix’s monitor, and the first entry might only start appearing 36 hours later. The added blog would be automatically put inside your blogrolling if you are a signed-in user.
6. So, your blog added, how could you get the URL of your RSS feed? You could go to blogrss, enter your blog’s name to search (Or just search at BlogMatrix main page). If it’s already available, you’d see your blog listed in the search result, click on it would bring you two icons and two code chunk, where you could copy and paste into your blog template. One icon is the link to BlogMatrix main page, the other is the link to your RSS URL. Put your RSS URL up on your blog, or give it to some reader who need it.
7. Take Oon Yeah’s blogspot site as an example, search “Transitions” at blogrss, you would see his blog (oonyeoh.blogspot.com) in the result list. Follow the link and then you could grab his RSS URL as http://feeds.blogmatrix.com/feeds/0186/018674.feed.rss

That’s it. If there are blog-tals like PPS need your blog’s RSS to parse and updating in their main page, you know what to do. You got the option to generate your RSS even if your blogging tool don’t.

My car

I sent my car for servicing this morning, be more specific: changing the tyres, front brake, balancing, alignment… I have to admit that I didn’t know much about car except to drive it. Sometimes I even feel embarrass to mention of that among my friends because they all seem pretty good in automobile knowledge. Being ignorant, I don’t familiar with the average market price on car servicing, so I’d just always send the car to the neareast workshop.

My new 13” tyres (175/70R13) cost me RM130 each, it is branded Classiro and imported from Indonesia. Is it over-priced or OK? May be I shouldn’t bother, as long as the service is good and no problem after all. What really bother me is, you got nothing to do while waiting for your car being fixed. There are always people hanging around, watching how their cars being fixed. I’d just feel bored. It’d be nice if the workshop located near to a cafe, which equipped with wireless Internet access :-), even better if the workshop itself providing Internet access. Haha, just my imagination, it didn’t sound justifiable to them.

Oh yeah, I owned a 1.5 litre engine Proton Wira.

Waypath

Technorati has announced their Keyword Search (Beta). Then BlogStreet launched a Blog post search. My last survey of search engine in Blogland listed 5 blog searching services. It’s just not enough, the creative ball can’t resist to keep rolling over on blogosphere.

Out of the above mentioned new searching services, I have missed out two existed RSS search engines: Blogdigger and Waypath. Waypath is cool, highly recommended! It gives better relevant search result than others (in my opinion).

And yeah, just found out that Dave Winer got a Weblog Search too. It’s powered by Google, which, simply said, sending the query to Google, getting the result, massaging, fetch the exact blog posts. Good idea.

What’s the difference between these search engine with traditional search engine like Google or Alltheweb? Some of these blog search engine didn’t spider webpage, instead, they fetch RSS and store them. The key point is they treat a blog post as single unit, traditional search engine would a file as a unit.

The start of Project Petaling Street

I surfed to Project Petaling Street after finishing some work. It’s kind of habit I’m going to catch up since it at least centralize a few blogs I used to read. But then, wow, there’s a heat event going on. Is it something wrong today? It’s 13th, Friday anyway.

First, Tim Yang made a corner turn and showing an attitude against PPS. Although he is one of the founders, he called PPS a self promotional wank, elitist and self-deluded. Instead, he put the other project, Matafilter, under his belt.

Then the people at PPS, which once met with Tim Yang at first blogger met, responsed. Check out Aizuddin, Dinesh, Oon Yeoh (and here), Jeff Ooi.

So far Dinesh has elaborated what’s really happening under the hood, in his perspective. And pretty sure then Tim has his side of story to tell. Anyway, it isn’t sound fair to Tim saying PPS is just sorta self promotional wank and he’s even one of founder! If he felt the idea was stolen or unhappy with how the project brought on, that’s the other story. I doubt Jeff Ooi need PPS to boost his blog as Malaysiakini would sure having more readers than PPS.

One of the critic raised by Tim is that PPS’s residents are through invitation. But everybody in a group got their very own opinion to share and voice out, and people have always having different ways to judge others’ writing, especially in web. And it is amplified by this blog phenomenon! So invitation could be a good start, it’s just impratical if you track a few hundred blogs at once.

However, the event would bring something to Malaysia blog community, whether it’s bad or good. We should do more pondering over this (as Oon Yeah called it) M’sia blog soap opera. :)

What a city

I live in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It’s the biggest city in Malaysia. And as other major city in other countries, it is crowded, full of people, and cars. If you own a car and you used to drive to work, you got to be ready anytime, ready for any chance to stuck in a massive traffic jam. It could happen at any place, and anytime, as long as you are on the road. Don’t presume you’d be lucky on the road, just be prepared, and patient. Well, of course, that’s my very personal opinion.


It might not be a normal day. We’ve just gone through a congested evenning 2 days ago, because of flash floods caused by heavy rain (pity all those car owners whose cars buried by flood). And this morning, it came again, you’d be suffering if you drive to your office through middle ring road or Istana road, or somewhere else connected to them. There are two tanker accidents which one got on fire and the other turned over. Then of course it caused the other massive traffic congestion. I have to spent more than one hour to reach my office. As I woke up early this morning, I was wondering it’s so great I could go to office much earlier than normal and avoid the traffic jam. End up I was disappointed, just the other day stuck in the car matrix…and I might consider as lucky, my colleague left his home at 7:00am and arrived office at 10:00am!! Could you imagine that?

When I walked down my office to go for lunch this noon, looking up to the clouds, I saw a hazy air, not very sure if those hazy days are back to us or not?! And watching a row of bank people stand aside the road and picketing, lots of car drive through and horning to support them. I got a thought to escape from all of these stuff. Is it because of the city? Or is it just me feeling exhausted? Anyway, the city still breath peacefully, it has no up-and-down emotion. It’s just me, wandering around, thinking of love and hate of a city.

Malaysian's blog center

[via Screenshots] Project Petaling Street — Content by Malaysians being Malaysian, is a project started by a core group of Malaysian bloggers. It was an idea caught in a first ever M’sian blogger meet, and then with just a few days effort, the project is up and running! Not even the project site, there’s a Project Petaling Street Wiki too. They are way fast, amazing…

Mean while, the site showing blog entries, as well as RSS, of core members’ blogs with MT trackback; lots of stuff is going on, e.g. a search engine for M’sian blog based on it. Expecting the trackback by public would be available soon.

It’s so great that I could now tracking many M’sian’s blog instead of going to them one by one. It might be sound the same if you use RSS aggregrator to keep track of your favor blogs. What extra features such a bloggin center providing are, you would be keep posted with new comers, and there is always more and more collaborative stuffs would be created by the powerful community.

Java Everywhere

[via Russell Beattie] I’ve never been JavaOne conference (or JavaTwo, the JavaOne in Taiwan). But when I looked at the official website and viewing the webcast, I feel, well, cool! And they also introduce a new collaborative workplace java.net.

It seem Sun is trying catching up with more marketing effort. May be they should have these cool stuff more often, and organize them at more places. You won’t gain lots of fresh technical food there, but it’s kind of motivating to try out more of Java stuff. That’s what Microsoft do with regular conference (e.g. Technet) to attract and create local developers’ desire to try their technology.

Ask for opinion of Digital Camera

I am considering for getting a digital camera. There are so many brands in the market and they all looks pretty similar. I try checked out some survey on web but it just didn’t help me to make decision. It sounds good to have something like Canon Powershot S50. But my budget may be just be enough to get a 3.2 mega-pixels camera (may be 4.0 Mpixels).

I knew this blog haven’t brought enough eye-balls for polling :). Just wonder I might could get some hints and personal experience from you. If you drop by here for any reason, and you got a digital camera, would you share some information like what kind of digital camera you have, and what’s the best thing you think of it?

Thanks!

Three hours downpour

I got a very bad experience yesterday evening, as most other people who worked in KL city area. The 3 hours downpour afternoon caused flash flood in many areas in the city. And I got home after 2.5 hours I left office. My friend spent 3.5 hours to get home, damn, that should be enough for you to drive from KL to Johor (center Malaysia to south Malaysia, over 220 KM) in a normal day.

I can’t resist to think of quiting such a city life style, while stuck in the car. Is it worth? You may feel good to live in a city like KL for benefit of feeling “in” and easy access to lots of facilities. However, that’s always trade-off. The quality of life drop when it come to day-to-day working environment. Of course, the biggest problem would be the traffic situation. Some people could handle but discipline themselves like wake-up much earlier to go to office, staying late to skip the rush hour.

May be it’s just me. I couldn’t stand much with this, always dreaming to have a more relax working life and stay away of wasting time in traffic. Guess it’d be time to do something.

entry_category_id in mt_entry

For the first time, I took a look at MT tables and play around. Then I found the field entry_category_id in table mt_entry contains all NULL value. Shouldn’t it be the category id of the entry? It sounds obvious to get an entry’s category in mt_entry table.

Later, by reading Brad’s SQL statement for Mark’s nothing personal RSS feed, I realized the category id is actually stored at mt_placement. And apparently, it’s for the purpose of able to link one entry to multiple categories. But where could I put the multiple categories to one entry? The option isn’t at new entry or power-editing mode of editing entries.…

[update] I am so careless. There is a little mark “Assign Multiple Categories” sit right beside the Primary Category.

Google Reloaded?

There is interesting analysis/guess on why google behaved differently at this Webmaster Forum thread: Why Google has become its ‘own worst nightmare competitor’. The post, written by Chris_D, explain the it was analogy of technology evolution take of Intel and Google, where:

if you don’t take advantage of the technological advancements you know will happen - your competitors will

Many people noted the changes of searching recently in Google, do they just simply mess up? Or is it some development going on with the competitive pressure?

Mobile Phone Numbers Follow Customers

It’s so nice if you could always keep your mobile number, no matter who’s the service provider of your mobile. U.S consumer may soon enjoy it. Court Lets Mobile Phone Numbers Follow Customers

A three-judge panel upheld the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites)’s long-delayed rule forcing wireless (news - web sites) telephone companies to let cell-phone customers keep their phone numbers when they switch carriers

It’s a real hassle to switch carriers, you got to transfer your address book from one SIM to the other (more if you got calendar stuff in your mobile), sending email/SMS to inform all your contacts the changing of mobile number. As a consumer, it’d be good if mobile number could be always stay the same. The number would be like an identity then, but you always got the choice to have a new one, as long as you paid.

It isn’t a good news to telco though. Take Malaysia telco as example, certain numbering are allocated to different mobile service providers. The current players on the market are DIGI, MAXIS/Timecel (note: MAXIS just bought over TimeCel a few months ago), Celcom/TMTouch. Some countries assigning all their mobile number under one particular area code (e.g. all mobile number in Singapore started with ‘9’). Instead, we have different “area code” for assigned to telcos: MAXIS/TimeCel(012, 017), Celcom/TMTouch(019, 013, 010), DIGI (016). And pre-set numbering has been allocated for these telcos. For example:

• MAXIS number: 012-3215xxx
• DIGI number: 016-2703xxx
• TimeCel number: 017-8889xxx

Since these numbers are pre-allocated (in charge of MCMC ), if it’s going to implement “mobile number following customers”, there are a lot of jobs aheading these telcos for implementing this feature. Most of the system on supporting mobile operation has been adopting the identification of own mobile number or other operators’ number by checking on the prefix 3 or 4 digits. If it got to be consolidated, billing system need a big change, CDR processing got an impact, commission system, CRM, ICS…etc, it got to be a huge headache.

Is U.S. telecom industry applying the same rules? It’s lucky M’sia telco don’t have to worry about it yet.

Steven Chow's Shaolin Soccer

It’s fun to watch Shaolin Soccer’s trailers in English(the first and the second). Steven Chow is my favorite comedy actor. He had been praticing many ways of performing comedy (I don’t appreciate all of them though). Shaolin Soccer is his latest film and is going to be showed in U.S.. I wonder would Western share the same type of humuor with Eastern? Moreover, it’s kind of fun to watch his speak in English (for me :-)… but his words and slang is kind of hard to replicate in other language. Anyway, hoping the film could achieve good result and he is more known to the world outside of Asia.

Weight control

While I am worrying lost control of my weight, been seen Sam Ruby and Sifry’s experience with Atkins.

Not knowing if the plan/product is available here, I am planning to try more exercises first, maybe at least swimming for two days per week? Hmm, I am over weight of about 8KG, got to be get serious on that.

weblogs.com ping

Is it because my hosting provider out of U.S? Or weblogs.com is simply too busy? That might be multi-millons pings weblogs.com received at every single moment, but it’s a bit too many for me to get timeout. I was getting about 4 of 5 average failed ping to weblogs.com, wondering could it possibly is server problem… Point browser to weblogs.com but it looks good.

[Update] Saving of this entry is failed to ping weblogs.com too.
[Update.2] Updating of blog entry seem don’t have the problem on ping. weird?

Jeremy's rant of font on Linux

Jeremy was frustrated with font on Linux, he has tried to do a simple task to have a decent view on 3 different browsers (of course, all running under Linux): Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla, Konqueror. Well, page on Firebird and Konqueror look crappy, Mozilla get the smooth-edged font right. Mozilla and Konqueror appeared to have the same fonts chosen but showing different result. Mozilla Firebird is still displaying the original font name for users to choose, something like *-adobe-*-time… (yes, that’s pain in the ass when you need to figure out what it is).

I don’t really know what’s the cause, but I do know how it feel. Back to the days where I had to configure my own Linux environment, I got to spent over 10 hours in front of the monitor, just to make the window look good. Certainly techniques to using TrueType font and XFT have been existed for a long time, and I am sure most of the Linux distribution put them on by default. So you ain’t gonna face this problem if you just install some distribution and using it with default option. The pain would come when you want to tune something. Is Linux ready for Desktop? To certain extend, I think the answer is yes. It got the environment for you to get the jobs done, it got the beautiful window manager which fairly perform most of UI job. However, if you tried to customize/configure something or you’re having some not-so-supported hardwares, Linux isn’t quite friendly to most of the users. Unless you got the know how, you won’t be out of the mess.

In my opinion, X Windows is the single biggest burden for Linux to be the desktop to compete other modern system. Lots of known techniques and solutions to well-known problems aren’t quite being aware. Linux kernel, filesystems are stable and reliable, lots of open source tools greatly improve productivity, but on UI side like font or printing issues are quite competitive to their rivals. These problems got existed solutions, but why people would still be bothered? Is it too many choices where different techniques applied by different distributions? Or the know-how is too difficult to access?

I’ve been using WinXP for the font. Maybe it’s time to try the latest Redhat 9 to check how’s the current Linux distribution answers to the desktop requirement. For sure we’d need trivial issues like font and printing to be working at the first place, then we’d talk about Linux for the desktop computing environment.

A standards compliant web publishing tool

[via Zeldman] A List Apart interviewed Six Apart’s Anil Dash on their upcoming MT-powered hosting service Typepad. Instead of talk about Typepad as yet the other web(log) publishing tool, the interview focus more on the standards-compliant feature/characteristic of Typead, which Zeldman noted: “may be the first standards-compliant publishing tool for the rest of us”.

Typepad isn’t just only generate valid markups, it itself is built with standards compliant tool as well, which means the development team treat valid XHTML markup as nature in their own coding, and the pre-built templates, to be claimed web standards inside out. It’s great to see Typepad has a set of pre-built valid XHTML+CSS markups as the templates for users to choose. Typepad could be the strength to push for more standards compliant blogs. And for novice users, Typepad provide set of templates where they tend to playing around with pre-built templates (yeah, I couldn’t resist to change template time by time when trying out Blogger serivce. That is the area where MT particular weak to attract novice users).

Inequality in Blogland

The meta blog sites such as Technorati, Po