July 02, 2003
No, I will not fix your computer
Sometimes 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. :-)
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
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:
- Mozilla on Windows now has support for NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use “windows integrated security”.
- Mozilla’s bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.
- Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
- Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a “delete junk mail” menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
- Pop-up blocking has been streamlined to improve usability.
- Users can now specify “blank page,” “home page,” or “Last page visited” for each of first window, new window and new tab.
- Users can now specify default font, size and color for HTML mail compose.
- Image blocking/disabling is now more flexible and users can “view image” to see blocked or not loaded images.
- “Launch file” after downloading has been enabled for .exe files
- It is possible to build Mozilla for Win32 using GCC. See the win32 build instructions for details.
- Proxy auto-config (PAC) failover has been implemented
- Mozilla 1.4 contains thousands of additional bugfixes, including changes to improve performance, stability, web site compatability, standards support, and usability.