yowkee essential

A New Version, A New Home, A New Campaign

Mozilla.org released Mozilla Firefox 1.5. They have a new home: Mozilla.com — clean, simple, focus on Firefox and Thunderbird, I like the design. And with Firefox 1.5, no doubt it’s time to shout out the challenge to market loudly. Mozilla would have a new marketing campaign (note: page not ready yet) very soon. Finger cross…

Get Firefox, Earn some cash

Google’s Firefox referral is now international:

The referral is only for Windows users, who previously never install Firefox in his/her PC, install and run the Firefox at the first time.

Get Mozilla Firefox, no matter you will help me earning some little cash or not. Get it, it’s for your own enjoying web surfing.

Apple Mac OS Broadband Tuner

Apple released Broadband Tuner 1.0. It adjusts the TCP send/receive and socket buffer, intending to let Mac OS users take the full advantage of their high speed broadband (with high latency).

Of course you could adjust the system variable with sysctl (under root authority) if you know how to do it. The Tuner basically changes the following parameters:

• net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072
  
• net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400
  
• kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000
  

Why Apple released the broadband booster now, that they could have done it long time ago? Pushing for more iTunes downloading?

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 in Mac OS X

I changed my browser back and forth in between Safari and Firefox. Lately Firefox 1.5 has been much more often than Safari. Its new tab option: “Force links that open new windows open in: A New Tab” just wins my heart — it match exactly what I used to do. I knew that Command+click could let you open a new tab of the links. But well, less key-strokes is always better for me.

On the other hand, probably I didn’t search hard enough for the right key (I don’t bother to do key remapping yet on my iBook). Use Command + Shift + {{ or }} is simply damn painful and inconvenient. Mozilla Firefox works sweet with Alt + 1, 2, 3… for the respective tabs opened. I use Adium as the basic IM client on Mac OS X, so it has the same shortcut key for multiple chat windows. So Firefox score +1.

Sourceforge's new user interface

Sourceforge has re-designed its user interface into a cleaner and easier navigating manner. A good move, especially on the download list of the available version to users — less choice is better.

However, on the application’s project main page, I was always confused with the green bar “Download xxx” — it doesn’t look like a link to me. There’s 4 out of 5 times when I intend to download an application from its main page, I clicked the links under “Latest News” instead of the green Download bar.

Well, I don’t know about others, probably I just need time to get used to it.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

W3C published a draft of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), as well as HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0. The current WCAG is WCAG 1.0, which published as W3C Recommendation May 1999.

It’s first time I noticed there’s HTML Techniques document for Accessibility guidelines. I wonder is most of the blog engine on the market has covered the accessibility consideration in their default blog template? That would be good to many disabled web users.

Some web accessibility validators (or should be testing tools, verifier, advisor):

• Accessibility Monitor : an online validator following WCAG
• A-Prompt Toolkit : a Windows application to test your web page accessibility
• NEWMAN Color-Blind : validate if you color design being considerable to color-blind
• WebXACT, they also have a desktop tool Bobby
• Lynx : An easy way to test your website’s accessibility, is to get text-only web browser lynx to surf to your site

OS Programming

• OS Development Tutorials get you started on every basic aspects of OS programming: boot sector, boot processing, kernels, interrupts, memory management…etc
• 16 papers on real-time and embedded Linux

Nowadays I am getting used to trust more on server-based storage. It means I stored the emails at Gmail, have my bookmarks at delicious, post my thought on my blog, have the code at some SVN/CVS servers.

Why would I still have posted the links here? Is it because I am not organized enough? At times when I got some ideas I do simply wrote and send email to myself, and at times I surf through some good URL — I bookmarked at Firefox. That’s probably kind of die hard work habit. But I realized it’s more because I think my blog belongs to mine, but del.icio.us isn’t.

Malaysian Politician Blog

It’s good to see Malaysian politician do blogging. In the old days, it’s always media doing one-way broadcasting news. And they choose what you could read, they interpret in ways they’d like to, in certain way their freedom on news is still very restricted — because of Malaysia government control of news casting.

Even in days of Internet being adapted widely as the alternative channel for news or information, you wouldn’t get to know opinion of politician in person. That partly because what we read on web is mostly written, heard, drafted by some one else instead of the particular person. With blog, nope, with more politician (or more persons in authority) joined the blogosphere, we can percept their messages in first hand. People could directly feedback (comments) and more importantly, through the constant reading of a people’s blog, you would most likely understand where this person stands. It’s good we could have that kind of understanding and communication with our own country’s polictian, isn’t it?

So far I knew there’s blog of Lim Kit Siang and Teresa Kok. Any other M’sian politician’s blog you know of?

Error 404 page

I only realized I didn’t yet have a proper 404 Error page, when I saw the link the article The Perfect 404 at digg. It’s an article in A List Apart, published in January 2004 issue.

It’s thorough introduction to guide you to create the error page for your site. Why bother? Because people come to the wrong URL links at your sites/blogs mainly because:

• wrongly typed URL
• faulty referral from other websites
• out-dated links from other websites, or search engine
• moved or deleted pages (moved pages have to return with code 301 — moved permenantly)

You aren’t going to let them just leave away, are you? So it’s better to have some guide on your 404 page.

I didn’t actually following the guide, but just simply create a page to advice the visitors to:

1. Do a site search for what they original come for
2. Go to Home page
3. My English blog or Chinese blog

Think that’s good enough for this little personal website.

An Example

Mu Mu, Body Blog

A noticable scheme in blogosphere: female blogger with snapshot of her body — not necessary naked, and not necessary having text sexual-related, is easy to get famous, at least at Technorati. Damn Yang and XiaXue are the example. Now we have Mu Mu, a 25 years old Chinese lady, whose blog is very famous among China bloggers.

Mu Mu named her blog dancing and body blog. I have a glance and she did have attractive photos on her blog, with nice thought out text. Her blog made it into New York Times : A Party Girl Leads China’s Online Revolution, and made it into Top 10 search of Technorati.

Nokia no longer release business phone without WiFi capability

Nokia is being agressive on WiFi. It draws a roadmap for all its high end mobile phone all equiped with WiFi capability, further with WiMax while available. That means most of its new series of Series 60/80 phones would come with WiFi. It seem to be a good move, with the low cost of WiFi chipset, data transfering on the widely used wireless network, and hints on bypass GSM/GPRS — WiFi phone?

Would you feel comfortable with the city you're living?

The event, that 3 Chinese women logded complaint of intimidated by police, sparked uproar when a video clip revealed the naked woman ordered to do ‘Ear Squat’ in front of a policewoman.

The news is at its peak and Home Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid will go to China to clear any mis-perception that our police is targeting China citizen. It’s a hurt to our tourism. However, the event trigger me of some thing else. The abuse of police power isn’t quite an unfamiliar stuff in our daily life. Although without any proof, we are used to think of the following cases:

• some polices are taking bribe
  
• to make complaint effectively reported to authority, we got to seek some one who is powerful enough to help
  

Think about that, is the abuse just happened on foreigner? Would you think it might happen at our own citizen? Quite possibly, I could hear you whispering that…

As a normal people living in a big city like KL, I didn’t feel secure. Comparing to Taipei and Singapore, the 2 places I’ve visited lately, I dare not said it’s usually safe if you walk alone in the city in late night —- though my friends in that 2 cities are proud of that. Besides the safety, one particular thing being harmful to our tourism is the attitude of taxi driver. When I was in Singapore, I never felt worry to take on any taxi at any places, knowing that they’d honestly run the metering. And I could logde the report if they didn’t do so, you knew they are effective in handling that. But on the bus coming back to KL in late night, I was worried about where we are going to take off the bus. Why would I worry? Isn’t this the familiest place I am living? I knew there’d have drivers asking for double of the fair charges, or even more. Well, with the cases friends ever experienced or heard over, you knew that taxi drivers at certain places (especially places trourists used to be) going to charge much higher — and they don’t meter the journey.

To be fair, there could always some mis-behaviour by minority in any cities. I just hope this would be changed in the future and let whoever come to our city and country feeling secure and comfortable.

How Sony could notify most of its DRM CD users

Ben Edelman has an excellent idea to help Sony cleaning up its DRM mess. Sony has announced an exchange program to call for free replacement of customers’ XCP-affected CDs.

So, how could it effectively notify most of its customers, who most of them probably didn’t go online and not notified of the heat event?

When a Sony customer play his/her XCP player, it would send message to Sony’s connected.sonymusic.com — which reply a null message with a reference to nobanner.xml (http://www.sonymusic.com/access/banners/nobanner.xml). Ben’s idea is to replace this nobanner.xml with a proper notification message to show on its player — hence alerting its customers. Read the details here.

read more | digg story

Google Services

TipMonkies has an Ultimate Guide to Google Services.

Google isn’t just doing search and ain’t simply giving you that simple plain text box. It has tons of other services related to images, video, book, desktop app, map, blogging, advertisement…and more. Going through the list, except most search related — which basically indexing the contents on web (takes it to be images, video, published papers/books), Google has bought over some other small companies to provide quality image management application (Picasa), desktop search (still about searching, but just a layer up your hard disk), Google Earth (would map info via satellite consider information on web to be indexing?)…

All and all, google is slowly building up whole chunk of technical driven services or application (self-build or bought over). Nevertheless, technology is the core competency of Google. And it ain’t following other old web startup like Yahoo, who target to be the homepage of everybody’s browser and having its own army for media contents (Warner’s style). Google stay focus and grow around its core. That’s good because both has the separation of web market and giving its own different evolving path. These companies’ future is interesting to look out.

UI Design: Rounded Corner

Basement.org has an good article regarding Why Do We Love Rounded Corners, which is partly based on paper Information Object.

It has well says over the linkage of things, or looks we prefer, to the leverage physical experience of how we interact and use object. So rounded corners are preferable because human are attracted to things tha t appear to be organic in nature. And comparing to plain old rectangle boxes, rounded corners indicate more information (and more related) to the object it contained.

I am only wandering is it because we feel circle is prettier than rectangle? Our body naturally being rounded, rounded corners in physical world are less harmful.… (e.g. a rounded table compare to table with right angles).

Simple Sharing Extension

Microsoft published an extension for RSS and OPML: Simple Sharing Extension . The SSE specification is licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.5.

Its usage model looks to me the SSE is targeting mutual syncing and subscription amongs publishers (websites/blogs). There is more interaction could be imagined with introduction of sx:sharing, sx:related, sx:sync. I didn’t see anything get it more content-rich, would it matter for more data exchange among publishers? Would more interaction helps web growth? The success of protocol always depending on its stability, widely-spread and stable. Licensing SSE under CC doesn’t necessary make it stable or widely adapted, it’s at least sounds encouraging though.

We have Atom being developed over 2 years. How far would SSE go?

The Best Software Writing 2

Joel has collected the best writing on the web about software, and published as The Best Software Writing 1. Here’s the collection for the 2nd book. Go and submit your favourite software articles on the web.

read more | digg story

How to get developers to contribute to your open source project

titus has some nice says about how to really get developers/users to your open source project. Think about the source control system you choose, think about the web page, mailing list’s accessibility. Well, sort of marketing for open source project.

read more | digg story

Encyclopedia in your PC

Now you could download the whole WikiPedia in XML format. download.wikimedia.org providing the database dump of Wikipedia for current pages, titles only and full pages to be dowloaded. How big could it be? It’s more than 14GB.

So it’s Encyclopedia in your PC if you know how to setup up mediawiki and load the dump file. Or you might want to print it out (who would want to do that?). Or if you are creative enough, there’re lots of things you could experiment with the XML files. Have fun.

Your Blog at WordPress.com

The beta is over, it’s opened!

Go get it, NOW

WCG 2005 Singapore

I am neither a usual PC gamer nor fans. But I do like the excitement brought by the games. Unexpectedly, I bumped into the World Cyber Game (WCG) 2005 on the past Sunday when I was looking around for the target of half-a-million-ringgit race 3.

Wow that’s great, I never knew this year’s grand final is held at Singapore Suntec city. It felt good to be there, watching the teams battle out in the final. I could see through those young guys’ fire in the eye, the people sitting on the stage sweating, shouting and focusing in the cyber game, that’s the real hero for them.

Btw, the result has been out.

Half a million ringgit race 3

My wife went to Singapore to join the Half-A-Million-Ringgit-Race Treasure Hunt. It’s organized by Singapore Tourism Board, as one of the series event/activities to promote Singapore’s tourism — the slogan for the programme is Visit Singapore, Learning about Singapore.

She has been there for one week and I missed her a lot. So on last Friday night I took bus to go to Singapore too, with the hope we might be lucky in Race 3 — well, the race 3 started on last Saturday (19/Nov).

We arrived at the starting point of the race early Saturday morning, register and have the first riddle: (you got to re-register even if you have joined the previous races)

Sitting along the quiet path,
This is hardly nature’s wrath.
If you strain your sights hard enough,
You might glimpse a fruit that’s just so tough.

Well, we got a car this round (from my sister-in-law), and this riddle seem extremely easy! Initially her sister suggested it could be the orchard at Bukit Timah, but come to really think of it — this is a game promoting to know Singapore, then obviously the answer is the Esplanade !

So and so, with smile on our face and confidence, we started the searching along all possible quiet path we could find around the Esplanade. Guess what? A few hours later, we are exhausted, on our feet we have been though a big big round surrounding the Esplanade — because we thought it’s obviously some quiet place where you could glimpse the roof of Esplanade. That’s the look of a durian obviously isn’t it?! All Singaporean knew that. Further more, lots of the participants have the same thought and been the same place, we met and said hello, and having the same misery face. It’s such a easy guess and yet we are out of stream…

We finally gave up around 3:30pm at the afternoon, decided to go back to my sister-in-law’s house and do our homework on Internet. That end up with a good sleep and through to the night.

Frusted, feeling hopeless to the game, we wake up the second day (20/Nov) and had some good news! With friends’ help and we’ve been thinking it could be the long under-pass linking among a few shopping mall in that area — CityLink, which allows you to walk to Marine Square, Suntec City, MRT without a shine of sun. That could be a place be the first checkpoint! We went with excitement. Again, few hours later we are down, having a delicious Ramen and, hopeless again. The last hope, well, it could actually be the orchard at Bukit Timah. My sister-in-law had the never-say-never attitude, she went all by herself to Bukit Timah to have a search.

Errhem.…today, Nov/21, I am at my home at KL, typing for this blog post. End of the story, end of my 2-days journey at Singapore for the Race 3 of the treasure hunt. Of course, we didn’t find it. My wife was so close at the Race 2 and yet Race 3 game seem so far… May be I was the one bringing the bad luck to her. Well, the organizer might be happy, I am one of the trourist well spending in that 2 days for over 500 ringgit —- think about if they could attract a couple hundred of Malaysian for the race.

diggdot.us

If you would just like to follow up with all the heat news and the buzz, especially on the technical side, just stay on Diggdot.us.

Diggdot.us is Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular/. It browse through the 3 famous web channels constantly, cycle after cycle, and shows up the news list in unified format.

Sony's DRM rootkit: The Real Story

I am following the story started here. And wishing some one would have summarized it in a way covering most critical aspects.

Well, here’s it. Bruce Schneier’s complete overview of the whole Sony rootkit saga. He sum it up well, excellent article. Go read it!

Some highlights:

Sony claimed the rootkit didn’t phone home when it did. On Nov. 4, Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of global digital business, demonstrated the company’s disdain for its customers when he said, “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” in an NPR interview. Even Sony’s apology only admits that its rootkit “includes a feature that may make a user’s computer susceptible to a virus written specifically to target the software.”

This drama is also about incompetence. Sony’s latest rootkit-removal tool actually leaves a gaping vulnerability. And Sony’s rootkit — designed to stop copyright infringement — itself may have infringed on copyright. As amazing as it might seem, the code seems to include an open-source MP3 encoder in violation of that library’s license agreement. But even that is not the real story.

read more | digg story

Airbus A380

Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Airbus to buy the double-decker Airbus A380. It’s going to start service on Australia-Europe route in 2007.

The A380 arrived at KLIA on Wednesday, heard that there is a test flight this morning. It flight through on air around 10:30am this morning. I didn’t follow colleagues to watch it outside of our office. Nevermind, let’s have some view of A380 at Flickr.

Dig? gg..? Digg

Digg was formed by Kevin Rose, who was known as one of the TechTV guy in The Screen Saver. Digg is frequently taken to compare to Slashdot lately, mostly for the style of similarity. Here’s what’s digg about:

• User submitted story (geek stuff)
• User decided what to be show on home page
• Cleaner style of comments (some might not agree)
• One click post to your blog

Well, I couldn’t really describe it clearly why Digg stand out of Slashdot. Probably it’s the digg feature, the users place their vote on the article they valued or liked. It’s always the minor feature that keep the users stay with the software, you click here and there, seeing the number changed, articles floating upper.….then you are satisfied, you feel cool, and then you like it!

Further reading:

• Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot
• Digg Gets Kiss From a Rose
• Digg temporarily downed by ‘success’
• Digg Secures $2.8 Million fund
• Tagging the news you want to use
• del.icio.us/tag/digg

Firefox 1.5 RC3 Released!

The auto-update went through without problem for me, sweet. Mozilla.org has put up the RC3 logo on the main page, but at the time of writing, release note for RC3 seem not updated yet.

read more | digg story

Why do people still use plaintext network protocols with networks

While at Supercomputing 2005 I came across a plasma screen with the sniffings of people’s passwords they are transporting over the network in cleartext! Why do people still do this?! The link leads to a realtime update of the passwords being sniffed

read more | digg story

Half a Million Ringgit Race (2)

It’s apparently not many Malaysian noticed the race I blog a few days ago — even though that’s huge money to win.

May be more Malaysian has been aware of it now since TheStar has its media coverage of the winner of race 1. The Malaccan got the RM50,000 into his pocket happily.

My wife and her friend have gone to Singapore on the past Monday. It’s already on Race 2 (with award RM75,000). On Tuesday, they wasted no time to register and going through 4 stations, solving all the given riddles. It’s percepted as pretty fast as they caught up with the 1st team just within a singular day! However, the luck isn’t with them. The last station is at a place that didn’t operate on Tuesday (the rule is, you can’t get in for the hint of next check point if the participate office isn’t operate).

Waiting cautiously till Wednesday morning, they arrived the check point and found there is already one team staying in front of the gate — all wanted to step into the Bollywood Veggie at the first second it opened! Too bad, without prior experience, that one race would only consist 3 to 5 check points, they didn’t know to search for the letterbox as it’s the last check point! And it’s even worse when they finally found the letterbox, the paper inside the letterbox is LOST?! My wife called the organizer 15 minutes later and only then found nobody should take the paper away.

They got back to the letterbox later on and found the paper, probably organizer did call the other team and ask to return. However, it seem too late to them, even though following the instruction to make call and register their achievement of the final check point. Only winner go away with the RM75,000. :(

Google Base

In the old days, the start of the web crawling activities tend to categorize content on web — Yahoo started that way. Then the volume of web contents grew tremendously, no one could really follow and no single company could afford spending enough manpower on categorizing each web sites pop into the web world. And so Google borned with the type of simplest single textbox interface — that you just type in whatever you got to grab from the web, who cares which category that thing has to fall in.

Google was big, back then it stormed into the search engine world and creating a huge cake of ads market place. All kind of texts are crawled, stored into its thousands of servers. Text could be stored and searched. All right, why not image? Why not published books? Why not video? Oops, there are more and more to be revealed on how we’re going to defined the content generated by human being. Why not you define it?

Here’s come Google Base. It said:

Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we’ll host and make searchable online.

Now you have the influence, you defined it.

HOWTO links

• Setup the SSH server to use keys for authenticationSetup the SSH server to use keys for authentication
  Great, so with proper public/private key-pair then I don’t have to type the password everytime.
  
• How to getting start with Ruby
  
• Personal Fedora Core 4 Installation Guide
  
• Fedora Core 4 tips and tricks
  Well, something you got to do each time you install the Fedora Core. It looks like it’s better to install the kernel-module-ntfs via rpm instead of yum, especially after upgrading the Linux kernel, then have to repeat finding the exact matched version of ntfs kernel module.
  

Blog Marketing

Who is this girl named Dawn Yang? Her blog clapbangkiss isn’t accessible when I wanted to take a look how cute she is. This name is so hot because it has stayed on top 3 search of Technorati for 3 days! (well, surprisingly searching “Dawn Yang” on google image didn’t really bring me to see the photos I would like to see).

Well, what does that mean? All the web marketing guys on earth must now be very curious to know how she makes such an heat effect in this blog phenomenon. She must be a talented marketing person, or someone she hired is. It’s all about traffic, traffic and traffic, and she made it. In other words, with so many online ads out there targeting on weblog, millions bloggers eye on Technorati on ideas to blog on topics that could possibly bring the most traffic to their blog, on every second. That would made whoever famous even famous, whatever hot even more hot. You got it, it’s not easy to get into top 10 search, once you are in, it ain’t that hard to step into staying there for days.

After putting Google Adsense into my blog for a few days, I started feeling tired of it —- no more checking on Technorati for what’s hot to blog and what’s people searching now. Traffic is the keyword to bring the revenue to you. But not now, not now for me.

Google Analytics

Google acquired Urchin on last March. Now it has converted to Google Analytics.

This is what Google Analytics offer:

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

The software originated from Urchin perform analysis on your website traffic, study the visitor’s surfing behavior and from there you could identified where’s the bottlenecks or strength in terms of the advertisement potential. Should give it a try.

Peter Drucker has passed away

Learning about the sad news of Peter Drucker’s demise this morning. He departed this world on Nov 11 2005 in California, at age 95.

Drucker, the father of modern business management, formed the path of how modern business management to be. He is no doubt the pioneer of the current business philosophy which we are familiar with. His amazing, visionary management theory has inspired people well for more than 40 years.

Thank you, Peter. We would be missing you.

Visit Singapore, Learn about Singapore - A Half A Million Treasure Hunt

If you are a Malaysian, got some free time, wonder where to look for quick money, check this out. Singapore Tourism Board is organizing a Half-A-Million-Ringgit Race, exclusively just for Malaysian! Non-Malaysian, Malaysian PR or Malaysian workers in Singapore are exluded.

Looks like they are serious to get ringgit flow into Singapore in this period of time, to boost Singapore tourism. There are totally 5 races, from race 1st to 5th it provides sole rewards of RM50K, 75K, 100K, 125K and 150K. That’s very attractive isn’t it? If you are Malaysian who pay attention to media, you probably have noticed the event at The Star, Sin Chew Daily, 8TV and TV3.

How did it start? It would put up a riddle on the selected media — which its answer point to the starting point of the race. Then you could get to the location to make registration and start to look for the treasure cheat —- after going to a few points , each with the clue poster to give riddle to be solved. There would be only one winner for each race. The important document you got to get to eligible to claim the prize (well, if you are the winner): Malaysian Passport, Immigration card and the endorsed registration card.

Do check out its FAQ if you are interested.

Firefox 1.5 RC2

Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is now available to download. I was using Firefox 1.5 RC1 since 2 weeks ago, worked fine for all my normal web surfing need (well, probably because I didn’t have much extension installed) — and the rendering speed seem faster most of the time. One noticable changes to most users is the layout of Option dialogue. It’s now more user friendly and easier to navigate and understand (hiding the un-necessary columns to avoid complexity).

Asa Dotzler has some brief info of what are fixed of this RC2 since RC1. And if you wonder why it shows Firefox 1.5 instead of Firefox 1.5 RC2 after the auto-update or manually installation, he has an explanation too.

Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta --> Windows Defender

Last week, Anti-Malware Engineering Team at Microsoft announced that they have figured out a name Windows Defender as the the final product for their anti-malware product, that current known as Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware and released as a beta version.

On the path of this rebranding from AntiSpyware to Defender, the army of Microsoft lawyer team has done their job on clearing any legal obstacle. Adam Lyttle, a 22-year-old developer from Australia, who developed a program under same name which prevent any website changed your PC setting un-noticely, was contacted by the lawyer that his product was infringing on the Windows trademark. He signed the agreement after thought and returned. Two weeks later, he learned that the product name he was ever used, was now a official brand name of the AntiSpyware Beta.

From this article New name flap for Microsoft — but this time its legal right is clear

Lyttle received no money under the agreement, and he said in an interview Monday that he would have given the name to Microsoft just the same had he known the company wanted to use it. But he said he would have preferred the company to have been more straightforward.

and

If Lyttle had asked whether Microsoft planned to use the name, the law firm would have been obligated to refrain from deceiving him, said intellectual-property lawyer Thomas Hoffmann, a lawyer with DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary in Seattle. Otherwise, Microsoft and its lawyers were under no legal or ethical obligation to volunteer the information.

Well, lawyer has their way of doing thing and it’s their job to ensure the clearance of any possible legal threat anyway. From their point of view, not everyone would be so kind like Adam when it come to money. But sure that it isn’t that comfortable if you at Adam’s position — wondering if himself has fallen into any kind of set up.

A buiness lesson to learn.

AJAX

AJAX, acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a hot topic/technology in web development field. Ever since many web application going towards this approach (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail beta and other new application like Basecamp), it has been widely known and picked up by many web developers.

So, where did it start from? Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications — this is the first article named the acronym AJAX for using the combination of asynchronous JavaScript and exchange of data via XMLHttpRequest doing web development. The data being exchanged in between client and server not necessary has to be in XML format, but that’s the common approach most developers practice.

Why AJAX? In layman term, the web developers wish to achieve and providing a quick response and easy-to-use desktop like environment to web interface (that’s the web browser we stared at everyday). Traditional websites or any sort of web application would fully show its page as per requested once it loaded enough data from remote web server. That could mean a untolerable waiting while network is too slow. And it also cause some problem on the case where you’d some data verification from the server side — but it’d never get done until you fill up all the required data on one page. With AJAX, in between this page and the next page (well, also mean before you click the submit button), it already sending portion of data over to the server and did the necessary query or verification —- and even better, it shows the returned data on the spot!! So and so, this is more getting closer to the desktop application experience where the users familiar with.

AJAX is sure brought to be compared with technology also trying to achieve the same effect, like Macromedia Flash. One advantage it has over Flash is, there’s nothing new — it use the plain old JavaScript and XML, developers are familiar with it and search engine friendly. Of course, this isn’t a technie to replace what Flash could provide for the multimedia side of the effect. On the bad side of AJAX, sometimes it’d bring users believe they are using some sort of real desktop application and expecting a faster response. And it might break what the Back button do or slow down its effect.

In conclusion, AJAX looks like an exciting new technology/skill worth to invest to learn. So I went over to Amazon, it showed 4 books of my search result:

• Dave Crane’s AJAX in Action
• Foundations of Ajax from Apress
• Professional Ajax
• Ajax Patterns and Best Practices

The 3rd and 4th book would only be available in 2006. So right now we are only left with AJAX in Action and Foundations of AJAX if we tend to learn things from reading book.

Note: I joined Amazon Affiliate Program, if you interested, below is the books link.

PDA Phone

I was doing some Palm application development few years ago. At that time I brought along a PDA everyday, fully enjoy the feel of productivity —- just the feel, I didn’t ever actually fully utilize the tool. At times I did enjoy the convenience of stuffing lots of e-books into it, so I always get something to read on the road.

May be it’s the lack of multimedia functions of the PDA I owned made me step back. Now my hand is itchy again. I am looking for a new mobile phone, and wondering, why not getting a PDA phone?

Some web surfing and googling show Treo is possibly out of my budget. And Pocket PC is out of my choice because I don’t like my electronic device all attached with Windows. Wow…thing like Palm LifeDrive and Nokia 770 just looks awesome, so attrative :~~) . But they are also much over the budget :(, and, they are not phone.

Motorola is producing a series of Linux phone, like the A728 and A732. Linux phone seem to be a good fit for my PDA phone choice. It has the OS I wanted — at least I knew a little of it, and I could have done some hacking with it. And then I found more hacking stuff with Motorola Linux phone, e.g. Hacking the Motorola A780. Hacker Harald Welte form a project OpenEZX for Motorola EZX phone platform, mainly the A780, E680 and E680i. There are either toolchain and customized made image to load and overwrite the existing OS on the phone.

That sounds good. E680i is available in Malaysia and seem cost around RM1200 at the mean time. I am looking forward to it.

Slide

Slide is a new way of photo sharing. It gives you a desktop software. Once installed it would indexing all your photos in the hard disks, and categorized them into channels. With channels you could invite your friends (who should have an account in Slide too, I guess) to view your selected photos. That’s the new way of photo sharing, kind of P2P. But not really p2p, you are requried to register at Slide and you could have the options of desktop viewing and published your photos on web.

One particular feature of Slide is the software would stick at your desktop and “playback” your photos with a always-on ticket interface. The always on slide show feature seem to be an unique UI feature and allow alerting of your friends’ new shared photos.

Many companies are working on social-networking type of software. What Slide is trying to accomplish would be like what others trying to add more and more into the current sharing framework — photo sharing, tagging, subscribing (Flickr provide photo channel subscribing via RSS too), text, video, IM (Instant Messaging).…etc. Looks as if someone manage to incorporate all kind of sharable contents (stuff interesting to share) would be the winner. But the ease of use of the software interface would always be the key factor to differentiate from all the competitors. Slide claimed their software usablitity is what they are different than others. You might want to give it a try.

Google CC Search

The above is shown in Google Advanced Search. There is a new criteria for search filtering based on Usage Right:

• aren’t filtered by license
• allow some forms of re-use
• can be freely modified, adapted or built upon

Google seem to use Creative Commons to identify the license of the pages it archived. Truely that is big effort spent to make this work.

On the other hand, Yahoo Advanced Web Search seem long having the option to filter your search based on licensed content. And it specify to use CC. It’s CC search option is shown as figure below. Here’s its tips:

• This special Yahoo! Search finds pages that have content with a Creative Commons license

Google’s approach is not to confuse the users with less information provided. Yahoo’s approach seem to be more appropriate if users know what actually is CC.

Would users really care which license was specified? Not really, might not at the stage when they go to the search engine. At the first place, they might want to look for something could be freely distributed, or some licensed content. When it was found, the license details has to be further studied then.

Also, would it mean Google plan to identify web content or downloaded softwares which use GPL, BSD ….etc licenses?

• Reference: Joi Ito’s Google + CC = Good

Google Adsense Referral

In short, this is a new referral program run by Google Adsense (well, at least new to me). If anyone going to sign up Google Adsense with me as the referral, when you earn the first 100.00 and eligible for the paid out, the referral’s account (me) would get the 100.00 credit too.

Note: well…I don’t think you would be interested. If you really do, please look at the right sidebar of my main blog page, and click at the ads image below my Flickr photos :p.

Hong Kong Badminton Championship, Semi Final

I’ve been spending around 8 hours today (oops.. I mean Nov 5th) in front of TV, to watch the live cast of Hong Kong Badminton Open at ASTRO Channel 80. Well, on and off, I was either in the computer room for some works, or staring at the TV.

It’s the semi final matches of the tournament today. The organizer splitted the matches into 2 sessions, where afternoon session playing Men Single/Double, Women Single/Double, Mix Double; and the night session playing the other match of the 5 groups (MS/MD/WS/WD/XD). This seem to be the recent trend as a few tournaments practiced the same way lately, which in the old days they used to place 2 courts and playing 2 semi-final matches at the same time. This is good for the fans, you won’t miss any one of the matches (there is always only live cast on one court — so not covering the other court if two matches play at the same time).

However, it is really too exhausted to watch a tournament for such long hours. Badminton, due to its rules of play — player could only gain point/credit with their serve of the shuttle, has been claimed not “fit” for live casting and ads/commercial show in between the matches. The game used to be 15 points per match, 3 matches a game (except Women Single would be 11 points per match). Heard the IBF would experiment the style of 21 points per match — point gaining without serve soon.

Back to the tournament, I was so disappointed with Lee Chong Wei. He isn’t only lose to Lin Dan, he doesn’t even show he could play at the same level as Lin Dan — even though his world ranking is now world number 3rd. There used to have people calling Lee as “Champion Kampung” (Kampung is a Malay word which means villeage, local). I don’t think this is fair to him even though he has only showed he is unbeatable and strong in Malaysia. On the other hand, in most other tournaments with the strongest players anticipated, he always handled well and getting into Quarter Final or Semi Final. So he live up to his world ranking. But today he really not playing his usual level, can’t figure out why he always performed superb in one day and then looks totally lost confidence at the second day.

Game of the day goes to Men Double match between young Chinese pair Xie ZhongBo / Guo ZhenDong v.s. the veteran Jens Eriksen / Martin Lungaard Hansen. They deliver a fantastic game to the fans. The fast and agressive young Chinese pair lost at 12-15, 6-15. However, they shows a exciting style with their offensive skills. On the contrary, Erikson and Hansen was cool, their excellent control of mid-and-front court make the young guys running the court, and yet they get the rhythm of the game in their hand. My hat off to them.

There is only one bad thing, in the final tomorrow, there would have China v.s. China in Men/Women Single and Women Double, sure it isn’t a good news for the fans.

By the way, if you are a badminton fans like me, do drop by on Badminton Central. It’s a great forum for every thing about Badminton. :)

AOpen's MiniPC

Here’s the Mac Mini looks-alike MiniPC. More interesting, it is pre-installed with Linux by default. The Linux distribution came with it is Linspire, which claimed to be The World’s Easiest Desktop Linux.

It’s an interesting way AOpen approachs the mini-size desktop market. But why do they do that? Mac Mini might have some success, and that probably make some PC users wish they could have such a mini sized and cute PC at their desktop too (or laptop?). Is it the only reason Mac Mini making successful sales? I don’t think so. What Apple selling is the superb feel-good consumer experience —- a combination of great looking, cute Mac Mini with Mac OS X, and even their other product lines (iPod, high quality monitor…etc). An only look-alike PC might not replicate the same success sales on market. Moreover, what market are they targeting for? If it’s loaded with Linux by default, would normal PC users buy the idea? Would Linux hackers feel cool to get a cute looking cube but suffering lower performance (which they could get higher specification with lower price).

MiniPC is going to ship with price starting US399 (Linux) and US499 (Windows). Yes, it did come with Windows pre-loaded. It is in a more or less same pricing range with Mac Mini. On the other hand, small form factor PC has long been every where ever since Mac Mini out in the market. I don’t think PC users would be so excited then about a Mac Mini “replica”.

I just couldn’t agree to such an marketing idea.

Mike's book: Jobs I’ve Known

Mike Evangelist is using his blog Writers Block Live as a tool to write his new book Jobs I’ve Known. There are a lot of interesting stories, good to get a bit more inside-info into how Apple running the business and how Steve Jobs actually making the key impact in each Apple product development.

Here are some nice pieces:
* Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article
* Apple - Thinking Different Again
* Making It Look Easy - The Birth of the iPod

Adsense

It is Deepavali and Hari Raya holiday this week at Malaysia. I got a long vacation. Been Melaka to relax for 3 days, come back, I feel like playing around with blogging again.

Look at my blog, it’s aged, outdated. But googling around just get me felt that I wasnt’ able to catch with all those happenning stuff. At last, I only could make one change: make Google Adsense enabled for my blog — just for experiment. Since it’s a very low volume blog ever since I decided this should be a place only for my very random writing (and write for what? self-complement?), the text-ads put up on each individual page wouldn’t get much click-through. Anyhow, let’s start with a small step to revamp my weblog.

Other notes

It’s sure feeling lonely when nobody care/read what you are writing. Is that the reason why I can’t get back the passion of blogging of 2 years ago? (anyway, I was then only actively blog for 3 months.)

Weblog, or blog, has been widely known and recognized in Internet for years. There are probably over few thousands new weblog created in every single day. So why should I care to create one? I found my brain stuck when I was away from the writing activities, there’s no juice when I figure I should have some idea to put on my blog. That’s the only reason I should back to blogging and help myself to build up some good habit.

My wishes is:
* Wake up early at specific time everyday
* Do some light blogging at week day, as the day job takes up most of my time —- well, this bother me a lot because my job came to the stage when I started feeling like run away from it
* Do some deeper study into any topics at weekend, write it out for better understanding of it