February 10, 2004

Ferrari 3000

fr3000.gif

I can’t really link Ferrari to Acer.…tough it looks good (if you are F1 fans). May be a “BMW Thinkpad” sounds nice too.

Or I should open a restaurant: Ferrari Chili.

Comments (0)

August 22, 2003

Carry on

It’s August, 21st, exactly one month hiatus from my last blogging. I did more enjoying life than blogging during this one month. My depression and pressure was released and everything else was just, fine.

Thought and things I’ve done while I took the break:

May be I am just too un-patient, can’t keep the thing going more than a few months. I admire people who could do things consistently. I am still trying.

I found my blog reading declined. For once blog reading is the main activity of the day and I always felt I can’t miss out any interesting posts or intelligence generated on my favourite blogs. Nevertheless, every event would find its balance after over the peak. It’s time for me to re-organize my mind and life.

Comments (5)

July 18, 2003

The Trouble of Google

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

Steven got a point on these issues:

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

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

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

Comments (5)

The new Clie PEG-UX50

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

The PDA has somethings different:

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

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

Comments (0)

July 17, 2003

Yahoo plan to buy Overture

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

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

Comments (0)

July 16, 2003

An iPod offer

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

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

Comments (0)

July 03, 2003

What [ ] Are You?

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

[via theOtaku.com: Guru, Anime Quiz]

[via Quizilla!]

Yes, I’m boring.

Comments (0)

July 02, 2003

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?

Comments (0)

June 06, 2003

Bible Code

[via boing boing] I remember when I first read Michael Drosnin’s Bible Code, I was shocked. It was amazing at first glance, and no doubt the story is interesting. Only months later I realized the algorithm could work as long as you gave enough input. You would gain similar result if you apply the program on big text book such as Gone with the wind (well, I wonder what would we get if apply it on all series of Harry Potter?).

Natural language only contains limited of symbols, that create the chance to relate them meaningfully in a info-rich context. That’s still amazing because the original authors didn’t intend to hide any information in his/her text, but the patterns were there, all the time.

Here’s an analysis from Scientific American. And Dave Thomas’s finding on applying Bible Code technique to Bible Code II excerpt.

Comments (0)

June 05, 2003

The e-Marketplace for freelancer shrinked

The job on-line agency Guru.com is going to end its service end of this month. That’s one of the doors closed for freelancers. Once in a while, there were many sites open for job/work exchange. And they did bring lots of companies to seriously look into outsourcing option. Engineers came from place like India giving much lower price to contracted software, it’s pretty attractive especially the software in small scale.

However, according to the article, there are less work exchange nowadays. What really happen? It seem globally sinked economy’s side effect. While the global environment start back to normal slowly, small companies choose not to spend, big-corp choose secured partners. Is this the cause? I don’t know. Free-lancing market in Malaysia is still OK, but freelancers really can’t expect much at the mean time, unless they did have pretty good contacts.

Comments (2)

Miscellaneous update/Random thought

Wow, adot’s notblog has brought quite some traffic to my blog. I saw his update on 3 Firebird goodies just while I was going to post them, might as well quoted his:

If you’re looking for more on Mozilla Firebird then don’t miss don’t miss David Tenser’s amazing Firebird Help site, Ben Goodger’s great Reasons to switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser doc and Minh Truong’s 10 incredible Mozilla Firebird features (and how to use them) page.

[update] One more: 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot

My intention was actually promoting Mozilla to IE users. To further think about it, sometimes all great posts regarding Mozilla just didn’t make sense to those novice users. Technical geek seem easily pick up the switch and enjoy it. Normal users might need some mentor to hint them, little training would be more helpful. Then what’s the best time for these people to switch, since they don’t seem bother to know/care all the goodies of Mozilla (Firebird)? It’s time when their everyday browser having problem! For example, my sister, a typical IE user, has an easy switch while her IE having a localisation problem, and enjoy it ever after.

My performance of first interview seem not excellent enough to get its second try. There are 2 more days for this week and they still haven’t called me, think my chance has gone…

Then I got a chance to talk to a ex-boss for some business oppurtunity. It looks like I really want to leave. But not really. People used to be conservative on moving on because of the uncomfortable feeling of leaving familiar environment — you got your territory in office even though you don’t have a room! Besides that, I was just lazy to leave. Sometimes I was so fed-up with the management, sometimes I could just bear with that. Once the up-and-down period passed, you’d back to normal and feel secured. Nevertheless, one for sure would be lossing my enthusiasm once staying long enough.

Comments (0)

May 06, 2003

End of Iraq war, where's WMD?

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

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

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

An unconfirmed blog entry at Derek ’s site.

Comments (0)

April 28, 2003

Can't access to DiveIntoMark

Is Mark's blog went down in the past 12-14 hours? I was not able to access it. It might be some routing problem of my Internet access.

However, just checked, it's there. Glad to see it back online.

Comments (0)

April 25, 2003

Not a blog day

I am so tired day, physically and mentally lassitude. Partly because of the late slept last night, and also the annoyance of what happen in the office. You would be bothered by lots of things when you worked in a big corporate. The work assignment, political fighting, increment/promotion issues....Damn the bureaucracy

Comments (0)

April 22, 2003

What's your Winer Number

That's definitely a way to make famous people more popular. Guess we'd going to have 2 more acronyms in blog community, where WN stand for Winer Number, and EWN stand for Extended Winer Number. Check it out at Mark's post.

I couldn't really following what happened when I read Mark's Enough already. It should because I am not a regular reader following all the happening regarding RSS. Until reading this, and Winer Number. I do sense something about Dave over some posts on mailing list/forums. I was just among others, initially reading lots of his articles/blog when getting to blog world. And then surf away. As first knowing Blog, one thing I always complained about scripting.com was why it took so long to load. I also found weird of own webserver implementation of Radio Userland, and its unfriendly outliner/scripting environment -- I thought it was because I never used Mac then. MT come to rescue...

Mark really got the good sense of humour. Why is he acting like this? He explained. You could check Kevin Burton's experience as well. :)

Comments (0)

April 14, 2003

OK, what's up?

Check out the last entry! When is it written? It's almost 2 months ago. What happened to me?

Reading blog is a everyday thing to me. Yet I haven't fire up the engine to use to blog writing. For my past experience with a Userland Radio powered blog and Blogger blog, they all stopped after several months. Then I decided to spend the effort getting a domain and hosting for myself, and for this blogging. What so big deal about the blog? There's million blogs out there and why I so care about my (English) writing skill, layout of the site...etc...

Maybe I should just take it easy, things go easy when you relax and just follow your sense. The page is ready now and I try to put down more of my thought :).

Without knowing much of CSS, I insist to try designing my own layout of the blog and utilize CSS. That's nice! I have lots of fun over last whole week playing around with CSS and reading output of all these genius:


Thanks for all these brilliant effort, therefore I could skip the W3C CSS Spec :P.

The design is going on. The next step would have to read Mark's Dive into Accessibility. It's a great learning experience, may the great source with me.

Comments (0)

February 27, 2003

Rationale of starting this blog

I started blogging 2 years ago, using blog as a tool for my diary and web links collection. I was attracted by Radio's nice looking template and easy use of Blogger. However, it isn't easy to keep writing, even you are just writing what you are doing everyday: routine events, boring TODO list or moan in mind which nobody could understand. So I was just gave up on that on and off several times.

Nowadays blog has become a buzz and should everybody start a blog isn't a question anymore. (And yes, blog about blog is way too annoying to read :-). This post would be the only one) I am wondering why not take blog seriously and do it at least for my own good, which I could improve my english writing, for own memory, or explain things more clearly in writing. Hence this domain registered and I got my own web home! Thanks for the great team for MovableType. It suit my need well .

Comments (0)