yowkee essential

Changes

I didn’t write any things for months. Bad habit — procrastination, laziness hit me ever since Chinese New Year. Just a loosing on the end of consicious for one week, it could easily ruined whatever good habit you are building in progress. A good lesson to learn.

Of course, it isn’t just purely about consitently blogging. My emotion is down and up for the past month, and been thinking a lot about my job. Also, the hosting of this blog is changed from ICDSoft to Dreamhost. I saw many blogs promoting about Dreamhost, with its looking good feature vs pricing trade-offs, I switched. However, it isn’t as stable as I thought. I’ve even experienced out of connection of my blog because of the wrongly installation/configuration of PHP in the host (sounds ridiculous, a system admin simply changed the configuration which broke the clients’ web?). It’s now obvious to seen that many promoted Dreamhost due to its huge rebate rewards, and the key complains to Dreamhost could be concluded as:
* Lack of stability (system setup, connections…etc)
* Notorious CPU usage limit: it provided tremendous bandwidth for its hosting, but once users exceed the CPU percentage limit, users’ sites were taken down without proper notice.

This sounds bad. However, I decided to stay for a longer while to test it out. After all, this is the first post of my blog after switch hosting for 4 weeks. I do like its big storage, SSH access and the hosting of unlimited domains.

Changes, it’s the time for changes. Co-incidentally, usually when you’re thinking of changes in your life, you’d also encounter many others things, people or events changed around you. I thought a lot about my job and flip back-n-forth between stay and leave. Changes would probably come pretty soon. Come to that later.

The past 2005 and new 2006

It’s now 2006. Happy New Year to all of you.

I didn’t do any introspect for the past 2005, intending to treat it as any other normal day, let it past and welcome the new year.

Just for some notes and recording of the observation of the software technology on 2005, it’s sure a year of scripting. Web development is getting much improved with the hype of AJAX (which changing the visual display interacting with users, being more friendly if put on good uses), RubyOnRails and such like web frameworks have boosted a lot in the eases and speed of developing an web application. And then come Web 2.0, we have seen lots of new way of web interaction being implemented. Other area of software development seem less mentioned in major media or even blogosphere (well, probably it’s my poor coverage of concern). Development methodology like agile development has been more practically and seem it’s actually the right way to grab certain parts of doing development of various methodologies (which is suit to you).

It’s forsee 2006 would be still a year for more Web, Web and Web. Those development frameworks would progress being more mature, and AJAX would be widely deployed and possibly it’d trigger something more intuitively.

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.

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.

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.

Ferrari 3000

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.

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:

• Without securing the other job, I tendered my resignation. It isn’t an action without deep thought. I have decided it’s time to end my 2 years service in this big corporation. Since I have understood myself better ever and bigCo/bureaucracy just doesn’t suit me. I am glad I did it. Phew…

• The plan is to take a 3-months break, for sabatical and to ponder for new oppurtunity. But 2 weeks later after I resigned, I got 2 job offers. I chose one of it and it’s still at negotiating stage. Well, you’d never know what’d happen in life.

• Life is more beautiful and relax, as you didn’t spend over 70% of time to stay in front of computer monitor.

• Blogging. Last when I blog, I started with refering and commenting links. I was so care about site-statistics and always try to bring more readers to my blog. Anyhow, I didn’t used to be a good writer and couldn’t suddenly be one. If I keep going like that, I would have unnecessary pressure and it isn’t fun at all. So here’s another decision: from now on, blog only for myself. Take it to be journal-style blog, or no communication happen in this blog, or no readers at all (well, guess all the readers had gone if there’s any). Doesn’t matter, for what it worth, blog is a place to console the heart.

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.

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.

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:

• Laptop look alike instead of traditional PDA’s palm shape.
• Build-in WiFi, Bluetooth, IR, digital camera. You could only get either WiFi, Bluetooth or DC with Palm Zire 71 or Tungsten series.
• 480×320 resolution with 65K color depth. I wonder would most of Palm application looks OK on the screen? Most of Palm applications are developed for resolution 160×160 or 320×320.

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

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.

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.

What [ ] Are You?

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

[via theOtaku.com: Guru, Anime Quiz]

• What Anime Medium Are You?
• What Anime Art Style Are You?
• What Forest Creature Are You?
• What Magical Girl are You?
• What NERV Child Are You?
• What Shoujo Mascot Are You?
• What DragonBall Girl Are You?
• What DragonBall Guy Are You?

[via Quizilla!]

• What Matrix Persona Are You?
• Which X-Men character are you most like?
• What Finding Nemo Character are You?
• What Chinese Symbol Are You?
• Which Spirited Away character are you?
• What Toy Story/ Toy Story2 Character are You?
• What Nintendo character are you?
• What disney character are you?

Yes, I’m boring.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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