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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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’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.

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

[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.

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?

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.