yowkee essential http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ yowkee's blog on technology, movies, Malaysia news, trivial stuff in his life... en-us yowkee@gmail.com Copyright 2008 2006-03-12T12:05:42+08:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Changes http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/03/000265-changes.html 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... 265@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ 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.

]]> General 2006-03-12T12:05:42+08:00 Happy Chinese New Year http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000261-happy_chinese_new_year.html Chinese New Year is approaching. Wishes all Chinese a happy and prosperous new year ahead! It’s the year of the dog. I was quite unlucky lately. Just two days before Chinese New Year Eve, I had the stomach inflamation. Diarrhea and vomitting — I can’t remember when’s the last time I vomit, bad feeling. So I was weak through out whole day yesterday and luckily some friend could drive me back to home town in this CNY eve — it’s the traditional family should gather together in CNY eve. Anyway, the good side and also the bad side, I couldn’t... 261@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ Chinese New Year is approaching. Wishes all Chinese a happy and prosperous new year ahead! It’s the year of the dog.

I was quite unlucky lately. Just two days before Chinese New Year Eve, I had the stomach inflamation. Diarrhea and vomitting — I can’t remember when’s the last time I vomit, bad feeling. So I was weak through out whole day yesterday and luckily some friend could drive me back to home town in this CNY eve — it’s the traditional family should gather together in CNY eve.

Anyway, the good side and also the bad side, I couldn’t enjoy all the traditional food this round.

]]> Personal 2006-01-28T23:45:46+08:00 All England Badminton Semi-Final 2006 http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000260-all_england_badminton_semifinal_2006.html It was an amazing run for Malaysia men double on quarter final, which all three pairs had advanced to the semi-finals yesterday. It’s such a breakthrough for our men double youngster, would have been something to do with the new coach Rexy. Good job, Rexy! Chong Tan Fook-Lee Wan Wah advanced into the final today with beating compatriot Mohd Fairuzizuan Mohd Tazari-Lin Woon Fui 15-8, 15-7. While in other court, the agressive attacking pair Mohd Zakry Abdul Latif-Gan Teik Chai was down 14-17, 9-15. They’ve been leading with 14-5 in the 1st game with Zakry’s lots of tricky shots. However,... 260@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ It was an amazing run for Malaysia men double on quarter final, which all three pairs had advanced to the semi-finals yesterday. It’s such a breakthrough for our men double youngster, would have been something to do with the new coach Rexy. Good job, Rexy!

Chong Tan Fook-Lee Wan Wah advanced into the final today with beating compatriot Mohd Fairuzizuan Mohd Tazari-Lin Woon Fui 15-8, 15-7. While in other court, the agressive attacking pair Mohd Zakry Abdul Latif-Gan Teik Chai was down 14-17, 9-15. They’ve been leading with 14-5 in the 1st game with Zakry’s lots of tricky shots. However, it could be anxious to end the game, or their brain just went blank — lost focus, the inexperienced pair allowed their opponent to come back from 9-points gap. And they didn’t ever request to take a break in this period! Anyway, it then replicated the 2004 final of Tan Fook-Wan Wah versus Jens Eriksen-Martin Lundgaard Hansen. Tan Fook-Wan Wah would have the chance to revenge on their lost on 2004.

The amazing Eriksen, he is already 36 and can still play such an intense game in the competetive All England. That probably would never occurred in Men Single as MS surely required tougher stamina. Peter Gade is an good example, he was surely out of stream in his 2nd/3rd game with Lee Hyun Il, which Lee has an easy win with 3-15, 15-8 15-1. I was really hoping to see Peter’s challanging the title again. But what could you expect? When a player was so exhausted and the normal rhythm was gone, age count!

Lee Chong Wei, yet again can’t beat Lin Dan outside of Malaysia courts. But it was so close this round! In the first game, Chong Wei was playing like his game with Lin Dan at World Championship last year — no confidence, slow foot work, weak smash. I was then feeling like argh…gonna lost again. And then the real Chong Wei was back. Starting from 2-8 in the 2nd game, he morphed into a different person — patient set up, speed running, smooth cross-court net play and smash. The fast and furious play getting him the 2nd game (15-10), then all the way leading to 13-6 in the third game. There’s no happy-ending for M’sian fans, Lin Dan’s switching gear and boost up to come back from 6-13 to 13-13, 14-14; and eventually took the match, to storm into final.

What a pity! Lee CW was called as Kampung Champion (could only win title in Malaysia) by some of badminton fans. But I bet to differ, to really look at his result at various open tournament. He used to live up to his world ranking. That he mostly only lost to top ranking players (e.g. Lin Dan, Taufik). Without his stable performance, his world ranking won’t climb up to the top three.

While IBF (International Badminton Federation) is going to change to 21-points (credit without serving) format around March this year. God seem wanted to shows why 15-points (credit only with serve) game was fun to watch: the ability of coming back from big points-gap and creating drama of the game. There seem to have happened a lots in All England 2006: Eriksen-Lundgaard’s game from 5-14 to 17-15, Lin Dan’s 6-13 to 17-14, Chong Wei’s back from 10-14 to 17-14 in 2nd game with Chen Hong in QF….etc. Those were the holding-breath moments, you wouldn’t forget when you’re following it — and then you’d love the game!

]]> Sport 2006-01-22T09:13:51+08:00 Reading Summary http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000259-reading_summary.html Sleep deprivation has some impact on me. I am trying to be an early riser starting last week. It’s nice to wake up early everyday, but the keep popping-up night activities didn’t do a help on the need of sleep. Coffee keeps me awake, I probably need one of this. Out of juice to write anything, here’s the stuff I am reading-on: Mark Pilgrim takes a hard look at the recently released Photocast of Apple iPhoto 6 — which spikes critics from the RSS community, and wondering does Apple do understand the standard? To sum up, the “photocasting” feature centers... 259@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ Sleep deprivation has some impact on me. I am trying to be an early riser starting last week. It’s nice to wake up early everyday, but the keep popping-up night activities didn’t do a help on the need of sleep. Coffee keeps me awake, I probably need one of this. Out of juice to write anything, here’s the stuff I am reading-on:

To sum up, the “photocasting” feature centers around a single
undocumented extension element in a namespace that doesn’t need to be
declared. iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the
first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It ignores
features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements
features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95% of
RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong.
]]> Computing 2006-01-19T07:08:38+08:00 Technorati's front page's changes http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000258-technoratis_front_pages_changes.html Instead of just listing the “Top Search This Hour”, Technorati is now offering the list of Top Search and Hot Tag at its front page. It’s a minor step forward by Technorati. But it’d sure slowly changing blogger’s habit, pay more attention to Tag, Tag and Tag. With more accurate tagging and your blog posts got more attention. What’d be my wished feature on Technorati? I hope it’d separate tagging by different language and providing search based on different languages, this should have boost blogging to the other level world wide.... 258@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ technorati-new-frontlist.png

Instead of just listing the “Top Search This Hour”, Technorati is now offering the list of Top Search and Hot Tag at its front page. It’s a minor step forward by Technorati. But it’d sure slowly changing blogger’s habit, pay more attention to Tag, Tag and Tag. With more accurate tagging and your blog posts got more attention.

What’d be my wished feature on Technorati? I hope it’d separate tagging by different language and providing search based on different languages, this should have boost blogging to the other level world wide.

]]> Website 2006-01-17T18:14:36+08:00 Digg/Pligg/SpyMy http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000257-diggpliggspymy.html I found SpyMy via Jeff Ooi. Initially feeling it’s great that someone is making a similar Digg service for Malaysia, which was long expected. People who following the web trend among blogosphere would find Digg is the good solution to your flooded feed aggregators. Digg’s success is mainly due to its users’ posting and voting features, and other “cool” Web 2.0 characteristic, in layman terms it provides more interaction to users. That’s also why its users are mostly computer geeks and youngsters, and people tends to compare it with Slashdot But I was disappointed while surf over to SpyMy and... 257@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ I found SpyMy via Jeff Ooi. Initially feeling it’s great that someone is making a similar Digg service for Malaysia, which was long expected. People who following the web trend among blogosphere would find Digg is the good solution to your flooded feed aggregators. Digg’s success is mainly due to its users’ posting and voting features, and other “cool” Web 2.0 characteristic, in layman terms it provides more interaction to users. That’s also why its users are mostly computer geeks and youngsters, and people tends to compare it with Slashdot

But I was disappointed while surf over to SpyMy and notice the similar interface. Take a looks at the screenshot of SpyMy, Pligg and Digg, do you think this is something we should do?


digg.png
pligg.png
spymy.png

        

Web 2.0 service like Digg or reddit is US-centric and articles posted mostly only interested to geeks. So there’s big potential to expand to other more specific areas. To segment the market for Digg-alike web service, I could think of following potential fields:

  • Region-interest: it has been lots of web portal focusing on region’s interesting news/events/activities. And these portals are all lacking of the interaction to allow users to vote for their favor posts or commenting. Good target to apply digg-alike service.
  • Different language: it could surely see that users stick with the web with the language they’re most familiar. A Malay-only or Mandarin-only users posted/voted service should have potential.
  • The other “niche” fields like shopping, books, movies, musics, even technology specific to Linux, Windows, Gadget…etc for the particular interested group of people

So and so, there are plenty of areas to explore and deploy the idea. Nevertheless, the key point is, you could copy the idea and develop your own version — but not copying the exactly same web behavior (the flow of the web service) and user interface! Let’s do porting and expanding, not copycat.

]]> Website 2006-01-17T10:58:26+08:00 Validate Web 2.0 http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000256-validate_web_20.html The guys at 30 Second Rule create a Web 2.0 Validator at their spare time. It's created with Og/Nitro in 30 minutes! Now it seem pretty reasonable to judge Web Two-Ooh sites by whether they're using some rapid development tools like RubyOnRails. Ha ha.. Not really. But this is a fun validator to play with. I type in delicious and it got only 7 out of 42 rules (note: the rules are set by users, Web 2.0 is users-oriented, remember?). The following is the current set rules: Is in public beta? Uses inline AJAX ? Uses python? Uses the... 256@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ The guys at 30 Second Rule create a Web 2.0 Validator at their spare time. It's created with Og/Nitro in 30 minutes! Now it seem pretty reasonable to judge Web Two-Ooh sites by whether they're using some rapid development tools like RubyOnRails. Ha ha.. Not really. But this is a fun validator to play with.

I type in delicious and it got only 7 out of 42 rules (note: the rules are set by users, Web 2.0 is users-oriented, remember?). The following is the current set rules:

  1. Is in public beta?
  2. Uses inline AJAX ?
  3. Uses python?
  4. Uses the prefix "meta" or "micro"?
  5. Is Shadows-aware ?
  6. Uses Google Maps API?
  7. Refers to mash-ups ?
  8. Has favicon ?
  9. Mentions startup ?
  10. Attempts to be XHTML Strict ?
  11. Uses Cascading Style Sheets?
  12. Appears to be web 3.0 ?
  13. Mentions Less is More ?
  14. Refers to the Web 2.0 Validator's ruleset ?
  15. Mentions Dave Legg ?
  16. Appears to use AJAX ?
  17. Appears to be built using Ruby on Rails ?
  18. Makes reference to Technorati ?
  19. Refers to VCs ?
  20. Refers to Flickr ?
  21. Mentions Nitro ?
  22. Links Slashdot and Digg ?
  23. Mentions Ruby?
  24. Mentions Cool Words ?
  25. Appears to use MonoRail ?
  26. Has prototype.js ?
  27. Creative Commons license ?
  28. Uses Semantic Markup?
  29. Refers to web2.0validator ?
  30. Refers to del.icio.us ?
  31. Uses microformats ?
  32. Refers to Rocketboom ?
  33. Actually mentions Web 2.0 ?
  34. Use Catalyst ?
  35. Mentions RDF and the Semantic Web?
  36. References Firefox?
  37. Appears to over-punctuate ?
  38. References isometric.sixsided.org?
  39. Validates as XHTML 1.1 ?
  40. Mentions 30 Second Rule and Web 2.0 ?
  41. Uses the "blink" tag?
  42. Appears to have Adsense ?

I wonder what's the "Cool Words" in rule 24, thought there would have rule on "support REST URL", but no. Anyway, enjoy the story behind the development, have fun playing with it.

]]> Website 2006-01-17T07:38:26+08:00 Wikipedia is 5 years old http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000255-wikipedia_is_5_years_old.html Wikipedia turns 6 5 years old on January 15, 2006. The famous information resource on the web has served billions of query over the years, despite its accuracy and credibility was under fire a few times over past few months. The issues raised mostly related to people modified entries related to them, or false/fraud information. That including Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, edited his own biography around 18 times, everybody-known podcaster Adam Curry’s edting of Podcasting entry, and the false claim on JFK murder. Wikipedia, which based on the open source collaboration software — Wiki, allows anyone who read... 255@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ Wikipedia turns 6 5 years old on January 15, 2006. The famous information resource on the web has served billions of query over the years, despite its accuracy and credibility was under fire a few times over past few months. The issues raised mostly related to people modified entries related to them, or false/fraud information. That including Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, edited his own biography around 18 times, everybody-known podcaster Adam Curry’s edting of Podcasting entry, and the false claim on JFK murder.

Wikipedia, which based on the open source collaboration software — Wiki, allows anyone who read the web adding, editing and voting for entries’ removal. That brings the never-ending debate about its credibility and accuracy of information. What’s people really worry about?

  • Without knowing the authority behind the article, there’s always a chance something is missed out

  • EVERYBODY could create the history. That made people worry

However, the physical encyclopedia in the real world, which has a team of experts proof-reading, made mistake too. Taking out the controvesary related to human and history, Wikipedia did a very good job on most other items — especially on those objective fact and information of technology. For years, it’s always my 1st or 2nd choice when I meet any unknown term (the other one is Google). Even come to history, does it so scary that it might bend the “official” history a bit? History is used to be the stuff controlled by authority — and Wikipedia is the pen given to people. What’s more important, it’s the transparency it guaranteed. Think about how web surfers found out all the details people’s editing their own biography? Because Wiki, as a collaboration and documenting web service, it keep everything in version control. So the Wikipedia users get to see the changes over time, if they do spend the time to dig through.

Wikipedia is in fact considering to start applying editing only by users, lock most of the text to anonymous. With the transparency of the process, I still have the faith to it. My favourite tool.

]]> Website 2006-01-16T18:07:20+08:00 Feed2Podcast http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000254-feed2podcast.html I blog about PODZINGER yesterday. It turned audio into text and archiving them. On the contrary, if you want to give your blog a voice, try Feed2Podcast. You give Feed2Podcast a RSS feed, and it’d turn it into a Podcast. In other words, the web service use text-to-speech technology to read your blog feed to your subscribers. It’s a totally reverse conversion service to PODZINGER. One particular difference is, bloggers might not mind their voice to be converted into text and read/search, but getting a generated tune to read the text they wrote? If you don’t mind the less-human tune... 254@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ I blog about PODZINGER yesterday. It turned audio into text and archiving them. On the contrary, if you want to give your blog a voice, try Feed2Podcast.

You give Feed2Podcast a RSS feed, and it’d turn it into a Podcast. In other words, the web service use text-to-speech technology to read your blog feed to your subscribers. It’s a totally reverse conversion service to PODZINGER. One particular difference is, bloggers might not mind their voice to be converted into text and read/search, but getting a generated tune to read the text they wrote?

If you don’t mind the less-human tune to read your text out to the readers, try it out!

]]> 2006-01-16T17:01:40+08:00 PODZINGER http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000253-podzinger.html PODZINGER is a Podcast search engine. Ever since podcast joined the world of weblogging, I’ve been wondering would there be such a service archiving the audio, analyzing/indexing the audio content. PODZINGER uses the speech recognition from BBN Technologies — transferring audio into words/text and archive them. From the returned search result, users could directly subscribe to the podcast to their iTunes or Yahoo! podcast. Or download the audio to your local drive. It claims to have the feature to play the audio straight to the spot of your searched words. But right now, clicking the play button seems always getting... 253@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ PODZINGER is a Podcast search engine. Ever since podcast joined the world of weblogging, I’ve been wondering would there be such a service archiving the audio, analyzing/indexing the audio content. PODZINGER uses the speech recognition from BBN Technologies — transferring audio into words/text and archive them.

From the returned search result, users could directly subscribe to the podcast to their iTunes or Yahoo! podcast. Or download the audio to your local drive. It claims to have the feature to play the audio straight to the spot of your searched words. But right now, clicking the play button seems always getting the alert message of slow connection or files not found over there.

The search is pretty effective and accurate, though I don’t think it has enough podcasts being archived. It’s a good web service worth looking forward to.

]]> Website 2006-01-15T11:10:51+08:00 Technorati is the most friendly web service to non-English blogger http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000252-technorati_is_the_most_friendly_web_service_to_nonenglish_blogger.html At the mean time, Technorati should be the best ping service and blog search engine. It has millions of blogs ping to it and doing a good indexing job, except that sometimes you’d still seeing its searching temporary out of service (due to the heavy traffic). Nevertheless, even if it’s not the best ping service yet, it must be the most friendly towards non-English bloggers. Checking all the other famous blog services and you’d probably notice most of them are English-centric. But Technorati’s doing a good job to normalize the blog-weight, you get to see all different language tag got... 252@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ At the mean time, Technorati should be the best ping service and blog search engine. It has millions of blogs ping to it and doing a good indexing job, except that sometimes you’d still seeing its searching temporary out of service (due to the heavy traffic).

Nevertheless, even if it’s not the best ping service yet, it must be the most friendly towards non-English bloggers. Checking all the other famous blog services and you’d probably notice most of them are English-centric. But Technorati’s doing a good job to normalize the blog-weight, you get to see all different language tag got into the top/hot tags and top search at the hour.

For example, if you do monitoring on the top searching tag/keywords on Technorati, you might find “Microsano” to be a hot keyword today. I was surprised I couldn’t find anything of this word on Google early morning, while I noticed this word at Technorati. Instead, Google was suggesting me if I am looking for “Microsoft”. This’s implicitly telling me if gonna search for any hot event in blogosphere, do go for Technorati first.

Out of curiousity, I’ve check against Google late afternoon and get some result. Via Google’s translation service, it’s translated as “microhealthy”. Not quite knowing what it means. It seem to be some Spanish organization is organizing an event to spot a keyword to be first appear on Google, and pushing it! (well, so this has something to do with Google). Whoever get the top of search result of “Microsano” by March would be rewarded. Interesting idea.

]]> 2006-01-14T18:55:00+08:00 Ping-o-Matic is down temporary http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000251-pingomatic_is_down_temporary.html The RPC services in Ping-o-Matic! seem down temporary. My ping in these 2 days all getting error return. Checking the website doesn’t get any clue though. So what’s the backup if you do want to ping to some blog-portal type of services. Some searches lead me to the following: Pings.ws : its allow the manual blog-pinging to around 16 blog ping services (Weblogs.com, Technorati, Blog.gs, My Yahoo…) If you think only Technorati make sense to you (well, it’s the most famous and “most-ping” service), it has a web page for you to ping manually. Or point your blog system to... 251@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ The RPC services in Ping-o-Matic! seem down temporary. My ping in these 2 days all getting error return. Checking the website doesn’t get any clue though.

So what’s the backup if you do want to ping to some blog-portal type of services. Some searches lead me to the following:

  • Pings.ws : its allow the manual blog-pinging to around 16 blog ping services (Weblogs.com, Technorati, Blog.gs, My Yahoo…)
  • If you think only Technorati make sense to you (well, it’s the most famous and “most-ping” service), it has a web page for you to ping manually. Or point your blog system to http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
  • The other xml-rpc ping URL that was handled by ping-o-matic automatically: A2B (http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b), original Weblogs.com (http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2), blog.gs (http://ping.blo.gs/)

If you have the faith that ping-o-matic would be recovered soon, do the ping manually with the above webpages. Otherwise change the ping URL in your blog system, most of blogging system nowadays should have a place for you to input ping URL.

]]> 2006-01-14T08:57:35+08:00 What's next for Apple? http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000250-whats_next_for_apple.html Clayton M. Christensen, author of book The Innovator’s Dilemma and Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, think that Apple’s current success might not last long with the proprietary architecture of iPod. iPod is the dominant MP3 player in the market right now. But I don’t think it’s the software inside that made the success. It’s the design being the key to get it standing out of others. The design of the looks-n-feel, how users interact with the device, and the supporting community forking out more innovative products surrounding it, and etc. All of these getting... 250@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ Clayton M. Christensen, author of book The Innovator’s Dilemma and Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, think that Apple’s current success might not last long with the proprietary architecture of iPod.

iPod is the dominant MP3 player in the market right now. But I don’t think it’s the software inside that made the success. It’s the design being the key to get it standing out of others. The design of the looks-n-feel, how users interact with the device, and the supporting community forking out more innovative products surrounding it, and etc. All of these getting Apple in the lead of market. That’s its core competency: ability to innovate. Getting iTunes or the iPod softwares open and hook into every other MP3 players seem great. But who’d want that? People no longer need to stand on the edge-technology to produce yet another MP3 players. In 90s, Apple get beaten by didn’t recognizing the power of openning PC architecture. But MP3 player is really another play field, other vendors won’t need any open standard to produce a look-alike and act-alike player. The market might keep growing for another 2 or 3 years. But then you’d need other thing to sell, neither audio player or some video player gadget, it’s something else. Something that only company with the ability to innovate would produce and get in the lead.

How about Mac OS running on Intel platform and made more users switch? I don’t think Apple would get much more share of PC users market. Most of the people has been used to their Windows PC and comfortably stay still with it. There’s large potential in younger ages or hacker community, not the mass market. Would OS X get any chance? Probably. I’m buying the great platform given by Mac OS X and lots of great softwares on it. If Apple do want to open, it should open the Cocoa framework to the world out there. It’s the well designed interfaces and platform drives more innovation in softwares — and softwares bring in more demand for the OS.

]]> Mac OS X 2006-01-14T08:25:04+08:00 Google Mini http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000249-google_mini.html If your company has tons of essential/vital documents stored in the intranet servers, distributed in the various intranet services, wouldn’t you wish to have “local google” site for you googling it? Google’s answer to this particular market demand is its new product Google Mini. As the product name revealed, it’s a shrink down version of Google’s technology. It’d index all your files, providing similar interface as the Google search engine, capibility to view your Word, PDF files as HTML file on browser.…etc. It’s targetting to small and medium size companies. But I thought only BigCo needed more for such search... 249@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ If your company has tons of essential/vital documents stored in the intranet servers, distributed in the various intranet services, wouldn’t you wish to have “local google” site for you googling it? Google’s answer to this particular market demand is its new product Google Mini. As the product name revealed, it’s a shrink down version of Google’s technology. It’d index all your files, providing similar interface as the Google search engine, capibility to view your Word, PDF files as HTML file on browser.…etc.

It’s targetting to small and medium size companies. But I thought only BigCo needed more for such search engine to plug into their existing intranet services (all the huge and sloopy web services recommended by consultants..). Is Google aim at the correct market?

It could be seen as Google’s steps on trying to keep its competency on what it excel — technology. Despites of various web services released over the years (and the buying over products to merge into its web services), trying out different channels with its core technology would be a good go.

]]> Google 2006-01-13T07:22:52+08:00 Google Analytics reopen its subscription by invitation http://www.yowkee.com/blog/archives/2006/01/000248-google_analytics_reopen_its_subscription_by_invitation.html If you are still keen to sign-up for Google Analytics, they’ve now giving out accounts by invitation (you have to sign-up first). From its homepage: We’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun re-opening signups for Google Analytics on an invitation basis. For more information on when you might receive an invitation, please read our Progress Updates page.We will continue to send out more invitations to sign up as we add additional capacity to Google Analytics. If you’d like an invitation, please submit your e-mail address on our signup page. Thank you for your patience and for your interest in Google... 248@http://www.yowkee.com/blog/ If you are still keen to sign-up for Google Analytics, they’ve now giving out accounts by invitation (you have to sign-up first). From its homepage:

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun re-opening signups for Google Analytics on an invitation basis. For more information on when you might receive an invitation, please read our Progress Updates page.

We will continue to send out more invitations to sign up as we add additional capacity to Google Analytics. If you’d like an invitation, please submit your e-mail address on our signup page.

Thank you for your patience and for your interest in Google Analytics.

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