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Description: yowkee's blog on technology, movies, Malaysia news, trivial stuff in his life...
Last Update: 00:29:53 03/04/2006
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Additional Info
First Fetched: 00:19:00 01/31/2004
Last Updated: 00:29:53 03/04/2006
Headlines
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Thunderbird, the Firefox’s sister product, released its 1.5 version. It is now loading faster with my 1 year stored emails, better option dialog, spell-checking when you type…etc. Here’s some noticable new features: Auto-save draft, this would be useful if your PC crashed in the middle of composing an email Software update is implemented in the same manner as Firefox 1.5 and much more usable Podcasting support Load and Export all your feeds from and to a OPML file Better auto-complete function (most used popup first) The release note claimed support of Google Map, not trying out yet Overall, Thunderbird 1.5...
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So Steve delivered the keynote for Macworld 06, pretty much the same model as last year. Starting with the retails update for 2005 and introducing new, cool stuff. Here’s the summary: It’s amazing! Apple sold over 14 millions of iPod over last quarter! It’s once again dominate the MP3 player market, what’s other competitor doing? I’d said people should continue buying Apple shares. Very good sales figure for selling songs over iTunes too. I’ve just blog about Google Video Store yesterday. But looking at Apple’s selling of video over iTunes — they’ve sold over 8 millions video since launched last...
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Google didn’t lay its hand on music selling business, instead, it started with Video. Google Video is now providing paid video content to users. They hook up with groups of provider like CBS, Sony BMG, NBA….for various entertainment video. That could be pretty convenient if you missed out show of the TV series that you’re following, feel like to watch the NBA game last night that isn’t available at your subscribed channel. Now you could just “google” it. (note: Apple iTMS has certain TV series provided too, I am not sure which having more videos to sell). And people like...
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Since it’s a Mac day, let’s have some amusing video to watch: Re-Introducing the Real Windows Vista If you follow Longhorn/Vista development, this should earn a good laugh. It’s a hilarious clip from Tauquil Atkinson....
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Macworld 2006 kicks off today and Steve Jobs would deliver the opening keynote address. Steve is always the best person to kick off any large Mac event. He’s the icon of Apple and every media loves him (US media). You could see that from the media coverage once he delivers his speech, all eyes on him. Then for sure that the Mac blogland would be full of stuff he’s going to talk about, for days, even weeks. The top searching words today for Technorati would be “Apple”, “Mac” or “Macworld”.. And this year no doubt that many would expect on...
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From Kevin Wallace: Dear Microsoft Word,Printing a document does not constitute a ‘change’ in the sense that you have to ask me if I want to save it before closing. Please stop asking. Thank you Ditto....
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This idea is awesome! Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student, come out the idea of selling pixel on a homepage, for 1 dollar per pixel. The idea is outstanding and excellent, simply because nobody ever think this would get to any where. But he proved it works! The pixel ads are sold at unit of 10×10 (100) pixels block. At this time of writing, it has almost all sold out. The key to this success would be the domain name of www.milliondollarhomepage.com. What would one expect if he/she want to put up advertisement on Internet? The 2 key elements to attract...
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Adrian and David have a talk about Django Framework and RubyOnRails on Dec 3rd 2005, the video and audio is available now. I spent a good 3 hours watching and listening to the talk and both parties presented well of their web development framework. Django seem generally suitable for quick setting up of a content-rich websites and come with a awesome admin interface by default. And RubyOnRails is pretty much more towards building up a web application from scratch — where it saves you lots of hassle on initial setup of infrastructure. David has a excellent presentation with the display...
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I am looking at the list of softwares included in Google Pack — which Google claimed as a free collection of essential software. The first question pop into my mind: hmm…essential, why is there no Thunderbird ? And why Norton Antivirus 2005 (some more with 6 months subscription for updates)? Why isn’t it AVG Anti Virus Free Edition (free for personal use)? Or even ZoneAlarm ? Of course it’s understood they wouldn’t include Microsoft Anti-spyware. Oh by the way, they don’t even include Google Talk, sounds valid since Google Talk isn’t as essential as MSN Messenger, Yahoo messenger or AIM...
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Wow, have fun with retrievr. It has a small drawing area (I wonder why not making a big one?) let you draw something with your mouse. Whatever you draw, it would pull something similar from Flickr. The application is developed with flash. The immediate auto-search function is disabled temporary due to the high traffic (probably have been digged or slashdotted), you have to click the not-so-easily-noticed “retrievr search” button, just beneath the drawing area. Although didn’t know what economic effect it could drive to, not sure what’s the algorithm it used to capture the similarity, it sure is fun to...
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Clipfire has a clean homepage as simple as Google — a text box with a button named “Find Deal”. So you could guess it’s kind of search engine. Yes, it’s a search engine and it specialized in shopping. What’s cool about web application like Clipfire isn’t just about how good its search feature is. It has the integrated feature just like Digg or reddit. These Web 2.0 applications are users-driven, the users form the community. They could post links, they would vote for their favourite links and comments and discussed. That created the well behaved, self discipline user group who...
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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...
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It isn’t easy when one has promised himself that he got to blog at least once a day. Most of the time, waking up early and sit in front of my laptop — brain isn’t juicy. At night, a tiring body (after full day working) is trying to get its control center into one ship. So I stare at computer monitor, only feel blank. The intuitive blog experience often comes when I am going to blog about me, me and me. It’s always the easiest thing to talk about yourself since you are the one most familiar with it. Ok,...
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Reading 2 news regarding Symantec: If you use Symantec (Norton) AntiVirus, beware that it was found having buffer overflow while decomposing RAR file. A properly drafted rar file could attack your antivirus and open your machine for remote access. What’s the work around right now? Avoid it, filtering out rar files for scanning, until they have the fix. Symantec wouldn’t sell or support its product LC5 (a.k.a L0phtCrack, a NT password hash cracker — well, in security point of view, it was named password auditing and recovery tool) outside of US, due to US Government export policy . It’s been...
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I was getting a new kind of “spam” into my previous entry (note: spam comments have been deleted). The spam comments are kind of comments none of program would filter it out, as it is posted by a real person. Imagine this, somebody with some strong political opinions/views to express and he has the spare time to go all the related blogs to copy and paste his views on the comments. This is what happenning, though the comments made sense and do express certain views, they are un-related to the blog entry at all. I am not sure if all...
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Gus Mueller, who is famous for the Mac app VoodooPad, talked about his route on how to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days . Lots of people out there are doing it: either as an independent programmer, or a small group of people forming a micro ISV. It ain’t easy. David St Lawrence has a series of posts of Don’t give up your day job (part 2, part 3). Speaking of multi-sources income, should you keep your day job to pay the daily expense, and digging the other income in the rest of the day? Many people are...
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