tin_the_fatty: Interests

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 22:54:44 GMT

Signing Off

I am retiring my Radio weblog. You are invited to visit my new MovableType weblog.

Sat, 25 Jan 2003 01:16:04 GMT

Big Music Labels Dying

Very interesting commentary. In summary, 75% of music are published by the big 5 record labels and their subsidaries. Last year all of them were either losing money or barely broke even. They blamed music privacy and file sharing. We think otherwise.

This commentary pointed out something new to me. Since earlier 90s all the music labels were pushing those boy bands and girlie bands to teens. None of these bands lasted more than a few albums and music quality were generally rather poor. They could not keep those fans as the fans grew up, and were replaced by other boy bands and girlie bands, which would attract teens then, but could not attract the now grown-up fans. Fans who have grown up stopped buying music, or buy a lot less music than before. The cycle continues, and now there is a whole generation of 20-30s who don't listen to much music. Every few years a new generation joins this class of non-consumers. The situation would only get worse. They say the big labels either radically change their business model, or go out of business, within 5 years.

The situation in Hong Kong for Canto Pop isn't much better. The most successful record companies such as EEG actually act as managers for their artists, and take a big cut from every dollar their artists earn, e.g. TV adverts, product promotion, concerts and shows, etc. I discussed this with a friend, who told me that albums don't sell all that well these days, as a lot of fans just buy cheap pirate copies. It's tough being an artist.

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 00:16:37 GMT

The Shutdown Yesterday

The housing estate I live in has had its penta-annual electricity check yesterday. No electricity for most of the day, so my computers were all shut down in the morning before I left the house.

Well it is all back to normal now. I hope.

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 00:06:16 GMT

Po's Gig is Back

Here.

For US$40/HK$320 a year, Radio is very good value. Folks probably pay more for 40MB of web space alone. It really is a very good way to host a weblog.

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 14:46:24 GMT

Fight Spam

Some very smart people met up on fighting spam. Slashdot, as usual, has a follow-up This comment is most interesting. I use a few DNSBLs, and althou this blocks most of the spam houses from my mail server, there are quite a few false positives (the so called collaterial damage). I use services from godaddy and paypal, and both are blocked from my mail server because their IP addresses appear in some of these DNSBLs, meaning that I would have to manually put their mail servers into my accept list before I could receive email from them, and I won't know about such rejects until I look into my maillog.

Something worth investigating.

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 09:31:15 GMT

Collateral Damage?

We snapshooters shoot each other. A lot. We also share our pictures. Roy shot Po awhile a go, at a canteen we visit often, and posted the picture on news://news.freeforum.org/interest.photography. Normally this would be total unremarkable.

However, a loser of the name passer-by-02 stole the picture, put a mosaic on Po's face, re-posted the picture onto a web bulletin board, claimed to be the person in the photo and challenged others to break the mosaic. It seemed that this loser also happened to be Public Enemy No. 1(TM), and his post created a lot of responses. The mosaic was broken in no time, and the original picture of Po was reposted. Then other losers started doing the Photoshop jobs and put Po's face on foul things.

Normally this wouldn't worry Po or Roy a bit. However, rumours had it that quite a few folks wanted to get hold of this passer-by-02 to settle some odds. Po was in no mood to settle any odds on behalf of this passer-by-02, so he made an announcement to clarify that passer-by-02 stole the picture, which was taken by Roy, from the freeforum newsgroup, and that he was not passer-by-02. Stupid people are stubborn. Let's say the community of passer-by-02-alikes were so stupid and not convinced. You have to give them credit thou that they came up with the theory that this passer-by-02 had a split personality, and was acting as passer-by-02 and Po at the same time.

Po contacted the operator of the web bulletin board, who agreed to meet Po and Roy at the Police Station, but did not show up, and could not be contacted again. Very fishy I think you would all agree.

The Station Sargent at YT Police Station was very friendly and explained the situation to Po and company from the Police's point of view.

Things have since quiet down. The crowns who wanted to get at passer-by-02 apologized (sort-of) to Po on the web bulletin board. Po is however still pissed off about this passer-by-02 roach. We are meeting tomorrow evening at the canteen to discuss this mess and generally be amused at Po's expenses.

I am classifying this under Social Restructuring, because the behaviour of passer-by-02 and his "friends" were just so appalling. If this is indeed the norm of the younger generation, Hong Kong has no future.

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 13:14:34 GMT

The Important Character Jar-Jaromir in The Return of the Kind

Funny.

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 17:01:13 GMT

Tomorrow's World axed after 38 years. Falling audiences prompt the BBC to finally drop its long-running popular science programme from its weekly slot. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

I am shocked to learn about this. I used to watch this programme all the time during my years in the U.K.

Wed, 25 Dec 2002 15:48:42 GMT

Christmas Day

The Lady has got the flu. It's her second year in a row that she can't make Christmas service. Oh well.

Nice chat with the family during dinner. I mentioned that we didn't hear news of congested border control points this time around like we used to during long holidays. Dad thinks it's because people are too poor to go anywhere, and are pretty much stuck in Hong Kong over the holiday. Mike was out last nite, and thinks that folks didn't know what to do last nite as they had no money, and as a result hanged around TST doing just... hanging around. Not a good sign.

This is funny. Highly recommended light reading.

Can't wait to go see Harry Porter and the Chamber of Secret. It's only $30 for a ticket at Tuen Mun Cinema. Probably going tomorrow. Cool.

Just received an email from Lucy and Richard. They are having an excellent time in Maldives. I do envy them.

With Jasper around, I am having 2nd, 3rd and 4th thoughts about going away, even to ZS. Sigh.

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 03:48:34 GMT

Many Health Supplements to be Banned in UK. While in the US, Microsoft is still fighting off the dissenting States over remedies for its antitrust violations, a far more sinister oligopoly is working in the EU and internationally to strangle its competition - and not only are the EU governments not acting to stop it, the European Parliament is actually a key, if unwitting (half-asleep?), instrument of this assault on consumer rights and public health. You've heard of the War on (Some) Drugs... well this is a War on Alternative Remedies and Supplements. [kuro5hin.org]

This is bad news for the bio-tech-wannabes companies in Hong Kong, who rely on concepts of researches into Chinese herbal medicines. The thing is the majority of resulting products will be herbal extracts, i.e. food supplements, rather than drugs. It looks like one big market will be gone for these companies.

So much for the "Chinese-medicine Port" concept of TGW's government.

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 17:34:51 GMT

I was at the City Hall earlier today, and saw a poster for this. No sh*t.

Our uni mate Andy is a great fan of marching bands. When I was in London we were involved in the local ATC, and he was the bandmaster. One of the kids in the marching band who played the clarinet used to shake and wave his upper body while he was marching. It was like Jack the Piper, and we had a good laugh of it. I still think it's pretty funny.

Oh the good old times.

Fri, 13 Sep 2002 14:33:57 GMT

With all the news about the 911 anniversary and about the pressure of Muslims all over the Western world, I suddenly think of Barda, on my way home today.

Barda was a course mate at university. He was born in Pakistan and grew up in Bradford, U.K. where there has always been a big Pakistanian community (not to mention recent racial disturbances.) Barda's father taught at the University of Bradford at the time. For no good reasons we were all rather rotten to him. Somehow I still remember him as the beer-drinking, ham-eating, cigarette-smoking self-proclaimed Muslim who also refused to practice fasting (no food during the day in the holy month). I imagine he would have been getting lots of shit since 911. I don't think anyone from the course kept contact with him. I wish him well.

Yes by the way I am quite fed up with all the mentioning of 911.

Sat, 15 Jun 2002 16:21:53 GMT

Tourist-friendly London

There is a reason why London is one of the most tourist-friendly cities in the world. Doc seems to be enjoying it. I am talking about this.

Broadband Internet in Hong Kong is cheaper than anywhere else in the world. 802.11b equipment are selling like hotcats in Hong Kong. Yet of today I have still not heard of any local community wireless network efforts. Is it because we just don't stay outdoor for very long, and would rather stay in air-con'ed buildings?

Mon, 10 Jun 2002 07:42:45 GMT

It's cheaper on a CD!

An article/weblog on physical object vs online distribution.

When I wanted to install Mozilla on my old man's computer (no broadband access, only 56K dial-up), the solution was so obvious: download it to one of my computers via broadband, and burn a CD. The blank CD costs about HK$1.5. Okay I waited about 10 minutes for the CD to burn, but that was all. Couldn't imageine how I would do it otherwise.

Sun, 09 Jun 2002 00:28:18 GMT

I send this in order to have your comment.

Good read about the fun that comes with Windows viruses.

Wed, 29 May 2002 23:55:52 GMT

Star War funny. Enjoy.

Sat, 04 May 2002 00:51:03 GMT

Went to see the SpiderMan movie last nite with the Lady. We both loved it. Excellent. There is a Slashdot review here.

Thu, 02 May 2002 22:21:45 GMT

Good argument for Open software. Blind faith on a black box is not the way to go for high reliability.

Thu, 02 May 2002 22:05:07 GMT

MS' MIT prof witness gets toasted over KDE, GNOME. Drenched in GUI stuff... [The Register] Excellent annotations, and lots of fun!

Thu, 02 May 2002 12:36:18 GMT

A possible solution to spam from mainland China.

Fri, 05 Apr 2002 23:10:16 GMT

Sega doing Palm Games

Here. Download the trial games http://pda.sega.co.jp/index-e.html. Don't mind the poor English on Sega's site.

Be warned, these games only work on colour Palms, and rumoured to crash quite a bit. Hotsync your Palm before installation!

Fri, 05 Apr 2002 03:55:21 GMT

Read about the Cyberport on the dead tree version of SCMP. Response for the project was "lukewarm". From the article, it appears that the rent is about HK$10 per sq ft, and management fee is HK$5 per sq ft. Considering that the Cyberport is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, where other supporting infrastructure is seriously lacking, no wonder why. The SAR government is deeply involved in this project. Again, one of those sad plans and sad projects. Should have seen some head rollings, but as usual our CE is a nice guy.

The way I see it, it's another sign of social decline. I am tempted to open a new category called "Social Restructuring" for this sort of things.

Fri, 05 Apr 2002 03:44:07 GMT

I have not written lately. Been busy doing other things. I even missed the excellent tutorial on macro photography the fine folks at NPC did.

A weblog is supposed to be a continuous journal. The theory is that the weblogger would be putting all thoughts and idea along the day. This is obviously not happening with this one you are reading. I average about a few entries each week. It's not that I have been idle. In fact, normally I only find time to sit down and do the writing when I have some spare time and free from other engagements.

I did consider doing the weblogging on my Palm. It works, as previously demonstrated on this site. I even found a place where they are selling a Palm III keyboard for HK$600, which is a reasonable deal. The problem is that I have some doubts about this investment. The Palm III form factor is near obsolete. This Palm III keyboard will only fit my Palm IIIx and the Handera 330. In view of the existing Palm PDAs Sony have been bringing out, I have doubts as to whether the replacement for my trusty IIIx will be a Handera, and I do not intend to replace it unless it is somehow destroyed. So the IIIx keyboard is likely to be useless for the replacement machine, and I'd have to get a new keyboard at a higher price.

(Which reminds me to do a HotSync for my IIIx.)

Anyway, weblogging with my IIIx is unlikely to happen.

The iBook is too big for lugging around for weblogging purposes. I am planning to buy a Powerbook for real work anyway, and I don't want to take this HK$30K machine with me everywhere.

I checked out a very portable IBM Thinkpad at the PCCW shop. It's nice looking, battery life is reasonable (nowhere near the battery life of Mac portables thou), and the price is okay, but there is only one problem: the keyboard is very small. I couldn't touch-type on it.

I think the keyboard of Sony Picturebooks are bigger, but they are also expensive and I am not sure I would like their tiny screens.

Oh well. The search goes on.

Sun, 24 Mar 2002 16:03:30 GMT

Got my Jabber server running again. The Windoz client I am using is quite nice. There are a whole bunch of them.

It's a bit like ICQ, only you don't (yet) get any spam messages and it's all Free Software. My Windoz client winjab does Chinese reasonably well.

If you like to try it out, connect your Jabber client to rollingegg.net, and open an account.

Wed, 20 Mar 2002 16:06:20 GMT

Virtual Keyboard a Reality [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Great news, great product! Cool.

Sun, 17 Mar 2002 15:26:58 GMT

Couldn't stop laughing about this.

Sun, 17 Mar 2002 12:43:41 GMT

Did tons of writing and planning for some forthcoming presentations/sales pitches. Finished a BIG5 beautifier function/procedure for my WebCM package (well not quite finished, I had it working in python, have ported the code to PHP, but have no way to test it. Maybe I really should go buy that Apple TiBook.)

Generally speaking, good progress over the last couple of days. With no distractions, I work better.

Went to this place called Cafe E.S. Kimo for lunch. I have been off my daily routine of latte for the last few days. Had one there. It was reasonable. Cream on top was too thick, but that I could live with. RMB18 each, I don't suppose they sell a lot of those.

Quite a few sites have been blocked off by the national proxy servers, so I couldn't read about Paddy Ashdown vs Milosevic on the BBC website. I tried to setup an ssh tunnel use my server at home as a proxy, but couldn't get it to work. I am not going to spend more than half an hour of my precious time to fiddle with it, so maybe next time. I am quite annoyed.

Time to go for some food. Went to the resident's club last nite. Very quite, but food was okay. It's also gone much cheaper than before. It used to cost more to eat there than to eat out in town plus the taxi fare. Pity they have also stopped doing the buffets.

Thu, 14 Mar 2002 00:59:11 GMT

National Geographic Afghan Cover Girl Found [Plastic]

And here. For your interest.

Tue, 12 Mar 2002 01:03:18 GMT

ICQ hack theories flood into Vulture Central. Walking on deathrow [The Register]

You have been warned.

I stopped using ICQ a few months ago. I didn't want a bloated program running in the background on my aged-PII laptop with only 192MB RAM. I also used to get no end of Uh-O's while I work.

I tried out a few Linux ICQ clients. None of them work particularly well, given that I need BIG5 encoding support (at least read if not write). So I gave up for good.

I have "Investigate Jabber" down on my todo list.

Mon, 11 Mar 2002 17:02:06 GMT

So, Asimov actually died from AIDS. He died at a very old age thou. For the link-lazies, no he wasn't gay. He got AIDS from a blood transfusion.

Mon, 11 Mar 2002 09:46:19 GMT

Iranian Toy Stores Will Sell Anti-Barbie Doll [Plastic]

And the same story from the BBC, and the official website.

Funny thing that Barbie, barbie-copy, and Dara and Sara are all made in China. Factory of the world...

Wed, 06 Mar 2002 15:37:09 GMT

I was working in the sitting room a couple of nights ago on my laptop, and was tripped over by the ethernet cable and hurt my foot. No big damage done, but it could have been the Lady of the House who was hurt.

So I decided to go get myself some 802.11b equipment to get rid of those nasty long cables. Visited Connexions at Wanchai Computer Centre, which I highly recommend as knowledgeable no bull folks. Bought the Buffalo set (access point plus USB unit) and a PCMCIA card. On the box the Buffalo AP claimes to be able to serve as an radio ethernet bridge (which means a pair of them can be used to connect two separate wired LANs together, not that I'll have any use of this at the intended place of use, but I like the flexibility) and the price was okay. The USB unit is good for the Lady's laptop computer, and the PCMCIA card is of course for my laptop. The Buffulo card is believe to be identical to the Lucent card. It has a socket for plugging in aerials, which again, adds to the flexibility.

It all works pretty faultlessly, which I must say, is a rarity these days. It's very convenient, now that I can use my laptop computer anywhere in the flat (except in the kitchen. 802.11b signal penatration is not very good, and certainly couldn't go thru the few walls between the study and the kitchen.) It is not ideal thou, as my laptop is kinda old, and could only run on battery for about 1.5 hours.

It does get rid of the long ethernet cable that connects the Lady's computer in the sitting room to my network in the study, which is a Good Thing (TM).

At the moment I have the wireless network totally separated from my home network. This AP also acts as a broadband sharer, connecting my wireless-connected computers to the Internet via an ADSL modem, making use of my Netvigator broadband, which I use as a backup and is vastly under-utilized.

I am trying to redesign my network so that the wireless network is somehow connected to the home network. I could throw them all together into one subnet, but this is no good, as I don't feel like the data going through my network leak out out to the atmosphere. I would like the connections to be encrypted and secure, while at the same time I would also like to be able to offer Internet access to my neightbours. The built-in WEP encryption of my equipment has been proven to be no good, and there are tools around which would reveal the WEP encryption key after listening to a wireless network for a few hours. Something like IPSEC is needed.

I have seen articles that discussed this. O'Reilly Net has devoted a whole section on 802.11b technology. I'll post the links as I go through them.

Sat, 02 Mar 2002 15:12:02 GMT

Ten Years Writing Book Reviews

Reading and writing sharpen one's mind. Shouldn't you start publishing your thoughts? Come join weblog.

Sun, 24 Feb 2002 13:44:34 GMT

Technology: Deal agreed to make all stolen mobiles useless. 04:16 ET - Ananova [NewsBlip.com]

My brother in law deals in second hand mobile phone. His business is very good. He takes in a lot of used-phones, some of them pre-owned, some of them of questionable origin.

If the same thing happens in H.K., I suppose his business would go down quite a bit. Would the network operators do it? I doubt it thou.

Sun, 24 Feb 2002 11:54:43 GMT

Internet Gives You Attention Span Of A Goldfish -- Oooh, Fishflakes.Com! [Plastic]

How true. Does that mean my weblogs never get read to the end?

Sun, 24 Feb 2002 02:58:35 GMT

My trusty faithful old Sony 15sf II (which I bought back in 1996) suddenly died. Power seemed to be on, but the green power light and the orange standby light were both on, plus the geom light was also on. The screen however didn't come on.

Ken mentioned this place in SSP that sells 2nd hand equipment for cheap, which I walked pass before but didn't pay too much attention (things were actually not that cheap when I first visited the place). Went down there with a photog friend Billy, and each of us got a big Nokia 21" for $650.

I spent all yesterday evening treaking the config in Linux, and have it now running at 1280x1024/15bit at 85Hz. Nice, but I need a BNC cable to take full advantage of it.

Oh not to forget, the Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro I am using was a freebie given to me by another photog friend Peter. Hey Peter are you going to come upload your website to my server?

That place has also got a few HP DLT tape drives, which are going for $1,000. Tempted. CD writers just don't cut it when it comes to backing up modern harddisks or networks.

Sun, 24 Feb 2002 02:31:36 GMT

Funny photo. Must see.

Tue, 19 Feb 2002 16:40:01 GMT

Microsoft, Sun, Sony and Linux. In his book Charles Ferguson tells the story of his start up Vermeer, how they saw the opportunity for FrontPage, and then sold the company to Microsoft. He gives a compelling account of the Web industry in 94, 95, 96 and 97: how Netscape had a historic opportunity to displace the Microsoft monopoly, and how MS themselves had failed to see the huge opportunity the Internet presented and were asleep at the wheel. MS eventually woke up, partly thanks to the braying of Netscape's hopelessly naive management team, and marshalled all their considerable resources to deal with the threat from Netscape. Ferguson predicts Sun will be out of business by 2006. At first I was flabbergasted by this conclusion, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. [Advogato]

Interesting read. I don't however agree that Sony is strong in building a good UI, especially on a computer-like device. Their software for the bluetooth camcorder is hopeless. The standard user interface on the PS2 is simple yet confusing (at least to me.) Some people like Sony's jog-dial, but even that is not without problems.

Tue, 19 Feb 2002 16:18:15 GMT

Can you say SPAM?

I was going to get that hk.cn domain!!

Seriously, when my business partner Ken asked me about dealing with spam, I told him to block all the .cn domains, which would immediately cut his spam in half. No kidding. These days I get so many spams from China and Taiwan it's not funny.

Came across a case which was handled by one of the partners in the law firm I work for. An idiot bought one of those spamware package, and decided to start his advertising campaign. The spamware sought out a badly configurated open relay email server and spammed away, which bought the email server to its knees. The company that owned the email server had to call in professionals to fix the server and resume service. Twice it happened to this poor email server, so the company took the matter to the police. A bunch of IDIOTS! The "professionals" were just so incompetent they installed an open relay email server in the first place, and failed to lock it down in subsequent events. The company didn't know what they were doing and took on the service of the wrong people. I would love to see how the Legal Department and the prosecutor fought this case.

And that Zhao Peng chap at the end of the article is just full of it.

Tue, 19 Feb 2002 15:43:20 GMT

My Win98 HD also happens to be my CD-burning environment. It so happened that I needed to move a ton of pictures and photos I downloaded from the net (porn!) to CDs. I couldn't do it, so I bit the bullet and read the documentation on CD-writing for Linux.

Turned out that it was quite a hassle. The standard cd-writing software is designed to talk to SCSI CD writers, and would only talk to my ATAPI/IDE CD writer thru an IDE-SCSI driver. To get the IDE-SCSI driver to take over my CD writer, it is necessary first to get the IDE driver to ignore the CD writer... Not to mention that the cd-writing software doesn't know anything about iso9660 format, so the program mkisofs is needed to put the files you want to burn onto CD into a big iso9660 file first before you could put them onto CD. Basically a big mess. I am running Mandrake 8.1, which is already one of the most user-friendly Linux distributions out there. Fat chance your granny would be able to burn a CD with Linux...

Tue, 19 Feb 2002 13:16:56 GMT

I have meant to write this, but was kept busy, and got this nasty flu that just wouldn't go away (I'm still on medication.) Anyway, about the fireworks: we might be in a recession, and sometime we lose faith in our future, but we surely can put up nice firework shows. I never knew it, but that firework show gave me confidence in meeting the challenges ahead. I hope that it did the same thing to the thousand of people watching it.

The "debrief" article I am supposed to write for the NPC website is overdue. Althou I have the outline, I have yet to actually get down to finishing it. My Win98 harddisk, which is my Chinese writing environment, has just crashed. All the data seem to be intact, but it seems that an unrecoverable bad sector has developed right at the beginning of the HD, so it just wouldn't boot. The IBM HD is about 15 months old. Bugger.

Wed, 13 Feb 2002 11:17:46 GMT

I am right now at TST waterfront, having my photo gear all set up & ready waiting for the Chinese New Year Fireworks.

A bit disappointed that I could only find one fireworks boat. The NPC chairman is right next to me. Lots of old & new friends. The place is absolutely packed.

Our location is excellent. Hopefully we should get some good pictures.

Sun, 10 Feb 2002 18:38:26 GMT

On this, I totally agree.

Sun, 10 Feb 2002 14:36:54 GMT

For the last few days I have been to a few of the popular computer malls to look at the latest gadgets. The search was no where extensive, but it was difficult to find the Handera 330, and the only shop I found which had it in stock was selling for HK$2650, which was a bit higher than what I am willing to pay, not to mention that the colour Palm m505 was only going for HK$2950. I talked to some folks in the trade, and apparently the Handera is highly popular with a specific group of IT folks. Funny I see far more Sony Clies than any other Palm devices in public.

CF-type Bluetooth cards are fairly common, althou they are also kinda expensive. They would go very well with WinCE devices. Pity right now only the Handera in the Palm world could take it.

802.11b radio ethernet cards are everywhere. The cheap ones have gone down to around HK$600, althou the more expensive ones are still around HK$1,000. USB adaptors are only around HK$800, which is very attractive. They are much easier to install and more flexible as they may be moved around machines. I am very tempted to get one in order to get rid of the ugly blue Cat-5 cable going from my study to the Lady's computer in the sitting room.

Also saw the Ericsson R380sc going for around HK$1,600, which is very reasonable. I'll however find out more about this phone before I put down my hard earned cash.

Tue, 05 Feb 2002 17:14:35 GMT

Just as the built-in mail program on the Palm, Eudora uses the MAPI for sending email when sync'ing. It knows how to dial-up to a server and send email from there, which the built-in mail program doesn't do.

My Palm is a 4MB RAM version. There are places where I can get it upgraded to 8MB for HK$360. I never found the need to do it. The whole Eudora package is pretty big. I have left the web browser uninstalled, still I couldn't install the email client w/o first getting rid of some of the Advango channels.

Maybe I should skip the upgrade, and go straight to a Handera 330 with a 32MB CF card? Or a 16MB MMC card and one of those 802.11b CF card?

Tue, 05 Feb 2002 16:50:14 GMT

It seems to work. There are a few problems thou.

The Palm sync program relies on an MAPI client on the computer. The latest Mozilla 0.9.8 doesn't appear to be an MAPI client, so no luck. I used to use Eudora, but gave up a few months ago, as Mozilla became more and more mature and crashed less than Eudora did. So the only thing left is Outlook Express (yuk!) Yap it's working. Nop I am not too happy with the fact that I have to run OE. Surely there must be a better way.

Palm is potential a better blogging machine than my T39mc. The display is much bigger, and I have played with Ken's Palm folding keyboard, which is highly usable and very nice. He's now using a Treo to replace his Palm IIIc and his mobile phone, but his girlfriend May is taking over the Palm IIIc together with the keyboard. I suppose I'll have to get a new one instead of just nicking it from Ken.

Without additional software, my Palm could only send mail while sync'ing. This is not ideal, as my weblog won't be updated until I get home and sync my Palm in the evening. I suppose I could sync it at the office, but I do not really wish to have my personal data on my employee's computer. I can also update my blog via email from the office. Maybe I should invest in a copy of multimail for my Palm?

Oh just remember Eudora for Palm. Download... Install...

This may enable me to send email using my mobile phone as a modem via the IR link. It's not going to be as convenient as say a RIM or just do it on my T39, but I don't have a RIM and I am still struggling with email on my T39.

None of the solution I have looked into so far solves the problem of putting images on my website via mobile means. I suppose a laptop would do the trick, but obviously this is a last resort.

Tue, 05 Feb 2002 00:47:06 GMT

Yes, I am in the writing mood again.

Tue, 05 Feb 2002 00:45:25 GMT

Jon Udell: "Dave's premise, and mine too, is that the Web has been in a state of arrested development since shortly after its birth. It was meant, from the start, to be a two-way collaborative writing environment, not a one-way publisher-to-reader environmen." [Scripting News]

The problem is that, most folks don't have much to say on the web. The local population is ever worse in the sense that it's in the culture to remain silent, and expressing yourself is sometimes considered uncool. On the local Usenet-type newsgroups there are an overwhelming number of so-called "CD-ROMs", who only read, but never writes. Not that many people have personal web pages these days. When I first started trying to put together a personal web page, I was stucked. It's easy to put simple stuff on the web, but to put something that looks good on the web is hard.

To put up a decent web page, one needs quite a lot of contents like pictures and stories, etc. Unless you are a person as interesting as Dr Jones or Luke Skywalker, your C.V. isn't going to be very entertaining, so the average personal websites are all pretty boring. Most folks aren't good designers, and even less are good enough to implement good designs on the web, so the design of the average personal websites also suck.

Radio (and for that matter, blogging) is good, in the sense that one could start small, and over time the website could become bigger and better. If you are interested, email me and I'll talk about the various blog tools I have played with.

Mon, 04 Feb 2002 14:21:20 GMT

A colleague at work bought a new Casio E200, which is supposingly the latest greatest WinCE/PC 2002/whatever machine. Nice screen, and nice packaging. Plenty of expansion slots. Reads the CF card from my Nikon digital camera, althou displaying the pictures on them were a bit slow.

The GUI was rather more complicated than my Palm's.

Not that I dislike Microsoft to the degree that I hate anything they make. They actually make very decent hardware, e.g. their rodents are excellent. But I can't imagine myself using one of these WinCE machines.

For the price they are actually very good value for money. HK$4K, and you get a nice colour screen, 64MB of RAM, lots of expansion, and MP3 sound and movie capabilities. The colour offerings of Palm, Handspring and Sony are at least two-third of the cost, has about a fourth of the memory, MP3 sound for the Sony but definitely not movie capability. Comparitively speaking, the Palm machines are more expensive.

However, I am still using a Palm IIIx, with 4MB of RAM. I use it to store my deadlines, schedules and contacts, with the latter being the most important. A friend of mine lost her diary, and lost contact with most of her friends. Contacts of some friends she could obtain from other friends, but some of the overseas friends she had trouble getting those contacts back. If it wasn't my Christmas card to her parents she would have lost my contact as well. To prevent something terrible like this happening, I have all my contacts on my Palm, and I sync my Palm with my desktop computer every few days. Now if I lost my Palm, all I need is to go buy another PalmOS machine (I like the Handera 330), install the new cradle if necessary, and sync away, and I've all my contacts back in my PDA.

The problem with WinCE machines is that they are priced such that they are not easily replaceable to me. The lowly Visors and Palms are around HK$1K. This is a price relatively easy to bear. The Handera 330 is around HK$2.4K, which is okay. At HK$4K, it is more like an expensive toy.

Sat, 26 Jan 2002 15:13:30 GMT

Interesting article about wireless technology in 2001.

A few years ago when I read about 3G, we were promised high bandwidth, inexpensive access plus lots of other advantages. People were saying 3G would render land lines obsolete. This is not happening.

I looked at Sunday's website: it's HK$50M annually for the first five years. That's just the license fee. Plus investment in new equipment and infrastructure. I think 3G investors are in for a very nasty surprise.

Now go read this article on UWB.

If Cringley's got it right, 3G will never take off. Folks don't need high bandwidth over long distance. Not now. Not in five years, but by then UWB equipment will be mainsteam. 3G is obsolete before the operators can recoup the massive investments.

Just saw an excellent programme made by RTHK on TV, about the telecom market in China. Apparently the Chinese are not happy with Ericsson/Nokia/Motorola selling them mobile telecom infrastructure, and they are trying very hard in R&D and commercialization of 3G technology, so that when China Telecom and China Unicom start building their 3G network, they get to use Chinese technology.

It seems to me that they should be doing R&D and commercialization in UWB instead. 3G is doomed. The window of opportunity is gone. Skip 3G and go straight to 4G/UWB instead would be a better move.

Sat, 26 Jan 2002 14:57:06 GMT

On this cold evening, I just had a cup of latte with Baileys. Nice.

Went to Cass Pang's concert last nite. She talked too much, and didn't sing enough. In the first half of the concert her performance was disasterous. The sound engineer should be shot. They probably didn't rehearse enough as so many things went wrong. The production crew was incompetent. Her sessions with Wong Yiu-Ming and Paul Wong had no spark whatsoever. Very disappointed.

Thu, 24 Jan 2002 14:24:35 GMT

No shit.

I was amused by the section "Learning Chinese". Ironic, in the sense that, what has "human rights" got to do with "intellectual property rights"?

Sat, 19 Jan 2002 06:31:49 GMT

Yes! Finally, crema!

Nothing was going right with my previous attempts to make a decent cup of coffee with the espresso machine. Discussed with friends on the net and on the phone. We suspected that the coffee was grinded too finely. Jimmy even offered to provide me with some benchmark coffee! I have been busy all week so couldn't take up his offer.

I went back to Welcome's and bought some more coffee at the TW Coffee Concept booth, only this time I grinded the coffee quite a bit coarser than last time. It works out okay. Coffee for the Lady tonite I suppose?

Picked up this pamphlet of Tsit Wing Coffee Co., Limited. Don't rush off to their website yet, 'cos you'll be bored. I surely did as I went thru two routing pages and one splash page between these two before I got to the main site.

Looking at their pamphlet is yet another torture. Their slogan is "TW Coffee Concept - Quality is ever our compromise". No I am not kidding you. These guys are unreal. The literature in the pamphlet is highly entertaining. Sigh.

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 07:40:46 GMT

I do not know if it inspired the new iMac -- it is still a great little flim. Okay, everyone has been comparing the new iMac to Pixar's mascot. Fine, but when I first saw Luxo Jr. in the late 1980's, I thought it was the funniest thing I'd seen in years. It still is. [ Quicktime ] [More Like This WebLog]

I say, definitely.

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 13:57:04 GMT

I must be mad or something. I have not mentioned anything about my new digital camera, or the 2nd hand slide scanner I am about to acquire... but I am talking about this low-tech home-use espresso machine which I just bought today. It's a Krups Espresso Primo, which is no longer made. The local agent is doing their annual grand sale. Espresso machines like this starts from about HK$2K, but I got mine for HK$500. Not bad at all.

But it's not all without problem. When I took it home, it wasn't working. Although the boiler became hot, the pump wasn't working. I took it back (just under an hour's journey each way) and had it exchanged (the unit comes with a three months warranty and three days one-for-one exchange). The technican who handled it was very kind and nice about it. He agreed to my request to test the new one. No luck with it either, and good thing we tested it. The kind technican then took the machine apart and fixed it on the spot while I was watching, and now I know how to take it apart myself. Cool. It turned out that one of the power connectors to the pump came off so it was an easy fix.

At the office where I work during the day we have a Nespresso machine, which is a high-tech consumer version of the normal espresso machine. Every month from a choice of about 4 to 5 different tastes you order from Nestle little cartridges of concentrated coffee extract to make cups of espresso. To keep the machine relatively fool-proof, the pressure it creates is nowhere near as high as the 15 bars created by my Krups. As a result the fluffy milk (called froth) it generates is pretty pathetic. Having said that, one thing that is good about the Nespresso machine we have is that it is much quicker. It would fill up a mug in about 30 seconds. My Krups on the other hand was slow. Maybe I had the coffee powder compressed too tightly or something, but it was dripping rather slowly when I was making my first cup of coffee. I waited for about 5 minutes, and the cup wasn't even half full...

Home-use espresso machines are no good for entertaining your guests. One could only do two tiny cups at a time, and by the time you are on your third and fourth cups, the first and second cups would have gone cold. Cup warmer you say? In fact there is a newer model that features a cup warmer at the top of the machine, but there wasn't any at the sale so I couldn't get it. In any case, it would take forever to prepare four tiny cups of espresso. Might well just bring out the scotch instead.

I made the first cup of coffee into a Cappuccino, which is half espresso half fluffy milk and a bit of chocolate powder on top. The milk-frothing thingy worked really well, and it was actually quite alright.

I have a little idea about a web project that involves my Krups. I shall reveal it in due course. In the meantime, you may be interested in the original Trojan Room Coffee Machine. I have been told that my Krups makes much better coffee.

Tue, 08 Jan 2002 14:03:22 GMT

Follow up to the new iMac: the HK$14k model has a SuperDrive (which writes DVD!) and not a combo drive (writes CD-ROM reads DVD). Consider that a DVD-R drive which writes DVD is about HK$5K, I suppose the new iMac is not too bad. The iMovie video editing software is very easy to use, not to mention FinalCut Pro (which is considered the best video editing software on any platform) this is one cool inexpensive multimedia workstation.

Tue, 08 Jan 2002 00:49:19 GMT

I have been busy working and finishing a project of twin websites. It's very close to delivery.

Franki a photography friend complained that it is a hassle to burn his digital images onto CDROMs. He has a 1G microdrive. Everytime he needs to burn his images onto a CDROM, he has to manually fill the CDROM up by seperating his files. I am planning to write a little Perl script which would go thru a directory of files and seperate these files into groups and put them into directories of an arbitary size. Franki is not the only one who needs such a solution. Once this script is finished I'll sell it to Franki and then release it under GPL. No I don't hate him, it's just that development costs money, and he's in a good position to fund the project which will benefit us all. Sure he'll get credit for it.

Tue, 08 Jan 2002 00:16:42 GMT

If you have not seen it, here is the new cool iMac. The first lot will come in this month. At HK$14,400, it is however not cheap. I suppose the novelty factor and the cool-look factor costs. Check out the demos.

Mon, 31 Dec 2001 16:35:48 GMT

New Year with Jupiter hanging over your head!

Mon, 31 Dec 2001 14:34:40 GMT

Ultra Cool Movie: Spirited Away

Just saw it at Tuen Mun. Wasn't expected much, but it was absolutely brilliant! A pleasant surprise. Fun and very educational. Must See.

Thu, 27 Dec 2001 14:36:35 GMT

Haven't been web-surfing as much over the X'mas holidays, so can't bring you any new links. I have been reading instead. Went thru Book 1 and Book 2 of Harry Potter, and is currently about a third into Book 3. Haven't watched the movie thou, 'cos they are only showing the Cantonese-dubbed version in all three cinemas in Tuen Mun, and I'd really like to see the one w/ the original sound track. Meant to pop out to Yau Ma Tei to see it at the Broadway, but was too tired to bother. Oh well, later maybe.

Just arranged for an appointment for Lily to see Dr Ryan, supposingly the specialist in H.K. We are hoping to proceed with the operation to fix Lily's hip problem. I did some research right before X'mas.

Lily has got what is called hip dysplaysia. It's a genetic problem that is causes by imperfect hip joint development.

I have also found this list, which althou is a bit old, I suspect the situation nowadays isn't much better. In Hong Kong where the majority of the local golden retriever (or as a matter of fact, all dogs) population are rather small, there are a lot of breeding between closely related dogs, so the situation could only be far worse. For those who can't be bothered to visit these links, the summary is that close to 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 golden retrievers suffer some degree of hip dysplaysia. On Lily's family gathering party, 5 of Lily brothers were there. 4 of them already showed some signs of hip dysplaysia. Co Co the mother also showed some slight signs. Not good indeed.

Lily won't be getting a hip replacement, which is a HK$20K per joint job. A hip replacement is an operation where plastic implant is put into the hip socket, and the top part of the dog's upper leg bone is replaced with a plastic ball. It is not w/o problems, and usually done on older dogs. The general vet (Dr Pahl I think. The nurses called him Dr Gerry, which is his first name) who did the X-ray for Lily explained the kind of operation he recommends, and I think it's triple pelvic osteotomy. Basically, the socket bone is cut off, rotated by an angle so that the socket sits on top of the ball of the upper leg bone and then put back on. Wicked. Only puppies under the age of 1 are suitable for such operations. Dr Pahl said that Lily appeared to be suitable for this operation.

Will keep you updated on Lily.

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 02:24:33 GMT

New PowerBooks in stores [MacNN]

Yap, the H.K. AppleStore has also been updated. Nice.

Thu, 13 Dec 2001 06:43:32 GMT

Taking the P department: You've heard of Segway, of course, now meet Megway.

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 22:55:02 GMT

The real cost of software.

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 22:51:33 GMT

My brother Mike is a big fan of console games, but I prefer PC games. Now that the officially imported PS2 is available for a very reasonable price of HK$2K, I think he will acquire one quite soon.

I came across this bit. The start of the demise of M$? I don't know. Microsoft Bob was a failure, but it was nowhere as ambitious as, or as high-profile as the XBox.

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 14:04:52 GMT

I actually like reading a lot. I have always enjoyed reading. It's just that the life pace is so fast in Hong Kong I don't get to read as much as I would like.

Over the weekend I bought a couple of new books. I picked up C.S. Lewis's The Complete Chronicles of Narnia (published by Collins) RSP UKP29.99 for HK$99 (around UKP8) and I am quite pleased with myself over this purchase. My brother Mike is also a big fan of the Narnia stories. The BBC made a whole drama series a few years ago and I saw that on local TV. I don't watch much TV these days, so even if they do a re-run I am bound to miss it. I might just well pick up a set of VCDs or something. The website is here.

Then I picked up Chi-cheung Tong's Elementary Shanghaiese, which was published by the Chinese Press. I used to learn Shanghaiese with Professor Tong when he was doing external courses at City University. I didn't pick up a lot of Shanghaiese during the two courses I did, but enjoyed Prof. Tong's insights into the change of spoken languages and writing of Chinese dialets.

The Lady of the House picked up the first Harry Potter English novel. I have not read any before myself, but the first few pages seem to be okay. I suppose I'll like this book. Ten more days to go before the movie!

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 13:37:18 GMT

BBC don't-miss: Kenyans document poverty with old Betacams [Robot Wisdom]

The will and the power to communicate is the key to the future. TV doesn't teach one how to communicate, and IMO has managed to change a few generations of young people to walking zombies. I am looking at how to push this weblog thing to more. Problem is, these days even kids don't tell other kids "Hey! I have a website!"

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 05:42:04 GMT

HK shuts schools to migrants. Hong Kong's government refuses to provide education to children from mainland China who are fighting for the right to live in the territory. [BBC News: world]

I am somewhat surprised to find this piece of news on the BBC. I am not registered with SCMP, but HK iMail has this today.

I am disappointed with the government on this. Can't they do anything right these days?

Thu, 06 Dec 2001 16:43:05 GMT

Dan Mitchell asks a question that came up on yesterday's radio show. Microsoft's software costs more than the computers that it runs on. Customers don't know what to make of this. [Scripting News]

The solicitors firm I work for is a big time Microsoft house. I have heard no plans yet of upgrading to WinXP thou. In any case, I have licensed Win 2000 and Office 2000 running on my work machine. When my father was working at the Provisional Airport Authority, their IT Dept sent out a memo, saying that installation of M$ software on their home machines is allowed. I could check whether this is applicable to my employer now. Was M$ HK being exceptionally flexible? I don't know.

In any case, I don't rely on M$ Office. I could use it if I want to and when it is available. I do everything as plain text. If I ever need fancy formatting then I use KOffice or OpenOffice.

OfficeXP has that nasty product activation thingy, but I am sure there are ways to go around it for those of you who are not willing to pay full price for the product.

The Lady of the House is entitled to getting an education license. In the UK, the cost for an education license is exceptionally good, and I expect that it would be just as good here. That would have to wait until she gets a new P4 to replace her ancient Penitum233 thou.

Tue, 04 Dec 2001 13:30:50 GMT

"I'm A Stranger Here Myself". Listen to humorist and bestselling author Bill Bryson's account of coming back to the U.S. after living in Britain for two decades. [Salon.com]

Bryson is very good. I have read a couple of his books, and both were excellent. Highly recommended.

Mon, 03 Dec 2001 14:10:01 GMT

Now I know that my postfix config is working, and why my emails don't seem to get delivered! It turns out that Radio has been stealing my emails!

What happens is that I have Radio setup so that I could email a certain email account, and have Radio pick it up, and put it into my weblog. This is convenient for when I am on the road. I am not comfortable putting my laptop out on the net, so it's sitting nicely behind my OpenBSD firewall. However, I didn't setup a separate account, but instead used my regular frank@rollingegg.net account instead (silly me!) So every two minutes or so, Radio comes thru the pop3 port and steals all my email!

No wonder why I am not getting any daily reports on my firewall...

Sun, 02 Dec 2001 02:26:32 GMT

Right next to the cybercafe I visited yesterday was this little Adventure Shop, selling Dungeon and Dragon stuff, among others.

Then this morning, I come across this. Kind of funny.

Sat, 01 Dec 2001 10:10:47 GMT

Huge LAN party!

I visited a Hong Kong-style cybercafe this morning. Bunch of school kids playing Counter-Strike or whatever network game there. Those machines were much faster than my own workstations. These cybercafes are popping up everywhere. Looks like they are going down the same road as Taiwanese topioca tea houses---so many of them that the market is saturated within a short time, followed by fiece competition and everybody loses.

It would however be fun to do a LAN party for education, e.g. talks on installing Linux over ftp, setting up Samba, networking config, website building, etc. etc. Something to think about for the year 2002.

And I still haven't gotten my X'mas cards yet...

Fri, 30 Nov 2001 15:13:26 GMT

Macau ripe with pirated Harry Potter copies. CNET Nov 30 2001 2:18AM ET [CNET]

Our friend Peter used to work for one of the big cinema chains. He showed NPC around one of the top cinemas a couple of years ago. A lot of effort and thoughts go into planning and running a cinema. After that visit, I thought the $50 movie ticket was worth every penny, even with an average film. I am definitely going to wait till Harry Potter comes on and see it in the cinema.

The movie opens on 20 December. Lily our dog is going to join up with her parents, brother and sister for a good swim and some fun on 15. BBQ around 25. Looks like it's going to be a busy December.

Have to do some X'mas cards this year...

Thu, 29 Nov 2001 16:20:25 GMT

Toronto via Sam: The winner of the Afghan war was... Russia? [Robot Wisdom]

Excellent piece. Well worth reading.

Pakistan is friend. India is not. Russia is not. China is going to reach Korea's level of energy use within the next ten years. Where are we going to get our oil? Why bother sending someone to the Moon? How about developing a new energy source?

Tue, 27 Nov 2001 15:01:19 GMT

Generate AM Radio Broadcasts With Your Monitor [Slashdot]

The point is not you can listen to music without a sound card (these days what computer doesn't come with reasonable sound hardware?), but that your CRT is actually leaking information. Yes, at least in theory, it is possible to spy your screen from a distance.

Mon, 26 Nov 2001 15:14:33 GMT

The Harry Potter movie has been on for about a week in the U.S. It has gotten excellent reviews and is very successful at the box office. We don't get to see it until X'mas thou.

The Lord of the Rings will also be on during the X'mas holidays.

I also look forward to the Spider Man movie, which unfortunately, isn't on until May 2002(!).

Sun, 25 Nov 2001 17:58:20 GMT

Some bad sectors developed on my OpenBSD firewall/webserver a few weeks ago. It wasn't getting worse, just plain annoying as the system would grind the HD every now and then when it was trying to read the bad sectors. These bad sectors were in the system area, so I couldn't just mark them as bad and forget about them.

Spent whole weekend installing the latest greatest OpenBSD 3.0 (which has just shipped!) on another drive, and moving all the old stuff over. The process isn't as smooth as I would like. Major changes in the firewall and NAT config. Problems with postfix, pthreads, gtk and glib.

Got most of the stuff working. Even restored photocat's web space (empty website).

Sat, 24 Nov 2001 15:00:49 GMT

Red Moon -- Chinese Announce Manned Moon Mission [Plastic]

We hear nothing about this until now. I am not too sure that this is worth pursuing, when there are so much still to be done.

Sat, 24 Nov 2001 14:46:30 GMT

Pokey Man Big in Japan. Boong-Ga Boong-Ga is a strange new arcade game that is sweeping Japan. Players poke a butt with a plastic finger. What's that all about? By Mark Baard. [Wired News]

No comment.

Fri, 23 Nov 2001 15:34:10 GMT

United Parcel Service. "If you think UPS is too big to have something like this happen, think again." [The Motley Fool]

I see a lot of folks like this. When we propose solutions and products which would enhance their productivity and make their job so much easier to do to these folks, they would give all sorts of excuses just to get rid of us. They try very hard to block us from the real decision makers in their organization. Do they not know, the more productive they are, the better prospect they have for the jobs?

It is very frustrating.

Wed, 21 Nov 2001 00:12:41 GMT

Email from Afghanistan

As pointed out by the comments following the article, it does sound a bit fishy thou. Afghanistan ain't going to get that ADSL overnite for the chap in the story to download all the movies, not that I know of a TCP/IP stack for a Commodore (but maybe an Amiga? They run OpenBSD you know.)

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 14:41:07 GMT

Economic Phase Transition

Exactly the same problem w/ Hong Kong. Majority of population are not well adapted to the new economy. However, instead of investing in education and training to increase productivity, human resources are spread thinner and thinner in order to cut cost. The result is that we go cheaper, not more efficient. I am sure this is not the way to go forward, and unless there is a major shift in people's perception about the future and what we should be doing, we are pretty much doomed.

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 16:33:33 GMT

Satellite Discs in Afghanistan!

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 14:18:48 GMT

BMG to replace anti-rip Natalie Imbruglia CDs. New stock, free replacements [The Register]

I have a feeling that anti-rip CDs will appear in Hong Kong soon. I do not have the figures, but apparently peer-piracy is fairly common among school kids. Such anti-rip CDs will stop swapping of MP3 files, but won't stop people copying the CD to an MD via a plain old audio cable. It will also stop the legit user from transferring a bought-CD to his/her MP3 player.

I don't care too much. The last CD I bought was Danny Summer Live in Concert 2000. I went to that event and enjoyed it very much was the main reason why I bought it. I would be annoyed if I couldn't rip it. If I knew I couldn't rip a CD I wouldn't have bought it in the first place. No big deal for me.

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 09:47:37 GMT

Observation of the SMS Market

By SMS I am talking about the short messaging feature of GSM mobile phones. In most countries where GSM systems are deployed, SMS messages can be sent across different networks easily. It is easy to use, almost instant delivery and relatively inexpensive (costing something like 5p to 7p, which is about one H.K. dollar, to send a message). It's so successful that SMS accounts for around 5% to 10% of revenue of typical European GSM operators.

The local Hong Kong GSM operators will never see this revenue though. For one, SMS messages in Hong Kong cannot be delivered across different networks, i.e. an SMS message sent out by PCCW network user to a Sunday network user will get dropped into the bin bucket and never be delivered. The network operators are too stupid to link up their network, and OFTA (BTW, their website sucks, but that's another story) is too lazy to do anything about it. As a result, consumers are deprived of a valuable communication tool, and the network operators are unable to explore a major section of the market.

Another reason why SMS will never be as successful in Hong Kong as in Europe is that, the literacy rate is lower. The term "literacy rate" is in the context of both knowledge of the English language and computer literacy. The average Hong Kong youngster has problem communicating efficiently in English. Unfortunately, the same average Hong Kong youngster has the same problem communicting efficiently in Chinese. As a result, a written form of communication tool such as SMS is of little relevance to our average Hong Kong youngster.

Even if our youngster is willing to send a message in Chinese, he or she would have problem entering the message into the mobile phone. Chinese typing is not a compulsory subject at school. Most Chinese-capable mobile phones use the T9 Chinese entry method, which is not taught at school. The incentive for our younger to learn to use is T9 is rather low. He or she would have to overcome so many difficulties in order to send SMS, he or she might well just give up and make a phone call instead.

The low "literacy rate" (in the above context) is scary. It will affect the survival of our society. I shall write another article on this.

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 08:52:47 GMT

Jagger Says He's Given Up Drink, Drugs and Partying

The Stones performed at my university in the 60s!

The Rock Dinosaurs rocks on, and folks like them will always have dignity alright.

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 00:41:27 GMT

Sir Paul on all fours!

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 00:38:03 GMT

Welcom to the United Police State of America!

Security through obscurity. Cool!

Sun, 18 Nov 2001 01:40:21 GMT

Malaysia: Prime minister sees Israel as root source of terrorism [Robot Wisdom]

From the man who sent his right-hand man to prison for buggery...

Sat, 17 Nov 2001 00:18:38 GMT

New Star Wars Episode II Trailer Out [Slashdot]

Some funny comments in Slashdot. Here to get to the trailer, as the original Slashdot link doesn't work. Pick the medium or small if you don't have Quicktime Pro 5. That Skywalker chap is ugly.

Tue, 13 Nov 2001 23:42:23 GMT

Temperature suddenly drops to 16 degrees C. It's cool, and looks miserable outside. Some fine whether expected on the weekend thou.

Weather Underground cool site!

Tue, 13 Nov 2001 23:33:13 GMT

Oracle delivers e-mail challenge. CNET Nov 13 2001 12:20PM ET [CNET]

Stuff everything into your SQL server! One of these days I'll have to setup a good fast machine with a few disk spindles to run PostgreSQL and do the same.

Mon, 12 Nov 2001 14:49:27 GMT

Let's hope Uncle Osama likes Windows XP.

Funny comic. Very true about M$ keeping track of all XP users. The worst bit about XP is that, the license will expire in two years' time. Yes, that means you will have to either renew your license, or upgrade, either way, you'll have to pay.

Before XP, one buys a copy of Microsoft DOS/Windows 98/ME/NT/2000, one could use this copy on one machine at any one time, till eternity. It's up to the user to decide if and when to upgrade. So if one is still happy with WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, one could will be still using DOS 6.1. No such luck with XP. You may still be on your Office 2000 and are happy with it and have no plans to upgrade for another few years. If you upgrade to Windows XP now, in two years' time, unless you pay again for your operating system, your XP workstation will stop working.

Now if Windows XP is much cheaper than say Windows 2000 then I suppose upgrading every two years is okay. However, from what I see, this is not the case.

I don't care. I am using Linux. I am using Windows 2000. I might acquire a Mac running OS X. I am not touching XP.

Sat, 10 Nov 2001 16:29:20 GMT

ADSL Service in Zhong Shan

The official English name for "Chung Shan" is Zhong Shan.

I am looking at some pamphlets for ADSL service in Zhong Shan, which I obtained a couple of weeks ago from a China Telecom outlet down town. It's actually quite reasonable in price:-

Installation	RMB100
Monthly Fee	RMB150
ADSL Modem (purchase)	RMB780

This is supposingly a special offer for Autumn, and is only good for residential addresses. It's an always-on-no-limit service, so existing ISDN users would have strong incentive to switch over. BTW the price for non-residential ADSL is expensive.

Is broadband in Hong Kong too expensive? I don't think so. Althou a lot of the investments in telecom services are in equipment, labour and land costs etc. are also substantial. Hong Kong is an expensive place to do business in, so the cost of running a broadband service would be higher.

Althou I am not 100% sure, I suspect that users on a residential ADSL line don't get a real IP address. I say China should fully adopt IPV6 before everybody else does.

Sat, 10 Nov 2001 16:11:40 GMT

Dial-up Internet Access Sucks!

Away from home, I am stuck w/ dial-up Internet access provided by a local ISP china-way.com. Speed is actually quite reasonable and liveable during the day, but like Hong Kong, the peak hours are in the evening. I have been trying for the last 15 minutes but all I got was a busy tone, except once I managed to login, but the DNS server was too busy and didn't work, so I couldn't get to anywhere and the link was of course unuseable.

Oh I also don't get a real IP with china-way.com. ICQ and colleagues would work, but there is no hope of doing any sort of hosting, except for folks on the same subnet.

Shouldn't complain thou, as it's actually quite inexpensive.

Fri, 09 Nov 2001 15:41:17 GMT

Hack your bank for $995. Cambridge boffins post gory details on Web [The Register]

This is not good, in the sense that it doesn't do any good to public confidence in encryption technology. Suddenly, all that 128 bit SSL web transaction means bugger all. Not to forget, it is only as strong as the weakest link.

Fri, 09 Nov 2001 09:17:00 GMT

I have noticed for the last couple of months that the sound quality of my mobile network has deterioated quite a bit. Although I am supposed to be on a special concession, the price has somehow gone up by a small amount. I know Sunday has been losing money since the beginning, but looking at their high-profile expensive website, their expensive TV adverts (okay it's not Andy Lau or Aaron Kwok, but look at the frequency!) I keep wondering whether they have their corporate priorities right, and if I would be better off with another network operator.

I have just upgraded my mobile handset w/ Sunday, and paid $300 as prepaid. It's no big amount, and I would happily give that up for a better service (if it's indeed better).

Wed, 07 Nov 2001 00:31:21 GMT

TDK to make Bluetooth module for Palm. CNET Nov 6 2001 4:27PM ET [CNET]

Huh?! Clip on? Not an SD-size card?!

Wed, 07 Nov 2001 00:29:47 GMT

Hewlett family hate Compaq merger (true). Voting with their feet [The Register]

How ironic. I don't think the merger/takeover is a good thing for HP, which I have always liked. And HP has just closed their calculator department... Demise of a great company?

Mon, 05 Nov 2001 23:50:09 GMT

The Economist: The next society. Peter Drucker. Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social--and perhaps also political--force over the next decades. [Tomalak's Realm]

Are you prepared for it?

Mon, 05 Nov 2001 23:25:25 GMT

IBM Launches Public Domain Project "Eclipse" [Slashdot]

This is some real killer development tool. It's actually not under Public Domain, but some form of Open Source License. Folks are very exciting about this. I like what one of the posters said "IBM: Our 800 pound gorilla.".

Sun, 04 Nov 2001 02:15:03 GMT

UNIX hits the Big Three-Oh [Slashdot]

What more could I say? Happy birthday Unix. Many more happy returns!

Sat, 03 Nov 2001 23:26:49 GMT

HP Calculator Department Closing [Slashdot]

Argh! Sad day it certainly is. I remember fondly my old man's HP-45 when I was a little kid. This beast had a red tube display! I had access to a 11C in secondary school, and that thing was much more programmable than the standard Casio. The 28C took me thru university. The best thing about HP calculators is RPN, which gets rid of the hassle and confusion of ()s.

By the time the 48 came out I already left engineering for good, so I never got to play with it. Maybe I should pick one up now?

Fri, 02 Nov 2001 15:01:02 GMT

Civilization III Is Out, And It Rocks [Slashdot]

I have played both the original Civilization and Civilization II. They were great at their time, but since RTS games such as C&C and RA are just so much more exciting... Or maybe I'll pick up and spend some time w/ Civ III...