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29 January 2003 |
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23 January 2003 |
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.
8:16:37 AM 
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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.
8:06:16 AM
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20 January 2003 |
Hobson's Choice
I went to a school play "Hobson's Choice" when I was in Sixth Form. It was the first time I came across this play and this story. It was good performance and I liked it. When I said to my schoolmates that Hobson didn't really have much choice, they told me that the whole idea of the story was that Hobson had no choice.
thttpd is working really well on my OpenBSD gateway machine serving up my weblog and a few other under-utilized small sites for friends, It is run chroot()'ed, meaning it is reasonably secure. Virtual hosting is so easy to do. Throttling is also a cool feature, althou I have no use for it at the moment.
I need something more. I want to run MovableType, which means perl w/ CGI. thttpd has a CGI interface, but to run it chroot()'ed I would have to reinstall perl in the chroot()'ed environment, which I have yet to figure out, and it looks extremely messy.
Apache running chroot()'ed has one advantage: with mod_perl, since the module is initialized at startup before entering the chroot jail, there is no need to install perl within the chroot jail, and this makes setting up much easier.
I could run thttpd listening on port 80, and Apache listening on another port. This would enable me to run MovableType on the backend and still let thttpd serve my weblog. The weblog search script however still wouldn't work.
Apache also does one thing which thttpd does not. Apache has this great mod_proxy module which does reverse proxying, so I can run Apache on my gateway machine, and let it connect to another server on the intranet, thereby exposing this other server to the outside.
Maybe it really is time to upgrade my gateway machine?
9:12:04 PM
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19 January 2003 |
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.
10:46:24 PM
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TODO List
- Finalize draft letter to be sent to hkgolden.com for Po.
- Finish Rico's workflow program.
- Look into setting up MovableType to replace my Radio weblog. Radio is good value-for-money for what you get: software plus update plus web space. However, I am cheap, and have no use for web space provided by Userland. Radio have problems handling double-byte Chinese characters with grace. I also don't want to devote one good computer to run Windows just to run Radio, nor do I want to run Radio on my Tibook. I am therefore looking for something to replace my Radio. MovableType is powerful and looks good. It is free as in free beer for non-commercial use.
3:46:20 PM
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16 January 2003 |
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.
5:31:15 PM
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12 January 2003 |
The Important Character Jar-Jaromir in The Return of the Kind
Funny.
9:14:34 PM
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11 January 2003 |
Speed is Important in Usability
I only used Apple's new browser Safari for a shortwhile when it first came out. Apple has just posted an update, so I downloaded it and played with it some more.
Safari is FAST. The more I use it the more I appreciate its speed. I have to admit it now, that its speed makes the Internet more pleasant to use.
Althou I am tempted, I doubt I would use Safari in its present state as my default browser (which at the moment is Chimera). With tabbing under Chimera, I normally Apple-click on all the links in a windows, and those links will be loaded in a different tab in the background for me to go check later on. This is so cool because I don't have to wait for the new link to load and it does not interrupt my flow of reading the orignal window. Safari lacks Mozilla-like tabbing, so when I Apple-click on a link to open a new window, the new window is opened all over the place. I also have to try to find and restore the original window, which is a bit of a pain.
I don't doubt for a second that Safari will get tabbing shortly.
6:06:22 PM
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09 January 2003 |
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08 January 2003 |
Test of Concept
- ❑ There are so many things I wish to write about.
- ❑ The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
11:41:08 PM
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02 January 2003 |
NetNewsWire Pro
NetNewsWire Pro is a very promising client-side weblog application for OS X.
It's still in beta, and there are some rough edges and show stoppers. I am too busy to do a detailed bug report, so I am going to leave it for now, and come back to give it another spin a few revisions later.
12:04:25 PM
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29 December 2002 |
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22 December 2002 |
Rent a Telescope
Astrophotography is hard. You need a fair amount of background knowledge and some hefty equipment. For those who live in or anywhere near a big city, light polution doesn't make it easier. It means that they would have to travel far with all the heavy equipment.
Not to mention the loss of sleep.
Not anymore. Rent a good telescope with the corresponding CCD camera from these folks. They are in Arizona where they have a lot more cloudless nights than most other folks. It's certainly an interesting idea.
3:03:54 PM
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21 December 2002 |
Can't Take Broadband Internet for Granted
A nicely written article here. Good arguments for not doing heavy Flash and graphics sites and fighting spam.
9:17:56 AM
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These folks need your help. I have just upgraded my membership to Silver and thereby given them US$60. I am running a Mandrake 9 workstation. I have just played with their new Multi Network Firewall and like it a lot. Their software has always been excellent and available for download for free. US$120 a year is a good price to pay for top quality software. Oh BTW Silver membership entitles me to Sun's StarOffice officue suite.
Highly recommended.
8:16:51 AM
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15 December 2002 |
MandrakeSecurity Multi Network Firewall
Very cool.
It is a dual-license software, being proprietory or GPL. It costs USD1990 (if you want full support), but also available for free download. The price is kinda steep, but definitely something I would recommend to clients.
9:09:54 PM
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12 December 2002 |
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05 December 2002 |
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02 December 2002 |
Then I found this, which is a good guide for setting up any blog client.
6:00:18 PM
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Getting Newz Crawler to work w/ Userland Radio
I couldn't find the documentation to enable this. There are bits of information around but they are sketchy. I spell everything here hoping that Google would pick this up, for the benefit of other bloggers.
On the Radio side you need to enable "The Blogger API in Radio", then on Newz Crawler you enter the name of the machine running Radio as the url, and "/RPC2" (and not "/api/RPC2"!) as the directory. Enter "80" as the port number. Do a refresh, and you should see your blog as an option on the pull down manual on the right.
I couldn't do a screen dump as I have really uninstalled Newz Crawler from my Windoz workstation. It's nice, but not that nice.
5:40:28 PM
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30 November 2002 |
Test post using Newz Crawler. Baby in hand, so typing w/ only one hand now.
--
Composed with Newz Crawler 1.3 http://www.newzcrawler.com/
10:49:04 AM
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3G Network: The Future is Bright, the Future is Hello Kitty.
Slashdot has a piece here.
The problem I see about 3G is that, it is not a disruptive technology, yet what we have right now (2G or 2.5G) are more than adequate. Bearing that in mind, all the 3G opeartors are talking about grabbing more money from their subscribers. I am paying HK$200 to HK$300 a month, and I am a fairly heavy voice user, totaling about 800 to 1200 minutes a month on average. Hutchison/Orange has been talking about HK$500/month for a typical 3G user. Unless there are really overwhelming reasons, I don't see myself doubling my mobile phone bill anytime soon. In any case, most of the features promised by 3G are already avaiable (more or less) on present 2.5G networks.
It is entirely possible that operators are thinking that if we are paying HK$200 a month for voice, then we would want those data services, thereby doubling our monthly mobile phone bill. Unfortunately it doesn't work exactly like that. The mobile phone is a communication device. It doesn't matter what form of media be it data or voice we use, we use it to communicate. Noone will take a doubled phone bill easily.
Mobile operators talk about MMS these days, 'cos it's the big money spinner. HK$5 for a short movie clip, HK$10 for transferring photo etc. is good news for the investors and shareholders, but not so good for the users. MMS in its present form is pretty much doomed in Hong Kong.
There is a network connection problem right now. The various mobile operators are ganged up into two groups. MMS sent from an opertor in one group could not be received by a user on an operator in the other group. It's like the old SMS interconnection problem between all the operators on the network, and everybody suffered.
Interesting movies and short clips, containing voice and images, are very difficult to make. It's a bit like DVs. A lot of people have them, but there aren't that many who do it as a hobby. Editing is hard, and the equipment for doing it used to be expensive. Much of the software for video editing were any good or particularly easy to use. The novelty of moving images wears off rather quickly. The Hong Kong people aren't a particularly expressive bunch, and that doesn't help MMS to become popular.
For the small amount of data going thru the network, MMS is far too expensive. The operators may see a tiny spike in its usage, but the novelty will wear off rather quickly.
One of the comments on Slashdot is very interesting.
8:34:40 AM
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28 November 2002 |
Yes, this is currently now served by thttpd.
5:34:44 PM
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A Lighter HTTP Server
I have been playing with the thttpd web server. Apache (which comes with the standard OpenBSD installation) is the world's most popular, and probably most powerful, web server. It is however too bloated for my wimpy Pentium MMX 166. I am very tempted to switch over to something lighter.
This article talks about Boa, another light web server. This somehow triggles my desire to switch. I looked at thttpd before, so naturally I pick thttpd to experiment again.
thttpd is fast and highly responsive. Its throttling control is easy to use and effective. I capped one of the websites it serves to 500 bytes per second, and the download rate hovers around this figure. Cool!
The switch is however not without problems, and there are pieces of puzzles which I need to solve before it could replace Apache on my server for good. It doesn't have PHP support, but this is okay with me at this stage, as none of the websites on my server needs it. I would like to run Movable Type on this server, but have yet to figure out how to setup a chroot environment with perl.
Updates to be posted.
8:09:32 AM
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27 November 2002 |
Mozilla 1.2
Rejoice! It really is better than IE.
FWIW, I use Chimera on OS X, which is based on Gecko the rendering engine behind Mozilla but lighter.
10:18:32 PM
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11 November 2002 |
New Header Graphics
Wilson, who is a fine designer and photographer did this for me. Thanks Wilson.
11:37:37 AM
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02 November 2002 |
Why PDF sucks
Keep reading, 'cos the real juice (IMO) starts from the 10th paragraph.
How true: Interleaf has been dying for years. Ventura Publisher has been dying for years. PageMaker is a deadend and last time I mentioned it I was laughed at by some designer-wannabes.
9:59:30 AM
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15 October 2002 |
Follow up to Microsoft's Switch advert: Microsoft PR Rep is the Switcher. Here's a followup to our earlier story about Microsoft's "inverse switch" ... [Slashdot]
A very quick down-turn of the story. Here is how they managed to track the person down. Are you sure you still want to use Microsoft Word now?
11:07:21 AM
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23 September 2002 |
Another cool service from Google. The SCMP is not one of the news sources. I wonder what they are thinking.
9:55:57 PM
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22 September 2002 |
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.
11:48:34 AM
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21 September 2002 |
Discovered this gem yesterday. Works fine with the Win32 and Linux versions of Mozilla, but under OS X, the "Save" button was missing, so there is no way to use this. Bug has already been reported, so have faith that it will be fixed.
Which also means, I am typing HTML right now on my TiBook under Mozilla.
1:23:53 AM
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14 September 2002 |
According to some research, Hong Kong has the third highest percentage of broadband internet access users in the world. This should be something to be proud of, but no. The research also says that most broadband users use the Internet to do email, ICQ, download MP3s and surf. Basically, mostly for entertainment and amusement.
One doesn't need broadband to do ICQ or email. Web-surfing is much nicer with broadband, but one can survive with a 56K modem dialup. Basically, most folks are just not using broadband to its full potential.
Po stopped using Radio since his copy expired. He said he was too cheap. Different priorities, fine. (But then one doesn't need broadband to do weblogging, especially w/ Radio.) I must say I am a bit disappointed thou.
The fine folks at Netvigator offers this value-added service . Knowing that most folks have nothing to say and even less to express, I wonder how popular this service is.
Broadband has become a necessary tool for software development. I have linked to them before. Check out these folks.
9:50:13 AM
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13 September 2002 |
An ex-client's new website.
So 90s.
Forgive them, they don't know better.
11:00:31 PM
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