tin_the_fatty: Web

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.

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.

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 13:12:04 GMT

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?

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.

Sun, 19 Jan 2003 07:46:20 GMT

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.

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.

Sat, 11 Jan 2003 10:06:22 GMT

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.

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 01:29:39 GMT

Macworld Expo Comments Continue

Safari breaks single day download record for Apple. The browser war is not concluded!

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 15:41:08 GMT

Test of Concept

❑ There are so many things I wish to write about.
❑ The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 04:04:25 GMT

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.

Sun, 29 Dec 2002 15:43:25 GMT

Short article: "PBase Switching to for-fee Service"

Sun, 22 Dec 2002 07:03:54 GMT

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.

Sat, 21 Dec 2002 01:17:56 GMT

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.

Sat, 21 Dec 2002 00:16:51 GMT

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.

Sun, 15 Dec 2002 13:09:54 GMT

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.

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 01:30:30 GMT

Joe Clark Interview on Slashdot

This article is too important not to link to.

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 00:04:14 GMT

Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China
Wired article.

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 10:30:47 GMT
WTF?

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 10:00:18 GMT

Then I found this, which is a good guide for setting up any blog client.

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 09:40:28 GMT
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.

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 02:49:04 GMT
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/

Sat, 30 Nov 2002 00:34:40 GMT
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.

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 09:34:44 GMT

Yes, this is currently now served by thttpd.

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 00:09:32 GMT
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.

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 14:18:32 GMT
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.

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 03:37:37 GMT
New Header Graphics
Wilson, who is a fine designer and photographer did this for me. Thanks Wilson.

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 01:59:30 GMT
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.

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 03:07:21 GMT

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?

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 00:31:26 GMT

Microsoft Tries a "Switch" Campaign. Twirlip of the Mists writes "There's a new page on Microsoft's web site that ... [Slashdot]

Must read. It's very funny.

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 13:55:57 GMT
Another cool service from Google. The SCMP is not one of the news sources. I wonder what they are thinking.

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 17:23:53 GMT

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.

Sat, 14 Sep 2002 01:50:13 GMT

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.

Fri, 13 Sep 2002 15:00:31 GMT
An ex-client's new website.
So 90s.
Forgive them, they don't know better.

Sun, 28 Jul 2002 17:37:42 GMT

"Hottentot Venus" laid to rest 200 years after her abduction. "...Saartjie Baartman was dragged out to squat before the mob at 225 Piccadilly, the show's promoters billed her genitals as resembling the skin that hangs from a turkey's throat. For several years, working-class Londoners crowded in to shout vulgarities at the protruding buttocks and large vulva of the unfortunate woman made famous across Europe as the "Hottentot Venus"...Death in Paris a few years later treated the young woman...little better than life. She was carved up by Napoleon's surgeon, who made a cast of her body, pickled her genitals and brain, and put her skeleton on display in a museum." Chris McGreal, "Coming Home", The Guardian (UK), 21/02/2002 [cite] The story of Sarah Baartman, The Hottentot Venus, concerns the ritual humiliation and violation of a young African woman who was abducted to Europe in 1809 and subjected to vile humiliations and brutality. [kuro5hin.org]

The story is facinating, and followed by some highly intelligent comments. Kuro5hin (pronounced as corrosion) is a very cool website. Cream of the Internet I would say.

Sun, 28 Jul 2002 17:35:03 GMT

The rumour of my death has been exaggerated

It has been too long since I last updated my weblog. I run my Radio software on my HP Omnibook laptop. The HD died the second time since I bought this machine two years ago, so I go through one HD each year. I can't say this is good. The thing is, the HDs in my desktop machines aren't doing much better.

Anyway, I bought a cheapo 10G to replace the old 5G. Fortunately, the old 5G failed only partially, and with some mucking around I managed to pull most of the files off it, and the Radio software came back to life on the same laptop, which is nice.

But then when I installed the 10G new HD, I put in two partitions: one for Windows 2000 and another for something else. Mandrake 8.1 came up with minimal fuss, and was in much better shape than the upgraded Mandrake 8.1 on my desktop machine. Sound, X, KDE2/3, network, etc. all worked fine. Couldn't be happier, except I really wanted to put those cool OpenBSD stickers on this laptop, and to do so, I needed to run OpenBSD.

OpenBSD actually installed and ran fine. My two network cards (one 3COM PCMCIA 10/100M ethernet card, and one Buffalo 802.11b WiFi card) came up and were talking to the network with minimal fuss. The problem was with getting X to work. xf86cfg wasn't working anywhere as smoothly as it does on Linux, and I had to edit the X86Config file by hand. Losing text mode after launching X is a long-known yet unfixed problem. Mind you, KDE2 works fine. I didn't spend enough time to get Mozilla to work (the port tree is still only at 0.9.3 and appears to be broken). I want to run my Radio software, and need to test my websites with IE, so am pretty much stuck with running Win2000 on this laptop. Sigh...

I tried before to run Radio on my TiBook. Migration was straightforward, well-documented and problem-free, which is nice, but for some strange reasons response of the Radio outliner was rather poor (unresponsive) compared to my much slower PII laptop. I have therefore given up this idea.

Radio is nice, but lacks some features which I would like, e.g. site-wide search. I am considering whether I should "eat the dog food" (which means a programmer using one's own program) by using WebCM. To be able to do so, I'd have to add a new feature: paragraph objects being displayed in chronological order. Auto-expiration would also be highly desireable. Outputting to a static site is also something nice to have. Hmmm... something to think about in the next couple of weeks.

Fri, 14 Jun 2002 14:24:43 GMT

Ken's friend Wah Chai was kind enough to share this website with us. From our reliable source, it is brand new. However, it feels like we are back to 1995! Truly amazing.

This is a neat trick: On the front page, click either "English" or "Japanese" (let's not worry about there is no Japanese on this site, yet) then click on "English" or "Japanese" again. Keep clicking. Yes, eventually you get shut out on your browser. Cool or what?!

Feel free to browse around this site. The PR text reads like monkeys wrote them. The graphics flash like the red-light district in Mongkok. Mind you, althou the photos of the dressing model are badly done, the model is actually quite nice.

I could go on, but I am suddenly feeling very sad. I thought it was funny and something for us to laugh at, but it is not. The fact that a web designer these day is doing such crap work, and worse, the client is willing to accept such crap work, is really depressing.

And the folks who own this website are supposed to be tasteful designers!

Sat, 08 Jun 2002 15:55:56 GMT
If you read it on the Internet, it must be true!
Beijing Newspaper Spoofed by The Onion [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

The Reuters story is here, and the original Onion story is here.

Wed, 05 Jun 2002 23:47:11 GMT

I only use IE to test websites these days, and have been browsing the web with Mozilla for quite some time now.

Mozilla is more standard-compliant, more featureful, more stable and far more secure.

Highly recommended.

Wed, 05 Jun 2002 23:39:14 GMT

Mozilla 1.0 has been released! Rejoice! Get it here.

Sat, 25 May 2002 01:11:55 GMT
Test. Test. Test.

Mon, 13 May 2002 00:15:06 GMT

What a coincident! I came across this piece.

We did a demonstration of our WebCM package to a travel agency a couple of weeks ago. They used to be hosted at a web-hosting company specialized in serving travel agencies. The web-hosting company went busted and were bought by another travel agency. This is bad for our potential client because their competitor may then have access to their website visitors' profile and possibly, other important data.

Our potential client although well impressed with WebCM, was however reluctant to commit. During casual telephone conversation with one of their senior employees, he indicated that they would wait and see what would happen with the existing supplier. Corporate suicide?

I see small to medium size travel agencies doomed in the next two to five years. Plane tickets are a commodity: one Cathay return ticket to London is identical to another, and whoever sells it cheaper would sell more. Potentially noone could sell Cathay tickets cheaper than Cathay itself, and Cathay could easily wipe out all the Cathay agencies overnite by selling cheap tickets direct from its own website. All the other airlines will follow suit eventually. And then there is Li Ka Shing's latest venture priceline.com operation in Hong Kong. Whatever Mr Li is involved in, all the small independent traders tend to be marginalized. I expect small and medium travel agencies to be driven out in the future just like your local butchers are being driven out now. Bigger travel agencies who organize their own local and foreign tours may survive, on thin margin as today, but even this is uncertain. Cathay organizes their own packages, and so could priceline.com. They could easily enjoy a bigger economic of scale.

The Post Office offering a clearing house service for online transactions seems to be a good way to go. It is difficult to do ecommerce in Hong Kong, because none of the banks and credit-card companies are cooperating. I have been told that to get a bank to handle your online transaction, you need to put HK$2M on account. There are other folks who would do it for you, but they charge an expensive monthly fee, plus a high commission, which virtually wipe out any competitiveness you may have gained by going online.

The Post Office could easily become the saviour of the small online traders by handling both the delivery and the transaction. Since it can make profit out of the delivery service, it can also keep the transaction commission relative low. The Post Office may be in the prime position to move into this new business model.

Sat, 11 May 2002 01:48:23 GMT

News from Faraway, and Observation on the Media

Interesting essay here about The Big Lie. This illustrates the power of blog. Formally putting something on the record is easy with blog.

The problem with soapbox-for-everybody is that it might get highly confusing. Read this article and see if you agree. Most people want life to be simple. Most people want to be spoon-fed. It is easier to follow the flock. I don't think that the blog scene would go down well with the local folks. Most folks here still think that if it is printed on a piece of paper, then it must be true. They are refusing to learn the lesson from the local tabloid weekly magazines.

Sun, 05 May 2002 09:19:36 GMT

For no special reasons, I am receiving more spam than usual these few days. Have to work on better spam filter rules.

Came across this interesting story.

Ken's acquaintance Ah Keung bought some spamming software to promote his poster-printing service. Apparently quite a few stupid morons call up to enquire, so there are sad cases who actually read spam! The problem with these gullible dummies is that they keep the spammers alive.

Yes, we have been trying to get Ah Keung to show up at our office so that we can waste him. So far he is not tempted.

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 15:14:59 GMT

I received a call from a Netvigator (one of the two ISPs I use) salesperson about half an hour ago, about my ADSL broadband subscription (HK$298 for around 50/100? hours a month).

It appears that my commitment contract has expired. I am now free to discontinue the service. They would however be glad to sell me another contract of 14 months for HK$298 per month unlimited usage. In additional, it will be free for four of these 14 months.

I told her that I thought 14 months of commitment was just too long, and other ISPs were doing much better deals (I was pulling her leg of course. i-Cable and HKBN are both cheaper, but as a part-time SOHO I wouldn't want to be with them), and she immediately went on to another option: 12 months contract, HK$198 per month unlimited usage, also with some free months thrown in.

I immediately complained that it wasn't the right way to do business and I felt cheated. I have been with Netvigator BB for over two years now, and since it goes onto my credit card, I haven't missed a single month of subscription, so I consider myself a good customer. As a part-time computer consultant myself, I value customer relations highly. I am more willing to give my good old customers special deals and bend over backwards for them than newer customers who are not as committed. Quite the reverse with Netvigator. If I had accepted their first offer, I would have accepted the less-favourable offer.

So I called up the fine folks at HKNet (the other ISP I use) and signed up for the special offer of a 12 months contract for upgrading my line to 3MB.

Thu, 02 May 2002 12:36:18 GMT

A possible solution to spam from mainland China.

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 03:39:23 GMT

I went for a haircut on Monday. In the middle of my hair wash, my mobile phone rang. I was physically in a vulnerable position and couldn't answer the phone without getting it wet. There was a caller-ID, so called back a few minutes later.

This client of ours had some trouble with their email, but couldn't reach Ken for some reasons.

The next day Ken told me this client had trouble sending email to a business associates of theirs (let's call them P for now). All email bounced back from Netvigator, saying that the account does not exist.

It turned out that P used to host their .hk domain at Netvigator, but switched to hosting it with the ISP of their parent company in Europe. They made the switch, but Netvigator didn't do any follow up to remove P's record on Netvigator's DNS servers, so all computers of Nevigator users think that P's domain was still hosted at Netvigator, while in reality P's account was no more.

This was a big mess up. Ken wasn't too happy, because client are not very understanding, and in the past he had lost a few client because of no fault of his own.

Fortunately Netvigator fixed the mess quickly upon P's complaint.

Fri, 12 Apr 2002 11:15:14 GMT

802.11b Hitting It Right

This is pretty cool.

I obtained a pamphlet for this 802.11b (aka radio ethernet) service yesterday while I was at a PCCW shop checking this out. The pamphlet mentions no price, but here it is. HK$18 an hour is actually quite expensive, consider that a commercial ADSL line is around HK$600/month for unlimited access (I think), and those Pacific Coffee places all have Internet-connected computers there for customers to use anyway. A reasonable access point is just under HK$2K, so if response is good, it shouldn't take long to recoup the investment. HK$10/hour would be much easier to swallow I say.

The Wharf folks were far more forward-thinking. They have been offering a similar service in Ocean Terminal and Ocean Centre for well over a year now. It doesn't say how much the service costs, but wants your credit card information. Weird.

Mon, 08 Apr 2002 22:47:12 GMT

Interesting application. Hotmail on steroid. Would you pay US$30 a year for reliable webmail that doesn't suck?

I use Mozilla as my main browser, so Oddpost is a bit useless for me (note the claim that 90% of Internet users now use IE). I have to admit that the IE widgets are very well done.

Maybe I should adjust our development target.

Fri, 05 Apr 2002 04:32:12 GMT

Language Negotiation

A former client's new website is back up. The one we did for them had a nice virtual tour of the place, movie clips of shows, photos of the excellent bands and singers who were just natural performers, a user-updatable "latest news" system in three languages, a working enquiry form, and automatic language negotiation. The new site has none of these neat features.

The colour scheme of the old site is actually quite similar to the new site. Whether the design of the new site is better is highly arguable. We are still on good terms with this former client. The new site couldn't be free, and would certainly cost more than paying us to migrate the old site to the new server/ISP of their choice.

I don't understand it. Pay-more-get-less-go-back-to-square-one. Maybe the client want to take the simplistic approach?

Enough whining about former clients. It's language negotiation that I want to write about.

Language negotiation on Apache is hard to use. Different browsers also have slightly different ways to tell the webserver about what languages they understand. It just doesn't work very well as the RFCs suggested. However, we figured out a straightforward way to do it, so with the old club-bboss site, a Japanese browser would see the Japanese version of the site, an English browser would see the English version, and a Chinese browser would see the Chinese version, all automagically without the user needing to select the version (extra clicks are bad for usability.) There were of course links to the other versions on the web pages for the user to overrid and choose another language. This is a unique feature that we are quite proud of.

Ken recently did this. His initial plan was to do automagic language negotiation. Ridley insisted that he wanted the tunnel page as it is now, and forces the visitors to do that extra click to choose the language of the site. Maybe Ridley is trying to convey the good message: P.E. is good for you.

I think language negotiation is a good thing(TM). Clients are not convinced. Hmm...

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.

Tue, 26 Mar 2002 01:31:48 GMT

1024-bit RSA keys in danger of compromise

This has far deeper effects than it sounds. Encryption keys for the following services may be affected:-

HTTPS

SSH

IPSec

S/MIME

PGP

So your "Verisign-protected" credit card transaction websites may no longer be "highly secure". Certified server keys issued by Verisign et al will need to be renewed and upgraded. This costs $$$.

I suppose I'd have to fire up my copy of PGP and generate a new key.

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.

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.

Fri, 15 Mar 2002 18:40:19 GMT

Hello from Zhongshan!

It's working weekend. Have a long list of stuff to go thru and write. Making good progress today, despite having slept most of the afternoon.

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 17:35:39 GMT
Test.

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.

Sat, 02 Mar 2002 15:06:31 GMT
With the opening up of online access the Global Village is becoming plagued with Village Idiots. [maggard on Slashdot]

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?

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.

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 17:57:41 GMT

The story of blog in the Guardian.

I have not had a chance to play with Blogger, but it is apparently the biggest. I have played with LiveJournal and it is quite good. Both allow you to incorporate them into your own creative sites. On the LiveJournal website they even show you how to incorporate it in Flash.

Sun, 10 Feb 2002 17:26:50 GMT

Technology: Baby Robbie's website gets 1,000 hits a day. 09:39 ET - Ananova [NewsBlip.com]

Hmm... Blogging is actually very easy these days. No more messing about with HTML, ftp or Dreamweaver. If you know how to write and how to type and are computer-literate (i.e. knows how to use a web browser and go online) then you can setup you own weblog. You can do it at work, while commuting or at home.

Where is your weblog?

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 17:06:58 GMT
Test from Euroda for Palm.

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 16:20:28 GMT
I am writing this on my palm, and if things work as planned, then this message should show up on my radio site. The idea is so that I can do mobile blogging on the road.

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 14:01:09 GMT

The Handspring Treo is uber cool. Carolyn Ong of the SCMP didn't like it, but I don't agree with most of the things she said in her article. The lack of expansion is no big deal, 'cos the Treo is a self-contained unit, which, like all Palms, are niche machines. They only do a couple of things, but do them better than anything else on the market. My work partner Ken's just bought one, and I played with it for the first time today. I certainly wouldn't mind using one. The price is also right. Some local journalists argued that for the same price one can get a PDA and a good phone. They don't get it. Freeflowing of information. Very nice.

Ken's purchase of the Treo was not all without events. All but one at the shop worked. The one he bought died the next day. Maybe it was his bad luck. For what it's worth, his purchase of the original colour Palm IIIc also caused many trips to the local distributor.

The Nokia uber phone costs more. Okay it's got a colour screen, but it doesn't run Palm's thousands of software packages, and won't do GRPS, which Handspring has promised as a future upgrade.

I actually like the form factor of Ericsson's R380 very much. Massive screen hidden under a keyboard is just so neat. Problem is apparently with the OS: poor usability, and nobody likes it. Maybe I should pop down Ap Liu Street more often and see if I can pick one up for cheap.

One of those days I'd have to go upgrade the firmware of my Ericsson T39. The latest version of firmware fixes its problem with sending email. With my Chatboard, I'll be able to blog on the road and upgrade this website via mobile.

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.

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"?

Sun, 20 Jan 2002 14:15:59 GMT

No, it doesn't look as good as the default does it?

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.

Mon, 14 Jan 2002 04:22:03 GMT

Updating your Radio Blog via SMS!

It has always been possible to update a Radio blog w/ email. You setup a special email account for Radio to read from. Any email delivered to this email account w/ the right subject line (for spam-block/security) will be posted as a blog entry.

I have this piece of kit for my Ericsson phone. Amazing little phone, it actually does POP3 email receiving and sending, so I can send email from it. The only catch is, the chatboard only write SMS messages and not email. Since my mobile operator Sunday does have an email-to-SMS gateway, I have never bothered to setup the POP3 email part. Blogging w/ SMS should however be tolerable.

It turns out that Davies has been using an SMS-to-email gateway to achieve this. In the U.K. most mobile operators offer an SMS-to-email gateway, meaning that you can address your SMS message to email. Unforutnately, Sunday doesn't, so no luck.

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 13:47:30 GMT

This is a test for photo-embedding in Radio 8.0. Looking good.

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 08:04:33 GMT

Test.

Radio 8.0 seems to have rationalized the way images are handled. Now it would automatically sync the www/images folder with the images folder on the ftp/www server, so no more messing about with manual file transfer. Maybe Radio 7.0 used to be able to do it, but I couldn't figure out how. In any case, just this new feature is worth the US$40.

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 07:12:46 GMT

Welcome to the New Look.

This is the stock Radio theme. It certainly is more colourful than my old one. Finally the calendar thingy is implemented.

Look forward to yet another new look soon. I couldn't let my work on the funny looking header graphics gone to waste could I?

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 06:45:08 GMT

Yep, Radio 8.0 is finally shipping. Go get it here. It's free for the first 30 days.

It's appears to be more complicated than Radio 7.0, which I have been using for the last couple of months. I have been quite happy with Radio 7.0, except inserting pictures and photos into my weblog has been tedious. I'll see how the new version fares.

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 01:57:47 GMT

Radio 8.0 is not shipping until tonite local time.

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 13:41:42 GMT

Radio 8.0 is supposed to be shipping. However, the download files are all missing. The upgrade file is still the old 7.0.1 upgrade last I checked a couple of minutes ago. The screen shots look very promising. Can't wait.

I thank James for pointing this out to me. I was quite exciting, but didn't have time to check it out as I was at work. Oh well...

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 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.

Sun, 23 Dec 2001 00:59:01 GMT

When I asked around, it doesn't seem that folks have actually clicked on the excellent links I provided, like this and this. Go for them folks, you'll be amazed.

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 23:28:34 GMT

Google has just extended its Usenet archive back all the way to 1981. My first post on Usenet, all the way back to 1/1993!

For the old-timers, check out the time-line.

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 15:43:48 GMT
PHP 4.1.0 [freshmeat.net]
The main site is slow as a snail right now. Seems like a lot of folks are eagar to grab the latest greatest release. I managed to load up the ChangLog file: tons of bug fixes (none of which bit me) and some new variables. Nice. According to conventional wisdom, a point one release is always good.

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 15:13:08 GMT

David Winer of Frontier, Manila and Radio fame mentioned CityDesk on his weblog. I took a quick look at it, and am happy to report that it looks quite promising. No, it's not as sophisticated as, say Radio, but simplicity is a good thing in this case. I installed it on the Lady's Windoz computer running the Traditional Chinese version of Windows 98, and CityDesk seems to handle BIG5 encoding without any problems. I'm going to set it up for the Lady so she can have her own website for communicating with her students.

There is a free version that does up to 50 articles. Well worth investigating.

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!"

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 07:12:43 GMT

Here are some good suggestions for preventing the next outbreak of Internet worm at your establishment. I like the bit about sending an exe file that displays the message of "You would have been infected if this one is for real!" when launched, from an external account. Good education.

My friend Peter has just sent me an exe file. I received it using Mozilla on my Linux workstation, so it wouldn't have done anything anyway. It's not that I don't trust Peter, just that I know better to click on exe files received from email. And, no, Peter, I don't know what's in your exe file.

Sun, 02 Dec 2001 02:00:36 GMT
Netscape Communicator 4.79 [freshmeat.net]
Argk! Why don't they just drop it! Netscape 4 gives web developers all over the world nothing but grief. It crashes and it burns and it doesn't do CSS properly. Let's call it an old nitemare and leave it behind.

If you want to upgrade, go strict for Netscape 6.x. It's much nicer, much more stable, and much prettier. I am using the development branch Mozilla, which has been rock solid.

Fri, 30 Nov 2001 00:15:46 GMT
The TurdTwister - the Ultimate Gift
Remember to check out the different pattern designs!

Tue, 27 Nov 2001 00:17:37 GMT
Alison: "You've always wanted to get into Alison's pants. Now you can do it from the convenience of your own room, through a novel web interface!" Screen shot. [Scripting News]
Porn!

Mon, 26 Nov 2001 14:22:53 GMT
Boohoo Tells a Dot-Com Disaster. British e-commerce site Boo.com was famous for its meteoric rise, its executives' lavish lifestyles and its spectacular crash and burn. A new book by one of the founders tells some of the inside story. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
Ho ho, I remember boo.com very well. I was in the U.K. doing my ITMA exams just before its launch. There were adverts every where. At such high burnt rate and the limited range of goods on offer, it was obvious that boo.com could never survive. A few months afterwards, I read about their high-profile high-tech website which was pushing the envelop---yeh right, the website was so graphics, bandwidth and java-intensive, most folks' computers loaded it slowly, ran it slowly and crashed often. I tried to load it once, but gave up before the loading completed. Classic example of bad usability.

I suppose the latest 1GHz+ P4/AMD and JRE would handle the client side stuff very well and should crash less often. A lot of us have broadband, so the download time should be bearable for us the luckier ones. The fact that trying to shop is more like an adventure would still suck big time.

Sun, 18 Nov 2001 01:03:55 GMT

MIT Technology Review: All the News That's Fit for You. At its tenth anniversary this fall, Microsoft Research unveiled prototype software that analyzes and indexes news footage. Q-Video, as Microsoft calls it, lets viewers find a CNN story as easily as a New York Times article.

Neat stuff, and the research is being conducted in Beijing!

I am not entirely comfortable about it thou. The article mentioned that the search will be highly personalized, which means that our profiles will probably be stored somewhere on a M$ computer. Can you say "Police State"?

Wed, 14 Nov 2001 00:06:57 GMT

I have been running LimeWire 1.7, a Gnutella client for a few days. Gnutella a P2P (person to person) file sharing protocol, which is analogue to Napster. Unlike Napster, it is capable of sharing any kinds of files.

Problem is, althou it is chewing up my ADSL line, no file transfer is actually happening. No, there is nothing wrong with my installation.

Tue, 13 Nov 2001 00:51:01 GMT
"Like Dracula In Charge of a Blood Bank" -- Tobacco Firm to Profit From Cancer Gene Patent
Can you say diversification?

Mon, 12 Nov 2001 14:59:16 GMT

Oh BTW I am back in H.K. and now in the comfort of my ADSL lines. Broadband does make one's Internet experience much nicer.

Yes at my day-time job we have ADSL. It's just not the same as having ADSL at home thou.

Sun, 11 Nov 2001 16:45:43 GMT
K-Log Tool for Fighting Terrorism
My point is not fighting terrorism. My point is the so-called Knowledge Log. Participants forms a big Intranet, sharing knowledge and information. Updates are posted, and all information and knowledge are searchable.

The Hong Kong Police and the Interpol would have something like this (probably a more low tech version) in place. I suppose they could do with an update thou.

Sat, 10 Nov 2001 09:08:06 GMT

Good Demonstration of the Power of Radio

Here I am sitting in the study of my old man's holiday home in Chung Shan. I have my trustful laptop (called "milky" BTW) with me, and typing away for my weblog. If I had a digital camera, I suppose I could easily upload some pictures at the same time.

One could always use FrontPage or Dreamweaver or GoLive or whatever web building software installed on a laptop and does the website updating via a dialup line. Radio only makes it much easier.

It is also possible to make Radio respond to weblog update via email. Imagine: you are on a trip w/ a digital camera, your note book and a voice recorder. You sit down at a cyber cafe, upload you pictures to the workstation, login to hotmail or your favourite webmail system, and type away with your notes and your voice records. Send your email, and your Radio site is updated with the latest news! I'd have to organize a tutorial for NPC members sometime.

Go grab your copy of Radio now!

Mon, 05 Nov 2001 23:55:15 GMT
Darwin Magazine: Culture of Collaboration. But not every company is positioned to take advantage of the tools. The danger for many is overspending on collaborative technologies without making the cultural and organizational adjustments necessary to derive any benefit from them. [Tomalak's Realm]
I have been telling people about Collaboration since last year. Most folks don't care. Most employees don't see the value in it, and don't want to put the effort in. Even our little partnership has problem adjusting to the way it works. It's easy to see the advantages but difficult to implement.

Fri, 02 Nov 2001 17:54:49 GMT
PhpWiki 1.3.1 (Development) [freshmeat.net]
Wiki is nice. Wiki is powerful. Wiki is user-friendly. Wiki is convenient. PhpWiki is one of the many implementations. Wiki is highly recommended.

Wed, 31 Oct 2001 17:46:17 GMT

More great weblog software! Like Radio it (in this case a client program) resides on your everyday workstation. It is however not clear whether you could add entries off-line and update the weblog later when on-line. The Palm version (!) seems to be able to post-when-hotsync. I suppose it depends on the client software.