tin_the_fatty radio weblog

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.

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 03:42:43 GMT

Product vs. Service: VoIP

Interesting story about some big corporation trying to charge a premium for a cheap service. Analogues of telephone companies and WiFi-service providers were drawn. I am wondering whether charges of the various local companies are too high, and why they claim to lose money over local voice lines.

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!

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 01:06:01 GMT

Macworld Expo: Exciting Times

The media have been saturated with information on new hardware and software from Apple just announced in Macworld Expo.

Apple's new presentation software Keynote is very interesting. I look forward to playing with it and using it.

I like the form factor of the 12" Powerbook G4, althou I am not comfortable that it lacks a PCMCIA card slot. I admit that the PCMCIA card slot on my 15" TiBook is unoccupied most of the time, so it is quite possible that Apple's decision not to put the slot in the new machine is sound.

The Airport Extreme is also very interesting. This piece of equipment could serve as an access point and a bridge at the same time, meaning that one can form a mesh WiFi network easily. There are access points, and there are bridge, but I believe this is the first one which does both. Pity to use the Airport Extreme card (for the high speed) I would have to upgrade to a new machine, which I won't be able to do until next year.

The new Safari browser will replace Microsoft Internet Explorer as the default browser on new machines. It is based on the KHTML core, and is lightning fast. It beats Chimera on speed by a comfortable margin. However, it has problems handling tons of CSS stuff. Web developers will have to support an additional browser from now on, which is of course bad news.

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:00:56 GMT

Basic Law Section 23 Legislation Demonstration

I attended the big rally and demonstration a few weeks ago, and bummed into Po, a good friend who is a student at the Lingnan University down the road from where we live. He was helping the Student Association folks (who did some fine work at the rally demo) to take pictures of participants. I received the following email this morning.

各位朋友：

你好, 我地係學聯社會運動資源中心(簡稱8樓)呀！…
上次係反對23條大遊行中，我地攪左個影流，大家寫左留言，
我地幫大家影左相！
D相已經晒好喇！
我地打算送返比你呀！
日期：11/1/2003/1/9 [Ed: 11/1/2003]
時間：大概下午5:30
地點：九龍旺角西洋菜街(行人專用區)我地有街站
做咩：羅相、同大家再傾下計、同其他行人傾下23條？？？無所謂
有咩打比彩鳳96240117 / 27873551

彩鳳

費用全免 歡迎捐獻 
查詢電話: 27873551 , 73022646 蘿蔔糕 
電郵 : smrc (AT) sinatown.com 
主辦 : 學聯社運資源中心 
地點 : 旺角彌敦道739號金輪大廈 8/F A 

(太子始創中心斜對面, 隧道比鄰,煎釀三寶隔離)

Not that I didn't shoot myself on the day...

I'll try to attend their "debrief" session. The least we could do to support these fine young people.

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.

Sat, 04 Jan 2003 02:14:03 GMT

Apple may charge for iApps

The rumour is all over the place on the Internet. Apparently Apple will starting charging for the now-free iApps.

I use iPhoto and iMovie, especially the former, quite a lot. If I had to pay for them, I probably would, but then I would also look at alternatives, such as the excellent iView Media Pro. As long as the iApps are reasonably priced, I would say it would be good for the platform in the long run, as this would push the users to try and evaluate the iApps as well as 3rd party offerings.

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.

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.

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 03:20:24 GMT

NetNewsWire Test.

Wed, 01 Jan 2003 04:49:05 GMT

Happy New Year!

Sun, 29 Dec 2002 15:43:25 GMT

Short article: PBase Switching to for-fee Service

Wed, 25 Dec 2002 16:08:04 GMT

I have had no mobile phone for a couple of days. The Lady traded hers in, but couldn't decide what to get, so had no phone to use. She was going out while I'd be at home most of the time, so I lended her mine. It was actually quite a refreshing experience. I was feeling free and detached. Until she picked up a Nokia 6510. Nice little phone. The quality is assuring. We have not bothered to swap SIM cards, so I am using it right now. Maybe all the features are functions and bells and whistles are irrelevant.

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 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, 18 Nov 2002 02:05:42 GMT
BBEdit version 7.0
It is out. I really like the new CVS support.

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.