Post from Hong Kong
As I'm typing this, the bustling traffic of Causeway Bay is slightly audible from my friend's service apartment. She's here for work and has been kind enough to provide me and my girl friend a place to crash for a few more days. My feet are already begging for mercy due to the excessive walking that suddenly became part of my daily routine. The weather here is chilly, ranging between 17-20 degrees, making it ideal for walkabouts. Generally, food has been great. The dim sum, porridge, dumplings, Chinese-style deserts and roasted poultry are all better than what is available in Malaysia.
Before Hong Kong I had reached Macau first, on a Saturday. Time was spent visiting the casinos and historical sites. Venetian, while above par, was surprisingly not as great as I expected. All in all, the sights in Macau were not that impressive. It was fun watching people though. Folks from all walks of life end up in the casinos in Macau at night. Some are very seasoned patrons - obvious from the way the shuffle chips with just 2 fingers - while others, like myself, just tourist walking around. Macau isn't a place that ranks in my 'must-visit' list, but it's so near Hong Kong that it made sense to drop by.
Monday was when I reached Hong Kong where I stayed for 2 days in a hotel along Nathan road. Walked along the many tourist streets there (Temple street, Ladies Market, etc.). Also went to the fishing village Tai-O, Victoria Peak lookout area, Po Lin Monastery and Tian Tia Buddha on Lantau island, Avenue of Stars and Stanley Market. I've never been surrounded by so many Chinese! It's actually just weird looking at all the people with the same skin color as me. The good fashion sense of the people here somewhat offsets this - people here are heavily dressed and makes for good eye-candy. I still felt alien though - not being able to speak Cantonese nor Mandarin fluently enough.
The day has just started. Today will be spent on shopping in Wan Chai (where there's tons of gadgets and phones I heard) and maybe a visit back to Avenue of Stars at night to catch the Hong Kong night skyline. Tomorrow will be spent in Disneyland (girl friend's wish). Time to stop writing and start walking.
Using Smartphones To Augment Your Brain
The hype nowadays is to use smartphones as social and communication devices. But believe or not, these small little devices function as handy note takers. Use them to store sensitive information such as bank account numbers, credit card information, EPF account numbers, insurance details, etc. Many software exist that stores data encrypted and password protected. Since you're bound to have your phone with you, this'll turn out to be real handy. They also work great as your electronic memo pad. Anything that needs writing down can be scribbled, written or captured on your phone (checkout Evernote). Notes are uploaded automatically to a server and accessible on a PC or another device. Pretty handy. And I'm not the only one that thinks so. Check out Palmdoc's latest post.
Conversation of an Engineer and a Manager
Management: How many feet do mice have?
Reply: Mice have four feet.
M: Elaborate!
R: Mice have five appendages, and four of them are feet.
M: No discussion of fifth appendage!
R: Mice have five appendages; four of them are feet; one is a tail.
M: What? Feet with no legs?
R: Mice have four legs, four feet, and one tail per unit-mouse.
M: Confusing -- is that a total of 9 appendages?
R: Mice have four leg-foot assemblies and one tail assembly per body.
M: Does not fully discuss the issue!
R: Each mouse comes equipped with four legs and a tail. Each leg is equipped with a foot at the end opposite the body; the tail is not equipped with a foot.
M: Descriptive? Yes. Forceful NO!
R: Allotment of appendages for mice will be: Four foot-leg assemblies, one tail. Deviation from this policy is not permitted as it would constitute misapportionment of scarce appendage assets.
M: Too authoritarian; stifles creativity!
R: Mice have four feet; each foot is attached to a small leg joined integrally with the overall mouse structural sub-system. Also attached to the mouse sub-system is a thin tail, non-functional and ornamental in nature.
M: Too verbose/scientific. Answer the question!
R: Mice have four feet.
Wordpress 2.9 Released, This Blog Updated
News of a new Wordpress release - v2.9 - hit Twitter last night, with these new features (along with 500 bug fixes and misc enhancements!):
The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:
- Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
- Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
- Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
- Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
And there's more! Under the hood Wordpress developers did some magic too:
- We now have
rel=canonicalsupport for better SEO.- There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your
wp-config.phpfile by addingdefine('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.- Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
- A new
commentmetatable that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.- Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
- You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
- We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
- Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
- Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
- Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
- The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
- Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
- When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
- The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
- Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
- Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query
Wordpress 2.8.x users should be able to just hit the update button in their admin interface, wait a few minutes and upgrade to 2.9. Those seeking to do a fresh or manual install can grab a copy here.
Firefox Officially Retired – Long Live Google Chrome!
Yes, I was sceptical such that such a thing could happen. Sure, Firefox wasn't stellar in performance, but I put up with it. Javascript can't be fast. Firefox loads up slow because I've got a tonne of add-ons installed and dozens of tabs open (literally). And font rendering sucks because web developers chose to use non-standard fonts. But more importantly, Firefox, in my books, is better than Opera (because of the add-ons), IE for Windows (because it's secure) and any other browser on Linux (they're just unpolished).
Then came Chromium (or Google Chrome). I ignored it from v1 to v3. Then I tried it on Linux and I've been using it for months, the Linux nightly builds. It's stable enough for extended use, having only crashed once or twice loading Flash. And now it has graduated to Beta, with extensions. I bet soon users will realize how fast a browser can be. It's just amazing. When you're on the web 8-hours a day due to work, 10 seconds here and there adds up!
The first hint of performance issues with Firefox was with Google Wave (I still have 25 invites). And Facebook. And Google Docs... Oh well, you get the idea. Most Javascript-laden site would perform just average or below average on Firefox, but totally flew once Chrome is used. And the start-up time is just stellar! Firing up the browser with dozens of tabs open no longer needed a trip to the pantry for coffee!
If you're not on Google Chrome yet, try it. You might just be surprised (as I was). Then get some extensions.
Some Google DNS Benchmarks Against Open DNS and TM’s DNS
Script that was ran:
for i in "lifehacker.com" "facebook.com" "manu-j.com" "reddit.com" "tb4.fr" "bbc.co.uk" "bernie.net.my"
do
for j in "4.2.2.2" "8.8.8.8" "208.67.222.222" "202.188.0.133"
do
echo $j $i `dig @$j $i | grep Query | awk -F ":" '{print $2}'`
done
done
Readings:
The result is surprising, since it shows that for certain sites (facebook.com, lifehacker.com and bernie.net.my), TMNet's DNS is getting better response times than all the other DNS servers, including Google's. But they are worse in others. Google's DNS however, performs more consistently (~67ms).
Credit goes to Manu-J for the script and inspiration come up with the stats.