Upgraded to Firefox 1.5.0.1

I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 a while ago. Lately Firefox has been nagging me to upgrade to 1.5.0.1 (what a minor upgrade). I ignore it for a few days, until the nagging got to me. According to the upgrade application, only the Javascript Debugger (which I rarely use) will be broken with the upgrade to 1.5.0.1. Seeing no harm in upgrading, I went ahead. So far the browser is still fine, keeping my fingers crossed, hopefully nothing real bad happens. I depend on the browser for a living, as I am a web developer. :)

My blog a splog?

I was trying out the email-to-blog feature in blogger to post to this blog. It worked properly with another blog I have on blogger, so I don't see why the same settings would not work on this blog.

I sent the email for the post from my iPAQ 2210 because I did not have access to a desktop for that day. The post did not appear, and I was not able to log on to blogger using my Pocket IE (not supported) or Minimo (too slow) to check the settings.

Only in the evening when I got back home, I was able to log in to blogger to check what was wrong. The post was received by blogger alright, so the email communications path was ok. However, the post was flagged as "Draft" and when I clicked into the post, this is what I see:



That's wierd, I was not aware that I had to enter word verification text for posting. I clicked on the orange question make beside the "Word Verification" label, and blogger gave me the following page:



So I had to dutifully enter my email and the word. One working day later I got an email telling me that some human being has verified that my blog is not a splog, and now I can post without requiring to enter the word verification text.

I did a little research, it seems like I am not alone. Apparently Blogger's algorithm for identifying splogs is flawed/buggy, and a number of genuine blogs have been tagged as splog just like mine.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Although it is a little late (we are into the 2nd day), I would like to wish whoever is reading my blog a Happy Lunar New Year!

Lost Bloopers

Stumbled upon another video site: Fosfor Video. Interesting collection of funny videos, and the first one I watched is the Bloopers from the series Lost. Not really as funny as expected, but since I am a fan of Lost, I welcome the chance to see the actors and actresses to fill in the gap before Lost arrives in Singapore. There was some news about Apple finally deciding to open the iTunes store in Singapore, but I don't know if the video section will be included. If yes, I think I might just buy the Lost season 2 episodes - waiting for it to get to our TV stations is just too long.

Related link for the previous blog post

In case you are not from Singapore, I need to provide a little context for the previous blog post. National Kidney Foundation is one of the largest, if not the largest charity organisation in Singapore (by the amount of donations collected per year). Recentl investigations show that there were many wrongdoings by the ex-CEO TT Durai and it is summarised in this report and detailed in NKF's website

Durai and Qin Hui

I wrote to the Straits Time Forum today with the following letter. Regardless of whether they are going to publish it, I am publishing it here:

In Chinese history, there was a man Qin Hui who was responsible for the execution of the national hero General Yue Fei. From the About.com article on Yue Fei, Qin Hui is someone "who wielded real power at court", and he managed to convince the then emperor to execute Yue Fei by imposing a "mo xu you" (fabricated charge) crime on the general.

Only after the next emperor succeeded the throne did the truth of Yue Fei's execution come to light. By then, the only way to punish Qin Hui was to (1) build a statue of him and his wife (still in a temple in Huang Zhou today) for people to spit on; and (2) write the story into the Chinese history books so that generations to come will know of the deeds.

TT Durai's deeds has uncannily mirrored that of Qin Hui. Wielding his power with the old NKF board, he made up many ways to pay himself excessively, and eventually brought Singapore's national pride, the NKF to become the national shame. Now the new board has succeeded the old board, and the wrongdoings come to light, there is no immediate way anyone can punish TT Durai.

We probably cannot erect a statue of TT Durai for public spitting, but we can include the wrongdoings into the Moral Education and Singapore History syllabus so that every generation of students will learn about the wrong deeds. This approach will achieve both the effect of educating our future generations, and also to punish TT Durai, without having to wait for the authorities to figure out whether any criminal charges can be brought against him.

supercalifragilisticexpialidociousgooglegame

Michael Barnsdale picked up an idea in my blog and turned it into a game. He asked me to give it a name, so I thought of using this word "supercalifragilisticexpialidociousgooglegame" as the name.

Filed in: fun

Longest Word with valid search results?

Just for fun. I wonder what is the longest possible string (with no space) that will return valid search results from the common search engines like Google and Yahoo. One search term that turned up in the web traffic report for my other blog is "AbstractTransactionalSpringContextTests". A total of 39 characters, any one with suggestions of a longer search term?

Filed in: fun

1TB Email!

MailNation Solutions Blog > 1TB Email!

Unbelievable? Believe it. :)
But I think I will still stick to GMail. I don't need that much space for email. (Maybe Adam Curry will need it, he is the first person I hear of maxing out his GMail box.)

Filed in: coolstuff

TiddlyWiki

Once in a while I would come across something that is so addictive that it blows me away. TiddlyWiki is a self-contained HTML file that has the many functionalities of a Wiki, and there are a number of extensions and plugins that make it interesting.

I have not started playing with it, but the process of understanding it is already interesting enough. More details in days to come. :)

Filed in: wiki tiddlywiki coolstuff

My first GreaseMonkey script

Following yesterday's post on editing comments in Blogger, I took some time to write a greasemonkey script for adding a link to edit comments.

Filed in: blogger hack greasemonkey

Editing blogger comments

Ok, once I am a little more active about posting to this blog, I get spam comments. I did not want to block anonymous posting because I have previous feedback from friends saying that they want to post comments but don't want to log on to Blogger. So do I have to put up with spam comments?? No, but all I could do previously was to (rudely) delete the whole comment post, leaving some others scratching their heads about why a comment was deleted (it only shows up in my blog as 'comment deleted').

By default Blogger does not have a link to allow me to edit comments, it only has a trash can icon allowing me to delete comments. Google brought me to the Blogger templates site, which has a quick hack to bring me to the edit comments page.

On closer inspection, basically the hack works on the fact that comment posts are also identified by blog ID and post ID. The trash can icon link contains these information, but it is for the delete-comment.g URL. The Blogger template hack simply replaces the URL to post-edit.g. Hmm, maybe I can try my hand at writing a simple GreaseMonkey script to add the edit comment link beside the trash can icon. That will be for later. :)

[update] Found a blogger comments editor at userscripts.org, but it seems to only add the link to the page for adding new comments.

[update2] Ok, I was ignorant, just learnt that Blogger has a feature to turn on captcha (word verification) feature for comments.

Filed in: blogger hack

del.icio.us as a cognitive engine?

del.icio.us is a popular and good site for tagging, and many people have devised many different ways to use it. The categorisation method I have recently started using in this blog is also based on the tagging ability of del.icio.us, a blogger hack I learnt from FreshBlog.

As I stumbled on Typo just now, I suddenly discovered another use of del.icio.us : when you come across a new site and don't know what it is all about, the fasted way to find out about it is not to read the description on the site, but to try to bookmark the site using del.icio.us. This is because when you try to bookmark the site (typically using the 'remember this' bookmarklet), del.icio.us will display the form for you to tag the site, along with the recommended tags that del.icio.us thinks that will be relevant for this site (I guess this is based on tagging by other users).

As a result, at a glance you will know the possible tags that this site could fall under, and this can tell you a lot about the site. Take the Typo site for example, when I clicked my bookmarklet, the recommended tags are:

ajax blog blogging blogtool development engine framework opensource programming rails ruby rubyonrails tool tools wordpress

Apparently these are tags taken from my existing tags, but the important thing is that del.icio.us immediately told me a lot about typo based on tags I understand - tags I use. Within 2 seconds, I can conclude that Typo is a blogging tool, opensourced, based on ruby on rails and is somewhat related to wordpress (substite or enhancement, that I will have to find out by reading more on the Typo site).

So del.icio.us can sometimes even be turned into a cognitive engine to tell me about a site before I need to read anything from the site, and the best part is it tells me this by using tags I use.

Filed in: del.icio.us

Nokia N91

My mobile contract expired this week, and I started to look around for new phone models I can buy (hopefully), and I came across the Nokia N91, which is really a phone that has EVERYTHING I ever wanted (so far) in a phone. Too bad Nokia also just announced recently that this model is going to be delayed to early 2006. The price is going to be too steep for my liking to, judging from the estimate I see from this article from infosyncworld (look for the estimated price at the last paragraph.

Scott Laird has been tracking N91 pretty well, a good reference site for knowing what has been happening with this phone.

Another thing I learnt from Scott's blog is that there is this new blogging engine known as Typo based on Rails (maybe even RoR) with quite a lot of good features out of the box.

Filed in: nokia n91 typo blogging tool

Playing with GreaseMonkey

Just installed the GreaseMonkey extension today and browsed userscripts.org to look for scripts to play with. Came across this script that allows me to add tags to my blog, pointing to del.ico.us and technorati, effectively creating categories in Blogger. Let's test it out. :)

Filed in: tagging del.icio.us technorati greasemonkey

Approached by a friend on network marketing

Ok, I try to keep my mind opened and go listen to a presentation again. Still I walked out of the presentation thinking these guys are only a bunch of motivation speakers wannabe reusing the same descriptions over and over again. "So-and-so is a great guy to help you build your passive income business because he has good work-ethics", "so-and-so is such an amazing couple", "do you want to achieve your dream", and other sentences like this peppered the whole evening's presentation.

They always talk about building a business and being a business owner, but I really wonder how many of them talk about a business in terms of revenue, expenses, costs, gross profit, net profit, tax etc etc etc. Isn't the bottom-line what people always look for in a business?? No, in the network marketing world, it is the down-line you are concerned with, nevermind that only that few blessed individuals who started the network are the only case studies you can show with the multiple down-lines which you always dangle as carrots to the prospective recruit.

Maybe I don't understand the business of network marketing, but no-one who approached me has bothered to explain the mechanics to me. They are always too concerned with rehashing the rhetorics. Ok, history has proven that network marketing company works, but shouldn't the recruitment process be more pragmatic and appeal to people's power to reason and identify a working business model, than to appeal to people's greed (disguised as 'dream')??

To make matters worst, I have to receive an SMS followed by a phone call at 12.30am from this friend after the session, asking for more of my time during my precious weekend to sell me more about the idea. Oh, and the CD they passed me for reference in my own time, they need it back in two days...... I really wonder what is the hurry, don't they know that such pressure tactics scare people off?

NeoCOUNTER by NeoWORX - The only web counter that displays your online visitors by country

Then again, blogexplosion give me an exposure to site that I would not otherwise have known/gone to. Quite a lot of things to learn from other blocks, like this tool I saw off one blog.
NeoCOUNTER by NeoWORX - The only web counter that displays your online visitors by country

TotallyConfused

Just joined blogexplosion. Initial impression is that it is a site that use mechanisms to make people click on other people's site. Not too much of a use. I will click on the surf button, go do something else, and come back half a minute later to click on the "GO" button. Actually quite waste of time because the traffic coming to your site is not really reading, just surfing.

Crying, while eating

Another example of people being too free.
Crying, while eating

OfficeGuns - Guns - Double Maul

Some people are really too free and have a lot of time on their hands.

OfficeGuns - Guns - Double Maul