Malaysia Internet Interruption

It's 26th November again and Taiwan was shaking. Despite the fact that the life lost is small compared to last year tsunami, I'm going to mark this date on my yearly calendar as the "Earth Shaking Day". The earth quake scalled at 7.1 ricther were causing disruption to the Asia Pacific Cable Network (APCN2) underwater cables. Aparently ISPs in the South East Asia region shares the same cable to link all the communication network to the US and to the rest of the world.

What did I do that day? I reboot the server once (old habit), ping and tracert to Google,Yahoo and Utusan (I didn't aware of the quake until I read The Star later that day). With no Google and Yahoo means no internet social life for me (Gmail, Blogger, YM, Meebo, TechCrunch) at least for the rest of the week. So I thought of looking for locally host content and sevices provider. All the local news press site are available Utusan, The Star, The News Starit Time, Berita Harian and of course the local tourism portal VirtualMalaysia.com still up and that was it. Without Google I didn't have a single clue what to do next. So logged to the long lost local search engines cari.com and catcha.com. Both were working but still most of the results will pointed out to abroad.

Well I guess there is no such alternate routes or perhaps no alternates routes could survive the 7.1 richter scale shake. I wonder if there is no internet ever created, what will happen to us all?

Keyboard Hack - How to Display Odd Characters Using Keyboard.

I was searching for a shorcut to display symbol so that I can easily type it while I chat or to be insert in comment box etc. Well I found a bunch of it.

Alt Key + Calculator Number = Symbol

Hold the ALT key & type the number next to the symbol you want on the CALCULATOR part of the keyboard, then release Alt Key. Symbol will appear. And here is the full list.

Alt + 0169 = ©
Alt + 0174 = ®
Alt + 15 = ¤
Alt + 20 = ¶
Alt + 21 = §
Alt + 128 = Ç
Alt + 129 = ü
Alt + 130 = é
Alt + 131 = â
Alt + 132 = ä
Alt + 133 = à
Alt + 134 = å
Alt + 135 = ç
Alt + 136 = ê
Alt + 137 = ë
Alt + 138 = è
Alt + 139 = ï
Alt + 140 = î
Alt + 141 = ì
Alt + 142 = Ä
Alt + 143 = Å
Alt + 144 = É
Alt + 145 = æ
Alt + 146 = Æ
Alt + 147 = ô
Alt + 148 = ö
Alt + 149 = ò
Alt + 150 = û
Alt + 151 = ù
Alt + 152 = ÿ
Alt + 153 = Ö
Alt + 154 = Ü
Alt + 155 = ¢
Alt + 156 = £
Alt + 157 = ¥
Alt + 159 = ƒ
Alt + 160 = á
Alt + 161 = í
Alt + 162 = ó
Alt + 163 = ú
Alt + 164 = ñ
Alt + 165 = Ñ
Alt + 166 = ª
Alt + 167 = º
Alt + 168 = ¿
Alt + 170 = ¬
Alt + 171 = ½
Alt + 172 = ¼
Alt + 173 = ¡
Alt + 174 = «
Alt + 175 = »
Alt + 225 = ß
Alt + 230 = µ
Alt + 241 = ±
Alt + 246 = ÷
Alt + 249 = •
Alt + 250 = ·
Alt + 253 = ²
Alt + 350 = ^
Alt + 352 = `
Alt + 382 = ~

Update
Alt + 0128 = € - Thanks A1 Web Solutions

Some might find this useful while others might thought this is just another geek stuff. As for me, most probably I just want to use "²" for my Malay language chat like "layang²" or "macam²".

Slide Show Presentation Goes Online

There is time when I open up emails from my friends I'm hopping that there is no PowerPoint (with .ppt extension) stuff attached. I hate the idea of opening other application while you're browsing through email. Why? well it's simply annoying and those kind of attachment are prone to be a virus. Similarly, I used to get video attachments through emails but thank to YouTube such attachment is rarely invade my inbox. However this situation has change when SlideShare, an online slide show sharing come to the rescue our needs.

At a glance, SlideShow website look just like YouTube. Even the process flow and services look alike. You PowerPoint presentations can be imported and embedded on your website or blog with a snippet of code - a process now familiar to every blog and web owner. There is the ability to click forward, back, visit the original location of the file on SlideShare and even add tags so others looking for similar topic will find you.



When I first saw it, I realised that the same feeling struck again. Of course the first one was when I use YouTube. However there are still limitation in SlideShare;
- No fancy transition can be transferred, only forward and backward navigation.
- I detect spams in some presentation comments
- Full online editing is not there.

But give them some time to evolve and I'm sure this web 2.0 site is going to be a hit.

Microsoft's New Home Page

If you haven't notice yet or perhaps you are not one of the Microsoft products fans, they have change their corporate website design. The new navigation is aimed at helping their client to quickly find the most sought-after content on Microsoft.com. They start working on it last year and had gather a bunch of beta tester to give feedback on the new design and navigation system since early 2006.

The way I see it, the most significant changes made are on the floating navigation panel and the main content presentation display. If you click on the product menu on the right, the rest of the page will dimmed and can't be click. They must be really want you to concentrate on their products then.

Investigating inside the codes reveals no table layout exist. All layout are controlled by the CSS. Despite the prominent use of Ajax,the site adapts gracefully by replacing the Ajax panel with plain-looking menus on separate pages. However there is no sign of any RSS feeds either button nor the automated "link href=".

Now you might be wondering, does any of the above really matter? Well, the site looks and works great for the most of users. Beside, no matter how good your designs, you still can't satisfy everyone.

Heads Up - Two in three retail PCs are notebooks

Based on current analysis by Best Buy, Radio Shack, Circuit City, CompUSA and Staples in US: Notebook shipments rose 57.7 percent during the first three weeks of the holiday shopping season as compared with the same period last year. These is no surprise, reviewing Dell catalog for December 2006 issue in my hand, the cheapest new notebook with wide display, AMD Sempron 3500+, 512MB DDR-2 SDRAM, 60GB SATA HDD and ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 is for RM2,249.00 it's less than USD1k.

Again despite issues like performance and capacity, technology lag, reliability, expandability, configurability and upgradeability shadowing the usage of notebooks for years, it is clearly demonstrate that price will is always win the users heart.

As if I could only have one computer, though, it would be a notebook, but only because client support is my primary task and I've gotten comfortable doing it in the client site rather than in my office.

Face Recognition Technology by Polar Rose

The way I see it, the web is increasingly becoming visually oriented, progressing from text to photos and other rich media such as video and podcast. Polar Rose claims that close to 10 million new photos are uploaded on a daily basis, a number which is doubling every eight to ten months. We should thanks to the digital camera innovation and internet for the exponential growth. Perhaps a picture does tell a thousand words.

Even so, most of the photo are unreachable due to lack of algorithm that could surface them like the way text search does. Since the day of Altavista, Inktomi, and Google we haven't seen any new revolutionary of photo search technology without the "human" intervention.

To overcome this issue, Polar Rose technology makes photos searchable by analyzing their content and recognizing the people in them. Yeah it's another face recognition technology just like Riya that I've discovered earlier. The Polar Rose's face recognition technology used was originally developed by CTO Jan Erik Solem during his M.Sc and Ph.D. stints at the universities of Lund and Malmö in southern Sweden. It's unique in that they are able to extract 3D information from regular 2D images.

However "human" users are still needed as to help to train the application recognize each individual in the photo. Polar Rose offers a plugin to be installed into your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser. The plug-in detects people in online photos and places their signature rose approximately where the pinhole of their shirt would be. A click on the rose will bring up a tooltip with relevant information, including name and other photos found of the same person. You can apply to become a beta tester but the plugin will be released only during the first quarter of 2007.

Face recognition is cool but like I said earlier in my previous post, if this technology going to be a public tools it does raise some privacy issues. To avoid this, perhaps it can be tune by identify object or item instead.

Riya - A Visual Search Tool

I came across to a similar technology when I interviewed a candidate for my previous company. She develop a colour recognition application by calculating percentage of colours in a photo for her thesis project. But my interest dies as I can't imagine how to monetize the idea. That is before I discovered Riya.

Riya is a facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface. Face recognition technology isn't new. You can find it in cameras, cellphones and biometric devices but for the sake of web application, this is really great.

I decided to try out Riya's functionality. The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application (around 40MB) that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while - about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete.

That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 60 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are. And then click the "Run Rec" button, it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy.

I could also allow friends to tag and search my photo and let it all searchable in public search. On this extend I realize that Riya might have some privacy issues in the future. Imagine if Riya get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd. It almost like FBI's backup suspect database.

But if Riya choose client/partner wisely it might benefits us all. Just look at like.com. You can identify a similar accessories or item detected in any photo. You can even select your favorite celebrities photos and copy their style. Paris Hilton wannabe, this is your day.

Ruby - The gems of programming language

I've heard about Ruby for quite sometime. Ruby is a reflective, object-oriented programming language. It combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan and CLU. Yeah like C wasn't enough.

The language was created by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto way back in 1993. Matz stresses that systems design needs to emphasize human, rather than computer, needs.

"They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves." - Matz

One important part about Ruby is that it is distributed under an open-source license. It is a cross platform. So if you have15 minutes to spare try this web based hands on tutorial to get some ideas.

Malaysia Broadband ISP

How do you browse, if I may ask? Did you subscribe a broadband service from your local ISP? Nowadays you barely can surf with 56kb dial up connection, considering if you are one of the YouTube, P2P services junkie.

Currently I'm using an ASDL from my office and dial up from my home. I'm seriously considering to upgrade my internet service for my home usage, so I dig around. Here is some information about ISP in Malaysia with broadband services:

1. TMnet Streamyx - Wired
   
2. Jaring Broadband Wired/Wireless - Wired/Wireless
   
3. Time Broadband - Various
   
4. Airzed WiMax - Wireless
   
5. DiGi Mobile Broadband - Wireless
   
6. Nasion 1 Wireless Broadband - Wireless
   
7. Maxis Wireless Broadband - Wireless
   
8. Maxis 3G - 3G
   
9. Celcom 3G - 3G
   
10. Smart Ku-Band - Satellite
    
11. Smart C-Band - Satellite
    
12. EB Technologies MyWave24 - Wireless/Wired
    
13. PenangFon - Wired
    
14. AtlasOne - Wireless
    
15. MyKris - Wireless
    
16. ZapZone - Wireless
    
17. GoLightSpeed - Wireless

Wow that much? Currently TMNet taking the most share on the Malaysia broadband pie. The problem with TMNet ADSL broadband services is that you wont get the speed that you subscribed. Look carefully to their terms, TMNet's broadband speed is based on best effort and factors such as; Quality of the copper cable (Yup we still use copper), distance from the supporting TM exchange, weather, electromagnetic effects, PC performance, Internet traffic during the period, and the website that you visit. Recently TMNet caught the copper line thieves which is turn to be their own supplier. Sigh... Coincident?

All and all I just hope the Malaysia's broadband service and penetration should be improved by widening the service using microwave (WiMax) or using Power Line Communication (PLC) technology in near future.

The Best Places to Waste Time on the Web

Inspired by PC World's article on The 15 Best Places to Waste Time on the Web, I realize that I also have a list of places to waste on the web.

Ok they got 15, but mine has been group to 5 type of web sites. I eliminate some other stuff like email, searching tool and forum board as it will make my list never ends. Here goes:

1. Digg
   Watching this ever popular social bookmark in action can really waste my day. Try out Digg's Swarm or Stack, you can visually see each entry marked as Digg or popular in real time (I think). A similar site would be Slashdot, Delicious, Reddit, furl.
   
   
2. YouTube / MetaCafe
   This hot services which I don't have to introduce is really addictive. Watching 'Mat Rempit' in action in YouTube is just so amusing or watch other user experimenting stuff that you wouldn't dare, nutts. It's really huge interm of collection of public videos. I can do this the whole day.
   
   
3. Flickr
   As an avid photographer, this is a must. Reading all the exif data from good photos consume lots of time plus lots of cool groups to check on.
   
   
4. Blogs / News, lot of them
   Friends blog - as seen on my blog sidebar, including friend's friend blog.
   Tech blog - Techcrunch, Engadget, Gizmodo
   News - Yahoo News, ZDNet, The Star, Utusan Malaysia, Malaya Mail, Berita Harian, Harian Metro
   Newsletter - SitePoint, Site Pro News
   
   
5. Blogging
   I'm not sure if this should fall under wasting my time or filling my free time. I blog so that I remembered any information that I discovered from the Interenet cloud. I guess this is how contribute back to the net sphere.
   
   

You also might have your own version, it's all personal preferences and needs. Perhaps you want to share with us here.

Digg - Swarming the thought

Did you ever wish to read minds of other people? And ever want to know how its feel like? Well Digg Lab shows some interesting applications that resemble the feeling of reading other people thought, well sort of.

If you are new to this, Digg is free an online social bookmark service. What it does is allowing any user to submit a story complete with the URL link, title and short description and save it into their server. Other Digg member (Digger) would cast a vote for any story that they like and they call it Dig It, and if they don't like it they just Burry It.

In Digg Swarm, any new story will keep pouring into the screen and shows who Digg the story in every second. Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored (yellow) stories indicates more diggs.


If you feel that you can't keep up with the info, you can turn to Digg Stack which much organize like a stack of story. Digg Stack shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. It also allows user to pause the stack movement and a lever to control the stack size.

The project are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. Once matured they will published the API to allow outside developers access to this data.

I like the fact of not knowing what’s going on in someones’ head. If I knew life would be boring, it’s the hoping, the wondering, the guessing that makes life interesting. It keeps me on my toes.

Blogger Beta Hack - Label Cloud

I really wanted to re-arrange the Blogger Beta label into a better visual presentation, like above. Today I got some free time to play around with it. So I searched through and Phydeaux hack matched my criteria. Read on his blog entry for more details.

Color Wheel Pro - Create colour schemes for your website

Creating a website template never been an easy job for me. It consumes lot of man hours just to meet the client expectations. Luckily Color Wheel Pro is here to help you with the visual and I can spend more time with programming.

Some hightlight feature

• shows colour schemes on real examples.
• includes numerous presets for every type of colour scheme.
• exports the palette in ACO, ACT and GIF formats.
• You can create colour schemes based on the traditional red-yellow-blue (mixing) colour wheel and on the visual red-green-blue colour wheel.
• Comprehensive documentation on colour theory.

Plus, you not only use it for designing a colour scheme for a website, you can also apply the scheme to your business card, product box etc. My wife use it to set a colour scheme for our living room. Neat.

Free Trial Version available for you to try it out.

Firebug - A web developer companion

I couldn't thank more for having a Firefox as a free, reliable & web developer friendly browser. And now Firebug teaming up with Firefox, that's really huge for me. Firebug currently is a on Beta 1.0 version, giving you access to development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. How cool is that? Here are some features of Firebug:

• You can undock Firebug into its own window—multi-monitor users rejoice!
• The DOM inspector now offers full in-place editing of your document structure, not just attribute values.
• The DOM inspector’s CSS tab reveals all applicable CSS rules for elements, including properties inherited from ancestor elements, and lets you toggle on/off and edit individual style declarations.
• The DOM inspector’s Layout tab pops up guides, rulers, and shaded boxes in the main browser view to illustrate the CSS box model as it applies to each element that you hover your mouse over.
• The Net tab graphs the request times for all files that make up a page, meaning I can just about throw away the Tamper Data extension, which I previously used for this.
• The new JavaScript profiler reports on the execution times of your JavaScript functions, so you can pin down performance bottlenecks in serious JavaScript applications.

Even though this is an extension for Firefox, for Internet Explorer, Opera & Safari lovers, check out the Firebox lite. However the best aspect of this new extension is that (based on this blog entry), it is FREE. Thanks to the creator of Firebug, Joe Hewitt.

Random Thought: How to create Technorati

Woke up this morning and suddenly this question pop in my mind "How Technorati works?" Yup I'm a late dreamer. Anyway I dig a little bit and found some clues from David Sifry, the creator of Technorati himself. He describes the process flow as following:

1. We spider blogs, and match up their links to your blog - to anywhere on your blog
2. In the inbound blog list, we use the outbound links from the blog homepage, not from the archives
3. We do process RSS feeds an other metadata, but that doesn't affect your inbound blog stats.
4. Nightly, we go through the database and re-calculate the number of inbound blogs and links, which helps us double-check our work and also allows us to create the interesting newcomers list, the interesting recent blogs list, etc.

So my next question would be, "How to create a blog spider?" Well I figure that a blog spider must be like a webcrawler or something. It traverses the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. Well said, but it's now sounded more like How to create a Google bot kind of stuff.

I saw some the spider were written in Ruby, Phyton and Perl. Take a look to this article, "A web crawler in Perl", maybe this is a good lead.

FeedBurner: Your Optimized RSS Distributor

We have CD Burner, DVD burner and now we have the RSS/Atom feed burner. Imagine this, as a webmaster or blogger, don't you ever wanted to know how many RSS feed subscribers currently you have, where they're coming from and what they like best? Maybe you don't bother, but I do.


With FeedBurner services, it shows how to accommpolish 4 goals using just your own RSS feeds:

1. Publicize your content and make it easy for people to subscribe.
2. Optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be consumed by subscribers wherever they are.
3. Analyze your traffic to learn how many subscribers you have, where they're coming from and what they like best.
4. Make Moneyitize by participating in the FeedBurner Ad Network. Why not reward yourself for your effort?

I really like the distribution optimization made by FeedBurner. There so many RSS reader out there and do you think is that your job to find it all so that you can share your feed? I don't think so. So now I've converted links of my feed to a single FeedBurner link.

I also went through all the functionality and I must say I'm impressed. Kudos FeedBurner team.

Google's Page Rank Unleashed

While searching some good reading material to kill my never ending boredom, I found this formula

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed. Phil Craven has published an article on "Google's PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it".

Based on his article I would say it will took ages to raise my blog's page PR. Knock yourself out.

Snap: Take A Peek Before Visiting Any Links

Snap Preview Anywhere displays a preview of ANY site that is linked to from your page. Your site visitors can now visually decide whether a site is worth visiting before actually clicking the link to go there.


Feature Highlights

• High Quality Preview Images
• Instant Feedback and Response
• Largest Library of Site Previews
• Simple Sign-up Process
• No Maintenance Required
• Snap Search Box
• It's FREE
  

If you're trying to plug the javascript generated by Snap into the Blogger Beta (v3.0), you might having difficulty to save it. Just omit the "defer" from the code "javascript defer id=" and save it.

Blogger Beta Hack : Peek-A-Boo Navbar

Originally posted in Bloggeratto, this piece of code will make your blogger Navbar remain hidden but when you move the cursor on it it will slide down but this is only fully supported on Firefox, Iceweasel(linux),Flock, MZS6,Netscape, Safari & camino(linux).

Just add this 2 lines code in the CSS right before the "body {"

#navbar-iframe{opacity:0.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=0)}
#navbar-iframe:hover{opacity:1.0;filter:alpha(Opacity=100, FinishedOpacity=100)}

There are many other hacks available out there and on my mind that I would like to try out but I'm not in a hurry here.

ASCII Art - Generator

I believe any BBS user or perhaps you might even received email from your friends sending out this ASCII picture once awhile. Nowadays there are many ASCII converter available on the internet with so much of variation. Text to ASCII image, jpeg image to ASCII image and so on.

But the most amazing ASCII image I ever saw was a portrait created by Guruprasad Vanalkar. He creates an amazingly accurate, life-sized, colored portrait of Dean Cain on a typewriter for "Believe it or not" TV shows.

Anyway, here are a few ASCII sample of converter.

- Text-Image.com (Web Based)
- ASCII Generator Software v 0.6.8
- ASCII Art Generator (Web Based)

Heck I can give 700k ++ list, well you know where to find more.

Pluging out the Pluck

Pluck is pulling out their RSS feed reader from their product line. Too bad I was just about to use it. Here is some of the announcement.


Pluck RSS Reader Shut Down Notice

Consumer RSS reader services will be discontinued January 5, 2007.

All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck's focus in other business areas, the venerable RSS readers are set to be retired from our product line.

Over the next two months, you will have the opportunity to export your RSS feed subscriptions to other RSS readers of your choosing.

Please see the instructions on this page for details on how to export your subscriptions and bookmarks (Windows only) for use in other readers.

Read the full announcement.

JsCalendar - Déjà vu

When I first saw it, I thought I've seen this before. Well I did but in this version, the JavaScript Calendar add some extra punch including time and keyboard functionality.

Supported browsers

» Internet Explorer 5.0+ for Windows
» Mozilla, Netscape 7.x, Mozilla FireFox (any platform)
» Other Gecko-based browsers (any platform)
» Konqueror 3.2+ for Linux and Apple Safari for Macintosh
» Opera 7+ (any platform)

Features

» The look is customizable through external CSS
» High quality color themes
» Keyboard navigation
» Can show days from adjacent months
» Can show week numbers
» Translated into many languages
» Any day can be “the first day of week”
» The default “first day of week” can be configured in the language file
» One can easily jump back or forward with 24 years
» Provides help hints (also configurable)
» Includes an optional time selector with 1 minute resolution
» Special days (configurable list of days that are displayed differently)
» Allows multiple days selection
» Fast and very easy to setup

Take a look at the demo page. Enjoy

Relay - file and directory management

I love small apps. Most of the time it is just a straight forward function with minimum effort. While searching for the AJAX version of file and directory management, I found Relay. Develop by Chris Iufer, this is a free distribution piece of software.

We are freely distributing the software open-source. So we hope it comes in handy to all those readers of yours who were begging to get their hands on a copy of it. The project is launching as a public Beta, and we hope that the community will really help us make this thing stellar. Were positioning it as a better way to manage your site files for things like blogs or personal homepages, and to transfer files between artists and their clients.

Features

• drag-n-drop files and folders
• dynamic loading file structure
• upload progress bar
• thumbnail view, including pdf
• multiple users & accounts with basic administration
  

And here is the scripts for your own pleasure. Enjoy

CosmoPOD - The Ultimate Online Desktop

I had a dream that someday I no longer need to buy any computer or notebook what so ever. I just need to go to any FREE client terminal all around the world to access my online desktop where I can do my daily routine and job. Impossible? Maybe I don't have to dream anymore because CosmoPOD has it all, well almost.

Back to my dream, the advantages of having the online desktop are:

• no hardware maintenance
• don't have to worry about virus / spam / malware / spyware
  
• no need to worry about compatibility, patches and upgrade because all software and hardware is taken care of by the service provider.
• no need to reinstall everything each time I use any different PC. e.g YM messenger, etc.
  
• insanely flexible and mobile: I just need a browser with internet anywhere in the world and TADA!!

And of course there are disadvantages

• what happen if there is no internet? Sigh!
• hardware getting more expensive because there is no demand anymore
• business related to personal computer collapsed, or maybe we don't have to use money anymore at that time

Anyway CosmoPOD allows you to run a remote Linux PC from your desktop without having to actually install a Linux operating system. Once inside your new CosmoPOD desktop, you will have access to dozens of free or open source applications. There are two types of accounts, FREE and premium account. For the FREE account you will get 50+ applications running on your desktop with 1 GB storage. For the premium account you will get 100+ application, 3GB storage, write/download and run software and many more goodies.

CosmoPOD team taking a sweet time on developing this AJAX based desktop because they know that they are already ahead of the game. They said that many AJAX proponents already exist in a mature stage on Linux, so why go reimplement them from scratch?

If you are new to Linux OS, maybe you want to try out the free account first so that you can get the feel. As for me I don't care what OS or software to play around as long as it deliver the way I want it to be.

Pantun

While waiting for someone today, I browsed through my SMS list and struck with 2 messages which had "pantun" sent by my wife. It reminds me how busy I was while working with CAT.

If you are wondering what is "pantun" is all about, well in Wikipedia definition: The Pantun is a Malay poetic form. The pantun originated as an oral literary form of expression traditionally used among the Malays. Pantun had been in its current form since 15th century at the latest, based on Malay manuscripts written within this period.

And here is the "pantun" SMS I had:

Alif main pikul beban
Muaz main sepak-sepak
Ayam pun dah balik reban
Awak bila nak balik pulak?

and on the other day

Alif pesan beli mi Maggi
Muaz pesan Pizza Hut
Pukul berapa awak balik ni?
Apa lagi balik la cepat!

Yesterday, while reading a funny answer paper for history subject from one of the St Francis Institution's student, I read his finishing touch. This kid, I believe his name is Thye Yong Lun wrote:

Berjalan-jalan di tepi muara
Hendak mencari anak dara
Kalau nak cari anak dara
Di tepi muaralah

Nice one :D

Sitemap Protocol - Microsoft & Yahoo Joint Support

Google Sitemap is now getting support from Microsoft & Yahoo. They have moved to a new name space called www.sitemaps.org with now version 0.9.

In case you are new to site map, using a site map not only makes it easy for your users to see the entire structure of your website, but it also makes it easier for the search engines to spider your site.When the search engine spiders come to visit, they will follow all of the text links from your main index page. If one of those links is to a site map, then the spiders will go right to the sitemap, and consequently visit every page you have text linked to from that site map.

Let examine a sample of valid sitemap protocol

<blockquote><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset></blockquote>

Easy stuff

SEO - How Does Your Site Score?

I found a cool tool called Sitescore. This is a free check-up on how well your site stacks up in search engine ranking and offers you tips on how you can make your site easier to find by the search engines most frequently used by the general public.

I really like the final report. It shows the overall summary consists of Marketing, Design, Accessibility, Experience and Visitor Ranking of your website. The report also shows all the good or bad points complete with breakdown descriptions and suggestions.

The generated reports for each domain will be cached. You need to sign-up (it's free) to re-generate report for the same domain.

Unbelievably my blog scores 7.1 out of 10. So how's yours?

Blogger Beta Hack - Expandable post entry

This is a very useful hack. The purpose of this hack is to display only the summary of your full article / story on the main page. When reader click the "read more" it shows the full article on the next page.

To me it is so important and I hope that Blogger Beta should add this feature ASAP, but I simply just can't wait. I've done it in previous Blogger build, so I look around and I found a Blogger user that dedicate himself to hack Blogger. Thanks Ramani (I think he is from India).

Anyway here are the steps.

1. 1. Search for "post-header-line" to find this portion of code in your template and add the lines in as shown below.
   
   

   <div class='post-header-line-1'/>
   <div class='post-body'>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
   <style>.fullpost{display:inline;}</style>
   <p><data:post.body/></p>
   <b:else/>
   <style>.fullpost{display:none;}</style>
   <p><data:post.body/></p>
   <a expr:href='data:post.url'>Read More......</a>
   </b:if>
   <div style='clear: both;'/> <!-- clear for photos floats --> </div>

   
   
2. (optional step) Goto Settings->Formatting. At the bottom, you will find the text box provided to specify the "Post template". Copy/paste these lines into that text box and save the settings.
   

   Type your summary here
   
   <span class="fullpost">
   Type rest of the post here
   </span>

Voila, now every time you want to create a post, "Type your summary here" and "Type rest of the post here" will be display. Just replace it with your entry.

With all the fuss you will be rewarded with at least double page views in your blog stats. Just make sure you don't reveal everything in the blurb.

Bright Future for Adobe Apollo

In case you haven't heard of this, Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime (like Flash itself) being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop. It's due to release on Adobe Labs in early 2007.

The idea is that developers will be able to bring their web applications off line and take advantage of things a desktop application can do like drag and drop file, etc. Despite that, Apollo will be running on a cross platform machine like PCs, Macs and Linux.

Bringing visual rich content like Flash isn't new. Macromedia started it with Macromedia Central. Central acted as an application manager and Flash applications written for Central ran inside a Central desktop client instead of as separate applications, the model Apollo uses now. Some said that developing apps with Central was a nightmare. I don't really know because I never touch Macromedia Central before, but later Macromedia Flex (now Adobe Flex) has made writing applications in Flash much more simple. In fact, Apollo wouldn't have been possible without the Flex framework.

I heard that the AJAX support in Appolo will make AJAX development much more easier. Currently AJAX developers need to deal with a variety of different browsers and that requires extra time and cost. But since Apollo is a cross platform itself, so you can ditch the hacking process as you are now dealing with RIA desktops. You can just port your current Ajax application to Apollo with almost no code changes.

In conclusion, Apollo seems uniquely positioned to open the world of desktop application development to the average web developer, so that should spur the development of a lot of new apps. It's up to the developer to create applications that make people's lives better and that are easy enough for the average user. So keep on refreshing the Adobe Lab.

Reciprocal Link - Find Out How Deep The Bunny's Hole Goes

Photo by lottuh1977

What the heck is a reciprocal link?

A reciprocal link is a text and/or banner link to a site that, somewhere in its pages, carries a similar text/banner link to your own site. Easier word - a link back to your website.

Some benefit of reciprocal linking :

1. Increase Your Website Traffic
2. Increase Page Rank in Search Engines
3. Offer Your Website Visitors Valuable Resources

Some says that reciprocal links are losing their value or even Google discredited all type of reciprocal linking. Many said that to overcome this, choose sites relevant to the subject of your site and trade/beg/ask permission to put your link there.

I say let's create an experiment which I would like to call it "How Deep The Bunny's Hole Goes". The objective of this experiment is to analyze how reciprocal affects your website traffic and page rank.

It's a simple experiment, make it fun like playing a tag game. Copy the following script and post to any website, blog of your friend or what so ever.

You were tag no ### by <a href="http://azowebsphere.blogspot.com">Your site name & link</a>. You may tag to others too.
Find out more at <a href="http://azowebsphere.blogspot.com/2006/11/reciprocal-link-find-out-how-deep.html">How Deep The Bunny's Hole Goes Experiment</a>.

Replace the ### with total no of tag that you have create and of course your site / blog name with your own link. To make it effective, install a Google Analytic script before you start.

Let's share how much you website / blog gain out of this experiment.

AJAX Edit-In-Place - Flickr Style

If you have ever use Fickr, you might be wondering how on earth they can save the title and description by simply hovering on the elements without reloading the whole page.

With this feature you can imagine how many page load you can save or at least it can impress your friends or boss :D

Ok basically it has two components, the user interface manipulation and the AJAX call itself. This AJAX uses Prototype,a JavaScript Framework.

I uploaded a working source codes so that you can test it on your own.

Happy programming.

CSS Layout - Back to basic

For the past 5 years I created numerous of websites, some are simple, others cause me restless night and part of the job may require CSS layout design. It sounds not so important, unfortunately it does. For the past few years, SEO has become part of the design requirement and it helps a lot on pushing the content and boost the page rank.

Instead of starting out with blank CSS and HTML documents every time you need to build a layout, you can create a bunch of layout templates as it will give you a solid basis for creating the rest of the design.

You can create 2 column layout, 3 column layout, centered, fixed and others. You may explore other possibility from this CSS website.

These templates can be really basic, in fact that is exactly what you want as the final design. The fonts, the colours and so on will be different every time. It’s just the main sections we want to be able to quickly get into place.

As for example, here is a sample of my most common CSS layout:

1. The HTML page
2. The CSS file

Since I can't find a way to post the source code in this Blogger entry, I make you life easier by posting a zip file using the online storage service by esnips.

Netvibes - The real executive desktop

While glancing through some of the freelance projects frowarded to my email, I saw a job which require cloning a site called Netvibes. The price offered were around USD100-300 and it is all AJAX. Sound reasonable to me, but when I browse through Netvibes :O USD100-300 is too small for this kind of job. It could take ages (for me) to clone it. Well see it for your self.

Netvibes claims their service as Web 2.0 expert and currently based in Paris. Netvibes still in beta (like every industry player), but when using the application I feel like using Yahoo Desktop with steroid (lots lots of steroid) or should I say Pageflakes alike?

Looking for a freelancer or want to become one?

Occasionally a friend of mine always ask for people or any of my friends that has capability for certain type of job. It was hard for me to find a suitable candidate for the task but by googling a bit it wasn't hard at all.

I found a website that focus on IT freelance resources called GetAFreelancer.com belongs to a Sweeden company. Basically it almost look like the everyday job seeker portal with 2 types of target user; a Buyer and a Provider. A buyer post a job into the system pool by adding the job description and choose criteria such as programming language, OS platform and so on. A provider will search any job that match with their criteria/specialty and engage the price bidding. It is up to the buyer to choose which provider suitable for the job.

Now the catch here is that none of the buyer or provider are allowed to insert their contact infomation as it will violates their terms of service. I guess this will be a thread for their existance. Furhtermore, GetAFreelancer.com will act as the payment aggregator, which means a buyer will only pay to the sites not to the provider directly.

I manage to join this site for a couple of days now and I subscribe to the buyers job email alerts. To my surprise the system does alert me many jobs posted by the buyer from all over the globe. This look like a lucrative business to me.

Ramadhan is leaving us

Ramadhan is known as a month with thousands of blessing (Bulan penuh rahmat), has just left three more days. I wish every month is a Ramadhan, but Allah has set it for reasons. So I hope I can do much more prayer- terawih, kiamulail, reading Al-Quran and gifts to the one needed.

For Muslim all over the world, this month brings opportunity to them - interms of selling anything related to celebrate the Eidl Fitr: Cookies, cloth, household stuff... and much much much more. Even in Jalan TAR Malaysia itself the flow of crowd never stop.

So I take this opportunity to wish every muslim Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri & Maaf Zahir Batin. To friends, have a save journey. Like the TV3 said Aidilfitri adalah hari untuk di rayai bukan ditangisi.

Packages2Go In Kosmo

While doing my daily maintenance on Utusan's Kosmo server today, I saw a few familiar faces. Who others that our dearest Nurezali (not Nurazeli) and Jeffry Noor. Well kudos guys, you guys are now officially famous.

I've spent 5 wonderful years with you guys. Keep the ball rolling.

Yahoo first Open Hack Day

When I first read it I thought it was black hat kind of hack, but I thought wrong. Yahoo initiates this first hack day to gather all the coders to hack Yahoo applications. I can smell some new innovation coming up next.

Anyway, here are the list of the Open Hack Day Winners:

• Best Overall: Blogging in Motion: wearable technology. Blog from your purse. - Diana Eng, Emily Albinski, Audrey Roy
• Second Place: YBox: Turn TV into a simple, web configurable dashboard. - Josh Rooke-Ley, Tarikh Korula
• Thired Place: Search Hack with Dynamic Tagging: Semantic Search using Yahoo Search API for Seed Documents, Evan Hoff
• Best Sharp OSA Hack: Print a Pretty Impromptu Poster, pick a Flickr tag and print impromptu posters on the colour photocopier. - Ben Metcalfe (with assistance from Tim Shattuck)
• Best Social Commentary: Y! Space. It's like Yahoo! 360. But not for old people! - Winona Tong
• Too Useful: shill.icio.us. Find users who are trying to drive traffic to their sites by artificially boosting del.icio.us popularity. - Jason Gurney
• Best Schtick (and Worst Hack): Blabber. It's a talking head! Except it has the same voice as you! - Mo Kakwan
• Best Messenger Hack: Lingo! Y!Messenger plugin to help put Yahoo! Services in Context. - Kristopher Tate, Matt Olson, Qingfeng Huang, Aiguo Fei
• Best Messenger Hack, Second Place: Plaxo Yahoo Messenger Plugin. A plugin for Yahoo messenger that allows you to look up your friends' Plaxo contact information. - Trevor Gattis, Amber Haq
• Best Messenger Hack, Third Place: Ask questions to Y! Answers from Messenger. Allows users to ask question by typing their request into a messenger secondary window. - Sharan, Vincent
• Best Upcoming Hack: Gutentag. Describe yourself, then find people, events, and places that you'll love but would have never known about. - Josh Dewald, Mabel Liang, Taylor Dondich
• Best Local/Maps Hack and Worst Kiss-Ass (for comments made to the moderator during the demo): Road-Trip Radio. Take a trip down the coast and know exactly when and where to turn that dial...so you never miss a moment of your favorite NPR or radio program (and don't have to buy a satellite radio)! - AJ Arora
• Best Flickr Hack: The Color Field Camera. A 1950s snapshot camera with built-in LCD screen. Blends live video with flickr images that match the color of the object in the center of your view. - Bjoern Hartmann (presenting)
• Best Mail Hack: Yahoo! Mail with Flickr Image Association. Use photographic association to easily recall and visualize email. - Dan Lindquist
• Best Mail Hack, Second Place: Flickr Photo Postcard. Send a postcard of a Flickr photo to a friend's email. Just find a cool photo on Flickr, click the send postcard button, fill in the email and message, and click send! - Leah Culver, Tantek Celik
• Best Mail Hack, Third Place: Something With Your E-Mail. Just a draft of turning microcontent from email to actionable goodness. - Christine Hodges

Hard Disk vs Online Back Up

I've been thinking is it worth it to buy a SATA hard disk to back up my stuff or find any online back up service to store everything online. The same thing happen previously when I try to decide to search for web hosting with a big storage or a small one.

Browsing the web today lead me to a service provided by Amazon (yeap that Amazon.com). They call it the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). If you are a developer and having headache to store your data, this is might be the right choice. What's catch my eyes is the pricing. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost. $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used. $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

Well again it is up to your personal preference. With Bluray coming up next, I think storage price will keep cheaper & cheaper.

YouTube soon to follow Napster history

Read it from the Yahoo news today. It says Universal Music Group, the world's biggest record company, recently accused YouTube of being a serial copyright infringer.

I guess life is like a roller coaster. YouTube now is like at the top of the peak and soon or later will going down. It just a mater how steep the slope is. Currently YouTube is the 3rd most viewed website in the world (damn Alexa is down to confirm this). I even uploaded a few videos in there.

But hey YouTube is not the only free video sharing out there. Some of it like MetaCafe are equally interesting, but I think YouTube has the much volume compare to the others.

Not to forget, recently Yahoo acquires online video editing JumpCut as part of the Yahoo family. I did try it, and it is simple enough.

PHP Editor - A complete list

While searching for a good PHP editor, I found this site , which is a link from the PHP.net itself. All this while I was using the Eclipse & CFStudio only. Hmm, feel like live in the box :D. Now I wonder which one is the best.

Welcome to PHP world

I've been ColdFusion developer for so many years. Perhaps now is the best time for me to venture deeply into PHP world. ColdFusion has several cool framework to work with such as
Fusebox , Mach II & Model Glue .

Well, PHP also has many cool framework to work with such as Zend Framework, CakePHP, Symfony Project, Seagull Framework, WACT, Prado, PHP on TRAX, ZooP Framework, eZ Components & CodeIgniter. You could compare all the frameworks here.

So what I need now is a real project to apply some of this frameworks.

Innovations in your life

I read a copy of Utusan's Esti dot my (dated 30 August 2006) to my 14 months old son, Muaz Hazimi yesterday. Of course I do the reading most of the time and he just continue doing what he knows best, throw off everything on his mom's makeup shelf.

In this issue, ESTI covering the innovation and invention from Malaysia local SMI/SME, especialy for the villagers. It shows how SIRIM plays the main role to improve productivity through their inventions. And of course our famous local inventor Mr Zulkifli Haron was mentioned too. Some of the inventions are machine to make/cook lemang, rempeyek, kuih ros, semperit, pineaple juice extractor, thousand machine "mesin ribu-ribu", and many others. I wonder if they archive and display it on their web.

ESTI also cover a story of Pakistani inventor, Ghulam Sediq Wardak, a local man who has spent his life developing original solutions to everyday problems. He has invented 341 invention however none are patented. Among his invention are radio powered by body electricity, automatic cradle rocker, solar-powered water pump and solar-powered car. An interesting quote from him, "The main purpose of my inventing is not to earn money. I want to render a service to my countrymen and to all people in the world."

So what is the moral behind all this? Do I have that kind of feeling, invent something to solve daily problems? I used to have it, but now I'm narrowing it down to IT solutions. I wonder if my kids has it?

And one more thing, you should read a photo or cartoon book to your 14 old months kids to attract his/her attention because by the time I finish reading ESTI, he throw away an expensive MAX base powder and scaterred to pieces. Crap....

"jted mime type"

While finding a clear idea what is "jted mime type" is (written on my technicall manual), I accidently found a calculus lecture notes by Prof Ghrist from Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois. I find the way he illustrate the calculus theories is quite interesting. If only he was my calculus lecturer. :D

Clustering 2 nodes with Windows 2003 Enterprise

One of the opportunity while I'm joinning Tera AP is to be able to learn how to set up a cluster environment server.

So what is a cluster ?

A cluster is a group of computers, called nodes that function as a single computer/system to provide high availability and high fault tolerance for applications or services. Windows 2003 Servers can participate in a cluster configuration through the use of Cluster Services. If one member of the cluster (the node) is unavailable, the other computers carry the load so that applications or services are always (with a small interruption) available.

All nodes of the cluster use a Shared Disk – an external disk or disk subsystem which is accessible for all nodes through SCSI (2 Nodes) or Fibre Channel (more than 2 nodes). All data will be stored on the shared disk or an external disk subsystem (for example Exchange databases).

Every node has a local Exchange 2003 installation with a unique configuration for every cluster node. Each Cluster with Exchange 2003 has at a minimum one Exchange Virtual Server (EVS). An EVS is the logical node that will be used for all cluster operations. An EVS contains an IP address, network name, physical disk and an application.

A cluster can be …

Active/Active or Active/Passive
Microsoft recommends only Active/Passive clusters – we will check the reason later.

The number of cluster nodes supported by Windows 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter is 8 nodes. Windows Server 2003 Standard and Web Editon doesn’t support a Cluster.

In an Active/Passive cluster - If one node in the cluster fails, the active cluster failover to another node which becomes Active. This is called Failover. If the failed node is back online, a Failback can be manually initiated or automatically configured in the Cluster Group properties.

Every cluster node must have two network interfaces. One network interface for the cluster communication called the private LAN and one network interface called the public LAN. You can link a cluster with two nodes with a simple cross link cable. If more than two nodes exist in the cluster you have to use a dedicated switch / hub.

The private NIC is used for the Heartbeat communication (Cluster communication). A Heartbeat is much like a ping which can be used to test if the other cluster node is still available. If the heartbeat fails, the Failover process occurs.

Clustering changes with Exchange 2003 SP1

In versions before Exchange 2003 SP1, regardless of the number of cluster nodes you could only have one instance of a Public Folder store that is associated with the MAPI folder tree.
In Exchange 2003 SP1, the Exchange development team added the ability to have multiple MAPI Public Folder databases on a single multi node cluster.

This support was added because the Exchange team saw that Outlook 2003 cached mode puts a greater load on Public Folders like the Outlook Address Book (the OAB will be loaded offline at the client). With the help of multiple Public Folder stores the load can be spread across these folders. This allows a better client performance.

Why Active/Active cluster is not recommended

Active / Active cluster is not recommended because of Virtual memory (VM) fragmentation.When two instances of the information store is running in one memory space, it might be possible that sufficient VM does not exist to bring the resource online during a failover/failback.

For more information see here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;816893kb;EN-US;816893

There are three main concepts which reduce virtual memory fragmentation:

• Decrease the number of dynamic allocations when the system is started
• Increase the size of the virtual address space
• Allocate similar size allocations from common regions of memory

Exchange Server 2003 Cluster Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server (up to two nodes)
• Windows 2000 Datacenter Server (up to four nodes)
• Windows 2000 must have SP3 + 329938 hotfix or SP4
• Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (up to eight cluster nodes)
• Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition (up to eight cluster nodes)
• Hardware on cluster HCL
• Windows 2000 - Check lists for cluster service installationhttp://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=266
• Windows Server 2003 – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=17219
• Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) installed

Exchange Server 2003 Cluster Setup Changes

• Block removal of node if an EVS is running on the cluster
• The /disasterrecovery switched is blocked
• Prevent Exchange 2003 from being first non-legacy server in a Exchange 5.5 site
• By default, POP3 and IMAP4 resource not created (as part of the Trustworthy Computing initiative from Microsoft)
  Cluster service account doesn’t requires Exchange full admin rights
• IPSEC is now supported between front-end servers and back-end clusters

Exchange Server 2003 Cluster Disk Changes

Windows 2003 clusters now support Volume Mount points to overcome the limits of traditional drive letter assignments. This new feature is very useful for four and eight node Exchange clusters because the traditional drive letter assignment in Exchange was very limited in cluster environments when multiple storage groups and stores where used.

Windows 2003 Cluster Setup

1.0 Create a new Cluster

The Windows 2003 Cluster administrator after successful installation.

2.0 Cluster Administrator

Exchange 2003 Cluster Setup

Before we install Exchange 2003, we must create a MS-DTC (Distribution Transaction Coordinator) resource.

In Windows 2003, Microsoft recommends installing the DTC as a separate Cluster Group containing a Physical Disk, Network Name and IP address resource and then adding the MSDTC resource to the cluster group.
For more in formation how to setup the MS-DTC in a Windows 2003 Cluster, read the following Knowledge Base article.

The second step is to install Exchange 2003 and all required hotfixes on each node. You MUST install Exchange one after the other. After installing Exchange, you can deploy Exchange 2003 SP1 on every cluster node. For more information on how to deploy Exchange 2003 SP1 into a cluster environment read the following article.
Once the Exchange 2003 binaries have been installed on the cluster Node we can now create an Exchange Virtual Server.

The Exchange Virtual Server creation process is much the same as for Exchange 2003. First we need to create a cluster group for the Exchange Virtual Server. The group must have at least one physical disk resource, at least one IP address resource, and a network name resource. The network name resource must have a dependency on the IP address resources in the cluster group.

When all resources are online, we must create the System Attendant resource. The System Attendant Resource (SA) creates all the other Exchange 2003 cluster resources automatically.
To do this, right click the Exchange 2003 cluster group and choose New Resource and then choose the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant. You must name the SA.

3.0 Exchange System Attendant

Add the Nodes that will be possible owners of the System Attendant Resource. A possible owner is a node in the cluster on which the resource can be brought online. These Nodes will also be added as a possible owner of all the other Exchange resources that are automatically created. A Node must be specified as a possible owner of a resource in order for us to failover to that Node.

4.0 Possible owners of the EVS

You must set the dependencies on the System Attendant Resource. The dependencies are the following:

• Network Name resource
• All disk resources (that Exchange 2003 should use - this includes Mount Point disks which will contain Exchange 2003 data)
  
  

5.0 SA – Resource dependencies

Like a normal Exchange installation you must select the administrative group where the Exchange virtual server is created.

6.0 Chose the administrative Group for the EVS

Within the chosen Administrative Group you now have to choose a Routing Group where the Exchange Virtual Server will be located when more than one Routing Group exists at the time of EVS creation. You can change the server location in the Routing Group after installation.

7.0 Select the routing group for the EVS

Please read the wizard's summary carefully.

8.0 SA – Resource dependencies

9.0 Done

The following picture shows the Cluster Administrator tool after EVS installation. Note that all Exchange resources are NOT online.

10.0 Cluster Administrator after EVS installation

Exchange 2003 no longer creates a POP3 and IMAP cluster resource. This is part of Microsoft's Trustworthy initiative and it is also true for a “normal” Exchange 2003 installation.
Next, we have to bring the System Attendant resource online. To do so, right click the EVS System Attendant and click “Bring Online”.

11.0 You have to bring the System Attendant Online.

How can I create expandable post summaries?

Dont you wish Blogger could just take your first paragraph as your teaser? That's what I'm thinking, and some how, they has that. The only thing is you need to tweak your template a little bit.

Check this article on, How can I create expandable post summaries? With this trick, you can choose to display an arbitrary amount of text from the beginning of each post, as a teaser for the whole thing. Then users who want to read the rest of the post can click a link to see the full text. This is handy if you have lots of long articles all on one page.

How was your 1st day?

Well yesterday was my 1st day of joining a new company, Tera AP. It was very exciting and thrilling to get involved in something new. It's a small IT company and currently supporting major news publication companies in Asia Pacific. I was lucky to had chances o meet all the team members because most of the time, they won't be around in the office. The office is located in the Phileo Damansara which next to The Star building.

Well one thing about this area is that everything is expensive. The visitor's park rate is RM2.20 per hour and I parked here for about 10 hours. That cost me a whooping RM22. What a nightmare. It almost like the same amount to remove a clamp in Tech Park Malaysia. Now I know how the CAT's new staff feeling on the 1st day of their job.

About my job, I'm suppose to provide consultation on pre-installation requirements as in Microsoft Active Directory design, hardware specification and sizing, and the overall system configuration details of Tera sofware. Wow, what a mouth full.

Anyway wish me luck.

For the love of the CATizen

Well, it had to happen one day. My time here is coming to an end. I want you to know this decision was difficult to make, and I hope nobody thinks I am being disloyal by making this move. I've made it after a lot of soul searching, and I believe it is the right decision for me to make at this time.

People will know, I'm sure (I hope); that I've always given my best in the time I've been here. And you all have made me very welcome since the day one, 5 years ago. It’s been great working with each and everyone of you.Thank you for all the help and support that you have given to me throughout the years.

Special thanks to En Rohizam for giving me an opportunity to learn and develop myself until what I'm today.

As for IT Department, Nurezali, Jeffry, Kamal, Khussairiee & Ali, good luck and thanks again for being passion with me for all this years.

By the way incase you guys need to contact me, my phone number still the same but my new email is _____@gmail.com. Keep in touch everybody.

Thanks again for everything.



Yours truly,

Azizul Ameir
key: azo
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