Random Brain Dump

Been having issues with my computer at home recently…

First the video card died inexplicably a few weeks ago so I upgraded to an Nvidia 9600; now I’ve got DirectX v10. But it still sucks considering it was only 18 months old. Then last week’s heat wave finally fried my CPU. I had trouble installing the heatsink on the CPU when I built my current machine last year. My guess is that there’s always been heat dissipation issues and the heat last week was the last straw.

So I spent some bucks getting a quad-core CPU and a spanking new Asus motherboard as well as some additional RAM and a terabyte hard drive which by the way is an engineering marvel: cramming 1 terabytes in a few 3.5″ platters. 6 hours of working late into the sweltering night and I finally got a pretty beefy Windows Vista system running. Other than the computer case and some RAM modules, it’s pretty much a brand new system.

Been testing it past few days and it’s rock solid and very zippy. Despite careful research, I did spent $700; for a few hundreds more I could’ve gone and get a Mac. I did contemplated it but decided to take the plunge later when I upgrade my notebook.

As if the world needs yet another iPhone blog post, but I must say that I am super-excited. I’m definitely gonna get one and retire my old sucky razr. It’s timely since our AT&T contract is up this summer.

It’s always wise to skip 1st generation of a new product, and I’m glad I did. That’s not to say I was tempted. The 2nd generation adds 3G network and GPS. I’ve been putting off getting a GPS device for my new car. I can’t wait to see the many location-based applications that will be coming out. In fact, I might consider writing a few apps myself!

Most of all, I’m looking forward to lugging one single device. Oh yeah…

This week has been full of conferences for me. First I attended Interwoven’s GearUp. It was fun in part that I got to hang out with my friend Bill (an Interwoven employee) for a few days. I haven’t seen much of Bill last few years. The keynotes were usually boring, but the highlight was Guy Kawasaki’s presentation: most lively and entertaining keynote I’ve ever attended. Big take-away from Guy: “it’s okay to ship crap!” 🙂

I also went to the Web 2.0’s Expo. It was bigger than I had imagine. Everything and everybody is working on something labeled web 2.0 I guess. There were booths from a lot of small companies I never heard of. Social networking and cloud computing seems to the major themes. I’m surprised that I didn’t see Facebook there. Yahoo’s booth was tiny at the corner.

The coolest demo was TellMe’s mobile app on Blackberry. You speak to it and it displays search results on the Blackberry. It’s basically search on voice recognition. Very useful…

Ran accross a t-shirt with the above graphic and I just had to order one for myself. Geeky, sure but I like… 🙂

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Mozilla project. I still was with Netscape that faithful day: March 31, 1998. I still remember the big engineering gathering announcing the move. Open source by a commercial software company was pretty much unheard of at the time. The decision to open source the browser code was both controversial. It was a difficult time for Netscape– Microsoft IE was cannibalizing Navigator’s market share and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. By some account, once mighty Navigator’s market share had perilously fallen to 20% at that time– an astounding decline no matter how one looked at it.

Giving away many man-years of commercial code seemed illogical even to me at that time. But an essay by Eric Raymond called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” became very instrumental in the push toward open source. Raymond’s main point was that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I remember, the client team had to spend months cleaning up the code. In particular, there were a lot of comments that the public might deem inappropriate. Many people expected the open source community will immediate embrace the code and push it to success. The reality was different. The move was a little too late in saving the company which got bought by AOL later that fall. The move was to salvage the browser. But when the open source community did not become an immediate driving force, some key folks like Jamie Zawinski began to leave the project. Underscoring complexity of the project, it took another 4 years before Mozilla 1.0 saw the light of day.

Ten years later, IE still dominates 80% of the browser market. Given Mozilla’s current market share at 17-18%, Mozilla barely recovers the market share lost it its lifetime. It speaks volume to Microsoft dominance and proves the difficulty of turning the tide. It took some time, Mozilla is emerging as a powerful, innovative and influential project. It relentlessly puts out version of Firefox with one innotive feature after another; by contrast IE has become stagnant. I for one can’t wait to see what the next 10 years Mozilla will bring to the users.

So, we have a new piece of trivia: “when did Netscape Browser died out?”
Answer: “March 1, 2008”

Looks like 3/1/08 is the official date of demise for Netscape browser when AOL will cease all support for the storied browser. It’s a little fact most people don’t really care about, but it’s rather sad in perspective for a former Netscape employee like me…

After putting it off long enough, I spent some time this weekend tweaking my blog.

First, I hacked some plug-in code to get the random posts in the format I needed. I had to go all the way to making changes in some SQL queries. While WordPress’ APIs are getting better, I still find myself going all the way and hit MySQL to get the necessary data. It’s not ideal because this type of code changes will break with schema changes. Oh well, it is a hack I guess… Finally, I tweaked the CSS to fix issues that had been bugging me. Some were minor issues like color and font inconsistencies; some were layout issues.

Some of results are:

• The sidebar is re-arranged around a bit. More useful data is pushed up and space efficiency was taken into account.
• The new list of random posts, with excerpts, appears at the bottom of the sidebar.
• The footer is now rendered a lot cleaner than before.
• The new list of most commented posts appears in one of the footer columns.
• More consistent link hover styles for both black and blue backgrounds.
• Time/Date is now displayed with no wrapping.

Next thing I want to tackle is to build a better Flikr widget than the one I’m currently using…

Recently I started to setup my Vista desktop machine to double as our dvr, recording TV shows which we watch on our media center pc in our living room. These videos are DVR-MS files and they are MPEG-2 encoded. The files are huge– 1 hour of Monk eats up 3 gigs for best quality recoding! For the life of me I couldn’t find a configuration Windows Media Center to use more efficient codecs. Perhaps a reader of this blog can enlighten me.

Anyhow, the best workaround I’ve found is MCE Buddy: a windows service that automatically re-encodes the video files to other ideal formats like H.264 & DivX behind the scene. Added bonus: the program claims to be able to automatically removes comercials! Sweet!

This is jumping through a hoop, I wish the video codec was configurable in the first place to avoid this re-encoding business. I suspect copyright protection has something to do with the missing codec configuration. Annoying nevertheless.

Recent upgrade to a new version of WordPress involves database schema changes. This causes some of my plugins to break, particularly you’d see database error when leaving a comment! Good thing comments were saved okay though. I finally got around to fix it, so commenting now works perfectly.

Apologies from yours truly…

I got tired of the old skin, so I configured a new one. I am always partial to black background, but just haven’t found many skins I like. But I generally like this one with its blue dominated bold design. Don’t have time now, so more customization have to come later.