Browser makers warned against ad-blocking: ZDNet Australia: News: Software

Browser makers warned against ad-blocking: ZDNet Australia: News: Software

An interesting view on ad-blocking.

This Blog Is Full Of Crap: The Carnival of the Vanities #144

This Blog Is Full Of Crap: The Carnival of the Vanities #144

I was attracted by the name of this blog actually.

50 Coolest Websites 2005 - TIME.com

50 Coolest Websites 2005 - TIME.com

Being a member of an e-commerce company, I'm sad that my company web site isn't in the list and look forward to see my company's rapid and quality improvement.

NLog - Introduction

NLog - Introduction

Other than Log4Net, we have another logger module for .NET developers.

The Code Project - rEmail Part 3 - MIME Introduction - Internet & Network

The Code Project - rEmail Part 3 - MIME Introduction - Internet & Network

This one do the same thing on me like the last article I've blogged.

The Code Project - a Library for downloading Mails from a POP3 Server - C# Programming

The Code Project - a Library for downloading Mails from a POP3 Server - C# Programming

This article remind me of the time when David (my ex-teamate) was making a email retrieving library.

The Code Project - AJAX DropDownList - ASP.NET

The Code Project - AJAX DropDownList - ASP.NET

Once again, AJAX. This time, it's on a drop down menu web control. I've found that, in the past few weeks, there're new postings on AJAX applications in Code Project. That's a good sign.

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

This is one of the most interesting passages I read in the past year on blogging. Remember to respect others' intellectual property.

Who Will Google Buy Next? || kuro5hin.org

Who Will Google Buy Next? || kuro5hin.org

Interesting passage with a list of Google sub-company.

Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

Will the Macintosh® still work fast with multimedia tasks? Let's see.

Advice for Begining Your Ph.D Career

Advice for Begining Your Ph.D Career

I hope to count this advice in my life.

Online Marketing Blog: RSS for increased search engine rankings - Daily Search Marketing News

Online Marketing Blog: RSS for increased search engine rankings - Daily Search Marketing News

I've been being noticed the impact from new technologies (blog, wiki...) on the society and business world. And now, this post told me how RSS increases the search engine rankings of my sites. By the way, this blog looks cool and worth subcribing.

Heinze: I Feel At Home

Heinze: I Feel At Home

As you may know, I'm a fans of ManUtd. This year, they failed to win any trophy, it's sad. But I'm still happy that I find really good new players in ManUtd, Rooney, Ruud, C. Ronaldo, Rio, and finally Heinze. I really admire Heinze veyr much, before he played in the first match for ManUtd (I watch his play in Copa America and Olympics). He's not only a good player in terms of technique and performance, but also mental.

"I’m the sort of person who likes to make continuous progress"

"Tiredness is not a big issue"

After reading the interview in ManUtd Official Site, I've found the above reasons why I like Heinze much. I hope ManUtd will improve far much from this season, to avoid losing good players like Henize. If I were a soccer player, I'd also leave the club if I've already given my best but the club is under archieving.

Visual Studio: Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap

Visual Studio: Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap

Are you waiting for VS 2005? Take a look on some screen shot and know how M$ re-invade and integrate those 3rd-party plug-in into VS 2005.

Visual SourceSafe

Visual SourceSafe

This is again on VSS (obviously, I'm currently working with VSS). This is a blog on VSS, and I found that there are a list of helpful topic on VSS application, even though they're a bit old.

Example VSS Framework for Source Code Management

Example VSS Framework for Source Code Management - Part 1
Example VSS Framework for Source Code Management - Part 2

Source code is one of the most valuable property of a IT development team. Managing your source code is an important task and worth doing some studies on the topic. The 2 links listed above are web pages introducing Source Code Management with Visual Source Safe (VSS). If you're currently working with VSS, do take some time to read though them and don't let your team keep playing with chaotic source code flow. Enjoy.

The Code Project - Refactoring to Adaptive Object Modeling: Entity Relationships And Accountability - Design and Strategy

The Code Project - Refactoring to Adaptive Object Modeling: Entity Relationships And Accountability - Design and Strategy

After a year of post-college working life, I realise that requirement is one of the most unstable elements in software development. This is particularly obvious in business IT development. But today, we've got the Adaptive Object Model to tackle those ad-hoc creation and modification of program workflow.

City of Heroes

City of Heroes

Wow, this game looks good!

(WHAT A) WONDERFUL WORLD

(WHAT A) WONDERFUL WORLD
(Cooke/Alpert/Adler)

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about science books
Don't know much about the french I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you loved me too
What a wonderful world this would be

Don't know much about geography
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for
But I know that one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful world this would be

Now I don't claim to be an A student
But I'm tryin' to be
Oh maybe by being an A student, baby
I can win your love for me

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about science books
Don't know much about the french I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you loved me too
What a wonderful world this would be

------ lead guitar ------

But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you loved me too
What a wonderful world this would be"

News! Your Storage Increases by End of August

While I was checking my 99% full Hotmail account, I found this annoucement.

By end of August, wel increase the storage capacity of your MSN® Hotmail® account at no cost to you. It part of our on-going commitment to improve our customers?experience. Here is some more information about the free upgrade:

Storage capacity will increase from 2MB to 250MB

Attachment size increase from 1MB to 10MB

Keep more of your e-mail for longer

You can share larger files like photos, music and video clips

Upgrade happens automatically---you don need to do a thing

TheServerSide.NET - Testing ASP.NET Applications with NUnitASP and NUnit

TheServerSide.NET - Testing ASP.NET Applications with NUnitASP and NUnit

This article is not new but really worth reading, especially for those ASP.NET developers who want to produce better quality artifects by doing more unit testing.

The Behaviors of Professionalism

The Behaviors of Professionalism

This web site provide a list of professional behaviors. However, it require registration, which is free. ^^"

The Competition Master - Career - Professionalism

The Competition Master - Career - Professionalism

Tell you "What is Professionalism".

Are You a Professional?

Are You a Professional?

I've just finished my probation review(Yeah! That's cool!). But then I come out with a question, "am I a professional?". This page could give me some hints.

Intro to ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005

Intro to ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005

This introduction can probably answer the most FAQ on VS2005 - "What's new?"

Racing-Live.com - F1, WRC, Rally, MotoGP, Live

Racing-Live.com - F1, WRC, Rally, MotoGP, Live



Well, well, well...
We've got some Scout Trooper team helping us in F1 car maintenance, cool~

A Gamers' Manifesto

A Gamers' Manifesto

This is a good passage and I really agree with the arthor's opinion on game industrial. The current game market is really filled with guns, meaningless high resolution animation and graphics, new version of old games without any really enhanced feature, and the flopping DDD breasts... Hope that we can have some really good games in the coming years.

FeedReader, RSSOwl and RSS Bandit

I was doing some research one rss this afternoon. And then, I found my current rss viewer, FeedReader, is not that functioning when handling RSS from Xanga and Gamer. This is bad that I have been using it for months (and I actually have the tolerent, horrible...).

After that, I started finding rss viewers in sourceforge and reach another 2 rss viewers, RSSOwl and RSS Bandit.

RSSOwl is good as it allow users to reach the rss in a url bar and display it as a subscribed feed. RSSOwl is good aslo because it can handle Xanga RSS.

RSS Bandit is also good and can act as a complement to RSSOwl. It is able to handle Gamer RSS, which RSSOwl is not. Another feature from RSS Bandit is that it allow user to display all unread item in a list.

Try them out! They are just cool~

Tapestry - Your Favourite Comics by RSS

Tapestry - Your Favourite Comics by RSS

This is amazing! I got RSS on Dilbert and Alien Loves Predator~!

Feed Validator for Atom and RSS

Feed Validator for Atom and RSS

If you're a maintaining a copy of rss, try this out to check if your rss is valid.

robinho.org - The next soccer superstar

robinho.org - The next soccer superstar

A web site of one of the favourite soccer wonder kid - Robinho. Check out in the multimedia section, you will find him very amazing.

My most hardcore project after college

I've spent the past week on a hardcore project. The project is raised by the incompatibility of Microsoft Enterprise Library with Oracle 10g. I have to modify the Data Access Application Block with Oracle Data Provider(ODP).NET. The project is difficult than all of the projects I did after my college(it's just because those I did before are too easy), but I really enjoy that.

Blog Refactory

Well... sometimes, I do think my blog needs to be refactored, and hence, I did it this morning.

Chicago crime database | chicagocrime.org

Chicago crime database | chicagocrime.org

This is really a good thing by means of management (as taught in college, we need some measurement for quality management). Will we have a HongKong Crime Database from the HK Police Department?

Blogthings - Your Linguistic Profile

Blogthings - Your Linguistic Profile

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English

35% Yankee

10% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

The Code Project - Performance considerations for strings in C# - C# Programming

The Code Project - Performance considerations for strings in C# - C# Programming

The area of the content is clearly stated in the page title - Performance considerations for strings in C#. Enjoy^^

The Code Project - AJAX WAS Here - Part 3 : Auto Complete TextBox - ASP.NET

The Code Project - AJAX WAS Here - Part 3 : Auto Complete TextBox - ASP.NET

This guy is really cool on AJAX. Here is the AJAX ep3 posted in Code Project.

sloyd^3 (change the colors of all 3 sides - addictive puzzle game, like a rubix cube) - games

sloyd^3 (change the colors of all 3 sides - addictive puzzle game, like a rubix cube) - games

Any one solved this?

Web Test Tools

Web Test Tools

This page is particular useful for web test. It contains a huge list of web testing tools, covering areas like load test, link checking and security test. If you have ever found there're still dead links in you web site product in live environment (after UAT), try those tools. They worth trying for relieving your blood pressure. XD

Software Engineers are like Soccer Players?

If you ask me to give a job which is the most similar to Software Engineers, I would say Soccer Players.

Short Life
Playing sports as a job is normally short life(although there are exceptions). Typical retirement age of soccer players is around 3x years old. Stamina of people normally start decreasing when they reach 30 years old. For a soccer player, it is difficult for them to play throughout competitive matches with they decreasing physical ability.
Programming is also an engery-consuming task. A simple class often occupies a programmer 1 - 2 days for producing a release. Within this period, programmers are going to work intensively with the classes. Developing a class will make developers exhausted like after taking several successive exams. Older people (>40 years old) often fail to endure such stressful tasks.

Creativity
Have you even seen how C.Ronaldo and Ronaldino play their soccer games? They combine their creativity into their dribbling skills, and these really make them success.
Similarly, programming require developers to create some sort of solution design in terms of data structures, algorithms and system architecture. Creative programmer often think out of the box to provide some new features and improved solutions to old questions.

Speed
With the fabilous dribling skills, soccer players still need to run quickly so that they can really pass through they opponent.
Information Technology is probably one of the fastest changing industrial in the world. In term of speed, developers need to be able to develop in a high speed and catch up with the current technology rapidly and repeatedly. Especially with the new trend of dynamic software process, software engineers have to provide releases in short iterations. We often need to provide a release with few changes within several working days.

Power
Sports are usually linked with the term "Power", as sports are really some sort of physical competition. The term "Powerful" will link me to some strong soccer players like Vieri, Cantona, Rooney, Stam, Batistuta... They are strong and powerful and hence they are able to do that work (shot, dribble, pass and tackle) against their opponents' pressure. This is really important in the modern soccer games since the games is getting more physically competitive. To be successful, you have to work as usual even if under opponents' challenges.
The term "Powerful" also applies to developers. Powerful developers can solve their problems as usual, no matter the level of difficulty of the problems. They may work slower with more difficult problems, but they will not feel very bad when they meet some difficult problems.

Efficiency
The whole modern world talks about "Efficiency", including soccer world and IT world. It is obvious that we prefer a worker to do more successful work rather than fooling around.
Soccer player can be efficient in various way, with various role in the team. While we are watching soccer games, there are often some statistics on particular players showing their efficiency. The goal-to-shot rate is obviously the most important parameter to a striker, while percentage of complete pass and successful tackle are that of a midfielder and defender respectively.
Developers can also be efficient. This can be archieved by practising high quality software development. Known from our experience, the development bottleneck is in Testing and Maintenance. To improve the efficiency of a software process can be easy archieved by cutting the resources for Testing and Maintenance by means of providing better quality releases. High quality system require less resources for Testing and Maintenance. It therefore actually make the whole software process more efficient by cutting a large fraction of resources in Testing and Maintenance (which is reasonable).

Vision
Some top soccer players in the world are not very strong and can't run very fast (e.g. Zidane and Beckham). However, their vision in the matches make them an indispensable member in the teams. Their vision allow them to clearly understand the complete situation of the match, and hence make some good tactical decision. This make them become the master players and commanders within their team. As a result, vision is the key to be a top soccer player.
When the term "Vision" is applied to development, it means the prediction in various areas like system requirement, technology and system limitation. This particular important in designing systems and components. Vision is a essential criteria for software engineer unless you want to be only a code generator.

Blue-Collar
Some weeks ago, I heard that Chelsea's midfielder Makelele said that professional soccer player are blue-collar workers. Well, that's true, and I totally accept that. As a soccer player, you most likely will not do management things. Even if you are the skipper, all the management tasks you have to do are within your small team, instead of the whole soccer club.
Software engineers are also blue-collar workers(At least at the entrance level). Sofwrare engineers typically starts that career in development jobs. At this stage, they would not have to do much management, except management themselves and their product quality.

Teamwork
Soccer requires quality teamwork, as it's a 11-vs-11 sports game. There's no way for you to play it without any teamwork with other players. A team with quality teamwork is obviously better than one without.

"Many hands make light work."

At the same time, software engineering is also a demostration of importance of teamwork. Even though there're lots of heroic programmers in the developers world, teamwork is recognised as invaluable assert for a software engineering team. The performance on good co-operation often out weight the communication overhead (which can be reduce time by time). If you ask me to choose between developing alone and developing as a team, I'll definately give you the answer, "Team!"


I don't whether you enjoy these paragraph or not, but I really enjoy the time when I was thinking for ideas and writing this whole passage. Hope you enjoy. Happy blogging.

candygrlgrl's Xanga Site

candygrlgrl's Xanga Site

Well, I've found a webLog from a fans of my favourite female singer, Candy Lo's Xanga(Blog) Site. That's cool to see everyone's blogging. Suddenly, I thought of "do I need to set up a xanga (I've got an account)?". Well... in I think I still stick to Google's Blogger at the moment.

Blogger Help : On the Go with Blogger Mobile

Blogger Help : On the Go with Blogger Mobile

Currently, "I'm Blogging It" on the web. Later on, it may be in mobile.

Antivirus programs, protection guide, virus info and removals, antivirus tests, free support!

Antivirus programs, protection guide, virus info and removals, antivirus tests, free support!

Here comes the Anti-virus software ranking 2005. Enjoy!

3D Load Packer - Multi Container Loading Optimizer

3D Load Packer - Multi Container Loading Optimizer

While I was thinking about some efficient stock usage problem, I found this tool - 3D Load Packer - Multi Container Loading Optimizer. The tool make use of their own algorithm - Astrokettle Algorithms. The photo at the bottom of the 3D Load Packer - Multi Container Loading Optimizer also interests me much!

By the way, there's another gain for me. I found that the problem I think is a 3D Bin-Loading Problem, instead of the 3D-Knapsack Problem I initially thought.

.NET Tools: Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now -- MSDN Magazine, July 2004

.NET Tools: Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now -- MSDN Magazine, July 2004

How many do use among them?

The Code Project - AJAX WAS Here - Part 1 & 2 - ASP.NET

The Code Project - AJAX WAS Here - Part 1 : Client Side Framework - ASP.NET

The Code Project - AJAX Was Here - Part 2 : ASP.Net Integration - ASP.NET

About 2 months ago, I blog about AJAX. And then, today, we got 2 article on AJAX with ASP.NET. They really interest me because of the huge user satisfaction it brings.

The Code Project - 8 tips to make you more efficient as an ASP.Net developer - ASP.NET

The Code Project - 8 tips to make you more efficient as an ASP.Net developer - ASP.NET

Paul Heap has written an interesting and informative article with title "8 tips to make you more efficient as an ASP.Net developer - ASP.NET". Take a look and see how to improve yourself.

A cool web based slide show system

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

I've previously experienced a web based slide show and video conference system in my placement job. However, the system is not very completed even though it's good looking. The slide show in flash format is difficult for user to prepare, and of course a flash editor cost some money. The video conference part......

Here is another web-based slide show system, - S5. It only require simple XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. All these are free, easy for preparation and lightweight for server load. Although S5 doesn't provide video broadcasting function, I still think it worths our study and further development into a more enhanced system.

D Programming Language

D Programming Language

A few days ago, I referenced a blog post from Dr. Chun's Blog on dotNET languages. He give me another amazing post on programming language today. This time, it's for another new language - D.

Reading the comparison between D and C, C++, c# and Java, you will find that D has the combination of practical functionality in C and C++, as well as programming flexibity in C# and Java. Let see if D will be as successful as those 4 languages.

City University of Hong Kong Undergraduate Student Project (2003-2004)

City University of Hong Kong Undergraduate Student Project (2003-2004)

After reading a news in newspaper that Nazir Usman (one of the mentor teamate few years ago) had win a prize for his FYP, I start searching for some other news with his name. Finally, I reach the CityU Library for our FYP report (I almost forgot this web site). If you are CityU Student, you may go there to download and read their report.

Honestly, some of the FYP were well done with full feature which is written in the report, but some weren't. As I know, some of these FYP claimed to have some features that not yet implemented. As some of my fellow reported, "It doesn't matter if the feature has be implemented yet, just write it down into your report". Some cases are even worse. I noticed that some "FYP" were not implemented with any feature. However, these guys can still pass the FYP and some even got a high grade. They just made a demostration on a fake product, do a bit smooth presentation and wrote an impressive report.

It sometimes gives me a feeling that Presentation Skills outweighted Analytical and Practical Skills in the world nowadays. Is the world on the right track? Some people said that the success of humanity came from their communication skills. However, without some real workable stuff, what are we communicating for? Should we keep a better balance between this area for evaluation? I just have no idea. I don't have an "A" for my FYP and my report haven't been published. Am I jealous? Well, may be... I do appreciate most of the projects in the list, however, I do think some of them doesn't worth it.

After sharing with Rick, he point out an interesting issue - "Working outside school for 1 year is much better than playing inside school for 3 years". It's true. I played too much, and now have to learn back some of the important skills, like communication. I'm learning, and will be learning. I don't know when will be the most shining moment in my life. Years ago, I want to do some big and memorable things, e.g. big and success software or systems. How about now? I still dream of producing a system the make everyone remember me. But can I do it? When will I do it? Will I do it with my friends? When I change my target? Well, I've got too many questions that I failed to answer...

Anyway, Congratulations to Usman. Nice to hear about your success.