February 2003 Archives

Today was Bristol reunion day. I met up with Silke, Manoj, Roy and Weihui for lunch at a good Japanese restaurant. Then I had dinner at Spizza with Weihui (again), Hedy and Jong Shyan.

I now take this opportunity to fulfill my promise to my companions and will thus rephrase my previous sentence: I had dinner at Spizza with one who aspires to be A&G's youngest (and most youthful-looking) partner, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and a recently promoted manager at Sun Microsystems.

Makes me wonder what on earth I'm doing with my life.

In other news, it appears that Bristolians are the smiliest people in Britain.

I'm pleased to report that yesterday I learnt how to fix a Flash accessibility 'bug'. I had a problem with a Flash movie which had various elements such as movie clips, buttons and text input fields on it. When you filled in the first field, and hit the 'Tab' button, you'd be taken to the next nearest element - which unfortunately was a button. Thus the flow of use would be disrupted.

I searched some Flash forums and found that many people have been trying to remedy this problem since circa 2000 (the Flash 4 era). Flash MX, however, allows you to customise your tab order and disable tabbing for specified elements.

The Textfield.tabIndex property lets you set the order, where Textfield is the instance name of your input field.

The .tabEnabled property, when set to False, can be used on buttons and movie clips so they won't show up when you hit the Tab button while filling the form.

Voila. Note that since this is an MX feature, you must publish your Flash file as version 6. Your users also need the Flash 6 player for everything to work.

[ Update: Read my tutorial on Flash MX tabbing! ]

Ach, I've been so busy over the past couple of days that I didn't have time to blog. I'm dead serious. Last night I worked till 2 am. Sent my mother to the airport at around 7 am. Sent off a few more emails when I got home. Drove to the office.

This site is due for a relaunch, but I have no idea when it's going to be. It would've been ideal if it had coincided with the anniversary of my domain registration. That's also the time that my contract with the current web hosting company expires. The server's been giving quite a bit of problems, downing my webmail access, mailing list, and probably a few other things I haven't noticed yet. The problems I've reported to tech support haven't been fixed yet.

So pardon me for not replying promptly to your messages.

On 25th February in the year 2000, a law student feverishly registered her first domain name while sitting in her room in her little student house, connected to an amazingly fast university network.

She had earned enough money viewing online ads to pay for the domain as well as a year of webhosting. She had completed her research and found a deal worth pursuing.

She tried to register a dot com, but alas somebody had registered the name she wanted just two months earlier. After berating herself for not making up her mind soon enough, she decided that a dot org wouldn't be too bad either.

And so vantan.org was born.

And I shall go to sleep now.

It's disturbing to receive emails from those dodgy Nigerians - especially when somebody's just been shot dead for it.

Calling all Singaporean motorists: Check your CashCard's expiry date via the NETS website by keying in the 16-digit number at the back of the card.

• Why do CashCards have to expire?
• Why aren't expiry dates printed on the CashCard?
• Which banks and ATMs are able to renew my CashCard?
• Where can I buy a new CashCard? (etc)

Your questions answered on the FAQ page.

Please spread the word to family and friends. Your cards might need to be replaced sooner than you think.

[ update: The New Paper had an article in Dec 2002 about this. ]

Today is my mother's birthday. It was also my little cousin Hannah's birthday (she's five). Her dad brought her over to our place and we all went shopping together. Then we had a big family lunch at the Rice Table, which is extremely good value for money, but rather hazardous to the waistline.

Later this evening we had a satisfactory dinner at Fabulous Fizz, and watched 'Flamenco Republic' by María Pagés and company, which was very good.

If you asked me to describe what it was like, I'd say, clappity-clap-clap-clapitty STOMP STOMP [ola!] Thummpitty-thumpitty-thump THUMP THUMP THUMP!!kerrrlickerrrrlickerrlicklerr lickerrlickerrlickity-clok [massive applause]. I'm sure you understand what I mean.

After over a year working on the church website revamp, I was more than pleased to hear from Sharon that a new participant joined Alpha after finding out more about it on the church website. Hurrah!

Prior to that, random expatriates told the Vicar that they found out about the church from its website, before arriving in Singapore. I hope this will continue to happen with the new site.

It's my own little joy.

I couldn't help lifting this off the latest Sitepoint newsletter:

'New Official CSS Site Not Compatible with Internet Explorer

The Web people at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have made a gutsy move by launching a redesigned version of the Cascading Style Sheets site that does not work on Internet Explorer for Windows.

In standards-compliant browsers like Netscape 7, Mozilla 1.2, Opera 7, and Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh, the primary navigation bar of the site hovers solidly on the right of the page thanks to the CSS2 property 'position: fixed'. In Internet Explorer 6 for Windows (which doesn't support that property value), however, the sidebar scrolls, and CSS bugs in the browser cause the boxes in the sidebar to blow out to an unusual (and unattractive) size.

As is the case with most CSS-only designs, the site remains usable despite the formatting problems in Internet Explorer 6. Since I'm sure that a site with as high a profile as this one would have been tested in IE6 for Windows, the CSS Working Group can only intend this move as a kick in the pants to Microsoft. Think they'll get the message?

"Hergee berger snooger bork," says Opera Manager

In a hilarious, but equally pointed move in criticism of Microsoft, Opera has released a special edition of their Opera 7 browser that replaces the text on the MSN Website with language familiar to fans of the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show.

Opera 7 "Bork" Edition is a protest against Microsoft's practice of blocking users of Opera and other alternative browsers from a site that they could easily display. The MSN Web site specifically detects Opera 6 and earlier and sends them to a "simplified" version of the site with broken layout elements.'

[ update: Recent Opera press release on this matter. ]

I've received some important information from the makers of Movable Type, which fellow users might be interested in. If you use MT, aren't on the MT mailing list, and have not yet received an email from MT today, please contact me to find out more. Thank you ;-)

Some belated news: Google has bought over the company behind Blogger. Things are going to get really interesting for many of us.

Updates:

Kottke's already done a mockup of what the new Blogger site might look like. Personally, I'd call it Bloggle. It sounds cute.

Meg (co-founded of Blogger) has more links about the acquisition.

Dad and I met up for lunch, for the first time ever since I started working.

I brought him to OK Yong Tau Foo, probably the most crowded unit on Mosque Street during lunch time. We had to wait over 20 minutes for our food to be served, but it was worth it.

What touched me as a regular customer was that, in the middle of my meal, one of the aunties handed me some coins. I was a little surprised. She asked me in Mandarin if I was the one who had tea this morning at their coffeeshop. I said yes. She replied, we realised that the tea was stale, so here's your money back. My dad was impressed.

At the cashier, I realised that Makan Sutra had awarded them with a 6 (or are they counted as 3 pairs?) chopsticks Oscars award for 2002 - the highest honour any restaurant could attain.

Add another for service.

[ update: The Yahoo food guide gives it a 6/6 too ]

I tried to e-file today, only to find myself waiting for 27 images to load. They didn't. The largest image was 700x800 pixels in size, and there was no ALT text indicating what each of the images stood for.

There was a text-based nav bar, but some links were broken or led to pages with more missing images. A red scroller declared, 'Our website will be under maintenance on 8 February 2003 to 9 February 2003. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.'

While the idea of making citizens file their income tax online was pretty visionary a few years ago, it takes much more intuition to realise that you don't just have to get people to key in your URL for the magic to work.

Instead, visitors should be able to identify where they can log in at once. They shouldn't have to download huge and meaningless graphics, or read press releases about e-filing deadlines when such information could be easily summarised.

Maybe as I type, somebody's frantically trying to fix all the bugs. But even if the site required maintenance, why couldn't it have been done before we received our notice from the IRAS to e-file early ... and increase our chances of winning, um, cash prizes?

[ update: after writing in to the IRAS, I received a reply this morning telling me that the new site is up. Hurrah! Although they should have put up a placeholder in the meantime, so nobody would see all the ugly broken images in the first place. ]

[ update #2: Don't worry. E-filing commences Feb 22, not immediately as I misread it. Such was my excitement upon receiving a letter from the IRAS. Doh. ]

Major freakdom - USC just told me they didn't get my final letter of recommendation, which is a major shocker to me, because I sent off two packages a few days before the December deadline last year.

In fact, I distinctly remember posting my boss's letter, as I was so tired from preparing my final documents, that I nearly sent everything to the Admissions Office - only to realise at the last minute, thankfully, that the letter was supposed to go to the Annenberg School of Communication instead.

Which was why I spent another thirty something bucks - to rush that slim white envelope over in time.

Thank goodness for UPS tracking, as it gave the name of the person who received the package. I really hope they find the letter soon, or else it'll be another mad rush for me.

Meanwhile, over at UIE:

'...having a usable web site is not always enough to convince users to transact. Even if a user can complete a transaction on your site, doesn't mean that they will transact.

To be successful, sites must go beyond Usability by focusing on Persuasive Design. They must motivate users by taking advantage of persuasive tactics that will make them take action. The most persuasive web sites focus on making users feel comfortable about making decisions and helping them act on them.'

Continue reading here.

I just spent the last three hours holed up in my studio, running through the side As and Bs of almost all the diskettes I've stored my music on. Each disk contains twenty tracks, some good, some bad, many incomplete. I don't know why I'm writing this down, because it won't matter to most of you. But well...

Sadly, I discovered that one of my older (circa 1995) disks has a corrupted side B. Pity, because it had my farewell song to my good friend Joan, as well as a rock track on anti-abortion and a couple other decent tunes.

Now I feel like selling my KORG hard disk recorder D1600 and the O1W sound module. They didn't serve my needs. I don't like wiring too many components up and holding on to a forward button for twenty seconds just to select the last sound on the list. While KORG sounds are generally what you may call kickass, I never really found their user interfaces very friendly - apart from the units with touch screens.

Yesterday morning a strange thought entered my head. I was told to look underneath something as there would be a sign. I didn't believe it, but when I looked I thought it was a weird sign. Two long strips side by side, with a short strip in between them, aligned at one end. I struggled to think about what it could be, then I concluded it looked like two white piano keys and one black key.

I had Bible Studies yesterday evening as usual. Esther and Michael were telling me how they saw the accident scene - the one where the doctor crashed his BMW into a tree. Seems it isn't so straightfoward. The car was on the OTHER side of the tree from the main road, and the driver's side was totally smashed; the paramedics had given up, and eerily, the car was facing the plot of land where a temple once stood, across the road. It was recently pulled down. The couple insisted that there was no way the car could have ended up in that position, even if it had skidded. Whatever the case may be, I truly hope the bereaved family will be able to cope with the loss - especially the wife.

After class, Amrit and I tinkered with Esther's Roland keyboard and he taught me a couple of tricks to sound more 'jazzy'. He himself was trained by a black guy when he was in the States. He mentioned a good jazz piano teacher here, charging amazingly low rates.

The bulbs in my lava lamp have been constantly blowing. I just went back to my room a few minutes ago, turned on my lava lamp (which had a brand new bulb from IKEA), and it not only blew, when I tried to unscrew it, it broke into pieces with smoke coming out of it. Somebody get me an extra night light, quick! I'll be playing some loud music tonight, all right.

I guess I should try to sleep now.

I'm getting baptised on Sunday, March 2 at St George's church at Minden Road, Singapore. Everybody's welcome to watch me get water drizzled down my head.

Correction. I might be changing the date to Sunday April 6, and the good news for everyone who's interested in attending, is that it MIGHT be at 10 am. I'll keep you updated.

It's funny how, three years ago, I was advocating all sorts of rights and practices in Gender class which were probably banned in the Bible. Two years ago, I went back to church regularly but didn't feel anything special about it. A year ago, I still had no concrete intention to become a Christian (baptism = outward sign).

Then I volunteered to design the new website, got to know the folks at church better, decided to attend Alpha, and ... well, here I am.

Gripe, gripe, gripe. I was able to access my site at work yesterday afternoon, but not at home last night. I suspect a DNS update lag on different networks.

Anyway...

Out today: Nielsen reiterates on website real estate.

The new Movable Type 2.6 should be out anytime this week, if my calculations are correct.

Recently discovered: No War Blog. Independent weblogs are perfect for this sort of thing, really - providing analysis without having to worry about breaching state policies and commercial interests. Well, not as much as traditional media at least.

Kottonwool just drew my attention to the new Nokia 3650. Unusual interface, but the possibilities are almost endless - as far as we can imagine today.

Some of you have noticed that this site was (once again) down, over the weekend.

This was because my web host screwed up big time.

You see, I own two domain names. One is vantan.org, the other is a dormant account which hasn't been used for anything yet. I asked them to RENEW vantan.org and switch the dormant account to a new host called AddAction. They wrote back saying, OK, tell us what the new nameservers are. I sent the details to them, specifying that it was for my OTHER domain name.

Instead, they switched vantan.org's nameservers and left the other domain alone. I found this out when I checked INTERNIC's registry over the weekend. I wrote back saying, hey, vantan.org is down. You got my requests mixed up. Please switch them back ASAP.

It took them another day to reply to me, and even more time for this site to get back online. My email was down as well, and what's worse, nothing bounced back to the senders so they won't know that I didn't get their emails.

My web host didn't even apologise for the two-day outage after fixing the problem. All they said in their final email to me was, they've 'made the changes as requested'. They used to be able to apologise. So much for their legendary service. If I had an e-commerce site hosted by them, I'd sue for two days of lost business.

So anyway, please resend me any emails I might have missed over the weekend. Sorry and thanks.

The time is 10.43pm. I am now downloading the current/old St George's website as a backup (in case things go terribly wrong later).

11.06pm. The old site has been backed up. I have uploaded a placeholder page while I replace old with new.

11.36pm. Making some amendments before uploading virtually all the new files.

11.48pm. Uploading the new files.
There's an argument on BBC going on right now. Muslim cleric (presumably extremist) and the host of the show, from opposite ends of the spectrum. I hope nobody gets killed.

1.14 am. More amendments and uploads.

Some content is still pending. Check it out, anyway: www.stgeorges.org.sg.

Dang, Netscape 7 doesn't seem to recognise the margin spacing I've given the content. But it renders fine in IE and Opera. Any suggestions?

I'm sleepy. I'll leave it as it is tonight and see what the others think tomorrow, at the office.

I was shopping for a new domain name for my good pal Van Heng, when I decided to do a WHOIS on Microsoft. And you won't believe what the hackers have done to their registry. This is a sample of what was listed on their server WHOIS (with additional insights from me, in brackets):

MICROSOFT.COM.Z-IS-THE-BEST-Z.IFUD.COM (If these guys love Microsoft so much, why are they hacking their registry?)

MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.LIVE.FOREVER.BECOUSE. UNIXSUCKS.COM
(Allll riiiight...)

MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.CRASH.IN.6MN.ORG
(hmm I'm sure that's happened to my Windows OS before)

MICROSOFT.COM.WILL.BE.BEATEN.WITH.MY.SPANNER.NET
(Ah, this one likes a little S&M)

MICROSOFT.COM.WANTS.U.TO.HAXM.COM
(Ooh yes I see it's happened many times)

MICROSOFT.COM.WANADOODOO.COM
(Don't! Don't!)

MICROSOFT.COM.SHOULD.GIVE.UP. BECAUSE.LINUXISGOD.COM
(Okay. Linux is cool)

MICROSOFT.COM.RAWKZ.MUH.WERLD.MENTALFLOSS.CA
(Canadian hacker?)

MICROSOFT.COM.OHMYGODITBURNS.COM
(I know XP's fast, but this is too much)

MICROSOFT.COM.IS.NOT.SEXYCOOL.ORG
(They just need a little TLC)

MICROSOFT.COM.IS.A.STEAMING.HEAP.OF. F***ING-BULLSHIT.NET
(This guy is pretty direct. Sorry for the bad language, I have censored it accordingly)

MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.TEH.GAY.OMFGLOL.COM
(Can someone please decipher this for me?)

MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.ITS.OWN.CRACKLAB.COM
(Well the Cracklab better be doing something about you, young man.)
[ Update: Hey, this link exists! ]

MICROSOFT.COM.HAS.A.PRESENT.COMING.FROM. HUGHESMISSILES.COM
(I certainly hope that wasn't from Osama or Saddam)

MICROSOFT.COM.FILLS.ME.WITH.BELLIGERENCE.NET
(I can see that, fella)

The new St George's website will be up soon. As in, real soon. The folks at church need a new site to host their forthcoming activities like Alpha and Friendship Sunday.

In the meantime, click around the old site before it gets replaced. Try not to get lost >;-)

Back to working on the new site. *Yawn*

I think my rights as a web designer have been blatantly disregarded of late, so allow me to draw some attention to an article on how (NOT) to work with designers. Better communication, understanding and support = better creative output, I say.

Cheers to Kottonwool Kim for mentioning this article.

As for me, I think I need to be firmer in my decision-making and not allow other people to keep on changing their schedules. I was spoon fed at Eyeball, with my schedule all planned out by the web coordinators. Now I have more independence - tempered by a greater propensity for panic attacks. What I do (until I find a more meaningful vocation) often lands me smack at the end of the production line, so if content isn't in on time or clients change their minds, I'm screwed.

It isn't fair.

Back to the church website *yawn*.

This morning, I left home a little earlier so I could post a Chinese New Year card to Little Dan as promised. Then I headed towards the bus stop, only to find that I'd forgotten to put my farecard back in my wallet. I decided to go back home to retrieve it.

While I was waiting for the traffic lights to change, someone came up next to me and I realised it was Winnie, one of my juniors from university. We both confessed we were late for work, and we ended up talking rubbish just like in the old Bristol days. Just as we were crossing the road, I saw my bus pulling up to the bus stop - which I had just left.

Classic Murphy's. It would usually take 20 minutes or more for the next bus to arrive, which would make me VERY late. After picking up my farecard, I stepped out of the house and it started to rain on me at once. It was like having 'LOSER' written on my forehead.

I decided to take a taxi. Fortunately, despite the rain I arrived at the office in just ten minutes. Then the fun began. I discovered I had to complete two interactive ecards in just as many days, preferably. I didn't think that was very fair, so I wrote something rude to my boss.

Just before hitting 'send', I rephrased the email.

Then I rephrased the rephrased email.

It sounded a little more polite, so I sent it off. My boss reviewed the deadline and gave me until early next week to complete the Flash. Hallelujah.

After sulking my way through work, grappling with Actionscript beyond the depths of my comprehension, my mum called and we went out for dinner. I had half a plate of Yu Sheng to myself, which was good. I bought a birthday present for Weihui, and some more books for myself.

Not that I have time to read them until I complete my Bible Studies homework AND church website.

Now I've just received a nice email from a new reader. Hooray.

Make my day. Please.

This is a really clever way of bringing the game to us. Watch how the last match progressed online, using Flash.

The server hosting my website is having its hard drive replaced. So if your emails to me have bounced back recently, kindly resend them.

If we continue to have problems I think I might just shift to another web host. But database transfers are so tedious. Tsk, tsk.

Sister update: Vicki has changed her mind about MSG after three days of eating boarding school food, consuming her first bowl of instant noodles.

Site update: Over the last two months I've tried and tested two completely new designs for this weblog, but now I don't like either of them. Back to the drawing board.

St George's update: Ricky and I went through the second half of the soon-to-be-launched website this afternoon. Some content pending. He thinks it's 95% done, which is more than I can say for my Bible Studies homework.

My sister is living in a resort, I say. The food is great (while the parents are around anyway), the teachers are pleasant, the rooms are bright and new, and the pantry/lounge area looks like a service apartment, as you can see from the photo above.

It's like, the education is incidental. Heh.

We only had a few hours to go shopping, so all I bought myself was a pair of shoes, and a few goodies for my colleagues. Dad and I spent one morning at a driving range. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and met up with Vicki's guardians. And ... that was it for CNY in Perth.

I have some nice photos to put up but I'm too lazy to do an album. Funny how, two years ago, doing online photo galleries was a big part of my job. Anyway, if you know of a good PHP photo album I can easily install, please post a comment.