March 2006 Archives

Why do exciting things happen when my server is unstable?

According to my Mint stats, this site made it onto the home page of Tailrank for my previous post on CSS support in email programs. There was also a referral from the Alpha version of Measuremap (bought over by Google), which is still off-limits to the public. Now that's got me curious.

Lastly but definitely not least, here's three cheers to the talented folks at Manic, where vantan.org is currently listed as a 'random fave'.

[Update: Zeldman.com has brought over 2,000 referrals my way. ]

... is being able to file my Income Tax on a Mac.

Using Firefox.

And doing it in 1 minute.

I must qualify that this happened after several attempts to log in. First, using Firefox - when the system kept taking me back to the home page instead - then Safari, where nothing progressed, then Internet Explorer, where the home page layout got busted and I had to scroll horizontally to click on the Login button.

After entering my password, the page just hung for minutes and the Submit button had been de-activated, so I couldn't do anything but quit the browser and try again with Firefox. That was when everything suddenly worked. It was erratic, but I've done my duty as a citizen and that's what matters.

Looking at the page code, they're using more styles now ... but they can do so much more with stylesheets than simply colouring table row backgrounds.

But yeah. Overall, this is progress.

[Update: I went to another public web page on the site and realised they could cut down on a lot of code, still. Lookie here:

Full-sized screen shot]

My web host has informed me that the server CPU load hit 99.9% because of trackback spam sent to this website.

If it continues tomorrow (which is likely), my account will be suspended indefinitely. I have to do a lot of things to fix it and back up all my data. And that of everyone else hosted on my account.

See you around - hopefully when I'm next back online.

This puts the icing on the cake - Someone looked at a Microsoft stylesheet and noticed a most amusing comment. See the original screen shot.

So they're human, after all.

However, I just checked the stylesheet in question and it appears that all references to 'stupid hack' have been removed. Hush now.

Technorati Tags: microsoft IE CSS

I've always wondered to what extent the different email programs support CSS. Well, here's the answer. Thanks to Jim Barraud (aka van6ogh) who posted this most useful link in Ma.gnolia.

The article's pretty thorough - they even covered Lotus Notes! To quote,

You can have a field day as long as you're not sending to Notes. It offers dismal property support that includes only very basic text manipulation.

Now I feel vindicated. It's heart-wrenching when my CSS-only layouts get totally wrecked after importing a HTML file into Notes. However, it works better when the styles are embedded in the same document, not linked as a separate CSS file.

Technorati Tags: css, email

I was checking out the BusinessWeek Online feed using Rojo and saw this headline and blurb:

What Will Google Use $2 Billion For?

As if it doesn't already mint money, Google's raising $2.1 billion more in a new offering. You sure don't need this kind of money to develop Web services, do you? So maybe the question is, how many more Web 2.0...

Two headlines below, was this piece of news:

Facebook for Sale; But $2 Billion?

So says our Steve Rosenbush in a story today. Apparently, the social-networking site turned down an offer for $750 million. Even that's way more than the $580 million News Corp. paid for the much larger MySpace last year...

Hmmm! Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

This site (and other domains hosted on my account) went down a couple hours ago, due to our mt-tb.cgi file(s) being pummelled, presumably by spam. We're investigating the source of the problem. The web host has warned that they won't allow us to down the whole shared server again.

So just in case you see a 'Suspension' notice again, no, I didn't put any nude photos of myself on this website.

And no, this post won't be accepting any trackbacks. In the spirit of things.

The BBC has compiled a list of '50 things to eat before you die'. How many have you eaten? I scored 41/50.

Funny how some dishes are named specifically, but others are lumped together like Thai, Chinese, Greek and Mexican food.

What else should have been included on this list? I'm thinking escargot and buah keluak (a black nut often cooked with curry/meat). I tried the latter at Soul Kitchen where the paste was placed in a bowl. I wanted it all to myself, but had to be polite.

1. Our words. We'll say something we didn't mean, or get proven wrong. It happens when we can't bite our tongues in time.
2. Our hats. Even worse than just eating words, because we'd usually say "I'll eat my hat if you ever succeed in blah blah [add negative comment here]." It's a serious undertaking ;-)
3. Humble pie. A culmination of the above.
4. Air. You may find that strange but we call it 'jiak hong' in the Hokkien dialect, and it means taking a vacation.

Pah. I tried re-installing Brandon Fuller's MTValidator plugin and kept on wondering why it no longer worked on my site. It would say my pages were invalid when most of them were in fact, valid.

Then I looked at the requirements list and discovered that I had an older version of Perl. Not assuming that's the only problem but I find it strange that it used to work a couple years ago and now it doesn't.

Anyway, I managed to successfully install Formatlist, a MT plugin that adds bullet and number formatting. Let's see how it works and if it produces valid code:

1. Testing line one
2. Testing line two
3. Testing line three

Wow! it works. I typed three lines of code, selected them all, then hit the button and it immediately encased each line with the necessary tags. Nifty. (Seal of approval)

Next, I installed SmartyPants. Can you 'see' the difference in my quotation marks?

Glad to see that Gmail has finally added a 'Delete' button next to the 'Report spam' button. I tend to delete as many mails (if not more) than mark them as spam, and that dropdown menu wasn't very convenient. I also like the 'View as HTML' feature which saves me from downloading documents I only want to preview.

Which leads to my theory that this is only a precursor of more things to come, seeing how Google has acquired Writely. Wouldn't it be cool if you could not only preview a Word document as HTML, but also make amendments and email it back?

I'm now looking at some old attempts at redesigning this site, and laughing at most of them.

I was too tired to report it earlier ... but I won!

More importantly, we raised over $3000 for the old folks' home.

Just checked my Mint stats and found a re-surge in referrals from Zeldman.com due to his new Ma.gnolia bar*. A friendly 'hey!' to all newcomers. I just signed up with Ma.gnolia myself. It looks much neater than Del.icio.us.

[Update: Since there were no Ma.gnolia groups for 'Singapore', I've just created the Web Standards Singapore Group. Membership is open to all. ]

In other news, I will be singing at the Hilton Hotel Singapore for charity tonight. How this has happened is a long story, but the voting money goes to an old folks' care centre that my company adopted. I'll be having a simple lunch - no spices, no fried food. Then I'm going for some beauty treatment! ;-)

* A pun that some Singaporeans may get - we had a famous Magnolia Snack Bar (our parents may have dated there!) that was restored briefly when Times the Bookshop was revamped at Centrepoint.

Somehow the flight back to Singapore felt less gruelling than my flight to the US. Maybe it was because I felt the worst was over and I had already gone through the two transits, so I knew what to expect. I also stopped counting down the hours, because a lot of hours are involved and you get depressed just thinking about it.

However there are some things I learnt from my trip:

It's eleven plus am, and as I'm packing (or making some attempt to do so), I'm listening to the news on TV. A fourplex in North Austin caught fire and 21 people are homeless. However, firemen prevented the fire from spreading to neighbouring units.

Another piece of news is that Cisco Systems is sponsoring a free wireless network for downtown Austin. Maybe when I next return to SXSW (what a tone of certainty I have!) I'll get to try out the service.

Back to packing... If the shopping at Highland Mall is good, I may not post anything new for a while. Ta ta!

I've been living in a hotel in Austin, Texas for a week now. And on some days, the tap water tastes weird. I thought the pipes were musty. However, sometimes the water tastes fine so I wasn't sure how exactly to complain to the hotel about this.

The weirdest thing was when I purposely tasted a mug full of water before popping an efferverscent Vitamin C tablet into it. The water tasted fine.

However I let the Vit-C water sit for a while as I was furiously blogging away on my laptop. Later I drank from the mug - and the musty taste returned!

The plot thickened. Then, on a whim, I Googled around and found that yes, Austin water does taste funny sometimes. It wasn't the plot that thickened, but the amount of dead algae.

In the summer, it's been reported, the Colorado river slows down, giving algae the opportunity to grow. When it dies, it releases an odour and taste. Warm weather is said to be another main factor causing the algae to flourish.

And locals here in Austin have mentioned that the weather has been hot lately.

Anyway, in 2004 the Austin Water Utility issued a statement assuring citizens that this grassy-tasting water is harmless.

Neighbouring towns in Texas also have the same problem - if you have hot weather, you'll have funny tasting water.

No wonder the hotel was trying to sell US$3 bottles of water in my room.

Lucian left for the airport this afternoon, so I hung around and started chatting with some other participants who were also not satisfied with the way our panel discussion was going. Then everybody packed the hall for sci-fi author Bruce Sterling who said lots of funny things about the world and America (think Michael Moore) and received the only standing ovation I've seen at SXSW.

Then I walked around town, taking photos of my last evening in Austin. I had dinner at the Rio Colorado (good, cheap Mexican food and burgers and really polite service), bought some souvenirs and took a cab back to the hotel.

Tomorrow I'm thinking of checking out at noon (the stipulated time), leaving my bags with the hotel, walking to the nearest Target (over 5km away)shopping centre for a look-see. Along the way I'll have lunch and walk back to the hotel. Then I'll catch a cab to the airport at 3pm, and fly at 6pm.

There doesn't seem to be much left for me to do in Austin.

Finally after all these years I got to meet Jeffrey Zeldman face to face. He's a really nice guy and I was flattered that he remembered who I am.

I told him we started a Web Standards Group in Singapore but it kinda fizzled out. But now I'm all inspired to get our group going again!

My hotel room's high-speed internet connection didn't work when I got back past midnight today (we were at the uber cool Fray Cafe storytelling sessions - check out my pics in Flickr.com).

I called the helpline and it turns out there was a problem with the hotel's internet connection, not my laptop. Thank God. I didn't want to find out that I had damaged company property! So anyway, they said they'd tell the hotel about it and that I should keep on refreshing my browser because the connection could be restored at any time.

Another 15 minutes went by and still it wasn't working, so I gave up and went down to the lobby which has free Wi-fi. Uploaded my load of pics to Flickr. Now I'm done with that, done with this post and it's time to go to sleep. I'm attending some interesting panels tomorrow.

Forgot to bring Photoshop with you to SXSW? Don't fear - Pixoh is here.

Pixoh is an AJAX (phweet!) application that lets you easily resize, crope, rotate images and save them to various image formats. I managed to crop and save one of my Flickr images in a matter of seconds.

Mark G was showing me his favourite Firefox extensions and I was mightily impressed. It's been a while since I last installed any new things in Firefox.

One of the most awesome tools is the Tab Preview. You hover over a tab in Firefox and see a screen shot of the web page.

I checked out the Extensions page and found another gem by Performancing, which allows you to post to your weblog via a built-in editor. It's pretty convenient. What I like most about it, is that it automatically adds Technorati tags. Like this!

Technorati Tags: Firefox, extensions, Technorati

I've never blogged so much in just one day. And it'll be like this every day unless my fingers drop off or my laptop explodes. Visit websg.org for the latest SXSW updates.

In between, Lucian and I had a nice light lunch at a Mexican cafe. Great service, good prices.

I'm gonna upload lots of pics to Flickr right now, but thought I should just blog about this first.

#1 line: "I was linked on Zeldman.com". I said this only to the academic guy in the kilt, actually.

Standard line: "We're from Singapore." coupled with either "That's 14 hours' time difference!" or "It takes over half a day to fly here."

Not so sexy pickup line: "Ve vork for ze government."

More info over at Break Bread with Brad.

Checked into the DoubleTree Hotel Austin in the early evening. It's one of the older hotels, as I had heard, but thankfully it's been recently renovated and my non-smoking room is clean and well-furnished.

After I left my bags in the room, I had dinner with Mark and talked football (Premier League, Champions League, World Cup) and geeky things. We ate at Hut's, possibly the most famous burger joint in Austin. The burgers lived up to their reputation. We each ordered a diet Coke and they gave us two huge glasses, about 0.75 litres each. And refills were free. I couldn't finish my glass.

More office work coming in, and more photos to upload. Ta ta for now!

Technorati Tags: sxsw, food, austin

I woke up late this morning, had a quick chat with Katie and went back to sleep. Woke up again, washed my hair, changed, made myself a cheese sandwich (yum!) and continued to sit at the dining table with my laptop, watching the workers move in and out. I'm good at doing that.

Rosie and Bonnie are now lying at my feet. Both dogs are asleep. I'm listening to a symphony of doggy snores.

Argh, I'm running through the schedule, and there are too many good panels clashing at the same time.

I wish I had Hermione's Time-turner pendant. Then at least I could attend everything I want!

Update: I've made my choice.

After a short but comfortable flight from Los Angeles, I'm now in Austin, staying over at Kristen and Mark's new place. It's coming along nicely!

Finally got to meet Rosie and Bonnie. We're going out for dinner soon. Ta!

Update: Had a most satisfying dinner at Salt Licks. Managed to finish (nearly) a full slab of baby black ribs. The ribs were huge! If that was a baby, I'd like to see an adult. Oh, I forgot ... this is Texas.

Aghghgh! Look at who's performing after the screening of the movie, 'Before the Music Dies'.

I'm a big fan of Erykah Badu because she's different from the typical R&B/soul diva. Her lyrics can be pretty 'cleva' too (as she says she is, in a song)- even if some tracks are, as a friend puts it, 'esoteric'.

I also have a Branford Marsalis album, Requiem, which can be a bit abstract but there are a couple of really good tracks in there.

And with Jazzy Jeff spinning - well I guess it's gonna be a good party.

I'm pleased to announce the launch of websg.org, a joint initiative by Tribolum and Vantan.

We will be covering SXSWi on this spanking new blog, among other things.

You have to give it to Lucian for his kickass design. I'm sure Zeldman would be proud ;-)

To non-techies who don't know what I'm talking about, this is with relation to a previous post about a special lifetime web hosting offer (Textdrive), combined with an enterprise-level sharing service (Joyent) and secure file storage (Strongspace).

I haven't really done much with my 2GB Textdrive hosting account. I've yet to receive a Strongspace login id, but at least they wrote us an email to explain why - because they're upgrading to new servers earlier than planned. Which is good.

That leaves me with Joyent to play around with, and it's fairly nifty, although at this point in my life I don't find it essential. I like the fact that I can tag my emails and files with keywords, and create smart groups comprising specific tags.

If you wonder why Textdrive doesn't show many screen shots, that's because there isn't much to show of their self-made control panel, which is pretty plain and iconless - nothing like Cpanel. And because it doesn't have Cpanel, it doesn't have Fantastico, which is an auto-installer (meaning that you can create Content Management Systems, blogs, forums and other whatnots in an instant). Textdrive is obviously targetted at people who don't need help installing things ;-)

I've realised that we shouldn't get so caught up doing tedious little technical things - which most people won't notice in the end. But oh well, my money's in, and I'll make the most of the generous gigabytes of space I've acquired.

Interestingly, another friend's web host is also making a lifetime web hosting offer. With Cpanel. This could be a new trend in web hosting. Good for people with money to spare, provided they're also confident that the companies involved are trustworthy and creditworthy as well.

After months of ding-donging, my order of Reason 3.0 finally arrived. I will post more updates in my Korg Blog, since this is pretty geeky-music tech stuff.

Update 3/6/2006: I received a query for a Reason 3.0 registration key. I'm sorry but I don't do this sort of thing. You should purchase a legal copy of Reason 3.0 and support the developers of this software.

Support this new blog on Singapore history.

Hmm ... if I had time I'd write something myself! But I'm slogging all the way through this weekend until I fly to Austin ... and even then I'll be working on my laptop. Phew!