Posting comments

I realized today that comments were disabled on this blog (not that people actually write any coments ^^;).  I guess it was disabled when I upgraded Wordpress.  Anyway, it's on again.

Anime

I've been getting back into anime recently and have been catching up on a number of series as well as revisiting old ones.  This weekend I re-watched Samurai Deeper Kyo after getting the box set.  The first time I watched it, the translation was horrible and I couldn't quite figure out what was happening at the end.  With better translation, this series is definitely more enjoyable!  The voice acting for Kyo is pretty amazing.  There are a lot of famous voice actors that fans of anime will quickly recognize.
I've also been trying to catch up on Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha.  The first season turned out to be quite good and I enjoy the characters and story so far.

Both series are worth checking out but each is very different in feel to the other.

New PC

I finally bit the bullet and decided to replace my old (but still reliable) pentium 2 Linux box. I have one computer with the Antec Sonata case and it's very quiet, but this time I wanted something small, quiet yet still be powerful to last me for a while. I decided to build my own using a Shuttle PC barebone system. I picked the SN95G5V3 since I wanted to go with a AMD 64 processor and I didn't want to invest in a new PCI-E video card when I had an extra AGP card lying around.

I picked up a AMD 3500, Pioneer DVD burner ($60), Seagate 500GB SATA HDD ($270), and 1gig Cosair DDR memory module (single so I can add another gig later on without having to dump this one). The price was decent and it took me about an hour to put everything together. Now, the only problem is that I have no OS for it...

I plan on running Linux on it, of course, but I haven't downloaded it yet so here I sit with a pretty awsome little machine and not being able to turn it on! ^^;

Mail redirect for Thunderbird

Eudora has a nice feature that lets users redirect email to another account and now I stumbled across an extension that allows Thunderbird to do the same thing:

http://mailredirect.mozdev.org/ 

Postgres

It's late at night so what am I doing...? Reading up on Postgres, of course! Postgres is an open-source relational database that has been around for a long time, but initially it was a very academic project that was somewhat difficult to install and use. That was about 3-4 years ago and since then it has made a huge amount of progress. A lot of people use mysql because it is (1) fast, (2) easy to use, and (3) easy to install. I think (2) and (3) are two of the big factors in its popularity. Performance is also an factor, I'm sure, but how many small website that uses MySQL are really hit by performance issues where they can notice the difference between MySQL and some other database?

Last year, I decided to try out the latest release of Postgres (8.0) on a Linux box, and instead of using a pre-built package, I decided to install it from source! This was what I use to do with MySQL, too. Well, after downloading the source package and running the simple command everything was up and running! It felt as easy if not easier then installing MySQL.

This weekend, following a memory upgrade to my notebook, I decided to try installing Postgres again but this time on a Windows(tm) machine. Postgres now has a native windows port and an installer. One click to to start the setup followed by a few clicks of the "OK" button and Postgres is now running on my notebook. So simple...

There has been a lot of misconceptions about Postgres left from people's experience 5 years ago. 5 years is like another era in Internet time. I think I'm going to use Postgres wherever I use to use MySQL. I'll update my experience with this database as I work with it more.

My techie weekend

Heading into the weekend, I decided that I needed to get in touch with my techie side. ^^ I've been focused a lot on process and project planning at work recently and really needed to step away and let my mind concentrate on something else. I had a list of ideas that I wanted to do and I did get a good start on them.

I spent a lot of time this weekend reading about GAIM development as well as programming with Mozilla. GAIM is more straight forward but I really need to get a better grasp of GTK+ programming before I feel that I can make any headway. I played with the source a little and got the environment set up and I'm now working to understand how things work. I realize that GNOME have been working to establish a standard UI and best practices, but I still think the look of it is... not that great....

I also spent time looking at XUL programming and Mozilla. There's some interesting technologies associated with this, but the documentation on them is confusing. Part of it might be the terminology and also because projects are moving so fast that a lot of documentation are out-dated. Frankly, I wasn't sure where to start.

JavaScript have come a long way from when I first used it and the DOM specification have brought web development to a new level. It excited me as I was studying this to see how much more mature the field is and what it is capable of. Web development is now so far from just doing page layout with HTML and adding some roll-over images that everyone should recognize that web developers (truly good ones) requires the full set of software programming skills as any other software engineer. In fact, at work, I've stopped using the term "web developer" and more "frontend engineer" because the tasks these individuals are doing are programming projects. Traditional software engineers can also do these tasks but they would have to spent a considerable amout of time reading the many standards and specifications.

I've also spent a lot of time dealing with spammers. Man, I really dislike spammers. I'm ok with legitmate companies sending out emails, but spammers that tries to flood you and invade your privacy are parasites. Spam is one of the reason I changed email clients, upgraded this blog and spent part of my weekend changing my slickedit forum. When will spammers get that people don't read their crap?

Yahoo! UI library and Design Pattern

Although I'm a little late in writing about this, but the Yahoo Developer's Network continues to release new products to the community. The User Interface Library has been released with the BSD license to allow building modern interactive websites. In addition, Yahoo released their Design Pattern Library.

I hope things like these will help demonstrate that Yahoo is indeed a tech company.

How we organize information.

I was writing in my pocket notebook (the paper kind) when a co-worker jokingly asked me where is the search function? I started thinking about the increasing amount of information (especially in electronic form) that we're faced with and how we organize them. Then I started to wonder... do we need to organize anymore? Before computers, it was necessary to organize information using some kind of system like a file cabinet, but it was quickly discovered that no matter how we organize not everything fit into the system nicely. The system didn't scale and so creative cross-index schemes was needed to deal with all the information. Similiar methodology was applied to computer systems from file systems to basic things such like how we organize emails, but we've now hit the inherent limitation of this method. There is now simply too much information for a person to try to organize.

That brings me back to my original question. Is it necessary to organize information at all? Can we rely only on searching algorithms? When I look for an email, I often use search instead of navigating the directory structure I've set up for storing email. When I look for a file, I often use "locate" or "find" instead of relying on my understanding of the directory structure. Once I stepped away from trying to figure out where a particular piece of information should go, my productivity improved because I only need to focus on how I can retrieve the information when I needed it .

Does that mean we don't need to organize information anymore? Should every file or email just be in a single big directory and we would just use a search algorithm? My answer is no. Ultimately we still need some form of organization because of our need to process and sort information. Our brain needs some sort of structure to aid it, but it is clear that setting up categories and expecting everything to fit nicely in one of the pre-defined categories doesn't work.

I'm starting to see the next generation of categorization that uses the computer's ability to search while letting users still browse and have a structured view of the information. "Tagging" is a term popularized by Flickr to allow users to assign keywords to pictures. Pictures that have the same tag (or a set of tags) forms a collection, but because an item can have multiple tags a picture can fit into many different collections depending on the views and needs of the user. EverNote, a note taking program, doesn't use tags but it represent a similiar concept using the abilities of the computer. In addition to setting up traditional categories, EverNote also allows users to define "keyword" categories which allows users to define attributes of the notes that should fall into those categories. For example, I might write a note to describe "company holiday party" and instead of trying to decide whether it goes into "holiday events" and "company events", my rules will fit the note into both categories. Thus, depending on why I'm looking for the note, I will go to the category most natural to my needs.

I'm still adjusting to this method, but I'm excited to see more applications adapt the method and see its effects.

How true this is...

from Death by Risk Adversion

Free lunch?

So some telecom companies are saying how companies like Google are using their lines for free while they spent money building the network lines. What a bogus claim. Haven't those companies been selling the ability to access sites like Google as part of their marketing? It is also very hard for me to imagine that these companies aren't already making money in some way from their data lines. I, for one, do not get my access to the Internet for free. I pay a monthly fee to my ISP which happens to be... a telecom company.  It feels like double charging to me.