the Infor

An interesting post from Read/WriteWeb

2006-05-28T16:58:00.000+01:00

A post with a title “Firefox vs IE Smackdown!” really made me laugh out!

Just imagine Ben Goodger (Lead Engineer on Firefox who also works for Google) saying: “Now talks about designing and developing for IE – ‘we know it can be a little frustrating’. Discusses CSS issues and shows that IE7 has fixed all but one of the 25 bugs they identified ‘that drive developers crazy’” while Tony Chor (Group Program Manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team) being present (seems like that) in a conference! I mean how funny is that!

A battle between Google and eBay is coming?

2006-04-21T14:55:00.000+01:00

According to ZDNet News, eBay is feeling pressure from Google because "After years of working closely with the search giant, eBay last year became alarmed as Google started assaulting its turf in multiple ways, including creation of a competing classified-advertising service," the report said. So it turned to Microsoft and Yahoo, another two giants in IT industry, looking for a way to survive (everybody knows what google does all the time, so I dare not say eBay is going to win). However, given the huge customer base and years of excellent reputation, Google still need time before it can really kick eBay's ass. Well, I think so.

Can your Internet Exploer Pass A Spoofing Vulnerability Test?

2006-04-06T22:12:00.000+01:00

A vulnerability in Internet Explorer has been discovered by Hai Nam Luke. This vulnerability could be taken use to conduct phishing attacks. Luke supplies a link on website for testing purpose. Once open the page linked, an address " http://www.google.com/" is shown in address bar of Internet Explore and contents of the page looks exactly like "Google", however, the page changes seconds later into another one with the address of "Google" remain in the address bar, which means you could have been filling your credit card information or any other private information already if somebody else has built a fake website taking use of this vulnerability, and there is no way you can notice the spoofing. Version of the Internet Explorer I'm using is 7, so I assume those old versions under 7 are all vulnerable. Test link can be find here, and also method to solve the problem. Test it, fix it and be careful!

Happy First CSS Naked Day!

2006-04-05T12:37:00.000+01:00

Happy first annual css naked day everyone! Now there are at least 545 websites showing their <body> online. Some still maintain great usability because of good semantic markup and hierarchy structure, of course including mine ;) however some are a little bit shy without their "cloths". For why semantic markup is important, please read Matthew Paul Thomas, then you can have an idea.

IT people have sense of fun ;)

2006-04-02T21:33:00.000+01:00

It seems such an interesting idea to have an annual css naked day for web masters to delete style sheets for just one day, 5th April, and let websites naked on shown without design! It's also a test to see does your website was implemented with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures. It has got quite number of supporters by now, and of course including me :) People interested in this "day" can go to http://www.dustindiaz.com/naked-day/ and leave your name, website address to be one of us! So, let websites rock and roll and be naked ;) but remember just for one day!

Am I posting to 3 blogs at the same time ? Yes I am...

2006-04-02T03:47:00.000+01:00

Well, it's not a cool thing to do! The reason is so obvious : people from far east, my country, cann't see! after i tried from two different service providers, i have to give up and came out the idea to setup my own standing alone blog site, theInfor. And here are the other two hosted by blog service provider: theinfor.blogspot.com and theinfor.wordpress.com . Articles in future will be posted to these three blogs at the same time.

template change

2006-03-31T17:34:00.000+01:00

The old one doesn't feel so right to what I've been posting. So I decide to change another more serious template. Some features added before are lost, but doesn't matter. Will redo them later.

Another website I just developed

2006-03-13T17:55:00.000Z

After a month's work, I finished another website(www.baoweimantou.com) which I planned to do just after watching a movie called "the promise" directed by Kaige Chen. Obviously, the movie is crap, however, what made me pissed was the arrogance and self-deceiving way that Kaige Chen behaved. You are not a hero or at least a good director if everyone paid for your movie wanted their money back. And I don't know any other movie which has ever made that "miracle"! Weeks later there was a short movie make fun of his incapability of directing the movie, which was god damned true, and the brilliant author of that short movie became the target of the so called director. He threatened he would let lawcourt solve this issue and made insulting announcement in public. And after that, Mr Chen flied to Germany for a ceremony and showed his rubbish movie to european audience, which any other chinese people prefered not ever happen. Comment he brought back from europe was also, crap! So I decided to make this website running, no matter whether it is too later since people are put their attention away from this disreputable director and his rubbish movie or there is nothing this website can change. But there never was a website devoted into criticizing one sing movie, but "the promise" made it. So again, Kaige Chen, listen, your movie "the promise", as well as the way you behaved, are all CRAP!!!

Top ten cheap domain name registrars from "About"

2006-03-05T01:41:00.000Z

I came accross the list below on http://onlinebusiness.about.com when I tried to find out which company offers the most cheap domain name registration service. According to the article, the top 10 cheap Domain Name Registrars are: 1) NetFirms $4.95 for one-year .com registration 2) Yahoo $4.98 for one-year .com registration 3) EV1Servers $5.99 for one-year .com registration 4) Hostway $6.95 for one-year .com registration 5) Stargate $6.95 for one-year .com registration 6) Interland $7.95 for one-year .com registration 7) Web.com $7.95 for one-year .com registration 8) AIT Domains $7.99 for one-year .com registration 9) Go Daddy $8.95 for one-year .com registration 10) RegisterFly $9.99 for one-year .com registration

An online shop I just developed

2006-02-20T15:45:00.000Z

I just finished developing an online shop for a UK based company who sell boxing sport facilities.The online shop's web address is : http://www.mammothsports.co.ukThe website is developed from Zen-cart online shop software http://www.zen-cart.com which is really powerful and also open source. The software supplies excellent support for customed page layout, self-defined business process, and also brilliant support for different payment methods.Contributed by the zen-cart community, lots of plug-ins are or being developed to improve the online business software. For mammoth sports project, manager of the company wanted to charge extra money if customers desided to pay through paypal (price of the products is quite low, and paypal make charges over transactions into the company's account) I took use of an "payment discount" plug-in and change the discount program code to realise the over charge function. Turned out working perfect!

Muslim protesting against cartoons satirizing Propher Mohammed, 7th Feb 2006, Manchester, UK

2006-02-07T17:35:00.000Z

Today let's talk about politics other than the Internet. A funny thing is, I was sitting on a bus this afternoon and suddently it just poped into my head that if I got a camera recoding everything aroud me, I might be able to catch something interesting. 10 minutes later, while the bus arrived muslim district on wilmslow road, I saw hundreds of muslim holding their religionary flags and some other stuff walking a march to the opposite direction. Some of them even slaped their own undressed chests in an orderly phalanx and shouted loutly at the same time. That's when I took this video.

Apparently, they were extremlly unhappy with the cartoons satirizing their Prophet Mohammed, published by a Danish cartoonist. The protests are now all over European. Protesters even set Danish embassies on fire. Although medias claimmed they were just following the "free speech" rules and doing nothing wrong, some critics from western countries had been blaming the medias failed to realize their speech would certainly affect muslim's religion emotions. It's like you have the rights to curse, but if you used it in a wrong way, apologizes might be the best way to solve the problems. On the other hand, a muslim (7th Feb, metro news) had pointed out some muslim's inappropriate behaviors, including burning the Danish embassies, being dressed like a suicide bomber and making death threats can do nothing good but just confirm the criticism in the cartoons.

So, a conclusion: You keep your free speech rights, and also your clear mind.

p.s. My voice was not in the discussion in video.

How to keep tracks with all your comments accross the blogosphere?

2006-02-06T02:58:00.000Z

If you are a busy blogger, or a busy reader of bloggers, you must be exhausted with openning different websites, searching the articles you commented, and checking if the conservation still going on. But now, with coComment's support, it is not an annoying problem to track all your's comments accross the blogosphere. As described by the team, there are 3 funtions worth a mention. 1. Capture:coComment supplies you facilities to manage all your comments that you let "coComment" keep track with in one place, and the work could be simply done by just clicking a button on Links column just before you press submit button. Next time you login to coComment, all the comments of those articles you participated in are supposed to be gathered together on a special page as "your conversations", and "that allows you to quickly see your comment and where it was posted, with a link to the original site". 2. Share:According to their official website, coComment also allow you to publish your comments accross the blogosphere on your own blog. Your visitors will be able to see where you have been commenting recently and learn the value you have added to those conservation. However, on one point I am doubting, why or will visitors be really interested in where you have recently being commenting? I mean except you are a very famous man or you made so great success in certain area, people want to know every conversation you have participated in because their curiosity, otherwise, they are usualy navigated from some other place and will left your blog just after reading certain articles. So from this point of view, it does not make that much sense to publish "your conversation" on your blog, again, if your blog is not that hot/popular! But there's also an idea, if a blog is a topic oriented, you can make a topic oriented conservation on puspose, and publish them on your blog, by doing this way, i believe there is bigger chance the added-value will finally come true. 3. Alert:Since this tool is still in development status up to now, I can just get some idea from the introduction on coComment's home page. The main idea is pretty much like a notifation tool to let user know what's been added to a "particular discussion in real time". The work the coComment group have done by now is impressive, the service is doing great and the work to convince people is also being done quite well. So, let's wait and see if it can be another "must have" for bloggers! ---------------------------------------------------------- another idea: will it be a good idea to let users define tags for their conversations? It can ease the search in future and also enrich the "share" function: visitors can choose a tag and only the conversation related with the tag would be displayed to them.

The funniest website I've ever seen

2006-02-02T17:19:00.000Z

I was browsing websites through links posted on "1000tags another stupid - brilliant idea" (Michael Arrington, The TechCrunch when I got into a site named "The Million Dollor Homepage". I sweared I laughed (well, smiled actually since I was in the library at the moment with people around me all reading) when I realized this was the funniest website I'd ever seen, not because the site is a tommy rot, just because it is a very "interesting" funny idea. The homepage is fullfilled with countless differently sized little tiny commercial images links laid one beside another tightly. There are no rules for page layout except "Be Full!". And of course there is rulls for obtainning a little space for laying your own image. You want it? $1 per pixel! It is obvious the website was already sold out and the founder, a young man, had made great success by building such a simple stuff. 1,000,000 pixels in all?! Definitely another millionare! The funniest one ;)

What's new about Windows Live Messenger

2006-01-30T21:12:00.000Z

I didn’t spend that much of time reading blogs about Windows Live Messenger, but I do have been using the new messenger, which has already left the “butterfly” family that caused lovely Leah Sniffed like a child ;-) I have to say a bunch of new features have come and are coming along with this new version are all very impressive (at least sound like that). 1. The first new feature that everyone will get to know at the first place is the new version allows users to define their own favorite color for messenger panel. 2. Another new feature is the Unified Contacts. I’d better refer to what Jen conclude in an email and posted by Marty. Unified Contacts is a new feature of Windows Live Messenger that combines your Windows Live Mail address book with your Windows Live Messenger contact list. Unified Contacts makes it easy to interact with all the people that are important to you using Windows Live Messenger, even if you don’t have an Instant Messaging address for them. In Windows Live Messenger, contacts from your address book automatically show up in your contact list with a grey contact card icon next to their name. They cannot see your status and you cannot instant message with them. You can add and edit address book contacts in Windows Live Messenger, including entering a birthday or phone number. If you have the appropriate information entered, you can email and call these contacts using Windows Live Messenger. 3. I didn’t notice users now can name their contacts nicknames. Then you won’t be bothered if your contacts so annoyingly keep change their IDs that sometimes you don’t have any clue: Who the hell is this productive ID-poet again?! After obtain the power to set a nickname, you can ignore all the following ID changes and, maybe, just name them ID-poet 1, ID-poet2, etc? LOL 4. Wow, finally, we can send offline messages and don't have to send emails instead when either you or your contacts are (appear) offline! 5. And what? PC-Phone call? I hope Microsoft can take over the huge potential market in China which Skype just be deprived due to those telecommunication companies shameless monopolization. Come on, rock and fight for people’s sake!

Sketch Image Search

2006-01-10T18:25:00.000Z

Sometimes when I was doing bits of image design work, I always want to search some images for further work as rough materials according to the contents. I have clear mind myself about what these images that I need should be like, such as a green eye or a people standing by certain gesture. Of course, I can "Google" it with terms that can represent the images characteristic the most. However, the fact is publishers of those images don't always name the picture in similar ways; a facetious photographer could possibly name a picture of a beautiful female’s eye as “am I a sexy man in that little heaven?” Undoubtedly, Google wouldn’t send that picture back to you no matter what term you are using except ones like “heaven”. So, as an alternative for searching images without considering what names of the images are, the sketch image search become available online from retrievr. It let users to draw a rough sketch on the drawing panel they provide, and then perform a matching between what the user just draw and what it has according to its index. Currently the index is mainly based on some of Flickr’s images. And as announced on the introduction page, the application is still an experimental service. However, it can work very well if the rough sketch supplied by users is drawn properly. The most important two factors that impact application’s performance are colour definition and shape of the sketch. I actually made some experiments, some of the results turned out to be very satisfying. For example, by just drawing a Cambridge blue dot on the panel, seconds later, I get several beautiful blue eyes shining on the page, whatever the images names are! I also draw a red heart-shaped pattern with little black dots added on it, and an image of strawberry came out just as expected! But there are limits of the application. Here is some introduction from the site: One thing to keep in mind is that retrievr doesn't do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you're drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won't get you one back (except your index only contains images of chairs). The same holds for corporate logos, icons &c. It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors. Another thing to know is that there's currently no way to specify the aspect ratio, so you have to rescale the image in your head (things that are close to the borders of the image you're thinking of should be close to the borders of your sketches), but that's really more of a missing feature of the drawing flashlet than an inherent problem. Sometimes it also helps to remove detail instead of adding it. Personally, I see retrievr more as an "exploration" tool than as a "search" tool, and it seems to work very well for that. Anyway, the publication of this site may mean a milestone in image search history. I hope the technology can rapidly grow up.

Feeling good to publish a duplicate ?

2006-01-07T17:34:00.000Z

What a shame (-_-!). A new Chinese website named dingr turned out to be designed (layout, icons, and functions) almost the same with one of the other famous web 2.0 website digg. The application is good and impressing; however, we are expecting new versions of the application rather than that with just a replacement of interface language, English to Chinese or whatever. Duplication is worth nothing! What makes the Dingr standing out by now is the language user base, the fact that tens of millions Chinese internet users make our “internet” activities localized in the language specific world. We are not dully learning new techniques, but how come we are always dully coming up with new ideas?! Instead, when a new application is published and earning high reputation, the first thing pops up in our heads is: copy it! Comparing with the wide spread of digg, which has already be integrated with many other different web applications, I am wondering when and how our own web applications, especially the dingr starts its next step: copy again or find its own way?