HK Junkcalls #2 on iTunes AppStore Hong Kong

I'm very pleased that "HK Junkcalls" is now #2 on iTunes AppStore Hong Kong. (Link to iTunes AppStore)

TED Talks: Living with Data

Very innovative stuff from India

Rexona-Stunt City

This ad is surely looks expensive to produce. From reddit.tv

My Twitter Python script

I know there are tons of twitter python script out there. Here is my simple python command line script to send twitter update:

import twitter, sys
api = twitter.Api()

USERNAME = 'YOUR_TWITTER_USERNAME'
PASSWORD = 'YOUR_TWITTER_PASSWORD'

api = twitter.Api(username=USERNAME, password=PASSWORD)

if len ( sys.argv ) > 1:
 message = sys.argv[1]
else:
 message = raw_input('Your twitter message: ')

status = api.PostUpdate( message )

You're going to need Python twitter installed, of course.

Dropping of 11 degrees over 15 hours

Attached above is the temperature chart from Hong Kong Observatory of dropping of 11 degrees. Quite a change for most people. Below is the temperature with relative humidity.

Bullet impacts at 1,000,000 frames per second

Cool videos from Make

[Stolen Goods Alert] Girlfriend lost an iPhone 2G

My girlfriend just lost or got stolen an iPhone 2G. Here is the specification:

iPhone 8GB (Part no. MA712LL/A)
Serial number: 7S745W0BWH8
IMEI: 011364001848800
ICCID: 89014103211491576298
Reason of loss: Lost/Stolen? in Mongkok, Hong Kong
Date of alert: 29 September 2009

If you have it, please let me know. No questions asked with rewards.

China Menu iphone app

Just found this cute Chine Menu iPhone app to figure your favorite Chinese food. Very interesting.

Direct link to iTunes.

Link list for today

• Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web
• Microsoft WebsiteSpark
• NYTimes: For First Time, AIDS Vaccine Shows Some Success in Trials
• BusinessWeek: The Kinds of Employees You Want to Hire
• Python: Meet diesel
  

Link list for today

• SimFinger
  and iShowU HD
• The death of the greatest human being who ever lived
  
• Linode - good alternative Xen host than Slicehost?
• A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

Push e-mail support for GMail/Google Apps

Google just flipped the switch on push e-mail support via Exchange protocol with Google Sync. Works well on iPhone even on GPRS.

Now it makes Yahoo! and Hotmail harder to compete?

Link list for today

• Techcrunch: We are supposed to change the world

Oliver Sacks: What hallucination reveals about our minds | Video on TED.com

Did you know 4.0

Apple brainwashing: How we do it

From Fake Steve

Link list for today

• Netcat how to from Hacker News
• guava-libraries - from Google
• Techcrunch: Alibaba Turns 10 – Aims To Create 100 Million Jobs, Employ 10 Million People
• Crazy subpixel type face

PCam Lite 1.0 on iTunes AppStore!

After 10 months of agony, my Panasonic security camera application has been shipped on the iTunes AppStore.

Here is the direct link to AppStore download via iTunes

Update: turns out there is already a wonderful app PCAM by David Eubank already on the AppStore. I have pulled my app so as not to get people confused. It's easier for me to change name right now than later.

3 Hong Kong iPhone tethering clocked to 1.7Mb/sec

I'm pretty impressed with 3 Hong Kong's iPhone tethering, clocked to 1.7MB/ sec in Central.

An Amazing nanotech based water filter that fits in your hand and can make even the filthiest of water drinkable.

Saw this on reddit.tv

James May rides in a U2 spy plane

Saw this on reddit.tv. Didn't get tired after watching for 10 times.

Mocha Bear by Caffé Habitu

Went to Caffé Habitu in 33 Leighton Road, Causeway Bay yesterday. Got a cutsy creamy bear. Thanks to the Habibi café girl.

iPhone starts selling in Malaysia

Just noticed iPhone starts selling in Malaysia with the operator Maxis.

However, the iTunes AppStore of Malaysia features no Malaysian apps at all. Smell like an opportunity for me.

Nokia Phone Schematics via Shenzhen

Given I am only stone throw away from Shenzhen, I have got to pick up one of these Nokia schematics books!

nokia-schematics-via-shenzhen. From Hack a day

Divine Project

Fascinating idea of building a Wordpress site automatically from Photoshop.

How DNA Copies Itself

Free SMS to Hong Kong with Google Voice

Just setup a Google Voice account with a Skype USA number. Works like a charm.

Surprised to see Google Voice has free SMS even to Hong Kong. Wow.

1983: The Brink Of Apocalypse - 1:14:18 - Feb 3, 2008

From Reddit.tv

Link list for today

• Apache HTTP DoS tool released
• iPhone SQLite Encryption With SQLCipher
• BWToolkit 1.2
• The new Task Queue API on Google App Engine
• Business Week: The Next Google?
• LucidDB
• The Accidental Diet
• Fleur Hong Kong flower shop
  
• Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy
• Starting Up, One Year Later: The Downward Spiral
• 香港統計資料 - 統計表 - salary of Hong Kong IT workers compared to other industry

iPhone Taiwan Girls

from zosoiv71, by way of What the iPhone Teaches Us About Happiness

Where are you Android girls?

Amazing Landing in Kai Tak

Entrepreneurs can change the world

DB Timetable J2ME version

I have added a new Discovery Bay Timetable for J2ME phone. You can install the J2ME app at

http://k.tiandiweb.com/DBTimetable.jad

In the meantime, I have open-sourced this simple Java application to Github. So if you are interested, go check it out!

http://github.com/kenguish/DBTimetable/tree/master

Link list for today

• Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System
• Python Queue interface for AMQP
• Apache CXF- An ultimate web service open source framework : Lets start learning
• Fast rounded corners in Photoshop: I don't do good graphic design, but now at least i know something
• New cool list of Linux must-have programs: surprisingly useful list!
• New Phrack issue: a lot of Mac OS X hack stuff
• Too Small to Fail
• Effective Strategy To Estimate Time For Your Design Projects
• A Python Script to Automatically Extract Excerpts From Articles
• celery - Distributed Task Queue for Django

Nvidia Tegra: HD streaming and Flash support demonstrated by Gordon Grigor

Looks too good to be true: great battery life and full HD video playback.

Saturday Night Live - Natalie Raps

Amazing Natalie Portman

Betty Bowers Explains Traditional Marriage to Everyone Else

The Library Of Alexandria - Best Of Carl Sagan's Cosmos (7)

Steve Ballmer as a car salesman

Google Wave

Can't wait to try Google Wave out.

Link List for Today

1. Video: Tele Atlas' photorealistic city models to aid navigation, terrorism
2. How To Convert Any Video File Format Under Linux: seriously the new Handbrake on Mac is lot easier to use, but a commandline ffmpeg is always nice
3. D-Link router captcha broken
4. django-imagekit: looks real nice for image resize in Django!
5. Scaling Memcached: 500,000+ Operations/Second with a Single-Socket UltraSPARC T2
6. "I Did It For You All...": On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine... good joke...
7. Webmonkey: Facebook Opens Up to OpenID
8. NYTimes: QUESTIONS FOR MYRON SCHOLES - Crash Course
9. Reverse Geocoding using MySQL GIS
10. Love’s Labors and Costs

Link list for today

1. PR Lies Destroy Your Understanding of How Business Really Works. - With Owen Byrne
2. Freshbooks Adds Tool to Online Billing Service and Building Network of Contractors
3. Tim Ferris Workout
   
4. ThingDB
5. WaitLess: Non-fancy LED display bus tracker.
6. HornetsEye
7. Nitrogen: Erlang web framework. This sounds fun after Django.
8. TED's Open Translation Project brings subtitles in 40+ languages to TED.com: wondering what's their interface for typing in captions
9. UFO sighted over Afghanistan: maybe the Predator C?
10. "Auction Site" Swoopo got $44800 for a $2500 computer. See comments for explanation
11. Terms of Services on video sharing sites
12. Old Chinese Hack Tool Used for New Tricks
    

Link list for today

1. Biblical Marriage
   


2. If you have to learn just one programming language: interesting read. Would like to check out Clojure later.
3. NSConference 2009
4. The iTunes App Store and One-hit WondersDjango Pisteon: interesting handler for writing RESTful APIs
5. Virtual Neurons Acting Like the Real Thing - The Blue Brain Project
6. You got ur Erlang in my Ruby
   

Lego Computer

Seen on Reddit.TV.

Link list for today

1. DeLong: The Current Situation (as of April 24, 2009)
2. China's Google Maps (zoom out for best effect) (edushi.com): 3D map site developed by Aladdin
3. How to build an iPhone application in 20 minutes
   

Ontime HK on newsstands

Feel kind of funny to see my Ontime HK iPhone App (link to iTunes AppStore) got mentioned on an iPhone free software application guide, commonly available on newsstands.





Here is the full text. Got 5-star. Thanks.

Link list for today

1. When Offshoring Your Development Team Means Buying a Boat
2. Code Project: Build an Ncurses UI with Python: very very cool!!! ncurse in python!
3. Simple Python ctypes Example
4. Python Google Analytics Client: How to use it and how to help make it better
5. Corporate Blogs: It's The PageRank, Stupid
6. The Stock Market Story
7. Do It Yourself Biohacking
8. The Five Deadly Sins of Project Management
9. Tapestry for Nonbelievers
10. How to build an iPhone application in 20 minutes
11. PySmell: textmate/vim bundle for Python
    

Link list for today

1. Google Analytics API Launched!
2. Google O3D
3. jsPDF: client/server _Javascript_ PDF library
4. Open Font Library
5. Discovery Is The New Cocaine - Going Beyond Engagement
6. What I Wish I Had Known About Developing C/C++ From Linux Before I Started
7. Solidworks Student Design Kit
8. Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone
9. CouchDB: Perform like a pr0n star
10. PBS Launches Video Portal with Full-Length Programming
11. IceTV wins landmark case against Nine Network in High Court
12. GM DEFAULTS (GM)
13. BBC: Simulated brain closer to thought
14. Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996
15. What San Francisco/Silicon Valley can learn from the Twittering company: Zappos
    

Link list for today

1. BoingBoing: Elizabeth Warren is frank and funny about the TARP trainwreck
2. The Bank Crisis is Over
3. Mashable: How To Log In with Applications that Use FB Connect or Twitter Sign In
4. SMTP Injection: one more thing to worry on rogue/badly written PHP scripts
5. Neat Vi Tricks: have been using vi for 10 years, still don't know man of these tricks
6. Flash Face Recogniton Drawer or DIY Flash Mask
7. Youtube Symphony: the video streaming quality is exceedingly good
   

Cool Forklift

From Y Combinator

Blondie girl on spammy sites

This girl seems to be everywhere on those dormant websites (which have expired or setup by spammers?). I think she's super cute, and she is everywhere.

Link list for today

1. Seth Godin: How to make money with SEO
2. IBM The rsync family: rsync tutorial. Good comparison with the GUIs.
   
3. Wired: PIN Crackers Nab Holy Grail of Bank Card Security
4. Potrace
5. ForeignPolicy: 10 easy steps to writing the scariest cyberwarfare article ever
6. Inside the precision hack
7. How to Spot Quality within Web Design: Examples & Tips
   
8. Paul Graham's The 10 Secrets of Selling Online
9. Autodesk to build AutoCAD for Mac
10. CNN Money: Warren Buffett takes charge: on BYD
    
11. Avoiding iPhone App Rejection From Apple: a tech support person from Apple advised me to not exceed 4.5 meg of data per 5 minutes of activities
12. Biggest porn site on the web YouPorn powered by Perl/Catalyst (top 50 in alexa) : via Reddit
    
    

PHP on App Engine

This is seriously crazy: PHP on App Engine, deployment using Caucho Resin.

To Nokia: your Symbian stuff sucks

Agree with Mike Rowehl on iPhone devotion blinds Silicon Valley app developers (not!).

Link list for today

1. Facebook Char Architecture: We chose to simulate the impact of many real users hitting many machines by means of a “dark launch” period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat servers, query for presence information and simulate message sends without a single UI element drawn on the page.
2. MIRAI株式会社
3. The Next Revolution and Alternate Storage Propositions
   

Busted! The sneaky moves of anti-social smartphone users: Renny Gleeson on TED.com

Link list for today

1. file2.ws: interesting one click content poster
   
2. NYTimes: Keeping up with being kept: interesting dating site business model
3. SDTimes: Someone Figured Out How to Step Up in VMware: scary stuff
4. Times: Get Rich Slow: Paul Graham's stuff is now mainstream. Good to see cheap startup idea beats out finding VC money.
5. How to recognise a good programmer
6. 42 Questions Every Freelancer Should Ask Their Clients
7. Sort Algorithm Animations: saw a similiar one back in Turbo Pascal 7.0!! Good to see a Flash version.
8. Sex, Lies, and Software Development
9. Django Best Practices
10. concept device: gps fitted inhalers
11. Rough Type: Google in the middle
12. 工聯會開班授facebook溝通技巧
13. Wired: Secret Law of Flying Could Inspire Better Robots
14. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips
15. The Incredibly Shrinking Market Liquidity, Or The Upcoming Black Swan Of Black Swans : from Venture Chronicles and Phatdat
    

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world.

Link list for today

1. The dark side of Dubai
2. How the Internet Got Its Rules: RFC story
3. Digibarn: Xerox Star 8010 Interfaces, high quality polaroids (1981)
4. Video: Django’s Adrian Holovaty Shows Off EveryBlock’s Guts

Discounted Visual Studio 2008 + MSDN Professional with a catch

Saw Microsoft Hong Kong's offer of VS2008 with MSDN Professional. The big catch is "Offer available through Microsoft Open Licensing Program only". One Google search away reveals that means "5 Microsoft Product licenses or a server license".

Link list for today

1. New da Vinci Robot Displays Your Internal Organs in 3D HD!
2. Man Burnt to Death by Exploding PC (direct link to the Times of India)
3. Nine Inch Nails made an iPhone app
4. Google Voice for iPhone and iPod Touch Coming Soon
5. A faint sound of applause
6. From Bubble to Depression?

Secured delete

尼位哥仔 mou 完監之後記住 dd 係最容易做 "secured delete"。

The Great Zero Challenge

Sun Microsystem's new corporate Strategy

From http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.media/sunstrategy.gif

Link list for today

1. William K Black - Systematic Ponzi Scheme - "The best way to rob a bank is to run one" (pbs.org)
2. Dubai: How not to build a city
3. Chinese Social Networks ‘Virtually’ Out-Earn Facebook And MySpace: A Market Analysis
   
4. THE WAR NERD: THIS IS HOW THE CARRIERS WILL DIE (UPDATED VERSION): maybe that's why there's the giant Boeing 747 with laser
5. Sleep May Prepare You for Tomorrow by Dissolving Today’s Neural Connections
6. Web Site Makes Millions by Connecting Cheaters

Link list for today

1. Palm Pre at Web 2.0 Expo
2. Amazon Elastic MapReduce
3. Stanford Course On How To Build iPhone Apps Will Soon Be Available On The iPhone
4. GalleryView - A jQuery Content Gallery Plugin
5. Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy
6. Reversing Tooth Decay
7. Design to Sell
8. Python on Tiny Embedded Wireless Devices with Synapse SNAP: upload script over the air?!

Link list for today

1. The Right Way to Make a Dropdown Menu
2. Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery
3. Dr. Rodgers' Testimony: High Technology Innovation: Free Markets or Government Subsidies?
4. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome exercises that really work
5. Google uncloaks once-secret server
6. Subprime millionaire
7. Frocessing
   

Silicon Graphics Declares Bankruptcy and Sells Itself For $25 Million

Quite a sad day to see SGI got sold.

Watch Starwars on Telnet

From Commandfu:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Link list for today

1. 黎三萬自白書: 人怕出名豬怕肥...
   
2. Can design save the newspaper? Jacek Utko on TED.com
3. The Oil Drum: Electric cars are coming to Europe
4. Engadget: China Unicom still not confirmed as Chinese iPhone provider: Chinese law banning WiFi use in mobile phones; and Unicom's insistence on installing its own software on the iPhone, including some sort of *gasp* non-iTunes media player
5. iPhone Pirating App Attacks Rival Pirate App Store: if my next iPhone app gets pirated, it would be a badge of honor...
6. Dell 24-inch monitor for $209
7. AirCoaster iPhone App Turns The Stock Market Into A Scary Ride

Link list for today

1. My Manhattan Project
2. The Wider View: Nazi codebreaker which shortened the Second World War by two years
   
3. Google 香港財經現正推出，歡迎試用！
4. How my start-up failed: read this condom keychain story last year. Good to revisit
5. Skype for iPhone (iTunes link)
   
6. 癮香港：3HK M1n1Bus 狡猾軟件？

Link list for today

1. Wired: Entrepreneurs Find Gold in Gadget Startups
2. How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
   
3. Welcome to America, the World's Scariest Emerging Market
4. Review of 3D Engines for the iPhone
5. Is China the New America?
   

Reverse Image Search Engine

I have a few clients that got sued by Gettys Image for using their stock photo. Looks like TinEye's Reverse Image Search has matured enough that more companies will use it for copyright compliances.

"What we need is young people instead of them wanting to be an investment banker we need them to decide they want to be an engineer"

From Let the engineers rule :

Barack Obama has on The tonight show. pinned the zeitgeist with this quote "What we need is young people instead of them wanting to be an investment banker we need them to decide they want to be an engineer"

Tata Nano

Impressive.

Mailchimp Review

Some clients have been requesting large e-mail batches services, so I have been checking this MailChimp for a while.

Here's finally a review about Mailchimp.

Trucks Fail

From Failblog:

Yahoo! Paid Search sucks

From Y Hacker News:

....We tried Yahoo: It's a complete waste of time and money. Ads were always edited by Yahoo staff (requiring frequent e-mails to clarify the service we were paying for), bids may be changed at random, the interface is a nightmare kludge and there is no way to opt out of Yahoo's 'partner network' (which seems to consist only of spam domain landing pages), so bidding a keyword to the top of the Yahoo search results guarantees a load of expensive visitors from click-farms. I would love to advertise on Yahoo's search result pages and will do so the moment Yahoo Search Marketing is taken over by a competently run organization (Go Microsoft!)....

I am not familiar with the system in USA, but the one in Hong Kong runs like a Mafia. You cannot do this and do that, with entries require real Yahoo! eye-balls approvals.

Link list for today

1. College Prestige Lies
2. Why Django
3. Interesting Twitter server admin application
4. Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet
5. Great tower defense game on iPhone: I like the touch concept on a 3D sphere instead of a 2D one
6. Duck Duck Go Architecture
7. FedEx crash at Narita: direct link to the bounce video
8. Nothing to lose
9. Skype for Asterisk
10. Commandline-fu: learn a new "mtr" command, which is ping + traceroute combined
    

Update: Narita Crash video

Link list for today

1. O'Reilly Radar: How to build companies that matter
2. Mac OS Xploitation - PDF file
3. tempest on PS/2 keyboards
4. Google’s “designer drain” - Tech and designs are hard to mix?
5. Cat languages
   

Adamo, salespitch for the macbook air

Very cheesy TV spot. Try to stick an Italian? designer to look chic. The people using the notebook look like faking it.

Great BBC April Fool's Joke

What they have in store this year?

Link list for today

1. The oddities of being a scientist-programmer
2. Improving Running Components at Twitter
3. Wired Blog: SXSW: Objectified Teaches Us 'You Are What You Own'

Shipping my first Facebook application: 李炳光牧師 FBApp

Background:
Boss has been a faithful Christian that puts a lot of effort to Rev. P.K.Li's website pkli.com, mostly by putting persistent efforts to maintain the weekly sermons. No easy feat by all means for a tight budget group. A lot of the weekly sermons MP3 have to be edited by hands using Final Cut Studio 2, to reduce noise and normalize the videos, and then uploading to Amazon S3 for downloads.

Problem is the traffic seem to hover in the same level, about a few thousands people a month, not too impressive. So boss wants actions! So here were my suggestions:

• Mac OS X Dashboard Widget - checked!
• iTunes Store Podcast download - checked!
  
• iPhone interface - checked!
• Videos on Google and Youtube - checked!
• Facebook Group and profile - checked, too!!

Well, Facebook Group got 386 people as of today. iTunes Podcast does pretty good with 400 - 500 podcasts downloads a month. But boss wants more. So what to do?

Enter Facebook Application. Facebook Applications let you create an application that lives in Facebook.com. So here is the plan:

1. Write Application
2. Get as many people to add this application. Showered them with latest Rev. P.K.Li's speeches
3. Pester the people whenever there are new speech
4. Let you friend's know you added the Facebook app. More people joint. Yay.

How-to:






Creating a Facebook application is not difficult at all.

1. Sign up a Developer account. Register an application at the "Developer" Facebook app.
   
2. Go through the tutorial at Facebook Developer wiki with PyFacebook. I use Django to integrate with it.
3. Then hook up the Speech data in the original pkli.com's site with the Facebook FBML templates.
4. My mantra is Fail early fail fast. So ship it first http://apps.facebook.com/revpkli/ and wait for feedback.
   

Total time spent: 3 hours.

What's next

This app is not going to be as popular as gaming apps as Mafia Wars, so as long as more people download Rev. P.K.Li's speech, then it's mission accomplished for me.

Improvements coming up:

1. Add "My favorite" feature.
   
2. Let people rate the speeches.
3. More social networking features: send this MP3 to friend
4. Facebook Connect integration back on pkli.com
   

You are welcome to check it out: 李炳光牧師 Facebook Application

Very interesting killer contract

Simple contacts are always the best.

We will always do our best to fulfill your needs and meet your goals, but sometimes it is best to have a few simple things written down so that we both know what is what, who should do what and what happens if stuff goes wrong. In this contract you won't find complicated legal terms or large passages of unreadable text. We have no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. We do want what's best for the safety of both parties, now and in the future......


More....

Link list for today

1. qTip
2. jQuery imageSwitch
3. Rat Traders
4. Apple's MobileMe drop supports for a dead browser
5. Facebook Connect for iPhone
6. The Positive Legacy of C++ and Java
   

Link list for today

1. Yes, CEOs Should Facebook And Twitter
2. NYTimes: Why Bad Times Nurture New Inventions
3. Google releases Jakiu codes for their App Engine
4. Slow Computers Are the Only Reason We Still Get Breaks
5. Siftables - Making the digital physical
6. The Economists: An idea whose time has come
7. Niche Social Networking sites
8. Facebook Connect for iPhone: "I like this".
   

Cloud hosts deathmatch

Amazon has got the new pre-paid instance plan for their EC2 cloud computing services.

Rackspace also announced a similar service with Mosso.

And then there are Slicehost.

What a fun time to build web applications.

Link list for today

1. iPhone OS 3.0 coming soon
2. Ajaxian: Project DragonFly: Floor planning from AutoDesktop
3. New build of Sequel Pro 0.9.4
4. Intro Load Balancing for Developers – the Architect’s View
5. How To Develop A Facebook Page That Attracts Millions of Fans
6. Fluid Grids
7. Shrinksafe: Nice Javascript shrinker using Mozilla's Rhino Java based Javascript interpreter (my head is hurting...)
8. Comparison of data analysis packages: R, Matlab, SciPy, Excel, SAS, SPSS, Stata
9. Good reminder on using Apache "ab" to optimize code
10. Django: Serving static files with Django and AWS - going fast on a budget
11. Global heroes
12. Google Voice Review: real screenshots!!
    

Link list for today

1. Fonts: Inconsolata, A free font success story
2. FFmpeg 0.5 released
3. jQuery UI Tabs with Next/Previous
4. Google Voice: one number for you to rule them all
5. How does they pack all the voices in Apple's new shuffle? VoiceOver works for other language, too, but not in Mac OS X.
6. QCon London 2009: How web is changing software architecture
   

Link list for today

1. Slashdot: IE 9 engine to be the last
2. Patents Being Abused To Put Your Life In Danger: TIA (this is America)
3. Wired: 10 Best Uses for RFID Tags: Point 7 is the best. The city aims to blanket itself with microchips—from bus stops to restaurants. Tourists may soon get maps, schedules, tips, and other info just by waving their cell phones.
4. Social media's history and trajectory -- talk notes from danah boyd is tl:dr. This is the distilled version.
   

Silicon Graphics to be delisted

(From multiple sources) SGI will be delisted tomorrow.

Too bad that PC based video cards and Linux eliminated the reason to use their stuff.
I still missed my old O2 and Indies, though.

Link list for today

1. Depression? Recession? No, It's the Great Restructuring
2. OpenProcessing: have a new website
3. iTunes gift card algorithm cracked
4. Face recognition demo: sounds more like facial feature marking to me.
   

Nice piece of Samsung marketing material

From Gizmodo:

Link list for today

1. Custom Authentication in Django using Facebook Connect
2. Understanding DateTime, tzinfo, timedelta & TimeZone Conversions in python
3. Remote image processing in JavaScript
4. The Hacker's Diet, by John Walker of Autodesk fame
   

QRCode vs. dood me co

硬喺唔明點會有人俾 8 亳子去做樣應該唔洗錢嘅嘢。喺 d 乜嘢 business model?!

dood me co vs. Google Adwords Print Ads 2D Barcodes

Target for Today

From NY Times: Steal These Federal Records — Okay, Not Literally:

Marissa Mayer On Charlie Rose: The Future Of Google, Future Of Search

Just watched this from TechCrunch:

Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney

Quoted: Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney

"ZDNet Australia writes that NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second-most-popular application in its category in Apple's App Store. Alvin Singh created Transit Sydney after he began teaching himself how to program in Cocoa Mobile. Within days of its Feb 18 release, Singh received a cease and desist notice from Rail Corporation NSW, the government body that administers Sydney's CityRail network. The email states: 'I advise that copyright in all CityRail timetables is owned by RailCorp. ... Any use of these timetables in a manner which breaches copyright by a third party can only occur through the grant of a suitable licence by RailCorp.'"

I am going to watch closely on this issue. Maybe someday some morons decide to do the same thing to my Ontime HK timetable, too.

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Saw that on Y Combinator News. Funny as hell.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Link list for today

1. Smarter Django "If" template: less gluecode is always better
2. Etherpad clone: never try putting HAProxy and EvServer before. Will try this setting instead of using Google App Engine everytime
3. HTML5 Video / Flash support: 2 years later Theora will be the video streaming standard, hopefully
4. Skype SILK codec, royalty free license
5. Twilio looks fun: PBX scripting for the rest of us?
   

Google App Engine Pending downtime

Just gone to Google App Engine's status page and saw them have scheduled downtime coming up.

Here's their relevant thread on it.

Macropinna microstoma: A deep-sea fish with a transparent head and tubular eyes

Google I/O Session 2008: Google App Engine with Django

I am in the process of porting DB Timetable from a Django deployment to Google App Engine. The biggest problem is Google runs their server on UTC. So now I have to rewrite the time calculations with PyTZ and get them working again.

Here's their session last year by Guido himself:

Connect a Bluetooth GPS with your eeePC

I am in the process of porting my 2 years old GPS application to Linux. Basically it:

1. Connect to your garden varieties Bluetooth GPS device
2. The program will load your GPS coordinates every 20 seconds
3. And display your coordinate on Google Map

Nothing too fancy on Mac. Just go to the "System Preferences", click a few button and *boooom* (chimed in by Mr. Steve Jobs) it just works.

Now, doing this thing on Linux should have involved just a few commands. The eeePC wiki has this guide that is tl:dr for me. Here are the 3 lines command to connect to your GPS.

hciconfig hci0 up
rfcomm connect 0 00:0B:0D:6D:90:A9
gpsd /dev/rfcomm0

Line #1: Bring up the bluetooth device
Line #2: Connect to the bluetooth GPS device with ID 00:0B:0D:6D:90:A9
Line #3: Bring up gpsd

How to find the ID of the bluetooth device? Use the command:

hcitool scan

Hope this page will help somebody figuring out the bluetooth GPS setup for eeePC.

Link list for today

1. Box.net: Don’t launch a storage service if you’re going to close down within a year. I like Dropbox a lot because I always keep a cache on my local computers regardless. Webdrive only kind of services sucks.
   
2. How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data: interesting way to store
3. Upgrading MySQL with Replication: interesting
   
4. Cut a pizza with laser
   
5. Why lenses are the real key to stunning photos
6. JQuery File upload plugin
7. DJBDNS on Mac OS X HOW-TO

Link list for today

1. PDF to Word online convertor
2. BWToolkit: cool interface builder plugin for Cocoa
3. sslstrip: hacking ssl in local network
4. Etherpad: interesting real time text editor like the SubEthaEdit, except it's web based.
   

Link list for today

1. Cappuccino and 280 Atlas look too good to be true
   
2. Firefox 3.1 has huge improvements: HTML5 video support and insane Javascript engine upgrade
3. Mailchimp integration with Wufoo: maybe all these Web 2.0 BS finally means web services can interactive with each other nicely
4. Ivona: great text-to-speech engine
5. Windows Live Mail actually supports POP3 for free now.
   

HK Q4 GDP Fell 2.5% in 2008. HK Govt expects 2009 GDP decline of 2-3%

Link list for today

1. Mighty Mouse 徹底清潔教學-分解篇
2. XenServer is now free (from Slashdot). (Almost plan to install a XenServer Express today...)
3. PyBrain - machine learning library for python?!
4. Google App Engine can buy quotas now, finally. Reduced free qoutas in May: 10GB in-and-out to 1GB, 46 CPU-hrs per day to 1 CPU-hrs per day, but fixed quotas for applications with billing enabled will not be affected.

WebObjects Tutorial for the year 2009

What takes Apple so long to produce a a decent WebObjects tutorial with Eclipse?

Link list for today

1. Debian 5.0 stable released. New support for eeepc.
2. How Google and Facebook are using R
3. The fabled A/UX operating system from Apple Computer
4. Computer Vision Premier.
5. Breaking a Visual CAPTCHA
6. Story of iShoot.
7. Tokyo Cabinet
   

3 Hong Kong has visual voice mail in Hong Kong for iPhone

3 Hong Kong has Visual Voicemail for iPhone. Free for the first 2 months, $1 USD per month afterwards.

Django CMS

Django flatpages is great when you only has a simple site with a "title" and "content" block. Anything more than that will give you trouble, such as multiple locales, extra picture uploads box, etc.

Looks like Django CMS looks pretty interesting with WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop interface. Yea yea yea you can add a TinyMCE in 5 lines of code with flatpages, but somebody else did the dirty for you here. Will try this on my next Django project.

SMS API verdict: 1328.hk

I have been looking for a nice SMS API.

Tried this Clickatel company. Their SMS always sent from the +44 country code, which should be England. Price is too expensive with setup fees. Simplewire also offers SMS API, but I don't think they offer simple GET/POST gateway, but gave you some DLL/.JAR file to integrate with. Nah, too much work.

So turns out there are 2 local Hong Kong companies that offers SMS cheaply without setup fees:

• 1328.hk - This company's website looks seriously crap but hey, who cares if it works. I debit $200 HKD into their HSBC bank account and got the SMS API working in an hour. Rocks. Funny their company's main support hotline is a cellphone number... are they hiding something....?!
  
• AccessYou - This company also offers SMS API. Didn't try. Let me know if you do. (By the way, my boss has been seeing their magazine ads on PCM and E-Zone, pestering me to give them a ring. This company 's magazine ad actually said they offers FAX API. Hey that has to be my dream come true... pass a super big TIFF/PDF with a phone number to their API, and *bang*, fax comes out from Intratubes to your fax machine. Turns out when I called them for a quote, they said they 'no longer' offer this service... good move. Your server would be end-of-story by keep receiving big API payloads... )
  

English book stores in Hong Kong

I have a lot of trouble finding good English technical books in Hong Kong after so many years ordering from Amazon.

There are a few good local bookstores to buy and pre-order:

• Swindon Books offer good ordering service. I ordered TAOCP from them (okay, I'm still stuck in book 1. TAOCP are those books belong to the "A Brief History of Time" category i.e. looks good on the bookshelf). It arrived in 4 weeks and delivered straight to my office.
• My personal favorite bookstore is the Data Bank in Causeway Bay. They are a small bookshop and seem to really care about computer books. They have quirky books like Programming Erlang, Programming Collective Intelligence as well as the whole shebang iPhone SDK books collections. Their shop is 2 buildings away from Sogo, right next to the Mioggi tower.
• Unknown bookshop on the basement floor of Golden Computer Centre. They are a big English bookstore right underneath the stairwell, on the South Western entrance. They have a lot of Microsoft, RoR and a few Python books. Their books are more general than Data Bank, but do have quirks sometime. Bought my Rapid GUI Programming with Python and QT book there.

If you know a few more, please let me know!!! Of course you can still order online from Amazon....

Hi. Welcome to Kenneth Anguish's blog.

Hi. Welcome to my blog. My nick is Kenneth Anguish, or just short for kenguish.

Generally this blog is all about web and software development stuff like Python, iPhone SDK and Django. I will figure out some other interesting topics to write here.