Freedom & Free Beer

Open Source vs Closed Source

Just came back from the Open Source vs Closed Source debate. It’s inspiring and quite entertaining with an unplaned swap side drama half way through the debate.

Here is a quick recap,

1. Free as in freedom, not as in free beer, in the open source world.
2. Majority of people there liked the open source side of the debate. (Because of the swap side thing, we don’t know who is who, but people voted for open source)
3. People don’t always trust open source software for important things like medical applications. One reason is that there is no one to sue if something goes wrong
4. Open source software tends to have higher chance to fix security problems before they happen. Closed source software has no chance of doing that
5. Job security is higher in open source software dealers. If a closed source software company decides to cease development on their software for whatever reasons, their dealers would suffer
6. Microsoft made what people like, that’s why they are successful
7. People dislike monopoly rather than Microsoft, there are differences between the two
8. Microsoft’s monopoly is MS Office, not windows like many people think. Even open source dealers are using MS Office for their own business. It’s just better
9. Patents mean to encourage innovation. But the over use of patent can effectively work against innovation. The effective period of patents may need to be shorten
10. Patents are good for attracting investment regardless if they are good for innovation
11. Open source could hold the key to end software piracy
12. It wouldn’t help to believe religiously one side of the argument. Rational analysis is needed
13. Businesses don’t particularly care about open or closed source, they use whatever is commercially viable
14. Open source licenses are there to protect the software from becoming closed source, not to prevent people from making profit
15. Some companies charge a license fee for extensions of open source software
16. Companies dealing with open source software can be profitable. There are proven successful business models
17. The existence of open source forces closed source companies to be more competitive. It’s good for innovation
18. The co-existence of open and closed source worlds will likely continue with open source software playing a more important or even predominant role in the future

Well, that’s enough for more debates. Comment here to express your view if you like.

Firefox: Acting Explorer

This may sound a little odd at first.

I just found out one more advantage of Firefox: its ability to act as Internet Explorer whenever needed.

What, “Spy vs Spy“? Is it necessary for a good browser to act like a not-so-good one?

Oh yes, because it’s a real time saver when you have to test your web project on both browsers all the time. It also helps when you want to save a table from a webpage into excel.

Now in firefox, I simply do one click to see how my pages look on explorer, another click to be firefox again, then exploer, firefox, explorer and firefox, it’s that easy.

Starting Firefoxing

TechReflect: Conceptual

Conceptual thinking is arguably one of the most important things to take home. Although common in management, it’s not something people would usually relate to technology, where logical thinking is more common. It’s worth mentioning as it takes technology to a whole new level. The graphic approach is stimulating and the idea of conceptual approach in technology is thought provoking.

Image: An example of highly graphic conceptual schema in database design

Care: Heat Reflection

An elderly lady felt sick and was under the care of railway staff at Strathfield station in western Sydney at 6:49am earlier this morning. The lady was kept warm with heat reflecting material while waiting for paramedics to arrive. A personal shopping trolley was found nearby, which belonged to the passenger who accidently felt ill on her way to western Sydney.

Japan: Wollongong

I accidentally found out that many of the photos I took in Wollongong last week have already ended up in a Japanese site. The new web2.o technology is just amazing. I guess translation is not needed as a picture says a thousand words.

A preview of the Japanese site is here.

Joost: Preview

I have been asked about Joost a lot lately. Here is a screen preview on what you can get from Joost.

Scroll down to see more, or search “joost” in the search box on the right to find out more on Joost.

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popular events

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fast cars

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fast boats

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animation

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travel & leisure

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variety & religions

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possible crime & violent

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health & meditation

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sports & fitnesses

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live concerts

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out door concerts

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extreme sports

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serious issues

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restricted programs

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political issues

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animals & wildlife

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more

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a lot more

CSS: Deformat

CSS technology provides a flexible way to format web pages in massive scale. I also found the reverse process, deformatting, another advantage of the technology.

This finding is related to another passion of mine – mobility.

Handheld devices are handy. But it also means smaller screen unless you have a hand of the size like King Kong. That creates the need for web developers to build sites that can display well on both common computer screens and smaller size handheld device screens.

CSS can solve this problem in at least 3 ways.

1-CSS Options

Developers can offer more than one CSS to display the same webpage in different ways to suit different screen sizes. Manufacturers may configure their devices to select the most suitable styles automatically or users may select their preferred viewing size and style manually.

2-Flexible Design

Having web pages of flexible width controlled by CSS is an even better way to ensure that web pages are displayed properly on screens of all sizes.

3-Deformatting

If all else failed, the CSS deformatting capability can be a life saver. Instead of displaying a scramble page like non-CSS pages may do, a deformatted CSS page is still viewable in a plain format.

In order words, CSS can not only control web pages, it also has the ability to surrender such control without any side effect whenever required.

(Written on 2:12pm 15/05/07 on the way back to Sydney from Wollongong, Wollcome to Wollongong)

Wollongong

Wollcome to Wollongong! Here is an quick pictorial tour to the city

You can tell you are not far from a art gallery

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It’s not drinking water, but good for the eyes

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Get a different view by adding a few extras

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The work of a carpenter turn artist
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You can always tell where people keep their money in Wollongong

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The work of a plumber turn artist

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The work of a real life artist

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Everything is safe in Wollongong including the stuff you just threw away

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Forget the GPS thing on your mobile, it’s more pleasant to find your direction here.

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More artwork on transparent media

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Would you mind having a coffee here

Youtube: Eurovision07

Youtube has a large collection of clips on this year’s Eurovision. There are also talks on including the event in a Joost channel in the future.

Meanwhile, if you want to see it but don’t want to go through the downloading process, you can watch the Eurovision final on SBS televison tonight.

Why do we watch it?

Well, I found it quite unpredictable and seriously entertaining. You get to see something that is very different from the main stream entertainment. You are guaranteed to get a mix feeling from something new, something beautiful, something weired or anything at all, you name it. This year’s event is held in Helsinki, Finland. So you also get a chance to have a virtual tour to Finland.

If you are too used to life in Australia, you may also be surprised by the number of countries that can fit into one continent. Naturally, politics is also part of the excitement when you have so many countries involved in a competition.

Some facts worth knowing: Celine Dion represented Switzerland and won Eurovision in 1988. Abba won 1974 Eurovision with their song Waterloo. Paris Hilton has yet ruled out the possibility to represent a European country to compete in the event. –There has been something good came out from the whole thing although not everything you know is associated with it.

Best of all, the politics involved has nothing to do with us. What’s left is sheer entertainment.

(image: Eurovision 2007 Helsinki Finland)

SEO: fightback

One way to counter act the black hat SEO sites* as a user is to preview the sites before you open them.

The following image is a google search result page with previews. Note the thumbnail images on the left.

At the moment, google itself does not provide the preview option to users. But there are good news for firefox users. You can install a addon to get google previews as demonstrated in the above image. The addon is called … googlepreview. As I write, a similar addon is also made available for internet explorer. Click here to find it.

Once you install the addon, you can also use it to preview yahoo search. The following image is a search result page with preview from yahoo.

A test shows that the current version of the addon is not integrated well with yahoo. Everything is fine when you search from the yahoo homepage. But if you attempt a second search from a result page in yahoo, you may not get the previews again. You have to return to yahoo’s homepage to do a new search in order to get the previews. Well, it’s called googlepreview. The name says it.

You can easily switch the previews on and off with one click on your browsers status bar. Click here to find it.

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*Black hat SEO refers to the methods used to fool the search engines to give high ranking to websites with contents that are not relevant to the search key words. The methods are also called spamdexing. Legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) is known as white hat SEO.

The Report

Start writing the report. That’s the message we got this week and really helped me to focus on it. It’s also great that the rescheduling helped everyone to be back on track.

Sense of Completion

With so many things happening at the same time, it’s great to feel a sense of completion.

I decided yesterday evening at the MIM lab to comment on not some but all the affiliate blogs. If you were shocked to see a message on your blog, you had not been singled out for an attack by words. And if you ever felt your blog were overlooked at any point of time, you needn’t feel that way any more. -Mission accomplished.

(img: mission accomplished)

Time Constraint

I knew it. It’s in my swot.

Things are really piling up as the project develops. I had to take a deep breath and revive myself hoping to find a way to catch up with whatever felt behind.

I discovered that I had been working in the project rather than on it. Studying and applying new technologies is exciting but also time consuming. I felt the need to apply some serious time management in order to meet the targets I set out for each week. I cancelled one scheduled meeting on Monday and managed to finalise the system plan. (Woosh… what a relief.)

There are still a lot of pressure as I am unsure if I can grasp the new technologies well enough to complete the project on time. But this planning exercise definitely helped to ease the pressure. Anyway, I am aware of the risks involved in learning something new, so I am not giving up yet.

By the way, looking at this cartoon also helps a bit.

Internet Matured

I published my personal view on the internet’s maturity on SydneySpeaking yesterday. (see Blogging: Live*)

The full article Internet’s childhood has ended is published on today’s The Australian, Australia’s national newspaper.

By the way, The Australian will soon be the only full-sized broadsheet newspaper in the country. FAIRFAX Media has announced it will significantly reduce the size of other broadsheet newspapers, including The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

TechReflection: Feed AIO

I applied the Feed technology to make this Blogs All-in-One.  (Click here to see it)

(Greater flexibility of working or doing other things is just another advantage of interactive communication.)

APEC 2007

(Unplanned Posting)

I bought a bottle of drink in a shop. I got a one dollar coin change with a big cheer from the guy behind the counter. He said “It’s brand new, it must be your lucky day.”

The two things he said turned out to be truth.

The one dollar coin is new and shining. It’s a new design for APEC held in Australia this year. Here is a bit info on what I know about the event.

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The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum will be held in Sydney on 8-9 Sep 2007.

The event will bring together the leaders of all major regional economies as well as thousands of delegates, support personnel and the international media, and is one of the most important annual meetings of world leaders.

Warm up events have already been going on since January.

If you are doing your own business or wants to do so one day, you may want to find out a bit more on events in the field that you are interested. However, APEC’s agenda this year has expanded to include key global issues including counter-terrorism, non-proliferation and health. So what do you know? Perhaps APEC isn’t just for the politicians

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I wasn’t going to write this as I was just on my way back to the city office from a suburb. By the time I got back there, I would probably have forgotten all about it. But a big sign “free internet” suddenly appeared in front of my eyes. I thought “OK, but what’s the catch”.

There was a catch and it turned out to be “Just for today!”

Blogging: Live*

Live* from Parramatta.

The Romantic Parramatta River

Got here this morning, had a bit of surprise. I accidentally bumped into a DMT Tech mate (you know who you are:) ), had a quick chat before rushing to a seminar.

After sending a few email out as I often do after attending an event, I thought “would all the stuff I put online look the same at Parramatta?”

You are right, of course they do – People are gaining confidence on today’s online interactive technology. It’s no longer that “virtual” or abstract like people used to think about the internet.

(Info 4 overseas folks: Although it’s not part of the City of Sydney, Parramatta can be remotely considered as part of Greater Sydney. It’s not that far after all.)

*Live Scene: The sound system they have here seems pretty good. It’s playing something like “i wanna wake up with you…put the music to my…” oh, it changed, it become something like “she could see from my face I was *%$#*&* high….you are beautiful…beautiful it’s true” -They must be playing the CD version, no wonder it sounds so good, I think I will stay to do a bit more work online.

Tech: Beautiful CSS

So much beautiful CSS, so little time…

50 Beautiful CSS Web Designs

The web is not enough

Tech:Sydney Airport

This is an instant posting from the Sydney Airport.

It’s easy to get online here even if you don’t carry your own laptop or handheld with internet connection. The whole airport is wired or wireless depending on how you want to get online. Interactive technology is widely used for interaction between the airport and passengers.

If there were any interactive technologies being under used here, mobile notification would be one I can think of. Wouldn’t it be good to receive detailed flight information on your mobile phone a few hours before your departure? It can be as simple as “SydneySpeaking Sydney2GoldCoast, check-in t2 counter8-12 close 9am, boarding 9:30am Gate 33″.

We have the technology to do this quite easily and automatically. It would put passengers at ease as they no long have to search through the whole scrolling list on the screen to find just one flight in order to find their way to the plane. It would also ease the pressure for airport service staff and distribute the crowd more evenly at the airport. Instead of gathering anxiously under the screens, passengers can simply enjoy shopping, coffee and what ever leisure or entertainment the airport has to offer.

(image: Sydney Airport)

TechReflection: Blogging –Thanks

The City of Sydney is considering putting me on their payroll for being such a good ambassador of the city through SydneySpeaking.*

Light Show -Sydney City Town Hall

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The City of Sydney (Sydney City)
http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au
Email: council@cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au
Tel: +61 2 9265 9333 (24 hours, 7 days per week)
Town Hall House, 456 Kent Street, Sydney NSW 2000

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*Ok, just kidding, no such appointment whatsoever at least for the time being. -What I was trying to say is that I am really glad the blogging thing took off so well. When I typed “sydneyspeaking” into google, I went “what!”. The soaring number of total hits on this blog surprises myself a great deal. Even some light hearted stuff, like the Bridge Walk page, got quite interesting comments from people I didn’t know before. So thanks for visiting!

 

 

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Since I was asked this evening, I chat with a few people on how I fit blogging into my schedule.

I don’t actually do it as a separate thing to what I normally do. Like, I don’t go to Bridge Walk for putting a post on the blog, it was scheduled quite a long time ago. The blog is just a perfect platform for me to share with other people and keep an electronic dairy and photo album. When I talk to friends about the event, I don’t need a disk or a hard copy album, just so handy. Since I know people almost everywhere in all continents, making and sharing a decent looking album so easily is just blessing. That’s not something email alone can do.

Another thing I found is that saying something whenever you feel like makes thing a lot easier. Some posts I wrote are still not finished. You don’t see them because it’s save as drafts inside the blog itself. That way, I get to record whatever inspired me instantly, never have to look for them as they are right here (big time saver), add to them whenever I like and publish them when the time comes.

With auto login, I no longer have to go through the “username then password” process to change things in the blog. Another time saver you may like to consider.

In term of technology study, I found it helpful to write about it as that helps me to think clearly and do better targeted research. Save me from drowning in confusion.

TechReflection: Feed

The feed practical was fun. I’m glad that I did it tonight or I might never get the time to actually do it otherwise. I was told about the BLOGLINES thing before everyone arrived (You know who you are, thanks). Studying it and actually doing it later in the evening was great. With this feed technology, I can view a collection of blogs in one place without even having to open the actual blogs.

TechReflection: Blogging –Thanks

Click to read more!

TechReflection: XHTML 1.0 Strict & Transitional

It was confirmed last week that we can use either XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Transitional in DMT. I researched into the differences between them.

XHTML 1.0 Transitional is the same as HTML 4.01 Transitional, but follows XML syntax rules. It supports everything found in XHTML 1.0 Strict, but also permits the use of a number of elements and attributes that are judged presentational.

XHTML 1.0 Strict is the same as HTML 4.01 Strict, but follows XML syntax rules.

You can find more info on this topic here.