Horizontal Perspective 横顾天下

Nowadays my email inbox is stuffed with some 20 to 60 SPAM, Scam and general junk messages daily. I rely on the MailScanner on my mail-server and Thunderbird (my mail transfer agent program) to collectively filter the fluff off so I ’see only the good stuff’. Occasionally a few would slip through that look good enough to fool the unwary netizens. Fortunately the Internet Mail Standard (technically RFC-821 for envelope information and RFC-822 for message text format) ensures that the delivery passage information of any email is embedded within the mail itself. We only need to know where to look and how to interpret the data to sort the fakes from the genuine. (more…)

Microsoft provided a status report at the annual Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference held in New York this week. In it, Microsoft says it has sold more than 100,000 SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) licenses to about 60 large enterprise customers, among them Credit Suisse, HSBC, Synovus Financial Corp. and Wal-Mart.:

News source :
Informationweek.com 2 Jan 2008
Visualstudiomagazine.com 4 Apr 2008

What pop straight into my head : Poor chaps, did they have a hard time selling Window Servers ? ROTFL

For those unfamiliar with internet acronyms like ROTFL, here’s a short list.

A short list of Internet acronyms (more…)

The people I look up to most in my life:

• My Father
  My father’s name ‘振权’ means ‘to exert authority’, and yet he is one of the least pushy person I know. Although his relationship with me and my two younger sisters was not the touchy-huggy kind, his tender side showed in all he did with/for us. He read widely and had a large collection of books, which he added to in his frequent visits to book-stalls. I took after his reading habit at a young age and because he showed me how to use the dictionary, I was able to read through most of his collection before I finished primary school.
  In the year 1952, he was stricken with Polio and was hospitalised with little prospect of regaining mobility. My mother had a failing heart-valve and she too was admitted for observation at the end of her pregnancy. After my birth, father somehow persuaded the British nurses to help him make his twice-daily visits to the maternity ward to look in on mother and me. He kept up the vigorous regime of physiotherapy and regained the use of all limbs. However, the right leg was partiality atrophied and he walked with a limp the rest of his life. Still, it was a remarkable recovery according to the medical staffs. I learned to never give in to despair but to plod on no matter what. (more…)

There’s a quiet evolution going on right under our feet, and unless your eyes and ears are open, you might miss it entirely. The change is being dubbed Web2.0. For a while I thought it is net-speak for Internet-2, the Gigabit link to the trunk lines that would boost the inter-node speed a thousand fold. Later I came to believe it refers to IPv6 witch will exponentially increase the numbers of available Domain Names. It was none of those two. The name implies that it’s an upgrade to the “previous version” of the ‘net’. The problem with calling it that, is that it’s not really a tech upgrade. What’s really happening is that the people who are on the web and using the web are doing it differently than they used to. The shift has been so gradual and gentle that I think of it more like the slow fermentation of grape juice into a fine wine.

This evolution is just the ticket to really stir things up and get me off my butt.

My first encounter with the technology that enabled the evolution was in 1997 when I started visiting a site called slash-dot, which went by the tag-line ‘News for Nerds, stuff that matter‘. It was a dynamically generated site with a large and active community of, er, nerds (like me). It carried tech news, cool ideas, lively discussions and, most important, syndicated feeds. You no doubt would instantly recognize this as a blog, but those day we referred to it as ’slash’, and there is a constant clammer for the latest build of ‘the code’ so we could all start our own ‘web log’ and spread the feed. When some bright sparks left to replicate the concept with a new language called php2, there was an acrimonious debate where the term ‘trators’ were brandished about. Fast-forward to 2008 and there are hundreds of codebase to choose from, php5 has become the prefered development platform, ‘weblog’ had been shortened to ‘blog’, and everyone (not just nerds) has been to one. Whew!! What is it about this phenomena that’s so appealing? What’s the difference to the average web-surfer (bet you’d not heard that term for a while) that get him/her all fired up? Well, here’s the main difference:

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