A developer's blog

2008 is almost over, and Google has released Zeitgeist 2008. A good time to blog about it, since it’s still quite fresh and if I don’t do it now, I would postpone it on and on and on, right? :P

Zeitgeist | Pronunciation: ‘tsIt-”gIst, ‘zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.[1] [2]

This year the chart is not as colorful as before but it was enhanced with annotations :P

Economy

Since the first release in 2001, the Zeitgeist progressively does a better job reflecting situations of the world, from regional to international.

Trends for Layaway

And no, that’s really a burst, a sudden increase in term of 8 times the original volume; not because the chart is scaled! The turkeys did quite a good job!

Over the hedge comics @ overthehedge.com

Oil

Gas price contributed is part, oh well…

Look at how consumerism has taken over the world. People care about the environment not for their children but instead for their pocket. What if one day the earth stood still? :P

Who, what and how

I comment only for what I feel like commenting :P

Who is…

1. who is Obama
2. who is McCain ~ Google is becoming one of the criterion for presidency :P
3. who is Palin
4. who is lil wayne
5. who is miley cyrus
6. who is dolla
7. who is jonas brothers
8. who is chris brown
9. who is biden
10. who is martin luther

What is…

1. what is love ~ How can you define love :P
2. what is life ~ 42
3. what is java ~ Americans doesn’t seem to use that much coffee ;)
4. what is sap
5. what is rss
6. what is scientology
7. what is autism
8. what is lupus
9. what is 3g ~ Proof of Apple’s influence (j/k, 3G standards are in active development)
10. what is art

How to…

1. how to draw
2. how to kiss ~ Isn’t this stuff best practiced than learning
3. how to write ~ Blog is growing, right…
4. how to cook ~ Restaurants are now expensive for Americans
5. how to tie
6. how to hack ~ Adults are taking their kids apart from the fun…
7. how to run
8. how to cite
9. how to paint
10. how to spell

International queries [3]

Nothing that much interesting, since Google themselves is quite lazy to translate the international queries this year :P

What a pity Vietnam still haven’t generated enough data to appear in the yearly list, or is it some kind of classified data? Because I’m quite sure not only Vietnam are contributing to that infamous #1 query, while the second and third appeared in the Zeitgeist…

It’s not something that makes you proud when you searched for blog the most… ;))

Loneliness

Technology takes people nearer to each other… less and less lonely since 2004. The world is getting better! :) You’ve got to love it!

Translation

Google released Vietnamese support for Google Translate this year together with a couple of useful enhancements (translated search, dictionary, etc.). Before that I have always been in doubt that all the Vietnamese pages on Google is machine translated; but that’s countered by the fact that nobody in Vietnam ever succeeded in writing such a translation engine; and the translation looks natural enough :-/ Time to put that to the test :P

Web history in Vietnamese

Same page, translated from English

Sure enough, you can see the apparent similarity: the wording is the same; the grammar on the static page is a little better than the translated one but is still far from perfect. My guess is Google has someone with basic Vietnamese knowledge, and the person’s responsibility is just to check whether the translated text is readable. Oh well, even though people has to turn to English if they want to read the TOS, this may help kids and give a good example of how hard to translate Vietnamese (O’ great language =)).

Also, since I received complaints that my English is so terrible, this blog has just been enhanced with a translator thanks to David Pozza and Google for providing the API, hope it is more readable now ;)

(Look to the right)

~ And that’s another day with Google

Actually, that should be NewBlog.Start() since this is not my first blog, and definitely not the second nor the third blog :P. This blog was created last week, in the middle of hurried… Ahh… It’s been better since then… And since when I have started loving storms? Possibly when instructors started to let their students take the day off and hold the deadlines for a while. ^^

Things are a little off-track. My first intention months ago when I wanted to escape from the closed space of Yahoo 360 is to move the whole blog out here. I even wrote a converter and publicized it for that sole purpose. But after the fall of my database and the obstacles I encountered setting up this blog (WordPress error, slow queries, faulty FTP etc.), most of which are just common traits for a byet host. I’ve had an unpleasant experiences with them in the past too; but that’s just what you could expect from a free host. You aren’t paying for it, so all complaining is for yourself. Why I’m not affording a decent host you ask? Possibly because of the ever increasing inflation rate here that when someone started to have a decent amount of money, he must then use the extra to pay for the rise of everything. And that’s such a big problem that I can’t solve in a day or two, so its best to cope with it. As a precaution, I’m going to have a plugin synchronize this blog with a backup too.

Back to the storm, it was cold yesterday but today turned out to be a sunny day. Hot weather as usual, dogs barking and running around (not birds singing), people yell at each others (not kids playing), and stuff. I started the day with a big headache. Partly due to the unsatisfied intention of creating the theme I want: A combination of the elegant transparency found in pixeled and the coolness in transparency from vistered little. To my surprise, vistered little still work with the current version of WordPress. I thought there was some good reason for WordPress to remove their #1 theme from the old repository, when that theme contained link to nowhere other than windy road and was released under GPL… Well, that’s some Automattic thing and possibly not a user’s matter ;))

So here it is… I end up creating a new header and adding some feminine to the theme. Nonetheless it’s black and I feel some strength coming from it (Added shadows and some dashes) B-) It should work for the browsers mentioned at the bottom. Should someone be unable to enjoy the beauty (seeing an ugly header or something), they should just scrap that IE6 and use Opera instead. Geez, don’t they have any idea that browser is back from 2002 and even at that time it already lacked behind?

Installed Gears according to the recommendation from WordPress’ admin page. How come the save button is disabled offline? It’s Gears supposed to handle offline transactions? Another percent in Google’s 47% beta. Or is it WordPress didn’t make use of that offline database? Great idea anyways.

Another disappointment: Microsoft Word will not register this blog for some mysterious reason and I won’t be able to enjoy the comfortability of the #1 text processor… Got it working by now. It turned out that I firewalled Word before and didn’t enable XML-RPC for WordPress…

That’s all I remembered to write, half of the free day has passed by. I have to resume doing stuff tomorrow, just hope that my ISP won’t collapse like they did twice last month. Imagine cup coming and I am still have the competition-phobia :-SS,  a SVN repository still thrist for files I can hear it screaming… Argh… At least my head no longer hurts ^^