A developer's blog

My blog

Yes, the number reset since last time…

And yes, my blog URL changed :(

Aww, I tried to stand through all that and look at what I’ve got in return :( I thought it was better for a Vietnamese to use a Vietnamese host, as a way of supporting its growth and Vietnamese host as a whole. Upon registration, they advertised themselves as ad-free, then they installed text links that broke my design; I’m ok with that. Later they remove the ads but insert a hidden iframe to “borrow” page rank; I’m ok with that too and even added a link to them in the footer. Upon the moment I decided to check my blog for comments (which is a few hours ago), they gave me pop up ads! X(. That’s just way beyond the end of my rope!

Since the owner of that .vn host couldn’t help becoming a total (something not nice) in the end, I decided to move. Moving WordPress is mostly painless: WordPress do most of the work for you through the Import / Export function. With that all your post, pages, tags, categories and even metadata is carried over. Though it could be a problem if your blog has a large amount of content, which in turn make your xml grows way beyond the file upload limit set by most free host.

Moving links are a bit tricky: You have to type in <your blog URL>/wp-links-opml.php to get the links, save it to your computer and upload it with another importer (bundled within WordPress’ import). Your link categories are not preserved though. I don’t feel like re categorizing them, in case I have to move again for some reason ~_~

I didn’t do a database import since WordPress keep generating revisions for my posts and fill up the database even after I “defined” WP_REVISION to 0 (whose decision is it to make a blogging software a wiki when it’s mostly used for personal purposes!?).

The reason I choose the current host? It’s the same hosting provider behind, the URL is longer and it does not ends with .vn, but this host support 5GB of storage and have been around since 2006 without advertisements, only a small statcounter script at the end. But still, that snippet breaks my xHTML :( well, everything has a price…

I could have hosted this as my own provider but I’m unsure about byet’s policy on this :/, considering the fact that even their premium customers have stability problems, they might as well wipe people with multiple accounts to free up their system at any time. It’s better to have some kind of cover.

Side note: If you are interested in having a place you can host your files uninterrupted by advertisements and will be using it effectively enough to prevent the deletion of you account (you are not allowed to host large images, file upload scripts etc.) you could gave these a try:

• http://hcmuns.uni.cx
• http://photo.jpe.gs

I made sure they are stripped of advertisements, the script installers are intact and spaces set to the maximum limit for free accounts. You I’ll get domain names like <your choice>.<provider> (yes, they 4th level domains, I can’t afford a 2nd level domain to provide you with 3rds~_~)

Humors

Before I had time to care about my blog, I was knee deep in coding tasks :/ And in those days when I fell stuck I resort to reading humors from vnexpress. Frankly, even though I know they are just jokes and they rarely happen, I can still smell the foul out of the columnist’s ignorance!

Example? Let’s start with this

When NASA started to send people into space, they found out normal ballpoint pen can’t be used in zero gravity.

To overcome this problem, NASA established a working group to make a pen which can be used in space and on all kind of surfaces. The program ran for 3 years and cost $7 million.

Meanwhile, the Russian astronauts chose to use pencils.

Real entities, real countries, false story.

It’s true that astronauts usually though ballpoint pens can’t be used in space and they created a pen that ejects pressurized ink; but that’s not because they don’t know that. They just wanted to ensure everything would work! And no, the Russians don’t use pencils that often. They have been using normal, earth bound ballpoint pens and that worked.

The story is nothing more than an urban legend, as noted here

This story marvelously illustrates the perils of government waste; pity it’s not true. NASA didn’t have $12 billion to spend on anything when it first started sending astronauts into space in the early 1960s. The agency’s entire budget for the 1960 was $500 million; by 1965, it was up to $5.2 billion, still not enough to throw billions away reinventing the ballpoint pen.

Be that as it may, astronauts in the Apollo program did begin using a specially-designed zero-gravity pen in 1968 called the Fisher AG-7 Space Pen. Nitrogen-pressurized, the pen worked in “freezing cold, desert heat, underwater and upside down,” as well as the weightlessness of outer space. It was developed not by NASA but by an enterprising individual, Paul C. Fisher, owner of the Fisher Space Pen Company. By his own account, Fisher spent “thousands of hours and millions of dollars” of his own in research and development; not billions.

The Fisher Space Pen is still used by both American and Russian astronauts on every space flight, and you can buy one yourself direct from the company for a measly 50 bucks.

Fisher AG-7 space pen, Image comes from here

And you can rest assured the story above isn’t the only time that newspaper copy pasted a joke mail to make an entry :)), the second one to be discussed is here.

This is a real story happened just offshore Newfoundland, October 1995. The following conversation between a U.S. Warship and local Canadian authority published by the U.S. Navy Command several days later.

Americans: Please divert your course 15^o to the North to avoid collision.

Canadians: Please divert your course 15^o to the South to avoid collision.

Americans: I’m a caption of a U.S. Navy ship. I reapeat, divert your course.

Canadians: No, I repeat again, you divert your course.

Americans: This is the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lincoln, the second largest ship of the Pacific fleet. We are escorted by 3 destroyers, 3 cruisers and numerous other ships. We demand you to divert your course 15 degrees North! Otherwise we have to take action to assure our vessel’s safety.

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

As usual as it would be, you can’t believe anything on a Vietnamese newspaper, especially when it assures you that the story is true =). The U.S. navy has noted before (this page is now deleted) this is simply a joke

“The Lighthouse Joke”

The following is being transmitted around the Internet as an event that really took place, but it never happened. It is simply an old joke like those found in popular magazines

Vietnamese aren’t the only one trying to prove they got the scoop though. Mike McConnell, director of National Intelligence spoke at a symposium at Johns Hopkins University:

“Now this is… true,” the director says. “I was in the signals intelligence business where you listen to the people talk and so on. This is true. It’s an actual recording.

“There’s a party talking to a ship at sea that says, ‘Ship at sea, please divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.’

“Now the response was, ‘Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.’

“The first party says, ‘Sorry, sir, but you will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.’

“The answering party says, ‘This is the captain of a United States naval ship. I say again, divert your course.’

“The first party says, ‘Pardon me sir, you must divert your course.’

“Now the American ship says, ‘This is an American aircraft carrier, the second largest ship in the United States fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers, numerous support vessels. I demand that you change your course 15 degrees north. I say again, that is 1-5 degrees north or counter-measures will be taken. Do you understand?’

“The response was, ‘Dear Captain, the next move is your call. This is a Canadian lighthouse.’

“All of this is prologue to a history of American surveillance and the current debate over eavesdropping on domestic calls and e-mail traffic with suspected terrorists abroad.

“The point of my story is, always know who you’re talking to,” McConnell said.[Source]

But the difference is: American newspapers dig in almost immediately (How intelligent is the Director of National Intelligence?)to prove it’s false!

Now I know why Bush though Iraq has WMDs, conducted a billion-dollars-worth search and came up with this

Cannot find weapons or CIA Error

Iraqi Explorer

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 ^^