tin_the_fatty weblog

Google IPO.

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The new outlook of my weblog is a cheap immitation of the front page of this morning’s SCMP.
Universal Suffrage in the U.K. in 1928, in the U.S.A. in 1965, in South Africa in 1994(!) Are we the people of Hong Kong no better than those in the U.K. in 1928, those in the U.S.A. in [...]

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you are not sincere in wanting to communicate with me.

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Wong Yuk Man spilled it out last night in his radio programme: Tai Pan is quitting from his morning programme.
A move to help out the pan-democrats?

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Had the misfortune to assist the Lady on an IT assignment. The assignment itself is a total joke.
We had to copy a completed form/questionnaire for the Lady’s own use. It was created with Word, and the raw HTML contained so much crap, it was shit for the eye and the mind. I thought HTML files [...]

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bought by Microsoft. It has been around for ages. I was very impressed with it when I first saw it. Now it’s a free download. Go get it.

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They couldn’t get the trade mark registration.

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Story.

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I couldn’t get it to work on my TiBook. It just hangs there with the rainbow ball and has to be force quitted. I have exhausted all the suggestions I could find from Google and on Apple’s support website, but still no go. A few G5 users also complained about iMovie crashing and taking a [...]

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Jasper is starting to have a hard time taking longer walks in his nice pair of Nike trainers, which are just about to touch his toes.
The plan was that I would take Jasper to the public library in Tuen Mun in the afternoon, and wait for the Lady to get off work and join [...]

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After a couple of days, things seem to be running okay.

dick:/home/backup# du -s -h -c *
1.3G daily.0
337M daily.1
360M daily.2
352M hourly.0
338M hourly.1
339M hourly.2
339M hourly.3
328M hourly.4
337M hourly.5
4.0G [...]

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My friend Stephen has had his 3G phone from Hutchison for a few weeks now. I asked him how he liked his 3G service. “Awful!” was his response. His biggest complaint was that switching from the 3G network to the GSM network on the phone is far from seamless (normally taking a few minutes, unless [...]

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has become a lot more useful since last time I played with it. IMAP, SMTP and SSH are all usable. Speed is still a bit slower than 56K dialup, but for HK$38/month and available virtually anywhere, this is pretty good. It is attractive to be able to work virtually anywhere.
I access GPRS from my TiBook [...]

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From the perspective of a semi-technical person, the Hong Kong Observatory has always been one of my favourite govt departments. Their weather forecast stopped to suck and got quite accurate in the 90s. They have their own atomic clock, and started running their time server at stdtime.gov.hk a few years ago, to which all my [...]

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Having a good time.

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Something based on this has been implemented on a newly installed Debian Linux server at home, pulling the /home directory on mother every four hours, and making rotating daily snapshots for seven days. Since rsync is used, only the delta (i.e. difference) is transferred over the wire and is very efficient and speedy.
Now all I [...]

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memcached. Basically it’s an object cache implemented as a server, accessed via an API set implemented in Perl, PHP, Python and Java. Stuff anything worth saving into the cache, and Bob’s your uncle.
Very useful for building highly scalable web applications.

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Anja has gotten rid of the sidewinder design on the front page of her weblog, as the index.html file has become too big.
I shamelessly imitated her design back in 12/2003. My index.php file hit the 200KB mark from day one. I chopped it to display only six months of entries back in 2/2004, and right [...]

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Big pro-democracy demo rally last Sunday, which I didn’t go.
The organizers claimed over 20K participants. The HKP claimed 10K. TCH’s braindead Central Policy Unit claimed the amazing figure of 7,627. CPU published some figure w/o doing basic sanity check, and everyone had a pretty good laugh this morning at its expenses.
In the press release it [...]

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is pointless.
I retrieved the Phone from Hell from the data centre yesterday. Now I have to figure out how to get rid of it.

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