2004/12/31

The next Chief Executive

By now, there are six candidates (Henry Tang, James Tien, Leung Chun Ying, Peter Woo, Donald Tsang and Arthur Li) aggressive to be elected as the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong.

Henry Tang James Tien Leung Chun Ying



Peter Woo Donald Tsang Arthur Li

Except Peter Woo and James Tien, the other four are already in the Executive Council. The wars amongst them have started. Last week, James Tien publicly accussed Donald Tsang manipulating with the West Kowloon Cultural Center Project to gain support from Cheung Kong Holdings and Sun Hung Kai Properties Limited. Donald Tsang was weak in defending himself against the accusation. Finally, Tung stood out and asked James Tien to shut up.

Hey, look, we are expecting more fighting for the gain of power.

Do you think who will win eventually ? I have confidence that the power will be in the hands of Donald Tsang.

2004/12/30

Startup Inspector for Windows



For a long time, I have been troubled by unwanted software programs which start up automatically after my PC boots up. Not only will the bootup takes longer, but also since these programs are memory resident, they will slow down the speed of operation. Actually some started programs might not be used at all.

I have download a copy of Startup Inspector for Windows. This program helps me to clean up startup applications and I can select those that I want. Of course, the speed of operation is improved to a great deal. Also, it can also examine whether a startup program is spyware.

The good news is Startup Inspector for Windows is a freeware. If you find it useful, please consider giving a donation.

2004/12/28

陳慧琳紙醉金迷演唱會

昨晚觀賞了“陳慧琳紙醉金迷演唱會”,感覺是好很正,華麗催燦,金光閃閃,極具氣派,令人大眼界。那個特大的舞台,足以容納四十多位舞蹈員齊齊跳勁舞。最吸引還是那鑲滿了鑽石的馬車及 Kelly 所戴的鑽冠,價值一億,很多觀眾都急不及待衝上台前拍攝馬車這一幕。

這次演唱會大部份都配以大型歌舞表演,最後壓軸的一幕 Medley 還是那三首經典跳舞快歌,花花宇宙,戀愛情色及失憶周末,再配答張國榮及梅艷芳歌曲 Mix一起,勁度十足,夠哂火喉。

這可算是我看過最好及最有水準的演唱會,繼續努力呀,Kelly。

2004/12/27

Another sad day

This is another sad day. I eagerly waited for the afternoon news. Tears in my eyes when I heard the latest death toll.

Sri Lanka: 4,500 dead
India: 6,000 dead
Indonesia: 4,000 dead
Thailand: 400 dead

When the big waves retreated, dead bodies were found hanging on trees every where. What a horrible scene in human history. Those who survived said that at the time the monster waves came, they could not see the sky and they felt that God wanted to punish them.

What lessons have we learnt ? Would brilliant scientists please develop tsunamis pre-warning systems ?

2004/12/26

Most Tragic Boxing Day in History

I was in bad mood today coz 26 December 2004 was recorded as the most tragic Boxing Day in history !!!

An earthquake under sea of Indonesia measuring 8.9 in magnitude triggered a series of tsunamis sweeping across the coastal lines of South East Asia countries. At the time of writing this post, the number of people killed was over 3000.


Phuket in devastation

Sri Lanka: 1,500 dead
India: 1,000 dead
Thailand: 55 dead
Indonesia: 450 dead
Malaysia: 7 dead
Source: Government officials

The death toll is expected to rise.

Christmas is supposed a time for joy, fun and family reunion. Let's hope no more natural disasters will happen in festive days in future.

2004/12/25

Visit to Ocean Park

Today is the Christmas day. My family went to Ocean Park to get some funs. All the places were very crowded. I was lucky to win a jumbo price in throwing tittle sand bags to hit down three cans simultaneously.

I took some very nice photos about fishes. Inside the Panda Habitat, I could take some photos of the male Panda An An at a very close distance. Though Ocean Park is full of fun, with the coming opening of Disneyland, this is our last visit. Looking around, I must say that some facilities in Ocean Park are really aged. Also, in recent years, Ocean Park lacks new themes and facilities to attract visitors. People still go there coz they have no other choice.


Colourful Tropical Fishes


Panda An An

2004/12/24

Adding Google Search Tool to Blog

The whole day, I am very sleepy due to the effect of taking cough syrup. I have had a bad cough lately. I do not want to see a doctor as I know very well that this is a chronic illness in early winter.



I have tried to look for hints on adding Google search toolbar onto my blog template. Hopefully, I find some HTML scripts and insert them right the way. The effect is satisfactory.

I am so happy that the whole damn thing works so fine to my satisfaction.

2004/12/23

Blog Template

I spent several hours finding my favourite blog templates.

Only about 30 blog templates are provided by blogger.com, which are share-used amongst over a million users. Quite boring to see bloggers are using more or less the same templates. Blog is a personal thing. Every blogger has his/her own characters and way of thinking. This should be reflected in the weblog layout. I am tired of choosing one amongst the default templates of blogger.com.

At last, I downloaded a template found in blogtemplates.noipo.org. No the best I have seen, I must say. With a bit knowledge of HTML syntax, I was able to add a hit counter, an analogue clock and some favourite links onto the template. What's next ? I think I will add Google and Yahoo search tools. Give me some time to figure these out.

2004/12/22

Schwinn Evoution Bike

For the past 10 days, I keep on going to California Fitness Centre for a physical exercise of riding Schwinn Evolution Bike.



Schwinn Evolution Bike is a well-designed fitness equipment. If one works hard, he/she can burn up to 600 kcal in a 45-minute session. For a 75-minute session, I think the kcal consumed should be around 1000. Too bad that the gym centre only provides 75-minute training classes on Saturday or Sunday only. Of course, I will spare some time to catch these classes.

I have seen some experienced players not putting their feet onto the paddle cage and not securing their feet tight with the strap. This is a bad practice. Some trainers have reminded that when the resistance is adjusted to very high, the two legs should work on a push-pull fashion. The strap will help one to lift up his/her feet thus producing a pulling strength. Without the strape tied, one just has the push power from the other leg which is stressful enough to harm your body.

Riding Schwinn Evolution Bike is a vigorous physical exercise. The warm-up part and the cool-down play plus the strecth are extremely important to relieve the body muscles gently.

2004/12/21

Tung Chee-hwa and President Hu

Hooray...most people had seen Tung Chee-hwa being publicly condemned by President Hu Jin-tao on TV.

Tung was reminded by President Hu to examine inadequacies and to do a better job. Hu's remark implicitly reflects the fact that Tung is ruling Hong Kong in a poor manner. Sigh, he hands the livelihood of Hong Kong people to big consortia. He continues to ignore public opinion. We have nothing to remember or celebrate in his 7-year of governance.

We still have two and a half years to suffer before the next Chief Executive.

2004/12/19

King of Rock and Roll

If you ask me who is the King of Rock and Roll, without hesitation, I surely say Ronnie James Dio.



Ronnie has an ugly face. How comes he looks so bad ? However, when it comes to rock and roll vocal, no rock singer can ever beat him. Just listen to "Man on the silver mountain", "Long live rock and roll", "Temple of the King","Sign of the Southern Cross", "Holy Diver" and "Don't talk to Stranger" etc., you will agree with what I say. He was involved in the bands ELF, Rainbow, Black Sabbath and finally a band in his own name "DIO".

I learnt of Ronnie James Dio more than 25 years ago when Angel Leung was a DJ in Commercial Radio 2. When I say 25 years ago, you can guess how old I am now. Angel was the only DJ in Hong Kong willing to promote rock and roll music on radio. Following her departure, rock fans in Hong Kong were completely out of touch of rock music from airwaves.

Long live rock and roll !!!!

2004/12/18

Domain Name Renewal


My domain name i3way.com is registered with godaddy.com and will be expired by Jan 2005. The renewal cost is US$8.95 per year. Very cheap and affordable. Indeed, Network Solutions charges about US$34 per year.

In Hong Kong, any domain name ending with .hk is charged at HK$200 (US$25.7) per year by Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company Limited. Frankly, this is a high price to pay. That’s why I am not interested in having a .hk domain name.

In the past 4 years, the administration of my domain name has been handled by a friend who possesses good DNS knowledge. Now that I operate my own DNS server, I think it is time for me to handle all the admin jobs by myself.

Why godaddy.com charges so low and yet it can still run a viable business ? Here below is the answer.

"You are probably wondering how we can charge as much as 70% less than our competition and still be in business, right?

First of all, we run a tight ship. We choose our promotions carefully and ensure every advertising dollar pays for itself; we streamline our systems and billing processes; we don't have any frills (like the $5000 office chairs of some of the now bankrupt dot-coms). We also don't waste money on unnecessary things like toll-free telephone numbers that are often abused anyway.

Second, we're straight shooters. There are no tricks in what we do, just good, old-fashioned, reliable business principles. Quite often we're asked if we bait our customers with low rates and then charge high renewal prices. Anybody that expects us to do that will be disappointed. We believe in the old saying, "You can shear a sheep many times but you can only skin it once." So, your renewal rates will be no higher than the rate you paid when you initially registered your domain name, or what our registration rates were when you transferred your domain name to us (the only exceptions would be if the price the registry charges us increased, or if you took advantage of a limited-time, special price. And if the registry increases our cost, yours will go up only by the amount ours did, never more).

What's the end result of all this? Well, we're happy to tell you that we're a small but profitable company that expects to be in business for many years to come. All this, of course, is due to value-conscious customers like you."

2004/12/17

Don't send me Christmas cards

By now I have received over 20 Christmas cards from business people that I know. They all know my email address and yet they chose to send paper cards instead of emails for festive greetings. For this, I am getting angry. How many trees would be chopped down each year just for the sake of fabricating large quantity of Christmas cards.

Come on.. We ae now living in an Information Age. Festive greeting by email is highly efficient, time-saving and environmental friendly.

Stop sending out Christmas cards now !

2004/12/16

Big Gate Crab "大閘蟹"



Yesterday, I met a friend and we then go to taste the famous Big Gate Crabs in Tsim Sha Tsui. We dipped the crab meat in a special kind of vinegar. So tasteful and delicious that we could not stop eating. There is a Chinese saying that the meat of Big Gate Crabs is cool to internal organs so we needed to drink some wine. After the meal, we had a small cup of ginger tea to make our body warm.


Be careful, Big Gate Crab is classified as very high cholesterol food. One can not take too much or too often.

For me, I don't have any worry. Last year, my physical examination report revealed that my cholesterol level was below average.

2004/12/15

Spam Filter

About a year ago, I started to set my filter rules in webmail. The spam filter has successfully helped to eliminate over 3000 junk email messages, average 10 spam mesages are caught per day. Still not good enough as I have about 50 junk email a day. I need to make tighter control in filtering.

Increasingly, spammers send out HTML mails with images containing adveritizement to avoid spam messages being filtered by text-based rules. Nothing on Earth can filter this kind of spam mail.

Here is the hit rates of my text-based filtering rules :

No. of hits String in message header

17 Award
91 Free
36 Application
120 Cheap
138 Free
34 Fw:
27 Fwd:
8 Male
53 N/A
11 Notice
3 ROLEX
284 ci (target word is cialis)
144 med (taget word is medicine)
111 online (target word is online porn)
48 order
51 pharmacy
111 price
24 shop
12 size (target word is penis size)
60 software
2 strength
99 weight



No. of hits String in message body
97 Generic
172 cheap
107 cialis
1022 click
3 good price
87 loan
106 mort (taget word is mortgage)
85 rates
82 unsubscribe
80 viagra


2004/12/14

Christmas Celebration

My son, Edwin, should be quite happy for this Christmas.

Oh yeah, I've promised to take him to Ocean Park during the holiday. This will be the last time for our family to visit Ocean Park. After Sept 2005, when Disneyland opens, who else will spend time and money in playing there. Time to say goodbye to "Old Ocean Park".

On 25 Dec, the Christmas day, we will enjoy buffet dinner at Regal Hotel.

Of course, he will make my life difficult if he does not have a present in this festival. He's got a new gameboy and two tapes of games already .

Wooo.. summing up, I need to spend about HK$1500 for my son in this festival.

2004/12/13

Dinosaurs Extinction

My son Edwin who is in P4 grade has to write simple English journal on a weekly basis.

The theme of a recent assignment is "How did dinosaurs disappear on Earth?"

Here is what he wrote.

"Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for over 65 million years. Then one day, there was a big space asteriod that hit the Earth. The whole Earth was on fire and all the dinosaurs on land died. Some dianosaurs living in water could still live. After the huge fire, it come the Ice Age. The dinosaurs in water also died. This did not end the Dinosaur Age.

There is a story saying that a dinosaur is living in a lake in italy. I think the story is true."

《拼音大師》國際中文版- Phonetic Master International


This is a powerful tool, one of the best software packages I have ever used.

Being integrated to MS Words, it can produce Putonghua phonetics from the text input. The phoentics can also be sounded out in human voice. If you are eager to learn how to say a Chinese document in Putonghua, this one can help you. The output voice file is saved in wav format. For me, I will use wav to MP3 converter to convert the Putongua voice for storage in MP3 player, easy to carry around.

Motorola C650


Buy this camera phone from NWT at HK$1166. Performance-wise, this cell phone is disappointing. The resolution is just 128 x 128 pixels, supporting 65k colours. Memory size is just 1.6M. Cannot store more than 20 pictures.

The camera attached to the back of the phone is a damn thing. It captures a blur picture. I think I will not use it.

The only attractive things to me are small size, light weight, low price and the sending of Chinese SMS text from a PC when the phone is hooked up to a PC using a USB cable.

How long can I tolerate this piece of little silver shit ?

2004/12/12

清拆紅灣半島



近年,有兩件事是值得香港市民感到驕傲和自亳的。第一是七一遊行,市民用遊行將不合理的法例向特區政府施壓,迫使政府暫時擱置23條立法。最近的紅灣半島清拆事件,民意戰勝大財團的金錢掛帥,迫使大地產商放棄清拆,香港亦得已避過一場環保大災難。還記得地產商在記者會上,辯稱紅灣半島質素低劣,非拆不可,真得很想知道地產商改建後的紅灣半島會買幾錢一呎 ?

2004/12/10

Fedora Core 3


Fedora Core 3 (FC3) was officially released last month. I find this package more attractive and easy to use than FC1 or FC2.

Cool ! The Chinese fonts in OpenOffice look great. The default browser is Firefox. I didn't have much pain in getting all browsers plugins working (realplayer, flash, java, pdf) except the mplayerplugin. MPlayer was not provided. I have to install MPlayer and mplayerplugin from source (tar ball) or rpm.

Hey.. I could not locate xmms, the MP3 player and Totem, the multimedia player. I should also need xine ! Can't understand why these multimedia goodies are not bundled with FC3. Wooo... Need some time to configure out how to get these stuff installed.

Evolution is the email client in Gnome desktop. I don't think I will ever use Evolution since I prefer to use Thunderbird for reading mail and RSS news.

For software updates, software update managers that can be associated with FC3 include Synaptic, apt-get,yum and connection with Red Hat Network. Hm....I am getting confused. Which one should I choose ?

2004/12/08

Energy-saving light bulbs

In the past few weeks, three eneregy-saving light bulbs in my house burnt out. These were products from mainland China. I estimate the avearge life-time is about 1 year.

I have used similar products from Philips which last for at least 3 years. I don't think energy-saving bulbs made in China can have a good quality.

If Philips light bulbs cost a few dollar more, it is worth to buy. After all, the product life-time is much longer. This in long term saves me much money.

2004/12/04

Sham Shui Po Computer Festival

The 2004 Sham Shui Po Computer Festival will be on 10 -13 Dec at the streets near to Golden Shopping Arcade.

I plan to buy a 15-inch LCD monitor, budget at HK$1500, and a GeForce 64MB or 128MB 3D display card, should be around HK$200.

Need to remind myself to bring some bad or corrupted CDs for hanging on to a Environmental Protection X'mas Tree. All the CDs will be given to Friends of Earth after the show.

2004/12/03

梅艷芳逝世一週年

現在距離梅艷芳逝世一週年還有3星期,但此刻我巳是懷念這位超卓的巨星。

過去二十年,我們都是陪伴梅艷芳成長的,她的歌聲優美動人,扣人心弦,充份發揮女性美,鄭裕玲曾經說過香港要等待二十年才可以出一位梅艷芳這樣出色的歌星。

中國有個鄧麗君,香港有個梅艷芳,而台灣則有個張惠妹。現在,鄧麗君及梅艷芳都不在人世,唯一寄托便是張惠妹了。

亞妹姐,拜託妳哪,妳不要有事呀,記得每年做例行婦科檢查呀,繼續唱好歌給我們聽呀!

BogoMIPS

The word BogoMIPS is made up of "Bogus" and "MIPS".

When Linux Kernel boots up, it executes a busy loop to measure the CPU speed in terms of Million Instruction Per Second (MIPS), called BogoMIPS. BogoMIPS is bogus.

Another interpretation of MIPS is "Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed".

My RH station has a calibrated delay loop of 799.53 bogoMIPS. It rides on a K6III 450 MHz CPU. For a single CPU station with P4 3.4 CPU, there could be 6717 BogoMIPS.

2004/12/02

Nike Air Max 95

Last night I went to Mong Kok to take a look at latest Nike Air Max running shoes.

Seems that Air Max 95 series have the best looks and styles.

My favourite is the Olympic Models - Bronze Editions, selling at US$225. It is not available for sales in Hong Kong.

2004/12/01

Snort

Snort is the best Intruder Detection System in the open source world.

Just learn that Snort has three modes :

-sniffer mode;
-packet logger mode; and
-Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) mode.




In NIDS mode, it has built-in 2500 detection rules. A dedicated station is needed for Snort as it requires a high processing power.

IPv6 internal IP addresses






Does any one how many IP addresses are reserved for internal IP addresses in IPv6 space ?

In IPv4, there are about 18 millions grouped as :

10.0.0.0/8
172.16.0.0/12
192.168.0.0/16

World AIDS Day


Today is the 1st Decemeber 2004, it is also the World AIDS Day.

I don't find many web sites putting up a red ribbon to show their cares. In the past years, thousands may be millions web sites were willing to spread the message across by placing a red ribbon to alert attention. I am not happy about the cyber community not showing care at all.

Google is doing a good job. It has placed the red ribbon in an easily seen position.