Welcome to Yee Siang's Website

I have finished my job today to convert a blogspot site into a mobile devices friendly version using mobeegen, a technology that I created with Websight Sdn Bhd.

We choosed http://annasyue.blogspot.com/ to be our very first blogspot sample. It is quite a successful project and I am looking forward to mobilize more website created by different type of platform and tools.

The good thing about Mobeegen is that it is not a reconstructed static version of your site, but rather a dynamic one where it automatically follow your original update. This feature has elminated your hassle to mantain 2 separate sites.

The left is the original version and the right is the mobilized one. Tested on iphone, native-app-like interface is very convenience for me who has a fat finger.

当今大马的RSS不见了?

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00

距今已经20天了，当今大马的RSS Feed 还是不见踪影……

根据资料显示，当今大马发布在其RSS Feed 个的最后一则新闻为 Oct 4, 2011 9:21 PM 的 "向同善医院停车场发射水炮　内政部将对付违反操守警员"。之后该RSS Feed 的网址便一直down 着。

我想这是因为网站正在改动过度去收费方式所影响的吧？

没有关系，这里有个替代方案；我从网站抓下html然后做分析，发布自己的RSS Feed 管道；可以显示malaysiakini 中文网最近两天的新闻头条。http://mydb.yeesiang.com/go/malaysiakini_zh

更多相关的大马中文媒体 RSS Feed 可在 http://mydb.yeesiang.com/go/mandarin_news 免费获得。

南洋网遭黑客入侵

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00

2011 年10月7日，下午2.50 分，南洋网站其中一页面被发现黑客踪迹：http://nanyang.com.my/node/388117?tid=461

载图1：网页上方显示黑客踪迹

载图2：HTML 代码被黑客植入。

本地媒体网络系统有待改善。

2012 pre-buget Bursa

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00

Lets try to predict the content of buget 2012 base on bursa performances.

Top Gainers

panamy, gab & carlsberg, petrdag & petgas, tenaga

Top Losers

dlady, f&n, shell, misc, jtinter

Some Prediction:

Incentive for energy saving appliances manufacturer?
Allow tenaga to raise electricity rate?
No tax increment for alcohol drinks?
Raise on cigarette tax?
Proton getting any goodies?
Petronas getting any goodies too?

Hehehe.. just for fun..

A memorable day

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00

虽然我不认识你，但是在我用过的众多smartphone中，apple 无疑是最user friendly 的。

我不信教，但相信你的离去对于你那千千万万的信徒来说是沉重的…… RIP

我在此捕抓下Apple 网页历史性的一刻，标榜着你的离去是新的时代的开始。

我期待更加开放却又不失user friendly 的新机种。

Malaysia news site

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00

Malaysia news are mainly categorized by languages like English, Malay, Mandarin News and etc. Then, you may also divided them into pro government, neutral, or 't'.

Here is the list of them, but not a full list anyway:

English News

Bernama News http://www.bernama.com
The Star http://www.thestar.com.my
News Straits Time http://www.nst.com.my
The Sun http://www.thesundaily.my
The Edge http://www.theedgemalaysia.com
Malaysia Today http://malaysia-today.net
The Malaysia Insider http://www.themalaysianinsider.com
MalaysiaKini http://www.malaysiakini.com

Malay News

Utusan http://www.utusan.com.my
Berita Harian http://www.bharian.com.my
The Malay Mail http://www.mmail.com.my
Bernama http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/bm
Kosmo! http://www.kosmo.com.my
Sinar Harian http://www.sinarharian.com.my
The Malaysia Insider Bahasa version http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/bahasa
MalaysiaKini Malay version http://www.malaysiakini.com/bm
Merdeka Review edisi BM http://www.merdekareview.com/bm

Mandarin News

Sin Chew Jit Poh 星洲日报 http://www.sinchew.com.my
Nan Yang Siang Pau 南洋商报 http://www.nanyang.com
Oriental Daily News 东方日报 http://www2.orientaldaily.com.my
China Press 中国报 http://www.chinapress.com.my
Guang Ming 光明日報 http://www.guangming.com.my
Kwong Hua Yit Poh 光华日報 http://www.kwongwah.com.my
See Hua Daily News 诗华日报 http://www.seehua.com
Overseas Chinese Daily News 华侨日报 http://www.ocdn.com.my
Merdeka Review http://www.merdekareview.com
MalaysiaKini http://www.malaysiakini.com/cn

Tamil News

Makkal Osai
Malaysia Nanban
Tamil Nesan
MalaysiaKini/Semparuthi http://www.semparuthi.com/

Feed Technology

Most of the malaysia news site still running on web1.0 technology while some of them not even have any web presence. Thus, probably we shouldn't demand much.

The national news agency - Bernama news provide news in major language like english, malay and mandarin. However, only the english and malay version provide RSS Feed:

Bernama English http://web8.bernama.com/bernama/v5/rss/english.php
Bernama Malay http://web8.bernama.com/bernama/v5/rss/malay.php

Even that, the feeds are not in sync with the website content and do not show the latest today news from all categories.

The star who ranked no 17th top Malaysia site in alexa, provide the most complete RSS Feed feature among the local traditional media. Feed are well categorized and presented at http://thestar.com.my/rss/

Sin Chew, the largest subscribed traditional chinese newspapaer in Malaysia, did provide RSS feed under url http://www.sinchew-i.com/rss.xml prior to Jan 2011. The reason for the service discontinued is unknown. They however, injected advertisement text into their news content online.

Online media like Malaysia Today, Malaysia Insider, Malaysiakini and Malaysia Review do provide comprehensive Feed features.

The future

I find local traditional media have hard move in giving away free news headline online, probably afraid of their current subscribers would turn over to it. Apparetly, they are loosing out in this new biz model to modern online media; and their difficulty is not due to budgeting or technology barrier but their failure to see the big picture.

I belive the future will be dominated by online media. Most people have the misconception that online media are all dominated by anti-government media company. This is not true as bernama is solely operating online.

It is also a misconception that online media must be totally free and the traditional paid subcription model will not works. I think it will works just fine, where paid user get to read the full content while free user just can get a glimpse over the headline.

Imagine the future where your smart home system can integrate with your favorite news site, reading out today news headline for you using text-to-speech techology while your are busy brushing teeth or holding your sandwiches on the breakfast desk in the morning. Who would wanto get their hand dirty on the inked obsoleted media anymore?

People are always on the move nowsaday. How often you brought along your smartphone in compare to the newspaper u bought in the morning?

Traditional media, please..... change and transform for better tomorrow. I will do something to catalyst the process. The work is in progress, stay tune.

Install yum on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00

RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 do not come with yum by default.

I come to a situation where yum is required to install php-dev.

Getting all the required package (RPM)

$wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/yum/yum-2.4.2-0.4.el4.rf.noarch.rpm

$wget ftp://195.220.108.108/linux/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/sqlite-2.8.16-1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

$wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-7.el4.rf.i386.rpm

$wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/python-sqlite-0.5.0-1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

$wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/dag/redhat/el4/en/x86_64/dag/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.7-1.2.el4.rf.noarch.rpm

Install RPM

$rpm -ivh libsqlite-2.8.15-1.i386.rpm

$rpm -ivh python-elementtree-1.2.6-7.el4.rf.i386.rpm

$rpm -ivh python-sqlite-0.5.0-1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

$rpm -ivh python-urlgrabber-2.9.7-1.2.el4.rf.noarch.rpm

$rpm -ivh yum-2.4.2-0.4.el4.rf.noarch.rpm

Setup Repository

$wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm

$rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm

Yum update all package

$yum update

Notes:

http://techtrouts.com/how-to-install-yum-on-red-hat-enterprise-linux-4/ provide the default tutorial but one of the link (http://techtrouts.com/how-to-install-yum-on-red-hat-enterprise-linux-4/) to obtain sqlite is broken. I searched over the google and found a smilar package (ftp://195.220.108.108/linux/dag/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/RPMS/sqlite-2.8.16-1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm) and it works eventually.

Hope this article helps.

Install tidy to lampp with php5

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00

Installing tidy for PHP5 is pain ass. Many of the resources found on Internet is either misleading or purely not functioning.

For this tutorial, i am using Fedora distro.

Install the lampp

My favorite apache-php combination is LAMPP from Apache Friend. In this tutorial, i going to use Lampp 1.7.1 which available as archive on http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/XAMPP%20Linux/

The reason simply because my application require this spec:

PHP 5
Tidy extension
Zend Optimizer extension (not support PHP5.3 yet!!)

Lampp 1.7.1 is bundle with PHP 5.2.9 which will work for the troublesome zend optimizer.

Follow the instruction found on the site, untar the lampp package to /opt/lampp

Create a phpinfo.php file and access it from browser to make sure everything works

Get the latest Tidy's source

Goto: http://tidy.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tidy/tidy/

Then, download by clicking the 'Download GNU tarball'

This will download tidy into '/home/username/Downloads/tidy-tidy.tar.gz'

Then, extract the file and found '/home/username/Downloads/tidy' folder created.

open terminal, type:

cd /home/username/Downloads/tidy/build/gmake

Then, run gmake:

gmake all

Now copy the lib and includes folder that are in the '/home/username/Downloads/tidy' directory to '/home/username/tidy'.

Download the PHP

Goto: http://my.php.net/releases/

I using version 5.2.9 for zend optimizer compatiblity. Thus, i download the PHP 5.2.9 (tar.gz) into '/home/username/Downloads/php-5.2.9.tar.gz'

Then, extract the file and found '/home/username/Downloads/php-5.2.9' folder created.

We will not going to compile the entire php as the focus is on tidy extension.

Compile the PHP tidy extension

open terminal, type:

cd /home/username/Downloads/php-5.2.9/ext/tidy/

phpize

./configure --with-tidy=/home/username/tidy/

make

cp modules/* /opt/lampp/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613

The last command looks complicated but actually is simple. It is to copy the compiled tidy.so to the php extension folder. I am using lampp from xampp friends and thus the directory is located as above.

All you need to do is to enable this extension in php.ini file and do a testing.

Remarks

1) If compiler complaints about libtidy not found, try to do:

yum -y install tidy-devel

However, this would not create a correct tidy.so due to the incorrect version of tidy used.

2) Sometime tidy might shown loaded on phpinfo but display class not found error in php code. This is due to the incorrect version of tidy.so loaded. Please take note that the one found in pecl is for php4.

Mobile Web Insights from 2010 to 2015

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00

While the majority Malaysian are still fanatical about lining up for iphone4 (even though half of them only use up to 10% of the phone's features), smart phone has become the latest trend in IT world.

That means, more and more website content will be browse by these smart devices. Yet, only minority of them are design for mobile devices friendly.

Lucky enough, most of today smart phone come with 'smart enough' web browser like safari for iphone, ie for windows mobile and google android has its own, they still have one big issue: screen size.

Website was design with min 640x480 resolution, then move up to 800x600 and now 1024x768. Many of the old design used nested table heavily for layout thanks to m$ frontpage. While most modern website emphasis on philosophy and practices likes liquid layout, tableless design, w3c validated xhtml etc etc, many of are still out-dated.

These out-dated website has become a problem for small screen devices like smart phone. keep on zooming and scrolling (vertically yet horizontally) just to read a line of text is just frustrated. The web just need to redesign for these devices!

Heavy use on javascript has become another issue in today mobile devices. Most of these devices do not has large memory space like the desktop/notebook used to have. However, this issue can be overcome in near future as technology advance. Just for the time being, don't overuse the javascript for your website.

openwave has published an article about european web traffic behaviour. From the graph, adult content hogged most of the bandwidth while operator portal have the top transaction and user hits.

For Malaysian, as a friendly nation and aslo the world's biggest online social network consumer group, we probably have most of our mobile bandwidth spending on the social network category. It's interesting to see such research being carry out and made public.

Then, only the Malaysia software developer will started to revamp their website application by convincing their client/designer to get rid of heavy fancy looking web design and get back to simple, lite and standard one.

My CodeIgniter journey

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:00:00

PHP is always my favorite programming language for its lite weight, comprehensive and rapid prototyping nature. Like other PHP programmer out there, I hate to do repetitive job every time a new project started. Writing authentication, database abstraction layer, CRUD grid and pagination over and over and over again is just the worst thing can happen in a programmer life. Framework is the only answer. Now, the question is: which one to choose?

I have been playing around with Zend framework since version 0.x and is always confuse with its architecture, design philosophy and etc. The lack of ORM and the process of manually integration with doctrine is more like a hack.
Symfony is always the most complete and perfect framework in my opinion, where i found its design philosophy shared many similarity with mine. However, it is always overhead for a small project.
I used to developed my own framework but eventually the code grown ugrly and outdated.
Most of the opensource framework required PHP5 and one of my project which require PHP4 has eventually drive me to CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter has the major feature i looking for:

PHP4
MVC
Form Helper
Plugin/library base
Multilingual

HMVC

However, it also lack of the most important things i required: HMVC (hierarchical MVC). I am so used with HMVC concept in my previous asp.net mvc project where i can easily call controller B's action in controller A's view. This is handy when you need to do things like outputing a drop down list of foreign table. CodeIgniter do have HMVC support in 3rd party library but it is totally not PHP4 compatible. This is one of the major drawback for me.

Layout

CodeIgniter also lack of a default layout engine. Layout is important to ensure similar view and feel across all php pages in your website. Again, i am so used with the masterpage concept in asp.net mvc, it can even get nested within one and another. I even implemented the concept in my own framework. Luckily, there are a number of layout library for codeIgniter. The coding is simple.

<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Layout 
{
	var $template_data = array();
	
	function set($name, $value)
	{
		$this->template_data[$name] = $value;
	}

	function view($view = '' , $view_data = array(), $return = FALSE, $template = '../../layout')
	{
		$controller = $this->CI =& get_instance();
		$this->set('content', $controller->load->view($view, $view_data, TRUE));
		return $controller->load->view($template, $this->template_data, $return);
	} 
}

ORM

CodeIgniter also lack of ORM but i came across some tutorial on how to integrate doctrine with it. I think this is not a big deal as the model layer is pretty well done.

Grid

Grid is always a major component in CRUD type of application. I wrote my own helper which allow me to easily create consistent and manageable grid across all controller:

In View:

As you can see, it is very simple with a one line code.

<h2>List</h2>
<?php echo grid($grid); ?>

In Controller:

Just a snippet...

$this->load->helper('grid');
$this->pagination->initialize($this->UserModel->countAll()); 
$data['grid']['pagination'] = $this->pagination;
$data['grid']['records'] = $this->UserModel->getAll($offset, $this->config->item('grid_per_page_limit'));
$data['grid']['columns'] = array
(
	'username'=>'Username', 
	'date_modified'=>'Last Modified'
);
$data['grid']['controls'] = array
(
	'edit'=>'Edit', 
	'delete'=>'Delete'
);

In Model:

function countAll()
{
	return $this->db->count_all('users');
}

function getAll($offset=0, $limit=10, $sort='id', $order='DESC')
{
	$this->db->select('*')
		->from('users')
		->order_by($sort, $order)
		->limit($limit, $offset);
	
	$query = $this->db->get();		
	return $query->result();
}

In Config:

Create a config file called application.php to store all your application setting and autoload it.

// pagination
$config['grid_per_page_limit'] = 30;

In helpers:

Create a helper called grid_helper.php and autoload it.

<?php  if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');


if (!function_exists('grid'))
{
	function grid($grid)
	{
		$CI =& get_instance();
		$buffer = '<div class="datagrid">';
		
		$records = $grid['records'];
		$pagination = $grid['pagination'];
		$columns = $grid['columns'];
		$controls = $grid['controls'];
		
		if($records)
		{
			// generate pagination
			$buffer .= $pagination->create_links();
			$buffer .= "\n";
			
			$counter = $CI->uri->segment(3) ? $CI->uri->segment(3) : 0;
			$buffer .= "<table>";
			$buffer .= "\n";
			
			// generate header
			$buffer .= "\t<tr>";
			$buffer .= "\n";
			
			$buffer .= "\t\t<th><span class=\"counter\">Counter</span></th>";
			$buffer .= "\n";
				
			foreach($columns as $column)
			{
				$buffer .= "\t\t<th>".$column."</th>";
				$buffer .= "\n";
			}
			if(is_array($controls))
			{
				$buffer .= "\t\t<th><span class=\"control\">Control</span></th>";
				$buffer .= "\n";
			}
			$buffer .= "\t</tr>";
			$buffer .= "\n";
			
			// generate records row
			foreach($records as $record)
			{
				++$counter;
				$oddOrEven = ($counter & 1) ? 'odd':'even';
				$buffer .= "\t<tr class=\"{$oddOrEven}\">";
				$buffer .= "\n";
				
				$buffer .= "\t\t<td><span class=\"counter\">".$counter."</span></td>";
				$buffer .= "\n";
				
				foreach($columns as $columnKey=>$column)
				{
					if(substr($columnKey, 0, 5) == 'date_')
					{
						$value = unix_to_human($record->$columnKey);
						$type = "date";
					}
					else
					{
						$value = $record->$columnKey;
						$type = "";
					}
					
					$buffer .= "\t\t<td><span class=\"{$type}\">{$value}</span></td>";
					$buffer .= "\n";
				}
				if(is_array($controls))
				{
					$buffer .= "\t\t<td><span class=\"controls\">";
					$buffer .= "\n";
					foreach($controls as $controlKey=>$control)
					{
						$buffer .= "\t\t\t".'<span class="control">'.anchor($CI->router->fetch_class()."/{$controlKey}/".$record->id, $control, array('title' => $control)).'</span>';
						$buffer .= "\n";
					}
					$buffer .= "</span></td>";
					$buffer .= "\n";
				}
				$buffer .= "\t</tr>";
				$buffer .= "\n";
			}
			
			
			$buffer .= "</table>";
			$buffer .= "\n";
			
			// generate pagination
			$buffer .= $pagination->create_links();
			$buffer .= "\n";
		}
		else
		{
			$buffer .= "No Records";
		}
		
		$buffer .= '</div>';
		
		return $buffer;
		
	} 
}

?>

In libraries:

Override the default pagination library by creating one at application\libraries\MY_Pagination.php

<?php 

if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed'); 

Class MY_Pagination extends CI_Pagination
{
	var $CI;
	
	function MY_Pagination()
	{
		parent::CI_Pagination();
		$this->CI =& get_instance();
	}
	
	function initialize($totalRow)
	{
		$config['base_url'] = $this->CI->config->site_url()."/".$this->CI->router->fetch_class()."/".$this->CI->router->fetch_method()."/";
		$config['total_rows'] = $totalRow;
		$config['per_page'] =  $this->CI->config->item('grid_per_page_limit');
		$config['full_tag_open'] = '<div class="pagination">';
		$config['full_tag_close'] = '</div>';
		$config['cur_tag_open'] = '<span class="current">';
		$config['cur_tag_close'] = '</span>';
		$config['num_tag_open'] = '<span class="digit">';
		$config['num_tag_close'] = '</span>';
		
		parent::initialize($config);
	}
}

?>

For the Css:

.datagrid table
{
	width:100%;
	border:1px solid black;
	border-collapse:collapse;
}

.datagrid td
{
	border:1px solid black;
}

.datagrid th
{
	text-align:left;
}

.datagrid .counter
{
	display:block;
	text-align:center;
}

.datagrid .controls
{
	display:block;
	text-align:center;
}

.datagrid .date
{
	display:block;
	text-align:center;
}

.datagrid .odd
{
	background:#EEE;
}

.pagination
{
	margin:1em 0 1em 0;
}

.pagination .digit
{
	padding:3px;
}

.pagination .current
{
	font-weight:bold;
}

As you can see, the grid package is not complete and allow many room of improvement such as filtering, sorting, ajax, session memorizing etc.

This is just a beginning of my journey in codeigniter, and i wouldn't limit myself to only 1 framework. Afterall, it is all about finding the most suitable framework for the kind of project you are handling. Of course we always hope there's 1 framework that suit all type of projects, but we need to face the reality.

I will be sharing more of my experience and little plugin/library i write for my codeigniter project here. But as the time i writing this article, codeIgniter team already working on version 2 and is going to drop the PHP4 support.

PHP 4 support is deprecated. Features new to 2.0.0 may not be support PHP 4, and all legacy features will no longer support PHP 4 as of 2.1.0.

澳门香港游 2010

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00

和老婆共游澳门香港。

入住伊萨贝拉的房间，以为晚上会时光倒流回到2046，结果却是热到逃跑。

旅店对面便是闻名的祥记面家，周要排长龙直到街上；推荐招牌虾子捞面（￥20）和姜葱鱼皮（￥14）。

澳门除了吃还是吃。

不可错过的义顺牛奶公司，找必吃之一的双皮炖奶（第一次听到奶可以拿来炖……）。啊！也别忘尝尝猪扒包。

牛什。不是每个人都能够接受的街边小食，卫生问题加上近年来热腾腾的黑心食品事件，我本身也不太敢多吃。建议尝试他的加喱鱼圆，但个人还是觉得马来西亚的比较好吃（我自己做的，用足新鲜材料）。

葡挞。多年前风靡马来西亚，现在有机会来到发源地，一定要尝试有什么不同。个人口感不挑剔，的确分辨不出有什么不同。

我们吃得哪家是位于竹弯的安德鲁饼家，这小镇环境倒是很优美。

酒醉金迷的赌场不是我的茶。

这次的旅游重点是亚洲成人展。多说无益，看图吧。

这些不是女优，只是cosplay 而已。

这两位也不是女优，模特儿而已（playboy 花花公子的）

这几位就是女优啦

展览会除了女优show，cosplay 比赛，成人用具展销，还有国内外相关行业人士的舞台表演等等；实属在马来西亚难以遇见的另类体验。这是一个年度展销会，错过的朋友明年可以报名。

前往大三巴牌坊，人山人海的……

感觉上整个澳门是个肉干城，不然就被钜记饼家和周大福给占领了。

不可错过的潘荣记金钱饼。

老板在酷热的环境下努力烘烤出来的饼，每片都薄薄脆脆的，超好吃，价钱又公道！但是，要小心附近的大声公凉茶，网上虽然好评如潮，其实价钱很贵（一瓶菊花茶要价￥20，淡淡的，有图）！

来到牌坊！夏天天气又热，我们便躲进冷气博物院。

博物院后山有个公园，可以遥望澳门全景。旧楼

新楼

感觉上，就像回到了故乡马六甲（圣保罗山？）。

晚上到九如坊吃澳门港督御厨煮的澳葡料理，最重要的是，饭后别忘了点他的招牌甜点 - 木糠布甸！

听说这里的焗鴨飯是澳门首长最爱的一道菜。

最后乘搭渡轮下香港… 嗯，天气不太好，浪很大，老婆晕晕吐吐了几回。

找大伯和堂哥，再去shopping! 不巧碰到香港旅游团在菲利宾被夹持时间，在餐馆电视机旁，让我见识到了港人的万众一心。

回到九龙找吃：小食档的环境恶劣肮脏比臭豆腐的味道还恶心。尝试了澳门香港两边的街边加喱鱼蛋，得到的结论还是我自己做的好吃得多。

Sungai Chiling 2010

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00

如果要选雪兰莪州最漂亮的瀑布，她当之无愧！

Sungai Chiling 坐落在KKB (Kuala Kubu Bahru)，位于福隆港半山。从南北大道 KKB/Tanjong Malim 的收费站进入，然后根据福隆港的方向牌驶进。这里是雪兰莪和霹雳州的边境，群山环抱，是个很有灵气的地区。

我们一行五人早上八点出发。我是司机，凭着残存在脑海中的点滴记忆，终于在九点钟抵达山脚下。接着在那里的乌雪新古毛乡村随便找了个食档吃了个简单的早餐：凉茶和云吞面，味道不怎么样，却要 4块钱左右……但看在店里的小美眉份上，算了啦~ 半山下的道路很宽。途中，我们碰见了一支甲虫车队，然后一起在桥上停了下来拍照。小小的七彩甲虫车在大蓄水池衬托下很……特别。

再往前走些，过了一座看似殖民时代的铁桥，我们的主角 - Santuari Ikan Sungai Chiling 就在右边啦。入口处被浓密的热带雨林遮盖着，除了个简单的牌楼和停泊在路旁的车子外，她实在很难引起路人的注意力。忘了被什么什么局管理，管理员友善地向我们要求签入和缴付一零吉的入门费。接下来的旅程便是小小的探险了。

森林保护区内分叉路口众多，又没有明确的指示牌，很容易走错路。但其实条条道路通罗马，只要有其他游客的踪迹（如: 鞋印或垃圾)，就不用担心会迷路。大致上，里面有两条道路，一条是水陆，另一条是山路。水路有明确的指示牌，不必上山而没有体力要求，共要渡河6次。山路就比较辛苦，需要上下山，最后过河一次。

不论根据哪一条路，途中都有丰富的热带植物可以观赏。当然也少不了蝴蝶和可爱的虫虫。可怜的马陆被大意的路人踩断了一半。

抵达终点，冰凉洁净的Sungai Chiling Fall 等待着我们。

游伴

独乐乐不如众乐乐，独游纽西兰回来后的我却变得很喜欢同朋友们一起去游玩。

瀑布前大合照

在一块很特别的木头前合照

水坝前

大瀑布下的石头上

冷到发抖的小妹妹……

刮痧美容

秃头护理

螳螂捕蝉，麻雀在后。这只麻雀一直很怕下水，长时间躲在岸上sms；证明这里的电话signal 还可以，并不是很ulu的地方。

我的个人写真，题目分别为："我爱大自然" 和 "我爱水上漂"

刚过不久的新年期间，很多亲朋戚友都说如果我走在街上，他们都不会认得我。看了这照片后，我也默默的同意。有人说我壮了，我也暗暗的开心。:)

Ulu Yam 美食

我的行程安排一定不能少了美食。下山后，我们来到了附近的Ulu Yam 新村。

如果你不知道，这里是 Loo Mee 卤面的发源地。新村街上有许多家餐馆，每家都卖 Loo Mee！

我选择了这间餐馆，因为我记得它的味道…… 食客可以选择户外或户内（冷气）。

招牌鱼饼。雪白，香滑，弹口，大份！

再来一碟野味：咖喱山猪肉！

后记

其实这是我第二次来到这个瀑布，物是人非 (现在 vs 2007年9月) ……

前一天才买的Teva拖鞋，今天拿来测试，效果令人满意。

p/s: O仔生病进厂了，以上的照片大部分都来至于这一位随行的少年天才摄影师 - 子祥。在此谢谢子祥和他心爱的Pentax DSLR 的照片供应。

KKB, Fraser Hill, Ulu Yam, Tanjong Malim.... 这里的点点滴滴，每个景点每条道路，甚至是空气里的每一粒水分，都隐藏着我不愿想起的记忆。但无论如何，我还是一而再地到回来……我想，只因为我太喜欢这个瀑布了。

床边

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00

夕阳通过落地百叶窗射入房内，微弱的阳光是唯一的光线。她缓缓地站了起来，小心翼翼的把椅子移到一旁，尽量不让它发出一丝声音。

“不要走……”正当她转身之际，一把颤抖无力的声音从背后传来。她定了下来，回过头拍了拍他的肩旁说道：“天就要黑了，我先出去吃吃晚餐便回来”。

躺在床上的是一个消瘦、看起来大约七十多岁的男人。实际上他的年龄并不大，但长期服用烈性药物和近期的电疗已把他折磨得如此。对比下，那站着的中年女人虽然素颜，但那柳叶眉和樱桃小嘴遮盖不了昔日的风采；一旦打扮上街，就算说她三十岁都会有人相信。

岁月流逝，时光回到了二十多年前。

“不要走……” 一个壮年男人脸上挂满着泪水正跪着苦苦哀求女人，而女人却不愿正视他。夜深人静时正上演着一场家庭伦理剧。

这对夫妻结婚已有七年了，孩子都生了几个。从当初的一起挨饿租房，奋斗到今天，他们渐渐拥有了计划中的一切。当初男人为了买下这间屋子，终日早出晚归，不惜日夜奔波、长途跋涉。这份工虽然辛苦，但却能够让他赚取高薪，在最短的时间内实现梦想。终于他成功了，亲手从包租婆手中接过房屋的地契和钥匙。心想有了屋子便能够给老婆大人安全感，过去一切的委屈都值得，自己以后也能够不再那么辛劳了，可以安定下来，在家附近挑份轻松些的工作。有什么比和老婆和孩子一起过个安稳的日子还要幸福的事？

就在真正拥有房子的那晚，他对她说了第一个“不要走”，因为女人告诉了他个晴天霹雳般的决定。

“我们离婚吧，你别怪我。你可有想过这些日子我是如何过的？我需要你的时候你却不在我身边，让我每天晚上独守空闺。我们跟本不应该在一起…… ”，女人冷冷地说。
“我这么辛苦工作赚钱是为了谁？孩子都那么大了你还说这些话？！”，男人对女人的无理取闹感到愤怒和不解。
"你以为我不知道你在外面做过些什么吗？你又认为我舍得孩子吗？但我看不见我们的未来，我不能继续欺骗自己，我已经决定了，我要去过我自己想过的生活"。

当一段缘分到了结束时，再多的哀求、解释和泪水也无可奈何。结果他们达成了协议，为了孩子着想而不签字离婚。两人成了有名无实的夫妻，而那床头挂着的结婚照里的亲密笑容仿佛正在嘲笑着他们。

女人离开了，带走了某些孩子，留下另一些孩子。接着，女人有了自己的伴，男人也找到了解决寂寞的生活方式。他，毕竟是个男人。

连串激烈的咳嗽声把女人从昔日带回来。她轻轻的叹了叹气，随即俯身为男人搓背止咳。

“好的，我不走，我不走。今晚我留下来陪你……”，女人温柔的说。女人伏在床边轻轻哼着他们年轻时爱听的歌；男人留下了泪水：是感动？是病痛？是后悔？是害怕？

其实男人并不是第一次住院，而女人却从来都没探望过他 - 这应该是男人一生中最后一次住院了，也是他最后一次对她说不要走了。

凌晨，男人在睡梦中逝世，是握着女人的手离去的。

古城@2009

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00

有一个地方叫Hometown，游客却叫她做古城。大家都喜欢来这里走走吃吃。

这里除了天空比较蓝，还有天气比较热外，我不明白她还有没有什么特别之处？

是马六甲的战前老店屋特别好看？

是因为这里的庙宇特别灵验？

或是这里的小孩比较可爱？

还是为了那勉强的世界遗产？

其实古城的人或鸟儿都不太介意这些名号……

只要大家找到吃就好。啊，忘了一提：三宝井的导游已经 UPGRADE 了，不再玩摸肚子游戏，现在反而钟意玩井水。

其实古城的故事何其多？譬如：有只小白兔就这样睡在路边，永远再也起不来了。据闻，她昨晚半夜肚子饿过街去吃云吞面……

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Switch Line

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00

As a Scite (Scintilla) Text Editor user, I use the keyboard shortcut of line switching ("CTRL + T") frequently. It's helpful for me in the web app development environment.

Come to dot net development months ago, I am surpised that Visual Studio lack of this feature. Luckily, I am able to write macro for this custom function.

Click Tools->Macro->Macro Explorer
Browse for Samples->VSEditor n the right and double click on the file and it will start the Macro Editor Windows.
Scroll right to the bottom of it, past the code at bottom into it as a new sub (function)
Now, we wants to register this macro with our keyboard shortcut.
Back to Visual Studio, click Tools->Options->Environment->Keyboard
Type 'switchline' in the textbox under 'Show commands containing:'
You will see a highligthed 'Macros.Samples.VSEditor.SwitchLine', make sure it is selected.
Select 'Text Editor' under 'Use new shortcut in'
Move your cursor into the textbox of 'Press shortcut keys', hold down "CTRL" & "T" on your keyboard.
Click OK and now it is done. Enjoy coding!

    Sub SwitchLine()
        Dim thisLine As String
        Dim lastLine As String

        ' get current line, set cursor to start of line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(0)
        ' set cursor to end of line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine(True)
        ' copy the selection into thisLine
        thisLine = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text
        ' set cursor to end of line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine()

        'set cursor to last line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.lineUp()
        'set cursor to start of line of this lastline
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(0)
        ' set cursor to end of line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine(True)
        ' copy the selection into thisLine
        lastLine = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text
        ' set cursor to end of line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine()

        ' copy this line text to last line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(0)
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine(True)
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text = thisLine
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine()

        'copy last line text to this line
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.lineDown()
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.StartOfLine(0)
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine(True)
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text = lastLine
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine()

    End Sub

Minifying Javascript & CSS in ASP.net MVC

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00

YSlow

Have you ever wonder why your website took more than 1 minute to load even on localhost? YSlow from Yahoo is a very handy tool to meter loading performance of your web application.

Accumulated yahoo years of experience serving billion of visitor hits daily, the tool provide grading base on analysis on various ruleset, for example:

Making fewer HTTP requests
Put JavaScript at the bottom of HTML
Make Javascript and CSS external
Minify Javascript and CSS
Make AJAX cacheable
...

It is available as Firefox browser plugin for Free download here.

Minify

It has been a trend recently to provide a xxx-min.js by various javascript libraries. A minify javascript/css version of file removed unneeded infromation such as comment, white space, or even rename long variable name to shorter one to achieve smallest byte footprint as possible.

There are several free & open source tools out there who does the work for you automatically, either in "pre-compile" or real-time mode:

Using with ASP.net MVC

In real world scenario, we often include multiple javascript and css files due to the modularization of application design. It's common to have more than 10s jquery plugin js files along with 4 to 5 css files. Each of these external files will trigger the browser to send at least one HTTP request per hit, thus defeating the thumb of rule number 1 defined by YSlow: "Making fewer HTTP requests".

Combres, an open source .Net library hosted on codeplex, is a prefect tool to minify and yet combine multiple javascript & css files on real-time with caching. It works in both ASP.net WebForm and MVC environement.

I will not go into detail on how to deploy it as Code Project has provided a comprehensive tutorial here. Following the step by step tutorial, you will be amaze by combres as how easily it can be implemented into your existing project with little modification and huge beneficts in return.

Before:

<!-- jquery base -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.cookie.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>

<!-- jquery ui -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.7.2/ui/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.7.2/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css") %>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />


<!-- system core -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/core.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>

<!-- notices plugin -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/notice.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.blockUI.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="<%= Url.Content("~/Content/notice.css") %>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

<!-- form plugin -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.hint.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/form.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.maskedinput.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.7.2/ui/ui.datepicker.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="<%= Url.Content("~/Content/form.css") %>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />


<!-- tip plugin -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jtip.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="<%= Url.Content("~/Content/Helpers/Tip/css/global.css") %>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

<!-- autocomplete plugin -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-autocomplete/jquery.autocomplete.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-autocomplete/jquery.autocomplete.css") %>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    
<!-- grid plugin -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/grid.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="<%= Url.Content("~/Content/grid.css") %>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

<!-- passwordStrength plugin -->
<script src="<%= Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-pstrength/digitalspaghetti.password.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script>

Then, implement Combres by rellocate them to xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<combres xmlns='urn:combres'>
  
  <filters>
    <filter type="Combres.Filters.FixUrlsInCssFilter, Combres" />
    <filter type="Combres.Filters.HandleCssVariablesFilter, Combres" />
  </filters>
  
  <resourceSets url="~/combres.axd" defaultDuration="30" defaultVersion="1" defaultDebugEnabled="true">
    
    <resourceSet name="siteCss" type="css">
      <resource path="~/Content/style.css" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.7.2/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css" />
      <resource path="~/Content/notice.css" />
      <resource path="~/Content/form.css" />
      <resource path="~/Content/Helpers/Tip/css/global.css" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-autocomplete/jquery.autocomplete.css" />
      <resource path="~/Content/grid.css" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-countdown/jquery.countdown.css" />
    </resourceSet>
    
    <resourceSet name="siteJs" type="js">
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery.cookie.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.7.2/ui/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/core.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/notice.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery.blockUI.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery.hint.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/form.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery.maskedinput.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.7.2/ui/ui.datepicker.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jtip.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-autocomplete/jquery.autocomplete.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/grid.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-pstrength/digitalspaghetti.password.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery-countdown/jquery.countdown.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/countdown.js" />
      <resource path="~/Scripts/jquery.pngFix.js" />
    </resourceSet>
    
  </resourceSets>
</combres>

In result, only 2 line of codes in output:

<link href="/combres.axd/siteCss/1/default" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="/combres.axd/siteJs/1/default"></script>

Your visitors will be happy as your website is loading faster now. Not to mention that your boss will be smilling for the cost saved from the bandwidth.

丹绒士拔 (Tanjung Sepat) 情人桥

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00

丹绒士拔渔村位于毛立(Morib) 附近，是个华人新村。和较为著名的Kuala Selangor 相比，这个渔村位于雪州的西南南部，其实再往直下便能抵达森美兰州的波德生海边。

趁着周日，我来到这里吃海鲜、顺便拍拍照。从Cyberjaya 到这里需要约一个小时半的车程，途经Dengkil -> Banting -> Morib，都是别具特色的小镇。进村前竟然看见了个“丰盛港”的招牌，丰盛港不是在柔佛州吗？

谁说情人桥只有情人能来？这里是村名和外劳垂钓偷闲的好去处。

渔村的生活节奏缓慢轻松，夕阳西下时，海风缓送，都市人也爱来放松心情。

桥旁置有成排的椰树干，想必是渔民拿来绑船用的。

这脚车勾起我童年时的回忆……

桥上点滴……

瓮中鱼，是垂钓者丰富的晚餐。

你吹我如何？当她慢慢缩小后，当地人又把她和地板摩擦，让她在惊吓中膨胀。[河豚]

顽强的小生命尽然以木桩为家，与海为邻。

它在泥地里扎根，无惧风浪。

这里没有热浪岛的白皙沙滩，却有许多马来西亚人Take for granted 的红树林。

无题……

夕阳西下后……

留下不想回家的归鸟。

这里的海鲜并没有我想象中的出众，还算可以，价钱也当然比大城市来得便宜。其实，丹绒士拔拥有的并不只是情人桥和海鲜而已；但这短短的行程，我并不奢望什么，只求精神上来个刷新 (Refresh)。

家乡随拍

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00

生日的那一天，我回老家……

表哥刚买了个DSLR，兴致勃勃地说要拍田野风光。我们先去葡萄牙村，却变得越来越商业化，闷……

换个景点，Semabok 绿油油的稻田，但被人造的电缆架破坏了。再换个景点，Sungai Duyong。

蓝色的旗帜随风摇摆，和国旗、渔船、破船、还有曾经是稻田的新兴住宅区相映成趣。

被搁在岸边的破船，别有一番滋味，可算是当天最大的收获了。

好多香蕉啊……

代表着南洋风情的椰树……

最后，还有妈妈种在家门外的 "leng keng"。

午后雨景

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00

小时候的我很喜欢午后的下雨天。那时，我都爱跑到后面的房间，趴在窗前的书桌上听雨（尽管那房间阴暗兼闹鬼）～

雨水打在对面屋子的锌片屋顶上，发出嘀嘀嗒嗒的响亮声音；然后沿着凹沟的屋檐化成几道大小不一的迷你瀑布、霹雳吧啦地流下。雨、时大时小；而风、突东突西的变化集合了一场动听的交响乐；加上序幕的闪电响雷效果，简直就是我小小天地里的星光水火海上大汇演。

雨永远是最厉害的演奏家，那旋律跟随着心境，烘托着感觉，感染着情绪……

美中不足的是：老家后巷的沟渠平时排水不良，炎热的天气后突然被雨水一激，瘴气恶臭顿然间散发出来。人们说：很多时候并不是一个人给你留下印象，更多的时候是一种味道……

当周杰伦唱着 “最美的不是下雨天，是曾与你躲过雨的屋檐” 时，雨天那淡淡的忧伤，象征着回不去的从前；那蒙蒙的湿气蕴染了每个角落，让我放慢脚步看清生命的倔强；无论经历过多重的创伤，只要不放弃，就会有雨后的彩虹。

随着时代变迁，老家被铲，我搬去了别个地方，午后雨景之交响乐已不复存在。现在，我住的地方后面是一座小山丘，每逢雨夜后的清晨我都苏醒于一片湿草的芬芳中。而你，又会不会在下雨天时特别感性，喝着杯咖啡翻翻老书、旧信或日记，让往事伴随着雨声渐渐在心底弥漫？

Ignoring Thumbs.db update to subversion respository

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00

Thumbs.db files are stored in each directory that contains pictures or movies on Microsoft Windows NT versions prior to Vista. The file is created locally among the images, however, preventing system wide use of the data and creating additional data load on removable devices.

It is handy when come to displaying directory's images responsively but annoying when it is used together with source control. It was a design flow done by Microsoft and luckily they fixed it on latest version of windows. Beginning with Windows Vista, thumbnail previews are stored in a centralized location on the system.

For programmer who still developing application on windows XP with SVN source control, the following tiny piece of windows command might be helpful:

ECHO "Remove all Thumbs.db in this project..."
DEL /S /F /Q Thumbs.db /a:s

Just copy and paste this command into a .bat file and then place the bat file to your respository folder. Click it before you commit your project and it will automatically remove all Thumbs.db file in the directory and its subdirectories as well.

Adding in syntax highlighter to my blog

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00

My blog system was build with FCKeditor and I was happily using the default setting until I feel like writing some tutorial about programming.

I will be writing article about programming and will meet circumstances where I need to embed the coding along with the content. You will be agree that programming code looks boring and thus it has to be colourful ;)

So I did some search and found this cool Open source fckeditor plugin: Syntax Highlighter.

Lets try some PHP code here:

function is_alphanumeric($input)
{
    return (preg_match("/^[A-Za-z0-9]+$/i", $input));
}

Then, here goes some javascript code:

// call periodical
$(contentDiv).everyTime(100, function(i)
{
        if (parseInt($(this).css('top'))>(contentDivHeight*(-1)+8))
        {
            // move scroller upwards
            offset = parseInt($(this).css('top'))-scrollSpeed+"px";
            $(this).css({'top':offset});
        }
        // reset to original position
        else
        {
            // reset to original position
            offset = parseInt($(this).parent().height())+8+"px";
            $(this).css({'top':offset});
        }
 });

And the HTML code (with some mix of javascript code in it ):

<h2>Documentation</h2>

<p>Include these dependency files to your header.</p>
<code class="html">
<xmp>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.timers.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.autoScroller.js"></script>
</xmp>
</code>

Last, some dotnet c# code which i will be using quite often in near future:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;

namespace MvcApplication2.Helpers
{
    public class LabelHelper
    {
        public static string Label(string target, string text)
        {
            return String.Format("<label for= '{0}'>{1}</label>",target,text);
        }
    }
}

OK, let's see how it goes...

小美女

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00

有一天，侄女九个月大了，专业的摄影师舅舅替她拍写真照……

来，摆一个可爱的样子…… 好，试试微吐舌头的样子……对，对了。咔嚓！

接下来，我们来拍张会放电的照片。头稍微地下，眼睛望上…… 看这边…… 对，要天真无邪+迷死人的样子…… 好。咔嚓！

最后，舅舅说：我们要向难度挑战。我们来拍张破坏形象的照片做纪念。

侄女：考虑………考虑…………考虑……… (以后嫁不出去怎么办啊)

好啦，就来张傻笑的样子。咔嚓！

乖，下次舅舅请你吃棒棒糖。

Email Marketing

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00

Email marketing is more associated with SPAM, something that you and I would never like to read in our mailbox.

Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US$400 million on e-mail marketing in 2006. This explains why marketer still want to give a try, hoping a certain percentage of receiver would like to read the email and then click on the promotional link in it before deleting the mail.

How it is done technically

Technically, email blasting is not something hard. It can be done with most scripting language by looping thru the list of emails 1 by 1 and send them out as individual email (it is a must or else u would have exposed the whole database's emails to all recipients). The only difficulty is to find the right SMTP server that would allow you to do so, which itself is not black listed by most email service provider such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail.

Email Blasting in Malaysia

For a country like Malaysia where technology advancement is slow, the method is still popular here. The standard price now is around RM800 per blast at the database size of around 150,000. All client need to do is to pay the fee and then the "email marketer" will start blasting email with designed content, base on the database that he owned (keep secretly and will never expose to client). Little or totally no info such as gender, age group, geo location, income segment... about the database can be obtain.

Malaysia client some how think that email blasting is similar to the way how door-step-flyer delivery works. They never know it is possible to track the successful reading rating of these commercial email. They also never imagine it is possible to do a more accurate blast categorized by geo location etc.

To know the marketing result, the unprofessional "email marketer" normally tell client to setup a site counter on their destination website, hopefully by monitoring the website statistic, one could tell if his website get sudden hits boost thanks to the blasting. This method is unreliable, inaccurate and deprecated.

Measuring the success of email marketing

Measuring the successful rate of an email marketing campaign is difficult but few common methods are used:

Web Bug

Using an HTML IMG tag embedded in outgoing emails, calling for a small, transparent tracking image. When the client or browser used to display the email requests that image, then an "open" is recorded for that email by the image's host server.

Pros: Email 'reading' (more appropriate to be called 'opening') rate can be track without the need for clicking on links. Notice that not all email marketing campaign provide a URL link to be click.

Cons: Most mail client nowadays has the function to disable image or at least warn the reader about an external image is triggering. Futher more, it required certain level of programming knowledge to implement the tracking script, where most unprofessional email marketer lack off.

Bounce message

What if the email address recorded in the database is obsolete and no longer valid? Bonce message is the machanism used to track this kind of unsuccessful blasting.

Technically, one will need to hook up a script to the blasting email account (FROM email account), then it will automatically analyze the replied email and count the sum of bouce back email. Unprofessional email marketer will never care about this step, in favour to hide the fact that their database is old and not up to date.

Unsubscribe request

Ubsubscribe request can be a tracking method similar like bounce message, to track the unsuccessful/negative response.

While anti spam association requested unsubscribe instruction to be included in the mail, unprofessional email marketer used it in the wrong way. All they did is to blast spam mail out to email address composed by brute force attack like method, then include those email who submitted the unsubscribe request back into the database. In this way, they get to ensure the database is up-to-date and emails are valid.

A better way of email marketing

The old and traditional method - "Newsletter subscription" is always the best. You can ensure your recipeints is always positive about the information you sent to them as they did the subscription themselve.

By integrating with a member database, you can further customize your newsletter system to send email base on your targetted groups of peopel.

Of course, option must be provided to those who wish to unsubscribe your newsletter. Then, you must make sure your newsletter system stop sending email to these group of emails even they are still in your database for some reason.

To protect your brands and accountablity, you should never disclose your members' email address list to 3rd party. You must not use it to blast unrelated 3rd party information as well.

看病机器

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00

转载：http://www.kwongwah.com.my/news/2009/07/06/21.html

来自于马来西亚的光华日报 - 小小发明家。

“大红花发明奖”得奖人

姓名：连莹莹

学校：槟城新江小学

年级：5H

“嗨，你们看我发明的这部先进的“看病机器”，很实用哦！它不只能准确地诊断病症，而且收费便宜，让贫穷病患最受惠。我将来还会创造更多造福人群的东西，大家等着瞧吧！”

我去clinic看病时，医生开口第一句话就是：你那里不舒服啦？然后我就告诉他：我发烧、伤风兼感冒。接着医生做的事情都很公式化：量体温，看看喉咙，问我痰的颜色等等……

童言无忌，小妹妹的发明让人会心一笑。在电脑化的今天，或许我们真的可以用机器取代这种千遍一律的看症工作，让我们的医疗人才去专注在更复杂的手术等等。

愿与大马医疗人员共勉之。

Mysqldump Alternative

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00

Although phpMyAdmin can do most of the Import and Export job for small scale database, I still required an automated way to do the backup together with cron tool. Furthermore, phpMyAdmin is not realiable because it is an PHP level implementation. Running a large scale database such as a well establish forum can be a pain if you have phpMyAdmin as your only option.

exec Mysqldump

Mysqldump is a very important sub application provided by the Mysql database system to perform backup, fast and reliable. However, as PHP has no function interface to access this application, the only choice leave are calling it thru exec, system, or passthru:

exec("mysqldump --add-drop-table --host=localhost --user='' --password='' dbname");

However, due to security reasons, most share hosting provider has blocked this php function, making the solution impossible.

SELECT INTO OUTFILE

Since then, programmer has been creatively using alternative to solve the issue.

Mysql query provide this SELECT INTO OUTFILE feature to allow programmers to dump chuck of data from SELECT into a file specified.

$backupFile = 'backup/mypet.sql';
$query = "SELECT * INTO OUTFILE '$backupFile' FROM `blogs`";
$result = mysql_query($query);

Again, I was unable to use this function on my share hosting server. ACCESS DENIED error issued.

PHP Implementation

I then forced to search for other alternative on PHP level.

I do not like this option as it is very unpredictable/unstable due to the maximum script execution time setting which would cause the script to quit half way while backing up a very large database. Worst still, without any warning. As result, the exported sql file is corrupted and unusable.

The open source community have come out few class for it.

Mysql Backup by Vagharshak Tozalakyan

Download: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2779.html

Using the class is easy:

<?php

require_once 'mysql_backup.class.php';
$backup_obj = new MySQL_Backup();
$backup_obj->server = 'localhost';
$backup_obj->port = 3306;
$backup_obj->username = '';
$backup_obj->password = '';
$backup_obj->database = '';

//Tables you wish to backup. All tables in the database will be backed up if this array is null.
$backup_obj->tables = array();

if (!$backup_obj->Execute(MSB_SAVE, 'backup.sql', true))
{
$output = $backup_obj->error;
}

However, I found the class is not working on unicode data. To fix it:

edit mysql_backup.class.php
goto line 101
add in the following line at the beginning of funciton _Query($sql):
// try to make utf8 compatible query
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $this->link_id);
save the file

MySQL Dump by Marcus Vinícius

Download: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2527.html

Using the class is easy:

<?php

mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
require("class_mysqldump.php");
$dump = new MySQLDump();
print $dump->dumpDatabase("mydb");

?>

I haven't try this class yet. It would be useful to backup the whole database at once.

Backpack Wishlist

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00

生活越来越充实，工作也逐渐繁重。不想让自己迷失在繁忙中，我把想去的地方一一记下。

Taiwan。台湾环岛游一直是我的愿望。我想在台湾体验到的是“人”。我喜欢台湾人的人情味，可能她的文化贴近大马吧；我也想看看那据说是毛利人祖先的台湾原住民，当然还有性感的槟榔美眉。

Macau。澳门的旅游塔是我将做笨猪跳的下一站。我想澳门另一个吸引着我的地方是他那和马六甲类似的古城气氛吧。

Angkor Wat。这做古城是 khmer 民族的骄傲，她的宏伟壮观更不在话下。想到凌晨日出时要和几百个游客一起抢位子拍照就有点兴奋啦，呵呵。

Vietnam。越南的风土人情丰富，我最想到夏龙湾去看山峡，还有一位越南女网友。

Thailand。这是另一个佛教文化丰富的国度，马来西亚的邻居，同属Indochina 的一部分。我喜欢泰国的美食。

Bali。那短暂的旅程无法让我看清巴厘岛的全貌，所以我想再踏上巴厘岛，以另一个方式去旅游。

相信不远的日子里，我将站在这些照片中，展始我人生的另一端旅程。

IASA Conference 2009

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00

The International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is the premier association focused on the architecture profession through the advancement of best practices and education while delivering programs and services to IT architects of all levels around the world.

Established in 2002, IASA is an international non-profit business association dedicated to the advancement and sharing of issues related to software architecture in the enterprise, product, education and government sectors.

The association is committed to improving the quality of the IT architecture industry by developing and delivering standards, education programs and developing accreditation programs and services that optimize the development of architecture profession. IASA membership consists of approximately 6,000 members located in over 50 countries.

IASA has been in Malaysia for more than 5 years and this is my first time (representing Raingate System Sdn Bhd) joining their 2 days conference, hosted at Legend Hotel Kuala Lumpur.

Started with a Star Trek theme intro, the president & deputy president of IASA Malaysia lead the audience into the important of IT Architecture. Then, Mr Eric from SAP pointed out the industry is moving towards business intelligence direction. Next, Professor Dr. Terry Halpin from INITI, who also founded ORM.net, highlighted the interesting use of fact orientation and natural language in model-driven engineering.

In the afternoon, talks split into 3 tracks. My interest is in Cloud computing as I am aware of the needs to allow my web application to scale dynamically according to its growth.

Mr Hoong Fai from Microsoft started the talk in the topic of "The changing landscape of services architecture and how S+S, SOA and cloud computing are part of the evolution". Being portrayed as the BIG THING of the decade, cloud computing are similar to grid computing and utility computing and yet very different. Its main characteristic is to allow users to consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Virtualization are the main underlying technology that being used.

Software running on cloud computing environment is called cloudware. It required changes on software architecture to harvest the greatest benefits from the distribution nature of cloud computing. To achieve the goal, developer and architecture has to move away from ACID to BASE methodology. To ease the process, Microsoft provides the best-of-breed solution through AZURE.com.

Security as the top issue was covered by Mr Sudev Bangah (from IDC) on day 2. While both client and hacker are aware of this emerging technology, its adoption rate are highly depends on the vendors. To solve this chicken and egg problem, vendor must take action to safeguard their services, guided by the trends of Encryption (HTTPS), audibility and certification (ISO27001).

Throughout this conference, others interesting topics about cloud computer are presented. For example, the use of RFID in cloud computing, how the industry leader utilized the technology and the rise of 'consumerization' to lead IT industry further into direction define by consumer.

Raingate New Website Launched

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00

Raingate System which established in year 2006 is growing steadily in medical industry providing strong R&D and reliable solution.

As the business grow, Raingate required a refreshed and matured looks for her website.

Oral SPA Sonic Cleaner

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00

Nothing comes better than having a bright and confident smile. Don't let bed breath and yellowish teeth stop you from smiling...

Oral SPA, a brand from Ameba Products Malaysia is here to bring us an all new experience for our daily oral care needs.

Its flagship product, the Oral SPA sonic cleaner is a multi-purpose tooth brush which helps to clean our mouth effectively and professionally. A sonic tooth brush might sounds new to Malaysian. Unlike commonly seen oscillate toothbrush (namely Oral-B Braun (TM)), Sonic brushing used 3rd Dimension (z-axis) hitting to clean your teeth further while you are brushing in 2nd Dimension (x & y-axis).

Ameba is not the first who come out sonic technology based tooth brush. Other notable players in the market are Cybersonic (TM)(only available for sale in US and Canada) and Sonic Care (TM) by philips. Even Oral-B is entering this market with his Vitality (TM) series.

Oral SPA sonic cleaner is more than a sonic electric tooth brush. Thanks to its patented locking head system, one can easily turn it into a flossing tool by just replace the removable brush head with a flossing head (included in the All-in-one page together with a flossing string). After all, complete oral hygiene involves more than brushing teeth.

This unique plugin system also allow all sort of tools to be developed, only limited to one's imagination. As an environment friendly innovation, they will be compatible with existing handle and just work out of the box.

Here are some other notable features:

3D Sonic brushing at 25,000 strokes per minute
Replaceable Ameba Brush Head with twin-layer bristle, available in 3 degree of softness
Mountable Ameba Flosser head
100% waterproof, washable and hygienic
Twisting mechanism on/off switching
Body made by high-quality alloy
Battery operated (1x AA Battery included)
Dimension: 200 mm (H) x 25 mm (W) x 25 mm (D) (excluding protrusions)
Weight: Approx. 15 g (body only)

The All-in-one pack comes with:

1x Oral SPA Sonic Cleaner
Flosser kit which includes 1x Detachable Floss Holder & 1x roll of Floss string
3x Ameba Standard Cleaning Head (G77T)
1x AA Battery
User Manual

Surprisingly, this features packed Oral SPA Sonic Cleaner is not a complicated gadget. Designed to empower DIY concept, its simplified mechanism enabled user to self assemble and disassemble for maintaining and cleaning purposes. Spare parts will be available for sale very soon. Thus, users do not have to worry about sky high maintenance cost.

The product is only available for sale thru www.oralspa.com. According to the founder, Mr Jimmy, his choice of using World Wide Web as the only distribution channel is to minimize the overhead selling cost. As an innovator and manufacturer himself, selling thru website also helps to forge a direct and effective communication link with his clients.

Did I mentioned that a Oral SPA Cleaner All-in-one pack cost only RM60 or USD25 with FREE DELIVERY to your doorstep?

Welcome to Yee Siang's Website

Malaysia Politician Blog

Barisan National

United Malays National Organisation (UMNO)

Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA)

Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC)

Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu (PBB)

Parti Gerakan Rakyat (Gerakan)

People's Progressive Party (PPP)

Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)

Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS)

Parti Bersatu Rakyat Sabah (PBRS)

United Pasokmomogun Kadazandusun Murut Organisation (UPKO)

Sarawak United Peoples' Party (SUPP)

Sarawak Progressive Democratic Party (SPDP)

Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS)

Pakatan Rakyat

People's Justice Party (Parti Keadilan Rakyat, PKR)

Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, PAS)

Democratic Action Party (Parti Tindakan Demokratik, DAP)

Others

Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM)

Malaysian Workers' Party (PPM)

Malaysian Dayak Congress (MDC)

Pan-Malaysian Islamic Front (BERJASA)

Malaysian Indian Muslim Congress (KIMMA)

United Pasok Nunukragang National Organisation (PASOK)

Community Coalition Congress (CCC)

Federated Sabah People's Front (BERSEKUTU)

United Democratic Sabah People's Power Party (SETIA)

State Reform Party (STAR)

Malaysian People's Wellbeing Party (KITA)

Malaysian Democratic Party (MDP)

All Malaysian Indian Progressive Front (AMIPF)

Punjabi Party of Malaysia (PPM)

Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM)

Parti Bangsa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS)

Sabah Progressive Party (SAPP)

Malaysian Indian United Party (MIUP)

Parti Cinta Malaysia (PCM)

Malaysian Makkal Sakhti Party

Human Rights Party (HRP)

Parti Ekonomi Rakyat Sarawak Bersatu (PERSB)

Sarawak National Party (SNAP)

Mobilize Blogspot site