The T60 has arrived for 2 weeks now and I finally able to get the Vista repartitioned to free up space to install Fedora Core.

The Vista disk shrink function sucks because it cannot deal with system files and page files that scattered around the disk.

At the end I use gpartd in ubuntu 7.04 liveCD and get the job done.

I will write more about the laptop later.

Bittorrent is really fast when the source is in demand..... ~700MB CD in 2 hours.

Going to try it out on my new Thinkpad T60 to see if I can shrink Vista on the harddisk. Some reported that gpartd can get it done.

Vista is really sucks in the sense that all the system files and page files scatter all over the place, so user often can't shrink the partition with the build-in partition shrink function (I can only squeeze 20GB out of a 60+GB partition)

Twitter是近來在 Internet上很 hit的玩意. 它像一個 blogging system (aka microblogging);又可以是 IM;有人用它當syndicaion tool; 總之玩法多多,可以發揮創意. 很多香港的 bloggers也加入行列大玩這新玩意.

我也開始看看這小鳥是甚麼東西. 作為一個 developer,當然要試試其 API有多勁. Internet己經見到很多圍繞 twitter的其他玩意,如 twittervision. 所以我也為 Nucleus 寫了個 plugin去 integrate twitter. 這個 plugin 現在己可以自動 download及 archive tweets. 遲些還可以寫上 twitter及在我 blog update時自動宣佈.至於它的 API,用了差下多一星期覺得很豊富,又很有彈性,可以用XML,RSS,JSON,Atom format.我只需 >10行 php code就可以 call個 API.

sidekick
pig
jan
jacky
天佑
cow
speechlessness
ryoko
oslo

Did I mentioned at the beginning of the year 2007 will be a year of changes?

The 1st change happened just over the weekend, I switch ISP from Bell Sympatico HSE to Teksavvy.

They have a discount rate for my company and I heard only good things about them, so I switched.

Indeed, switchover is smooth, apart from some setup issue on my part on out-going email. They even have NNTP server so I can read some local newsgroups on Thunderbird, just like the good old days.

Read a discussion on the Mozilla forum about making Mozilla a desktop environment.

In the quest for WebOS, some point in time a new breed of Desktop environment will appear. These desktops looks and feel like the desktop you use today, except that everything underneath is connect on-line. Your applications and data storage are likely on-line, or persistent on local system when the system is not connect to the net. (Of course, we better have a never failing connection to the Internet for this to work....)

The discussions now seem to be how the local infrastructure should be like. The few of them in discussion or even being implemented currently are all living inside the web browser (i.e. EyeOS, XIN, Goowy, ORCA, and alike). They, in a way, like a virtual-machine (actually desktop only) running on top of the native desktop. There is still one layer from the functional or presentation point of view to a user that making WebOS a native OS to them.

So, some of this new idea are to have a base OS, might that be Linux/FreeBSD/whatever to provide the hardware support and run the WebOS on-top of it. I guess I'd rather seeing the OS as a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to the WebOS, which we need anyway if we want to use say the printer and other local devices.

The discussion above even pushing the idea one more level asking maybe we should make the browser window disappear and become the root desktop (using XUL and other alphabet technologies). I think it's really possible to do. After all, we already seeing LinuxBIOS can boot into X now. All we need is to have a Mozilla running as a desktop, and a WebOS stack is completed.

A web-era thin-client is born.

Today, I decommission web-o-url, a set of PHP scripts I wrote back in 2003 to collect useful links I saw on the web.



It is my first PHP project to learn about the language, MySQL, and creating web application in general. It's kind of like blogroll and features a category structure to group links in a searchable fashion. Most important, it gets the job done.

As I start a blog and blogroll is getting popular, I start to use NP_Blogroll on my blog to collect links. On the other hand, tagging is taking off and gone crazy on the web. I realize the limitation of one category per link and want to add tagging function to web-o-url.

Since Joel stopped working on the plugin and I need a tagging function for web-o-url. I decided to continue develop NP_Blogroll to add the function. I've been working on the plugin and gradually migrating all links from web-o-url to NP_Blogroll.

Today it's done. So, it's time for web-o-url to go.

Skype is petitioning FCC to open cellular network for its software (Ok, not literately but basically what they are asking)

It is the next step in the evolution to a full boardband communication world, some calls it hyper-connectivity.

Telecom technologies evolve from its infancy days of analog to digital. As communication carries in a digital network, the total bandwidth increased as newer and better technologies developed. One of the trends is to move from circuit-switch networks (i.e. ATM) to packet network (Ethernet+TCP/IP, the Internet) to realize higher effectiveness of our network and cost saving with one infrastructure for all traffic.

This transformation also happen from the core of the network to the edge, which reach into our home and our life. We now have dialup/DSL/FTTH/HSDPA, tomorrow we are going to get WiMax/UMB/LTE. The pipe folow us anywhere we go, instead of at a stationary location. It's all about having a big fat pipe of packet network from your at anywhere to a server/service/information somewhere around the world.

Once we got this big pipe that is accessible anyway, next question is how we are going to use it. Today, we are only using our cellphone in a very limited way; phone call, SMS/MMS, CSD, WAP, Internet access, maybe even IM (just started recently). These applications are all support and provided by the cellular operator, and is rather limited. Why I can't do Voice over IM? What about watching Youtube on my cellphone? Skype? run some p2p to share some stuff while I am out there. What stopping me from running Vonage VoIP service on my cellphone? What if I have a PDA phone and want to run Google Office? Currently, you probably can't. Even if you have a relatively fat pipe like EVDO Rev A, unless you are just using your cellphone as a modem to a laptop, you cant really fo any of these.

So, it makes sense to open up the cellular network so user can run whatever they want on their capable phone. This allow us to use our phone innovatively.

Reading some news about that suppose to come net meltdown.

Ok, the internet bandwidth is getting chow up in a fast rate (I first heard about it from our CTO last year, and still wondering it's an illusion). Youtube, VoIP, p2p, spams, botnets, and plain old people browsing the web; you named it.

I guess it's time to crunch out the next generation technologies to increase the capacity of the Internet. I hope all these new things like PBB/PBT, faster optical network and others going to helps us keeping up with the demand. But on the other hand, thinking back to some of the up and coming technologies like FTTH, WiMax, UMB/LTE, they are all access technologies actually going to increase the demands since they give users are bigger pipe to access the information they want on the internet.

Whether it's real or not, all I care is able to access the Internet whatever way I want.