I have been seeing many people's blog that use Feedburner has that "xx readers" icon showing and wondering how many people subscribe to my blog via RSS feed and how it works.



After seeing this and some digging around, I have the answer.

Basically what it does is simple; When a feed publisher robot hit a site, it left a signiture in the HTTP USER_AGENT variable. In there, it reports how many user(s) is watching this feed. i.e.

Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 4 subscribers)

So, I enhanced NP_BotTracking to take and present the information.

Mean to write about my Motorola Ming PDA phone I pick up last year while I am in Guangzhou.

The phone is fairly small, since the phone has no keypad (using vitual one on screen). I think it's even slightly smaller when compared to O2 Atom. The main attraction of the phone is its transparent flip that allow user to see the screen under it. It has a 2.0 MP camera that can take pictures and video. The picture quality is decent under good light condition, but still coming short in lower light, even just indoor lighting sometimes. The phone come with a 512MB transFlash SD, I replace it with a 1GB one.

The phone is running Linux and come with many applications that I needed from a PDA, such as todo list, calendar, note, alarm clock, world clock, and calculator. It has other build-in tools like email client, web browser, voice recorder, photo editor, and dictionary. One neat application is the function to scan and import business card, I didn't really use it since I do not trade business contact often with others. There is also a FM radio build-in.

Another useful function is a handwriting recognition that able to write in English and Chinese. Since I do not know how to type Chinese using any input method, this is a god-send. The function works relatively well for my ugly writing.

It supports GPRS, and act as modem. The bluetooth function allow sharing pictures/ringtone/files with other phones or with my Thinkpad T30.

It has a Java VM that can run games and other java applications. In fact, I was able to run a java Google map program that use a bluetooth GPS receiver and connect via GPRS to get current location information. However, GPRS is not fast enough to allow speedy map update and very expensive.

Video and mp3 are handled by Real player. The phone can connect via USB and act as a storage device. I am able to download podcast to the phone this way.



However, the phone is lacking in many area:
- no EDGE, no Wifi, EDGE (and a reasonable price service) can allow me to use my GPS with Google maps.
- todo list has only 3 priorities, wish there is 5 levels. Also it will be good if I can only show only one priority of tasks in the todo to hide lower priority one.
- alarm setting in calendar rather limited, i.e. can't do 1.5 hours before appointment, or remind 1 day ahead. Also, I cannot change the snooze interval when I go the reminder, where I can only cancel the reminder otherwise.
- bug that when finding recipient in compose SMS, some names begin with "." didn't show
- addressbook category rather limited, only up to 6
- addressbook address field is a bit short, sometimes not able to put in full address
- sweat and grease stick on flip easily, worst in the summer
- no auto timezone adjustment. it's a GSM network standard function.....
- cannot change ringtone volumn and other sound volumn seperately. I found that alarm and reminder is too loud.
- cannot freely custom all buttons on the desktop (only the right hand side one... would like to chage the browser one as well)
- hope more locations for world clock
- note cannot configure default files location like in camera, and the last open location is not preserved when open a new file
- cannot backup todo list to transSD
- the playlist in real player is too short (50 songs)
- it will be nice if there is a free-hand note program like Windows XP tablet 2005's Journal

We know this is going to happen eventually in some form (Ok, I am sure not the only one seeing this and this). The way we watch TV is not going to be the same in the post-torrent world.

From the announcement, quoted:

Highlights:
* Solutions provide lower costs for IPTV operators while offering broader content choices for subscribers
* Reduces the cost of the DVR by using shared disks in the home network
* Using peer-to-peer technology lowers storage and bandwidth overhead of archive-TV for IPTV operators
* Residential Gateway software from Jungo, now part of NDS, works in conjunction with NDS Synamedia Metro(TM) to gather, manage and protect content in home networks and across internet connections

The system consists of 2 components; a distributed DVR set-top box that record and store on any storage devices in the local network. A P2P client that share locally available contents with other in the same P2P network. Contents are encrypted and DRMed.

I suspect this is likely sold by some ISP/cable companies to their subscribers. The box will be setup to join the provider's internal p2p network, which is carried by the its network. Meanwhile, all subscribers on the same network can share contents "legally" among themselves. Of course, this is assuming that the provider has agreement with content providers. The DRM ensure only those in the network can share contents.

In addition, I think one thing it's missing (or not announced) is an infrastructure for the ISP to seed contents, which can be as simple as a bunch of servers connect to the P2P network for others to download from. Once the contents is out there, all users can shared among themselve and allow ISP to use minimal infrastructure to maximize contents distribution.

BTW, Cringely is talking more about how he see Google might rise up to own the Internet and take over our cable and phone here and here I am wondering how this picture fits with NDS's story.... the end-points doesn't seem to be meeting up here...

World's First Peer To Peer DVR From NDS - Gizmodo

Since I upgraded to FC6, MySQL seem to be acting on me from time to time. NucleusCMS and Gregarius from time to time encounter error while inserting new row to table. There is an error "Error 1062: Duplicate entry 'xxx' for key 1" each time when it corrupted. At the beginning I thought it is caused by my laziness to just copy over the database directly instead of re-import it during upgrade. But the problem persist even after I delete and re-build the database.

I suspect this happened when multiple insert queries execute at the same time, maybe they are executed by both core on the AMD64 X2? The reason for saying this is that I notice Gregarius is configured to do 3 RSS feeds update simutanously, and once in a while this corruption resulted. In my NucleusCMS blog case, the corrupted table is to store a validation key that generate during on each web page loading, which multiple access can happened at the same time.

The AMD64 X2 CPU can executed 2 threads at the same time since it's a deal-core CPU, kind of smell like a race condition here..... If MySQL is running on one core, while the 2 insert queries are running at the same time (one on each core). One insert query might be suspend (for MySQL) before the operation finished and the other query is executed.

I have since configured Gregarius to update one feed at a time, and so far has not seem the error. This might be some hints to the problem.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=25853

I've been using and playing around with my FC6 for the past few weeks, it's running much stable now.

I left my laptop on overnight so Rhythmbox can check for new podcast to download. I listen to them directly from my laptop and have the application started on bootup.

One small annoyance I found recently was the CPU is running quite hot even when idling over-night. I found out that Beagle seem to be the cause; It also seem to have a bug that eat up half of the memory. Anyway, I tried it a few times but didn't find it useful, and thought it's a security risk to have all my info indexed. So I turn it off.

On the Repositories front, I am running into more and more dependancy problem between Fedora Extra and RPM Forge/Dries/FreshRPM.... I am going to re-visit later which RPM repositories I should use.

For Windows users, Media player is the default music/video player that come with the OS. What is the equivalent for Linux?

I think there is no one application for viewing/managing multimedia files on Linux. The UNIX way of things is that one application/tool do only one thing and well.....

Anyhow, the default audio player that come with Fedora Core 6 is Rhythmbox. It's basically a clone of iTune for Linux. It use GStreamer as the back-end to handle audio.



Rhythmbox has all the basic function to manage music on your computer. It allow user to listen, search, sort music collection; It supports playlist and play queue; It is able to access Internet radio station (aka shoutcast); It can download and manage podcast feeds. Other major functions included a plugin interface, music streaming to share your music, and import from CD.

One good thing (or maybe bad thing) about Rhythmbox is that there is not a lot of parameters to configure, which prevent from confusing users. Meanwhile, I use Rhythmbox to monitor and download podcast, so no need to use PodNova, get_enclosure, or alike.

One thing I wish Rhythmbox to have is implementation/support of various effects and vitualization plugins like those for xmms (a winamp like player).

Other audio players seem interesting for Linux are XMMS2 , BMPx and Democracy (for video).

Finally find some times to change the skin. I think the current one has been used for over a year now.

This time I pick the default skin to based on. I always make changes to the skin to suit my need.

The goal in this update:
- to have a new looks
- be XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid
- moving toward a tag-centric setup
- keep the main page simple, remove less useful features from it (ie mail to a friend, print, rss)

So far, most components work except Blogroll has some links that is not valid. I am going to omit them for now and fix it later.

I am still working on some minor details, so expected the look will slightly change in the next little while.

[update]One side-effect of the facelift is that Technorati finally pick up my blog![/update] Not _TRUE_.... it stops picking up my blog update after that..... even my blog is XHTML compliant. Technorati suckx

After some work, most of the functions on admun2 is now back. (with the exception of mldonkey, samba, icecast)

The only problem still bothering me is DVD burning. The server crashed when burning DVD, the problem seem to be related to some DMA timeout error.

When I am going to fix this?