Where’s that bandwagon that is iPhone? After skipping out on the 1st generation, I decided that I too will join the iPhone generation. I was one of those dorks that lined up when iPhone 3G was launched. They ran out of the model I wanted, so I placed an order rather than settle with the available models.

Anyway, my unit finally came & I picked it up last night. It’s a beautiful device and I can’t wait to put it through the paces! If only I can pry them from my girls’ hands… The fact that even my 4 year old can operate with easy the first time is a tribute to its design. They’re all over it.

Last week was the big launch of Firefox. This week, Eclipse Ganymede will be launched tomorrow.

Eclipse is a popular open source IDE. Each year, the Eclipse Foundation ships annual releases, so far around the summer. It’s a release vehicle where all major Eclipse projects release & synchronize their code. The Ganymede (all releases are named after Jupiter’s moons) release this year represents a simultaneous release of 24 eclipse projects– an incredible scheduling feat if you ask me.

I’ve been using several release candidates and so far so good. For an overview of the new features, check out this article. Coolest feature is probably muti-core CPU support.

So, go get the bits here.

Been having issues with my computer at home recently…

First the video card died inexplicably a few weeks ago so I upgraded to an Nvidia 9600; now I’ve got DirectX v10. But it still sucks considering it was only 18 months old. Then last week’s heat wave finally fried my CPU. I had trouble installing the heatsink on the CPU when I built my current machine last year. My guess is that there’s always been heat dissipation issues and the heat last week was the last straw.

So I spent some bucks getting a quad-core CPU and a spanking new Asus motherboard as well as some additional RAM and a terabyte hard drive which by the way is an engineering marvel: cramming 1 terabytes in a few 3.5″ platters. 6 hours of working late into the sweltering night and I finally got a pretty beefy Windows Vista system running. Other than the computer case and some RAM modules, it’s pretty much a brand new system.

Been testing it past few days and it’s rock solid and very zippy. Despite careful research, I did spent $700; for a few hundreds more I could’ve gone and get a Mac. I did contemplated it but decided to take the plunge later when I upgrade my notebook.

As if the world needs yet another iPhone blog post, but I must say that I am super-excited. I’m definitely gonna get one and retire my old sucky razr. It’s timely since our AT&T contract is up this summer.

It’s always wise to skip 1st generation of a new product, and I’m glad I did. That’s not to say I was tempted. The 2nd generation adds 3G network and GPS. I’ve been putting off getting a GPS device for my new car. I can’t wait to see the many location-based applications that will be coming out. In fact, I might consider writing a few apps myself!

Most of all, I’m looking forward to lugging one single device. Oh yeah…

This week has been full of conferences for me. First I attended Interwoven’s GearUp. It was fun in part that I got to hang out with my friend Bill (an Interwoven employee) for a few days. I haven’t seen much of Bill last few years. The keynotes were usually boring, but the highlight was Guy Kawasaki’s presentation: most lively and entertaining keynote I’ve ever attended. Big take-away from Guy: “it’s okay to ship crap!”

I also went to the Web 2.0′s Expo. It was bigger than I had imagine. Everything and everybody is working on something labeled web 2.0 I guess. There were booths from a lot of small companies I never heard of. Social networking and cloud computing seems to the major themes. I’m surprised that I didn’t see Facebook there. Yahoo’s booth was tiny at the corner.

The coolest demo was TellMe’s mobile app on Blackberry. You speak to it and it displays search results on the Blackberry. It’s basically search on voice recognition. Very useful…

Ran accross a t-shirt with the above graphic and I just had to order one for myself. Geeky, sure but I like…

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of Mozilla project. I still was with Netscape that faithful day: March 31, 1998. I still remember the big engineering gathering announcing the move. Open source by a commercial software company was pretty much unheard of at the time. The decision to open source the browser code was both controversial. It was a difficult time for Netscape– Microsoft IE was cannibalizing Navigator’s market share and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. By some account, once mighty Navigator’s market share had perilously fallen to 20% at that time– an astounding decline no matter how one looked at it.

Giving away many man-years of commercial code seemed illogical even to me at that time. But an essay by Eric Raymond called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” became very instrumental in the push toward open source. Raymond’s main point was that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” I remember, the client team had to spend months cleaning up the code. In particular, there were a lot of comments that the public might deem inappropriate. Many people expected the open source community will immediate embrace the code and push it to success. The reality was different. The move was a little too late in saving the company which got bought by AOL later that fall. The move was to salvage the browser. But when the open source community did not become an immediate driving force, some key folks like Jamie Zawinski began to leave the project. Underscoring complexity of the project, it took another 4 years before Mozilla 1.0 saw the light of day.

Ten years later, IE still dominates 80% of the browser market. Given Mozilla’s current market share at 17-18%, Mozilla barely recovers the market share lost it its lifetime. It speaks volume to Microsoft dominance and proves the difficulty of turning the tide. It took some time, Mozilla is emerging as a powerful, innovative and influential project. It relentlessly puts out version of Firefox with one innotive feature after another; by contrast IE has become stagnant. I for one can’t wait to see what the next 10 years Mozilla will bring to the users.

So, we have a new piece of trivia: “when did Netscape Browser died out?”
Answer: “March 1, 2008″

Looks like 3/1/08 is the official date of demise for Netscape browser when AOL will cease all support for the storied browser. It’s a little fact most people don’t really care about, but it’s rather sad in perspective for a former Netscape employee like me…

After putting it off long enough, I spent some time this weekend tweaking my blog.

First, I hacked some plug-in code to get the random posts in the format I needed. I had to go all the way to making changes in some SQL queries. While WordPress’ APIs are getting better, I still find myself going all the way and hit MySQL to get the necessary data. It’s not ideal because this type of code changes will break with schema changes. Oh well, it is a hack I guess… Finally, I tweaked the CSS to fix issues that had been bugging me. Some were minor issues like color and font inconsistencies; some were layout issues.

Some of results are:

• The sidebar is re-arranged around a bit. More useful data is pushed up and space efficiency was taken into account.
• The new list of random posts, with excerpts, appears at the bottom of the sidebar.
• The footer is now rendered a lot cleaner than before.
• The new list of most commented posts appears in one of the footer columns.
• More consistent link hover styles for both black and blue backgrounds.
• Time/Date is now displayed with no wrapping.

Next thing I want to tackle is to build a better Flikr widget than the one I’m currently using…

Recently I started to setup my Vista desktop machine to double as our dvr, recording TV shows which we watch on our media center pc in our living room. These videos are DVR-MS files and they are MPEG-2 encoded. The files are huge– 1 hour of Monk eats up 3 gigs for best quality recoding! For the life of me I couldn’t find a configuration Windows Media Center to use more efficient codecs. Perhaps a reader of this blog can enlighten me.

Anyhow, the best workaround I’ve found is MCE Buddy: a windows service that automatically re-encodes the video files to other ideal formats like H.264 & DivX behind the scene. Added bonus: the program claims to be able to automatically removes comercials! Sweet!

This is jumping through a hoop, I wish the video codec was configurable in the first place to avoid this re-encoding business. I suspect copyright protection has something to do with the missing codec configuration. Annoying nevertheless.

Recent upgrade to a new version of WordPress involves database schema changes. This causes some of my plugins to break, particularly you’d see database error when leaving a comment! Good thing comments were saved okay though. I finally got around to fix it, so commenting now works perfectly.

Apologies from yours truly…

I got tired of the old skin, so I configured a new one. I am always partial to black background, but just haven’t found many skins I like. But I generally like this one with its blue dominated bold design. Don’t have time now, so more customization have to come later.

Every quarter, Yahoo! holds a hack day when engineers are given 24 hours to dream up an idea and build it out– it’s a way to promote innovation in the developer ranks. I’ve seen some very innovative stuffs in the past. So this past hack day, I worked with two of my co-workers David & Ahmed to build a chat or IM “robot”. Very geeky but also very cool…

A chat or IM bot is basically a piece of software that acts like a real chat buddy: you send it a message and it replies with a response to you. We called our bot Alfred, Batman’s confidante and assistant. The idea is that this is an all-knowing chat buddy. You send it a question like “How do I make a grilled cheese sandwich?” and it will return to you an answer by searching Yahoo! Answers database. In this case, the bot will send back a chat message with instructions on making the sandwich! You send it a command like “tell me about 2008 Olympics” and it will return you the popular links del.icio.us users have bookmarked about the 2008 Olympics.

I had a lot of fun hacking Alfred, probably the most satisfying piece of code I’ve written at Yahoo! Check out Sarah Bacon’s coverage of our hacks at the official Yahoo! Messenger blog, including a screen shot.

An analyst has recently concluded that Apple is making about $831 per iPhone! This includes $18 per month from AT&T. Sweet!

Apple is going to have a monster xmas season!

Okay, I know I’m dating myself for blogging this, but I don’t care..

  Back in the early PC days, the Amiga grabbed a lot of attention. It was the dream machine at the time. I remember one day casually walking by a computer store on Main street in Alhambra, oh I don’t know mid ’80s. I saw an Amiga on the window, displaying the classic animation of a bouncing red/white checkered ball. I was quick to ditch my friends and went in to check it out. I still remember that I thought it was the coolest computer I’d ever seen. I was blown away!

I had been reading about the Amiga in Byte magazine. I was a kid with a $200 Commodore 64, green with envy at all the rich kids at school who owned IBM, Atari & most of all Apple II. So it wasn’t like my parents were going to get it for me. Don’t remember the price, just that it was ridiculously expensive. Technically, the Amiga was best in the market at that point, but it was mismanaged and eventually flamed out– just a footnote in computing history and another of many duds left on the wayside by IBM & Apple.

Anyhow, Arstechnica features an on-going series of articles on the history of The Amiga. Very intriguing geeky read, highly recommended from yours truly!

1. genesis
2. birth of Amiga
3. 1st prototype
4. enter Commodore

Here’s a funny excerpt:

Amiga, Inc. didn’t have a lot of money left over for shipping its prototype to the show, and the engineers were understandably nervous about putting such a delicate device through the rigors of commercial package transport. Instead, RJ Mical and Dale Luck purchased an extra airline seat between the two of them and wrapped the fledgling Amiga in pillows for extra security. According to airline regulations, the extra “passenger” required a name on the ticket, so the Lorraine became “Joe Pillow,” and the engineers drew a happy face on the front pillowcase and added a tie! They even tried to get an extra meal for Joe, but the flight attendants refused to feed the already-stuffed passenger.

Tonite, after processing some of the pictures of the kids I took earlier in the evening, I uploaded a few of them to Flickr. In the process, I discovered something a bit troubling. The uploaded images on Flickr looked washed out! I looked closely at the settings in the Flickr upload tool and discovered it resizes the uploads due to size limitation. While JPEG is a lossy compression, resizing should not produce visible differences between compressions– otherwise, the format would be useless.

After reconfiguration, I re-uploaded a file in its entirety. I looked at the different sizes on Flickr and again, the image simply didn’t look faithfully replicated! Could the bits be altered I thought? So I downloaded the picture and compared it against the original JPEG. No difference in file size, good! I viewed the 2 files in Photoshop and they look identical, again good!

This meant that there is a visible difference in the rendering of the images on Flickr in the browser. A partial screen dump above shows the browser on top of Photoshop, both displaying the same image of the same size. The difference in coloration is obvious. But at this point I no longer suspect Flickr and began to suspect the browser; so I loaded the original JPEG file into Firefox & IE. Eureka, I see the same difference between the browser and Photoshop.

I didn’t get it, while I understand HTML is limited to web color space, I always thought JPEG is rendered in the browser without such limitation. Then I remember reading about Safari rendering JPEGs better than other browsers. I hit Flickr with it and bingo– chalk up more love for Apple from me! Safari rendered the image faithfully!

It turns out some systems (devices or software) are built without color management. Vista and Safari render photos faithfully because just as Photoshop, they have color management and will take into account the embedded ICC profiles in their rendering algorithms. Whereas other system like IE & Firefox and my printer, don’t have color management and render photographs with unpredictable color maps.

This was a lesson in color management for me. For a good example on color management in web browswers, check out this article.

I’ve been using Zoundry as a blog writer client last few years. It’s free and works better than most of standalone clients I’ve tried. Just downloaded the beta version of Windows Live Writer tonite and I’m impressed. Some of the things I like include:

1. WYSIWYG mode applies styles straight from the blog CSS. I’ve never seen this implemented on other clients I tried.
2. Images in a post are even automatically uploaded (including auto-thumbnails).
3. Inserting a map is a cinch (Microsoft map of course)!
4. Templates

Pretty sweet…

I received a phishing attempt in my inbox this morning. Phishing is a fraudulent attempt which fake emails are sent to unsuspecting users tricking them to surrender sensitive user information usually by linking the user to a site that is forged to look legit.

This particular email disguises as Bank of America informing me of an "unauthorized activity". First, I am not BofA customer and secondly, the email was poorly done (spelling error for example). It was a dead giveaway, so I spot it as a phish right away. The link included in the email is simple bare URL, linking to a site in Tanzania! I’m insulted!

Pictured above is the screen shot I made from the fraudulent site in Tanzania, forging as BofA. It’s tricking users into entering BofA user IDs & pass codes. Bastards! Some of recent phishing attempts are very clever. Some of my co-workers at Yahoo even fell to victim to recent schemes.

Phishing is becoming more prevalent, so be prudent…

Subject: Unauthorized Activity

Dear Bank of America client,

You have received this email because you or someone had used your account from different locations.For security purpose, we are required to open an investigation into this matter.
In order to safeguard your account, we require that you confirm your banking details.
The help speeed up to this process, please access the following link so we ca complete the verification of your Bank of America Online Banking Account registration information.

http://www.data-exchange.co.tz/boa/ssl/online/

If we do no receive the appropriate account verification within 48 hours, then we will assume this Bank of America account is fraudulent and will be suspended.
The purpose of this verification is to ensure that your bank account has not been fraudulently used and to combat the fraud from our community. We appreciate your support and understanding and thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

One day 2 weeks ago while hitting the gym, I lost my cell phone. I also lost our corporate pager. A few days later, while trying disconnect their UVerse TV service, AT&T inadvertently took down my DSL. Then while hacking some PHP code, I inadvertently brought down this site.

I was left feeling totally disconnected all of sudden. Didn’t take long for me to realize how dependent I’ve grown to these things.

DSL is finally back on, the site is restored (obviously since you’re reading this), Yahoo! replaced the lost pager. The cell phone (which is fairly expensive to replace btw) is still missing.