Geeky Things

LUCKY – I was upgraded to Business Class in a flight to Taipei few days ago… (I’m not the kind of people who can afford business class anyway so…… )

The only problem is … a flight between Taipei and Hong Kong takes only 1.5 hrs, why don’t I get these kind of upgrade when I travel to London -_-

And the Breakfast is…. Yummy yummy…..

Havn’t been updating this blog for a while! Life have been crazy for me so this blog somehow turns into a “Delicious Update Page” -_-… Maybe it is time for me to write down at least something…. here is a list of what’s going on….

Oursky Ltd

1. My new company – Oursky Ltd, which focus on Web Application Development Service, is moving to a new office this week. Our client’s projects and in house projects (a SMS twitter-liked service and a iPhone app) keep us very busy. Please contact us if you need any help on web projects or if you’re outsourcing IT works.
2. Kampo is joining us as the “Business Director” — we really need someone to help on marketing and sales — after a month of operation.

Technology

1. Playing with Google App Engine, Django these days. Honestly I really love Pylons more… but you know.. client is the king… sometimes. Django is good, as easy as Ruby on Rails with a better programming language (Python), but just like RoR it was built with a lot of assumption and if you need some functionality which is outside the scope of what it is designed for…. well. And the model of Django is really suck compare with SQLAlchemy. (sorry to ignore the argument here…)

Other

1. Of course don’t forget the Creative Commons Hong Kong.
2. Helping to get the Wikimedia Hong Kong First Anniversary Conference organized…
3. Will try to help more on the Hong Kong Blogger Conference…

Finally it is here… so now I can use Del.icio.us extension on firefox 3 — so good….

All of the web developer hate IE6~ AT LEAST I HATE IE6. Fixing IE6 wired display problems take 60% of the development time~ shame on you Microsoft.

So if you hate Microsoft and it’s IE as much as I do and you can’t show a warning message to all IE 6 users “Your browser is outdated” because you are afriad of your client, let me introduce you — the IE7-JS .

It is a Javascript Library by the hero Edwards, which fixes most of the IE6 problems. I’ve just tried it on couple of my website and it works pretty well except some latency and minor problem. So no more IE6 hack… (or lesser…)

(From simon) Hey man that’s rock!

Today just tried the new Fring for iPhone. That’s the best way to connect IM on iPhone I’ve ever seen. Although many web apps (such as JiveTalk) already made connect to popular IM such as MSN and Google Chat on iPhone possible, most of them are not stable and cannot maintain connection when you leave Safari or when you close the iPhone.

In contrast, Fring is much better — For example, even when you close Fring, Fring will just hide itself to the background, so that when someone send you a message, it will ring and show the number of message you have missed just like the SMS and Email App. built in.

Besides IM ability, Fring can also connect Skype and SIP ’s VOIP function! (although it seems not really useful for me — why would I borther voip when iPhone is a full feature GSM phone itself? And I don’t do much long distance call neither)

In a word: Fring is really the dream app for iPhone! It turns my iPhone to the best communication devices! Phone / SMS / Mail, and now MSN / GTalk!!!

Last year me and some of my friends spent quite a lot of time to encourage people to comment on the Digital Copyright Consultation paper. Recently there were two LC papers (Here and here) describing the result of the consultation and the Government’s next step. The proposal this time is much more better than the suggestions in the consultation but are far from perfect. Here are some of my initial thought:

On the format shift (or media shift):

- At 8b) , government propose that the rights of format shift should not confer any rights to circumvent “technological measures to prevent copyright infringement”, namely DRM -_-. This is a important limitation which will makes the rights of format shift useless. As you can see many CD nowadays are DRM protected, with the given suggestion, is still a crime for users to copy legitimate copy of CD music into their iPod.

Moreover, most of the DRM used online today are not preventing copyright infringement actually -_- , they’re used to prevent format shifting as a anti-competitive behavior.

- I don’t have much to say about the scope and limitation on format shift at this point. But would like to add that the papers and the example given in other jurdisiction didn’t mention about obsoleted devices. I think the final law should include a special exemption for people to make copies from obsoleted devices under any circumstances. (Of course it might be difficult to define what’s obsoleted)

On criminalization of streaming

- Again, the first issue is how they define streaming in Law? Many program today offer some feature like “download while you play” (which means you can view a media when you’re actually still downloading), would that consider as streaming? What if a contributor provide a media as a HTTP or FTP download, but the downloader use for instance VLC to stream the FTP files?

- I’m more concerned with something like youtube. Technically speaking users are just uploading a complete file to a platform, is it streaming if the user upload a file to a platform provide streaming service?

On OSP’s caching exemption

- Glad to see government provide the exemption, but the limitations at 14. seems unrealistic for me:

* “The exemption only applies to communication that is not infringing” : That’s practically equals to having OSP to censor user’s data. OSP have the risk of infringing copyright if they don’t censor user’s data in this case

* “The content as contained in the original version should not be modified during the reproduction process.” : That could make many OSP’s temporary caching services useless. For example Google provide page caching services for mobile phone, and it will reduce the size of the images for better user experience in mobile phone. It certainly means that Google need to modify the original version of content.

VERY ANNOYING! I tried to share a Google Document about Creative Commons with others this Morning but I just found that no email were sent by the Google Documnet….. what the hell is going on….

iPhone is the best mobile devices I ever have but as any other electronic devices it sucks in some ways. One of them is the camera which only have 200 million pixel, wired coloring, no self-timer, and have no video feature.

But we know iPhone is basically running a MacOSX so we can add function to it, right? Someone created “CameraPro” which have a lot of advanced feature but that need money… which as I know, made many iPhone owner disappointed.

Last week I found one nice software called snapture, with a lot of feature for camera such as self-timer, digital zoom, and burst mode! And it is free. Well it more or less fix the iPhone’s camera…

You know? When Amazon started its’ elastic hosting services (EC2, S3 and SimpleDB), the world of web development have changed.

AND NOW, GOOGLE WANT TO CHANGE IT MORE DRAMATICALLY!

Google App Engine, is a full stack of web application development environment based on Google Infrastructure, so basically you’re deploying your application as reliable as google’s one.

In contrast with Amazon’s approach of allow users to upload a virtual machine to run in Amazon’s cluster, Google want you to put only the application to their cluster. Currently it only support Python (but since I really love Python so I’ve no complain with that), and run in CGI mode. From it docs it is WSGI compliant too so basically I can use my favorite Pylons Web Framework there

You can’t write file in the App Engine environment just like in Amazon EC2, all data must be saved into DataStore.

It is now in Preview Release, with 10000 slots only…. well I’m too late -_-, but it is really really exciting to know that and I will probably deploy one or two of my apps there in future

UPDATE: I’ve got a account at Google App Engine now