USPS insurance isn’t worth jack

For those who dislike USPS like I do (previous posts one, two, and three), here is another horror story: USPS: Your Five New, Insured Laptops That We Lost Are Worth $74.

In other words, USPS has no problem taking your insurance money but has a big problem when it comes to paying out the amount you insured for.

New Twitter HTML badge script

Twitter HTML Badge

I bet most people never noticed that I displayed my most recent Twitter update as my blog description – it was right under the blog title. I used Twitter’s HTML badge script, and it worked great. Until today.

This morning I noticed that the Twitter update was not showing up, so I thought Twitter was down, as it had been often lately. Turned out Twitter was not down. Instead, the old HTML badge script was deprecated and a new one is in place.

I don’t like the new script. It returns Twitter updates enclosed in separate <li> elements, which did wonders to screw up my blog header layout in Internet Explorer. I had no choice but to restore my default (useless) blog description. Twitter just became less useful to me.

Wikipedia in classical Chinese

The English version of Wikipedia is typically the first resource I turn to when I research something on the Net. I don’t think it would be true for the Classical Chinese version though. And by “classical” I don’t mean “traditional” – I am referring to the ancient ways. Let’s just say that my eyes were sore after looking at the front page.

[Via Cowboy Caleb]

MacDongle

Yet another Apple-hostile blog post: Why Doesn’t Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero?. Can’t say I disagree.

I like this one’s comparison of Macs to hardware dongles. I like the article even more (and Apple less) when I think of the tight controls Apple is going to place over iPhone applications.

Facebook beacon deconstructed (by someone else)

Facebook has been gathering a bit of negative publicity due to its Beacon feature. It started as opt-out but is now opt-in after all the complaints. Needless to say I have disabled Beacon globally in my Facebook account the moment it was possible (under Privacy > External Websites).

Regardless of privacy issues, the Beacon is interesting from the technical perspective. I had wondered how Facebook JavaScripts were able to directly contact Facebook servers from partners’ web pages. The short answer: iframe. The long answer: Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript.

On a Beacon related note, you can have some fun by adding fake Beacon stories.

"10 Reasons To Hate Cellphone Carriers"

I haven’t done a pure link post for a while, but given the ordeal I am having with AT&T right now, I just can’t help but to link to this article "10 Reasons To Hate Cellphone Carriers".

Maybe in the future wireless LAN will be so prevalent that we can just use VoIP phones instead? How I wish so…

Gravatar on my blog

Yesterday Automattic, the company behind WordPress the software and WordPress.com the free blog platform, acquired Gravatar and decided to give away premium services for free. Frankly, I had not heard of Gravatar before reading about the acquisition, but the word ‘free’ got my attention and I went ahead and created an account at the site.

Basically Gravatar allows a person to create avatars based on emails, and I happily created some for the fun of it. After creating my avatars I realized one thing, that I can’t use them anywhere! No problem, I thought. That’s why I host my own blog, so I can experiment and integrate with services like Gravatar.

Today I installed Gravatar2 plugin for WordPress, tweaked my comment CSS and PHP files, and made live the spruced up comments layout. Go ahead, view the comments for this blog entry – I have (or will have) created a comment to demonstrate the new look.

Google buys Jaiku

Well, I never thought Google/Microsoft/Yahoo would buy a product like Jaiku, because

1. it’s not a very complex product,
2. it doesn’t have the biggest user pool compared to Twitter,
3. and it’s not a big money maker.

With all that said, I actually prefer Jaiku over Twitter. Jaiku’s interface is more Web 2.0, and it has more features like the ability to publish content from feeds. See for yourself: my Jaiku and my Twitter accounts.

I guess the lesson is that one does not have to be the market leader or have a giant community in order to be bought (and make tons of money).

The final lesson, I suppose, is that I would be a terrible visionary.

Overcast afternoon at Fort Funston; Zooomr and Flickr

My friends bailed on the badminton game today, so I lugged my camera to Fort Funston instead. Oh yeah, I brought my wife and dogs too. But instead of the sunny, windy Fort Funston of my past trips, today I was greeted by overcast and plenty of fog.

Nowadays I am uploading my photos onto two photo sharing services, Zooomr and Flickr. The photo set on Flickr is here. [Update @ 2007-07-21T23.46-8:00]Smartset doesn’t work on Zooomr right now. Zooomr Smartset is here.[/Update]

Time killer: Flickrvision

Try Flickrvision 3D, it’s pretty mesmerizing. And in full screen mode it can be quite a good screen saver.