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]

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.

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.

Badminton videos online

Last week I managed to download quite a few badminton match videos from eMule. I was quite proud of myself for having the idea to search there. Then today I saw this guide to downloading videos, and the steps were almost the same as what I did by myself.

BitTorrent didn’t have much on badminton when I tried it last week. The guide mentioned that as well.

Great Product Manager for Google Maps

By now many people have come across the humorous Google Maps travel direction from New York to London. If you haven’t, here is the link, refer to step 24.

This got me thinking, Google must have an ingenious Product Manager (PM) who possesses the little touches that make a product spark. I mean, isn’t this humorous travel direction a great way to generate free publicity for the Google Maps product? I had seen it mentioned in blogs many days ago, and a friend just IMed it to me too.

Of course whatever I had just said about the PM might be totally wrong – it could just be an Easter egg that some engineer put in.

Google now has Singapore street-level maps

This might not be new for everybody, but I just found out that Singapore street-level maps are now available on Google Maps. Satellite view is possible on all but the highest zoom.

In the mean time Live Local and Yahoo Maps still have the older low-detailed maps of Singapore. Of the three, Yahoo has the the worse looking bunch of polygons.

Transformers trailer

The first full-length trailer of Transformers the live-action movie is now available on Yahoo Movies. It looks enticing and sure beats the short teaser I mentioned a while back.