Link. I can’t believe I haven’t seen this till now. Have a good laugh!

I left out a few topics for Math in the original file. I’ve updated it already. Please tell those whom you know have downloaded the file about the update.

Download (Updated 27 May 2007 8:15 pm)

I saw this at one site I frequent and I was… intrigued (if that’s the right word).

Enough said.

I’ve been using Feedburner to publish my Feed if you haven’t noticed. And in case you were wondering what the hell a feed is, it is a “data format used for serving users frequently updated content.” “Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.”

Anyway, the news is that Google is buying Feedburner. I’ve been using Feedburner for a while and when I first saw it, I was pretty impressed by it. It offers some pretty cool features including some nice stats. It’s a pretty Web 2.0-ish kinda service. A good investment by Google I’d say. It means another revenue for them to place their Adsense on.

This brings me back to my previous posts on Google World Domination. It may seems smart on Google’s part to eat up potential companies to expand themselves. Even though I am pretty much pro-Google, I won’t want to see a day when almost all major web services are owned by Google. No way.

Primarily as a way of reminding myself of the tests, I’ve created a document with the topics, times and venues for the various papers. The venues are 06S56 specific. Due to popular demand my spirit of sharing all the good things of the world, I’ve uploaded it here.

Get it

Ever ran out of music to listen to? Looking for quality music albums that you can download for free and legally? Check out Jamendo! It’s a pretty cool site that allows users to upload music of their own creation under a Creative Commons License. Basically, you can download the music and use it for any purposes you like. With some of them, you can even make commercial derivatives out of them. This is probably the open source version of music.

One of the albums there that caught my ear (and which first brought me to the site) was “There’s nothing impossible”. You might notice that the first track of the music was used in a Web 2.0 video I posted on my blog earlier. Yep, you’ve guessed right: I was led to the site by this video. You might want to sample a little of the music with this little widget below:

Internet Explorer is truly annoying. I think if you do a search on my blog, you can probably find quite some post on my rants on Internet Explorer. Today’s rant is not so much on the browser’s web page rendering capability but on one of the stupid bug it has: PNG images are not displayed on Web sites in Internet Explorer. Not that I care about getting PNG images to work in IE, I need it to test out websites for those who are still using or have no choice but to use IE.

P.S.: You might have probably noticed I”m suddenly blogging more often these few days. It’s probably due to my workload getting less (I have some minor projects here and there plus some revision to be done). I will probably write more about this in a future post for those who do not know why I am doing these projects. It’s great that CCAs are being passed on to the year ones gradually. The new Exco has already been selected and I guess it’s about time we shake some legs

五月天 - 《一千个世纪》
曲:石头
词:阿信

当时地球还年轻
我们诞生荒凉大海里
演化到了寒武纪
我们长出脊椎和勇气
某天我们开始踩出脚印
学会双手拥抱学会爱情
长出人类的心
啊啊 我要和你一起走过一千个世纪
每次诞生我都要与你相遇
每次轮回都为你
当时你我都野性
我们学会用火和穴居
後来帝国正崛起
我们战乱之中更相依
某天我们突然回忆过去
我们只是两段平凡基因
却爱的很美丽
啊啊我要和你一起走过一千个世纪
下一个我也许是人或蚂蚁
每次诞生 我都要与你相遇
每次轮回都是为你
啊啊我要和你一起活过一千个世纪
每次诞生都只有一个意义
就是和你在一起
在一起
直到文明又毁灭
一千世纪後的第一天
伊甸园里肩并肩
我们笑看太阳也熄灭

Tags: lyrics, 五月天

There are times when issues popup which you absolutely have no idea how to resolve. There are some who will straight-away make a run for online forums or other avenues to ask people for help. I, on the other hand, prefer to search for my own answers until I’m absolutely sure I cannot find whatever I’m looking before before I turn to such forums for help.

And as it turns out, I often do not get the help I want to get. I ask questions and most often my threads get one or two useless replies or nothing at all. I can summarise it as due to the following:

• I did not ask the question properly and thus no one has any idea what the hell I am talking about.
• People hate me.
• No one knows how to help me.

If I could find what I was looking for, I wouldn’t need to ASK in the first place, would I? Sometimes it’s just plain annoying to get no response to whatever is asked. I’ve experienced this countless number of times. Take this as an example. I’m sure that there must be someone who knows how to do that.

On to another issue. The elevators at my flats allow you to request for a elevator to go upstairs or downstairs. There are some idiots (henceforth referred to as “you”) who in wanting to go downstairs, press the buttons for both directions and in the end, both elevators move to that person’s level and then one just stays there while the other goes down. Get the flow?

Anyway, what annoys is me is that I, on the ground floor (or any other floor actually), have to wait for a much longer time because both elevators have been called up to your level before one of them comes to the ground floor bearing YOU. These people are really inconsiderate. So much for moulding Singapore into a “civilised society” (优雅社会).

It’s official. Starcraft II is coming! Truth be told, I’ve not exactly played Starcraft before owing to its age. As a fan of Warcraft III who has played Blizzard’s games growing up, I’m really excited to see a new game being released in the future! World of Warcraft was something I wanted to play as well but seeing that it required a monthly subscription, I guess it was not the type for me. Perhaps I’ll get to it when I have some sort of stable income.

The graphics look pretty sleek. Definitely an improvement since Warcraft III. Since I haven’t played World of Warcraft before, I’ve got nothing to compare. I wonder if it will run well on a Pentium 4 machine. I’m getting pretty high CPU usage on my Pentium 4 computer just by visiting their Starcraft II and World of Warcraft site alone.

Anyway, here comes my developer rants. Skip these if you are not interested.

I’ve observed that Blizzard have pretty “high-tech” and good looking sites compared to many other corporate sites. Of course, you can say that they are a gaming company and thus the higher graphic density of their sites but hell, their designs do appeal. And if you happen to view the source code of their sites (WoW or Starcraft II), LO! and behold, their sites are written in XML and transformed to XHTML by XSLT. Wow. I swear I’ve never seen any other sites do that.

After pondering through this, I think this is a pretty clever way to setup a website. My hunch is that they store at least some of their content not in the form of databases but in these XML files that we are served. Their scripts can simply edit the XML files and then when a client requests for a page, they can simply serve the XML file to the clients without the need to regenerate the whole page using server side scripting like most sites do now. Rather, the “display” generation is done by the clients themselves via XSLT!

This is pretty analogous to what many Web 2.0 sites and AJAX have been doing: moving processing to the client and relieving load off the servers. I’ve written something about this in one of the articles of my Thinkquest entry. In the JavaScript case, data is served to the client and through JavaScript, the page displays and or allows manipulations to the data through AJAX etc. In this case, the server serves content to the client via XML and the client formats it accordingly using XSLT. I’ve got a feeling we might be seeing more of this in the future.

Time to brush up on XML and learn XSLT!

Tags: Web

I haven’t blogged for a while. If you’ve noticed, I’ve just changed the site design. It’s called Redoable and is kinda cool. And since there was a new version of Wordpress being released (2.2), I thought it might be a good chance to do a mini-revamp now. Some minor problems with the theme though they should be solved soon.

It was kind of sad that VJ soccer boys lost to RJC yesterday. I’m sure they’ve tried their best and let’s hope they can at least win the third title.

There were some people from Millenia Institute yesterday at the above mentioned match who sat at our side and decided to jeer and create trouble during the match. At the end, some of the male teachers who were there and some ex-victorians went ahead and gave them a piece of their minds. I’ve been reading this person’s blog recently regarding the students from the school he teachers. Coupled with the recent posts about the “parents’ letter” issue, I wonder what the hell our education system is moulding us into.

This morning at Jalan Besar stadium, our soccer girls managed to win TJ 1-0 to get into the finals. Good job girls! The goal was pretty cool. A long range shot. I’ve just realized that even though the stadium is relatively nearer form my house than any other places, it still would have taken me 15 minutes to walk there. Add the blazing sun into the formula and… you get the picture.

I’m sure that for most of us who went down to CCAB yesterday and for those that went to the stadium to support today were not thinking about half-days or full-days when we were cheering for them to win. Those who are seriously do not get the point. It was more of school spirit that drove me to support them in addition to reasons like our class were supposed to go and because Jalan Besar stadium is so near my house.

There was this lack of spirit for Dunman High and I could feel more of it here. Time passes really fast and it is six more months before we are out of the school and into world of National Service. I hope I can still remember my time here vividly when the time comes.

Now, time to start work on the stacks of things I plan to do. Any one has extra time to sell? I’ll buy them!