If there were an all-in-one SNS service

It would provide:

• an external personal information portal, through which other people could get this person’s profile easily. Concretely, this might be a blogging intermedium, or a complete blogging space;
• an internal personal information portal, through which he himself could access lastest news, weblog subscriptions, mailboxes, search results, and even everything. RSS feed aggregator is a good example for this;
• a powerful networking mechanism(foaf, community, interest, tag);
• an audio/video P2P communication tool;
• …

For now, Google has Blogger, orkut. But both are unsatisfactory. This is absolutely true for me at least – thinking about the inaccessible blogspot, and so few functions with orkut. Comparatively speaking, Microsoft has MSN Spaces, My MSN, wallop(though it exists for experimental purposes), MSN Messenger. Yahoo has only My Yahoo!(but it is the first internal personal information portal with RSS support). It seems M$ has surpassed Google.

So, big guys, come on. Grab these goodies: Six Apart(Movable Type and LiveJournal company), WordPress, Bloglines, Friendster, Meetup, Skype.

P.S. //addoil uuzone~

Snow, firecracker, sticky rice ball

It snows again! The large-sized flakes danced in the lamp light, elegantly and fairily. It was just a beautiful picture for me when I was waiting for the No. 386 bus. I like the snow. But at the same time, the snow totally hid the moon up. Yes, it’s Lantern Festival today. The moonlight should be very nice if the sky was clear.

The coming of Lantern Festival indicates the ending of Chinese lunar new year celebration. So I can hear that firecrackers popped here and there, although it has been forbidden within the 5th ring road by the government. And some of the burglar alarms of cars were raised, making noises along with the firecrackers.

Binbin bought us sticky rice balls at the No. 10 Daoxiangcun sales department. It’s amzing that all the kinds of stuffing are my favorite ones: black sesame seeds and walnut, creamy coconut paste, sweet-scented hawthorn…

P.S. Differences between Yuanxiao and Tangyuan:
They look similar regarding to color and shape. Actually Yuanxiao comes from north China. Tangyuan comes from south. Yuanxiao is usually made by rolling in a bamboo sieve, while Tangyuan is folded with bare hands, and tastes much softer than Yuanxiao.

Personality is usually consistent

Long time ago I took a personality assessment for the sake of knowing myself better. The result for me turned out to be INTJ. And now it seems unchanged.

Introverted (I) 66.67% Extroverted (E) 33.33% Intuitive (N) 58.33% Sensing (S) 41.67% Thinking (T) 70.59% Feeling (F) 29.41% Judging (J) 51.52% Perceiving (P) 48.48%

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs)

INTJ – “Mastermind”.

Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population.

loner, more interested in intellectual pursuits than relationships or family, not very altruistic, not very complimentary, would rather be friendless than jobless, observer, values solitude, perfectionist, detached, private, not much fun, hidden, skeptical, does not like most people, socially uncomfortable, not physically affectionate, unhappy, does not talk about feelings, hard to impress, analytical, likes esoteric things, pessimistic, not spontaneous, discontented, guarded, does not think they are weird but others do, responsible, insensitive to the misfortunes of others, orderly, clean, organized, familiar with darkside, does not value organized religion, suspicious of others, lonely, rarely shows anger, punctual, finisher, prepared

favored careers:
scientist, dictator, forensic anthropologist, systems analyst, philosopher, nuclear engineer, political analyst, researcher, statistician, scholar, research scientist, computer scientist, software designer, curator, computer programmer, aerospace engineer, electrical engineer, paleontologist, english professor, philosophy professor, chemical engineer, epidemiologist, forensic scientist, museum curator, research assistant, mechanic, astronomer, figher pilot, librarian, systems administrator, neurosurgeon, book editor, biotechnology, archeologist, lab tech, bookstore owner

disfavored careers:
advertising executive, job in entertainment industry, performer, singer, art therapist, childcare worker, bartender, dj, even coordinator, hair dresser, wedding planner

Breaking the great firewall of China

Personally speaking, surfing the Internet via Google search results can be a frustrating thing, coz quite a number of websites have been blocked by the so-called Great Firewall of China. The actions taken by China censorship are mostly reasonable(I mean FLG), while sometimes are arbitrary. You know, we could not visit blogspot(Blogger.com(Google)) directly here in China, while this site might be the world’s largest blog service provider.

Here is some thoughts dealing with this:

1. Proxy: This is useful for those directly connected to the net. But it’s insane for me to use a proxy server to access another proxy server;
2. Google cache: It used to be blocked by the firewall too. I’m happy to see the restriction is gradually loosening;
3. Online RSS aggregator: This is a good idea. At least we could read now, since not write;
4. Anonymous web surfing software: Haven’t tried yet.

You could never press save button too frequently

Most programmers might have experienced the vexation after losting hundreds of lines of code, without saving to files. The causes can vary from unexpected OS crash to hardware failure, or even a naughty cat.

This morning I just found Wikipedia, likewise, also placed such a placard on its website:

Power corrupts. Power failure corrupts absolutely.

We’re currently recovering servers from a power failure in our colocation facility. This means backing up 170gb of database on several servers and running recovery. Back soon…

Wikipedia uses InnoDB. A sudden power failure often corrupts some data files and sets the database state into unrecoverable. Sure they have backup and redo log files. But it still takes time.

With an eye to the accidents with LiveJournal and Blogsome a few days ago. My suggestion for you guys is definitely DO MORE BACKUPS. And take care.

Talking about that snowy day

…
white headlights and red rear lights of cars and trucks on the North 4th Ring Road;
…
slippery sidewalk with a thin layer of snow on it;
…

This entry is trackbacking to http://www.blogcup.com/read_joanna2008_28309.html.

Watching Spring Festival Gala Live Broadcast online for now

CCTV.com provides 1 link entry for domestic users and 3 for abroad. Having inspected each one patiently, I found out that the only one I could both hear and see it through was Abroad Entry 2.

The sound effect is rather nice. But the mosaic in the Media Player window can easily prevent me from clearly seeing the subtitles and faces of the hosts and hostesses.

Gotta know which is my next plaything? Skype! Skype through GPRS! Count on the coming story.

Wandering the Vacant City

It’s still a 24ish hours way to the Rooster Year. At this point, this north capital city is just half empty! Many people were making short or long journey to get home for family get-togethers. So as one of my colleagues had put it, like, half of the country’s population were on the way. Spring festival is a time of “floating” for the whole nation. I knew this when I took bus from Zhongguancun Crossroad bus stop back to Tuanjiehu. If it were not spring festival, the compartment of bus No. 302 should be EXTREMELY crowded, and the traffic should be EXTREMELY heavy. But today there were still empty seats. Actually I took a cozy nap sitting on mine.

Though it is forbidden to play with fireworks within the 5th ring road of Beijing. I can still indulge in the festive atomosphere. There will be just a few of ppl going to work tomorrow. I mean, I’m also planning to get back to my parents’ place in the morning, a while after presenting myself in the office. (I’m diligent enough, really.)

So just celebrate the holiday with your parents, beloved ones(young couples have another festival during this special season ;-)), call old friends, breath some fresh air, and have a good rest.

Happy new year, guys!

2 Tips of using Firefox

Which extensions do you recommend?

• Gmail Notifier;
• Bloglines Toolkit;
• Deepest Sender: Post to LiveJournal;
• Tabbrowser Preferences: This 1.1.1 version make the browser in single window mode;
• ColorZilla: Snap the color of the mouse position within the browser;
• Send To: Send selected text to my Editplus;
• lget: Simplify downloading files of any types;
• del.icio.us: Post current page;
• Furl Tools: Furl this page.

How to remove search engines in the Firefox search toolbox?

You might have noticed that a bunch of search engines are natively integrated in Firefox. You can access them via just a few clicks, without installing any plugins. It’s also quite easy to add engines that you want through Mycroft (del.icio.us / search, Baidu mp3, and CIBA is NOT in it. I’ll try to add them shortly.). However, you can’t remove anyone of them from the GUI. Here is what you’d try out:

• Navigate to $PROGRAMFILES%\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins;
• Each search engine has a .src file and a .png(or .gif) file. Delete the two files for the search engine you wish to remove;
• Restart Firefox.

With MSN Search officially released on Feb 1st. Google is no more the exclusive search solution for me. You know, I used to be so addicted to it. Anyway, having more choices is not bad at all. (I hate monopoly. Vive la freedom!) So my Firefox search engines are including but not limited to Google, Google Images, Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN, Wikipedia (EN), Furl.net.

P.S. Ask Jeeves always has problem with GB2312. Report said that Ask Jeeves acquired Bloglines. I usually spend about 2 hours on Bloglines everyday. So this message somewhat turned me down, I’m feeling nervous about the uncertain consequences Ask Jeeves might bring to Bloglines. God bless the poor online RSS aggregator.

This is a revolution

So dudes, this is the official announcement of the release of my English weblog. I’ve been working on its template and css files for about 2 days. And now it looks quite neat. Why did I setup another weblog besides the older one?

WordPress is a wonderful blogging software. It supports category, trackback, referer, and of coz, rss, which are exactly what I’m looking for these days. I’m always excited about the fresh air in my life.

How comes this title?

The cosmos is invar“iably changing. Full of challenges, isn’t it? As a tiny creature on the blue planet, I’m actively engaging in the revolution.

How often would it be updated, presumably?

Because English is not my mother tongue, I can’t speak THAT pure English as some of your guys do. But I’ll try to scrabble here once in a while, maybe once or twice a week. Thanks for your patience.