Firstly, I couldn’t talk much, arrived late, and was tucked to one quiet corner. Then again, I has always been under the radar, haven’t I? Anyway, I only joined the dessert portion of the Ping.sg Indian Food gathering today. However, instead of having dessert at Plaza Singapura as planned, it was at Dome at Park Mall.

I got to meet a few people at the gathering… including Brokenshadz and Champagne. It was quite a casual gathering and when I was just about to take photos… I realised that I forgot to put batteries inside my camera! How dumb can I get?

And oh, Priss thought I was just playing around when I started writing all my replies on the whiteboard. Apparently, she didn’t realise that I was mute. Hehe… no worries, I’ll be ok. =) Soon. Rinaz joined my club because she apparently had a sore throat as well - something that she caught on Monday or Tuesday. Well, at least she can still talk… still not too bad. =)

I order a Strawberry Smoothie - which turned out to be a Strawberry Milkshake! Oh man… don’t those people know the difference between a milkshake and a smoothie??? Moreover, I’m lactose intolerant… let’s see how many times I have to make my way to the toilet soon. =( Priss’ tea didn’t come eventually. So much for service. Thankfully, Claudia’s Yebber wasn’t there else they’d get really bad rating.

Amidst all the chatting (which I wasn’t really part of), Daphne got a call relating to something about her credit card. I didn’t know what happened after that but the next thing I knew was that Daphne said she had something on and left.

Hmm… very awkward leh… Did I miss something?

I am now suffering from "Whose ping is it anyway?" withdrawal syndrome. Every time I look at a post now, I can’t help but read the title and abstract and guessing who the author is. If only every post is now a "Whose ping is it anyway?" question.

Argh!

Whenever I look at Chinese posts, I start wondering if it’s Stuart’s or Andrew’s or CowboyCaleb’s (which usually do not require much guessing). Sometimes, I’d look at my own ping and wonder whose it is. Hmm… Suddenly, CowboyCaleb became everybody’s best friend, so did Chioves (I’m sure spelling is wrong, someone please correct me), Sheylara (and Goonfather), lancerlord, jialat, estee, and paddytan. =P I’m sure the list goes on and on.

I was mentioning to Ridz, that it’s really sad if there is really a log for the game and you find out that whenever there is a pr0n post, the most frequent answer is your blog’s. Conversely speaking, this is a good litmus test of what your readers relate your blog as - political, satirical or just simply out of the world.

Meanwhile, I am having trouble not searching for the 4 options and clicking on the button. Wait, there’s no button… Urgh!

Blog2U relaunched their new website today. As such, it is important for all current Blog2U registered members to re-register again! Apparently, it’s now much easier to have ads on your blog… or at least they’ll make tracking your ads much more easier. Does that mean the end of cut-and-paste ad scripts? Well, I am not really sure, but here’s the email I got from Shirley:

Hi Everyone

Good news! We have launched our new website at http://www.blog2u.sg. 

What’s new??

Auto displaying and removing of banners on blogs.

Tracking script for collecting blog data.

Auto accept ads function.

View Ads history.

Payment via Paypal.

What’s not new?

Prompt payment after posting of ads. (We know you love this feature)

Friendly service.

As this is a new system, we need all bloggers to re-register with us. 

How to register?

1) Register here as a blogger.

2) Go to Manage Blog.

3) Add your blog url.

4) Copy and paste the following script on your blog.

               <script src="http://blog2u.sg/adserve/b2u_counter.js" /></script>

(This tracking script will also be use to display your banner advertisement. Please put it at a prominent position)

If you encounter any problems, feel free to contact us here.

First 50 bloggers who register with us will get a free 1 year subscription of GadgetTrak for Windows (Worth S$59.90)!!!

See you at our new website!!!

Sincerely,

Shirley Soh

BLOG2u Pte Ltd

Bridging New Media

http://BLOG2u.SG

Have you got your email yet? No? It doesn’t matter. Just visit their registration page now to be one of the first 50 to re-register to get for yourself a 1 year free subscription of GadgetTrak for Windows worth S$59.00!!!

I hope I’ll get mine. =P

Ed: This is not an advertorial but a public announcement service for all current Blog2U members to re-register their blogs. Hurry! =P

It’s never been this stressful getting into Ping.sg. Argh! I wanna pull all my hair out! =(

Oh wait, you mean I didn’t have to do "Whose ping is it anyway?" before I could get in? Gee…

It’s the end of the financial year (yes, Simply Jean does have a financial year) and there’s going to be some changes in which the blog will be run. Starting from today tomorrow, only the latest entry will be available via browser. This is because of a Loof Virus that’s spreading around on the host server that is currently still attacking all the Wordpress blogs. This is the same virus/code that brought down various blogs in recent weeks, including Kevin’s. While the administrators are working on it, all users will only get to see the first post via an internet web browser. The alternative is for readers of Simply Jean to subscribe to the feed.

However, the authors at Simply Jean are perplexed at what the feed url is. However, we suspect it’s something along the lines of feed://http//feeds.feedburner.com/simplyjean, but seriously, we don’t use feed readers ourselves, so we are not too sure. Any help from any kind souls will be much appreciated.

At the same time, the familiar face that the blogosphere has seen - who was the "official spokesperson" for Simply Jean may also change. Jean (the current spokesperson) will be stepping down with effect from 15th April 2008. The blog will be undergoing a revamp soon to reflect the new dynamics that an almost new panel of authors will present. Some of these new and exciting features are described below.

As the cost of operation is rising (we just received an email stating that we have to upgrade our service plan), we are considering opening to any opportunities of advertising with us. While Simply Jean’s Alexa rating is only in the range of 220,000 to 230,000 (although usually nearer to 220,000), we also boast a Page Rank of 4/10 which rose steadily since the inception of Simply Jean last year. As of the new financial year, Simply Jean will be registered as a business entity. We hope that through various innovative ideas, we hope to generate revenue that could be returned to the readers or people.

For a start, we may consider a subscription plan that another popular aggregator also considered last year. However, instead of using that revenue for our operating costs, we hope to collect enough per year to return it back to people who need the money. We feel that this is an innovative idea that no other blogs or aggregator has tried. The actual cost of the subscription is still under discussion, but we will make it affordable to everyone.

We also realised that the recent flood of advertisements from our advertisers have slowed the loading of the first page somehow. While this is also temporarily solved by the first-post only solution as described above, we at Simply Jean believe in providing some form of premium service to our readers. In addition to our subscription plan that we will be introducing, readers may also opt for a speed-on-demand feature that allows them to download our pages at a faster speed. For as low as $5, our users can opt for faster loading during peak hours at 8:00am to 11:00am, and 5:30pm to 10:00pm. These hours will be revised every 3 months as we monitor our web statistics. More details will be available at a later time.

As for the closing of Simply Jean, this is still being discussed. If the business plan pulls through (amongst other plans that cannot be described yet due to our non disclosure agreement with our VCs), Simply Jean may be maintained by a totally new panel of authors, as mentioned above. We understand that there may be some apprehension about the subscription plans and the speed-on-demand feature. Thus, should any reader require any subsidy, we may provide as much as $2.90 per month.

Meanwhile, we welcome any flaming feedback from any of our readers. As you can see, we are still as humourous as ever and we believe that this will keep our blog alive and commercially viable. We look forward to a good year ahead and a strong mandate from you, our reader.

Food glorious food! Dinner was great and you simply have to be there to taste and to savour the taste! =) If you are a scallop person, you will definitely not want to miss this part at all!

From top left down, we have salad, yummy-licious dressings for the salad, onion rings-scallops(yummy!)-fish, chicken!, crab meat and spaghetti (just look at that overflowing sauce!), salmon on french (can’t remember what that’s called), diced tomato on french and mushroom on french (can’t remember what they are called too) and forks and spoons (sorry, these are not edible). =P

Some of us decided to pay nostalgia a visit and played some games. Do you remember 5 stones? Or old maid? Frankly, I can’t remember how to play old maid. They should have brought zero-point there as well! =P

Half way through all the gossiping interacting, Yebbers decide to call everyone together for a round table speech session (and showed various video clips of the Yebber Ambassadors) and a round of bingo. At first… I was thinking "fwah! so high tech ah? got program leh!"… then… I saw…

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s the Yebber 1st Anniversary Party which was held at Mint Museum at 26 Seah Street, located just across the road from Raffles Hotel. There are 5 storeys and a roof top at the Mint Museum, which hosts a collection of old toys and games from way back. At the basement is the restaurant while the 2nd floor hosts the collectibles.

When I arrived at the party, the Yebber team were still preparing their stuffs and there was nothing I could do except to take photos! Haha… enjoy the photos! There will be more later =)

If you couldn’t find the place, you couldn’t possibly miss the Yebber sign! Thanks Yebber for making my life much more easier! =)

The Yebber Ambassadors @ Work to prepapre for the arrival of guests

And in the background is a projector rotating the photos from past Yebber outings. Did you see yourself there?

The Yebber counter and the program sheet for the evening. Did you drop your name card for the lucky draw? I hope you won something

I didn’t know that the mint museum is an official place! Apparently it’s officially opened by Mr George Yeo, the then Foreign Affairs Minister

If you look down once you are inside, you’d see the restaurant; else you can just make your way to the lift inside. So cool right? =)

And while you are inside, do observe the no outside food, no pets, no smoking and no photography rules. Oops! NO PHOTOGRAPHY?! Yikes! No wonder they had been staring at me!

There’s even a mint shop that you can get some souvenirs from! Too bad, by the time I was back to the counter, it was closed. =( There was also a shelve of stuffs (I didn’t catch what it was) but again, by the time I returned, the shelf was cleared. =( Sigh.

Feeling lost at where to go? No worries! There’s even a directory with HUGE FONTS! For the Yebber’s Party, we are heading to the 3rd floor! Yeah! Childhood favourites!

At the 3rd floor, you’d be welcomed by exhibits of soft toys and games from the early 1900s. Wow! It was really relic! I won’t have known any of these existed! It was on display at the door as well as the back of the room, where our food was. Argh… the food made my stomach growl…

Took a nice photo at the party? Don’t worry, there’s a Canon Selphy which was brought by the team for you to print out that Kodak or Canon moment. So  thoughtful right? Too bad it doesn’t take in MS Duo Pro. If you have a Sony camera, you are "in luck". =P

At the back of the room is where the speeches and prizes are going to be. Hey, what are the guys looking at?!

Read the rest of this entry »

For everyone who’s been reading my blog, they’d know that I almost never delete any comments unless they are spam and even when people advertise their blogs in the comments form, I usually keep one eye close unless it’s very outright. However some proclaimed "anti-terrorist" took a step too far that I just couldn’t stand it any more.

I deleted his comments.

Now you see it:

Now you don’t!

Good riddance. It was so damn irritating. I was already tolerant by letting his first comment stay, but I guess some people don’t know their limits, especially when commenting on others’ blogs. Deleting comments never felt this good. =) I wonder why is it that some people never grow up.

Simply Jean had been running for about a year and 3 months. A blog that was initially started so that friends would be able to blog anonymously under a single moniker grew to be a blog commenting on almost everything, particularly Singapore social issues. Some have thought Simply Jean to be a political blog, but that’s… a little far from the truth. The fact is, Simply Jean is as political as the man on the street - which is quite apolitical if you ask me. Besides the usual ramblings, Simply Jean serves no more than just the daily news and discourse. Amongst the most popular topics are ERP hikes, petrol hikes, taxi fare hikes, Mas Selamat, the Li Hongyi episode and the Pedra Branca fiasco.

However, here’s where the problem lies. These daily news and discourse are usually available here, here and here; or if you have a deeper pocket, here too and we are thinking if Simply Jean is still serving any purpose at this moment. While it is common for other personal blogs to post pictures of their authors, it’s a little different here. Simply Jean wasn’t meant to be a personal blog.

In terms of "political comments", Simply Jean is lacking in many areas. In terms of the daily discourse, it’s almost what everyone else on the streets is saying. In a nutshell, Simply Jean is beginning to be of little substance. As one reader puts it:

Author: unknown

Comment: your blog is getting more and more boring…. zzz

Thus with a heavy heart, Simply Jean will breathe her last breath on 15th April 2008, yes, that’s the day when the last post will be published and Simply Jean will be history thereafter. To make it easier to remember, it’s also the last day that you guys should be filing your income tax. =)

So hurry now and unsubscribe Simply Jean from your RSS feed reader. The last thing you want is a dead feed.

A warm welcome to everyone who’s joined us today at School of Information Systems @ SMU, Seminar Room 2.4. Do feel free to drop by if you are around the area. Today, we have an interesting company showing us cool stuffs and we will be covering Architecture of a Web 2.0 Enterprise PHP application, Unified Communications Project as well as touching on PHP basics.

8:00pm: First, we have Vikram Rangnekar who is from Voice Route that specialises on VoIP in open source. Voice Route started off in the US in 2005 and they are curringly in USA and Singapore. There are currently about 600 customers including Verizon and Motorola and strategic partners such as Starhub. The Druid OSE is also available online where people can download and peruse.

Today, they are going to present a demonstration on how their product work.

The software interface to control the phones that are plugged in is simple to use and supports various protocol such as that from Cisco. Some of the features include a dial pattern Wizard, which is able to collect numbers and "send it off to somewhere". There is also scheduled routing which is useful for conferencing. The hardware also works with off-the-shelve hardware trunks and automatically configures the trunks when plugged in.

In addition, there are standard features that include call records - for missed, received and dialled calls, standard reporting, and a unified mailbox that connects other IM protocols as well. For call routing, there’s call forwarding and this feature called "follow me", which allows callers to "follow" the users. There’s also some blocking features that will allow you to block your ex-girlfriend from calling you (hey!).

As the control panel is web-based, users are able to log into the server to control the various aspects of the hardware. As this is open source code, it’s very active in that there’s constant changes to the software.

Coming back to the slides…

Vikram presented an evolution of the web application, which he timed from Web 10000 BC to Web 1.0 and finally to Web 2.0 - that encompassed AJAX, Comet, Flex/Flash and so on. For Druid OSE, they actually make use of a lot of the Web 2.0 stuffs and PHP as Middleware - which is used to serve the data structures. They also make use of Json/JsonRPC for making calls such as "getting a list of names" or "getting a lot of numbers" from the server.

He also touched on the online recreation of the desktop application, which generally comprises of dynamic content, providing a familiar feel and behavior and a responsive interface. The application (Druid OSE) is also data driven and hence uses structured data.

In the aspect where PHP as Middleware, there is an SOA Architecture (service oriented architecture) between UI and PHP, which call PHP methods from the UI - and these methods return Json serialised data structures. The application also makes use of pass function arguments instead of $_POST. Most people are familiar with $_POST but the team prefers to call the functions directly. 

The Druid team also has a philosophy that helps them keep their code clean - by keeping PHP code and HTML code separate. They use something called the "Dojo" which is some Javascript UI framework. By using this method, the Javascript code actually "re-renders" the PHP code within the HTML code through class calls in DIV tags that keeps the HTML code clean.

Vikram is moving into the development of Druid modules by using the internals of the auto-attendant module and unified mailbox as examples. He’s now logging into the server through PuTty. There were questions from the floor if the team actually developed the hardware. In actual fact, the hardware is actually done by another company and they are responsible for the application within the box. Vikram also showed what components that are running within the box which includes IMAP components.

Where the code is concerned, there are actually 2 aspects to the code - a community open source as well as a customer-required code core which is not available to the open source community. This is essential because these are specific needs to a customer. It is not intentional for the customized code to be closed but rather a necessity since it is their specific and separate need.

On a closing note, the Druid team is very familiar with Dojo and they’d like to thank Dodo (http://www.dojotoolkit.org), Dovecot, Jabber2, Qugga and Asterisk for their works. More information may be found at their website, http://www.voiceroute.org, on facebook Voiceroute Open Source as well as IRC at #druid on irc.freenode.net.

8:48pm: The previous session has overran a little because the interest in this was a little underestimated - for more questions, you may send your questions to Voice Route. Following up, Miccheng will be covering the topic on whether PHP is for WIMPS. Yes, are you a wimper? We are now moving from a topic on open source to closed source. 70% of PHP developers run on Windows because it provides a familiar "My company runs on Windows Servers" GUI environment. In fact, ASP and PHP can co-exist.

There is a weak link in IIS and PHP. The first option is that IIS is a multi-threaded (high concurrency) server, and we can run it there. The second option is to have it as a PHP-CGI "one request per process" module. The best solution so far is the use of FastCGI which is still essentially "one request per process". However, there is a performance improvement from 40 RPS to 1600 RPS. Latest tests with native response caching/ kernel output caching an go up to 6000 RPS (which is not verified yet?).

The recommended configuration is Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 with Fast CGI, Mod Rewrite Pro, MySQL 5 and Zend Core 2.5. There are more resources, a list of which will be available on the PHP Meet up website. There’s a demostration on http://miccheng.homeip.net:81/. (Quick, go do a DOS attack!).

However, it is still recommended for hardcore developers to make use of Linux and Apache, since PHP has better performance on native Linux and Apache without having to go through a "middle" IIS. There will be some free stuffs given out later if you fill in your feedback forms later. =)

9:08pm: Break time! We’ll be back shortly =)

9:38pm:  Welcome back to the PHP Meetup! Now we have Adrian Quek from Ablewise. Those who were there at the Facebook Garange will recognise him. They are currently setting up their workstation that runs on Ubuntu, but are currently trying to fix it properly. Miccheng is giving a brief up on what’s to come. From next month, the PHP meet up will resume on the second Wednesday of every month so that it will not clash with the Linux meet up that is just a few doors away now. They meet every 3rd Wednesday of the month. Coming up, we have Michael Lim from Comiqs, which was Techcrunch’ed. Also, we have Choon Keat from Ruby Brigade who also produced Shared Copy which was also Techcrunch’ed.

There’s now a call out to the core team, which includes Jean who is currently mute and also a call for volunteers. If you would like to sponsor, you may also contact Miccheng who will give you a shout out during the meet ups. There’s also going a planned conference this year, somewhere in October and there’s a need for volunteers. If you would like to help out, you may email Miccheng at miccheng@php.com.sg. You may also spam him.

There’s also a shout out to The Indulge Restaurant which is at the basement @ the Cathay and basically Miccheng is just killing time now.

There’s a conference planned for May for iPhone for iPhone app developers. Anyone who is interested may also email Miccheng or Bernard Leong from SG Enterprise.

Now that Adrian is done with the preparation, he’s going to give an introduction to Image processing with PHP. Originally, he’s using Ubuntu with Apache and GD Library. He’s showing a rough guide for GD2 installation, but generally most of these instructions are available on like. There will be some GD2 demos, including Captchas (anti-bots verification), and resizing, copying and cropping pictures.

The code is really small, but I believe that if you email Adrian, he’d be glad to email you the codes. However, just as you might be disappointed that you can’t get to see any demos, we guys at the floor also can’t see anything because Murphy’s Law just kicked in - anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

There are a few functions that are being used for Captcha including imagecreatetruecolor, imagecolorallocate, imagefill, imageforntheight, imagefornwidth (size range is 1 to 5), imagechar, and imagesetpixel. For image resizing, copying and cropping, the functions are imagecreatefromjpeg, imagesx, imagesy, imagedestroy and imagecopyresized.

Due to the lack of demo, there will be (expectedly?) less questions - but despite this, the short presentation was very fun and easily understood. He’s also agreed to try a Windows version in the future. It’s ok Adrian, all of us forgive you. =)

10:04pm: Lucky draw time! There’s going to be 2 copies of Windows Server 2008 and a PHP book to be given away - which is won by DK! Taiko! =( Goodnight everyone and thanks for joining us in this wonderful session. =)