On Vacation!

I’m starting my vacation tomorrow, and waiting for the latest Apple laptop annoucement. No blog for awhile.

Woohoo! My New Toy!

Just got my new toy iPhone3G before the 6GB data plan promotion is over. After the iPhone’s out, I have been so hesitated to get one even though I really wanted one. Lots of negative news kept hitting into my ear and eye, like dropped calls, system hangs, application crashes, battery life, etc. Couple days ago, at Apple’s Let’s Talk event, Steve Jobs promised to resolve those problems with 2.1 firmware upgrade and it’s just released on yesterday, Friday. Woohoo, perfect timing! I got no execuse to stop myself, plus the local carrier 6GB data plan promotion will be ended very soon by the end of this month. So, why wait, let’s do it! Today, after my Japanese class’s over, I went to a Rogers shop and got a lovely white one. Now, I’m downloading my iTune and will play around more after dinner. Woohoo!

End of the World or New Breakthrough?

If you go to Google page today, you will see the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) surrounding the Google’s logo. Google tries to remind everyone that today is the day of switching ON the LHC.

About an hour ago, it’s activated successfully. Scientists believe that LHC helps recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. In the near future, they may be able to unlock the secrets of the universe. Once the secret’s being unlocked, many things may change. Good or bad, who knows? People usually look at the bright side and tend to ignore the side effects in the long run. Well, our world is always balanced. We gain some we lose some. Personally, I do really hope some new breakthrough happen as a result of this LHC project. On the other hand, some folks believe that the LHC project may result of The End Day. The LHC highly unlikely but possibly yields a side-effect that triggers a puny black hole which swallows our earth. Can you imagine that? Let’s visualize it with a help from YouTube:

First Taste of Web 2.0 Programming

I had an impression about Web 2.0 programming was easy. So did friends in my circle. They always said “It’s just a fancy webpage coding in some DHTML and some JavaScript re-branded as ‘AJAX’ or ‘Dojo’ buzzwords.“

BIG MISTAKE!

This week, I just took a course on Web 2.0 development in IBM training center. After 3 days, I realized that my impression on Web 2.0 coding was totally wrong. It’s NOT EASY at all. To those Web 2.0 developers, we should appreciate their amount of time and efforts spent on building Web 2.0 sites for us and our customers. Never underestimate the complexities and efforts to develop a quality Web 2.0 site.

If you can allocate 3 days for Web 2.0 education, you may be interested on taking the course “Developing Ajax Applications with the WebSphere Feature Pack for Web 2.0“. It covers almost end-to-end technologies on creating a Web 2.0 web sites in IBM approach, like using Dojo toolkit for UI front-end and WebSphere Application Server for back-end. This 3-days course covers very rich Web 2.0 technology materials, like Advanced JavaScript, DOM, XMLHttpRequest, AJAX, RESTful Services, JSON, RSS, ATOM, and Dojo, etc. The only missing thing is sMash. Hope they will add the sMash and Groovy to the course in near future.

Comparing with typical JAVA desktop application development, Web 2.0 seems a bit more complicated. To develop JAVA desktop applications, you usually deal with one UI programming model like Java Swing or Eclipse SWT. However, to develop Web 2.0 applications, you have to understand and work with Ajax/Dojo event system, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), DOM manipulation, and mixed/matched HTML/JavaScript codes. The end-result could be quite spaghetti if it’s not carefully designed and written. As a software engineer, we should be more serious on Web 2.0 programming; it’s not ‘just’ another HTML page.

OMG! Localizing Internet Social Networking?

Does it make sense to you if Facebook and MySpace do not welcome users from other countries except United States? How do you feel if you want to register to Yahoo or Google but got rejected because they detect your computer’s IP address is from China? How about you can’t sign up and play SecondLife because you don’t have any referral from existing players? Come on, it’s INTERNET, WEB 2.0 social computing era! Well, it did happen.

One day I was chatting with a friend working in a neighbor group. I was wondered he has a Facebook or not. He responded not only he has one in Facebook but also one in Mixi. “Mixi? Nanikore? なにこれ？” Well, we were speaking in half English and half Japanese (my friend is Japanese but I’m not and I’ve just started learning the new language for 10 months). “Mixi? What’s that?” It’s the most popular Social Networking Services site in Japan, and has over 10 million users and an 80% share of the social networking market in Japan. Mixi is also invitation-only, you can’t self-register, you need a friend in Mixi to invite you. I was interested to join and my friend sent me an invitation email from his Mixi. I clicked on the invite URL, the registration page was displayed in all Japanese characters. I entered my name, address, a brief introduction of myself in Japanese, email address, password, etc. I clicked ‘Enter’. Oops. No good, missing my mobile phone email address. It’s a required field. Ok, I entered my Canada Telus’s one and wondered why it’s a mandatory field. I clicked ‘Enter’ again. Huh? Invalid mobile phone email address message was displayed. I checked the Mixi’s regulation and rules. In fact, Mixi requires the user’s local Japan mobile phone email address (like @docomo.co.jp) for registration and authentication purpose. In other words, people like me will not be able to join Mixi. For some people, they may even interpret as “if you don’t live in Japan you’re not welcome to Mixi“. What? I was shocked.

Localizing social networking on Internet? It sounds crazy! So, I did more readings on Internet regarding the Mixi regulations. Indeed, months ago, Mixi welcomed everyone in the World and it did not require your Japan mobile phone email for registration. Somehow starting from April 2008, the new ‘localizing’ rule was introduced and strictly executed. I believe Mixi has reasons for this new rule, like reducing numbers of spammers and stalkers. Is it the real reason? Or, is it really trying to localize the Internet social networks? I do not know. The concept of ‘localizing internet social networking‘ is new and seems ironic. To vision the potential benefits, I believe we should be open-minded and try to think outside the box.

P.S. Apparently, Japan government does not have regulations for social networking sites to acquire user’s mobile phone email address. According to the Mixi’s explanation, it was for the “safety” of the community and to keep bad people out. All new registration requires to enter a valid PC email address and a local Japanese mobile email address. Within 15 days, Mixi will send a confirmation link to both your PC email address and your Docomo mobile phone. You need to click on those links from your PC email and mobile phone in order to confirm and complete the registration. That’s the Mixi’s new way to keep their community safe.

Any thoughts?

Using Blog & Twitter for real business

Found an interesting YouTube video on “How To Use Twitter For Business“. The host talked about a fountain pen maker conducting his art design business with utilizing blog and twitter: RICHARD INK. It may not be a very strong business case scenario, but it’s at least a practical one that real people using it in their real business. Only 15 minutes video, worth to take a look.

Book Review: Professional Jakarta Struts

Last week I was trying to refresh my Struts memory, so I grabbed a book from my company’s library: “Professional Jakarta Struts” by James Goodwill and Richard Hightower. It sounded “professional” quality, so I read it, played around the samples, and disappointed.

I couldn’t believe the book had so many typos and coding errors in numerous examples of programs and configuration files listed on the book. It really led me to have a second thought about the quality of this book. Despite many editorial errors, the authors did a good job on explaining the “how-it-works” of different parts in the Struts framework with using a step-by-step approach. The book provided a rich explanation on the logical flow of ActionServlet, Preprocessor, PlugIn, and form submissions, etc. Especially the chapter of “Working with the Validator“, it addressed the mechanics and usage of Validator in a decent detail. On the other hands, the chapter about “Tiles” was weak, it’s all about presentation but no pictures no diagram no sample screenshot at all! Only lists of source codes with little descriptions were enclosed. Without pictures, it’s hard to follow and visualize the look & feel on various layout samples described in the book. And “Tiles” is one of the major features in Struts! The last five chapters were about Struts specified taglib APIs, HTML taglib, Tiles taglib, Logic taglib, Template taglib, and Bean taglib. Do not expect detail descriptions or usage examples. These chapters seemed to me only a kind of re-printing of the APIs from the Struts online documentation, and took almost 100 pages, 1/4 of the whole book. Well disappointed. Probably I will get another one from the library later.

Web 2.0 apps security

Today I attended one of the e-meeting presentations from IBM’s SWGAB Web 2.0 Series. The topic is attractive and interesting: Web 2.0 applications security. I wasn’t disappointed, and indeed, it’s a very good presentation.

The talk started with a quick introduction of Web 2.0, and then emphasized on the importance of security. It discussed many potential security problems such as ‘persistent’ and ‘non-persistent’ attacks by cross site scripting, SQL injection, cross site request forging, JavaScript hijacking, and client-side mashups, etc. It also covered the countermeasures and protection approaches for the above problems. Next, the talk introduced the concept of secure client-side mashups and the OpenAjax Hub 1.1 that supports secure cross-frame messaging. Regarding the web authentication, the presentation also covered the OpenID, the new trend of single-signed on authentication being used in some web2.0 sites. It addressed the OpenID technology as well as the concerns like phishing, usability, and trust issues.

Overall the 90 minutes talk was very rich and filled with lots of practical materials. Audiences without familiar with those security problems may be a bit tough for them to follow. If the presentation could be extended to a half day seminar with more examples and details, it will be a wonderful Web 2.0 education asset. Even though it’s only a 90 minutes short talk, I did really enjoy it. Hope the replay will get it out soon. Unfortunately, the presentation is IBM Confidential material, I cannot post it out to public. When the replay is out, I will definitely download it and re-watch it again.

Web 2.0 under 5 minutes

Accidentally found this YouTube video when I was doing Google search on something else. Hm…. I was so curious then clicked on it. Nothing fancy, very plain, but quite interesting so want to share with folks reading my blog.

卒業 - アイタス日本語学校

Today is my last day of Japanese language class at Aitas Japanese School. I have been studying Japanese language from this school for the past seven months. Really enjoyed the interesting learning from both very experienced instructors, Masa sensei and Kyoko sensei. Unfortunately, the school does not offer intermediate/advance courses for JLPT2 and above levels yet, otherwise I would love to continue my study with them. From now on, I will be on my own. I passed my JLPT4 exam last December. Hope that I will pass the JLPT3 exam at the end of this year, and then JLPT2 in the next, and so on. The following short essay is my last homework 卒業作文, I wrote it to appreciate my sensei with my very limited basic Japanese language. Enjoy.

宿題の作文課題： 「卒業　そつぎょう」

今週土曜日は　僕の最後の日本語クラスだ。　レベル七に　全部の授業を終わる。　そうだね、卒業だと思う。　アイタスで　日本語を習うときが楽しかった。

七か月に　速くなった。　僕は　雅先生に　初めて会談するのをまだ覚えた。　その時　僕は　ちょっと緊張して、　先生に日本語試験をいただいた。　親切な雅先生は「大丈夫、大丈夫、もしわかったら、書いてください…」と言った。　じゃ、　レベル四からだった。　それから、毎週の土曜日に　アイタス日本語学校へ　行く。　でも　家から学校まで　遠くて、二時間ぐらい　かかるよ。　先ず　車で　Fairview モールへ　いって 駐車する。　次ぎ　あそこの隣に　地下鉄に乗る。 DonMills駅に　乗って、　Sheppard駅で　乗り換えて、　Bloor駅で　乗り換えて、　Ｂａｙ駅で　降りる。　五分に歩いた後で　学校に着く。　大変だそう。　僕は　面白い雅先生と恭子先生に　日本語や　いろいろな日本文化を教えていただいたので、日本語を勉強することが大好きになる。　ことし　一月から　いくら　雨でも雪でも、　いつも　毎土曜日に　学校へ行ったのに、よく楽しい。　それは本当だ。　最後のクラス後で　面白い先生達に　さようならと言う。　懐かしいね。

雅先生と恭子先生と　いろいろ　どうもありがとうございました。　さようなら。

m(_ _)m