Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

back in time

As part of Google’s celebration of its 10^th birthday, Google has made its earliest search engine index from January 2001 available to the public. With the help of the Internet Archive, people can revisit those pages even if they are not there anymore.

Sure I believe most of my visitors like you know the Internet Archive bit already – it has archive pages right back to 1996. But I still enjoyed this 2001 search. You need to know the exact URL of the page you wanted before you can access it in Internet Archive, but this Google search does not, just type in the key words you wanted.

This enables you  to do a lot of stuffs ... like check what kind of promises auntie Helen has made back then, or things happening in Afghanistan before the 911. Quite interesting to see how the world was like - blog was pretty much a new concept, SNS has yet been created, and people's hope was still high on Duke Nukem Forever.

Apart from those, it's just fun to revive your good memories.

Life without Internet

Wonder how many people from North Island can get online now.

A problem within Vector's fibre network seems to be causing many people in North Island lost internet connectivity for about 7 hours+, started around 12:30pm today. As far as I understand, Country's second and third ISP Vodafone and Orcon are both affected, not so sure about Telecom.

The details are still quite sketchy, however, I suspect the outage is possibly due to our aging infrastructures failed to stand in the bad weather this week?

Seems to be OK now, at least for me.

This is a huge outage and I do expect some sort of explanation, report or compensations for this.

Auckland University switching to Google Apps

Auckland University's email services will be switching to Google Apps next month.

Google Apps is a service most of ordinary users never heard of, but yet it is so popular that some of small site owners just cannot live without it. It provides an integrated solution for small site owners, provide the Google services like Google Chat, Gmail and Google Canlendar to users of those sites, free of charge.

I'm not a very tech savvy person so the Google Apps saved me from all the hassles like manage emails. If somebody is more unsavvy than me, they can even build a whole simple site by using Google Sites.

Compare with old university 100mb storage  (1mb maximum attachment) email system, the Gmail service is just too generous, and it was free in the form of Gmail for quite a long time now. And even better, it is free.

There's only one down side:there will be usual google ads in it. Oh maybe two, another one being the administrators have little control on storages(I think all your emails are now stored on Gmail server）.

I thought people paid enough tuition fee to fund an email service that has no ads on it.  I didn't expect to see this kind of time and money save move on New Zelaand's largest universiy.

It's bit worrying that corporations are becoming more involved in the process of educating our future generation.  I wonder what kind of effect would have on the people who get their business degree in "Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium".

Another worrying bit for more self is that my other bit of life online is now just fell into the hands of Google, yet again. I'm already dependent on lots of google services like Gmail, Google Reader, Calender, Apps, Docs ... they are all good but you just feel you cannot put all your stuff in the hands of one giant corporation.

It may not doing the evil today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?

Tomorrow is the day!

The long expected Firefox 3, will be officially released on 17 June 2008, which is ... tomorrow night or early Wednesday in NZ.

There were several beta and RC versions available. I did not try it since I'm not that kind of guinea pig type software enthusiast. However, from other people's comments, I expect the Firefox 3 to be something worth you to download, and have a try (if you never used firefox before...)

I'm a long time Netscape - Firefox user. I enjoyed Firefox with its high flexibility - you can almost add any function you can imagine to your browser by simply install a plug-in.

Another reason is just do my small bit to prevent a monopoly. Netscape has been put down by AOl, which is a sad story. However, it's legacy, and the <blink> tag, continued in Firefox.

Of all the visitors to my Chinese and this blog, roughly 25% of them are using Firefox. It's a high percentage considering that Internet Explorer had a several year monopoly over the market.

The Firefox 3 release also got something quite special ... It will attempt to become "the most downloaded software in 24 hours" in Guinness World Record. 1.3 million people worldwide have pleaded that they will become part of this "download day".

Great idea to increase Firefox's publicity.

RSS Awareness Day

Apart from the May Day, some people suggested to make today also the "RSS Awareness Day"

If you don't know what "RSS" is and how to use it, this site does a much better explanation than I do. Have a read, I think you'll benefit from it.

It certainly benefited me. I subscribed tens of news sources and hundreds of blogs. It's just literally impossible to open each site and whether it has been updated.

Then the RSS come to rescure. Through an RSS reader, I can see all updates from all sites I subscribed in one place and only to read stuffs I'm interested in. If you subscribed an RSS document (we call it feed, which if you look up, you'll see a yellowish square icon at right hand end of your address bar) like mine, you don't even have to open my blog again - I output full text to my feed, so you can read them in your feed aggregator.

Most websites and blogs have that yellowish icon. If you click on it, you will get the RSS feed.

What I've found really surprising is that only 6% of world's internet users use RSS. I think the major barrier of introducing RSS to more people is that the whole thing is still bit too complex for some people (especially for those who type www.google.aol in their address bar), they don't understand how HTML works but they know how to visit a website. Well that's good enough for ordinary people, isn't it?

The same should apply to RSS. People don't have to know what RSS stands for, they don't have to know how it works, the only thing they need to know, is how to use it, in the simplest way, which requires quite an effort from major websites and communties and still has a long way to go.

Recommended reading

The Atlantic Monthly has published a quite good introduction of Great Firewall of China . It has discussions of why it happened, how it works, and most importantly, why most time a foreign visitor cannot feel the existance of the wall. If you would like know more on the issue, the one is the place to go.
One thing worth to mention is that just recently large amount of English sites, like English Wikipedia were unblocked in China. Most commentators regards this move as the gesture of "good faith" towards the Olympics. Surely hope so.