Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

Windows server 2008 now available free to Uni students

I can get the product key without a problem, but I didn't bother to download it ... I don't really need a server OS :(

This must be very helpful for a computer science student, but I have only found University of Auckland, and Canterbury on the able to get it list.

The only software in the DreamSpark program I've really used so far is the Visual Web Developer. Deleted soon after the installation - simply too hard for a beginner.

Outage Notice|维护通告

The maintenance took roughly 40 minutes, and I'm glad to say that, the transition was very smooth and I did not mess any thing up(at least it looks like at the moment).

You may discard this message now,thanks.

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IE8 Beta 1

I have spent bit of time yesterday to make this blog more IE8 compatible. It was first time I checked this blog under IE8 Beta 1, not too bad, just some floating problem in CSS. Added two clear:both; and it looks as good as usual.

If you've encountered any bugs after the change, please tell me so I can "try" to fix them.

There's one weird problem, however as you can see in the picture.

It turns out that wordpress automatically convert some punctuations to UTF-8 compatible codes. For example, (') and (...) would become (’)[’] and (…)[…], which look like fullwidth form punctuations in CJK characters. We use them in Chinese, but that curly apostrophe looks just terribly ugly in English.

I was quite surprised that I didn't realise this problem before. That little apostrophe appeared fine in IE 6-7 and FX 2-3, I guess that's because they are not really up to that mysterious "the standard".

But if IE 8 keeps this "standard" in the final version, that little apostrophe would become a headache for  wordpress based UTF-8 coded blogs. Wordpress should consider at least put this somewhere in the settings that allows people to disable this converstion easily.

After consulting with Google,  I understand there are two solutions. One, if you know what you are doing, get into the /wp-includes/formatting.php file, and kill the conversions that have offended you in wptexturize function.

Or there is a plug-in called Quotmarks Replacer that solves this problem. What it does is to disable(or should I say filter) the wptexturize function altogether, so all the punctions will appear as the same as the ones you actually typed.

End of an era

Chairman and co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates is retiring today to devote more of his time in his foundation to combat poverty. Read more »

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?

8 million

That's the number of total download in yesterday's "firefox 3 download day".

Other source says that the market share of Firefox 3 reached 4% at end of the day. Quite amazing, really.

However, the firefox team still needs to keep up with the updates. I've also heard many complaints saying that it crashes regularly or incompatible to Silverlight.

Non of those happened to me, yet. What I see is a huge improvement on reducing memory leak and faster rendering speed. The only problem is, firebug plugin has yet to release a Firefox 3 compatible version.

Overall, I would highly recommend this version for people still on Firefox 2 or IE.