Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

WordPress 2.7

I'm upgrading wordpress to the latest version today. The upgrade itself wasn't too bad but I need to work on my theme to try to make it more compatiable.

As the result of that, you may experience brief outage, errors when opening pages ... and other strange stuffs while I'm working on things, just bear with me for a day or two, and my apology in advance.

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I give up on threaded comments ... I'll work on that later, so it's all done.

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Yes I did it! The theme now supports the new threaded comments feature! I amended my original CSS a bit so if you ever come across any bug while browsing ... please tell me here, thanks.

Bear's no blog for little longer ...

Whoo! It's half way through the last week of the semister before exam and I'm already terribly out of shape. Three consecutive days of work from 5 - 10, I mean 5am to 10pm, I'm really lucky that I can still breath.

In fact I'm even luckier than I thought. At least I had the chance to go home and sleep on my bed. For some degrees I understand it's quite normal that most people simply moved their home to university, and made couches as their beds.

That's not because my laziness during the semester, I worked harder than everyone else. It's just because the final assignment really requires that amount of time to finish it.

So ... I'll try to restart this blog after the exams...

I'll be back, soon

Please read the title in Austrian accent, haha.

Well Christmas is fast approaching, but before that it's also the busiest time of the year, again. I need to take some time away from this blog to do my own stuffs, so I won't update this blog as frequently as before.

I hope to end all  works and to start thinking about Christmas no later than November 21st. I'm currently considering whether I should have my holiday in China this year. If this travel plan goes ahead, I'll definitely visit the area devastated by the Sichuan Earthquake happened in may this year, maybe volunteering some works.

If you feel that you need to read something from me(I sincerely hope no one does), you can subscribe to my daily digest. It's a collection of best and most interesting articles in my subscription list(as you may know, I monitor a large amount of blogs and news sources), and is updated daily - read others' blog is far more easier than to write my own :)

The only down side is, the content is a mix of Chinese and English articles, so if you read English only ...

Another victim...

The milk scandal in China is possibly  hitting the consumer confidence there harder than expected. Dairy products from milk to ice cream are all found to be contaminated.

The white rabbit creamy lolly has been one of the most popular lolly in China, and has been found of being contaminated by melamine.

Most people born between 70s - 90s in China, including myself, consumed the "white rabbit" at some stage of their lives. I even brought it once here in New Zealand - they are more than lollies, they are ... how should I put this, a kind of your childhood memory.

If this brand also falls in the scandal, I really don't know what food is actually safe in China - I can assure you that this is not an isolated food safety case. People deliberately add all sorts chemicals to nearly every type of food, and we've been eating those everyday.

This country needs to have a serious consideration on its economic development policy - it just CANNOT override other things like food safety - enough is enough.

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?

I need to take a break from here...

It's closing to end of this semister, busiest time of the year. I messed up quite a lot of my work and study during the year, and it's now time to catch up.

I won't invest too much time in here from today to possibly until end of this month(June).

However, I am still closely monitoring development of news such as China Earthquake, NZ elections so on ... So you can still expect to see frequent new updates in my Digest, well if you subscribed it.

Today's the Queen's Birthday holiday, but what's more important than that, it marks the start of Winter season. The weather's so cold at night and I was struggling to type up my work.

Take care of yourself - get worm clothsing and don't catch cold -  if you are a student it  definitely gonna costs you a lot  if you catch cold around this time.