Olympic, China, Microsoft

I'm originally going to blog about the amazing opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic games on last night. But I just changed my mind as my good feeling is substituted with big anger!

Today is the second day of the Olympic games, I'm just going to checkout for the official means on watching the games via Internet. After all, I found that, i-cable is the only authorized company to provide the Olympic video online in Hong Kong. Hence, I visit the site and well, fail to watch any video clips.

The site shown that, Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 is required. Currently, I'm using Mac OSX as my primary desktop and I'm already installed the official WMV codec from MS website. And the sad fact is that, clearly MS Windows is prerequisite for watching the games. But hey, Olympic is the event of anyone on the earth, it seems now, Olympic is game for Microsoft users.

Nowadays, we can watch TV and listen to radio as long as you have working TV set or radio. But on the Internet, you must pay to one vendor: MS. Sorry I believe there is something wrong, what do you think?

What happens during power outage

Just skimming through Slashdot and enjoyed an well-written article by Halfgaar.

What's make me think interesting is the following two points:

• Different components on the system response slightly different during power outage
• Another point is how aged disk will died after power failure

My /first/ Mac

Last Friday, I finally bought my /first/ Mac (yup, theoretically, it is the second as I iPhone is counted Mac also:).

Hardware design is just really and I have also very happy with the design as well as the performance so far.

By the way, usability of OS X is really excellent.

Recover the data on iPhone

Recently, I bricked my iPhone again (the third times). I've some photo which haven't yet uploaded to my album, hence I really want to find a way to recover my photos.

As I don't get any good solution, I managed to restore it and use a simple tricks to dump the iphone disk image, then, use some common data recovery tools to help the process.

To dump the image into a disk file (in your desktop), run the following in the iphone:

root@my-iphone> dd if=/dev/disk0 | ssh username@mydesktop 'dd of=iphone-dump.img'

When this is finished, you can use some tools to recover the file on the disk image.

Firefox 3.0

After months of beta and rc releases, Firefox 3.0 is ready. I've switched to 3.0 since beta 5, it is really very fast and much more responsive, especially on the Linux. You can download it from here.

The decline of Gentoo

Recently I am considering the aluminum iMac as my next workstation. After all I don't make the decision on 20" or 24" yet. The hardware design is excellent.

Hence, I have to do some studies on how well such machine is supported by Linux. And yet, I found one excellent writeup on Ubuntu wiki.

During the googling, I realized one thing: Ubuntu has a vibrant user community.

Sometimes (quite a few years) ago, Gentoo is my only OS in my box.

In my memory it have the best quality documentation and the most vibrant user communities. But this situation is changed. The notable trend is that, recently, whenever I'd like to search for some hardware / kernel related info, the page is hosted ubuntu wiki.

ProgrammableWeb: Directory for public web (web2.0) service API

ProgrammableWeb is an index for publicly available web API and mashup.

This is really a nice website, when you need to quick reference for all those API.

By the way, I find that, a kind of "scheduler" web service is lacking. Does it existed already?

Google App Engine

Google had released the Google App Engine on April. This service will be an perfect choice for SME, Open Source community, and individuals who doesn't want to maintain its own server environment / infrastructure.

It is a complete app hosting service /plus/ Python-based API. Currently, it provide a persistence API, url fetch API, and it support the django framework.

As a Python fan, I'd definitely try it out, though, I'm now on the waiting list only:(

Marriage of Web 2.0 and next generation mobile device

While web 2.0 application is a norm and more app / website has released iPhone specific or optimized version, this lead to a question in my mind: What's next?

Back to days when J2ME and smart phone hit the ground, I still don't buy any of these platform as they screen are so small and the UI is still very less convenient. Now with iPhone and Android coming next, I'm really expecting to see some new innovative app released.

Oracle 11g on Gentoo Part 2. dbstart, dbshut and emctl

On Gentoo Wiki, there is a page dedicated for Oracle on Gentoo. You should found a set of rc script to start / stop Oracle instance, Listener, the EM DB console and isqlplus. For 11g, however, those scripts need some adjustment. This post will shows you how.

1. 11g no longer provide isqlplus, hence the script should not start/stop isqlplus.
2. Secondly, dbstart and dbshut will manage the start and stop of listener, hence, the rc script should not deal with the listener directly (let dbstart do it).
3. For dbstart/dbshut in 11g, you need to supply ORACLE_HOME as the 1st argument, just like the following shows:

    oracle> dbstart /u01/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1
   

4. For emctl, you should pass ORACLE_SID to emctl via environment variable, just like:

    oracle> ORACLE_SID=mydb emctl start dbconsole
   

Finally, you can use my init script for 11g. The files can be downloaded from here.

To use the script,

 root> tar -C / -zxf oracle-11g-gentoo-rc-scripts.tgz
 root> chmod +x /etc/init.d/oracle
 root> vim /etc/conf.d/oracle # edit the ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID