ADC on Trafik

ADC just covered an interesting French Developer: Apple - Pro - Profiles - Trafik - Art of Code.

google-diff-match-patch

Found an interesting Google code on text diffing, matching and patching: google-diff-match-patch

The Diff Match and Patch libraries offer robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text.

The python code is real useful for us! Thanks Google.

WBox HTTP testing tool

WBox is a ping-like utility to test HTTP.

Looks pretty interesting. Codes are short.

HKPL Checkouts 1.0

Direct download link: HKPL Widget 1.01

Hi, this is my first ever widget that was built using Dashcode. HKPL Checkouts is a simple library records widget, that keeps you informed about your library records.

I made this widget because I forgot to renew a book for almost 2 months, fined for almost $100 HKD! So I have vowed to myself that I will make a widget to make the world a better place...

So here it is. This widget is actually powered by a simple python program, that logins to HKPL website on your behalf, grabs the library records and parse the information in a nicely layout table.

I will make a version 1.01 sometimes which add 'book search' feature. So stay tuned! If you find any bugs or have any suggestions, feel free to leave a message here. Thanks!

[edit 2:54am] 1.01 Bug fix is out: Thank you to the support from our friends at Mac.hk. thmalex and Dennis found an off-by-one error... a CS 101 mistake, very embarrassing. My girlfriend's and my own library accounts have maxed out all the slots, so I can't verify if I have squashed the bug just yet.

New York Magazine - The Profit Calculator

Interesting breakdown of different profit models of NY businesses, from being a drug dealer to H&M.


New York Magazine - The Profit Calculator

Folk Guy

Things to look out for when building a large application, by Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us

I always keep referring to this little txt document everyday:

Learn Apache - tuning can make things a lot faster. Understand headers,
mod_rewrite (a dark art). Put a proxy in front of Apache e.g. Perlbal from
LiveJournal - one guy on a modem can suck up lots of resources otherwise.

Images off a different server, RSS from a different server.

"Save site for offline use" feature in IE is particularly nasty.

The easier the API to get in and out of, the more people will use it. There's
a long tail of smart developers. Stuff like SOAP discourages adoption. No API
key = people can play with it faster; drives attention.

More....

Google Maps with Streetview

Wow, that is real cool.

Apple Store SF Streeview on Google Map!

LINA - cross platform linux library for Macs and windows

LINA looks pretty damn cool. If I can link all my binaries in Xcode and get them deployed to Linux and windows, it would be even better.

Very Funny Ads

This keeps me laughing for hours: Very Funny Ads.

Tony Blair: I did what I thought was right

Tony Blair: "I did what I thought was right".

Also see part 1

Pulsely Locate for Mac v0.1

We just release Pulsely Locate for Mac. Pulsely Locate is an online service for you to post your current location, so your friends and sweetheart(s) can see where you are.

We are building a native application instead of just a webapp. The reason is we have to interface nicely with the popular bluetooth GPS devices, so instead of asking people to run Firefox, _and then_ download a pesky Firefox plugin, we opt to just build native applications.

Pulsely Locate will support 4 native platforms eventually:

• Mac (checked!)


• J2ME version for cellphones (coming out by May 1st, 2007)


• Linux (coming out by May 2nd, 2007)


• Windows (coming out by June 1st, 2007)

We roll out Mac version first simply because we are more proficient in writing Cocoa applications. We are already building Windows and Linux versions, but making bluetooth devices talk nicely under them would be more difficult.

Anyway, we will open source all the client applications asap (very likely to be GPL). We are studying which SVN repos should we use, from Google Code, Sourceforge to Berlios, but we are very anxious to open source it asap so stay tuned. But if you want to see the source code for now, just send us an email and we'll email the source codes to you right away!

Desktop Tower Defense

Wasted 15 minutes playing this Desktop Tower Defense game. It's real hard to beat!

SouthWest 786 OAK-MDW Landing on 6-16-2004

SouthWest 786 OAK-MDW Takeoff on 6-16-2004

Video: water pipe burst in Berkeley

We drive down Bancroft, making a left down Shattuck, and found a water pipe burst in Shattuck! What a day.

This movie was shot on 11/8/2005.

My cat

"Papers" on Mac OS X

See this "Paper" for Mac OS X, that let you organize and read PDFs. It looks pretty useful and I am very tempted to try it.


Basically, there are two kinds of approach to organize a large collection of files:
1. file system approach. It works for everybody by copying the metaphor of a tree structure. This approach is good if you browse more than you do search.
2. List structure, a.k.a the iTunes approach. This is great, if you search more than browse.



I like iTunes, and its search feature is a godsend>. If I want to listen to Beethoven, I just need to type "Beethoven" and all his 1 to 9 symphonies are all there. I would not want to go to the file system to drag beethoven music into Winamp.

Obviously, Paper is looking to do an iTunes approach. The pre-release app looks beautiful, but it runs very slow after importing 50 PDFs. Probably memory alloc/retains bugs? Yea I am sure they will fix it in a few weeks, but...

... I am still stuck in the "file system" approach, as I tend to put PDF books of different publisher in the same folder. And Spotlight serves me well for now? Everybody has resistance switching to something new afterall.

Gapminder at Google

TED 2007 has Hans Rosling's passionate speech about opening useful data to everyone.

Now you can see the animated stats interface on Google.

References:

1. Gapminder World 2007, at Google

Jeff Hawkin's Numenta opens its "Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing"

Just woke up and read Slashdot that Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Sim Platform is now available.

I did read Jeff's On Intelligence book about his idea of HTM, though I forget pretty much everything by now :-). But I am pretty excited about this, especially the 3 components have python bindings.

Go check it out.

References

1. Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) downloads


2. Introduction to Numenta's Research Release from Jeff Hawkins


3. Numenta Blog

MacFUSE, now works with sshfs

MacFUSE has been out since MacWorld.

I just got it installed onto a Powerbook from SVN. I used to be a great fan at running sshfs on Debian as my primary development machine. Now I don't think there's a reason to run desktop Linux at all! There is nothing to hold me back running everything on Mac OS X.

Thank you very much Amit Singh, the "Network is the computerMacintosh", because of you.

iPhone IS open enough

Slashdot has this slightly anti-iPhone post: No Third-party Apps on iPhone Says Jobs on January 12. And not surprisingly, most people there condemn Apple as not open enough, therefore won't buy it when it comes out.

I stand by my comment:
For me I don't really care about third party apps, as long as Safari works as advertise.

Safari with AJAX powered webpages can create a very compelling solution. Forget about "Network is computer" crap from Sun.... Apple finally got this working now, albeit 6 years late.

I'm sure a whole new generation of "web 2.0 companies" will be geared to make "iPhone screensize compatible" webpages, and that would be fun!

Steve Jobs is making "information truly available at finger tips now". And I cannot wait to have Pulsely to support iPhone! O yea, I thought Opera for Mobile is ubercool. Forget about it...

Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot

I am sure you know that a few Asian countries were hit hard with fiber lines malfunctioned after the Taiwan earthquake. Here are my my comment on Slashdot on how I got through that few days:

Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot

I live in Hong Kong, and indeed it was a huge disaster. I run an online flower shop myself, so we see our daily traffic went flat for the last couple of days. And I can't even ssh into our colo in USA.

Recape of the situation: 6 underground fiber lines were cut. "Foreign" sites like Slashdot, Google, EBay and Yahoo! were dead. Hong Kong based sites, Australia sites and a few European sites like BBC does work, so that give us hope. So...

On day 1 ( 12/28 ): we found out Google Hong Kong still works, and Australia sites work... so we search "australia proxy server" and funny that a few ISPs have open proxies open at 3128 (Looks like Squid Cache to me!). Since we must be an early batch, we feel wonderful to be "the only one" in town to go online, beat the odds and get all the pussies...

One day 2 (12/29): news of the proxies must have gotten out. Yahoo! Answers are full of such foreign proxies lists, and some entrepreneur hackers must have wonderful day, building their own proxies and lured people into using it. Of course your average surfers wouldn't know normal http is unencrypted... Meanwhile our "free proxy" running by that friendly Australia ISP finally adds ACL to block us out... We try installing Google Web Accelerator, and it did no good, and accessing local sites are even slower...

On day 3 (12/30): we start looking for Australia colocation / dedicated server plans to run our own proxy server. Their prices are at least 2 times more expensive than US hosting companies, so we start pinging popular hosting in USA.... ev1servers.net? down. Rackspace? up (but too pricey). Godaddy? up, and lo and behold, they have a cheap $29.99 USD virtual linux plan.

So, we setup our own Squid cache [squid-cache.org] and it finally keeps us reading Slashdot until this day

:)

I'm MaliciousKitty. Welcome.

Hi, welcome to my blog. My nickname is 'maliciouskitty' and I will keep my real name a little mystery until a little while later.

I am currently working in my startup, called Pulsely. Obviously as any veteran entrepreneur will know, everyday is exciting and difficult, so the focus of this blog will be primarily focused on a few things:

• Pulsely - the startup and my passion every single day
• Technologies: WebObjects, Python, Django, Mac and AJAX related stuff
• Businesses: Building a successful Startup
  
• Places: Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and China

Yes I am pretty late to writing blogs, as I was too busy with work. Right now my Alexa ranking is 3,593,978. I am sure that it will go up soon.

Anyway I hope you will find my blogs interesting. If you would like to contact me, please email me at maliciouskitty@pulsely.com.