My Homepage is Gone...

on Tuesday 28 March 2006
Apparently, Yahoo! is very efficient in detecting violations of terms and contracts. Darn it. My homepage is no longer there. Oh well, there goes my favicon and tag clouds. I wonder where else could I host small files without hassle.

How to use the tags

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I've been meaning to do this ever since I started tagging. Tag? What's that? Sites like Del.icio.us and Technorati offer bookmark and blog taggings for categorisation and organisation.

See that selection box on the left with the header "Topics"? Those topics are my del.icio.us tags. Selecting any one of the topics and clicking 'Go' will change the area below, headed by "Topic Posts" to display links to the most recent posts that are tagged with the selected topic. Neat eh? It's a multi-select box too, so you can select several topics and 'Go' for pages tagged with all the selected topics. Did I do do that? Of course not. The script is from FreshTags.

Isn't tedious to tag all your previous posts? Yes, it was. But I can't help it... :P A couple a day and now I'm finally done tagging. My blog posts anyway... now for all my bookmarks... Ugh.

ajaxWrite - Word on the Web

on Friday 24 March 2006
Looking for Microsoft Office alternatives? OpenOffice too much of a hassle to download and install and update? Or just plain not as good as MS Office? I think you'd want to keep an eye on the new ajaxWrite. A new word processor that requires no money, no installation, and probably no requirements except having a JavaScript-enabled browser. It uses AJAX, a new development technique for interactive web programming. Give it a try, it definitely looks promising, especially since the word processor is just for starters.

God's Debris

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I just read a rather thought-provoking book by Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert. There's a banner on that comic page that links to a page offering the free download of God's Debris. It's apparently a really big success story.

Why is it a good read? Precisely because it's rather controversial and thought-provoking. It's like a cross between fiction and philosophy, where ideas are presented via a simple story. I find it a very interesting read and opens up my mind to several perspectives I haven't thought of. Although some of it might sound far-fetched, but for some reason, they just seem to click and sound reasonable. Go figure.

A word of warning though, DO NOT read if you're narrow-minded and easily offended by views and ideas that do not subscribe to the norm. The story is presented as a dialogue and the discussions touch upon religion, evolution, human nature, relationships, and reality. The best way to enjoy the read is to be open and neither accept nor reject the views, but to simply ponder... and argue (if anyone wants to argue the points, I'd be happy to oblige, I like to argue ^-^).

There's apparently a sequel, called the Religion War, that was hinted at near the end of God's Debris. My curiosity is definitely piqued. Unfortunately, the price at Amazon means it'll probably cost at least RM60 around here, if the government even approves of it... Oh well.

A New Homepage is Born!

on Wednesday 22 March 2006
Phew... I've dug around and decided to just set up a GeoCities account with a basic web template that I'll play around with when I have the time. Visit it here. It's not necessary to visit though. There's not much there at all. Why'd I do it? Well, so I have somewhere to host my "favicon.ico" file and a place to put my del.icio.us tag cloud. Hehe. Look at your URL bar. See that nice little icon next to my blog address? It's the third generation of it already. I just scrapped the earlier ones and just kept it simple, seeing that I only have 16 by 16 pixels to work with anyway.

Oh, and in case anyone's interested, in addition to the favicon converters/generators links I posted earlier, this logo generator is pretty helpful in producing simple word-based images with customisable size, font, and textures. Unfortunately, that page is loaded with ads and can be slow to load. Luckily, I use Mozilla Firefox with a nifty and very useful plugin called Adblock. It allows you to filter away ads from pages so the browser won't even load them at all.

Favicon Problems

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Right after the del.icio.us tag cloud problem, I found out what a favicon is from here, and here. What's a favicon? It stands for "favourites icon". See that little icon that appears next to the URL in your browser window? It's that one. It's also the icon that appears when you bookmark a page. Apparently, Microsoft created it as a means to tracking who's bookmarking whom, but modern browsers display all the time, making it moot.

The icon has to be a 16 by 16 pixels icon by the name of "favicon.ico", for full compatibility (although Firefox and some other browsers still display it if you provide .png or .gif, but not IE). I actually had fun creating it... and have been trying to find a web host to put it in, since Blogger apparently doesn't allow uploading of .ico files. Darn it. I tried a couple of supposedly free web hosts, but they're usually meant more for online storage than web hosting, or they have some usage limitations. Oh well. I thought of Geocities as well, but they do have this clause saying you can't use it for hosting images. I kinda lazy to go set up a facade page just to let me link to a .ico file... oh well. I'll get around to it (*dlim puts appends a new task to his long to-do list*)

Oh, and in case anybody's interested, here are some favicon generators: this and that.

Del.icio.us Tag Cloud

on Tuesday 21 March 2006
I'm half-way through adding tags to all my old posts. I'm just tagging along as I have the free time for. I've just added FreshTags to my template as well. It's a fun way to integrate my del.icio.us tags with my blog by providing filters and topic organisation. Granted that my blog isn't really so widely read at all and is rather pointless, I still like the organisation. I used to just prefix my post titles with a one-word description of the post. Del.icio.us gave me a really fun way of organising my stuffs (I'm a sucker for organisation), and FreshTags help with the filtering. Cool!

Oh, I digress. My main reason for this post is just to show my del.icio.us tags as a tag cloud. But, apparently, blogger blocks the script tag from being used inside a post. Which means I can't actually show my tag cloud inside a post... darn it. I suppose it helps prevent malicious scripts from being embedded inside a post. Oh well. I'll think of something.

Another DDO Review

on Tuesday 7 March 2006
Sigh. Look at this preview. Doesn't sound so optimistic for DDO. Even worse when the user comments mostly rant about the game. Sure, there are positive reviews, but I think the general conclusion is that it's not really a breakthrough. Just another MMORPG that adopts Guild Wars idea of instanced dungeons. Problem is, it's also charging a monthly subscription and has much less content and poorer graphics. Darn. Maybe I'll just wait for the Guild Wars expansion, Factions, and try it out with the prerelease invitation key a friend was kind enough to send my way.

EDIT 20060308-1757: It's funnny why review articles like this and this gives a very good rating, yet player comments are almost contradictory. Is it because the players who really like the game are too busy playing and have no time to rebute these nay-sayers? From all accounts, it's a very group-oriented game, almost exactly like PnP D&D. I wonder if all those nay-sayers are simply too used to the typical and numerous level-grinding MMOs available. But then again, the relatively small amount of content, plus the fact that some players are able to max out their level in a week or so does make the game quite repetitive. It might still be worth a try, perhaps much more so when more content have been released.

What D&D Character Are You?

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This really fun (if you're a D&D fan) quiz has been updated with more questions, options, and results! Personally, I think it's much more accurate, because the result is exactly my favourite character. The output:

I Am A: Neutral Good Half-Elf Ranger Druid

Alignment:
Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered 'normal'.

Race:
Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf. They are smaller, like their elven ancestors, but have a much shorter lifespan. They are sometimes looked down upon as half-breeds, but this is rare. They have both the curious drive of humans and the patience of elves.

Primary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Secondary Class:
Druids are a special variety of Cleric who serves the Earth, and can call upon the power in the earth to accomplish their goals. They tend to be somewhat fanatical about defending natural settings.

Deity:
Mielikki is the Neutral Good goddess of the forest and autumn. She is also known as the Lady of the Forest, and is the Patron of Rangers. Her followers are devoted to nature, and believe in the positive and outreaching elements of it. They use light armor, and a variety of weapons suitable for hunting, which they are quite skilled at. Mielikki's symbol is a unicorn head.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy of NeppyMan (e-mail)

Well... maybe I cheated a little. I got an elf initially, then I just looked at the code and tweaked it slightly so I'll get half-elf. Hehe, all I needed to do was change 2 answers to be more human and less elf. But I couldn't get rid of the druid secondary class though, druid is quite tight with rangers. The alignment, deity, and primary class was perfect though. And from the detailed scoring, I'm least likely to be a chaotic evil gnome mage bard. It used to be halfing. Time to go update my sigs in the Wizards forum. ;)

Del.icio.us

on Friday 3 March 2006
My friend was right. This Del.icio.us is really quite a useful repository of bookmarks. No wonder it's gained such popularity, and no wonder Yahoo! bought it. I can't help tagging all my links! A dozen or two down, several more dozens to go....

Oh and by the way, this post was made via email. I suppose emailing in my blog post makes it more convenient to post. Unfortunately, the post ended up only as a draft, so you'd still have to manually publish it. Auto-publishing via email would've been too risky I suppose.

The First DDO Review

on Thursday 2 March 2006
The first review of Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach (DDO) is out! And the review is excellent! I'm really really definitely getting it.

It's still not in Malaysia yet of course, at RM 189 (at the Software Boutique), it's much cheaper than World of Warcraft and Guild Wars when they came out. Still, as my friend pointed out, there's still the matter of a monthly bill. Oh well, I'm still trying to convince myself not to get it and buy the next expansion of Guild Wars (coming out next month or so) for the simple fact that there's no subscription fee involved. But... but... I'm a D&D fan, how can not play DDO? To buy... or not to buy. That, is the question. Heh.

New Look

on Wednesday 1 March 2006
Woohoo! First release of new look. Been tweaking this for quite a while, yet there are still quite a few tweaks I'll want to try out later. Aside from more hacking and tweaking of the template, still waiting for the time to check out del.icio.us, more Technorati stuffs, Google's AdSense, and Flickr.

EDIT: A bit more tweaks are in... ^-^