Pragmatic Revelations » Web

Web Design Service

Adrian Hoe — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:47:20 +0000

Are you looking to create a unique website for your business? Do spend a little time to visit my company, AdaStar Informatics, website and see how we can help. We specialize in custom web design and branding-oriented content creation. We can provide services for businesses in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong. If you’re interested to learn more about our services, you can also contact me here.

Catching HTML bugs with Safari 5

Adrian Hoe — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:45:28 +0000

A bug in a seemingly harmless HTML code had been bugging me for almost 2 weeks. I was sort of yanking my hair while trying to trace the bug which messed up the HTML page. The debugging task was even harder because I work on a HTML template with an extension .THTML. The template does not only contain standard HTML but also tags which are only recognized by AWS (Ada Web Server) . This template file is parsed by the web application (I am developing), which has AWS library, before it is dispatched as raw HTML code to a browser.

In my design, I break down the HTML template into header, body and footer so that I can reuse the common codes in header and footer. That means, all the body templates are without tag. This missing tag disables the syntax-coloring feature of code editor, leading to a more laborious code reading.

Before this, I had gone through every line of html source code in the template file umpteen times. This “obscure” bug, if not removed, would throw a monkey wrench in my works. I browsed the Internet and read articles in hope that I would get some clues. So, I was reading a few articles about Extensions in Safari 5. Extensions are not really impressive to me as I do not need to add missing functionalities to my browser. Safari itself is more than enough for my daily browsing activities. Somehow, my curiosity had driven me to enable the Develop menu in Safari 5. After activating it, I noticed some debugging tools in the menu. I enabled the web inspector by selecting Show Web Inspector in the Develop menu (Figure 1) then navigated to the web page I wanted to debug. To use these debugging tools, the Develop menu must first be activated. Here is a simple guide to enabling the menu.

Figure 1

Safari 5 immediately detected two error messages as shown in Figure 2. These two errors were easily corrected. After removing these unmatched tags, my web page still did not show up properly with the intended layout.

Figure 2

Then I selected the Elements tab and it showed me the page source in debugging mode as shown in Figure 3. I instantly spotted the

tag which was supposed to be in the

tag.

Figure 3

I clicked on the little grey triangles in the left pane to expand the

tag and the

Enable Develop menu in Safari 5

Adrian Hoe — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:09:17 +0000

One of the new features for Safari 5 is the Develop mode. It allows web developers to debug HTML code on Safari. Before you can use this feature, you must enable the Develop menu first. Here’s how you can do it:

Click on Safari menu and select Preferences. In the preferences window, select the Advanced tab and then click the checkbox for Show Develop menu in menu bar.

The Develop menu will then appear in Safari menu bar. Select Show Web Inspector to inspect your HTML code. You can also activate extensions support by selecting Enable Extensions in Develop menu. Extensions let you add those missing features.

Flash of the titans

Adrian Hoe — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:22:21 +0000

Apple’s decision for not to implement Adobe’s Flash into iPhone OS has turned Adobe-Apple relationship sour. In an open letter from Steve Job, he has written clearly about Flash’s weaknesses and a firm stance against Adobe’s Flash. I absolutely agree with Steve based on my experience with Flash. I would say: “Flash is nice to look at, but is a nightmare to have it!”

A week or two before Apple published Job’s open letter, I learned about an open source Flash project called Gnash from Twit. You can listen to the podcast here.

I really don’t believe in develop-once-deploy-everywhere development concept. I am more a native application guy because I only believe in native performance without relying on third party software components to run the applications. My experience with Tweedeck served as a wonderful example.

Tweetdeck was developed using Adobe’s AIR and Flash technology and is a develop-once-deploy-everywhere kind of application. Its user interface on the Mac really sucks. It looks more like a Windows application rather than Mac’s native Cocoa application. One thing annoyed me was that I had to upgrade Adobe’s AIR whenever it became available. I feel happier for not running Tweetdeck now.

A Java application has its downsides as well. It too depends on Sun’s JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Java has never become an implementation language in my software development career. Only recently when I began to involve in web application development, I have to work with JavaScript. The experience is awful, in my experience.

It is understood why Adobe is so furious about Apple’s decision not to allow Flash on its mobile platform. The reason is obvious: Adobe loses its grip on Apple’s mobile devices and has been discounted in Apple’s mobile computing gameplay. But Apple is not an easy-to-squeeze apple, it is huge and capable.

Apple has been working on an open web standard HTML5 and Apple’s own version of Flash, Gianduia. With HTML5, Apple’s computing platform becomes even more open, unlike otherwise as Adobe claimed. Both are exciting new technologies which I would like to implement to the web application I am developing.

I will write more about HTML5 and Gianduia when I have found time to research more about these two.

The new WordPress

Adrian Hoe — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:55:04 +0000

Just finished upgrading WordPress to 2.7.1 with a totally new user interface. I still prefer the one in 2.6.x so I guess I need a little time to get use to the new UI.

The upgrade is inevitable because some of my sites were affected by Yahoo! Counter malicious malware. It is a nasty injection of script. I could not locate where it was injected and my web host wasn’t very helpful. I decided to upgrade, hopefully, to wipe out the code injection.

Now, I have to file a request to Google to clear the malware listing of my sites.

Ada Obsession

Adrian Hoe — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:25:42 +0000

Well, well, well. Kazeserver alpha RC1 has to be delayed due to some design issues and I am rewriting most part of the software so that the source can be understood easily. For the past two weeks, I was troubled by the old design but I have got a new picture now.

Isn’t Ada code easy to understand? Well, yes. But I was using a lot of Unbounded_String in records which made my code hard to read and understood. While Unbounded_String is compatible with database operation, it lacks the understandability and readability if compared to String (1 .. 10) for example.

Today, I am totally obsessed in Ada and am feeling the strongest Ada obsession after a couple of years. The feeling is still burning. If my Ada obsession keep burning, I believe I can release KazeServer for alpha testing before of June. Hopefully.

Patched a security hole in KazeServer

Adrian Hoe — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:46:52 +0000

While I was at Honda waiting for the technician to reprogram the ECU, I found a security hole in the authentication part of KazeServer. An unrecognized user id with a null password would grant access to KazeServer but without any significant usability but posed a potential risk.

I quickly identified the cause and rectified the problematic logic in the program design. One down and many to do. One of the other critical problem is that KazeServer will get over with initialization and execute even without the MySQL server is running. A serious bug though.

Another 3 more days to release Alpha RC1 and yet so many problems and unfinished parts. I feel the release will have to be postponed then.

Pre-Alpha RC1

Adrian Hoe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:46:22 +0000

I am in the midst of getting the KazeServer to roll out. During this pre-Alpha RC1 stage, works have been a little pressured especially cleaning up parts of the codes to make it neater and more efficient. A number of factors are also affecting during pre-Alpha stage.

One of them is the gnat Ada compiler issue on Ubuntu Hardy Heron or 8.04. Hardy comes with gnat-4.1 with a number of packages not added. Without these packages, I can’t build AWS-2.3. So, I have to roll out Alpha RC1 on Mac OS X until Ubuntu Intrepid or 8.10 with gnat-4.3 is released (hopefully with gnat-4.3 by October). I have another option which is I have to move to Debian Etch with gnat-4.1 but including the libaws-2.2.

libaws-2.2 is a pre-built library for AWS on Debian Etch. I am developing using gnat-4.4 and AWS-2.3 on Mac OS X. Moving to Debian Etch means I am downgrading the version of gnat and AWS and I feel a little skeptical about it. This is one thing I hate most, version inconsistency among the Linux distro.

After talking to my friends on this matter, it looks like I have few choices but to target on Mac OS X for the moment considering the tasks of installing and get the Debian Etch up and a whole lot of uncertainties in gnat-4.1 and AWS-2.2.

Entering Alpha stage

Adrian Hoe — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:35:18 +0000

Finally, after weeks of experimental development, KazeServer is entering Alpha development stage. I expect to roll out Alpha RC1, hopefully before this weekend.

KazeServer is a web-enabled membership management system that allows registered members of an organization to login to review their membership data and other membership related transactions or records. KazeServer is developed 100% with Ada and AWS (Ada Web Server). The application itself is a web server. No web server, e.g. Apache, is needed to run KazeServer. It is a totally stand-alone independent application with a built-in web server (AWS).

Looking for a web hosting provider?

Adrian Hoe — Sat, 03 May 2008 03:05:45 +0000

Alright, you need to find a web hosting company which provides web hosting services at a price ranging from $4 to $8. And you want a detailed review of their web hosting service to ensure reliable service. Look no further, visit webhostingchoice.com for a list of web hosting providers. It is easy, quick and hassle free.

At webhostingchoice.com, you have a comparison chart of pricing, fees, disk space, transfer and rating to help you choose a web host of your choice. Click on every links to checkout the web hosts’ websites to learn more about their products and services before you jump in.

This site also includes a learning center to help you through the web hosting jargon words, hosting scams, marketing gimmicks used by web hosting providers to lure and lock in customers. The site provides comprehensive advice and FAQs to guide you selecting a web host and to avoid pitfalls and tricks.

A list of useful links and resources is also included for your convenience. You may want to sign up their newsletter for monthly updates of hosting tips, offers, coupons, interviews and etc. to keep you abreast of the web hosting business and to enjoy discounts from coupons.

Take a look before you jump!

China’s proven world class competency

Adrian Hoe — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:20:55 +0000

During the snow hazard in China this February, the Chinese government had successfully managed the natural disaster and crisis with much professionalism in such a short period of time. According to an unconfirmed source, the Chinese government managed to develop a Disaster Management System in just 5 days. 75 software engineers from the Chinese military worked around the clock for 5 days to bring up a web based Disaster Management System to collect, manage, disseminate, coordinate, and to provide command and control to the military disaster relieve team during the recent snow hazard.

The system was developed using Ada, AWS (Ada Web Server) with a little of PHP and Perl. The system deploys a MySQL database running on Linux. The system is hooked up to air-borne SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) for real-time acquisition of landscaping information in snow hazard affected area to help assessing the damage of rail ways, roads, housing and forest. The Chinese army engineering company was dispatched by the system to areas in need of assistance.

I have yet to receive further details of how the system works and probably will not. Anyway, that shows the Chinese ability and responsiveness in dealing with natural disaster. Hail China!

Looking for Windows web hosting?

Adrian Hoe — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:22:21 +0000

If you Google for “Windows web hosting”, it returns 3,260,000 or more of possible websites providing Windows base web hosting services. These web hosting company offers a wide range of hosting plans and offers. To skim through all these searches for a right plan is not an easy task and usually daunting.

WebHostingChoice.com provides you a competitive list of windows hosting plans and company. The website also provides information about scam, domains, dedicated server, and a lot more in its learning center to help you understand jargons of the web hosting. You can search or browse web hosting services by features. Perfect for beginners to learn about web hosting to avoid pitfalls that could possibly hamper your website traffic and popularity. It saves you time and money. Try it out today.

If you are running a web hosting service, you can advertise your hosting service here by submitting your web hosting company details. A great way to start your web hosting business from home and let your website and web server monetize for you!

What else? You can subscribe to WebHostingChoice.com newsletter by submitting your email address to receive up-to-date web hosting business trends and information. You will never be left behind and always ahead for the latest offerings.

Free Web Polls

Adrian Hoe — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:15:31 +0000

Alright. You need to get an idea what your visitors think of an issue. You need a web poll which is easy to setup and most importantly it is free and does not take up additional disk space or database. There is a free web poll which provides myspace polls. It takes less than 2 minutes to sign up and get your poll up and running. Everything is stored and calculated on their server. Everything they offer is completely free and no pop-up advertisement or banners.

Spam emails and your privacy

Adrian Hoe — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 06:35:32 +0000

Have you been wondering why are you receiving those spam emails? Worst when you check your email with your colleagues around and suddenly a porn email pops up. It is so embarrassing. There is a convenient software to remove porn. It can delete any files using secured method is higher than government standards, making sure the files you have deleted can never be recovered.

The software, Evidence Blaster, does not only securely remove any files or folders, it also protect your privacy by clearing all your private information about you in your browsers and email clients leaving no trace of what you did on the Internet. The software helps you to safeguard your job by covering your tracks before your employer can find any from your computer.

Make a copy of your favorite website

Adrian Hoe — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 06:10:16 +0000

Have you ever come to a website and found the contents very interesting, you saved it but later after a month, you can no longer find that page again? Some websites have dynamic contents. After a certain period, the contents will be removed to conserve disk space. But, that article has something for your research paper and now it is gone!

Well, there is a website to allow you to copy web site, save it to your local hard disk. Unlike save page in web browsers, the software saves the html code, grabs the graphics, audio and video at lightning speed. Once these have been downloaded and stored on your local hard disk, you can browse off line anytime even though the original page has been removed.

This Web Site Downloader is an useful application to archive websites and/or dynamic contents for future reference. It is easy to use. Just 4 simple steps: 1. Create your project, 2. Enter the URLs, 3. Begin downloading, 4. Start browsing off line!

1 million visits

Adrian Hoe — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:35:30 +0000

Yipee! My website has surpassed 1 million visits milestone on this last day of 2007. It took almost 6 years (since February 1, 2002) to reach this mark. A good reason to celebrate.

I like to thank all visitors and fan readers from all around the world for giving the support. Thank you and I wish everybody a Happy New Year 2008. May you and your family in good health and have a prosperous new year.

How to choose a web hosting provider?

Adrian Hoe — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:12:51 +0000

There are thousands of WHP (Web Hosting Provider) with various plans. It is very difficult to make comparison of these plans and services offered by these WHP. Finding one is already a hard start. Web Hosting Choice (http://www.webhostingchoice.com) lets you source your favorite WHP. It also provides useful database query tool to search for the WHP of your choice according to your requirement or budget.

The query tool is very easy to use. Just enter your budget and requirement parameters, for example, the monthly fee you are willing to pay, the amount of hard disk space and bandwidth you expect to be provided. Then it will list all the WHPs that fit into your budget and requirement. Simple!

Whether it is for business or personal website hosting, no more wasting time, Web Hosing Choice is the right place to begin with.

Steganography and Information Security

Adrian Hoe — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:19:02 +0000

One of the major threats in this information age is the exposure of sensitive information in the Internet. The most common method of securing information is through encryption technology. Today, 128-bit technology is the commonly used encryption method in emails and documents. Recent upheaval as my ISP closing down port 25 for SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) has rung an alarm to my computing needs on the Internet. My ISP’s decision is to curb spammers who have abused direct SMTP access to email servers. The act is a foolish one as this will not stop spams but at the same time, it affects those genuine users.

A 128-bit encryption can be broken into with cluster computer. A cluster computer consists of computers, called nodes, with one or more CPU. These computers are connected to a network. A special program capable of distributing calculation tasks to all the nodes is needed. This architecture is called Beowulf. Breaking a 128-bit encryption is just a matter of time depending on the number of nodes and the number of CPUs on each node.

My ISP forces all direct SMTP connection to be routed to an unsecured proxy server. As an emergency contingency to my Internet use, I quickly setup encryption for my email client. So far, the closing of port 25 has not affected me.

As I have the need to send sensitive work information across the Net, I feel the encryption is not enough on a unsecured proxy server. I would elevate the level of information security by using steganography together with encryption.

Steganography is a technique to embed information to a digital photo or picture without altering the photo or picture at eye level. The technique uses advanced algorithm to manipulate bits of data in the digital image with the bits from the information I am going to send. To extract the information from the encrypted digital image, an original image is the key. Only my intended recipient has an original copy of the digital image.

Information Forensics

Adrian Hoe — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:19:52 +0000

What is information forensics? Information forensics is a science of investigation into systemic processes that produce information. Systemic processes utilize technology, primarily computing technology, in creating, delivering, storing, evaluating and processing of information. This process is usually complement by manual process. Information forensics investigation dwells into the aspect of creation, operation and evolution of the enterprise information.

My first exposure to information forensics was during my project seeding at UTAR. Dr. Robert Tee was a good friend of mine and he exposed me to information forensics. Although we did not dwell too much deeper into it, I did some research myself and practice it. I provide Information Security Assessment Service to my clients on demand basis.

Information forensics is also very useful for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). My current SEO effort has fully utilized my skill in information forensics investigation to optimize my blog search results on search engines. I also utilize this skill to investigate the visiting patterns of my visitors by cross-referencing their IP addresses from various sources, visiting destination, search criteria, and other interests. From this information, I can have a deeper understanding of the visiting habits of my visitors and identify their search interest. To date, I have identified some spammers and reported them.

I am amazed how information forensics investigation helps me in SEO. If you would like more information about SEO or ISAS services, please visit here.

Safari 3

Adrian Hoe — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:20:54 +0000

I updated to Safari 3 two days ago. It is included in the free 10.4.11 (Tiger) software update. Although it is still in Beta, it is already usable and it has got many features which I like.

Movable tabs – It is sometime a need to rearrange the tabs according to the tasks I am working with on the browser. When I was too tangled up with web projects and web browsing, I used to like Firefox as it allows to rearrange tabs.
Reopen all windows from last session – This is another handy features which you can reopen web pages where you left off after say, you accidentally closed the browser. Again, I don’t need Firefox anymore.

Rendering of Chinese characters on Safari is the most superb. No web browser can beat Safari. This is another great reason why I still stick with Safari.

MySQL server down

Adrian Hoe — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:15:26 +0000

I’ve recently experienced a frequent downtime of MySQL server at my WHP. It was down twice in a day yesterday and thrice in this month. Apparently, I think some processes had overloaded the server and brought it down.

I contacted the tech support of my WHP and they were able to bring the server up in less than 15 minutes. They have done a great job.

Yesterday, I wrote a message to Fathi Said, CEO of IX Web Hosting informing of the downtime I have experienced and my concerns. This morning, I received a call from Chris Bingham, the Customers Relation Manager. He offered me to move my hosting account to another server hopefully that will solve the problem while their technical support will fox out what has been overloading my current server. So, expect my sites will be down for a few hours during the moving exercise.

This is the greatest support I ever had amongst the WHP I had hosted with. I will recommend IX Web Hosting if you are looking for a web host.

Looking for a home based business?

Adrian Hoe — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:00:46 +0000

Have you noticed your neighbor and your friend’s husband do not need to go out to work? Do you ever admire them having their own home based business? Well, if you do and you don’t know how to get started, here’s a good tip for starting your first home based business.

The Internet has opened up a whole new dimension in our lives. We are able to communicate face to face looking at each other across continents, able to share information with a click of the mouse and etc. Many people has turn home based in this century to conserve earth resources like gas, time and to reduce company expenses. Many businesses also go home based to minimized operating expenditure.

Many people like to have home based business because of minimal capital involvement, flexible working hours, don’t need to meet clients, business across countries’ borders, and you are the boss! Just to name a few. The benefits of having your own Internet home based business have no limits. It is time to discover yourself the benefits of home based business.

What kind of business is good to start you off?

How about phone card affiliate program? USPrepaid.com offers you an attractive package to start you off with a website of your own domain name. Sign up is very simple:

Think of a catchy unique .COM domain name.
Sign up at USPrepaid.com.
Setup your website.
USPrepaid will provide you some training.
Market your site.

USPrepaid offers over 850 phone card brands with commissions up to 50% but mostly about 22%. Your operating expenses are the $74.95 one-time setup fee and monthly subscription fee of $19.95. There is minimum risk as you don’t have to pay a huge capital upfront. When you have made some sales, your commissions will be paid with cheque. But if you are not residing in the U.S., your commissions will be paid in the form of traveler’s cheque (in U.S. Dollar) via Fedex.

USPrepaid will provide you training for setting up your site, checking inventory, sales and profit; selecting products and setting up prices and all you need to run your Internet home based business. USPrepaid will also design your website and it will be up within 72 hours!

If you are thinking of starting up a low cost home based business with minimum risk, USPrepaid’s phone card affiliate program will be a good start for you.

Kazehakase – The Web Browser

Adrian Hoe — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:37:25 +0000

Kazehakase (風博士) is a web browser created for Unix-liked system with Gtk+2 libraries and is heavily based on Gecko rendering engine.

It supports multiple tabs, RSS and periodical auto update which is useful for monitoring come websites without AJAX.

The web browser is named after the short story Kazehakase by Japanese author Sakaguchi Ango.

Mobile Marketing

Adrian Hoe — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:24:02 +0000

Have you ever received a SMS or MMS for marketing some products or services on your mobile phone? I have received many recently. Many are not local origin.

Technologies such as Internet and mobile phone services such as MMS and 3G have opened up a whole new dimension of marketing channel to businesses and corporation. A new marketing strategy called mobile marketing is increasingly becoming the most popular marketing tools. Businesses can deliver marketing content directly to the palm of targeted consumers.

A survey has found that more brands are ready to spend larger proportion of their marketing budget on mobile campaigns in the very near future. About 71% have projected to spend more than 10% of their marketing budget in mobile marketing campaigns in the next 2 years. The survey have also indicated about 10% of consumers receiving SMS marketing have requested for more information on products and services grew from 32% in 2006 to 58% in 2007. More survey details can be found here.

How do you perform mobile marketing? First, you need to have mobile marketing software. GoLive! Concierge is a industry leader in mobile campaigns management suite. Setting up your campaigns with the software is fairly easy. You can provide services such as: subscription, ring tones and wallpapers download, SMS voting, Text-To-Win, reminders, polling, auction, chat and much more; to your targeted recipients.

GoLive! Mobile is also having an in-house design team to provide your company WAP Site Design or Mobile Website Design. You can host your content with GoLive! Mobile’s WAP Site Hosting or Mobile Website Hosting plan. If you are looking for a complete suite mobile marketing products and services, GoLive! Mobile is the right place to look into.

Database Restored

Adrian Hoe — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:07:28 +0000

I don’t exactly know for sure but all my WordPress databases were having some hiccups. When I visited all my sites, it displayed “WordPress database error: [got error 28 from storage engine]“.

That sounded like some kind of storage error. Have I run out of disk space? Nope. I am only using 200+MB of disk space out of 400GB of total disk space. A search on the web had suggested that a MySQL database problem had occurred. MySQL can become overburdened after many long hard days of fetching and editing tables and created overhead. This is like having defragmentation of hard disk space. Data stored in this defragmented space is no longer continuos.

I quickly followed the repair instruction found on Paul Stamatiou‘s blog. Unfortunately, I could not start phpMyAdmin either. It gave me some error messages. From the error messages, it look like I had run out of disk space on /tmp. I was helpless so I turned to my WSP.

Andrey, the support of my WSP, and the administrators had done a great job. They fixed my problem under 15 minutes while I was interacting with Andrey. This is, perhaps, my best experience with all the WSP so far. I hope they keep up with their good work. Two thumbs up for them.

New Look

Adrian Hoe — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:28:57 +0000

It has been a year since I used Water theme. I really like its clean page layout and particularly the blue water graphic. But I think it is enough for the theme which has served my blog for over a year now.

I came across Cutline theme, another clean page layout with 3 columns. One thing I prefer Cutline over Water is Cutline has bigger text, good with my Hyperopia (farsightedness). I know most modern web browsers allow increasing/decresing the font size. I rarely use it because I find it cumbersome and sometime does not work well with some web page layout.

I also upgraded WordPress to 2.3 and most of the plugins. Before I did the upgrading, I did not realize how big my blog was, but still not too big enough comparing to others.

I got a theme, so to speak. And I need to think of a new blog title that reflects my weblog – “The Eccentric Logic of An Eclectic Mind”. Meaning the unconventional (or unusual or odd) way of logical reasoning of a mind made up of or combining elements from a variety of sources which best describes my blog.

Website for business

Adrian Hoe — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 01:42:49 +0000

Many people are still having the wrong idea of having a website for their business. They know a website can be accessed from anywhere in the world as long as one has an Internet connection. They assume by having a website, it can generate business for them like a snap of their fingers.

Having a website involves many processes:

Web design – involve many interviews and literature study of the company history, products and services, customer care, business strategies and a lot more. This also includes choosing a suitable theme for the company.
Search engine submission – Once the website is up and online, the url has to be submitted to search engine with keywords for indexing. This is a huge job as there are thousands of search engines out there.
Online marketing – Having indexed by search engines is not enough. It is still like a sitting duck. You need to have online marketing to spread your web presence.
Lead generation – You need to attract visitors interested in your products and services to your website.

You need a complete package of small business web design. At Website Pros, they provide everything you need from making your website from scratch to online marketing and lead generation at a very affordable small fee. Website Pros offers All-In-One-Package for a small starter business. Or you can choose Signature series which offer custom designs that includes Flash graphics.

They have very creative minds in web design. Their designers are also very patient with clients who have absolutely no knowledge of how website works. Their professionalism guides you through every steps of design requirements all the way to the end. It is risk free for All-In-One-Package because there is no contract and no setup fees required. Perfect for a small starter business who knows absolutely nothing about website.

Safari vs. Firefox

Adrian Hoe — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:10:07 +0000

Last November I blogged about Firefox 2 here. I love Firefox but it is too buggy and slow in execution. Safari remains as my main choice of web browser. When inputting Chinese character, I will definitely for sure to use Safari. Its Chinese support is superb compared to Firefox. In Firefox, some of the Chinese characters cannot be displayed properly. Safari now supports inline spell checking. Although, I still use Firefox once in a while for some reasons, Safari remains my favorite web browser.

Notebook computer batteries lifecycle

Adrian Hoe — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:40:14 +0000

I have heard from many vendors giving all sort of statement on how to care for your notebook computer or cellphone batteries. I have also searched the web and found countless number of articles about batteries.

One discovery I found out recently was when I acquired a new Apple MacBook two months ago. I installed a widget called iStat Pro.

At one of the section, I noticed an information about charge cycles. Whenever, I charged my MacBook’s battery, the charge cycle will increase by one. It will increase even though if I plugin external power for 1 second.

During charging, the positive active material is oxidized, producing electrons and the negative active material is reduced, consuming electrons. Every charge cycle will oxidize and reduce the positive and negative electrodes respectively in the battery. This is the cause of the degrading of the battery health. To maximize your battery health:

Make sure your battery is fully discharged before begin charging again.
Make sure your battery is fully charged before unplugging your charger.
If you plan to use your notebook computer for a long time, make sure computer is connected to external power source even though the battery is fully charged. The charger in most modern equipment such as Apple MacBook has intelligent charger. It will stop charging when the battery is fully charged.
If you plan to use your notebook computer for extended long period of time, charge your battery to full and unplug it from your computer and work with external power source.
If you plan not to use your notebook computer for a long time (more than a day), charge your battery to full and power down. Do not put your notebook computer to sleep or hibernation. When the computer is sleeping or hibernating, it withdraw power from its battery to preserve the contents of its memory. The battery power will be drained off in a few days time.

Server-Push JPEG Stream

Adrian Hoe — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:46:24 +0000

I am working on a video server project since last week. This project is to develop a client software running on Mac OS X to control a video server and to retrieve streams of JPEG images from it. And of course, I am going to develop with Ada together with AWS (Ada Web Server).

Up to this point, I am able to connect to the video server with AWS and retrieve a stream of JPEG images from the video server. I have been able to manually extract JPEG images from the stream identified by SOI (0xFFD8) and EOI (0xFFD9). But some of the images extracted from the stream are not recognized as JPEG file while some images appeared to be corrupted. I am totally puzzled by this behavior.

Could it be the size of the stream buffer (512 bytes) causing the corruption? Could it be the output of the received stream to a disk file delay the receiving process?

Here’s a snip of my Ada code:


     ...
     Data         : Ada.Streams.Stream_Element_Array (1 .. 512);
     ...
     loop
        AWS.CLient.Read_Some (Connection, Data, Offset);
        exit when Offset < Data'First or Count > 512_000;
        Ada.Streams.Stream_IO.Write (File_Handler, Data);
        Count := Count + Integer (Offset);
     end loop;
     ...

It is quite fun spending entire day hacking the server-push stream and the JPEG images. It has been a long time since my last hacking. Welcome back to the reality!

Scarce resources on AWS with Ajax

Adrian Hoe — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 06:04:30 +0000

Although AWS comes with some demo codes, I find it insufficient to learn using AWS to develop an Ajax web application. Due to the scarce resources on using AWS with Ajax, I’ve been trying to understand the working mechanism between AWS and Ajax.

To build a knowledge base in myself about developing a web application using AWS and Ajax is challenging. To use AWS with Ajax, I need also to learn/use XML/Ada. I’ve played around with XML for a while, mainly hacking into data saved in XML format by some Mac OS X applications.

XML is Extensible Markup Language. This is a format used to organize text files into tags and associated set of values. XML/Ada is a collection of simple modules that provide manipulation of XML streams.

In an Ajax (or Reverse Ajax) capable web application, data streams are packaged and sent in XML format, for example:



   Acme Corporation
   ACME

A JavaScript will interpret and read the corresponding tags and associated values after the web page has received the package.

Reverse Ajax

Adrian Hoe — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 04:28:21 +0000

Since my new job at Singo Solutions, I’ve been reading about Ajax and Reverse Ajax. My development project requires the use of Ada, AWS and Ajax to build a web application with real-time data display and better user-browser interaction. See my earlier post about Developing web applications with AWS. Ajax was a term new to me. I had not bothered to read about Ajax and JavaScript before I joined Singo Solutions.

What is Ajax? Ajax is an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. The conjunction was injected into the acronym to spice up and to make pronunciation easier. Ajax is not a technology. It is a web programming technique to develop interactive web applications using combination of technologies such as JavaScript (JS), XML, DOM and XHTML. Ajax makes the web page to exchange a small amount of data with the server behind the scene, so that the entire web page will not have to be refreshed each time the user requests a change. With this technique, information can be displayed on web page in real-time without user’s intervention or a web page reload.

What is Reverse Ajax? Reverse Ajax is just different from Ajax, as reverse Ajax is a compounding technologies for pushing data from a server to a client. These technologies include COMET or PiggyBack and Polling, and, of course, Ajax.

Ajax keeps alive a connection between a server and a client and send data to the client. In another words, the server will contact the client when data need to be sent (without Ajax, the client will have to contact the server in order the data can be sent from the server to the client). The problem is that some web servers can’t easily contact web browsers. One thing for sure, the firewalls will get in the way.

Comet, or long-lived http or slow load technique, keeps the communication between a server and a client open. This technique actually have a client to send a request to the server and also allows the server starts replying to the request, slowly, extremely slowly but the reply actually never finish. This permits the server to keep the communications channel open to pass down additional information when the time comes. The closest comparison to this technique is server push.

Reverse Ajax makes the browser to send requests in the background to the server and receive responses/data from the server without the intervention of user.

To use both Ajax and Reverse Ajax, I need to use JS in web templates although the web application (server) is developed with Ada and AWS. I am starting a love/hate relationship with JS.

Building wget for Mac OS X

Adrian Hoe — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 02:56:41 +0000

wget is a very useful utility. It can retrieve files from the web using http or ftp protocols. Unfortunately, it does not come natively in Mac OS X. I had occassionally tried to use wget to download some html pages from some websites a few months ago but wget just wasn’t there. I was kind of lazy to download and compile the source until today, when I needed to download some 50 files from a website. I needed wget badly.

It took me not more than 5 minutes to download, build and install. I downloaded the latest and stable version 1.10.2 on Mac OS X 10.4.8.

Download the source from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/
Unpack the tarball tar xzvf wget-1.10.2.tar.gz
This creates a directory wget-1.10.2. Change the working directory to it: cd wget-1.10.2
Configure the build: ./configure
Build: make
Install: sudo make install
wget should now be in /usr/local/bin

Developing web applications with AWS

Adrian Hoe — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 07:20:16 +0000

What is AWS? AWS or Ada Web Server is a complete web application framework written completely in Ada and allows development of application with an embedded web server. The application is self-contained with an embedded server. That means, the application is also a web application that can be controlled and manipulated using any web browsers on any clients that connect to it. And more, you don’t need any web server like Apache anymore.

My current job involving developing a web application using Ada and AWS only and there will be Ajax using server push technology in AWS. I was developing some web applications using AdaCGI. One drawback about using AdaCGI is that if there is a minor format changes in the html code, the entire application needs to be re-compiled again.

I was not totally familiar with AWS before I joined the US-based company but I was familiar already working with mails using AWS with the SMTP and POP protocol. I am beginning to understand the mechanism of the http protocol in AWS and I hope to write about this with more details in near future. I am beginning to love this job already and I believe I will be busy in the mud hole mingling with Ada, AWS and Ajax.

Web presence for Shorin-ryu Seibukan Melaka

Adrian Hoe — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 06:26:02 +0000

Just 10 minutes ago, I’ve started the web presence for Shorin-ryu Seibukan Melaka dojo. Please visit http://melaka.seibukan.org.my for more information about the authentic Shorin-ryu Seibukan Karate-do in Melaka and training classes.

Firefox 2

Adrian Hoe — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:10:50 +0000

Mozilla has released the long awaited Firefox 2 web browser. Firefox 2 is a major upgrade to its popular and acclaimed free, open source web browser. I just finished downloading and installing Firefox 2 on my Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris 10 x86 machines. I noticed improvement in performance, speed and user interface compared to version 1.x.

Firefox 2 has made web browsing easier and delivered best online experience. On Mac, I use both Safari and Firefox for my browsing. Unfortunately, Safari is not really working together with WordPress. For example, I lose all the editing functions when I write my post. The editing functions panel is not displayed in Safari. In the contrary, Firefox 2 displays the editing functions panel and I am able to access these functions by clicking on the icons. Firefox 2 allows me to easily write my posts.

I have not been using any Microsoft products since I completely ditched Microsoft in 1998. The only product that I had on my Mac was IE, Microsoft’s web browser. In terms of performance, speed and security, IE really sucks. I have deleted IE on my Macs and replaced with Firefox.

Mozilla makes improvements to the user interface, security tools and options for customization, combine to deliver rich, engaging, safer and more productive web browsing experience for all.

One feature I like most in Firefox is its ability to view background image and page info. These are valuable tools for web development. Another feature I use most is displaying my browsing history in the sidebar which allows me to browse my history side-by-side with web pages.

Tabbed browsing has become a de facto standard feature in most modern web browser. Mozilla has changed the user interface of tab and allowed moving tab to any position you like so that you can arrange the pages you are browsing according to your priority. Another plus for Firefox 2 which makes web browsing more productive. Apple’s Safari does not allow moving the tab.

Another good selling point of Firefox 2 over Apple’s Safari is the built-in spell checker in input fields. Firefox 2 will underline misspelling inline and is very useful for blogging. With Firefox’s built-in spell checker, there is absolutely no necessity to install additional plugins for blogging tools such as WordPress.

Although Apple’s Safari is also a nice web browser, it still needs some patch up to be on par with Firefox 2. The only best feature in Safari is its excellent support of international character encoding. Apple has done a great job not only in Safari but in Mac OS X and applications as the whole.

So much on the features that I like most and often use. I will let you to discover Firefox 2 yourselves.

Weird formatting behavior

Adrian Hoe — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 09:13:27 +0000

In my Solaris 10 post, there was a weird formatting behavior which troubled me in last 24 hours. The “#” were not aligned in same column. For example, it looks like this:


Create two files in /etc

# echo 195.168.24.1 > /etc/defaultrouter
# echo nameserver DNS_ip_address_1 >> /etc/resolv.conf
# echo nameserver DNS_ip_address_2 >> /etc/resolv.conf

I came across Brian’s website and found his

 and  tags look great and I followed and modified his css stylesheet for my use. There was no problem before I added these tags because I used  tag for this purpose. I could not solve the problem and I emailed Brian. After a couple of emails, I was still unable to solve the problem. In his last email, he said:
…I suspect it has something to do with the css code.  Try commenting out the white-space and word-wrap commands from your pre tag style and see what happens…
The idea rang in my head and I did some experiments and found the culprit was the 
 tag. It contains “text-indent:-5px;”. I edited the  tag in the html of Solaris 10 post and the problem is resolved:


Thanks Brian, if you are reading this.



Migrated to WordPress
Adrian Hoe — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 14:59:46 +0000
I accidentally deleted my personal website directory two days ago. Since I had deleted the directory, I took this opportunity to redesign my personal web site during this festive season. I installed WordPress to my personal directory and migrated two blogs, Tech Grotto and Malacca’s Glog. The migration was successful.
I had 94 posts in Tech Grotto which made categorizing difficult. Anyhow, I managed to categorized posts from both blogs. Later in the evening, I hacked the Water theme and WordPress PHP source to modify the Water theme and moved About and Project page to the new site.



AdrianHoe.com powered by WordPress
Adrian Hoe — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:28:00 +0000
I was just wanting to try out WordPress, a blogging script that was installed on web server, to see if it was any better than Blogger. I installed WordPress to AdrianHoe.com root directory and started to mingle with it. After less than an hour of mingling, I started to love WordPress.
I did not expect to start using WordPress right away. I ended up redesigning AdrianHoe.com business website using WordPress. I find it easier to design and maintain web contents using WordPress.
Here’s the screenshot after the redesign:

I have installed WordPress Database Backup plugin and have my database backup. I will not import my existing personal blogs to WordPress until I am more convinced and comfortable with WordPress.
WordPress is more flexible, powerful and faster than Blogger for sure.



Blog almighty, a potential business resource
Adrian Hoe — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 06:27:00 +0000
When I started blogging, it was some kind of addiction to me. Now after 2 months, I start to realize blogging is a very powerful tools for marketing and to get messages across.
My karate blog, for instance, has generated many inquiries and interests. It has brought some passionate karate-kas to my training place at Bukit Beruang. It has also sent my messages and ideas across so many readers locally and across continents. My blog has initiated their thoughts and passion. I find these people are of same thinking and share similar ideology who dislike political skirmishes. These people like to seek self-betterment instead of heroic display.
My recent iBook posts, another instance, have brought forth people with the same experience via comments and mostly through my contact form. There is even a guy who has bad experience with a local Apple’s authorized reseller. The post and comment(s) may be bad for their business. On the other hand, this will alert potential buyers to be more careful when selecting vendors, forcing these company to improve their services or let die. That’s business all about.
A blog can be a massive vault of useful information for a business. Marketing, services, opportunity, and list goes on. Blog can be a new powerful business tool able to transform traditional business in many ways.
Blog is a great tool to collect public opinions before making any business decision. The responses of the public or groups are crucial. Proper strategies can be shaped by effective use of the blog and public opinions received.
I can still remember my friend, Robert, told me about young people wasting their time blogging in University. Robert is an associate professor and head of department at UTAR. I always remind myself of his comment. I agree with him to some degrees. It is the ignorance and misuse of blogging in most young people. Blog is their loyal friend. I have read about people blogging about their anger and fuss about their work and about anything that does not favor them. They have even used 4-letter word such as F*** to express their emotional feeling towards some incidents or people. I used Sh!T to express unbalanced worthiness and dislike about things. Anyway, it does not matter simply because it is just an expression to balance stress. Readers should not take these expression seriously but to understand the emotion, feeling, psychology and intention of the poster. With the understanding, one can find enormous useful information which is relating to the event or things in their post.
I was involved in a business meeting yesterday. Together with the information I obtained in the meeting and my experience in blogging, ideas have begun to spark in my mind and I shall develop new business soon.



A drawback of AdaCGI
Adrian Hoe — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 06:55:00 +0000
The AdaCGI is a nice Ada interface to CGI (Common Gateway Interface) to create an Ada application that can be invoked by HTML servers.
I am using AdaCGI to develop a mission-critical web application. However, I find that AdaCGI is unable to many things. One of the important features missing is that it can’t do redirection as in PHP:
do_redirect ( "index.php" );

I am not sure if there’s a way to do that in Ada/AdaCGI. I hope I will never need to code in PHP.



Am I Cyberchondria?
Adrian Hoe — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 05:04:00 +0000
Cyberchondria is a colloquial term for hypochondria in individuals who have researched medical conditions on the internet.
In my earlier post, Digital addiction, I mentioned about developed special skills using Internet to do some or any kind of research. I learned to use the Internet to learn about people’s diseases and medication 6 years ago when my second elder sister, Angie, was first diagnosed of stage-4 breast cancer.
I could remember that I had read about children doses for my medication on the product pamphlet. The drug is called Cough-en Linctus by Xepa-Soul Pattison. I gave a dose of 2.5ml to Dmitry early this morning at 0335. He had some good sleep after taking it. Cough-en is the most vile cough medicine ever created by man – it could knock out an elephant cold.
When I woke up this morning, I quickly searched the Internet for Cough-en and Pseudoephedrine. I learned a lot about Pseudoephedrine and I was quite shocked about its side effects.
I used to take a drug called Clarinase whenever I was down with Sinus or nose allergy. Anyone of these could make my day and Clarinase had been effective on me to reduce my symptoms.
Of course, I don’t simply take any medication. I like to learn about any medical condition before or after seeing a doctor.
I hope I will not become psychosomatic.



Melaka bloggers
Adrian Hoe — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 17:45:00 +0000
I was trying to search for bloggers from Melaka. The result was quite disappointing. Perhaps I should organize a website for Melaka bloggers.
Any supporters?



Digital addiction
Adrian Hoe — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 07:45:00 +0000
Working as a software developer for more than 15 years has cultivated my dependency on computers for sure, especially the Internet for the past 3 years after I installed broadband access at my home. I have developed special skills of doing research on Internet.
At the begining of 2006, I have used the Internet to track down a person with some (but very little) Internet existence. The result was remarkable and led me to Seibukan Malaysia.
My recent exposure to feature-rich blogger has opened up a new experience window in my digital life. I have noticed a very significant change in the way I observe people, things and events surrounding me every passing minutes.
Psychologically, I am aware of such addiction but I am not suggesting that I am addicted to blogging. My anima is aware of such changes and I personally think the psychological impact of blogging is worth noting.
We have read a lot about teenagers addicted to gaming. Some has gone way too far by committing suicide or shut themselves off from normal social activities.
Is this the first sign of computers conquering humans?
How do silicon chips make such psychological bonding with carbon life forms?
I have been putting some efforts to not depending so much of computers. I am also trying to expose my children to nature as much they can. Is this effort enough?



Blogging saves my time
Adrian Hoe — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 05:06:00 +0000
What to do after lunch? Read articles? Continue with work? Rest?
After blogging, I started to feel blogging can actually save time. Or, I would rather say it lets me make good use of my free time to write out my thoughts. Of course, one has to be careful of what he/she is blogging about.
Now, I have perfect understanding of why millions of people, of all ages and almost from all walks of life, love to blog.
Blogging also allows me to continue my diary writing which I had put aside some 28 years ago.



Argh! I’m banging my head on the keyboard
Adrian Hoe — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 07:42:00 +0000
A week has passed by since I took up a project to develop web applications with Ada. One of the major obstacle that is preventing me from moving further is the problem of making a dynamic shared library using Apple’s Xcode 2.2 with gcc/gnat 3.3.
There is no project option of making an Ada dynamic library in Xcode. So I chose BSD Dynamic Library with C and added Ada source files into the build source.
Everytime I hit the build button, it gives me “Build succeeded with 2 warnings.” The warning message says “warning: no rule to process ‘$(PROJECT_DIR)/cgi.adb’”
I am exhausted with this problem and I think I shall leave it behind for a moment before I continue with the development.
Any takers?



I ditched my blogger
Adrian Hoe — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:49:00 +0000
I developed a simple blogger for my karate weblog 2 months ago. It was a simple broken PHP script which had not much of attractive features but it served my purpose until I tried on Google’s Blogger.com.
After some testing, I decided to ditch my blogger and moved my karate weblog to blogger.com and decided to create my tech weblog.
So far so good and I am happy with it. Good bye my PHP blogger script.