WILLIAM KHOE

The level of honesty on eBay

William Khoe — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:46:58 +0000

I continue to be surprised by what people would say to list their used item as new. I recently looked into buying a game and there was this guy who was selling one “new”. The description was a bit lacking, so naturally I emailed him to make sure that the item is indeed brand new, sealed/never opened. Here is the response I got:

“By new I mean It has never been used. I bought it when it first came out. I opened it out of excitement but nevered installed it into my computer. So the disk is untouched. thanks for checking it out.”

I think a two-year old can read into this. “Oh, I got the game! I am so psyched! Let me rip it open and stare at it!” I am curious if he could say this in real life and not considered a fraud.

Yahoo! desperate for engineers

William Khoe — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:46:49 +0000

Last Thursday, while I was heading out for lunch when I ran into a long queue of people lining up for a money machine (you get into a plastic box full of dollar bills, then they pump air while you try to grab as much $$$ as you can). Oh, they provided free lunch as well. The catch: you gotta refer someone to Yahoo! And if that person got hired, you get $6,000 bonus for engineering position. Wow, aren’t we desperate for engineers…and this is after we laid off about 1,000 people about a month ago (although no engineer was affected). Valleywag said Y! is trying to hire more engineers for the new ad platform AMP.

Long story short, I didn’t see any mention of this in any brochure I saw when I was lining up. I got into the money machine and managed to grab $217. Not bad…some people were able to get $500+

Indonesia bans YouTube and MySpace

William Khoe — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:42:26 +0000

From MetaFilter:

“As a result of the Dutch film Fitna, Indonesia has blocked several websites including MySpace and YouTube. This follows hot on the heels of a new bill which could see people face six years of jail time or a 1 billion rupiah fine for being caught sending out porn, “false news” or racial or religious slurs on the Web. The Indonesian government will start censoring the Internet next month with specialised software. Very disappointing for a country which had a reasonably free press.”

I grew up in Indonesia and although the government is one of the most corrupt in the world, and most of the populations are uneducated fanatics (aka idiots), I never thought censorship would ever come to cyberspace. Very sad indeed, I hope whoever decided this is a good thing realizes that it’s no longer the 19th century.

CG Art World Relaunched!

William Khoe — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:58:54 +0000

This is actually a week-old news, I just didn’t have a chance to blog about it. If you remember my site dedicated to the best CG art on the web, the underlying code was using Menalto Gallery (you’ll find it if you do a search on “Gallery”). This is a very popular choice for a gallery application, mainly because there seems to be no one else out there doing a better job. After a year of using it, I can tell you with some certainties that you should stay away from it. Menalto Gallery suffers from a common syndrome that affects many open-source project: it tries to do as many things as it can possibly think of, whether it makes sense or not, on top of its aging platform. Overtime, it turns into a giant slowpoke. The code looks like an unappetizing spaghetti and it is a nightmare to work with. Tons of questionable functionalities, yet it cannot do the basic ones well.

Then comes ZenPhoto. I stumbled across this gallery application by accident and I must say it is a godsend! It has exactly what I need and none of what I don’t. After playing with it for a few days, I decided to redo CG Art World using this framework. I did it in 3 days over the weekend. Not only the backend is totally solid, I also had a chance to redesign the frontend so it is up to speed to the current web standard. On top of that, I added tagging, commenting and rating systems without breaking a sweat! ZenPhoto might not have a sophisticated templating system, a support for multiple graphic library or ~~album-within-album-within-album~~ feature. But honestly, who needs that? Because of its simplicity, I was able to do what I want after a very small learning curve. Kudos to the team at ZenPhoto for thinking things through before hacking away yet another gallery framework.

I’d also like to thank them for featuring my site on their showcase page!

Yahoo! loses its musical soul

William Khoe — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:53:01 +0000

My “boss” in the product side, Ian Rogers, has left the building for a startup company Topspin Media. A huge loss for Yahoo! You will be greatly missed.

You can read more about it here.

Polar Bear getting cuddly with Husky dogs

William Khoe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:48:29 +0000

No, this is not an April’s Fool joke. It’s super cute, though! Check it out!

An important update from Yahoo! CFO: Blake Jorgensen (Maximizing Value)

William Khoe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:40:56 +0000

Penguins take flight

William Khoe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:09:15 +0000

The BBC will today screen remarkable footage of penguins flying as part of its new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution. They don’t need to huddle together anymore in the cold winter, they just fly to a warmer place! Check out the video below:

Dreamhost down again…

William Khoe — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:58:02 +0000

It’s a shame that any good popular hosting service seems to be doomed by their popularity. Dreamhost has once again disappointed me. The day after I discover my site’s newly gained popularity, the server went down for 5 hours! Argh! That’s it, I can’t take this anymore, goodbye Dreamhost, I’m looking for a replacement!

On a lighter note, check out this hosting service: http://www.nouptime.com/

CG Art World #1 at Google

William Khoe — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:59:15 +0000

I did it! After about a year of promoting and improving the site’s content, CG Art World is finally on the top of the list for the search term “CG Art” beating high-caliber CG sites such as www.cgart.com, www.3dtotal.com and www.deviantart.com! Wow! I couldn’t believe my own eyes, I didn’t even know this was possible in such short period of time. I guess the real battle is to hold the fort and defend the throne. Time to get to work!