Michael Jackson, King of Pop: RIP
Michael Jackson died of heart attack at 50! The creepy thing is, I was listening to his music when I heard the news. First Billie Jeans, then Thriller…
Lies, damned lies and statistics
Don’t fall for Microsoft’s latest propaganda!
Really awesome concept: Project Natal
Can’t wait for this to come
Quote of the day
It’s been a while since I blog anything. To all my loyal readers (however few you are), I apologize 
So let me start off with quote of the day from my fellow co-worker Brandon: “[Regarding corporate hierarchy] We can’t start shaving off management layers, because then the top dudes could eventually talk to guys doing the actual work…”
Hopefully with all the layoffs that’s been going on and Carol Bartz as our new chief, we can put a stop on redundancies and start launching cool products again.
The level of honesty on eBay
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
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+
UPDATE: This is of course, followed by a round of layoffs a few weeks after. How ironic.
Indonesia bans YouTube and MySpace
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!
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
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.
