Technology

Authentic Asian helps non-Asians better understand Asian culture

Wuhan is the greatest WordPress theme ever. Wuhan is the theme I use for this website. While changing a few minor bits here and there, I’ve noticed a README file in the theme directory. Here is what it said:

I don’t have a wishlist. I don’t need donations. If you enjoy this, please consider putting a link to
my website on your blog. It’ll be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!

Meng

P.S: To make it even easier for you, here’s the code:

<a href=”http://www.authenticasian.com”>Authentic Asian</a>

=)

*******************************************************************
Theme Name: Wuhan
Theme URI: http://wuhan.authenticasian.com/
Description: Inspired by Macromedia website. Built based on Kubrick.
Version: 0.4
Author: Meng Gao
Author URI: http://wuhan.authenticasian.com/

The CSS, XHTML and design is released under GPL:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php
*******************************************************************

Of course I could not NOT link to the site. While at it I decided to check it out and see what this guy was all about. I expected nothing more than just another blog with a bunch of posts about everything and anything and mostly computers and WordPress. But what I found was totally different. I found something I was looking for for some time now – a high quality blog about Asian (Chinese mostly) culture. Here is an excerpt from the About page:

Asian culture is becoming increasingly prevalent in America and Europe in the recent years. Yet people who use chopsticks, practice kungfu or eat sushi do not necessarily understand Asian culture better than an average American. To this end, I hope to start a website that will help non-Asians better understand Asian culture.

I recognize that there are many ways in which Asian culture can be explained and demonstrated. After much contemplation, I decided to start off with something specific: tattoo or t-shirt designs featuring Asian art or calligraphy.

…

Apart from that, I also plan on writing articles to showcase certain Asian cultural products, such as martial arts, musical instruments or Asian cuisine.

Everyone knows how much I love Chinese culture, so it is almost needless to say that not only did I link to it from this post, but I also subscribed to the RSS feed.

KDevelop vs. Microsoft Visual Studio .Net

This article at NewsForge.net compares KDevelop and Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. It suggests that KDevelop is an often better option, even though it still has a few sharp edges waiting to be rounded. This review is mainly based on functionality needed for C and C++ programming.

I myself don’t use neither KDevelop, nor Microsoft Visual Studio .NET thus I can’t really say if the article holds any water. But more publicity can’t hurt KDE project, so I decided to link to it. Let me know what you think about the review. Even though I use Vim practically for all my programming, I am still interested in other IDEs and editors.

On organizing photos

I am looking for a better way to organize my photos. I have a whole lot of them and a lot more are coming.

Currently, I have a somewhat good organization but it is not very convenient to use. I have all pictures in the photos folder. Most of them are sorted into albums by date and name (/photos/year/year-month-day_album-name/). Others are organized into projects. Actually, I’ve had only one project so far – “Picture of the day“. I am using it to store single pictures and pictures which don’t belong to any particular album (/photos/Projects/POTD/year/month/day/). I have also created a Photoblog, which basically shows one picture at a time using the reversed date sort of my “Picture of the day” images.

Locating albums is fast and easy, but they are not adding up at the speed of singled out images. Single images need easier navigation. I’d go even as far as searching. Thus they need tagging or some similar mechanism. I also need a better photoblog with previous/next/today navigation, comments, and RSS feed. I also want to be able to use my images in posts for this blog once in a while. Ideally, I would also want a way for offline browsing of these pictures. In any way, I don’t want to store images in the database – they are just fine on my hard disk.

There is also something else. For some time now I am postprocessing all pictures that I publish. I want the original image to be stored somewhere handy. It shouldn’t be visible from the web, but it should be trivial to find if I need it.

From what I want, it seems that I need some database usage at least. Even if just to store the tags/keyword and comments. If I’d go in this direction, I want it integrated with my blog as much as possible. I want the same user and SPAM control.

I have been looking at different plugins for WordPress, as well as integration of some 3rd party tools. So far I didn’t manage to try any of them.

Do any of you have any suggestions based on my needs? I’d really appreciate it.

Update: Tried Gallery. Doesn’t work for due to the way it integrates to WordPress and impossibility of using EXIF comments as image titles during the import of albums. Other than that, seems to be a good piece of software.

Update: Tried Coppermine and didn’t like it for the above reasons.

MEditerranean Area Network Operators Group

I’ve got this message from Paolo Lucente (reprinting with his permission) via my contact form:

I’m Paolo Lucente and i write from Italy. I’ve found your email address on the Linux Counter website.

I wish to signal you a new project that is actually starting up: MEANOG, the Mediterranean Network Operators Group. It aims to be the venue of a regional forum to exchange ideas and discuss both designing and operational issues in building and running IP networks, therefore covering topics that revolve around network operations and network technology deployment. It also aims to be a new and informal channel to present technologies, products and novel approaches of interest to data operators in the Mediterranean area.

If it could of interest for you or you know anyone might be interested in it, please give a look to (or signal) the project homepage: http://www.meanog.org

The project is very young and the homepage is really poor in terms of contents; any further idea, comment, critics or advice is warmly welcome.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation

Cheers,
Paolo

I myself am not so interested in networks, but since some of you are, I thought I’d post it here. Check it out – maybe you can be of some assistance.

IBM presentation

I just came back from a two hour presentation by IBM that they gave in our office. They were mostly talking about their OpenPower servers, TotalStorage storage and backup solutions, and, of course, about their BladeCenter.

Overall, the presentation was slightly boring and a bit too long. I learned little except for the names of product lines. I was also repeatedly told that IBM is getting ~~cheaper~~ more affordable and more open.

I was also surprised as to how often the word “Linux” came up. I mean it was used almost as often as “IBM”. Every ,and I mean every, slide of the presentation had the word “Linux” written at least once. They even had a picture of tux on a couple of pages. And they mentioned a few times that IBM currently works with Red Hat and SUSE.

The funny thing is that almost every time one of the presenters used the word “Linux”, someone from our guys was turning around and looking at me. I was the biggest Linux and Open Source Software advocate present there. Some people can still remember similar presentations from a few years ago when I would ask about Linux support and presenters would just nod their heads negatively. There has been surely an improvement. Those who don’t support Linux, don’t even come to our office anymore.

The resume of the presentation is still the same as it always was though – a nice fairy tale that you have to sell your organs to live in. You don’t need organs in the fairy tale anyway. The sales people were trying to convince that the situation with expensiveness changed dramatically, but watching how comfortably they were operating with tens of thousands of dollars, I tend to think otherwise.