I don't know why, it seems that the "Search King" Google and Microsoft doesn't like Opera. I can understand why Microsoft sort of hates Opera, and you can find alot of news and rumours on the dark side between Microsoft and Opera. However it seems that there is no negative news that shows Microsoft hates Firefox. For Google, I still remember GMail does not support Opera when it first open the service to public. Now the problem no longer exists. But then, Google Reader and Opera is not living in harmony. In Opera, the elements in Google Reader are cramped up together. Firefox is working fine on it. It seems like Google and Mozilla has some sort of alliance thing between them. Maybe open-source thing will always be the most attractive/peaceful ones among others eh ?

I'm a big fan of Opera for years, but I don't hate Firefox. I still use Firefox once in a while. However, it's just a pain in the ass (alright, maybe it's not that serious) to open Firefox specially for Google Reader, while using Opera to surf other websites. I use Google Reader almost everyday to read news/feeds. For Opera fans out there, here's a fix to make Opera to work perfectly with Google Reader :

1. Download Reader.js (contributed by unknown coder)
2. Visit Google Reader main page
3. Go to Tools menu, select Quick Preferences -> Edit site preferences -> Scripting. Under the Use Javascript file, point that to the newly downloaded Reader.js
4. Refresh the page and get ready to read thousands of feeds that you subscribed ;)

Enjoy ;)

前几天在 Karen Q 的 blog 看了这部短片由吴宗宪及Sweety主持的 “宪在不准笑” 。 看着看着差些笑得从电脑椅给摔下来。。呵呵，实在是太好笑了。。搞得我都笑得快断气。。。





本想说 bt 下载这一部，不过就找不到。。。失望后就下了七八部其他的台湾综艺节目。。。算是补偿一下吧

Just blog this to keeptrack the update history on my site.

Alright, my webhosting company has moved my site to another new server. During the DNS propagation period, some people are visiting the latest content on new server and some are seeing the old content on old server, that causes some of the shout messages and also my weblog entries are messed up in new and old server. Luckily I still got the chance to do a database dump on the old server and merge with the dump on new server. The rest of the files (eg photos) can be uploaded again from local computer. So now everything is restored and should be appeared correctly in order.

ps: It would really freaks me out if I can't perform database dump on the old server because I don't have any recent backup... So regular backup of your database is really a good habit... (nah, I'm a lazy person.. who cares anyway about database backup eh ?)

Rawwwrrrrrrrr ~~~~~~~ !! This site is finally up and running again

beh tong nia... I can't believe my lame ISP really took 72hrs to update their cache for DNS records ! Last week, my webhosting company actually planned to do some RAM upgrades for the server. Then in the middle, I'm sort of confused, but I think they moved some of the accounts to another new server/datacenter in US. So new server means new IP address. That also means http://ahkuan.com is pointing to another new IP address. The changes is made effective pretty quick in the top registration database and the webhosting's DNS servers, however, the so called DNS propagation process is causing all the mess around.

Let's go in plain english... You see, every ISP cache the master DNS records and read them locally instead of looking them up on the Internet each time someone wants to view a website. Some ISP fetch a new copy once every 24 hrs. However, some ISP (like the one that I'm using) they fetch a new copy once every 72 hrs... or even longer ! So even though the domain name ahkuan.com is already mapped to a new IP address in the top level domain servers, but your ISP's DNS cache is still pointing to the old IP address ! So there will be chaos... some will be viewing the most updated content on the new server but some will still be visiting the old content on old server. Unless everybody is using pure IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx instead of ahkuan.com, you'll probably have to wait up to 72hrs until your ISP refresh their DNS records cache.

It won't be surprised if you're still having problem to resolve to the correct address even after your ISP updated the cache. The problem might be your operating system is caching its own copy of DNS records. For windows user, go to command prompt, and type the following command:


This will flushes and resets the contents of the DNS client resolver cache. Try /displaydns to display the cache content.

明天就是中秋节了（之前还以为是这星期六... 晕）！中秋节怎么可以没有月饼啊？所以我就买了两盒，意思意思一下。 我也有两年没吃过了 呵呵...



至于下面那些照片嘛，都是一时无聊乱拍的... 在国外无法吃到的朋友可以解一解馋

Subject	月饼
Location	Dining table
Date	2006.10.05
Time	Around 8pm
Equipment	Sony Ericsson K800
Picture Size	Scaled from 1536 x 2048
Extra note	Images are rotated, and saved with 85% quality

Yikes... my site has been acting strangely or totally down since the evening of 2/10/2006 until this evening At first I'm pretty nervous because I suddenly remembered that I haven't pay the bill and it's going to due... in 1 day time....

However, the sql is acting strange and keep throwing a "Too many connections" error on my face. If I didn't pay the bill, they should stop serving my site temporarily and shouldn't be this weird or stupid. After checking out with the admin, I just realized they're carrying out a server update. In fact, it's a huge update... .

The RAM has arrived at the datacentre and they have advised an upgrade window of approximately four (4) hours. The upgrade will only take a few minutes, but please allow the full window so as to allow time for any issues that may arise. We expect full services to be restored by approximately 14:30 AEST.

...

We are waiting for a response from the data centre about an upgrade due to a RAM issue on the Milkyway server, the server is currently running on a gigabyte of RAM thus using quite abit of swap causing the slow accessing times. The main services suffering are - ftp, email and sql. We appologise for the inconvinience.

So, during the update process in these few days, sometimes the site is totally down, sometimes it's up but the PHP script has sql connection problem. If I managed to get through, either everything is fine or I'll notice the site's content is old one. It's sort of a database rollback, just that the problem is it didn't rollback to the most recents one. It's like right now I'm seeing the most updated content on my site, 1 hr later I visit again it's rollback to the content that's few days back. Then I come back again, it's restored to the latest one... I can't issue a lockdown on my site because of this and also FTP is not working too...

Anyway, thank god the update has completed, and thank god again all the data is restored properly

Opps... I just forget something...




Some quick history: I was playing around with some really simple dynamic page content thing using PHP back in April 2005. I would say that's just getting to know the language. Later on, I wrote a simple authentication/control system which became the fundamental building block for my personal website. That time it was around August 2005. One month later, a simple weblog system along with some simple interface is hosted on 100webspace.com. The first blog entry was posted on September 27, 2005. Since then, I have named my site as Darren's Outpost

As time goes by, I feel the need of my own domain name and a greater control/configuration of the server. So I registered ahkuan.com, and moved to a paid web hosting company MDWebhosting.com Old site is officially closed on 29/04/2006

So now, we all know time flies. According to the statistic info in my about page, at this moment it shows:

Currently there are 152 blog entries found in 41 categories. So far, there are 97 comments exist in 26 blog entries. It will be the #143 shout message if you make a new shout right now.

I've contributed heaps of time, dedicated lots of energies, caused trillions of my brain cells to commit suicide, drank lots of coffee Coke and listened played thousands of thousands of songs to build my site. It's small, but it's my playground, a place for me to hang out and also a place for me to challenge my skills.

The image beside is a snap shot of my website at this moment. Let this be marked down in a world that time does not stop, and you're welcomed to witness the 1st anniversary of my site.



ps: This entry is forced to halt publication due to a 3 days server update. This was originally drafted on 2006.10.02 and publish on 2006.10.05

Fixed several url rewrite problem in Apache on server side. Apparently that's my mistake, I tried to do something like [0-9\w], which is invalid and will be interpreted as [0-9w]. However, it works perfectly for the new version of Apache on my local computer.

Below is a quick reference or a cheat sheet for Apache mod_rewrite from www.ilovejackdaniels.com :

The last time I played around with the themes on my operating system, manually, is when I'm still in high school, a place where the teacher pwns the classroom hmm... that time I'm still using Win98/ME or whatever. Then later on while I'm in college, a place where students pwns the classroom, I played around with LiteStep and WindowsBlinds. First encounter with LiteStep to me is "Wow, this is kick ass !", it has a shell to replace windows' one. Had a lot of fun to modify and adding new things to it. WindowsBlinds was free (I think so) that time. Now you need to pay $19.95 for it, and also, now it's a component of the Object Desktop suite.

Story ended after I upgraded to WinXP, I sticked with the original theme that came along with WindowsXP. It's been years, until now =) I'm bored with my desktop look and feel, also affected by the Windows Vista's drooling-vista-aero effect... I've made some changes created a disaster to my desktop...



If you're a poor bastard like me, who's unable to become a beta tester for Windows Vista to enjoy the Vista-Aero due to slow/old computer, or for other N reasons, you can download Brico Pack Vista Inspirat from CrystalXP.net. Install it, and you'll be able to duplicate the disastrous outcome that looks exactly(almost) like the above screenshots. It also comes with a dock thing (top center in the screenshot) that acts similar to Mac OS X Dock.

Don't understand why I said it's a disaster ? Oh well, for most time of the installation it says "Modify xxxx.exe" instead of "Extracting xxxx.exe" or "Copying xxxx.exe". It seems like it's patching the executable files. That makes me feel nervous. There's a "Uninstall" option but the "damage" is done, how clean they can undo it ? But anyway, up until now, I haven't encounter any system crash or weird acts yet.

ps: To make the above screenshot looks more like Windows Vista, I've changed the wallpaper from cute anime girls to Vista-like wallpaper which somehow focus on the leaves and grasses... Mircosoft Windows Vista is sending a message to the public - "We're environmentally friendly products !"

Some random shots when I'm in Southbank on Friday night. Those pros and gurus out there, please don't criticize the photo quality I don't have a tripod for my phone and I only have 5 secs to grab each photo...

Subject	Southbank Night View
Location	Southank
Date	2006.09.22
Time	Around 8pm
Equipment	Sony Ericsson K800
Picture Size	Scaled from 2048 x 1536

And btw, if you're looking for the Conrad Treasury Casino, it's the building that's light up with nice purple colour