Getting stuck? One of this method can help you.

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Problem, like shadow, shall never go away



Let's face it, we can never get away from problems. And we should all have the experience of getting stuck, no matter how hard you try, there doesn't seems to be a progress in finding the resolution.

It's all because of the juice



The "creative juice" is what we need in resolving problem. The juice contains all the "nutrient" we need in solving the problem, these nutrients are what we consume everyday - the things we see, we learn and we listen. These information help us to find the best way to tackle the problem, thus, when we are stuck, it meant the "juices" is unable to circulate.

Cleanse yourself



One of the method which works very well for me is taking a bath, I have "solved" many problems during my bathing time. The sound of the shower, the isolation and the steam, establish a very well environment that I find idea is flowing around me. One of my lately encountering is designing the roadmap for my product. I need to strikes a balance along the product line and to satisfy needs of all kind and some of them is contradictory (e.g. a software solution vs a hardware solution). One night, when I am bathing, I realize that I can simply split the product into two but having one as the subset of the other.

Apart from bathing, dish washing and extensive walking can also help me to better circulate my "creative juices". The repetitive action enables me to get into the state that, idea can again flowing freely.

Zen is null



What I have been sharing is nothing magical, the activities are similar to meditation. Meditate enable us to get into a state that enable our "creative mind" to become dominant. I am no expert in Zen or Buddhism, but to describe this state of mind, I find it is close to the state "null" that we are familiar with. The state of meditation is not either an "empty string" nor "non existent".

It has been realized by a lot of people and nicely explained in various books. One book which I strongly recommend is Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware. It explains all the above with theoretical information.

To summarize the article, I would like to share a quote from Zen master Daisetz Suzuki

"Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking."

Happy Meditation.

Internet booming in China

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Came across an annual report about internet development in China today and notice a significant adoption of internet usage in China.

Also, internet access is no longer for people living in big city. The increment in rural area and villages has outgrown those in the bigger city (60.8 vs 35.6%). What's more, most of them are using broadband for internet access (around 90%), and surfing on the mobile phone has a significant gain as well (133%).

I think the explosion can be seen in two fold, one is the general public adoption while the other is the booming of our own internet application. We are now having all kinds of localized web application, which break down the language barrier for the user adoption.

Talking about web application, it is found that about 24% of the web site hosted in China is using PHP, which is the most popular languages among all.

The report is very informative and I am seeing that the internet user in China is now more comfortable in using this media to do things more than web browsing. The penetration of using the internet to do ecommerce might be coming soon.

The iPhone that never sleep

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Mobile Blogging from here.


I like my iPhone, the apps and games are wonderful. But I can only realize the true power after subscribing to a data plan.

See the above? I can now blog at anywhere, locate myself at any time and what's more is to get the latest information on the road.

But are we not getting connected enough? Now, other devices, such as the digital camera or portable gaming console, can also gain access to the net.

I wonder when would we feel exhausted in sending update to our friends round the clock.

Before that, I will enjoy the using of my iPhone. :)

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]


The Netbook Era

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2008 is definitely the era of netbook - low cost but under power laptop, which is good enough for day to day internet surfing and light enough to bring along.

I keep hearing a voice telling me to get one and finally, I could resist this temptation and place my hand on this.



The price of a netbook varies, some could be as costly as a low end notebook but in general, the specification for most of them is more or less the same. As a secondary machine, I prefer to spend less on it, although there are some drawback (which I will talk about it later).

The brand "Hasee" might be unfamiliar to most of you as it is a manufacturer in mainland China. The specification of the machine as follows - 80G HDD, 1G RAM, 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 10.1" LCD (LED Backlit), 130 Megapixel webcam and it all costs me US$346.

It comes with no OS and I am having Ubuntu 8.10 running on it just fine (with most of the drivers available except the webcam), the only draw back is the size of the keyboard. It's small when compared to the others (HP M1000 offers the best keyboard btw) but I couldn't complain for the $$$ I am paying.

It serves very well as a browsing machine but I found that the resolution (1024 x 600) hinders the using of IDE application since some of the menu items cannot be shown properly in this resolution.

Before MBA comes down in price (or given a refresh in hardware specification), I will settle my desire in having a small notebook with the Hasee.

Finding the right user to test your software

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Over the years of development on my product, I have been working with different batches of tester. And I have noticed some good time, as well as some bad time with some of them. I noticed a "trend" that lead to my different emotions.

I feel fruitful and respected when I work with tester who is knowledgeable. The "knowledge" I am referring to, is the understanding of the domain that the software is dealing with. One analogy I can thought of, is the necessity to recruit driver in testing out a car. You won't find someone who don't know how to drive a car for testing.

OK, I hear your voice. You say the test is biased if the user is already "contaminated".

I would agree if the test is focused on the perception on something intangible. E.g. the color should be used or where the submit button should be placed. But if the test require the knowing of the mechanism, it falls into another dimension.

What's more, if your test is composed by a league of such user, I could not imagine how diversify the feedback will be. Each of them will likely to represent the personal preference of the user and what matter worst is, these user will likely NOT to be the same group of user who gonna pay and use your product.

Developing software is an art, but spotting the right gang of people to give you feedback is even so. Now I will go back to my cave and meditate on the next features to implement.

Software I have purchased in 2007

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Some people like to buy clothes and I definitely have a desire to buy good software. Be it commercial software, or shareware, I would get myself a license as long as I find it useful.


  1. Springy
  2. BetterZip
  3. PulpMotion
  4. HTTP Scoop
  5. Connected Flow - Aperture Plugin
  6. Connected Flow - iPhoto Plugin
  7. Sticky Window
  8. PDF Studio
  9. Coda
  10. Parallels
  11. Oxygen XML Editor (include the license for SVNClient)
  12. VMWare Fusion
  13. Screen Recycler
  14. iLife 2008
  15. iWorks 2008
  16. Keynote Pro - Eclipse Pro
  17. Graphic Converter 6.0 upgrade
  18. Fission
  19. Write Room
  20. VMWare Workstation 6.0 for Linux
  21. 1Password
  22. IntelliJ 7.0
  23. Mac OS X 10.5
  24. MarsEdit 2.0 upgrade
  25. TheMacPak


The heavily used application


With OS excluded, I still have a couple of candidate.
VMWare Fusion, iWorks, Connected Flow Aperture Plugin, 1Password. This one is tough so there will be two winners - VMWare Fusion and 1Password. You can find both application running on my mbp everyday, my development work rely very much on VMWare and 1Password could help me to manage the password for the different kind of account I am having.

The worst investment


There's several of them, TheMacPak, Screen Recycler, Parallels and Oxygen XML Editor. But if I have to pick one, it will go to Parallels. I bought it even before it ships, it works OK but definitely resources hog. Besides, I am so used to VMWare that I jumped right into it when they have the mac version ready. Sometimes, I should just wait and decide.

The bang of the bucks


Springy. It's very useful, especially with the context menu integration. The good thing is, it even works with JAR files, that helps me to navigate through the java library which I need to tackle in development work.

The interesting candidate


Apart from the application above, I would also like to mention a service which I used a lot over the year. I purchase the stock photo and vector graphics which I used in presentation from iStockphoto. They used to be quite cheap ($10 for 10 credit) but have increased the price recently. Still, they offer a wide range of quality photos that could liven up the boring presentation.

Expression Engine Re-visit

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Sometimes ago, I talked about my view towards Expression Engine.

Time rolling forward until May, 2007. I am now determining on how to setup the community site for CECID, which we expect it will be


partly a blog, partly a forum with user activity, some static pages for file downloading purposes.



The challenge is, are the a single platform that serve it all?

Can my old mate help me out?


My first reaction is to consider about Wordpress, the tools I am most familiar with. It is easy to setup, quite extensible (due to the availability of plugin and templates) but it only shines in a single perspective - Blogging. It will be difficult to integrate other features, especially on how to share a single user account across the different function.

So, a no go. Next, Drupal and Joomla comes up in mind.

Time to think alternative


I have tried Drupal quite extensively before, when I was setting up this blog. I remember how tedious it is in both configuration and content publishing. I can't even spot out the route on how to do every thing. The admin panel is messy in short.

Joomla, it has the functions required and provide rooms for the administrator to configure the look and feel. Customization can be done, yet, it's not intuitive. I don't have much interest to try out again, but might consider to take a second look at it.

Can we have a second chance?


And EE pops up in mind again. Headed over to their new homepage (http://ellislab.com/) and noticed about the new look. Gone through the 4 video tutorial in illustrating the main concept of EE (especially the templating system) and I can grasp their templating idea. Like why it is done this way and the strength of the architecture.

They provided the forum module with a single user database, too. So, it matches functionality. What I have done next is to apply for a trial account, allowing me to try out their templating system, forum module and such. Their templating system is very powerful, the content aggregation and look of the website can be designed with ease, it is a very nice MVC implementation. Imagine, you can customize the layout of the homepage in HTML, but you have provided additional tag that allows logical operation in building up the page.

A powerful templating system



For instance, I can define the homepage to show the latest forum post summary on the right hand side, and only show the summary of each blog entry in reverse chronological order. I can even pass in arguments which the tag can understand, e.g. the number of entry to show, etc.

The content of the website can be defined into groups, e.g. product group, download group, etc. For each group, we can define the look and feel individually. I have spoted a nice layout from the Open Source Web Design web page, and have it applied to the "Product" section.

Administration and installation is also a breeze, you post the article, configure the server all in one place. The layout makes much more sense and you can decide to turn on or off certain features as you see fit.

There's always a but ...



With all these features, I am sold, but there's a downside. It is not a free software.

They offered 2 types of license, basically one for commercial and one is not. I checked with them and they said we can use the non-commercial license. This license, together with the forum module, cost the centre for about HK$1200. I would say it is reasonably charged.

Now, what's left are the building of the Information Architecture, and also the templates that will be used in the forum module.

For anyone of interest, head over to Expression Engine and get a copy of Core Edition, which is for non-profit and personal use. It has provided the templating engine already.