When I’m at the beach, looking at the waves coming and going, it reminds me of life. Life is like catching waves. Some peopele are good at choosing which waves to catch. There’re big waves, there’re small waves and there’re fake waves. The bigger the wave, the harder you gotta paddle to catch it. The bigger the wave, the more dangerous it gets. Are you the bunch of people that enjoy floating up and down with the waves. Or do you enjoy catching the wave and sliding to the shore. Are you patient enough to wait for a big wave or you’re happy to experience a short push. Waves are never ending. How much time can you last in the water. Some people won’t even go into the water at all. Do you travel around the globe to find better waves. Are you game enough to try the extreme 10m waves. How do you catch the waves? body boarding, surf board or just on your own. Do you goto the beach for fun or work out? Did anyone teach you how to surf or you learnt it yourself. Everyone has their own style and preferences, just like our everyday life.
Monthly Archives: February 2008
Ankoder (Encoder) – free demo
Officially announcing the launch of a new service that the team at RoRCraft has been working on for the past few months – Ankoder. It took us a few months because we’ve built it via our own transcoding server API. We’ve definitely learnt alot by developing a sample application through the API. We’ve added features like progress and secure callbacks.
Ankoder is a service aimed at developers that wish to develop their own online video applications. We feel that developers is the most often neglected segment of the market. Our aim is to make is as easy to use as possible, and not having to worry about scalability and stability. The business model will be similar to Amazon’s web services which charge a small fee on a granular per use basis. We believe this is the next era in software development where some fundamental services are outsourced to 3rd parties. Software development is a very new industry and cost cutting is the only way to keep up with today’s competition. Why does software still cost so much to develop today. More on this later …
Working at Jelly
Tim has been organising casual social working at his apartment on Fridays every fortnight since last year. I’ve finally made it to one last Friday. Here’s the proof.
There were a couple of us interested in sharing an office space last year, but it didn’t happen after the office we picked was taken. Anyway, it was fun to see some friends again after working from home for a while. Working together definitely brings some synergy on many levels. I will try to organise the same concept in HK or China when I get the chance.
Hottest topic in HK this Chinese New Year – Edison/Cecilia/Gillian scandal
This was the most talked about topic since the Bus Uncle å·´å£«é˜¿å” on youtube. My mum’s friends were asking me about this at yum cha. People are discussing the size of his p*nis in the office. It’s made its way to the international media, CNN.
Sorry I don’t have any pictures for you to download, but you may find the full timeline from this blog and related links.
Apparently, the person that is releasing these photos calls himself ‘Kira’, which came from the popular Japanese Anime “Death Note”. Where Kira is a guy that has control over people death by writing the person’s name down in the notebook.
Starting up in the US has its benefits.
Yesterday, I wanted to add the new youtube video unit adsense to our site today. After a long search on their help docs to the mailing list group, I’ve come to realise “Google Video Ads is only Available for publishers located in the United States with English-language websites.”
Same goes with Amazon devpay – “Sellers of Amazon DevPay applications must be able to do business in the United States. Funds earned through the sale of Amazon DevPay applications can only be withdrawn to U.S. bank accounts.”
It is inevitable to setup a base in the US if you’re serious about selling your services to the world.
RealPlayer desperate enough to provide youtube downloading.
Realplayer must be losing alot of market share since youtube and all the flash based online video sites became available. Now they’re even using adwords to advertise themselves as a youtube video downloader. It is sad to see that they have to come down to this step. This company has been at the bottom ever since web1.0 boom. They tried open sourcing their media streaming platform, helix. They also support SMIL and SVG, but still they are beatened by Flash’s powerful actionscript and built in vector graphics.
Their business model is just the opposite to Flash. Realaudio makes money from selling players and media servers. Flash makes money from the development tools and give away free players. It is the developers that helped Flash florish. If you go and ask a developer, the chances it that they know how to make a video in flash and have no idea how to make a realaudio video. The cost of purchasing a real streaming server is just too high. The open source version is probably missing alot of commercial features. If there’s a pay-per-use realaudio solution, I might consider using it. Another interesting fact is that alot of handsets are equiped with realplayer and it is the main player for 3G mobile TV. If realaudio cannot secure its position in the mobile market, it is a stock to be sold.
Choosing the president by their website.
Interesting analysis of the candidate websites on ajaxian just by the javascript library they used. Obama and Hillary are clearly in the mainstream with high quality websites.
http://ajaxian.com/archives/super-tuesday-ajax-endorsements
Barack Obama
Barack is trying to be inclusive by weilding Prototype, Scriptaculous, and jQuery in the same page. This is a risky approach as it adds weight, and could pit the rivals against each other.
Hillary Clinton
Hillary has also gone for Prototype and is using Ben Nolan’s Behaviour library to add JavaScript unobtrusively, and is wrapping her Flash with SWFObject.
John McCain
This is a bit of a party foul. A view source on McCain’s website shows you Dreamweaver all over. There are more MM_* functions than you can swing a monkey at.
These campaign websites are of very high quality. If compared to the last HK chief executive campaign websites, I would be embarassed. This maybe partly due to the amount of investment the Americans put into their campaign, but I’d love to see this level of quality in HK websites one day.
My macbook battery dies exactly after 14month!
I have no idea how this happened. One day I put my macbook in my bag as usual and this is what happened after I took it out. I’m surprised how it even exploded somehow and conveniently dies after 14months from purchase. The battery still has about 50% capacity on its own, but the power indicator doesnt display properly, so it’s hard to tell if it’ll suddenly shut down.
Rex Chung 