skywalker's blog

Tired. Fatigued. Exhausted.

Very tired.

Extra-fatigued. Extremely exhausted.

Madness. Craziness. Insanity.

(It's been non-stop work since ~end-Oct, even went to school on Saturday AND Sunday for the third consecutive week. The pressure's insane. Though not till breaking point. Yet.)

 When Thursday night comes, I'm gonna take a few days rest to clear my mind. And do the things I like. =) A mini-break before the upcoming exams.

To all who happen to stumble on my blog,

-- edited; done already -- 

Please help me fill in this survey. It's on intellectual property
rights, P2P and piracy. (26 questions total; won't take more than ten
minutes.)

Note: There is a bit of Singapore focus here and this is a group project.

Thanks!

Edit: The survey is done and there were 218 respondents. Many thanks to all!

Anyone knows how to create web presentations using Javascript easily without writing chunks of code? Dreamweaver?

 A good example is one of Brendan Eich's presentations.
 

I happened to bump into Air Mozilla, a free Mozilla TV channel the other day and something just stirred me. They mentioned that they were hiring, and that half of their employees are all around the world, with the other half situated at Mozilla HQ, at Mountain View, California.

What is Mozilla? Yes, it's something that grew out of Netscape when it was open sourced just before the turn of the century. And the browser that is used by around one in five around the world, Firefox, is their main product. And this is a testament that open source can stand up to the might of Redmond, eating away at the market share of Internet Explorer at the rate of a few % per month (may vary). The work of hundreds, or even thousands of engineers, contributors, college people, professors etc. culminates in this wonderful product. Yes, no software can truly be without bugs, as Mitchell Baker, head of Mozilla Corp once said. But the focus is on creating something small yet lightweight and powerful enough to be customized to anyone's liking.

Now the thing is... Mozilla will hire anyone with the passion, skills or the community spirit (of course not just anyone, they still have to go through selection process) if they have not contributed before. But if they are regular contributors already for a period of time, then there is just the administrative work, and the occasion meeting at odd hours if you happen to live on the other side of the world.

The opportunity is there. It is definitely there. It is how willing we are to abandon our thinking of the traditional workplace, throw away conventional thinking about timezones and start working on some project with some other just-as-passionate people millions of kilometres halfway around the globe. All it takes is a few years of dedication. This is the new way of working in the IT industry.

I now write this in the hope that I can fulfill my dreams, something within me that was ignited the moment Thunderbird was born. That would be the first half of 2003, or rather 4.5 years ago. Whether I can fulfill that dream still remains a possibility, but steps have been taken to inch closer to that dream. The mental preparedness to attend meetings in the middle of the night here in GMT+8 is there already.

*writes this after watching Air Mozilla Live at 5AM local time. Still remembers when Asa was too caught up with IRC that he didn't really pay attention to Dan. And Mitchell's "flippant" description still lingers. And oh, the last question really was quite stunning. For all those who were there, this is nth10sd signing off. And this post will be cross-posted to all my blogs, including my course blog. This is a good example of how the people, listed below, can get together from places from all around the world and work and collaborate on a technology product together. No matter whether you are in Amsterdam or Singapore or Mountain View. :)

cheers go out to (in no particular order) Amsterdammer, Asa, sethb, davida, tomcat, marcia, sp3000, mcsmurf, reed, and any others whom I may have inadvertently missed out.

-----------
reed: "your answer is in the FAQ."
nth10sd: "Whoops. OK."

That's right, after getting Adobe CS3 I have started using Dreamweaver on the Mac instead of Nvu, which can be quite a pain due in part to its unmaintained codebase and lack of a universal binary.

Thus, you may be seeing different code being posted from Sep 07 onwards, but validation still passes, and what you see with web browsers should remain the same.

So far, Dreamweaver seems a charm, the lack of crashes and CSS problems which had plagued me should now be a thing of the past.
 

I will be posting some of my thoughts on this blog:

- inaccessible - (Edit: permissions not granted)

To avoid cross-posting, views on InfoComm Technology (or more generally computing in our lives) will be posted there. I *occasionally* have some long posts when I feel like expressing more of my views. (But that's what blogging is for, isn't it? ;-) )

There has been a lot of talk in my university about plagiarism; if found guilty a zero is awarded on that paper. Using some sophisticated software, they prowl the net on search of clues that any student is plagiarising and not using their own effort.......

 Now my question niggling in my mind is this: What if I were to post something on The Rumbling Edge, and in turn it gets transmitted and quoted throughout the web, be it automated RSS feed sites or user-submitted content on websites or forums, then me making use of what I say on TRE in my paper that I hand up to the university for assessment? Their software will most definitely pick this up and accuse me of plagiarism from the internet.

 No.... wait.... Plagiarising who? Me? Is it a crime to get accused of plagiarism of yourself?? I infringe the copyright of.... myself??? I get charged for copying... my own words?

 Now this is something I better clarify before 4 years down the road I get charged for plagiarism of myself for my Honours project... Hmmmm The Rumbling Edge could be one I suppose...

Note: I'm not condoning plagiarism here. It's just the zero score bit, and the need to appeal (and fork out money) the result, when deep down in your heart you've done nothing to deserve this, merely rewriting something you post on the web into your university homework. And being accused of plagiarism from the internet when the source is from..... yourself.