One of my pet projects oboeyasui.com is down. My service provider just turned it off without any notice. It is the first time I have had a site become so popular (apparently a million hits a day) that it got shut down. So I don’t know whether to feel extremely sad or just normal sad.
I can’t really argue with my service provider about turning it off, as the site was hosted on a shared server. I didn’t realise it had grown into such a monster. It would have been nice to have been given even a day of notice. Also they say that I need a $125 a month package to host it. Since the service was a free service (it didn’t even have ads) I don’t think that I can afford to pay out $1500 a year out of my own pockets. I do believe that other providers probably could host it for a lot less but still it wouldn’t be self-supporting. It’s a shame as it was a useful (and popular!) service that no-one else was providing.
Maybe one day it will live again. Let’s see…
PS. I’ve managed to keep a few shortcut urls going via manual .htaccess/apache rewrite rules going.
Posted on March 17th, 2008 by Ian Cheung
Filed under: Web Dev/IA | 1 Comment »
Our second child Jamie Robbie Shinji Jan Ji Cheung was born last week. Both baby and mum are doing fine, and Michelle is now a proud big sister. I’ve posted a couple of photos and a video to facebook but I know not all of you have a facebook account so will post some photos and the video here. If you have flickr you can see a few more photos.
Photos:
Video:
Posted on February 13th, 2008 by Ian Cheung
Filed under: Jamie, Photos & Photography, Videos | 11 Comments »
It’s my birthday soon and usually an infallible present choice for me is a Liverpool shirt or some other kind of merchandise. However this year if you are thinking about getting me something like that, don’t. I still support Liverpool Football Club (and always will) but I don’t support its owners and the way they are behaving. And as they seem to listen to money first and fans last, I will not buy any official merchandise until things change. I also don’t want anybody to buy merchandise for me.
If you are a lifelong fan like me, I hope you will consider doing the same for the sake of our club.
Posted on January 25th, 2008 by Ian Cheung
Filed under: LFC | 1 Comment »
For anyone thinking of buying a Sanyo Xacti DMX-65, you should know that the software bundled with it is incompatible with older AMD processors. And possibly very old Intel processors. The software is Ulead’s MovieWriter 5 SE for Sanyo and is used to create DVDs from your videos.
I have an Athlon XP2500+ in my desktop and it crashes when I try to import movies from the camera. It works fine with my laptop which has a Intel processor but it doesn’t have a DVD burner. It’s all a bit annoying.
One solution I found is a program called DVDSanta. It seems to work fine and is $30. You can find it here http://www.dvdsanta.com/
Posted on January 11th, 2008 by Ian Cheung
Filed under: Tech | No Comments »
I had a long break (relatively speaking) over the New Year. Lots of time to think, lots of time away from the computer. I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions as such but I did a lot of thinking on goals, direction, what makes me happy, how to spend limited time etc. I came up with a simple goal for this year:
Produce more, consume less.
Produce more what? Hold on a moment…. I’m having a flashback to Maths class where my teacher is shouting “5 what? Apples, oranges, monkeys?” after I wrote down an answer without units.
The answer is anything that makes a positive difference, great or small. So anything from web sites to blog posts, to email replies, to meaningful conversations with people I meet, to taking more photos. Consuming less means less RSS reading, to web site surfing. I don’t watch much TV any more because of the time it robs you of, but web site surfing is about the same. It seems more intellectually fulfilling, and depending on the sites or feeds you do learn stuff (A new fave is http://betterexplained.com/) but it is still pretty passive and requires a magnitude less effort. It isn’t a patch on actually doing stuff, actually creating stuff. So that’s what I am going to start doing.
I’m also going to try out an experiment resulting from a quirky thought I had. “What if the only application I used was Thunderbird (my email client)? So no web browsing.” My guess is that I would reply to mails and stay in touch better with friends and family. Once I set up email to blog posting and maybe some way of finding out the latest footie result without a web browser, I’ll give it a go for maybe 5 days (Mon-Fri) and see what happens.
Posted on January 7th, 2008 by Ian Cheung
Filed under: GTD | 3 Comments »
