At the Brink of Being Sick
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
I think I’m gonna get sick.. but hopefully not.. it just sucks! I guess it all started yesterday, when I went back to hostel to collect my wireless access deposit. I was given a check instead of cash. Crap.. now I have to haul my ass to a Maybank or Public Bank branch.. It started raining and I had to jog a little distance before reaching the car that Xiu Yin was driving. I was wearing a a sleeve-less shirt, and was greeted by super cool air-cond when I got into the car.. so that was probably how I got sick..
Flu set in last night.. but weirdly, it wasn’t the kind where your nose is dripping like a tap. It was like after you had those flu medicine: my throat felt dry, like I had something stuck there. I really had not much time to bother ’bout it as I had a presentaion due the next day. Sigh… I keep losing track of time.. it’s already Saturday today.. so I meant Thursday when I said yesterday, and “the next day” meant Friday, when I had my presentation.. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: life
Poor Basics: Who is to Blame?
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
It’s my 3rd year in college. It’s called “Advanced Diploma” in TAR College, and boy, the schedule is really much more packed than in Diploma. It’s not that the stuff we learn are tougher, just that we’re required to cover a lot of stuff in such a short period of time.
One of the module’s I’m taking is basically ASP.Net. Classes on it are super boring, as the lecturer goes at a really slow pace. Today, she covered control structures (if-else, switch) - stuff that we learned in the very first semester of college (2 years ago). She gave us a question that more or less required us to convert if-else to swtich:
if (num >= 1 && num < 3) {
Response.Write("option 1");
else if (num > 4) {
Response.Write(”option 2″);
}Shockingly, one of my classmates answered:
switch (num) {
case (num >= 1 && num < 3):
Response.Write("option 1");
case (num > 4):
Response.Write(”option 2″);
}Tokyo Drift
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
The Fast and the Furious returns to the screens with a sequel titled Tokyo Drift. Thanks to 2 Fast 2 Furious, I had pretty high expectations of the movie. It premiered on Thursday and the previews looked stunning too, so I went to KLCC with some friends to catch it on yesterday night. We were lucky to get tickets, most folks are probably watching football at home..
The movie is about a guy called Sean, who, when added with cars, equates to trouble. He was sent off to Tokyo, where his dad (divorced) serves in the navy. So that’s where the story basically starts. The best scene in the movie was probably the car park drift action. I disliked the ending particularly as it looked like Initial D. To make things worse, they keep changing the camera angle to the point where things flash past you and you have no idea what the heck is happening..
The most interesting character of the movie I would say, is Han, who taught Sean how to drift. Han offered his car to Sean to challenge Takeshi (a mob fella), knowing that he’d wreck the car. His reasoning? It’s a small price to pay to know if someone can be trusted. And of course, Sean didn’t leave town. You’d also love the reason why he drifts – no the money, but girls.
All in all, it was a pretty entertaining movie except for the ending/climax. When we were leaving KLCC, some Malay fellas, obviously pumped up from the movie, revved and screeched around the car park in their modified Evos and Kancils.
After getting home, I spent like a couple of hours trying out (or rather, customizing) Foobar 2k 0.9. Some nice soul did a nice customization and I tried it out. After some modifications, I’ve got the best audio player (sound quality, memory usage, interface) in the world and it’s certainly worth the time spent customizing:
Bad XHTML..
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
I was working on SpoonFeed’s “auto-detect feed” feature last week, and thought that it’ll be a piece of cake, thanks to PHP5’s SimpleXML libraries. It is of course easy, if the page is valid XHTML. I tried it locally with my blog and it worked fine. Unfortunately, problems arise when the page is not valid XHTML. I came across this problem when I tried “auto-detecting” Neowin.net. Though it sports a new design and has a XHTML 1.1 Strict doctype, the tags aren’t structured properly.
In strict XHTML, tags that don’t have closing tags (like img and meta), should be in the form:
The backslash is very impotant. If left out, it’ll be treated as an opening tag. Neowin.net (and probably many other sites) do just that. All their meta tags are “opening tags”. PHP5’s SimpleXML parser would parse all HTML (it ain’t small), waiting for the closing tag that never came.
I’m all bogged down with my studies, and doubt I’ll find enough time to work on SpoonFeed. Even if I do, I think I’ll be skipping the “auto-detect” feature for a while..
Tags: my_web_projects, xhtml
SpoonFeed
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Months ago, after discovering that FeedLounge was a subscription based service, I decided to spend my semester holidays cloning one. Hence, SpoonFeed was conceived. It even has the tagline: “Spoon-feeding you with newsfeeds”. I had great plans for it, since I found FeedLounge still have room for improvements. What’s more, I personally find that FeedLounge is the only worthy web-based feed reader and hence, the only one that’s subscription based.
Unfortunately, the semester holidays flew by and I hardly finished much of SpoonFeed. My new semester’s already started and I wonder how much time do I have to work on SpoonFeed. Sigh.. Nevertheless, I still plan to tackle tiny parts of it on a weekly basis, probably tapering off in 2 months time where assignments for most modules are due. I’ll be posting updates about it weekly, and schedule milestones every Sunday. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you: SpoonFeed milestone 3.
A sketch of the future SpoonFeed homepage cum login screen.
Simply put, SpoonFeed is a web-based, RSS newsfeed reader. It uses a PHP5/MySQL backend (though I wonder how much of PHP5’s true potential am I leveraging on), supports ATOM, RDF, RSS and RSS2 formats (details on that later) and sports 5 different layouts. I’m working on the “Add a New Feed” part now, hopefully I can get it completed by the next milestone.
When user want to add a new feed, a dialog prompts them for a URL. Simlpe enough? SpoonFeed will try to fetch that URL, and see if it’s XML, and try to parse it. (Note to self: what if it’s an invalid format?) If it’s a feed, confirm with the user. If it’s a HTML page, try getting the feeds from the link tags. I think it’s a very simple, subtle way of implementing a feed auto-detect function.
After that, I’d be working on feed read/unread functions, and more importantly, polling the server for fresh feeds. That would make it like milestone 5, which I plan to upload to a online server for beta testing. Until then, go here for all SpoonFeed related screenshots. As usual, any feedback arre much appreciated.
Tags: my_web_projects
