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April 29, 2005
More Nikki Webster
I gotta stop doing this :) Whatever Nikki Webster's manager is doing is working well, she has jumped from 93 to 7 on FHM 100 Sexiest Women 2005 in Australia and New Zealand, above Delta and Imogen! Above Delta eeeer maybe ... by a long shot, but above Imogen? Come on ...
Posted by vhadiant at 08:29 AM | TrackBack
April 28, 2005
WordPress, looking good.
I had a look on the latest WordPress release and I have to say that it's looking really good. I dare say even better than MovableType already. The management console, the weblog posting tool and even the stock standard template are nicer and easier to use than MT. One thing I notice, now you can create articles/pages within WordPress, this blog server is becoming more and more of a CMS than just a traditional blogs.
My hosting provider give me a free WordPress hosting, that shows how popular it has become. I'm really tempted to use that instead of MT, but I'm a control freak and I need to have 100% control of this stuff so unless I manage my own install that's out of the question. This is where I got stuck again, WordPress requires a database or some sort, ack .. and Hostway don't give me free DB, I gotta pay for it :( Ah well ... back to MT I suppose, this is where MT got it right, you don't need a full blown relational DB to use it, instead you can use Berkeley DB which is available in almost all Linux installation.
Posted by vhadiant at 08:46 PM | TrackBack
April 20, 2005
Automatic Computing Science Paper Generator
[Via Australian IT]
This is just too funny :) Automatic generator for CS papers. Well lemme see, since discovering this website I have a couple of papers 'generated':
Tongs: A Methodology for the Simulation of Vacuum Tubes
Victor Hadianto
On the references:
Hadianto, V., and Zhou, X. Improving interrupts using robust algorithms. Journal of Stable, Decentralized Algorithms 28 (Dec. 1996), 1-14.
Hartmanis, J., Wu, G., and Hadianto, V. Hierarchical databases no longer considered harmful. Journal of Event-Driven Archetypes 72 (Dec. 2004), 76-88.
TearfulTairn: Improvement of Cache Coherence
Victor Hadianto
On the references:
Hadianto, V. Exploring robots using wireless communication. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Sept. 2005).
Cool .. I wish they're around when I was at Uni ha!
Posted by vhadiant at 11:26 PM | TrackBack
April 17, 2005
Shark attack at Bronte
And what did he do? Just like what any other surfer would do, jump back in the water as soon as he can :)
Posted by vhadiant at 10:05 AM | TrackBack
Update on GMail as your spam filter
Browsing through the GMail user help news group shows that I'm not the only have that has this idea. A couple of other people have done this and reporting good result.
I haven't experienced this myself, but apparently some people have problem with the spam filter, they reckon it's a bit flakey, whatever it is hopefully it'll be sorted out during this beta period.
I've came across 1 false negative and 2 false positive. I don't think the false positive is so much of a problem sicne both of them are newsletters, I can understand why GMail may consider them as spams.
One more thing worth noting, since GMail store your "sent mails" as part of the conversation in the Inbox, when you POP your emails, you'll download your all your sent emails as well (the one that you composed over the web interface), nice ...
Posted by vhadiant at 09:45 AM | TrackBack
April 15, 2005
Currently in love with ...
Keren DeBerg :)
Yet another artist discovered from Scrubs, even if the quality of the show has been going downhill since the beginning of season 4, I think I can watch the show for the music only :)
The Scrubs website has an extensive list of all the music played in the show (and more from other location here).
Oh and in Keren's website you can listen the full 5 songs from her debut album.
More good info about Keren on Scrubs@MOPNT.
[More]
She apparently started her own record label "Big Pea & a Dime" :)
Posted by vhadiant at 06:54 PM
April 14, 2005
Gizmondo price drop, deliver adds
[via Joystiq]
Oooo a £100 price drop, but now you have to receive at least 3 ads on your Gizmondo. This will be content targeted as well, depending on the owner of the device. Now you have to make sure you change your ownership details in Gizmondo database if you buy this thing second hand, last thing you want to see on your Gizmondo is an advertisement targeted to a 17 teeny bopper.
My prediction? Same fate with Nokia's N-Gage.
Posted by vhadiant at 08:02 PM | TrackBack
Cat fight - aaNet vs Exetel
[Thursday 14/04/2005 10AM]
Reps from both ISP now have been barred from posting in the other ISP forum by the Whirlpool masters. Both Annette and Cat said that the other ISP is the one to blame on this fiasco.
Annette said that aaNet owe Exetel 300 grand, while Cat posted that Exetel is the one that owe aaNet 6 figures sum. Who's telling the truth? Hard to tell at the moment.
Annette Linton (with John Linton) is the owner of Exetel and there's an allegation (and more here) that Cat is Lorraine Rose, owner of aaNet. Now this gets interesting hehehe :)
[Later on the day ....]
At about 1:15PM the first batch of Exetel disconnected customers have been reconnected (presumably using Telstra now).
And there's an offer from Veridas to rescue Exetel. Also the carrion eaters are out, Wild offering free churn and free 3 months for Exetel customers.
[Exetel rebuttal]
Later in the afternoon here is Exetel rebuttal claiming that there is no 5 months negotiations claimed by aaNet. So far there's no official statment from aaNet.
[aaNet seeking insolvency order]
Later Cat/Lorraine posted in WP that aaNet is seeking insolvency order against Exetel. The plot thickens ...
[aaNet official response]
Oops apparently there is an official response from aaNet.
Until the time of this posting (around 8PM) accusations and allegations are still aplenty between the two ISPs fanbois in WP, just check out WP for the full battle :)
Posted by vhadiant at 08:01 PM | TrackBack
Sydney homes are more unaffordable than ...
New York! :) The latest study confirmed that the housing price in Sydney and Melbourne are unaffordable by most Australian. But dude .. don't we all know that already :)
Posted by vhadiant at 08:41 AM
April 11, 2005
The Distillers on Gran Turismo 4
Gran Turismo 4 has been released in Australia and is currently devastating the sales chart. I don't need to post yet another review of it (it's awesome!), but I was pleasantly surprised to hear The Distillers' Drain The Blood in the soundtrack. It was a bit of a surprised really when I first heard that, who would have thought :)
Well, someone somewhere in Japan must be listening to the Distillers, yeap the game's score has just gone up on my own personal rating, now currently at 11 out of 10 :D
Posted by vhadiant at 09:21 PM
April 07, 2005
GMail as your spam filter
I’ve been using SpamBayes for a while and while it’s good, I found it that I have to keep retraining it since I have a massive amount of spams compared to the valid emails. My current training database is already my second database, and I’m not looking forward to do another SpamBayes training. Lately more and more mails have been classified as Junk Suspect rather than Junk Emails, this is getting annoying. At the moment on my SpamBayes training database I have 3 times the number of spam than valid emails, SpamBayes recommend that you have about the same amount of data on both category, this is just simply impossible (well for me at least).
My hosting provider also provides a free spam filtering service where they put *** SPAM *** on each email that they identify as spam, but it doesn’t work very well. On average I got about 30 - 40 spams a day and only about 2 or 3 marked as spams, sux.
Now I’m thinking, since all the free emails (Hotmail, Yahoo!, GMail)do a damn good job in classifying the spams, why don’t I just use them as my spam filter? So to do this all I have to do is automatically forward all emails from victor@hadianto.net to vhadiant@gmail.com and let GMail does it job. Whala!
On top of that since GMail offer free POP (unlike Hotmail and Yahoo! where you have to pay for the POP access .. boohoo) I just POP it back using my Outlook client, and bang problem solved!
Well I’ve just activated it now and send a test message from my ISP email account to victor@hadianto.net and it arrives successfully at vhadiant@gmail.com. So the jury is still out on how effective this going to be, but I’m pretty confident that this is going to work.
PS: This will only work if can configure your email forwarding rule on your mail server.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Nikki Webster on FHM
Yes yes by now everyone who reads the news regularly must have heard about Nikki Webster celebrating her 18th birthday by having photo shoot for the "sexy but not sex" FHM. Well not quite 18 actually, according to once source she is 2 months short of her 18th birthday.
Hmm let's see, Nikki Webster after 5 years of non-appearance, recently dropped by her record label, a sudden re-appearance in a reality TV show (Dancing With the Stars), and now a photo shoot for FHM. Sounds familiar... I wonder if they all have the same agent?
I refuse to classify this in the "Music" section, instead put it in the "Misc" category.
Posted by vhadiant at 08:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 06, 2005
Bondi's Surf
This is just way too good :)
[via Aquabumps]
And this is to all that snigger under their breath when getting the answer of "Where do you surf?" as "Bondi". I know that Bondi is probably flat, mushy, suck, or just straight for the good part of the year, but it can be juicy as well. That pic was taken on Mon, 21 March 2005 (a bit old I know, but I've just come across it today), the beginning of the April 2005 swell.
Posted by vhadiant at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft is pulling all the stops on XBOX 2
Well after Hironobu Sakaguchi left SquareEnix to start his own company making games exclusive for XBOX now 2 more legends, Yoshiki Okamoto and Tetsuya Mizuguchi are going to work making XBOX 2 only games.
Ah Okamoto-san, I will always remember my misspent youth spending hours and hours (and hours) in front of Street Fighter 2 machine.
After the total failure in the lucrative Japanese market, MSFT seems to be pulling all the stops trying to entice more and more Japanese games developer to make titles for XBOX. I’ve always said that XBOX in its current form, despite its relative easiness to make pirated games, will not make it in both the Japanese and Asian market. Japanese and Asian prefer different types of games than the American, it has always been and I can’t see this to change in the foreseeable future.
It’s hard to explain the different between Jap/American/European games flavour unless you play a lot of games yourself and have tried the different type of games. I personally prefer the Jap style games, Euro games second and I hate most of the games that come out from the US. Don’t really know why, I guess how you grow up with your games has a lot to do with this.
The Asian market has always been leaning to the Japanese games since donkey’s age, luckily for us there are enough American who like those Japanese games to warrant conversion, especially the popular one. Having said that I still couldn’t forgive Square for not porting Final Fantasy 2, 3, and 4 to English version.
Anyway, around late last year the sales figure for PS2, XBOX and GameCube respectively were 70m, 15.5m, 14m. My prediction, seeing all the efforts that MSFT is currently doing, XBOX 2 will be closer to PS 3 and that will make GameCube a distant third on the next generation console. I don’t think XBOX 2 will take PS crown on the next gen console, but it’s looking very dangerous. I’m a PlayStation bigot so I will buy PS3 regardless, unless SquareEnix moved to XBOX exclusively. They’ve done this before moving from Nintendo to Sony when they were SquareSoft, it was the greatest coup in the gaming industry (ever, if I may say so), then you know it’s Game Over.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:21 PM
April 05, 2005
FTA ... yeah right ...
[via Frank Arrigo]
[snip]
Impatient TV viewers turn to BitTorrent
Some Australians are turning to file-sharing networks for new episodes of their favorite American television shows.
According to a new report, the popularity in Australia of one peer-to-peer application--BitTorrent--is driven in part by local television networks that have adopted a strategy of being slow to air current episodes of popular TV shows.
[/snip]
... driven in part by local television networks that have adopted a strategy of being slow ...
Add moronic programming schedule to the list. After enduring 3 weeks of Scrubs on Channel 7 with the following schedule (rough estimate, it is a while back):
Week 1:
Tue 10:30PM
Wed 11PM
Thu 10:55PM
Week 2:
Tue: 11PM
Thu: 11:25PM
Week 3:
Thu: 11PM
I gave up ... Fortunately Channel BT came to the rescue.
Posted by vhadiant at 11:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Graduate ...
Seen in Whirlpool forum:
[quote]
if you apply for a graduation position and they ask for your academic transcript and you have a failed subject, do you think you could edit the academic transcript so that they won't know that you failed?
e.g. you failed subject A and then did it again and you passed but you only show them the pass one?
[/quote]
Geez if this is a University graduate I don't understand what stuff they teach at uni these days. Hmmm "Fake Degree 101" ...
Posted by vhadiant at 12:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 03, 2005
Blurring the reality and fantasy
This news is a bit old:
[snip]
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12700815-23109,00.html
A SHANGHAI online game player stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber-sword, the China Daily said today.
The incident creates a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons.
[/snip]
Heh I guess this incident will also creates a dilemma in Australia where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons :)
Seriously I think the border between reality and fantasy is getting thinner. When kids first experience with pets are with Tamagotchi, they’ll probably will have serious problem about handling real life pets later on.
Posted by vhadiant at 08:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
