明天就是中秋节了（之前还以为是这星期六... 晕）！中秋节怎么可以没有月饼啊？所以我就买了两盒，意思意思一下。 我也有两年没吃过了 呵呵...



至于下面那些照片嘛，都是一时无聊乱拍的... 在国外无法吃到的朋友可以解一解馋

Subject	月饼
Location	Dining table
Date	2006.10.05
Time	Around 8pm
Equipment	Sony Ericsson K800
Picture Size	Scaled from 1536 x 2048
Extra note	Images are rotated, and saved with 85% quality

Yikes... my site has been acting strangely or totally down since the evening of 2/10/2006 until this evening At first I'm pretty nervous because I suddenly remembered that I haven't pay the bill and it's going to due... in 1 day time....

However, the sql is acting strange and keep throwing a "Too many connections" error on my face. If I didn't pay the bill, they should stop serving my site temporarily and shouldn't be this weird or stupid. After checking out with the admin, I just realized they're carrying out a server update. In fact, it's a huge update... .

The RAM has arrived at the datacentre and they have advised an upgrade window of approximately four (4) hours. The upgrade will only take a few minutes, but please allow the full window so as to allow time for any issues that may arise. We expect full services to be restored by approximately 14:30 AEST.

...

We are waiting for a response from the data centre about an upgrade due to a RAM issue on the Milkyway server, the server is currently running on a gigabyte of RAM thus using quite abit of swap causing the slow accessing times. The main services suffering are - ftp, email and sql. We appologise for the inconvinience.

So, during the update process in these few days, sometimes the site is totally down, sometimes it's up but the PHP script has sql connection problem. If I managed to get through, either everything is fine or I'll notice the site's content is old one. It's sort of a database rollback, just that the problem is it didn't rollback to the most recents one. It's like right now I'm seeing the most updated content on my site, 1 hr later I visit again it's rollback to the content that's few days back. Then I come back again, it's restored to the latest one... I can't issue a lockdown on my site because of this and also FTP is not working too...

Anyway, thank god the update has completed, and thank god again all the data is restored properly

Opps... I just forget something...




Some quick history: I was playing around with some really simple dynamic page content thing using PHP back in April 2005. I would say that's just getting to know the language. Later on, I wrote a simple authentication/control system which became the fundamental building block for my personal website. That time it was around August 2005. One month later, a simple weblog system along with some simple interface is hosted on 100webspace.com. The first blog entry was posted on September 27, 2005. Since then, I have named my site as Darren's Outpost

As time goes by, I feel the need of my own domain name and a greater control/configuration of the server. So I registered ahkuan.com, and moved to a paid web hosting company MDWebhosting.com Old site is officially closed on 29/04/2006

So now, we all know time flies. According to the statistic info in my about page, at this moment it shows:

Currently there are 152 blog entries found in 41 categories. So far, there are 97 comments exist in 26 blog entries. It will be the #143 shout message if you make a new shout right now.

I've contributed heaps of time, dedicated lots of energies, caused trillions of my brain cells to commit suicide, drank lots of coffee Coke and listened played thousands of thousands of songs to build my site. It's small, but it's my playground, a place for me to hang out and also a place for me to challenge my skills.

The image beside is a snap shot of my website at this moment. Let this be marked down in a world that time does not stop, and you're welcomed to witness the 1st anniversary of my site.



ps: This entry is forced to halt publication due to a 3 days server update. This was originally drafted on 2006.10.02 and publish on 2006.10.05

Fixed several url rewrite problem in Apache on server side. Apparently that's my mistake, I tried to do something like [0-9\w], which is invalid and will be interpreted as [0-9w]. However, it works perfectly for the new version of Apache on my local computer.

Below is a quick reference or a cheat sheet for Apache mod_rewrite from www.ilovejackdaniels.com :

The last time I played around with the themes on my operating system, manually, is when I'm still in high school, a place where the teacher pwns the classroom hmm... that time I'm still using Win98/ME or whatever. Then later on while I'm in college, a place where students pwns the classroom, I played around with LiteStep and WindowsBlinds. First encounter with LiteStep to me is "Wow, this is kick ass !", it has a shell to replace windows' one. Had a lot of fun to modify and adding new things to it. WindowsBlinds was free (I think so) that time. Now you need to pay $19.95 for it, and also, now it's a component of the Object Desktop suite.

Story ended after I upgraded to WinXP, I sticked with the original theme that came along with WindowsXP. It's been years, until now =) I'm bored with my desktop look and feel, also affected by the Windows Vista's drooling-vista-aero effect... I've made some changes created a disaster to my desktop...



If you're a poor bastard like me, who's unable to become a beta tester for Windows Vista to enjoy the Vista-Aero due to slow/old computer, or for other N reasons, you can download Brico Pack Vista Inspirat from CrystalXP.net. Install it, and you'll be able to duplicate the disastrous outcome that looks exactly(almost) like the above screenshots. It also comes with a dock thing (top center in the screenshot) that acts similar to Mac OS X Dock.

Don't understand why I said it's a disaster ? Oh well, for most time of the installation it says "Modify xxxx.exe" instead of "Extracting xxxx.exe" or "Copying xxxx.exe". It seems like it's patching the executable files. That makes me feel nervous. There's a "Uninstall" option but the "damage" is done, how clean they can undo it ? But anyway, up until now, I haven't encounter any system crash or weird acts yet.

ps: To make the above screenshot looks more like Windows Vista, I've changed the wallpaper from cute anime girls to Vista-like wallpaper which somehow focus on the leaves and grasses... Mircosoft Windows Vista is sending a message to the public - "We're environmentally friendly products !"

Some random shots when I'm in Southbank on Friday night. Those pros and gurus out there, please don't criticize the photo quality I don't have a tripod for my phone and I only have 5 secs to grab each photo...

Subject	Southbank Night View
Location	Southank
Date	2006.09.22
Time	Around 8pm
Equipment	Sony Ericsson K800
Picture Size	Scaled from 2048 x 1536

And btw, if you're looking for the Conrad Treasury Casino, it's the building that's light up with nice purple colour

Test... Test... Testing 1 2 3...

Ladies and gentlemen, I 'officially' announce that the updates on my site has completed! This update took me almost 3 months to finish. That's pretty long time, since all the updates are on local and I don't focus on this everyday, so sometimes I tend to forget where I stop the last time. Anyway, this update is accompanied by the release of D's Bloggie v3.1 . Weblog is the main content on my site. So for most of the time, whenever there is a major site update, my D's Bloggie will be updated too, and vice versa.

This site update, like most of the major updates, which heavily involved in backend changes. For database part, I've created 5 new tables, added 21 new columns to existing tables and dropped 5 existing columns. This is not fun, I've to change lines of lines of codes. I've also revised most of the sql queries and remove any duplicate queries. On a full standard page it usually needs around 30 queries, after the tuning, it now requires only around 20 queries =) For search engine optimization (SEO) part, I added 'description' and 'keyword' to the HTML <META> tag. Depending on the page's content, different or custom descriptions and keywords will be used. I'm not sure why Google indexed my main page but not the rest of other pages. I even added new rewrite rules to rewrite all the URLs that points to weblog and shout entries. For example, '/weblog/100/' will now be rewrote to '/weblog/100.html'. So I hope this will help abit for Google... although Yahoo has already crawled almost all the pages on my site. That's weird eh ?

Weblog entries are now able to carry multiple tags/categories instead of just a single tag/category. Tag and category is an exchangable term on my site. I've expended from originally 9 categories to 41 categories in this update. The new categories can be arranged into hierarchy format, which means every category can be a parent category and allowed to have sub categories beneath it. The public is also able to perform a search on the weblog entries, by matching the entry's title, description and content. The default search mode will be 'exact search', and it's the only search mode available right now. Read my other entry Stucked with "homemade" search engine for own weblog for more info.

This site update also indicates the starting of the battle between my site and spammers. Now, this site is armed with site-wide banning (IP range, hostname). On top of that, suspicious private message/shouts/comments will not be added. You're free to view my blacklisted list. For security, CAPTCHA (aka verification code) is used on several new pages as well as extra tracking to strengthen site's security.

For tools section, I added a few new tools. Most of them are for administrative purpose. Only URL Extract is opened for public. For weather report, I added new weather reports that cover most of the cities/capitals in Australia.

The most noticeable layout changes will be the new logo design and the side navigation menu. The side navigation menu is moved to the right hand side. This is also a part of the SEO, data comes first On this update, side navigation menu is break down into modules, every page can choose to load the required or preset module instead of displaying all. For example, the shoutbox will only be loaded on the main page's side navigation menu. It will never appear in other pages because it's not needed.

For D's Bloggie part...


Again, please report any bugs or weird CSS rendering. You can also contact me and let me know.

*Update 2006-09-30* Forget to mentioned duplicate sql thing.

Another file-sharing is targeted and ordered to shutdown by recording industries.

Quote:

Sad ending I would say. $30 million to avoid lawsuits ? I guess that's another alternate way how the recording industries are making(milking) money. Anyway, on yesterday, the eDonkey website is wipe out clean, only leaving a message behind:

Quote:

Goodbye, eDonkey! I think LimeWire will joined you pretty soon since the recording companies filed a copyright infringement lawsuit LimeWire back in August.

Read more news on Wired

It's weekend again, it's also time for me to make progress on updating my site. This time I've completed alot of things that's on my todo list, I would say this will be another major site update. However, it will be backend-wise, nothing much unless I do some cosmectic updates (which is also on my todo list @@)

Anyway, the biggest problem I encountered right now is building my own search engine that search through my weblog entries with ability to sort results by relevancy/date/topic/category. There are few easy ways to do this, one is using MySQL built-in "Full-Text Search" function, which also includes boolean full-text searches using IN BOOLEAN MODE modifier (eg using + - etc signs). Another way to do this is using a simple sql query with LIKE %string% clause.

Everything sounds so sweet and nice before I realize that my blog entries contains bbcode tags. The content of the weblog entries are rendered on-the-fly. So if you searched a keyword that's used for a bbcode tag, then the return result will not be accurate. MySQL also requires pre-indexing the data before you can use the full-text search, that means you'll need extra database storage for indexes and slower performance too.

So, I want to do a search on my rendered weblog entries instead of entries in raw format. That's possible, but that will probably be done with regex in gayness loops in PHP rather than MySQL (well, at least that's the way I can think of). If not then I'll have to stripped the bbcode tags and build my own indexing system. That's kinda redundant and I won't implement it with a complicated relevancy matching algo, so what's the point eh ?

I read some articles/guide/how-to but neither of them mentioned or have solution to the problem I mentioned. So I went to a few other people's weblog/forums to test this. The test results surprised me. Just try yourself in those "homemade" personal website/blogs and compare the ones that uses systems like phpbb/blogger.com. Use search query like "[b ]" or "<b>" and you'll know what I mean.

For now, I'll just see what I can come out with. If anybody has experience in this or knows great resources please let me know *scratching head... *

Some readings:
MySQL Full-Text Search Functions
Solano Systems - MySQL Relevancy Search

Screen shot of my website on 1920 x 1200 resolution =)

Click on this link to view the image.