Author Archives: Tech Admin

A Perspective of Failure

As the time is ticking and counting down to the new year, I’d like to review what I have done so far on this blog; my plan, my expectation compared with the realization and final result. Earlier in this year, I set a target, which I was pretty sure achievable. I aimed to increase the rank of the blog gradually by executing some methods I believed will end as success. However, the statistics of this blog for this year shows something that is perfectly contrary to my initial plan.

Statistics of tech.amikelive.com in 2009

It can be seen in the statistical graph that the traffic trend for this blog is negative. Traffic constantly decreased as the months progressed. In a bigger picture, it is clearly a sign of failure, a situation that is most unexpected by me. However, since it is there for a reason, learning and analyzing the cause and trying to improve the situation becomes interesting to me.

I have learned some lessons regarding to this failure. First, time is always a constraint. Even though I read a lot about new technologies, fiddled a lot with codes, explored a lot of new stuff, created some software, and did other things which should have turned into blog posts, in reality I couldn’t do so. This exacerbated the scarcity of good quality posts. The main cause of why I couldn’t sit on my couch writing interesting stories about my experiences is because I lacked the quality time to do so. Second, inspiration to write does not come instantly. Currently I have a list of post to write. But surprisingly, even though I created the list several months ago, it hasn’t been transformed into posts. Now, I perfectly understand the meaning of “writings deserve due appreciation”. Writing quality posts is apparently not easy. Third, managing too many things will sacrifice one or two things in the list. This is related with the first two lessons. Despite being successful in my other aspects of life, I failed to do it here. Finally, perfection sometimes brings trouble to advance to the next step. In the execution my plan, I often accentuate in perfection by ensuring the riddance of any sort of flaw which often hindered me from accomplishing the whole piece.

Slightly off topic, this year the economy was bouncing up again after the deceleration during the downturn. Good treatment and policy has progressively healed the wounded economy. I believe, I can also find the formula for treatment and apply it in order to go back on the track and level up this blog next year.

I welcome 2010 with optimism.

Green Purchasing Meets Green IT

I was attending a conference about green purchasing in fourth week of October taking place in Suwon, South Korea and pondering about what the substance of the conference would bring impact to the IT field. The conference theme was about green purchasing, a term coined to refer to purchasing of sustainable products. Despite the seemingly simplistic definition, the idea of the green purchasing actually has been attracting wider audience as these days concern about life sustainability on planet earth has been growing more rapidly.

Al Gore's speech in 3rd Conference of Green PurchasingThe conference was organized by International Green Purchasing Network (IGPN), an organization which promotes green purchasing across the globe. It was sponsored mainly by the Korean government and some UN committees. Former US president Al Gore who was awarded as Nobel peace prize laureate in 2007 was invited to deliver the keynote speech. He spoke about the importance of living green to sustain the environment and do our work in ensuring that future generation would still be able to live on earth conveniently. He mentioned that climate change is a real issue and should be addressed through fast-paced global collaborations. The temperature rise issue, melting arctic ice issue, and some other environmental severance issues are wake-up calls to governments, companies, and also to individual consumers to take care more the behavior in living. Therefore, purchasing goods through green purchasing method is one of the methods an individual, company, or organization can contribute.
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Sizzling Upload Progress Bar in PHP with APC, Part 1: APC Installation

After some series of “political” technical notes, I think it’s the right moment to supply some more technical posts to fellow developers. This time I will write about creating sizzling upload progress bar in PHP. In the past, there had been heated debate in PHP internal list about RFC 1867 implementation on PHP core code. If you were there, you might still remember that we had to patch the file main/rfc1867.c and some other files and then recompile PHP to get the upload progress bar hack working. Some harsh critics even mentioned that without the built-in capability of upload progress, PHP was years behind Java and Perl and lacked its capability as a web programming language.

Fortunately, since PHP 5.2 (especially after PHP 5.2.6 release), showing upload progress is not a big deal in PHP. Thanks to APC developers -mostly are also core PHP developers- who contributed to changes in APC that led to the availability of this long-waited feature. With APC we’ll be able to track the progress of file upload and provide our users better convenience when using our application.

Still, APC is not a part of core PHP shipped as a bundled package. We need to install it manually. In Windows, we can simply load the dll file to get it working. However, Linux users may need some pointers about how to install and enable this package. Hence, I will provide some guide for APC installation which was tested on veteran RHEL 4 and energetic young Fedora 10. So, let’s just go to the installation part. Continue reading

Collectibles After Months of Seclusion

You may have noticed that the postings in this blog become scarcer even though it was already scarce before. This doesn’t mean that I have lost the interest in writing posts here. Instead, the sabbatical period (in another sabbatical period) has brought me a lot of new findings, interesting and exciting things to explore. Here, in this post, I write some of the stuff you may find yourself curious about too.

Wolfram the Knowledge Engine and Knowledge Discovery

Wolfram Alpha logoSome have speculated that Wolfram will be the Google-killer although by purpose they are a bit different (and the Wolfram dev team also clearly mentioned about this on their site). Wolfram is a knowledge engine with its own data repositories which is capable of answering questions to very diverse domains. Different with search engines in which data are collected from various sources and then ranked based on relevance, utilizing page rank algorithms, the knowledge engine stores data that are “factual” and representative for the knowledge. For each given question, it computes the answer based on the model that represents the question. Two pertinent fields to this application are machine learning and data mining. Key issue in developing application like Wolfram is that it should be smart enough to interpret the question and provide relevant and factual answers thus less being subjective. Continue reading

Riding The Cloud of Multi-million Worth of Infrastructure

Do you still remember the OLPC (One Laptop for Child) program and other (if any) with similar purpose? Let me help you lessen the time for googling by citing the mission of this program from its official cite, “To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”  From a recipient’s point of view, what could this be? The meanings and implications may differ however one thing for sure, the recipient -given the condition he/she can’t afford laptop at normal price- is given luxury at very affordable price, the luxury of owning the gate to access the advancement of technology.

Similar story now may be repeated in the near future in computation area. It’s less than decade from year 2000 but if we compare the computing power of a node (e.g.: standalone PC, server, workstation) in that year with today’s, the discrepancy is very significant. In less than a decade we have seen how computers are becoming faster and how hardware prices are becoming cheaper. These days, multi core processors are becoming more common thus multiplying the computation speed of those of single core.

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