Hotel Vistana Kuantan

Alright, it’s time for the second part of the Kuantan trip. For 23rd to 24th December we stayed in Vistana Hotel Kuantan, a 4 star hotel.

Afraid to be disappointed, I did not scan for wifi availability this time but at the registration counter there was a TMNET HotSpot logo so I asked the guy. He politely mentioned that Internet access is available 24×7 in the business center and lobby, via TMNET HotSpot service and they sell the starter pack for RM28.00.

The hallway of this hotel is undecorated as well, but looks nice and eye pleasing. I noticed a faint smell of paint so I asked a housekeeping girl whether they are renovating – they are. We were given a room at the top floor (6th floor).

vktn1.jpg

Continue reading Hotel Vistana Kuantan

1TB Hitachi Hard Drive

After 51 year from the introduction of the first hard drive by IBM in 1956 (5MB in capacity), Hitachi has released a 1TB hard drive. For the technical readers, 1TB = 1024GB = 1048576MB. That’s a huge amount of data, and if the hard disk crashes and you don’t have any backups or a RAID setup, you’ll end up kneeling down and crying over your lost data. And just imagine what’s the cost for data recovery service…

Hitachi 1TB Box

In the future if I even consider buying disks this big, I’ll surely buy by pair and setup RAID.

The consumer version of the Hitachi drive is named Deskstar 7K1000 while the two other versions (which will be released later – 2nd quarter) are called CinemaStar for DVR boxes, and unknown name for enterprise with certified MTBF.

The disk contains 5 platters, in which each carries 200GB. The 7200 rpm Serial-ATA drive will have 32MB data buffer. It will be available in SATA 3.0Gb/s and Parallel-ATA 133 interfaces.

Of course, this big capacity drive was achieved by Perpendicular Recording.

For further reading this technology go to http://www.pcworld.com/article/….

Whatever it is, I am sure that late Reynold Johnson will be very happy with what has evolved from his invention and how it has helped mankind.

Thanks for Azidin for the heads up.

I Am 50 Inside

Yesterday: I went to see the company doctor due to my giddiness problem and the doctor said I need to exercise more. My cholesterol level ain’t that great either and my risk to getting a heart disease is 7%. Lucky for me my blood pressure is normal.

Today at a pharmacy I got a test to see my body fat level and it’s spiking high. And my metabolism rate is at 50 of age. I am in my late 20s and my metabolism rate is almost twice my age. I really have to think harder about my health.

This Friday I shall restart my gym sessions which have been stopped for 2 months since the fasting month.

Hotel Grand Continental Kuantan

As I mentioned earlier, during the Christmas weekend we went to Kuantan, Pahang for business trip. Due to the late reservation, we were unable to get a decent hotel. Decent here means with a hotel with Internet connection inside the room 😉 Even our favorite, Swiss Garden Resort was fully booked.

So during the first day, 22nd to 23rd December we end up in the Hotel Grand Continental Kuantan, owned by Grand Hotels International. I believe it is a 3 star hotel but please correct me if I am wrong.

When I first arrived, I scanned for wifi availability and detected that TMNET Hotspot is in the lobby.

The hallway of this hotel is clean, but undecorated. That’s not really important as long as we have a place to stay.

Grand Continental Kuantan 7

Continue reading Hotel Grand Continental Kuantan

Google Analytics Plugin Not Showing

Well, this is not a complaint to the great plugin, but for some themes.

Themes like Intense, and AquaGreen does not have any wp_footer call so the tracking code will not show. How to fix it?

Open up themes/[themename]/footer.php and add <?php wp_footer(); ?> before </body> resulting in:


<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

Hope this helps. I discover this after 5 minutes of head scratching. 😉

Be Careful In Cyberjaya

For those working/studying or doing whatever in Cyberjaya, please be careful if you make the illegal U-turn after exiting The Street Mall. If you can, do a U-turn somewhere else where it’s safe.

Yesterday night after dinner at Street Mall, I heard a loud bang. It turns out a Satria from the MMU stretch ran directly into a Waja making a U-turn. That Waja has just minutes before passed by me as I get to my car at The Street Mall.

To people driving from MMU side, come on la… slowly and be alert of cars making the U-turn. I know it’s illegal, but what’s the use of defending that you’re right when your car is all messed up. The Satria was indeed very fast as I heard the tires screech for a long time before the bang!

Nobody died, I think. The Waja ended up on the roadside and the Satria totally lost the front engine part – just imagine how hard the collision was!

PayPerPost Acquires Performancing.com

This is an unexpected news but comprehensible indeed for PPP. For me this is a very good news for bloggers as Perfomancing is generally a very good idea for Internet Marketing strategy. The official news can be read here.

According to PPP, by the acquisition they now gained a number of powerful blogger support tools such as Performancing Metrics, the free blog analytic service, and Performancing Exchange, the online “classifieds” for bloggers.

The PPP brand, however will not be used for two of Performancing assets – the Firefox blog editor and Performancing Partner Ads technology. According to PPP these two assets will be migrated to a new brand. Lets just wait and see.

Performancing Metrics is a service for bloggers to track visitor stats, with built-in AdSense auditing. The platform is now in beta and currently reports blog visitors, blog comments, ad clickthroughs, and a few other features.

Performancing Exchange is an online marketplace for companies, blog sites and others wishing to employ professional bloggers.

These FREE tools will surely enhance PPPs offering to bloggers and I would not understand why any blogger passionate about writing not joining PPP. I am amazed on the marketing strategy by them, and from the looks of it PPP will stay in the Internet community longer than what some people anticipated.

As for me, I am taking a personal strategy of my own – not too fast, and not too slow. Until I get my payments from PPP I will just take it slow, one step at a time. It’s a good idea to make money from blogging, without effecting the integrity of the things you write in your blog.

This post is sponsored by PPP, who else? 😉

Happy Holidays

I would like to wish everyone a very Happy Holidays. Be safe.

I will be away for the weekend, to a galaxy far far away. Just kidding. I am going to Pahang for my wife’s business. It’s not a vacation as I have to spend my time in the hotel room working on a development project. I promised to deliver it right after Christmas, so basically I have no choice or I will be shot if I don’t finish it.

I am unsure whether we’ll have Internet access at the hotels, as we will be staying in normal hotels – all 5 star hotels are fully booked for the weekend! 🙁

Enjoy your time.

Blogger Moves Out Of Beta

blogger.jpg

Blogger is now out of Beta: www.blogger.com. However I tried my Blogger Beta Importer and it still works 🙂

I think this is because the importer depends on the RSS provided by the New Blogger. Perhaps I should change my importer’s name to New Blogger import?

My true wish is that to have that importer being able to integrate with WordPress importer control panel officially or unofficially but I just don’t have the time to look into WordPress code yet eventhough I periodically checks out the code from the subversion repository. One of my blogs run 2.1-alpha3 and there are many improvements I do like a lot such as the image push to editor and the visual and code editor on the same screen!

IMHO importing from RSS is much efficient than the legacy method of logging into Blogger, publishing the template and extracting from there. But of course, a simple change on the RSS output and the importer will not work 😉

Why WordPress

For those who are still thinking whether or not to migrate from Blogger to WordPress, here’s a good insight by Anita Campbell. Although it was written more than a year ago, it’s still relevant.

Blogger (non-beta) users will be able to use the built-in import function and while you’re at that you might want to take a look at this best practices when moving from Blogger to WordPress, by Tom Sherman.

For Blogger Beta, you can use the script I wrote and still use the same technique described by Tom so that permalinks to your blogger pages will be redirected to your new WordPress site. I have not tried it yet, and since I am sleepy coming back from night shift I think I’ll let you try it and let me know 😉

See ya around.

First Blogger Beta Import

Following the post Import Blogger Beta to WordPress, here is a working example after an import.

Before: homemakerdiary.blogspot.com (Blogger)
After: www.homemakerdiary.com (WordPress)

hmd.jpg

(Images are imported using the plugin mentioned earlier)

P/S – to my current one and only web development client, I am doing this as a hobby during breaks. Please be assured that the real work is progressing well and hopefully by Christmas we can launch it 🙂

Import Blogger Beta to WordPress

This page is outdated. Please click here for the update. Comments are closed on this post.

As I have not heard anything about the solution to this problem, I wrote a script. This script is a simple but powerful 😉 script which extracts the posts and comments from RSS feeds at blogger.com.

Instructions:

Copy the script to your main WordPress directory and run it (http://your.name/blogger-beta-import.php). The options are self-explanatory. This means you can customize the category and user before importing.

Warning:

This script represents a security hazard if left on the server. Once you are finished, delete it. Don’t even rename or save a copy on the server. The script does not honor WordPress authentication and checks, but utilizes some of WordPress’ functions.

Limitations:

  • No handling of images (stay on blogger server)
  • Comments will have the names but not email or URL – limitation with RSS from Blogger
  • Unlikely to work if you use other comment systems
  • You need to enable RSS feed for comments – very important!

As for images, they will stay in blogger.com but I suggest you download them at once to your server as Blogger does not allow hot-linking (images will be blocked). You don’t have to do it one by one, you can use this plugin by Notions: Blogger Image Import. I’ve tried it and it worked well. One thing is that it depends on CURL to download images – servers without this extension will not execute the script. Let me know as I have a workaround for this, provided that your PHP version is later than 4.3.0.

Continue reading Import Blogger Beta to WordPress

PayPerPost Requires Disclosure

Mike Arrington of Techcrunch revealed on Saturday that PayPerPost will require bloggers to disclose that the post is a paid post. It can be done on the individual post, or site-wide using a disclosure policy.

In October when PayPerPost created DisclosurePolicy, Mike stated that he hopes not many bloggers will go along with PayPerPost. I understand his concerns about blogsphere and public trust, but if bloggers dont just jump to take every opportunity they see, we can still withhold the integrity of blogsphere.

Nevertheless, PayPerPost is a good form of blog advertising and helps many bloggers to earn an extra income, at least to cover the hosting expense while doing what they like – to write. Bloggers need to remember though, that they should write only on what they believe is true. I believe readers will be able to detect if the blogger is sincere or just writing for money!

This is a paid post.

Casino Royale

As mentioned earlier I went to watch Casino Royale earlier tonight. The movie is alright, but can be better.

What I like:

  • The starting montage is indeed suitable and gives me the feel that this is a Bond movie.
  • Bond’s weakness is as usual – women.
  • No SPECTRE – frankly I’m tired of that shit, plus Blofeld.

What I don’t like:

  • The theme song is less catchy than the previous movies.
  • The fights are too barbaric and too real.
  • Bond is too serious, emotionless most of the times except when he was with Vesper in the shower.
  • The crook was killed to easily, and not by Bond.
  • Where’s Q?
  • Where’s the fully equiped Aston Martin?

My wife seems to think that I watch too much of the older movies and she actually enjoyed the new one more.

I’ll add up the list if I find anything else I left out. 😉