Monthly Archives: March 2004

adopt a blog

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in response to china’s second major block on blogging service typepad.com (last time is to blogspot.com and it’s still blocked), someone came up with the idea of adopt a blog to promote freedom of speech. the idea is simple. if you own a private domain, you can host those blogs that are blocked. that way the chinese government can no longer block a bunch of sites by blocking one domain host.

i really enjoy the idea. unfortunately i can only host one or two blogs due to limited space. if you want to participate in the project to promote freedom of speech visit this site!

Support Adopt a Blog

i'm accepted to the graduate school

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my professor said the department has decided to accept me to the graduate school even tho i haven’t taken GRE yet. i can take the test as late as the fall semester. but i do want to take it this summer. not too much can go wrong now. starting the fall semester i will be getting a full scholarship for the tuition for 5 years plus TA or RA for a monthly wage studying toward a Ph.D in management science. i’m sooooooooo happy :) things seem to have settled quite fast :)

it’s SNOWING today; can you believe it? and i thought it’s going to be warm and wore sandles.

stop all the banning

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by changing the background of my site to black i’m joining the protest against china’s banning on personal websites.

All typepad.com and blogs.com hosted sites are banned in China starting this morning, a week after China has agreed to amend its constitution to respect human rights. This is another move by the Central government to curb free speech and freedom of information on the Internet. This is the first time in two years that China has blocked access to foreign servers that host personal sites. (Correction SECOND time in two years as the last event was in Jan 2003)
read more at glutter’s

sadly, for my presentation on the internet censorship in china next thursday, i have more stuff to add.

imperfect google

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as i’ve argued before, google’s algorithm is imperfect.. here’s another discussion of its down side.

the search results as well as the news results (since on their faq page they said the news follows the search algorithm closely) are ranked by page ranks.

PAGE RANK DEFINED: Condensed version
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

if links are “votes” by google’s algorithm, the author brought up an interesting point of distinguishing positive vote from negative vote to improve the algorithm. obviously not every time you link someone is to praise them.

google’s popularity oriented algorithm has caused other problems. but when it’s apparently helping to spread China’s one-sided tightly controlled news source, it can’t be good.

what's big right now

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is taiwan’s election. something that does affect mainland china and possibly the relationship between US and China. but it’s kind funny how this whole thing is filled with conspiracy (reminds me of the last election in america). it definitely made the top news for quite a few days. it seems to be a big mess but i agree people’s reaction is demonstrating great democracy. despite the outcries and disapproval, it seems chen shui-bian had won again. chen’s all for taiwan’s independence but he’s lost much support over the past four years. i like how corbett puts it, people want change, but they also want stability. what will be the future for taiwan and mainland’s problem and what role will the US play in it? it’s such a mystery.

here’s a great blog post concerning the election

analysis about the shooting

interesting article
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new theme: tulip

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i think this theme looks quite soothing. i love the header image :) i learned a few new tricks while putting together this theme. first i made the cloudy tiled background with photoshop.

make cloudy tiled background
1. create a new image. i used 250x250px. you can go whatever. fill the image with the color you like. i used medium grey.
2. filter -> render -> clouds that will create a cloudy looking image
3. filter -> other -> offset make sure you have warp around checked
mine turned out to be pretty seamless with just minor imperfection. i corrected it with smudge tool. ideally the offset warp around trick should work for making any tiled backgrounds but i haven’t tried.

i also learned a new css trick.

another css trick
thought it’s kinda cool to make the first letter of the body of your text unique. do something like:

.just:first-letter {
 font-size: 200%;
 text-transform: uppercase;
 font-family: Georgia;
 font-weight: bold;
 color: #C89F40;
}

for me the first letter included in <div class=”just”> and </div> will look different than others. you may also use it for paragraph tag like:

p:first-letter {
/* your definition */
}

cleartype and drop shadow don't mix

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While surfing around the internet, sometimes you may come to a website with appearantly nasty looking, unreadable fonts.. well, let me guess, you are probably using IE and that the designer has probably used dropshadow filter in their css for their fonts.

why is that? this is because you have cleartype turned on for your computer.

for example: you might see something like
http://regretless.com/buttons/others/cleartype_ss.gif

well many other people who DON’T have the cleartype function turned on will see something like:
http://regretless.com/buttons/others/cleartype_no_ss.gif

what exactly is cleartype?
to put it in my simple terms: it’s a function on your computer that allows you to see fonts in anti-aliased forms. read more about cleartype here

How do you Turn ClearType on/off?

1. Right-click your desktop and select Properties.
2. Select the Appearance tab, and press the Effects button.
3. Check the box next to the words labeled “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts,” and select the option you want from the drop-down box.
4. Close the Effects dialog by clicking OK, and click Apply to complete the process.

my idea to fight referral spam

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today i was trying to remove the referral spams i’ve been getting. i found there are so many that it will be way too time consuming to remove them manually. while i do not want to completely rid of my referral script, i can no longer stand all the horrible porno referral spams i’ve gotten. i’ve been thinking about an efficient script to prevent them. many people have already talked about different ways to fight them. [referral spam removal] but i just think making a block list is too tedious. so i thought of a different idea. i will share this idea and some php code with you but this might or might not be what you want to do. the appoarch will increase your bandwidth. i installed it today so i don’t know how much bandwidth it will eat up. we will see.
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