My wish for 2008

Is that I'd get a project where I don't need to touch ASP.NET or JavaScript or fiddle (something people use the less polite word f*ck) with AJAX for a whole year!

Of course, one doesn't always get what one wants.

jliu

My register lost johnliu.net domain and didn't even tell me

I don't know if I had blogged this before, anyway, I've owned johnliu.net for a couple of years.  In 2006, It expired into redemption period (because I've changed email and didn't follow my old email address, my bad).  But I was able to save it in time.

In 2007, it again expired, but this time I received no email notification from the domain register.

They were not able to re-secure my domain, so now it's parked by some evil domain squatter.

The register gave me john-liu.net for free.  But it sucks when you can't trust your register to remind you that your domain is expiring.  (The same register seem to send me a lot of spam mail promoting their SEO technology).

I think this year, I'm going to go for an external host and have john-liu.net redirected there.  I'll probably keep using spaces for blogging.

Update on 2009-05-19 13:52 by JohnLiu.NET

Hey didn't you lose your johnliu.net - how did you get it back?

The trick is to not advertise your website.

You see, when I had johnliu.net I tried hosting my own blog, CMS, Wiki...  but the server I used at home was a bit on the crap side and I always suspected that script kiddies are out there hacking my machine at home.

At the end, I just leave that machine off for long stretches of time.  All requests to that server automatically fails.

I still held the domain, but it never lead to anywhere.  
It even fell off google.  (this actually was a bigger lost I feel at the time)

So because no one was really visiting the site, when the squatters got it - they didn't keep it after the intial (I assume 'free' period).  They let it expire, and my register was able to lock it and hold it for me.

In summary, I got lucky.

Now that I'm more serious about the domain again - I better not let it expire like last time.

December 2007

Is gone.  Lina and I went to New Zealand for a visit, with our unborn child (the little guy is probably sleeping through the whole trip). 

I don't know if I expected NZ to change a lot, I feel it changed, but not much.  One Tree Hill is no more, there is no tree now, and the whole place is just the Park Summit.

No more George Pie.

Auckland Grammar School has about 4 or 5 more buildings which is kind of crazy.

My old place is still there, but it's now inhabited by strangers who has planted new and strange plants in the garden.

The road to Cape Reinga is being resurfaced and they've removed the shop (and the post office).  There is a mail box though, but stuck between two Portable-Loos it's just not the same.

We still had heaps of fun.  Thanks NZ.

jliu

Using Windows Live Writer now

After a bit of hiccups with installing windows live (the live version) as opposed to the beta I was using.  I'm glad to report that it is now working properly (as this post should hopefully prove).

What is hakia and why should I care

I was reading my web ad's again (because I turned adblock off - I'll talk about that some other time).
There's this ad that hits me again and again.

"Can't find what you're searching for on Google?  Try Hakia"

My first impression is great another startup throwing money away...  you are 10 years behind Google.  Give up!

Curiosity got the better of me, so I searched on Google with this exact phrase:
"What is hakia and why should I care"

Google didn't have an answer for me, but it pointed me to a few Hakia websites which I didn't want to go read (after all it's just marketing rubbish written to suck venture capitalists' blood and money dry!).  I also found a link on readwriteweb.  What other people think, now that's far more juicier.

I didn't manage to get past the first sentence when my imagination ran wild.  The magic word?  Semantic Web.

Back in my university days, there was all this talk about the semantic web.  Idea is simple really.

• Web (http) is designed for people
• Web will become overloaded with information
• Machine agents will be necessary to search our results for human queries
  
• Web is hard for machines to understand
• For this to happen, we need either:
  • A really powerful/fast natural language processing system to translate web information on the fly
  • Or someone bored enough to go around tagging all the web data with xml-based RDF's
    

Of course, Google happened, and people realized they didn't need semantic web... for another 10 years.  There's always the problem of finding answers to really obscure queries that you might have.  Usually, we just blame ourselves for not knowing how to type the Google query.

Try this one.

"who is the first man on the moon"
http://hakia.com/search.aspx?q=who+is+the+first+man+on+the+moon
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=who+is+the+first+man+on+the+moon&btnG=Google+Search

Hakia at this stage feels REALLY limited.  It doesn't seem to understand a lot of stuff or have answers to many things.  I imagine this is because it hasn't indexed/parsed enough content - what I would like to see is this:

1. Don't fight Google head on - I don't think this can be won in 10 years.  I think they need some big guys behind their back to go directly against Google...  Ask Jeeves... I think isn't big enough.
   
2. Open up the RDF data to machine queries - sell them to volume users like Google, MS, Yahoo, etc.  I'm sure lots of people will be very interested.  Hey Yahoo bought their search from Google for a long time!
   
3. Stay relevant enough and long enough so that semantic web might actually take off.
   

Haha anyway, my love is for the semantic web, not necessarily for Hakia.  But good luck to them for pulling this off.  The web depends on somebody getting down and do this stuff.

Here's what wikipedia has to say about Semantic Web