The Kindness Chain

Has someone just given you an act of kindness? Thank that person. That person might have just received kindness from someone else, and thus has passed the kindness baton onto you.

The kindness baton is now with you. What will you do?

Pass it on?

Keep it for yourself?

Questions! Questions! Is there even a need for questions? The power to change lies in you. Pass on, make a better world. Keep it, the world just gotten a little dull.

Pass on that baton to another person. When the other person thanks you for it, say this: "Do the same kindness to another person". Let the other person decide whether to pass the baton or not. You have done your part of complete the kindness chain.

Finally! Categories

Ok, so I have finally added categories into my blog so that I can properly categorised my blog post. More than just administrative, it's so that I can put up the menu up there and have you sort out the post. Plus, I like things organised. And if I'm going to get any advertising agencies for my site to earn a tiny income from here, I need to have proper site maps.

There's still a lot of things I want to work on for my little site. The most painful eye-sore is the site design. I really should start working on it. But then again, it's not my highest priority right now.

I'm considering a tick-tock improvement cycle for my site, somewhat similar to how Intel implements their tick-tock model, shifting from working on shrinking their transistors to working on a better microarchitecture, and back again. So I'm going to implement something like that, shifting from implementing site improvements on existing items, to implementing something new on my site, which I will share how I did that new thing to the world.

Interestingly, Intel is not going to use that tick-tock model anymore, instead, opting for "process-architecture-optimization" cycle. Moore's law is in trouble.

Right, so on to what I'm going to work on next. Maybe https for my site?

Improving my little site

Ok, so I've been spending the past few days trying to improve the site at the back. This is very important as the content that is generated on the front depends a lot on what was at the back. The system behind the blog posts were not correctly rendering <br /> properly. So I had to dig deeper to find out why my /n is not properly converted.

Turns out, the way the wiki text parser is treats every line break as a new line to parse, thus totally ignoring my regex that needs to read the /n symbol. Thus I had to do hackish methods make line breaks work.

It works out now properly.
Like!
This!
Tada!

And the previous posts are now rendering line breaks properly too.

The best teachers

Today I came across a very nice quote:

The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.

- Alexandra K. Trenfor

Now, how true that. When you are learning about technology, there always this strange catch at the back of your head: When will this piece of knowledge go outdated?

Technology moves at an incredible pace. What you learn today will eventually become obselete in a couple of years. In some cases, months.

As a teacher myself, I never provide my students answers to the questions they have. Only pointing them at the right directions for them to seek the answer. In some cases, I ended up learning along side with them.

You see, the skill of acquiring knowledge is more important than the knowledge itself. Knowledge is an object; you can get it, you can lose it. But the skill to acquire knowledge stays with you till the end.

When it comes to technology, such a skill is arguably the most important skill of all. It is the skill that allows you to stay relevant in the midst of a fast changing environment.

Hello and Welcome

Hello!

It's my first blogpost in a very long time. But this time round, it is hosted on my very own site. It's my own domain, my own server, and my own application. No, I'm not using Wordpress or Joomla. Although they are great softwares, I decided to write my very own. Why? Because this is who I am.

I'm sure most of you who know me, know that I write my own programmes. I live and breathe technology. (Not really but you know what I mean)
When I first started doing websites, I started by using my own blog. It all started with simple HTML. Then CSS. Then Javascript. Back then, there wasn't any fancy HTML5 we have today. It was just plain HTML4.01.

Today, I still want to carry on with that method of learning. By writing my own blog. But this time round, it's up another level. Many levels actually. For example, I am practically administrating the linux that runs this site, administrating the hardware-related things like LVM, administrating the LAMP stack, the website statistics, the PHP that made this site work. To say that I have grown in knowledge, I would say that is an understatement. I've leveled up! Yet at the same time, it's merely the tip of the iceberg.

My pursuit in technology has increased my curiosity. I'm not satisfied with what I know. I want to know more. Yet there is a certain danger to that. Knowledge in itself isn't useful if it isn't applied, in many cases. What I want to do, is to bring value to the society with whatever I know. After all, the society does not reward individuals for what they know, but for what they contribute to the society.

In the following months, I'm going to take all my spare time to develop more applications for everyone to use. This blog will be quite a general site that features mostly me, my views, and my tech adventures. I'll be regularly improving the aesthetic and the functionalities of this blog.