河國榮, An Aussie in Hong Kong

For the past 6 months, I've tussled with trying to set up a reliable backup system for my digital photographs and film scans. I have been scanning my photographic film with a film scanner at 4000 dpi. The raw images are around 130MB each and it takes a long time to scan a whole roll of film. My 200GB external drive had numerous scanned images on it and the last thing I wanted was a hard disk failure. A backup was of the utmost importance.

People using computers today are working more and more with digital photos, movies and music and all of these require massive amounts of disk space. Archiving these for protection is not easy. Tape drives are expensive. RAID 5 towers are probably the best option but are also too expensive. That leaves DVD because CDs are too small to consider.

I've been an addict for quite some time, and not just to one thing either. I've been drinking coffee for several years and usually have to drink at least one cup every day, sometimes two or three cups every day. Off and on, I've also been a TV addict, and I'm probably a dog addict but that's still up for discussion. My biggest and worst addiction though has been my computer!

While others get addicted to surfing on the internet or playing online games or participating in online MUDs (are they still around?), I'm simply addicted to my computer whether I'm surfing, checking email, scanning photographs or watching videos. Every morning when I wake up, the first thought that comes into my head is whether there is any email for me even though I receive very few non-spam emails. All through the day, rather than consider useful things to do, it's much easier to sit down in front of the computer and find stuff to do. You can waste countless hours putting all of your computer files in order.

This is a heads up for those of you who might want to leave comments in Chinese. It's not a problem. I can comfortably read Chinese and even reply in Chinese if necessary.

A few days ago, I began looking at the way my blog was styled and considered methods of improving it or at least making it look nicer. I'm a perfectionist in many ways so placing style information within the actual web page was not the way to go. Instead, I used style sheets (technically known as Cascading Style Sheets or CSS for short). They're similar to the way text styles work in word processors. They were developed by the World Wide Web consortium as a way to simplify and centralise the visual design of web pages but took a very long time to be fully embraced by the web community at large. These days, we're looking at version three of the CSS standard and other than Internet Explorer, almost every browser is on board to fully support the standard soon.

Many people know that I'm an avid user of Apple computers. I've been using Apple computers since around 1989 when I purchased my first Apple computer, the IIci. Actually, it wasn't my first Apple computer. The first Apple computer I ever owned was a IIe purchased, used and sold back in 1983 before the first Macintosh was ever released.

These days, I'm using a 'desklamp' iMac with a 17" screen, running Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther". It's very solid. Applications almost never crash and when they do, they have no affect on other applications running at the same time. At this very moment, I have only seven applications running, but there are usually in excess of 15 applications running at any time including email, web browser, text editors and photograph processing applications.

I've just spent the better part of two days working to make some of my blog available to people with 'handheld devices'; ie, mobile phones.

People could already view my blog from their mobile phones just the way it was but it would be expensive and slow because the blog is large.

Some people have smaller screens than others. My screen is 1440 pixels wide. Many people only have 1024 pixels to play with. Someone once commented in my blog that the centre column was too narrow. When hopefully that's been solved now with a new layout option.

There are now two layout options: a 3-column layout, and a 2-column layout.

To switch, scroll down until you can see the XHTML and CSS buttons in either the right or left column. Just above the buttons, you'll see a simple statement: "Switch to 3-Col layout" or "Switch to 2-Col layout" depending on which layout you're currently looking at. Click on the statement and your layout will change instantly.

Enjoy.

Hello friends.

Just a reminder that you can always the read the latest eight articles in a skinny inexpensive format from your handheld device (ie, mobile phone) by surfing to http://www.hokwokwing.hk/handheld/.

Commenting from handheld devices is not possible yet but if anyone wants it, I'll try and add it asap.

My apologies to those of you waiting and hoping for new articles from me. I've been very busy over the last few weeks with computer upgrades and developments. I've also spent considerable time watching Dragon Ball Z and am currently spending every night at TVB working on a new series in which I only have a few scenes but because of the martial arts involved; I'm not the one fighting; require an exorbitant amount of time filming every night from five or six in the afternoon through to five or six in the early morning.

It is quite normal for me to require a rest after a period of being very busy. The computer upgrades and work I've done over the last few weeks took a lot out of me and I've not had the mental energy to write anything for the blog. I'll place more articles here soon. I promise.

Some of you may have already noticed. I've now added captions to my images. I think it's far superior to relying on Image Title parameters (ie, the Tool Tip text popups you usually see) and adds value to the images. I've been developing them for quite some time but couldn't get the images to centre on the page until today when a couple of nice people on the css discussion list gave me pointers. The web community is truly a great and helpful place.

I don't know how they look in IE but they look great in Opera, FireFox, Safari and OmniWeb.

On Wednesday, I did an interview with the folks over at moShow where they specialise in podcasts and mocasts (I'm not sure if they're the same. Podcasts are supposed to be audio-only because current iPods; where the podcast name comes from; cannot play video whereas mocasts; ie, Mobile-casts; can be played on mobile cameras where video is possible.).

Anyway, I talked my head off and they had enough material for three episodes. The first episode is already available so if you're interested, head on over to moShow and listen in. The other episodes will become available on the coming two Thursdays.

Note. The interviews are in Cantonese.

Say goodbye to television as you know it.

Just as PodCasts are allowing absolutely everybody to make and distribute their own radio shows, VideoCasts are also allowing the ordinary people to make and distribute videos. No longer will what we can see on TV be controlled by the rich television companies. No longer will we be forced to watch the Olympic Games because every single available channel is showing them.

My wife and I looked at the new Motorola ROKR iTunes phone today here in Hong Kong. We weren't impressed. The plastic used to build the phone was... too plastic! I wondered if it would survive even a single drop to the ground.

My wife who has been using a Nokia 8310 since I can't remember when decided to buy the Sony Ericsson W800i instead. While almost twice the price of the ROKR, I don't think we made the wrong choice and I'm sure it'll work well for her for many years to come.

And it's fully supported by Mac OS X's iSync so what else can I say.

A week ago, I had finally decided on what I wanted in my online photo albums. I wanted a design that was simple to use and simple to look at, a design that would show off my photographs rather than distract from them. In html terms, to me, this meant a single page with controls to view the thumbnails and navigate between photographs, a single page without the flashes of multiple page reloads. I knew exactly what I wanted.

So I sat down and began on the design. Structure first; i.e., html, or in my case, xhtml. There was no style information in the structure. It was pure structure, the way xhtml is supposed to be. It looked good and straight forward. Then the style. CSS. I've done a lot of css work over the past year while I've worked on my blog, changing, improving and developing the blog's design. I've become quite familiar with css but I refuse to bow down to tweaking my css for the sake of arrogant egotistic non-compliant browsers. Writing the css for the photo album was not a piece of cake, but it wasn't difficult either.

iTunes changed the music landscape around the world, even in places where people were unable to purchase music from the iTunes store because their address was not within an authorised country. Before iTunes, people only had two choices for music; buy it at a music store, or download it from an unauthorised source on the internet. Once iTunes proved to the world that people would legally buy digitised (and medium rip quality at that) music if given the chance, other companies began working out how they could join the bandwagon and divert some of that new money into their own bank accounts.

iTunes allowed people to buy music from a corporately condoned online source. It allowed people to easily search for and sample music before buying it, and in the process allowed consumers to expand their music horizons, discovering new musicians and new genres of music, including those not affiliated with the big record labels. Most significantly perhaps, iTunes has also had a permanent affect on the music business itself.

Ok. The blog is back on line on its new home in a new server.

I had to move the blog. There were one or two functions I needed which were once available on TypePad and then taken away; too complicated to discuss here except to say that if I didn't write anything for awhile, the main blog page would gradually shrink until nothing showed except for the sidebars. That won't happen now.

Additionally, I'll be setting up two new blogs. One will be specifically for bird watching so that those of you not interested in my bird photographs won't have to look at them; something akin to being forced to look at a friend's huge collection of baby photos. The other blog will be the story of our pets.

Both blogs are NOT online yet. In fact, I haven't even begun to design them. I've had trouble contributing to this blog recently (busy and sick) so I hope I can find the time to contribute to all three.

In the meantime, feel free to look around as usual and email me if you find any errors in the blog; eg, bad links or missing photographs.

Regards,
Gregory

A couple of weeks ago, I finally sold one of my Canon lenses, a high quality 85mm/1.2L lens that still looks and operates as well as the day I purchased it. This was my first eBay transaction and it was a learning experience. It took four auctions before I was able to sell the lens at a price I could be comfortable with. eBay made a lot of money out of me but at least I now have some funding to buy a lens that will be more relevant to the wildlife photos I'm taking these days.

I was lucky. The person who won the auction for my lens (a fellow Australian nonetheless) transferred the money to my PayPal account less than an hour after the conclusion of the auction. There was no doubt about getting the money. In return for their promptness, I packaged and shipped the lens the same day. The buyer was very happy.

But not everyone is lucky and there are many many shysters on eBay.

As some of you might be aware, the notification system I was using before wasn't working very reliably. I personally had two different email addresses registered with the system but rarely received a notice whenever a new article was added to my blog. Not good!

So I did some searching and found a plugin for MovableType that adds notification capabilities. The plugin is called MT-Notifier and while it's not perfect, it's still very good.

After installing MT-Notifier and testing it a little, I copied the email addresses from the old Bloglet subscription list and added all of those addresses to the new notification system. If you were on the Bloglet list, you should have received a new Notifier confirmation email sometime today. Simply click on the confirmation link in the email and you'll automatically receive www.hokwokwing.hk update notices in the future.

One of the nice things about MT-Notifier is that you can now subscribe to a single article and get notices every time someone (including me) writes a comment for that article. I think those of you who like to comment or question my articles will like this function. To get notices whenever new comments are added to an article, simply turn on the Receive notices whenever new comments are added to this article checkbox at the bottom of the comment form before you submit your comment.

If any of you have problems or suggestions regarding the new notifications, please email me.

Sometimes you get lucky…

The week before last, just as I was leaving home to go to TVB, I noticed a butterfly in the Christmas trees. The colours struck me immediately and I raced back inside to get my camera. Opportunities like these come once in a lifetime.

The result was a wonderful photograph which looks even better when enlarged.

For those of you who find it difficult to remember my web site's domain, I have registered another one. You can now use either www.hokwokwing.hk or www.gregory.hk. Both domains work equally well for web and email (although the RSS feeds will always refer to hokwokwing.hk for the time being).

I have applied for yet another two domains. I'll let you know when they've been confirmed; quite possibly next week ;-)

After finishing "They're Playing Our Song", I needed rest. My vocal chords needed rest. More than a week before the show began, my chords had begun to inflame. I had worked them too hard with strenuous vocal exercises in the mornings followed by rehearsals every day for 8 weeks. When my chords began to feel tight, I consulted my doctor and was informed that my chords were inflaming. I halted the morning vocal exercises but it was too late. For the entire week that we performed "They're Playing Our Song", my chords were straining through every single show. I was only able to perform successfully and get through the ordeal by not speaking between shows, taking anti-inflammatories at night before sleep and using a Japanese powder known as 龍角散 'Dragon Horn Powder' before each show. Still, my vocal chords suffered tremendously; especially during those shows when our microphones weren't working; and they needed rest. I needed to shut up.

The week after the show, I couldn't completely abstain from talking. My parents were here and I don't get many opportunities to be with them so chatting with them was a blessing not to be ignored. Only after they had left Hong Kong and returned to Australia could I really allow my vocal chords to relax; no singing and as little talking as possible.

No talking meant no going out to eat and chat with friends. It meant staying at home.

My blog is a MovableType blog developed by Six Apart Ltd. They also have other blog systems. They're a very smart company. You can read about their products on their web site. Like many other systems, MovableType allows you to add functionality via plugins.

One such plugin designed to implement threaded comments is called MTSimplyThreaded which I installed and experimented with. It could link comments to other comments but it couldn't produce a hierarchical comment scheme so it wasn't what I wanted.

I'm blown away by the Apple iTunes system.

I'm getting myself organised for a musical future, and part of that involved converting and importing into iTunes all of the Karaoke VCDs and DVDs we have in the house. When the tracks become part of the system, they're easily accessible, and they'll get listened to. The process of converting and importing the Karaoke tracks took three days of AppleScript scripting to automate and process, along with lots of Chinese typing, but I now have more than 700 karaoke tracks; both audio and video; in my iTunes library. Being a perfectionist, I then proceeded to correct the data for the tracks in my library, and create playlists (unrated, not played within the last month, ≤xGB) that I could use on our Apple TV and iPhones.