妈妈的博客

Blog，不知道让谁给翻译成了博客， 在国内现在是火一样的热。其实说起来博客也算是古董了，记得上大二时，看到有同学写blog，觉得很新鲜，当时也不知道是什么，总之觉得和网上日记差不多。那时在同学的帮助下也建立了自己的blog。因为当时还没有像现在这样的blog服务网站，所以当时还要自己找服务器，装blog系统，建立数据库，设计首页等等。那时觉得这是搞电脑人的专利。

4年过去了，大家都在blog了。

今天晚上，我帮妈妈也建立了一个blog，因为她经常读别人的博客，我觉得她也应该有写的欲望。因为我当时就是这样觉得的。

今晚和她视频聊天时，又谈到了为什么我不用中文博客。其实原因有很多，最主要的原因就是中文太难打了。我今晚和她讲，打英文是打5，6个字母就是一个词，可是打中文时打5，6个字母只是一个字，而且打完之后还要在一堆字里挑你要的字，等到挑好字了思路也没了。还有就是英文很简单。英文和中文比整个这个语言就简单得很多。想东西的时候思路很顺，不用怎样考虑用词和语法。就好比西方人，见了张三就叫他张三，而国人就要按年龄和地位而分了：小张，老张，张叔叔，张伯伯，张爷爷，张经理，张处长，张副总裁兼党委书记。。。累。

但是土生土长的中国人用英文是不能表达百分之百的情绪的，但是现在看来，7年不说汉语，我用中文也表达不清了。

总之这是一个好的开端，人总是要表达的，要说的话憋在肚子里会生虫子。而且博客给了每个人一个平等的机会去做一次作家的梦，不管你是谁。

当然，如果你是名人，即便写得再烂，也还是会有成千上万的人去读的。

Found the bug

One of the reasons I switched to this new theme was because my old one was kinda buggy. Many times it would cut off on the left side of the text. It was very annoying and I had no clue why, wishing that by changing theme I can get rid of this problem.

Little did I know that the new theme didn’t help much either, the problem was still there, and this time not only it cuts off on the left side of text, it even dropped my side bar where it contained all my archives and links.

So I decided to look into it and try to figure out what is going on. After 2 nights of checking and testing, I finally found out the problem was caused by an “&“. You might wonder what I am talking about. Well, to understand what I am saying you have to have some programing knowledge. It’s kinda like the escape character in C#/C++. One of my URLs I included in my blog contains an “&” (ampersand), I didn’t really pay attention and left it there. Turns out the HTML took it as a operator rather than a character. What I should have used is , which displays an “&” (ampersand) on the webpage.

A good resourse to use is http://validator.w3.org/. It can validate your XHTML code and point out the errors for you, sort of like a debugger, very handy.

Kind of a dumb problem, but I am really happy that I figured it out. On another look, this also shows that WordPress is yet to mature up as a blogging platform. Each blog entry should act like an individule container, errors made in the a single blog entry should affect that entry only, instead of messing up the entire site.

A step-by-step guide on how to play music and video on MSN Space

After reading jojo’s comment, I started looking into how to play music or video on MSN Space, it’s not the easiest thing to do, but there’s a way to do it. Just in case I have other friends that wanna do this but don’t know how, I decided to create a step-by-step guide for this task. Hopefully it will be easy to follow, otherwise please let me know.

Before we start, I’d like to state the MSN Space Official Policy here, make sure you read this first and knowing that you are responsible for your own Space.

IMPORTANT

• This feature is to be used for authorized content only. Please respect the creative efforts and intellectual property of others, and do not link to unauthorized materials. Linking to unauthorized material is a violation of the law, and of the MSN Spaces Code of Conduct.
• Please note that the Windows Media Player PowerToy is available in English only and is not supported by Microsoft. Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer questions about PowerToys.

The Microsoft Windows Media Player PowerToy enables your viewers to watch or listen to authorized personal media files you have linked to. You can customize the experience by adjusting Windows Media Player settings, such as auto start, times to play, and player mode.

To play authorized audio or videos on your space, you must first download the Windows Media Player PowerToy onto your space. Then you must add the URL of the authorized personal content you want to play to the player on your space. You cannot add or store your personal audio or video clips on your space, you can only play authorized personal content that exists on the Web.

To play authorized content on your space, you have these choices:

• Create a website that includes links to your authorized audio or video clips.
• Use an audio or video hosting website to upload your own audio or video clips. See the instructions at that website for determining the URL of your clips.

From the official policy, you can see that MSN Space does not allow you to upload music, however, you can play the music that’s already on the web.

1. So the first step is to upload your music onto the web, so your MSN Space can point to it. To do this, you have 2 ways:
   1. If you have a personal web server, like me, you can upload your music there and get the URL of the file. For example, if I upload bg.mp3 on my server, the URL would be: http://espressoo.com/bg.mp3
   2. If you don’t have a web server, then you can register for a free one at Yahoo. I think you can use your existing Yahoo account information. The free account will give you about 15MB storage and 3GB data transfer rate per month. That means if your mp3 file is 3MB each, you can store about 5 songs on there, and you can play for about 1000 times per month. If this is the way you are doing, make sure you find out about the mp3 file’s URL (link).
2. After you uploaded your song onto the web, now we can start working on the MSN Space part.
   1. First of all, go to your MSN Space and Sign In. In my case, I would go to: http://spaces.msn.com/espressoo/ and then click on the button to sign in.
   2. After signing in, you will notice that the URL has changed to: http://spaces.msn.com/espressoo/P
      ersonalSpace.aspx?_c01_blogpart=m
      yspace_c02_owner=1&_c=blogpart
   3. Now add &powertoy=musicvideo to the end of the displayed URL.
   4. So now your URL becomes: http://spaces.msn.com/espressoo/P
      ersonalSpace.aspx?_c01_blogpart=m
      yspace&_c02_owner=1&_c=bl
      ogpart&powertoy=musicvideo
   5. In the web browser, click the Go button next to the address line, and then wait for your space to reload.
   6. After reloading, click on Customize on the upper right side.
   7. Then click on Modules, you will now notice that there’s a PowerToy: Windows Media Player option, click Add.
   8. Click Save.
   9. Now you can configure the module:
      1. Enter the URL of your music file, notice here it supports a variety of file formats. In my case I will enter http://espressoo.com/bg.mp3
      2. I am not sure what Position in sec. means, but I don’t think we need to change that, just leave it as the default, 0.
      3. Times to play means how many times you wanna play the music.
      4. Rate to play means how fast you wanna play the music, leave it as the default 1 to play at normal speed.
      5. Auto Start means whether you want the music to start playing by itself or you want the user to click Play to play it. If you are using this as the background music, then you should check Auto Start.
      6. Display Mode has 4 options: Invisible hides the entire module, so the users won’t see the windows media player, but the music will play in the background. So if you are using this as the background music, you can choose Invisible. But the user won’t be able to stop the music since the module is invisiable. None determines whether to show the windows media player control buttons, when you choose None, it will still show the module with the visual effects, but it will hide the control buttons. Mini and Full determines whether to show the mini set or the full set of the control buttons.
      7. Right Click Menus determines when a user right clicks this module, whether to show a menu or not.
   10. After you have configured all this, click Save to save your settings.
3. You can play around with the settings and find the best combinations for your site.
4. To play videos, you probably don’t wanna set it to Invisible. But the rest of the settings should be the same.
5. Depends on your Space’s theme and layout, you can drag this module around for a better position on the web page. The size will also change if you put it in the side bar for example.

That’s basically it, now when you go to my Space, you will hear the background music, but you won’t see the player since I set it to Invisiable.

I am sure I must have missed something in the instructions, if so, please let me know.

By the way, the background music is quite nice, isn’t it?

The End.

New Get a Mac TV Ads

Apple has recently posted their new Tv ads for Mac. I saw 2 of them on TV last night, didn’t realize that there are actually 6 of them and posted on their website. Check it out, they are pretty funny, I like the “Network” one the most. Hahaha…

 Too bad I am still using a PC…I need a Mac…

New MSN.com

Do you like the new MSN.com? Looks OK to me, but it is a lot more streamlined than before.

A New RSS Reader

Not sure if you use a RSS reader, but if you write blogs, you’d better learn about what RSS is. For a better definition, you can go to Wikipedia.

Let me give you a simple example, say you have 10 friends that write blogs. How long would it take you to go to their sites and read their blogs? How do you know who has updated their blogs and who hasn’t without going to their site? If this seems impossible for you, then you might wanna get to know what RSS is.

Well, you can imagine your blog as a radio station, and the RSS is the radio wave. It publishes the content you wrote and send them out. For someone to be able to listen to the radio station, they’ll need a radio. That is a RSS Reader. The RSS feed also has an address, which tells the reader where to look for. With a RSS Reader, the contents of blogs come to you, rather than you go to various sites and look for them. As you can see, it saves you A LOT of time.

After you learn all about RSS, I got 2 suggestions for you on RSS Readers. There are a lot of choices out there, but I like RSS Bandit and Feedreader the best. Both are free.