Why indeed. From a writer’s point of view, XHTML is a pain, because it’s stricter than HTML. And a few (or many, depending on whether it’s XHTML Transitional or Strict) rules changed too.
All these for what ?

Even the crowd in Slashdot seems to be having problems getting a clear answer to this.

However, XHTML actually does have a huge benefit (in addition to other benefits listed in the discussion above) — it makes your website viewable on mobile devices.

PDA and smartphones nowadays are no longer a rarity. From teenagers to corporate executives, they’re now have and use them on daily basis. And browse the Internet with them.

And only more of them will browse the Internet from their mobile phones.
Even here in Indonesia, I can browse the internet freely using my Nokia 9500 with flat monthly fee of just about US$ 25. And I do browse a lot from my mobile phone

You definitely don’t want to alienate these people.

Adhering to XHTML makes it easy to make your website viewable from mobile devices; actually, pretty much from any browsers. You can even change the whole layout completely in a snap, literally.

So many websites nowadays are not getting traffic from us, mobile Internet users. Their websites are beautiful in Internet Explorer, but shows utter crap or plain nothing on our smartphones.
Don’t let your website to be one of those too !

I was trying to setup a “Save This” link so visitors can easily save any article into their del.icio.us account. However, it didn’t work.

After checking on Firefox’s Javascript console, I saw this error message : “missing ) after argument list“, pointing to the encodeURIComponent() function. It must be me, because after I contacted del.icio.us support, they said they never encountered error like this before. I probably should have informed them that I’m using Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Ubuntu, it might be specific to this configuration.

Anyway, the solution is to use these code instead :

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url=<?php rawurlencode(utf8_encode(the_permalink())) ?>&title=<?php rawurlencode(utf8_encode(the_title())) ?>” target=_blank><img src=”http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif”> Save This Page</a>

Hope it helps someone else out there.

Another interesting comment — it’s funny, but may also contain some truth in it. In any cases – spam suck.

Quoted from comment #16672295 :

Right now, spam goes past spam filters by including a large amount of random nonsense text that resembles English language reasonably well. So we will get spam filters that detect large amounts of random nonsense text. So spam will include text that makes actual sense. Give it twenty years, and your average spam email will consist of 300 pages of text that is better than anything Shakespeare has ever written, followed by two lines begging you to buy viagra. Thirty years, spam will be two hour Quicktime movies better than anything you can watch in the cinema today, with the hero using viagra bought from the spammer in the right places.

Anyway, the real solution to stop spam is to use multi-tiered filtering system.

Bayesian filter, captcha, blacklists, user-submission etc are no longer effective when used on their own. But when combined (example: SpamAssassin, Spam Karma 2), their effectiveness will goes up surprisingly high.

You’ll need to pay attention on the order of deployment though — incoming email should be received by the blacklist filter first. This will cut the number of spam tremendously, so other filtering engines (which are also more resource-hungry) won’t be overwhelmed / won’t overwhelm the server they’re on.
User-submission (example: razor) should be last, you don’t want to annoy your users too much really.

Cheatsheet (CS) is a / several page(s) of condensed information on certain topic, which acts as a quick reference. It’s very handy because it’s just a page with most of the information that you need already there. Remember your cheatsheets back then when you’re still at school ? Amazing isn’t how much information we all managed to cram on so little piece of paper 🙂
It’s basically the same, but these cheatsheet are not for school exams – they’re for life exams : our daily job.

Note that creating a good cheatsheet is no easy task. Some authors have donation links put up on their pages. Therefore, if you found anything useful (eg: saved you lots of time / it’s a lot of convenience / actually saved your butt), consider donating. The authors deserves it.

Here I’ll try to list all (good quality) cheatsheets on IT. If you see something missing, please feel free to comment, and I’ll add it. Thanks.

Continue reading TCCO : Cheat sheets :: IT →

At a glance, Annisa Rania Putri doesn’t seem to be a special girl. Born on 1999, there was nothing special on her birth as well, except that she was born though Caesarian operation. However, when she spoke on an audience on Tuesday, 17 October in Jakarta, everyone’s jaw was on the floor.

To see an Indonesian speaking fluently in English, especially at an age of only 6 years old, is quite something. But I’m sure you’ll say “impossible !” when I declared that this girl also speaks Korean, Arabic, and Dutch. Yet, this is the case here.

In Padepokan Toha, Jakarta; hundreds of people were mesmerized by the speech delivered by this indigo child. She advised people, decades older than her, to fast (this was the month of fasting for Muslims, Ramadhan). This is because fasting will cause people to love each other. As it spreads, peace will prevail. “With fasting, we can get rid of our negative energy, and develop the positive energy which is love”, said Annisa in English.

In her childish style, she continued her messages. People must not lie, she said. To those who already had this as a habit, they must try to be honest from now on. Fasting can help too with this.
“Do not lie, because once you lied, you will keep doing it until you’re old”, she said.

Delivering awesome speech is not her only special ability. She can also design house — she designed a 4 story house in Kelapa Gading area, Jakarta. With no formal education in architecture whatsoever.
She can also build her own computer and operate it.

Accoding to Mrs Yenni, her mother, Annisa’s special abilities began to show around October 2002. She claimed to see a big flower close to their home, but Mrs Yenni couldn’t see anything.

Annisa then started to call her by her name (this is highly unusual in Indonesia).
“(It’s OK,) I’m older than Yenni anyway”, said Annisa.

Hopefully the future will be only even better for Annisa. Congratulations to her family !

Source: Tribun Timur newspaper

From this comment :

Remember: There are only two tools in life. WD-40, for when something doesn’t move, and should; and Duct Tape, for when something is moving and it shouldn’t.

The reply is even more clever :

So does the universe explode if you spray duct tape with WD-40?

I hope nobody will try to do that for our own sake !

It’s 05:30 and I’m already working… ok, let’s start with something light then.

Riyo of Bedeng.com told me yesterday about a website, which I have let my browser opened on since; Vetusware.com. It brings way too many memories from the past.

Back then, BannerMania was dominating the banner-creation scene. Pretty much all banners created by computer back then will either be created by BannerMania, or PrintMaster. It hurts your eyes after a while though, so Broderbund’s PrintShop (and much later, Microsoft Publisher) was a welcome change.

I gained fame in my university after writing an article for campus’ magazine in Assembly language, compiled with Turbo Assembler. It was a small utility written to park hard disk’s read/write head to a safe place, so it won’t crash on a data-laden sector when the computer is shut down.
A lot of my friend was amazed to see first-year student already coded in Assembly. I don’t, since high school I have seen others (high schoolers) doing it for years. Some people are really bright, it’s quite scary.

With help from PC-Tools, I’ve managed to extract data from unreadable floppies. Since floppies still uses FAT12 data structure, it was quite easy to salvage data from it using direct sector access. Still, some people thought I’m some kind of wizard or something, heh.
I prefer PC-Tools v4.23 though (the link above is version 6.0), it’s simple, does the job with none the bloat, and very small at about 100kb (I think).

Being a Pascal hardcore, I was quick to obtain a copy of Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows when it was released, and started coding in it. However, like Wordstar for Windows, it’s pretty buggy, and I had to abandon it.

Not many people know this, but Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a God-send (or, for Bill-haters, Satan-send). A lot of PC was first interconnected via network with each other with this. It was more stable as well than Windows 3.1 (surprise!)
In my previous job using this, we were able to purchase less printers, and started sharing them instead via network. It resulted in a lot of yelling though, “Is the printer ready yet ??”, “Hey, insert some paper there will you”, and so on – until we introduced them to WinPopup. Then people started to annoy each other with it *sigh*.
Well, at least only us knew how to SPAM the WHOLE network,especially when we’re pissed off. Respect mah authoritah !

When VisualBasic 3 showed up, I quickly realized that I can code multimedia applications easily with it. I recorded a few nasyid into WAV files, photoshop-ed a few graphics and photos; resulting in a (back then) jaw-dropping multimedia-rich interactive demo. With lots of buttons, of course.
I donated the demo to the Islamic society in my campus for use in the campus fair (where each society presented themselves to new students). I think they had a lot of new students signed up with them then.

Before WinAmp, we had trackers. Modplay was one of it. It’s really, really amazing to hear your computer playing polyphonic sounds from the internal speaker, which usually only sounded the boring *beep*.
Later I bought Soundblaster’s AWE32, and midi files suddenly sounded so awesome.
Then MP3 came, and everything became obsolete. *sniff*

GIF2ANSI ? What the heck is that ? Well, on the “black screen” (DOS), ANSI was the graphic for the (otherwise) boring console. Believe it or not, just by using text, people managed to create astoundingly great art. GIF2ANSI makes this process simple and a no-brainer for a, well, no-brainer.

ASCIImation is where you can watch StarWars in ASCII. “Awesome” is not descriptive enough to explain it.
And in ASCIImator you can find lots of modern ASCII arts.

Right, I REALLY have to start working now. Enjoy !

I just realized that Akismet marked 4 legitimate comments, today, as spam. That’s too much false positive for one day, no way I’m gonna wade through 24000+ spam to find out the other false positives.
So I installed Spam Karma 2 instead.

So far, looks like this is one quality WP plugin. I just unzipped in plugins directory, activate it, and it works straight away. Most will find no need to change the default settings, it’s already good enough.

Kudos to Dr. Dave for the excellent work. Also thanks to Eko for introducing me to SK2.