GMail Account giveaway

I still have 9 gmail invites as of now. Want a gmail account? contact me with your F.Name, L.Name, and your email address.

Light a candle for the tsunami victim

For all those who cares... http://www.kaskus.com/peduliaceh/index.php?peduli=view

Inventor of Optical Storage?

Did you ever wander how much the inventor of optical storage gets for copyrights and pattern rights? Sales of DVD and CD sky-rockets during this festive season and you must be thinking... this is a heck of a golden egg laying chicken... Well, apparently not. The inventor invented a medium that everyone use nowadays and made life so much different than we had imagine before, and totally change the preception of digital storage, never made a dime at all from his invention... poor fella... Read this: Scientist's invention was let go for a song

Tsunami and it's aftermath

Was watching Channel News Asia interviewing a Singaporeans who got back from affected areas, and I totally can't believe what this singaporean secondary school girl say... "I'm just glad I got to play around the beach and pool before they were destroyed lah"... This is such a disgrace... it's equivalent to saying: "Like it matters to me..." But then again, I'm glad I'm not a singaporean so I can say this out loud without a sense of disgrace...

Sad Christmas - Tsunami and it's aftermath

Total death toll of 23,000 up to now, 10,000++ are from Sri Lanka, millions homeless, billions of economical loses, fishermens with their lifelyhood distroyed, many families in which their living depend on the sea, be it production or tourism, all left with nothing overnight. Refugees constantly increasing, healthcare situation getting worst and worst in many refugees center, risk of infection and many other things... A Sad thing to happen on a supposingly happy holiday weekend... This tradegy reflect on how fragile we humans are compare to nature, and as facts could not be alter, we should live our lifes to the fullest. Follow your heart for you will have no regret. My deepest condolences to those victims of the tragic disaster.

Some Yesterday's news and gossips...

"Once hyped, the traditional PDA today faces declining sales and growing competition from smartphones" - tomshardware-The PDA, an endangered species. Are PDA really dying off nowadays? with the emerging of Pocket PC adn smartphones, PDA's functionality is fully integrated within these new devices. Will PDA being an Island itself, be able to survive the rush of all these new gadgets in the market? Well, personally, I won't buy a PDA cos' I have everything I need in my handphone minus the touch screen. But then again, prehaps we shall see a whole new range of PDA soon enought?... Will Mozilla Firefox dominate the IE market? well there are quite a bit of issues with it, especially when you can't use Windowsupdate website with mozilla firefox cos microsoft is using lotsa COM+ and ActiveX stuff with their Windowsupdate. Here's some article about Firefox's weakness: Firefox的致命弱点 在新一年中需要解决的问题 Some Movie Reviews: 功夫/KungFu Hustle 天下无贼/a World Without Thieves Some Gadgets Review: The Zen Micro: Creative Guns for the iPod (Again)

Christmas Giveaway

It's Christmas day, not snowing here in Singapore. How I wish Singapore were situated somewhere near the north polar circle where... you'll probably see sparkling white snowflake dancing in the air with the acquaintance dazzeling wind, snow covered cars parked by the street that shape a odd dome, people pack up with layers of jacket and everyone is as plummish... well, you get the picture. Cool weather, layers of jacket, daily tempreture difference of over 20 degrees... I miss Melbourne, althou, it wasn't that long period of time that I was there, but a mere two years are enought for memories to last. And yes it doesn't snow in Melbourne this time of the year, being near the Southern polar circle, it's just freaking hot this time of the year. I just miss the cold weather during winter, and the fun of dashing down the slope on a snowboarding, especially when doing the blackrun where... thing might just spurn outta control, but that's what you would probably want when snowboarding, everything but control, the feeling to just loose it and let it flow and glide along, swirl whichever direction to your desire, make a sharp turn, glide your hand on the snow and make a wave of snow fly up ( to splash upon whichever unlucky soul to be in the way... ), and last but not least, just tip and fall and have yer head down in the snow with yer board on yer feet... tat, is what I call life. Things had been slow in work, my computer in the office is starting to give way and just hang whenever I run a Web application of my Local IIS, maybe this calls for a reinstall or reformat... however I'll just leave that to monday, and just celebrate this festive season by shopping my money away... and of course, a little bit something to share with everyone, I have 10 gmail invites to giveaway. Interested? Leave your name and your email address in my doodle-board or Gmail me at Ross.chang@gmail.com and I'll get back to you... maybe latest before 31st Dec, that is, before I fly off to HK for a 4 days vacation... If you are using Mozilla Firefox and Yahoo! Mail, here's a little present that you would probably appreciate... Merry Christmas everyone, and have a fabulous new years ahead... Disclaimer: I reserved the rights to sent GMail invites to whoever I like. and Please don't hate me if I dun sent gmail invites to you... it's Christmas day...

New IE Patch to prevent firefox download??!!

An interesting catch on the net today, wandering how true is this: 微软新补丁封锁Firefox下载？！ But then again, what are the odds of Microsoft doing it vs not doing it? Microsoft kills netscape, netscape left a seed in the opensource community, which Microsoft deems too insignificant, and now the seed had bloom into a Firefox to burn Microsoft, and now microsoft is now performing a Cursed Seal to Cage the Firefox?...

Buying IBM PC anyone?

Read this very interesting blog from 洪波-对牛乱弹琴 | Playin' with IT... the article "国际商业机器的奶牛"and his description of how a Chinese company 联想 brought over IBM PC division... and yea, I'm not talking about any particular IBM PC... An insert: "6.5亿美元（现金）+6亿美元（股票）+5亿美元（负债）+7.05亿美元（服务费）=24.55亿美元。瞧，一头能吃能喝就是不产奶的奶牛，被IBM狠狠地一挤，居然挤出了这么多金灿灿的美元，简直变成了一头金牛" It's really amazing how big corporation make their purchasing decision...(and prehaps, hit the brick wall, but well, u know big corporation are so big, they would probably break the wall)... now what would I do with USD$2.455 billion...

Canon Pro Shutterbug Event 3...

I was at the Canon Shutterbug Event last sunday. Canon was releasing the EOS 1Ds Mk2 this time round, the successor of the historical full frame EOS 1Ds, and this is infact a magnificient body... at a magnificient price... at a RRP of SGD$14k and street price of SGD$12k...
Insert from DPreview.com: "The EOS-1Ds Mark II is the sixteen (point seven) megapixel successor to the EOS-1Ds which was announced almost exactly two years earlier. Carrying on from the EOS-1Ds the Mark II has a full size 35 mm (36 x 24 mm) sensor which means it introduces no field-of-view crop, an 18 mm lens on this camera will provide exactly the same field-of-view as it would on a 35 mm film camera. At first glance it's clear to see that Canon has stuck (as they did with the EOS-1D Mark II) with the same body and control layout. The timing of the EOS-1Ds Mark II's announcement was interesting if not totally surprising coming just five days after Nikon announced the twelve (point four) megapixel D2X, the megapixel one-up-man-ship continues." Well, I manage to get my hands on a preview copy on the event itself, and was able to use it for a couple of minutes. If there was only one word to describe, just "Breathless" would do appropriately... the 1Ds Mk2 couple with the 70-200 F2.8L was just perfect. Having a full frame sensor on a 70-200 range was perfect, as oppose to the 1.6x crop sensor of the 300D, 10D and 20D, the crop/magnification factor on 70mm would make 70 x 1.6 = 112mm, too much tele for portriats... now... if money were grew from trees... and sat on a vast just on my table... (will someone snap me outta it?...)

Canon Pro ShutterBug Event 3 - 19.12.04
Models posing in the Shutterbug event. Suppose to be the official launch of the EOS 1Ds Mk2, but only 2 set for us photographers to play with. More models than cameras... haha...

Photographers are generally not in the picture...

Was going through some of my photo archives in my portable, in search for photos to stick on this blog, and I've just realize it is rather difficult to find meself in my gigs of digital photos... sad sad sad... nevertheless, manage to dig-up a decent-not-too-werdo potriats of my own, taken by Yen while we were in tioman. Thousands of dollars spend on photography equipments and having so little snap shots of myself, how pathetic. Joey finally got his 28-135 IS USM today after much rantting about not having a decent lens for his 300D. He's probably trying to figure out how the Image Stablization works for his style of shooting... Anyhow, the good thing is, this new lens of his would probably get his hands off from borrowing my 24-70 F2.8L lens.

SQL Server Reporting Service...

Been doing some development that utilize MS SQL Reporting lately, and I'll say, this is really good stuff and worth blogging. Thought I would like to share some of these with those who are just starting up MS SQL Reporting. After installing SQL Reporting, and some reading up on Google, took me about 15mins to create, setup, code and run a workable ASP.Net application with SQL Reporting. Was actually faster than I'd expected for my standards.. :P ...For a start, read this... My First impression of this product was, Simple lighweighted, featureless reporting system. After several test report creating and playing around with the configuration, I was wrong. Although it is not as feature rich as Crystal, MS SQL Reporting does have a decent number of features to meet most of demanding business needs. Basic stuff like charting, tables, drill down, linking reports to VB.NET (Dang, why only VB.Net) and utilization of External Assemblies(tat's the cool part) The fun dun just ends here, MS SQL Reporting have also exposed a series of methods via web services for programatically manipulation of reports and report generation. Here's a section from MSDN that describe how to generate report and output it to a file (pdf, excel, html...). I mean, look at this man, this is really cool stuff, and if your development is fully microsoft dot net, SQL Reporting can be integrate into your system seemslessly. Still at requirement stage now, once my project moves into coding stage, I'll write more about it as I code along...

Programmers are generally lazy...

We find ways to get the job done faster than ever and probably quote you a week for a day's job... just to make up for the exploitation upper management usually inflict upon us, and just to prove my point, I've been finding ways to NOT write the lenghty codebehind to call a particular store proc... not to mention all the parameters passing codes and stuff. Here's a particulary interesting catch on the web, a ways to generate the CODES by passing in the name of your store proc... You'll get a list of C# codes in your query analyzer after running the SP... how cool is that~!

Jinggle Bell, Jinggle Bell...

Jinggle all the way... time flies, and of couse I know I'm not the only one to notice, been my 3rd Christmas in Singapore already. It's tat time of the year again, lotsa shopping to do, lotsa work to clear, lotsa gifts to give away, year end leave clearing, the once/twice a year going back to m'sia... I would say, Dec - Feb period is the high point of the entire year, and it's where my bank acc take the pludge as well.. sob sob... Well, work hadn't been that interesting. Just had the chance to flumbble with SQL Reporting, and recon it's really a cool tool, quick and easy setup, relatively easy to pick up comparing to Crystal, thou of couse the lack of advance feature but heck, if you have a low budget project to go about, it's really a good consideration...

Junkies n stuff 3

Another boring sunday weekend. Suppose to join some photoshoot outing today but I'm just lazy and overslept. Now just deciding what to eat. Any singaporean reading this? can recomend any good hawker center around?... Damn I miss m'sia...

Clubsnap anyone?

Just figured... I've been patronizing Clubsnap so often that... it the first website I go to whenever I have access to the internet. Now, is that call addition or what?... and guess wha... me gf is making a fuzz abt it...

IPod Min vs Creative Zen Macro?

Went to Sitex recently to try out the new stuff Creative Technology came out to combat the IPod Mini. Looks really sleek and nice, and solve one of major problem of IPods (whichever version), which, is the lack of a battery compartment to allow changing of batteries. In Sitex, me and my girlfriend went to the Mac booth to toy around with the IPod Mini for a while before proceeding to Creative's Booth. If there is only one word to describe the IPod (Mini and the like), Splendid. The design, color, control and misc, just everything a perfect portable MP3 should have, well, except for the battery life which is sorta like miles behind, and the price tag (duh)... In the Creative's Booth, there is this BIG banner about the Zen Macro, an Array display of the various color of the Zen Macro, and a Pack of Humans clustered around the Zen MacroTest drive section. Well, looks promising, considering the spect, it solve most of the major drawback of the IPod. After pushing and bashing and bumping :P, we finally get to try out the Zen Macro. First impression: Plasticy piece of ***, then comes the navigation part. While I was trying to make my way around the list of menu items and songs in the device, I notice one of the most serious design flaw, a rather annoying flaw, not something that would jeoprodize the operation of the device, but it's basically a pain in the ar** to operate... the touch scroll control is totally out. I've tried to scroll and it ends up being a click, and when I initiated a click, it become a scroll (duh). Thou for the attractive price, and it really solve the battery problem of the IPod, the Zen Macro is not something I would recomend. Well, the conclusion me and my girlfriend had was... IPod still rules~~!!... and here's a couple of links, u decide Zen Macro vs IPod Mini

Hello World~~

It seems that every tom dick and marry is setting up a blog... mind as well do one up just for the heck of it. A Bore+est saturday cos have to go back for daily build. Just can't comprehend mindset of project managers/project directors... being so paranoid about application bugs and UAT completion... my god, just set a cut of date for the UAT and tat's it... I mean, developing such a Huge system ( yea I mean, really huge... this beast takes 3-5 hours to build everyday ), there is bound to be errors, and if there isn't a cut of point of the UAT, things could be pretty bad, not just for her, for everyone in the team as well... haiz... just ... trying to make a fuzz......