robertliu.com

Don’t worry! You got the right web address.

If you’ve visited my website before you might have noticed it’s changed from a pleasant light blue theme to a red sunset theme. That’s because I’ve decided to change the backend of my website to Wordpress 2.5.1. I was happy using Mambo for the last year or so but since the split into Joomla the whole Mambo community went into mutiny and there was not much support for either CMS.

Even though I’ve spent less than a few hours using Wordpress, I can immediately notice that Wordpress is faster, cleaner, simpler to maintain and easier to expand because It follows the latest web standards.

So, what you see now is actually just a temporary page until I get more time to adjust my website!! (I’m just one human being that needs to eat and sleep as well.) I just downloaded someone else’s template for this sunset theme, but I’ll almost definitely design my own once I’ve finished the upgrade…

Even though Wordpress has made the migration from Mambo pretty painless, there are still many imperfections leftover from Mambo that needs to be manually corrected around the backend. So far, I’ve corrected my blog entries as far back as 2006, but still have 2 more years to go! Damn, I’ve almost been blogging for 4 years!

Quick news about life in Japan. Went hiking up Mt. Mitsutoge on Sunday and absolutely killed my legs. The 6 hour hike turned into a 1 hour hike followed by 5 hours of cramps and PAIN! Will upload some photos in the next few days.

To move with the times I will try and add videos as well as zillions of pics to my website. So here I am testing out YouTube:

As I write this new entry, my site is only half complete. But I am quite impressed with the progress I have made in the past week - hand coded the template using pure CSS, migrated my old blogs into this site and lots of other tweaks, as well as a backend upgrade to Mambo version 4.6.1. Still need to put some pics up and make it feel more homey, and hopefully that’ll be less than one (or two) weeks away, assuming I don’t get distracted.

Welcome back to a completely unchanged* site. I’ve switched web hosting companies so I’m now hosted on 4uHosting.co.uk. The reason I switched was not because my old host tried to charge me 5 times for the same service (they were nice after a few of my complaints and even upgraded me) but because 4uHosting offers 3 addon domains for about £50/year. What this means is that I can host a maximum of 4 separate websites (1+3 addons) on the same piece of web space. This way it works out cheaper than actually purchasing a separate hosting package for each website where you probably wouldn’t use all the webspace allocated. (I think I may have confused non-techies now!)

*When I say unchanged, the changeover didn’t exactly go as planned. The backups I made of my database didn’t actually back anything up…so I was pleading for my old host to send me one of their backups. Unfortunately, their 24hr and weekly backups had just been overwritten but they managed to find an archived backup from January. So, I’ve managed to salvage most of my blog and also managed to retrieve the entries between January till now via Google, but mostly Yahoo! cache. Yahoo was surprisingly more efficient in caching my web pages. However, I am also missing about 5 recent entries which will be lost forever

You may notice a reduced functionality in my website. I’m waiting for a completely new version of Mambo (the backend of my website) before I do my major revamp. Photos will now be shown on Flickr, although I’m looking for a way to display pictures hosted on Flickr on my website.

Aside from that, I’ve also finished university for good! No more exams, except maybe one final interview with external examiners, but I really hope not. Now I just have to wait until the 23^rd June for my preliminary degree class classification. I’m praying it’ll be a 2:1!!! Right now I’m in Vienna, visiting Katja, but I’ll be back at the end of this week. No longer a student, so must find a job!

A sneak preview of what’s to come for my new website - Flickr (see little flash animation on left right somewhere). For those that don’t know, Flickr is an online photo management facility. For only $2/month you can basically store an unlimited number of photos (2Gb upload limit/month - which is plenty). They also have free accounts with 20MB upload limit/month for lite users. I’ll probably switch to using Flickr for all my photo storage now since I only have a limited amount of webspace. The good thing is, Flickr is widely used so lots of development goes into it (owned by Yahoo I think) - and there are lots of cool stuff you can do with the pictures, if you know how. I’ve only uploaded one “Set” (equivalent of an album) at the moment - my day trip to Bled.

I’ll slowly move all my photos in Menalto Gallery to Flickr (might take a while) and I’ll probably upload higher res pics instead, so won’t be a simple case of transferring directly from Gallery to Flickr. Since I have just under 8000 pictures on my hard drive it’ll probably take a few months to get it all up onto Flickr. Anyway, enough fun for one day…back to revision.

Here’s the evidence:

BlogExplosion.com have apparently recorded my fastest time of 51 seconds on a fiendishly difficult game of Sudoku! This is more than enough to prove my genius-ness and my skillful Sudoku solving skills. (The screenshot was not edited in any way!

Okay, the 22:22 is the real time I solved it in, which, in itself is pretty respectable - I’m sure you would agree. However, I did technically achieve that 51 seconds. I chose a fiendish game to play, however, rather than the page presenting me with a challenging game of Sudoku, it gave me a 9×9 grid of empty squares! Mwhahahaa…only took me a few seconds to realise how to fill it in completely, and thus, the world’s fastest time of completing a game of Sudoku – 51 seconds. Thank you. Thank you.

Anyway, back to the real world – work.

Got £5 to spare? Well, I don’t really, but felt like it was a bit of fun to spend it on getting certified typing skills! As you can see from the picture, I’ve appeared for the typing skills certification. My results: Gross: 71 wpm, Net (including errors): 68 wpm at 95% accuracy. Something good to whack on that CV of mine – if I were applying for a secretarial role, which I’m not, so just gonna leave it in my little folder of “Achievements”.

Why not see how fast you can type for free! http://www.typingtest.com/ - the trial one’s are shorter – so less accurate, but I managed over 80 wpm in one. The real thing is a little harder with weird words and lots of numbers and punctuation and lasts 10 minutes – taking the best from 3 attempts.

For those observant readers amongst you (yes, there are a few), you will have noticed a slight addition on the right hand side of my website. That would be the Google AdSense advert thingie-majig. Ever since I started my proper websites – proper meaning something more than “Website under construction” + many moving gif’s + ad/referral links that will make me millions – I’ve tended to avoid putting any adverts unless the advert was the subject I was writing about. No particular reason, I guess to avoid any distractions from the main subject – me!

Hehe, but I do like it when there aren’t ads everywhere. I especially hate it when a beautiful webpage loads up with the information you are waiting for and then this little flash animation just pops up in front of all the text and then you have to find that little ‘x’ to close it – even more annoying are the ones that come with sound when you don’t expect it. The BBC is a good example. No external ads. Just the information you need.

Anyway, I hope that little skyscraper ad from google doesn’t distract anyone – but please do click on them! I get paid £100 per click. Honest!

Well, one week back in the UK so let’s see what I’ve achieved. I’m temporarily back in my own room now that my brother and his girlfriend are on their holiday somewhere on an island in Spain. It really does seem that we have overgrown this little house of ours. I suppose now that all three of us brothers are now studying at uni it won’t really matter for a few more years, and then we should be in the position to “move out” – even if mum says so otherwise.

I’m still slowly getting through papers that I need to read for my project, and hopefully sometime this week I can start writing up a literature review for it. But one minor achievement is that I think I’ve managed to reduce my spam in my Yahoo Mail account by over 80%. The 10 days I was on holiday in Croatia, with absolutely no access to the internet, I received 2000+ junk messages in my “bulk mail” folder. Given that Yahoo automatically erases them after 7 days, it works out at approximately 300 spam messages a day – which seems about correct given the rate at which I usually delete them when I do have access to a computer. Now, I seem to receive less than about 50 spam messages a day. How did I do this? After painfully recording every email address used by the spammers over a period of a week, I collected the most frequently used domains, and blocked no less than 499 of them. The 500^th being just a plain email address that I wanted to block (no one personal btw). However, I know this is only a short term measure to tackle spam, since spammers will normally change their email addresses, or even mask it with someone else’s. At least I have less spam now.

As with my new laptop, everything’s installed and working great. Well pleased with it and I think money well spent. Haven’t managed to find any problems with it yet and no complaints so far. Since dissecting my previous desktop computer, and getting my brothers to sell bits of it on eBay, the only useful bits I kept were my hard drives. It’s taken quite an effort to sort everything and reorganise all my data. I’m gonna keep my 250gb drive and use it as extra storage for my laptop. Seems like a lot of space, but I do store a lot of digital photos (as well…ahem…other things). My other 80gb drive has now been reserved by Katja. I’ll try to get that review done on the laptop within the next couple of weeks, for those contemplating purchasing a W3V.

I did a little work on my final year project today. Ok, mainly just browsing internet pages and searching for relevant papers, but it’s a start and gives me a better picture of what I need to do next. After a short while, I got a little bored and so jumped to working on my webpage. It’s often difficult for me to update my blog. I can either write about completely irrelevant things or share about what happened during my day. Given that I don’t really fancy sharing everything I did (or there was nothing to share), it’s hard to keep it ‘alive’.

It’s a fact that Mr Google likes frequently updated sites, and especially sites with plenty of content. Not that I make my site in the hope of topping Google searches, but more for sharing my life and thoughts with friends and family and those with nothing to do but to read about other people who have nothing to do but write about themselves.

I’ve updated my template, in that my site should appear more of less correctly in the latest browsers of Firefox, Safari and IE. Changed my intro message and updated a few things on the “About Me” page. Since content is king, send me some questions so I can add it to the page or at least make it more interesting and worth visiting.