Computing

The technology for SEO on Flash is still limited currently. The robots provided by search engine cannot read the content inside the Flash. If your page is composed of Flash without any other content, then you will be in trouble. As one should note, the best website without people visiting is a total failure.

However, all of us know that Flash can provide a rich user experience to us by doing a lot of fansy things. This is particularly true before Web 2.0 and AJAX appear. Even AJAX is becoming popular, it is still a programming language of Dynamic HTML and Javascript. These are still a high wall for those designers to get involved. Thus, some people start to think of ways to work around the situation.

SWFObject

One of the methods is provided by Geoff Stearns, creating a tool named SWFObject. The method of this toolkit is to place the Flash object into the html dynamically using Javascript with the innerHTML attribute of DIV DOM node. Before the browser runs the javascript code, site administrator can put the description text inside the DIV. Whenever the robots come to the page, they do not run the javascript code and thus see the description and index them. For a browser viewed by user, the javascript is in fact run, and the description text will become disappeared. Oh, what a great tool.

Drawback

The main drawback of this toolkit is that site administrator need to write the description in text one more time, which is like creating the content in both HTML format and Flash format. Someone may argue AJAX is so mature now, doing duplicate things are stupid. Why not develop a better AJAX web? May be they are true.

Anyway, this is a good tool if you still believe in the fantasy of Flash. Besides this, the new technology, Flex, which is developed by Adobe, may also fit in to provide fantasy flash and SEO as well. Flex is somehow kind of XML. It can run flash component by fitting in XML content, so the XML content can be indexed by search engine. It may be the future trend.

To casify Wordpress mu, andrejciho provides a great solution to this making use of phpCAS 0.5.0.

Here are the instructions listed in his page, mainly:

1. Adding the phpCAS as a plugin to Wordpress
2. Customize the login / logout logic to use CAS Authentication
3. Change the Welcome message and email

These are done very well by walking through the instructions below:
http://www.andrejciho.com/wordpress-mu/wpmu-cas-integration/

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This time I want to introduce a book I just read from the Internet. It is free of charge to download and the contents are mainly focused on questions that we will face during an interview.

The author has eight years of JAVA experience, even he was graduated as a Mechanical Engineer. He has experience on different fields of JAVA, from JavaSE to JavaEE to other related technologies that companies usually want, from concept, theory to the programming language. It benefits not only to the job seekers, but also the interviewers.

Most questions are composed of Q&A style, divided into parts of different topics, with an index for you to locate several subsets of the questions. You can also take it as a quiz on your JAVA knowledges, e.g. before you go for certification. I didn’t actually start reading it, but there are already many reviews on the book.

Page about the book:

http://stores.lulu.com/java-success

As I discussed Subversion a year ago, dated back to July, 2006, it’s of great functionalities compared with the old versioning system, CVS. Currently, finally I have a chance and time to try it out.

The learning curve of SVN is comparatively easy, perhaps it’s due to the similar structure and interface to CVS. I just used two days to catch it up and switching a project from CVS to SVN successfully.

The major idea of SVN is the fact that it controls versions for a bunch of files, instead of one version for one file. In real case, we developers add a feature to software by manipulating bunch of files. Using CVS, we need to set up clear policy on making commit logs in order to let other developers know what you did for that feature. In case someone doesn’t follow the policy, everything will be messed up. For SVN, you commit a few files by saying these changes are for the same feature. Then, other developers are clear that why did you modify those files.

Moreover, one thing that is good for SVN is the better API I think. I am not sure about the actual infrastructure, but the fact is that there are many web applications, particularly issue trackers, that can query the SVN repository to display many different kinds of reports. For instance, I used one open-source software namely “Trac” which helps me relates the issue tracking progress to the changes on SVN. Trac can also query the SVN repository for revision comparison.

I can see switching to SVN is a trend in version control system development. At least many open source project has already switched to the SVN repository. It is easy to install, easier to control, and most importantly it is similar to using CVS as a client.

Install Instructions of Subclipse (SVN support on Eclipse): http://subclipse.tigris.org/install.html

Subversion Book: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

Trac Project: http://trac.edgewall.org/

The following software (or more accurately a plugin of Outlook) helps to draw data from Google Calendar to Outlook, and consequently synchronized to PDA/Smartphones. The program is named as Remote Calendars.

The program is actually doing a trick, by downloading the iCal file from Google Calendar, and update the Outlook Calendar if any entry is new or modified.

However, there are still some defects and some functions that not work, it cannot be “synchronized”, means one side change, update in another side. It cannot be automatically refreshed, it can only be updated every time Outlook starts. This program still need some time to develop.

Anyway, the program is good enough to make my schedule better. My policy will be add things to Google Calendar at my most convenience, and take Outlook as my master backup of all schedules.

Reference:
http://www.grinn.net/blog/dev/2006/04/incorporate-google-calendar-into.html

I am happy to announce that the course registration of my first Master course has started. Really nice. XD
My preliminary choices are:
ECOM6013 E-commerce technologies
ECOM6023 E-finance

I plan to take one more module, since these two modules are scheduled on totally different period, they will not collide. What I am thinking is between
ICOM6031 Internet information engineering
ICOM6033 Smart card and RFID technologies

Both are my interested topics, really difficult to choose.

Funny Video telling us how the web and real life are changing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=

MySQL login problem

After I performed the Windows Update this morning, I found that I cannot login to my MySQL Server, neither using MySQL Query Browser nor command line client. It says something like password incorrect, etc. I checked the Task Manager and the server is running. It runs just like normal.

So, I tried to uninstall the update one by one and found that after I removed the following item:

Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework, version 2.0 (KB928365)

the problem is solved.

How to repeat:
Performs Windows Update and include this item:
Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework, version 2.0 (KB928365)

After rebooting the computer, you will not be able to login to the MySQL Server using any way.

Bug Report @ MySQL - http://bugs.mysql.com/29741

WAMP Tray Icon Lost

Besides the problem on MySQL, my WAMP tray icon also lost after the update, and of course it comes back after I removed the update.

I found my WAMP tray icon lost. However, after I checked the Task Manager, the WAMP manager is still running and the Apache connection is still fine.

WAMP version: 1.7.2
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2

I am invited to participate in the Java Certification Day on 21 June in Hong Kong. The talk mainly introduces some new technologies in the Java World, but I think they are not quite useful.

The first talk I attended is “Java Programming with no Java *code*”. The name is so attracting but the content is rubbish. It just introduces how Netbeans creates a BPEL project. It is not really about JAVA programming, it’s a construction of SOA projects.

The second talk is about non-intrusive monitoring using JMX. Other than the introduction of two softwares, JConsole and JFluid, I don’t think the talk is worth attending. And the last talk is on “High Performance Java Technology in a Multi-core World”, it did state how hardward can help to improve the performance of Java applications, but that’s not my knowledge field. That’s why I leave earlier (actually it overruns a lot).

After that, I went outside and proceeded to the promotional counter. After discussion with an Education Manager, I am much clear about my certification path. Personally, I want to take the SCEA exam as a long-term objective. Before that, I will take SCWCD and SCBCD which I did set as objective this year. Thus, I bought two discounted exam coupons and two corresponding ePractice exams. Totally, it costs me HKD2000. The price is acceptable and I hope this is worth and get me to a good career in the next job.

It is so surprised to me that MySQL Database does not support well in the use of subquery, which is the very basic syntax that we used in SQL.

These days, I received a performance report from my user and saying that one of our operations is very slow. A single SQL needs 1.5 minute to run on recent Dual Core server. After some investigations, I locked the target to one particular SQL during the execution of the operation. This SQL makes use of subquery which is in this syntax: WHERE…IN.

Google tells me that this issue has been reported since 2004 in early version of MySQL like 4.x. The problem was not focused in any of the updates afterward. After that, I read the article on the topic
How to optimize subqueries and joins in MySQL

This article not only shows the workaround to the issue, it also explains why the performance is so bad. It is briefly due to the reason that MySQL runs in an outside-inside manner, which means it first executes the main query and run the subquery later.

I am happy that there is a workaround to the issue, but I just don’t understand why MySQL does not fix the internal logic using this approach and need us, application developers, to do the workaround.  Perhaps, that’s the problem of open-source project.