kTsang+

My Wikidot 4th

It’s the 31st of October.  So, on this day, 4 years ago - I made signed up at Wikidot as the 47,197th user - not knowing how much it will influence me as a person.

It’s hard imagining my life without Wikidot.  It’s such an easy-to-use platform, yet sophisticated and complex at the same time.  Ironic, isn’t it?  I’m using Tumblr to post a this blog post about my 4th year having a Wikidot account - where as I should really be posting a blog post on Wikidot itself.

Anyway, this is a post of how thankful I am of Wikidot, the very supportive Wikidot Community and of course, the Wikidot team itself.

I first signed up for Wikidot when I came across the Game Maker Wiki - run by Shawn Hartnell.  Four years ago, I knew little about Game Maker and it’s GML - so I decided to sign up to the GM Wiki community and mainly asked questions rather than contribute.  I soon forgot about the website as I moved away from Game Maker into PHP.

At the time, I also created “kenandtom.wikidot.com” - a shared site between me and my brother.  There, I maintained a personal website with “diaries” and pictures.

I think my first contribution was a Greasemonkey script to remove the then newly introduced Wikidot Toolbar.  Soon after, I released a PHP “no-toolbar browser”.  Soon, I became more and more active in the community.  Not only was the community extremely helpful, they were supportive and kept me engaged in Wikidot.  Here, I would like the thank all of the Wikidot Community (especially James Kanjo and Shane Smith) for their continued support and encouragement.  Thanks.

Soon, I became a Wikidot Guru.

Another person I would really like to thank was the then CEO of Wikidot - Pieter Hintjens.  He, again, was really encouraging and ultimately - was the person who kept me at Wikidot for the past 2 years.  While he was CEO, he kept the entire Wikidot community informed of the internal workings of Wikidot.  He communicated with us - as community members - making sure that they are doing what benefited the users the most.  I miss the frequent blog posts and community interaction at Wikidot.  But, I still love Wikidot all the same.

I was featured by Pieter in several blog posts - along with this post - which is just about me and my achievements at Wikidot.  Names “Kenneth’s Dozen” - I was twelve then.  Now, I’m fourteen!  On the same day, I (along with a dozen community members) were given Superguru powers allowing us to create 1,000+ sites.  I was really surprised, yet humbly pleased of myself ;)

But that was two years ago.  Now, I’m still there in the community - helping out the best I can with the available time I have.  But as time goes on (for the next three years at least), my involvement with Wikidot’s community (and perhaps the wider Wikidot itself) will diminish.  The final three years of my compulsory schooling and HSC will be critical to me.  So - expect less of me in the coming years.

Phil - I’m still waiting for my invitation to the “Tribal Council” on my 18th birthday!

HTTPS x Google Chrome = Unblocked Sites!

Recently, I discovered that accessing HTTPS sites at school via Google Chrome essentially bypasses the school filter for websites.  I have not figured out why this occurs yet - but it appears that this exploit is working for Google Chrome only.  I’m guessing that Google has a unique way of processing HTTPS requests because when trying accessing certain HTTPS sites on Opera and Internet Explorer, certain HTTPS sites return a host unavailable error.  This “exploit” allows access to HTTPS enabled sites such as Gmail and Facebook.

Using this “exploit” does not appear to violate the policy for responsible use of technology (and the internet).  This is because the end-user may be unintentionally accessing services like Facebook and Gmail without knowledge that it would normally be blocked.  Furthermore, the end-user takes no extra effort in using “3rd party/hidden” websites to unblock sites - i.e. proxies.

The only thing from my current copy of the internet contract that I may be violating is that I’m not reporting my find.  So - here are my findings.  I might not have reported them - but I have published them.  And with some searching, I’m sure you’ll find this blog and this post :)

Working with GML again…

For the past year or so, I have barely touched Game Maker - because of lack of cross-platform capabilities.  Even with GM4Mac and GameMaker HTML5, I’m still not able to do most things because of lack of DLL support.

However, I was looking for a nice way to package my school timetable and present it in an informative, yet non-obstructive way.  So back came Game Maker and GML.

GML was basically my first programming language.  From there, I began to learn the basics of PHP.  So, in reality, GML should be easy as… 1, 2 and 3 - right?  Well, here are the three mistakes I keep on making:

Dollar sign variables: I keep of putting the $ before the variable name.  In GM, this is used to define color.

Period to join: I keep on using the period or full stop to join strings and variables together.  GML uses the plus sign for everything.

Converting from string to integers and back: PHP’s flexible method of being able to join integers with strings without the need of converting it has really paid it’s toll.  I keep on getting errors from compiling when I try and lots of things together.

I hope to release a beta of my timetable viewer in the next couple of weeks… hopefully before next year.

The Apple, The Mac, The Jealousy and The Death

R.I.P. Steve Jobs… you were an inspiration to the technological world. You made us PC users jealous of all Mac owners.  But really, all those beautiful products you made us - the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad are uniquely Apple.  Steve, RIP… see you in your own invention - iCloud (coming 12th October 2011).

Why do I use Virgin Mobile?

I use Virgin Mobile because:

• Virgin-to-Virgin SMS is free
• there is long expiry (cheapest for $15 / 180 days)
• that means I can unlimited text anyone on Virgin for “$30 a year”
• my entire family uses Virgin
• my friends use Virgin

Farewell Ubuntu… but coming back soon!

After 50 solid days using Ubuntu, I finally found a reason to switch back to Windows…  I needed MS Publisher and Adobe Premiere Pro really badly.  I have an assignment that required me to use MS Publisher - pamphlet designing for science.  Plus, I had eisteddfod videos to edit (which I had already done - painfully on another computer).

Basically, I attempted to do a dual-boot install.  That didn’t work.  Because the first operating system installed on the HDD was Mac OSX Leopard, the partitioning was done in GPT rather than MBR… which was required in W7 (for 32 bit anyway).  Although, I do have two separate hard drives installed on the computer.  The second HDD did have MBR partitioning… but didn’t have access to the boot partition or anyway of booting up without changing the Disk 0 to MBR too.

What I did was replaced the 40GB HDD with Ubuntu installed and replaced it with another 40GB HDD.  We do have a stock-pile of 40GB IDE HDDs - so that was handy :D

Most of my stuff was already in my Dropbox - so all I did was a tarball of the “File System” on Ubuntu for future use (if I ever need to access it).

So far, Office 2010, Dropbox, Java, Adobe Reader X, Avast!, iTunes and Notepad++ has been installed.  I plan on installing Adobe CS3 tomorrow :D

I’ll be going back to Ubuntu as soon as possible.  Perhaps using a WBUI instead.  That way - I can safely have two OSes on one computer without fiddling with GRUB… Okay, time to get some sleep for tomorrow’s RE test :P

Pidgin = Facebook Chat

Just realised that I can use Pidgin for Facebook Chat…

1. Firstly, download Pidgin: http://pidgin.im/
2. Add a new XMPP account.
3. Your username is your profile username at Facebook (you may need to set one).
4. Domain is chat.facebook.com
5. Password is your Facebook password
6. Ensure that you “Require encryption” in the Advanced tab.
7. Done.

Just Updated to Ubuntu 11.04

Last night, I took the 10.04 > 10.10 > 11.04 update path to the newest Ubuntu version.  I had downloaded the ISO boot-up and wanted to do a clean install.  That never worked…

Unity and it’s the poor fallback

Booting up the ISO caused a big issue on my system.  My computer has on-board 865g Intel Graphics… which is really crap in today’s standard.  But I never expected any problems with running Ubuntu on it…

I booted the ISO up and much to my shock - it appears that Ubuntu Live CD had crashed it’s GUI.  The installer didn’t pop-up… the screen wasn’t drawn properly… it was all a mess!  I couldn’t have possibly installed Ubuntu on this!

The other upgrade path

I didn’t know about the Unity issue with my graphics card… I thought I might have had a corrupted installation disk or something.  So, I went for the Distribution Update path via Ubuntu 10.10.  It ran smoothly, taking around 30 minutes to download and 3 hours to install.  During this time, the computer froze several times while it installed the new icons / X Window stuff…  At the end, the installation looked like a success!  I clicked on the “Reboot now” button and waited for the new Unity to show up after the loading screen… I was deeply disappointed.

Unity = fail on Intel 865g

Yeah… Ubuntu booted up to a nasty message saying that Unity wasn’t supported on my system and that I should boot Ubuntu Classic.  Ubuntu Classic died too… it crashed many times… and I decided to have a little look on the web for soultions.

Turns out Unity 3D didn’t support 865g.  And, it turns out that you can install Unity 2D which works great on OpenGL-less cards.

I was surprised that Unity 2D didn’t come included and made active once the hardware was detected to be crap.  I wasn’t happy when my OS died in front of my eyes!

But Unity 2D looks good now

I’m loving Unity at the moment.  I’ll write more about the new features in a future post… But, it’s working just fine… (perhaps a little annoying, cause’ it feels like it’s designed for touch screens)…