Everybody want it, but few people actually get it.  Sucess, is a such troublesome word:  when it is ambiguous,  it makes me frustration, just to image only after a long time of hard work, you suddenly start to doubt  that what you were doing isn’t really what you want;  but when it is clear, I mean when it is made clear by others, parents, boss, friends and most importantly, the media,  it makes me angry,  because  your success can’t be defined by others! And it is certainly not just about fame and money. So, what is success? Read the rest of this entry »

For the past about six months, I am working on the eZ Publish CMS of the eZ System. I feel it has some unusual characteristic compare to other CMS: joomla, drupal, XOOPS to name a few. From the projects I built and asm building, I have outlined some points which a Project Manager may need to get clear before push the work to developers (If only this would be true, my life would be so much easier ). Read the rest of this entry »

The zend.com are initiating a beta certification program on Zend Framework. I received an email informed me that I could get a 50% discount on the exam fee and a free study guide if I schedule and attention the exam before the end of this month. I do have some working experience on the Zend Framework before ( I have built a small project use it recently ), but I feel my knowledge on Zend Framework is still not adequate for passing the exam. So, I have ordered the PHP Architect’s book: Guide to Programming with Zend Framework. Read the rest of this entry »

As a blogger, you probably already knew Darkroom, a minimalist full-screen text editor( inspired by the WriteRoom a similar processor offer on Mac OS). What’s good about Darkroom is that it forces your focus your writing content and nothing else. It has no window caption bar, status bar, menu bar, tool bar or window borders. Sitting on your screen nakely with its full dark background and green text, you will feel as if you are the famous hacker in “Matrix”.

While Darkroom can help your write better content, it is a desktop tool. And moreover, it is only available on Windows. For those like me use a *nix box, there is a Java-Version of Darkroom, JDarkRoom, which is still in beta. I tried install it on my OpenSUSE laptop, but it seems has some problems to start up.

So, here comes the Writer! A online clone of the Darkroom. Read the rest of this entry »

ThemesWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides for designing Web Themes and Templates. This site intends to ease the web design process by providing tutorials for a large number of systems at a common location.

It is often difficult to find a resource that is focused on providing quality, relevant and free information for designing themes and templates; specifically one that covers a wide range of applications. This is where ThemesWiki.org intends to step in. Launched initially with tutorials covering over 20 Content Management Systems, ThemesWiki.org is expected to grow into an exhaustive resource for the theming community, with users generating most of the content. Read the rest of this entry »

First, here is the information on New York Time on how to help:
China Disaster Relief: How to Contribute
Suddenly receive message from Google China Adsense team, says that the earth quake victims in central China need at least 2,600,000 tents. A shock massive earthquake rocked central China province Sichuan on 12th, May. Due to non-stop raining on the area, the situation of the victims is very worrying. There are about 600,000 tents in need in Mianyang Beichuan where sheltered many victims there. Read the rest of this entry »

When you define or assign tags in WordPress, here is what WordPress does:

1. Every tag must have a name.

2. Every tag must have a slug, the url of the tag.

3. By default, WordPress will automatically generate the tag slug based on the name of the tag you entered.

4. However, if either the value of the tag name or the tag slug is new, then Wordpress will consider it is a new tag in the system.

So, a problem will arise, when your blog has non-western language characters or terms been used as tags. Read the rest of this entry »

As in my previous post, I briefly introduced how you can use SimpleXML object to load various web services’ API query urls, if you so choose to mashup a website with data provided by the various websites, such as YouTube and Amazon. Of course, the pay off comes when you use some affiliate code in your query, such as the famouse Amazon’s ECS and you did a pretty well job on your page layout & design, and seo to attract many visitors to you sites. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many social network websites (e.g. YouTube) and big brand websites(e.g. Amazon, Yahoo) use REST or SOAP or even RSS web services to provide the enormous data for developers. Using these data, we can build a website virtually with no own database at all, all the information are come from these big sites. The nice thing is that, virtually all of the data returned for your web service client request are a XML data stream. So, we can use the nice PHP5 built in SimpleXML object to parsing the XML data stream, and format the representation of the data according our own website needs. However, the XML data format vary from site to site, some of the XML data returned from the sever, includes namespace and CDATA; if this is the case, you need find a way to access a sub item in the XML data use the same ” -> ” syntax. Read the rest of this entry »

Life, I think is like a hyper-speed train running on a hyper-speed railway track, and you are the driver; plus you also have the ability to control which railway track you want to travel on. Time passes by so fast; things happen. What if one day you realize that your life is running on a wrong track? Or you just doubt and say to yourself “Maybe my life is not heading to the right direction?”
Of course, just realize above questions already required the person has done some considerable thinking about life. So, let’s just say we want to use this “hyper-speed-train-running” metaphor( and personally, I really think it is a “so Good” metaphor ), what you would do if you decide that your life is indeed heading into the wrong direction?
Read the rest of this entry »