Author: shun

Exit Strategy

Grace: “So how long will it take Tibor to replace both break pads?”

Me: “He said two to three hours…”

Bryan: “Me talk first….”

Grace: “Bryan, please don’t interrupt. It’s impolite. It’s your turn when daddy and mommy are done talking.”

Home phone rings… Ignored.

Grace: “So to replace both breaks, it’d cost….”

Grace’s cell phone rings…

Grace: “Hello? Hi, Ma… Ok…. Hold on a second…”

Grace, wide-eyed, walks toward me extending her arm out to hand me the phone.

“It’s your mom. Your dad passed away.”
.
.
.
.
The news came very unexpectedly. But then, any news bearing the death of a family member always does. It was like a 6-foot-3 guy throwing a punch in my stomach with his full weight behind him — shockingly painful, but at the same time, numbing.

How was I supposed to feel? The sound of my mom’s trembling, sobbing voice sent more shock waves through my empty mind than the news did. I simply had no idea what to make of all this.

Finally I concluded it was a mistake. Mom always jumped to conclusions.
.
.
.
In the back of my mind, there was always a way to get out of this immigration hell hole I am in now, a way to finally resolve everything that’s stopping me from realizing my full potentials, a way to finally take good care of my parents like they did for me. I had an exit strategy — all planned; almost everything set in motion… all except for this immigration hell hole I am in.
.
.
.
The heart attack swiftly robbed any chance of him ever seeing his grandchildren and denied him of seeing his other son and the only daughter getting married. He’d worked so hard all his life, but the only time he got to rest was when he took his last breathe. Fate has its ways to mock a man.
.
.
.
So my exit strategy is probably flawed. It doesn’t account for emergency situations delicately, especially with the kind of shitty predicament that I am currently in. Maybe it’s time to revisit this again sometime. I’ll revisit this when I am in a better mood, or when there’s enough money in the bank, or when Taiwan has a new president, or maybe when… Whatever.
.
.
.
It’s funny how time is conceived and measured in such precise terms. Scientists can measure almost anything relative to the time. And yet, to us humans, time is just an abstract concept that really doesn’t mean anything. And it’s relative only to the mind that perceives it. To Bryan, a two-and-a-half-year-old, having to wait for a minute to speak is like a life time — because a minute relative to his young life IS indeed a much bigger unit in proportion to his life than what a minute is to an adult. Time literally loses its meanings when human perceptions are thrown into the equation.

What I thought I had years to do and plan for turned out to be all garbage and fruitless idealistic dreams when the news of my dad’s death struck. It turned out that there was simply no time for all of that. It was either done or never to be done. The false hope that “time” will eventually take care of everything simply tramples any hope and opportunity that might have left to actually bag the issues in question.

With that, all plans will be re-assessed and re-valued in a more concise manner — especially with Grace’s pragmatic approaches, my dad’s legacy shall be to have brought us a new set of objectives, maybe a new direction, and maybe a new life. And that is our new exit strategy.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 Graphic

I wrote about Firefox 3 Beta 2‘s cool intro page upon first launching it. Now Beta 4 is ready with a new intro page (though I’ve been using the nightly builds for some time now). It’s table as hell. And it’s nappy as hell (almost as fast as Safari 3 now).

firefox_3_beta_4_graphic

I honestly can’t find any bugs that are show stoppers. So head over to Oxymoronical and download the Firefox Nightly Tester Tool to help enable all your favorite plugins on this beta and start enjoying the new Firefox.

Here’s a list of improvements made in this version for you geeks out there…

On a similar note, sites I’ve built ever since Firefox 1.5 are still holding up perfectly in Firefox 3. But looking at the progression of Internet Explorer, what was built for IE5.5 almost always needed tweaks with each subsequent upgrade! Talk about poor forward planning on Microsoft’s side! Boo! And that’s what happens when a company makes piss poor browsers that doesn’t adhere to industry standards (and with its own internal standards changing all the time).

Volusion V5

I’ve written Volusion a few times. The first time I used Volusion (version 4) it really sucked in terms of UI (though the commerce portion was pretty good). And many of the problems in V4 were addressed in V5. So kudos to Volusion for noticing what sucked and made improvements upon them.

The good on V5:

  1. Much simplified templates. No more nested ASP codes that one may accidentally delete/alter and break the entire store. It’s now easier than ever for any designer types to make modifications to the store’s front page.
  2. Way better administration console on the back end compared to V4. Cleaner UI with improved tool tips.
  3. Great documentation now with video tutorials and an active community forum.
  4. Ample email tech support.
  5. Easy to copy/paste Div IDs that would ultimately to be replaced by generated codes. Volusion has good documentation on them too.

Now the bad on V5:

  1. Templates are somewhat messy and limiting. For example, it’s hard to change the way the featured products are dynamically laid out on the homepage. There are tables upon tables upon tables nastily nested within each other with the generated codes — I’ve never seen a more ugly generated code with tables like that.
  2. Web 2.0 functionalities need to apply (unless they were implemented by Volusion). It’s a little dubious that neither Prototype nor jQuery were allowed to run on Volusion because somehow it breaks the
    1
    $

    functions that make those Javascript libraries so beautiful and powerful to use.

  3. It’s one thing to produce generated code, but it’s another to NOT give them good ID or class labels so that us designer/coder types can at least manipulate the look and feels more easily. It’s not unusual to target a table nested 3 or 4 layers down with CSS selectors trying to get something look just right.
  4. Tables are evil, especially nested ones. At least have the sense of giving us the chance to alter/modify those templates that were generated from the ASP code (i.e. featured products). For example, give us the template that generates the output of each product. Even if they are just tables, show them to me and allow me to replace all those tables with nice and easy DIV tags!
  5. About the only thing that someone can really customize is the homepage. Everything else is pretty much locked down (or at least I couldn’t find a way to modify the other product pages in any meaningful way). In other words, customization is limited only to the homepage (layout wise), everything else all you can do is font sizes, colors and what not (maybe some graphics)… that is if you know your CSS (Thank you, Firebug and Safari 3 Web Inspector)
  6. Volusion claims that they have fixed the transparency problems with
    1
    .png

    files. They lied. PNG files will show like a sore thumb in IE6 and earlier. And don’t bother to include one of those

    1
    .htc

    fixes in the header or CSS either. Volusion doesn’t allow them.

  7. Instead of using standard Prototype and other popular Javascript libraries, Volusion opts to use some commercial package that is 3rd rate at best in performance and generated output.
  8. The pages are pretty slow to load. I’ll bet it’s because of all the nested tables. It’d be in Volusion’s best interest to cut down the load on CPUs on those nested tables per page so that its overall server performance can increase for everyone!
  9. Email support is getting pretty slow in replying issues. It used to take mere hours, now the turn around is the next day.

I hope Volusion fixes at least the problems with Javascript libraries so that I can use Prototype and Scriptaculous to enable my clients’ sites to be more visually interesting (without constant page refreshes!). The next big deal would be to allow more flexibility with templates elsewhere.

Otherwise, I think Volusion is still a decent package. It’s just that many of the stuff they implemented are still stuck in 1998.

MacBook Pro Battery Replacement

About a little over a month ago, my MacBook Pro would just randomly shutdown when running on battery power even if the battery was still at around 60% charged. That really pissed me off because I really hate the process of having to restart and set up everything again before I can dive into work, not to mention the mysterious shutdowns was really getting me worried about data corruption (like it did to my Lightroom catalog).

Unfortunately I couldn’t really part with my computer for work reasons, so I hadn’t taken it to the Apple store because it might mean I’d have to leave my laptop there for a few hours (or even days). And I’d have to go through the motion of backing up everything again… But I decided to call Apple today anyway because it’s ridiculous that my less-than-one-year-old battery can now only stay unplugged for less than 1/2 hour on a full charge!

Apple told me was that batteries are “consumable goods”. And the tech support told me that an average battery life is for about 300 charge cycles, and mine was reading 463! I told them it’s understandable that a battery would ultimately become less chargeable over time, but for its capacity to drop so drastically within a period of less than two months is unusual.

They agreed. And a replacement battery is on its way courtesy to Apple.

So my MBP will soon resume its role as a portable again. Yay!

UPDATE 03.10.2008: My replacement battery arrived the next morning via DHL! Grace then called them to pick up the replacement unit the next morning; they came within a couple of hours… Wow.

Installing Multiple Firefox Version on Windows XP and Mac OSX

As a web developer, one of the worst nightmares has to be dealing with all the different browsers under the sun (not to mention the various versions).

I wrote about installing different versions of Internet Explorer on Windows XP for testing purposes (simply because each version is so drastically bad in its own unique way that you need to test each one of them separately). I had decided to take that one step further with Firefox today.

Thank goodness for oldapps.com, I was able to get hold of Firefox 1.0 and 1.5 to play with in XP.

Installing on Windows XP (not for the faint of heat, or you can try the standalone versions of Firefox without worrying about going through the troubles.):

1. Download and install an older version of Firefox. When you run the installer, make sure you choose

1
custom

installation and install this version in a different directory. For example:

1
Mozilla Firefox 1.0

(in keeping with the default naming convention). Continue installation as prompted. DO NOT RUN Firefox when it’s done.
2. Open Windows Command Prompt and type the following and press

1
Enter

:

1
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE = 1

3. In the same Command Prompt, type

1
cd

and find your way to the version of Firefox you just installed. Using the folder naming convention above, it’s probably something like this:

1
cd /"Program Files"/"Mozilla Firefox 1.0"/

4. Once you are in the directory, type the following and hit

1
Enter

:

1
firefox.exe -profilemanager

5. Firefox’s profile manager should now appear. Now create a new profile and name it accordingly (i.e.

1
firefox1.0

). If you want, name the

1
default

profile to the version of Firefox you currently have prior to the installation.
6. Now go to the appropriate Firefox folders and make shortcuts from them and put them where you access them the most (The Taskbar in my case).
7. Right click on the shortcuts and select

1
Properties

to pull up the Properties window. In it, there’s a

1
<strong>Target</strong>

field. At the end of it (after the double quote), append the bolded typeface in the following:

1
2
3
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 1.0\firefox.exe" <strong>-p Firefox1.0</strong>

Do this with each version of Firefox shortcuts you have with a matching profile name. And you are done. The only caveat is you can't run multiple versions of Firefox concurrently like you can with the "Multiple IE" install.

Here’s what my VMWare Windows XP Taskbar looks like:
windows xp taskbar

Installing on Mac OSX:

The process is similar to those found on Windows XP. But I couldn’t get them to work as advertised. So I can’t really endorse the methods here. But there are standalone versions out there that made my life easier.

The upside of Mac OSX is, multiple versions of Firefox can be running at the same time!

UPDATE: I did manage to get multiple Firefox versions to work without asking for a profile upon launch every time as described by Jeroen Coumans‘s blog (PDF). But there’s a trick that you should know about!

For the life of me I couldn’t get them to launch without asking for a profile even though I followed the steps exactly. The problem? I had three versions of Firefox in the same directory labeled:
Firefox 3
Firefox 2.0
Firefox 1.5

That’s a NO to the hack described on the site. In order for the script to recognize the paths, the portion of the name following the word “Firefox” can not be repeated. I have tried “Firefox-” followed by the version number, but that didn’t go. And underscore didn’t do it either. But if you simply remove the space making the names looking like:
Firefox3
Firefox2.0
Firefox1.5

Then all is good.

I will probably install a couple of older versions of Opera as well since they are supposedly pretty simple — simply install different versions of Opera in their own folders and be done with!

via [JiveBay] and [Jeroen Coumans]

WWSJD

Grace asked the other day what Alicia was talking about WWSJD… I paused in disbelief.

It’s no secret I am a Mac fanboy. More specifically, an Apple fanboy. Not that I think everything Apple does is the best, but everything they have done shows they have put a lot of thought and understanding in their products, services and their audience. I just can’t say the same thing about any other company.

So it’s only natural that I have come to admire how Apple has been able to design everything with an element of “human touch” to it. This was less evident during the “Steve-less” years of Apple. But suddenly when he returned, everything has a “Steve-ness” to it again! So I have concluded it’s the “Steve touch” that makes everything pop.

When I am stuck at a design decision, I try to clear my head and imagine “What Would Steve Jobs Do?” (WWSJD) if he was in the same situation…

Of course the act itself is a lost cause without having worked with His Steve-ness (though I came close having made to the final rounds of interview at Apple once in 2005). But the process works in that I’d be forced to think more objectively from a human interface design point f view. And I’d more closely study, dissect and analyze Apple’s UI design decisions on my Mac and on Apple’s website.

This also works in information organization, which is also an intricate part of UI design when the user has to interact and process the information visually. This has been something I haven’t been good at as evident with how the pricing section of my photography site is laid out. I am lost when there’s A LOT of information to be processed in a minimalistic fashion. So I am going to give it another shot sometime next week.

But word on WWSJD. Word

Soft Launch

I quietly launched my photography site yesterday without making a fuss about it. I still think it’s not quite ready for “live”. But I am already three weeks past my self-imposed deadline (two days past the 2nd deadline). So it had to be up just as a matter of principle.

So I finally added a portfolio/gallery, added more blog entries (which I had to backdate for chronology’s sake) and made a bunch of enhancements to the backend management console. But I still have a bunch of stuff I need to do with it: Most noticeably — Trim and organize the portfolio in a meaningful order (Prof. Randy Akers would probably have something to say how the portfolio is ordered right now), further streamline the pricing section to make it easier to follow (possibly replace text with some kind of meaningful graphics or illustrations)… etc. I mean, that’s probably what Steve Jobs would have done!

shunchu.com photography site

Curious where my professional photography site is? www.shunchu.com

DUH!

Bowing Out of Apple Aperture

I wanted to love Aperture. And I did. But it’s time to let go.

I was going through a few thousand images that I’d rated and enhanced in Aperture to look for stuff for my portfolio. I wanted to polish up a few images that I thought were good enough to make it into the professional portfolio. But it soon became evident that even 3GB of fresh RAM doesn’t satisfy Aperture’s hungry appetite for more! Spinning arrows, lagging waits and delayed responses were frequent. Somehow I don’t remember Aperture being so unpleasant to use — and this was Aperture 2.0, the version that supposedly offered performance enhancements.

Another bummer I discovered with Aperture 2.0 was that its new RAW engine v2.0 doesn’t support my Fujifilm S5 Pro at all. This means the RAW image rendering on my camera’s RAW files still looks very weird (blocky, blotchy and making images more like JPEGs) — basically when used with my camera’s RAW, it’s the old v1.1 engine with features enhanced around it.

So this drew the line for me. I am officially dumping Aperture. I will spend the next few months retrieving all the RAW masters and bring them in to Adobe Lightroom as their permanent home. Unfortunately this means I will lose ALL the edits and enhancements I made to all the images. But the upside is the images will probably look better with Adobe Camera RAW’s rendering engine. And I’ve gotten fairly efficient in using Lightroom that I can probably zip through those edits pretty quickly anyway.

The war is over. Adobe Lightroom has won. This proves that having a beautiful, extremely streamlined and intuitive user interface isn’t everything. Performance and proper support of RAW rendering, even with an inferior interface, can do wonders in a photographer’s workflow. I will just have to be more selective in what I deem “edit worthy” when I port the images over from Aperture.

Apple, I love you and all. But Lightroom will probably take over the professional photography workflow application market when Lightroom 2.0 is introduced. You can safely kill off Aperture now — it gave Adobe a good run for its money and made them haul ass on a software that was supposed to be dead. Gently unplug Aperture’s life support and put your resources elsewhere (i.e. save up to buy Adobe out right!).