25 posts tagged with "personal"

So apparently Gmail knows I'm Chinese. Or so I think. In the past when I log out of Gmail, it will say "Please wait..." Recently, perhaps through some heavy-duty data mining, it told me to "请稍等..." (Chinese for "please wait") instead. I thought that I had turned some settings in Firefox to display Web pages in Mandarin or I revealed through my emails that I'm Chinese - in which case that would be a serious case of privacy invasion, I think.

And all of a sudden, it now speaks to me in English again. I thought it was a mistake on Google's side. Turns out, it is! Another guy (Joe Shaw) who has entries in Planet SUSE's blog aggregator also has a similar problem. Well, mine is seemingly resolved now. Hopefully Joe's get resolved soon too.

Tip: If you are observant, you will see that when you try to login to Gmail's site, the login page is SSL-secured. Once you log in though, the page is not transmitted through SSL. If you want to keep your connection SSL-secured, you have to login with this address https://mail.google.com instead of http://gmail.com

Basically if you specify right at the start that you want SSL connection, Gmail will keep that for you.

2014-06-24 update: In the process of moving my blog, the Chinese characters got corrupted due to improper encoding handling. I shall leave it as it is. Also it seems that the problem Joe Shaw had was of a different nature - he was complaining about spam which is something different.

This is one of the most amazing video of nature I have ever seen. Over the years I've watched countless nature documentaries, many of which are on the savanna with the lions, buffaloes, giraffes, and elephants roaming free. This video clip from YouTube below beats them all.

If you're confused with the many different types of creative commons licenses out there, here's a gem for you. Take a look at this pictorial show (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works). It explains in a near idiot-proof way what the differences between the creative commons licenses are. It's very easy reading, so take 5 minutes to boost your knowledge.

I've installed the reCAPTCHA plugin for Wordpress today. The whole process is very simple - took me less than 15 minutes. Simply follow the instructions on the download page. I like reCAPTCHA because not only does it help to prevent comment spam, it helps digitize books as well. I don't know how it works exactly but the basic premise is that words are scanned from books and used in the pictures for reCAPTCHA. How the system tells whether the entered words are correct or not, I don't know. All I know is it works and that's good enough for me.

Well, I finally got around to doing my own blog. All along I had wanted to create the software for my blog. I've had that idea for nearly half a year now, I think. Considering that in these six months, the development of my personal software for the blog has been less than 'progressive', I decided to simply use one of the open source blog software out there. Realistically speaking, the Wordpress blogging Web application that I'm using now is definitely better than what I can do in my spare time, which isn't a lot.