Wiideo – Wii Videos

Since the design of Wii is so innovative (e.g. the remote), one obvious challenge is to educate the consumers about all the new stuffs … even before they buy the game console. What approach is better than video clips ? And of course with the help of Internet, the cost of distributing these video clips to potential consumers is practically zero.

You can find dozens of Wiideos in Internet, some by Nintendo, some by other professional animators / graphic designers (e.g. www.super78.com). Here are some clips I really really like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5cPVP_llfo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaUvbncE3Gk

The Wait is Finally Over

Work, work and more work … what a boring weekend ?! There are couple of things that cheer me up though. First, after months of waiting, the Samsung BlackJack is finally shipping here in the city and we should be able to buy it before end of the month. Two things come to my mind immediately, how can I protect the phone properly and how can I use my Shure headphone with it ?

So I surfed to my favorite PDA / Mobile phone jacket manufacturer … Vajacases.com … ah, there is a good one. Done deal … and now for the headphone adapter since Samsung uses a non-standard headphone plug for their phone. Couple of searches and I found this headphone adapter in eBay. It comes with microphone as well. Not bad, not bad.

Site Revamp with Amazon aStore

Really tied of keep updating my other site, 80days.com, with travel content. So I decided to change it to a shopping site with all sorts of travel related goods. Surprisingly, it just took me an hour for a four-pages, three-categories eShopping site. What can I say ? Amazon.com is still king of eCommerce sites with a good business model.

How To – Upgrade Lifetype

Many of you may need to upgrade your Lifetype time to time, therefore I think it may be useful if there is a simple guideline (from a user point of view) to go thru those steps … on top of the detailed wiki article in Lifetype (don’t forget to read it, it is a must). Here is the guideline:

  • First, backup your data using MySQL export tool, e.g. phpMyAdmin. Save this export dump to your local PC.
  • Then, you have to backup the changes you have done to your Lifetype engine before. In most cases they are changes in your template, plugin, javascripts, resources etc. Therefore, create a directory in your local PC, and ftp the following possible changes from the server and save in this local PC directory as backup :
    • The files / directories under /gallery/ – these are your resources files
    • Any files / directories of your current template under /templates/
    • The files / directories of the plugins your installed under /plugins/
    • The javascripts like prototype.js, scriptaculous.js etc.
    • The .htaccess file – that may include some Apache changes
    • The config.properties.php in /config/ – that is your current Lifetype settings
    • The files you changed in /locale/, in case you have set up your own language files or changed any text strings.
  • Then, rename your current Lifetype directory to something else – e.g. lifetype_old, blog_old etc. You can remove this directory later if your upgrade is successful.
  • Third, download the latest version of Lifetype, upload to your server.
  • Fourth, unzip the new Lifetype, and rename the new Lifetype to your original directory name – e.g. lifetype, blog etc. And also rename the config.properties.php as something like “config.properties.php.original”.
  • Now, copy all the changes you backed up to the new Lifetype installation – gallery, plugins, config.properties.php, javascripts etc. in the right places.
  • Lastly, run the wizard.php … and the rest is done by the script.
  • That’s it !!

Hope it helps.

Entrepreneurial Proverbs

Yes, may be it’s a bit late to cross post this article, but I reckon it’s never too late to have something useful about how a geek can start up a business … especailly in a list of proverbs !!

And my favorite one is:

Jump when you are more excited than afraid — lack of fear is irrational, and too much fear is debilitating. Make the jump into your business when you have considered the fear, and come out more excited than afraid.

Here you go … Entrepreneurial Proverbs from O’Reilly. Enjoy and learn !!