Category: Services & Products

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.

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.

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 !!

It all started from a very simple idea … put up something nifty in the sidebar of my blog. Of course, it is easy to put up Google adsense, Amazon Omakase, RSS etc … but what about something better, something easier to manage (in my blog) ? Like widgets ?

Since the good old days of Windows Active Desktop, Apple Dashboard, and Yahoo Konfabulator, widgets are really not new stuff. But we now have Vista sidebar gadgets, and after Newsweek declared 2007 is the year of widget, I am sure we will see a lot more about widgets.

However, what really really really caught my eye is the following blog post:

If you were going to invent the portal today, would you?

Just some excerpt …

My point is that all content needs to be loosed in the smallest particles possible (widgetised) – then it will reform itself into valid and relevant units, driven by the consumers of that content. One unspoken issue underlying this is the concept of ‘portal death’.

Check that blog post, check out the concept behind widget and widget sites like widgetbox.com … widget is going to change the Internet and the world again.