WiredAtom

My blog had been breached once before with the same attack. But it’s happened again even though the WordPress version being attacked the 2nd time was definitely newer than that previous attack. I hadn’t been on my own blog for weeks. And the only reason I found out was because I installed Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Grace’s machine, and the new Firefox (working with Google) has this new feature that can detect “bad ware” like that.

Basically someone “somehow” inserted a line of Javascript code into a couple of my blog entries and pretended to be “statistics” code. But in reality, it’s a script that behaves as trojans, presumably for Internet Explorers…

After some troubleshooting and searching, I removed all the codes and requested my site to be reviewed by Google in order to be considered safe again in its database…

For the first time in my life, I tasted what it felt like to have my words twisted in a family political wrestling match in order for one side to win an argument. The worst part was, what was said didn’t even come out of my mouth! It infuriated me, but at the same time, it saddened me that they had to resort to lying to make a stance in light of my father’s passing.

Ever since my father died, the secondary issue that everybody gossips about now is how the overall combined “Chu” family wealth was to be redistributed. You see, my father had many siblings; and when it comes to money, of course, for many people the idea of “integrity” is just a recommended trait to have whilist fighting for what they think is their “fair share”… I am sure all this is making the ancestorial spirits groovy about the whole ordeal.

Family politics is fun when watching from afar. Now that I got dragged into it for a lie someone (whose name shall remane anonymous) made up, the real “fun” is yet to come.

Oh, why must “lies” and “politics” always go hand-in-hand?

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 $ 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 .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 .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.

I am almost two weeks late on getting my photography site up. And that upsets me.

I had almost everything ready to rock until I hit a sudden insecurity in myself — Will people really pay for what I want to charge for my photography? I had all the content thought through, written and even posted, all ready to beg a few friends to proof read them for me. And then I hit the “pricing” page. Then all wheels stopped turning as if someone turned off the steam engine (or snatched the hamster out of the exercise wheel) that was plowing ahead.

So I started to ask people around me to brainstorm on the feasibility of my business model, which is quite a departure from how photography is traditionally priced with other photographers. My core beliefs wants me to do one thing, but the standard practice in the industry wants me somewhere else. I was torn.

So I bummed around professional photography discussion websites for a week. And I spent a lot of time explaining to anyone who’d listen about my ideas and why I felt so confused… much of that time was waiting for people to get online, to reply my emails or just to meet up and talk… Ya know, just talk…

Finally I have arrived at a good place where I feel comfortable in putting up the pricing again. The up side is my original intuition about what I should do was right, but not without some modifications to minimize risks and to address some potential concerns. So I am ready again. And the site shall be fully functional by the first half of this week (fingers crossed).

I have to say that reading some of those professional photography sites also reassured me that I am heading towards the right direction. Some of what those photographers say made me realize that there is indeed a difference between art and ego. By being able to let go of my ego, I can breathe easier and feel better about myself, not to be caught up in a intellectual property fight with my customers. I will probably write another post about this later (or possibly even on my new photography blog). But the “slowing down” of that one week, now I understand, was needed for me to feel the conviction and feel better about myself as an artist.

So. I am back.

BIG thanks to: Grace (Mrs. Pragmatic), Jason and Alicia (the dynamic duo and sometimes my conscience), Brian (my Euro-American half brother), my cousin Alex (for casually dropping a bombshell which required me to address an important issue), and Miho (Ms. GREAT ideas mixed with an artistic twist).

And the following who actually provided advice a few months prior: Mari & Dave (great insights and business sense) and Christy (my #1 spy with insights of a “typical American mom” flavor).

Brian and I are supposed to start a project on a site that would help consumers make more informed decisions on products they consume on daily basis. It’s going to be a site where anyone with Internet (or heck, an Internet phone like the iPhone) would be able to find out immediately all they’d need to know about a certain product they are buying: materials used to manufacture them, labor conditions, political influences of the manufacturer, environmental impacts/footprints….etc.

So I was doing some reading and research on the underlying software and how I’d build or modify it to work the way Brian had envisioned. I went back to some bookmarks I saved for this project from a couple of months ago and was surprised that some of them had already gone offline! And then I dug deeper and did more reading and realized that a lot of useful info on how I’d approach the project had all but disappeared!

We have all been relying on the availability (or the perception of) and immediacy of the Internet too much nowadays. We expect everything at our finger tips through the power of Google. But most of the time we fail to retain the information the good old fashion way — make a copy of it… This is frustrating… So I guess from now I will just use OSX’s “Print to PDF” feature more liberally when I see a keeper on the web….

I’ve heard some “interesting debates” (to say the least) about the idea of Intelligent Design that somehow all people were “intelligently designed” by this supreme being living up in the heavens. And this supreme being is almighty and can do no wrong.

My answer to that is: that being could take some industrial design lessons down here on my humble Earth. And while he’s here, I’d like to ask him a few questions as to why he designed things the way they were if they were supposedly so intelligently designed (NOT!).

Anyone who’s tried to pick his/her own child’s ear can attest that the way ear wax are formed inside a child’s ear canals proves that the ears aren’t so intelligently designed. Some wax hug to the wall of the ear and seem to have root grown inside them. Sure, there are remedies to use and techniques to try, but my point is, if the ears were so intelligently designed, the damn wax would always fall out of the ear “by design”!

Evolution is dirty and messy, and that’s the way things work. Anyone who tells me there’s a God up there who so intelligently designed everything so perfectly can try to dip his head in the water for 10 minutes and tell me if the fact that we can’t breath under water was so intelligently designed by this God of his. When everywhere else in the world is in a hurry to fund math and [real] science, it’s hard to comprehend that here, in the United States, arguably the most advanced nation in the world, even has a movement that’s seemingly winning the “Intelligent Design” war in education. Are they really serious? Or is this just a big hoax by the Religious nuts?

Religion belongs to the heart and private homes; it has no place in education, politics or government.

Sorry. I was frustrated trying to pick some of the weirdest ear waxes in Bryan’s ears. And I thought this stupid Intelligent Design idea is just insane and poorly conceived…. hence the rant…

I’d been following the opening of The Secret Workshop in California so that I can attend one and learn more of what I can’t get from other professionals. I am not so worried about the technical stuff in Photoshop or lighting stuff — it’s the meat on how to get into the commercial and editorial industry that I am most interested in. Also the bits on how to photograph infants that will be a boost in the right direction.

But I’d been so busy with other stuff that I’d forgotten to follow up with the site and COMPLETELY missed out on the signups for San Francisco, San Diego, AND even Phenix, the next closest thing to anything California! I am so bummed! The only opening they have is in Michigan, but it’s going to be held within weeks after Grace giving birth, which means it’s probably not a good idea to leave home for four days…

Maybe I will bum around trying to get on a waiting list (if I am so lucky)…

ARGH!

Ok, another pointless ugly rant on Microsoft IE.

Engineers who came up with the guidelines for Microsoft IE must have their heads filled with tofu… umm, wait, I like tofu. Their heads must be filled with turd. Simple standards are simply ignored or conveniently misinterpreted by the IE’s rendering engine. It makes debugging a living hell from the perspective of a web developer no matter how much time I’ve already spent doing this for a living.

And then today Microsoft went and made an offer to buy out Yahoo for a cool $44.6B? Give me a f*cking break. How about spending some of those billions on fixing the damn IE and ensure future developments of IE adhere to standards?

The World Wide Web would be a better place without Microsoft. But then again, without scums, how can we appreciate the beauty of all the other standards-adhering browsers? Nonetheless, if I ever meet the guy(s) who was in charge of defining the renderer guidelines, I might just kick him in the nuts. Idiot.

I started using Facebook more seriously when Brian told me that’s how his brothers stay in touch with their high school friends. So I thought that might be a cool way to hook up with friends I’ve lost touch over the years. So the nightmare begins.

First of all, the UI design of the site sucks. And it doesn’t just suck a little, it’s a design disaster from usability standpoint. Every time I want to do something simple, I have to think about where that feature may be, or if clicking on that button will do what I think it’d do. In UI design terms, the site has very low “affordance” to usability, meaning it’s not very intuitive.

One thing I like about Facebook, though, is how it allows outside developers to develop mini-applications that allows users to plug them right in to the existing infrastructure of the site to “enhance” existing features. But I hate how abundant and frequent people have been, or sometimes are forced to be, sending invites to add those mini-applications just because they are there. Over a short period of time, the UI get cluttered up and is littered with trivial and useless crap that other people have too much time doing. So I simply ignore 90% of them.

Facebook started out with noble goals and intentions. But all it is now is a slightly more improved version of MySpace (which belongs to all-time horror site of fame). It’s arrogant to say this, but when “ordinary people” with no design sense are given the ability to do whatever they want, they will make absolutely the worst design decisions ever, hence making the Internet a worse place to be. Sorry to be such a web design Nazi.

Having said that, at least Facebook doesn’t yet allow people to mess with crazy backgrounds, obnoxious auto-play audio tracks, movies and other crazy things like MySpace. And for that, I reluctantly still use it from time to time just to respond to messages. And I’ve gotta to admit, it’s gotten pretty easy to find people on that thing than even Google!

For some reason, my MacBook Pro has been failing to warn me when it’s running on reserve power before the battery runs out of juice and shuts the computer down unsafely. And today I’d almost wasted days of work on Lightroom due to a corrupted Lightroom catalog .lrcat file when my MBP abruptly shut off. Adobe’s documentation was less than helpful (another evidence that it’s the new Microsoft!). But thankfully, this article from Jonathan Kingston’s blog has an alternative way to salvage the catalog, and days of my life, back….

Life is good again. Thank you Mr. Kingston!

I’ve been sweating bullets with this project I’ve been working on with Neely — he’s supposed to be demoing it at a major conference in New York with a partner in a couple of weeks. But I am still not quite where I’d like to be in terms of polish and grace.

Neely’s been telling me to just code for the immediate requirements and nothing more. But my philosophy has always been to look ahead just a little more and prepare for what’s to come as “no-brainer” feature requests. Apparently this type of thinking has been hurting my development time on this project…

I rarely read Wil Shipley’s blog entries because they are usually quite long and sometimes very technical. But just out of the blue I decided to read “something” today. And there I came across his coding strategy and philosophy on coding for only what’s necessary and nothing more.

I’ve always understood the idea of “push it out to the market first and fix it later”… But I just never felt right implementing that in good conscience knowing that I am purposely releasing a faulty software only to fix it when complaints flood in. But the way Wil explained it made a lot of sense to me and I think I am going to make what he says in that article my focus from now on — if there ain’t complaints, it ain’t broke. And if there ain’t requests, it ain’t a useful feature.

Live and learn…

So can someone explain to me the “real reason” why the Feds shot down California’s proposal for a waiver to implement stricter rules on carbon emission? Is this one of those “about face” rulings? Or does it have real merit in it? I mean, if the politicians are too bought off by the motor companies to get it done, why can’t individual states implement something better? And let’s not forget, it takes a while for those cars to populate the roads en mass that can even make a positive impact on the environment… hence, the sooner, the better… The Fed’s plan looks pathetic compared to rules already in place in other industrialized nations. So if the car companies can make cleaner cars for THOSE countries, I don’t understand what the big deal is to implement the same thing in the U.S.?