Well, it looks like Intel is set to be the king for desktop processors again. And it is bad times for Intel’s main PC processor competitor AMD. Just a few years back, I would have thought that Intel may be overthrown as the world’s leading supplier of processors, but Intel came back with a vengence. Actually, Intel had (has) tons of money to spend, so they finally decided to throw their money into making better processors and it came to be Core 2 Duo. After that crap called Pentium IV was easily overtaken by AMD64, I guess Intel realized that they really needed to put some effort into producing decent processors for a change. And with so much money thrown at it, they finally did it. Even the latest AMD processor - Phenom, cannot beat Intel’s offerings. And comparing price value, again, AMD’s offerings cannot beat Intel’s ones.

But for me, I would always support AMD. I mean it is because of companies like AMD that we are having good prices for our processors. If we let Intel come and muscle away the competition, we will again see another Pentium IV show. I won’t want to be paying an arm and leg for something that is not really worth that much. Already, many experts are predicting price increases for Intel processors in the near future. Worse still, AMD most likely will not be able to produce enough processors for the market, which would mean that we will be flooded with Intel processors everywhere. PC manufacturers will be unable to offer AMD alternatives to their customers and this will inevitably lead to Intel gaining even more market share.

I usually don’t support something just for the sake of it. But I think purchasing AMD processors in this case will really help the PC market in general. Competition is good. Monopoly is bad. If we don’t support the underdog, we will all be sniffing the big dog’s butt real soon. And I don’t fancy sniffing anyone’s butt at all. Come on AMD, you got to regain more market share and start destroying Intel.

Well, I am a owner of several web directories and I would like to share with you some of the tips which website submitters can use when they submit websites to directories. I have seen a lot of websites being submitted and to tell you the truth, a lot of people submit sites without thinking or even any consideration. A lot of these are SEOers and paid submitters, who spend hours and hours submitting websites to directories. The problem is that a lot of these “SEOers” are just kids without any knowledge of SEO. Hence, for a serious web directory, these sites are usually rejected immediately. And these directories are ones which you would want to be in. So, I would recommend everyone not to use such services. And if you don’t have the time to do the submissions yourself, I would recommend you to engage a professional instead of those “US$10 for 1000 submissions” kind.

Okay, here are some of the tips:

1. Submit to the correct category. That’s pretty important. Note that some directories get a lot of submissions and it’s frustrating for the editors to spend time to change categories for you. Don’t piss off the editors.

2. A proper description for your site. Ensure that you don’t try to “sell” your site or make it a marketing slogan. Just tell the readers what your site is about. And make sure your spelling is correct. It’s embarrassing to have spelling mistakes as it looks unprofessional. Seriously, would you approve a site with a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes?

3. Have a proper title. Yes, this is very important as the first thing the editor sees is the title. Do not have long winding titles or titles with too many repetitive words. It looks very spammy to the editors. In fact, the title should be the title of your website. Some directories allow you to have keywords in your title, but some don’t.

4. Avoid submitting your site’s subdirectories or inner pages. A lot of directories don’t allow this. This helps build some sort of trust between you and the editor. For me, I won’t be approving any website with long URLs, URLs with huge number of keywords and those with very deep URLs too.

5. Read the FAQs or any terms and conditions first. Some directories will allow certain criterias while others do not. Although it can be very tedious, but it can really help to get your site approved. If you get rejected once, perhaps you can read the terms and conditions again to see what went wrong.

 Hope these tips will improve your chances of getting approved. Do note that some directories are just not meant to be, so you shouldn’t waste a lot of time trying again and again to get approved. You will never know what the owners are thinking.

Yes, I really do. That chunk of minced beef, all so oily but when you fried it in the skillet, it smells so damn good. Just add some minced onions, garlic, a little pepper and salt, you will have a great snack to go with that bread of yours. And best part it is easy to do. No need complicated recipes or anything, just a little skillet, some heat and you are ready for a great meal. Just thinking of it makes me hungry again. Ahhh….the simple pleasures of life eh? A can cost like S$2.50 and it’s enough for a big meal, well, enough for me anyway. But for some people in Singapore, their fat asses require much more oily fried food.

However guys, remember, this is beef we are talking about. And since it is canned food, and we don’t know how it is processed, so you need to cook that corned beef properly. Since it is minced anyway, just cook it till it is slightly crispy and “well-done”. Not harm in that. We are not looking at some juicy steak here. It’s corned beef for god’s sake! It’s better to be safe than sorry. Considering the problems with beef, I think we shouldn’t take the risk.

Oh, and try not to eat corned beef too regularly. It’s unhealthy. Actually, I think it’s very unhealthy. It’s not easy to resist the temptation, but we all got to. The oil, the fat, the red meat, the processed food….it’s the trifactor or is it quadfactor?! And remember to wash down all that corned beef with vegetables and fruits. A healthy diet is paramount.

If you know any great recipes for cooking corned beef, please leave a comment here. I am always on the lookout for good recipes.

I am here to introduce to you again directory script - OpenLD. This open source directory script is a newly setup project. I believe that it has only been in development for less than a year or so, but it’s feature list is quite impressive. If you are looking for a free alternative to PhpLD or other paid directory script, you should take a good look at OpenLD.

Basically, it has all the important features for a web directory script - the ability to store, arrange and display links into categories, link validation, search function, a powerful administration console, numerous category options, template (theme) support, word censoring, IP banning, domain banning, paypal integration as well as support for different database backend. You can also create SEO friendly URLs, very useful for those looking to improve their Search Engine rankings. However, one of the most important feature is it’s ability to allow extensions (or plugins) without too much trouble or modification to your code. This would be a god sent for those webmasters who do a lot of modifications and are looking to upgrade their script. Usually this is a nightmare for upgraders, wondering whether their mod will break their script.

Although OpenLD is currently not that popular, I think it will gain popularity in time. From my brief trial of the script, it seems stable and relatively fast. I also didn’t face any issue with this script. Of course, the community support for this script is not huge, in fact, it’s pretty small. It’s support forum is rather bare. But everything starts small right? The latest version is now version 1.2. Go give it a try and join the community!

This according to Neowin. It seems that Microsoft’s latest service pack for WinXP provides some performance gains for some PCs. However, the article also states that the latest service pack for Win Vista, that is SP1, doesn’t provide any provide gain at all. And Microsoft has said that WinXP SP3 is just a collection of patches and nothing more, yet it does make your WinXP faster. My company has several systems on Win Vista and I must say, these systems are seriously under-powered to be using Vista. I think that Microsoft should make it a priority to ensure that Vista is streamlined and improved so that it won’t be a drag on productivity. Loading times for Vista can be tedious to say the least, and with anti-virus, anti-spyware and whatever security software, most Vista systems can be unbearable to use.

Several of my company’s oldest PCs is still based on WinXP, and these run fine. At least they are bearable. A clean installation of Vista doesn’t help much however, with a clean installation of WinXP, most Pentium 4 systems run great. Just with 256MB of RAM and you are okay. With Vista, even with 1 GB of memory (and higher end systems as well), it is dead slow. Loading basic software like Excel and Word is also slow, not to mention other higher requirement software. I won’t want to state the obvious, but Vista systems are terrible for offices and work. A lot of the staff are frustrated with their systems, and this results in slower productive and my boss breathing down my neck. A lot of PC manufacturers nowadays only offer systems with just Windows Vista. I am ditching all of them, except Dell, who offers their customers WinXP as an alternative. More manufacturers should consider offering WinXP alternatives than just Vista ones. Vista is not only slow, a lot of older software cannot run on Vista systems and this can result in a lot of problems, especially for the IT departments. And just think of the upgrade cost for all those software! It’s going to be a financial nightmare for the company.

Anyway, anyone here tried WinXP SP3 yet? If it is as good as the article claims, I think it’s a good time to upgrade your WinXP system to SP3. With the performance gain and all the security patches, I think everyone should consider patching their system to SP3. Well, this service pack is supposed to come out in 2005. But I guess Microsoft was too busy trying to counting their billions to concentrate, so it was delayed. Yes, that’s what rich people and their employees do, count money. What? You expect them to care about their customers???!!! What I am even more afraid of is that once Microsoft realize that their SP3 will result in better performance for WinXP, they will be tempted to delay the release even further. Or even forgo releasing it! You will never know what Microsoft will do to ensure that people buy their latest Operating System (aka Windows Vista).

I am going to patch all my office systems when it is offically launched. Hope it is as good as the article says it is.

I am sure all you guys would have heard of Google? It’s that search engine that is making tons and tons of money and is now currently running out of ideas and is buying over small companies left and right. Yes, that greedy Google. Anyway, it seems that Google is not really that greedy. Everytime you go to that search engine, you will see a button called “I’m Feeling Lucky“. What this button does is it goes direct to the top search result. So let’s say you search for “Spam Fighter” and press the button “I’m Feeling Lucky”, it will go to the Spamfighter website instead of the search result list. So when this happens, Google doesn’t get the chance to show the advertisements like normal. This means that they are losing money from the revenue they would have received if they didn’t have that button on the search page.

So why does Google keep that button? Well, according to Google, they want people to know that Google is made up of real people. They don’t want people to think that Google is “too dry”, “too corporate” and “too much about making money“. Yes, would you believe that. Google isn’t about making too much money. And apparently, one percent of users use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button! And it cost Google US$110 million per year! So from this, I believe that Google is making US$11 billion per year through advertisements.

I bet that their investors are very angry with Google for having that button. US$110 million is a lot of dough and investors would want to get their money back. So how long will Google keep that button to show that there are real humans in that corporation instead of just that droid Matt Cutts? I believe they will remove it soon. Maybe in one to two years time? Greed is the hallmark of Google now. Instead of innovators and people of great vision and ideas, they are now full of business executives and money (grabbing) men. Their recent spade of buyouts is prove of that already. I’m not feeling lucky anymore.

For more information about this, check out this site.

 

Yes, the place where you shop till you drop or till you are broke, whichever comes first. I believe that I will be departing two weeks from now and it will be my first trip out of Singapore since 2003. And I doubt that I will be doing anymore travels in the coming years, it’s very expensive! The 5 day travel to Hong Kong cost about S$800 and that’s not counting meals and other expenses. Only the air tickets and lodging. Anyway, it’s the holiday season, prices will inevitably rise, so I am pretty sure the prices are not the lowest. I hate those budget airlines. I mean, although the ticket itself is reasonable, the prices of food and drinks on the planes are not. Yes, budget airlines don’t provide drinks and food. You need to buy them yourselves. Nowadays a lot of airports restrict the amount of liquid you can bring on board, so you are left thristy unless you buy drinks from the airlines. Smart move right? I wonder whether they will start to charge for using the toilets later on? That could lead to serious diaster in my opinion! Major diaster!

What will I be doing in Hong Kong? Well, I am not sure. Perhaps it’s just to relax for a while and see something different. Hong Kong is famous for being a shopping paradise, so I guess there will be at least a certain amount of shopping involved. But then I am not really into shopping. Actually, the reason is more for travelling and seeing the world with several of my friends. I would like to see other countries, especially Europe but that’s way out of my budget. The furthest I can afford is Korea, but my friends have been there recently so we decided that Hong Kong would be a good compromise. Perhaps in 3 years time, I can save enough money to travel to Japan!

Well, I don’t think Hong Kong is an interesting place. In fact, it’s a lot like Singapore - overcrowded, dirty and just full of people rushing here and there. Probably the food there is better than what we can find in Singapore and women just love shopping in Hong Kong. But other than that, it’s basically Singapore. All we have to do is to change a few landmarks and ensure that all protestors are well caged. Oh well, it’s better than nothing.

Anyway, I have a directory for Singapore Tour Operators/Travel Agencies. It has 6 pages of travel agencies and tour operators based in Singapore!

Looks like our dear Google is searching for people to fill in some positions. Check it out here. Apparently, they are looking for the brightest minds in sales management. Yes, that’s right. Sales Management. Not programming, not program analysis, not web designer, not those types but instead SALES management. I mean, if you look at what Google has done (or what they didn’t do) for the past 2 to 3 years, you would think that they would be trying to get people who are into web programming and smart people who thinks of new innovative ideas to improve their Search Engine. But no, instead, they are trying to get sales people. It looks like Google believes that the huge amount of dough they have made is not enough and they are looking for new ways to make even more dough. Or they could be planning to burn more people at the stake, whichever is easier. That’s businesses for you. No competition, no impetus for change and no improvement in their search engine. What more can I say?

Maybe I should apply? It seems that they are looking for spooky people and at the same time, people who are smart. It seems that I only qualify 1 out of 2 criterias. Maybe all I have to do is wear something scary or gothic, I can fulfil the scary part? You know, wear like that guy in the music videos. I can’t remember his name, but he does look spooky enough. I am just wondering whether I should put on makeup for the interview? And I am also wondering whether the position of “God” has been filled? If so, who is the person in that position and what the hell has he/she been doing?

Anyway, if you are interested, you can send an email to Google asking them for a job. The email address is ironically scarysmart@google.com. I believe that they also have several positions of “Blood Sucker” open and they are urgently in need of such talent. Remember to read what it says in the link because that is the most important thing to do when sending in a resume. You don’t want your prospective employer to be pissed off at you even before he/she starts hiring you, right?

Partimage Is Not Ghost (hence PING) is a software meant for backing up partitions or entire HDDs. It’s just like Norton Ghost (or Symantec Ghost) but with a few difference. First of all, it’s free and open source. And secondly, it is based on Linux. So what you get is a bootable CD (or DVD) and it works independent on your operating system . So if you are using Windows or Linux, it doesn’t matter. What it matters is that you have a CD-ROM Drive and HDDs to backup.

This powerful software allows you to do backup through a Microsoft Network. So just like Symantec Ghost, you can backup or restore partitions through your network easily but without the need for expensive software. And best of all, since it is based on Linux, you get a lot of support for different network cards, making it much convenient to do restoring and backing up through the network. You don’t need to worry about drivers and stuff. It also supports CD and DVD Burning, allowing you to do your backups on CD and DVD media. And from PING’s documentation, it seems that they also allows backup or BIOS data. I am not sure how that works, but it should be a good thing. PING also claims to support more file systems than their competitors, so you shouldn’t have to worry about what type of filesystems your system is running.

If you are looking for a open source alternative to Norton Ghost, you should really give PING a try. All you need is a burner and you are really to backup your entire office’s PCs. Probably take you one quarter the time you would if you have to do Windows installations every 6 months or so. Just don’t ask me why they named their software like that. Anyways, I am always keen to hear about new and exciting software, so if you find any out there on the Internet, give me a little heads up so that I can do a review on it.

Yes, it’s really a very solid media player I ever used. It plays about every video file I tried. Although it doesn’t look like much, it is a very stable product that works very well. In fact, it looks like the yucky old Microsoft media player. Perhaps that’s why they called it Media Player Classic (MPC)? I mean, when I play videos, who cares how the media software looks, right? I just want to watch the video. How the software looks is not important to me. Sure there are a lot of people who take a look at this software and say that it looks old. But surely, those are just eye candy and when you are watching movies, you won’t be looking at that. Oh, yes, it’s free (open source) too. And you don’t need to worry about resources, it takes very little of it. And it’s just about 2MB to download! If you are looking at functionality, Media Player Classic is your man. If you are aiming for looks, there are a huge number of players out there for you to choose from.

You can even use MPC to play quicktime (mov) and realmedia (rm) files! Just download the related codecs (which could be rather big) and your MPC will be able to play them. Not a lot of players can play these two types of files. And it plays DVD Videos too! Even Microsoft Media Player requires you to purchase a third party codec to play DVDs, but not MPC. It plays without any additional software. If you are looking for subtitle support, MPC has it too. Good for watching those foreign movies eh? It is surprising that such a small compact piece of software can have so many features! I am always surprised to see people willing to trade functionality for looks and then start complaining when their player acts up. It’s actually quite amusing to see that when it happens.

Media Player Classic is for Windows only. There is a version for Windows 98 and Windows Me as well. Please give it a try. I am sure you will realize that nothing beats MPC.