Ahhh…yet another good open source alternative. Well, this is cannot be called a software, perhaps more like a script for websites. Basically, what you do is to code a few lines into your web code and it will act as a mp3 audio player. Exactly like those you see on various websites but this is in flash. No worries, it’s not a resource hog and it’s pretty small in size. And in the looks department, it looks pretty nice. Not too  “flashy” so to speak but yet presentable to most visitors. I think it will look good on “minimalist” websites like mine.

This Flash MP3 Player comes in different sizes from small to well, medium. Even the largest takes up only a small portion of your web layout. The largest also allows you to play multiple music tracks. It allows your users to choose which music tracks to play and allows them to adjust their volume. It feels to me that it is very clean and very stable. I tried a few on other websites and all seems to work perfectly. Of course, it also depends on the MP3 file you are showcasing on your website but it was able to play all the stuff which I threw at it. And coding it to your webpage is very simple. Just link to it like any other flash file and do your configurations in an xml file. Easy. Of course, the easiest is the “mini” version of the MP3 Flash Player, it just allows you to play a single audio file and the colours and look can be easily customized. Nothing for you to configure either.  But I think playing just one track is going to be tedious after while, why not give your visitors something more? The “multi” isn’t that much bigger and it has a ton of cool features too. If I ever wanted an embedded player, I would certainly choose the “multi” version. But it really depends on your webpage and it’s layout. If it doesn’t fit, you will have to choose another style.

Anyways, this flash script is open source and you can download it to check out it’s code. Flash should be supported in a good number of web browsers. In fact, I think all modern web browsers should already have support for flash and if they don’t, ditch it and get a better one, like…well….dare I say it…..Internet Explorer 7 or Opera! Hahaha, I am sure a lot of web users will kill me if they know that I am promoting Internet Explorer, but I am serious. Firefox is getting nowhere for me. So Internet Explorer is my next best option.

Well, it’s about time! I know all of us hate spam, especially if it is through the email. When you check your email, don’t you just hate the tons of spam that flows in? You know, those emails telling you to buy some sort of medical drug which can enhance one of your body parts….ya, like I need it! And out of 100 emails, only 1 or 2 are legitimate emails. The rest are just spam but you still need to check all of them in case you miss an important email. Arrggghhh….you have to spend precious minutes or even hours going through the damn emails everyday and it’s a big waste of time and effort.

But for webmasters, you can help fight back. How? Well, you can just add one link to your website and it’s this URL. Don’t worry, it’s just a webpage which has a large number of invalid email addresses. Since a lot of spammers harvest email addresses from email bots. These bots are just like Search Engine bots but what they do is to collect email address from webpages and they do this by following links. Usually, webpages have email addresses in them, like those contact us page and so on. So if an email harvesting bot follows that link, it will come to that page and they will start harvesting those invalid emails. The webpage is sort of like an infinite loop since it links back to itself. The best part is that the email addresses will change everytime the webpage is accessed. So the email harvesting bot is actually harvesting a infinite number of invalid email addresses! Wuhahaha, take that assholes! I would love to see the look on the spammers face when all his/her effort has gone down the drain and they may even need to ditch their mailing list. Won’t it be just great to know that spammers are to waste resources and effort by sending emails to invalid addresses? You know, exactly what they are doing to us?

However, I see a potential problem. The link itself. Sooner or later, spammers will figure out that this webpage has such invalid email addresses and it won’t be difficult for them to add into their email harvesting bot the URL to avoid. Perhaps, a better idea would be a script which someone can run on their webpage and the script would generate these superfluous email addresses for the email bots. This way, we can have a huge cluster of websites which can really destroy the usefulness of the email harvesting bot. Imagine, having tons and tons of invalid email addresses for the spammers to send their spam to and no way for them to really know which site is causing the problems for them? I like it! I like it very much.

 

Alright guys, how are you doing today? Fine? No? Well, I guess there is nothing a little beer cannot solve doesn’t it? When you get back from work and you are really stressed out, go to your fridge and take out a can of beer or if you have brewed your own beer, well, take out that bottle of beer and have a nice long sip. But don’t drink it fast, drink it slow and enjoy the taste of fine beer. I always tell others, beer is good to a certain extent. Of course there are people out there who takes things to the extreme, but in all seriousness, moderate drinking of beer or alcohol is good for you.

Anyways, you guys should know that I have brewed my previous two batches of beer, one is a Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale while the other is an extract recipe. I have bottled the Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale and opened a few bottles. Yes, they do taste great. But I am thinking of trying out other flavours of beer, so I have set my eyes on this Morgan’s Beer kit called Blue Mountain Lager. It is available in Singapore and sold by Homebrew, one of the few home brewing suppliers in Singapore. The best part about Homebrew is that they supply you with this “beer recipe kits” which provides you all the ingredients needed for the recipe and charges you less in a bundle. Sort of like a package thing. From their website, the Blue Mountain Lager with Lager Malt and additional hops is about S$47. That is S$47 for 23 litres of fine beer. Quite reasonable considering the price of malt and hops is rising.

From what I read from other beer brewing websites, it seems that this Blue Mountain Lager is one of Morgan’s more popular kits. And everyone seems to say that this kit is worth a try, especially for someone who doesn’t have much experience in brewing. It’s a very easy to drink beer, definitely great for my friends who aren’t into stronger beers like stout. Too much Tiger Beer I guess. Anyways, just like the Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale Kit, all you need to do is to have a pot of boiling water, add the Lager Malt and the Blue Mountain Lager kit into the boiling water and let them boil for like 10 minutes. Then after flameout (which means you shut off the flame for your brewing pot), add in the finishing hops and let it rest for about 5 to 10 minutes. After that, you need to cool it for a while and then add to your fermenter (with cold water). Yes, that’s easy. Easy Peasy. No need to do all those complicated stuff just for brewing beer!

The Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale tastes great, so I really hope that Morgan’s Blue Mountain Lager will top it. Once I am done bottling my extract brew, I will get some more bottles and then start my next beer - Blue Mountain Lager!

Take a look here. That’s 10 free CD/DVD burning software for you to try out! Sure, all of us have used Nero before and found that it works well. And we get so used to using Nero that we don’t really want to try out other software. Well, I think we should. Nero is a paid software and the next DVD burner your purchase may not come with Nero. This will certainly cause a lot of problems if you aren’t used to the new interface. Plus, Nero is very much a bloatware. It takes up a lot of space and have tons of useless features and may be sluggish on low end PCs. I am sure that those 10 free CD/DVD burning software would not be as resource hungry as Nero. I always like lean software which doesn’t tax the resources too much.

Basically, what a CD/DVD burning software should have is data burning, CD/DVD duplication, audio CD/DVD creation and video (VCD/DVD Video) conversion. The others are just extras to most people and most people seldom use them at all. In fact, most people use their burners to make backups of your CDs/DVDs.

My favourite is InfraRecorder, as it is completely open source and has a good number of features to boot. However, I found that it has some problems with certain drives, especially when doing DVD burning. But with the latest version, I think quite a lot of bugs have been patched and it should be quite stable. From what I know, it doesn’t support Blu-Ray or HD DVD either. Too bad. However, from the list, there are a few free software which can support Blu-Ray and HD DVD like StarBurn & BurnAware. Now, that’s impressive for free software. We usually think of such free software as perhaps something with less features than a commercial one, but that’s not always true. Sometimes, free software can even have more features than their commercial counterparts.

I think I will be doing some testing on these software in the near future. They do look very good as alternatives to Nero. Not to say that Nero is a bad software, but it is always good to have alternatives and I am a sucker for testing out new software. I like to try new things! Especially those that are free. If you know any other free CD/DVD burning software, please give me a hoot and I will put them down on my list to test out.

I am sure that you guys know by now that I have already bottled my home brewed beer and I am eager to crack open a bottle. Well, I did it. I opened up a bottle and took a nice little sip of the fine home brew and it was wonderful. Too bad, I didn’t cool it enough but I am sure when it is chilled even more, it should taste even better. The beer looks clear, without any hint of cloudiness or sentiment. This is what I wanted. However, the carbonation was a bit weak, not too sure why is it that way. I added the correct number of carbonation drops to the bottles. Perhaps I need a little more time for the yeast to completely carbonate my beer. Anyways, it is just the first bottle. I am sure that if I age them longer, they should mature and get better tasting.

Here are some of the pictures

Look at the head it created! Malto-dextrin, I love you. You can also see the little bubbles in the glass, looks good doesn’t it?

A closer look of the beer. Clear golden brew. Just the way I like it. I took the photos in the evening, so it isn’t bright enough to show off the nice gold colour of the brew. But I think it looks light enough to be a lager.

It looks a bit darker here. Most likely due to the fact that the area I am taking the photo from is a bit dark because of all the curtains and shades. However, you can see the opposition buildings through the glass. Nice.

The same picture but showing the head. As you can see, the head/foam didn’t retain very well, but this photo was taken about 10 minutes after taking the first one.

For those who are interested in the taste of the beer, all I can say is that it taste very clean. It leaves very little aftertaste in the tongue which makes drinking this very refreshing! And although it has a hint of bitterness, it is not too overwhelming like my previous batch (which I threw away). You won’t feel the bitterness after a while anyways. This is an easy to drink session beer and should go down easy with most people. Alcohol content is about 5%. But you will probably not taste the harshness of the alcohol in this beer.

Oh, if you don’t know, this is an Australian Pale Ale which I brewed from a can of Cooper’s concentrate, some malt, dextrose and malto-dextrin. All of them combined and created this fine looking brew. Thanks Coopers for making this so much easy! I am sure I won’t be so lucky to get such a brew after only 2 tries. And I hope this has inspired some of you to start brewing your own beer, instead of buying commercial beers which cost half your arms and both your eyes. And the best part about home brew, you don’t need to worry about driving home after drinking. You are already at home!

Looks like we are having a span of very weird weather in Singapore these few days. Just yesterday and the entire of last week, we had rain. And it rained most of the day and night too. But just today, we had sunny weather! It was blazing hot all of a sudden. I had thought that it was going to be a rainy day again, but I was dead wrong. It was very sunny with no speck of clouds that I could see. However, in the evening, it started to rain again. Talk about extremes. Sounds like the weather is going crazy again. I guess we humans are to be blamed for this weather pattern for pumping out all sort of nasty gases into the environment. You reap what you sow. And looking around the world, we have seen a lot of evidence that if we don’t do anything to stop pumping out greenhouse gases into our air, we could be facing a big worldwide disaster. Food crops are failing, property/buildings destroyed or damaged and people are killed by the extreme weather.

However, I am glad for this break in the cold rainy weather. Every morning, I wake up freezing. And when I take the bus to work, it would be freezing in the air-conditioned bus as well. With today’s warm weather, it was much better in the morning and on the bus ride to work. I am usually not afraid of a little cold weather, but the last week, it was very chilly, especially in the morning. Feels a lot like what I experienced in Hong Kong last December, except that it was rainy in Singapore. You go to work and to lunch drenched. Not a good way to spend the day in the office. Plus the damn bus ride to and from office was so slow, because our bus drivers are all morons and cannot drive properly when it is raining.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring, more rain or more sun? With this kind of weathers, I think it would be hard for any forecast to be really reliable. It’s hard to plan for your weekends too. I am going to spend my weekends indoors this week. No point traveling to the beach only to find that it is raining cats and dogs.

For some giggles. Click here.

Quote from the little story:

“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you’ve no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”

Ask who is she talking about? I think most of us faced this problem one time or another in our work, don’t we? It is ironic that the fault usually lies with the employers and usually the employees are the ones to be blamed rather than the big guys up stairs. But that is life. Will it change? I don’t think so, rich and powerful people will never accept responsibility when there is failure but they will be the first to claim credit when something goes well. Sad, but true. Just look around in Singapore and you will see that our leaders are a good example of this. If the economy is doing well, they get all the credit. But when the economy is not doing well, they will claim that others are causing the downturn and that the workers are just plain lazy, unproductive and uncreative who are causing all the problems for the economy. Man, I just love my country’s great leaders.

One of the least known technique for extract brewing is called “Late malt extract addition“. Basically it calls for the malt extract to be added late, say maybe at 45 minutes of a 60 minute boil. Extract beer brewing is actually the use of malt extract and boiling them along with the hops to add flavours and bitterness to the beer. What normally brewers do is that they start the boil with all their malt extract (be it liquid or dry) and then start adding hops to this boil. Some beer recipes call for bittering hops to be added at the start of the 60 minutes boil and then subsequent addition of hops at maybe 30 minutes and so on. The longer the hops is in the boil, the more bitter it gets. Aromatic hops are added at the end of the boil. Boiling is not only needed to for the addition of the hops, it also helps stabilize the wort and get out any proteins that was not removed by the malt extract manufacturer.

However, the problem with this method is that the wort (including the malt extract) which is being boiled tends to darken due to the actual boiling process. They call this carmelization and it not wanted when you are planning to create a light coloured beer. And worse still, the carmelization may create off-flavours to your beer, something like perhaps a burnt flavour. This is usually a problem with brewers using a partial boil which means that for a 23 litre wort, you boil about only 10 litre or less of wort and just add water to top up the 23 litre of wort. This is because the sugars from the malt extract will settle on the bottom of your brew pot due to the high gravity of the wort, even if you stir the wort often during boiling.

The solution is to add perhaps a third of your total malt extract at the beginning of the boil and then the rest at the last 15 or 10 minutes. This way, you will be able to maintain a lighter colour beer since there is much less darkening of the wort. The reason why there is a need to add the malt extract to the beginning is that hops need the sugars and the enzymes to effectively extract the alpha acids from the hops, thus you still need some extract in the boil. However, since the amount of sugars in the wort is much less, there will be less carmelization and thus your wort will be lighter in colour.

For more information, check out this great article on late malt extract addition.

You will remember for my first brew, I commented that my wort is very dark in colour and the resulting beer looks like some dark stout rather than a pale ale? Well, I did boil it. But I boiled the beer concentrate which is hopped! That’s probably the worse thing to do, it not only darkens the beer, it makes it more bitter plus it boils off any flavours and aromas in the beer concentrate. A rookie mistake but what the heck, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger doesn’t it?

I guess for most Singaporeans, growing up in this hyper competitive society, all of us need a little help now and then. The problem is always time and the fact that we Singaporeans are always overwhelmed with work. So how about our little ones in school? Do we have enough time to spend coaching them? How about their lessons? Do we have enough time to know what subjects they have and how to help them? The most likely answer is no. Even for those lucky few who have time to teach their children, you could always get some more help from people who are more experienced in teaching.

And nowadays, if you look at Singapore schools, they are very different from before. During my time, the lessons are just lessons. The teachers teach their students from the blackboard and from the book. However, now lessons are no longer mundane and boring. The lessons now teaches students to think out of the box and creative problem solving. You get very interactive classrooms and everyday there is something new to learn. But this also increases the pressure on students. They have a lot to absorb in a very short period of time. I know the feeling. When I was at that age, I feel lost sometimes too. Thus, the students too need help. Of course, I am not talking about spoonfeeding, but basically coaching and support from someone other than their teachers and parents. This is where tuition centres can come in and help out.

Well, I have complied a list of Tuition Centres in Singapore for you. If your child is weak in certain subjects, there are tution centres which specialized in these topics or subjects.

If you are a webmaster, I am quite sure that you have faced before Search Engine bots. They are little programs sent by Search Engines like Google or Yahoo! to spider or to index your website in order for your webpages to appear in their Search Engine results. They are very important, especially nowadays when we are flooded with new websites everyday. You need to get visitors from Search Engines. They are one of the most important traffic generators for most websites on the Internet. However, not all bots are good. Some bots are sent by email harvesters or some unknown Search Engine whose purpose is just to index as many sites as possible in the shortest period of time. The problem with that is it may crash or slow down your server and thus preventing others from accessing your site. Worse are those bots which are improperly coded which may result in endless indexing of your site. This again creates problems for you and it certainly doesn’t benefit you (I doubt that you will get any traffic from such Search Engines), even if you have a lot of bandwidth and server resources. They are also bots which ignore normal spider “etiquette” and do their own stuff like indexing hidden files or follow links which are not meant to be followed. Don’t you just hate irresponsible bots? They ought to be shot.

The sad truth is that a lot of webmasters don’t know that they have been attacked by “bad” bots. I must admit I used to be one of those who thinks that ignorance is bliss. However, you will be surprised that one day, this ignorance can really hurt you when your server goes down or that your webhost refuse to host your site on their servers because of these bots hammering on their servers. You will have to spend time to search for another webhost, upload your files again and wait for DNS propagation. Big big waste of time and your site will not be accessible during this time. And it will just happen again as bots keep on attacking you. These bots will never stop unless you do something about it.

My advise to all of you webmasters is to do some basic protection early. Check your website logs and see which bots (and their IP addresses) have been tracking you and try to block them. These bad bots usually attempt to navigate the easiest prey, so you should make it as tough as possible for them to get through. If you need more information on how to block these bots, take a look here. It’s a very good site who a lot of information on how to spot bad bots and how to block them. Most of the solutions provided are easy to follow.