Here are some juicy videos regarding Starcraft II shown during BlizzCon 07.

• StarCraft II Terran Faction BlizzCon Preview PC
• StarCraft II Single-Player Campaign BlizzCon Preview PC
• More Starcraft II Videos @ GameSpot

I have did some Search engine optimization (SEO) for this site.

• Removed /archives/ from the blog post url
• Dynamic Page Title (finally)
• Page Title will appear first

After this phrase is done, I am going to rename /blogs/ to /blog/ because technically, there is only 1 blog and not many blogs.

A man checked into a hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an e-mail to his wife.

However, he accidentally typed a wrong e-mail address, and without realizing his error, he sent the e-mail.

Meanwhile….Somewhere in Houston , a widow had just returned from her husband’s funeral.

The widow decided to check her e-mail, expecting condolence messages from relatives and friends.

After reading the 1st message, she fainted. The widow’s son rushed into the room found his mother on the floor and saw the computer screen which read:

To: My Loving Wife
Subject: I’ve reached
Date: January 31, 2004

I know you’re surprised to hear from me. They have computers here; we are allowed to send e-mails to loved ones. I’ve just reached and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow.

Looking forward to seeing you TOMORROW!

Yours,
Loving Hubby…..

Source: ppingg of Hardware Zone Forums

Below is a live shot of Nokia N81.

I am still waiting for live shot of N82 to be leaked as I am more interested in it due to its candy bar form factor.

I guess all will be revealed on 29th August 2007. Mark down that date!

I am also hopping that the OS will be featuring FP2 instead of FP1.

Nokia N81

Check out the teaser site: http://www.070829.com/

Source: First live pic of the new Nokia N81

*UPDATE*
- More Pictures Of Nokia N81 (Dummy Set)

We all use passwords every day; they have become very common today. Checking out mail, transferring money, shopping online, all those actions involve introducing a password. So if you use a password it is supposed to be a long difficult one in order not to get your account stolen. We are always told of stories about breaking easy passwords and stealing money.

Very many people have read and heard these stories, but let us see what happened to the passwords that people use.

10. ‘thomas’ (0.099%)
In the tenth place we see a name Thomas as a password. It was the most popular name in UK in the year 2000 maybe that is what made this password so popular. Anyway 1 person of 1000 picks this word as their password. Or could it be Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Edison? Their fans could use this password too.

9. ‘arsenal’ (0.111%)
The other popular choice for a password is the name of a soccer team. For example Arsenal is in 6th place in soccer related passwords. And it made it to the top 10 most common passwords.

8. ‘monkey’ (0.133%)
Why monkey? I dont understand it too. Maybe people think that no one would think of this password if they wanted to brake into your account. Usual there is a 6 minimum letter passwords and monkey is a 6 letter word, besides it is memorable so maybe this is what played its role.

7. ‘charlie’ (0.139%)
We have got one more name in our top list. Maybe such famous persons like Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Sheen or the Charlie from the Chocolate Factory persuaded people to choose that password. Or maybe people just use its Slang Meaning which means cocaine and that’s not a very good thing.

6. ‘qwerty’ (0.141%)
QWERTY is the word that is the easiest to type. Our keyboard set is called like that and this is what comes first to mind for those who use a 10 finger fast typing technique. It made 1 person out of 700 pick this word as their password or maybe not.

5. ‘123456′ (0.176%)
Another easy combination that is even easier for the users ‘123456′ it meet the requirements of minimum 6 letter password and this password contains numbers in it which is another requirement on some web sites. Just count to six and you get a password.

4. ‘letmein’ (0.176%)
A good desire when you want to check out your account or see if you received any money there. It is a modern equivalent of ‘open sesame’ which is longer and takes one second more to type. It is something like ‘trustno1′ password from X-Files series.

3. ‘liverpool’ (0.182%)
Liverpool is one of the most popular soccer teams in the world and here is the result: one person out of 550 picks this word as their password. So many people trust their team and their password.
By the way ‘liverpool’ is ranked 3rd in the most common soccer related passwords leaving Manchester United and Newcastle United far behind. Well maybe those names are too long and hard to type.

2. ‘password’ (0.378%)
Here we come; we have got to the 2nd place with password ‘password’. Well, when it says “Type Password” you start typing a password. And 1 person in 250 is doing that.

1. ‘123′ (0.3784%)
It has not gone too far from ‘password’ but it is even easier to count to 3 then to count to 6. Apparently not that many websites require users to have a minimum 6 letter passwords. And it brings us to 4 people out of 1,000 that type the simplest combination possible ‘123′. It is a good thing they dont type something like ‘111′ or ‘222′ etc. Maybe most of us know that it would be ridiculous to have such a simple password.

If you add up all those percentages you will get that 1.8 % of people worldwide use one of the passwords from the top 10 list. As a matter of fact 6.5 % of people use passwords from the top 100 list. We are glad that the remaining 91.7 % has nothing in common when they pick a password. It is up to you to decide whether to use a longer and stronger password or to use a more memorable one.

Source: LunaSouL of Hardware Zone Forums

CS3214 Workshop
Been so busy for me for the past few weeks, need to enjoy my last bit of holiday before my school starts. Anyway, my school has not yet officially started, it will start on 16th August 2007. But currently I am attending CS3214 Workshop and it happens everyday from 1st August 2007 to the day my school starts from 10am right up to 5pm. Unofficially, my school has started for me.

CS3214 is like a Final Year Project (FYP) in polytechnic by it is just a module on its own and it is worth 8 module credits and I think it is much more tougher than FYP. And the “best part” is that we have to code in Java. I have no idea why schools in Singapore is so pro Java, seriously Java sucks, it is so fucking resource consuming. And in order to code it, I need a computer with at least 1GB of RAM if not I will take like forever to compile the final codes. And the laptop I bought last year just barely meet the requirements.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Caught Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 2 weeks ago at GV VivoCity, it was quite bad and rather draggy/boring and it lasted about 150 minutes. I got a feeling the subsequent 2 movies will not be that good too.

Flashpoint
Caught Flashpoint which stars one of my favorite actor, Donnie Yen (甄子丹). The show was good, there were fight scenes almost throughout the whole movie which lasted about 90 minutes and those fight scenes were very well calligraph by Donnie Yen himself.

Those who love SPL: Sha Po Lang and Dragon Tiger Gate, will love this.

Portable HDD
Finally gotten myself a DIY portable harddisk drive, it is a 160GB Hitachi 5400RPM 2.5″ HDD with Cutie DX casing. It cost SGD$208. I am going to use it to backup my CS3214 codes in case my notebook cannot take the load that Java gives it and decided to give up on me. I can’t afford any mistakes here as my grades are at stake.

First time doing a review here, so please be gentle with me, my English, my photography skills and my video skills. Thank you.

It is a home made review so everything is not professional.

Summary:
Pros

• Sound equalizer is a very good feature to have
• Sound quality is definitely better than iPod
• User interface is some what similar to iPod
• It is as thin/small as iPod Nano
• Uses drag and drop via Windows Explorer instead of some crappy applications *cough* iTunes *cough* SonicStage.

Cons

• Songs are listed by file names instead of by artists/albums/songs
• I think the headphone wire is a little to long for comfort.
• For some reasons, the file browser does not detect pictures or text files whereas when I use the main menu to access them I am able to do so.
• OLED screen not as sharp but power saving

Read More (1,255 More Words, 9 More Images, 1 More Videos)

Lots of rumors have been circulating the web lately. Especially regarding their Nseries. Nokia have announced alot of phones this year but no Nseries so far. Anyways, this announcement is supposed to include the N95 8 GB, N81, N82 and maybe a surprise. I can’t wait.

Source: Next Nokia announcement on August 29th

I have been waiting for this a long long time. I just can’t wait to change my handphone. My current handphone, the O2 Atom Exec is a good PDA but it is definitely not a good phone.

In a roundtable with the European press, John Chambers confirmed the “end of life” of the Linksys name, being replaced by the new and redesigned Cisco branding.

This decision follows Cisco’s move last April to make it easier for Linksys resellers to add Cisco products to their offerings and vice versa. Also, just a few weeks ago, Cisco created a new division solely focused on the SMB market and headed by Rick Moran, formerly marketing chief of several Cisco communications applications like the unified communications portfolio, Cisco IPICS, Cisco Small Business Systems (Linksys One), TelePresence, Business Video and Physical security.

“It will all come overtime into a Cisco brand. The reason we kept Linksys’ brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there’s very little advantage in that”, said Cisco’s CEO.

Source: Cisco kills Linksys brand, plans agressive move into consumer markets (video)

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that (potentially) contains non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many European languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way around this, either by changing the standard, or by agreeing on a way to convert internationalized domain names into standard ASCII domain names while preserving the stability of the domain name system.

IDN has, by the standards of the Internet, a long history; it was originally proposed in 1996 (by M. Duerst) and implemented in 1998 (by T.W.Tan et al). After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) was adopted as the chosen standard, and is currently, as of 2005, in the process of being rolled out.

In IDNA, the term internationalized domain name means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII algorithm can be successfully applied.

Source: Wikipedia

I didn’t even know that existed till one of my users emailed me about it. Cool stuff here man.