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.

I have finally took some time off to redirect http://www.lesterchan.net to http://lesterchan.net and update my links to reflect this change.

As for my links in my WordPress plugins, I will update it when I release updates for all of them after WordPress 2.3 is released (sometime in September 2007).

For all those that linked me, it would be good if you can change my url from http://www.lesterchan.net to http://lesterchan.net. If you find it too troublesome to do so, you can just leave it as .htaccess will take care of it.

But most importantly, a big thank you for linking me.

Why is .www deprecated?

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

By: www. is deprecated.

FeedBurner
I finally took some time to update my site’s feed to use FeedBurner feed.

So now I can see how many people are subscribe to my blog’s feed. =D

Feel free to subscribe to GaMerZ.Blog feed or if you want to keep track of my WordPress Plugins development, feel free to subscribe to GaMerZ.WordPress feed.

Technorati Ranking
As my site is still on WP 1.5.2, I can’t use any WordPress plugin to display my Technorati Rank as all of them requires WP 2.0 and above.

I took some code from Douglas Karr’s Technorati Rank WordPress Plugin and an image from Eric’s site and with the help of GD2 library, I generated my Technorati Ranking Image which has the same style as the FeedBurner feed count.

Both the FeedBurner and Technorati Ranking information can be found on the right menu, under Tracking.

PS: My http://lesterchan.net/ site is ranked 1,923 in Technorati! I have finally made it to Technorati Top 2K sites!

Went to Singapore Indoor Stadium to watch The Year of Jacky Cheung World Tour 07. It was my first time watching a concert.

Was there about 2 hours earlier (the concert suppose to start at 8pm) and there are plenty of carpark lots available. I was monitoring the carpark and I concluded that to confirm find a parking lot besides the Singapore Indoor Stadium (there are plenty of car parks, I am talking about the nearest carpark), it is best to come 90 minutes earlier.

As for dinner, the best is to have dinner first before going there because the restaurants there are VERY LIMITED and they are not cheap as compared to other restaurants. I ended up waiting Nissin Cup Noodles with LiXiang at 7-11 because it is the cheapest alternatives, even though the cup noodles cost $2.25 each.

We bought a pair of $88 tickets for $190 because it is sold out everywhere and we got this lobang from Hardware Zone: MarketPlace Classified/Garage Sales.

As usual, being in Singapore everything gets delayed, the concert got delayed till about 8.30pm before it started.

The concert lasted for 2 hours and 45 minutes and after that there is 45 minutes of Ann Kok encore. It is during the encore part that he sings most of his oldies.

The concert/encore ends with the song 祝福 which brings the atmosphere to the max, I think I love that part the most. I recorded that part, but I think I will violate some law if I upload that part to Youtube.

He speaks mostly in Cantonese but from what I gathered from Hardware Zone, during his concert on Friday, he speaks mostly in Mandarin. So whenever he speaks I have to ask Li Xiang to translate it for me because I have no idea what he is talking about as I do not understand Cantonese.

Overall, the concert is very worth it and definitely beats listening to the CD at home (which I always thought it is the best alternatives). The ambiance and atmosphere are 2 important factors that make the money worth.

Next time when I go out to work, I will definitely get the most expensive ticket, but now being a poor student, I should just be satisfied with the cheapest ticket.

To be honest, throughout the whole concert, I only know a handful of songs, most of the songs are alien to me. LOL

Of course my favorite song by him are ä¸åƒä¸ªä¼¤å¿ƒçš„理由, 吻別, 祝福 and 等到花儿也谢了.

It is a pity he didn’t sing “In Love With You”, which he duetted with Filipino singer-actress Regine Velasquez.

By the way, there is no special guest.

Here are some photos from the concert.

Ticket

Stage – Actual

Stage – Zoom In

Jacky Cheung With Dancers

Jacky Cheung Alone Giving Speech

Ticket prices are: (SGD) $198, $168, $128, $88 (Avg: $145.5)
Seating Capacity of Singapore Indoor Stadium (during Concert): 7,306 – 7,968 (Avg: 7, 637)
Number of days concert is held: 3
Estimated revenue: 3*$145.5*7,637= $3,333,550.50

I wonder how much of the actual money goes to Jacky Cheung.

Had dinner at Pasta de Waraku again, but this time I am going to blog with more information and pictures!

Pasta de Waraku – Japanese Casual Pasta & Cafe Restaurant
#02-82/83 The Central
Tel: 65348085

Top of the Menu Cover

Bottom of the Menu Cover

Mini salad comes with every pasta

Al’ Aglio Olio Japanese Style (SGD$10.80)

Chicken &amp Mushroom Soup Pasta (SGD$14.80)

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) – Coke

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) – Corn Soup

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) – Pork Salami & Tomato Pizza

Pizza Set (SGD$19.80) – Spaghetti Alla Bolognese

Just in case the information is a little vague, the pizza set is SGD$19.80 and comes with a glass of coke or wine, corn soup, a mini pizza and a mini pasta.

I think I just found the monitor that I am going to get next year!

Samsung 24″ Widescreen Monitor (245BW)

Features:
» 1920 x 1200 resolution
» 5ms response time
» 1000:1 contrast ratio
» 3000:1 dynamic contrast
» 400 cd/m² of brightness

» Images courtesy of Engadget
» Source: Samsung announces 245BW and 226CW widescreen monitors

Sony announces a lighter version of the current PSP during E3. It is not exactly PSP 2, it is more like PSP 1.5 (or that is what I will call it).

The lighter version still includes the 4.3″ LCD and UMD, but instead it is 33% lighter and 19% slimmer. Game loading time and battery life have also been improved. The only additional feature here is a video output where you can just plug into any television (preferably a 40″ LCD TV) and play instead of using the small 4.3″screen of the PSP.

» Images courtesy of Engadget
» Source: Sony’s new PSP is slimmer, includes video output
» Engadget’s PSP 1.5 Gallery

Die Hard 4.0
Caught this movie on Saturday. It was 150 minutes long and the movie was not that bad, slightly above average, as expected, it was an action packed film with actions almost through the whole movie. Maggie Q only lasted 1/2 way through the show maybe since she is an Asian and this is an American flim. LOL

Pasta De Waraku
Located at 2nd level in the newest shopping center in Singapore, The Central, Pasta De Waraku serves Japanese Pasta and it is by far the best pasta I have eaten and prices there are very reasonable, the price ranges between $12.80 and $16.80.

Pete’s Place
Celebrated my mom’s birthday at Pete’s Place. It is located at the basement in Hyatt Hotel. Pete’s Place serves Italian food and they have a very good buffet spread. This is the 3rd time I have been to there, prices for weekend lunch is about $45 per head and just by eating a single dish from the spread, is enough to fill your stomach.

CakePHP
I have been coding an in-house billing system for Frro.net for the past week and I am using CakePHP to do it. It is my first time using CakePHP and I am quite impressed by it. No wonder it is called “The Rapid Development Framework for PHP”. As a first timer to CakePHP, I am able to pick up things quite fast. When I first started coding, I am not really comfortable with it because I spend more time finding out how to do some stuff rather than coding. But as time goes by, I am more familiar with it and coding had never been easier as CakePHP will do most of your work.

David aka Zeus, Junyang and I have revived Frozened and now we are known as Frro.

Do check out our web hosting plans. We have already ordered our own server from Dell and we will be providing VPS solutions soon.

Thank you =)

Transformers
I am not really a fan of Transformers Cartoon or rather I did not watch much Transformers when I was young. But I love Transformers the movie, it is the best movie I had watched since Lord Of The Rings. The CG was fantastic, the storyline was good, the action was almost throughout the 140 minutes long movie. 2 thumbs up. Can’t wait for part 2 and 3.

iPhone
My uncle who is working in LA has a taste of iPhone and this is what he wrote to me. Just to share it with you guys

» They sold 525,000 phones since Apple launched on June 29, 2007 at 6:00 pm.
» I tried the phone and it’s quite impressive except the price US$499 for 42 GB and US$599 for 8GB.
» Everything is touchscreen and it’s visual display is beautiful just like a mini laptop computer.
» The cons is it gets heated up quickly after pro-longed use and gets hot and never very ergonomic to your hand. Speaker phone not great but ok in terms of sound level.
» A lot of people said it’s better to wait for the next generation because they probably will fine tune it. It’s not always good to buy a first generation gadgets because they bound to have little problems. But I must say, it’s pretty impressive

Premix/Remix 2007
Here are some more pictures from Premix/Remix 2007 taken by Nic and Leon.

Nokia N95 8Gb Edition
According to Just Another Mobile Phone Blog, Nokia N95 8Gb Edition was discovered within some text in the XML file on the Nokia site.

EDIT: Totally false:

ok people, it really is time to forget this thread, There is NO N95-8GB hard drive handset, Nokia Wont be doing this 100%, Its is another model in the work running under the n95 software profiles, UAPROF Developers have renamed the profile to keep to device name secret! So lets all still talk about N95 because its not going to change in spec! ok

Samsung K3
I have the Samsung K3 with me for about 1 week and here are some pros/cons I have discovered.

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

Note: I have not tested the battery life yet.