His Story

刚刚看到驱动之家的一则新闻，说今年一月份以来“家庭服务器版 Windows 发现 2400 个 bug ”。其中 15% 的 Bug 已修正，也就是说有大概还有 2000 个 Bug 未修正。因为我本身就是个 SDET，所以对新闻的真实度不表示怀疑。这个报道也很中立，没有对事情本身做太多评价。基于对事实的尊重，下面是三个开源软件公司及组织的 Bug 数据库地址，分别为 Redhat, Mozilla 和 OpenOffice.org ：

1. http://www.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi
2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/query.cgi?format=advanced
3. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?format=advanced

各位看官也不要闲着，请在“ Only bugs changed between: ”下面的起始栏里面填上“ 2007-01-30 ”（月底也算一月份，对吧？），然后在截至栏填上今天的日期。还有，要记得不要把已修复（Resolved）和已关闭（Closed）的 Bug 算在内哦。然后点 Search 按钮，看看返回多少 Bug。我在此不做任何评价。

How do you solve the problem that a single page cannot display two sets of information in different character encodings under IE? I had this problem in the counterize plugin for Wordpress, since the default page is in UTF-8 but the IP location information retrieved from somewhere else is in GB2312. So everytime I have to switch back and forth in IE -> View -> Encoding. Apparently Firefox does not have this problem. I don’t know how does it detects the GB2312 text and displays it correctly. But I do have a work around for this.

It is fairly simple. Create a separete page with its default encoding set to GB2312 and retrieves whatever information in GB2312 it wants. Then in the UTF-8 page that used to be problematic, replace the original script calls with iframe calls to the new GB2312 page. That’s it!

Example: Replace something like

<script src=”a.php?some=parameters”></script>

with something like

<iframe src=”b.php?some=parameters”></iframe>

where in b.php it passes some=parameters to a.php directly by using the script tag.

One more advantage is that when browser creates iframe objects, it creates a separate thread for loading the framed page. It allows constant information in the UTF-8 page to be displayed first while GB2312 page is loading, instead of waiting long for the GB2312 text to be retrieved and the displays the rest of the main page.

It is quick and dirty, but as long as it works, I’m fine with it. Remember to set the iframe to be borderless and transparent.

是在太喜欢 Windows Vista 的新界面了！无奈办公室的电脑不是自己的，没有办法尝试 RC1 。所以只能改一下 GNOME 的界面来画梅止渴了。

*没有装 Aiglx 或者 Xgl，纯用 NVIDIA 的官方驱动和 Beryl 实现

刚才跟 Seven 在 MSN 上聊天，结束的时候伊跟我说 Bye Bye。然后我想就没想，顺手打了一个 exit。

当发现窗口还傻乎乎地留在桌面上的时候，才想起来关闭一个聊天窗口只要用鼠标右击左上角那个 [X] 就可以了。

exit

I have just created a little simple test for Windows Live Contacts Gadget. If the current page is not under the domain of wangxiaohu.com, please visit the original post.

Having just done my school work, I rushed back home and installed the fresh new Windows Live Writer. I have played it for few minutes actually, and I find it really a nice tool which solves many problems I have had before.

1. It is so convenient to post an image, such as a screenshot of my current screen. What I did is simply pressing the [Print Screen] button, then [Ctrl]+[C] and here it is:
2. It detects that http://wangxiaohu.com is a blog, a Wordpress based blog and automatically converts what I have just typed into a clickable URL!
3. It is able to retrieve all my previous posts from my website and allow me to make modifications to them, or even remove them. I don’t even need to tell it my website use Metaweblog API.
4. Adding a map to my blog is made possible, by simply entering the address.

There are many other features worth to be mentioned, and I just roughly listed the most notable ones in few minutes. Common functionalities such as settings for Categories, Trackbacks, etc. are well implemented.

Well done, WLW team! Thank you, and I am looking forward to see the final release of this tool.

It is nice to have friends around. So does everyone else.

I just came across an interesting website xhtmlfriends.net which provides a crawler for XFN, as well as a visualizer for friends network. I think if someone in Windows Live Spaces team haven’t heard of XHTML Friends Network (XFN) yet, it is better to have a look now.

XFN is simply a XML standard that adds descriptions to a normal link to your friends’ blogs. The descriptions can contain information such as “Have you met this friends before?“, “Are you in the same residence?” and etc. In general, it describes how close the relationship between you and friends. The link to a friend’s blog can be seen as an identification of your friend. For example, here is the XHTML of the link to Sui’s blog:

<a xhref=”http://inexist.spaces.live.com” rel=”friend met colleague co-resident”>

In my website, there are a bunch of links written like this. So they can be identified by XFN services, for instance the list of all my friends by simply give my website URL (”wangxiaohu.com“).

An more advanced example is that, for a given a website with XFN supported, networks of friends can be visualized instantly, such as this one. In the graph, each person is presented as a node and the length of vectors intuitively indicates how close two person are. In contrast, mine is much more simple, since none of my friends blogs contains XFN description yet. :P

However, it seems that Friends Explorer in Windows Live Spaces does not support XFN, or have something like that yet. If it does, it will be cool, since Spaces is well integrated in the Windows Live Messenger and thus more acceptable by large group of users.

Lishan has just sent me an URL and urged me to take a look. It’s Pando, a software that allows you to send files with any sizes through your email account. It overrides the size limit set by each email service provider, so that you don’t have to worry about sending a music video larger than 50MB or something like that.

The idea is cool. I am wondering what email providers’ opinions will be? Hate it or love it? Depends. There are always smart companies can make use of this kind of software which make use of their services. We will see.

Screenshots of Pando are here.

上星期突然发现学校的VPN允许用PPTP连入了，兴奋不已。学校的VPN用的是Cisco某个系列，之前只能用和Cisco VPN兼容的客户端连入，而基本上绝大部分Pocket PC都只配备了PPTP连入方式。早就发过邮件给学校的管理人员抱怨对Pocket PC的支持太差，然后等到现在才等到令人神往的PPTP连入。网站上有详细的连入说明，当然是非常仔细地一步一步照做了……

很快，就被Dell Axim X5浇了一头冷水：总是提示我的用户名和密码错。不是X5有问题就是学校的VPN有问题。可是，网页上表述的那么清楚，怎么会有错呢？经过反复的密码输入验证，一定不是自己的问题。算了，把它摆在一边不去想它。

今天不知道什么原因又把X5拿了出来，可能因为是这个VPN的问题让我心里实在难受。打开Connections下的Drivers，看看里面的驱动，有一堆NDISWAN Miniport的驱动。不过，竟然发现没有PPTP NDISWAN Miniport！我很自然地去Google一下，发现基本上搜到的其他Pocket PC都有这个驱动。花生料虾米西芹？这个得好好想想。不是X5有问题就是我有问题。对了，好像有一次随便逛注册表，看到某个地方出现PPTP和PPTP1两个关键字，然后又好像绝对那个PPTP1看起来很不顺眼，选而删了。

赶快去注册表看看！有了微软官方MSDN上对PPTP的信息，找到问题应该不难。原来每个Miniport在/HKLM/Comm下都有一个“Type”和“Name”，比如L2TP1的Type就是L2TP。那么，我删除的那个PPTP1就是PPTP了。木哈哈哈！问题找到了！

不过，怎么修复这个问题呢？算了，直接照着L2TP1的葫芦画个PPTP的瓢吧。经过一番捣鼓，然后Reset。Yeah！驱动列表里的PPTP NDISWAN Miniport又出现了。赶快连上VPN，能看网页，能MSN的。一个字，爽！

It is annoying that there is no simple solution for printing two pages on a single sheet of paper under UNIX systems, while under Windows it is simply a select box in print GUI. There are two ways under UNIX to do this, which are mpage and pstops.

Using mpage

$ mpage -2 input.ps > output.ps

Using pstops

$ pstops "2:0L@.7(21cm,0)+1L@.7(21cm,13cm)" input.ps output.ps

Note that files to be printed, but in other formats, need to be converted to PostScript (.ps) format first.