Ben Crox on Blog

Thanks very much for those who make and keep updating wikimatrix. I am sure that reading the big table on wikipedia has no fun.

All the below are my own opinion, which in turn are based on my special requirement and vision.

Tiddlywiki

I am a long time fans of tiddlywiki, for personal use. In particular, I love the BSD license, love the pyTW adoption when planting to server. Best for wiki / javascript hackers.

But it is simple NON-solution for multi-user environment.

Mediawiki

English wikipedia ( in fact most non-Chinese language wikipedia ) helps me a lot.

The downside is trivial, mediawiki means to be public, for text only application. I cannot blame it, but would not use it.

TWiki

Good to have ACLs ( by default, when compared to other wiki software and their often outdated ACL plug-ins ). Use it for projects and internal collaboration.

Bad, very bad when you want to install it ….

tikiwiki CMS/Groupware

Lots of features, you cannot treat it as wiki only.

Sorry, I always give up for its all-in-one, tiny font-size, rather ugly styling.
A mess of dot-php files when extracted.

PBwiki

Can anyone tell me what’s the point ? Using PB in barcamp.org is … a nightmare full with 500 and 404 for me.

Pmwiki

Good, very good for its advanced table cell syntax. Installation is not hard as well.

Yet, still have to figure out how to build up the user accounts.

I make local copy of jquery + GM my default browser plug-in, even in Chrome.

Thus… I have AdBlock in Chrome now -_-.
And the very first thing to block with is the *.facebook.com/* $(”div.adcolumn”);

Yes, paranoid am I. Rather pay 1 USD / mo to FB to get rid of all ads….

Thanks a lot to Dennis of BeanBox, the new RED HOT barcamp.hk website is launched !

Now, mark your calendar like me:

Ben
@ 30boxes

appoint me anytime!

( the above widget might not been shown up in RSS , please visit my site )

In Short:
1. Sign up NOW , either at the wiki or facebook group
2. Know where to go, how to go. If you have any questions, please DO ask in facebook group. Please feel free to email/gtalk/msn me ( I am writing the BarCampHowTo )
3. Call your friends to go together
4. Blog/Twitter (with “#barcamphk“) before and after you go

Again, the MS sphere make me more than angry. Technically I appreciate their holistic ecosystem. But they are never as ideal as they claim.

You can always recruit a team of MSCEs or so, you can feed them with decent salary / training, but can you tell them to challenge and tackle problems ?

Some always being smart enough to do so, yet the majority would recommend stupid fall backs. That is how Microsoft describes security and maturity, like a falling old man.

That is exactly how Linux is differ from Unix, edge differ from stable. You don’t need to know everything, you just need to learn a lot, to prepare for the never ending life of debugging , restructuring and patching if you DO open source. Of course, you are not to debug for bugs, not to reconstruct the old falling castle, nor to patch all the way the broken parts.

You do all these mainly for a HANDSOME base that you hacks onto, that you get all the good feelings and to be FREE to INNOVATE, to remix and to build dream life.

And then, some MSCE tell you: “Sorry man, where can I find a replaceable alternative after kicking your genius butts, like all those replaceable screw and nuts ?”

YEAH, Microsoft itself is not the business evil. It is where business evil breeds. And MSCE is nothing more then a popular brand of screw and nuts, despite the vast pipe of talents/genius got branded.

Being SO STABLE ( delivering classic BSOD ) , do your highly certified MS experts ever feel safe with their nicely dummy GUI ? Ask them !

Listen BSD/*NIX guy, if you know at any point your stuff might fall, prepare a damn nice funny Graphical Screen of Death. Twitter save themselves by the whale, we all have to LEARN.

mysql> delete from wp_comments where comment_approved=’spam’;
Query OK, 1121292 rows affected (88.5 sec)

Other 30k comments are NOT filtered as spam , I’ve just approve 8 of them.
Other 29.992k comments where deleted by a huge bunch of SQL operation.

–
My bad, this old version of WP does not close comments for old post , in contrast to what I’ve expected.
SQL is always the real place to do admin….

( Why I’ve stopped to approve comments ? Imagine that after a holiday, you have some 1K comments waiting approval…
and WP show 1K of them at once in the admin page, no pagination, 99.9% spam … That was what I find after not adding new rules for spam fighting for a month.

1 year later, I have got such 30K pending and 1M filtered spam. Poor server, sorry guys….)

http://friendfeed.com/bencrox

Bravo ~!
Dont comment on my blog.bencrox.info, comment on friendfeed instead.

OK , I have no spare time to manage this blogware, especially when moderating comments.

I don’t want to challenge spam fighting after not being a mail server admin for 2 years.

Two option:

1. Use third party comment system, such as … Google Friends connect ?

2. Completely move to another BSP. ( and yes, I have some activity in blogspot, and one quite active xanga )

At this moment, option 1 is not yet feasible. So I will spend a little time to explore more BSP and feed apps.

This blog ( either http://blog.bencrox.info or http://www.bencrox.info/wordpress , the same thing ) will be used to post announcements ( for hkday.net BBS , or anything that worth ) and to do experiments ( anyway, I can touch the very back end to play with). No comments.

My xanga site will still be active, Chinese only. ( I don’t like xanga, yet it keeps nice footprints. Too bad it loads Google analytics in the worst way, that sucks. )

I’ll blog in English ( errr… or else ) in other site, mainly for tech / programming stuff.

Just to shout for the new date. Please refer to last post ~

…. 直到換系統吧。

太扯了！
08 年出的文章已經很少﹐但是在編輯中途﹐因各種原因而文本全失﹐怕且也有十萬字。

單單剛才就丟了 30 字 x 三百幾行﹐冇癮。

也許我未想通﹐也許是成見裏藏有雙重標準。對我來說﹐香港需要獨立﹐而西藏獨立不獨立則分別不大﹐是故支援和反對都沒所謂。

說香港需要獨立﹐那是因為我把香港的核心問題﹐定作太過依賴大陸。回歸這麼多年﹐理應看得很清楚﹐大陸對香港的打壓﹐絕大部份都只是香港內部借助大陸的名義實施打壓﹐其餘問題是整個中國人身份框架的問題﹐大陸政府無差別地打壓異見﹐沒有特別針對香港。

香港不可能武力獨立﹐甚至以現在的情況﹐主流香港人捨得和大陸決裂的﹐少之又少﹐頂多是不喜歡中共、不喜歡中國憤民罷了。獨立的香港也不用刻意跟大陸決裂﹐只是要有變成台灣的準備。大陸不會放過墮斷華人代表權的機會﹐不惜為此打壓一切不以中共為尊的華人。香港的獨立﹐實際作用於華人的政治空間和制度發展﹐作為中國多元文化不被獨專的保全區。這兩個作用越來越微了﹐因為香港人一元化的趨向已經太強﹐把以上希望寄托在當下的香港人身上﹐風險實在太大。

西藏獨立不獨立﹐不是主要問題。如果西藏不先解決她要在現代文明中扮演一個甚麼角色﹐那樣獨立了的西藏只是另一個尼泊爾或剛果。正因這樣﹐我一想到西藏獨立﹐會推論的是藏民教派衝突、原教旨主意的藏傳佛教版本醞釀、漢藏衝突變成長期國與國對抗﹐正如中東的以色列一樣。

頂多都只是另一個以色列﹐攪不好就是另一個尼泊爾、另一個剛果。我也沒有格外歧視尼泊爾和剛果﹐但那個程度的混亂﹐比如今中共有限度（當然仍是血腥暴力）鎮壓的西藏﹐沒有明顯的好處吧？

香港如果竟然獨立到﹐不會變成長期戰爭﹐頂多只是被解放軍一夜屠城罷了。西藏如果獨立到﹐以現在的西藏定位﹐跟中共（甚至其他國家、宗教、地區﹐或內部衝突）打到下個世紀都沒完沒了。