Blog of Roy Chan

有人可能留意到這幾年在 DebianHK 的每個日誌 (blog) 項目中偶然多會多了個 trackback url 的連結，現在又消失了。原因是我正想測試 drupal 的 blog trackback module。但想了一陣子，最終還是決定待更新至 Drupal 4.4.0 才開啟這功能。

如果你不知到什麼叫 blog trackback ，我就在此簡單介紹一下：

blog trackback 是 Movabletype 提出的功能，目的是當你寫一項 blog 時伺服器會幫你通知另一伺服器你寫了一篇她可能有興趣的 blog 。好像很空汎，實際上 trackback 在 blog 界主要用在以下兩項用途：

遙距回應 (Remote Comments)

當你在人家的 blog 看到篇好文章，想作出詳細回應。如果你寫在對方 blog 站的回應功能上，久了你也可能很難找回你的回應。如果你寫在自己的 blog 站，對方或對方 blog 的讀者就很難知道你有這一篇回應。聰明的人可能立即想到一個辨法就是在自己 blog 站貼完，再把自已 blog 的連結及簡短內容貼在人家 blog 站的回應上。而 trackback 功能就是把以上動作交由 blog 軟件自動進行。

方法是當你看見對方 blog 有個 trackback url 時，抄下這網址 。當你寫 blog 回應該文時，將那網址 填入你 blog 軟件的 trackback url 欄中。 (Movabletype 把以上動作編成 bookmarklet ，令使用者只要看對方 blog 站時按一個 bookmark 就可以跳到自己 movabletype 站的新增 blog 頁並自動填上 trackback url 一欄) 當你張貼你的 blog 後， 你的 blog 軟件自動會發送一個 trackback ping 到對方 blog 的 trackback url 通知對方你張貼了一項回應他 blog 的 blog 。正常情況下，你再回到對方 blog 站，將看到多了篇回應寫有你 blog 的網址及你回應的簡短版。

好像很麻煩和用途不多，但你和對方都鍵立了系統自己明白的連結。當有多幾個人對對方的 blog 互相 trackback ，有些軟件就可以用這些資料繪出整編對話的樹狀圖。

有些 blog 站也提供 auto-discover 功能，讓你寫 blog 時不用理 trackback url 。 blog 軟件自動會檢查你 blog 中所有連結有沒有 trackback 連結。有的話，自動會發送 trackback ping 給對方。

內容收集 (Content Aggregation)

有些所謂 Content Aggregation 站專門收站 (如 Internet Topic Exchange)某些特定題目的 blog ，會提供一些 trackback url 。例如你想對一本書寫份書評，可以到 Book Review Repositery 找找相對種類書籍的 trackback url ，填入自己 blog 軟件。那 Book Review 站就收集你及其他 bloggers 的書評，令其他人查閱都方便得多。有些軟件甚至可以為每個 blog 分類 (category) 設定 trackback url ，當你每次在該分類張站 blog 時，自動幫你通知該內容收集站。

其實 trackback 的功能也不止以上兩項，有人用 trackback 功能將自己電腦正在播放歌曲名貼上自己的 blog 站。

現時 Drupal 對 trackback 功能的支援還是很有限，就算我啟動了這功能，大家也不要期望過高。 看看誰人有時間改良有關的 trackback 模組。

• What Is Trackback?
• How trackback works?

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Just seen a blog entry about using GPL code inside a company from Planet Apache. The author stated that some problem I haven’t aware before.

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Ok, I just received email from Debian Installer system that it finally accept my stardict 2.4.3 packages. You will see them around in SID soon. Remind you once again, no dictionary is included in the package. You need to download from the original site or wait until I have time to hack the Dict format. May be easter, I don’t know.

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心血來潮走去看自己很久以前的一個個人網站，看到一段很久以前由《銀河英雄傳說》節錄出來的句子：

那些星星經歷過數億、數十億年的生命。早在人類誕生之前就一直閃爍著光輝，在人類滅絕之後，它們仍會繼續綻放著光芒吧？人的生命連星星一瞬間的光輝都不及。這是自古以來人們就明白的事情。然而，認識到星星的永遠和人世的一瞬的是人不是星星。

中學時代，我偶然會很喜歡望向蔚藍有些白雲的天空或滿天星星的夜空。我從來不懂得看星，但她令我想起每顆星其實只是很遠很遠的太陽，或者比太陽大幾百幾千幾萬倍的恆星。一切煩惱事和浩翰的宇宙相比，只是雞毛蒜皮的小事。哈，我這幾年似乎忘了很多往日自我開解的方法。

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May be someone (or noone, Haaa) still waiting the new stardict package appear in sid. Me too. Foka had help me to upload them over a week ago. The ftp-master report this:

Your package contains new components which requires manual editing of the override file. It is ok otherwise, so please be patient. New packages are usually added to the override file about once a week.

I asked Foka and YP. It sounds like we need to wait.

Besides, there some problem about other dictionary package. And I didn’t have much mood to write in detail. May be next times….

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週五回來香港前買了套《走向共和》的 DVD 。六十集，蠻長的一套劇。 看了六集還未講到甲午。初步感覺拍得不錯，拍攝手法頗有電影感。配音及尾曲也不錯 (片頭一開始那幾秒令我想起 GUNDAM)

我在初中時代算是一個國史迷，由盤古初開的神話到明末的歷史都翻過一些課外書籍 (左傳也讀了一半) 。但唯獨對清朝的故事敬而遠之，因一直都覺得清末是我國最羞恥的年代，每次聽到甲午、八國聯軍的事都有種刺痛的感覺。還記多年前去看歌舞劇《城寨風情》，這劇寫得不算怎麼。但看到講辛亥革命成功，一班演員大喊：『中國人終於站起來！』，那時想起了六四，感慨得掉了幾滴淚。

大選有了結果，很失望但也無可奈何，始終是台灣人的決定。可惜的是未來四年，香港會頗難過。

片尾曲《走向共和》

曉光 詞
徐沛東 曲
徐沛東 演唱

一年年 花開花落，冬去春來，草木又蓬勃
一頁頁 歷史翻過，前浪遠去，後浪更磅礡
一座座 火山爆發，天崩地裂，君王美夢破
一頂頂 皇冠落地，斗轉星移，世事有新說
一滴滴 水滴石穿，粉身碎骨，志向永不舍
一曲曲 浩蕩長歌，起伏回響，悲壯動心魄
一代代 仁人志士，救國救民，上下求索
一輩輩 英雄好漢，前赴后繼，熱血染江河
風吹過 雨打過，鐵蹄踐踏過﹔
火燒過 刀砍過，列強分割過
撫摸著傷痕昂起頭，吞咽下屈辱心如火
走過長夜，走過坎坷，走進曙色。

片尾曲《年輕的向往》

曉 光 詞
徐沛東 曲
宋祖英 演唱

秋的落葉 春的花香，天地在輪？的激流中動蕩
血已冷了 還有熱淚，眼睛中閃爍著憤怒的信仰
秋的悲涼 春的希望，愛懷恨給了我吶喊的力量
廢墟下面 新綠萌芽，用生命去換取自由的陽光。
春天是我們的 春潮滾滾而來
就是那冬天 也不曾奪去我們年輕的向往

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Thanks Jeff for mentioning DebianHK and added links on Planet Gnome.

While Anthony and me are not always in HK, I don’t think I can do the same thing as HKLUG in DebianHK. Besides, I really want to take a rest after leaving HKLUG. As what Anthony stated in the slogan, the first step of DebianHK is to unite Debian user in Hong Kong. I even want to unite the Free Software developers and contributors in Hong Kong which is one of my wish when join HKLUG. Planet DebianHK is the first step while I saw people start to use DebianHK for blogging. We will try our best to provide a better environment of Debian users and Free software contributors. Let feel free to write your suggestion to us. ^_^

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I had mention that I had upgrade the kernel of my thinkpad X30 to Linux 2.6.4 from 2.6.2. It’s sound 2.6.4 got much problem that 2.6.2 don’t have. The NIC and sound not function after sleep mode. But I have configured to comple the 2 drivers into kernel rather then a loadable modules in there versions. So, I can’t sure it is a problem of 2.6.4 or not. However, the major problem is that the PCMCIA can’t work in 2.6.4, so I switch back to 2.6.2 now. While I have patch the 2.6.4 to support supermount and bootsplash, I think I may use a clean code to test again later.

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Indeed, I want to wrote some thing about blog and wiki crossover in previous entry. But I got ton of stuffs about wiki in my mind suddently. Ok, let it be it’s own entry.

I found some got doing a thesis about combining blog and wiki. It’s not a new idea. TikiWiki already implement a CMS, with blog features, using wiki as their text formatting tags. Subscribers of DebianHK should aware that we use wiki instead of HTML for the text formatting coz I think wiki rules. However, we should use HTML as default and allow people to chose wiki if they like it. It works better with those blog client. But drupal didn’t support it yet. Some people is working on it.

Besides, combining blog and wiki is not only using wiki to wrote blog. They got much feature to benefit each other. For example, some wiki already support RSS feed of site change. Some even suggest to have RSS feed of top read pages and top linked page.

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In the last DebianHK offline meeting, Badguy and I have a discussion about the Wiki. He complain the text formatting of Wiki is not enough and his teammates hate to use it after he built one. (I wish I haven’t miss-respresent his comment. Correct if you watch it, Ben!)

I would like to say I have the similar feeling while first touch it. However, after I play it more in the previous year, I start to figure out that it is a good(TM) idea. (Do you know Wiki is also another baby of the innovator of Extreme Programming.) The major rule of Wiki is "Don’t care about other things, just drop down what you have". You can always refine it later and rollback anytime. It is a great for capturing idea of brainstorm or collabrative writing. The tags of Wiki are designed to have low learning curve. Or indeed, you should needn’t to care about the formatting.

Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of WWW, had mention that he NEVER intend to ask people to write those <xxx> directly when he design HTML. It should be a job of some generator of editiors. Being an expert of manual HTML authoring, I also agree that HTML is not well for quick note. <a href="…"> is one of the troublesome tags. Common Wiki tag provide a intuitive formatting which we always use in email and USENET. Have you notice that even M$ word provide auto formatting. Auto convert *words* to bold words and turn on the bullet list if he find you type "* " at the beginning of the line. It’s really a great function for those typing geek.

Besides, Wiki is open and every one can modify it, add their idea and know what other have done. The whole system is try to motivate to contribute. (Similar to OpenSource) Some one may argue that WYSIWYG html edit is more effecive solution for fast text formatting. But it is not portable when you using you own computer. Javascript WYSIWYG HTML editor like epoz can solve the about problem but it is hard to check the changes between different versions.

Of course, maintainer of the site should have a well plann and clear guideline to make other understand what they can contribute. Wikipedia is one of the most successful case of Wiki. The site allow people to write a totally free (in sense of free speech) encyclopedia collabrately via Wiki and collected over 220,000 of english articles and over 300,000 of articles in other languages. Even small as Wiki.Debian.org.tw have built a pretty good collections of chinese debian tips.

As I have said, I agree the text formatting tags of wiki is not enough. That why many implemetation of Wiki extent it own set of Wiki. But it also create problem to move around different Wiki site.

Recently, I saw some people talk about creating a standard of Wiki text formatting tags.

• http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=RFCWiki
• http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiMarkupStandard
• http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1737.html

It is a good idea and should be done ASAP. However, I found many of them is well designed, destorying the intuition of Wiki and repeating the layout-driven problem of the Netscape & IE HTML extension.

I still think ReST of Python is the best text format of such a wiki style site. However, It sounds like only Zwiki of Zope support it now.

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有留意其他新聞都知終於成功發現第十大行星 Sendra 。和冥王星一樣，Sedra 的軌道並非和其他八行星同一平面。

Sedna 本身是 Inuit (住在加拿大北部，即愛斯基摩人)神話中的女海神，亦掌管動物， 特別是海豹之類。而神話中，海豹、海獅及鯨魚是由 Sedna 的手指變成。

另一樣有趣的是 Lord of The Rings 會被改編成三小時半的音樂劇， 預計將在明天於倫敦公映。原著中有很多詩和短歌，改編成音樂劇也可能不 錯。不過 orkut 有不少人都覺得難以想像如 LoTR 變成意樂劇會變成怎樣， 有人亦不敢想像 Orcs 唱歌的情景。

另外，我在上周六把手上的 notebook ，換了 2.6.4 。

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好了， Stardict 2.4.3 的 Debian 包 終於大致上完成。 同時，我也得到了 WordNet Debian 包的維護者 Andreas Trille 同意做一次 NMU 去令 wordnet 產多一個 stardict-wn 包去支援 stardict 。

在 Debian-devel 上， Andreas 及其他人都提出最好是 stardict 可以支援 DICT 格式，這可以省了數十 MB 的空間 (Debian 上而有太多 DICT 格式的包)，而本身 DICT 也是 RFC 標準。不過 Andreas 仲使不太願意也 很康慨地答允我這個暫時方案。

現在只等 Foka 有時間檢查好再上載好就可以了。大家就可以有最新的 stardict 用了。 (心急的可以到 http://www.debian.org.hk/~voidoo/debian/incoming/ 下載試試) 當然, 中文及其他字典還 要自己去主站下載。

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I have begin to jog every morning when I’m in zhuhai. I’m not intent to lose some body fat but having some sport is better for me. I wish I can keep it.

Besides, I think I haven’t mention that I had already finish the fellowship of the rings last week. Ok, I know I’m very slow but it is a good start for me. Have I told that I haven’t read more then 2 chapter of any english novel since I left my secoundary school (I can only finish tech/sci english book). LoTR is already a record for me and I sure that it will be my first finished english novel.

With the help of PDA, I think I will keep finish at least 1 english fiction per 2 month in future.

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昨晚初步完成了 stardict 2.4.3 的 debian package 及對 wordnet 的修改，也寄了電郵 給 stardict 原作者 和 debian-devel 打招呼和問意見。

其實 stardict 2.4.3 的 debian package 早就完成了，不過一直想分拆幾個 package 以減少佔用 mirror 站的硬盤空間及是否修改 Makefile.am 令其將字典轉換程式安裝上 /usr/lib/stardict 。拖了一個多星期，還是用最原始的 cp 去做算了。

我已把半完成品放上 http://www.debian.org.hk/~voidoo/debian/incoming/ ，有興趣的可以自己下載來玩玩。

這個版本分拆成 3 個 package:

• stardict: 重要程式
• stardict-common: 硬體無關性的資料檔
• stardict-tools: 字典轉換程式

不過因為版權問題，這個版本沒有任何字典。當然理想的處理方式都要以一個字典一個 package 的方式放上 Debian 。但中國人對知識產權的認識實在太差了，幾乎所有在 stardict 主站上的中文字典的來源及真正版權都不明不白。我想短期來說都很難可以包一個中文字典上 debian 供 stardict 使用。

我的計劃是先修改現時 Debian 上而有的字典包，令她們生成多個含 stardict 格式版本的package。第一步從 wordnet 開始，待測試 好後會寄及 wordnet 的管理者。然後就到 gcide, freedict, jargon 等。搞妥這些易處理的後，才把有問題的字典一個一個的發上 debian-legal 做驗身。

修改 wordnet 也搞了一陣子。因為懶得再加 build-depends 去讀取 stardict 字典的 ifo 檔需要資料 ，結果還是被迫要改字典轉程式，令其生成一個 ifo 草稿，然後再增修其他資料。

大體上都是照這個方向去做，現在主要是看看 debian-devel 還有什麼回應罷了。

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I’m sorry that I need to offline many ISO Image mirror in ftp://ftp.hk.debian.org/ while 2 harddisk of my server is crashed yesterday. I had try to move some important mirror to remain harddisks but the space is not enought and I have no time to goto the data center to replace the harddisk. While I’m in HK on weekday, the ISO image will not online in these few weeks. Sorry for any inconvenience.

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You can believe how horrible in these few days in my zhuhai office. They are fertilizing and the horrible organic muck ……. ! The smell spead in our office even we are on the 5th floor! It smell like we are dropped into the hell of dung. >_<

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Ok, I never play others love match/friendster stuff. But Orkut really cool to me. Being a geek, I think it is interesting to draw some graph diagram on people social network. May be later orkut will do that, whose know. Also, while I read something about the FOAF, I would like to see some similar implemetation.

Anyway, I think I had invited too much friend and need to cool down myself and see what happen few day later.

Besides, I found some comment on Orkut:

• Thirteen Ways To Save Orkut
• Playing around with Orkut
• Orkut: What Is the Point?

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YP invite me to join Orkut, I’m really getting crazy on it. Besides, there is another similar called FOAF. The Dashboard in Gnome got support on it! Wor!!!

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