News

NeoHide site has just been reviewed by the prestigious blogged editors! Amazingly, we have achieved a acceptable high score of 7.9 out of 10 in the Personal Blogs category. Not a bad achievement, judging from the way this site has undergone minimal maintenance.

(more details can be found below here...)

I am having this WordPress character display for quite some time and not knowing how to resolve it until today. Thanks to Steven Wong on his post about fixing characters on WordPress.

Before that, my blog was running fine with capabilities to display non-English characters, such as Chinese characters properly with no issue. During that time, the site is running on WordPress legacy version; that is, version 2.0.11. However, after upgrading a later version of WordPress, i.e. WordPress 2.3.x, those non-English characters have failed to display, and replaced by question marks (?). For example, "" would show up as "???"

(continue reading to find how to resolve this issue...)

Obama Barack swept to victory just a few hours ago to become the first black president of the United States of America. After being elected, his reply to the world is "... change has come to America...". The result saw him triumphed over John McCain to secure at least 270 votes, thereby achieving a sound 349 votes, in contrast to John's 162 votes; that is a good 68.3% victory for the Democratic Senator.

(With courtesy from BBC News)

It turns out that most of his votes came from young people, black people and first-timers. Nevertheless, the great relentless speech coupled with battling campaign ensures his victory is worthwhile.

Undoubtedly, America is set to ensure multiple changes within the cabinet as well as the governing policies when the Bush presidency comes to an end.

LinkShare Symposium West 2009 will be held in San Francisco. The great event will take place on January 21-22, 2009 at the Palace Hotel.

Introducing the 6^th Annual Summit at this grand location, Paul Cantello, Senior Manager of Trade Shows and Events, has announced that formal invitation will be given out in the forthcoming dates. For more information, check out the links below.

• AGENDA
• SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
• HOTEL & TRAVEL

With the recent release of Google Chrome web browser (still in beta stage), how many of you have realised that Google actually automatically updates your browser version, without you realising it?

Following the Google Chrome Dev Channel Chooser tool, made available by Google, I have actually updated to the developer's version of 0.2.152.1 (as you can see from the screen-shot below).

(Click here to access the screen-shots of Google Chrome...)

In just a few more weeks to go, Ubuntu 8.10, nicknamed Ubuntu Intrepid, will officially be released. Meanwhile, Ubuntu developers has revealed the progress of alpha stage into beta stage, with Ubuntu 8.10 Beta now made available online for testers to download.

As advised by the Ubuntu developer team, this is still a beta release and it is strongly advised that it should not be installed on production machines. Just wait for three more weeks as the final (official) stable version will be released on October 30^th, 2008.

New users can download the ISO files from the local sites or mirror sites, via the link here. To upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04, you can do the following:

1. Press Alt+F2.
2. Type in "update-manager -d" into the command box.
3. Update Manager will inform you that a new distribution is available, i.e. "New distribution '8.10' is available".
4. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

This will automatically upgrade the distribution from your current version to this beta version (which is a good thing about Ubuntu). Enjoy!

Other related link
About Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

Mollom has finally shed the beta tag from its service. From the newsletter that I received from Dries Buytaert, he has officially announced that the "beta" label has been taken off and with the help of startup Benjamin Schrauwen, they have managed to keep the website free of spam via the first commercial product, that is Mollom.

Mollom has been tested in the market for the past 6 months; since then, the service has blocked almost 9 million spam messages across thousands of websites. The service will continue further to enhance and continue block spams on many more websites.

(Read more about Mollom...)

Yes, it is coming soon. Microsoft has announced that their next generation of Windows Live Hotmail is going to be much faster and better than before. What changes will there be? According to the giant software company, Windows Live Hotmail will:

• be up to 70% faster to sign in and read the email.
• incorporate enhanced technology to identify spams and protect users against viruses and scams.
• be cleaner, simpler and easier to use, because of its sleek design. The idea here is to combine the usefulness of the classic version and the powerful functions of the full version of Hotmail together.
• contain new themes, colours and designs for users' personalisation.
• easier to categorise and group contacts together.
• provide more storage spaces.
• allow users to message using web-based Internet Messaging tool directly.
• let users share calendars with friends and family members.

With so much enhanced features coming up, I cannot wait for it to be released.