John Lai

I injured my right ankle back in October 2006.  Today, I did the aerial for the first time in three years, and I’m so happy I have my ankle back.  I can flip again!  I don’t want to suffer another long term injury ever again.

It’s been two weeks and Google has indexed the content on the homepage of  http://flowerville.ca nicely.  However, Google has ignored the remaining 300 businesses in my directory because they are not referred to from anywhere else on the site or the www.  I built a BROWSE page to list all flowerville stores to remedy this.  So hopefully Google spider will get around to indexing them.

http://flowerville.ca/dir

I found a good and free file manager plugin for TinyMCE called TinyBrowser.  You can download it here.  Here’s a quick screenshot of what it looks like.

I tried a few others as well,  but they were not to my liking.  The ones I tried were:

- Kae’s File Manager - I didn’t like it because it stores file information to a mysql database.

- TinyMCE Ajax File Manager - I couldn’t integrate this properly.  I read in forums that other developers experienced similar challenges because of bugs in the plugin.

- MCFileManager/MCImageManager - Costs too much money.

Another blogger provided a detailed analysis of other file manager plugins for TinyMce here.

I launched flowerville.ca.

Flowerville is a free service for store owners to create their online store. Store owners can sign up, create a website and upload their store’s catalogue. Flowerville makes great effort to optimize your website for search engine indexing (SEO). This means you are more likely to show up in major search engines like Google and Yahoo!

I built this application by myself (design and coding). This will be an SEO experiment. Now it’s time to do some offline marketing!

Bluehost does not officially support subversion. I was still able to install subversion on bluehost shared hosting using the following script:

cd ~
mkdir src
cd ~/src
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/apache/apr/apr-util-1.2.12.tar.gz
wget http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/apache/apr/apr-1.2.12.tar.gz
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
wget http://www.webdav.org/neon/neon-0.28.0.tar.gz
tar -xzf apr-util-1.2.12.tar.gz
tar -xzf apr-1.2.12.tar.gz
tar -xzf subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
tar -xzf neon-0.28.0.tar.gz
cd ~/src/apr-1.2.12
./configure –prefix=$HOME LDFLAGS=”-L/lib64″
make
make install
cd ~/src/apr-util-1.2.12
./configure –prefix=$HOME –with-apr=$HOME LDFLAGS=”-L/lib64″
make
make install
cd ~/src/neon-0.28.0
./configure –enable-shared –prefix=$HOME LDFLAGS=”-L/lib64″
make
make install
cd ~/src/subversion-1.4.6
./configure –prefix=$HOME –without-berkeley-db –with-zlib –with-ssl LDFLAGS=”-L/lib64″
make
make install

Copy and paste the contents into the terminal while logged in via. Remember to hit ENTER on the last line.

If you need to do a svn+ssh access, you need to open up port 22 for ssh access. You do this by purchasing a dedicated IP.

Someone asked,

hi. I am a Grade 12 student. I am deciding whether to choose commerce or engineer as my undergraduate program. More specifically, I will choose finance or ECE. Which program is easier to find a job? Which program is easeier to find a high salary job? Furthermore, which career has more opportunities? I applied for commerce in UofT. If you know some of the students from Uoft commerce undergraduate program,can you tell me how many of them find good jobs and their salary? What kind of jobs do they do?(ie investment banking or something else)
Thank you very much.

So here’s my answer:

Which program is easier to find a job?

In engineering, the biggest demand is for software development (web, mobile or desktop). Almost 90% of my electrical engineering buddies ended up in software development. So if you have an engineering degree, and have 1 year of software development experience (from coop, volunteer or hobbies), then it’s easy for you to find a job. If you don’t have work experience, you will have a hard time finding a job.

According to one of my colleagues in investment banking, he says new grad employment rate is about 50% within the first year of graduation because of the poor economy (things could be different 4 years from now). He graduated in 2004, and back then, the employment rate for commerce grads within first year of graduation was 80%. From his experience, most of his classmates ended up in marketing or accounting.

If you do not have work experience, then getting an engineering job (software) or getting a finance job (accounting or marketing) are equally hard. The more elite disciplines (aerospace engineering, investment banking etc..) are practically impossible. Getting a job depends on your reputation first, your work experience second.

Which program is easier to find high salary job?

The salaries for accounting, marketing and engineering are similar, even when taking years of work experience into consideration. However, if you have what it takes to survive engineering, but you choose to do commerce, then you will be paid more in commerce than in engineering. This is because commerce is generally easier than engineering, so you have a better chance at being top 10 in a commerce program to demand a higher salary than if you were a bottom feeder in an engineering program. If you work as an investment banker (only the elite get here), and you work your butt off and take abuse from employers like a dog, then you’ll be paid more than the average engineer who’s typically in software development or IT. There’s potential for you to make lots of money in engineering only if you start your own business. So again, high pay requires you to have a good sense of business (ie. commerce).

In the end, how much you get paid depends on how well you market yourself and how valuable your skills are. The best way to do this is if you work part time jobs in industry while studying. By exposing yourself to industry, you’ll see first hand which skills are most valuable.

Alright, I think my two answers answered all your other questions.

To check your webspace quota on a 1and1 linux package, login to http://admin.1and1.com. Then go to “Package Information” and click on “Quota”. See image below:

I’ve been working so much I forgot how enjoyable some of my other hobbies were. I took a break this weekend and re-discovered my passion for theorizing and formulating wacky ideas. I ended up writing 5 blog posts:

Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. - 5 hooks in 4 minutes

Why Superpower Nations Aren’t Democratic

Career or Love

Rationality - The New Cool Aid

Google Reader Impedes Discovery

I also spent a lot of time debating subject of science vs. non-science at http://www.philipbrocoum.com/.

So I wrote on 5 different topics and researched countless more. It’s good to think outside the box every so often!

I do not have an RSS aggregator. I do not use Google Reader. Why? It’s because I do not “follow” any particular topic. I like to “discover” topics.

I like to Google “how to enrich uranium” and discover a delicious a recipe for “Swedish meatballs“. Why would I manage a Google Reader of exponentially growing feeds on topics I read only once?

As for the couple of topics I do follow, I frequent one or two credible and high quality sites. Why waste time logging into Google Reader to browse a couple of headlines when I can go to the website directly and read everything?

When a friend asks, “But John, don’t you follow my blog? You’re missing out on important [subjects] people  care about.” My response is, “If a [subject] were really important, or if it’s directly related to my work, then the [subject] will surface in our normal conversation. I will subsequently follow up with research. Otherwise, I’m content with reading the good old newspaper (online).”

On stackoverflow.com, I asked, “Why do most large companies prefer WISA over LAMP?”

Some interesting answers are found here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/221716/most-large-companies-prefer-wisa-over-lamp-why

In short, the reason is because Microsoft is liable for “problems”. With open source, no one is liable for “problems”. It’s all about who you can sue…