In the morning, I woke up, found some food, and met a few more people at the hostel. I spent time talking with two people working there: Athena and Sherry, who was volunteering during a break from university in Hong Kong. Both were kind and enjoyable company. Athena spoke excellent English after studying it at university, while Sherry was volunteering partly to improve hers. I was waiting for a call from a work colleague in Shenzhen. We had spoken about business by phone but had never met in person. At about 2:00, we made contact and arranged to meet for coffee half an hour later. I chatted with Sherry and Athena until it was time to leave, then took a taxi to the cafe.

Early in the morning, I got up, ate a little, and went to the train station. I walked through the subway station and eventually arrived at the KCR depot. I bought my ticket to Lo Wu and was off. The border was a little stressful, especially because I didn’t yet have a visa for China. On previous trips, I had purchased my visa at the border, and I did so again this time. I paid the rather steep fee of HK$380; it would have been almost HK$700 had I used my U.S. passport. To reach the small visa office, go through security until you reach the mainland China gates, then look to your left and go up the escalator.

Another Christmas overseas. Today was a good day, like most of my days. After waking up, I took the MRT to the office, but alas, nobody was around! I waited, read for a while, and waited some more. An hour and a half went by, and I was still waiting. Since I normally went to work in the afternoon, I wasn’t surprised that nobody was in the office. I went downstairs to the coffee shop, and a few minutes later a co-worker met me. We chatted for the next two hours about China, travel, teaching, politics, and my home countries. It was a good time. Once we finished our coffee, I went upstairs and found that people had arrived. To my surprise, my boss had brought plenty of turkey and other food. For the next …

So, you have a web server. So, you have PHP. So, you want to make it a little quicker? The following are a few ideas to let you do that. First, let me share my experiences. I have always been wondering “what would a digg do to my site.” I mean, I don’t run a commenting system, so I’m refering to just some article. Because I prefer to manage my own server, I have decided to use a VPS (Virtual Private Server) from VPSLink. Before purchasing I searched around, read reviews, and finally tested it out. Liking what I tested, I stayed. However, since I just host a few ‘play’ sites (http/email/ftp), and a few sites for friends, I am not going to spend much money on a high-end plan. …

If you flip through my site, you can see that I have had the privilege of travelling around the world. Even though I don’t often experience “culture shock,” I sometimes encounter things that are genuinely unique. This was one of them. One of the first nights after I arrived in Taipei, I was doing something in my room when I heard music. I didn’t quite know what was going on, didn’t really care, and forgot about it. The next night, I heard the music again. By the fourth night, I asked my host, “What is that noise?” She just started laughing. One question I forgot to ask when I moved in was, “Where does all the rubbish go?” In this part of Taipei, there is no …

Life is full of choices. What should I wear today? What goals should I set for this week? What should I eat for breakfast? The third question is easy for me because I know how to order only a few things at the local Morning Burger. Beyond breakfast, however, there are plenty of decisions to make. Recently, I have had to make some difficult choices, and I hope they prove to be the right ones. I made a deal with myself: once my bank balance fell to a certain level, I would find a job. Although I am careful about spending, I still need to eat. I am nearing that point, so I have decided to pause my Chinese studies and earn some money.

Let’s say one page on your site is getting hit hard. And I mean, it was digg’d or something. If the page resides on some CMS or blog, and each request is being processed by PHP and resulting in requests to your database, which, as they say, crap is gonna hit the fan. Well, at least if you’re cheap like me, you’ll try to squeeze every penny out of what you’ve got. That said, mod_rewrite comes to the rescue. There are only a few modifications that you need to do. The first is to ensure that mod_rewrite is enabled. If you have apache installed on debian, this might do:

I’ve run into this error quite a few times, might as well toss blog entry about it: ERROR 1064 at line 17: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1’ at line 7 One likely reason this comes about is because the data being imported/exported is not compatible with the database version. For instance, at home you export the information from a mysql5 database. Then you try to import it on a mysql3.23 database somewhere else – and it fails on you. Bummer. The solution is quite simple:

Status: ✅ My buddy Ian and myself have decided to get our MCSEs. However, Ian is a Mac lover, and I can’t seem to stay away from Linux (and I’m too cheap right now to buy a MacBook). The irony might be subtle, yet we are still studying and making progress. For the most part, I have decided to take the tests in the following order: 70-290, Security+, 70-270, 70-291, 70-293, 70-294, 70-298, 70-299

So, you’ve got a few Xen images around, and they are starting to fill up. How do you add a few more gigs to ’em? root@tpe:/# xm shutdown vm01 root@tpe:/# cd /xenimages root@tpe:/xenimages# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1000000 >> vm01.img root@tpe:/path/to/images# resize2fs -f vm01.img That’s it, you just added a gig to your image called ‘vm01.img’.