Sunday Times have an interview with the famous (notorious?) Singapore blogger xiaxue. Yes, I don’t just read technology related blogs like Joi Ito, John Patrick or Dan Gillmor. I also read foul-mouthed 20 year old girl who constantly bitch about her life.

Speaking of my blogrolls, another worthy of mention is Mr Brown (blogger turn journalist) who started blogging in 1997, before the word “blogging” is invented. His work of fame is the Singapore National Education, a series of political satire “documenting the dysfunctional side of Singapore life”.
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I don’t normally blog news in Singapore because there isn’t a lot of exciting news (and also I seldom read local newspaper anymore). But there are interesting two news in Straits Times today.

First of all, 24 bloggers will be blogging live from National Day Parade (9th Aug) on www.ndp.org.sg. While it is common for high-tech conferences to have a blog on the side, it is pretty cool for NDP committee embracing blogging as a media (together with TV and radio ;-)

Acting as ‘eyes and ears’ at the big birthday bash, they will send text and picture messages through their mobile phones to the parade website www.ndp.org.sg, to keep people in the thick of the action at the National Stadium.

Not only that, anyone can also moblog the National Day Parade *grin*

Mobile phone users, except those using pre-paid cards from M1 and StarHub, will be able to post their own comments on the mobloggers’ sites and chat via SMS with the mobloggers.

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Got the news that Michael Powell, chairman of FCC started a blog on AlwaysOn (via Interesting-People)

I am participating in Always On Network’s blog to hear from the tech community directly and try to get beyond the traditional inside the Beltway Washington world where lobbyists filter the techies. I am looking forward to an open, transparent and meritocracy-based communication— attributes that bloggers are famous for!?

Check out what he is blogging! Welcome onboard, Sire!

Just one comment: Why Always On, a supposingly blogging site “Powered by Geeks like you” yet operated just like a news site. (No, it is worst! It doesn’t provide any RSS feeds for each author and forcing you to register to do anything more). I can understand you probably want a hosted service but Typepad and Blogger.com would be so much nicer.

Dave Winer have another interesting idea to deal with comment spams.

Here’s a free idea I had the other day while cleaning up a spewage of comment spam. What if comments, by default, were deleted after 24 hours? What if the owner of the site had to check a box in order for a comment not to be deleted? That way if a comment had lasting value, the owner of the site could make sure it sticks around.

Interesting..I should try to implement this in my Drupal 4 Blogger :-)

Jonathan Schwartz, the President and COO of Sun Microsystems, now has a weblog (via Kevin Werbach). Jonathan was one of the keynote speaker at Supernova and I am very impressed with his soft-spoken, but smart and thoughtful evangelism. I am going to enjoy reading his blog.

ps: Oh yea, Tim Bray has a entry on the anxiety this cause within Sun. Well, he is the president of the company afterall :-)

Read more in this eMarketer article about who are the Bloggers (via Loic)

“Exactly 61% of the blog readers that responded to the survey are over the age of 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year. In fact, nearly 30% of the respondents are between the ages of 31 and 40, and over 37% spanned the ages of 41 to 60. And nearly 40% have a household income of $90,000 or higher.”

I finally migrated to Drupal 4 Blogger today. It is about time that I do this myself and eat my own dog food. Hopefully this would help to dig out the bugs but so far, so good! But I dont promise this to be perfect so please report any problem and bear with it for a while.

I look forward doing blogging without having to wait for rebuilding and without MT hogging 99% of the CPU when rebuilding. :-)

ps: Oh yea, migration is done using mt-to-drupal.

I just hack up an alternate method to migrate from MT to drupal. Download mt2drupal.tar.gz.

This is a perl script written as an MT-plugin, utilizing on MT libraries to export the data directly into Drupal database (limitation: only for MySQL for now). So unlike http://drupal.org/node/view/6141, you do not need to generate large intermediate php files and the migrated entries will not be stored as HTML.

The script can migrate from MT to Drupal 4.4.1, Drupal CVS and also Drupal 4 Bloggers. It will migrate:

a) all your bloggers
b) all your defined categories
c) all your entries including body, excerpt, extended (in 4.4.1 & CVS, it is stored as bodyextended and in D4B formatting rules are also preserved)
d) all your comments (with anonymous support, in CVS and D4B)
e) all incoming trackbacks (stored as comments)
f) all your outgoing trackbacks (D4B only)
g) all your trackbacks trackers (D4B only)

It will also keep your permalink by using URL aliases in Drupal. (enable path.module). You can also migrate MT into an existing Drupal installation. You can see the migrated site of this blog at http://james.seng.sg/dblog/ (Running D4B of cos :-)

Disclaimer: While I tried to test it as much as I can and that it works for me, I give no assurance it will work for you. So backup all your database before you attempt this.

Just release Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.7. This is a major release with lots of changes and bugfixes.

One of the most difficult to use Drupal as a blog is customzing the look-and-feel. It is almost impossible to do without some php programming knowledge which is beyond most bloggers – you are pretty much struck with what Drupal themes offers. This is one area where MT definately shines with its simple to use template tags. Well, wait no more! You can do likewise in Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.7 now :-)

There are also numerous bugfixes including the autodiscovery in trackbacks (thanks to drumm and crschmidt) and I also fold the contributed patch from mervissen. Thanks!

Please note that there are four database changes in this release. Please read the release notes before attempting to upgrade. As usual, bugs, patches and feature requests would be appreciated.

ps: Incidently, I need some help to document down the tags you can use for templating. Email me if you wish to help! Thanks.

I just realized typekey is using captcha (via charles). Yep, I am equally surprised that SixApart would use captcha given how much attention (hint: zero) they pay to my scode plugin.

Well, Ben put his bets on Jay’s blacklist which I believe is a mistake. And I think he made another mistake to think Typekey will solve the comment spam. My scode (captcha) has not stop an occassional comment spammer who has to manually enter the code for every spam he post. So what makes a ‘verify-once’ and hencefore licensed-to-spam Typekey will work?

Maybe I been in the cat-and-mouse game with spammers that I have little faith in old-tricks-that-didn’t-work. I suppose people likes to learn lesson which you can learn from history on their own because ‘it is different this time!’.

You know what? As a futurist and technologist, I realize there is nothing different and there is no new technology. Old ideas recycled, old tricks in new environment. Just because you put a new name to the hype does not make it different. Spam is spam. It exists before we have Internet and will continue to exists in what to come next.

ps: If you think deeper, Typekey just a ‘identity-solution’ similar to those proposing Public-Key solutions. Identity-solution helps in identifying the spammer. It does not actually stop spamming. (It is indirect and dependent on whether spammers is willing to expose themselves)