The Land of WII's

Back to the blogsphere

Wei Ma — Sun, 29 May 2011 04:50:19 GMT

It’s been a while since my last post. Life has been pretty busy and it was hard to find free time to do blogging. However, I think squeezing 20 minutes per day to write some thoughts shouldn’t be that big a deal. So, here I am, I am planning to write my thoughts online more frequently. Partly for the people who care about me and partly for tracking my steps during the years to come.

For the past a few days, I have been busy learning Microsoft Dynamics CRM system. Watching the design of a complete software system is a complete eye-opener. Will see how things turn out after I got better understanding.

Computers for moms

Wei Ma — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:05:51 GMT

My mom is 71 years old and she wants to have a computer. Because—according to her – “I will have a dictionary (she is trying to learn some English), a phone (I showed her how convenient to make oversea long distance calls with Skype), and a movie player all integrated into one device”.

So, I let my mom play with my laptop while I was at work. The result was a disaster. Even though Windows 7 (I have Chinese version installed) is the most user-friendly OS in Microsoft’s history. It is still way beyond what my mom’s reach with minimum training (I spent about 2 hours explaining how things work before I left home). There are so many little glitches everywhere that we learnt to quickly go around them without noticing they are there. But for someone like my mom they are disasters. So, I gave up the thought of buying a laptop for her and decided she was better off with the traditional devices.

I was never an apple fan because of their pricing strategies. Paying 200 dollars more for a computer/phone just because it has an apple logo was never my thing. In the morning of May 28th, after come back home from a grave yard shift, I found myself surrounded by the news of IPad reaching Canada. I needed a reading device, so I decided to give apple a try. I ended up to be one of the first Canadian customers of IPad (the third in queue in front of Bestbuy located at Kingsway).

I wouldn’t say that IPad gave me 100 percent satisfaction. After paying 600+ bucks of my hard-earned money, I don’t even get a file management system? I can’t make a pdf file with my laptop and drag it to my IPad so that I can view it later? Don’t even mention that there are no usb port at all. Well, it felt like you are a PRISONER of the device. I was enraged.

Since 600 dollars is a lot of money and I didn’t feel like to return the device I got after standing in line for 2+ hours. I calm down myself and baby-stepped to explore the evil toy. I wouldn’t yap about the experience (which was painful for first-time apple users like me) of eventually get my pdf book showing with iBook. But the result was surprisingly good. The iBook software is so well made that using it is like reading a real book, but with a dictionary on top of my figuretips (literally). And as I played with different applications, I found myself spending more time on IPad than on my laptop. This device gradually grew from an e-reader to a PIM system and a personal financial management system. I still don’t have the freedom I anticipated when buying this device, but I am a much happier prisoner now. The only complaint I still hold strong is the wireless connection issue.

I let my mom played with the IPad after downloading a Chinese book from iBook store. She just opened the book and started reading. She asked much less “where is …” questions than she was playing with my laptop. Things seem to be at where there are supposed to be and no need for learning.

I used to think the overpriced Apple products were only targeted for younger generation because of their “cool” look. But my mom’s experience told me that Mr Jobs must has done something right to bring his company to today’s success. While my mom still doesn’t have her precious Chinese-English dictionary IPad, I almost have the urge to throw another 1500+ hard earned dollars to buy a mac to develop one just for her. This is just a crazy thought. But who knows, I may become an Apple developer one day if the motivation is strong enough.

Setting up Subtext on Softsyshosting server

Wei Ma — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 07:29:12 GMT

The factor that Subtext’s creator, Phil Haack, is also the guy behind .Net mvc gives me a lot of confidence for picking it as the blog engine for my site. The installation guide on Subtext’s official site is precise but not tailored for every single individual Web Server. So, I was mostly on my own when tring to install Subtext to Softsyshosting web server. After a few trials by error, I was able to get Subtext up and running with Softsyshosting. Since David Mitchell’s blog helped me a great deal during the process, I thought I could do the same thing to help saving Softsyshosting users some headaches .

Step 1: Grab subtext from http://code.google.com/p/subtext/downloads/list. The version I used was 2.1.2 deployment.
Step 2: Unzip the zip file to your local drive. Mine was “E:\downloads\SubText-2.1.2”.
Step 3: Log into the DotNetPanel, and choose SQL Server 2008 option.

Step 4: In the database GUI, create a user, for example joe. Set a password, for example, WontForget.

Step 5: Create a database “std”, and set joe as it’s user.

Step 6: Open web.config file located at Subtext directory. In my case, E:\downloads\SubText-2.1.2\Subtext.Web. Look for the line containing “connectionString”, mine was line 33. Change the connection string to the form of connectionString="Server=72.18.156.74,1533;Database=s td;Uid=joe;Password=WontForget;”, The database name, Uid and Password may vary depend on your own database setting.

Step 7: Login DotNetPanel again, click on FileManager

Step 8: In the FileManger GUI, create a new directory, say, blog. After done this step, your GUI should look like

Step 9: Go to ftp accounts GUI by clicking the “Ftp Accounts” link on the left menu bar

Step 10: In Ftp Accounts GUI. Create a new ftp user, set its home folder to Root Folder/blog, and give the new user read and write privilege.

Step 11: login the ftp server of Softsyshosting. Upload all contents under the subtext directory.

Step 12: Go back to DotNetPanel, click on Web Sites

Step 13: In the Web Sites GUI, click on the link for your web site. Mine was wiiland.net

Step 14: In your Web site GUI, click on the virtual dirs tab

Step 15: In the Virtual Dirs GUI, create a new virtual directory named blog, set it point to /blog/Subtext.Web physical directory.

WARNING: Set the virtual directory point to /blog won’t work.

Step 16: In the Virtual Directory GUI, click on the link to your newly created virtual directory to enter properties GUI.

Step 17: In your virtual directory properties GUI, click on the Extensions tab.

Step 18: Set the virtual directory extension property, in the drop down list for Asp.Net, choose 2.0 Integrated pipeline.

Step 19: Now use another browser, open your web site at yourdomain/blog. Subtext will take care the rest of installation.
Step 20: That it. Enjoy your new blog site :)

PS: I didn’t realize that so many steps were involved in setting up a blog engine until started writing this little tutorial. I am grateful that I had a very detailed guide to start with. Since I have read David blog entry for so many times, I might unconsciously put statements from his blog to this entry without putting quotation marks. However, I have no intension to steal his credit. So, if you see anything good here, it’s from David and the official Subtext documentation; if you see anything bad, it’s from me.

开源，Subtext, 以及其他

Wei Ma — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 17:02:12 GMT

到温哥华有一个半月了。零零散散地做了不少事情。用SubText架起这个博客,算是了了一个心愿。知道Phil Haack 是因为关注.Net MVC，继而才知道了SubText。一直想对开源组织作一些自己的贡献，也给Rob Conery 的SubSonic提交过代码，但是总觉得好像都没有太多的参与进去。这次用SubText架blog，至少能提供一些feedback外加一些文档吧。温哥华这几天天气不好，风大雨大的，昨天雨伞都吹坏了。今天天气貌似要好一些，赶快出门买点东西吧。