A Perfect Data Mining World

This was a comic strip my business partner shared with me today. I’m sure most of us would be able to relate to the last frame of the story. How we’ve been thronged by countless sign ups everywhere we go.

What inspired me to write this post was the fact how many websites are now doing data mining – not username and password but emails. More and more websites are realizing the value of your personal email. Notice the many genre of websites mentioned.

Well, what I’m thinking is how will our user experience change having to either register for nearly all websites OR get an OpenID account in future.

What’s your view on the matter or the future?

Possible Premature Drive Failure With Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive

A friend of mine forwarded an email to me warning there may be major problems which can lead to premature drive failure with the new 3.5 inch Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.

He said this in his email:

If you have just brought a brand new internal 3.5-inch Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive, be warned that it is currently experiencing some major problems which can lead to premature drive failure!

If you own a Seagate that is 1TB and above, chances are you are affected. The new 1TB drives are using 7200.11, Seagate’s new family of hard drives that have improper firmware which can lead to your drive being unusable only after a few months.

The problem appears to be rooted in the drive’s firmware which can run fine but suddenly seize up after a few weeks or months causing the drive to be beyond recovery. Seagate has since released updated fixes for their drives to correct this problem and there have been reports of problems going away after the update.

But to be clear, if your hard drive is affected and you cannot detect it in BIOS, consider it bricked and you need to contact Seagate to have them fix the problem. Your data will be retained, however which is a relief. As before, it is a firmware problem, not a hardware problem.

If you do have a problem with the hard disk, the links to the correct firmware can be found on the official Seagate forum.

Disclaimer: I’ve no hard evidence of the matter but am sharing this out in goodwill of my friends, clients or users to backup their data if they own the said product.

WordPress 2.7.1 Fixes 68 bugs

I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 not awfully long ago. Simply because my drafts were behaving weird. Whenever I saved a draft, the Comments and Pings option were turned off. Thus, whenever I had scheduled posts they had comments and pings turned off.

The new WordPress 2.7.1 deemed a maintenance update fixes upto 68 bugs. Some notable list of bugs were:

• Permalink box below Title shouldn’t shift page
• Revisions do not respect time zone offset
• Add new link fails silently
• New installs: admin has user_level 0
• Theme preview fails when theme in subdirectory
• Tag cloud order priority is broken
• WP reinstaller doesn’t work
• ‘Draft Saved’ current_time not reflecting timezone setting in the edit area
• Distinguish between approved / unapproved comments in All Comments list for IE7
• Active plugins table rows are not highlighted
• jQuery/Thickbox Issue IE7/8
• Drafts are published in the past

View the changelog for the full WordPress 2.7.1 changes. Or, head on over to WordPress.org to download now.

Malaysian 9 Year Old iPhone Application Developer

I’m beginning to feel there’s no such thing as too early to start anything right now. Plus, what surprised me is how our local Malaysia newspapers never picked this up. It’s already been plastered over at BBC News. What? Is it because he’s a Malaysian kid residing in Singapore?

The boy; Lim Ding Wen, innocent kid only wanted to create the iPhone application called; Doodle Kids, for his two younger sisters. Talk about pure passion.

Read the whole story of his accomplishments of being fluent in six (6) programming languages at the BBC website. Image credits: BBC

I Heart Edenspiekermann

Oh, you don’t speak German? Well, neither do I but I loved the promotional marketing phrases used in the Edenspiekermann website. Especially when you know there are nincompoops in Malaysia making the decisions of Malaysia government websites.

Here are the phrases in order:

1. We work for your customers.
   We may have to take their side at times.
2. Challenge us.
   Complacency is the enemy of great work.
3. We don’t give answers.
   Unless we can explore your question.
4. We are not suppliers.
   Partnership gets the best results.
5. Talk to us.
   We thrive on feedback.
6. Trust us.
   You hired us because we can something you cannot do.
7. Pay us.
   Our work adds to your bottom line, so invest in your future.

Simply, love it! Now all I need to do is print packs of these 7 phrases and start delivery to every corporate manager in Malaysia – politicians included.