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I will go to KL to attend the BarCamp Malaysia held on 26th and 27th July 2008.

What is BarCamp?

Frankly, I am not sure too. According to BarCamp.org,

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

Get the idea? It is a group of people gather together and sharing with each others. BarCamp Malaysia is the 1st barcamp in Malaysia. Check out the interesting schedule.

When is BarCamp Malaysia 2008?

Date: July 26, 2008, 10:00AM-6:00PM. July 27, 2008, 10:00AM-2:00PM.
Venue: xTrain Sdn Bhd, Unit E-7-1, Block E, Megan Avenue 1, 189 Jalan Tun Razak, 50400 Kuala Lumpur. (view map)

BarCamp Malaysia was a registration only event but due to the overwhelming responds, they are open to walk in registration at 9am, 26th July 2008. So, if you are not registered but interested, make sure you are there early!

I am not giving any talk at BarCamp Malaysia 2008 but I am very much looking forward for it! Surely, you will meet many geeks and experts there and discussing geek topics with them is FUN!

I have a community site powered by Drupal but it cannot display chinese characters, even though it supports unicode by default.

All non-English characters are displayed as question marks (???). I tried to reinstall Drupal but without any luck. Yesterday, I finally discovered the problem and solved it!

The problem

Last time, I installed Drupal using the cPanel Fantastico script installer. The installer created database using Latin collation. That’s why Drupal cannot display Chinese characters because the database is not unicode (UTF-8).

Lesson learned: Do not install script using cPanel Fantastico.

The solution

The solution is simple, correct the tables’ collation to UTF-8 using the following SQL query (thanks to neo_fox):

ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

I ran the query using phpMyAdmin found in cPanel hosting control panel. But the drawback is that you need to run the SQL query for every single table…

I modified 20+ tables and it works! Now my friends can leave chinese message on the community website.

We know that domain name is a branding, so do logo did. I would like to design a logo that could express my blog’s name and my blog niche. I am not an art guy, so I do not have much experience on how to design a logo.

How to design?

I know design is not an easy job, but there are few factors that you must consider before design a logo. The 4 main factors are simplicity, meaningful, creative and impressive.

Of course, to digitize your logo, you need a free vector graphics editor software called Inkscape to help you. You can download Inkscape here.

Ink your Logo

With the help from Inkscape software, I start to draw my logo and it just took me few minutes to complete. Inkscape is not a image editor like photoshop, but is an excellent free vector graphics editor. It is very useful when come to create logos that need to be printed on big banners. With this tool, you can not only create fine details, but also can scale the images to any size you want.

So, you want to see my first logo ?

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A month after Firefox 3 beta 1, Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 2 and available for download here.

What’s new about Beta 2?

Compared to Beta 1, the Firefox 3 Beta 2 has improved location bar that makea the search result easier to be identified. The results for the location bar are shown in 2 lines: page title and web address, in different colors. The matched keyword is bolded and underlined.

Image: Firefox 3 location bar search

You also notice that the Go button at location bar is hidden until you enter a website address in the location bar.

Firefox 3 beta 2 also has a better search panel that allows you search for history, tags, and bookmarks. You can add as many search rules as you like, and save the search as a dynamic folder, much like Thunderbird’s email search.

For more details, check out Firefox 3 beta 2 review.

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I just updated Firefox 2 to version 2.0.0.10 from 2.0.0.9. The minor update fixed 3 bugs to improve the stability of Firefox. No new feature.

On the other hand, Mozilla released the 1st beta version of Firefox 3 at November 19, 2007 — Firefox 3 Beta 1. It is the next generation of Firefox web browser with many new and improved features.

I tried Firefox 3 Beta 1. It looks great but is not compatible with many Firefox add-ons, even tried forcing to be compatible using Nightly Tester Tool. No choice. I reverted to Firefox 2 in just a few minutes.

One shall wait for the final release version of Firefox 3. According to the release roadmap, it will be released at late 2007 or early 2008.

Off topic: Just checked my blog taffic statistic yesterday, 42% site visitors are using Firefox!

browser, firefox, mozilla