Year: 2005

Today, December 29th marks the start of the school vacation, or as we say in Australia “school holidays”
I have to be back at school on Friday, February 10th ! A grand total of 42 days of Rest and relaxation.

We finnished up with a lunch paid for by some of the parents. This sort of thing is quite common in Korea. It happens at the start and the end of the school year and important events in between.

Vacation: A period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation, especially one with pay granted to an employee.
Holiday: Chiefly British. A vacation. Often used in the phrase on holiday.

Merry Christmas for 2005 and have a happy new year

Yesterday I changed my webhosting company and created a new domain name.

My website is now called stephenhucker.com
hucker.net still exists and will continue to do so for some time.

But for now, my focus is on stephenhucker.com

My previous webhosting company was POWWEB.COM
I hated them!
Their userinterface was terrible. It took me at least 10 minutes to find out how to do things.
Then I wouldn’t need to do it for a few months by which time I had forgotten where it was.
It looks like they are now changing that, but too late for me.

STEPHENHUCKER.COM is hosted at bluehost.com
For @ US $94 for one year I get 10 GB of disk space and 50 mysql/postgress databases.
As well as that they give me SSH access!
and it works prety well

I had to copy my wordpress installation from hucker.net to stephenhucker.com
In theory I could use wordpress to restore a backup of my hucker.net database and all would be well.
But it didn’t work

So I SSHed to my website and use mysql admin to import the database backup. It worked prefectly.
Without direct command line access I would have been unable to import my archives.

Below is a summary of what I did

stephenhucker.com# ls
./ ../ wp.sql

stephenhucker.com# mysqlshow -p
Enter password: #######

+—————-+
| Databases |
+—————-+
| wordpress |
+—————-+

stephenhucker.com# mysql wordpress < wp.sql -p

Enter password: #######

About a month ago the Korean government finally got around to banning Napster type websites in Korea. Up until now people could download movies and songs and pay maybe 50 cents for a movie.
Thats a pretty good deal, but highly illegal, even under Korean law. So it is good to see the governement enforcing copyright law in a sensible manner.

Alas, I spoke too soon 🙁

Uri party lawmaker Woo sang-ho is hoping to introduce a bill which ?¢‚Ǩ?ìforces Internet companies to supervise file transactions between their users, and to delete or stop them when the contents are copyrighted materials such as music or video files. The bill also says that the companies would be punished for up to 50 million won in penalty.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

Korean ISPs are obviously not happy at such a heavy handed approach ?¢‚Ǩ?ì`It is a na?ɬØve idea that would kill the emerging Internet industry,?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ said the association in a statement. “even if there can be a short-term effects in protecting digital rights. But in the long term it will not benefit the contents?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ owners, let alone the Internet users and service providers.?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢

The problems with this sort of approach are the assumption that you can ban something by trying to stop people doing it. Remember the hugely successful war on drugs. After tens of thousands of deaths, billions of dollars spent, it is nearly impossible to buy drugs ? Oh, wait I must have been smoking something

Potential problems with this bill are:

1. Who pays for the added costs of monitoring file transfers?
2. What happens when you have a legal file with a name similar to some copyrighted material?
eg a home ?¢‚Ǩ?ìStar Wars?¢‚Ǩ¬ù video
3. If a file is mistakenly stopped is there an easy way to complain and get it working again?

Potential ways of avoiding the law

1. Use of Encrypted P2P. If a file is encrypted then the ISP can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t know what it is.
It probably is only a matter of time before P2P networks become encrypted. When this happens how will an ISP know what is being transferred? Will they then ban encrypted P2P networks because of the law or relax because they can’t supervise encrypted traffic.

Fortunately “Instant messaging services such as MSM Messenger, Web mail and portal services will not be subject to the new law. Only peer-to-peer service and Web hard service will be forced to take actions on the illegal file transactions,?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ said Woo?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s aide Park Seung-nak.

References:
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/biz/200512/kt2005120719195011890.htm
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=298373

2005 is my third financial year in Korea. The first two years for Australians are tax free 🙂
The Korean tax system is based on the calendar year whereas Australia’s is July – June.
I think the Korean system is better b/c the tax year is the same as the calendar year. But it also means you have to do your taxes at Christmas time!  That sucks!

The English version of the Korean tax website is at Korean Tax office

They have a word document explaining the tax system at Korean Taxation 2005 It has a HWP extension (Hangul Word Processor) but it is actually a word document, so don’t panic.

What is WPG2?

WPG2 is a WordPress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within WordPress to share photos, videos and any other Gallery2 content seamlessly into the WordPress Sidebar and Blog entries. The current version of WPG2 is 1.0, released on September 13th, 2005.

http://wpg2.ozgreg.com/index.php/Main_Page

Good example of Gallery 2 integration into WordPress – http://www.ozgreg.com/

Gallery 2 Download – http://codex.gallery2.org/index.php/Gallery2:Download

Friday, 2nd December
Friday night I decided to visit my friend who works in a shop in Songnamdong. After riding there I discovered the shop in the nearly empty. My friend told me that the owner is closing the shop and he is moving back to Daegue where he will start work Monday working in car detailing (painting).
I was quite shocked. He is one of my few Korean friends, and now he is gone 🙁
After saying goodbye, I went and saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Friday. It is the best movie in the series yet.
It marks the transition to a darker more adualt theme with characters dying within the first few minutes of the film.
The special effects are wonderful and more importantly are not there to cover up a lack of story or acting. The script is very tight and the acting excellent.
I would recommend this to anyone, except very young kids who might get frightened.

Saturday, 3rd December
Saturday afternoon I couldn’t study so I went window shopping at Lotte Department store.
To my amazement they actually had in stock the new Apple iPods, the Nano and the iPod Photo and at offical Apple prices.
So next time I need an iPod product I shall visit the store.

With the introduction of iTunes 6 you can now store lyrics in the ID tags of your songs. If you have an iPod it can then display the lyrics when you are playing the song.
Pretty cool. But I have several thousand songs!
going to google and typing “[songs name] lyrics” and pasting it into iTunes is going to take forever.

One solution is Sing that iTune!, a widget for Konfabulator.
Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to.

Sing that iTune! is a widget that finds out what song iTunes is playing, goes to the net, retrieves the lyrics, and inserts them into the MP3 or AAC file that is playing. All this is done without human intervention!

Kongabulator is owned by Yahoo and can be found at http://www.konfabulator.com/download
Sing that iTune! is found at:

http://blog.livedoor.jp/widget236/archives/9489848.html (Japanese)

There are also several other iTunes related widgets, just do a search for iTunes widgets.

So you have the lyrics, now you need the album art:
ITunes Companion – Grabs the album art for the currently playing song.