Chinese readers, do you understand the above sentence?  It is Chinese written in 火星文 (literally means Mars Language), and in formal Chinese it should be written as:

“追赶着潮流，拒绝着落伍，使用着一种据说来自“火星”的语言，这就是新新人类。可是尽管是新新人类，要想快速的输入与识别火星文可不是一件容易的事情，怎么办？那就交给火星文输入法来办！它可是新新人类QQ聊天的必备工具！”

If you ever chatted with TW internet users, you’ll find that there are common typos.  Since they are really so common, they become accepted practice and eventually it evolves into this Mars Language.   Weird, right?  That’s the power of the rebellious youth!  If you want to learn more, check this out: http://baike.baidu.com/view/32668.htm.

Tonight when I visited facebook, I found it loaded surprisingly slow.  Not sure whether it’s my own issue, or I’m getting a bad ISP, I searched “facebook loading” on twitter, and found that it is an universal problem.

Twitter is really up to what it claims, it helps me to discover what’s happening right now.  I’m not keen to tweet, but twitter does help me when I need to check out “breaking news” that will never get covered by the major media channels.

Well done Twitter!  And Facebook, you need to start creating a failing-whale equivalent.

While there is no way to change calendar days into red text during public holiday, there is a workaround by adding these publics as calendar event.

Go to http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars/index_abc4.html and search for “Hong Kong Holiday Calendar (Traditional) 1.0“.  Click on the download link, then your iPhone will ask if you want to subscribe, say yes then you’ll see the holidays being added to your iPhone calendar as shown.

It is reported that the hacker training company “Black Eagle Security” (translated from its Chinese name “黑鹰安全网”) was shut down and that the company owner and general manager were arrested.

According to PRC law enacted February 2009, “提供专门用于侵入、非法控制计算机信息系统的程序、工具，或者明知他人实施侵入、非法控制计算机信息系统的违法犯罪行为而为其提供程序、工具，情节严重的，依照前款的规定处罚。” (Google-translate it yourself if you can’t read Chinese), it is illegal to provide hacking tools and training in China.

This case is rather controverial.  In what circumstances is it being considered providing hacking tools?  Say I am a security author and I am writing to teach people what is rootkit and how to protect against it.  If I give code examples to show what a rootkit is, will I be prosecuted?  I am not knowledgable in legal matters, but this kind of stuff makes me worried because it is subjected to individual interpretation.

So what is the practice in Western world?  It’s probably quite different(let me know if you know about it).

Security and hacking is essentially the same thing viewed from different angles.  So if you are a security enthusiate and you blog on internet security in China, be careful.

Setup UCenter Home

First, download the installation package at http://download.comsenz.com/UCenter_Home/2.0/UCenter_Home_2.0_TC_UTF8.zip.  Again I choose the Traditional Chinese edition with UTF-8 encoding.  Under the root’s shell, issue the following commands to download and unpack the installation package.

mkdir ~/setup-ucenter-home
cd ~/setup-ucenter-home
wget http://download.comsenz.com/UCenter_Home/2.0/\
UCenter_Home_2.0_TC_UTF8.zip
unzip UCenter_Home_2.0_TC_UTF8.zip

I would like UCenter Home to be installed at http://u.tcpo.org.  Because I have put UCenter into http://u.tcpo.org/ucenter, I can save put UCenter Home into the document root fof the domain, i.e. /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org/

cp -pr upload/* /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org/

Then I need to create config.php based on config.new.php

cd /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org
cp config.new.php config.php

Next permissions for some files and directories need to be changed in order for UCenter Home to run correctly.

chmod 777 attachment
chmod 777 data
chmod 777 data/*.*
chmod 777 uc_client/data
chmod 777 config.php

During the setup of UCenter Home, you need to make one user the administrator.  Visit http://u.tcpo.org/ucenter/admin.php, login with the 創始人密碼.  In the category 用戶管理, click on 添加用戶.  Enter the information required to create your first user.

Then, go to the category 應用管理, click on 添加新應用.  Enter the URL of http://u.tcpo.org/install/index.php and then click 安裝.  After that, the UCenter Home installation guide is shown.

1. 安裝開始

Here file/directory permission check is done.  If it is all ok, then proceed with the installation.

2. 設置UCenter訊息

Here UCenter information is pre-filled, normally you don’t need to change anything, just click on the submit button.  After that, you will be shown a message telling you that the application is successfully installed, go to the next step.

3. 設置數據庫連接訊息

Here we will reuse the same database connection parameters as that we have setup for UCenter.

數據庫服務器本地地址: localhost
數據庫用戶名: uc
數據庫密碼: <password>
數據庫字符集: UTF-8
數據庫名: UC
表名前綴: uchome_

6. 安裝完成

Here enter the user name and password of the administrator

After that, the installation guide is completed.  To safeguard the system, do the following.

cd /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org
rm -rf install
chmod 644 config.php

If you go into the administrative interface of UCenter Home, you will notice an error saying:

File: /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org/./data/tpl_cache/template_default_cp_advance.php can not be write!

This can be fixed on changing permission on the data/tpl_cache directory.

chmod -R 777 data/tpl_cache

Now everything is completed, you can enter http://u.tcpo.org/admincp.php to fine tune your configuration.

1. UCenter 1.5.0 安装介绍
2. UCenter Home 2.0 安装方法详细介绍

Here’s what I want to achieve: setup UCenter Home 2.0 on a dedicated linux server.  And since installing UCenter Home is a 2 step process of installing UCenter first and then UCenter Home, I break it into 2 posts.  This post covers installing UCenter.  In next post I’ll talk about UCenter Home.

Setup UCenter

UCenter is the pre-requisite of installing UCenter Home 2.0.  UCenter stands for “User Center” and is the integral part of Comsenz’ products.

First, download the installation package at http://download.comsenz.com/UCenter/1.5.0/UCenter_1.5.0_TC_UTF8.zip.  Here I choose the Traditional Chinese edition with UTF-8 encoding.  Under the root’s shell, issue the following commands to download and unpack the installation package.

mkdir ~/setup-ucenter
cd ~/setup-ucenter
wget http://download.comsenz.com/UCenter/1.5.0/\
UCenter_1.5.0_TC_UTF8.zip
unzip UCenter_1.5.0_TC_UTF8.zip

I would like UCenter Home to be installed at http://u.tcpo.org.  Because UCenter and UCenter Home cannot be installed under the same directory, I decided to put UCenter under http://u.tcpo.org/ucenter.  The document root of the domain u.tcpo.org is /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org in my server.

mkdir /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org
cp -pr upload /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org/ucenter

Then I need to change permission to some files and directories to allow read/write by apache.

cd /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org/ucenter
chmod 777 data
chmod 777 data/avatar
chmod 777 data/backup
chmod 777 data/cache
chmod 777 data/logs
chmod 777 data/tmp
chmod 777 data/view

Next, I need to configure apache so that it responds to virtual host u.tcpo.org.  The following section is put inside /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName u.tcpo.org
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/u.tcpo.org
        CustomLog logs/u.tcpo.org-access_log combined
        ErrorLog logs/u.tcpo.org-error_log
</VirtualHost>

Then restart apache.

service httpd restart

I also need to prepare a MySQL database and a MySQL user because running the UCenter installation guide.

CREATE DATABASE UC;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON UC.* TO "uc"@"localhost" \
  IDENTIFIED BY "<password>";
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now I can visit the UCenter installation site at http://u.tcpo.org/ucenter/install.  A license agreement will be shown, click “我同意” to proceed.  After that, a step-by-step installation guide will guide you through the setup procedure.

1. 開始安裝

This step checks the server configuration to see if it meets UCenter’s requirement.  If everything’s fine, you will see everything “ticked”.

2. 安裝數據庫

Here I enter the database access information.

數據庫服務器: localhost
數據庫名: UC
數據庫用戶名: uc
數據庫密碼: <password>
數據表前綴: uc_

I also need to setup a 創始人密碼.

3. 安裝數據庫

You should see messages saying that database tables are successfully created.  If not, check your database access parameters entered in step 2.

Now UCenter is completely setup.  You can use the 創始人密碼 to login into UCenter 用戶管理中心 to have a look around.

“在这里要说明一下：我们提供了 4 种不同的编码。包括 GBK 简体中文版(推荐)、UTF-8 简体中文版、BIG5 繁体中文版(推荐)、UTF-8 繁体中文版，请自己的需求选择相应版本的论坛程序下载。”

It means the author recommends installing the package using GBK/BIG5 encoding instead of the UTF8 one.  It confuses me as I thought the UTF8 version is be more appropriate for general use.  I have friends writing in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, so UTF8 is a requirement for me.  To confirm whether UTF8 version is worse than its GBK/BIG5 peers, I download all packages and diff them.  The result is comforting, as the only output is of the following type:

<               <option value=”0″>Flash动画</option>
<               <option value=”1″>Media视频</option>
<               <option value=”2″>Real视频</option>
—
>               <option value=”0″>Flash動畫</option>
>               <option value=”1″>Media視頻</option>
>               <option value=”2″>Real視頻</option>

So if you are struggling with version choice, you can safely choose the one that fits you the best.  In my case, it is the UTF8 version.

But why did the author recommend against the UTF8 version?  Well, I can think of 2 reaons:

1. UTF8 has characters in varied length.  If you are sure you only have GBK or BIG5, then it saves you some bandwidth using GBK/BIG5 instead of UTF8.
2. The author has a China-only mindset.

Well, reason 2 is further enhanced by the fact that UCenter has only Chinese documentation.

Then a few years ago, soon after I learned a great new stuff called Blog, I started writing my first one.  However, it is not easy to maintain an active blog, as some of you ex-bloggers must have experienced.  I was not an exception and I gave it up very soon.  I had actually made a second effort writing another blog, but again that was a failure.

After spending a few years in corporate, I found that I am gradually deteriorating into a bull-shit engineering manager, i.e. one who thinks he is technical savvy but in fact he isn’t.  It makes me feel bad as I am not using my full capability, and I am determined to get back to the front-line, to stay in-touch with the fast-evolving real world.  To show my determination, I want my venture to be documented, and there is no better tool than blog.  So here comes my third attempt…

I am determined, but only history will tell…

P.S. a YO!Net nodelist is available here.  It’s the only thing I can find on the net to prove the previous existence of Stepo Paradise.