blogs

I used to sell on eBay a couple years back. I stopped because I got busier and didn't feel like paying ebay all the listing/final value fees/store inventory fee + Paypal fee.

Every time I hear some news about ebay, I've always hoped they'd reduce fees. But they've always increased fees.

Then I heard the news that they disallow sellers to leave negative feedback. This is getting ridiculous. I understand the feedback retaliation loop between sellers and buyers. I've been on both the seller and buyer sides. What EBay is doing is to improve buyer experience on the expense of sellers. This can't work cause sellers can't have their voice heard.

Tags: ebay

If you are running SSL with JBoss, you'd notice that Tomcat always sends "Cache-Control: no-cache" http header which ask browsers not to cache any content. This is a big NO-NO for static content like images, Javascript, css which should be cached by browsers to improve page loading performance.

JBoss wiki has the detail of how to disable cache control.

Once you get that fix, you can use to JBoss's ReplyHeaderFilter to specify max-age header to tell browsers to cache your content.

Tags: ssl jboss, tomcat, ssl, max-age, cache-control

You hear that UTF-8 is the gold standard in internationalization. so you prepare your JSP pages to use UTF-8 charset.

Then you get your resource bundle files(property files) to use UTF-8 encoding. Everything looks fine in your text editor.

Now you load up the pages. Every character retrieved from your resource bundles look garbled.

This is because Java loads property files using ISO 8859-1 character encoding. Resource bundle utf-8 hack comes to rescue.

Tags: java utf-8 internationalization

ZipRealty is a pretty good site for researching/shopping houses. I can save homes that I am interested in and see all of them in 'My Homes' page.

Sometimes, I need to send the lists to my agents to ask them advices. They always want the MLS numbers.

So I created this GreaseMonkey script to show MLS numbers on 'My Homes' page.

Hope someone finds it useful.

Tags: greasemonkey ziprealty

Apple released new generation of MacBook a couple days ago. Amazon has slashed its price on "previous" generation of MacBook and offers rebates as well.

Here's a trick outlined by rabidrobin at SlickDeals

1. Create a new account
2. Go to the product page for an applecare for macbook pro
3. scroll down until you find the "I Own it" checkbox, and check it
4. At the top of the screen, click on Recommendations
5. Go through the list of 20-30 or so recommended items and click "Not Interested" for the ones that aren't macbook pros
6. Look in your goldbox, I was able to buy the mac pro 2.2 ghz today but sometimes it may take overnight

Tags: amazon apple macbook deal macbook_air macbook_pro laptop

Before my son was born, I spent a lot of time trying to find a pretty unique and uncommon English name for him.

Here are the web sites that I found most useful:

• Nymbler - Your Personal Name Suggestions is the best one because Nymbler can give your name suggestions based on your favorite name. You can also exclude names, save your favorite names. The suggestion part is really the best to help you discover new names
• Think Baby Names tells you the meanings of names, the origins, and their variant forms, and other names that sound like the ones you are looking at. This site has done the best SEO as it constantly comes up as the first result when you google "baby name the name to be checked"

Tags: baby name naming

It's the end of the year. Time to cast you vote for goal of the year.

I have to say that some of 5 candidate goals are not top 5 quality!

But no matter whose candidate goal they include, My vote goes to Sebastian Larsson's stunning goal at the 93rd minute help Birmingham City to defeat Tottenham on December 2nd, 2007.

Tags: soccer goal video sebastian_larsson fsc fox

Slowly, more and more sites have supported login using OpenID.

The selling point of OpenID is that you can use one login to access varies sites. This is very convenient. But I am worried about losing the same passwords for all the OpenID supported sites I access. There are so many phishing activities going on to steal passwords. I need something that's not password-based.

I came across Certifi.ca which is a password-less OpenID provider using SSL certificate for public key-based authentication. The basic idea is that you store your public SSL certificate(public key) and the private key in your browser. Certifi.ca identifies you by your public key, and uses your public key to encrypt communication between your browser and itself. Your browser with the private key is the only one that can decrypt the communication. There's no password needed!

Tags: ssl certificate public key openid provider certifi.ca cacert.org

I started to host tahoewiki.org on Wik.is with a pro account a couple weeks ago. It's powered by Deki Wiki which I first learned through ReadWriteWeb. Time for me to give a review.

Reasons for choosing Deki Wiki:

• It's open source
• It has a suite of widgets and web Services mashing up contents. The mashup features are important because I want to bring in contents from other sites into the wiki

Tags: wiki mashup wik.is deki mindtouch review

I have updated Tahoe Wiki to include the following tips:

• Winter driving in tahoe
• Deals and money saving tips for skiers & snowboarders including beginers
• Lodging

Those are things I've learned over the years of going to Tahoe. Enjoy.

Tags: snowboard tahoe wiki ski winter vacation driving saving tips