Chinese Blog Site: diandian

Weibo is my favorite twitter. In Chinese it means micro blog. Weibo is very populate in China. I have seen some English tweets there. Today, I noticed one my of followers has moved his blog from Sina blogger to Diandian web site. This caused my interest.

Actually I like Sina blogger very much. It has some nice features. However, the only thing I miss is the CSS and HTML control. I cannot define my CSS classes and HTML scripts there. That's why I prefer Google's Blogger. I have my duplicate Chinese blog at Blogger as well. For sure, it is also for backup purpose.

点点 or dian dian in Chinese means bit by bit. As it says in Diandian's about page, all the complicated contents starts from simple points, then lines, curves, pixels, text and more. Its motto is Let blog start simple"(in Chinese). The overall look of dian dian blog site is very simple and clean. Of course, the most attractive point is the feature of customized CSS and HTML with Javascript.

Based on some articles on TechRice, Diandian is a copy of Tumblr, which is popular web based blog service. I tried to explore Tumbler, but I could not find a reason to switch to this site, even it says that you can customized everything.



Although the following diandian.com home page looks like Trumblr.com, there is difference, blank page on diandian.com. According to diandian's plan, they will have some distinctive features for bloggers.



There are many great web services in China. I don't mean I want to get the best blog web site, but I am interested in one with features I want. In addition to that, the popularity and reliability are also very important. I am going to ask my Weibo follower about it. I really like to move my Sina blog to another simple and powerful blog site in China.

I'll keep my update about Chinese blog if I make any significant changes.

References

• My Weibo: 茶树油客
• My Chinese blog at Sina: 茶树油客的博客
• Chinese blog service: diandian
• TechRice article: Diandian Founder Jack Xu: Before I Knew What a Computer Looked Like…: 

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Mac OS Security: Gatekeeper (1)

Mac Mountain Lion OS 10.8.2 introduced some new changes in the area of OS security. In this blog I am going to explore the first one: Gatekeeper. It is a very interesting concept. Security concern has been with computer OS since it started. How to protect user data, information, and their privacy has become one of most important issues in personal computers. Even Apple's Mac OS has been very strong in terms of fighting computer virus or malware, with the population of Internet, Apple has realized the potential danger of malware invading Mac OS. Macs still takes very  small market share, comparing to Microsoft Windows. This has been used as an excuse for Mac not having much malware attach. However, Apple is aware the potential attack, and has been keeping very close eyes on the battles of malware against to personal computers.

Based on the information from the past WWDC, there some seminars on Mac security issues. I noticed that Apple has learned lessons in this battle. In this battle, most security focuses have been mainly on defensive side. For example, wildly used anti-virus softwares are always one step behind malware. As a result, Windows treats apps from Internet as potential malware and prompt daunting warning messages to let user to make decision to accept them or not. Apple thinks that this would be a never-win-war.

In Mountain Lion OS, Apple introduced Gatekeeper concept. This is based on a very different concept. In stead of black-kist strategy, Apple implements white-list strategy. This is very analogous to security gate in reality. Security guard will allow any one to enter as long as they have proper id card. Alarm will be on if a faulty or unauthorized id is present. As a part of Gatekeeper strategy, Apple asks all the Mac application developers to apply for Apple developer's id. Apple recomments developers to sign their applications with their ids.

Hence Mountain Lion OS introduced a big change. In order to smooth the transition to this new security practice, the new Mac OS provides three convenient options for Mac users to install apps:

• Mac App Store 
• Mac App Store and identified developers
• Anywhere

With those options, users can temporally loose control on Gatekeeper if they want to install known apps without developer id. You can keep your gate door wide open by allowing Any one, but I think most people will choose the first or second option.

I think this will be a new change in app development. Any developer will require to obtain his/her id if he/she wants to distribute apps through internet.

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VIM Tips: Multiple Commands

This tip may be too simple and not not the best way to do it. However, it saves my tremendous time. Last week, I was going to bring my Visual Studio solution to my work. This solution contains a lots of projects. I realized that there are some namespaces and copy right issues to be updated. I could use VS to do it. But the VS at work is a new one, without tools like Refactory tool, CodRush Express, Resharper.

I did not like the native Find & Replace in VS. I decided to use VIM to do the job. The challenge I faced was that, first, I had to find all the files contains the strings I would like to replace, and secondly, do the find and replace for each file.

I used TotalCommander tool to do the search. It has built-in find feature and it is very powerful. I can easily get the search result files in one panel. Then I added a tool bar associated with VIM (set parameter %P%N). It is a very cool tool.

Next, I tried to use VIM to do replacement manually. I had too many .cs files. It was just to tedious. Then I searched for a way to do replacement, then save the changes and quit. Can I do three commands in one line? Soon I found a way to do it:

:%s/searchpattern/replacement/g | write | q

In VIM the pipe char is used to link a list of commands. This made my job much quicker. Afterward, I found that this could be done on command line like this:

gvim -c "%s/searchpattern/replacement/g | write | q" test.cs

I think that there must be a better way to run a chained command in a Windows command console: first finding all the files containing expected strings, and next using gvim to do the replacement.

Reference

• Total Commander tool

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VIM Tips

Recently I was working on a project to set up a new server. The new server is a replacement of existing one. One of issues I tried to resolve is to migrate permissions from the existing server to the new server. The problem is that there are too many folders to be checked, 4k folders. I need to find a way to export permissions for each folder to a text file.

Quickly I found a command to get permissions:

cacls.exe folderName

It was very nice to find out this command. Then I use Tree to export folders to text file and edited the text file as a batch file. This is a simple batch file, but a long list of folders.

@cacls folder1 > perm.txt
@cacls folder2 >> perm.txt
...
@cacls folder4000 >> perm.txt

I encountered a problem. Some of path was wrong. I think I may missed some parts of their paths. To find out which one is not valid is a challenge. I need to find a productive way to do that. I knew the following command is a convenient way to detect valid path:

@IF NOT EXIST %folder1 ECHO %folder1

I used VIM to help me to create another batch file based on my above batch file. I used the following VIM replacement command to trim my batch file:

:%s/@cacls //g
:%s/ > perm.txt//g
:%s/ >> perm.txt//g

Those are simple VIM find and replace commands. Now I have a list of paths left:

folder1
folder2
...
folder4000

Then I use find and replace with group command to repeat folders with ECHO command:

:%s/\(.*\)/\1 ECHO \1/g

where \(xxx\) is a group. Finally I insert prefixing IF command at each line the the command:

:%s/^/@IF NOT EXIST /g

where ^ is the beginning of line. With above commands, my new batch file was created.

@IF NOT EXIST folder1 ECHO folder1
@IF NOT EXIST folder2 ECHO folder2
...
@IF NOT EXIST folder4000 ECHO folder4000

Soon I found invalid folders and quickly I fixed my scripts.

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