Tag: Internet

Volunteers Needed

Posted onAuthorShi ZhiXing1 Comment

Dear friends,

I had lunch with Ven. Dhammika yesterday at BDMS, and he asked if I know of any web wizards who can help him come up with some web page for him. It’s basically a web page/site comprising a map of the sacred Buddhist sites in India. All content and pictures are ready, waiting to be pieced together by the volunteer-to-be.

The candidate(s) should be:

  1. A Buddhist or at least Buddhist-friendly. (Call me biased, but who are we kidding? 😉 )
  2. Able to advise and follow-up with an implementation suitable for the above.
  3. Either Web or Design savvy or both.

and be expected to:

  1. Work with a witty Venerable (no, not me, Ven. Dhammika! … ok, I’m witty as well, but that’s besides the point! 🙂 )
  2. Converse in English.
  3. Not tremble in the presence of an Angmo.

So if you’ve got what it takes and are in Singapore, contact me via the comments today!

PS: Screening of suitable volunteers last till 7th July, 2007.

Leave A Message

Posted onAuthorShi ZhiXing27 Comments

Dear Friends,

If you have any thoughts, comments or questions, please leave them here.

Please use the following format where possible. 8)

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All messages are assumed to be public unless you indicate otherwise.

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For questions that may apply to others, I will remove personal references to protect your identity before posting it as a Q&A entry.

May you be Well and Happy!

Well in the Body, Happy in the Mind.

First Post

Posted onAuthorShi ZhiXingLeave a comment

So I’m starting a blog to write down the questions that people pose to me my encounters with people who come to me with questions. I’ll also post occassional ramblings about IT stuffs that I used to dabble with or am dambling with.
To start off, here’s a side note about blogs, I wrote a software called BNG back in the late 90s. It’s an acronym for Buddhist News Generator. You see, this web site used to be on a space hosted by my ISP Pacific Internet back then, and it barely supported any server side scripting … I could of course use FrontPage, which I did initially, but got sick of the thick chunk of FrontPage Extension code that becomes embedded into my web pages.

I was also working on some Multimedia Web Browser called Inspire in a little company’s R&D, and that got me into writing apps that talked HTTPConnect and stuffs. Eventually I wrote BNG as a Windows app that talks directly to your web site’s FTP servers and allows you to enter News snips which would get packaged and uploaded to the configured page.

In short, it does what blogs do (more or less) without server side scripts, database and the like. But it does not have WYSIWYG editing, support for searching, comments, indexing, and all the cool fancy stuffs we take for granted in blogs today. But that was the late 90s.
So did I invent the blog? Naye. Posting style kind of web site became pretty popular with many web sites before blogs came about. I guess the inventive thing about blogs was not so much of a technological progress, but a paradigm shift (don’t you just love these jargon that makes you think that you are intelligent! 😉 ). Blogs are really web sites that are diaries-on-steroids. And perhaps this blog is one such site.

In any case, I’ll just post occasionally and if enough of it appears, I’ll provide a link to the main page for public access.

Till then.

How Do I Learn Most Things?

Posted onAuthorShi ZhiXingLeave a comment

So I picked up Wiki over a few days last week or so. With all honesty, I did not know a hoot about using wikis, setting it up nor do I claim to be a wikiMaster right now. But I found out how to download and setup a wiki package, how to create new pages etc because some (young) folks wanted to use wiki but didn’t know how to … and didn’t want to lift a finger to learn.

It’s strange ‘cos as I think I learnt most things this way. It goes something like this:

  1. Something needs to be done.

    2. n

  2. No one wants to do it because its not something they’ve done before.
  3. I check it out.
  4. Read up, research on it and learn how to do it.
  5. I get it done.
  6. I learn a new skill.

For the most part, doing things is really a replication of something that’s been done before. Save for the creative screenplays, art, music etc, most things are really just that. Replication.

Just observe how its done once. Then replicate.

Simple. Ok, maybe not all that simple. Sometimes, you need to repeat the cycle numerous times to replicate flawlessly. But mostly, you don’t need to be flawless in your replication. The ability to replicate flawlessly, is to manufacture; the lack thereof, art.

The ability to replicate flawlessly, is to manufacture; the lack thereof, art

So its very interesting for me to observe how all these folks who want to become Buddhas in future, or claim to want to, are so low on interest to learn. Afterall, all SammasamBuddhas spend many many eons (3 Maha-Asangkayas Kalpas to be sure … for those who are of sharp faculties and are earnest in their training) learning and practising.

Alright … enough rambling for a Sunday …