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Today is a long day, but it was a great one ;). I ended up exhaustedly going to bed around 6:00 in the morning after some crazy warcraft games with my friend. Then woke up around 2 something in the afternoon to help my friend move out. She doesn’t have a lot of stuff to move, but the long sleepless night just drained all my energy.

After everything was set, i just went home, did some cleaning with my roomate. The other roomate left his room a big mess (may be he thought he has no more responsibilty because he no longer stays in the apt.) , so we had to clean it to have another one move in. Then i continued working on photo editing to get it done in time. By the way, I’m on my way to finish an album collection of all the pictures that my friends and i took this summer, so that i cand send it to everybody as a memorable thing. Hopefully i can get it done soon before my friends leave for New York city. They are going to school down there.

Farewell party at 6, but i had to drive around to pick up my friend, his sister, and bought some “hot drink” for the party. It was raining so hard :(. Finally, we came to the party at 8 something while people had started eating like an hour or so ago. However there was heaps of food, my friend’s mom cooked Vietnamese food so well. She made “Bun bo Hue” so so good. I was kinda tipsy after some shots with my friends so couldn’t enjoy Bun bo Hue that much ( i won’t have a chance until xmas to try his mom’s food again since he’ll be leaving tomorrow, damn!!). The party was so fun, only 5 of us are young, the rest are just friends and relatives of my friend’s parents. They talked so loud when they were drunk and we just made fun of them ;). hehhe, the fun part was we discussed the real estate in Vietnam. I promised my friends i would offer them a house if they want to live in Vietnam for the rest of their life (hahahah, i wish i had 1cm of land)….

…Now im back home…back to photoshop and continue the design. I’ll post it up here when i’m finished….

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 1:00 am under Daily thoughts
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Just got in my office today, read the Google News, and I have to say Google has been making a lot of significant improvements lately. Today, they’ve just released Google Talk (Beta) a few hours ago and this IM client promises to bring Google into the VOIP market where there are already giant competitors such as Skype, YIM.

For those who are still vague about this new service, this is an Instant Messaging client that works similar to other IM software. You can send instant messages to your friends anytime, or you can call them for free (PC-to-PC) as long as you have a microphone and a speaker…

Google Talk currently integrates with Gmail and enable you to check your mailbox via a link provided. It can also notify you unread messages in your mailbox, works like Gmail notifier as you are familar with that.

As I know, Google Talk is developed mainly on Jabber open-source standard, so basically you can use other third party software which also uses this technology to connect to Google Talk server. To name a few Adium, Apple’s iChat, Psi, and Trillian Pro.

More reviews about Google Talk (here)
More reviews about Google Talk technology (here)
Download Google Talk client (here)

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 9:54 am under Daily thoughts
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today is gonna be a big battle between me and AJAX again. geeze…. But i’m excitedly working on it :). Happy Friday dears

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 10:39 am under Daily thoughts
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I got an email from a person at the International Student Services of my school to ask for our response to a recommendation from a faculty member regarding to Vietnam flag…

Dear Vietnamese Students,

Would you be willing to provide me feedback on a question below? I will keep your responses confidential and will not share your names with anyone.

First some background: A faculty member has requested that we replace the current official flag of Vietnam that is hanging in the RIT SAU with an alternate flag (yellow with 3 horizontal red stripes). The current policy at RIT is that the SAU flags are not representing Vietnamese-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc, but are representing the nations that have sent students to study at RIT. On occasion, a representative from the current government of these countries comes to campus. Students from a particular country might feel they are being placed in a difficult situation if the flag being displayed by RIT were not the officially recognized flag of the current government. Also, due to limited space in the Union, we would not be able to accommodate multiple flags from the various countries (currently we display about 100).

So, my question to you is: What are your feelings about the current flag that hangs in the Union (red field, gold star)?

In advance, I thank you for taking a minute to reply.

Sincerely,

xxxxxxxx

Director

International Student Services

The email just brought to my attention because i thought they have known which one is an officially recognized flag already. So this is my reply to him with a little bit of my thoughts and understanding:

Dear xxxxx,

I would suggest to keep the current flag hung in SAU now. That flag is an officially recognized flag of our nation and the other flag (which is recommended to replace the current one) cannot represent for a country in any situation.

As you know that our government just paid a visit to the US in a week (mid of June) in response to your president’s invitation. The delegation had come and visited many places in the US such as Microsoft Corp., Boeing Corp., White House, NYSE, Harvard University, and so on. Every place we visited, the flag with red field and gold star was hung representing for Vietnam flag. Here are some information you can check out for clarification:

http://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/news/story.php?d=20050623121611
http://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/us_vn_relations/prime_minister_s_us_visit/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050621.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/21/world/main703143_page2.shtml

I know that there are still many thoughts and prejudices protesting against the current flag, but I hope you will consider it carefully and recognize how importance of a flag to a nation is. I would feel very disappointed of the fact that if representatives from our country visit RIT in the future, the non-official flag will cause much confuse to RIT community. And the national flag is the first thing people have to get to know when they’d like to learn about a country, what will happen if it confuses RIT students who want to learn about Vietnam?

I hope you will make appropriate actions for this circumstance.

My Name

Yup, and that was my feedback to him. Gladly I received a positive response from him right away as they also have no plan to change the current flag… so it’s just a little thought today :).

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 3:45 pm under Daily thoughts
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AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a technology that has been developed and used widely in web applications recently. Using the combination of javascript and XMLhttp request gives surfers a seemless refreshing page and gets rid of the time to wait for the page to fully refresh. Now only data that user needed is refreshed, not the full page anymore. This is a powerful technology that can be used to reduce server process time - yes, tremendously… just imagine a page has to display many server controls and each control needs a postback corresponding to user’s selections.

Are you still confused? Just experiment Google Maps and Google Suggest to have a close view of how they have implemented this technology. Navigating the map just is so fast and seemlessly or Google suggestions just appear almost immediate when we start typing our first letter. That’s just so cool, isn’t it?

… been working on this technology since last week and have tried to implement it into my project. It took me much time to understand and work it out, and the result just made me happy. Unfortunately, everything works fine on my machine but the test server, which is so unexplainable. I spent a boring friday to find out the problem and eventually realized the web.config file didn’t reflect the properties I set (which is just weird because we set up the cruise-control application to compare and move latest files from Visual Source Safe to Test sever). I will work more on this tomorrow and see how it goes…

More info about AJAX Technology:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
• http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
• http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/csharpsample/default.aspx
• http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

…yup, i ended up knowing that the Test server is using another web.config file. That explains why my web.config with key/value for AJAX didn’t come into play. Now everything works fine.

Filed by Tran Nguyen at 8:48 pm under IT
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