Leon Ho

position:relative and overflow leaking bug in Internet Explorer

Leon — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:04:09 +0000

If you see your div with position:relative is leaking over the parent div with overflow-y: auto, the solution is to give position:relative to the parent div too. Don’t ask me why - It is just another bug on IE.

Tips from position:relative and overflow in Internet Explorer - Snook.ca.

Workaround on Wordpress iPhone crash

Leon — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:37:29 +0000

To fix (prevent) it from crashing from setting up your blog, point the Blog URL to the xmlrpc.php address of your wordpress setup. i.e. http://your.wordpress.blog/xmlrpc.php

via Is Your Wordpress iPhone App Crashing at Setup? - Jonathan Wilbur

Fix Mail crash on iPhone 2.0

Leon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:53:01 +0000

If you haven’t jailbreak your iPhone 2.0 firmware, you have to restore your iPhone and set it up as a new phone. Yes. You will lose many data, including SMS.

If you have jailbroken your iPhone 2.0, you can fix it by ssh’ing into your iPhone and run the following command:

chown mobile /var/mobile/Library/Mail /var/mobile/Library/Cookies/ /var/mobile/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist

Leopard Upgrade Problem - Keys do not stick on Keychain

Leon — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:34:13 +0000

After the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, keychain cannot save or modify passwords anymore. The only way I can resolve this issue is to reset my keychain by running Keychain Access app, then go to Preferences -> Reset My Keychain.

Webomatica and MacFixit have mentioned other ways to fix common problems on Keychain.

My Social Site Usage

Leon — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:19:19 +0000

As you all know, I love metric. Meaningful data always provides useful information. For usage of social sites, FriendFeed has the best position to provide some meaningful stats. After it has been aggregating my updates for a month or so, it shows I use blog the most (because of Lifehack and this blog), then Twitter, and Google Reader.

My Usage:

What my friends use:

Yes, twitter beats all other social sites within my social graph, hands down. It is getting extremely popular, and also its user contribution is cheaper than other social sites — It only costs 140 chars.

BTW, add me to your friendfeed.

Video on Flickr! But 90 sec?

Leon — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:33:55 +0000

As a long time fan and a pro user of Flickr, I am pretty excited about their video support. The only catch though is that videos are limited to 90 seconds in length and 150MB in filesize.

To be honest with you, 90 seconds is really short. I am not a video editor and tend to keep raw clips on my hard drive. How can I say keep a video of a full presentation or wedding ceremony on Flickr for example?

I understand if they ease their limitation too much, Flickr will become a movie sharing site, but 90 secs is just too short.

Anyway I have uploaded a video for testing and embedded here:

Now you have the power of Google: App Engine

Leon — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:00:05 +0000

Wasn’t it your dream years ago to have access to BigTable and GFS (Google File System) from Google and not worry about your scaling problem? From tonight, you can.

I am not going to introduce all the features it has. You can watch tonight’s Campfire One video which introduces the whole lot of Google App Engine features.

(video urls via Socbleizer)

Is Stepcase going to use it? Probably not yet, because currently it supports Python only. But once it supports Ruby we may consider to deploy some of our Rails apps to there.

It is pretty easy to use though. It already has a nice little SDK with deployment tool and a testing server. Here is a quick way to test the app engine. Once you have an account and created an app, go ahead and create a new directory locally to keep these two files: app.yaml and hello.py.

Once this is done, go ahead and use SDK’s dev_appserver.py to test your app:

You can now access your app at http://localhost:8080/

Once you think Hello world app is good enough for your enterprise customers, deploy it:

Go to your assigned URL, in my case, http://demo.appspot.com/

Now, I can’t wait to see millions of visitors who come this hello world app and watch it scales!

Ma Wan Park and My first attempt on HDR

Leon — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:19:16 +0000

Yesterday the weather was pretty good so I spent some time outside and practice my photography skill. I visited Ma Wan park in Hong Kong and found a nice artificial waterfall. I thought it could be a good candidate to make my first HDR photo:

How about a photo to test my 55-250mm lens?

What do you think? Other photos are on my flickr page.

Why did I become an entrepreneur?

Leon — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:32:55 +0000

I did another presentation in an university class last night and talked about my story of founding Stepcase. It reminded me that this post has been sitting in the draft area for quite a while. I guess I will just publish it to express myself…

Why did I become an entrepreneur?

Since I left Red Hat and relocated to Hong Kong last year, I thought of doing something totally new and exciting. Yeah, how about become an entrepreneur?

What are the reasons? It links back to early days in my life, when I first caught the entrepreneurial bug. In 1998, I started a web company in the Internet bubble era when I was studying in university. I planned to grow it when I graduated, however because of the bubble busted the small venture didn’t work out. During my 6 years work at Red Hat, I served for the company with my best effort, gaining my experience in software engineering and management, and deep inside me I wanted to start up another company one day. I waited because it is hard to find something I can work on everyday which fits in all of my passions. Stepcase is a rare opportunity for me, as it fits all my passions - productivity, web, software development, and startup. Because of the popularity of Lifehack, which is one of the top 100 blogs of the world (http://www.technorati.com/pop/blog), it generates enough revenue which could support myself and hire employees to grow, plus I am still young without too many obligations in my life - that’s when I decided it was a good timing to start a company.

So, I have started my company, Stepcase Limited, in Hong Kong last year. Stepcase is a Web 2.0 company which provides solutions of productivity through content, community, tools and software, to level up the life of individuals and groups.

What’s the most difficult part on creating this opportunity? First, spend time on passion - even when I don’t have the time. I started Lifehack (http://www.lifehack.org) as my hobby 3 years ago. I started the blog because I wanted to share what I have learned on productivity and lifehacks. It consumed most of my time off-work at the beginning - but I firmly believed this could be a great resources for everyone. Now, it’s still alive and has been transformed to a business.

Second, personally it was tough to make a decision to work on the venture full-time. Friends and family asked me why I would want to leave a good job and work on something that has a high risk. I told them: “This is where I truly love to spend more time on. I know it has risks, that’s why I am doing it in the early stage of my life when I still OK to lose everything.”

I feel motivated by different challenges on the business everyday. I enjoy the process of working on what I am really passionate about. I am inspired by the fact that there aren’t any existing companies which started up this way, by creating a successful content and community product first (i.e. a blog) before creating a software product to complete a range of solutions. I hope this may shape the way how people executing their Internet company.

Company Information:
Stepcase Limited is one of a new breed of online company bringing content and development together to help our users become the most productive, organized, and effective people they can be. Stepcase Lifehack provides a daily dose of tips, advice, howtos, and inspiration for readers looking to change their email habits or change their lives. Stepcase Apps is developing a suite of online tools to help the individual web worker, the small business, or the corporate team to work more efficiently and achieve greater satisfaction in their results.

Google Contact API. Good Start on Data Portability.

Leon — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:24:34 +0000

In the past, many web services are not comfortable opening up their users data. They allow users to import data from other services, but do not allow people to export their data. That includes contact details. Many of those services think data lock-in is the way of keeping users, but they didn’t realize it may push users away. The tide has changed — now, Google allows users to CRUD (create, read, update, delete) their contacts through an API. In short, it enables users to export their contacts in a programmatic way. It allows programmers tapping into Google contact more easily and safely. I believe this API opens a new arena on data portability on the Web.

Now I want to see this from Facebook.