Migrate from Goolge Pages to Appengine

Migration without losing any data.

When it comes to Google Pages, will you opt-out or do nothing and wait for your pages to be migrated to sites smoothly? We can wait, but at a cost. Google Sites do not provide equal or more features than Pages do. No custom Javascript; no uploaded HTML; limited layouts, themes. It dose not seem possible to migrate without losing any data. Even the appearance will change. So, where else can we migrate to?

Our choice is Appengine.

Pros:

• Powerful.
• From the same vendor.

Cons:

• Technical skills required

Step by step migration:

1. Download your pages as a zip from Google Pages
2. Create a new appspot handle
3. Download appengine SDK from http://code.google.com/appengine/
4. Create a new project
5. Configure the project
6. Unzip pages into static content directory
7. Test on localhost
8. Deploy to appspot
9. Test with http://<your-handle>.appspot.com/
10. (Optional) Bind your domain

The long waited automatical migration from Pages to Sites is still not done! Is Google waiting for everyone to opt-out? The magic is a rumor.

Option 1 - Do nothing, and your pages will automatically be moved to Google Sites

• We'll set up the new site and move your pages for you.
• Visits to your googlepages.com URL will redirect to your new site.
• Note that Google Sites does not support custom JavaScript or CSS in its pages.

Option 2 - Opt out of the move, and take your pages to a new location

• Download your site.
• Once you've moved your site to its new location, opt out of migration by setting up a redirect below.

Let's wait and see.

A History of man-made Lunar Impact

Hit the Moon

An incomplete list of lunar impact by human being.

2009.10.9 7:31 EDT
Nasa LCROSS
http://www.nasa.gov/

2009.03.01 16:13 CST
嫦娥一号 ChangE1
http://baike.baidu.com/view/32160.htm

2008.11.14
The Moon Impact Probe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Impact_Probe

2006.9.3 05:42 UT
SMART-1
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=39961

Distinguish the two words in reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a great idea, but people can `easily` distinguish the known word from the unknown one.

Moebius Gears

Here's a picture of Moebius Gears.

Look cool? If you are on a Linux box, you might already have a lively demo installed. For Ubuntu users, it is located at /usr/lib/xscreensaver/moebiusgears.

Press Alt+F2 and type /usr/lib/xscreensaver/moebiusgears and run!

The xscreensaver source code could be downloaded from here.

The Risk of OpenID

OpenID seems a promising standard for user authentication. If service providers support OpenID, users can login without creating another pair of account and password. Ideally, a user need only remember one pair of account and password. However, such convenience comes at a cost. The only pair of account and password or the OpenID provider becomes a Single Point Of Failure. If you ever forgot your password or the Identity Provider withdrew your account because you didn't login in the past three months, you will have no way to login to any of the services. Here, we assume that the service providers only accept authentication from OpenID providers. This also applies to other forms of third party authentications.

For users, care should be taken on choosing OpenID providers. Users should keep their OpenID account active and secure the password. For service providers, they should allow other ways of authentication besides OpenID. Users should not lose the service if they lose their OpenID.

OpenID is not that open, not even as open as telephone numbers which could be transfered among telephone service providers.

Inventions: Fancy Disk Copier and Fancier Copy Dragger

Here are our two new inventions: the Fancy Disk Copier and the Fancier Copy Dragger.

The Fancy Disk Copier is a CD/DVD copy machine. It works like a photo copier. You put in a source CD/DVD, and press "COPY"; the copy CD/DVD will come out instantly. Unlike a photo copier, the Fancy Disk Copier will copy with absolutely no loss of quality. The differences between copies and the original CD/DVD is not distinguishable by anyone except the Fancy Disk Copiers. This will, hopefully, prevent copyright abuse.

Our second invention, the Fancier Copy Dragger, is a dragging controller of copy speed. The Fancier Copy Dragger not only supports dragging forward at any pace, but also enables user to drag back in case a user would enjoy the copy process again. What's more, the Fancier Copy Dragger allows users to undo all copies by dragging to the very beginning. Those undo-ed CD/DVDs can be used as if they are new ones. Unlike photo copiers, hundreds of pieces of paper got wasted once any error occurred. The Fancier Copy Dragger will help protecting our environment.

Thanks for your interest in our new inventions. We will send out our "beta" products to selected users starting from next week. Get involved.

Happy New Year 2009

Today is January 1st, 2009. The sun raises as usual, but there's a leap second added after GMT 23:59:59 Dec. 31, 2008. At that time spot, you might notice something like XX:59:60. XX depends on your timezone. If you are using Beijing time, it should be 07:59:60, and if you locate in central America, it should be 17:59:60.