syamsul's domain

Couldn’t resist Yahoo’s offer of getting my own domain name for only ~$5 a year, which is really cheap even if it’s US$$, because most Singapore hosts offer it for ~S$20. So, I clicked a few buttons and..voila…syamsul.net was born!

Decided to get a cheap S$2.50 monthly plan from Focushub to go with it though, and am moving my blog and photo gallery to this account, leaving my coolsphere.org site with more space to host my school-related websites.

Had a problem logging in to cpanel on this site (got some message about the root partition being full or something) but the technical support at Focushub was really responsive and resolved the issue for me within an hour. Otherwise, so far so good – this US-based hosting doesn’t seem to be any slower than the Singapore-based hosting that coolsphere.org is on.

I started using Moodle this year, as seen on this website, for one of my English classes. I have been doing weekly journal writing, and even tried out peer assessment of writing. So what next? Well, I went fishing for ideas around the web and here are some of the interesting articles I found:

• Moodle review by the Teaching English and a Second or Foreign Language Journal
• Moodle at DCU explains why the Dublin University decided on a campus-wide deployment of Moodle
• Moodle meanderings at Auricle explain has some thoughts on using Moodle

This one isn’t really about Moodle, but is a listing of authoring tools for teaching English as a Second Language

Well, not quite what I set out looking for, but very informative reads nonetheless.

I was reading Red Sky in the Morning, and two lines in particular really intrigued me:

“When babies are born in these old books, the mother’s poor daughter is always sent to the kitchens to boil gallons of water. It never explained what the water was for.”

As it turns out, this is actually more than an old wives’ tale to get the men out of the way and messing up the intricate process of childbirthing I found this website to be most informative

The AFU & Urban Legends Archive

It lists and clarifies or debunks just about every urban legend ever heard!

Another interesting website The Straight Dope. Their motto is Fighting Ignorance Since 1975 (It’s taking longer than we thought)Do they succeed? Check it out!

MacCentral has posted an
excellent article showing the insides of the Mac mini. It sure looks easy enough to upgrade the RAM. Most tempting!

On another note, iWok 05 and iLife 05 have started shipping too! Can’t wait for the reviews!!

Wish I’d found this sooner. WordPress Help – Podz @ Tamba2. Looks really useful.

Ok, transferring my blog entries over to my new hosting service was not as straight-forward as transferring over my Moodle stuff. Someone really ought to write an easy-to-use plugin to backup/restore WordPress entries. Or if it exists..make it more easily available.

Didn’t bother to go through the hassle with my Mambo site though – simply re-created the entire thing, especially since it’s still rather bare anyhow.

Since I was re-doing stuff and my old photo gallery was sparse anyway, also decided to re-create my Coppermine Gallery using a Kubrick-based template so that the look’s consistent with my blog’s.

This was my first time installing Coppermine Gallery on my own btw (my former installation was pre-installed by Globat) and I was amazed by just how easy to install it was..just like it’s user interface.