Search for PayPal in Vietnam and you won't get many good results.

If you're American or from another Western country and just traveling to or working in Vietnam temporarily and you already have a PayPal account then heed this one warning: DO NOT access your PayPal account WITHOUT a VPN! (If you don't already have a VPN get one. Ref: StrongVPN) Doing so will flag your account (similar to what happens when you use your credit card overseas without warning your bank first) and your PayPal account will be limited to receiving money only until you "verify" it. This can be a PITA so just DON'T access PayPal using a Vietnamese IP address. You can Google "what's my IP" to make sure your traffic is being tunneled properly.

History: PayPal started as a service for eBay sellers who didn't have real businesses and therefore couldn't open merchant accounts to accept credit cards to accept payment from buyers, both as bank transfers as well as credit and debit cards. It was eventually bought by eBay due to the symbiotic nature of the two. For many years PayPal was not available to Vietnamese users. due to the high amount of fraud originating from Vietnam. Fraud is one of PayPal's biggest problems and they spend a considerable amount of resources trying to detect fraud, often resulting in suspended accounts of legitimate users. Many non-Americans can't use it which has resulted in services like Moneybookers or Liberty Reserve.

PayPal's absence from Vietnam left open an opportunity for Vietnamese PayPal clones like MobiVi, etc. The problem with these is that none are as versatile as PayPal and some only allow transferring money between users of the service who also use the same bank!

If you're Vietnamese or working in Vietnam and want to open a Vietnamese PayPal account it is now possible to do so and receive money. You simply need to open a debit/credit card account at one of these banks: Techcombank, ACB, Đông Á, Eximbank. Then you can connect it to a Vietnamese PayPal account. Remember that PayPal won't allow you to change your country once you open an account.

Final warning: Don't access your US PayPal account from a Vietnamese IP address. Always use a VPN like StrongVPN. I learned the hard way and ended up with a locked and useless PayPal account. Whether you should even use PayPal is another issue altogether.

10/04 06:20 @thomaswanhoff Surely everyone was clued in from the start but the AP tattling on Zing forced the hands of these public companies. #
10/04 04:30 @aminhdo MOOC? I guess it's a good idea, although can we do it remotely over the Internet? #
10/04 01:29 Vietnam is free too :) RT @alansoon: How is it that you can always find free wifi all over #Ulaanbaatar but never in a city like #Singapore? #
10/03 12:54 @sitesnbites If you follow me I can DM you some Vietnamese tutors' contact info #
10/03 10:29 Zing gets zinged by advertisers after AP outs them as pirate music d/l site: Coca Cola, Samsung, Yamaha, etc pull ads: http://t.co/W8Mx2syy #
10/03 07:03 @jon7b @TylerWatts I don't know Watt you are talking about. Teehee. #
10/03 05:22 @PiiSiiD Haha, I don't think that they will guarantee 30 minute delivery time or your food is free if delivering from NYC to Phnom Penh :) #
10/03 04:31 Incroyable. RT @SharingTheValue: "2/3 of VN consumers are online everyday" #Vietnam http://t.co/xxl83AMI - Cimigo #
10/03 04:26 What if FourSquare let you virtually travel to restaurants and order from them online? J/K That would never work. #
10/03 04:23 @jon7b I get yelled at when I leave the bathroom light on at my own house. I used to leave PCs running 24/7, now more watt-conscious. #
10/03 02:01 @devwil Lol where is this? Worth the price of a "punani" to hear that #
10/02 23:29 How much electricity does Vietnam's grid save per day by people accessing Facebook on phones instead of PCs? (Charging iPhone5 costs $.41/y) #
10/02 04:44 @MienHPham Try turning off social media outside pomodoro breaks. And don't listen to music with vocals (in a language you underatand) #
10/02 02:39 @aminhdo It's not every day that I say this but. Batshit f'n insane. #
10/02 02:14 @MienHPham #pomodoro #timeboxing #hourofpower #meditation Weekly todo lists, etc. Listen to techno and turn off social media. Etc. :) #
10/02 02:03 @etienne Which begs the question: Apple, religion or philosophy? I think they've copied the Church in more than one way ;-) #
10/02 01:58 @aminhdo How much of Buddhism isn't philosophy? Potentially a really easy book to write :-) Philosophy of Mormonism OTOH... #
10/02 01:33 @chrisfharvey Gubmint don't want scientists to research, artists to create, businesses to innovate, information to be translated & shared :( #
10/02 01:15 @caffeinatedmatt Quick, throw some cough & cold medicine in the coffee pot and see if meth comes out! #
10/01 23:33 Here. RT @michaelcoyote: So anyone here think that the thieving and molesting TSA wouldn't throw us under the bus for cash or extortion? #
10/01 23:31 EarBook: A human-compiled Zuckerberg-voiced personalized podcast of your Facebook feed. Cute cat photos described in detail. #
10/01 23:12 @aminhdo There are many more vastly different British accents than in the US, and much more American movies for them to watch than from UK #
10/01 04:30 Vietnam product and content websites are being hindered by lack of millions of local bloggers writing and linking. Can't compete globally. #
09/30 23:53 When people complain about the cool rainy weather in Saigon I smile and think about April. #
09/30 07:49 TIL about Facebook for SIM from an Argentine carrier, a FB "app" for dumbphones on a SIM card that only uses SMS: http://t.co/omQlOu82 #
09/30 07:42 @PiiSiiD Free or cheap license for disciples, but sold like multi-level marketing scheme :) Or freemium model. #
09/30 00:05 What if the Buddha had patented Buddhism? #
09/29 22:28 The next digital divide: those who have access to 3D printers and those who don't #
09/29 10:07 RT @wired: 48-Hour Adventure Time 'Jam' Produces 100 Weird, Weird Games http://t.co/J8KUHBv9 #
09/29 08:25 In case your research requires 10,000 cat images, including facial features: http://137.189.35.203/WebUI/CatDatabase/catData.html #
09/29 07:17 @free_thinker Yup, would need some new architecture outside of Javascript. But Dalvik is open source, so why not? Like Jolla. #
09/29 05:42 Wonder if Firefox OS #Boot2Gecko should support running Android apps on top of HTML5/JS apps. We don't need more ghost town marketplaces #
09/29 01:03 Have duplicate contacts clogging your Android phone? Go to http://t.co/Nn2We1yn (nice contact manager), More > Find & merge duplicates. Sync #
09/28 04:24 @connyb Hey Conny, I hear you work for Cambodian ISPs? Can you tell me more about it, just curious? Was nice meeting you at #BarCampPP #

Step 1: Install t (Ruby Twitter command line client). Run the following (substitute your own Twitter ID):

t timeline @tomosaigon --csv --number 3000 > tweets.csv

Step 2: Convert CSV to JSON using http://www.cparker15.com/wp-content/uploads/csv-to-json/csv-to-json.html

Step pre-3:

cached=$(/usr/bin/grep $1 $CACHE)
if [[ $cached != "" ]]; then
        echo $cached|/usr/bin/cut -d' ' -f2 ; 
        exit
fi
 
url=$(/usr/local/bin/curl -v $1 2>&1|/usr/bin/grep '^< Location: '|/usr/bin/sed -e 's/< Location: //')
echo $1 $url >> $CACHE
echo $url

Step 3: Open Chrome Developer Tools and in the command line type "var a = " then paste the copied JSON. Hit enter.

var out = '';
for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
    var t = a[i]; 
    var d = new Date(t['Posted at']); 
    if (d >= new Date('2012-09-01 00:00') && d <= new Date('2012-10-01 00:00')) {
        var tweet = t['Text'];
        var tcos = tweet.match(/http:\/\/t.co\/\w+/g);
        if (tcos) {
            for (var m = 0; m < tcos.length; m++) {
                tco = tcos[m].replace(/\//g, '%252F');
                $.ajax({url:'http://www.saigonist.com/saigonist/untco/' + tco, async:false, success:function(data){
                    tweet = tweet.replace(tcos[m], data.trim());
                }});
            }
        }
 
        tweet = tweet.replace(/("")/g, '"').replace(/(^|\s)@(\w+)/g, '\$1<a href="https://twitter.com/\$2" rel="nofollow">@\$2</a>').replace(/(^|\s)#(\w+)/g, '\$1<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23\$2" rel="nofollow">\$2</a>')
        out += ((d.getMonth() + 1) + '/' + d.getDate() + ' ' + d.getHours() + ':' + d.getMinutes() + ' ' + tweet + ' ' + '<a href="http://twitter.com/' + t['Screen name'] + '/statuses/' + t['ID'] + '" rel="nofollow">#</a>');
        out += '\n';
    }
}

10/02 04:44 @MienHPham Try turning off social media outside pomodoro breaks. And don't listen to music with vocals (in a language you underatand) #
10/02 02:39 @aminhdo It's not every day that I say this but. Batshit f'n insane. #
10/02 02:14 @MienHPham #pomodoro #timeboxing #hourofpower #meditation Weekly todo lists, etc. Listen to techno and turn off social media. Etc. :) #
10/02 02:03 @etienne Which begs the question: Apple, religion or philosophy? I think they've copied the Church in more than one way ;-) #
10/02 01:58 @aminhdo How much of Buddhism isn't philosophy? Potentially a really easy book to write :-) Philosophy of Mormonism OTOH... #
10/02 01:33 @chrisfharvey Gubmint don't want scientists to research, artists to create, businesses to innovate, information to be translated & shared :( #
10/02 01:15 @caffeinatedmatt Quick, throw some cough & cold medicine in the coffee pot and see if meth comes out! #
10/01 23:33 Here. RT @michaelcoyote: So anyone here think that the thieving and molesting TSA wouldn't throw us under the bus for cash or extortion? #
10/01 23:31 EarBook: A human-compiled Zuckerberg-voiced personalized podcast of your Facebook feed. Cute cat photos described in detail. #
10/01 23:12 @aminhdo There are many more vastly different British accents than in the US, and much more American movies for them to watch than from UK #
10/01 04:30 Vietnam product and content websites are being hindered by lack of millions of local bloggers writing and linking. Can't compete globally. #
09/30 23:53 When people complain about the cool rainy weather in Saigon I smile and think about April. #
09/30 07:49 TIL about Facebook for SIM from an Argentine carrier, a FB "app" for dumbphones on a SIM card that only uses SMS: http://t.co/omQlOu82 #
09/30 07:42 @PiiSiiD Free or cheap license for disciples, but sold like multi-level marketing scheme :) Or freemium model. #
09/30 00:05 What if the Buddha had patented Buddhism? #
09/29 22:28 The next digital divide: those who have access to 3D printers and those who don't #
09/29 10:07 RT @wired: 48-Hour Adventure Time 'Jam' Produces 100 Weird, Weird Games http://t.co/J8KUHBv9 #
09/29 08:25 In case your research requires 10,000 cat images, including facial features: http://137.189.35.203/WebUI/CatDatabase/catData.html #
09/29 07:17 @free_thinker Yup, would need some new architecture outside of Javascript. But Dalvik is open source, so why not? Like Jolla. #
09/29 05:42 Wonder if Firefox OS #Boot2Gecko should support running Android apps on top of HTML5/JS apps. We don't need more ghost town marketplaces #
09/29 01:03 Have duplicate contacts clogging your Android phone? Go to http://t.co/Nn2We1yn (nice contact manager), More > Find & merge duplicates. Sync #
09/28 04:24 @connyb Hey Conny, I hear you work for Cambodian ISPs? Can you tell me more about it, just curious? Was nice meeting you at #BarCampPP #
09/27 09:57 @patrizio_bui Are you still at ERC? #
09/27 07:56 Luck: (both good and bad) the sum of (a random % * # of opportunities * your own ability to take advantage of (or be affected by) them) #
09/27 05:42 Wish somebody would just ship the Internet on CD-ROMs to Vietnam. On a giant boat or something. #
09/27 04:32 @jobnomade Cool, a lot of startups. Let me know when code is more than a PHP object dump :D P.S. That 4sq API is nearly deprecated.. #
09/27 04:29 @tropixblue Yes. For motorbikes which are >90% of the people we must only use the smallest lane which is also used for car parking #
09/27 01:57 Vietnam has a thriving Facebook fan buying black market. If FB's fake user deleting doesn't crush some brands here many more fakes must go. #
09/27 01:31 A totally independent tourist police is needed. RT @VNNetBridge: Police declare war against crime in Saigon http://t.co/7vzFAfmm #vietnam #
09/27 01:24 What is the proper, pragmatic, locale-appropriate (Vietnam, after all) response to a car driving in the wrong lane hitting you? #voluat #
09/26 23:03 Maybe represent.vn can auto-aggregate Tech Startups already tagged on Foursquare (just found out it's a category!) cc @vutrinhan #
09/26 06:17 Banh dau xanh: Cookies made from sugar, mung bean, and bacon! Thus proving that bacon makes anything taste better. #QED #
09/26 03:50 @lfopw Indeed, although same can be said for Vietnam: I see Bentleys, Royces daily. But a lot of beater Toyotas in Cambodia too. Ironic, eh? #
09/26 03:40 @john_weeks Enjoyed your webcomics session at #BarCampPP. And thanks for the free print comics! Wonder if webcomics could be next Instagram #
09/26 03:35 @nguyenhimself When speaking of multiple iPhones the correct mass noun is herd. A herd of iPhone 5. #
09/26 02:21 @nostarwhere @ctcrowell Metro Detroit is livable enough for US. Research hospitals, international connections & trade, overall low crime, &c #
09/26 00:59 "It's like a war, because everybody seems to become very selfish once they are behind the wheel of a car" - on traffic in Sao Paolo #
09/25 22:10 @jon7b @aminhdo Difference is arrangement (& energy). Proteins that've broken down. Organs no longer self-repairing. What's this about 140g? #
09/25 21:34 @rockportrait I've been 4x and haven't seen any of those. I go for functional reasons, e.g. visa run or BarCamp. Otherwise, visit friends. #

It's that time of the year again. Flood time!

Saigon and Vietnam's Mekong Delta generally has two seasons - rainy and wet. But at the end of the year somewhat coinciding with the dry season is high tide season where the highest tide level maxes out some meters above low tide. Each year the effects of high tide on Ho Chi Minh City get worse, not just due to climate change or rising sea levels, but due to 1) urban sprawl taking over former urban flood plains which would have absorbed some rain water (rain water just makes the problem worse but isn't the root cause) with construction and paving over of land with impermeable surfaces, as well as 2) a general sinking of the city due to (illegal) leaching of underground water supplies reducing the water table level and 3) lost efficiency of canals where piles of trash thrown in the rivers is blocking the flow of water back out

This week's high tide times so you know when your streets will be flooded: (data comes from Saigon Port dumped into a Google Doc which is then proxied through this site to overcome cross-site script hacking in order to hide the days outside of this week)

During development sometimes I hide a server behind a shared password for http basic auth, based on an Apache configuration (if you still want to use .htpasswd but don't have Apache and htpasswd installed you can still generate the password entries using openssl). nginx can use the same format of .htpasswd files by using the HttpAuthBasicModule. But sometimes I need a service to crawl pages on the server (for example Drupal's linkchecker module). And sometimes storing the basic auth login and password in a script isn't wanted or advisable. Instead we can configure nginx to skip authentication when connecting from localhost/127.0.0.1.

Open up your nginx configuration which already contains your auth_basic directives. Assuming you are running a PHP site and you have a "location ~ \.php$" block, make it look more like this:

location ~ \.php$ {
  satisfy any;
  allow 127.0.0.1;
  deny all;
 
  auth_basic            "Restricted";
  auth_basic_user_file  /yoursite/path/.htpasswd;
}

Remember that the order of the allow/deny directives matters. More on the nginx_http_access_module module.

How can we store tables or spreadsheets in Drupal content nodes?

Drupal is a Content Management System as well as a Content Management Framework. It's meant for facilitating the creation and editing of content, where content doesn't just mean simple text. CCK allows Drupal site managers to easily enable complex data types for their content. But sometimes it's not so easy to manage lots of simple data in the way that a spreadsheet (meaning Excel or Google Spreadsheet) easily manages many rows and columns of related data.

Sometimes you really want tabular data and you may not know for sure how many rows or columns you'll want beforehand, which is never a problem for Excel or Google Spreadsheet (which is also why sometimes people abuse Excel as a general purpose database). Maybe you are importing spreadsheets or are using spreadsheets with many rows and columns, and only want to use a section of the spreadsheet. Maybe you need to use spreadsheets because you are using formulas and want to do some graphing based on some numbers too. In fact, Excel can do much more. Rather than hoping all of those use cases will make it into a Drupal module anytime soon, wouldn't it be nice if you could just embed a spreadsheet in a node?

There are some modules for attaching tables or tabular data to nodes but in the end the interface can be a bit unwieldy. I discussed building something like a spreadsheet to quickly edit many values and below I present a demonstration.

What is already available that we could use to attach spreadsheets or something similar to nodes?

1. You could: Configure a Google spreadsheet that's either public or somehow accessed via a Google api, perhaps using OAuth2 or just assuming the viewer also has edit access to the spreadsheet. Google already lets you embed spreadsheets including the editable spreadsheet but they don't let you limit the view of the spreadsheet (limiting the view still lets everyone access the whole spreadsheet by changing the URL).

We would also need new nodes to automatically create sheets in the spreadsheet or new spreadsheets altogether and embed them in node edit. This would need to use their APIs since the embeddable Google Spreadsheets require an existing spreadsheet, otherwise this step needs to be done manually for each node - a new Google spreadsheet created per node.

This Redmine Google Docs plugin takes a similar approach and shows how the resulting data could be embedded.

(This might be worth investigating as well.)

2. Another approach would be to take an existing JavaScript or Java spreadsheet that could be embedded. This could be exactly what you want if you need the full functionality of Excel in each node. One such online spreadsheet is ZK Spreadsheet which is written in Java, and would let you have full formula and charting support.

3. Embed a widget like the form below as a CCK field in a node. It would be a new CCK field type where the editing widget is the below spreadsheet-like table and the display widget might be the same thing, an uneditable table, or the raw JSON string representation. In the database, the actual value of the field would be JSON (unless you wanted to use PHP's serialize() which would require POSTing values first instead of just posting the json value). This means you wouldn't relate or compare this field to anything else, as with any serialized data in a database. You could come up with some other schema involving columns and rows to store the table's values for each field in a node but I'm not sure it's worthwhile.

I created this demonstration but haven't turned it into a Drupal module. There is code to dump the edited values into a single JSON value to be stored in the database but the storage would be module-specific.

Get the JavaScript - then combine it with html and CSS, which you also see below.

The problem is this. ImageCache is a great simple way to transform random images into useful dimensions, etc. But sometimes the uploaded image is already exactly the quality and even dimensions we want. But after imagecache module runs, the file size is actually larger than the original while the quality has gone down, despite JPG image quality being 100% (default is set to 75%). One workaround can be to re-sharpen the image (imagecache_sharpen) but this also loses some quality.

1. Check that the uploaded image (metadata saved as CCK field, file stored directly in sites/default/files) has not been degraded in quality.

2. Check that minimum/maximum resolution for the image fields (CCK) are set to 0 (no restriction) so that they aren't accidentally resized at the upload to CCK step.

3. Run "drush imagecache-flush" in case you have files left over from a recent imagecache configuration change.

4. Try replacing GD with ImageMagick. If you stick with GD, and try compiling a newer GD library. ImageMagick by default can output higher quality images than GD.

How does Drupal's image resizing and processing work?

ImageCache goes through imageapi which uses different image processing functions based on the library (by default GD and ImageMagick support are provided) used.

Any resizing operation will result in a change (loss) in quality. That is to be expected since upsizing creates new pixels from single original pixels without having new information (unlike the magical effects of zooming into images on CSI shows) and downsizing will generally cause information to be lost and many pixels will "store" the information from several surrounding pixels.

So only operations that keep the image the same dimensions or crop the image (in which case the cropped portion has the same dimensions in both old and new files) will retain the same quality and avoid any blurring.

When using PHP's GD, Drupal will make calls to imagecopyresampled which will affect image quality unless image width and height are kept the same or cropping is performed. This is partly due to imagecopyresampled and partly the way it is called. "Fastimagecopyresampled" is a possible replacement: (from http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.imagecopyresampled.php#77679) - this is a higher quality version of PHP's imagecopyresampled. It does result in higher quality but requires hacking Drupal code instead of overriding any hooks.

I've found that it's better to use ImageMagick than GD. The only remaining problem is that for similar quality images, the file size is something like twice as big after ImageMagick processing. You could mess around with ImageMagick's quality settings by hacking Image API code or by copying imageapi_imagemagick.module into a custom module and configuring it for use instead. But you risk breaking quality for other images. I haven't found the reason why IMagick makes image file sizes larger.