SMART in Management.

A target in Management should have the attributes of SMART. That means:

1. S - Specific



The target must be certain, cannot be unsure or even not exist!



2. M - Measurable



The target we made must be measurable



3. A - Attainable



A target must be realisable, or reachable by efforts.



4. R - result-based



All our efforts should target at the traget, not just doing for doing. The most heard excuse in target-making is :"we are concentried on the process but not the result."



5. T－ Time-based


Every target must have a schedule and a deadline.

The art of paper cut

So many times, we think there is only one way to do one thing, but actually, there are a lot of ways to do a thing. The problem is only we don't or won't even dare to think such ways exist. For example, what could a paper cut be looked like? or just like this?







More: Peter Callesen's Work

Design clock

There are many different kinds of clocks. This one is an amazing one because it is a timed bomb.



Every morning, it beeps like a bomb with Di Di Di ... When you don't kick it off, the beep interval will be shorter. Another interesting thing is, if you want to stop the alarm, you must press one of three colorful buttons (the correct one!) that represent three cables. AND, the correct one is selected randomly every day!

So if you're that lucky to get the right cable, you can snoop. Otherwise, nobody knows what happens ....:-)

Transformers Theme for Firefox

I belong to the generation who watch the cartoon "Transformers" and grew up. So when this July the movie "Transformers" shows up in the cinema, I watched it as early as I can. Now I've digged out an eye candy for those Transformers' fans just like me: A Firefox Transformers Theme







You can download it here, open your Add-in Manager, and drag it into it to install.

A word

If you don’t know where you are going, you may end up somewhere else.

Problems with IMG html tag in Flash 8

In these days I am fighting with some bugs in Flash 8. So comes the problem: I want to create a text field in Flash 8, and change its properties to "dynamic text" with "multi-line", "selectable" and "render as HTML", then I connect the text field to some html contents. Everything is fine, until I try to show some pictures using the html tag img. The result: NO imgs are shown.

After long long time with try-error and searching in the net, finally I found the reason for such problems. There are some bugs with IMG html tag in Flash 8. My solution is: After the img tag, insert at least 8 <br /> tags.

To be careful: The support of img tag is only available from Flash v7 and ActionScript 2.0. So please pay attention to your publish settings too.

Ajax RSS News Ticker

Today I want to introduce a very useful tool called "Advanced RSS Ticker"。 This tool uses a PHP class which can parse the RSS feed. The PHP class is Last RSS. Comparing to other PHP class, I think the most highlight is that it supports UTF-8. You may wonder, is there any RSS Parser which supports no UTF-8. Yes, there is ONE. I don't mention its name because it took me so many time to figure out that it is NOT UTF-8 compatible. :-)

You only need to download this and extract the zip into your web directory. Try the demo.htm within it, it is that easy!

There is also another PHP RSS News Parser. Since I didn't try it, I left it to you to compare this with the other two. ;-)

Problem with Windows Time Update

Recently I always faced some strange problems. :-( Today I met a problem with Windows Time Update.

I tried to use the tab "Internet time" after clicking on the clock to select "Adjust Date / Time". When I selected the server "time.windows.com", then clicked "update now" on the right. Ok, error came! I got an error message "An error occurred while Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com". Great, then I tried it with other time servers. Nothing different.

How to fix this up? Here are some steps I found in the internet.

1. Press Winkey+R, or select "Run..." from the start menu, and type "cmd" in the box;
2. After the command window shows up, type the following commands:

net stop w32time
w32tm /unregister [ignore error message]
w32tm /unregister [enter a second time]
w32tm /register
reg add hklm\system\currentcontrolset\services\w32time\parameters\ /v NtpServer /t reg_sz /d time.nist.gov /f
net start w32time

3. Try the "Internet time" update again. It should work now.

strange problem with Node Template

Yesterday I mentioned that the strange problem with my Drupal module "Node Template": If I enable the "clean URLs" in Drupal, then clicking on the menu item "my node templates" will show the message "access denied" with the error 403.

After long long time with try-error, finally I found the cause of the problem. In the .htaccess which is in the root folder of Drupal, there are some lines looked like this:

# Protect files and directories from prying eyes.
<FilesMatch "(\.(engine|inc|install|module|sh|.*sql|theme|tpl(\.php)?|xtmpl)|code-style\.pl|Entries.*|
Repository|Root|Tag|Template)$">
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

Since I used "/nodetemplate" as the path for the menu item "my node templates", then the server will block this path only because the path "/nodetemplate" ends with the string "template". That's really a dreadful setting! I cannot suggest all the users to change their .htaccess file, so I changed my path to "/nodetemplates". BOOM! Everything works like a charm now.

Indeed, such kind of FilesMatch settings are intended to protect the unauthorized access to those files. But, it has so many side-effects. For example, you cannot use any string which ends with "template" or "root", etc. to name your shortcuts as your path in Drupal. If you did this, you will get the strange problem too!

New features in Node Template

It's really a happy thing to find out that there are already some people using my Drupal module "Node Template". Today I just caught some spare time, so I made some updates to the module.

New features include:

1. Now automatic node creation is optional from version 1.3.
2. Share template with others is possible from version 1.4.

Today I released v1.5 only to fix some bugs according to the issues. When there are still some problems, just try to use the dev release of the module.

The reason why I don't want to release v1.6 today is because a strange problem on my computer. if I enable the "clean URLs" in Drupal, clicking the menu item "my node templates" will cause a page that says "Access forbidden" with "error 403". I guess it can be some setting problems of my web server. Currently I am using xampp 1.6.2. When I figure out what happens, I'll release v.1.6 of the module "Node Template".

Difference between German and Chinese

Found some very interesting art works from an Chinese artist in Germany that reflect the difference between German and Chinese.

Left (Blue): German & Right (Red): Chinese

Three Meals 一日三餐

Contacts 人际关系

Moods and Weather 心情和天气

Transport 交通工具

For more info of this series of works: http://www.yangliudesign.com

References 参考：http://www.uni-ulm.de/acssu/cgi-bin/topic.cgi?forum=18&topic=933

作者介绍：刘扬，一九七六年生于北京。十三岁随家人迁居德国。十七岁时被德国柏林艺术大学设计系录取，师从于霍尔格马蒂斯，获硕士及大师班学位。毕 业后曾先后在新加坡，伦敦，柏林，纽约工作及生活。零四年在柏林开始自己的设计工作室。曾任教于荷兰设计中心，中国中央美术学院设计系，英国格拉斯歌美术 学院，并在国际设计研讨会及博览会讲座。刘杨的作品曾多次在国际设计大赛中获重要奖项，作品被国际多家博物馆展览并收藏。

Yang Liu is born in 1976 in Beijing. She came to Germany with her family at the age of 13. She was 17 years old when she studied in the Art University of Berlin (Universitaet der Kuenste Berlin). After her study she made his career as a Designer in Singapur, London, Berlin and New York. In the year of 2004 she founded her own Design Studio. Besides Workshops and Lectures on international conferences she tought in the Central Academy of Fine Art Beijing and the Glasgow School of Art. Her works are presented in many international contests, worldwide can be seen in Musums and bought for collections.