Guoqiang shared (Chinese page) a long domain name:

http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/

Wooooooooooooooooooow.

I did a lot of stupid things when I was young. Besides robbing girl’s magic cube, I also devoted quite some time to recite long numbers. Pi was my favorite. I managed to remeber the first 100 digits of Pi. I cannot remember some portion of the long number, till now, I can only write down the 85 digits after the dot now. Here is the try with my break of the numbers.

3. 14 15 926

535

8979

323

8462

643

3832

7950

2884

19716

93993

7510

5820974

9445923

0781640

6286208

9956280

Persons who can recite more than 100 digits of Pi include:

• Run Liu
• Isaac Mao
• Qi Wang

With the continous increase in hit rate for my Pudong Airport website, and more and more compliments I got for the work done, I feel it is neccessary to give the site a better and shorter URL than the current one:

http://www.wangjianshuo.com/personal/places/pudongairport/

The site has been successful

Based on the good information provided on the site, the site has become the first return result for search terms such as Pudong Airport, pu dong airport. It is the must see website for visitors for Pudong Airport. I am very happy to see the result. Currently, all the information are publicly available and free of charge. It is there simply to help confused visitors for the city.

Shorter and Better Domain Name: PVG.CN

Today, I registered PVG.CN for the Pudong Airport website. PVG is the international airport code for Pudong Airport, which will appear on your ticket. In case you are curious, SHA stands for Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, which does not serve international flights now.

Best unofficial airport website

The vision for this site is the best unofficial airport website. As the previous Pudong Airport site on my personal web site, this website needs to be more professional, more helpful and provide more functions. The work will still base on my volunteering time and effort. I believe it may become a highlight for the unusable airport.

YOUR HELP NEEDED

Please follow the simple three steps to help me to build the website and to help more visitors.

1. REVIEW the current content of Pudong Airport website

2. THINK about what are the information and functions you need most but is missing.

3. COMMENT on this page and let your voice be heard.

I appreciate your help. Meanwhile, for a professional website, I need native English speakers to be volunteer to proof read the new site. Please send me email at jianshuo@hotmail.com.

P.S. Shanghai Lightening

My friend Tang Zhen sent me a phone about the lightening in Shanghai.

Recently, it rains heavily in Shanghai at night. The left lightening hit the Jin Mao Tower and the right one hit Oriental Tower.

G asked me about the newly announced cooperation between Sina and NCsoft on Lineage. To be honest, I am not an online game fun. I am talking about this topic from the outsider’s point of view.

Internet Cafes are Popular

In the year of 2002, millions of net cafe emerges throughout China. Whenever you go, you will find the Internet Cafe – in “second-tier” cties like Luoyang, even in Daocheng.

The core business of the Internet Cafes, however, is not the Internet access. By my rough estimation, about 1/2 of the so called Internet Cafe does not provide Internet service. They provide online games to game players.

Online games including some games that don’t need a server. Examples are CS (Counter Strike) and Q3. People with one computer can directly connects to other’s computer on a peer to peer mode to play the game. This sort of games does not need a server so the it is cheap to play. I heard it is about 2-5 RMB per hour.

Online game – Legend

Legend from Korea company AtoZ is absolutely the biggest winner of online game. It granted the permission of server operation to a Chinese company called Shenda (shenda.com). It license the Internet Cafe to run the Legend clients. The Internet Cafes don’t charge the player directly, but the hours they spend on the computers greatly increases such bring more money to the cafes. It is said that a license for Legend will greatly help the business of the Internet Cafe.

Meanwhile, Shenda also sells “value-card” to players to get access to the game. The “value-card” is very profitable since some players will send 1,000 RMB per month on the value card. The Internet Cafe business owner will also get a small margine to sell the value-card.

Besides the income for computer-hours, and value-card, the drinks, and foods served by the Internet cafe also make a large portion of the profit for Intetnet cafes due to the large number of visitors and the long time they spend in the cafe.

The value chain continues

Currently, there are even some people who make a living by playing the online games. The virtual goods in the online games are labelled with value in real money and they can always get a good price in the market. Some goods in Legend can be sold at 1000 RMB to 5000 RMB. According to Sina’s special report (Chinese site), someone sold 5 “magic books” at 5000 RMB each – that is 25,000 RMB. Very nice deal, isn’t it?

To get more goods in the virtual world, they work very hard – actually, they are not players – they are professionals to get more goods in the virtual world and sell them out in the real world. I cannot understand the reason why people are willing to buy the goods but it really happens in the young generation in China.

Money. Money!

At least up to now, online game means money in China. The value chain, as I described, include

• The game provider, like AtoZ or NCSoft
• The operator, like Shenda or Sina
• The Internet cafe – millions of them
• The gurus in the game field – who sell their goods
• The players – who seem to have unlimited budget on games

The chain will allocate the money from millions of players among the game provider, the operator, the Internet cafe and other people like those who sell goods.

Lineage means profit to Sina

As you can see, the launch of the new game Lineage will put Sina to the position of the operator and it will definitely be the powerhouse for the profit of Sina.

I received an email from my dear reader today. Per his/her permission, I posted the questions here and I’d like to share my answers with you.

I am a small volume amateur stock investor. You seem to be very

knowledgeable on issues regarding SMS and the internet. I own a few shares of SINA. Please tell me what your opinion is on which portal is better.

For SMS: SINA, SOHU, or Netease?

For Games: SINA, SOHU, or Netease?

For Portal Content: SINA, SOHU, or Netease?

For online shopping: SINA, SOHU, or Netease?

Who do you think will be the next “Yahoo”?

DISCLAIMER: THE OPPINION EXPRESSED HERE IS, AND SHOULD ONLY BE TREATED AS, PERSONAL OPPINION. THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY FOR ME TO HOLD ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE RESULT OF THE STOCK BUYING AND SELLING CAUSED BY THIS ARTICLE.

Sina is the best

As a common netizen here, I will, with most of my friends will choose Sina as the best portal, the best SMS provider and the best news source in China. There is no doubt if there is only one web site here in China that is valuable, it is Sina. It is strong in most all areas – because it is so strong as a news portal, this brings so much traffic to the site and make it possible for other sub sites (health, finance, SMS, game) to succeed.

SMS

For SMS, the biggest movement of Sina is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook XP to allow users to drag and drop emails, notes, and calendar items to the plug in and send them via SMS. This has not been popular yet, but it is unique enough to differentiate Sina from other SMS providers. Sohu and Netease don’t have such cooperation with Microsoft in China.

Also, as I know, Sina also offers $5 package for 80 SMS messages to overseas users. Check out David’s comments on this. It is very cool.

Besides these innovative applications, Sina’s traditional SMS business runs very profitable. It offers tune and screen saver downloading, SMS package that allow users to pay less and send more, news headlines via SMS and even mobile pets that requires you to send SMS to sina to feed them, taking care of them. All these services generate huge amount of traffic of SMS messages. Sina will share the SMS revenue with the mobile operator.

For netease and sohu, personally, I don’t use their service. So does most of my friends. However, do not take my perspective as general ideas. I do know someone who loves Sohu better than Sina, but it is relatively rare.

Portal content

Definitely Sina. In the break time in office, people use to browse Sina for the latest news. Most of my friends’ first reaction for breaking news is to go and check Sina, just as CNN or MSNBC for Americans.

However, something really happened two days before that made Sina look really bad – it falsely reported that “Bill Gates was murdered in LA” as the headline news. I don’t know whether CNN or Bill Gates will sue Sina for this. If it is the case, this will impact the stock of SINA – according to Raymond.

Anyway, Sina offers better news and quicker news than any other media here in China. In one word, I love Sina.

Online game and online shopping

For online game, none of the three portal you gave enjoys high reputation. The legend from Korea occupy the market. I am not a online game player and don’t know too much about it.

For online shopping, I don’t go to Sina, or netease or sohu. For online shopping only limits to book and CD. I will buy my stuff at www.joyo.com, www.cnforyou.com. These are smaller website and didn’t IPO. But they are the best sites for books and CD. Till now, I never heard of anybody who has bought via Sina, Sohu or Netease. But it is common for me to buy via the two sites I mentioned – one every two months.

Who will be the next Yahoo!

You have got my answer: sina – if there were any Yahoo! again in China.

Background

Please note I am a young man in the IT industry. People in other industry with different background or age may have completely different preference.

Thanks for the good topic for me, G.

P.S. My site received 2496 hits on the day of March 31, which is the highest in the history of this site. Meanwhile, the month of March closes with 40K hits, while I forecasted to be 32K 10 days before. Thanks for all the readers who supported me.

I am so impressed by the good words I received in the last two weeks. I am very happy to see these feedback and I’d like to thank you for your encouragement.

I didn’t confirm with each of you who sent the letter to me. I assume you should be OK as long as I don’t put your full name or email address. :-) Do let me know if you don’t like me to share it here. Thanks.

I was in Shanghai last month for my brother’s wedding. It is a very

beautilful city. It reminded me of Paris or New York. We had a wonderful

time.

Thank you for researching and posting the information about golarger and how

to stop them from getting through to my computer. I was very irritated to

get the unwelcome pop up messages from them. I appreciate the work you did

to stop them.

— Becky

I learned a lot from your web site: the nearby hotel, which taxi to take etc. The information I found on your web site will help me w/ my trip to Shanghai/Huangshan.

You did a great job! Thank you so much.

— Yiwen

Oct, 2002

Mar, 2003

http://java.sun.com/getjava/download1.html

Currently, I found my computer is infected by the annoying Xupiter.com toolbar. This is very annoying.

The symptoms

One day, I suddenly found whever I type a wrong URL, or when the server I want to visit does not respond, the URL is first changed to a strange format, something like

http:///?%20msn.com, where /?%20 is inserted unexpectedly.

Meanwhile, the page of http://www.xupiter.com/search2error2.html is loaded. Sometimes another pop up window with Ad also appears.

This is really annoying!

What is Xupiter.com?

Thanks for PC Hell to give clear explaination of Xupiter.com as below:

What is Xupiter?

Xupiter Toolbar browser plug-in tools that gets installed on your computer through a popup ad or driveby installation that installs many times without your permission. It can also be loaded as an Active X control in Internet Explorer.

Once installed on your computer, Xupiter proceeds to display pop-up and pop-under ads as you surf the net. It also adds the Xupiter Toolbar to your browser, adds links to your favorites, and changes your home page. Xupiter then proceeds to track your browsing habits and report back to a server.

It also listed the way to tell you if you have Xupiter on your computer.

Follow these instructions:

1) Click on Start, Run

2) Type MSCONFIG and press Enter

3) Click on the STARTUP tab

4) Look in the list for the following item

Xupiter Toolbar

5) If this item is in the list. You have Xupiter installed. Uncheck it to temporarily disable the toolbar.

Update: Now the Toolbar has been upgraded. In step 4, you may also see

XupiterStartup2003

XTCfgLoader

It will run C:\Program Files\Xupiter\upiterStartup2003.exe

If you find these, you have Xupiter installed.

Remove it

It does not work if you delete all files under C:\Program Files\Xupiter folder. On one hand, you cannot delete them directly since some of the files are in use, such as XTCfgLoader and XTUpdate.dll. On the other hand, deleting DLLs and Exe rudely are always dangerous and may lead to instable system.

The best way to is to turn it off by uncheck the check box before the two files in MSCONFIG and restart the computer. Xupiter is not removed but it is not annoying any more. If you want to manually remove it in a graceful way, check Doxdesk.com‘s page for more information.

P.S. Dang An ID 9904154 @ 021-62403626

I sometimes find my site is linked by some other sites. It is always a pleasant suprise for me. Here are some of them.

1. Colleen’s page
2. Web casting
3. Messages on Net Send Spam
4. lascivious.org

Update Links Back December 18, 2003

I am trying to link back in response. Below is my blogrolling list as it is handy for to quickly add a link. I will compile them into my directory periodically.

When I started my website one year ago, I only have www.wangjianshuo.com and some very simple page. I don’t remember the PR value of that site since I didn’t know about this magic word.

Later, I found it is ranked PR4. I love this number very much since most of the sites are PR3 or PR4. Some of them are very large sites.

These days, I found the PR for both of my Personal site and blog site reach PR5.

This is very encouraging news

Why? Since I get listed higher in the result of Google search engine. Sometimes I don’t know why, but my sites are among the top 10 for certain keyword. Sometimes, it even appears as No. 1 site.

Interesting results

“Net send spam” – it returns my blog entry of “Net Send” – Yet Another Type of Spam as the top result record – sometimes as the second one.

“Pu Dong Airport” – the first three entries comes from my site.

“Hai Nan” – also brings a lot of visitors.

It is interesting.

Why this will happen

I believe it is due to two factors:

1. My friends are linking to me. Raymond, Christina, cnblog.org and Patrick‘s site helped to increase my PageRank. Thanks. I will link back in a special section.
2. Two sites interlinking each other. I didn’t realized it before but I found home.wangjianshuo.com provides 80+ links to www.wangjianshuo.com and receives 100+ links from it. This may also cause the upgrade of PageRank for both sites.

More on PageRank

Google’s got a secret all want to know

Updated Find out PageRank of your site December 29, 2003

The easiest way is to download Google Toolbar. After you install the toolbar, visit your website and your PageRank will be displayed as a small green bar on the toolbar. Move your mouse over the small green bar (marked as PageRank) and the numeric value (0-10) will be displayed as tool tip.

I extracted this part from my previous article MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP. From my log file, I found lots of my visitors came to my site with search keyword “Install Pearl on Windows XP“.

Install Perl on Windows XP

1. Download ActivePerl for Windows XP from ActiveState. At the time I downloaed, the version was ActivePerl 5.6.1 build 633.
2. After registering my user information, I choosed WIndows MSI package, which is 8.31M in size.
3. It took me about 2 minutes and 51 seconds to download – thanks to the broadband provider – China Great Wall Broadband Corp[Chinese site]. I haven’t dreamed of downloading files larger than 5M in 10 minutes before.
4. Install the MSI package. There is no any problem during the installation. I accepted all the defaul settings expect changing the default location from c:\Perl to c:\Program Files\Perl. I believe it is always good to follow the Windows convension instead of seeking for a place in root directory of C:\. This makes the disk hard to manage. Update: I am changing my mind recently. “C:\Program Files” folder is special in terms of Read-only settings and security permissions. Moving programs from their original location to this folder may bring unneccessary trouble if the program has never been tested in this environment.

Configure IIS for Perl and perl script with .CGI extension to work

• I know it is wired for more green hand to have CGI run on Windows computer. At this time, if anyone access http://home.wangjianshuo.com/mt/mt.cgi, it will prompt to download the file instead of see the result. I configured IIS to recognize .CGI extension just as it recognize .ASP or .SHTML.
• In Inetmgr.exe, right click MT folder and select Properties. Click Create button in Application Settings area on Directory tab. Click OK to close the dialog box. Now we have created a seperate application.
• Right click on Web Site node in Inetmgr.exe (the parent note of Default Web Site).
• Click Add and enter the same parsing program (C:\program files\perl\bin\perl.exe “%s” %s for my case) and enter .cgi to Extension text box. Click OK. Note: The above changes can ONLY be changed on website level, not on applicaiton level, otherwise, the OK button will always be gray in the “Add/Edit Application Mapping” dialog box.
• Click Configure and check the program to parse .pl files. It is C:\program files\perl\bin\perl.exe “%s” %s for my server.

More resources:

• My tips to build a website
• MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP