IBM Chief Purchasing Operations Transferred to China

I just come across an article from China Supply Chain Council stated that IBM was transferring its chief purchasing operations to China, a move that highlights China’s growing importance in the field of global supply chain. This is the first time the headquarter of a IBM division has been relocated. No doubt Shenzhen has emerged as the global logistics hub, and thus China anchored its status as a global supply chain hub by harnessing the Information Technology.

My view: The cheap labor, the availability of software and services skills in China with the set up of Pudong technology Park of Shanghai has indeed helped China in building the competitiveness of this supply chain hub.

WordPress and Yahoo!

I just met a friend at a bookstore. I am going there to buy some VB 2005 and Ruby on Rails related books. This friend told me he found the first problem in customizing his blog, i.e. did some CSS edit with Yahoo! Web hosting. (He was using Yahoo! Web hosting for nearly six months). After he changed his blog’s header weight, the update only take effect after 24 hours. He asked why he needs to wait for so long to view the changes he did on his WordPress blog? His CSS script errors or Yahoo! servers’ problem? I can’t answer it because I’m not with him when he was doing the CSS edit.

However, I experienced something I do not like Yahoo! Web hosting package. I once installed and customized a WordPress blog in Yahoo!’s server for one of my clients. Though I got the option to make my client’s blog as the home page, Yahoo! by default will force that blog to a subfolder. To be more specific, my client’s blog home page address will become, i.e. www.example.com/blog/. Moreover, all the pages are within the subfolder, put an example, the “About” page, would appear as www.example.com/blog/about.

Assume that my client want to host another blog in the same Yahoo! hosting package by using Movable Type, another blogging software available in Yahoo!. After he completed the Movable Type installation, it would appeared as the following URL, i.e. www.example.com/blog1/. I feel the methodology behind this setting is: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just take it as granted.

I even read some sources on the Web, there are issues pertaining to permalink when you host your blog with Yahoo! For all sort of issues stated here, I hope Yahoo! would aware of this problem and take action towards in integrating WordPress and Movable Type with its hosting package.

Yahoo! Try to improve your blogging package and thus attract more customers.

Dot Asia Domain Name

I read that the Internet will soon have a domain to unify businesses and other users in the Asia-Pacific region. A key oversight agency has approved a “.asia” domain for Internet addresses, supplementing suffixes available for individual countries, such as “.cn” for China and “.jp” for Japan.

I personally feel that this is a great news especially for the Asian Web sites. If people from around the world particularly want to search something from Asian countries, they can just find these Web sites by looking at the dot asia domain name, e.g. www.example.asia . On the other hand, for newly Asian Web start-ups, they can easily gained differentiation from others on the Web.

Introduction

I’ve been blogging with my Blogger account for quite some time. This is my first experience with WordPress. I first thought of buying a domain name and hosting my blog somewhere in Yahoo, Dreamhost or MediaTemple, or do a domain-mapping, I’m not decided yet. In fact, my former schoolmate was using WordPress in Yahoo Small Business Package for a while and he was persuaded me to make a switch. I was just do some trials in this blog and I found out that I need to upgrade in order to do some CSS edit. Also, I had problems in using the Sidebar Widgets feature with IE7. I had to install and use Firefox to remove any “Category” that I don’t like. I hope the technical staff of WordPress would fix it in the near future.

And here, I want to say that this is yet another technology blog on the Web. I really hope it goes well in the future. But I would very much like to differentiate this blog with an Asian’s perspective and furthermore, blogging on the emerging new technologies or start-ups in Asia South.

Update: At first, I was using kennylee.wordpress.com as my personal Web log. However, I prefer to blogging on the Web using my own domain, i.e. TagEdge.com and I have moved all my posts to this new site in November 2006.