all are rates for calling landlines. not yet found clear rate table for mobile phone on vendors' website.

Softphone	rate in sgd/min
Gizmo	0.053
Skype	0.034
HeYo(和悦)	0.031
OpenWengo	0.019

clearly i am gonna try openwengo rightaway:) besides the rate, it also attracts me because it has a firefox extension, and is a GPLed project using SIP, which provides application portability and no vendor lock-in for propertiary things.

Gmailthis is a nice piece of javascript used as a bookmarklet to copy the webclip & link you are browsing to your gmail compose window. This is cool especially when you are considering Gmail as your bookmark system.

I did a little modification of the original script and fixed the encoding problem hopefully for all non-ascii page title and text.

Usage: create a new bookmark in your browser with the following piece of text (obviously as a single line) as its location. fire it whenever you find sth interesting.

javascript:addr='you@staul.com';popw='';Q='';x=document;y=window;if(x.selection) {Q=x.selection.createRange().text;} else if (y.getSelection) {Q=y.getSelection();} else if (x.getSelection) {Q=x.getSelection();}popw = y.open('https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to='+encodeURIComponent(addr) + '&su=' + encodeURI(document.title) +'&body='  +escape('<a href=')+escape(location.href)+escape('>')+escape(location.href)+escape('</a><br>') + encodeURIComponent(Q) ,'gmailForm','scrollbars=yes,width=680,height=510,top=175,left=75,status=no,resizable=yes');if (!document.all) T = setTimeout('popw.focus()',50);void(0);

Tips: change the red part to the target email address your webclips or links are going for.

remembering passwords is really a nightmare nowadays. where there is an account for you, there is a password you have to remember. as a human being, you are simply destined to reuse the same password across a bunch of those. if you are a typical human being as i mentioned afraid of forgetting passwords, but paranoid of using shared password of online community, for example, with your sensitive ones such as internet banking or email, i found one nice solution for you:

- idea is, you remember one single password, which is going to be derived to many for every specific use, and they are supposed to be completely "random" with one another. you don't have to remember any of them either. if one of them happens to be exposed to a bad guy, none of the rest would be exposed, nor the only password you memorize. see how it is achieved as follows.

- let's start generating your passwords here
type the only password you are happy to remember in field "Your master password", type sth into "Site name" as your parameter, and finally click button "generate" to get your derived password. now you see the point. the generated password has a relation to the parameter you choose for different account. different parameter leads to different passwords.

- example usage: use "msn" to generate password for your hotmail account, use "gmail" for your gmail and gtalk account, ... you can have your list easily extended. whenever you are required to enter a password for an account, you should use that webpage to quickly generate with the same parameter you use as the first time.

- important notes: the link above for password generation is actually a simple webpage with a little javascript embeded to do the computation. you should keep the link and best have a copy of it so that you can get back your passwords easily whenever needed. if you lose this generator, you lose all your passwords!

for my own sake, and probably others', i also made a backup of the generator in my linux blog ,which is unfortunately not accessible in China. i would wish i've managed to host it in msnspaces for convenience, but people will understand microsoft stuff always sucks!

big thankyou to Nic for this great tool.

Update (2006-04-10 22:08) : just found a firefox extension doing the similar thing called PasswordMaker. people might prefer this browser extension for greater convenience. choose as you like.

the problem seems similar with google desktop for searching chinese. if i  search for "手机" in gmail, i get 5 results. but if i search for "机", i get much more than 5 results with "手机".  how come they are even not able to deploy a search die as simple as a substring match for non-english languages??? everybody knowing programming will know it. it does not even matter what language it is. what's wrong there in google. how come is this crappy!