About this homepage

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I am setting up this homepage for several reasons. First, I would like to be known by more people in the world. Therefore, I have set up my personal profile, in addition to the means of contacting me, in the hope of knowing more friends, although in writing, around the world. Second, I hope that I can share with fellow visitors my personal experience in programming and the use of computers. I am planning to write a few handy software products for public download later on, and I am now learning a number of programming languages which I believe would assist in my future career.

Most importantly, I have a belief that one cannot claim himself to be proficient in anything without ever doing it. That's why I have always tried to allocate some time out of my tight schedule to work on this web site.

This homepage comprises five sections.

The About Me section contains my personal profile and all sorts of information about me.
The Articles section contains essays written by me recently on a number of topics.
The Tektroniks section is especially suitable for those who would like to learn programming and electronics. There would be links to great resources, tutorials etc. in this section. Owing to its intimate relationship with computer science and electronics, there are lots of technical terms in the pages. I would try to get each term explained carefully, yet there may be times when certain prior knowledge is assumed.
The Software Recommendation section is my recommendations to some third-party software products which would be worthwhile for you to try. Each software is comprehensively introduced with reviews and user tips.
The Web Links section is the largest section of the site and contains a list of web sites which deserve visiting and recommendation. This is not merely a list of URLs, you would also find my comments on each site listed.

This is the 3^rd version of this homepage. Several design philosophies are paramount in the design of this homepage.

The first principle is that the website should be displayed correctly in all browsers. This is satisfactorily achieved by conforming to the XHTML 1.0 standard proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I have rewritten all web pages from the ground up so as to ensure that conformance is achieved to the maximum extent possible. All the web pages on this web site are passed to the W3C HTML validator for HTML checking before they are posted. I have put up the HTML and CSS validated logos on the home page of the web site.

The second principle is that the time of loading must be as short as possible. Regardless of the fact that many people have broadband connections nowadays, many are still using low-speed dialup lines. Therefore, the number of images used is reduced to the minumum and I have deprecated the use of Flash or even Java applets because they usually slow down the whole loading process. The navigation column which was constructed using images is now replaced by a text-based one. However, DHTML is implemented so that Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6+ users would see a change in colour as the mouse moves over a menu item. While users of other browsers would not see such effect, they can still click on the menu item to jump to a specific section. Several tasks which were once accomplished with JavaScript is now deprecated to take care of users of non-JavaScript browsers.

The last principle is concerned with the use of words. I am captious about words. I have spent much time on translation. The pages are first written in English, and are then translated into Chinese. In order to make the best translations, virtually every translated sentence has been edited two times or above for better presentation of ideas as well as eradicating grammatical errors.

Therefore, with these principles in mind, the creation process of this homepage is rather painstaking and requires investment of much time and effort.