As of this announcement, this site is now hosted with TotalChoice Hosting. The migration process has been smooth as a whole and no data loss has been incurred. It has been a nightmare since Eryxma went out of business in April 2004. Glexicon took up, but became defunct again likewise in several months. Now that I have learned the lesson and avoided annual contracts altogether, but billed monthly for reduction of risk. I earnestly hope that this migration marks the true end of all chaos that have plagged me for long, at least for the foreseeable future. For further details of the migration, please refer to my feedback forum.

I'm glad to announce the immediate release of my Perl 5 Tutorial, First Edition today. You can download it at here. You will also find the release note there in full.

As of this announcement, this site is now hosted with Eryxma. While the previous host, 5GBHosting, was largely able to deliver the services stated, their servers have become overcrowded and obvious performance degradation has been observed over the past several months. As they have raised the tariff recently, I decided to switch to another host. Eryxma appears to have a conscientious team and are dedicated to offering technical support of high quality. I anticipate considerable performance improvement as a result of this migration. A new feedback forum has also been established.

The backend Perl script powering this Web site has been replaced. The new script has been rewritten from scratch, which is now object-oriented and easier to maintain in the long run. Moreover, this version is rigorously checked for security vulnerabilities.

The official release of the Perl 5 Tutorial, First Edition will be made on 31^st December, 2003. The First Edition is largely finalized. Preparation of the Second Edition has been started, and this edition will be revised thoroughly to ensure materials are presented in a way that are easiest to understand. More diagrams and code examples are also expected in this edition.

Having plodded through 2 years of hard work, the First Edition of the Perl 5 Tutorial is now largely complete. It is estimated that more than 95% of the material initially planned for the First Edition has now been included. Therefore, the first release candidate was released yesterday.

The release of the release candidate marks the commencement of the proofreading stage. In the meantime, effort is devoted towards rearranging the materials and tidying up so as to make it more consistent, as well as rectifying spelling and grammatical errors. Not much new content will be appended except to round up a few unfinished parts as of the release of this Release Candidate. The HTML version is also being prepared before the final release. To further improve the quality of the tutorial, I hereby invite everybody to evaluate it and give me your feedback or/and suggestions.

It is planned that two or three Release Candidates will be released prior to the release of the finalized First Edition. The First Edition is expected to be officially available at around late 2003 or early 2004.

The "Web links" section backend script has been largely completed and would be up for testing. The script features online management of web links and uses MySQL database for storage of data.

The domain of this site ("cbkihong.com") expired in late November 2002 because I failed to notice the imminence of expiration date in advance. Therefore, I lost the domain until recently the DNS record was finally deleted and I can register it again. Registration has been completed and the domain name is expected to be functional in a day or two.

I would like to take this opportunity to extend my apology to my fellow visitors who have tried to access my site and saw nothing but tons of popup ads in the meantime which was very annoying. I have now changed my domain registrar to GoDaddy, and I can assure this would not occur again as the domain would be automatically renewed upon expiration.

Also, 2mhost, the web host I used for the previous year, deleted my site without prior notification several days ago. I have had enough of their poor customer relations. Please stay away from them. This site is now hosted by 5GBHosting.com. It has a lot of awesome offerings that far surpass what was offered by my previous host. Most importantly, the new host places no restriction on forums, so I can reinstate my user forum again, although all previous user data have been permanently lost.

In the meantime I have started preparing a PDF version of my Perl 5 Tutorial, typeset in LaTeX. The first 3 chapters are now available in the PDF format. It can be downloaded from the Download page.

Owing to a sudden change to the Terms of Service of the web services provider, the feedback forum will be shut down permanently with immediate effect.

If you know of a web host satisfying the following requirements, please feel free to let me know.

• 25MB+ web space
• Custom Perl/CGI scripts (A MUST!!)
• Bandwidth 750MB+/month
• Allows Bulletin Board Software (usually stated as terms in their TOS or FAQ)
• FTP Access
• Less than US$50/year

If you know of a host or you can host it for me, please use my email feedback form to send me your message. Thank you very much.

All existing user accounts previously on this forum have been archived, and would be restored once I can find an appropriate server to reinstate my forum. In the meantime, you may use the email feedback form indicated above to forward me your ideas on my personal homepage.

Having plodded through series of examinations, I have eventually been able to make use of my holidays to continue with development of this web site.

For the time being, there are several major tasks ongoing on this web site: converting the site into the new CGI-driven model is still going on, and once all the pages on this site has been converted, the new site will be officially opened to the public. For now, a beta version is available here. Note that many pages are not yet converted, so you are likely to get "Internal Server Error" messages.

The Perl tutorial is still under construction, as always. Much of the earlier chapters were rewritten in a more concise way. In addition to all these updates, modifications at a later stage include converting the web pages from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0, and rectification of a few Javascript bugs with the navigation column in certain browsers.

I have been working very hard in these two months converting this web site into a CGI-driven one. It is expected that the time needed to modify or create a web page would be sharply reduced once this restructuring is complete. The CGI script concerned is now largely complete, and I need to convert all the existing web pages into data files used by this script, and this process would take several weeks.

On the other hand, authoring of the Perl 5 Tutorial has been resumed, and approximately 35% of the content has been written. I sincerely hope that the tutorial could be ready by April. Once the accuracy of the tutorial is verified, I will start preparing a version in PDF format for visitors to download and read offline.

I'm excited to announce that I have signed up a paid web hosting service with 2mhost.com and registered the domain "cbkihong.com". My official web site have been relocated to http://www.cbkihong.com with immediate effect. The new site allows me to make full use of CGI scripting to increase the interactivity of my web site in a long term.

The existing Spaceports web site http://cronus.spaceports.com/~cbkihong will NOT be shut down. It will become the mirror site of www.cbkihong.com and includes everything on my official web site except the Feedback Forum. The URL redirection address http://bernardchan.cjb.net will continue to refer to the Spaceports mirror site.

I relocated the site to a paid host for faster page loading, getting more powerful features as well as having a shorter URL. I am currently modifying the scripts of the Feedback Forum so that it matches my layout design. All member accounts on the previous forum on the Spaceports site will be ported to the new system, so please be patient.

The Feedback Forum of Bernard Chan's Personal Homepage is officially open today. This feedback forum is intended to receive visitor feedback, kept me in contact with my friends as well as for other general purpose discussions.

please click here to learn how to use it, as well as the points you should remember when using the feedback forum. To go directly to the Feedback Forum, click here.

The writing of Perl 5 Tutorial has been proceeding sluggishly recently. This is because on review I found that certain parts in Chapter 1 - 3 are not quite easy to understand on beginners' perspective. In order to make such fundamental concepts easier to understand, I have been trying to rewrite parts of Chapter 1 - 3 to help readers better understand the topics before working on subsequent chapters. Therefore, this tutorial may not be ready until late 2001. Please bear with me - I am going to have a pretty heavy workload in the coming academic year, but I will strive to finish it as soon as possible. Please kindly drop me a message as to how I can further improve the presentation of the tutorial. Your help is very much appreciated.

I am now actively writing the Perl 5 tutorial series. I hope this tutorial will cover as many as possible, and this is a long-term project towards writing a good guidance material for programming beginners. The first volume, Perl Fundamentals, is expected to be finished in 2 months time.

Updating of the "Web Links" section is complete, and I am glad to announce that the new web site is officially open today. Some of the sections in the web site is not yet available, and I am constantly adding new content to my web site. Please don't forget to bookmark my web site!

This web site is now Netscape 4.x friendly, and most display problems have been fixed. DHTML effects of the navigation column for Netscape 4.x may be added at a later time.

The new web site is expected to be available in 2 weeks.

The first phase of testing has been completed and the average loading time has found to be substantially shortened. I am now having a term break and am busily upgrading the whole of the existing web pages to the new version, and this process is expected to complete by early - mid July 2001.

The old version would be removed immediately once the upgrade is complete, so please be patient.

The design of the 3^rd version of this homepage is complete and some pages have been uploaded to the server for testing. In the tests I would try to focus on the time of loading and compatibility with the mainstream browsers on the market.

This new design is optimal for Netscape 6 and Internet Explorer 5. I may consider adding support for Netscape 4.x at a later stage. However I would try to make the pages accessible to users using alternative browsers.

The graphical navigation column has been replaced by a text-based DHTML one. I suppose this would help reduce the loading time of all web pages.