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Baidu, the leading internet search engine in China, lost Shawn Wang, its Chief Financial Officer in a Christmas holiday vacation in China. Shawn Wang lead the company into a successful breach into NASDAQ in August 2005 and has the glory of of making Baidu the first China company to be included in the index.

“We are all completely shocked and deeply saddened by this tragic news,” said Robin Li, Baidu’s Chairman and CEO. “Shawn’s leadership and vision helped transform Baidu into a leading US public company, and his presence will be greatly missed. Shawn was not only a tremendous leader within our company, but also a wonderful friend to us all. We extend our deepest sympathy and most sincere condolences to Shawn’s family.”

Shawn Wang’s lost to Baidu is a pretty bad hit for the company as stocks starts to plummet right after the news of his death. However, people will remember him as the “CFO of the Year” by CFO Magazine in 2005.

This blog will be slow in updates, or without any updates for January 2008 as I’ll be bathing in lecture notes for the upcoming exams. Sorry for the inconvenience, if you would like to contribute do leave a comment below. Thanks.

Mozilla, the company behind popular internet browser Firefox, email client Thunderbird, is giving users an option to have their support problems for Firefox to be answered live with the opening of Live Chat.

This chat service is not open 24 hours daily yet, but it will eventually when this service evolves itself as time goes on. If your question and troubleshoot procedures doesn’t help you, give Live Chat a shot and get some experience helper’s answer.

Compare Firefox’s support to Internet Explorer’s support base, it is clear Firefox users can get a better leverage of support on top of the already overwhelming great community support in Mozillazine and other Mozilla software community. With Live Chat up, you can now get your solutions as quick as possible, thus leading to the amount of unwanted time spent for your support thread to be answered in the forums.

Beat this Microsoft.

Let us all keep our heads down and observe few minutes of silence for the departure of Netscape Navigator on 1st February 2008.

Netscape Navigator was one of the earliest internet browser which brought internet to live in 1990s. It was acquired by AOL in 1999 and AOL launched the first Netscape 6 browser, a Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser in 2000 and in 2003, an independent team was founded to continue the development of Netscape Communicator web suite.

With the entrance of Firefox into the internet browser market which is largely dominated by Internet Explorer all these while, Firefox managed to gain a hold itself a strong firm place in the market. As what they pointed out in Netscape’s Blog:

While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.

AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.

There you go, AOL says we should just end the use of Netscape and everyone should adopt Firefox. A sad milestone for Netscape indeed, but its legacy and brand will remain in our minds, always.

Starting from 1st February 2008, Netscape Navigator’s development and support will end at version 9, and will also be putting up an archive for all its previous versions for your collection, if you would like to remember back the old days.

Sorry for the inactivity for the past few days, things are going slowly since it’s Christmas. I’ve updated Wordpress to 2.3.2 since its a version which fixes a flaw which can allow unauthorize viewing of draft posts.

And you all might have notice this, I’ve changed the theme from a 2 column fluid theme to 3 column fixed width theme for better and easier viewing on most broswers. Enjoys. Do let me know in the comment if anything goes wrong.

Once again, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, may everyone have a better year in 2008.