4 letter symbols in NASDAQ

When every news media started talking about Facebook's IPO and the symbol rumored to be FB or LIKE, I thought it has to be the latter, not the former, because I thought NASDAQ had a rule that all symbols have to be 4 letters. I am a lazy investor and have been a big fan of NASDAQ 100 ETF (which was a bad idea) I still remember its name went from QQQ to QQQQ when it started being traded at NASDAQ itself. This post from WSJ confirmed it happened in Nov 2004. However, just found another article from 2007 that NASDAQ has dropped this restriction!

Topic of the day: Facebook and Hong Kong politics

The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) is a Communist China leaning political party in Hong Kong. A Facebook group named 《我相信可以召集１００，０００ 個厭惡民建聯的人！》(which means I should be able to find 100000 people who dislike DAB) was established in July 2008 to condemn the questionable practices of this party. Facebook removed this group this morning, when the group has over 84k members and inching closer to the 100k goal.

The membership of this group has been growing steadily since it was established and it grew rapidly from 30k to 84k since last October because of the hi-speed rail controversy.

A lot of Hong Kong netizens are wondering why Facebook did this. It would be absurd if it was pressured by the party itself or even the Chinese government.

A new group has been formed as a replacement.

Tech of the day: Facebook photo upload sucks

I just want to rant about my horrible experience with uploading photo to Facebook. No matter what I use: my 4 year old XP PC, brand new Vista PC, Ubuntu, in combination with IE or Firefox, I would run into the dreadful "Uploading failed" error from time to time. (Well, I had great success using the simple text/HTML form based interface but it doesn't preview the photo so it's a pain to use)

Yesterday I even tried Adobe's AIR-based Photo Uploader for Facebook. It's a hit-or-miss as well. And previewing photo was very slow with this tool.

I can't imagine no one has come up with a good solution to this common problem on a popular service but unfortunately that's the case after I googled.