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2004-11-30
Lying
So there is this little news saying that lying makes brain work harder. Yet another piece of your-mother-is-a-woman kind of "scientific" research. Using this for lie detection seems to be the only little merit, but I still not yet buy that it would definitely be superior to a traditional polygraph, as some people can convince their brain that they are not lying. Can't help but think of this quote from Seinfeld.
- "Just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."
- - George, in "The Beard"
2004-11-29
Interview #3
So here it comes, the 3rd interview. It was pretty short this time, and the questions are less challenging. At the end, I failed to come up with questions because I have already asked most of the things I pretend to want to know in the first two interviews. Let's wait and see how it goes at the end...
2004-11-28
Wouldn't it be nice...
to have an extension for Mozilla/Firefox that removes those annoying, redundant spaces inserted between every consecutive pair of Chinese characters in Chinese newspaper homepages like Appledaily and Mingpao? Now you can! Check out the extension RSRemover by yours truly!
2004-11-26
Black Friday
Big sale day, huh? Not really. I was looking for a cheap, maybe 3-4MP digital camera, but didn't see any decent deals on newspaper; there are better deals on the web anyway. I suppose the now abundance of deal sites have completely changed the way people like me to shop. So I just went to Circuit City at 5am with my sister's family to get a PS2 and some games for her.
2004-11-25
Turkey Day
The day for food and entertainments only. I've spent today in Austin in my sister's as usual. Seen The Incredibles too. Turned out to be the best movie I have seen for quite a while.
2004-11-24
Froogle Wish List
Froogle has a new wish list feature, and I have created mine for fun. But of course, I won't mind actually receiving anything in the list, so feel free to give me anything there :)
2004-11-23
About the C-Exam
Ok, I have calmed down now. The exam was actually harder than I have expected, and there were a few surprising questions:
- Some questions on Pastry, instead of "fundamental" questions on general systems areas.
- A question on language security, which I know virtually nothing about.
- Enumeration of possible new features you can bring with a specific piece of hardware, more on testing creativity than knowledge.
- A question on whether I have read a specific narrow paper in security. Of course, I haven't.
- A question on how to hack a remote machine!
2004-11-22
I PASSED!
2004-11-21
Gimp 2.2 soon
Gimp 2.2 is about to release soon. Function-wise, it is no doubt one of the best in the FOSS world. Yet it is also the application with an interface that I hate the most.
The problem is usually not because of time, effort, or incapable of designing better interface, but the general arrogance of many people in the FOSS community. "We are genius that know what is best for you, and you idiots are just not smart enough to appreciate." What they never seem to get, which I think is the most important truth in computer science, is that all people are idiots. We all are. No offense, but FOSS should be of the idiots, by the idiots, and for the idiots. Software should be designed for people's convenience, not the other way round.
I have to be very grateful that I have no artistic talent and don't really have to tolerate Gimp.
The problem is usually not because of time, effort, or incapable of designing better interface, but the general arrogance of many people in the FOSS community. "We are genius that know what is best for you, and you idiots are just not smart enough to appreciate." What they never seem to get, which I think is the most important truth in computer science, is that all people are idiots. We all are. No offense, but FOSS should be of the idiots, by the idiots, and for the idiots. Software should be designed for people's convenience, not the other way round.
I have to be very grateful that I have no artistic talent and don't really have to tolerate Gimp.
2004-11-20
Rockets Game
Watched another Rockets game live on TV today. The team was saved by McGrady, although Yao fouled out near the end. Can't help but noticed some interesting statistics on Rockets' performance base on whether I watched live/real-time statistics, as follows.
Definitely there are some correlations (for statistics freaks, the correlation coefficient is about 0.5). Really a shame that they are not going to show many games on local TV this season, and the next game I can watch will be nearly two months from now...
|
| W-L | Win % |
|---|---|---|
| Watched live | 3-1 | 75% |
| Real-time stat | 1-1 | 50% |
| Not watched | 1-4 | 20% |
| Total | 5-6 | 45% |
Definitely there are some correlations (for statistics freaks, the correlation coefficient is about 0.5). Really a shame that they are not going to show many games on local TV this season, and the next game I can watch will be nearly two months from now...
2004-11-19
Why Evil?
I guess this deserve a bit explanation (and more publicity). It has been a while, but the problem is still there. Basically, the prices that publishers are charging have gone up crazily in the last few years. True, those publishers have done nice indexing, web interfacing, providing pdfs, and whatnot, but the insane prices would just prevent reasonable dissemination of information. After all, the most valuable part of the articles, i.e. the contents, are already provided for free. So last year Don Knuth wrote this public letter to the editorial board of Journal of Algorithms (JoA), one of the most prestigious journals in theory, about this situation. One thing led to another, the whole editorial board of JoA has resigned, and became the editorial stuff of a new journal, ACM Transactions of Algorithms. They also promised that "individuals and libraries will be able to subscribe at an attractive price similar to those of other ACM journals."
I don't want to pinpoint any particular publisher. But to me personally, the timing couldn't be any worse, since this was right after my first JoA paper got accepted...
I don't want to pinpoint any particular publisher. But to me personally, the timing couldn't be any worse, since this was right after my first JoA paper got accepted...
2004-11-18
Google Scholar
Another cool new service from Google, Google Scholar (in beta too, as always). A search for my name seems to suggest that right now they are doing fine only on well-indexed databases, for example those by ACM, IEEE, or one of those evil, greedy publishers. This maybe a bit too early to judge anything right now, but if they do rely on other indices to gather information, I can't see why I would use it because
- the indexing done by ACM is doing exactly the same job, probably would even update faster because they don't rely on Google Scholar; and
- it is important in my field to look for latest workshop papers, which are not showing up in their results.
Lack of sleep may...
Ok, this is new. Lack of sleep may lead to excess weight. Given that I am up since 4am today, I suppose I have a good excuse. I particularly like the explanation:
"The metabolic regulatory system may have evolved to motivate humans to store fat during summer months when the nights are shorter and food is plentiful, which was a survival mechanism for the body to prepare for the dark winter months when food would not be as plentiful," said James Gangwisch, a post-doctoral fellow in psychiatric epidemiology at Columbia University.So whoever gives me the extra workload, I can legitimately say, "You're killing me!"
2004-11-17
C-Exam Hell
Yeah, hell is the only word that I can think of. I have read most of the textbooks I have, some of them twice, a stack of papers to complement, and countless notes with related information I found all over the world, yet I still feel that I don't know enough to survive through the exam. Now the exam is less than 5 days away, the only thing that can rescure me is bs, a technique that I have some but not too much. My destination? Dare not to think...
2004-11-16
Visitor referred from a strange place
Found out a visitor to my homepage referred from this page. This is interesting, since I have taken off any link to that page for quite a while already, and Google seems to have forgotten it. But it turns out others, including AskJeeves, MSN search, and Yahoo, have not. While we don't have a clear winner here, we definitely have a clear loser.
2004-11-15
Gout and Firefox
I had another gout attack last night. Couldn't sleep well, but not that serious as I still managed to get to school and attended my boss' pizza talk.
It's been a while since the release of Firefox 1.0, and many of extensions are still disabled because of incompatibility. Yet I checked today and realized that it is just because the software update is broken. I've managed to manually upgrade the following extensions, which are quite useful for me:
So go ahead and update manually if you use them too!
It's been a while since the release of Firefox 1.0, and many of extensions are still disabled because of incompatibility. Yet I checked today and realized that it is just because the software update is broken. I've managed to manually upgrade the following extensions, which are quite useful for me:
So go ahead and update manually if you use them too!
Blogging around the world
Neat. They do have people to read blogs in different languages. However, this leaves me wonder, which kind of Chinese I am a native speaker of, whether it is Traditional (Big5-HKSCS), Unicode (UTF-8), or Western (ISO-8859-1).
2004-11-14
Give up
Ok, I give up my plan of not updating the blog and just begging for money. It doesn't seem to work anyway. Right now, I'm going to change the plan to keep updating without begging for money. See if this will work better. Wait, isn't this the original plan that failed?
2004-11-12
My Ads
Come on guys! I told you that my boss may not be supporting me in the summer, so just do me a favor and click my ads! You do want to incentivize me to update this blog frequently, don't you =)
2004-11-11
2nd Interview
I have the 2nd round of interview today (yeah, I'm a bit surprised to that too). Got a few algorithm and data structure questions, nothing particularly hard. But I think maybe I was a bit nervous (excited?), sometimes I answered the question right away without first asking for clarifications and thinking. Regardless, he seemed to be surprised to know that I'm more of looking for an internship right now. I expected that as they seemed to be interviewing me for a position of software development engineer with a title of technical program manager...
I also received EQ2, finally. Not for me, I can't afford spending time playing it. It's really a pain in the ass, though, to upload the 12 CDs to the real player/investor...
I also received EQ2, finally. Not for me, I can't afford spending time playing it. It's really a pain in the ass, though, to upload the 12 CDs to the real player/investor...
2004-11-10
More on C-exam
I talked to my boss about C-exam again today. He said repeatedly that it is not such big a deal. Well, according to the 2 passes out of 6 takes history last year in our group, I am not exactly that optimistic. Maybe I'll not be so crazy like others to study the implementation of something like mbuf, but I did spend some time reading some more important data structures like pcb and vm.
2004-11-09
Still Firefox
Yup, still about Firefox... It crashed 4 times for me today. True, the way I use it is probably a bit too demanding, but it is crashing even more frequently than the Preview Release version I've upgraded from, which, I consider, is quite unacceptable. Too bad that they spend such effort in pubicity for a release of this quality.
Firefox 1.0
The wait is finally over. Today is devoted to Firefox. Grab it wait it's still hot. Why else do you think I get up at 3am this morning?
2004-11-07
Yale
Just realized that one of my classmates back in HKU CE has joined the PhD program in Yale. Good for him! Speaking of Yale, they have a faculty member that has done a lot in the research area that I plan to do for my PhD dissertation.
2004-11-06
Rockets won again
So when I watch their games they're 2-0, and when I don't watch they're 0-2. I'll need to watch more of their games now...
3.5 hrs
I've seen two horribly sucky movies on TV today, Jawbreaker and Cruel Intentions. What a waste of 3.5 hrs. But I guess I would just do whatever it takes to avoid studying anyway.
2004-11-05
Interview and C-exam date
I had the interview today. Didn't run well, and I answered one question pretty wrong. I would be surprised if I hear from them again.
I also setup the C-exam date. That would be Nov 22. Just over 2 weeks from now, which is quite scary. I have done a networking book and an architecture book, and will read an OS book over the weekend. Then what remain are a security book, a harder architecture book, and hundreds of papers...
I also setup the C-exam date. That would be Nov 22. Just over 2 weeks from now, which is quite scary. I have done a networking book and an architecture book, and will read an OS book over the weekend. Then what remain are a security book, a harder architecture book, and hundreds of papers...
2004-11-04
HKU ranks 39th
According to a top universities list produced by the Times Higher Educational Supplement, the University of Hong Kong ranked the 39th worldwide. Better than I expected it to be. I would be really interested in knowing Rice's position, though, to see if I came all the way to US to go to a "worse" school...
Preparing for interview
So my boss has told us repeatedly that because of funding issues he may not be able to support us for the summer, and we'll definitely need to find a summer internship for next year. So here I go, I'll have an interview with Amazon tomorrow for a software developer internship position tomorrow. I spent the whole morning preparing for that, but essentially what I have done is to have a hair cut and buy an iron.
I have also invited two faculties for my cexam committee. Now that I have all the people, I'll just need to pick a time and then study for it...
I have also invited two faculties for my cexam committee. Now that I have all the people, I'll just need to pick a time and then study for it...
2004-11-03
Second lost
So Rockets also lost the second game. Glad that I couldn't watch it. Also makes me so sorry with trading Franchise and the Cat...
2004-11-02
My Business
Finally today is the Presidental Election Day. Well, none of my business, because I can't vote.
Finally today is the first Rockets game. Well, none of my busniess, because I don't have cable.
What a life!
Finally today is the first Rockets game. Well, none of my busniess, because I don't have cable.
What a life!
2004-11-01
Houston Weather
I think the only thing people can possibly like about Houston's weather is the clear distinction of seasons. Autumn has started today, with the temperature suddenly drops from 80s to 50s and 60s, and the sudden bad rainfall (not to mention the typical flooding afterwards). No wonder why I have a stronger desire than ever to graduate soon...
Submission called off
So finally we didn't submit the paper, as the paper was not ready. I guess one week is really too short to write this position paper, particularly when we didn't really have a position... Too tired to write anything else now...
