Musicians of the day: Slipknot

I'm writing this because I came across this comment by Slipknot's lead singer Corey Taylor: he thought the record industry made less money because of not just illegal download but also the poor quality of new music. I couldn't agree more. In fact, Slipknot are pretty much repeating themselves after their debut album! Well, this comment earned me some new respects so I might download their latest (legally)

BTW, I found the above 'coz it was linked to an article about Lars Ulrich (Metallica's drummer, who was very vocal against Napster) tried downloading Metallica's latest CD.

Topic of the day: what is in a name, Pt II?

This is about another name that has caused some controversies: netbook.

Anyone who is even remotely familiar with tech news would have heard of netbook, a term that became popular when ASUS released its EEE notebook computer two years ago. The common usage of the term refers to all notebooks with similar spec (low processing power and small size)

However, it turns out the term is trademarked by Psion, the pioneer in handhelds dated back to early 80s. Psion actually made a line of handheld named netbook until 2003 (now discontinued but remaining stocks and replacement parts are still being sold) They have sent legal letters to various websites to demand them stop using this term. In the mean time, big companies like Intel and Dell are pushing for cancellation of Psion's trademark.

IMO this case is very different from other cases where companies are sitting on patents, do nothing but suing others on patent infringement. Call me biased: I like Psion. It was a well-respected company when they were making some of the most advanced handhelds, like Psion Organiser. The technology they put in their handhelds from the 80s to 90s are quite innovative. I wish I could afford a Psion back in those days. In this case I sympathize with them. Psion is not even demanding compensation. Their trademark shouldn't be taken away like this. Besides, using netbook to describe EEE-like computers are kinda silly anyway. If it means a notebook on which internet-based applications are utilized heavily, all notebooks are netbooks these days! I just don't understand why people like these are so obsessed with that term.

Topic of the day: what is in a name?

The effort to recall (i.e., remove from office, for those not familiar with American politics) San Jose City Council member Madison Ngyuen failed. Part of the reason for the recall has to do with the naming of an area in San Jose: several blocks on Story Road which has lots of Vietnamese businesses. There are some very vocal proponent of naming it "Little Saigon" but Madison voted for "Saigon Business District" instead, which caused a lot of protests by the Little Saigon supporters. Eventually it was named neither "Saigon Business District" nor "Little Saigon" but businesses are allowed to put up banners that says "Little Saigon."

I was very confused when I read the news since I don't understand why "Saigon Business District" instead of "Little Saigon" made a big difference. It turns out the latter has special meaning to former South Vietnameses, who were driven out by the communist party (aka North Vietnam) The new community built (like the one in San Jose) can only be called "Little Saigon" 'coz the "original" Saigon, which was the capital of the country, no longer "exist" when it was renamed to Ho Chih Ming City by the North Vietnamese. Some argue that by choosing the name "Saigon Business District", Madison was pro-communist. I thought you could only accuse her pro-communist if she proposed "Ho Chih Ming Business District" instead!

Anyway, this is one of those things that outsiders (like me) never understand.

Topic of the day: the auction of the bronze animal heads looted from China

This is the 3rd time I wrote about this topic! (The first time was 9 years ago. The 2nd time was 2 weeks ago. Both were in Chinese though.) The latest news was that the auction was won by a Chinese collector but he has already announced he would not pay 'coz he needed to stand up for his country.

Again, this has caused a lot of controversy. Some praised him for being patriotic by sabotaging the auction and thus causing troubles for the auctioner and seller. Some think this is childish and did nothing good about the image of Chinese.

I gotta admit I'm biased: I think they should go back to where they come from, i.e., China. I am not sure how to make that happen though. If the Chinese paid a lot for it, I think it is a waste of money that could have better uses elsewhere in China. On the other hand, YSL bought it fair and square. You can't just ask his bf to give it up for nothing.

So, the question that I've been thinking is: what is the fair value of these 2 heads? Certainly not 15.7 million euro! After all, the garden where they come from was built 300 years ago so they can't be older than that. I guess some critics are right: Chinese should stop making a big fuss about them. Don't bid on them and don't talk about them. Then their values would go down a whole lot. The Chinese government could even build replicas of them and put them in the original place in the garden, not unlike how bridges were rebuilt after disasters. There is no need to get fixated on these relics (btw, many agree relic is a more accurate description than "national treasure")

Topic of the day: Lang Lang and Steinway

Lang Lang and Yundi Li are probably the most famous Chinese pianists currently. There shouldn't be any surprise that companies will seek their endorsements to promote their products. In fact, I saw an Adidas ad on Lang Lang's website. I doubt he wears Adidas when he performs though. Anyway, the more interesting deal to me is the Lang Lang line of piano from Steinway. I couldn't find much info in English but I did find a few articles about this in Chinese. According to that article, this line of piano is made in China and sold for ~RMB$40k (~US$5800) each. I think this line certainly has its appeal to the middle-class in China. After all, there is no bigger brand name than Steinway in piano. And it feels good to be associated with Lang Lang this way!

Some might say it's a good strategy for Steinway to expand its marketshares. On the other hand, some might argue a "cheaper" line dilutes the brand name as well as the profit margin. That is the reason a lot of analyst said why Apple has not entered the red-hot netbook market. Also, is it a good idea for an artist to associate him/herself to a "cheaper" line?

I am not familiar with piano at all but "signature" model named after famous artists are certainly very common in the guitar world. In fact, any famous player you could name will have his signature model already (Joe Pass, Jim Hall, John Scofield, Steve Vai, B.B.King just to name a few) And these signature models are not always expensive, for example, the street price of an Epiphone Joe Pass Emperor II is $600. Also, the artists do not necessarily personally favor the models bearing their names! For example, Joe Pass did not seem to have played the Joe Pass model made by Ibanez on stage that much. (Another interesting story was that Joe Pass was playing an Ibanez Joe Pass in his instruction video and in the middle of it he said "hey, it has 24 frets, I didn't know that...!")

Tech of the day: Arch Linux

I am by no means a Linux expert but I do play with different distros from time to time. One of my "mission" has been creating a portable Linux-based virtual machine, i.e., the files that contain the VM as well as executing it all reside on a flash drive. I have played with VMWare's Player and Server product before but they cannot be executed from a flash drive last time I checked. My latest hope is Portable VirtualBox. To try it out, I picked Arch Linux as my distro because it is supposed to be fast to start. In fact, it is more for advanced users compared to Ubuntu. I dive into it anyway.

The installer was actually quite straightforward. I went thru every step on the menu and accepted most of the default values. Here are the problems I encountered so far and the solutions:

1) It is defaulted to static IP. For my purpose (run as a VM), I'd rather use DHCP.

2) By default it doesn't install any "GUI" (i.e., Windows Manager in Linux terminology) unlike Ubuntu comes with GNOME by default. It doesn't install X windows either. Fortunately its package manager, pacman, is just as simple (if not simpler) than apt-get.

Step 1: Sync the repository (don't ask me why!)
pacman -Sy

Step 2:
pacman -S xorg

Step 3: Assuming you want to use KDE as your Windows Manager
pacman -S kde

However, when installing xorg, pacman always stucked at downloading libxau-1.0.4-1-i686, so I googled and found its .pkg.tar.gz. Used wget to download the file and then pacman -U the file to manually install it.

Another problem is that pacman always hang in the middle of downloading a file after several others are downloaded. I did 2 things:
(i) used the fastest mirrors by rankmirror
(ii) replaced the default download command with wget by uncommenting the XferCommand line in /etc/pacman.conf

One feature of pacman I found really cool is that if I hit Ctrl-C in the middle of downloading, it will switch to the next mirror and continue from there! (More Ctrl-C will interrupt pacman but it is OK. Just re-run pacman and it will pick up where it was interrupted. Isn't it cool?)

Configuring X has never been trivial for me but it has been made easy on Arch Linux. Use the tool hwd like this and it will automatically generate a /etc/X11/xorg.conf for you:
hwd -xa

I switched to JWM from KDE though 'coz I couldn't get the latter to work (maybe it requires more resources than I provide it through Virtualbox but I am not sure) JWM is really light-weight and start up real quick.

Two tips for running JWM:
(i) I had to configure X windows first.
(ii) run xinit /usr/bin/jwm
(iii) The "Start" menu of JWM is totally configurable. Simple copy /etc/system.jwmrc to your ~/.jwmrc and edit it. Most of these shortcuts won't work yet because the application hasn't been installed. For me, the minimals are xterm, Firefox and Pidgin (simply use pacman to install the last two.)

3) To get Flash Player and java working with my Firefox (better to have MS fonts installed too):
pacman -S flashplugin ttf-ms-fonts jre
Then reboot the VM. (Otherwise Firefox keeps complaining the plugin is not there)

4) If the instance is not properly shutdown, check disk will fail next time you start it up and it will put you in the maintenance mode. Follow its instruction to mount the filesystem as rw, then run fsck to fixed those bad inodes.

5) There is no sound by default.
On the host (the Virtualbox app), I chose "Windows DirectSound" as the host driver (and the only available controller is ICH AC97)
Inside the VM, I need to install amixer and then run it to unmute. From the ALSA Wiki entry:
pacman -Sy alsa-lib alsa-utils
amixer set Master 90% unmute
amixer set PCM 85% unmute

Now I could IM, surf web (even listening to Joy Division on Pandora) Call me a happy portable VM-er!

每週冷飯﹕奧運隨想--談民族自尊

摘自2001年10月1號

每四年一到奧運會﹐總覺得民族情緒特別高漲﹐大家焦點總是放在本國在獎牌榜的排名。香港傳媒報導中港運動員的情況時特別肉緊﹐沒有贏得金牌的都以“失手”來形容﹐擺明車馬地偏幫“自己友”。

可惜在奧運以外﹐香港人還是崇洋崇日多於崇中﹐君不見本地的時裝牌子取的總是扮歐洲的名字(有趣的是﹐國產名牌大地牌有一段時間為了趕時髦改了一個西化英文名字﹐因反應奇差改回原名Da Di) 不知道大家有沒有發覺﹐香港時裝店用的所有mannequin外表都是外國人﹗廣告或者歌詞也總喜歡加插一兩句英文(或其他外文)以示高人一等。香港人的民族自尊心實在脆弱不堪﹐這自然也是殖民地政府種下的禍根﹐不知道我們特首有何解決辦法﹖

對比起香港人﹐美國人的民族自尊心又似乎過份強烈﹐香港報導奧運偏幫自己友的程度和他們相比可謂小巫見大巫﹐他們簡直有一種優越感 (被稱為沙文主義chauvinism)﹐這在四年前美國NBC電視台評述員在開幕禮介紹出場各國時表露無遺﹐當年引發不少居美華人抗議。事實上﹐單從體育可見美國人對外來事物接受力很低﹐全世界最受歡迎的運動--足球--在美國始終未打入主流﹐全世界賽事迷最推崇一級方程式﹐美國人獨愛他們的三級方程式。

其實香港人和美國人各走極端﹐最理想的當然是既以自家事物為榮﹐亦以開放態度對待外來事物。

以上寫於00年悉尼奧運後﹐西人有云﹕the more things change, the more they stay
the same﹐現在看來當真不錯﹕各種惡習已由香港蔓延至祖國(香港唔學好﹐祖國學
更壞﹗)歌詞中加插一句不倫不類的We're Ready正是北京奧運主題曲。而劉翔因傷
黯然退出﹐無法衛冕金牌﹐跳欄項目對中港觀眾以至傳媒登時變得毫無意義。至於
美國足球界﹐碧咸由旋風式登陸至萌生去意﹐還不到兩年時間﹗