Music of the day: Tsar's Bride: Overture by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

I am blogging this for my son. We heard this on radio this morning and this is the first piece of music that he told me he liked. He liked the fact that "it had a lot of instruments," which is consistent with his philosophy of "more is more!" I guess I need to play more orchestral music in the cars.

Book of the day: Graded Go Problems for Beginners Vol.2

This is part of a well-prepared series of problem books (or tsumego in Japanese) by Kano Yoshinori 9 dan. While the Vol.1 could be found on Amazon, the rest are not as readily available. I bought Vol.2 and 4 from Powells.com back in Jan. The goal was to finish 327-problem Vol.2 6 weeks ago. I started doing 10 problems a day, then 5 a day, then 5 every other day but I finally finished it last week!

Before proceeding to Vol.3, I am going over Vol.2 again. This time I should spend less time and get less wrong. (That's how we're supposed to study tsumego according to the experts)

Music of the day: Venezuelan Waltzes, Antonio Lauro

In the bad old days sometimes I heard a great piece of music on the radio but I missed it when the DJ told the name of the piece.

Well, not any more! From the local classical station KDFC's website, I could easily find out that the great guitar piece I heard on 5/3 1:57 pm was Antonio Lauro's Venezuelan Waltzes performed by Eduardo Fernandez (and the link to buy it)

Topic of the day: Social networking may harm your job prospect

...... or maybe not.

I have read all these comments about what you say/post on social network will be used by future employers for making decisions when you are trying to get hired.

Well, I won't like it if my private life is being probed for employment. On the other hand, it is not a bad idea to be a bit more careful at what you do on social network. It is the same as saying things in public.

Then I came across this story: a bank in Texas has mandated its hiring managers not to look for info from social network. This actually makes some senses. There are a certain things employers are not supposed to find out from candidates because of discrimination laws (in some states, for example, the age, the race, whether she is pregnant...... etc) If they can't ask about those during interviews, why should they be allowed to find those out from places like social networks?

Musicians of the day: The Tardy Brothers

Just heard them on Music Choice. If you followed death metal, you'll of course recognize the last name Tardy immediately. That's John Tardy, the vocalist of Obituary. The song was from their album "Bloodline" which was just released! Of course it reminded me of Obituary (In fact I thought Music Choice was playing Obituary before I looked at the song info :P) which is not a bad thing. I haven't had enough of their music!

The funny thing is: I read some comments on Blabbermouth.net and some says the band name doesn't sound metal at all. (The Jonas brothers, anyone?)

Tech of the day: FaunOS

I'm in the mood of playing with another Linux distro (see my previous post about Arch Linux) The motivation this time is to improve boot time on my various PC. I am in search of a distro that I could put on a USB flash drive and boot from there faster than booting from the HDD. Because of my good experience with Arch, I picked the Arch-based FaunOS.

The first challenge is to write the FaunOS image (btw, the official download link doesn't work. Use this mirror instead) to my Flash drive. The instructions given was to use dd (a Linux/Unix util.) I do have numerous *nix environment to choose from and I picked Cygwin. The documentation is a bit hard to find but eventually I figured out (by trial and error) Cygwin sees my USB flash drive as /dev/sdb (FYI, I have a HDD with a single partition on that PC and I've unplugged other USB drives)

After I dd the image to the drive, it now contains 2 partitions (a 5Mb FAT show up as sdb1 in FaunOS and a 1Gb boot partition sdb2) I don't want the rest of the space go wasted. So I fire up GParted in FaunOS and create a new FAT32 partition on space left. However, Windows only maps the first partition it could use on a flash drive to a letter drive, which is the tiny 5Mb one in this case. The solution is simple: remove that 5Mb partition using GParted again. Then the big partition became usable in Windows!

So, will FaunOS end my search of my perfect USB bootable linux distro? I'm afraid not. Here are things I don't like:
1) The boot time (from turning it on 'til I have a usable Desktop) is around 1.5 min, compared to 3.5 for XP. It's definitely a improvement but I think I could still do better if I build from the scratch (and use JWM instead of KDE)
2) Even those I choose to "Save" my session before shutdown but it does not remember my Wifi setting after re-boot so that adds another 30 seconds to the boot time
3) Audio does not work out-of-the-box.
4) FaunOS is an orphaned project.

My next step will be trying out larch, a utility for building "Live" Arch Linux. I'll be rolling my own, so to speak.

[Correction] Audio does work. I just need to open the mixer and unmute PCM.

每週一噏：拳王之國，德先生

今週最熱門的話題莫過於豬流感，不過已有太多人噏過，當中更不乏專家，筆者講多無謂，反而想講另兩個話題：

早前香港首席才子陶傑寫遊戲文章玩出火，戲稱菲律賓為僕人之國，掀起一場種族歧視爭議，才子亦不得不認低威。其實如果要恭維菲國，大可稱之為拳王之國，皆因來自菲國的Manny Pacquiao已取得四個重量級別的拳王寶座，自去年戰勝金童Oscar De La Hoya，已被視為拳擊界最好打之人，昨天又擊倒英國拳手Ricky Hatton，再次見證Pacquiao實力之强。從直播可見，不少白人觀眾難掩失望之情，如果和白人優越感破碎毫無關係，筆者實在難以置信。

明天是五四運動九十週年，傳媒例牌又把五四精神德先生（democracy）賽先生（science）大講特講，可悲的是，年復一年，兩者仍和大眾緣慳一面：科技不是沒有，只不過太多被利用造假（如毒奶粉），談不上已具備科學精神；而對民主抗拒的民眾大有人在，從藝人成龍日前中國人要管之論可見一班。 提到後者，他雖然力踩中國廠商，指國內製造的電視機會爆炸，不過仍然被選用為上海博覽會形象大使，可見其後台之硬！