Topic of the day: Boycott Pocket God

Imagine you are a minority in your country and there is a game of which the object is to kill and torture people of your race. Will you be offended? I would be furious!

And that's what the iPhone game Pocket God did to Pacific Islanders. I thought Apple has a high standard on approving apps to be sold at their App store. Well, probably not.

The sad thing is: the maker of this game is going to make even more money because of this publicity (for example, idiots like this are encouraging people to buy and try the game.) It proves once again no publicity is bad publicity. Shame on them!

Tech of the day: ex-Facebook exec replaced departed MySpace CEO

I don't have the experience of being a top dog and then slowly overtaken by another up and comer (I went out on top! :P) but I could imagine it gotta hurt. Think IBM->Microsoft. Or more recently, Yahoo->Google. Add another from the tech world: MySpace->Facebook. I still remember when MySpace was king, many commenters think Facebook only appeals to the college crowd and being too elitist. When MySpace fell behind Facebook in US, people still said MySpace was the worldwide leader. Well, MySpace has lost that crown too. Perhaps it's time to play the game my son likes: "Follow the leader" Or better yet, hire someone who used to work for the leader/competitor! Is this desperation act? I won't call it that 'coz MySpace is still THE place for bands to promote themselves. On the other hand, it is hard to reverse a trend in the tech world. Just ask Yahoo.

Tech of the day: Fate of a cloud pioneer

Before I talk about this pioneer, I gotta admit I hate the term "cloud." It has become yet another hype like "Web 2.0." Running Web application and storing data on the internet are nothing new. Case in point: GeoCities was started 15 years ago. And that's what they did (well, they are more well-known for offering free website hosting.) Ironically, it will be shutdown later this year even though the hype of cloud is higher than ever.

Recommended by a friend, I started using GeoCities one year after it was launched, i.e., 1995, because I need to migrate my old web page hosted by my grad school's computer science department (they were not going to host my page much longer after I graduated!) Like most people of that generation, that's where I honed my HTML skills! One thing unique about GeoCities was that it organized web pages into "neighborhoods." Users could choose the neighborhood that represents the contents or reflects the personalities. I still remember my neighborhood was "Broadway!"

The memory associated with GeoCities was not all great though: after hosting my personal web site for 7+ years, it was lost all of a sudden and Yahoo couldn't bring it back. Not a big loss for me 'coz I left it outdated anyway. I had "outgrown" static web pages and spent most of my energy on 00zine.com those days.

Still, it is really sad to see it go. With such a brand name and large number of users, I just don't understand why Yahoo couldn't make a ton of money out of it. In fact, this is just one of many cases where Yahoo was unable to take advantage of its vast user base (those uses Yahoo mail, My Yahoo, Yahoo Answers......)

Musicians of the day: American Idol, classical edition

That's basically what the KDFC Classical Star Search is about. They are cutting down to 3 finalists in the 2 groups (adult and youth) Check out the videos of the 10 semifinalists in each group. All are so impressive that I have no idea who to vote for!

每週一噏：千人諾諾，不如一士諤諤

本文標題的意思，相信大家不難理解，諷刺的是，令筆者想到這標題的人和事，竟與之完全相反！所講的當然是上週提過的港大學生會長陳一諤為當權者六四暴行開脫，或者應說：一諤大言炎炎，不敵千人投票罷免！

平心而論，今次陳一諤成為眾矢之的，坊間的報導其實算不上客觀，不信的話且看看此博客轉載陳全部發言，不難發現傳媒的確有斷章取義之嫌，不過陳偏袒政府也是無庸置疑。

發生這件事亦非全無正面影響，首先，此事激發起一向政治冷感甚至對學生會也極冷淡的港大生不再沉默，而六四事件發生於二十年前，被淡忘也是無可避免，更遑論深入探討，這次風波倒令大家激辯一番，真相越辯越明，陳如果一心想偏幫政府恐怕是越幫越忙，難怪有人質疑陳並非官方欽點的打手！

[按：舊零零誌的冷飯已炒得七七八八，留下一些待將來適當時候再翻炒！取而代之的是每週一噏，靈感當然是來自不喜歡鬥噏的香港特首煲呔曾！]

Topic of the day: Arnold and the new Terminator

We might see Arnold "the Governator" Schwarzenegger in the next Terminator movie! He is not going to act in it. Instead, the movie studio will make a digital model of him and use that in the movie! Isn't that cool?

Terminator II is still my all-time favourite Sci-Fi movie (probably tied with the Matrix) However, when I watched it in the movie theater for the first time, I actually fell asleep! I think I watched it during Summer break. I forgot if it was because I had a jet lag or I stayed up all the night the night before (or both!) Those were the good 'ol days.

Book of the day: A Romance on Three Legs

Does the title remind you of "The Romance of the Three Kingdom"? Well, it's a complete different topic. See sub-title: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano

You might wonder how interesting a book could be if it is all about a particular piano. I am with you since I quit reading a somewhat similar book ("A Devil to Play," in which the author covered his personal experiences learning French horn, interspersed with history of the instrument. It would have made a good blog post but I think he drags on too much about the former. And his writing styles, which tends to jump around a lot, did not help.)

I have skimmed through this book at the bookstore and found it really interesting. The first chapter is your typical musician (Glenn Gould's) biography: what kind of genius and how weird he was. It gets more interesting starting the 2nd chapter, which is about the blind piano tuner Charles Verne Edquist, who worked with Gould on his "Perfect Piano." This piano was actually one that has been owned by the Eaton Department store in Toronto for a long time and played by many. Eaton was about to return it to Steinway and exchange for another one! I definitely want to find out more.

Game of the day: the 6th Ing Cup has a new winner!

The 24 year old Choi Cheol-han has defeated the former champ Lee Chang-ho in Game 4, coming back from losing the first game in the best-of-5 series. Ing Cup is the highest paid Go competition in the world (winner takes home US$400k)

Another interesting fact is that the losers of the past 2 tournaments (2000, 2004) all become winners next time. Is this an indication that Lee Chang-ho will win again in 2012 (after winning it in 2000)? On the other hand, there has not been a repeating winner in the short history of this tournament. Oh well, it will all make the 2012 Ing Cup even more interesting!

Tech of the day: no demand if Apple does not make it

The title pretty much sums up whatever Apple has to say when asked about new products on the market. I still remember Steve Jobs said that people didn't want to watch video on their portable player when everybody else is making such player except Apple. Of course he sang a different tune when Apple released the video iPod.

Apple's Tim Cook claimed that Apple is not going to make a netbook because iPhone and iPod Touch do a better job. Typical arrogance from Apple. And it just doesn't make much sense to me! Can you watch flash video on an iPhone/iPod Touch? No! Can you type at full speed on them? No! Watching streaming video and blogging are 2 of my top activities and I can't do them on my iPhone. There are some reasons that netbooks are selling like hotcakes. I gotta admit these days I leave my notebook at home while carrying the iPhone all the time but I am knowingly making a sacrifice.

Topic of the day: Susan Boyle, Oracle and the beauty of the web

The hottest topic in showbiz right now gotta be the Susan Boyle phenomenon while the hottest topic in tech biz is Oracle buying Sun. What do they have in common? Read on!

If you pay any attention to the news, you would know that Susan Boyle was a participant in a British talent contest. A YouTube video of her singing got amazingly popular (over 12 million hits!) You could read about people singing her praises almost every where! And not surprisingly, there are backlashes: tons of comments about her being overrated could also be found (and I am in this camp. For those who think it's her true talent (without good look) that leads her to her current success, I hate to burst the bubble: the brilliant one here is the producer of the show, who is so masterful at manipulating the audiences! She may have a nice voice, but it can't be THAT great.)

The beauty of the web is that you could find comments from every different angle. The same can be said about Oracle buying Sun too: I have read a lot of positive ("good fit") comments thinking as well as negative ones ("what are they thinking?") IMO, the most ridiculous one said Oracle wanted to be like Apple. Gimme a break! Surely Apple dominates the digital music market but they have a big mountain to climb in the computing market! I think Oracle is doing better than that already.

Well, this is the web and everyone is entitled to his/her opinion!

Tech of the day: Arch Linux full update trouble (Part II)

Remember I forced installation of Xorg in my last post? Turns out this new version (1.6) of Xorg is causing more trouble!

My X windows, which uses vboxvideo driver (from VirtualBox Guest Addition, aka GA), refused to start (from /var/log/Xorg.0.log):
(EE) module ABI major version (4) doesn't match the server's version (5)

This time the solution is a bit harder to find (under the responses to this post) but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: we need driver files that is compatible with verison 1.6 of Xorg. One source that include them gotta be the Guest Addition installer! Indeed, here is the command to tell the installer just dump the files to a target directory without installing:
sh VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run --noexec --target [directory name]

The target directory will contain vboxvideo_drv_16.so and vboxmouse_drv_16.so

Simply replace /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vboxvideo_drv.so and /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/vboxmouse_drv.so with the above. The driver versions won't mismatch anymore where X starts!

Tech of the day: VirtualBox shared folder

I run Linux on my XP box as a guest OS using VirtualBox and prefer to use the guest more than the host (XP.) Still, sometimes I need to move files between the guest and the host and VirtualBox's shared folder feature comes in handy. Here are the steps to set this up:
0) create the shared folder on your host (or skip this to use an existing one.)
Also create a mount point (a unix dir that will be mapped to the above) on the guest.
1) Choose the Shared Folder option from the Devices menu on your VirtualBox. Use the folder from (0) as "Folder Path" and enter a "Folder Name" you like.
2) install VirtualBox guest addition by:
- Choose the option from the Devices manual on your VirtualBox, which makes the guest addition installer available as a CD
- mount /media/cd (to mount the CD rom)
- cd /media/cd
- sh
- shutdown -r 0 (reboot)
3) mount -t vboxsf [the folder name from (1)] [the mount point from (0)]

Note: for some reason mount gives me "Protocol error" after I used it for sometime (I've performed a full-update, i.e., pacman -Syu, and move the files to a new PC in the mean time) The solution was to performed all of the above steps again.

Tech of the day: Arch Linux full update trouble

One thing I like about Arch is that it uses rolling release, i.e., components within the OS are updated and released continously, instead of having a fixed release like Ubuntu (BTW, I think Ubuntu drops support way too soon. Feisty was released on 19 April 2007 and support was ended on 19 October 2008! Now I have a completely unupdateable installation sitting on my workstation waiting to rot.)

And it could be done with 1 command: pacman -Syu

However, I tried updating just now and ran into this:
error: could not prepare transaction
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
xorg-server: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri.so exists in filesystem
xorg-server: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

The solution (courtesy of this Arch Linux forum post) is so simple:
pacman -Sf xorg-server

Then run pacman -Syu again.

每週冷飯: History Repeats Itself

摘自2002年:

筆者是一個超級金庸迷﹐不停地重覆閱讀金庸所有作品是我的「癖好」﹐最近又輪到第N次(N>10)重讀「鹿鼎記」這本筆者心目中金庸最出色的作品-- 皆因他成功地把實在的歷史和虛構的創作世界融成一體。不過每次重讀「鹿鼎記」﹐其中有些片段總是令筆者「慘不忍讀」﹐惻隱之心油然而生﹐最甚者莫過於吳之榮興起《明史》文字獄這一段。

可能對不少朋友而言﹐韋小寶的風流搞笑故事遠遠比《明史》文字獄一案印象深刻得多(某些所謂改編自「鹿鼎記」的電視劇索性把這一段完全省略﹐認真不知所謂。這些編劇難道以為自己的創作本事比金庸更高嗎﹖) 據筆者在網上查閱清朝歷史﹐《明史》一案真有其事﹕話說康熙年間小人吳之榮窮途末路之際﹐發現由富商莊家公子編輯的《明書輯略》多處用了前明的年號，於是到京師向權傾朝野的大臣鰲拜告狀﹐謀求升官發財。
『鰲拜以軍功而封公爵、做大官，向來歧視漢官和讀書人，掌握大權後便想辦几件大案，鎮懾人心，不但使漢人不敢興反叛之念，也令朝中敵黨不敢有甚麼異動，當即派出欽差，赴浙江查究。這一來，莊家全家固然逮入京中……在明史上列名的文學之士，無一不鋃鐺入獄。』
『最慘的是，所有雕版的刻工、印書的列工、裝釘的釘工，以及書賈、書鋪的主人、賣書的店員、買書的讀者，查明後盡皆處斬。據史書記載，其時蘇州滸墅關有一個李尚白，喜讀史書，聽說蘇州閶門書坊中有一部新刊的明史，內容很好，派一個工役去買。工役到時，書店主人外出，那工役便在在書鋪隔壁一家朱姓的老者家中坐著等候，等到店主回來，將書買回。李尚白讀了几卷，也不以為意。 過了几個月，案子發作，一直查究到各處販書買書之人。其時李尚白在北京公干，以購逆書之罪，在北京立即斬決。書店主人和奉命買書的工役斬首。連那隔壁姓朱老者也牽累，說他既知那人來購逆書，何以不即舉報，還讓他在家中閑坐？本應斬首，姑念年愈七十，免死，和妻子充軍邊遠之處。 』(節錄自金庸小說原文)

今日重讀這一段﹐感受尤其深刻﹗不知各位有否如筆者一樣立刻想起香港特區基本法第二十三條中的煽動叛亂及隱匿叛國罪﹖這些封建時代的不合理惡法竟然會在廿一世紀自詡文明先進的香港特區政府出現﹐又怎能不叫筆者慨嘆一句﹕"History repeats itself!"

不幸的是，此等惡法可能越來越有市場！
且看看兩則近期新聞：藝人成龍指香港及台灣太自由，所以變得很亂 ，認為「中國人是需要管的」。
較早前又有在港讀大學的內地生為當權者六四暴行開脫，居然有網民附和，指當年學生和市民參與六四乃係叛國及顛覆政府。
對於以上言論，已故偉大領導人鄧小平有一名句，我可以贈他們，那就是：「胡說八道」！

Topic of the day: Secession of Texas?

You might think this Russian Professor Igor Panarin was crazy when he talked about "The Texas Republic" (see my earlier post) Think again! Breaking news: Texas governor Rick Perry suggested that Texans might at some point get so fed up they would want to leave the union.

And if you are still not convinced, this idea does have its supporters (check out these comments) You might be surprised how much Texans are proud of their state. I'm not 'coz I used to live there.

Well, maybe next time Houston Astros (or Texas Rangers) play in the world series, it will indeed be a World series! (We haven't had one for a long time, after Toronto Blue Jays won it all in 92 & 93) Or maybe not (according to this, Texas does not have the right to secede.)

Tech of the day: Pidgin and Yahoo IM

What is not to like about Yahoo's Instant Messaging? The client! (a.k.a. Yahoo Messenger)

I use Pidgin, an open-source universal IM client, instead. In fact, I carry a Portable Pidgin on my thumb drive all the time!

However, it stopped working since a few days ago. Here is the solution (courtesy of the Ubuntu forum): Modify your Account setting in Pidgin, choose the Advanced tab and change the Pager Server to 66.163.181.173.

Topic of the day: YouTube Orchestra

Most people would agree one could find the worst in music on YouTube. Even people who could barely sing and make sound out of their instruments post their crap on it (including yours truly!)

However, no one could deny among all these crap there are still quite a few gems. I bet one of your friends must have sent you some links to some virtuosic performances that completely blows you away.

Apparently people in the music biz agree and utilize YouTube to discover talents. A YouTube Orchestra is formed by musicians who posted on YouTube and auditioned for a spot on the orchestra. And they just performed at the prestigous Carnegie Hall!

So, that's my motivation to put more craps on YouTube!

Topic of the day: race and political correctness

A famous Hong Kong columnist/talk show host got into trouble when he made a joke that involves Flipino recently (ironically, the column is named "Politically Incorrect"!) Well, he might feel better if he knows a Texas Representative, Betty Brown, has also made a politically incorrect comment regarding Asian and had to apologize: she suggested Asians living in US to change their names to more "Western sounding" ones so that it is easier for the voter registration office to process them.

For any person who has any familiarity with Asian culture, s/he will of course know that a lot of Asians are very proud of their heritage, of which their names are an integral part. However, I am gonna cut Brown some slacks, considering she is from a town in Texas where the closest metropolitan area (Dallas) is 1.5 hour of driving away. She probably hardly knows any Asian, let alone their culture. Of course, ignorance is not a permit for being naive. Let's just hope that she has learned her lesson and stop being a joke herself.

Tech of the day: What if AOL...

Once upon a time, AOL has its own proprietary software that allows its subscriber to access its own content, a "walled garden" if you will. And that's before the time Websites and web browsers became popular! AOL was hugely successful back then.

And of course today's AOL is nothing like that. It is no longer a walled garden. Anyone could visit AOL.com, which is just like any other internet portal (Yahoo, MSN, you name it) In fact, I couldn't tell what is special about AOL today. And according to an AOL old-timer, who supposed to have written this, this is exactly AOL's problem. He suggested AOL would have been better off if it has kept its walled garden. I am not sure if his strategy would work but I'm surprised to learn that AOL's client software still has 28.6 million users!

Star of the day: Nick Swisher

How did Swisher qualify as star of the day? First of all, he played in the game of the day (according to this Yahoo blog) Second, he pitched a scoreless inning and strucked out 1 batter but most importantly, he is an outfielder/first baseman!

I have been following Swisher's career since he started with Oakland Athletics and then traded to Chicago White Sox, both are teams that I root for! Glad to see that he did something that will guarantee him being mentioned in future trivia quizzes.

每週冷飯: 強權鎮壓公理的時代

摘自2002年11月1號:

筆者一向有一個天真的想法﹕就是隨著時代大輪轉動﹐人類會越來越文明--尊重生命價值以及人性自由。翻看歷史﹐自十八世紀啟蒙運動(The Enlightenment)以來﹐人類日漸重視個人的存在價值﹐崇尚自由民主的意識萌芽﹐尋求從封建時代被君主或宗教盲目支配中解放出來。

不幸的是﹐筆者的想法實在太一廂情願﹔事實上人類社會正在走回頭路﹗以往世界大戰前惡勢力抬頭的先兆都已出現﹕獨斷獨行的政府力圖擺脫人民監察﹐以籠統的民族主義掛帥﹐把所謂國家利益淩駕於人類基本權利之上﹔更嚴重者藉此侵略別國﹐危害世界和平。亦有宗教狂熱份子走火入魔﹐以聖戰為名亂施暴力﹐草菅人命。恐佈活動有如野草燒不盡﹐春風吹又生。

這些現象實在不容忽視。支持國家民族（以至宗教）驟耳聽來似乎是理直氣壯，但具體行為不能違反自由﹑和平等大原則，否則不論政府還是恐佈分子都是橫蠻無理。

愛自由﹑和平及公義的群眾力量不容小窺，例如當年印度聖雄甘地堅持以非武力的公民抗命方式成功爭取獨立﹐美國總統尼克遜因被傳媒揭發水門事件而下台﹔說明真理只有越辯越明﹐而真相越禁越禁不住。極權政府﹑極端分子應好好反省﹕任何高壓或暴力的行為最終只有失敗﹐開放的對話或談判才是解決問題的方法。

以下是出自曾為和平作出努力的神父Martin Niemoller 關於納粹黨的名句﹕
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't
a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a
Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up
for me."

活在這個動蕩的時代﹐我們還可以沉默下去嗎﹖

後記﹕我們學識淵博的保安局長(這希望不是國家機密)指民間某些反對香港政府基本法二十三條立法諮詢文件的意見太情緒化﹐不值得深入研究云云﹐令筆者想起 George Orwell名著《動物農莊》(Animal Farm)中的一句話'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others'此話葉太以前曾經引用來批評傳媒﹐何其諷刺﹗

該文出版後不久保安局長葉太亦因二十三條立法為政府"食死貓"下台﹐六年後(2008)捲土重來﹐竟成為監察政府的尊貴議員﹗最近批評入境處優待權貴亦毫不手軟。只是有中央作後台的葉太是否小駡大幫忙，還是未知之數。

更令筆者灰心的是以支持國家及宗教為藉口的惡勢力好像變本加厲：由內地到港成為大學生會長的竟然全無血性地為政府開脫血腥鎮壓的罪行，宗教團體在加州亦成功推動通過剝奪同性戀人士結婚權利的法案。筆者還是這一句：不能沉默下去!

Tech of the day: dotcom business models

Remember back in the hay day of the dotcom bubble (around 1999) if you build a website that could attract eyeballs, you could get rich? Well, it turns out it's still necessary to have a business model!

This article analyzes and breaks down all the existing models out there. Quite an interesting read. Not surprisingly, most websites out there still rely on ad dollars. I guess one could say it's no different from the dotcom bubble era. Just that the web ad market is more mature, especially after Google emerged.

Animal of the day: House Swift

This is another post about bird after I wrote about Hawaiian Petrel a few months ago. And I learned about House Swift because the Chinese University of Hong Kong has a construction project that requires to take down old nests of these birds so they are building new ones as replacements.

The interesting thing about House Swift (according to Wikipedia) is that it never settles on the ground. I started getting confused since its name means "without feet" (even this Mingpao article uses that phrase in the title!) but that is not a factual description! It does have feet.

Furthermore, does house swift indeed flies in the air all the time (again, that's what the Mingpao article and this implies)?The latter is conflicting about this. First it mentioned:

Swifts ... roosting only at night

Then it said:

Swifts can't perch because their feet are small and weak.

Well, I guess it does rest in its nest after all. Otherwise there is no need to build replacements for them.

Topic of the day: 10 years ago

Microsoft sent me an e-mail thanking me for using Hotmail for 10 years. (Isn't it amazing that I stick with them for that long?)

Well, the funny thing about that e-mail is that it mentioned "back around the time I started using Hotmail":
- Windows 98 was the hot new operation system!
- Titanic broke every box-office record imaginable.
- The Spice Girls were rocking stadiums from London to LA!

Do you still remember? I surely don't.

Oh yeah, I was 10 years younger then. :(

Topic of the day: What's wrong with America?

There were 8 mass murders in 4 weeks that took 50+ lives. That is very very wrong with this society.

Is gun control the answer? I am not sure. After all, this type of things do not happen in other "gun free" countries as often.

It might have to do with the illusion of so-called "American dream": people work hard and could do better than their previous generation here. Look at people around you and me. We are all afraid of losing our jobs (and the house and our kids' education that depend on them) This expectation is just too high. Nothing could keep improving forever. Sometimes it gets better. Sometimes it gets worse! For one thing, I don't think I could do better than my parents. Will my kids do better than me? Surely I hope so but it will be a challenge. When such a high expectation is not met, I could see some people become depressed and think of themselves as failure.

Maybe it's time to rethink and try not to reinforce the illusion.

Commercials of the day: Jazz trumpeter vs square pants

The 1st one is a Crown Royal commercial. The story line is about an old jazz trumpeter found a talented young musician on the street who also play jazz trumpet and reminded him how he got started. So he brought the young guy in the jazz club and jam with him.


Find more videos like this on AdGabber


I think it's a nicely done commercial (I'm biased though 'coz I love jazz) and suits Crown Royal's image perfectly.

I am not as certain about the 2nd one. It's for promoting Burger King's kids meal. Remember the controversial song "Baby got back" (was condemned for treating women as sex objects)? The lyric was rewritten to talk about square pants (as in the hit cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants) And in one scene the "king" was measuring the "back" or the pants of the chicks. I'm pretty sure it would draw criticisms and I indeed found some.



I could understand people who know about "Baby Got Back" would find this offensive and worry about sending kids wrong messages (women being sex objects) but I doubt kids would get that message at all.

Star of the day: Ken Griffey Jr.

The sporting event of the day is supposed to be the NCAA Basketball championship but I couldn't care less. I care more about baseball's opening day (it was opening night yesterday) Even though he is not on my team, I gotta give it to Griffey, for hitting a homer on his first day back as a Seattle Mariner. Junior: you are THE man!

每週冷飯:戰爭啟示錄

以下摘自2002年5月1號:

自從美蘇冷戰結束﹐除了生活在依然戰火連綿的個別地區的民眾﹐世人大都鬆了一口氣﹐以為戰爭的威脅不再存在﹔不過去年「九一一事件」卻把這個和平的假象狠狠的撕破﹐令我們不得不重新面對現今世界種種隱藏的危機。

事實上現今世界各地都埋藏著隨時可被宗教﹑種族以至政治理念衝突「引爆」的「火藥庫」﹐以巴(Israel and Palestine)﹑印巴(India and Pakistan)﹑波斯尼亞(Bosnia)等地的戰火皆由宗教以及種族分岐所引發﹐這些僅是全球「火藥庫」的冰山一角而已﹔更令筆者憂慮的是一股潛力巨大的極右化暗湧。

相信對歷史略知一二的朋友都知道在二次世界大戰前夕﹐全世界各地民眾皆面對不同程度的經濟困境﹐把責任推到新移民的排外思想﹐和以對外擴張勢力為解決辦法﹐在這種情況下最有市場。回顧第二次世界大戰前﹐德國納粹(Nazi)政權以及日本軍國政權皆以類似歪理取得國民支持。

不幸而且可怕的是﹐近日類似的思想在世界不少地方皆有借屍--全球經濟不景--還魂的跡象﹕日本首相小泉純一郎企圖藉著參拜供奉包括第二次大戰甲級戰犯在內的靖國神社提高支持率﹔法國極右翼政黨國民陣線黨魁勒龐(Le Pen)以主張排外打入總統選舉第二輪﹔奧地利公開讚揚納粹主義的自由黨在兩年前的大選中獲兩成七選
票﹔香港政府為阻止港人在內地所生子女移入製造危言慫聽的言論。他們都成功地挑動社會某些對現狀不滿﹑對前途不明階層的人士的情緒以取得支持﹐由這股極右化力量可能引發的全球戰爭危機實在不容忽視。

面對這些危機﹐作為無權無勢的小市民到底可以做些甚麼﹖我認為個人力量雖然微弱﹐但我們可以不平則鳴﹑口誅筆伐﹐向惡勢力說不﹐不作沉默或盲目的羔羊﹐以理性打倒成見﹐挺身而出捍衛公義﹕例如日本老兵篠塚良雄親身指證日軍七三一部隊當年侵華的暴行﹔法國三十萬名學生舉行示威聲討勒龐﹔ 耶路撒冷「希望之花學校(Hope Flowers School」藉著教導一班猶太以及阿拉伯學童合作種菜而播下和平種子等等﹐他們的做法均值得借鏡。筆者深信只要大家用心用力﹐我們還是有踏出戰爭陰影的希望。

七年後的今天﹐以上所述的「火藥庫」完全沒有降溫﹐世界只有變得更加不和平﹐
實在教人灰心﹐無論如何﹐筆者堅持繼續以一支筆桿捍衛公義﹐不會向惡勢力低頭。

Eat of the day: Midnight truffle vs Chocolate Extreme Blizzard

If I have to pick an all time favorite dessert, it's gotta be Blizzard from Dairy Queen. And if I have to pick 1 flavor, it would be chocolate extreme (with brownie pieces, chocolate fudge......) Still, I have been looking forward to new flavors for a while. And I found it this week: a brand new flavor called "Midnight truffle." The funny thing is the poster of "Midnight truffle" looks very similar to chocolate extreme. I studied the ingredient carefully and it turns out the difference is the former has truffle while the latter has brownie. The rest is basically the same. And the winner is...... Midnight truffle!

Musician of the day: Tomonori Nishimura

I was looking for the music of the popular new age pianist Yukie Nishimura and ended up finding this album
Fritilaria
by Tomonori Nishimura. Interestingly this is also new age but at the other end of the spectrum, compared to Yukie's music.

I cannot find any info by Googling his name though. If you know more about this artist, please comment.

Tech of the day: FLAC and MP3FS

The company who owns the patents of MP3 is pushing a new format, MP3HD, which combines both losslessly compressed audio and the original (lossy) MP3 in a single file for backward compatibility (the lossy part is playable on all existing MP3 players) This idea was bashed heavily by Slashdotters. And they mentioned a very interesting alternative: rip your music to the lossless (and open source) FLAC format. Then mount the directory using MP3FS. The files will be "seen" as MP3 (transcoding is performed on the fly whenever the files are accessed) so they could be transferred to devices that could only play MP3. And you could play the FLAC files directly through applications like Foobar2000. No double-ripping and wasted storage!

Topic of the day: how to suppress freedom of speech effectively?

Learn the Hong Kong way: tell the protesters they won't get hired.

Here is the background: Hong Kong government is planning to subsidize companies to hire new HK college grads as interns. The monthly salary will be HK$4000 (~US$516.) This has caused an outrage in the college community because it artificially surpress the wages to a unreasonable level (I made HK$4000 per month as an intern 15 years ago. Does the government think there is no inflation for the last 15 years?) Some students are organising protests because they think the government is only doing this to drive down unemployment and make the officials look good. They would be better off without it.

Hong Kong legislator Priscilla Leung has made some comments about this (link to video in Cantonese) and drew heavy criticism by some HK bloggers. Those blog posts were titled "Leung says protesters won't get hired." Well, the whole context was that Leung worked in a college and was told by business owners not to recommend students who were protesting to them. So, it's not her who suggested to businesses not to hire protesters. Still, she did mention she was against the protests. She indeed suggsted students to accept the low wages for now and expect better things in the future.

BTW, Leung was backed by a church who was (in)famous for its anti-homosexual stance and in return she was against a proposed domestic violence victim protection law to include homosexuals.

Music of the day: Taranta, Estudio

I have not listen to much music during my trip. So of course I have to make up now that I'm back. Found this gem by the previously mentioned Lenny Breau in which you could hear clearly his classical influences:
Taranta.

While in the mood of classical, here is another beautiful track, written by Tarrega and performed by Liona Boyd:
Estudio in E. And it is easy enough that even I could play it (the TAB could be found in Fifty Easy Classical Guitar Solos)

Game of the week: Hong Kong Sevens

It was actually held last weekend and it is the biggest sports event in Hong Kong every year, which is interesting because rugby (or the seven men version of it) is far from the most popular sports in Hong Kong (that honor belongs to soccer) I think it does have its appeal: what other team sports tournaments that feature teams from 24 country could complete in a weekend?

Most importantly, Hong Kong won 2 big matches (against Portugal and Tonga, which was the eventual silver plate winner!) and was the only Asian team that qualified to play for the silver plate. (The top 8 of 24 teams played for the highest honor, silver cup, while the bottom 8 played for the silver bowl)

每週冷飯﹕安樂主義

摘自01年12月15號﹕

早一陣子從朋友處學到「安樂醒」這個新名詞﹕即是早上不用鬧鐘﹐順其自然地起床的意思。靈光一閃﹐覺得這種態度其實可在日常生活很多方面派上用場﹐為了實踐這個想法﹐筆者數月前和友人到加洲優山美地(Yosemite)搞了一個「安樂Camp」﹐包括以下活動﹕安樂行山(不設定任何目的地﹐略為疲倦立即折返)﹔安樂食(任意進食﹐隨時加料)﹔安樂飲(各適其式﹐可醉可不醉)﹔當然還有安樂醒﹐因為基本上整個行程並無特定節目﹐因此全無時間限制。至於安樂駕駛﹑隨意停車更不在話下﹗

想深一層﹐「安樂主義」其實是和中國道家傳統一脈相承﹕無求﹑無為﹐在充滿矛盾和節奏急迫的現代社會﹐這個不失為一個取得平衡的生活態度﹐從個人層面可令人心平氣和﹐從社會層面更可能達致世界和平﹗各位朋友﹐不妨一試﹗

當年順其自然的生活實在令現在有兒有女的筆者感慨良多﹐所謂此一時彼一時﹕
1) 行山不可能設定任何目的地﹐小朋友略為疲倦立即折返。
2) 不能任意進食﹐小朋友食飽方為大前題。
3) 飲酒不可醉﹐否則無人照顧小朋友。
4) 早上不用鬧鐘﹐視乎小朋友何時要起床。
5) 開長途車必須將就小朋友的如廁時間表而停車。

想深一層﹐現在以安樂來形容生活倒是貼切﹐此樂不同彼樂﹐乃係天倫之樂也。

Magazine of the day: Audiophile (Hong Kong)

If there is such thing as audio equipment news junkie, I would be one. Even though I rarely buy any equipment, I just love reading the reviews or even the advertisements! Those gears always look interesting to me. One of my favourite magazine is Audiophile from Hong Kong. Most of the gears are so exotic (and not to mention, expensive) that I'll never own one. However, the March 2009 issue is an exception: it has a special on complete systems that are under HK$30k (~US$4k) Definitely a good read. I could see 2 trends in this mag:
1) more and more coverage of brands from China. After all, they make affordable gears and they know the taste of audiophiles in Hong Kong and China well.
2) even though most of the systems are still being used with CD players, some are taking PC/iPod into account. And I believe that is the future.

Topic of the day: future of music

I came across two music related stories on Slashdot:
1) An Israeli guy named Kutiman has created an album (or project if you will) named ThruYOU where all songs/videos are remixes of videos from YouTube. Here is one of his video:


2) 17 million people stopped buying CDs in 2008. Well, I am not one of them. I have bought less than 10 since 2005 when I started using Rhapsody. (Before that I used to buy ~1 every week) In any case, no one should be surprised since it is so much more convenient to buy from online stores like iTunes or just listen to highly personalizable streaming like Pandora or Last.fm.

What's more interesting is that there is a common theme in the responses to these stories: music these days sucks. (Someone even posted an audio file which contains 2 songs from Nickelback and they sound almost the same musically. Will talk more about this when I get a chance) And of course there are rebuttals, and they do have some points:
1) most people are "attached" to the music that they grew up with and thus dislike newer music.
2) even musicians that do not keep "pushing the envelope" can make good music. And I totally agree. The best example could be found in blues: a lot of blues musicians are still following the same "formula" that is almost 100 years old but as long as listeners could emotionally connect to them, they are good music. Music can be good for many different reasons.

Topic of the day: cheering for the team that beat yours

Cheering for the team that beat yours is true sportsmanship. Supporting them financially? That's yet another level higher! Here is the story: McClymonds High School from Oakland beat Monte Vista from Danville and advanced to the state championship, which is held in Sacremento (~2 hours away). Due to lack of funding, the team was not able to get there one day in advance and stay at a hotel overnight before the championship game.

Now this is the heartwarming part: People familiar with the area would know Danville is an affluent community. A Monte Vista parent heard about this and wanted to help so he organized fund raising and got enough money to cover McClymonds' cost of accommodation. And they also wanted to do it anonymously.

The story didn't end here though: Oakland's school district learned about this and asked McClymonds to return the money because the district do have enough money for that and would pay instead. Whether this has to do with saving face or not is up to your interpretation. Nevertheless, it is a happy ending.

Music of the day: Revelation by Joe Satriani

This song was voted by Guitar Player's reader as the "Best guitar solo on an album released in 2008." If you think about it, there are tons of guitar solo from albums released in 2008, it is really a honor to win that award. And if you listen to that track, you will know why. I guess the more appropriate description would have been best guitar instrumental track. It is vintage Satch: great melody and full of energy yet sounded fresh enough to differentiate from his old stuff.

BTW, the rest of the awards are not as interesting: so many repeat winners. For example, Pat Metheny and Joe Bonamasa won both 2008 and 2009 in the jazz and blues category, respectively.

Topic of the day: AIG bonuses

As a taxpayer myself, there is no way for me to be happy about AIG employees receiving big bonuses even though the company needed taxpayer's money to bail it out. On the other hand, I have my reservation about the way politicians are dealing with this.

First of all, some politicians are just exploiting this to earn more votes at the next election. Don't be fooled by them.

Secondly, AIG defended by saying some bonuses were given because of contractual obligations so some politicians are suggesting to pass law to invalidate those contracts. IMO it is dangerous considering it is done retroactively. Imagine your own contract with your employer. Is it OK to change the terms without your consent? You probably don't think so. Of course, this is just my layman's way of looking at contracts. A lot of legal experts think otherwise. And they do have a point. After all, aren't insurance companies the best at making use of the fineprints in order NOT to honor contracts? Our government lawyer might be able to do the same thing!

I remember President Obama had problems with bonuses given to employees of Wall Street firms earlier as well. And I disagree at that time too. Bonuses being a substantial part of the compensation was the culture of Wall Street. I felt quite personal about it because when I worked there, my guaranteed bonus was ~20% of my salary. That was the reason why I would accept the lower salary. Can you imagine being denied that much of your total compensation?

Topic of the day: some people are (too) sensitive

Here is the story: a guy who works for a PR firm was visiting his client Fedex in Memphis. Regarding the city, he posted this via Twitter:

True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say I would die if I had to live here!

Then someone from Fedex learned about this and wrote a letter to his higher-up at Fedex to complain about this Tweet.

I think I won't be too happy if someone thinks my home town sucks but I won't react this way either. Seems too sensitive to me. This blogger seems to agree. Of course you would hear a lot of comments about being careful with what you tweet but this blogger has a good explanation: it is easy to take Tweet out of context.

Maybe I have offended some Fedex-er by writing this post already. Ooops.

每週冷飯﹕想做百萬富翁嗎﹖

摘自01年7月1號﹕

"Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"在美國推出以來收視一直高踞不下﹐最近新登陸香港亦掀起一陣熱潮﹐實有橫掃千軍之勢﹐歸根究底﹐都是金錢的誘惑吧﹗

上星期加州彩票累積獎金再創新高﹐達一億四千萬美元﹐頓時成為城中熱門話題﹐人人大發富翁夢﹐結果由一位已退休的聖荷西居民一票獨得﹗認真幸運﹗

讀了蘇師父的「厄運、好運與自我實踐預言 」一文﹐不禁莞薾。其實筆者除了贊成「自我實踐預言(Self-fulfilling prophecy)論」之外﹐還贊成「人生零和論」﹕每個人一生的大大小小厄運和好運的際遇加起來大致互相抵消﹐佔別人多少便宜也會被別人佔回多少便宜。

有人也許會問﹕「我一向倒霉﹐怎算零和﹖」又會說﹕「某某如此富有﹐相信沒有多少行厄運的日子吧﹗」其實這個正反映人們只會記得自己吃虧之事﹐卻忘掉自己佔便宜之時﹔相反地﹐對別人則只看到風光的一面﹐忽視其風光背後的辛酸。最近香港金融管理局長任志剛先生接受訪問﹐其年薪雖達九百萬港元(一美元等於七點八
港元)﹐但他表示他不是一個快樂的人。又記得年前美國某電視台做了一個探討彩票巨獎得獎人的特輯﹐發現好幾位得獎人中獎後生活並不好過﹕或者是不懂得處理突如其來的財富而走上頹廢荒唐自毀之路﹐或者是引來一大堆對其身家垂涎的親朋戚友﹐以至終日提心吊膽﹐需要隱性埋名斷六親。「塞翁得馬﹐焉知非禍﹖」

各位朋友﹐如果能抱持「零和論」這種態度面對人生﹐遇到不如意的事情也不用忿忿不平﹐因為將來會有好運的事來抵消嘛﹐我想這樣會活得快樂一點。

現在看來這個所謂「零和論」難免有點阿Q﹐尤其是在當今金融海嘯下破財或失業的人士﹐恐怕不易如此豁達。至於不快樂的任局長﹐在今年退下的消息甚囂塵土﹐不知會否因此更快樂﹖而"Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"再度成為話題﹐皆因奧斯卡得獎電影Slumdog Millionaire正是以這個遊戲的印度版為題材。

Tech of the day: to become a salesperson, learn photoshop first

According to LAPTOP magazine, some office depot employees confessed that they would take the original price tag of a clearance item (e.g. laptop), photoshop it to a higher price with the difference being the price of extended warranty and present the modified price tag to shopper pretending they are throwing in the extended warranty for free.

Why would they do it? Well, the margin on laptops are very low while that of extended warranty are very high. I personally had horrible experience with extended warranty sold by another store. And it's quite typical: first you have to go through phone support that put you on hold. Then the phone support will ask you to do numerous meaningless steps, in my case, including reinstalling the OS! Finally hopefully they would agree to have you mail in the laptop for repair. The repair work done on my laptop was just lousy. I can't imagine it is done by a highly paid technician who took his time to complete the work. Since that experience I decided I would only buy extended warranty from the manufacturers directly. In fact, the one provided by Apple is so good that it is one of the reasons I recommend Apple to my friends who are not computer hobbyists.

BTW, there is another article about sales lying to customers that items were out-of-stock if they refused to buy extended warranty. And one advice by that magazine is: customers could lie and said they want the warranty so that the salesperson would take the goods to the register. Then cancel the warranty last minute before they pay. Isn't it sad?

Topic of the day: Pope's take on condom and AIDS

I guess no one could deny Pope Benedict is a lightning rod: his recent take, condom not being the solution to the AIDS problem in Africa, has caused yet another controversy. The WHO certainly disagree.

I do think the media has exaggerated a bit. It is no different from what the Vatican has always been preaching: not having sex is a better way to avoid AIDS.

No doubt about that. The problem is: most human are merely mortal and could not resist temptation even if they want to! So it is still better to promote and get people to use condom than not.

Topic of the day: President Obama and his NCAA tourney picks

Not sure if Mr. Obama is the first President who goes public with his picks but the first thing that come to my mind is: how would the religious/conservative groups react to this? Will they accuse him of promoting gambling? Don't get me wrong: there is nothing more popular than picking the NCAA tourney bracket for sports fan, especially for a basketball fan like Mr. Obama. I can't wait to see how good his picks are!

Topic of the day: Kong Girls

Today I'm writing yet another topic about internet culture. Kong is a popular shorthand in Hong Kong for, well, obviously, Hong Kong! However, Kong Girls doesn't refer to Hong Kong girls in general. Instead, it refers to a class of Hong Kong girls with some common (and bad) characters/habits, e.g. greedy, brand name worshiping, over-aggressively dieting. self-centered....... Check out this special report video:



It brings back some good memory of mine! Around 8 years ago a bunch of unmarried guy friends and myself formed a group and it all started with conversations about bad experiences with Kong girls!

Topic of the day: Grass-Mud Horse vs River Crab

This is a recently created "legend" from China and it is quickly spreading in the Chinese online community (and out of it too) in a viral fashion. Earlier this year there was a campaign to censor content deemed indecent on the internet, which was criticized as an act to suppress free speech. The story was created as a challenge to the authority: can they censor an innocent sounding story like this? In Chinese, grass-mud horse sounds like the famous F-word while river crab sounds like harmony. It's not hard to see what the story actually mean beneath the surface. The term harmony is misused in China. It's more like intolerance to differences in opinions. Check out the video below. The lyric is explained in great details.

Game of the day: Cuba vs Mexico

You all know that I am a huge baseball and football fan (you could tell by the hats I wear) I always feel empty between Superbowl and the opening day of the baseball season! Not this year though 'coz we have World Baseball Classic. There are not many MLBer on these 2 teams but it was still fun to watch. What worries me the most was the attendance seems quite low. I hope they will still play in 4 years.

每週冷飯﹕龍的傳人﹐來點創意好嗎﹖

摘自01年6月1號﹕

最近在香港見報最多的相信非那條值九百萬的飛龍莫屬﹐依小弟愚見﹐這個設計和本港近年種種"娘炳"(香港俗語﹕即土氣十足)徽號比較起來﹐其實不算太差勁 ﹐其中暗藏香港兩字甚具智慧。不過概念上則太封建﹕自古以來龍乃係君主專用的徽號﹐象徵著帝皇的權力﹐以此為香港的標記﹐莫非想表示香港會倒退回極權統治的時代﹖

這邊廂官方努力保存中國傳統﹐那邊廂傳媒卻並無合作之意﹐報章﹑雜誌以至電視台繼續不遺餘力地「輸入」日本漢字﹐近期的熱門是「女優」。明明中文詞彙中有「女藝人」一詞卻棄之不用﹐難道用日本漢字就顯得夠「in」嗎﹖實在令人費解。而該電視台女藝人比賽節目所採用的橋段就更加不堪入目﹐都是抄襲自台灣那些抄
日本的節目。香港的電視人﹕來點創意好嗎﹖

講開抄橋﹐電視台抄完日本還未夠﹐又抄美國的"Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"據報導香港版沉悶不堪﹐絕不如美國版的緊張刺激﹑扣人心弦。其實美國的真人Show"Survivor"也是抄自外國﹐但抄得相當成功。香港人則連抄的功力也未到家﹗嗚呼﹗

早一陣子報紙刊登了一個創造力調查﹐發現香港兒童創造力明顯落後﹐有人歸咎於香港教育太著重「死背書」﹐筆者認為教育制度的確有問題﹐不過背書並非主因。我覺得香港學習的環境是要學生全盤接受老師所教的一切﹐絕不鼓勵學生提出疑問﹐或尋求其他解決問題的辦法﹐這才是最大的問題。此外﹐友人提出香港忽視藝文方
面的教育﹐亦減少了啟發學生創意的機會。

不知道香港各位官大人有沒有打算提出任何善策﹖如果情形再不改善﹐大家將會被未來的電視節目悶死﹗這個問題似乎比人人有自置居所更為迫切 >:)

最近電視人質素又成為香港熱門話題﹕亞洲電視引入張永霖及王維基一對孖寶﹐又旋即送走滿口改革的王維基﹐鬧劇過後雖有新股東注資﹐長遠止血仍未見有何辦法﹐始終還是要改善節目質素﹐提升收視方能達致收支平衡﹔無線一台獨大﹐進取心成疑問﹐亦非市民之福﹐故坊間有論者要求亞視交還牌照﹐讓有能者重新開台﹐也不是無的放矢。

總括而言﹐今時今日香港電視人創意依然欠奉﹐而香港有否倒退回極權統治的時代﹐大家亦心知肚明。

Musician of the day: Lenny Breau

FM 91.1 (KCSM) is a SF Bay area jazz station and it is the top radio station in my car. FM 91.1 in Toronto also plays jazz and thus became my top radio station there! I listened to their show Jazzology when I was driving. That is a very interesting show: the host interviewed a guest, who is a jazz guitarist from Newfoundland studying at York University. They discussed the music they like and the approaches taken by those musicians. They also took the time to explain concepts like comping and II-V-I progression in layman's terms.

And I "discovered" a versatile Canadian guitarist named Lenny Breau. His approach to harmony was compared to pianist Bill Evans. The track they played came from Live At Bourbon St They also mentioned he played other styles like country and flamenco. I wonder how his flamenco playing sounds like!

Musician of the day: Matthew Applegate

Applegate is not your typical "electronic musician." He is creating new music at the National Museum of Computing in UK, using vintage computers, some dated back to World War II! Check out this video.

Topic of the day: commitment to blogging

I have not missed a day ever since this blog was started late last year but I am facing the biggest challenge so far: I'll be traveling. I am going to write whenever I can and upload whenever I get an internet connection. According to my buddy, Wifi is almost everywhere these days. I know it's hard to commit to writing when I don't even know if anyone is reading other than myself!

Topic of the day: story of another irresponsible mom

I think I have blogged too much about the mom of the octuplets already. More on her later. Breaking news from Hong Kong: a 14 year old kid is pregnant and photo-blogging herself. Her posts drew a ton of criticisms: some thought such act encourages more young girls get pregnant. On the other hand, some praised her being brave.

If you have been following this blog, you know I hate to sound like a close-minded conservative but I do have 2 problems with her thinking:
1) she claimed that the father of the baby as well as her parents urged her not to have the baby and that's a reason she's keeping it. Almost any reason is a better reason than that!
2) she didn't worry about not being able to take care of the baby when s/he is born because she could give him/her away. Again, giving away your baby should never be part of the plan!

Regarding the octo-mom, please please please follow her "blog" and videos. I am hoping the ad revenue generated will result in more companies sponsoring her and makes her less dependent on taxpayers like us!

Topic of the day: Stem cell funding ban lifted

What President Obama did was a no brainer: impeding scientific/medical advancement because of religious belief is simply ridiculous. Of course, there are always naysayers from the religious right. And some of them did raise an interesting question (see the comments on SFGate): when it was banned 8 years ago, the stem-cell research community in US has moaned about US would be lagging behind countries without such restrictions. So, what exactly have these country done in the last 8 years? According to those responded: progress has been made in Europe using cloning for liver tissue regeneration. One major advance in France was they were able to show that embryonic stem cells can regenerate heart tissue and other types of stem cells cannot. Well, it is time for US to catch up.

Tech of the day: the strength of DRM

For those not familiar with the term, DRM (digital right management) is what digital content provider put on their files to limit how users could use the contents. For example, the music files you bought from iTunes Store has DRM to make sure (a) you could only play it on Apple's devices and (b) you can't play it on more than 5 computers. Another example is eBook you checked out from libraries. The DRM on it make sure you can't keep the book forever (just like "physical" books)

DRM involves encryption for sure. Otherwise users could easily "edit out" the unwanted bits in the files and remove the DRM! And conventional wisdom related to encryption is that the stronger the better. When one encryption is scheme is broken, it is always replaced by yet another stronger one. One would logically think that applies to DRM too. However, I came across this comment on Slashdot that makes a lot of sense: the strength of protection is related to the values of the things it protects. It's all about opportunity cost. Petty cash doesn't need a million dollar safe. Likewise, DRM only needs to be strong enough so that enough users are not bother to remove them. After all, the contents are not that valuable. iTunes' DRM and Microsoft's "Plays for sure" DRM have all been broken before and those companies didn't seem to worry about that too much. (They did try fixing them but it has been a cat-and-mouse game) A lot of their users won't bother to use the tools to remove the DRM anyway.

BTW, the comment is a response to the story that a website hosting code that breaks Adobe's ADEPT DRM (a technology used by libraries) have been taken down.

每週冷飯﹕衝出亞洲﹐挑戰世界

摘自01年5月1號﹕

記得十多年前有人預言太平洋世紀即將來臨﹐不過隨著九十年代初日本經濟陷入衰退﹐以及九十年代末亞洲金融風暴﹐太平洋世紀的來臨似乎遙遙無期。

其實﹐雖然亞太區目前經濟方面實力如何尚需拭目以待﹐但在藝文界以至體育界方面的成績經已有目共睹﹐不少亞洲人經已成功打入以往由歐美人士壟斷的市場。

最明顯的例子莫過於荷李活電影圈﹐李安及其電影「臥虎藏龍」勇奪數項奧斯卡獎﹐反映其地位已被美國主流影壇所肯定。至於音樂界﹐日本指揮家小澤征爾(Seiji Ozawa)早於一九七三年起成為著名的波士頓交響樂團音樂總監﹐中國作曲家譚盾相信亦會因為「臥虎藏龍」配樂而更上一層樓。

今時今日的亞洲人不但能文﹐而且能武﹗早幾年日本棒球投手野茂英雄(Hideo Nomo)轉投美國職棒﹐掀起過一陣旋風﹐最近雖然沉寂下來﹐上月又投出一場No-hitter(即全場無人自其手中成功擊球上壘)﹐這已是他旅美生涯第二次作出如此難得的演出(不少成名投手一生從未投過一場No-hitter)。來自韓國的投手朴贊浩(Chan Ho Park)亦取得相當不俗的成績﹐現今是洛杉機隊的中堅分子。美國職棒最新的旋風則是今季才由日本轉投的外野手(Outfielder)鈴木一郎(Ichiro Suzuki)﹐此君是日本太平洋聯盟連續七年的冠軍打擊手﹗至於足球界﹐一九九九年楊晨加入德國法蘭克福足球隊﹐成為首位打德國甲組聯賽的中國人。目前在意大利的日本球星中田英壽更是公認的好波之人。此外﹐今年初王治郅成為首位進軍美國職業籃球(NBA)的中國人﹐而韓國女高爾夫球手朴世莉(Si-Ri Pak)則是美國女子職業高爾夫球界的前列分子。他們的成績實在令人鼓舞。

八年時間匆匆過去﹐全球經濟現正經歷一場破壞力比亞洲金融風暴厲害得多的金融海嘯﹐相對而言﹐日本"爛船"何止三分釘﹗中國更被視為救星﹐早已衝出亞洲。對筆者更有趣的反而是玩一次Where are they now?問答遊戲﹐藝術界生涯較長﹐以上諸君仍然活躍﹔體壇則較為殘酷﹐目前仍在高峰者僅鈴木一郎一人矣﹗(朴世莉於07年成為高爾夫球名人堂一員﹐可算功德完滿﹐如今比賽只是錦上添花)不過江山代有人材出﹐最新一期奧斯卡獎得主就有由印度人執導﹑主演的Slumdog Millionaire。至於音樂界﹐朗朗及李雲迪已是古典家一線的演奏家。體壇方面﹐投手王建民是紐約洋基隊的主將﹐中場姚明更是全美職業籃球最佳球員之一。只有足球較為遜色﹐歐洲四大聯賽僅得效力曼聯的朴智星比較搶鏡。

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﹗

Tech of the day: EU demands MS to offer other browsers

As you all know, if you install Windows on a computer, IE comes with it. A lot of people think that is monopolistic behavior, including EU. EU thinks Microsoft should offer the user choices of other browsers in addition to IE. I doubt it is practical. What choices should Microsoft provide? Must it include every browser that exists in the world? If I write a browser that nobody use and Microsoft did not include it, can I sue them? It just does not make a lot of sense.

Also, some people suggests Microsoft should provide Windows without any browser. Well, given such a Windows installation, how does the user go about downloading the browser of his/her choice? After all, even though I seldom use IE, it used to be among the first applications I executed on new computers just so I could download Firefox! (Nowadays I always bring Portable Chrome with me on my flash drive so I don't need to do that anymore)

Topic of the day: luck, fame and career

My last post about Marc Copland, who IMHO is underrated as a jazz pianist, got me thinking: why wasn't he as well-known as Chick Corea or Brad Mehldau? To me, his music is certainly as enjoyable, if not more than, the above I mentioned. I don't really have an explanation.

Perhaps that's what showbiz is like. If you want to be famous, you gotta be savvy, be aggressive to market yourself. Then you can have the companies with big budget to market you. After all, there are tons of pop singers who sing better and look better than those "American Idols" yet no one knows about them.

Then there is the comparison with competitive sports, which seems more fair, isn't it? If you have the same level of talent as Lebron James, Lionel Messi, Tiger Woods or Lee Sedol, you would have been discovered by scouts in your sports or have won many amateur tournaments and be able to "make it." In fact, I doubt you could find a golf player as good as Tiger or Go player as good as Lee yet no one knows about them.

Then I gave it some more thought: what about the "luck" factor? If Drew Bledsoe was not injured in 2001, will Tom Brady's potential ever be discovered? He might have got bored sitting on the bench, quit NFL and become a successful business exec! (he majored in Organizational Studies at Michigan) You never know... If Go Seigen was not injured in that motorcycle accident, he might have won some major titles. (It's not like not having won any major titles diminished his accomplishment as one of the all time best Go players)

Album of the day: New York Trio Recordings, Vol. 1 - Modinha

This is an awesome album by the underrated pianist Marc Copland. It has the classic jazz piano trio sound, on par with the works by Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett! Check out its reviews by various newspapers, magazines and websites.

Game of the day: LG Cup Final, Game 2

To become the best of the best, you have to beat the best of the best. That's what Gu Li just did! He shutout Lee Sedol 2:0 in the best-of-3 final of LG Cup. Time will tell if Gu Li could continue dominate the world of Go like Lee does. If he succeeds, it will be a great achievement since no other Chinese has done that in the modern era except Nie Weiping and Go Seigen. Even though the game was invented in China, the quality of Chinese Go players went downhill around 200 years ago. At the same time Go became well established in Japan, where players improved generation by generation. Japan was the super power in Go until Korea took over 2 decades ago. Players like Gu Li and Chang Hao have given China hopes to be on top of the world of Go again.

Topic of the day: online rumors rebutted online

There are 2 cases happened recently. Both has to do with companies being accused of unethical business practices. Both tried defending their reputation by posting.

Case 1: Last.fm is an online music service with a social component. What it means is that you could listen to streaming music from its website, starting with an artist of your choice, for example, rate your music and it will find people who like the music you rated highly for you. And you could get music recommendation that way.

It all works fine for music streamed from its website. What about music you listen from your own collection sitting on your local computer? That's where audioscrobbler, a piece of software/technology owned by Last.fm come into the picture. Its job is to send what music you listened locally to Last.fm so that you could get better recommendations.

And audioscrobbler is in the middle of this controversy: an insider told tech website TechCrunch that Last.fm was assisting RIAA to find out who has listened to the leaked new album of U2 since it has the data available from audioscrobbler. And Last.fm denied it officially here.

Case 2: EastBayExpress, a local free weekly, has reported that Yelp's sales rep had approached businesses to indicate that if they buy advertisement from Yelp, their negative reviews could be taken care of. Of course this is serious allegation, for a website like Yelp that relies on being neutral. And here is its official response.

You could judge yourself who to believe. Moral of these 2 stories? whatever you hear from the web, be skeptical, including reports on business ethics, restaurant reviews, and software that is supposed to keep your privacy protected.

Star of the day: Sean Penn

Congratulation to Sean Penn for winning his second Oscar best actor award (for his role in the movie "Milk," a biopic of the SF gay politician Harvey Milk who was assassinated.) I remember the first movie that I watched starring him (and Robert De Niro) was "We're No Angels." That was a hell of a funny movie! I also enjoyed his other movies like "I am Sam" and "Sweet and Lowdown" very much.

Some people in the gay community think that this Oscar might help the cause of overturning gay marriage ban. I am not too sure about that. (Studying what effects movies have on real world issue would be very interesting.) In any case, it will provide a boost to the morale of the community for sure. And I am glad to see that.

每週冷飯﹕Napster

摘自00年8月1號開場白﹕

今年以XX 2000為名推出的軟件多不勝數﹐不過風頭之勁必定沒有一個比得上Napster。首先向未用過Napster的朋友介紹一下﹐Napster是一個用來和網上其他Napster用戶交換MP3音樂檔案的軟件。簡單來說﹐Napster 軟件把用戶的電腦連接到Napster公司的中央目錄﹐一方面告知目錄該用戶有何音樂檔案與其他用戶分享﹐另一方面讓該用戶搜尋中央目錄﹐尋找能提供其所需音樂檔案的用戶﹐然後直接連接兩用戶之電腦﹐傳送檔案。大家可以想像得到這是一個很受歡迎的功能﹐事實正是如此﹕Napster用戶增長速度極快﹐短短一年之間己有二千萬用戶﹐任何時候通常都有七十萬至九十萬首歌供下載。

由於Napster如此受歡迎﹐問題亦開始發生﹕首先是美國不少大學發現由於太多學生使用Napster(免費和高速的學校網絡是使用 Napster最理想的環境)﹐其流量霸佔了網絡大量頻寬(bandwidth)﹐甚至影響了其他正常需要使用網絡的工作﹐例如學術研究﹐因而禁止了學生在校內網絡使用Napster。接著更大的問題來了﹕知名樂團如Metallica等指責Napster公司讓用戶交換其作品﹐侵犯了版權﹐要求 Napster公司交出交換他們作品的用戶名單﹐但被拒絕。然後這些樂團以及唱片業界控告Napster公司﹐這宗官司正鬧得熱烘烘﹐日前法庭判 Napster的確有版權問題﹐但上訴期間仍可運作。

平心而論﹐擁有版權的作品不可以未經授權抄錄給他人﹐這是不容爭辯的。但今日的問題也反映了唱片業﹐特別是其中的大企業﹐反應遲鈍﹐後知後覺﹐且欠缺遠見。此話何解﹖其實唱片業多年前一早就應該預見到將音樂轉化為數碼格式的技術將會越來越進步﹐也越來越普及﹐而互聯網的速度亦必定會進展到用戶可以輕易傳送這些數碼音樂﹐當時就應該盡快研究方案去配合這些技術﹐例如開發符合經濟原則和有效的數碼音樂銷售模式。就算今日能夠成功禁制Napster﹐那些沒有中央目錄的檔案交易技術如Gnutella又如何禁制呢﹖(可以告誰﹖)

其實﹐Napster也有其正面的用途﹕可讓(不計較版權的)新晉音樂人容易發表和散播他們的作品。另一方面﹐有調查顯示很多用戶在使用 Napster後增加了音樂方面的消費﹔又有調查指出Napster用戶很多都會洗去大部份下載的作品﹐換而言之﹐Napster提供了一個免費試聽服務 ﹐令樂迷花少了“冤枉錢”在不喜歡的音樂上。

Napster也可算是Peer-to-peer computing/sharing(同儕分享)的先鋒﹐其流行甚至引起了電腦業先驅Intel總裁Andy Grove的注意﹐對於目前以centralized client-server access pattern為假設的寬頻網絡基建並不符合這日漸流行的Peer-to-peer access pattern的需要感到隱憂。事實上﹐Napster這類Peer-to-peer技術可以讓網民分享學術報告﹑公開的商業資料等種種檔案﹐說不定會取代WWW成為下一代互聯網主流技術﹐其商業潛質實在不容忽視。筆者有一位朋友安裝寬頻的主要原因正是Napster。

大家請拭目以待巨人唱片業和小子Napster大戰的結果吧﹗而下一個風頭軟件不知會不會是另一些Peer-to-peer軟件如Gnutella, Scour 或 Freenet 呢﹖

事隔差不多十年﹐有幾點值得一提﹕
1) Napster官司導致「原版」Napster壽終正寢(今時今日的Napster只是購買了該名字而已)﹐但卻沒有令唱片業一勞永逸﹐眾所週知﹐繼Napster之後的突破即是BitTorrent﹐多年後的今天唱片業仍無法從法律途徑徹底「打倒」BT。
2) 當年的檔案分享發展至今日的串流分享﹐主要用於分享直播電視節目(包括體育及劇集等等)﹐位於荷蘭的MyP2P被告上法庭﹐目的是禁止該站分享各大聯賽的串流﹐結果是MyP2P獲勝﹐只有荷蘭甲組未被解禁﹐可見訴諸法律效力有多大。

Album of the day: Invocation

I learned about the guitarist Paul Bollenbeck and this album of his from his interview in this month's Guitar Player magazine. It is also reviewed by JazzTimes. The tracks I like include the bluesy "Everything must change" and the Pat Martino-ish "Dancing Leaf" Don't care for those with vocal (wordless!) though.

Topic of the day: Shaolin Theme Park

My friend told me some monks are planning to build a Shaolin "theme park" in Hong Kong to promote Buddhism and he wonders if this (using Buddhism themes to make money) is against Buddhism principles.

I am no expert in Buddhism but I think one key concept is 破除執著 (don't be fixated on things, in this case, commercialism being wrong) so I don't see a big problem in this one. In some Buddhist traditions, the method for promoting Buddhism does not matter as long as it gets the job done.

On the other hand, I can't deny it is getting more and more common these days that religions (including Buddhism and Christian) are being exploited for money making purposes.

Topic of the day: octuplets' family in financial trouble

I wrote about the octuplets' controversy last week and I was hoping she made enough deals so that she could take care of her kids without using taxpayers' money (yes, mine included)

Well, things are not going that well for them: she was just dropped by her PR firm. Their house may be foreclosed. And TLC (the learning channel) has no plan to create a reality show based on her story.

Here are some really good suggestions for TV exec. Hopefully one of them will listen. I can't wait to watch if it happens. Please help me help her!

Topic of the day: even bad movies look good?

Roger Ebert supposed to have said that, according to this review. Ebert did not say so about the movie being reviewed, Hotel For Dogs, but the reviewer thought it applied to this movie. In fact, most critics are rather harsh on it.

Oh well. I enjoyed it (watched with my daughter yesterday.) Having a good looking young actress, Emma Roberts, certainly helped. Forget about the critics!

BTW, I googled but could not find where Ebert said that. Nevertheless, I kinda agree with that in the sense that the technology, effects, costumes...... are so good these days that it is not too difficult to make a grandiose movie with a terrible story.

Star of the day: Paris Hilton

Happy birthday, Paris!

Yeah, I know it's someone else's birthday too.

Album of the day: In Hatred's Flame

This was released last year by the death metal band Exmortus. This album contains lots of "classical" metal elements like melodic bass lines and great guitar solo. Some songs reminded me of Iron Maiden. I am glad to see bands going in that direction. BTW, the members of this band are all very young and I believe are from the bay area. I am proud of them!

每週冷飯﹕ 國寶

原刊登於00年5月15日:

本月初兩間拍賣行在香港拍賣國寶招致滿城風雨一事﹐ 相信很多朋友都會聽過。我覺得在中國人的地方拍賣本國被入侵和掠奪去的物品﹐的確是一種十分不尊重的行為﹐其實拍賣大可在紐約或倫敦進行。我個人認為大商業機構一般情況下不會公然挑戰政府權威﹐這次拍賣行罔顧政治壓力﹐必定是出於商業因素。這幾件拍賣品如果不是在香港這個中國人地方拍賣﹐相信不會如此矚目 ﹐自然也不會賣得這樣好的價錢。無論如何﹐為了短線利益而自毀名聲和得罪權威﹐我覺得始終不是高明的商業手法。

至於有關方面以高價購回國寶 ﹐有論者認為此事令年青一代重新認識以及關注中華民族尊嚴和文化﹐花了錢也是值得。筆者不敢苟同﹕首先﹐傳媒以至普羅大眾一向善忘。更重要的是﹐本地流行文化一向沒有保存和維護中國文化的意識﹐現時不少香港報章雜誌大力宣揚吹捧日本潮流﹐常常在中文之中夾雜日文﹐例如以“水著”代替泳裝﹐以“攻略”表示策略﹐以“OL”代表白領儷人等等﹐以顯得“入流”。但願中文不會因此而失傳﹗

我認為這個社會任何機構﹐不論大或小﹐都負起相當社會責任﹐不能為了商業因素任意妄為﹐這個會是我們《零零誌》堅守的一個原則。

事隔九年，又有國寶圓明園銅獸首被拍賣，今次地點雖則是在巴黎，似乎仍然傷害中國人感情。

那邊廂為了短線利益而自毀名聲的事情亦繼續發生，當真是太陽底下無新事。（《零零誌》當然亦繼續不會為了商業因素任意妄為﹐皆因小弟尚未想到如何用本站賺錢！）

Tech of the day: Slacker Radio

I am no stranger to online music service and have been actively using Rhapsody and Pandora for a long time but I just learned about Slacker Radio this week (from comments to the news that Sirius XM is filing bankruptcy. Many commenters high raved Slacker as a better alternative to satellite radio) and of course I checked it out.

Like most other services, Slacker provides a variety of channels (each main genre like classical, jazz, blues...... are further divided into a few sub-genre channels) Again, like most other services, it also allows you to define your own customized channel. The way I did it was starting with a single artist (I picked Andres Segovia) and from the list of related artists I choose who I like (mainly classical guitarist) and who I ban (world music and new age artists).

So, what do I think of Slacker? Let's start with the good: Slacker provides a channel called "Classic Jazz [Non-voc]" which cater to jazz fans who don't like vocal (thank god I'm not the only one!) That's pretty much the only thing it does better than other services IMO. The pre-defined channels aren't really anything to high raved about (contrary to opinions I read on the web) Even AOL Radio has more blues channels than Slacker! For customized channel, I think Pandora has a superior recommendation engine/algorithm (probably because of its music genome database) In other words, it is more capable of finding songs/artists closely related to those I specified. And Pandora's iPhone client works better than Slacker's: I tried the latter on 3G but it won't play (will try it a few more times to confirm though) Also, Pandora on iPhone has no commercial/promotion break. As far as comparison with Rhapsody, I think it's apple to orange: Rhapsody allows subscriber to pick precisely which songs to play (therefore justify its higher cost) as well as providing pre-defined and custom channels.

Do I want to see Slacker to succeed? Of course! The more competition in this space the better! (I also hope more people will pay for Pandora's service so that it will survive) I just think it is a bit overrated. For example, a Jupiter analyst said "Like Apple, Slacker isn't in the business of renting music; consumers can purchase tracks, which is what everyone is accustomed to." Well, one important feature of Slacker is "saving a song" to the user's library so that s/he can listen to it in the future, unlimited (while s/he is still paying, of course) How is that different from Rhapsody? And Rhapsody provides tracks for users to purchase too. It seems to me that the critics were quite unfair to Rhapsody, probably because it is own by Real (who is notorious for forcing adoption of its client software) and used Microsoft's DRM technology.

Tech of the day: have you violated copyright by reading books aloud?

Author's guild seems to think so (while most sane people think otherwise)

The controversy stems from a new feature of the latest version of Amazon's e-book device, Kindle 2. This new feature, called text-to-speech, simply reads out the words of the e-book to the user. The first thing came to my mind was that some people will use this in favor of audio books. Why did the author's guild have a problem with that? Of course it has to do with money. Let's use Dan Brown's Angels and Demons as an example (price quoted from Amazon): the kindle version costs $7.99 while the audio download costs $26.23! (just for reference: the paperback costs $10.88 while the audio book on CDs costs $35.47!)

However, the text-to-speech feature is not created just for destroying book publishers' profits. How about books of which no audio version exists? Furthermore, when done right, audio books are not merely text read aloud. Good audio books are performances in which the reader reads the text with emotions and portray the characters appropriately. (One of my buddy is on the road a lot and listen to lots of audio books and he really appreciate good performances) Of course, book publishers and authors will lose some audio book sales to the budget conscious readers who don't mind the machine generated voice but no business is immune to changes brought by technology anyway.

Star of the day: Jose Canseco

For those who have doubted Canseco's credibility, once again he's proven to be correct. He outed Palmeiro as steroid user in 2005 and A-Rod last year. Both denied and turns out they were liars, not Canseco. Of course Canseco didn't do it simply for the good of the game. He has definitely benefited financially. Still, next time when he has something to say, more people will listen.

While googling comments about Canseco, I came across an article that brought up an interesting question: when Senator Mitchell released his baseball steroid usage investigation (commissioned by MLB), the biggest name was Roger Clemens. A-Rod was not mentioned. If MLB knew A-Rod failed his test in 2003, how come Mitchell was not told about that? Did MLB "sacrificed" Clemens, an aging and retiring star, and protected A-Rod, who represented the present and future of the sports? Interestingly, Canseco also questioned why A-Rod was not in the Mitchell report when it was released.

Tech of the day: Bill Gates unleashed "hardware" bugs

Releasing software with bugs is nothing new for Microsoft (and Bill Gates) but he still pulled off a surprise by opening a jar full of mosquitoes at a tech conference. Of course, just like the software with bugs, the intent was not to harm people. He just wanted to raise the awareness of malaria (which could be spread by mosquitoes) And as expected, some people objected to this stunt. On the other hand, I'm surprised by the numbers of people defending him in this thread.

Topic of the day: the bare minimum amount of exercise

I gotta admit I hate working out. I have tons of excuses to avoid doing that. Even if I have the time, I'd rather sit down and do nothing than working out. I do know that it does my health no good if I keep avoiding it. Here comes good news: 7 minutes per week of vigorous exercise is good enough.

Now do I have an excuse not to do that? (Probably not :P)

Topic of the day: the octuplet controversy

When I heard the recent news about a lady giving birth to an octuplet (8 babies at the same time), it reminded me of the heartwarming story from a few years ago: the couple has tried many years and finally the baby-giving god has decided to grant them their wish, a bit more than they could handled though. Fortunately sponsors jumped in and hopefully they were living happily ever after.

Well, it turns out this story is a bit different because that lady has 6 kids already and she's also a non-working single mom. Lots of people voiced their outrage and concerns that she will turn to the welfare system to support her 14 kids! In the mean time she is shopping her story around.

The way I look at this is: ideally she gets money from her deals, just enough to cover the expenses of raising her 14 kids, no more no less. So basically the curious readers of the gossip magazines and her book will be supporting her kids instead of the welfare system while she gains nothing more from this. For the outraged folks: let's dial down a bit otherwise the bad publicities might prevent her from getting a deal!

Notes to the few pro-life critics who jumped on this: this has nothing to do with pro-life. Nobody would disagree this is a "pro-responsibility" issue, as simple as that. Stop hijacking!

每週冷飯﹕懷舊

原刊登於00年5月1日:

最近家中大收拾和整理舊物﹐因為筆者喜歡懷舊﹐所以把舊書舊雜誌翻閱得津津有味﹐原來我早己和雜誌結下不解緣﹗其中不少是自八十年代開始收集﹐本本都有感情﹐本本都捨不得丟掉(最後迫不得已唯有只留下每個年代一些有代表性的舊書舊雜誌)

我以往買的雜誌主要關於電腦科技﹑影視娛樂以及音樂。電腦雜誌方面﹐我自83年起開始閱讀I.E.電腦週刊﹑微型電腦專刊﹑現代電子﹑香港電子等等 ﹐今天重讀﹐其中不少內容都令筆者感概良多﹐包括今天大放異彩的UNIX﹐袋裝電腦(今天Palmtop Computer的前身)﹐85年John Sculley重組Apple公司和Steve Jobs被擠出局﹐雷聲大雨點小的日本第五代人工智能電腦計劃﹐以及可以列為文物的8"大磁碟的廣告(如果嫌這個不夠懷舊的話﹐請讀關於卡式磁帶機驅動程式一文﹗)

以上提及的所有雜誌現在均已不再存在﹐在雜誌界想圪立不倒實在是一件十分困難的事﹐曾拍過多張具代表性和紀念性照片的《Life》雜誌亦於最近宣布停刊(只搞網上版)﹗不過我相信如果零零誌在十幾年之後還會被大家重讀的話﹐我們一眾主筆必定已心滿意足。

原來《Life》雜誌只是比PC Magazine, AsianWeek及Dr. Dobb's Journal走快幾步﹐它們都在去年停印﹐只出網上版。

Topic of the day: ESPN360

Just read an article about ESPN charging ISPs a fee so that their customers could watch videos on ESPN360. How comes it is news? I have been watching ESPN360 for more than one year (for Canadian Football and Major League Lacrosse. Yeah, I know I'm a sports junkie) I could understand that people would be surprised if they are not sports fan though. I am also not surprised that the same people would be pissed because the ISP must have recouped part of the cost from them, who are not even using that service! As one of the comments say, content providers such as ESPN obviously like such deals. ISPs makes such deals to differentiate from their competitors. (Just like certain channels are exclusives to a certain satellite/cable TV provider) The only loser seems to be customers. In the past, I always tell people that if they don't like the way they are charged by all those satellite/cable TV providers, stop watching and terminate the service, but it is much harder for internet access because it is not just for entertainment. Can you imagine not having internet access at home?

BTW, one of the comments also mentioned an interesting connection: ESPN is owned by Disney and the largest shareholder of Disney is ...... (drum roll please) Steve Jobs! I thought the man doesn't do evil (wait, that's Google.)

Album of the day: Uroboros

For a Japanese band to make it big in the heavy metal scene in USA, it is certainly quite an achievement (probably as hard as an European became a successful sumo wrestler in Japan!) And the band Dir En Grey did it. I knew about this band because MTV2's headbanger's ball showed their video "Saku." It was voted the #1 video of the year on that show in 2006! Fast forward 3 years (and 2 albums later), I saw another video from their latest album Uroboros, on headbanger's ball again. And I listened to the whole album on Rhapsody and I must say I was impressed. Their music is not the straight forward loud and rock type. Even though I don't understand a word of their lyrics, the vocal successfully conveyed a very mysterious and dark mood. It's much more interesting than either the visual rock which used to rule in Japan or the heavy metal popular here.

BTW, just for curiosity, I checked out two other Japanese metal bands from the 80s on Wikipedia: Seikima-II and Loudness, the latter being the first Japanese heavy metal band that signed with an American label. So glad to hear that both are still active after 20+ years!

Tech of the day: $10 laptop from India?

When my dad asked me about a piece of technology, you know it has really generated a lot of interest, not just from the circle of tech geeks or gadget freaks, but from the general public. He was very amazed by the news about India will be releasing a $10 laptop (perhaps he recalled spending ~$150 on my first computer, a Apple II+ clone)

Oh well, if it's too good to be true...... (you know the rest)

Details from The Hindu:
1) the device will cost $20-$30.
2) the device is not a laptop. It needs to be connected to an input and a output device to be useful (i.e., more like a desktop)
3) the device could be used for accessing the web (e.g. download e-content by e-learner)

And according to The Guardian, the device has 2Gb storage and wireless networking capability.

With such details, I guess the general public won't be excited anymore. Still, I'm interested to see a working demo of it.

Star of the day: David Beckham

I guess it is more likely than not that Beckham will leave LA for Milan, judging by stories like these. As a fan of Beckham (actually, a fan of all current and former Man U players!), I am torn. On one hand he is doing so well in Milan (and in Europe in general) That level of playing is definitely more beneficial to his career. On the other hand I wish he would stay in the States, to fulfill the expectation of him lifting MLS to a higher level.

In any case, I will respect his decision and wish him well wherever he plays!

Album of the day: Traced in Air

Last year Guns 'N Roses (or I should say Axl Rose) released his first album in 15 years . Around the same time, another metal band also released its first album in 15 years. I am talking about Cynic here. Cynic certainly is much less well-known then GnR but in their genre, progressive death metal, they are very highly regarded (if not more than GnR in its respective genre.) Cynic's Focus, released in 1993, was a ground-breaking album, fusing jazz and elements from other genre into death metal. Half of the band played on Death before, which lend the band a lot of credibility for sure. I am glad to see them back together and releasing new material. Cynic is currently on tour with Meshuggah now. Coming to SF tomorrow but the show is sold-out already :(

Game of the day: Batoo

This post is not about that game but about a new board game which is a variant of my favourite game: Go.

The creator hopes to draw more young players by making the game more "computer game"-like with graphics and additional scoring rules, inspired by the popular game Starcraft. See screenshots and description of rules here.

I will definitely give it a try when it gets easier to access (without requiring registration)

每週冷飯﹕冬

摘自00年2月1號

本來以為今個冬季的主題曲會是“這個冬天不太冷”﹐原來卻是遲來的冬天﹗上個月我還在為沒有白色聖誕而失望﹐怎知前幾天一早出門竟然遍地積雪﹐天氣真像女人心情一樣難以捉摸﹗

事實上我對雪的感情也是又愛又恨﹕前幾天我在紐約中央公園玩雪﹐霎時間有一種重拾童真的感覺﹐心情頓然開朗起來﹔但上班下班時走過濕滑的積雪﹐又感到懊惱不已。唉﹗這個世界真是沒有絕對美好的事物。

其實想深一層﹐如果沒有肅殺的冬天﹐又怎顯出春天的可愛﹖相信很多人像我一樣抱怨嚴冬減少了很多出去“蒲”的機會﹐不過從另一個角度看﹐它也令大家有更多時間留在家中和家人一起﹐而且令人更珍惜和欣賞你的關心。朋友﹐不要錯過這樣的機會啊﹗

筆者希望在此向各位讀者好友及家人傳送一點暖意﹐祝福各位被病魔打擾的朋友早日康復﹐龍馬精神地迎接龍年﹐在新一年萬事勝意﹗

其實每年冬天都是生病的旺季﹐不過一年後又忘得一乾二淨﹐只覺今年特別慘﹗還有﹐我對本文完全沒有印象﹐迎接龍年似乎不覺特別興奮﹖不過從描述的情節看﹐寫的應是本人。

Book of the day: The Shock Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Who could have thought of the connections between disasters (natural or man-made), dictatorships and free-market economy? I certainly would not have seen it if not for this book, written by Naomi Klein.

The first example occurred in New Orleans, after Katrina hit. Free-market economist seized the opportunity to rush in and replace public schools by private ones. Later in the book she has also given examples in Argentina, China and most recently, Iraq. And all of them are connected to the highly regarded, Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman.

This book is certainly an eye-opener. Of course, one should always read the other sides to every story. Reviewers at Amazon pointed out that Friedman was actually opposed to the Iraq war.

Topic of the day: do Prop 8 contributors have the right to hide?

Will the people understand that giving money to support unfair legislations (e.g., Prop 8, gay marriage ban) cannot have it all? Simply because you are afraid of boycott of your business doesn't mean you should sacrifice people's right to full disclosure and transparency. If you are so afraid of boycott, my advice: next time think before you give your money. Just so you know, you could "vote" for it and no one would know about your vote.

BTW, Prop 8 proponents have also threaten to boycott businesses that did not donate to their campaign. It is another example of "if I do it, it is right. If you do it, it is wrong."

The irony is: the people who demand for extra right (right to hide their political contribution) are the same people who take away right from others.

Music of the day: Sonatas for Guitar by Bach

This is a free download offered by the local classical station KDFC. Just visit their website, scroll down and you will find the link (require signup and iTunes installed)

This is originally written for violin (Sonata No.1 in G minor, BWV 1001: IV. Presto) and arranged by Nicholas Goluses (also the performer) If you want to play it yourself, the tab could be found here.

BTW, KDFC refers this as MP3 but it's actually in AAC format (just like everything else offered on iTunes) I guess the term MP3 has lost its original meaning!

Topic of the day: New York Times selling its stake in baseball

If you know anything about American sports, you would know NY Yankees and Boston Red Sox are the biggest rivalry. The irony is: the newspaper NY Times actually owns part of Red Sox (not Yankees!) I wonder if they have to disclose this whenever they write about Red Sox. Even more ironic is that Red Sox should actually be a better investment than the newspaper business (lost $57.8 million in 2008 because of the decline of ad revenue)

I wonder if New York Times will be joining the following publications by stopping the print version and publishing online only:
- AsianWeek
- Dr. Dobb's Journal
- PC Magazine

Maybe it's just a question of "when?"

Tech of the day: cell phone camera beep sound

The approval rating of our congress reached record low (9%) last July. If you are wondering why, take a look at New York Republican Congressman Peter King, who introduced a bill to mandate all cell phone must make a loud sound when its camera is being used for taking picture. Mr. King: what's your priority?

Topic of the day: class notes seized and destroyed

An Economics teacher (presumably in a US high school) required all students in the class to turn in their notes at the end of the semester for him (or her) to destroy so that future students of the same class cannot copy such notes.

Isn't this strange? Why should he (or she) prevent the students from referring to their notes in the future? The teacher should not prevent future students from being lazy by taking away from current students! This is just wrong. Period.

BTW, it is interesting to look at the issue from the legal standpoint. Most legal opinions on the thread pointed out that the students have right to their notes so the teacher should not be allowed to take them away.

Topic of the day: Faking for the cameras

From the February issue of the Gramophone magazine, there is an interesting article about how actors and actresses play the role of musicians in movies. We have all seen many poor performances. On the other hand, some were quite convincing. The difference is of course related to how much efforts were put into preparations.

Some actors are pretty good musicians, like Jamie Foxx, who has no problem playing the actual piano parts and sang in the Ray Charles movie (he studied classical music in college!) It's different when he prepares for the role of a cellist in the upcoming movie, "The Soloist." Even though the soundtrack will be played by another cellist, he learned how to play cello, a new instrument for him, just so he would look like a real cellist in the movie, down to the small detail like how a cello is being held.

And you could imagine how hard it would be for a non-musician, like Jessica Alba, to play a blind violinist in the movie "The Eye." She has also put in a lot of effort learning the instrument, starting with "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"

So, next time when we think Hollywood actresses are all about pretty faces, think again. Successful ones like Alba worked very hard at it.

BTW, this story also reminds me of my favorite music themed movie, "The Fabulous Baker Boys", starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff and Beau Bridges. The Bridges are not pianists in real life but their performances were quite convincing. Pfeiffer sang the actual parts in the soundtrack and I enjoyed her singing very much. (Her role was originally written for Madonna!)

每週冷飯:十年前的定位問題

前言
熟悉筆者的朋友可能都知道本blog的前身是99年至04年出版的零零誌，當年筆者結束零零誌，想省掉每年要交的註冊費，於是連域名00zine.com 也放棄了，之後一直後悔！等了四年才把00zine.com買回來重頭開始過。目前的形式是每日一篇，以英文為主（在公司蛇王寫blog寫英文沒有那麼礙眼），盡可能也會寫一點中文（長期停寫恐怕會退化），或重溫一下當年的舊作（當今中外雜誌也頗為流行“開倉”炒冷飯）

以下摘自原刊登於99年11月15日（第二期）的開場白，提到“互聯網的發展令人人只要有熱誠都可以參與［發表］個人化的訊息”，預視了三年後開始大行其道的blog，筆者也算有點遠見吧 :P

我們的“口號”是探討新世紀新人類新生活感受享受以至心理命理﹐我們認為這個新世紀的特色是多元化、全球化、互動化以及網絡化﹐互聯網的發展令活在這個新世紀的新人類一方面能夠輕易吸收各方面的新資訊﹐另一方面亦有機會和廣大群眾分享個人的認知和感受﹐接觸大眾已不再是大商業傳媒機構的專利﹐也就是說資訊已不再受他們操縱﹐人人只要有熱誠都可以參與提高全“地球村”生活以至知識水平的過程﹐這個新資訊網絡可以容納大眾化的內容﹐更可以容納小眾和個人化 (personalized)的訊息﹐這也是我們出版本刊的目標。本刊的作者們都是生活在這個新世紀的新人類﹐我們在每篇文章真誠地表達個人對該話題的認知和感受﹔原創性、真實性和個人化是本刊的“個性”(personality)﹐我想我們能為大家帶來一點新鮮的、與其他主流刊物/網站不同的東西。