Tech of the day: software nostalgia

I've just read that software company Borland was sold recently. That name certainly brought back a lot of good old memory. Borland was the developer of the DOS utility SideKick, which was highly raved by reviewers back in the 80s because it allowed user to quickly open or hide it, pretty much like multi-tasking on Windows but that's before the days of Windows. I have almost completely forgotten about it.

I think the most famous software made by Borland is probably Turbo Pascal. Every computer enthusiast from the 80s have played with it! I bet it introduced a lot of them to programming. And that was not lame programming (read: BASIC) but real programming with a speedy compiler/editor and a real language! Borland sold off its compiler business and it is now owned by Embarcadero. You could download Turbo Pascal for free from them.

Another product I almost forgot was Paradox. That's the database software I taught in college for a living.

BTW, there is another article about old-school programming techniques. Fortunately I haven't done much of those at work. I am not qualified as old timer!

Topic of the day: South Park mocked Disney

Whether you like "South Park" (the animated TV series) or not, you gotta admit these guys "get" pop culture. They know what buttons to push to create controversies. Their parody of Tom Cruise and his "religion" is certainly legendary. The episode that made fun of High School Musical was also hilarious. And the latest one that I couldn't stop laughing was about Jonas Brothers and the stupid purity rings that they wear to symbolize the fact that they won't have sex under marriage. It was said in the episode that the purity rings were pushed so that the company could sell sex to teenagers! You might wonder why it isn't the opposite. I thought so for a second but then I understood! Let's face it. All these teen boy bands have was their good looks, in other words, sex appeal (don't tell me it's their talent) What could make them more acceptable to parents than "purifying" the appeal? It was a clever idea but it is also too superficial. Just think about what happened to all those teen idols who vowed for no sex until marriage. How many of them got pregnant before marriage?

And I want to give more credits to South Park by putting the blame on the company rather than the performers (Jonas Brothers in this case. They don't look that bad in that episode) You could watch it on their website. It is the first episode of the 13th season.)

Topic of the day: Journalism today (and the story of Japan town)

This article named "S.F. searches for solution to Japan Center woes" appeared in San Francisco chronicles yesterday. If you read the article (and it's pretty obvious judging by the title), you might think something is really wrong with Japan Center (the name of the shopping center in Japan town) The articles portrayed the place as having an outdated look. It even used the word "dead zone" to describe the neighborhood.

However, I could tell you such descriptions couldn't be more wrong (and most commenters agreed. In fact they were outraged!) I just went there this Sunday (my first visit in 3 years.) The stores and restaurants were all busy. The iconic Kinokuniya Book Store has been expanded to a 2-floor operation!

It seems to me all that needs to be done was rebuilding/reinforcing the parking garage so that it meets the current earthquake standard. That makes me wonder what the motivation of the writer of that story was. Do you think he is unbiased?

BTW, on the topic of quality of journalism today: it sank to a new low when it was discovered that a student's Wikipedia hoax quote was used worldwide in newspaper obituaries! The quote was:

One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear

It was made up by a student who added it to French composer Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page. So apparently journalists are using Wikipedia as their source these days. Laziness? Incompetence? or both?

Tech of the day: My VM has lost its voice

As I previously mentioned, I run Arch Linux in VirtualBox on my Windows machine. I could playback audio after I installed the ALSA tools and made the adjustments (see my old post) However, it stopped working after I moved the VM to a new HP notebook. When I try adjusting the PCM channel through amixer, it was simply not there. Again, I found the solution from the same ALSA entry on ArchWiki (thanks!) The section was about making sure the sound modules were loaded.

Basically I found from lsusb that my sound module is: snd_intel8x0

So I modified the MODULES line in /etc/rc.conf to this:
MODULES=(snd_intel8x0 snd_pcm_oss)

And reboot, unmute and adjust the channel volumes through amixer again. Voila! I got audio back!

To make the Amixer settings permanent, follow these steps.

And I have found a post about getting EMU 0404 USB (my external sound card) to work in Linux. Guess that's something I should try in the future.

Tech of the day: Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem was a very popular first-person shooter game in the 90s. (Even a casual gamer like me knows about it!) Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to the latest and greatest version of the series and was supposed to be released in 1998, but it was never released, to this day. And it has become a joke in the industry and a synonym to vaporware (software that was promised but never delivered)

Nevertheless, there was still hope among Duke Nukem fans that it would be released someday as long as its creator, 3D Realms, is still around. After all, subject of another perennial vaporware joke, Guns 'N Roses' new album Chinese Democracy, was finally released last year. Well, that last hope was dashed because 3D Realms has just closed its door.

Music of the day: Exposures - In Retrospect and denial

This was a double CD released by melodic death metal band Dark Tranquillity in 2004. The second half contains live performances. I've been to their concerts twice and they never disappointed. I could hear the same kind of energy from these live tracks. And the first half contains previously unreleased or "B-side" material. I wonder why they were left out of the previous CDs 'coz these are pretty good stuff.

Topic of the day: teacher appreciation week, cinco de mayo and mother's day

What do they have in common? For one thing, they all happened in the past week. More importantly, I believe they are celebrated/promoted/marketed heavily because of business interests! I am pretty sure a lot of flowers, cards, beers...... were sold for them. I gotta admit I am not a big fan. All these pressure to appreciate your teacher, your mom and Mexican culture is just a little bit too superficial. Cinco De Mayo is not even celebrated in Mexico! And how come there is no software developer appreciation week during which our clients sent us flowers/gift card/breakfast? I know why: they have paid our employers already! Back in my days (I know, my "good old days" talk again) we had one "official" teacher appreciation activity for the whole 6 years of high school. And of course, great teachers' efforts were always appreciated with or without such activity. In fact, one of our favourite teacher told us we should have been more frugal when we picked the place for celebration because we were just students.

每週一噏：棋壇喜與悲

今週發生了一件中國圍棋界十分振奮的事﹐指的當然是古力奪得首屆BC咭世界圍棋賽的冠軍﹐原來此前中國棋手從未在任何世界圍棋賽的首屆奪標。而古力本人亦保持另一個驚人的紀錄﹕就是六次打入世界圍棋賽決賽均成功摘冠﹗

而日本棋壇一代怪傑﹑榮譽棋聖藤澤秀行今週病逝﹐全球棋迷自不然感到失落。藤澤老師在92年以67歲高齡衛冕王座﹐成為史上年紀最大的大賽奪標者﹐是一項驕人的紀錄。相信中國棋手對藤澤老師會特別懷念﹐皆因當年他帶領一班日本棋手訪華﹐該年代的中國棋手獲益不淺﹐藤澤老師這種無分國界地熱心推廣棋藝的精神﹐實在令人肅然起敬。

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！

Topic of the day: Roll 'n Roll Power!

Next time when you hear people blasting the music by Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones, don't just tell them to turn it down 'coz they might be using the music to drive crickets away! That's what people in Nevada use to defend against the onslaught of crickets.

Topic of the day: animation and age discrimination

Political correctness police striked again! Here is the story: Movie critics have been singing praises for the new Pixar animated movie "Up," which breaks the tradition by featuring an old guy as the main character. However, some analysts suggest investors to dump the stock of Disney (owner of Pixar) because it is hard to sell merchandises related to this movie. (Believe it or not. Kids fall for merchandises related to animations BIG TIME! Toys, clothing, lunch bags, cups...... the possibility is limitless) And those analysts were accused of age discrimination! I think that's BS. Do you think senior people will really get offended by such comments?

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......)