Tech of the day: Adding a printer in Arch Linux

We have a network printer which we identified using an IP address. There are quite a few steps to add this printer to Windows XP. One would imagine it would be much harder on Arch. Well, It can't be easier! Here were my steps (thanks to these instructions):
1) install the following using pacman
pacman -S cups ghostscript gsfonts gutenprint

2) start the CUPS daemon
/etc/rc.d/cups start

3) hit the admin page
http://localhost:631

4) add the printer
you just need to give your printer a name, location, description. Since this is a network printer, use the AppSocket Protocol, i.e., specify the Device URI as:
socket://[the printer's IP address]

So easy! However, this is the first time I agree with the people who complain about Linux using cryptic names. There's no way I could tell CUPS is used for configuring printing before I see what it stands for (Common UNIX Printing System)

Tech of the day: correct backspace in Emacs

I wrote about trying out Zile as my Emacs replacement the other day. For some reason Ctrl-K doesn't work so I went thru the pain of installing all dependencies for Emacs and finally got it running. Life is good except backspace is acting like Ctrl-D. Backspace is notoriously problematic for Emacs but the problem was usually that it acts like Ctrl-H! Well, I did find my fix. Just add this to .emacs:
(global-set-key [backspace] 'delete-backward-char)

Music of the day: Flamingo

What could be more inspiring after a violin lesson than listening to the works of some great violin master? That's exactly what KCSM (our local jazz station) did for me today, by playing Stephane Grappelli's Flamingo.

Star of the day: Barry Zito

The Giants have a pitcher who beat the reigning World Series MVP, Cole Hamels. In fact, he has won as many games and has a better ERA as Hamels. Who would that be? Our former Cy Young winner of course!

Topic of the day: it's not your fault when you left your kid behind

A family took a taxi from the Boston airport to home. When they got home, they left their daughter who was asleep on the taxi. The taxi driver got a call from the taxi dispatcher and drove the kid back to her home.

Next? He got suspended by the police, which was changed to a warning later.

Yeah, let's blame it on the driver, not the parents.

Tech of the day: 1984 and Animal Farm

These are probably the 2 most well-known books about dictatorship. And they were in spotlights again. Here is the story: as I have previously written, Amazon is selling an e-book reader called Kindle, on which their customers could buy e-books from Amazon wirelessly. Recently some Kindle customers found out some of their purchases were deleted from their Kindle by Amazon (Amazon did refund the purchase price)

1984 and Animal Farm would probably be the worst books for Amazon to "showcase" their ability to delete any of your e-book anytime, and ironically, these were indeed the books that were deleted by Amazon!

Topic of the day: pretty model and mini-Weiqi

Teen models have made a big fuss in Hong Kong recently because they were planning to appear in a signing event for their photo collections at the largest book exhibition in Hong Kong. Some HK netizens have organized protests since their appearance would attract a big crowd of guys (many with cameras and related equipments) and cause a big scene, which annoyed attendees who only care about books quite a bit.

Oh well, it seems that models have a different image and ways of promotion in Korea. According to this article (in Chinese), two Korean models are invited to be trained and to participate in the preliminary rounds of World Mini-Weiqi competition.

Tech of the day: Zile Is Lossy Emacs

Among the sea of vi-ers here, I'm the sole emacs-er. Naturally no one bothers to install emacs on the Solaris boxes here (except for an old box.) I have been using that lone box forever until it was taken away. So I've finally decided to do it myself. After all, I did it with 1 line (pacman) on Arch. I'm probably 1 pkgadd away from having it on Solaris. WRONG! This monster has so much dependencies! I have installed 5 of them and when I failed to download the jpeg library from Sunfreeware.com , I gave up and install Zile instead. It turns out all of its dependencies have been installed already. We'll see if it will make me forget about emacs completely.

每週一噏：再談封神榜，商紂王

早幾個星期提過的劇集封神榜終於大結局，我雖然喜歡該小說，但對書中（及劇中）一味强調商紂王為奸，周武王為忠，十分有保留。早一陣子讀的歴史書指那個時代所謂天子並非直接統治全國，實應視為各部落的共主，商周之爭其實是一個集團取代另一個的地位，並非那麼忠奸分明。

再上網搜一搜，找到更多有趣的文章，原來毛主席也曾為紂王平反，指出紂王伐大國東夷，從此以後東夷與商不斷朝聘往來，商文化源源不絕地傳播到東夷，而東夷的一些農作物的種植技術和一些手工業的生產技術也傳入中原地區，經濟與文化得到了廣泛的交流，紂王把東夷和中原的統一鞏固起來，在歷史上是有功的。

但也因為伐東夷大大消耗國力，主力部隊難以調回，被想取而代之的周武王有機可乘，紂王以70萬東夷戰俘及奴隸臨時武裝起來應戰，最後兵敗自焚。

紂王被指控的罪行，如施酷刑炮烙，如闢酒池肉林，與夏桀的罪行同出一轍；西諺有云："History is written by the victor" 周朝史家有心抹黑，砌紂王生豬肉，大有可能！

Tech of the day: Upgrade to Firefox 3.5

Normally I don't upgrade my browser until something went wrong and made it unusable. FF 3.5 is an exception though. I really like the ability to tear out a tab its own Window. So I've upgraded my Windows FF to 3.5, and finally, the Gran Paradiso (Firefox 3.0) on my Arch Linux VM.

However, the latter is more complicated than I expected. First I tried the most straight-forward way: pacman -Sy firefox. That broke my installation in several ways:
1) it upgraded libreadline.so.5 to 6 but bash still depends on 5 so pacman starts giving error.
2) it didn't upgrade sqlite3 (might be caused by (1))
3) Arch won't boot anymore (because of readline)

Fortunately it's a VM so I just rolled back. Tried again. These are my steps:
1) pacman -Syy
2) pacman -S readline bash
3) pacman -S sqlite3
4) pacman -S firefox

Voila! now I am blogging using Shiretoko.

Topic of the day: parity - good or bad?

This is a topic that comes up again and again in sports. I guess it really depends on how good your team is. If you're a Yankee fan or a Cowboy fan, you don't care about parity and you just want to see them win it all again and again. On the other hand, if you root for a smaller market team, e.g. Milwaukee Brewers or Arizona Cardinals, you know there is no way for them to be winning year after year. The best you could hope for is that once in a while they could go all the way. Parity would be your cup of tea. It does seem to be going that way for football and baseball.

Chess, an individual sports, is going in that direction too. I've just read an article about world chess ranking. It seems that the No. 1 player (Topalov) or the world champ (Anand, who currently ranks No. 2) doesn't win tournaments all the time, unlike their predecessor, Kasparov, he won or tied for first in 15 consecutive tournaments from 1981-90! According to the columnist, this is because of the advances in overall chess knowledge (i.e., everyone could learn from internet and studies game records)

Well, as a fan, it seems to me that it's more fun to have a dominant player you could worship. I hope that columnist is wrong.

Star of the day: Jonathan Sanchez

He is the first Giant pitcher who pitched a no-hitter since 1976! And he is not among the top 4 pitchers on the team. What a confidence boost for him! Go Sanchez. (And his dad should come visit him more. This is the first time he saw him pitching here.)

Tech of the day: the Power button on SlingPlayer Mobile

I'm talking about the iPhone version here. I wasn't able to find that button under "Remote." It turns out it just doesn't show up at first. Swiping to the left and you will see more buttons and "power" will be one of them.

Musicians of the day: Strunz and Farah

I have always been a big fan of guitar music. If there is one thing I want to complain about the SF bay area, that would be not having enough great guitarists touring here. But I guess I'm spoiled by having premier jazz clubs here so I could see great jazz musicians almost year-round. Ever since I fell in love with the sound of nylon string guitar, I try to attend to concerts with it as much as possible. And I'm glad that I didn't miss Strunz and Farah's performance at Yoshi's tonight. Their style is best described as fusion, with elements of flamenco, jazz and middle Eastern music. I heard a little bit of everything of the aforementioned at their show. The two guitar masters were backed by a flutist/clarinetist, a bassist and a percussionist, who were great instrumentalists themselves. It wouldn't be wrong to call their music new age but it is definitely not your typical soft/relaxing elevator music. On the contrary, it is full of energy and emotions.

Topic of the day: how to explain this to kids

It is about a DVD that was given to grade school kids by their teacher which is supposed to contain the kids photo/video but she accidentally slipped in a video of her having sex with her man.

It is a big mistake by her for sure. On the other hand, look at the reactions of those parents: one said he wanted the school to help explaining this to his kids since he didn't know how to. Come on! He is an adult and certainly know what sex is (otherwise he won't have kids)

If I were him, I'd explain like this: (1) this is a video of your teacher having sex. (2) In order to have children, you need to have sex. (3) your teacher has provided her video by mistake so we shouldn't watch it. That's it! How simple is that?

Star of the day: Steve McNair

Another one left us this week! I'm talking about the great quarterback Steve McNair. Who could forget his performance in the superbowl? What a game he played (even though his team didn't win)

RIP.

Topic of the day: bike messenger

I was told that biking up and down hill is a great way to lose weight. Even though I'm no good at biking, I love doing it. So I figure it might be a good idea to get a bike messenger job if I get laid off. Well, it is a very dangerous job according to studies. And the job doesn't paid that well.

I still dunno why a lot of messengers ride road bike rather than mountain bike though. I thought the latter is easier to get up and down hill and ride through uneven surfaces in the city. If anyone knows the reason, please comment.

Star of the day: Billy Mays

RIP, Mr. Mays.

I am an informercial junkie. Of course I've seen many of Billy Mays' commercials, of which the most famous is Oxiclean (too bad I couldn't find a good YouTube link of that) I'm sure I'll be watching re-runs of this and many other of his great works. He will be missed.

Another icon from our generation has left us in the past few days :( When the radio station played a couple of Bon Jovi's songs in a row this morning, it scared me!

Musician of the day: Ottmar Liebert

I saw new flamenco guitar master Ottmar Liebert playing at the Rrazz Room inside SF's Hotel Nikko tonight. I was totally amazed by the complexity of the music coming from his solo guitar. His music truly embodies the "global village" spirit as its root is in Spanish while played by a German like him (his father is actually Chinese-German!) And the background slideshow of photo from places he traveled enhanced the whole experience too.

He also spent some time answering questions from the audiences. He told us he started playing when he was 13. He paid merely $20 to take weekly 30 minute guitar lesson for the whole semester!
About his guitar, it's made by luthier Lester Devoe. Even guitarists from Spain buy from this California luthier so it's a testament of how good his guitars are. He said flamenco guitars usually don't last longer than a few years because of the "abuse" they received from the guitarist (e.g. the percussive tapping on the top) so flamenco guitarists usually spends less (~$7500) whereas classical guitarists would paid $30K or more!

每週一噏：巨星殞落

講的當然就是Michael Jackson！無論你喜歡他的音樂與否，也不論他的私生活是否有問題，無可否認，他是流行音樂界一代巨星，82年一張Thriller，九首歌中有七首出single，全部都能打入Billboard十大，實在架勢堂！

不過，我認為MJ最值得被紀念的，是由他和Lionel Ritchie為非州旱災帶來的饑荒賑災，合寫We are the World一曲，該曲及相關的Hands Across America活動總共籌得一億美元善款。

最後想提一件個人的MJ小插曲，話說小時候有朋友問我最喜歡聽甚麼音樂，我說MJ，其實當時對外國樂壇一竅不通，只知有MJ，一首歌也未聽過；她即時嗤之以鼻，因為她喜歡的是巴哈！