Topic of the day: what you think is good for your kids might not matter after all

A friend posted this on his Facebook: The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting To me it's pretty much commonsense. I mean, it is never good to overdo anything. However, this quote might sound a bit depressing (or relieving, depends on what you have done):

Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. "Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store," they argued in USA Today. "By the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago — what kind of education a parent got, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children."

Topic of the day: Magic The Gathering

I just learned about this game because its world championship was won by a team from China. This was the first time an Asian team won the team competition. There might be some truth in this old saying: "With the vast population of China, you should be able to form a team that win at any event" Well, maybe the FIFA World Cup is an excpetion.

Tech of the day: Second day with Toshiba Satellite P505

I am not ready to live without ACPI (or recompile the kernel) yet so I've decided to stick with Vista for the foreseeable future and default GRUB to boot into it. I have tinkered with GRUB before and I thought this would be easy. Wrong! Most info floating around is about the older version of GRUB but Ubuntu 9.10 comes with GRUB 1.97 beta (for documentation, looks for GRUB 2) So, I couldn't just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, which correspond to entries on the GRUB menu, because it doesn't exist anymore! It was "superceded" by /boot/grub/grub.cfg, which users are not supposed to edit manually.

I ended up changing /etc/default/grub by setting GRUB_DEFAULT=saved and executed update-grub. Then I picked Vista from GRUB once and it remembered my choice.

Now that I'm back to Vista, reluctantly. The next thing is to get sound output through HDMI. [Update: I've tried it. That link mentioned choosing SPFIF but I could actually choose HDMI as my default Sound Output Device and it works.]

[Update 2: I've found some fixes that could replace the acpi=off workaround but I've yet to try them.]

Tech of the day: First day with Toshiba Satellite P505

My goal is to dual boot this desktop-replacement notebook with Windows 7 and Arch Linux. It actually comes with Windows Vista Home Premium (M$/Toshiba offers free upgrade to Win 7 but for some reason Toshiba's registration system is down so I'll try again later) According to instruction I googled, Vista provides a "Shrink" feature in its Disk Management but some reported it didn't work for them. I tried it and it shrunked my Vista partition from 360Gb to 180Gb, which leaves ~180Gb for Linux. I was so glad it worked out (but my euphoria was premature) Next I used Toshiba's recovery disc creator to create the recovery disc immediately (it is very possible that a simple mistake could render everything unusable) Finally, I put my Arch Linux (64 bit) installation CD in and rebooted. The first thing went wrong was that the installation requires network (I opted for the CD that does NOT include everything) Second, Arch's installer used cfdisk and it complained about "bad primary partition 2 partition ends in the final partial cylinder" And nobody has offered any good solution except for wiping the HDD!

So there we went. I rebooted with my newly created recovery DVD. I chose the option "Erase the hard disk" which led to 2 choices "delete all data and partitions from the hard disk" or "delete all partitions and overwrite all sectors on the hard disk" The latter is supposed to take a long time so I picked the former. Well, it takes a long time too (2 hr 15 mins) And it doesn't seem to be absolutely necessary from reinstalling Vista! Anyway, I picked the option that allowed me to pick the size of my partition (and I chose not to create an extra partition for System Recovery, i.e., will rely on my DVDs from now on) After it slowly created the partitions, I was prompted to insert the 3 DVDs one after another, for it to slowly copy all the files back. That took another hour. Finally it rebooted with Vista! And as usual, Vista needs to slowly set itself up. Just when I thought it's done, another Toshiba program took over for "configuring system" then reboot. This cycle has repeated so many times that it seems never ending. I think what it actually did was re-installing all those Toshiba's drivers (noticed the screen went from lo-res to hi-res) Anyway, another hour of my life was wasted on this. I knew it's done when Vista asked me to create a new user account.

Now it's ready for another attempt to install Arch, using the "core" CD which does not rely on FTP to complete the install. And this time the installer (or cfdisk) didn't complain about the partitions and the installation went all the way 'til completion. Happy ending? Well, far from it. For one thing, networking required setup. I was smart enough to start with wired networking. Even that didn't work out of the box and after lots of googling (the Wiki suggests to use hwdetect, which wasn't installed and without access to the net I have no way to install it! The Wiki also suggested dhclient instead of dhcpcd. Again, no internet no installation!)

So it's time to try a different distro. Before that, I preferred to clean out Arch first by blowing away the 2 partitions (root and swap) on my HDD, and took out GRUB from the MBR. The latter was actually trickier that I thought on Vista: I had to reboot with my Toshiba Recovery DVD and choose Recovery Console from one of the Recovery Options. Once in the console, execute: bootrec.exe /FixMbr

Next, I reluctantly went with the popular and familiar, Ubuntu. (I think Canonical drops support on releases way too soon so users need to keep updating in order not to left behind. On the other hand, users who update too soon could run into their own problems, see below) Ubuntu 9.10 was right out of Canonical's "door!" Again, installation went well, as it has always been. And again, trouble started when I tried to get network working! To troubleshoot, I enlisted the help of Arch's Wiki (yeah, the same steps work for both Arch and Ubuntu) and found that my Ethernet adapter uses the module atl1c. Looked for this in dmesg and I saw a bunch of errors related to ACPI (also caused Wireless adapter to fail) So, the workaround is to disable ACPI (here is how) Or try compiling the newer kernel. After 12 hours of tinkering with it, enough is enough and I called it a night.

Tech of the day: Google Chrome OS

Here is the simplest explanation: if your next computer runs Chrome OS, basically all it has is a browser.

It might sound strange for those who are used to old-school computing. However, this is my daughter's perception of computing:



Yes, it's a full-screen browser with a Google logo. (She made this at school without any input from me. )

If you think about how you use your computer, what applications are running most of the time, in addition to your browser? Maybe an e-mail client if you're not using web mail already? Maybe a word processor if you're not using Google Doc already? Maybe a media player if you're not consuming your media through the Flash-plugin of your browser already?

Suddenly Chrome OS is making a lot of sense huh?

Music of the day: Songbird

I'm sure Kenny G's original version does not need further recommendation. This is an interesting cover version featuring Bonfiglio on harmonica accompanied by violin.

拳王再闖高峰

早幾個月提過來自菲律賓的拳王Manny Pacquiao，昨日再贏一場冠軍賽，成為第一位分別在七個重量組別奪冠的拳王，認真威水！


Fast forward此片5分鐘可見拳王如何技術擊倒對手。

Music of the day: more jazz violin

After the Regina Carter concert, I went to another jazz violin show: Mads Tolling Quartet at Yoshi's SF. I heard a tune from his latest album "The Playmaker" on the radio and was immediately impressed so I listened to his 2 albums on Rhapsody and went to his concert. It is not exactly the classic jazz violin sound that I enjoy so much (i.e., Stephane Grappelli) His sound is more fusion like, which I also found very interesting. For some reason I had a feeling he would end the concert with his Led Zeppelin cover, "Black Dog," and I was right!

I found it interesting that so many jazz violinist are from Europe, like Mads Tolling. Through the Jazz violin tag radio on Last.fm, I've also listened to other Europeans like Mateusz Smoczynski, Zbigniew Seifert, last but not least, the great Jean-Luc Ponty. I heard his live version of "Cantelope Island" on radio and it was fabulous.

I should also mention that Mads Tolling is a violinist of the most well-known jazz string quartet in the world: Turtle Island String Quartet. In fact, I have not heard of any other jazz string quartet until I heard Quartet San Francisco playing Dave Brubeck on the radio! If you like jazz string quartet, please also check out Basquiat Strings.

Book of the month: Stradivari's Genius

This book started with the history of violin making from the earliest days, with special focus on the greatest violin maker of all time: Antonio Stradivari. Then it traced the ownerships and famous players of six of Stradivari's masterpieces: 5 violins and 1 cello. One might think it must be boring to read such history but the opposite is true. This books read like a novel, with unexpected twist at the end! This is a must-read for all violin lovers.

Musicians of the day: The Power Triplets

The name of this band says it all: this is a trio that plays really powerful fusion and instrumental rock music, that reminds me of the work by Frank Gambale, Stu Hamm, Steve Smith, Joe Satriani and Billy Sheehan. That's a very good company! Here is a link to their tracks on Rhapsody.

Topic of the day: annoying commercials

Dunno about you but I really found that UPS Whiteboard commercial quite annoying because I don't like the way that guy tries to act smart. Well, it turns out that guy is probably quite smart 'coz he was actually one of the advertising agency executives responsible for coming up with that commercial! No wonder he looks natural when he drew stuff on the white board.

Music of the day: Classical and Flamenco guitar

I've just discovered this online streaming radio station from Sky.fm.

So far I've heard the usual suspects: Strunz and Farah, Jesse Cook, Lara and Reyes, Carlos Montoya. Well, more flamenco/new age than classical. Anyway, not bad for a Sunday morning.

Tech of the day: I hate time zone!

I have spent the past few hours on one issue: trying to insert a timestamp with time zone properly represented into Oracle through JDBC without success.

I started with using a DATE column in Oracle and a straighforward JdbcTemplate update method with Types.TIMESTAMP passed as the type. A timestamp like 2009-10-29 09:30 GMT+2 is stored as 2009-10-29 00:30, which is correct because my client and Oracle server both runs on PDT. Ideally I would rather store the timestamp in GMT, i.e., 2009-10-29 07:30. Alternatively, it would still be OK if I could store time zone into the database as well, i.e., using Oracle's TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE datatype (btw, I can't use TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE if I want to use this column as the partition key!) Unfortunately, JdbcTemplate update for some reason stores it as 2009-10-28 05:30 PDT (i.e., it treated 2009-10-29 00:30 as a GMT time!)

It drove me crazy until I found this article from someone who has the same problem and provided a solution:

The resultSet.s[g]etTimeStamp method has an overloaded cousin, that takes a Calendar parameter.

To use this, you will also need to invoke a different cousin of JdbcTemplate's update which takes a PreparedStatementSetter and override the latter.

Music of the day: RTHK2 Oldies

今日太太介紹聽香港電台第二台，我說這裡日間時段正是香港半夜，播的都是老餅歌，她說都可以聽啊。

於是我裝了iPhone App FStream，輸入了一堆URL，聽了：
關菊英-過客(無線同名電視劇主題曲)
葉振棠-勝利雙手創(亞洲電視劇「我來自潮州」主題曲，改編自紅極一時的台語歌「愛拼才會贏」)
張德蘭-愛的短箭(無線電視劇「家有嬌妻」主題曲）

的確好適合我這個老餅。

Topic of the day: Governator dropped The bomb

You have probably seen Arnold Schwarzenegger dropping bombs all the time in his action movies. This time he dropped the F-bomb, albeit a subtle one, in his message to legislators.

Interesting politics and politicians with guts? Yes! That's possible!

甚麼是好逸惡勞？

香港政府為協助大學畢業生就業推出「大學畢業生實習計畫」資助內地企業提供一千個實習空缺，但反應並不熱烈。居然有人批評這證明香港人好逸惡勞：

中原人力資源顧問董事總經理周綺萍批評，兩個月來僅吸引兩成畢業生北上實習，是反應冷淡，更反映本港大學畢業生好逸惡勞。她指內地工作機會相當難求，現時政府親自出馬拉攏內地大企業，大學生仍無動於衷，抗拒長時間駐內地工作，只求本地舒服安樂工作。盛智晉薈國際顧問公司行政總裁李彥樺指，香港大學生為怕辛苦，的確浪費政府一番心意。

我認為這是絕對不負責任的講法。為甚麼一個城市／地區的人不願離鄉別井去外地工作就等同懶惰？一家人想在香港齊齊整整就是罪過？觀乎世界各地，凡有大量年青人必須離鄉別井去外地工作方能維持生計的地區，經濟必定有嚴重問題，往往是政府經濟政策失敗之故。

再講，整個「大學畢業生實習計畫」背後的動機昭然若揭，無非是為美化失業率，為當權者面上貼金！

Topic of the day: pseudo-maternity leave for women without children

A survey in England found that 74 percent of women surveyed agree employer should give women equivalent of maternity leave even though they are not having babies

So, it's about fairness, right? Well, that should include men then.

To be honest, I think the result is kinda useless. After all, if you ask, who wouldn't want to have more paid time off?

Musician of the day: Jenny Scheinman

I am totally in the mood of jazz violin, after listening to Chris Church (from Jesse Cook's band) and Regina Carter last week. And I "discovered" Scheinman from Ben Allison's latest CD Think Free(BTW, Allison has always put out interesting music and this CD is no exception) Now I'm listening to her CD The Rabbi's Lover.

Music of the day: Rain Day

This song is the perfect description of the weather today. It came from new Flamenco guitarist Jesse Cook's latest album, The Rumba Foundation. I saw him playing with his band at Yoshi's last week. They sounded even better live. His music might not have a lot of depth. Even he admitted it was commercial stuff but all I care was that its beautiful music. I was surprised to see that his band featured a violinist, Chris Church. His playing fitted very well, by providing a whimsical atmosphere. Their show had lots of variety too: some songs are duet between two guitars, some are guitar + percussion. And there was of course a solo guitar piece by Cook.

Here is the Rhapsody link

Musicians of the day: Rodrigo y Gabriela

I missed their concert at Oakland a few weeks ago because of time conflict :( It's a group I really want to see playing live. Check out this NPR interview, about their special style: