Pan Admun Republic of Western Blog

What? Have you see a good looking kid before.

We have a lot of good snow this Monday night. There are patches of soft powder all over the place, makes it very fun to ride on. I call it "rider friendly". The weather warms up quite a bit compare during the day makes it even more enjoyable.

The session is focus on terrain adaption and ride on powder snow.

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The weather is somewhat cold (it was -28 on Friday night...), the good news is we've been getting snow on and off throughout the week. So, the snow condition is pretty good.

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As the rise of blog, RSS, and social networking, many web services surrounding them are introduced. The latest one is social bookmarking. It's interesting to see people coming out with solutions for users to bookmark and categorize their favorite sites.

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In my post about bittorrent, I was wondering how we can use peer to peer technology in the future. One of the questions is how this market model works. After reading this, I got some idea.

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I seem to always forgot how to do this....

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON [database].* TO '[username]'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '[password]' WITH GRANT OPTION;

That Pepsi Girl, hum...

Some think this is a flog, a fake blog by corperate marketing to harness the blog power to draw people to their ad campaign.

Whether this is a flog or not, the commerical indeed seems quite successful, credit to the cute girl (name Mandy, as reported), another case of sex sales.

On the other hand, I was watching Chinese cable TV the other night, there was a commerical from a Rogers wireless retailer. It has a cute Chinese girl too, but the effect is nowhere near the pepsi girl. Ok, the viewer community is much smaller, but it's about making an impact to the viewers.

This commerical feels so cheezy; A somewhat cute Chinese girl dancing hip-hop happily, and phone ring so she grabs it. The girl acts quite unnaturally, at least I think so. Then there was one close shot that showing her belly button (the sex-sale-punch), it just plain ugly.

US army is deploying robots to fight. The usual response from people are: a) oh, no. Terminator is coming b) yeah right, you rich boy trying fight your dirty war with toys again

This actually remind me of Fuchikoma , the 4 legs AI tank in Ghost in the Shell. It fights along its master to provide transportation, armor protection and fire support. It is kind of like these robots, especially the Talon. I could imagine having these robots deploy with troops and fight along with soldiers. It just like a Fuchikoma without a brain.

Also see here

The weather is quite cold in the morning at -13, but I feel it must be around -20 after wind chill since my toe is freezing in the boots. My boots has poor insulation and my toe usually freeze under -15 or so. Then the weather warm up over lunch.

The section focus on: 1) pressure control 2) speiss 3) down un-weight turn.

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The best way to spend Valentine's day if you don't have a girl friend is to spend the night up the ski hill and snowboard on soft snow.

I spend 2 hours up the hill practicing intermediate sliding turn, but still with problem on inclination (hand put far too outside the board), angulation (not enough cowboy), pressure control (not balance flex throughout the board), and timing (flex to fast, too late).

More to improve.....

I've been having encoding problem in Nucleus since I started putting Chinese in the post. It turns out I can fixed it by setting the encoding from the language file. UTF-8 rulez!

Nucleus Support :: View topic - Bringing nucleuscms to arabic

The weather this Saturday is warm. It stays at near zero, the snow is slightly melting over lunch.

The session runs by Anne on half cab.

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So, many are writing about 10 places in their city. So, here's my.

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Just noticed this morning when sending email form my Yahoo mail account, they now added Captcha challenge before accepting the mail.

Parently, there must be a lot of spambots/worms using Yahoo mail now, so they have to put in something to block them.

圍村盆菜

The weather continues to stay warm. Actually, it was not as warm as previous day, snow is not melting while it's still warm.

The session is run by Ezio, focus on basic carving with flexion and extension.

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Is it a good thing to teach about writing virus, spamware, worm and spyware?

Why not? Without classes like this, people are figuring out by themselves how to write such program anyway. I believed virus/spymware/worm is not a very hard piece of software to write, any decent programmer with good knowledge on the platform can write one. And a good evil coder can write some very damaging software, as history had shown.

However, I have one reserve on the idea. The emphasis of the course should be on how this type of software works and how one can counter it. If I'm teaching such a course. I will set up a closed network and release tons of virus, worm, and spyware for students to find them, disect them, and find fix for it. I will also have them write post motem report to explain why such problem exists and how to prevent such problem in future design. I do believed many of these security problems are origin from a poor design that didn't consider from the security point of view. Such a class can drill in the idea how to design a secure software, IMHO.

This is how we raise the next generation of virus/spam/worm fighter.

Way to Go, UoC.

p.s. For the record, I graduate from UoC in 98'

CBC News: University to offer e-mail spam course

Bend your knee!

Janus, on how to snowboard

The weather is so warm and sunny, the snow actually melting. It turns into slush, and I no doubt wear one too many layer and sweating.... and I have to worry about getting sun burn.

It is a short session with Anne, since Tamara is out of action this season. 8(

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X'mas day was spent relatively quiet. We went out to see my cousin Justin practice soccer, and have dimsum at Taiko. I saw a really big fish. Afterward, we went for some shopping at UNI before head home.

After a short stop at home, I head out to meet up my buddy Mike and his wife Lisa (Why most of my friends are now married?). We shop around Time Square and Causeway Bay, and have dessert together.

I was home at supper time to join the X'mas dinner at home. It was a great meal of mixing East and West. We have Turkey and sushi on the table, as well as salad, pasta, and soup.

I fell asleep on the couch after the meal, while my cousin watching Beauty and the Beast in Cantonese.... sounds wierd.

Boxing day was spend on opening gifts first thing in the morning, of course. We have a light breakfast and head to Wan Chai Gap for a hike to Aberdeen Upper Reservoir.

There is a BBQ area near the reservoir, I meet up with M and L for a BBQ organized by their friends. I have not been to a Hong Kong Style BBQ for so long, which charcoals are light up in a pit, and each person BBQ the food with a log fork. There are a lot of people and tons of good food. It's not your ordinary Hong Kong style BBQ. There are fatty chinese eel, big meaty fish, mushroom, japanese rice cake, veal ribs and many many other stuff. The BBQ is a marathon, go from noon to past 7pm. I ate and ate until I have to stop. But we still went for dessert and chat afterward.

27th was spend mostly shopping around and seeing my secondary school buddy Patrick and his family, as well as a few friends.

It is X'mas eve, I called friends Eddy & his wife Judy out for supper.

Eddy works in Quarry Bay, so we first hooked up in Causeway Bay, and we shop a bit for my laptop bag. (found a messenger bag type from Targus... that was a really good one but is too expensive)

We left for TST just after sunset, people already off work and on the street. It's packed with people.... it's Causeway Bay, afterall. The atmosphere of Christmas is thick. I forgot how Christmas like in Hong Kong, I don't even think I feel so Christmas in Canada besides the weather (white and cold) and when in the shopping mall (all the people plus the Salvation army with bells). I guess I just never over here at the Hong Kong Island on X'mas eve and it's been many years since I was back in Hong Kong. The sounds and light, so vivid and saturated, flood into me. Again, that "so alive" feeling. This year, the police is putting the whole area in Paterson street and Lokart road as pedestrian zone. The street is packed with people. A multimedia advistisment of Moto A668 is by the street corner. With sound and sight, it creates a small world of its own in the middle of the crowd.

MTR is as usual very crowded, to say the least. We arrived TST without any further issue. The sight here is different than Causeway Bay, the whole Nathan road from TST to Jordon becomes pedestrian zone as well. But you can it feels like something is missing, when compared to Causeway Bay. There are a lot of people, still. Note, females in Hong Kong Island and Kowloon really have different style... you can tell right out. I guess it's also depends on where different crowds hangout.

We settled on Todai Japanese buffet, which is from US of A. I know they have a place in San Jose, but never been there before. We usually went for better Japanese food. Food is okey with a lot of variety. Price is a bit higher since it's x'mas, and they put a time cap to 9:00pm, so they can do a second round for the night. There is more time then we need anyway.

After the meal, we walk around to see the light decoration. We start heading toward TST east. We can see the crowd looming ahead of us (and here). We walked (and walked) to the walkway by the harbor, and follow the crowds heading toward Star Ferry.

Since there is crowd control from the police in effect, we can see a lot of police and crews using loud speakers to give direction to people. It feel a slight tension here, remembered the incident in LKF few years back.... The farther we walk, the more crowded it gets. it takes us sometimes to fight through (actually following the flow) the crowd arriving by the space museum. The walk of fame is closed for inflow traffic since there are too many people there already. Then we heard announcement that Star Ferry and Ocean Terminal is getting too crowded as well, so they stop the traffic. Damn, I thought I wil try to catch the ferry back home.

So we go on plan B, once again follow the crowd and turn north on Nathan road.



As we walked passed Panisulla hotal, we see a lot of people still trying to get to the Star Ferry and other "closed" area. Many are dressed in custom (x'mas hat and what you got there) and has small light and neo decoration/toys bought from the people selling on the street.

We get to the TST MTR enterce, but it's exit only... so no luck. Walk on to the Park Lane, there are x'mas carol. Finally, I arrived Jordon MTR, after a full circle from where we started. I bid fairwell to my friends and hup on the tube to hit home.

So, been there, done that. One item checked off my list of things to do.

The guy creates Apple. Cool talks for geeks.

You learns first by doing it, then move up a level and re-visit it from another angle to understand and make sense of it. What a way to learn by yourselves.

IT Conversations: Steve Wozniak Part 1 - Gnomedex 4.0

These people have no moral, caused others problem and grief for their own fortune... yet it's not personal? I don't get it.

Interview with a link spammer | The Register

Who's know where Internet come from? Eh, the DoD reserach project in the 1970's?

Here's some answer.

The 'Complete' History of the Internet - www.WBGLinks.net

Because there are too many services out there want me to put a button on my blog to allow others to add me, I decide to not put any. The only exception is the RSS and ATOM feeds, which is popular standard.

It sounds like a good idea to me, solving the too-many-buttons-press problem.... but my guts feeling is it's not going to happen, since someone need to put forward resouce for it to work. Also, there are concerns on privary and other issues.

Scripting News: 1/11/2005

more relasted:
A nice summary here
here
here

I set a list of objectives before the season starts, let see how I do so far:

- get instructor L1 certification
- ride switch over green and hopefully blue terrain (sort of able to do heel-to-toe turn on green)
- improve intermediate sliding turn definitely better in riding form and more stable on icy condition, but can improve more on ice
- able to comfortably come down black diamond run (Need Improvement: better but still need more work)
- improve short radius turn on blue terrain (has not start)
- improve carving on blue terrain (has not start)

The flowers that represent Hong Kong.