Pan Admun Republic of Western Blog

This is so true. The fastest way to send a lot of data from point A to point B is not via the net.

I still remembered that pointless story (Ok, maybe I just don't see his point) my prof told in the first day of computer networking course. He asked something like "How to send a lot of data down the road to another computer?" The answer turn out to be copy the data on tape and carry the tape by walking.

The math of sending 1GB, in today's standard:

By internet: assumpting DSL (~150KB/sec for me), 1000MB = 1000000KB / 150 = ~6666 sec = 111 minutes

By walking the DVD: burning DVD ~ 20 minutes, walking 15 minutes (~1 km in city), total 35 minutes! (or 5MB/sec!!!!)

Of course, this depends on how much data you are sending and how far you're sending it to.

It must be the best kept secret on the net about how to have great throughput. hehehe

新無線通訊

The dot com was burst in 2000/2001, it was like the end of the world; (Ok, I exaggerated...) Big (and small) companies collapsed one after another, employees getting layoff left and right, the countries are at war, virus is killing people. To some, it's a nightmare.

During the past few years, the economy surrounding the net seem all dry up and will not return for a while. VC money is tight, if there are any. Companies are struggling to still alive and hang in for the storm to past. People is turning every rock trying to find jobs, or have to change career all together.

Now the market is turning around, things are getting better. Money is flowing in (and out of) the net again. Even it's not like back in 2000. People found jobs available.

Another economics cycle ended for yet a new one to start.

New technologies are developed in the past few years, but do we progress to another level? or merely just another incarnation of the same old with new wrapping.

[update]
Second thought, even those it might be a new wrapping..... but it certainly better and improved.
[/update]
A whole new internet? (kottke.org)

Just reading this from Wired. A all-podcast radio station to launch in San Francisco soon.

I saw recently more and more and more podcast going on the net, don't even mention those from the podcasting pioneers. It's not just the bloggers going verbal these days, many on-line/on-air radio outlets also slowly experimenting with this new media.

I am surprice to see podcasting, as a media/distribution channel, is gaining popularity. I thought at first, who want to talk to a recorder and put the tracks on the net, anyway. But I was wrong... there are many of them. I guess there's nothing earth shattering here, as people already saying this for months. But it's interesting to see it grow so rapidly, as it only starts around Oct last year. This thing for sure grows a horn and gain traction.

無驚無險, 又到六點...

Just returned from TO. The weather suckz. It started raining on Friday night and just seem non-step until Sunday.

It's good to catch up with my friends (Claude, Nelson, Fred). Have a good time eating Shanghaiese (A place west of Golden Commerce), Japanese (Sushi Time @ Queen, and some takeout), Korean BBQ (Walker Hill @ #7). Also have bubble tea (technically, I should say "fruit tea") @ go for tea, and chinese dessert @ Hong Fok Tong. I didn't do enough shopping this time, only picked up some batteries for my coreless phone and MP3.... kind of hesitated to buy DVD while I still have a bunch to watch and doesn't know any good one I should get.

Oh, well. This fixed my need for good food for the near future.

Just saw ana, and others mentioned olso is creating a sticker map. So, here I pitch in my 0xdeadbeef color scheme button.



Nucleus also has some buttons, here I pick one.



In process of making the button, saw this button maker. Cool.

See: olso's sticker map

I don't care if the general can command their troops with a hand gesture. But I do want to able to use my hand to cut a piece of code from a file and paste it elsewhere. I want to analysis my code by moving my hands over a 3D display and trace the function call from A to B. Then I can grab the complier to compile the program, literally.

Of course, I wanna be like Tom.

Can you see... it gives you a better interface to your computer.
Can you see... you can use your data in an amazing manner.
Can you see... it's cool.
Can you see... it's tom.


Defense Tech: "MINORITY REPORT," FOR REAL

This one looks kind of ugly, but taste alright.

Ingredients:
- dark soy sauce
- chicken

(That's it? Yes, no shit)

Procedures:
1. heat up the pot
2. add some oil
3. put in chicken, cook for a bit
4. add in soy sauce, with a bit of water.
4 cook until done.

Finally find some time to fix my NTP setup to sync the clock on all my machine. It's broken for quite sometimes that require manual action during summer time clock change....

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It doesn't seem like an very interesting read, but it points at the new economy surrounding syndication technology.

It's a shift from poll to push in information access technology. We no longer need to go poll all websites manually and see what's new. Now we get notify (the push to us) as new information available (Ok, I know it's still a polling scheme in the backend, but to the user's it's push to us as it's available...).

Thanks to the advance on the Internet, we (almost) no longer have the bandwidth problem we run into in the mid 90's that killed the first generation of push technology (still remember pointcast, castanet, etc?). And today's new push technology is smarter and light-weight.

It allows us to have a system that bring to our attention information that we interested in. My Feed of Feeds currently only present me with all the new post, but I can hack it with a small engine that go through the in-coming bits and flag the one I might want to read ASAP. It can even sent it to me ASAP via SMS and such so I can take action if needed.

Interetsting, eh?

Vote with your feed | Steve Gillmor's Inforouter | ZDNet.com

Japan official is working on allowing gas exploration rights in an area of the East China Sea that claimed by China.

I hope we learned from history, this is the kind of thing eventually countries go to war for, right? I don't think it's something everyone want to see again. It's 50+ years now and people start to forget?

Greed, power, nationalism, corruption still burning everywhere in the world.

BBC Chinese - 日本宣布將授權爭議海域石油勘探
BBC - Japan risks China anger over gas

You see a computer screen, I see a gallery.

Just read this at slashdot, buzztracker maps geographic location on Googles news and display it on a world map. It's like a little map showing where's the big news are happening around the world at the moment.

Current hotspot:


Slashdot | Mapping Google News

I didn't listen to a lot of podcast since it got popular a while back, but as a plugin developer working on Nucleus, I hack up a small plugin to do podcast.

PigPig is the first Chinese podcast I ran into so far (Anyone knows any out there?). She is a student from UofC, if I'm not mistaaken. I also guaduated from UofC too, so I listen to it with interest.

Pigcast

Indeed, the internet changed everyday. Nice little summary, it's like a little mirror. Things are getting more "social" everyday; social bookmarking, group this and that. It's all about linking.

I still remember before the days of WWW, there is also a thing called BBS. 2400 baud is fast back in those days. UNIX is for rocket scientist. email is transport via UUCP. telnet is cool. Linux is at 0.9x. Slackware is distributed on 30+ diskettes. Redhat 3.0.3 on CD.

::littleoslo:: Have We been Heard?

面係人地俾，架係自己丟！

- A old saying, reminded after reading this.

Not that I'm smart or anything, but I have been thinking about this for sometimes here (and here), I guess I'm not alone.

$2/$3 a show? I guess it's not too bad, afterall.

Mark Evans :: A New Business Model for TV

Watched Sin City with friends last night. I browsed wintervalley's post (not fully read... just hate to know the details before walking into movie) about it and thought hum, interesting. I don't know what I'm walking into.

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It's all software.... everything is possible.

- hear this at work from my fellow engineers.

With cheaper/bigger pipe and stroage, it's soon for new types of channel appears for movie distribtuion.

A DVD is about 4.7 GB is size (yes, there are dual-layer out there, but let's left it out of this discussion). With all the trailers, special features, I'm sure the actually movie size is about say 4GB. There is already 4GB flash card out there. Ans yes, they are expensive and all. But price will drop and size will grow. We'll soon able to get a movie on USB key drive. As far as I know, movie downloaded via BT, even in good quality, usually under 2GB....

The idea Jason mentioned about using USB keys drive for netflix rental looks really interesting. Renting movie on USB key drive from Blockblaster? Cool!

Bottom line, DRM is still a big issue, and I guess users (including me...) still not buy in to the idea of giving up the idea of owning 'em if you pay for it (especially when it's $20 a copy).

Cutting edge obsolete technology (kottke.org)

Related:
The Future of Cable TV in the BT World
Renting My TV Programmes

I join the blog radio on oui-blog and blogcast on blog-you this week. I thought at first I want to increase traffic to my blog via exposal on these channels and on the same time to be able to pay more attention to the HK blogosphere so I can get more first hand feel on HongKong.

This is particular important since I block my blog from web spiders from Yahoo and Google alike (via robots.txt). I don't feel too kin on seeing my content/opinion poping up on the search engine everywhere, unless it carries some weight. One example was my blog used to popup on when people search for "green onion pancake" because I have a small little post on making them...... I'm kind of shy, you can tell. Because of this, my blog is mostly dead quiet until recently.

It so far works pretty well, I see increased traffic to my site, and hopefully people like my stuff.

STACKEY // BLOG //: "BLOGCAST"

I guess what happening here is the content makers are trying to find more media to sale their contents to and they want to protect their asset on those media to ensure profit. Yes, mobile phone and Internet (only partially) is about communication. But there also a boardcasting/contents consumption part in it. You surf the internet to get information, no matter it's knowledge on the wikipedia, product price search. They are content.

The content people does not realize that Internet and mobile phone is not a uni-direction channel like TV. The receiving end has the ability to response, this is the natual of these media. The old business model just not suitable here anymore. I guess by finding a balance to allow sharing and
discussing via the reverse direction, they can actually increase the revenue.

Of course, it is a fine line to walk on...

Techdirt:One More Reason Why Copy Protection Isn't The Issue

I've been a fan of flip phone since I got my S/// z600, but this phone looks cool to me. I guess slide phone will be my next favorite.

I'm wondering if it has enough PDA functions.... I was still debating if a smartphone in my future.

Nokia introduces new high-end GSM phone - 8801 (phoneArena)

I still remembered when I first start playing around with friendster, it got quite slow that I often give up. This happens even at night (I guess it's day on the flip side of earth, eh). Later, it gets better as things speeded up. Some rumor was flowing around about it moved away from java to PHP. This article confirmed that.

So, bad design does hurt bad in this case, so it seems, mainly database bottleneck.

Techworld.com - Friendster scales the network with open source

p.s. LAMP == Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP == The Open Source killer web app platform

The chairlift.

Here's a list of common problems I noticed on new snowboarders:

- counter rotation, caused by lack of upper body moment. This happens when the board/lower body turns to one direction, while the upper body remains on another direction. Sometimes, a rider just use the counter rotation force to trigger a turn. It works, but much less effective (and easy to catch the other edge).
- lack of flex/extension, caused by fixed knee position through out the turn. This hampered the ability to turn effectively and reduce the stability on bumpy terrain.
- breaking/bending back, which happens often on toe side turn. Instead of bending the knee, a snowboarder breaks his/her back to maintain balance. This caused body out of alignment with the board's working edge and skid in result.

春天來了, 冬天還很遠...

p.s. Hum... I can't remember who said: "春天來了, 夏天還會遠嗎?"

So, Google Maps has a new feature to show the satellite picture of the map being shown. I'm still not sure what it's for besides you have a 3D view of the surrounding of a place.

It's kind of neat to see my place from high orbit.



p.s. They pinpoint the house across from me instead, so I guess the wrong house will be bombed if someone uses Google Maps as reference. Keyhole or not, it is not perfect.

Arrrrh! I want one of this!!

Scalar Corp 7-Gram Wearable Screen : Gizmodo

You just have to respect the enthusiasm of Japanese, they built the bike in Akira, the glider in Valley of the Wind, and now the walking robot like in FrontMission....

It walks very cumbersome, still. But it's a first.

The Land Walker, robot transport Gundam style - Engadget - www.engadget.com.

The 04-05 snowboarding season finally come to the end after almost 4 months (Dec-Mar). It rained all afternoon and night last night, the snow is melting fast as the temperture is about zero most of the day. The ski school at Camp Fortune is closing for the season.

It had been a very good season for me, my riding improved a lot and have fun teaching programs and various private lessions. The weather been pretty good to me, too.

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This come to mind:

She likes me, she likes me not.
She likes me, she likes me not.
...
...
...

After a quick supper with Heng and some bubble tea, I suddenly feel like to go for a ride. So, I drove south to get away from the city. I drove to North Gower, swing around to Kars, and headed back to Ottawa. It's a big loop for about an hour.

The last time I did that is about 2 years ago after I came back from Japan. I wasn't too happy at the time so I drove. This time, I can't say I'm particularly happy, but I drove anyway. I have the music on loud and drove down that dark country road. The drakness surrounding me and only the headlight lead the way. I feel relax and have a peaceful mind.

This idea of taking a ride to clean the mind started back in my university days; Once my housemate had a breakup and need some quiet time, so she ask me to go for a ride with her.

Now I supposed to feel better.

Admun News Agency - OTTAWA - At 10:29am this morning, Pan Admun Republic of Western Blog was under attack by the invader from Mars. UFOs fly over the blog country and fire death beam. Explosion, smoke, and fire are observed. The ASDF (Admun Self-Defense Force) was mobilized to defense the country but was no match for the Alien.

We will continue update the situation as details emerged, please stay tuned for the latest from our live boardcast

As seem on sidekick: netdisaster

Saw this at sidekick, my mailbox size is now 1362MB and increasing.... interesting.

I know it's April's fool today.. and even have a outlook reminder popup to remind me not falling for any stunt.

Dec 28th morning was spent taking care of business and met up with friends.

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