Pan Admun Republic of Western Blog

I always think I will quit whatever job I do and go teach in school when I get older and approach the end of my technical career. It's a lower stress work, generally more stable, and with many holidays. Furthermore, I like teaching which brings me satification when someone learns.

So from time to time, I spend time thinking about teaching. This even start before I become a TA and snowboard instructor. I'm always wondering how to become a teacher and what makes me effective. I might just pick this up form my father, who used to be a secondary school teacher.

There are a few qualities I can think of that a teacher needs:
- patient, not every one learns on the same pace
- ability to explain idea, it has to be systematic that students can see the logic of how things work
- ability to communicate idea in more than one way, no single way can explain to all students

Well, I need to survive work for the next 20-25 years before myabe I may quit......

I actually subscribe to over 200 blogs and news via my feed on feeds RSS aggregator. I like to have many perspectives on things in Hong Kong, IT, Life, and etc.

There are more than 10 blogs that I like, but here's my 10 picks (not in order):

• 亂衝亂撞
• 豬欄
• 栗子 Dear Life
• The Dukedom of Aberdeen 香港仔公國
• 網絡暴民 Jacky's BLOG
• 港燦筆記
• Just a Sidekick
• Over the Rainbow
• Marz 格子
• PK_日記

p.s. I need to get del.icio.us tag plugin for Nucleus going......

Saw this at here, someone trying to crack someone else computer, but with his/her deep knowldege on "hacking", he/she attacks 127.0.0.1..... just crack me up.

There just too many script kiddies out there that know nothing but download tools.

stupid, eh?

KatRiders.com :: View topic - Uuber Hacker

On cable TV here in North America, there is a show called Judge Judy, hosted by a retired family court judge turns TV show personality. She resolves family dispite cases on TV. It is common for people in the US of A to bring despite to court, they just seem to have a habit of suing whatever they like.....

Recently in Canada, some muslim community propose to setup a muslim tribunals to resolve family despite using Sharia law.

I have not give it much thought yet, but I'm not sure this is a good idea for our communities. My reason is that the tribunal is based on Muslim Sharia law, I'm worry it sets an incorrect precedence for more such ruling on family matters, which may create a chaos as many different values clash on the same issues. Also, I'm wondering what kind of power this tribunal has on people that is not muslim. In addition, some believed that this law marginalize women.

Ontario will make own decision about Muslim tribunals: McGuinty - Yahoo! News

Whether it's true or not, it must be a good storyline for movie....

Somehow this remind me of Castaway and Gundam.

Japan still waiting on possible WW2 soldiers - Yahoo! News

The power supply for my external HDD enclosure lay on the carpet like a undersea fiber linking 2 shores across a big ocean.

Just dig up the tickets I have for the past snowboarding season....

48 tickets
12 runs a day
1 km per run

Milage: 48*15*1 = 576 km

Wow!

Winter is 6 months away.

The spring starts when all snow melt, tree is only with bare branches. Not much is happening for few weeks



Then green starts to grow.



and spring start to go into action

Just put together the computer I got on Friday. It's a AMD Athlon 64 3000+, MSI RS480M2-IL m/b, 1GB dual channel DDR RAM, with a 20GB ATA HDD. All these are construct in a AOpen case. Total damage is CAN$550.

Fedora core 2 (x86) installs alright, updated all RPMs and it seem even able to detect the SATA IDE. NIC is detected without a problem. The other problem I encounter so far is the computer struck on reboot during shutdown. I will try out the sound card later, as well as the firewire and USB2.

I'm going to wait for FC4 for AMD64 come out in few weeks, then I'm going to move all old server function over here one by one.

Yeah!

It is a rainy weekend, what a rip-off for a long weekend for those like to go out and do something.

It's exactly 天雨路滑.....



Then I had a car accident yesterday afternoon. It's nothing big, but enough damage. My car's front right wheel hit the curb on a left turn. It was a 90 degree kind of turn, because of the rain, the car slips. The rim is damaged but okay. However, the axial bent. I wasn't driving fast, but should have been more careful since it's raining. It's too late to say that now. Fortunately, I walk away alive and unscratch (yeah.... shouldn't make it a big thing for such a small accident. I had worse....)

So, I spent 2 hours waiting for tow truck to drop my car off to the repair shop. The rest of the weekend will be without a car.

This is my second car accident since I start driving in 1999, the first one was with my VW Golf on 2 years back on a showy night. My car slipped out of control before a light and hit a light pole sideway on the front....

For a 3 seconds incident, it has a great impact on life; cost money (hopefully not too badly), let someone down (I was on my way to pick up a friend to airport, she ends up have to take the bus in the rain), and mess up the Sunday boyz night outing (so someone else has to drive), put some bitter feeling in me.

From time to time, I'd suddenly think; "gee, what if this happened and I get into an accident?" It's kind of like a hair-raising alarm to me danger's ahead. That remind me to be careful. It's an level of alertness, I just not alert enough sometimes even I drive safe. That's what kind of bother me. And I should seriously thinking about taking advanced driving course to learn what to do on these kind of scenario.

I have seen my first RSS Ad since late last year, and the number has grow steadily.

So far, most of the Ads I see are banners on the bottom of an item. But some of ad actually appears as an item. This concerns me a lot; As the number of such ad grow, the noise level going to increase to a point that I'll have to filter a lot of junks before I can see see something useful. Sure, someone is going to come up with filter and other technique to battle these, but just like spams on other media (ie email), it's going to be a uphill battle.

RSS is supposed to be a simple format for people to notify the world they got new contents, but it's no longer simple.

from sidekick: 第一個RSS 廣告

Saw the news awhile back about the first lady's speech, finally have a change to watch it.

A funny speech from the First desperate housewife lady, who used to be a librarian. She talks about how useful a chainsaw to the cowboy, and he who milk the male horse, and definition of a short walk (about 20 foot).

Whether you hate the man or not, you're going to like the humor in it and got to see the man from another angle.

Jackson's Junction: Video: First Lady Laura Bush steals the spotlight at WHCD

I went back to work on Sunday to catch up with things, and saw a roadkill as I drove in.

It saddens me when I saw the animal laying on the middle of the road. What a stupid idiot runs over animal like this? The road is a 40km zone and the roadkill is just ~20m passed a speed bump.... don't tell me you didn't slow down to pass the bump!

Everyday when I left work, I saw these 2 ground hounds by the road side eating. They will run back into the bush if you stop and look at them. On the other side of the road there are a bunch of gooses. They are nice little cute creatures enjoying their spring.

Now's only one ground hound left....

Our campus is just next to a swamp that is designated as a protected habitat for migrating birds and local creatures. There is a short path running through it that many take a walk during lunch time. It's a nice little walk to be away from things for 15-20 minutes break. The treeline blocked the view to our site and you are like walking in the wild. I have done that a few times. We have other neighbors here like goose, and even one time I saw a deer.

People are just too good at destroying things. I always think it is an attritude thing, when people talking about save the Mother Nature. It all starts from small little things like respect the land and living with our envionment in harnomy.

Read it on 靚靚映風, your car is indeed a weapon.

p.s. My apology for the picture of dead animal.....

In the beginning, there was World Wide Web. It grows out of the academic community into the commercial world. People savvy for more information on-line.

Web surfers, who access the www via a web browser, fetch HTML pages from a server on the internet via HTTP. This content delivering mechanism is a form of pull technology. One short-coming of this is when a surfer pulls a webpage, it is unknown whether the content has changed. So he (or she) has to continue to pull to realize if new content has emerged. To help automate this, a Meta tag was invented to tell the web browser how often it should reload a page.

» Read More

From time to time, I have too much left over rice after meal. The next day what I do is make fried rice.



Ingredient:
- eggs x2
- left over rice
- salt
- soy sauce
- optional: fixed vegetables

Procedure:
1. blend the eggs
2. add a little bit of water and salt in eggs
3. heat up pan with oil
4. put eggs in pan and scamble
5. add rice, spread a bit of water on top of rice (put in veget if wanted)
6. add soy sauce
7. mix up egg and rice until done

So, I've been thinking about upgrading my server at home. I currently favor a system with AMD Athlon 64 3000+, MSI RS480M2-IL mobo, 512 dual channel DDR RAM.

I am thinking to use my existing FC2 setup on it, but likely going to end up migrate all services to it slowly to minimize impact..... I have people hitting my server for Nucleus stuff like plugins. It will be suck to have my server down for days.

Speaking of services, here's a list of services running on it currently:
- NTP
- IMAP/POP3/webmail/sendmail
- FTP (usually disabled)
- NFS
- DNS for internal domain edhome.ca
- ddclient to DynDNS
- DHCP
- MySQL, w/ phpMyadmin
- Apache
- user data storage

I also have all my applications running on it:
- Blog (Admun + Admun NUDN)
- Feed on Feeds RSS Aggregator
- wiki
- Gallery web album
- BT using Torrentflux
- MlDonkey
- TV capturing

I got to think about how to do it. I want to use FC4 (coming June) with this new server, but I'm sure there will need a lot of works to get it going.

I'm planning to add these functions in the future:
- upgrade to a better TV capture card
- real-time tv streaming, might need to get a new capture card with 2 tuners
- PBX with asterisk, VoIP using SIP, voicemail access over the net, maybe ever VoIP out-going local call
- setup Samba

Went to watch The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy tonight on a date. Yeah... it's not really a good date movie. But I wasn't really on a date, anyway.

It got more what I call not-so-real sci-fi style, you know, the kind that you won't list the spec of the spacehip type XYZ and no crazy scientist will publish paper telling you this technology is coming in 10 years. A thing from the radio show days, maybe? It definitely no bleeding edge space technology like you see in Star Wars, but it's fun to see infinite improbability drive at work.

It got more imagination than special effect and CG. One example is you don't got to see spaceship landing, but just hear it touch down. I mean, I remember at least 2 cases of USS Voyager comes down from orbit and land with thruster. It's not they do not spend money on CG and such because there are some scenes with quite a health does of CG. I guess it's more of a subtle thing taken from the TV show?

Story wides, you can tell its British roots from the british humors, and Arthor, the main character just smells like from UK alright. I has a not of subtle humors and I particularly like the way it pokes at things like bureaucrats, politicians, and religion. Oh, also it's a very violent movie; all people on earth were killed within 15 minutes of the movie started. (sorry for the spoiler)

And just as most movies, there has to have a love line there; Loves makes man do things. ie go a long long distance to save the loved one.

BTW, it's 42, that's all you need to do.

I give a 2.5/5

Read on PK_ an article about overtime and long working hours in Hong Kong. Interesting read since it gave a view of why everyone stay late at work. It echo many views from talks with friends when I was in Hong Kong last year.

Working live is different in Canada, at least from what I see. Most people, especially those with family, live a pretty regular life. By regular, I mean 9-to-5ish working hours, supper home with families, work on garden on weekend, etc.... ok, maybe I generalize a bit, but the thing is people here have a life after work; Work is important, but they put emphasis on a balance life style.

From personal experience, I live in Canada and work for a telecom R&D shop here in Ottawa. I am a late to work type, usually back to office around 9:30am, then I stay to 5ish before go home. But from time to time, I got my lab shift in the early evening after 5pm and will stay to 8-9pm or even later. I also work weekend and such sometimes when there is a need and I feel it worth it. At work, we are pretty easy on the 7 working hours part, I'm fine as long as I'm keeping up with my schedule. Probably due to the nature of my line of work, it is relatively flexible at work. I can go to dental appointment for an hour or so during the day, then back to work. Often I go home early, have supper, watch some TV, _than_ drove back to work for a night shift. Also, I could setup remote access to do work from home, but I didn't because I don't want to take works home.

Even those management is flexible, there are cases that people were asked to work longer hours and weekend, even over X'mas (the campus actually suppose to be shutdown). Fortunately, there is OT pay allow is or able to bank the time for vacation. Some people I know may not be as lucky; They got so much work that overtime is almost like expected and a must. But these are not a wide-spread cases that I can see.

Am I a workaholic? I don't think so. I seem still have a life.

I don't know if you know what is fortune cookie. But for most Canadian, it's one of the things attached to Chinese food.



It's a small little sweet cookie comes with your bill after supper, and there is a lttle words of "wisdom" in the cookie.

So, you asked: "Why this little cookie called furtune cookie? Can it really fortune telling?"

Yes, it can. And it's like this:

Me and Heng had supper after work. We asked for the bill at the end, while having a chat.

(bill arrived, admun picks a cookie.)
...
...
(So, we were talking about some girl and such)
...
Me: "(她) 係你就係你,唔係就唔係" (She is my if destiny allowed)
Heng: "......"
Then I crack open the cookie and see:



So, they know what to tell me! And it also has French on the other side:



Now you know.

And yes, there is no such thing called fortune cookie in Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.....

The title say it all. A good read with all these discussions among HK bloggers on what is blogging.

Om Malik's Broadband Blog: Blogging 101 - what's blogging, what's not

There was a lot of re-thinking about why I blog recently. I read many posts from many HK bloggers asking the same question. I thought I know what I blog for, but it's getting more fuzzy after all the new discussions. I questioned myself: Am I actually blogging?

There is no doubt that the viewpoint in that TV program is quite narrow. (BTW, thanks to alex for putting it on-line so us oversea can see!) Blogger and blog culture is much wider than what is seen in the program.

I think the other discussion right now is center on whether a "web diary" is a blog. I agreed that if it's just a blog of "oh, I eat today at noon", there is no difference than those who make those "me too" website back in the old days. They put a few random pictures and flashy text, and call it's their homepage..... come _ON_!

A blog should be a voice about the person writing it, in another word there has to be a personality in there. Another way to put it is it should offer some opinion in it, not just a one-liner and than a link and trackback. That's what I follow when I write a post. When I link to a news or etc, I usually put in some of my thought, even if it's not much of it.

A blog can be about a wide range of topic, may it be politics, technology, news, personal, pepsi girl, ranting, and what you got. It's a blog if there are opinion, personality, bi-direction communcation (via comemnts/trackback).

The other thing I found is when you blog for a while, you get that brain struck going on sometimes, and your opinion-over-BS noise radio may raise and you think it becomes irrelevant... No. It does not matter at long as you speak your opinion and keep blogging.

Blog on, guys and gals!

[update]
Hum, just think of that a blog is also defined by the readers it target. A diary usually just target for one person (the writer). But a blog is write to all on the net, or at least a group of people it aims
[/update]

I saw a video clip of driving in fog a while back at littleoslo's blog. Few weeks back I drove to Tremblant one more time to hit the last snow before spring take them away. I was alone on the road 5:30am, the street lights zooming by and the night is passing by me. Then I pull out my camera and....

this
that
more

p.s. Please pardon the background music.....