His Story

8 months is a long long period to many people to wait, especially to someone who is impatient such as me. For those of you who have kept me posted, you probably know that I will be adjusting my watch to Pacific Standard Time in January - Yes, I’ve got a job offer there in April and the title is Software Design Engineer in Test.

Since then, I become much more interested in anything that has to do with software testing. For example, the top 20 replies by Programmers to Testers when their programs don’t work. It recalls me back to the good old days when I was a second year student in Software Engineering. When the time was up for each coding assignment, the most frequently used explaination to the running time troubles people were hearing was the #1 reply in that post. (Why are you laughing? Was that you? :)

Dream is free for everyone and everyone can have it. But it is the begining of every pricelessness. Good luck to me.

在郑州的头24小时，两件事印象比较深刻：

1. 在转机时遇到一群准备回乡下的农民朋友。大家找不到座位所以就席地在各自的编织袋旁边。可能是太无聊了，一个年轻人噌一下从袋子里提出一个笔记本，然后他对隔壁大声方言到：“上 QQ 给家里说咱们在北京准备转机了。”
2. 因为手机有手写功能，父亲会发短信了，结束了若干年来只会打 OK 和 Yes 的历史。

明天回深圳，洗洗睡了。

When people visit His Story with URL www.wangxiaohu.com, I always want it automatically goes to wangxiaohu.com in order to be consistent. So I wrote this plugin for personal use.

It redirects the current URL to another URL with desired domain name. The source code is here:

The plugin first checks if HTTP_HOST equals $target_host (In my case, it’s “wangxiaohu.com“). If it doesn’t, the plugin simply replaces HTTP_HOST with $target_host and provides a 307 header for temporary redirection.

To install,

1. Give $target_host a new value
2. Rename the file to extension .php
3. Upload it to Wordpress wp-content/plugins directory.

WARNING: This plugin is not guaranteed to be problem free. Use it at your own risk.

刚刚上网就受到上面发过来的今天 Hamilton Spectator 的一个版面。大麦，机器犬大麦，上了头条。更多的照片在这里（感谢摄影师 Peter）
大麦的官方名字叫做 AIBO Entertainment Robot，是 SONY 在 1999 年推出的产品。虽然大麦的“身体（hardware）”全是购买的，但是里面的“思想（software）”是我一行一行写出来的。

我是从 2003 年大二结束后的那个夏天开始创造大麦的思想。那时候因为很喜欢麦当劳的 Big Mac，而且麦大简称又叫 MAC，再加上“麦大”反过来也是 Big Mac 的直译。所以大麦这个名字就是在那个时候想到的。那个夏天只是学习如何设计机器犬内部马达的控制，并且初步设计了它行走、站立、坐下的动作。

2004年的夏天，又给大麦加上了视频和音频的传送。虽然它可能不知道自己看到的是什么，但是能够在本地计算机看到大麦看到的东西，对当时的我也是很兴奋的事情。

再后来我大四，然后读了研究生，没有太多时间在大麦身上做更多的改进。不过我时常带着大麦给其他人做了很多演示。包括附近的高中生、一年级的学生和一些朋友。

我知道大麦的功能和很多其他大学同样的 Project 相比，实在是逊色很多。但是因为大麦，我学到了很多别人没有学到的东西，比如 PID Control Theory、音频视频的网络传输、软件的模块化等等。同时也让我认识到我所掌握的东西，确实有很多的不足。大麦可以扩展的功能实在是太多了。希望以后如果有机会，可以有一个更出色的人来照顾它。

昨天的演示，是最后一次带大麦出来。

再见，大麦。