His Story

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jEOkxRLzBf0

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

by John Lennon

打算这几天回久违的麦大看看，顺带看一下我的大麦。想起那段和大麦朝夕相处的日子，真的很让人怀念。刚才突然看到另外一个大学在用 Wiimote 去指挥大麦的兄弟走来走去，让我见影思物。除了我，大麦应该会一直都安静地收藏在麦大某个保险箱里吧。

Wow, that is a long title. Yes, they are the famous two principles in Software Engineering I’ve learned when I was in ITB. It says that, the software you designed is stable, if in general

1. It will never enter a undesired state
2. If it unfortunately enters an undesired state, it will eventually back to a desired state later.

While it is realistically impossible to achieve the first goal, although software engineers are trying to reach it as close as possible, there are many ways to accomplish the second one. It sometime can be some procedures, which are what we called "backup plans"; it sometime can be some kind of self recovery mechanism; or, it can be proved that the software will eventually do something good. Here is the video version of the idea.

 说起第一次看到真人版《变形金刚》的预告，那还是在 Ancaster 的电影院看《加勒比海盗2》之前几分钟看到的。预告一开始，讲的就是什么火星探路者传回一些什么机密影像回地球 Blah, Blah。还没看到最后的电影标题的时候，就觉得自己胸口那个什么东西在发热。但也不知道这个预告在说什么。直到最后一堆废铁自己组装出来若干个大字，我才猛然被烫了一下—— Transformers 变形金刚。说实话，这名字挺俗的——变形金刚。孩之宝寂静了几年终于盼来了第二春，屁颠屁颠地哈拉着下个月准备上映的真人版。预告篇我看过，几个长的丑了吧唧长的很后现代的机器虫子在互殴。要么怎么说人家吃能量块儿的比咱们吃汽油的牛逼呢？照现在的油价来看，丫跳两步的钱够我半星期的工资了。后来一小屁孩儿跟我指正，说那不是虫子，那是擎天柱，我才想起来我的那个《变形金刚》的年代已经那么久远了。

我上小学那阵，每天过了新闻联播，就傻了吧唧搬个小凳往电视跟前那么一杵，等着开演。家里空间不算大，电视和沙发之间也就三米。可就是生怕有画面看走了眼，所以都做电视机前面，直到视网膜里没有不想看的东西位置。那时候外面引进的影视都有个专有名词叫做译制。所以《变形金刚》开演之前，都会有个跟 Windows 蓝屏差不多的画面，基本上就是一个棱形，中间仨字儿：“译制片”。好不容易盼夏雨望春风地开始了主题曲，眼睛就已经跟上了瘾似的渐渐直了。广告商其实也挺孙子的，主题曲完了，还得跟你插播个广告。一群美国小屁孩，拿着变形金刚的玩具，吧叽勾吧叽勾（得念 bia ji giu）地喊着互打。搞得整个小学的男生人心惶惶，谁都做梦梦见过买了个大黄蜂、红蜘蛛啥的。别说你没有，你肯定失忆。我就经常很痛苦地从梦中醒来，然后发现两手空空。而且还不信是梦，翻开被子愣了吧叽地摸了半天，直到胸口里面有个东西凉了下来才停止。经过几次周公耍宝之后，自己也找过破纸盒之类的DIY个擎天柱什么的。为什么喜欢擎天柱呢，其实如果了解《天龙八部》里面萧峰的都知道。那种大哥级人物，说话不飘，有感情，伟岸。偶像啊！

之后的岁月里，人长大了，没那么疯狂了。不过偶尔经过玩具店，看到些变形玩具，还是会驻足少许。慢慢地，就淡了。

刚刚到手一辆 Altima 2.5s，全是自己这半年的血汗换来的。算是圆了儿时拥有一个变形金刚玩具的愿望吧。汽车人，变形！

Tell me, what do you see in this picture?

No clue? Take a closer look.

These are plastic bags.

There are about 60,000 plastic bags in the first picture. That is the number of bags used in the US every five seconds. Each plastic bag takes up to 250 years to decompose. (credit: chrisjordan.com)

I’ve got another request to be added as a friend on Facebook. I joined Facebook last year. Now I have 66 friends so far. I do couple of checks everyday on Facebook and even get updated through SMS on my cellphone. According to the website itself,

Facebook launched in February of 2004 and the website now has over 19 million active users across over 47,000 regional, work-related, collegiate and high school networks

Here are few things I like about this social network website:

1. People are real.
   Everyone on Facebook has to get either a college email or a work email in order to register, where obtaining the college or work email is already an identification process per se. Therefore people to be added are not just a ID or nickname. This is very much different from forum like communities.
2. Efficient user classification.
   There are two types of classifications on Facebook, which are networks and groups. The concept of network is pretty much like community in expo.live.com, that only people with specific email can be in the network defined by the domain of that email. Whereas for groups, which are less formal than networks, people can join together by interests or purely no topic.
3. Extensibility
   Facebook provides a light library of APIs for developers to re-use the existing information. Any Facebook application redirect the user to the authentication gateway on the official site. After user is identified, the application runs on the third-party website or client computer can obtain necessary information of that user, such as friends list, to do something like Friends Visualizer .

But, Facebook does not really rock. It just manages the friend list in an interesting way. What I can’t imagine, is that if someone can come up with a combination of all three websites: Facebook, Douban (see previous post) and expo.live.com. That will be interesting.

BTW, the support of international characters in Facebook takes points off a lot.

Last week I bought a second hand 19″ Samsung SyncMaster 940BW from http://expo.live.com for $100. But it’s not a replacement of my old display. I just extend my desktop to it so I can have more screen space to use.

I put my HP Pavilion dv2040ca at the left hand side to make it looking cool. Then I installed Synergy from http://synergy2.sf.net . It is a great tool which allows me to further extend my mouse/keyboard input to the laptop.

Now I am playing this Quake3 based game from http://www.worldofpadman.com . At the same time I have my IMs and Outlook 2007 running at the sides. Ah, degenerated life…

上海的 Windows Live 国际产品组最近正在测试基于微软自己的 Windows Live Agent 平台的 Live Messenger 英汉字典机器人。只要在 Live Messenger 添加 en-cn@hotmail.com 为好友就可以了。这样比我每次都要去某个搜索网站打“fy someword”要方便很多。因为还在测试，所以功能只有翻译一项。如果以后能加入其它的功能，比如输入拼音返回中文，就会更酷了。反馈地址在  http://feedback.live.com/?mkt=zh-cn

Just found a interesting flash game, called “Monkey Kick Off“. It’s pretty simple, that all you need to do is just click. I’ve got 4949 “monkey meters”, as shown off in the screenshot. What’s your score?

March 30, 2007 Update: You can’t beat me.

1997 年：电影解压卡、MIDI 游戏音乐、单色纯数字手机

2007 年：电影解压卡、MIDI 游戏音乐、单色纯数字手机

是进步还是倒退？是通信、娱乐的新浪潮还是吃饱的撑的？