His Story

OK, most of you have heard of Shanghai Noodles. It is very popular in Chinese-like food courts and cafeterias in North America. I guess it pretty much because it is low cost and its recipe is simple to follow. Sometime it is called Lo Mein (捞面), means “noodles out of soup” in Chinese, to differentiate from soup noodles. In Chinese foods, Lo Mein from various cities can be very different. The differences take places in preparation and ingredients.

This evening, I made myself my favorite Lo Mein. It is called Zhengzhou Noodles with Pork and Spinach, where Zhengzhou is the capital city of Henan Province, and it is my town where I was born. Just like Shanghai Noodles, its recipe is very simple too.

Ingredients: Any kinds of noodles (e.g. wheat noodles), Any kind of grounded meat (e.g. pork), any kind of green leaf vegetable (e.g. spinach), raw garlic (4 slices, grounded), oil, soy sauce and salt.

I never find out how much some item in the ingredients is required, because I hate to remember the numbers and units. Take a look at the above picture and figure it out yourself. Actually the ingredients are not important here. It is the preparation identifies Zhengzhou Noodles.

Preparation:

1. Prepare the noodles in the normal way. Take away the water and cool down in a plate.
2. Put 2 spoons of oil in a frying pan and turn on the stove.
3. When it is hot enough, put the grounded pork and 4 spoons of soy sauce in.
4. Stir frying for a minute, then put spinach in.
5. Keep stirring until spinach is soften.
6. Add some water and wait until it boils.
7. Turn off the stove. Add grounded garlic and salt according to your taste.
8. Mix with noodles and enjoy it.

My father taught me how to make it on phone when I first learned cooking in Canada. Before I learned cooking other foods, I made myself Zhengzhou noodles almost every week. I tried different noodles, meat and vegetables but this one is my favorite. My mother loves to add some vinegar and that sometimes makes my mouth running too.

刚看到的新闻，Google 开始支持专利搜索了。这个创意挺好，不愧是搜索引擎起家的公司。随便看看专利搜索的主页面，乱七八糟什么稀奇古怪都能申请专利，很有意思。不知道以后是不是还要学学 Youtube ，来个本周点击率最高专利排行？可惜的是，很多基本功能还很欠缺。特别是一些对于法律诉讼很关键的浏览方式，比如：按时间来排序。所以，随便玩玩就好。

随便搜了几个关键字，比如 apple、sun、mouse、cat。比较有趣的关键字是 chinese，基本上返回的专利有两类：一类是跟吃喝有关的，一类是跟中文处理有关的。一个是粮食，一个是食粮。说起来也是，中国的饮食文化和文学艺术什么时候追溯起来都那么博大精深。搜索到的结果其中倒是有一项让人听惊诧的，就是一个叫做 Chinese Typewriter （中文打字机）的专利。惊诧之一，是这项专利申请于 1946 年。惊诧之二，是这项专利的申请人林语堂。说林语堂可能有人不知道，但是可能有人知道《当代汉英词典》；说《当代汉英词典》可能有人不知道，但是可能有人知道《京华烟云》。

从小就崇拜会发明创造的人，特别是这种又编词典又写小说的。不过看看另外那些手工笔划出来的专利，多数看起来还是很普通的。个别专利甚至普通到“震撼”的级别：为什么这种东西也能申请专利？！好吧，下面我也申请一项专利。当当当党，急速紫菜蛋花汤来了！步骤如下：

1. 烧一锅热水，越滚越好。
2. 打三、五个鸡蛋在饭盆里疯狂搅拌，越均匀越好。
3. 将翻滚的热水迅急速倒如饭盆里！越快越好。
4. 放入紫菜若干。

最后，凉一下就可以享用了。趁这项专利还没有通过验收，你是不是应该立刻下厨房去试一下？

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.

I use del.icio.us a lot. It’s convenient for saving my bookmarks using tags. While there are several other websites provide the same service, such as Windows Live Favorites and Yahoo Bookmarks, one thing of del.icio.us that attracts me is its domain name. The trick is that the word delicious is separated by dots and ended with .us, the country code top level domain (ccTLD) of United States. Its actual domain is icio.us, and it comes with a prefix del.

What is cool?

While they were a huge amount of demands on getting a domain ended with .com, .net, .org and etc, del.icio.us has chosen the naming strategy different from others. There are many other domains like this, such as yan.se, a Shanghai based company that provides services on photo printing. The phrase yan se (颜色) in Chinese means colour, which is exactly what the company has to do with.

In general, domains like these does not care what the suffix domain is originally set for. They are heavily language specific. So let us simply call it Hyper Level Domain. A hyper level domain is not really a domain pattern per se. It is often named based on Top Level Domain (TLD) and might even be Second Level Domain (SLD) based possibly.

What is the market?

Since the concept of Web 2.0 was coined in 2004, people have tried and found many labels for it from different aspects, such as AJAX, Wiki, Tags, Simplicity and so on, and many of them are intended to be eye-grabbing. What hyper level domain can provide, is that it starts grabbing eyes from users by the stage of entering the URL in their favorite browsers. And I really want a domain name of wangxiao.hu !

What is the problem?

To register a hyper level domain, some condition is usually applied. Since the suffix of a hyper level domain can be a ccTLD to a particular country, and thus one needs to go to the domain registration companies of that country for it. The problem is, the domain registration policies in most countries require one to provide an actual address in that country. So I cannot register for my wangxiao.hu unless I have an address in Hungary. By checking yan.se in any WHOIS service, you will find it is actually registered with an address in Sweden.

Another problem is that, when more and more hyper level domains are registered, the ccTLD will probably lose its significance. This is also why the address of the domain owner is required in problem above.

Wh.at hyp.er lev.el doma.in na.me c.an y.ou thi.nk of? :)

It’s kind of interesting to find that douban.com is useful for gathering people with same topics together.

Douban is a website that allow people to exchange ideas, opinions and other information related to books, music and movies. By using the statistical data from user rankings, top popular publications are iterated in its frontpage, so good songs, novels and movies are introduced. In other words, the contents of the website is an outcome of community collaboration. By specifying one’s location or interest, related audio-visual product or publications which might be interesting to the user are recommended. It guesses your taste!

Other than that, it integrates discussion boards and social networking into itself. Are you from Shenzhen and living abroad? Come to join From Main Street To Shen Nan Dao at Douban. Leave your footprint there.

http://googlechinablog.com/2006/03/blog-post_16.html

It’s been a while since Google China Blog opened in Feburary 2006. The strategy of showing off Googler’s life to public to promote Google’s culture is well done. It is just amazing and attractive for all the programmers living in China and oversea, such as myself, to dream to have a job offer at Google. The URL above is a post by Kaifu Lee, the president of Google China, formerly a vice president of Microsoft Corp., talking about food suggestions in Beijing. In contrast to the previous post, I prefer more posts that are full of life style like this one.

Take a look!

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) 是一个新的非盈利组织，希望可以通过开发100美金左右的低价笔记本电脑，来帮助我们对世界上的儿童提供更好的教育。本计划最早由OLPC现任主席Nicholas Negroponte在2005年1月于瑞士的Davos召开的世界经济论坛（World Economic Forum）提出。OLPC的目标是：为世界上每一个儿童提供一个可以发现（explore）、发掘（experiment）、发表自我（express）的机会。目前OLPC的$100笔记本电脑还没有投入生产，也不会销售，而以后这些电脑将会通过各政府部门直接在学校中发布。

OLPC网站打算提供多语言的信息，目前还没有相应的中文翻译。有意愿做翻译工作的朋友可以下载XLIFF文件或者POT文件进行翻译，然后发给OLPC有关人员。我目前翻译了POT文件的一部分，所以也可以在这个基础上继续，并把翻译后的POT文件发给我和所有其它一起做翻译工作的朋友。

Update:

OLPC已经启用了中文，地址是： http://laptop.org/index.zh.html

update:

这里不是报名处，请不要在此报名志愿者。本文只是小虎在组委会网站报名后写下的日志。为什么会有那么多人在我这里报名呢？想不通。

目前来说，2008北京奥委会还没有列出任何志愿者职位，只能提交个人信息到人才后备库去了。提交过程是一步一步的表格向导，简洁与专业并重，让我至少对奥委会的网站技术人员敬重十分。2008年离现在说近算近，说远也远，谁知道那个时候我会出现在哪里呢？不过能够为奥林匹克运动出一份力，还是非常令人骄傲的。

北京2008，加油！

Noticed that the trailers for X-Men 3 has just been put on Apple’s Movie Trailers. The release date is May 26, 2006, to which for sure I will be looking forward.

我怎么都不会想到我自己竟然超级无聊到这种程度。有生之年算是cosplay一了把。

唉，我们研究生的心理状况真的很需要关注…
更新

又无聊了一把……你投票了么？