I suppose I am not terribly social, a vaguely dark shadowy figure, at least some of the time. To counter this unwholesome tendency, I decide I should join as many social networks as I can.
Social networks, here I come!
What else?
- Tao said: I twit, 20 minutes ago
- Tao said: Aha 7 days ago
Friday, July 24, 2009
Social Networks
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Tristan’s new pictures
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Tristan’s New Bike Video
A couple of days ago, bought a bike for Tristan. Shot two videos, here they are:
Tristan’s New Bike:
Part 2:
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Online backup solutions
Sometimes I want to transfer a file from one computer to another, sometimes I want to store some files sot that I can use them later, maybe on another computer. Of course, there are USB thumb drives, but they are not convenient, anyway, one more thing to keep track of.
Many years ago, I used Yahoo Briefcase online storage, 30 MB storage for free users. For a couple of PDF and MS Word files, that’s enough. However, Yahoo Briefcase went belly-up a couple of months ago.
Wikipedia entry on Yahoo Briefcase
After that, I am searching for a replacement. At first, I think Microsoft’s Live Mesh is good:
it has 5 GB storage space, and can help you to synchronize files among computers.
Later, I found Microsoft’s another service, SkyDrive, is even better:
It has 25 GB space, but it cannot sync with multiple computers. Along with WinRAR, it solved my online storage problem. SkyDrive has a 50 MB file limits, with WinRAR, one can easily chop large archive files into 50 MB chunks to upload to SkyDrive.
Today, I read an article suggest that Google should provide a similar service:
NYT Article: Online Backups Could Use Google’s Expertise
I had the same though when I was searching for a replacement for Yahoo Briefcase. It’s good to find others have similar thoughts.
By the way, if you want to send someone a big file, check out this service:
a similar site is Drop.io. But it has a limit of 100 MB per file, compare to File Dropper’s 5 GB.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The man who loved China
Just finished reading
The man who loved China
Some reading notes:
Joseph Needham was very smart, very talented. A top-notch scientists at his early 30s, elected to Royal Society when 31, wrote a couple of very good embryology books.
An avid nudist, womanizer, left-wing activist (most Cambridge intellectuals were left wing at the time). A wild, if not good dancer.
Met a female Chinese scientist, Lu Gwei-djen (鲁桂珍), fell in love. His wife was OK with it, formed a menage-a-trois. Loved China because of her, learned Chinese (good at it) within 3 years when he was about 38 years old.
Became a diplomat to China in 1943, helped scientists in free China. Traveled extensively in China, especially to Dunhuang, got to know Rewi Alley (of the gung-ho fame). Bought and collected a lot of Chinese books. Interested in the Science and Civilization of China. Want to write a book on it.
Not a trained historian and sinologist, he managed to wrote wonderful and authoritative volumes of Science & Civilization of China, became very famous. His lecture in US about Chinese gun powder triggered Ted Kaczynski, the unabomber.
Elected to be master of Gonville and Gaius college, became a Cambridge don.
A chain smoker, he lived into his 90s, died peacefully, had a wonderful and fulfilled life.
A lot of wonderful history and anecdotes of China and Cambridge, but with some minor errors. For example, there was no People’s Liberation Army in Chongqing at 1943, as the first chapter described. Nevertheless, it is a wonderful read. The author is a great story teller. Had a interesting observation of modern-day Chongqing in the epilogue.
Enjoyed it greatly.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Split ghost images
FAT32 volumes cannot handle files bigger than 2 GB. When ghosting a hard drive, the image file size can easily go beyond 10 GB, when you are using an NTFS volume as the destination. So, to make the resultant image files more easily handled across the platforms, one can use the following switches to split the image files into smaller parts:
ghost32 -split=2000 -auto
This will split the image files into 2 GB chunks.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Tips on using Firefox
Just updated my Firefox to version 3.5. Fixed a Java installation problem on my desktop machine. Ever since version 2 of Google Chrome stopped supporting accesskey html attribute, I gave up on Google Chrome and returned to Firefox. One benefit is that now I use the same browser on both Mac and PC.
Google Chrome no longer supports accesskey
I formed the habit to use Alt key to access the accesskey elements, (on Mac, that’s Ctrl key), but the default settings of Firefox is Shift-Alt. I don’t like the extra shift key. Fortunately, you can change that by going to the address bar, type
about:config
then, change the value of ui.key.contentAccess to 4.
Documentation on ui.key.contentAccess
I made an online bookmark page for myself. With Firefox, I can easily go to, say, Yahoo Mail, by typing Alt-Y. Another nifty feature of Firefox is that the keyboard shortcut for search is the slash (/) key. So for those entries do not have an accesskey, I can easily type a slash, then the name of the link, to put keyboard focus on it, and hit Enter key to follow.
My bookmark page with accesskey features
This way, I can quickly follow any bookmarked pages without much mouse movement. That’s kind of a nirvana.
With Internet Explorer 8, you must put an extra Enter key to follow the accesskey link, which is a little bit cumbersome, but still much better than Google Chrome. Also, for search inside IE8, one must first type Ctrl-F, type the name of the link, then Esc, then Enter to follow. Too much keystrokes for my taste.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Photos and Videos of Playland
Yesterday, we brought Tristan to Playland, Rye, NY. It’s a short drive from our home, and the weather is nice.
Tristan surely had a good time, which is obvious from the video and photos.
Video:
124 Pictures on my online album
Pictures uploaded to Flickr
TextOpus
When I tried to combine a couple of custom dictionary files from different applications on computers, I need to sort text lines and remove duplicate lines. I can use Microsoft Word for sorting lines, but it turned quite difficult to remove the duplicate lines.
I tried Excel’s Advanced filters with the unique rows checked, but it turned out Excel is case-insensitive, which is not very usable.
I discovered that there is an online text tool just for doing that, removing duplicate lines:
Online tool for removing duplicate lines
Also, the site has some other text tools as well. The site is called
GDGT
I was blogging about the niche social network sites. Soon after that, I read a New York Times article about a new social network sites for gadgets. Natually, the site is called GDGT.
They say GoodReads is the Facebook for book lovers, so, GDGT is the Facebook for gadget lovers.
