Alien

2011-01-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

如果你相信IMDB Top250的用戶評分和 The Wisdom of Crowds，豪無疑問，當Inception被提名金球獎最佳影片的同時The Social Network獲獎確是一人得道，雞犬升天的終極示範。不是想說The Social Network有多爛，如果要頒給它一個獎項，在Facebook上進行用戶投票而在虛擬世界上得到一億個"like"會來得更創新和名符其實。上帝要讓你滅亡，必先讓你瘋狂，May God bless Facebook....and Golden Globe

2006-11-26T14:08:00.000-08:00

Sudan egg

Sudan egg is not referring to the eggs originated from Sudan, instead, it is referring to the eggs produced in China, where chickens and ducks are fed with food contaminated by Sudan (a form of industrial dye) to induce a reddish color in egg yolk. This case has been covered extensively in the mass media of Hong Kong (not sure about mainland China). Interestingly, CNN has an article today about how human evaluate risk wrongly. The idea is similar to what we learned from the Sudan egg incidence. The intake amount of Sudan to be fatal to human boday is equivalent to eating 200k eggs according to some authorities. On the other hand, eating meals from McDonald for 1 month consecutively can already damage your liver badly (according to the movie supersize me). Which one do general peopl more afraid of? I bet it is Sudan egg.... to be continued

2006-05-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

HTML recommendation to combat against phishing

As we know, phishing activities are very active in the Internet nowadays. Such vulnerability of phishing is partly because we allow a user's password to be sent in its plain format to the server side; it makes the phishers able to collect username and password by setting up a fraudulent website that looks like a legitimate one and tempt the user to input their secret information. I am suggesting to add a new attribute within the HTML input element to improve what we are currently using (<input type="password">) for password input. The new attribute will be something like (<input type="challenge" param="some random string" value=... >).The browser will render this as a password box significantly different from what the password box we are using to indicate it is secured, and when sending out the data, it uses the value input by the user to encrypt the random string and send it back to the server.

As you can see, the idea here is to avoid sending the password in it's plain format to the server; instead, it is used to encrypt a string. Given a corresponding changes in the server side to generate random string with proper timeout period when user access their login page, and use the same encryption/decryption mechanism to check against the password, phishers can no longer harvest plain password but an encrypted form of it. This new HTML input attribute can guard against phishing activities nowadays to certain extent. How do everyone feel about this addition?

p.s. This scheme may be vulnerable to man-in-middle attack, where once a victim visit the page, the phisher contacts the legitimate site and asks for a random string, and passes on the random string to the victim. Once the phisher collects the salted password from the victim, it forwards to the legitimate site and gain the login control. This can probably be fixed by allowing the random string consist of the client and server IP (or some value derived from these two values), so that the client (browser) is able the tell the random string is sent from the server it is talking to.

2006-04-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

Newly erupted Internet buzz word - browser shopping.

This activity is analogous to what we called "window shopping" in real life except that it is practiced in the cyber space. It refers to browsing product pages without actually buying them. It is predicted that more than 30% of the Internet activities are related to browser shopping and this number will be growing rapidly.

2006-03-15T23:40:00.000-08:00

Congratulation! You have been chosen. Recently, I have started a campaign that will revolutionize information flow over the web in the near future, you have been selected as one of the few luckiest testbed. The name of this project is called "Parasitic blogging" . From the name of this project, you can see that it meant to live parasitically. Instead of posting articles on one's own blog, I propose to post them as comments of other blog (it can be your friend's blog). By reshuffling how information is hosted, it revolutionize the internet as a source of information. You no longer go to some particular authoritative source for information; instead, you gather them from everywhere, this will give you a more balanced view of opinions (which the world is currently lack of), polish your information gathering skills and make you a better researcher; at last, it favors the hard-working people who dig into different places and leave their personal digital traces.

You can always be one of the very few people who started an eruptive campaign that generate the next wave of Internet.

2006-03-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

Everything has a beginning, must have an end.

Rossi, Tassotti, Galli, Baresi, Maldini, Eranio, Desailly, Albertini, Evani, Weah, Papin, Costacurta, Donadoni, Boban, Gullit, Massaro, Carbone, van Basten. How many of these players do you still remeber? May be you are not aware, there is a match today between Milan and Barcelona, no no, it is not the semi-final of European champions league, it is the retirement match for Demetrio Albertini. Interestingly, Albertini, being a Barcelona player currently, play in the side of Milan and scored a freekick.

Today, we all buried something in some place.

2005-10-31T23:51:00.000-08:00

BRICs

BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are four countires whose economic potential is such that they may become among the four most dominant economies by the year 2050. The thesis was proposed by Jim O'Neil, global economist at Goldmann Sachs.

....

The BRIC thesis is merely just that. Prediction of events in future has always been notoriously difficult. There are many uncertainties and assumptions that could mean that any of these four countries do not live up to their promise. The preeminence of China and India as major manufacturing countries with unrealised potential has been widely recognised, but some commentators state that China's lack of full democracy could be a problem in the future, as is the possibility of conflict over Taiwan. Likewise, the population of Russia is declining, and this may have implications for its future. The potential of Brazil has been speculated upon for many decades without amounting to fulfilling this potential. Factors such as international conflict, civil unrest, political policy, outbreaks of disease and terrorism are all factors that are difficult to predict and that could have an effect on the destiny of any country. India, China and Russia are all in disupte regarding territory for example. Nonetheless, the BRIC thesis is based upon thorough analysis of key economic indicators.

2005-07-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

Recently, I choose one of Natalie Ng's photo as my wallpaper in the desktop computer in my workplace, well, she is gorgeous, isn't she?

The story is like this...... On Thursday July 21 2005 around 3pm, I left my cubicle for a while, and of course I lock my computer everytime I am away according to the company policy, thus the monitor showed, you know, Natalie Ng. When I was back, a colleague passed by my cubicle, due to the nature of human curiosity, he peeped into my cuibicle, without noticing that someone is watching him from behind (that's me, another peeper). Probably he was stunned by the beauty of Natalie Ng, even after he passed my cubicle, he walked back and peeped again, and this time was longer than the previous one.

As a considerate colleague, I then decided to use a blank wallpaper to avoid such embarrasing circumstance. Story end.

2005-06-05T23:30:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since my last entry. Ok, two things to put down here.

1) Why my interest to blog (seems to be) decreased? (If not interested, jump to 2)
Everytime I think of something to write a blog entry, I sort of undergo a filtering process, judging whether this idea or thought worth to be in the blog entry or not. As time passes, I start to feel that let's do some other stuff, this crappy thing will just sink to the bottom without being noticed. This reason is also becuase I have read so many "JUNK" blog, I feel so disgusted (but still keep reading) why people (including me, yes I am a POS) keep putting useless content on the web, exactly like part of the lyrics in "the sound of silence"
people talking without speaking,
people hearing without listening,
people writing songs that voices never share.
Perhaps the last sentence should be re-written as
people writing blogs that thinkings never share.
But anyway, it's just like academia, having publications is at least better than no publication, a blog is still a blog.

2)Is my posting pattern predictable?
I HAVE BEEN working on modelling the posting pattern of bloggers for a while, what I have used is a periodic inhomogeneous Poisson model (sounds geek?). It basically said that people write blog in a quite regular pattern, usually at night 2AM when they are lonely, sleepless, best time for individual thinking and shit, thus we should learn this pattern and schedule to retrieve them for supporting a live-feed news alert. However, is my posting pattern predictable (or at least periodic)? Absolutely not, period. So, what to do with it? Seems having the bloggers (or blogging software) to notify others that they have new entries is a elegant solution. Olston et.al have proposed similar ideas in the paper "Best-Effort Cache Synchronization with Source cooperation". Though it seems to me that such large-scale cooperation in Internet scale seems infeasible, the world is changing so fast, google has just enrolled this webmaster sitemaps service. Basically, as a webmaster, you like your website to be visible, well use this service and google can guarantee your site get crawled whenever you have new things added. If you don't do this, fine, no one care about your website then. Come on, give me a break, is this a really win-win situation? Seems yes, websites get visibility, google can provide better service, everyone is happy. Yes, it is really a win-win situation, but I feel a bit worry. This reminds me of the documentry called "the corporation", In modern world, there is something called the corporation, they gather a lot of human resource as a giant machine, they sort of posess human rights (they can own land and properties, they can sue people and shit), we are living with these giants together, if we are not inside one of these giant machine, basically, we are dead meat, not competitive at all, waiting to be eaten (or be converted to some part of them). I hope I am not jumping too far away, but what I worry about is that search engines in general have become so influential that you'd better work closely with them, otherwise, you are out of the game. Returning to this new Google "service", webmasters creates content and provide information to Internet user, who is the eventual benefitor of this "service"? Google of course, they can provide more updated information, improving the search result, attracting more users.... why not webmasters get paid for using this "service"?

2005-04-02T22:48:00.000-08:00

The only forever thing in this world is change -- anonymous

2005-04-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

Search engine result page hijacking

Recently, I came across an article in slashdot about the 302 page hijacking, I was not aware of this before until I try to search my name on yahoo! link It seems that such page hijacking is evolved to another generation. Instead of redirecting you to another page which the end-user will get annoyed and notice that there is something wrong, they show you an advertisment, while the page still look legitimate. Why would the spammer choose my page?

My page rank is low and it is easier for them to convince the search engine that their page is more authoratative than my personal page hosted in UCLA
My page is popular and there is commerical value showing ads :D

If you read this message, please create a link to my legitimate page (http://oak.cs.ucla.edu/~sia) so that my page won't be hijacked by the spammers, thanks.

2005-02-25T16:28:00.000-08:00

Reversing a linked list


#include <stdio.h>
                                                                             
typedef struct node {
       int val;
       struct node *next;
} Node;
                                                                             
Node* reverse (Node* head) {
       Node* previous=NULL;
       Node* current=head;
       Node* follow=head->next;
       Node* tmp;
       if (head == NULL || follow == NULL)
               return head;
       while (follow->next != NULL) {
               tmp=follow;
               follow=follow->next;
               tmp->next=current;
               current->next=previous;
               previous=current;
               current=tmp;
       }
       follow->next=current;
        current->next=previous;
       return follow;
}
                                                                             
void printlist (Node* node) {
       if (node==NULL)
               return;
       printf ("%d ",node->val);
       printlist (node->next);
}
                                                                             
int main (int argc, char* argv[]) {
       Node a,b,c,d;
       Node *t;
       a.val=1;
       a.next=&b;
       b.val=2;
       b.next=&c;
       c.val=3;
       c.next=&d;
       d.val=4;
       d.next=NULL;
       printlist(&a);
       printlist(t);
       printf ("\n");
       return 0;
}

2005-02-23T23:26:00.000-08:00

An observation of discussion forum

Recently, I came across a post in a discussion forum, it reported that the following question generated >3000 replies in a mainland discussion forum. Here is the question:

Richard bought a chicken using $8, he sold it for $9. He then bought it back using $10 and sell it again for $11. Question: How much does Richard earn?

I was surprised that such a question can generate >3000 replies, so I followed through the thread, which also has >100 replies, to try make something out of it. My observation is that
1) 10% of the replies are saying that the answer is 0, 1, or 3
2) 70% of the replies are reiterating the correct answer 2 using various mathematical/ economic/ accounting models.
3) 20% of the replies are simply junk.

Any conclusion from the above observations? Well, may be the following:
1) The web is being filled with junk.
2) People are not using their time wisely on the Internet (including me).
3) Anything can happen beyond your imagination on the Internet.

2005-02-20T17:26:00.000-08:00

Demetrio Albertini 2

A sequel to the Prelude
After spending one season in Lazio, Albertini was given a free transfer to Altanta, while he is going to end the professional soccer life in a miserable team, "miracle" happened. He was given a chance to transfer to Barcelona. It means that Albertini will appear in the Spanish league again in a team, which Milan had beaten 4-0 in the Super Cup exactly 10 years ago 1994 in Japan, after his first debut in Altheltico Madrid. Good luck to his career in Barcelona!

2005-02-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

Google Map

Here is a in-depth description of how google map works.

2005-02-12T21:51:00.000-08:00

Testing virtual functions, destructor and static_cast properties


#include <iostream>

class A {
        public:
                virtual void function () {
                        cout << "A" << endl;
                }
                ~A () {
                        cout << "DA" << endl;
                }
};

class B : public A {
        public:
                virtual void function () {
                        cout << "B" << endl;
                }
                ~B () {
                        cout << "DB" << endl;
                }
                void f1 () {
                        cout << "F1" << endl;
                }
};

class C : public B {
        public:
                virtual void function () {
                        cout << "C" << endl;
                }
                ~C () {
                        cout << "DC" << endl;
                }
};

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
        A* a;
        B* b;
        C* c=new C();
        a=c;
        a->function();
        b=static_cast<B*>(a);
        b->f1();
        delete b;
        return 0;
}

2005-02-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

do division without using / and %


#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>


void division(int dividen, int divisor, int& quotient, int& remainder) {
        int count=0;

        if (divisor<=0 || dividen <=0)
                return;

        remainder=dividen;
        while (divisor <= remainder) {
                divisor<<=1;
                count++;
        }
        for (int i=0;i<count+1;i++) {
                remainder-=divisor;
                if (remainder>=0) {
                        quotient<<=1;
                        quotient|=0x01;
                } else {
                        remainder+=divisor;
                        quotient<<=1;
                }
                divisor>>=1;
        }
}

int main (int argc, char** argv) {
        if (argc!=3) {
                printf ("Usage: %s dividen divisor\n",argv[0]);
                return 0;
        }
        int a=atoi(argv[1]);
        int b=atoi(argv[2]);
        int c=0,d=0;
        division(a,b,c,d);
        printf ("dividen: %d divisor:%d quotient:%d remainder:%d\n",a,b,c,d);
        return 0;
}

2005-02-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

Print an integer using putchar only


#include <stdio.h>

int main (int argc, char** argv) {
       int i=390487;
       int base=10;
       int remainder=0;
       for (remainder=i/base;
      remainder>0;
      base*=10,remainder=i/base);
       base=base/10;
       remainder=i;
       while (base>0) {
               putchar('0'+remainder/base);
               remainder=remainder-(remainder/base)*base;
               base/=10;
       }
       putchar('\n');
       return 0;
}

2005-02-11T13:12:00.000-08:00

Reversing words in a sentence


#include <stdio.h>

int reverse(char* start, char* end) {
       char tmp;
       while (start < end) {
               tmp=*start;
               *start=*end;
               *end=tmp;
               start++;
               end--;
       }
       return 0;
}

int main (int argc, char** argv) {

       char test[]="A loves B";
       char* start=&test[0];
       char* end=start+strlen(test)-1;
       char* begin;
       char* stop;
       reverse(start,end);
       printf ("%s\n",test);
       begin=start;
       stop=start;
       while (stop<end) {
               while (*stop!=' ' && stop!=end)
                       stop++;
               reverse(begin,stop-1);
               begin=stop+1;
               stop=begin;
       }
       printf ("%s\n",test);
       return 0;

}

2005-02-11T13:05:00.000-08:00

Multiplying a number by 7 without using *


#include <stdio.h>

int main (int argc, char **argv) {
 int number=30;
 printf ("%d\n",(number<<3)-number);
 return 0;
}

2005-02-03T18:55:00.000-08:00

Old man and doctor

A 70-year-old man goes to the doctor's for a physical.

The doctor runs some tests and says to the man, ''Well, everything seems to be in top condition physically, but what about mentally? How is your connection with God?''

And the man says, ''Oh me and God? We're tight. We have a real bond, he's good to me. Every night when I have to get up to go to the bathroom, he turns on the light for me, and then, when I leave, he turns it back off.''

Well, upon hearing this the doctor was astonished.

He called the man's wife and said, ''I'd like to speak to you about your husband's connection with God. He claims that every night when he needs to use the restroom, God turns on the light for him and turns it off for him again when he leaves. Is this true?''

And she says, ''That idiot, he's been peeing in the refrigerator!''

2005-02-03T18:53:00.000-08:00

Blonde and doctor

A blonde walks into a doctor's office and tells the doctor
she's broken every single bone in her body.
"That's impossible!" says the doctor.

The blonde says, "No, it's really true. Look!"
She then touches her leg with her index finger and screams "Ouch!"
Then she touches her arm and yells "Eeeeoooow!"
Finally she touches her ribs and can barely maintain her composure
as the tears start to roll down her face.
She says, "See, I told you I broke every bone in my body."

The doctor rubs his chin, then conducts a thorough examination.

"Well, miss," he tells her,
"I've got some good news and some bad news.
The good news is, you haven't broken every bone in your body.
The bad news is, you've broken your finger."

2005-02-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

Life insurance

Richard is a sales agent for life insurance plan. One day he went to a training camp to promote the life insurance plan provided by his company. 100% of the soldier subscribe to the plan after this promotion talk. His advisor, John, want to know what makes Richard such a successful sales, so he decided to attend his talk next time.

Richard: "Hey buddies, if you unforturnately die in operation and had subscribed to our life insurance plan, the US government will reimburse your family memeber 200K dollars, otherwise, the government will only pay 6K dollars"

A soldier: "WTF, our lives are invaluable, no matter how much our family get back, they can't turn us alive!!!!!"

Richard replied: "Dude, think carefully, if a war really happen, which kind of soldiers do you think the US government will send there? with or withour insurance plan?"

.................The talk ends and again 100% of the soldiers subscribe to the life insurance plan.

2005-02-02T14:09:00.000-08:00

If you don't see me for 3 days...........

On Friday morning, the husband went to work and get his salary as it's the last day of the month. He was so happy and hang out with his collegues throughout the weekend and spend all his moeny. He went back home on Sunday night. No doubt, his wife was very furious and angry at him.

Wife: "How do you feel if you don't see me for 3 days?"
Husband: "Well, that sounds good"

On Monday, he can't see his wife.....

On Tuesday, he can't see his wife .......

On Wednesday, he still can't see his wife ......

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
On Thursday, his swollen eyes get better and can barely see his wife again :)

2005-01-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

Memory is the root of pain. Why we keep archiving them on blogs (or by other means), shouldn't we let go and forget them?

2004-09-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

Wanna get a free ipod? Here you are :

Click on the following link, sign in, then you will be asked to complete a deal (which might cost you a few bucks or just some freebies), then you will have to refer to your friends and ask them do the same task and you will get a free ipod for free about 2 weeks later.
Here is the Link

2004-09-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

Politicalize (政治化)

This is a term that I often heard of but never understand its meaning. Referring to a critics titled "The critical point of left-right paradigm shift" (what a fancy name) appeard in Ming Pao Sept 13, the day after Hong Kong Legislative council election, it claims that this election is highly politicalized.

I am confused. I suppose legislative council election is politics, how can politics be futher politicalized? It's like saying that you americanize an american, does this make sense? Ok, back to the topic, this article claims that the visit of Chinese olympic gold medalists and the affair related to an candidate in democratic party and prositution in Shengzhen further politicalize the election. What the fxxk. How can these non-politics affair politicalize the election. I would rather say the visit of Chinese olympic gold medalists is being politicalized as someone claims that this event is organized so as to give "happiness" to Hong Kong people to distract their attention on election, thus the main theme of the visit switch from celebration of atheletics achievement to the distraction of general public talking point.

For the democratic party candidate and prositution, I would rather not comment on this until the turth is fully unveiled. However, do remeber that it's the democratic party challenge the trustworthness of mainland police first and bring this into politics, how can you say that this even politicalize the election.

I feel sorry that such article appear in Ming Pao, the so call most trustworthy newspaper in Hong Kong. Also, you will also feel disappointed when you know the authors: Yuk Fai Shum (a PhD candidate majoring politics in some British university) and Wan Kei Cheung (The former president of student union in Hong Kong university)

2004-09-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

my new blender

This is the new blender I bought on August 29 2004. I got it from Fry's for 20 bucks. On August 29 2004, I went to Lake Legg for fishing together with Tao, Nevin, Rosa, Jennie, and Jonathan. The view there was magnificent. It is basically a park, with 3 lakes inside. Tao and me wake up at 8am that day, and he drove to Nevin's home first, and we went to pick up Rosa, and she was a little bit late. We then head towards Lake Legg, while we stop by BIG5 in Atlantic Blvd to get the bait and fishing license, and also some food at Ralphs. By 11:45, Jennie called and told me that they decided to join, that's good, we can bridge more friends together.

We arrived there and spot a place to set things up. Tao and me start learning fishing, while Nevin and Rosa just wandering around without purpose. Fishing is tough, I spent quite a long time figuring out how to cast the fishing rod correctly, and of course, the first few (actually the only) result are waterweed. After a while, Jennie and Jonathan comes, they brought us some snacks and water, but they seems not that interested in fishing (may be they didn't get a license and afraid of being caught) , while Jennie casted once or twice, and Jonathan didn't. Later on, may be they are too boring in waiting for fish, Nevin, Rosa, and Jennie took a walk round the lake to take some pics and feed some ducks, while Toa, Jonathan, and me continue to pursue on fishing and hope to get something.

Later on, we had lunch (simply sandwich) and take a rest. I try to convince them to play Frisbee disc but fail (some of the excuse are they are old, having back problem), only Jonathan play with me for a few rounds. Actually I should ask them to bring cards, so that we can at least play some static games. Time flies, J^2 left and we are still unable to get some fish, and we decided to left after a few rounds. The overall impression is that we spend a nice afternoon in Lake Legg together, try to stay away from the fast paced LA. Tao proposed to go to Fry's in a very ad-hoc manner and that's how I got this blender. On our way back, we went to ABC cafe in Monterey Park again to have cheap meals, while i get some mangos and banana from the Hong Kong supermarket to make smoothies that night. Thanks for Peter's recipes, it is a total success :)

2004-05-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

Design Principle of Webpage

HTML frame is one of the frequently used techniques in designing a webpage. The majority is to split the screen into two unequal half, having the menu (for navigation purpose) on the left side, while the corresponding content on the right side. Here is one of the example cs143 course homepage. The funny thing is that why menu are usually on the left and content are on the right? Someone suggested that it is a psychological heritage, people usually perceive left being the beginning of an event, so it is natural to put menu on the left side so that our eyes follows naturally from left to right when following the link.

If you think a little bit more, this design is in fact imposing a physical barrier in browsing the homepage. Assume that you are not using a scroll mouse (either a two button mouse or the touch pad in notebook), when you click on a link in the menu frame, and if the content page is so long that you need to scroll down in order to read, you need to move the mouse pointer way to the right side of the screen to scroll, and if you want to browse another page, again, you need to move the mouse way to the left and click. However, if the menu is placed on the right side, you only need to maintain the pointer in the right half of the screen, which tremendously reduce the mouse movement and obviously should increase your browsing efficiency, in addition, you might lengthen the lifespan of your mouse if it is a ball type!!!!

However, the invention of scroll mouse alleviate this problem completely. From now on, you can keep your mouse on the left part and do all the scrolling.

Based on this speculation, we might ask several questions:
1) Is the design of placing scroll bar on the right having some advantage over the left?
2) Is the invention of scroll mouse motivated by this phenomenon?
3) If the majority of webpage design is to place menu on the right, will the invention of scroll mouse be delayed several years?

p.s. I am NOT a left-handed person.

2004-05-18T01:09:00.000-07:00

The day after tomorrow (where will you be?)

CNN reported there is an expected high season for Hurricane (a.k.a Typhoon for those form in Pacific Ocean) for the east coast of US. It's quite ironic that the news appear before the release of one of the most sought-after sci-fi movie this year. In case you've never heard of TDAT, here is what the story about: because of the green house effect (or some other human-related anomaly), there occur tsunami in NY, tornado in LA, hail in XX or any disasters you can think of. Human face the problem of being destroy by nature AGAIN, and the fxxking US government will lead the human race to overcome this problem.......

Ok, I have gone too far away from the real topics of this entry. I assume all you know that Hurricane occurred in northern hemisphere will be in an anti-clockwise motion, while those appeared in southern hemisphere is clockwise, by the way, not long ago, a hurricane just attack Brazil.(why? try search "Coriolis force" in Yahoo, yes I am a Yahooholic, :) )

Similarly, some other phenomenon also experienced this symmetric effect. One of them is the so called water sink phenomenon. I came to know this by reading book (iirc, it's from "100000 why?" - shi wan ge wei sheme) saying that for those northern hemisphere sink, water drain out in an anti-clockwise fashion, and the vice versa in southern hemisphere. I've asked quite a lot of people about this and they just give me sxxt answer like, if you view from the north pole, earth is rotating anti-clockwise, if you view from the south pole, earth is rotating clockwise, or someone just said, oh really? I didn't realize, is that true?

Driven by his inborn curiosity of the nature, Richard did a research on it and publish it on his first homepage in 1996/1997, hosted in http://www.chevalier.net/~sia (however, it's gone and perhaps you can get it back from the Wayback machine if you are lucky. He tries to confirm it with every friends that he has met who come from the southern hemisphere (e.g. Australia, Brazil), but none of them can tell whether the direction is really clockwise or not.

At the end of 2003, his friend, Jason Miu attended a conference in Australia, Jason was asked to take a video for Richard to show the direction. Surprisingly, the direction is anti-clockwise!!!!!!! It is not sure whether this result is due to the intrinsic force applied when water drain away from the toilet (yes, it's toilet, the video is a piece of sxxt in a toilet and water drains away, and that is used as an indicator). He was shocked, is the book (100000 why?) creating a hoax? Anyway, he will continue to pursue this problem which he started since 1990.

Somehow, life seems to be destined, he has been searching for the answer for 14 years and still not satisfied, what is the motivation driving him to pursue on this problem? No one knows. Someone said that before every mathematicians born to the world, they were given a look at one page of the holy book kept by the God, and the rest of their life is to reconstruct this page back. Perhaps the previous life of Richard is water, always being drain to the sink, that why he spend so much effort in his life in this problem. :)

2004-05-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

Journey of Life (漫步人生路) rm

I never get tired with your charming accompany in this long journey;
在你身边路虽远末疲倦
Travelling with you leg by leg;
伴你漫行一段接一段
Once a hurdle is overcomed, another is waiting ahead;
越过高峰另一峰却又见
Set our target further apart so our dreams always in front of us.
目标推远让理想永远在前面

Though the path may be rough, I am prepared for the drill;
路纵崎岖亦不怕受磨练
I will experience ups and downs, surrounded with me are tears and happiness;
愿一生中苦痛快乐也体验愉快悲哀在身边转又转
Enjoying snowflakes in the breeze, savoring the taste of blossom though foggy;
风中赏雪雾里赏花
What a wonderful life!
快乐回旋

No more grumble and treasure every moment,
母用计较快欣赏身边美丽每一天
The best is yet to come;
还愿确信美景良辰在脚边
I would rather let joy overshadow sorrow;
愿将欢笑声盖掩苦痛那一面
May be nice, or may be wicked, new ideas come up everyday;
悲也好喜也好每天找到新发现

Oh! Blizzard, we are ready for you;
让疾风吹呀吹尽管给我俩考验小雨点放心洒
I am determined to proceed.
早已决心向着前

2004-05-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

Demetrio Albertini

1994 USA World Cup, the 22 aged Albertini made his first appearance in World Cup, respresenting Italy. Together with other soccer stars, Roberto Baggio, Paolo Maldini, Frenco Baresi, Signori, they put Italy to the final against Brazil. He score the 2nd penalty in this legendary match. Beforet that, as a squard member of AC Milan, he got a change to win the European Championship, a while before this, he is a teammate with the legendary Netherland player "Marco van Basten".

After 1994, he experienced ups and downs in both Milan and Italy. While players comes and leave Milan, like Baggio, Inzaghi, Leonardo, Boban, Bierhoff, Rivaldo, etc. Albertini, together with Maldini, Costacurta, seems like having a high probability of ending their soccer life in Milan.

Things happen, sometimes after 2000, he was lend to Altheltico Madrid, while he spend one year in Spain, he went back to Italy as a player in Lazio, the once a time rivial of Milan. Before an away match with Milan, Albertini said "I had never think of using the away team changing room in San Siro"..................

To be continued

2004-05-04T01:22:00.000-07:00

Power Law discovered in Instant Messanger application and social network on the internet.

You spend 90% of the time in chatting with only 10% of the people in your contact list, while the rest of the time are for the remaining one.

2004-05-01T02:24:00.000-07:00

news

The low quality milk poweder problem had been revealed for a while, this is sad. Though something is irrevertable, at least we should do something, right? The government official should definitely resign to show the repsonsibility. Yes, I know you still want to work for the country, but please work in other position, you fail this time.

2004-04-29T02:05:00.000-07:00

The following is written in Chinese and specially created for Kelvin Leung.
As he will get married soon, hope it will give some insight

定國安民鑑古知今兼善天下方可成就大業
強身健體厚德載物待人如己才能修身齊家

2004-04-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

Why kwong is going to ocean park alone?

This is a good song.

2004-04-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

Today afternoon, I go to the LA Times festival of books with Sourashis, and have taken some photographs. It's like a carnival and very refreshing. It boosts up my morale after weeks of works and pressure.

2004-04-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

I am attending CS249 now, but the lecture is of very slow progress, we have covered Power-Law, White-Noise, Brownian Noise, their Fourier Transform, and also a 2D Gaussian distribtuion, and Stott Parker is moving onto the correlation between dimensions, and drawing an ellipsoide on the board.

2004-04-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

As these days I am doing my blog research, I start to think why I am creating this blog, and here are the 3 reasons:

1) Just for research, to test what can weblog really do and perhaps the most important job is to get blog links from blogger.

2) To establish a blog that capture my feeling and dailylife so that if any person is interested in what I am doing, they can still read my blog

3) To archive my feeling. As I suddenly have a strong desire to read the composition I've made in elementry/high school, but somehow I lost it. As an alumni, I am planning to suggest my high school teacher to build a digital homework archive, which is a fancy idea and might secure some funding from the HK government. (This blog is to demonstrate the importance of perserving the growth of a person)

Anyway, the above are just some official excuses comes up in my mind to disguise the underlying reason of this blog.

2004-04-21T23:59:00.000-07:00

This song is my recent favorite and I have introduced it to Alex and Sourashis. (I hope it won't cause any copyright trouble)

2004-04-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night (1 am), I receive a phone call from my grandpa and grandma. I realize that they miss me very much..... they told me that they feel boring. It reminds me that I should call back to Hong Kong more often and chat with them.

2004-04-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

This is the homepage of my friend, Sourashis Roy

2004-04-14T17:49:00.000-07:00

I want to move to University Apartment in Rose Ave as soon as possible

2004-04-14T17:42:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of movies I am expecting:
1) Kill Bill 2
2) The Day After Tomorrow
3) Into the mirror
4) Omen 5 .....

2004-04-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

After reading a technical report from HP Information Dynamics Lab, My respect to HP research lab increased by 10 times.......

2004-04-06T00:20:00.000-07:00

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. (anonymous)
Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today. (James Dean)

2004-04-05T23:10:00.000-07:00

El riesgo siempre vive.

2004-04-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

One of the most stupid things to do is to post your resume on the web and impose a password control.

2004-04-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

Life isn't for people to find themselves, it's for people to create themselves.

2004-04-02T01:03:00.000-08:00

It's 1am at night. the LA police are using chopper to search for something. It's in Westwood. Seems the opponents are very tough to handle, they spend a long time and still search/chasing.

2004-04-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

I just started a cron job to crawl the front page of http://www.blogger.com every 2 minutes. This bootstrap process is to get the URL weblog hosted by blogger.com. Hope that this blog will also be included.

2004-04-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I bought DIABLO 2 from BestBuy. I like this game very much because of Diablo 1. I wasted my whole night playing it. Today, I wake up a little bit late, but still, I play it again. I have my lunch at home and back to school to continue my work on weblog downloading. Rightnow, I am in the process of generating a list of weblog to crawl.

2004-03-30T17:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night, I go to watch "the passion of the christ" with Sourashis, Alex and his girlfirend. The movie is very tense. I go back home late, but I have to wake up early today to catch Prof. Ellision to sign up the timesheet. Finally, I make it but I am so tired that I go back home for a nap and lunch. Then I back to school and pick up my DVD burner from Brenda. After that, I created my first blog.

2004-03-30T17:45:00.000-08:00

This is my first blog message!!