Your walk in a cafe. You see everyone is working alone with their laptop. Nobody is talking to each other. Even the most ardent Internet junkie would admit they should have spent more time personally with other people rather than glue to the computer screen all day long. These cafe owner even try to setup rules asking patrons to log off and talk.

These moves are no doubt well intentioned. It will probably inspire many supporters. But why is so many people stick to their computer in the first place? It would be easy if we can determine that too much Internet is for sure a bad behavior, like watching too much TV. But what if it is true, that your second life is actually better than your first life?

2010.02.06 [philosophy] - comments (0)

Last month I've upgraded my first generation Mac Mini to Intel Core Duo. I have been bother by its wireless network issues ever since. It is a late 2009 model with Snow Leopard. It is connected to a Linksys WRT110 router. The problem is its poor reliability. Packets are dropped frequently. Sometimes it disconnects from the access point altogether. This means a very frustrating experience for some applications. VNC session are dropped frequently to the point it is unusable. Directory browsing and file transfer with Samba is a hit or miss. It unreliable and often incurs lengthy delay.

It seems mine is not an isolated problem. Wireless issue is a frequent topic on Apple support forum. I find many message like this one:

Topic : New Mac Mini Wireless Internet - Slow, Disconnects frequently

I use ping to test its connectivity. Pinging the gateway from the Mac gets result like below. There are plenty of missing packets.

64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=1.219 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=3.698 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=3.862 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 10
Request timeout for icmp_seq 11
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=3.671 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=13 ttl=64 time=3.766 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 14
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=15 ttl=64 time=3.997 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=16 ttl=64 time=5.394 ms

Pinging the Mac from a PC, both are connected wirelessly, is even worst. Besides loss packets, the response time is pathetic. Sometimes it takes hundreds of millisecond.

Reply from 192.168.1.120: bytes=32 time=609ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.120: bytes=32 time=632ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.120: bytes=32 time=655ms TTL=64
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.120: bytes=32 time=97ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.120: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.120: bytes=32 time=93ms TTL=64
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.1.120: bytes=32 time=640ms TTL=64
Request timed out.

Note that this is not a wireless signal problem. I have moved the access point to only 15 feet away from the Mac with a direct line of sight. The test does marginally better at best. Besides, none of other wireless devices on the network have any connectivity problem.

After several false start using different suggestions from the Internet, I have found a config that dramatically improve the Mac's connectivity. I set the router to use Wireless-G only. The default of Linksys WRT110 is in "Mixed" mode. It includes some proprietary Linksys enhancement that none of my device can take advantage anyway. And it is not even Wireless-N. Setting it to Wireless-G only improve the Mac's connectivity with no loss of performance for other devices.

2010.01.26 [tech] - comments (0)

SF Appeal has published the Muni onboard video recording of the collision between a Muni #19 bus and a pickup truck on Jan 5th morning. The intersection is controlled by four way stop sign. Question has been brought about who's at fault. I have reviewed the video frame by frame. I come to a clear conclusion that the truck driver was at fault. While the bus driver technically did not made a complete stop, it has the right of way. The accident was caused by the truck running the stop sign at a high speed.

The four frames below captured the action during a span of 2.8 s until the moment they collided.

• Frame 1 - 00:02:34.22
• Frame 2 - 00:02:35.02
• Frame 3 - 00:02:36.02
• Frame 4 - 00:02:37.02

At frame 1, using the trash can as a reference point, it shows the bus was right at the intersection. The truck was about half a block away. It should be immediately obvious that the bus has the right of way.

At frame 2, the bus rolled forward. The truck was still some distance away.

At frame 3, the bus proceeded across the intersection slowly. The truck still have not arrive at the intersection. It should stop and yield to the bus.

At frame 4, truck ran the stop sign at high speed and caused the collision.

Base on the video frames, I plotted the estimated position and the movement of the vehicles during this 2.8 s on a map. I estimated the bus has rolled through the stop at 8 mph. In contrast, the truck has flown through the intersection from half a block away at 32 mph.

The verdict is clear, the truck driver was driving recklessly and caused the accident.

San Francisco Chronicle has published an article with the release video titled "Crash video shows bus, pickup ran stop signs". It implies they are equally at fault. I think this is wholly a mischaracterization by failing to unambiguously call out it was the truck's fault. The bus had the right of way. Actually had the bus made a complete stop the same accident could still happen.

2010.01.07 [San Francisco] - comments (3)

My niece was visiting us from Peru. So we had an active holiday week showing them around in San Francisco. She brought her 1 year old baby daughter along. I setup some old infant gear for her. It all worked out quite well.

This is the first time Tatchee has a baby visitor. I'm delighted to see him act like a big brother. He spontaneously bring her toys and other stuff for her comfort. Other times I saw him act with a sense of fairness. When the baby try to grab things from him, he hold it away from her and told her that you shouldn't grab things from others. Tatchee is a little boy to us. We only realize how much he has grown up when he is together with his little niece.

2010.01.02 [personal] - comments (0)

I have a phone call with my dad this evening. We talked about some issues in handling of family properties. At the end of the conversation my father mentioned sometimes he feels he is counting days. He is in his mid-80s so it is not a complete surprise. Since my mother passed away last year my father is living alone. Actually this is something already on my mind, perhaps subconsciously. But we have seldom talked openly about it.

It started when my mother was departed after a short struggle with cancer. I feel I have lost a part of myself. I have not lived with my parents for quite some time. When I was young I want so much to get away. I moved out to the dorm when I went to college. I was so happy to have a place of my own. Later I started working and I have moved across the Pacific to San Francisco altogether. I was mostly focusing on myself, seeking a good career and to make the most of my life.

Often people don't think much of something until you lost them. Parents are always there. I can always go back to them once in a while. Well now my mom is no longer there. And many conversations between us will not happen anymore.

I have never regret coming to San Francisco. It is a fulfillment both careerwise and personally. After spending almost 1/3 of my life in this city, I come to see it as my home town even more than my birth place. Most things I have done I will not choose differently if I were given the choice again. But it is also true that by moving away I have become somewhat cut off from my family and relatives. My mother was often the bridge between myself and my relatives. Now that she was gone I become even more isolated.

My uncles and aunts are all in their 80s and 90s. They are all going to depart fairly soon. Our redemption is in the next generation. But the picture is grim. I have written about low fertility rate on a macro level. On the personal level, it means several of my cousins have well passed marrying age but have remain single. We were once children growing up together. Now it seems we won't have enough children of the next generation growing up together like we once did.

Having say that I must not complaint too much. Having Tatchee is already a great blessing for us. But if one child is good, then two must be better. But it seems the prospect of Tatchee having a sibling is diminishing. My system engineering side tells me that we should have redundancy. What if he contacted a deadly disease? What if he were hit by a car? What if Tatchee does not has a child of his own? I am looking ahead to the day when I die. Would that leave him as the end of the gene line? Who is going to burying him when Tatchee too has aged and die?

Back in my childhood in Hong Kong my mom has given me a rich network of family ties. Something I've never learned to appreciate until recently. And what do I provide to Tatchee in my turn? To think about he will inherit my social isolation, and not to mention a world of global climate change, I start to feel ashamed.

2009.12.28 [personal] - comments (0)

Monday is Tatchee's preschool's day off. I brought him to my office for a few hours so that I can work there. I brought the Totoro DVD to entertain him. And I also brought along some toy cars. One of them is his favorite police. I was worrying about its siren and the sound it can make. I warned Tatchee not to make noise it in the office. Once he was there he understood that noise is not appropriate and voluntary put this car away. Finally, I bring him along to an hour long meeting. He played quietly in the meeting room the whole time. People are fairly impressed by him. I'm happy that the day turned out quite well and he wasn't too bored.

Later I talked to my neighbor about this. She told me when she was very little her mom brought her to her office one time. To this day she still have a vivid memory of that trip, like the typewriter that impressed her. I'm writing this down so that I can chat with him when he gets older to see if he remember this day :)

2009.11.30 [personal] - comments (0)

I am off to a vacation to Perú shortly. I was hit by flu in the last few days. So my preparation is somewhat interrupted. I hope the trip will be smooth from now on.

2009.10.31 comments (0)

Last Saturday I have joined WalkSF in their annual Peak to Peak Walk. We gathered the starting point at West Portal. It was sunny when I took off from the east side. Who would have expected it was actually drizzling in West Portal! We headed out to the wood in Mount Davidson and then Twin Peaks and over a series of hills in San Francisco. When we have arrived on Twin Peaks, we were right at the edge of the morning fog. The scenery change from instance to instance. One moment we saw the Sutro Tower floating in the air, a moment later it was hidden by fog. I find such scenery magical. I have also visited the beautiful campus of USF for the first time. The walk ended in Coit tower where we have a small picnic.

I was also using this walk as a training opportunity for my upcoming trekking trip in Peru. I carried a backpack with 20 pounds weight the entire day. I don't know if this is a significant factor, but I was really tired at the end of the day.

2009.10.27 comments (0)

Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources (1986)
Director: Claude Berri [more...]

2009.10.18 [movie] - comments (0)

Yesterday's storm has caused quite a bit of havoc for me. It wasn't the first time we were out of power during a storm. But this time I saw the electric pole in front of my house exploded in a blindingly lightning. It continues 4-5 more times in the span of half an hour. Firemen has closed off our street because live wires were still dangling from the pole. We went out to the street with trepidation because we have to pick up our son from pre-school. I found there was a one foot deep flooded pond to wade through in order for us to go out. We are stopped from returned home for another hour until the PG&E people have arrived. The good things is PG&E restored the power by 9 pm. Also there seems to be no injury other than the damaged equipment. [more...]

2009.10.14 comments (0)

Last night I was in this unfortunate incident. I was walking in Mission when a young man behind me suddenly fell down, knocked himself unconscious and was bleeding on the street. I called 911 for an ambulance. This was perhaps the first time I use the emergency service. I gave the dispatcher my location. It was an small alley, those name I only come to know for the first time despite having walked by it many times. Nevertheless, the dispatcher immediately identified the street. This is all more impressive because I have mispronounced the street name. She sent an ambulance to the scene. It takes less than 5 minutes from the time I picked up the phone to the arrival of the ambulance. I saw the young man was getting help. I hope he was only drunk and suffer no more than a bruise on his face. [more...]

2009.10.07 comments (0)

The title of this precentation Data and Capital Markets in Money:Tech 2008 is not very obvious. It is actually an excellent presentation on the state-of-art of database design. Dr. Michael Stonebraker is behind a series of database innovation for several decades from INGRES and Postgres up to his current work on StreamBase Systems. In this talk he has criticized the traditional RDBMS as something woefully outdated. He has presented several new directions in database design that he think will soon upstage the current generation of RDBMS systems. [more...]

2009.09.28 [tech] - comments (0)

I've mentioned that I'm reading Richard Florida's Who's Your City. It explores the finding that innovation and creativity are often concentrated in certain region. The location a person lives has a great impact on one's life but people have often overlook this factor. I'm so interested in the topic that I have pick up some other related books as well as some book I've read in the past. I plan to do a summary on all of them shortly. [more...]

2009.09.23 [book] - comments (0)

You may have aware of the media buzz around the British government has made an posthumous apology to the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, who despite of his contribution in World War II, was dishonored by the conviction of being gay in 1952. The government's apology is perceived as fair an uncontroversial, given Turing's monumental contribution to computer science and that gay is not longer considered a crime today. [more...]

2009.09.22 comments (0)

I'm reading Richard Florida's 2008 book "Who's Your City". In this book he asserts that the location where one lives has significant impact on every aspect of one's life. Therefore one should give it major consideration and choose it consciously. [more...]

2009.09.14 comments (0)

今天好辛苦地從網上找到一堆中國方言的例子，紀錄下來跟大家分享一下。我只懂粵語，所以好不容易才找都其他方言的紀錄，如有什麼地方弄錯請見諒。 [more...]

2009.07.19 [language, chinese] - comments (0)

I have done some performance benchmarking for Python's ctypes library. I am planning to use ctypes as an alternative to writing C extension module for performance enhancement. Therefore my use case is slight different from the typical use case for accessing existing third party C libraries. In this case I am both the user and the implementer of the C library. [more...]

2009.07.16 [python] - comments (3)

When I first started blogging, I have a lot of geeky posting about software development. The idea of blogging is to write on short subjects frequently. It is different from writing a long article, which is so burdensome many people end up not doing it at all. But in practice, I have not lived up to expectation of a prolific blogger. Sometimes the gap between postings can be a few months. [more...]

2009.07.12 [python, tech] - comments (0)

8pm in the evening, it was those time of the day when sunlight shine horizontally from the west. Looking out of the window, it illuminated distance objects in a glowing golden light. The crown of the tree outside was highlighted today. A little bit of drizzle coming out of nowhere has just passed. There was just enough moisture in the air for a rainbow to emerge. For a few minutes a beautiful picture has appeared in front of my eyes. I feel thankful for a having a good day. [more...]

2009.07.11 comments (0)

Just to follow up with more fun with Google Earth. I have captured another picture a short distance to the northeast of Angkor. The are many dots scattered in this territory that look like bomb craters. Unlike the fields to the south, there seems to have little trace of human in this area. What are these dots really? [more...]

2009.07.05 [geography] - comments (0)