US federal judge rules against teaching 'Intelligent Design' in classroom yestarday. Good for the kids now that the idiots are not allowed to stuff non-sense into their curriculum.

I don't plan to spend time debating creationism itself. Instead this led me contemplate the appeal of creationism and the concept of anthropomorphism. There are plenty of world origin myth. What about the world is originate from four elements and such and such. Few would consider them as valid theory. Why does creationism seems to be more plausible and have more credential in comparison? I really like to challenge fundamental assumptions. Great insight would often come after.

First of all many of us are already indoctrinated with Christian theory since young. But besides that the logic of creationism appeals to anthropomorphism - the attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena. We love to perceive the world according to human behavior. It is easy to think of things coming from a designer similar to ourselves. In contrast other theories like Big bang, heaven and earth or four elements don't have this kind of appeal.

Turns out I am not the first one to think of this. Philosophers have been thinking about anthropomorphism for a long time. Just too abstract for most people to grasp probably.

2005.12.21 [philosophy] - comments

Nathan Torkington invite people to recount how they became hackers as an inpiration for new generations. I have taken this chance to write my own. It is reposted below.

---

How did I get into computer programming? I pride myself being a teen computer science theorist. Long before I've touched a real computer, I have already learned a whole lot of Basic programming by reading computer magazines in public library. My first program is really on a Casio programmable calculator. It has a macro function, a random number generator and a conditional branching command. With those I have build a Blackjack game. Later my friend got a Casio pocket computer PB-100. He generously lent me this new toy several days at a time. PB-100 has a great feature that it supports the spade, diamond, heart and club characters. So I got to build a number of card games using Basic.

Then my friend invited me to his home to use his Apple II. By then I have already learned everything about 6502 machine code. I decided my first program should be an assembler. I coded all the machine code on paper and brought it to my friend's home for a trial. After an entire afternoon of debugging it went no where. This became my first abandoned project. Eventually my parents gave in and bought me an Apple II. I have to confess that most of these came from the thriving pirate computer industry at that time. I got to read the pirated Apple reference manual translated into Chinese. It includes the source code of Woz' Basic ROM. That piece of software was really an enlightenment for me.

In time I moved up to Turbo Pascal, 300 baud modem and so on. I was steps ahead of other when I started CS in college.

2005.11.21 [education, computer] - comments

I have written several comments on the BBC news website before. Despite making much effort in writing some original and substantial comments, I have not have luck to have them selected so far. That is until today when I make some Google search and run into one of the comment I have made about Tung Chee-Hwa's resignation. It was silently accepted for half year before I have found out. BBC has highlighted my comment and it wasn't very kind:

Even to the end he has managed to further damage Hong Kong peoples' confidence
Tung Wai Yip, San Francisco, USA

2005.11.20 [media] - comments

I hit upon an entry of my family name Tung 董 in Wikipedia yesterday. What I saw doesn't delight me. It looks like a mischievous teenage has put his twisted bio into the entry. I went in to clean it out and added Tung Chee Hwa as the sole representative of the Tung clan for now. Although it has only 3 lines, this is my first original content contributed to Wikipedia. And a little something I have done for my family name. Furthermore I am delight to find the prankish entry has only been up for 10 days before I shot it down.

Wikipedia is frequently looked as a rival to traditional institutions like Britannica. People like to pick out bad entries from Wikipedia and complain how professionalism is being overran by amateurishness. I of course have many counter arguments. But today I have realized something more. If encyclopedia is to be a most comprehensive reference of knowledge of all kind, then it is a long tail business! I don't expect anyone would care enough to put an entry of my family name into an encyclopedia (I have been generous to call Tung "a common Chinese family name"). There is going to be many many knowledge important only to a small group of people and few others. In the age of information explosion Britannica would have a hard time to hire enough experts to write about each and everything important and remain economically viable. Just 4 years since inception Wikipedia already claim more articles than Britannica. It is really no accident.

2005.11.11 [tech] - comments

Since it opens in 1930s, over a thousand people have taken their own life plunging into the cold dark water under the Golden Gate Bridge. Should a barrier be built to stop people from attempting suicide? That is the rebate reignited recently. My first reaction is if people cannot jump from the bridge, they will find another way to kill themselves. A barrier is likely to be costly, ugly and not necessary effective. Like many people I identify the bridge as an landmark icon but have certain sense of apathy and even regard this as a myth.

I have eventually changed my position. A barrier should be elected. Think about it. The Golden Gate Bridge really has a magical spell to be the place to end one's life. Once we stop making it convenient, most suicidal people are probably not as determine as we would have thought.

The Chronicle is running a 7-part series on the barrier issue. By taking a close look at the people involved it gives another dimension to the issue. These are wrenching and anguishing stories about real people, many of them young, brilliant and promising. Let this be a wake up call, for we have really ignored the issue for too long.

2005.11.02 [San Francisco] - comments

As a software developer I am a strong advocate of open source software. They are used extensively both at my work and for my private projects. In retrospect, open source platform, often referred to as LAMP, has long past the stage being just an useful extension to proprietary software. It has become my dominant development platform. If I were to build a server application today, it would make very little sense for me to consider Microsoft servers. Why choose a framework that leave you with a single tools vendor. LAMP has proven to be technical viable, cost nothing to experiment and distribute, and more importantly I trust them because of its openness. Nowadays I need little justification to pick LAMP over Microsoft.

What a big leap from just a few years ago when it looks like Microsoft is going to take over the world.

2005.11.01 [software, tech] - comments

My reaction on the fad of Ajax is posted in a comment to an O'Reilly article Is AJAX Here to Stay?

---

When people boast with the term 'ajax framework' I sneer. There is no framework in software development sense, no library, no API, no references. Ajax is primary a web applications look and feel. Part of it is a technique to overcome the page by page look and feel of regular web applications. Another part is a lot of client side coding to update the screen and simulate desktop widgets.

Before 'ajax' is coined, we have another term to describe these client side coding - DHTML, a collection of tools make up of HTML, javascript, dom, event, css, etc. As any DHTML partitioner can tell you, it is lots of hard work, trials and error, and hair pulling to get these trickery done. Ajax suggests we do this in a massive scale. Adding cross browser, cross platform support into the equation and you'll find it is not really for the faint of heart.

Now we have some very smart people pushing the envelope of existing primitives and built some very cool applications. Everybody else is trying to follow suit. What we really need is a higher level web application and widget framework to make this sustainable.

Two developments come into my radar screen. Both are browser independent. XForm poise to be the next generation of web forms and it could form the basis of richer user interface. The OpenLaszlo platform allows developers to create applications with the rich user interface. Although it currently requires Flash as the runtime engine.

As much as I like to see a rich user interface, it is also important to keep in the balance with simplicity. I'm rather weary of sending thousands of lines of javascript to be executed on client. It is not the efficiency as suggested in the article that concerns me. It is the complexity of those code that makes me feel uncomfortable.

2005.10.09 [UI] - comments

The news of San Francisco building a city-wide wireless network is getting a lot of attention these days. Broadbandreports runs several stories on this. While broadbandreports itself is a proponent of municipal broadband, I am surprise that the news draw torrents of criticism from readers. Many reject this because it is a 'liberal' thing. Other took the line of incumbent telcos that existing access methods is preferable to a public project.

While I think many posting are nothing but political fervent, I am also disappointed that people do not see the potential of universal connectivity as a big step forward (a departure from the usually 'hypish' technology sector). I have posted my reaction, which I include here:

---

Reader's post

Disgusting

It is pathetic how the flaming Left in this country has confused the term "right" and "entitlement." Sure, everyone has a "right" to Wifi. There is nothing stopping you from working, earning some money and buying the needed tools yourself. Its no different than there being a right to free speech and free press. Does this mean the government is required to provide you with the means to exercise those rights? Of course not.

Some other posters here have mentioned guns. Under Mayor Newsom's reasoning, the right to gun ownership requires that the government give free guns out to everyone.

---

My response

There is nothing stopping you from working, earning some money and buying the needed tools yourself.

True. There is also nothing to stop private entities to build railroads and toll roads and then charge everyone a use fee either. Just like what the country did a century ago. Do you find it disgusting that the government took it upon themselves to build roads and offer it for free to people?

Look there are no lack of proposals from commercial companies to offer the service, apparently costing the city little. People get access in the parks and schools and cafe and hopefully all pocket of households that do not yet have access. I don't understand what the objection is. Do you have a better proposal?

3G, if it is available at all, would cost a bundle. Imagine now that there is universal wireless access. You go to a shop and look at an item. You'll pull your PDA or cellphone and do a search on the UNC code. Immediately it turns out a list of reviews, links to other outlets, and recommendation for alternatives or accessories you'll need. You'd IM your wife. Once she sees the picture she'd told you you got the wrong stuff again! That's new commerce that will be enabled by universal access! You'd bet Google is working on that already!

You'd think broadband report readers are a bunch of smart guys. But when it comes to public project all the anti-government ideology would just overcome their judgement. Guys I'm off to hack the next big thing for the future of universal connectivity. Go on with your anti-government bashing.

2005.10.04 [mobile, network, San Francisco] - comments

Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond? No, just an embarrassing mistake their recruiters made. it seems tech recruiting work like this. Go down a list of names that the recruiter has peripheral knowledge at best. Send him a spamesque email like "Hi X, we would like to speak to you about a job opening we have, ... If you know of any other qualified person, please pass this message to them." One score when the recipient replies.

Well one of these Microsoft recruiting email inadvertently goes to Eric Raymond, the most public, most outspoken sworn enemy of Microsoft. So he posted this email to the public for a good laugh. It would be more funny he went on to arrange an interview or even got an job offer from some clueless manager :)

2005.09.12 [humor] - comments

"So, the worst has happened. The city has, in functional terms, been destroyed. Fatalism has had its ultimate day.[more...]

2005.09.05 comments

Talking about flooding, I come to realize it may be a most destructive kind of nature hazard. The New Orleans flood destroyed much of the city in one shot. It is estimated the fatality may result in an astonishing 10,000. We fear the powerful earthquake, the violent tornado, uncontrollable wild fire, or explosive volcanic eruption. But despite its destructiveness, we don't seems to have as much awareness to flooding as to other form of natural hazard.

I theorize that flooding has a different character. It is usually non-violent (barred flash flood or torrents). Indeed a flooded town is often serene. The destruction is often silent.

2005.09.05 comments

It always frustrate me to find maps don't come with scale. It is particular important if you try to judge whether a route is within walking distance. Google map is an incredible tool. But it needs to show the scale too!

So I have decided to make my measurements and come up with some reasonable estimate. I will use the zoom control as the scale. Up to 9 zoom levels were measured with level 1 being the most detail. The distance between the center of + mark and the - mark, is shown below. Beware that the projected images near the poles (e.g. Helsinki,Finland) seems significantly distorted.

Level	Distance
1	230m
2	450m
3	870m
4	1.7km
5	3.3km
6	6.4km
7	12km
8	24km
9	47km

2005.06.24 [geography] - comments

Beginner programmers often wonder about Python's sequence indexing and slicing notation. Array index starts from 0. Slicing uses half open notations, where L[a:b] is a subsequence with index x where a <= x < b.

Why is the endpoint excluded? Isn't it more intuitive if array index starts from 1 and the endpoint is included, so that a 3 elements array is referenced as L[1:3] with items L[1], L[2], L[3]?

It turns out this notation is an elegant and deliberate design and it has some excellent properties.

We write programs to operate on arrays, to find their length, traverse the subsequences, split them or join them. The half open notation always show a simple pattern. But the inclusive notation often requires adding 1 or substracting 1 to the indexes in many operations. Thus it is more vulnerable to off-by-one-error. This article One True Way of array indexing discuss this at length. I have reproduce its example (with corrections) below:[more...]

2005.06.16 [software, python] - comments

This is my observation on Jobs' speech in the WWDC 05 Keynote.

---

Thanks Daniel for your coverage on the keynote. Reading this is as if I were there.

Jobs has made a very diplomatic presentation. Going Intel is so touchy that they have to introduce this with great care and sensitivity. The humor and cheerleading that is routine in this kind of event are markedly subdue. In place of it are lot more solemn and contemplative atmosphere. Making light joke on the bunny man on fire commercial and have the two CEOs embrace in front of the audience is a ritual for the past foes to make up. I think the ability to change without getting too entrenched or too religious is especially important for Apple to survive and to thrive.

Perhaps this can be a lesson for political adversaries too?

2005.06.15 [computer] - comments

A report from Public Policy Institute of California says that California is still strong in biotech industry. What really interest me is its contrast with the IT industry. While biotech may turn out marvels in science, its not likely to be a powerful engine of economic growth. The report says "biotech is not an enabling technology like information technology that lays the foundation for other industries and promotes growth in many other sectors".

Original report is available online.

2005.04.27 [business] - comments

Reuters reports low-cost computers and open source software making it cost less to invest in a startup. I always think open source is an under appreciated revolution. Not only is it redefining laws of economics and inspires people to collaborate, now it also form the basis of a low-cost computing platform and sprawl a new wave of innovations.

2005.04.03 [tech, business] - comments

• The third day's keynote is delivered by Greg Stein from Google. He gave some insight about evangelizing Python in his last few companies. Small companies are more readily to adopt Python and consider it a competitive advantage. Whereas large company would hold on until the support environment is present. Nevertheless he believes the growth of Python has passed the tipping point and it was never a problem to train any new programmer Python.

  He went on to describe the use of Python in Google and emphasized SWIG as a great glue for integrating code build using various languages.

• Andi Vajda, whom's search engine PyLucene is what powers my MindRetrieve project, is giving a talk in PyCon. He outlined the challenges to compile a Java application into C executable and making it into Python extension library using GCJ and SWIG. The issues including different memory management, different thread model and cross language error reporting. The success of PyLucene draw a lot of interests in compiling other Java projects into executable and provide more language binding.

• I enjoyed yesterday's lightning talks so much that I have stepped up to demonstrate my own MindRetrieve project today. Again the room was packed. I'm glad that I went thought the 5 minutes presentation reasonably well and as at least a few people seems to appreciate my idea.

  Geek biker Peter Kropf has made a cross country motorcycle trip. With the bike was a custom built hardware censors and cameras recording everything. He made his videos available on his website .

  Chris Tismer shown a web demo using stackless Python to maintain server state. Stateless Python sounds like a mystery. But his few lines of code is a great introduction.

I thoroughly enjoyed this three days of PyCon, met lots of great people and learned a whole lot. I cherish this supportive open source community and look forward to more exciting development in the coming year.

Read more about day 1, day 2 and day 3 of PyCon.

2005.03.25 [software, python] - comments

• Guido van Rossum delivered the State of Python keynote on the second day. First he mentioned a security issue in the Python standard library was reported recently. While the scope of this issue is limited, this has prompted the development team to setup a structure to response to future security problems. He then described some incremental improvement proposed. This is followed by some contentious "optional static type checking proposals". We can expect Python would continue its slow growth policy with few major change in coming releases.

• I am missing more formal sessions because of the continuous discussion of web development in python. Shannon Behrens is giving a improvised tutorial of his Aquarium web framework to a user. Using this fairly straightforward framework he has covered the essence of web development within an hour. The Aquarium framework is comprised of mere a few thousands lines of code. This gave another perspective to the framework proliferation problem. Python is so productive that it is well within a single talented developer's capability to build a complete framework.

  The open source movement give great opportunities to geeks to produce and contribute independently. But that could also leads to divergence is most apparent in Python's web development environment. A truly successful project will need not only technical excellency but also the ability to find consensus and to build coalitions.

• Richard Jones has shown us the Roundup issue tracker. It seems to be well build and has rich functionalities. If you are starting a new project it is definitively an alternative to Bugzilla. Another similar project mentioned is trac with also has subversion integration.

• PyCon has two sessions of Lightning talks make of of a series of informal 5 minutes presentations. This provides a low pressure environment and encourages people to show case smaller projects or ideas that might not warrant a full session. Given its unofficial nature I'm surprised to find the lightning talks is actually very well attended.

  Armin Rigo has demonstrated a neat collect class that build a sequence from iterator on demand.

  The Holger Krekel and Armin Rigo team has even more neat tools to show. The rlcomplete2 seems to be a must have command line completion tool. shpy enable people on two different computers to share screen and edit the same file simultaneous. That's what you call pair programming!

  Wayne Yamamoto from Rustic Canyon Partners come to solicit talents to build startups base specifically on Python technologies. So far the Python community seems to be remarkably uncommercial. Many being merely closet Pythonistas. I think we really need to do more to let the larger world know how incredibly productive these Python technologies really are.

• A few more sessions worth mentioning. Christopher Gillett from Compete Inc described the use of Python for large scale data mining. Michael Salib try to save all of us from the software patent machine. He has built a US Patent Database using Xapian as the search engine. Anna Ravenscroft shown us some important libraries dealing with date and time including Dateutil and pytz.

Read more about day 1, day 2 and day 3 of PyCon.

2005.03.24 [software, python] - comments

I am really excited to go to PyCon for the first time. This is some notes about what happened in this 3 day conference in Washington D.C.

• PyCon2005 starts with a keynote from Jim Hugunin from Microsoft, who started the IronPython project that ports Python on Microsoft's .NET platform.

  Coming from Microsoft automatically put one into defensive when confronted with the non-Microsoft community. Jim certainly knows when to crack Microsoft jokes and what to say when a demo crash. Putting this aside he did delivered some great demos and made a strong case about the value of python on .NET platform. On the other hand I can't help thinking about how much ill will and negative publicity Microsoft has created.

• The next interesting session is Holger Krekel talking about a novel testing tool py.test. He find the JUnit inspired unittest.py clumsy to use. With his test tool, user create test cases just using the assert statement, instead of the function call based unittest module, which he find quite clumsy. He then done some clever analysis when there is exception and generate an informative report.

  He then went on to show another tool that bring a twist to RPC. Instead of the usual approach of transferring the objects to the remote host, he simply creates a two way channel and let the local and remote code communicates in their own way. Smart tool! Unfortunately the website http://codespeak.net/py seems to be down throughout the conference.

• Next session Grig Gheorghiu cover a lot of ground about agile testing. He touches on various tools and the XP principles. Finally he demonstrated using wiki to let customers design test cases and provide instant testing and feedback. Don't you think all software should some have something like that? Check out FitNesse and Selenium.

• I really love the PyWebOff presentation Michelle Levesque gave in the afternoon. She hit the nail on the head that having far too many web application frameworks in Python causes great confusion to the users. It was a fabulous and very entertaining presentation. The message is clear, users need a clear guidance on what framework to use given certain requirements.

• Ian Bicking's talk about WSGI is exactly an effort to bring order to chaos about the proliferation the frameworks. While it is good to define a standard interface between certain layers, it is less clear to me if this effort would weed out the number of frameworks, at least not in the short run.

I think Python is missing the opportunity to establish itself as a premier web development platform due to these issues. Otherwise it could easily double or triple its user base. Instead it is losing market to some less capable tools like PHP. I was so passionate about this problem that I have spent most of the afternoon discussing this in open sessions rather than attending talks.

Read more about day 1, day 2 and day 3 of PyCon.

2005.03.23 [software, python] - comments

Below is how my last blog entry translated into Japanese using Google translate. It looks cute that the translated page keeps the original formatting.

2005.03.13 comments