[d] My recent runnings

I have been running regularly in the mornings in the past two months. Morning runnings help me in building the endurance, maintaining a working momentum and losing weight. One of the proofs is that I was able to hike the Hollyburn Ridge trail in Cypress Provincial park with relative ease. This trail, being "moderate" as rated, used to be a challenge for me.

When I was at Vancouver I ran in the neighborhood of UBC, on SW Marine drive. The route starts from St. John's college, ends at Westbook Mall, and follows the same way back. This route boasts very scenic view, and best fresh air in North America.

The San Diego route starts from Regents Road and Executive Drive. I run to UCSD campus, going as far as the Computer Science and Engineering building, and take the same way back.

On 9/17 after staying one night at University of Chicago's International House, I started from I-House and toured the whole U. Chicago campus. The temperature was a bit cool but after a while it became okay. Chicago's summer is really nice, albeit after October you basically will be forced to run indoors unless coldness is your favorite.

On 9/20 (today! I am back to San Diego now). I did a morning running from UIC to Chinatown, and took the bus back. The route starts from UIC, takes Halsted street all along till Archer street, and then turns into Chinatown Square. This is what I have never done in the whole past 5 and 1/2 years when studying in Chicago, and brings lots of fun :).

[m] What is Google Chrome aiming at?

Google released its Chrome web browser on Tuesday, September 2. Being a long-time Firefox user, I have downloaded and tried out Chrome. The browser is light weight. Its user interface, just as described in the release news conference, is "simple enough to make you forget the existence of the browser itself". Google claims that the release of Chrome is to contribute to the diversity of browser user's choice. Nothing wrong with this statement, but what's more?

Here are my two cents:

- A defensive attack at Microsoft to protect Google apps. To ensure a significant control of the platform where one's own applications runs on is a key factor for the success of internet giants. An analogy is that we never heard an Amazon statement claiming "powered by Microsoft SQL Server technology". Google has invested considerable effort in the new business of Google apps (docs, mail, calendar) that have both light local existence and tight integration with the service cloud. Putting the user experience of these applications in the hand of a well-know rival is a threat of today, and will be a disaster in the tomorrow.

- Make official endorsement to a non-IE platform. Isn't there Firefox, and it is backed up by Google already? The answer is both yes and no. OEMs can hardly bundle Firefox with a Windows PC, even if Microsoft does not offer incentive for such deeds. Simple reason: nothing offered by Mozilla foundation. On the other side, another open source browser endorsed by a money-making company as Google could potentially bring money-making opportunities to the OEMs too. The time-to-market cycle of business stimulated feature development, such as adding a security control for online shopping checkout, will be much more assured in this case.

- Think about Opera, think about the mobile markets. Opera makes its own share in the mobile browsing market largely due to it is so far the best candidate who achieved seamless user experience both on desktop and mobile devices. The light weight and concise user interface of Chrome makes its expansion to a mobile platform quite feasible. As for Google's future in the mobile OS field, I am optimistic. Remember Robert Love is on its side...

Well, with one of the players makeing a big move, let's wait and see how the whole chess game goes on.

[m] 俄罗斯教训格鲁吉亚: 小国滥玩"大战略"不足取

格鲁吉亚选择在奥运开幕之际进攻南奥塞梯, 结果被俄罗斯反戈一击. 搞得军事行动失败不说, 主动要求停火还不被别人理睬.

俄罗斯作为前苏联的主要继承人, 当然是霸道的, 和原来的小兄弟们关系也都不太亲密. 我有好几个朋友就是从前苏联加盟共和国过来的, 说到俄罗斯都颇有微词. 问题在于像格鲁吉亚这样明知在南奥塞梯有俄罗斯驻军, 还敢于不宣而战的二愣子却是仅此一个. 究其根底, 还是盲目相信美国和北约必会撑腰. 四百万人口的小国, 何以能确定俄罗斯, 美国, 北约三大势力能被自己运筹帷幄? 这次滥玩"大战略", 吃亏真是不小.

[r] Hostels in Rio

Although Brazil is considered a developing country, the hotel cost is far from low. This is especially true in tourism-flourished Rio. The hotel I stayed costs $150/night. For a single student, a good way to cut lodging cost will be staying in hostels. Two websites to find them:

http://www.hostelworld.com/
and
http://www.hostelz.com/

The hostels in Rio charges $15-$20 a day, and quite a few of them resides in areas that have good views (e.g. Copacabana Beach).

[d] Flourish 2007 Conference

The UIC ACMers and LUGers organized a very successful Flourish 2007 Conference. It is the same group of people who turned SEL 2262 from a boring TA office into a friendly lounge for computer science lovers. My respect goes to these young & energetic boys/girls. They are the real hope of pushing UIC forward towards one of the top school names, well, at least from the current 50-or-so ranking in CS.

Being one of the attendee, One of my pleasures is being able to listen to Chris Dibona's talk in person, and take a picture with him. Information age shortens the communication distance, but not necessarily the geographical one. Obviously getting travel money to go to open source conferences like OSCON and PyCon will be a dream for my Ph.D. career at UIC ... , not even likely after starting full-time job... So, thanks Flourish!

[d] New Year, New Car

我的老丰田Camry已经开了两年整了，故障也越来越多。年底假期期间它连连抛锚，终于让我下定了买新车的决心。上周末买下了这辆07款福特Escape. 自己开车上班是安全多了，爸妈要是今年来也能舒服不少啊（想念中）。主要指标：

• 入门级四门SUV ，2.3升185马力
• 油耗23/26（街道/高速，英里每加仑）
• 自动档五级变速
  

[m] “Aggressive" 的百度

上次老陈来芝加哥的时候，我开车陪同。他对我在高速路上驾车的两个习惯颇不以为然，一是换道时回头看盲区，一是经过高速入口时减速让支道车并入。按老陈的说法，在成都要像我这样，大概是寸步难行的。"在国内就得Aggressive!"

"Aggressive"的注解，我在生活中当然颇有体会。早在当年申请出国时，实验室一位常年做学生干部，而同时在申请的兄弟，即“无意”地用嗅探软件获得了我的邮件密码，并侦听三个月之久。我的所有电子邮件，均被抄送一份给他，直到被我发现，并投诉至网络中心为止。此兄目前在某银行开发软件。仅此记忆，已让我不敢对国内银行“保守客户隐私”的承诺太过认真。

无独有偶，百度在裁员风波以后，最近又惹出了一个新麻烦。那就是修改搜索结果，把用户对知名下载网站的搜索结果，引导到自己旗下的下载网站去。搞得人家不依不饶打整版广告抗议。这起事件说明，对有些公司标榜的“诚实”、“严谨”、“用户至上”、“商业道德”，只需要完全按相反意思解读就对了。2002年，Google的搜索结果中忽然出现大量的天x门，法x功关键字，导致Google在中国被屏蔽了好一阵子。当时就有许多证据指向新兴的百度，使用了垃圾链接技术，诱使Google的自动搜索提高被禁页面的搜索评级，然后再匿名向监管机构举报，以此打击竞争对手。

我很奇怪象百度这样的公司为什么没有被用户抵制，或是出现股市信任危机。同样的作为在美国，对公司的影响是相当负面的。对此，大概只能用中国国情来解释了罢。

[m] 最近的一个小爱好

就是到新浪去看blog。自己写blog两年了，就是自娱自乐。新浪的全是名人（现在也有一些草根了，象非常真人），充分满足大众的8卦心理。要是美国名人也自己开博，估计我早把Jennifer Aniston的订上喽，还看什么八阙啊。

先是以为名人也跟风，今天看了几篇文章才发现蛛丝马迹，原来新浪的内容编辑联系了300多名人，而且反复做工作（估计也提供一些代写服务）才竖起的这面大旗。高，实在是高！blog不比邮箱，估计没人愿意开两个，看来搜狐是棋输一招了。

我看要做社会网络的研究，还是得在中国，随便点开个博客文章评论都上百。跟中国比，美国的互联网社会网络太小儿科了，不过蕴含的商机还是多点。

[d] 印度房东家的晚餐

到科罗拉多来的两周确实过的相当充实。细细算来，公司组织了午餐两次，烧烤一次，漂流一次，日子过得还比较腐败。在公司的项目和Summer of Code上也颇有进展，厚厚的一本"lucene in action"居然已经看完，这种效率是原来从来没有过的。可见好的环境是多么重要。
印度房东晚上有客人来，邀请我一起进晚餐。我再三推辞，倒不是因为吃不惯印度食物（我对curry颇有爱好），而是因为来的人中有长者，而据我推断一般老人都不说英语，怕自己混迹其中让别人交流不便。房东一再说明语言不是问题，英语绝对通行。盛情难却，于是答应了。
7点左右客人陆续来齐，连主人夫妇和我，共有10人之多。大家先是围坐聊天，主人捧出面包待客。不出所料，几句英语过后，果然就是!@#%##. 好在印度话有一个好处，和日语一样，就是夹杂很多和英语同音或相近的单词，所以我还不至于完全云里雾里，居然还听出大家谈论的是板球：）。谈话里大致知道在denver地区有8个印度板球俱乐部，也有自己的赛季，累积分冠军和淘汰赛冠军，觉得颇为新鲜。
晚餐桌上摆出了五样菜：烤辣鸡腿、酸沙拉、炖蔬菜、咖喱米饭和咖喱汤。大家各拿盘取食，然后坐在一起聊天。男人们到了沙发上，都自然地脱鞋盘腿坐上去。我想就是传说的印度人吃饭时盘坐手抓大致就是如此了罢，只是时代进步，餐具不是直接用手而改用刀叉了。女主人的手艺真是不错，味道和平时在印度餐馆吃的有些不同，不过我想要比正宗程度，肯定还是今天的更高了。饭后大家打牌，兼有小赌，我就没参加了。倒是因此，有了小小的对双扣和麻将的思念...

[d] Another Summer of Code

It is summer again and Google is organizing the second Summer of Code. Although I am going to start my internship soon in Colorado, I still wrote two project proposals and both got accepted. Due to time constraint I could just take one, from Open Source Application Foundation.

Being a developer for open source projects is fun. It means lots of email exchange, coding in the midnight and in the backyard, trying hard to understand others' ideas and making self understood by others. But so what? it is FUN, that is worthy of all the efforts.

There are quite some rule changes this year for SoC, overall Google is much matured on managing stuff. Started to involve in open source communities from last year, I also gained experience for a better participation. Let me start the keyboard exercise today.

[d] Feelin' Good

Chicago is welcoming 2006 spring now. In the morning when I walked out the house to the car, oh, the gentle breeze make me feeling so good. Mild weather, a little bit moisture, a non-crowdy I-290, what can I expect more?

I am still working on the grant proposal. Kinda of slow, yet there is progress. The past project is a deviation from my career goal, but if it could be funded, the whole idea will not be too bad. I wish that a month later, I will be updating this entry with joyful comments. Anyway, let's see how it goes.

[updated 04/20/06]
I am glad to put it here that my research grant is funded today. Yay!

The summer internship is going to start on May 15, and there will be less than two months for me to stay in Chicago in the upper year. Since 2003, I've spent every summer at the lakeside and seldom realized those wonderful aspects of Chicago's hot season. Although it is often implicit, I do have to admit my love for this city in heart, for its diversity, social events, various people I met, and most importantly, the Ph.D. student experience.

[updated 05/24/06]
The export licensing is still under processing, and internship start date gets deferred to uncertainty. Let's wait and see.

[m] Notes about Staying at Shanghai

My staying at Shanghai, which was between Jan. 13th and Jan. 21th, was definitely involuntary and unexpected. The U.S. consulate general in Chengdu sent my visa application for background clearance and I could do nothing but just wait. Although the checking process was annoying and the hotel cost was expensive, I did found something interesting and worth writing down. This could act as a memorandum for my next Shanghai visit, however readers should warned that China is changing so rapidly and any experience notes could get outdated quickly.

[trip-planning]
e-trip is now becoming popular in China and a site to recommend is ctrip(www.ctrip.com). Ctrip is like a Chinese version of hotels.com, and provide lodging searching and booking services in major Chinese cities. Another convenience it is providing is booking ticket over the phone and picking it up at the airport. This service is especially in China as electronic tickets are not commonly provided by the flight carriers yet.

There are also several Chinese hotel chains that have online service. To name a few, Motel168(www.motel168.com) and JinJiang Inn(www.jj-inn.com). To save your cost instead of browsing Hyatt, Marriot and Ramanda sites, you should defintely give them a try first.

[on-site at the airport]
There are lots of services at the airport. You can find lots of small travel agency counters that could help you for lodging and ticket booking. But remember to bargain! Almost all quoted prices are negotiable and the final deal could be 40% to 50% less in price. I found my hotel at one of the counters, and get a RMB160/day price with free airport picking up. There are also car rental at the airport, including lots of international brands as Hertz, Budget etc. However, to rent a car, you need either be a foreigner (with non-Chinese passport) or company-endorsed.

There is an outlet mall at the airport, which consists of 40-50 stores. Most brands are European and North American and the prices are a somewhat higher than at Chicago. Be careful to read the "Made in" tag, as lots of the mechandise are actually made in China.

[monetary matters]
Although credit cards are now commonly used in Shanghai, cash is still the king. Don't count on traveler's cheques unless you could find a nearby bank. At the same time, there a lots of limitations to use credit cards, such as inconvenient refunding. I used to pay the hotel bill with Unite Visa and found a mischarged item later. When I called the hotel, I was told that my card is needed again for refunding, even if the card number was known.

Despite of the temporary inconveniences, I could expect credit cards to be in majority of Chinese's wallet soon. There are so many credit card advertisements on the news paper, and the offers vary from reward points/miles to VIP travel service. I also saw quite a few chain stores issuing their own credit cards, with a bank partner.

[other things]
1. Ask and keep all the receipts as possible as you can. The cash-transaction nature makes purchases hard to manage, unless you keep all the receipts.
2. Be cultural "billingual". When you are back to China, think and act as normal as the local people there. This is especially true for daily life.
3. Be ready for new stuff and make quick decisions under new circumstance. At least for me, China is now is somewhat as fresh as I arrived U.S. three years ago. Never hold prejudices of the local environment, but be open minded and willing to learn.

[m] became a Ph.D. candidate

I proposed and defended my dissertation topic towards Ph.D. degree on Friday, December 16th. According to UIC regulations, I became a Ph.D. candidate and finished the second milestone towards degree completion (the first one was the Qualification Exam).

The dissertation topic, called Personal Augmented Computing Environment (PACE), was based on my long-time thoughts about how the advances in mobile computing and grid computing could benefit individual users. Having been a mobile handset developer for one year and a research assistant with EVL for three years, my past experience backed me up perfectly in conducting a research project as proposed. Particularly I am interested in three aspects of PACE: 1) effective clustering and utilization of mobile device resources, 2) scalable multi-modal human-computer interaction and 3) context-aware methods and models.

[updated on June 22, 2006] One keynote on this year's WWW conference specifically addressed personalized web search in mobile environment, which was very close to the paradigm of PACE. As I will start my internship at Motorola Lab from August, I feel quite motivated in exploring the "Seamless Mobility" concept heavily prompted by Motorola.

[d] Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Yesterday Chicago had its biggest snow blast this winter. Although I had to leap among snow piles on the streets and spend half hour to dig the old Camry out, the feeling of holiday season was sweet and warm. Next Friday will be the prelim exam date and I expect it to go through smoothly. This year had been a hard time for me (I even did not have time and mood for the Thansgiving turkey). However, it is good to see things changing gradually and positively.

On X'mas day, I will be flying home. How I missed my parents, the view of Jingpin Hill from the window of my bedroom, and the delicious meat buns served with hot soup! No place is better than home. That is so true. So let me turn the radio louder and sing along with the music: "let it snow, let it snow, let it snow......".

[d] Da Sox wins!

The recent hot topic of the game between Chicago White Sox and L.A. Angles finally has its result revealed: Sox won the game 9:6. This morning when I was waiting for #8 bus on Halsted, I saw trees on the road side were decorated with -- white socks! Needless to say Bridgeport has been the area that most celebration took place. Being a southsider, especially one lives near the home field of this team, feeling of pride and joy also comes to my heart. Wish White Sox all the best in the World Series!

[d] ipod nano scratch

There has been tiny scratches on my new ipod nano already, although I have just used it for two days. This little cute thing is also vulnerable. Here is how the screen looks like now.

With the doubt whether I was just a careless user or there was some problem with the coating plastic, I googled "ipod nano scratch". Ouch! My worry was true: the first 15 records were all about user complaints on this issue. Clearly, Apple did not do a good job on the screen manufacturing (it's shipped from Shengzheng, China. Whom should be blamed for? ......).

Luckily (or surely), issues are always followed by solutions. I also found one post by Todd Dailey: Restore your iPod nano to new condition with a $4 can of Brasso. Todd claimed that his solution to be successful, with proof of pictures before and after treatment. I will look into that later. His post was also a good beginning of the "scratch fix" thread, where over 100 people followed up with their experiences.

At the same time, I need to start to look for a nano case now. Even after treatment, this is still a necessary accessory. The lowest price I can find online is about $17. Apple really created a good business, exactly as the other fashion creator: Google.

[Edited on 11/15/05]
I got the case from U. of Washington bookstore, during HitLab visit. The final price is $19.99 + tax. The rubber case doubled my nano's thickness, and the cumbersome coat I recently putted on doubled my figure as well ......

[d] Meeting Mr. Galvin in person

I get a precious chance today to attend the talk given by Mr. Christopher Galvin. Chris was Motorola CEO when I was still at Chengdu site, and his retirement was six months after my leaving, on June 2003.

One funny thing I remembered was that when our team was developing voice dialing software on a PDA cell phone, Chris' name was used as a sample contact list entry. In the demo video, I spoke the name "Chris Galvin" to the phone, and Chris' contact list automatically popped up with pictures.

That was things three years ago, good memories. The topic of today's lecture is how Motorola succeed to grow into a manufacturing giant, and Chris did tell some stories I did not known about before. Before founding Motorola, his grandfather founded two other companies and they both went bankrupt. The reason? No innovation and following existing business patterns. This story actually inspired me to change perspective on my current situation, of which I am trying to not mimic other's way but deal with things in my own style and is starting to get positive results. Success comes from perseverance. If every dog has its day, then I will definitely wait for mine.

[d] SoC deadline finally came

The deadline of SoC is Sept. 1, and it came yesterday. My TSC-I2 project final released version 0.08, which is for sure not perfect for the coding geeks but good enough for me.

What did I get besides the stipend and the T-shirt? Well, I got to know that open source force is now really powerful: the software construction tools, the operating system platforms, and a very, very big and active community -- on sourceforge.net alone, there were over 50 new software released or updated on the single day of Aug. 31; I also worked together with a group of smart people, regardless of their nations and levels of education; more? a motivation to take care of something with "Made by Xun" logo:).

[d] long time no update

There has been apparent discontinuity for my blog since the end of July. During the past three weeks, I had been badly stuck by implementing PLL for tsc-timekeeping. The scale of the source code was not big, but some of my understanding of the whole mechanism was not correct. The annoying problem of integer overflow also took me over a week to spot and fix. But that was real life.

What I learned from this lesson is two kinds of work are at least as important as, if no more than, coding: planning and analysis. After I decided not to mingle with the code anymore but sit down and work it out on "pencil & paper" fashion, all were solved within two afternoons. Analying the data with matlab helped me to find out the overflow problem, which is almost impossible to spot by bare eye.

I also learned that one should show good communicating skills. Not just to promote oneself, but also make the best use of the team power. Comment the code in detail; talk to mentor whenever failures are observed or bugs are fixed; actively make team mates involved in testing and using the deliverable...... These are so important that I will definitely put them as a gauge in my resume.

[d] get time to start the cool summer

ICORR2005 is ending tomorrow. My poster presentation and lab tour are both today and at this moment, I am done. It is time to start the cool summer and delve myself into open source codes.
After acceptance of summer of code, my email box on bert is flooded with maillist emails and I didn't have time to look at all of them. When I am reading them today, I found lots of things have been going on, and the first weekly update was due on Tuesday (ouch!). Well, a cup of coffee and 2 hours after midnight always work for the overdue projects ( I hoped they also work for the credit cards :-) ).
Doing a mentored project with peers to discuss with is of much fun. These used to be my happy memories in Moto, and now google is bringing them back.