Summer

Here comes summer, a season of departures, when the Welly lads are setting out for Hong Kong and New York; and a start of adventures, when two dear friends have just got married and are leaving Beijing for the South. Wish you all good luck!

Congrats to Zhenyu

... who has successfully and completely turned into a family man!

It seems that everyone is getting married in 2009...

Welly: Rethink the BBS

In the past month I have been hacking the Welly BBS term client while waiting for the visa approval. I was fortunate to work with some amazing people: aqua, gtCarrera, and KOed, who are nice, young, and smart. I envy them. :-)

The project was initially a fork of Nally, which was developed by yllan and now is maintained by jjgod. It uses Core Text for rendering, much faster than state-of-the-art (ATSUI based) BBS terms on Mac OS X. Nevertheless, we don't want a general terminal application; there are enough good ones. Welly is tailored for exploring BBS, where we can also try fancy stuff for fun, such as Cover Flow and Quick Look integration that I finished recently.




One day Geoff asked me why Chinese prefer such old-fashioned term BBS sites. Yes, this is a little bit weird. It seems that most people, particularly on-campus students, prefer telnet access and the terminal way to present and exchange ideas. Some even spend hours there every day, as I did. We are using terminal emulators that have a history of more than 20 years, though they may be implemented via modern technology. Many term BBS sites also provide Web access and may use AJAX extensively, however, the core parts are derived from aged systems, mostly either Firebird or Maple.

I can still remember the days in 2005, which consequently drove me to get down to preparing for GRE and brought me two awesome years at MSR Asia as well. It changed anything, as least to myself --- I once had a dream of having a good job and a stable life in the city but gave up after the hard time. Thanks to better who stood with me. The immediate issue of Sci-Fi World, the most popular Chinese sci-fi magazine, came up with a Ma Boyong's novel titled The City of Silence, which quoted from the famous song by Paul Simon:

People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

I guess I might be overacted at that time, but there is no turning back.

Here is the move within a couple of weeks: Beijing => Haikou => Beijing => San Francisco => Boston.

Once

May 19-21 is the mourning period for quake victims, who speak the same dialect as I do. I was born there and sometimes lived in Chengdu during childhood. My cousins there have been telling me all about the horrible days. I wish them the best of luck.

Btw, got a nice birthday gift this morning, the music CD and DVD of the film Once including the song Falling Slowly. Thank you, my friend.

New Labels

To be consistent with the name of this blog that embraces a filesystem naming style, I am introducing the following labels for my posts.

/dev/random, replaces "code", which is inspired by the homonymous column in the USENIX magazine ;login:.

/media, replaces "movies" and "music" for entertainment.

/mnt, for mount points, replaces "travel". Of course it includes trips more than those to mountains.

/usr/X11R7, where the X Window System resides, replaces "photos". When will it be replaced by "/usr/X11R8"?

/var, replaces "uncategorized" for scribblings, e.g., the current post.

New Macbook Pro

I was told by fishy yesterday that the new Macbook Pro was out, 15-inch screen, clocked at 2.4GHz, with 2G memory and 200G hard drive. Cool. Say goodbye to my 4-year-old PowerBook, which has been crashing since last September. It's time to get in and code on a new laptop. :-)

A Little Confused

I caught cold two days ago, which makes me feel extremely bad the whole day. Frans gave an overview on his recent research projects this afternoon, and later we had a talk. He's really really a smart and amazing guy. Some random thoughts.

What can be done in systems research? A new language, a new library, or a new virtual machine, well, I'm afraid it doesn't matter. What are the "right" programming abstractions for systems? Just to build and gain experience? We all agree that MapReduce is perfect, because it is simple, expressive, practical, say, it works! Dynamo and GFS are great, but they are lessons taught by the industry and cannot be cloned by research institutes. I also think Sinfonia is a nice research project; the minitransaction thing is cool and general. What else? DHT? Yet another file system? Another D³S? What lessons can be learned after building prototype systems on campus and what would it contribute to the community?

Analysis, though sometimes like bug-finding "evil" on the other hand, would at least have a formal model, which is really interesting to apply some algorithms on. Furthermore, they could provide some insights on computer systems (though not always), i.e. what's the right/wrong thing. I'm still trying to figure out whether they are useful for building systems. Exploring these abstractions is fun, but I'm afraid building is as important as analysis. Anyway, I don't feel good.

Vacation

Now I'm the only one in the cubicle. I have to come to Sigma because my laptop has been down for months.

riki arrived at Beijing on Friday from New York. He should be enjoying sunshine at Haikou. Have a good time, dude. :-) nowhereman said he would be back in Jan or Feb for vacation, after his visit to Stanford.

I have to wait for a while and further plan my vacation for the Chinese New Year in Feb. Frankly speaking, I don't feel good about the CCTV New Year's Gala. They would usually say that "we Chinese would eat Jiaozi at Chinese New Year eve; we Chinese would bla bla bla...", but I'm afraid it's nothing for a southerner. It's even worse for the ridiculous words and artificial smiles that pervade.

Some wild thoughts.

While writing some text processing scripts in Python, I was again annoyed by the poor performance due to the stupid global interpreter lock on a multi-core server. The threading problem is painful for scripting languages like Python and Ruby. I cannot believe that scripts could only be executed in such an inefficient way, just for compatibility with C libraries, even if it's claimed by some famous language designer. If it would not be, why not make something to be?

I have been trying to dive into program analysis for some time, only getting some initial ideas. It looks to me that graph reachability presents a general framework in reasoning about program behaviors, while modelling and solving the constraints in a graph would be fun. Maybe I should focus on mining the high-level systems semantics that can be manifested from the constraints. It has been a fairly long time since I shot photos. I didn't even take any photo this fall, the best season in Beijing, instead busy with coding, debugging, writing, which never ends.

What gold saint are you?

Well, sometimes it works...

What gold saint are you? Your Result: Gemini Saga   You are the golden saint of Gemini. Very powerful but inwardly perturbed. You seek to do the right thing but your inner ambitions will often get the best of you. You are always two minds about everything but always do the right thing in the end.
Aries Mu
Aquarius Kamus
Virgo Shaka
Aiolia Leo
Libra Dohko
Scorpio Milo
Capricorn Shura
What gold saint are you? Create MySpace Quizzes

The Same Deep Water As You

Got some time to watch the first episode of Season 4 of One Tree Hill. I just like the words that Lucas was typing on his laptop at the end of the episode.

Tree Hill is just a place somewhere in the world. Maybe it's not like your world. Maybe it's nothing like it. But if you look closer, you might see someone like it.

Someone trying to find their way.

Someone trying to find their place.

Someone trying to find their self.

mystery is now at Boston. superhog's home and preparing his new life at Los Angeles. riki's leaving for Tibet. For me, maybe it'll get a little busier than expected this month.

Stanford T-Shirts

riki is back again. He's just graduated from Stanford and will continue his happy life in New York this autumn. He bought me a Stanford T-shirt, but I really didn't know if I dare to wear it...

Google Map's Street View

It's awesome! It looks much cooler than Virtual Earth. See how Google Campus looks. Enjoy exploring the street view of the bay area, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami and the New York city. Maybe some day we could construct such virtual environments to play Counter-Strike in.

25

Niobe: I remember. I remember when you used to dance. I remember you were... pretty good.
Morpheus: There are some things in this world, Captain Niobe, that will never change.
Commander Lock: Niobe.
Morpheus: Some things do change.

Beyond

Two rejections in one week, isn't it perfect?

At least I can listen to Beyond, the band I've been loving since I was a kid. Even Ka-Kui has passed for over ten years, their songs are still uniquely encouraging, inspiring and giving hope to us.

Some things never change, but some things do.

Start Over

So here is the year 2007.

For the last three months, it is busy and enjoyable. I quite look forward to the subsequent work, which is really challenging and exciting.

I got some time last weekend to review the show One Tree Hill. I've been loving the songs in this show for quite a long time, such as I Don't Want to Be from Gavin DeGraw (the theme song), Overdue from Get Up Kids and The First Cut Is The Deepest from Sheryl Crow, many of which are performed in Karen's Cafe. It is also fascinating that most episode titles are named after titles of songs. I love songs:-)

Well, it is hard to comment about the characters. I do understand Lucas's decision to leave the town and start over at the end of Season 1. In my mind the story ends there. From Lucas's eyes, I can see tiredness: maybe because of either Haley's new life with Nathan or the things messed up with Peyton and Brooke. I cannot really accept some stories in the following seasons such as his disease or Keith's death; their short starting over and immediate coming back is somewhat ridiculous. But it's life, unpredictable and messing.

V for thanksgiVing

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

Winston S. Churchill

Yeah, not V for Vendetta. Another Thanksgiving.

I was so depressed one year ago when I wrote on my MSN space with the words "thanks to those who hurt me". Well, blow it off. In fact it's always oneself hurting himself.

Thanks to the nice guys who have cared about me and helped me a lot enjoy the amazing days on campus, especially to V, the optimist who is cute and nice, a gesture for victory, or a symbol for courage and hope. Viva la V!

By the way, I come to the new domain for my blog, procfs, which is technical and short that makes it a good one.

9.18

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

George Bernard Shaw

The Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931.

To Be or Not to Be

To be or not to be, that is the question. As Neo said in the movie The Matrix Reloaded, the problem is choice. However, most of time we've already made the choice and the problem is to understand it.

Without question, Grigory Perelman has made his choice to turn down the 2006 Fields Medal, and is believed to live in St. Petersburg reclusively. He's made such great contributions to the Poincaré conjecture that maybe even another label pales. The New Yorker has published an interesting article on the topic of the Poincaré conjecture though it's more like a political novel messing with intrigues.

Meanwhile, Pluto has no opportunity to made its own choice: to be or not to be a planet. It is now out of our solar system as a planet in a recent vote by the International Astronomical Union and considered as a "dwarf planet". People always prefer labeling, and usually show little respect to inherency.