Monday, August 25, 2008

论民主

"民主,就是手上有一本护照,随时可以出国,不怕政府刁难;民主就是养了孩子知道他们可以凭自己本事上大学,不需要有特权;民主就是发表了任何意见不怕 有人秋后算账;民主就是权利被侵犯的时候可以理直气壮地讨回,不管你是什么阶级什么身份;民主就是,不必效忠任何党,不必讨好任何人,也可以堂堂正正地过 日子;民主就是到处有书店,没有任何禁书而且读书人写书人到处都是;民主就是打开电视不必忍受主播道德凛然地说谎;民主就是不必为了保护孩子而训练他从小 习惯谎言;民主就是享受各种自由而且知道那自由不会突然被拿走,因为它不是赐予的。

  民主并非只是选举投票,它是生活方式,是思维方式,是你每天呼吸的空气、举手投足的修养,个人回转的空间。"
-- 龙应台 <<为台湾民主辩护--与华人世界对话>>

Friday, August 22, 2008

This Struck Me...



Good news is I am not alone, bad news is we all are screwed. :(

Original from here.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

EE vs. CS

Disclaimer: Original article from here. I copied it here just in case that site is down or something.

Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science

Wire wrapped board. Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

Big Island, Hawaii The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes."

"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."

"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."

"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."

"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

解决VLC中文字幕的乱码问题

当用VLC播放电影时, 中文字幕却显示乱码或四方格, 那表示VLC里的设置不对.

解决方案很简单, 前提是电脑里要有中文字体:

去 Settings->Preferences, 在Video->Subtitles/OSD->Text renderer, 选一个中文的字体.

本人用的是 "C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\simhei.ttf"

解决方案引用自这里.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

I Want To Be An Engineer???

Came across this picture on the web

As of my current standing, I think most of my fellow male engineers will disagree with the advice above...

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Saturday Casual Walk

Today, as usual I had my dinner, and as usual I took a stroll to a park near to my flat.

However I found something unusual at a place I visited so many times: a Möbius strip shaped climbing wall. Such strip is unique in the sense it has no absolute 'outside' and 'inside'. Aptly enough, this climbing wall is called 'infinite wall'.



I am amazed I kept overlooking this for so long...

Saturday, August 02, 2008

The Quality Problem of My Sony Ericsson P1i

Updated 8/8/2008:
SE called me today and I was told they had the phone main board changed. But when I got my phone, it was a new one. The staff seemed quite reluctant to admit they gave me a new phone. All in all their service was not as bad as what I read on web. Case closed. :)

NOTE: I went to the SE service center at Simei

------------ End of Update ------------------

My P1i has a broken jog dial recently. Since no product is perfect, I just took my phone to the SE service center without much complaints.

Initially I was told the phone only needed a few days to be repaired, it was reasonable and I waited.

However, yesterday I got another call from SE and was told due to lack of parts, it will take a further 2 weeks. This is clearly not acceptable. Worse still, the phone loaned to me cannot send SMS properly and it really makes no sense for consumers to buy high-end phones from SE if the reliability and service level are so low.

Let's talk about consumer loyalty. I think my next phone most likely will not be SE.