Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Pareto's Law

I need to move house again. During packing, I found out there are quite a lot of stuff that I didn't even manage to unpack from my previous move: 2 pairs of jeans, a few shirts, a stack of unused notebooks (the good old dead-tree ones), and some blank CDs.

This again confirms the Pareto's Law: In 80% of my time, I only use 20% of my stuff. In other words, more than 50% of my things can be thrown away, or better still, need not be bought at the first place.

Late in February I threw away a part of myself after 9 years, well, not exactly the physical self, but more on the memories. I don't see how the relationship is going, I just buried it somewhere, and left.

Friday, March 20, 2009

When Mac OS Fails

A conventional wisdom for IT people, especially those of my age, will be Unix or its derivatives are secure, while Windows is not.

That is why when Apple was pushing for OS X a few years ago, it kept on emphasizing its OS is of BSD-Unix variant, and therefore, more secure.

Things change fast, especially in IT. The most recent security test for browsers showed a fully patched OS X was hacked in seconds. (Relevant news here)

And guess what is the toughest combination of operating system + browser to hack?

  • Firefox + Windows
  • Chrome + Windows
The relevant news article is here. The authors didn't mention anything about browsers running under Linux or Solaris.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Regulating Genes

I was told the following video creators really know their molecular biology:

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Blogging or Facebooking?

Recently the frequency of updating my blog has gone down and instead, I spend more and more time on facebook, or "facebooking".

If your network circle is small, there won't be much activities in your facebook page, however, having a big network is not always good either. As your circle gets bigger, it becomes more and more unwieldy to handle. Look, the circle may consist of your acquaintances from primary school, secondary school, college, and all previous and existing companies you have served. I don't know about you, but there are things that I am willing to share with my college friends, but not to my current colleagues. A common denominator for all these groups will boil down to essentially nothing about myself, or just plainly about other people's stuff.

I am thinking the reason why I shift to facebook, and I realize facebook does give me more interactions with my friends, and at the same time, I can just choose not to talk but to look at what others are up to. Moreover, when I say something or do something, I can be relatively sure people will notice, though they may not respond and leave comments, which is fine with me. Blogging so far does not have this kind of 'traffic'.

Does that mean I will abandon my blog? No, I don't think so.

My long time readers may realize I have not blogged about technologies for a long time. The truth is I have been busy working on some Linux hacking and have made some progresses. When the project hits the milestone, I will post some how-to's and do more sharings. Stay tuned. :)