Someone Really Did the Research on It

http://www.omninerd.com/2005/11/11/articles/41

Figure 12. Maximum economically justified hypothetical hybrid sticker price vs hypothetical hybrid gas mileages for various gas prices

Google Map Starts Sucking?

Like someone's comment in the groups says, it the project manager having too much time? Why change something good for worse?

Do not even bother to post screenshots, because it really sucks. Just c/p my post in groups:

The new printout is useless. I have a few points to make.

1. The assumption that text is easier to read than maps is wrong. Of
coz if you print everything on the map the streets/road would be so
small that they are very hard to read. But the good thing about old
Google map is that you can adjust the zoom level and print out exactly
the part you want, which can be just as big or small as you want. In
fact, image is much easier to read than text when time is limited
(driver needs to keep focus on the road, not the text).

2. The maps on the new printout is useless. The "overview" is for
astronauts and cannot be used for guidance unless you are guiding a
cruse missle. The "start" part is irelevant, because most of the time
it will be yes, your starting point, which is either your office or
home area, and you know it so well you do not need any help. The "end"
is too small to be helpful.

3. More on the last statement in (2): the end part is the most
important. Because big roads in the middle of the route are much
simpler, and harder to miss, than the final miles down to the small
local roads, which the driver probably has never been to (otherwise who
needs a map?).

4. I think the ideal direction printout should be:

- text directions, but mostly for reading BEFORE the trip.

- let user select rectangle areas on the map for printing, this could
include major exchanges and tricky parts of the route, the printing
resolution depends on the user's selection.

Am I on the Cover?

I guess the white MCS in the middle could very possibly be mine. This is the recently-updated page of the Big MINI Day event, which I went in May 2006 and was (probably) the only one pepper-white /black roof MCS without any mods, assuming they Photoshoped off the license plates.

Galileo Hacked

Jason Koski/University Photography

Mark Psiaki, left, professor of mechanical andaerospace engineering, hooks up an experimental GPS/Galileo digitalstorage receiver and patch antenna with the assistance of graduatestudents Todd Humphreys, center, and Shan Mohiuddin in Rhodes Hall. Copyright © Cornell University

July 7, 2006

Cornell sleuths crack secret codes of Europe's Galileo satellite

By Thomas Oberst

Members of Cornell's Global Positioning System (GPS) Laboratory havecracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes of Europe'sfirst global navigation satellite, despite efforts to keep the codessecret. That means free access for consumers who use navigation devices-- including handheld receivers and systems installed in vehicles --that need PRNs to listen to satellites.

July 7th TH

Thunderhill 7/7/06 Driver List
NO	FIRST_NAME	LAST_NAME	GROUP	YEAR	MAKE_MODEL	COLOR
1	George	A	Instructor	1998	Mazda Miata	Red
2	Hsin	F	Instructor	2006	Acura TSX	White
3	George	F	Instructor	1997	Mazda Miata	Green
4	Andrie	H	Instructor	TBD	TBD	TBD
5	Peter	H	Instructor	2003	BMW 330i	Red
6	John	H	Instructor	2006	Porsche Cayman S	Black
7	Jay	H	Instructor	1997	BMW M3	Black
8	Travis	L	Instructor	2000	Porsche 911	Black
9	Philip	L	Instructor	2005	Lancer Evolution	Silver
10	Allen	L	Instructor	TBD	TBD	TBD
11	Dave	M	Instructor	1997	BMW M3	Silver
12	Steven	N	Instructor	2001	VW GTI 1.8T	Silver
13	Bob	P	Instructor	1997	Mazda Miata	Red
14	Matt	R	Instructor	TBD	TBD	TBD
15	Jared	R	Instructor	2002	Corvette Z06	Silver
16	Vanessa	S	Instructor	2002	Subaru Impreza WRX	Blue
17	Jim	B	Red	1993	BMW 325is	White
18	Seth	B	Red	2005	Porsche 911 GT3	Grey
19	Jeff	B	Red	1997	BMW M3	Blue
20	Dick	C	Red	1988	BMW M3	White
21	Todd	F	Red	2002	Honda S2000	Silver
22	Benjamin	H	Red	1997	BMW M3	Blue
23	Chris	L	Red	1992	Porsche 968	Black
24	Ron	M	Red	2000	Porsche Boxster	Black
25	Robert	O	Red	1969	Chevy Camaro	Grey
26	Elmer	S	Red	2002	Corvette Z06	Silver
27	Christopher	S	Red	2001	Acura Integra	Silver
28	Marco	S	Red	1998	BMW M3	Silver
29	Raza	U	Red	1998	BMW M3	White
30	James	B	Yellow	1995	Honda Civic CX	White
31	Jordan	B	Yellow	2004	Audi S4	Blue
32	Nathan	B	Yellow	1975	Porsche 914-4	Red
33	Joseph	C	Yellow	1987	Porsche 944	Blue
34	Albert	C	Yellow	1972	Porsche 914	Blue
35	Bob	D	Yellow	2003	Radical SR3	Red
36	Ted	F	Yellow	1989	Porsche 911	Silver
37	Barry	F	Yellow	2005	Audi S4	Grey
38	Tim	G	Yellow	1997	BMW M3	Silver
39	Gabriele	G	Yellow	1999	BMW M3	Red
40	Steve	K	Yellow	2003	Mitsubishi Lancer Evo	Silver
41	David	L	Yellow	2003	BMW M3	Red
42	Tsalani	L	Yellow	2006	VW GTI	Black
43	Brian	S	Yellow	2004	Audi S4	Blue
44	Hung	V	Yellow	1998	Acura Integra	White
45	Matthew	B	Green	1985	Ford Mustang	Silver
46	Mike	B	Green	1991	BMW M5	Silver
47	Edmund	E	Green	1993	Ferrari 348/TB	Red
48	Roger	E	Green	1986	Porsche 944 Turbo	Red
49	Gene	G	Green	2003	Corvette Z06	Blue
50	Eric	G	Green	2004	Honda S2000	Silver
51	Miao	H	Green	2005	MINI Cooper S	White
52	Christy	H	Green	1990	BMW 325i	Silver
53	Thomas	H	Green	1998	BMW M3	Blue
54	Frank	J	Green	2003	Honda S2000	Red
55	Yash	K	Green	1995	Chevy Corvette	Red
56	Younggon Eric	K	Green	2003	Mitsubishi Lancer Evo	Silver
57	Shelliam	L	Green	2004	Subaru WRX Sti	Blue
58	Frank	M	Green	2000	Subaru RS	White
59	Richard	V	Green	1995	BMW M3	Black
60	Cindy	W	Green	1988	BMW M3	White
61	Cindy	W	Green	1988	BMW M3	White

The End of Formula1

Micros**t to Supply Electronics to Formula 1

http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/07/05/2357227.shtml

"... begginning in 2008, Micros**t will be the sole supplier of Engine Control Units to Formula 1..."

By year 2009, Formula 1 will cease to exist in motorsport, because 90% of drivers will be killed and the rest 10% sued by M$ for using illegal copies of software from their teammates.

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Fyre It Up

x' = sin(a * y) - cos(b * x)
y' = sin(c * x) - cos(d * y)

I Knew This Is Going To Make International News

Shanghai's signature knock-off market shuts doors

Fri June 30, 2006 11:51 AM ET SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Xiangyang Road Fashion and Gift Market, Shanghai's most famous street market for cheap imitation goods, was shutting up shop Friday, the victim of city government plans to redevelop the area. Stall owners said they had been told by authorities to vacate the area completely by late Friday night -- though some die-hard hawkers were merely moving operations to apartments in nearby residential buildings, and soliciting customers on the street. At its height, Xiangyang attracted thousands of foreign tourists and local residents to its cramped, muddy aisles. It offered ultra-cheap legitimate products -- clothes, sports equipment and shoes -- beside a wide range of counterfeit branded goods, from scarves and handbags to watches and pirated DVDs. Vendors said the business environment had worsened somewhat in recent months as China, under pressure from foreign trading partners, had taken sporadic steps to crack down on trademark violations. The redevelopment of the downtown Xiangyang area, which will include a metro line and possibly an up-market commercial project, sealed the market's fate.

A Few Things

1. Updating FC4 mysteriously solved the LCD display fubar problem.

2. Installed picasa and google earth.

3. Failed to run wmii

4. Found a nice image viewer: qiv

Blogged with Flock

Test from Flock

Can I blog from Flock now?

......

...

technorati tags:test

Blogged with Flock

MINI Turns One

One year of MINI :9

 

Fixing Strang FC 4 Display Glitch

Starting from the login screen, the entire display is fubar and pixes are mixed up at super low resolution 320X???... very scary because it looks like a broken display at the beginning.

typed login and password by memory and it actually logged me in. the mouse pointer is at the correct location on the LCD but the all the other contents are at super low resolution and as a result, convoluted. I managed to "feel" the location of an xterm terminal and did this:

su (be a little brave)
system-config-display --help
system-config-display --set-resolution=1024x768
system-config-display --reconfigure -v --noui
reboot

I have no idea what I was doing but that was all could try before attempting to re-install the entire system which is pretty much as bad as it could go assuming I do not have to replace the computer.

Fedora actually booted up and with an even scarier display, this time only part of the display is access able by the mouse pointer but I was able to login and the 1400-1050 display showed up except every has like 4 versions convoluted on the screen and again I had to find things through memory.

Good thing is I am able to use GUI mode of system-config-display and by selecting ATI Radeon M9 with generic LCD 1400x1050 and restart (logout/login) xserver, things seem to have come back to normal.

I have no idea what caused the glitch. I did update via yum and there is a new kernel (the third one). But I tried with all 3 of those and got the same scrambled display.

Hopefully I do not have to do this again. But I put this writeup somewhere other than my computer just in case.

20060204

Rained for the Entire Weekend, in CA :(

But did 100 miles anyway, in the storm ... ... totally different feeling.

Couldn't find a better chance to test the mood of DSG, especially when everyone else stays home ... well, sort of. Saw a black MCS, a white Z4 (top up, of coz) , 2 motorcycles and only 2 Ferraris.

My Wife Has Record at HomeDepot

During check-out, the guy asked for my home phone number and, guess what, it was already in the system, only with my wife's name on it. Pretty surprised...

yum

yum successfully installed the following, which I was not able to install from scratch:

mplayer
gaim
ntfs

The process is so simple that it is shocking, compared to the growing dependency requests which last forever in the configure-make-makeinstall or rpm way.

Another sign that things have improved over the years.

Fedora Core 4 on T41

Installing Linux on PC is no longer a daunting task, because after I had it working on my 1 year old T41, I do not really feel like wrting up some detailed installation notes. Fedora Core 4 pretty much works out of the box as installed from the 4 CD-ROMs or the 1 piece DVD. Ironically, the downloading took me longer.

Only a few tihinhs worth mentioning:

1. Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 Driver for Linux

A year ago I was using LinuxAnt, a wrapper on top of the correspongin Window XP driver for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 card. The installation was easy and the wrapper/driver is easy to use (through redhat-config-network) and stable. But the LinuxAnt wrapper is not free. After 30 days you need to buy a license although it is not expensive at all. I was screwed by someone and left the country. For the summer of 2004 I was pretty much on dial-up on the edge of my bed (see old posts dated last summer) and WLAN was not necessary so I did not bother to pay for the driver.

After this much time, things have improved. There is a completely open source solution: Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 Driver for Linux, following the installation guide included in the download, it was relatively easy. The prosess did not exactly match the descriptions, but again I managed to get it working with the system-config-network utility, even encryption works fine and the wireless link is automatically established on every reboot despite an irritating error message on system startup (something about frequency, it does not matter).

2. Screen resolution.

Somehow the same screen does not as good in Linux as in OS X and Windows, it is always a bit blurry. Besides I was always a little worried while selection the display hardware type during installation. This time I was a bit brave and choose 1400x1050 on the IBM LCD (still selection generic LCD in installation) and it actually looks pretty good on KDE. One funny thing: GNOME desktop looks misplaced after I bumped up the resolution, changing configurations did not seem to help. One day I was bored and used my mouse to drag the task bars around the desktop ... ... After a few spins the problem is gone! The twisted screen corrects itself and everything comes back to normal! Now I have 1400x1050 on GNOME as well as in KDE. No extra configuration is needed.

Our Neighbour Has A New Baby!

Born Thursday, 18th. So small and cute :)
Now there are two babies in the neighbour yard.

Living with the MINI Cooper S Automatic

Living with the MINI Cooper S Automatic

Somebody did this write-up and saved me tons of typing. I have not finished reading the entire thing yet. But judging from his colour choice I must agree with him :DDD Anyway, I would prefer more time behind the wheel than the keyboard!

野百合也有春天……啊

……84号公路西向里废弃的农舍，在丛生的野草里边爬出那些花来，沿着木板墙往上生长，算不上协调，但是有生命力，总是好的。

回来的路上，就只想着肚皮，要吃烤肉了。

2005年8月6日。来自美国东西海岸几所大学的交大校友以及台湾同胞，海外侨胞们在半月湾。

世界很小啊

大学时的同学，千里迢迢找工作，结果一不留神，跟我工作的公司就在一条街上。布朗运动真神奇啊。

Little Kelvin Is Sick Today

When I came back from dinner, little Kelvin is gone! My neighbour took their 18-month Kelvin to the hospital after realizing that he is having a light fever in the late afternoon... It might have been the water spray in the morning, or simply too much fun in the yard throught the day.

Hope little Kelvin is fine :)

A Fun Run

It has been quite a while...since my lasgt post... All right, even the profile pages seems to have changes and all my "recent" posts are gone. A lot of things have happened and it could be the reasone of no posting (another reasone would be nothing really happened, which is not the case this time).

My wife can finally took over the Mini when she can drive herself to school every day. So I have the little machine for the weekend. One thing to do is to mount a video camera on it and take it to the moutains through 84 and 35 ... Unfortunately I cannot upload the videoS here ...

For the record, practically I was not actually speeding. According to the speedo in the videos, I was going 50-ish, around the limit.

What A Week

What a week......

Matt13.com - OpenOffice.Org or Microsoft Office

Matt13.com - OpenOffice.Org or Microsoft Office

This seems interesting. I use OpenOffice because first of all it is legally free and secondly it is not from M$ and last but not least it can export to PDF file which I find very useful when I am printing across platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, HP ...).

Since I do not care about most of the features, stability and performance are the main concern. So far I am pretty happy with my OpenOffice. It could be interesting if I can have a chance to try Apple's Pages.

Our Janitor

Our janitor came to my cube later today, after almost everybody had left, and asked if I was getting ready to move.

Our janitor said he never saw it coming, that our company is merged by another one and now we are moving. He said he though we are gonna stay for a long long time. He said he had worked in the previous place for 25 years.

Our janitor has the coolest car in our parking lot, a 90's black Vette. Cold and dark under the tree. No one else even come close.

Our janitor even rememberd my name, even though I don't exactly remember his and was too embarrased to ask again.

Our janitor is the only black people here, in this all Chinese-Russian shop. But he's cool.

Our janitor said good-bye and we shook hands. He's gone just like our receptionist, HR (yyyyes!), finace and my ex-boss.

Back to the Dark Ages

Got dragged to watch the Star Wars the other day, such a waste of time - I feel better washing dishes for 2 and half hours.

In a country where Yoga is cool and Buddhism is spiritual, you kind of figured what people would do for such a long series of movies (yes, I just said it, it is too long, too much). It is simply a one-page, 5-minute story streched into a decades-long third-rated plastic cartoon, where pigs fly, elephants work in the government (...) and top guns flight with AA battery powered light bulbs - they call it "light sabre", a kitchen knife would have been far more leathal for advanced space age when people dress like homeless in Chinese Tang Dynasty (only a little more than 1000 years ago, about 4 times the age of America). Don't they just love retro? This trend has been noticed ever since the Matrix. People in the future just so dig the style.

I guessed (using the word guess here is almost an insult to myself) then entire "story" within the first 2 minutes. The rest of the time is just for ticking the boxes and checking the time.

Suck you must, if you like to speak backwards like a mystic, 320-year old some "lord" without underware, read this:

siht daer `erawrednu tuohtiw "drol" emos dlo raey-023 `citsym a ekil sdrawkcab kaeps ot ekil uoy fi `tsum uoy kcus.

Forget about Si-Fi. All you can do is reality TV, eating worms, 3-some, breast surgery, pimping $50 cars, UFOs, police chasing pickups and rap. Or do you have films, where I couldn't help thinking about LAPD talking to an illegal immigrant from eastern-Europe while watching this Star Wars thing... I also remember seeing Chinese villagers speaking Japanese in American movies as well. And there was one film where a bounch of Chinese policemen in a car chase with an American businessman in a Chinese city - remember, Chinese cops do not drive at all. Marked police cars are driven by chauffeurs used to send in-laws home, not out-laws to the station.

First DELL Impression

Not that I wanted to buy one, I got one from work which was delivered today. It's a proper machine, solid, functional with all the usual stuff (4 USBs, wonder who would ever need that many in a laptop, but no 1394). Yet it looks 5 years old in its dreary gray plastic right from the box ... yes the IT guys have had them for a while to install the system, but for a one-day-old computer, the Latitude D610 looks pathetic, and feels that way too - it is so hot that it makes the one-year old T41 feels refreshing.

One advantage: it won't be stolen from the office, who would bother to do that? It is a smart choice in that way.

Final Gear Final?

This happened only 3 weeks after I found this nice site.

Even BBC did not say a word! The ISP just gave an ultimatum to Final Gear, demanding that all downloads to be taken away or they will take action.

It sucks. Think about this, even Top Gear (BBC) did not say a word, you really think they do not know this?

Lucky me. I have downloaded all available episodes till now. Time to burn a few DVDs.

Top Gear & Fifth Gear

Nice TV programming. Wonder Americans could ever produce anything close to that. I can now really hear some engine noise and human voice, not electrical "music" or redneck screaming. And finally, I can watch a car show without pickups... or at least, a show that test drives a pickup in the correct way :D

It's Been A Month Since MCS Arrival

Roof

Haven't posted a thing, for obvious reasons :D

Got MCS Today!

Well, actually, yesterday, March 22nd. We were too busy driving it around town as well as on a few streches of 280. It was raning heavily but the Mini just went like a magnet.

Yes.

MCS Arrived at Distribution Center...

Eventually!
IttookonlyaweektobuiltyettookalmostamonthtoarriveinAmerica!
WhoknowshowlongitwouldtaketogettoMtV!

carwindowfigure 

New Features In Picassa 2

This image is generated by Picassa from four pictures I picked from a library. the original photos are not square by Picassa managed to crop a square out of each photo and it looks not bad.


photo collage generated by Picassa

Another good feature is to generate a web page from selected foder. I write code every day but I really hate to write HTML or XML or any web-related code. The page is very simplistic but in a very pleasant way. A photo webpage should not contain anything more eye-catching than the photos themselves, which kind of follows the Google Way.

Picassa can also send selected pictures using Gmail or some other email services. One good thing: it automatically resizes the pictures. Although I am no longer surprised when I open an email sent to me by a friend which contains pictures, 9 out of 10 times the pictures are over 1000 pixes on each side which blows up the entire screen. Yes, some people really do not know that they can resize their pictures!

Yet Another Guy Got Dooced

On NBC 11 News, a guy was fired by Google after saying that the comany was "doing very well" on his personal blog. He did not seem too upset about this on the TV. I am not sure if the lesson has been learned yet, but how hard is it to NOT talk about work on your blog? Come on.