Drop

It's so much work to build houses. Can't we genetically code a seed? You throw it in the ground, water it, and prune it. It grows into a house next year. "Let's plant our next house." "We need a seed that can grow on a rocky soil." "Our house is a bit crowded, we need a few new rooms" "Okay, I will let that few branches grow, it's going to be Lily's bed room. " "I want my own bathroom" "Sure, in a couple of months, your own suite will be read. You will have to walk a few more steps, honey." "Son, don't think it's time for you to grow your own house?" Biology is the answer. Let's play God. Huhhhh~ An't we the most efficient machine? adaptive to our environment; a machine can reproduce itself; self maintained; Self upgrade through giving birth to a slightly different version of us;

I watched Peter Singer's talk: The why and how of effective altruism today. It somehow reminded me Steve Jobs. I have heard that Steve serious studied zen for a few years in his 20s. It is impressive. Steve must have resolved in those couple of years. Peter Singer mentioned this website: 80,000 hours . They have some great advice if you are wondering question:  where you can have the biggest possible positive impact

My daughter has played piano for 10 years, she is working on her grade 9 pieces this year. They were hard, hard as rock. She would eat, drink, and go to washroom many times before she start her daily practice. Once started, it wouldn't took long for her to find excuses for a break. I pushed, reminded and offered to help. But I think, all I did was nagging: "you are not working hard enough." She screamed, cried, and smudged her snot all over the couch. She rolled up like a potato bug, just like what she would when she was that new born baby fifteen years ago. It was my fault. It was just like how many years I have been working myself, I needed to learn to see that effort, the struggle in everything. I didn't see how hard she was trying. I didn't see that. Today's lesson was for me. Everyone is doing their best. 

This GIF is Reindeer . Treat Studios  created it two years ago. After seeing this on G+, a few thoughts started to growl. They are not about the artistic taste. They are about what we can do or be as an individual. You are more than what you think you are. You can easily tell whose lawn was maintained by professionals. Why is that? Professionals do the work with a much higher standard. Can you do that? I am sure you can, if you have the patience, and interest to read this post. But why people did not do a professional job on their lawn? Can it be that they didn't want to? Self motivated people are rear to find. But almost everyone can do it if a clear standard is given. They need a Santa to transform them. The Santa here is someone who zaps you into a Super Saiyan.  He is setting the standard, the target, and direction. Having a purpose, and meaning is making the difference. When the right group of people get together, some will come up with the direction....

I am interested in to being productive. Seeing results satisfies me. Many of my friends are amazingly productive, done admirable things. These are a few things I have learned these years. No matter who you are, I believe your  Habits are who you are. If being productive is what you want, simply build up the habits of productive people. Here are some habits of mine. Wake up on the right side of the bed A simple morning routine is a habit you should all have. Some call it a morning ritual. I didn't understand why my mornings were often stuffed with chaos, and struggles. For many year, my morning were not much different from my collage days, except with more chances for it to go on a wrong track. My life is simplified after I finally had my routine. I meditate a while for if I can get up early. I have the same, breakfast for most of the days now. Oatmeal, a handful of mixed nuts, and dry berries. Compares to days without breakfast, my brain works on a higher frequency wit...

I saw this post on on g+, by V C Willow . I don't want it to be lost, post here so that I can come back and ground myself. A group of professionals posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds , 'What does love mean?' The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined 'When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore.. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love.' Rebecca- age 8 'When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.' Billy - age 4 'Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.' Karl - age 5 'Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.' Chrissy - age 6 'Love is wh...

Here is a link that I will try to make a stereo vision input with. http://code.google.com/p/sentience/wiki/HowToMakeAStereoCamera

I saw this post and many other post about the exodesk. It's an affordable version of Microsoft Surface. I believe it can be replaced with CV + AR. It's going to happen. 8-] http://mashable.com/2011/11/21/exodesk/

I never thought that you can find the lecture and the text online: This is the lecture given by W. Gilbert Strang at MIT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c Textbook: Introduction to Linear Algebra http://math.mit.edu/linearalgebra/

Thanks to Fred Chen's help. Fred is currently a PHD students in University of Alberta. 1. The idea I am passionate about is augmented reality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality 2. The advanced man-machine interface lab, CS department of UofA. http://spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca/ammi/projects/ . 3. Some of the advanced CV labs (Following UC Berkeley, CMU, and Microsoft research) http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/ http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_project_view.html?menu_id=261 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/vision/ 4. Computer vision(CV) has developed into a huge area with many directions.  This book has a comprehensive covering of the whole domain, "Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications". An electronic version is available here ( http://szeliski.org/Book/ ) for free.

It wasn't a surprise to me that we had about 40 people showed up for the 350 moving the planet rally. Most people were either young or old.  We started at the 150-whyte ave intersection. I learned that the construction site has been polluted by a gas station. It has been there for 14 years. Hard to believe. A big piece of land on Whyte ave not used for anything for 14 years. What a waste. Green Party candidate David Parker had some very practical tips for what you can do if you care about the environment. Meteorologist Julian Brimelow gave a techy speech. Very educational.  MP Linda Duncan came and had a nice speech. It was inspiring.  Raging Grannies: It's a good start. 

The issue : I found that paper is essential in current business work. Having a hard-copy of a document, a copy of design, it's the most effective way for discussion, for making notes, and recording a decision. To work effectively, it's important to have a hard copy. The Goal : I wish that we can work smoothly without the hard copy of docs, note books. Possible solution : I wonder AR and computer 3D vision may bring this to reality. Virtual "hard copy" of the docs. You can spread it out over your desk, flip through it, write on it and what ever else that you can think of that you may do with a real paper. Maybe not paper air plane. Why not? Virtual note book that you can write on. The pen can be your finger or a pen, or something that your computer treat as a pen. Water down version : (Need to check the current tech level and might be a first step toward a better version) Is there some window manager that can work with AR or VR eye-wears? It's might be a...

To implement the UI that we see in that Iron man holograph UI, using the current technology without the cost of an arm or a leg, here is the possible solution. Please see my previous post. Using the augment reality glasses to project the model into our eyes Give 3D vision to our computer Questions I have are: Do we have the product? Probably. I hope it works with Linux, has a simple/easy API to work with. It is not the critical part for this moment. If a Linux friendly 3D display is not ready yet, a stub can be used for development. (Action item, find what's out there) Do we have 3D vision implemented for computers? Probably not, maybe not as well as mouse and keyboard. Maybe implement a simple version, for example, build the 3D tracking ability to a pen. (Action item, find a product, the hardware. If it doesn't exist, maybe put together of two webcams.) What libraries, softwares and existing knowledge we can leverage. (Action item, learn)

I sought, and I found what I was looking for. Having watched too many sci-fi movies, to name a few, the interface in minority report, the Zion control in Matrix. Every time when I have to work with paper, either at work or at home, I wish augmented reality and virtual reality is available for mundane usage instead of gaming or military. The UI in iron man movies is the most exciting and most attractive UI to me. I want to bring this into reality. I wish that one day, the user interface that we need to work with is as simple as paper documents, photos; models projected as 3D objects.  Using 3D tracking and augmented reality, the environment can be our computer screen. The input device can be our hands, or a real pen. You grab a piece of "paper", put it on the table, pick up a "pen" or using your finger, dip in to a color that you like to write or draw in, start writing. This is not a dream in a far future anymore. There is VideoMan  http://videomanlib.source...

Here is a post I found on the shroomery forum, I like it, afraid it's going to disappear before I have time to contemplate on it, so I quoted it from this URL: http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/6501917 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are a robot. This is the first thing you must accept on the road to liberation. Whether or not you are a tabula rasa , a blank slate, when you are born, or there is some spark of uniqueness which allows your mind to react differently to the world than someone else would in your exact situation, the undeniable fact remains: you are a robot. You are biologically programmed through the act of human reproduction, you are emotionally and linguistically programmed by your parents and all those with whom you interact, and you are programmed to live within certain systems (rational, calendric, numeric, religious, scholastic, etc.) by your parent-cul...

There are 36500 days if you are going to live 100 years. What are you going to do with it? What matters the most? Apparently, I am still looking for the "meaning" of it.

I received a WoW invitation from a friend. Downloaded the install package from their website. First thing I tried is install it on my VM. That is a win xp guest of my Ubuntu amd64 gusty. Which did not work for some reason. The WoW crashes. I talked with my friend again, and find out that "many" uses Wine to run it. It's a surprise to me. Wine wasn't friendly at all back to 5 years ago. The open source world did so many great things. >sudo apt-get install wine >winecfg I set the virtual desktop to 1280x900 as another friend suggested. >wine ./Installer.exe Everything seems okay except the font is a little funny in that window. After everything is done, I try to start the WoW from the installer. It failed. Before that it was trying to install a html engine. That's where it failed. My heart sink a bit. I tried to run the WoW from it's ~/.wine/drive_c/..... /WoW.exe location. It's like a charm. The application stated, with a small problem. The mouse ...

package com.tiandao.ws.util; import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream; import java.security.Principal; import java.security.cert.CertificateException; import java.security.cert.CertificateFactory; import java.security.cert.X509Certificate; import javax.servlet.ServletContext; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; import org.apache.axis.MessageContext; import org.apache.axis.transport.http.HTTPConstants; import org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext; import org.springframework.web.context.support.WebApplicationContextUtils; public class AxisUtil { /** * This method read all possible certificate from request. If the apache * passes certificate to tomcate in "SSL_CLIENT_CERT", this method will * reads and create the certificate. * * @param request * @return */ public static X509Certificate getX509Certificate(HttpServletRequest request) { X509Certificate ret = null; String certString =...

This application was designed and implemented as my first web app following the DDD principles. There are some interesting issues to solve. I had the domain models exposed to the presentation layer. No facade!??? Yeeeeaah, but not exactly. I did not see the similar design at other places yet. Which has no facade in front of domain models, no facade between presentation and business layers. I can imagine the reaction from people who are so used to facade. Spring+AspectJ allow you have this design. Using domain object that has the supporting DAO injected and letting "spring's annotation transaction aspect" handles the transaction. It can work. Although, using Spring+AspectJ can implement this design, it doesn't necessarily mean this design is good for all applications. An evaluation needs to be done. Here are the pros and cons . Pros: Faster development. It accelerates the development. No Facade for the exposed domain model. When a domain object is a natural entry point...

Facelets Before knowing this, I can hardly think of a reason to use JSF. There are many benefits from using Facelets with your JSF app. I like the most is the "jsfc" attribute. What it does is converting xml element to another at runtime. With this feature, JSF can finally be "designer friendly". Although I haven't find a way to get the facelets template also friendly to html designers. It's hundred miles better than using bare JSF. From: <input type="text" jsfc="h:inputText" value="#{hello.world}" /> to: <h:inputText value="#{hello.world}" /> Inside Facelets Facelets fits JSF like a glove Developer Doc TestNG I like its annotation, data provider, dependent methods, and some other flexible features. TestNG Doc EasyMock Doesn't matter you are a classical or mockist styles of Test Driven Developer, you will find EasyMock is a good tool in your pocket. Mocks Aren't Stubs EasyMock Doc Shale Ever wondere...