eat(); sleep(); hack();

2005-06-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

2005-06-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

JS/UIX - Terminal: "JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping."

2005-06-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

I talked to Andy and Tom about Apple's Switch to x86. Andy thinks that Apple is doing this because Intel has DRM technology. Tom points out that by making the switch, they can use the latest and greatest (tm) device drivers from, say, NVidia and ATI. While I'm not sure if Apple is doing this to get breadth in device driver support (that is, hardware support for the whole spectrum of devices), I would believe that they're doing this to get support for the most high end of devices.

Another thought-- I was asked if Apple is planning to enter the mobile handset market. It seems to me that that market is too commoditized for Apple, they seem to be the tgpe to enter an untapped market. I think what is much more likely would be an "iVid" device-- a hard disk based device which can plan full-length movies. Instead of the "5000 songs in your pocket" it will store 5-10 full length movies. With iTunes, Apple has a track record of succesfully distributing songs electronically and profitably, and they can take that track record to the studios and say "now let us distribute movies electronically.

2005-06-08T07:11:00.000-07:00

Hell froze over

I'm referring, of course, to Apple's announcement that they're going with x86 CPUs. I talked to James and Sulaiman about this yesterday, and some takeaways were:

1) its a testament to Apple employee loyalty that they can keep this secret for five years
2) moving to x86 would not only let them switch CPUs, but also motherboards and chipsets. Apple was rolling their own chipsets up till now.

3) Between the motherboard and the chipset, we're estimating that Apple can probably shave $100-$200 off the unit cost of a Mac, which would be a big chunk of the Mac-over-Dell premium, possibly enough to convince people to switch. But it is unlikely that Apple's making a switch this drastic for just incremental speed increase and $100-$200 off the unit cost. The move is most likely strategic.

Possible strategic advantages:
a) Apple now has its choice of vendors for chipset, motherboard, and CPU-- it will now be much easier to switch to AMD if they're not happy with Intel.
b) The Pentium, with its larger market share, has more money going into it, which means more money for Pentium R&D, which means a brighter future for the Pentium
c) There is the hypothesis the press mentioned: that this lets Apple build fast notebooks, there has been all this talk that Apple has not been able to put a G5 in a notebook for heat reasons. Personally, I believe a) and b) are more important

3) As for application vendors, James points out that Apple has successfully made a more drastic switch just a few years when they switched from OS9 on Motorola to OS/X on PowerPC. If any company has the know-how to make this switch, its Apple.

Also, companies like Adobe would only need to write their performance-critical assembly code once, which is a win.

4) I do not believe that this will lead to OS/X running on $200 generic computers or home built computers. Consumers will still be deciding whether to buy a Windows computer or a Mac. Putting an x86 in the Mac will not turn it into a Wintel computer.

John Siracusa points out that Apple can now gauge the size of the OS/X on generic x86 hardware by seeing how many people hack their non-Apple computers to run OS/X on it.

For my part, I'm going to put off my plans to Switch for a little while longer.

2005-06-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

Andy and I had an interesting excursion to Flushing today, I'll let him tell you all about it.

Meanwhile, I played around a bit with IIMF (international character input) when posting the comment to his story. At least for traditional Chinese, it seems like you need a special keyboard, because I couldn't decipher how the roman letters correspond to the Chinese radicals. It seems like hitting one key brings up a single character and hitting two keys brings up a menu from which you can select characters.

2005-05-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

How the ioccc spells David

2005-05-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

Kleptography is the photo gallery of Don Ellis. Now that I am getting more and more into photography, he is becoming my new hero.

google_screenshot

2005-05-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

google_screenshot
Originally uploaded by benhsu.

Google seems to have a way of being an API reference of sorts. I haven't found what else can be accessed in this way

2005-05-08T18:17:00.000-07:00

Pictures from the Museum of Natural History

2005-04-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

George Psalmanazar - the first Formosan to visit Europe

2005-04-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

I bought a digital camera for Christmas, it was a Canon SD 300. Its small enough (literally the size of a pack of cigarettes) that I can take it anywhere.

I started a page with flikr, originally this was to give photos to my friends who asked for them, but I think I will use it to share my photos with the general public.

So, you can see my photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benhsu/

So far I have a few pictures from the New York Auto Show (which Tom asked for), one from dinner with Andy and Tash, and a few from my trip to Montreal

2005-04-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

Ditch your DSL for a Snail

In other news, was in Montreal this weekend, very cool city.

2005-04-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

Dialect Survey Results

2005-04-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

Ned Batchelder: Phishing fun with Unicode

2005-04-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

Top Ten Evolutionary Adaptations

2005-03-26T19:46:00.000-08:00

I enabled comments on this. Hopefully spammers won't abuse it. Have fun.

2005-03-25T20:28:00.000-08:00

Picture of the Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea.

2005-03-24T05:27:00.000-08:00

videos of wobbly windows and other cool graphics stuff

2005-03-23T10:27:00.000-08:00

Check out Julian Opie's site, designed to look like an old fashioned Mac Desktop.

(System 7.5, right?)

2005-03-22T19:59:00.000-08:00

Srinivas Ramanujan has a posse

2005-03-22T17:22:00.000-08:00

Online personality tests, I know, but we're all entitled to our guilty pleasures right?

Na... Sodium
You scored 51 Mass, 27 Electronegativity, 23 Metal, and 90 Radioactivity!

You are the very salt of the Earth... well, part of it anyway. Society
needs a lot of you. You'd of made a perfect peasant in feudal times.
You do your own thing without asking too much, but once you've
established yourself in your life you don't change it too easily. The
problem with you is that, while you are a great cornerstone of a
society, you don't really feel the personal onus to keep it going.
That's why we need taxes... heh heh heh. With respect to relationships
you'll probably, sadly, never find one of those loves that solves every
problem you've ever had... but you're still capable of having a great
relationship filled with all sorts of positive nouns like trust and
whatnot. You can balance your lack of neediness by being with someone
who deeply does need you (or needs someone at least)... halogens are
good for that (F, Cl, Br, I). Unfortunately you can replace that one
special person easily with a whole lot of people who are a little
special, so this relationship probably will not last forever... go for
it if you live in the countryside... if you're in the city then it
might just be best to live the bachelor's life until you grow sick of
it.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 80% on Mass
You scored higher than 39% on Electroneg
You scored higher than 3% on Metal
You scored higher than 99% on Radioactivity

Link: The Which Chemical Element Am I Test written by effataigus on Ok Cupid

2005-03-22T17:13:00.000-08:00

meme propagation

The Babyname Wizard, very cool, fun to play around with how name demographics change. I never knew how popular a name "Queen" was.

A few names of people I know are not on the applet's radar: Tibor, Tallulah, Marin

2005-03-22T11:15:00.000-08:00

To follow up, the software runs in 640x480. Whee! I feel a caffeine-driven need to go eighties.

The program was actually the "offical" practice tests from ETS. Took the first one, the program said my "preliminary scores" where 700V, 800M. Not bad. I feel overconfident.

2005-03-22T09:51:00.000-08:00

I'm installing some GRE prep software. I wonder if it is possible to (approximately) date when a piece of software was released by reading the list of non-friendly-countries in the EULA. The software I have did not mention Afghanistan

http://www.bxa.doc.gov/policiesandregulations/regionalconsiderations.htm

2005-03-14T15:16:00.000-08:00

Lots of brain-teasers here

2005-03-11T10:36:00.000-08:00

Is it hack or not?
This is a hack
This is not

2005-03-08T17:56:00.000-08:00

Tools for Producing and Consuming Blogs

While dining at Zabb Mr Hyatt told me about bloglines. I had been using sage to read my blogs, but the advantage of having all my feeds stored in one place and readable from anywhere was tempted, and I checked it out.

I've been very impressed so far. It handles some feeds Sage wasn't able to like Dilbert, and it archives links for at least a few days even after they expire out of the .xml file, so I don't have to check Gothamist every day. Both Sage and Bloglines handle OPML so transferring my feeds over was a snap, and Bloglines gives you a browser-link to automagically subscribe to feeds, which even does some searching for the feed URL for you, so adding new feeds is a cinch. It lets you clip articles to a personal blog. You can organize your feeds into folders and click on the folder and that seems to give you an aggregation of all the feeds in the folder

Some of the feeds I imported showed up as having 200 new articles, and they were in some random order, I'm going to guess this is an artifact of the import/export. Its not a big deal to me.

One annoying thing so far is that it automatically marks all your feeds as read, you have to manually "keep-alive" it. Also, "export subscriptions" does not work in FireFox.

I also tried Gnome blog. My last post was made with it, it's not bad but there the inability to go back and edit previous posts and the lack of preview-ability is keeping me on the web interface

2005-03-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

Beer sundries

A few photos to go with my last entry:

2005-03-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

Beers sampled in the past month...

I've found two sources for buying fine concoctions of malt and hops in the City. One not far from me, and one in Brooklyn.

One of the top sources in the City is American Beer Distributing in Cobble Hill, on a street with many fine eateries, groceries, and drinkeries. They had a wide selection of beers, many Belgians I never saw before, several Hitachinos, and even Unibroue 11 which I thought was extinct.

And it turns out that a liquor store right by the local McDonalds where we used to buy soda has a fine selection of beers, including Chimay and Unibroue.

Beers recently sampled:

Avery Hog Heaven: very crisp and hoppy, I wanted to try this because of the label which had flying pigs on it
Allagash Four: hoppy undertones, sweet alelike flavor not unlike DT. Good but not as good as the Double Bastard (next entry)
Stone Double Bastard: like the Allagash Four, but sweeter and hoppier and superior in every way. Very very cool. I bow to the brewers skills.
Hitachino Weizen: I was expecting something more unique out of Hitachino, perhaps it was because I liked their other products (the White and the Lacto) so much, this was a perfectly drinkable lager but nothing to write home (or, in this twenty-first century) blog about
Schlenkerla Wheat: I had a good experience with Schlenkerla before. I think the last beer I had from them was the Marzen which I described as having an herbal smell, not unlike longan. This was not as good, it was herbal but the taste was medicine-like.

Still to come: Unibroue Raftman, Unibroue Eau Benite, Balladin Nora, and Ommegang Rare Vos

2005-02-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

Spotted near Rockefeller Center

I love this city

2005-02-18T19:25:00.000-08:00

meme propagation, Lego goes to church

2005-02-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

Google Cheat Sheet

2005-02-15T11:56:00.000-08:00

Okay, I just got that PBF strip.

(hint, the farmer cracked open the egg and the bacon was inside the egg)

2005-02-15T10:56:00.000-08:00

meme propagation, The History of the Wikipedia Page of the Heavy Metal Umlaut, in Flash

2005-02-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

I didn't get this weeks PBF? Did anybody understand it?

2005-02-12T08:51:00.000-08:00

Postcards from 92-09 63rd drive, Rego Park, CA

As many of you know, I spent the last few weeks moving across the country (Los Angeles -> New York City)

On Tuesday Andrew and myself went to an Uzbeki restaurant. The venue was lightly decorated, with each table having an eclectic set of condiments consisting of a bottle of Italian dressing, a bottle Heinz ketchuo (which in turn has a label boasting how it "Hides Grill Marks!") and a bottle of the Vietnamese rooster hot sauce.

We ordered some bread, some stuffed baked goods, some hummus, several kabobs, and two bottles of soda. The bread was semi-torus shaped in that the hole does not go all the way through the bread-- one breaks off wedges of the bread and can also eat the flat section in the center, it was made with poppy and sesame seeds and was good. The doughy goods consist of "mushroom chebureki", manty, and samcy. The samcy was a flaky, baked pasty stuffed with meat, the manty was similar to the Tibetan mantou-- a light dough skin wrapped around a large wad of meat stuffing and (if memory serves) pan-fried. The chebureki was a light flaky fried pastry stuffed with very hot mushroom stuffing-- imagine a stuffed Indian puri. I tried to eat it like a puri-- breaking off some pieces of the dough and using it to pick up the stuffing.

The kabobs consisted of a lulya kabob, some onion and tomato kabobs, a beef kabob, and a lamb fat kabob. The lulya kabob was ground lamb and ground beef. The fat kabob was very fatty, and went well with bread

A very interesting meal, worth repeating.

(by the way, not more than two blocks away from this place is a Russian grocery store which sold the best matzah I've had, charred to perfection in a way which brings out the taste of the wheat...mmm)

2005-01-21T18:46:00.000-08:00

I read on /. recently that when companies tell you "this call may be monitored or recorded" they are recording what you say, even when you are on hold and not talking to a representative. I can only surmise they do this to gauge customer hold-frustration.

So I was on the phone with some utility or other, and thinking to test this, started mumbling when I was hold something along the lines of:

"you know, just in case somebody is actually listening in, it wouldn't kill you to have a 'press 0 to speak to a representative' option, I know you're trying to minimize actual human contact to minimize costs but this is simply good--"

at which time the machine at the other end said "please hold while we transfer you to a customer service representatvie"

I do not know if they had some voice-recognition thing going (ask me about my UPS voice recognition rant sometime) or if they had a live human listening in, or if it was triggered by a timeout, but it was cool

2005-01-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

Today's Wikipedia entry involves Empress Wu, and a story my grandfather told me.

According to him, the first character ("illuminate") was created to be the Empress's name, and the correct writing of it was the one on the right (two eyes and not "bring"). The lower half of the glyph was the word for "empty", the idea was that nobody was worthy about being looked upon by Empress Wu.

Wikipedia suggests that the correct writing had the word for "bright" on top and empty on the bottom, a light source with nothing beneath to hinder it.

Today, I'm not sure which version to believe.

I also liked the glyph she coined for land, it has the glyphs for "mountain", "water", and "soil" on top of each other.

2005-01-09T21:54:00.000-08:00

My friend from school Tim was in the area, went down to see him this weekend. We knocked off a bottle of DT and a bottle of Alaskan Smoked Porter.

The porter had a thick pour, it was the first time I noticed how viscous the fluid in a beer's pour was. The aroma and taste was like smoked salmon. I was very very impressed, it makes my A-list.

Saw House of Flying Daggers today, and I was floored by how far the genre has advanced in just the few years since CTHD. There were some very well done special effects with the flying sleeves and the throwing daggers, and the bamboo forest fight alone was worth the price of admission.

2005-01-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

Any French speakers out there?

I wanted to know what "Quelque Chose", the name of a beer recently sampled, meant. Babelfish and Googlefish both say it means "Something", it seems the translation is missing some more subtle connotation/implication.

Something sweet? Something mysterious?

2005-01-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

I saw a few friends from my school days over the weekend, I think the most interesting utterance occurred at 2AM on the 27th, when we speculated about a computer larger than the visible universe, which uses wormholes for its message bus.

Beers sampled recently include Unibroue Quelque Chose which tastes like mulled cherry-wine, and a Craftsman Holiday Spruce beer, which might be this one but I am not certain, this one had a refreshing taste, the name in conjunction with the taste made me think of pine needles, and the comments about drinking a Christmas tree are not inappropriate.

Other beers tasted over this holiday: Westmalle (forgot which one), Augustijn, Old Rasputin, Damnation, and Salvation

I think my poison of choice from now on will be Tremens aka DT

2004-12-20T01:37:00.000-08:00

This might not have all the variants I saw in that book I read when I was twelve, but it'll do. Check out the Piecelopedia

2004-12-19T22:59:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia's take on Chinese
names

I always have a hard time explaining how Chinese don't have a list of baby names. One of my friends didn't believe me when I said there was no name in Chinese as common as "John". On reflection, imagine if there was such a name, imagine how many "John Chens" there would be

2004-12-19T22:41:00.000-08:00

Lego Logic Gates. Does this mean that Lego is NP Complete?

2004-12-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

shi shi shi shi shi shi

2004-11-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

Sex at the speed of light ,courtesy of memepool.

2004-11-04T15:45:00.000-08:00

Today's NP-complete problem is Golomb Rulers

2004-10-31T20:22:00.001-08:00

Two new beers studied recently:
Ommegang Three Philosophers, a Belgian-style Quadrupel, combining the sweetness of a cherry lambic with the richness of Chimay-Red

Grant's Mandarin Hefeweizen, the mandarin orange flavor is the perfect substitute for lemonyness.

2004-10-31T20:22:00.000-08:00

2004-10-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today at In-n-out I saw somebody ordering animal style fries for the first time. A description of this food item is in order:

take the classic In-n-out fries (which taste like actual potatoes), top with melted cheese, and chopped grilled onions.

Sounds so good, and so bad for you.

2004-10-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

Today's Wikipedia link isJapanese Names

2004-10-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

Postcards from 423 North Atlantic, Monterey Park, CA

I had lunch with Yung and his family at Dumpling Master (also known as "Lao Fu Zi"), which ChowHound recommends as a spot for dumplings. The place is in an small unassuming storefront near a supermarket, with the obligatory addenda to the menu pasted on the walls.

They had a very wide selection of dumplings: the traditional pork ones, shrimp, lamb, fish, and vegetarian; all of which could be boiled, steamed, or pan-fried. We got (if memory serves me) the shrimp steamed, the fish steamed, the pork steamed, and the pork fried. The dumplings were quite large, I would say 30-50% larger than equilavent items at most places. The stuffing was juicy and the wrappings were thin, not paper thin, but thin enough that we concluded those dumplings were at least wrapped on-site.

For those of you who don't know, thick wrappings are typically a sign that the place bought these dumplings whole and frozen and just cooked them on site. These thin wrappers are a sign that at the very least Dumpling Master makes the fillings and wraps the dumplings on-site. After eating a few more dumplings we decided that the wrappings were also hand-made on-site.

We also got some good XLBs, some excellent scallion pancakes which were thin and light, and a good fried rice made with tomatoes and chicken.

Good. Its definately a place I'll recommend to anyone whose eaten a lot of dumplings.

2004-10-03T17:32:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of Oktober

There is a new euphemism which has entered my speech. It is "studying material" and it means liquor. It comes how I say I am "studying" the finer points of beer.

I was recently at Alpine Village in Torrance, and I purchased a fair range of "studying material", and I have been learning from them. It can be difficult to say what I learned because sometimes the labels are in German with the Olde German Font with such letters as the elongated S, but I shall do my best to catalogue my learnings here before I forget too much.

I have drank four bottles. The first is "Warsteiner Premium Dunkel", in a dark bottle. The beer did not have much carbonation, but was on the dark and sweet side, almost like a lightly carbonated wine. Good.

The second was "Pilsner Urquell", brewed in "Plzen, Czech". The taste is in the spirit of the big name domestics, but more bitter. Not my cup of tea I'm afraid.

The third one was "Oktomberfest Ur-Marzen" from Spaten, in a light-blue-labeled bottle. A good dark ale which goes down easily.

The fourth was, I think, "Original Schlenkerla Smoked Beer". The label was drawn like a piece of parchment with letters in the old font. The back label gives the URL. The fragrance is very pleasant and exotic, like herbs and longan, which is a relative of the lychee. The flavor is pleasant and sweet. Very cool, the gem of the haul so far.

2004-09-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

Also I offer these quotes from Lord of the Rings:

"Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?"
"A man may do both, for not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of a legend, though you tread it under the light of day!"
Eothain and Aragorn, The Riders of Rohan

"We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man's-flesh to eat. We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose. I am Ugluk. I have spoken"
Ugluk, The Uruk-Hai

I wish Peter Jackson retained more of Professor Tolkien's speeches and dialogues.

2004-09-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

Today's passage from ROT3K concerns the death of Dian Wei and Yu Jin's heroics:

However, the beating of gongs and rolling of drums mingling with his dreams awoke Dian Wei, and he jumped up. His trusty halberds had disappeared. The enemy was near. He hastily snatched up an infantryman's sword and rushed out. At the gate he saw a crowd of spearmen just bursting in. Dian Wei rushed at them slashing all around him, and twenty or more fell beneath his blows. The others drew back. But the spears stood around him like reeds on the river bank. Being totally without mail, he was soon wounded in several places. He fought desperately till his sword snapped and was no longer of any use. Throwing it aside he seized a couple of soldiers and with their bodies as weapons felled ten of his opponents. The others dared not approach, but they shot arrows at him. These fell thick as rain, but he still maintained the gate against the assailants.
However, the mutineers got in by the rear of the camp, and they wounded Dian Wei in the back with spear thrusts. Uttering a loud cry he fell. The blood gushed from the wound in torrents, and he died. Even after he was dead not a man dared to come in by the main gate.
Cao Cao, relying on Dian Wei to hold the main gate, had fled in haste by the rear gate. Cao Amin accompanied him on foot. Then Cao Cao was wounded by an arrow in the arm, and three arrows struck his horse. However, fortunately, the horse was a fine Dawan beast full of spirit and, in spite of its wounds, it bore its master swiftly and well as far as the bank of River Yu.
Here some of the pursuers came up, and Cao Amin was hacked to pieces. Cao Cao dashed into the river and reached the further side, but there an arrow struck his steed in the eye and it fell. Cao Cao's eldest son, Cao Ang, dismounted and yielded his horse to his father, who galloped on. Cao Ang was killed by arrows, but Cao Cao himself got away. Soon after he met several of his officers who had rallied a few troops.
The soldiers of Qingzhou under Xiahou Dun seized the occasion to plunder the people. Yu Jin took his army, fell upon them, and slew many. Thus he protected and appeased the people. The plunderers, meeting Cao Cao on the road, knelt down howling and said Yu Jin had mutinied and attacked them. Cao Cao was surprised, and he gave order to Xiahou Dun, Xu Chu, Li Dian, and Yue Jing to attack Yu Jin.
Now when Yu Jin saw his master and a great company approaching, he at once stopped the attack and set his troops to make a camp.
An officer asked him, "The Qingzhou soldiers say you have turned traitor. Why do you not explain now that the Prime Minister has arrived? Why first make a camp?"
Yu Jin replied, "Our enemies are coming up in our rear and are very close. It is necessary to prepare for defense or we shall not withstand them. Explanation is a small matter, but defense is very important."
Soon after the camp was finished, Zhang Xiu fell upon them. Yu Jin himself rode out to face them. Zhang Xiu drew back. The other generals of Yu Jin, seeing he advance thus boldly, also attacked, and Zhang Xiu was overcome. They pursued him a great distance until his force was almost annihilated. With the miserable remnant he finally fled to Liu Biao.
Cao Cao's army reformed, and the commanders mustered. Then Yu Jin went to see his master and told him of the conduct of the Qingzhou soldiers and their looting and why he had attacked them.
"Why did you not tell me before you made the camp?"
Yu Jin related what had occurred.
Said Cao Cao, "When the first thought of a leader in the time of greatest stress is to maintain order and to strengthen his defenses, giving no thought to slander but shouldering his burdens bravely, and when he thereby turns a defeat into a victory, who, even of the ancient leaders, can excel Yu Jin?"
Cao Cao rewarded Yu Jin with a golden armor and the lordship of Yishou. But Cao Cao reprimanded Xiahou Dun for the lack of discipline among his soldiers.

2004-09-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

Wasabi clears your sinuses as much as alchohol makes you warm, which is to say, it doesn't.

2004-09-19T16:44:00.000-07:00

The Skirball Cultural Center has an exhibit on Albert Einstein which runs through the end of 2004. It featured several exhibits on how special relativity affects time, how mass distorts the space-time continuum, and how gravity bends light. The highlight of the exhibit were several pages of manuscript from his work.

There used to be a page out there where Kermit, Gonzo, and Fozzie would explain the theory of relativity. Sadly, I am unable to find it. I was able to find this three part story starring Kirk and his evil brother Skippy. (part IV has not been posted as of this writing)

2004-09-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reading ROT3K now, and today's excerpt is the duel between Sun Ce and Taishi Ci

Now having seen all he wished, Sun Ce thought it time to return and wheeled round his horse. But when he was going over the summit, someone shouted, "Stay, Sun Ce!"
Sun Ce turned. Two horsemen were coming at full speed down the next hill. Sun Ce halted and drew up his little escort right and left, he himself with his spear ready.
"Which is Sun Ce?" shouted Taishi Ci.
"Who are you?" was the reply.
"I, Taishi Ci of Laihuang, come to take him prisoner!"
"Then I am he!" said Sun Ce, laughing. "Come both of you together. I am not afraid of you. If I were, I should not be Sun Ce!"
"You and all your crowd come on, and I will not blench!" cried Taishi Ci putting his horse at a gallop and setting his spear.
Sun Ce braced himself for the shock, and the battle began. Fifty bouts were fought and still neither combatant had the advantage. Sun Ce's commanders whispered to each other their admiration and amazement. Taishi Ci saw that the spearmanship of his opponent showed no weak point whereby he could gain the advantage, so he decided to resort to guile. Feigning defeat he would lead Sun Ce to pursue. Taishi Ci however did not retire along the road by which he had come, but took a path leading around the hill instead of over it.
His antagonist followed, shouting, "He who retreats is no worthy soldier!"
But Taishi Ci thought within himself, "He has twelve others at his back and I only one. If I capture him, the others will retake him. I will inveigle him into some secret spot and then try."
So flying and fighting by turns he led Sun Ce, an eager pursuer, down to the plain. Here Taishi Ci suddenly wheeled about and attacked. Again they exchanged half a hundred bouts, without result. Then Sun Ce made a fierce thrust, which his opponent evaded by gripping the spear under his arm, while he himself did the same with his opponent's spear. Neither was wounded but each exerting his utmost strength to pull the other out of the saddle, and they both came to the ground.
Their steeds galloped off they knew not whither, while the two men, each dropping his spear, began a hand to hand struggle. Soon their fighting robes were in tatters. Sun Ce gripped the short lance that Taishi Ci carried at his back, while Taishi Ci tore off Sun Ce's helmet. Sun Ce tried to stab with the short lance but Taishi Ci fended off the blow with the helmet as a shield.
Then arose a great shouting. Liu Yao had come up with a thousand soldiers. Sun Ce seemed now in sore straits. His twelve followers came up, and each combatant let go his hold. Taishi Ci quickly found another steed, seized a spear, and mounted. Sun Ce, whose horse had been caught by Cheng Pu, also mounted, and a confused battle began between the handful of men on one side and a whole thousand troops on the other. It swayed and drifted down the hill side. However, soon Zhou Yu leading his troops came to the rescue, and as evening drew on a tempest put an end to the fight. Both sides drew off and returned to camp.

2004-08-23T17:46:00.000-07:00

Postcards from 1108 S Baldwin, Arcadia, CA, take 2

Today was a moving day for the company, and several of us did not have to come in. Instead we had lunch at Din Tai Fung again.

There were three of us. We had several orders of the chicken soup (one per person), an order of the fish zhenjiao[1], an order of the sticky rice shumai[2], two orders (4 pieces total) of the pork not-charsiu-bao[3], and of course, the crab-and-pork xiao lung bao.

The soup was simple and very refreshing. The fish dumplings had quite a bit of (I think) cabbage inside which also made it very refreshing.

The pork buns were a new discovery. I've had quite a few of these buns, and I could tell simply by looking and handling the outside that these were going to be good. Its hard to convey how I have this knowledge. The buns were just right in terms of firmness and moistness, and very consistent throughout, with no soggy spots.

No trip to the Big Bad Ding can be complete without getting the Shanghai dumplings. As usual, the dumpling wrappers were marvelous in how thin and yet strong they were. We did not have a single dumpling break and spill its precious oup. The stuffing was even better than I remember it, very high in crab content. The moment I broke open the skin to sip the soup I was overcome by the smell of crab meat, and eating the dumpling gave me the taste and texture which says this was crab with a 'c', not krab with a 'k'. The stuffing is not unlike what a properly prepared crabcake should be.

The one minor disappointment was the sticky rice shumai which was good, but it was all rice inside, could've used something to break up the flavor. Next time we would probably get some shrimp shumai (which were not available that day) or even a second order of crab dumplings instead. I also want to try some more buns (maybe the red bean bun as a sweet) and even their fried noodles, as I have had nothing but good things to say about their dough.

[1] Zhen means steamed, jiao refers to the half-moon shaped dumplings.
[2] Shumai, as I understand it, refers to the open-topped dumplings
[3] Bao, as I understand it, is when the four corners of the dough are folded up to meet each other.

2004-08-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

When it comes to games, I have a technical definition for the word "evil".

It means "computationally complex and yet abstract enough to make me want to analyze it"

I was introduced to such a game recently, the game is called "Raj". The game is played as follows:

Fifteen tokens are placed face down on the table. Ten of these tokens represent prizes and are valued 1 to 10. The other five are "booby prizes" and have negative values from -1 to -5. Each player (the game provides cards for up to five players) gets a deck of "bidding cards" numbered 1-15.

Each turn one of the tokens is turned face up, and the players choose one card to use in the bidding. All the selected cards are then turned up and the player with the highest bid wins that prize. At the end of 15 turns the player with the highest total value in prizes wins, so one wants to win the good prizes and avoid the booby prizes.

What makes it evil is that if two or more players play the same value bid card, they neutralize each other and are treated as if they're not played. This keeps people from, say, always playing "15" for the "10" prize. I don't remember what happens if all the players tie, I'm guessing that the prize is set aside and nobody wins it. Clearly, the number of possible games is (15!)^{n+1}.

Lets say that we play conventionally when we play the card which corresponds to the prize value, i.e. 15 for +10, 14 for +9, etc.

Drawing out some game trees for games where there are only 2 bidding cards per player and 2 prizes suggests that for short games it pays to play conventionally. For three cards and prizes I can imagine situations where you give up the biggest prizes but get the next two prizes to come out ahead. I also think that as the number of players increases, it pays to play unconventionally by underbidding, because the odds that two or more players will cancel out each others high bids is higher.

(I really need to go work on the gametree searching engine...)
((By the way, you can play this with a deck of cards, use one suit for the prizes and the rest for bidding...))

2004-08-09T18:23:00.000-07:00

I *heart* Wikipedia

I've started using Wikipedia as a source for short, primer articles (isn't that what encyclopedias are for?) about topics I don't know anything about. I would say it is superior to using even Google, since with Google you are dependent on somebody out there writing an introductory piece on their website, or you resort to gleaning the definition from the context of some article.

The range of topics Wikipedia covers is diverse, I've used it to learn about the Sengoku Era, fugu, and codecs. Slashdot's coverage of it mentions Crushing by Elephant, and today the Golden Age of Video Games made the front page. They also have this useful thing which can be used for finding out who you share a birthday with.

For Firefox/Mozilla users, there is a Mycroft Plugin for Wikipedia.

2004-08-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

I'm trying out BevMo as an alternative to Bristol Farms and the other specialty food stores for my beer source. They are a local chain with an online presence. I have not shopped at their online store but I recently went to a local brick-and-mortar store.

New beers scored: Unibroue 2004 edition, Gulden Draak, and two Abbey Ale Tripels whose names I do not remember, along with a 4pack of Unibroue Trois Pistoles and two bottles of Delirium Tremens (fear the pink elephant!).

I'm drinking the Unibroue 2004 now. Good beer, can't describe the flavor, but it reminds me of Unibroue Maudite.

2004-07-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

Scientific American: Miracle on Probability Street
The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America

Two choice quotes from the article:
- "In the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month."
- some people sometimes exhibit paranormal powers (unless experimental controls are employed, at which point the powers disappear)

2004-07-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

The Laws of dimsumdynamics

I was having dimsum at Empress Harbor today, and the following thoughts entered my head:

The First Law: no two dim sum meals you will eat will be exactly alike

The Second Law: at every dim sum outing there will be something you want that they won't have that day. Quite often this Law is manifested when you see something you want after you've gotten the check or everybody's full. Other times you come with a list of things you want and they won't have one of the items on the list.

I have also observed that quite often I would see things I've never seen before, but that might just be my good fortune and not a proper Third Law.

One result of these three laws is that while they don't rule out a "perfect" dimsum meal outright, they make it so that if you plan a perfect dimsum excursion, you won't have it, because by the Second Law you won't get one of the items you want. But you can get a near-perfect dimsum meal.

2004-07-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

Pictures from Apollo 11, aren't they gorgeous?

Some choice favorites: AS11-44-654 (Earthrise), AS11-44-6611 (crater), AS11-40-5850 (Armstrong's first photo), AS11-40-5862 (Aldrin's descent) AS11-40-5863-69 (Eagle composite), AS11-40-5874 (U.S. Flag), and AS11-40-5879 (the footprint)

(sorry no hyperlinks, the site's use of Javscript seems to make it nontrivial)

2004-07-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

I recently dined at O-Dae-San , a Korean seafood restaurant which featured a fair bit of sushi, some wonderful crabs in a mildly spicy sauce...and live shrimp.

By "live" we do not mean "the critter is alive when you order it, and they bring it flopping and drowning in air to your table so you can verify its fresh", I mean "the critter is alive when served". The shrimps are decapitated and peeled, but in a testament to the survivability of the shrimp, (perhaps this guy can make it his next project?) the heads are still alive and the whiskers are still wiggling when on the table. The peeled bodies and the wiggling heads are both stuck into a bowl of ice and brought to the table.

Myself and my good companions were debating whether to order this. I had thought that "alive" was where I draw the boundaries for my otherwise courageous gastronomic explorations, but after a few shots of soju I decided to go with it.

The shrimp meat was excellent. Very large specimens of the species, and very very fresh. After the bodies were eaten the live and wiggling heads were taken away and deep fried. Then they were returned to the table and we opened up the heads to grab a delicate morsel of meat in the head.

A good dining experience. Unfortunately it was marred by service which even I considered awful. We had to wait forever for everything, even to make our official diplomatic protest with the hostess at the poor service.

2004-07-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

AOTC

NetFlix served up Attack of the Clones today. I have never seen so much money wasted on such an awful movie. The scene in the factory made me think about the scene with the chompers in Galaxy Quest ("it serves no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway"). The final battle scene had some redeeming value.

2004-06-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

benhsu@gmail.com

I got a GMail account a few weeks ago, and I've been playing with it. I've moved all my high volume mailing lists to it, and I've used gml and YoSucker to migrate saved messages for the same mailing lists to GMail.

Things I like about it:
- hot keys for "reply", "send", "compose", and "up to folder"
- messages are automatically threaded, with options to collapse or expand individual messages
- use of javascript obviates many of the page reloads, thus improving responsiveness
- quoted portions of messages are automatically hidden

Things I don't like about it:
- marking items as spam should automatically take you to the next message
- while there is a filter to perform actions on all future messages, there is no way to perform "run" a new filter on the current inbox
- there is no "feedback" button at the bottom despite what the help says

Let me know if you want an invite

2004-06-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

In an amusing coincidence, the Halting Problem came up at work today, in a very unrelated context.

I need new sobriety tests, being who I am, I study for the simple proof sobriety tests. Maybe the halting problem and the Pumping Lemma can be my new sobriety tests

Not that those tests are effective, anyway.

2004-06-09T17:31:00.000-07:00

Fugu Not-Poisoning

2004-05-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

The economics of free-as-in-beer

2004-05-27T16:21:00.000-07:00

It has been nearly two years since I moved into my current place. The apartment has a porch out front where I can sit and ogle traffic. Since the first day my dream has been to wireless up my house and spend my weekends sitting out front with a laptop and a beverage.

I talked to two friends about wireless security. Glenn has a wireless setup at home, and it turns out he uses a prototype from work, though he says that wireless devices with stronger encryption are coming down the pipes. James proposed treating the home network as insecure and running IPSEC over it. The problem is my network will have at least 3 OS'es on it (at least one flavor of Windows, at least one flavor of Linux, and I plan for my notebook to be an OS/X machine, and cookbooks for cross-platform IPSEC over the LAN are sparse to nonexistent.

Oh well, I'll wait, and pocket the 1500*(sqrt(0.07)) dollars. Now to get a home entertainment box...

2004-05-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

Purely by coincidence, it turns out that one of my colleagues has some Pi Luo Chun, except with his the unbrewed leaves are white in color and actually do curl up like a gastropod. I pinched a pinch of his PLC, the flavor seems smokier than mine.

This weekend was productive. Went to the Huntington Gardens, which have some very nice museum pieces including an Original Gutenberg Bible as well as several different collections of botany. Installed the new offering from Red Hat ^W^W Fedora, and wondered why up2date/yum/rpm takes up 80MB of RAM and swaps in and out for 15 minutes before showing a progress bar. The last time I installed third party software like the flash plugin I was doing it the old fashioned way: google, dl, install. Since then pillars of the community have set up yum repositories for everything which makes it all much easier. Running up2date/yum after a fresh install was a pain though, it'll take over an hour to install a handful of packages, most of which was spent resolving dependencies. This may have been because prelink or some other such process was running and building a cache...

Consumed Raising Arizona, I have not laughed this hard in a very long time. Bought a few of the symbolic-manipulation-heavy, computationally-intense, but simple ruleset games I liked: Tantrix and Zertz

2004-05-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

T

Sometime back I invested in a tea infuser, so I can now enjoy the pleasures of loose tea.

Sometime farther back a very refined colleague at my last company taught me about a tea with a most appetizing named called "Pi Lo Chun" or "Jade Snail Spring", so called because the leaves are dark green in color and curled up into snail shapes. I finally bought some of this tea.

The color is a very dark green, and although a small percentage of leaves are curled up, most of them are curled up along the lengthwise axis, resulting in twiglike shapes. The tea brews very quickly ("60 seconds for the first brew, 40 seconds for subsequent brews"). Upon the addition of water the tea leaves unfurl very quickly. The aroma is very rich, almost milky, and the flavor is closer to oolong than dragonwell.

One thing which impressed me a great deal was the quality control of the leaves. I have other teas at my desk where a spoonful of leaves will contain many tiny fragments of tea leaves, like the flakes which settle to the bottom of a bag of potato chips. These flakes are a pain to clean out. There is no such unpleasantness with this tea

2004-05-16T11:23:00.000-07:00

Been busy, haven't been consuming my NetFlix productees.

But I did see Spirited Away, which I was very impressed by. Very beautiful story, and the animation was off the scales in both imagination and technical excellence. Princess and the Warrior was also good in a very surreal way

I forgot a few more changes about Chungking Express (or my version of it). Turns out the scene where 633 runs up the stairs was there, they just subbed it differently.

In my other version of CKEX the version of "Dream Lover" (the Cranberries in Cantonese song) was only played during the end credits, here the instrumental version was played in the end credits and the full version was played when Faye terraforms Tony's apartment. Curiously enough, there was no background music played when Faye waits for Tony to finish his coffee. In my other version a brief riff on Dream Lover was played in that scene. They also took out (I think) one of my favorite bits, when Tony says "I don't know when it happened, but somehow this (California Dreamin') became my favorite song"

"All the Leaves are Brown" was not heard more than 4-5 times during the movie, contrary to my expectations.

2004-04-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

Netflix served up Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time and Chungking Express this weekend.

Ashes was weird. the point of view kept shifting between at least two people, and it also shifted in time from the present to the past and back. It was, as near as I can tell, a story of an "agent" for martial artists who helps them find work, and of the people he works with.

The physical quality of the film (color and graininess) and the special effects are all very similar to what you see in the Run Run Shaw movies of the 70's. I was surprised to find it was made in 1994-- so I'm betting that WKW wanted it to look like it was made in the 70s. Maybe bits of unclipped subtitling was also intentional: there are bits in the movie where you see Chinese subtitles half-shown at the bottom of the screen, as if the movie was not clipped properly.

Chungking Express, I've seen before, but this seems to be cut differently than the last time I saw it: so far I've noticed there was more footage with Brigette Lin and the Indians, and the scene where 223 runs up the stairs right after being dumped is gone. I don't remember if there was supposed to be a scene in the beginning when 223 was running around the tracks.

2004-04-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

poetry

2004-04-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

"The interpreter was written by someone who shouldn't have stayed up so late, Edwin Brady, and the language was designed by two people who shouldn't have had so much to drink, Edwin Brady and Chris Morris. "

2004-04-20T09:06:00.000-07:00

Another piece of spam made it past my Bayesian guards this week:

From: "Camille Barrera" Add to Address Book
To: ben_hsu@yahoo.com
Subject: Marlene enjoys m asturbating to fish screwing
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 19:20:16 -0100

Ben_hsu, Sun, 18 Apr 2004 21:24:16 +0100

http://66.132.228.201/stiff

effluent embezzle ode delusion crayon inner anniversary burlesque bennington drizzly angelica
functionary invalidate anaheim strenuous gagging anabaptist hausdorff gmt tried easel crutch cordage
commonality

or you can optout @ gooutoncemore@list.ru

gamecock metro perspective grammatic hermosa recriminatory rosalie postmultiply primate aghast
ringlet weeks cosine chalet lingerie pervasive luxury mirth entirety ow sordid libertine trellis car
ywca snapshot stationmaster ketchup rerouting sanitate frankfort czarina sphalerite irreversible
spur tn *Ben_hsu

I heard about farm animals but FISH? "M ASTURBATING"?

2004-04-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

My Netflix account starting producing this weekend. I enjoyed Office Space, which can be thought of as an insight into the fears and dreams of the engineers of this country.

On Sunday I saw Kill Bill vol 2, loved it. Gordon Liu was Pei Mei, and I wonder if he enjoyed playing the part of the Sifu for a change. I'm sure he played the part of the student many times.

God bless Tarantino, he's convinced Miramax to finally distribute Hero.

2004-04-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

Japanese in Backus-Naur form

2004-04-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

Postcards from 1066 Gayley, Los Angeles, CA

There are several places in Los Angeles where one can get a good Slice. I am fortunate enough to live near one of them.

Lamonica's is located near the UCLA campus. Walking in one is confronted by the subway signs from days gone by, the giant train switchboard on one wall, and the obligatory Subway Map decorated with photos of famous pizzarias in NYC. The tables and chairs look like they came out of my elementary school.

The slices have very flavorful cheese and tomato sauce, and they provide the obligatory condiments of ground cheese and ground peppers. Depending on various factors the crust can pass the "droop test" or it can be something which will pass the droop test if it wasn't cooked as long. I discovered today that the garlic knots are also excellent there, very flavorful without any skimping on the garlic. Garlic knots which taste like garlic.

Best of all, at ~$5 for dinner, competitive in price with McDonalds.

Now I just need to figure out the (free) parking problem.

2004-04-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

Postcards from 1108 S Baldwin, Arcadia, CA

For the past several months I have heard very pleasant things about Din Tai Fung, a restaurant in Arcadia which is a branch of one in Taipei. Today I decided to see if the legend is real.

Din Tai Fung turned out to be in a small plaza adjacent to a Wells Fargo bank. One can easily tell which storefront it was from the large crowd milling outside waiting for their number to be called. The people waiting were carrying little clipboards with ordering slips on them.

The decor inside was pleasant but not opulent, chiefly consisting of a traditional painting and several pieces of calligraphy. Also, behind the hostess' stand was a large window through which you can see the chefs at work. To my uneducated eye, their technique seems very good, combining high speed with high quality.

The hostess told me the wait will be half an hour, and told me come back in a bit to get an ordering slip. I went next door to get some boba (which was a story unto itself-- huge servings at buy-one-get-one-free) and came back for a slip.

During my wait I overheard two things: that when the store opened at 10:30AM there was already a line, and that one of the items (the soup dumplings) had already sold out (in under ninety minutes!).

I ended up ordering an order of the crab meat dumplings and a beef noodle soup. The beef noodle soup was not what I normally saw: the broth came separate from the noodles. The beef came in thin slices and not in the chunks I'm used to. The broth was more clear than rich. The noodles have a quality which I liked, and I think both the words "compact" and "dense" describe them well. Not chewy or hard or even firm, but definitely very good.

One of the reviews described the dumping wrappers as "engineering marvels", and they truly are. The pleats are folded very crisply, almost like origami, and the wrapper is less than 1/4 the thickness than those at other places, and it borders on translucent. It would be an exaggeration to say that these were paper thin, but it would not be a very great exaggeration.

Despite my fears, the dumplings did have soup in them. Apparently the "soup dumpings" which were sold out were dumplings in soup, not soup in dumplings. The soup filling was just on the right side of hot, and kept a wide berth from being injurously hot. The meat of the fillings was very finely chopped and mixed.

Without a doubt, the clear champion of XLBs in Southern California.

The place has an incomplete website at http://www.dintaifungusa.com
the chain as a whole's website is in yesterday's blog entry

2004-04-09T11:32:00.000-07:00

List of possible local restaurants to explore.

I must make a pilgrimmage to Din Tai Fung (site in Chinese).

2004-04-02T10:24:00.000-08:00

In praise of Mike

While praising my friend Mike on his insightful, informed, and eloquently expressed views regarding the recent shooting of Taiwan President Chen Shui-Ban, I wrote the following:
(((mike++)++)++); (((++mike)++)++); ((++(mike++))++); ((++(++mike))++); (++((mike++)++)); (++((++mike)++)); (++(++(mike++))); (++(++(++mike)));
That led me to write this bit of perlery
#!/usr/bin/perl sub mikeifyhelp { ($value, $level) = @_; if ($level==0) { return "mike"; } if($value < 2**$level) { $retval = "(" . mikeifyhelp($value , $level-1) . "++)"; } else { $retval = "(++" . mikeifyhelp($value - (2**$level), $level-1) . ")"; } return $retval } while($l=<>) { @a=split(//,$l); for($i=0; $i<scalar(@a);$i++) { $d = ord(@a[$i]); print mikeifyhelp($d, 7) . ";\n"; } }

Which, when fed his original email, outputted:
((++((((++(mike++))++)++)++))++); ((++(++(++((++(mike++))++))))++); ((++(++((++(++(mike++)))++)))++); ((++(++((((++mike)++)++)++)))++); ((++(++((((mike++)++)++)++)))++); ((++(++(++(((++mike)++)++))))++); ((++(++(++(((++mike)++)++))))++); (((++((++(++(++mike)))++))++)++); (((++((((mike++)++)++)++))++)++); (((++((((mike++)++)++)++))++)++); ((++(((++((mike++)++))++)++))++); ((++(++(((++(++mike))++)++)))++); (((++((((mike++)++)++)++))++)++); ((++(++(++((++(mike++))++))))++); ((++(++((++((mike++)++))++)))++);

(much more truncated)

2004-03-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

I check my "junk" folder from time to time, just to make sure there were no false positives. I found this piece of drivel in it:

From:	"Citi-Card"   Add to Address Book

To:	"ben_hsu" 

Subject:	CITI_bank e-mail Veerification - ben_hsu@yahoo.com

Date:	Sun, 14 Mar 2004 23:18:38 -0500

DEAR CITI_bank Clients_,

ThIs LETTER was se-nt by_the Citibank _server to veerify _your_ _EMAIL adrress.

You must complete this process by clicking on the_link beloww and enttering

in the small _window_ your _citibank Debbit full Card Number and pin that

you_use on the Atm. This is done - for Your protection -H- becouse some_of our

memebrs _no_longer have access to their _e-mail_ addresses and we must verify it.

http://citibanking.net/?nruJvYv3NvMK7uww25DKiZTmeNAnb71zzwi4uOijV5qoBYr

To verify your email_ address and akcess _your Citibank

account, klick on_the link beelow.

HBd0AWmJXdW4evEJOTfEQy

Maybe I should be glad that spammers and con artists are this stupid, and maybe I should be wishing there were more scammers this stupid, but...

I UNDERSTAND ENGLISH IS NOT THEIR FIRST LANGUAGE (the URL had a .ru domain) but IS IT THAT HARD TO DOWNLOAD A SPELL CHECKER AND RUN IT???

I weep for our future.

2004-03-08T16:19:00.000-08:00

Bay Area Restaurants

2004-03-08T16:12:00.000-08:00

Thoughts and discourses on the sources of dim sum in Los Angeles, from one particular sink of dim sum

There are four dim sum halls (I believe that is the proper term for a dining facility of such size) I have been to. Here are some thoughts on them.

Winner: NBC Seafood: very high quality all around. The place is huge, with back rooms on top of side rooms on top of back rooms, and the result is a short wait time even at peak hours. Some very creative things including a "dim sum hamburger" consisting of a patty of ground shrimp sandwiched between two slices of lotus root. Bonus points for being (reasonably) English-friendly.

First Runner up: Empress Pavilion has some very elaborate dumplings, including one which combines pork, duck, and shrimp.

Second Runner up: Empress Harbor is notable for enormous har gow with as many as four or five shrimps inside, and excellent mango pudding.

Finally, Ocean Star is also excellent, and would not lose in quality or happiness to the other three, and only fell to this (infinitesmally close) fourth place because of what I remembered were higher prices.

I have heard of "888 Seafood" but have not eaten there.

2004-03-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

Jeremy has collected on a word bounty, a proof that something exists without showing what it is is "an existence proof", as opposed to "a constructive proof".

Thanks Jeremy, now I have a stock and geeky answer to questions about {Sichuan, Szechuan} restaurants here. I owe you one beer.

2004-03-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

I was told not recently about a trend in (I believe) Korean clubs, where the men would line up on one side of the room, and the women would line up on the other side of the room, and during the evening a given man would point out a given woman to the host{ess}.

The host{ess} would then bring the woman over to the man, and the woman is supposed to make a show of being dragged kicking and screaming (regardless of whether she finds the man desireable), and the rule is that they would have to share a minimum of one drink.

I don't know about you, but it seems like the Stable Marriage Algorithm can be applied at some point here.

2004-02-28T18:40:00.000-08:00

How do Iron and Carbon make Steel?

2004-02-20T17:40:00.000-08:00

Another word bounty

Is there a term in mathematics for when you prove something exists without showing what it is?

e.g. "I know you can get from over there to over here by bus-- I know someone who does it all the time-- I just don't know how".
or "I know theres a Simpsons where Bart says 'can't sleep, clown will eat me'-- I saw that clip-- I just don't know the title of the episode"

2004-02-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

RSSzilla, or RSSbird?

Since I came to grips with what RSS does and does not do, my main gripe has been that I woul have to open a new browser each time I want to read the story associated with a headline. This is slow, cumbersome, and cluttersome, as it litters my desktop with one-time browser windows.

You'll think someone will embed Mozilla's Gecko engine to have the RSS aggregator do its own HTML rendering.

Enter RSS Reader Panel. It is an extension to Firefox (and possibly other zillish browsers) which will display the RSS headlines in a side panel. The stories then open in the main panel.

Based on the simple test of one RSS feed, it works quite well. My only gripe is that it uses the main bookmarks to store the RSS feeds, so all of the bookmarks are displayed in the "feeds" panel.

2004-02-11T22:51:00.000-08:00

RSS

I played around with an RSS reader today. For those of you who don't know, RSS is a protocol which lets you receive headlines from a remote site. Your reader will receive a list of headlines, and each headline would have a URL you can click on to go to the main story.

My preliminary opinion is that this is not a complete replacement for looking at the website's front page. This is because it does not give you the fill site. Take Tom's Hardware for example, the RSS feed will give you the news stories in the sidebar. You still need to read the "main" stories yourself.

With Fark this weakness shows up in the photoshop contests. It'll give you the link to the image source for the contest, but not the comments thread where the entries are posted, and thats the whole point!

update: it seems that a number of the feeds I read are from third parties which monitor the site, maybe that has something to do with it...

2004-02-09T13:37:00.000-08:00

want to learn Tibetan?

2004-02-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

While waiting for my food at Casa Bianca recently I remembered this Gardenerism:

Cutting a pizza

2004-02-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

Vocabulary Questions

Is there a word for when the sound of a word viscerally generates the appropriate feeling for that word? I am not talking about onomatopaeiae where the word is pronounced like the sound it represents. I'm more talking about when a word like "gulag" rolls off the tongue with a feeling of unpleasantness

Is there a word for the "correct misspelling" of a word? Like how "pah-tay" is a correct misspelling [or not, but the concept behind the example I hope is still clear] of "party" but "pah-er-tee" is not.

2004-01-18T16:39:00.000-08:00

The Tower of Hong Kong

While dimsumming this weekend, I was reverting to my childhood ways and trying to stack the empty dimsum baskets such that every dimsum basket is smaller than or equal in size to the ones below it. This let me to think about the Tower of Hanoi problem, and what would happen if the problem was relaxed so that some of the disks can be of the same size: these disks would start of next to each other in the tower, and because they are the same size, you can put them down in any order as long as the bottom one is smaller than the disk below it, and the top one is bigger than the disk below it, for example:




1     |--|

2   |------|

3   |------|

4   |------|

5 |----------|

Here disks 2,3, and 5 are considered identical for the purposes of solving the puzzle. Clearly, a stack of n identical disks can be moved in n steps in the obvious way. So, this problem is the same as if the disks were given weights, and some disks have a greater cost of moving them, because we can just turn a stack of n identical disks into one disk with cost n Given a weighted tower of hanoi where the disks are numbered bottom-first 0,1,2...n and each disk has cost c0, c1, c2...cn of moving, clearly disk 0 is moved once, disk 1 is moved twice, disk 2 is moved four times, et cetera, so the cost of moving the modified tower over is: sum(2^{n}*c_{n}) 0...n This notation is only partially in LaTeX, therefore it is inept and barbaric.

2003-12-22T10:50:00.000-08:00 Thunder, Thunder, Thunderbird! I test-drove Mozilla Thunderbird this weekend. Good points (vis-a-vis : Evolution) - faster startup times - moves deleted items to Trash instead of just marking them deleted - integrated Bayesian spam filtering - automagically scarfs addresses you send email to and puts them in your address book. Bad points - "Mark as spam" should have a hot key, and automatically delete the item - nothing which requires a browser (opening links in the email, or even the online help) works in KDE. This is as you can imagine a non-trivial bug. Tried one fix (setting it in user.js prefs file) which didn't work, trying another fix which involves rebuilding Thunderbird 2003-12-21T07:31:00.000-08:00 The first, third, but not the second law of thermodynamics