Random Brain Dump

I am starting the process of back posting of previous galleries including the monthly galleries and travels/trips.

One of the trips posted is the rafting trip with the Tieu’s and a small group of friends at the South Fork of the American River this past summer. We took the trip the day after I left Vitria. It’s sort of a celebration of a job switch for me. We went with All-Outdoors and were generally happy with their service. I went with them years ago. Our guide was a bit inexperienced and the rapids were class 3 so I find them a bit tame. But all in all, it was a lot of fun. I finally got around to post the pics here: trips/rafting_2005

I used some bad tags in one blog entry that causes the site to prompt for user id & password. It didn’t mean that the site requires login, just bad coding on my part. I started to see it last week but I had dismissed as a bug on Firefox 1.5 beta. Whew, glad that was fixed 🙂

Thanks Truc for dropping me an email about it…

I had yet another case of insomnia last nite so I stayed up channel surfing and caught a few HBO documentaries. One of them, Unknown Soldier, is particularly powerful. It’s a story of a son’s quest to re-assemble the life and death of the soldier father he has never known.

In 1969, Lieutenant Jack Hulme was blown to pieces in Vietnam, just days short of ending of a tour that’d bring him home to his wife and his newborn son. 30 years later, John Hulme pieced together the life of a father he’s never known through personal accounts. Particular touching was the interviews of Jack’s father, a normally stoic 80+ year old man. It was clear Jack was the apple in his eyes and his death was a huge loss for the old man. Through the process, the son came to terms with the life and death of his soldier father. Very powerful stuff…

Watching that reminds me of my parents’ generation and the trying times they had to endure through the war. My dad and my uncles were soldiers in the Vietnam conflict. My uncle Ty went MIA in the early 70’s. I was too young to retain any meaningful memories of him. Like John Hulmes, I only remember him through pictures. One thing I do remember however was a blue/gray sweater with a large print of a racing car in the front. It was, according to my mom, my uncle’s gift to me after a trip abroad. That was probably the only thing that represents any real connections between him & I.

I imagine that it’d be very interesting for me to find out more about my uncle through the personal accounts of my mom & my other uncles. And one of these days, I might just do it!

My server has been a target of a DOS attack as of this morning. My hosting provider is working on fighting it at the moment. Access to the site will be unreliable until the attack is averted.

UPDATE (11/4/05):
Looks like the attacks subsided somewhat, while everything isn’t yet back to normal now, web access seems okay. There’s still some weird behavior with the databases…

In a demo of Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft claims that it is more expensive to use Eclipse (an open-source & free development tool) than buy Microsoft tools.

What a bunch of crap! Mike Milinkovich of the Eclipse Foundation recognizes that claims like this from Microsoft represent the highest compliment for Eclipse. I couldn’t agree more…

…
Repeating the Microsoft mantra that “free is not really free,” the programmer showed that while the basic development environment for Eclipse is free versus a basic Visual Studio 2005 license, which costs $8,200, the cost of using Eclipse increases as users tap into load testing and other advanced features.

When he added it up, the cost of using VS 2005 was over $30,000 versus more than $100,000 for Eclipse-based applications.

ZDNet reports that Firefox topped 10% of the browser market, though I’ve read reports that growth is slowing. It gives you an idea how hard it is to topple IE dominance.

On a related note, Firefox 1.5 release candidate is out… Navigation seems a bit quicker in the new version.

This is a fascinating finding by Mark Russinovich. His painstaking investigation reveals that a Sony Audio CD install some malware on his PC. It’s a really interesting read. He details the whole process step-by-step. Check it out as Mark’s investigative techniques are very impressive.

The anti-copy protection software is based on Rootkit which is used by hackers of viruses. It goes deep into the operating system and make itself “invisible.” It basically prevents uninstallation or deletion of itself and is therefore extraordinarily difficult to uninstall. In this particular case, removing it manually could shut off access to the computer’s CD player itself. It installed without the user permission nor notice. So it’s basically a virus, it is an intrusive compromise and it is nasty!

The length the record company goes through really infuriates me. While they have the right to protect their content, I have a problem when their tactic crosses the line of fairplay and infringe on consumers’ rights.

UPDATE #1 (11/2/05):
Looks like Sony is bowing to consumer pressure and will be working with anti-virus software makers to provide a patch to remove the software.

UPDATE #2 (11/11/05):
The first malicious trojan horses that piggy-backed on Sony CD walware were spotted yesterday. They enable the attacker to have complete control over the infected host. So the reality is the software from Sony CDs isn’t just about content protection anymore, it’s also enable PCs to be taken over by hackers!

California has already filed a class action lawsuit.

Halloween is always one fun event the kids look forward to. This year both of the girls dressed up as Minnie Mouse. We took them to Great America (an amusement park) for the Nickelodeon halloween parade. Suzanne & Betty then took the girls for a quick round of trick-or-treating, after which they, of course, gorged on the candies they worked so hard for!

Check out the October pics:monthly/october_2005

Check out Thinking Machine 4. It’s a chess playing program that displays what the computer is “thinking”. Very cool!

Of course, the computer isn’t really thinking. The program is a form of artificial intelligence. What it really does is compute all possible moves it can make and all possible moves its component can make in response to each of its move, and so on… This is known as a game tree. Each potential move is visualized by a line on the chess board in the program.

Back in my UCLA days, I spent a semester programming a checkers game using game trees like this one in my advanced programming class. The program can play checkers against a human or another program. At the end of the semester, we had a huge checkers tournament where each student’s program is pitted against other students in the class plus the professor’s. The tournnament represented something like 50% of the grade so the students (including yours truly) spent countless hours during the last few weeks tweaking and optimizing their algorithm. Mine used a rather simple but very effective algorithm and it went undefeated, beating the professor’s as well. (yes, I was a geek then too… ;))

I took 1 year worth of courses taught by this professor from the mathematics department. So when I graduated couple years later, I went to Dr. Mark Franzen and asked for a recommendation letter. He did remembered me and we had a pretty good chat. I remember that at the time, he was packing his office to leave for Chicago or somewhere else in the midwest that day. He gave me a nice letter of recommendation which I still keep to this day.

I was curious as to what Dr. Franzen is up to these days, so I googled and found that he’s left academia in the 90’s and founded two companies. He was a CEO for IntelRX somewhere in Wisconsin. Good for him…

The Planetarium @ De Anza College is putting on a laser light show this month. It has been ages since the last time I caught a laser show so I figured it would be fun for the family. But Suzanne felt like going to bed early with Allison, so I took Katelyn with me to catch the 8:30 show. It was Katelyn’s first laser light show. She was excited about it and, the whole day, she kept reminding me that I had promised to take her.

The sound system was great, I enjoyed the music; but the laser show wasn’t as impressive as I had imagined. The whole show felt so 80’ish, I can almost swear that some of the sequences were the same I saw years ago. For example, the star wars dog-fight sequence that seemed awefully familiar to me. Even the music was mostly 80’s (they were playing Major Tom for example). Space was the theme of the show.

Katelyn was enjoying the show at first but the show lasts a bit too long for her. She got antsy and lost interest in the end. She particularly like some of the sequences with space and animal characters. The show ended on a high note with a very entertaining sequence about the Milky Way galaxy. The song was pretty cool (it sounds like one of those funny Monty Python’s). I should’ve brought my camera. A slow exposure of the laser light dancing might be very interesting.

All in all, it was a fun evening outing for just daughter and father.