Random Brain Dump

Last week, 2 packages I bid on eBay was shipped to my home. I opened them to inspect the DVDs for damages at which point Allison got curious about whom this package is for. She just had her birthday 2 weeks ago. We must’ve mentioned to her that she is growing taller. Allison was probably proud of the compliment and retained it in her memory because here’s the quick conversation I had with her:

Allison: "Daddy, what are these movies?"
Rex: "These are DVDs of very old Chinese movies."
A: "Do you like to watch these?"
R: "These are birthday presents for Grandma, they are her favorites. She watched them a long time ago."
A: "Her birthday is coming?"
E: "Yes, in a couple of weeks!"
A: "Oh cool! I can’t wait to see Grandma on her birthday, she’ll be taller!"

Man, is she cute… 🙂

Okay, I know I’m dating myself for blogging this, but I don’t care..

  Back in the early PC days, the Amiga grabbed a lot of attention. It was the dream machine at the time. I remember one day casually walking by a computer store on Main street in Alhambra, oh I don’t know mid ’80s. I saw an Amiga on the window, displaying the classic animation of a bouncing red/white checkered ball. I was quick to ditch my friends and went in to check it out. I still remember that I thought it was the coolest computer I’d ever seen. I was blown away!

I had been reading about the Amiga in Byte magazine. I was a kid with a $200 Commodore 64, green with envy at all the rich kids at school who owned IBM, Atari & most of all Apple II. So it wasn’t like my parents were going to get it for me. Don’t remember the price, just that it was ridiculously expensive. Technically, the Amiga was best in the market at that point, but it was mismanaged and eventually flamed out– just a footnote in computing history and another of many duds left on the wayside by IBM & Apple.

Anyhow, Arstechnica features an on-going series of articles on the history of The Amiga. Very intriguing geeky read, highly recommended from yours truly!

1. genesis
2. birth of Amiga
3. 1st prototype
4. enter Commodore

Here’s a funny excerpt:

Amiga, Inc. didn’t have a lot of money left over for shipping its prototype to the show, and the engineers were understandably nervous about putting such a delicate device through the rigors of commercial package transport. Instead, RJ Mical and Dale Luck purchased an extra airline seat between the two of them and wrapped the fledgling Amiga in pillows for extra security. According to airline regulations, the extra “passenger” required a name on the ticket, so the Lorraine became “Joe Pillow,” and the engineers drew a happy face on the front pillowcase and added a tie! They even tried to get an extra meal for Joe, but the flight attendants refused to feed the already-stuffed passenger.

Tonite, after processing some of the pictures of the kids I took earlier in the evening, I uploaded a few of them to Flickr. In the process, I discovered something a bit troubling. The uploaded images on Flickr looked washed out! I looked closely at the settings in the Flickr upload tool and discovered it resizes the uploads due to size limitation. While JPEG is a lossy compression, resizing should not produce visible differences between compressions– otherwise, the format would be useless.

After reconfiguration, I re-uploaded a file in its entirety. I looked at the different sizes on Flickr and again, the image simply didn’t look faithfully replicated! Could the bits be altered I thought? So I downloaded the picture and compared it against the original JPEG. No difference in file size, good! I viewed the 2 files in Photoshop and they look identical, again good!

This meant that there is a visible difference in the rendering of the images on Flickr in the browser. A partial screen dump above shows the browser on top of Photoshop, both displaying the same image of the same size. The difference in coloration is obvious. But at this point I no longer suspect Flickr and began to suspect the browser; so I loaded the original JPEG file into Firefox & IE. Eureka, I see the same difference between the browser and Photoshop.

I didn’t get it, while I understand HTML is limited to web color space, I always thought JPEG is rendered in the browser without such limitation. Then I remember reading about Safari rendering JPEGs better than other browsers. I hit Flickr with it and bingo– chalk up more love for Apple from me! Safari rendered the image faithfully!

It turns out some systems (devices or software) are built without color management. Vista and Safari render photos faithfully because just as Photoshop, they have color management and will take into account the embedded ICC profiles in their rendering algorithms. Whereas other system like IE & Firefox and my printer, don’t have color management and render photographs with unpredictable color maps.

This was a lesson in color management for me. For a good example on color management in web browswers, check out this article.

I had one of those insomniac nights this weekend. After spending hours on my computer I peered through the window and saw the first light of day. I knew it was going to be a good and special day. It was my baby girl’s birthday– she’s turning 4!

As I was thinking about Allison, I heard hurried footsteps. It was Katelyn; she woke up at the crack of dawn to remind me to wrap Allison’s presents. She excitedly agreed to help me. We wrapped two presents and left them in the middle of the living room as Katelyn suggested.

As Allison staggered out of bed with eyes barely opened, we were ready for her. Katelyn, Suzanne & I ran to her and showered her with birthday kisses. We led her to the living room where she discovered her presents. We then surrounded her and did a family happy-birthday dance and gave her a family group hug. She liked that.

After getting dressed, we all went to the family’s favorite breakfast place: Hobee’s. After Allison ordered her usual: Mickey Mouse pancake, I whispered some instructions to the waiter. When the waiter brought out her pancake with a birthday candle on top of it, we sang happy birthday to her with the help of some in the patrons of the restaurant. Allison seemed to dig that as she smiled from ear to ear.

In the afternoon, we had a little birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. This year we decided to play it small and low key, so it was just our family & the Tieu’s. We ended the day with Allison opening her presents. She was most excited when she opened the present from her mom: Cinderella’s toy computer. Allison spotted this toy and been asking for it for months!

As I reflect on the past year, the one thing most noticeable about her is her communication. She is much more vocal than last year; in fact she’s always talking up a storm. She’s often the loudest and talks the most in the house! She still can be very stubborn and still is causing much of the fighting with her sister. She constantly testing her boundaries and my patience. I tried to be more stern this past year with her whenever she misbehaves but her mom still accuses me of spoiling her.

She also showed some form of independence this past year, she participated in sleep-overs and spent the few nights away from home and without her parents. She was learning to participate too so she’s not left out as often when she plays with sister & her cousin Malia. She started her second year at pre-school; this year without her sister who is a kindergartener at a different school. She can write her name. She still loves to draw and improved beyond just simple stick figures. She started to color very well– inside the lines and all.

The thing most fun to me is the fact that she loves being photographed by her dad. She became more comfortable and learned to smile and pose naturally in front of the camera. She always ready to crack a beautiful smile for me. Thanks kid for indulging your old dad…

Happy birthday #4, baby!

A few of the pics are posted here…

The documentary starts off with a story of a young man in Mobile Alabama who learned that his professed love was spurned by his sweetheart. Devastated by the rejection, he drove off on his motorcycle in the middle of the night looking to drink his misery away. Even that simple attempt failed as the bar tender refused to serve the under-aged man.After wandering the night, he enlisted in the army and eventually chose to deploy in the Pacific front instead of troubled Europe.

Little did he know that the upcoming attack on Pearl Harbor will be laying the horrific war path ahead of him for the next 4 agonizing years. He served under MacArthur in the Philippines. As the Japanese closed in, MacArthur took off in a small boat with his family, leaving thousands of American soldiers and civilians to surrender to the enemies. The young man survived the Bataan Death March and endured savage years as POW in Japan.

Eventually, the determined man survived the war and headed home after Japan surrendered. Years earlier, the army had informed his family of his "death." When he placed a call home, his mother, his aunt and sister– all fainted after hearing his voice. His father instead spoke with calmness and with certainty; he told his son "I knew you’d make it!"

The young man’s sweetheart, who had a change of heart and had been waiting for his return all these years, decided on marry someone else after learning of his "death". Three days after his return home, the man’s sweetheart married another gentleman.

The War is a documentary that reconstructs WWII through microscopic stories like this one. I finished watching most the 15+ hours. Very powerful stuff; as usual, it’s the story-telling of Ken Burns that makes the documentary engrossing. In fact, unlike The Civil War, Burns used no historians or experts to dissect events and provide history lessons. I had expected that and do wish Burns had worked that in. Instead, Burns tells the war through sole the accounts of people at war and at home, barely mentioning Hitler and the likes. This bottom up approach offers a unique and very personal account of the war. While not as good as The Civil War, I thought is an exemplary piece work– 6 years in the making. I also wished McCullough was the narrator.

I hope some of the politicians like Bush, some of Japanese politicians and that idiot Ahmadinejad, watch it and learn from history.

Take-away points, learned or appreciated, from the documentary:

• General MacArthur was a coward
• The horrible Bataan death march
• Terrible sacrifices of that generation
• Bad planning contributed much to heavy losses of the war
• The greatest generation is disappearing: about 1000 WWII veterans die each day. In fact one of the man featured in the documentary recently passed away.
• A Marine said "I don’t think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars."
• One mother’s all four sons died in the war. She learned 2 of her sons died on the same day.
• Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye gave a Rambo-like effort taking out 3 machine guns firing at his men and got hurt in multiple places. He finally received his Medal of Honor 55 years later for that effort!
• Some veterans have post traumatic stress for decades, some never really recovered wholly

I came home a few days ago, my dear Allison excitedly ran out and greeted me at the door, proudly showed me her alphabet crown. Her pre-school awards the paper crown when a kid learns the letters and their sounds. Yeah!

I was very happy and proud of my little munch-kin. And as a reward for a job well done, I made her a promise of getting her a toy of her choice.

While David Letterman has mellowed out a bit in recent years, there are still glimpses of his former self once in awhile. Case in point: his recent interview of Paris Hilton after her stint in jail. No softy questions lofted here… It proves he’s the cooler late night show host and edgier than a tame Jay Leno; Dave wasted no time & relentlessly pounding on poor (okay rich) Paris.

Hilarious! Makes me almost feel sorry for the media-magnet girl…

This is one of my favorite shots of Allison I managed to snap this past summer.

I’ve been using Zoundry as a blog writer client last few years. It’s free and works better than most of standalone clients I’ve tried. Just downloaded the beta version of Windows Live Writer tonite and I’m impressed. Some of the things I like include:

1. WYSIWYG mode applies styles straight from the blog CSS. I’ve never seen this implemented on other clients I tried.
2. Images in a post are even automatically uploaded (including auto-thumbnails).
3. Inserting a map is a cinch (Microsoft map of course)!
4. Templates

Pretty sweet…

I received a phishing attempt in my inbox this morning. Phishing is a fraudulent attempt which fake emails are sent to unsuspecting users tricking them to surrender sensitive user information usually by linking the user to a site that is forged to look legit.

This particular email disguises as Bank of America informing me of an "unauthorized activity". First, I am not BofA customer and secondly, the email was poorly done (spelling error for example). It was a dead giveaway, so I spot it as a phish right away. The link included in the email is simple bare URL, linking to a site in Tanzania! I’m insulted! 🙂

Pictured above is the screen shot I made from the fraudulent site in Tanzania, forging as BofA. It’s tricking users into entering BofA user IDs & pass codes. Bastards! Some of recent phishing attempts are very clever. Some of my co-workers at Yahoo even fell to victim to recent schemes.

Phishing is becoming more prevalent, so be prudent…

Subject: Unauthorized Activity

Dear Bank of America client,

You have received this email because you or someone had used your account from different locations.For security purpose, we are required to open an investigation into this matter.
In order to safeguard your account, we require that you confirm your banking details.
The help speeed up to this process, please access the following link so we ca complete the verification of your Bank of America Online Banking Account registration information.

http://www.data-exchange.co.tz/boa/ssl/online/

If we do no receive the appropriate account verification within 48 hours, then we will assume this Bank of America account is fraudulent and will be suspended.
The purpose of this verification is to ensure that your bank account has not been fraudulently used and to combat the fraud from our community. We appreciate your support and understanding and thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.