Random Brain Dump

Last week was the big launch of Firefox. This week, Eclipse Ganymede will be launched tomorrow.

Eclipse is a popular open source IDE. Each year, the Eclipse Foundation ships annual releases, so far around the summer. It’s a release vehicle where all major Eclipse projects release & synchronize their code. The Ganymede (all releases are named after Jupiter’s moons) release this year represents a simultaneous release of 24 eclipse projects– an incredible scheduling feat if you ask me.

I’ve been using several release candidates and so far so good. For an overview of the new features, check out this article. Coolest feature is probably muti-core CPU support.

So, go get the bits here.

Been having issues with my computer at home recently…

First the video card died inexplicably a few weeks ago so I upgraded to an Nvidia 9600; now I’ve got DirectX v10. But it still sucks considering it was only 18 months old. Then last week’s heat wave finally fried my CPU. I had trouble installing the heatsink on the CPU when I built my current machine last year. My guess is that there’s always been heat dissipation issues and the heat last week was the last straw.

So I spent some bucks getting a quad-core CPU and a spanking new Asus motherboard as well as some additional RAM and a terabyte hard drive which by the way is an engineering marvel: cramming 1 terabytes in a few 3.5″ platters. 6 hours of working late into the sweltering night and I finally got a pretty beefy Windows Vista system running. Other than the computer case and some RAM modules, it’s pretty much a brand new system.

Been testing it past few days and it’s rock solid and very zippy. Despite careful research, I did spent $700; for a few hundreds more I could’ve gone and get a Mac. I did contemplated it but decided to take the plunge later when I upgrade my notebook.

Last week, the girls helped their mom making me an omelet on the morning of Father’s Day. We then head out to the backyard to snap some pictures before heading out to Suzanne’s sister’s for lunch and then a movie. Caught Indiana Jones finally…

Here’s a snapshot of me & my 2 girls on Father’s day.

We were driving yesterday and explained to the girls that we were going to look to buy a house.

Suzanne: We are going to look at a house because we’re looking to buy a house.
Allison: We’re going to buy a house?
Suzanne: Yeah…
Allison: Are you kidding?
Suzanne: No.
Allison ponders then said: But how are we going to bring it home, Mommy?

Ouch! Lakers choked & gave up a 24 point lead and lost a home game to the Celtics. Their championship run is doomed as they are now down 3-1. What an unbelievable meltdown.

They don’t deserve to be champions with a historical collapse like this, especially when Boston held off the Lakers after they stormed back from being down 22 points in Boston. Celtics are the clearly the better team.

With the recent final-four loss by UCLA, this has been all too-depressing!

I was so disgusted by the months long fight over the name “Little Saigon” in San Jose city council. If you’re not a Silicon Valley local, you may not be familiar with the “controversy” over naming a business district “Little Saigon” that took months to resolve and involved world class drama that included disruptive protests, recalling an elected official and even a hunger strike by a well-known fanatic. As far as I know the city hadn’t solved the issues of crimes, corruption, homelessness etc… So, it made you stop and go WTF?

Now there are signs of political backlash against Vietnamese candidates. Gee, that’s a surprise… It’s funny now that everybody is blaming everyone else for their dismal showing in recent election. A recent Vietnamese candidate who gathered a mere 760 votes, blamed the council woman for her humiliating showing, how dignified! The ridiculous drama wasn’t just embarrassing to witness but also undid years of political advances of the local Asian communities.

I know I’ll never vote for these folks in the future, let alone folks outside of the Asian community. What idiots!

As if the world needs yet another iPhone blog post, but I must say that I am super-excited. I’m definitely gonna get one and retire my old sucky razr. It’s timely since our AT&T contract is up this summer.

It’s always wise to skip 1st generation of a new product, and I’m glad I did. That’s not to say I was tempted. The 2nd generation adds 3G network and GPS. I’ve been putting off getting a GPS device for my new car. I can’t wait to see the many location-based applications that will be coming out. In fact, I might consider writing a few apps myself!

Most of all, I’m looking forward to lugging one single device. Oh yeah…

I canceled our subscription to Netflix and is going back to Blockbuster. The main reason is the rediculously long wait for popular new movies. Almost every popular release has a status of “long wait” or “very long wait”. Case in point, I’m still waiting for “There will be blood” which was released months ago. With blockbuster, I used to get new movies when they’re released.

I like Netflix video streaming service, I would’ve stayed with them just for that. Unfortunately, the available libraries are pretty slim and the video is highly compressed (not surprising). Plus, our daughters like going into the store to pick their own kiddie movies. And since the summer is here, it makes sense for the switch.

I was helping Allison finishing up her bathroom “duties”, when Allison stepped on the stool in front of the sink and looked at herself. Then she grinned and said:

“Hello gorgeous!”
Then she bursts out laughing…

That girl is too much!!! 🙂