January 25, 2007

1.25

audited continuous finance, investment

found continuous finance very close the the combination of probability, stochastic process, mathematics modeling which i learnt in college.

a lot of unfamiliar jargons in investment.

January 24, 2007

1.24

talked with Rong.

Start on WIL again.

Need to come out with a paper within one month. How should I plan it?

Software developers do spiking and prototyping in the first iteration.

Should I do some prototyping for research?

Never hear researchers do that. But perhaps I’m not really a researcher now. I’m just a paper writer.

January 23, 2007

1.23

courses. 3 in succession. great teachers.

planning how to set up servers for the group in the future.

emacs : is it worth it?

The reason for i didn’t update the blog yesterday is: I’m a little exhausted The cause for that is, again, the ever energy draining emacs.

i got to know it when taking the data structure course of Zhu Zhongtao in Tsinghua. He is crazy for emacs and he was demonstrating it in the class room everyday. For a long time I worship those hardcore hackers. I myself also spent a lot of time in it. But now I ask myself: what is the advantage emacs gave me in helping me SOLVING PROBLEMS?

It helps when occasionally I need to ssh into a unix/linux server or linux embedded system(Well, most embedded systems can’t afford emacs by the way).

It provides me something for everything so I don’t need to spend the hell lot of time to find and install and maintain a tool every time I try a new language.

Multi-window and multi-frame sometimes help.

But that’s All. Don’t tell me how cool it is to spend a whole lot of effort to make emacs assist you in browsing and programming object oriented source. Don’t mention your long precious .emacs file to make gnus working for gmail plus rss plus whatever. Don’t even mention your newest achievements on adding various panels and windows for emacs: it’s born for command line.

Why the hell should I spend that much time to know so much details of a software in order to use it? It just makes no sense. Stallman did a pretty good job in writing this software. But why should users all over the world to go through the effort he spent on this? Look at
the new group of emacs. It contains often the most messages. And most people are just asking how they can tweak their chars and buffers in emacs one way or another. Isn’t it obvious useless repetition?

Why the hell should people put so much effort in enabling old emacs-lisp to deal with everything? Lisp IS out-dated for application development in graphics window and internet era. And it IS so again the wisdom of unix to try to do everything not so well in one program.

It’s a tragedy for programmers to adherent to one software, one os, one platform in such a degree. The only thing a programmer should adherent to is problem solving, which, require in its natural, constant adaptation and pursuit for new things.

I’ll still use emacs as a better replacement of notepad. (Not even sure if it’s better than gedit in some cases.) And that’s all. Adios, Zhongtao.

Emacs is like Stallman. They are all tragedy figures to me in that they were born pioneers, and uncompromisingly moved to their goals only to become the hindrance in the trend at last.

So many pioneers end up like that by the way…

1.21

sensor programming.

did my first review of paper.

sorry being so harsh, man.

January 20, 2007

11.20

meeting of structure sensor project.

got to finish it within this week.

January 18, 2007

physical economics

Physical_economics

I never really understood why economists can measure the well being of a society by numbers, especially, the number about money. I always feel a lack of reality when looking at those numbers. The stock market of NASDAQ is even more confusing. I believe the number of money and stock are based on physical reality of individuals their interaction and the environment. And I don’t have either the time nor the faith to investigate the implication of the stochastic process of stock market. And on the other hand, the understanding of the physical reality of industry is important for me, and many students with a science and tech major. What’s more, the mathematical-physical technique would also be useful for us as well. (But, speaking of that, the stochastic analysis of traditional economics/financing is also to us… But still I prefer a sense of physical implication.)

Buffet is a practitioner of “Determining the real value of a stock”. He does this by investigating the people and the strategic situation of a company, other than stock price fluctuation. Isn’t that the “physical reality” of a company? Although I’m not in a position to say that I understand either Physical economy or Buffettology very well, I have a feeling that maybe they can be combined together in a certain way, to provide a practical technique for engineering/technology people to gain substantial insight about the industry.

I take zero responsibility for the words above:)

1.18

sensor programming

1.17

took 3 classes.

found that the mobile phone cable i bought is the wrong type for my phone.

sensor programming. Mmm… I can get it done now.

January 17, 2007

apple : never open

here people blame apple’s closed system strategy again. if you prefer audio than text, you can listen to this.
i phone is, again, a closed platform. Even its carrier choice is limited: a two-year contract with singular. I’m not surprised with this. It’s not because of the crazy personality of Jobs or the self-esteem of Apple, it’s just because that the companies is built up and has been run this way for so many years that the whole system in the company can’t work in another way. Bill Gates commented the i phone plan: “they never get it.” But I think he knows very clear that Apple doesn’t have the kind of engineers and business people experienced with “messing up” with a whole bunch of hardware / software partners and squeezing the profit out of they. In turn Microsoft doesn’t have the engineer and business man to design an innovative, complete and elegant end device and to run a closed strategy to reap the profit exclusively from it. Well, you can always hire somebody else, but the people a company hire have to always fit the way the company is currently running, especially at the crucial point of competition.

So, for this reason, I don’t think we can expect much from apple opening its product. Is it a bad news for startups and freelancers interested in next generation mobile devices? Not really. Big players can’t change their way of business, and what’s good for us in that?

1. Their strategy will gradually become outdated.

2. They collide on each other.

And those two creates a gap in the market for new comers. Hasn’t Microsoft thrived in the gap between IBM and Apple?