Song Way

I can’t do that…..

Their makings might be shaky and primitive, but their mind and body is free and energetic out there in the sky, while a huge number of so called “researchers” imprison their mind and body in the lab.

Hats off to the farmers.

i configured songweilab.com and zhxin123.com following this thread:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/412
the trick is to use virtualhost.
both sites are in development, though.

laziness and fear

fear dictates you over your own mind.
laziness seduces you to follow others.

and by finger pointing to each other, they work perfectly well together. to the extent that a lot of people forget the existence of the third option.

and to make the situation even worse, one may harm himself by trying to completely eliminate the two.

fear prevents one from danger.
laziness helps one to focus on important matters.

maybe the ultimate enemy for one is always the breaking of balance.

and it’s getting harder each day to restore it in this crazy world.

luckily, i found some nice remedies along the way, like this one:

“emotional content, not anger!“


i’m not a believer of any religion, but sometimes i want to say this is my salvation.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080619/tc_pcworld/147315
“
“More than half the world’s population now own a phone” was a typical headline.
To give you some idea, in the time it’s taken you to read this paragraph, another 3,000 or 4,000 phones will have been sold. Nokia alone is reported to sell in the region of 17 phones per second.
Let’s face it: 3 billion phones represent a lot of plastic.
The raw material alone needed to produce 3 billion phones is far from insignificant.
Essential ingredients such as coltan, which can be mined by hand and is in plentiful supply in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been blamed for helping fuel the civil war, increasing child labor rates, fostering illegal encroachment into national parks and the deaths of endangered gorillas. Once you have the ingredients, there is the shear amount of energy required in the manufacturing process and concerns about the working conditions in the factories. And, at the end of all that, there is the carbon emitted in shipping the finished products, usually by air.
Mobiles that do end up in the ground have the potential to come back to haunt the owner, and millions of other people, as toxic chemicals slowly seep out into the natural environment. A single lithium-ion battery has the potential to contaminate up to 600,000 liters of groundwater.
Unfortunately, it’s a subject that for many is largely ignored, and I– like many other people– don’t have any easy answers.
“

I’ve got high hope on android, and the open mobile platform it is going to open. I tried to participate the competition myself with some of my classmates but it didn’t work out. Mostly because of the lack of spare time, I think. But never mind. We might get loads of inspiration from the prize winners as well. let’s go:

AndroidScan
Developer: Jeffrey Sharkey
barcode. it’s originated from Japan and widely used there. A good way to link everything to the net:)

BioWallet
Developer: Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez
iris authentication. I guess bio authentication would become mandatory for mobile devices


One discovery: most of the prize winning software are developed by small teams, with one or two members.


CallACab
Developer: Konrad Huebner, Henning Boeger
similiar apps: call the cop. call a wrecker. custom one button emergency signaling. you don’t need to check your position and do the meanless talking.

Commandro
Developer: Alexey Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha
track your friends’s location and status

CookingCapsules
Developer: Mary Ann Cotter, Muthuselvam Ramadoss
I’ve no interest in cooking. but the idea would be appealling to me if it could download standard multivideo how-tos from the internet. Yeah. pervasive just in time learning.

EmRadar
Developer: Jack Kwok
Always a good idea to put emergency alert on mobiles. Like earthquake alerts…


goCart
Developer: Rylan Barnes
Yeah. we always wish we could the average price on line when we came across something nice.
Barcode would be universal…

gWalk
Developer: Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching,
Rene Scholze
personalized tours… I think we can also put this into the multimedia how-to directory. basicly my concept is a social networked ppt on the mobile devices.

IMEasy
Developer: Yan Shi
IM enabling collaboration on maps and paintings. Maybe we need to collaborate on more things.

Jigsaw
Developer: Mikhail Ksenzov
White board data capturing. Maybe folks can use it for books as well. But, actually we can just shoot a pic and do expensive photo processing on your server.

JOYity
Developer: Zelfi AG
Maybe we need to extend role play games to its literal meaning.


LifeAware
Developer: Gregory A. Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar
I don’t like this kind of “tracking” apps, really. I think a major mistake in computer app design is to consume too much time, energy and privacy of the user. Who would like to be tracked all day like this? And who would be interested in knowing every little detail of the others?
Less is more. the computer age is maturing enough to get over the playing new gadagets as a toy period.

Locale
Developer: Clare Bayley, Carter Jernigan, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin
change setting automatically with location information.
Yeah. we need the mobile to be more intelligent.

LreadyEmergencyManager
Developer: Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong
Nguyen
emergency connection. yeah. emergency.

Phonebook2.0
Developer: Voxmobili
Although I don’t like status tracking, I would appreciate a phonebook that would display “don’t call me” status on it.

PicSay
Developer: Eric Wijngaard
maybe we need to add video support as well.



SafetyNet
Developer: Michael DeJadon
Oh… didn’t i just think of this one…

SocialMonster
Developer: Siu Lung, Ben Hui, Tommy Ng
….
We can actually do this on facebook. Why bother creating another here?

SynchroSpot
Developer: Shaun Terry
Location based alert: yes, this is much more flexible than time based alert.

Teradesk
Developer: José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini
File sharing between mobiles/mobiles and computers


WritingPad
Developer: ShapeWriter Inc.
not quite sure how powerful this is… But we do need more powerful input method on the mobile.


Ideas:
coordination schemes with location tracking, group im, or even video conferencing.
remember those strategy game? how about putting drag-select-communicate scheme to the im with map?
not much mobile/online server scheme. for me this is something that can tap the true power of the mobile system. do we have a ssh term on android???? hey it’s linux! But I still haven’t found it.
not many bluetooth apps. I really think opportunistic forwarding is a great way to know people around you.

a gpled mind graph software in java

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

http://goosh.org/

o my gosh

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinasallseeingeye/print

Is this for real?

following this
key step:
1. set those environment variables anywhere before you start X11 server:
export XMODIFIERS=’@im=SCIM’
export GTKIMMODULE=”scim”
export QTIMMODULE=”scim”

2. start scim demean right before you start X11 server:
scim -d


example: my .xinitrc file:
export XMODIFIERS=’@im=SCIM’
export GTKIMMODULE=”scim”
export QTIMMODULE=”scim”
scim -d
fluxbox

windows:
add a desktop shortcut to C:\WINDOWS\system32\scrnsave
assign a key shortcut to it.
linux:
xset dpms force off
use some keyboard short cut to fire up this shell command.

You computer is a danger to you: it will eat your time, with so many fancy eye candies and the gateway to internet which is ever tempting your inner laziness.
It’s no news. People in the world are aware of that but most of them are still just one click away from being distracted, including me. And because I’m often unable to hold my basic instinct to try out all kinds of digital trash in my computer, I spend loads of time to reinstall it.

It’s probably a shame for a computer science major, since i have the knowledge to make things simple. Yeah. It’s a matter of principle for me. And in order to make this principle more established I decide to publish it here, spending 20 minutes more in distraction.

principle to stay as the master instead of the slave of my computers:
keep a *nix server whenever possible.(everyone should have their own server in a few years) and keep all the data that means something to you on it with a version control system.

if you have a working/secure system already, don’t change it until things break.

if you can do something online, don’t bother to install a software in your computer.

if you can use public computers with secure access to your server, don’t bother to carry laptop/pda with you.

on your computer, stick to the command line whenever possible. to hell, gui

linux for your server and windows/mac/any os the hardware you carry is intended for on your laptop/pda. it’s not that i like windows. the reason is to avoid dealing with hardware drivers yourself whenever possible. but 2 notions on windows: never use ie. have at least one malware detector.

keep a minimum set of software

install the software on your *nix instead of your laptop/pda/desktop whenever possible.

no themes, no eye candies. if you ever feel a need of change to the default desktop background, set it to grey. the user interface colors/themes are meant to be clear in logic and dump&humble in everything else.

avoid the radiation of the screen whenever possible.

if the work flow shaped by above principles are sub-optimum for quite a while(several days), spend sometime to think carefully how it can be improved the most while violating the above the least. and then stick to it.

above all, the aim is to spend the least amount of time dealing with the computer, or even looking at it.

green free source super lightweighted next generation text editor on both X and win32

google: the best page in the universe

Links to some of my creation/collections

• my notebook:i’ve been using this blog as a public notebook for a little bit, but i found this to be a better place to dump all that.
  
• my chinese blog:this one is not likely to be blocked in China.
  
• my google reader shared items:high volume. caution
  

Next phase of working at home: Leaving home to be continued

digital camera
grep photos in digital camera:
gphoto2

manage and upload your pictures:
picasa


webcam
webcam driver: qc-usb and linux-uvc-source
especially, support in debian:(i don’t know which one would work for the specific camera)
qc-usb-source
with the help of module-assistant
compile:
m-a a-i qc-usb-source
modprobe quickcam #i’m using quickcam

linux-uvc-source
with the help of module-assistant
compile:
m-a a-i linux-uvc-source
#for quickcam pro 5000 this one worked.

now install luvcview to see if your webcam is working

you can also do video chat in
amsn
or
ekiga

even do http streaming:
uvc streamer
install script for debian

su -
apt-get install linux-uvc-source amsn gphoto2 luvcview
m-a a-i linux-uvc-source
reboot
#you still need to install picasa

business etiquette video

management in China

openwrt kamikaze is a linux distribution that works with wireless routers and other embedded devices.
https://dev.openwrt.org/

lm system health sensor utility
http://www.lm-sensors.org/wiki/ProjectInformation

list open files
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsof

resize ext2 fs
http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/resize2fs8.html

find what sys call a program makes
http://linux.die.net/man/1/strace


monitoring network of computers
http://www.zabbix.com/

monitoring network of computers
http://munin.projects.linpro.no/

http://www.lirc.org/

they even have a list of config files for devices out there on the market.

i just found this fantastic way of sending signals along powerline at your home:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10%28industrystandard%29

and this is one of its hardware implementation:CM11A
http://www.smarthome.com/1140.html

and a linux program to talk to the computer interface.
http://heyu.tanj.com/

so, we have a complete solution of basic home automation
now. although the options of actuation is quite limited. and CM11A has its share of problems. but i guess there are a lot more solutions out there, and many more to come in the future. i knew of this but always thought it’s kind of distant from everyday life. now, it’s right there in front of me. the more you think about it the more fascinating it could be. we really can’t blame Bill Gates for putting so much money into it:)

from http://www.gnokii.org/ “

gnokii features

gnokii allows you to communicate with the phone over the serial cable connection, usb connection (support depends mostly on the operating system level support), infrared connection and bluetooth connection.

gnokii provides many functionality of different areas for user to manipulate mobile phone.

SMS

You can send SMS, receive them and save them in the phone. gnokii supports delivery reports, picture messages (Nokia own protocol), concatenated messages, wap pushes, unicode messsages. gnokii allows you to send and receive logos and ringtones over SMS.

Phonebook

gnokii offers you possibility to read and write phonebook. Phonebook entries can be displayed in human readable form or can be exported to comma separated output, vCard version 3.0 format or ldif format. You can import data from the same formats. Please note, that supported phonebook entries depend on the phone features and therefore may not be all imported.

Calendar

gnokii supports either calendar or todo lists. gnokii is capable to export calendar to iCal files and import them from the same format. Most calendar features like different types of events, recurrence, start and end times are supported.

Call management

You can initiate and answer calls with gnokii.

Other

Among other gnokii capabilities you’ll find security options like entering PIN, ringtone and logo handling and many many others

“