Although this is a relatively mundane topic for a blog, it is ineluctable to be written down as well. Looking back to my 2009’s resolution set out 364 days ago, not a very strong finish I have committed. The only purpose for such a write-up is very personal: I want to record it before all memories faded.

My ranking system:

  • Not done is nothing or almost nothing has been achieved on this item.
  • Progress is the item has not been fully finished. But some progresses have been made so far.
  • Done is the item has been finished or on the track. No more extra efforts are required for it.

2009 New Year Resolution:

> Look into my future and set out the masterplan (Progress)
> Build logical mindset (Progress)
> Keep concerntration (Progress)
> Keep a low profile and be humble (Done)
> Stay away from wrath (Done)
> Master 10000+ new words (Progress)
> Recite “Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century” (Not done)
> On writing well (Not done)
> Better and stronger figure (Not done)
> Advance programming skill (Done)
> Deep understanding on cloud computing (Done)
> Practice sketching (Not done)
> Play acoustic guitar (Not done)
> Read Bible (Not done)
> Get driving license (Progress)
> 2 trips abroad (Done)
> 30k+ RMB pocket money (Done)
> A more serious relationship (Done)
> Stop scratching my head (Not done)
> Listen to classical music (Done)
> Aesthetics knowledge (Not done)

A summary:

  • Not done: 40%
  • Progress: 25%
  • Done: 35%

如何阅读一本书 (Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren)
- Highlight Loc. 3743 | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 1970, 09:30 AM

在评断一本理论性的书时,读者必须观察他自己与作者之间的原理与假设的一致性或差异性。在评断一本实用性的书时,所有的事都与结果及目标有关。如果你不能分享马克思对经济价值的狂热,他的经济教条与改革措施对你来说就有点虚假或无关
==========
如何阅读一本书 (Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren)
- Highlight Loc. 3755-57 | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 1970, 09:33 AM

当你在阅读任何一种实用书时,一定要问你自己两个主要的问题。第一:作者的目的是什么?第二:他建议用什么方法达到这个目的?以原理为主的书要比以规则
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如何阅读一本书 (Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren)
- Highlight Loc. 1219-21 | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 1970, 10:02 AM

分析阅读的第一个规则可以这么说:规则一,你一定要知道自己在读的是哪一类书,而且要越早知道越好。最好早在你开始阅读之前就先知道。
==========
如何阅读一本书 (Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren)
- Highlight Loc. 1253-55 | Added on Tuesday, February 03, 1970, 10:05 AM

一开始时,你要先检视这本书—用检视阅读先浏览一遍。你读读书名、副标题、目录,然后最少要看看作者的序言、摘要介绍及索引。如果这本书有书衣,要看看出版者的宣传文案。这些都是作者在向你传递讯号,让你知道风朝哪个方向吹。如果你不肯停、看、听,那也不是他的错。
==========
The New Yorker (The New Yorker)
- Highlight Loc. 194-96 | Added on Tuesday, February 10, 1970, 10:04 AM

There’s a phenomenon in charity called the “identifiable victim” effect: the best way to get people to give is to focus on one person who’s going to benefit from the donation, rather than on a large group.
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Technology (8-29) (Feedbooks)
- Highlight Loc. 1205-6 | Added on Tuesday, February 17, 1970, 09:38 AM

Nothing can kill innovation faster than the performance anxiety that results from outsized ambition.
==========
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert B. Cialdini)
- Highlight Loc. 151 | Added on Thursday, February 19, 1970, 04:27 AM

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason.
==========
The Good Enough Revolution When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine (Wired)
- Highlight Loc. 168-70 | Added on Saturday, February 21, 1970, 04:19 AM

to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we’ve stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we’re now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price.
==========

I am very tired. Seriously, I start to looking for chances leaving this city and pursue a period of new life.

I was not quite happy with the default pale theme of Flash Builder 4 beta. In these days, the infamous Notepad++ really got my attention and I am constantly using it in various scenarios from differing the code to code reading. One of the state of art features is its pre-delivered themes: Bespin. The theme itself inherits from KDE. A dark theme does good for eye sight. After I binged around (no longer googled :) ), no dice. So I managed to customize one for myself at the first convenience. Here is the outcome:

FB4_Bespin_Color

If you have the same complains with the bleached background of Flash Builder or any eclipse based IDE, you can save the time and grab the preference file here: FB4_Bespin_Color-0824.epf.

3browsers

Internet Explorer is essential. I need it to purchase from Taobao and pay my bills through online bank system. So far ActiveX is still the very preference of these B2C websites.

Firefox is ubiquitous. I am an active user for various productive web2.0 apps like Xmarks, Tor, Instapaper and on and on. They only integrated well with FF and treat IE as quaint decades before. The cons are it’s no longer the fastest browser on the market, UI is not so brilliant against Chrome and Safari.

Chrome is tomorrow’s star. I do love its fastest Javascript engine V8, it’s graceful UI cope with Windows 7. Fast and neat. Though I am not quite keen to it’s tightly bound with Google products like Bookmark sync. It’s not yet poised to a majority adoption before Google can merge stable/beta/dev branches together someday.

Additionally, I’m a day to day user of Safari under OS X.

Why there is not an all in one browser which covers all my not so ambitious needs? Like no longer bothered to open all of three in the system?

simple0808

Why simplicity matters? As we are more forgetful than we believe. Like this ad slogan, I didn’t recoganize it’s a play on words at my first glance.

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/google/ci_12953995

Mercury News Interview: CEO Eric Schmidt on Google, Apple and Microsoft

By Elise Ackerman

Mercury News
Posted: 07/31/2009 02:00:00 PM PDT
Updated: 08/02/2009 07:27:22 AM PDT

When Eric Schmidt joined Google eight years ago, he didn’t think the popular startup was destined to become one of Microsoft’s most formidable challengers. As Schmidt said in an exclusive interview with the Mercury News recently, he didn’t even think Google would ever make a significant amount of money.

But that didn’t matter. Schmidt had already had an illustrious career as a top executive at Sun Microsystems and, more recently, as chief executive at Novell. He wanted to have good conversations and be around interesting people he liked who were working on cool technology. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin fit the bill, with an emphasis on “interesting.” And thus was born one of the most successful management teams in recent history.

Near the fifth anniversary of Google’s initial public stock offering, Schmidt recalls some of his early, jarring days as Google’s top executive, explains the company’s unique relationship with Apple and addresses recent scrutiny of its business practices. The following is an edited transcript.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not saying I will upgrade my current set soon. Just a wish list for those I really like to have if there is enough of pocket money.

  • (Done 09/07) iPhone 3G S. Yes, even the outside doesn’t change anything, what’s inside the brickle plastic shell attracts me: Cortex A8 CPU, 256MB RAM, and Power VR SGX GPU, 54% faster than his brother iPhone 3G.
  • Kindle DX (done 09/08). I have a bunch of books on the reading list. Most of them I cannot find in local book store. Kindle DX is a killer gadget for reading PDF files.
  • Palm Pre (abandoned). With the release of its Web OS source code and with the good memory with Treo 600/750, there is enough of reason to believe this revolution hit from Palm.
  • New model of Macbook/Pro. The keyboard of my old MBP is annoying, prone to dust and with the protector, it just feels weird.

The job and life itself holds all the pressures that are inevitable, the small cubic things are some relieves I could take and afford.

Jun.17

Face myself

I made the decision to face myself. Started from 27. Be real and be strong.

I was playing around Ant to try out automation (command-line) build. It is declaimed by Adobe that this feature will be enhanced somehow in upcoming Flash Builder 4. Although I have not had a chance to tickle it there are a couple of classes I found started from “automation” in the 4.0.0 sdk. A signal of that?

Anyway, I followed this series of great tutorial, not too long enough I stucked at the part 2 when I need to compile the project with Flex mxmlc compiler. Some errors poped up and another googling game came right after. Sadly, all of them didn’t work like expected.

The root cause was stupidly simple. Ant doesn’t like back slashes for folder path (“\”). Because I installed FB in the default Application folder, the folder path goes like:

/Applications/Adobe\ Flash\ Builder\ Beta/sdks/4.0.0

To enable Ant work as you wish, remove all the back slashes and here we go!

Today when I was trying to port a Flex 3 library project to new released Flex 4 beta, I got such compiler error went as:

Invalid Embed directive in stylesheet – can’t resolve source ‘Embed(“../../images/ECUEGraphics/Alerts/3D/Alertcritical3D.gif”)’

I located the line of the code in a locale file which helped point to an embedded file, the relative file path seemed to be damnly right and the file itself laid there. I try to use another path finding way to start with “image/…”. As it worked for me pretty well and it’s my preference over this relative path. Still, no dice.

Then I googled around and eventually this tip lighted the bulb. The author had exactly the same problem only his code was in a CSS file while mine is in locale file. So I changed the code from:

BASE_ALERT_3D_CRITICAL_IMAGE		=Embed("../../images/ECUEGraphics/Alerts/3D/Alertcritical3D.gif"

to

BASE_ALERT_3D_CRITICAL_IMAGE		="images/ECUEGraphics/Alerts/3D/Alertcritical3D.gif"

then everything worked like a charm. I didn’t know why as same metadata worked perfectly in my CSS file. Anyway, a piece of note here.

I got at least 3 facebook confirmation messages this morning. That is an indicator that people get used to handle their social requests as their first job in the morning prior to the job they are set. Even I am now writing a blog post as the first thing I do in the Wednesday.

We are more caring about people not the job or work in essence.