Aftermath: Population Zero

I watched a movie tonight on CTV HDTV channel. "Aftermath: Population Zero".  It's a sci-fi movie or future projection, about the changes and evolve of earth after all the human beings disappear in one day.  This movie is quite thought provoking.

There is no cast in this movie, only a narrator explains what's happening.

Within the first couple of hours, power outage everywhere. After backup power depleted, most of the cities will be out of electrical power in a few days.  The nuclear power plan may last longer with diesel backup generators.  However, they will end up with disasters after the diesel run out.

Power outage, nuclear power plans explosion, industrial plants explosion, those won't damage the earth too much, just the related areas.  Animals will thrive and rule the earth again.  They are evolved to live on the earth in most of the conditions for thousands of years.

Most of the human built building or constructions will be collapsed or damaged in two centuries. The remaining parts ironically include the Great Wall in China and other ancient buildings like the Pyramid.
The carbon oxides generated by human beings will be absorbed by mother nature in less than a hundred years.  The movie also projects the world without human beings after 1000 years. There is no obvious sign of human being on earth anymore. The next ice age will hit the earth after maybe 25,000 years.

It takes human beings 10,000 years to establish the civilizations and put our signs on the earth. Compared to the 4.5 billions years age of earth, it is just a blink of eye.

Dream of Red Chamber

Dream of Red Chamber
Originally uploaded by tqhh

I uploaded the photos I took this September when we were watching the "Dream of Red Chamber" dance in The Center in Vancouver.
The dance was based on the traditional classic Chinese Novel, written by an author in Qing Dynasty. The novel was claimed the best four classic in China. Almost everyone in China knows the basic storyline of the novel.

The show was performed by Beijing Dance Group. It's a good show with fantastic stage design, fabulous light effect and music. However, I was expecting the music would be familiar to us, but it wasn't. Maybe because of the copyright issue, they didn't use the the music from the popular TV drama of the same story.

The show was great. It is divided into several scenarios, from DaiYu entering the House of Jia, Grandma Liu and her grandson, the complex relationship among BaoYu, DaiYu, and BaoCai, till the poem party, flower funeral, marriage of BaoYu and DaiYu, ended with the death of DaiYu and BaoYu went to temple. It's a complete story and will be most enjoyable if you are familiar with the original novel.

Most of the audience there were Chinese. That's totally understandable. For oversea Chinese, the dance is like a cultural feast.

New Year Gathering

We had a new year gathering with friends last night in Richmond.  We visited Nancy and her newborn baby girl before the dinner.  The baby girl is so cute and lovely, looks very similar to her dad.

We talked about new year's resolution during the dinner, seemed nobody had really come up with any real or practical resolution in the 2010.

When I was running outside today, I found my iPod touch sucks. The volume down button won't work and the shuffle doesn't work as well. This new iPod touch is not a good buy.  Control is too much trouble, although it seemed innovative in the first impression.  I'd rather use a reliable control system like before.

English Writing

As I write more and more blog posts, I found it is necessary to learn more about English writing.

The following is a book review I read recently, which I found it's a good example of writing.

"With the increasing number of Linux programming books on the market, the new Linux coder is left in a bit of a muddle.
Information about Linux is spreading—a good thing in terms of the open-source model and the community that supports it. The influx of new Linux authors also tends to decrease the odds of finding literacy and technical expertise in the same place. Numerous would-be writers ride the popularity wave of “Penguin Power!”, resulting in increasing numbers of Linux “bibles”, most of which are just as difficult to follow as the original and not nearly as imaginative. In either case, the context is most often distorted, if presented at all. Then again, there are exceptions."

Running changed my life

When I was running today, I was pondering my running habit. It's the end of 2009 and a good opportunity to retrospect my life, especially the running habit.

I started running from about 2007, to prepare for Vancouver Sun Run.  That's the first time I seriously start running and preparing for a race.  Before that, I was running in gym during work-out as a warm-up.  I used to run 3 times a week with 30 minutes covering 5k, on and off.  I trained together with Kenneth, a pretty good long time runner in our company.  We ran every Monday at lunch time.  My plan was to finish Sun Run within 60 minutes. We followed the training plan created by Kenneth, ran about 15-25 minutes each session, plus warm-up and cool-down.  During the training session, my confidence was built up gradually.  One night, I tried to run 10k on the treadmill in the gym of our apartment and I made it.  I can still remember how excited I was and I was anxious to tell Kenneth that I had made my first 10k in my life on treadmill.  I really believed that I can finish Sun Run 10k. The Sun Run wasn't too bad and I made it in 56:56 the first time.

I wasn't a runner at all in my early time.  I run sometimes in the morning, usually 2k, urged by my parents in middle school.  I was bad at running, jumping, because I had no interest and I thought I had no talent in them.
In my university, one roommate who is an avid runner run for 10 years.  He went out for a running almost every night.  He didn't inspire me but his persistence had impressed me.  I found the first time that running can be so addictive to a person.  I started running at the fourth year after I recovered from a severe headache due to nose inflammation and lack of activities.  I ran couple of times at night.  I don't remember the details, but I thought that it wasn't too bad as I had no bad memories.

The second time I tried to run was during my GRE preparation.  As Mr. Yu Minhong mentioned, you may run 2,400m every night to encourage you to score 2,400 during the GRE test, which is the 100%.  I am a kind of guy easily motivated and I started running again.  I don't know how much I ran every night, but I do remember that I ran at least half an hour in the humid and hot summer night, almost every night.  At that time, I found running not boring to me, as my brain wasn't rest and I can think of anything during the running.

My interest in running resumed after the first Sun Run, but hadn't yet formed a habit of running.  The second year I attended Sun Run with a better time of 51:56.  That's a bit improvement to me and my interest in running was ignited eventually.  I was very confident that I can do a better job in running.  I decided to pursuit a higher goal of running.  I registered the Victoria Half Marathon in the Fall.  And I then attended the running clinic of the running room.  I was training for the half marathon in the summer time.   I did couple of long run from 12k to 16k.  I was confident again that I could made the half marathon.  At the same time, I had purchased the Garmin 305 running watch and two pairs of professional running shoes.  I checked the runner's forum daily to get inspired by other runners' stories. I went to Victoria with my parents to attend my first half marathon race in my life.  The experience was great to run a race with thousands of runners, in a beautiful city full of scenic views during the race. I made the race in 1:56:xx, which gave me a good boost of running enthusiasm as I could finish my first HM in 2 hours.

I kept running after the race and I had attended the Harley to Harrison 100K relay together with other 7 runners.  I was the first leg of the relay.  I got up at 4am in the morning and started the race around 6am. Our team did pretty good, ranked No. 5 in non-professional runners.  Like a miracle, I hadn't had any serious injury in my running, maybe because I hadn't pushed me too hard. :-)

The beginning of 2009 unravel the climax of my running habit for my 34 years of life.  I had registered the Vancouver Marathon 2009 after I finished the Victoria half marathon.  I started training with my own plan, a confident and aggressive plan.  I planed to finish my first marathon in 4 hours, which is not impractical based on my time of half marathon.  I started my training in January, when the road were still covered with snow. I ran downhill from the top of Burnaby mountain, which is really a bad idea.  I injured my left knee in the second time I ran downhill.  The injury turned out to be the first serious injury of running, ITBS.  I felt the pain during my training on Burnaby lake and I had to cut my training plan.  I heavily cut back my mileage and run very slow with Ying in the lunch time to get a slow recovery.  I did massages and bought supplements to help the recovery of the knee.  I did a long run in March for about 20 miles. I did it slowly and did no harm to my knee.  After that, I had confidence again to finish my first marathon, although my goal had been adjusted to just finish strong, instead of 4 hours.  The Sun Run added some more confidence in my running. I finished my 3rd Sun Run within 50 minutes.

The Vancouver Marathon was my first marathon.  The journey had been covered in my previous post "Vancouver Marathon".

My running interest kept going high after the first marathon. I then registered the Okanagan Marathon in Fall. This time, I didn't want to be too aggressive.  I strictly followed the Hal Higdon's 18 weeks marathon training plan. I only missed 2-3 times running in the whole 18 weeks' plan.  I can still remember that how I got up very early in the morning to finish my 12k, 20k running plan during my vacation to Ucluelet, how I stayed late to run 11k watching the sunset, how I managed to finish the 20 miles running on treadmill, how I run freely in the downpour of rain...  I am still amazed at my capability to finish the 18 weeks' plan rigorously. It's a life changing experience and the training really paid off.  I exceeded my best estimate during the race. The details of the race is recorded in my post "Okanagon Marathon PR'ed".

My life is completely changed after two marathons.  I am now a very confident person in running.  I also believe that with proper plan and preparation, people can reach targets that they can't even think of in the beginning. I learned a lot from running and it benefits me both physically and mentally.  Running changed my life forever.

Boxing day

We went out today to check out the busy boxing day.   There is as many people as before this year, due to the impact of financial crisis.  Still a lot of people in Walmart and Superstore.  Guess people are in favor of bargain store in this situation.

Urban Network Down again

Last night, the Internet at my home was down again.  I left a message to urban network.  They called me that the network was recovered last night around 2am. I hate Urban network.  It's network is really unstable.  Down once a month.  I hate it.  I'll switch to Shaw cable soon.

Interesting English Idioms

When you read books or watch movies, you sometimes bump into some interesting English idioms.  I'd like to record some idioms or phrases I learned in this post.

Those idioms or phrases can't be interpreted literally.  Some of them are just daily English that I don't know of.

white elephant: expensive but useless stuff
cut the cheese: fart
bowel movement: pooh
smooch: kiss and hold each other closely

Survivor, RCMP and Boxing Day

Survivor:

I missed the seasonal finale of the latest Survivor: Samoa last night.  I thought it is on TV tonight, but I am wrong.  Anyway, I have downloaded the latest episode and will watch tomorrow.

(updates)

I just watched the seasonal finale of the Survivor: samoa with Linda  this morning.  As I expected, Russel entered the final three.  However, he didn't win the million dollar eventually, instead, Natalie won it.  This is somehow out of my expectation, but it still makes sense.  The producers pushed Russel  as the most controversial and debatable player in this season.  Russel is "evil", but he is really a seriously player in this show.  I can understand that most of the jury don't like him as he had introduced a lot of negative impact to the game.  However, it is his way of playing this game.  He entered the final three because of his strategic playing and he lost because he had offended other players.  Nobody likes be played or manipulated by a single powerful player in the show and they revenged eventually by voting for Natalie.  Interesting, for audience like me, Russel was voted the player of the show and won 100k.  Anyway, this season is interesting.  Everyone was played by Russel, actually, by producers.  Producers love to see this kind of players in the show as they are provocative and eyeball attractors. I guess producers intentionally broadcast a lot scenes of the "evil" behavior of Russel.  Anyway, as audience, we love the dramatic moment and uncertainty of the show.  That's the main reason I love watching reality show.


RCMP:

I've checked the application procedure of RCMP as I am interested in this type of career.  You have to pass a sort of physical assessment, just like the military entrance exam.  I think that I am capable of passing the assessment after my work out this year.

The basic measurement includes:

* run 5 km in 22 minutes
* push-up 20
* pull-up 6
* bench press 100% weight

The superior standard is:

* run 5 km in 19 minutes
* push-up 70+
* pull-up 18+
* bench press 150% weight

You will be paid $500 per week during the 22 weeks cadet academy training. After the training, if you can pass all the exams, you will be employed.  The starting salary is about $46,000 annually and will increase to $76,000 in three years.  Basically, $10,000 raise each year, which is not bad at all.  Think about it, you are guaranteed $76,000 per year after 3 years.  With all the benefit and retirement pension plan, it is quite a good career direction once you are both physically and mentally ready for this job.  RCMP is like FBI in the states.  The job could be quite interesting, better than the boring corporate jobs.

Boxing Day:

I've ordered a portable harddrive from bestbuy.ca.  My wishlist includes:

* external card reader
* some books
* a lamp for reading

New year's resolution

To discuss the new year's resolution in this post.

* Get ready for the baby girl
* Fitness workout, try to lose 20 lbs, think about fitness trainer certificate
* Vancouver marathon 2010, and one more in fall
* New job opportunity
*

merry X'mas

Today is the X'mas eve.  I worked from home this morning, as usually we can go home after the lunch.

I worked out this afternoon in the gym downstairs.

I cooked a delicious dinner tonight and had wines with my in-laws.

I had vacuumed my apt tonight and cut my hair myself.

Seems a pretty busy Xmas eve. :-)

got my sony ebook reader

I received my Sony Ebook Reader PRS-600 last night and I was eager to play with my new toy.  I've downloaded a lot of ebooks to my reader.

The "calibre" ebook program is an excellent program.  I used it on my Windows and Linux platform.  The original Sony library program sucks.  It won't allow you modify the meta information of the ebooks.  The "calibre" supports most of the popular ebook readers on market. It easily detects your device and connect to it.  It support modification of the meta data and provides fetch news function and convert the news to ebook format, which is pretty convenient.

Another tool useful is the "chm2pdf" under Linux.  I can use it to convert the chm book to pdf format and download it to my reader.

Under Windows, if you have Acrobat (not reader) installed, you can virtually convert any document to pdf format by printing to the Acrobat printer.  I actually realized this point after I managed to install another universal document converter, which is not more than a very slow virtual printer device.

Anyway, I love my book reader, although it is a bit slower than my expectation.

Phoebe and Mike's wedding

It's Phoebe and Mike's wedding yesterday.  I was the "official" photographer. :-)


The wedding started from 4pm in the indoor garden of Best Western Coquitlam. It's a nice place for wedding, with a lot of green plants and a special arch.

The wedding was well planned by Phoebe.  She looked beautiful with the white wedding dress.

We then went to the Executive Hotel for the reception.  The food was great and I ate too much.
After the reception, the DJ arrived and the dance started. I actually danced for a while to burn some calories.

After weight loss, I found that I can dance better than before. :-)

Calcium

We went to see Dr. Zhang yesterday.  During the visit, we were discussing about the calcium. Dr. Zhang mentioned that spasm at night is usually caused by the shortage of calcium.  (My research shows that short of magnesium can also cause spasm.) The remedy is to take calcium supplementary plus magnesium.

Calcium exists in many food.  However it is not easy to absorb them by human body.  That's why children may take extra Vitamin D to help absorb calcium.  Runners needs more calcium, thus running under the sunshine is a good method, so long as you have sun cream covered.  Sunshine will help form Vitamin D in human body.

Many Chinese old ladies broken their bones easily as they are short of calcium.  After my research, I found many bone related problem are actually caused by short of calcium, like bone spurs.

It is very important to drink milk everyday to get enough calcium and regular exercise to beef up the strength of bones.

Baby's party

We went to the baby's first month party of Andrew's.  It's a nice and well-organized party.  In total, around 60 people, including Andrew's friends, Lynn's friends, and families.

What's interesting is I met my co-worker in the party, as his wife is a friend of Lynn.
The world is so small.  You may meet people from different background in un-expected places.

Also, there are couple of new babies in the party. One baby girl, and two baby boys, including Ryan.

The food was great.  All my favorite.

All the best wishes to Ryan and Andrew, Lynn and families.

experience of weight loss

I've recorded the lowest weight this morning since my weight loss program, 160.4 lbs.  It's 30 lbs less than my previous heaviest weight.

It's a good milestone to reach 160 lbs.  I am only 0.4 lbs away from my goal of 2009, although this goal wasn't set for a long time. :-)

The secret for my weight loss is exercise + diet plan.
You have to maintain a negative energy balance, which means less intake than consumed.

I am a workout fanatic now.  The body felt uncomfortable if no work-out everyday.
Weight training is the most effective way to lose weight as more muscle means hight metabolism, which will burn more calories after work out.  Cardio is also important.  It is very healthy.  As a runner, I am addicted to Cardio.

The diet plan is not complicated.  I am taking a low carb, low GI diet plan.  And I have to stay away from sugar.  For each food, I'll read the nutrition information, if the percentage of sugar is high, it won't be on my shopping list.

That's my experience and it worked well.

flashforward

I watched 10 episodes of the Sci-fi drama "Flashforward" last weekend.  It's the best Sci-fi drama I watched recently.   I would rate it as 4.5 out of 5.

The plot was based on the "Flashforward" novel written by a Canadian novelist. All human beings had experienced 137 seconds of loss of consciousness, due to some physics experiment.  20 millions people lost their life in these 137 seconds. Almost everyone seemed having some vision of the future 6 months later.

Everyone's life has been changed some way due the vision of the future.
FBI agents Mark and their colleagues are trying to figure out the reason and have unraveled some secret plan under the table.  Characters in the drama have also presented different personal issues, like drinking, unfaithful, post war syndrome, ...
The plot went to pretty tight and seemed plausible so far.

I believe that it had borrowed some element from Heroes, where main characters are people with super powers. The similarities are obvious. They both had some vision to the future.

I love the discussion of future and their impact in sci-fi novel, tv.  The dream and vision to the future may be the eternal topic of sci-fi.

kernel upgrade and merge

Come back to the office and worked a busy day today.

I have fixed the kernel module loading problem by fixing the bootmemheap module.  The kernel initialization code had changed the order.  As the bootmemheap has to be setup before the slab is setup and after the mmu is initialized, we have find a proper place to setup the bootmemheap.  It was setup in the timer initialization procedure, but now the timer initialization is moved after the slab initialization.  So, we have to use a early boot parameter to initialize the bootmemheap.  This fix is actually proposed by Dave and I ported it back from another branch to the 2.6.32 kernel.

I re-discovered the vmlinux.lds linker script and studied it again for the proper initialization order of the functions.

I have merged the changes from the main branch to the new chip supporting branch.  Will upgrade the kernel for the new chip tomorrow.

Agony of the toothache

I was fighting with the toothache and headache since last Thursday.  The ordeal is the most painful experience I ever had in my life. It's a "good" experience and lesson to me.

The pain started from a small crack in one tooth.  I wasn't aware of the crack maybe a month ago.
The slight pain caused by the crack was classified by me to the sensitivity problem of the teeth, which was a known problem to me. Until the teeth hygiene procedure was done on last Friday morning, the dentist had noticed the crack and asked me whether it was painful or not.  I wasn't 100% sure about the pain and had ignored it.  So, I stupidly answered no.  It wasn't painful at that moment actually. I won't realize the revenge of the ignorance will come that soon.

I had since made an appointment with my dentist to fill the crack on Monday morning.  Thus, I thought I am settled and the treatment wasn't too far from Friday. I got a cold in the meantime. The toothache was getting worse since Friday night.  I had to take Advil to help the sleep.  Daytime in Saturday wasn't that bad.  I felt the pain a little bit, but the night after the party is really the climax and nightmare.  I went to TK's X'mas party with Linda. We had great food and I drank a glass of red wine, which is the best catalyst of the toothache.  The party was filled with fun and it was the best company X'mas party I ever had. During the trip back home, the toothache and the following headache finally strike me down in the cab and the whole night was ruined. I can't help moaning in the cab because of the sharp and lasting pain in my left face.  I held a tight fist and the whole body to resist crying out of the pain.

The pain was originated from the deep bottom of the tooth with crack and it spread to the upper part till the top of the ear.  I felt like someone was pulling my nerve relentlessly, the pain come and went like tide.  Sometimes strong and sometimes weak.  When I got home, I had tried all kinds of methods to help resist the pain, like massage the head, ice the face, or play dead. I had only a few minutes for a short recover and I had to prepare the next wave of pain.  I can hardly sleep on Saturday night.  The urge of calling 911 to get immediate treatment popped up from my head couple of times in the night.  Only till the dawn of Sunday, I fell asleep eventually with the help of Advil and Tylenol, or the exhaustion helped it. Oh, my God.  I will convert myself into a devout Christan if God had helped me that night.

I didn't go out on Sunday and just stayed home watching TV.  The daytime was somehow not too bad. The pain attacked me several times.  After the dinner, the pain was coming precisely every hour, lasting 5-10 minutes. I had to sit idle and withstand the pain until it receded.  The better part was I knew that it will last 10 minutes and come again one hour latter.  That gave me a small hope of one hour's painless life.  The next hour, the pain come back again and the life was suffering again.

When I laid down on the bed that night, the pain was coming sooner than ever.  Almost every 10-15 minutes, I had to hold my hand tightly, grab my arm or leg, moan a little bit to relief the pain.  I had cursed why the night was so long.  I had to sit up and the pain was slightly better when my body was up. The whole left face was numb and hot. Man, I sympathize now why some patients had to seek for solace from pot.  The marijuana may temporarily relief the unbeatable pain of those patients. I took Advil and it didn't help at all.  I finally fell asleep again for a few hour early this morning.

The dentist told me that I had to do the root canal treatment to get rid of the bad tooth nerves on that cracked tooth.  The pain was caused totally by the dying tooth nerves.  My tooth nerve, it punished me as I had abandoned it at first without proper treatment of them in the first place.  After sitting on the operation chair in a stationary pose uncomfortably for two hours, the root canal treatment was finally finished. During the treatment, I had made my mind that I have to be very careful with my teeth afterward, be very gentle to them, to take good care of them, to cure them for any small problems.  They will treat you they way you treat them.

I don't want to endure the agony of the toothache anymore.  It's unforgettable in my whole life. I just need to "enjoy" it once and that's more than enough.

kernel upgrade

I am working on kernel upgrade to 2.6.32 today.  Ported all our patches and working on API changes.  Looks promising and I hope I can finish it by tomorrow.

I interviewed 3 applicants today.  Two of them are pretty good and ranked No.1 and 2 so far.

some misunderstood sayings

I was discussing the six most misunderstood traditional sayings in China with Linda tonight.  I searched the Internet and found the original sayings.


Sometimes, people only know a part of the original sentence and make use of it, regardless of the original meaning of the whole sentence.  That's how the misunderstanding happens.


原句：“或曰：‘以德报怨，何如？’子曰：“何以报德？以直报怨，以德报德” ————《论语 宪问》 

原句：。“子曰：兴于诗，立于礼，成于乐。子曰：民可使由之，不可使知之。”——————《论语·秦伯》 


原句：量小非君子，无度不丈夫。——————民间谚语联对 

原句：吾生也有涯，而知也无涯，以有涯随无涯，殆已 ——————《庄子·养生主》 


原句：相濡以沫，不如相忘于江湖——————《庄子·大宗师》 

原句：天地不仁，以万物为刍狗，圣人不仁，以百姓为刍狗——————《道德经》 

Weather, Amazing Race, and Final Destination

Today's highest temperature is around 1 degree and the lowest is as low as -6 degree.  It's quite a cold winter, at least in December.  This week the temperature is forecast to be high 0 and low -7.  It's like Calgary in Vancouver.

The climate is changing so fast every year.  Last year, we got snow as early as later November.  This year, the November is full of rains.  It's sunshine since the first day of December, but the weather is getting colder. Who knows what gonna happen each year with the global climate changed faster than ever.

I watched the seasonal finale of "Amazing Race" last night.  As I expected and forecast, Meghan and Cheyne won the 1 million dollars. They had won a lot of legs in this season.  It is said that they are the one of the winningest in the history of amazing race.  That's great and I am fan of them.  This couple are intelligent, hard working and quite cooperative.  They deserve the winning.

I had also watched the "Final Destination IV" yesterday.  It's the fourth one of the film series.  As the previous three, it's filled with various brutal and bloody death scenes.  I guess audiences are entertained with the various death scenarios, and was trying to challenge the director's imagination and creativity on the death events.  This one has introduced something a bit different.  The main character seemed relieved and saved his girlfriend by saving life of a lot others.  However, the destination is destined.  They can't escape it at the end.  As said by the character, "we probably shouldn't be here from the very beginning", and they died.

long run

I did my first long run in the winter season.  Today is a day with nice weather.  Sunny but not very windy in the morning.  I got up at 8:30am and went out without any breakfast.  I ran 10 miles in 1:26:39. The running was great.  I covered myself with gloves, head band, and a windshield jacket.  It's cold, but running was smooth.  I actually met several runners on the road. After the running, I had recorded the lowest weight since my training, 162.6lb.  That's the weight after long run without drinking and snacks.  So, it is the next record for me to break.

I need to start the 18 weeks running from the end of Dec.  So, I have 3 more weeks to lose more weight before the start of the training. I had a brunch buffet this noon, and I really felt guilty of having too much food in the lunch.  I have to skip the dinner for this.

My goal of the next marathon is 3:30:00. Based on the McMillan Running calculator,  I should set my long run pace to 5:18 to 5:55 minutes per km.  My marathon pace is 4:59 minutes per km.  I decide to set my long run pace to 5:20 from beginning.

Linux Kernel, Xmas Party, and Shopping

Too late last night to post an entry. So, this one is a bit longer then.

Three things to talk about.

The first thing is that, with the release of Linux kernel 2.6.32. Broadcom's Bcmring SoC is officially support in Linux Kernel.  And my name is officially imprinted as the maintainer of this architecture in Linux kernel's history.  :-)  I had made 1.2% line of code changes in this version of kernel and ranked 11th, among all the kernel developers in the whole world.  I didn't write those code, but I served as the gate keeper and liaison of the open source community and our developers.  Broadcom actually didn't not a bad job in support Linux kernel in this release.  It ranked No. 4 among all the companies that supported this version of kernel.

We had the Xmas party last night at Radission Richmond.  This party is saved at the last moment.  It's fun as we got people involved to play games after the dinner, instead of the old casino games.  The only issue is that less people were involved in the post dinner games.  It would be better to have more people involved in games. like team competition, that would be more fun.  Anyway, this kind of after dinner activities are not bad.  Ying won the second prize of the lucky draw.  Good to her.  But, she may have made the biggest joke of 2009, but answering question of how many transistors in our latest released chip.  She estimated about 1000, which is a huge joke, as of today's technology, the chip normally has transistors in the order of millions.  You can't believe that the answer is coming from an engineer working in semiconductor industry. What a shame. :-(

Went out for shopping this morning and met three friends in Metrotown.  What a small village of Vancouver. One is my alumni, one is my classmate in SFU, and one is my coworker.  Incidentally, all went to shopping in Metrotown/crystal mall at the same period of time.
I went to SonyStyle store to check out the ebook reader PRS600. This reader is a bit heavier than I thought.  The E-ink screen is interesting, which looks exactly like a paper.  Anyway, maybe my expectation was a very light weight book reader, or maybe the commercial of ebook readers looks so attractive, I was slightly disappointed about the book reader.  But I still decided to get one, for no other reason, just the convenience of carrying around a lot of books you can read.  That's the beauty of the ebook readers.

legal courses

I took two online legal courses today offered by the company regarding EEA (Electronic Espionage Act) and foreign business bribery.  Those are short courses, each took about half an hour to finish.

I think it is good to educate employee on those sensitive legal topic, especially for high-tech companies like us.  Employee will get some better idea on those legal topic with a short course, which is good enough to convey the basic concept and serves as a heads-up.

I learned that you are not only illegal to spy on competitors' trade secret, but also you have to be careful not leak our trade secret accidentally or unintentionally.  The foreign country business bribery, I've learned that the bribery can have a variety of forms, not confined to cash, offer of employment, special discount, or stocks are all considered some kind of bribery.

It's better to learn those legal issues if you want to do business in or with the US companies.

Busy day and "Never give-up"

I was working on the new toolchain today.  I've created scripts to build the buildroot-2009 toolchain and modified our build system to take this new toolchain as an option.  I've tried to build an image and the image built successfully with the new toolchain, although I haven't yet tested it.

I just sit there and working on my program the whole day, not much time to even get up for some water, before I realized that I was quite thirsty then.

Anyway, I can get an initial version to start with.

Just another discussion tonight with Linda about how to make thing happen when there is a lot of red tapes or hurdles.  The scene from my favorite movie "Shawshank's Redemption", when Andy received the first bunch of books from the government after he kept writing letters to them for a couple of years, jumped out of my brain immediately.  There is a lot real cases happened in our life or we learned from our friends that you can really facilitate some thing like immigration, visa application, or make things possible from seemingly impossible, like getting a job by keep trying and trying.  I believe that it is the spirit of insistence that eventually worked.

To overcome hurdles, to bypass red tapes, to pursuit girls, to overturn the initial refusal, if you keep trying and insist, you may eventually turns things from impossible to possible.  That's the power of "never give-up", which is also the spirit of Xu SanDuo in "Solder Sortie" Tv drama.

Sometimes, miracles may never happed, but most of the times,  you will gain something.  After all, you have nothing to lose if you got the refusal already.

I've also learned from running marathon, that if you keep running and have a good preparation, for a man like me who had never demonstrated any telnet or interest in sports, can eventually finish the marathon with a time I am proud of.

But don't forget a good preparation is also the foundation of the final success.

“不抛弃，不放弃”, 这是钢七连的精神，也是值得我们每个人学习的。

Thought from Insurance

I had attended the benefit seminar held in the company yesterday.  I had been pondering about the benefit and the insurance after the seminar.

As a permanent employee in a sound company, your employer will normal buy all kinds of insurance for  you, like life insurance, long term disability insurance, extended health care and dental care, travel insurance, and so on.  The consultant revealed yesterday that company averagely paid about $4,000 premium per year per employee.  It's a big number, out of my initial imagination.

With all kinds of benefit provided by your employer, you and your dependents are usually insured to stop you from worrying about any incident or misfortune happened.  It quite a humane protection of employees.  I believe the benefit is usually available to permanent employees. The self-employed or contractors may have to buy the insurance themselves.

The availability and coverage of insurance to working people is a remarkable difference between developing countries like China, Indian, and developed countries, like the US, Canada.  Although I am not knowledgeable enough to further discuss the details of the insurance and the difference, I feel like your life is a bit more secured in developed countries.  BS, that's sure.  That's why people immigrate to Canada from China, from India, leaving behind all their connections and relatives in their old countries.