Happy Birthday to Me
Posted by eric in Miscellaneous on October 22, 2007
Normally I ignore my birthdays. When I was younger, I wanted to get older. Now that I’m older, I want to be younger. Sigh.. will we ever be happy in life?
Well this has been a significant year to me because of the recent changes in my life. If you’ve seen any of my past entries, you might have read about a small trip I took to Taiwan. Lately I’ve been experiencing a personality change as well (upcoming in a future post). Collectively, all these experiences have changed me in the last few months making me look forward toward the next year with eager anticipation. I haven’t felt this way in a long time so I wanted to mark this occasion here.
So what’s the lesson I learned? The adage of the day is “change is good” in your life. If you feel like you’re in a rut, do something different. It will make you feel a lot better.
So, Happy Birthday to Me! 
Watching a random user use Vista
Posted by eric in Programming, Software on October 9, 2007
I was sitting in the library earlier today when I noticed someone sitting in front of me with her computer on. While laptops in the library are commonplace these days, what was especially interesting about her computer was that it was running Vista. So out of curiosity, I decided to watch Jane Doe for a few minutes to see what her experience with Vista was like (Yes I’m nosy, but this is for an educational experiment. 
And if you’re the person who I was watching, I apologize. Don’t worry, I was too far to see anything meaningful! ).
Jane had a Sony laptop running Vista Premium. Let’s see what she was doing while I was watching:
1. Getting Connected
Shi Da (師大) has a wireless network across campus. The first thing I saw Jane do was try to get connected to the wireless network. She stayed on the wireless network dialog for a while (probably a good 2 minutes), which I’m guessing because the connection wasn’t connecting.
2. Media Player
After getting connected, she restored an already open Windows Media Player window which means she was listening to music. I noticed headphones on so that seemed like a valid assumption.
3. Messenger
Of course who doesn’t use IM these days? She popped open MSN messenger next to check on who’s online… well that was the original intention at least. The window stopped functioning during login and then the crashed dialog opened up showing the window had stopped functioning. I couldn’t see which option she clicked, but the progress bar started going afterwards.
4. Browser
Jane opened up an Internet Explorer window, but unfortunately this one also stopped functioning. She typed, clicked on the window without any response. Then the crashed dialog opened up showing the window stopped accepting input from the user. She clicked it and the progress bar started again.
5. Waiting
She went back to her studies while waiting for the close dialog to turn off. About 3 minutes later they finally closed. She opened up another browser window and this time no crashes. She typed in Facebook’s URL and started checking someone’s profile (couldn’t see from where I was sitting).
6. Torrents
She opened up another browser and this time opened up a torrent tracking site. She downloaded a torrent and started downloading some file (once again, couldn’t see exactly from where I was sitting).
7. Switching back and forth
For the next few minutes, Jane switched back from Facebook, to Media Player, torrent status, and back to Facebook.
8. Back to networking
About 5 minutes later, the browser stopped loading web pages. So she went back to the wireless network dialog to check on the network status. About 30 seconds later, the network was back up so she went back to Facebook.
At this point, I stopped watching as she was just browsing Facebook now.
One question comes into mind: did she use any of the “new” features of Vista? Absolutely not. Everything that I watched her do on her computer, XP could have handled perfectly if not better than the Vista equivalents. For example, the sidebar was left in the default state with the picture and clock gadget. The sidebar was left uncustomized and was just sitting there taking up screen real estate. Flip3D? Might as well not exist as she used the task bar to change windows.
So what did I learn from watching this random computer user using her computer running Vista for a couple of minutes? I learned that the flashy Vista or the new UI means nothing to the user. The user only wants to be able to accomplish a task: chat, read web sites, listen to music, …. While I learned this lesson previously through my past work experience, watching this random user today just reinforced this idea in my mind. I believe all software developers should watch a user use a computer before programming professionally. Of course I mean a “typical” user, not your project partner who’s hacking away at a bash script. 
Watching a user gives a lot of insight into how to design software for the user and not for the programmer.
Taiwan’s Weather
What can I say about Taiwan’s weather? I come from California, the west coast of the United States, where the weather is a nice 80+ degree Fahrenheit (29+ Celsius) in Los Angeles and a brisk 65+ degrees (18+ C) in San Francisco. Precipitation rarely occurs in Los Angeles while it occurs regularly around the winter/spring season in San Francisco.
Taiwan on the other hand is a tropical island surrounded on all 4 sides by the Pacific ocean. The temperature averages around 30-35 degrees Celsius (86 F – 95 F) and rains just about every other day. I don’t think I’ve gone a week yet without it raining at least once during the week. Since Taiwan is such a small island surrounded by the vast ocean, you can probably guess the weather here is completely dominated by what the ocean pumps out.
Not only is it hot and precipitation nearly constantly flowing, the high humidity is what I hate the most about Taiwan’s weather. The humidity makes it such that once you step outside, you’ll be sweating all over. Once you get back inside with the AC, you’ll develop a sticky feeling with the sweat drying up on your back.
The humidity not only makes it difficult to stay dry, but it also causes food to spoil at an exponential rate. If you don’t finish any food, you better stick it in the fridge immediately. Otherwise, you’ll start to notice little flies buzzing around and probably mold growing by the time you wake up the next day. Even dry crackers that are not properly enclosed will rot as one of my school mates here can attest to.
Back onto the topic of precipitation, rain occurs so often and at a specific time that there’s even a special name for the rain: Afternoon Thunderstorms, or in Chinese 午後雷陣雨. The day might start out a sunny 32 degrees, but once 1:00 pm rolls around, the clouds would drift in bringing a downpour for a few hours before leaving, letting the sun make a come back before nightfall.
Even though it constantly rains, that is not the most dangerous weather around. Rain is a small matter compared to the typhoons that come here quite frequently. On my 7th week here in Taiwan at this posting time, I’ve seen 2 typhoons (one on the day I arrived, another a few weeks ago) with a 3rd coming in less than 24 hours. What’s a typhoon? I’m not really sure how it compares to hurricanes (which is what we typically hear about in the states). In fact wikipedia even combines searches for both keywords into a single article: Tropical cyclone, which leads me to believe they are the same phenomenon. In any case, typhoons sometimes causes all businesses and schools to take a break when it passes by if it’s considered especially strong. Otherwise daily life continues on without a hitch.
You would think Taiwan’s weather in all the cities would be pretty much the same since Taiwan is such a small island right? I was shocked to find out in fact it is quite different. There could be torrential rainfall in Taipei, while it’s blazing hot 25 miles (40 km) away in Yilan City. Weird, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes so I know it’s true.
So what have I learned these past few weeks living here in Taiwan? Mainly that Taiwan is completely different from where I grew up in California. While the humidity and constant rain gets annoying, the clouds in the sky can lead to some great photo opportunities, such as this:
As I’ve come here to learn more about Chinese culture, I’ve accepted Taiwan’s weather as just another part of the Taiwanese culture. For anyone coming to visit Taiwan, hope this weather guide helps you plan on what to expect.
Halo 3 Launch at the Taipei Main Station
With the pre-launch marketing I posted about the other day, I noticed this yesterday right outside Taipei Main Station (named so because this stop is where all forms of transportation intersect in Taipei):
Yep. Only a multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft with unlimited amounts of cash can launch a game everywhere across the world all at the same time.
The stage shown above just repeated the Halo 3 trailer over and over. Nothing live or I might have missed it.
I was really disappointed with the swag. There wasn’t anything free. Once you buy a copy of the game, then you get a crappy bag with one of those imprinted pictures that look like it will fade in 3 washes.
And now for more pictures of the Taipei launch:
And yes, the main station always has horrible traffic as you see in the pictures above.
Preparing for Halo 3
There’s been lots of publicity in how much marketing money Microsoft is pumping into Halo 3. With the game being only 3 days away, the mothership is doing everything to make you buy this game. This is even apparent with all the marketing blitz here in Taiwan. I can only imagine what the marketing is like back in the states.
Here are some picture of Microsoft’s hard earned money at work here in Taiwan’s Taipei Main Station underground shopping mall when I was walking through there earlier today.
The Failure of WGA and Vista, Part 2
Posted by eric in Miscellaneous on September 4, 2007
Well, as luck would have it, the failed WGA check happened to me again today. My expensive heavy laptop just became yet another paper weight. I’m typing this on my 1 hour limited desktop session while I move all my files over to my external hard drive to back up.
I’m tired of this crap coming from Microsoft. This is how they treat us paying customers while all those who download the illegal copies of Vista can use their computers fine.. I have FREAKIN 4 COPIES OF YOUR STUPID VISTA OS (actually, 5 counting this Asus laptop which came with Vista) for Christ sake! Well enough is enough. One can only take so much. This is going to be the end of Vista for me. Once I backup all my files, I’m going to complete wipe my machine and reinstall XP for gaming purposes. I’m going to make Ubuntu my main system now. If I’m forced to use it, I’m confident that I’ll learn how to use it in no time. I might even consider looking at a Mac laptop in the future! *shudder*
Microsoft, I’ve been a big fanboy of your products since I started taking interest in computers back during the DOS 6.2 days. Ask anyone who knew me when I was younger, they would tell you how I would religiously promote your products. Heck I even made a career out of your technology. But your latest blunders have really made me reconsider my past decisions and this WGA crap has really let me down. As if it matters, but you just lost a faithful customer along with everyone who I have contact with. I will never recommend your products again.
The Vista VirtualStore
Since I will be traveling for the foreseeable future, I’ve recently transitioned my main machine to my new laptop: an Asus G1S.
One of the first things I normally do with a new system (2nd time for me because of this) is copy over all my news feeds. I use the awesome, free feed reader GreatNews. After installing the latest version and then copying over my existing feed database (GreatNews.ini and newsfeed.db), GN refused to recognize the updated files. Thinking this was a problem with GN didn’t solve the problem for me.
After digging around my backup files, I finally noticed what the problem was. Because Vista uses the universally-hated UAC, by default your admin account does not have permissions to write to the “C:\Program Files” folder. So what Vista does is shadow the folder to your “C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files” folder.
So looking up this folder under profile, I indeed found my INI and DB file in here with the out-of-the-box default file. After replacing these files with my backed up INI and DB file, GN is now able to load up all my existing feeds and settings.
The Failure of WGA and Vista
I’ve made it clear that I hate Vista in the past and the latest incident does not surprise me of all the blunders coming from up north lately. In this InfoWorld report, someone at Microsoft uploaded a bad patch onto the Windows Update servers, which in turn all Windows machines automatically downloaded and installed. Because of my recent move, my current main machine is now an Asus G1S which I recently bought that came with Vista preloaded. While I could have easily reformatted and reinstalled to XP or even Linux, I decided not to since the machine seemed to be working pretty well and I had other things I had to worry about. I even went as far as thinking Vista is finally usable now since I haven’t had any crashes while using the new laptop.
Unfortunately for me last week, I was hit with the WGA bug and Vista in turn reported that my copy was pirated. Having just bought the laptop which came with Vista pre-installed, of course that wasn’t the case. Windows refused to let me access my machine nor my files and the only thing I could do was enter in a “valid” product key or use Internet Explorer to browse the net for more information. At first I thought my machine had failed for some reason due to bad Asus software so I was desperately looking for hints at the Asus website. Only now did I find out this was Microsoft’s fault (should have known). Normally when this happens to me, I bust out my repair toolkit to try to fix the problem or at least backup my files. But unforunately for me since I’m currently traveling, I didn’t have access to all my system repair utilities. In the end, I gave up and reformatted and reinstalled the entire machine using the Asus system restore CD’s.
As a result of the system restore, I lost some blog posts that I was writing and some screenshots. Luckily I didn’t lose too much since the laptop was still pretty new. As a paying Microsoft consumer, we should not have to deal with this. As many people have preached, DRM such as WGA only makes it harder for legitimate users. Those who want to pirate stuff will always have a way. GG Microsoft.
On another note, having worked at a company that works closely with Microsoft, I know about all the hoops and red tape that are in place to prevent such things from happening. I’m surprised that Microsoft calls this an employee blunder and I think they’re just trying to find a scapegoat so the company overall doesn’t look bad to the public. I’m starting to think that all the stories of all the smart people leaving Microsoft for other companies are true.
Overcoming Shyness
Posted by eric in Commentary on October 31, 2007
First off let me say I am by no means an expert on this topic. I am also not saying I’m completely “cured” either. This post is only my reflection upon my recent experiences in trying to overcome this “problem”.
The first step is to recognize by yourself that being shy is a problem. Having other people tell you will not work. You need the inspiration to come from within. Personally, I knew being shy was a problem for many years and many people have urged me to change, but it was only the last few weeks that I came to the conclusion that I must change myself in order to transcend to the next level of life.
Once you’ve realized that being shy is a problem, here’s what I consider are the most important factors to overcoming shyness:
With these tips in mind, I’ve been successfully transforming myself into a more social person and meeting lots of new people. So far I’m having lots of success and with friends who support me, it’s been a lot of fun. Even though I missed out on so many years in the past, with another new year ahead, I’m enthusiastically looking forward to what’s upcoming.
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