Today, I came across book sharing website at anobii.com. It is pretty much like Douban.com, except this one is focus only on books and have a better user interface. Naobii.com is based in HK, which is kinda an unusal place to start a new web 2.0 venture. The website allow users to create and share their books collection. User can enter title of the books, rating and comments, then Naobii.com will take care of the database and provide other information of the book like cover picture, publisher, etc. The website connects users share comon reading interest. The website is still in beta stage, but it has already built up a large book catalog and user base. When Douban.com first come out, I thought about using it to keep track of my books. However, I found it too inconvinent to use and dropped the idea. Naobii.com seems addressed most problem of Doubai and it also provide easy integration to your blog and export your book shelf in plain HTML for backup. The website is still in its infancy, it needs many improvement. It is still too much hassle to add a book, the book search function is not fast enough. I think Naobii.com can post a serious thread to Douban.com, which is slowly turning into an anti-intelligent getto. Probably including music and movie reviews is not a good idea, espeically music, it really dumb down the intellectual content of the users.

I went to shopping with Pat this afternoon.  Unfortunately, after spending 3 hours in the mall, the only thing I bought is a polo shirt.  Not a very productive shopping trip.  I first went to Mountain Equiment Co-op then head towards Park Royal.  This two places has totally different shopping style.  I feel very comfortable selecting clothings in Mountain Equiment Co-op, while I am quite uneasy finding the right clothings in Park Royal.  I don’t know much about the clothings in general.  The clothings in Moutain Equiments are all functional, there are specification for me to look up.  I can compare their water-proof, warm-keeping, breathness, price then make an objective judgement.  On the other hand, the selection criteria of the clothings in Park Royalother is subjective.  I know what kind colour I like and whether the clothes is comfortable or not, but I can never tell I bought the right clothes.  If clothing style is purely subjective and there is no dispute on tastes, then at least I don’t have to care what others people think about my clothes.  But this is obviously not the reality, people judge you by what you wear.  Yet there is no objective rules to capture how people may judge you.  To make it worst, try to use statistic approach by simpily getting the most common fashion style won’t work.  Fashion is something contradictary on its own, it has to follow the trend, but at the same time blame the lack of uniqueness or character.  Almost policy in the old communist China is wrong, but at least they have done one thing right by making everyone wear the same style uniform everyday everywhere.  This policy is probably the only way to my problem in clothes shopping.  Ok, I do agree the Mao style unifrm is ugly.  Maybe we can fix the system by hiring some top fashion designers to make a better looking uniform.

In grade school or junor high, people love practical jokes. If the joke is harmless, at least physically, it is nothing but some nonsense fun. However I can’t believe someone who is in his mid-thirties still play practical jokes pulling the chair when someone trying to sit down. Yes, I was the victim this time and luckily I was not hurted. Actually, it is my own fault, I should be more aware of that baka colleague. You just can’t let your guard down one second when he is around. It is not the first time his stupid jokes offended friends in the group. I am just the lastest name added to the long list. I won’t even bother to demand for an apologize, since we all know he is shameless, never will, probably not able to, express any sense of sorry to anyone. Judging from his past records, you cannot trust him he to be mature enough to distinguish when is ok to have fun or when is not. I suspected he does not have any awareness about the responsibility of his own action. So you can’t really upset with someone who is simplily retarded. You can only feel sorry for him, maybe pray for him if you are religious. Well, maybe God can’t do much about him except writting him off as a counter example for the rest of us. Nor you can ignore him, he is just part of your work life. Just like everything else in life, it is full of unpredictable events. The only thing you can do is always be prepare and react fast to stay way from harms. The moral of this story is thy shoult never get close to that guy. I had paid my price for not listening to the advice of the previous victims. It is really my own fault.

It is my turn to be the PMC Idle. My old project is finished and the whole term is not assign to new project. There are rumors that the company is going to have another restructure next month. Right now, the executives are waiting other projects to finish, so they can realign the engineers and shuffle people between departments. Since we have almost nothing to do, we start collecting verification statistics and benchmark from the previous project, which is something never done before. In the past, we were rushed from one project to another, never have the time to do a proper postmortem analysis. In the project, we have run over 20000 simulations, combined CPU time is over 6 years. Ironically, the simulations spent 20 years sitting in the server farm waiting for CPU become available. I am not the only one out of work, my boss has nothing to do as well. He called a meeting trying to figure out something for us to work on. At the end, we decided we should just relax and take this time to learn something new. I have assigned myself read management books borrowed from the library and proposed a few verification infrastructure projects. The problem is we will have to go through a few hoops to get those pet projects approved by the upper management. In this company, we don’t have any system setup for personal research or development work. We can only envy those in 3M or Google who can spend 20% of their time working on fun pet projects.

I proudly present the new face of my blog.  I have been developing this wordpress theme for the past two weeks, experimenting with AJAX and PHP.  The new layout greatly improved the aesthetic and function of my blog.  On every page, I added a drop down menu and a left side bar with widgets on recent posts, and comments for easier navigation.  On the front page, I added more information about my blog on the right side bar.  This theme is not yet complete and the rennovation of my site is only half done.  Here is the short term and long term to-do list for my blog.

Short Term:

• Package the theme for download and create a documentation page for the theme.  I still have to figure out where to submit theme.
• Add a profile box on the front page with brief introduction of myself
• Write the page about myself
• Write the page explain the meaning of “Philosophy’s Camp” and some background history of horace.org
• Add comment sections for pages.

Long Term:

• Rework the CSS style sheet, consolidate the style elements.  My current style sheet is based on the wordpress default theme, so it still contains with many useless elements.
• Add post preview on the search result page, category and archieve index page.
• Think about what to put in the place of the right side bar in single post page.
• Use collapsable tree for the page widget and archive widget
• Make the theme true AJAX compliant, only refresh the updated portion of page instead of refreshing the whole page
• Add a database to display quotes from my favour philosophers.

Feel free to leave me comments to let me know your opinion on the new design.  Tell me what new features you would like to see and what current feature is hard to use.  I will incoporate the suggestion in the next release.