[thumb:1830:l] It is one of the unusual Sundays that I wake up early in the morning. The whole family, including me, Pat, her brother and the two dogs went to SPCA walkathon. We were there on time but we couldn’t find the registration so we end up late to the walkathon. The dogs already left so we followed the trail to catch up with them. We met them on the half way when they are coming back. We were managed to join the line up for the final quarter of the walkathon. There were many fun activities after all the dogs came back. As usual, there were many exhibition booths from various dog supply shops. There were agility courses and dogs race against each other. We had a good time and left after watching a few shows. Charlie is really tired after a long walk today so he was really quiet on the way way. It is fun to have some excerise on Sunday morning and see many cute dogs. Too bad that this walkathon is not as big as the one I went last time.
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In order to renovate my website, I have to make a few though decision.? One of them is which language should I use.? No, I don’t mean English or Chinese, I mean programming language to server dynamic content.? Using PHP is one of the obvious choice.? However I feel that PHP is just a hugh collection of libraries.? There is not much learning value since anyone can be a PHP programmer if he is armed with the reference manual.? ASP or JSP is another candidate, they are similiar to PHP, but since I am not using IIS nor Tomcat, it is too much trouble to setup the environment.? Writing CGI in Perl or C++ is so old fashioned plus it is really inconvinient, so it is out of question.? I have considered tcl, which is the language I most familiar with.? However I think I should learn something new instead, plus I am alreadying writing too many tcl code at work.? Then one language comes to my mind, Ruby.? It supposes to be the most powerful object oriented scripting language with the best of everything, maybe except speed.? I read that with the Rails library, it allows very rapid web development using the built-in SQL data structure.? I decided to embrace this language.? It seems to the be work horse behind web2.0 and is endosed by O’Reilly.? I think Ruby could be the white knight saving the web from the evil .NET proposed by Microsoft .? I just start reading the tutorials and wrote the “hello world” excerise.? I hope I will have a better idea in a few weeks after I had learnt more about it.

Finally I have finish migrating all the softare in my old web server to the new linux box and upgraded to the latest release. I have installed phpbb to keep track of my articles, coppermine to organize my photos, wordpress to blog and mediawiki to catalog my things. It took me almost week to setup my webserver. The only thing left to do to install a small hit counter. It is much faster now, especially when I am uploading photos. It doesn’t have any fancy feature, only the out of box opensource programs with a few useful plugins. I think I will keep those software as it is for the timing being. I always want all programs in my webserver share a unified look and feel. It would me quite some amount of work to craft the skins of each of the program. I would probably settle with a nice looking front page that can pull and merge data from all programs using some cool AJAX interface. I still want to write a quote database myself as an learning excerise fo ruby on the rails and MySQL. That would be my side project after my project at work is finished, so that I have some more free time.

P.S. I installed the xanga plug-in for wordpress. In the future, my blog will be cross posted to xanaga if it works as advertised.

The company shut down for a week to cut cost but it lost more than 1 week of productivity.? Today is the first day back to work after the shut down.? I end up spending the whole morning chatting with colleagues about? their vacations.?? All of us are still in the holiday mood, especially when we only have two more days before another weekend and half of the people are still on vacation.? Not only we talked what we had done in the past week, we also spent equal amount of time critizing the management.? Last year the CEO gave each employee a copy of Jack Welch’s Winning trying to get the message of change across the company.? The only message we get is the management is violating every single practice in the book.? The most fundamental partice is being candor,? the shut down week and recently layoff? shows the management violated the trust of employees.? I am not the only one have the feeling the company only retend the employees with golden handcuff.? It is wildly preceived by almost everyone I talked to working here.?? If Vancouver has as many high tech company as the silicoin valley, PMC will have a mass exodus in no time.? Tonight I have my first class in political philosophy.?? I found learning what is justice is much more interesting than trying to working some boring old product no one really cares about.

I read two innovative idea on the news today. The first one is an automatic side mirror. The side mirror will tilt inward to cover the blind spot when the driver put on the turning signal. It will tilt downward in reverse gear to check the side curb when parallel park. The second idea is a chopping board with integrated scale. These two innovation are relatively low-tech, just put together existing ideas. However it is the creativitly behind the innovation inspire me. I think invent some part useful, but not totally useless thing is not very hard. There are many inconvinience in daily life waiting to be overcome. I already thought about an idea, self fold sleeping bag. It is always very troublesome putting the sleeping back into its bag. Many people have flash of interesting idea, but most of them never bother to spend time to make it happens. Most of innovation doesn’t justify the cost of production nor even the cost of development. Only a few great ideas flourish and become the new big hit. The problem most of the time, you can’t tell which idea will fly, which one will bomb. I want to be an inventor too but too lazy to spend time in making invention.