Category Archives: Daily Scribble

My random thoughts of the day.

Daily Scribble

Michael Jackson

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apes

Today, everyone is talking about Michael Jackson passed away. I hear it at work, I got it from the front page of the newspaper, I got it from the headline of the evening news, and I got it in almost every blog I visit. I can’t even escape from Michael Jackson visiting friends tonight, the host of the house party is playing Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson maybe the an pop icon, he maybe very talented, but I never like him and never will. To begin with, I am don’t like dance music and I found his songs are too noisy to listen. When he was really popular in the 80’s, I don’t understand why people love those silly dance moves. Then in the 90’s Michael simply became a laughing stock in the music industry. After many failed plastic surgery, his look resembled the apes in the movie Planet of the Apes. Later on his pedophile scandal make totally bankrupted his character.

He may left behind many legendary work in the mind of his fans. To me, all I remember about Michael Jackson are the funny moonwalk, a really stupid computer games featuring him using moonwalk to kill aliens and the dirty dance in which he keep touching his lower part. I guess I just have to bare the endless media coverage about Michael Jackson in the next few days until everyone finally get tried of him and move on.

Daily Scribble

Direction of the sun

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Buying a house is probably the biggest purchase normal people ever made in a life. There are many factors the buyer has to consider before signing the offer. Location, price, size, building material, environment, school net, etc are factors most people come up in their mind when they make a purchase. The amount of sunlight the place get is often a factor many people easily overlook. You want to have more sunlight shine on the place in the winter and avoid afternoon heat in the summer.

Even you are aware about the sunlight, most often you can only rely on the not so accurate the general rule of thumbs, like avoid having west facing window and prefer to have south facing windows. If you want to find out the exact amount of sunlight the place gets all year round, technology comes to help.

First, go to Google map and search on the address. Switch to satellite view to pin point the exact location of the house. Compare the satellite photo with the floor map of the house and jot down the orientation of the windows. Then download a sky map software, instead of finding out the stars at night, use it to find out the position of sun during the day. You enter the altitude and longitude of your city and enter the time of the day, then the software will show you where the sun is in the sky. Pick at least a day in each of the four seasons and track the path of sun the in the sky. You will have a pretty good idea how much sunlight the place will gets.

For example, this is the sunlight data of Vancouver on July 1st

Altitude (° ) Azimuth (° ) Time (24h)
0 50 5:05
10 65 6:23
20 78 7:31
30 88 8:32
40 100 9:32
50 118 10:43
60 140 11:55
65 180 13:14
60 213 14:23
50 242 15:46
40 260 16:55
30 270 17:50
20 280 18:52
10 295 20:02
0 310 21:19

Altitude – how high is the sun. 0° = on the horizon, 90° = right above the head
Azimuth – the bearing of the sun. 0° = North, 90° = East, 180° = South, 270° = West

Download Vancouver Sunlight Data

Daily Scribble

No more Economist

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In the economy downturn, first the company laid off the librarian, then it cut all the magazine subscriptions and close down the library. I am a long time loyal reader of the Economist since university. I used to read the article on the website using my dad’s subscription account. I forgot when I first discovered the company orders the Economist, but since then I have been borrowing the magazine from the library every week. I hang out in the library quite often and make good friend to the librarian. She is so kind that when the Economist arrive every Monday and she will put it in reserve under my account and email me to pick it up.

I like reading the paper copy better than the online version, as I can read it anywhere I like, including in the toilet. Now I can no longer borrow the latest issue Economist from the library, I have to decide whether or not order my own copy. On one hand, reading it online is free, on the other hand, reading it online is not very convenient. I will try reading it online for a while since how well can I keep up with the reading. I found reading the Economist in toilet actually takes up all my toilet reading time and I have no time left for other books in the toilet. Maybe I can be more productive if I read real books in the toilet and squeeze time here and there to read an article from the Economist during the day.

Daily Scribble

Richmond Night Market

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Every summer from May to Oct on weekend nights, the abandoned industrial area next to the Knight bridge will turn into Richmond Night Market. It is very crowded as usual. Probably because it is the only hang out places stay opens for families and friends after the malls are closed.

The main attraction of the night market is the open air food court. There are lots of Asian street delicacy from Chinese, Korean and Japanese. There are some new varieties every year. A few years ago, it was the takoyaki. There are still a couple takoyaki booth this year, but it is clearly out of fashion. The new items this year is large squid tentacles, many booths offers it in different favors, including bbq, pan fried, fried and curry.

Another hot item this year is the Korean potato skewer. Let me try to describe how it looks like. Imagine a potato is sliced by rotating blade into a single curly thin slice while maintaining the shape of the potato. Then the potato is stretched on a skewer for died fried and decorated with cheese or favored powder when it’s done. The potato skewer is very popular among the white guys, almost every white group order one to share. I think this food has a huge potential in the mainstream market. After all, potato is the staple food for Canadians and everyone loves fries.

Daily Scribble

My favorite text editor

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Vim Logo

Vi has been my favorite text editor for many years. I learned how to use Vi in university and I never use any other text editor since then. Vi is an open source software and it come with any Linux distribution. Vi is still the most powerful and most efficient text editor even when comparing to the newer GUI based text editor nowadays. Unlike the newer editor, you won’t find any bell and whistle user friendly features in Vi. You have to master at least the basic shortcut keys and commands to get start. Many first time Vi user are hopelessly lost when they are welcome by a blank screen that they can’t even type a single character or exit.

Once the short cut keys become your second nature, Vi is a lot faster than any other GUI text editor. Your finger never have to leave the keyboard or even touch the mouse. Vi has a a different design philosophy than other editors. Vi is modal editor, which means you have to toggle between different modes. In navigation mode you can move the cursor, search, replace, copy and delete text. In insert mode, you enter the text. Many people argue that the modal editor is so out dated and it is inferior to GUI text editor. But they forget all editor are implicit modal editor. They can not type at the same time when they take their hand off the keyboard, moving the mouse to click the menu item.

Vi and Emacs are the two text editors of choice for all geeks or real programmer. Each side has gathered a cult of followers with Tim O’Reilly as the figure head for the Vi camp and Linus Torvalds as the figure head for the Emacs camp. Asking the question of which editor is better often becomes a religious debate. It is true that Emacs is more flexible and powerful than Vi, thanks to its LISP engine at the core. Emacs is good at many things but I think Vi is better on text editing. I found the Emacs commands are too hard to use and worse of all not very finger friendly. Although Vi and Emacs users may debate among themselves which editor is better, they all agree Vi or Emacs are far better than the other toy editors.

Useful links:
download Vi
Vi Tutorial
Vi Tips and Tricks