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.

I was talking to a colleague from Taiwan today.  This poor guy cannot go back to Taiwan, not even visiting, or he will be throw into jail once he landed.  He came to Canada to study highschool and university hence escaped the 2 years military service.  Although he is now a Canadian citizen, he cannot renounce his Taiwan citizenship until he had served his term.   As long as he is a Taiwan citizen, he will be subject to the Taiwanese law once he set foot on Taiwan.  He said that even changing his name cannot escape the military service, somehow the Taiwan government know you are the same person.  I feel sorry for him that he can’t even go home to visit his parents back in Taiwan.  Military service a very unproductive policy.  Young men wasted two years in the army, not learning anything particularly useful.  The talented who study aboard won’t come back to the country since the cost of spending two years in the army is too high.  People should not forced to join the army.  The army should just hire its soilders like the police hire policemen.  Making it a true profession instead of forcing the unwilling young men to join will improve the quality and fighting power of the army.  Military service is a thing of the past when the number of men determine the outcome of a war.  In future wars, technology and elite soldiers can make up with a smaller army by fighting more efficiently.  The army will only have soldiers who control the weapons and the technicians and engineers who supporting the weapons.  There is no need for the foot soldiers, except maybe a small team of special operation force.