T M T » Technology

Creating Value in Real Time – My column on ClickZ

Xuhui — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:13:30 +0000

Please read my recent column on ClickZ:

http://www.clickz.com/3640574

“These two important differences lead to the very reason why a technology like real-time bidding can potentially create tremendous value for buyers and sellers simultaneously…

Sun VirtualBox is now Oracle VM

Xuhui — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:16:44 +0000

I’ve been happily using Sun VirtualBox until version 3.1.8. It started to give me trouble when I upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 LTS guest OS. I suspected that the VBox version I’m running is out of date. However, when I ran “check for update” it happily reported that I’m “running the latest version”.

After several iterations of struggle, I came back to revisit the notion of “the latest version” by going directly to the VBox website. Sure enough, the latest version is 3.2.2. Shutdown, download, install. Out it popped the window indicating I’m about to install Oracle VM!

After some panic, I realized that it is not a trojan horse but rather the side-effect of Oracle’s recent take-over of Sun Microsystem. Because it was hastily rebranded from Sun VirtualBox to Oracle VM, even the software itself didn’t recognize it has a new owner and newer version available.

Emails with fancy signatures

Xuhui — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:31:23 +0000

One annoying thing about Outlook is that it will show emails with graphical signature line as having an attachment. Since having attachment sometimes is an important filtering criterion for me to search for important attached documents, this becomes a pain. I ended up hating all the people who have fancy graphical signature lines.

What I hate instead is that Outlook is not paying attention to many small usability issues. When I tested this with Yahoo mail and Gmail, both of them correctly identified inline images as not attachments.

iLife patch fixed the memory leak problem

Xuhui — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:05:39 +0000

iPhoto 09 has been plagued by performance issues. One of the most annoying ones is the memory leak problem in slideshow mode. I used System Monitor and have seen memory footprint steadily grew from 200MB to 1.2GB while playing an endless loop of video files.

Last weekend Apple released a patch that finally fixed this problem. This feels great and we can now enjoy family video clips for as long as they want now.

What will happen to Google China

Xuhui — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:56:43 +0000

By now, Google’s announcement to exit China market if the Chinese government doesn’t change their censorship policy has been discussed ad nauseam. The limited attention span of people also have shifted towards some real disasters in the world – like the Haiti earthquake. So what will Google China do? Here is my prediction.

Google will drag this out silently for a couple of weeks for good measure. Then it will post another blog, saying the following:

“After our announcement posted on Jan 12th, we have received a tremendous out-pouring of support from citizens and friends in US and especially in China. People have said XYZ and ZYX, …. they have done YYY and ZZZ and truly amazingly loyal to the Google brand and what it stands for. After some soul searching at the US executive office, we realized that our mission is to help the internet become a better place by organizing the world’s information. It will be a tragic setback if we give up that effort in the world largest internet market.

“In the meantime, we have held several open and candid conversations with government officials in China. We have achieved mutual understanding of our disagreement. We have agreed to continue to build an open internet while under Chinese laws. As a result, we will make certain adjustment to our scope and business models in the China market. We want to balance the importance of continue to help build the internet market in China and the importance of freedom of speech. But we will not give up one of the most important market in the world.”

In other words, show is over, back to business now.

Two Great Movies

Xuhui — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:43:44 +0000

I watched Invictus and Avatar this weekend. Very different but both are great movies.

Invictus is about how to heal old wounds. It takes courage, wisdom and determination. The nuance shown in the process of change is great to watch and appreciate. It wouldn’t be a great movie if the story behind it wasn’t a true story. Of course, that is not to say the presentation is sub-par in any shape or form. The pace of the movie is very nice, not rushed but always gripping.

Avatar on the other hand, is all about presentation. Completely 3D, extensive CGI. It is a beautiful story borrowing some bits and pieces from American Indians and modern day world-wide struggles. An entirely invented alien language and completely new alien world (Pandora) immersed you in a heightened sensory-overload experience. If you like Scifi movies, you’ll love this one.

Virtualization on Windows 7

Xuhui — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:32:32 +0000

Windows 7 has been very robust for the last several weeks that I feel confident enough to push the performance boundary a little. I want to see how well Linux virtual machines (VM) runs on top of Win 7.
There are three popular choices to run VM on Windows 7: Virtual PC, VirtualBox and VMware Server.
Virtual PC is a free Windows update for Windows 7. It is intended to supply a Windows XP VM for legacy programs. I was able to boot and install Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) on it but couldn’t boot into the finished install at all.
VirtualBox (VBox) is an open source VM acquired by Sun. It is cross platform (OS X, Linux or Windows). VMWare Server(VMS) is the entry-level VM (freeware) from the virtualization powerhouse VMWare.
Both VBox and VMS install and run Linux VM successfully. Of the two, I feel VBox is more suitable for a desktop/laptop host environment because of its small memory footprint, nice “seamless mode” when guest and host apps run side by side and full snapshot capabilities. VMS is probably more suited for a server environment for its web-based remote management GUI. In my test VMS also has slightly better device drivers such as video that works more smoothly out of the box.
Some of the features VBox has are included in the VMWare Workstation version (or the VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X). It is not free though.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.8.6

Xuhui — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:03:22 +0000

Finally got around to spend sometime in blogging again and did some upgrades. Now the Wordpress of this site is upgraded to the latest version: 2.8.6. I’ll say I’m quite impressed coming from the really old version (2.0?). The plugin management is significantly improved as is the entire admin console. Upgrading is a relatively painless process since there’s not too much customization in my Wordpress install.
I think for most people choosing the hosted version from Wordpress (or any other blog software) is the way to go. Upgrading happens behind the scene and you always have the latest greatest features and hand-holding. For me it is a choice to learn more about how things work behind the scene – it’s an extension of my day job. So I also upgraded the Google Analytics so that I have a better idea what the 20 people are reading about on my blog.

One thing broke was the Chinese display support. I had to make some changes after some online search and trial:

Using phpMyAdmin, select the database table “wp_post”, select “Structure”, edit “post_content” field. Change Collation to “utf8_unicode_ci” from “latin1_swedish_ci”.

Windows 7 is pretty good

Xuhui — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:21:06 +0000

The blue screen of death is no longer an issue after I caught up with all the system update patches. So far I really enjoyed my experience with Win 7, comparing to the Win XP it replaced and the Snow Leopard upgrade I still regretted. Maybe some of these new features are in Vista also, but I completely skipped the Vista experience like a bad TV show:

The calculator is much improved. Whoever programmed it finally realized that you don’t have to imitate the real-world calculator just for the sake of it. The designer/engineer at Apple still think that way – and did good job at it I might add;
The task bar is great, much better than XP, Vista, or even better than OS X Snow Leopard.
Overall feels pretty fast and stable, even though I’m running it on a 2-year-old laptop (2.2Ghz Core 2, 800MHz FSB, 2GB RAM).
Nice little touch like the fast switching themes, short-cut key to choose projector connection options.
900 other features I haven’t discovered yet.

Small issues:

Outlook system fonts became smaller than in XP and there’s no way to completely change it. Changing font size globally is still a visually poor experience.

Windows 7 Ultimate

Xuhui — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:35:46 +0000

I just got my Windows 7 Ultimate as a holiday gift. Installed on a two-year-old notebook PC yesterday. The installation went very smoothly as I have a clean install. The PC had WinXP and Ubuntu dual-boot. I used GParted to easily removed and resized the Linux partitions. Then I instructed Windows 7 to take over the unpartitioned space.

Win7 rewrote the Linux boot manager (grub) with its own. It boots slightly slower than WinXP even though it is a new install while my WinXP had 2 year worth of junk on it. Win7 named its boot partition C Drive and the first partition D Drive. So if I like it, I can just use the WinXP partition as the data partition for Win7.

All the important drivers such as sound, video, printer, network and wireless worked out of the box. Office suite installed easily. So does Firefox and a few other essentials. Win7 networking worked well. I was able to join my office domain and setup exchange server connections fairly easily.

Today is a rude awakening when I got the first blue screen of death when it booted up in the morning. Still investigating…but I think I’ll be dual-booting WinXP Win7 for a while.