...if piecing together 1500 pieces wasn't enough, I was crazy enough to make a stop motion video. After approximately 5 hours, 270 photos later, some iMovie magic and awesome music knowledge from awesome friends...

Sunday, 22 November 2009

#326 - Hot weather makes me feel lazy.

Today was a super hot and humid day in Sydney and I just simply felt like doing nothing at all. The day was indeed a very lazy day, just sat at my desk doing not much at all. In fact halfway through the day I just decided to lie down and sleep, though not much longer afterwards I woke up because it was too hot. Tried googling to see if there was any explanations to why hot weather makes people sleepy or lazy, but unfortunately didn't come up with anything useful other than a random comment on a forum saying "Cold weather makes me sleepy too. Being awake makes me feel sleepy."

Monday, 23 November 2009

#327 - Tackle things one at a time as they come - don't spread yourself out too thin!

Everyone of us have the same amount of time - 24 hours in a day and it is really up to us how we use these precious 24 hours. Many of us have heaps of things that we want to do, a huge "to do" list that seems to only ever get longer and longer, unfortunately with only 24 hours it isn't always possible to accomplish everything that we want to do. Discussing this with a friend, we came to the conclusion that the best way is to concentrate on a few things and tackle them as they come, rather than spreading yourself out, having a finger in everything and only getting bits and pieces of everything done. We felt it was more important to get a few things done well rather than have lots of things partially done. In fact, this is quite related to one of my earlier musings (Thursday, 29 October) - focus is important in achieving a goal.

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

#328 - USB 3.0 will be here...soon!

Today was the first time I heard about USB 3.0 when I read this article: "Where's USB 3.0?" Maybe I'm slow, but a quick skim of Wikipedia reveals that USB 3.0 was first demonstrated in September 2007, the standard/specifications released in November 2008 and the originally estimated public release was sometime this year.

Reading about USB 3.0 makes me want it right now! It is said to be approximately 10 times faster than USB 2.0 (max transfer rate of 3.2Gbits/s compared to 480Mbits/s) - that is like transferring 700mb (amount of data that fits on a CD) in 1 second! In addition, USB 3.0 will be able to simultaneously send and receive data (current USB devices can only do one at a time).

Unfortunately the good news sort of ends there. If you plug the new USB 3.0 device into a normal USB 2.0 port it will transfer at the USB 2.0 speed. Also, as with many 'deadlines' the public release has been delayed to sometime next year, so still sometime before we get devices using USB 3.0 and computers with USB 3.0.

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

#329 - Be optimistic and don't say something you'll regret.

Watched the TED talk Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion today and despite probably missing his focus on classical music, I still felt it was quite good (he is a great speaker). The two messages that I took from his talk were right at the start and at the end.

The first one was: be optimistic. Benjamin tells of two shoes salesman who went to Africa and saw that the natives were all barefoot. One of them reported "Situation hopeless. They don't wear shoes." The other reported "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet." Exact same situation, yet so very different responses. I try to be as optimistic as possible, so I would hope that I can be like the second salesman and have a bright view on any situation.

Towards the end of the talk, Benjamin tells a story about a girl who survived Auschwitz. Unfortunately one of the last conversation with her younger brother ended with her berating him and calling him 'stupid'. So since surviving Auschwitz she made a promise to herself: "I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say." Although this is probably something that is going to be very hard to achieve, I think it is something that we can all aim to do - don't say anything that we'll regret.

Thursday, 26 November 2009

#330 - TEDxSydney

Being a big fan of TED (awesome talks - many of them are must sees) the idea of having TED in Sydney sounds great. Although I don't think this is strictly a TED event per se (the 'x' means "Independently organised TED event"), I hope the talks will be just as great. Since TEDxSydney will be held in Sydney, I would imagine it will have a more local focus with more speakers coming from Australia - it'll be interesting to see what talks come as a result of TEDxSydney!

Friday, 27 November 2009

#331 - Be grateful - it's good for you

As kids I'm sure we've all be told to be grateful for what we have and thank people who help us etc. So it was quite interesting to read this article Does "counting your blessings" really help? It explains a 10 week experiment where three groups of participants, one group was told to list five things they were grateful for, the other five things they found a nuisance and the other five to just list events during the week. The group that listed five things they were grateful for were in general more positive and also healthier. Other studies have shown that gratitude is not only related to feelings of happiness, hope etc but it might actually cause you to be happier!

Saturday, 28 November 2009

#332 - WordPress doesn't have tables!

The fact that there is no simple way to insert tables in WordPress came as a big surprise to me when I started writing the "Firefox Multitouch Gestures" post. Googling about it only led me to various WordPress plugins for adding tables, though none of them seemed to do what I wanted to do - a simple table! I had always assumed that being a fairly mature blogging platform, WordPress will support simple tables 'out of the box' by unfortunately this is not the case. So I resorted to the HTML mode and manually entering table tags for the table. As expected, switching between HTML and WYSIWYG mode in the post editor screwed up the HTML, but luckily it wasn't that bad. The table works, but it appears slightly malformed (there is no right border) - will do for now I suppose.

Sunday, 15 November 2009

#319 - Two things: Fast decision making can be critical at times and people can sometimes think very irrationally...

I was standing at the train station today waiting for the train and looking at a group of three people who were just talking to each other. Suddenly one of them accidentally drops their phone (an old Nokia 3315), all three look down at the phone, then one of them stepped forward to pick the phone up. Except when he stepped forward he kicked the phone down onto the train tracks. Now all three were staring at the train tracks. At the same time the announcement overhead starts "The train arriving at platform three...", the group looks to their right and indeed a train is coming.

So what do they do? One of them is just standing there seemingly still deciding whether he should go and grab the phone or not; the other jumps down to grab the phone while the other is yelling "leave the phone!". Luckily the guy that jumped down to grab the phone jumped back up before the train passed - he had probably only 1 or 2 seconds to spare. The fast decision made by the guy that jumped down meant that he was able to get the phone and be safe (had he hesitated he would not have made it in time), but on the other hand, I feel that it was a rather silly decision to make - risk your life for a phone.

Monday, 16 November 2009

#320 - Yann Tiersen's  Comptine d'un autre été: L'après midi is lovely song.

My sister introduced me to "Comptine d'un autre été: L'après-midi", a piano piece composed by Yann Tiersen and I feel it is a very nice song. If you feel like you've heard the song before it might be from the movie: Amélie. Although the YouTube movie clip isn't actually related to the movie, it is a nice (but sad) clip to watch. Will be looking forward to learning to play this song when I get my hands on a piano!

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

#321 - Message to Oracle: Empty string is not the same as null.

This is just a rant as a result of a 'bug' that needs fixing from work. For those of you who are non-programmers, 'null' in programming is quite literally 'nothingness'. While 'empty string' is a string that has zero characters to represent nothing (Strings are just a series of characters). Null is the absence of a value. Empty string is something to represent nothing. This probably isn't the best explanation, so it might not make much sense as to why there is such a distinction to represent "nothing" ... but take my word for it there is.

So this brings me to my rant of the day - Oracle databases silently converts any empty string values into null. So if you try to store an empty string into Oracle it will magically be stored as null. This causes all sorts of problems when you take the value out from the Oracle database and try to use it, since it will give you null when you are expecting empty string (all other databases will return empty string).

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

#322 - Understanding Your Brain for Better Design: Left vs. Right

As most people know our brain has two halves - left and right. The biggest difference between the two halves is how it processes what we see. The left brain takes a more 'bottom up' approach - looks at all the small details and builds a bigger picture. Whereas the right side is more 'top down' - looks at the big picture and slowly breaks things down into details.

Obviously we need both halves of our brains to work, but generally we all have a dominant half which effects the way we think and perceive the world. I used to feel that the more creative of us were right brain dominant and thus it was in their nature to be more creative. However, this article brings up a very good point - left brain dominant people are just creative in a different way compared to right brained people and depending on your brain dominance you should play to your dominant brain's strength. I'll be giving that a go and trying some slightly more orderly creativeness

Thursday, 19 November 2009

#323 - Don't be afraid to ask for help when you're in trouble.

Today was a rather slow day at work because I was attempting to figure out something I knew very little about. When first tackling the problem it felt like there was a possibly I could get it working, but then as the hours passed by it became clearer to me that I was just going around in circles I could have (and should have) at that point asked people around me for help since I knew they would know much better than me, yet me being stupid I didn't. Why? As stupid as it sounds, it was because I didn't want to feel stupid asking a potentially stupid question. But as the day drew to a close and not having progressed much, I realised my stupid mistake and felt very stupid.

So, the lesson of the day? Ask for help when you feel like you need it (do give it a good try first, don't just ask for help before giving it some thought), because it may or may not be a stupid question, but if you don't ask for help at the end you will most likely eventually have to ask for help and you will feel stupid for not asking for help!

Friday, 20 November 2009

#324 - Google releases the Chromium OS open source project.

Sometime ago there was talk about Google releasing Chrome OS and today that exact project has been open-sourced! The main idea behind Chrome OS is that for most of us, a good majority of what we do on a computer these days is using the Internet. We boot up our computer, and chances are we open the web browser, check our email, the news, forums etc. So the smart people at Google thought, well if we are hardly using any of the desktop applications and all we really want is to surf the Internet, why not cut out all the wasted time loading desktop applications that we rarely use? As a result, they came up with Chrome OS. It seems like a very interesting idea to me and now that it is available for poking around, might just install it on my old laptop and see how it goes ps. Is it just me or does it feel like Google will take over the world?

Saturday, 21 November 2009

#325 - Writing emails in a language you are unfamiliar with is a long and painful process.

It's no secret that I'm not that great with written Chinese, in fact I'm quite bad at it. Today I tried writing an email to my parents in Chinese and it was really really hard! In the past, I would enter Chinese using 'bopomofo' (a phonetic way of entering Chinese) which was slow since I didn't know which keys were where; but do-able since I know how to speak Chinese, so all I had to do was enter the sound and pick the correct character.

However, this time I was trying to practice my written Chinese so I was using the awesome Chinese input method in Snow Leopard - you quite literally draw the character in. After a couple of characters, I realised how much I had forgotten - even the most basic of characters I had no clue how to write! I ended up going to a English-Chinese dictionary and looking it up. The entire email of approximately 3 sentences took me at least 30min!

Sunday, 8 November 2009

#312 - There is actually a ISO standard (ISO 8601) that covers the "representation of dates and times"

In my attempt to give my weekly musings a bit more structure, I looked up what day and week of the year we were in. The day of the year was simple enough, but the week was actually more complicated that I thought it was! I always assumed that 1st January will be Week 1..but then thinking about it, if 1st January is a Friday, will it still be Week 1? According to ISO 8601, if 1st January is a Friday, Saturday or Sunday it is actually Week 52 or Week 53 of the previous year (ISO 8601 week starts on Monday). To confuse things even further, the system followed by USA is different to ISO 8601 - weeks start Monday, and there are partial weeks at the start/end of the year. If you're wondering, 09/11/2009 is Week 46 and the reason I start on Sundays for these posts is so I can have Sunday to write them up, and it's no fun to come up with the musing for the day and write about it on the same day.

Monday, 9 November 2009

#313 - Magic is awesome! But figuring out how it is done is tricky.

Had been playing around with Ruby on Rails for the past few nights (getting it to work with PostgreSQL is amazingly tricky!), but when I finally got it working I was able to continue with the very basic online getting started tutorial. A couple of commands later I had a "working" web-app - create/update/delete posts and comments was all working. It was great to see it working, but unfortunately I had close to no clue as to how it was all working thanks to all the rails magic. My initial quick attempt (it was like 2am) at poking around to see how everything worked was futile - I just confused myself even more So as much as I like all the awesome magic that makes things "just work", I think understanding and finding out how everything clicks together is important too. (Of course, this applies to 'normal' magic too - watching them is fun, but working out how they work can be challenging, but probably just as rewarding)

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

#314 - An item that is expensive doesn't necessarily mean that it is of higher quality - do your research!

A couple of weeks ago, read "9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You" on Coding Horror, and would say it is definitely worth reading. The 9 points listed are all quite good and I have to admit have been victim of most, if not all of them. Reading/knowing these 9 points will probably not make you immune to sneaky marketing techniques, but hopefully it'll make you more aware when you are deciding what to buy. Though, if you do end up buying something for a bit more than you should've paid, don't worry - a random post I read ages ago (will try to find it) said that you'll grow to like what you own and think it is the best

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

#315 - Even something boring like a business card can be made awesome with some creativity.

To a good majority of people, business cards are probably quite boring - a rectangular piece of cardboard with the contact details and logo of the company. They're all about the same, with some variation in the colours/logo/names, but it is probably hard for any particular one to stand out. Of course there is nothing wrong about standard business cards, but even something as simple as business cards can be made to be simply amazing with some thought and creativity - 100 (Really) Creative Business Cards. In my opinion, some of them are probably a bit overdone, but there are plenty that are just simply awesome - the one I like most is the tooth decay/dentist one. Looking at all the business cards made me want to think outside of the box and take something old and boring and give it a twist.

Thursday, 12 November 2009

#316 - "...the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." -Apple

Looking into the Evolution of Apple Ads lead me to one of their earlier campaigns "Think Different". It was quite interesting to see how much has changed from when computers first came out and comparing it to what we have now. Though the one thing that stood out for me was the quote above in one of the ads. To me the quote seems to be challenging people to voice what they are thinking without worrying if other people will think they are crazy and/or stupid (something that I find hard to do myself). The other reason I like it is if someone calls you "crazy" you can point them towards this quote

Friday, 13 November 2009

#317 - Window blinds are opened during take off and landing so that passengers on the plane can be aware of the outside surroundings and alert the crew if anything seems amiss.

Was on a plane tonight and the usual take off/landing notice of "please open your window blinds" caused me to think...why? A quick google gave me a reasonable answer which makes sense: with the window blinds open, the passengers can see outside and alert the crew if needed. To be honest, I never thought of it that way - always thought it was something to do with some technical reason such as cabin pressure. As the idiom says: many hands make light work! Well, in this case, many eyes make flying safer!

Saturday, 14 November 2009

#318 - Listening to 'live' music and playing music sounds different (in a better way) to listening to music from the computer/stereo etc.

Without thinking much, it might be easy to think that listening to music from CDs etc would sound better then listening to someone play since the recorded CD is probably a professional playing and recorded in a specialised studio with all the acoustics tuned to perfection. However, I have always found that listening to someone play (especially someone you know) almost always sounds better! They may make mistakes, but somehow the overall feel of the music just feels better. Similarly, playing a song yourself is very rewarding - despite all the mistakes when practising, when you're finally able to part of the song it feels great! Note: I often label myself tone-deaf, so you might have to take this point with a grain of salt, though it'll be interesting to see what other people think.