Month: February 2003

Waking Up

I woke up at dawn today realizing that I need to turn down righteous ass and turn up the path of least resistence.  I am done with complaining for  now, instead focusing on using what I got to build what I can.  Heck, if I can endure a personal back-massage from John Draper (aka Cap'n Crunch) to get a beta (alpha?) copy of Macintosh assembler back in 1984, I can wing it now.  Oh, boy that sure was an embarassing moment.

Don Don likes Dun Dun too

Dave and Marc are talking about Dun Dun, chinese spicy noodles in heavy peanut sauce.  I had a lot of that at one of Dave's bloggers dinner and so did Dave.  Peanut is supposed to be good for your health, but it sure didn't taste like health food.

Speaking of spicy noodles, try Bi-Bim-Naeng-Myun, a Korean spicy noodle.  Bi-Bim means mixed.  Naeng means cold and Myun means noodle.  Put it all together and you get Mixed-Cold-Noodle.  What makes it special is what you mix the cold noodle with.  Usually its real mean spicy red pepper sauce.  My wife knows the secret receipies of Oh-Jang-Dong, a neighborhood in Seoul famous for Bi-Bim-Naeng-Myun, and it is spicy enough to put me on a week of liquid diet if I had it too often.  Now thats spicy!  Yum.

Michael Earl says Cambridge has spicy noodles. "I strongly recommend Mary Chung's Dun Dun Noodles (in Central Square, Cambridge) — heavy noodles in a hot peanut-based sauce, shredded chicken optional. The Peking Ravoli and Suan La Chow Shao soup are also fabulous. It's a favorite of the MIT comp-sci culture, interestingly." [Scripting News]

I heartily concur. In fact when I first heard Dave say 'spicey noodles' I thought of Dun Dun noodles and David Levitt – my friend who went to M.I.T. who used to take me to Mary Chung's.  I believe it's on Mass Ave.   David now has a company called "Connected TV". [Marc's Voice]

Internal Java memo is right

[There are people saying that the internal memo is a hoax.  It doesn't matter if it is a hoax or not.  Its messages are still true: Sun needs to fix Java now or let IBM do it for them.]

An internal memo supposedly written by Julian S. Taylor titled "The Java Problem" is absolutely right on.  While it focuses on Solaris version of Java, it is also true for Win32 version.

1. The support model seems flawed
…
Java packages are released (re-released) every four or five months, introducing bug fixes and new features and new bugs with each release. These releases are upgrading packages which remove all trace of the prior installed packages and cannot be down-graded in the event of an error.

Each version of Java takes a long time to download and install so users will be hesitant to get the latest version unless they run into a situation that compells them to get a later version.  This problem is not limited to Sun.  Software industry as a whole must learn that upgrade doesn't mean wholesale replacement of old version with new.  It means ability to add and replace components safely (read undo).

2. The JRE is very large.
The JRE is significantly larger than comparable runtime environments when considering resident set size (memory dedicated to this specific program). It has been seen to grow to as much as 900M. This has a drastic effect on both performance and resource usage. It also means that multiple JREs present critical resource constraints on the servers for such thin-client systems as SunRays. Typical resident set requirements for Java2 programs include:

Hello World 9M
SMC Server 38M
SLVM GUI 60M
Component Manager 160M
TogetherJ 300 – 900M

When it comes to memory consumption, only one word can describe Java: disgusting.  While Java is not as bad on Win32, it still is bad enough to make me think twice about writing applications and utilities in Java.  Java is the king of open source languages because people will not pay for memory hogs with slow motion UI.

Stuffy XML-DEV

Adjective: stuffy
1. Lacking fresh air
2. Excessively conventional and unimaginative and hence dull

My recent post about SOSML (Son Of SML 😉 caused a small avalanche of old arguments and emotions on XML-DEV.  I was able to read only a few messages before things got too stuffy for me.

Orto: J2ME to DHTML

Orto is an interesting project that lets you convert a J2ME client into DHTML.  Its difficult to understand all of it and there seems to be many restrictions, but its seems clear that Orto allows you to write clients using Java and have it run on browsers without Java VM.  The idea itself is intriguing.

Lotto craze in Korea

I guess it had to happen.  Korea caught the lotto craze with prize going reaching $100 million.  Unfortunately, there were too many winners and people are hopping mad.  Even if you matched 4 out of 6 numbers, you get only about $20 because there were seven hundred thousand people who matched 4 numbers.  Now that sucks.  But at least these folks were better off than those who matched only three numbers, well over three million of them, who probably got only coins.

My wife buys lotto whenever she dreams of catching pigs, swimming in or stepping on manure.  Koreans are into dream interpretations and these sort of dreams are considered to bring in fortune and luck.  Yes, there are bad dreams that will make Koreans afraid to go outside.  Its not that Koreans really believe in dreams, but more like 'why take a chance when you don't have to?'

Comments are back in because I enjoyed occasional comments from strangers more than I realized.  Some style changes as well.  I don't know why the permalink was using a tiny image of # character, but I changed that.

Korean Days of the Week

This is one of those random topics I thought people might enjoy reading about.  Names for Korean days of the week are same are Japan.  I don't know who copied who, but I doubt it was copied from China because China uses different names for days of the week.  Meaning of the names translates perfectly to Western names for days of the week which supposedly originated from the Babylonians.

Monday is Wol-Yo-Yil.  Wol means moon.  Yo-Yil means day of week.  Eveyone knows that Monday means Day of the Moon, right?

Tuesday is Hwa-Yo-Yil.  Hwa means fire.  In Korea, planet Mars is named Hwa–Sung where Sung means Star.  Tuesday also means Day of Mars in the West.  I don't know which came first, but I am pretty sure one of the two, names for days of the week and names for the planets, came first.

Wednesday is Soo-Yo-Yil.  Soo means water.  Since Mercury is named Soo-Sung and Wednesday means Day of Mercury in the West, we have another match.

Thursday is Mok-Yo-Yil.  Mok means wood.  Jupiter is named Mok-Sung in Korea so Jupiter part matches.

Friday is Goom-Yo-Yil.  Goom means gold or metal.  Venus is named Goom-Sung, again matching Friday as Day of Venus.

Saturday is TTO-Yo-Yil.  TTO means earth.  By now, you should be able to guess that Saturn is named TTO-Sung in Korea.

Sunday is Yil-Yo-Yil.  Yil character means day or sun.

Was this post interesting?  If not, let me know.

Gnome 2.2: Pretty

If you haven't heard, Gnome 2.2 is out.  What I like best about this release its sub-pixel anti-aliased text rendering.  I don't know why but I just get off on anti-aliased text just like that way I get goosebumps when I feel along the silky smooth bodyline of a Ferrari or listening to pebbles crackle while walking about a Zen garden.  Woooo.

JahShaka: open source realtime multimedia studio

Apparently a major open source project that could have as great an impact as Gimp and Gnome.  Only problem is that a wild and crazy guy named Marc is getting involved who can help make JahShaka insanely great and bring Adobe and Macromedia into harms way.  Just kidding.

Frankly, I think Marc's involvement in anything is both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing because of all the creative insights, ideas, and attitude he brings.  A curse because you will have a tornado in your office, sucking up everyone's attention and throwing them about with almost religious fervor.  In a word, fun.

Pixar is using Rackspace blade systems – with 1,024 2.8Ghz Xeon processors.  This is great for JahShaka – which I'm starting to get involved in. JahShaka is the worlds first OpenSource Realtime Editing and Effects System which takes advantage of the power of OpenGL and OpenML.  This means it can run it's amazing stuff on XBox and PS2s! [Marc's Voice]