Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category.
29th March 2006, 04:27 pm
N°1 « Pays »
J’ai lu recemment des articles dans Augean Stables, un blog d’un americain qui a écrit aux problèmes socials en France. Dans son blog, il a écrit que, plus en plus, ses amis francais ont realisé que la situation immédiate en France, le violance et les manifestations, c’est possible qu’elle ne va pas passer comme avant. Il a écrit qu’un des ses amis lui a dit, “mais, [les français] nous sommes tétanisés.“
L’autour a réfléchi que le sentiment public a bien changé maintenant, au contraste de ce qui s’est passé avant la guerre en Irac. Avant la guerre, en opposition des americains, le sentiment était bien anti-americain en France. Maintenant, après les grandes manifestations contre le comique Danois au Moyen-Orient, des agitations dans les banlieues, la population française realisent que la situation en France n’est pas mieux que celle aux États-Unis.
Hier, j’ai rendu visite à une professeur qui vient de France. Elle m’a dit qu’elle n’a pas peur de ce qui se passe maintenant, et elle va continuer d’avoir confiance au gouvernment. Elle croit que les troubles va cesser en un mois. On se promet qu’on se verra pour verifier sa prédiction.
27th March 2006, 05:37 am
In the past day or two, a couple of people have asked me (in various forms) about how Chinese writing works. The best book to read on this subject is Ramsey’s phenomenal book on the languages in China, the Wikipedia article on Chinese writing isn’t bad either.
This is the first thing to remember: Chinese is not written in an alphabet.
Think about that for a second. What’s the conventional definition for a “word”? Spaces on both sides of a string of letters? That definition isn’t gonna fly in the case of Chinese. We simply don’t write with spaces.
In Chinese writing, each character represents one idea, and combinations of characters can be put together to form bigger word-units. Not being an alphabet, explicit information on how the word is/ should be pronounced is generally not encoded as part of the character.
Here’s an example:
English: I am writing in Chinese.
Chinese: 我在寫中文。
The Chinese sentence consists of 5 characters. 我 means “I”, 在 is the equivalent of “am …-ing”， 寫 is “to write” and 中文 means Chinese (lit. Central writing).
Now a Mandarin speaker would pronunce the sentence one way, and a Cantonese speaker another way. The pronunciation of these characters can be sufficiently different such that the two are not mutually-intelligible.
Of course, it is not only the pronunciation that is different among the dialects. Grammar and word choices can also differ. For example, the way to form the -ing in Cantonese is “… 緊”, so a more natural way to write the sentence above in sentence in “Cantonese” (i.e. with Cantonese grammar) would be「我寫緊中文」.
Many of the words used in the dialects (particularly those that not used in Mandarin) were written with characters that are now obscure or have been phased out. This is because the writing of Chinese has been standardized to be Mandarin Chinese, regardless of which dialect one speaks natively. Hence, even for a native Cantonese speaker (like me), it could be quite challenging to read prose written in “Cantonese”, simply because it is not a usual way to write. There are many ways in use to replace the “lost” characters with modern variants, which makes it difficult to understand prose written “in dialect” without reading it aloud, for the common technique is to choose a character that sounds similar to the one that’s missing, even though the meaning is not appropriate.
Hope this answers the question once and for all.
28th January 2006, 01:59 am
I paid $5 to try out FeedLounge when it came out, and I’m still going back to Bloglines.
At first, I thought I’d like FeedLounge’s more sophisticated UI, but it turns out Blogline’s simple UI was easier to use, faster to load and less error-prone.
With Bloglines, once I click on a feed (or a folder of feeds), all the posts are marked as read. With FeedLounge, posts are marked read as I read them, but that just made scrolling a lot more cumbersome.
I also thought I’d like FL’s Outlook 2k3-like 3-pane view more than BL’s traditional 2-pane view, but FeedLounge’s view ended up taking too much screen estate, and the additional post-title pane in the middle isn’t all the useful either.
2nd December 2005, 07:02 am
I was uploading something just now, and things were really slow, then I had this idea. I figured I’ll write it down here.
The inspiration was this: I tried to use nautilus to drag-n-drop my files to an remote mount that uses the SSH gnome-vfs back-end. It didn’t work because it was too slow, so I went back to the command line. That got me thinking: in a remote Smalltalk system, the only way to talk to the image is via some sort of VNC connection. That’s really cool, but I bet it’ll be really unbearable on a slow connection.
Here comes the brilliant idea: why not implement a VFS backend for a Squeak image? That way, on a remote machine, you can use something less bandwidth-hungry to do your editing.
I envision something like this:
$ mount -t squeakfs Squeak.image /mnt/image
$ ls /mnt/image/MyClass
myMethod1:
myMethod2:with:
...
I mean, this could be useful even in a non-remote situation.
Am I on crack?
7th October 2005, 02:42 pm
今天早上，意外地收到了一封不是junkmail的留言。一位叫Jessamine的讀者（讀者？）留言問我，在上一篇的中文記事裏所提到的「瓊瑤式的口吻」，究竟是什麼意思。
仔细地解釋這個想法並不容易，因為那只是一個個人的感覺。和香港人相比，我一直覺得台灣人是文皺皺的。幾年前到台北旅行時，有好幾次看到了一些夷非所思的中國字，也聽到了一些從未聽過的四字成語。台灣人的用詞一般都很文雅，在日常生活裡，四字成語也用得多。當然，台灣社會裏也有着各種不同的口吻：本省人跟外省人之間有分別，南部人和北部人有分別，會講台語的和不會講的也當然有分別。
大陸的文字寫得短，感覺上很簡樸；香港的文字卻是最實在的，文意直接了當而對我來說也是最親切的；而台灣的文字就很長，但它確實是華麗的。
撇開滿口閩南腔的「台灣國語」不說,台北人的中文水平應該不錯。上一年的冬天在香港，因為王家衛將要把它拍成電影，有一個晚上我讀了王文華的「蛋白質的女孩」。這種數小時內可以看完的流行愛情小說沒什麼了不起，但總比香港叫深雪之類的作家寫得好。擁有24小時營業的誠品書店，台北人的文學水平比香港人的高。
最近有空，從網上下載台灣的「康熙來了」節目，從此對台灣的文化有了進一步的了解。在台灣，作家們紛紛都跑去當電視主持人。王文華也配上了當紅的綜藝一姐陶晶瑩在主持節目，但我不覺得他們有什麼看頭。反而，同樣是作家出身的「康熙來了」主持人蔡康永就有趣的多了。我找到了他在台灣中央大學的一篇演講的錄音，挺有意思。
王文華最近放假，從他訪問蔡康永的節目裡，我隱約明白他離開的心情。他自己也說，幾年來，一直在吃老本，還是靠「蛋白質」來找妹妹，受夠了。
台灣媒體沉迷着王文華的性向。嘉賓上他的節目，那也變了一個必問的問題。我對他的性向不感興趣，但他的文筆總給我有一種膩膩的味道。他隨後的其他作品，有一些我也讀了。和「蛋白質」一樣，初讀時還是有一點新鮮，但很快就變得有點做作了。王文華的文筆和瓊瑤的當然不一樣，但那種粘粘的筆風卻是同出一撇的。
那種粘粘膩膩的感覺，就是我所說的瓊瑤式的口吻。
21st May 2005, 06:05 pm
前幾天，東京的同事叫我去讀一下叫TRICK FISH blog的網站裏的文章，最先讀完的是「私」と「僕」と「俺」、そして「ボク女」。要是直譯為中文，是「我」和「我」和「我」，還有「我女」
，毫無意思。
跟中文不一樣，日文有很多不同的第一身代名詞，而在每一個選擇裏都暗示着微妙的區別。男人通用的有三個：
- 私
：工作時或有禮貌時用的敬語
- 僕
：工作時或私時用的敬語
- 俺：私人，或罵人的時候用
這篇文章也就是討論着這個話題。文章的重點在第一身代名詞在女性上的新用：最近，女孩子用上了傳統上男性用的代名詞「僕」、這些女孩被統稱為「ボク女」（僕女）。
筆者說，特地用這個代名詞的女孩子不是沒有動機的。有女權分子用「要男女平等，就得共用一樣的代名詞」來解釋這個現象，但這只是個很弱的答案，因為共用的代名詞以經存在，那就是「私」。因此一個更合理的說法一定要考慮各種不同社會元素。
筆者提起了許多引起這社會現象的原因，包括時下的少女漫畫，現代女性的自我形象及其他男女之間的性別政治等等。雖然這種字面上的語言現象並沒可能在華語社會裏出現，但是裏內的各種問題是實在的，在華人社會裏又會引起怎樣的現象呢？
19th February 2005, 09:50 pm
Last week, a lot of things sorta clicked together for me.
My key revelation is: It’s better to send a message asking for something to be done, than to explicitly invoke the functions yourself
.
The first step into reaching conclusion began when I was talking to Miguel on the T after watching Hide and Seek. He told me he’s been reading a bit into the permathread that is SOAP vs. REST. I remembered two things from that conversation, 1) Schema validation is used only at development time, there is no need to schema validate incoming messages in production, and 2) in a REST-like system, the URL pointing to the service is analogous to the monikers used in COM and Bonobo.
The first point provided a nice introduction to last week’s inter-blog discussion about truth in WS.
Which leads to the 2nd point.
Prof. Rasala has been teaching this class on Web Services since last year. When he was preparing for this class last year, I would go to his office every week and do a brain dump of the stuff I know about Web Services. Oftentimes, we will then have a pleasant discussion about what the XML Web Services vision is and how it works, etc.
Unlike me, Prof. Rasala first learned to use the XML Serialization before learning any of the APIs from System.Xml. While I shared the same enthusiasm when I first learned how to use XmlSerializer (Miguel will attest to that), I soon learned that XML Serialization has its limitations and eventually settled down on using XPath as my favorite way of traversal XML documents. I got especially keen on XPath once I realized that XPath can be implemented on top of different storage mechanisms. Since then, I’ve been trying to convert Prof. Rasala to the XPath camp. I think I succeeded last week.
Similar to how monikers condenses a set of method calls into a single string, XPath does a similar thing with XML infosets. In the contest of Web Services, while everything already works in this fashion, using URL+query strings is a lot more economical and copy-n-pasteable than blobs of XML in a SOAP envelope with various WS-Addressing headers. The last is basically what Miguel pointed out on the T.
Most of this maps pretty close to how Smalltalk works already, but after reading Don’s entry on Indigo, I’m curious to see if there’s an extensibility mechanism (other than the wonder doesNotUnderstand:
) which will allow me to have direct control over the mapping of selectors to methods. In Indigo-speak, I’m searching for the equivalent to:
void ProcessMessage (Message m);
4th November 2004, 02:21 pm
As a foreign student who have lived in the US for the past 7 years, 3 under Clinton and the past 4 under Bush, I’m finding this country growing less welcoming and less appealing.
Four years ago, as I was about to start college, I remember thinking to myself, “life has been pretty good in the past 4 years, I can see myself becoming an American.”
. Ever since the Patriot Act was proposed, I have been feeling less and less inclined to “becoming American”
.
From this map produced by USA Today, it looks like the America that I loved is rapidly shrinking.
One thing that I find repulsive is the self-righteousness from many people on the Right. More than ever, I find the frequent pronouncements of “America is still the greatest nation on earth” to be arrogant, ignorant and illusional.
Maybe there is hope, that it is not only about Red states and Blue states, the Left and the Right, as Jon Stewart so poignantly said on Crossfire. Maybe we should look at this as different shades of purple:
.
Here is a page with links to more maps of the 2004 election.
This just in: Greg Palast says Kerry won.
New
: Interactive map from the New York Times.
*
On a more Mono-related note, we made 2 releases on Election Day, 1.0.4 and 1.1.2. However, the pages to the packages and installers didn’t get updated until Wednesday afternoon. Hopefully it’s all sorted now.
13th October 2004, 01:07 pm
I just got back from my American Government class where we had a heated debate about tax policy. I made a comment about how strange it is that so many Americans argue for a flat tax rate based on social justice
. They claim that “it is unfair to tax someone who earns more money”.
This makes no sense at all. If anything, the rich use more public resources than the poor and it is fair
to pay for it. For a good summary, read The Life of Joe Republican.
On my way back from home, as I was crossing the foot bridge, I thought of a line that I could have used during the discussion:
Tax is only burden if you cannot afford it. If you can afford it and still call it a burden and ask for relief, then that is lazy and weak.
For a long time, I have been puzzled as to why some many supporters of Republican policies choose to do so; most of them I know are simply not rich enough to benefit from those policies. I think this Slate article answers some of those questions for me.
Choice quotes:
“The people with less than $10 million are still very focused on their personal financial situation in the short term,” he told the Wall Street Journal, where the results were first published.
and also
At a certain point—somewhere north of $10 million—wealth may become “f*** you and f*** you, Republicans” money…. People with such sums don’t need to worry about how income or capital gains taxes affect their daily lives. Raise ‘em, lower ‘em, who cares? They’re still going to be disgustingly rich. And so they are free to devote their attention—and resources—to other areas: the environment, education, foreign policy, the Supreme Court, social issues, stem-cell research, the war on drugs, whatever. And it seems that for many of the truly wealthy, focusing on those other issues leads them to favor Kerry over Bush.
I think the key quote is this: Taxes are a byproduct of wealth, not an obstacle to its creation.
