The Last Three Minutes

A nice short movie. In one’s life, the best moments may only need three minutes, I mean, to recap.

"The Last 3 Minutes" From Shane Hurlbut, ASC from Shane Hurlbut, ASC on Vimeo.

Jailbreak iPhone OS3.1.2

Now blackra1n does it all, jailbreaking and unlocking iPhone.

This is specially for OS 3.1.2 with Modem base 05.11.07. Follow the simple steps provided by iClarified in the following link:

http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=5886

Pick sn0w if you want to unlock your iPhone.

Note, while in the step of “Post Install Log for sn0w”, it may take long time to get it completed. If it takes longer than a few minutes, you may just abort it by hitting the Home button and start blackra1n over again. The second time should be a smooth sailing through the black rain.

Updated (2010-01-20):

Using iPhone Browser, the real root directory “/”could not be seen. You can install afc2add service via Cydia to resolve this issue.

LanManServer hands on startup

My 64-bit Vista desktop started showing a very slow startup. Every time when it starts up, I had to wait for about 20 minutes until the network connection becomes available. This problem bothered me for weeks.

This is apparently due to Vista somehow booting up services in wrong order causing some dependant services hanging. I was trying to look at solutions in the Internet, but don’t have a proper set of keywords for googling, until I noticed in Task Manager there was a service “lanmanserver” hanging in as “starting” but couldn’t run until about 20 minutes waiting.

Now I’ve finally found a perfect solution related to “lanmanserver hang vista 64 bits” google keywords. Thanks to DEANREILY who posted it.

Here is the recap of what I did according to this solution:

1) Use regedit in administrator mode
2) Change entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Spooler. Double click on "DependsOnService" entry. Add (append) three separate lines:
LanmanWorkstation
LanmanServer
LmHosts
2) Change entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetLogon.
Double click on "DependsOnService" entry and find the "LanmanWorkstation" line and delete it. Add a "LanmanServer" line If you don't see it.
My system had one line “LanmanWorkstation” before the change.
3) Click OK and exit the Registry Editor. Restart your computer. The 20 minute delay on start up problem should be gone.

Updated (2010-01-17):

The above solution will cause the Print Spooler service being unable to start any more, so all added printers are lost.

The root cause is really due to load order dependency of Print Spooler and Network.

Scenario:
    The spooler (I have a network printer server) wants to start but Network has not started yet.

Solution (Kludge):
    Simply set Printer Spooler service with manual start. (Note: Printer Spooler does not support delayed automatic start)

The Network will start normally. No more 20 minute delay. Then manually start the Print Spooler service, or whenever needing a printing job.

Climate Change is Nature’s Way

What is the major cause of global warming if so? Howard Bloom’s article sets the logic.

This is a great article. Climate change due to human cause is just a story but not a science. I hope those radical minds who took office with the given power to understand more science before deciding to hijack us to a costly direction with wrong and very wrong reason. The COP15 meeting in Copenhagen should be just dismissed.

Tranquil Morning

The Photo Album, Tranquil Morning --- Golden Faces of Centennial Park, has been released at my website EggheadLabs.com.

It was taken while I had a morning walk around Centennial Park, Ellicott City, Maryland.

Besides the above link to a full-size movie, here is the quick preview (Click on PLAY to start the movie).

Due to varying whether in the last week of October, I purposely planned all the sunny days for hiking on Shenandoah National Park, and left this raining day for local activities, such as having a walk in this Park. It turned out a perfect scene for fall foliage unexpectedly. I started wondering whether my original reasoning of such plan had even been required.

For this photography session, I had made tremendous planning, including a serious update of Manfrotto tripod with 488RC2 ball head, as well as a shutter remote.  The morning came unexpectedly rainy and of course quiet just because of the rain. My hands were so busy with shutter button, lens zoom, tripod adjusts, even holding an umbrella (there were still a few rain drops on my lens, which can be seen in some of the photos).

This is a combined trip with quite a lot of hiking activities. Besides photographic equipment, I started paying more serious attention to the pro hiking gears from REI (yes, had got a membership just for that).

Worldview: Realism vs. Idealism

The philosophy that has dominated science for centuries assumes that only matter --- consisting of atoms or, ultimately, elementary particles --- is real; all else are secondary phenomena of matter.

The notion, however, that all things are made of atoms is an unproven assumption; it is not based on any direct evidence for all things.

Is there an alternative to the philosophy of material realism? Since Rene Descartes divided reality into two separate realms --- mind and matter --- many people have tried to rationalize the causal potency of conscious minds within Cartesian dualism.

So the question is, Is there a monistic alternative to material realism, where mind and matter are integrally part of one reality, but a reality that is not based on matter?

There is such an alternative. The alternative is monistic idealism. The philosophy is monistic as opposed to dualistic, and it is idealism because ideas and the consciousness of them are considered to be the basic elements of reality; matter is considered to be secondary.

In the idealist philosophy, consciousness is fundamental; thus our spiritual experiences are acknowledged and validated as meaningful. However, modern science's embracing of material realism changed all that; instead of being united with nature, consciousness became separate from nature, leading to a psychology separate from physics.

We are conditioned to believe that we are machines - that all our actions are determined by the stimuli we receive and by our prior conditioning.

This is why it has become so important for each of us to examine closely our worldview.

[from "The Self-Aware Universe", by Goswami]

Fall Foliage in Beaver’s Bend

The Photo Album, Fall Foliage in Beaver’s Bend, has been released at my website Eggheadlabs.com.

It took me nearly two years to get this album into Flash work since the photos were taken in Beaver’s Bend in 2006.

Quest for Finding Ourselves What We Don't Know

We human tend to be excited on how significant as we have gained a little more knowledge about the world and achieved steps of advancing the society, which otherwise is neglectable comparing to the path the universe has evolved so far.

It is to me far more greater that we could have realized how vastly unknown the universe would be, with so many problems are yet unsolved or even yet to be discovered.

Taking an attempt of further examination inward, it is profound by admitting that we human being are so ignorance.

A Sentimental Lotus (莲的心事)

The photo album, A Sentimental Lotus (莲的心事), has been released at my website EggheadLabs.com.

The Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania, has such natural photographic scenes and variety of flowers. It is the lotus, however, amazed me the most and struck my memory of the famous poem by Xi Muring (席慕容 - 莲的心事).

Job Security or Insecurity?

It is bad that job insecurity could cause one’s loss of steady income for living; It is even worse that a secure job could destroy one’s otherwise a creative career in lifetime!

Thanks to the Armageddon

If asteroids had ever hit the Earth before and caused dinosaurs deracinated, we would have the reason to be scared should those deadly objects hit the Earth again. But we human beings should first thank asteroids for having wiped out all dinosaurs, or otherwise there would have been no chance for human development under the dinosaurs dominance.

The next hit by asteroids, or some other forms of extraterrestrial objects or even Gamma-burst radiation, could then become our Armageddon being deracinated. The future beings whoever will be developed after it would really thank this round of Armageddon by having destroyed us, the dominant and insane human beings. I suppose that such future beings do consider themselves being better evolved, more intelligent, nicer, … … and happier.

There will be the time, however, when the future beings are puzzled by examining our human being fossils together with those of dinosaurs which will be found in a museum remnant of human civilization, I will be surely snickering under the surface of the Earth or above the heaven!

The Universe

The universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe.

Mist over the West Lake

The Photo Album, Mist over the West Lake, has been just released at my website EggheadLabs.com.

I had enjoyed a couple of trips to Hangzhou, China, during the spring time in 2008. As planned, I did bring my DSLR with me but end up I only took a few shots with average scenes, while competing the shooting opportunities with the crowd tourists who were in front of your camera all the time.

It was in one particular rainy day I’d finally found what I was looking for in QuYuanFengHe (曲院风荷). The reason was simple, the tourist groups were absent due to the rain, which created a great opportunity for me to capture the misty scenes which would have been blocked by the crowd in any normal day. Unfortunately, I suddenly realized that I did not bring my DSLR with me, while only having my Cybershot in my pocket.

Hey, nothing to be complained. I then wasted no time and shot as many as possible. Certain shots did perfectly match the obsessive complex that I have been carried inside of me for decades towards my hometown.

Transfer Apps from iPhone to a New PC

If you’ve ever tried to synch up your iPhone to iTune on a new PC, you could end up lose all apps that you installed in your iPhone.

Before you decide to synch your iPhone with a new PC, make sure to perform the following steps to ensure all apps can be safely transferred to and preserved on your new PC.

0. Connect iPhone to the new PC. DO NOT SYNCH at this moment.

1. In the iTune of the new PC, authorize this PC to take apps. Note that you only have up to 5 PCs for apps transferring.

2. Right click your iPhone under the DEVICES at the left explore list and then select “Transfer Purchase”.

3. Then iTuen starts transferring all the apps from your iPhone to the new PC.

Shrink Hard Drive Partition

How to shrink a large sized partition is a bit tricky.

Here is the use case. When you bought a new PC with just a single partition as Drive C: with the Vista OS installed, you may want to shrink it down and leave extra space to another partition (say D: for your personal files).

If you try to directly shrink the C partition, it is often found that you could not shrink it as much as you wanted. This is because that some files are located nearly at the end of the partition that needs to be shrunk.

You can use PerfectDisk 8.0 to defrag those files and move them to be more compact in chunks near the beginning location of the partition. Even so, the 30-day free trail version of PerfectDisk isn’t that perfect as some system files are so persistent to be moved around.

Here is the tricks:

1. run PerfectDisk to defrag and clean up more free space first. Chances are that not much available space can be freed up.

2. try moving system files with PerfectDisk. It requires rebooting the system and perform such moving operation at the very beginning of next bootup. The consequence may improve a little free space, but still not enough to be shrunk as you needed.

3. At this moment, go ahead to use Vista Storage Management to shrink this partition to gain whatever available space for new partition.

4. Then repeat steps 1-2, amazingly you can further defrag and clean up more free space right after shrinking operation at step 3.

5. Repeat step 3 to shrink this partition further to whatever the Storage Management would allow you to gain.

After a few tries, you will be able to get enough size for the new partition as you desire so. Then you can format the new partition (say Drive D:) and start using it.

Got my new Intel Core i7 PC

Newly ordered a Dell Studio XPS with Intel Core 7i inside. This baby has 4 cores, which are showing 8 threads in the Task Manager.

I’ll benchmark it later until I get an Mac Leopard running on it.

Here are the names I gave to my recently owned computers:

• Egghead (a generic one I built by myself)
• Poet (Dell XPS 9150 Dual Core)
• Pundit (Dell M1330 laptop Core 2 Due)
• Swami (Dell Studio XPS Core i7 quad)

I just wonder what the next PC’s name will be.

Gone Too Soon

What we are memorizing after Michael is his legacy which will never be gone.

[on my exit row seat right before the flight took off at SAN heading to DFW]

The Capitalist Manifesto

"Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity. "      - Karl Marx

"What we are experiencing is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of finance, of democracy, of globalization and ultimately of
ethics."      - Fraeed Zakaria (2009)

At this crisis of economy, government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem!

It Is Europeans Who Are Mostly In Debt

If you think it is Americans who are to blame as having borrowed too much more than they could afford, then think twice!

Take a look at the top external debt (in US dollars) per capita data by countries, these data apparently show that many European countries are in ridiculously deeper debt.

Among these 18 countries, Monaco and Ireland are more than 10 times of their GDP could produce. Only three non-European countries are on the list, those are Qatar, Australia and the USA.

People in rich country do have more purchasing  power to leverage their debt. For such fair comparison, I took their high GDP per capita to normalize their high debt. So here is the list of Debt per capita as percentage of GDP per capita (the debt-to-GDP ratio).

Again, after the normalization, these Europeans are still on the top of the list. Taking Monaco as example, people in Monaco share the average debt as high as over 18 times as their GDP contribution. As I expected, two poor countries, Zimbabwe and Liberia, are also borrowing money around as twice what they could produce.

With such per-capita GDP normalization, it is equally fair to judge the debt of each country, no matter they are poor or rich. So I plot a scatter chart of all countries in the whole world to examine their normalized per-capita debt in relate to their GDP contribution. If every country borrows money at the same level as the same ratio to their GDP contribution, the fit line should be flat.

However, the figure turns out to be upper bend to many rich countries. It is obvious that many rich countries, especially those in Europe, are responsible for their deeper debt as over borrowing money externally.

In a huge contrast, Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China as well as India only show their small fraction of debt (under 30%) in comparison to their GDP.

Poor Countries, High Birth Rate

Poor countries tend to have high birth rate. I use the available data for over 225 countries around the world to plot the following scatter chart.

The correlation coefficient of –0.54 shows such an inverse relation statistically.