October, 2007
Earth Quake
At 8:03pm, the kittens were feed with their main course (dry food) and dessert (can food and egg). I just finished cooking my own dinner, put the serving tray with my dinner to the coffee table, and was about to enjoy my meal while chatting with Huahai on my cell. It just seem to be a normal weekday night for me these days. Before I took the first bite, however, I heard some huge noise and everything inside the apartment started shaking violently along the building itself. The kittens who were wondering around me startled and quickly ran away.
Yaha! A Math Game for Everyone.
Yaha! is a traditional math game popular among Chinese speaking populations. It has been historically given a varieties of names, but the essence of the game is the same: the players are given 4 playing cards, their task is to use the 4 numbers represented by the cards, use them once and only once, to get the number 24. The players are allowed to apply all four arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as well as parenthesis as they see fit. The winner is whoever comes up with a correct solution first.
电脑病毒, Linux和中国
昨天我的从中国来的访问学生说他的电脑中病毒了,然后很形象的给我合掌鞠躬,说,熊猫烧香。这个病毒我听说过,没想到在美国还有人中招,很吃惊。来美国以后,我很有一些年没被电脑病毒所困扰了。唯一的一次病毒事件,还是中了那个有名的‘爱情信’病毒。
一个关于逻辑和概率的简单科普
人们一般说的逻辑指命题逻辑,它是理性思维的基本规则。比如以罗素为代表的数理哲学家就把逻辑看作数学的基础。命题逻辑的规则并不多,很多人心里都是知道一些大概的的,不过有人没有正式学过,有些地方不太清楚而已。这篇文章就简单扼要地说一说。更重要的是,本文要介绍现在一个新的进展,就是把概率论看作逻辑的扩展,把传统的亚里士多德的逻辑看成是概率论的特例。
A Thinkpad X61 Hotkeys Solution on Debian Linux
On my old Thinkpad X31, there is a nice little program called tpb that makes all Thinkpad hotkeys work on Linux. However, that project hasn't been updated for two years, and tpb does not work with the newer Thinkpad models. On my new X61, notably, the sound volume controls are broken: volume UP and volume Down keys produce the same effect - bring the volume to the half level. It seems that piece of hardware called nvram, on which tpb relies, now produces different values than older models. So, I have to ditch tpb.
yyhh.org
Now this site is added as a Facebook application. You can add this application to Facebook by linking to http://apps.facebook.com/yyhh_org
Use XRandR 1.2 to Swtich on External Display for Thinkpad Laptop
Thinkpad X61 has an VGA output port, so it supports dual-head display. However, with the Intel GMA965 graphics chipset in X61, the thinkpad_acpi (used to be called ibm_acpi) kernel module does not seem to support switching on or off this VGA port any more. The traditionally used commands, such as "echo crt_enable > /proc/acpi/ibm/video", no longer work.
Fortunately, the xserver-xorg-video-intel display driver supports xrandr 1.2. extension in recent versions of Xorg X server. So we can use xrandr to dynamically switch on or off the external VGA display, and much more.
Install MEPIS Linux on X61
I got a brand new Thinkpad X61 laptop last Saturday. Unfortunately, the factory loaded Vista Home Basic was too bloated and ate up 700MB memory from a fresh boot without launching any application! If you know me, you know what I will do - remove Windows and load up Linux!
Posting blog entry to Drupal from within Vim
Some people may wonder why would anyone want to do this?
Yunyao and Huahai start to build their Web home
Well, we don't have a single physical home yet, how about a virtual home for starters?
Actually, this site has been around since 2003, for our wedding site and other personal stuff. But we didn't get the energy to build a public face for this site. Now Huahai decided to use this space for his blogs, so gave it a face-lift. I hope this could become a central place for keeping in touch with us.
The site is powered by Drupal, an open-source content management system. Right now, I am not allowing random visitors to create accounts, but I can add people manually. Just drop me a line.
About us
We are a dual career married couple who happen to work with technology a lot. This site is about our lives, our thoughts, and everything going on about us. Hope you enjoy the time spending with us here. As you know, all human connections are real, even the "virtual" ones :-)



