While many PC users are looking forward to Windows 7, many Mac users are also dying for the newest OS X: Snow Leopard. Most new features sound nice, but not so impressive (After all, this is just a small upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard). However, there is one particular thing that caught my attention: Out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange.
Some background about Microsoft Exchange (ME): This Microsoft technology is very popular in the business world. It allows users to manage emails, tasks and daily events such as conference, meeting, etc. This doesn’t sound much exciting, but a good size business would go nut without using ME or an equivalent system. For example, if I am assigned a project and need to setup a meeting with other employees[a] to gather specs, figure out solutions to the project, etc, (or just planning a party ), this is all I need to do: Read the rest of this entry »
This happens very often, if not every single day. [↩]
I was reading a book Zach gave me, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, and I came across the section he talks about his childhood dreams. I thought to myself “What are my childhood dreams?” My thoughts stumble as I couldn’t think of a single thing I dreamed of as a child. Finally, I remember that I used to dream of being a police officer. Then I wonder why I wanted to be a policeman; after all, I grew up with LEGO (still loving those), power rangers and their action figures. Why didn’t I dream of being a superman, or being one of the power rangers? Does it some how reflect who I am and what I decide to study, and to do?
I was brought up in a realistic home (which I don’t mind, but it think it kills some of my creativity). I wasn’t into music, drawing or any kind of art. I remember drawing the same thing on every single free-drawing assignments, a house — a simple combination of squares, rectangles, and triangles. As I grew up, I found computers exciting. Yup, I got introduce to computers through a computer game. After a couple times hearing my dad yell at me for breaking the computer[a], my mom decided to send me to computer classes during the summer and I got introduced to word and spreadsheet. If I’m not mistaken, I was in 4th grade. That was when I told myself “One day, I’ll be like Bill Gates!” (Not having to go to school and is still that rich and famous, of course! )
Back then, I was a total slacker, and probably still is . I would lie about finishing my homework so that I could play my action figures or watch TV. My parents hired a college student to come and make sure I finished my homework, help me with the assignments if necessary, and eventually teach me new concepts. That went on for a couple years until I had to take the computer classes at school. The college student, my home teacher, realized the computer ability I had, and I was doing pretty well at school, so he asked a friend of his, a computer guy, to teach me. Read the rest of this entry »
Just to clarify, it wasn’t my fault. Dumb Windows 98 first edition and Windows ME failed themselves. [↩]
This is a new and weird thing, but give the first video a try and see if it catches your attention.
Get excited -- Meet Milo
You are probably thinking: ‘Great! More reasons for the nerds to lock themselves in their rooms. More distraction from my schoolwork.’ And certainly, talking to a computer / imaginary friend does not help socializing… Before my comments bored the devil out of you, take another look at this video. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my bad habit is that I don’t like to learn to use someone else’s product when I know I have the ability to make it.
Throughout years of programming, Date and Time has been one of the things I find annoying to deal with. Luckily, I didn’t have to do much with date and time since most of my work is done around the database and algorithms, until recently, when I was going to build a new blog myself, which requires accurate storage of date & time (when was this published, last modified etc.).
Most programming language have a pretty decent date & time library, but that also means it’s pretty complicated to use. Those libraries are helpful in most cases, such as (2009, 6, 3, 20, 6, 0) will give me June 3, 2009 8:06 PM. But what timezone is it in? Are you talking about 8:06 PM in England or 8:06 PM over in Washington State? Things get hairy once we have to deal with the timezone, and then daylight savings. To be honest, I don’t even know if the Collegedale, TN timezone is currently -1 or +1 for daylight savings. All I know is that it’s 4 hours behind the UTC/GMT and that’s good enough.
With the mind set that I’m not going to find out if I’m under any daylight savings, I need a way to store date and time in the most accurate way possible: Read the rest of this entry »
I decided to start this blog after being bored to death for the first couple weeks of summer (yeah, my great summer plan was ruined). On the other hand, I kinda miss being a SAU freshman blogger, too.
The domain name has been registered for a couple weeks. I, however, didn’t plan to run WordPress on it, but some custom CGI scripts instead. There’s nothing wrong with WordPress but I don’t quite like its text editor and I want some custom functions for my blog so I was going to ‘cook something up’. Finally, I realized it’s not worth all the effort to build the whole blog just for some random features so I decided to stick with WP.
), this is all I need to do: Read the rest of this entry »
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. I would lie about finishing my homework so that I could play my action figures or watch TV. My parents hired a college student to come and make sure I finished my homework, help me with the assignments if necessary, and eventually teach me new concepts. That went on for a couple years until I had to take the computer classes at school. The college student, my home teacher, realized the computer ability I had, and I was doing pretty well at school, so he asked a friend of his, a computer guy, to teach me. 
