Older blog entries for sye (starting at number 411)

a colleague's mother passed away. Her wish was your kind donations to St. Jude research hospital - pediatric cancer genome project.

She studied art in London before setting off with her mother on an aid mission to China, which prompted the Chinese ambassador to predict:

Millions of Changs and Wangs with open arms
The Albion maiden will embrace,
Whose rare benevolence and natural charms
Profoundly touch the heart of an ancient race.

I wonder who was this Chinese ambassador

孔夫子名片-tcc
by Helen Tang on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 1:33pm

話說...........很多很多年以前.........

孔子收到美國「漢學國際研討會」的請柬，

邀他在開幕典禮後作專題演講。

孔子十分高興，準備先去印一盒名片。

文具店老闆見聖人來了，異常恭敬，

問清楚名片要中英文對照，就對孔子說：

「英文的一面，不知該怎麼稱呼？」

「不是有現成的Confucius嗎？」孔子反問。

「那是外國人對您老的尊稱，把『孔夫子』拉丁化的說法。」

老闆笑笑說：

「您老不好意思自稱『孔夫子』吧？」

「那倒是的」孔子想到自己平常鼓吹謙虛之道，不禁沉吟起來。

「那，該怎麼印呢？」

「杜甫昨天也來過」老闆說。「哦，他的名字怎麼印的？」孔子問。

「杜先生本來要印Tu Fu」老闆說：「我一聽表示不好，太像『豆腐』了。」

杜先生說：「那就倒過來，叫Fu Tu好了。」

我說：「那更不行，簡直像『糊塗』！」

「那怎麼辦？」孔子問。

「後來我就對詩聖說：『您老不是字子美嗎？子美，子美……有了！』

杜甫說：『怎麼有了？』

我說：『杜子美，就叫Jimmy Tu吧！』」

孔子笑起來，叫一聲：「妙！」

「其實韓愈也來過」老闆又說。

「真的呀？」孔子更好奇了：「他就印Han Yu吧？」

「本來他要這樣的」老闆說。

「我一聽又說不行，太像Hang you了。

韓老說那：『倒過來呢？』

我說：「You hang？那也不行。

不是『吊死你』就是『你去上吊吧』，太不雅了！」

「那後來呢？」孔子問。

「後來呀…」老闆得意洋洋：是我想到韓老的故鄉!對他說：

『您老不是韓昌黎嗎？』他說：『是呀』，我說：就印Charlie Han好了！

「太好了，太好了！」孔子笑罷，又皺起眉頭說：

「他們都解決了，可是我到底怎麼印呢？」

老闆想了一下，叫道：「有了！」

「怎麼樣？」孔子問

「您老不是字仲尼嗎？」老闆笑道。

「對呀，」孔子滿臉期待。
....
.

老闆：「而且還曾周遊列國，就印Johnny Walker好了！」

Becoming a translator, first one I would like to do is "Taryn Simon: The stories behind the bloodlines"

I switched into a new career without having to go through such interviewing process, is that good or bad? And daddy still won't drop ACID. Is that a right attitude for multitudes of unsustainable US health care? How serious if we get the wrong idea of this data-related error that he refers to?

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/CueCat_Guide.

a conversation I had that made my day.

My friend's yahoo email is being 'hijacked' ( not exactly once I paid a bit more attention. They were doing the simple spoofing trick of swapping letters) . I called her and find out that she is not traveling in Spain. Also her gmail account is having problem as well. I suspect the scammers are originated from China and targeted circle of Chinese friends emails.

http://advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary/42.html

http://psroc.phys.ntu.edu.tw/main/7-1.html

Apache Cassandra/Hadoop vs. Lucene/SOLR, what SEO problems are for these two pairs to solve?

btw, liked this banner at local friend's meeting place 'There is no way to peace. Peace is the way'.

planet moodle ? why all these different names for the same old PHP crowd?

Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages

code testing and its role in teaching

had a lot of fun just now going through 'Higher-order Perl' by Mark Jason Dominus. Damian Conway, co-designer of Perl6 wrote his 'Praise for Higher-Order Perl...':

"It raids the deepest vaults and highest towers of Computer Science, and transforms the many arcane treasures it finds - recursion, iterators, filters, memoization, partitioning, numerical methods, higher-order functions, currying, cutsorting, grammar-based parsing, lazy evaluation, and constraint programming - into powerful and practical tools for real-world programming tasks, file system interactions, HTML processing, database access, web spidering, typesetting, mail processing, home finance, text outlining, and diagram generation.

Along the way it also scatters smaller ( but equally invaluable ) gems, like the elegant explanation of the difference between "scope" and "duration" in Chapter 3, or the careful exploration of how best to return error flags in Chapter 4.

this and that & that could be useful to me as well. thanks