Iraq won the Asian cup

What an emotional moment it is. Just one hour ago, I accidentally switched the channel into CNN and saw the last few minutes of the game. The Iraq beat Saudi Arabia by one point in Asian cup soccer game. I saw the Iraqi crowded at the TV and cheered for their coming championship together as I experienced our third position of the world cup baseball game tournament in 2003.

From the news, I realize that it is the first soccer championship for Iraqi for the last 31 years. Iraqi people made the impossible into possible. As discussed in the news, this incredible job is made under the condition of lack of money, lack of training, lack of everything. Even more, these players fought for their countries, their families, every victims of the war. They are the historical heroes of Iraqi now like our little baseball players from the little league with the championship cup few decades ago. Their achievement will last for long. They give the Iraqi hope. The gunfire started everywhere in Baghdad at the moment they won.

Congratulation to Iraqi. I can feel their joyfulness. I hope they can stand up again after the years of suffering by the invasion and suppression. I also hope our Taiwanese can stick up too to show the world that they should not ignore the truth of our existence. But I think the pity is we will not be able to this emotional moment from our very biased Taiwanese media.

Making the vacation message in the unix email system

I do not know if the commands apply to every server. It is the way how our department email server works now.

1. Check and see current vacation message: cat .vacation.msg
2. Edit vacation message: vi .vacation.msg
3. Edit vacation message within vi editor: I am not familiar with vi at all, and for me to remember all the commands. Here are some essentials:
   
• dd: delete entire line
• dw: delete the character before the cursor
• ":" : go to the command line
• wq: save and quit of the file used in command line
4. Activate vacation message: mv inactiveDotForward .forward
5. De-activate vacation message: mv .forward inactiveDotForward
   

Research Memo: co-kriging functions

The function kriging and coregfit are two functions to work for cokriging in BMElib. The convention of using kriging in multivariate problem is discussed in BMEprobamoments. The idea is to use the cell data structure to save the multivariate information and do the prediction.

No surface M-bags to Taiwan anymore .....

It was a really bad experience by shipping books to Taiwan this time. The USPS closes their service for surface M-bags to Taiwan now. It means the shipment of 60 lbs books to Taiwan will cost me $233 US dollars. Isn't it crazy? The shipping fee is even more expensive than buying the new books.

American baggage company is the one I found from those Google advertisement for international shipping services, after my few hours desperate internet search. I do not know if they offer the best prices but at least their price sounds to me is more comfortable. $135 for the books of 300 lbs. The disadvantage of such service is they only deliver the packages to the depot rather than your home. It means I will have to drive to warehouses to drop off or pick up my stuff, but, anyway, I save at leat $200 dollars per 60 lbs parcel. Hope it can be a pleasant experience with this small delivery company.

Rising Superpowers in the history (大國崛起)

This series was produced by CCTV China. It is no doubt today that China is one of the most terrifying emerging power in the world. Many magazines or articles predict that China or India will overpass the US in the next few decades. This series shows their Chinese people's ambitions. This series discuss every super powers in the past or nowadays about the mechanism, the boundary conditions and the reasons for their success. These countries includes Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, British, France, Germany, Soviet Union, Japan, and United States. Every country took its own historical opportunity to become the major domination of the world. Such discussion generates a lot of buzz within China as mentioned in some newspaper. No matter whether the China will become the next super power as the media or Chinese people expect, this series can always be a good media for us to understand our world nowadays and the contemporary history in the world.

Be a Taiwanese, the funny thing learned from this series is that Taiwan was found as Formosa by the first super power, Portugal, then governed by the third super power, Netherlands, and then colonized by the other one, Japan, and finally controlled by the current super power, United States. It can be said that we are so internationalized.....ha...

Such a educative series can always help us understand where our position is even though we will be never in the list of super powers. The series still teach as how to find and hold our own opportunity. Hope one day we can be the Netherlands in the series ....... as long as we will not fight each other anymore. The vision should take further into the world rather than the political opponent as we are doing now.

Taiwan -- A People's History (打拼-台灣人民的歷史)

Taiwan's PTS (Public Television Service Foundation) recently produce a series talking about the Taiwanese history. Given the previews, I anticipate to see this series very much. I do not remember I had seen any kind of very organized Taiwanese history TV shows in the past, even though I am from Taiwan and I had been focus on our own culture and history for a little while.

I do not know if this series had already been broadcast, at least I still can not find their full version on youtube. Anyway, I believe this must be a valuable series to see at least for our Taiwanese generation who had never been well taught our history. It generates the debates and argues nowadays about the Taiwanese identity in Taiwan society. In addition, the production from PTS is always good from the past experience, as it was called leading sports station in the universe in the past years .... Ha .....

Suffered by mlb.tv blockout?

It is always annoying that mlb.tv has the block-out policy once the games are broadcast by nationwide channel, especially my favorite Yankees, Redsox or off-season games are often in this category.

For the guys like me without TV at home, here is the solution. The P2P technology provides the forwarding TV show from the current channel. MyP2P is an website which put all sports games available in all kinds of P2P services together, even CPBL .... Ha. Also, the P2P services are also arranged for the easy download. With this service, we probably will not miss any interesting games easily again.

A free dictionary to install on PC

There is another article which introduces several on-line dictionaries. However, it is not always the case that your computer is online.

WordWeb is a free English thesaurus and dictionary to install locally. In other words, it is a English-English dictionary with synonym and antonym with pronunciation support as well. Even though the example sentence is not the focus here, WordWeb is still a very useful tool for writing or learning English.

楊宗緯 Songs

楊宗緯 has not been a real singer, but his songs spread more widely than anyone else. I like him since my first listening to his singing in 康熙來了.

Later I follow his performance strictly in 超級星光大道. Here is the list of his songs.

轉載自SonyChuck MP3合輯分享

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The best online dictionary?

What is the best on-line dictionary or simply dictionary?

For me, in order to learn English, it is not really easy for me to find a good dictionary which satisfies my poor English level with a very small vocabulary. I need the dictionary can pronounce, I need English explanation, and I also need Chinese explanation.

I have tried

• Dr. eye: a well-known dictionary from Taiwan (English-Chinese dictionary with example sentences, and pronunciation service). Its service is also adopted by Yahoo Kimo Dictionary.
  
• freedictionary: a free on-line English-English dictionary with pronunciation
• open dictionary: a growing open source dictionary with multi-linguistic translation
• Webster dictionary: a renowned English-English dictionary with pronunciation service and Webster Thesaurus gives the synonym and antonym services
• Dict.cn: This is my current favorite on-line dictionary with English-Chinese, Chinese-English and English-English dictionary along with the example sentences. The pronunciation service is provided as well. In addition, it sometimes gives synonym. Some of its disadvantage for me is the support of big5 (Traditional Chinese) is not perfect with very little bugs sometimes but bearable.
  

The next generation of Computer

This guy, Jeff Han, I believe he will dominate the world for a few years like Windows, Google or youtube today. The first time I see his presentation of his innovation of multi-touch sensing computer, I was really amazed by his work. After his presentation, I can only say if there is any product from his research with affordable price, I will go buy one right away.... :-D

Here is his presentation

DLL creation and calling by VC++6

In Yahoo Kimo knowledge base, there is a very good example to learn the dll creation and calling in VC++6. I do use this example to create the dll file for my own project and it runs well.

Here I borrow some of the content from the website and add some of my interpretation.
The essential part to generate a usable dll file is the modification of the header file from the original one for exe file.
For example, the hello.h should be

// hello.h___________________

#ifdef __cpluscplus
#define EXPORT extern "C" __declspec(dllexport)
#else
#define EXPORT __declspec(dllexport)
#endif

EXPORT void hello();
// end hello.h___________________________________________

The red bold part is the required addition to the original header file.

In the main file, hello.c, we can simply keep the original file as the original one, such as
// hello.c___________________

#include"hello.h"
#include

EXPORT void hello(){
printf("The First Hello World !");
}

• To build a hello.dll, in visual C++ 6, we can create a dll project with the inclusion of the files above.
• To use the hello.dll, we should include the hello.lib generated from the compiler into the main executable code. Then the dll, lib and other codes are put in the same folder to make a new executable file which can use the functions in dll files.

Fortran and C/C++ interaction

To develop a C++-based program with the support of built Fortran library, the mixed language programming is the essential part. It had been a frustrated process for me to figure this out. Here are some very important documents for the interaction between Fortran and C++ with the usage of visual Fortran and visual C++.

1. A introductory website
2. The MSDN mixed-language programming page
3. Some tips: some of them are not quite right but it is still worthwhile to consult with.
4. The most important: the table to see which library and settings has to be done in visual studio. It is also briefly shown here in Table 1 and Table 2

Table 1: The library combination for Visual Studio (both Visual Fortran and Visual C++)

Table 2

GIS data and resources

1. Few ArcGIS Notes from a website of a doctoral student in NTU
   
2. Taiwan GIS resources from a class document in 2008 spring
   
3. GIS resources page from Duke university which has a very well-organized with simple description and links
4. Computer Geography page from Ireland which provides some lecture notes about Computational Geography (such as small area problem and Spatial analyst) and also many useful GIS resources.
5. Xtoolspro is a shareware for ArcGIS which provides many useful functionality addition to the original ArcGIS functions.
6. SaTScan: A free software that analyzes spatial, temporal and space-time data using the spatial, temporal, or space-time scan statistics.

Useful website for Mac users

Applewoods is a very good website for Mac users, especially Taiwanese. It is very consistently updated and fast. You can very easily find useful information or little software from the site.

As a newbie to Mac, I like it very much, especially it is posted in traditional Chinese. Surfing there makes me feel like home.....Ha.

How to see MLB.TV full screen in Mac

After 2006, mlb.tv only supports windows media player format. It makes a lot of Mac users suffer in watching mlb.tv. In order to workaround this, two little programs are required to download, Flip4Mac and QuickTime FS. After downloading and installing, here are the instruction to see the mlb.tv in full screen.

1. Go to the mlb.tv and now you can see the game in the default small screen.
   
2. Use right button to adjust setting to "Launch Quicktime player" (I do not remember the exact word in the setting menu).
3. Shut out your firefox (browser), and reopen it to mlb.tv.
4. This time the quicktime player should launch in a new window rather than playing in the browser.
5. Run QuickTime FS. In its window menu, press Quicktime FS, and then go Full screen.
   

Note: for the QuickTime FS, there also have the widget for download and it is even easier to use.

Research Idea: the comparison of two long-term variables

Following the idea of upscaling study, how do we know if the long-term estimates is good enough in the case that we do not have long-term data to compare with?

The idea of the comparison is for both of them, to create a t-distribution and compare these two t-distribution by using t-test to see if the null hypothesis will be rejected.

For the t-test, we should estimate the long-term mean along with their standard deviations, and the number of valid values. However, one difference between the regular t-test and our t-test, because the long-term estimates also accompany with their estimation variances. One possible approach is to add estimation variances on the regular variances to be the new long-term estimation variances for the t-test.

Another proposed task for the upscaling test is the evaluation of the spatial pattern of the accuracy. The presentation of the estimation errors over the space is drawn on the map.

Research Memo: Upscaling technique

In the HEAPL study, I develop two upscaling techniques; however, for the geostatistical approach, a S/T process is often considered as the combo of a meantrend and residuals. For the upscaling problem, we should be careful of how to apply the upscaling techniques.

It is divided into two parts: meantrend part and residual parts
From the equation (3) and (4) in the HEAPL paper, it upscales the residual meantrend and covariance function into larger scale. As for meantrend part, it is also very important to the estimation, though it is considered as deterministic.

To upscale the meantrend part of the S/T process, instead of the stochastic upscaling as mentioned in (3) and (4), it can be simply aggregated by arithmetic average on the basis of the long-term period.

This idea can not only be applied in this HEAPL study but should be used in any S/T studies.

Shipping books to Taiwan (M-Bags)

It is time to pack my stuff to start my next position. Even though this trip is going back home, the leaving of the place I spent over five year is still emotional.

Before shipping my books back, I collect some potential economic ways to deliver these heavy stuff. The first one is the M-Bags. Though I am still not clear of the way to deal with it, some of useful websites I have collected.

1. A website to consult about the detail instruction for shipping in M-Bags
2. The rate information from USPS website

How to merge polygon in ArcGIS?

Case 1: Automatically merge all small polygons into a big one with respect to a specified attribute.
We can refer to the dissolve function in ArcToolbox.

Case 2: If the two specific polygons are expected to merge, follow the steps as follows
a. Select Editor > Start Editing.
b. Toggle the original polygon layer invisible.
c. Select the polygon features from the new polygon layer to be merged.
d. Select Editor > Merge.
e. The Merge dialog lists the polygon features to be merged. Click OK to merge the polygons features.
f. Select Editor > Stop Editing and click Yes to save the edits.

For more info, we can refer to the ESRI website

One note:
The dissolve function in ArcGIS 9.2 is not as capable as it was in Arcview 3.2. The dissolve function can experience memory limitation difficulty once the shapefile is too big. The workaround for the polygon dissolving is the usage of Arcview 3.2 geoprocessing wizard.