Ji He's Weblog

On the last working day of 2005, I received a registered letter from my university, National University of Singapore, which stated:

"It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY has been conferred upon you in writing on 13 Dec 2005. Accordingly, you are entitled immediately to all the privileges attached to the degree..."

Well, while I am still wondering what privileges are attached to me as a permanently head damaged (PhD) person, the letter still turns to be a year-end pleasure as this title comes with no ease. At least it costed me nearly four years of boring time on a "cast away" island. It's time to buy an expensive crystal document frame, put the litter in, hang the frame in the wall, and save it to my grandchildren ;)

Posted by Ji He at 3:48 PM | Permalink

We bought a Christmas tree for our first Christmas holiday in the new house. It is a 7.5 ft prelit artificial tree from Amazon. After my wife's hours of fluffing and decorating, the tree is, simply put, gorgeous :D

I would like to take this chance to say "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!" to all relatives and friends of the family and all visitors to our web site. Wish you a happy year-end and good luck in the whole new year!

Posted by Ji He at 12:00 AM | Permalink

How your life could be, without 'Made in China"? Sara Bongiorni tells the story of her family to readers of the Christian Science Monitor, and concludes:

'After a year without China I can tell you this: You can still live without it, but it's getting trickier and costlier by the day. And a decade from now I may not be brave enough to try it again.'

The full story is here.

Posted by Ji He at 3:04 PM | Permalink

Three years after their introduction, tablet PCs have settled into a small niche serving people who regularly take notes or fill out forms while on the job. Yet they'll remain just 2% of the overall notebook market. Use has been limited to markets such as health care, pharmaceutical sales, manufacturing, and education. Consumers, meanwhile, have shown little interest in tablet PCs. Analysts say Microsoft has been partly to blame. InformationWeek has the full story.

Posted by Ji He at 11:38 AM | Permalink

Just out of coincidence, I noticed that my web site jihe.net is four years and two days old already (ref) !

Simply put, this is still (and always) a small personal hobby site; yet I am so thankful to YOU, all the visitors for making this possible. Also I would like to thank my web hosting company DifferentHost for its sponsorship and technical support.

Lastly while most importantly, I would like to thank my wife Lucy for not disliking me upon her first glance at my (ugly) online pictures ;) Thank you Lucy, and may the web site grow with our love and the family :D

Posted by Ji He at 4:36 PM | Permalink

Again, this is a headsup on the freely downloadable version (Developer's Edition) of Sybase ASE 15.0 for Windows x86, Linux x86 and Sun Solaris 64-bit which can be downloaded via http://www.sybase.com/ase_1500devel.

Sybase's web site is as-nearly-non-searchable-at-all-as-usual and I am always wondering what are the differences between its "Developer's Edition" and "Express Edition" (available here as I previously mentioned). Anyway I am glad to find a free, workable ASE 15 Windows version for testing, before I mess up the product server at my institute :D

Posted by Ji He at 4:17 PM | Permalink

Discovery of today: If you search "Machine Learning" at Google, you will get a large "Want to work at Google?" targeted advertisement on the very top of your search result page (see below).

Isn't this a strong indication that Google is hungry for machine learning professionals (or at least someones who know about or are interested in machine learning)? Interestingly, search results for many other related terms like "Machine Intelligence", "Text Processing", "Text Mining", "Data Mining" etc. won't give you this ad. This probably, probably I say, is because the one who post this targeted ad has only limited knowledge to machine learning and hence could not expand the keywords set pretty much :D

Posted by Ji He at 3:50 PM | Permalink

Today I received an email from Watson, the manager of the my sponsoring web hosting company, which said:

"I believe your domain is having a huge spam problem. Did you enable catchall once/previously? The emails are coming to random email address @jihe.net. ... The amount of spam hitting all your domain is almost 1GB/day..."

1GB per day? That is by average 500 - 1000 spams every single day! I am so thrilled that spammers all around the world start to love my domain, despite of every measures I tried to "hide" myself from them. If they are listening, I would like to send every one of them a single-trip ticket for free as the Christmas gift. That ticket brings them to the place named h.e.l.l.

Posted by Ji He at 11:22 AM | Permalink

Zend Core for Oracle? This sounds like an old news for half a year. So this is just a follow up -- the RELEASE version (no preview, no beta) version is officially announced today at the Zend web site. This is not a big, but considered an exiciting news in the open-source community, especially for PHP the thriving free programming language.

Not sure what it is yet? According to the official web site:

"Zend Core™ for Oracle® supports businesses using PHP with Oracle Database for business-critical Web applications. It provides a seamless out-of-the-box experience delivering a stable, high performance, easy-to-install and supported PHP development and production environment fully integrated with the Oracle Database..."

Register and download.

Posted by Ji He at 5:07 PM | Permalink