Google Code University
Muahahaha, so much win!
Not that there weren't free online guides and tutorials of all sorts of programming languages, but this is organized and aggregated. And it haz exercises too! zomg!
Enjoy!
Steve Jobs is Darth Vader?
Taiwanese people are too funny. Maybe they have too much time on their hands, haha
They're also the ones that brought you the CGI reenactment of Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno fiasco and Tiger Woods' midnight car crash.
For your enjoyment
Old Spice Man
I gotta give credit to Isaiah Mustafa and the creative guys that made those commercials possible. Cases in point: Questions (making of) and The Man Your Man Could Smell Like ("Helllo ladies. Look at your man. Now back to me... Sadly, he isn't me")
Believe it or not, those commercials are taken in one shot. No CGI.
I think what's ingenious is their recent PR strategy: utilizing social network and YouTube to generate buzz and publicity.. for FREE. (*Ahem* RIAA, you can learn a thing or two - you know, instead of getting less than 3% of the money invested back.)
You can find the Internet video responses the Old Spice Man gives by visiting his official YouTube page.
Here's a few notable ones:
- To Ellen DeGeneres, Apolo Ohno, Perez Hilton, Isaiah Mustafa, Ryan Seacrest, Demi Moore, Alyssa Milano (one, two, three, response from Alyssa)
- I dont know to label this. Check me out?
- Starbucks, Huffington Post, Twitter, Gilette
- To 4chan, Gizmodo, MrBabyMan,
- A few lulz: painting, space shuttle, a huge gold key, manly bs, tattoo bs, Old Spice bs, presidential bs
With all those links, Googlebot must think my blog is spam D:
By the way, I'm using this video to make my own voicemail. 
-edit-
A better overview: Alyssa Milano To Old Spice Man: Are You Strong Enough To Be My Man?
Rapping Out Cisco Interns
Interns at Cisco have too much time in their hands...
*edit* seems like the intern girls have taken the video down. On the other hand, the other video has over 60k view counts. wow o.o
But there’s no such thing as ‘free’!
FTA (from Reddit): There is no 'free' lemonade
This column is a true story -- every word of it. And I think it very appropriate to consider around the Fourth of July, Independence Day spirit.
Last week, I was in a car with my brother and his fiancee, driving through their upscale neighborhood on a hot summer day. At the corner, we all noticed three little girls sitting at a homemade lemonade stand.
[My brother asked how much, and the kids said they're free.]
His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."
That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.
"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."
I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.
"You must charge something for the lemonade," I explained. "That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs -- how much the lemonade costs, and the cups -- and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money."
...
No wonder America is getting it all wrong when it comes to government, and taxes, and policy. We all act as if the "lemonade" or benefits we're "giving away" is free.
And so the voters demand more -- more subsidies for mortgages, more bailouts, more loan modification and longer periods of unemployment benefits.
They're all very nice. But these things aren't free.
The government only gets the money to pay these benefits by raising taxes, meaning taxpayers pay for the "free lemonade." Or by printing money -- which is essentially a tax on savings, since printing more money devalues the wealth we hold in dollars.
If we can't teach our kids the basics of running a lemonade stand, how can we ever teach Congress the basics of economics?
Um, wtf? As Reddit titles it, "Sweet little girls give away free lemonade. Conservative columnist decides they represent everything that's wrong with America."
Firefox is free. Google services are free. Linux is free.
What really "sets me off" is people drawing conclusions too quickly.
When Intuition is Wrong and Math is Right
Got two math puzzles, see if you can figure it out 
FTA:
Alice secretly picks two different real numbers by an unknown process and puts them in two (abstract) envelopes. Bob chooses one of the two envelopes randomly (with a fair coin toss), and shows you the number in that envelope. You must now guess whether the number in the other, closed envelope is larger or smaller than the one you’ve seen.
Is there a strategy which gives you a better than 50% chance of guessing correctly, no matter what procedure Alice used to pick her numbers?
Second one. FTA:
I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?
Answers are in the links. Damn these puzzles. Anybody got a good source of puzzle like these?
Microsoft Instaload: Insert Batteries Any Way You Like
FTA:
Microsoft has come up with an amazingly obvious tweak to battery tech that should save us some headaches, as well as several trillion hours of head-scratching and peering into dark holes.
Named Instaload, the invention lets you stuff the batteries into a device any which-way you fancy, eliminating the need to read dark directional diagrams. The most impressive part is the low-tech way this is handled. Each contact in the battery compartment has both positive and negative terminals. If the fat, flat end of the battery is pressing against them, it touches the outside contact. If it is the pointy positive end then it makes contact with a slightly recessed inner contact. This, combined with some simple circuitry, makes sure the current is always running the right way.
Unfortunately, this being Microsoft, it wants everybody to play by Microsoft’s rules, and to pay for the privilege. Microsoft “offers fair and reasonable licensing terms” for Instaload, which is kind of like offering licensing terms on the idea of shopping with a shopping cart (wait, what?)
A shame, really, as it’s the cheap gadgets that could benefit from this the most. Thanks to this licensing short-sightedness, we see this tech coming to Microsoft mice, and pretty much nothing else anytime soon.
Gahh, I can't believe I didn't think of this idea first. It's like these little annoyances that could make me millions But like the article said, I don't think anybody would pay for the licensing fees. Eventually, the design will be reverse engineered and spiraled out of control, and Microsoft can't keep it exclusive.
Skype and its fair use
I got into an interesting discussion with a guy in my team. What makes the ability to correctly capture and identify Skype traffic so valuable? Why are we wasting time and effort on finding out how Skype routes traffic under different type of network scenarios? Skype Inc. can easily change the behavior in the next version, and we need to retest and check if their packets fall within our parameters.
He says Skype and among other applications, will eventually be bundled together as a filter list, and customers would subscribe to get the latest definitions - kinda like antivirus software.
Who would have such an invested interest in categorizing Skype traffic? ISP, he says. He explains:
Skype is a P2P technology: other than having a centralized login server, everything else is handled by peers. Every computer running Skype is a node, and if the computer and network qualifies, it can be a supernode. Because Skype doesn't run on a centralized server, Skype Inc. doesn't pay ISPs for the leased lines it uses to connect calls - the clients do. Compared to Vonage, calling cards, and other VoIP services that use centralized servers, Skype is pocketing a much larger amount of profits, and ISPs wants a share of that.
This is where my opinion differs from my teammate. Why should Skype share their profits with the ISPs? That's their competitive advantage. In addition, if ISPs start blocking Skype traffic until Skype Inc. pays for the leased lines, wouldn't that become a net-neutrality issue and a violation of antitrust laws?
I do not want to live in a world like this.
SF Pride Parade
I went to the San Francisco Pride Parade with a couple of friends today. I'm tired and exhausted from all the walking and sitting in CalTrain and VTA, but what I saw today is definitely interesting.
I'll post pictures with an update, and my writing cannot do justice to describe what I've seen, but this'll do for now.
The CalTrain was jammed packed with people heading to SF. When we arrived SF (after 2 hour and 15 minutes of CalTrain and VTA), we stalked a group of people dressed in funky clothes and eventually reached the parade. I saw everything between neon-colored outfit to black leather strapping, fishnet to nothing but a cup-thing covering the crotch area. But most people in the parade was just supporters in matching tshirts - Democrats trying to get votes, organizations, companies, etc.
The real party was in the next block.
There were long lines that led inside a fenced area. I didn't venture in, so I don't know what's inside. But a sign that says "leather fetish" and another, "steel erections" - I kinda have an idea what's in there.
Hmm, that's all I can think of right now. Plus, I'm dead tired. I'll have more to write when I have the pictures to jog my memory.
Oh also, I saw a guy with iPhone 4 on the bus today. Oh, and Lady Gaga is a big thing in the gay society. I thought that was interesting 
China, Taiwan & Hong Kong get top-level domains in Chinese
FTA:
ICANN today approved the first top-level Chinese language domain names: .中国 and .中國 for China; .台灣 and .台湾 for Taiwan; and .香港 for Hong Kong (China and Taiwan get two each because of Simplified and Traditional Chinese – whereas the characters for Hong Kong are the same in both).
...
One disadvantage of course is that non-Chinese speakers will have a harder time finding the website, so it works both ways to an extent
Whoa, seriously? I thought it was a joke until I saw it on ICANN. How's that going to work? Wouldn't the website become inaccessible if you're using a public computer that doesn't support Chinese input? Interesting. Maybe I should nab http://陳威安.台灣