M.Y. Lessons Learnt

It’s really not easy.

May be I have not spent enough time in Beijing, or I simply didn’t know where to look for. It’s not that easy to find the old Beijing, in the post-Olympics days. But still there are lots of places that I wished I could spend more time and took more pictures. What I managed to do was to keep taking photos, and selected some to process it with Virtual Photographer plug-in … and here is my old Beijing.

Click the picture to jump to the gallery in Facebook, and hope you like it.

To prepare for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has undergone some massive changes. Therefore, even though it’s not my first visit to Beijing but the modern Beijing is still very new to me. 

What surpised and touched me most about the city was not the high-tech buildings, excellent highways, impressive Olympics games venues, and renovated tourist spots; but instead, it was how I felt about the people there - they are confident, happy, proud of themselves and their motherland. In addition, I can tell they are very determined to build a better country for their future and next generation. Isn’t it one of the reasons why we wanted to host the Olympic games ?

Click the photo to see some more Beijing photos, hosted in Facebook.

As blogged in one previous post, I was one of the 50 winners of the Bring Back That Brand New Blogging Event. To enter the contest, I submitted a screen shot of my first blog post back in 2002 and the following winning line was selected by the organizer - “I kinda believe that web blog is the future”. The organizer also compiled those 50 winning lines in a set of presentation slides titled “This is the story of why we blog…”.

Following is my part in the set:

Check out the whole set here in an interactive fashion.

17th Floor - the Smokeless floor.

Today the China astronauts retuned to earth safely and completed their 3-days space-walk mission. I think no matter how you see China, we have to agree they did a great job in year 2008 so far. And no doubt there are also a lot of problems along the way, but seriously, they are improving - in a pace that no other countries in the world can ever dream of.

No doubt the Government needs to find ways to produce better goods, and quality food. And the Government needs to help the poor and unfortunately people.

Give China some time, and give China a chance. Go, China, Go …

No, it is not a typo in the title, but indeed it is what the Google G-1 ad says. So is the new Android phone really that good ? Check it out.

Many times I ask myself “Shall I get a phone that is easy to use, or a phone that is technically excellent ?”. In other words, shall I get an iPhone or an Android phone ? Of course, now I am using an iPhone 3G and am very pleased with it. But I think everyone has to admit, the first Android phone - T-Mobile G1 is very, Very, VERY cool. It’s cool not because of the so-so hardware, but really the software itself - Android and the applications run on top of it.

Liz Strauss, famous online community builder, blogger and author of the book “The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog”, recently ran a contest on “Bring Back That ‘Brand New’ Blogging Feeling Event” and gave the bloggers around the world a chance to win a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of her ebook.

Only 50 winners in the contest and luckily, I won !!

To enter the contest, here is the image of my first blog post back in 2002 …

Imagine you have all the books in the world, except one.

A comic from Eastern European - great story, great art, great translation. Enjoy … but it is a very sad story!

Probably the biggest news in recent weeks, Google launches their own browser - Chrome. They have posted the behind-the-scene information about Chrome with 38 pages of comics. Indeed, if you read the pages without knowing the software beforehand, you will probably think they are talking about building an operating system. Anyway, if you don’t have the time to read thru the 38 pages, here are some main points:

• A browser design around web applications, instead of web pages
• It needs to be stable, faster, more secure, clean & efficient user interface … and make it open source
• Make it a multi-process browser, not multi-threaded - no more browser crash just because one tab’s web page has memory leak or rendering bug …
• There is a built-in task manager such that you can eliminate some mis-behave processes, if needed.
• The beautiful part is, to me, Google can test each build of the Chrome browser by simply using their massive infrastructure to crawl tens of thousands of web pages. And they can also use the ranking of pages to test the most popular pages in the Internet …
• Webkit is the rendering engine Chrome uses, and it is fast …
• They also built a Javascript virtual machine. Instead of “interpreting” Javascript code, it generates machine code of the source. In addition, Chrome also improves the Javascript garbage collection method.
• The user interface of the browser is redesigned - now the tabs are on top. And the URL box is now the Omnibox - it shows the search suggestions, top pages you have visited and those you have not visited.
• There is a new tab page that shows the thumbnails of the 9 most visited pages.
• You can turn on the read-only mode (they call it incognitco window) and it will not save your browsing history, cookies etc.
• Each process has its own sandbox and cannot write / read files off your hard drive. No more watching your sensitive data and running malware … as soon as you close the tab, everything bad running in this tab is gone.
• Chrome runs a security model better than BIBA security model which is used by Vista.
• Chrome will warn the users of phishing and malware websites from lists Google is maintaining.
• Google also introduces Gears to help the developers to improve the capabilities … 
• It is an open source project, make available for all bright developers.

So, how’s the beta version performing so far ? Not as fast as it claims … but once it loaded the page, the speed is pretty good. And the page scrolling is a bit strange … Will keep you all posted.