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Portfolio

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:13:03 GMT

Spurred by my dorm’s photography contest on Flickr, I finally made a place for my photos online (a place other than Facebook): say hello to Minh’s Portfolio. I’ve been meaning to add a “portfolio” of sorts to my website for around four years now, but for both a lack of time and a lack of resources, most of my work has stayed hidden on my computer.

Occasionally you’ve seen some of my work illustrate blog posts here, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Eventually, I hope to add my actual art and website portfolios to the gallery, but for now it’s just photography. Since the gallery doesn’t show full-resolution images, you wouldn’t notice that the equipment I’ve been using is, well, lacking.

Until last year, all the photos were taken with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P72, a now-antiquated digital camera that takes photos at a resolution of 640×480 pixels. A resolution that low would’ve been acceptable several years ago, when we bought the camera. In contrast, the newfangled gigapixel cameras these days can probably discern strange quarks from top quarks.

Because the Cyber-shot was the family camera, I only had access to it during family vacations. But last spring, I was forced to replace my trusty, non-flip, cameraless Nokia phone with a battery-draining Samsung Sync, weighted down with no end in pay-to-unlock gimmicks. (I also had to swap my reliable Cincinnati Bell service for Cingular, but that’s a sad story for another day.) At least the new phone comes with a decent camera, which means I can snap photos on a whim. For a phone camera, it’s not half-bad: the resolution is 21^st-century, and the quality isn’t much worse than the film cameras we used to operate.

(Remind me to tell you about my family’s hardy Canon film camera some day.)

I know my “photography” doesn’t hold a candle to that of some of my dormmates, but I’ve at least established that I can operate a camera. Maybe some day, I’ll prove myself worthy of moving up to a disposable digital camera. They didn’t have those around when I was growing up, y’know.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1205 under This Website | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

High school humor

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:37:54 GMT

I keep a folder of bookmarks filled with pages I intend to mention at some point on this blog, because they’re just so funny or otherwise worthwhile to read. But the last time I ever drew from the “Blog About…” folder was over a year ago; since then, its growth has closely paralleled that of the National Debt. The 182 bookmarks stand as a rustic testament to my penchant for procrastination, and that’s just the ones I didn’t lose when switching to the Mac. Though many of those links are now dead, no longer interesting, or covered copiously elsewhere, I’m still going to post the interesting ones.

Well, maybe later. Instead, I thought it’d be fun to share a few of my oldest “good read” bookmarks. Here are some of the webpages I added to the “Humor” folder back in high school, sorted by date bookmarked. Seriously: it’s not every year you find this kind of brilliance on Digg or Reddit:

Steve, Don't Eat It! – 1991 Urkel-Os (bookmarked June 23^rd, 2005)
Under Construction (June 22^nd, 2005) – guilty
The Onion 2056 (June 22^nd, 2005)
Big Fat Institute for Advanced Interactive Experiences (April 11^th, 2005) – based in Cincinnati
The Credit Card Prank (April 1^st, 2005)
PodBrix (February 27^th, 2005) – Legos, except not
Taste for the Web (February 8^th, 2005) – a parody of Paul Graham
Postal Experiments (January 21^st, 2005)
“Oh my god! There’s an axe in my head.” (September 22^nd, 2004) – in 112 languages
BlueScreen Screen Saver (August 28^th, 2004) – free from Microsoft
win98.c (February 14^th, 2004)
Case Western Reserve University, circa ~~2000~~ 1900 (September 2^nd, ~~2003~~ 1903) – background
Laws of Japanese Animation (September 27^th, 2002)

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2071 under Summary | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Almost a snow day

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:11:42 GMT

Sixth grade was not a good year for me on the school bus. Every year, Loveland City Schools shuffled its bus routes around, with the intent of keeping us students on our feet. That year, my stop wound up first on the route. The long ride each morning – usually half an hour to school – exacerbated my motion sickness, keeping me under the menacing eye of the bus driver.

One day, a classic winter storm passes through Cincinnati. You know: snow, sleet, slush, ice, slice. I can’t remember quite how much snow accumulated that day, but it can’t’ve been more than five inches. Regardless, the weather forecasters went hysterical about the sheer severity of the storm. Loveland, on the other hand, kept their cool. At the time, the district was hard core about staying open despite inclement weather. (I believe these days we call it “flinty Chicago toughness”.) Nothing like those Northern Kentucky schools that’d shut down whenever it felt chilly outside.

Still hoping for a chance snow day, I monitor all the TV stations’ scrolling tickers that morning. There’s an art to channel surfing on snow days: you switch to each channel as its ticker nears “L”. Little Miami, Live Oaks, Lockland – wait for it – Lynchburg. Fooey.

My bus meanders along its usual route, but at normal walking speed. Due to the thick layer of ice on the roads, the driver never makes stops; instead, she coasts a bit, swings open the doors, and waves us in. One by one, we jump aboard the oversized toboggan. While the driver carefully manages the slick hills, time is ticking on my motion sickness. We’re already plenty late for school. A few more minutes, or a couple more speed bumps, and I’ll have to pull out the Kroger bag the driver required me to carry, just in case.

Just as we slide past the final stop and start across town to school, the dispatcher comes across the radio, unusually loud and clear:

Base to all drivers, pull over. Repeat: pull over. We are determining whether to cancel school for today.

The freezing, exhausted passengers on the bus erupt in celebration, followed by arguments about who gets dropped off first once school is called off. Surely following the route in reverse would be unjust: some of us had been riding almost an hour already!

During the next ten minutes, we search for ways to stay warm as the district deliberates (in their cozy office, no doubt). Finally, a relieved-sounding dispatcher gives the all-clear over the radio. There will be school after all. Defeated silence. The eighth-graders at the back of the bus resume their daily routine of furiously scribbling down homework answers just before arriving at school. The kids across the aisle kick themselves for not flushing at 7:00 the night before. And I just want some fresh air.

Although St. Columban School is located within the Loveland school district boundaries, students come from several surrounding districts as well. That morning, the school appeared conspicuously empty. Of course, with Little Miami, Milford, and Goshen all closed, everyone but us Lovelanders had an excuse to stay home.

Readers from the West Coast will probably want to know what a Kroger bag is. They’re your ordinary plastic grocery bags, but tan-colored, so they make for good barf bags and great dresses (apparently).

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2061 under Elementary School | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Revisiting Atmosphere

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:28:37 GMT

Longtime readers of this blog – again, all two of you – will recall that I’m still a fan of Adobe Atmosphere, that brilliant online virtual reality platform, even though Adobe killed it off shortly after version 1.0, more than five years ago. But even though Atmosphere has gone virtually unused in the years since, I’m on a quest to preserve its memory:

Shortly after Adobe pulled their support, I asked the user community for help in establishing an “abandonware” website specifically for Atmosphere, similar to websites that memorialize other long-gone software. That led to the article on Wikipedia. The article still lacks numerous details and contains scant citations, but it’s a start.
A few months ago, I updated MingerWorld – which I painstakingly developed during my freshman year in high school – for compatibility with Atmosphere 1.0. Finally.
My latest project is “Dialup”, an avatar that Atmosphere’s beta testers will instantly recognize. It imitates the placeholder avatar that other users would appear to wear as Atmosphere downloaded their real avatars.

The breakthrough came when I found Joe De Costa, who’s been running a working copy of Atmosphere’s chat server all these years. With his permission, I hooked MingerWorld up to his server, allowing you to explore the world as it was meant.

Atmosphere’s powerful chat functionality allowed users to see and converse with each other in-world, setting the software apart from countless other 3D offerings, including Adobe’s later ventures in 3D modeling.

In a fit of irony, Adobe released the chat server under an “Atmosphere Open Source License” but neglected to publicize the fact. In fact, the only way to obtain a copy of the source code was to contact Adobe directly. So even at the height of Atmosphere’s popularity, there were only a few chat servers in operation, apart from the official Adobe server. The vast majority of worlds were connected to the official server. After 2004, these worlds went silent: even in the worlds that saw dozens of visitors at a time, each user would appear to be alone. For the many thousands of meticulously-built worlds, the “killer app” was gone.

I want to fix that. I have a copy of the Adobe Community Server software, which I’m planning to run on my own computer in the future. I’d love to make the software publicly available, the way it should be, but first I have some legal questions about it. The key passage in

reads:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Adobe grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free license to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, and sublicense the Software for any purpose provided that the copyright notice below appears in a conspicuous location within the source code of the distributed Software and this license is distributed in the supporting documentation of the version of the Software you distribute.

That’s all well and good, but contained in the source code are two references to patent applications held by Adobe. The first was granted as patent 6,842,786 and seems to describe a server-side dynamic language runtime. The second is still pending after all these years and covers the way worlds “cloned” when full. (An overflow copy of the world was created automatically, so that worlds wouldn’t fill up so severely and users wouldn’t have to load 150 avatars on their dialup connections. Most of us found the feature annoying but dreaded the alternative.)

So my question is: would I be legally permitted to distribute and even modify the server software, as provisioned in the license, even though Adobe holds a patent on certain parts of the server? Note that the license never mentions patents, but rather grants sweeping rights. If not for the patent question, the license would even let me relicense the server under something very much like the MIT license.

Any help appreciated.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2060 under Adobe Atmosphere | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

AIM OpenID Login in Motion

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:44:30 GMT

From the I-should-have-blogged-about-this-literally-a-month-ago department, AIM OpenID Login has been released as part of Six Apart’s Motion package. That was a mouthful, so allow me to unpack the sentence.

AIM OpenID Login is a small plugin I wrote in 2007 that lets anyone with an AOL account – including AIM users – easily log into your Movable Type blog to post a comment. Motion is a plugin for Movable Type that turns the blogging software into a social networking platform. It’s currently a public beta, so you can download it for free while Six Apart works to smooth out the edges. According to the FAQ, its features – including, presumably, AIM OpenID Login – will be folded into the standard Movable Type application by version 4.25.

Early last month, a product manager at Six Apart e-mailed to notify me that my plugin would be incorporated into a future Movable Type release. He did not ask my permission. As it happens, I’d already given explicit permission by licensing the plugin under the GNU General Public License, as I was required to. So this e-mail was simply a courteous heads-up. As you might imagine, I’m quite pleased that one late night of coding has led to such visibility for my code. If only I got such a high ROI with this week’s complement of problem sets.

Even if you have no inclination to turn your blog into a full-fledged social networking service, AIM OpenID Login lowers a barrier that keeps your readers from becoming commenters.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2058 under Perl | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

AVIM not just for Firefox

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:28:15 GMT

In July, when I last wrote about AVIM, it was a Firefox extension that let you easily enter fully-accented Vietnamese into any webpage, as well as most of Firefox. It also supported a few well-known Firefox extensions.

Since then, AVIM has gained French and Chinese localizations and added support for all of Firefox. More importantly, the extension now supports a number of Mozilla-based applications, including Songbird and Flock. AVIM’s also been downloaded nearly 30,000 times and serves over 1,700 people as of last month.

Mozilla Messaging today released the first beta of Thunderbird 3. Since it runs on Mozilla 1.9, AVIM supports it too. It’s a boon for Vietnamese speakers who still use a desktop application for reading e-mail and news feeds.

You can download AVIM for free and drag the file into Thunderbird’s Add-ons window. Alternatively, you can use Thunderbird 3’s new Add-ons Manager to install an older version of AVIM hosted by Mozilla.

One thing you’ll notice about AVIM is that, even though the extension is intended for Vietnamese speakers, the extension’s menus aren’t necessarily in Vietnamese. If your copy of Thunderbird is in English, for example, AVIM is also in English. That’s because I designed the extension to blend in with the application as much as possible.

Unfortunately, efforts to translate Thunderbird into Vietnamese aren’t complete yet. In the meantime, you can force AVIM to display in Vietnamese anyways. Regardless of AVIM’s interface language, the extension will continue allowing you to type in Vietnamese.

You might’ve noticed that AVIM is essentially in maintenance mode. I’ve implemented all the big changes I have planned, and I really don’t have much time to work on the software in the near future. However, you’ll continue to see AVIM support more and more applications as they upgrade to Mozilla 1.9. Someday, I’ll get around to writing an operating system–level IME, so you’ll get AVIM’s well-known flexibility no matter which application you’re using. Someday.

As always, I welcome any contributions to the AVIM project, whether in the form of code or translations, or by spreading the word. Working on AVIM’s code require little more than a working knowledge of JavaScript and Vietnamese. For any code or translation contributions, you’ll receive due credit on a widely-used piece of software and the satisfaction that you’ve helped real people in a measurable way. If you’d like to help out, please contact me.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №2056 under AVIM | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

In a word

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:17:17 GMT

The following exchange was edited out of Saturday Night Live’s coverage of the final presidential debate, in order to allot adequate time for applause:

Moderator: “Since you two clearly do not endorse the negative words your campaigns have used against each other in the last few weeks, would both of you care to summarize your campaigns in a single, hopefully positive word? Sen. McCain, you first.”
“Joe-the-Plumber.”
“One word?”
“Hyphenated.”
(Headline: “Joe-the-Plumber’s Name Hyphenated”)
“All… right, and you, Sen. Obama?”
“Look—”
“That’s all the time we have for tonight, live from all of us at Saturday Night.”

That’s about all the politicking you’ll find on Minh’s Notes this election cycle. TV comedy – Fox News and MSNBC included – have done a wonderful job covering the campaigns this time. Though I wonder if I’d have more to say (read: more fodder) were I still in Ohio around now, deep in the heart of Pro-America.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1268 under Quoteworthy | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Résumé

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:19:20 GMT

Stanford’s Career Development Center provides your typical list of action verbs to add that fleeting pizzaz to your résumé. After all, who wants to be something good long-term, when you can do something good and be done with it already? So for those still padding their résumés and for everyone else’s reading pleasure, here are 25 completely reasonable suggestions for action-filled job descriptions, ranging from the inept to the utterly inept, and extrapolated from the CDC’s action verbs (in bold):

Acted childishly.
Conceptualized nebulous abstractions.
Imagined being CEO.
Planned to get work done.
Contracted and delegated it out instead.
Figured the job was for life.
Arranged deck chairs on the Titanic.
Cut and pasted. Copied too.
Discovered gravity.
Referred self to psychiatrist.
Drew the curtains.
Oversawed plywood for the deck out back.
Invented all kinds of excuses.
Fabricated lies unabashedly.
Maintained own innocence.
Bound and gagged.
Drove self home every night.
Merged onto I-75.
Installed spyware accidentally.
Operated a pencil sharpener.
Collated. (Yes, collated.)
Produced bugs.
Furnished own apartment.
Assembled IKEA furniture.
Interviewed self for the job already; thanks for the offer. (Problem solved.)

Amelia Bedelia would be proud.

Warning: Tongue planted firmly in cheek.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1267 under Humor | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Mười lũy thừa một trăm

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:10:01 GMT

Back in May, I remarked that VDict’s English↔Vietnamese machine translation service was too good at churning out sometimes incomprehensible Vietrish. I also pointed out that the major Web translation services, such as Babel Fish or Google Translate, hadn’t gotten around to supporting Vietnamese. Today, Google has – VDict now piggybacks on their service – and my first thought was to try and break it.

Another welcome

Once again, the Vietnamese Wikipedia’s opening paragraph:

Hoan nghênh bạn đã đến với Wikipedia tiếng Việt! Đây là bách khoa toàn thư có nội dung mở và thuộc sở hữu cộng đồng. Dự án được bắt đầu từ tháng 10 năm 2003 do công sức đóng góp của nhiều người ở khắp mọi nơi, bạn cũng có thể tham gia. Hiện giờ chúng ta có 86.752 thành viên (có tài khoản), nhưng mới chỉ đóng góp được 58.022 bài thôi. Rất mong sự tham gia tích cực của bạn!

Which roughly translates to:

Welcome; you’ve arrived at the Vietnamese Wikipedia! This is an open-content encyclopedia belonging to the community. The project began in October 2003, thanks to the efforts of many contributors worldwide; you can join in too. Currently, we have 86,752 members (with accounts) who’ve contributed only 58,022 articles. We really look forward to your active participation!

Surprisingly, Google Translate gets it mostly right:

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia! This is the encyclopedia content open and owned communities. The project was started from tháng 10 [“October”], 2003 by the contribution of many people everywhere, you can also participate. Now we have 86,752 members (of accounts), but contribute only be 58,022 items only. We hope the active participation of you!

Sure, it’s pretty ungrammatical, but at least they didn’t start rambling on about medication, like VDict did. Still, Google passed my little test because they rely on sophisticated statistical analysis techniques to determine which English phrases typically go with each Vietnamese phrase. Rather than simply looking individual words up in a dictionary and pumping out the matching words, the smart folks at Google seem to take into account the kinds of phrases actually in use on the Internet and normalize them, so that no matter the source language, Google internally represents each sentence the same way.

Regained in re-translation

This statistical technique usually allows Google’s translation to at least sound remotely relevant. But it also makes spotting errors more difficult. Case in point, a definition of the Moon:

Mặt Trăng (tiếng Latinh: Luna, ký hiệu: ☾) là vệ tinh tự nhiên duy nhất của Trái Đất và là vệ tinh tự nhiên lớn thứ năm trong Hệ Mặt Trời.

Quite straightforwardly, it means:

The Moon (Latin: Luna, symbol: ☾) is the Earth’s only natural satellite and the fifth-largest natural satellite in the Solar System.

But here’s what Google thinks it means:

Moon (Latin: Luna, symbols: ☾) is a natural satellite of only Earth and the satellite is the natural largest in the Torah.

First of all, English has this tricky feature where moving an adverb like “only” around the sentence actually changes the sentence’s meaning. But quibbles aside, I wouldn’t think to look in the Torah (the first five boks of the Bible) for the Moon. I&dquo;d just look up. Coincidentally, the fact that the Moon is the fifth-largest moon was lost in translation.

Now, the experts used to always caution against using machine translation tools. They also advised that we reverse-translate anything we find using those tools, just to see how much gets lost in translation:

Moon (Latin: Luna, ký hiệu: ☾) là một vệ tinh tự nhiên của Trái đất và chỉ là các vệ tinh tự nhiên lớn nhất trong Hệ Mặt Trời.

Apparently, not much. This reverse-translation hides the various translation mistakes we saw before, because every word in the sentence above, when placed in exactly the same context as that sentence, will always have a 1:1 correspondence with a word in the target language. In other words, since “abc1def” can only ever translate to “vwx2y&z” and is the only bit of text that can, “vwx2y&z” can only ever translate to “abc1def”. So if you’re using Google to translate into a language you don’t know so well, you don’t really know how well or how poorly Google’s doing.

Counting oddly

So now, for kicks, a little stress test. Below we have a series of numbers spelled out, with all its idiosyncrasies:

0–30. Số không, một, hai, ba, bốn, năm, sáu, bảy, tám, chín, mười, mười một, mười hai, mười ba, mười bốn, mười lăm, mười sáu, mười bảy, mười tám, mười chín, hai mươi, hai mươi mốt, hai mươi hai, hai mươi ba, hai mươi tư, hai mươi lăm, hai mươi sáu, hai mươi bảy, hai mươi tám, hai mươi chín, ba mươi.

Một trăm (100), một trăm lẻ một (101), một trăm lẻ năm (105), một trăm hai mươi mốt (121), ba trăm (300).

Một ngàn (1.000), một ngàn lẻ một (1.001), hai ngàn rưởi (2.500).

Một vạn. Một vạn (10.000), một vạn lẻ một (10.001). Một triệu (1.000.000). Một tỷ (1.000.000.000).

Một nửa (½), một phần tư (¼), một phần trăm (1/100 hoặc 1%).

Translated, with annotations where incorrect:

0-30. Zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen different [where’d that “different” come from?], eighteen, nine of ten [woah, going fractional suddenly], twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, from twenty [mistaking tư (“four”) for từ (“from”)], twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.

One hundred (100), an odd one hundred (101), a hundred odd years (105), a two hundred and eleven (121), three hundred (300). [An odd quirk of the Vietnamese counting system is that lẻ (“odd”) precedes the ones digit if the number is above 100.]

One thousand (1,000), an odd one thousand (1,001), ruoi two thousand (2,500).

A van. A ten thousand (10,000) [một vạn gives different results when alone], an odd one thousand (10,001). One million (1,000,000). One billion (1,000,000,000).

One-half (½), a quarter (¼), one percent (1 / 100 or 1%).

Counting is just one of those things that Google will have to hard-code into their translation software to get completely right. Statistical techniques won’t really cut it, because – well, when’t the last time anyone spelled out “eighty-six thousand, seven hundred fifty-two”.

The post title, by the way, is how you’d spell out “ten to the hundredth power” – a googol – in Vietnamese.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1265 under Vietnamese | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

A smile and nod

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:02:24 GMT

The old joke goes: if you know three languages, you’re trilingual; if you know two languages, you’re bilingual; and if you know only one language, you’re an American.

Ohio has struggled with immigration from Hispanic countries more than the small number of immigrants would indicate. Late last year, four illegal immigrants from a poor village in central Mexico were found stabbed to death inside their home, vividly symbolizing the hostility that immigrants face in that part of the country.

The anti-immigrant sentiment has always focused around language, even though the real reason for the animosity has always been about jobs. First, the outcry was about policemen having to learn a second language; then, about schools having to create ESL classes. Although Ohio’s state and local governments have never conducted an appreciable amount of business in Spanish, the state legislature is attempting to ensure it will never happen in the future:

The Ohio House passed a bill Thursday requiring that government business, such as meetings and public records, be in English.

The measure, sponsored by Rep. Bob Mecklenborg, R-Green Twp., passed by a vote of 54–42 over the objections of lawmakers who argued that the bill contradicted the country’s heritage as a land of immigrants. It still needs Senate approval.

“This bill is forward looking and will ultimately promote the similarities that unite us,” Mecklenborg said. “It will further promote economic success and result in more productive and involved citizens.”

The Hispanic community has generally been vocal in encouraging immigrants to learn English – it is, after all, a must for working in the area. The only Spanish-language newspaper and radio station in Cincinnati set aside generous space for English instruction. Nevertheless, the fact that Hispanics speak Spanish is often brought up as a reason that they don’t belong in Ohio, straw-man argument or not. So Spanish-language government publications would be prohibited, if the Ohio House gets its way. Next will surely be a measure to stem the rush of schools adding Spanish language courses. (One wonders if Rep. Mecklenborg realizes how many students from his alma mater learn and use a second language. Hint: all of them.)

It happened before. During World War I, Ohio passed the Ake Law, banning German-language instruction in elementary schools. Other evidence of the predominant German-American population was similarly suppressed: families changed their names to more Anglo-sounding ones, sauerkraut became “victory cabbage”, the few remaining German-language newspapers folded, and Cincinnati’s many German street names were quickly replaced. All because foreign cultures were equated with foreign loyalties.

Today, foreign languages are too often viewed a telltale sign of unpatriotism and a mark of disdain for the “native” culture – unpatriotism even on the part of legal citizens. That’s sad. If it is so American to be diverse, why are we suddenly shifting to the idea of one country, one language, while pretty much the rest of the world allows for multilingualism?

And yet, it isn’t just about language. Growing up in Cincinnati, English was my language, but that didn’t always make a difference. In school, I was initially placed in something of a remedial language program, until the teacher realized I knew what a “cow” was and my pronunciation of “tree” was just fine.

There will always be people certain I’m a foreigner due to my name and my face. It’s somewhat entertaining to see the look on others’s faces when I answer the question, “Where are you from?“ with “Here.” (The response was always, “Oh. No, really. Where’re you from?” The correct answer must’ve been China, but I always answered wrong.)

As a child, getting this question every day – and having to identify the cow on a flashcard – didn’t bother me too much. But looking back, it’s these little things, which come from even well-meaning people, that bother me the most. They show how insidious the concept of “not one of us” can become. For what is ostensibly a multicultural society, the characteristics of a monoculture shine through clearly. And what I experienced was really just the surface, because as a child, you never really see the discrimination and double standards that take place around you.

Of course, I really can’t fault well-meaning people for getting my country of birth wrong. But it’s a bit frustrating that – after mentioning my Vietnamese heritage and explaining that Vietnam is the country just to the south of China – all I could do was smile and nod. There was no convincing them that I am one of them.

I don’t know what the intent of the English-only legislation is. The issue in Ohio isn’t really about illegal immigration: the state sees far fewer undocumented workers than other states, and factory jobs are being lost to overseas workers, not immigrants. So if every Hispanic immigrant were to quickly learn English, would everyone be satisfied? Or would the Americans still not be American enough?

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1220 under Politics | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

I’ll find something to put here

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:24:11 GMT

Irony of ironies: Microsoft now owns a share in the company that Blake Ross, co-creator of Firefox, now works for. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make much of a difference in terms of Web browsers, as Blake hasn’t been incredibly active with the project lately. It’ll just be one of those strange corporate relationships that people bring up in conversation, like how Sara Lee makes a brand of shoe polish and how McDonald’s used to own a majority interest in Chipotle.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1158 under Mozilla | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Another farewell

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:49:08 GMT

Adding insult to the injury that is Jeeves’ forced retirement, the new Ask.com has also retired Teoma, a search engine that it acquired some time ago. Although Teoma’s index of websites was always puny compared to the likes of Google and Yahoo!, their search algorithm and the way they organized results made it quite easy to find what you were looking for, a quality that made the search engine my second favorite, behind only Google.

So, as the Gaelic word teoma gives way to the boring English ExpertRank moniker, my second favorite search engine becomes Clusty, a meta-search engine that also features result-grouping. It in fact has everything I would’ve ever used from Ask, save for local search.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №997 under Computing | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

A luckier one

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:53:05 GMT

Google just released a free version of the 3D modeling application they bought last month, SketchUp. It looks like Google has the intention of really developing this software. Let me just take this opportunity to wax nostalgic and lament that Atmosphere didn’t strike nearly as much luck when Adobe bought it a few years ago, then later abandoned it. Google found a good idea and is going to popularize it, but Atmosphere was so much better of an idea, and it would’ve really jived with Google’s other services: it was SketchUp with a built-in Google Page Creator (the Builder), an immersive Google Talk (in-world chat), and a Google Video to boot (embedded videos and Flash animations). Plus, it had a grassroots-style community, one that I really miss.

At least I still have my copy of Atmosphere to tinker around with…

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1014 under Adobe Atmosphere | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Fifteen minutes

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:50:47 GMT

All this year, students on campus have been frantic, anticipating the big new role California was to play in the presidential primaries yesterday. After all, when was the last time California was at the starting gate, Super Tuesday, deciding who gets the nomination and who gets written off? This was a big deal for the state, and students on campus – who are allowed to vote in California, regardless of their state of residence – were strongly encouraged to vote here rather than their home state.

I didn’t vote yesterday. I received a few snickers from peers who found out I’m planning to vote in a month, in the Ohio primaries, because by then the nomination would’ve already been settled.

As it turns out, although California will award more of its delegates to Clinton, the “settled” race is far from over, so look to the Other Super Tuesday on March 4^th, when Ohio, Texas, and a few other states actually decide who makes the cut. Wouldn’t be ironic if – in an election cycle where the states tripped over each other to be the first to hold primaries – the states that, undeterred, kept their late contests mattered more?

I predict Iowa will feel mighty irrelevant come the party conventions. As for California, enjoy the 15 minutes of fame.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1169 under Politics | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Background noise

Mon, 07 May 2007 07:59:54 GMT

In 2004, I went with some fellow high schoolers on a mission trip to Chicago. Towards the end, we were treated to a day at Navy Pier and all the touristy areas downtown. On the way back, we stood waiting for the Blue Line train in a brightly-lit but very boring station underground. (Matt, who had a knack for napping wherever he went, leaned into a small nook in the wall and promptly began sleeping.) Soon, a man nearby pulled out his guitar. His strumming wasn’t so bad, but his singing was. Despite that, we sang along, added a bit to his donation box, and stayed around until the train came. Though the music he produced didn’t hold a candle to the stuff in our iPods, it was very welcome. It was real; it was there.

The Washington Post ran a story today about an experiment that saw renowned violinist Joshua Bell perform in street clothes, during rush hour, at a busy DC Metro station:

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities—as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The article is a beautiful profile of the harried, hurried crowd. But really, you don’t need a virtuoso. There’s already plenty to observe wherever you go. The guy in the corner with the multi-million-dollar Stradivarius? He’s just there to show you what everyone else is missing out on.

Many thanks to Steve Nguyễn for the tip.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1105 under News | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

My dorm is your dorm

Mon, 07 May 2007 07:59:27 GMT

I’m still not a fan of The Review, but the paper’s latest diatribe against the ethnic theme dorm program deserves comment, because I don’t think the reactions I’ve seen are adequate. The columnist rehashes the same points everyone throws at the program, and I know those points will be refuted in time, so I won’t rebut them point-by-point. Instead, I think I’ll keep your attention better with a higher-level defense of the program.

Disclaimer before I begin: the only ethnic theme dorm I’ve lived in is Casa Zapata, so I’m probably making ruthless generalizations here, but I believe the theme dorms have a lot in common anyways.

Ethnic theme dorms are not the one-day “multicultural fests” that your elementary school might’ve organized. They put a lot of effort into events throughout the year, exposing students to the many issues facing minorities in less fortunate sections of our society. Although the issues are typically discussed from the perspective of a particular ethnic group, they transcend race. For instance, Casa Zapata’s talks may mention illegal immigration with some frequency, but the community places importance on this issue more for protecting the poor than for protecting any particular race.

Ethnic theme dorms may exude more of a sense of community than other dorms do, but it’s not a matter of inclusion or exclusion, and it’s not a matter of who has more in common with whom. In my experience, ethnic theme dorms do more to keep everyone in the loop. It’s partly a matter of your dorm mates recognizing and greeting you when you’re more than 500 feet away from the dorm. Even if you’re not of the same ethnicity as they are. I was a freshman in Casa Zapata last year, and I certainly didn’t feel like that weird outsider who likes Mexican food. A lot of dorms, including non-themed dorms and especially fraternities, make similar attempts at creating a tight-knit community, but they don’t get called out for it, because – for example – “all the Roble kids sit at the same table” simply isn’t a valid complaint in our setting.

When I was little, I was under the naïve assumption that, if somehow everyone would just ignore each other’s race, everyone would eventually forget about it, and we could move on. It was naïve because it conflates two approaches: ignoring an individual’s race when interacting with them, and ignoring the topic of race altogether. The former approach is laudable: who cares whether you’re white or Asian or Hispanic when you’re playing cards with someone? However, the latter approach is unacceptable: if you ignore the issue of race, it doesn’t eliminate the problems that raised the issue in the first place.

We are in a university. It’s true that many of us have already overcome the “prejudice and poverty” that the ethnic theme dorms often discuss. But our role as students is to learn about the world’s problems, both technical and societal, both facing us and facing others. Our role is to take that knowledge and eventually work towards solving them. Those actually facing prejudice and poverty today are counting on us. Celebrating food or music or other aspects of a culture is just one aspect of an ethnic theme dorm. It’s somewhat of an icebreaker, to get everyone ready for the real issues.

It boils down to this question: do we want “racial harmony” just within our school, or do we want it for the society at large? If it’s the latter, we can’t settle for the columnist’s stop-gap solution of eliminating the discussion. Yes, after doing so, we will get bogged down in our schoolwork anyways and forget the whole thing happened. But what about those not fortunate enough to be here? We’re not just in it for ourselves.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1103 under College | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

0x10118FF8AE9811DB9F6F42C955D89593

Mon, 07 May 2007 07:57:29 GMT

No, the title of this post is not a bug. It’s a reasonably secure password (not one that I use, thankfully).

You may remember when security expert Bruce Schneier wrote last month about the passwords people tend to choose for their MySpace accounts. You may’ve even chuckled at the one in a thousand who chose “blink182” as a somewhat conspicuous key to their online existence. But don’t be so quick to consider yourself completely secure.

Schneier recently wrote another piece, examining the techniques that password crackers now use to reveal “offline” passwords – the kind that unlocks your OS, as opposed to the kind required to log into a website.

Essentially, as long as the password is stored on the computer in some form, it’s possible to compromise it. (No server would accept 350,000 guesses per second for the same password, which is why online passwords aren’t quite as vulnerable.) Through brute-force means, it’s possible to scan the entire hard disk and try everything that fits in the password field. If you have a thousand dollars to spare, that is: you need some serious software to do that.

The article does get a bit technical at times, but it makes for a great read, even for computer illiterates. At the least, it gives you a little respect for human ingenuity.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1094 under Computing | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

The joy of clicking

Mon, 07 May 2007 05:29:37 GMT

Last week, I accompanied my blog entry with a lovely crayon drawing. Longtime readers of this blog – again, I’m referring to myself in the third person – will recall that this style of art is nothing new for me. What’s new is that I’m no longer slapping together crude vector drawings using Word and touching them up with the spraypaint tool in Paint. I still wanted a crude drawing to illustrate how simple a roundabout is, but since I’m no longer on a Windows box, I had to find some program to draw it in.

It really surprised me that Macintoshes don’t come with a decent drawing program. They’ve got oodles of photo-processing applications – Preview, iPhoto, and (the wonderful but hard-to-find) Core Image Fun House, to name a few – but nothing for simple drawing. That’s how I found ArtRage, a bonafied painting program for Windows and Mac OS. Even the free version is a joy to use, and it really makes me want to watch Bob Ross whack his paintbrushes again, because ArtRage basically lets me do that with the mouse.

I know of no other program where drawing a dark line with a marker involves going over the same spot three times, and drawing a purple line over a green one makes for an icky shade of gray – but that’s what happens in real life. So you can do things in ArtRage that aren’t possible in Paint or Corel Draw. Ambient Design’s unwavering attention to detail makes it possible to create real digitized paintings without ever having to scan one in. It also saves a ton of paper: mistakes are undone by Ctrl Z, not by crumpling and tossing yet another marred, almost-there sheet of art.

For years now, the only type of art I’ve really been comfortable producing is the pencil sketch. I abandoned colored pencils (and thus color) when I realized that they were making my drawings less realistic, not more. But with ArtRage, I think I can finally give color a little love.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1089 under Computing | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

0x10118FF8AE9811DB9F6F42C955D89593

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 07:03:43 GMT

No, the title of this post is not a bug. It’s a reasonably secure password (not one that I use, thankfully).

The article does get a bit technical at times, but it makes for a great read, even for computer illiterates. At the least, it gives you a little respect for human ingenuity.

[Originally published at Minh’s Notes as Entry №1094 under Computing | Comment using your LJ account | TrackBacks]

Technorati claim… please ignore

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 08:49:56 GMT

Technorati Profile

Backup

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 03:05:50 GMT

All you Friends of Frank out there probably know of the recent LiveJournal power outage. While I trust that LJ won’t have problems this severe in the future, I am aware that many of you maintain Xangas in addition to your LJ (or you’ve at least gotten an account there) – I’ve got proof, as much as I dislike Xanga (notice that I haven’t linked to them yet).

Planet Xavier syndicates both LiveJournals and Xangas, in addition to blogs from a variety of other services. So if you’ve been listed with me, you can post at Xanga or Blogger and rest assured that your post will show up at pX just like your LJ post would – assuming that I know about your Xanga or Blogger, of course.

If you have one that I don’t know about, let me know, so that you can continue to blog in the event that LJ goes down like this again. My e-mail address consists of mxn, then an at-sign, then the domain zoomtown.com.

Six Apart also provides a service called TypePad, which also lets you publish a hosted blog. TypePad offers tons more blogging features, its servers are a lot faster, and you get a yourname.typepad.com address. Its new file manager now lets you host a normal website with them too.

Then again, it’s not free. If you’d like a free, reliable blogging host, try Blogger. With Blogger, you get to customize your site a lot more, you also get a yourname.blogspot.com address, you can see what posts look like as you type them (you need a desktop client to do that with LJ), and the servers are tons faster – after all, Blogger is owned by Google. (If you tried Blogger way-back-when, it may be time to take another look – it’s gotten a lot better since then.)

I’d like to apologize to LiveJournal for advertising alternatives here, but I’d like to let people know of good alternatives that they could use side-by-side with LJ. Continue on…

Here’s a gem

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 05:20:23 GMT

I’ve written up a entry over at Minh’s Notes that’s worthy of notice here:

From the front, it looked legitimate enough to be a parking ticket, but it was just ever-so-slightly tilted.

Read A new religion…

Silent

Sat, 04 Sep 2004 01:25:22 GMT

This Minh’s Notes mirror has been silent for awhile. You can blame schoolwork for it, but my lack of posts here is also due to upgrading my Movable Type installation to version 3.1. It broke the script I was using to automagically update this site.

Until I get this fixed, you can visit Minh’s Notes for your browsing essentials.

Preparation

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 18:20:58 GMT

It’s finally the day before school again. And I’m not saying that with any kind of relief.

Mr. Hausfeld told me yesterday that, after Mr. Odioso took a relatively direct route from an English classroom to the Fine Arts wing, his pedometer read about a quarter mile. Heeding the implicit advise, I went out and got new running shoes today.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of us are diligently working on finishing (or starting) the pile of assignments due first thing tomorrow morning. And that’s my cue to stop blogging and continue working—

[Minh’s Notes | Link | Comments | TrackBacks]

More complication

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:36:03 GMT

I went and did some errands at school today. It was the usual Book Day, except:

The first thing I noticed was, of course, the new Principal’s Office / Information Desk. Oh, it’s now called the “Principals Complex” (without an apostrophe, as I recall). My bad.

I had to sort out a few discrepancies between what the counselors’ said about teacher recommendations and what some others have said.

Assistant principals, please note that when you state, “College counselors will be at school on both August 18 and 19,” you lead me to believe that college counselors (in general; as in, all college counselors) will be at school (as in, within the premises) on both August 18^th and 19^th (as in, Wednesday and Thursday, August 18^th and 19^th, 2004).

Thank you.

There are digital clocks in the halls now. faints and quickly recovers And they actually say BELL when the bell has rung. Or, at least it’s supposed to. They’re still working on the ones that keep saying BELL even before the bell system is installed. I’m sure that’ll get straightened out soon.

Poor Mr. Brower, who prided himself in maintaining standard NIST time in his classroom, won’t be able to justify his attention to detail any longer.

I got my parking pass from the AP Office. I’m really going to miss my afternoon nap on the bus…

I got a chance to tour the school and get used to the new numbering system. And the new wing. And the new clocks.

Before, I thought getting from room 2524 in the Old Wing to room 1247 in the Fine Arts Wing was going to be difficult. Let’s just say I “misundercalculated.” I knew my trip between classes was going to be a nice five-minute marathon; it’s now a testament to my running shoes.

Even after arriving in the Fine Arts Wing, I have to actually find the room amid debris (yes, it’s still under construction) and a series of poorly placed hallways. I have to round the entire wing to get to and from the room. After all, it would have been a faux pas to make even the smallest of hallways behind the stage.

</whine>

Forget cross country. Your sport is my school day.

(If you still want to compare first semester schedules with me, you still can. It’s archived, for your convenience.)

[Minh’s Notes | Link | Comments | TrackBacks]