A developer's blog

Earth hour

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They said the earth needs my vote.

Not the first time I turned off my light, but still mine seemed to be the only one not turned on in my neighborhood. I spent the hour looking up to the cloudy sky while people a singing (from inside a karaoke bar), stereos are turned to their maximum volume (from a fashion shop across the street), and streetlights’ haze still mix with even brighter lights from surrounding buildings and vehicles…

Therefore from my own experience, I highly doubt the 5% savings figure they give on TV for the hour. But that’s still possible, thanks to our highly environment-aware electricity supplier, EVN. They celebrate earth hour around the year (for those of you who can’t read it, they cut off power randomly 24/7), so you can count any “vote” from Vietnam as ten! Even better still, the big shots are increasing electricity, post renting fees, fuel price and car taxes to “encourage better usage of existing resources”, then award themselves (with the surplus money you give them of course) for having accomplished such a great mission for mankind!

Lightning magnet

I don’t know if what they (the government) did could really make the weather like others have been saying about the most recent lightning strike.

Image: Tuoi Tre

What I’m wondering is how they managed to continue their rituals despite “heavy rain” when 2 days later it turned out to be a hailstorm? Vietnamese heads must be harder than I have thought (And helmets are not all that necessary). =)

About the lightning strikes, I think it is normal for such poorly managed or recovered places. From the photo above you may see a small piece of metal pointing outward from the roof, which could have attracted the strike. Possibly something like that happened in last year’s incident too, and as you may see, nothing much changed from back then so I won’t expect anything to come this time.

HDD failures continued

Following my HDD’s demise, three more of my classmates’ HDD failed in the last two week. What an unusual number for such a short time frame and small group of entities. I thought that something else must be wrong other than my HDD’s intrinsic problem, and what could affect a HDD without you noticing?

An EMP bomb magnetic storm maybe.

I searched, but NASA seemed reluctant to publish such “uninteresting” details to the public. They must have needed that to plan their missions! :/ Anyways, the only notable articles I found are from Vietnamese sites and I can’t find en external source confirming this [1][2].

It’s predicted that between 12-20 magnetic storms will affect Vietnam during 2009, threatening the health of magnetism-sensitive people or heart disease patients, according to Dr Ha Duyen Chau, acting head of the Global Physics Institute.

Maybe I’ll explore this a bit more later, given that I have time. In the meantime, try not to blame your beloved servant for its failure, that may not be its fault :P.

Ancient kings

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It’s not until yesterday (April 4^th) that I wonder who exactly I am taking a holiday commemorating. It’s a bit of a surprise to know that the entire first 2000 years of Vietnamese history is still a mystery. I always know that history from those time has a bit of romance and imagination, like deities fighting each others over a girl and magical turtles rise from the sea to give you the Excalibur after Arthur had finished using it… Wait a minute, that joke is not historically correct! The turtle only appearing after the Hong Bang era, and at first it gave out free crossbows only!

Back to the kings, Vietnamese could have invented life-prolonging medicine back then, considering the fact that there are only 18 kings for the dynasty but it spans over 2000 years, averaging over 100 years for each ruler! The textbooks never explained why, possibly because they are just copying from some 14^th century text they don’t have a clue of.

Wikipedia explained that there may be a prolonged self-governing period before that with no kings. Think about it, a society where nobody has authority to force anyone else to do anything, everyone is free to work and live… Wait again, isn’t that sound a little familiar?

Vietnamese are definitely the fire starter! =)

The more you know about it, the more complicated it becomes… It’s easy to consider all the kings starting from the Hungs as the “original” Vietnamese. Historians would have questioned who was the father of them? The text books’ answer is Lac Long Quan, the “magical” and “dragonish” father of the entire nation (Save that genealogy debate about how a hundred entities inbreeding with each other could not have suffered from genetic degradation later). Then who’s Lac Long Quan’s father? A god? A dragon? :P Nah, it’s a half Chinese named Kinh Duong Vuong, otherwise known as Loc Tuc. Who was the nation’s grand grand father is unnamed, but the grand grand grand grand grand father is definitely a Chinese, Than Nong. How could such a self-esteemed nation have originated from the Chinese?

Câu hỏi tại sao người Việt nhận là con cháu của Thần Nông, một trong những ông vua đầu tiên của Trung Hoa là vấn đề được nhiều người tranh cãi. Một số nhà nghiên cứu hiện nay, dựa trên các dữ liệu về sử học, thần thoại học, ngôn ngữ học, đã giả thiết rằng Thần Nông là một vị thần có nguồn gốc từ phương nam (từ phía nam sông Dương Tử xuống đến hết Việt Nam ngày nay, đó là vùng đất cư trú của cư dân Bách Việt). Sau khi nước Trung Hoa mở rộng từ phía tây sang phía đông (giai đoạn một), rồi từ phía bắc xuống phía nam (giai đoạn hai) thì Thần Nông được người Trung Hoa sát nhập vào văn hóa của họ và được coi là một trong các “ông vua” đầu tiên của họ. Thực ra trước đó, Thần Nông đã được coi là “ông tổ” của một số bộ tộc Bách Việt. Và sau này, do ảnh hưởng của văn hóa Trung Hoa rất mạnh, nhiều người lầm tưởng người Việt nhận một ông vua Trung Hoa làm ông tổ của mình.

Anyway, my trace of “my own” ancestry stopped at Phuc Hy, possibly the first king of all. At least I now have a better clue where I’m from. :P

Holidays are all around

It’s a holiday here, it’s a holiday there. Thailand, Philippines and India all have holidays within this or next week. Great time to enjoy yourself and blow of some dust from your blog :P.

Happy holidays, and don’t waste water!

Possibly largest inauguration festival ever in America. It’s not just about the well-planned celebrations, it’s a about the new attitude. It’d be hard for Bush to stand between an open crowd like that (neither in a small crowd). One could say it’s courageous, the highest target for those who don’t like America stand between a sea of people. But the ceremony went through smoothly. Well, looks like the terrorists like the democrats :P

I haven’t seen any change for the ongoing conflicts just yet, but I’ve seen changes on the white house’s web site. Really diligent webmaster. Last time I checked (around 11 am EST), it’s still Bush’s. I was expecting only a name change, but the new design surprised me. I like the new color and layout, the feeds and the jqueries. The professional online presence from the presidental campaign was carried over. If this were a Vietnamese site, it’d took one or two month to make the same change :))

The political Google bomb from 2004 was also taken care of. I tried to access the old target and got redirected to the new biography, while search engines are redirected to Bush’s. Well done! I like the new administration already!

Also, from the new biography more goodies is now accessible. (Say, you want to know about the first pets?)