A developer's blog

“This is why it’s so goddamn hard to be in love”

Warning: this may spoil your Valentine’s Day :P

The title is just a quote from Alex Hitchens from Hitch, a 2005 romance comedy. It describes just what I feel: all men got tested until they can’t keep up and either be sorry, regretful, or something. Men have their own lives, yet they have to give that up to running around in panic whenever their beloved got problem; and because they are men, they have to solve the problem themselves!

It’s OK if they are capable of solving all problems all the time. Unfortunately, most men can’t. What if their significant someone got into some kind of situation when they are having important meeting at work in which they’ll get fired for leaving?

• The rich man’s most caring move will be asking someone else to do their job, which costs them money and reputation should their preference is absolutely required.
• The average man have their friends or relatives do his job, which they may or may not do.
• If he is alone, he will have to storm there and risk everything he has.

Just worth it, if that’s for the one you love.

Yeah…

Imagine what if there is no situation and it’s just she wanted to have dinner with you early so your date that evening you last longer?

Some recent reader’s letter posted on Vnexpress discussed about the wife’s controlling techniques on their husband. Most wives like to control their husband, which is fine; but some just wanted to push their men to the limit. The stories are long  and complex but eventually, their men get used to it and developed all kind of counter moves, from silly to ingenious.

I see little difference between those wives and 5 years old kids

• I won’t eat spinach if you don’t buy me that toy! (cries)
• I’m really sick; could you be home right now? (about to cry)

Those wives love their hubbies, I know. It’s great to be in love. Men feel great to be relied upon and is willing run to their wives when ever they are needed. Those moments make they feel their manhood is complete. But as I said, they can’t do that all the time.

Life doesn’t always go like films. A recent research found out that, those who crave for romance films have lower chances to success in love. Why? Because they wanted everything to be perfect – just like films. When prince charming will just abandon his castle, his country, his job to run across the seas, the mountains, slay dragons to reach the princess…

Then in the end, Shrek the monster is the lucky guy.

The main moral of Shrek: not your typical fairytale.

But that is also a film. In Real Life™, will you live happily ever after with a drunk, snoring monster as a husband?

Back to the main topic: wives are controlling but do they really need to? Their husband may not listening when they talk, not care about them as much as they wanted but why don’t they just… ask for it? Is it any harder than hiring private detective to spy on their hubby? Why the one time they can’t care about their beloved is enough to defy all others? They keep saying their husband doesn’t give enough care for them… Do they notice that their husbands were caring when they are mad?

At least that many why explained why there are such a lot of humors about men’s understandings of women. Like everything men knew about women.

Disclaimer: I don’t write about all men or all women, I’m just writing about some of them. So if you see any coincidental similarities between you and those people, just consider yourself apart from them. How sick of me to rant about love when Valentine is so near :-<

English training

The first time I have come to an English course outside school for the last 10 years! One year from the last time I took any English class – still that plain old familiar feeling. The class is cleaner, though not as clean and carpeted as if it were paid 10 times more for.  The chalkboard is still there, the table is too low for an adult to sit. In short: I’m at an elementary school; not an English training center.

Well, that’s all you are going to get being trained for the national foreign language certification, anywhere in this country :”< . Since the international certification like IELTS, TOEFL and TOEIC all fixed their prices at $150, which translates to 2 years tuition fee at my university (and even so that does not include training materials), I am left which one choice to reinforce my knowledge, 17 times cheaper :-<.

Based on all the criticism for this certification I’ve heard, I figured it would be easy to take, writing-only exam. Seems like all the rants are for other degree granting institutions, which have lower standards. At mine, the examinees have to work through four skills: writing, reading, listening and speaking with increasing difficulty for each level. They composed half of the test materials. The other half are taken from other textbook and courses: New Interchange, Lifelines, TOEFL training etc.

Got to work myself out :-<

Switching from formal training to freestyle learning and then back gives a whole new perspective. I felt like I’m in a linguist class =). I used so many patterns, structure and grammar daily for reading and writing without remembering what their names are. I can’t help wondering why they used such fancy words for beginners who just started to learn the language in the first place. Auxiliary verbs, what is that? Some kind of verb that can be put through electronics’ auxiliary port?

Another funny thing is the listening I heard in the first day. It sounded like Mojojojo (albeit with a British accent):

“Because of the huge interest in X, the X meeting will be moved from room 203 to 302, that’s room 302, and for Y, the meeting will be held in room 203, and that room will held the Y conference at 10:00″

“I have personal reminder for professor X, Y and Z. Professor X? Professor Y? Professor Z? Your Blah Blah conference will be held in Bangkok in June. And professor A? I got a reminder for professor A. Please leave your speech at the reception desk before 16:00 this afternoon. Thank you”

I felt somewhat silly answering question based on stuff like this. Oh well, a fair price to restructure my English know-how.

Nodame Cantabile anime

Animax is showing this, I watched 2 episodes without understanding a thing. They speak Japanese the whole time :-<. All I can hear are names and honorifics like “sempai”, “sensei”, “chan” xD.

Look like it pretty much stick to the manga. The drama is also conveyed with static images rather than moving ones; this anime looks more like a collection of moving sprites to me. The only advantage watching this over reading manga is I don’t have to search my files for the song being played by the characters. Characters voices are a little unrealistic but the music is fine :).

When I’m gonna get this language anyway?

My blog

Yes, the number reset since last time…

And yes, my blog URL changed :(

Aww, I tried to stand through all that and look at what I’ve got in return :( I thought it was better for a Vietnamese to use a Vietnamese host, as a way of supporting its growth and Vietnamese host as a whole. Upon registration, they advertised themselves as ad-free, then they installed text links that broke my design; I’m ok with that. Later they remove the ads but insert a hidden iframe to “borrow” page rank; I’m ok with that too and even added a link to them in the footer. Upon the moment I decided to check my blog for comments (which is a few hours ago), they gave me pop up ads! X(. That’s just way beyond the end of my rope!

Since the owner of that .vn host couldn’t help becoming a total (something not nice) in the end, I decided to move. Moving WordPress is mostly painless: WordPress do most of the work for you through the Import / Export function. With that all your post, pages, tags, categories and even metadata is carried over. Though it could be a problem if your blog has a large amount of content, which in turn make your xml grows way beyond the file upload limit set by most free host.

Moving links are a bit tricky: You have to type in <your blog URL>/wp-links-opml.php to get the links, save it to your computer and upload it with another importer (bundled within WordPress’ import). Your link categories are not preserved though. I don’t feel like re categorizing them, in case I have to move again for some reason ~_~

I didn’t do a database import since WordPress keep generating revisions for my posts and fill up the database even after I “defined” WP_REVISION to 0 (whose decision is it to make a blogging software a wiki when it’s mostly used for personal purposes!?).

The reason I choose the current host? It’s the same hosting provider behind, the URL is longer and it does not ends with .vn, but this host support 5GB of storage and have been around since 2006 without advertisements, only a small statcounter script at the end. But still, that snippet breaks my xHTML :( well, everything has a price…

I could have hosted this as my own provider but I’m unsure about byet’s policy on this :/, considering the fact that even their premium customers have stability problems, they might as well wipe people with multiple accounts to free up their system at any time. It’s better to have some kind of cover.

Side note: If you are interested in having a place you can host your files uninterrupted by advertisements and will be using it effectively enough to prevent the deletion of you account (you are not allowed to host large images, file upload scripts etc.) you could gave these a try:

• http://hcmuns.uni.cx
• http://photo.jpe.gs

I made sure they are stripped of advertisements, the script installers are intact and spaces set to the maximum limit for free accounts. You I’ll get domain names like <your choice>.<provider> (yes, they 4th level domains, I can’t afford a 2nd level domain to provide you with 3rds~_~)

Humors

Before I had time to care about my blog, I was knee deep in coding tasks :/ And in those days when I fell stuck I resort to reading humors from vnexpress. Frankly, even though I know they are just jokes and they rarely happen, I can still smell the foul out of the columnist’s ignorance!

Example? Let’s start with this

When NASA started to send people into space, they found out normal ballpoint pen can’t be used in zero gravity.

To overcome this problem, NASA established a working group to make a pen which can be used in space and on all kind of surfaces. The program ran for 3 years and cost $7 million.

Meanwhile, the Russian astronauts chose to use pencils.

Real entities, real countries, false story.

It’s true that astronauts usually though ballpoint pens can’t be used in space and they created a pen that ejects pressurized ink; but that’s not because they don’t know that. They just wanted to ensure everything would work! And no, the Russians don’t use pencils that often. They have been using normal, earth bound ballpoint pens and that worked.

The story is nothing more than an urban legend, as noted here

This story marvelously illustrates the perils of government waste; pity it’s not true. NASA didn’t have $12 billion to spend on anything when it first started sending astronauts into space in the early 1960s. The agency’s entire budget for the 1960 was $500 million; by 1965, it was up to $5.2 billion, still not enough to throw billions away reinventing the ballpoint pen.

Be that as it may, astronauts in the Apollo program did begin using a specially-designed zero-gravity pen in 1968 called the Fisher AG-7 Space Pen. Nitrogen-pressurized, the pen worked in “freezing cold, desert heat, underwater and upside down,” as well as the weightlessness of outer space. It was developed not by NASA but by an enterprising individual, Paul C. Fisher, owner of the Fisher Space Pen Company. By his own account, Fisher spent “thousands of hours and millions of dollars” of his own in research and development; not billions.

The Fisher Space Pen is still used by both American and Russian astronauts on every space flight, and you can buy one yourself direct from the company for a measly 50 bucks.

Fisher AG-7 space pen, Image comes from here

And you can rest assured the story above isn’t the only time that newspaper copy pasted a joke mail to make an entry :)), the second one to be discussed is here.

This is a real story happened just offshore Newfoundland, October 1995. The following conversation between a U.S. Warship and local Canadian authority published by the U.S. Navy Command several days later.

Americans: Please divert your course 15^o to the North to avoid collision.

Canadians: Please divert your course 15^o to the South to avoid collision.

Americans: I’m a caption of a U.S. Navy ship. I reapeat, divert your course.

Canadians: No, I repeat again, you divert your course.

Americans: This is the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lincoln, the second largest ship of the Pacific fleet. We are escorted by 3 destroyers, 3 cruisers and numerous other ships. We demand you to divert your course 15 degrees North! Otherwise we have to take action to assure our vessel’s safety.

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

As usual as it would be, you can’t believe anything on a Vietnamese newspaper, especially when it assures you that the story is true =). The U.S. navy has noted before (this page is now deleted) this is simply a joke

“The Lighthouse Joke”

The following is being transmitted around the Internet as an event that really took place, but it never happened. It is simply an old joke like those found in popular magazines

Vietnamese aren’t the only one trying to prove they got the scoop though. Mike McConnell, director of National Intelligence spoke at a symposium at Johns Hopkins University:

“Now this is… true,” the director says. “I was in the signals intelligence business where you listen to the people talk and so on. This is true. It’s an actual recording.

“There’s a party talking to a ship at sea that says, ‘Ship at sea, please divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.’

“Now the response was, ‘Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.’

“The first party says, ‘Sorry, sir, but you will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.’

“The answering party says, ‘This is the captain of a United States naval ship. I say again, divert your course.’

“The first party says, ‘Pardon me sir, you must divert your course.’

“Now the American ship says, ‘This is an American aircraft carrier, the second largest ship in the United States fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers, numerous support vessels. I demand that you change your course 15 degrees north. I say again, that is 1-5 degrees north or counter-measures will be taken. Do you understand?’

“The response was, ‘Dear Captain, the next move is your call. This is a Canadian lighthouse.’

“All of this is prologue to a history of American surveillance and the current debate over eavesdropping on domestic calls and e-mail traffic with suspected terrorists abroad.

“The point of my story is, always know who you’re talking to,” McConnell said.[Source]

But the difference is: American newspapers dig in almost immediately (How intelligent is the Director of National Intelligence?)to prove it’s false!

Now I know why Bush though Iraq has WMDs, conducted a billion-dollars-worth search and came up with this

Cannot find weapons or CIA Error

Iraqi Explorer