New Semester is gonna start soon...and Twitter

Time flies, and I will be turning into a Year 4 student very soon. Like everyone in NUS does, I worry about this, about that which is supposedly trivial. What to do in new semester? "A million dollars question, dude."  Too many modules to take, part time at Munchie Monkey(Yeah, I interviewed and were employed already), probably doing lab demonstrator for Year 1 Lab, and at the same time FYP coming...argh!

By the way, I'm on Twitter now : http://twitter.com/junyuan1987 Check it out!

A nice essay: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

A nice article on Richard I stumbled upon the web. Feynman always seek new things to explore, and have a gold heart to share what he knows to other people. Pretty lengthy, but worth a read :) Enjoy^^

My favorite quote:

(when the author told Feynman that he's sad because he's going to die)

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think."
And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize
that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

We share because we care ;)

Link

Google Chrome OS

Wow, is that true? I mean, Google mean it? Chrome, being a browser which is less than 1 year old, is going to enter the OS war where Windows 7, OSX Snow Leopard and various Linux distros fight their way out. On the bandwagon of cloud technology and web-based applications, Chrome OS aims to be a lightweight, fast and easy to use OS. Yeah that is fantastic, since everyone of us use the web for most of the stuff, like checking email, watching video, listen to music, interact with friends etc...With the promising technologies like HTML 5, this is surely a big hit. Well, after all it is built on Linux kernel, which is free and open sourced. Hooray!

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Prepare for the GRE General Test - wikiHow

Prepare for the GRE General Test - wikiHow

The speed, size and dependability of programming languages

Square root of x divided by zero: The speed, size and dependability of programming languages

MS Word 2010 Takes On Tex

Slashdot | MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX

    Just dug it from Slashdot. I've been using MS Word since I used computer apart from playing games and doing other things. It's quite handy, and admittedly I like MS Word 2003; I just can't stand the ribbon and resource-extensive features in MS Word 2007. On the other hand, LaTeX produces nice and sexy documents that make you cry in joys when you see your thesis/report/articles/whatever looks professional and....beautiful. Yes, beauty is one of the reasons why I support LaTeX.

    So, now MS Word 2010 is going to deal with LaTeX? Whoah. I think that it is not gonna happen in any possible way, period. Reason?

1. Beauty. As mentioned above, LaTeX produces nice looking papers, MS Word doesn't. Of course you can tweak here and there to make it better to human eyes, but you can pick up LaTeX in the same amount of time, AND you don't need to do all the settings everytime.
2. Resources: Yes, LaTeX and its packages may eat up lots of spaces, comparable to MS Word, but in terms of processing speed, I think that LaTeX wins here. You can just open a text file, type LaTeX text inside, save as .tex, compile, and get your PDF/PS. MS Word, on the other hand, needs long time to start up.
3. Supported Platform: LaTeX runs on every major OS you can think of. MS Word doesn't.

    Conclusions: LaTeX ftw!

Wolfram Alpha is live on Friday

    You know Google? The powerful and simple search engine that has invaded into the everyday lives of any single living person in this planet. Wolfram Alpha, invented by the physicist and founder of Wolfram inc. Stephen Wolfram, is a "computational knowledge engine" which rivals the search engine giant in terms of knowledge searching. It's a pretty good news to the people who search the web for their scientific work or numerical data.

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Wolfram Alpha to Launch Friday Evening

Diablo 2 gogogo!

Due to my Ubuntu system, I have been unable to find games of good quality to play, considering the fact that I am a gamer. Having tried several games, I'm back to Diablo 2!! What a classic it is! Strangely enough I could not mount the expansion disc to install it, though the vanilla one is okay. I was forced to find a zip version which is "direct-play"able. Patched to v1.12a and used Multiple Resolution Patch, the world of Diablo 2 is so lovely~! Would find some time to hack&slash again :D

NUS Temperature Screening

    As everyone has known, swine flu (Influenza A(H1N1)) has raised to Phase 5 according to World Health Organization(WHO). To respond to that, NUS has decided to set up temperature screening stations in the campus. We need to measure our temperature daily and report to a website, and do the screening before going in any locations, e.g. Lecture Theater, offices, labs, examination halls etc...Quite tedious, but it's worth it as no one know whether swine flu loves Singapore or not. I just hope the coming screening tests are quick and efficient; Can't imagine hundreds of people packing in front of examination halls for 1 hour @_@

New emoticons for Gmail

Do you use Gmail? If yes, do you love the emoticons in Gmai? I always wonder why there are only 19 emoticons available in Gmail...Now Google hears my call: They introduce new ones. Hundreds of them.

If you wanna try it, go to Labs tab under the Settings, and enable the the Extra Emoji option, which is the fourth last in the list currently. Interesting enough, these emoticons are straight from the "secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission". Japanese are known to be obsessed with such emoticons in their everyday lives such that support of them was added to only the Japanese version of iPhone.

References:
Offcial Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Extra emoticons
Inspired By A Pile Of Crap, Gmail Adds More Emoticons

First Post!

Ah, my blog has revived again......what to blame? I have 3 exams in these two coming weeks, not counting the reading week. I have nothing better to do except trying to make the best use of the almighty web. I think writing a blog is not a bad idea, indeed.

However not to let my effort be futile again, I will try to use English more often as it is faster. Or it is just me....

I write about my life mainly, for instance my college life, friends, family, and some reviews and comments on applications I have used on my Ubuntu machine. Yeah, Linux rocks!

That's all for today...Erp it is almost 2am now, I'd better catch sleep now. See you next time!