The Network under the Bright-Bright Sky

Is it that hard for the refrigerator in the world to add a door-opened alarm? All it takes is a 555 Timer, or better yet, a few transistors. It supposes to be so simple but that my refrigerator doesn’t have this feature. End results? The moisture finds its way sneaking into the freezer component and forms the crappy ice.

jamie found links to a discriminating selection of Siggraph papers at waxy.org. Among the more captivating:

• automatically improving the attractiveness of faces in portraits;
• automatic substitution of similar faces into photographs
• using still photographs to enhance video of a static scene.

Can you trust any video now?

Link to the original from Slashdot: Some Eye-Popping Research From Siggraph

If the harddrive growing speed is strictly sticking with the Moore’s Law (so far that’s pretty much the case), and that my data is growing slower than what’s Moore’s Law has predicted, then my server could still hold my data at anytime in the future.

A big assumption: I have to keep forking out money in purchasing new harddrive.

In the Q1 of 2007, I spent a whole lot in buying a 500GB, and it was full for quite some time. I have to stop my data from growing for a while also. While the 1TB harddrive price dropped to HKD $1300 from HKD $3000 when it was released, it’s still pretty expensive. Besides, it looks like my data doesn’t grow as fast (because I watched less Anime recently? who knows-), so I bought a new one the day before and settled with a 640GB.

The old 500GB is then transferred to the backup server. The backup server now have 2*250GB+1*500GB=1TB space available. Comparing with my 100MB  installed in a 386 desktop 19 years ago, it is 10000 times bigger. (That’s about doubling for every 17.1 months, that’s not apple to apple comparison, but anyway). The 320GB from the backup is also offlined so I colud use it to backup my desktop now.

It took 1 day to re-sync the existing 4xxGB through the 100Mbps ethernet. Looks like I must upgrade it to GE next time.

I’ve forgot to bring my SIM Card when going back to Hong Kong. Luckily, we still have public phone kiosk around, and there are even some free public phone in the Airport. If free Wifi is available, I could even make calls through VOIP.

Actually, if everyone show up on time, we could still live without cell phone.