Stanley Yao's Blog

I don't like to discuss politics, but I just can't stand so much unobjective information from some western media any more.  Learn the history, not the media!  China is a friendly country and Chinese people love peace.  Take a look at http://www.anti-cnn.com/ with more videos and photos.  See for your self how some media makes biased reports.

You have your own wisdom.  Do your diligence, read some unbiased history, find out the truth, make up your own opinion, and don't blindly follow the media.  I don't ask you to believe me.  But please do believe the truth!!

Since a few years ago, I've been longing for a light portable library that can hold a couple hundred books, articles, and news papers in it and I can read anywhere when convenient.  I've tried a bunch of devices from Franklin to Palm and read about Sony's Reader which, although features electronic ink technology, didn't caught much popularity at all.  Amazon's newly launched Kindle seems to begin to light up the candles of the portable reading.

It take much to build a electronic book reading device that could compete with paper books.  First of all LCD still causes much more eye fatigue than natual ink on paper.  The electronic ink technology in the Kindle could simulate natual ink and the ability of changing the font size is a plus for eye comfort.  Content quality is the next most important thing.  For example, the Acrobat Reader for Palm has to transform normal PDF files into a special format to be displayed on Palm.  It not only take a long time to transform, but also lose a lot of formatting for graphics, tables, and math formula.  Content collection is also a challenge, where Amazon definitely wins with its unbeatable collection of books, partnership with large content providers, a aggregation of community contents (e.g., blogs).  And don't forget these can all be access wirelessly while you are on the go and they are fully searchable!  Isn't that cool?

Since this is only the first version, there must be a lot that could be further improved.  While I'm reading, I like to see more per screen.  So while not change the physical keyboard into a touch screen and let the screen be as big as possible?  Kindle won't have the dilemma as iPhone's small touch screen keyword, because Kindle has bigger screen.  Even many people got use to the iPhone keyboard after practicing, Kindle will be even much easier.

It has been reported that due to the burgeoning advancement in digital multimedia content on TV and Internet, reading and literacy capability of young generation is decreasing.  Hopefully this cool gadget could bring books back into the competition with TV and Inernet.

Link: Animated 3D Driving Direction

Reading map isn't always an easy job for lots of people.  In Friends TV show, Joey put a paper map on the gound and step on it in order to get a sense which direction is right.  Though that's a little bit of a extreme case, it illustrates the challenge.  Many people need more intuitive online maps too and especially the driving directions, so that they don't have to put the computer monitor on the ground and step on it :)  Some GPS devices like TomTom came up with really nice 3D UI to show the driving directions in a much more intuitive way.

Live Virtual Earth Map provides a rich set of APIs with which interesting map applications could be developed, even in 3D and birds eye view.  As an example, I built an animated driving direction that kind of simulates TomTom.  Turn by turn the map will move as if you are driving and what you see is a view of 45 degree looking down from above your "car" and you can see clearly what road and intersection is ahead of you.

The basic idea is to call the routing API to get the itinerary with all segments of the driving direction.  For each segment, the map orientation will be adjusted so that the next point is right ahead and then pan to the next point while showing the textual turn by turn instruction. Some suggestion for the API is that the panning APIs are mostly asynchronized so that the calls return immediately while the actually panning is done a while later.  This causes a little bit trouble in showing the textual turn by turn driving direction in sync with the map animation.  Map events help to some degree, but still some work needs to be done to keep the map and text in sync, because events are generic and there doesn't seem to be a way to assign per event instance parameters.  Also the detailed road of each segment is not available, so when the road between 2 points is not straight we can't follow the curve of the road in order to simulate the exact driving experience.

Facts:

• Across 6 continents
• 24 hours exclusive beaming on liveearth.msn.com
• 2 billion audience world wide
• Organized in part by Al Gore
• 150+ top bands

When there are a deep chain of function calls, especially when the managed and unmanaged code are intermingled together, it's getting more trickier to debug.  One situation is that an exception is thrown deep at the bottom of the chain and caught at some level after it's relaid/re-thrown by a couple of levels and the message logged by the exception handler code is too generic to help locating the root cause of the exception.  In this case Visual Studio could help locate where the exception is actually thrown at the beginning.  This helps a lot in narrowing down the problem when debugging in a large code base.

After loading the project into Visual Studio, bring up the exception dialog by menu "Debug" => "Exceptions..." and check the types of the exceptions that you want to investigate.  After this attach to the process in question.  Whenever the statement will cause exceptions to be thrown, it will prompt and let you choose whether to break at that trouble statement and do further investigation.

Yahoo! Mail begins to roll out unlimited storage today worldwide.  Feeling lucky that minutes after their announcement, I'm getting this great offer already.  Now I don't need to worry about overflow any more. :)

Making the client side scripts work across different major browsers is not easy, especially when client debugging is not as convenient as more strongly typed programming languages.  Try the following web page.  It works fine on IE but on FireFox clicking the button will trigger nothing to happen.

The page will silently fail and none of the event handlers works.  Change the document.onclick handler assignment into the following and it works on both browsers.  Tools like the Error Console on FireFox is very helpful in diagnosing these type of errors.