I just did it.

http://www.redcross.ca/

Click "Donate Now" then "Donate online"
Input everything regarding payment:
personal info, payment method, amount...
Select China Earthquake under the Fund Designation item,
and submit.
Print out the receipt.

地震还在持续着

在老美的地震局网站看到，从昨天下午开始地震到现在，已经有 10 多次 5 级以上的余震，成都那边的通讯依旧不稳定，短信和电话都很难接通。

要了解最新的地震情况请订阅这个 Feed，用浏览器在这里观看最近七天世界上发生的地震

刚刚又发生了余震

上面的信息，都是老美的，USGS，呃，中国地震信息网和中国地震局的信息更新太过缓慢，政府的信息化工程太垃圾了。

这个页面有最新的地震数据，包括 Google Earth KML，更多的 Atom and RSS Feeds 以及 CSV Files 等等。

为震区同胞祈福。。。

update:都江堰的震后照片

update1:来自海内的两张图片，希望大家警惕，严重警惕

My third effort towards the evaluator role (three weeks in a row).
It was neatly done.
I hate to say it myself, but I had an incredible sense of humor tonight.
It was roughly drafted and delivered in a seamless flow.
I have no regret.

But up till now I haven't slept for 24 hours.....for work...
solely on two coffees and one tea.

Link	Artist	Title	Album
1	坂本真綾	Folly	アルバム未収録21曲詰め合わせ
2	Ennio Morricone	A Fistful Of Dynamite	The Very Best (Vf)
3	Cocteau Twins	The Itchy Glowbo Blow	Blue Bell Knoll
4	Echobelly	To Get Me Thru the Good Times	Gravity Pulls
5	Echobelly	Gravity Pulls	Gravity Pulls
6	Chara	Beautiful Scarlet	夜明けまえ
7	Dim Dim	Spiral	Kiwi
8	My Little Lover	YES~free flower~	presents
9	南央美	Sweet Call	OST<机动战舰Nadesico之电子妖精星野琉璃>
10	Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions	Lost me on the road	Bavarian Fruit Bread

Comments

突发奇想把原来放过的再来上一遍.

有删节.

A lot of reference books for geeks or experts lay themselves in the dusts of basements around the world and people are still creating such basement dusties for various reasons.

Humans have amazing techniques for encrypting accessible expressions and narratives, turning them into books. So far the reverse engineering is mainly done by those who need to decode the info with respect to their own interests, on the basis of self-motivation; if published, such a reverse engineering is often called tutorial or book for dummies. However, that means, if the topic that I care is rarely visited, I'll have to walk down to the arena and make my personal tutorial.

Wiki is a collaborative-filter of books and lots of tutorials came into being because of this. What's missing is content-based analysis here. We have enough data (the dusty books) now. To make those outrageous maths and physics accessible to most, building books for dummies upon the massive basement dusty data would be a nice thing to do. Google has taught us a lesson that translation could be nicely done without fancy single-node based AI. The intelligent content conversion might cause a bit of panic at the first thought, but would unnecessarily remain frightening when taking a glimpse at the sheer number of computing units that exist and witnessing how fast and sustainable the number grows.

According to the Long-tail, I believe that the decomposition of the same set of abstract theories have been repeated over the years (or each day) and the efforts are frozen in the data (enormous dusty books with the same title) already. One day, it might take less time to defrost such intelligence, i.e. generate a personal tutorial, than to search for a good one or to find multiple dusty books as we usually do in the past.

The first step could be as easy as to crawl over all the keywords with necessary filtering, retrieve the interesting statements, list them somewhere you can reach in one shot, and finally maybe show an Amazonish invitation "If you got stumbled upon B-spline, you might wanna look at this quote....", blah blah blah.

It works perfect now after a few days of investigation.
Now I find no reasons to return to Windows anymore.

My recipe:

1. Soundcards: Builtin Intel (hw:0), SB Live! 24-bit 5.1 (hw:1)
2. Sound device: pulse-audio (new in 8.04 Hardy Heron)
3. There should be two ways of configuring surround sound: low-level one with ALSA, and through the high-level delegate pulse-audio.
4. With ALSA I never succeeded by creating and tweaking the ~/.asoundrc, where I specified channel duplicates to route the PCM through all my available speakers; I referred to at least 5 different tips from online peer ubuntu users. But with pulse-audio you simply have to do this:
   
5. in System -> Preference -> Sound, turn on pulse-audio as the devices for all audio applications, and use your surround-equipped soundcard as the hardware mixer.
   
6. Install the package pavucontrol, which raises the linux speaker configuration to the Windows level (many linux hardcore followers hate to and have to admit it). By default the menu item is hidden in the Applications menu, you need to edit this utility to check it under the category Sound & Video.
   
7. Under pavucontrol, you will see a dialog with three tabs. Look at the tab playback, right-click the labels on the left and check the checkbox that "moves the stream" to your surround device.
8. Move on to the tab Output Devices, find your surround devices, and right-click the label again, check the checkbox default. You can go on with the Input Devices tab to select your default input device, but that's unrelated to the surround playback.
9. Reboot and it's done.

I still keep one specific setting from the earlier ALSA attempt without testing what would happen by turning it off: under /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, uncomment the line with default-sample-channels, set the value to 6 if it is not there yet.

In general, pulse-audio does a pretty good job, although the GUI tool pavucontrol is not perfect; the right-click-on-label thing would be really confusing to a computer newbie who doesn't have the habit of wild clicks with the mouse.

Anyways, I'm listening to the excellent Deep Space Mix series from ASC, recommended by my friend from lab, on the Ubuntu-hosted surround-sound party!!

1. apt source list update: by switching to the repo at Univ. of Sherbrooke here in Montreal, downloading is literally "instantly done".
2. Dual-head tweaking thru both the system GUI facility and xorg,.conf; my 19' screen can only go up to 1024x768 at 75Hz; before suspend, a manual screen setting update should be made, otherwise you woke up with only half the face working; the dual-to-single switching is still not trouble free, I ended up getting 10% of my screen chopped off (no redraw at all).
   
3. Sound tweaking: 5.1 doesn't work, no matter how I edited the alsa configures, with GUI or the configuration files; tried duplicating channels, nothing happened; an invalid default channel number could shut you outside X; pulseaudio is buggy, ALSA is still the most stable one; Jack requires special sampling rate and buffer size to get rid of the jitter; used modprobe, dmesg, strace, /etc/init.d/alsa-utils, pavucontrol, aplay....
   
4. Chinese language support, with which SCIM works perfectly. You still need to install language packs, in my case Smart-pinyin for Chinese and Anthy for japanese but will never have to fall into the manual configuration traps again.
5. Compiz may need a quick fix.
6. Install libflashsupport to enable sound in flash web content, otherwise your youtube would be a pantomime house.

List of packages that I installed individually (unordered)

1. qemu + kqemu + m-a
2. Wine
   
3. Opera
4. ScribeFire for Firefox
   
5. Kate
6. aMSN
7. Filezilla
   
8. aMule
   
9. Azureus
   
10. checkgmail
11. KDevelop
12. Matlab
13. Eclipse
14. SPE
    
15. latex + Kile + LyX
16. KPDF
17. RapidSVN
    
18. PD
19. Audacity
    
20. last.fm client
21. mplayer
22. VLC player
23. amaroK
24. Kino
25. Comix
26. Dia
27. EasyTAG
28. Gmount-iso
    

Now I'm able to have a tight sleep without video or audio assistance (listening to music or watching TVs) again.
feels good.

Vista on my new laptop, Sony VAIO on sale, drove me crazy: surround sound thru my SB 24-bit external is not working, due to the notorious driver disability. After making the wrong decision of erasing Vista from the hard drive, I found that XP can't be installed because the hard drive can't be detected by XP installation disc (probably due to the SATA driver or sth, but I failed to make it work even with SATA-included versions, because VAIO's BIOS is literally a zombie). However, the more evil devil turned out to be the Sony customer service, circular responsibility, constant absence of the suggested representatives; finally I was told to have to pay $30-ish to get the recovery CD. So I said, fxxk it. I'm done with Windows. This seems to be the chance. Anyways, I have one working at lab, with which I can still enjoy the DAWs for my mixing/mastering work.

After trying Hackintosh Mac OS X, which failed to bring up the available screen resolutions and suspend function, both essential to laptop, Linux became the apparent choice. I've lived with ubuntu 6.06 before, and looked like Fedora has gained a bad fame in speed. What is more interesting was that the latest long-term supported version 8.04 just came up on stage, so how the story went was quite apparent.

I was impressed by how much ubuntu desktop has advanced in terms of the built-in hardware support, software abundance, and their usability.

1. Dual head works, even though it required a bit of xorg.conf tweaks, but the Windows-like screen settings have greatly reduced the headaches I had with Dapper a year ago.
2. Suspend works and wireless runs like breeze, although the suspend and awaking loop is not as swift as on Windows, but, hey, it's free.
3. On Windows, I had to provide my webcam driver but here with aMSN, it just works without a bump. Never knew video chat has been possible on ubuntu.
   
4. VoIP with Ekiga worked! Another surprise! Although the connecting/dialing process is not as fast as on Freecall for Windows, but it is fully compatible with my Freecall service.
   
5. Kate is nearly as good as Notepad++ for coding, not quite yet but good enough. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of Emacs or Vim, because I don't consider absolute addiction to keyboard a healthy perspective. Sticky note is built-in.
   
6. Matlab, python.....are all there.
   
7. ScribeFire on Firefox is good enough as a viable alternative for Windows Live Writer.
8. Lots of light-weight widgets for daily routines and apt-get/synaptic makes it easy to update and install all the gears.
9. mplayer is as strong as always; Codecs downloading is fully automated!
   
10. The only game I still play occasionally, Duke Nukem 3D, is now a cross-platform open-source project, meaning that if I want, I can have it fully functional on ubuntu.
    

Still, sound remains the biggest problem on Linux, I never got the surround sound working, and the lack of multiplex support (!) is really frustrating. Jack seems to be a nice rescue, which even allows for modular audio chain (!!), but not all applications have Jack support. Audacious stays buggy as before, even though this time I didn't have to spend 2 hours trying to compile it myself (apt has it). Anyways, with last.fm I can live without local music library. I'm happy that PD is there in the repository; it wasn't there in the Dapper age. All production work is still Windows-happy. Pity.

There was a certain mindset of mine, a stubborn reliance on a small number of Windows applications, that prevented me from ditching Windows for a few years. But for this unwise choice of laptop (even Compaq can work with XP thru BIOS), I wouldn't have discovered that I don't really need Windows for work anymore.

A man has to remain open to all new possibilities, new horizons.