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In the Thanksgiving gathering, the topic of conversation turns, naturally, to the current economic condition. When I made my remark that the country is in the best condition in the past twenty years, I was immediately countered by the question: "Compare to what it was twenty-five years ago when you just arrived in The States, was the economy better off today." Actually, I've been pondering about this question a lot lately and my "best of the times" remark was largely the conclusion from that. Maybe mentally I'm already approaching my 知天命(know my roles) years, I've been spending more and more time in reflecting the path I've been taken, and the path the country have been taken. And indeed, I see the country could econimically in the best condition than any time in the past twenty-five years. True, the country hit a speed bump and the economic activity today is slight off compare to what it was a year or two ago. True, auto industry is in need of putting into life support. Yet, amid all this groom and doom, a sense of insecurity finally set in.

A sense of insecurity has been absent for too long. After nearly fifteen years of nearly un-interrupted economic boom and a sweeping victory over Iraq of the Desert Storm. American people started to feel it is invensible. This sense of invincibity, reflected in the economy, is increasing willingness to take risks and as a result, we've seen a period of time of un-interrupted asset bubbles, in which, one bubble starts to form before the previous bubble fully deflate.

The first asset class to enter the bubbling stage is the stock. When Allen Greenspan gave the "irrational exuberance and unduly escalating stock prices" remark, the stock market laughed at it and never looked back again, so it seemed, for a long time.

The bubble of the stock market, at it's early stage, was in close cooperation of another bubble: the dot com bubble.

The dot com bubble eventually turned into a dot com bomb. While the dot com bubble was deflating, a much bigger bubble in real estate started to accelerate. Given that the home equity is by far the biggest portion of all the asset values, hopefully, this real estate bubble would be the ultimate bubble. So far we're seeing the effect of the bursting of such a bubble: it is bringing down the value of almost all kind of asset class.

I think the return of a sense of insecurity is good for the long term health of the economy. As long as the sense of insecurity does not turn into panic, it can set the stage for another long period of growth.

http://www.cycom.co.uk/howto/cvssshtunnel.html

ALEXANDRIA, Pa. — Rev. George M. Docherty, credited with helping to push Congress to insert the phrase "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance, has died at 97.

I had been an opponent to the removal of the phrase "under God" from the Pledge, until that day on my way to work after dropping my daughter off at the Catholic school.

I changed my mind when I related the issue with guy marriage. The argument against guy marriage that I resonant with is the that it dilutes the meaning of the marriage. By the same token, if we force people that does not agree with God to pledge his allegiance "under God", it also dilutes the meaning of his entire allegiance. By that argument, I now support the removal of the phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance.

It turns out that Latex support in WordPress is not built-in. Instead, there're several plugins available to enable the use of Latex in WordPress. "WP Latex" appeared to be the "Official" plugin that is used by "blog.wordpress.com".

The plugin that enjoys five star rating is "Latex for WordPress". But I opt to use the newest one: "Easy Latex", released by the author only a couple of days ago. So far, it seemed to be working, as long as the math tag is appeared in the the visual view as plan courier font.

These are a couple of major accomplishes I made over the this long weekend.

1. Retired "Berlin". Replacing it with "Paris", a server-class beast, which is configures so all functions requiring the server to listen to the ports that's visible to the outside world are carried out in two virtual machines, hence isolating the host OS of "Paris" from the outside world at the boundary of the virtual machines.

"Andrew's Favorite Math" has been dormant ever since "Prague" and "Helsinki" were lost. Lately, I learnt that Latex works with WordPress. Reactivating the site becomes much appealing. So I Installed WordPress in "Mont-Valérien" and will import the archieved contents, hopefully, within the next few days.

2. Snow-proofed the shed. It has been consuming most of my Saturdays for the past six month. Yesterday (Saturday) was dry and I took the opportunity to lay down the rest of the roof felt to protect the roof deck from water. Shingles will probably wait until next spring. The shed has been nice and cozy for the past week. Today I moved several wheel barrows of gravel to form the ramp so I can move the lawn tractor to it's new home, freeing it's place in the garage for my car.

All-in-all, it's been a productive weekend.

I received an email from Quotaless the other day:

Our Quotaless Users,



An estranged man, by the name of Jaimie Baillie recently
tried to illegally hack into our server database after a
failed attempt to have Quotaless.com removed from the
internet. I did some research on this man, and it turns
out he is a convicted pedophile who lives in Canada. I
also found his account at Quotaless to contain Child
Pornography. His account has been terminated, and I
assure you your account at Quotaless, is of course, safe.



His address is:



n-nn S_______ Blvd

North York, ON

Canada, M6A 2G5 


After this email is sent, he will try to have my personal
site shutdown, but that won't stop me. He has hurt you
guys, our users, and he has hurt several innocent
children. He has been reported to Law Enforcement
agencies, but let's not stop there. Let's make this man
regret what he has done. He put all of you at risk.



Best Regards,



Daniel J. Gagnon

Director, Server Operations & Security

Chief Technical Officer

Quotaless.com

I'd say that sending this email is pretty unprofessional, not to mention the inproper format of the mail. Exposing an opponent's home address is pointless, unless your intention is to induce harrassment to the person. As uncivilized as the cyber space is, we don't want to see bringing an cyber fight to the main street!

In a medical device software I'm currently developing, I need a popup window animating like the windows poping up from the task bar. After some experiment, I got the following that works satisfactorily.

    Private Sub Form1_MouseClick(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs) Handles MyBase.MouseClick
        Dim screen = PointToScreen(e.Location)
        Dim dlg As Dialog1 = New Dialog1
        dlg.Opacity = 0.4
        Dim size As Size = dlg.Size
        Dim top As Integer
        Dim left As Integer
        dlg.Enabled = False
        For s As Single = 0.1 To 1.0 Step 0.1
            top = screen.y - size.Height * s
            left = screen.x + 10 * s
            If top < 0 Then
                top = 0
            End If
            'If left > Parent().Right - 10 Then
            '    left = Parent().Right - 10
            'End If
            dlg.Bounds = New Rectangle(left, top, s * size.Width, 20)
            If dlg.Enabled = False Then
                dlg.Enabled = True
                dlg.Show(Me)
            Else
                dlg.Refresh()
            End If
            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(16)
        Next s
        top = screen.y - size.Height
        left = screen.x + 10
        If top < 0 Then
            top = 0
        End If
        'If left > Parent().Right - 10 Then
        '    left = Parent().Right - 10
        'End If
        dlg.Bounds = New Rectangle(left, top, size.Width, size.Height)
        dlg.Opacity = 1.0
        dlg.Refresh()
    End Sub

The latest cvsnt is not compatible with wincvs.

In journalism, bashing Microsoft won't get you fired!

So here we go again. Hardly a day has past since the news of Windows Azure hit the wire, Paul McDougall proclaimed Microsoft's Azure is DOA. And his argument is: "IBM's free Lotus Symphony office suite has seen more than 200,000 downloads to date. That's 200,000 users that don't need to buy Microsoft Office."

Funny how journalist always quote evidence that goes against their argument. Let's look at the equations:

(Lotus Symphony + Free) / (Microsoft Office + half a grant) = 200,000 / 1 billion

Like one commenter put's it: people "must love pain!" Sadly (or happily for Microsoft), so far it's proven to be true.

I rest my case!

It doesn't take long to locate the Latex and BibTeX style files for SPIE Proceedings. But it took me some time to figure out how to get it working. So if you're new to Latex like me and working on a Windows environment, this may save you some time.

1. Use MikTex Package Manager to make sure the packages ifthen and cite are installed. It's most likely so if you made a full MikTex installation.

2. Download the class file, spie.cls and the bibiography style file, spiebib.bst and place in a newly created folder for your manuscript project. This may not be the best way to do it but it works.

3. Download the example files: article.tex, report.bib, and mcr3b.eps and place them it the directory created in the previous step. The file mcr3b.eps is actually named mcr3b.ps. Make sure you rename it when or after you downloaded it. You may also want to rename the .tex file into a name that's more representitive of the topic of your article (e.g. myspiearticle.tex).

4. In TeXnicCenter, use "File->Open..." to open the .tex file. At this point, no project has been created yet.

5. To create the project for the article, go to TeXnicCenter main menu and select "Project->Create with active file as main file". In the popup window, check "Use BibTeX" check box and select a proper language (en) and Dialect (US). This will create a project named as your .tex file name.

6. At this time, you're ready to build the project by selecting "Build->Build Output" from the main menu or by pressing F7. You may repeat the build up to three times to remove all the warnings.

If the selected output profile is "LaTeX => PDF", you'll probably get the following LaTeX error: "Unknown graphics extension: .eps.". To get around the error, you may "Build->Select Output profile..." one other than "LaTeX => PDF". For example, MiKTeX comes with a nice "Yap" DVI viewer. If you do need a PDF file as an output, you can select "LaTeX => PS => PDF" as your output profile.

Finally, if anyone knows the proper way to install the style files, please drop me a note.