An End for this Blog

I just realized it has been one and a half year since my lauching this personal blog website by looking at the dates on “Archives” (the column is on the right side). It’s surprised to see that this blog actually started from September 2007. Time flies by so quickly and silently and I believe life is, to certain extent, flying quickly and silently.

Looking back at the past one and half year, the first ever jumping to my mind is–nothing. Seriously, I simply cannot get any conclusive image for the past one and half year, though there were lots of big and determinant moments. We are pursuing whatever we want to, and some of us simply get lost on the way to the destination, while others lost their original motivation and turning to just moving along. We never think of something seriously only after we encountered them accidentally in our life.

Reading Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death (I started reading this book maybe more than 1.5 years ago, but finished it about 1 year ago.) refreshes my retrospectives on this finale moment of a human’s life. It happens so quickly, some smoothly, some not. While not everyone would think of this issue sympathetically, I always feel sorrow but quite natural when thinking of it. As everything else in the universe, when there is a beginning, we would anticipate there is a ending. This also applies to any human life.

Now it is time to end this blog, just like how I promptly opened it. Suede’s hitting song “everything will flow” is one of my favorite songs among all. We know everything will flow, but we should also know they will leave remnants on their way flowing, which we cannot deny. I think the best one can do is to accept it, just like to accept all your facets, good or bad. Finally, Suede’s another song “so young” is also one of my favorite. I believe there is no finale performance and the destination is the blue sky.

To those I once loved in my life

对自己真心喜欢过的人、事、物，往往不会提及，那些堆放在某个角落的花儿们是不应该拿来做谈资的，因为曾经投入过真挚。这样的绝对私有就好比书架上最前排最显眼的书往往不是最心意相通的那些。

可以高谈阔论的反而是不会刺痛、无关痛痒的一些。好比经常被人笑话的发型，无所谓，I don’t care。 反正都在接受度以下，所以好或者不好其实没有太大差别。就象现在那么多“美女”，反正都在欣赏以下，所以美或者不美也都没差。但是不想说出来，因为或许会伤害到其他人。

懂得所以慈悲，不懂所以恣意。

Solve ODEs and Perform Nonlinear Regression with MATLAB

Cleve Moler’s book Numerical Computing with MATLAB is a good begining, which has an online version.

C. T. Kelley’s group specially focuses on nonlinear regression. His book Iterative Methods for Linear and Nonlinear Equations and Iterative Methods for Optimization are good ones. Besides, they have MATLAB version of Implicit Filtering package on their website.

远行的冲动–An Impulsion of Traveling

George Sand说过，旅行就是普通人逃离平日的生活。我则觉得远行是一种生活态度。如果单要放松，以今日的技术，大可不必车马劳顿。事实上，真正的旅行总还是累人的，但乐此不疲的大有人在。“在路上”，更多的是一份心情，一份向着一花一草微笑的心情；一份期待，一份看进每个过客眼里的期待；一份冲动，一份抛掉所有、背包上路的冲动。陌生的地方，陌生的人，陌生的际遇…..虽然最终可能只是又一次的平常，但对于起身上路的人，潜意识里总有着罗曼蒂克的设想。去沙漠，那会不会曾经有过另一个楼兰；去大海，海底有没有亚特兰蒂斯城。访古，能不能遇到先贤的魂魄；游今，有没有异士的掌故。即使去一座城市，保不准撞见都市童话，又或者黑帮火拼。

前天，看到别人拍在虎跳峡的照片，血液里的冲动瞬间引爆，很有马上启程的劲头。那可是滇藏，无数人心中的香格里拉，也是我一定要去的地方。很久前就挂在嘴边的滇藏线、川藏线、青藏线、新藏线，直到今天还没实现，忽然明白原来“踏遍青山人未老”很有些难度。但是，似乎每个背包客又都有着一张青春的脸，至少在远行时，他们脸上的细纹和斑点都是模糊的，模糊在山林河泽、旷野天地间。也是，当整个人都在天地的衬托下缩成一个原始的点，我们又怎能看清那些细纹斑点？幕天席地的洒脱、江青月近的淡然，这些恐怕就是冲动的来源吧。

鬼にも涙–淡淡夏日黄昏的芳香

七月新番中有一部叫作《夏目友人帐》，和《百鬼夜行抄》（改编的电视剧当然就没有原作那么有神韵了）一样是讲人和妖怪的关系。

一直很喜欢妖怪的故事和题材，比如《モノノ怪》，哦，对了，好像捉妖人总和猫有千丝万缕的联系。

嘛，其实妖怪大都很可爱，可怖的反而是人呢。

夏目友人帐公式

片尾曲–夏夕空

色付く西空に

差し込む一筋の日

夕立の雨上がりに

気づく　夏のにおい

ひしめく光が照らす思いに

耳をすませば聞こえし友の面影

夏夕空　香り立つ

鮮やかな過ぎ去りし日々

心のまま　笑いあった

あの夏の思い出よ

绯色渐染西方天空

漏下一缕阳光

骤雨初霁

嗅觉那夏日气息

充满斑驳阳光的回忆里

侧耳倾听，那是昔日友人的旧影

夏日夕空，清香漫溢

韶光似锦

心意互达，相视而笑

那是夏日的回忆

President Faust’s Speech to Harvard Class of 2008

Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008

‘You are at a moment of transition that requires making choices.”

“You won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it. “

“I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.”

An inspiring “parking space” theory. Most of us would become more and more puffed up with conceit, thinking we know the world, the crowed and ourselves, thinking we could make a best pathway of ourselves. However, we easily got frustrated as soon as there showed up some obstacle on the pathway. It’s always a benefit to learn from those who have experienced everything, even though we are facing different circumstances from the older generations.

The whole address could be found on website: http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/faust/080603_bacc.html

Failing to plan is Planning to fail

For those PhDs (some abnormal life mode beyond most of the world~~), here is some interesting and thoughtful guide. Though you might be much smarter than lots of others, it won’t hurt to go quickly through it. Many thanks to Dr. Azuma (let’s mark the title to show respect to those finally got it. “To know the road ahead, ask those coming back“–Chinese proverb) to prose such a guide.

“Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.”

A Dreamer or an Engineer?

“A vision without a task is a dream.

A task without a vision is drudgery.

A vision and a task is the hope of the world.”

–Anonymous, 1730

“Just do it.”

–slogan for Nike

–interesting and meaningful quotes from “Center for Biofilm Engineering” at Montana State University.

iMac setup D*O*N*E!

I’ve been trying to downgrade Leopard’s X11 to Tiger’s, under the introduction of Ben Byer and Tim Baur as mentioned in the last blog post, but failed. It gave me an quartz–wm controlled X11, still no full screen mode available. I tried to modify .xinitrc and org.x.X11.plist, also the preference parameterization, nothing better. I just gave up and forced myself to get used to it. One lightly good thing is that I could use Leopard’s Space function and associate X11 to an individual space. That’s all of it.

Once I faced a license problem with MATLAB, which cost me much more time than it should be to figure it out. There’s no license manager, say, lm/ folder installed, therefore I’ve noway to lmdown or lmstart. I thought there’s some files missed during installation or the installation isn’t completely successful. I uninstalled MATLAB, reinstalled it, but nothing happened. Today, I just asked someone whether the license has expired since it was passed to me. No surprise or much surprise, the answer is yes. So I’m now having the new license on and it starts working finely. It’s just that this time my MATLAB doesn’t need lm command anymore…

Whatever, my iMac is setup now, no matter how well the X11 part is functioning and that’s the whole story of couple days’ struggling. I hate it!

The damned X11 problem

So finally I catch the reason why I cannot install windowmaker on my Mac successfully. The Fink I once installed was a beta version and not working in this case. There is a new version for Mac OS X 10.5 recently released: Fink 0.9.0. After updating my Fink to this version (just do a quick fink selfupdate), now I could get windowmaker. However, one more problem followed. The X11 windows crashed immediately after its being launched. I could even do nothing before its disappearing. That really sucks. I couldn’t even touch the “Window Focus Preference” option. I thought it might a problem of the .xinitrc file, so made some edition to it with comparison to my old Mac file, but it didn’t work. Somehow it showed “fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) or KillClient on X server “/tmp/launch-R27MOU/:0″, so I turned to the org.x.X11.plist file trying to make it work. There were 4 items in this plist instead of just 1. Since I don’t have another such file to look at, I kept it unchanged. BTW, in my previous OS X Tiger, there’s no such a file. It seems Apple just changed the way X11 works on their Leopard (I know this is OLD news). Well, after I install whole bunch of softwares, including steps such as “sudo apt-get install gv” and “sudo apt-get installauctex“, the X11 server finally came back…BUT, whatever I did with the preference setup, I couldn’t get the “Full Screen” toggled. It’s really ridiculous when I found out this is because the damned bug in Leopard X11! Actually people are now taking back Tiger’s X under Leopard to fix this bug and one step is “sudo mv /usr/X11 /tmp/“! I’m beaten!! All I need to do is to go back to Tiger’s X and what I’ve done is wasting my time!!! Shoot Leopard X11 !!!!