Surprised by Joy

Here is an very interest NYT article, talking from the author's own experience (see the open carton) to Tim Tebow. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/magazine/let-my-tebow-go.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0 What touched me is the term "Surprised by Joy". I think in our life we are surprised many times, and try to remember them will be another joy :-)

This will definitely cheer you up

The link blew. I just can't stop laughing at some of that. http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/people-who-are-having-a-worse-day-than-you

Cool prank :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeXMxuNNlE8&feature=youtu.be That was so cool!!!

Why he got fired from facebook

A very interesting read from a former FB employee

xhtmlConformance mode Strict

Doing some jquery ui debug for my friend. Her calendar ui shows month/year select box stocked instead on one line. Did some checking and her table cells are 1px short .... Found out it is the DOCTYPE HTML Transitional of her default asp.net rendering. And set xhtmlConformance mode Strict in web.config should fix that. However the Strict did touch the doctype at all, and a manual fixed that. Will try to figure out why xhtmlConformance didn't work tomorrow.

mstest and localization hell

I have a project which have some localized resources in a dll. My test won't pass because for some reason it can't find the resource. Funny thing is if I create another project with the same code, test works. And it turned out someone added Test Settings and it set to deploy. So Visual studio copies everything to a TestResult directory, but forget to copy the localization dlls :-) Just that stupid thing alone took me a long time to figure out. Then the test fails on the build server. The only difference is on build server it run under mstest.exe. I tried it on my machine, also not working if invoked with mstest.exe. So did some online search and a parameter /noisolation needs to be added to mstest.exe for it to work. Some more digging and the real solution is to add [DeploymentItem(@"xx-YY\Resources.resources.dll", "xx-YY")] (where xx-YY is the locale code, i.e. en-US). Hope this can be of help to others.

Parasits and brain tumor

I was reading some thing about parasites, some parasites that usually inhabits in our digestive systems actually ends up in our brain and can cause a lot of issues. However, this reminded me of something. I have recently learned that brain tumor is very hard to treat because there is a blood barrier between brain and blood vessels. What if we can use the parasites (or borrow the way it went into the brain) to deliver cancer treatment drugs for brain cancel patients?

More progress stuff, for public knowledge and also for me

Yesterday after I got auto completion to work (Thanks Sharp Develop!), I started to think about check in/out. I always uses cvs before, but svn is definitely the way to go this time around. After searching for some online ones that is not as satisfactory, I found this one: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/setting-up-subversion-on-windows.html. Waited till today to ask wife if it is OK to reinstall our server (it is getting slow any ways). Then found this link when I tried to figure out how to show a popup near caret: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/22803/Intellisense-like-Method-Selection-Pop-up-Window. So GetrectFromCharacterIndex will do it :-)

Money Linq Update

Got wife's argo, she hates me now. Almost drive out by myself, half way through had to drove back, and she is on phone. So with the 10 minute spare time I finally figured out what's going on, Thanks Sharp Develop, now Money Linq got auto complete (errr maybe not, because no UI for that yet).

MoneyLinq

Recently I updated to windows 8, and a problem surfaced again. Have to find my old Microsoft Money CD and install it. The money file was some how corrupted and almost give me an heart attack. So I decided to start (again) implement my own financial software. There is a product called linqpad that a co-worker at my new company showed me, and I wanted to do something similar :-) The linq part is actually easy, just use the code providers by MS and it is done. However it is the auto complete feature that I am having a lot of trouble with. So after some search I found Sharp Develop. It already has it. Last week I spend a couple of hours (spread cross different nights) try to get the code completion part out. I got sick yesterday and despite the huge headache, it give me enough time to make it working (kind of) outside Sharp Develop. And today when I got some free time and tried to integrate the parts from Sharp Develop to MoneyLinq, found auto complete is still not working for customized types inside lambda expressions..... So back to debug again, hopefully I can make it work before wife gets angry (and WOT 8.0 beta is out, got to try it out as well).

Still Alive

Recently I finished Portal 1. I know it is an old game, took me a long time to finish it after I stopped playing world of tanks recently. Got surprised by the ending song, Still Alive. It is so clearly wrote, beautiful song with an engineer twist :-) Best song I have heard in a while.

Best Starcraft match so far

Janbi vs Zero Was such a surprise ending, keep me on the entire match :-). Enjoy!

The Ferdinand

Finally I unlocked Ferdinand, a Tank Destroyer I have been waiting for sometime now. The road to Ferdinand is a bumpy one, with a great MarderII, followed by not so good Hetzer, and later on the great StugIII, followed by the huge disappointment of Jagd4, then a not so good JagdPanther (both of them with paper armor that can't survive well). Now finally the Ferdinand, a TD with some armor :-) The World of Tank balance system is rather bad now. The german Heavies used to be the best, but after some "adjustments", has became the worst, with other nations guns easily able to pen the armor, the only german advantage of armor is gone. Now Maus is just a slow heavy ball of clay. The German Tank Destroyer however is still good compare to USSR. The Russian Tank Destroyers are just bad, with both ISU152 and Object with paper armor that can't survive in cities. Why WOT need to make some tanks that are just bad?

John Carter

Last weekend we got John Carter from redbox, I have to say it is a great movie. From what I hear, this is the SIFI book that started all, and it is true (beam transport space travel, super strength due to environment differences etc). I like the feel of the movie, too bad it didn't make money for Disney.

dead lock with insert

Recently I encountered a strange problem of dead lock. Our code deadlocks when 2 process insert record into the same table (Both process insert into table A with different record). I was amazed that this could happen, since a deadlock always requires 2 resources and the table only have 1 index. A closer look and the table was selected before, got rangeS-S lock, and the insert tries to upgrade to rangeI-N, which dead locked with the first. But why this have not happened before? Well this will only happen for serialize isolation level. Our database is on read committed, and after I took the code out and run in multiple test programs they are all fine, this lead me to the last suspect, nservicebus (we use it to receive messages). NserviceBus default to serialized isolation level, so one line of code to set it to read committed fixed the dead lock.

Greedy Goblin

Found his blog through an WOT rigging discussion, http://greedygoblin.blogspot.co.uk/ I am seriously thinking it could be true (I have a lot of games), and I should not sink any more money into WOT till it is more open.

Kaju Katli

This is one of my favorite indian snake, Kaju Katli. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaju_Katli And just learned the cover is called "Varakh", which is actually thin silver!!

Diablo III free to play this weekend

Any one with a battle.net account can try Diablo III beta free this weekend, however I was only able to get in yesterday, today it is always busy, will just play World of Tanks 7.3 beta for now :-)

Change (and rather funny)

Remember the President Obama "Change" poster? Another artist Tim Doyle made this a while ago (Saw it on world of tank forum and did a google). Change By Tim Doyle Image below:

Cool World of Tanks statistics tracking

http://tank-tracker.com/View_Tanker.aspx This site helps track your stats for the pas hours/days/month etc. Very nice.

Epic game, Bisu vs Flash

Best game I have seen ever, two top players and non stop action, brought to you by NukTheStars part1 part2

Some interesting historical stuff

I was reading some thing on the internet and keep on going off to different directions, before I know it I was deep in naval warfare and guns. Here are some interesting stuff I found out. 1. Because guns are heavy, they have to put them low in the ship, and because it is impossible to drill holes on flanks, they have to put guns on decks. Some big war ships have as many as 3 decks. 2. Naval guns are very inaccurate, so they have to be fired in close range and in big numbers. 3. Ship can be racked, which is if a cannon ball landed from head to toe instead of side to side. Racking can be really bad for a ship, because the ball travel through the entire ship and cause huge damage/death. 4. All guns will try to fire at the same time to reduce the change one gun's fire ignite other gun's powers.

A billion dolloar of CRAP

Blogger exposes loophole in $1billion fleet Yes the blogger has a simple way of by pass the scanner. If there is a machine, there will be people who can cheat it. I do believe that it will be simple to fix this problem (use a background made of PORK lol), however it will still be ways to cheat it. I am sure someone at TSA has thought of this before, but they all got bought off by the company who sale scanners.

ARL 44

World of Tanks related. I have finally unlocked the ARL 44, it got an amazing gun for its tier (200+ pen). However it will take a long time to grind the gun (needs track, turret, another gun then the gun I want). So I will just wait it out till they have a sale on the ARL 44.

I am not surprised by this

50p tax rate not raising much revenues.

The long grind of T34

This is related to World of Tanks. In the next version they are going to replace the US T34 and T30 with other tanks, I am grinding to get the free tanks :-) After a long grind I got the T34, now I want the T30. Problem is, T32 to T34 is a pleasant grind, the T32 is fast, tough, I love it very much and the grind seems to be a snap. It even raised my win percentage. The T34 on the other end is bigger (target), weaker, and without the top gun, it is a downgraded T32. At least it is fast enough, else it will be a horrible grind.

Brain Tumor

Just got the shocking news that one of my friend's daughter has brain tumor. I was shocked. She is such a sweet little girl, why??!!!!! I even feel anger. This even is the worst one in my life, because it actually shakes me to my core, almost worse than me contract this tumor.

WOT Progression

Yesterday I finally elite my E50, and a day earlier I elite my King Tiger :-) Not too long ago I was simultaneously leveling 10 tanks, now only 5 is in the list. My t44 is still 60k away from the t54, and the t32 is only 100k (plus I got 50k of free exp if required).