Ryu2.mind

AirAsia is not really a ghetto airline -- just be sure to add one hour to the scheduled arrival time... ;)

Make sure your GSM international roaming service is in working order BEFORE the day of your departure. Sorry Linda and Cindy... =P

I'm never flying China Eastern again internationally, cheap price or not. Parking out in a remote stand at Pudong Airport without a jetway in driving rain at 6 AM in the morning is not my idea of a good end to a flight.

Back in the USA... anyone want to hang out tonight or tomorrow night? =)

Filled With Your Glory

My favorite praise song, sung today at my favorite church, in the fellowship of some of my favorite folks:

No matter where in the world I've been, it's always good to be back home, if only briefly, and be reminded of what truly matters...

Filled With Your Glory

Michael Sanchez, Sean Barber and Blair Toews

In my heart, in my heart, there's a fire burning
A passion deep within my soul
Not slowing down, not growing cold

An unquenchable flame
That keeps burning brighter
A love that's blazing like the sun
For who You are and what You've done

And as the fire is raging on
So your praise becomes my song

The whole earth
Is filled with Your glory Lord
Angels and men adore
Creation longs for what's in store

May You be honoured and glorified
Exalted and lifted high
Here at Your feet I lay my life

From the ends of the earth
To the heights of Heaven
Your glory Lord is far and wide
Through history You reign on high

From the depths of the sea
To the mountain's summit
Your power Lord it knows no bounds
A higher love cannot be found

So let the universe proclaim
Your great power and Your great name

The whole earth is filled with Your glory Lord
Angels and men adore
Creation longs for what's in store

May You be honoured and glorified
Exalted and lifted high
Here at Your feet I lay my life

The whole earth is filled with Your glory Lord
Mountains bow and oceans roar
Creation longs for what's in store

May You be honoured and glorified
Exalted and lifted high
Here at Your feet I lay my life

For the Shanghai-based folks, who's up for this? =)

Link to evite page

I don't have everyone's email addy, so apologies if you didn't get it before... and do pass it on!

Back in Shanghai, and back to the usual routine. My May holiday was definitely enjoyable, with -- to borrow an old McDonald's slogan -- food, folks, and fun in abundance. Going in, I wasn't expecting to learn anything much, but some lessons and thoughts are just right now slowly starting to come to me, especially after sharing and talking with like-minded folks in Thailand and the States. More to come later.

For now, posted pictures and commentary from Thailand:

Malaysia:

and the USA:

--------

Warning: nerdy post to the extreme; non game programmers can stop reading now.

Even though as a developer, I'm privy to a bit more info than the general public regarding this kind of stuff, I still spent the better part of the past two days soaking every bit of news and opinion on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 (nonstop clicking on the reload button, with literally over a dozen window and tabs on every gaming and tech site) -- the consoles which are going to be battling it out for control over the gaming scene for the rest of this decade. (Sorry Nintendo, but even as a die hard Nintendo fan for many years since grade school, I'm not holding my breath... =( )

General consensus seems to indicate the PS3 has much more raw horsepower, and the demos floored me like they did everyone else. But numbers tell surprisingly little.

Intellectually, I'm getting more and more fascinated with GPGPU techniques; essentially, using the GPU as a general purpose stream processor to handle stuff other than rendering, like physics. The main limitation of these techniques has been the horribly assymetric AGP bus on the PC in terms of readback from video RAM (ie, retrieving your results your GPU computed for use in your game). PCIe removes the bandwidth disparity, but there's still latency and bus contention issues to deal with, so it's no panacea. I don't know what interconnect they're using on the PS3, but as long as CPU and GPU use separate memory banks, you'll run into this issue. UMA seems like it will be a logical approach to solving this issue, even though raw bandwidth seems to be less.

The Ageia PPU seems to be interesting too... too bad it's not incorporated into any of this crop of consoles. Let's hope though they don't lock you into any specific proprietary API (cough... 3Dfx... Glide... ack...)

Please Sony, get a good compiler team this time, or just acquire one. gcc has never been known for its performance -- on any platform. Furthermore, it looks like that both the Xbox 360 and the Cell PPC cores are strictly in-order units, putting the onus of scheduling and thus performance squarely in the hands of the compiler writers.

I'm hopeing we can have something on the Cell that's the equivalent of the Intel C++ Compiler for their platforms or IBM's XLR compiler for PPC (MS should just adopt this for the Xbox 360), and support for OpenMP as well. Seems that Cell still has remanents of the PS2 EE/VU design decisions -- explicit DMA transfers to/from SPUs, relatively little cache to work with, so a philosophical learning curve will still be there, it seems, for PC-weaned devs, unless they get some rocking middleware.

The little things amazed me as well. Xbox 360 supporting PSP connectivity. The PS3 having not only Memory Stick slots, but SD and CF as well. With the two heavyweights of the industry both jumping on the "universal convergence" bandwagon, might this be the era that we finally see this holy grail of consumer electronics kick-started after decades of failed promises?

Well, it's gonna be an interesting few years, that's for sure.

Disclaimer: my own personal opinion only, and only formed from publically-announced information.

From: majordomo@lists.stanford.edu <majordomo@lists.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: majordomo@lists.stanford.edu
To: mwang@cs.stanford.edu
Date: May 12, 2005 10:47 PM
Subject: Majordomo results:

>>>> unsubscribe fics-chat

Succeeded.

For those of you who don't know, it was my college fellowship's famous -- most would say infamous -- unofficial email list where people would post anything and everything: requests for books, rides and miscellaneous favors, long-winded discussions shallow and deep, and of course -- the 'who's up?' messages that brought color and distraction to many an all-nighter. The messages and threads were inane for the most part, but sometimes -- just sometimes -- there'd be diamonds in the electronic rough.

It was not unusual to see dozens of messages generated over the course of one night, and I remember that one night, there were 500 emails, the result of a particularly wide-ranging discussion involving pretty much all of FiCS and then some. (It caused more than a few people to have problems with their disk quota...)

Even after I graduated, I stayed on, as a 'lurker'... I think I persisted on there longer than almost any FiCS alum from my time at Stanford, longer than Paul Kisoo Lee, list founder. Longer than greats like davehong, dchai, henryhsu, etc. Before I signed off, I did a 'who' command to query the members one last time -- only Irving and Phil from my class of ~20 FiCSters are still there to witness the antics of the young 'uns, and they're both still serving in the fellowship in some capacity.

Partially, it was out of laziness, but also in a way I unconciously chose to stay on there even long after I graduated, because it was, in a way, a link to the past. I think there were two main reasons: First, living and working in the Bay Area after Stanford, I never really thought of graduation as a clean delination between life stages, but rather a fuzzy, gradual boundary, considering all your underclassmen friends and the campus were just a few minute's drive away.

Second, because my classmates and I were also the first 'freshman' class in our fellowship, we felt a very special affinity for FiCS, being in many ways its initial core... serving as small group leaders, officers, etc. and building it up to what it is now, so in a way, it was fun to see our 'baby' grow through reading the emails.

Even fast-forwarding several years to my first days here in Shanghai when the people I knew in this city could be counted on 1 hand, it'd be reassuring in some inexplicable way to wake up and see dozens of "who's up" messages in my inbox (thank goodness for Gmail's auto-threading!)... an assurance that, yes, there was something still familiar from home that (however irrelevant those emails were to my life) was at least predictable in its routine.

But now, I now know effectively 0% of the current people in FiCS, and I've realized that it's time to move on... to be focusing on working at a new job, in a new life, in a new country, being part of a new community, in a new church, making new friends. There's email, IM and blogs to keep in touch and share with my personal friends from those days, so I'm not severing any real connection; I also know the fellowship that our class pretty much started is in good hands.

So, I admit, I wasn't really thinking of it as such when I finally issued the command to leave after 9-odd years; rather, it was mainly a step to save me time in the morning going through my inbox, but now I realize... it's also a little milestone for me in my transition thus far.

Farewell, fics-chat, and thanks for the memories. You'll be missed. =)

My international cell group meeting tonight was the best I've had in a while. The leader was Joseph from Kenya, and he spoke out of Psalm 118. In reading it, there was a lot there to refresh me; for instance it probably provided -- at least in part -- the lyrics for at least four praise songs sung in most contemporary English-speaking chs.

But the zinger that I was reminded of was in these two verses...

"It is better than to take refuge in the L than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the L than to trust in princes." -- Psalm 118:8-9 (NIV).

Which caused me to remember something best expressed in Job:

"Can you fathom the mysteries of G? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens -- what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave -- what can you know? " -- Job 11:8-9 (NIV).

The truism that I was reminded of is this: It is what we know that enables us to realize what we don't know. And, this application to our sp knowledge is unique compared to our Earthly pursuits in that we delight, rather than find uneasiness in said unknown.

We ought to learn about Him, His character, and His ways, so that empowered with what we know, we can realize what we don't know and trust Him and His provision all the more. And that trust, itself that purest basic expression of faith, is what gives us joy at the most abstract level.

On another note, after tonight, I'm glad to be slowly starting to see this group of people become my community here in SH (the one I can blog about, that is... ;) ) Twenty young adults, all committed believers -- representing 11 countries/regions on 5 continents... a chance to (somewhat) break out of the Asian-American xtian bubble that I was in since high school.

Moreover, I've been very blessed by the Africans at ch in general, and tonight's study just underscored it. While all the ws leaders seem solid, whenever I see a black guy up there setting up before service, I know that ws is going to be rocking. To GrXers going to Kenya this summer: I can tell you that if the folks you'll be working with there are a fraction of what the Africans here in Shanghai are like, prepare to be in for a treat and be seriously encouraged by their fervor! =)

Slowly but surely...

Link courtesy of dchai and the JBB:

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2005/05/13/1038156-ap.html

Singapore turns to rap and hip-hop

SINGAPORE(AP) - Singapore's prime minister launched the country's latestbehaviour modification campaign on Friday, urging teachers to usehip-hop and rap music to teach proper English and warning thatcontinued use of the mutated local form of the language could makeSingaporeans unintelligible.

"Speak in a normal Singapore tone,which is neutral and intelligible," Lee Hsien Loong said. "But speak infull sentences, with proper sentence structure and cutting out all the'lahs' and 'lors' at the end of each sentence."

Lee was referring to two words commonly added to the end of sentences in "Singlish" - a mishmash of English and local dialects.

"Can or not? I think can," he said, using another commonly used phrase in Singlish.

Thecity-state is well known for its numerous social engineering campaigns,most of which are government-backed. Singapore in the past has urgedits citizens to wave at fellow motorists, flush public toilets, be moreromantic and arrive at wedding receptions on time.

Lee urged teachers to use "pop songs, hip-hop and rap as mediums for teaching good English."

"Ifour English becomes too mutated, then we become unintelligible toothers," he said. "If we speak in a dialect which only someSingaporeans can understand, then we are handicapping ourselves andcutting ourselves off from the rest of the world."

Theadministration began waging war on Singlish in 2000 and attacked thecountry's most popular TV character, Phua Chu Kang, blaming his use ofSinglish for a rise in bad grammar among citizens.

Critics have denounced the numerous behavioural campaigns as Orwellian and condescending.

My take:

Doesanyone think that, maybe, just maybe, most rap and hip-hop songs aren'texactly textbook examples of English grammar and eloquency themselves?=P

Mindyou, I love Singapore, Singaporeans and Singlish,really. My uncle and aunt are Chinese-Singaporean and I've had a chanceto visit that city-state 6 times so far in my life.  A previousjob of mine involved some consulting/contract work there. During my collegeyears, I befriended quite a few Singaporeans. And, I've met quite a fewof them here in SH as well; I'm guessing that next to Americans,Singaporeans are the 2nd most represented nationality at theinternational church here. Most of all, G's doing some great things inthat country and I have no doubt it will be a springboard for His workin the years to come.

My Singaporean friends from school are perfectlycapable of speaking the Queen's English in the classroom, and yetwhenever I go to Singapore and meet up with them, those same folks --graduates of Stanford, the Ivies, etc. -- lapse into Singlish just likethat.

I suppose it's just like people speaking Shanghainese here-- taking pride linguistically and embracing something that's one moreexpression of unique identity, even though they're perfectly capable ofcommunicating in the common language. So, if they want to speakSinglish by themselves in informal settings, I say more power to them,as long as they're teaching proper English as well.

But towards the latter end, are the Singaporeans so kiasu (enthusiastic about doing something, to a fault) that they don't realize that the cure may be worse than the disease? =)