How to upgrade from Fedora Core 2 to Core 3

Yum yum....
Ryan Tomayako gave a list describing what need to be done. See the link: http://naeblis.cx/rtomayko/2004/12/06/fc2-to-fc3-upgrade-with-yum

The Event Generator Idiom

The Event Generator Idiom: "Keep event ha"

From Xiaoyu:
Bill gave a very good description of how to implement the event processing paradigm in Java.

My Second Thoughts on Software Architecture - I

I take the course CS6704 "Software Architecture" this semester. My motivation of learning the software architecture is to apply the knowledge to the complex software design. The software for complex systems, reusable frameworks, or effective toolkits usually requires sophisticated design. The construction of such software requires to considering the software reusablility, extensibility, efficiency and so on. Taking object-oriented software analysis and design into the design procedure, designers are facing more challenges on data abstracting, information hiding, and interface organization. Even though software engineering provides methods and tools on unified modeling, the designers are still suffering the pain on the covering so many requirements in a elegant way.
If there is some systematic way to guide the construction of such the software architecture first to meet the basic requirements, and then refine it by applying reusable patterns, the design procedure will be much easier to be carried out and managed. Considering of contructing a building, the workers will have better ideas on understanding how to build it if the architecture blueprint is provided in advance. While for the architects, if they have already well known most construction styles, and also they understand the procedure of producing demanded documents, generating blueprints should have less pain. That is what I am expecting what I will learn from the software architecture.

PIM -- Personal Information Management, a Buzz Word Now

PIM (Personal Information Management) is becoming a buzz word in the IT world recently. The latest published computer magazine "Communications" also focused on this special topic. It included several interesting papers various from the basis of the PIM to some special topics of PIM (such as privacy and scurity). The Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech opens a new course this semester called "Personal Information Management", which is taught by Dr. Perez-Quinones. The course is to offer to computer science graduate students a fundermental knowledge on the fresh topic and encourage them to explore further reseach on it.

PIM seems to be a new term for most of us, but the usage of the PIM software has been a long history. File explorer in Windows, outlook, and Google desktop can be seen as PIM software. PIM is defined from wikepedia as the following:

A personal information manager (PIM) is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. As an information management tool, a PIM's purpose is to facilitate the recording, tracking, and management of certain types of "personal information", including personal notes, digital address books, lists (including task lists), and significant calendar dates; some PIMs may also manage e-mail or fax communications, or boast project management features.

Obviously, the PIM applications are a user centric design systems. They should organize user's personal information and provide an easy way to allow users to access it.

Though I did not take this course this semester because of my tight schedule, I can not help think about the related research topics of PIM and what kind of the software is going to be release as mature PIM products. The topics of PIM should include but not limited as the following ones:
1. What is the personal information, notes, address book, email, pictures, files, information availabe on internet? How to define personal information, and what are the necessary characteristics of it? This questions should be answered before other research work.
2. Where to store the information, on PC disk, on mobile device, phone system, or internet? If the data is distributed, how to store the information to keep synchronization among the data?
3. What is the organization of the information? Use a hierachy tree, or a relational database, or leave the mess data without organization but only indexing? Whether the organization should adapt to the users or frequency of the usage of the information.
4. How to allow users to access the information at any time at any where? How to identify the user, how to identify the request, how to represent the result, and how to delivery the data according to users' devices on hand? Lots of questions need to be concerned.

From my point view, the PIM software will be very popular in the near future. The information might still stored in Internet or local machines in a data centric way. However, it will be organized and presented in a user centric way. At that time, each man will have one or more electronic secretaries work for you to help you process the information of daily life.

The Privacy That We Forget to Concern

One of the latest news about Google is that the company denied the request from the government to sell the its costomers' search activities. Google did keep the promise, doing no evil about the privacy we forget to claim. However, the search activities data is stored somewhere in Google's hardware. It might have been automatically filtered, categorized, and organized. There might be groups of people who look into the data daily and analyze the potential requirements or anxieties. In the future, Google is able to sell this data, or acts as a consultant company for others.

It is reasonable to keep the data of the search activity to analyze the a group of users' behavior. But the data should not be indentified for each individual. Even though most people do not think it is possible for Google to build such a powerful tracking system to record their search activites, believe or not, it is still possible for Google to identify what is the current research topic of a research lab in HCI center at Virginia Tech.

I did not blame Google for doing that. Instead, I think Google did a quite good job on protecting the customers' privacy. What I really concern is that people do not realize the importance of their privacy and find ways to claim their rights when they are accessing Internet. If you are using a computer which has a stationary IP address, you might need to consider to claim your privacy rights when the daily visited Web site is logging everything you did. Internet has set up a cyber society, in which people are communicated electronically. When we find that someone is recording our daily behavior, we need to seek ways to protect us.

Living without Google

Today I downloaded and installed another software tool from Google, Google desktop 2. This new version of Google desktop adds some some awesome functions based its first edition. It provides a 'side bar' which can host shotcut of the weather, news, photos, maps etc. Techniquely, this software is not difficult to implement. But it is so cool that I like it immediately.

I can not remember when I get the feeling that I almost can not live without Google. I used Google search engine on 2000. Now it has been 5 years and I still use it almost daily. I have a personalized Google home page, which I can custimize a page to contain the stock market information, weather forcast, gmail messages, cnn news, and so on. Personalized Google can also record my everyday search activity. If I can not remember how I found the web site one week before, I just go to the history record and find it out within few minutes. Google also provide a network analystic web site to provide graphical reports on the traffic of the visitors who watched my blog. Including all what I mention, there are more software and services provided by Google that I use daily. I am even thinking of making money from Google by letting Google put Ad on my web site.

All of sudden, I realized that it might be a bad thing to become more dependent on Google. If Google start charging money from search, or the company is disapeared, how can I still enjoy the life now. Actually it is not true that I can not live without Google, but it is true that if there is no Google, my life will be not so easy as it is now. However, Google is so powerful that I really do not know how we can defense ourselves in front of the big monster. How can I know that Google is storing and sailing my privacy to the goverment, or Google is lying in the search result? Fortunately, Google is rich, and her belief is 'do no evil'. Though no company can alway guarantee that she will be as good as she would, let us hope that Google can keep the promise as long as the her stock is high above than 100. I would like to see Microsoft and Yahoo try very hard to keep up with Google. Because of those competitive companies, Google can not survive without us. That is the same reason that why we now become more dependent on her.

I recall a line from my faverate movie "Shawshank Redemption". "Let me tell you that the walls are funny. Fist, you hate them. Then you get use to them. And then years after years, you can not live without them. That is what we called institutionlized." Are we institutionlized yet?

Can video game be a sport?

The 60 minutes tonight broadcasted an interview with Johnathan Wendel, who is the top one video game player in US. Johnathan is also known as the pseudonym 'Fatal1ty' among all the video game players. As most sports stars or movie stars, he earns his money from a well paid job, playing vedio games. Also as those starts, he is well-known by a lots of people, and has fans all over the world. More suprisingly, he get his name recoded in the wikipedia, the famous world wide free encyclopedia. How can a game player be so famous, and can own over $500,000 just by playing games? There must be something different in the current world.

As most other young guys, I play vedio games too. But my major purpose of playing game is to kill time. When there is nothing I can do, playing a vedio game can be more exciting than watching a boring movie or a comedy show, or maybe much easier to read a textbook. However, each time when I finish playing a game, I just feel that I get nothing but wasting all the day alone. That is one of the reason I do not like playing games very much because you spend time on it but almost get nothing in return. It is also the reason why I do not want to join the game industry as my future career even though my research is somehow closly related to it. While I was watching this interview, I realized that I should take a second thought about the vedio games. Vedio games can be cyber sports existed in the future. Vedio game will be some special form of sports, just like chess and bridge. People competed in vedio game would be no difference with others competing in the sports field. Running and jumping can improve the shape of your body, while playing vedio games will speed up your mind processing. It could be healthy activity as long as it will not hurt other parts of your body or mind.

Though vedio game is popular and is thought to be useful on training the mind to response fast and preciously control the body movement, it is still a very dangous activity. That is because of its terrible side affect -- addiction. Young man is much easier to addict to it just as some of them addict to drinking. Spending too much time in front of a computer with a restless mind will be very harmful. Also staying in home just playing games will disconnect the young generation from the real world. Once a person is addicted to the video game, it will cause both physical and mental diseases. No other sports has such side affect. So before any research results on the side affect of addicting to vedio game is published, I will not consider the vedio game as a sport, or at least a good one. Moreover, I will not suggest anyone who would like to be a professional game player even they are talented. The real world is more worthy to be worked on.