Fly together Forever 比翼恒飞

Apparently, google maps has different features/capacities based on different user interface languages. My parents just complained to me that they can’t find “place of interests” in their google maps any more. After obtaining more information from them, it appears that they are actually using Chinese version of google maps, while when they were using the English version, “place of interests” was indeed visible as an option.

So the problem is how to change the UI language. The website URL for the Chinese version of google maps is the same as the English version, both of which is maps.google.com, so must be another way of doing it. Searching the UI, I can’t find a control to change language anywhere. However, I did notice on one page when clicking around, where I have this in my address bar.

http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?hl=en

by chaning it to:

http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?hl=zh-CN

As expected, I get Simplified Chinese version of google maps. So to switch UI language in gmap is to append “?hl=LANG_CODE” to the URL, such as:

http://maps.google.com/?hl=en

Will load the gmap front page in English. Some LANG_CODE I tried which are recognized by gmap is: de, en, fr, ko, ja, ru, zh-CN and zh-TW. (See language identifier for a complete list)

Our first child, a little boy, nick named haohao (full name still needs to be decided) was just borned naturally today in York Hospital. As 6/Feb/2008 is the chinese new year eve, so haohao is still born in the year of pig, rater than the year of rat.

I will upload pictures of our little baby to the online gallery soon.

After 4 years of PhD study, finally I passed my viva (or defence in US) on Wednesday 14, Nov, 2007.

Thanks first go to my family, including my parents, who  made my PhD study possible finacially and they are always ready to encourage me whenever I am struggling with whatever issues. My wife, (was my girlfriend) , also support me throughout my PhD study.

This research was made possible under the excellent supervision of
Prof. Andy Tyrrell and
Dr. Julian Miller. I would like to thank them for their continuous support and guidance of the project as well as their suggestions and direction. In addition, I highly appreciate the efforts they exerted to find financial support for my further research.

Credits should also go to my friends, labmates, thanks for the assistance and suggestions, as well as the laughs and times shared with me.

I think this should be the last degree in my life, or anyone know is there a higher degree to pursue? (I know postdoctor is not considered as a degree, but rather a job) Although, even if there is a higher one, I doubt whether I am willing to consider it…

I got married several months ago, but did not have time to put up all the photos to share with my families and friends all over the world.

Just installed
Gallery 2 and
WPG2 for WordPress and all
wedding photos are all uploaded. However, you do need a login/password to access them. If you know me personally, please ask me for that.

As this blog is hosted by SCIM sponsor
AWTOHOST, with the
migration of SCIM website to a faster server, this website is now also benifitial from this migration. In addition, this solved another outstanding issue: the plugin
Akismet now can connect to the master server properly. It seems the old scim host is blocked by Akismet server.

Big thank you to
AWTOHOST again.

I registered
www.liucougar.net domain name 3 days ago, but I had to call
active 24 custom service to have my domain name activated: due to some unknown reasons, my order was canceled by one of their agency!

Anyway it should be ok now.

Last night, the online shopping website of ASDA seemed to be undergoing some upgrade: the service was quite unreliable. In fact, for more than half an hour, clicking on any links on the web page did nothing.

When finally it got back to normal, seems it did not like IE any more: it was impossible for me to add any items to my shopping basket. As I had been aware that ASDA was not compatible with Firefox when checking out, I thought adding items to basket should work fine, so I opened a new tab in Firefox to access ASDA.

It turned out to work just fine under Firefox. When everything was added and we were satisfied, I just proceeded to check out under Firefox (which had not worked out of the box, I had to modify the dom tree to get ride of some broken javascript function calls to make it work). After the successful page shown up, I realized that ASDA is now compatible with Firefox, finally! That’s nifty.

Today, October 1st, is the national day of People’s Republic of China, my mother country. I don’t know how to express my emotion at this moment, but I do feel compelled to write something about this in blog to show that I am Chinese and I love my mother country from my deepest heart.

I had no idea what I could do for my country today: I am no way near of literal master to write an article about China. However, when I heard the "Today is your birthday, my China" (今天是你的生日我的中国) in a forum thread, the idea of translating the lyric to English came to me. I did try my best to translate it but please bear with my English.

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Just noticed Alice’s blog about "
life is tricky". I do not know why but the "
Trial and error" method come across my mind after I read it. Quote from the wiki page:

Trial and error has a number of features:

• solution-oriented: trial and error makes no attempt to discover
  why a solution works, merely that it
  is a solution.
• problem-specific: trial and error makes no attempt to generalise a solution to other problems.
• non-optimal: trial and error is an attempt to find
  a solution, not
  all solutions, and not the
  best solution.
• needs little knowledge: trial and error can proceed where there is little or no knowledge of the subject.

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