For all you mothers out there

Enjoy!

The Bay Model

This is the first time I heard of this, but looks amazing. It seems like a perfect place to visit during spring break...

Validation, and Rent-a-person

A friend of mine sent me a link to a movie called Validation (thanks Tom!). It's an awesome movie, and my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it - and guess what ? It turns out the same directory made a movie called Rent-a-person. It's equally entertaining...and those two movies are separate yet entwined :)

Ever heard of beef that's over $150 per lb ?

Costco online now sells Japanese Wagyu Beef. Price? $2299.99 for 15 lbs. That's over $150 per lb. That's gotta be more expensive than a regular cow in whole...

Snow + tree = breathtaking :)

Taken at the top of Sky Express lift in Heavenly, on Christmas Eve.

Driving to the end of the rainbow...

We - the commuters driving to work - are the pursuers of the proverbial end of the rainbow for a pot of gold. But this morning, it was literally true:

This storm's getting better :)

Well, NWS just updated the forecast, and it gets better and better:

* TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS THROUGH MONDAY NIGHT: 10 TO 20
INCHES...WITH 18 TO 30 INCHES ABOVE 7000 FEET.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Finally, the storm I've been waiting for is coming :)

National Weather Service's special weather statement at 3:24pm today (Dec 13th) says:

* IN THE LAKE TAHOE BASIN...6 TO 12 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE AT LAKE
LEVEL...WITH 10 TO 20 INCHES ABOVE 7000 FEET.

Yeepee! That ought to cover enough coverage to open up a lot more slopes. Sounds like the real snowboard season in Lake Tahoe will start soon :)

A chance to submit your question to the upcoming Obama-Biden administration.

The transition team of the upcoming US administration set up a page using Google Moderator service (internally called Dory - if you've seen Nemo....) http://change.gov/page/content/openforquestions. You can ask any questions, and vote for the questions. I really appreciate the transition team trying to listen to the people through various channels like this. While this is really only a small sign, I already feel better about the new president-elect, and can't wait to see him into the office :)

PS. The URL has changed from my earlier post.
PS2. Now the transition team has a blog explaining why they are doing this: http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/open_for_questions

The flower that blooms in adversity is the most...

Well, the winter's finally arrived in California, but we still have these amazing flowers in our frontyard:



Taken with T-Mobile G1 :)

Heavenly started making snow - opening on Nov 21.

Yeepee! I can't wait to go up there on the Thanksgiving week - I have booked a room for the entire week :)

Bike friendly or not ?

In reply to my previous post, a friend of mine (who doesn't live in the Bay Area) asked me if my route is really bike-friendly. Well, you can find the answer to that question at:

http://www.vta.org/schedules/gmaps/index.html

And if you overlay my route  (unfortunately I don't know how to overlap my route on top of that  bike map yet), you'll notice that a lot of it is covered by bike lanes. And except for a short stretch on Camden (and the right most lane in that section on Camden is really wide so no worries), most of my routes outside bike lane are through neighborhood streets (e.g. through Campbell), which has virtually no traffic in Saturday morning. So that route is very safe and bike friendly (there are less traffic signals on those routes as well, which helps a lot). Oh, and the route is essentially flat - there are very minor incline/declines but no hills at all, with a lot of straight runs where you can go as fast as your legs can allow.

Saturday's bike trip

Yesterday, I had the longest bike trip so far - about 21 miles (33km) from my house to Cupertino High School. 

It took me about an hour and 40 minutes - the average speed of about 12.6 miles per hour.

Considering all those stop times at numerous traffic signals, this is better than I actually expected

- 30 seconds wait at 20 signals would be 10 minutes, and that would make the average speed 14 miles per hour.

Here's the map with my route:

View Larger Map

The weird loop at the end was basically to spend time before I met my wife at

Cupertino High School - I arrived there much earlier than I expected,

so the loop became much larger than I originally planned.

Now this gives me high hope that I can bike to my work within 2.5 hour or so in the bike-to-work day next year...

Silicon Valley's road names

As a computer science geek, Silicon Valley has many "interesting" things around, and among them is the names of streets. Here's a few of them that are interesting to me:

While Semiconductor Drive in San Jose sounds like a perfect place to find semiconductor companies, you'll have better luck around Component Drive, which crosses with N. 1st Street - where you can pretty much find all major and minor semiconductor companies. Not so far from  Component Drive, you can drive through Disk Drive in San Jose, and then after just one signal away and you can hit Fortran Drive and Fortran Court right next to each other.

You don't even need to ask which company is at 1 Amd Place, Sunnyvale. Of course, there are a few giants that won't be satisfied without its name on the road sign: you can't drive through Oracle Parkway in Redmond City or Cisco Way in San Jose, and you don't even need those road names to know where you're getting into if you drive through those streets.

However, not all companies are witless and boring to make their coporate address in their own name.  The famous Infinite Loop in Cupertino is a pun for every programmers out there, although the Loop isn't really a complete loop by itself- which kind of fits the "fruit" company that is located there). Both Network Circles in Santa Clara and Menlo Park are really full circles and you can keep driving on those Circles without leaving them (they are also the address of the same company who owns network.com). 

Joe Garcia for Congress....NOT

If you can vote against Joe Garcia (you can, if you live in Florida), here's one more reason to do so. He's a spammer - I live in California, and I rarely register for any political events/organizations, and I suddenly got two emails from him, asking for support.
Unless this is a deliberate attempt by his opponent to put mud on his face (which I seriously doubt), he's a bona fide spammer in my book, and although I have no idea who he is and what kind of politician he is, he's either not paying enough attention to his campaign or he's using illegal and abusive tactics (spamming IS illegal), and in either case, you should not vote for him.

Keep an eye on LHC

Are you worried about LHC (Large Hadron Collider) bringing the end of the world ? Then rejoice - now you can keep an eye on LHC at: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Enjoy!

PS. Ian, thanks for the link :)

The first spam that made me laugh...

I found this in my inbox today:

From: "clinton tarsicius" <fuge@mail.totalcar.hu>
To: <gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org>
Subject: I got you naked gcc-patches
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:04:39 +0000

Watch.

For most of you who don't know what gcc-patches means: gcc stands for the GNU Compiler Collection, and gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org is a mailing list where the code changes to the GCC are sent and discussed. Naturally for an open source project, the list is open to everybody. So, in some sense, the spam is not only funny but also correct :)

Software Engineers vs the Universe

I subscribe to the quotes of the day feed from QuotationsPage.com. I really like today's quote:

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

The answer to Apple's use of PA Semi

The new article confirms my own speculation.

What would Apple do with PA Semi ?

Ever since Apple acquired PA Semiconductor (if you missed the original news, one of the first reports is here),
I've been pondering what Apple can/will do with PA Semi that would be interesting enough for PA Semi people to stay around. PA Semi arguably has one of the best microprocessor team in the world, but such people are not easy to keep - after all, if you're a good microprocessor designer, it isn't very hard to find another project/company to jump to. Companies are always looking for great engineers, and PA Semi had many. For Apple to have any hope of retaining those people in PA Semi, it has to have some interesting project for them (or, alternatively, large enough money can do the same job, but I doubt Apple is willing to spend much more - good processor designers are not exactly cheap already). Also, buying a microprocessor design house isn't a tactical move - it must have some deep strategic advantage to Apple.

So what new project would be interesting to PA semi folks and also benefit Apple strategically ? I think it must be a new processor for iPhone and iPod. Apple uses various chips for iPhone and iPods - at least from PortalPlayer, SigmaTel and Samsung. I forget the exact figure, but I think the current estimate of iPod and iPhone unit sales for 2008 is somewhere around 70-80M (with iPhone taking 7-8M). I don't know exact sales breakdown between different iPods, but let's say Apple sells 20M iPod Touch and iPhones (which presumably share the same processor). If the development of a processor for iPod costs $100M a year, per-unit cost would be $5. At that price, it's not a slam dunk in terms of economics, but it's within economically viable range. Apple might very well design their own SoC for iPhone specifically, and can reap the economic benefit.

However, another important point is the explosion of smart phones. The processor arms race that happened with PC is only going to happen again with smart phones. It's bound to happen - as people do more and more stuff on their cell phones, people will demand better performance which translates into new capabilities. Part of the reason Apple lost the first PC game was the performance. Apple couldn't quite develop their own processors - their volume wasn't high enough (I don't remember exact numbers, but before iMac, their sales only around 1M a year, if I remember correctly). This time around, the difference is that Apple has enough volume. With that, the economics of having a processor team in-house just might be viable, and provide all the strategic benefit that comes with it.