Archive for May, 2009

Trouble registering Visual C++ Express Edition

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Microsoft makes this Visual C++ compiler freely available.  However, you need to register it to use it for more than 30 days.   If you click on “register now” you will be asked for a windows live account, which you can create for example, as a Hotmail email account.  

But the next step, which is to obtain the registration key, can go nowhere — at least it did for me.  After I pressed the “next” button, nothing.  No error message, just an unending wait for the page to load.  I tried repeatedly and then suspected the problem may be that I am using a non-Microsoft browser, i.e., Chrome.  I repeated it with IE 6.09, and it worked.  

I’ve long since given up on IE — Chrome is way faster and easier to use.  But it’s good to keep IE 6 around for situations like this :-)

Posted in technology | 1 Comment »

Wolfram Alpha

Monday, May 18th, 2009

If you haven’t tried Wolfram Alpha, you should.   Today was my first day of using it, and I ended up using it more times than I could keep track of, in fact way more often than I used Google.   Here are some queries that I tried

http://www58.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cdf+rayleigh

http://www58.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cdf+gaussian

http://www58.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=chi+squared

As you can probably tell, it was day where statistics was very important to my work.  And here’s another one, just for fun

http://www59.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=factor(1111111111111111111)

I’m hooked.

Posted in Math, technology | No Comments »

Best commencement speech

Monday, May 11th, 2009

I remember the commencement speaker when I graduated from Michigan in 1986. He was an eminent Russian studies scholar. His speech was about 1 hr long, full of insights into what was then the Soviet Union.  It was totally inappropriate to a graduating class — as if we had not heard enough lectures, here was one more.   The crowd was noisy and, towards the end, started throwing beach balls around.  The speaker closed by remarking “The last time I saw behaviour like this was in the Soviet Union”.  Gee, thanks. 

This year Larry Page gave the speech at Michigan. I saw it on YouTube. Here is the link. Larry is not normally a great speaker,  so I didn’t know what to expect.  This speech is one of the most moving that I’ve heard in a long time.   It is very personal, which I think is why it is so good.   And, he kept it to 16 minutes.  

Posted in family | No Comments »

Dragon kiln

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Adjacent to the NTU campus there is a pottery factory known as the “Pottery Jungle”. They have a huge kiln, which is built into to slight rise.  It is called a “dragon kiln”, or anagama kiln according to Wikipedia. The kiln is almost big enough to stand up in, and extends into the hill like a cave.  The waste heat from a lower section rises and helps fire the pottery in the upper sections. Here are some photos.

At the mouth of the Dragon Kiln

At the mouth of the Dragon Kiln

It takes a large team to fire the kiln, and once fired, it can be run for days (up to 12, according to the Wiki post above).  Thousands of pieces are fired at once.

Inside the Dragon kiln

Inside the Dragon kiln

You can see the location of the Pottery Jungle at this address

Posted in science | No Comments »

The silent ringtone hack

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

After I moved to Singapore, I obtained a cellphone through a prepaid plan. The number was recycled from a previous user. I started getting repeated calls from a number in Indonesia. This person still persists in calling, obviously having nothing better to do.

To get a number blocked in Singapore you need to file a police report. It didn’t seem worthwhile to bother the police about a nuisance caller.

I found a simpler option, which I read about somewhere on the web. I added the prank caller’s number to my contacts list. Because my phone allows you select a different ringtone for each contact, I created a special silent ringtone by recording 10 seconds of silence. I then assigned the silent ringtone to the prank caller. He can call all he wants but my phone wont make a sound.

I’m told some phones have a simple call blocking software built in. My phone, which runs Symbian S60 series 3, doesn’t have such a feature. But the silent ringtone hack works pretty well.

Posted in Uncategorized, technology | 1 Comment »