A Techie’s Story (Toastmasters Icebreaker Speech)

As a software engineer, I enjoy programming and problem solving with great vigor. If I had to count the years of programming that I have done since school, it would be around 30 now. And I know I could never have enough of it! In fact, I am constantly fascinated by the ever-developing new technologies and I am proud to say that I have been able to keep myself on the cutting edge.

I was born and grew up in Beijing during the Great Culture Revolution. Since my father worked for the official China Foreign Languages Publication and Distribution agency, we lived in a community with many well-known translators and language experts. In the vicinity there were also many famous research institutions and engineering organizations. We were surrounded by intellectuals. The schools I went to were very academic centric unlike most of the other schools at the time which were hardly teaching any true knowledge. From a young age I developed good study habits. The conscientious and diligent old Chinese professionals had left a deep impression on me which I have carried along throughout my life.

Before I entered high school, universities in China were reopened. My academic record provided me an opportunity to go directly to university studying foreign language. I knew language and culture wouldn’t fulfill my entire inquiring mind, so I went to a magnet high school where I found math and physics were extremely exciting. The challenge and puzzle-like nature of the fields made me determined to study electrical engineering and mathematics later in college.

I remember my first computer course in college was titled “Z80 Microprocessor” and my first programming language was Z80 assembly language. I could never forget how thrilled I was the first time I built a functional control board with just a few chips and some electronic components, and I could even program it! Soon after, I picked up BASIC, Pascal, FORTRAN, and C programming languages. I enjoyed my time programming on the mainframes in computer rooms as well as the time making real time control systems using single board computers on those long workbenches. The more I learned, the thirstier I became for it. I subsequently finished my EE master’s research on a robotic control system. The actual robot was controlled by a Z80 single board control system. My simulation program was written in FORTRAN 77 and run on PDP 11.

In 1993, a UC Berkeley math Ph.D. was attracted by my math skills and he hired me as a professional programmer to write 2D and 3D AutoCAD drawing programs. Since then I became exposed to a myriad of flavorful commercial programs, from C, DB IV, LISP, and 8086 assembly language, to Visual C++; from CAD drawing, industrial robots and many other real time embedded control systems, to Windows GUI components; my programs had changed from solely problem solvers or command executors  to a series of presentations. In early 2002 I landed on the web platforms where I have found more rooms to express myself through the web pages I delivered as well as the “poems” I coded in computer languages. I have devoted my full attention to every single challenge I encountered, no matter how big or how small.

Although I have got both the depth and breadth of programming knowledge and experience, I have found there is always an immeasurable room to explore in this mind-paradise. I feel I have certainly grown into a true passionate programmer.

敬业与乐业 — Dedication and Enthusiasm

敬业，即责任心，是对学业或工作专心致志；乐业，即趣味，不仅乐意去做某件事，而且从中领悟出趣味来.

Dedication, i.e., responsibility or conscientiousness, is devotion; Enthusiasm, i.e., passion and delight, is not only willing to do, but also appreciate the enjoyment of doing.

 

Souvenir of the Year

A Great Book

The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential, written by Cisco executives Ron Ricci and Carl Wiese, provides practical, actionable advice on how to lead a truly collaborative organization, and includes case studies from companies like General Electric and Q&As with some of the world’s leading collaboration thinkers. Click here to read a sample chapter.

The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential

Imagine an organization in which people:

• Communicate openly across business functions and departments
• Are always aware of the company’s objectives and priorities, even as they rapidly evolve
• Perform multiple different roles during the day
• Self-select for projects based on interest, expertise and importance to the business
• Locate needed information in real time
• Work as mobile and distributed participants—even beyond the walls of the company—as partners, customers, contractors and suppliers

Highly recommend “The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential” written by Cisco executives Ron Ricci, Vice President of Corporate Positioning, and Carl Wiese, Senior Vice President of Global Collaboration Sales.

The Lantern Festival

Today is the Lantern Festival day.

On every fifteenth of the first month of the lunar year, right after the Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, people usher in the first full moon of the New Year with a traditional Chinese holiday, the Lantern Festival. Eating Yuanxiao (元宵, glutinous rice balls), and enjoying lanterns and the lion dance are traditional activities that people won’t want to miss.

There is an old saying that the “food is the paramount necessity of the people”. When talking about the Lantern Festival, the tradition of eating Yuanxiao can’t be missed. Yuanxiao is a type of dessert made of glutinous rice with or without filling. It can be filled with black sesame, bean paste, sugar, hawthorn, and so on. There are various ways to make Yuanxiao, including boiling, sautéing, deep-frying, and steaming. In addition, glutinous rice balls are called Yuanxiao in the North, while in the South, they are called Tangyuan (汤圆). There are slight differences in making Yuanxiao and Tangyuan. In Beijing, Yuanxiao is best characterized by its filling. People first prepare the dough with the filling and then put it in a machine. The machine gradually shapes the dough into a ball and it’s a little bit like making a snowball.

However, in the south, making Tangyuan is quite similar to making dumplings, because they are both molded and shaped by hand. Making good Tangyuan requires glutinous rice flour that is of high quality, because it is not easy to keep them fresh.

Besides eating, there is also playing of course. Popular traditional activities of the Lantern Festival include going to the fair, lighting lanterns, and guessing riddles. The fair is an open market held near a temple or in a park. There are traditional snacks to taste and various folk performances to enjoy. As the name suggests, lighting lanterns involves lighting and hanging various types of beautiful lanterns. Guessing riddles also originated from lighting lanterns. People write riddles on the lanterns and passersby can attempt to guess the answer. At the fair, the first person who successfully solves the riddle may receive a prize.

During the Lantern Festival, not only can you eat delicious Yuanxiao, but you can also enjoy the lion dances. The lion dance is a traditional Chinese dance. Dancers hide themselves in a lion costume, then roll up and down and move left and right to imitate a lion, which is very interesting to see.

This year the Lantern Festival meets Valentine’s Day on the 14th of February. It is said that in ancient times, the Lantern Festival played a similar role to “the Valentine” as well. In ancient times, young girls in China were usually not allowed to go outdoors, but the Lantern Festival was an exception. It was a great opportunity for single young people to meet each other.

Does the Lantern Festival sound interesting to you?

(Attribute to the great course contents of chineseclass101.com)

Year of the Horse

Horse is one of Chinese favorite animals. Horse provides people quick transportation before automobiles, so people can quickly reach their destinations. Horse even can help people to win the battle. Therefore Horse is a symbol of traveling, competition, and victory. That’s why Horse is connected to speedy success in China.

Horses like to compete with others. They pursue for their freedom, passion, and leadership. That implies that people will have busy schedule for their goals in the year of Horse. Horse hour of Chinese Horoscopes is from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. Sunshine generates lots of heat during the Horse hour. Therefore, horse is connected to heat, fire, and red. Horses like social activities, because horses like to show off themselves. Since horse is a social animal and red is also connected to love, therefore horse is treated as a Romantic Star in Chinese Horoscope.

It is believed that Year of the Horse will bring health and prosperity.

One of the most popular greetings for Year of the Horse is 马到成功, which means wishing you every success, be accomplished instantly, or carry out your mission quickly.

Today is the first day of Year of the Horse. I hope everyone has a prosperous and healthy New Year!

龙马精神，马到成功!

Happy Year of the Horse! 马到成功！

Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve, the last day of Year of the Snake. Happy New Year – Year of the Horse!

骏马做伴, 一马当先, 恭祝朋友们马年大吉大利!

The first day of the 2014 Chinese New Year is on January 31, 2014 in China’s time zone. This day is a new moon day, and is the first day of the first Chinese lunar month in the Chinese Lunar Calendar system.

Chinese New Year is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. In China, it is known as “Spring Festival,” the literal translation of the Chinese name 春节 (Pinyin: Chūn Jié), since the spring season in Chinese calendar starts with lichun, the first solar term in a Chinese calendar year. It marks the end of the winter season, analogous to the Western carnival. The festival begins on the first day of the first month (Chinese: 正月) in the traditional Chinese calendar and ends with Lantern Festival which is on the 15th day. Chinese New Year’s Eve, a day where Chinese families gather for their annual reunion dinner, is known as Chú Xī (除夕) or “Eve of the Passing Year.” Because the Chinese calendar is lunisolar, the Chinese New Year is often referred to as the “Lunar New Year“.

A reunion dinner is held on New Year’s Eve where members of the family gather for the celebration. The venue will usually be in or near the home of the most senior member of the family. The New Year’s Eve dinner is very sumptuous and traditionally includes chicken and fish. In some areas, fish (Chinese: 鱼) is included, but not eaten completely (and the remainder is stored overnight), as the Chinese phrase “may there be surpluses every year” (Chinese: 年年有余) sounds the same as “may there be fish every year.”

Dumplings (Chinese: 饺子), eaten traditionally in northern China because the preparation is similar to packaging luck inside the dumpling.

Sticky Rice Cake, Niangao or Chinese New Year cake (Chinese: 年糕), most popular in eastern China because its pronunciation is a homophone for “a more prosperous year (年高 lit year high)”.

According to tales and legends, the beginning of Chinese New Year started with the fight against a mythical beast called the Nian (Chinese: 年). Nian would come on the first day of New Year to eat livestock, crops, and even villagers, especially children. To protect themselves, the villagers would put food in front of their doors at the beginning of every year. It was believed that after the Nian ate the food they prepared, it wouldn’t attack any more people. One time, people saw that the Nian was scared away by a little child wearing red. The villagers then understood that the Nian was afraid of the color red. Hence, every time when the New Year was about to come, the villagers would hang red lanterns and red spring scrolls on windows and doors. People also used firecrackers to frighten away the Nian. From then on, Nian never came to the village again. The Nian was eventually captured by Hongjun Laozu, an ancient Taoist monk. The Nian became Hongjun Laozu’s mount.

This picture brings back a lot of memory from many years ago. It’s how exactly we placed 饺子 (dumplings) on 盖帘 (a disk-shaped apparatus made of stalks of broomcorn which is used to hold food or cover a vat or a basin).

Interesting JavaScript Links

• How to use promises natively in JavaScript
• asm.js, an extraordinarily optimizable, low-level subset of JavaScript
• Comparison of JavaScript frameworks
• JavaScript Promises
• AngularJS from an Ember.js Perspective
• Node Tools for Visual Studio
• Svg.js in Action

PhD Forum on Mobile Experiences

As mobile touch screen devices become increasingly ubiquitous, they are also becoming more accessible to people with visual impairments. Both Apple and Google have developed screen readers that are pre-installed on their devices, but Apple’s iPhone seems to be the most popular touch screen phone among blind people. The downfall with an iPhone with VoiceOver is that it is very slow, as the user averages about 1.5 words per minute typing this way. Washington University CS Ph.D. candidate Shiri Azenkot developed Perkinput, a nonvisual text entry method that uses the 6-bit Braille character encoding.

Perkinput is aimed to enable blind people to use mainstream mobile devices as efficiently and effectively as sighted people. It is based on Perkins Brailer, a mechanical device that uses 3×2 keys to represent each alphabet character and allows users simultaneously press the keys to enter a character. Perkinput allows the user tapping out braille characters using one tap with two hands on a larger screen such as a tablet mobile screen or two taps per character on a mobile phone.

Figure 1 Perkins Brailler and Perkinput. Braille encoding for ‘r’ is the binary string “111010”.

Shiri had participants use VoiceOver, which is what is currently used with smart phones, as well as Perkinput to compare the typing speed. Her results showed that not only did participants immediately enter more words a minute using Perkinput initially, but after multiple trials saw more improvement. The error rate was also lower using Perkinput. Here is a live demo:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot8_lObS1Lc.

InTRApreneurship: How Your Entrepreneurial Spirit Thrives in Corporate America

Here are some notes from Cheryl Porro (salesforce.com)

Her company started Opportunity Open Market Program in which employees could move to a different team rather than to another company.

Three times a year, they had a major release; at that time, they held a job fair, providing an opportunity to move to another team at each release.

There was a group of engineers in disparate groups who were interested in pursuing an idea that was not a high priority for the company – less attention-getting. But they were interested in the technology and formed that team & worked on it for three months. At the time, there was an idea that was expected to be the attention-getter and everyone had planned to be the “big announcement” at the Company release; however, in the end, it did not meet the expectations.

But the team that had taken on the lower-priority idea did complete it in the 3 months and it became the focus of innovation at the major presentation.

By making room for a little bit of disruptions this Team had achieved the Dream-force announcement in 3 months.

All due to grassroots participation & energy!

Click here to read more GHC notes on InTRApreneurship.