Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

LinuxBIOS is an interesting project. One day may be our PC will boot with LinuxBIOS and run Mac OS X.

LinuxBIOS: Frequently Asked Questions: “Current PCs used as cluster nodes depend on a vendor-supplied BIOS for booting. The BIOS in turn relies on inherently unreliable devices such as floppy disks and hard drives to boot the operating system. In addition, current BIOS software is unable to accommodate non-standard hardware making it difficult to support experimental work. The BIOS is slow and often erroneous and redundant and, most importantly, maintenance is a nightmare. Imagine walking around with a keyboard and monitor to every one of the 128 nodes in a cluster to change one BIOS setting.

The LinuxBIOS gunzip’s the Linux kernel straight out of NVRAM and essentially requires no moving parts other than the fan. It does a minimal amount of hardware initialization before jumping to the kernel start and lets Linux do the rest. As a result, it is much faster (current record 3 seconds), which has sparked interest in the consumer electronics community as well. Moreover, updates can be performed over the network. “

This is an interesting way of using a camera phone…

“ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — When Lisa Johnson saw a man exposing himself to her in a parking lot, she reached for her cell phone — not to call 911, but to snap a picture.

The images captured on her camera phone led police to the capture of the former principal of a nearby high school. After his arrest on public indecency charges last month, he resigned from a lower school job.”

This article reminds me of another interesting use of a camera phone, which I have learnt from PerCom 2004. Often people have difficulties remembering where they have parked their cars in a public parking lot (e.g., in a shopping center). To help you to remember, using your camera phones, you take pictures of your parked cars with some location objects (e.g., parking lot poles). The pictures of your parked cars can serve as your temporary memory when you actually forget where you have parked.

Just got back from PerCom 2004. I’m so tired. On Sunday, I will fly out to CA again for the AAAI-04 Spring Symposium. After a week of travelling, I know that for sure I’m not built for any kind of consultant life style.

Done filing our 2003 tax returns. I have been using the Internet to fill taxes in the past 3 years. It seems like the task is getting easier every year. Man, I just love the Internet!

This year I finished the whole process took about 1.5 hours.

Talking about politics, some may think the constitution changes in China is only a show and nothing more. To me this seems like the government is making one step towards the right direction. The culture of one government can’t just change over night — it takes time.