I was really shocked and offended when one of friends showed me the “Boycott Beijing 2008″ in Notepad++’s homepage. I respect the developer’s free speech, though I think it is totally wrong:

If you care about the human right in Tibet, come to Tibet and take a look. Do you remember how the media duped the US publicity about the Iraq war?

If you want to boycott the Chinese government with your poisoned prejudice, stop buying anything made in China like my boycott to French products, and leave the Olympic Games alone, the biggest dream for all the people over the world to compete with sports instead of politics.

Regardless, SourceForge is a platform to promote open source movement, not your personal opinion. If you posted in your personal blog, I won’t even bother to demonstrate my disregard at all. Please stop abusing SourceForge, Notepad++.

I joined Microsoft Canada Develop Center recently. And according to the contract, Microsoft is solely, exclusively intellectual property owner of Employee Work. I just contacted with LCA team of Microsoft and clarify the ownership of contribution to dojox.gfx, PyAWS and this blog.

I received the reply yesterday, as long as I don’t use any resource of Microsoft, including the device, network connection and the topic does not conflicts with Microsoft’s interest, it is totally OK to keep programming for the open source community and blogging as my will.

So I am back.

Brian Kernighan, the co-worker of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the author of The Unix Programming Environment, the developer of AWK etc gave an informative talk: The Unix Legacy

This forerunner traced back the origin of Unix, showed the simplicity and elegance of original Unix design, for example, pipe and grep. He also commented GNU implementation as the bloating instance, such as cat and wc. At the end of the speech, he demonstrated the vista of Unix, and the spirit behind the Unix.

Personally, I do not 100% agree the functionalities bloating. With 8k memory in the original design, lots of functionalities are trimmed down to fit the small memory footprint; while with more advanced hardware available, the developers could take care of the voice from the minority. Support of multiple byte encoding in wc may seem redundant for western European users, but it really make more sense to the CJK users. It is really hard to make the tradeoff between the number of similar applications of the length of the man pages.

The illustrated photo is also shot by Treo 650, so it is with the podcast, — a good and bad show case how versatile Treo 650 is in multimedia.

Intel is offering $1m in prizes to designers and manufacturers who can come up with sexier alternatives to the “big, beige box”. This sounds like a Project Runway in the Information Technology side. Nowadays, the computer is not only the tool for production or toy for enterntainment, it stands for the taste and personality. Just curious whether Intel invite another Tim Gunn as the mentor or Michael Kors as the mean judge? At least they should invite Heidi Klum to host the Intel Developer Forum 2007.

I eventually put the Firefox with Google toolbar in the sidebar since Firefox really rocks in the Web development. Here are more slogan from slashdot:

Friends don’t let Friends use Internet Explorer.
— TheShadowHawk

‘Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.’
— JZnat