The Ji Village News

季庄新闻–Haidong Ji’s Blog

Since I listed some of the Chinese books I read in this post, I made a list of some English books I’ve read in the last 3 years or so for completeness. The books are not listed in any specific order. I highly recommend most of them.

I am currently reading a Chinese book, 我的父亲邓小平，(My Father Deng Xiaoping), written by Deng’s daughter. I usually alternate English and Chinese books for reading.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Great book. Highly recommended. Funny I can relate to Frank McCourt’s Irish experience, growing up a country boy in rural China.

Soul Mountain by Gao XingJian
Great book. Great, great translation by Marbel Lee. It helps if you know some of China’s recent history.

One Man’s Bible by Gao XingJian
See comment above.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Great book and very entertaining. A great blend of culture, religion, history, and geography.

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
See comment above

Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes by Steve Olson
Excellent book, highly recommended for people who are interested in understanding more of our common ancestry.

Waiting by Ha Jin
Excellent, excellent book. Ha Jin writes individual’s longing, helplessness, kindness, cruelty with beautiful and compact language. I am deeply impressed by his mastery of the English language.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Good book. It helped me to contemplate and organize a lot of thoughts I already have on the subject of globalization. I don’t necessarily agree with all his conclusions, especially his discussions on the Middle East and the Muslim world. Nonetheless, the author provides good background and interesting anecdotal evidence to put globalization in perspective. I wish he did more research on China, though.

Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
A classic. Pete Jackson did a great job adapting the trilogy to the big screen.

Getting Things Done by David Allen
A great book full of practical tips on how to prioritize, manage your time, and enhance productivity. I followed the principles for a while but kind of fell off the wagon, so to speak. I’ve got to re implement most of the ideas again.

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Interesting book. One takeaway is to remember many so-called experts are biased when giving you advice, especially when the expert’s own interest is at stake. Think your real estate agent and financial adviser.

The Importance of Living by Lin YuTang
A best seller in the late 1930s, this book is a classic. I haven’t finish it yet, but so far I love it a lot. I will borrow it from the library again and read it in its entirety soon. Lin YuTang is a true great author that bridges East and West, and I think he deserves more credit than what he gets. Frank McCourt also talked about his reading of Lin YuTang’s work in Limerick, Ireland.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
I brought this book to Sweden in summer, but didn’t finish it. I read probably 2 chapters and loved it. I will read it in its entirety soon. The novel was made to a movie of the same title. I remember seeing it a few years ago and loved it.

My proposal on sqlcmd was accepted at Sql PASS European conference, to be held in Barcelona, Spain. Last Friday I submitted the last document the Spanish Consultate in Chicago needed. I was told that I would be able to get the visa next Friday.

I will deliver a session on sqlcmd for the conference. So, I will be in Barcelona from 02/20 to 02/26. If you are my reader and will be at the conference, please feel free to stop me and say hi.

Here are some links to funny spoof MTV videos produced by college kids in China. The shorter guy is 黄艺馨 (Huang YiXin). The tall guy in the back is 韦炜 (Wei Wei). The guy in the background playing computer games is 肖静 (Xiao Jing). Oh wait, maybe he is their agent busy dealing with potential sponsors:-)

All of them are students from 广州美术学院 (loosely translated to GuangZhou Painting Art Institute or GuangZhou Art Institute). GuangZhou is the capital city of GuangDong Province in southern China. The local dialect is Cantonese, the same as HongKong.

Here are more videos:
http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/2006/01/our-video-gallery.html

I have encountered a few instances of application failing to install because of the .Net Framework on the machine is either too old or too new. This happened quite a lot during my testing of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Beta and CTP. I figured it was ok because, after all, it was Beta, although I wasn’t too happy about it. Simon has a good blog entry about this topic, where Microsoft SQL Server 2005 RTM cannot cleanup older versions of .Net Framework. If you have installed Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Beta or CTP, you really don’t have much choice, short of rebuilding your machine, which is what I did.

It happened to me again within the last couple of months, although I couldn’t remember what application I was playing with. Yesterday, as I was testing SyncToy recommended by my readers, this problem resurfaced. So I decided to blog about it.

During SyncToy installation, I got the message below:

This setup requires the .NET Framework version 1.1.4322. Please install the .NET Framework and run this setup again. The .NET Framework can be obtained from the web. Would you like to do it now? Yes Button No Button

Yes Button will lead you to http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx. From here you have the choice of 3 .NET Framework versions to choose from as of this writing, among Service Packs, SDKs, Compact Framework, Redistributable for Windows 2003, and others. And nowhere does it mention version 1.1.4322, which is required according to the message mentioned above.

Now I have .NET Framework 2.0.50727 on my machine. I don’t know enough of the differences among those versions. But it upset me.

During the MTS, COM, and COM+ days, one common problem developers encountered was DLL hell. It was caused by incompatibility among different versions of a same DLL (Dynamically Linked Library) file. You needed to be careful when you register DLLs using regsvr32. Microsoft has touted .Net Framework as a solution to address that problem. Judging from my personal experience so far, I am not convinced. I hope we won’t have a .Net Framework hell in its place.

I know .Net Framework is still relatively new, so I would not be too harsh. But I think it is something that needs to be addressed before it escalates. For example, backward compatibility is something to look at seriously; more robust and reliable .Net Framework distribution needs to be researched; all tools released by Microsoft should be recompiled so different versions would be available for download for different .Net Framework install, etc.

To find out the version of .Net Framework on your Windows PC, check the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\vX.X.XXXXX, where X.X.XXXXX is your .Net Framework version number.

Granted, this does not only happen on Windows platform. Linux sometimes has similar dependency issue. That’s why it is always a good practice to test that before you do an RPM install. Use rpm -i PackageName –-test to find that out, as I learned during my attempts to install some SMTP tools on Linux described here.

By the way, I don’t understand why marketing people invented the .Net lingo. Put it mildly, I am not particularly fond of it. I remember reading somewhere before that Microsoft decided to drop the lingo a while ago. But it is still here today. Or maybe it got scaled back. Maybe Windows 2003 was to be called Windows .Net Server initially. Anyway, I will rejoice if .Net lingo is totally dropped. But it does not look like it is going to happen.

My parents visited us on September 11th, 2001. They were supposed to fly to New York City to meet my brother first, who lived there then. However, their Japan Airlines Boeing 747 was re-routed to Chicago that day, because of what happened in NYC. It was their first time on a plane, first time to go abroad, first time to meet Maria and Benjamin, and they do not speak English. So we were really lucky that I happened to live in the Chicago area. I drove to the airport and picked them up around noon that day.

At that time I had not seen my parents for 6 years for financial and visa reasons. So naturally I was pretty excited about it. One of the first things they said after we met was: Haidong, you are fatter than before.

I smiled a little after hearing that, for I know that my parents were not trying to insult me, although I felt they, especially my dad, have done plenty of it before. (I’ve made peace with that.) On the contrary, they meant it as a compliment.

You see, I was born and raised in a rural village in ShanDong province, China in the 1970s. I was born in 1971, in the middle of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. At the time, the country was in chaos and most people, especially those in the country side, were very, very poor. My dad was a middle/high school Chinese teacher. His status was non-agricultural, meaning that he got a salary from the government and did not have to do agricultural work. People with non-agricultural status also got a lot more ration coupons for food, oil, and other daily essentials. My mom, although an elementary school teacher, was classified as agricultural. That made her children with an agricultural status also. As a result, we didn’t have government furnished housing and we had to live in the Ji Village. As peasants, we were hungry most of the times. Most of the country’s population were peasants then. Even today, there are still significant amount of people who make a living from the land.

Like everywhere else in our shrinking globe we all call home, one’s economic situation has a real large impact on the social custom and the kind of language you speak. Since we were hungry a lot of times, one common greeting we used then was “Have you eaten?”, instead of “How are you doing?” or “How do you do?”.

Obesity was virtually non-existent. Instead, if you looked a little chubbier and had a healthy glow on your face, that could only mean that life had been treating you well. And it was something to be congratulated. Thus, “You look fatter than before” is the equivalent of “You look great”. If somebody said that to me, I, as a modest Chinese, would simply say something to the effect of: “No, no, no, I am just slightly fatter than before. You should see so and so. He is really fat!”

The economic situation has improved rapidly in the last 30 years or so, especially in cities and the coastal regions of China. The common greeting of “Have you eaten?” is rarely used nowadays. For younger and town folks, “You are fatter than before” is probably an insult. However, there are still significant amount of people in China who are very poor and do not have access to good education. I would not be surprised if these greetings are still used.

To get a better understanding about life under the social, political, and economic turmoil in China before 1980s, I highly recommend the movie To Live. It is a touching, powerful, and realistic movie that tells the tragedies and hopes of a simple Chinese family. The movie covers the civil war right after the Japanese invasion was defeated in World War II, the establishment of the People’s Republic, the Great Leap Forward movement, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. You will need to read English subtitles to watch this movie. Come on, get over it:-) You really miss out a lot if you only watch English movies.

In Linux, you can use rsync to synchronize files in multiple directories. I am looking for the equivalent in the Windows world. This is my user case:

1. I have a usb flash drive to carry files around;
2. I have fixed number of directories on a Windows machine from where I save and edit important script, source code, and other files;
3. I can create the same directory structure on my usb flash drive, if needed. The usb has 1 gb capacity;
4. In almost all cases, files on the Windows machine are more recent.

I want a simple program that update all files in the usb drive, so that they are in sync with those on the Windows workstation. Ideally, the program should be lightweight and has a command line interface.

Any recommendations? Or maybe I should write one for myself. This could be a good project for me to fulfill my wish of being a functional C programmer.

I totally rebuilt my Acer Aspire 3500 laptop. I wiped out Windows XP Home Edition and installed Windows XP Pro SP2. When I brought it for a presentation last month, I couldn’t redirect the video signal to an external projector or monitor at Microsoft’s office.

It turned out that my laptop uses a separate program to do that. I wouldn’t be surprised if other Acer models are the same. Anyway, if you’ve rebuilt your Acer machine and need to redirect the video to an external monitor, you need to have eManager installed. Get it from Acer’s support site and run it to direct video to the external source.

Tonight I tossed away the Christmas tree. To me, that concluded the Christmas / New Year holiday season. Chinese New Year comes next. On Jan. 29, 2006, it will be the year of the dog.

Some pictures to share with you, my dear reader. I posted more here in an earlier post:

1. Christmas tree. Here you can get a general idea of what Tomten looks like. It looks kind of like a gnome.

2. Gingerbread house

3. Breakfast with Santa at Cheney Mansion in Oak Park

I have asked for MSDN subscriptions here. Don Kiely, Sql Server MVP and all-around nice guy, has generously given me a free MSDN subscription. Don’s blog is one of my favorite. And he recently produced a training video here. I’ve seen Don presenting at last year’s PASS conference in Texas. He is a great speaker. Thanks a lot Don for your generosity!

I promised Don that I would sing his praise before sun rise daily. I actually also need to sing praises for Steve, Andy, and Brian, the guys who build and maintain SqlServerCentral.com. You guys rock! SqlServerCentral.com has built such a wonderful community for Sql Server professionals. It is on this wonderful community portal that I started my technical writing. And I appreciate it very much for your kindness, generosity, and help over the years.

Also, thanks to Brian for introducing me to book writing. Our book, Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services will be available by the end of January. However, you can pre-order it on Amazon now:-)

VMWare recently released a freeware called VMWare Player that can play a pre-built virtual machine file. A virtual machine is an OS bundled with whatever the virtual machine creator put there. This is perfect for people to test-drive various operating systems and software, without going through the hassle of installing themselves. VMWare currently provides virtual machines preloaded with RedHat, Novell Suse, ubuntu, Oracle, MySql, and Bea, among others.

Memory used to be a bottleneck for virtualization software to take off. However, on the hardware side of things, both Intel and AMD are pushing 64-bit processors pretty aggressively now. With 64-bit architecture, the memory space the operating system can access increases exponentially (from 2^32 to 2^64). With the push towards 64-bit and the emergence of virtualization technology, I wonder what kind of impact this will have on the software landscape, like operating systems, database software, web server, and application server, etc..

Linux, MySql, Apache and other open source software have made great headway in enterprise server market, especially for large financial firms. I do believe there are still a big learning curve and intimidating factor at play for mid-size to smaller firms when it comes to learning and evaluating alternative software products like Linux. Maybe the combination of 64-bit and virtualization software will help. Using the cliche popularized by the book The World Is Flat, 64-bit and virtualization will help bring down barrier of entry and flatten the competitive landscape. With more memory and more powerful processor, virtualization software helps people test things out that they may not able to or too difficult for them to try otherwise. And that will be a good thing.

The current market leader in this arena seems to be VMWare, since it works on both Windows and Linux platforms. Microsoft’s Virtual PC and Virtual Server only works on Windows, and my limited testing in installing Fedora Core 2 on Virtual PC didn’t work out very well.

Software vendors, jump on the wagon. Oracle, MySql, IBM, Bea have created and provided virtual machine files for downloading at VMWare’s Virtual Machine Center. I think that is a smart move. Even Microsoft has something to gain in doing so. For example, it can team up with VMWare and distribute Sql Server 2005 for a wider testing via their distributing channels.

I have personally tried ubuntu Linux distro on my laptop and it worked pretty well. My laptop is Acer Aspire 3500 with Celeron processor and 512M of memory.