The Ji Village News

季庄新闻–Haidong Ji’s Blog

I rented and watched The Year of The Yao from Netflix recently. It was a documentary of Yao Ming’s rookie season. We all enjoyed it.

I have great admiration for Yao Ming. When he came to the NBA, he was just 22 years old, with language, cultural, and social barriers to overcome, not to mention the pressure of NBA life, the media, and great expectations of a lot of people from China. Yet he seemed to take everything in stride, and handled all of those with grace, humility, and a great sense of humor. I was very excited to see him coming to the US and play for the NBA. And, frankly, as a fellow Chinese, I am very proud of him.

Most of the details, games, and background information are not new to me anymore, since I followed reports of Yao Ming pretty closely during his rookie year. However, I think it is going to be a great movie for people who generally do not follow the NBA, or people who are interested in this interesting cultural exchange between US and China. Strangely, one thing that still surprised me was how tall he is. The footage of him at a Bestbuy store and the airport really struck that point home.

Someday I’d like to see one of Yao’s games live. My son is a big Yao Ming fan now and would like to get his signature. I planned to go see the game between Houston and Chicago in January, but Yao was injured and did not play, so we didn’t go.

Yao, by the way, is his surname / family name. Ming is given name. It means brightness in Chinese. I wrote some explanation on Chinese names here.

I’ve been working with 64-bit SQL Server 2005 laterly. I just finished setting up a 2-node SQL Server 2005 cluster with SP1 on AMD 64-bit processors with Windows 2003 R2. 64-bit is really sweet.

Anyway, I guess the venerable DOS editor named edit is not ported to 64-bit machines. I figured this out when testing sqlcmd on a 64-bit machine.

As described earlier, the default editor for sqlcmd is edit. However, when you invoke it on a 64-bit machine, you get:
‘edit.com’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

See instructions here to set the editor to something else. I guess Microsoft should really change sqlcmd editor to Notepad, which works on 64-bit Windows.

Benjamin and I went to Lincoln Park Zoo on Good Friday. I actually couldn’t remember when we visited the zoo before that. We had a great time. I highly recommend it if you are in town and have time. Admission is free. There are bus stops at the zoo. I think the one we took was No. 151 from downtown Chicago.

The zoo apparently has undergone extensive renovations. The Pritzker Family Children’s Zoo is totally new and terrific. Benjamin had a great time with the Treetop Canopy Climbing Adventure inside. Inside the same building, he also had a blast playing with 3 very playful and cute beavers. He moved his hands on the glass wall, and the beaver on the other side followed him. That was a lot of fun. Getting up close and personal with the polar bears is another highlight.

Entrance close to No. 151 bus stop:

African fresh water fish:

Polar bear swimming:

Another shot of the polar bear swimming:

The playful and cute beaver. It was on the other side of the glass wall:

Beaver diving:

Another shot:

Benjamin playing with the beaver. As he moved his hands up and down, the beaver would follow on the other side of the glass wall:

Full body shot of the beaver:

Treetop Canopy Climbing Adventure

We went to the beach afterwards. As mentioned earlier, it was unseasonably warm.

Montrose beach:

Water is still cold:

But then it is not bad once your body adjusts to it:

More zoo pictures here if you are interested.

We went to Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, for my son’s spring break. My brother’s family just moved there recently. With everybody being new to the area, I didn’t know which place to visit for some fun. Naturally, I started looking for Children’s museums.

Some web search revealed there is a place called Dallas Children’s Museum. It is in Valley View Center, a sizable mall in Dallas. So my son and I drove there for a visit.

Dallas is a big city, one would think a museum bearing its name should be interesting. However, it certainly cannot live up to that big name. The place is very small, occupying one or two rooms with old toys and equipments. If you are expecting exciting and interactive games and activities, you will be disappointed. If you happen to be there, it is all right for pre-schoolers to play a little bit and have some fun, but I would not just make a separate trip to it. Not worth it.

However, all was not lost. I saw computers there;)

Above is a shot of one of 2 computers that proudly sport Windows 3.1 operating system. Now see if you remember what happens if you do Ctrl-Alt-Del:

I couldn’t remember exactly when I first saw a computer, but it has to be after 1990, the year I went to Xiamen University. We had an introductory course to PC (IBM PC-XT). The lab was held at a computer center of the university. It seemed that 2 students had to share one PC during lab at the time. The PC is some kind of IBM PC XT based clone. The operating system was DOS, whose version I cannot recall now.

Those PCs were housed in the computer center, which was air-conditioned. Before we enter, we had to take off our shoes and put on quite, soft sandals, as if shoes would somehow disturb those state of the art, expensive machines. All PCs had a reset switch. We quickly learned its purpose and used it many times to get out of trouble. The teacher actually kept an eye on our reset-button usage to gauge our skill level.

Within one or two years, there seemed to be a lot more computers on campus. I started learning Windows 3.1. I can still remember the time when I took a mouse usage tutorial (single-click, double-click, moving around, resizing Windows) on Windows 3.1, and was very impressed and amused by the whole GUI thing.

This is a shot of the desktop, Windows 3.1:

Below is a shot of Microsoft Word on the museum’s computer. I forgot to check its version. If you ask me, from a usability point of view, I think today’s Word is actually worse than the version pictured here:

I actually don’t use Word anymore. With the exception of Outlook, I hardly ever use any of the rest of Office Suite applications. Even Outlook is kind of forced on me, because I really have no other choice. Now mind you, I still consider myself a power user of Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and other Office Suite applications if situation calls for them. I know how they work, and I could whip out useful VBA macros without too much trouble.

Finally, you can play Wheels of Fortune on Windows 3.1:

PS. I love the Dallas area. The big draw is affordable housing. Plus, Plano seems to be very family-friendly with nice parks and lots of community activities.

I talked to my mom today. She told me that my hometown, the Ji Village, will have running water soon. Isn’t that amazing?

When I was growing up, my hometown was your typical Chinese village: no paved road, no electricity, no tv, no cars, even tractors were rare. In fact, if for whatever reason, a truck or a tractor was in the village, all the kids would go and look. The social status of the children who have any relation to the driver would jump exponentially. Any children who had the privilege to get into the driver’s cabin would bounce on the seats up and down with excitement.

We lived in a house with earth walls and thatched roof. A small radio, a bicycle, a watch, and a sewing machine were our biggest possessions. We used kerosene lamps at night. Wheat straws, twigs, branches, and corn stalks were used for cooking. We didn’t have a toilet. Instead, we had a walled area for that purpose. Human waste was collected and stored as fertilizer. In fact, when there is no farm work in the field, people like my grandfather would carry a thing called 粪头 to collect animal droppings around the village for the next planting season.

About 30 meters south of our house, there is a communal well, shared by 5 or 6 families. It is pretty deep, I’d say around 10 meters. The water buckets we had were shaped like a cylinder and made of sheet metal. To get water from the well, you put the bucket handle through a hook, which was at the end of a fairly long rope. When the bottom of the bucket touches the water, you can start shaking the rope so that the bucket is tilted enough to let water in, but not so such that the handle slide off the hook and the bucket sink to the bottom of the well. If you managed to get the bucket about half full, it is challenging to get it completely full, because it is hard to tilt the bucket at that point. Once you manage to get a full bucket of water, you can pull it up. It takes some practice to get it right. In the few times that I did it, I managed to get half full bucket most of the time.

So, it is nice to have running water in the village. That will definitely improve villagers’ life.

I decided to gave away the extra copies of my book. In the US, I sent 2 copies to Ohio, one each to Florida and Texas. Overseas, I sent 2 copies to India, and one copy to Australia. I had tea/coffee with a reader in the Chicago area and hand-delivered a copy to her. In February, I send a copy to a friend in Alaska. Now I have no extra copies left.

I probably should make a copy of the front cover and the acknowledgement page, and send them to my parents in China. They cannot read English, know nothing about computers, but probably will feel good about it. I thanked my parents for their perseverance, hard work, and giving me education under very difficult circumstances in the book. I love my parents, but I find it difficult to express my feelings to them. I am trying, though.

Hopefully most of the people who requested a copy have gotten it already or will get it soon. And I hope it will be helpful to you.

Today I played with a server setup a few months ago but has since been neglected. It has Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition on it.

I got the following error when trying to connect to it using sqlcmd integrated authentication from my workstation:

C:\>sqlcmd -S MyServer
HResult 0×35, Level 16, State 1
Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [53].
Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Native Client : An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections..
Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Native Client : Login timeout expired.

So I googled around a little bit. Some suggested to enable and start Sql Server Browser Service. I didn’t think that was the issue, because I had several SQL Server 2005 servers with Sql Server Browser Service disabled and I still could connect to them remotely. Subsequent testing confirmed I was right.

I then played around with Sql Server Surface Area Configuration (Programs -> Microsoft Sql Server 2005 -> Configuration Tools). Click on Service Area Configuration for Services and Connections. For Remote Connections, I adjusted the setting to Using TCP/IP only, and it worked. The other 2 choices, Using named pipes only and Using both TCP/IP and named pipes, did not work.

In this post, I talked about how you can set your default editor for sqlcmd.

At the end of that post, I asked how to make that variable persist. To do that, you can create an environment variable. For example, you can create an environment variable called sqlcmdeditor, and give it the value of your favorite editor.

This works, but if you define a lot of sqlcmd variables, you will have quite a few to manage. That is not an elegant solution. Below is a list of sqlcmd predefined variables, most of which you can set to a value you like. As you can see, creating and maintaining them can be messy:

SQLCMDCOLSEP = ” ”
SQLCMDCOLWIDTH = “0″
SQLCMDDBNAME = “”
SQLCMDEDITOR = “gvim”
SQLCMDERRORLEVEL = “0″
SQLCMDHEADERS = “0″
SQLCMDINI = “c:\initial.sql”
SQLCMDLOGINTIMEOUT = “8″
SQLCMDMAXFIXEDTYPEWIDTH = “0″
SQLCMDMAXVARTYPEWIDTH = “256″
SQLCMDPACKETSIZE = “4096″
SQLCMDSERVER = “MyServer”
SQLCMDSTATTIMEOUT = “0″
SQLCMDUSER = “”
SQLCMDWORKSTATION = “MyWorkstation”

Instead, you can simply create one environment variable for sqlcmdini. I have discussed sqlcmdini in this post. Within sqlcmd initialization file, you can set values for the rest of sqlcmd predefined variables. As sqlcmd is invoked, the initialization will be executed, and the rest of variable values can be set there accordingly. I think this is a much simpler and elegant solution. Below is an example of my initialization file. I set sqlcmdeditor and sqlcmdmaxfixedtypewidth variables in this sample, but you can set others to suit your needs:

set nocount on
go

print ‘You are connected to ‘ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(20), SERVERPROPERTY(’servername’))) + ‘ (’ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(20), SERVERPROPERTY(’productversion’))) + ‘)’ + ‘ ‘ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(30), SERVERPROPERTY(’Edition’))) + ‘ ‘ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(20), SERVERPROPERTY(’ProductLevel’))) + char(10)

:setvar SQLCMDMAXFIXEDTYPEWIDTH 20

set nocount off
go

:setvar SQLCMDMAXFIXEDTYPEWIDTH
:setvar sqlcmdeditor “gvim”

Here are some links to a few very interesting entries on China, media, and censorship.

Bingfeng has a piece on PBS’ Frontline discussion with his own comment. He updated his entry with a reader’s comment. That comment was from me, so you kind of know where I stand By the way, I couldn’t leave my comments on his blog purely because of technical reasons. (Maybe trackback would work?). I think Bingfeng is a Chinese working in Shanghai.

Here is the transcripts of the PBS discussion, along with some participant’s follow-ups.

Here is Wang Jian Shuo’s recount of his BBC interview. To me, it is a very thoughtful write-up and I like it a lot. Wang Jian Shuo is a Chinese software executive in Shanghai.

Flypig, a Chinese college senior working for a business-oriented newspaper based in Beijing, has an entry on Reuters’ reporting of the Chinese blogger hoax. Flypig’s entry is in Chinese. I left 2 comments in English.

Here is BBC’s interview of some Chinese bloggers. I like Kevin Wen’s comments. Kevin is a software executive in China.

Finally, below are links from Reuters regarding the blogger incident. The journalist, if I can call him/her that, apparently didn’t bother to check the facts and didn’t retract the story afterwards. A little bit of irony here, I guess.

Original Reuters’ report
Reuters’ follow-up

During our trip to Dallas for spring break, I was pleasantly surprised that my first grader’s Chinese is better than I expected.

My son was in a Japanese immersion Montessori school for pre-school (3-4) and kindergarten (5). We put him in the Japanese immersion program because Japanese is as close to Chinese as I could get when there were no good Chinese school in close distance. I am sure there are Chinese schools in Naperville or Palatine, but they are a long drive, especially with bad traffic. I also have to admit that him knowing Chinese didn’t seem so important to me when he started pre-school. (And there is no Swedish school in close distance either, given that not too many people use it in Chicago.)

As I am getting older and he is getting bigger, I gradually realized that it is very important for him to know both Chinese and Swedish. And I gradually intensified my effort toward that end (Chinese). I bought the BBC Mandarin Chinese program Muzzy and games called Wawa Yaya. Those are great programs. At the same time, I started introducing simple phrases and sentences in our daily conversations. One thing I learned is that I need to be tactful. I do not want to turn him off. It is a lot of fun to play and interact with him, so I need to do more of that.

So when we were in Dallas, my brother, my sister-in-law, and I spoke our local dialect (not too different from standard Mandarin), mixed with some Mandarin, for his benefit. To my surprise, he understood a lot of simple questions. And he seemed to be able to figure out what we were trying to tell him in Mandarin. He did have trouble differentiating some sounds initially, for example, the word hungry (饿 e) and hot (热 re).

I think his Japanese is fluent at his age level. His English is good. He knows some Swedish and probably a little Spanish. It is up to me to help him improve his Chinese.

Any ideas, tips, and suggestions from my readers will be greatly appreciated! If you have Chinese speaking children between age of 5 and 7, maybe we can arrange playdates together. Also, please do not hesitate to contact me (haidong.ji AT gmail.com) if you have questions on this subject. I will do my best to help. Or maybe we can even form a group on this.