As the midterm assignment in an acting class, on 11/18/2009 I acted in a play called ”fresh off boat (F.O.B.)”, which depicts the hardship and prejudice faced by first generation immigrants in the U.S.
The figure I played was “Steve”, who was trying to demonstrate that he was not a traditional greasy, dirty, and clumsy foreigner.
If you are a video blogger on WordPress.com, you will be delighted to find out that now you can customize your video player with your own brand logo and color. Log on to your admin panel, and configure your video player logo URL and color from Settings=>Media.
Here is an example:
Currently this feature
is available to VIP video blogggers only. Contact
WordPress.com support for details.
TechCrunch has a short post reporting Dr. Kaifu Lee’s next career move. The post made fun of Google Chinese translation. Well, I decided to take 20 minutes off my busy schedule, and translated his letter in English.
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Kaifu Lee
Time flies and it’s been another four years. In retrospect and looking back at the four years I spent at Google, all the happiness, successes and challenges kept on flashing in my mind like a movie. In this touching farewell moment, my heart is filled with gratitude. In the past four years, Google China has steadily grown into a stable, mature and well-managed company.
During the whole four years, I’ve strived to bring to China the sprit of Google – equality, innovation, fun, and audacity. This process has not been easy, but we adhered to our beliefs and values steadfastly with intensive perseverance.
We have focused on perfecting Chinese search, and have suppressed the temptation to develop more cool and ostensible products. Today, the quality of Google Chinese search is the most accurate, most comprehensive, and most real-time among the peers. We have also developed several dozens of new products, expanding the territory of Google China. Among those, Google Maps, Google mobile search, Google mobile maps, Google translations are the best in China. In addition, we introduce the music search, which allows users to enjoy the copyrighted but free music for the first time, creating a new model for free music download in the whole world.
I am particularly impressed with the conducts of our employees, who developed timely products to help China combat devastating snows, earthquakes, and hurricanes, confirming my believe and that Google China employees love not only Google, but also China, and that they possess not only creativity, but also loving hearts.
I always smile heartily when I walk into some café shops, and see young people using Google integrated search, or looking up the real time traffic maps, or listening to copyrighted Google music, or selecting an iGoogle ‘skin’.
Google is both a great and lovely company, and I’m very grateful for this life-time opportunity to build Google China from scratch. I’ve learned a lot in the process – Internet technology, innovation models or values.
I have no regret on what has been achieved at Google. However, there is still one regret in my life and I want to tackle it. In the past 20 years, I have had the privilege to experience Apple and Microsoft in the PC era, to experience Google in the Internet era, and to see all three world-class companies growing and become successful. I have had the privilege to do the most creative work when both the silicon valley and Zhongguancun were ascending. My knowledge in the tech arena and my insights learned are my most valuable assets. I deeply hope to pass these assets on to young people in China.
My next step is to, together with young Chinese entrepreneurs, create new technological marvels. I want to take initiative to do some overall planning. I have reached this stage in my life that my heart tells me that it would be too late if I procrastinate.
So, although Mountain View, CA offered me an olive branch and hoped me to stay for another four years, I have made up my mind. Deep inside my heart, I want to help young people fulfill their dreams, and in the process, fulfill my own entrepreneurial dreams.
This past weekend, I was finally relieved from business strategies, career transitions, and knowledge transfer. I will comb my thoughts over this weekend, and soon will share with you my next plans.
Whenever I think about this step, I think of Steve Jobs famous saying:
“have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Finished listening two of Obama’s audio books: The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father.
There are a few key elements which made Obama who his is now.
The first is his Harvard education. He probably wasn’t the smartest kid in high school, but he certainly knew how to seize the opportunity when it arose. He seized the opportunity to transfer to Columbia University from the virtually unknown Occidental college, and later on to Harvard. When you are a minority or a graduate of a state university and you tell the world you want to be the CEO of HP or governor of California, you need to do a hell lot of work to prove yourself. With a seal from Harvard or Stanford, nobody is going to seriously question your credibility.
The second element is his eloquence. I haven’t heard of a better politician when it comes to expressing ones points so eloquently and clearly. His eloquence is based on substance, which is manifested in the lucid writing and organization of ideas in these two books. Writing definitely makes ideas more lucid and tangible. In fact, I noticed that some of his best campaign lines were originated from his books.
The name “Audacity of Hope” actually came from one sermon given by his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Obama wrote this sermon in each of his books, so I guess it made a deep emotional imprint in his heart. This is not surprising to me, because it indeed takes the audacity of hope to carry a self-made black man into the highest office. Without hope, he could have floundered; without hope, everyone of us could have floundered. I wonder in his silent prayers, did Obama say to himself the murmur he heard at his church one day “Thank you Lord, for carrying me this far”.
John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla foundation, did a great presentation at last WordCamp San Francisco. His most valuable points are: decentralized decision-making and treating community members like citizens.
The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we live, communicate, and innovate. In traditional companies, people with positional power, such as CEO and CTO, are the ones who make the key decisions. That is not going to work advantageously in the Web era, particular in open source communities. In these new settings, the best ideas are often originated outside of the corporate doors, from some unknown but passionate community members. Ideas and proposals are debated and selected based on merit. That is more democratic and history has proven that democracy is superior to dictatorship.
WordPress.tv is a popular blog hosting collections of WordPress videos, including WordCamp videos, tutorials, etc. It’s the visual resource for all things WordPress.
WordPress.tv has just integrated with dotSUB to provide translation for some popular videos. To help translate your most favorite videos into your language, you can create a dotSUB account, then visit WordPress tv project to begin translation.
Once a new video is added to the dotSUB WordPress tv project, all the translation is done by volunteers using dotSUB toolsets. dotSUB then provides an external public API to access its translation metadata and translation texts.
The API has the following form:
http://dotsub.com/api/user/{dotsub_username}/media/{dotsub_external_reference}/metadata
where dotsub_username is username one created for your video project at
dotSUB, and dotsub_external_reference has to be the guid of the
corresponding WordPress.com video.
For example, the public APIs for a WordPress.tv video “Adding categories and tags to your posts” ( guid 1UKXOM9q) are:
http://dotsub.com/api/user/wordpresstv/media/1UKXOM9q/metadata
http://dotsub.com/api/user/wordpresstv/media/1UKXOM9q/captions?language=eng
WordPress.com video player queries the above API URLs and integrates
the translation texts.
Watch this particular video clip below:
In order for the video player to locate the correct API URL, the external reference has to be configured correctly as the guid of each video.
It takes the following steps:
Step 1.
Select your video within dotSUB project space. Click “Video
Properties” tab, then Click “Edit Video”.
View the screenshot
Step 2.
Find out the guid of this same video within WordPress.com blog media
library. The guid is the portion of the shortcode without brackets. Eg:
if the shortcode is [wpvideo 1UKXOM9q], then the guid is
1UKXOM9q
Enter the guid into text field “External reference”, then click Save.
All the other fields such as video title, year of publication are for
dotSUB internal use, thus not required for the integration to work.
View the screenshot
Step 3.
The change will take effect in about 12 hours because the internal video
information is cached for 12 hours. To force it to take effect
immediately, clear the cache, then check the video info again. Eg:
http://v.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/video/video-xml.php?guid=1UKXOM9q
(of course replace the guid with your specific ones).
If you see <dotsub_metadata> and <dotsub_caption>, that means cache is cleared, your dotSUB configuration has been applied successfully, and the translation will be displayed by WordPress.com video player.
It’s a joy watching tiny seeds growing into three feet tall tomato plants or lush vegetables…
WordPress.com is on CNET 2009 Webware 100 winners list.
Within the Social & Publishing category, the winners include Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Bebo, Meebo, Hi5, etc.
Last night I had an opportunity to listen to piano concerto performed by Leon Fleisher, one of the greatest virtuosos. The music was certanily fantastic, but one thing that touched my heart most is the motivation for this performance.
Leon was flying back from an overseas trip when he heard that the homeless situation in Sacramento was devastating. He was moved and called California philharmonic and volunteered for a fundraising performance, raising money for the homeless people in Sacramento area.
The needy will not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted ever perish.
I was delighted to receive a book from my great uncle, professor Dai Zhizhong, who is a famous mathematician. The book is on valuation theory, a branch of group and field theory. The book was written by him last year when he was 85 years old.
In 1940s, uncle Dai was the teaching assistant of another world famous mathematician, professor Chen Xingsheng. Chen served as vice president of the American Mathematical Society (1963-64) and was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the Wolf Prize in 1983.
I remembered visiting uncle Dai when I was 13 years old. I was really a country boy and he was the president of Jiangxi University at that time. I was very nervous and looked at him with great admiration. When I went to college, he wrote me a letter encouraging me “百尺竿头，更进一步”, meaning every success in the future. Once I asked him “shall we work on things only when we have strong motivation in them?” He replied “what would you do at times when you don’t have motivation?”. When I flipped through his book last night, I realized that for every theory he proved, it could take months or years of hard work. Nothing is more true in the saying “there is no shortcut in climbing the science mountain” when it comes to math.
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