XMPP is great!

These days I have been indulged in learning XMPP stuff. But it is more like a chain of learning. New things appear one by one. But it is quite exciting to know that there is a solution like XMPP for IM and possibly for my project.

Hope that I can work it out.

Also, just take a look at security books, hmm, that is another important area if one wants to set up his business. Definitely I want to know more about those encryption/decryption, it is just a matter of time to get myself familiar with them.

It is Chinese new year this Saturday. Not too much surprise. I still have the same food like before. When I was in China, my parents would cook nice food and dumplings the day before the Chinese new year. Now I can only eat these carrots and pork.. Anyway, it will be better and better.

Projects on progress. Plans on progress. Business on progress. There are more needed to be done.

Just a note of jQuery

A post for my personal study of jQuery:

Will IBM's Graphene Transistor break the bottleneck of processor development?

The recent news from IBM via engadget showed the new discovering in graphene could make it a great transistor, to the tune of a record-setting 100GHZ!!!

The news reminds the latest assignment about the multi-core programming. Indeed, the bottleneck of getting a faster clock speed in processor has forced the programmers to change their way of coding. Though multi-core has solved the problem partly, there is still gap between the expectation and reality. 2 3-GHZ cores won't achieve the performance of a 6GHZ core. Hence if they can make the latter without the heat, cost and manufacturing problems, I guess they will prefer to produce the faster one.

Having read the news of the graphene transistor, I start wondering what will happen if chip makers just keep creating more cores instead of increasing the speed, isn't that kind of GPU? If this will be the truth for the following years, then a trend is that many current applications will need to be changed to a parallel style, in order to handle more and more transactions and workload. They cannot count on a faster processor, but only more cores to be working.

Maybe in the near future, if Graphene transistor is really used in commercial products, then it will be a real boost in the processor industry. Hope that won't be too far away from us.

GPU is fighting for a change of its position in computer architecture?

As NVIDIA's Tesla has been exposed to us for a while, the generation of GPU seems to struggle for a position change with its current master, CPU.

Actually I am not surprised to see that NVIDIA is going to make it happen. The original design of GPU has granted it with more computing capability. Compared to CPU, GPU have more cores and processors inside. This means GPU will have a much better capability of multi-core programming. A interesting story about GPU's multi-core programming is the cryptanalysis using GPU. A friend of mine once showed me how to make use of his powerful GPU to decrypt a piece of password. Since GPU can do more things at the same time with lots of cores, it is quite efficient to decrypt the encryption simultaneously compared to sequentially decrypt it in a single Intel core.

And maybe Intel cannot bear its main products being replaced, that's why it is trying to bring out its own GPU plan(Larrabee). Maybe in the future we will not talk about CPU. Instead, we will just say Stream Processing and General Purpose GPUs (GPGPU) which will do both CPU and GPU's work:)

Challenges of remote collaborations

Mostly I am working on either course projects or company projects with other people in the same site. But the experience of working with partners remotely on the same project is quite different from the regular one. New challenges arise here:

1:Time zone differences conflict with regular schedule. When working in two sites of different time zone, team members always have to keep in mind of the time in other sites. If there is a customer issue in UK, and it requires the fix by US team, then UK team should be aware that US team may not respond to their mail during UK's daytime, as that would be the night in US. It is very useful to have a calendar with the overlapped available time of different teams.

2:Communication Matters a lot. Different countries have different culture. Maybe it is polite to say something in your site, but it is not always case to say that in another site. And people from non-English spoken area may not use it as well as those native speaker. So the slangs in mail or phone call will be the obstacles in communication.

3:Honesty and trusts are bridges. Since team members are working in different sites, it is not possible for one to know exactly how long others spend in the office, or how much efforts others have done for the project. Then it is the most important for each team member to report his/her working hours and achievements regularly with honesty. And it is also the most important for them to trust their partners. If everyone doubts the performance of others, then there is no way to succeed together.

4:Size the work carefully. Normally if teams are working in the same site, they will have a rough idea of others' efficiency in work. But if they are working remotely, it is not wise to measure the working hours of some task using one site's standard. Sizing the work without considering the site differences is quite dangerous and may finally push one site too much or drag the other site's process.

5:Inform others where you are. It is risky to work alone without telling others your progress, especially when you are working on something that has already been discarded by the team.

Why Apple refuses flash in its mobile devices

Jan 27, 2010, Apple releases its latest ambitious product-iPad. It has the iPhone OS, with 9.7 inch screen and 1 GH processor.So far everything sounds not bad. But when Steve was demonstrating those publisher's websites, chunks of unloaded spaces were quite outstanding on the 9.7 inch screen. People were surprised to realize that we still couldn't see flash on a big screen this that. And according to Steve Job's words, Adobe was too lazy to do a good job on flash. That was the main reason why Apple didn't take flash into their devices like iphone/ipod touch/the upcoming ipad.

I don't know whether Adobe is really a lazy company like that. But one thing I know is that most websites we are using nowadays have used flash. A survey in UK showed that over 60% of users won't buy ipad, among them, 50% of them count the lack of flash as one of the reasons they won't buy ipad. If Adobe is really as lazy as what Apple said, then I don't think there will be so many users weigh flash over their ipad.

Essentially, Apple is just a company. It is a charitable foundation. Precisely, A company will commit to its stock holders and owners. And ipad is actually nothing more than another cash cow to help apple break its revenue record once again. And I think the reason why Apple doesn't take flash into those products. Maybe Apple wants to set up another standard like HTML5 to replace flash? Maybe Apple will have to disclose some hidden information to developers if flash is allowed?Maybe Apple treat Adobe as the partner of Apple's worst enemy Microsoft? Or maybe Apple knows for sure their products will sell well even though users complain for the lack of flash? Well, only those top guys of these companies know the reason.

Finally, Oracle can start building its ambitious empire

2 days Ago, EU gives the permission to Oracle for its deal of acquiring Sun Microsystems. I guess Oracle may feel happy and upset at the same time: they are happy because the EU finally allows the acquisition; they are upset because both Oracle and Sun have lost quite a lot since they announce the deal. In one presentation by Larry Ellison, he mentioned that the delay of acquisition caused a loss of millions of dollars per month for both sides. So people can image how painful it will be to see a huge deduction of revenue at the end of each month. Very soon , when we install the latest JDK, it won't be marked as Sun Microsystems, instead, it will be Oracle.( I can't imagine that, but it will be true sooner or later....)

So now who is feeling painful? Perhaps IBM ,or HP? After the acquisition, Oracle will be a hardware provider and a software provider at the same time. And right now the bigger player who can do both is IBM. I still remember that one year ago there was a rumor that IBM would acquire Sun. And after several months it turned out to be Oracle who got the deal. Followed by that was a long period of debacle between Oracle and EU. Though the cause for this is not that outstanding for this huge acquisition, there may be some other factors blocking the process. (I am just saying, who knows.)

Actually I don't care whether Oracle would be another IBM or not. As a non-entity, the fight between giants is just a show for me. What I am interested is some strategy that Larry Ellison may deploy in the future. As he doesn't seem to be a Cloud Computing fans right now, and all the other big companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Sun(At least Sun is still a separate company right now), they have started their Cloud Computing service for a while. And there is no sign so far that they don't want to get their share of cookies. So what will Oracle do after it acquires Sun? In a video Larry Ellison joked the idea of Cloud Computing. Will he make this joke into practice? Will Oracle stop the cloud computing development in Sun after the acquisition? Who knows. We'll see it.

I am setting up another project right now, and busy with those server configurations and project management. Maybe I could write it down here as kind of experience sharing with everyone.