Harry Chen's Roving Mind

US the lifestyle superpower

2009-12-31T16:13:00.000-08:00

Immigration is a hot topic in the US. Some people argue that immigrants will take jobs away from the locals and bring in new cultures that destroy the core American values. On the other hand, some people argue that the US is built by immigrants and welcoming new immigrants is in the core of the US culture.Don't matter which side you stand. The truth is that people love coming to the US. They like

A new war in the cloud

2009-10-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

In this week's Economist magazine, an article talks about an ongoing technology war between Microsoft, Google and Apple, fighting to dominate the clouding computing market. The premise is that while all three companies have ample resources and niche technology to win, but the final outcome is still too early to tell -- i.e., don't bet your retirement fund in any one of the three companies. :-)

Mahout: Open Source machine learning library

2009-09-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

Apache Mahout is an open source project aimed to develop a scalable machine learning library. This is an exciting project. Although machine learning technology has its roots in the field of artificial intelligence, but it has broad application in today's digital world. In the past, developing sophisticated and scalable machine learning library is limited to academic institutions and commercial

Britain grocery store explores weather prediction

2009-09-01T13:30:00.001-07:00

Tesco, the largest grocery chain in Britain, is exploring a new kind of data-mining technology to save cost. A six-person research team developed a computer software that calculates shopping patterns based on weather prediction. Research showed that changes in weather often affect people's shopping behavior. Supermarkets that stocked more meat and other barbecue foods in anticipation of

Retirement in an aging population

2009-07-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

Retirement planning is an important topic in personal finance. The purpose of retirement planning is to ensure a person have sufficient living incomes after leaving the work force. Recent reports in the Economist showed that the world's population is getting older. This is going to complicate retirement planning for the individuals and the governments.Key facts reported in the articles are as the

BoA customers get free museum passes

2009-07-04T21:11:00.000-07:00

If you're a Bank of America customer, you are eligible for free weekend passes to over 100 museums in the US. This is a part of the Museums on Us program.For the rest of 2009, you can get free passes during the following weekends:July 4-5August 1-2September 5-6October 3-4November 7-8December 5-6If you are in the Bay Area, check out the San Jose Museum of Art, the Tech Museum of Innovation and the

Flock may be losing its steam to Firefox

2009-06-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

Recently both Flock and Firefox released a new version of their browser product, namely Flock 2.5 and Firefox 3.5. While both browsers are based the Gecko engine, Firefox 3.5 is certainly beating Flock 2.5 in terms of performance. My default browser used to be Flock, a social web browser that has built-in support for many popular web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Del.icio.us. But,

Twitter increases TechCrunch web traffic

2009-06-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

There is a new trend in social media. Tweets, messages posted on Twitter, may soon replace RSS feeds as a major source of web traffic. TechCrunch recently released its web traffic statistics. Excluding direct hits, after Google, Twitter is the number two source of referral site that drives visitors TechCrunch. I'm very surprised!Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunchGoogle: 32.7%Direct: 22.7%

China secures oil supply from Brazil

2009-05-19T09:24:00.001-07:00

As the credit market dries up, oil companies that need urgent investments are going to China for cash. Brazilian oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA announced that it has secured a $10 billion loan from China in return for a long-term supply of oil.This is not the only oil-for-loan deal that China made with oil-rich countries. Similar arrangements have been made with Kazakhstan and Russian oil and

Inside look of a personal credit crisis

2009-05-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

The health of the United States economy is not good. In fact, it has been really sick. The root cause of this sickness was cheap home loans to people who actually can't afford to pay. It's to hard to imagine how we have come to this situation. Many people blame the problem on irresponsible lenders and immoral investors. But, the truth is that the borrowers are also guilty as charged. Because they

Good reasons to use Twitter

2009-04-27T21:36:00.000-07:00

A year ago I complained about Twitter. I thought writing tweets and following others on Twitter were a waste of time. A year later I changed my mind: (1) using Twitter is not a waste of time if I use it with a purpose in mind, and (2) microblogging empowers people to voice their opinions, reversing the typical consumer-producer role in mass communication. The usage of Twitter is very simple.

The Economist on world economy

2009-04-23T10:44:00.001-07:00

In this issue of The Economist, it paints a rather cautious outlook of the world economy. Recent economic data shows signs of the world economy could be in a recovery. But, that could be an illusion, the article warns.Among many tricky issues, reading economic data is always difficult. Even if the economy is on its way to a recovery, the path is going to long and painful. During this recovery

Programming languages should die

2009-04-19T10:21:00.001-07:00

Recently I wrote a blog on learning new programming languages and how to think about the constant changes of programming languages. Learning a new programming language is easy, but mastering it, able to use it well, is often difficult. It would be ideal if the world has only one or two programming languages. All engineers can master them and program with them effectively. Unfortunately, that's

Apple product as new U.S. military weapon

2009-04-18T12:59:00.001-07:00

One of the ubiquitous Apple iPod products is emerging to become new "weapon" gadgets in the US military. Using the Apple iPod Touch, new military programs are underway to build systems that would link up soldier communications.The iPod Touch seems to be a good candidate for new US military programs that seek to improve real-time communications between soldiers, command centers and intelligence

Create singleton classes in Java

2009-04-15T23:34:00.001-07:00

The Java singleton design pattern restricts the creation of a class to one object. There are two ways to create a singleton class in Java. While both approaches are correct, but deciding which approach to use requires some discussion. Let's see how to create a singleton class Foo, which has one method doFoo that prints a string message to the standard output stream. By being a singleton class,

Blogger category feed URL

2009-04-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

By default, all blogs hosted on Blogger come with a single RSS feed URL. Many bloggers use "labels" to tag their blog posts, so that the posts of different categories can be grouped. Labels are extremely useful for organizing posts and directing readers to a specific topic of blog posts.To create an RSS feed URL for a specific blog topic (i.e., posts tagged with a specific label) use the

Nintendo DSi to compete with iPhone

2009-04-11T21:59:00.001-07:00

The best selling iPhone applications are video games. Knowing this we can safely predict that the market of casual gaming, especially on mobile devices, is likely to expend in the few years. iPhone seems to be the leader in mobile gaming. To compete, Nintendo recently released a revised version of DS console called Nintendo DSi.The DSi has two key improvements: (1) better multimedia support --

On learning new programming languages

2009-04-10T00:49:00.001-07:00

Programming languages are the building blocks of computer science. New programming languages often emerge every few years. Recently I come across a new language called Scala. This new language attempts to unify object-oriented programming and functional programming. Its syntax is similar to Java and C# with some additional features. This paper gives an overview of Scala. After reading up on

Another powerful Twitter use case

2009-04-04T11:13:00.001-07:00

People use twitters for many different reasons. For businesses and investors, some use cases are more compelling than the others. From the BusinessWeek, this use case describes how businesses can use Twitter to reach potential customers:Here's what happened when Chris Savage, the chief executive of Wistia.com, searched for the phrase "private video sharing" on Twitter, a social networking site.

Google to acquire Twitter, for real?

2009-04-02T23:49:00.001-07:00

The blog community seems to be saying that Google is in talk to acquire Twitter. By the way, not too long ago, Twitter turned down a half-billion deal from Facebook. Twitter is a fascinating business and service. It's a simple service. People of all ages can quickly learn how to use it. To some it's an addictive communication and mind-broadcasting tool. However, while Twitter interests many

ABC Nightline on Netflix

2009-04-02T23:03:00.001-07:00

ABC's Nightline recently featured a short story on Netflix. It takes you to behind the scene of the "red envelopes": how DVD's are handled in the distribution sites, the giant machines that process millions of DVDs and the workers that checks received DVD for damage at 3 o'clock in the morning. Do you know Netflix spends $300 million in postage every year?Watch the ABC Nightline segmentTechnorati

Mozilla Labs releases Weave and Personas

2009-03-31T23:14:00.001-07:00

Modern web browsers are extremely customizable. Mozilla Labs, an incubator of Firefox browser projects, recently released two interesting software programs: Weave and Personas.Weave is a program that allows user data like bookmarks, history and passwords to be synchronized across multiple browsers. This program can be very useful to users who have personal web data scattered between mobile

Free Google music downloads in China

2009-03-30T08:59:00.001-07:00

Google launched a new venture in China that allows free downloads of licensed songs over the internet. Free music downloads is a basic service currently offered by Baidu.com, Google's Chinese competitor.The new service offers some 350,000 songs, and the number is expected to rise to 1.1 million in the coming months.Fact: more than 99% of all music files distributed in China are pirated.

Reasons to visit your public library

2009-03-29T10:22:00.001-07:00

Public library is one of the most important civic service created in the modern society. It's a place where citizens, regardless of their income level, social status and age, can have free access to books and other media. Some claimed that public library is an American invention. But, for certain that Benjamin Franklin and his friends created the first public library founded in the United States

Index funds beat actively managed funds

2009-02-28T01:58:00.000-08:00

When it comes to mutual fund investing, I'm a believer of index funds. During the recent volatile market environment, actively-managed mutual funds on average produced more losses than the losses of passively-managed index funds.Average losses for stock-index funds last year were 39.1%, while actively managed funds lost 40.5% on average, according to investment researcher Morningstar