Welcome to my virtual space

This is real, and it happened in one of the most prosperous cities of P.R.China A 2-year old girl wandered onto a road at 15:52 on 2011-10-13 in the city of Foshan, Guangzhou, P.R.China. A minivan hit her with its right front wheel. Every following…

Windows Activation error 0xC004F211 can happen after upgrading the hardware of a computer (e.g., CPU, motherboard): One should click the button Troubleshoot to resolve this. The following will show up: Don't worry. Click "I changed hardware on this device recently" at the bottom. You will…

Day 1 (641 km) Day 2 (533 km) Day 8 Day 9 Day 15 Day 16 Austin

The performance reported by Windows Experience Index: CPUScore : 7.7 D3DScore : 5.2 DiskScore : 7 GraphicsScore : 5.5 MemoryScore : 7.7 TimeTaken : MostRecentAssessment WinSATAssessmentState : 1 WinSPRLevel : 5.2 A computer configuration reported by Belarc: Additional information to the report generated by Blarc:…

If Google Maps' Globe View is grayed out, you cannot rotate or tilt the maps. Globe View is a very useful function for many purposes. For example, when you try to match the map with an aerial photo, rotating the map to match the orientation…

Clone UVCCamera library. Make modifications if necessary. Run Gradle assembleRelease tasks to build libuvccamera-release.aar and usbCameraCommon-release.aar Clone libcommon. Make modifications if necessary. Run Grade assembleRelease task to build common-release.aar In Android app project, create directory libs under directory app. Add libuvccamera-release.aar, usbCameraCommon-release.aar and common-release.aar to…

If one is confident the OOM error is caused by a system defect, not by an app, he can try to modify build.prop under /system. 

EF has been evolving. Mixing data models created with different versions of EF may lead to strange compiling errors. Database first approach is usually far suprior to code first approach in terms of performance. When using the wizard to create a model, if connection string is…

If you love DataBinding, don't bother ViewBinding PopupWindow is rarely useful because what it can do usually can be done by making a layout visible/invisible, with customized Dialog (i.e. extending Dialog). Inflating a layout can be a problem for PopupWindow from a fragment. Spinner often has…

Android system apps are those such as Settings. Android SDK comes with a tool called aapt (Android Asset Packaging Tool). Each Android SDK comes with aapt located in its directory such as: C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\build-tools\23.0.1 To view a package, one needs to pull the package…

Reliable, reasonably thin and light. Fast whening running an application, but slow when switching between apps. It is a fine device for occasional use such as testing apps, using just one or two apps (e.g. browsing Google+ or Facebook), but not good as the primary…

Some old USB card readers limits the speeds of SD card reading and writing. USB 3.0 card reader should be the minimum requirement. SanDisk Extreme Plus SD cards have excellent performance, great for 4K video. CrystalDiskMark is used for the following tests. SanDisk Extreme Plus (V30)…

Nissan LEAF S 2019 Nissan Leaf purchased before 2019-07-07 enjoys free charging from EVgo which customer service is excellent thought their fast-charging stations are relatively sparse right now (2019). One can drive a Leaf from Boston to Montreal (500 km) with 0 charging cost by…

This is a story of getting lost in the wilderness of White Mountains and battling overnight to reach civilization on a weekend in late fall of 2007. Please refer to the maps of Figure 1 and 2 at the end of this page for various locations described in the…

Generating Jave code from WSDL sounds like a task that is so common that there must be a good tool for it. Yes, there are a few tools. Good tools, probably not. kSOAP2 J2ME Stub Generator seems to be an abandoned project. Though it can be…

Traditional Outlook add-ins work for both POP/IMAP and Microsoft Exchange accounts. Most email accounts are POP/IMA accounts. New Outlook add-ins that can be downloaded from Microsoft app store do not work with POP/IMAP accounts. New Outlook versions will no longer support traditional add-ins that can…

The installation of Microsoft Office developer tools for visual studio 2013 November 2014 update takes about 25 minutes.

Revamping Outlook.com emails (e.g. xxx@msn.com, xxx@hotmail.com like emails) requires reconnection. Follow the instructions to reconnect. You could delete the old outlook profile and create a new one. Deleting the profile does not delete outlook pst files corresponding to existing email accounts. You will be prompted…

If IIS has not been installed, Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off > check all the components under Internet Information Services that are needed (it may be easy to just check everyone if you are not…

The interest in China has been rising rapidly in the last decade or so. One cannot understand China by reading books published in China where there is heavy censorship. One may think that books by Western Sinologists are the best alternative. That was what I…