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Liu Xiang Manteo Mitchell The most popular Chinese national sport hero failed to clear the first hurdle at an opening heat of the 110-meter hurdles. He immediately headed to the closest exit, but was instructed to turn back by an Olympic staff member. He went…

The recent doping suspicion raised by Ye Shiwen’s stunning swimming performance has brought doping into the spotlight again. Many people use words doping, stimulant and performance enhancing drug interchangeably. For example, in China, stimulant (兴奋剂) is almost the only word used to refer to doping…

Follow this artilce instead of Microsoft instructions for localization.

Though the Chinese regime regulates the press more heavily than any other countries, it is incompetent when it comes to things that affect lives directly – drug, environment, food, etc. There are more snake oils in China than all combined from other countries. It is…

Usually double spacing is caused by some text editor or control interpret both carriage return (0x0d or \r) and new line (0x0a, or \n) as starting a new line. This can be remedied by remvoing all carriage returns. For example, in Visual Studio, replace "\n"…

The disqualification of 8 badminton athletes for their not using their best efforts is an injustice at its worst. The whole incident started with two Chinese players intentionally losing. Under the current Chinese sport system, by no means can their athletes make such an important…

The GNU GPL may be good for software intended to be free, but it is generally detrimental to the software industry. It is a child of Free Software Foundation. If software was developed largely by people as a hobby, the GPL would make a lot of…

The media frenzy surrounding the suspicion of Olympic gold medalist Ye Shiwen doping is unprecedented in terms of scale. The suspicion is primarily due to her mind-blowing performance in her last lap of the 400 meter individual medley. It was faster than the that of…

Touching, heart wrenching, thought-provoking, exceptionally educational. That is what The Land of Sorrow impresses me. It is like a time machine bringing its readers back to the traumatic Great Cultural Revolution. It is a novel, but it is also a history book. The major events…

This is a translation of a G+ post An African lion cub looks depressed. His mom asks him what is wrong. The cub said: "I have just eaten a person, probably a Chinese". The lioness reprimands the cub "Ate a person withtout checking his passport?!…

A copper mine itself may not necessarily be a bad idea if it is transparent and well managed, but every project under the current totalitarian regime is operated in a black box in which many dirty deals can be made, numbers can be forged. The…

I have had muscle spasms during training and a marathon. All of them were most likely caused by severe loss or imbalance of electrolytes. Appropriately replenishing body with electrolytes is naturally the most effective way of preventing muscle spasm. The most important thing do do after…

My friend Frederick Flather, a lawyer, novelist, historian, and independent thinker, passed away on Monday April 16 2012, at the age of 80. I have lost a friend with whom I have enjoyed many enlightening conversations. Freddie reminds me of the official motto of New…

Upgrading Microsoft Windows usually takes a day but it does not mean one has to do a day's work to accomplish it. Installing the OS usually takes one to two hours. Installing updates which could be well over 100 takes two hours or so. Configuring firewall and installing all the…

A year experience of using Godaddy's Virtual Dedicated Server involving frequent extremely long email relay delays (up to a whole day), and frequent poor performance (almost daily) shows the VDS is not business grade. At one pointer, a problem of the parent server shut down our VDS. It…

I tend to be an early adopter of new technologies including consumer product front. I bought my first digital camera - Kodak DC20 - in early 1997 when most people had never heard of digital camera. I was probably the only person in our company…

Reviews on DPReview.com and a review with comparison with Canon PowerShot sX280 HS and Panasonic Lumix ZS30 at CameraLabs.com. A short video shows how the Wi-Fi feature works. One cannot peep pixels of these P&S compact cameras. They would scare you. For pocket size travel cameras,…

For those who appreciate the usefulness of shutter cable, controlling a digital camera via a smartphone is an exciting relatively new feature of digital cameras. This is done via WiFi. The common problem with this feature is the hassle of establishing connection between the camera…

The Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development estimates conservatively that US$2.74 trillion flowed out of China illicitly from 2000 to 2009. Some people believe this number is too conservative, and believe the actual number may be an order of magnitude higher. A very high…

AAC is a part of MPEG-2 AND MPEG-4 specifications. Open source codec implementation can be found in FFmpeg, FAAC and opencore-amr. JAAD is a Java version of AAC decoder (decoding only). aacdecoder-android is a library for Android to play AAC streams or files (decoding only). Java AAC…