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Oh no my MacBook blew up, not even a startup chime. At least my files are OK. Good thing dad left the old Powerbook when he visited. #fb

2,147,483,647 Tweets Ought To Be Enough For Anybody

I've been trying out various Twitter clients on the Mac and had almost settled on Pwitter as a free, light, and most Mac-like choice. But then all of a sudden it started acting up, repeatly showing tweets, losing track of read status, etc. Meanwhile the main website worked fine, so I punted Ptwitter to the curb and thought nothing more of it.

Turned out that I had been hit by the Twitpocalypse, the epochal event where the unique serial number that identifies each individual tweet exceeded the number that can be held in a conventional 32-bit signed-integer variable. The bugs I saw in Pwitter were the typical signs of an index overflow error, as the Tweet-IDs overflowed the variable, wrapped around, and confused the program.

Looks like the author has already fixed the bug, recasting the Tweet-ID variables to be Unsigned Longs instead of the standard Ints. That should hold us over for a while. But he better be ready to update again when we hit 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 tweets and blows up his weak-sauce Long Int.

Wide Open Spaces

Uncle originally bought his place in the newly developed east-Taipei because of its proximity to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall park which offered a nice space for the grandparents and the kids. Thirty years later, the area is now amongst the most upscale district in Taipei, and the SYT park is packed with oldsters, youngsters, and all ages in between every day.

Across the street had been the hulking Songshan Tobacco Factory. As the area became built up, it was no longer practical to have a factory in the middle of the city. So the factory was abandoned, the old buildings and dorms became cheap exterior sets for the soap operas. The flat ground was roughly paved to form a dozen outdoor basketball courts, and the remaining space was allowed to become an overgrown lawn for the dogs and kids. The open field in the middle of the city also made it a perfect location for election rallies and other public events.

The grounds were kinda scruffy, but the city did keep it mostly kinda clean, and the kids sure got after each other on the blacktop courts every day. But the land was just too valuable to leave fallow, and soon there were rumblings of developers eying the spot like a tigers eying a piece of meat, and Farglory was the alpha male who won the prize. The land will be developed as a combination of a stadium arena, shopping center, and hotel-office complex.

Sure, there were sporadic protests. We got fliers from the local citizens' group in our mailbox looking for support in preserving the land as open park space. But I was lazy and cynical of the process and never got involved. They finally fenced off the entire lot the other day. The pickup hoopsters, frisbee-chasing dogs, and rollerblading kids evicted to parts unknown. The high walls are emblazoned with Farglory logos and slogans, promising to be the most advanced cultural, technological, and ecological development ever. Well, if you want to be green, how about not building in the first place? The last thing the area needs is another department store, with at least half a dozen already within walking distance. There's even already the Taipei Arena nearby which already has trouble filling dates, so having another stadium right there doesn't seem like a productive use, either.

So my kid will miss out on the extra play space, the air will be even more choked with the smog from buses and cars, and that'll be the upside compared to the hassles during construction. But I guess it does come in handy once in a while to be able to walk down the street and pick up a Tiffany bauble for the wife anytime I want.

承晞 Update

So how's the baby doing at the two-month mark?

• Picked the name 承晞 just in time for 滿月. Literal translation would be "to inherit dawn's first light".
• He's already earned his first allowance just by existing, thanks to Taiwan's NTD3600-per-head stimulus plan.
• Height: 57cm (up from 48cm at birth)
• Weight: 5Kg (up from 3Kg at birth)
• Second course of hepatitis B vaccine
• First course of 5-in-1 vaccine
• Sucking down 100-120cc of milk every two to three hours, mostly breast milk supplemented by Wyeth S-26 Gold baby formula.

Any doubt about the grandparents' spoiling the baby was dispelled when mom barely blinked as I told her how much the Bugaboo stroller cost and asked her to carry the humongous box back to Taiwan for us.

Funny enough the stroller is earning its keep even though we haven't even took it outside yet. Just as a rolling pram to wheel him around the house and upstairs to see great-grandma everyday without disturbing his sleep.

Another funny coincidence, mom hit the Coach Outlet and asked what we wanted. The MIL asked her to get the largest bag she can find, so mom got a big white tote bag in colorful logo style. Turned out that it was a diaper bag (you could tell by the included changing pad), so it naturally goes to the wife, to make those family outings oh-so-fashionable.

And of course, he's still the cutest baby in the entire world. Now with more smiles!

Sun Set

To be honest, I probably could've just sent this out as a 140-char tweet and let it fade away into the Internet aether. On the other hand Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems marks the end of a significant chapter in computing history, with some personal relevance, too. Not to mention it's been a while since I've updated the blog so a new entry seems warranted.

Thanks to family friends with Apple employee discounts I was indoctrinated early in The Macintosh Way, with mice and GUI and all that, which minimized my exposure to the joy of MS DOS. School's computers were still Apple IIs with some Commodore 64s with some PETs languishing in the back. Played around with BASIC programming on the 8-bit machines but that's hardly a real command line, nor real programming, for that matter.

Of course, I was super excited going off to college, with their banks of computer labs, speedy new 486 PCs in the dorms, and my very own e-mail account to keep in touch with high school friends. E-mail was hosted on the time-share system, but thankfully they offered the more friendly PINE for us newbies, instead of generic Unix mail. Nevertheless it was an introduction to the Unix command line system. Living amongst all the Tech geeks, it wasn't long before I was gobbling up the documentation and customizing my shell environment. Of course, this was all hosted on the mysterious but surely mighty SunOS servers.

When I got my foot in the door at JPL, the standard job of the summer undergrad intern is data processing, on Sun workstations, of course. It was so awesome to have a station all to myself, with a full X-Windows environment so I could run multiple terminal windows and maybe even a Mosaic instance on another virtual desktop. My mentor was nice and helpful on the actual scientific tasks, but I was expected to do the data-munging and other tedious tasks myself. Time to learn emacs to do the programming, sed and awk to crunch the data files, not to mention the specialized astronomical applications with their own inscrutable config files and scripts. The Sparcstation 20 was more than up to the task, however. I could even work from the dorm via a remote X-window session or Telnet into the shell.

By the time I got to graduate school, the transition to from SunOS to Solaris was complete, and Windows machines were infiltrating the halls of academia. The Sparcstation was relegated to e-mail server duty, but the Ultra 5's and Ultra 10's were still the dominant platform at the observatory, to run all the Unix-based programs. There was this new thing called Linux, but that's still way too much trouble to install and make work on commodity PC hardware.

Meanwhile at home I was still steadfastly holding onto the Mac, all through the decline of MacOS 9. But when Apple made the big jump to the Unix-based MacOS X, I was fully prepared for the transition thanks to my SunOS experiences, so much so that I made sure the Terminal would open on login, just like good old xterm. The Sun machines were steadily obsoleted and replaced by Linux on PCs in scientific computing, and just plain old Windows when I got a real job. And Apple has all of a sudden become the flag-carrier for Unix-on-the-desktop, as Sun fades away into the maw of the Oracle acquisition machine.

Both Apple and Sun have helped me keep an open computing mind and kept me from becoming yet another Windows drone. So here's to the original Stanford University Network and all people it touched, I amongst them. Hopefully Sun technologies such as ZFS will live on in MacOS X, and Oracle will continue making Sun hardware into the best database appliances money can buy, since Sun Micro is still a good customer of ours.

Labor Via Twitter

Instead of recollecting and re-editing the story of the birth of our first child, I'll just repost all the tweets that I sent out throughout the process, a raw retelling mostly sent by iPhone.

We have water leakage. No big water-break and no labor yet but we're off to the hospital.
11:41 PM Feb 27th from TwitterFon

Confirmed water break but no labor yet. We're admitted and will induce in the morning. We're not leaving here without our baby!
1:22 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Ooh we have a contraction. Dilated one finger-width here we go...
2:46 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Contractions getting regular now, every 10min or so, so far.
3:42 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Baby's not low enough yet for imminent birth. This could take a while.
7:20 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

A quick breakfast run to the MickeyD around back. No food for her until the doc checks her out, though.
8:54 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Contractions every five minutes or so and getting stronger. Definitely no need to induce at this point.
9:17 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Doc's here. Cervix open two finger-widths but we'll give her a shot to regularize the contractions. OK on the breakfast front.
9:23 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Cervix opening fast by the time the anaesthesiologist got here it's already getting a bit late for the epidural. We'll ride this out.
10:32 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Saved the money on the epidural so we'll do the in-room birth. She doesn't need to move to the OR and I get to take pictures.
10:52 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Fully dilated time to push. 11:28 AM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Baby is starting to show time for delivery
12:42 PM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

Yay she's done it!
1:17 PM Feb 28th from TwitterFon

2988g healthy baby boy born at 1:13pm
1:37 PM Feb 28th from TwitterFon