I've uploaded photos that other people took for me during my trip to China. They are tagged as 團友相機. Unfortunately one of the people in the group opened an account with ECPocket to store the high resolution images, and the account has since expired (due to inactivity I assume). So we are stuck with the crappy ones that she uploaded to Yahoo images.

One of the reasons why I would rather not use free services when I am dealing with things that I really care about.

Been playing with oprofile at work lately. Not sure if it's the fault of the EMT64 intel CPU that's on my work computer or the fact that I am using a 2.6.9 kernel, neither CPU events nor callgraph work. I am not sure if I am allowed to discuss the profile results, but let's just say the result suprised me a little. Too bad sysprof requires kernel 2.6.11 or later, and too bad that Centos 4.2 is only up to 2.6.9.

Installed oprofile on my powerbook that's running linux 2.6.15, and I am still limited to using timer interrupts. In this setup oprofile doesn't complain about callgraph though, but I am not able to decipher the result that opreport -c produces. I used it to get a profile dump of gaim starting up, but the result isn't too useful, I am guessing that's because timer-based profiling doesn't really work well for short running tasks.

Next thing I am going to do is try oprofile on my home desktop, which has a AMD 32bit CPU. Will also try sysprof on my powerbook and see if that can produce anything more useful.

Went out with Dave, Milan, Vineeth and Wasim last Sunday to play bowling. The bowling place closer to Milpitas was full already, so we went to another one in Fremont. It was the first time I play bowling ever, and it was pretty fun. Didn't do so well though, got 80s in the first game and 60s in the second. Also hurt my forearm, which partly explains the drop in my performance.

ahem excuses, excuses.

Played around with Gaim Doodle today, it's making all the Riverbed'ers install the 2.0 betas :-)

This week didn't start well for me.

First on Monday I forgot to bring my cellphone, which by itself isn't that big of a deal. But I was supposed to go to this tax place to pick up my tax stuff (we've been paying my uncle's friend to do our taxes for years, he do this for a living so we trust that he does a better job than we ever will), and since I would be going there pretty late (6ish) he asked me to call him beforehand. Well, still not a big deal since I was leaving from my work anyway, and they had just hooked up the phone on my desk. So I called him and told him I would be there in 20 minutes. You see the freeway entrance right next to our office building is carpool only, so I figured I would take the long way to get to the entrance that everyone else uses. Only that I didn't actually know where that is.

20 minutes later, I finally got on the freeway. But that's not the end of the story. It was the first time I drove by myself to Oakland's Chinatown, well needless to day, I got lost. I ended up somewhere at Alameda before I finally picked the right freeway exit. By the time I got to his office it was about an hour after I called him.

Oh did I say that was the first time I drove by myself to Oakland? Well that was also the first time I drove home from Oakland by myself. I am not even going to say where I ended up at, because I have no idea. Eventually I did find the way home, with gas to spare.

Fast forward. Today I almost got a ticket on freeway. Well, I thought I was going to get one anyway.

Here's what happened. So I was driving on 237 on the left-most lane. A car was coming close from my back so I changed to the second lane from the left, and was going to change back after that car drove by. Right when I was changing back though, another car came forward. So I thought I would just speed up a bit right? Well turns out that car was a cop, and I didn't notice.

Just as I was speeding up the cop turned on his signal lights (whatever you call those flashy lights on top of cop cars), and I said to myself **. So I slowed down, changed back to my own lane, and phew, the cop stopped the car that passed me (the car that I yielded to).

And yes, I was speeding. Just like everyone else in California.

So I've been driving to San Francisco for quite a while now. It's not a pleasant commute, but it's not as bad as when I first started. I've been trying not to make the decision whether to stay up at SF or relocate to Mountain View. Mountain View is quite a bit closer to my home, but everyone on my team works at SF, and I am liking the environment there.

Well, the upside is, I don't have to decide now. The downside is, well, sooner or later I have to. I think I know what I want to do, but the ideal solution to the problem requires great courage to execute.

sigh