Author: shun

White House Silence on Rove’s Role

The New York Times is reporting that the White House Silence on Rove’s Role in C.I.A. Agent Leak. Until the unraveling of the man behind the leak, the Bush Administration repeatedly assured the public its seriousness in punishing the source of this life-threatening leak. But now Bush all of a sudden is quite and has nothing to comment?

“Are you going to fire him?” the president was asked twice in a brief Oval Office appearance with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore. Both times, the president ignored the questions.

Then a White House aide signaled that the session was over. “Out those doors, please,” the aide told journalists. “Thank you very much.”

When it comes down to punishing others, even without a shred of evidence, Bush’s administration was all over the place and showed “resolve”. But when it comes to punishing one of their own, where’s the “resolve” and strong stance now?

I have no sympathy for the jailed journalist as well. It’s one thing to cover a sensational story for the sake of journalistic creativity. But when someone else’s life can be in danger because of your story, especially that of a public servant in a sensitive position, journalistic integrity should take a back seat and allow the human side of the journalist to take control. Everyone’s a human first; all other roles we play in our lives are secondary and are simply labels we carry with relatively meaningless substance.

Baby’s Almost Here…

Grace has been noticing some biological and physical changes to her body. This can only mean one thing: The rascal is almost ready to meet see the world! The human body is really a miracle machine. In most cases, when the fetus is ready in its development, somehow (scientists still don’t know how) the body secrets a hormone to make the necessary changes to a woman’s body to prepare her for the birthing ritual.

Grace said that the last time she spoke to Annie, her friend in Australia who was also pregnant at the time, brought up the almost the same symptoms as ones Grace’s experiencing now; and a couple of days later, she gave birth to a healthy girl.

So now we are kicking into the “standby” gear. So Grace washed all the baby cloths and blankets while I helped organized the baby’s crib (mattress, bed sheet, bumps, toys… etc). I might put the infant car seat in the car as well today.

Ah~ the fun is about to begin.

Delicious Library — WOW!

Delicious Library logo I have read about Delicious Library at quite a few places. But I never really thought much of it. So last night, I decided to kick the tires at this award-winning software…. Boy, was I blown away or what!!

Once you use one of the three methods (Title, Author, ISBN) to search for your item (books, DVDs, CDs and games), the result is returned fairly quickly from Amazon.com’s database (needless to say, you need to be connected to the Internet to use this).

But there are still things I was annoyed at:

  • It only searches at Amazon’s database: I had some books that showed up only at Barns and Noble but not at Amazon. So I ended up having to hand code those. I also had to borrow pictures of some books from BN.com from time to time.
  • It gets confused on locale: Sometimes it returns results from Amazon UK or Amazon France when the book was clearly available in Amazon’s US site
  • Because it only looks at Amazon’s database, you can forget about foreign titles. All the books I got in Chinese (or even English titles from Singapore, Hong Kong or Australia) don’t show up even thought the ISBNs are valid.
  • The damn interface doesn’t scroll with the mouse. Using the scroll bar becomes a hassle when you have 100 items to enter

But the software was amazing overall. I spent about an hour and a half entering everything I own (less games and CDs) into its database. Despite its shortcomings, this thing is great. I can now keep track of who’d borrowed my books and DVDs!!

And damn it, I own 100+ books. I thought I’d shed most of them with all the moves I’ve had!

UPDATE: The comment Jeff made got me interested in finding out what else’s out there. Booxter from Deep Prose Software makes book entry WAY easier than Delicious Library. But it does require that I am on Amazon’s site as well. Too bad it doesn’t support DVD collections (or does it?).

Brian’s Blog’s Up!

Finally got Brian over on to my server last week. Set him up with WordPress and life is good.

We found ourselves trying to catch up with each other with very mundane stuff every time we start a conversation. Blogging, as Brian has discovered, allows friends/families to keep in touch with ideas, thoughts and the latest insignificant things (that you still want to know about) in each other’s lives.

We’ve been friends since sophomore year back at SCAD. He was the Deputy Marriage Commissioner who performed the ceremony at my wedding. It was pretty cool to have my best friend to conduct the ceremony. Not sure if this option is available elsewhere, but we were thankful that it was in San Jose, California.

More WP Plugins

Installed Jon Abad‘s great LiveCalendar which puts Ajax (combination of XMLHTTPRequest and Javascript) to good use.

The downside is, the Coloured Calendar doesn’t work with LiveCalendar 1.6. I did get colors to work, but they won’t stick because of Ajax’s realtime data updating.

Anyone got any success out of this?

Self-healing Genes — Tomorrow’s Science, Today

I realize something crazy like this is going to happen sooner or later, but I am completely unprepared for this news reported by Wired (Giving Genetic Disease the Finger):

Scientists are closing in on techniques that could let them safely repair almost any defective gene in a patient, opening the door for the first time to treatments for a range of genetic disorders that are now considered incurable.
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“This doesn’t just deliver a foreign gene into the cell,” said Nobel Prize winner and CalTech President David Baltimore, who with a Sangamo paper co-author Mathew Porteus proposed this method to cure genetic diseases. “It actually deletes the miscoded portion and fixes the problem.”

Modern science has prolonged life, now it’s going to extend life beyond the scope of human’s natural normality to live. But then, it’s not all happy news. Scientists caught some side-affects early on:

One trial that did succeed, but then ended in tragedy, was a 2002 French X-linked SCID trial that used retroviruses to deliver a new gene into the patients. The new gene cured the disease in 12 patients, but went on to cause leukemia in three of them. It turned out the foreign gene, in addition to producing the protein that vanquishes X-linked SCID, had the unexpected side effect of sometimes turning on a cancer-causing gene.

But the latest technique from CalTech supposedly fixed that problem. Long term effects are never easy to assess: Who knows what this new method will cause over a person’s life time, or worst, passing the problematic gene in question to the future generations. Talk about home-made genetic mutations!

Ultrasound — Three Time’s the Charm

Last time I mentioned Grace’d be going in for a third ultrasound scan. The hospital just wanted to make sure that the development of the fetus is on par.

This time we got the same ultrasound operator as when Grace got her first scan (the last one was weird). The guy has an awesome office with a tiny forest garden (literally; not one of those sandy Zen ones) going on his desk right next to the machine.

The operator confirmed that everything looked normal and on target (size, weight, amniotic fluid.. etc). He commented that sometimes pediatricians get paranoid when some petite Asian women are compared to 180lbs Caucasian ones. Though most fetuses are similar in size, sometimes the appearance of the belly can vary drastically. Apparently Grace is on the petite part of the spectrum (for now).

Michael said that some women experience a phenomenon called “popping” towards the end of the pregnancy (last couple of weeks, even) where the belly suddenly grows enormous. Maybe that’ll happen to Grace.

Less than a month to go. Preciously few days are left for good night sleeps. 🙁

Tiger-like Search Box

Took sometime to fiddle with the Search Box today to make it look like this:
My search box screenshot

Much to my dismay, this elegant look only works under Safari. Under any other browser, it’d look like any normal search box.

This All the other browsers blows!

Apple has an elegant solution at its Dashboard Widgets download site (upper right hand corner). But it involves image alignments… And I don’t really want mine to look like this:
Apple's search box screen shot
(this was happened in Firefox after a search result was returned)