120 hrs

2012.05.12 Yandang Ninghai outing

Ferri Zhang — 2012-05-13T22:06:00+09:00

2012.05.12 Yandang Ninghai outing

My favourite programming quote

Ferri Zhang — 2012-05-07T13:31:07+09:00

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." - C.A.R. Hoare

Long time no brain

Ferri Zhang — 2012-03-21T23:52:00+09:00

An old post: 很久没动脑了.

Now, again, long time no brain.

Happened to read a so-called Einstein's Puzzle, and tried to solve it with aid of Excel... an approach not so decent...

Following are the puzzle and a perhaps decent solution(via: http://www.stanford.edu/~laurik/fsmbook/examples/Einstein'sPuzzle.html):

# Copyright (C) 2004 Lauri Karttunen
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
#   GNU General Public License for more details.

Einstein's Puzzle

Variations of this riddle appear on the net from time to time. It is sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein and it is claimed that 98% of the people are incapable of solving it. Some commentators suggest that Einstein created such puzzles not to test out intelligence but to get rid of all the students who wanted him as an advisor. It is not likely that there is any truth to these stories. Whereever this comes from, it is a nice riddle.

Let us assume that there are five houses of different colors next to each other on the same road. In each house lives a man of a different nationality. Every man has his favorite drink, his favorite brand of cigarettes, and keeps pets of a particular kind.

The Englishman lives in the red house.
The Swede keeps dogs.
The Dane drinks tea.
The green house is just to the left of the white one.
The owner of the green house drinks coffee.
The Pall Mall smoker keeps birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
The man in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The Blend smoker has a neighbor who keeps cats.
The man who smokes Blue Masters drinks bier.
The man who keeps horses lives next to the Dunhill smoker.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
The Blend smoker has a neighbor who drinks water.

The question to be answered is: Who keeps fish?

This is a simple constraint satisfaction problem. Let us start by defining a regular language that consists of all the possible solutions for the puzzle. We need five basic variables: Color of the house, Nationality of the owner, and his favorite Drink, Cigarette, and Pet. We define each variable as the language of the possible values of the variable.

define Color [blue | green | red | white | yellow]; define Nationality [Dane | Englishman | German | Swede | Norwegian]; define Drink [bier | coffee | milk |tea | water]; define Cigarette [Blend | BlueMaster | Dunhill | PallMall | Prince]; define Pet [birds | cats | dogs | fish | horses];

The next concept to define is that of a House. Let us construe it as a concatenation of the five terms defined above:

define House [Color Nationality Drink Cigarette Pet];

With five variables each taking one of five possible values, this gives quite a number of possible households, 5x5x5x5x5 = 3125, to be exact. A road with five houses next to each other, House^5, provides an astronomical number of possible combinations of colors, nationalities, drinks, cigarettes and pets.

To solve Einstein's puzzle, we represent each of the fifteen constraints as a regular language and intersect these languages with the initial set of all possibilities. If all goes well, at the end we will know who keeps fish. For example, we can interpret The Englishman lives in the red house. as $[red Englishman]. This constraint is trivial to encode because in our representation of a house, the color and the nationality are adjacent. The second costraint, The Swede keeps dogs could be represented as $[Swede Drink Cigarette dogs] but we will choose a less verbose formulation, $[Swede ~$Pet dogs], that does not explicitly list the variables that separate Nationality and Pet. The fifteen constraints are shown below.

define C1 $[red Englishman]; # The Englishman lives in the red house.

define C2 $[Swede ~$Pet dogs]; # The Swede keeps dogs.

define C3 $[Dane tea]; # The Dane drinks tea.

define C4 $[green ~$Color white]; # The green house is just to the left of the white one.

define C5 $[green ~$Drink coffee]; # The owner of the green house drinks coffee.

define C6 $[PallMall birds]; # The Pall Mall smoker keeps birds.

define C7 $[yellow ~$Cigarette Dunhill]; # The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.

define C8 [House^2 ~$Drink milk ~$Drink House^2]; # The man in the center house drinks milk.

define C9 [? Norwegian ?*]; # The Norwegian lives in the first house.

define C10 $[Blend ? ~$Pet cats | cats ~$Cigarette Blend]; # The Blend smoker has a neighbor who keeps cats.

define C11 $[horses ~$Cigarette Dunhill | Dunhill ? ~$Pet horses]; # The man who keeps horses lives next to the Dunhill smoker.

define C12 $[bier BlueMaster]; # The man who smokes Blue Masters drinks bier.

define C13 $[German ~$Cigarette Prince]; # The German smokes Prince.

define C14 $[Norwegian ~$Color blue | blue ? ~$Nationality Norwegian]; # The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

define C15 $[Blend ~$Drink water | water ? ~$Cigarette Blend]; # The Blend smoker has a neighbor who drinks water.

All that we need to do to solve the problem is to impose the constraints on the row of five houses by intersection. The solution below is almost correct.

define Solution [House^5 & C1 & C2 & C3 &C4 & C5 & C6 & C7 & C8 & C9 & C10 & C11 & C12 & C13 & C14 & C15];

The result is a network with five paths. In four of the solutions nobody keeps fish and the German keeps the same kind of pet as someone else. We need one final constraint, presupposed by the question Who keeps fish?:

define C16 $fish; # There is someone who keeps fish.

With C16 added, only one solution remains. To make it easier to see, we compose the solution with the transducer that adds some prose around the pieces along the one remaining path:

define Describe [House -> "In the " ... .o. Color -> ... " house " .o. Nationality -> "the " ... " " .o. Drink -> "drinks "... ", " .o. Cigarette -> "smokes "... "s,¥n and " .o. Pet -> "keeps " ... ".¥n"] ;

We can now see the solution.

regex [Solution .o. Describe]; 76 states, 75 arcs, 1 path. xfst[2]: print lower-words In the yellow house the Norwegian drinks water, smokes Dunhills, and keeps cats. In the blue house the Dane drinks tea, smokes Blends, and keeps horses. In the red house the Englishman drinks milk, smokes PallMalls, and keeps birds. In the green house the German drinks coffee, smokes Princes, and keeps fish. In the white house the Swede drinks bier, smokes BlueMasters, and keeps dogs.

In short, it's the German who keeps fish.

Happy New Year

Ferri Zhang — 2012-01-23T01:38:15+09:00

祝各位新年快乐，龙年如意。

Chinese New Year is public holiday under different names in following countries / regions...

Public Holiday Announcement for Brunei
Chinese New Year

Public Holiday Announcement for Korea
Lunar New Year

Public Holiday Announcement for Philippines
Special Non-Working Holiday

Public Holiday Announcement for Indonesia
Chinese New Year

Public Holiday Announcement for Malaysia
Chinese New Year

Public Holiday Announcement for Vietnam
Lunar New Year

Public Holiday Announcement for Taiwan
Chinese New Year

Public Holiday Announcement for Hong Kong
Lunar New Year

Public Holiday Announcement for China
Spring Festival

11冬的路点

Ferri Zhang — 2012-01-12T01:14:00+09:00

Chinese New Year is approaching.

1

According to http://imnerd.org/douban/ I only read 6 books in the year 2011.

2

I visited a lot of places in Shanghai.

3

I am not sure with whom I will end up with.
"She's smart, sexy, sophisticated, spontaneous, complicated.", quote from Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
In fact, I am only thinking that she should be really into me.

4

work

Little words

Ferri Zhang — 2011-11-20T00:23:00+09:00

Just visited one of my old and abandoned blogs by chance.

And in its description reads "自由，自制".

They are nice words.

How to translate them?

11夏的路点

Ferri Zhang — 2011-09-30T23:56:10+09:00

1

已过年中3个月了。我忘了要在年中的时候写点什么了。

2

悬而未决的状态最后还算有一个好的结束。
离开了帝都来到魔都。
遇贵人相助。
Shanghai, I love you!

3

work

What we talk about when we talk about TGIF

Ferri Zhang — 2011-07-16T02:10:00+09:00

It's past 00:00, so it's technically already Saturday. But let me call it Friday night.

And, what are we talking about when we talk about TGIF(Thank God It's Friday)?

An escape from work? A reunion with old acquaintances?

Whatever, I don't wanna disappoint those who trust and are nice to me.

I'm coughing.

--
Sent from my mobile device

On 裸婚时代

Ferri Zhang — 2011-07-02T02:00:15+09:00

6月25日下午开始看《裸婚时代》，6月27日半夜看完。
看这部剧的动力和《蜗居》的一样，作为和当代密切相关的资料片看。

作为一部电视剧，这部剧：
节奏挺慢的，用二倍速看挺好；
有些桥段、引用蛮有意思的。

然后：
故事中的两个年轻人与《蜗居》里的相比，貌似更加无辜；
这部剧里的情节比《蜗居》里的更加容易让我联想到现实。

现实：
现实里没有孙晓娆；
联想到公司里的一个同事本来开车来上班，经常腐败的，有了孩子之后就开始带饭了；
公司里的另一个同事本来经常腐败的，刚买了车开来上班，老婆怀孕了，也开始带饭了；
一高中同学因为意外怀孕一毕业就结婚了。

裸婚时代OST

裸婚时代全集

****精神文明和道?

Ferri Zhang — 2011-05-01T12:27:19+09:00

最近，苦于需要在微软的框架内工作。
微软的东西的其中一个特点就是限定好的丰富，她为你提供了丰富的她认为~~好用的~~对的途径、方法、接口。
然而，就我的感觉，她的好多东西都不适合工作，不好用，效率低下。

相反，开源、自由、免费软件社区则是一个群策群力的地方。大体上，你可以贡献自己认为好用的东西，不过这个东西会经过所有社区成员的测试选择，与实现同样功能的东西竞争。最后的默认包里包含的往往是被广泛接受的组件们，而特立独行的使用者也可以选择把那些广泛接受的组件换成自己更喜欢的不那么流行的等价物。

---
思绪飘浮，想到了这么一个比较。

****精神文明是封闭的。大家可以在*的领导下畅所欲言。比如，大家可以在征得*的同意之后发表批评*的言论。

道?（原则、信念）是开源、自由、免费的。道?的内容随时代、地域、人群而改变。反映着大家的需求。

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墙外，开源、自由、免费软件让生活更美好。

墙内，盗版微软。鲜有自由。

How to grow in an organization

Ferri Zhang — 2011-04-16T01:20:00+09:00

How to grow in an organization
Posted by Sanchit Jain April 7, 2009

I read a story in my high school English book written by a famous Indian author (I forgot the name) – There was an old blind man who used to work in a grocery store. He was very good at mathematics. He used to sit next to the shop owner. Whenever a customer bought goods from the shop, the owner would speak out the product list. The old man would quickly calculate the total amount payable with his impeccable strong hold on mathematics. He also had a good memory and knew the prices of all the products. One day when he came to the shop, he came to know that the owner had bought a new device called a calculator. The calculator could do all the maths and much faster! Slowly the old man became obsolete. The owner had not asked him to leave but he felt he was not doing much at the shop and became restless.
One day when he was sitting next to the owner as usual, with the owner doing all the maths on the calculator, the owner wanted to know the price of a product. The old man of course had this information handy through years of working in the shop. In fact he also knew how much quantity of that product was in the shop. From that day his role changed, he would advice the owner on inventory management, cost price and selling price of each product.
A few days later on being asked by someone what was he still doing in the shop, when the owner now had the calculator, the old man said that he had been promoted to be a manager!
The morale of the story is simple. To grow in an organization, make yourself replaceable. Grow your fellow employees to take your place. Growing your team should be the higher objective, and you’ll see that your own growth was a natural consequence.

Comments

how true… this happens always. As organizations grow they change, so the roles of everyone also change. If employees don’t change and grow as the organization grows, they become pretty soon dispensable. You can only be indispensable if you grow out of your job and move to more value added job. This is true of any organization. Growing your career by jumping ship is the most risky path, once you get stuck in this jumping game, there is no safety net, you fall very badly. Grow naturally by learning you will have a healthy growth and you will enjoy the growth.
Comment by Maqbool Patel on April 14, 2009 @ 9:00 am

True, job hopping may result in a short term apparent growth but it would probably not give one a career. A survey of the CXO’s revealed that 90% of them were not job hoppers, they would have switched only a few jobs in their long careers…and most of them did not do it for money but more to align their work with their expertise.
Which is quite natural. There are two ways – if you don’t like your work you can go look for another job, and the process may be endless. Or you change what is not good at your present job, improve the present organization wherever needed, and carve your way to leadership.
Comment by Sanchit Jain on April 14, 2009 @ 9:59 am

how can we identify the areas where we need to grow so that we can be replaceable? The knowledge about all the products, inventory etc that old man in the story had made him replaceable but all this knowledge came from his past experience. The best part is his expertise and interest in his work, things like how much quantity of that product was in the shop, etc… shows his interest in his work. The expertise which came through his interest and pride he has show towards his work made him replaceable.
If we can identify such key areas and expertise in such areas than we are ready to get replaced.
Comment by Nikhil on April 17, 2009 @ 12:54 pm

In true sense when one works on replacing oneself he/she is not replacing himself/herself, but the job. Once you work towards replacing yourself, all you are doing is replacing/enhancing the job you are currently doing. This can be done at every level. Let’s say you are a Java developer. Currently you are doing job of pure development, ie, someone defines the project for you and architecture and you go ahead code it as per the spec. As you try to replace that coding job, you think what else can you do? In the process of coding, you have learnt a lot about the domain itself, how the work flow happens, how the messages are handled, etc. Why not make a jump and start your own design and start comparing your design with the design your manager/lead gave you and start the dialog and keep growing. Now the job of a pure developer has become not just developer, but of a mini-architect. You can also look around and see where are the pain points of the project/organization are, like communications, HL7, DICOM, EDI, XML etc. This you will know if you participate in project status meeting (many people think this is a waste full thing to do) and start developing those skills as they pertain to your job and start growing….
Comment by Maqbool on April 20, 2009 @ 7:51 pm

via: How to grow in an organization | Technology Bits and Bytes

---
p.s.
The General Manager told us interns: do whatever you can, to make your boss successful; do whatever you can, to make your subordinates successful.

Enter to grow in wisdom; depart to serve better thy country and thy kind

Ferri Zhang — 2011-03-28T23:56:00+09:00

最近看了一期非诚勿扰（安田失败退场）。
里面提到了写在哈佛某个校门内外的两句话：Enter to grow in wisdom; depart to serve better thy country and thy kind. (by Charles William Eliot)

想起竺可桢校长的两个问题：诸位在校，有两个问题应该自己问问，第一，到浙大来做什么？第二，将来毕业后要做什么样的人？
以及流传极广的一个回答：混；混混。

看了“两个问题”的演讲全文，在结尾，竺老自己回答了这两个问题：第一，诸位求学，应不仅在科目本身，而且要训练如何能正确地训练自己的思想；第二，我们人生的目的是在能服务，而不在享受。

竺老曾在哈佛求学，其后治校之风格深受哈校影响。

Data loss

Ferri Zhang — 2011-02-02T12:29:00+09:00

My laptop crashed yesterday, because of some hard drive failure.

The worst thing could follow is total loss of data on that 500GB hard drive.
And according to Thinkpad CS, I have to wait until after the Spring Festival holidays to find out the result.

Ironically, I had run a backup on my laptop just on the evening before yesterday.
But I didn't have a consideration on what data is significant.
So, by default configs, the backup includes only a small part of the data important to me.

"Until the loss of something, you won't know how much it values to you."

"If no one but you could ever remember something, isn't it just a void?"

Good luck to all my data.

Data loss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And, happy Chinese New Year to you all~

10冬的路点

Ferri Zhang — 2010-12-31T22:54:00+09:00

18:40 2010.12.31

1

2010年的最后一天。
已吃过晚饭。
看来不会有变数了。寂寞跨年夜。有史以来最寂寞跨年夜…

昨天收到Fubye 的短信，说他印象中一起玩桌游看电影玩游戏的跨年夜。
回复他说，同愁没有以前那样的跨年夜了。

2

我的状态是悬而未决。这种悬而未决，也可以看作是走投无路。
到这般走投无路的境地，是由于最初对于信息源的甄别不当，以及之后策略调整缓慢，错过了很多机会。

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another. - John Dewey
上面这句话是前几天在李开复的微博上看到的，很应景。
结束一个阶段，应该准备着去投身另一个阶段，肆意的松懈只意味着崩溃或者将来花更大代价的补救，和得不偿失。

为了恶补一些知识，找到不少美帝的优秀教科书，看得不亦乐乎。
一本编撰良好的书比一个庸师n 个学时的课都有用很多。但是为什么没有在上庸师课的时候就开始看相关的书呢？
一次整理豆瓣上的书籍tag ，才发现自己没有完整读过几本编程相关的书。倒是读了很多liberal_arts 的书。

3

这半年的生活有点像08年下半年的生活，但是是在校外独居。
去学院办理退宿手续之后回到新住处的时候，真的很有北漂的感觉，rootless 。

4

Been there, done that 是12月9日在微博上看到的话。
这句话的一个解释是：To have experienced the topic under discussion, to the point of boredom or complacency.

不讨论这句话用来表达厌倦情绪或者对新进者的轻蔑感情的作用。

我想，在been there, done that 之后，我该不该，以及该在何时stay, maintain 呢？
我该如何cope with 离开某地，告别某人，结束某事的伤感呢？
也许真正在过程中enjoy 了某地，某人，某事，就不会有伤感了？

5

明年是本命年，自己的年龄很大了。

2里说了我恶补了一些编程相关书，但是中间还穿插着一些liberal_arts 的书。
今年最后一本完整看完的书是希特勒的《我的奮鬥》（黎明書局1934）。
先看的电子版，然后预约拿到了学校图书馆的一个副本，看最后几章。

拿到的副本是我借到过的最黄的一本书，而且旧到掉渣。但是没有发霉的气味，可能是用药水处理过。
这本书是民国时期一个叫周宗瑾的学生购置的。上有其人印章，“学”字开头的编号，以及开篇记和阅后记。
书中见年代久远的各种不同笔迹的批注，如阅豆瓣。
批注中可看到，几个民国学生将《我》作励志之书，图兴中华以?国之道。

购书者署名

让步

Ferri Zhang — 2010-12-14T11:29:00+09:00

看到一篇文字：裂缝 | 小水的日记

两个人越是相熟，越是志同道合，交流到深处的时候，极微小的差异都可能是致命的。

它们会突然间被赋予旁人看来并不具备的重要性，上升为原则性的问题，仿佛暗示着广大命运的不可调和。

猜测1：正因为问题本身并不重要，于是真正考察的是，谁会在这场斗争中率先让步。从此两者的关系就发生了微妙的变化。

猜测2：我们可以忍受一半和谐一半不和谐，却无法忍受99%的和谐与1%的不和谐。1%就像那宁可抓破皮肤流血，也要除去的痒。

就连上帝都偏爱离群的羊羔。

对于这篇文字的其他部分，不予置评。

我觉得猜测1 说的很好。
正因为问题（差异）本身并不重要，于是真正考察的是，谁会在这场斗争中率先让步。从此两者的关系就发生了微妙的变化。

`define`	`C1`	`$[red Englishman]; # The Englishman lives in the red house.`
`define`	`C2`	`$[Swede ~$Pet dogs]; # The Swede keeps dogs.`
`define`	`C3`	`$[Dane tea]; # The Dane drinks tea.`
`define`	`C4`	`$[green ~$Color white]; # The green house is just to the left of the white one.`
`define`	`C5`	`$[green ~$Drink coffee]; # The owner of the green house drinks coffee.`
`define`	`C6`	`$[PallMall birds]; # The Pall Mall smoker keeps birds.`
`define`	`C7`	`$[yellow ~$Cigarette Dunhill]; # The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.`
`define`	`C8`	`[House^2 ~$Drink milk ~$Drink House^2]; # The man in the center house drinks milk.`
`define`	`C9`	`[? Norwegian ?*]; # The Norwegian lives in the first house.`
`define`	`C10`	`$[Blend ? ~$Pet cats \| cats ~$Cigarette Blend]; # The Blend smoker has a neighbor who keeps cats.`
`define`	`C11`	`$[horses ~$Cigarette Dunhill \| Dunhill ? ~$Pet horses]; # The man who keeps horses lives next to the Dunhill smoker.`
`define`	`C12`	`$[bier BlueMaster]; # The man who smokes Blue Masters drinks bier.`
`define`	`C13`	`$[German ~$Cigarette Prince]; # The German smokes Prince.`
`define`	`C14`	`$[Norwegian ~$Color blue \| blue ? ~$Nationality Norwegian]; # The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.`
`define`	`C15`	`$[Blend ~$Drink water \| water ? ~$Cigarette Blend]; # The Blend smoker has a neighbor who drinks water.`