Home powered by battery

将来每个家庭将由电池来供电。用户可以看到目前电池剩余电量；用户可以将一个物理的电池划分为若干个逻辑电池，每个逻辑电池可以用来为不同的家用电器来供电，用户可以精确地了解每一个家用电器的耗电量；用户可以预约电池充电的时间，例如在避开用电高峰的时间段内给电池充电；用户可以将电池内多余的电卖给电网；这样的系统还可以很友好地接入太阳能发电设备；短暂的停电也将不影响普通家庭的日常用电需求。这所有的一切依赖于电池技术的进步

创新的音视频服务

设想有这样一个公司，提供专业的音视频采集/编辑服务，并结合当下强大的社交网络，将音视频内容在第一时间迅速传播到客户的社交网路内，这会不会是一个很酷的服务模式？

Reading Rework

最近一直在陆陆续续地读rework这本书，书中有一些观点我非常赞同，举几个例子：

1. 不要做大的决定，做一些小的决定，这样比较容易调整

2. 要适时做一些能让你有成就感的事情，保持士气

3. 做产品不要总想着要多做些功能，要少做并做到最好

4. 创业尽量少用别人的钱

5. 把一件事情尽量分解，让每一小块都可以在2-3个星期内完成

6. 不要忽视你在开发一个产品中的一些副产品

7. 不要等产品完美了再把它推出，尽早的推出你的产品，不断改进

翻墙

这段日子1-Click Web Proxy也不好使了，今天在taobao上买了个包月的VPN帐号，下午在公司的网络里折腾了半天不好用，晚上回到家里便好使了。能够无限制的访问互联网真是一件痛快的事情！

9 Rules Of Success for Every Growing Business

There is an interesting article posted in elance blog, the author listed 9 tips to grow a small business, I think they are practicable and useful -

1. Smile
2. Be honest
3. It's YOU. Not Your Business
4. Never burn bridges
5. Listen
6. Never Sit Alone: Network
7. Get to know sneezers
8. Show value first
9. Do awesome work

Click here to visit the original copy

Crack WPA

Wireless connection is never secure. I have been cracked a WEP password in 10 minutes with BT3 and an enhanced wireless receiver. But it is been difficult to break WPA encrypted wireless connection as it requires dictionary brute force, which typically takes days or weeks in a standalone PC. But things are quite different if the cracking is performed parallelly by hundreds of machines. The WPACracker team offers such a service, that you can run your network capture against their 400-CPU cluster, thus significantly reduce the time to 20 mintues. You need to pay $17 for that service.

Vmware7+WinXP+Ubuntu

I installed Vmware7 in Windows XP, for code version control purpose, installed one Ubuntu 9.10. The virtual network was setup to work in bridged mode, which means the guest OS (Ubuntu) has a logically seperate Ethernet interface, and the IP address is in the same LAN as host OS (WinXP). After that, I can access svn service from any other machines within the LAN, the problem occurred when I tried to checkout code from host OS. TotoriseSVN complains connection to svn server failed. After googling for a while, I found someone had similar problem as me, and that was caused by a bug in vmware 7 and it affects "Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC". Fortunately, there is one workaroud: disable the "Offload checksum" in the deveice driver manage page. I tried, it works! The other remedy will be more complicated, setup the network mode to NAT, and forward any traffic you want pass to the guest OS, e.g., svn in vmware NAT settings. I didn't try that. Refer to original post for this issue.

Century park gathering

This morning, I met 7 GE colleagues in Century park. It is very happy to met old friends in a so nice day. Kids are excited, we have 6 girls and 2 boys, setup a small tent in the lawn. My daughter is too young to be invovled, she felt into sleep finally :-)

High Speed Wireless

There is an article reviewed three different high speed wireless standards,

• WiGig
• WHDI
• SiBEAM

WiGig works at 60-gigaherz wireless spectrum, creates a 10-meter range with transmit speed up to 7 gigabits per second, which is almost 11 times of 802.11n speed (600 megabits per second). WHDI puts more weight on multimedia content delivery, especially for high definition video, it uses 5 gigaherz spectrum with throughput up to 3 gigabits per second, with a range of 100 meters. SiBEAM also uses 60-gigaherz spectrum and provides multi gigabits/second capability, makes it a strong candidator for replacing existing cables in your home.

Back to video, all above standards requires video be digitized before being transmitted over the wireless link. Well, there is another standard called HDcctv, which aims to transmit high definition (720p, 1080p) video over coaxial cable without digitization and packetization, the throughput is up to 3Gbps. Unfortunately, HDcctv also has two competitors, PSIA and ONVIF.
Let's see who will become dominant standards for streaming high definition digital video and analog video!

iPad

iPad was first on sale on Apr 3, to my knowledge, it is not just an ipod touch with big screen. It enables many rich media applications which are not optimized in small screen device like iphone. This version supports wi-fi and bluetooth, and next version will support 3G network. It is a picture frame, a news paper, a movie theater, a skype phone, a game station, ... what ever you named it. I shall buy one and try home dashboard on it. There is one article talks about it from Sina

Home dashboard

I was thinking a board with full customized capbility, with a 9 inch LCD, you may drag and drop pre-built widget such as weather, stock, transportation, sports, news into the display area, the device will deliver the information timely; It shall be able to download and playback the pictures/videos in your camera or camcorder so that you don't need to connect the camera to the computer manully; more over, it can connect to your web/security camera, display who is in your front door. Finally, the device is able to be powered by a battery like a cell phone.

In one word, home dashboard brings various convenience to your daily life and makes your home looks modern. The question is how much you will pay for the device?

Bonjour 2010

There is one story in slashdot, said one guy boosts the mobile broadband signal with a kitchen saucepan, which is a very cheap and almost always available trick to everyone. Unfortunately, I am not able to open the video link in youtube due to GFW. Well, as 2010's is knocking at the door, I hope everyone has a big dream come to true in the next year and there will be better technologies for the world.

A Green TV

Today, I was working at home. During lunch time, I opened my TV set, all goes well, after two minutes, TV screen turns off automatically, while audio is still on, just like a radio. This has occurred couple of times, until today an idea comes out of my mind. Will it be a very nice feature if the TV can automatically turn off the video display but keep the audio on when it detects there is no audience. I call it green TV as it can save a lot power if you just want to "listen to" the TV or you are busy with a phone call or simply left home and forgot turn off the TV. The technology behind is not complex, what I suggested is adding a smart camera module inside the TV and with certain intelligent video/image alogrithm, the camera can judge if there is person watching the TV or not, and pass the information to screen controller for making decision. Within this camera, we even can implement more sophiscated algorithms to dectec human body's gesture, e.g., wave hand vertically to switch channel, wave hand horizontally to change speaker volume etc,. Not only we are watching TV, TV is watching us as well. A lot of innovations can burst out! I bet TV set is another wonderful battlefield in the next few years.

HD Video Transmitter and Receiver

Recently, I am helping Sam to seek an local parterner, who can make HD video transmitter and receiver, as wll as HD video recorder. The system architecture is HD Camera + HD video transmitter + I talked to my university supervisor Professor Chen, whose expertise in video indurstrial is well established. And his team developed TI DaVinci-HD based video recorder for multiple companies. Professor's concerns is the volume and price

Pending Ideas

There are couple of ideas keep coming back to my mind. I don't expect to turn all of them into successful products, I do want to put significant amount of my effort to make some of those ideas happen. I herein archive them -

• Smart Board - digital ink with storage capability, replace conventional whiteboard
• Portable patient monitor - low cost, easy operation personal medical equipment
• Foetus ECG monitor - low cost, easy operation, accurate machine for family use
  
• P2P TV - embed peer to peer (BitTorrent, eMule) capability into home TV Set
• Infant feeding chair - a special chair to release parent's hands when feeding the baby
• Run errand - business model, help customer to handle personal affairs, e.g., retrieve visa
• Thinkgeek - business model, sell very special but interesting elecrical equipment
• Internal trading - sell bamboo derivates, e.g., foodstuff, crafts
• Wedding helper - business model, new couple list the gifts they want in our website, friends and relatives pick up what they like to offer, we deliver goods
• ...
  

personal pension and medical insurance

Today I went to a government department to retrieve a debit card, which I can use to deposit money as my personal pension and medical insurance as the company does not take care them for its employees. I need to deposit 869RMB each month, which is 26% of Shanghai average salary. Among 869RMB, 68% goes to personal pension and 32% goes to medical insurance. I need to deposit moeny before 10th or 19th of each month.

HUAWEI EC169 3G Adapter

Last week, my friends Weiming gave me a HUAWEI EC169 3G (cdma2000) adapter for a trial. It is very nifty, looks just like a USB thumb drive. I plugged it into one of Dell D630's USB interface, Ubuntu starts to recognize it and configure it without any manual intervention. Soon Ubntu reports there is one mobile connection available, by clicking the connection, one configuration windows appears, simply typed in service provider name "China Telcom", it connected to the network. I saw a "ppp0" connection has been setup by issuing the command "ifconfig". Connection speed is not bad, download speed is 480Kbps to a local server. Overall, this is a very good product and Ubuntu is also excellent at supporting this device!

Google spreadsheets was blocked

I was not able to access my online excel sheets hosted in spreadsheets.google.com, initially I didn't realized that it was blocked by GFW, according to most of articles posted in all kinds of forums, I added below contents into c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

• 64.233.189.101 writely-china.l.google.com
• 74.125.127.100 writely.google.com
• 209.85.225.101 docs.google.com
• 74.125.127.139 spreadsheets.google.com

But it doesn't work either. What I can do is to start Tor and add *spreadsheets.google.com/* into FoxyProxy whitelist, finally it works

Hacking your neighbour's wireless bandwidth

To save cost, we decided not to apply ADSL link from China Telcom or Unicom, instead we contact a gentleman, who provide a wireless solution at a very attractive price. Yesterday, he came to our office, bringing a high power wireless adapter (Realtek chipset), after installing the driver, I can search active wireless AP in the circle of 1.5KM radius around the building according to him. The second step is to crack the password, unfortunately, he can only crack the link encrypted in WEP. By booting the machine from Back Track 3 live CD, and running a program called spoonwep, we successfully cracked two AP password. The first one SSID is guiguan, password is 35363332313137383131313131, the other one SSID is zhenya, password is 6650324356. I know there is way to crack WPA-PSK link also but I won't spend time on it. There is one article talks more details: http://www.laha.cn/2009/06/11/bt3-spoonwep-handbook-pdf.html/comment-page-1/

A way to access picasaweb

Well, Great Fire Wall caused trouble again. Picasa web was blocked, I tried FoxyProxy+Tor, doesn't work at all. Fortunately Google search engine still works, find a very interesting solution posted by "ylyner" on Jul 28. Edit "C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts", add in below lines:
#picasaweb.google.com
203.208.39.104 lh1.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh2.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh3.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh4.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh5.ggpht.com
203.208.39.104 lh6.ggpht.com
You are now connected to your web photoes. Please try mine