Friday, 31 December 2010

Memo of 2010

2010年的元旦在哈尔滨度过,那是我迄今领略过最痛苦的寒冷,当然,是肉体上的。那里四处都冒着蒸汽,很多地方都结冰,人们穿着厚厚的深色衣服,出租车司机会在半路停下拼车。

春节去了西藏。从那里我开始认真思考旅行这件事的意义。之后我常常和人提起青藏线格尔木到拉萨那一段的风景,因为那确是我见过最美的地方。“西藏最有魅力的是藏族人”,我不同意赵嘉老师关于摄影的很多观点,但他对西藏的这句描述我很赞同。

三月中旬从百度离职。关于百度,舆论有很多负面的评价。就我看到的而言,对于员工来讲,百度是一个开放,公平的公司,能者居上,勤奋和才华在这里会得到奖励。离职是因为我不喜欢这份工作对生活的影响,且有太多的事情想尝试。

四,五月份开始做化妆品零售,做过很多努力但终于失败。这件事情中,我明白世界上有很多人的不靠谱程度超过了自己的想象,要极力避免这类人成为自己的合作伙伴。

六月份去了甘肃和青海。我很喜欢甘肃,空气新鲜,水果甜美,到处是大气的风光。在西宁丢了钱包,包括所有的银行卡和身份证。那是我在旅行中遇到的最大困难。当时身上只剩几十元现金,在机场有个姐姐借了我1000元,做火车回的北京。中途还去西安吃了肉夹馍。

八月和九月在干两件事情。一是做网站,目的是学习下技术顺便看看能不能赚钱。二是整理照片参加摄影比赛,想看看靠奖金能不能生活。在我的努力中,这两种赚钱方式都很失败。

之后去了内蒙古东部和大兴安岭。季节赶得不好,正是青黄不接的时候。这次旅行之后,我开始对salsa失去兴趣。后来我想,最重要的原因是跳舞的时候感受不到和舞伴间的交流,让我不安惶恐。跳舞和做爱在这里很相似,情感交流是一个最基本的条件。

整个十月都在忙Google的面试。面试出乎意料的简单,自认为面的很好,自以为十拿九稳,都开始考虑入职后用mac还是thinkpad了,结果HR电话告诉我她们很sorry。从此我深切地体会到,再有把握的事,也得给自己留后路。

至此,2010年已经背到极点,人品基本没浪费而且攒了不少。带着被Google据掉的深重苦恼,我在十一月中旬开始了这一年最长的一次旅行:西南环线。从北京到银川,之后到西宁,坐火车进藏,从拉萨开始走川藏线,经过梅里雪山到丽江,从昆明到桂林,之后回北京。用了将近一个月时间。川藏线很艰苦,有时候要用一天时间才能找到车。常常满怀期待地到一个地方却发现不过如此,而不经意间倒常常遇见特别的精彩。想想人生也是如此。凡事按照自己的想法认真去做就是了,虽然这些努力很可能和结果无关。无论如何,安心接受事实就好了。这么说不是因为看得开,而是未来还有很长。任何结果都是一时的风景,前途一定有更好的地方等着被发现,只要一直向前走。

十二月开始了全年最靠谱的项目。非常感谢很多朋友长久以来的支持和信任,没有这些帮助,我的自由职业者生活是无法实现的。未来一定会有很多的困难,我所能做的只有认真去面对。

总的来说,这是不顺利的一年,希望人品没白攒。事业上大致如上,持续的阴暗后有了一点好转的迹象。最重要的经验是,人脉非常重要。主要的信息和机会,都是通过面对面的交流获得的,互联网,个人能力等等都是次要的。感情方面完全狗血。我很怀念校园时代,大把大把的漂亮女孩,她们笑容清浅聪明有趣。毕业后认识的异性,往往礼貌周全却只想敬而远之,这还算是比较好的。

人生好像一场旅行,一时的欢乐和痛苦都很肤浅,因为路途会继续延伸,眼前的这些无论好坏,终将一去不返并成为记忆。

Thursday, 12 August 2010

snippet 2010.08.12


1. Refined messpic's blog. Turns out scrollHeight doesn't work for Chrome. clientHeight is good for both FF and Chrome. Hopefully IE7 will support it.

2. Retouched a photo yesterday.

3. Start to use SVN in Google code to manage my source code. It's after I lost some of them when writing to NTFS from my linux box. Lost a day's work....

Wednesday, 11 August 2010

daily snippet 2010.08.11

1. Get the blog of messpic.com ready.
I wrote blog in blog.sina.com.cn and display the posts in messpic.com. There's a problem. Sina has a anti-hotlinking facility. After some research, I find it's based on HTTP request's Referer header of each tag. Only unset referer of erferers from inside Sina will be served. I hacked it via proxy. One of my appengine's URL is appended to each of the post's 's src attribute. The appengine I request each original URL using urlfetch. By default urlfetch's http request doesn't set Referer header, so the images will be returned.

Saturday, 7 August 2010

Things need to complete before choosing whether get a job.

1. Finish the SNS project. At least integrated four sites: renren, kaixin, qzone and MSN.

2. Finish the fight-training.

3. Setup the photo studio.

If all has been done and both project won't get profitable. I may consider getting a job. But not in big corp, not as Eng.

Friday, 6 August 2010

daily snippet 2010.08.07

messpic.com is ready for release. Don't support IE6 though.


Thursday, 5 August 2010

daily snippet 2010.08.05

1. Investigate a little bit about Javascript's closure. MDC's explanation is the best. Some nerd wrote a very geeky one. It's highly technical and hard to understand.

2. Optimized the photo display in main page of messpic.com

3. Get my ID card back making fake ones.

Monday, 2 August 2010

daily snippet 2010.08.02-2010.08.03

1. Build my portfilio. Would deploy in this week, without blog.

2. A very good way to create water color paint in PS.

3. When using PS's batch function, it's better the path doesn't contain non-English characters. In my case, PS CS5 in Windows XP will complain the directory don't exist if the path has Chinese character.

Tuesday, 27 July 2010

daily snippet 2010.07.27

1. Fix the work station. It can't fire up monitor. Turn out that the vedio card is broken. The vendor just give me a new one.

2. Learned a cool PS technique: create realistic water surface in PS. Below is my homework.
3. Watched Toy Story 3. It's good but not as the comments.


Monday, 26 July 2010

snippet 2010.07.26

Investigate how to build a portfolio. Learned several PS tips.

1. SimpleView is a flash-based web portfolio. It can be embedded into HTML easily.

2. A guy invented a way to make ordinary photo look like infrared photography.

3. A unique way to make skin smooth while retain texture.

4. Subject extraction and fine-tuning with mask.

Tuesday, 22 June 2010

Programmatically log on to a website using GAE(Google Appengine)

In GAE, urllib2.urlopen() series methods eventually call GAE's urlfetch() to do the job. At the time this post is written, there's no way to let Urlfetch understand cookie.

After some time, I found a solution here. It worked fine by far. Maybe some day I'll improve his class to some extent. My next app will heavily use this function.

Monday, 14 June 2010

How I bind custom domain name for GAE(in China mainland)

This is the third day spent on binding my custom domain to my app. I'm exausted and want to record the path I've gone. According to Google's manual page, this task should be very easy, which is true, for users OUTSIDE of PRC of course.

1. I tried as Google's official method, namely adding a CNAME to ghs.google.com from my domain admin tool and other stuff. This doesn't work for people in China because their goverment has blocked virtually of IPs of ghs.google.com.

2. After some googling I found loads of pages wrote by Chinese guys tring to solve this problem. They simply add A record pointing directly to one of the IP of ghs.google.com which was not blocked by the GOV. This is bad since using ghs.google.com is for load-balancing. Actually, this method won't even work since all IPs were blocked.

3. I tried DNS forwarding. Failed because no DNS server in China provide URL forwarding service and yahoo.com's forwarding service is blocked by GOV.

4. I figured maybe I'll have to use a third-party host to redirct for me, via the famouse .htaccess config. So I started searching for web hosting service. There are bunchs claiming to provide free web hosting. None of them function after the long registeration process. In fact, they share similar signing up UI and even identical tone when persviding you to their paid service. I spent more than one whole day registering various 'free' web hosting sites and almost want to kill myself in the end. The case is better in China, first there's no free providers, and the charging ones need some lisence from GOV. We are so living in a free country here!

5. Finally I found a free DNS forwarding service that is not blocked by our dear old GFW. I can't reveal its name in case our human rights activists will use it too much and bring GFW to shut it down. Yes, it worked.

I must say googling all day is not much fun and made me throw up. All the tools I used building the app is free, but using them in China need us to pay extra labor. Thanks to this great goverment.