DVD authoring

A friend asked me how to burn his grand daughter’s video to a dvd disk. I have done something like that using windows couple years ago. As I moved to Ubuntu recently, I was annoyed to found it quite complicated. I tried a couple of ways. Eventually my solution is the following: One major difficulty…

Useful Tools

Just found a list of good tools suggested in Nuit Blanche. The list may be a bit dated but many of the tools are still very useful.

Hong Kong

It almost concludes my short trip back to Hong Kong. Asia is blooming. Nothing can hide this fact. To my surprise, the cost of living in Hong Kong even excluding housing is on par with the US now. Food is no longer cheap. I still have the impression that going out lunch is less expensive…

Another GPS stolen

I went to the post office near 61st and Yale just now for 15 minutes and my GPS got stolen. If my students can be that quick and effective, I’d be really impressed. This was my second GPS got stolen in less than 1 year. My first one got stolen just less than 1 week…

chkdsk is evil

As title. I erased everything in my drive with chkdsk /r. After frequent trouble with Cygwin, I finally decided to give Ubuntu a try. My drive had 3 logical partitions. I have one with WinXp 64, one with WinXp and the last one without any OS. I tried to install ubuntu in the third partition….

The sixth day after power outage

Just passed the fifth night without power, it is getting very tiring. I only come back home to sleep and staying in office the whole day. I am kind of lucky that still haven’t got sick yet. But I am not so sure if this continues for another week. I couldn’t sleep well at all…

A not so rigorous introduction to finite fields

Field is meant to extend the most basic set of mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division beyond real number. As subtraction and division are really inverse operations of addition and multiplication, we actually only need to consider the latter two. The set of all real numbers are closed under addition and multiplication. In the…

The second day without power

It is Tuesday night. I have never gone through a power outage lasting that long. According to the news, electricity can take a week or more to be fully restored. About one third here has no power in Tulsa. There is no traffic light in many roads, even the bigger one. I was quite a…

About method of types

Question: I was confused on the proof of Theorem 11.1.3 in yersterday’s class. And I am still confused after review the book and your notes many many times. I think that one of key points of Theorem 11.1.3 is that, under any source distribution $latex Q(x)$, the upper bound and the lower bound is true…