Phew, just to celebrate a fruitful day of working, I created two pictures of Ashley. From a photo.

Here they are:

Original

Line Art

Instead of becoming a professor, I should be an artist, right?

Posters on the wall can make a big difference to the look of the house. I used to pay $20-30 at the MIT Bookstore, and the Harvard/MIT COOP to buy the posters. The problem with these pre-made posters (in addition to being very expensive) is that you may not always find a suitable picture for your wall.

Sometimes, I just want to put my own pictures on the wall, but in poster-size. Theoretically, it is not hard, I can just do some simple calculations, and do it in Photoshop. But it is still a cost, and as a result, I never did that.

I found this website http://www.blockposters.com/  that helps you to do it in 3 easy steps: upload, select how many pages you want it be, download a pdf file and print.

The drawback of this service is that the maximum size of the picture is limited to be 1MB, too small if I want to create a big wall paper. Hmm.. Maybe they can do something in the future…

There is an interesting story in New York Times yesterday: The mayor of New York City announced that a “Congestion Price” will be charged during peak hours on the most congested roads in NY.

From NYT: The basic idea behind congestion pricing is simple: make motorists pay to use the busiest streets. Under the Mayor’s proposal, an invisible line would be drawn around Manhattan from Eighty-sixth Street south to the Battery. Vehicles crossing this line on weekdays between 6 A.M. and 6 P.M. would be charged a fee—eight dollars for cars, twenty-one dollars for trucks. (Those travelling only within the congestion zone would pay half price, while taxis and livery cabs would be exempt.) The fees would be assessed electronically and could be paid either with a toll pass or over the phone or the Internet.

This seems a natural response to the problem of congestion: if you really need to use that street, that means you have something important to do, and potentially would rather pay more than other people to get a less congested street. However, look at many other congested places: Disney Land, Ski resorts, amusement parks, Movie theaters on the first day of blogbuster movie release. It seems that fixed price is a pretty standard practice. Why these places do not increase the price in peak season?

I went to watch Spider-Man 3 this Monday, in the whole cinema there were only a few people. So it felt like I had the movie in my living room, giving me the full freedom and preventing me from exposure to the germs in public areas… Should they increase the price or decrease the price on Monday? On one hand, I had a much better movie-going experience than people who went just one day before. I’d rather pay twice the price to enjoy this experience. Yet they did not over charge me. On the other hand, they can lower the price to attract more people to go on Mondays. Yet they did not lower the price. Maybe, these two effects can cancel out! That is: they do not need to lower the price to attract people, because people expected a better experience, and the people I saw on Monday already took this into consideration.

I bought a Maxtor Shared Storage Plus external hard drive.

The installation is simple, you just connect it to the network, and you can find it when you install the driver.

There is a small CPU inside the box, and it supports simple Web Server, file sharing capabilities. So I was thinking maybe I can get it to do more things, like mysql, php, etc. Then it will be really working as a linux server. Turned out that someone has worked this out at http://openmss.org

OpenMSS is a replacement firmware for the Maxtor Shared Storage. Currently it’s a modified version of the original firmware which includes:

* The same as the original firmware.
* opt directory pointed to your harddrive for local system files.
* ipkg tool to install your own packages.
* Telnet enabled by default (can easly be disabled and replaced by ssh).

Current experimental packages on ipkg server:

busybox_1.0-8_mipsel.ipk
ctorrent_1.3.4-dnh1-1_mipsel.ipk
dropbear_0.46-4_mipsel.ipk
hddtemp_0.3-beta14_mipsel.ipk
kissd_0.12-1_mipsel.ipk
kissd_0.9-1_mipsel.ipk
lsof_4.75-1_mipsel.ipk
ncftp_3.1.8-1_mipsel.ipk
noip_2.1.1-1_mipsel.ipk
rsync_2.6.6_mipsel.ipk
strace_4.5.11-1_mipsel.ipk
unrar_3.51-1_mipsel.ipk
vsftpd_2.0.3-2_mipsel.ipk

In the discussion forum, there is one how-to to explain how to install MySQL, PHP, HTTP.