http://blog.mikezhang.com thoughts of michael xiaoquan zhang professor at hkust Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:12:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en First letter was from our university president, explaining that in light of the recent financial crisis, we have to follow the new budget plan and reduce the salary by 5.4%. Second letter was from my daughter's school, explaining that in light of the recent financial crisis, they have to follow the ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2010/03/01/two-letters-in-one-day I need to convert a bunch of isbn numbers from the 13-digit format to the 10-digit format. Figured out the algorithm, and implemented the following subroutine in PERL.  It should be fairly simple to port it to other languages. sub isbn1310{ my $isbn13=shift; my @isbn13=split(//,$isbn13); my $sum = ($isbn13[3] * 10) + (9 * $isbn13[4]) ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2010/01/28/converting-isbn13-to-isbn10 I have to make some heavy computations these days.  It gives me a chance to compare the computing power of my two computers. On both machines, I have the same version of MySQL.  The program, written in Perl, conducts some complex calculations based on MySQL data. Dell-Mac Skirmish It is interesting to observe ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2010/01/06/computing-power-skirmish Before tweaking MySQL: it used 5% of the CPU and 250MB of the memory. After tweaking, it uses 94.3% of the CPU and 2.33GB of the memory. I could increase the memory use even more if I needed it. :-D http://blog.mikezhang.com/2010/01/05/fully-utilizing-my-computing-power I downloaded an ebook, it contains hundreds of one-page pdf files.  I certainly don't want to upload all of these one-pagers to my Kindle. To concatenate these files, there is no simply and easy way.  Commercial software packages are available from $14.00 to 20Euro. A simply perl hack does the job: Install ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2009/12/28/join-multiple-pdf-files-to-a-single-one-on-mac The most memorable sentence, by the Colonel: "We will fight terror with terror." It sounds so familiar. LOL. If you have watched "Brave Heart"+"The Last of the Mohicans"+"Minority Report", you pretty much miss nothing. Overall, it is still a good movie. http://blog.mikezhang.com/2009/12/24/avatar http://blog.mikezhang.com/2009/12/07/time-is-the-coin-of-your-life Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen (also spelled as Qian Xuesen) passed away yesterday. To me, he is as legendary as John Nash. A movie based on his life would also be highly appropriate named "A Beautiful Mind". Interestingly, both Nash and Tsien were affiliated with MIT.  It was 2008 when I last visited Hang ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2009/11/01/rip-dr-tsien-hsue-shen-qian-xuesen http://blog.mikezhang.com/2009/09/21/sleepy I type my BiBTeX entries carefully, but different journals may have different requirements for capitalizing paper titles. Some would like a plain format, like Some, Author, 2009, "Capitalizing BibTeX titles: A simple tool," Science, 110(1), 1-20. Some Bibtex class files may automatically lowercase all words after the first, so the title looks like: "Capitalizing ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2009/08/26/bibtex-title-capitalization-uppercase-tool