What would you do when you …?

Do you often hear expressions such as

• "What would you do when you go to college?"
  
• "What would you do when you work?"
  
• "What would you do when you have a boy/girlfriend?"
  
• "What would you do when you serve in the military?"
  
• "What would you do when you are married?"

? Many people use this kind of expression to persuade another to change some current habits. Why do I have to make daily decisions now based on some future scenario? If my options are fewer in the future, I will adapt then. Why can't I utilize the larger number of options that I have now? This reminds me of someone I knew when I lived in a dorm. He doesn't want to clean up the room because "rich people hire housekeepers to do the clean up". The problem was he did not have any housekeeper at the time. If you persuade me with reasons such as health, hygiene, knowledge, frugality, or any the good morals, I'm willing to listen. But "What would you do when you …?" is not a convincing argument.

SNG unit report

When you watch news on Taiwanese TV channels, do you often hear "John Du, SGN (satellite news gathering) unit report" or "Jane Du satellite report from Washington"? What I'm going to discuss is not the content of news because everyone knows just how bad it is. I'd like to discuss something technical, something applicable everywhere in the world.

As an audience, I don't care how the pictures are transmitted to my TV. What I care about are location and time. They usually show the location, although the precision is not completely satisfactory. Time is just as important as location. Since news is called "news", then they have the duty of showing how new the news is. Some SNG pictures are live, and then get recycled during the next hour, and over and over again. So what if they tell me it's SNG? I'd rather see time stamps that include full date and with the precision of minute. This is a very simple technology, yet it provides vital information. Many news reports involve A saying something, then B responding to A, and then C saying something. In this case, the ordering is very important. In addition, news shown in late night or early morning are usually rerun. And the news may include video recorded even earlier, possibly ranged from 4 to 20 hours ago. At this time, they must show two time stamps, anchor's time and the video's time. Furthermore, people who watch news at this time during the day usually don't have the sense of time. Showing time stamps help these people come to sense. And pictures captured in another time zone must include local time and the time in major broadcasting area.

Some people might think nobody would care about this, except geeks like me. But do you not see reporters' names included in news articles, printed and televised alike? Most of these people are not famous. Why? This is a form of responsible journalism. Showing time stamps is also a form of responsible journalism, as a proof of not falsifying the sequence of events, or misleading the audience.

Example

Mumbai, India
Picture in local time	5:30 PM 2/25/2008
Picture in Taipei time	8:00 PM 2/25/2008
Anchor's time	9:13 PM 2/25/2008
Now	1:13 AM 2/26/2008
(not lotto numbers)

See also (all in Chinese)

• 學校沒有教的新聞學（一）SNG新聞
  「Satellite News Gathering，也有人說是Some News Garbage」
• 娘～～是SNG車啦！
  「垃圾車與SNG車，兩著共通處在於裡頭全都裝的是垃圾」
• 臺灣媒體亂象

Edison Chen sex photo incident — Part 2

Many people have criticized the police for this incident, such as "everyone has seen it. What good is arresting a person or two" or unfair prioritization just because the victims are celebrities. About the first criticism, I have to criticize the criticizer. If spreading the photos in public is illegal, spreading them privately is legal, then the police were merely doing their job. They can go only as far as where the evidence is. The second criticism is understandable, but it's not excusable at the end of the day.

The following is that I have to criticize against the police. They've arrested some John Doe here and there. If spreading these photos publicly is illegal, then the first suspect that should be arrested is the newspaper or magazine that publishes the photos! So what if the important parts are censored, cropped, or covered by text? Selective prioritization is minor; Selective arrestment is no better than a bully!

See also

• Edison Chen sex photo incident — Part 1

Kosovo declaration of independence

If you land here to read about Kosovo's act, then this is not the best place. I apologize in advance. I am no expert of Balkans' politics, but I do know that this event is important enough to be on the headline. It is between 1:19 AM and 3:37 AM on 2/18/2008 in Taipei (6:19 PM to 8:37 PM 2/17 in Kosovo, 12:19 PM to 2:37 PM 2/17 in New York) when I compose this blog post. Let's take a look at the front pages of news media inside and outside Taiwan.

BBC News


Financial Times


People's Daily

科索沃 = Kosovo, 独立 = independence

CNN


Le Monde


Yomiuri Shimbun

コソボ = Kosovo, 独立 = independence

In Taiwan
United Daily News

陳冠希 = Edison Chen

China Times

A political gossip related to the presidential election

Liberty Times

Unregistered helicopter "handcuffed"

Apple Daily

建仔 = 王建民 = Chien-Ming Wang

TVBS

入聯 = to join the UN

SET

An old man (grandpa) spent a night in a night club with no money at all. He had to strip and leave all clothes as collateral.

CTI

Just a "real time" news ticker. No sign of Kosovo.

Eastern Television

陳冠希 = Edison Chen

Era News

Drunk man hit mom

Formosa TV News

錯誤 = error

Edison Chen sex photo incident — Part 1

      Edison Chen
      Cecilia Cheung
      Gillian Chung
      Bobo Chan
      Hong Kong Discuss Forum

The Edison Chen sex photo incident has drawn massive media attention recently. Google Trends shows a huge increase of searches for the parties involved (right). I didn't want to comment on this issue because it is just a gossip by its very nature, a big gossip. But there is one thing I can't stand and must say. Edison Chen and some of the other celebrities have publicly apologize. What is there to apologize? These people are victims of a criminal activity! The person who spreads these images and videos without permission should apologize. If you can tell me how that two (or more) consenting adults taking sex photo is illegal or unethical, I will shut up forever. Chen was also pulled from a new movie as a result of this incident. He is a victim too. Why should anyone take away his employment opportunity? If somebody stole your privacy, and your boss fired you because of it, what would you think?

This makes me remember another thing. A student was raped, and the school expelled the student in the name of "damaging the school's reputation". This is preposterous. These examples expose a distorted belief in this society. That is if a criminal activity involves sex, then the victim is also questionable.

These celebrities don't need to apologize. They have done nothing wrong. They should be angry and condemn. This incident is in the same class as leaked private financial or medical records.

See also

• Edison Chen sex photo incident — Part 2

TWY

I think the translation of the Taiwanese currency should be "yuan", not "dollar". The symbol should be ¥ and not $.

Why is "圓" (yuan) sometimes translated as "dollar" (e.g. Hong Kong dollar), "dollar" translated as "圓" (United States dollar in Chinese)? It is not without reasons. In late 19th century and early 20th century, the world was divided into a handful of monetary regions. The dollar, peso, yuan, won, yen regions can be considered as one because one of such unit was defined as approximately 27 grams of 90% pure silver. These countries gradually became unable to sustain silver standard or gold standard, and abandoned the standards around World War I. But the names of the currency units remained unchanged, for the most part. It was a chaotic period between 1911–1949 in Mainland China in terms of monetary history. Warlords were everywhere, and new banknotes were issued almost every year. When the character "圓" was printed on the front side, sometimes English translation with "yuan" was printed on the back, sometimes with "dollar". Yuan was more frequent than dollar. Therefore, I've proven that 圓 = yuan = dollar.

圓	yuan ↑ ↓dollar

Then why do I still advocate the use of yuan? Right now the currency unit of Mainland China, South Korea, and Japan are all cognates of the character 圓 (yuan). And they are respectively transliterated as "yuan", "won", and "yen", spelled as they are spoken. The fact that Hong Kong's 圓 is translated as dollar is because it was a British colony. However, Macau's 圓 is not translated yuan or dollar. It is "pataca" because pataca is the Portuguese word for peso. Taiwan was never colonized by an English speaking country in modern time. There is no reason to use the word "dollar". So we should use "yuan".


In addition, English has almost never been printed on banknotes since the issuance of the Taiwanese (old) "dollar" in 1946. But the first two series of the new Taiwanese "dollar" after 1949, the vertical series, had English translation with "YUAN" on the back. What else can be more official than banknotes? So my proposal is not without precedent.

If we were to use "yuan", then the symbol should be ¥.

Unfortunately, the ROC government in Taiwan, in recent decades, disregards the precedent of yuan. English documents and web pages use "dollar". Even the folder of the 1999 commemorative banknote for the 50th anniversary of the issuance of the new Taiwanese "dollar/yuan" had the word "dollar". This also exposes the ignorance of standardization in the Taiwanese society.

Taiwanese yuan, TW¥.

Unnecessary redundancy that is not needed

Why is organizing photos a baffling ordeal?

If you know me, you know that I like to take photos. I have two cameras, one of which is compact enough to fit in my pocket so that I can capture rare or interesting things at the spot. I know that people often wonder "when can I get your pictures?". Organizing photos is a demanding task for me. It's not just a simple matter of transferring files from the memory card to the hard drive. There are many other little tasks, and I will explain why

Photos

Exif

JPEG files produced by digital cameras usually contain Exif metadata (data about data). What it records includes a number of things such as time, aperture, shutter speed, orientation, and other camera settings.

Orientation

While taking photos with portrait orientation, Canon cameras still store the photo in landscape orientation, but flip the orientation information in Exif. As a result, not all software recognizes this method of orientation. Photoshop, ACDSee, Firefox, and IE don't recognize Exif orientation. So for maximum compatibility, I have to rotate these photos manually. There are many software that can do this. But most destroy or partially destroy the original Exif information. The only one that does not, at least for Canon-camera-captured photos, is Canon's own ZoomBrowser application.

Timestamp

As I said, Exif includes timestamp. The file system, NTFS in my case, also records timestamps. NTFS records the timestamps in UTC internally, and displays with user's time zone setting. When I change my system's time zone, the timestamps on my file system appear to shift as well. But this is not the case for the timestamps in Exif, as it is part of the file. I leverage this difference to indicate where the photo was taken, at least in what time zone. I make sure that the timestamp in Exif is the local time where the photo was taken, while the NTFS timestamp is in the time zone of my system. But wait, why am I telling you this? How does this impact my organizing photos? Rotating photos changes the NTFS timestamps. So I have to correct the NTFS timestamps after rotation using ACDSee.

Videos

Canon cameras capture videos in Motion JPEG, a compression scheme that doesn't really compress much. Therefore, videos must be recompressed. And my choice of codec is Xvid. Here are the steps that I must perform to convert MJPEG to Xvid.

• Extract the audio (wav file) from the original video
  
• Convert the wav file to mp3
  
• Encode the video with Xvid as the video codec, and the mp3 as audio
  
• Inspect the quality of the new video (watch two files side by side)
  
• Validate that it is indeed encoded with Xvid and mp3
  
• Restore the original time stamp
  
• Delete the old copy and rename the new copy

Publishing

There are thousands of websites that provide photo service. But I'm not satisfied with any of them. The problem? Size and scale. These websites usually shrink the image size. If the size can be preserved, then most likely they limit your upload capacity. If you know me, then you would know that size and completeness is a big deal to me. There are no free online solutions for 9GiB of 8600+ files. What better place is there than my own hard drive? So I used JAlbum to generate HTML and thumbnails, then I host them with Apache. This process is also time consuming (computer time). I'm looking for alternatives.

Text description

People often ask me why I don't add text to the photos. I could, even with the complex process described above. But it's not the action of adding text that takes most of the time. It's the time spent on deciding what to write. If I were to write anything at all, I must look up the right references, provide background stories, and most important of all, write them in both Chinese and English. I tried this with my trip to Paris and England. And it proved to be a time consuming task as well.

Since it is a complicated process, it is best for me to accumulate the photos for a while and do them in batch. I can achieve economies of scale by performing the same tasks repeatedly in a shorter amount of time.

Wikipedia has everything

Test card

Scale of large things

We often hear "project A will cost $X million" or "something will cost $Y billion" on the news. Do we really understand how big these amounts are? Studies show that a group of people would spend a lot of time to decide how to spend a US$3000 budget, and relatively less on a multi million dollar budget. The reason is simple: we know how big US$3000 is. For your convenience, I've compiled a table of large monetary values. While I was doing this, I realized that the number of units sold is also a frequently mentioned figure on media. So without further ado,

Monetary

Source	Date	Thing	US$	TW¥	CN¥
IMF thru Wikipedia	2006	Nominal GDP of the World	48.25 tr.	1559.77 tr.	356.82 tr.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of the U.S.A.	13.19 tr.	426.58 tr.	97.59 tr.
White House	2007	Outlays of the U.S. Federal Government	2.78 tr.	89.85 tr.	20.55 tr.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of the P.R.C.	2.64 tr.	85.50 tr.	19.56 tr.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of France	2.25 tr.	72.81 tr.	16.66 tr.
HM Treasury	2007	U.K. Government expenditure	1.20 tr.	38.70 tr.	8.85 tr.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of the R.O.C.	364.56 b.	11.79 tr.	2.70 tr.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of Singapore	132.16 b.	4.27 tr.	977.42 b.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of Vietnam	61.00 b.	1.97 tr.	451.12 b.
Forbes	2007	Bill Gate's net worth	59.00 b.	1.91 tr.	436.36 b.
Yahoo Finance	2007	Microsoft's revenue	54.07 b.	1.75 tr.	399.90 b.
Directorate-General of Budget, Accouting and Statistics, Executive Yuan	2007	Outlays of the R.O.C. central government	51.46 b.	1.66 tr.	380.62 b.
Yahoo Finance	2007	Microsoft's gross profit	40.43 b.	1.31 tr.	299.02 b.
Yahoo Finance	2007	Amazon's revenue	13.15 b.	425.14 b.	97.26 b.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of Brunei	11.56 b.	373.77 b.	85.51 b.
Apprentice 505	2006	Cruise line industry	10.00 b.	323.30 b.	73.96 b.
NY MTA	2007	Total operating budget of NY MTA	9.72 b.	314.09 b.	71.85 b.
Apprentice 504	2006	Americans spend this much on cereal	6.00 b.	193.98 b.	44.38 b.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of Madagascar	5.50 b.	177.78 b.	40.67 b.
Department of Budget, Accounting, & Statistics, Taipei	2007	Taipei government expenditure	4.39 b.	142.05 b.	32.50 b.
Yahoo Finance	2007	Amazon's gross profit	2.46 b.	79.53 b.	18.19 b.
Washington Metro	2007	Budget of 2007	1.89 b.	61.14 b.	13.99 b.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of Eritrea	1.16 b.	37.50 b.	8.58 b.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of Liberia	614.00 m.	19.85 b.	4.54 b.
Yahoo Movie	1997	Cumm. gross of the movie Titanic	600.79 m.	19.42 b.	4.44 b.
Yahoo Movie	2004	Cumm. gross of the movie Shrek 2	441.23 m.	14.26 b.	3.26 b.
Reuters thru Wikipedia	2007	Official list price of Airbus A380	319.20 m.	10.32 b.	2.36 b.
Taipei MRT	2006	Revenue of Taipei MRT	311.78 m.	10.08 b.	2.31 b.
Yahoo Movie	2003	Cumm. gross of X2: X-Men United	214.95 m.	6.95 b.	1.59 b.
NY MTA	2004	Long Island bus operating budget	100.60 m.	3.25 b.	744.04 m.
Department of RTS, Taipei	1988-2006	Per km cost of high volume lines (Taipei MRT)	89.58 m.	2.90 b.	662.51 m.
IMF	2006	Nominal GDP of Kiribati	70.00 m.	2.26 b.	517.72 m.
Taipei MRT	2006	Pre-tax profit of Taipei MRT	31.55 m.	1.02 b.	233.34 m.

Unit

Source	Start	End	Thing	Unit
ITWorld.com thru Wikipedia	2001/10/25	2006/1/15	Windows XP	400.00 m.
Sony thru Wikipedia	2000/3/4	2007/9/20	PS2 Worldwide	120.00 m.
Wikipedia	2001/10/23	2007/10/15	All iPods	119.00 m.
Sony thru Wikipedia	1994/12/3		PS	102.49 m.
Wikipedia	1983/7/15		NES	61.79 m.
Motorola thru Wikipedia	2004/11/8	2006/7/18	RAZR V3	50.00 m.
Nintendo thru Wikipedia	1990/11/21		SNES	49.00 m.
gamecubicle.com thru Wikipedia	1985/9/13		Super Mario (All-stars excluded)	40.24 m.
GameDaily Biz thru Wikipedia	2000/10/26	2007/9/13	PS2 US	39.10 m.
Nintendo thru Wikipedia	1996/6/23	2005/3/31	Nintendo 64	32.93 m.
Wired thru Wikipedia	1988/10/29		Sega Genesis (Mega Drive)	29.00 m.
Xbox.com thru Wikipedia	2001/11/15	2006/5/10	Xbox	24.00 m.
Nintendo thru Wikipedia	2001/9/14	2007/9/30	GameCube	21.66 m.
ownt.com thru Wikipedia	1988/10/23		Super Mario 3 (All-stars excluded)	18.00 m.
Punch Jump thru Wikipedia	2005/11/22	2007/9/30	Xbox 360 Worldwide	13.40 m.
Nintendo thru Wikipedia	2006/11/19		Wii	13.17 m.
GamePro thru Wikipedia	1998/11/27		Dreamcast	10.60 m.
IGN thru Wikipedia	1998/4/1		StarCraft	9.50 m.
GameDaily Biz thru Wikipedia	2005/11/22	2007/9/13	Xbox 360 US	6.30 m.
Sony thru Wikipedia	2006/11/11	2007/9/30	PS3	5.59 m.

Note: Using the following exchange rates
US$ = TW¥ 32.33
GB£ = US$ 2.03947
US$ = CN¥ 7.396