Reading Time: < 1 minute Saw it at dealsea. This is a good deal, if one does not plan to travel Southwest using the points soon. They offer wide variety of giftcards (not limited to Amazon). I got some Wal-mart gift cards instead, per my wife’s suggestion 🙂 (image credit: onlinegiftcardsblog.com)

Reading Time: 2 minutes The following was written more than a year ago… ====== Got opportunity to work on those two technologies recently due to job change. Had some gotchas as I transform from C++, CAD programming to this new program paradigm. Data problem vs. coding error In CAD world, sometimes there is problem with the data (CAD file)

Reading Time: < 1 minute Stanford commencement speech (2005) Macintosh 1984 commercial Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 1983 Apple event My other post on Steve Jobs. Walt Mossberg on Steve Jobs.

Reading Time: < 1 minute (Update 10-01-2011) We went to Youyou’s school this morning for “Parents work day”, basically they have some small playground improvement projects (painting, making a new climber), and in the lunch time, we have a BBQ and potluck. The ethnic diversity of the students/parents background surprised me a bit, reminded of Rolla (a lot of Indian

Reading Time: < 1 minute Dirty flag on a HTML form is much trickier than I thought, that is, it is tricker when I started to programming for dirty flag. Saw this javascript snippet. It works great except in my case, I was generating dynamic drop down (selection menu), and in a lot of cases it behaves as opposite to

Reading Time: 2 minutes I felt it’s easier to make money from those offers from writing iPhone, iPad and iOS apps. At least this is true for me so far. Another plus side people may not pay attention is the “no tax” benefit of the bonus miles/points. Also keep in mind if one needs to apply for home loan

Reading Time: < 1 minute It looks like it. Obviously my observation could be quite limited. But here is the background, in the good old days, Apple ranks app mostly by the download number in a given amount of time, and the ratings/reviews. So basically the popular the app, the higher the rank. This process could reinforce itself. Apple realized

Reading Time: 2 minutes (Update 06-24-11) Last night I found “More iPhone 3 development” (by Dave mark and Jeff Lamarche) chapter 14 deveoted full chapter to multithread including timer. (Original) As of iOS 4, Apple made blocks and Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) available. Previously it was available on Mac. Some pre-requisite or recommend readings WWDC 2010 video session 206:

Reading Time: 2 minutes I got those questions from a reader: Why there is no national 529 plan? Looking at some states plan, it’s pretty much mutual funds like 401k, the investment return is like S&P? Why bother (consider S&P return is so low)? I am not expert on this, I think why each state has a plan is

Reading Time: 3 minutes (Update 05-10-2014) I saw the IPO of China based Cheetah Mobile in the news, not too impressed or confident of their apps though, although I know they make money. Cheetah was a subsidiary of Kingsoft (and King still has a big stake after IPO). I also noticed the WSJ article about China app market. I