Those nice URLs that used to search the iTunes Music Store now return something much less helpful:

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在 - Zai4 - At, In, Exist, In Process

孟修在不在? - Meng4 Xiu1 Zai4 Bu4 Zai4? - Is Jenny there?

Waxy.org has a comprehensive-looking list of sites that are covering E3.

Sony will release a handheld game system!

North Korea’s military fired a laser in March at two U.S. Army helicopters patrolling the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in what U.S. officials call a provocative action, The Washington Times has learned.

They think it wasn’t just a targeting laser, but an actual laser weapon they bought from China. Yes, there really is something called the ZM-87 Portable Laser Disturber.

More on laser weapons.

彩 - Cai3 - Bright Colors

彩虹 - Cai3 Hong2 - Rainbow

Today’s word of the day features SARS Soda. Don’t miss it!

Our conclusion: It’s SARS-tastic!

沙 - Sha1 - Sand

沙 is also used in the name of a very popular soda in Taiwan, 沙士 - Sha1 Shi4. It’s a sarsparilla soda made by Hey Song. Unfortunately for them, sometimes SARS the disease is written in Chinese as 沙士. This is not helping their sales.

In related news, a popular local soft drink called Sars (沙士) has raised a few eyebrows following the outbreak of the disease.

Sars, a shortened version of its major ingredient, sarsaparilla, has been the flagship drink of the Hey Song Co since the 1940s.

It tastes like root beer and is popular because many people believe sarsaparilla lowers body temperatures and prevent sore throats or other ailments.

Still, some consumers feel a little uneasy that the soft drink bears the same name as the syndrome, said Chou Shiao-ping (周小萍), Hey Song’s spokeswoman.

“There might be some association with the illness,” she said.

Jenny confirms that they used to drink this stuff (with some salt added) to cure sore throats. Well, what do you know. Today we were in our local asian grocery store, on the way to see my parents, and there it was: The SARS soda!

Our opinions of the drink:

Me - It’s fine. Funny tasting Root Beer.
Dad - Tastes awful. Can’t stand it. Mediciney.
Jenny - Great! Brings back nice memories of childhood.
Ma - Smelled it only. No opinion.

Big things are afoot in the world of RSS this weekend. The most influential people in RSS and weblog space are trying to get together and define a new standard for “RSS for Weblogs” before some big company shows up and does it for them. Follow the numbered links towards the bottom of this post at dive into mark to watch the discussion play out.

If a consensus does emerge, I’ll generate a template for b2 that implements it.

The Minutillo.com Zeitgeist is now updated daily.

I really like the color scheme of this site.

New family pictures at M.info.

媽 - Ma1 - Ma (Mother)

The more formal way to say Mother is 母親 - Mu3 Qin1. And Mother’s Day is 母親節 - Mu3 Qin1 Jie2 - Mother Holiday.

乒 - Ping1 - Ping (the sound)

And would you believe 乓 - Pong1 - Pong. Yes, it’s true. And the game is really called 乒乓 - Ping Pong! Well, actually 乒乓球 - Ping1 Pong1 Qiu2 - Ping Pong Ball.

It’s not clear if 乒 also means ping in the submarine or Internet sense.

That last link comes from Mike Muuss’s site. He was the original author of ping! Says Mike:

Unlike every other document on the Web, this page is in final form and completely finished. *grin*

Q&A at java.sun.com on Java 1.5, also known as TIGER. It should βeta at the end of this year.

Update: Maybe JSR-166 will be included too? It is a package of new “medium-level” tools for concurrent programming, for when wait() and notify() are just too primitive. Looks cool.

Neal Stephenson’s next, the prequel to Cryptonomicon, is finally coming out. Quicksilver seemed to take almost as long as A New Kind of Science did. Let’s hope it’s better.

Speculation. Reality.

找 - Zhao3 - Search, Seek, Find

Now you can 找 for more words and definitions. Try typing English words, or Pinyin (like Zhao3), or Chinese characters if you have the technology. If not, cut and paste should work.

DAAP is the protocol iTunes 4 uses for music sharing. Also apparently Nat Torkington has about half of Napster implemented, but not going to release the code just yet.

The Office of Special Plans, AKA the Cabal, is now in charge of intelligence.

See, the problem with old-fashioned intelligence operations like the CIA is that they look at the evidence first, and draw conclusions later. This method is slow and produces unpredictable results. OSP has a new, streamlined process: Presuppose your conclusions! Then find evidence to back them up.

(found at This Modern World)

Member when I asked the lazyweb for a breakdown of the popularity of weblog tools?

Ask and you shall receive. And here’s why he’s doing it.

喜 - Xi3 - Happiness, Delight, Like

A 喜事 - Xi3 Shi4 - Happy Affair is a happy occasion, like a wedding, or a birth, or a pregnancy…

This is also used commonly as 喜歡 - Xi3 Huan5 - To Like. 我喜歡蟲 means I like bugs.

Two of these next to each other is 囍 - Xi3 - Double Happiness, Marital Bliss. You’ll see this character a lot at a Chinese wedding.

Pudge says just use curl.

Where is Raed ?

This article about Science Applications International Corp. makes them sound spooky and very cool.

Adding to SAIC’s covert aura, Beyster has hired an unusual number of former spies, law enforcement chiefs, and secret warriors. Some 5,000 employees — roughly one-seventh of the workforce — have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest arrays of top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country. “We are a stealth company,” says Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer. “We’re everywhere, but almost never seen.”

They get extra cool points in my book because their name makes me think of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.

運 - Yun4 - Luck, Fate, Use

We need 好運 - Hao3 Yun4 - Good Luck.

I got my report card! A!

And we made an offer on a house. Today’s experiment…?

Microsoft has launched a web spider. I was visited on May 29th, it requested robots.txt like a good spider and then hit some random set of pages across this server. It also made lots of totally bogus requests to things like http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/http. It seemed to generate more 404s than actual valid requests.

It came from 131.107.163.47 and its user agent was MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler (How's my crawling? mailto:newbiecrawler@hotmail.com).

They’ve been keeping track of this spider for a while at Webmaster World. I guess it used to ignore robots.txt, and triggered some of their tricky spider traps.

Microsoft already has search at MSN but the actual results are outsourced. Recently they said they want to have their own search engine. Some product manager there said he thought it shouldn’t be too hard to make one better than Google. Maybe this is the beginning of that. Personally, I think they might consider fixing the search engine at MSDN as a warm-up problem first.

2300 now

買 - Mai3 - Buy

This is a perfect example of why I hate tones. 買 is buy, pronounced Mai3. But 賣 is sell, pronounced Mai4!

Buy, Sell!
買, 賣!
Mai3, Mai4!

They even look the same! IT’S HOPELESS!!

(English is not blameless though. Can and can’t sound almost identical when said mid sentence. Try it. Say “I can do it.” and “I can’t do it.” quickly.)

There are more pictures of Alexis, featured in today’s Word of the Day, at Minutillo.info.

阿 - A1 - Prefix used before names

One of the ways you use 阿 is to say 阿姨 - A1 Yi2 - Aunt (Maternal).

Jenny is the youngest among her sisters so their kids should really call her 小阿姨 - Xiao3 A1 Yi2 - Little Aunt. But, by the vagaries of Chinese naming, there’s lots and lots of people who end up with that same title. Jenny, of course, is special, so she requires a special name. She forces the children to call her 好阿姨 - Hao3 A1 Yi2 - Good Aunt. Mostly she lives up to it.

Today, this one:

managed to call her 好阿姨 for the first time. I told her she can either call me 姨丈 - Yi2 Zhang4 - Husband of Maternal Aunt (who is younger than your mother!) or Uncle Steve. She said “Uhn See?” which I accepted.

逛 - Guang1 - Stroll

We had a nice 逛 along the greenway today.

My first vacation with Jenny was to the White Mountains. We stayed in a tiny hotel in Littleton. We saw the Old Man of the Mountain then, and we’ve always liked him. Now the Old Man is gone.

想 - Xiang3 - Think, Think Of, Miss, Want To

I found this graphic on a Chinese MP3 site that you can somehow download and use on your cell phone:

It says “Thinking of you…”

Some guy was searching for the oldest running application he could find. His results were fairly interesting. The ensuing discussion at Slashdot was even better, they were able to come up with all sorts of ancient code, crazy anecdotes and wisecracks, like this gem:

My girlfriend’s mom wrote some of the first conversions of actuarial tables to mainframe, from books, in the 1950s and 1960s (all done w/ punch cards and machine language, of course) at a life insurance company in Mass. The company was still running a lot of her orgininal code when she retired a couple of years ago.

This is obviously an apocryphal story.

Who can spot the inconsistancy that gives this fakery away?

Exactly.

We all know /.’ers don’t have girlfriends.

Zing! Anyway, towards the bottom was this comment:

The oldest commercial application, i.e. one sold as a software product, is SyncSort. SyncSort was one of the very first commercial third-party software applications. It was also the first to be patented. SyncSort, Inc. was formed in 1969.

SyncSort was the first useful sort program to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies). This was a huge win for mainframe shops with their big tape-to-tape sort jobs. That’s what all those spinning tape reels were doing on early computers. SyncSort cut days off some batch jobs.

I think to myself, “How quaint, in the early days of computing, just a simple sort algorithm was a product! My how things have changed, how far we’ve come, etc, etc.” But then I clicked through to the site, and was HORRIFIED. The thing is still for sale!

SyncSort provides a plug-in replacement capability for the UNIX system sort, the Merant Micro Focus COBOL sort, the Software AG NATURAL sort, the SAS sort, and the IBM DB2 LOAD sort.

SyncSort performs a sort, merge, copy, or join application:

* A sort application reads records from the source, reorders them according to the specified sort keys, and writes them to the target.
* A merge application reads presorted records from one or more source files, merges them according to the specified merge keys, and writes them to a single target file.
* A copy application reads records from the source and writes them to the target without changing the order of the records.
* A join application reads records from two sources, joins each record from one source with zero or more records from the other source according to the specified join type and join key, and writes the new joined records to the target.

So basically it’s a plug in replacement for sort, uniq, cut and paste. Amazing.

I want one!

PS. You just have to love this performance chart:

2200 pulse-pounding mAh!