Shot their own feet

Live Mail filtered Microsoft Survey invitation as junk. I lost a teeny-tiny chance to win in a sweepstakes. Oh well… Do we have to take training courses in “how to compose emails in a junk-unlikely style” someday in the future?

on Hamming’s “You and Your Research”

Definitely one of the best talks on how to do a research, especially, good research. He clarified several key points making academic activities a career rather than a living, which are so often neglected when research becomes a systematic complex hardly understood by people within it.

1. Figure out what is important work and what is not, only work on the important problems. The reality is, trivial tasks are not much easier to be accomplished. However, to distinguish and tell the meaning of important things require insight, and hard-thinking.

2. Commitment to the research. Do it with heart and passion. In your mind, there should be no “on duty/off duty” schedule for the research topic, simply concentrate on it. Rewards often come when nobody expects them, particularly not in the regular office hours.

3. Communicate with colleagues, find sparks from within or out of the narrow field of your specialty. Growth is always done on the boundaries more than inside. Learn about new ideas and be inspired.

4. Accumulate more knowledge. 10% more knowledge and you will be 100% more productive! Work a little more overtime when necessary, that worths.

5. Keep the balance between evolutionary skepticism and respect for existing theories. Feel about the right direction and be confident.

Of these points, the first is definitely the most important. Many talented people turn out doing trivial things because they never spare some time and brain to think about what they are doing. So I remind myself, only do the important things.

How far will this fight go?

It’s a pity I now can only edit this site using vpn/proxy tunnels. The filtering system is blocking any access or incoming link from many of my favorite sites, such as blogspot, wikipedia and wordpress.com. There are currently on-going plans for large scale, dynamic proxies to punch the wall, but still the whole thing is weird enough as in today.

On the other hand, ISPs in China are actively preparing to block BitTorrent/eDonkey/eMule traffic, or to charge by volume. The former will inspire ssh-enabled clients like utorrent, the latter will harm regular downloads from traditional methods. Wherever this battle ends, the only group get hurt are those most powerless. Those cannot resist the over-charging and not well-informed to find an alternative way through.

On Bram Cohen’s Talk in EE380@Stanford(050215)

I happened to watch the video through the link provided by Cohen himself on his blog.

In this talk he first talked about performance evaluation of BitTorrent, experimentally. He said simulation should never be considered as a serious approach for his protocol, yes, he depricate it. Then he suggests how a good evaluation should be made. Real nodes and real network, of course, and variety in them. Finally, many, many nodes, the more the better. That is why he joked that the best way is using worms/virus to capture many, many zombies to carry on the benchmarking work.

In the second part of the talk, several default values and algorithms are discussed. If I am not very wrong, he doesn’t care much about proving his algorithms as long as they work well in real world. The default values of the pipelining request, peer set number come almost the same way, by guessing and testing. So that is how he works, he thought of some policy of designing software, implement it, see how it works out and improve anything that sucks. Finally he leaves the analysis to the researchers who did not drop college like him but becaome graduate students.

Generally speaking, you should not expect much argumentation on his algorithms or things like “thoughts behind BitTorrent” or how he works them out, he is a very pure programmer and follows his own way (is that a curse or a praisal?). But really, he is a good programmer.

Btw- Cohen don’t be mad at me will you?- I think you giggled too much and I did not quite enjoy that. Maybe I do not have very good sense of humor, any way. And actually I found this link because of Cohen’s blog article impugning the Avalanche project by Microsoft, there was quite an argument about it. A comparison is what I plan to look through next.