Regular Fasting in Weekend

I think the feeling of hunger is a vital part to one's sensitivity which aids the individual's survival by reminding that his or her mental state is bound to the physical being of the body. However, in daily life, I found that eating has often become a scheduled task which occurs at a regular schedule without regard to whether or not one feels the need to do so. (This is made possible by the modern efficiency in producing food and there is undoubtedly good reasons for it.) Arguably in modern age, an overwhelming emphasis is placed on the intellectual as opposite to the bodily in a fashion as if the two were separable and the body mainly exists to sustain the intellect. Gradually, eating as a task becomes mechanical and contrived. We often seek to disrupt this growing numbness by trying new food, but I think a better solution is to feel the essential feeling of hunger again by fasting. For the past few years, I usually skipped a meal on Saturday and/or Sunday and that helped restore my integral sense of body and mind.

What If a Tree Fell in a Forest and No One Hears...

This is a classic philosophical puzzle: what if a tree fell in a forest and no one hears, did the tree fall? I take this essentially as a question on existence: does something exist if it does not register on anyone's mind? The tempted answer is yes followed by the further question "but how do you know that?" The difficulty lies in the confusion of the knowledge of existence and existence itself. In physics, quantum mechanics has provided an amazing distinction between the two and I shall explicate that in a later article.

My answer is simple. The event exists, i.e. the tree fell, and if you ask how I know it, I will respond: you just told me that. My point is that the knowledge of existence requires existence whereas the converse does not hold in general or there is no way to test such condition: in the example, you have to convey that to me in the question. Because for us to know that something exists, we must observe it, i.e. in daily experience, existence and our knowledge of it are bundled together. (That explains the common confusion of the two concepts.)

P.S. Existence is a deep issue in many disciplines and it fascinates me for long. I will try to remark on it from different perspectives in the future.

Weibo Redirecting Loop Fixed (Finally)

Yep, I used Sina Weibo and this is me @ weibo. I have been annoyed by their redirect loop for quite a while. So if you use the handy tool curl to look at weibo.com with

curl -I weibo.com

(the -I switch gives only the returned header). You see that the domain is redirected to www.weibo.com. It used to be that www.weibo.com redirects back to weibo.com, thus the loop. (The way you get out of it was to directly visiting your weibo profile (such as www.weibo.com/falcondai). I think they just fixed this problem in the past few days and www.weibo.com no longer redirects back to weibo.com

Domain Mapping Verification with Nslookup Command

I have been setting up my domain name(s) and redirection in the past few days. This process is frustrating for me, a starter for the speed of DNS record propagation in the web which might take up to 48 hrs. Basically main name servers around the world will update their records with each other. And my default DNS server which is provided by my ISP might not have a updated record of my zone file and this delays my testing.

I used Windows to do most of my development and I found a good use of its nslookup command to speed up this process by designating the nameserver to the one hosting my zone file using this command

nslookup -d <your_domain_name> <your_nameserver_url>

(the "-d" is optional and with it the command returns more details.)

For example, I used GoDaddy to host my domain zone files and my updated zone file lives on ns65.domaincontrol.com (and ns66.domaincontrol.com) as indicated in the screenshot:

For more info on nslookup on Microsoft Support: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/200525

Rebooting My Blog

Recently struck by the urge to share what I have been thinking and the need to persuade myself that I have learnt something during my soon-to-end undergraduate life at University of Chicago, I decided to pick up blogging as a channel to share my ideas, passion, and above others, life.

What will change? Well, I have been learning to develop mobile app and web app whereas most of my previous experience with programming has been with non-network apps.

So what am I going I planned to mainly write about the following categories: my path into the dev space (I hope to share my experience and learn from my readers), tech ideas, physics/math/philosophy meditation and perspective (my majors and lifetime curiosity), cooking (I love to eat and experiment with food), maybe art and social issues like my old posts.

As for style, I will try to keep things concise and clear. I might also post in both/either English and Chinese.