Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT

I just received my new gadget today. It's Sennheiser PXC360BT headphones. I bought it for its active noise canceling. I want to know if it's effective on a plane. I will field test it on my way back to Canton.

The box is not big, and you can see the headphones inside with a paper box underneath. The headphones come with a removable battery, a Micro-USB connector, audio cable, and all kinds of adapters. They are put in the traveler's bag inside that paper box.

The battery was empty, so I charged it with my MacBook Pro over the Micro-USB connector. I didn't finished the charging within an hour long lunch, so I need to measure the charge time in the future. I tested it via Bluetooth with my iPhone and also via audio cable with my MacBook Pro. The sound quality is good to me and it feels comfortable to wear.

Pairing the headphones with iPhone is simple and straightforward. Press and hold the Bluetooth button and you can connect it on the iPhone. The iPod app treats it like an AirPlay device so you can easily switch between internal speaker and Bluetooth headphones.

After lunch, I've tested it on the subway. Wearing the headphones will reduce the noise. Enabling active noise canceling will further reduce low frequency noise. With both Noise Guard and Talk Through enabled, you will hear people on the train shouting to each other in front of you. In their perspective, it's just talking. With low frequency noise canceled, it sounds like shouting.

So far, I've noticed two small problems with Sennheiser PXC360BT. One is that when charging and listening over the cables at the same time, static is noticeable. The other is that when Bluetooth is interfered sound will jump. If it's interfered for several seconds, iPhone treats it as AirPlay device disconnected and then pauses the music.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Merging Two English Blogs

I have two English blogs now. One on Blogger and another on Posterous. I wanted to post different things on different blogs. Posterous should be more light-weight and photo driven. However, I don't post often so I can't differentiate two blogs.

I just (eventually) started my Cantonese blog. For Cantonese input convenience, I type on my iPhone and then post it to Blogger via Posterous. That means I have the same Cantonese content on both Blogger and Posterous. (I will hide one in the future to avoid duplicated content.) so I think using the same method for my English blog should be feasible.

After merging two blogs, I don't have to worry about differentiation any more. I don't have to think about which blog to post depending on the type of content. I can focus on writing instead of tools. If I'm with my Mac, I will use MarsEdit; If only my iPhone is available, I will use Posterous. No matter what I use, all content merges to my Blogger's stream.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Moving Blogs to New Domain

I bought catchen.me last year and point it to my old domain catchen.biz. Now I want to use catchen.me as my main entrance. That means I need to migrate all sub-domains under catchen.biz to catchen.me.

Why did I use catchen.biz at the first place? I wanted to register a domain from Google Apps in order to make sure that my domain is associated with Google Apps. Neither catchen.com nor catchen.net is available so I picked catchen.biz. However, I found out that people don't respond well to .biz domains. When I say "you can find me on catchen dot biz", they will ask "catchen dot what?" Then I understood that I needed to get a easily recognizable domain. That's why I bought catchen.me.

I let catchen.me point to catchen.biz for several months and it works well, but the content stays on catchen.biz. Now I want to move the content to catchen.me and make catchen.biz a simple redirection. I wanted to do this long ago but I'm too lazy to set up an Apache for the redirection. I don't want to touch all those configurations so I kept postponing this task.  Recently I found out that I can do this with pure JavaScript and that's a language I'm comfortable with, so I decided to give it a try.

I wrote a less than 30 lines JavaScript file and push it to Heroku. Then it's done. And it's free! I don't need to maintain my own server. Heroku's free plan should be enough to handle a few request to my old domain. I don't need to know anything about Apache configuration.  All I need to learn is Node.js, but I want to learn it for fun anyway.

So far, I've migrated three sub-domains: english, cantonese, and dotnet. If the solution is stable, I will move chinese, which is the sub-domain with most content.

Blogging with Wacom Bamboo Special Edition

I bought a Wacom tablet last month. This is the first blog post I try to write with it in English. (I've tried that in Chinese.) It's nice to write instead of type, though it needs some training.

Writing in English on Windows 7 requires little training. The initial accuracy is not bad. In contrast, Snow Leopard couldn't recognize my handwriting at all. Experience of writing on Windows 7 is smooth. I can write in my way, which doesn't look good, and Windows 7 can recognize most of them. With some training, Windows 7 can do it better. Less correction is needed after writing several training sentences. And the correction works in a smart way. Windows 7 can remember what you have written even after you inserted them to the editing area, and it provides meaningful options if you want to correct a word. Space will be inserted if needed during correcting and editing. Windows 7 knows what words and sentences are.

Writing in Chinese doesn't include many features in English counterpart. You can't write freely on the baseline. You have to write one Chinese character in one box, and write them one by one. Correction is based on character instead of word. The good news is Windows 7 knows Chinese words and it recognizes Chinese characters by seeing it as part of a word. Snow Leopard doesn't supports Chinese recognition at all. I can only wish they do a better job with Lion.

See My Posterous

I haven't updated this blog for a year. I just don't have enough incentive to write in English. iPhone gave me the incentive to write in English as Chinese input method on it doesn't fit its smooth experience. And Posterous gave me the platform.

It seems Apple doesn't pay much attention to iOS input methods. Chinese input method on iOS doesn't have any intelligence like its counterpart in English. There is no guessing on correction based on dictionary or statistics model. No matter what you type, iOS just pretends that you won't hit an adjacent key. But the fact is you can't avoid making mistakes while typing in such a tiny keyboard. So the process is really frustrating. You need to keep correcting minor mistakes and that interrupts you flow of writing. That's the reason l avoid typing Chinese on my iPhone.

Since I switched to Mac, I tried to find a substitute for Windows Live Writer and then started using MarsEdit. MarsEdit isn't as friendly as Windows Live Writer, but I can have a better control over the source code. Then I started looking for a blogging client for my iPhone and couldn't find any in 2 years. Then Posterous's official client came out last month and I'm impressed by its design and philosophy.

Blogging on a mobile phone shouldn't be too serious. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time within this small screen adjusting details, so the blogging process should be easy. Posterous has made it so easy to blog on your iPhone. Write some text, add some attachments, and then click "Send". No rich text editing, no photo arrangement, its as easy as writing an email within the built-in Mail app. In fact, sending an email from your iPhone was the recommended way for posting to Posterous prior to the release of the Posterous app.

So I started blogging on Posterous in English since last month. Here is the address: http://posterous.catchen.me. It's updated several times a week and I recommend you subscribing to it.

Twitter Account Suspension

My Twitter account (@CatChen) was suspended for half a month.



I woke up in the morning and found my Tweetie stopped updating. I thought Twitter was down, but it didn't recover after several hours. When I check out my Twitter web page, I saw that Account Suspended message:

This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.

What kind of strange activity did I have? I don't know. A lot of Chinese Twitter user got suspended for no reason, and I can only guess that using Tor might lead to strange client IP activity. No matter what was the real reason for my account suspension, I got to get it recovered first.

I tried to request on the web, but I saw nobody actually processing my request. The request stayed open for two weeks, and Twitter support didn't give me any update. When I saw no hope of getting my account back, I saw a tweet from a someone who had successfully rescued his/her account from suspension. He/she said that contacting suspended@twitter.com might help, and I tried. One day after talking to suspended@twitter.com, I got my account back.

This experience is awful, but at least I got some information to share: contact suspended@twitter.com ASAP, if your account got mistakenly suspended.

Graduation & MVP

My commencement was on July 1st, and I receive my second MVP award on the same day!

I was so nervous on June 30th, because I knew that there's an important day coming. I was ready for the ceremony, but I was not sure about the MVP award. I didn't know whether I could get it for a second time. I knew that one certificate from my university was coming, and I was still looking forward to receive another one from Microsoft.

My dad came to my commencement, with a Sony H7 camera, but he didn't manage to take picture of me, because I was too nervous and walking too fast while I was on the stage. After the ceremony, we started taking picture all around the campus. I just kept pulling out my phone from time to time, to check whether I received email from Microsoft.

That email came really on time. It was around 11:00 at night, the same as what happened last year. I was watching TV with my parents, and I told them that I managed to get it twice. They all felt happy and proud.

Atteding the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008

I got my first visa last month, and bought my first international airline tickets two weeks ago. And I will be flying to Seattle tomorrow.

Getting a visa seems easy to me. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm in the last year of my university study, and there's no reason for me to give up my degree at this point. During the interview, the visa officer just read my invitation letter and MVP recognition letter, and asked only 5 questions, then said "have a nice trip" to me.

The airline tickets from Beijing to Seattle and then back to Guangzhou cost me about 800 dollars, and that seems cheap enough to me. Since Microsoft will cover accommodation and transportation fees, I just need to spend around 1000 dollars for the whole trip.

Anyway, I got to sleep now, for I need to rush to the airport tomorrow morning. Good night guys.

Unlocking My iPhone

Finally, I have unlocked my iPhone with a pure software approach. Now I can make phone calls, and send out text messages. I can fully experience how good or bad an iPhone is.

I have spent a whole night on unlocking my iPhone. I had my iPhone worked in 1.1.1 as an iPod Touch before unlocking it. So I installed the unlocking software, and wanted to continue using 1.1.1. But then, I found that it had no signal. I read through the unlock tutorial, and found that I must upgrade it to 1.1.2 in order to fix the no signal problem.

I upgraded my iPhone to 1.1.2 for three times. The first time, I forgot to install OktoPrep, so I had to downgrade it again. The second time, jailbreak.jar failed to kick my iPhone out of recovery mode, so I considered that as a failure and downgraded it again. The third time, I used AppTappInstaller.exe to kict my iPhone out of recovery mode, and finally got it done.

Chinese New Year in Beijing

As I will go back home at the end of February after finishing my internship at Baidu.com, I will just stay at Beijing during the Chinese New Year. This let me avoid the horrible Chunyun. I had decided to stay before I came here. It has proven that I made a wise choice, since the storm made all kind of transportation stuck.

Internship at Baidu.com, Inc

My web development engineer internship in Baidu.com officially started last Wednesday. So far, I have been in this city for 12 days. Right! 12 busy days!

I flew to Beijing last Tuesday morning, took a lunch at McDonald's, and visited the company as a guest at the afternoon. Process of checking in was scheduled on Wednesday, and it took the whole morning. And then, I became a member of technical support group of service operation division under technical department. A web development engineer under technical support group sounds weird, right? At least I think so.

That is caused by a so-called historical problem. Before the company has a portal search, which means when it was still a search solution provider to other portals, technical support group wrote web pages for consumers and helped them consuming the core search service. The group played the role as consumer technical support, and ran under service operation division.

Nowadays, technical support group mostly acts as template support, which means writing templates for all kind of products. We also do front-end researches, in fields like web standards and JavaScript programming. There are many talented people in our group, and we share all information and knowledge we have freely via emails, blogs, and internal magazines.

So far, I enjoy working here, as I can take projects that I feel passionate with. I think Baidu.com would be a passionate start of my career.

P.S. My CV has been updated, for my TOEFL score was out and my internship started.

Exactly 300!

I wrote exactly 300 words in my TOEFL writing test second essay! It just reaches the minimum word count of so-called qualified essay.

In fact, I have done little preparation for my TOEFL test. From time to time, I think I need to do something about my TOEFL test, but I just don't want to do anything around it. So, I didn't use any strategy during the test, and spoke and wrote without any so-called pattern. I don't know what kind of score I might get for doing this. Anyway, it will just reflect my true level, I think.

Tired of filling application forms!

I'm applying jobs now. In fact, I hate filling out all those kind of forms online. They look familiar, and I still need to copy information from my profile and paste them into forms. Why they don't apply some open standards and APIs? For example, they can use hResume, which is a microformat.

I really want to implement my own open resume standards, and let those job application sites just crawl my website in order to get my information. Then I might have my resume done once for all.

Joining IfGoGo.com

Ok. I haven't written anything in this blog for a long time, but recently I have joint an English team blog. That is IfGoGo.com, which is an English blog written by Chinese.

I still have no idea about what I should post here and what I should post there. There's no theme for both blogs, so maybe I'll just post English stuffs randomly. Anyway, remember to check out what's on IfGoGo.com, because it has a wonderful team, and great posts will appear soon.

Translation Job

I've started translating Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action into Simplified Chinese since this month. It's a contract with Turing Book Company, Posts and Telecommunications Press. The book is more than 500 pages, and I'm going to finish it in 4 months, with my partner Junyu Wang.

I've finished first two chapters of the book in 2 weeks, and start feeling that the job is quite interesting. At first, I've found some phrases and clauses hard to translate, and asked the translation support group for help, or just try to see what Google Translate might offer me. Then, I started getting used to those phrases and knowing how to break down complex clauses. Google Translate did offer me a lot, more than translation results. It lets you know how to write translated sentences more like natural Chinese sentences.

The side effect of doing translation job is that, after reading every perfect phrase or complex clause in English, I would try to think about how to translate it, totally naturally, even if I have no intention to translate it. When I'm reading a book in English, I'll keep trying analysing what I've read, just like a parser, and this makes me feel weird.

Microsoft MVP Award received

This is the last day of the month, and I have to post something to keep the pace, which means at least 1 post per month. In fact, I received the MVP Award at the first day of the month, but I totally forgot to write it down in this blog.

There are around 200 active MVPs in mainland China, and about 2000 active MVPs all over the world. And I'm so proud to be one of these 2000. As an MVP, I received an Award Pack from Microsoft, which included a laser pen, a USB drive, and a $150 coupon from Microsoft Company Store.

I have chosen a camera, a headset and a keyboard in the Company Store, and had $60 left. Then I picked some gifts for my parents and friends. Sharing the value of the award with people who supported me makes me feel quite happy, as I think their support is also some kind of contribution to the community and they deserve it.

Keep Writing

I think I should keep writing as I'm preparing for the TOEFL iBT. However, I have no idea about what should I write. Keep writing all those TOEFL style topics, like do-you-agree-with-the-following-statement things? I don't think so. Maybe I should read some articles on the topic of American campus life or academic essays everyday, and then write some comments telling that this is something I like and that is something I dislike.

No Junk Food Month is nearly over

This May is my No Junk Food Month, and it's nearly over!

Advanced to Round 2

We got rank 26 with 7 votes in Round 1 of Imagine Cup 2007 Web Development invitational, and advanced to Round 2. Our project is a Q&A system with feature of recommendation. Here is the page of our team: Jovenes.

Blog*Spot or Block*Spot

It has been blocked in mainland again...