dancing with my shadow

the name of my blog comes from a line in song ci (宋词) "shui diao ge tou (水调歌头 )" by su shi (苏轼). song ci is a from of classical chinese poetry from the song dynasty. they are actually lyrics, and with tunes, they can be sung. here's the english translation (found here) and the original chinese version of "shui diao ge tou". the translation is not bad, in my opinion.

Shui tiao ko tou
The moon -- how old is it?
I hold the cup and ask the clear blue sky
But I don‘t know, in palaces up there
When is tonight?
If only I could ride the wind and see --
But no, jade towers
So high up, might be too cold
For dancing with my shadow --
How could there, be like here?

Turning in the red chamber
Beneath the carved window
The brightness baffles sleep
But why complain?
The moon is always full at parting
A man knows grief and joy, separation and reunion
The moon, clouds and fair skies, waxing and waning --
And old story, this struggle for perfection!
Here‘s to long life
This loveliness we share even a thousand miles apart!
 
 水 调 歌 头
明 月几时有
把酒问青天
不知天上宫阙
今夕是何年
我欲乘风归去
又恐琼楼玉宇
高处不胜寒

起舞弄轻影

何似在人间

转朱阁
低绮户
照无眠
不应有恨
何事长向别时圆
人有悲欢离合
月有阴晴圆缺
此 事古难全
但愿人长久
千里共婵娟

how to add a cloud label to blogger

here's the tutorial on how to add a cloud label to blogger as the one i have on the right: http://phy3blog.googlepages.com/Beta-Blogger-Label-Cloud.html

avatar and fault tolerance

watched the movie with lei, ermin and yehua on the second day of its worldwide release. we had an interesting conversation right after the movie. in the movie, dr. grace augustine said that the roots of the trees on pandora form an enormous and intricate network, and there is communication and information flow. the last part of the movie is about humans trying to destroy this network of life, and they found that there is a mother tree destroying which can destroy everything. so this leads us to find the analogy in the network on our planet, the internet. the fact that they have a mother tree is not very fault tolerant, like a client-server architecture where the server will become the central point of attack. this again shows the importance of distributed system. a purely distributed system means every node is equal. even some nodes fail, the system can still function, and it's hard to take down every node. purely distributed system is hard to implement and only exists in research projects. many p2p systems (skype, bittorrent) are still a hybrid of client-server and p2p architectures. makes me want to change research group even more because i think this area is very important.