2005/02/28

Chromatron, a game

This is a puzzle game of laser beams and mirrors. Fang, a former classmate, gave it to me. And it is full of fun. There four generations of this game, the frst one is free and the rests are not. Even the first generation is hard.

The writer must be a person who works or has worked in physics for years since myself works in this field for many years. If you think you are genius, don't miss this one.

2005/02/17

How to print watermark in M$ excel.

Officially, Excel does not support background printing. The best way we found is to use header and footer. View->Header and Footer..., then we can insert a picture as a background. Don't worry, if the header is a picture, it will be lying rather under the table than stack on the top of the table.

One more thing, is that normally, a picture file is obvious large compare with a excel file. So if someone just need a text based watermark, then wmf file is not a bad idea.

THE GATES

The famous Christo and Jeanne-Claude have just finished their newest art work, the gates in Central Park of New York City. As avant-gardes of modern arts, we should rush to the spacetime get a feeling of it in our vivid life.

You can goto their website to have a look.

2005/02/08

笑话:我们是做过的

中学,教数学的是一个40多岁的女老师。一日课间,一位仁兄因为一道复数题不解,走上讲台问老师。老师看了看,说道,“这个i我们是做过的。”

2005/02/07

Special Characters

As a foreigner, the names of those special characters are new to us. Here they are

! exclamation mark 33
' apostrophe 39
( left parenthesis 40
) right parenthesis 41
* asterisk 42
, comma 44
- hyphen 45
. period 46
/ slash 47
: colon 58
; semicolon 59
[ left square bracket 91
\ backslash 92
] right square bracket 93
^ caret 94
_ horizontal bar (underscore) 95
` acute accent 96
{ left curly brace 123
| vertical bar 124
} right curly brace 125
~ tilde 126
‚ comma 130
„ low left rising double quote 132
… ellipsis 133
† dagger mark 134
‡ double dagger 135
ˆ letter modifying circumflex 136
‰ per thousand sign 137
Š capital S caron or haceck 138
‹ left single angle quote 139
Πcapital OE ligature 140
‘ left single quotation mark 145
’ right single quoatation mark 146
“ left double quotation mark 147
” right double quotation mark 148
• round solid bullet 149
– en dash 150
— em dash 151
˜ small tilde 152
™ trademark 153
š s caron or hacek 154
› right single angle quotation mark 155
œ small oe ligature 156
¡ inverted exclamation 161
¢ cent sign 162
£ pound sterling 163
¤ general currency sign 164
¥ yen sign 165
¦ broken vertical bar 166
§ section sign 167
¨ umlaut 168
© copyright 169
ª feminine ordinal 170
« left angle quote 171
¬ not sign 172
® registered trademark 174
¯ macron accent 175
° degree sign 176
± plus or minus 177
´ acute accent 180
µ micro sign 181
¶ paragraph sign 182
· middle dot 183
¸ cedilla 184
¹ superscript one 185
º masculine ordinal 186
» right angle quote 187
¼ one-fourth 188
½ one-half 189
¾ three-fourths 190
¿ inverted question mark 191

The number behind each sign is the ascii number of each character, so you can add &# in front of the number and put a ; behind it in html. e.g. for ^ caret, we write ^

2005/02/05

RIGHT and LEFT in politics

As you can see from the link above, originally left inclines to equality rather than right emphasized liberty. But as time goes, it seems right becomes opposition and left is for government.

2005/02/03

Roman Numerals

As we can see, this vintage numbering system is still vividly flying around. For instance, the coming Super Bowl, X_X_XIX means 39th.

Symbols:
I is 1
V is 5
X is 10
L is 50
C is 100
D is 500
M is 1,000

_
V is 5,000 any symbol with a bar on top times 1,000, obsolete since the largest numbers usually expressed in Roman system are dates.

Rules:
I. There is no symbol for zero;
II. The number is calculated from right to left.
III. If the symbol on the left is larger or equal than the consecutive right symbol, the symbol on the left is adding to the number. For instance, larger: VI is 5+1=6, equal II is 1+1=2, combination VII is 5+(1+1)=7;
IV. If the symbol on the left is smaller than the consecutive right symbol, the symbol on the left is substracted from the number. For instance, IV is -1+5=4, XIV is 10+(-1+5)=14;
V. Every kind of symbol is substracted at most once if is ever substracted. For instance, if we want to note 18, we us e XVIII rather than IXIX;
VI. The code should be as short as possible. For instance, we use IV to note 4 rather than IIII;
VII. The smaller symbol should be on the rightmost possible position. For instance, 39 is X_X_XIX but XIX_X_X, 14 is XIV but VIX;
VIII. There is no two consecutive substractions. For instance, 1989 is MCMLX_X_ XIX rather than MCMIXM

Samples: this year 2005 is MMV, 1979 is MCMLX_XIX, 1989 is MCMLX_X_XIX.