housing market and economy trend

Lately I've been reading SF Examiner a lot. Not sure if it's due to the handouts in front of Old Navy, or just the fact that it's free as vs. SF Chronicle. I do like the layout, w/ Mayor & Governor's schedule, literary events, food/restaurant event, and other events on second page.

Anyways, yesterday's paper had an interesting article about re-zoning in North Beach district.

It's been somewhat known fact and topic of humorous speculations that even long time residents of San Francisco may need guidance of tour guide when strolling SOMA/South Beach district that surrounds SBC Park. That area used to be warehouse district, but is in a process of being converted a full-time residential district. Bordering the financial district, this conveniently located district also boasts its convenience to Bay Bridge, upcoming Giants games and trendy restaurants and nearby clubs not to mention walking distance to the CalTrain station and Transbay Terminal. Not many of these new luxury condos are in high-rise, but warehouse conversion into modern-style loft. There are talks about high-rise buildings surrounding embarcadero and Transbay Terminal but it's still just talk.

However, on yesterday's paper, I read that some stretch of 3 blocks in North Beach are converted from small business area into residential district, and would impact investment-property owner who owns a warehouse and plans to turn it into loft condos in negative way.

This was interesting for two reason. The fact that North Beach seem to be going through much of lodging turmoil lately with many of long-time apartments forcing low-rent renters out to the street to turn the apartment complex into high-profit condos is one. The other is the fact that I didn't realize investment-property owner could actually lose money with the change of district like this. With all the hypes in real estate investment, I've so far only heard profits better than some stock trades.

tcl/tk

got tcl/tk 8.4 downloaded and also downloaded tk module for perl on cpan.
tk's "make test" was interesting, opening windows/buttons/texts/colors in rather illustrative way.

mono project

My recent interest in Windows Development brought me to Mono Project.

I've seen a demo a few years back, at OSCon.

Haven't touched it since, and thus I'm still quiet unfamiliar.

The projects have sources for developers, binary for users, wiki-style documentations, active mailinglist, ...

Another interesting to note is that it's also available on Mac OS platform, as well.

Something to delve into. :)

mysql and more... documentation-wise

What I do like about mysql is its easy online documentation.

Apache also has relatively good one-stop documentation, but it's not as well focused/organized.

Oracle & Sun-Java are supposed to have community and online-documentations, as well.

When go to mysql's documentation's and just see the TOC or do search on key word, it's rather straightforward, installation, query, or troubleshooting.

windows day - cygwin & activestate perl to begin with

Trying to watch VOD(Video on Demand) from SBS(www.sbs.co.kr) on Mac proved to be rather painful. Spent 3 hours, already paid for VOD session, yet keep getting stuck on Windows Media version conflict javascript message, it lead to nowhere but frustrations.

That, in addition to some recent notes in tekie-mailinglists, triggered my interests in MS Windows development forum.

First, checkout activestate perl and cygwin for download, then apache for windows. Will see how it looks...

kernel popcorn'in day

Finally something came over me. To break out of day to day stuffs, to do something different, something new, something that's not just treadmill running sort of being on the same spot all the time: much calories are burnt when running on treadmill, but I'm going no where. Thus instaed of usual websurfing, email checking, ..., when I opened up the laptop last night after the dinner, I began hitting "The Linux Kernel Archives" and downloading the latest kernel source, 2.6.11.11 and compile. That's babysteps in kernel developments. First know where and what version of the sources to get, trying to keep up with mailinglist to understand the recent developement trends, and try to compile it myself. I've been trying to read up on the mailinglists, but they do mostly sound greek to me; fascinating! The sources were fetched around 10:00pm last night. Had to unzip w/ 'bzip2' in /usr/src/ then untar the whole directory. inside /usr/src/linux-2.6.11.11, run the series of make (as is explained in Muli Ben-Yehuda's Linux Kernel Compilation : from source to running,

1. make config
   
2. make dep
   
3. make clean
   
4. make mrproper
   
5. make bzImage
   
6. make modules
   
7. make modules_install
   

I think I finally hit the sack around 1:00am while 'make modules' is still running.

I do remember vaguely doing it years ago, but the kernel developers must do these many times in daily basis. Could quietly be fascinating or could be super boring, I thought. In any case, I'm glad I've tried it last night/this morning, and I must train myself to do these more efficiently and to read through & tweak the sources for debugging/hacking.