Computing Life

I was always interested in building a small cluster with my (old) computers for my research project (just like MATLAB Distributed Server or a Hadoop cluster). While MATLAB is one of the most mature platforms for scientific computing, it's also extremely expensive, so expensive that an Ivy League college ...

Black Friday comes and goes. This always seems a good time to stock (or over-stock) stuffs with all kinds of sweet deals. But instead of spending money (possibly more economically), why not just make some money from the deals? In this post, I'll introduce my experience in trying to ...

The background is, I have a git repo of nodejs code. There is a controllers folder in the repo, which I just made some (well, a lot of) changes and am about to commit the staged changes.

Then in the root folder of the repo, I suddenly have an urge ...

• PhD阶段的一个很大的经验教训是，很多事情都很难，需要付出很多精力才能取得一点点成就和别人的承认。所以一方面需要耐心再耐心，慢慢打怪练级，一方面也要多思考自己的才能和兴趣适合什么样的工作，通过调整未来的方向来让自己更舒服一点。
• 越来越觉得科研甚至整个人生是一个和天打交道的过程。逆天行事比如要开始一个不切实际的项目必然会事倍功半，而往往方向对了不用花太多精力就可以收获很大的影响力。相比于各种数学技巧等等，对方向的把握或者说运气也许更为重要。也就是说，如果觉得一些事情太难，要么是方向不对，要么是方法不对。看起来像废话，但指导意义是从这两个方面来思考如何改进。
• 向他人学习有一个有效的方法，就是关注冲突（他人和你不一样的想法），思考彼此的优劣。如果别人的更好，就逐渐去改变自己的思维方式。一言以蔽之就是见贤思齐焉，见不贤则内自省也。
• 使用Vim的正确方法似乎应该是尽可能少的无脑重复操作比如狂按wwwwwbbbbb等等。如果多动脑，多用fF/?%等等效率会更高。
• 终于有点知道自己喜欢的东西是什么了 -- 把一个东西从无到有的做出来。哪怕原来对这个东西一点都不熟悉，也可以很快地把一个系统日出来。比如半小时确定框架，找素材，画出来一个漂亮的示意图，3天内学3D max, Unity 3D, Vuforia然后做了一个增强现实的demo出来。又比如3天内学node.js，生成/读取QR code，强化iphone编程 ...

Can a node.js/express.js web app update itself from a github repo? (i.e. whenever we do a git push to github, the server side will also use git pull to update itself)

It's possible thanks to the powerful WebHook of github.

The basic idea is, to ...