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Alexa Sparky 1.4.7

Sparky is Alexa Internet's free Firefox plugin. Sparky accompanies you as you surf, providing useful information in your status bar about the sites you visit without interrupting your browsing.

Discover website traffic trends -- Is this site getting more popular, or less?

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the Tet cakes(Viet Nam)

Tet fried cakes served with tubers Kieu

cakes To

cakes "No"

cakes "In"

make cakes tet

cakes "chung"

cakes "chung", lol!

Braiding couplet

be used to vest premises and To come to meet Spring.previously from the grape to the popular "tồn cổ" is still used to hang  "câu đối đỏ" on New Year. The sentence is written word for Grapes (black or yellow) on the red or pink paper plates for training should also be called to question red. Itself the "câu đối đỏ" also appears in the sentence for the New Year:

Five fruit tray

Spinner five fruits a fruit tray with fruit about five different things often have the day of the Vietnamese Tet. Fruits presented to express wish of the family home by name, color and arrangement of them.


picture Tet

Above the altar hangs a common folk paintings in terms of results, the book ... there as a small text (text Tam, Phuc, Germany ...).

Planting the tree Neu

Tree Neu

Humans and devils co-inhabited the earth. The devils overwhelmed the former and invaded their land. Buddha told the devils: "I will hang my cassock on top of the bamboo, and wherever the shadow falls is Buddha's land, and you devils must give it to men." The devils agreed. So after planting the bamboo
Buddha flung his robe to the top and made the bamboo higher by means of magic; as a result, the cassock overshadowed the whole land and the devils were chased to the East Sea. Then the devils prayed to Buddha for permission to return to the mainland for a three day visit to their ancestors' tombs on the occasion of Tet. For this reason, Neu is often planted on this occasion. It is a bamboo pole with green leaves, an eight sign amulet and earthen bells hung from its top. Lime powder is scattered round its base to allow the painting of cross-bows and arrows to chase away the devils or keep them at bay.

TET in Viet Nam

Tet starts on the first day of the first lunar month and is the first season of the new year (according to the lunar calendar), and therefore it is also known as the Tet Nguyen Dan, literally meaning Fete of the First Day, or the Tet Tam Nguyen, literally meaning Fete of the Three Firsts.
Tet is also an opportunity to welcome deceased ancestors back for a family reunion with their descendants. Finally, Tet is a good opportunity for family members to meet. This custom has become sacred and secular and, therefore, no matter where they are or whatever the circumstances, family members find ways to come back to meet their loved ones Vietnamese Tet has quite a few original practices with customs and entertainment that have distinct Vietnamese cultural characteristics. In the framework of this article, a few customs and practices are presented so that readers can better understand the traditional Tet of Vietnam.

IntroductiontoLinux forReal-TimeControl

Documents

Introduction to Linux for Real-Time Control, a document prepared for NIST by Aeolean Inc. that describes the various real-time Linux approaches. [PDF, 740K]:

Measuring Performance in Real-Time Linux, a presentation at the Third Real-Time Linux Workshop in Milan Italy in October 2001 that describes techniques to measure software timing. [PDF, 632K] The accompanying paper. [PDF, 236K]

Real-time Operating System Timing Jitter and its Impact on Motor Control, proceedings of the 2001 SPIE Conference on Sensors and Controls for Intelligent Manufacturing II. [PDF, 106K]

Embedded Real-Time Linux for Cable Robot Control, a presentation at the ASME Computers in Engineering conference in Montreal Canada in October 2002 that describes embedded- and real-time Linux and a cable robot application. [PDF, 1M] The accompanying paper. [PDF, 98K]

Real-Time and Embedded Linux for Manufacturing and Robotics, a presentation at the March 2003 eGov Open Source Conference in Washington DC that describes real-time and embedded systems and some applications. [PDF, 2.5M]

Use of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense, a document prepared for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) by The MITRE Corporation. [PDF, 4.2M]

Free and open source software, a document prepared by the Swedish Agency for Public Management (STATSKONTORET) that describes open source software in general. [PDF, 94K]

Articles

A comparison of hard real-time Linux alternatives, by Peter Laurich for LinuxDevices.com, 19 November 2004.

Police shut down huge illegal party on West Side

Like many other illegal parties in Chicago, the one police shut down Sunday in a former industrial building on the West Side had flowing liquor and spinning DJs.

But this party in Lawndale also featured what police called "an elaborate, club-style entry," with four industrial spotlights illuminating a sign and velvet ropes marking the entrance.

The party was busted when a neighbor made a complaint about the blaring music coming from the 4400 block of West Fifth Avenue, Chicago police said.

The building where the party was held is along an industrial strip, but it's surrounded by a small residential area.

When officers from the Police Department's Mobile Strike Force arrived about 12:45 a.m. Sunday, they found a line of people waiting to be patted down by two men in body armor acting as security guards. Inside, more than 300 people packed the one-story yellow brick industrial building, downing $5 drinks and dancing the night away.

Police said the two doormen, Dwayne Troupe, 22, of the 8500 block of South Bennett Avenue, and Ambrosio Silva, 28, of the 5300 block of West Henderson Street, were carrying guns. On searching the building, police found a woman, Zenobia Mills, 28, of the 700 block of South Kostner Avenue, with a gun, as well as five other handguns in other parts of the building. The three were charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon and other gun-related crimes, and were being held in lieu of bail at the Cook County Jail.

Bernard Harrison, 26, of Oakbrook Terrace, admitted to police that he organized the party and was charging admission, according to the police report, and was cited with several city ordinance violations, including operating a public place of amusement without a license.

"I'm positive that we prevented a shooting or homicide that night," said Harrison District Cmdr. Penelope Trahanas.

.by http://www.chicagotribune.com

Bay is nice, but not what Mets need

Did the Mets just buy themselves a playoff berth? That’s the burning question in Flushing after the club came to terms with Jason Bay for a four-year $66 million deal. Bay still has to pass a physical this weekend — and that’s less than a guarantee, given the condition of his shoulders and knees — but barring any reversal, the Mets have the home run threat they believe will turn them into at least a wild-card team.

Not everyone agrees, however. While Bay’s credentials as a power hitter are beyond reproach, the real issue is whether the Mets have misspent their money. One major league executive said on Tuesday, “they would’ve been better off finding a front-line pitcher” instead of a corner outfielder.

Another senior official suggested GM Omar Minaya would’ve been wiser waiting for next winter’s ripe free agency crop, which will include, among others, Cliff Lee, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett and Joe Mauer. If the Mets really wanted to use their financial might, they could’ve made a blow-away offer to any of these stars and been better off in the long-term.

The reality, of course, is that the Mets couldn’t afford to wait, not after a disastrous 92-loss season in 2009. The Mets haven’t been to the postseason since 2006 and a restless fan base was demanding some kind of response from Minaya.

For whatever reason, the Mets let John Lackey and Randy Wolf slip though their fingers, and were similarly inert while Mike Cameron and Mark DeRosa signed elsewhere. Obviously they were waiting on bigger prey — Bay or Matt Holliday — but hitting more runs won’t change the Mets’ profile by themselves.

What they need are dependable starters behind Johan Santana — at least 40 wins from the 2-3-4 slots in the rotation. Considering Bay’s contract calls for a mere $10 million payout in 2010, it’s likely the Mets are preparing to reel in another pitcher. Maybe it’s a gamble on Ben Sheets, maybe it’s Joel Pineiro. There’s also a possibility of a deal that would bring Bronson Arroyo to New York.

In the meantime, the Mets are getting an infusion of power that will take pressure off David Wright. The third baseman, once a 30-home run threat, hit only 10 HRs last season, and just five at Citi Field. Bay will be a welcome antidote to the power deficit, although he’s more likely to hit 25 home runs at cavernous Citi than the 36 he slugged with the Red Sox.

The other highlights on Bay’s resume include his ability to thrive in a big market, as well as his familiarity with pennant-race pressure. That means a lot to a Met team that’s gained an industry-wide reputation for being soft, and otherwise no match for their division rivals, the Phillies.

But Bay comes with baggage: he strikes out often (162 times last season) and has hit .300 only once in his career. His defense is also a potential problem, given that he won’t have the Green Monster to cover up his flaws in the field.

Instead, Citi Field could expose him as “a notch above (Hideki) Matsui” in the words of one talent evaluator. The Red Sox were sufficiently worried about Bay’s long-term durability; his knees and shoulders are what could keep Bay from passing this weekend’s physical in New York.

Still, the Mets are banking on Bay as the latest in a steady stream of free agent saviors, starting with Pedro Martinez in 2005, followed by Carlos Beltran, Billy Wagner, Santana and Francisco Rodriguez.

The Mets paid handsomely for each of these stars, and did so again with Bay. Their $16 million annual average was the best offer out there, which Bay discovered after weeks of hunting for an alternative.

He put the Mets on hold while his agent, Joe Urbon, circled back to the Red Sox, asking if there was a way to get Bay back to Fenway. But that path became permanently blocked after Cameron was signed. With fewer and fewer options, Bay needed an exit ramp from a disappointing free agency campaign.

The Mets were just as needy. The fan base was growing increasingly agitated at Minaya’s inertia, having seen the Yankees acquire Curtis Granderson and then trade for Javy Vazquez. The Phillies, meanwhile upgraded their ace from Lee to Roy Halladay, reason enough to pick them to repeat as National League champs.

The Mets needed to prove to their public that a business plan did, in fact, exist — just as invoices for 2010 were being mailed to season-ticket holders. By the end of the day, both Bay and the Mets agreed to this marriage of convenience.

Of course, it remains to be seen how the more important questions are answered next season. Can Santana rebound from his second elbow surgery? Will Jose Reyes ever play without pain? Can Beltran? And can Wright be more than a gap hitter at Citi?

Those are the make-or-break issues for the Mets. Bay’s home runs will obviously help. But for now, consider the Mets a work in progress.

.by /msn.foxsports.com

HUNGRY TIGERS HUNT DOWN MEGSON IN GRUESOME SURVIVAL FIGHT

Klasnic holds off his marker to score

Wednesday December 30,2009

By Matthew Dunn

STEPHEN Hunt proved that Hull have legs to match their heart with two late goals to ensure the Tigers at least had something to show for their valiant efforts this Christmas

Paul Robinson’s failure by inches to clear Republic of Ireland international Hunt’s effort off the line secured a point at Bolton after battling defeats against Arsenal and Manchester United.

And it proved some vindication of Phil Brown’s determination not to “throw” either of those matches against the ‘Big Four’ sides to improve their chances in their relegation battle.

Hull, to their credit, arrived with exactly the same team that lost so valiantly to United just 48 hours earlier.

While such integrity – take note Wolves – showed that Hull’s hearts are in the right place, it nevertheless put something of a question mark over their legs. Phil Brown said that turning up with any less intensity at the Reebok than they had shown at the KC Stadium on Sunday was a “no brainer” – this after all, was a game they stood more chance of winning given that it was against a team with just one victory in the last nine games.

Hull’s record of five games without a win was no more impressive, which probably explains the scrappy start to the match from both sides more than weariness from a busy Christmas programme.

Until the 20th minute, that is. Zat Knight’s long punt forward may have lacked any real

Mohamed ElBaradei: From fission to Pharaoh?

From fission to Pharaoh?

Dec 17th 2009 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

Egyptian reformers suggest a possible president

Getty ImagesPlanting a bomb under Egyptian politics

WHEN Mohamed ElBaradei won the Nobel peace prize in 2005, Egyptians happily proclaimed him a national hero. But now that he has retired after 12 years as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, some are calling him a villain. He may be an American or even an Iranian agent, hint editorials in Egypt’s state-owned press. He bears a nasty grudge against his native country after so long abroad, grumble other government mouthpieces.

The reason for this sudden spate of spurious insinuation? Responding to pleas from reform-minded Egyptians despairing of local politics, Mr ElBaradei has suggested he may return to Egypt and run for president in elections due in 2011. Worse yet, he has deigned to propose conditions for his possible candidacy. The poll, he says, must meet internationally accepted standards.

For so prominent a citizen to toss his hat into the ring would cause scarcely a shrug elsewhere. In Egypt, where five decades under a single party and almost three under its present leader, President Hosni Mubarak, have smothered all but a pretence of democracy, it has raised a big cloud of dust. The notion of Mr ElBaradei’s candidacy brings a frisson of unpredictability to what Egyptians had assumed would be a scripted outcome, giving either a sixth six-year term to Mr Mubarak, now 81, or a win for his son, Gamal, who steers policy in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).

More annoyingly for Egypt’s rulers, Mr ElBaradei’s declaration of conditions has cast unwonted light on the crafty constitutional mechanics that allow the stage-managing of Egypt’s supposed democracy. Even to become a legal independent candidate, for instance, Mr ElBaradei would need to collect 250 signatures from a range of “elected” officials, all of whom happen to sit in bodies massively dominated by the NDP.

Perhaps not even Mr ElBaradei himself expects that he may be allowed to become a serious challenger. Yet such is the depth of frustration with Egypt’s stagnant politics and many social ills, particularly among the generation that has known no rule except Mr Mubarak’s, that even this distant hope has stirred passions. Surprisingly, considering that he has spent most of the past 40 years outside Egypt, and rarely pronounced on its troubles, some 21,000 enthusiasts have signed on to a Facebook support group. Perhaps theirs is the voice of Egypt’s future.

. by .economist.

The others

Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

It is becoming both easier and more difficult to experience the thrill of being an outsider

Illustration by C. Corr

FOR the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition. It is no more distinctive than being tall, fat or left-handed. Nobody raises an eyebrow at a Frenchman in Berlin, a Zimbabwean in London, a Russian in Paris, a Chinese in New York.

The desire of so many people, given the chance, to live in countries other than their own makes nonsense of a long-established consensus in politics and philosophy that the human animal is best off at home. Philosophers, it is true, have rarely flourished in foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Königsberg; Descartes went to Sweden and died of cold. But that is no justification for generalising philosophers’ conservatism to the whole of humanity.

The error of philosophy has been to assume that man, because he is a social animal, should belong to some particular society. Herder, an 18th-century Prussian philosopher, launched modern conceptions of nationalism by arguing that a man could flourish only among his own people who shared his language and culture. “Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself,” Herder wrote.

Even an exemplary modern liberal philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, found this sort of emotional logic seductive. “Everyone has the right to live in some society in which they needn’t constantly worry about what they look like to others, and so be psychically distorted, conditioned to some degree of mauvaise foi”, Berlin said in 1992, near the end of his life, explaining his support for Zionism.

And yes, no doubt many people do feel most at ease with a home and a homeland. But what about the others, who find home oppressive and foreignness liberating? Theirs is a choice that gets both easier and more difficult to exercise with every passing year. Easier, because the globalisation of industry and education tramples national borders. More difficult, because there are ever fewer places left in this globalised world where you can go and feel utterly foreign when you get there.

It has long been true in America that nobody can be foreign because everybody is foreign. In the capital cities of Europe that same paradoxical condition has more or less been reached—especially in Brussels, the self-styled capital of Europe, where decades of economic migration have been reinforced by an influx of European Union bureaucrats. There the animosity between Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians makes them foreigners to one another, even in their own country.

To get a strong sense of what it means to be foreign, you have to go to Africa, or the Middle East, or parts of Asia. In South Korea last year 42% of the population had never knowingly spoken to a foreigner. Well, they had better get ready. The country’s foreign residents have doubled in the past seven years, to 1.2m, or more than 2% of the population. And that share could rise: the foreign-born average in the rich world is over 8% of a given population.

Foreigners par excellence

The most generally satisfying experience of foreignness—complete bafflement, but with no sense of rejection—probably comes still from time spent in Japan. To the foreigner Japan appears as a Disneyland-like nation in which everyone has a well-defined role to play, including the foreigner, whose job it is to be foreign. Everything works to facilitate this role-playing, including a towering language barrier. The Japanese believe their language to be so difficult that it counts as something of an impertinence for a foreigner to speak it. Religion and morality appear to be reassuringly far from the Christian, Islamic or Judaic norms. Worries that Japan might Westernise, culturally as well as economically, have been allayed by the growing influence of China. It is going to get more Asian, not less.

Even in Japan, however, foreigners have ceased to function as objects of veneration, study and occasionally consumption. Once upon a time, in the ancient and medieval worlds, to count as properly foreign you had to seek out a life among peoples of a different skin colour or religion. They were probably an impossibly long distance away, they might well kill you when you got there, and if you went too far you might fall off the edge of the world.

At the dawn of the travelling age, writing an imaginary legal code for a Utopian society that he called Magnesia, Plato divided foreigners into two main categories. “Resident aliens” were allowed to settle for up to 20 years to do jobs unworthy of Magnesians, such as retail trade. “Temporary visitors” consisted of ambassadors, merchants, tourists and philosophers. Broaden that last category to include all scholars, and you have a taxonomy of travellers that held good until the invention of the stag party.

To be foreign got much more straightforward from the 17th century onwards, when Europe adopted a political system based on nation states, each with borders, sovereignty and citizenship. Travel-papers in hand, you could turn yourself into an officially recognised foreigner simply by visiting the country next door—which, with the advance of mechanised transport, became an ever more trivial undertaking. By the early 20th century most of the world was similarly compartmentalised.

Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition, but in practice it can be a huge relief

The golden age of genteel foreignness began. The well-off, the artistic, the bored, the adventurous went abroad. (The broad masses went too, as empires, steamships and railways made travel cheaper and easier.) Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.

Writers in particular seemed to thrive in exile, real or self-imposed. The qualities of it—displacement, anxiety, disorientation, incongruity, melancholia—became the modern literary sensibility. A writer living overseas could shrug off the perceived limitations of country and culture. He was no longer an English author, or an Irish author, or a Russian author, he was simply an Author: think of James Joyce, Christopher Isherwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky. It became, and remains, bad form to pigeonhole a writer by country. All want to be writers of the world, and the world rewards that aspiration. Of the past ten winners of the Nobel prize for literature, five (V.S. Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Herta Müller) have been émigrés.

An earlier Nobel prize-winner, Ernest Hemingway, set the ground rules for the writer as foreigner when he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris: live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (or equivalent), work in cafés, meet other artists, drink a lot.

Not everyone can be Hemingway. Many foreigners today are threadbare students, overworked managers, trailing spouses. The male expatriate in Bangkok is a great deal freer than the female expatriate in Jeddah. The lot of unwilling foreigners is far worse still. A life of foreignness imposed by poverty or persecution or exile is unlikely to be enjoyable at all.

Even so, all other things being equal, foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility.

It may be this sense of a return to childhood, consciously or not, that gives the pleasure of foreignness its edge of embarrassment. Narcissism may also play a part. While abroad, one imagines being missed by friends and enemies at home. Beneath it all there is the guilt of betrayal. To choose foreignness is an act of disloyalty to one’s native country.

That idea of disloyalty is less bothersome now. But a century or so ago it was a mark of deviance for an English gentleman to admit the desirability of living anywhere other than England. The best argument in favour of spending time abroad was that it gave you a better appreciation of the virtues of home. “What should they know of England, who only England know?” wrote Kipling.

I’m an alien

Nowadays, you might rather say that the more you know of other countries, the more inclusive of all humanity your values will become. You educate yourself, beginning with anthropology.

Every foreigner of inquiring mind becomes a part-time anthropologist, wondering and smiling at the new social rituals of his adoptive country. George Mikes, a Hungarian living in England, wrote a book in this genre called “How To Be An Alien”, published in 1946. It was not really about how to be an alien at all, but about a foreigner’s view of English society, and it was very funny. Mikes rightly saw that most social codes partook of the arbitrary and the absurd. If you happened to stand outside them, as a foreigner always did, then life could be a continuous comedy.

Mikes wrote later, tongue in cheek, that he had expected his English friends to be very angry at the mocking portrait he painted of their country. Instead they seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Mikes had been making fun of a culture confident enough to laugh at itself, and his underlying admiration and affection for it were clear.

Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live

Still, it could have gone badly wrong. Foreigners do complain more than they should, and locals do not like it. If you were to write a book called “How To Be An Alien” today, and meant it to be a serious manual of instruction for use anywhere in the world, it might consist of three rules only. Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live. Exaggeratedly nice. Avoid even trivial criticisms. You do not go into somebody’s house and start rearranging their furniture.

Perhaps foreigners are, by their nature, hard to satisfy. A foreigner is, after all, someone who didn’t like his own country enough to stay there. Even so, the complaining foreigner poses something of a logical contradiction. He complains about the country in which he finds himself, yet he is there by choice. Why doesn’t he go home?

The foreigner answers that question by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual sense. Something within himself has driven him away from his homeland. He becomes even a touch jealous of the real exile. Life abroad is an adventure. How much greater might the adventure be, how much more intense the sense of foreignness, if there were no possibility of return?

For the real exile, foreignness is not an adventure but a test of endurance. The Roman poet Ovid, banished to a dank corner of the empire, complained that exile was ruining him “as laid-up iron is rusted by scabrous corrosion/or a book in storage feasts boreworms”. Edward Said, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian-American scholar, caught the romance and pain of exile when he called it “a strangely compelling idea, but a terrible experience”. The true exile, he said, was somebody who could “return home neither in spirit nor in fact”, and whose achievements were “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever”.

The willing foreigner is in exactly the reverse position, for a while at any rate. His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time.

Of pain and pleasure

The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding”.

Illustration by C. Corr

Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it. Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born intellectual resettled in France, has caught this sense of deprivation by comparing the experience of foreignness with the loss of a mother.

But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.

+++by http://www.economist.com/