I had a look at the Chinese translation version of Laurence Steinberg’s The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting when I was in Taiwan on July 2005. After reading the book for around one hour in a bookshop, I found the ten principles of good parenting convincing. So I bought it and read the whole book.

I do not like the Chinese title of the book. It does not truely reflect the contents of the book. I prefer to a direct translation of “ten basic principles of good parenting.”

Here are the ten basic principles for sharing and for my easy reviewing on the Web. (more…)

I want to buy a HDD-based multi-media player for me to have another place to store and play music, photos, and video. I also want it be a more convenient place for my little boys to playback their favorite DVDs on LCD. It can also be a place to backup my large volume of photos taken these few years. The following are three products in my watchlist.

• TVIX M3000U from DVICO — The Original Digital Jukebox — TVIX is a portable multimedia player for digital home entertainment that brings your movies, music and photos to your TV.
• TVIX HD M5000U from DVICO — The newest and most advanced HDD-based Divx player from DVICO.
• MediaMan HVX-3500 — Mediaman HVX-3500 is a versatile multi-media player that allows you to store a plenty of data, music, photos, and even complete movie collections and playback them on your AV systems.

The prices are reasonable: TVIX-M3000U costs around HK$ 1400, MediaMan HVX-3500 costs around HK$1900, and TVIX-M5000U is the most advanced and the most expensive (around HK$ 2600). I have saw the demo of the former two in Hong Kong consumer-electronic shops. The following are the main differences I can notice.

• Both TVIX HD M-5000U and MediaMan HVX-3500 supports DVI, Component, S-video, and Composite output for video, but TVIX M3000U does not support DVI.
• TViX HD M-5000U can be networked with a PC using its built-in LAN port. You can navigate to a file in a PC on and play the file from its original destination without having to first copy it onto the TViX HD.
• TViX HD M-5000U can display images in BMP format in addition to JPEG format.

Do you konw other similar gadgets that I can purchase in Hong Kong? I appreciate it if you can share with me what you know about HDD-based multi-media players suitable for small living room.

I saw the great potential of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry many years ago. Today, with the recent advances in computing and networking technologies, the growth of this industry becomes a real trend. This article from BusinessWeek online (April 17, 2006), Software-as-a-Service Myths (by Jeffrey Kaplan), explains why this new bread of Web-based software has staying power. The following summarizes the main points I got from the article.

• While Saas is not a new idea, the economic climate and rapid advancements in application development tools have combined to make SaaS more attractive and successful today than their predecessors–ASPs (application service providers) and hosting services of the past.
• SaaS allows for lower total cost of ownership and quicker time-to-value.
• SaaS solutions are emerging to address nearly every business application need. SaaS not only applies to customer relationship management and salesforce automation but also makes sense for many front-office functions and team-oriented collaboration purposes.
• As SaaS gains mainstream acceptance, it is becoming an important disruptive force in the software industry.
• It is not easy for the big and established software vendors to dominate the market of SaaS. You can also join the SaaS movement and make wealth.
• SaaS is not only for corporate user. Many SaaS providers aimed at small and midsize business and the home user.

To probe further about SaaS and its players, SaaS Showplace (saas-showplace.com) is a good place to start with. It gives a simple, easy-to-use directory of SaaS providers and enabling technology vendors.

I know the rough figures about current world population (~ 6.5 billion), China population (~ 1.3 billion), and Hong Kong population (~ 6.9 million). I also know that human babies were born every second. Likewise, there are people passed away every day. However, the following websites can give me a deeper and real feeling about those statistics about human population.

• Population Counter - Country Index — The world’s population according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

  It presents data for the population births and deaths by country. The data was collected since January 1, 2005 and new births and deaths are checked for every two seconds. I don’t know exactly how they can do it, but it gives me a real feeling that people are dying every second and babies are born every second. For example, I can calculate that in Hong Kong there are about 132 births and 113 deaths per day since 2005.

• Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before — Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

  This website can give you various prospects about human population. To quote a few: population is very weakly related to land area; More children are born each year in Africa than are born in the Americas, all of Europe and Japan put together; In Uganda and Niger half the population is under 15 years old; In Italy, Spain and Japan only 14% of the population are children aged under 15.

• Population Rank order (by CIA - The World Factbook).

  This website presents rank order in population of 238 countries or regions. China comes frst and India second. Hong Kong SAR (special administrative region of China) ranks 100. The website also provides various background information about each countries in the Earth.