Does Air-Conditioning Work?

Many years back, I learnt about how air-conditioning works. It basically works by transferring heat through conduction from the cooling fins to the air outside of the room/house/unit that it is supposed to cool.

Outside air < — Cooling fins <— metal tubes <— freon gas <— internal air (from room etc)

In the process, some heat is generated. This heat generated is due to inefficiency of the compressor, electronics etc found in air-conditioning units. This inefficiency is common in practically *all* electrical devices, where some electrical power is converted into actual intended work, while others are lost, either as heat, sound or kinetic energy or a combination of them all.

In a sense, air-conditioners do not create “coolness”. “Cold” cannot be created. Only heat can be created. Coldness appears to exist only in contrast to the lack or relative differences in heat. So while a heater generates heat, a cooler (eg air-con) does not actually create cold. It merely displaces it. Coldness itself is also empty of inherent characteristics.
Further to that, heaters do not actually generate or create heat as well. They merely release the potential energy “trapped” or “stored” in the fuel, or convert energy from one form to another, eg convert electrical energy to heat energy. In the process, most heaters “lose” some energy through ambient heating (ie, heating up the appliant itself in an unintended manner), unintended lighting, sound etc. We can perhaps say that heat itself is dependent arising, that it is also inherently empty.

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Catching Up with Old Friends … …

I recently met two old friends … no, not that they are old, but more that we knew each other a long time ago. 😉

To protect their identities (I always like this! :p) … let’s call my friend … ok, ok, let’s cut the bull and get it over. If my friend has problem with his name appearing on my obscure blog, then he needs to stop living under a rock! 😉

So ChingWi messaged me one day that she has a friend Hanguan who needs some advice from a monk and referred him to me. I agreed but didn’t thought much about the name, though I thought she was referring to Angguan, another friend from awhile back, but that’s another story.

Friday came, and when this Hanguan came over my cubicle (monks have cubicles? *gasp*), I was like “Hey, I know you!” and he was like “Yeah, wow … you … “

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What Price Peace?

So awhile ago, I had lunch with a good friend, Yong Hee. He asked me my thoughts about “ends justifying the means”, ie if the end is strong enough, can it necessarily justify the means to achieve it.

I thought for awhile, and later asked him in return: If someone declares that to have peace,
we need to kill everyone else (so that there is no conflict, hence peace) … is that still right?

Many of our daily decisions do not result in life and death, but on very grey areas where it’s hard to delineate right from wrong. I personally find it important to see the means as part of the end as well, i.e. the actions themselves are part of the result, and not separate from the derivative result that we are pursuing.

The other thing to also consider … as I mentioned to him is the very fact that we are even having second thoughts about certain course of actions … often these are tell tale signs that perhaps the balance is not there.

Chinese translation: http://buddhavacana.net/2013/05/29/和平的代价/

First Post

So I’m starting a blog to write down the questions that people pose to me my encounters with people who come to me with questions. I’ll also post occassional ramblings about IT stuffs that I used to dabble with or am dambling with.
To start off, here’s a side note about blogs, I wrote a software called BNG back in the late 90s. It’s an acronym for Buddhist News Generator. You see, this web site used to be on a space hosted by my ISP Pacific Internet back then, and it barely supported any server side scripting … I could of course use FrontPage, which I did initially, but got sick of the thick chunk of FrontPage Extension code that becomes embedded into my web pages.

I was also working on some Multimedia Web Browser called Inspire in a little company’s R&D, and that got me into writing apps that talked HTTPConnect and stuffs. Eventually I wrote BNG as a Windows app that talks directly to your web site’s FTP servers and allows you to enter News snips which would get packaged and uploaded to the configured page.

In short, it does what blogs do (more or less) without server side scripts, database and the like. But it does not have WYSIWYG editing, support for searching, comments, indexing, and all the cool fancy stuffs we take for granted in blogs today. But that was the late 90s.
So did I invent the blog? Naye. Posting style kind of web site became pretty popular with many web sites before blogs came about. I guess the inventive thing about blogs was not so much of a technological progress, but a paradigm shift (don’t you just love these jargon that makes you think that you are intelligent! 😉 ). Blogs are really web sites that are diaries-on-steroids. And perhaps this blog is one such site.

In any case, I’ll just post occasionally and if enough of it appears, I’ll provide a link to the main page for public access.

Till then.

How Do I Learn Most Things?

So I picked up Wiki over a few days last week or so. With all honesty, I did not know a hoot about using wikis, setting it up nor do I claim to be a wikiMaster right now. But I found out how to download and setup a wiki package, how to create new pages etc because some (young) folks wanted to use wiki but didn’t know how to … and didn’t want to lift a finger to learn.

It’s strange ‘cos as I think I learnt most things this way. It goes something like this:

  1. Something needs to be done.
  2. n

  3. No one wants to do it because its not something they’ve done before.
  4. I check it out.
  5. Read up, research on it and learn how to do it.
  6. I get it done.
  7. I learn a new skill.

For the most part, doing things is really a replication of something that’s been done before. Save for the creative screenplays, art, music etc, most things are really just that. Replication.

Just observe how its done once. Then replicate.

Simple. Ok, maybe not all that simple. Sometimes, you need to repeat the cycle numerous times to replicate flawlessly. But mostly, you don’t need to be flawless in your replication. The ability to replicate flawlessly, is to manufacture; the lack thereof, art.

The ability to replicate flawlessly, is to manufacture; the lack thereof, art

So its very interesting for me to observe how all these folks who want to become Buddhas in future, or claim to want to, are so low on interest to learn. Afterall, all SammasamBuddhas spend many many eons (3 Maha-Asangkayas Kalpas to be sure … for those who are of sharp faculties and are earnest in their training) learning and practising.

Alright … enough rambling for a Sunday …

How to Enable Chime for DBVPalm

How to enable Chime for DBVPalm

Overview
This details the installation process for the wav file for dbvpalm app.

Steps
After installing dbvpalm.prc, do the following:
1. Copy dbvpalm.wav to a folder “/Palm/Launcher/” in an SD card.
2. Insert SD card into your Palm.

Run DBVPalm and it should play the chime upon starting.

System Requirements
1. Palm OS based PDA with SD card slot.
2. For Sony Clie PDAs, a 3rd party add-in is required. See Notes below for detail.
02 July 2006