張五常的劣譯

翻譯不是易事,因為好的翻譯一定要靈活,不能硬譯,也不應流於意譯,以求準確達意而又地道;就算是兩種語言都精通,亦都未必能夠做到。就以張五常為例,他的英文一定相當不錯,中文則雖偶有沙石,但文章亦不乏精彩之

The evolution of checklists in my work

Over the past few years, I've become a real fan of using checklists . But I wasn't always this way, and I think how I evolvedto using checklists in my work is an interesting illustration of howsmall cultural things can make a big difference.

As far as I can reverse engineer the evolution, it goes like this:

A few years ago I switched jobs within the university, moving to a newgroup . The new group had and has a strongculture of writing what we call '


作個悶演說

有時會奇怪,為甚麼有些人說話,永遠都可以沈悶到不行︰明明是有趣的話題,變成催眠曲;明明是有深度的主題,就變得冗長而瑣碎。就以大家由小學到中學都聽過無數次的「勉言」或「致辭」,你記得有多少個可以用「精彩

幸福如飲水

有個朋友,丈夫忠誠可靠,兒子聰明伶俐,自己則是個盡心盡力的妻子和母親,雖然也有一份全職的工作,但照顧一家的起居飲食都無微不至;在一般人的眼中,我這個朋友的生活就是幸福的寫照。

她可能真的很幸福,然而,這

和你在一起

很舊的歌
但無論什麼時候聽都舒服

悼念好友爸爸—單車

那晚聽陳奕迅演唱會,聽到「單車」這首歌,不期然想起我那已離世的父親。期間,湊巧亦收到好友傳來的電郵,得知他爸爸剛離開了的消息。

不管是那個年代,代溝總是永遠都存在的問題,父與子的溝通問題,好像又份外嚴重


The Young Victoria ("宮廷眷戀─維多利亞與阿爾拔親王") ------ 不太有看頭的宮廷愛情片!

























Film : The Young Victoria (2009)
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
Written by Julian Fellowes
Starring Emily Blunt/ Miranda Richardson/ Jim Broadbent/ Paul Bettany/ Mark Strong/ Rupert Friend/ Thomas Kretschmann/ Julian Glover/ Michael Maloney/ Rachael Stirling
Music by Ilan Eshkeri
Running Time: 105mins

1. 近幾年好像有很多齣宮廷片,都是一些少不免的權力鬥爭,勾心鬥角的內容!

Testing in the face of popen()

Suppose that you have a program that runs another program and uses itsoutput; for example, you have a high level analysis program that runsa low level state gathering command (or several commands) to gathervarious information.Here is something that I have recently learned the hard way:

You really want to give your high level program an option to getthis status output from a file instead of by running the commands.

Doing this saves you from having to recreate a specific scenarioeach time you want to test how your


The White Ribbon(白色恐懼) ------ 自身產生的恐懼

























Film: The White Ribbon (2009)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Written by Michael Haneke
Narrated by Ernst Jacobi
Starring Christian Friedel/ Ulrich Tukur/ Josef Bierbichler
Running Time: 144mins


1. 看此戲絕對地因為導演是Michael Haneke,他之前的作品令觀眾所產生的恐懼完全是內在而生的(睇過"Benny's Video", "Hidden", "Funny Games US"都知佢

眼見未必真

昨天有個同事用電郵傳了一張演講的宣傳海報給我,我看到講者的名字印錯了,應是"Perelman",海報上卻是"Percelman"。於是我立即回電郵告知同事,誰知他說海報上分明印的是"Perelman",還順便指出其實我們的眼睛時常會作弄我們。我