Taipei Day 2 - 10 Sep 2013 (Tues)

Journey starts at 10 am today. And since it was already a bit late, we went straight to 台北车站 and had our lunch there in the food court. 

Surprisingly, Starbucks are pretty popular in Taiwan. There is 2 even in the same single 台北车站 subway alone! 

We ordered a veggie sushi box, a charamel macchiato, and I tried the Tao hu faa of Taiwan. It's a bit different from ours. Theirs is not using the thick type of black/white sugar. It's diluted sugar water. But the Tao hu faa is really soft. 

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Went to 国父纪念馆 after brunch. 

It was hot today!! 

We walked around, but found nothing really interesting or special. 

Coincidently there was a 圆明园 展览 there. We decided to pay for it. T$250 per head. 

No photos from here because its prohibited from taking any photographs. All is say is, if u are a person who is interested in the history of Qing dinasty (清朝）, this is a place u definitely should not miss. Plenty of genuine artifacts and photos to be seen here. 

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Rushed to 故宫博物院 at 2pm.

http://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%8B%E7%AB%8B%E6%95%85%E5%AE%AE%E5%8D%9A%E7%89%A9%E9%99%A2

This is a 100% must visit place if you are a fan of china history. 

This was taken out side of the building. 

Entrance towards the building. 

Again. It's a place where photography is prohibited inside the building. 

The building is full of historical artifacts, which has the collection all the from 3000+ years ago. 

The building is segregated into sections of prehistoric artifacts, which includes religious, culture, art, calligraphic, sculpture, weaponry, pottery, etc.....

And most of them are the originated from the original author/creator. 

The place closed at 6pm. With a full 3 hour to spend there, we could hardly even finish touring the entire building.  You could imagine how rich the content of what the place is offering. With only NT$200 per person, it's definitely offering a lot of what you paid for. No doubt about it. A definitely must visit place if u are a Chinese history freak like me. 

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Meeting Laogu and Adele at 士林夜市 for dinner. As the usual thing. Ate a lot. Walked a lot. Shopped a lot. And saw a lot of interesting gambling games. :D

All in all, it's a travel back to china day for us. Tiring, yet rewarding :)

Taipei Day 1 - 9 Sep 2013 (Mon)

Reached 桃园 airport at around 3:15pm. 

The weather was clear and bright. Nice :)

We took a bus (国光) and headed towards the central bus station. It was T$120 per head. And then from that station we took another bus to 西门町. This was free. 

Our hotel is 立夏商旅. It's located at the central city. Very convenient. 

Something very special about it is that, the hotel is somewhat located in a SINGLE floor of a multi stories building. Yes. Only a single floor. Pretty unique from the perspective of a Malaysian. 

Ok. It was a bit pricy. T$2500+ per night.  But given the strategic location, and nice room, I'd say its reasonable. U could save quite some money on transportation as well as time, and that kind of makes up for the gap, I'd say. 

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Straight down from the hotel, right next to it is a very busy night street full of activities and hawkers. 

We headed straight to try out the very famous 阿宗面线 at 峨眉街. 

Honestly speaking , it was not bad. But really, not that really good. It's nothing quite near to Penangs Kampung Malabar's pork broth. At T$4.50 for a small bowl the size of an ais kacang, not really worth it. But if u are here, it's still worth a try la. 

Now this is something really interesting. It's call 花生卷冰淇淋. 

It's made up of a layer of pohpiah skin, wrapped around grinded peanut sugar, with 2 scoops of ice cream of your choice. The peanut sugar that I saw them grinding was of the size of at least a square cube of 30cmx30cmx30cm. It was HUGE. Wonder where they get that :p

As we moved on. Danielle spotted something that she have dreamt of trying badly. 大肠包小肠. 

We were already bloated at that time, and so we carry it along in our backpack. But the smell of it is enough to make anyone salivate. 

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Off we go to Taipei 101 building, the tallest landmark in Taiwan. It's some distance away from our current location. We need to take mrt(the blue color rail) about 7 stations, and some distance if evening walk to reach there. 

Along the way, we came across this building which is a famous book store. 诚品书店。its a chain book store, just like Popular or MPH in Malaysia. Just that, there is one of it that lays in somewhere of this city, which opens for 24 hours!

Anyway, we didn't enter that building as we were short of time. 

We reached Taipei 101 around 9pm, and its closing in 10pm, so we gotta hurry. 

Still the queue is long. 

We bought our tickets, and of we go. 

The lift that took us up to the 89th floor of this building is claimed to be the fastest lift in te world. From level 5 to 89, it took us less than 15 seconds. 

Honestly, with the price that we paid (T$500 per head), there was nothing really special about it. If you are for the introduction of Taipei city, I'd suggest that u go during day time. And apart from that, there is really nothing else that you can expect for. It does allow you to go to level 91, which is open air to enjoy the breeze though. 

Well. That concludes our first day in Taipei. 

Taiwan Here We Come

Coffee at airport. Waiting patiently for the flight ......

Autumn Leaves

Have been in love with this Jazz song for quite some time, but haven't really got the time to get around it.

Came across this today. Well, lets see how far i can get to this this time around :)

http://jazzguitarlegend.com/jazz-standard-lesson-6-autumn-leaves/

http://jazzguitarlegend.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/JGL_Autumn_Leaves_Melody_Chords.pdf

Working With Perforce -G (Python Marshalled Object) Option

Most common pitfall is to directly get the output pirnted in stdout and marshal it:-

#!/usr/bin/env python
cmd = 'p4 -G changelists -m 3'
mo = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
result = marshal.loads(mo)
pprint(result)

Nope. This won't work correctly.
You will only get the last data in the list of 3 items.

This is the correct way to do it:-

#!/usr/bin/env python
cmd = 'p4 -G changelists -m 3'
mo = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

result = []
try:
   while 1:
      output = marshal.load(mo.stdout)
      result.append(output)
except EOFError:
   pass
finally:
   mo.stdout.close()

pprint(result)

Reading/Writing xlsx File In Python

I'm using the python library openpyxl.
The below shows an example of how to iterate thru cells ...

#!/usr/bin/env python

import openpyxl
from pprint import pprint

wb = openpyxl.reader.excel.load_workbook('test.xlsx')
s = wb.get_sheet_by_name(name='Sheet1')

d = s.calculate_dimension()

r = s.range(d)
print "Range:" + str(r)
for row in r:
   for cell in row:
      print cell.get_coordinate()
      print cell.value

If you need help, u can use the python interactive session:-

%python
>>> import openpyxl
>>> help(openpyxl.reader.excel)
>>> wb = openpyxl.reader.excel.load_workbook('test.xlsx')
>>> help(wb)
>>> ws = wb.get_sheet_by_name(name='Sheet1')
>>> help(ws)
>>> cell = ws.cell(row=0, column=0)
>>> help(cell)

How To Kill A Bunch Of My LSF Jobs

I want to list out all my current jobs in lsf:-

%bjobs

JOBID USER STAT QUEUE FROM_HOST EXEC_HOST JOB_NAME SUBMIT_TIME
4883896 yltan RUN ice_arc_sm pg-yltan-l pg-iccf0082 *eep 11111 Mar 1 15:37
4883898 yltan RUN ice_arc_sm pg-yltan-l pg-iccf0039 *eep 11111 Mar 1 15:37
4883974 yltan RUN ice_arc_sm pg-yltan-l pg-iccf0079 *eep 11111 Mar 1 15:45
4883975 yltan RUN ice_arc_sm pg-yltan-l pg-iccf0082 *eep 11111 Mar 1 15:45
4883976 yltan PEND ice_arc_sm pg-yltan-l pg-iccf0035 *eep 11111 Mar 1 15:45
4883977 yltan PEND ice_arc_sm pg-yltan-l pg-iccf0039 *eep 11111 Mar 1 15:45

Killing All of the listed jobs 

%bjobs | awk '$1 ~ /^[0-9]/ {print $1}' | xargs bkill

Job <4883896> is being terminated
Job <4883898> is being terminated
Job <4883974> is being terminated
Job <4883975> is being terminated
Job <4883976> is being terminated
Job <4883977> is being terminated

Killing All of the listed jobs, with a few exceptions

%bjobs | awk '$1 ~ /^[0-9]/ && $1 !~ /(4883896|4883898)/ {print $1}' | xargs bkill

Job <4883974> is being terminated
Job <4883975> is being terminated
Job <4883976> is being terminated
Job <4883977> is being terminated