Grouse

It's kinda sad, if you think about it. Whenever people such as I identify ourselves as having or are taking a course in Computer Science, the natural reaction of people will go something like "Oh, so do you know how to do this effect for MSWord?" I mean, it sucks because people have this preconceived notion that we who are in Computer Science are being schooled in the arts of using various office productivity software. It also shows how good a job the Microsoft marketing department has been doing; to be able to reinforce the idea the Computer Science = Microsoft products.

Well, for the most part, the people are not exactly wrong. Most of us who are in Computer Science usually have a knack with things related to computers; well even in the most unfortunate case of having to deal with a completely new system, Computer Scientists tend to be able to figure things out much faster than the other people. However, it is truly irritating when that is the only perception that people have on Computer Scientists. Personally, I feel that it shows a certain form of disdain by the masses on the work that we do, as though Computer Scientists are like the vermin of society, who could only manipulate commercial software products like MSWord. I mean, our work is no less important than say the Electrical/Electronic Engineers or even the Musicians; it is just that most of what we do doesn't impact people that overtly in their lives.

Ever wondered what passes through the mind of a non-tech-savvy person? Well, I did, but I never quite figured out what they really thought about us who are in the Computer Science field. I mean, I can understand why sometimes they display some level of awe when we accomplish some seemingly impossible task on the computer (at least to them), but I cannot understand why at the same time they will issue this stereotype onto you and label you as the dude-who-did-this-I-don't-understand-thing-on-the-computer. It is curious since the same people often do not use the same tactics on people who are doing something more visible, like the engineers. No one seems to label the Mechanical Engineer as the dude-who-did-this-I-don't-understand-thing-on-the-<insert mechanical hardware>; mostly they can just look at what has been done and sort of understand it.

I have no clue why people treat Computer Scientists with such weird disposition. I mean, we are humans after all, doing what we do best (with computers), which is not unlike the Musicians who can play their instruments, or the Engineers who could build stuff that works. What makes me really sad is that there seems to be a complete conspiracy of the mainstream society against those of the Computer Scientists. Ever heard of bad coverage on Engineers? Those are mild compared to the various mass media-assigned terms on us Computer Scientists. Among those who give us the worst of all labels and stereotypes, the mass media ought to take the most of the blame. For they have always been at fault right from the very beginning. Whenever there is some kind of news report related to computers, they make it sound as though the Computer Scientist is the one at fault. They take our terms and corrupt them (Hacker vs Cracker, RAM/memory vs Hard disk space to name a few), blame our programs for the dumb things people do (rampage shooting linked to "violent video games", copyright infringement linked to "file sharing technologies"), poke fun at us without mercy (all the fat-nerd jokes and stereotypes in films) and even blame us on things that we don't even have control over (global warming due to use of energy and since computers use energy, we're at fault).

The saddest thing is, even with evidence contrary to the point that the mass media put across, the damage is done and we're condemned.

Politicians seem to make lots of comments on how technology will cause the utter downfall of society, due to it's far reaching effects. And among their policies so far, the ones that they seem to be targetting at the most nowadays is that of computer technology. Back in the latter half of the 20th century, the technology that was under the spot-light for policy makers was that of nuclear energy. Everyone witnessed the absolute destructive power of the nuclear bomb during World War II, and it seemed to be of paramount importance that such widespread use of such a terrible technology should be curbed. Well, the intentions were good, but then again if the proliferation were of such concern, why did the two biggest countries stockpiled massive amounts of the weapon?

Now, in a post nuclear-war-danger era and post-9/11 era, the focus seems to be that of the computer and its supposed ill-effects. It is said that most of the coordination of the terrorists was done via the Internet, and thus many of the governing bodies have tried legislative means of controlling the Internet, or at least the Internet within their geographical boundaries. Too many high school shootings later, politicians think that video games have a negative impact on minors and are striving to obtain an outright ban for that age group. Internet music was under fire recently when various companies decided to lobby the politicians to reign in the folks who were sharing commercial music illegally, and the politicians promptly went down the draconian route of banning all forms of internet music.

What's wrong with these people and all these reactions? If we look carefully at this, we realise that the people who are making the most noise on the issues are often the ones who seem to least understand them; has anyone seen a qualified Computer Scientist standing up and voicing the dissent that the people are showing?

Technology is never at fault; people are. Technology is just an entity, a piece of knowledge. By itself, it is never wrong; there is no wrong or right with technology. Technology's use is the thing that can be wrong or right, and its use is determined by the people. My only hope is that people will try to understand computer technology and Computer Scientists better, and deal with the real issue of usage rather than trying to ban outright the technology itself.

Education, I believe, is still the best solution for most of the problems that we are facing nowadays.

Swiss Army Knife [in a thumb drive]

It's really cute. Apparently people are reading the stuff that I am posting around here. Considering that more than half of my posts are rants of all forms, it is amazing that some useful nuggets of information actually pop up through the email.

Remember this post? Well, a reader (The Free Geek) has kindly emailed me a link to this article where a list of useful applications are available to be put into your trusty thumb drive to turn it into a a digital swiss army knife of sorts. Have a look, some of the stuff seems interesting enough for a good try. Besides, thumb drives are so cheap nowadays (in terms of cost per unit storage) that it'd be really a waste to not try to make them a little more useful than just simple devices for transporting data around.

ed

Oh man. ed is the ultimate in text editing. It is the ultimate in spartan-ness, the ultimate in portability (it exists on every *nix and linux system known to human kind). And it is so obscure that it takes a little getting used to in order to do productive stuff with it.

If you thought vim was spartan with its cryptic abbreviated key-stroke commands, you should check out the commands that ed has. Be amazed. Be very amazed.

Okay, enough said. Time to get back to coding (in ed).

rtfm mode

Yeow... So much to do, so little time to do them all. It is rtfm time for me as I trudge on into the various endeavours.

First of all, it is the venerable FL Studio 7 which I just purchased in order to put together decent music that I want to hear. This baby is a gem (and costs a fair bit despite the 10% discount that I managed to obtain through a user support site), but like all gems, it requires a fair bit of hacking in order to fully exploit its abilities. So it is back to the manual for this one before I can produce anything truly marvellous.

Second of all, it is the new Microsoft Windows Vista. No, I'm not updating Edythe to run that beast of an operating system, but since my lovely sister just bought herself a spanking new HP Pavilion dv2200 laptop which comes with Microsoft Vista Home Premium Edition together with Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student Edition, and I've been designated as de facto sysadmin, and so I need to read up more on the intricacies of the various components. Vista seems like a lot of eye candy, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as it was originally stated, at least, for non-developing use. I can't even imagine how it would be possible to run cygwin on the thing without dramatic changes. The only irritating thing was the sensitivity of the touchpad; simplying hovering over any link/button caused it to be auto-activated.

Third of all, it is my LiveUSB project. I've just gotten myself into the "enviable" position of using at least 5 different operating systems at the same time, and thus in the event of system failure I cannot just sit there and hope for the best. So, I got myself a [relatively] cheap 2GiB thumb drive and need to proceed with loading it up with a barebones enough kernel on a FAT32 file system so that it can double up as a data transferral system as well as a system recovery tool. And since I'm such a lazy bum in terms of finding the relevant tools/software to pull this off, I've decided to hack it out from whatever I have, which means that again I need to read the manual.

That's a whole shebang load of things to read. So, until next time, I'm probably gonna be reading manuals until there is no tomorrow...

Chobits

omg, I just spent a whole bunch of hours doing the installations and reading Chobits manga. It is a romance-like manga, but the themes that it explores include things like what defines humanity, what defines love in humanity, and the effects of anthropologic artificial intelligence with regards to their interactions with us humans. The artwork may not be stellar (I think I'm spoilt by the good quality anime that we have nowadays), but the story was just so... touching. I couldn't resist but to feel strongly each time Chi makes an innocent comment about Hideki, or when Chi and Hideki hug each other. It kind of makes me feel like I badly need a hug (Alice, where are you?).

Okay, typing anymore at 4am in the bloody morning without sleep is so not going to make this a nice post. Maybe later in the day.

Another Quick Post

Ah, it's been a while. Things have happened along the way. Let's start slow and fill in the details as they come.

First of all, I've managed to upgrade my aging Samsung SGH-640 phone to the slightly newer Motorola L6. I wanted a clamshell phone to protect the main LCD from all the rough and tumble that I'm used to, but apparently they don't have that anymore. So I was stuck choosing the standard style or the sliding type. I picked the standard style as I found the sliding style a bit too weird for my taste. And among all the standard "brick" styles, I chose the Motorola L6 because it closely resembles the Motorola V195 phone that I have from T-Mobile in the United States. Well, by "closely resembling" I do mean that the keypads work similarly, which means that I do not need to relearn the keying that I've been used to for over eight months with the V195.

Second, I've kinda picked up a clarinet to play just for fun. It's an interesting instrument, but the fingering seems to be simple yet complicated. Unlike the saxophone which has really complicated fingerings with so many different things to push with all the fingers + palms + base of fingers, the clarinet uses only the fingers/finger-tips to do all the pushing, but with a twist. For instance, the left thumb needs to be placed in an odd position so as to be able to both cover a hole and press on an additional key slightly higher up in order to play the higher notes. This is bad for me because my thumb is really straight and can't really be adjusted to that level, but well, I guess that it is just a matter of time before I actually get used to it.

I think I'll end for now. Got a bit too lazy to finish this one up... >.<

Quick Shot

It feels kinda weird to find myself updating the prose-y blog more often then the poetic one; after all, the reason why The_Laptop Says was started was due to the fact that I found that I needed an additional avenue to vent out pent up feelings and thoughts in a way that is more direct and dense as compared to the nuance-y style of poems. Seems like I'm starting to evolve in terms of my writing again; from poems to prose. Very interesting development, maybe I can finally work on that project that I've always been trying to do.

Anyway, this is a short post, because I've been running on 5-hour sleep days for the last 3 days again. Until next time...

Giant Earthquake + Rock-ish Bands + [Heavy] Metal Bands

Remember this? Well, some things still don't change; like the fact that the horrible stairs are still there for me to climb up and down with. Ever since I've returned, I've spent most of my day walking up and down such steps. And people wonder why do I have such insane calf muscles...

So KaiXin met up with me today for a dinner and chit-chat. Kinda interesting to realise that he is almost done with his NSF days; kind of reminds me that I'm really growing older as the days go by. The fun part was that between he and I, we reduced this

to this. That's right, it is the amazing Giant Earthquake. And I kid you not, the two of us managed to polish off the entire bowl of 8 huge scoops of ice-cream with 8 toppings. An amazing feat, excellent for a hot day. If anyone'd like to pull this off, I'd suggest caution. heheheheh...

I was looking through my collection of music, and realised that I have almost nothing that is good to listen to now. Most of my [singing] music pieces are of these form; they are always so wistful and lamenting about lost loves and such. In fact, the main reason why I'm switching to 樱桃帮 (Cherry Boom) is that I needed something more rock and a little more... evil. That's right, Cherry Boom's music is a little on the evil side, so says this. If I actually have the time, I'll probably look deeper into this, but considering the fact that it is a rock-ish band, I'm not complaining. Currently I'm hot swapping Cherry Boom with Teresa Teng, and if the combination doesn't work well, I might just throw in Opeth or Therion.

No, I'm not in a music crisis... yet. Just trying to fine-tune some of the music that I listen to to further optimise their effects on me.

Till next time.

[edit: blogger is being anal... I should have started a new post rather than edit a draft. Now it refuses to edit the !@#$ date/time to yesterday]

Old Poem Brings New Meaning

I was doing some cleaning up of Edythe's hard drive recently and stumbled upon this old poem written some time in September 2006:

Farewell
It is in my eyes, that tears swell and fall,
That mark the losing of a lost love.
And that of the passing of a side of me,
That I knew was stillborn.
As the night passes into day,
I slowly die off, a little more than the day before,
Inasmuch as the physical body dies a little each day.
But the blow,
It hastened the process,
And I feel that the world is no longer
The happy place that I knew it to be.
Love, thou art elusive.
Thou art my bane.
I cast thee out of my life,
So haunt me no more.

Looking back into the not-so-far-away past, the memories of what prompted the genesis of this poem came flowing back to me in drips and drabs.

It was a sad moment, really. I recalled that at that point in my life, things were all going sort of downhill, My love life was basically in shambles; thought I found a love, but it was proven to be just a figment of my imagination, my friend thought she found me a love, but it turned out that there was something very wrong with that picture also. Maybe one day when the people are no longer that close will I be able to say in more detail.

September; it was a month that I felt really sad from it all. Little did I know then that the worse kind of feeling that I would be receiving over the whole period would be the time that occurred just after spring break in March. Oh boy, that was the worst possible kind of feeling that can hit anyone. But still, September was pretty bad enough. If you've been following what I've written in The_Laptop Writes, you would probably be able to follow how my mood was changing, and how my mental state was like during that period.

Well, as I said, all these are but stories/feelings of the past; now, I'm delighted that I've found Alice. She's a wonderful person who loves me for who I am, not who I was/will be. She loves me for the faults that I have and the joy that I bring. And I love her for being herself, truthful and trustworthy, and intelligent enough to look past the spoils of the material life and look beyond into the intangibles that so govern our lives. She's the woman that I would gladly live with for the rest of my life, no doubt. She may not be of movie star style, nor is she a techno-geek like me, but her insight and view on life, her life and mine, is something that I really admire. It is so hard these days to find people who are of similar mindedness, and in her it seems that I've found what I'm seeking. I used to be so gloomy about not being able to find someone to love, but now that Alice is here, there is but calm serenity within my heart; knowing that happiness is just peeking around the corner.

Alice, my dear, if you are reading this, know that I'm missing you terribly over here in Singapore and I can't wait to be back in Pittsburgh to spend the next two semesters with you again. And no, this is not mushy; these are words spoken by the_laptop. (=

I2R Again, Great Fun

Ah, the fresh smell of the free coffee in the Institute for Infocomm Research. It's been almost a year since I last worked here, and much has changed (as usual). Some of the friendly faces that I once knew have moved on to other callings in life, and I find myself in a not-altogether new environment to work in.

This is what I dream of—the working life of a researcher, where knowledge is learnt for the sake of learning new things so as to be able to apply them to something that is totally new for the advancement of some aspect of humankind. This beats the drudgery that is associated with the [artificiality of] homework that I face while I was still taking the courses back in college. Not that the homework was bad, but that there doesn't seem to be any meaning behind the homework. But then again, homework is necessary for ensuring that we have a certain mastery of the concepts that we are required to know and thus qualifies as a "necessary evil".

Ah, but whatever. So I'm now in my office, at a desk with a very decent computer running a not-so-decent version of Linux (it's called Ubuntu) and preparing the environment for the hard core stuff that I'll be working on while reading up on the various articles to get myself up to speed for the stuff that is going to happen during the entire 8-week attachment that I need to do.

Ubuntu is not a bad version of Linux; it's just that I'm so used to the good old fashioned command line (and the extremely minimalistic fvwm2 that I hacked together) that the Gnome interface seems a little too superfluous (and space wasting with their dual bar system). My current default windowing manager on my Slackware partition on Edythe is the KDE (which I seriously don't like but am putting up with it because of some of the useful properties that it has), but I'm looking into either putting up blackbox or even icewm as the default one (saves on power due to less eye candy). AfterStep is another viable alternative, as is FluxBox. But I might just stick with Ion, which is probably really the most suited for my keyboarding ways.

Who said that Linux cannot have a nice GUI? It's just that most of the mainstream GUIs are so fat and clunky that they become fairly useless [in my opinion].

So, what started out as a simple moment-of-contentment thing has turned into a mild rant. Bleah.