Jessie's Girl

Some songs sounded cool then, but upon reflection at a later time, it is actually quite terrifying. Here's an example Jessie's Girl:Sounds cool for an 80's song right?

Now, read the lyrics:

Jessie is a friend,
yeah, I know he's been
a good friend of mine
But lately something's changed
that ain't hard to define
Jessie's got himself a girl
and I want to make her mine
And she's watching him with those eyes
And she's lovin' him with that body,
I just know it
Yeah 'n' he's holding her
in his arms late,
late at night

You know, I wish that I had Jessie's girl,
I wish that I had Jessie's girl
Where can I find a woman like that
I play along with the charade,
there doesn't seem to be
a reason to change
You know, I feel so dirty
when they start talking cute
I wanna tell her that I love her,
but the point is probably moot
'Cos she's watching him with those eyes
And she's lovin' him with that body,
I just know it
And he's holding her
in his arms late, late at night

Like Jessie's girl,
I wish that I had Jessie's girl
Where can I find a woman,
where can I find a woman like that
And I'm lookin' in the mirror all the time,
wondering what she don't see in me
I've been funny,
I've been cool with the lines
Ain't that the way
love supposed to be
Tell me, where can I find a woman like that
[Solo]
You know, I wish that I had Jessie's girl,
I wish that I had Jessie's girl
I want Jessie's girl,
where can I find a woman like that, like
Jessie's girl,
I wish that I had Jessie's girl,
I want,
I want Jessie's girl

Terrifying no? Someone covetting his good friend's girlfriend?

Condone Perfect Jerks?

Should we condone the behaviour of the few who seem to be more intelligent than us, even when they are acting like perfect jerks? Like every argument, there is a good side and a bad side. The good side of it all is the supposed benefit that we can obtain from these intelligent person, if we don't "cramp their style". The bad side of it is that these "geniuses" might end up having a problem with how they relate to people in general in the future, causing them to be ignored by the very people who might benefit from whatever new creation they might have.

Well, those two sides seem well-balanced to a certain degree, but seriously, there is much more to be discovered first before we can even argue about that. First off, what exactly do we mean by "perfect jerks"? Do we mean a general disdain of people, the looking down of people, or just being annoying to everyone with no regard whatsoever? Notice that for each of the three sample definitions, there can be a different conclusion to the earlier question. In this instance that I am arguing about, I shall define a "perfect jerk" as one who annoys to everyone without any regard, often with no ill intentions whatsoever. This is to contrast with those who annoy people with bad intentions.

My stand is simple—everyone has the right to their own personal space, and so no one, no matter how smart/intelligent/dumb/silly you are, has the right to take that away from someone else. Clearly, if anyone attempts to do that, you have every right to "defend" against them. This is what most of our laws and rules and regulations were designed to ensure.

[Ed: This was originally to have gone up on Oct 18, but I got too tired trying to continue it. I'm leaving it here in its incomplete state because I got sick trying to argue my points.]

The_Laptop's Domain

Finally! The first iteration of my own domain is up and is accessible through http://thelaptop.info/ or http://munthye.info/ (the latter just redirects to the former).

The site is deliberately spartan and is used to host static material that a blog will prove to be insufficient for. This includes things like source code, my own music compositions, and even other better typeset versions of essays that I've put up here.

Alright, that's a quick blurb for now. I'll write more about this when I have the chance.

A 2004 Email…

It's humbling to note that the person whom I had traded emails with back in 2004 over how his cryptosystem based on pseudo-random number generators was in fact an elder and that he had recently passed away.

Here's an excerpt of the "final" reply I made on the subject:

Well, the problem here is the idea of pseudo-random. Even with a large period, simple linear congruential generators are still easy to break, using what is known as the index of correspondence, the key in cracking simple XOR ciphers.

Combining multiple linear congruential generators using Knuth's algorithm M may provide a longer period, even if you are using simple linear congruential generators. However, the security of such a lagged pseudo-random number generator is only as strong as the weakest generator. Also, even if your generator produces a nice sequence that is periodic only after exp(exp(exp(exp(exp(exp...(100)...))))), it will be as good as a one-time pad if you can guarantee that the bit sequence will *never* be used more than once.

Avoid using pseudo-random number generators as cryptographic algorithms. These are among the weakest link in the entire security chain. Notice that most cryptographic algorithms rely on other sources for random numbers, like hashing random events using a secure one-way hash. But of course, using a long period pseudo-random number generator is really a good thing for simulations.

My last point: Since pseudo-random number generators mostly rely on the simplest of all arithmetic operations, they are constantly under the scrutiny of mathematicians all over the world. It pays to use something that has been tried, proven and shown to be un-crackable than relying on the unsound knowledge that the pseudo-random number generator is "secure".

More details on the exchange can be found here.

I think I was a really terrible asshole then… I never did see Mac as an elder—I've always thought that he was roughly a peer. I guess I was wrong.

It turns out the Internet has a way of masking who you really are talking to. Now, if only everyone were to learn how best to talk to people without sounding too haughty/condescending.

I guess I have much to learn…

Eyes!

On the topic of reading, here's some interesting things:

• Wikipedia article on the 10 (yes, 10) types of eyes
• Wikipedia article on the evolution of the eye
• Wikipedia article on the Mantis Shrimp (scary little bugger)
• Wikipedia article on hyperspectral imaging

Completely unrelated to work of course, and unrelated to the fact that I love pretty eyes.

>.>

iRex Digital Reader 1000S

If you knew me well enough, you'd know that I'm a sucker for reading. While I like that PDF documents are so prevalent these days, and that most computers can read them with relative ease if one stays away from the overly bloated ``official'' reader, I'm still not happy with the fact that the only way to read these documents is through a computer screen that is largely placed in landscape format.

I mean, come on. The screens have such high resolutions, surely we can just rotate the screen to put it into the portrait format that is characteristic of most typed documents?

Well, no. Only a few screens do that.

For a while, I've been looking at having an e-book reader. The current offerings by the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader are inadequate for me---I'm reading academic papers not ``New York Times bestsellers''. Their ridiculously small screens are completely useless when trying to read technical papers which are almost always stored in Letter or A4 format (the readers mentioned deal with sizes of roughly A6).

But then I found the iRex Digital Reader 1000S. With a diagonal of 10.2 inches, a resolution of 1280×1024 (effectively having a reading area of 6 inches by 8 inches), I knew I have found what I wanted. Not to mention the use of Wacom's amazing pressure-sensitive digital writing instruments---annotation should be quite an interesting occurrence.

Needless to say, I put my money where my mouth is and placed an order for it. Let's see if it lives up to its claims when it finally arrives.

Routing Daemon

A basic working "skeletal" routing daemon for the IRC server project was completed today. It was an interesting undertaking—ZQ and I wrote roughly 200,000+ bytes worth of raw C code (roughly 8,000 lines) for both the server and routing daemon, and managed to get past the second checkpoint today.

It would seem that the age-old computer science idea of abstracting away the details is a most useful idea when doing software engineering. The approach that we took involved writing abstract data types like linked lists, hash tables, bidirectional dictionaries (allowing references between any two sets S and T with a bijective function over S→T, graphs (weighted multi-directed graphs), extensible octet buffers before hand, and then when we had to deal with the upper layer items like routing tables, packet forwarding and all the other protocol specific items, we already had the necessary framework to work with.

Most of the final parts of the code were put in over last night. That was a good 2,000+ lines of code from the two of us. Then, the debugging was done today, and amazingly, it all worked out fine; there were only 5 or 6 minor bugs that required fixing.

Alright, I've done babbling for now. Off to bed.

Unifont

Unifont is an awesome monospace font.

'nuff said.

Coffee is Like a Mistress

Today while I was at La Prima Expresso's and ordering a cup of milk:

(Cashier rings up the register for a 16oz coffee and 1 chocolate croissant.)

Me: Oh, I got milk today.

Cashier: Oh, I'm sorry… let me ring you up again. Also, that's really strange. You usually get coffee.

Me: Yeah, but coffee is like a mistress—you do it often enough, you end up having to take a break from it sometimes.

Cashier: That's the oddest thing I've heard today.

Musing

I wonder what happens when the companies that we entrust our data to for hosting go under eventually.

Will we be able to get all our data back, or will the data be gone forever?

Software Updates

I formally protest against Adobe Acrobat Reader for the reasons of code-bloat and instability. If you actually try to install this tool, you find that you will have a working version of the Reader, but in addition to that you have this weird Adobe AIR installation, and one other program that I have no idea why we might need to use it for. Not to mention the fairly large download [of 33MiB], but since most of us are no longer using dial-up, I think that it is okay.

Personally, I love using Evince (you can download it here), kpdf, or even xpdf for my PDF needs. In view of the fact that pretty text output these days are mostly rendered in PDF form for portability, these tools are more of a necessity than anything else. Any of these tools are awesome to use except for one reason—they don't run on the Windows platform.

Searching around on the Internet revealed this tool: Foxit Reader for Windows. While this is not as open as evince, kpdf or xpdf, it does have the advantage that the reader is freely available, and that it runs on windows. The download of the file was roughly 2.3MiB, and it had similar functionality as the Reader [by the creator's claims]. From these two rather disparate numbers, one might wonder what Adobe has been putting into their Reader download bundle.

For the PDF files that I have thus far, Foxit Reader seems to do a decent job, even incorporating multi-tabbed viewing to reduce the clutter of the workspace when alt-tabbing between windows. I only resorted to doing this because I had to read a particular series of PDFs for revision for a midterm, and the Reader decided to ditch me and hang for some unknown reason.

It is things like that that slowly push me away from the Windows platform and moving ever more closely to that of the GNU/Linux platform.

——

On a semi-related note, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out. I'm not sure how much better it is from 2.0, or how it handles the inconsistent rendering behaviour on MSWord files. Once I've tried it sufficiently, I will talk more about it.

——

Python 2.6 is released. Python is a really cute language, and 2.6 is "one heartbeat away" from the next-generation version of Python 3k or Python 3.0. Code compatibility should not be a big issue when transitting between Python 2.5.2 to 2.6/3.0, unless one has been doing all sorts of really exotic operations based on exotic library functions/keywords that has been deprecated.

I managed to get Python 2.6 to compile on AFS, and have finally rid myself of the aging Python 2.4 that exists in that system.

——

GIMP 2.6 is also out, with a slightly modified interface, and with better management of stuff. I'm not sure of the whole impact, but I've updated my versions with it just to be sure.

Coffeemaker + Grove City + Bose + The Other Shore

As an experiment last night, I prepared a pot of coffee using my new coffeemaker, and poured half of the pot (6 cups) into my stainless steel thermos flask. That was at 10pm last night.

This morning (9am), I opened up that flask and poured out a cup of coffee to drink. Mmmm mmm… delicious, hot brewed coffee. It's wonderful. That's almost 12 hours of keeping the coffee—my room mate claimed that the coffee will only be kept warm for only 4 hours.

Well, I knew he was wrong, but I'm more glad that I could actively prove that he was wrong.

——

Yesterday was the annual SSA trip down to the outlet shops at Grove City mall. It was an interesting experience, in that I didn't have any real need to purchase anything, but I went nonetheless, in part to just escape the usual drudgery of doing things only on campus, and in part because I wanted to take Ida out on a random trip around somewhere near campus, yet not that near that it is very familiar and all. The Grove City trip was much fun, considering that we walked all over the place looking at goods [and not really buying any of them]. I needed a new pair of jeans because I was fast wearing out the three that I have now, and have already donated the three that I could no longer fit into. Thankfully, I managed to get one of thos jeans, and damn, I must admit that my thighs are just too darn fat. I need to lose those flab soon, otherwise I'd find myself in the unenviable position where I can no longer fit into "normal" pants because of thick thighs.

There has to be an easier way of losing fat in those regions that don't involve intense amounts of running. Maybe I should take that whole skipping/jump rope thing seriously.

Bose is now officially my favourite audio equipment manufacturer. The kind of fidelity and ease of use… it just blows your mind away. I currently own this set of in-ear headphones, and when I return to Singapore, I will most definitely get one these noise-cancelling headphones. Why wait till when I return? Well, that's when they will actually be physically useful, since the SNR at home is really low due to the fact that I live in an apartment that is on the lower floors of the buidling—if I want to do some music composition/remixing/developement, I will most definitely need to fix that problem. And hopefully by then, I would have sufficient disposable income that the cost of the device doesn't put me off by too much.

And I'm still waiting for ASUS to bring out a better battery for the EEE PC—Edythe-EEE is literally not having a good time with the default 4400mAh batteries.

——

So the previous night, I went to watch The Other Shore with Ida at the Philip Chosky Theatre. This play was written by Gao Xingjian and was played by the School of Drama in CMU. It was an interesting play (I will not bore you with details of plot/themes—see the link given) in the sense that it used abstraction to great effect. While it was still possible to watch the play and leave with some idea of what was going on, I found that going into the play with concepts of Chinese thought like Daoism, Buddhism and even Confucianism helped in the comprehension just that bit more. In fact, I found myself seeing, at times, two or three different images/interpretations for the scenes, based on my understanding of both Eastern and Western philosophies. That said, the other really fun thing about this play was the fact that we were seated on the stage.

That's right, there were about four to five rows of seats on the stage in which some of the audience can sit at. The theatre was obviously designed to be the traditional front-view only style, but this set-up meant that it was converted into an amphitheatre of sorts. It wasn't much of a bother, considering that the choreography was sufficiently well done that we didn't miss out on anything despite sitting on the "wrong" side of the stage.

——

Back to reality. Need to study for a pile of midterms next week, as well as run a few experiments and even write some code for the routing daemon (otherwise life will be sooo screwy for the week coming). Thankfully, it is mid-semester "break" [of one day], so there should be some extra time to get more stuff done [hopefully].

Till next time.

Quick Blurb

Things in progress:

• Fixed numbering scheme in old poetry blog [finally]
• Converted the "..." to a proper ellipsis "…"
• Rudimentary parts of new domain/portal is being put together—stay tuned for updates
• Midterms are beginning; a ton to do
• Pocket saxophone has arrived—working on tone

That's as much as I can say in a jiffy.

Keepon

Keepon is so CUTE!And here's another:

Random Blathering

Generally speaking, I actually like using my external keyboard to type long-ish essay-like things, like blog posts, essays/papers, and L_A^Tεχ documents. But when it comes to code, I have a tendency to prefer my laptop keyboard over the external one. Till date, I have not really figured out why that is the case; one theory that I have is that when I'm programming, my fonts tend to be much smaller than when I'm typing essays of other sorts, and that I don't usually need to refer to any source materials in the interim, and thus pulling Elyse closer to work on the code is more productive than trying to use the external keyboard.

But having an external keyboard is quite awesome. By design, my work desk in the dorm has a slide drawer, which I can easily slip my external keyboard into. This gives a slightly different angle for typing, which makes it useful when I need to change the angle due to stress on the arms/fingers.

Alright, enough of random blathering—back to work I go.

Wish List

Some things that I would like to do when I return to Singapore:

• Fix my eyes so that I don't require such high-powered glasses
• Build a new medium-end computer for my mum to use
• Build a semi-high end server complete with separate Internet connection for development/web presence
• Practise on my alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet, flute, piccolo and try to get into gigs
• Write a book
• Get my driver's license
• Put up an album of music that I composed

I wonder how many of these things will I actually be able to do.

Ed: I managed to get decent web-hosting. Now I need to expand my web presence.

Food for Thought

From this site: President S R Nathan wrote:

Farewell, Ben Jeyaratnam, farewell. You fought a long battle for your ideals. You were destined not to see it through. May you now rest in peace.

I wonder if this should be interpreted shallowly or deeply.

Sexeh...

Awesome picture of a horse:

Chrome

So I managed to get Chrome to have a memory access problem. Suprisingly though, it is still running; possibly due to the multi-threadedness/multi-process way in which Chrome works with.And yes, Haskell is fun.