Affection...

I guess it is that time once more... the need for some affection I suppose.I don't want to say more.

Walking on CoalsAsphalt

It's that time of the year again, summer for the northern hemisphere, and graduation season for North American colleges and universities.

Pretty nostalgic really, reminds me of my own graduation just a few years back. Now I'm starting to feel a little bit old heh. But then again, life goes on.

Graduation is an interesting social mechanic if one stops to think about it. It is largely symbolic---after putting effort for n years and taking k courses, the power invested by the board of directors of the institution confers upon you the degree that you had worked towards. Since we are talking about undergraduate degrees, of course we mean things like Bachelor's. But as I was saying, it's largely symbolic---has your journey in learning truly ended? Definitely not, since things are always in flux; this is the real world after all. But it does mark the soft ending of one chapter in one's life and the beginning of the nebulous part that is also known as ``adult life''.

Symbolism... that's something that the world, as a whole, seems to partake in. Symbolism is probably the very epitome of human consciousness, as it is a compact way of transmitting a whole host of related information without actually exhaustively enumerating them all. So far, machines cannot do that properly yet---the concept of auto-inference is not fully operational partly because most machines do not have the equivalent of a life-time of experiences that a human has. But as always, I digress.

Graduation. I look at the folks I knew from CMU and see that they have graduated. It's funny how when I first knew them, they were only froshlings straight out of high school, with idealism and enthusiasm infectious. And now they've all grown up. Hahahaha... I am starting to sound like an old man. Some of the friends I made over here in UIUC are also graduating, and being the rather sentimental person I am (an irony, I know), I do feel a little sad that they have finally graduated and are leaving. Happy that they have finally begun their life journey in the never-ending stream of the ``adult world'', sad that someone I know will be less close from now on, only because.

Yesterday was pretty nasty for weather. The temperature hit around 33 degrees Celsius, and the humidity was fairly low for most of the day, except in the evening/night, where it rained something fierce. I think I drank almost 4 litres of water yesterday just to cool down---and it was the first time that I felt that going barechested was actually necessary. Of course, as I am writing this now, the weather is something much cooler, probably under 25 degrees Celsius or something, I'm not too sure. Strangely though, even when it was getting hot, I didn't really find that my skin was exploding into anything weird, partly because the humidity was just that low. It would be interesting to see how I fare when I return home for a visit some time in the near future.

On Saturday, I did a crazy experiment, where I tried walking barefoot from my house to the ARC where my jujitsu training was held. Holy cow, it was the afternoon and I swear that the aspalt roads where bloody hot. I could only sustain a distance of around 0.7 miles before giving up and putting on my VFFs. Feet were sore as hell, and when I got home to check on the damage, a small number of blisters were already forming. The hot spots were terrible---it seemed as though I was sustaining some burn damage underneath the epidermis due to all the redness. Ice treatment was done, and I had to lance the four blisters because the fluid pressure was making it harder to walk than necessary. Of course, some anti-bacterial ointment was used around the incisions to prevent infection, and as at today, my feet feel rested, comfortable and blister-free.

Anyway, that's all the crazy updates I am willing to write for now. Till next time.

To Sir, With Love

T'is the season for graduation, and so this song seems quite apt:Old, quaint, but still apt. I miss this film.

Elyse in Precise

So, the last time that I wrote here, I talked about showing how Elyse looks like with Precise Pangolin. Here is a screen shot of her:

Lovely, isn't it?

Of course what you are seeing is not the ``stock'' installation---there were some things that I had to tweak to make sure that things worked out the way I want them to be. Now that I am a little more cognitively associated (wasn't so on Saturday due to the massive amounts of crashing that I had to do due to my horrendous sleep habits from the previous week), let me try to catalogue some of the changes that I did with the stock installation of Xubuntu 12.04.

• The installation uses 3 partitions---Ext2 for the O/S itself, Ext4 for /home/*, and one swap partition that is 2GiB, about half the amount of RAM Elyse has.
• The usual stuff that I like to have (i.e. C/C++, python, LaTeX, vim) are also installed. One new addition: explicit installation of numpy and scipy.
• Altered ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc to undo the fubared colour scheme that came on default for the console---I like my default ANSI colours thankyouverymuch. If I remember correctly, all I did was just to delete the lines containing the special palette colours that were set up.
• Added the PPA for Skype(Enable the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and use that one instead since the PPA for Skype is broken) and Chrome and possibly Dropbox.
• Oh, remap the keyboard's caps lock key by editing /etc/default/keyboardto read as

  XKBMODEL="pc105"
  XKBLAYOUT="us"
  XKBVARIANT=""
  XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"

  Yes, it does a little more than remapping the caps lock key to control, but sure.
• Oh, if it is not obvious enough, set the terminal font to GNU unifont. I used to like really tiny fonts to see more, but then I realise that having a wider variety of viewable glyphs was more useful than reading too many things on screen. In fact, this is partly the reason why I update Eileen to the newest version of PuTTy---it allows the use of ``proportional width'' fonts for the terminal. This means that a pan-unicode font like GNU Unifont that has both single and double-width characters is usable.

So yeah, those were the ``special'' things that I did on the default installation to make it less annoying, but other than that, there were half a dozen other small tweaks that aren't really worth mentioning, so I won't.

Alright, till the next post.

[Ed: Since the post I realised that the PPA for Skype was unnecessary. Enabling the ``Canonical Partners'' repository and then doing sudo apt-get install skype works as expected.]

Precise Pangolin

This has been a rather long week, what with all the double-time that I have been taking just to keep on top of things. I think that have been pretty uncomfortably drained this semester, and now that the classes are over, I will be able to get back into doing what I like best, which is actually solving problems.

Kinda sad how things are huh...

Anyway, on to less sobering news. Now that Xubuntu 12.04 LTS ``Precise Pangolin'' is out, it is time to take it out on a spin. After discussing with myself for quite a while, I've decided that Elyse should be wiped out and reinstalled with a full partition of Xubuntu. Really, I don't use the XP partition that much anymore, not since I have Eileen with all her bells and whistles. Keeping the components on the XP partition up to date was starting to be too much of chore, and seeing that I actually use the Linux environment more these days just made it the right choice to switch over the Xubuntu completely.

So, first impressions on the Precise Pangolin on Elyse. For one, the theme is too damn dark for my liking. I'm going to stick with it for a while, but if I don't like what I see, it's going to go back to the light coloured theme that I had used earlier. What irked me the most was the fscking of the terminal colour template, like, seriously. None of the ``standard'' 16 colours, all kinds of random shades... how it it usable?

I will try to put up some screen shots when I feel more cognitively alert. I need to catch up on some sleep for now. Till next time.

Still Alive...

It's kinda funny how one's perception of time changes when one has only slept around 5 in the last 48 hours. Each day feels as though it were twice as long when in fact nothing much has changed. The mind feels more awake for some reason, and the body loyally soldiers on, its fatigue of being sedentary alleviated through the many body conditioning exercises like the push-up, the squat and the crunches that comprise the breaks that I take in between sprints.

I hate this semester. Really really hate it. It's like freshman year in CMU all over again---overloading on the second semester and taking all kinds of flak for it. The pain is real, and as I get older, I was starting to think that I cannot actually take such brutality any more.

Oh how wrong was I!

It turns out that the training that I had been doing for months prior had conditioned my body to be just that little bit more resilient, and as long as I take cat naps at times when by mind is wavering, I'm pretty good to go without having to go for a good night's sleep. To feel young once more! It feels as though I had forgotten this aspect of my life. Actually, come to think of it, I never really had to deal with this aspect of my life because for the most part, I was ahead on things. It was only at times of duress that I started to falter and had all kinds of problems.

Anyway, I will expound more about this when I have completed... some things. till the next update.

Bunch of Stuff...

Today feels dastardly different, partly because the temperature is now rising into the 28 degrees Celsius zone. Couple this with the fact that I have not been sleeping enough for the last few days just makes me feel a little woozy in the head. I'm on so many different kinds of self-medication that I'm starting to wonder if I am already down with something.

But anyway, just something cute: ``online'' vi. Not vim, but venerable vi. Pretty cute---I'm tempted to load it on my domain just to make things interesting.

In some other less cutesy news, the multiprocessing module in Python is a quick and dirty way of using the multiple cores that are present in many modern day machines. Dumbly parallelisable algorithms will never be the same again.

Another cool library in Python is the difflib. It contains some rather standard string-edit distance computations, which can save more programmer time when trying to implement those things---I mean seriously, why should we keep reinventing the wheel whenever we program?

Finally, just a tip for using sqlite3 in Python: cache into memory look up structures as much as possible. If things are still slow, consider using PRAGMA cache_size = 10000, where you replace 10000 with some bigger number. That should allow better use of main memory to support those joins and buffers that are oh-so-important for fast execution of queries.

I still haven't figured out if sqlite3 for Python has provisions for prepared statements, and honestly, I don't have the time to figure that out just yet. Maybe next time.

Orthodox File Managers

You know, I'm starting to suspect that I favour the command line a little too much, sometimes at the detriment of my own sanity. While the command line is awesome for doing things like running complex programs, or even to use a barebones-esque no-nonsense text editor, there are some limitations that even I have to start to admit that are causing severe productivity issues.

File management is one problem that I think the command line is really nasty for. Put simply, it becomes quite nasty to have to retype very long paths that come from very strict hierarchical management of the underlying file system. Couple this with the need to transfer files remotely, some form of location persistence would have been very useful.

Recently, in a bid to deal with that problem, I've started to dabble in the notion of the orthodox file manager. Orthodox file managers are a very mature technology---even in the days of DOS, there was the DOSSHELL that made navigating the file system easy. It wasn't that necessary then though due to the 8.3 file limitation. Part of the reason of my annoyance with modern systems comes from the need to escape various characters in the file names. Aaanyway, as I was saying, orthodox file managers. The old standby that I'm using for Linux and Unix-y systems is Midnight Commander. It's simple and gets the job done---it supports file type highlighting too, check it out at this site for some ideas.

For Windows, MC is a little strange to work with. For that, I actually go with FAR manager, a product originally from the creator of WinRAR. FAR manager works like MC, except that it is in Windows of course. But unlike MC, FAR manager can be extended with various plug-ins, and the one that is most useful is the FarNetBox, which allows one to connect to servers via SSL to perform transparent file copies. (Note: I'm using FAR 2.x, so I will need that plug-in. This site shows more plug-ins for FAR 3.x, which is still undergoing development.)

Well, that's all I wanted to talk about regarding orthodox file managers. Till the next time.

Trial By Fire

``The journey of a thousand miles begin with one step.'' It sounds a little cliché, but it is still one of the more useful mantra that one can have. It's just a way of reminding oneself that no matter how hard the road appears ahead, a small step in the positive direction is all it takes to get going.

This is roughly how I am feeling now about things. It's a really long and arduous journey ahead, and I had barely even scratched the surface on how deep the rabbit hole goes. It doesn't help much that I feel... mostly isolated with little support. Not a good sign---I wonder if I can hold on to my sanity this way. It's a hard life, but no one said that life was ever easy.

Anyway, enough of this mediocre spiel. Back to the proverbial grindstone.

Almost There... I Wish...

Well the left eye is feeling better, but I need to watch myself a bit more. This fortnight of hell is starting to take its toll on me as I beat myself black and blue to get everything that needs to be done, done. I really cannot wait to put check marks (or tick marks) on that list that chronicles my death march to finally show that things are done and giving me a sense of achievement and purpose.

But the pain, the sleep deprivation, the mental anguish, the physical inaction---all these need to be faced first.

Once more I question my judgement on what I now term as the ``second semester syndrome'', where I inevitably overload my second semester of college/grad school. Saw that happen once, and it scarred me, and now, it seems like it is happening again. I really need to be more careful on my choices like this.

Mild [Undiagnosed] Left Corneal Abrasion

Great, just great. About a week after my ``new'' right corneal abrasion has healed over, my left eye seems to have gotten one this time. Why am I so susceptible to corneal abrasions at this point? Is it because I've been using my eyes too much to the point where they get too dry, and then one accidental rubbing is enough to scrape at that old corneal wound from LASIK?

I think for safety reasons I should really use more eye drops, regardless of whether I feel the need to or not. I think that the more tired my eyes get, the more I feel like rubbing them, and the higher the chance of causing more damage due to the friction and the dryness.

Not a good way to be trudging through hell fortnight.