So I think that there're a few things that I've slowly learnt over the past few weeks, and here are just some of my thoughts.
Firstly, Singaporeans have one common problem. The whole idea that doing something is ``for the experience''. I mean, that is plain ridiculous. Why is this canned response so popular here? Why can't we begin any endeavour with the mentality that we want to achieve a certain tangible goal other than just experience? It gets exasperating at times to hear people say things like that, particularly when they are being interviewed by the media. This is probably among the worst ``politically correct'' answers that one can give, because it demonstrates one crucial point: we do not seem to have that critical thinking element that is oh-so important in the world today. To not admit defeat and claim that it was ``a good experience'', we are molly-codling ourselves into a false sense of security, in that we think that we have not really failed in any sense. That is a classic example of evading the issue at hand. Note that this is different from saying something like ``yes I failed, but here are the other things that I have found out''---this other way of representation may appear cursory similar to the ``politically correct'' version, but the nuance demonstrated is far from being the same. In the former, there is an air of resignation, the demonstration of a lack of wherewithal to actually learn from what happened, while in the latter, the active voice shows a completely different picture. We should all strive towards a more critical form of thinking, and to actually learn from the experience, instead of saying some vague quasi-politically correct statement.
Secondly, problem-solvers cannot really stay in one place for too long. The rationale for this little assertion is straightforward---problem-solvers go where the problems are, and once the problems for a source dry up, they go on to another location to look for new ones to solve. Thus, staying at one place for too long is detrimental to the mental health of the problem-solver, whose mantra is to solve problems that they encounter, since the number of questions to be solved in a particular location is finite and will dry up eventually. This is of course a rather abstract and metaphorical allusion that doesn't sound rather grounded in reality, so here's a more explicit explanation of what I am really trying to say. I don't think I can settle down that easily, since at heart I'm a problem-solver---solving problems are what makes me feel happy. Okay, not happy, but at least sufficiently contented. Problem-solving as a hobby is a rather masochistic endeavour, since one is paradoxically expending a lot of energy at a task that one is supposed to be doing ``in leisure''. I find that throughout the years, only two things I don't really get sick of doing---making music and solving problems. That of course doesn't mean that I can do the same thing for a few hours (that's painful), but at the very least, I have more than a passing interest in such matters. People strive for material gains, while my wants are more complicated---I thrive on knowledge. That is my opiate for happiness (or at least, contentment) and life.
Lastly, something a little more light-hearted. I found my previous blog colour scheme too depressing (not as depressing as that green-on-black monstrosity I first started out with) and have jazzed it up a little with some of the new doodads that Blogger seems to have introduced. While I'm not completely impressed, there is a certain lighter feel to it, kind of uplifting in fact. Of course, I tuned the layout a little so that even on Edythe-EEE, the page looks fine. Overall I think things are not too bad now.
So what else am I working on? A lot of other projects, quite a few of the time-sappers are for work, while I have the usual pile of projects that I've always wanted to work a little on. Maybe I will get to work on all the stuff that I want to eventually. Meanwhile, work beckons.
Till next time.
Showing posts with label edythe-eee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edythe-eee. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Monday, March 01, 2010
Imperial March
It's March! A month befitting its name in many ways. It's a march uphill towards the Promised Land [of project completion]; it's also a march uphill towards the Liberation of The Engineer and the Hailing of The Scientist, hopefully.
But that aside, things have been really in the doldrums lately, due to the large amounts of work that is coming together from all directions. At the very least, the whole Chinese New Year thing is done and over, and life has more or less gone back to what it was prior to the influx of activity from the single largest event within the Chinese lunar calendar.
In other news, my Neo has finally arrived. If you've not heard of the Neo, then let me expound on its usefulness---it has a whopping 700 hours of projected battery life just from 3 AA batteries; try beating that with any laptop that you have today! Needless to say, my Neo has a name now: Eiko. It's the first time I'm using a Japanese name, and this one means ``long-lived child'', which is an apt description of her battery life and her general ``indestructibility''. The sole purpose of Eiko Neo is to provide a distraction-free mode of typing things up, be they papers, program code, or more likely, novels/novella. Eiko is much more comfortable to type on than Edythe-EEE, since Eiko's keyboard is actually full-sized while Edythe-EEE's is kinda on the small side, with really nasty contact responses and awkwardly placed shift keys. Oh, even with the extended battery pack, Edythe-EEE cannot last as long as Eiko in terms of staying power.
So enough of my new tool. Things are moving along at a frenetic yet paradoxically slow rate. Eventually things will start to make more sense, and perhaps I can finally say things in ways that I actually want to, as opposed to speaking in such loopy logic.
And that's the blurb for now. Onward to the Imperial March.
But that aside, things have been really in the doldrums lately, due to the large amounts of work that is coming together from all directions. At the very least, the whole Chinese New Year thing is done and over, and life has more or less gone back to what it was prior to the influx of activity from the single largest event within the Chinese lunar calendar.
In other news, my Neo has finally arrived. If you've not heard of the Neo, then let me expound on its usefulness---it has a whopping 700 hours of projected battery life just from 3 AA batteries; try beating that with any laptop that you have today! Needless to say, my Neo has a name now: Eiko. It's the first time I'm using a Japanese name, and this one means ``long-lived child'', which is an apt description of her battery life and her general ``indestructibility''. The sole purpose of Eiko Neo is to provide a distraction-free mode of typing things up, be they papers, program code, or more likely, novels/novella. Eiko is much more comfortable to type on than Edythe-EEE, since Eiko's keyboard is actually full-sized while Edythe-EEE's is kinda on the small side, with really nasty contact responses and awkwardly placed shift keys. Oh, even with the extended battery pack, Edythe-EEE cannot last as long as Eiko in terms of staying power.
So enough of my new tool. Things are moving along at a frenetic yet paradoxically slow rate. Eventually things will start to make more sense, and perhaps I can finally say things in ways that I actually want to, as opposed to speaking in such loopy logic.
And that's the blurb for now. Onward to the Imperial March.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
February Musings
Hmm. February, a traditional month for pain and anguish. Heh. Maybe not this February---things have changed. Probably. Who knows? So many things have happened over the last week that at times, I'm still a little giddy from the excitement.
I've finally got around to doing yet another round of upgrading of the software components that are running on Elyse. I got rid of the propriety SSH/SFTP tool that was licensed to CMU and installed WinSCP instead. Much cleaner interface, and less monstrosities to deal with, I suppose. I've updated my FL Studio to the latest version while updating Audacity to the beta which is much more recent than the last stable (works fine as far as I can tell). The good thing about this is that now FL Studio can double up as a VSTi plug-in from within Audacity, which further allows the use of Nyquist (the LISP-like programming language in Audacity) to be further combined with the plethora of tools that FL Studio has to offer.
I originally thought of upgrading the Xubuntu install on Elysie to Karmic Koala, but after reading the many problems that occur with machines that sport the nVidia graphics cards after that upgrade, I've decided to give the Koala a miss. Besides, things are working relatively well now and I don't see a need to rock the boat, as compared to my high portable and mostly experimental rig on Edythe-EEE. I might consider upgrading the home computer to Koala since it is using an integrated graphics card, which reduces the issues that can occur with the propriety binary blobs that are needed for the higher end cards. Speaking of which, I probably need to run an update on the Windows XP 64-bit edition partition of Elysie---the last time I ran anything on that was... a very long time ago.
Life. That's right, I was mumbling something about that before I got hopelessly side tracked. February is a month of confusion many times, and this year, it's probably not going to be that bad. Most of the things that are causing me severe anguish are at least undergoing some form of amelioration, either through efforts of mine or not. There are things that I have already done, and there are also things where I have little control over, so I suppose there is little need to worry about them. After all, life is short, for how long can we be worrying about things anyway?
I remember that I used to think that I would be a detective when I grew up. That's right, a hard-boiled detective, one who went around looking for clues, sleuthing for ideas on how to solve a crime, learning the art of cryptography to foil the bad spies and other detectives who are trying to muscle in on my jobs. Or a spy, one of those two; it didn't really matter which. There was a certain romantic feel to that line of work, always living on the edge, always doing things that people have little idea is going on, walking about in the shadows, seeing things that people don't see, and best of all, achieving successes that the normal folks would never have thought originated from one. Of course, as time went on, it made less and less sense to be working as a detective nor spy (something about level of danger and the need to be realistic on what my body can and cannot do), but many of the job traits that I loved seemed to manifest themselves as part of my personality. For instance, while I used to like the limelight a lot when I was younger, I tend to shun it in favour of working deep within the shadows and making magic happen. Even today, I still have a tendency to walk in the shadows, avoiding light (both literally and metaphorically), and preferring muchly to work hard in a secluded location than to draw attention to myself for no rhyme nor reason.
Alright, I have no idea what my direction of thought is... it is getting rather late, and I ought to go get some sleep. Till next time, I suppose.
I've finally got around to doing yet another round of upgrading of the software components that are running on Elyse. I got rid of the propriety SSH/SFTP tool that was licensed to CMU and installed WinSCP instead. Much cleaner interface, and less monstrosities to deal with, I suppose. I've updated my FL Studio to the latest version while updating Audacity to the beta which is much more recent than the last stable (works fine as far as I can tell). The good thing about this is that now FL Studio can double up as a VSTi plug-in from within Audacity, which further allows the use of Nyquist (the LISP-like programming language in Audacity) to be further combined with the plethora of tools that FL Studio has to offer.
I originally thought of upgrading the Xubuntu install on Elysie to Karmic Koala, but after reading the many problems that occur with machines that sport the nVidia graphics cards after that upgrade, I've decided to give the Koala a miss. Besides, things are working relatively well now and I don't see a need to rock the boat, as compared to my high portable and mostly experimental rig on Edythe-EEE. I might consider upgrading the home computer to Koala since it is using an integrated graphics card, which reduces the issues that can occur with the propriety binary blobs that are needed for the higher end cards. Speaking of which, I probably need to run an update on the Windows XP 64-bit edition partition of Elysie---the last time I ran anything on that was... a very long time ago.
Life. That's right, I was mumbling something about that before I got hopelessly side tracked. February is a month of confusion many times, and this year, it's probably not going to be that bad. Most of the things that are causing me severe anguish are at least undergoing some form of amelioration, either through efforts of mine or not. There are things that I have already done, and there are also things where I have little control over, so I suppose there is little need to worry about them. After all, life is short, for how long can we be worrying about things anyway?
I remember that I used to think that I would be a detective when I grew up. That's right, a hard-boiled detective, one who went around looking for clues, sleuthing for ideas on how to solve a crime, learning the art of cryptography to foil the bad spies and other detectives who are trying to muscle in on my jobs. Or a spy, one of those two; it didn't really matter which. There was a certain romantic feel to that line of work, always living on the edge, always doing things that people have little idea is going on, walking about in the shadows, seeing things that people don't see, and best of all, achieving successes that the normal folks would never have thought originated from one. Of course, as time went on, it made less and less sense to be working as a detective nor spy (something about level of danger and the need to be realistic on what my body can and cannot do), but many of the job traits that I loved seemed to manifest themselves as part of my personality. For instance, while I used to like the limelight a lot when I was younger, I tend to shun it in favour of working deep within the shadows and making magic happen. Even today, I still have a tendency to walk in the shadows, avoiding light (both literally and metaphorically), and preferring muchly to work hard in a secluded location than to draw attention to myself for no rhyme nor reason.
Alright, I have no idea what my direction of thought is... it is getting rather late, and I ought to go get some sleep. Till next time, I suppose.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Upgrade Day?
Today seems to be a day of system updates. Edythe-EEE has Xubuntu Karmic Koala running sweetly, and she is still continuing in her task of performing trial factoring for Mersenne prime numbers during the [long] hours that I have nothing to run on her. Elyse just had her 64-bit edition of Xubuntu Jaunty Jackalope updated to the 64-bit edition of Karmic Koala, and things seem to be dandy for her also, though I probably need to muck around with getting the PPA version of Pidgin working so that Pidgin is always updated each time a new release comes out---there are just too many wonky things that happen that require an update to ensure that things are working, something about having to deal with the legions of people who are still on propriety networks whose protocols are not very intuitive nor reasonable.
Apart from the various Xubuntu upgrades, Elyse also has her cygwin environment upgraded. There's no real compelling reason for that to occur, except that it's something shiny, and since I'm already in the mood of updating systems, I might as well do it too. In other news, I have also gotten SDL and MinGW in the guise of Dev-C++ up and running. I need SDL to muck around with preparing an emulated version of this, which is a rather cute little small-pixel system. MinGW is so that I can actually compile the code across a whole slew of platforms to run them on, which is always awesome.
Alright, I need to go for a run; I think I'm addicted to endorphins. Till next time.
Apart from the various Xubuntu upgrades, Elyse also has her cygwin environment upgraded. There's no real compelling reason for that to occur, except that it's something shiny, and since I'm already in the mood of updating systems, I might as well do it too. In other news, I have also gotten SDL and MinGW in the guise of Dev-C++ up and running. I need SDL to muck around with preparing an emulated version of this, which is a rather cute little small-pixel system. MinGW is so that I can actually compile the code across a whole slew of platforms to run them on, which is always awesome.
Alright, I need to go for a run; I think I'm addicted to endorphins. Till next time.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Koala Moves
After about a day or so of arm-wrestling, I've managed to get Xubuntu Karmic Koala running on Edythe-EEE. Things are surprisingly smooth, with everything seemingly working out of the box. However, I take offense at the default colour scheme and layout, and had to change it back to something that I preferred on the rather small pixel estate. I've even tested the external monitor VGA socket, and it appears to work flawlessly. Hurray, I suppose.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Technical Aspect of NaNoWriMo 2009
Now that I have completed the main task of NaNoWriMo to hit 50k words (up to now, I even have a 2k word buffer), I suppose it might be interesting to talk a little about the set up that I used to work on the novel this month.
For starters, I used vim as my workhorse text editor. I kept a running skeleton/outline of my story thus far, including cast, locations and other relevant information in a file aptly known as idea. It was a very basic set up using a semi-hierarchy system, without any other plugins or things that provided better outlining support. As for the actual novel, I ran two different tools, vim when I was working on Edythe-EEE, and Q10, a minimalistic full screen text editor with live word count and word count target setting, and a clock when I was working on Elyse. I made some modifications for vim on Edythe-EEE though; I remapped j and k to gj and gk respectively, and made sure to unset the textwidth variable. The cumulation of these changes made vim much easier to use to edit ``single-line paragraphs'', since the gj and gk commands allow screen-based movements across the line, instead of just skipping lines (and thus paragraphs!).
I also had a LaTeX source file set up which included the various text files that comprise my chapters. The LaTeX file was set up for A5 paper and would be the means in which I would be typesetting my text. I could have done everything in one file, but the tagging from LaTeX would interfere with the word count, and that it would start to get very unwieldy when all the text of the novel were in one place: the huge quantities of text just makes things unnecessary fatiguing. These were supplemented by a simple bash script that ran pdflatex and wc to get the PDF file of the novel and the word count of the text respectively.
To top everything up, all the files were version controlled using subversion on a space that I had on Assembla, which made synchronising between Edythe-EEE and Elyse an easy task to do.
Maybe I will talk about my inspiration for this piece of writing some other time.
For starters, I used vim as my workhorse text editor. I kept a running skeleton/outline of my story thus far, including cast, locations and other relevant information in a file aptly known as idea. It was a very basic set up using a semi-hierarchy system, without any other plugins or things that provided better outlining support. As for the actual novel, I ran two different tools, vim when I was working on Edythe-EEE, and Q10, a minimalistic full screen text editor with live word count and word count target setting, and a clock when I was working on Elyse. I made some modifications for vim on Edythe-EEE though; I remapped j and k to gj and gk respectively, and made sure to unset the textwidth variable. The cumulation of these changes made vim much easier to use to edit ``single-line paragraphs'', since the gj and gk commands allow screen-based movements across the line, instead of just skipping lines (and thus paragraphs!).
I also had a LaTeX source file set up which included the various text files that comprise my chapters. The LaTeX file was set up for A5 paper and would be the means in which I would be typesetting my text. I could have done everything in one file, but the tagging from LaTeX would interfere with the word count, and that it would start to get very unwieldy when all the text of the novel were in one place: the huge quantities of text just makes things unnecessary fatiguing. These were supplemented by a simple bash script that ran pdflatex and wc to get the PDF file of the novel and the word count of the text respectively.
To top everything up, all the files were version controlled using subversion on a space that I had on Assembla, which made synchronising between Edythe-EEE and Elyse an easy task to do.
Maybe I will talk about my inspiration for this piece of writing some other time.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Cycle of Life
I think that this is a very apt picture:
And yes, I've modified it a little to fix the aspect ratio for my monitor(s), and made it into my current wallpaper.
[Ed: The picture featured here is not the one that I modified, but the raw dump that I received.]
And yes, I've modified it a little to fix the aspect ratio for my monitor(s), and made it into my current wallpaper.
[Ed: The picture featured here is not the one that I modified, but the raw dump that I received.]
Sunday, November 09, 2008
All Xubuntu Are Intrepid Ibex
How strange it is to bat an eyelid, and find that the week has passed us by ever so quickly. One moment we were trying to rush through the jobs and homework that we need to do, the next we are just literally sitting there and waiting for something to happen. The strangeness of it all, and I do mean the perception of time of course, that even though things are happening at the same rate (time moves equally fast for all of us), not everyone has the same feeling for time. It gets curiouser and curiouser…
It has been a rather tumultuous fortnight; I basically was see-sawing between extreme levels of productivity and extreme levels of inactivity. I suspect that this could be a result of the cold weather and the fact that it is the semester crunch-time, though I do not really have any way of showing this other than making the observation. This weekend was really a lull-ish one; the upcoming week has so many things that are due that it is not even funny anymore. But overall, I have a slightly better confidence over this semester's classes than the last—I just need to put in a bit more effort to ensure that I end up getting the results that I want/need. The classes this semester are not entirely hard; they are just relatively time-consuming. But that just boils down to time management, and I think that I'm starting to get the hang of this.
That said, the last two days were mainly systems-y stuff. As noted previously, I have had Intrepid Ibex Xubuntu running on Edythe-EEE. Previously, I have upgraded the VM in Elyse to run Intrepid Ibex also. Last night, I set up Intrepid Ibex for Elyse's alternative partition, but for some reason, the upgrade backfired and left me without a bootable Xubuntu partition. That was when I decided to just wipe out and reinstall the x86-64 version of Intrepid. That partition was mainly for work, and when I needed the extra horsepower (and RAM), so there was nothing there that I could recall that was not mirrored somewhere else.
The overall feel of Intrepid is alright, considering that things are still not broken after installation. I've not managed to test to see if the new kernel is really as spiffy as everyone says, but I think that the quality can be seen in the fact that Edythe-EEE, an underpowered high-RAM machine, can run it with little to no delay, I think that at the very least the bloat in Intrepid hasn't gotten to the point that it requires a tremendous amount of horsepower to work with.
That's all I have for now though. Sorry.
It has been a rather tumultuous fortnight; I basically was see-sawing between extreme levels of productivity and extreme levels of inactivity. I suspect that this could be a result of the cold weather and the fact that it is the semester crunch-time, though I do not really have any way of showing this other than making the observation. This weekend was really a lull-ish one; the upcoming week has so many things that are due that it is not even funny anymore. But overall, I have a slightly better confidence over this semester's classes than the last—I just need to put in a bit more effort to ensure that I end up getting the results that I want/need. The classes this semester are not entirely hard; they are just relatively time-consuming. But that just boils down to time management, and I think that I'm starting to get the hang of this.
That said, the last two days were mainly systems-y stuff. As noted previously, I have had Intrepid Ibex Xubuntu running on Edythe-EEE. Previously, I have upgraded the VM in Elyse to run Intrepid Ibex also. Last night, I set up Intrepid Ibex for Elyse's alternative partition, but for some reason, the upgrade backfired and left me without a bootable Xubuntu partition. That was when I decided to just wipe out and reinstall the x86-64 version of Intrepid. That partition was mainly for work, and when I needed the extra horsepower (and RAM), so there was nothing there that I could recall that was not mirrored somewhere else.
The overall feel of Intrepid is alright, considering that things are still not broken after installation. I've not managed to test to see if the new kernel is really as spiffy as everyone says, but I think that the quality can be seen in the fact that Edythe-EEE, an underpowered high-RAM machine, can run it with little to no delay, I think that at the very least the bloat in Intrepid hasn't gotten to the point that it requires a tremendous amount of horsepower to work with.
That's all I have for now though. Sorry.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Intrepid Ibex Xubuntu on Edythe-EEE
Take a look at this screen capture:
This is the stock Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) that I managed to get installed on Edythe-EEE. The installation process was relatively painless, considering that Edythe-EEE has 2GiB of RAM (this is always useful). For all practical purposes and intents, I did a clean install because of the [wrong] design decision that I made earlier to allocate 512MiB of hard disk space for swap space. That decision was made because of I had only 512MiB on the machine then, which was generally not a good idea.
Since I've increased the RAM on the machine, it made things so much easier. Edythe-EEE has a relatively sheltered life, sitting at home and serving as a backup server in case things go awry. That is, until I buy the really large battery for her, thus giving her the competitive edge to challenge Elyse in terms of raw stamina.
The only drawback in the installation is the dealing of the weird screen brightness issue with regards to the reboot/suspend/open lid actions. I think I can live with that, so I'm probably not going to attempt to fix it. That said, the wireless card (a notorious issue with the EEE PC 701 series) has been enabled through the magic hackery of NDISWrapper (details can found here).
Again, this post was created in Edythe-EEE.
——
Also, check this for fixing the gargantuan scrollbar widths. The actual file location is /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0 (I'm editing the Clearlooks one).
This is the stock Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) that I managed to get installed on Edythe-EEE. The installation process was relatively painless, considering that Edythe-EEE has 2GiB of RAM (this is always useful). For all practical purposes and intents, I did a clean install because of the [wrong] design decision that I made earlier to allocate 512MiB of hard disk space for swap space. That decision was made because of I had only 512MiB on the machine then, which was generally not a good idea.Since I've increased the RAM on the machine, it made things so much easier. Edythe-EEE has a relatively sheltered life, sitting at home and serving as a backup server in case things go awry. That is, until I buy the really large battery for her, thus giving her the competitive edge to challenge Elyse in terms of raw stamina.
The only drawback in the installation is the dealing of the weird screen brightness issue with regards to the reboot/suspend/open lid actions. I think I can live with that, so I'm probably not going to attempt to fix it. That said, the wireless card (a notorious issue with the EEE PC 701 series) has been enabled through the magic hackery of NDISWrapper (details can found here).
Again, this post was created in Edythe-EEE.
——
Also, check this for fixing the gargantuan scrollbar widths. The actual file location is /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0 (I'm editing the Clearlooks one).
Sunday, October 12, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
iPod Shuffle? Why I Hardly Even...
First, I have a new iPod Shuffle, courtesy EWT trading. They were giving out free iPod Shuffles to graduating CS majors who sent in their résumés. I thought, why not? And here's a picture of my newly obtained iPod Shuffle.
Notice that it is sitting on top of Edythe-EEE.
I hate iTunes. Okay, maybe hate might be a tad too strong a word, but at least, the way iTunes supposedly mangles one's music files/directories while trying to be "helpful" makes me sad. If you looked carefully at the picture, you'll find that Edythe-EEE is running a program: gtkpod. It is yet another open source program that can fulfill a need that I require.
On another note, the battery of my Motorola V195 is bjorked. Couple that with a rather loose hinge, it is high time to get a new phone. I'm not sure if the service plan works that way, so I decided to get an unlocked Motorola V197 instead. Notice my fascination with clam shells still.
Hopefully things will start to fall in place.
Oh, the B♭ soprano clarinet has arrived, and I've basically tuned it somewhat. Turns out that the notation for the instrument is weird; it writes E but sounds like a D, which confused the hell out of my ears while trying to figure out the actual tuning of the instrument. It also appears that my horrendously powerful lung power acts up again, and ends up causing the instrument to be sharp by 25cents before proper tuning.
The reed case has arrived, and now the clarinet is almost fit for playing. I just need to practice more on it so that I don't squeak that much 30 minutes into the playing.
That's about it for now, I guess...
Notice that it is sitting on top of Edythe-EEE.I hate iTunes. Okay, maybe hate might be a tad too strong a word, but at least, the way iTunes supposedly mangles one's music files/directories while trying to be "helpful" makes me sad. If you looked carefully at the picture, you'll find that Edythe-EEE is running a program: gtkpod. It is yet another open source program that can fulfill a need that I require.
On another note, the battery of my Motorola V195 is bjorked. Couple that with a rather loose hinge, it is high time to get a new phone. I'm not sure if the service plan works that way, so I decided to get an unlocked Motorola V197 instead. Notice my fascination with clam shells still.
Hopefully things will start to fall in place.
Oh, the B♭ soprano clarinet has arrived, and I've basically tuned it somewhat. Turns out that the notation for the instrument is weird; it writes E but sounds like a D, which confused the hell out of my ears while trying to figure out the actual tuning of the instrument. It also appears that my horrendously powerful lung power acts up again, and ends up causing the instrument to be sharp by 25cents before proper tuning.
The reed case has arrived, and now the clarinet is almost fit for playing. I just need to practice more on it so that I don't squeak that much 30 minutes into the playing.
That's about it for now, I guess...
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
2GiB for Edythe-EEE
So I've upgraded the RAM on Edythe-EEE from 512MiB to 2GiB. Overall, she does seem a little more responsive, and this makes me glad.
Now I've really achieved what I perceive to be the best set-up for Edythe-EEE. Code hacking ought to be fun.
Next up ought to be the upgrade of the battery.
Now I've really achieved what I perceive to be the best set-up for Edythe-EEE. Code hacking ought to be fun.
Next up ought to be the upgrade of the battery.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Edythe-EEE Xubuntu: Overall Success
So I'm now sitting in one of those places where I can get free wireless broadband access and testing out Edythe-EEE's wireless capabilities. And I'm proud to announce that the wireless LAN works flawlessly even under this Xubuntu installation. This is fairly important, for it means that I now can truly make use of Edythe-EEE as a portable platform when the situation arises. Compared to Elyse, Edythe-EEE's strengths are that it is ultra-portable. This strength, however, comes at a price, since the battery life of Edythe-EEE is much shorter than that of Elyse.
Put in another way, Edythe-EEE's purpose is to provide that extra-portable computing power for me on the move, and is to be deployed under situations where Elyse may be too bulky to get the job done.
That all said and done, I guess it is time to end this post for now.
Put in another way, Edythe-EEE's purpose is to provide that extra-portable computing power for me on the move, and is to be deployed under situations where Elyse may be too bulky to get the job done.
That all said and done, I guess it is time to end this post for now.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Edythe-EEE Has Xubuntu Now
And with some effort and plenty of help from online, I've finally managed to get a working Xubuntu operating system working on Edythe-EEE, my ASUS EEE PC. The only caveat here is that it is running Gutsy Gibbon instead of Hardy Heron, which, at the current stage of things, isn't going to be a really big problem right now. Perhaps in the future, I'll need to reconsider this step, but for now, as far as I'm concerned, this set up is already great as it is. Check out how it looks like:
Granted, it doesn't really look like much, but with this upgrade of sorts from the original watered-down Xandros version, it is so much better and can thus support my programming and work better.
Oh, need I mention the fact that I'm typing up this post right from Edythe-EEE herself? The one big drawback that everyone seems to bring up is the fact that the keyboard is absolutely tiny. In my opinion, it is not as bad as it seems to be, once you are a decent enough touch-typist of course. The sheer size of the keyboard means also the rather lack of tactile feel of the keys, or rather, the tactile response. Thus, the keys will require a fraction bit of strength more than the usual larger keyboard.
I also realised that the problem that I was facing earlier with regards to the Ethernet port not working on Edythe-EEE was the fact that a cold boot was required. Apparently, a power cycle was necessary to ensure that the network adapter is recognised. This is the only quirk that seems to have occurred during the two times that I did the whole reinstall. Hopefully, this problem will not surface itself again.
Now I have yet another machine that I can use to deploy for the various projects that I might have in mind. Meanwhile, let me see if I can hack out something that is a little more useful to me at the moment.
Also, I'm never going to run Microsoft Windows on Edythe-EEE. It is pointlss; she has only 4GiB of internal storage, so installing that bloated operating system and the whole shebang to make it squeak along is not acceptable at all.
Alright, that's all for now, perhaps. Till next time.
Granted, it doesn't really look like much, but with this upgrade of sorts from the original watered-down Xandros version, it is so much better and can thus support my programming and work better.Oh, need I mention the fact that I'm typing up this post right from Edythe-EEE herself? The one big drawback that everyone seems to bring up is the fact that the keyboard is absolutely tiny. In my opinion, it is not as bad as it seems to be, once you are a decent enough touch-typist of course. The sheer size of the keyboard means also the rather lack of tactile feel of the keys, or rather, the tactile response. Thus, the keys will require a fraction bit of strength more than the usual larger keyboard.
I also realised that the problem that I was facing earlier with regards to the Ethernet port not working on Edythe-EEE was the fact that a cold boot was required. Apparently, a power cycle was necessary to ensure that the network adapter is recognised. This is the only quirk that seems to have occurred during the two times that I did the whole reinstall. Hopefully, this problem will not surface itself again.
Now I have yet another machine that I can use to deploy for the various projects that I might have in mind. Meanwhile, let me see if I can hack out something that is a little more useful to me at the moment.
Also, I'm never going to run Microsoft Windows on Edythe-EEE. It is pointlss; she has only 4GiB of internal storage, so installing that bloated operating system and the whole shebang to make it squeak along is not acceptable at all.
Alright, that's all for now, perhaps. Till next time.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Firefox 3 Installed (Finally)
Finally I got off my ass and set-up Firefox 3. In the very short period of me using it, I would say that it is decent as a browser. The only icky thing about it is the lack of a good compact theme. For Firefox 2, I used miniFoxFlat, but couldn't find a similar theme for Firefox 3. The closest was Classic Compact, but even then it looked too flashy for me.
That is, until I discovered that in addition to that, I needed to add Classic Compact Options just to be able to pull off the entire miniFoxFlat look. Check out the following screenshot:
Notice how much more compact Firefox looks now, compared to the default theme that it comes with.
In fact, the default theme looks so much like Internet Explorer 7 that it wasn't even remotely funny.
On a separate note, I've always liked user interfaces that are "cholestrol free", i.e. without extraneous widgets and oversized gadgets just to get something done. Which explains my choice of the console interface and the rather spartan look on most of my applications, and also the relative comfort I have with working on the tiny screen of the ASUS EEE PC.
Okay, that's all for now. Till next time.
That is, until I discovered that in addition to that, I needed to add Classic Compact Options just to be able to pull off the entire miniFoxFlat look. Check out the following screenshot:
Notice how much more compact Firefox looks now, compared to the default theme that it comes with.In fact, the default theme looks so much like Internet Explorer 7 that it wasn't even remotely funny.
On a separate note, I've always liked user interfaces that are "cholestrol free", i.e. without extraneous widgets and oversized gadgets just to get something done. Which explains my choice of the console interface and the rather spartan look on most of my applications, and also the relative comfort I have with working on the tiny screen of the ASUS EEE PC.
Okay, that's all for now. Till next time.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Elyse
And so the time had come when I bring on a newer machine to take Edythe's place. After a rather tumultuous two to three years, her fan gave way and I had to seek out another to stand in her place. Today, I proclaim that Elyse is my new consort for the projects to come.
Elyse is a Fujitsu S6410, a real beauty and quite the workhorse with 4GiB of RAM and a decent Core 2 Duo processor. Armed with an additional modular battery, Elyse will be there to do all the hard computations when the time arises. She's a pretty machine, and maintains almost the same sexy demeanour as her sister Edythe. A pity that Edythe's fan had decided to throw in the towel—it'd be interesting to see the two of them interacting with each other. Edythe's "mini-me" (dubbed Edythe-EEE) will still be around, performing the light computations that are necessary when Elyse is busy working on some computation problem.
It is hard to explain this to someone who doesn't quite understand, but when one's work is based on the efficacy and efficiency of one's tools, there is this sense of attachment that I cannot seem to be able to shake away easily. Is this some kind of strange fetish? I don't believe so, unfortunately. I just like the thought that the tools that I use are somewhat sentient, and that they are indeed my friends—the silent friends who are always there to help without complaint, to be able to ensure that things work out as well as they can without thinking too much about whether it will cost them dearly or not.
All right, I think I've probably ranted enough for the day. In other news, I'm finally home (good grief), and am paying the price for a rather hot and muggy weather. I think that it'd probably be a while before I'm completely used to the hot and humid feel, but in the meantime, I'm never too far off the wash basin, since the rapid relief of cool water on a hot and muggy skin is much too tempting to resist.
Cheerio.
Elyse is a Fujitsu S6410, a real beauty and quite the workhorse with 4GiB of RAM and a decent Core 2 Duo processor. Armed with an additional modular battery, Elyse will be there to do all the hard computations when the time arises. She's a pretty machine, and maintains almost the same sexy demeanour as her sister Edythe. A pity that Edythe's fan had decided to throw in the towel—it'd be interesting to see the two of them interacting with each other. Edythe's "mini-me" (dubbed Edythe-EEE) will still be around, performing the light computations that are necessary when Elyse is busy working on some computation problem.
It is hard to explain this to someone who doesn't quite understand, but when one's work is based on the efficacy and efficiency of one's tools, there is this sense of attachment that I cannot seem to be able to shake away easily. Is this some kind of strange fetish? I don't believe so, unfortunately. I just like the thought that the tools that I use are somewhat sentient, and that they are indeed my friends—the silent friends who are always there to help without complaint, to be able to ensure that things work out as well as they can without thinking too much about whether it will cost them dearly or not.
All right, I think I've probably ranted enough for the day. In other news, I'm finally home (good grief), and am paying the price for a rather hot and muggy weather. I think that it'd probably be a while before I'm completely used to the hot and humid feel, but in the meantime, I'm never too far off the wash basin, since the rapid relief of cool water on a hot and muggy skin is much too tempting to resist.
Cheerio.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
EEE PC
As you'd know by now, I have one dead CPU fan on Edythe, which meant that I didn't really have a computer with which I can work on easily. Thanks to the wonders of technology and money, I have a relatively cheap machine called the ASUS EEE PC. With this, hopefully I can survive the coming fortnight more easily.
Also, I need a new computer when I return. Grr...
Also, I need a new computer when I return. Grr...
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