Video Watching

What a nice and quiet day.

I spent a little bit of time reworking a little on the blurbs that appear at the top and bottom of my blogs to make them less awkward sounding---I hope that I have achieved my goals through the adjustments.

I had also spent a little bit of time watching this introductory video on medieval recorder music, and certain rather interesting thoughts came to me, specifically, the part concerning the use of finger-based articulations over tongue-based articulations. Emily [in the video] pointed out that there were times where she would naturally resort to using finger articulations instead of tongue articulations for instruments that are generally ``always going on'', like the bag pipes (it is impossible to actually use tongue articulations since the purpose of the mouth is to replenish the bag of air via the one-way valve). These finger articulations are a cross between a mini-trill or some kind of mordent, and are most obvious when trying to separate out two notes of the same pitch. She also pointed out that more often than not, she is playing legato/slurred, and thus the finger articulations act as a way of keeping the legato playing while still allowing some distinction of the notes that are played.

In 笛子 technique, the so-called 南派 (southern style) 曲笛 playing uses lots of 打音 and 叠音 to articulate notes (for the gory details, do consider reading this section of my article). Noticeably, there is a severe lack of tongue-based techniques like 吐音, or anything that causes a severe ``break'' for the matter. Prior to the introduction of the G 大笛 (ambitus being roughly the same as the baroque flute), the largest 笛子 were of the 曲笛 range, i.e. about a fourth interval higher than the concert flute. At that ``low'' range, it was stylistically better to keep things in legato due to the less crisp nature of the tone.

I just found it interesting that a similar argument could be made for the restriction of techniques as part of a stylistic choice. Of course, these days under the 新派 concept of using the entire 笛子 family as a unified whole, there is hardly any restrictions of the sort any more. Bear in mind that back in the day, the 笛子 was not taken to be a virtuosic instrument---it was primarily an accompanying instrument for opera, and almost all instruments play about an octave higher [in general] compared to that of the more modern Western music tradition. It is interesting to note that the recorder family is one that is also treated similarly as the 笛子, with their actual pitches one octave higher than what is annotated. To say that there is some relationship between 笛子 and recorder is probably a mild understatement.

Anyway, that was roughly what I was thinking about for quite a bit.

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In other news, European Speedrunner Assembly (ESA) Winter 2021 is currently in session, and I have been taking time here and there in between the [light] reading and The Outer Worlds to watch a run or two here and there. Of note is the runner Juh0rse---he is a fellow Singaporean, and his Minecraft Any % (1.16, Random Seed, Glitchless) run is hilariously painful [for him] and fun [for us] to watch. I've caught him on ESA Marathons before; he was mostly speedrunning horror games, and Bishi Bashi.

Which of course brings me to something fun: speedrunning. The short technical description of speedrunning is the process of getting from the start state of the program (game) to a determined end state of the program (like winning/ending screen) using nothing more than what the program provides (like only providing input from the controller, keyboard, or mouse, without using any external programs to assist), in as short a time as possible. Of course, it is more fun than that because the said program is a game, and there is usually nice graphics, sound/music, and hilarious artefacts to observe as well. But don't let the fun get in the way of what speedrunning is---it is a fun way of defining the type of hacker attitude necessary for software testing. Much of the techniques used in speedrunning can often be translated into some kind of software test technique or attack vector, with an understanding that it is much stricter because the gentlemen rules of speedrunning only allows input from what is normally allowed, i.e. one cannot do hardware re-soldering, or run some kind of ``trainer'' program. The ingenuity of the speedrunners in finding glitches and exploits that can be humanly executed is what makes it a most fun sport for me.

I would say that my introduction to the speedrunning sport is from the Games Done Quick (GDQ) series of charity marathons.

I have been following the GDQ series of marathons from back in 2011 when it was still run by Speed Demos Archive and Speedruns Live, complete with their own IRC channel on Freenode (#sdamarathon). In the early days, when I was still studying in the US, I even donated some money too, and would have Elyse running the live stream while I was working on Eileen. The GDQs then were more informal and friendly, and I loved the Midnight Crew, the unofficial title for all those on the graveyard (relative to the on-site time zone) shift. The graveyard shift then was fun because a more adult-friendly atmosphere was allowed; I don't mean gratuitous sex and violence, but more candid banter than would include some mild swears here and there as needed.

But as the marathons got larger, they got more organised, and from the organisation, corporate structures were put in place, and various things that were normal from the old cosy format was no longer allowed.

It gave GDQs a good polish of professionalism, but in the process, seemed to nullify its grassroots origin a little.

But ESA marathons are still small in comparison and still retain that charm.

In either case, I no longer watch them live that much, partly because I'm getting older and have things that need to be done in between that disallow marathoning, and partly because... well... it's been ten years, or nearly twenty GDQ marathons. I won't say that I've seen them all, but I have seen a lot. As such, I'm a little more discerning on which runs to catch and which to skip, and have found it easier to handle things in a more bite-sized fashion.

Alright, enough of a brain dump for today. Till the next update.

Goodbye Eirian-III

I've had Eirian-III for quite a while now, and it is with great sadness that I'll have to retire this tablet.

I've had Eirian-III since January 2013, and she had always been my go-to for any of the coloured stuff and comics. Each time I travelled, it was Eirian-III that I lugged along instead of Edythe, Elyse or Eileen. Much good times were had.

But today, it was deemed the day where Eirian-III has to be retired. Her battery wouldn't charge, and upon closer examination, was already swelling up, a sign that things weren't going well.

And so, retired she shall be.

I'll always remember the times that Eirian-III had provided me with much needed entertainment that cannot be gleaned from the ``pure'' e-ink readers that her sisters were (Eirian, Eirian-II and Eirian-IV). Much fun was had watching Twitch streams on her as well. And geocaching with tools running on her, including oversized maps that make it easy to look ahead.

It will all be consigned to the past now.

Will I get a replacement for Eirian-III? I don't know, and I don't really think so. While great, Eirian-III has never been my standard workhorse---she ran stock Google Android with all its... flaws. Her coloured LCD was great for comics, but I'm no rabid comic devourer. She did follow me through great works like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, One Thousand Nights and A Night, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, not to mention my own compendium of web comics for easy reading. But are those enough reasons to consider getting a replacement? I don't think so.

So to my faithful device, thank you for your service, and thank you for your patience with a fool like me. Your absence will be felt in time to come.

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.

Trapped

Funny how when I'm ``trapped'' in my apartment/room I actually have so much to talk about on my blogs. Actually, come to think of it, it isn't really funny but quite sad, and is probably systematic in terms of what it entails. It is not that I don't want to be in the office/lab to get stuff done---it's cold out, I'm running out of clothes because of a lack of laundry time and I have a nice set up at home that allows me to work from the relative comfort of the apartment. The only caveat is that I don't really get to exercise my vocal cords nor social skills, but it is a small price to pay compared to having to dress up and cycling in the cold towards the office/lab.

My place suffered a drop in power yesterday, which promptly knocked out Elyse since I didn't load a battery in her. Eileen worked fine only because her battery is always inside, so I can't do what I usually do with batteries---take them out so that they don't ``overcharge'' (note: lithium batteries cannot overcharge because of the protective circuitry in place). So now, as a type of UPS, I stuff Elyse with the bay battery when she's on. Weird that such a thing happens though.

With the shortening of the daylight hours and the relatively horrible positioning of the dinner table/work table with respect to the only light in the living room, I'm so glad I bought a desk lamp. Now I can actually be up and do things and hopefully make progress.

Anyway, sleepy time. Till the next rant.

On Extra-Martial Infidelities

Damn it! I've deleted quite a few rants that I should have completed, but for one reason or another, I could not complete them before I completely lost the thought process that generated that rant. Must be something to do with how life is always moving forward and things like that.

Anyway, I think that I need to arrest this loss of words immediately. By deleting all those half completed rants and writing somethin about them I suppose.

The world today is much stranger than what I could remember. On and off, it seems that infidelity is the ``in'' thing, from Tiger Woods down to local celebrity film maker Jack Neo. I can't understand why they fall to temptations like that---it just doesn't seem right to me that they can make a conscious choice like that. Yes, I chose the phrase ``conscious choice''. It is hard to get involved in a relationship if there is at least one party who is not willing to be in the relationship in the first place. And by hard, I really mean impossible. Think about it this way, sure, there might be one who is taking the active step in trying to cajole the other to get involved in the relationship, but if the other party remains disinterested and more importantly, uninterested, then no amount of cajoling is going to be of any help (taken partially from real world observations and erm personal experience).

So a question remains. Why do people get involved in such infidelities in the first place? Without falling into the cheap argument of how the social mores are degrading over time, I offer a simpler explanation: the need for a thrill, the need for something different yet more of the same. In many cases, I would suspect that the parties involved just wanted more thrill in their relationships, no different from that initial magic they felt in their original marriage (otherwise why would they even marry their spouse in the first place?). But this highlights a more pressing issue: why is it that they need to rely on extra-marital affairs to provide that kick that their original marriages are not providing?

This brings me to my main thesis: the fundamental of any human relationship is good and honest communication. The success and failure of any relationship is dependent on all the parties who are involved---often it is hardly the case that a sole person is ``in the wrong''; there are contributory factors from all the parties who are involved. Good and honest communication is hard to come by, especially by people who are considerably less blunt, but when properly administered, I think that it has a much better success in quickly determining potential problem areas before those escalate into truly sore points that will end up with the whole extra-marital fiasco.

But then again, I'm not married [yet], so take all these words with a certain amount of skepticism---it is just my own philosophy on how things ought to be run.

And on another note, I realised that my typing ability seems to be degraded for some reason---either the keyboard of Elyse sucks, or that I have not been typing long enough sentences for a suitably long period of time that all the coordination of my fingers are no longer in good pace with each other. Until the next time I suppose.

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.

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.

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.

Misaligned Ramble...

It feels a little different, writing on Elysie instead of Elyse (no, there's no typo there). First of all, I am sitting much further from my text on Elysie than on Elyse---something about having a fairly large screen I suppose. Secondly, things just feel a little different when one is just sitting down and chilling out a little, with the help of a little bit of alcohol to help soothe the nerves.

The night time air always feels different for me. It is as though being nocturnal was something that I secretly loved to do, that somehow I commune better when there is less light outside. Unfortunately, it would appear that ever since that I have done the LASIK surgery, my night vision hasn't really been the same as it was, and that the glare of lights are still playing havoc on my overall perception of objects around me. For that reason, I actually wear sunglasses even when it is dark out, relying heavily on my rods to provide the necessary resolving power to see better in the dark.

Well, I'm rambling again. I started off trying to write something, and then got severely side tracked as I get FL Studio 9.0 to install on Elyse. Ugh... I can't multitask at all.

This sucks.

Ramble Bramble

So I've been back in Singapore for the better part of two weeks, and the one thing that I can truly attest to the city is that it is bloody hot. Thankfully though, I have more or less acclimatised to the ridiculous weather conditions, and is slowly getting more and more comfortable with the formerly excruciating heat.

I must say though, that I am starting to like the idea that I have decently good skin now. It is really nice to be able to live through the day and do things without having to feel uncomfortably itchy and dealing with cracked skin from the lack of sebum/thickness of the skin plaque itself. Sure, it is not as dry as in the US (there is this perpetual stickiness from the humidity), but at least I don't feel as uncomfortable as before. The stickiness from the perspiration and humidity is something that one can sort of get used to (taking some showers when the feeling borders upon that of pure discomfort).

That aside, the temperature here is truly abhorrent. The last time I checked my thermometer, it was registering highs of about 35 degrees Celsius, something that was never the case about 6 to 7 years ago. Many people would take this as an indicator that the world is indeed warming up due to the effects of global-warming, but to be really honest about it, the entire mechanism of global warming is not something that just came about recently---it is an action that has been in place for more than fifty years now. To say that the world has only been recently affected by global warming is like saying to an 18-year-old that he/she has just recently grown up.

But as usual, I digress.

Sitting around, waiting for work to begin, can be at times both interesting and infuriating. Interesting because I get to do things that I wanted to do but never quite seem to have the time to do so, like working on one of my multitude of personal projects. Infuriating because what I am doing doesn't pay the bills---one needs a job in order to make enough money to pay off stuff. I'm not saying that I have a ton of bills to pay now, but it is nice to be making some cash to squirrel away so that when I need to use it next time, I will have some at hand.

I've built myself a new machine. She's an Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q9550 with 8GiB of RAM, 1TB hard disk, NVidia Geforce N9600GT graphics card on a Gigabyte motherboard with a 21.5" Samsung LCD display. Her name is Elysie---kind of related to Elyse (differs by one letter!) but sufficiently different. Everything about Elysie is excellent---she runs on Windows XP x64 edition for gaming and the standard Xubuntu 9.04 distro for the main operating system. The only thing that I need to figure out now is how to ssh to Elysie from outside the LAN; this is an issue that is compounded by the rather strange and draconian way in which the ISP implements the IP address mapping; hopefully I can figure this out soon enough.

Well, that's all for now, I suppose.

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.]

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.

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).

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.

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.

Phone in Working Order; Huzzah!

Amazingly, they've managed to re-flash the software of my phone, and so life seems to be moving on dandily with everything that ought to be working, working. The only caveat is that I lost all the data that was not backed up onto the SIM card, but then again that wasn't much data.

While trying to restore the settings on my phone, I realised that I couldn't really connect to it directly from Elyse using Bluetooth—it seems to be a deliberate limitation of the phone. Not an issue though; my US cellphone can accept stuff on the Bluetooth stack, and so I just used it as a proxy to handle the data transfers itself.

——

Not too long ago, I talked a little about how some friends just go cold. I realised that that very description that I wrote could very well be a description of me towards some other folks, I guess. The bottom line is that at the end of the day, we're all rather similar to each other, despite the efforts of some of us in trying to be as unique as we possibly can.

Maybe this is nature's way of regulating relationships between people?

That aside, I'm starting to feel that while on the one hand I'm much more human than I was, on the other hand, I'm starting to be even more detached than before. It's an interesting conundrum, both in the sense of how it got to that stage and why is it even in existence. To both these questions, I don't think that I have a good enough answer.

Sometimes life is infuriating. It throws you so many curve-balls, and you try your darndest to deal with that crap, and you just fail at it. Other times, things are really smooth, and then after a while you get scared, wondering if it is all just a dream and that something really bad will occur just around the corner or something.

But I guess that's what makes us human.

π-approximation day.

First off, happy π-approximation day! On a day like this, it is also interesting to note that I'm roughly 6 months more to turning 24. That is mildly disquieting; to think that I'm fast approaching my quarter-life mark. Scary thought.

——

So right now I'm working on Elyse in the middle of the Starbucks of Plaza Singapura, and from what I see, it seems that the store is under some form of auditing by what seems to be an internal auditor. I'll just sit down and watch the show, I suppose...

That's it for now. Oh wait, not really. I'm really uncontactable by cellphone for the next 3 days or so, so revert to email/facebook/carrier pigeon/IP over Avian Carriers.

Till then.

Summer Redux Week One

So, let me be a little honest here. It has been a while since I last wrote anything of substance here, ever since the day that Edythe decided to take a holiday. Now that Elyse is online and working, I guess that some life updates are in order of some sort.

By now, I'm already back in sunny Singapore. What I forgot to mention is that Singapore is this really hot and humid place, and that's probably the only reason why I might not really like it here, after all these years. Since this summer, I'm not doing any internships/attachments whatsoever, I don't have the luxury of hiding away in air-conditioned rooms. Running around trying to avoid the heat is one of those "black art" things—there's no real foolproof way of doing it without expending more effort.

In the week (roughly) that I've been back, I've not managed to see what has changed throughout the land. Part of the reason was as above, and the part of the reason is that I don't seem to find the impetus to actually travel out of my house these days. After being away from home for so long, I suddenly realise that hanging out at home is one of the things that I kinda missed, hot weather notwithstanding. The sheer familiarity of it all evokes a certain nostalgia that I cannot quite explain with words, despite the fact that the apartment is as messy and cramped as before, considering the fact that it houses four adults now (as opposed to the two adults and two kids before).

I sit here at yet another coffee house, and just watch the world go by as I pen all these thoughts here. I maintain that one of the more interesting things to take part in is the art of people watching. Sitting quietly in a corner to observe the surroundings have proven to unearth more interesting sights than anything that I have done, and I could have sworn that I actually recognise some of the people who are currently here (I'm probably suffering from a case of mistaken identity, but I guess that as long as I do not make an ass of myself by calling out their names in public, I'd be fine).

In a way, this summer is meant to be a period of R&R, a way of ensuring that my mind is relatively relaxed in order to take on the challenges that the next year will bring. I'm not that vocal these days, preferring to hide away from the crowd and stay hidden, waiting till people seek me out. For too long I have been the prime motivator of things; I guess that the time has come for me to truly take a step back and observe all that is happening, and to wonder if anyone is still interested enough in me to actually take that step to want to meet me.

Is this wishful thinking? I doubt it. Reciprocation is one of those things that is really hard to quantify, yet it is one of those really important values with which one measures the strength of the relationship that one has with another person. To reciprocate𔃀is to acknowledge that another person is as important to one as one is to that person. I used to treat all these really seriously, and be the person who goes round trying to reciprocate to people. But then time has steeled my mindset, and I figured that if I'm the only one doing all these... social things, then what manner of reciprocation is this?

And so I sit there, hidden away in the corner, wondering about things on my own, looking on as the world passes me by. It is interesting how a year can change one's mindset on matters relating to human relationships. This time last year, I was all hyper-enthusiastic in trying to organise meetings between groups of friends—now I just adopt a completely wait-and-see attitude. So much other things to do, most of which have to do with self-betterment.

Ah, writing. My salvation from the complications of the world. It is a known fact that I'm a verbose writer; my professor and teaching assistants for the technical consulting class have grumbled time and again about the level of verbosity. The final consulting report underwent a good 3-4 iterations of edits before settling down to the form that was handed in.

Writing succinctly—I used to know how to do that. Except that these days, where people demand a "minimum number of words" for essays, I tend to bloat up my text such that they read more easily, albeit in a more verbose way. As a mentor once said, my writing reads like a novel, which is good if I am writing a novel, but it sucks if I'm writing something like a business report or even a technical report.

I have found a simple way of dealing with this though. Since my mind thinks in such convoluted ways, it is probably best to leave it as is, and to write the first draft in the most convoluted way that mind envisions it. After that, I will pull out my editor persona and start slicing and dicing the words such that they are the most concise form that I can get away with. I like the fact that I like writing, and so I'm not going to try and kill that innate verbosity just to conform to one of the many standards of writing there are. Prune will be the word of the day now, I guess.

So I've rambled on and on and on without much coherence in my thoughts. Not that it matters much, really. At this stage, I'm just happy that I can sit here in the nice air-conditioned room writing about things that I sort of care about. Maybe one day, at the end of it all, I can look back at myself and think fondly of the times that I had while sitting at the coffee house.

Also, when I'm sufficiently acclimatised to the weather here, I might just jot down random bits of information here and there about the things that I see. And now, time to write yet another article on one of the other blogs.

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.