Weekend Grouses

Yet another week has passed, and I'm still none the wiser on so many things. Some interesting hacks though, if you are a coder and would like some really clean but tiny monospaced fonts to program with, I highly recommend proggy fonts. They are highly legible and are sharp enough to not have to rely on hinting to make them look good. Also, they can be easily integrated with the Windows Console as an alternative font.

That hack aside, my clarinet has finally arrived, as well as my reeds and a plethora of random geeky apparel/cool stuff. The instrument seems to be okay, but I seem to keep playing notes a tad too sharp; at this stage I'm not sure if I'm to be blamed for that one, or if the instrument is the one that is at fault, or if my tuning meter is bjorked. The clarinet is ebonite, so it will not suffer unduly under the rapid changes in temperature/humidity like how a wooden one might. On a somewhat related note, I realise that I have slightly better control over reeds that are harder than reeds that are softer. I wonder if this is a good thing or not.

Last year in college, last year in many things. It is a tad strange to be thinking of things in this way, considering how I was raring to get back into society and do work just a couple of years ago. Indeed, time can change a person's thought and demeanour, and as things go, it might seem that I'm slowly having mine changed too.

I've long since given up on looking back on what I have done, figuring that those were rather inconsequential in the life that I have chosen anyway. Some might say that I have done plenty in the past that is worthy of mention, but I believe that what I did was nothing compared to what others might have done in that same time. A nobody trying to eke out a name for himself—that's basically what I am at the moment. I know I'm not as smart or as aggressive as some of my other peers, but I try my best given my somewhat limited abilities. I know that some of my peers just downright... dislike me, since I'm always so odd and strange by their standards. I used to worry a lot about blending in; now I just want to be able to convince myself that I do not answer to them with regards to behaviour and understanding—I am only answerable to myself.

Not too long ago, a peer chided me somewhat jokingly that I was "asking for it" when I decided to do Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University while he was doing a double degree (which included Computer Science because he was bored) at another university. That thought had stuck with me for quite a while, making me rather uncomfortable and having various misgivings about what I had done. But today, I think I know better. I might have been a dumbass (by his standards) for doing Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, but I am pretty certain that I learn much more here than I could ever learn elsewhere.

I was basically getting sick of having to correct people on their views/thoughts on Computer Science, and by "people", I do mean those who were supposed to be teaching us. At least over here in Carnegie Mellon University, I have professors who are doing cool stuff, who are happy to teach us what they know, and who are willing to challenge us on our perceptions on what we believe and think about Computer Science. Perhaps that is the reason why the CS Department is one of the best ranked Computer Science programmes in the world. Perhaps that is why I am here, since I've decided to actually do Computer Science as my profession.

Perhaps it is a sign to remind me that no one truly understands what another person's goals and aspirations are, and that I should stop listening and taking to heart reactions and words that have no positive consequential effect on me.

Perhaps it is also a reminder that I am still in control of my thought patterns, and that no outside influence has the right to claim that my thought patterns are wrong, particularly if that outside influence has no inkling of what he/she/it is talking about.

Perhaps it is time to realise that there are dumb people of all sorts, not all of them in a way that is stereotypical or easy to identify.

*sigh*

Going somewhat off-tangent again.

It's a nice Sunday today, and I've been up since 0700hrs. I have no idea why I keep waking up early these days, but it is something that I've slowly grown to accept and sometimes like. Nothing beats some semblence of silence in which work can be done, thoughts can be processes, and discomforts can be aired. It will be yet another long day.

Hoop Dancing!

Something more random: hoop dancing! And no, I'm not about to try that anytime soon... >.>

Pretty Eyes

Pretty eyes... eyes that mean something. Those attract me really deeply.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy to look into someone's eyes that deeply without them feeling awkward. Fortunately, I've found one who doesn't mind me gazing into her eyes deeply whenever I want to.

Need I mention that I'm madly in love with her also?

Musician vs Blargh Player

So, according to a friend, there's a difference with being a musician and a blargh player. A musician makes music, while a blargh player plays the blargh well. I wondered why he called me a musician as opposed to a blargh player—am I really a person who makes music instead of playing blargh well?

Week 0 Redux

The week is just about done, and things are indeed starting to fall into place somewhat. One silly thing that I keep having problems over is the relative confusion over the dates, since I keep thinking that Sep 01 is on Saturday, as opposed to Monday. That is fast changing however, due to the fact that it is the Labour Day weekend, which pretty much means free food and a day of rest [of sorts].

Homework has started to stream in slowly, and life is starting to look really different now, since my priorities and modes of operations have shifted a little here and there. It's a strange year ahead, and I know it deep within my bones.

I can't seem to be able to write more, so I shall just stop here. Perhaps a cycle through Schenley will help make things a little more palatable.

Lily Was Here

"Lily was here" is a fun song for the alto-sax. Now I want an alto-sax badly... I'll probably buy one when I return to Singapore.

Blurb

Indeed, it just feels so long, since the last time I actually wrote anything here. School has begun, and like all things related to school, there is much to be done before I actually have the chance to just sit down and catch a bit of breath.

The week is almost done, and honestly, the outlook seems alright. Networks does prove to be a more interesting class than Operating Systems, and of course there's the whole thing about Algorithms that makes it literally interesting.

There is much reading/writing to be done, and it will indeed be a most fruitful semester. Will I be stressed out under the onslaught of all that heads my way? That, I cannot forsee, because it is still too early to say. Homework has been released, and with a little advanced planning, I ought to be able to get most of it done before they are actually due. That is of course the more important aspect of things.

So this is my final year in Carnegie Mellon University; there's so much that I like about this place, and yet as time passes the level of alienation just increases slowly but surely. Perhaps it is because of the rapid changes that are occurring in the environment, or it could just be me being not very responsive to the changes and thus feeling the awkwardness. Perhaps I will figure out things as and when they arrive, and that things will be much nicer in the long run.

And yes, SSA has its first chill. I'm glad that I only have to be around for less than 30 minutes, since I have Kiltie Band rehearsal at 1730hrs. I don't want to undergo unnecessary steps just to humour the legions of people who have vastly different views of life than me.

That's all for now, perhaps. I need to grab some food before I collapse from hunger (last meal was at about 0800hrs).

Pressure Mounts

And so, the pressure mounts, really, for it is truly a moment of desperation of sorts. All hopes placed in a single basket, which makes things really uncomfortable and completely frightening. I chose this path myself, and through the various levels of inaction, have now to suffer for my folly.

How am I to cope with this? How am I to be able to handle this problem now?

I know not the answer except to bury my head low and work on this as best as I can.

Academic Year Begins

After a rather odd journey halfway across the world, I'm finally back at where my current journey was left off. So strange, the first time I set foot here was almost two years ago, and I found the place rather different to begin with. Today, when I set foot upon it again after being immersed in my home world for a good 3 months, I find that the old feeling of something being different returning once more.

So the new academic year begins.

Radio Silence Once More

Once more I find myself seated at the airport again, waiting for my flight out of Singapore to return to Pittsburgh, where my current life is located. Transitional locations... things that till this day, never cease to amaze me. It will be a while till I'm able to get connected to anything else, and so meanwhile I shall just declare a moment's radio silence, at least until I've arrived at my final destination for this trip.

This upcoming year promises to be a rather interesting one, considring the fact that there are so many things that I'll need to deal with, among which include the concept of graduation. All things have more or less come to full circle, and this will once more prove to be one of those things that I'll need to learn how to deal with.

That said, it is almost time for boarding. I shall talk more about these at a more convenient time.

Till next time.

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.

sftp, ssh, scp

Just a quick blurb. ssh -X will allow X-forwarding provided you have a running X-server on the host machine (an example for Microsoft Windows would be Xming). sftp allows simple FTP-style manipulations of SSL.

Recursive copies over SSL are performed with scp -r user@hostname:remotepath localpath from the *nix prompt.

Cygwin works well in supporting these.

That's all.

Mild Panic Prior to Party

So, roughly 20+ hours before the annual meet-up amongst the scholars, I'm starting to have my usual dose of misgivings. The reasons are still the same as before—I just don't feel that I might fit in well.

Then why the heck do I still attend such meet-ups? It is indeed a rather interesting problem. Honestly, I don't believe that I have a really good reason why this is so, but one thing that I can think about is the fact that deep inside, I'm still human and maintaining good contacts with these folks helps in the preservation of my humanity (of sorts).

The sad thing of course is that each time after these meet-ups, I tend to become even more morose for a while. Maybe I feel inferior to what they have done; maybe I'm just a plain worrier. I honestly have no idea whatsoever. Perhaps this time round, when the numbers are fewer and made up of people that I sort of know a little more, I can be a little more comfortable with myself. Hmm... on a semi-related note, how crazy ought I to be? My craziness isn't KY-styled, nor is it Ding-styled; mine is notoriously geeky and over-the-top at times. Maybe I ought to bring a couple of machines over with the intention of sitting down and programming should the need arise.

Eww... I think that it defeats the whole purpose of turning up to the gathering/party. I should just be normal; no one else is going to bring a laptop, let alone two. Awww, screw it. I'll just bring along my laptops, and see how it all goes on. Some of these things... just need to be figured out on the spot, and worrying about it before hand is so not going to be useful, at all.

On an unrelated note, I've finished watching Black Lagoon. This is more adult-themed than most of the other animes that I've watched, in the sense that it has much more explicit violence involved in it. Storyline-wise, it wasn't too bad; the art style was less cutesy than the "usual" anime style and a little more realistic in feel [for an anime]. Hellsing, the other anime that I've completed watching some time back, is similar in genre but boasts a more stylised animation technique, which makes it all the more spooky, as compared to Black Lagoon. Both are excellent animes, though their content matter is more suited for a mature audience.

Deus Ex is one computer game that I've recently embarked on. It is an interesting game in its own right, mixing role-playing elements (like skills and inventories) with first-person shooting. The gameplay of Deus Ex is similar to that of Hitman, in the sense that there's a lot of sneaking around involved—it is neigh impossible to play Deus Ex or Hitman using an all-out brute force approach. Firstly, there is a severe lack of availability of heavy weapons and ammunitions, which makes it more tactically sound to rely on stealth and sneaky weapons. Secondly, the areas of combat are really restrictive, unlike in games like Quake, where the expansive landscape and relative abundance of ammunition and weapons makes it much easier to engage in armed combat.

Which style of gameplay do I prefer? I like games like Quake and Unreal Tournament for their no-nonsense frag-fest, but sometimes, all the non-stop action is nasty on the eyes, because when playing these fast-paced games, I actually blink even less than usual (I'm known to blink very little to start with), which makes eye irritation and fatigue to be a real issue. So, sneaking games like Deus Ex is a refreshing change for me for once in a while, though the intricate plot sometimes makes it irritating. Deus Ex doesn't suffer that tremendously as compared to other games in its genre (like Hexen), but it's long narrative does sometime cause some irritation.

So, while Deus Ex is a refreshing change, I doubt I'm going to dump Quake or Unreal Tournament anytime soon. That's about it for now, I think.

Death

Death is interesting, serene, and comforting. To be able to be embraced by Death's loving arms, seems to be the ultimate life that one can ever live.

But like all questions that one asks oneself, how does one seek Death? There are, unfortunately, many ways to die, but they are largely separated into honourable means and dishonourable means, and not by suicide nor homicide, contrary to popular belief.

Should Death be sought as a means of escape, then it is likely to be dishonourable, particularly if the choice of dying is short and painless. Even the path of Death chosen is for escapism can be made honourable if the method in which one is despatched involves the greatest amount of pain that can be inflicted in the longest amount of time. This explains why the act of seppuku is considered honourable, while the act of shooting one's head with a shotgun isn't.

The underlying assumption is that pain is something that one seeks to avoid, and to seek it as the penultimate step to actual Death would entail that one did not choose Death as merely a means of escape, but as a rite of passage towards something that would liberate them. It is the concept of "rite of passage" that separates an honourable death from a dishonourable one.

Legends from around the world have often placed the death of a warrior in battle as the among the most honourable Death that one could get, while those who just died of old age tend to be belittled as being weak and dying dishonourable ones.

Honourable deaths are hard to come by in this time and age—no one is foolish to emabark on a war or battle just to die honourably. However, dishonourable deaths are far too easy to attain. Some examples include leaping off tall buildings, hanging oneself, or even to be knocked down by motor vehicle while crossing the road carelessly.

Perhaps we ought to see Death by old age as an honourable Death in this era, since the number of ways to die dishonourably is much more than that of an honourable Death.

A Failure

I think I'm a failure. Even though I'm designated as the assistant conductor of my Chinese Orchestra, there is much that even I don't really know. While some might say that I have some talent in feeling for the music, I think that this "talent" is still too raw to be of any good use to everyone else.

Guess that means that I need to put more effort into trying to learn more.

Passion

What is it that makes one person to be revered with greatness while others are quickly forgotten? Is it a political ideal? Could it be sheer wealth or scientific ingenuity? Perhaps, considering the fact that till this day we still remember the Rockefellers and the Einsteins of the world with some awe.

What is it that binds these people whom we acknowledge for their greatness? I suspect that the underlying thing that binds them to our consciousness is that of their passion. Passion here can be one of a multitude of things; it could be the compassion that they have for others, or the great eternal love they share with a special someone, or it could even be the strong interest that they have for the field that they are studying.

Passion. Why did I bring up this topic out of the blue? Because that's something that I've been wondering about for quite a while. In my previous post, I was talking a lot about emotions and after watching Ouran High School Host Club again, something inside me seemed to have been awakened. It is this whole concept of passion.

It would seem that among the things that people look out for in others, passion ranks as among the highest attributes that they see. People feel touched when they sense the passion that is within one. All these feelings of passion are what makes people great.

[Ed: I wrote this a bunch of days back, but somehow lost the drive to finish it. I'm going to publish this as is.]

Aimless Wandering of Thoughts

Life can sometimes be like a myope walking around without his/her glasses. The myope can see that in the far side of the road, there are obstacles or people who might be able to provide help, but since he/she is a myope, the views of the far end of the road are just a blur, and all that the myope can see are things that are much closer.

Sometimes, some people can see far very clearly, but can't see clearly things that are close to them. They have lofty aims, and often make it really big professionally due to their foresight, yet when it comes to living in the current time, they seem to be unable to meet the mark.

Yet there are others who cannot see either far or near clearly—they end up banging into a lot of painful obstacles until they learn how to see things using more than just their eyes.

And there are the lucky ones who have near-perfect vision, and can see both near and far well. Some of them become very strong leaders to guide those who can't see near, others as leaders for those who can't see far. Yet there are a few who will just silently walk on the road, knowing full well that their near perfect vision grants them a preternatural ability to avoid all obstacles near and far, and not evangelise to other folks whom they think are not worth the time and effort that they have been using.

But for all those who are not blessed with a pair of perfect eyes, they can rely on their eye glasses to help them see better. In life, these glasses are the opportunities that arise to widen one's reflective equilibrium, the education that we receive, and the experience that we gain whenever we hit an obstacle and fall. We almost never walk the road alone; there are others who share part of the journey with us. Sharing our visions with others, we can learn more about the world, and with the people that walk with us, we can have an almost perfect vision together.

Life is not about walking the road alone. There're always companions to be found along the way. The only thing that makes life difficult sometimes, is that one's companions are not always going to be around forever. The loss of a companion, no matter temporary or permanent, is often a reason why some people just sit down on the road and cry for a bit, unable to proceed. With our companions on the road, we have an intertwined destiny of sorts, and their loss can cause a gaping hole in one's collective consciousness.

——

I never truly liked goodbyes. Goodbyes are one of those moments where the sense of loss can simply overwhelm my rather delicate emotional states. Despite the fact that I know that partings are as much as a part of life as are joinings, I can never seem to reconcile with that fact in my heart of hearts. My biggest discomforts in life are largely stemmed from goodbyes from various people, many of them who are friends at some time or another. To say that I'm just an emotionless logic machine, would be a vast underestimation of my humanity.

I broke down before. It is something that I don't really like to bring up, but there're no secrets, really. The break down was not wholly unexpected, given the circumstances in which it occurred. Don't get me wrong, life is beautiful and all, but life can also be a bitch at times. And it is at those times where if one does not have enough support, one breaks down. As I steadily increase in age, it seems that I am slowly regaining what was my lost humanity. And it shows in the most unlikely of places.

As a musician, I was only a technical player, being able to play the notes as they were annotated on the music score, following with mechanical precision the timing and dynamics. I was not a bad player, but all who were more experienced than me told me that my music was lacking in emotional content; all they heard were just unconnected tones, and not the music that was within. But as I slowly egressed from my self-made shell of isolation, I began to understand what was it they meant when they said that my music was lacking in emotional content. I started to listen to Teresa Teng's music, and from there I slowly learnt how to bring out the emotion that was within the music.

I used to play with only my fingers, now I play with my heart. Any wind instrument that I pick up, as long as I knew how to play notes on it, I could play music now. Emotions... something that I once thought that I would never need, have become something that I am slowly learning to accept as being a part of me.

It is the repressed emotions of many years that caused my break down. It was not a pretty sight, from any perspective. Life was literally being turned upside down through the destructive thoughts of the break down. I couldn't help it then—my rational mind was screaming at me to stop the idiocy that I was displaying, but I couldn't reign in the uncontrollable outburst of emotions. I broke down so hard and so bad, that people got worried, people who truly cared, and people who didn't really care all too much. That night when it happened, it was a dark night indeed.

Today, right here, right now, as I am saying all these, I cannot tell if I've truly gotten over that break down that I had. I think that I am fine, and no one seems to notice anything truly different about me, but this is one of those things where it is really hard to tell. Sometimes I sit alone in the dark and look out the window, like the many nights I had before the break down, thinking about things in the past, present and future, wondering about the things that I could have done, and the things that I have done, and the things that I need to have done. Each time I sit in silent solitude in the dark contemplating, I always wondered what I would have become had I chosen a different path in life.

——

The moon. She lured me, enticed me, then mocked me and spurned me. Now she sits up there in the pretty sky serene and quiet, her rays of light bathing me in a strange silent glow. I used to love the moon, then I hated it; now I just feel sorry for it. For in all the actions of mankind, good or bad, at least we are together as one. The moon just sits there, alone in her heavenly throne, and can only sigh at whatever happens beneath her feet, as her eternal glances upon earth, go on into infinity.

I looked upon the moon's face, and thought, goodbye world.

Environmentally Friendly Mumbo-Jumbo

What exactly does one mean when one says of being "green"? Unfortunately for us all, it would seem that what people think to be "green" really are things that seem to consume less energy when in use, or their overall phenotype just appears to be a more environmentally friendly alternative.

The truth of the matter is often quite different. While I do not disagree that an appliance that consumes less energy during operation is more "green" than one that doesn't, it is surely a folly to think that that is the only factor in which we are considering. The appliance or object that we are looking at often has some sort o manufacturing process behind it, and the fact is that I doubt there's anyone who actually took the opportunity to do a complete calculation on the actual amount of energy and resources that are used in the production of the product.

Here's an example. In the production of consumer electronics, various types of semi-conductors are used. We know that for a large portion of these devices, the purity of silicon is of major concern. The production costs of pure silicon is fairly substantial, if one factors in the need to have a very controlled environment to prevent contamination, or even the fact that silicon itself has a very high melting point and thus requires copious amounts of energy just to smelt it down. Now factor in the act that impure samples of the silicon are not really reused, and there's probably the need to actually reheat and re-purify the silicon die. All these require energy, and at the end of the day, we are still looking at a manufacturing process that requires the same if not more energy to produce the so-called "green" equivalents.

Perhaps one way of actually achieving the whole concept of "greenness" is to look into better energy resources. When I say "better", I do mean that the efficiency of the power generation is much higher than it is now. Even the relatively "clean" nuclear fuel is not exactly very efficient, as considerable amounts of th generated energy is lost when used to heat up water to turn the turbines. If a more direct way of using the energy is discovered, we would be in a better position than before in having clean energy.

But now of the things that we always need to think about is, do we really care what the output is at the end of the day? Are we really that interested in having a "green" world? Have we transcended our own human nature and realise that there's a tomorrow that we can look forward to? Somehow, I sincerely doubt it. Consider the situation nearly 200 years ago. The world was in a much better state environment-wise. This had something to do with the fact that there wasn't any organism that was in a position that can cause a global change to hat was essentially a very "natural" thing. But the creation of modern science and th quest towards world domination has led to inventions that were great then, but were slowly recognised as being detrimental to the environment only decades after it was first discovered. By then, the invention had already proliferated throughout the world in its many forms, and the damage would have been done. Remember the whole CFC fiasco? It was only a couple of decades before folks realised the kind of damage that was happening, and it was only then that science had a means of explaining.

In my opinion, in order to have a more environmentally friendly future, science itself has to be more conscious of its far-reaching effects. Often the discoveries of damages occur only after their effects have been felt—it is very reactionary and highly irresponsible. In the quest of developing new technology, one must not forget the fact that the world today owes its existence to science, be it good or bad. All the "save-the-world" movements in the world will amount to nothing if the creators of the technology themselves do not recognise the problems that each of their solution brings.

Am I being idealistic here? Perhaps a little, but I strongly believe that for any action to actually have a lasting impact, we need to bring about change at the most fundamental aspect of it all, and to nip the problem literally in the bud. Only through this, will we be able to actually do something that can make amends for the drastic changes that we have made to the environment.

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.

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.

Lurking In The Background + News Media Issues

Yet another day has passed me by, and honestly speaking, with the lack of a direction of what exactly to do, I've slowly lapsed into a state of ire. While on the one hand I am glad to have the chance to actually take a break of sorts from the hustle and bustle, on the other hand I realised that I actually miss the whole shebang of actually being busy.

Perhaps my defining moment about life is that of being in a constant state of business, always having to do one item after another, meeting each deadline as they arrive? That I cannot truly tell, but perhaps a few anecdotes might show the direction that I'm leaning towards.

In general, I tend to like lurking in the background and working on things that way. Once upon a time, I was one who was always glad of the limelight, and would somehow manage to end up in positions where the spotlight would be on me, all in the good sense of the word of course. But as time went on and I starting to see how the world is, I realised that perhaps it was wholly unnecessary of me to try to be in the limelight all the time; lurking in the background and being humble can take my much further, because I can learn more due to my unobtrusive nature. One must be really sure of one's abilities in order to be able to take the limelight, for once one is there, seeking help will become a really difficult thing to do, because of the whole issue of pride and the light in which people sees one.

The spark that I once had while younger, has evolved into a steady flame that burns steadily against the strong winds. I might not have that kind of exuberance like when I was only a child, but I'm pretty certain that the determination and enthusiasm that I had then is still with me, albeit in a different form. Perhaps I had said this before, but I think it'd be good to say it again—I'm not fighting for myself, I'm not travelling through time to see the world for myself, I'm doing it for the people who believe in me. Does this mean that I believe in myself too? Perhaps, but in my mind, that is something that I ask myself only sporadically. Why worry about something that you don't really know how to start answering? Why not look at the things that you know, and figure out some greater truth from there?

[Ed: I just realised that I had written an earlier post lambasting mass media some time back. Talk about a genuine and consistent dislike of this group of folks.]

On a wholly unrelated note, I'm not too fond of the mass media in general. There's something about the concept of a "scoop" that does not sit well with me. In the bid to obtain the best "scoop", madd media companies and freelance folks have resorted to questionable practices, like stalking their targets, or even harassing them through their insistent questioning techniques, and sometimes even haranguing in public just to be able to evoke an emotional outburst to be able to make that "scoop". There is no news media that is exempt from this act, from traditional print media to those based on the Internet. This is all an issue about human psychology and perception.

That's why I refuse to read newspapers nowadays, because I simply do not condone such acts of invasion towards a person's privacy and rights.

We ought to get this straight with ourselves: media companies are not our defenders of rights and liberties; the folks who are going to fight for our rights are those who are willing to go to court to contest the issues that we find to be uncomfortable over. Media companies have only one aim in their existence; it is the same aim as all other companies, and it is to make a profit. Technically, they might have an obligation to report the truth, but practically, there is no real provision towards reporting the truth in a completely unbiased manner, or even to report the truth for that matter. Media companies will report whatever they can get away with, and the more outrageous the report they can provide, the better their sales and thus the better their profits. Which brings us to my original grouse of reporters doing anything to get themselves the "scoop".

I watch with disgust on some of the ways in which reporters carry themselves. Instead of treating their interviewee as a person, they treat them as some kind of prisoner, and end up asking very prying questions or asking in ways that are not polite at all. These forms of treatment extend beyond your average citizen—they are employed even on important people like the leaders of a country, or even celebrities. Another related issue is the reporters' general "know-it-all" attitude. The sad thing about it is that like many things related to news and media in general, misrepresentations of actual information gets used a lot. Some classic examples include the perversion of the word "hacker" and the "Anonymous" hacker group. It's ridiculous to the point of pure disgust. Just watch the video clip that I linked to and observe how the presenters make everything sound legitimate and completely correct, when reality is far more different.

What do these all show? The target of the news media is not to inform the public, but to make the public feel informed. There's a subtle difference there: if the objective is to inform the public, then more can be done in terms of actually obtaining better accuracy and to seek expert opinions on the matters at hand, and not to just blabber about something with that "know-it-all" tone when the fact is that they don't really know what they are talking about. However, through the various techniques that one observes in the presentation of news reports, it can be seen that informing the public is rarely the key objective (unless it is some government sponsored public message), the news media provides just enough truth to gain some legitimacy, and then fudges the rest to make it "sensational".

Oh right, I almost forgot about that word, "sensational". If a story is not "sensational", then it will not be a part of the news. Thus, normal pickpocket cases hardly appears in the news, unless of course if someone really big and famous gets pickpocketted. This is what I think academic circles call "selection bias", i.e. to only select stories that best toe the "official line".

Alright, I'm getting sick of bashing the mass media companies. Hopefully, the audience that they are earning their money off can be educated enough to understand that not all sources of information seek to inform them, and to always seek objectivity as the basis of learning about what is going on in the world. Someone did say, "Comments are free, but facts are sacred." Now, if only those news folks would remember that adage.

Myth Debunking

Contrary to popular belief, I actually do not like the glamour road. I used to be That Guy who was always appearing in very public places, doing lots and lots of things, so much so that people started to get really jealous and stuff about it. Nowadays, I'm just happy to work behind the scenes, and to just appear as and when I need to. I don't feel a need to assert/prove myself through such petty displays of ability, but like all folks, if there is a need to actually step forth to do things of that nature, I can do it; I just make the choice not to for the most part.

Glamour is a very icky thing. In the beginning, it is all nice and fun, because you have this feeling of superiority over other folks, because you feel Special, you feel like you've become the centre of attraction for this side of the world. But as time goes by, people start to alienate you because of your ways, and you end up befriending others who are just as star-struck as you are, and at the end of the day, you would have forgotten how to communicate with the man-on-the-street.

I guess that is a pretty good summary of my early years.

I knew I was different from most folks; I never came from a rich family, nor do I go to those "magnet schools" for the rich and the famous. I'm just a silly neighbourhood kid who managed to make a few breaks here and there due to opportunity and the aid of people who sort of cared. That is probably the reason why I was never really comfortable with my fellow scholars from A*STAR.

Most of them come from rich families. Most of them lead very opulent lifestyles. Could this be some inferiority complex that I'm having? Perhaps it is the case, for I do find it hard to converse with them without feeling rather awkward, in the sense that I keep feeling as though they are better than I am, even though they are just my peers.

Ugh. No one did say that one must be friends with everyone, colleagues-to-be or not. I'll just have to suck it down and see what's going to happen next. I know that I'll never be as sophisticated as these people, but I know that at the end of the day, I'll be proud enough of my own skill to hold out on my own. If I cannot earn money nor friendship, at least I can earn some respect.

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.

就说"她"到底是谁吧...

夜风以冷，我又是单独坐在电脑前静静的思考着，心中就想着将来的问题。直至以后的路程，除了修读博士学位之外，就好像什么都没有了。记得上次我一直说的“她”吗？如今，我觉得我自己已经找到了“她”了。

和她在一起，我不禁会开心起来。当她在我旁边是，我总觉得自己很幸福，天天都可以濯在那儿望着她那美丽的面孔望，也就从不觉得无聊。我从小就不会笑，但每当我见到她时，我脸上就不知不觉地露出一种很自然的笑容。依我看来，这一次我是真的遇到了“她”了。

偶遇的情形，说起来也有一点意思。我们打算一起来往的一年多前，我们早就有见过彼此。还记得当时就是我其中一个朋友在宿舍里招待了潜在的新生，而刚好那新生就是Ida。当时的情形也不会说很尴尬——我只觉得她为人很风趣，很有个性，也觉得和她很谈得来。

不知不觉地，一年后她果然成为了我大学的学生之一。也就从这里，我和她就慢慢地互相交谈，互相了解。几个月后，我们就决定一起来往。

Ida为人好，心地善良，样子也长得不错。和我的旧女友相比，Ida会显得比较大方。她不大爱喜欢花钱，价值观和我得很相像，所以我们俩就这样很谈得来。我之间的爱情，是以互相理解为基础，以互相沟通为维持的方法。她的为人是那么的好，我总觉得如果我这一次就这样错过她的话，我就不会和自己过得去的。

当然，修读电脑科学系的她，也和我一样有一些怪癖，但这些怪癖，我越看越喜欢。这样的人，哪里可能在新加坡找呢？

只能算是缘分吧。我国的都市那么繁华，人们几乎是养尊处优的，唯物主义也就成了都市人的座右铭。我本身的价值观会比较抽象——我不大爱金钱；我反而比较喜欢学新的知识，以及摸索和人与人之间的各种关系。以这样的主义，我又怎么能在本地的女子中找到知己的女友呢？

*叹气*

我这也不想继续说下去了。现在我身边有了Ida应该是足够了的,我又何必想那么多无关的事呢?

Projections

The trick to doing anything well involves more than just technique and practice—it involves mental conditioning and psychological preparation. The key idea behind all these is that of projection, or the way in which one uses imagination to literally be the role in which one is supposed to be playing.

Let's start with a very simple example. Suppose one is playing the flute, and wants to play a high note. The straightforward way of doing it is to just play the high note based on the learnt techniques. This is not a bad idea per se, but then the note will seem to be lacking some flavour, and some might describe it as being "out of the blue". Now, suppose that the high note in contention is really a part of a musical phrase that mimics the voice of an opera singer. Then, it is more "natural" to imagine that one's instrument is really the opera singer's voice, and with that, the resulting tone played tends to have a subtly different feel to it, and matches a little bit more closely to the intent of the composer.

The reasons surrounding this idea of projection may not be completely grounded in pure scientific theory, but an idea on why this works could be explained through the use of the fact that the imagination of the role that one is supposed to play helps prime the body to react accordingly at the subconscious level. It might not work for everyone, but nonetheless it is a good thing to try out if one wants to exceed one's current abilities.

Part of psychology is that if you convince yourself enough that you can do it, you will end up being able to do it.

Hmm...

Something that I found someone had linked to: A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys. While most of it is sort of true, there's a lot of stereotypical stuff in it.

Not all geek guys are Trekky fans, among other things. I'll leave it as that for now.

My Geekiness Rears Its Nerdy Head Again

My geekiness rears its nerdy head again, I suppose. Check out this program:Would you believe that this same program produces this?The tricky part is figuring out what actually is going on in the program.

Cheerio for now.

Bunch of Munsch

I just realised that perhaps I ought not to be wearing my current set of polo T-shirts. Without buttoning up the entire front of the polo T-shirt, the collar tends to fall really flat onto my shoulders, which makes the whole polo T-shirt collapse like some really weird article of clothing.

I'm not sure if it is because my polo T-shirt is old, or if my neck is too thick or if my shoulders are two broad which screws up the entire set up of the shirt. The third possibility, of course, is that I've not buttoned enough of my shirt.

Enough of random rantings.

——

So I had lunch with Harish, Sadu and Yongji today, and among other things that we talked about, we were discussing about our favourite pet peeve—the education system. Among the four of us, three have been studying in the United States and there was one who had studied both back here and over there.

Our consensus is that our current education system is inadequate in the production of thinking people, though our reasons are more varied than what one might expect.

I'm of the opinion that our system here tends to produce workers than thinkers as a matter of principle, while the others think that the whole culture itself is orientated towards regulation. Now, regulation is not a bad thing, but too much of it can become detrimental; need I bring up the multitude of problems that are occurring in the current situation?

——

It's nice to see these folks once more. They remind me of a time where we were more carefree and had more time to debate about the various occurrings in Singapore. I wonder when these times of debate and thought will return again.

xchg

The magic to mutexes (or mutices) lies in the xchg instruction.

I've always been wondering how the O/S kernel can actually implement atomic operations until I read some of the 15-410 Operating Systems class slides to realise this little trick.

Hmm... kernels. Maybe I should write a "modern" kernel as a side project some day.

Some Friends... Just Go Cold

And sometimes I still wonder why I keep wanting to preserve old friendships between people who have already drifted so far apart from me. There are many people that I have met and tried to step into their world, just to see how things are alike, but each time that I do that, I realise that there is little that I can do to learn of their world. Sometimes, the world of some folks are just too hard to fathom, simply because one is not in the correct state of mind to fathom what it is that they have experienced. So while there are many good friends whom I still keep in contact with and maintain a rather warm-ish relationship with, there are many others that I've started to slowly let the connection cool down somewhat, simply because it is no longer that easy to keep abreast of how they are doing in their lives.

Not to mention that the conversation topics have slowly turned from warm to cold.

I don't blame anyone for this; each and every one of us have a different perspective on life that we carry around with us. Sometimes these perspectives change, and then we start to learn of other things and mix with other folks whose perspectives are most similar to ours. I'm not sure if I've said it before, but this whole "I am a scholar" thing has always been a little too much to bear for me, simply because after my twelfth birthday, I had always tried to stay as far away as I can from the "glamour road", for I had been there once and the feeling wasn't that great. The whole "glamour road" is a farce of sorts, a kind of self-indulgent means of asserting one's importance in the world, where one's true importance might actually be nothing at all.

I'm probably among one of the most "poor" scholars around—I still think from a very grounded perspective, and still have not seen myself as "one of those who are elite". I'm not an "elite" despite what others might want to say; I'm still someone trying to eke out a living doing what I think I might know how to do. Sometimes I find it hard to balance all these feelings, particularly when I'm mixing with the group that thinks that it is made up of "elite" people.

Maybe I've said it somewhere, but I'll say it here. Sometimes the stories of those who are not so "elite" can teach us more than all the education that we can get out in academia. I'm not the brightest, and I'm not even remotely "bright"; I'm just really lucky to have opportunities thrown at me by folks who care and lucky to have folks who care to lead and guide me through my life. That's why I do not like going around talking about my "real" life to folks—I don't believe that my worth is solely deigned by what prestigious position/role I play. I believe that one's worth is based more on intrinsic values than extrinsic ones; take away all of the awards and leave only my name, and I want all that remains to speak volumes of myself.

And if you guessed that I just had some meeting of some sort with the whole bunch of other scholars, you are right. I generally don't feel this way unless I've just been inundated with a whole pile of really "heavy" feeling elitism. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.

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.

The Power of Habit

Not too long ago, I was taking the NEL when I realised that the door that was directly in front of me refused to open for my entry. Somewhat startled, it took me 2 seconds to realise that it was not in use, and to scamper into one of the other opened doors.

A little moment's reflection made me decide to observe how many people would make the same mistake as I did.

To be fair, it is rather hard for anyone outside of the train to be able to see the sticker from the outside—something to do with the many layers of intervening glasses. But from the inside, the sticker label is quite clear:What this picture doesn't really show that it is roughly at eye-level for an "average" height person (say 1.65m or so). I wonder how many people will actually see it and not stand there and attempt to alight from it.

Unfortunately, not many people actually saw the sticker until it was too late.

From the starting station (Serangoon) to the ending station (Harbourfront), I found that there were at least 3 people who automatically stood in front of the doors each time the train arrived at a station. Among these folks, there were both the young, the old and the plain clueless. I guess the power of habit is really rather strong here. It was quite funny actually, to see well-dressed folks just standing there when the train arrived at the station, and waiting for the doors to open up, despite the fact that they might have been around and thus seen the other folks who were trying the same thing just a few stops before.

It goes to show how observant of our surroundings we really are, that and the power of habit can cause. This little unexpected social experiment just shows that habit can lead to complacency, and in this case to embarrassment. Now think about the more "serious" problems that are out there, like the operation of heavy machinery or even the whole shebang of counter-terrorism efforts.

If all we are doing is to rely on habits to allow us to get through with what we are doing, sooner or later, we'll end up being somewhat complacent. In this case, the payback was just slight embarrassment, but in the other more "serious" cases, real lives may be lost and real properties may be destroyed. It goes to show that we should always take the time to stop and reflect upon what we are doing to ensure that the habits are well-understood and the ability to be flexible will still stay with us.

Blurb

There is a problem that I keep running into—the feeling that I'm more "elite" than the people around me. And no, I don't mean being the techno-geek kind of 1337, I do mean "in real life" kind of elitism, the kind that separates the "rich" from the "poor".

I'm not some rich dude, nor am I really that great by any degree, but with the increasing amounts of education that I'm receiving, it seems that it has the effect of increasing my awareness of my environment, to the point that I actually start seeing the environment not as being composed of just people, but also as being composed of people and their thoughts. Each time I turn around to look at people, I just feel as though I could sense what they are thinking about, and can almost figure out why they are here and why they do what they do.

And that's where the problem starts. I find it increasingly hard to accept the fact that there are some people who keep making silly mistakes or take silly actions; they keep repeating things that do not really benefit them much. The chronic gambler, the perpetual bankrupt, and the eternal instigator are but a few examples that I can think of that fall into this category of people. I wonder if this is an act of snobbery on my part, as part of the "elitism" gained through all the knowledge that I've gathered, or is it just a natural occurrence of a "normal" human feeling.

I wonder too how some politicians can put up with their constituents, as not all constituents are learned or even well-informed of the situation. How do these people pull this off? How is it that they can bring themselves down from their high-up-there social status down to the level of the average citizen, without looking too snobby nor getting visibly irritated? I think that as time goes by, this will become more and more important as I slowly climb up the social ladder through the life path that I am taking.

——

It has been a rather quiet summer thus far, with little astonishing things occurring. So I've had a class outing, and have met with various people to various degrees, and have pretty much the time to actually engage in a frequent enough swimming schedule. That said, I've also have the time to write several cute programs, and to put together the slides for the Introduction to Traditional Chinese Music class that I'm teaching this coming semester. Given the current lethargy in contributing prose to my scribbling blog and my poetry blog, I'm seriously considering a marathon writing session tomorrow, just to squeeze those creative juices out again.

In a way, I'm glad that I didn't have any time nor real ideas for writing—it just shows that I have other [more important?] things to do. These days are spent pretty much in near isolation, considering the fact that I don't actually go out that often now that I don't really need to work. All these isolation instances that I'm applying to myself seems to have their intended effect on me—to be less distracted of things that don't really matter, and to be able to refocus my energies on those that actually do.

All this time I had been thinking. The main thoughts that dominate my mind are that of the future. Strangely enough, I cannot believe that I'm actually thinking much more deeply about the future and what it entails. That could be because of what I've managed to find recently—my humanity.

Humanity—the ability to love and be loved, to care and be cared for, to empathise and sympathise. I learnt bits and pieces of it ever since I left Singapore to pursue my overseas studies. The last two years were full of varying levels of experiences, from the truly happy to those that still have a lingering pain within me. These emotions and their related controls truly came about only when I was isolated from the place that I know well, simply because, in all honesty, it wasn't really conducive for me to do some inner searching. Folks from my old environment just cannot look past my exterior and see what is within me, which explains why I keep faltering in the old environment.

But here, and now, I think I'm starting to figure out what is it I want. Till next time.

Small Chew Compiler

And so, after about 758 lines of Python code complete with embedded C within the code, the basic compiler has been completed. I've managed to get it to compile the "standard" library of words that I've crafted to run off the core words, and the various types of control flows like recursion, nested IF-ELSE-THEN statements all work nicely. Compilation is performed through piping from the command line because I am too lazy to hack out stuff to make use of argv.

Apart from genuine string manipulations and arrays, everything else works well with the compiler.

Alright, it's getting late, and I'm going to knock out. Once again, till next time.

[Ed: Small Chew can be found here]

Yet Another Short Update

I'm now at Library@Esplanade on my annual pilgrimage to the classiest arty-farty place in Singapore. Apart from the annual pilgrimage affair, there's also the necessity of having to source for various books for the class that I am teaching this coming Fall. Not that I have no idea what I'm going to be saying, but seriously, I think that it is good if I am able to pull out backing evidence for the things that I say so as to ensure that things are going to go smoothly.

Alright, I think I'm sick of working on the slides—I might just go and fix the interpreter generator for now. Till next time.

Short Update

Okay okay, I get it. I've not been updating this as much as I used to, simply because there is really little to write about. But today, now today is just plain different. There's actually some interesting stuff to talk about here.

For one, I'm really excited that I have managed to find a 17 open-hole flute with B-foot from Amazon.com. While I must say that I'm not really a very big fan of flutes as compared to say the 笛子, I'm always on the look out for a French-styled B-foot flute, simply because of its range and overall balance compared to the C-foot flute. The construction of the B-foot flute is subtly different from that of the C-foot flute, and with that subtlety, it introduces a whole range of notes that can be played on the B-foot flute instead of that of the C-foot flute. This also means that when I've amassed enough cash to actually purchase a sterling silver flute, I'd be ready for it, and not end up wasting my money simply due to the fact that my abilities do not commensurate to the abilities of the instrument.

And yes, I've managed to get it to ship to Singapore. Now the thing is, will it reach me in time? Only time will tell on this one.

That said, I spent the day divided between programming my "toy" stack machine to prepare for the Forth virtual machine that I'm working on, and watching a movie, Get Smart. It's a fun movie, and I could almost recall the original television show through some of the antics, particularly the whole shebang of doors that needed to be entered just to get into the headquarters. It's full of laughs, with a relatively well-mixed set of various types of humour. A refreshing film for the summer, I'd guess.

As for my virtual machine project, my compiler is still missing the ability to resolve addresses, as well as the rather important IF-ELSE-THEN structure. It is currently able to do everything else rather well, and I'd have to sit down and write Serious Code in order to make it completely working.

That all said, I'd conclude that it was a rather eventful day today. And later on in the morning, it is off to swimming I go once more.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

"And that's why we can't have nice things", a statement that csawyer uses very often. More often than not, she was referring in a nearly tongue-in-cheek manner, but sad to say, this can be the truth in the real world.

The fundamental problem that contributes to this perspective is the tendency of people to "game" the system. Of course, when I say "game", I mean "treating the system in question as an optimisation problem and trying to solve it". There're many examples of this: the "grade inflation" problem as shown by the increasing number of students who are doing increasingly well in classes, the number of people who are actually in middle class now compared to 20 years ago, and even the gradual increase in wealth of the countries in general.

While I'm not advocating that "gaming" the system is a purely "bad" thing, what I'm trying to say here is that such behaviour is almost expected of us under any situation. It is an instinct that is strongly tied to the concept of survival; the one who can produce the most "optimal" outcome will be the one who has the highest chance of survival.

Which is why we cannot have nice things. Because the moment something nice is put in place, some unscrupulous people will start to "game" the system and then cause the infamous Pareto distribution to occur.

Okay, starting to be rather incoherent. I shall stop here.

Nerdy Girls, Sexy?

D'oh. Read this first.

First off, notice the use of the semantic phrase of "X 2.0". It is so clichéd just to label things as "2.0" just because people want something to sound more "hip" and "new". And since when it is fashionable to be associated with the "geek" stereotype?

Since the media pounced upon it of course.

So the infamous media is converting the concept of a "geek" into one that oozes sexiness and savviness that is unlike other "in" social groups that they had identified in the past. The question to ask is, at the end of the day, will we end up with a situation where there are just many poseurs of "geeks" and that the real "geeks" become completely and horribly misunderstood and ostracised?

Take the case of the "hacker", a term that has been so blatantly corrupted by the media. Hackers used to be folks who were brilliant at hacking things related to computers, i.e. be able to come up with novel solutions to problems that exist on the computer system. But all thanks to the media, the term "hackers" are now associated with people who break into systems for fun or for profit, and because of the mass infiltration of the mass media, it made everyone think of "hackers" in that sense.

Yet another example of a not-so-intelligent media corrupting words and definitions. "Anonymous" has been termed as being an "internet hate/hacker group bent on bringing down the Church of Scientology". Sure it sounds impressive, except that "Anonymous" isn't even a group—it is a term given to the faceless people who lurk around a bunch of picture board websites. And here's the really silly part: there exists a "leader" for "Anonymous". Wow, can't those newspeople/media people think for a second on what they just said?

Finally, it is the attitude of the media people that makes my blood boil. Newsanchors and reporters tend to have that "oh gee, I'm holier than thou art" feel about them, and sometimes the way in which they interview people leaves much to be desired. "Hard-hitting" reporter you say? I think a more appropriate term is "aggressive". Some of the questions that they ask... can be really uncalled for. And yet the public devours all these bullshit greedily. This is yet another reason why I refuse to read newspapers and watch television—traditional media companies have been to staid in their positions to change their ways. At the end of the day for these folks, it is the profit margins and market share that matters, not the accuracy and impartiality of the news.

Again I think I've gone on yet another tangent. So, nerdy girls, sexy? Hell yes. Ida is one helluva sexy geek girl/nerd girl, and she always makes me happy whenever I see her. I can literally spend the whole day looking at her without feeling bored.

I shall end on the cliff-hanger.

Eh, Update?

I must admit that I feel only slightly bad that I've not really updated anything here over the last 11 to 12 days. The thing is, there's so much to do over that period of time that it is starting to become really hard to "get into the mood" of writing rants of some sort.

In theory of course, this is supposed to be my summer break. But in reality, this summer break is just a thinly disguised self-exploration/recreation period where I'm supposed to make use of to learn the stuff that I had always wanted to do but never did have the time for during the academic year. Already I'm writing a Forth implementation, and simultaneously to that, I'm writing a really small stack machine implementation to test out some of the concepts of effective compilation of code, so as to make better use of the Forth dictionary when I start to implement that. There is also the issue of deriving the "smallest" working set of primitive operations, and the little stack language that I designed seems to be performing a decent enough job in helping me in that. Hopefully something really interesting will come out of it.

On a separate note, I've been somewhat confirmed for the concert to be held in December next year. This time round, I'll be solo-ing 《今昔》 by 陆春龄. It is a rather complicated piece, not because of its technical content, but because of the need for a certain level of musical maturity in order to understand and re-create the emotions that are involved in the piece. I'm rather amazed at the fact that I am actually up to the task in performing this piece, but then again it has been a good 15+ years that I've been playing on my 笛子. Sometimes it is just a little hard to remember that I had been playing for that long already.

On yet another note, there were a whole plethora of meetings that occurred over the last week. It was great to be able to meet up with some old friends just to catch up and see how things are going along. It was a pretty decent experience, and I'm sure most of the folks whom I've met up with would tend to agree with what I have said.

Alright, it's getting late and the old man feels old. Until next time.

Random Ramble

Recently, I rewatched the Matrix trilogy, and realised that this second viewing makes more sense than the previous one. There's something about the vagueness of the Matrix trilogy and the vagueness of life that makes me draw various parallels between the two circumstances.

"You've already made the choice; you are now here to understand it." Isn't that a sufficiently vague statement that means nothing more than the words that comprise it? Yet at the same time, the concept of this statement is prevalent in the Matrix mythos. The underlying assumption here is that life, at the end of it all, does not truly contain "free will", if "free will" means having the ability to decide what action one wants to perform. Perhaps this is true in the real world, and that all of us are just playing out the parts that fate/destiny has given us. But like all abstractions, perhaps "free will" is our answer to justifying actions using Occam's razor.

Air-Conditioners

On a completely unrelated note (as usual), I suddenly realised that air-conditioners are more efficient in cooling a room down if the external weather condition is much cooler. This means that for places like sunny Singapore, the air-conditioner is actually working a lot harder to pump out the thermal energy from the room than say an air-conditioner in the middle of Alaska.

The principle of the air-conditioner is based on the heat pump, which in turn is based on the expansion and compression of the coolant fluid to transfer the thermal energy. A heat pump takes in thermal energy from one region and dumps it into another region. So, in the case of Singapore, the heat pump will take the excess thermal energy inside the room and dump it into the outside world. Except that when dumping the excess thermal energy, the Newton's law of cooling tells us that if the temperature gradient between the outside region and the coolant fluid is too low, the rate of transfer of the excess thermal energy will be lower. Now, taking that into consideration, it is clear that the heat pump is most efficient if the outside is cooler than the inside.

But if the outside is cooler than the inside, isn't it cheaper energy-wise to just open the bloody windows?

Also, I'm not a physicist. So don't lambast me when I use Newton's law of cooling as part of my explanation.

Life

Ah, life. Full of interesting things to think about, wonderful people to hang out with and that special someone to hold close and just curl up with. Am I less of a pessimist now? Perhaps, since my temperament has changed somewhat given that my life circumstances are slowly getting better.

It is strange to note that this time last year, I was in a situation that was pretty sitheremilar. Except that the feeling was somewhat forced. I'm grateful for what I have now, and especially who I have now.

I used to think that life was all about logic and axioms. But as time went by, I realised that it was just impossible—there's more to life than just a deterministic outcome. It pains me to see people who think that life is all about logic and just fail to comprehend that life is more than that. There's this side of life that involves feeling, that involves rational thought, that involves empathy. Empathy and feeling are things that are uniquely human; these are what separates us from any other logical system. I'm sure that some purists might argue that it is possible to codify all these feelings and empathy into some logic framework; I'm positive that it would probably work out provided one uses a good encoding scheme. But we're not computers, so why should we reduce ourselves to just logic processing machines? What kind of life it is for a human if we live it out like a machine?

I used to be a logic machine of sorts, trying to hide my feelings and humanity away from it all, and survive on a cold, intellectual exterior. But as time went by, all these hidden away emotions and humanity started manifesting themselves as uncontrollable manic/depressive episodes. But of course, the terms "manic" and "depressive" are nothing more than placeholders for the extreme mood swings that I'm referring to—they probably do not correspond to the standard clinical definitions.

But after some help from several people, I start to realise that there is more to life than just solving equations/problems using logic—one must look beyond the logic framework to understand more about the world. Last semester, I took courses in technical consulting, ethics and economics, and the truth is, I actually enjoyed the lessons that they teach. Granted, they are mostly not too relevant to my core of Computer Science and Machine Learning, but they provide a rather interesting way of viewing the world at large. Technical consulting taught me how to apply my problem solving ability to the outside world where there's more than just the best technical solution there is; there is a need to consider the human aspects of technology as well. Ethics brought up more viewpoints that I can take, other than the "cold and intellectual" utilitarian perspective that I tend to adopt in real life. And economics just proved that many of the activities that humans engage in can still be analysed from the perspective of some semi-universal law or hypothesis.

So, what's all this rant about? I actually have no clue... perhaps this is one of those "memory purge" things that I engage in to sort of put my life into perspective of sorts, and perhaps to act as some non-subtle commentary of some people's lives that I know.

Till next time.

A Class Meet-Up

Right. So yesterday was a class reunion of sorts, where all the misfits who made up my old class were supposed to meet. It was an interesting meet up, to say the least, because all the misfits of old are now fledging members of normal society with little of the misfit-ness that was the driving characteristic of our class.

Well actually, not all the misfits are fledging members of normal society. I'm still pretty much a misfit given my geekiness.

Heh. I still can silence the whole table with one sentence of network communications protocol, which shows pretty much that I still have that "oh my god I have no clue what you just said" property, which is probably no different from the old days. Not that I don't like it much, but it is just one of those things that sometimes it might be good to not have. Most of the folks are on their way to actually making real money, which is good, while I'd still be cash-strapped for at least another 6 years, and even then, when I'm actually ready to make "some money", my pay would still be lower than the rest of the folks who had already started working earlier than me.

Strange how time has changed most of us. Most of the folks characters haven't changed much; good friends of old are still good friends now, but sometimes I cannot help but think about how everyone's lives have deviated from everyone else's. I guess my feelings on all these gravitate to the neutral side, because let's face it, it is increasingly unlikely that our paths will cross again in the future under normal circumstances due to the divergence in what we are all doing.

Implicit Memory Manager for Forth

And so it is another one of those gee-I-ought-to-be-asleep-but-I'm-not kind of writing. Previously, I was talking about having to write a memory manager for my forth interpreter. The memory manager is actually done, and I think that it probably works. I'll probably write a stronger series of tests to ensure that it really works correctly, but at this point, I'm satisfied with what it can do.

The design for the memory manager is simple. It uses an implicit list to keep track of blocks of memory that exist in the forth virtual machine (fVM). Since all memory locations are allocated by cells, where each cell is 32-bits wide, there are no real alignment issues to worry about. I avoided an explicit list to reduce roughly three cells worth of memory that is required by that more advanced data structure. What this means is that the memory allocation and freeing are both linear in time with respect to the number of memory blocks that are in the fVM. Freeing uses coalescing, and the linear traversal required means that we can perform consistency checks in the fVM heap to prevent silly things from happening.

The memory manager is deliberately separated from the main code, thus allowing me to implement other versions should the need arise. The only thing that is still missing is the realloc() function, which might be useful in the case of trying to FORGET a word in forth.

The next step in the interpreter code, it seems, is to define the dictionary and some primitive instructions. Once these are done, I can start to compile the default dictionary and actually have a working forth implementation running.

Who knows, I might just put up the code once I have it all done.

Can't Run Away From malloc()

And I thought that this was the last time I needed to write a memory manager. Turns out I was wrong. What happened was that I finally decided to sit down and write that forth interpreter that I've been meaning to. While I was happily writing the code for the interpreter, I suddenly realised that I needed to handle memory for variables as well as words for the interpreter.

The realisation that I needed a memory manager was almost immediate.

So I guess it is time to roll up my sleeves and write that memory manager all over again. This time, hopefully it is much simpler due to the way the alignment works in my virtual machine for forth (alignment is by cells, which is different from bytes).

Late Post

I promised an exposition here, and here it is.

The basic thing that I sort of realised while walking around was that of change. The overall climate here seems to be rather different from 2 years ago, and I almost feel like I am some outsider, in comparison to before. The subtlety of the changes are not readily apparent, but upon further thought, things start to fall into place.

The main idea that floated around in my head with regards to change, is the fact that there is this slow dissociation on my part to various organisations in general. Inasmuch as I would like to remain anonymous, there are many times where the association is enforced to a certain degree, and because of that, I do not have that opportunity all the time. Apart from my reticence in wanting to be easily recognised, there is also the tacit acknowledgement on my part on the relative lack of viable options that I can pursue to ensure my chosen actions.

Again, I digress due to the lateness of the night. I shall try to remain on topic once more. The core tenet of the change that I have noticed, is that the people that I once thought I knew have changed much. In general, there is this trend where people seem to be taking me a little more seriously and treating me in a more "adult" manner than before, even though I am practically a similar person as I am today as I was 2 years ago. And by this statement, I'm really implying also that many of my friends have already started to treat me thus. Not that this is a bad thing, but as I said earlier, these are part of the changes that I seem to have perceived.

And the million-dollar question (literally): why am I working my butt off for a PhD? I'd be lying through my teeth if I didn't say that I want to do it because I actually want to contribute a little back to the society that I sort of grew up in. It sounds cheesy, I know, but that is the feeling that I truly get whenever I step back to examine what I have been doing and the choices that I am making. But sometimes, I just feel a little sad at the way with which I'm supposed to contribute back to the society—I feel as though I'm no more than a high-cost worker who is doing things that 90% of the populace have no idea about.

I'm probably fine with being an anonymous contributor, but I think the more important thing that I need to worry about is keeping that little spark within me alive so that I can touch more people's lives in ways that they'd never known, without me ever having to show that I was the person who was behind the idea.

Change

I realised something rather interesting. A common theme that keeps running through my mind these days is that of change. Everywhere that I look, I see change. Of course, not all of the change is good or bad too, for that matter, but the mere fact that change is so pervasive and obvious to me today strikes me as being rather odd. That and also the weird feeling of why I'm doing what I'm doing, working my butt off to get a PhD.

I'll expound on these more when I have the time.

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.

Future Post?

If you happen to be able to read this at the time of 2359hrs (SGT), then it means that the experiment worked. So blogger recently rolled out their future post system, which allows a more controlled way towards publishing posts at a specific time in the future. It is high time that they had such a feature too, considering the fact that this is something that was likely to be supported by other systems elsewhere.

That's all I'm going to mutter for now. Till next time.

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.

End of Semester

Again, it is the end of the semester, and more importantly, it is the end of the second year of college for me. Lots of things have happened thus far, both good and bad, throughout these semesters. A quick recap of this year I guess, before I fly back home once more for the summer.

I was ditched by one, and found by another. My grades climbed, and hopefully will continue to do so. Life is good, life is bad; there is much to be happy, yet there are times to be sad.

So after the final final exam, I was basically packing the whole dang day. And the switch from the extra large packing boxes to large boxes meant that I had to basically pack more in terms of number of boxes, but less in terms of the individual mass. This all meant that it was practically possible for a single person to actually move each individual box, as opposed to the 25 inch ones that required at least 2. Also, this year, KK's basement seemed to unavailable, so it was also a good thing of sorts that the box was on the small side as it could then fit into those narrow stairways.

At this stage, my brain is kinda tired and so I will not attempt to write more. All that I will add is that I will be on radio silence for a few days, possibly weeks. Till then, take care.

Intermezzo

So marks yet another day of writing my ethics essays. They don't seem to be really hard, and seem more of being summaries than anything else, but it is really hard to tell at this stage. Things are starting to get crazy here, and soon I'll need to do my packing (probably a little on Thursday evening and a lot more on Friday afternoon).

So much to do, so little to do them all. And I'll probably end up missing Ida a whole bunch over summer.

*sigh* Back to the grindstone.

Peace out.

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...

Management of Life

Again I've not been saying anything here for a while. Part of the reason is due to the fact that Edythe's CPU fan is pretty much dead, part of the reason is also due to the fact that there so much that needs to be done during this "death march" week. Life is not as bad as it seems though; I'm feeling rather good of myself and am in control despite the fact that everything is starting to crunch down for me.

I had been sick since last Friday—I had a bad-ass fever for the whole of Friday evening up to Saturday. But after 10 doses of Dayquil, lots of water, cough drops and trying to catch as much sleep as possible while keeping a good hold on my schedule and thus plan on dealing with the work, I think that I'm in really good shape to proceed well.

Life is bad; life is good. It is all a matter of perspective I guess. Adopting the right attitude and mind-set seems to be the best possible start that one can take towards maintaining an overall positive experience.

Alright, so much for now. I need to get back to editing the final revision of the full consulting report for class.