[One Year Late] Task

While clearing up the stuff that I had accumulated over the last 2+ years, I rediscovered these that should have been up one whole year ago. Basically, the idea was to customise a particular icon(s) for the folks that wished me a happy birthday last year, but I kinda... forgot due to the amount of work to do. Oh well, better late than never, so here goes:

The Final Countdown

Minor Edits

Some minor edits for my information portal. These include:

• Removing the hairspace surrounding the emdash
• Tweaking the solidus to hug to the left and have zerospace on the right to facilitate proper line breaking
• Reduce unnecessary verbage for a few of the pages
• Putting up the final paper I wrote for my research
• Introduced more details on the various code substitution tools I have

As you can see, really minor edits to make it a little more readable/usable/pleasing to the eye.

Alright, it is getting late, and I should probably turn in for the night. Till next time.

I Lament

Optimism. I never believed in it. Never did, never do, and never will. Optimisim is something that I find to be among the most unnatural of all things that one can possibly come up with. Why be an optimist when the world keeps crumbling around you? Why subject oneself to the illusion that things cannot get any worse?

Life... it is a complicated beast. And really, I'm just... tired. Tired of all the things I have to put up with. Tired of having to deal with five hundred different things at the same time. Tired of having to deal with the unreasonable pencil pushers, tired of having to fight for every damned thing that I want and need. Tired of having to pushing myself so hard only to be faced with one setback after another.

Stress. Heh. What stress right? Except I'm no smart person. I'm hardly one of those really ``intelligent'' people, nor am I one of those ``rich'' people. And I sure as hell am not one of those folks of authority. Who am I kidding with myself? Do I really think that I can progress at all?

Heh. Perhaps on the days where my mood is on the good side. Perhaps on the days that I remain delusional and am high on the nectars of petty successes. But when I sober up to the realities of it all, I find myself back to a position where I once was, never having really moved far from it.

Whine. I do not whine; I lament. I lament why I have to put up with all these kinds of crap from myself by myself---I lament why up to now I still don't have a firm grasp to my own emotions. I lament how I managed to deceive myself that I truly fit in, and lament why I chose such a hard life for myself. Indeed, I lament many things, but I do not whine.

I think I need real solitude, something far away from people of any sort, not even through my own domain of the Internet. Nay, I should stay away from civilised contact for a bit, and do a few deep soul-searching to think why I am why I am, and figure out what I must do.

And if there's any resolution I need to make, it will be that I be as misanthropic as possible. Already my year-end depression syndrome is running late, and I want to let it run its course fast so that I can better concentrate on my work when the semester begins.

It is going to be a busy day tomorrow.

Science Paper Generator

Something fun before I sleep: generate your own science paper.

Alright, off to bed I go.

Years Ago Today

Two years ago today, I was literally a broken man. One year ago today, I was on the mend, and seeking salvation. Today, I feel like all of the bad things that happened was part of a nightmare that I have finally woken up from. If you still have no idea what I'm talking about, then read on---I'm referring to my mental state with regards to human interactions/relationships.

Vg nyy ortna nyzbfg guerr lrnef ntb, npghnyyl, jura V jnf whfg nobhg qbar jvgu zl angvbany freivpr. Gur Yhane Cevaprff, zl vavgvny sbenl vagb yrneavat nobhg ubj gb ybir, bayl gb svaq gung vg jnf bar-fvqrq, naq zber bs na vasnghngvba guna ybir. Gura, gurer jnf gur snyfr ubcr bs gur AnAbJevZb Nssnve, jurer V gubhtug V sbhaq fbzrbar jub jnf ernyyl vagrerfgrq va zr, ohg vg jnf cebira gung V jnf whfg orvat cergragvbhf ba zl cneg.

Vg vf ng gung cbvag gung V fybjyl fyvccrq bss vagb n fvyrag znqarff gung bayl gur pybfrfg sevraqf pbhyq thrff ng.

Vg jnf jvgu gung fgngr bs zvaq gung gevttrerq bss gur Pureel Oybffbz Nssnve, jurer zl nyernql jrnxrarq cflpur jnf zbzragnevyl envfrq jvgu ubcrf, bayl gb or qnfurq va gur zbfg harkcrpgrq naq haqvtavsvrq jnl. V fjber bss gelvat gb npgviryl vavgvngr eryngvbafuvcf, nf V fgehttyrq gb teno zl fnavgl onpx sbe zlfrys. Vg jnf qhevat guvf crevbq gung V jrag sbe gurencl.

As I slowly let go, I slowly regained myself again, and the best thing that can ever occur came to me. Ida and I found each other.

Why do I suddenly reopen all these old wounds of mine? There's no reason except that, perhaps this can be a form of actual closure. I once said many years ago that I would not live past 20---I was right, in a way. The old me died a year ago, the new me is now in control. New, improved, and much more human than before. I know that there's a long way to go, but to be able to look back and face my past like this, I think that it allows me to be at calm with myself.

The road ahead is rocky, nonetheless, for it is my destiny to be so. But I no longer fear myself; I am starting to understand both my irrational and rational sides. May the years ahead be more fulfilling than before.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a very useful command line program that can be used to do batch processing of graphics. Here's a useful incantation:

convert input-files -colorspace Gray -depth 4 output-file

Note that this allows the creation of a pdf of images. Interesting for converting comics into a pdf that Eirian can read.

Alright, I'm done with writing. Back to converting comic piles.

Three, Three Apples! Ahahahahah!

One, two, three! Three, three apples! Ahahahahah!

Society's Failings

The modern society is a technological marvel, and a governance miracle. Governmental systems do a pretty good job in ensuring that people get their basica amenties and not cause large scale disobedience, and have generally done a good job in maintaining inter-state relationships.

Except that the modern society is also a hot-pot for all sorts of fail. In many ways, it would appear that we have not stepped out of the middle ages when we look at the lowest common denomination of the populace. It is indeed true that literacy rates today are much better than those that wre about 300 years ago, yet we don't find that people are any more intelligent than before. I wonder what education is really about the last few years, and honestly, I do not find a satisfactory answer.

The naïve answer to education is that it ``raises people's awareness of the world and world at large, and thus increasing their ability to make rational decisions that further improve themselves''. In many circumstatnces too, we find that education is seen as the de facto poverty cycle breaker. Except it does not seem to really be the case. Education is a noble attempt in raising people's awareness---this I do not disagree, but in the ensuing steps taken to meet the ideals of education, our society seems to have taken a step back as a whole.

Look at the current financial crises. Who were the ones that inspired its occurrence? It is not your daily person---many of the folks who contributed to the mess are those who were supposedly ``educated''. The Chinese have a saying 聪明反被聪明误, which translates to the smart being blinded by their smartness. That is, what I think, to be the most apt description of why the financial mess came about in the first place.

While I'm not propounding that we should all adopt a centralised control system to deal with society and its failings (think about the ``no-child-left-behind'' policy that practically plagues the public education system in the United States as a valid counter example to a centralised approach), I'm trying to say that the education system has gone beyond the concept of ``education'' into a numbers game of sorts. How many people out there who score perfect grades can actually apply what they supposedly have learnt in real life? Sure, there's probably a sizeable number who can do that, but what about the others? And why are there still school drop-outs then, given that we have learnt so much about how to teach people?

I think the core of society's problems boils down to one word: choice. In many sitautions, the infrastructure is there for people to take that step forward, yet they do not. I think that the issue is that the people choose not to move forward. I can back this up with carefully chosen examples; let us go back to our flogging child, i.e. education. Sure, education expenses are expensive, and the costs are expect to rise even more every year. And yet, there are also a multitude of programmes that provide the funding necessary for a student to make it through school should he/she choose to work hard and demonstrate potential. And the natural argument against this is: define ``potential'', and how about those who don't really have ``potential''? Well, the answer is refreshing simple: there's education opportunities of all sorts, the academic one is but one of the few that are available.

Not everyone can be a scribe or priest or any of those academic people. That is a fact of life; people are all born under different circumstances. But in the context of society, everyone has an almost equal chance to learn to the best of their abilities and then work on towards doing something that they are proud of themselves. While I'm not a fan of affirmative action, I cannot deny that affirmative action has created opportunities for the economically underprivileged to actually take the step forward and rise through the social fabric. But yat another question returns: how many actually make good use of these opportunities?

Choice. People always have a choice, it is whether they want to take it or not. There are many things in life that are determined by choice and decision, which is a strange thing since I just stated that one of education's goals is to teach people how to make better choices, with the premise that rationality is a good metric in determining if the choice that one is taking is indeed ``good'' or not. Hence a chicken and egg situation, where people need education to learn how to make better choices, and people need to make the right choice to embrace the opportunities that education provides.

Maybe there's no way out of that problem; ignorant people will want to remain ignorant, and the smart alecs will ruin themselves (and everyone around them) with their shenanigans. But I hold a glimmer of hope for the everyperson, to be able to slowly see what the best choices that they ought to make. Ignorance is probably the single most deadly thing that a person faces in today's society---many of the bad decisions that were made by individuals or even groups of people are based on being ignorant of some aspect of what they are thinking about. For example, religious extremists and fundamentalists are deliberately ignorant of how their narrow interpretation of their teachings do not commensurate with how the world currently works---all these just leads to the clashes between them and the rational people who populate target group of society that the extremists/fundamentalists do not see eye to eye with. A similar argument holds between the extreme liberal and the extreme conservative. The key to a society's success is probably that of moderation.

People will most definitely take me to task for that last statement that I made. Moderation---no one will openly want to admit that, since it almost implies that these people need to admit that not all of their teachings are right, when they have been told for countless ages that their teachings and ideas were absolute. I'm always very sceptical at an ideology that propounds very absolute terms of ``correctness'' and ``goodness''. That and the hard-coded dogma that the ideology prescribes. The problem with dogma is that it is usually temporally sensitive---something that might work in ancient Rome, for instance, can be almost completely irrelevant in a modern city like Chicago. Blindly applying ideas is probably the single largest cause of many of society's problem.

Which brings us back to education. What should education be? Should it teach what we want our progeny to hear, or should it provide choices for them to understand all the perspectives in as an objective way as possible to train them to learn how to make valued judgements? Should it be a fact-recall type system or should it be so general purposed that the students end up knowing the most generic way of doing something that they forget how to apply the concepts in real life?

Again, I beg of moderation. Some ``core facts'' ought to be kept in the recall format, concepts that can be safely classified as being part of the ``basic human archetype''. Good candidates for such concepts are things whose unknowing state can cause the person to not be able to function at all in the modern society. However, when controversial issues are concerned, the gist of the arguments on all perspectives ought to be demonstrated to the student and let him/her decide which is more compelling in his/her perspective. Note that by ``controversial'', I do not mean something like the evolution vs creationism debate; I'm explicitly referring to issues where there is strong objective reasons to support either hypothesis. Things that involve some manner of ``magical thinking'' and/or belief systems ought not be presented as facts of the case in the schools.

But who am I kidding? The educators are humans, and are thus subjected to the usual biases that occur when one's belief system is challenged by the empirical sciences.

So at the end of the day, are we, as a society, doomed? I highly doubt that it will be the case, but if we keep adding kludges to the current education infrastructure, I'm pretty sure that we will be engineering our downfall in time to come. The time of change is at hand, and should the human race want to survive for another thousand years, reforms in the way we do things ought to be considered, and at the very least, the lowest denominator of society be brought up, so that people can actually start living in the twenty-first century.

Smart-enough?

The sweet silence of the campus, devoid of complicated matters like classes, homework, and people. Far removed from the hustle and bustle of daily life in the University. A most interesting moment indeed. True isolation has never been more acute than now---almost all the usual spots of social activity are closed down in one way or another for the ensuing break, and this, unfortunately, includes the computer clusters.

The semesters has finally wound down; I have bittersweet feelings over the whole experience. On the one hand, my life has finally picked up where the pieces last fell and I'm moving forward once more, in a rather happy and contented fashion. On the other hand, there is the worry about the future and the various sets of setbacks that await me when the ramifications of this semester return to haunt me in the future.

On a semi-related note, I already know that I'm not smart, so I adjust my aim to just be ``smart-enough''. It turns out that perhaps I'm not really ``smart-enough'' given what I'm seeing this semester, and that worries me on so many levels. Yet strangely, despite all the innate worry, I seem to be of unsusual calm. That is not right---I ought to be really panicky and wondering what's the best thing that I need to do, yet I find myself in such a state. Perhaps I'm just being resigned, resigned to the fate that awaits me, resigned to my life the way that I think it was planned out for me.

Yet deep inside me, the fire to take on the challenges and to fight burns strongly within, egging me on, telling me that the odds are always impossible, but only the greatest do impossible things. Perhaps I'm one of these ``greatest'', most definitely not among the masses but at least by my book.

In that case, why this feeling of doubt? Why do I keep wondering if I can make it or not? Why can't I stop worrying about things like that: clearly there're more productive things that I can leave my mind to. But, like all things by me about me, I don't really have an answer. Perhaps I'm just some two cents hack hallucinating that I can literally take on the world; maybe I'm just very delusional and highly suggestive to mere persuasions of greatness.

What have I become? Why have I become so? These questions... I do not expect an answer to. But hopefully, I will not end up killing myself both in physical and figurative senses just to ensure that I'm ``answerable'' to the folks.

Double-spaced Sentence Separators Activated

Oh by the way, if you are reading this on a Javascript + Unicode enabled browser, you'd find something interesting. Specifically, you will find that all sentences are now magically punctuated by the equivalent of two non-monospace spaces. All thanks to a few little hacks in the Javascript that I'm using to format text in the way that I want to [so that I can avoid having to remember all the damn entity incantations]. Nifty huh? Finally sentences stand out much more than before, and the whole ``Wall-O-Text'' syndrome should probably be better managed/mitigated.

Alright, now I'm really off to bed now...

Semi-Hypnotic Writings

And I with all my insanity decided to write down some random thoughts just before I sleep, by capitalising on the semi-hypnotic state that I am in right this instant.

So, as the campus starts seeing the general exodus of people and thus quietening down, I find myself once more sitting quietly and alone in the calm of the storm. This semester has been quite a drag in many ways, despite it being one of the more fun semesters that I ever had; perhaps it is a good thing that I can finally sit back and catch some breath. The irony of it all is that when I actually have the time to relax, I find myself to be unable to do so, and really, to keep finding myself gravitating back to doing ``real'' work like studying/reading/writing. I'm uncertain why I cannot loaf about when the opportunity presents itself.

Perhaps it is the stresses of the day. Even though it is technically winter break right now, I find that I need to do a lot of planning with regards to the logistics of the even moving of everything back home. Also for some reason, I find myself thinking about the future, and lapsing into dreams/daydreams about how my future life can be like, in terms of what I am doing, who I am doing it with, and how I lead my life in general. It is mildly disconcerting---I know I plan a lot, but this sort of stuff seems to fall into the domain of over-planning/over worrying. So much for a peaceful start.

But then again, it's probably a good sign that my subconscious is working on that problem as my conscious one strives to ensure that I do not stab myself in the face while working with the daily vagaries of life. I'm really satisfied with the way that I have developed over the years---the levels of intuition and awareness that I seem to possess never astounds me as I learn of my latent capabilities every day. It is really hard to believe that nearly 7 years ago, I was basically a pompous jackass who's sole goal was to try and outsmart everyone everytime. Nowadays, I just want to be good enough, get the job done, and then look for something more interesting to work on. Maybe it is age catching up; I have no idea.

The future. It is an interesting thing, this... future. There're so many possibilities, yet each are bound by one's abilities and the opportunities that one happens to be exposed to---miss any of these two main ingredients, then the future will not be as ``bright'' as it can be. So far I've been pretty lucky in both senses of ingredients; I'm not complaining, but I think that the effort that I put in to better ready myself for the future pays off, the only issue with it is that it takes a damn long time before all that preparation will actually start paying for itself.

Alright, I think that I'm losing control over the semi-hypnotic state and am about to slip into sleep. Till next time then...

Douchebaggery Can Bite My Shiny Metal Ass

You can always not like the research that I do, but you should respect that work has been done and not just diss it like it were a passing cur. I hate people who belittle the things that I do... it is annoying, it is downright stupid, and it is completely unnecessary.

Just because you are older does not give you the absolute right to claim that what I'm doing is useless and give me that dismissive wave. Just because you are younger and a ``prodigy'' labelled by the press does not give you the absolute right to tell me what I should be doing, particularly when I am having fun. You have your fun your way, I will have my fun my way, thankyouverymuch. You do your research in your cubby hole, I do mine in my cubby hole, thankyouvermuchalso.

People who do not know how to respect others and what they do ought to be taken aside and have some sense beaten in their heads. Age and level of genius does not give one the unassailable right to douchebaggery---you are as human as I am, and you can still bleed. No one is immortal.

And do not make me unleash my full violence upon you...

Beanbag Chair---I Want!

For some reason, I want a beanbag chair. I don't really like high-backed chairs (i.e. no executive chairs for me), preferring the low-backed ones to support my weaker lower back. And it seems that people don't generally sell beanbag chairs, which I find to be rather odd/weird---aren't beanbag chairs in somewhat high demand?

In other news, I'm finally done with finals for this semester. The only thing that I have left is the final paper/report that I need to write with respect to the Noun Phrase In Context (NPIC) classification research that I've been working on for the last two months of the semester---I'm going to write this one over Sunday. Meanwhile I just want to take a little hard-earned break from all the ridiculous charging around that I've been doing recently in the goal of being ahead.

Alright, off to play I go... till next time...

Fembot

Hmm... fembot has arrived. Inasmuch as I love robots and technology, I would not want a girlfriend/wife who happens to be a robot---there's so much more fun that can be had with a human girl than with a robot, and I don't have to worry about the programming and other maintenance issues (humans tend to have self-maintaining systems). I also don't want to use imperative language all the time (which seems to be the case with Aiko here), but this is a nascent technology.

I will probably write more about this... I'm too damn tired and need some sleep.

The Hell...

As this week draws to a close, I cannot help but wonder what I have done with my life, in the sense that I was not certain if I am doing things rationally or not anymore. There's just so much to handle, and I think I might have lost yet another friend.

Oh well, things happen. People change, and sometimes, one cannot control these changes that occur in people. Perhaps I have been too awkward around people, perhaps I am just a big jerk. But either way, the change has been effected, the damage done, and now it is time to move on.

I wonder about the future, more so than I actually care to admit. While I have a rough 10-year plan on what I am going to do, it is really hard to ascertain if what I'm doing was right or not-so-right. Asking me this question 10 years ago would yield a much different answer, since I actually knew what direction that I was taking then. I guess despite my age, I'm still struggling somewhat with the complexity and open-endedness that is life.

Maybe I will be a treasured member of whatever organisation I am in, or maybe I'm just the third cog in a machine that needs only two---I don't really know which is the greater truth. Many things have occurred since then that increases the slow distaste I have of people; not all people, mind you, just some here and there. And I've always put up with it quietly. Perhaps it is time to ensure that my displeasure be easily made known... or not. I'm confused.

Whatever. Soon, this place will be yet another passing memory, like all places that one is. Maybe I will see some of the people in the future, but it is unlikely our paths will cross again. The only thing that is unchanging is that I am with myself, all the way, to the end.

Why am I so pensieve all of a sudden? Why do these strange thoughts engulf me once more? Have I not left them behind quite a while back, or is it the stressful circumstance playing itself out once more?

This week will soon be over... and hopefully the use of hard physical labour will ease my mind of such confusing thoughts.

Deep Disturbing Side

If there is one thing that I get annoyed the most, it will be the complete and utter ignorance of me by others. I start a conversation with you, you snipe at me---I do not like that. You are in a position of power, you abuse it and make me do your bitch work---I do not like that. You think you know everything in the world, and call me an idiot before understanding what I know---I do not like that. You want me to do everything for you without any sort of energy trade---I do not like that. You treat me like a passing shadow, stomping on me whenever you have the chance---I do not like that.

In fact, it is probably really easy to quantify what I get annoyed the most: being treated like as though I am not there. I am not a sheeple, I am not part of the masses. I do not have to belong to any single group of people to belong anywhere. I move like the wind, I displace myself in places. I find my own way through life; I do not subscribe to particular whims and fancies of people for the hell of it. I can live as a hermit---I will go insane and psychotic, but I have no fear of that. I can live in society as a part of it---I do not fear that either.

I cannot stand being ignored when I am actively talking to someone. Do that enough times, I can and will go ballistic.

V oryvrir vg vf gvzr gb erirny rira zber bs gur qnex naq qnatrebhf crefbanyvgl gung V unir xrcg haqre pbiref nyy gurfr lrnef. V nz n avpr thl va trareny, ohg orvat chfurq nebhaq rabhtu gvzrf zrnaf gung V unir fybjyl yrneag ubj gb unearff zl qrrc fhopbafpvbhf zvaq naq creireg vg gb gur zbfg fnqvfgvp crefbanyvgl gung bar pna rire vzntvar.

Nezrq jvgu cher ybtvp naq hanqhygrengrq fnqvfz---gung vf gur qrrc fvqr bs zr gung V arire unir gb hfr.

Fbba... whfg chfu zr rabhtu bire gur rqtr... V JVYY tb bire gur rqtr.

Naq gurer jvyy or zhpu erwbvpvat. Rkprcg vg jvyy or sebz zr jura V svanyyl tb orlbaq qnexarff, arire gb erghea gb gur yvtug.

Eirian and Other Diversions

Yeah... it has been a couple of days since I last wrote anything here. Not that I'm skiving or anything, but the fact remains that there is so much to be done over the last few days that it was really hard to be able to sit down and do a little introspection and wonder about other interesting things that have occurred.

The first interesting thing over the last few days was that the official record temperature that I went out without a jacket is now -2 degrees Celsius (with windchill). It wasn't that bad, actually, considering that by now most of my body is literally immune to cold. The important thing about how to actually survive something like this is to have good quality cloth that is non-porous---this will prevent the wind from slicing through the material and freezing oneself.

The second interesting thing to have occurred was the utter vote stuffing for The Glass Is.... It started off with being ``half-empty'' trailing at about 64.5 million votes (a travesty if you ask me, since most of the world is supposed to be rather un-optimistic), but with the combined efforts of my room mate and I, we managed to raise it to about 66 million votes, and with the help of other members of the Internet, we managed to push it past the ``half-full'' vote count. Here's a screen capture from my room mate's computer at that fateful moment:And now we are just making sure that we preserve the lead to show that the world is not really that optimistic after all.

The third interesting thing to have occurred is the arrival of my Continued Fractions book. As at now, here's a list of things that I want to do over Winter break:

• Forth in assembly
• Continued Fractions library prototype in Python 3.0
• Study for GRE
• Building applications/kernel for Eirian

Speaking of which, my iRex Reader is now known as Eirian, which means ``silver'' in Welsh.

Alright, back to the final grindstone for this semester. Till next time.

Not-so-stressed...

Good things come to all who plan for it... I'm not so stressed now. That's a good thing.

(=

Stressed...

Stressed... need air... must... breathe...

Web Comics Redux

If you have been paying attention to the side bar labelled Web Comics, you would have realised that it has been steadily increasing in size. Since I never did give a good description to each of them over in that side bar, here's a slightly more in depth look at them, in alphabetical order.

• Cyanide and Happiness is an absurdist comic that features the most unrealistic situations that can happen in real life. More than just a social commentary, it is also populated with terrible puns and sexual innuendoes. I like this comic because it updates daily, and provides my daily dose of WTF.
• Dr McNinja is an adventure comedy about a doctor who is a ninja (or was it a ninja who is a doctor?). The adventures here are usually fun and out of this world, and have several memorable moments (like chainsaw nunchucks!). I like this comic as it satisfies that adventure side of me, without the usual grovel associated with ``realistic'' renditions.
• Garfield minus Garfield is a different take of the cult classic comic Garfield. The difference here lies in the complete and absolute removal of all other characters that are not Jon Arbuckle---this has the strange and twisted effect of showing how truly alone he is, and how his antics are really sad, since he is talking to himself most of the time after all, even if Garfield is present (Garfield's ``speech bubbles'' are really thought bubbles, and is unlikely that Jon will ever know them directly). I find this comic somewhat hilarious as it brings out a different side of Garfield, and it sort of reminds us how loneliness can be such a terrible thing.
• Girls with Slingshots is a slice-of-life comic about Hazel and Jamie, two best friends who take on the city together as they live their lives. It also features a few other hilarious characters, like Clarice (porn store clerk by day, dominatrix by night) and McPedro (a talking Irish cactus). A touch of reality with a tiny bit of absurdism---that's what draws me to this comic.
• Jack of All Blades is yet another adventure comic, but this time it is set in a completely fantasy setting, and thus have a much more comic effect than say Dr McNinja. It is a fun read, and features a cast of very interesting characters, including a shape-shifter and an inventor penguin. I like this comic for its light style and easy comedy.
• Kukuburi is easily the one of the most complex plotlines of all the comics here. Set in a strange fantasy setting, the storyline is just about to be unfolded. The art work is brilliant---each rendition of the phantasmal plane has just enough details to make it believable. A most fun read indeed.
• Megatokyo is what happens when manga meets geekdom. The concept of alternate realities coexisting in the same plane and the complex interrelationships among the characters are the main selling points of this comic. Updates are supposed to be thrice weekly, but is often looser than that. But the wait is usually worth it, as the pencil work is excellent. Fred pays a lot of attention to the details with his pencil work, and all the diehard followers of this comic wait patiently for the next one to be up each time.
• PhD Comics is the first web comic that I started to follow, and still remains among my favourite. Depicting the lives of PhD students and being presented in an easy-to-digest 4-panel style, PhD Comics is a good source of the pain and pleasures of being in the PhD programmes. Some of the jokes can be a bit technical, but most of the comic is accessible by folks who don't have that technical background.
• Questionable Content is a fun slice-of-life comic by Jeph Jacques, and features the lives of the three [current] ladies who work in the Coffee of Doom, as well as Marten, the main male protagonist. Questionable Content balances realism with a dash of absurdism, like the various anthro-PCs like Pintsize and the oversized and somewhat sentient iPod Winslow, in a way that is hilarious and yet not altogether impossible to fathom. I like its depiction of life, and find the stories really interesting.
• Sam and Fuzzy is another absurdist comic (seeing a trend here yet?) featuring Sam, a taxi-driver-turned-fugitive-turned-ninja-emperor, and Fuzzy, a bear of ridiculous strength and propensity for violence whose origins are yet unknown. It updates thrice weekly, and has a really large cast that comes and goes as and when the story leads. The plot line is fairly intricate, yet not impossible to follow as Sam Logan helpfully puts out links to show where a crucial plot item was first shown. I like the smooth nature of the art work and the excellent story-telling of this piece.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is a non-sequitor comic that makes a lot of plays with words. I discovered this comic fairly recently, and so cannot really give much of a description, but from what I have been reading [in the archives] so far, I like its approach towards understanding various aspects of human nature.
• Sinfest features the smooth manga-style of Tatsuya Ishida, and is often talking about current affairs (recent story arcs) and the issue on ``what is life''. Featuring a cast that covers God, Buddha, and the Devil, to the mortals like Slick, Monique (ooo so cute), and the fundamentalist Seymour. I like the depth that this simple comic achieves through the few words that it uses.
• Sore Thumbs can be seen as what Megatokyo was once before, with an emphasis on gaming culture and the clashing of that with various fundamentalist principles. Featuring a cast of cute women and various types of men, this comic is really interesting in the way it depicts the absurdity that arises in real life.
• Perry Bible Fellowship is the undisputed absurdist comic of the list. Most of the humour in this can be seen as ``dark'', but upon deeper reflection, it just shows that ``one must be careful what one wishes for''. The exploration of human reactions and the problems of jumping to conclusions too quickly makes this an interesting comic to use to learn yet a bit more of human nature.
• Wapsi Square is a comic that has a very deep dimension to it. I sort of stopped following it for about a year, but that was because I didn't really have the time nor effort to follow the intricate storyline that is the main feature of this. Perhaps when Winter break arrives, I will have the energy to look at this again, and pick off where I last left off...
• XKCD. You either understand it, or you don't---there is no middle ground. The brainchild of Randall Munroe, this comic is a cult piece, setting off trends and memes all over the Internet. Featuring simplistic stick figures and even simpler backgrounds, XKCD brings out the geek in all of us with its steady jokes from Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics. If you can understand everything in XKCD, then perhaps you are not too different from me after all...

And so that's a quick introduction to each of the comics that I have on my web comic side bar. Have fun, while I head back to working on some homework that is due very soon...

iRex Digital Reader 1000S---Arrived!

Without much fanfare, my iRex Digital Reader has arrived. Check it out:The text is pretty sharp in spite of having only 16-levels of grayness---this is due to the rather high resolution of the device (1280×1024 spread over (roughly) 8inches by 6inches). The response to input is relatively spiffy, which is good, except for a few cases where the page size was ridiculously large in storage space due to the insertion of images that were scanned at high resolutions.

I'm quite happy with this device---being able to read is always a joy, and now that I have something that is as funky as this, it is even more fun than before. I will take my Digital Reader for a spin, and then talk more about it when I have the chance.

Till next time...

Waiting...

And so begins a three-day lull period, except for the fact that it is not technically lull, since I actually have to do non-trivial stuff, like for instance, my research and research paper, as well as the final term paper for the Chinese language and culture class that I am taking. Hopefully, my order for the iREX DR1000S will actually come in today to help relieve an otherwise terrible week.

c|3n1z3|\| 0f t3h c|_u5+3rz

It is somewhat official---I am semi-officially known to be a denizen of ``The Cluster'', and am one of the ``cluster-folk''. This ``cluster'' that I'm referring to, of course, refers to WeH 5207, better known as the ``Wean Linux Cluster''. It is interesting, since I have tried valiantly to avoid ending up in the cluster for the first two years of my time over here in CMU, knowing full well that the moment that I went there often enough, I would blend in most naturally given my geeky but weird ways.

Well, I guess two years of prolonging what was inevitable is long enough, and I find myself retreating to the Cluster whenever I have free time.

The other denizens of the Cluster are pretty interesting people, who look rather mundane on first glance. We have huginn (wait, huginn's a chick?), Elly (and Elly is a dude??), talchas, rntz (rntz rntz rntz) and jwise, who are almost permanent fixtures of the place. Each of them are fun in their own way, and are all excellent hackers. It is fun just to be able to hang out there, and the amount of random noteworthy geeky/hacky knowledge thus obtained is almost immeasurable.

Also, code seems to magically work itself out in the room. Someone told me that it was the spirit of the old hackers that was helping, and I am inclined to believe that to be the case. After all, most of CMU's fabled School of Computer Science was built upon the efforts of faculty and star hackers, and I'm pretty sure much of that cosmic energy goodness is still haunting the buildings and powering the people in it.

That said, csawyer said that my cursive style was pretty, which I found to be amusing. I never knew that I had a nice handwriting style to boot.

Alright, back to cramming for a final that is held in-class tomorrow.

The Daily WTF

Something fun to read: The Daily WTF. Essentially a web site containing various stories about horrific programming errors that should never have occurred in the first place.

If I ever see any of these things in real life... I think I might just physically pulverise the culprit. Grrr...

Semester Close

The semester close begins innocently enough just about a month before it actually begins. You don't realise much, until the time suddenly starts crunching down on you from all directions. You get all nervous and worried, and wonder if you'll be able to do all that you need to do, or is it going to be some terrible thing that you will end up being burnt from all directions. At the very least, you know that you have survived thus far, and thus have some semblance of perspective of the whole issue. Yet at the back of your mind, you are still worried about all matters big and small, and wonder if you will magically be able to pull through or not.

And then within a blink of an eye, the end of semester is gone, along with the finals and everything else, and you wonder to yourself if it all had been a dream. You blink your eyes, then rub them to clean out the gunk, and then pinch yourself. Feeling the pain of the pinch and the somewhat refreshing feel of your eyes from the rubbing and blinking, you realise that all that you had been through was real. You then reflect upon what has been done, and wonder if you had lived a life that is worth living.

Winter would have arrived, and as the snow flakes fall gently all over the lawn, with you inside your cozy dorm room, staring out into space as everyone else has gone home for the winter break, you wonder, do butterflies have feelings...

Kiltie Band on Youtube!

Here's a clip of the band that I play in, and the rendition of ``Fight for the Glory of Carnegie'' on homecoming weekend with old Kilties:I'm pretty sure that I will miss this fun part of my college career.

``Pretty Typing `Part Deux' With Small Bugs''---Working... Sort Of...

I have managed to port the script that I used for my portal such that it can be a more general purpose prettifier. This means that I can simply type things like ``this'' and will find that the output is much sweeter... and it also means that I no longer have to memorise those damn entity references and just type clean text that can be read almost universally everywhere.

That is the most irritating thing that has been done---as you can tell. Also, if you are using Internet Explorer, you'll find that you no longer have to get the ``MathPlayer'' tool just to view this blog---I've decided that the need to display pretty mathematical equations here is rather moot because I'd rather have a more rigorous version typeset using pretty LaTeX, and hosting it from my portal.

So, before I go crazy with this new-found formatting power, I will retire for the night. The day ahead is going to be a rather long one, and I sure as hell need as much rest as I can get away with.

Till next time...

``Pretty Typing''---It Is Really Nice...

It all began because I didn't want to type “ and ” for the stuff that I write in my own portal, that and the need to memorise entity numbers for "…", and "—", while still maintaining some semblance to the actual plain text of the pages while being displayed on text-only browsers like elinks and lynx.

That made me use a total of 3 hours to hack up a Javascript thing to get the job done. Most of that time was spent in wondering what the magical incantations were to do a DOM traversal. Then the 30 minutes was to fix the bug that Internet Explorer was demonstrating.

So, it is done. Ugh. Back to work from the diversion.

On Helping People

It has been such a long 24 hours, possibly one of the longest 24 hours that I have had in a while. With deadlines looming so close, there's little that I can do but to bite the bullet and attempt to brave all that comes my way.

For some reason, I suddenly feel sagely, almost like I'm the rational voice among the drowning drone of the people. It is a funny feeling, and seriously, I don't really know what to make of it. On the one hand, I like helping people, and have done so many times before. On the other hand, I know that I need to slowly wean myself away from that feeling in order to ensure that I don't end up being abused like some slave of someone.

That said, it is not that I will stop helping people—it is just that I will only offer help should I explicitly be asked to do so. People are strange irrational creatures, in the sense that they will never be happy with the fact that you offered help, even if it is really obvious that they most desperately need it. In fact, I think that there is a branch of psychology that deals with the idea of how people like to feel as though they had "worked" for something in order to feel suitable satisfied. The silliest example that I come up with is that of the marathon. Clearly, one can easily travel 42km by car or even bicycle, but these people choose to run the marathon instead. By that observation, it can be seen that perhaps their goal is not to get from one place to another, but the process in which they had "worked hard for it" that makes it fulfilling to them.

I'll leave that for now. I need to catch some sleep if I want to do well for the microeconomics test tomorrow morning. Till next time…

Two-day Crunch Down

Today marks the beginning of the crunch down that is going to span two days. What an irritating thing really, having so many things that are due/happening at the same time.

Hopefully I am able to pull this one off and get away with it. Meanwhile, I need to get to class.

Until next time.

Dead Fantasy

Woah, scary:Dead or Alive meets Final Fantasy in this indie flick. It has little/no plot, but it does feature the main heroines from both series slugging it out on ridiculously impossible scenes.

Have fun.

Mother

Something really sad/interesting/touching from the cesspool of the Internet:For some reason, I have this sudden impulse to run back to my mother and give her a hug, thanking her for all that she has done for me.

The last time that I had ever had tears fall from my eyes was when I watched １リットルの涙.

I guess I'm still human after all.

All Xubuntu Are Intrepid Ibex

How strange it is to bat an eyelid, and find that the week has passed us by ever so quickly. One moment we were trying to rush through the jobs and homework that we need to do, the next we are just literally sitting there and waiting for something to happen. The strangeness of it all, and I do mean the perception of time of course, that even though things are happening at the same rate (time moves equally fast for all of us), not everyone has the same feeling for time. It gets curiouser and curiouser…

It has been a rather tumultuous fortnight; I basically was see-sawing between extreme levels of productivity and extreme levels of inactivity. I suspect that this could be a result of the cold weather and the fact that it is the semester crunch-time, though I do not really have any way of showing this other than making the observation. This weekend was really a lull-ish one; the upcoming week has so many things that are due that it is not even funny anymore. But overall, I have a slightly better confidence over this semester's classes than the last—I just need to put in a bit more effort to ensure that I end up getting the results that I want/need. The classes this semester are not entirely hard; they are just relatively time-consuming. But that just boils down to time management, and I think that I'm starting to get the hang of this.

That said, the last two days were mainly systems-y stuff. As noted previously, I have had Intrepid Ibex Xubuntu running on Edythe-EEE. Previously, I have upgraded the VM in Elyse to run Intrepid Ibex also. Last night, I set up Intrepid Ibex for Elyse's alternative partition, but for some reason, the upgrade backfired and left me without a bootable Xubuntu partition. That was when I decided to just wipe out and reinstall the x86-64 version of Intrepid. That partition was mainly for work, and when I needed the extra horsepower (and RAM), so there was nothing there that I could recall that was not mirrored somewhere else.

The overall feel of Intrepid is alright, considering that things are still not broken after installation. I've not managed to test to see if the new kernel is really as spiffy as everyone says, but I think that the quality can be seen in the fact that Edythe-EEE, an underpowered high-RAM machine, can run it with little to no delay, I think that at the very least the bloat in Intrepid hasn't gotten to the point that it requires a tremendous amount of horsepower to work with.

That's all I have for now though. Sorry.

Intrepid Ibex Xubuntu on Edythe-EEE

Take a look at this screen capture:This is the stock Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) that I managed to get installed on Edythe-EEE. The installation process was relatively painless, considering that Edythe-EEE has 2GiB of RAM (this is always useful). For all practical purposes and intents, I did a clean install because of the [wrong] design decision that I made earlier to allocate 512MiB of hard disk space for swap space. That decision was made because of I had only 512MiB on the machine then, which was generally not a good idea.

Since I've increased the RAM on the machine, it made things so much easier. Edythe-EEE has a relatively sheltered life, sitting at home and serving as a backup server in case things go awry. That is, until I buy the really large battery for her, thus giving her the competitive edge to challenge Elyse in terms of raw stamina.

The only drawback in the installation is the dealing of the weird screen brightness issue with regards to the reboot/suspend/open lid actions. I think I can live with that, so I'm probably not going to attempt to fix it. That said, the wireless card (a notorious issue with the EEE PC 701 series) has been enabled through the magic hackery of NDISWrapper (details can found here).

Again, this post was created in Edythe-EEE.

——

Also, check this for fixing the gargantuan scrollbar widths. The actual file location is /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0 (I'm editing the Clearlooks one).

Michael Crichton—Dead

Yet another iconic figure has fallen to the natural course of life. Michael Crichton was one of my favourite authors, and probably can be seen as the person whose writings have influence me to consciously remind myself that science with no ethics or morals is a dangerous science. Being a person of science and medicine, Crichton was in the position where he could use fiction as a vehicle to convey the dangers of amoral science, in a way that is more convincing than one who is not a person of science.

That said, we've lost another good science fiction writer. Rest in peace, Michael.

Patched Jeans

So I finally got off my ass and patched the articles of clothing that were sporting various rips and tears in the seamwork/fabric. My jeans already had a tear before (due to a fall), and not too long ago I fell again and made that tear bigger but on a completely different axis of rip. Since I had a small amount of time today, I just patched the damn thing and so it will keep out the cold winds once more. Here's a view of the patchwork done on the interior:And here's how it looks like from the outside:I think I did a decent enough job in patching it.

Alright, time for a shower and then class. Till next time.

Caribbean Queen

And another nice piece from Billy Ocean:And here are the lyrics:

She dashed by me in painted on jeans
And all heads turned 'cause she was the dream
In the blink of an eye I knew her number and her name yeah
Ah she said I was the tiger she wanted to tame

CHORUS:
Caribbean queen
Now we're sharing the same dream
And our hearts they beat as one
No more love on the run

I lose my cool when she steps in the room
And I get so excited just from her perfume
Electric eyes that you can't ignore
And passion burns you like never before

I was in search of a good time
Just running my game
Love was the furthest
Furthest from my mind

Suddenly

For some odd reason, I woke up this morning with the words "suddenly, life has new meaning for me" stuck in my head. Check it out:And here are the lyrics.

I used to think that love was just a fairy tale
Until that first hello until that first smile
But if I had to do it all again I wouldn't change a thing
Cause this love is everlasting

Suddenly life has new meaning to me
There's beauty up above and things we never take notice of
You wake up suddenly you're in love

Girl you're everthing a man could want and more
One thousand words are not enough to say what I feel inside
Holding hands as we walk along the shore
Never felt like this before now you're all I'm living for

Each day I pray this love affair would last forever

There's beauty up above and things you never take notice of
You wake and suddenly you're in love

Fixing Tags…

Am fixing some things on the blog…I wonder if it is all going to work.

Halloween Parties [Not] + Clarinet

Last weekend was really the weekend of spooks and parties, considering the fact that Halloween just passed us by. Like always, I never did feel inclined to participate in the festivities, simply because I feel that I'm too old for these kinds of stuff, and the general I-don't-really-like-parties thing that I have. Most of the weekend was spent working on homework, catching up on some sleep, and playing some clarinet.

The clarinet is an interesting instrument, first of all because it doesn't quite follow the Boehm system at all by virtue of the acoustic properties of a end-blown cylindrical tube. It is also interesting because it has a more mellow sound than the flute, even though it is a soprano instrument.

Alright, enough for now.

Python

After programming in Python for so long, it is only recently that I discovered that Python has quite a few advanced data types. From queues, priority queues to calendar-related computations, Python seems to have them all. With all that in mind, I can see myself writing even more programs in Python than before.

Slide Rules! N600-ES joins N500-ES

So, you've seen the 10" Pickett Slide Rule. Today, I received my 6" one that I ordered a few days back. Take a look at it new in box:Pretty, yes? This one is so new that it comes with its own manual too:This baby is going to live in my pencil case, and will be carried around wherever I go.

I think that's all the slide rules that I'll be getting for now. Maybe next time if there's more slide rules that I actually need, I will buy them again. Meanwhile, I need to get back to work and then I can have the chance to play with my new tools.

(=

Hallo-ween?

In theory, today is supposed to be Halloween, and thus most people are actually going to dress up and go parties etc. Unfortunately, I don't think that I will be doing that—I'm likely to be working on either more homework or other related materials, like adding more useful content for my portal.

A new Pickett slide rule is coming in; this one is 6 inches as oppposed to the 10-inch one that I currently have. With the same number of scales, it is a really portable slide rule and will probably end up being a part of my usual carry-on arsenal. I realised that I have been pampered by the relatively easy-to-use "student" Mars Staedler slide rule—I can't seem to be able to figure out how to do the computations on the Pickett. It seems that I probably need more practice to get the hang of it.

That's a quick blurb for now. Maybe more stuff later.

Jessie's Girl

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

Now, read the lyrics:

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

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

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

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

Condone Perfect Jerks?

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

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

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

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

The_Laptop's Domain

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

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

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

A 2004 Email…

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

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

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

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

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

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

More details on the exchange can be found here.

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

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

I guess I have much to learn…

Eyes!

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

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

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

>.>

iRex Digital Reader 1000S

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

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

Well, no. Only a few screens do that.

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

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

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

Routing Daemon

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

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

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

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

Unifont

Unifont is an awesome monospace font.

'nuff said.

Coffee is Like a Mistress

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

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

Me: Oh, I got milk today.

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

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

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

Musing

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

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

Software Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coffeemaker + Grove City + Bose + The Other Shore

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

——

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

Till next time.

Quick Blurb

Things in progress:

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

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

Keepon

Keepon is so CUTE!And here's another:

Random Blathering

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

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

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

Wish List

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

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

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

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

Food for Thought

From this site: President S R Nathan wrote:

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

I wonder if this should be interpreted shallowly or deeply.

Sexeh...

Awesome picture of a horse:

Chrome

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

Why a Wiki?

Here's why:

You Like Biology, But I Like Computer Science

There's a rather simple reason why I never really write computer programs for anyone as far as I can avoid it—most people don't really treat computer programs seriously. The general reaction borders between "holy cow that's really cool" to "yeah... so what is it good for". The person who goes "holy cow that's really cool" is likely to be obnoxious, having some issues with attitude: either always trying to pilfer all that you know, or just want to one-up you.

The other one that is nonchalant is probably someone who doesn't care about computers other than computer games and maybe some office productivity suite. They usually think of me as a dork/geek/nerd, and would have as little to do with me as possible. These are the same people who will only gladly want to talk to me if they want something that I can do easily, and on other occasions they will just ignore me for as much as I can.

I've met enough of both kinds of people to not want to write programs for anyone as much as I can avoid it. That's enough of a blurb for now.

——

The week has been long, with almost everything due last Tuesday. Thankfully, I managed to get everything completed in time, and hopefully am faring rather well. The schedule for this semester is such that things generally snowball into a huge clump, but in between, there's enough time to plan around the crunch, only if careful discipline is maintained in trying to ensure that one does not end up doing the "death march" all over again. The thought of returning to work in A*STAR scares me a little—I'm mildly terrified in having to deal with some of my peers who are just plain obnoxious, who are happy to tear into any thing that you do just to get into an argument, to always try to prove that they or their field is superior than you or yours; the general know-it-all obnoxious attitude.

Inasmuch as I hate to say this, I just hate these kinds of people. Like, seriously. What makes them think that Computer Science is no less important than Biology? What makes them think that their double degree is worthed more than my single Bachelor's in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon? And lastly, who are they to say that I am less intelligent than they are?

All these nonsense... I hope that I don't have to put up with that when I return. I'm happy to work on machine learning research all day, and have little to deal with these kinds of people as much as possible. Knowledge has intrinsic value and power; I don't have to stoop to their level to take pot-shots just to prove a point.

To each his own, suckers.

Length of Paper Required for n Folds

According to this, if L is the minimum length of the paper with thickness t required to make n folds, then L=(tπ/6)×(2ⁿ+4)(2ⁿ-1).

Hmm…

And finally, I've managed to get LaTeXMathML working. Note that you might need additional fonts to display the math properly here.

Oh, by the way, if you are using Internet Explorer, you might need something that can handle MathML. (Why are you using Internet Explorer?)

[Ed: I removed the LaTeXMathML functionality because it was starting to become annoying and that this blog doesn't actually need to demonstrate math formula. From now on, if there's any important math-like thing that I want to share, it will be formalised and be available from my portal instead.]

"I'm a PC and I've been made into a Stereotype"

A rather whimsical ad:"I'm a PC and I run LINUX!".

That's all the blurb for now

Manna

Read Manna—it is a rather interesting sci-fi piece on a potential future that we might face. It brings out the salient arguments between the propriety and open source camps in a way that is more easily accessible to most people.

Jobs and Professions

Jobs and professions that I might have done in another life:

• Pathologist
• Musician
• Writer
• Spelunker
• Blacksmith

An eclectic mix, no?

iPod Shuffle? Why I Hardly Even...

First, I have a new iPod Shuffle, courtesy EWT trading. They were giving out free iPod Shuffles to graduating CS majors who sent in their résumés. I thought, why not? And here's a picture of my newly obtained iPod Shuffle.Notice that it is sitting on top of Edythe-EEE.

I hate iTunes. Okay, maybe hate might be a tad too strong a word, but at least, the way iTunes supposedly mangles one's music files/directories while trying to be "helpful" makes me sad. If you looked carefully at the picture, you'll find that Edythe-EEE is running a program: gtkpod. It is yet another open source program that can fulfill a need that I require.

On another note, the battery of my Motorola V195 is bjorked. Couple that with a rather loose hinge, it is high time to get a new phone. I'm not sure if the service plan works that way, so I decided to get an unlocked Motorola V197 instead. Notice my fascination with clam shells still.

Hopefully things will start to fall in place.

Oh, the B♭ soprano clarinet has arrived, and I've basically tuned it somewhat. Turns out that the notation for the instrument is weird; it writes E but sounds like a D, which confused the hell out of my ears while trying to figure out the actual tuning of the instrument. It also appears that my horrendously powerful lung power acts up again, and ends up causing the instrument to be sharp by 25cents before proper tuning.

The reed case has arrived, and now the clarinet is almost fit for playing. I just need to practice more on it so that I don't squeak that much 30 minutes into the playing.

That's about it for now, I guess...

NSFW Geekiness

My wallpaper for now:Who said geekiness cannot be sexy or even NSFW?