I probably should be grateful for the long weekend that is SIN city's golden jubilee celebration, but frankly, I feel anything but grateful.
If anything, I feel restless and completely pissed off, that such a long period of procrastination is allowed to manifest itself at all in the city where not working time beyond office hours is termed a sin.
The weekend has been too long, I think. Four whole days. Maybe it's because I have no one to actually go hang out with and do other stuff, or maybe because I am just irritated after barely recovering from a nasty bout of flu. Maybe it's because I'm staying in an apartment that is not air-conditioned, and am still living with my parents when my sister has just moved out completely to her new place with her husband. Or maybe it is the forced realisation of some manner of loneliness from rewatching K-On!, K-On!! and the K-On! movie, an affect that I naturally develop each time I watch anime like that. It reminds me of a kind of nostalgia that I never truly felt completely, having been mostly a sideline character at most of the clubs and societies that I had been a part of.
Camaraderie. I feel that of course, fleetingly at times, but never truly immersed in it. Maybe because there have been few places where I felt as though I truly belong, even from the very beginning. In spite of my seemingly gregarious nature, I'm more of a conflicted hermit.
Aiyah, it's frustrating to articulate just what is bothering the crap out of me.
Maybe it's the phoneyness of the whole jubilee celebration. Engineered, one might say if one were trying to keep in theme with the way how SIN city is run. The hilarious part is that despite being the person who lampoons this whole... PR stunt, I think I can safely say that I have taken part in more of such... activities as a performer than most people have as an audience. Maybe ``irony'' is the better word here, but I'm not in the mood to be pedantic today.
I wrote a micro-story yesterday, entitled Hold On To Your Love. Unsurprisingly, it is named after one of my favourite OSTs from K-On!, that you can hopefully watch here.That guitar... is to die for. A-hem. Anyway, I felt like I needed to vent something from the restlessness last night, and hence that particular micro-story.
I've also made yet another small progress through the William Russo book, by composing something a given pitch restriction. Maybe I'll work on the next exercise later this evening---composition with a rhythm restriction on C-major. Felt too irritated to work on that yesterday.
Today though... so much restlessness. I was tempted to head out to find a café to just sit down, have a cup of coffee and do some reading, work related and otherwise (am working through Othello). When lunch was done though, reality set in: it was nearly two in the afternoon. By the time I headed out, it would be time to return, not to mention the general impossibility to find a quiet place to sit around since most of the kids are taking over cafés and what-not for their studying needs. So I felt more irritation.
I couldn't/shouldn't play on my flutes and/or dizis though---my the lateral side of my thumbs'interphalangeal ligaments were starting to show some form of swelling that seemed consistent with calluses. I suspect it's because I've been playing too much of my 大G dizi---it weighs quite a bit more than what I usually play, and I have been giving it around two to three hours of practice on Friday and Saturday itself. I didn't want to introduce a new range of RSI, so am taking it easier.
That of course helped to add to my restlessness. My usual outlet of letting out such irritation is to wail away on whatever musical instrument I have my hands on. Since that is sort of not available, I just feel all the more annoyed.
At this point, I think I have run out of things to bitch about, and have diverged quite significantly in terms of the content, so I suppose I'll just stop here.
Till the next update.
Monday, August 10, 2015
Wednesday, August 05, 2015
Sickness and Keys
Let's be upfront -- this has been a trashy week.
I suffered from a horrible tension headache episode last week that escalated into a full-blown flu attack that knocked me off my feet hard enough that I had to take 2 days of sick leave just to sleep it off.
It's dumb. I really don't like falling sick. I'm sure most people feel the same way, except maybe for those who are looking for an excuse to just have an extended holiday of some sort. I'm not of the latter, because work has a way of quickly piling up when one does not move fast enough.
Already I am going to work another half-day more tomorrow just to cover for the time lost over the past couple of days. Looking forward to it in one sense, and not looking forward to it in another since I don't want my body to be further weakened, leading to something that is more chronic.
Anyway, rants aside, the rest had been fitful. The whether is too hot and humid, and as such, sleep came in bursts of no more than an hour. The coughing is just plain annoying, and nearly half the time it is an ``unproductive'' cough, i.e. there is no phlegm that is actually cleared from the throat. In other words, half the time I get this hacking cough that does little more than annoy the crap out of my throat.
Oh well.
Last Saturday was an interesting day. I went for two different rehearsals, one for the upcoming SG50 project that my sister suggested I join in, and the other being my regular CO stuff. The music for the other SG50 project is interesting -- the keys and the rhythms used are a little more contemporary than the concert time that is prevalent. The scores are also written in the prevailing trend of writing in an absolute scale without the melody line, i.e. like what one might expect from say a concert flute score. I can live with the latter though not happily -- since most of the time I'm called upon to cover the melody, and if that's not present it is obvious that there's nothing I can do. But this isn't the more annoying bit.
The writing of the music in an absolute scale is something that I don't really approve of, even though I know that it is definitely easier since one only needs to learn ``one'' set of fingerings. The issue here is not in execution but the overall music sensitivity of the musician -- it makes understanding the intervals of the music that much harder since the music is not written in the scale that the music is played. Here's an example of what I mean: suppose the notes are written in 1=G as 7♭ 1 2♯ 3 or something. Sure, it is easy to execute the notes, but it takes a little while to realise that it is actually in F-major (or D-minor, but we rarely name minor keys in CO music). This means that a certain set of dizi fingerings get ``lost'' in the outcome, and that it makes transposition that much nastier.
But it's just a minor quibble from a curmudgeon huh.
Anyway, it's late. I ought to sleep so I can wake up early and drive to work and clear out some of the stuff that snowballed over the past couple of days. Till the next update then.
I suffered from a horrible tension headache episode last week that escalated into a full-blown flu attack that knocked me off my feet hard enough that I had to take 2 days of sick leave just to sleep it off.
It's dumb. I really don't like falling sick. I'm sure most people feel the same way, except maybe for those who are looking for an excuse to just have an extended holiday of some sort. I'm not of the latter, because work has a way of quickly piling up when one does not move fast enough.
Already I am going to work another half-day more tomorrow just to cover for the time lost over the past couple of days. Looking forward to it in one sense, and not looking forward to it in another since I don't want my body to be further weakened, leading to something that is more chronic.
Anyway, rants aside, the rest had been fitful. The whether is too hot and humid, and as such, sleep came in bursts of no more than an hour. The coughing is just plain annoying, and nearly half the time it is an ``unproductive'' cough, i.e. there is no phlegm that is actually cleared from the throat. In other words, half the time I get this hacking cough that does little more than annoy the crap out of my throat.
Oh well.
Last Saturday was an interesting day. I went for two different rehearsals, one for the upcoming SG50 project that my sister suggested I join in, and the other being my regular CO stuff. The music for the other SG50 project is interesting -- the keys and the rhythms used are a little more contemporary than the concert time that is prevalent. The scores are also written in the prevailing trend of writing in an absolute scale without the melody line, i.e. like what one might expect from say a concert flute score. I can live with the latter though not happily -- since most of the time I'm called upon to cover the melody, and if that's not present it is obvious that there's nothing I can do. But this isn't the more annoying bit.
The writing of the music in an absolute scale is something that I don't really approve of, even though I know that it is definitely easier since one only needs to learn ``one'' set of fingerings. The issue here is not in execution but the overall music sensitivity of the musician -- it makes understanding the intervals of the music that much harder since the music is not written in the scale that the music is played. Here's an example of what I mean: suppose the notes are written in 1=G as 7♭ 1 2♯ 3 or something. Sure, it is easy to execute the notes, but it takes a little while to realise that it is actually in F-major (or D-minor, but we rarely name minor keys in CO music). This means that a certain set of dizi fingerings get ``lost'' in the outcome, and that it makes transposition that much nastier.
But it's just a minor quibble from a curmudgeon huh.
Anyway, it's late. I ought to sleep so I can wake up early and drive to work and clear out some of the stuff that snowballed over the past couple of days. Till the next update then.
Saturday, August 01, 2015
Delusions of... Normalcy
It's late and I should be asleep.
I know that SGDQ is running now, but it is late and I have two different rehearsals/practices tomorrow. Not to mention that I just recently ``recovered'' from my stupid tension headache.
But I had to write this piece. The topic had been floating in my head for the past week or so, and if I don't write about it now, it will become an obsession that will persist and end up with me engaging in weird compulsive behavior. So off I go.
Delusions. I think that as humans, we have a tendency to operate under our own set of delusions. Now, these delusions need not be of the more grandiose kind that one might be used to hearing about, but just random pieces of magical thinking that we tend to have to just allow the day to pass by quicker without having to fall into despair on realisation that in the cosmic scale of things, even human existence is meagre and meaningless.
I have my delusions of course. As do everyone else. Some of these delusions are rather overt -- everyone seems to believe that I have some kind of skill in some of the things I do when at best I'm merely mediocre. Some are covert, for instance the belief that one has power over the elements, or even to control/manipulate luck outside of the RNG.
Delusions are not as abnormal as they sound. I think it is part of the human condition. I thought back about the time when I was much younger, and realised that over time, ``growing up'' meant substituting the more fanciful delusions of my capabilities/worth with other delusions that do not superficially contradict the experience gained from observing the way the universe works. So, for example, instead of thinking that I have the capability of controlling weather, I now think that I have some kind of preternatural control over all things that use software programmable electronic circuits (aka ``computers'').
It's still consistent with the way one views other fellow humans -- delusions are part of the black-box package that comprises the brain and mind, and we don't usually need to care about the specifics of the delusion in order to function with the said people. The only times where it becomes necessary to have some partial understanding of another's delusions are when there is a need to create/maintain a stronger relationship bond other than mere acquaintance, i.e. when one needs to live with a person or when one is with an incompetent individual, with ``incompetent'' taking on the technical/legal meaning that the person is not wholly responsible for his/her actions due to youth or lack of maturity. In these cases, the partial understanding is needed to generate the kind of empathy that is often the bedrock of deep relationships.
Not all delusions are harmless though. Those that involve other people tend to be more harmful than those that live on silently within the person's mind. Projected emotions, assumptions are just two of the many different manifestations of harmful delusions that involve other people; they are harmful because they enforce the deluded individual's perspective on others who do not share the same, therefore leading to a lack of empathy, which leads to conflict. There are other personal delusions that can be termed harmful, but I am not of the opinion that it is in our place to explicitly point out to the person that his/her delusion is harmful to him/her, unless there is an exact situation where the said delusion is a direct contributory cause towards a life and death situation involving the person.
This means that state-mandated committing of people to asylums for acts that do not involve an immediate threat to anyone's life is something that I do not support in principle.
Given then that everyone has delusions and necessarily uses them to make everyday living less stressful, it becomes ludicrous when we start considering the notion of a ``normal'' psychology. As put by my abnormal psychology professor, a ``normal'' psychology (be it be population mode, median, mean metrics) is the most abnormal of all -- everyone is abnormal in some way, and all that matters is the degree of abnormality, and more importantly, how much it affects the quality of life. This means that it is much harder to prove that someone is ``sane'' instead of ``insane'', which provides a reason why I think that state-mandated committing of people to asylums is generally not a good idea.
But the purpose of this rant isn't to argue about what powers the state ought to/ought not to have; it is to point out that the world is delusional in general.
The important part is to know how to pick ``useful'' delusions so that we don't end up harming ourselves or others, while still staving away the void that is the rest of the universe.
In fact, it might be the case that matter itself is the biggest delusion of all, since most of the universe is made up of things that we cannot even start to characterise other than ``it is dark energy''.
I know that SGDQ is running now, but it is late and I have two different rehearsals/practices tomorrow. Not to mention that I just recently ``recovered'' from my stupid tension headache.
But I had to write this piece. The topic had been floating in my head for the past week or so, and if I don't write about it now, it will become an obsession that will persist and end up with me engaging in weird compulsive behavior. So off I go.
Delusions. I think that as humans, we have a tendency to operate under our own set of delusions. Now, these delusions need not be of the more grandiose kind that one might be used to hearing about, but just random pieces of magical thinking that we tend to have to just allow the day to pass by quicker without having to fall into despair on realisation that in the cosmic scale of things, even human existence is meagre and meaningless.
I have my delusions of course. As do everyone else. Some of these delusions are rather overt -- everyone seems to believe that I have some kind of skill in some of the things I do when at best I'm merely mediocre. Some are covert, for instance the belief that one has power over the elements, or even to control/manipulate luck outside of the RNG.
Delusions are not as abnormal as they sound. I think it is part of the human condition. I thought back about the time when I was much younger, and realised that over time, ``growing up'' meant substituting the more fanciful delusions of my capabilities/worth with other delusions that do not superficially contradict the experience gained from observing the way the universe works. So, for example, instead of thinking that I have the capability of controlling weather, I now think that I have some kind of preternatural control over all things that use software programmable electronic circuits (aka ``computers'').
It's still consistent with the way one views other fellow humans -- delusions are part of the black-box package that comprises the brain and mind, and we don't usually need to care about the specifics of the delusion in order to function with the said people. The only times where it becomes necessary to have some partial understanding of another's delusions are when there is a need to create/maintain a stronger relationship bond other than mere acquaintance, i.e. when one needs to live with a person or when one is with an incompetent individual, with ``incompetent'' taking on the technical/legal meaning that the person is not wholly responsible for his/her actions due to youth or lack of maturity. In these cases, the partial understanding is needed to generate the kind of empathy that is often the bedrock of deep relationships.
Not all delusions are harmless though. Those that involve other people tend to be more harmful than those that live on silently within the person's mind. Projected emotions, assumptions are just two of the many different manifestations of harmful delusions that involve other people; they are harmful because they enforce the deluded individual's perspective on others who do not share the same, therefore leading to a lack of empathy, which leads to conflict. There are other personal delusions that can be termed harmful, but I am not of the opinion that it is in our place to explicitly point out to the person that his/her delusion is harmful to him/her, unless there is an exact situation where the said delusion is a direct contributory cause towards a life and death situation involving the person.
This means that state-mandated committing of people to asylums for acts that do not involve an immediate threat to anyone's life is something that I do not support in principle.
Given then that everyone has delusions and necessarily uses them to make everyday living less stressful, it becomes ludicrous when we start considering the notion of a ``normal'' psychology. As put by my abnormal psychology professor, a ``normal'' psychology (be it be population mode, median, mean metrics) is the most abnormal of all -- everyone is abnormal in some way, and all that matters is the degree of abnormality, and more importantly, how much it affects the quality of life. This means that it is much harder to prove that someone is ``sane'' instead of ``insane'', which provides a reason why I think that state-mandated committing of people to asylums is generally not a good idea.
But the purpose of this rant isn't to argue about what powers the state ought to/ought not to have; it is to point out that the world is delusional in general.
The important part is to know how to pick ``useful'' delusions so that we don't end up harming ourselves or others, while still staving away the void that is the rest of the universe.
In fact, it might be the case that matter itself is the biggest delusion of all, since most of the universe is made up of things that we cannot even start to characterise other than ``it is dark energy''.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Singularly Mundane
Being singular in perspective and behaviour can be a very difficult path in a world where there is an increasing amount of ``social connections''. In some senses, it feels a little curmudgeonly in that I do not get with the times and hop on the latest bandwagon the way the many lemmings are.
You would think that having done this for a long time (i.e. all my life), it would be increasingly easier to maintain it. Unfortunately, it is not the case.
Ever since I bailed out on the Facebook, refusing to update ``my content'' on it, my digital social life has gone... mundane. I have more free time, feel less compulsive, and in general, have fewer but deeper communication channels. I used to hang out on IRC, now I'm barely there. I've since retired my MSN messenger and AIM accounts, leaving on the GTalk (or Hangouts, if you'd believe the current branding) one only.
No more drama.
Returning to blogging has heightened the sense of loneliness online, since it has always been a soapbox for me to air my views on to an invisible audience that has a high barrier towards response: blog comments are overtly more public than what the Facebook's ones are, and they need to be vetted by me via the moderation panel before they get published.
As such, hardly anyone ever comments on what I have said here or elsewhere. Hell, I'm pretty sure that my ``usual'' audience numbers no more than ten people to begin with.
Luddite-sounding babblespeak aside, I've started on yet another self-enhancement project: learn how to compose music. I had gotten some books on the subject back in 2009, but there was hardly ever any strong incentive to work through them. This time though, I am using Composing Music: A New Approach by William Russo as the source material and am using Frescobaldi with Lilypond. I was contemplating getting either Finale or even Sibelius, but I have not found anything convincing about their approach towards the composition process that justifies their rather steep price.
At this point, I don't really have anything else to talk about. I've just experienced a week where I met up with an old friend, some old colleagues, and a bunch of external meetings. In short, I feel more drained than my basic sleep deprivation might suggest. I just thought that perhaps I should write something here before I turn in for the night, as some kind of simple gesture in acknowledging that yes, this blog is getting regular updates in lieu of the near-complete silence on the Facebook.
Till the next update then.
You would think that having done this for a long time (i.e. all my life), it would be increasingly easier to maintain it. Unfortunately, it is not the case.
Ever since I bailed out on the Facebook, refusing to update ``my content'' on it, my digital social life has gone... mundane. I have more free time, feel less compulsive, and in general, have fewer but deeper communication channels. I used to hang out on IRC, now I'm barely there. I've since retired my MSN messenger and AIM accounts, leaving on the GTalk (or Hangouts, if you'd believe the current branding) one only.
No more drama.
Returning to blogging has heightened the sense of loneliness online, since it has always been a soapbox for me to air my views on to an invisible audience that has a high barrier towards response: blog comments are overtly more public than what the Facebook's ones are, and they need to be vetted by me via the moderation panel before they get published.
As such, hardly anyone ever comments on what I have said here or elsewhere. Hell, I'm pretty sure that my ``usual'' audience numbers no more than ten people to begin with.
Luddite-sounding babblespeak aside, I've started on yet another self-enhancement project: learn how to compose music. I had gotten some books on the subject back in 2009, but there was hardly ever any strong incentive to work through them. This time though, I am using Composing Music: A New Approach by William Russo as the source material and am using Frescobaldi with Lilypond. I was contemplating getting either Finale or even Sibelius, but I have not found anything convincing about their approach towards the composition process that justifies their rather steep price.
At this point, I don't really have anything else to talk about. I've just experienced a week where I met up with an old friend, some old colleagues, and a bunch of external meetings. In short, I feel more drained than my basic sleep deprivation might suggest. I just thought that perhaps I should write something here before I turn in for the night, as some kind of simple gesture in acknowledging that yes, this blog is getting regular updates in lieu of the near-complete silence on the Facebook.
Till the next update then.
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Lollipop
Man, that was a doozy.
I've had my Nexus 10 for a while now. I still haven't named my Nexus 10 yet, though I am veering towards calling it Eirian III. Eirian II is still going strong, and I have a tendency to take her out for a spin every month or two -- there are just some things were the E-Ink screen works better than your typical LCD display. In fact, for heavy reading (think more than 100 pages in a day), it is more comfortable to read on an E-Ink screen than a non-E-Ink one.
A pity that the Kindle DX is basically extinct, and that Amazon isn't really going to resurrect the larger form factor, deferring instead towards a high resolution (200+ ppi) displays in a 6-inch form factor, a format that I feel is quite useless for A4/letter-sized PDFs.
Anyway, my Nexus 10 shipped with Android 4.2 ``Jelly Bean'', and at the time of purchase the CyanogenMod version wasn't ready for it. And so I had been running the stock Android image for as long as I can remember.
My biggest beef with the stock Android image is that there is just so little... control that is available, without rooting the device. I don't trust Big Corp to have my interests as a priority, and thus prefer that anything that I paid money for should have the option of allowing me full control over it -- I am willing to take on the responsibility of undoing any damage done by my own stupidity, as long as I had the power to enact all the control that I care to give. In particular, I am very annoyed at the advertising.
Advertising is the bane of all things relating to the web. On the one hand, it sounds like a fair trade to provide ``free'' content at the expense of a few advertisements, but on the other hand, advertisers tend to cross the gray area of what is acceptable by either being more intrusive, or even downright misleading. I blame this on a couple of factors, namely the laziness of web site owners in managing their own advertising, and the negative side of the ``network effect''.
Most advertisements on web sites do not come from the web site owners themselves, they are instead delivered from one of many ad-networks, farms of servers whose operators act as a type of aggregation point for anyone who wants to run an advertisement. This... market arises naturally due to the cumulative heft of such ad-networks in fulfilling the two requirements of a successful advertising platform -- largest reach for those who want to advertise and a single point of contact and out-sourced management for those who want to have advertising dollars to support their sites.
Initially, I was neutral with respect to advertising on the web. Then it started to get obnoxious. Bandwidth was wasted in running large payloads of advertisements instead of the content that one was looking for, then the increasingly shady practices of the ad-networks allowing malware and downright unethical methods of gaining those click-throughs proliferated. Basically, ad-networks have turned from a somewhat tolerable nuisance to an unwanted harassment.
On the desktop, it is easy to mitigate these. Web browsers have various plugins that aid in blocking access to these ad-networks, which have the dual benefit of making pages load faster and saving of precious bandwidth particularly on those with quotas on them (think mobile internet or dial-up).
But the phone, or technically, the smart phone -- it is hard to use such tools. For one, actual control is hard to get at for such locked down devices. Android may be open source, but once the environment is ``live'', it is hard to impossible to enact controls on the fly. For two, much of the ads are found within the applications themselves, and by decree there cannot exist tools that publicly block ad-networks system-wide. Couple that with the misleading display graphics of the ads in question, it is a no brainer that the phone environment is particularly susceptible to bad ad-networks, especially since their user interface is error prone to begin with -- it is easy to ``slip'' and click the wrong damn button.
So what has this got to do with the ability to root? The answer is this file: /system/etc/hosts. That's a file that the underlying DNS look up libraries respect to obtain the equivalent IP addresses for a given domain name provided. With the proper set up, it is possible to hijack the domain name of the ad-network and redirect it to nothing, thus stopping the access of the ad-network at the lowest level of the OSI layers. This means that we have a system-wide (though crude) way of eliminating those pesky ad-networks.
CyanogenMod provides such powers on the get-go, and that's the reason why my Galaxy Nexus phone runs that instead of stock. But the Nexus 10, well, as you can tell from the link, development for it is sort of... slow to non-existent. So, I just load in the latest and greatest factory images (Lollipop 5.1.1 at writing) instead and root that instead and use the new root powers to load up a custom hosts file that will prevent access to the ad-networks' machines.
There is, however, a catch.
Unlike CyanogenMod, the stock factory images are very stingy in setting up the system partition -- there is literally no space for the 500kiB needed to load the custom hosts file. The way in which I discovered how to workaround that is something that I probably won't write about here. The principle though, is rather simple -- make space by deleting files already in system.
And so now, my Nexus 10 is running Android 5.1.1, somewhat secured from the dastardly ad-networks, complete with the obligatory screenshot:
I don't think I have anything else to write about now. Till the next update, I suppose?
I've had my Nexus 10 for a while now. I still haven't named my Nexus 10 yet, though I am veering towards calling it Eirian III. Eirian II is still going strong, and I have a tendency to take her out for a spin every month or two -- there are just some things were the E-Ink screen works better than your typical LCD display. In fact, for heavy reading (think more than 100 pages in a day), it is more comfortable to read on an E-Ink screen than a non-E-Ink one.
A pity that the Kindle DX is basically extinct, and that Amazon isn't really going to resurrect the larger form factor, deferring instead towards a high resolution (200+ ppi) displays in a 6-inch form factor, a format that I feel is quite useless for A4/letter-sized PDFs.
Anyway, my Nexus 10 shipped with Android 4.2 ``Jelly Bean'', and at the time of purchase the CyanogenMod version wasn't ready for it. And so I had been running the stock Android image for as long as I can remember.
My biggest beef with the stock Android image is that there is just so little... control that is available, without rooting the device. I don't trust Big Corp to have my interests as a priority, and thus prefer that anything that I paid money for should have the option of allowing me full control over it -- I am willing to take on the responsibility of undoing any damage done by my own stupidity, as long as I had the power to enact all the control that I care to give. In particular, I am very annoyed at the advertising.
Advertising is the bane of all things relating to the web. On the one hand, it sounds like a fair trade to provide ``free'' content at the expense of a few advertisements, but on the other hand, advertisers tend to cross the gray area of what is acceptable by either being more intrusive, or even downright misleading. I blame this on a couple of factors, namely the laziness of web site owners in managing their own advertising, and the negative side of the ``network effect''.
Most advertisements on web sites do not come from the web site owners themselves, they are instead delivered from one of many ad-networks, farms of servers whose operators act as a type of aggregation point for anyone who wants to run an advertisement. This... market arises naturally due to the cumulative heft of such ad-networks in fulfilling the two requirements of a successful advertising platform -- largest reach for those who want to advertise and a single point of contact and out-sourced management for those who want to have advertising dollars to support their sites.
Initially, I was neutral with respect to advertising on the web. Then it started to get obnoxious. Bandwidth was wasted in running large payloads of advertisements instead of the content that one was looking for, then the increasingly shady practices of the ad-networks allowing malware and downright unethical methods of gaining those click-throughs proliferated. Basically, ad-networks have turned from a somewhat tolerable nuisance to an unwanted harassment.
On the desktop, it is easy to mitigate these. Web browsers have various plugins that aid in blocking access to these ad-networks, which have the dual benefit of making pages load faster and saving of precious bandwidth particularly on those with quotas on them (think mobile internet or dial-up).
But the phone, or technically, the smart phone -- it is hard to use such tools. For one, actual control is hard to get at for such locked down devices. Android may be open source, but once the environment is ``live'', it is hard to impossible to enact controls on the fly. For two, much of the ads are found within the applications themselves, and by decree there cannot exist tools that publicly block ad-networks system-wide. Couple that with the misleading display graphics of the ads in question, it is a no brainer that the phone environment is particularly susceptible to bad ad-networks, especially since their user interface is error prone to begin with -- it is easy to ``slip'' and click the wrong damn button.
So what has this got to do with the ability to root? The answer is this file: /system/etc/hosts. That's a file that the underlying DNS look up libraries respect to obtain the equivalent IP addresses for a given domain name provided. With the proper set up, it is possible to hijack the domain name of the ad-network and redirect it to nothing, thus stopping the access of the ad-network at the lowest level of the OSI layers. This means that we have a system-wide (though crude) way of eliminating those pesky ad-networks.
CyanogenMod provides such powers on the get-go, and that's the reason why my Galaxy Nexus phone runs that instead of stock. But the Nexus 10, well, as you can tell from the link, development for it is sort of... slow to non-existent. So, I just load in the latest and greatest factory images (Lollipop 5.1.1 at writing) instead and root that instead and use the new root powers to load up a custom hosts file that will prevent access to the ad-networks' machines.
There is, however, a catch.
Unlike CyanogenMod, the stock factory images are very stingy in setting up the system partition -- there is literally no space for the 500kiB needed to load the custom hosts file. The way in which I discovered how to workaround that is something that I probably won't write about here. The principle though, is rather simple -- make space by deleting files already in system.
And so now, my Nexus 10 is running Android 5.1.1, somewhat secured from the dastardly ad-networks, complete with the obligatory screenshot:
I don't think I have anything else to write about now. Till the next update, I suppose?
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Negative, Positive
Recently I was told that I ``sound too negative on my blog'', or rather, I have a tendency to be all ranty and what-not instead of being thankful for the good things that have happened to me.
Honestly, that observation is correct. I do not have a legitimate reason to be pissy at life, with all things considered. I am gainfully employed, am happily attached with long-term plans of settling down, have interesting hobbies that I haven't really gotten bored with yet, and am generally contented with what life has thrown at me thus far.
But no one wants to read about how great someone else's life is! If anyone wanted to read that kind of drivel, it's probably better to look at Facebook and its ilk, where almost everyone self-selects their positive experiences in life to showcase to others.
That is, for those of you who haven't realised by now, the reason why I don't want to use the Facebook. Too phoney. Life isn't a bed of roses, but Facebook and other ``social media'' stuff skews the representation to the point where the ugly aspects of one-upmanship becomes the dominant factor, even if people aren't actively trying to outdo each other.
Actually, in the early days of the Facebook, people tend to be a bit more candid, showing a bit more of their ``other sides'' in a more personable sort of way, you know, the way a friend in the real world might share with others. Then it got opened up to the general public, and HR professionals start to apply the guilt by association fallacy and scan through all ``public'' information of their candidates, which led to a feedback loop where the whole sanitisation process/self-censorship process takes place, which in turn leads to the current behavior of only showing what is good in one's life.
So... in the bid to encourage people to put more of their information out there, we end up with people putting out only their most positive front. Maybe that's a backfire right there. Heheheheheh...
Anyway, yes, I have a tendency to not talk about the good things that happen to me. There are two reasons why, one more rational, the other more irrational.
The rational way of looking at it comes from a quote from Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:
The irrational way of looking at it is that I don't want to jinx myself.
I'll leave it as that for now. Till the next update.
Honestly, that observation is correct. I do not have a legitimate reason to be pissy at life, with all things considered. I am gainfully employed, am happily attached with long-term plans of settling down, have interesting hobbies that I haven't really gotten bored with yet, and am generally contented with what life has thrown at me thus far.
But no one wants to read about how great someone else's life is! If anyone wanted to read that kind of drivel, it's probably better to look at Facebook and its ilk, where almost everyone self-selects their positive experiences in life to showcase to others.
That is, for those of you who haven't realised by now, the reason why I don't want to use the Facebook. Too phoney. Life isn't a bed of roses, but Facebook and other ``social media'' stuff skews the representation to the point where the ugly aspects of one-upmanship becomes the dominant factor, even if people aren't actively trying to outdo each other.
Actually, in the early days of the Facebook, people tend to be a bit more candid, showing a bit more of their ``other sides'' in a more personable sort of way, you know, the way a friend in the real world might share with others. Then it got opened up to the general public, and HR professionals start to apply the guilt by association fallacy and scan through all ``public'' information of their candidates, which led to a feedback loop where the whole sanitisation process/self-censorship process takes place, which in turn leads to the current behavior of only showing what is good in one's life.
So... in the bid to encourage people to put more of their information out there, we end up with people putting out only their most positive front. Maybe that's a backfire right there. Heheheheheh...
Anyway, yes, I have a tendency to not talk about the good things that happen to me. There are two reasons why, one more rational, the other more irrational.
The rational way of looking at it comes from a quote from Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.No, this isn't an academic blog, so I'm not going to go all out MLA/APA and cite sources. Suffice to say, what this means in context is that talking about good things is just plain boring -- the set of good things that can happen to someone is the same, while that of the not-so-good is very different.
The irrational way of looking at it is that I don't want to jinx myself.
I'll leave it as that for now. Till the next update.
Wednesday, July 08, 2015
Hub, Spokes, SLAs
Unless you are living not in SIN city, by now you ought to have heard of the massive MRT failure along the North-South and East-West lines. More interestingly, you ought to have heard on the chaos surrounding the eventual dispersal of all the commuters who were stranded by the failed mass rapid transit.
This post isn't about who's to blame in that incident, nor even about speculations relating to that incident. I will use this incident as an analogy for system architecture design.
There are many different strategies in architecting a system, most of which depends on the nature of the system being developed. For example, if security is of paramount importance, then a hub-spoke strategy is used, with the server (or more often, a cluster of servers) sit in the hub, and everything else (the clients) connect as spokes to the hub. If the ability to ``self-heal'' is more important, then some kind of peer-to-peer based strategy is used.
There are of course more strategies to be used, and I will not go through them. I just want to point out something interesting. The public infrastructure in SIN city is designed around the concept of the hub-spoke strategy, where for the most part people are expected to make use of the mass rapid transits to cross the large distances (it's SIN city, so 40km or 25mi is considered ``far'') before switching to a bus or two for the proverbial last mile. This is the reason why there are many new MRT line constructions over the past fifteen years, political conspiracies aside.
There is a catch that is amply demonstrated through last evening's disruption. If you are using a hub-spoke model for architecting a system, the hub cannot afford to fail at all. Maybe I'm not saying this loud enough: THE HUB CANNOT AFFORD TO FAIL AT ALL. It is the innate risk behind this particular means of architecting. Since all traffic passes through the hub at some point, any downtime of the hub means massive damage to the system at large. As shown in last evening's debacle, the failure of the two biggest routes in the network was enough to cause a spillover of commuters that lasted too long for comfort.
Thus, the effective use of a hub-spoke model for system architecting will imply that one has in place a solid proactive maintenance plan for the hub to avoid any downtime whatsoever. This is where we find those triple-9 (< 8.75hr downtime/year) and quad-9 (< 52min downtime/year) service level agreements (SLA).
Now that has got me wondering what the SLA is for the running of the MRT lines in SIN city...
This post isn't about who's to blame in that incident, nor even about speculations relating to that incident. I will use this incident as an analogy for system architecture design.
There are many different strategies in architecting a system, most of which depends on the nature of the system being developed. For example, if security is of paramount importance, then a hub-spoke strategy is used, with the server (or more often, a cluster of servers) sit in the hub, and everything else (the clients) connect as spokes to the hub. If the ability to ``self-heal'' is more important, then some kind of peer-to-peer based strategy is used.
There are of course more strategies to be used, and I will not go through them. I just want to point out something interesting. The public infrastructure in SIN city is designed around the concept of the hub-spoke strategy, where for the most part people are expected to make use of the mass rapid transits to cross the large distances (it's SIN city, so 40km or 25mi is considered ``far'') before switching to a bus or two for the proverbial last mile. This is the reason why there are many new MRT line constructions over the past fifteen years, political conspiracies aside.
There is a catch that is amply demonstrated through last evening's disruption. If you are using a hub-spoke model for architecting a system, the hub cannot afford to fail at all. Maybe I'm not saying this loud enough: THE HUB CANNOT AFFORD TO FAIL AT ALL. It is the innate risk behind this particular means of architecting. Since all traffic passes through the hub at some point, any downtime of the hub means massive damage to the system at large. As shown in last evening's debacle, the failure of the two biggest routes in the network was enough to cause a spillover of commuters that lasted too long for comfort.
Thus, the effective use of a hub-spoke model for system architecting will imply that one has in place a solid proactive maintenance plan for the hub to avoid any downtime whatsoever. This is where we find those triple-9 (< 8.75hr downtime/year) and quad-9 (< 52min downtime/year) service level agreements (SLA).
Now that has got me wondering what the SLA is for the running of the MRT lines in SIN city...
Monday, July 06, 2015
Call Me Annoyed
Call me annoyed.
I really dislike waking up and feeling completely out of it, the exact thing that I felt this morning when I rolled out of my metaphorical bed (I don't actually sleep on a bed). My head was woozy, my nose was bunged up, the entire works of an impending cold short of a throat infection of some sort.
The temptation to see the doctor to get instant relief is high, but I feel uncomfortable with the fact that I had been seeing the doctor at a near regular rate of once per week. All for the same stupid thing.
I cannot understand my susceptibility to colds and upper respiratory infections. It's ludicrous actually. I know that I have some allergic rhinitis going on which is controlled with the steroid nasal spray (Nasonex), but ever so often I will get hit with a head cold with an über bunged up nose and a general wooziness in the brain itself.
Perhaps it is time to re-examine the vitamin C hypothesis again.
It has been a rather long time since I last took vitamin C supplements consistently. And during this time period of lull, I think that the cold incidence is a tad higher. However, this is merely an anecdotal observation -- I haven't actually tallied up the number of incidences of the cold during any time period. Medically, there is some light evidence that vitamin C can help prevent the cold, but only in the specific situation of active training under stressful conditions. Perhaps the heat stresses on the body from this rather annoyingly warm ``summer'' can be considered the necessary stressful conditions and all the Aikido training (and perhaps even the venerable 5BX that I had been loathing to do) can be considered under the aegis of ``training''. Which, of course, translates to me taking more vitamin C supplements.
Well, what harm can it do, right? As long as I don't overdose myself and keep within the LD50 of vitamin C (~12g/kg body mass using the rat model), there isn't any harm to be had.
Mundane vagaries of this sort aside, I have been reading on and off various threads on Reddit, and the kind the really gets my goat are those that involve the education system (``schools'') and bullies. As a general rule of thumb, Reddit has a predominantly American bias in terms of the user-submitted content, and on the topic of schools and bullies, it holds true as well. The sad thing of the US system is that of ``zero tolerance'' policies, or as I'd like to call it, the ``let's throw out common sense and judgement in favour of enforcing regularity and uniformity on everyone to avoid lawsuits'' policies. It makes me glad that I have no intention of raising my young in the US.
The prototypal story follows this general template: Alice is a student at a school, and Bob is a bully who keeps picking on her. One day, Alice got too pissed off at Bob and snaps, flailing/fighting/hurting Bob. Then, they both get detention and Alice is told to ``take the blows, not defend herself, and to look for a teacher''. Rinse and repeat unless things get nasty enough that someone gets sent to the ER or when a parent gets pissed of enough to have a showdown with the school administrators.
There are so many things wrong with that picture. The most damning is the dictum of never fighting back and appealling to authority. The problem isn't with the instruction, but lies within the context in which the instruction is provided. ``Appealling to authority'' works only if the said authority is just and even-handed, both of which are neigh impossible to get in the context of the school. Teachers and school administrators have, at best, a primitive notion of what being just means. The varying quality of the teachers is the reason why ``zero tolerance'' policies come about -- in the bid to enforce uniformity (aka Standard Operating Procedures or SOP), the judgement abilities of the teachers are taken out of the equation, making the rules rigid and unfair. Much of the action occurs after the damage is done, with everyone attempting to assign blame after the fact -- there is hardly any incentive for any teacher to actively step in to break up an altercation due to the lawsuit-happy environment.
I don't think Singapore has reached that level of stupidity. But then again, we tend not to have such blatant cases of bullying thanks to the full-scale indoctrination of proper social behaviour (or rather, conformity) that we don't find in the US.
Here's what I think. Violence should not be tolerated as a society -- there are always non-violent means of achieving a goal. It is laudable that schools try to inculcate that value into the young. It is also good to hear child psychologists praise the superior method of talking with one's children as the primary means of discipline, to get them to understand that something they have done is wrong.
However, violence cannot be eradicated completely from human society -- it ought to be allowed, with heavy penalties exacted on those who choose to use them. The reasons for this are pragmatic -- non-violent means of achieving goals assumes an innate intelligence and sentience that befits the status of homo, but there are times where the... person one is talking to refuses to use his/her intelligence and understanding to see the point being discussed. It is at such exasperating times that violence ought to be permitted. That said, there has to be a price for the application of violence, and the person needs to make a judgement on whether the objective is worth the price to pay for the violence enacted.
Back to the bully situation. The primary psychology behind a bully is an extrinsic source of superiority to mask the innate inferiority complex -- a sign of an immature mind, to put it in the bluntest terms. While it is possible for the intellectually advanced to bully others, in the context of the school, that is hardly the case. All the appeals to authority in the world will do little for the victim; but one violent outburst at the bully will make it clear that there is a price to pay for the bully to continue bullying. It's a primal way of settling problems, and I do not claim to agree with it completely, but it is a pragmatic solution of desperation.
That's how modern diplomacy works anyway. Heh.
I really dislike waking up and feeling completely out of it, the exact thing that I felt this morning when I rolled out of my metaphorical bed (I don't actually sleep on a bed). My head was woozy, my nose was bunged up, the entire works of an impending cold short of a throat infection of some sort.
The temptation to see the doctor to get instant relief is high, but I feel uncomfortable with the fact that I had been seeing the doctor at a near regular rate of once per week. All for the same stupid thing.
I cannot understand my susceptibility to colds and upper respiratory infections. It's ludicrous actually. I know that I have some allergic rhinitis going on which is controlled with the steroid nasal spray (Nasonex), but ever so often I will get hit with a head cold with an über bunged up nose and a general wooziness in the brain itself.
Perhaps it is time to re-examine the vitamin C hypothesis again.
It has been a rather long time since I last took vitamin C supplements consistently. And during this time period of lull, I think that the cold incidence is a tad higher. However, this is merely an anecdotal observation -- I haven't actually tallied up the number of incidences of the cold during any time period. Medically, there is some light evidence that vitamin C can help prevent the cold, but only in the specific situation of active training under stressful conditions. Perhaps the heat stresses on the body from this rather annoyingly warm ``summer'' can be considered the necessary stressful conditions and all the Aikido training (and perhaps even the venerable 5BX that I had been loathing to do) can be considered under the aegis of ``training''. Which, of course, translates to me taking more vitamin C supplements.
Well, what harm can it do, right? As long as I don't overdose myself and keep within the LD50 of vitamin C (~12g/kg body mass using the rat model), there isn't any harm to be had.
Mundane vagaries of this sort aside, I have been reading on and off various threads on Reddit, and the kind the really gets my goat are those that involve the education system (``schools'') and bullies. As a general rule of thumb, Reddit has a predominantly American bias in terms of the user-submitted content, and on the topic of schools and bullies, it holds true as well. The sad thing of the US system is that of ``zero tolerance'' policies, or as I'd like to call it, the ``let's throw out common sense and judgement in favour of enforcing regularity and uniformity on everyone to avoid lawsuits'' policies. It makes me glad that I have no intention of raising my young in the US.
The prototypal story follows this general template: Alice is a student at a school, and Bob is a bully who keeps picking on her. One day, Alice got too pissed off at Bob and snaps, flailing/fighting/hurting Bob. Then, they both get detention and Alice is told to ``take the blows, not defend herself, and to look for a teacher''. Rinse and repeat unless things get nasty enough that someone gets sent to the ER or when a parent gets pissed of enough to have a showdown with the school administrators.
There are so many things wrong with that picture. The most damning is the dictum of never fighting back and appealling to authority. The problem isn't with the instruction, but lies within the context in which the instruction is provided. ``Appealling to authority'' works only if the said authority is just and even-handed, both of which are neigh impossible to get in the context of the school. Teachers and school administrators have, at best, a primitive notion of what being just means. The varying quality of the teachers is the reason why ``zero tolerance'' policies come about -- in the bid to enforce uniformity (aka Standard Operating Procedures or SOP), the judgement abilities of the teachers are taken out of the equation, making the rules rigid and unfair. Much of the action occurs after the damage is done, with everyone attempting to assign blame after the fact -- there is hardly any incentive for any teacher to actively step in to break up an altercation due to the lawsuit-happy environment.
I don't think Singapore has reached that level of stupidity. But then again, we tend not to have such blatant cases of bullying thanks to the full-scale indoctrination of proper social behaviour (or rather, conformity) that we don't find in the US.
Here's what I think. Violence should not be tolerated as a society -- there are always non-violent means of achieving a goal. It is laudable that schools try to inculcate that value into the young. It is also good to hear child psychologists praise the superior method of talking with one's children as the primary means of discipline, to get them to understand that something they have done is wrong.
However, violence cannot be eradicated completely from human society -- it ought to be allowed, with heavy penalties exacted on those who choose to use them. The reasons for this are pragmatic -- non-violent means of achieving goals assumes an innate intelligence and sentience that befits the status of homo, but there are times where the... person one is talking to refuses to use his/her intelligence and understanding to see the point being discussed. It is at such exasperating times that violence ought to be permitted. That said, there has to be a price for the application of violence, and the person needs to make a judgement on whether the objective is worth the price to pay for the violence enacted.
Back to the bully situation. The primary psychology behind a bully is an extrinsic source of superiority to mask the innate inferiority complex -- a sign of an immature mind, to put it in the bluntest terms. While it is possible for the intellectually advanced to bully others, in the context of the school, that is hardly the case. All the appeals to authority in the world will do little for the victim; but one violent outburst at the bully will make it clear that there is a price to pay for the bully to continue bullying. It's a primal way of settling problems, and I do not claim to agree with it completely, but it is a pragmatic solution of desperation.
That's how modern diplomacy works anyway. Heh.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Flutes and 笛子
Some things to consider:
- The 口笛 has no equivalent. I don't even know how to explain this other than: an open pipe either 5 to 6 cm long or 8 to 9 cm long.
- D 小笛 is traditionally the highest pitched 笛子.
- Piccolo (keyed in C) is equivalent to the G 梆笛, though it tends to be more mellow. Full metal is the closest to 梆笛 timbre, Grenaditte/wood is furthest, and hybrids are somewhere in between.
- Treble flute (keyed in G) is equivalent to D 曲笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes. It also tends to be more mellow.
- Concert flute (keyed in C) is equivalent to the G 大笛; this does not change even with a B foot. It is on par with the G 新笛, though it is more nimble to play.
- Flûte d'amour (keyed in A/B♭) is equivalent to the E/F 大笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes.
- Alto flute (keyed in G) is equivalent to the D 大笛, assuming a foot with 2 additional notes. The D 大笛 is quite rarely used in Chinese Orchestras.
- C 大笛 is traditionally the lowest pitched 笛子.
- Bass flute (keyed in C) has no equivalent in among the 笛子 family.
SMS Musing #7
Wide awake from perspiring too much:
Never thought I'd write an entry on my phone in an SMS-like setting, let alone at around 1am. June came and went, and it hasn't been a productive month. Lots of diversions coupled with terribly warm and humid weather meant that I was always trying to find something else to do.
Work has been alright -- I've been coasting along on auto-pilot for a while and it's about time to dig the spurs in a little to push things over the current gravity well that comes from being in limbo between funding tranches and a less-than-obvious engagement strategy with potential partners. Frankly, it's not the most ideal situation for my operational efficiency -- reminds me too much of the nebulous direction that I'd experienced in grad school, where the direction that I think I was heading was totally not where I was heading. There will come a day where that traumatic experience will be gone from me, but today is not that day.
I've been taking French lessons on and off on Duolingo, a web site built by Dr Luis von Ahn, an old teacher of mine back when I was still an undergraduate in CMU. No real reason on why, except perhaps the feeling that it is time to expand my understanding of the Romance languages. Incidentally, I've also started on Spanish, and am hoping that the similarities will help rather than hinder progress. Maybe this is my way of preparing for Finnegans Wake, to be read some time in the unknown future.
Ah well. I think I'm sick of lying prone and propping myself on my elbows to type this all out on a tiny phone. Till the next update.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Typewriterisms Part Deux
First, read typewriterisms.
So I sat down and decided to work on the second part of what I had written in that old post. For reference, here's a Courier-based (non-jitter) version:
At first, I tried to attack the problem by trying to figure out how to encode and embed a pan-unicode font, which in our case is GNU Unifont. Then I realised I had two problems: I had to vectorise the raster format of the GNU Unifont (no easy task considering the tricks used to mimic a higher resolution for the CJK ideographs via a careful play of negative spaces), and I had to somehow shove that into a dictionary in the PostScript file to be referred to by the page layout program. I spent some time looking at all that and it all seemed like too much work.
Then I discovered the image PostScript command and figured that I could just render the GNU Unifont as a monochrome bitmap instead.
I put together a database from the GNU Unifont source hex files (and the combining characters list for all the diacritics) and slowly put together an increasingly sophisticated sequence of line renderers. With that (and some numerical tweaking on the driver program to make it look like lpr-emu.py), I present the output of ulpr-emu.py, a Unicode aware monospaced font ``typewriter'' renderer. Here's the output with the same input as before:
Kind of boring, I know. Apart from the different looking glyphs, there isn't anything particularly Unicode about it. But here's a render of the lyrics to 粉雪 by レミオロメン:
That's almost pure Unicode (technically UTF-8 with CJK ideograms).
I don't think I'm going to add that jitter thing to the rendering process this time. This can be seen as the prelude towards my 简谱 rendering system. I'm still debating whether to release ulpr-emu.py, since it is using the GNU Unifont dataset. But we'll see how it all turns out.
Till the next update.
Edit: I've released the sources.
So I sat down and decided to work on the second part of what I had written in that old post. For reference, here's a Courier-based (non-jitter) version:
At first, I tried to attack the problem by trying to figure out how to encode and embed a pan-unicode font, which in our case is GNU Unifont. Then I realised I had two problems: I had to vectorise the raster format of the GNU Unifont (no easy task considering the tricks used to mimic a higher resolution for the CJK ideographs via a careful play of negative spaces), and I had to somehow shove that into a dictionary in the PostScript file to be referred to by the page layout program. I spent some time looking at all that and it all seemed like too much work.
Then I discovered the image PostScript command and figured that I could just render the GNU Unifont as a monochrome bitmap instead.
I put together a database from the GNU Unifont source hex files (and the combining characters list for all the diacritics) and slowly put together an increasingly sophisticated sequence of line renderers. With that (and some numerical tweaking on the driver program to make it look like lpr-emu.py), I present the output of ulpr-emu.py, a Unicode aware monospaced font ``typewriter'' renderer. Here's the output with the same input as before:
Kind of boring, I know. Apart from the different looking glyphs, there isn't anything particularly Unicode about it. But here's a render of the lyrics to 粉雪 by レミオロメン:
That's almost pure Unicode (technically UTF-8 with CJK ideograms).
I don't think I'm going to add that jitter thing to the rendering process this time. This can be seen as the prelude towards my 简谱 rendering system. I'm still debating whether to release ulpr-emu.py, since it is using the GNU Unifont dataset. But we'll see how it all turns out.
Till the next update.
Edit: I've released the sources.
Friday, June 05, 2015
Pens
Ah June. The month of the hot weather. The month of the start of a really serious case of heat, haze, and humidity. The month where school-going children get their first major reprieve from the academic year. The month that... I could go on, but it's pointless.
What I mean to say is, it's 2015, and June. So, an entry is in order, and what better thing to talk about than the fountain pen and penmanship in general?
I got my first ``proper'' fountain pen back in 2009, and it has been nearly 6 years since. I never looked back---I've been using my fountain pen for almost all forms of writing, save cheque writing because fountain pens do not allow the underlying carbon copy to record the transaction correctly.
Man does it take me back to look at that writing sample from the past. I've fixed my cursive since then. Specifically, my capital `I', `F', `Q', `T', `J', `H', `A', `N', small `r', `f' have been fixed to conform to something more traditional looking. The reason for that was due to a reply from T-Mobile some time back, when I wrote a handwritten letter asking for a waiver of some fees due to me not being in the US any more and that I had already cancelled the phone account---the details didn't matter as much as what happened in my address. The first letter of my street name was misread as ``Fl'' instead of ``H'', which made me seriously reconsider how I was forming my words.
Of course, later on I adjusted my writing even more because I realised that there was a very good reason to have a ``standardised'' cursive script, and that the form that I was using was far from being standardised. In fact, it was some kind of bastardised form of pseudo-calligraphic-cursive-printed nonsense which was ugly, and more importantly, prone to misreads like the anecdote I referred to earlier. So I fixed them as best as I could, and I think that they look a little better now. Which of course segues (I adore this word---it does not sound like [SEG-ewws] but more like [SEG-ways]) into the other thing I want to talk about, that is, penmanship.
I'm not sure about the current school curriculum in SIN city, but back in the day, I remembered that we took up some form of cursive writing in class as part of English lessons. I believe it was in primary three or four that we were first introduced to cursive writing. I didn't really care for it much, ended up doing lots of printing, until I reached primary six where my awesome English teacher Mr Lin Min would basically be writing in cursive for everything. Note that these were the days where the ``word processor'' was mostly ye olde typewriter, and often times it was much faster to write notes out for the students with pen and paper instead of relying on the typewriter. The typewritten texts were reserved for the massive vocabularly lists, things that were better suited for the rigid formatting that typewriters are awesome at, but I digress.
In a world where reaching for a word processor is as convenient as coughing, it would seem that penmanship is dated at best and completely irrelevant at worst. I disagree with that thought for a variety of reasons. Logorrhea is the chief symbol of our times, as people (including me!) will happily type hundreds upon hundreds of meaningless drivel in order to convey a simple point, defenestrating conciseness of diction. Part of the reason for that is that typing on a word processor (I'm using this in the most general form of the noun) is quite effortless as compared to picking up a pen and then writing it down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes to write up this entire blog entry, I can probably write down only half of what I have typed up right here. It sounds counter-intuitive then to say that penmanship is even more needed now than before, but it is true---requiring an actual effort to put thoughts down on paper will skew the writer to actually sit down and think carefully what he/she wants to say before finding the right expressions and thus writing them down. This will naturally yield a much concise and pithy piece of writing.
Thus, it is still possible (and preferable even) that a handwritten essay of five hundred words is more worthy of reading than a thousand-word essay that was typed up in a word processor on a computer.
Pithiness aside, penmanship also trains one thing that we are sorely lacking in this day of the ``service industry''---fine motor control. Back in the manufacturing/artisan era (industrial/pre-industrial society), people did lots of fine craft work with their hands. That requires some rather exquisite fine motor control. Musicians, artists, they all have to keep the fine motor control up if they want to be successful at what they do. Even the peasant needs fine motor control to repair their own gear, weave their baskets and what not. But these days, with lots of push-button automation, we are finding that the need for such activities is gradually fading away. Writing is among the last bastions of easily accessible fine motor control activities that is left. While it doesn't necessarily mean that one ought to write lots of essays with the pen, it does mean that one should take the opportunity to write whenever they can, just so that they maintain their fine motor skills. Need a list? Don't pull up the damn word processor (or spreadsheet program; ugh) and just handwrite it. Need to inform someone something? Write a quick memo instead of sending yet another email---this is especially true when the person is like... a family member.
Anyway, I'm just ranting and losing steam. I think I'll stop here and move on. Till the next update then.
What I mean to say is, it's 2015, and June. So, an entry is in order, and what better thing to talk about than the fountain pen and penmanship in general?
I got my first ``proper'' fountain pen back in 2009, and it has been nearly 6 years since. I never looked back---I've been using my fountain pen for almost all forms of writing, save cheque writing because fountain pens do not allow the underlying carbon copy to record the transaction correctly.
Man does it take me back to look at that writing sample from the past. I've fixed my cursive since then. Specifically, my capital `I', `F', `Q', `T', `J', `H', `A', `N', small `r', `f' have been fixed to conform to something more traditional looking. The reason for that was due to a reply from T-Mobile some time back, when I wrote a handwritten letter asking for a waiver of some fees due to me not being in the US any more and that I had already cancelled the phone account---the details didn't matter as much as what happened in my address. The first letter of my street name was misread as ``Fl'' instead of ``H'', which made me seriously reconsider how I was forming my words.
Of course, later on I adjusted my writing even more because I realised that there was a very good reason to have a ``standardised'' cursive script, and that the form that I was using was far from being standardised. In fact, it was some kind of bastardised form of pseudo-calligraphic-cursive-printed nonsense which was ugly, and more importantly, prone to misreads like the anecdote I referred to earlier. So I fixed them as best as I could, and I think that they look a little better now. Which of course segues (I adore this word---it does not sound like [SEG-ewws] but more like [SEG-ways]) into the other thing I want to talk about, that is, penmanship.
I'm not sure about the current school curriculum in SIN city, but back in the day, I remembered that we took up some form of cursive writing in class as part of English lessons. I believe it was in primary three or four that we were first introduced to cursive writing. I didn't really care for it much, ended up doing lots of printing, until I reached primary six where my awesome English teacher Mr Lin Min would basically be writing in cursive for everything. Note that these were the days where the ``word processor'' was mostly ye olde typewriter, and often times it was much faster to write notes out for the students with pen and paper instead of relying on the typewriter. The typewritten texts were reserved for the massive vocabularly lists, things that were better suited for the rigid formatting that typewriters are awesome at, but I digress.
In a world where reaching for a word processor is as convenient as coughing, it would seem that penmanship is dated at best and completely irrelevant at worst. I disagree with that thought for a variety of reasons. Logorrhea is the chief symbol of our times, as people (including me!) will happily type hundreds upon hundreds of meaningless drivel in order to convey a simple point, defenestrating conciseness of diction. Part of the reason for that is that typing on a word processor (I'm using this in the most general form of the noun) is quite effortless as compared to picking up a pen and then writing it down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes to write up this entire blog entry, I can probably write down only half of what I have typed up right here. It sounds counter-intuitive then to say that penmanship is even more needed now than before, but it is true---requiring an actual effort to put thoughts down on paper will skew the writer to actually sit down and think carefully what he/she wants to say before finding the right expressions and thus writing them down. This will naturally yield a much concise and pithy piece of writing.
Thus, it is still possible (and preferable even) that a handwritten essay of five hundred words is more worthy of reading than a thousand-word essay that was typed up in a word processor on a computer.
Pithiness aside, penmanship also trains one thing that we are sorely lacking in this day of the ``service industry''---fine motor control. Back in the manufacturing/artisan era (industrial/pre-industrial society), people did lots of fine craft work with their hands. That requires some rather exquisite fine motor control. Musicians, artists, they all have to keep the fine motor control up if they want to be successful at what they do. Even the peasant needs fine motor control to repair their own gear, weave their baskets and what not. But these days, with lots of push-button automation, we are finding that the need for such activities is gradually fading away. Writing is among the last bastions of easily accessible fine motor control activities that is left. While it doesn't necessarily mean that one ought to write lots of essays with the pen, it does mean that one should take the opportunity to write whenever they can, just so that they maintain their fine motor skills. Need a list? Don't pull up the damn word processor (or spreadsheet program; ugh) and just handwrite it. Need to inform someone something? Write a quick memo instead of sending yet another email---this is especially true when the person is like... a family member.
Anyway, I'm just ranting and losing steam. I think I'll stop here and move on. Till the next update then.
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Be Professional
Well, I was about to write a ranty piece on how discrimination is innate in human nature, and how we as an advanced society (as compared to the past anyway) just learn how to downplay that natural reaction just so we can get along with each other, but seeing these couple of videos made me decide to write something altogether different. First, watch the videos I have in mind:Notice that they are from the same group. No I have no affiliation with them.
The thing is, it is important to treat everyone with the same basic attitude, and to never be condescending. Just because it's the first time you meet someone doesn't mean that the first impression you get is the actual behaviour of the person. It is much better (some might even say professional) to keep an open mind, a neutral stance, and defer judgement till later. Just because she looks like a cute stereotypical ``nerdy'' girl doesn't mean that she isn't in the top class of her art. While the videos were made largely with pranking in mind, they do convey a much deeper lesson to the instructors involved, and it is exactly what I said earlier. The monkey brain in us will naturally condescend others perceived to be physically unintimidating, but the human brain in us must be disciplined enough to override that sentiment and apply the cold hard truth of logic, that sometimes that unassuming exterior hides something superior and thus more dangerous.
What the videos do not show is the other end of the spectrum, where people get all subservient and obsequious in the face of ``authority''. See this next video, which does:Again, it's the monkey brain at work. ``Oh it's a motorcade with important-looking people; I should be as nice as I can because there's someone important in it and important people do not like to get stopped.'' Again, it's a failure of professionalism, where the trained human brain does not triumph over the monkey brain within. Don't get me wrong, the ability to immediately sense authority and adjust one's role accordingly is a useful skill for survival, but when one has a job to do, that job's requirements overrule any of these instinctual habits, particularly when the instinctual habits contradict what the job requires.
Here's a slightly different example on that concept. Take your regular soldier. After filtering out all the fancy euphemisms, a soldier's roles can be reduced to two principles: to kill on demand, to follow orders even if it means their total annihilation. The first goes against our usual social notions of ``acceptable'' behaviour, and the second goes against our innate monkey brain notion of fight/flight. If you run off without following orders to hold the ground and be overrun, you're a deserter---it's unprofessional, and more importantly, it jeopardises other plans that aid in the larger scheme of things.
The crux of it all is merely this: if you are taking up a job, be it a professional driving instructor, martial arts trainer, security personnel, or a soldier, do your job according to what your profession requires and do not let your monkey brain take over. Modern society has little place for monkey brain thinking under the highly specialised job structure we have, but it is an unfortunate trend that is going on now. Much of the cop problems brought up in the US are due to police officers not being professional on their job.
Before we can evolve to the next phase of human society, I think we need to rethink and relook how to be professional all over again. Otherwise that twentieth century notion of ``division of labour'' is no longer applicable and we'll need to come up with something better.
The thing is, it is important to treat everyone with the same basic attitude, and to never be condescending. Just because it's the first time you meet someone doesn't mean that the first impression you get is the actual behaviour of the person. It is much better (some might even say professional) to keep an open mind, a neutral stance, and defer judgement till later. Just because she looks like a cute stereotypical ``nerdy'' girl doesn't mean that she isn't in the top class of her art. While the videos were made largely with pranking in mind, they do convey a much deeper lesson to the instructors involved, and it is exactly what I said earlier. The monkey brain in us will naturally condescend others perceived to be physically unintimidating, but the human brain in us must be disciplined enough to override that sentiment and apply the cold hard truth of logic, that sometimes that unassuming exterior hides something superior and thus more dangerous.
What the videos do not show is the other end of the spectrum, where people get all subservient and obsequious in the face of ``authority''. See this next video, which does:Again, it's the monkey brain at work. ``Oh it's a motorcade with important-looking people; I should be as nice as I can because there's someone important in it and important people do not like to get stopped.'' Again, it's a failure of professionalism, where the trained human brain does not triumph over the monkey brain within. Don't get me wrong, the ability to immediately sense authority and adjust one's role accordingly is a useful skill for survival, but when one has a job to do, that job's requirements overrule any of these instinctual habits, particularly when the instinctual habits contradict what the job requires.
Here's a slightly different example on that concept. Take your regular soldier. After filtering out all the fancy euphemisms, a soldier's roles can be reduced to two principles: to kill on demand, to follow orders even if it means their total annihilation. The first goes against our usual social notions of ``acceptable'' behaviour, and the second goes against our innate monkey brain notion of fight/flight. If you run off without following orders to hold the ground and be overrun, you're a deserter---it's unprofessional, and more importantly, it jeopardises other plans that aid in the larger scheme of things.
The crux of it all is merely this: if you are taking up a job, be it a professional driving instructor, martial arts trainer, security personnel, or a soldier, do your job according to what your profession requires and do not let your monkey brain take over. Modern society has little place for monkey brain thinking under the highly specialised job structure we have, but it is an unfortunate trend that is going on now. Much of the cop problems brought up in the US are due to police officers not being professional on their job.
Before we can evolve to the next phase of human society, I think we need to rethink and relook how to be professional all over again. Otherwise that twentieth century notion of ``division of labour'' is no longer applicable and we'll need to come up with something better.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Some Music-Related Mumbles
I have an old Nyquist project from my last semester at CMU that I've hosted on my domain for quite a while. Recently, someone emailed me about it to clarify some points of how the library works. Consider me... amused. I suppose it's a good thing that people are actually using stuff that I had put together, right?
On another note, as I was casually looking about dizi resources on the web, I realised that fingering charts are among the most often asked questions. I have probably the most complete fingering charts for the dizi, covering all the basic fingering for all the 5 traditional keys per dizi, and then some. But I suppose it's too complicated for most people, which is funny considering the amount of effort I had put into simplifying the whole shebang. The long and short of it is, the charts make it easy to figure out how to play the dizi chromatically, assuming that one has a decently built dizi to begin with.
I am partial to Ng Teck Seng's (NTS) dizi myself over Dong Xue Hua's (DXH). It's not that DXH makes bad dizi, but that NTS is just more accessible for me, considering that he is a friend of my sifu from back in the day. I prefer dizi that are nimble in response, bright in timbre, and projective in tone, and the NTS ones are excellent for my purposes. I have also spoken with NTS and know that his dizi are crafted with acoustic principles in mind---there is a lot of physics that goes behind each of the bamboo flutes. It makes each instrument very consistent, and that is a very important thing when playing in an orchestra with different genres of pieces to play. A good dizi should consistently be able to reach the equivalent of the high-E note (by concert flute/piccolo fingering---actual pitch is dependent on the native key of the dizi), with the ability to eke out the high-G on occasion as a transient note. All of the NTS dizi that I own have this ability, which goes to say how consistent the workmanship is.
Anyway, that aside, time for more random ranting.
The past week had been quite tiring. I spent a lot time reading up various documentation to gain a deeper insight into the design trade-offs for the various sub-systems that we are intending to put together for the new framework. On the not-work front, I've finished reading Illuminatus!, and am switching over to non-fiction for a while, refreshing my knowledge on economics once again. Once that is done, I think I'll read Hamlet before moving on to some Russian literature (translated of course).
I know that I don't really have much to say, but I suppose it's a good idea to pen some things down here every now and then. After all, should I fall off the net completely (or in a more morbid sense, off this reality), this is one of the few things that are left behind to show that yes I had existed once before.
Till the next update.
On another note, as I was casually looking about dizi resources on the web, I realised that fingering charts are among the most often asked questions. I have probably the most complete fingering charts for the dizi, covering all the basic fingering for all the 5 traditional keys per dizi, and then some. But I suppose it's too complicated for most people, which is funny considering the amount of effort I had put into simplifying the whole shebang. The long and short of it is, the charts make it easy to figure out how to play the dizi chromatically, assuming that one has a decently built dizi to begin with.
I am partial to Ng Teck Seng's (NTS) dizi myself over Dong Xue Hua's (DXH). It's not that DXH makes bad dizi, but that NTS is just more accessible for me, considering that he is a friend of my sifu from back in the day. I prefer dizi that are nimble in response, bright in timbre, and projective in tone, and the NTS ones are excellent for my purposes. I have also spoken with NTS and know that his dizi are crafted with acoustic principles in mind---there is a lot of physics that goes behind each of the bamboo flutes. It makes each instrument very consistent, and that is a very important thing when playing in an orchestra with different genres of pieces to play. A good dizi should consistently be able to reach the equivalent of the high-E note (by concert flute/piccolo fingering---actual pitch is dependent on the native key of the dizi), with the ability to eke out the high-G on occasion as a transient note. All of the NTS dizi that I own have this ability, which goes to say how consistent the workmanship is.
Anyway, that aside, time for more random ranting.
The past week had been quite tiring. I spent a lot time reading up various documentation to gain a deeper insight into the design trade-offs for the various sub-systems that we are intending to put together for the new framework. On the not-work front, I've finished reading Illuminatus!, and am switching over to non-fiction for a while, refreshing my knowledge on economics once again. Once that is done, I think I'll read Hamlet before moving on to some Russian literature (translated of course).
I know that I don't really have much to say, but I suppose it's a good idea to pen some things down here every now and then. After all, should I fall off the net completely (or in a more morbid sense, off this reality), this is one of the few things that are left behind to show that yes I had existed once before.
Till the next update.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Technodiocy and An Irresponsible Parent
Today, I was supposed to write a piece lambasting a group of irresponsible individuals that I have observed. Work was sufficiently engaging and onerous that I had to delay that piece till now. And now, after riding the public transport back, I have found yet another group of irresponsible individuals that I feel I ought to lambast.
And so now you have the dubious honour of two rants for the price of one.
Let's begin with an assertion. I am a techie. Read my posts here from time to time, do a Google-stalk of me, read my personal domain and you ought to come to a similar conclusion soon enough. I like tech---I live tech, breathe tech and work on tech. Tech is my way of life, tech is my livelihood. There is no denying that I am no luddite by any means.
I own a smart phone. I own portable computers, several in fact, and work on powerful desktops and servers. I own some e-readers, and even a tablet. So I'm not exactly completely ignorant of the so-called mobile future.
Yet you don't see me lapsing into becoming a gorram phone zombie. I wasn't fully aware of just how bad the epidemic was until I started to look about me one day and realise that, to my horror, nearly 8 out of 10 people who were standing around me on a train or bus were burying their heads in one mobile device or another. That alone doesn't make them zombies of course---it is the modern day equivalent of say reading a paperback while on a transport.
What's infuriating is when people continue to use their mobile device while they are walking from one point to another that makes them phone zombies. It's ludicrous---a person, head all hunched up, staring at their tiny (or not so tiny) screens, sometimes plugged in with earphones, and justwalkingshuffling through the streets, oblivious of the situation around them. I took to observing just what it was that could make a person thus engrossed, and from my unscientific observations, more than 7 out of 10 of them were on some kind of messaging system.
Messaging system. While walking. How much more ridiculous can it get? I mean, if they were walking and watching some silly video that they had downloaded (or doing comparative shopping, which is on a whole new level of idiocy that I will not rant about today), it's probably less laughable. But on a messenging system? I fail to see just why a conversation cannot be left alone for the [short] time it takes to get from one lousy point in SIN to another on foot.
And if you thought that I was just ranting about adults, think again. I don't really care much about adults---they should, by definition, have the good sense to pay attention to what they are doing after all---but school-going children. Let me emphasize that a bit: school-going children. Not on holiday, not over a weekend out in the streets. Early in the morning while they are getting their collective asses to school. That's how stupid it has gotten.
It's an old saying to be bitching about how the newer generations are never like the old, but in this case, I feel highly justified in thinking so. I mean, wow, just how much interesting things can a sub-eighteen-year-old say particularly when five sevenths of their week is already spent in school? I have friends all over the world (mostly congregated in the North American continent), and am a techie, but I don't even see the need to be staring at the chat screen all the damn time. And lest any one starts saying any nonsense, allow me to point out that my generation was among the first to make use of ``personalised'' messaging systems or IMs (not IRC which predates all these and is an example of the ``group chat'' that the sheeple are rediscovering) on a consistent basis, and yet we don't even see the pressing need to always be staring at the stupid chat screen.
My children will never get a smart phone of that nature while they are in school. I'll get the dumbest phone I can still get my hands on and give them that, and only because payphones have gone the way of the do-do bird while the need to maintain contact between parents and children still exist. I am glad that my consort-candidate is in agreement with this as well.
And that's the first rant point. I feel a little better getting it out of my system, even though I know that this post is going to do absolutely nothing in reversing the rise in technodiocy.
The second rant point is triggered from an incident that occurred no more than an hour ago. I was on a bus heading home, and had secured my usual backward-facing seat. It's my usual because for some reason, no one will willingly choose to sit facing in the opposite direction of travel of the bus, which of course means that I have better than even odds of actually having a place ``reserved'' for the likes of me. Out of so many trips, it is on no more than five occasions that I failed to secure my usual place, but that's a mere diversion of this other point.
The bus stopped at one of the many stops, and a mother (I think) and child came onboard. Said child was probably no more than seven, all puny and what-not, and the mother was carrying a bulky but light looking plastic bag of widgets. They made their way to the back of the bus where there was only one seat left, the centre one that opened directly into the walking aisle with hardly any thing else.
Now, if you've not taken any of SIN's public buses, allow me to make yet another diversion. The centre rear-most seat is a bloody dangerous seat---it's slippery, has no other seats in front of it for bracing against sudden stops, which is a problem because more often than not the bus driver is a maniac that likes to accelerate and decelerate really quickly due to having an automatic transmission. For safety reasons, the centre seat of the buses now have a seat belt to help mitigate some of the risks. Most able-bodied people don't use it because it is often too damn annoying to find and buckle up in.
Now this mother and child pair made their way to the seat, and the mother sat in it and led the child to stand between her legs. I got pissed---it was clearly an at-risk behaviour for the child. I saw that the mother was hugging her child, but let's be realistic here; if something were to happen, the chances of the hugging being strong enough to hold the child such that the latter doesn't fly off to injure itself is just miniscule.
So, I stood up and looked at the mother, offering my seat and telling her, ``please sit here''.
That woman merely looked back at me and said no.
I felt like running up to her, and shouting straight in her face at the stupid risks she was taking with her child. But I remembered an important lesson---one cannot teach another a lesson if the other refuses to learn. Inasmuch as I'd like the child to be safe, that child is of the responsibility of that woman, her mother. There was nothing else that I could have done that would be right while still satisfying society's notion of etiquette.
I didn't go back to my seat. I fumed and stared daggers at the mother before alighting the bus a few stops later, thinking to myself that I need to write this down to expunge it from my mind. That such idiotic adults exist is one thing that I cannot forget.
And so now you have the dubious honour of two rants for the price of one.
Let's begin with an assertion. I am a techie. Read my posts here from time to time, do a Google-stalk of me, read my personal domain and you ought to come to a similar conclusion soon enough. I like tech---I live tech, breathe tech and work on tech. Tech is my way of life, tech is my livelihood. There is no denying that I am no luddite by any means.
I own a smart phone. I own portable computers, several in fact, and work on powerful desktops and servers. I own some e-readers, and even a tablet. So I'm not exactly completely ignorant of the so-called mobile future.
Yet you don't see me lapsing into becoming a gorram phone zombie. I wasn't fully aware of just how bad the epidemic was until I started to look about me one day and realise that, to my horror, nearly 8 out of 10 people who were standing around me on a train or bus were burying their heads in one mobile device or another. That alone doesn't make them zombies of course---it is the modern day equivalent of say reading a paperback while on a transport.
What's infuriating is when people continue to use their mobile device while they are walking from one point to another that makes them phone zombies. It's ludicrous---a person, head all hunched up, staring at their tiny (or not so tiny) screens, sometimes plugged in with earphones, and just
Messaging system. While walking. How much more ridiculous can it get? I mean, if they were walking and watching some silly video that they had downloaded (or doing comparative shopping, which is on a whole new level of idiocy that I will not rant about today), it's probably less laughable. But on a messenging system? I fail to see just why a conversation cannot be left alone for the [short] time it takes to get from one lousy point in SIN to another on foot.
And if you thought that I was just ranting about adults, think again. I don't really care much about adults---they should, by definition, have the good sense to pay attention to what they are doing after all---but school-going children. Let me emphasize that a bit: school-going children. Not on holiday, not over a weekend out in the streets. Early in the morning while they are getting their collective asses to school. That's how stupid it has gotten.
It's an old saying to be bitching about how the newer generations are never like the old, but in this case, I feel highly justified in thinking so. I mean, wow, just how much interesting things can a sub-eighteen-year-old say particularly when five sevenths of their week is already spent in school? I have friends all over the world (mostly congregated in the North American continent), and am a techie, but I don't even see the need to be staring at the chat screen all the damn time. And lest any one starts saying any nonsense, allow me to point out that my generation was among the first to make use of ``personalised'' messaging systems or IMs (not IRC which predates all these and is an example of the ``group chat'' that the sheeple are rediscovering) on a consistent basis, and yet we don't even see the pressing need to always be staring at the stupid chat screen.
My children will never get a smart phone of that nature while they are in school. I'll get the dumbest phone I can still get my hands on and give them that, and only because payphones have gone the way of the do-do bird while the need to maintain contact between parents and children still exist. I am glad that my consort-candidate is in agreement with this as well.
And that's the first rant point. I feel a little better getting it out of my system, even though I know that this post is going to do absolutely nothing in reversing the rise in technodiocy.
The second rant point is triggered from an incident that occurred no more than an hour ago. I was on a bus heading home, and had secured my usual backward-facing seat. It's my usual because for some reason, no one will willingly choose to sit facing in the opposite direction of travel of the bus, which of course means that I have better than even odds of actually having a place ``reserved'' for the likes of me. Out of so many trips, it is on no more than five occasions that I failed to secure my usual place, but that's a mere diversion of this other point.
The bus stopped at one of the many stops, and a mother (I think) and child came onboard. Said child was probably no more than seven, all puny and what-not, and the mother was carrying a bulky but light looking plastic bag of widgets. They made their way to the back of the bus where there was only one seat left, the centre one that opened directly into the walking aisle with hardly any thing else.
Now, if you've not taken any of SIN's public buses, allow me to make yet another diversion. The centre rear-most seat is a bloody dangerous seat---it's slippery, has no other seats in front of it for bracing against sudden stops, which is a problem because more often than not the bus driver is a maniac that likes to accelerate and decelerate really quickly due to having an automatic transmission. For safety reasons, the centre seat of the buses now have a seat belt to help mitigate some of the risks. Most able-bodied people don't use it because it is often too damn annoying to find and buckle up in.
Now this mother and child pair made their way to the seat, and the mother sat in it and led the child to stand between her legs. I got pissed---it was clearly an at-risk behaviour for the child. I saw that the mother was hugging her child, but let's be realistic here; if something were to happen, the chances of the hugging being strong enough to hold the child such that the latter doesn't fly off to injure itself is just miniscule.
So, I stood up and looked at the mother, offering my seat and telling her, ``please sit here''.
That woman merely looked back at me and said no.
I felt like running up to her, and shouting straight in her face at the stupid risks she was taking with her child. But I remembered an important lesson---one cannot teach another a lesson if the other refuses to learn. Inasmuch as I'd like the child to be safe, that child is of the responsibility of that woman, her mother. There was nothing else that I could have done that would be right while still satisfying society's notion of etiquette.
I didn't go back to my seat. I fumed and stared daggers at the mother before alighting the bus a few stops later, thinking to myself that I need to write this down to expunge it from my mind. That such idiotic adults exist is one thing that I cannot forget.
Friday, April 24, 2015
I Sped Up An Already Spartan Website
Recently I was reading about the Mobile Friendly Search Initiative by Google. On a whim, I decided to subject my domain to the test. To my utter horror, it reported that my simple design was not very mobile friendly.
Well, it wasn't exactly old news to me. I have used my own web site every now and then to look up some of the lists that I have online, from my reading list to my shopping list. I've long discovered that the ``auto-reflow'' option that was present in my phone's web browser was breaking my web site, and I never really knew why.
Now that I had a third party tool to demonstrate objectively that yes, my web site was not very mobile friendly, I started to find ways to fix it.
The first and most important thing was to add a new meta tag to my pages so that the page will scale according to the device's actual width as opposed to the raw pixel count. This is important because of higher pixel densities of the mobile devices compared to the usual run-of-the-mill generic monitor, but expect this to change over time as those 4k (and 8k) displays become more mainstream. For the sake of completeness, the tag looks like this:
Before doing the second one, I made a note of the total file size of all the files that are involved (XHTML, CSS and Javascript only)---it was 205640 bytes. To actually do the second one, I wrote a customised script in Python that made use of csscompressor and slimit together with the built-in
The next step is to turn on browser caching. It took me a while, but creating a .htaccess on the root directory of the public-facing web site with the following lines did the trick:
The last step of turning on compression on the payload turned out to be the hardest to pull off. At first, I was trying to use the deflate or gzip mods for Apache 2.2 (the server that NearlyFreeSpeech.net uses), but after not noticing any changes by spying on the response headers from HTTP in the client browser, I changed tack by using mod_rewrite instead. This meant that I had to append the following lines to .htaccess:
Even with the overhead though, I find the new set up way more responsive and totally worth it. It does mean that I need to do a little bit more work before I upload an updated file, but it does mean that now, the already spartan web site can be accessed much faster in more places.
Alright, enough of this babble talk. Till next time.
Well, it wasn't exactly old news to me. I have used my own web site every now and then to look up some of the lists that I have online, from my reading list to my shopping list. I've long discovered that the ``auto-reflow'' option that was present in my phone's web browser was breaking my web site, and I never really knew why.
Now that I had a third party tool to demonstrate objectively that yes, my web site was not very mobile friendly, I started to find ways to fix it.
The first and most important thing was to add a new meta tag to my pages so that the page will scale according to the device's actual width as opposed to the raw pixel count. This is important because of higher pixel densities of the mobile devices compared to the usual run-of-the-mill generic monitor, but expect this to change over time as those 4k (and 8k) displays become more mainstream. For the sake of completeness, the tag looks like this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>However, that got me thinking even more, especially after using the Page Speed Insights tool from Google. They highlighted some interesting things to think about, namely:
- Removing blocking Javascript/CSS;
- Minification of HTML/CSS/Javascript;
- Enabling browser caching;
- Enabling server compression.
async="async" keyword to each of my script tags, but it failed the XHTML 1.0 DTD validation, so I had to abandon it. That was a big no-no, so I had to abandon that tip that was suggested.Before doing the second one, I made a note of the total file size of all the files that are involved (XHTML, CSS and Javascript only)---it was 205640 bytes. To actually do the second one, I wrote a customised script in Python that made use of csscompressor and slimit together with the built-in
HTMLParser object to walk through the XHTML tree and perform the minification. I didn't replace the files with the minified forms---I am still editing them by hand with Vim---but created an output directory to dump all these files in. This step alone reduced the file size to 185602 bytes, around 90% of the original set of files. Specifically, prettyprint.js shrunk from 3876 bytes to 1299 bytes, or around 34% of the original file size. This is significant considering that all the pages that I ever author end up pulling that file. This is definitely a drastic saving in the long run even without turning on browser caching.The next step is to turn on browser caching. It took me a while, but creating a .htaccess on the root directory of the public-facing web site with the following lines did the trick:
<ifModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/javascript
"access plus 216000 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript
"access plus 216000 seconds"
</ifModule>
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
<filesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(css)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=216000, private"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control
"max-age=216000, public, must-revalidate"
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control
"max-age=300, private, must-revalidate"
</filesMatch>
</ifModule>
Caching made a nice difference in that the scripts and CSS (like prettyprint.js) need to be loaded only once and everything is nice and dandy.The last step of turning on compression on the payload turned out to be the hardest to pull off. At first, I was trying to use the deflate or gzip mods for Apache 2.2 (the server that NearlyFreeSpeech.net uses), but after not noticing any changes by spying on the response headers from HTTP in the client browser, I changed tack by using mod_rewrite instead. This meant that I had to append the following lines to .htaccess:
<ifModule mod_rewrite.c>
Header add Vary accept-encoding
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.gz$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
RewriteRule (.*\.(js|css|html)) $1.gz [L]
</ifModule>
AddEncoding x-gzip .gz
<FilesMatch .*\.html.gz>
ForceType text/html
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch .*\.css.gz>
ForceType text/css
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch .*\.js.gz>
ForceType text/javascript
</FilesMatch>
What this does is that it tries to look for a pre-compressed version of the requested file (seen as %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz) and returns that while adjusting the headers to inform the client that a GZIP stream is incoming. It's a form of trickery but it got the job done well. The last part of it was to adjust the minification script I wrote to generate the pre-compressed files as well. This new set of files generated an overhead of 66252 bytes, which meant that now, the total size of files hosted is 251854 bytes, or roughly 122% of the size of my original set of files. Specifically, prettyprint.js is now only 565 bytes, a cool 15% the size of the original file. The original files are needed in the event that the client browser doesn't support a gzip stream.Even with the overhead though, I find the new set up way more responsive and totally worth it. It does mean that I need to do a little bit more work before I upload an updated file, but it does mean that now, the already spartan web site can be accessed much faster in more places.
Alright, enough of this babble talk. Till next time.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
A Rant on Tuesday
I have no idea why I am writing so often for the past few days. Could it be a side effect from having getting away from Facebook, where I once used to leave behind some nuggets of thoughts that I happened to have at the moment, with only a handful of unblocked people being interested enough to look at them to reply?
I was out sick yesterday with a nasty cold. It was something that probably had been in the making for a while, considering how many people in the office are getting sick from the change in the weather conditions. The way colds work for me is more or less the same -- I end up with heavy congestion to the point where my Eustachian tubes become all bunged up. When that happens, I know that I have been hit with a rather nasty version of the cold bug and have to see a doctor as soon as I can before things go out of control like that time, where it led to a middle-ear infection with pus so bitter and nauseating that---let's not continue that line of thought.
I rested at home, of course, after seeing the doctor and getting all kinds of medication that are necessary to keep the congestion symptoms down. The problem with the medication, of course, is that it does end up making me a little drowsier than usual, what with all the old generation anti-histamines and other fancy stuff that are used to handle the symptoms. I'm too lazy and tired at this point (after putting in a 13-hour day) to actually sit down and list down every single active component in the medication that I'm taking.
The social climate on the whole in SIN is not getting any better. The annual Star Awards is upon us, and with it come the natural celebration of the man-made glitzy (but shallow!) world of television. I don't really like the whole Star Awards thing, and come to think of it, I never really liked all these award ceremonies thing ever since I became old enough to get disillusioned by all these awards. To be given an award by the same group of people who are working with you day in and day out feels strangely out of place, as though it is some kind of artifice to ensure that everyone keeps on working with everyone else in the long run, that everyone will pat each others' back when the necessity arises. That is not my kind of thing, I think. I have my own small bed of coals to walk through for the ``promotion ceremony'' that is coming up, so we'll see how that goes.
I used to like winning awards and prizes. When I was in primary school, it was the one thing that I could consistently get. There was always a reason for me to appear on stage for one award or another. It wasn't so much that I was prolific, but that my primary school itself was not among the elite that even a poseur like me can do enough to be recognised. But when I started to get into secondary school, and later on into junior college, all these awards things start to get on my nerves, even though I still kept on getting them, partly as a trick to see how far I can go, and partly because there was nothing else to be done in the context of school. School work was boring, there was always something more interesting while still academic out of it, and these awards were the one thing that helped to motivate me towards working outside of the curricula. Eventually though, the phoneyness of it all got to me and I soon started to slow down and not give too much of a damn about all these awards thing.
That would also explain why after primary school I refused to join any of the school Chinese Orchestras. The school Chinese Orchestras seemed to be more interested in winning the biennial Singapore Youth Festival awards, with a lot of focus on achieving technical prowess at the expense of actual enjoyment of making music. But that's a rant for another day.
I have no real agenda here except to toss a few words out there to cool off. It is the end of the day, and I think that I have achieved some progress, despite not writing a single line of code for work. I know it's shocking, but sometimes, reading can give a lot of interesting things to think about. As I like to say these days, ``think, don't hack''.
Till the next update.
I was out sick yesterday with a nasty cold. It was something that probably had been in the making for a while, considering how many people in the office are getting sick from the change in the weather conditions. The way colds work for me is more or less the same -- I end up with heavy congestion to the point where my Eustachian tubes become all bunged up. When that happens, I know that I have been hit with a rather nasty version of the cold bug and have to see a doctor as soon as I can before things go out of control like that time, where it led to a middle-ear infection with pus so bitter and nauseating that---let's not continue that line of thought.
I rested at home, of course, after seeing the doctor and getting all kinds of medication that are necessary to keep the congestion symptoms down. The problem with the medication, of course, is that it does end up making me a little drowsier than usual, what with all the old generation anti-histamines and other fancy stuff that are used to handle the symptoms. I'm too lazy and tired at this point (after putting in a 13-hour day) to actually sit down and list down every single active component in the medication that I'm taking.
The social climate on the whole in SIN is not getting any better. The annual Star Awards is upon us, and with it come the natural celebration of the man-made glitzy (but shallow!) world of television. I don't really like the whole Star Awards thing, and come to think of it, I never really liked all these award ceremonies thing ever since I became old enough to get disillusioned by all these awards. To be given an award by the same group of people who are working with you day in and day out feels strangely out of place, as though it is some kind of artifice to ensure that everyone keeps on working with everyone else in the long run, that everyone will pat each others' back when the necessity arises. That is not my kind of thing, I think. I have my own small bed of coals to walk through for the ``promotion ceremony'' that is coming up, so we'll see how that goes.
I used to like winning awards and prizes. When I was in primary school, it was the one thing that I could consistently get. There was always a reason for me to appear on stage for one award or another. It wasn't so much that I was prolific, but that my primary school itself was not among the elite that even a poseur like me can do enough to be recognised. But when I started to get into secondary school, and later on into junior college, all these awards things start to get on my nerves, even though I still kept on getting them, partly as a trick to see how far I can go, and partly because there was nothing else to be done in the context of school. School work was boring, there was always something more interesting while still academic out of it, and these awards were the one thing that helped to motivate me towards working outside of the curricula. Eventually though, the phoneyness of it all got to me and I soon started to slow down and not give too much of a damn about all these awards thing.
That would also explain why after primary school I refused to join any of the school Chinese Orchestras. The school Chinese Orchestras seemed to be more interested in winning the biennial Singapore Youth Festival awards, with a lot of focus on achieving technical prowess at the expense of actual enjoyment of making music. But that's a rant for another day.
I have no real agenda here except to toss a few words out there to cool off. It is the end of the day, and I think that I have achieved some progress, despite not writing a single line of code for work. I know it's shocking, but sometimes, reading can give a lot of interesting things to think about. As I like to say these days, ``think, don't hack''.
Till the next update.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Mumbling on a Sunday
Just a grab bag of thoughts, no real coherent theme except perhaps ``real life and what transpired''.
First off, I'm off Facebook once again. This time, however, I'm going to keep the account ``live'', but just not log in to do anything. I've left a single post on my wall indicating the ways of contacting me, and if you are one of those people who come here from that post, congratulations and thank you very much for keeping in touch somehow.
With that out of the way, let's get back to what I intended to mumble about.
Not too long ago, I made a trip to Teck Seng's place (NTS to those who play the 笛子) to get a replacement for my G-key 梆笛. That poor 梆笛 of mine had been in service since 1993 or so, and I would've continued playing on it if not for the fact that it had developed an extensive network of cracks particularly around the 膜孔---the hole where the paper-thin 笛膜 is placed. That has, naturally, caused me great grief over the past few years as I had to keep replacing the 笛膜 ever so often despite having fixed the cracks by filling them in with super glue. I had wanted to go to Teck Seng's place to get a replacement for a long while, but Sifu's timing had always been off---it was always better to go over with Sifu because then there will be lots of interesting conversations about 华乐 and 笛子 construction in general, among other sundry; it's basically like a meet-up with old friends. The new bangdi that I got is a wonderful instrument---it played wonderfully at the rehearsal last night. It's sweet and nimble, and more importantly, accurate in tuning, with the ability to hit the highest E, F♯ and G, of which the last two notes are notoriously hard to hit with any old 梆笛.
I've also got a G-key 大笛, thus fulfilling one of the items in my shopping list items. This instrument plays with the same range as a regular concert flute, with the chief difference of the added ``buzzing'' provided for by the 笛膜. I like its material feel; the bamboo is dense and even, it felt solid to hold and had a solid tone that resonated well. The only [minor] defect was that it was a little top heavy---the headjoint would feel much better if around two to three centimetres of the bamboo were sawed off. But with a change of fingering technique to use a more ``open'' holding method (I was using the concert flute style of holding with the index finger ``shelf'' resting on the 笛子 body), the weight imbalance can be mitigated almost completely. I have great hopes for this lovely instrument, and am looking forward to the day where I get to use it for a piece in the orchestra. There are a couple of pieces where the use of the 大笛 is necessary, but those have been elusive in rehearsal these days due to the rebuild phase of the cycle. The day will come, I'm sure.
Recently too, I had a big surprise---I got promoted at work. I wasn't expecting it because in my mind, I didn't fulfil the time-dependent criteria that HR set out due to my time in and out of studying overseas. But I'm not complaining; I feel a little more mollified that my work is getting recognition officially. That's a good type of incentive. Now I'm just wondering if they will keep promoting me a la Peter's Principle or will they know where's the sweet spot that best meshes my interests, abilities and capabilities. Only time will tell for this one.
I have started reading S. and it is a very interesting piece of work, with all the sub-texts here and there complete with their own conspiratorial tendencies. Unfortunately, much of S. is of a tactile/haptic nature with a lot of feelies and false documents to further enhance the frame story, it is not a book that I can easily read while I'm on the bus or MRT. Because of that, I am also simultaneously reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy on my Nexus 10, having switched over from my Kindle DX just for variety. The Trilogy can also be loosely described as being somewhat ergodic in nature, with the simul-flow texts and slight time independence in which the concurrent events are sometimes described with, though it still maintains a relatively linear layout without the fancy typographic adjustments the way House of Leaves uses to heighten the emotive content it is trying to convey.
I have finished reading The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night just a few days ago, and it has been a wonderful journey of slightly more than a year through it. The stories are at times moralistic, sexy, and sometimes just pure comedy, and I feel a little sad now that it is all over. It is a different sense of achievement as compared to reading say the KJV. Incidentally, I have placed the NIV on my list of things to read, just to compare and contrast between that and the KJV to see how imagery and interpretation changes over time. I have also added the Saheeh International Translation of the Quran to my list as well---it serves as a good complement to 1001 Nights because a lot of the imagery and moral lessons highlighted in 1001 Nights are strongly steeped in Islamic practices. I think these will all be excellent reads in the future---just not right now. I've read too many epics and need a little break (the Dune series is an epic).
On a last note, I think I will have to break a promise I made with a friend over War and Peace. We don't even talk much anymore, and even if we did, we barely trade a dozen of words. Somehow, I don't even think my friend is going to ever read War and Peace, so I will just go ahead and do whatever I want.
I think that's enough mumbling for a Sunday. Till the next update.
First off, I'm off Facebook once again. This time, however, I'm going to keep the account ``live'', but just not log in to do anything. I've left a single post on my wall indicating the ways of contacting me, and if you are one of those people who come here from that post, congratulations and thank you very much for keeping in touch somehow.
With that out of the way, let's get back to what I intended to mumble about.
Not too long ago, I made a trip to Teck Seng's place (NTS to those who play the 笛子) to get a replacement for my G-key 梆笛. That poor 梆笛 of mine had been in service since 1993 or so, and I would've continued playing on it if not for the fact that it had developed an extensive network of cracks particularly around the 膜孔---the hole where the paper-thin 笛膜 is placed. That has, naturally, caused me great grief over the past few years as I had to keep replacing the 笛膜 ever so often despite having fixed the cracks by filling them in with super glue. I had wanted to go to Teck Seng's place to get a replacement for a long while, but Sifu's timing had always been off---it was always better to go over with Sifu because then there will be lots of interesting conversations about 华乐 and 笛子 construction in general, among other sundry; it's basically like a meet-up with old friends. The new bangdi that I got is a wonderful instrument---it played wonderfully at the rehearsal last night. It's sweet and nimble, and more importantly, accurate in tuning, with the ability to hit the highest E, F♯ and G, of which the last two notes are notoriously hard to hit with any old 梆笛.
I've also got a G-key 大笛, thus fulfilling one of the items in my shopping list items. This instrument plays with the same range as a regular concert flute, with the chief difference of the added ``buzzing'' provided for by the 笛膜. I like its material feel; the bamboo is dense and even, it felt solid to hold and had a solid tone that resonated well. The only [minor] defect was that it was a little top heavy---the headjoint would feel much better if around two to three centimetres of the bamboo were sawed off. But with a change of fingering technique to use a more ``open'' holding method (I was using the concert flute style of holding with the index finger ``shelf'' resting on the 笛子 body), the weight imbalance can be mitigated almost completely. I have great hopes for this lovely instrument, and am looking forward to the day where I get to use it for a piece in the orchestra. There are a couple of pieces where the use of the 大笛 is necessary, but those have been elusive in rehearsal these days due to the rebuild phase of the cycle. The day will come, I'm sure.
Recently too, I had a big surprise---I got promoted at work. I wasn't expecting it because in my mind, I didn't fulfil the time-dependent criteria that HR set out due to my time in and out of studying overseas. But I'm not complaining; I feel a little more mollified that my work is getting recognition officially. That's a good type of incentive. Now I'm just wondering if they will keep promoting me a la Peter's Principle or will they know where's the sweet spot that best meshes my interests, abilities and capabilities. Only time will tell for this one.
I have started reading S. and it is a very interesting piece of work, with all the sub-texts here and there complete with their own conspiratorial tendencies. Unfortunately, much of S. is of a tactile/haptic nature with a lot of feelies and false documents to further enhance the frame story, it is not a book that I can easily read while I'm on the bus or MRT. Because of that, I am also simultaneously reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy on my Nexus 10, having switched over from my Kindle DX just for variety. The Trilogy can also be loosely described as being somewhat ergodic in nature, with the simul-flow texts and slight time independence in which the concurrent events are sometimes described with, though it still maintains a relatively linear layout without the fancy typographic adjustments the way House of Leaves uses to heighten the emotive content it is trying to convey.
I have finished reading The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night just a few days ago, and it has been a wonderful journey of slightly more than a year through it. The stories are at times moralistic, sexy, and sometimes just pure comedy, and I feel a little sad now that it is all over. It is a different sense of achievement as compared to reading say the KJV. Incidentally, I have placed the NIV on my list of things to read, just to compare and contrast between that and the KJV to see how imagery and interpretation changes over time. I have also added the Saheeh International Translation of the Quran to my list as well---it serves as a good complement to 1001 Nights because a lot of the imagery and moral lessons highlighted in 1001 Nights are strongly steeped in Islamic practices. I think these will all be excellent reads in the future---just not right now. I've read too many epics and need a little break (the Dune series is an epic).
On a last note, I think I will have to break a promise I made with a friend over War and Peace. We don't even talk much anymore, and even if we did, we barely trade a dozen of words. Somehow, I don't even think my friend is going to ever read War and Peace, so I will just go ahead and do whatever I want.
I think that's enough mumbling for a Sunday. Till the next update.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Motivation, Drive, Discipline
- motivation
- The psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal; the reason for the action; that which gives purpose and direction to behavior. (WordNet)
- drive
- The trait of being highly motivated. (WordNet)
- discipline
- A system of rules of conduct or method of practice. (WordNet)
Motivation is the prime mover for people to work towards their goals, for without motivation, there is literally no reason for the person to be doing whatever he/she ought to be doing. Everyone should have some form of motivation to get things done if they want to get ahead in life, or as I would like to call it, to improve upon what they are currently experiencing in life.
Drive is the kind of can-do spirit we often find in those we look up to as leaders and luminaries. It is the trait that manifests itself as the relentless pursuit towards excellence, the hyper-enthusiasm that surrounds the particular person that many are aware of but know that they cannot emulate for one reason or another.
The two traits of motivation and drive are what most people will tend to associate with the generic notion of a ``successful'' person in life (and society), but to claim that that is all that is needed, is a serious lie.
You see, motivation and drive aren't things that are around forever. There are days where one will feel unmotivated (or worse still, de-motivated, the kind of motivation-killing often ascribed to external influences), and if all that one runs on is mere motivation, productivity under its many guises will fall drastically. Leaders have their ``off'' days, and it's usually not a concern because these people don't always have to be making decisions all the time. So their ``off'' days can be covered up a little.
For those of us who are a little more minion-like (rank-and-file as they call it in a more politically correct way), we cannot afford this kind of ``off'' day. In fact, there may even be cases where we aren't even motivated with what we are doing at all, because the going is hard, is monotonous or is otherwise torturous, but we like the end result (being strong, having money), we know we have to keep chugging along despite the lack of motivation.
That is humankind's superpower: discipline.
Discipline is what gives you your steady gains in life, it's what keeps you going when motivation decides to take it easy in Tahiti. And the best part is, discipline can be cultivated, unlike motivation and drive.
Yet few people actually realise that simple fact. And that's what makes me sad/angry some times.
I don't like baseball, but I like a metaphor that is often associated with them. In a game of baseball, there are many innings, and the idea is to score as many runs through the bases as possible for each inning. There are many strategies to do that, but the two most extreme ones are going by singles and going by home runs. In a home run, the batter thwacks the ball waaaaay out and tries to run through all the bases at once, thus scoring a run on a single bat. It's high risk, but high return---similar to that of being driven. But the other strategy is to hit singles---have the bases loaded, with each runner advancing one base at a time per bat. It's lower risk, but it yields a steady stream of successes---but it requires discipline. You can keep going, but you won't get spectacular results on the get go.
Life's like this most of the time; small moments of overwhelming triumph with large amounts of just regular survival/living stuff. You need to grind through some stuff in life; it's inevitable. Don't rely on motivation for that, instead, rely on discipline. It keeps the output going while you are still feeling down, thereby reducing the negative impact from your lack of motivation. Can't wake up on time? Develop the discipline to---when your alarm clock rings, sit up right immediately and get off the bed. Do it till it becomes systematic. Now if you want an out, find a new motivation and build a new discipline while abandoning the old system.
If you want to be an innovator, then you will need to learn how to balance these two in a different way. Unfortunately, I have no words of advice for that for now---you're on your own. The proper balance between motivation and discipline is in itself a secret superpower that only the best in the world have perfected.
To paraphrase,
Discipline is what keeps you doing the thing after you've lost your motivation.
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
Patterns and Anti-Patterns
Patterns and anti-patterns. Conformity and deviation. One cannot live without either. With patterns and conformity, we stagnate through complacency, entrenchment, and hubris. With anti-patterns and deviation, we course all through the known knowledge space, each on its own, losing synergies from mutual survival dependence, each fighting each other on their own principles, and end up with chaos.
So the trick is the balance between the two extremes.
The current SIN-'net [in]famous A. Yee is a manifestation of the anti-pattern, the deviant. Except he is without balance, which caused him to end up in his current predicament. I pity him. An easy mistake to make, one that could've been avoided easily had he chosen to do so instead of letting the inner chaos erupt and take over. I envy him, because by sheer matyrdom, he managed to draw attention to the exact struggles that many have in the latencies of their consciousness but have been too comfortable to dare to voice it out in a repressive environment.
It's hard to decide which of the two feelings I have towards him is the dominant, since I only have this one-shot snapshot of the person himself. Maybe he's choice of a shock delivery was a calculated move, his choice of matyrdom for the greater good as his form of altruism -- never mind the self-death if the sheeple learn! Or it could just be the naïveté of one who hasn't figured out the right balance between patterns and anti-patterns, between being conforming and being deviating. The choice between interpretations of his intent itself is probably more revealing on me than on him.
But back to the point: the balance between the two extremes. Patterns are comfortable, they streamline the decision-making process by providing an easy pattern of ready-made questions with relatively ready-made answers. Routines and procedures are exactly the type of ready-made questions with automatic ready-made answers -- the decisions have been made before, and it is merely the execution of the decisions. Computers are excellent at following routines and procedures, as are most orthodox bureaucrats. There is a danger to that of routines and procedures though, as many a person who has used a computer can tell. If the input to the routine or procedure varies vastly from the assumptions behind the designed routine/procedure, the results are unpredictable at best and detrimental at worst. Most system designers know of that limitation, and so they end up trying to account for as many such assumptions as they can to make the routine/procedure seem ``resilient''. Much of debugging falls into that category as well.
That, however, ends up hiding the fact that as time goes on, the assumptions themselves change beyond the scope of the changes made to the routine/procedure, and it will be time to rewrite the routine/procedure. We know this for computer systems, but the same thing can be thought of for social constructs.
Laws are like routines/procedures. They are patterns -- patterns of society that has undergone codification and formalisation. ``One may not generate noise greater than 90dBA after 2100hrs'' can be one such law. ``Everyone must kow-tow to the local Inquisitor should he/she show his/her authority medallion'' can be another such law. Both are patterns, both are routines/procedures to guide behaviour under specific circumstances.
Both are also not always right.
That's where the anti-pattern/deviation comes into play. Anti-patterns/deviations serve as the search frontier for the novel -- new ideas to solve existing problems, new problems that the current patterns do not already solve. We codify this as ``research'' (yet another pattern!) but have mostly confined it to the fringes of human existence, and at a level that is more impersonal than most. Anti-patterns/deviations relating to science (both hard and soft) are acceptable only when confined to those researchers -- people invested with the power to research via their PhDs and their research tenure.
Once you bring it to the mainstream it's no longer research and is an implementation and with it comes different levels of expectations. Implementation of social change has become much harder ever since we gained better communication connectivity. Yes it's much harder, not easier. It's a contrary view and let me explain a little on the why.
You see, bottom-up social change is never smooth nor gradual. It comes like a whiplash in the form of an uprising or revolution, peaceful or otherwise. It is the accumulation of too many patterns that anger people past the point of repression into downright oppression that makes them spring back with a vengeance. And that is how it gets messy, since all the patterns that were present before now get swept away at once by the angry mob. A society without patterns to guide it (in the form of law, bureaucracy or authority) is a mob, and all mobs have the intelligence of the lowest common denominator, until a leader emerges that can somehow influence the mob towards a more patterned behaviour. Ease of communication provides a feedback mechanism for such bottom-up affairs, which can be seen in the Arab Spring of recent times, as well as the Maidan protests. Some of the feedback is from the local people involved, but due to the 'net's reach, we end up having feedback from outside of the local region, which can be good or bad depending on who's evaluating the situation.
What about top-down social change then? It has always existed, but it is confined to the patterned-thinking of whoever is in charge. After all, if it ain't broke, don't touch it, right? If the current set of laws and bureaucratic mechanisms are working, there is little to no incentive to shake them up in any way. More importantly, most of such top-down social changes are too feeble, particularly when it is done by committee. For some things that affect the status quo, the changes will come swift, but for those that can impact on whoever's in power's power base, the changes will be... less swift. Top-down social changes done by a Prince (feudal lord, warlord, dictator... well you get the idea) moves much faster, though the Prince is not immune to the lure of maintaining or elevating his power base.
Much of the [economically] developed world suffers from too many patterns, while much of the less [economically] developed world suffers from too many anti-patterns. International laws, trade agreements, even the status quo itself are patterns that get enforced ad nauseum, whether or not they are actually as effective as they were before. These patterns raise the barrier of entry into the mainstream, which partly explains why the less [economically] developed world remains so. Internally, the less [economically] developed world has too many anti-patterns, which naturally leads to the anarchy that is chaos.
Clearly, I've been reading too much of the Dune series.
Balance. Balance is key. But balance is hard to attain. Seeking a balance between the pattern and the anti-pattern is the goal that we should all strive for, especially in SIN city.
So the trick is the balance between the two extremes.
The current SIN-'net [in]famous A. Yee is a manifestation of the anti-pattern, the deviant. Except he is without balance, which caused him to end up in his current predicament. I pity him. An easy mistake to make, one that could've been avoided easily had he chosen to do so instead of letting the inner chaos erupt and take over. I envy him, because by sheer matyrdom, he managed to draw attention to the exact struggles that many have in the latencies of their consciousness but have been too comfortable to dare to voice it out in a repressive environment.
It's hard to decide which of the two feelings I have towards him is the dominant, since I only have this one-shot snapshot of the person himself. Maybe he's choice of a shock delivery was a calculated move, his choice of matyrdom for the greater good as his form of altruism -- never mind the self-death if the sheeple learn! Or it could just be the naïveté of one who hasn't figured out the right balance between patterns and anti-patterns, between being conforming and being deviating. The choice between interpretations of his intent itself is probably more revealing on me than on him.
But back to the point: the balance between the two extremes. Patterns are comfortable, they streamline the decision-making process by providing an easy pattern of ready-made questions with relatively ready-made answers. Routines and procedures are exactly the type of ready-made questions with automatic ready-made answers -- the decisions have been made before, and it is merely the execution of the decisions. Computers are excellent at following routines and procedures, as are most orthodox bureaucrats. There is a danger to that of routines and procedures though, as many a person who has used a computer can tell. If the input to the routine or procedure varies vastly from the assumptions behind the designed routine/procedure, the results are unpredictable at best and detrimental at worst. Most system designers know of that limitation, and so they end up trying to account for as many such assumptions as they can to make the routine/procedure seem ``resilient''. Much of debugging falls into that category as well.
That, however, ends up hiding the fact that as time goes on, the assumptions themselves change beyond the scope of the changes made to the routine/procedure, and it will be time to rewrite the routine/procedure. We know this for computer systems, but the same thing can be thought of for social constructs.
Laws are like routines/procedures. They are patterns -- patterns of society that has undergone codification and formalisation. ``One may not generate noise greater than 90dBA after 2100hrs'' can be one such law. ``Everyone must kow-tow to the local Inquisitor should he/she show his/her authority medallion'' can be another such law. Both are patterns, both are routines/procedures to guide behaviour under specific circumstances.
Both are also not always right.
That's where the anti-pattern/deviation comes into play. Anti-patterns/deviations serve as the search frontier for the novel -- new ideas to solve existing problems, new problems that the current patterns do not already solve. We codify this as ``research'' (yet another pattern!) but have mostly confined it to the fringes of human existence, and at a level that is more impersonal than most. Anti-patterns/deviations relating to science (both hard and soft) are acceptable only when confined to those researchers -- people invested with the power to research via their PhDs and their research tenure.
Once you bring it to the mainstream it's no longer research and is an implementation and with it comes different levels of expectations. Implementation of social change has become much harder ever since we gained better communication connectivity. Yes it's much harder, not easier. It's a contrary view and let me explain a little on the why.
You see, bottom-up social change is never smooth nor gradual. It comes like a whiplash in the form of an uprising or revolution, peaceful or otherwise. It is the accumulation of too many patterns that anger people past the point of repression into downright oppression that makes them spring back with a vengeance. And that is how it gets messy, since all the patterns that were present before now get swept away at once by the angry mob. A society without patterns to guide it (in the form of law, bureaucracy or authority) is a mob, and all mobs have the intelligence of the lowest common denominator, until a leader emerges that can somehow influence the mob towards a more patterned behaviour. Ease of communication provides a feedback mechanism for such bottom-up affairs, which can be seen in the Arab Spring of recent times, as well as the Maidan protests. Some of the feedback is from the local people involved, but due to the 'net's reach, we end up having feedback from outside of the local region, which can be good or bad depending on who's evaluating the situation.
What about top-down social change then? It has always existed, but it is confined to the patterned-thinking of whoever is in charge. After all, if it ain't broke, don't touch it, right? If the current set of laws and bureaucratic mechanisms are working, there is little to no incentive to shake them up in any way. More importantly, most of such top-down social changes are too feeble, particularly when it is done by committee. For some things that affect the status quo, the changes will come swift, but for those that can impact on whoever's in power's power base, the changes will be... less swift. Top-down social changes done by a Prince (feudal lord, warlord, dictator... well you get the idea) moves much faster, though the Prince is not immune to the lure of maintaining or elevating his power base.
Much of the [economically] developed world suffers from too many patterns, while much of the less [economically] developed world suffers from too many anti-patterns. International laws, trade agreements, even the status quo itself are patterns that get enforced ad nauseum, whether or not they are actually as effective as they were before. These patterns raise the barrier of entry into the mainstream, which partly explains why the less [economically] developed world remains so. Internally, the less [economically] developed world has too many anti-patterns, which naturally leads to the anarchy that is chaos.
Clearly, I've been reading too much of the Dune series.
Balance. Balance is key. But balance is hard to attain. Seeking a balance between the pattern and the anti-pattern is the goal that we should all strive for, especially in SIN city.
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Second Death
Grief is a normal human emotion. It is evoked whenever something or someone dear that was once available suddenly becomes unavailable, forever.
Before I flew off to the US, Leonard Nimoy passed away. When I returned from the US, LKY passed away.
One affected a large part of the anglo world, the other affected mostly a tiny island-nation with light ripples elsewhere.
No, this is not going to be a tribute piece to either men. The objective of this piece is to talk about grief. Grief is the predominant emotion that is present now, particularly in the case of the demise of Singapore's de facto strongman. Among the people that are best known for their general lack of emotion whatsoever (other than bitching about how things are broken), there is an almost universal deadness that comes about from national grief.
Universal deadness -- I can find no other way of expressing this. Almost all official government business is practically stopped, the usual propaganda machines are now churning out praises, memoirs, and eulogies from personalities who have had close contact with the former strongman instead of their usual selection of revenue-generating advertisements or even materials that help promulgate the particular merits of the latest public policy that has been published. The people I talk to seem more lacklustre than usual, as though their life had been sucked out of them. Everyone's thinking about attending the wake of the former strongman, and how to maintain things in the most sombre way possible.
Well, that's how they express their grief for the final loss of an era of nation building as epitomised by the actions of this one man.
If it's not obvious enough, I don't share in the same way of expressing such grief, not because I do not respect the man, but because I prefer a more active and positive form of expressing grief.
I celebrate the person's achievements, I celebrate the person's vision. I do not wallow about the losses, but try to look forward to the future.
Just in my last post, I mentioned about the second death. One only truly dies when the second death comes. And for LKY, that second death isn't about to come for a very very long time.
Is it a loss for us that he is gone now? No.
Look around. The man is mortal, but what he had done is still here. No loss. Celebrate what he did, look forward to the future, share in his vision. Mourn not the loss of the mortal flesh. That's how I choose to handle grief.
Rituals and funerals are for the living and not the dead. Let everyone have their rituals and funerals to provide the closure, but wallow not in the past. The future is already here, and we need to keep things going if we want our little island-nation to keep punching above our weight.
Most importantly though, when the dust settles, it is time to put away the glowing memories of the man, and to examine critically what it is that we need to do for our survival into the future. This may even mean having to tear apart the assumptions and arguments that were put forth in the policies by the strongman himself. It takes courage for sure to do that, courage and time specifically, but it has always taken courage to live for the future.
Living in the past glories is the sure way of ensuring our demise, and that is the single most disrespectful thing that we can do to the man that we claim to bring us up to where we are now.
Before I flew off to the US, Leonard Nimoy passed away. When I returned from the US, LKY passed away.
One affected a large part of the anglo world, the other affected mostly a tiny island-nation with light ripples elsewhere.
No, this is not going to be a tribute piece to either men. The objective of this piece is to talk about grief. Grief is the predominant emotion that is present now, particularly in the case of the demise of Singapore's de facto strongman. Among the people that are best known for their general lack of emotion whatsoever (other than bitching about how things are broken), there is an almost universal deadness that comes about from national grief.
Universal deadness -- I can find no other way of expressing this. Almost all official government business is practically stopped, the usual propaganda machines are now churning out praises, memoirs, and eulogies from personalities who have had close contact with the former strongman instead of their usual selection of revenue-generating advertisements or even materials that help promulgate the particular merits of the latest public policy that has been published. The people I talk to seem more lacklustre than usual, as though their life had been sucked out of them. Everyone's thinking about attending the wake of the former strongman, and how to maintain things in the most sombre way possible.
Well, that's how they express their grief for the final loss of an era of nation building as epitomised by the actions of this one man.
If it's not obvious enough, I don't share in the same way of expressing such grief, not because I do not respect the man, but because I prefer a more active and positive form of expressing grief.
I celebrate the person's achievements, I celebrate the person's vision. I do not wallow about the losses, but try to look forward to the future.
Just in my last post, I mentioned about the second death. One only truly dies when the second death comes. And for LKY, that second death isn't about to come for a very very long time.
Is it a loss for us that he is gone now? No.
Look around. The man is mortal, but what he had done is still here. No loss. Celebrate what he did, look forward to the future, share in his vision. Mourn not the loss of the mortal flesh. That's how I choose to handle grief.
Rituals and funerals are for the living and not the dead. Let everyone have their rituals and funerals to provide the closure, but wallow not in the past. The future is already here, and we need to keep things going if we want our little island-nation to keep punching above our weight.
Most importantly though, when the dust settles, it is time to put away the glowing memories of the man, and to examine critically what it is that we need to do for our survival into the future. This may even mean having to tear apart the assumptions and arguments that were put forth in the policies by the strongman himself. It takes courage for sure to do that, courage and time specifically, but it has always taken courage to live for the future.
Living in the past glories is the sure way of ensuring our demise, and that is the single most disrespectful thing that we can do to the man that we claim to bring us up to where we are now.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Death and Idolisation
I am unsure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I finally have material to write a post here.
Leonard ``Spock'' Nimoy just passed away recently, while a certain old school strongman is hanging in the balance between life and death. A friend posted a note on my Facebook Wall (yes I'm still using that... for now) commenting about how as time went by it was starting to be a little weird to see the pillars of one's youth dying one by one.
I remember talking about the second death before, the idea that one truly dies when everyone forgets the essence of what one was.
So, in some sense, when one is physically dead, one doesn't truly die when one's essence is still remembered. Leonard Nimoy will be remembered as the man who brought us Spock of Star Trek, and he will also be remembered less so as the poet/musician/director he was, while his relatives will remember him as a part of family. He may no longer be among the living having died the first death, but he has not died the second death, and therefore he is still alive in that sense. So, I don't feel the need to feel sad.
Same for the certain old school strongman, should the time comes where he ends up on the other side of the balance.
I suppose I'm odd in the sense that I don't attach too much to the physical embodiment of any particular person. No, I'm not cold. What I mean is, unless I know the person well personally and have interacted with the person on an emotionally more intimate level, if they are a public figure of some sort, I will only know them for their work, and not them as who they are. So, even if they did pass on, I do not see them as a loss, not in the way that is most emotionally jarring. Sure, they're not going to have anything new from them (they're dead), but the body of work that captures their essence isn't gone, and therefore they still live. After all, that is what we know them for, and in some sense it is more real to live in their works than in what we believe we know about their lives.
Because of that, I don't feel too bad or feel that things are crumbling when important people from my childhood age and eventually pass away now, some twenty odd years later. Death is part of life---there can be no distinction of life if death didn't exist. It may sound cold, but I think this is the right type of attitude to face the world.
Idolise the work, idolise the values, but do not idolise the mortal. Mortals die, works and values are eternal.
Leonard ``Spock'' Nimoy just passed away recently, while a certain old school strongman is hanging in the balance between life and death. A friend posted a note on my Facebook Wall (yes I'm still using that... for now) commenting about how as time went by it was starting to be a little weird to see the pillars of one's youth dying one by one.
I remember talking about the second death before, the idea that one truly dies when everyone forgets the essence of what one was.
So, in some sense, when one is physically dead, one doesn't truly die when one's essence is still remembered. Leonard Nimoy will be remembered as the man who brought us Spock of Star Trek, and he will also be remembered less so as the poet/musician/director he was, while his relatives will remember him as a part of family. He may no longer be among the living having died the first death, but he has not died the second death, and therefore he is still alive in that sense. So, I don't feel the need to feel sad.
Same for the certain old school strongman, should the time comes where he ends up on the other side of the balance.
I suppose I'm odd in the sense that I don't attach too much to the physical embodiment of any particular person. No, I'm not cold. What I mean is, unless I know the person well personally and have interacted with the person on an emotionally more intimate level, if they are a public figure of some sort, I will only know them for their work, and not them as who they are. So, even if they did pass on, I do not see them as a loss, not in the way that is most emotionally jarring. Sure, they're not going to have anything new from them (they're dead), but the body of work that captures their essence isn't gone, and therefore they still live. After all, that is what we know them for, and in some sense it is more real to live in their works than in what we believe we know about their lives.
Because of that, I don't feel too bad or feel that things are crumbling when important people from my childhood age and eventually pass away now, some twenty odd years later. Death is part of life---there can be no distinction of life if death didn't exist. It may sound cold, but I think this is the right type of attitude to face the world.
Idolise the work, idolise the values, but do not idolise the mortal. Mortals die, works and values are eternal.
Friday, February 20, 2015
Luni-Solar New Year
So it's day 2 of the Chinese New Year thingy. Not that big a fan of it all, considering that the people that we hardly ever talk to for the rest of the year suddenly feel compelled for one reason or another to meet up and keep up with the pretense of interest and concern. Farcical to the core, but since it is beyond my direct control considering that we are talking about my elders here [respect of elders is relatively inviolable, short of having the said elder doing something so heinous that it will cause the heavens themselves to revulse in horror], there's nothing else to do except to keep my cool and wait out the timer till everything returns to normalcy.
It's funny though. It seems that as each year passes, I find it less and less enticing to keep up with the whole charade that comes with the whole ``Chinese New Year'' experience. House visiting is a chore, and given the swelling numbers of people in general, even visiting the festivals of the according theme is a lacklustre proposition. Or it could just be a sign of the innate dysfunction, but I am really in no mood to over-analyse this whole thing.
It really doesn't help that this year we have the equivalent of four days of wasted time. I'm not sitting around to waste the time though---I'm heading back to the office tomorrow and the day after to get some work done, things that I could probably do at home since I mirror the code I need to work on via my own private code repository. That said, getting that done at home is impossible due to the whole need of humouring those who decide to visit, hence the excuse to make the excursion back to the office, braving the slow circulation of air and lack of air-conditioning to get the uninterrupted time needed to get the work done. I have discharged my duties well for the first two days of the lunar new year, so I don't feel guilty for doing the ``ditching'' thing.
Life has clearly evolved to a new phase. Some time back I was thinking a lot about how to steel and gird myself against the world, to eke out some kind of living on my own and dealing with the ramifications from that choice. A change occurred and soon that single-minded craze started to evolve into something a little warmer and more encompassing, and now I daresay that my perspectives and targets have changed again. I was never really ambitious to begin with, preferring to do live a life akin to the older days where work was just something to do to pay the bills and keep the roof over one's head, and the new choices that were made are further reinforcing this when the limited resource of time is taken into consideration. New things to think about, more worldly things, but not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm being deliberately obtuse because things aren't fully ripe for the telling just yet. Patience.
In a couple of weeks or so I'll be heading off to the US once again for my annual long break, a necessity to ensure that I don't go completely insane given the work load that I have. I'm looking forward to it, but probably with less enthusiasm than what I had started with nearly a year ago when I was mooting the idea.
As I said, a new phase of life.
And now, I should stop, because I'm rambling again. I'm not sure if I want to do that and provide material for people to over-analyse. Till the next update then.
It's funny though. It seems that as each year passes, I find it less and less enticing to keep up with the whole charade that comes with the whole ``Chinese New Year'' experience. House visiting is a chore, and given the swelling numbers of people in general, even visiting the festivals of the according theme is a lacklustre proposition. Or it could just be a sign of the innate dysfunction, but I am really in no mood to over-analyse this whole thing.
It really doesn't help that this year we have the equivalent of four days of wasted time. I'm not sitting around to waste the time though---I'm heading back to the office tomorrow and the day after to get some work done, things that I could probably do at home since I mirror the code I need to work on via my own private code repository. That said, getting that done at home is impossible due to the whole need of humouring those who decide to visit, hence the excuse to make the excursion back to the office, braving the slow circulation of air and lack of air-conditioning to get the uninterrupted time needed to get the work done. I have discharged my duties well for the first two days of the lunar new year, so I don't feel guilty for doing the ``ditching'' thing.
Life has clearly evolved to a new phase. Some time back I was thinking a lot about how to steel and gird myself against the world, to eke out some kind of living on my own and dealing with the ramifications from that choice. A change occurred and soon that single-minded craze started to evolve into something a little warmer and more encompassing, and now I daresay that my perspectives and targets have changed again. I was never really ambitious to begin with, preferring to do live a life akin to the older days where work was just something to do to pay the bills and keep the roof over one's head, and the new choices that were made are further reinforcing this when the limited resource of time is taken into consideration. New things to think about, more worldly things, but not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm being deliberately obtuse because things aren't fully ripe for the telling just yet. Patience.
In a couple of weeks or so I'll be heading off to the US once again for my annual long break, a necessity to ensure that I don't go completely insane given the work load that I have. I'm looking forward to it, but probably with less enthusiasm than what I had started with nearly a year ago when I was mooting the idea.
As I said, a new phase of life.
And now, I should stop, because I'm rambling again. I'm not sure if I want to do that and provide material for people to over-analyse. Till the next update then.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
4k
So some time back while I was waiting for the time to pass before I meet up with Ivan and consort, I walked into one of the electronics store and checked out one of those new-fangled 4k displays that are on the laptop. I must say that I'm... impressed in one way and completely baffled in another.
See, at 4k resolutions (I think it just means that one of the dimensions is within delta of 4000 as opposed to having only 4000 pixels), there is only one way to use it---scaled mode. Running the screen at the ``smallest'' text setting a la Windows 8.1 scaling yields a text size so small that even I cannot read, which is ridiculous considering that I actually can read the teeny tiny fonts on Edythe-II, which are at a more modest 2.5k (over 13.3 inches diagonal).
I don't think that I'm going to consider getting a 4k resolution laptop in the future---what Edythe-II has currently is fantastic. However, if I'm intending to use that machine as a dumb client to some servers to run command-line programs only, then perhaps the ridiculous resolution will work much better with the GNU Unifont with its fixed 8×16 character cell size. Already on Edythe-II I can have 4 vertical screens of text/code---maybe on a larger screen I can eke out 8? As far as I know though, what Edythe-II has at the moment is sufficient, even with the GUI heavy stuff.
I... don't really have anything else to say. Work is still ongoing, life is getting better, and I'm... missing someone. That's about it I suppose.
See, at 4k resolutions (I think it just means that one of the dimensions is within delta of 4000 as opposed to having only 4000 pixels), there is only one way to use it---scaled mode. Running the screen at the ``smallest'' text setting a la Windows 8.1 scaling yields a text size so small that even I cannot read, which is ridiculous considering that I actually can read the teeny tiny fonts on Edythe-II, which are at a more modest 2.5k (over 13.3 inches diagonal).
I don't think that I'm going to consider getting a 4k resolution laptop in the future---what Edythe-II has currently is fantastic. However, if I'm intending to use that machine as a dumb client to some servers to run command-line programs only, then perhaps the ridiculous resolution will work much better with the GNU Unifont with its fixed 8×16 character cell size. Already on Edythe-II I can have 4 vertical screens of text/code---maybe on a larger screen I can eke out 8? As far as I know though, what Edythe-II has at the moment is sufficient, even with the GUI heavy stuff.
I... don't really have anything else to say. Work is still ongoing, life is getting better, and I'm... missing someone. That's about it I suppose.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)