Month: February 2006

I was a little distraught when I wrote the last post, but I plan to be more rational this time. This post will contain a careful comparison between the Macbook Pro (MBP) and the Thinkpad T60p (T60p) to, you know, help me rationalise what it is I was thinking when I hit that cancel button on the MBP and chose the T60p instead. These are just notes to self.

Update: Here are the factors supporting my decision to pick the T60p over the MBP. The factors countering my decision are still being written up.

^* Final-final price, after all academic discounts and taxes.
^** Averages of values I’ve seen reported under minimal use.

The following is an example of the aforementioned “academic discounts”.

:(

A number of factors[1] contributed to this, but:

 Thank you for contacting the Apple Store.

 Your order W1944xxxx has been successfully cancelled.



 Product #   Product Description                      Qty     Price   Ext Price
 __________  ______________________________        ______  ________  __________
 Z0DF        MBPRO 15/2.0 CTO                           1  2,659.00    2,659.00

             With the following configuration:

             Processor                 065-6460  2.0GHz Intel Core Duo/256MB
             Memory                    065-6107  2GB 667 DDR2- 2x1GB SO-DIMMs
             Hard Drive                065-6106  100GB Serial ATA Drive@7200rpm
             Optical Drive             065-6096  SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
             Modem                     065-6201  None
             Apple Software Solutions  065-6200  None
             Keyboard/Mac OS Language  065-6461  BkLit Keyboard/Mac OS
             Country Kit/AEX           065-6102  Airport Extreme Card&BT
 _______________________________________________________________________________



             Subtotal:                   $       2,659.00
             Sales Tax:                  $         159.54
             Total price for your order: $       2,818.54

 Because you have successfully cancelled this order, you have not been
 billed for the items listed above.

[1] Those issues primarily include Apple kicking free software people squa’ in the nuts, and finding a better spec’d Thinkpad. I wish I didn’t feel so sad.

Today’s post was fuelled by comments on the last one.

I’m currently in my fourth year[1] of graduate school “working” on my PhDs, and I’m one class short of a master’s degree in mathematics. Is that something I signed up for when I entered grad school? No. Is that something that’s immediately necessary—in the sense that it’ll greatly enhance my knowledge/capacity/chances of landing a stupendous job? No. Is it something that I’m insanely passionate about or care a great deal for? Not really. But is it something I’m going to get just-for-the-heck-of-it anyway? Hell yes!

If you’re still with me, there is a point to what I’m saying, and I’ll get to it.

Just like everybody else, I’m decent at doing a few things and suck at just about everything else. But, unlike most people who are forced out of their niche, I’ve ended up structuring my life so that I don’t (need to) deviate in the teensiest from what I believe “comes naturally” to me.

If you asked me to jot down what I’d be doing if I weren’t a science geek, I’d probably rattle off a few things—composing/performing music, partaking in a form of creative expression like advertising[2], being a pastry chef, … and that’s about it. If you’re looking for a common thread here, there isn’t one other than my belief that I could live a life doing any of these things with no real effort from my end—like how things are now with being a science geek.

But, while I’m quite OK with doing much in areas I deem trivial—even if I don’t particularly care for it, like the math master’s[3]—I am strictly opposed to the prospect of “working hard” toward achieving an end because it’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me.

Now, herein lies my predicament.

Since it has all come so easily to me in the one prominent and persistent aspect of my life—school—I’ve gotten quite spoilt and expect it all to naturally be handed to me everywhere else as well. Because I deserve it(TM). The rational part of me comprehends that this is bollocks, and that I’m screwed, but that hasn’t seemed to change my outlook toward the world.

Hypersensitive to detail as they are, women’s internal red-light warning beacons shine brightly when they get wind of this, because in their eyes, I’m just this ambiguous floater who won’t “fight for them” given the need[4]. And that I will flake out if the relationship shifts from play… to work. While I wouldn’t declare these fears unfounded, I think it’s harsh. Because I believe that when all the chips fall in place, relationships can be a breeze too.

Just like every other aspect I allow in my life[5].

[1] That’s 4 years + 4 years undergrad + 12 years school + 2 years kindergarten + 1 year preschool; for the number junkies in the audience keeping track of this sort of thing.
[2] Clearly, watching programs based on what sorts of ads run during their breaks qualifies me an expert.
[3] According to my math-averse friends, this isn’t in the least trivial. But that’s not the point; it’s still trivial to me.
[4] A remnant from cavewoman times.
[5] And that, my lovelies, is one of the non-trivial reasons I am still alone. And, it’s not that this is a point of view that is trivial to fix; so it won’t be.

Alright people, it so happens that my life has (and I have) been sort of bleh for a while now. Apart from a constant daily grind that I’m ambivalent about, I’ve also been feeling remarkably uncreative. I’ve been sleeping oddly (2–3 days without sleep, followed by a day or so entirely sleeping); and spending a good chunk of my waking moments salivating over my new not-yet-shipped computer hasn’t helped either.

Somewhere along the line (my hiatus coupled with only being active online at Mac forums), my site’s primary traffic base has shifted (so says google analytics) from being 9/10 chic women to 10/10 Mac geeks (6/10 UNIXish + 4/10 Artsy).

I am not particularly pleased by that, but I’m not in a capacity or frame of mind to reverse the trend either. Which, I must admit, sucks.

But I figure I might as well kick up some uproar by violating confidence and posting some recent communication. I’m going to snip all informative regions, highlight the sections I found most controversial, and sit back and watch the fun. I am not even going to get into whether I agree or not with the mailer.

From an e-mail to me:

I have actually moved-on to making small bags of money (more like pouches than bags I think) at a job that seems to be less real than grad school.

… snip …

The plan is to try some totally different field for a little while, to see how I like it compared to good old engineering.

… snip …

It looks like you’re getting good action down there with junior girls and what not. Desi chicks aren’t really top drawer stuff. As discussed, a downhill slope from our VM days. And everyone seems to be married/hooked up already. I wonder if the old cliche about the best one being already taken is true.

… snip …

And I just have to add this for effect. Two (and I’m limiting it to two) adjectives that women back home have brought up when the conversation steered toward women here are: Phirangi[1] slut and Caucasian bimbo. In light of what the mailer above had to say, how am I to intepret this malevolence?

>:)

[1] I don’t know Hindi, so I don’t know what phirangi means. I’ve just assumed it to be foreign. I tend to assume a lot.

Unlike most men who tend to brag about even their most minor exploits, I tend to stay very quiet. And being someone who spends a good chunk of his existence carefully observing the system and intelligently (ab)using loopholes, it appears as though I have very little to say.

It’s an odd feeling; being proud of and wanting to scream out loud everything you’ve accomplished, but shutting up because you know it’s the only smart think to do.

(I’d written up a version of what I paste below to present to a Mac audience, basically asking the question, “How free software friendly is OS X”? As it turns out, Fink and DarwinPorts provide a free software package management system atop Darwin/OS X—just like any decent UNIX(R) OS. And that means I might run OS X for a while after all!)

When Apple first announced its shift to Intel processors last year, I recall a slew of articles from die-hard Apple fans who almost seemed to feel cheated. It seemed as though the one thing that differentiated them from the rest of the PC world was snatched away from them—while they were kicking and screaming.

Now I’m probably in the minority, but I was personally very pleased by this decision. It has caused me—someone who has appreciated but never really considered Apple machines—to order a relatively expensive laptop from them. Clearly, this move won them at least one additional customer.

But where am I coming from?

I’m a geek who’s been around x86 machines since I was 2 (two). And currently, after all these years, I am working on PhDs—in applied mechanics and scientific computing—where I get to play with large clusters (x86, of course). My primary work environment has been GNU/Linux for over a decade now, and exclusively for the past few years. And no, I haven’t a life, or friends.

Though I’ve had access to very capable generic machines, I’ve always enjoyed the visual appeal and unexplainable charm that Apple hardware presented (Yes, I’m looking at you, delectably-drool-worthy Orange iBook). But tantalising as they’ve been, the rational portion of my brain kept reminding me—different architecture: endianness, RISC/CISC, … . I am in no way saying it is inferior or bad; it’s just that I was not used to it and felt uneasy at the thought of making it my primary computing platform. This is the same mentality—but in the opposite direction—that drove those “I feel so cheated” articles I mentioned earlier.

Now before you go, “Why do you care what’s on the inside?”, I’d like to remind you I’m a geek, and these things matter to me. I care primarily because I work on things like optimising numerical libraries at low levels for a living, but even if I didn’t, I would feel strongly for some rabid-pseudo-religious reason or the other. Sometimes, you’re just entrenched and comfortable with what you’ve known and come to love, that’s all.

Which brings me back to the point of this story. Now that the shift to Intel processors had begun, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to pick up my x86y goodness in a fabulous casing with cool glowey LEDs; and I did. I know this will aggravate the more hard-core Apple fans, but I say “x86 goodness in a fabulous casing” because I’m thinking of it as just that: a regular, albeit attractive, PC variant. All the components inside seem generic enough, and I was carefully considering another close equivalent to the MacBook Pro.

I know. You’re going to scream “But what about OS X and all the other software goodies!?!”.

Honestly, I don’t know.

Being at a university, I’ve had the opportunity to use OS X from time to time, but never really long or seriously enough to form an opinion as to whether I love it or not. Until a few minutes ago, I was quite certain I was going replace OS X with a capable GNU/Linux distribution the moment I got my grimy little hands on my new machine. I would then have all that I wanted, a hardware and software platform I was used to and learnt to love, and the exterior shininess I’d pined for. But it just dawned on me that OS X being a UNIX(R) variant (even if quite seriously bastardised at that), and my lack of plans to do anything too fancy, that maybe it would foot the bill as my primary work environment.

So, here’s where I get to my question. I spent a few minutes jotting down my most-used applications (as an indicator of the sorts of tasks I do), and was wondering how much of this could be achieved natively in OS X? I am OK with the idea of installing an additional X server, for the applications that don’t like drawing using Apple’s own shiny graphics subsystem, but I am not OK with the recreating a GNU/Linux environment (ala Cygwin) inside OS X (to provide what it ought to in the first place).

Though I’m a bit of a Free Software zealot, and would probably move on to GNU/Linux anyway as soon as it were possible, I would love to explore the idea of just using a slick UNIX(R) based OS to get all that I need done, plus offering me some of the much-talked-about award-winning über-intuitive hyper-usability-tested interface done just right(TM). Maybe I will give OS X a whirl exclusively for a couple of months before making up my mind. Anyway, without stalling anymore, here is a list of my most used applications and often performed tasks.

All the time:
Bash shell
“Standard” command line utilities (e.g. gawk, grep, wget, diff, patch, …)
GNU Emacs (Just about all programming and writing)
GNU Screen (Multi-tasking)
Mozilla Thunderbird (E-mail, mailing lists, news, web logs, podcasts, …)

Often:
Mozilla Firefox (Browsing the Internet)
Gaim (Instant messaging)
Rhythmbox (Listening to music)
MPlayer (Playing files in every media format under the sun)
SSH (Secure remote access)

GCC/Intel Compilers (Building C/C++/Fortran code)
CVS/Subversion/Arch (Revision control)

LaTeX (Typesetting documents)
xpdf/xdvi (Viewing typeset documents)

The GIMP + ufRAW (Photo/Image processing)
Inkscape (Simple drawing)

Matlab/Octave (Prototyping code)
Mathematica/Maxima (Tedious algebra)

Less often:
GDB/DDD (Debugging code)
Ripping audio CDs to FLAC/Ogg Vorbis
Burning data and audio CDs
Mozilla Sunbird (Maintain my schedule)

Rarely:
Azureus (Download ISOs and such)
Audacity (Record and edit audio)

I would also like to (but currently can’t) try out voice conversations via services like Google Talk, but it’s not a requisite.

So, friendly Mac users, can all of these apps be run natively in OS X? If not, what would it take? Could you suggest alternative applications? What about programming libraries? Do the GNU auto-build-tools work seamlessly on OS X too? (As in can I just fetch, for instance, the GIMP and its dependencies, and build it without much mucking around?)

Anything else I ought to know?

And thank you thank you for your patience if you get to this point.

From hippy geek to hippy geek with cool-glowey LED thingy.

I know exactly what you’re thinking. Just what sort of music could the pundit have fancied last year? Right?

Here you go; some half a dozen of the more decent things from last year I added to my album collection.

What can I say? Respect the fuckin’ Brits.

That will be all.

I seem to be pinning some sort of major lifestyle change along with the whole “selection of a new laptop” thing. This basically means that the ThinkPad was pretty much a non-starter in our little race.

For instance, I’ve decided on replacing my generic backpack,

with something more sporty, like so:

Because, clearly, these are the sorts of changes that really matter.

Have you ever wondered whether the grand dreams you had for life were akin to a one night stand with an old flame?

Full of seductive words, excitement and high hopes… only to crash around you into a situation of embarrassment, disillusionment and great disappointment.

Being the geek that I am, I’m going to get technical for a minute, or three. This is a fundamental principle that’s known to anyone who’s done high-school physics, so I apologise for boring you in advance if this isn’t new to you.

Everything in this universe prefers to exist in a state where its energy is minimised. For instance, you’re more comfortable when you lie down as opposed to when you stand up, because lying down—among other things—reduces your “gravitational potential energy”. If you consider the following plot between your energy ‘E’ and some measure of your state ‘S’ (be it an indicator or whether you’re lying down or standing, or something more important…),

it is clear that you’re likely to exist at a state where S=S_E. This is an equilibrium state, where you’re in a local energy minimum. And since you’re in this “energy well”, and you need to put in effort (dS) to get out of that well, you can exist fairly happy in this state—what’s called a stable equilibrium. i.e. Left alone, you probably won’t change very much, because after you try to change by providing energy (doing work) totalling to ‘dS’, all you get for your trouble is to end up at E=E_H (some high), which isn’t even a minimum.

Not pleasant.

Think of this as actually getting up and out of bed; resulting in a state you’re less comfortable in. What’s really the point?

Like I started off saying, this measure of state, ‘S’, needn’t be something trivial, like “Is she lying down?”, but could be something more important, like “Is he single?”. In this case, the work done, ‘dS’, would be actually leaving your corner, and chatting someone up, even if it is only to get shot down and end up at E=E_H again. (Again, not what you want).

But, a more thorough examination of the curve gives us the following.

Woah! There is this huge (energetically) favourable state, E=E_NS (not-single), just waiting to be attained. If only one could see the bigger picture and took the time to cross the energy barrier (dS)—which, from the totally accurate plot, is a trivial effort—much bliss awaits.

And this, is the sort of pseudo-reasoning a geek must give himself to actually go out and work toward changing his state… to one of no-longer chronic-singleness.

He’s around. He’s just uninspired and unmotivated. Sorry.

There are only so many doses of “good news” in a week he can handle before he breaks and decides to curl up in a corner.

But he’s using that time to come up with a collaborative photo log project which is themed along the lines of this journal.

Seven “artists”. One year. One photo a day.
Much less work per person.

Update: So you’re not too disappointed, here’s a Levis ad featuring a blind man [~4.35 MB MPG]. It’s like that old saying goes, “if at first you don’t come up with something original, infringe copyright”.

I had two phone calls today. I could stop there, and that in itself would be news.

But it gets better.

Each of the phone calls informed me about the impending marriages of another two of my friends. As in one each; to other people.

Just a short while before, I was gloating about how I’d nearly conned the uni into giving me my math masters. Then suddenly, my meager intellectual achievements seemed so tiny in comparison, and I began to trudge along the familiar trail of “what’s wrong with me?”

Maybe this has something to do with it?

I spent a lot of time scouring the intarweb trying to find decent specification comparisons between the new Thinkpad T60 line of notebooks, and Apple’s own Macbook Pro. Surprisingly enough, there weren’t any that were satisfactory. So here you go, a comparison of the top of the line (slightly customised) variants from Lenovo and Apple. Clearly, there are intangibles—like “even without the second fucking mouse button, I’d feel so much more sexier with one of them in a coffee shop”—that are not taken into account below. Plus the sweet education discounts mentioned previously haven’t been accounted for either.

Update: Also see a more detailed comparison between the ThinkPad T60P and the Macbook Pro.

Yes, I know this is a stunt to increase traffic. These are desperate times, people. Sorry.

The thing about perpetually being in the uni is that you’re perpetually poor.

Sure, they try to hand-wavingly distract you from it,

but you know you’re still poor.