Category: General

Stuff for you to chew on while I wade through rough drafts of 3 or so unfinished pieces.

I told you I was going to go backward (to the basics) while the rest of the world forged ahead.

Screw you, web designer people.

Being more-than-slightly embarrassed, I’d been toying with numerous ways of framing the following sentence, but finally settled on just blurting it out. Maybe it’s just me, but have you noticed the extremely strong connection between your libido and appetite (or conversely, degree of fullness)? I don’t know about you, but sometimes, when I really have to concentrate on something, it turns out to be more productive if I am hungry or otherwise drained. There’s just too much more scope to be distracted otherwise.

There, I went ahead and said it. It wasn’t that hard.

I don’t know, maybe this a sign of this site returning to its roots. A sort of brutal, unabashed openness reminiscent of the times when its readerbase was literally non-existent.

Come on, admit it. You’ll feel much better.

Warning: The following is a severe test of your attention span. You might want to grab a cup of coffee or whatever beverage it is that floats your boat before proceeding. Or just leave.

I try to be non-prejudiced and objective about most things, but sometimes, my clearly preconceived notions and biases on certain topics overwhelm my rational thought process. I proceed to flow with these elitist impulses, after which I end up feeling guilty. And I hate feeling guilty.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Maybe an example will help concretise ideas.

You know that I spend a bulk of my summers travelling, flitting from one place to the next, a large chunk of which is conference-hopping. Consequently, I’ve sat through far more than my fair share of talks; some of which have been good, some, not-so. But (and I don’t know if I am supposed to be blurting this out), while the rest of the world is probably pondering over how good the research is, or how engrossing the speaker is, my first (and most critical) judgement of the “coolness of a talk” is based entirely on how the fonts and symbols are rendered on the projection screen.

Yes, I am being entirely serious.

If the person on the podium is not using a TeXed-up PDF with everything looking “just right” (as in gorgeous), my first reaction is to assume they aren’t “techy”, so they don’t know what they’re talking about. It might be stellar work, but my brain is already beginning to shut off as it’s concentrating on something else, like poorly anti-aliased fonts. I know this is wrong, but it’s an involuntary (even if socially conditioned) response; one that I can’t always control. And doing this sort of thing always gnaws on my insides for a lot longer than it ought to.

For the longest time, I thought I was alone in feeling this way, but as it turns out, really cool people can be this way as well (“…now I can’t stand to read papers that still do use it”). And, of-late, as I’ve been conversing with a few very different people, it’s becoming more and more clear.

EVERYONE’S A SNOB.

For instance, I was talking to the head chef at the university (of the calibre of the highly trained and skilled people who take part in those Iron Chef shows) during one of my baking expeditions. And guess what? He doesn’t eat tomatoes for over 8 months of the year. Apparently, they just don’t taste “right” when they’re off-season, and he can’t stand them.

Can you see?

Sure, it’s not in the same areas, but everyone has something that they honestly believe they’re so much better at, at which their understanding and skills are so much more refined at, … than the normal person, and clearly look down upon others from their high horses when they aren’t up to snuff in those regards.

But the thing I’ve realised is, once you’ve spent the time and gotten good at something, you probably are really more aware of what’s going on, and begin to understand the subtleties. That is just HOW IT IS. Just what is the big problem with rubbing this in the lesser mortal’s face from time to time?

Be it tomatoes, the anti-aliasing of fonts, rendering of symbols, fine wines, cheeses, quality of music recording/playback equipment, optics of the camera … anything. Deep down, everyone has something that they’re a snob about. Rather than feel guilty about it, realise that you’ve worked for it or are gifted, and this need to patronise the other folk is entirely normal; you’re almost entitled to it.

Like I keep saying, everyone’s a snob. Admit it. And let’s move on.

People around you have a problem with it?

Help them. Inform them. Show them what you know (flaunt it if need be), and they will either learn too or shut up.

It’s about time we stopped feeling guilty about the things we really should be proud of.

Addendum: My biggest issues in this regard (apart from the whole people-using-PowerPoint thing, that is) involve people using “crappy” equipment and lossy-formats (MP3) to listen to “crappy” music, and then mouthing-off about something trivial. Don’t know when a Mozart concerto transitions from an Adante to a Moderato? Well then, please shut up about the maximum bitrate of your IPod.

Out of curiosity, just what are those avenues you feel you’ve evolved to appreciate more than the average person? Food? Art? Punctuation? … Does it annoy you immensely when people constantly butcher what you hold so dear? Do you find yourself holding it against them, and regretting it later?

Feel free to chime in.

Isn’t it about time we refilled that section of the karma pot?

I write:

Hello Amanda,

I found your M-card and (what I assume to be) a keycard for your dorm on the floor in Pierpont commons earlier today. I’ve dropped it off at the information desk, so you can pick it up there.

Just thought I’d let you know so you wouldn’t worry,
wahgnube

She replies:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you looking me up and sending me an email. I was really worried about losing it, but I am glad some one found it and turned it in.

Thanks again,
Amanda

Yes, I think that about covered it.

And yes, I understand this was yet another filler post. But this time I’m not lying when I say, “please come back, there will be some real content on here soon.”

Update: Guess who’s number 1(!) on yahoo videos for Naomi Watts sex? Oh google analytics (and our horny search-engine-using teens), how we love you.

This is just a filler post. Real material will resume tomorrow. (Or is that much later today?)

There was a feature request for delineate the other day that wanted the posts vertically centered as well. You know, so they don’t look downright crappy (as in asymmetrical) at high resolutions. As it turns out, for all the talk “web designers” spew about not-using-tables and only using XHTML and CSS, there is no clean (as in trivial) way of vertically centering things using CSS.

So I resorted to much evil hackage, and voilà!

While I am at it, I might as well post a couple of other pretty pictures. Since the source for delineate was free since inception, a few people have snagged it and extended things in their own cool ways. I just post one of these interesting ideas below; incorporation of EXIF data and other general picture information along with the post comment window.

And, entirely unrelated, but too cool to pass up, here’s my new Emacs rendering ^super and _sub script in LaTeX-Mode.

People usually don’t like it when I copy and paste something I wrote elsewhere. But I haven’t done this in a while, so grin and bear it. Cheers.

The following was written up in response to something written elsewhere. So you probably have to have a browse before the context is clarified.

Fact: Men often aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. (Refer to pause or any other tell-tale sign when asked “Do I look fat?”, for an example.)

So please don’t hinge your state of mind (degree of happiness?) on and by passively mulling over everything he has to say (or doesn’t say, or things you “sense from his (in)actions”). For all your keen senses (yes, I admit they exist and try my best not to offend a radar I cannot sense), I think there are times when women forget they are primarily strong, independent, intelligent people (with their own clear opinions) and more-than-deserving of being cherished.

I know I wrote this in response to some random woman’s worry about whether some random guy fancied her. But I address it to all womankind, as a reminder of their individuality and an apology toward them for all that men (including I) have done (and preemptively, for what we will do).

Men are basically stupid. It isn’t worth over-analysing their their (lack of)words/(in)actions, and you probably won’t feel much better if you do.

On a forcibly-related note, my medical insurance providers just sent me a letter stating gender reassignment surgery is now covered under my plan! Oh joy of joys!

And just when you stop being sure what’s a joke and what’s not, you start feeling queasy on the inside.

For all my bitching, I think it’s ironic that the new image thumbnails you see on the right (→) (now moved to the sitemap) are pretty buzzword compliant. They’re rendered dynamically (DHTML), using delineate’s feed (RSS) which is neatly categorised (tagged), via a cron job (asynchronous? XML, almost AJAX?) and parsed using fucking[1] Python (Python) to generate strict, standards compliant code (XHTML) and styled using stylesheets (CSS).

Is there anything else people want to pile on there? I abhor javascript, so for my sites, AJAX (if and when it shows up) will probably not go beyond AAX.

<Dr. Weird> Gentleman, behold! Web two point oh! </Dr. Weird>
[Representative MP3 for those who don’t watch enough TV.]

[1] Yeah, screw you too.

I absolutely hate the fact that there is an entire meta-blogging industry out there run by these so-called experienced web gurus. These are the supposedly “early” (circa 2004) adopters of technology, and they pretty much get off on writing about writing, or writing about technology that makes weblogging possible (or easier). They’re the alpha bloggers and all the women flock to them. These are the kinds of people who use words like Web2.0 and AJAX and think they sound intelligent.

They pretty much seem to get off on this and don’t see the need to come up with any interesting topics of their own worth talking about, or even giving the rest of the world a peek into their lives. No, their entire post history reads like a giant help-the-clueless-newbie tutorial.

What is the intarweb?
How to blog?
What is blogging?
How to install blogging software?
How to customise blogging software?
How to draw an audience?
How to optimise your site’s position on a search engine? (Now these are the sleaziest of the lot)
And on and on…

You know what, just shut up. There are people out there who’ve been entrenched in technology for far longer. Things like maintaining a web page are not hard to do. And even if someone reaalllly technophobic needs to maintain a journal (on-line!), I don’t know, for survival, they have services like blogspot that even my grandma can find herself and use.

Get it into your thick skulls that you aren’t needed. Please stop mooching off the pseudo-celebrity status you’re so hung up on.

(As I intelligently get away with a meta-meta-post. A post about people who post about posting!)

“Though intellectually stimulating, working on fundamental theories can often feel like a thankless task. Results which don’t align with common experience and intuition we’re sceptical of and eager to dismiss, and those that do seem apparent and consistently underwhelm.” — Me, 2005

Rather than be one facet of my existence, being in grad school now seems to be what defines me. I don’t really have a problem with this per se, but sporadic comparisons between life as it stands and life as I envisioned it being by now usually cause some distress. This recently came to the fore yet again, when I was forced to answer a variant of the question every senior grad student dreads to hear—”When are you finishing up here?”

Like everything else in this unnecessarily-hurried part of the world, my landlords were beginning breathing down my neck concerning my leasing decision for 2006–2007. As in, the year after next!

In all honesty, I don’t know what I’m going to do a few minutes later. And besides, for all I know, I could get hit by a truck by 2007. But anyway, I mulled over it since they wanted an answer. A short while ago, I reached a decision, signed my lease (yes, it’s freaking insane), and had a very long (and somewhat awkward) conversation with my parents about my decision to spend another year in grad school here.

And by “another year”, I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m messing with the initial master plan. The grand total at the moment seems five years, as it was initially. It’s just, at some point, it looked like I could be out in four. It’s still entirely possible, but then I thought, what then?

I really like what I do here, and have a ton of ideas as to what else I plan to do. I have little planned on what to do next, besides I’ve assumed it’s going downhill from here since it can’t be better. So what’s the point? What’s the rush? Why not spend a little more time and do a good job, as opposed to a job that’s good enough?

And oh, in these time-scales, the hotness-meter ought to be in the 27,000–30,000 bracket by finishing time!

I quickly jotted down a road-map of what I’d intended to do and planned to learn in the remaining time, and got it OKed by the higher ups. I will con this place out of a couple of master’s degrees and a doctoral degree in more than one field yet.

And we all know that I can’t write when not on my computer. So eye decided to clean up delineate again. Now categorised thumbnails, temporal archives, and even a gimmicky link to a random image work. Plus, the annoying names of next and previous images which seemed like a good idea at the time (but confuse the hell out of people) are now gone.

I am so proud of it I could cry. Sniff.

All it now needs is an easy way to get back to the ‘home’ page from all other pages. I have been having some difficulties doing this without cluttering it up even more in terms of buttons in the bottom.

Love it? Hate it? Overwhelmed by my shameless plugging?

Let me know.

Normal people can just close this browser tab and come back another time.

If you’re a geek (like this site’s author) and frequent it for juicy tidbits on geeky things, I know you’ve been sorely disappointed for quite a while. What, with all the talk about foxy nurses and sweet-scented women and such.

Fear not my over-nourished, under-active cohorts, things are about to change.

Over last weekend, after ages, I tried to build GNOME from CVS. Contrary to popular belief, I am thankful for the fact that it’s freaking cold out in these parts. This keeps my otherwise-extremely-flaky laptop cool and alive at 100% processor usage for the evening or whatever it takes to build GNOME and its cohorts. No more “thermal event” system failures. Yay!

For the next 8 months, anyway.

Turns out, it wasn’t worth the pain [PDF]. Try zooming into that figure, and it’s like an infinitely dense fractal. No matter how deep you go, the dependency arrows still seem like a mangled mess. After toying around with some small sample apps, I gave up and decided to wait until the distribution folk packaged the bigger apps like Evolution. Along the same lines, I did embark toward modern doohickeys like Xgl, but soon gave up on that idea as well.

Honestly, I muttered something akin to “Screw that, life is too short”. But I have to say,

» zenity is the most simply-useful thing I’ve seen in a long while,
» what the fuck is up with so much Python use? Don’t people realize using anything other than C is nearly-automatically dog slow? Don’t even get me started on Java. Why not just start using Haskell or LISP, or heaven-forbid, C# everywhere?,
» after so long, gnome-terminal finally doesn’t seem sluggish,
» and why is esound still around?

But all was not lost. During the course of mucking around, I realised Emacs could be built using GTK as its widget toolkit and using Xft for anti-aliased fonts. So, in between writing something, I checked it out and built it.

Voila!

It’s so sweet, this post is being typed up on it. All the Emacsy flavour you love, none of the calories!

Here’s how you can go about getting it yourself:

1. Fetch the sources from savannah’s CVS.
   export CVS_RSH=ssh
   cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co emacs
   cd emacs
   cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs up -Pd -r XFT_JHD_BRANCH
2. Configure and build it.
   cd emacs
   ./configure —prefix=/your/fav/place —with-gtk —with-xft
   make bootstrap
   (Wait 19,000 years.)
   make
   make install
3. Run it and have enjoy!
   /your/fav/place/bin/emacs --font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10"

When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of science fiction literature. Books that frequently featured in my reading-lists included works by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. I can safely say—and I kid you not—I’ve read over 95% of everything Asimov has ever had published. And, to say the least, he was extremely prolific.

Bragging rights aside, none of this has too much to do with today’s post. It’s just, an oft recurring theme in his books involved a scenario similar to what follows. At regular instances, when the protagonist’s mind is at a peaceful, comfortably-numbed state—he’s asleep and dreaming, he’s idling, nearly asleep and not really thinking about the problem at hand, he has just orgasmed and lying spent inside the woman—he is suddenly struck with this brilliant flash of insight, whence he puts all the known pieces of the puzzle together, and, with a heavy dose of intuition, solves the problem at hand (usually involving the fate of mankind).

But always, every single time, this brilliant deduction is lost to the ether in his dreamy state. As he wakes, he’s left only with the strongest inkling he has the answer. He knows he has it, but doesn’t really have it. This is constantly at the back of his (and the reader’s) mind until the last few pages of the book, when things start to fall in place, and everyone realises he knew, and was right all along.

But why am I telling you all this?

Bear with me, it’s a little abstruse.

I am an avid aficionado of the local comedy-club scene, and I frequently see numerous artistes perform with different levels of success. But it is almost always fun. Now this is something I’ve always wanted to try, but I definitely need a lot of practise on (what I decree as) a stellar bit before my self-confidence is up to par. It’s not like I’ve not performed often on stage, but in most cases it’s something like a song or a play where everything is carefully rehearsed.

Now I know I can be a funny guy, but it’s a sort of dark, dry, sarcastic, rapier wit—the sort of thing which takes some getting used to. Plus my accent and usually unclear speech pattern don’t help.

This situation almost changed a short while ago. Almost.

A couple of days ago, when I was nearly-napping on my couch, I ran through an entirely perfect bit in my head which I knew I was funny, the material was fresh and original, my timing was spot on (you can not-stammer in your dreams) and I was confident. I’d struck gold, but, it’s just, I couldn’t get myself to sit up and jot it all down before I forgot it.

My brain tried to jolt me up, but I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t, because I was asleep.

And now, the nagging feeling of knowing I had it all, and that it’s still there, but just out of reach is killing me.

I can’t wait for the last few pages of my book.

Fun “science”: Did you know that your body is mostly paralysed when you sleep and dream? It is this that prevents you from acting out your dreams; and this is the mechanism that doesn’t function properly in people who are prone to things like sleepwalking.

Along the lines of parts one and two of this series.

I was at dinner with this woman, and during the entire time, all I was fixated on was how fabulous she smelt. I wasn’t really seeing her or listening to what she was saying, or even aware of my food. Now I am a sane person, and know it wasn’t her her but rather something she was wearing that I was obsessing over, but that’s about all my brain could process.

I almost—but stopped short—of blurting out the obvious “You smell most excellent,” you know, for fear of sounding too creepy. Because, let’s just say, I am not too keen on anything said being misconstrued as a come-on.

So my question to you is this, how does one get by in such situations? How can you compliment, without appearing creepy and probably get a tip or two in the parfum department instead of a glass of water on your face?

Is this another one of those situations you best avoid because you just can’t win?

On a related note, I think my sense of smell is slowly becoming hypersensitive. Sadly, this seems to be at the expense of my other faculties.

I had a couple of semi-serious posts typed up which tried very hard at being funny. Then I spent a few minutes with everyone’s favourite new pastime, google analytics, and struck gold with little-to-no effort. At the end of this post, I’ve linked to a list of things people have searched for to find this site over the last week. Last week!

Apparently, people are insanely obsessed with nurses. Especially the foxy kinds.

Why am I not surprised?

— Young age inappropriateness warning —

(What really is young? Ask your mommy.)

The list of search terms awaits.

What’s really hilarious is that search engines actually link here for much of this sort of content people search for. And these are engines written by PhDs, apparently.

Go away. There are no videos of nurses being raped on this website.

Remember this?

I’ve owned one for a few months now, and here are some terse thoughts.

I really like it, and for the most part it performs as advertised. The playback is stellar, the file support is arguably perfect and the recorder works like a charm. It even goes well with my Sennheisers. A little power and impedance matching <Shatner> before you buy</Shatner> can go a long way. And oh, the advertised battery life of 35 hours is not a lie (at least while sticking to music), who’d have thought?

Now, onto the negatives.

» FLAC encoding-decoding is a very assymetrically loaded process. It takes ages to re-encode my discs to FLAC, and it really doesn’t even get all that small, though playback is acceptable (as in acceptably awesome).

» The radio only picks up FM (or AM, I don’t recall), and there aren’t too many channels on FM (or AM). At least in this little town.

» I’ve managed to lock it up a few times, on average, once a month. But I can’t reliably repeat it, so don’t know what is going on nor can I file a bug report. Having stability issues in relatively simplistic hardware is not acceptable. Come on, it’s not like this is an XBox 360 with numerous cores.

» Video playback is something I never thought I would use, but it’s a cool thing to have for a long bus ride back home late at night. I watch episodes of Birdman, Rocketboom and other short shows. The point being, you really can’t stare at the teeny screen for too long at 15 FPS or whatever.

Which means no DVD ripping is advised. But getting mencoder to create videos playable by it works like a charm.

» The much famed camera (EOS 20D) to X5 connector doesn’t work, even after a couple of firmware upgrades. Which means, I can’t count on having an extra 30 odd gig hard disk on hand when my couple of gigs of flash memory in the camera run out.

Which they do.

» The interface is a little clunky at first, but it is a breeze to work with the nipple button once you get used to it. Plus you don’t have to stare at the screen when you’re changing something, you can have it hooked to your belt or in your pocket, and once you’ve figured the “key-stroke combos”, you can easily change playback settings and what not.

So this really isn’t a negative, except that it can put you off initially.

Update: While we’re on the topic of music, check out Pandora (requires Flash), an intelligent radio station generator, part of the Music Genome Project. You feed it what you like and it figures out from its insanely huge taxonomy database as to what to playback to you.