actuality.log

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.

Before I proceed, here are a bunch of ads:

1. eye is less lax about updating delineate, so check it out.
2. h has written up something he’s been wanting to for a long long time. It might not be informative to many, but he feels much better anyway.
3. I’m nearly down with the concept of being vegan, but freeganism is just a bit much. Icky.

Often times, I do stupid things. For reasons best left unexplained, I carefully sort my riches out into different accounts based on ease of retrieval, interest rates, purpose of savings, and so on. While all this is well and good, it makes absolutely no sense when you make no money!

It is a nightmare to manage. And now what’s happened is I’ve lost track of a few of them. Amongst these include those that ought not to be depleted, but are. This is very bad news.

Why the fuck can’t I leave personal financial planning to those who know what they’re doing?

I am a scientist, not a jew, damn it.

This web log is slowly going to abuse freedom of speech, just like all the stand-up comics its author aims to emulate. Not to worry, it will eventually be an equal opportunity offender.

I have been trying to keep my posts somewhat-short for a while now. This was initiated to benefit those who aren’t keen on large blocks of text, but it hasn’t been pleasant. It’s not me. At least, it’s definitely not how I write (or speak, for that matter).

My writing style is more along the lines of long-winded and usually muddled, often seeming pointless. That is what I enjoy, and that’s how this post is going to turn out. Lest you’ve forgotten, though I do enjoy your presence and value your opinion, this journal—at its core—is primarily an egocentric release mechanism. Nothing more.

So, what I’m saying is, “It’s going to be long and boring. Deal with it.”

Our topic of the day comes to the fore because of the recent passing of Turkey day. Now personally, not being a fan of Turkey and having work to get done, it really wasn’t terribly different from any other of my days. But the constant jibba-jabba of people around being thankful for this and thankful for that resulted in a stark realisation:

I am not really thankful for anything.

There have been points in my life where I’ve been called “an ungrateful wretch” (yes, in those exact words), but I’d rather believe I feel this way (thankless) because I really don’t have anything to be thankful for.

Really.

Like the rest of the world, all I have are huge internal lists of needs and ambitions, and to cut to the chase, I am nowhere near where I ought to be. Now that clearly sucks, and justifies why I am not thankful for anything. Screw you “Season to be jolly and grateful”, I’m going to stick to what seems more unaffected at the moment—being a Scrooge-like bitter old man and all Humbugey.

Bah, humbug.

Even with somewhat extravagant goals, my life plan is relatively uncomplicated.

Sit around and wait until the things you want fall in your lap.

This plan is seductive in its simplicity and brilliance. Except that there’s one minor flaw, it doesn’t always work.

There are several distinct aspects of my (or anyone’s) life which function on varying levels of this autopilot-panacea. For instance, the thing about my academic progress and intellectual work in general is that they function and proceed fully automatically—in spite of me. All I can recall doing is floating around arbitrarily, but when audited at regular intervals, really concrete things have gotten accomplished as my understanding of the world has grown.

See? That’s how my whole life ought to be. I’m talking about the rest of my life too. My “real life”.

Then I’ll be thankful.

I needn’t have to work hard at anything, I’m me god damn it. But, clearly enough, this doesn’t carry over all that easily into my real world. So in effect, I’ve been coasting along for a quarter century, in my (arguably pleasant) status quo. Nothing terribly important changing, nor anything magical happening. I repeat,

Let stuff in my life magically fall in place, then I’ll be thankful.

I am not really asking for much.

Now, veering tangentially off our topic of the day, I’ve learnt to accept that my life isn’t going to have the range of highs and lows experienced by those kids in their orgy high on PCP, and the next day when they’re stumbling near the gutter in the cold. No, my life is a lot plainer, and my entire range of experiences will fall within a much smaller range of highs and lows.

Is it really all that cool?

There are pros and cons.

Is it what I want?

I don’t really have a choice.

This is something I learnt as a toddler and has provided innumerable hours of amusing entertainment ever since. I had forgotten about it for ages, but it came back to me as I was doodling on my steam-misted wall during my shower. I am assuming you will find it fun as well.

First, you just pick any random number that pops into your head and write it down. Then, all you need to do is count the number of occurrences of each unique digit (in the order in which they appear) and write this down as well as the corresponding digit in the following line. Keep doing this over and over again until you get tired, or the number starts to repeat itself. It’ll be more clear when you see the examples below.

Let’s say we start with,
81189198.

OK, so we’ve got three 8s, three 1s, and two 9s. So we write that down.
383129.

See how easy that was? Now we just continue the process, two 3s, one 8, one 1, one 2, one 9.
2318111219

You get the idea. Here are a few more iterations,
2213511819
224113151819
22145113151819
22611425131819
3216511415131819
23… and so on.

Here’s another:

41
1411
3114
132114
31131214
23411214
22132431
… and so on.

Pick a number, try it. It can get addictive.

» For brownie points (if you know of this from before, shh) figure out the smallest repeating number you can find.
» For even more brownie points, figure out why 81189198 wasn’t such a random starting point after all.

I know that a large portion of the populace that visits this place enjoys lurking and being dormant. I respect that and don’t have any problems with it. But even if you feel you have little to contribute to discussions, wouldn’t you like to let me know you stop(ped) by?

Now is your big chance!

Drop me a line by leaving a comment below. Tell me how much you love/hate frequenting this place. Tell me something interesting about yourself, your favourite dessert or favourite holiday destination. Just stop by to say ‘Hi’. Anything you want. You can be as anonymous as you want to be.

Even frequent commenters, first timers, everyone else—feel free to join in the festivities. The more the merrier.

Please do, you know you want to.

At least, I know I want you to.

I live my life by a set of principled rules formulated based on my notion of morality—of what’s right and what’s not. For the most part, this is a non-issue as these align with traditional laws put forth by the legal system. For minor deviations, I do consciously make it a point to abide by the letter of the law, even if I’m taking liberties with the spirit in which they were intended.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I end up contemplating violating the letter of the law as well. Not because it’s convenient to do so, or because I aim to benefit unjustly from such a violation, but purely because my moral compass opposes what someone else decrees as “right”. I imagine something like this not bothering me, even if technically illegal, because I don’t believe I am doing anything evil.

After a couple of seminars on legal issues however, I’ve realized this is a totally brain-dead idea. Apparently, even tiny breaches of rules (which will only result in a stern warning or a slap on the wrist for a normal person here) can result in international students losing legal status, preventing them from completing their programme.

Now, a bulk of my life plan is predicated on leaving here with a degree, so I’ve decided to make myself aware, and play along.

So, basically, you’ve got to stick to your guns and principles—unless it’s (or could eventually be) tremendously inconvenient.