Posted by Jerry
Sun, 29 Apr 2007 05:50:04 GMT
Watched Primeval on TV over dinner on Friday night (actually, via a USB TV receiver on laptop, we don’t have a TV here… but I digress)... couldn’t stop laughing! See, that’s what an education of science and computing does to you. You can’t even enjoy a mainstream TV show without suspending your disbelief in a straightjacket, locking it key and chain in a cement-enforced trunk and sinking it into the harbour on a dark stormy night. It’s just as bad as watching hip hackers assemble virus code on a multipanel 3D interface, or infecting an alien spaceship using code written on an Apple laptop.
But back on topic. Some rants:
- You find a live frickin’ wormhole that transports you millions (billions? My science is rusty) of years back in time/into a parallel universe with live prehistoric reptilians roaming the earth, and you don’t even drag a bunch of the world’s best scientists out there to record, analyze and hopefully learn to recreate it lest it disappears? Albert Einstein must be spinning in his grave…
- You find a live frickin’ wormhole, and you only send 2 men, both who are completely unconcerned about this greatest breakthrough of science ever, through it?! How about at least gathering some samples of soil, vegetation and live fauna? (Counter-argument, see 1.2) How about some photos so you can document it?!
- Ok, maybe you’ve read Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (1952) and decided not to mess with anything. How about putting on some protective garments so you won’t accidentally pollute the timeline and rewrite history so an ape president rules over humans on Earth?! On 2nd thought, maybe they already did that in America...
- You find
a live frickin’ dinosaur many dinosaurs, one witnessed to be twice the size of a London bus and carnivorous, and you don’t even immediately deploy a battalion to defend yourself/quarantine the area/clear nearby townsfolk? Are you desperately hoping to be the recorded as the first modern human to become dino-chowder in the big book of Guinness? (See 3)
- You find a live dinosaur with wings, and you don’t/can’t even properly capture one (at least secure it so it doesn’t escape and then waste 5 minutes running through a building chasing the flying bastard) and analyze it in the name of science? Why is its poo green? I suspect it doesn’t have a chlorophyl-rich diet.
- When you find a live dinosaur, although it appears to be herbivorous, and it appears to be agitated by your presence, and it appears to have a huge, thick, fleshy tail, don’t go near it. Observe the majestic animal with respect from a distance, take your pictures, whatever. You don’t know its defense mechanisms, and you don’t want to try it first-hand. (Do dinosaurs growl like big cats, anyway?)
- See? That’s what happens when you only have a bunch of puny humans armed with silly little rifles. Everyone gets scared shite-less when a carnivorous dinosaur twice the size of a London bus suddenly appears at the camp, lives fall into mortal peril, and god knows what priceless data got lost when the raging thing kicks over a bunch of electronics.
- You ram a jeep at, what, 60km/h into a dinosaur twice the size of a London bus. The dinosaur flies a few feet. The jeep barely gets a wrinkle. The driver scrambles out unharmed and unfazed by the impact. That’s a darn good vehicle there, I’m convinced. What’s the brand, and where do I buy it? /sarcasm
Maybe I should watch more Youtube videos of people getting pwned in le groins to balance out my mental perspective so I can properly enjoy TV again.
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:03:22 GMT
MSN nick last weekend: “Jerry – ye olde arts of procrastination”, mostly doing nada, some guilty thesis research.
Monday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // coding”, pounded on keyboard for Distributed Systems Elvin programming assignment.
Tuesday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // reading”, started flipping through Spatial Database notes and speed-reading through first few chapters of library books.
Wednesday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // researching”, furiously skimming through book and lecture PDFs, writing on LyX.
Thursday: “Jerry – Haunted by deadlines // 3am sprint!”, 3am: just chat with Fieran for ~2 hours, paper due in 12 hours, type dammit type! 3.30am: Sod it, I’m going to sleep. 9am: Woke up, wolfed down sandwich, 200mg caffeine, finished up last question, submission, woot!
Friday: Commented code a bit, due date is delayed so less rush, woot!
On the other hand, still on the Todos-hovering-malevolently-around-the-corner list:
- Web programming for thesis
- Start preparing on thesis seminar
- Clean up submission for Elvin code
- J2EE code for next Wednesday’s tutoring session
- Start C coding for Advanced Networking assignment
- More experiments on sleep-hacking (More on this soon. :))
- Start cleaning up and publishing the ol’ Tomboy proposal, and aiming for GNOME 2.20!
Also, just watched Death Note 26 and 27. Holy crap, this story arc is going to be on a completely different level isn’t it?! Decided to go to AniDB page and change my old vote from 9 (the “Pretty Awesome” vote) to 10 (the “Frickin’ love it!!11” vote).
P.S – Just rolled my own Drivel 2.0.3 to work around the lighttpd + Expect HTTP header bug. Tried upgrading to lighttpd 1.5 (took some time to figure out how Debian packaging works) and running for the past few weeks, but for some reason PHP+fastcgi doesn’t send the MIME types properly = Firefox refuses to load Drupal test site CSS = ugly, and no Drupal testing. Now everything should be hunky dory. :)
Posted in University, Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Wed, 11 Apr 2007 07:15:00 GMT
“You will be reincarnated as a toad; and you will be much happier.”
Wow, really? Um, hello, whichever great Deity on-shift listening in on reincarnation requests from mortals today? Yes, hi. Whatever You do, could You please not make me a Australian Cane Toad; and in case toad queues are full and we’d have to settle for frogs, please please please don’t drop me on Earth within 100 kilometres of a Chinese restaurant or any of the countries in that link, okay? This is of the utmost froggy life-and-death importance. Oh, and if you can somehow fit in a distraught princess from an exotic country into my fates, I promise I will spend the rest of my amphibian life croaking your religion to my future fellow pond-mates. Kthnx.
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Fri, 06 Apr 2007 04:04:00 GMT
Ever since my old Creative mouse turned faulty (possibly by damaged copper causing intermittent shorts…) and started causing my Ubuntu to freakout and launching itself into a crazed stuttering fit every time I type, I’ve switched to touchpad-ing. Took some time getting used to, but eventually grew into it. Perhaps it’s just more natural for southpaws?
Anyway tickering around with Feisty’s settings lately I’ve noticed web pages seemed to jumped around randomly sometimes when I’m just moving my mouse. Then I realized I’ve accidentally enabled ‘vertical scrolling’ in Synaptics… something I never knew exist after 5 years in possession of this machine! Dude – Human interface devices rock.
Please excuse the gunk.
As you can see, I’m also rediscovering how to draw on touchpads. It’s no Kit (the SXSW baby firefox mascot is drawn on a touchpad. Now that deserves the term 1337 h4×0r skillz), and I sucked playing Chick Chick Boom, but hey, I’m learnin’!
As a side note, this completely refreshed my perspective on touch-screen UIs. OpenMoko, the Qtopia Greenphone and the Nokia N-series (not the plain-Jane 2 digiters, I mean 770 and the especially geekalicious n800) are going to rock the industry hard.
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:19:00 GMT
I’ve been considerably annoyed with my blogging setup recently. Typo’s create content page has a nifty preview box, which is a good idea, but refreshes way too frequently that it gets considerably hard to type with long blog posts (Solution: install Typo SVN), and Drivel is incompatible with lighty 1.4 because of a HTTP header bug (Solution: use BloGTK or upgrade lighty). On the other hand, BloGTK just reeks of not-so-good design, and lacks the GNOME usability touch in Drivel (Things that should work, should work. Solution: use Performancing/ScribeFire). Which, I did try, but it doesn’t support Typo categories properly… although that’s Typo’s fault of not properly implementing the MetaWeblog specifications (Solution: Don’t use Typo…). And no, I don’t feel like going back to Wordpress. :/
Finally decided that I’m going to try and upgrade Lighty to 1.5 preview. Looks like I’ll be needing those Gloves of +1 Compilation Success.
Edit: Accidentally borked my Typo setup this morning, while I found out the Typo ‘database restore’ doesn’t work 100%... the hard way. Thank the Web2.0 deities for Rails development environments!
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Sat, 31 Mar 2007 01:48:00 GMT
Feng and Wei are off to Sunshine Coast, so I’m generally free to spend the weekend alternating between procrastinating and attempting to get some Real Work done.
Took some photos of things lying around the place, for my own amusement:
A bunch of books I’ll probably be looking through for the next few weeks. Spotted the Qt book and grabbed it on a whim. Can’t keep going around as a Linuxer not knowing how Qt looks like. (Trolltech booth guy at career fair: “Are you good in Qt?” Me: “Er. Never used it before.” Booth guy raises eyebrows sympathetically. Me sidles off.)
Got these OpenWRT routers from NICTA on Thursday for my wireless mesh thesis research. With 5 routers in a small apartment, do I automagically qualify as a networking hardware geek?
A crack/dislocation on my aging laptop’s screen that appeared months ago. I hope it’s not going to get worse and destroy the LCD.
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Fri, 30 Mar 2007 06:15:47 GMT
Sitting down in front of my laptop after coming back from class, only to find
Conky showing the fortune:
So you're back... about time...
I wonder if my Feisty has been scheming on world domination while I've been away...
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Tue, 27 Mar 2007 07:05:00 GMT
The good thing about hosting your own proposal during Google SoC ranking times is that you know when someone hits the page. It becomes hopelessly addictive. Hello Gnomers/Googlers, if you’re reading this! (waves)
The bad thing about hosting your own proposal during Google SoC ranking times as an article on Typo is that the visitors will have no way to leave comments after reading it (although reviewers probably wouldn’t go out of their way to leave comments for fairness sake…) and you have no way to know what kind of impression it left on them, yet anxiously hoping some kind soul would perhaps wander to the front page and point out the fatal error in your document that you’ve just happened to miss… I’m tempted to add a Meebo widget. And how about the occasional mystery visits with no http reference so it’s impossible to know where they’re coming from? Great Penguins, the suspense!! I know I’m going to lose sleep until mid-April. :(
And the deadline’s extended to Thursday 2am too. Must resist… temptation to write… more!
P.S – This will also be the first time in a few years I’ve pinged Petaling Street again. Be gentle, fellow Malaysians!
Edit – Oh yeah, and I blame anxiety for the blatantly obvious elementary-level typo. :S
Posted in Rants, Code | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Mon, 26 Mar 2007 02:34:00 GMT
Twitchy left eye = impending misfortune. It’s an Old Chinese wives’ saying. I surely hope it’s completely unrelated to my thesis, or any of my Google Summer of Code stuff. Possibility of adding +1 Villain to personality aside, maybe I just need more vitamins. :|
Things to do this week:
- Complete Python script that reads SNMP statistics from my router and dumps them into graphs.
- Start work on coding assignments. C = lots and lots of hours running gdb and netcat, blargh.
- Make final changes to any SoC proposals before 10am tomorrow. After considering my free time I’ve ended up only writing 2 proposals, both of them for Tomboy. Shame there isn’t a Winter of Code. :p
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Jerry
Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:29:00 GMT
She’s getting married, and she’s not staying. Looking at fresh-faced giggly first-years I’m starting to feel old. You know how it is, when you can’t even look at your yesterdays in peace; remnants of your past starting to haunt you like a vast dark cloud creeping across your heartscape. I’ve frequently fantasized about transferring my consciousness back in time to my 12-year old self, but well, that’s never going to happen isn’t it?
Posted in Rants | no comments | no trackbacks
