Posted by Jerry
Sat, 19 May 2007 04:51:44 GMT
- Thesis seminar – We had to do a seminar for our thesis topics over the past week. Prepared slide drafts, rehearsed 2 times or so at home (by myself, in an empty living room… which was a bad idea!), went to uni as usual with shiny new NICTA laptop (loaned temporarily), was worried Ubuntu wouldn’t work with overhead projector so betrayed myself and decided to present on Windows using Adobe Acrobat (non-continuous full-screen PDF presentation). Presentation turned out only passable, got good marks (81/100) but pretty unsatisfied with my speech: the opening was a disaster as I pretty much panicked and slurred heavily, settled down on following slides, but turned out I was still speaking too fast (I know I tend to speak fast, so I consciously made sure I pronounced each word loud and clear to sort of slow down my talking… not enough! Reminder to self: practise pausing), and not enough eye contact (relied too much on laptop). Lesson: more rehearsing!
- Assignments – Load of work due in the following weeks. Thesis research is lagging behind. Possible crisis?
- Code – Started discovering Python, and liking it! Realized I never grew attached to Ruby because of heavy Perl-isms, Python’s cleanliness is great. Next on learning list: Code exercises, Django and Pylons!
- Life – Perhaps my reputation as ‘the other Web Information Systems tutor’ was better than I thought. Looking forward to passing out TEVALs (tutor evaluation forms) next week. :)
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Posted by Jerry
Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:08:35 GMT
Favorite question: “If you bumped into Paris Hilton at a party you would:”
- Hit on her
- Hit her (LOL)
- Take a picture on my cell phone and send it to all your friends
- Ask for her autograph
- Wonder what hallucinogen you had just taken
‘Tis a no-brainer; I’d suspect someone just fooled me into puffing a joint/poured a whole bottle of Vodka into the punch. xP
Now, it may or may not be a bad thing that I still haven’t learn PHP yet… nowadays mainstream languages like Java and C and .NET get all the attention that that’s all tertiary institutions ever teach. I’m not particularly keen on picking it up – don’t people complain about how ugly it is? (Myself, I prefer Python. Perfect mixture of OO-ness, whitespace and brackets) It is a pretty popular language in newspaper job listings over here though. Maybe sometime in the future when I decide to migrate to Drupal or Wordpress and learn by hacking bits and pieces onto the blog system. Where’s Boo, D, Erlang and Scheme anyway? I’m sure Bash and SQL would like a nibble of action as well. :P
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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.
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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. :)
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Posted by Jerry
Sun, 15 Apr 2007 06:41:00 GMT
It’s finalized: My Google Summer of Code 2007 proposals for Tomboy weren’t accepted. :( After results were out apparently there was one free GNOME slot that got unallocated and Sanford Armstrong offered to help, but it still turned out to be far too late. Pretty disappointed that I won’t get the possibly-awesome T-shirt or valid excuses to replace my laptop, but oh well. Going to pluck out original ideas from the proposals and start cracking on Gtk#. Expect some more Tomboy love soon, folks! ;)
Anyway, a review on this year’s SoC: Enthusiasts should definitely check out proposals listed on their favourite organizations. I have a good feeling about GNOME, Firefox/Thunderbird and Gaim Pidgin. Am I looking forward to the next few months of the Linux feature-fest. :)
And finally, going to release my Tomboy proposals into the wild under the Creative Commons Attribution license and move TomboyPIM into blog-post form so comments will be enabled (and search engines can index it, and maybe I’ll get more Tomboy/Google hits :)). Should be getting on it as soon as I finish my thesis report, due tomorrow (Ack!). Meanwhile you can check them out here: Networked Tomboy, and Using Tomboy as a Personal Information Manager: Integration with Evolution.
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Posted by Jerry
Sat, 14 Apr 2007 06:08:11 GMT
Was thinking about possible uses for the Nokia N800 Linux tablet recently, and had a short discussion with my cousin on utilizing Google Maps on it to compensate for lack of built-in GPS. We exchanged ideas on how it would work as a vehicle GPS system purely via WiFi… maybe overlaying a speech synthesis system (screen scraping + Festival would work) onto the Google Maps direction, and use the stylus to update the vehicle’s position on the map? (Could be done every few traffic stops or by a second passenger… but I imagine it would be a pain to use) And not to mention the lack of Wifi coverage in non-urban areas… Looks like it would still be better off if packaged with a GPS module.
And then what about software support? Neither the N800 nor the OpenMoko Neo1973, which does have GPS, are sold here, so they probably don’t have map software for this region. There are GPS software for Symbian, but it’s… well, Symbian. ;) I’ve been wondering if there’d be popular GPS devices on the Australian market use Linux… looks like TomTom does! Now I’m left wondering when we’ll see some Maemo/TomTom love anytime soon… :)
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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.
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Posted by Jerry
Sun, 08 Apr 2007 05:42:13 GMT
Read: Manna – The Book
One Slashdot poster linked to a multiple-part science fiction essay by Marshall Brain, entitled “Manna”, short for Manager. The story starts off eerily similar to what we (or at least, the Web Two Point Oh evangelists) have been envisioning all this while; distributed web operating systems with intelligent agents, machine automation… the topics you see scientists writing in Springer-published books and miscellaneous white papers. Interesting view on what a developed robotics future will bring us. But perhaps more intriguing is the end, where the open source world’s bazaar model is used to design the ultimate utopia to defeat capitalism… Viable? Perhaps?
This sounds chillingly similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, doesn’t it? Just yesterday, the web went abuzz as Amazon was revealed to have filed a patent for “a hybrid machine/human computing arrangement which advantageously involves humans to assist a computer to solve particular tasks, allowing the computer to solve the tasks more efficiently”. How long until we hit the AI breakthrough to make Manna 1.0 possible?
Remind self to buy at least 2 shares of 4GC in 2015.
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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.
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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!
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