Posted by Jerry
Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:36:45 GMT
Woke up early, remembered bread had run out, downed microwaved meat pie and banana instead for breakfast (Extra fat and carbohydrates = more sugars to burn for brain juice!), wash down with coffee. Continued work on my annotated bibliography, due in a few hours for Research Methods. Tried poking around with LyX and BibTeX for generating IEEE-style references but eventually got stuck. Popped onto #ubuntu for ideas (Thanks, sipior!), but in the end couldn’t get anything working. Ended up printing my BibTeX list from LyX into PDF, manually type-copying them onto AbiWord because LaTeX doesn’t produce copyable text, and then re-pasting them back into LyX. Spent the last few two hours quickly finishing it up, panicking, ran off to the nearest university library (frickin’ 15 minutes) and finally sigh of relief upon submission…
And then in the evening noticed a bunch of mistakes.
Man, won’t it be super-exciting when I really start writing my thesis.
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Posted by Jerry
Thu, 08 Mar 2007 02:46:46 GMT
Back from temporarily unofficial hiatus. Yes, yes, I know, should be keeping a habit of writing frequently and all. But sometimes habits do… slip. Or maybe I’ve just subconciously tagged blogging as too time consuming and mentally-retardant (offense to LiveJournal and emo-writers of the world not intended. Not entirely, anyway).
But I digress. This is, after all, a backlog post over the past month. So! A recap of events:
- Chinese New Year: Lots of ang pow, lots of food. Gained a little weight. I miss ba kua…
- Back in Brisbane! Moved into a new apartment unit down on Macquarie Street, almost next to the river. Nice, small and cozy. I think I’ll like this place.
- Starting my honours in BInfTech this year, wish me luck! Am signed up for 5 courses this semester (1 over the so-called ‘recommended for sane people’ mark). This way I’d only have to do 3 in July, 1 course being the ‘getting your act together and finally cranking out work’ part of my thesis… But, am crossing fingers and hope I’ll survive ‘till June.
- Research Project: Did I mention I’ll be doing my thesis? I did. I’ll be working with my supervisor, National ICT Australia on a wireless mesh networking research project. Currently I’ll be working on extending their monitoring tool, but who knows if it’ll change in the future. I’ll be reimbursed something like A$2000 because I can’t keep the IP (shame… won’t be patenting stuff anytime soon :p), with at least 1 weekly visit to their office in the city to play with their experimental grid. Might be fun, we’ll see.
- Other work: Will be doing website development with Yang and Chad. Tutoring Google SoC’s coming on soon, got to think of a bunch of really viable proposals (that won’t take up too much time and push me off the brink of sanity…) for OSS software. Maybe Gaim and Tomboy?
- Internet: Finally!! After 1 year and a half cousin finally agreed on getting and sharing a broadband account. No more stealing neighbours’ wifi internet access I guess. :p (I would argue that it’s technically not stealing but utilising publicly available resources... but that’s another topic.) Bid a Netgear DG834G off eBay, should be delivered and have ADSL installed anytime soon.
To-do List:
- Research: Read up on wireless mesh networking, routing protocols and Perl in general. (Man, I can’t believe I have to learn Perl. Let there be brain-fscking) Pick up bibliography and reading-list management along the way. Learn LaTeX, or derivation thereof.
- Watch list: Welcome to the NHK!, School Rumble 2nd Semester, Serial Experiments Lain. (and Heroes and Death Note when broadband is installed. Teh Anticeepayshen!!)
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Posted by Jerry
Sun, 21 Jan 2007 02:09:18 GMT
Watched these movies over the past few days:
Memento – One of the best plot and editing I’ve seen in ages. Great watch.
The Devil Wears Prada – Yukito liked Anne Hathaway a lot, but eh, average entertaining movie.
Borat – Despite some scenes that were somewhat unnecessary and only proved to arseholize the Borat character (dinner etiquette, subway with chicken), pretty entertaining, almost insightful, good watch. Golden Globe was worth it.
Jackass Number 2 – Okay, some of the stunts were pretty awesome; I’d want to try the fire hose if I ever get the chance. :P But the rest of the movie, really… I think my IQ just dropped by a magnitude of 20 points. Fart joke, woohoo!
Swing Girls – Cute japanese schoolgirls + swing music + feel good theme = good watch :D
Still on my to-watch list:
- Happy Feet
- The World’s Fastest Indian
- Fight Club
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
and Death Note 2 – The Last Name later this week with Yukito and Kelvin.
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Posted by Jerry
Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:53:06 GMT
Yay, I made a South Park pun. Man, I still remember last year’s summer break, where I spent 1 month hardly sleeping, only walking out of the house occasionally for classes and food, carpal tunnel, stiff backs and sore arses sitting on the floor hunching over my grimy ol’ laptop monotonously grinding for animal skins, dying, lagging (IronForge owns my laptop’s 8mb graphic card hard), raiding, wiping… And I miss my owl too. :|
Dang you Blizzard for making such a heart-renderingly addictive MMO! “I don’t think anyone realllly quits WoW.”, joked Davo. Indeed… after a whole year of not playing I still itch to log on to my Hunter again, but I didn’t have a stable enough permanent internet connection that would’ve been a necessity for any online game session that lasts at least 8 hours. And The Burning Crusade is coming out tomorrow too! Shame it got delayed… I could have been spending all my time procrastinating here rolling a Draenei. Sigh. :( Not that I could really complain though, I can imagine my CGPA if I had to divide time between course assignments, Project and WoWing. (shudder)
Gaah! BLOOD ELVES!! Must continue… resisting… temptation…
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Posted by Jerry
Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:16:26 GMT
I don’t understand why books in Australia are 3 times the price of back in Malaysia. Going Postal was $30-ish AUD the last time I checked at… Borders? at Toowong Plaza, but I bought Thud! (which was a great read. Constantly reflecting off of our world, but not skipping a beat in Pratchett’s trademark humour.) for $34.95 RM here in JB… that’s a 2.7 times difference! Do they print and publish all these books themselves or something? Surely they could have at least imported cheap lumber from SE Asia, I’m sure our economy wouldn’t mind a boost in exports revenue right now, we all know where it’s heading with all those no-talent politicians at the steer…
Saw Day of the Dragon, The Demon Soul, a crappy-publisher-looking Warcraft Archive (all Warcraft canon), Queen of Blades (Starcraft canon?), Nova (Starcraft Ghost) and Cycle of Hatred (World of Warcraft) at MPH. Is tempting… But why on earth don’t they have War of the Ancients book 1? Is no point not starting off the reading with the Kaldorei backstory.
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Posted by Jerry
Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:02:43 GMT
Yes, yes, you’re supposed to write something like this days ago. I admit, I’m a lazy bastard, okay? (Note to self: correcting laziness is a good idea to start off a new year resolution…)
In no particular order:
- Programming – Learn, and quite possibly master 3 programming languages/environments/frameworks, one every semester, from the following list: Ruby (on Rails), Mono (I do know .NET, but that was Windows. Linux libraries CIL bindings should bring lots more possibilities… and relearning C# :D), Boo, Python (or IronPython, maybe with Django), PHP, J2EE properly (with EJB, Hibernate, Spring or Struts), or [insert any random sexy gaining popularity functional language here]. If anything, Brainfuck would be an interesting experience perhaps…
- Contributing to OSS – Write something for Ubuntu/Gaim/Gnome/any FOSS project with any of the above 3 languages and get it into Debian. Aim for Google Summer of Code. Apply for next year’s NICTA research scholarship.
- Studies – Write a kick-arse thesis, complete honours, graduate (summa) cum laude.
- Health – Start going to gym, proper workout, build up arms and torso, gain more weight, look less geeky.
- Life – Write more, even if it’s just blog drivel. Take more pictures. Get into a long-term relationship. Meet more friends. Get drunk. Have fun.
I’m pretty worried, to speak the truth. Lilian Too’s fengshui book says Wood Rats will be facing hardship this year, although we’ll persevere. I don’t believe in fengshui as much as agnostics believe in a higher being, but it’s… depressing, no? We’ll see what happens in 12 months, and then I can write “2007 in review”. :p
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Posted by Jerry
Mon, 01 Jan 2007 13:48:00 GMT
So, it’s time to stop the curly scrawl of 6’s in dates out of habit and make that a cool jagged 7. Time for a performance review! Okay… not so much performance, per se. Truth to be told, compared to the awesome software engineers that’ve been bringing us the best of Web Two-Point-Oh it’s not much… but hey, a guy can dream and write boastful words once a while ‘aight? But I digress.
So. 4 things of 2006!
- University – I am now a graduate! University of Queensland, Bachelor of Information Technology, majoring in Computer Systems and Networks and Information Systems. Super-long-title double major, baby! Ok, it’s probably not that awesome, but do give me some credit for my study-plan-planning-fu. And hey, 6.44 CGPA! That’s something. ;)
- Final-year project – Our CSSE3004 closing presentation summed it up best: We were awesome. Without Ben, group F wouldn’t have stood for “Eff-in Fantastic”. Jono, your ub3r 1337 alg0rithm5 r0×0rs. Thomo, what could we have done without you our smooth-talkin’ group PR guy. Dave, group F wouldn’t have been the same without your smack talking of course. Davo, Jing, your enthusiasm and dedication to getting things done is what made our project shine. Thank you all. We earned our Project Excellence Award well.
- Linux convert – I’ve got a confession to make: I wanted to be a Linux-er for a long time. Kernel architectures in semester 1’s operating system studies was pretty interesting. (Yeah… I might’ve been one of the really rare attendees who found the Minix coding assignments fun… Hopelessly geek, I know. :p) I tried Fedora Core (3?) and Ubuntu Dapper (free CDs, as in beer!), but they didn’t quite seduce me enough into the dark side of FOSS, which was a shame. Later in November, I thought of giving Ubuntu Edgy a whirl and tried
dist-upgrading... and the result blew me away! 3 months, loads of tweaking, but still going strong… but that will be another story to tell. ;)
- Family visit – My parents came over to Brisbane for Feng’s graduation over winter in July. Stayed with uncle in Sydney. Beautiful sunset. Freakin’ cold night. Girraween, hiking. Oysters at Anna Bay. Sea at Terrigal. Saw dolphins (Or whatever the pair of fins riding waves from a distance is). Dug sand at Gold Coast (Remind self to either sift it or throw it away…). Sushi. Mistook inari for unagi. $10 Hush Puppies.
‘Twas a good year. Here’s to hoping a longer, fuller list in 12 months time!
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Posted by Jerry
Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:52:04 GMT
Yesterday, (well, the day before yesterday night before the day that was yesterday) I’ve finally got to fire up good old Azureus (I’m tempted to add ‘fat and gluttonous’, but I don’t want to get impaled with a ten-foot pole by Java enthusiasts… but I digress) after a good one year hiatus, for the new Ghost in the Shell movie, which I’ve wanted to get for quite a long time now. And it was… slow. Average of 10kb/s, constantly dropping off… and then today, nothing. 0 bytes. No peers. Zilch. Nada. Uh, what’s going on?
Lowyat’s news forums had the latest scoop on what went horribly wrong: Yesterday’s quakes in Taiwan damaged 5 undersea cables linking international traffic from SEA to the US. And repairs will take 3 weeks. (Zomg no internet for 3 weeks HYPERVENTILATE!) Ok, calm down. I can live with that. Tough networking veteran with many bag of tricks, I am.
Then, I’ve learned that TMnet was enforcing traffic shaping in my area since mid-2006. Just wonderful. Someone to spy on my packets and tell me I can’t use the Intarweb my way because they can’t be bothered to invest in better transport technologies. Who cares about net neutrality, yar?!
This holiday is going to suck… what on earth am I going to do with 14 GB’s of free space?!
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Posted by Jerry
Mon, 25 Dec 2006 15:39:14 GMT
Ah, sweet sweet broadband. I miss thee too much. (crosses fingers and hopes Ghost in the Shell – Solid State Society will be done by tomorrow morning... Dear BitTorrent Peer, please do give me all thy bandwidth. Love, A Peer.) Quite an uneventful Christmas too, I must add. I did want to write a little bit of something on Ruby, but at the point of writing I believe half of my brain has just turned itself off under effects of jet lag. Thus this blog post which is utterly devoid of point and insight. Ah well, Merry Christmas to anyone who still happens to live on the other side of the globe. I must bid thee good night for now.
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Posted by Jerry
Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:13:40 GMT
Sweet! Migrations to Typo, on Ruby on Rails, seems to work pretty well at the moment. It took a while to hack Typo’s Wordpress importing script to work with my old Blogger posts though, looks like the engine doesn’t quite enjoy the presence of untitled posts (bloggers don’t write no titles in 2002 dagnammit)... Ah semantic heterogeneity and the likes of dirty data concepts from Advanced Database. :P
Anyway! ‘Tis just a quick preview (indicator? premonition? I’m at a loss of correct words to use.) of hopefully more frequent blog posts to come. But not longer under ol’ It’s A Buggered Life. Not Grayscale either. It’s libcoffee.net.
Stay tuned for my… uh, two-year backlog!
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