Yawar's Journal

Kobo Vox

2011-11-10T12:19:00.001+08:00

THE KOBO Vox (from Latin, vox populi, ‘voice of the people’) is Kobo’s latest and greatest ebook reader. It’s basically a touch-screen Android tablet, but Kobo has made some smart trade-offs to keep it at the $200 price point. Here are my impressions.

First Boot

The first time it starts, the device asks to connect to a wireless network and then downloads and installs a software update. It then guides you through restarting and completing setup. You have to pick your time and date and then log in to, or create, a Kobo account. There don’t seem to be any options for not signing in to a Kobo account–to use the Vox, you must be signed in.

Hardware

There’s much to like about this compact device. It’s roughly three-quarters the size of an iPad, and has a crisp full-colour screen. Text is crisp and images really pop out. It’s a little heavy to hold; could get uncomfortable over extended periods reading while sitting or lying down.

The processor is not the most powerful you can fit into this form factor; but going for a slightly cheaper CPU is one of the trade-offs I mentioned, and ultimately I think worth it. I’ll explain more later.

There’s a single speaker built-in with sound quality similar to that of a smartphone. No microphone or camera–so there’s no scope for voice or video chatting. And in terms of connectivity, there’s Wi-Fi, an SD card slot and a USB port, but no Bluetooth.

Software

The Vox comes with Google’s Android OS 2.3 with a few relatively minor adjustments: the default home screen has a large Kobo desktop widget showing the covers of the five most recently-read books; the global pop-down notification list has been replaced with Kobo’s Reading Life stats (more on Reading Life later); and apparently you can’t access the Android Market because the device doesn’t (yet) pass Android hardware certification. There is an alternative app store called GetJar bundled.

Since the Vox isn’t locked in to the Android Market, you can actually install any apps (*.apk files) you can find floating around on the internet. So the keyword here is caution–there’s plenty of malware out there for Android. I installed a couple of essential apps from a relatively trusted source. The first is Overdrive, an ebook and audiobook app for DRM-protected books. Overdrive lets you connect to public libraries’ electronic catalogues and download books from them. I’ve successfully downloaded a couple of ebooks from my local library.

The browser doesn’t come with Flash installed. It’s possible to install it from Good eReader's list but I haven’t so far because from what I’ve heard, Flash is a mobile device killer. Even my laptop has a hard time with it.

There’s a YouTube app that works pretty much as expected; a music and video player that I haven’t tried yet; and a few other apps that I haven’t actually bothered to explore–a Facebook news feed widget for the desktop, and other similar apps that plug in to Facebook. If I could uninstall these, I would; but there doesn’t seem to be any way to uninstall apps yet.

Reading eBooks

One of the Vox’s biggest selling points is that it has a new ‘social reading’ feature called Reading Life. Reading Life lets you keep track of how many books you’ve read and how long you spent reading them; gives you ‘awards’ for finishing books; and lets you share these awards and statistics with friends. Newly introduced with the Vox is a comment feature called ‘Pulse’ that lets you publicly ‘like’ and share comments on specific pages of books you’re reading.

Reading Life is pervasive and easily accessible from several places in the Vox interface–the pull-down notification area at the top; the dock at the bottom; and from the Kobo reading and library app itself. This gives a feeling of coherence to the device and makes it feel more like an ebook reader than just a generic Android tablet.

However, you’ll only find yourself using Reading Life if you read ebooks on Kobo’s own ebook reader app. This would include reading books that you bought or downloaded for free from the Kobo store; and any books that you manually copied over from another device. If, like me, your main source of books is your public library’s electronic catalogue, you’ll probably end up using the Overdrive ebook reader app; and Overdrive is not integrated with Reading Life or Pulse.

Trade-offs

So in general, how is the Vox as an Android tablet?

A little under-powered. It runs most of the standard apps–browser, email, ebook readers–just fine. But when I tried to run a more graphics-intensive app, like the included free Scrabble, it more or less got stuck. I had to hard-reboot the device to get it up and running again.

At the end of the day, the Vox is a compact Android OS-powered device that lets me read ebooks and just enough more that it’s a compelling buy.

St Urbain's Horseman

2011-09-02T10:22:00.001+08:00

I’VE read a couple of other Mordecai Richler books by now, but this one was probably the most passionate, the most powerful. A man caught between two generations, between the Holocaust and the hippies, Jake Hersh is driven by a code of conscience and social justice that he feels is the only way to live up to the memory of his cousin and childhood hero, Joey. Joey who stood up to the anti-Semitism of Montreal in the ’40s, only to be run out of town. Who then went on a world-wide walkabout, rousting and rabble-raising and, seemingly, hunting down Nazi war criminals.

Meanwhile, Jake makes a life of comfort and luxury for himself, starts a family and settles for a peaceful home life. All the while tormented by his social conscience, a growing unease and a sense that the world is too unfair to let him live out such a good life without repercussions.

The chapters bled into each other, the pages flew by in a blur, and before I knew it it was over. Still, there were passages which stood out brilliantly, that you devoured because they were just so damn good.

Reading this passage reminded me intensely of the deshi diaspora in Western countries–so ironic:

Sitting with the Hershes, day and night, a bottle of Remy Martin parked between his feet, such was Jake’s astonishment, commingled with pleasure, in their responses, that he could not properly mourn for his father. He felt cradled, not deprived. He also felt like Rip Van Winkle returned to an innocent and ordered world he had mistakenly believed long extinct. Where God watched over all, doing His sums. Where everything fit. Even the holocaust which, after all, had yielded the state of Israel. Where to say, ‘Gentlemen, the Queen,’ was to offer the obligatory toast to Elizabeth II at an affair, not to begin a discussion on Andy Warhol. Where smack was not habit-forming, but what a disrespectful child deserved; pot was what you simmered the chicken soup in; and camp was where you sent the boys for the summer. It was astounding, Jake was incredulous, that after so many years and fevers, after Dachau, after Hiroshima, revolution, rockets in Space, DNA, bestiality in the streets, assassinations in and out of season, there were still brides with shining faces who were married in white gowns, posing for the Star social pages with their prizes, pear-shaped boys in evening clothes. There were aunts who sold raffles and uncles who swore by the Reader’s Digest. French Canadians, like overflying airplanes distorting the TV picture, were only tolerated. DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET, THE TROUBLE IS TEMPORARY. Aunts still phoned each other every morning to say what kind of cake they were baking. Who had passed this exam, who had survived that operation. A scandal was when a first cousin was invited to the bar mitzvah kiddush, but not the dinner. Eloquence was the rabbi’s sermon. They were ignorant of the arts, they were overdressed, and their taste was appallingly bad. But within their self-contained world, there was order. It worked.
As nobody bothered to honor them, they very sensibly celebrated each other at fund-raising synagogue dinners, taking turns at being Man-of-the-Year, awarding each other ornate plates to hang over the bar in the rumpus room. Furthermore, God was interested in the fate of the Hershes, with time and consideration for each one. To pray was to be heard. There was not even death, only an interlude below ground. For one day, as Rabbi Polsky assured them, the Messiah would blow his horn, they would rise as one and return to Zion … .

And this captured the exact feeling of when you suspect that you have it too good, that you’re one of the top percentiles out of the billions on this planet:

… From the beginning, he had expected the outer, brutalized world to intrude on their little one, inflated by love but ultimately self-serving and cocooned by money. The times were depraved. Tenderness in one house, he had come to fear, was no more possible, without corruption, than socialism in a single country. And so, from the earliest, halcyon days with Nancy, he had expected the coming of the vandals. Above all, the injustice-collectors. The concentration camp survivors. The emaciated millions of India. The starvelings of Africa.

I probably didn’t get most of the jokes. There were scenes and passages that brought a smile to my face, but nothing like the laugh-out-loud humour others seemed to find. Not like Barney’s Version, but of course that’s a story for another blog post.

Seen on Miway (Mississauga Transit) bus

2011-02-03T11:23:00.000+08:00

The way the sphere appeared
Up in the sky,
I stood in the shower.
I felt no fear.
I knew
It loved me.
The master returns
To dote on it's [sic] pet.

Life's Too Short for Instant Search

2010-09-10T07:13:00.001+08:00

GOOGLE has recently rolled out their very own instant search, branded Google Instant, for most signed-in users. The cool thing about it is that it can potentially save a lot of time for people all over the world. All this time adds up--every time a behemoth like Google shaves a few seconds off the time it takes people to use it, it's probably saving many years and millions of dollars of aggregated time and money the world over, thanks to the sheer number of people using it all the time.

Sounds nice, so I was pretty benign about the new technology, which shows you results while you type your search--until I saw that it insisted on showing me only 10 results at a time. No matter how many times I went to the preferences (Search settings on top right corner) and changed it back to 100 results, it always went back to 10.

So I turned it off (option available also in Search settings). In my opinion the instant search is not worth the trade-off of clicking through many pages of results, if I'm looking for something that's hard to find. I mean sure, Google is good, but it happens to me all the time that I have to do quite a bit of searching and sifting through the results before I find what I'm looking for.

Who knows, maybe in the future they'll improve it to the point that they'll be able to show a thousand instant results even before I've typed my search query. But until that happens, Instant Search stays off for me.

Blogging Sensitive Stuff, and Some Whining

2010-03-29T08:00:00.000+08:00

I THINK I've blogged before about not wanting to post private,
personal stuff. But I've been lumping some other things as private
as well--things I've been doing recently that are pretty
interesting (to me at least), but I don't want to post here
because that might lead to some awkward questions. But if I were
to post them in a few months' time, it'd be fine.

So I've decided to start blogging those things, as much as I can,
and keeping them saved privately as drafts. If all goes well, I'll
be able to publish them when the time comes with just a couple of
clicks.

Now that I think about it, I'm actually looking forward to typing
out some of these things and keeping them somewhere; I'll be able
to go back and look at them any time and remind myself of what
I've spent my time on. It's too easy to let the days pass by in a
blur in the normal 9-to-5 work, home, work, course of things.

On another note, though, I'm really missing the convenience of
blogging through Windows Live Writer. Still can't believe there's
no equivalent on the Mac that matches it for features and price.
As it stands, I'm using my favourite
text editor to type out the posts, log in to Blogger, and then
submit them.

So, an appeal to the internet: can someone please just write a
Windows Live Writer clone for the Mac? Thank you! :-)

Logicomix--Mathematics & Madness

2009-11-21T10:44:00.001+08:00

I BOUGHT Logicomix last Sunday and, reading feverishly on my lunch breaks, and in transit between home and work, finished it yesterday. Admittedly, I tried at first to draw out the pleasure, but finally gave up and glutted myself.

One thing: Logicomix is, as the name suggests, a comic book. Or rather, a graphic novel. But from here on I refer to it as a book because frankly, it's just trying to tell a story in the most interesting way possible.

Starting at the beginning though, I have to say I'd never have learned about it if not for this fine New York Times review. The book is on their best-seller list, and deservedly.

How do I describe the story? It's a story-within-a-story-within-a-story. The authors put themselves in the book, discussing the process by which they're trying to present the life and ideas of Bertrand Russell. That makes the book self-referential, which is ironic in the context of the story it's telling.

The main story is the life of the mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell and his titanic struggle to uncover the most fundamental meaning of logic (and therefore math, science and philosophy).

Russell lived in a time of great upheaval in the mathematical, logic and philosophy communities. He collaborated, and sparred, intellectually with such greats as Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel and David Hilbert (to name just a few). Their passion and drive is explored, and the authors actively try to explain, what made them so great, so insanely driven? (Russell and Whitehead worked on a book trying to explain all of mathematics for ten years before finally giving up and releasing it, unfinished.)

The authors seem to think there was a connection between their logical worldviews and some innate streak of madness. And they don't shy away from exploring this graphically, taking full advantage of the comic medium to show, for example, Russell waking from a nightmare of chaos, face contorted in fear and near-insanity.

Indeed, the authors are definitely not afraid of taking liberties with details of the story to add to the dramatic tension. They've done extensive research on the lives and ideas of everyone in the book--turn to the bibliography in the back if you don't believe me--and they feel, and I agree with them, that these changes add to the tightness and structure of the story. Sometimes you do get a feeling that a conversation seems too contrived, but honestly, the feeling is just washed away by the incredible ideas you encounter.

So is this a math book, stuffed full of math? Well yes and no. It's stuffed full of math and logic ideas, but there's not a single equation in the whole story. The ideas are explained by their creators and their best lovers, the protagonists of the story. You grasp them from the bird's-eye view and you get them, without needing to do a single sum.

So near the beginning of this post, I said it's ironic that the book is self-referential. Let me explain: the problem of logical statements that are self-referential is one that has puzzled great minds, including Russell's, for centuries. For example, how to interpret the following statement?

This statement is false.

If the above statement is false, then it must be true. And if it's true, it must be false!

Near the end, the authors hint that the end of their story is really just the beginning of the much greater story of the renaissance of mathematics with computer science. I'm eagerly looking forward to a follow-up book (or books?). Wishing every success to the authors.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.

Offtopic: Trying out the MarsEdit blog editor on the Mac to see if it's worth paying for.

Locked Out of Car? If a Knife Doesn’t Work, Try a Key

2009-10-02T09:59:00.001+08:00

THIS just happened, right before dinner. So I ordered a delivery and the guy arrived and handed over the food within half an hour. Speedy and efficient. Two minutes later he calls on my buzzer again to ask if I can check for a car key in the food package; he seems to have lost his. I open the door to the apartment building and we both have a look around, but no keys.

Then he asks if I have a screwdriver handy, or a knife. Well, I look around a bit, really hoping to find a screwdriver, but no luck. So I go into the kitchen for the knife….

Yeah, I know, you’re screaming at me, you’re about to hand over a knife to your delivery guy who’s standing just outside your door. But hey, it’s a cold night and the guy has to stand outside waiting for his delivery buddy to come pick him up, and I’m not thinking clearly—remember my stomach is empty. So, comes the moment of truth. I hand over the knife and he goes downstairs to see if it’ll work. I have my doubts, but anyway I have another look around for a screwdriver. Still nothing. Mental note: get some guy tools for the house.

I decide to go downstairs and see if I can try and get my knife back. Ha, ha. He’s on the phone with the buddy, apparently having given up on knifing his way back into the car. He’s done with the call and thankfully hands it back to me. We try to take another look around; finding nothing outside, I take out my house keys to open the building door and look around a bit more inside.

He notices the keys and suddenly, on a spurt of inspiration I guess, asks if he can borrow them. Now again, I realise what I’m about to do—if the guy tries to make off with my keys I’m stuck outside my own house. But at least now I have a knife in my hand. So I hand over my keys and he tries one, jiggling it around in there. Meanwhile, I’m standing watch nervously, rather scared at the prospect of passersby seeing the knife in my hand and mistaking me for a psycho killer. (I haven’t shaved today. Planning to tomorrow.)

Thankfully it’s an older model Honda Civic, with not much in the way of blaring theft alarms. Anyway, the first key doesn’t work and he moves on to the next.

Meanwhile, this guy on a bicycle pulls up, waiting for someone to come out of the building I guess. I’m ignoring him at this point, trying to keep the knife hidden but not too hidden in case he thinks I’m trying to hide it. It’s a fine balance to strive for.

Suddenly, one of the keys works! I’m pretty sure it’s the key to my apartment (not the main building), but anyway, the delivery guy’s in and thankfully hands me back the keys. More than a little thankful myself, I start heading back inside. Bicycle guy and I greet each other, me trying to keep him distracted from the knife with my megawatt smile. Finally inside the building, I sprint back up and lock the door behind me.

Whew.

Google Chrome Frame

2009-09-26T06:30:00.001+08:00

FUNNY how things turn out:

Re:Lame. (Score:5, Funny)

by derGoldstein (1494129)on Saturday August 22, @11:34AM (#29155639)

Oh cool, so I can install Flash, explorercanvas [google.com], and now SVG Web, and I'll finally have a browser that is half-way up to date.
Google: Please release V8 as a plugin for IE, along with CSS compatibility. Actually, scratch that -- please release Chrome as a plugin for IE.

It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Handwriting Is?

2009-09-09T09:33:00.001+08:00

IT’s hard to remember now, but once upon a time we were taught how to write in cursive, and expected to write clear, legible text with reasonable speed. Somewhere along the way, it all went bad. We had a rough time writing boatloads of essays and stories. It was easier to type, then text. Printouts replaced handwritten pages. And the cursive became an illegible monstrosity.

I’ll admit I’m guilty of this too, from time to time. Some time ago though I came across a font called Scala Sans which impressed me so much I actively changed my handwriting to its italic style:

It forced me to keep my writing controlled and measured; and prevented it from degenerating into a spaghetti-like mess as it usually did.

Today I came across a very interesting article in the New York Times: The Write Stuff (PDF version). It’s an Op-Art piece urging Americans, as the new school year begins, to try and collectively switch to an italic style of handwriting. The style they advocate is nothing new—it’s as old as the Renaissance—but it’s strikingly similar to what I myself have been using; it’s uncanny.

The article itself makes some persuasive arguments on behalf of italic—ease of reading being chief. Once we lose the extraneous curls from the shapes of our letters and tighten them up, they become vastly more legible even when blurred or obscured.

The great thing about it is that with the article printout, anyone of any age can get started with practicing the style—they’ve provided blank rows for practice, complete with little arrows giving directional hints on forming the letters.

One thing the authors of the article overlooked, maybe because they didn’t want to press too many points, is that no one uses old-style numerals any more in normal handwriting. Old-style numerals, or digits, descend below and rise above the lower and upper limits of the lowercase letter ‘x’. If you’ll notice, the font I’m using on this blog (Georgia) has old-style numerals: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.

The point of these, rather than the normal stuff we see everywhere, is they’re just like lowercase letters: inside normal text they’re more pleasing to the eye and easier to read. Inside headings and other stuff we want to stand out, we use the normal, ‘capital’ numerals.

Of course, no one is going to switch to italic in a few days, or even a few years. Hopefully though the article will influence some educators to introduce the style to learners.

Dawn in Chittagong

2009-07-26T11:50:00.001+08:00

Early morning
Smell of blades of grass and fresh flowers
Cold mist, surrounding the bungalow
Safe.
Tigers lurking in the bushes beyond.
Coffee table and chairs on the veranda,
Newspaper saying Superman is dead.

Up the stone steps
Careful, don’t fall
Across the grass lawn
On the swing
Don’t go too high.

Run back to the house
Into the bedroom
Open the drawer with all the toys inside
Break another one to see how it works.

Dad is home from work
Time for wrestling.

Wash up
Ready to sleep
Mom’s agreed to retell the story
Of the fisherboy who escaped from the crocodile
By putting a wooden foot in the river
And keeping his own
Safe.

The Final Word on Screenplay Writing

2009-07-22T11:00:00.001+08:00

WAS just thinking the other day that screenplay writing might be a useful hobby to have. You get to indulge your fantasies—playing out your favourite characters and stories and imagining their movie adaptations—while leaving open the slim chance that they’ll get picked up by Hollywood some day (and make you rich).

Interestingly enough, came across an article today which discusses screenplay writing and how it’s being adapted to the computer age. And through there, learned about the screenplay writing software that’s the equivalent of Microsoft Word in the movie industry, Final Draft. Apparently it’s so prevalent that the Final Draft creators have proudly put up a list of big Hollywood names and their high praise for the software—here.

Admittedly, apart from the cursory glance at the heavily-labelled screenshot on the product page, I have no idea how the thing actually works. But when James Cameron says this about it, you have to be impressed:

“You can't win a race without a champion car. Final Draft is my Ferrari.”

Notes on Our Winged Friends

2009-07-22T10:50:00.001+08:00

I KILLED a fly before dinner. Well it was more of a fruit fly, and I swatted it with a clap of my hands. Fast little bugger. I had to time it carefully and bring my hands together as fast as humanly possible (maybe a little faster) to do the deed.

Afterwards I had an interesting thought. I heard some time ago that flies have reflexes that are like a bajillion times better than humans. So any movement that humans make, no matter how fast, must seem like slow motion to them as they swiftly weave in and out amongst us. So the fact that this fly couldn’t escape my hands meant that it saw them coming but still couldn’t pull out in time—like a bad nightmare where you can’t escape your doom.

Putting on The Cranberries’ Animal Instinct now.

Seen on the Middle of the Road

2009-06-16T07:16:00.001+08:00

ON THE way back from work today, saw a woman sitting in her car, stopped in the middle of the road (residential neighbourhood), being approached by a big, burly man with what looked like a baseball bat. His van was parked near hers in the middle of the road too. Heard both of them shouting.

Craned my head to follow the action but the bus moved on and there’s no window in the back, so I had to leave them behind. Strangely enough, no one else in the bus seemed to notice. Our bus driver (a woman) just honked at them a little and moved on.

Yikes.

The Slashdot Effect!

2009-05-28T10:52:00.001+08:00

RECENTLY I’ve been getting more and more comments and emails about a little word count macro/script I wrote way back when for OpenOffice.org Writer. The main selling point of the thing was that it continuously updated the word count as you typed. I was proud as hell of it because I wrote it in Python—the coolness factor—and I used Python’s multithreading library to implement the continuous word count update. Double coolness.

I didn’t wonder too much about the sudden interest in that old macro, but now it’s all become clear. I’ve been Slashdotted! Well, not exactly. I mean, my macro didn’t make it as a main Slashdot post, and my blog didn’t suffer from any slowdowns. What I’m celebrating is that some random Slashdot user suggested to another that they can try out my macro. I have achieved the hacker’s nirvana, people. Bow before me :-)

From T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

2009-03-23T10:49:00.001+08:00

JUST came across this amazing little poem (or maybe a piece of a poem). Have to share it. This is from the second quartet of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

Commenting Using Facebook

2009-03-17T08:52:00.001+08:00

FACEBOOK did some spiffy Web magic a few months back that allows people to post comments, using their Facebook identities, on any sites which are set up to accept them. And these comments show up as news feed stories on those users' walls and on their friends' home pages.

My blog comment provider, Disqus, has apparently been setting up the Facebook Connect feature to work since the start of the year. I just tweaked some of my Disqus settings to enable it on my blog. Now waiting for the blue Facebook Connect button to show up above my comments boxes. Hope it works!

The Dark Knight

2009-03-15T06:03:00.001+08:00

FINALLY finished watching The Dark Knight. It's just as good as I remember it, from Heath Ledger's performance to the intelligence of the action (e.g. Batman fighting the SWAT team with their rappel lines).

I wanted to talk about a couple of things I noticed that stayed with me ever since my first, aborted, attempt to watch the movie in the theatre. First off, right from the beginning you notice there's a kind of a buzzing background noise--a tone might be the best way to describe it--whenever the anticipation builds up for action that's about to take place. I especially associated this noise with the Joker for some reason. It reminded me of a maddening, insane buzz that's also frightening, hellish.

Coming thus to the Joker--easily the most interesting character in the movie, and rightfully so. The Batman may be a complex creation--and some of that was delved into this time around as well--but in any story with the Joker, he deserves to steal the show. What interested me was--what's the driving force for him? He tells us he just wants to show us that underneath the thin veneer of morality and civilisation, everyone is just as savage as we accuse him of being. He sees civilisation as something that can be pushed over the edge and broken down, leaving the world in ruins.

And of course, the movie shows us the breakdown of civilised life in plenty of ways. The burning fire truck placed by the Joker in the middle of a road at night, the takedown of the helicopter, the hospital and the ferries carrying people across Gotham Harbour, these are all things that are unthinkable in modern cities, in the thick of law and order, and plenty of witnesses. But we see how easy it is to break it all down--how much we trust in each other to do the right thing in everyday life, and thus keep the system functioning. If people started abusing that on a massive scale, it would all crash rather quickly. Is the current financial crisis a good example of that? Probably, but even so, in a more subtle way.

And that's just looking at the movie from the Joker's point of view. What is the Batman thinking all the while he's tracking down fingerprints in shattered shards of bullets, keeping Harvey Dent on the straight and narrow, and scrambling to take out the mob and the Joker on two fronts? He says that he wanted to inspire people; we know he wanted to frighten criminals as well; but Alfred rightly points out that when he started waging war on the mob, he should have expected escalation and casualties.

But if the Batman does one thing and one thing only, he endures. I'm reminded of a scene from the classic Superman: The Animated Series episode where the Joker, come to visit Metropolis, finds Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane on a dinner date in a really high-rise restaurant, and in the course of a scuffle, throws Bruce over the edge of a balcony. He goes to check if Bruce has fallen to his death, and finds him clinging by one hand to the edge of another balcony, some eight or ten floors down. The Joker chuckles, saying, `My, my, aren't we tenacious?' and starts raining machine-gun fire down on Bruce--who quickly scrambles up the balcony ledge and into the offices/apartments below.

A Blog to Facebook Experiment

2009-02-23T12:37:00.001+08:00

THIS post is basically an experiment on Facebook's ability to suck my blog posts in and display them in my wall. I recently changed a setting in Facebook that I hope will make it display entire posts rather than just a couple of lines from them.

I've always felt that the main area of the Facebook profile, usually occupied by the wall, is an excellent place to post my own thoughts. Unfortunately Facebook etiquette prevents me from writing on my own wall. Although Facebook itself seems to encourage it.

So the new Facebook look, which shows my own activities as well as friends' wall posts all in one big mash-up, is an excellent way to do what I've wanted to for some time. Facebook should suck in the contents of each blog post and display them fully right inside the wall/activity feed. It definitely took me some time to come to this idea, but hopefully it'll work out all right. Fingers crossed.

For Posterity: How Shit Happens

2009-02-22T14:25:00.000+08:00

THIS is something I've been wanting to post here for a while but which completely evaded my puny memory for the past couple of years. It's for anyone who's ever worked for a large company where the most insane and inane ideas routinely get turned into everyday practice (I'm looking at you, Dilbert).

In the beginning was the plan
And then came the assumptions
And the assumptions were without form
And the plan was completely without substance
And darkness was upon the faces of the workers
And they spake unto their marketing managers, saying `it is a pot of manure, and it stinketh'
And the marketing managers went unto the strategists and saith,
`It is a pile of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof'.
And the strategists went unto the business managers and saith
`It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong and such that none may abide by it'.
And the business managers went unto the director and saith,
`It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength'.
And the director went to the vice president and saith,
`It contains that which aids plant growth and it is very strong'.
And the vice president went unto the senior vice president and saith,
`It promoteth growth, and it is powerful'.
And the senior vice president went unto the president and saith,
`This powerful new plan will actively promote growth and efficiency of the company and the business in general'.
And the president looked upon the plan and saw that it was good
And the plan became policy

The Divine Music

2009-02-18T13:13:00.001+08:00

SOMETIMES when I'm about to fall asleep, an amazing melody comes into my head, plays itself out, and goes away. This is something I've never heard before, but sounds absolutely fantastic and mind-blowing. I could even say, divine.

This happened on Sunday. An instrumental melody in the style of Indian classical music started up in my head, picked up tempo and slowly morphed into a fusion violin-piece, and finally a rousing opera-style crescendo. It was just unbelievable how beautiful it was and how smoothly it flowed from genre to genre, blending every kind of music between East and West and yet, as a whole, sounding nothing like any music I'd ever listened to.

While letting this tune carry itself on, I caught myself simultaneously regretting that I didn't know enough about music to record it, write it down somehow so I could actually enjoy it over and over again. But this was such a complex piece, spanning so many styles, somehow I think even a prodigy would have trouble capturing it all. Oh well.

Shopping Spree

2009-01-24T12:26:00.001+08:00

IT'S so easy to spend money these days. I just went on an online shopping spree and bought these two books: Getting Things Done by famed management guru David Allen and Statistics: An Introduction using R by Michael Crawley. The first is a recent favourite of mine; I read it a few months ago after hearing a lot about it on Lifehacker. The second seems to be a really promising introduction to statistics and probability modelling using my favourite statistical software, R. The author just seems to get the art of explaining new concepts. I wish I'd had this book when starting introductory statistics in uni. Anyway.

After placing the order I got a sudden urge to check out the other, more well-known book on statistics using R: Introductory Statistics with R (by Peter Dalgaard, a well-known figure in the R software community). I guess I was afraid of making the wrong choice. Of course Amazon allows you to cancel or change your order before it's shipped, but it's still a hassle. But on previewing the table of contents and excerpts of the book, I was just relieved to see that it took a much more mechanical approach to teaching--not my cup of tea. I prefer Crawley's more explanatory approach, which cuts to the heart of what you're trying to do with the statistical methods you're using, rather than just what the methods are called and how to apply them.

This might have been the first time I didn't experience buyer's remorse after a shopping spree. Well, maybe the second time. I did get an awesome pair of casual shoes recently....

Office Politics ... Get Me Out of Here!

2008-12-21T07:03:00.001+08:00

IT TOOK five months to crystallise my hatred for office politics. When I started work, it was something of a novelty, something to get used to along with the rest of the new job. Now, it's something that slows down work, makes it less efficient, and throws up occasional nasty surprises to be dealt with.

Playing the game is sometimes fun, of course. You can have a laugh about the antics people get up to. It helps if a colleague is sympathetic and sees things the way you do.

I wouldn't say the experience is worthless. It's forcing me to discover what kind of job environment I'd like to work in. When I'm faced with a job task or problem, I don't just like to solve it--I like to solve the general class of problems in that category, and discover and handle the root cause(s). I like to tackle a problem from the ground up, and if necessary, design a new workflow to handle it.

Unfortunately, I can only do that for the relatively trivial tasks which are given to me to do in whatever way I want. For more well-established tasks and duties, things which have been set in their ways for many years, all I can do is follow along doing exactly as I've been instructed--and maybe supplement it with a little more to make things easier in the long run. But in the short run, that always adds up to more work. It's almost not worth it.

I was never into Dilbert much before, but I did know what PHB stood for (Pointy-Haired Boss). After having experienced it for myself, I actually have it like a morning dose of coffee, and I have some consolation that, I'm not the only guy in the world who has to put up with a PHB.

Stupid Windows Mistake #1

2008-12-07T06:11:00.001+08:00

I MADE my first stupid Windows mistake since buying a brand-spanking new laptop a few months ago. It's been running like a dream so far. But a few days ago I tried to download a movie on Bittorrent, and when it was almost done the video file refused to play--even on VLC--unless I went to a special website, downloaded a codec and installed it. Well, I fell for it. But even after installing the codec, the file wouldn't play. I took the bait and caught it hook, line and sinker.

Uninstalled the codec after that, but the damage was done. Past few days, some spyware has been randomly popping up Internet Explorer windows every few minutes, and a resource-hogging Internet Explorer process has been running in the background, restarting itself every time I stopped it. The dud antivirus program Windows Live OneCare failed to find anything, so I got AnVir, which was being given away for free just yesterday apparently. AnVir found some possibly-risky programs in the system, so I got it to rub them out. Then I got rid of AnVir--despite these annoyances, I still don't like having any more programs installed than I have to.

The problem didn't go away. I then installed Spybot Search & Destroy--given rave reviews by PC World--and it found and removed a bunch of tracking cookies. No actual software on my hard drive as far as I could see. Got rid of S&D too.

The problem still didn't go away. By today I was sick of lame-duck software and tried a different approach. Since it was Internet Explorer that was being continually started up at some random ad sites, I decided to get my firewall to block Internet Explorer.

The firewall in question is the slightly enhanced--and more or less easy to use--one that comes with Windows Live OneCare. I'm on a trial version of OneCare that'll run out in about a couple of months, so I'll have to get another firewall up and running then. But for now, this simple block is doing the job perfectly. After I killed off the last couple of Internet Explorer processes that were running, they didn't respawn any more. I guess maybe OneCare isn't so lame after all.

Viva la Paz

2008-11-30T12:51:00.001+08:00

JUST saw Spanglish and loved it. Should've seen it a long time ago. Anyway. I'm in love with Paz Vega.

The Monash Letters #1

2008-11-18T12:03:00.001+08:00

I SET up my Gmail account in Microsoft Outlook recently for easy access and found myself going through old emails that I'd written to family when I started university in Malaysia. Going over them, I was a little surprised at how many emails I had written--I thought I'd written much less than I had. Anyway, I'm going to post some of them here. I just think they're interesting reading. It's like going back in time and meeting myself three years ago.

22 Feb 2005

The international student office is very helpful. I can go to them any time and they will help me out with any dates, deadlines, fees or advice. So I'm not really worried about immigration.

The internet connection is provided by Sunway hostel free of charge.
Of course, it's really paid for by part of our hostel fees. I paid the hostel fees today, by the way. I had to pay RM 1,985, most of it a refundable deposit for my room. The rest was a semester's worth of rent. I have about RM 2,100 in the bank, a few hundred in my wallet, the USD 800 bank draft still being processed. So I'm OK for now. I'm compiling a budget right now, will send it to you guys as soon as it's done.

About drawers, I meant there's no drawer in my desk. There is one inside the cabinet and I keep all my important papers in there. As for the kitchen, there is a medium-sized fridge, and I've put a water bottle, bread, and a sandwich spread in there so far. Technically we are allowed to cook, but not using gas appliances. So a couple of my roommates have got together to buy an electric cooker and use it to cook some of their meals. If I want, I suppose I can buy my share of it and use it too. Right now I'm eating all meals except breakfast outside, keeping daily food expenditure about RM 5.

Had a very interesting time today. The heads of the various departments in the business school talked to us about why we should choose one major or the other. The head of the school talked about the way they expect us to study now (evaluate, critical analysis, synthesis, application, etc.). The student association made us play a couple of games afterwards, like putting on our shoes as fast as possible and striking various poses. Then they gave us a tour of the university building and we had a photo shoot and got our Monash ID cards.

I also allocated my timetable online, from my hostel room, a few hours ago. It works like this: we choose four units to take in the first semester and are enrolled for them. Then we go to the website and choose which classes and lectures we want to attend, by clicking the appropriate buttons. I'm attaching my timetable, so you can see what classes I have. There are lots of abbreviations in it, though. Things like ETW1000 are unit codes. For example ETW1000 represents Business and Economics Statistics. Something like Lt7 means Lecture Theatre 7.
TR3, Tutorial Room 3. 28/2-21/3 means 28 Feb to 21 March.

Tomorrow I have the Diagnostic English Test at 9:30 am (1 hour long). After that I'm more or less free.

How Did He Get the Crazy Idea That He Could Win?

2008-11-09T11:55:00.001+08:00

THAT'S what I've been asking myself over and over again. Obama knew that he's special, but how did he decide to take on the institution of Washington politics to win the Presidency? I mean, what was the point where he sat down and thought, I'll actually get into politics, become a Senator, then after a couple of years, stroll into the White House. I've been obsessing over all this, as you can probably tell.

OK, so it most probably didn't happen like that. But I wanted to know more about the start of his campaign, so I did some digging in the usual serious news sites and found an excellent seven-part piece in Newsweek. Now I'm glad I waited until after it all ended to get my in-depth analysis of the election. Newsweek says the major three candidates allowed its reporters to follow them across their campaign--of almost two years I believe--and observe all the plotting and tensions first-hand, in exchange for their story appearing after the election.

It's gripping reading. I just couldn't stop reading it. (I did skip over a couple of the middle chapters though. Didn't want to read details of McCain's comebacks of earlier this year.)

Oh, and I found an amazing set of candid, election-night photographs of the Obama camp, taken while they were all waiting with bated breath for the results to come in. Here it is. Watch it as a slideshow.

Waiting, watching and hoping. This photo is from the photostream of Barack Obama on Flickr.

The Skinny Kid With The Funny Name

2008-11-06T11:17:00.001+08:00

FEEL-GOOD exercise: Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_presidents. Then, scroll down the list of US presidents while reading each name. Finally, read the last name. It goes something like this:

George Washington

...

Thomas Jefferson

...

(aside: Benjamin Franklin was never a president? Surprising!)

...

Abraham Lincoln

...

the Roosevelts

...

... a whole bunch of other WASPy names ...

John F. Kennedy

...

Bill Clinton, the Bushes ...

and then ... BARACK OBAMA.

If I forget everything else that's happened in the US since its founding, I know that in more than 200 years, there's never been anything like this. He's magic, there's no other way to explain it. I hope that the confidence and the faith he brings out in all of us eventually becomes a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy of global recovery and progress. But in the meantime, I know he's just landed himself in the biggest fight of his life. But then, this is what every US president-elect should be thrown into.

Kids and School

2008-10-26T04:49:00.001+08:00

I NOTICE something strange every morning as I go to work. I see kids of pretty much every age steadily walk to school--braving traffic and crossing roads, stoically and resolutely, come rain or snow. Much like Canada Post deliverymen when you think about it. Alone or in groups, with siblings or friends, walking long distances at 8 am, which was early dawn to me in my university years (i.e. upto last year).

And the strangest part is, the parents are nowhere to be seen. It's like the kids have been brainwashed into thinking they actually have to go to school!

Now take me when I was a kid. You'd need wild horses to drag me out of bed, a court order to make me brush my teeth, and both the carrot and the stick to make me put on my uniform. And if the car wasn't available to drop me off? Back to bed!

Kids these days....

Alexander & W.

2008-10-25T09:00:00.002+08:00

WARNING: this post (probably) has spoilers for both movies.

I'VE recently found myself borrowing a lot of movies from my local library. I always thought borrowing movies made much more sense than buying, but never had an easy, well-stocked, and convenient library system to use. But now I've just gotten the hang of taking out stuff from the local library system.

Anyway, a pattern has emerged. I've been taking out movies by directors who've released new movies recently. For example, after Burn After Reading came out, I took out and watched the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowsky. Will write about that later, maybe. Right now I want to talk about the titular movies.

When W. was released, it was just totally new to me because I haven't been following upcoming movie news from Hollywood. I just learn about new movies from Roger Ebert's reviews. So I thought that W. seemed like an interesting movie to watch. And as it turned out, I did get to watch it last weekend in the cinema. Definitely worth the ticket money.

Seemingly by chance, I'd watched Alexander recently as well--I'd seen it once already but just wanted to refresh my memory. Had forgotten that Stone had directed it, but after watching W. something just clicked and I found that he was behind both the movies. So now, with the context out of the way, I can explain what I found similar between the two movies and their title characters:

First off, obviously, they both focus on a single person on his journey through life and rise to power. If you put the two of them in parallel and look at it like that, it's a very startling similarity. I don't know to what extent Stone wanted to do that consciously, or just ended up doing it because it's his style, but the similarities are definitely there.

Both their fathers are leaders. Alexander's was Philip, king of Macedonia and obviously W.'s father is an ex-US president. They both have something to prove to their fathers--that they're worthy of leadership. Stone tries to show that neither can take criticism--Alexander blows up at his generals when they question his decisions to marry a foreign woman, to keep pushing on into India; and W. angrily crashes his car when Laura tries to critique one of his speeches.

Another thing I noticed, and I don't know how symbolic this is, is that both have armies of conquest in Asia. Alexander in ancient Persia, and W. pits the US into a war in modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan, not too far away. Their armies probably would have crossed each other's paths several times if they were in the same time period.

Ultimately, Alexander is both a tragic and triumphant figure in history--he brings a taste of civilisation and unity to half the known world, he wants to emulate Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind--but it all falls apart after his death. In W., President Bush and his inner circle are trying to bring democracy to the Middle East--they see themselves as lighting a fire of freedom that will spread throughout the region. So what if they really want to secure a continuous supply of oil? As Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) says of Alexander, 'no tyrant ever gave back so much'.

At the end of the movie, in a dream sequence, we see W. tilt back his head in expectation, trying to catch a baseball that's just been hit, the crowd going wild--but the ball never comes down, and the sky is pitch black. This tells me that we've yet to see the outcome of his tenure.

Of course, we have new information since the movie came out, and it doesn't look too good.

Wrong Answer Every Time!

2008-10-19T06:09:00.001+08:00

Just found this awesomely hilarious joke. I think it's safe to say that with each question in the joke, I got the wrong answer every time! :-)

Hello Mr. Warren Buffett

This is an old one......but, nonetheless, a "beauty" & is "brilliant".............!!!!!!!!!!!
I bet, you will enjoy reading this.......!!!!!!!!!! And for sure you had all the wrong answers for it...
Beautiful Madam was having trouble with one of her students in 1st Grade class.
Madam asked, "Boy, what is your problem?"
Boy answered, "I'm too smart for the first-grade. My sister is in the
third-grade and I'm smarter than she is! I think I should be in the 4th Grade!"
Madam had enough. She took the Boy to the principal's office. While the Boy waited in the outer office, madam explained to the principal what the situation was.
The principal told Madam he would give the boy a test and
if he failed to answer any of his questions he was to go back to the
first-grade and behave. She agreed.
The Boy was brought in and the conditions were explained to him and he agreed to take the test.
Principal: "What is 3 x 3?"
Boy: "9".
Principal: "What is 6 x 6?"
Boy: "36".
And so it went with every question the principal thought a 4th grade should know.
The principal looks at Madam and tells her, "I think Boy can
go to the 4th grade."
Madam says to the principal, "I have some of my own questions.
Can I ask him ?" The principal and Boy both agree.
Madam asks, "What does a cow have four of that I have only two of"?
Boy, after a moment "Legs."
Madam: "What is in your pants that you have but I do not have?"
Boy: "Pockets."
Madam: What starts with a C and ends with a T is hairy, oval, delicious and contains thin whitish liquid?
Boy: Coconut
Madam: What goes in hard and pink then comes out soft And sticky?
The principal's eyes open really wide and before he could stop the answer, Boy was taking charge.
Boy: Bubblegum
Madam: What does a man do standing up, a woman does sitting down and a dog does on three legs?
The principal's eyes open really wide and before he could stop the answer...
Boy: Shake hands
Madam: You stick your poles inside me. You tie me down to get me up. I get wet before you do.
Boy: Tent
Madam: A finger goes in me. You fiddle with me when you're bored. The best man always has me first.
The Principal was looking restless, a bit tense and took one large Patiala Vodka peg.
Boy: Wedding Ring
Madam: I come in many sizes. When I'm not well, I drip. When you blow me, you feel good.
Boy: Nose
Madam: I have a stiff shaft. My tip penetrates. I come with a quiver.
Boy: Arrow
Madam: What word starts with a 'F' and ends in 'K' that means lot of heat and excitement?
Boy: Firetruck
Madam: What word starts with a 'F' and ends in 'K' & if u don't get it, u have to use ur hand.
Boy: Fork
Madam: What is it that all men have one of it's longer on some men than on others, the pope doesn't use his and a man gives it to his wife after they're married?
Boy: SURNAME.
Madam: What part of the man has no bone but has muscles, has lots of veins, like pumping, & is responsible for making love ?
Boy: HEART.
The principal breathed a sigh of relief and said to the teacher,
"Send this Boy to IIM, I got the last ten questions wrong myself!".

From http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/warren-buffett-sends-a-letter-to-tmcs-tracey-schelmetic.html#comment-36751

Where Do Classroom Essays Go to Die?

2008-10-14T12:06:00.001+08:00

I'VE always felt that I did a good job back in middle school with a few short stories, in essay form, that our English class had to write. And I keep wondering from time to time what happened to those stories, the only copies that ever existed, with my writing on them, with those stories that always stuck in my mind. One was about a tense hospital situation where a doctor has to bring the news to a little girl's parents that she may be in terminal condition ... unless they can try a radical new treatment. Another (the better one) was about an Indiana Jones-type treasure seeker who, along with his fellow grave-robbers, fall under an ancient Inca curse and ... well, it's not pleasant.

So anyway, for some reason those two have been really bugging me, especially recently. I know that as soon as they were marked, the class assignments were put away in archival. But for how long? A week, a month, a year? In any case, they were probably thrown out a long time ago.

Kind of makes me shake my head and think about what it would've been like if we'd had the chance to keep a copy for ourselves, type it up and put it online ... silly really. I myself must have written countless little pieces of fiction through my school years. And that's just me, hardly an O. Henry or Mark Twain. Makes me wonder though how many amazing and insightful stories written by young people have been thrown away over the years....

GTDMail

2008-10-14T11:36:00.002+08:00

I REALISED after reading David Allen's Getting Things Done (well, most of it) that Gmail has been designed almost from the ground up to make implementing Allen's personal productivity system, easy. Now I realise this is probably not news to anybody, least of all Gmail aficionados (first time I've ever used that word--whew). But I just feel like going over some of the productivity-enhancing features in Gmail that have been going through my head lately.

First of all, the idea that you don't use folders--you just get an inbox and an archive for all messages, and you can tag messages with any--and multiple--tags that you like. The point of this is that you treat all incoming mail as something to be processed, something that requires your attention. And you view the inbox as a place that holds this mail--mail that you need to process as you soon as you get some time. Any mail you don't need to act on--like information for your reference, you might as well put it in the archive. And in fact, you might as well set up filters in Gmail that automatically archive it, if you know that you always get this kind of mail from somebody (or whatever other criteria). For example, I've set things up so that mail from the online vendor I buy bus passes from automatically gets archived, since I don't need to act on it--it's just order confirmations.

So in this way, you get your inbox down to zero messages, ideally. Everything that you don't need to act on, and everything you have finished acting on, has been archived. Anything you didn't want to keep, deleted. Simple, but it feels good to know that you're on top of your email instead of the other way around.

And of course, we do need to categorise our emails--work, personal, sports, whatever--and here we have tags. So you can tag messages any which way, for maximum flexibility, and then just click on the tag name to see all messages tagged the same way.

Of course, the real power of these categories, or labels, is that you can use them to find, say, all emails from friends about school--if you've tagged them as such: just search for `label:Friends AND label:School'. There's a lot of flexibility. After all, Google is all about the search.

So Gmail is all about these two concepts: the inbox, and the archive. Because broadly speaking, you're always either processing email, or finished with it and just keeping it around for reference. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Shameless plug: I highly recommend Getting Things Done. It's the one self-help book that I've ever read, but I can pretty much tell it's the only one I'll ever need to.

Thoughts on Immigration and Culture Clash

2008-10-13T06:54:00.002+08:00

FROM time to time I get to thinking about the difficulties people go through when they immigrate to countries, especially in the Western world. Radically different cultures clash, disagreements arise, and the biggest bugaboo is religion. And every new generation rebels against the old one's ways. So what do we do about this? Should the parents strictly enforce the homeland culture, or allow total integration into the new one, or try to balance the both, as they usually do?

Sooner or later, trying to enforce your own culture on your family, or even trying to make compromises and balance what you think is fairly, will backfire. The kids won't want to pray and go to the mosque, or stay strictly vegetarian, or wear the veil. And it's a matter of religion after all, you can't let it slide. Who knows where it will end. The neighbours will talk, rumours will start, and in general things will be awkward--at the very least.

How about totally integrating into mainstream society? Take your holidays when everybody else does, wish people Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, have the wife work 9 to 5 and make the kids do chores in exchange for cellphones and computers. After all, you're in a new country for a reason--things didn't work out too well in the old country; too much corruption and unrest; no rule of law and in general, things were going to hell. And here--what a difference! The bureaucracy actually works; things are done fast, online, conveniently, and in general, with peace of mind.

So what's the difference? Why couldn't things work the same way back home? Is it because of religion, cultural attitudes, laziness, corruption--who knows--probably all those combined. So, for all their faults, these people here have been doing something right--they've built roads and highways (and managed to put a street name sign on almost every damn road at every damn intersection), skyscrapers and freight ships. They've speeded up government, maximised efficiency, reduced corruption to a minimum, and made sure people are helped with education, finding work, getting social support--even tax money back from the government.

So, if we do as they do, kind of embrace the culture and values (well, without eating pork or ... whatever), what would the end result be? Who knows? Outrageous idea--it'll never happen. People of pride and dignity, people who hold on to their ancient traditions which have served them so well, are never going to jump in the deep end and embrace the sinful ways of the Western world. But their kids....

Some Credit Crunch Jokes

2008-10-12T03:26:00.001+08:00

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7659334.stm:

Q: What is the definition of optimism?
A: An investment banker ironing five shirts on a Sunday night

Q: What is the one thing Wall St and the Olympics have in common?
A: Synchronised diving

Q: What is the difference between a pigeon and a merchant banker?
A: A pigeon can still put a deposit on a Ferrari

I went to buy a toaster and it came with a bank

Q: What do you say to a hedge fund manager who can't short-sell anything?
A: Quarter pounder with fries please

Q: How many commodities traders does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None, they don't change bulbs; but the trading price of darkness plummets due to oversupply

Entries from a new financial dictionary:
Broker: What my stock adviser has made me
Standard & poor: Your life in a nutshell
Cash flow: The movement your money makes as it disappears down the toilet.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

2008-09-22T12:19:00.001+08:00

I'VE been converted to one of the credit-worshipping masses. Well, not so much worshipping as using. And desiring more of. The story is basically that after using cash all my life, and then taking to debit like a fish to water, using a credit card feels like a natural progression.

Of course, before I applied for one I was full of apprehension. I mean all I knew about them was the high interest rates, and the bunch of fine print that could get me if I didn't read it properly. And of course, the fear of being without a job and stuck with the card bills.

But the thing is, the card company sends you a clear, bold-highlighted bill with a due date each month. Just like any other company which bills you monthly. If you pay off the amount due on time, you're in the clear.

What that means is I actually have to track how much I spend and make sure I actually have that much money in my chequing account. Also, future expenses that I'll have to pay off before I get my next paycheque.

If I can do that, I can reap a lot of benefits--freeing up cash flow for almost a month, earning reward points and cash back, insurance on trips paid for with the card, and so on.

Now, if only I can convince the banks here to give me some more credit....

Some New Stuff

2008-08-26T07:55:00.001+08:00

FIRST post from new laptop and the latest Windows Live Writer. Everything is shiny and new. Vista Home Premium is humming along with whatever I throw at it. The special effects are sweet, although Flip 3D, the Mac-like window-switching effect, is a tad bit slow. Ah well.

The laptop is an HP Pavilion dv6919ca from Wal-Mart, for $598. That came to about $676 with tax slapped on, but I still consider it a pretty good deal. Here's HP's page with all the info on the model. I think the main thing is the AMD processor--that's what cuts the price down so much. Oh, and the Wal-Mart back-to-school sale. I actually would have gone for a Toshiba Satellite that was $50 cheaper and ranked higher on Vista's built-in performance score, but it was sold out. Looks like the people can tell when there's a free lunch around.

Anyway, another thing about this machine is the monster 3 gigs of RAM, which finally gets my mind off worrying about whether I have too many programs open, too many background tasks running in the taskbar, and too many gadgets on the desktop. I'm just piling up whatever I like right now. No doubt it'll slow down a lot later. Maybe by then I'll be proficient enough with Vista to speed it up a bit myself.

Now about the graphics card--the Nvidia GeForce Go 7150M. I don't know much about Nvidia cards and their capabilities on laptops, but from the name this sounds like a mobile graphics card. It shares the system RAM--doesn't have any memory built in--but since I (think I) have plenty to spare, I don't mind. I don't see any heavy gaming in store for this machine so it should be fine.

Btw, Windows Live Writer is surprisingly polished. It's just very well designed all round, and is working with Blogger like a snap. I tried using a Firefox addon called Deepest Sender to do snap blogging, but it errored out on me. Kudos to the WLW team.

The Entitlement to Being Able to Do Anything

2008-07-10T10:57:00.002+08:00

A LITTLE bit of a whimsical title to this post, couldn't really think of anything better on the spot. It's a rant anyway, so you've been warned. Anyway, Paulo Coelho asked something interesting in his blog/video blog. He basically is making the point that there are many things in life that we never try to do because we've been told that we can't do them: start a business, pursue a hobby, or a lifestyle, go into a career, or whatever.

What I want to talk about here is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. My main idea is this: how many things in this world are being done an endless number of times, with no thought for the environment in which they are being done? Let me give a few examples: how much paperwork is being generated by people and offices around the world just because paper is cheap and abundant? What resources are being diverted by telecommunications companies in big, underpopulated countries like Canada and Australia to set up network range in remote and uninhabited regions where less than 5% of their subscribers will ever go? I mean, they're incurring all these costs of putting up networks in places where most of their subscribers will never want network coverage, and then passing on these costs to the same people who'll never use the coverage.

Recently there've been reports of rare metals like gallium, indium, hafnium and such being `threatened' in their supply. These metals are highly essential ingredients to a lot of modern technology. Without them, we can say goodbye to modern airplanes, LCD screens, and some more similar tidbits. While they're not imminently about to run out, these metals are limited in supply. Now imagine them being used up to feed rising demand throughout the world ... going into factories, getting put inside the devices rolling off assembly lines at ever-increasing rates, and then staying in these doodads, the majority of which are not being recycled, but just filling--well--landfills.

Of course, the biggest waste that just gets me every time is water. We just use too much of it. Our baths and showers and toilets and sinks and basins all flush water down the drain as if it's a magical never-ending supply. People leave their taps on and go off and play a round of golf. Stuff like that. We desperately need water-saving washing and toilet systems, but right now they're pretty expensive. Let's hope they get cheaper in the future.

Then there are the businesses which are built on taking advantage of cheap gas (gasoline, petrol) prices. Yes, I said today's cheap gas prices. Because if gas was priced at its real value, home delivery companies which deliver to your house in 30 minutes or less, no matter how small the order, would be impossible. And people would actually be forced to get off their couches, turn off the TV, and go outside and get their own pizzas.

A huge case of consumers getting their way no matter what the cost is the current ethanol situation, and world food prices. Check this out: with rising petroleum prices, the developed countries have suddenly decided to ramp up corn ethanol fuel production and introduce laws forcing food ethanol as fuel on the public. And voila, corn supplies drop, and world food prices jump.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The world today has a culture of entitlement, an expectation of getting whatever it wants, in whatever quantities, and driving up the price of whatever's in short supply--to such dizzying heights that producers almost literally slash and burn anything in their path to fill this demand. There's something wrong with this economics--the economics of entitlement and expectations.

On the bright side, there is something I hugely appreciate about this sense of entitlement by the people of the developed world (I think I appreciate the irony of it). It's the huge advances in medicine that we've made over the past couple of centuries. I know it's a tired cliche, the repeated mantra of how we've eradicated polio and smallpox and malaria and so on, but it bears repeating. And modern medicine, and the expectations and entitlements which drive it, are working on cures to cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's ... the list goes on. Maybe even the cure to ageing. And these cures are slowly but surely getting passed on to the rest of the world.

This actually brings us back to Paulo's question of how much in life we're not able to do simply because we think we can't. What I've been talking about here is how much in life we do and consume just because we think we think we are entitled to them. Ironically, we may end up thinking that we're entitled to the impossible--and then achieving it.

Nine to Five

2008-07-10T10:01:00.000+08:00

FINALLY got an honest-to-goodness 40-hour-a-week job. I must be seriously out of shape, because it takes a lot out of me. Still getting used to waking up at 6 am every day for five days in a row, getting home at 6 pm totally exhausted, vegetating till dinnertime, then going to sleep. Planning to join a gym soon, though, so that might get me out of the house and back in shape.

Before starting work, I'd been keeping really wild hours, going to sleep at 5 am and waking up in the afternoon/evening. Still doing that on weekends in fact, so far. But on weekdays I'm forcing myself to sleep by 11 pm and wake up early. It's nice to know I can get up early, have a good sleep rhythm and get enough sleep during the night. Feels like my body's clock is getting tuned. Slowly.

Still need a lot of coffee relative to, say, 5 years ago though, to get through the day. Not sure how much of this is because I'm doing more work than I was five years ago. Trying to have a big breakfast and a coffee in the morning, but at work, by 11 to 12-ish I can almost literally feel my sugar and caffeine high wear off, and drowsiness starts creeping in. Have snacks and lunch by 2--2:30 pm, and a coffee to jump-start the sluggish body again. The coffee at work is really good, by the way. They have a premium brand which smells pretty expensive, a full-fledged coffee maker with the works. It takes a hell of a long time but the coffee is great.

The Master and Margarita

2008-05-06T15:05:00.004+08:00

I STARTED writing a small review of this book on my Facebook `Books' application, but then realised I had a lot to say about it. And one of the small book-review applications on Facebook is not a good place for a book such as this. (Which is actually a sad indictment of all my other book reviews there. Have to get them out here sometime.)

I heard about this book some time back, while I was in Malaysia I guess, as part of a controversy--a Russian film adaptation had been made, and was being denounced by religious groups there as being demonic because it showed a witch on a broomstick (and other things). If they had read the book, they would have seen how ludicrous that is.

It's a very complex book, hard to describe. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who loves to read, though. The editorial review on the book's Amazon.com page certainly does it a lot of justice.

Having read it a long time ago, I'm fuzzy on the plot details, but I do remember this: I found the book absolutely gripping, right from the first chapter. It's a story about Yeshua (Jesus Christ) in Jerusalem shortly after he was denounced by Judas Iscariot and brought before Pontius Pilate; the Master (a persecuted and marginalised writer in Soviet Russia), his faithful lover Margarita, and the Devil, Woland. That is certainly a wide-ranging story. And the plots are mixed in such a way that blurs the distinction between story and story-teller.

Bulgakov's imagination is certainly gripping. The characters and antics he dreams up are surreal and, at times, chilling. Woland comes to Moscow with his retinue of disguised demons; wreaks havoc on the Soviet literary establishment and high society; tempts Margarita with the promise of complete freedom from society's rules and boundaries; and in the process causes the Master and Margarita to be reunited, and their mutual story about Yeshua to be completed as they ride off, the Master healed after all his years in the wilderness, and Margarita finally at peace by his side.

Seriously. Read it. Update: read it with U2's Until the End of the World playing in the background.

Tabbing in Opera and Notepad++

2008-04-30T14:02:00.002+08:00

Notepad++

I'll get to Opera in a bit. It took a quick read-through of the source code (hurrah for open source), but I've finally got Notepad++ tabbing set up exactly the way I like it. For the non-techies reading this, Notepad++ is a free and full-featured text editor for Windows which is meant to replace, and beat the hell out of, Windows Notepad. In fact it does such a good job that I'd rather use it than pretty much all the other editors I've ever used.

After recently being forced to install Ubuntu Linux on my laptop (and loving it), I missed N++ so much that I downloaded and started running it with Wine, a kind of environment which fools a Windows-only program into thinking that it's running in Windows. (I've used Wine before to play Windows games such as Diablo II.)

Anyway, a couple of things were bugging me about Notepad++. Firstly, its tabs couldn't be navigated using the standard Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn keys. The program author doesn't consider them as standard as Ctrl-Tab, and leaves it up to you to change the shortcuts. Well, this I did, but N++'s default tabbing settings also show a small `task list' of open documents whenever you try to switch among tabs. For some reason this task list doesn't automatically disappear under Wine as it would under Windows. You're forced to right-click on it to choose the tab you want.

So this was the situation. What I did was:

Go to Settings > Shortcut Mapper... and, under the `Main menu' commands tab, changed the last two items's (`Switch to previous document' and `Switch to next document') shortcuts to Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn respectively. It's pretty easy--double-clicking on the command lets you choose a shortcut graphically.

Go to Settings > Preferences... and, under the `MISC' tab, disable the `Document switcher (Ctrl+TAB)', which is what N++ calls the task list there.

That's it. With this setup, N++ has tabbing the way God (and Firefox) intended--with Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn.

Opera

Opera is the shiznit, if I may use the term. Particularly the latest beta version, currently 9.50. I, a long-time Firefox user, have been enjoying its speed, new `speed dial' feature, new `quick find', built-in Bittorrent downloading and IMAP-enabled email client which lets me access my Gmail. It really gets the job done, and then some. Everyone should seriously try it out. The only thing is, to a Firefox veteran like me, I can't live without my Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn.

Opera has Ctrl-Tab tabbing with a task list by default--almost exactly the same as N++. Here's what I did to get back good-old Ctrl-PgUp & Ctrl-PgDn:

Go to Tools > Preferences..., then the Advanced tab, and the Shortcuts list item on the left side.

Make sure the Opera Standard keyboard setup is selected and then click the second Edit... button to edit the setup.

Type `cycle' in the Quick find search box on top of the Edit Keyboard setup dialog. This shows the page (tab) cycling commands. Double-click shortcut (on the left) for Cycle to next page and change the shortcut to `PageDown ctrl'. Then change the Cycle to previous page shortcut to `PageUp ctrl'.

Type `page left' in the search box and clear the shortcut for the Page left command. Really doubtful I'll ever need to scroll horizontally in screenfuls. If I ever do, I can worry about it later. Then type `page right' and clear the shortcut for the Page right command. We need to clear these because they would clash with our tabbing commands.

Click OK to get back to the Preferences window.

In the Advanced tab, click the `Tabs' item on the top left and under `When cycling through tabs with Ctrl+PageDown', select the `Cycle without showing list' option. This makes tabbing exactly like classic Firefox.

The reason I tackled both these programs here is there's a large similarity between what I had to do with each. Will try to put up screenshots later.

A Shoebox Budget

2008-04-30T09:30:00.003+08:00

A recent Lifehacker article gave me the idea of turning my formerly-useless Nokia phone box into a repository of all my receipts:

This way I figure I can follow my dad's advice about reconciling my spending with my monthly bank statements, say, once in a blue moon when I have some free time.

I still have the Expensr webapp, but man it's hard to get back into the habit of using it every day!

Found in Response to a PC World Article

2008-04-29T21:16:00.001+08:00

The article, 18 Features Windows Should Have (but Doesn't) elicited some less-than-reverent responses from readers:

zipzap said at Apr 29, 2008, 05:04: `Oh yea, MS really want to put more built in software... so they can get sued for being uncompetitive and monopolistic and all that rubbish.'

And at Apr 29, 2008, 05:59: `Things PC World should have but doesn't:

1) Brains
2) More Brains
3) A little more brains'

Fantastic.

Also, it's a little weird to see PC World so out of touch with its readship--nimble online blogs like Lifehacker often do a much better job at giving us the tips and tricks we need to get the most out of our PCs.

Hilarious Misuse of `Mullahs'

2008-04-28T08:28:00.002+08:00

I found this hilarious new usage of the term `Mullahs' and couldn't resist putting it up here:

`Furthermore, I made the switch because developing Ruby on Rails applications on Windows is such a pain, and most developers know this, so they go out and buy Macs. Well my friends, you can save your mullahs and turn your stock standard Dell into a kick arse development environment for Rails. Just check out the screenshot of my desktop below.'

For those not in the know, mullahs are respected Islamic scholars who often give sermons at mosques. Basically the Muslim equivalent of clergymen. Now what this inadvertent author probably meant is `moolahs'. Lol.

The Monkey King ... er, The Forbidden Kingdom

2008-04-23T11:52:00.004+08:00

VERY enjoyable movie. Jackie Chan and Jet Li together make movie magic--I just had to say it--and give the audiences a compelling show. Ironically, Chan and Li both come from this genre of action movies--chop-socky--but they had to do Western-style action movies to achieve Hollywood star power. And meanwhile, the genre was revived by such notables movies as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers.

OK, now that I've had my say, the movie. The hero is the ordinary and likeable kid in Brooklyn (Boston?) obsessed with old kung fu movies, Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano, who perfected the ordinary-guy-forced-to-become-a-hero technique in Sky High, another enjoyable movie--sorry, now I've had my say :-). He frequents the old Chinese memorabilia shop around the corner always in the hope of finding another old kung fu classic.

One day he finds an ancient staff of power in the store, and the elderly proprietor tells him that it's waiting for someone to return it to its rightful owner ... a mischievous deity known as the Monkey King. The Monkey King is probably the most interesting character in the movie, although he's absent for most of it. (Indeed I keep thinking of the movie as The Monkey King. Hence the accident-on-purpose title to this post.) The legend goes that he was imprisoned in stone after being tricked by the Bad Guy, who we'll come to in a bit.

Almost as if on cue, Jason gets into serious trouble with some of the neighbourhood thugs. Although the thugs do look like they could be from the cast of West Side Story, they are deadly serious for Jason, who is forced to run for his life, with the staff in his hands by accident.

He's cornered by the thugs, who're about to kill him, but the staff mystically transports him into ... The Forbidden Kingdom ... I guess, a faraway ancient China. He regains consciousness to find that some kindly villagers have taken him in, and finds soon enough that the villages and people of the kingdom are mightily oppressed by the armies of the Jade Warlord, who rules over the Kingdom in the absence of the Heavenly Emperor, and has imprisoned the Monkey King by tricking him into parting with his magical staff.

By chance, Jason is saved from some Imperial soldiers by Lu Yan (Chan), a vagabond who drinks wine all day and swaggers along until he's forced to fight, at which time you get to see some MAD skillz. Recognising the holy staff and taking Jason for a monk who is trying to return it to the Monkey King, Lu Yan takes Jason under his wing and teaches him the kung fu he will need to defend himself. They're joined by Golden Sparrow, a young maiden who has her own reasons to go along with them.

Along the way they meet The Silent Monk (Jet Li), who mistakes Jason for a thief and snatches the staff from him, leading to maybe one of the most anticipated fight scenes in movie history, between Chan and Li. Eventually they learn they're on the same side, and share a good laugh over Jason--`He's not even Chinese!'

Anyway, that's the setup, and these four characters are faced with the quest of returning the staff to Four Elements Mountain and freeing the Monkey King from his stone prison, where he's been for the past 500 years while the Jade Warlord terrorised the Kingdom unchecked.

Now, I won't talk about the quest itself--how Jason is trained by the two martial arts masters, how they survive a desert crossing to come to Four Elements Mountain, or how one of them is treacherously shot in the back by the White-Haired Bride (another staple of old martial arts cinema), and what Jason has to do to save that person. But it's all well worth watching, in the theatre if you can, with friends or a girlfriend (I think).

But I will talk about the Monkey King a bit. He is an unbeatable warrior with his mystic staff of power, and a mischievous spirit, always thumbing his nose at authority--especially the Jade Warlord, who is the Commander of the Imperial Army. This is what arouses the Warlord's hatred of him, and maybe what turns him evil. The motivations of the deities aren't examined in full--probably the movie would become an angst-ridden existential piece--but there's just enough there to leave you wondering what kind of politics they would have had in a heavenly imperial court. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

There's one thing I want to rant about. Apparently the consensus in reviews of the movie is `Great fight scenes, but too much filler'. To me, it was just the right amount and length. I've heard about, and been sceptical of, American audiences' apparent desire for `dumbing down' of movie plots, but this movie has an intriguing plot which makes you care about the characters, wonder about the life and times of the setting, and miss it when Jason gets back to New York, as he must in the end. If you don't know some backstory, how can you fill in the blanks in your head with interesting fantasy? That's part of what makes it fun. It's like these reviewers want a made-to-order story with exactly right amounts of setup and payoff, and no lingering anywhere, in case they're forced to think about a fantasy world (<Deity> forbid).

At one point, understandably, Jason's reaction to finding himself in ancient China is thinking it's a dream. There's a moment slightly after this where it's driven home to him how dangerous the dream is. Lu Yan for once sheds his humorous nature and says to Jason something like, `If you die in this realm, you will be found dead where you came from!' A dire warning in an otherwise light-hearted movie. The mix of light and heavy elements is right.

SPOILER WARNING: There is a spoiler (at least by my reckoning) in the comment below. Scroll down to see it.

Synchronicity

2008-01-31T01:00:00.000+08:00

This is kind of a strange post. The thing is, I see or experience strange coincidences in my life often enough that I've given a name to the phenomenon--synchronicity. Of course, I'm hardly the guy who came up with the word or its meaning. Nor am I the only person who thinks that coincidences happen to them. But I do use the word to describe strange, chance-defying happenings or experiences that, oddly enough, happen surprisingly often--to me.

The reason I'm writing about this just now is that, well, something ... synchronicitous (is that a word?) ... happened just now. Well, it seems like that to me. See for yourself.

First, I was browsing through the BBC News site and happened to come across an interesting graphical illustration of how the US sub-prime crisis happened. I was interested because I'd recently been looking at graphing and charting, and how to make eye-catching charts to visualise a lot of data.

So anyway, the BBC's sub-prime crisis guide happened to use the US city of Cleveland as an example of how the mortgage crisis affected poorer urban populations. I was curious as to why they used Cleveland; but there's a good explanation in the page itself which I will give here, also because it happens to be an important part of why the crisis happened at all.

For many years, Cleveland was the sub-prime capital of America.

It was a poor, working class city, hit hard by the decline of manufacturing and sharply divided along racial lines.

Mortgage brokers focused their efforts by selling sub-prime mortgages in working class black areas where many people had achieved home ownership.

They told them that they could get cash by refinancing their homes, but often neglected to properly explain that the new sub-prime mortgages would "reset" after 2 years at double the interest rate.

The result was a wave of repossessions that blighted neighbourhoods across the city and the inner suburbs.

By late 2007, one in ten homes in Cleveland had been repossessed and Deutsche Bank Trust, acting on behalf of bondholders, was the largest property owner in the city.

So, enough about Cleveland. Not quite, as it turned out.

I then came across this, an article about a couple of books written by one William Cleveland, who is `[o]ne of the pioneers in developing guidelines for comprehensible data graphics'. (By the way, the site where I found the article, Pictures of Numbers, is a blog about charting and graphing with some very good articles, if anyone is interested.) It turns out that Prof. Cleveland developed something called lowess, a statistical technique used in scatter-plot charts.

Now, lowess is something I've been coming across in the mathematical software package, called R, that I've been using to make my charts.

And lastly, while finding the above article, I came across another article, by Stephen Dubner, a journalist and one of the authors of Freakonomics. (I haven't read it yet. Hear it's good though.) Anyway, Dubner's article, called `How's This for a Coincidence?', mentions that he was on a plane to Cleveland, where basketball star LeBron James plays for the Cavaliers (I don't know if that's still true). Dubner was blogging about an earlier post by his Freakonomics co-author, Steven Levitt, in which Levitt had asked the readers what LeBron James had in common with his (Levitt's) wife. They like doing the `have-in-common' thing from time to time.

How's that for synchronicity? (Sorry. Couldn't resist that last line.)

Synchronicity update: the Freakonomics blog has done it again, with their latest post: Levitt's `What Do Lolita and Freakonomics Have in Common?'

Synchronicity update 2: coincidentally, the above blog post talks about a chart of US students' SAT scores compared to their reading habits. I came across this chart a few days ago.

Life in the Cloud

2008-01-02T20:13:00.000+08:00

OK, so suddenly I find myself with the urge to blog a bit about my changing computing habits. If reading techie stuff makes you want to tear out your own eyeballs and pin your eyesockets with two large needles, you should quit reading this now.

So. First off--the title. I'll explain it in a bit, but right now I just want to talk about what's behind it. Lately I've been moving a lot of my personal data online. I mean stuff that I'm used to keeping on my own computer, I'm uploading it for various reasons. For backup being just one of them.

Gmail--The Beginning of the End of an Era
It all started with Gmail of course, with its humongous 1 gigabyte of storage space. We quickly started using it to store our documents and such, a kind of freestyle file manager. And by now this has been going on for some time.

Google Docs
Then Google introduced Google Docs, the lightweight office suite which lives entirely on the web. It too stores files, albeit only documents, presentations and spreadsheets. But if you're whipping up a bare-bones document (assignment, proposal, whatever), and want to share it with friends and co-workers, it's excellent.

Google Notebook
Now we also have Google Notebook, which allows you to manage any textual info you might want to save for later use. These include bookmarks, and regular notes wherein you can keep stuff you've written but aren't sure what to do with it, stuff you need to remember, like an itinerary, or stuff you can't afford to forget, like your passwords. And of course, all of these are available from any web browser that can go online. I've found it very useful to have access to these notes both when I'm at home and at work.

Google Reader
I'm also using Google Reader, which just seems to be getting more and more powerful every few months. At this point I'm hard pressed to decide which is my favourite Google web app--Gmail or GReader. But I digress. If you're not a heavy (and I mean prolific) web surfer, you're probably not sure what exactly Google Reader is. A site that lets you read books, maybe?

Nope. It's a site which collects articles from websites you specify, and shows all new articles in bold highlighting. It actually shows all articles within its own page. This is incredibly useful because it saves you from having to hop around among a dozen different sites that you like. Instead you stay in Google Reader and read one article after another, skimming past the ones that don't interest you and digging down into the ones that do.

Once you pass over and read an article, it's changed back to non-highlighted. So you can always easily tell which articles you've read and which are new. You can `star' articles, like in Gmail, to keep them in a special folder in case you want to look at them later. You can `share' articles, which adds a link to the article on an automatic `blog' GReader creates for you, and which your friends can access once you give them its address.

I'll admit I'm a moderately fast reader, but GReader literally lets me read or skim through thousands of articles every month, no joke. So if you're someone who has to or wants to keep track of some kind of news, GReader will give you a considerable boost. And these days, keeping track of any kind of news is a snap thanks to search engines like Google automatically giving you continuously updated feeds of the search results. For example here's a feed on news about Jamie Lynn Spears. If you add this feed to GReader, it'll show the news headlines, and short summaries, as items almost as soon as they're posted onto the web. (Tip: don't do it, for your own sanity.)

Once you start using GReader and learning more about feeds and just how many kinds of information they can track, you'll be well on your way to becoming a true web guru.

Flickr
Now owned by Yahoo, and still offering a boatload of free storage space for photos, Flickr is probably the best photo storage site on the web. I've been uploading photos to it left and right. The only limitation for the free service is that you can upload a maximum of 100 MB each calendar month. Shouldn't be a problem for the occasional uploader.

Honourable mention: Google's Picasa Web Albums, a slick photo sharing app that lets you do one thing for free that Flickr doesn't: organise photos into albums. Free Flickr lets you create a maximum of 3 `sets', which are its equivalent of albums. But you can get around that by `tagging' all photos which would go into the same album with a common tag, and then doing a search for that tag.

OK, that is a bit cumbersome. So why do I recommend Flickr over Picasa Web? Because the latter has an absolute storage limit of 1 gigabyte, which feels rather irksome in these days of unlimited storage. But then again, who's going to use up a gigabyte of storage, right? Hmm....

Expensr
Last but not least, a gem among web apps. If you've ever had to manage money, you might have found yourself asking, Where did all the money go? Expensr tries to answer exactly this question, by making you keep track of all your expenses. It's free and it's fully on the web--once again, you can access it from any device with a proper web browser. (Forget the PC--I've heard people are using their Wiis to surf these days.)

If you take a few minutes to sign up and set up the accounts, you'll be rewarded in just a few days with a day-to-day visual analysis of your spending habits--as a pie chart showing where the money goes, and a bar chart showing how much goes each day. The site is new, but it looks promising. Some of the community-based features are intriguing. You can `tag' yourself as `in my twenties', `in my thirties', `in college', `renting', `a smoker', and so on and compare yourself anonymously to others in these categories.

The Cloud
Now, you might be getting a sense of how much you can put online just for the sheer convenience of it. Nowadays this data space is being called the cloud, and cloud computing seems to be headed for the big time, with Google and a select few others poised to be in the epicentre. And given the quality of their web offerings, I feel pretty good about that.

LEDs: Light Emitting Diodes

2007-12-25T07:18:00.000+08:00

If you look at your car's digital clock, microwave display, laptop computer's indicator lights, or your keyboard's Num Lock/Caps Lock indicator lights, you're seeing LEDs. They never wear out and they don't give out heat. The last bit means that they're turning hardly any of their input electricity into heat. That in turn means huge amounts of electricity is being saved.

If you think about it, they're pretty miraculous compared to incandescent lighting and fluorescent lighting, the two most popular lighting technologies we have today. I've been hearing more and more about LEDs since this past year and it looks like they're going to hit the big time pretty soon. For example, it looks like the developed world is passing regulations to ban incandescent bulbs in a few years.

Currently most LED lights are pretty small. But slowly we'll be seeing LED desk lamps, lightbulbs, laptop display backlights, televisions, and on and on. They're going to be rolled out and just blend in with our everyday technological landscape.

Such an important technology deserves to be well understood simply because it's going to become a huge part of our lives in the future. And, it's a pretty nifty application of simple high school physics. I recently found a good article that explains the whole thing very simply, and reminds us of how LEDs managed to attract our attention.

From the article: `Up until recently, LEDs were too expensive to use for most lighting applications because they're built around advanced semiconductor material. The price of semiconductor devices has plummeted over the past decade, however, making LEDs a more cost-effective lighting option for a wide range of situations. While they may be more expensive than incandescent lights up front, their lower cost in the long run can make them a better buy. In the future, they will play an even bigger role in the world of technology.'

Monopolists and interoperability?

2007-12-21T00:26:00.000+08:00

Here's an economist's take on Microsoft's new file formats. From the article: `While Microsoft could have kept the traditional ``.doc'' as its default format for MS Word, this would not have served its purpose: eventually, after enough of the world pays for Office 2007, holdouts will be dragged along, kicking and screaming. Then, in four or five years, Microsoft will begin our agony all over again.'

I'm not sure I understand what this means. After all, wouldn't it be in Microsoft's best interests as a monopolist to have everyone use its own established file formats? Why introduce new ones and create confusion in the marketplace? A later paragraph makes things a bit clearer: `So, by creating incompatibilities, some subtle and some obvious, that make its old software obsolete, Microsoft can sell its operating systems at high profit margins without fear that people will wait until the price drops. The price will never drop, because Microsoft will just roll out a new system, again at high profit margins.'

Of course, he's trying to find a purely economic explanation for Microsoft's new file formats, which is fine but it's not the whole picture. There's a growing movement in the world today that's pushing towards office document formats which are open and XML-based, to make it easier to process them and extract information from them. I myself hit on a similar idea--of serving XML-based Word documents ready-made in response to users' queries--a couple of years ago while doing time (my internship in a bank :-).

Anyway, Microsoft can't be left behind with its older, closed file formats, plus it too sees how useful XML-based formats can be, so it develops XML versions of its formats. The problem with that is there is already a growing XML-based office document standard--Open Document Format. Microsoft wants its own standard--it says ODF can't support all the features of Microsoft Office.

It's kind of sad reading about the kind of troubles ordinary, non-technical people have been going through adjusting to the new Office, file formats, and Vista: `The first person at my company to use Vista was our Executive Vice-President. He was furious. Vista and Office 2007 came with his new Dell computer by default. Dell didn't ask: ``Would you prefer the old versions of the operating system and MS Office that you know how to use?'' So our VP got a shiny new computer that he didn't know how to use: functions were rearranged, and keyboard shortcuts were different.' Especially because we have something like OpenOffice.org, which offers a familiar interface and the ODF standard file formats, for free.

Slashdot Humour Post #2

2007-11-30T09:03:00.000+08:00

I'm sorry but this stuff is just too funny not to share with y'all non-Slashdotters. The post (Your Ex-CoWorkers Will Kill Facebook) was about how awkward it would be to add your colleagues and boss as your Facebook friends, and then maybe stumble on pictures of you and your friends pinned up in their cubicle sometime. And what do you do after you leave that job? There are actually some good ideas in the comments. Some people apparently use LinkedIn to do professional social networking and Facebook for personal friends. Here are some of the funny comments.

Finally (Score:5, Funny)

by j.sanchez1 (1030764) on Thursday November 29, @01:55PM (#21521823)

Your Ex-CoWorkers Will Kill Facebook

At least those idiots will do something right before they die.

Re:uh, dont use it? (Score:5, Funny)

by AdmiralDouglas (1158047) on Thursday November 29, @03:29PM (#21523275)

Pembo13 read the post with a sigh. Thoughts of his lost love came streaming in on him from every direction. The parent's post was all too remeniscent of that seductive MySpace page he fell in love with so many years ago. He was sure she was the one. He knew it down to his bones.

But just as most of the turbulent online relationships he'd known ended up, he too, was doomed to her foe list.

He'd heard so many stories of couples meeting and falling love, when was it his turn? If only they could hear his heart, pleading for their attention! His fingers tapped away a message over the keys. A message in a cyberbottle. A plea.

A plea for a happy ending.

Don't worry, pembo13. Your time will come.

Re:Social Networking Sites in General (Score:5, Funny)

by Minwee (522556) <dcr@neverwhen.net> on Thursday November 29, @02:02PM (#21521943)
(http://www.neverwhen.net/)

It's beyond me why people are so quick to spill their most personal secrets on a social networking site

It's because they're hoping to score with Hot Internet Chicks. Why is this hard to understand?

If playing every Mario game ever made has taught me anything it's that guys will do anything, even eating strange mushrooms and jumping head first into sewer pipes, for the vague possibility of impressing women.

Re:this is old news... (Score:5, Funny)

by truthsearch (249536) on Thursday November 29, @02:05PM (#21521983)
(http://seenonslash.com/ | Last Journal: Friday May 11 2007, @04:02PM)

George: You have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world then George Costanza as you know him ceases to exist. You see, right now I have Relationship George. But there is also Independent George. That's the George you know, the George you grew up with... Movie George, Coffee Shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.

Jerry: I love that George.

George: Me too, and he's dying. If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George. A George divided against itself cannot stand!

Rambling post

2007-11-29T17:51:00.000+08:00

My discerning readers may have noticed by now that I'm not much for blogging about personal stuff that's been going on in my life. Or maybe not--personally I suspect my total readership here has the combined IQ of an eathworm. Ha, ha. That was me making a House-ian sort of crack. I promise I'll try not to do that--much.

Well, the past few days have slowly gone from being boring to more and more filled with anxiety, as the exam results come closer and closer. Mind has basically been on stasis, with online TV shows and movies keeping me entertained, apart from the quick snippets of The God Delusion read between computer reboots.

I have been programming quite a bit, though. At least, in JavaScript and CSS. Tried to make a simple CRUD web app using only those two--i.e. nothing on the server side. The aim was to make something that looked and felt Web 2.0-ish. It worked, except couldn't find any good way to store data on the local computer using only JavaScript--so in the end was forced to just pop up a new window with the data and ask the user to save it as a file with the correct name. Quite a stop-gap.

From there somehow I ended up trying out Dojo, which is an impressive framework but I'm still getting used to it, and trying to get it to work properly for me. It kind of gives the impression of being a bit buggy. But the use of `widgets' and easy theming are impressive.

Then I tried tackling rounded corners in HTML boxes using JavaScript-generated SVG images, on-the-fly, on the client side. Haven't got that to work properly yet, and needless to say, it will only work on browsers with native SVG support, like Firefox and Opera.

Update: Happily, I seem to have done OK in the exams, pulling through to the last phase of my time in Monash. It's just a huge relief. Now my last unit is left, consumer behaviour.

Windows died

2007-11-18T05:18:00.000+08:00

I was on ouou.com, watching some video when suddenly Windows faltered and crashed. I briefly saw a blue screen detailing some error and then Windows tried to reboot but couldn't find ntfs.sys. Whoops! It told me to try repairing the install from my original Windows CD. Now I know I have it around here somewhere, and it might be the best idea to just use it to repair Windows--after all I did pay a fair amount of money for it. But--I also had a Mandriva 2008 live CD lying around fairly close, and it's really impressed me with its performance on my laptop and its overall ease of use.

So I thought, what the hell, this is a sign, it's time to go back to Linux. And I did it. And ten minutes later, here I am with Mandriva installed and up and running. It looks and feels great, but I know it's not coming without a price. And so, here's a list of Windows software I'm really going to miss:

Microsoft Word. I was familiar with it, it did what I needed, and it was powerful so I could do a lot of other stuff with it, like easily writing VBA macros. Oh well.

EndNote. With EndNote and Microsoft Word working together, referencing became easy and powerful at the same time. I can only hope one day to create a perfect bibliography style file with BibTeX and use it with LaTeX.

EViews. Really going to miss this one, especially as I'm hoping to one day write a clone of it. Needed to familiarise myself with it more.

Firefox profile. I'd built it up over more than a year of browsing and storing passwords and bookmarks. Oh well. Will just have to build it up all over again.

Let's hope everything else goes great.

Beowulf

2007-11-16T23:06:00.000+08:00

Very impressive movie. I could have sworn in some scenes that the actors were really there, but apparently it's an animated movie, so there's no telling what was there and what wasn't. One thing I was really intrigued by was--you guessed it--Angelina Jolie. Her character appeared fully nude except for some body paint, and nothing got censored--even here in Malaysia. The movie got a PG-13 rating. I might be ranting here a little bit, but it just seems like kids these days don't even have to try to get to see nudity--it's just being handed to them nowadays. I'm happy to report Roger Ebert has noticed this too.

Well, not that I'm a prude--well, maybe I am if I have to see this stuff with kids under 15 or 16.

But yeah, really enjoyed the movie. And now, can't wait for the Dragonball Z movie to come out!

Some interesting articles about child abuse

2007-09-08T03:44:00.000+08:00

These articles raise some interesting questions about society's tendency to see all men as potential child molesters:

Are We Teaching Our Kids to Be Fearful of Men? (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118782905698506010.html?mod=Moving-On)
Managing the Risk of Child Sex Abuse (http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/2007/09/managing-risk-of-child-sex-abuse.html)
We Predators (http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/2007/09/we-predators.html)
Avoiding Kids: How Men Cope With Being Cast as Predators (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118903209653018615.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=1)

The last article is especially interesting to me as an adult male -- for obvious reasons. Should I assume that because I am an adult male, society will automatically profile me as dangerous and threatening to children? And will children behave towards me as if I'm a potential criminal? It's a strange world we live in.

On another note, Mark Bennett, the attorney who authors the blog `Defending People: The Art and Science of Criminal Defense Trial Lawyering' (http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/) seems to be a very good writer. Will be adding him to my blog feeds.

Some cool Firefox themes

2007-09-03T20:39:00.000+08:00

Aside from the default Firefox theme, there aren't any really cool themes that I've found -- but I do like a couple of themes which give Firefox the look of MS Office 2003. Here are the links:

Outlook 2003 Blue (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/890)
Outlook 2003 Green (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/892)
Outlook 2003 Silver (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/894)

An ideal theme for me would be a really minimalist theme which uses very dark colours, but doesn't overdo it. Yup, it's a high hurdle.

Update: Just found the perfect theme: Miint (http://www.twistermc.com/blog/miint/). Mmm, tasty.

Getting my.monash email in your Gmail inbox

2007-06-01T00:02:00.000+08:00

Yup, it's actually possible to send and receive my.monash (or any other uni/workplace) email from your beloved Gmail account. Here's how:

Receiving (mail into Gmail)

When someone sends mail to your Monash email address, you can have the Monash mailing system forward it to Gmail. Sign in to Monash Webmail (https://my.monash.edu.au/email/webmail.html) and choose the Options link from the row of links at the top. In the Options page, choose the Forwarding and Delivery link from the left side. There you can specify that email should be forwarded to your Gmail address and then deleted (so it doesn't take up any space in your Monash inbox).

Sending

You can compose and send emails from your Gmail account which will appear to be from your Monash address. To set this up, you need to be signed into both Gmail and my.monash. In Gmail, go to the Settings page, then go to the Accounts tab. Click the Add another email address link, and a window pops up asking for the name and address. Enter your my.monash name and email address here, click Next Step, then Send Verification. Keep the small window open because the Monash email site has a bug which makes it show Web page links incorrectly. In other words, you won't be able to verify that you own your Monash address simply by clicking the link in the email that Gmail sent to your Monash address.

Now go to your Monash inbox, open the message from Gmail, and copy and paste the confirmation code in Gmail's verification window. Hit Enter, and Gmail adds your Monash address to the list.

Try It Out

Compose a message in Gmail, and choose your From: address from the drop-down box. The person who gets the message will see the Monash address, and when they reply to it, the message will automatically come to your Gmail inbox. When you reply to this reply, the new message will automatically have your Monash address in the From: field. And so on.

The EndNote post

2007-04-29T01:53:00.000+08:00

For the past few days I've been installing EndNote, the bibliographic referencing software, on every computer I've been able to, and it seems to be proving useful to everybody. So I thought I'd share some more info about it that I've found out.

So first off, what is EndNote? It's a program that stores all the information about the references you use in your articles, and inserts them into Word documents as and when you want them. Oh, and it automatically creates and updates the list of references at the end of the document in the proper style (Harvard style in our case). This is very useful for us because we're always writing up assignments with a certain number of references required (say, at least ten) and we're always getting the references wrong -- or not quite right -- somewhere or the other. And obviously references are very important to us because Monash is starting to use Turn-It-In and is asking everyone to submit assignments electronically as well as on paper.

So yeah, I highly recommend EndNote to save a lot of time and effort. Monash makes it very easy for us to get up and running with it: go to http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/endnote/ for a summary page that contains all the EndNote links. After installing the program (Microsoft Word must be closed for the install to run), the program link should be in the Start menu (All Programs, EndNote, EndNote Program). Create a library file (File, New...) which will hold your references. You can of course have more than one library file, say one for each subject, but you can start out with just one.

Automatic bibliographic information

Once you're in the new library file, you can start creating some references (References, New Reference) to articles and books you've found. More importantly, you can now connect directly to Monash's online libraries to search for articles. When you find articles like this, you can just import the references into your library file and the information will automatically be properly formatted when you make EndNote insert it into Word. This is a simply awesome feature, not having to manually type in all the referencing info.

EndNote uses what it calls `connection files' to find out how to connect to each separate online database. The connection files relevant to the Monash databases are at http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/endnote/filter-connection-files.html. The most important connection files for us (business students) are `Business source premier', `Expanded academic ASAP (GALE)', `Econlit (EBSCOHost)', and `Monash University Library Catalogue'. In fact these are probably the only ones we need, and once we put the files into the C:\Program Files\EndNote 9\Connections folder, we can actually just delete all the other connection files in there.

Once you have the connection files set up, here is how to use them: tell EndNote to show you only the connections you want (Edit, Connection Files, Open Connection Manager..., then find and mark only the above connections). Then connect to, say, Business Source Premier (Tools, Connect, monash_business_source_premier_ebscohost). The search window should open up. Do a search, e.g. for anything authored by Mankiw. EndNote does the search, asks you how many results to show, then shows them. To see the detailed info about each search result, double-click it. You'll usually want to see the detailed info because the abstract will tell you if the article is relevant or not. To use the reference, copy it to your library file (the Copy ... Reference(s) To) button.

One issue with this feature: the first author is listed twice. Once the reference is copied into your library, open it (double-click) and delete the duplicate author name. Still less work than typing it all in.

Now the main part: putting the reference into your document. There are a couple of ways to do this, I'm just mentioning here the simplest. In Word, put the text insertion point where you want to insert the citation. Then in EndNote, move to the citation you want to insert, then click Tools, Cite While You Write [CWYW], Insert Selected Citation(s), or press Alt+2. And there you go, the citation is put into the document, and at the same time, the list of references is created or updated at the bottom of the document.

Another problem: it's not in the proper Harvard style. The closest style that EndNote has to the Monash Q Manual Harvard style is called `APA 5th', which you can find in the Style Manager (Edit, Output Styles, Open Style Manager...). Once the style is selected, make it the default style (Edit, Output Styles or the style drop-down box in the main toolbar). You can also customise the style to bring it closer to the Q Manual, but I've got a heavily customised style I can send out to anyone who wants it. Just put the style file into the C:\Program Files\EndNote 9\Styles folder and EndNote will see it.

Another issue: you want to include a page number in the citation, or you want to leave the author name outside brackets, like so: Mankiw (2005) says that.... You can do this in Word. Put the text insertion point inside the citation, then click Tools, EndNote X, Edit Citations.... Or click the button in the EndNote toolbar. Then select the Exclude author option. Or fill in the page number.

And that's all for now folks.

America's gun culture

2007-04-20T19:17:00.000+08:00

I am sorry to learn about the losses suffered by the community of Virginia Tech. My first reaction is to blame America's gun culture. After all, American kids are bombarded with images of gunbattles, gunslingers, and the gung-ho shoot-from-the-hip attitude as portrayed in the popular media. If they face these kinds of images growing up, how can they not come to accept guns as a solution to right the wrongs they face? But obviously, most kids don't do this -- only the ones driven to madness do.

If my first reaction was to think of gun culture, my next thought was, how to curb it? There is a powerful segment of Americans who will strongly oppose any attempts to prevent ordinary citizens from buying guns. King George might be trying to break into their houses, after all. And just in general, removing rights from people just sounds ... queasy to me.

But there is another option -- compulsory weapons training. Make it compulsory for anyone who buys a gun to receive training to use the gun, and psychological evaluation to gauge the person's mental health. This way, everyone who buys a gun automatically deals with a barrage of people who train him to use the gun properly (keep the gun safety on and all that); make sure he knows the what he will be liable for if he shoots his gun and hurts someone; and evaluate his general state of mind and fitness to use the gun. Preferably, there would also be a written exam (consisting of technical questions e.g. on gun care, and also -- crucially -- psychologically loaded questions like `How would you feel about shooting someone in the head?' which would give some basis to gauge the person's mental stability and mindset) which he would need to pass to get the license for the gun. (How do you think Seung-hoi Cho would have answered a question like that? Obviously with a rational answer -- but questions like this allow psychiatrists to pick up clues about the person's mental processes.)

In this way, guns become another state-regulated item, just like poison and radioactive materials. You might be asking, what next, will we need to give an exam to keep knives in our kitchens? To be honest, I think guns are far more dangerous than knives, because they are long-range weaponry, fire rapidly, and on average, do far more damage to the human body than a knife does.

Looking at this from an economic perspective, the use of guns in society has negative externality-like effects on society. Society wants individuals to use less guns than the individual wants to. Therefore, society should impose a tax on the individual who wants to use guns to bring his demand for guns down to an socially acceptable level. This tax is in the form of the gun training and written exam, which the individual would of course have to pay for just like any other training/exam.

We live in a world where we have to retake tests like the IELTS every few years just to prove that we are still as proficient at English as we were three years ago. I don't see anything wrong with taking a test to prove that we are fit to own a gun. In fact, there is more reason to make this a periodic test, say every two years. This way, kids will think twice before going off to buy guns to make themselves feel bigger.

Rocky Balboa

2007-01-05T00:11:00.000+08:00

Rocky Balboa is back to his roots in this last movie. The boxing champion of Philadelphia is back in the old neighborhood, looking for meaning in his life after the death of his wife Adrian. He's drifting apart from his son and living in the past, reliving the glory days in the boxing tales he tells the customers in his restaurant, Adrian's.

Rocky leads a lonely life, with exactly two people to call family -- his son Rocky Jr and his brother-in-law Paulie; and his friends and employees at the restaurant his only other human connection. The rest of New York sees him as Rocky Balboa, the Italian Stallion, the local champion. He hears `Yo, Rock!' on the streets -- people asking for autographs.

He befriends a woman who works at a nearby bar. She says he's met her before -- he has trouble remembering until she reminds him he walked her home one night, took a cigarette from her and told her to stop smoking. He remembers her as Little Marie, the girl who shouted `Screw you, creepo!' at him. She wonders why he wants her as a friend; he just needs a friend, someone to keep out the loneliness in his life no one else can stop.

Then, suddenly everyone's talking about a computer-simulated fight between Rocky and Mason `The Line' Dixon, the reigning undefeated world champion, in which the computer Rocky, in his prime, beats the hell out of computer Dixon. Suddenly Rocky is reminded of what he loves doing best, fighting, and wants to start training again so he can do small, local fights. To do this, he has to get a license from the boxing commission in the city. He has passed all their tests with flying colours, but they don't want to give him a license -- they tell him they're watching out for his best interests. Rocky gets emotional, asking the panel at the commission why they have the right to stop a man from following his dreams.

Dixon's managers have another idea -- an exhibition match between their client and Rocky, a match that will get Dixon the publicity he desperately needs -- with no challenger good enough to beat him, boxing fans aren't exactly knocking down the walls to see him, as they tell him. They approach Rocky with an invitation to fight in Las Vegas, leaving him with a dilemma -- should he embrace this chance to go down like a warrior, or pass up the chance to avoid embarrassing himself and the people around him?

From the scene at the commission, and throughout the movie, I kept getting a sense of why Rocky the man, and not just Rocky the boxer, is a champion at heart. His defining quality is to be able to see the people around him fall short, and to inspire them with nothing but his heart and his compassion. His son comes to him and shouts at him, blaming him for overshadowing his life. Rocky's reply cuts straight to the heart of their relationship: he'd held the infant Rocky Jr in the palm of one hand and promised Adrian that he was going to grow into a great man, better than anyone who came before. He'd watched Rocky Jr grow up and it was a privilege, because he was the perfect son. But when he grew into a man, he changed, because he let the people around him tell him what to think and what to worry about. Rocky shows his son the way to be a champion, and it's about getting back up and keeping up the fight no matter how hard you get hit.

Rocky accepts the fight (of course), and we get to see the training again, only this time the goal is not to build the perfect boxer's body: it's to build up all of Rocky's power, so that when he punches Dixon, Dixon should feel as if he's been kissed by a freight train (Rocky's trainer's words, heh).

Then comes the Big Fight, as always. It's one hell of a fight, as always. It pushes you to the edge of your seat and beyond. And in the end, it's not about who wins, but about Rocky, who has the crowd on his side all along. They can feel his champion heart -- they can see it in every punch he throws, and more, every time he gets back up to take more punishment from Dixon.

The first Rocky movie won an Oscar, I think for Stallone's writing. It had heart. The sequels had muscle and youth and energy and flash -- big bang for the bucks. They were enjoyable. But this last movie is enjoyable and has heart -- Stallone has done it again, by going back to the old values. Watch and enjoy.

Bangladeshi men are more studly

2006-12-09T01:30:00.000+08:00

Just ask Malaysian ladies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4802796.stm.

Programming kids

2006-12-07T15:44:00.000+08:00

Sometimes when I'm teaching kids at my mom's tutorial, I get this feeling that teaching a kid something is a lot like programming a computer.

The objective when I'm teaching is to get some concept across to the kid, so he can grasp it and manipulate it in his mind. With a computer, you want to instruct it to perform a certain task. So with this kid, you have to find a way to get the concept across, and the technique I use most often is to break it down into simpler parts which can be easily understood. E.g. to explain the concept of a conjunction (one of the parts of speech) to a kid in class 4, I would give an example of two short sentences, side by side, then show a conjunction which joins them together:

I ran. They walked.

Conjunction: but

Result: I ran, but they walked.

(I often use mnemonics too, like conJunctions are Joining words -- the `J' is the mnemonic; but that's not really relevant for computers.)

Anyway, with a computer, you break down a task, say changing the screen saver, into simple parts like: get the screen saver file name to use -- maybe from the user, or from some text file in the computer; access the Windows registry; put the new screen saver's file name into the right place in the registry; save and close the registry.

Now here is where it gets interesting. The first time round, it's almost a given that you won't get the concept across properly, and the kid will be in some kind of confusion about what you're saying. Same with a computer. It's almost certain there's a mistake in the program somewhere -- a bug. So you have to debug. This is an interactive process where you try to find out what's wrong by querying the kid/computer about what they think is going on, then you reprogram/re-instruct to compensate for that.

So, the kid says he doesn't understand the conjunction thing. The debugging always starts with making sure he knows the context that we're discussing this in; I have to make sure he knows that we need some words in the language to join sentences together to convey more information easily. (Otherwise we're forever stuck with extremely simple, one-verb sentences, each of which conveys maddeningly tiny amounts of information.)

In simple concepts like conjunctions, clarifying the context should clear up about 75% of the problems; but the more complicated the concept -- say, teaching the rules of algebra to a class 5 kid -- the more I have to go, step by step, into the parts which make up the overall concept: variables are unknowns; constants are knowns; variables and constants make up equations; equations can be solved to find the unknown by putting it alone on the left hand side; this is achieved by performing the same arithmetic operation to both sides of the equation, keeping both sides equal, and continuing until the unknown is alone on the left hand side.

For each of the above steps, I have to explain its purpose (context) -- i.e., what problem does it solve? Then I have to make sure the kid knows how to do it, and lastly of course, what to do if things don't turn out like expected. The same thing happens with computers, except of course they have no sense of context, nor do they need it. They simply perform one simple task after the other, in sequence, until the more complicated job is done. And unexpected outcomes are handled using a combination of the programming language and libraries of reusable code -- they're generally called error handling or exception handling (as in, exceptional cases).

Of course, all of the above is the ideal case when teaching a kid. The reality is I'm going to run out of time before I can properly explain the whole thing, or the kid is going to get incredibly bored and start drifting off to sleep. Maybe I can take a break then.

Finally managed to learn C#

2006-11-22T03:20:00.000+08:00

And it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I finally dove into the Ecma C# language specification document, for lack of any better reference/tutorial books here in Dhaka, and went through it absorbing everything that had confused me about the language before (like attributes, the override keyword and inheritance, assemblies and DLLs). A little bit about that spec. I downloaded it a long time ago meaning to go through it and learn the language, but kept putting it off. Now that I've done it, I see the spec is really an excellent reference for learning the language -- probably better than any O'Reilly `In a Nutshell' book for the language. If you're not new to programming, but are new to C#, just get it. It's worth it.

Wish there was an equivalent .NET library reference though. The MSDN library is very thorough but also bloated and slow. Kinda typical of Microsoft when you think about it. Heh, heh.

To celebrate, here's the first useful program I wrote (just now) in C#: ToggleScreenSaver. It's a command-line tool that turns your screen saver on or off. Works only on Windows. Usage is:

ToggleScreenSaver [on|off]

on: turns the screen saver on
off: turns it off

Source code:

// ToggleScreenSaver.cs
using System;
using Microsoft.Win32;

public class ToggleScreenSaver {
  static void Main(string[] args) {
      // args[0] is the first argument passed and so on, not the name of the program
      // That's a little brain-dead, but OK, we can roll with it
      RegistryKey rk = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey("Control Panel\\Desktop", true);
      if (args[0] == "on") {
          rk.SetValue("ScreenSaveActive", "1");
      } else {
          rk.SetValue("ScreenSaveActive", "0");
      }
      rk.Close();
  }
}

Some interesting tweaks for Firefox

2006-10-29T15:28:00.000+08:00

For when I get around to installing it:

(This is from the Slashdot article Firefox 2 Downloads Top 2 million in 24 hours.)

Annoyances

(Score:5, Informative)

by teslatug (543527) on Saturday October 28, @10:57AM (#16622640)

Here are some of the settings that I've gathered so far to get Firefox 2.0 to my liking:

In about:config
* browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 for one close tab button
* browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose to false for successive reading and closing
* browser.tabs.tabminwidth to 20 for displaying tab scrolling in extreme cases only
* browser.urlbar.hideGoButton no use for the Go button
* dom.disable_window to true, fix various window annoyances
* network.prefetch-next to false for not wasting my bandwidth

In userChrome.css for disabling the List all tabs which annoys me when using the close button:
/* Disable Container box for "List all Tabs" Button */
.tabs-alltabs-stack {
display: none !important;
}

Feel free to add your own to the thread.

LaTeX document fidelity

2006-10-27T12:34:00.000+08:00

Here's something I've been meaning to talk about. Came across this comment in an MSDN blog yesterday. The blogger, Rick Schaut, is a software design engineer for Microsoft Word on the Mac. He makes the following claim:

To relate this back to the equation editing problem, the problem with any TeX-based way is that you won't get identical layout from one platform to another. TeX (whichever flavor you're talking about) is designed to maximize the quality of the output for each given platform, but that sacrifices some aspects of layout compatibility.

Suppose, for example, you have two people working on a paper. One uses a Windows computer, the other uses a Macintosh. Should that paper include a rather lengthy equation, there's a good chance that the equation might fit on one line when the document is opened on the Mac yet not fit on one line when the document is opened on the Windows computer.

Here, Mr Schaut, you are happily wrong :-) TeX and LaTeX cleverly outsource the work of device- and operating system-independent document rendering; they merely specify the document's internal structure. Once a TeX processing system has turned the document into a PostScript or PDF file, you can merrily distribute it anywhere you want with full assurance that the rendering will be inviolate, down to the last full stop on the last line of each paragraph.

And of course, unless I'm missing something here, any plain LaTeX source files will compile to the exact same PDF file whether it's on Windows or the Mac; that's a given, because the processing that TeX applies to the source file is the same regardless of operating system.

Of course, there is the entirely separate issue of distributing LaTeX source files or DVI files of your documents; but given all the potential incompatibilities you can face there, why even bother to distribute anything other than PDFs? LaTeX + PDF is the only sane way to go.

Temptation, thy name is Internet Explorer 7

2006-10-25T22:56:00.000+08:00

OK, I know I said I'd upgrade to IE7 later, but I seriously couldn't resist the temptation -- especially since I have nothing to lose by upgrading now; IE is not my default browser and I'm not using anything that might not be ready for the upgrade. So how am I finding it?

Internet Explorer 7 feels much better than 6. Tab support is awesome, and rather faster than it was before, although still not as fast as Firefox's. And the keyboard shortcuts for switching among tabs should definitely be simpler than Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab -- they should really be Ctrl-PgDown and Ctrl-PgUp like they are in Firefox. That said, I've just discovered the Quick Tabs feature (shortcut: Ctrl-Q), which may just be the best tab-related feature I've seen yet in a browser. Press the key and IE shows a tab containing thumbnail previews of each of your tabs, and you can go to the tab you want with a single click. This is amazingly fast, and really cool.

Everything else they've done, including getting rid of the menu bar and putting the the address bar right below the title bar along with the navigation buttons, I applaud because it just increases the screen viewing space in the browser. Who uses the menus in their browser all that much, anyway? And if you need it, you can just right-click on any toolbar and turn it on. Or just press the Alt key to turn it on temporarily.

IE still doesn't have extension manager as convenient as the one in Firefox, but that's OK, I've invested a lot in Firefox, including future plans with Greasemonkey; and I wouldn't really switch back to IE even if it had awesome extensions. (Well, maybe if they had a Greasemonkey-compatible extension....)

So to conclude? IE7 feels like a hit. Definitely go for it. But as for Firefox 2? I've dowloaded the installer, but I'll still wait out the couple of weeks to get it through Mozilla's updating channels once they've made sure all the best extensions are compatible with it.

Eid mubarak

2006-10-25T01:04:00.000+08:00

Eid day yesterday was great. I think Bangalis really know how to turn in a good Eid party, if they're in the mood. Some friends got hold of a Bangladeshi biryani chef, who cooked us a big pot of awesome chicken biryani. We got together at their place and had a good lunch, and a nice break from the pressure of the upcoming exams. I know there's a risk of all these breaks from the pressure turning into a permanent break from studies -- but hopefully we'll keep things under control here.

Firefox 2 & Internet Explorer 7

2006-10-25T00:55:00.000+08:00

Firefox 2 is coming out in a few hours, but I'm really very satisfied with 1.5. I read though that 1.5 will soon have a minor update that paves the way for an automatic update to version 2, in a couple of weeks. I'm taking that upgrade strategy, because I'm a little worried that my current extensions, especially the very useful SessionSaver extension, will need some time to adapt properly to FF2. So hopefully in a couple of weeks that will be the case. But I'll probably wait a wee bit more even then while checking up on their status, i.e. what people have to say about them.

Not to sound nostalgic, but it seems like just yesterday that I downloaded the all-new Internet Explorer 5 over my slow dial-up line in Sharjah and tried it out, after reading a glowing review full of lavish screenshots in the Emirates' Windows User Magazine. And it was an awesome browser, the best of the best after using Netscape's weird-looking offering. But yeah, anyway ... IE7 is out now, and I know I'm going to upgrade. But similarly to Firefox, I'll wait till Microsoft pushes IE7 out to us through its Windows Update facility -- it gives everyone some breathing room and just feels right.

I won't really be using IE7 -- not with FF2 probably installed by then -- but obviously, it will be necessary to have it because of the bugfixes and interesting new features to try out.

It strikes me now that in about a couple of weeks, I'll be flying back to Dhaka, where my laptop will be totally cut off from internet access -- our desktop PC in Dhaka is the only machine which will be connected (hopefully, anyway). So it might be more than a month before any software gets upated on the laptop. That's fine by me, I guess. I'll still be able to try out FF2 on the home desktop. Hm, might download it now and take it to Dhaka to install, to save the download hassle when I get there.

Bayesian multi-category classification in Gmail?

2006-10-20T19:25:00.000+08:00

What this would do is something like what POPFile does for email clients like Thunderbird or Outlook or whatever: automatically categorise incoming emails based on keywords they contain. POPFile is trainable and it's supposed to reach a pretty high accuracy after a couple of weeks. POPFile doesn't actually put your emails into different folders in your email program; it just marks them as belonging to one category or other (say `Work', `Family', `Junk', `Stamp collecting', etc.). Then you set up your email program so that it puts these emails into different folders, or deletes them, or forwards them, or whatever.

What POPFile does

OK first of all, you're asking why would you want some software like POPFile to classify emails for you when you can just set up filters in your email program to do that based on who they're from, what the subject is, and so on? The reason is your email client's filters are static: they do not learn about new family members who are sending you email, nor about new correspondents from your workplace, nor about new junk mailers you have to deal with all the time. In fact, programs like Thunderbird already have Bayesian filtering to deal with this problem of continually-changing junk mails -- it's just that POPFile goes one step further, to try to identify your mails as belonging to arbitrary categories that you set up.

The idea is, once you've set up POPFile to recognise email from your family, from your work, and from your stamp collecting buddies, it will correctly identify these different types of emails, say, about 99.99% of the time. The rest of the time, which is presumably a piffling amount of time, you'll be telling POPFile something like `no, this isn't junk, it's just my little brother, mark it as ``Family'' '. And POPFile will continue to learn, using the Bayesian statistical analysis.

So the end result is, you can set up your email programs to put email marked `Work' in the right folder, and so on, without having to worry about updating your filters all the time.

Now here's my question: why should email program users get these benefits exclusively? Why can't we have something like this for webmail users? Specifically, Gmail users (like me, and it seems half the world nowadays)? Maybe we can. It boils down to three things: Gmail's JavaScript functions, POPFile's statistical categorisation methods, and Firefox's Greasemonkey extension.

What Greasemonkey does

Basically, Greasemonkey allows you to customise Web pages in Firefox in almost unlimited ways with a little JavaScript programming, using that page's Document Object Model and any JavaScript functions defined in it. Check out http://persistent.info/archives/2005/03/01/gmail-searches for an idea about just how powerful Greasemonkey is, and what it can do to Gmail.

I've tried out the above hack, and it actually does work, with a few hiccups. Furthermore, I've tried programming Greasemonkey scripts myself and I can tell you it's a really powerful way of customising websites which you love to make them even more useful. There are actually a ton of scripts people have written out there, and the best place to get them is userscripts.org. Check it out.

POPFile for Gmail?

OK, now we know we can extend Gmail's functionality in amazing ways with Greasemonkey hacks like the one above. Essentially, Greasemonkey is giving us the means to program a user interface for the new Bayesian classification classification features we want in Gmail. Greasemonkey scripts are written in JavaScript. Now I'm pretty sure the `business logic' of POPFile, which is currently written in Perl, can be ported to JavaScript without too much trouble. The end result: an interface in Gmail that tags incoming messages and quickly allows you to check for and correct mistakes, training it, and bringing the convenience of automatic Bayesian classification to Gmail. Anybody up for it?

The Trojan War was never this good

2006-10-19T19:12:00.000+08:00

Read Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos a couple of months ago, but haven't gotten round to talking about them till now. First of all, it's true that they're actually one book published as two, probably because if they were published in one piece nobody would buy a book that fat, and sales would be half as much as they were with two books instead of one.

Second, the book is not about the gods and Trojans and Greeks of the recreated Trojan war battlefield of far-future Mars; it's really about the future of humanity and what shape it might take. Simmons draws from a lot of literary sources, primarily Shakespeare (The Tempest) but also Proust (stuff I'm not familiar with) and Vernes (i.e. his Time Machine Eloi and Morlocks ideas).

The thing is, the story starts off with the scholic Thomas Hockenberry telling of the recreated war, and it's immediately gripping, especially to a guy like me who grew up reading his sci-fi on one hand and Greek/Norse/Egyptian mythology on the other. It's gripping for all the reasons the original mythologies are gripping -- the heroes and their stories are larger than life, etc. But the Trojan War storyline intercuts with that of the humans on Earth and the Moravecs on Jupiter, which takes the wind out of it somewhat, because you have all these new characters you didn't know before that you have to deal with, and you just want to get back to reading what Achilles did next.

Achilles by the way is the most interesting character in the story and Simmons lavishes him with detailed description, enough to satisfy any geek. Achilles the man-killer, Achilles the god-killer, Achilles the fleet-footed, Achilles this, and Achilles that. For some reason I kept imagining Brad Pitt as Achilles throughout the story, and it fit, right to the end. (But Eric Bana as Hector didn't -- Hector needs a stronger jawline, and a taller, more muscular figure).

The stories do converge, but they approach convergence from different points, and there's a lot of suspense. I won't bother with a detailed analysis of the thing here, but it's definitely enjoyable. I do want to talk about some of Simmons' ideas for the future of humanity though. Humans ten thousand years in the future are a sad, childlike lot, with every need catered to by robot servants and, who don't know how to read because they don't need to, and spend most of their time partying and pursuing other pleasures. Sounds perfect, but there's no intellectual stuff, no advanced thought. Simmons has a characters in the books disparagingly refer to them as `post-literate'. Ouch.

But these Eloi do have an interesting feature: they have been genetically modified to contain a hundred cybernetic functions, like a map/locator function that projects holographic images of the person being located; body status query functions; and advanced stuff like infonet access, the infonet being a semi-conscious web of information evolved from the internet which now blankets the planet. This infonet is extremely powerful -- it contains a huge amount of data, like information about every molecule in every cell of a tree the infonet user might be looking at. It's described as being totally overwhelming. You see the information, but you don't understand most of the knowledge contained in it. Oh, and you activate these functions by visualising combinations of coloured geometric shapes in your mind's eye. At least, until you can do it without thinking.

The `old-style', Earth-human protagonists introduced have a destiny to fulfill -- to recover the ability to use these advanced functions and recover the technological knowledge lost to the human race. But that's about it. There is some stuff about recovering some ten thousand humans encoded in a tachyon beam orbiting the Earth, but that's just another problem in the myriad collection of problems and mysteries the humans are faced with.

The infonet plays a large part in the book, actually -- combined with some really wild interpretations of quantum theory and post-human technology. It's a good read, but I still think the Trojan War part of the story should have been a different story altogether -- or rather, the story of the old-style humans on Earth should have been a different story, say The Final Fax. The Trojan War parts of the books would have made a kick-ass movie -- especially Achilles' visit to the pit of Tartarus in Hades, in the presence of the original Greek gods, the Titans, imprisoned there by Zeus.

If only they used this instead of E-Views

2006-10-17T09:49:00.000+08:00

(Interesting note: just found out that the Cochrane behind the famous Cochrane-Orcutt method was at Monash, http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/depts/ebs/.).

We started doing the basics of econometrics -- things like regression and ANOVA -- in Excel last year, but moved to E-Views this semester to do more advanced stuff like time-series analysis. That's too bad, because there's a much better program we can use: R (http://www.r-project.org/). The main reason is it's free -- we can download and use it at home, so we don't have to depend on the computer labs being open and free to get our assignments done. Here's a good article that talks about why R is great: http://jackman.stanford.edu/papers/download.php?i=22.

And yes, I know R is mostly command line and teaching it at Monash would take up too much of our time, taking our focus away from the econometrics theory. But R can be customised and tailored to the Monash courses with a little effort; and it has a Tcl/Tk widget set built-in which can be used to implement graphical versions of the stuff they teach us using E-Views -- things like restricted model F tests (Wald tests), AR(1) estimation, weighted OLS estimation, things like that.

That said, I'm still learning R and it's sometimes been frustrating to try matching my results on time series data to what my textbook, Wooldridge, says I should get. Things like ARMA(p, q) estimation seem to be built in to non-obvious places like the gls function in the nlme package. But it works, for the most part. Using Excel after R -- especially R's matrix handling -- feels like going backwards now.

Uptime on Windows

2006-09-13T17:03:00.000+08:00

Here's a VBScript script which runs in the Windows Scripting Host and shows you how long your computer has been running:


strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Set colOses =  objWMIService.ExecQuery("SELECT LastBootUpTime From Win32_OperatingSystem")
For Each objOs In colOses
    diffMin = DateDiff("n", wmiDateStringToDate(objOs.LastBootUpTime), Now)
    diffDays = Fix(diffMin / (60 * 24))
    diffMin = diffMin - diffDays * 24 * 60
    If diffDays >= 1 Then
        uptimeStr = uptimeStr & CStr(diffDays) & "d "
    End If
    diffHours = Fix(diffMin / 60)
    diffMin = diffMin - diffHours * 60
    If diffHours >= 1 Then
        uptimeStr = uptimeStr & CStr(diffHours) & "h "
    End If
    If diffMin >= 1 Then
        uptimeStr = uptimeStr & CStr(diffMin) & "min"
    End If

    WScript.Echo "Uptime: " & uptimeStr
Next

Function wmiDateStringToDate(dtmDate)
    wmiDateStringToDate = CDate(Mid(dtmDate, 5, 2) & "/" & Mid(dtmDate, 7, 2) & "/" & Left(dtmDate, 4) & " " & Mid (dtmDate, 9, 2) & ":" & Mid(dtmDate, 11, 2) & ":" & Mid(dtmDate, 13, 2))
End Function

Save it as a VBS file and try running it. Because it runs in the Windows Scripting Host, the uptime script can (generally) be run just by double-clicking on the file in Windows. If that doesn't work, somehow Windows' connection between the VBS file format and the WScript.exe program has been severed, and you'll have to run WScript.exe with the script name as an argument.

The script is basically my current fascination with the Windows scripting environment. There's a lot of documentation available, especially the Microsoft Windows 2000 Scripting Guide, which has been the most useful to me in understanding Windows' built-in scripting architecture.

Other ideas on what to do with this tool are kind of floating around in my head right now: using it to automatically download and tabulate exchange rates from Yahoo, then analysing the data with Excel; recording system uptime and usage statistics like how often and how long I use the computer; creating a script to quickly log in to Windows (Live?) Messenger and send a message to someone; rewriting the sparklines document in straight VBScript to run in the Windows Scripting Host environment, instead of having to open up the sparklines.doc document every time I want to create some sparklines.

All pretty cool ideas, at least from my point of view. And beyond them I might even look into accessing the Windows common controls and trying to create real graphical programs using just WSH. But that's in the far future.

Live word count script for OpenOffice.org

2006-05-02T19:43:00.005+08:00

UPDATE 9 Sep 2010: Did something I've been meaning to do for a while and wrote up an awesome wiki intro for the Live Word Count script in its new BitBucket home: http://bitbucket.org/yawaramin/oo.o-live-word-count/wiki/Home. As a consequence, I'm removing all the duplicate installation and usage instructions from this page. Please check out the BitBucket wiki--that's where all the action is!

UPDATE 17 Mar 2010: Moved script to new home at BitBucket, in case I need to make any further changes/improvements. Small fix to make sure script works both when started from the Macro Selector dialog box and from a toolbar button. Oh yeah, to add a toolbar button to start the macro, see instructions below.

UPDATE 13 Mar 2010: Slight change to wordCount macro to handle being started from a toolbar button.

UPDATE 2 Dec 2009: Confirmed that the script works with OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). As usual, see below for where to put the script in a Mac.

Also, I didn't realise this until now, but I've been cited in Linux Pro Magazine! Yay! :-)

UPDATE 30 May 2009: Just tried the script out again with OpenOffice.org 3.1.0 on Windows Vista; works fine. Please see the paragraph after next for the right place to put this script in Windows.

HERE'S something I worked on a long time ago but am finding very useful, a script or macro which displays a dialog box with a continuously-updating document (or selection) word count.

[...]

Styling Office XML Documents

2006-02-06T03:56:00.001+08:00

This post has been due for several days now. Been doing more research into Office 2003's XML file formats. The primary port of call for all budding Office 2003 XML developers is Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas. This is where you can download the schemas -- the formal descriptions -- and the explanatory documentation on the XML document formats for Word, Excel and others. Another important link is to the page for O'Reilly's new book, Office 2003 XML. There is a download for a sample chapter, Chapter 2: The WordprocessingML Vocabulary. Obviously these are very important references for someone who is just entering the field.

When I posted my last entry, I had already created the style file that tells Word how to display the raw account listing. I just wanted to play around with it a little bit, especially to see if I could get the table formatting right. The formatting as it currently is, is OK; but I wanted to customise it a little bit.

By now I've realised that mastery of tables in WordprocessingML will take some time and (at least) a couple of good references (see links above). So I'll just go ahead with the original plan.

Before I list the actual XSL transformations file that does the magic, I want to actually show its results, to get some oohs and aahs from the audience. Here they are:

The account listing as shown by Word when Word has no way of knowing how else to show it.

The account listing with an XSL transformation applied by Word. That is, when the XSL file tells Word how to display it.

OK, here is the XSL style file:


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:al="http://yawar.blogspot.com">
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <w:wordDocument xmlns:w="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/wordml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:sl="http://schemas.microsoft.com/schemaLibrary/2003/core" xmlns:aml="http://schemas.microsoft.com/aml/2001/core" xmlns:wx="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/auxHint" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" w:macrosPresent="no" w:embeddedObjPresent="no" w:ocxPresent="no" xml:space="preserve">
            <o:DocumentProperties>
                <o:Title>Account Listing</o:Title>
                <o:Author>Yawar Amin</o:Author>
            </o:DocumentProperties>
            <w:fonts>
                <w:defaultFonts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/>
            </w:fonts>
            <w:styles>
                <w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal">
                    <w:name w:val="Normal"/>
                    <w:rPr>
                        <wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/>
                        <w:sz w:val="24"/>
                        <w:sz-cs w:val="24"/>
                        <w:lang w:val="EN-GB" w:fareast="EN-US" w:bidi="AR-SA"/>
                    </w:rPr>
                </w:style>
                <w:style w:type="paragraph" w:styleId="Heading1">
                    <w:name w:val="heading 1"/>
                    <wx:uiName wx:val="Heading 1"/>
                    <w:basedOn w:val="Normal"/>
                    <w:next w:val="Normal"/>
                    <w:rsid w:val="00B04D4D"/>
                    <w:pPr>
                        <w:pStyle w:val="Heading1"/>
                        <w:keepNext/>
                        <w:pBdr>
                            <w:top w:val="dotted" w:sz="4" wx:bdrwidth="10" w:space="1" w:color="auto"/>
                        </w:pBdr>
                        <w:spacing w:before="240" w:after="60"/>
                        <w:jc w:val="center"/>
                        <w:outlineLvl w:val="0"/>
                    </w:pPr>
                    <w:rPr>
                        <wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/>
                        <w:b/>
                        <w:b-cs/>
                        <w:kern w:val="32"/>
                        <w:sz w:val="48"/><w:sz-cs w:val="48"/>
                    </w:rPr>
                </w:style>
                <w:style w:type="table" w:styleId="MyTableContemporary">
                    <w:name w:val="My Table Contemporary"/>
                    <w:basedOn w:val="TableNormal"/>
                    <w:rPr>
                        <wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/>
                    </w:rPr>
                    <w:tblPr>
                        <w:tblInd w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/>
                        <w:tblBorders>
                            <w:insideH w:val="single" w:sz="18" wx:bdrwidth="45" w:space="0" w:color="FFFFFF"/>
                            <w:insideV w:val="single" w:sz="18" wx:bdrwidth="45" w:space="0" w:color="FFFFFF"/>
                        </w:tblBorders>
                        <w:tblCellMar>
                            <w:top w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/>
                            <w:left w:w="108" w:type="dxa"/>
                            <w:bottom w:w="0" w:type="dxa"/>
                            <w:right w:w="108" w:type="dxa"/>
                        </w:tblCellMar>
                    </w:tblPr>
                    <w:tblStylePr w:type="firstRow">
                        <w:rPr>
                            <w:b/>
                            <w:b-cs/>
                            <w:color w:val="auto"/>
                        </w:rPr>
                        <w:tblPr/>
                        <w:tcPr>
                            <w:tcBorders>
                                <w:tl2br w:val="none" w:sz="0" wx:bdrwidth="0" w:space="0" w:color="auto"/>
                                <w:tr2bl w:val="none" w:sz="0" wx:bdrwidth="0" w:space="0" w:color="auto"/>
                            </w:tcBorders>
                            <w:shd w:val="pct-20" w:color="000000" w:fill="FFFFFF" wx:bgcolor="F2F2F2"/>
                        </w:tcPr>
                    </w:tblStylePr>
                    <w:tblStylePr w:type="band1Horz">
                        <w:rPr>
                            <w:color w:val="auto"/>
                        </w:rPr>
                        <w:tblPr/>
                        <w:tcPr>
                            <w:tcBorders>
                                <w:tl2br w:val="none" w:sz="0" wx:bdrwidth="0" w:space="0" w:color="auto"/>
                                <w:tr2bl w:val="none" w:sz="0" wx:bdrwidth="0" w:space="0" w:color="auto"/>
                            </w:tcBorders>
                            <w:shd w:val="pct-5" w:color="000000" w:fill="FFFFFF" wx:bgcolor="FFFFFF"/>
                        </w:tcPr>
                    </w:tblStylePr>
                    <w:tblStylePr w:type="band2Horz">
                        <w:rPr>
                            <w:color w:val="auto"/>
                        </w:rPr>
                        <w:tblPr/>
                        <w:tcPr>
                            <w:tcBorders>
                                <w:tl2br w:val="none" w:sz="0" wx:bdrwidth="0" w:space="0" w:color="auto"/>
                                <w:tr2bl w:val="none" w:sz="0" wx:bdrwidth="0" w:space="0" w:color="auto"/>
                            </w:tcBorders>
                            <w:shd w:val="pct-20" w:color="000000" w:fill="FFFFFF" wx:bgcolor="F2F2F2"/>
                        </w:tcPr>
                    </w:tblStylePr>
                </w:style>
            </w:styles>
            <w:docPr>
                <w:view w:val="print"/>
                <w:zoom w:percent="100"/>
                <w:doNotEmbedSystemFonts/>
                <w:validateAgainstSchema/>
                <w:saveInvalidXML w:val="off"/>
                <w:ignoreMixedContent w:val="off"/>
                <w:alwaysShowPlaceholderText w:val="off"/>
            </w:docPr>
            <w:body>
                <wx:sect>
                    <w:sectPr>
                        <w:pgSz w:w="11909" w:h="16834" w:orient="portrait" w:code="9"/>
                    </w:sectPr>
                <w:p>
                    <w:pPr>
                        <w:pStyle w:val="Heading1"/>
                    </w:pPr>
                    <w:r>
                        <w:t>ACCOUNT LISTING</w:t>
                    </w:r>
                </w:p>
                <w:p></w:p>
                <w:tbl>
                    <w:tblPr>
                        <w:tblStyle w:val="MyTableContemporary"/>
                        <w:tblW w:w="5000" w:type="pct"/>
                        <w:tblLook w:val="01E0"/>
                    </w:tblPr>
                    <w:tblGrid>
                        <w:gridCol w:w="2832"/>
                        <w:gridCol w:w="3238"/>
                        <w:gridCol w:w="2089"/>
                        <w:gridCol w:w="3061"/>
                    </w:tblGrid>
                    <w:tr>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:pPr>
                                    <w:jc w:val="right"/>
                                </w:pPr>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t>Account ID</w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t>Holder Name</w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:pPr>
                                    <w:jc w:val="right"/>
                                </w:pPr>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t>Balance</w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t>Debit/Credit</w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                    </w:tr>
                    <xsl:for-each select="al:accountlist/al:account">
                    <xsl:sort select="al:holdername"/>
                    <w:tr>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:pPr>
                                    <w:jc w:val="right"/>
                                </w:pPr>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t><xsl:value-of select="al:accid"/></w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t><xsl:value-of select="al:holdername"/></w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:pPr>
                                    <w:jc w:val="right"/>
                                </w:pPr>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t><xsl:value-of select="al:balance"/></w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                        <w:tc>
                            <w:p>
                                <w:r>
                                    <w:t><xsl:value-of select="al:drcr"/></w:t>
                                </w:r>
                            </w:p>
                        </w:tc>
                    </w:tr>
                    </xsl:for-each>
                </w:tbl>
                </wx:sect>
            </w:body>
        </w:wordDocument>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Yeah, whew! That was intense. Mostly though, it was the Word XML markup, which I won't even try to explain now. But for more on WordprocessingML, please check out the latest article at Brian Jones' blog. It's got an excellent mid-level overview.

I've made the XSL instructions bold so you can pick them out clearly and marvel at how few of them there are. (By the way, learned the XSLT at the W3Schools' XSLT Tutorial.) Basically, they say the same thing I described towards the end of my last entry.

Sorry about the underlines in the listing -- have been exploring off-the-top-of-my-head ways to best show listings in HTML, and this is the best compromise I've been able to find between source code editability and web page readability. Will update later if I find anything better. Leave comments with any ideas you might have. Well, got rid of the underlines with some cool new hacks I didn't know about before. Check out the rule for the <pre> tag in my stylesheet.

So what has this exercise accomplished? We see that Word has become, as a result of customers' demands on it, a full-fledged XML transformation and validation engine. With this power, businesses have an amazing new ability to juggle information around, push it into and pull it out of Office documents, change it, and just generally go crazy with it.

I know that the trend in business ~~lately~~ ~~forever~~ in our age has been to, whenever a new problem is faced, just throw more technology at it. Am I complaining? No way. Bring it on!

Sparklines, internship ends, MS Office XML documents

2006-02-01T23:48:00.000+08:00

In all the furore over my new and continually-evolving design I've been neglectful of my Sparklines code. Well, the good news is I've been working on it so intensively that the current version of sparklines.doc is so much more functional than the code I've posted here that I've seriously been thinking about deleting the code from the last two sparklines entries. But hell, it's amusing to look at.

The bad news is I've been working on even more exciting stuff for the last few days -- like my blog and conversion of the bank's daily reports into parseable XML form -- that the work I'm doing on sparklines.doc has slowed to a crawl. BUT to be fair, it meets my needs fully.

I'll take a brief interlude here and talk about some of the stuff I tried to do during my internship at ONE Bank, Dhanmondi branch. It'll lead up directly to why I'm so hyped-up about MS Office's new XML file format -- and this is weird, because just a few days ago I'd have told you OpenOffice.org's XML file format is better than Microsoft's. Now I'm strongly inclined to say otherwise.

At the bank, as I (think I) mentioned in Sparklines: can't resist, they have a lot of computer-generated output put in their hard drives daily. I guess their database-querying and -reporting software is tasked to process the day's transactions and output reports on the states of the various accounts, clients and such, every night. Now these reports are in plain-text format and currently the people in my branch, whenever they need to look up some information, just open up the report files in Wordpad and do a search for it.

This simple searching of plain-text files is well and good for small-scale information needs like looking up the account number of an account holder who can't recall the number, finding the interest rates offered on different types of deposits and loans, and sometimes also finding out historical interest rates. But it quickly starts sucking up your time if you have to keep doing things like:

prepare a monthly report on deposit mobilisation -- that is, a tally of the people who opened and closed deposit accounts, along with their account balances, and total amount of money deposited and withdrawn thus;

prepare reports with tallies of amounts grouped by type (deposit/loan), interest rate, and then economic sector code, as required by Bangladesh Bank;

prepare credit risk grading reports;

create mass-mailings to send out to account-holders and prospective clients;

email daily lists of transactions to the companies with which the bank has bill-collection arrangements;

and many more types of documents that the employees of each branch routinely have to prepare.

The common theme running through all of these different tasks is: the user has to process information output from the central database(s) in different ways and create documents showing these data in a nicely formatted way. And this has to be done month after month, with a lot of the document staying basically the same -- the changing data being the newly-processed information.

To me, the processes above are screaming to be automated. And this is where Office's new XML file formats come in. From what I've read about Office's (2003 and above) capabilities in Brian Jones' blog, Word lets you define arbitrary arrangements for your data and then lets you tell it how to format and display the data. This is done through the magic of XML schemas and stylesheets. For details, check out the article. But in short, suppose you start out with some raw data you're working on, information about about some accounts:

Account ID	Holder Name	Balance	Debit/Credit
1234567890	Mr X	100000	Cr
2345678901	Ms Y	96000	Cr
3456789012	Dr Z	45009.87	Dr

You have this data in XML format, obviously ideal because of its parseability to both humans and computers. Say, this is your XML:


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?mso-application progid="Word.Document"?>
<al:accountlist xmlns:al="http://yawar.blogspot.com">
    <al:account>
        <al:accid>1234567890</al:accid>
        <al:holdername>Mr X</al:holdername>
        <al:balance>100000</al:balance>
        <al:drcr>Cr</al:drcr>
    </al:account>
    <al:account>
        <al:accid>2345678901</al:accid>
        <al:holdername>Ms Y</al:holdername>
        <al:balance>96000</al:balance>
        <al:drcr>Cr</al:drcr>
    </al:account>
    <al:account>
        <al:accid>3456789012</al:accid>
        <al:holdername>Dr Z</al:holdername>
        <al:balance>45009.87</al:balance>
        <al:drcr>Dr</al:drcr>
    </al:account>
</al:accountlist>

Now, you need a way to tell Word (or any other XML-processing program) what kind of values to expect in each field so that it doesn't goof up on bad data: the account ID should be a sequence of ten digits; the name should be a string; the balance a real number (greater than zero), and the Debit/Credit field should be either `Dr' or `Cr', and nothing else. In fact, we could really just use `d' and `c', but Dr and Cr are time-honoured abbreviations of the words. Turns out the way to do is is through another XML file, a schema definition file.

More about schemas at MSDN's Advanced XML Support in Word and the W3C's XML Schema Primer.

Schema generator at XSD Inference Demo.

More tools, including one that validates your XML file against its schema, at XML Tools.

The schema definition for our account listing should be something like:


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    targetNamespace="http://yawar.blogspot.com"
    xmlns:al="http://yawar.blogspot.com"
    elementFormDefault="qualified">
    <xsd:element name="accountlist" />
        <xsd:complexType>
            <xsd:sequence>
                <xsd:element name="account" minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="unbounded">
                    <xsd:complexType>
                        <xsd:all>
                            <xsd:element name="accid">
                                <xsd:simpleType>
                                    <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">
                                        <xsd:pattern value="[0-9]{10}" />
                                    </xsd:restriction>
                                </xsd:simpleType>
                            </xsd:element>
                            <xsd:element name="holdername" type="xsd:string" />
                            <xsd:element name="balance">
                                <xsd:simpleType>
                                    <xsd:restriction base="xsd:decimal">
                                        <xsd:minInclusive value="0" />
                                    </xsd:restriction>
                                </xsd:simpleType>
                            </xsd:element>
                            <xsd:element name="drcr">
                                <xsd:simpleType>
                                    <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">
                                        <xsd:pattern value="[DC]r" />
                                    </xsd:restriction>
                                </xsd:simpleType>
                            </xsd:element>
                        </xsd:all>
                    </xsd:complexType>
                </xsd:element>
            </xsd:sequence>
        </xsd:complexType>
    </xsd:element>
</xsd:schema>

Yes, it looks rather daunting, but it's not that hard; I whipped this schema up myself browsing through W3Schools' Schema tutorials.

The last piece of the puzzle is, how do we tell Word how to format and display our nice XML file? The answer is the standardised XML Stylesheet Language, XSL. Yet another piece of XML coding, this file instructs Word on how to create a Word XML document on-the-fly from the XML data file that you have (the accounts listing file). Let me try a whimsical explanation here. Imagine the stylesheet file is talking to Word, giving running instructions as the input file is being processed.

`Started reading the document? OK, write the heading, ``ACCOUNT LISTING''. Format it with the ``Heading 1'' style. Now leave a blank line and start a four-column table, with column headers ``Account ID'', ``Holder Name'', ``Balance'' and ``Debit/Credit''.

`Now for each <account>, create a new table row, and: put the contents of the <accid> in the first column; the contents of the <holdername> in the second column; <balance> in the third; and <drcr> in the fourth. Oh, and sort the table rows by account holder name.'

And remember, this is a Word document that is being created -- not an HTML file. Yeah, you can do all that with XSL inside Word!

As an aside, for someone like me, who cut his teeth on LaTeX and then a little bit of DocBook (SGML and XML) with PassiveTeX, Jade, Apache FOP, you name it, Word's new XML capabilities just blow me away. It looks like Word has become the powerful XML processing and transformation engine that documentation writers have always dreamed of.

Soon, I'll post the stylesheet file I've created to do the transformation, and hopefully graphical comparisons of the different views of the same XML document.

The Wheel of Time -- The Eye of the World

2006-01-26T21:42:00.000+08:00

Wheeling Round and Round

Finished Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World and it was a whopper. The story itself is 782 pages. Not the longest I've read, but remarkable because the whole book is nothing more than a setup, even a leaflet, for the rest of the series. And wheels within wheels: almost the whole of the book is a setup for the last couple of chapters, where it really gets exciting.

The book as a whole is a long journey, a long series of hair-breadth escapes, interspersed with threatening dreams, drawn out but at the same time picking up more and more pace, until the explosive ending. The ending makes you want to go out and get the next book pretty much immediately.

But that's not the first thing that struck me, by far, while I was reading it. That would be the similarities to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Here are a basic few:

Two Rivers = The Shire
Tam al'Thor = Frodo, brings back `ring' (either Rand or the sword, or both, depending on how you look at it) from his adventures abroad
Fellowship sets out on quest
Mischievious Mat Cauthon = Mischevious Pippin Took
Moiraine = Gandalf
Lan = Aragorn
Sauron = Ba'alzamon
Fades hunting our `hobbits' = Ringwraiths
Trollocs = orcs
Padan Fain = Gollum
Journey to Blight = Trip to Mordor. Pack light, heroes! :-)
Children of the Light capture Perrin & Egwene = Faramir's gang captures Frodo, Sam & Gollum. OK, this is stretching it a bit
Green Man = Tom Bombadil, only sadder
Green Man = Ent
Egwene sounds like Éowyn

Um, am I forgetting anything?

Anyway, I do appreciate that there are definitely big differences. Jordan writes in more modern prose, with more short, sharp sentences for dramatic effect. Short. Dramatic. And he avoids, for the most part, Tolkien's rambling descriptions of this valley here, that nook and cranny there, that seem to go on for days. Oh, and a blessed avoidance of accented characters in names. But they're more than made up for with a liberal dose of apostrophes. Check out the names of some of the main Trolloc tribes (and I've thrown in their roots in monster names): Ahf'frait (afreet), Al'ghol (ghoul), Bhan'sheen (banshee), Dha'vol (devil), Dhai'mon (guess this one), Dhjin'nen (djinn), Ghar'ghael (gargoyle), Ghob'hlin (again, guess), Gho'hlem (golem), Ghraem'lan (gremlin).

But I digress. There is the One Power, a mystical force which comes from the True Source of the universe, drives the eternal Wheel of Time, and empowers a few chosen individuals with great power but at the risk of death and/or madness. But then again, it's like Tolkien's One Ring where it gives you power against the bad guy but the price is high. The real revelation is the turning of the Wheel of Time, where apparently the ages come and go and come again; nothing new ever happens. Civilisations rise and fall, and fall some more, in the eternal battle (you know the one, Good v Evil). Mankind continues to lose science and technology because it just can't get a firm foothold on the Earth before it's all toppled away again. Bleak outlook, really. But then I've heard there are thirteen books in this series, each one presumably as fat as the first. With that kind of length, what else could Jordan be doing but telling the story of the liberation of humanity from the yoke of the Wheel? Guess I'll have to find out. But it's what I would do.

New style, cont.

2006-01-22T17:22:00.000+08:00

After a lot of high-flying coding trying to get cookies to work (to
remember which user has seen which posts and/or comments) and at the
same be compatible with Internet Explorer, I've decided to BAD (Bypass
All Difficulties) and just show the posts and comments by default,
letting users hide them if they want. Code is so much simpler, and at
the same time IE users get to at least read the posts, even if they
don't get the cool clicking and hiding/showing effects.

New style

2006-01-19T04:06:00.000+08:00

After what seems like an eternity with the old ready-made style, have finally gotten down and dirty with Blogger's internals. The inspiration was Gmail's message display interface, which also led me to suggest such an interface for the next version of Thunderbird in the website maintained by the developers, here. Also led me to thinking about how to implement something like it with HTML. Plucked up some courage reading up on JavaScript, the DOM, and CSS, then gave it a try; rather aborted results can be seen here.

Then realised that Blogger's template system provides pseudo-HTML tags which automatically pull blog posts and comments out of the Blogger database -- so basically we have this big database of items which we can pull out and display, rather as if they were emails. Of course, they're a little more complicated than emails (because each post can have one or more comments), which leads to some code complexity; but on the whole it was surprisingly easy. Guess I have XML/CSS/JavaScript and their amazing expressiveness to thank for that.

One thing to note though is that the site doesn't work very well at all on Internet Explorer, even the version 6 that I have running on this XP Service Pack 2 machine. Tried a perfunctory hack to solve the problem, but hasn't worked. Oh well, will tackle it later, I guess. Meanwhile, I recommend all my beloved viewers (anybody out there? :-) use Firefox or Opera, the two best browsers available today.

Thunderbird rocks

2006-01-12T21:42:00.000+08:00

Set up Thunderbird to handle my Gmail account as well as the ISP-provided POP3 account. Works great and, what's more, allows me to sign and/or encrypt outgoing messages with Thunderbird's Enigmail extension which gives Thunderbird OpenPGP support.

Also set up the BDComics RSS feed (Tools > Account Settings..., then Add Account...), making it a hell of a lot easier to navigate all the great comics links put up there.

Sparklines: satisfaction and disappointment

2005-12-30T06:12:00.000+08:00

Could go into a whole diatribe about the paradoxical human condition of conflicting feelings but will keep it simple. Have achieved what I set out to do: and -- sparkline the bank's account opening activity during a given period. Well, have achieved it roughly, anyway. But generating sparklines is a big hassle: code for Office 2000 or XP and above? (2000 doesn't have a feature which makes the user's life a hell of a lot easier.) When generating multiple sparklines at the same time, scale them all to the same scale or different (as they are above)? Currently I'm coding for MSO2000, though there's no guarantee the code will actually work; and scaling to different scales even when generating in the same batch. Will have to change both these settings because the alternatives are so much more helpful.

On the plus side, wrote a clever little toolbar that manages generated sparklines -- i.e. selecting and deleting them -- almost well enough to be called a sparkline manager.

Here are the macros that pull in and parse the plain-text reports generated daily by the bank's software:

Sub inputData(fname, aDoc)
  Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  Set fin = fso.OpenTextFile(fname, 1)
  branchNamesStore = ""
  openingCountsStore = ""
  printingCounts = False
  weHaveTabs = False

  Do While fin.AtEndOfStream <> True
      aLine = fin.ReadLine
   
      Dim branchNamePoses(5)
      branchNamePoses(0) = InStr(1, aLine, " BRANCH       ")
      branchNamePoses(1) = InStr(1, aLine, " BRANCH" + vbTab)
      branchNamePoses(2) = InStr(1, aLine, " BRAN       ")
      branchNamePoses(3) = InStr(1, aLine, " BRAN" + vbTab)
      branchNamePoses(4) = InStr(1, aLine, " BRANC      ")
      branchNamePoses(5) = InStr(1, aLine, " BRANC" + vbTab)
   
      numAcctsPos = InStr(1, aLine, "OPENED :")
      lineHasComma = InStr(1, aLine, ",")
      branchName = ""
      branchNameTemp = ""
      numAcctsStr = ""

      For posCounter = 0 To UBound(branchNamePoses)
          If branchNamePoses(posCounter) <> 0 And lineHasComma = 0 Then
              If posCounter Mod 2 = 0 Then ' No tabs in this file
                  i = branchNamePoses(posCounter) - 1
                  Do While Mid(aLine, i, 1) <> " "
                      branchName = branchName & Mid(aLine, i, 1)
                      i = i - 1
                  Loop
                  branchNameTemp = branchName
                  branchName = StrReverse(branchNameTemp)
                  branchNamesStore = branchNamesStore & " " & branchName
              Else ' Tabs in the file
                  weHaveTabs = True
                  i = branchNamePoses(posCounter) - 1
                  Do While Mid(aLine, i, 1) <> vbTab
                      branchName = branchName & Mid(aLine, i, 1)
                      i = i - 1
                  Loop
                  branchNameTemp = branchName
                  branchName = StrReverse(branchNameTemp)
                  branchNamesStore = branchNamesStore & " " & branchName
              End If
          ElseIf InStr(1, aLine, "HEAD OFFICE") And lineHasComma = 0 And Not InStr(1, branchNamesStore, "HEADOFFICE") Then
              branchNamesStore = branchNamesStore & " HEADOFFICE"
              Exit For
          End If
      Next posCounter
   
      If numAcctsPos <> 0 Then
          i = numAcctsPos + 9
          Do While i < Len(aLine) + 1
              curChar = Mid(aLine, i, 1)
              If weHaveTabs Then
                  If curChar <> vbTab Then numAcctsStr = numAcctsStr & curChar
              Else
                  If curChar <> " " Then
                      numAcctsStr = numAcctsStr & curChar
                  Else
                      If Len(numAcctsStr) >= 2 Then Exit Do
                  End If
              End If
              i = i + 1
          Loop
          openingCountsStore = openingCountsStore & " " & numAcctsStr
      End If
  Loop
  fin.Close

  branchNames = Strings.Split(Trim(branchNamesStore))
  openingCounts = Strings.Split(Trim(openingCountsStore))
  Debug.Assert UBound(branchNames) = UBound(openingCounts)

  For Each par In aDoc.Paragraphs
      docLine = Mid(par.Range.Text, 1, Len(par.Range.Text) - 1)
      If docLine = "\begin{acc_opening_counts}" Then
          printingCounts = True
          GoTo nextItem
      ElseIf docLine = "\end{acc_opening_counts}" Then
          printingCounts = False
          GoTo nextItem
      End If
   
      typedNumber = False
      If printingCounts Then
          curBranch = Trim(par.Range.Words.First)
          par.Range.Select
          Selection.EndKey Unit:=wdLine
          For i = 0 To UBound(branchNames)
              If branchNames(i) = curBranch Then
                  typedNumber = True
                  Selection.TypeText Text:=" " & openingCounts(i)
                  GoTo nextItem
              End If
          Next i
          If typedNumber = False Then Selection.TypeText Text:=" 0"
      End If
nextItem:
  Next
End Sub

Sub importStats()
  Dim theDoc As Document
  Set theDoc = ActiveDocument

  Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  monthFolder = "\\accounts\MB_REPORT 2004\YEAR2004\DECEMBER2004\"

  For i = 1 To 31
      If i < 10 Then
          fname = monthFolder + "Dhanmondi Branch  2004-12-0" & Str(i) & "\AC_OPEN_ALL"
          fname = Strings.Replace(fname, "0 ", "0")
          If fso.FileExists(fname) Then
              inputData fname, theDoc
          Else
              Debug.Print fname, "does not exist"
          End If
      Else
          fname = monthFolder + "Dhanmondi Branch  2004-12-" & i & "\AC_OPEN_ALL"
          If fso.FileExists(fname) Then
              inputData fname, theDoc
          Else
              Debug.Print fname, "does not exist"
          End If
      End If
  Next i
End Sub

May not look like much but was a bitch to write thanks to the lack of regular expressions in vanilla Office VBA. This was the first half. The second half was even harder because even more ill-defined -- almost no one's ever done it before.

The sparkline generator:
Microsoft Word Object ThisDocument

Private Sub Document_Close()
  myDocumentClose
End Sub

Private Sub Document_Open()
  myDocumentOpen
End Sub

Module NewMacros

Function sizeof(arr)
  sizeof = UBound(arr) - LBound(arr)
End Function

Function sort(arr As Variant, Optional SortAscending As Boolean = True)
  ' Chris Rae's VBA Code Archive - http://chrisrae.com/vba
  ' By Chris Rae, 19/5/99. My thanks to
  ' Will Rickards and Roemer Lievaart
  ' for some fixes.
  ToSort = arr
  Dim AnyChanges As Boolean
  Dim BubbleSort As Long
  Dim SwapFH As Variant
  Do
      AnyChanges = False
      For BubbleSort = LBound(ToSort) To UBound(ToSort) - 1
          If (ToSort(BubbleSort) > ToSort(BubbleSort + 1) And SortAscending) _
             Or (ToSort(BubbleSort) < ToSort(BubbleSort + 1) And Not SortAscending) Then
              ' These two need to be swapped
              SwapFH = ToSort(BubbleSort)
              ToSort(BubbleSort) = ToSort(BubbleSort + 1)
              ToSort(BubbleSort + 1) = SwapFH
              AnyChanges = True
          End If
      Next BubbleSort
  Loop Until Not AnyChanges
  sort = ToSort
End Function

Function arrayMin(theArr)
  Dim arr()
  ReDim arr(UBound(theArr))

  For i = LBound(theArr) To UBound(theArr)
      arr(i) = Val(theArr(i))
  Next i

  If sizeof(arr) = 1 Then
      arrayMin = arr(LBound(arr))
  ElseIf sizeof(arr) = 2 Then
      If arr(LBound(arr)) < arr(UBound(arr)) Then
          smaller = arr(LBound(arr))
      ElseIf arr(UBound(arr)) < arr(LBound(arr)) Then
          smaller = arr(UBound(arr))
      End If
      arrayMin = smaller
  Else
      sortedArr = sort(arr)
      arrayMin = sortedArr(LBound(sortedArr))
  End If
End Function

Function arrayMax(theArr)
  Dim arr()
  ReDim arr(UBound(theArr))

  For i = LBound(theArr) To UBound(theArr)
      arr(i) = Val(theArr(i))
  Next i

  If sizeof(arr) = 1 Then
      arrayMax = arr(LBound(arr))
  ElseIf sizeof(arr) = 2 Then
      If arr(LBound(arr)) < arr(UBound(arr)) Then
          bigger = arr(UBound(arr))
      ElseIf arr(UBound(arr)) < arr(LBound(arr)) Then
          bigger = arr(LBound(arr))
      End If
      arrayMax = bigger
  Else
      sortedArr = sort(arr)
      arrayMax = sortedArr(UBound(sortedArr))
  End If
End Function

Function scaleHeight(num, max, theHeight) As Double
  If max = 0 Then
      scaleHeight = 0
  Else
      scaleHeight = theHeight - (num / max) * theHeight
  End If
End Function

Function lineChart(aLine, theHeight, widthMul, showAvg, vertPos As Single, ByRef header, Optional ByVal scaleSame As Boolean, Optional scaleMax, Optional scaleMin)
  If Right(aLine, 1) = vbCr Then
      theLine = Left(aLine, Len(aLine) - 1)
  Else
      theLine = aLine
  End If
  theSeries = Split(theLine) ' Contains the header label
  Dim numSeries() ' Does not hold the label

  numNils = 0
  For counter = 1 To UBound(theSeries)
      If theSeries(counter) = "nil" Then numNils = numNils + 1
  Next counter

  ReDim numSeries(UBound(theSeries) - numNils - 1)
  For i = numNils + 1 To UBound(theSeries)
      numSeries(i - numNils - 1) = Val(theSeries(i))
  Next i

  If scaleSame Then
      min = scaleMin
      tempMax = scaleMax
  Else
      min = arrayMin(numSeries)
      tempMax = arrayMax(numSeries)
  End If
  max = tempMax - min

  For i = 0 To UBound(numSeries)
      tempNum = numSeries(i) - min
      numSeries(i) = tempNum
  Next

  If showAvg Then
      sum = 0
      For Each elem In numSeries
          sum = sum + elem
      Next
      avg = sum / UBound(numSeries)
      avgHeight = scaleHeight(avg, max, theHeight)
  End If

  With ActiveDocument.shapes.BuildFreeform(msoEditingAuto, (numNils * widthMul) + 100, scaleHeight(numSeries(0), max, theHeight) + vertPos)
      For i = 1 To UBound(numSeries)
          .AddNodes msoSegmentLine, msoEditingAuto, ((numNils + i) * widthMul) + 100, scaleHeight(numSeries(i), max, theHeight) + vertPos
      Next i
      freeformName = .ConvertToShape.Name
  End With
   
  With ActiveDocument.shapes.AddShape(msoShapeOval, (numNils + i - 1) * widthMul - 2 + 100, scaleHeight(numSeries(i - 1), max, theHeight) + vertPos - 2, 4, 4)
      .Fill.Visible = msoTrue
      .Fill.Solid
      .Fill.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(51, 102, 255)
      .Line.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(51, 102, 255)
      dotName = .Name
  End With
   
  With ActiveDocument.shapes.AddTextbox(msoTextOrientationHorizontal, (numNils + i - 1) * widthMul + 5 + 100, scaleHeight(numSeries(i - 1), max, theHeight) + vertPos - 7.5, 50, 15)
      .TextFrame.TextRange.Text = strings.Trim(Str(numSeries(i - 1) + min))
      .TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Size = 8
      .TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Color = RGB(51, 102, 255)
      .Fill.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(255, 255, 255)
      .Line.Visible = False
      .Fill.Transparency = 1#
      textBoxName = .Name
  End With

  If showAvg Then
      With ActiveDocument.shapes.AddLine(numNils * widthMul + 100, avgHeight + vertPos, (numNils + i - 1) * widthMul + 100, avgHeight + vertPos)
          .Line.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(153, 51, 0)
          .Line.DashStyle = msoLineRoundDot
          avgLineName = .Name
      End With
  End If

  header = theSeries(0)
  If showAvg Then
      retval = Array(freeformName, dotName, textBoxName, avgLineName)
  Else
      retval = Array(freeformName, dotName, textBoxName)
  End If

  For Each elem In retval
      Debug.Print elem
  Next
  lineChart = retval
End Function

Sub selectChart()
  Dim ctl As CommandBarComboBox
  Set ctl = CommandBars("Sparklines").Controls(2)
  If ctl.ListCount < 1 Then Exit Sub

  lineArr = Split(ctl.List(ctl.ListIndex), ":")

  theNames = Split(Trim(lineArr(1)), ",")
  Dim shapeNames() As Variant
  ReDim shapeNames(UBound(theNames))
  For i = 0 To UBound(shapeNames)
      shapeNames(i) = theNames(i)
  Next i

  ActiveDocument.shapes.Range(shapeNames).Select
End Sub

Sub deleteChart()
  Dim ctl As CommandBarComboBox
  Set ctl = CommandBars("Sparklines").Controls(2)
  If ctl.ListCount < 1 Then Exit Sub

  selectChart
  Selection.Delete
  ctl.RemoveItem ctl.ListIndex
End Sub

Sub moveChartRight()
  Dim ctl As CommandBarComboBox
  Set ctl = CommandBars("Sparklines").Controls(2)
  If ctl.ListCount < 1 Then Exit Sub

  selectChart
  Selection.MoveRight
End Sub

Sub moveChartLeft()
  Dim ctl As CommandBarComboBox
  Set ctl = CommandBars("Sparklines").Controls(2)
  If ctl.ListCount < 1 Then Exit Sub

  selectChart
  Selection.MoveLeft
End Sub

Sub refresh()
  myDocumentClose
  myDocumentOpen
End Sub

Sub myDocumentOpen()
  CommandBars.Add(Name:="Sparklines", Temporary:=False).Visible = True

  With CommandBars("Sparklines")
      With .Controls.Add(Type:=msoControlButton, Temporary:=False)
          .Caption = "Line Chart..."
          .Style = msoButtonCaption
          .OnAction = "lineChartGui"
      End With
      .Controls.Add Type:=msoControlDropdown
      With .Controls.Add(Type:=msoControlButton, Temporary:=False)
          .Caption = "Select"
          .Style = msoButtonCaption
          .OnAction = "selectChart"
          .Enabled = True
      End With
      With .Controls.Add(Type:=msoControlButton, Temporary:=False)
          .Caption = "Delete"
          .Style = msoButtonCaption
          .OnAction = "deleteChart"
          .Enabled = True
      End With
      With .Controls.Add(Type:=msoControlButton, Temporary:=False)
          .Caption = "Refresh"
          .Style = msoButtonCaption
          .OnAction = "refresh"
          .TooltipText = "Clears names of all charts from the list, whether charts are still in document or not"
          .Enabled = True
      End With
  End With
End Sub

Sub myDocumentClose()
  Dim sl As CommandBar

  On Error Resume Next
  Set sl = CommandBars("Sparklines")
  If sl Then sl.Delete
End Sub

Sub lineCharts(theHeight, widthMul, showAvg)
  noTb = False
  Dim sl As CommandBar
  On Error GoTo makeToolbar
  Set sl = CommandBars("Sparklines")

continueWithTb:
  howMany = Selection.Range.Paragraphs.Count
  If howMany < 1 Then End

  lines = Split(Selection.Range.Text, vbCr)
  theHeader = ""
  For i = 0 To howMany - 1
      theShapes = lineChart(lines(i), theHeight, widthMul, showAvg, 100 + i * (theHeight + 15), theHeader)
      shapesStrTemp = ""
      For Each elem In theShapes
          shapesStrTemp = shapesStrTemp & "," & elem
      Next
      shapesStr = Right(shapesStrTemp, Len(shapesStrTemp) - 1)
      sl.Controls(2).AddItem theHeader & ":" & shapesStr
  Next i

  Exit Sub
makeToolbar:
  myDocumentOpen
  GoTo continueWithTb
End Sub

Sub lineChartGui()
  frmLineChart.Show
End Sub

Yup, very complicated. Hopefully will become simpler and simpler in future iterations. Sometimes wonder why I don't just switch to automating Excel charts.

Sparklines: can't resist

2005-12-26T04:15:00.000+08:00

When I started looking at ways to automate the graphing of the bank's accounts opening data, I originally started out with a 3-D line chart powered by a PivotTable. But have since realised that this is a perfect area of application for sparklines, Edward Tufte's `intense, simple, word-sized graphics'. For example, see above.

They're usually supposed to be surrounded by more context, but basically that is their size and general appearance.

Sparklines have so much potential in charting huge amounts of data; couldn't resist spending a lot of thought and time trying to figure out what would be the best way to implement them. First decided on plain HTML and CSS generated by Python, and spent a lot of time on it before decided it was too tedious because I had to get Python to generate each and every dot making up the lines. Python is very good, but after a while I realised I should use an environment which already provided vector-based drawing tools which could be automated.

The obvious choice turned out to be Microsoft Word, because of how common it is, especially here in Bangladesh. After some hacking, came up with the following code:


Const theHeight = 50
Const widthMul = 1

Function scaleHeight(num, max) As Double
   num = Val(num)
 
   scaleHeight = theHeight - (num / max) * theHeight
End Function

Sub genSl()
   Dim c As Shape ' Holds the canvases one by one
   min = 0
   max = 0

   Dim theArray()
   howMany = Selection.Range.Paragraphs.Count
   ReDim theArray(howMany - 1)
   Dim canvasNames()
   ReDim canvasNames(howMany - 1)
 
   For i = 0 To howMany - 1
       theArray(i) = Strings.Split(Selection.Range.Paragraphs(i + 1).Range.Text)
       For j = 1 To UBound(theArray(i))
           If Val(theArray(i)(j)) < min =" theArray(i)(j)"> max Then max = theArray(i)(j)
       Next j
   Next i
   max = max - min
 
   For i = 0 To howMany - 1
   ' For each paragraph in the selection a sparkline is drawn
       Set c = ActiveDocument.Shapes.AddCanvas(100, i * (theHeight + 20) + 200, widthMul * (UBound(theArray(i)) + 1) + 55, theHeight + 15)
       canvasNames(i) = c.Name
     
       With c.CanvasItems.BuildFreeform(msoEditingAuto, 0, scaleHeight(theArray(i)(1), max) + 7.5)
           For j = 2 To UBound(theArray(i))
               ' j starts from 1 because the first point was plotted in the BuildFreeform function
               .AddNodes msoSegmentLine, msoEditingAuto, j * widthMul, scaleHeight(theArray(i)(j), max) + 7.5
           Next j
           .ConvertToShape
       End With

       j = j - 1
       With c.CanvasItems.AddShape(msoShapeOval, j * widthMul - 2, scaleHeight(theArray(i)(j), max) + 7.5 - 2, 4, 4)
           .Fill.Visible = msoTrue
           .Fill.Solid
           .Fill.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(51, 102, 255)
           .Line.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(51, 102, 255)
       End With
     
       With c.CanvasItems.AddTextbox(msoTextOrientationHorizontal, j * widthMul + 5, scaleHeight(theArray(i)(j), max) + 7.5 - 7.5, 50, 15)
           .TextFrame.TextRange.Text = Strings.Trim(Str(theArray(i)(j)))
           .TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Size = 8
           .TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Color = RGB(51, 102, 255)
           .Fill.ForeColor.RGB = RGB(255, 255, 255)
           .Line.Visible = False
       End With
   Next i
 
   ActiveDocument.Shapes.Range(canvasNames).Select
End Sub

Sub showMarkers(n As Integer)
   pWidth = ActiveDocument.PageSetup.PageWidth
   pHeight = ActiveDocument.PageSetup.PageHeight
 
   Dim l As Shape
   For i = 1 To Int(pWidth / n)
       Set l = ActiveDocument.Shapes.AddLine(i * n, 0, i * n, 10)
       Set l = ActiveDocument.Shapes.AddLine(i * n, pHeight, i * n, pHeight - 10)
   Next i
   For i = 1 To Int(pHeight / n)
       Set l = ActiveDocument.Shapes.AddLine(0, i * n, 10, i * n)
       Set l = ActiveDocument.Shapes.AddLine(pWidth, i * n, pWidth - 10, i * n)
   Next i
End Sub

Sub doShowMarkers()
   Call showMarkers(10)
End Sub

If you're interested in using them, put them in some module in one of your documents templates (if in the Normal template, it will be available to all documents). Then put some data and numbers in the document itself, arranged in a certain way. The above sparklines were generated from the following data:


DSE 2 3 4 7 3 7 4 119 3
DSEGeneralIndex 749.11 768.03 795.05 763.7 752.91 792.56 874.57 870.46 874.22 842.36 845.07 848.41 807.6 806.92 750.84 787.94 791.7
DSE20Index 942.46 958.2 1004.56 963.88 920.73 973.88 1134.34 1094.45 1085.97 1052.47 1051.48 1054.89 1004.61 1021.5 948.27 964.13 964.32
RandomIndex 642.2 221.5 2

That is, each series is on its own paragraph (paragraphs not separated by blank lines), each item in the series separated from the other by a single space. To chart the data, select it all. If the selection contains a single data series, then a single sparkline will be drawn, and so on.

Need to work more on the code and especially on the GUI front-end. But for now it works OK.
Will upload it to a public server after working on it some more.

New ideas

2005-12-22T01:34:00.000+08:00

As usual, haven't posted in a long time. Never found much to talk about, but nowadays I find myself looking at problems and inconveniences in my life, and others', and thinking of ways to solve them.

Example. With the abolishing of rickshaws from the main road near leading up to New Market and Nilkhet, the road in front of New Market has become more jammed than ever with parked cars and stationary rickshaws. Right now it is a two-way street, with two lanes on each side and a lane for parking cars on. A simple way to solve the jam would be to allow only cars on the side further away from NM, and only rickshaws on the side closer to it. Sure, cars would have to exit through the other, further side on their way out, but then, that's what they're there for.

Work

Started at One Bank in the beginning of December. Worked, or observed, my way through a lot of stuff but I've finally seen what to me is the most interesting part of it all: the raw data generated by the computer system of the bank's daily activities. These data are in the form of plain text files arranged into folders, essentially by date. They are just crying to be pulled in and processed programmatically by Excel or some such program. For example, there are daily data files about fixed deposits which mature on the day; and new accounts (including loans) which were opened on the previous day.

In the new accounts example, the information in each file (each day's report) includes a grouping of accounts by branch, count of new accounts in each branch, and detailed information on each account (one account per line). The way it is arranged makes it possible to parse it and pull out the most useful data -- for example, the count of new accounts opened in each branch. If one does this every day to keep current, one can graph the daily account opening activity for each branch, and what's more, put these graphs together into a combined `3-D' graph for ease of comparison. This gives, over time, a nice high-level view of account activity throughout the bank.

This is exactly what am now trying to do with Excel and a well-crafted macro at the bank. Have made some progress, and think the parsing bit is taken care of thanks to Excel's, well, excellent plain text file importing/parsing capabilities. But a lot of it is still left, including programmatically generating pivot tables and charts for new months. Should be quite a challenge. If they let me do this, even intermittently, it should make it very interesting at work. Don't know who it will really help, though, to be realistic. At this point it's just a shiny toy, a very high-level view which branch employees may not find ultimately useful and thus may lose interest in rapidly.

But still look forward to exploring more of the daily reports and perhaps even getting something useful out of them.

Evolution v intelligent design, notes from Slashdot

2005-11-09T14:41:00.000+08:00

Kansas' education board has decided that its students should be taught about intelligent design, an alternative `theory' to evolution. Here's a posting from Slashdot (http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/11/08/2338233.shtml?tid=123&tid=14) which describes exactly how I feel about this:

Re:You are only hurting yourself you know.... (Score:4, Insightful)

by Decaff (42676) on Tuesday November 08, @10:15PM (#13985193)

Interesting comment--considering that they are teaching Intelligent Design alongside Evolutionary Theory. Your comment seems to indicate that, by teaching ONLY Evolution, that's how we develop Independent Thinking? Tell one side of a story? Somehow, that seems more like indoctrination to me.

You are missing the point. These classes are supposed to be science lessons, not philosophy or religion. There are plenty of alternatives ideas to evolution that can be discussed in biology classes, such as the ideas that fossils aren't old and the Earth was created recently. These areas are testable, and examining the data that suggests they are false can be highly educational - students learn about rock strata and radioactive dating.

Intelligent design is not testable. It is nothing more than a series of statements of incredulity - that because we don't yet understand everything about the evolution of life then there must have been intervention by a `designer'. This isn't science. Intelligent design might be science if there was some sort of valid consistent test for the existence of a designer, but there isn't. Also, because it is likely there there will always be some area of evolution or of biology that is not fully understood, there will always be some room for someone to say `that must be designed'. This means that Intelligent Design is never refutable; again, making it meaningless in the context of science.

Science teaching should include the idea that we are simply currently ignorant about some things. Coming up with untestable, irrefutable explanations to cover that ignorance is dishonest and should not be part of the process.

Imagine this sort of approach being used in other areas of science (e.g. `We don't yet fully understand the origin of comets, so aliens or gods must have made them') and the results are silly in the extreme.

Here's another that echoes it:

Re:You are only hurting yourself you know....(Score:4, Insightful)

by Flower (31351) on Tuesday November 08, @10:25PM (#13985290)
(http://slashdot.org/)

What independent thinking? ID certainly doesn't promote it. It provides the ultimate out in the search for truth. It's too hard right now to explain *this* so the obvious answer is God did it! (And don't even try to claim it is some ambiguous creator that spontaneously created the eye. The second some pagan asserts that it was the Goddess who made it happen you'll see every ID proponent in Kansas heading out to smite that heretic down.)

ID's greatest sin is that it closes doors to scientific research. If God miraciously intervened and created the eye then there is no reason to try to find an explanation. God did it so leave it alone and don't question it. Obviously if a million believers can't figure it out what could a scientist accomplish? And if this can be done in evolution then why can't it be done in other sciences? The creation of the universe is too complex to really comprehend so all this fluff about researching gravity really doesn't have to be done because we can just attribute the really interesting mysteries to God.

ID isn't science. It's the same old shit that pioneers in science had to fight against and be abused by centuries ago.

You have to love Slashdot: they put into words exactly how I feel about this stuff. I don't even have to raise a finger and type the stuff out, it's so perfect. Best of all, their sense of humour:

Hey Kansas! (Score:5, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08, @09:30PM (#13984798)

We're becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!!!!!

-- The World

And also:

Re:Misleading headline (Score:4, Funny)

by c0d3h4x0r (604141) on Tuesday November 08, @10:17PM (#13985212)
(http://c0d3h4x0r.0catch.com/ | Last Journal: Friday November 04, @05:23PM)

2)It redefined the meaning of science. According to the new definition, science is no longer is limited to searching for natural explanations for natural phenomena.

Excellent! So now student `science' fair projects can be about... well, pretty much anything!

Richard Feynman must be turning in his grave.

Cleaned my room

2005-10-06T01:14:00.000+08:00

I cleaned my room tonight. And I mean really cleaned, with mop and cleaning liquid. This is the first time I've ever done that, I kid you not. Room looks and feels cleaner than ever, but I know it won't last :-(

I'm managing to post now, after all this time, because only now have I gotten some time (well, stolen some time) to do it. It's been amazingly hectic for the last few weeks. The assignments have come and gone one after the other, and the way I am -- very bad at managing my time -- they pile up till the weekend before they're due, and then I start; of course by then it's guaranteed that I'll be brain-fried in a couple of days. But just enough, and just in time, to hand the damn thing in, then sink into lethargy.

Well, not actually lethargy. I've been snatching time to read Azarello's 100 Bullets whenever I can. I have upto issue 52, and it's amazing. For me it started off with a whimper, but it's gotten stronger and stronger. The big deal is that they keep the story intelligent, with plot surprises for me. And the characters just suck you in. I hate that. But I like and appreciate it very much. Plus Risso's art is a treat. I would be very surprised if he hasn't already drawn one of the Batman books.

Speaking of which, did I mention how much I love Lucifer? Mike Carey's Lucifer, I mean. It's so easy for me to identify with him. Damn. I have a problem with authority but will make my own rules as I go along. And yes, I hate hypocrisy ... but there's a line between playing by your own rules and being a hypocrite. Even if it's not there all the time. But that's what makes life so fun ... the back and forth between the law and lawlessness.

Anyway, back to the story. How did I end up cleaning my room? I have a reputation (at least among ... myself) for avoiding that kind of drudgery. Although I do like to think of myself as a glutton for punishment. Anyway. I was supposed to go watch a movie at 9 (pm), but my ISN meeting ... spilled over ... into that time, so I decided to skip it. Was hungry and didn't want to dine on popcorn watching the movie anyway. So. I came back home after dinner at Pink, the restaurant right outside the campus, and just decided to get it over with. The cleaning, I mean. I figured I wouldn't get the chance again soon.

Anyway, gotta go now. I should probably take my bath. At 1:30 in the morning, that makes me a very odd person. But then I've always been a night owl. Aren't all university students?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2005-07-29T00:00:00.000+08:00

I bought the book the day it came out on Dhaka, July 16th (from what I remember, Rowling wanted to release it on the day of the summer solstice, but also at midnight. So that ended up being July 16th in Dhaka). It was a hartal, so believe it or not, there was practically no one else at the bookstore compared to the crowd I'd been expecting. It cost Tk. 1,475 in anyone was wondering.

I started reading it immediately after getting home. I had to stop to do stuff like packing and meeting family, because it was the last day of my holiday in Dhaka, and I was flying the next morning. But I read whenever I could, and into the night. Around 2 am, I finished. It was well worth it.

When I started reading it, something felt wrong near the beginning. But I couldn't put a finger on it. Yesterday I realised that it was that in the second chapter, Rowling tells the story located somewhere far away from Harry -- and we the readers see something that Harry doesn't, something she's never done before. Think about it. Every device that Rowling has ever introduced to show something that happens far away from Harry or far before Harry's time -- Harry's connection to Voldemort's mind, the `memory dishes', the Dementors' awakening of long-dormant memories in Harry's mind, the journal of Tom Riddle, among others -- let Harry see and hear what's going on, as well as us.

So for the first time ever, the story shifts away from Harry and onto Snape. What does this mean? I have no idea.

Then, throughout the book, Harry has this growing paranoia and obsession with Malfoy. They've always been enemies, but before this book, Harry never attached such an urgency to finding out what Malfoy was doing. And his intuition proved right in the end. But the irony is that Dumbledore was willing to put his own life on the line to turn Malfoy from his father's and Voldemort's side, and wouldn't lift a finger to stop him.

Reading the book, you get the feeling that Rowling has got the whole of these characters wrapped around her brain, so easily do their interactions come together. But also, Harry getting together with Ginny felt pretty forced to me. They had some little interaction before, nothing that came before had hinted at the `little monster' of jealous love in Harry for Ginny. With Ron and Hermione, for example, you knew it was coming from book 4 -- the Krum stuff. That was extended here into the kind of interaction I'd always imagined they'd have before they got together.

The climax of the book -- between Harry, Draco, Dumbledore and Snape -- also felt like the most natural possible buildup to the big finish. I couldn't have asked for anything better.

Snape's escape, and Harry's failure to prevent him, showed just how much Harry trails the older wizards in actual power levels, and just how lucky he's been upto now fighting the Death Eaters. I could feel Harry's frustration as Snape turned aside every single spell Harry threw at him, but left Harry unharmed, a prize the Dark Lord would claim for himself.

And the situation that the last chapter sets up -- it's beyond anything that has ever happened in Harry's world. Suddenly it's become a much bigger and scarier place, and no more shielding, no more Dumbledore, Sirius or even Snape to take some of the heat off Harry. The only protector-figure left for Harry now is Hagrid, which is kind of fitting -- there's a connection between them. But you have to wonder if Hagrid's days are numbered too.

But I digress. Everything is torn away from Harry -- Hogwarts forgotten, training to be an Auror put on the backburner, and friends, except for perhaps only Ron and Hermione, left behind. He finally has a quest, but it's a huge one -- a whopper which I'm not sure how Rowling is going to fit it into a single book 7, unless much of the work has already been done for Harry. We can only hope.

But whether or not that's true, it's been driven like a nail into Harry's head that he has to, to the exclusion of everything else, kill Voldemort. Nice and chilling.

Holidays end

2005-07-14T00:14:00.000+08:00

I go back to Malaysia on the 17th, after a nice and relaxing vacation in which I've done everything the way I wanted to, but haven't done everything I've wanted to. Oh well, maybe next time.

But now, it's almost over, and that sucks. I've been watching movies, reading comics, downloading music and videos, and everything else without any regard to the time or how much sleep I get in the day. The only thing that I've seemed to lack is time -- it just flew by. I've stayed awake for 24 hours straight or more trying to do everything I wanted to do and still I was forced to go to bed, unsatisfied, at dawn. Only to wake up in the afternoon tired and bleary-eyed.

I have made sacrifices, e.g. my eyes. They're teary and bleary and a little bit red all the time, and oh so itchy. So itchy that I can get an almost orgasmic satisfaction by just rubbing them with the backs of my hands. Instead I force myself to pull at the skin around them a bit to satisfy the itch -- for a little while. If I rub my eyes my hands come away wet with a foul-smelling fluid that presumably comes from the backs of my eyeballs.

Today my semester results came out and I've done tolerably in all four of my core units -- haven't failed anything like I feared at times. Was a little surprised to see that I did best in the management unit -- a Distinction -- but then I guess it must be because of the second assignment; I worked hard on that one. The worst grade, a Pass, was in microeconomics. Guess I shouldn't be surprised, because no matter how much I like economics, I've always sucked at it.

Microsoft Office

2005-06-27T04:35:00.000+08:00

Following my success at installing Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger on my Linux laptop, I realised I might as well install Microsoft Office and make a clean job of fizzling out my open source utopia. So I did it, yesterday. I installed Office 2000, the latest version that was known, as far as I knew, to work with Wine.

The installation did error out at first, but a quick check of a couple of Wine websites told me the answer to that problem. So I managed to complete the install -- Word, Excel and PowerPoint, possibly the three most used desktop applications in the Monash computer labs. Well, Visual Studio/Visual C++ is up there, but still.

Anyway, after I installed everything and made sure it worked -- and it does, more or less -- I started wondering how far Wine has come at running Office XP. So I did some Googling and wouldn't you know it, Office XP now works with Wine -- again, more or less. Damn. Still, at least Office 2K has all the features I really need in Word and Excel -- tables within tables, and PivotCharts.

Using Word and Excel, even stripped of all their Windows XP eye-candy freshness, I quickly appreciate just how good the user interface is. How well everything has been put together and just gets out of your way, compared to something like OpenOffice.org. Take, for example, the pull-down menus of their word processors. Word's menus are of a reasonable size; they don't stretch down almost to the bottom of the screen. In OpenOffice.org Writer, they do.

Note: I'm not dissing OpenOffice.org here. I really, really like some of its features, and if I could help it, I'd use it over MS Office any day. Features like the true integration -- it's really one program that changes its menus, toolbars, etc. depending on what type of document you're viewing; Stylist and Navigator panes which quickly let you manipulate and apply all kinds of styles, and move around documents quickly; the built-in PDF export; the Python programmability (I've written a very useful little word count tool for Writer in Python -- remind me to talk about it some other time); and of course, the fact that it's free and open source, works pretty much flawlessly with MS Office documents, and runs on the Big Three operating systems of today -- Windows, Unix and Mac OS X.

But where does that leave me with MS Office? The truth is I need Excel to conveniently do data analysis in my statistics units, and Word as a last resort to open files I might come across.

Updating a page in a browser

2005-05-16T09:43:00.000+08:00

Say you know that a web page has recently been changed, but no matter how many times you click Refresh/Reload, the new version just refuses to come up. What do you do? Hold down Shift, then click. This will force the browser to go out and download the page again, instead of lazily telling you it has the latest version.

Quick update on Internet Explorer and Wine

2005-05-13T17:07:00.000+08:00

Well, turns out I didn’t need Internet Explorer 5 at all. The reason the IE6 installer I downloaded from Microsoft was not working with Wine was that I had the latest Wine version installed, and it had a bug which prevented IE6’s installer from working. I downloaded and installed a slightly older version of Wine (20041019), and voila, Internet Explorer 6 SP1 was installed (I’m running it now).

I then managed to go to the MSN Messenger website and let IE install Messenger 7 for (which I’m also running now). So now, instead of having to use the E-Messenger website all the time, I can sign in with the Real Deal(TM). Yessss.

Details? Feeling lazy now, maybe I’ll post them later.

Various

2005-05-12T23:30:00.000+08:00

The Darth Side

Ever wonder what thoughts swirled around in the evil Darth Vader’s head during the events of Star Wars 4–6? Well, here’s your chance to find out – this blog is the personal narrative of the Dark Lord himself! ‘The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster’, http://darthside.blogspot.com/. The classic post to read: ‘Does It Hurt When I Go Like This?’

Bruce Schneier

Check out ‘Schneier on Security’, http://www.schneier.com/blog/. He writes about an always-interesting topic, security, which inevitably leads to many diverse and interesting discussions with his readers on his blog – nowadays probably more about politics than about anything else. But it’s always an interesting take on the topic.

Internet Explorer on Linux

It’s ironic that I, a Firefox freak, am searching for a download of Internet Explorer 5. But it’s true. I am trying to install IE5, as insane as that sounds. And what’s more, I’m not trying to do it on my Windows machine, because I have none. I’m trying to do it on my Linux box, to get MSN Messenger to work on Linux.

For those of you not familiar with Linux, this is quite a trick, because it requires a lot of special tinkering before you can run common Windows programs like Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger. Things are going at snail’s pace now because I can’t find a download of IE5 anywhere on the ’net. Guess I’ll just have to keep searching.

Uni

University life never lets up. First there was the Monash Cultural Night, and that was so hectic it made us, the organisers, not so eager to see each other again for a while. Ironic.

Then there are all these damned assignments that have you on a choke-hold. They keep coming, one after the other. You keep putting them off, claiming to do ‘research’ and ‘I’ll start them real soon.’ But then a couple of days before the due date, you start doing the research and writing, and voila! Instant assignment. Meanwhile your brain and eyes are stir-fried.

On the up side, though, the assignments’ marks make up the total marks for each unit, so all the pressure is not put on the exam results.

Star Wars Movie and ...

I am so looking forward to the 19th. Episode 3 comes out, and all assignments for the semester are finally done and over with. Ah, the closure. Of course, that just means the exams are coming up in an all-too-few number of days, but that also means so is my summer vac. Ah, the mixed emotions.

Another (ir)religion post

2005-04-05T17:51:00.000+08:00

Yesterday night I had the usual `discussion' with another guy about religion. He's a Muslim, and a pretty dogmatic one at that. `Discussing' the basic concepts of religion with someone like that gets very old, very fast. For example, yesterday, he was of the opinion that I'm something really bad is going to happen to me, and I'm on the `wrong path' because I don't have any religion. Here's a basic idea of the exchange that followed:

--

Him: Man, I'm telling you, you should start believing, because see, if you keep on going this way, sooner or later something really bad is going to happen to you.

Me: Maybe. But if does, then don't you think that's unfair? If someone came up to you and told you, `If you don't do what this book here says, you're going to be punished....', wouldn't that make you angry?

Him: You can't question these things....

.
.
.

Me: But why am I on the wrong path?

Him: Because you don't follow the Holy Book.

Me: But why is following the Holy Book the right path? You've been told that it is, by other people. But how do you know that's it so?

Him: You shouldn't question these things.

Me: OK man, if I can't question your beliefs, then let's make it fair and say that you can't question mine.

Him: That's fine with me, even though you're on the wrong path and will burn in hell forever....

Me: I think we had a deal...?

Him: Yeah, I'm just saying, because you really are going to get hurt really badly some time if you don't start believing.

.
.
.

Him: Man, if you don't believe, you're going to burn in hell forever, even if you never do anything bad in your life. Even [somebody] who has drunk and committed murder and adultery and everything will get into heaven if they ask for forgiveness right before they die. (Slightly hysterically) You'll burn in hell forever!

Me: But what if I live my life as an atheist ask for forgiveness right before I die?

Him: ...

--

And then there was another thing that we touched upon: the Quran. Obviously Muslims believe that it comes straight from God, and yesterday I was trying, very subtly, to show this guy, and a friend of his, how maybe Muhammad and the Arabs of that time could have written it.

--

Them: The Quran had to come from God, because how else could it contain all the stories of the prophets like Musa (Moses), Isa (Jesus), Ibrahim (Abraham) ... in such great detail?

Me: Maybe the Arabs of that time knew of those stories from the old books, like the old and new Testaments, the Torah, etc....

Them: But the Arabs of that time couldn't read!

Me: But they could have heard the stories from someone or the other. You have to agree that at that time Makkah was a big trading city, and all kinds of people -- Christians, Jews -- traded there?

Them: Yeah....

Me: Then they could have brought the Bible and the Torah along with them, and told the Makkans and other Arabs the old stories.

--

But that did get me thinking. Suppose that there is a God, and He wants to test us while we live on earth. Suppose He has given us free will and wants us to use it to make our condition better, to live on earth with dignity and respect for one another. Maybe the real test is to see whether we can discipline ourselves even without the carrot and stick of eternal reward/punishment.

To make things more interesting, and harder for us, He has given us lots of holy books with lots of instructions and admonitions, thereby killing two birds with one stone. A beautiful masterstroke: the books contain the moral codes and authority to set mankind on a moral path, but also enough threats and contradictions to confuse and scare us. A test to see if we can overcome the confusion and the fear of being by ourselves to get to the next level, whatever that is.

Look that the history of religion in our world through this theory: everything is perfectly balanced. The feeling of fellowship and happiness from following a higher moral power, together; and the bloodshed and strife caused by conflicting beliefs. The holy books and beliefs give us just the right amount of guidance, while at the same time literally putting the fear of God in us, and the seeds of our own confusion and misery.

`Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell'

2005-02-24T23:42:00.000+08:00

Just a few days before flying to Malaysia I bought and read, in three days, Susanna Clarke’s 800-page debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (see Amazon.com). Where to begin? Well, let me start with the back cover blurb. Basically it talks about the two magicians who appear in England to revive English magic. It talks about Mr Norrell as a reclusive scholar-type with an aversion to hazardous forms of magic. And of Jonathan Strange as a wild magician almost on the brink, one who is ready to try anything to gain fame and power.

It couldn’t be more wrong.

WARNING: SPOILER

‘Two magicians will appear in England. One will fear me. The other will long to behold me.’ – prophecy by the Raven King, from back cover

Only someone who has read the book can understand how much the characters have been misinterpreted by the marketers. In the book, Mr Norrell has an aversion to any type of publicity and a dislike for any magic he didn’t personally sanction. Clarke writes of him destroying would-be magicians by forbidding them from performing magic, and censoring any writings on magic – even going as far as to magically vanish books of magic right out of people’s homes to keep the public from reading them.

Strange on the other hand is presented as a very likeable character, a gentleman to the bone. Here’s something I roughly remember from the book:

‘Wellington asked Strange, “Could a magician kill people with magic?”

‘Strange frowned. “I suppose a magician could. But a gentleman never would.” ’

Strange is blessed with an unparalleled talent for magic. He discovers magic as a profession quite by accident (seemingly). Unbelieving, he goes with the flow and discovers that things happen at his command that have not happened for hundreds of years. He comes into contact with, and works with, Norrell. Yet the world he enters is unexplored and disquieting, unlike Norrell’s world of ‘safe English magic’. Strange has premonitions of things going on that are just beyond his level of awareness.

Things continue. Both magicians grow in power and renown, Strange more so than Norrell, because of his willingness to aid his country’s war machine abroad. He practices magic on very large scales – rearranging the Spanish countryside.

After the war his wife dies in very mysterious and troubling circumstances. He is a broken man, although he tries not to show it very much. All he has left is magic. And the magic is growing stronger within him every day, as he immerses himself within it. He picks up more strange vibes, premonitions, insights. He goes to Venice and finds it, too, steeped in magic. In Venice Clarke describes one of the most memorable scenes I’ve ever read in a book. It involves trees, lots of trees. Read the book!

Strange discovers that his wife is not dead, but has been enchanted away by a suave, fun-loving and cruel fairy. After this, he throws all caution to the wind and distills all the knowledge he has gained in his years as a magician into a way to access the fairy country, Faerie. He uses madness, his own madness, as a tool to contact ‘the gentleman’, as the fairy is called. So desperate, and yet hanging on by a thread, he manages to save his wife, and at the same time, with Norrell’s help, revive English magic – as part of a spell worked long ago by the Raven King himself.

In the end, the eye of the beholder beholds the eye of the beheld. But you have to read the book to understand this!

He doesn’t emerge unscathed – the conflict leaves him literally in eternal night, which he and Norrell carry with them wherever they go. Clarke ends the book on an open note, as if indicating more adventures (and hopefully more books) to come.

One recurring theme I noticed in the book was the English’s unwillingness to accept magical causes for something, even though they know that magic is possible and even likely with Strange and Norrell having opened the doors to it. Strange himself is guilty of this before his wife dies. I think her death teaches him a lesson – if anything that could be explained at all by magic, it probably is magic. Cruel way to learn, and cruel lesson, but this is not an innocent book.

University, and some books

2005-02-09T00:23:00.000+08:00

AFTER a long time of hither and thither, I've finally bought the ticket. I am definitely going to Malaysia to study in Monash University. The student pass they have sent me will see me through Dhaka's airport and on to Kuala Lumpur, where I will be given a visa.

I've finished, within the last few days, Jean P. Sasson's Princess and Daughters of Arabia. The former was excellent. I found the book, of all places, in my grandfather's bookshelf. I've known of it for a long time, but for some reason or the other always passed over it, looking for interesting books. But....

I really like learning about things which have always been shrouded in mystery, and the book felt like a frank confession of Saudi royal life behind the veil. `Sultana' and Sasson's voices both felt sincere, and I identified with the princess. I have very strong and conflicting ideas about freedom and laissez-faire and non-violence and the fair treatment of minorities -- among other things. I love to see them echoed in other people.

Daughters was not as original -- and understandably so. Still highly readable, though. I'll never tire of Sultana's opinions and thoughts, partly because they're so much my own. I'm waiting for my brother to buy the next in the series, Desert Royal. (I'm currently broke -- in Bangladesh taka, anyway.) Then again, I'll probably be in Malaysia by the time he gets around to it.

I'm currently reading The Da Vinci Code. Another excellent book. Symbology; hidden meanings in famous artworks; secret societies; radical theories about Christianity -- it's all there and it's exactly my kind of brainy thriller. I can't wait to finish it, but am loath to at the same time -- because a book like this is hard to find.

Reading the book, I couldn't help comparing it to another radical book I've read recently -- Anne Rice's Memnoch the Devil. That book was about the vampire Lestat's quest for redemption, but also about the struggle between God and the Devil, apparently called Memnoch by himself and Satan (among other names) by everyone else. In it, Memnoch explained to Lestat an alternate, and shocking, view of creation and mankind and Christianity's history.The parts all fit cleverly, and the wheel turns. It left me genuinely frightened (not from the religious repercussions -- I'm secular -- but from the general atmosphere created in the book. Yes, it was that good).

Another thing which I've been exploring is a certain similarity of themes between the Princess books and The Da Vinci Code. In the former, Sultana has the feeling that many problems in the world are caused by male domination over women, which is unnatural. In the latter, much is made of the natural duality and equality of man and woman, and the subversion of that natural order in the modern world, and the resulting pain and misery. Almost uncanny.

For those who died: we came from the ocean, and we will go back to it

2005-01-01T21:24:00.000+08:00

`'Tis double death to drown in sight of shore.'
--
Shakespeare

THE mind boggles at the amount of death and suffering. The sheer scale of the disaster is unthinkable. The damage will take decades to repair. The blow will lay low the economies of the region and send it into an interrugnum of darkness and despair.

This is what floats through my mind right now, watching and reading about ten thousand new deaths with every new day and the rising difficulties facing the relief workers. Suddenly the Iraq insurgency, terrorist threats and Middle Eastern oil cartels seem like such distant concerns. Something has hit us here in Asia, and this something that could destroy this region and turn it into a hellpit of misery.

I look at satellite imagery of Indonesia before and after the tsunami and try to imagine what would happen if something like that hit here in Bangladesh. I can't; it's too hard.

I once read a Jungle Book story where Mowgli has the elephants of the jungle destroy his native village, which cast him out as a demon child and would have burnt his parents as witches. He said, `Let in the jungle, Hathi!' In the satellite pictures it looks like someone cried `Let in the sea!' and it was so. In the Jungle Books, there was nothing older or more powerful than the Law of the Jungle. Now it seems to me there is something older and more powerful: the Law of the Ocean.

And yet in the news they're always talking about what the UN is saying, what countries are forming coalitions, sending each other aid; the rich giving to the poor, and the poor sharing amongst themselves. Volunteers helping stranded tourists find their lost ones. All countries coming together in symphony and no jarring notes, no dissension. It's so amazing, so incredible to see this -- the countries acting as if they are part of one big nation, one nation-planet, governed by the common Law of Humanity.

Which is the stronger law? No doubt about it, the Law of the Ocean. We came from the ocean, and back to it we will go in the end.

Earthquakes, tsunamis and life

2004-12-29T00:38:00.000+08:00

I was chatting with a Sri Lankan friend about an hour ago and I mentioned to him my surprise that the Bam, Iran earthquake of last year is not mentioned by the BBC (at bbc.co.uk) as one of the major earthquakes of this century. Instead, after mentioning the Indonesia earthquake of a couple of days ago, the list jumps to 1964, I think. He said something to the effect that that's because the international community was not affected by Bam. With the Indonesia earthquake, the dead came from many countries around the world.

I suppose this view is cynical, but at least to me it's not such a surprise. I know that most people are more or less self-interested -- I know I am. So it's hardly immoral to give something more importance that affects you directly. Still, considering that 30,000 lives were lost in Bam, I think it deserved a mention.

And now, we're hearing that the Asian death toll is 44,000 (my God!) because of Indonesia's losses of maybe 25,000 and Sri Lanka's (almost) 19,000. I'm seeing stories of people from all over the world, famous and obscure, being caught up together in this disaster. This is brutal and amazing, that all are levelled to the same ground in the maelstrom, from supermodels to football stars, to the German chancellor himself.

And to add salt to the considerable wounds, Asia will almost certainly have to implement, at the cost of perhaps millions of dollars, tsunami and earthquake early warning systems or the tourist industry will never recover. Paradise on Earth will forever be on the lookout for death from the sea.

For science

2004-12-15T19:48:00.000+08:00

A few weeks ago I caught a little household spider in a transparent plastic floppy disk case. I showed it to Yaman, who recoiled in disgust (he's mortally afraid of all insects and most animals). Still, he overcame his fear enough to take the case from me and give it a good shaking. I shouted at him and snatched the case back. Then I put it on a table to observe.

In about a minute, maybe, the spider turned itself to `stand' on the ceiling of the case, upside-down. I then turned the case upside-down, to put the spider right-side up again. It went crazy! It started running about inside the case for about ten or twenty seconds, then slowed down and hung itself upside-down again.

I put it upright again. And again, it went crazy, skittering about madly, and then finally putting itself upside-down again. I did this several times, and each time it responded in exactly the same way.

After a while, I have to admit, I got bored (I'm not Richard Feynman :-). So I let it go on the balcony outside my bedroom. Immediately Yaman squashed it under his sandal. I shouted at him some more, then gave it up. He's totally determined to wipe out all of insectkind, it seems. (Yes, I know a spider is not an insect, but an arachnid. Yaman doesn't care.)

Mistakes I can make

2004-12-12T17:30:00.000+08:00

Yes, I too make mistakes. I did a very foolish thing today. I was walking home when a man wearing a shirt and lungi greeted me as if he knew me. He said he'd used to work for this video store that had closed down and that I had used to go there frequently (which was true, but that was a _long_ time ago, and he shouldn't have been able to have recognised me from from then). Although I didn't recognise him I shook his hand and he clasped my hand for a long time while he spoke of himself and asked me where I'd been recently. I answered him (Chittagong, Dhaka), wondering what he wanted (idiot me).

Then he started describing all the troubles he'd been having in Dhaka after losing the video store job -- looking for a job, supporting the family, and so on. And still I stood there like an idiot letting him talk on. I don't know what spell came over me -- was I uncertain as to whether he had really recognised me? Was it because he spoke some English as he told me about trying to get a job at a club in Gulshan? Was he going to ask me for a job?

Then I got a call from my mother, and I decided to get going. So I told him I had to go, implying that my mother had told me something I needed to do in a hurry. He kept on talking, finally getting to the point -- would I lend him some money, he would never ask me normally but he'd been having trouble recently and also suffering ill health -- he showed me his left arm, which had discoloured patches on it. That was when I started kicking myself (figuratively speaking) for staying to listen so long.

He was saying, maybe I could lend him a hundred taka? Maybe even fifty? I told him I didn't have anything, I would have given him something if I did have it, but I didn't. I lied, I did have some money on me, two hundred taka, but I would never give away money to anyone I met on the street.

He seemed very reluctant to let me go. I left him behind, feeling like a total idiot.

I love new software

2004-11-18T03:01:00.000+08:00

I don't know about you but, I'm a sucker for new (and improved) programs on my computer. This is what keeps me downloading and trying out most anything I can lay my hands on, from alternative office suites to mail servers.

Lately on Linux, I've been trying out the Xfce desktop environment, and I have to say, on my RAM-deprived PC (128 MB), it totally kicks ass. It's fast, clean, minimal, but it looks incredible, especially with the GTK+ Smokey-Blue theme.

I've also been setting up a mail system in Linux that uses MrPostman to download all my Hotmail messages from the Hotmail site, classify it into different categories using POPFile, and deliver it to my electronic mailbox. It's working pretty well so far, and POPFile is getting more and more accurate in its classification. My only problem is the lack of mail to download and test the setup! But what the heck.

Finally I've got a mail system that comes about as close as I've ever gotten to my own POP account with an ISP.

(Bangalis) debating the election

2004-11-03T15:13:00.000+08:00

This might be one of the more exciting events of modern times. The American people choose a new president and the rest of the world is riveted. Everyone I know has an opinion and wants to debate. Everyone here is rooting for Kerry, but the funny thing is people supporting the same guy find a way to debate with each other.

What I mean is, people start talking about Bush and Saddam and Osama and Iraq. The old story. Then someone goes, `Oh, I'm behind Kerry 100%.' And the other guy is `Absolutely, me too.' And they're both (moderately) happy. But then guy no. 1 says something like, `And you know, Bush did such-and-such and you could obviously see that it was wrong.'

Now this is a very innocuous statement because these guys are definitely on the same side, right? Wrong! Guy no. 2 gets all riled up at this point: `It's ridiculous! Can't you see that such-and-such! And this-and-that!!! And on top of everything else, ...'

Then guy no. 1 gets worked up as well: `But that was absolutely wrong! Bush should've gone to the United Nations and blah-blah-blah!'

Guy no. 2: `But don't you see, he says he did go! And that they gave him permission to blah-blah-blah!'

Guy no. 1: `What the hell are you talking about! Are you a Bush supporter!'

Guy no. 2: `I thought you said you supported Bush! Otherwise why were you arguing about him!!!'

Using GnuPG

2004-10-23T00:02:00.000+08:00

I've started using GnuPG, the GNU Privacy Guard. I've uploaded my public key to the MIT PGP key server, pgp.mit.edu. My key ID is:

D8643D69

and fingerprint is:

B57F D9D9 FFA1 A18F 9876 7512 5999 7722 D864 3D69

If this post has caused you a headache so far, sorry! I just like the idea of playing around with digital signing and encryption.

`The Apprentice'

2004-10-09T15:25:00.000+08:00

After watching four episodes, I've finally decided it's one of my all-time favourite shows. Two teams, minimal team loyalty, and almost constant bickering among the women are the defining factors, and it's great to watch.

My favourite episode so far has been the one where Sam got fired. He was labeled the `wild man' of the men's team, and he had openly admitted to Mr Trump that he had not earned the others' respect -- but he seemed to think that was their fault. After he was fired, he stared murderously at Trump. Hadn't anyone told him when he signed up there was a possibility he would get fired? Trump probably increased his security detail after that!

Yesterday night's episode was interesting because Nick folded when he didn't approve of a business tactic the others were using to get the customers in. They had set up Kwame at a desk giving out autographs -- `Get your autograph of Kwame Jackson, Wall Street [grunt]', as if he was a celebrity. In retrospect, it seems like what Sam tried to do in the first episode selling lemonade to a guy for a thousand dollars -- `I guarantee that if you buy this lemonade, you will have an experience that you will remember.' Kinda bending the rules of the show, but not quite. The implication was that after the show aired, all the contenders would become well-known to the public.

Anyway, Nick said he didn't approve of the tactic and wasn't going to be a part of it. But he didn't really do anything much at all. He just hung around outside and chanted something like `Coupons, coupons'. Carolyn was right when she pointed out he had looked like he was dying. Nick should have stuck up for the team and the team leader no matter what he thought of the tactics. And in any case he certainly didn't come up with anything better.

As for the women ... they focused on liquor and won. Heidi was very impressive selling the drinks. She capitalised on the male `macho' complex, urging them to down the shots. It was excellent. I don't know if you could say whether they went too far when the started drinking as well. Maybe that was a mistake, but they beat the men, which was the goal, so....

As for the whole `Shooters Girls' thing, small T-shirts and all, I think Trump and Carolyn were wrong to caution them about using sexuality. It should be obvious that their goal, and all their incentives, pointed at beating the men any way necessary. It was just business. If Trump wanted to see what they would do if they couldn't use sexuality as a tactic, he should have put them in a task which neutralised it -- e.g., negotiating with a woman, or in a highly scrutinised corporate environment. I don't know.

On a side note, I have to admit that for the most part I'm very erratic with my blogging. It's just that I just don't say anything if there's nothing interesting going on.

Haircuts as a kid

2004-09-07T20:51:00.000+08:00

When I was younger, from nine years to about eleven years old, we used to live in Dubai, in a part of town called Deira. I was pretty happy there, for the most part. At that time I really liked going for my haircuts. My father and I would go for a walk to the barbershop, which was moderately close. Maybe sometimes we'd take the car.

So I would sit in the barbershop, which was spotlessly clean, and cool and dry, and have the accoutrements of the haircut put on me. First came the universal inner towel and white cloak. Then, unique (as far as I could tell) to this barbershop, one of the Filipino barbers, they were young chaps, would roll out some length of plasticky cloth, cut it off at the end, and wind it around my neck, holding up the white cloak. This was probably to make sure no hair fell in through the cracks.

Then would commence the snip, snip, snippety-snip. And voila, we were done. I think once or twice after a cut, we would go to a nearby public library, which to my great regret I didn't spend more time in.

Later, we moved to Sharjah [Sharjah and Dubai are cities in the United Arab Emirates]. So I actually became a teenager growing up in Sharjah. But anyway, when I was still a pre-teen, by that time I was trying to throw off the tyrannical yoke of my mother and her enforced mushroom cut. She thought it was cute, but by that time I had developed enough sentience to realise it was ghastly. OK, it was really more suited to the Western or Filipino kids, but by then I couldn't really pass for either, so I decided the best cut for me would be a fully natural cut -- in other words, just let it grow however it will, and trim it if it starts getting uncomfortable. And to this day I've kept to that style.

So anyway, back then, I was this kid in Sharjah, trying to outgrow, literally, my mushroom cut. And there were a couple of barbershops pretty close to my place. In fact, probably there was one in the next building. Finally, shortly before I turned twelve, I managed to get there alone and gave strict instructions to have it cut evenly. I was quite pleased with the result, but my mother was noncommittal at best.

Still later, we had moved to another house in Sharjah, on another street. And there was another barbershop on this street, and I used to get my haircuts there from then on. This one had nice black leather chairs -- rather like I car's, I thought. Once, on my way to the place, I popped open and started drinking a bottle of Pepsi. Then when I got there, I had to wait while the barber was finishing with another customer. In an accident, I clumsily tipped the bottle of Pepsi and it spilled. Now what I should have done was let it all spill onto my lap, because I was sitting in a leather chair. And I knew that. But in a reflex action, I had opened my lap, and most of the Pepsi went on the leather.

The barber was mad. He went nuclear, really. He was a youngish (well, late thirties) Iranian guy, and he had a temper. He started yelling at me. Luckily my father showed up and it was exit, stage left. And no haircut that night. And I didn't go back there for some time, for good measure.

Actually the one thing I appreciate about those haircuts is I got into the habit of getting a standard `medium-length' cut which just about any barber can do, so it doesn't take me long to describe what I want when I have to go to a new barbershop. And that's great because I hate describing how I want my hair cut.