Analysing Transit Spending with Presto

ABOUT a year ago roughly I started using a new transit fare payment card called Presto. Presto is a top-up card–you pay as you spend–and it promised to unify fare payments for public transit systems throughout the Greater Toronto Area. By and large, it has lived up to its promise. But it does have its fair share of discontents.

One of the things that I was impressed by when I first got set up and registered on their website was they have a table of raw data on your transit usage–what service was used, where you travelled from, date and time, amount paid, etc. It was limited to only the past three months’ worth of data, though. No problem, I thought. I’ll just log in every three months, copy the accrued data into an Excel file, and save it that way. And for the most part it worked.

With this raw data, I imagined that I’d be able to do analysis on things like my travel patterns, bus timings (e.g. if some are regularly late), and of course how much I’m spending per week/month compared to how much I’d be spending with more conventional tickets or weekly/monthly passes.

I made a mistake, though. When copying and saving the data in a nicely formatted Excel file, I didn’t notice that Excel wasn’t properly understanding the date format (dd/mm/yyyy) used in the data and was converting it into bogus dates, for whatever reason. And so I deleted some (to me) extraneous columns in the data, like another column which contained the month in which the transaction took place. So I ended up not being able to do month-to-month-type analyses on a large subset of the original data.

Having learned my lesson, I’ve taken care to not delete any more columns in the fresh data I’m copying down now–just formatting things like transaction times and months when I’m absolutely sure Excel is understanding them properly.

With the new, better, data I managed to do a spending analysis like I originally wanted. And though I’d been a bit sceptical of the savings with Presto for me personally, I became a believer after seeing the figures below.

Before I get into the analysis though, a quick explanation of exactly how payment with Presto works: when you first buy the card at a transit kiosk, you pay some amount out of pocket for them to load the card with initially. When you board a bus/train, you tap the Presto card on a special reader and it deducts the amount of the fare from the card. Then you periodically top up the card to prevent going down to zero balance. You can set it up to automatically charge your credit card a certain amount when the Presto balance reaches a certain lower threshold that you set. This is really convenient and I’ve set up mine to auto-load $40 when the balances goes down to $20.

One more thing to keep in mind before the analysis: all of these months were more or less full working months for me, in which I worked at least 20 days and therefore took at least 40 transit rides throughout the month.

The Analysis Result

The above screenshot shows an Excel PivotTable with one line entry per month. So to go through the figures for September: the ‘E-Purse Fare Payment’ column says I spent $89.96 in transit fare in September; ‘E-Purse Load Value’ says my credit card was charged $80 total throughout September and that balance was added to my Presto card; and the ‘Grand Total’ of -$9.96, being negative, means I actually spent about $10 more than I loaded onto the card that month (since I had some balance left over from August). And so on for the following months.

How does this compare to what I would have spent with the more conventional weekly or monthly passes? Mississauga Transit, or MiWay weekly passes are $29, so for a month’s worth of them I’d have spent roughly $116, give or take a few days. For a monthly pass I’d have spent $120. Now these are basically the most affordable options if you need to ride 40 times throughout the month. You can’t get cheaper than that if you’re working full-time.

Given the above, September was really a very good month–lot of savings. My credit card was charged only $80. October was not so great, but not exactly horrible. Note that my credit card was still only charged $120–the extra $2.80 was from someone who borrowed the card and loaded some money into it by accident. This is no more than a monthly pass, and now let me explain why the spend was greater in October:

The above screenshot shows the same PivotTable as before, just broken down by transit system.

The person who borrowed my card spent about $11 on GO Transit, leaving $117 for my regular travel to/from work, and other places. Still competitive with the weekly and monthly passes.

November was competitive at a spend of $114.37–less than the MiWay weekly/monthly passes despite some extra travel on other transit systems. Again, my credit card was charged exactly $120. The remaining $5.63 was carried over as balance into December–something that is simply not possible with monthly/weekly passes.

December is so far so good. Presto has automatically reloaded early in the month, so for now the credit card has been charged a bit more than I’ve spent on transit this month. But that will have evened out by the time December ends.

All in all, a lot of value for money and a bunch of other benefits (check out the Presto website for details).

Process

The steps from raw Presto usage data to finished PivotTable are fairly simple–if you’re an Excel user, you should be able to mostly figure it out. But the really quick summary: log in to the Presto website, go to the transactions page, show all transactions from the past three months, drag-select (with the mouse) the entire transactions table (including column headings) and paste into Excel. Excel should understand the tabular format and get it more or less right. Get rid of all formatting, then convert the range to an Excel table (select any cell in the data, press Ctrl-T). Format the ‘Loyalty Month’ column (should be column H) with the custom ‘number’ format yyyy-mm. This uniquely identifies the month and year. Finally, create a PivotTable from this raw data with the following specifications:

Happy analysis

Tweet from the Browser Address Bar

This will work on Firefox and should also work on Chrome with a little adjustment. You can start posting a tweet straight from the browser address bar instead of having to navigate to the Twitter website and click on the new tweet button.

In Firefox, create a new bookmark with the following properties:

Name: Tweet (or similar)

Location: https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?source=webclient&text=%s

Keyword: tw (or whatever you like)

Description: Tweet something

Now, with this bookmark saved, go to the address bar and type: tw Just testing. Then press Enter. A new tweet composition page should show up with the words Just testing. Finish off the tweet as wanted and click Tweet.

Is the tweet composition page unavoidable? Maybe not, but I don’t see an easy way to tweet directly from the address bar. And maybe that’s for the best–giving you a chance to finalise things before you publish for the world to see.

Marvel’s The Avengers

Warning: Minor spoilers. I do references specific scenes from the movie, but nothing major.

HARK, True Believers, and let me tell you a story. It’s a simple story, one of raw power and potential, where Good comes together against Evil and drives it back for another day. It’s the original story of the Avengers, straight from their first appearance in comics.

There came a day (unlike any other), when Loki, the Norse god of mischief, unleashed a series of machinations, starting with a clash between the Hulk and Thor. Other heroes got involved by chance or by fate, figured out what was going on, and finally stopped him. On that day they came together as a team, and the Avengers were born.

Since those original comics came out, there’ve been many iterations of the story. Significantly, there was Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvel version of The Avengers. It even provided the source material for the enemy alien armada in the movie, the Chitauri. In a way, The Ultimates was the kick in the pants that started the whole Marvel Avengers movie franchise rolling. So given all that history, where does this movie stand?

First of all, its credentials are impeccable. The story has Joss Whedon’s imprint all over it—the snarky humour, the really fun moments, the horror and the Big Bad (and the hints of the Bigger Bad). Oh, and let’s not forget the destruction of, and escape from, the SHIELD base in the beginning—a nod to the destruction of the Hellmouth in the series finale of Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That was awesome

The screenplay is by Zak Penn, who’s done really good work recently—to me, most notably in his new (and returning) show Alphas, which is like a modern, grounded-in-reality version of X-MEN.

The ensemble cast plays really well off of each other, in a way a lot of ensembles haven’t been able to; their egos and personalities, their senses of humour and honour, shine through; and under Whedon’s guiding hand, through all their neuroses and bickering, they keep a laser-like focus on driving the story forward.

The story: there were many moments that were laugh-out-loud funny—e.g. when Captain America shows a bunch of hardened NYC cops why they should take orders from him. There were moments when I cheered—e.g. when Iron Man shows up in Stuttgart to take down Loki. Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark provides the attitude and AC/DC’s Shoot to Thrill provides the soundtrack. Awesome!

On a side note, when they first announced the original Iron Man movie, I was rooting for Leonardo DiCaprio to play Tony Stark. The character was literally based off Howard Hughes (notice how Tony Stark father’s name is Howard) and DiCaprio had proven he could pull off Howard Hughes. But three movies later, I’m solidly in the RDJr camp. He’s proven himself, and not just because of the moments when he’s funny and eccentric, but especially in the moments when he’s dead serious.

As for the characters: I won’t do a headcount (I’ll let Tony Stark do that), but it’s being said that Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner/Hulk provided the heart of the movie. Absolutely true. The wry humour and sarcasm, the world-weary cynic mixed with the eager scientist playing with new gadgets, Ruffalo’s Banner shows us all these sides of the character. As the Hulk, he shows us something almost elemental: rage personified, quick and unexpected as lightning, a force of nature, but ultimately a personality, a man struggling to do what’s right through the thick red haze of anger.

There was plenty of meat in all the characters; there were moments that showed that Joss Whedon gets them all. Take Captain America, Steve Rogers. A man who must feel like he’s suddenly time-travelled 70 years into the future, he’s looking for anything that’ll give him a connection to the past and the present. He doesn’t get most of the pop-culture references spouted off rapid-fire by the rest of the Avengers and SHIELD agents, but when he does, he has one of those ‘A-ha!’ moments that tell him this is still his own world.

Take Tony Stark. What’s the first thing this cynical technologist does when he comes aboard the SHIELD Helicarrier, Nick Fury’s flying fortress and repository of some of the best-kept secrets outside the Vatican? His actions are so quintessentially Tony Stark, they’re almost predictable.

Take the Black Widow. Much of her past is a mystery. In the comics, she’s a lot like a Russian version of Wolverine, given what was done to her by her government. She’s someone who’s trying to make amends; she’s a master spy—clever enough to outwit the god of mischief at his own game. All of these things are hinted at, and shown in her scenes. Every scene she’s given is used to the maximum.

And of course, take Loki. Disgruntled, and carrying a grievance the size of a kingdom, Loki comes to Earth with a plan to take away the world his brother loves and protects. He wants to ‘free’ people from the ‘tyranny’ of freedom—brilliant and twisted; something only Loki’s warped mind could conceive. The size of his ego, and his giant psychotic need for recognition, are such that one after the other, the Avengers and SHIELD big guns profile him and start figuring out his plays. Agent Coulson delivers what I think is the best line in the movie (and that’s saying something) when he explains to Loki why he won’t win.

If there was one character whose essence didn’t come out in the movie, I’d have to say it was Maria Hill. I know a lot of fans were excited to see this relatively new character (in the comics) make the transition to the big screen for the first time, but Maria Hill is literally supposed to have learned spycraft and attitude at the Nick Fury school of badass; she wasn’t really given an opportunity to show that here, maybe given the fact that Agent Coulson seemed to be performing the second-in-command duties in this movie. Oh well, maybe in the next one.

Speaking of Nick Fury’s second-in-command, one character who was rather conspicuously missing from this iteration of SHIELD was Dum-Dum Dugan; especially given that he’d been in the Captain America movie of last year. I guess they would have had a hard time explaining Dugan’s (and then Fury’s) seeming eternal youth (or at least their eternal non-retirement), something they still haven’t explained in the main Marvel comics storyline, as far as I’m aware.

I’ll skip the main plotline and results (the Avengers save the day, what’d you expect), and jump to the delicious little end-of-credits teaser. Let me take a moment here to cackle madly with glee while I tell you, True Believers, that if they carry through with what they’ve shown there (and history says they will), then the Avengers will be going intergalactic, interdimensional, inter-timeline and possibly exploring the boundaries between life and death! *cackle*

Verdict: Loved it. And Long Live Joss Whedon!

Bookmarking in Adobe Reader

I RECENTLY moved to Windows and started using Adobe Reader. The latest version is Adobe Reader X (that is, 10) and I started to keenly feel the need for a bookmarking feature like the one that's built in to Mac OS’s PDF reader, Preview. (Which is quite superbly done.)

A quick run through Reader's menus revealed nothing about bookmarking. Adobe's still calling the built-in navigation links in PDF documents ‘bookmarks’. So that’s a dead trail. A web search turned up a bunch of hacks, some of which work but not very well, and others which just don’t.

Fortunately, Adobe Reader X has a (no hacking required) feature that’s almost equivalent to bookmarking, albeit in a slightly unexpected place: the Comment panel on the right-hand side. If you click the Comment toolbar button on the right, the Comment panel pops up, divided into two sections: Annotations, and Comments List.

So to add a ‘bookmark’: click the Sticky Note button in the Annotations section of the panel, then click anywhere on the page where you want to position the sticky note. You can then minimise the sticky note by clicking the minimise button on its upper-right corner.

As soon as you place a sticky note on the page, it shows up on the Comments List section of the panel. This is awesome because this comments list can basically be used like a bookmarks list, with a click on each comment taking you to the exact page it’s on. And when you’re done with it as a bookmark, you can right-click on it and select Delete.

There is one drawback: every time you close the PDF file, you’ll have to save it, in place, again. The sticky notes, or for our purposes bookmarks, are saved inside the PDF files, and Adobe Reader doesn’t let you just Ctrl+S save a PDF file, it forces you to pick the file in a Save As dialog box each time. Still ... that’s a relatively small trade-off for a pretty convenient bookmarking feature.

Short Note on Blogging

SOME time ago I complained that there wasn’t any good, free blogging software on the Mac. Well, since then I’ve pruned my list of demands somewhat, and learned to settle for some typographical niceties like curly quotes (‘’, “”) and en-dashes (–).

And it turns out that the Mac’s built-in TextEdit editor does these nicely, with a little help from the system-wide Substitutions feature (in TextEdit’s main menu, click Edit > Substitutions > Show Substitutions, and check all the automatic substitutions offered there).

So now it’s just a matter of typing out my thoughts in TextEdit, which laods almost instantly; and dealing with the psychological baggage of navigating to the correct post page in Blogger comes later.

Thoughts on Lion

I UPGRADED to Mac OS X Lion, the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X, tonight. While the update was cheap ($30) and easy (click and run), it was also slow. Roughly speaking it must have taken at least a couple of hours to finish up. At the end of that, though, I found all my files and settings transferred seamlessly into the new OS.

The first question on my mind was whether Lion would slow down my system, given that I have a basic 2009 MacBook. The answer is no; it performs just as well as Snow Leopard in my perception.

On first boot there’s a change right from the start: the login screen is now a single page, not a window, of users and basic system info like battery status, time and Wi-Fi status. And on login the desktop is kind of sent hurtling forward towards you–it seems like Apple has grown fond of the kind of page-transition animations that started out on iOS.

Some of the biggest new features you see right after logging in are Mission Control and Launchpad. Mission Control (shortcut key Ctrl-UpArrow) is basically a new version of Exposé; and Launchpad is like the iOS app launcher–all your applications arranged in grids of icons, ready to be launched with a click. I like the former; but I don’t really intend to use the latter much because my most frequently-used apps are on the Dashboard, or I just launch them with Spotlight.

There are numerous new features scattered throughout the system; for a complete list see Apple’s page. I want to touch on a few of the UI changes.

The first is the look of basic UI elements like buttons, drop-down lists, checkboxes, etc. These are all now rounded rectangles instead of bubble-shaped. That’s definitely a break from the OS X Aqua design that was introduced ten years ago.

The second is the new overlay scroll bars that disappear when you’re not actually scrolling, thus giving you back some screen real estate. This is definitely influenced by iOS–designers had to figure out new space-saving tricks on mobile form factors and these tricks are now showing up on more traditional desktops. However, the new scroll bars aren’t actually enabled by default. In the System Preferences, General page, the ’Show scroll bars:’ option is originally set to ‘Automatically based on input device’, which basically means, ‘depends’. To enable the overlay scroll bars, choose the ‘When scrolling’ option here.

Also, another surprising (and slightly annoying) change is when scrolling with a wheel mouse, the traditional wheel down movement actually scrolls stuff up and the wheel up movement scrolls stuff down. To fix this, uncheck the ‘Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating’ option in the ‘Mouse’ page.

There are a couple of big changes in apps I use frequently. Mail has been redesigned to show all messages in the same conversation on a single page, like Gmail. For this I’m grateful. However, the ordering of the messages in the conversation view is most recent first–for me, that’s upside-down. This can be fixed in Mail Preferences, the Viewing page, in the ‘View conversations:’ section, by unchecking the ‘Show most recent message at the top’ option.

Another change is that the Address Book app has been redesigned to look like an actual open book with a list of contacts on the left and a detailed view of the contact on the right. I liked the old, normal Cocoa UI; to me the new design looks a bit cartoonish, and amateurish. The functionality is still the same, though. One thing I’ve always found puzzling that would be nice to get off my chest: all the operations on a card (a contact) are in the ‘Card’ menu, except for ‘Delete Card’, which is in the ‘Edit’ menu. Baffling.

Another couple of interesting (to me :-) tidbits: Lion has FaceTime calling built-in, and Google Chrome now takes advantage of Lion’s new support for full-screen mode instead of baking in its own.

So bottom line: Lion continues the evolution of Mac OS into something more iOS-like, but mostly familiar and comfortable for OS X users. Plus, it’s much easier to say ‘Lion’ than ‘Snow Leopard’, so that’s a win right there. :-)

Kobo Vox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!

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 :-)