The Lair

Slashdot is running a story about 5 reasons for Palm’s slide. One indication of a once dominant company gone to pot is their willingness to collaborate with competitors - in this case, with Microsoft. I like Palm and I’m a longstanding consumer, but the day they start selling a mini desktop as opposed to a lean, battery efficient ebookreader - well, that’s the day I start looking at alternatives. Do I want my next purchase to be a T5 ? or do I look around for alternatives? Well, at least my trusty m515 has a bit more life in it.

Incidentally, a phone conversation today reminds me: I need some safe topics of conversation for parents (mothers, specifically). I keep acquiring and forgetting the knack of diverting attention away from details like what I eat and how much I sleep. A conversation today went: Have I been eating healthily ? Erm. Does eating fruit count ? Oh, it does. Cool. What ? Don’t eat the fruit because it’s probably sprayed with all sorts of nasty insecticides ? ZOMG! Canned fruit ? Preservatives?! But, but, but …

I can’t win. I need to stop trying

Someone should stop scheduling meetings early Monday morning. Seriously. It’s not like being dragged into a series of technical presentations on a rainy, cold Monday morning is going to do anyone’s productivity any good - least of all mine. Even pretending to be interested took more energy than I had available, and I was doing the second presentation. Clearly, feigning interest at your own explanation of work over the past 3 months is a recommended course of actionsurvival trait.

On that note, why the heck is it that overhead projector thingummies have to become progressively smarter - but not smart enough to realize that plugging a computer in via a VGA cable generally means (*gasp*), you fricking want your LCD contents to be displayed ?. Because fiddling with computer settings is exactly the sort of thing that makes the presentor seem professional and with-it. Well, I can’t complain. The flop-sweat that broke out when my fancy Powerpoint slides refused to show up on the giant projector pretty much woke me up. It took a mixture of swearing, rebooting, pressing various hotkeys and listening to advice both helpful and unhelpful - to actually get the thing working. Of course, this fumbling around would have to happen on the single time that I was feeling too sleepy to actually check if things worked beforehand. Bah.

Next, Powerpoint is teh evil. By their very nature, technical talks of this sort pretty much have a captive audience… Having pretty dancing animations on screen (ok, so I don’t go that far) is a way of keeping people from falling asleep. The audience doesn’t really care about your project, they don’t want to be here when you’re explaining your work, they’re too busy tapping out slides for their own, usually - but since they are here, they might as well be entertained, right ? Wrong. Because pretty soon, things evolve into a kind of arms race with each tech talk developing more involved animations and fancy effects. Ooer. Didn’t see that one coming. The graphics and computer vision guys have a clear advantage in this area. They can pretty much sneak in any image they want into their presentation and say “it’s a good image to test our edge detection” on. Which images they snuck in this time are left to your imagination. (no porn allowed, incidentally)

More meetings, same time tomorrow. Oh joy.

The best mistakes are those made by someone else - if only one possesses the wit to learn from them. Someone who used to sit opposite me for much of the first two years here has just gone into the dungeons (not really, I just like the dramatic implications of a dungeon) to defend her thesis. I’m pretty confident she’ll pass; even if she isn’t. But the causal chain of events which led upto the thesis defence make for instructive analysis.

Actually, I’m pretty freaked out at some level about all this. It now seems pretty inevitable that I’ll be facing a similar ordeal by hostile assessors at some point in the future - possibly next year. Seeing exactly how freaked out this person is over the whole event is starting to make me feel twitchy. Me no likey twitchy. And I don’t yet know who the hostile external will be… which is bad. I do know who the hostile internal will be … and that’s about ten times worse.

But it’s also quite interesting to realize that I’m resigned to facing the ordeal by assessment - the painstaking paragraph by paragraph dissection of what will constitute three years of work. When I started down this road, I was wondering how on earth I’d finish. People who had finished seemed to be in some far away, remote ivory tower of genius while I plodded on in mediocrity - several thousands of feet below sea level. A couple of years on, I’m still below sea level, but that ivory tower seems closer - and it seems remotely attainable. Not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination. But at least I can see my way clear towards completion now. Something I couldn’t do at the start. Weird. Maybe I’ve just adapted.

Obviously, this means that when the newly passed (Am I jinxing her?) candidate emerges blinking into the daylight at whatever hour, we’ll gather round a bunch of people from the department and proceed to get sloshed at the local. Well, something like that.

On a random and completely unrelated note (I do that a lot, don’t I ?), I think everyone must have gotten that email of fun facts - which includes the salacious tidbit about the length of a pig’s orgasm. Some of you with well meaning friends left unattended near a email client may have gotten it several dozen times over. And then had that email forwarded by yet more well meaning friends. Well, it seems like a stick insect has that record beaten to a pulp. I’m not sure what good that information does the readers of this post - but it’s good to know that there is no point being envious of ham and bacon providers when lowly arthropods er.. perform better.

So I went and shot off my cakehole (well, my blogging cakehole - cakefingers ?) about how cool Blizzard was to be releasing patches for old games and so on. The patch version, as I mentioned earlier; was 1.19.

After an anxious day of waiting - actually, it’s not like I play Warcraft all that often; but the mere threat of being deprived of play is enough to make me want to play it right now, dammit - I download said no-cd crack from a dodgy site.

Only to find that in the interim, Blizzard has put out patch 1.19b … With just one fix: this patch fixes multiplayer games that would crash under certain circumstances. Why, thank you Blizzard. Aaargh. Is there a no-cd patch for version 1.19b ? Obviously not.

Head, meet keyboard. Repeatedly.

I think I’m going to overdose myself on cheap Mars bars and brood for a bit.

So it’s way past my bedtime, I’ve just come back from a dinner where a cow-orker is packing up to head further northwards, I’m checking my email and notifications and I notice something.

The Frozen Throne has been patched to version 1.19. Now, a bit of background information. Warcraft 3 (and the expansion, The Frozen Throne) is several years old. By the standards of computer games, it’s practically a grand parent. Yet for some inexplicable reason, Blizzard Entertainment - the manufacturer, is still updating the game and publishing patches. Oh, and allowing people to play each other online for free provided they have a registered copy. In a day and age where profit and loss is defined by the recycleable revenues of a MMORPG juggernaut and monthly subscription fees; this is a refreshing change.

Unfortunately, the hyper efficient community of underground programmers has not yet gotten round to producing what is known as a No-CD crack for the game yet. So, I’m twiddling my thumbs and visiting all the old haunts in the vain hope that someone will have published a crack. The efficiency of the underground in publishing exploits and cracks in response to releases … well, it’s becoming a victim of its own success.

One piece of software that the underground will no longer need to worry about is Opera. No more advertising, no more registration fees required. The (quite nifty) Opera browser is now free. With premium support for people who pay (corporate customers and customizations, perhaps ?). And with the possibility of Yahoo and other odious toolbars being incorporated into the browser at some point. But free. What compelled Opera Software to make the browser free, I wonder. Were the overheads simply too much ? And if their flagship product is being driven out of the market by the free (directly or otherwise) alternatives in Firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Safari; well, how long does the company have ? I don’t use the browser myself anymore - although there was a time when I used nothing other than Opera… but I’d hate to see them exit the desktop browser market.

Opera does lots of things really well. I don’t like their UI very much, I am disturbed by the lack of extensions available for the browser (yes, articles like this and this can’t possibly cover all the extensions people use)… but if I had to flee Firefox tomorrow, Opera is the browser I’d pick. And even now, assuming that the Firefox developers fritter away all their good vibes from the community (quite possible, I assure you) and things keep getting buggier and buggier (anyone remember Netscape 4.76 ?)… well, it would be nice to have a decent browser to fall back to. It would be annoying - but not overly so - to have to use the all new tabbed browsing capable IE 7 instead of the been-there-invented-MDI-browsing Opera. Or maybe I’m just a Microsoft basher at heart and I just need to use a non MS browser so I can hang out with the cool kids and sneer at evil Micro$oft. Yeah. And validate my geekish existence.

I’m back at full time (as near as dammit) Perl programming after two years of soul rotting Java. Not a particularly noteworthy accomplishment in and of itself, unless you factor in that a friend has splashed out on Perl Best Practices and I am an unexpected beneficiary of his largesse. As in, I get to borrow the book while he’s off doing other things.

Programmers code by instinct. They aren’t conscious of the hundreds of choice they make each time they code; how they format their source, the names they use for their variables, the kinds of loops they use … where and when to put comments

It’s comforting to know some of my choices, made instinctively, were right. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my variable naming conventions have been outed as mind bogglingly, cataclysmically flawed. Considering that I’ve probably used $total and $tot more often than any other variable name; this isn’t an entirely unfair assessment.

On a slightly different topic, what is with the obsession with lists ? It seems that everywhere one turns, there is yet another list. 50 worst songs, according to VH1, 10 most weepy movies, divided by gender … I am now compiling a list of the most subjective lists ever.

And in a shameless display of prostrating before an oncoming bandwagon, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I have two choices. I could either trot out the cliched Arrr, Avast me hearties and Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum lingo… or I could make like a modern day pirate, brandish an AK-47 and say … well, whatever it is pirates say these days.

It’s pragmatic advice: learn a new programming language every year. You may not actually use the darn thing in your professional career. Ever. But you’ve learnt it; and it adds another string to your bow… just in case. And a new perspective is gained about the languages you do use and like.

The thing is, I’ve never been very interested in Ruby beforehand. Almost everything that Ruby can do, Perl can do as well. Set aside arguments about readability and so on - I find well written Perl more readable than some STL code, for instance. The thing is, I know Perl. And I don’t have an irrational tendency to regard Perl as bad because some people golf in it. So, never had a reason to learn Ruby. That’s my excuse.

Ruby is a big draw these days because of the wildly popular Ruby on Rails. Here’s the problem - I don’t write web based software. Ruby on Rails left me cold. And so, there I was - desperately seeking an excuse to learn Ruby, a hook to get me interested in the language, if you will. And not being able to find one. There’s very little point in simply writing “Hello World” scripts in the language. And most things that are larger - well, I’d inevitably think about doing the same thing in Perl.

And then someone told me about MouseHole. As far as I know, no one has done the same thing in Perl - although they could. Exactly the sort of excuse I needed to learn the language. Essentially, it’s a proxyfied version of what Greasemonkey is to Firefox. With scripts - written in Ruby, of course - Mousehole can transform any content passing through to the browser. Not just regular expressions, mind you. But XPath queries. The works.

So now to find out what the fuss about Ruby is all about.

Google has launched a blogsearch. They’re only joining like .. a few dozen other people who’re doing much the same thing - like Technorati and IceRocket among a few others. Never let it be said that Google always blazes a trail uncharted by rivals. They went into webmail, they went into shopping and then they went into IM and now they’re going into blog search.

Conventional search on one side, Image search on another, News search, Usenet search and now Blog search. And never shall these indexes intertwine. At least, as far as the user is concerned. Not that I’m sure this is necessarily a good thing; because some blogs have helped me identify solutions (or at least hints) to obscure problems in the past - but at least settling on a definition for a blog will give a bit more information to Google in weighting up the relative merit of various sites.

The FAQ for blog search makes for interesting reading, however. Especially with the definition they’ve chosen to take - ie: they will search “every blog which publishes a site feed, either RSS or Atom“. Hmm. So are fast updating news sites also defined as blogs ? Perhaps there is an exclusion in force which says that if you’re included in news.google.com, then you’re not available in blogsearch ? El Reg is one source that seems to straddle the line between blog and news source. So is Slashdot, for that matter.

So I finally removed the dastardly Firefox stable version. Stability ? Feh. Over rated. Why not live on the cutting edge and install the newest Firefox 1.5 beta. From now on, I live on the edge ladies and gents.

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Anyone else have this thing where once you notice a particular word, it seems to crop up frequently in conversation and things you read the following week or so ? Yeah, schadenfreude is the word doing a shimmy across my vision these days. Perhaps fortunately (or not), no one I’ve spoken to in the past few days has worked that into a normal conversation. yet.

For the record, scha·den·freu·de: (noun) - Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

And in a weird circular sort of pun, perhaps I should get a life tag to fit these type of posts. Geddit ? Get a life tag. Oh, never mind. Anyway, schadenfreude is quite appropriate as an emotion I should be feeling; but am not.

The irritation with which I am facing Thursday midday has many causes, most of them small and niggling. But like this inexplicable cramp in my calf muscle which flared up and obstinately refused to go away; it’s just reminding me of my mortality a bit too much for comfort. First of all, lest I sound like some whiny footballer taking a dive once too often¹, note: I never get cramp. I consume way too much salt and drink too much water for that sort of thing. I may get hypertension at some point in the future, but I do not get cramp. Hence my irritation.

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I went to a LUG (Linux User Group) meeting last night. It was fun, in the sense of all meetings with (generally) like minded people. Now a seeming non-sequitor…
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No, I am sorry to disappoint the fetishists among you, but I’m not suddenly growing man boobs. I’m sure those of you who will doubtless visit this entry hoping for pictorial representation of saggy mounds of flesh dangling from my chest area will contain your disappointment and google elsewhere.

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In the years I’ve been (dramatically speaking) fending for myself, I’ve evolved certain patterns of behaviour. People who live on their own can pretty much attest that there is a whole raft of trivial little details that need to be attended before any serious work can get done. The details can stretch from the mundane like laundry and picking the optimal times to poke things into the washing machine.. and planning and cooking stuff ahead so that one doesn’t need to make stuff just after stumbling back home from a late night’s work - to the more serious things like making sure the rent checks go out on time and the various documents and forms are filled out properly. At least thank heavens that, unlike some other nationalities, I don’t need to report to and register at the police station before making any movements across the country.

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Notable events on the 1st of September, from Wikipedia.

Two years ago to this very day, I walked into my work place then and had this conversation with a cow-orker.
“Hey, you know … on the first of September, 1939: Nazi Germany began the Poland campaign and invaded. On the first of September, 2003.. I’m going to start pulling out of $work_place“.

Yeah. It seemed funny at the time. Funny-ironic, that is. The term exit strategy had not yet been coined, but it would have been appropriate for use.

The reason such milestones are important (well, to me, at least) is not so much a look at the past… as much as a way to gather my bearings. It’s been 2 years since I left reasonably interesting work (interspersed with long periods of near destructive boredom). Do I still think I made the right call ? And if I did, has it been worth it ? Milestones are useful to me for taking stock of the situation and two years seems about right for an assessment.