The Lair

Poland (who sits opposite me) told me that there was a Sri Lankan student in the first year CompScis. “Oh”, I said and left it there. Not entirely disinterestedly, you understand… it’s just that I’ve found it a safe (if somewhat antisocial) policy to avoid people of my own nationality. This is completely different from my parents behaviour, for example. Whenever they’re in these parts, they actually take great pains to hang out with fellow Sri Lankans and attend social gatherings and do the whole socializing whirlygig. Not me.

It’s not entirely distrust or anti-social behaviour. It’s not that I suddenly don an accent and start behaving more Brit than the Brits either. I just don’t seem to find very much in common with these people. My route through life is usually that of least resistance and for me, where meeting folk from the home country are concerned, discretion is very much the better part of valour. It’s a nasty (but possibly accurate) generalization that the size of the house and the model of car and where the kids are being sent to school are the prime topics of conversation with a certain set of SLans away from SL. That and the whole political/war thing, which I really don’t want to get into.

So, a Sri Lankan in the first year. Interesting. York is actually quite unusual because you can play “spot the brown” (I stole that phrase from Rustifer) really well. There are a few Bangladeshis running the Indian restaurants in town (funny how that happens, huh?), a few Pakistanis running kabab shops (yup, weird) and that’s about it. The nearby Gurkha regiment usually provides the South Asian flavour in these parts. Bradford or Leeds and a melting pot of immigrants it is not. So yet another Sri Lankan turning up in the frozen north is a noteworthy event, at least.

I demonstrate the Scheme programming language to the first years, so I know them by sight if not by name. After Poland informed me of a compatriot, I played a few guessing games trying to figure out which guy it was. In the end, it proved inconclusive so I had pretty much given up (not that I was particularly interested in finding out anyway). Until today.

Someone asked me to explain the almighty lambda and I was trying to figure out how much he knew. So, I asked him (what I thought was) a fairly trivial question as a starter and I got a typically Sri Lankan response.

God knows, men!

It’s difficult to convey the precise nuances and accents of that particular phrase, but trust me… it sounded very Sri Lankan. Huge grin and I asked the guy if he was… *blink blink* Yup, he was. How on earth did I guess, huh?

It appears that gremlins have once again taken over the blog. Since I couldn’t figure out a prosaic explanation for why some people get linky problems I decided to go on an upgrading spree instead.

If a problem doesn’t have an immediately apparent answer, it is always best to complicate things with new versions of software. That way, more things can go wrong and you can immediately blame the upgraded plugins for all your woes. That’s a win-win situation all round.

Weirdly, I have not been able to duplicate this linky problem. Based on what I hear, it sounds like either a rendering or rewriting problem. How much dodgy JavaScript is running on this site? Well, other than the technorati embed, not much. No external stats trackers here either. And Tz tells me it appears to be a Firefox specific problem too.

Some days, you’re the bug. Other days, you’re the windscreen. Please feel free to scream loudly if more things break so that I can commiserate with you and blame the bad bad plugins and Wordpress. Thanks.

Update: Oh and by the way, the snippets RSS feed now works in Google Reader. Just a problem with a missing header, which has been sorted out.

Or in Aussie terms, the teaspoons go walkabout. There are actually people who have studied the phenomenon of missing spoons. Their findings are that within 5 months; it is 80% accurate to say that there is no spoon.

And probably of the macabre humour variety, Polonium is much in the news in these parts due to the murder of the ex-Russian spy. Like probably everyone else; I think the message sent is rather clear. “Don’t fork with us”.

And almost finally (but not quite), What the fork is that? Well, it’s art.

And completely unhumourously, the US has spent more time fighting in Iraq than during WW2. Talk about a fork in the road, huh?

HP Printer Ink is supposed to be one of the most expensive liquids at $8000 a gallon. Pretty Excel graph found here.

This is more expensive than blood, booze and (of course) oil. Not used in the same quantities, you may argue but the price tag is staggering nonetheless. A slightly older study comparing the price of gas to other liquids was done a while ago too. That study found that nasal drops were actually one of the most expensive liquids around… barring the black gold printer ink, of course. Well, I have a new contender for most expensive liquid not found in a printer cartridge.

Went and grabbed a bottle of anti-allergy eye drops today. Perfectly innocuous bottle, contains a mere 5 milliliters of liquid. Since I’m not too well versed on the conversion between metric and the rods/hogsheads units; I asked Google. 3785 milliliters in a US gallon. I paid £5 for that teensy bottle - basically £1 per milliliter.

dramatic pause, probably unneeded at this stage. Not cheap, is it?

And yet, I’d probably cheerfully pay double that because my allergy symptoms actually went the hell away from (almost) the first dose. When they start using Sodium Chromoglicate to fuel cars though, I think people may start worrying a tad about the prices at the pump.

Having a bad case of the byzantines this week. First it was the bi-annual allergy flareup which left me with bloodshot red eyes and horrible cold/flu symptoms. Now, my beloved Philips LCD is having a bad case of the shimmies.

My LCD suddenly started to behave like the graphics were being rendered through a heat haze. I initially suspected some magnetic interference but it appears that LCDs are (supposedly?) immune to this problem. So, the technician shows up with a spare LCD and the fun and games begin. I don’t want to send my PC to the “workshop” to have it checked out; so I’m trying to get the problem fixed then and there. Only …

Spare LCD also shimmers. So, it must be the VGA card then. Right? Er. But the “other” (as in, third) LCD doesn’t shimmer. So, maybe it’s a Philips LCD thing? Lots of head scratching ensues. There is some experimentation with resolutions. There is shimmer at 1280×1024 but no shimmer at 1024×768. So, the obvious recommendation is: run at the lower resolution. Umm. No. I hate those large fonts. I is teh picky.

Lower the refresh rate then? That worked. So, running at the lowest possible refresh rate for this LCD fixes the problem (for now). The technician can’t explain what the hell the problem was and neither can I. But at least I don’t get a headache staring at the LCD anymore, so that much is good.

I’m immediately going to put my citation of Skitt’s law into effect and take this opportunity for a little bit of snark from the sidelines peanut gallery.

Since I generally follow this stuff (to the detriment of work, research and whatever else that is supposedly happening in meatspace)… Consider the following pair of statements.

a) Thou shalt not beat anyone up. Not under any circumstances. Never. It’s bad, mmmkay?

b) This whole situation would be sorted out if we just killed [public enemy number one].

I paraphrased of course, since I have no real intention of poking at the author with a pointy stick. No, honestly. I don’t. Stop looking at me like that. But in summary, not ok to open a can of whoopass, or have someone open said can for you. Completely ok to advocate assassinating someone, sans judge and jury. Move on, please. This is not the reality distortion field you’re looking for.

And this is probably why changing online identities every so often can be a good idea, especially if you debate politics online.

Heard about Skitt’s Law? Well, if not - click on the link and edjamacate yerseln. In summary, spelling or grammar flames contain spelling or grammar errors too. Pot, kettle, black… ha ha ha! to you too etc

Only, I think I want to generalize that into a “don’t laugh too hard at anyone, you might end up doing the same thing” rule.

In other news, I feel the need to vent about flavoured vodkas today. Why vodka in particular? It was one of those bad habits I picked up during my misspent undergrad days. Other than being a somewhat snobbish sounding drink to many (jeez, I don’t drink arrack and only arrack like a red blooded Sri Lankan male? what the hell is the matter with me?) I also happen to like the taste and odour. I’m not entirely sure where the myth about colourlessness, tastelessness and lack of odour came about but it’s definitely not the case as far as I’m concerned. Vodka only lacks colour, it most emphatically posseses both taste (of tap water, in the case of the infamous Rusalka vodka produced by the local rotgut manufacturer) and odour. The nicer (read: somewhat higher quality) vodka that I’ve quaffed has a distinctive smoothness about it. So why ruin things with fruity additions?

Last time I was back home, I sampled an … Absolut vanilla? Unsurprisingly, it tasted very vanilla. I’ve also mustered up the courage to sample the various citron flavoured varieties and my assessment is simple. Flavouring vodka is an abominable practice. The flavour drowns out everything else, all the subtle nuances and just feels wrong. It needs to stop now, before everybody’s drinks start to taste like lollypops. PSA ends.

Oh, and a somewhat ancient Slate article confirms that Poland makes better vodka than Mother Russia… Considering that online purchases are not possible, it looks like I’ll have to rely on the good offices of Poland (sitting opposite me) to try the famous potato based vodka. I’m surprised Skyy didn’t make the cut, though.

The only thing worse than missing documentation, they say, is documentation which is out of date. That’s why I’m regaling you with my efforts to get Quicktime for Java and the related SDKs installed.

Let’s start with the first obvious port of call - installation. The site says; “In order to install QuickTime for Java, developers will need to select ‘QuickTime for Java’ in the ‘Custom’ install option”. Ok, fair enough. Not everyone wants or needs the Java API to mess with Quicktime, so tuck it away in a custom option. But wait…

There is no fricking “Custom Install” option in the Quicktime installer.

Ok. So maybe the installer doesn’t like the permissions on my notebook? Let’s try it on another machine. Is a magical custom install button produced? Nope. Maybe they want you to download it later? So, tick the box which allows your software to be updated automatically by Apple and see if Qt-J is available. Nope again. The SDK is missing.

Right. So now what? Download their super bundled iTunes and Quicktime. Maybe that has the Java API? Nope, it doesn’t.

Google then. That’s right. Quicktime 7 installs Qt-J without asking anyone anything. Aargh. Thanks for letting me know. Not.

Go hit up their sample code. The installer which silently poked the API on my harddisk is also supposed to automagically add various bits to the system classpath. This is Apple. It’s supposed to “just work”, right? Wait. No, it didn’t. Unsurprisingly, the sample code refuses to run.

More Google. Apparently, the Java SDK for Quicktime is packaged as a zip file and is tucked away in a subdirectory off the main Quicktime install. It’s not even a jar file as convention dictates, but a zip file instead. *sigh*

Add the zip file to the classpath manually (fie to you, installer!) and it all starts working. Apple’s site however, is still broken. Dumbasses.

If it was this traumatic installing things, how do you think the programming is going to go? Yeah, I think it will go swimmingly well too. Yet this is actually the best available option for messing with multimedia content with Java. Pity the fool.

A couple of feeds I subscribe to are broken. Oh, they produce vaguely legitimate looking XML, but they violate the spec and produce publication dates which are not valid. Should I - be a good citizen and email the person in charge? Will it even make a difference? Or do I just ignore it? Normally, I’d just email without working myself into a lather but these are vaguely political sites (and not even politics that I wholly agree with) so I wonder about sticking my head up over the parapet.

I was asked why I wasn’t on Facebook. This, mind you, by a non CompSci rep of the GSA (The Graduate Students Association or something along those lines). It was asked in a pitying tone akin to “Oh, you poor man. What a pity about your wheelchair”. Yup, I am still a Facebook-less individual. I have not yielded to peer pressure. Yet. May not take long though.

I detest Quicktime and Real equally… Yet it appears that the Quicktime API for Java is better documented and developed than anything else available. Is it time to stop mucking around with alternatives which require horrendous hackery just to make the examples run and just go with the evil Apple offering? The Canuck Machead is probably going to laugh her head off at this.

And finally, not a quandary at all - but I just discovered yesterday that the late Milton Friedman coined the term TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). All this time, I thought Heinlein was the originator of the phrase, turns out it actually had roots in “real” economic theory from an article published in Newsweek circa 1975.

So, inbetween doing real work; I’m still tinkering around with Grapevine. There is a reasonable amount of “oh, ok. cool. I did this.” satisfaction (dare I say smugness) at having gotten it to a point where I can just leave it alone and it will (mostly) just work… Most fun, however, has been the weird and wonderful stuff I’ve had to do to make it actually work the way I want…

Some sites don’t have RSS feeds

Horrific, I know… but true. There have been various cost related arguments made elsewhere about the expense of an RSS feed. I saw a case being made here (can’t remember where I saw that link, but it was some local blogger). Extremely popular sites like Slashdot implement their own policies on how often an RSS feed can be updated by a client (Slashdot’s policy, original story is also worth a read). Even more interesting is the prediction made here that RSS would become mainstream in two years. The article was written in 2004. I think the prediction has come true, more or less… perhaps even sooner than the authors dared imagine…

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grapevine. The Ach empire is expanding… *snigger*

I think I can understand why my mother was so fond of the phrase “idle hands are the devil’s tools” when I was younger… I used to hear it a lot. Instead of doing real work (which, this month involves the wonders of the JMF among other things); I’ve been building what I call the Grapevine. It was suprisingly easy to cobble together too.

Nothing fancy… Grabs a few news feeds from mainstream SL/South Asian sites and throws them into a single page for a quick read/scan. I opted to use a slightly different layout from the traditional Ach “river of news” style but I think this works better for the type of feeds included. Like most of the other things I do, this is nothing more than another personal itch that I wanted scratched. Of course, the guts of this will probably evolve into Ach2 but that’s all way into the future … then again, I might start next weekend if I feel really bored.

Comments, suggestions, any more news feeds anyone wants added (so long as they’re vaguely SL-an in content)… lemme know. There is at least one other feed that I need to include in that list (it’s already there, but not visible to the general populace yet) and I’m working out a small kink that prevents including Google News and Yahoo News feeds from being added at the moment. Updates every half an hour, more or less.

In a slightly related vein, I’ve long been ambivalent on the subject of mixing code with presentational elements. Some of the most popular webby languages (PHP, ASP, Coldfusion) employ this approach, even though there are templating systems that help avoid the inherent messiness of mixing code with HTML… There is a similar problem for JavaScript heavy pages. It’s tempting to put in reams of code in onclick handlers and the like and I’ve done it frequently in the past. The main reason I employ this approach is readability, strangely enough. The intent of an anchor or button is immediately apparent on reading the source code - even if there is a lot of JavaScript attached. The alternate approach is to load everything via DOM or XPath operations. This leaves the HTML of a page unchanged, all the additional JavaScripty bits are added automatically after the page is loaded into a browser. I can see why this is neat, but it’s so hard to figure out which element has JavaScript actions associated with it that I tended to avoid the approach. This is why I’ve been wary of using (otherwise nifty) libraries like Behaviour.

Last week (or perhaps the week before), I suggested the use of Thickbox at work. It solved a UI problem that we had but introduced this strange new library (strange and new to me, at least) called JQuery. After a fair amount of frustration - it is rather different from the conventional heavyweight JS libraries - I’m beginning to finally get it and it’s pretty damn slick.

It’s also about … oh … one fifth the size of the current effects library that I use so that’s a hefty saving in bandwidth and page load times too.

I’m doing the equivalent of catchup; hence the title. No, that’s not very original either - I stole the title out of a Scheme workbook.

First, a need to vent about the much ballyhooed Democrat wins in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Yes, the Repubs (or Repugs, if you’re feeling mean) lost. Perhaps it wasn’t that almighty can of electi-owning whoopass that people hoped for. Whatever. The way I’ve heard (most, of an admittedly limited sampling) non-Americans celebrating; it seems like everyone loves the good ol’ USA again. What changed? There is likely to be gridlock because the president is Republican and will probably veto every single bill that passes through either House or Senate. The last Democrat president in office routinely ordered air strikes against Iraq and enforced the nofly zones too. Is this the first time in history that the US has unilaterally invaded (or attempted to invade) a country? I got a Panama and Cuba that says different. Is this the first time that the US has bombed some other country? How about Libya? Regardless of those actions being right or wrong, the US has a history of doing things like that and the Iraqi invasion was just the most recent. The distinction between the country and its political rulers and policies seem lost on some… and that irks me. Probably unnecessarily. But GWB has been dealt a smack in the teeth so everyone is happy again. I’ve even seen stupidity to the effect that “I can’t possibly like Americans who voted for GWB”. Spare me. Damn kids, now get off my lawn. I celebrated more when Ashcroft left office, to be honest.

For the record, Saddam had to be ousted. One of those classic “wrong thing to do, but appropriate outcome” things, was Iraq… at least in my view. Sorta the same argument as for vigilantism, maybe.

In slightly less turbulent waters; I’ve started grabbing last.fm data for another small mashup project. Only, it’s a bit weird because I haven’t got a clue (yet) about what I want to mashup. The small set of intrepid souls who’ve been pressganged volunteered have such diverse musical tastes that a mashup isn’t really going to find much in common between them… One very important question; how exactly does one decide on the genre of a particular song? I ask, because for obvious reasons last.fm doesn’t return this information… The more I think about it, the more I feel that this is as subjective as asking someone to describe a particular shade of red or something. Everyone is probably going to offer a different specific subgenre as their pick… And therein lies the rub.

When you’re flying (or actually, doing pretty much anything in an enclosed steel tube) the one word you really don’t want to hear bandied about is disaster. Other words that come close in terms of personal discomfort are flatulence, travelling companions with small bladders and insomnaic small children (but some of those terms are ancient history). But disaster? Now that’s a word you don’t really want to hear.

It’s safe to say that my family is somewhat used to travel related alarums and excursions. One aunt forgot that she had a flight on the day. She was called up in the afternoon by a family friend who wanted to know what time she was headed for the airport. “Today? No, my flight is tomorrow”. Actually, no it wasn’t. Another time, there was an arrangement for a pickup from Orly airport to get to Charles De Gaulle for a connecting flight. Only, the person making the arrangement said Charles de Gaulle to Orly instead. For the geographically challenged, these two airports are separated by the length of the fine city of Paris, France. After an hour waiting for a transport which never showed up (since it was waiting for a fare at CDG, as instructed), matters had to be taken into the traveller’s hands. That must have been one heck of a taxi ride across Paris. I gather that they made it to the connecting flight by the skin of their teeth.

See? We’re used to this stuff happening.

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And then there was quiz night. There was much debate about what exactly we were accomplishing by hanging out at the Inn. Were we, mayhap, stalking celebs? Fortunately, we didn’t settle on this as our primary objective. Were we then, intent on getting sozzled on the wide array of beers available for sale? Or perhaps we were just there to prove our intellectual superiority (in the face of seasoned quiz night veterans, excessive amounts of alcohol and performance anxiety) by walking away with the grand prize in our first tilt at the title? Fortunately, we didn’t have such grand ambitions either.

So, the evening ended up being unfocused, somewhat bleary and rather all-over-the-place. This wasn’t just the beer talking, we had endless difficulty deciding what we wanted to do, so we tried to do a little bit of everything.

First observation: I never thought I’d say this but San Miguel out of a can tasted much much better than I thought it would. I work hard at cultivating my beer snob image and the thoughts of drinking beer out of a can is tantamount to sacrilege. But it tasted surprisingly good. Shock and horror. I do confess that my taste may have been slightly impaired by a few lesser beers beforehand, though.

Second observation: the great majority of celebrities did not show. As stalkers, we thought the engine was running but in actual fact, the train never really arrived at the station. Boo. There was only one stalkworthy “celebrity” (I’m playing fast and loose with that term). This understandably led to some wailing and gnashing of teeth as the wannabe stalkers had to let loose some internalized angst. So, no celebrities. Bah. Not much stalking.

There was also valid criticism levelled about my struggle to come to terms with the concept of stalking per se. Namely, visible cameras do not a good stalker make. Nor actually, does proposing “The Stalkers” as a name for your pub quiz team. Not that I really consider the name we settled on to be a massive improvement; but skin is in, as they say.

The quiz. I was completely sure that we would have our ass sliced, diced and ripped apart by obscure questions and then handed to us in an ass salad by the veterans. I was already finetuning my veritable arsenal of excuses (“Yeah, we were all drunk. Otherwise we woulda been Jeremy Paxman and Stephen Fry combined”, “Those were actually rather silly questions”, “We had a bad place to sit, we couldn’t scope out the opposition”, “The quiz was clearly rigged. We demand a recount”, “Our resident vamp didn’t take one for the team and flirt enough with the quiz master”, “They probably got our scores mixed up with someone else. We didn’t do that badly”).

I spent most of the quiz in happy oblivion because I couldn’t see the scores unfold from round to round; but soon enough we actually did get into our stride. In the stone cold sober light of day, I’m slightly ashamed of a few we fluffed (aargh, I didn’t remember a Shakes quote. I should be flogged) but my modest ambition was to do better than 50% and we achieved that much at least. In summary, our place kicker did well but we were a team lacking specialists. We also lacked someone who could spell properly and actually broke the eraser off a pencil rubbing out answers. (Yes, I am well aware that I am going to be beaten up for making that observation).

So, for next time. We need more people reading Google News the week/month before (check), make sure the person doing a part postgrad in linguistics actually uh … knows how to answer the language round (um. I was drunk. I think the quiz was rigged. See excuses above), and we can win! Or at least come close to the heady heights of a playoff question. Which brings me to my question to the quiz virtuosos: Is the number of chapters in the bible actually 30,000 odd? I have a webpage which says different. Wikipedia says different too. In fact, there are 30,000 verses in the Bible but I distinctly remember the question being about the chapters, not verses.

My new excuse: the quiz masters got it wrong. It was all a conspiracy.

I’m about as good at photography as vampires are with sunlight. Let me get that out of the way first. So, why is it that I’ve suddenly had this urge to go around taking photographs of the food I eat? No, this is slightly more poseur than that. I just take photographs of the food I get served when I go out.

I’m wondering what to do with it; only I don’t go out that often so it would make for an infrequently updated site.

And weird Wednesday has shaken itself down into a solid plan. We skip the Thai food (A bailed, so everyone else bailed) and we go straight to the Green Green Land of Much Beer - the pub where the beer of self respecting chavs is available for sale. And; as the title would suggest, we’re also planning on doing some celeb stalking.

A little bit about my celeb stalking attempts so far: the report card is not going to look pretty. We went to this concert thing swarming with celebrities; my innate lack of desire to be photographed translated into a distinct reluctance to photograph others surreptitiously. This meant, no photos. Then, the Sloth started stockpiling incendiaries and nearly set his hair on fire. This in turn attracted the attention of the nearby celebrities (because you know, a guy saying “help, my hair is on fire” and then proceeding to beat at his hair lazily isn’t something one sees every day of the week). Maybe this time, we’ll do a bit better.

Oh, and I owe some of the celebrities a beer. Hope they come up and ask for payment. Heh, heh.