(identity 'myron)

Thu, 22 Jun 2006

Seattle [/misc]

Went to Seattle on the weekend and took some photos. They're pretty crappy, but hey at least I got a humourous shot:

// posted at 21:34. permalink   comments

Tue, 30 May 2006

The Lyrebird [/misc]

Once a blue moon there's actually something good on TV, and a few months ago, I happened to catch three minutes of some show about birds. The program host was talking about a bird that constructs mating calls by mimicking other bird calls... or really, any sound it's heard before. And so they go on to show one specimen that starts by reproducing first a few bird calls, then the sounds of a camera shutter, the sounds of a car alarm, and finally the sound of chainsaws. Words don't do it justice, though, and thankfully for us, it's on youtube.

It's one of those rare moments, a brief look in the mirror of sorts. Not to be missed.

// posted at 21:27. permalink   comments

X-men III [/movies]

Went to see X-men III on Friday night, and boy what a load. Pacing problems, bad scripting, the usual shameless hooks at the end, and the action wasn't even that great. There are a few surprises in the movie if you think you know what's going to happen, but they're mostly liberties taken with it being the "last" stand. And yet before and after the credits roll they have no less than two hook scenes. Hmm.

The thing is that this storyline includes the most non-action scenes of the three movies. With the whole cure concept, they really bring the x-men as parable concept to the forefront. But even as they force hard decisions on the mutants, I found it impossible to feel for any of them, the writing is just that unmoving.

Three out of five of us came out disappointed, so I'm giving this a 6/10.

// posted at 06:56. permalink   comments

Tue, 16 May 2006

Whoa [/World]

Who knows if this story about the US gov't spying on news agencies using phone records to investigate leaks is true (if it is, who didn't see it coming?)... but the comments on that page—my oh my. I keep wondering if it's someone's idea of a joke, as a kind of parody of citizens under totalitarian rule: "Excellent the Media needs looking after, Traitors most of them", "'Bout time you guys are roped in", "Good! I hope they do find out who is leaking national security info to the press. I'm tired of the press helping our enemies". Heh, heh...?

// posted at 07:00. permalink   comments

Sat, 29 Apr 2006

LibraryThing [/books]

Here I was thinking I'd write this long post about the books I've read recently but then I stumbled on to LibraryThing. So screw all the typing for a blog entry, here's my bookshelf, at least as many books as I could think of without calling home to ask what's in my room in Vancouver too.... And on the side-panel to the left, what I've read recently or are reading now.

Incidentally, the order they're shown right now kind of shows how they're related too. The two books touching Plato's Republic are also the books that lead the way to it. By some strange coincidence I bought both books at the same time looking for something to read, neither related to the other at first, but it turns out they both open with a quote from the Republic and end with direct references to it too. Shit happens.

Oh and if there's any other José Saramago fans out there, I just noticed a sequel to Blindness is out, Seeing... which I'm on my way to pick up now :)

// posted at 13:21. permalink   comments

The Turangalîla Symphony [/music]

Funny thing, I went looking for new music to listen to and I stumbled on the Turangalîla Symphony. If a lightbulb just lit up in your head, yes, it's the symphony Futurama's Turanga Leela is named after. It features an instrument called the ondes martenot, AKA "that instrument" from the original Star Trek theme that sounds voice-like but not quite.

Anyway, the symphony itself is quite... interesting. At times it sounds East Asian and at others, out of this world, though it's supposed to center around more earthly themes of love and death. Some passages sound almost like orchestral palpitations or heaving and it's hard to imagine what this would look or sound like played live. Strange music indeed.

// posted at 08:27. permalink   comments

Sat, 22 Apr 2006

Silent Hill [/misc]

Went to see Silent Hill last night. It wasn't all that it could have been, but it didn't suck either. It had its laughably bad moments but also some terrific horror scenes that kept me from sleeping soundly through the night. For a good primer on the series, see the wikipedia entry.

So let's start with the good. What really stood out to me were scenes they lifted almost verbatim from the video game. Watching these played out with live actors was pretty neat, especially given that the game came out in the pixelicious days of the original playstation. Apart from the obvious scenes, though, a lot of other details and allusions to the game were thrown in ranging from camera angles to obscure references like when Cybil Bennett scratches an area behind her neck. Throughout the movie, you could tell the people behind the production knew and liked the game a fair bit, making the whole thing feel rightly like it was paying homage to the series.

This leads to what the movie really has going for it: the visuals. Camera angles, details on monsters and the town as it transforms from a misty ghost town to a bloody, rusty mess—all of it was visually spectacular and will leave you with disturbing images you won't easily forget. What's even better was that they achieved this without resorting to gore (though where there are gory scenes, holy moly are they gory!). Hence they managed to build up a certain amount of fear of the darkness that the game is so famed for.

So what went wrong? It wasn't scary enough. They screwed up the pacing of the movie and dissipated a lot of tension with crappy dialogue or useless cut-scenes of the husband outside in the real world. The original game let you fall back into your comfort zone by switching to the more benign, misty version of Silent Hill which is more than enough of a reprieve. A lot of times throughout the movie, they would build up to a certain level of fear only to undo it moments later by switching away to another scenario.

What's more disappointing, though, is that the whole aural aspect of the games was missing. The original used sound to incredible effect in terrorizing the player with what they thought would be out there behind the next door, beyond the fog or just creeping into the light of your flashlight. There's no feelings of anxiety when what you hear, you also see at the same time. Relying too much on the visual aspect as the movie did removes much of the psychological horror that's become the hallmark of the games.

Which leads in to the other fault I found with the movie, that it's too obvious. There's one 5 minute grainy film-reel style scene near the end that explains everything, removing any feeling of mystery and intrigue into what's really going on in the town. The game made you work a lot harder for knowledge and even rewarded you by tailoring the many endings according to what you paid attention to and what you neglected in the game. And even then, they left a lot up for interpretation, giving the games a lot more depth, and that's without even going into the Twin Peaks-esque surrealism and subplots that the first game played around with.

With all that said, I still liked the movie. Even with all its faults, it's a lot smarter and scarier than what passes for horror nowadays.

// posted at 11:10. permalink   comments

Mon, 10 Apr 2006

Night At The Symphony [/personal]

I landed some free tickets to the symphony tonight and took a friend from work to hear Schostakovich's 10th and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. I'd forgotten how much I like to hear live orchestras. We really got lucky too, since it was his first time and the selection gave a great cross-section of classical music that was bombastic, emotional, dramatic and then finally, grim and harsh—certainly none of it boring.

// posted at 23:13. permalink   comments

Sun, 09 Apr 2006

The Whirlwind Update [/personal]

Apparently people still use this thing to see what I'm up to. So here goes, the past six months in less than a hundred words.

October, I applied for, interviewed, then accepted a new job at Refractions Research.

November, I found an apartment, bought some furniture.

December, I moved to Victoria and started my new job. Halfway through the month I got put on a project I had no idea how to even begin—heh!

January, the New Year. 2006 by Western count, 4703 by the Chinese. I had no vacation days, so I stuck around town. In that weekend alone I got through two books.

February. Don't remember anything significant. It's frightening when that happens.

March, I turned 23. Me to my friend: "When did the numbers start getting so high?"

Today, I started writing here again.

// posted at 23:35. permalink   comments

Sun, 09 Oct 2005

Dvorak Progress Report [/personal]

Well it seems that my wrist pains are all but gone now, but since I'm taking a three-pronged approach of exercises, periodic breaks and using the Dvorak keyboard, I don't really know which has been the most successful remedy. I am sure of a few things, though: 1.) Dvorak is by far the more comfortable layout, 2.) I can still type in QWERTY just like before switching to Dvorak, and 3.) the previous point does not apply when I'm drunk.

I've discovered that in a drunken state, I'm actually hard-wired to Dvorak and have huge difficulties typing in QWERTY. This is really odd considering how many more years I've spent with it. Something else interesting is that I never made a conscious effort to memorize either layout while learning them, but I can tell you exactly where each key lies in Dvorak and which finger to use to hit them. The same is not true of QWERTY at all, which seems to have remained with me through muscle memory alone.

It's been one week of retraining and Mavis Beacon tells me I'm at 52 wpm. Mostly fast enough to avoid getting frustrated typing over IM. But now I'm really curious how far I can go and if I can surpass my older QWERTY speed of 80-90 wpm. Time will tell.

// posted at 10:34. permalink   comments

Sun, 02 Oct 2005

Wrist Pains [/personal]

Well, I can't say it's exactly surprising, but I've started experiencing wrist pains. Lazy wrist posture and no jiggly wrist rest probably contributed the most. Thankfully it's not so much painful as it is sore... for now. And I'm sure as hell not going to find out how bad these things can get.

I've switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout cold turkey. I tried to do this once before and got up to about 20-30 wpm, but the frustration of relearning the keys in Vi just totally turned me off. Now that I'm forced to switch for comfort reasons, it turns out it's not actually that bad. I just have to stop and think about the keys I'm hitting. It's also perfect timing since I've been going through Learning GNU Emacs, and I haven't internalized any of the key combinations yet.

That said, there are some really nice quirks about Dvorak, other than comfort:

• Along with remapping Ctrl to the Caps Lock key, Ctrl-p is now extremely easy to hit. And no this does not mean print in Unix and OS X. It's easily one of the most common key chords in the shell.
• Similarly, Ctrl-h is now as accessible as ever and is far less straining than its functional equivalent, the Backspace key. Heh, can you tell I grew up on Unix?
• For programming, the hyphen/underscore is now on the home row.

Now the list of downsides.

• The / key is now vertically opposite of where it used to be; very confusing.
• The [, ] and {, } keys are now very far which sucks for C-style syntax in programming. You could see that as a good thing though—it's another reason to avoid that class of languages.
• The h, j, k and l keys for cursor movement in Vi now make absolutely no sense at all.
• ls is now off home row, and it's even two hits with the same pinky. Booooo.

Oh well. I've always found it more comfortable, and in the end that will overrule any of its downsides.

// posted at 12:43. permalink   comments

Tue, 27 Sep 2005

Ruby On Rails and Plurals [/programming]

I've been learning Ruby on Rails lately which is quite clean and elegant, but that's not what this post is about. From the moment I found out it attempts to auto-pluralize object names, I've been itching to bang on it to see what it understands and what it doesn't. The only thing I've heard said about it is that it's smart enough to understand child and children, person and people.... Well then, punk, let's go for a ride around the mess that is the English language, shall we?

% rails plurals
[a bunch of output about creating files and directories]
% cd plurals
% ruby script/generate model Child
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/children.yml

Works as advertised. Let's move on.

% ruby script/generate model Spy
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/spies.yml

Not bad, but still only smart enough to earn a preschool star sticker. What if my app's all about the world of fantasy fiction?

% ruby script/generate model Elf
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/elves.yml

Ok I'm mildly impressed at this poi—oh who am I kidding—it's time to bring out the big guns!

% ruby script/generate model Torpedo
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/torpedos.yml

Wrong! But most people won't even notice. Let's try something similar but more obviously wrong.

% ruby script/generate model Hero
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/heros.yml

Hehe. Now for nouns that have no plural forms at all.

% ruby script/generate model Deer
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/deers.yml
% ruby script/generate model Sheep
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/sheeps.yml

And finally the test for some Italian:

% ruby script/generate model Concerto
[...]
    create  test/fixtures/concertos.yml

For the record, this was done in Rails 0.13.1. Some other interesting examples it got right: Octopus/Octopi, Symposium/Symposia, and Vortex/Vortices. Oddly enough for each one of those, I could find a noun in the same "class" it would get wrong. It pluralized Fungus instead of Fungi, Ovums instead of Ova, Appendixes instead of Appendices. So go figure.

// posted at 19:58. permalink   comments