(identity 'myron)

Tue, 30 Sep 2003

Wikipedia knows all [/misc]

According to Wikipedia, I have the honour of celebrating my birthday on the 69th day of the year with 296 days remaining. Who knew? You learn something new every day with wikipedia.

Incidentally, their current events page makes a great world news summary, in case you're too lazy to sift through google news.

// posted at 19:12. permalink   comments

Mon, 29 Sep 2003

ILC 2003 [/tech]

I am such a geek. I've been drooling for the past few days over the tutorials and talks scheduled for the International Lisp Conference this year. The list of speakers reads like a computer science (or Lisp, at least) celebrities list: Paul Graham, Gregor Kiczales (Aspect Oriented Programming), John McCarthy (!), Gerald Jay Sussman, Richard Gabriel, Matthias Felleisen, Daniel P. Friedman....

Hopefully they'll post some notes or slides online after the conference. Hmm.

// posted at 19:16. permalink   comments

Wife [/Japan]

Hmpf, one of the Japanese words for wife is 家内 / kanai. The character combination means "inside the house". The same combination used in Chinese would mean something more along the lines of "inside the family", but never wife.

It's always interesting to see the differences between the two languages; they almost always perfectly reflect the differences between the two cultures. I wonder if looking at the Korean or older Vietnamese usage of Chinese characters would yield similar insight?

// posted at 17:43. permalink   comments

Sun, 28 Sep 2003

Outsourcing [/personal]

Had a brief talk about outsourcing on the way to work this morning with a friend, and now there's a nice story to give it some perspective:

"We need those technology skills. This country is making productivity gains only because of the technology we've been able to implement, and all of a sudden, we are abandoning those employees, and it's bothersome," said Friedman.

He said the offshore trend could also affect national defense. "One morning we will wake up 10 years from now and we will not have the skills needed to support the infrastructure of this country," said Friedman.

It's tough to make guesses at the long-term effects of outsourcing since it's a relatively new practice in IT, but here's my view, in bullets:

1. IT is not the same as manufacturing, where outsourcing also happened many years ago, because it's a not a trade worker position, ie. this is blue collar vs white collar. This is especially true of programming.

2. Because of the above, we can't assume success in outsourcing just because it worked for manufacturing and thus we have no idea of the social or economic effects of doing it. In particular, we don't know whether or not the job market, especially in this economic climate, can effectively re-absorb the droves of programmers and IT workers being laid off. This was not true in manufacturing many years ago, and I'm thinking this is because of the tradesman vs skilled worker distinction above; it's likely a programmer will be less able to move to another skilled worker position while also being very unlikely to accept a low-pay job like working at Wal-mart.

3. If the increasing number of laid-off IT workers cannot find suitable new jobs, then they will either leave the country to find work elsewhere (the reverse brain drain that the article mentions), let themselves fall into the country's social safety net, take a lower-pay job, or possibly re-educate themselves for a new position (unlikely). What's notable here is that the first three substantially reduces the buying power of the very market technology companies sell to.

4. IT and programming in particular, are relatively new disciplines. Just look at how quickly first-year curriculum changed from Pascal to C to C++ to Java, etc. We don't yet know what exactly makes software projects a success. This is also evident in the fact that only recently has software engineering really come to the fore as a discipline. So if you move programming projects abroad, then you will lose a significant portion of the people who built up the experience that brought us this far in the first place and you will also hobble their ability to continue building on that experience to further the computing science as a whole.

Maybe all this reads like a big-headed programmer's bullsh*t, but consider this: programmers re-invest a significant amount of their earnings towards furthering their skills and pushing the frontiers of technology. Can an outsourced worker working for a few dollars per hour do the same? This will have a significantly negative impact on the technology field.

Even if I'm completely wrong on all my points, then you'd still, at the very least, have to concede that there's so many unknowns here that it's very risky for the industry to turn to outsourcing en masse like it seems to be doing today.

// posted at 22:41. permalink   comments

CSS hover [/tech]

Think I went a little overboard with the CSS hover property, but it's cool, don't you think? Hover over this paragraph and watch the link if you're in any browser but IE.

// posted at 19:48. permalink   comments

EOL as a scheme learner [/tech]

Saw some of this guy's posts before a while back on comp.lang.scheme, asking general questions about learning scheme and slowly trudging on, much like I am, and now this.

NO you can keep your pwd and access to the answers, it's not worth the trouble trying to learn the language when all you get is crap and insults from the very people, who are supposed to be the teachers/authors and helpers in your attempt at learning the language.

Clearly you all have *HUGE* chips on your shoulders regarding who is the *elitist coder* and deserving of unending loyalty and praise from us lowly nobodies who had the *shockingly unthinkable and presumptuous* idea that we would try and learn a new language in the hope of bettering ourselves mentally.

Please forgive me for *attempting something clearly above my station in life* as one of the lower class humans.

And drop dead all of you. Your all just a bunch of *elitist snobs* who think they have the right to mess with peoples minds and confidence when those people get the *presumptuous idea* that they want to better themselves.

Pretty harsh eh?

// posted at 18:39. permalink   comments

How it should be [/tech]

Here's yet another pic of how this page is supposed to look for people stuck in IE. Notice the rollover links up top with the custom bullet images, cause they ain't showing up in IE.

// posted at 17:51. permalink   comments

IE sucks and then you die [/tech]

Yet again looking at my page for the first time on IE 6 after a substantial redesign. IE sucks. Most of everything works, except the calendar's fonts are too big by default, and the transparent gifs I cooked up to replace the png's (specifically for IE's lack of transparent png support), don't even show up likely because IE doesn't support background images in CSS properly for individual elements. Whatever. It's at least not as f*cked up as before. Mozilla is still flawless.

// posted at 17:36. permalink   comments

Mailinator [/tech]

This Mailinator anonymous e-mail service has been a god-send. In fact it makes it a lot of fun thinking up creative e-mail addresses on the spot... yousuck@mailinator.com seems to be popular. No doubt f*ckyou would be too. *grin*

If you haven't been using an anonymous email service, try this one out.

// posted at 05:30. permalink   comments

Sat, 27 Sep 2003

Redesign [/announcements]

Redesigned again, for the one person who's out there reading this in IE (*cough* Kenji, install mozilla dammit *cough*). In any case, this is a tentative design. It should be easier on the eyes; I've never been too fond of bright text on a dark background no matter how cool it looks. The calendar seems a bit out of place though, rather funny looking....

Comments have now been added care of HaloScan. Oh, and there's a direct translate to Japanese button on the left using Babelfish.

// posted at 04:44. permalink   comments

Thu, 25 Sep 2003

Sapir-Whorf [/misc]

Here's an interesting article about a study done on English, Japanese and Turkish speakers. It mentions the lack of an equivalent verb "to swing" in Japanese and Turkish, which the researchers argue affect the way speakers of those languages think about the movement of swinging.

In effect, it's a mild form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

// posted at 19:44. permalink   comments

Wed, 24 Sep 2003

Ackermann function, pt 2 [/personal]

So it turns out the Ackermann function really isn't that hard after all.... Obviously from the formula, you can just compute it by looking at the previous row (imagining it as an array), but it consequently also makes out a nice pattern that it's contracting the row above it, growing increasingly faster and faster by the row. Moving along....

// posted at 18:24. permalink   comments

Tue, 23 Sep 2003

Prevayler [/tech]

Ran into this project a while ago after seeing it's entry on cliki.net. Now there's a nice slashdot story about it. Needless to say, rarely have I ever seen so many posts with obscene language modded up. And they're probably right to be angry too. Hehe. From what it looks like, it's a neat technology, but otherwise unsuitable if you need to run relational queries or the comfort of transactional security.

// posted at 19:39. permalink   comments

Ackermann's function [/personal]

Just ran into a variant of the Ackermann function in SICP, and I'm starting to think the authors put it in there as a twisted sadistic joke. It's not exactly an easy thing to wrap your head around after having been introduced to recursive processes a few pages before.... Take a look for yourself:

(define A
  (lambda (x y)
    (cond ((= y 0) 0)
          ((= x 0) (* 2 y))
	  ((= y 1) 2)
	  (else (A (- x 1)
	           (A x (- y 1))))))

In mathematical notation:

A(m, 0) = 0
A(0, n) = 2 * n where n>0
A(m, 1) = 2 where m>0
A(m, n) = A(m-1, A(m, n-1)) where m>0, n>0

Don't know about you, but it makes my head hurt. This page has a nice analogy for thinking of it like an array where you find the answer to A[m,n] using other parts of the array.

Take a look at what he computed for A(4, 2). Note that he's computing the original Ackermann function, not this SICP variant that grows even faster.

// posted at 18:46. permalink   comments

Emacs [/tech]

In the interest of acquiring a good lisp environment as I continue to trudge along with learning lisp and scheme, I've started learning emacs. So far, having been an almost life-long user of vi/vim, the experience is not a nice one. "Shock" would probably be an understatement.

I've been working with the built-in emacs tutorial, and this is one of the first diagrams they present:

If you don't understand what C-b and such mean, the C stands for the control key. So it follows that navigation in emacs happens with control key keychords. 3 words: carpal tunnel syndrome. Does it look like I want rsi? Now you're probably saying, "Just use the freaking arrow keys", to which I'd respond exactly as the tutorial does, "once you gain practice at using Emacs, you will find that typing these Control characters is faster than typing the arrow keys." I'm specifically looking for the equivalent of vi's hjkl navigation, which I really like. They're all on the home row, and the keys are close together, unlike Ctrl-b, which can be a bit of a pain.

Beginning and end of a document is reached by Ctrl-< and Meta-> respectively, which isn't too impressive. Notice those are shift characters, which means the total keychord involves three keys held down. Although to be fair, vi uses 1 and shift-g, though it's not all pressed simultaneously. Still, the triple-key keychord is less accessible, imo.

Moving on, the numerical argument (or numerical multiplier, as I call it) is activated by Ctrl-u and then number. Not too impressive; too many keys. Vi takes the argument raw, which is nice and quick. There's an alternative to hold down meta while keying in the digits, but that requires a little hand stretching and isn't recommended by the tutorial.

The funny thing is the tutorial points out how convenient it is that you can hold down ctrl while you key in all the commands and how you don't have to continuously press ctrl seperately. This reminds me of the argument some emacs users make against vi, that having to switch to command mode through escape is clumsy. I'd counter that it's no less work than having to hold down control. In fact, having to hold down control while keying in commands makes it a command mode anyway. The only difference is that we don't like odd keystrokes and so we use escape to switch into command mode permanently while emacs users temporarily do so by holding down ctrl or meta.

Arcane as vi is, I wouldn't say emacs commands are any less so either, which is another argument used against vi. Difference is that emacs is a lot more conventional at first to the beginning user. Vi won't even let a newbie type into their document because they probably won't have learned how to switch modes yet. Though I secretly take joy in hearing of vi horror stories where a person ends up in vi by accident and gets totally screwed over--RTFM. ;)

Having said all this, it's easy to see how emacs vs vi flamewars erupted so easily in the past. Switching is definitely painful too, and the benefits of using emacs better show themselves soon, cause so far I'm not sold. Although Kenji seems to swear by it.... "Emacs master," he says. :)

// posted at 06:33. permalink   comments

SICP videos [/tech]

I watched the first video lecture of the course accompanying SICP at MIT, and it's quite enlightening. The first few minutes talks about some ideas that I've always thought to be true... Computer Science isn't about computers, it's about processes and problem solving using a computer. They also nicely explain why it's important to be able to have functions operate on functions.

So go ahead and watch them. It's a good laugh when they zoom in on students, what with the 80's fashion and all. A good chuckle and an enlightening experience--what more could you ask for?

// posted at 00:35. permalink   comments

Mon, 22 Sep 2003

Linguistics [/personal]

New blog from 4 linguists: Language Log. Make sure to read this post. I've been accused of taking things too literally before, but I've long thought the opposite is much worse: manipulating words in subtle ways so as to change the meaning to something more "convenient" to the speaker. The only thing worse than this is manipulating language itself. See doublespeak.

In other news, read an excerpt from Mariane Pearl's new memoirs of her husband's kidnapping. I won't try to deduce any meaning from it for you, but it can give a little perspective on things--it's certainly almost impossible not to react to something like that....

// posted at 22:37. permalink   comments

Sun, 21 Sep 2003

SICP [/tech]

I've started reading a section of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) each morning before work, and it turns out to be a fairly interesting read. Footnotes are unbelievably abundant and contain a lot of historical tidbits about cs. One thing I've noticed so far is the emphasis on functions and abstraction. Sounds like an odd remark to make, right? After all, cs is based on abstraction. But here it's a little different from how I learned it. Where I come from, they emphasized functions as a basis for code reuse. In SICP, it's functions, functions and more functions, even if they don't get reused--it's functions purely for the sake of abstraction, and if reuse occurs, then all the better.

An example is how they define a square root function that uses Newton approximation--they define three inner functions that are each only called once:

(define (sqrt x)
    (define (good-enough? guess)
        (< (abs (- (square guess) x)) 0.001))
    (define (improve guess)
        (average guess (/ x guess)))
    (define (sqrt-iter guess)
        (if (good-enough? guess)
	    guess
	    (sqrt-iter (improve guess))))
    (sqrt-iter 1.0))

In C-ish languages, I'd be tempted to write everything inline, just separating each block of code like a paragraph. At the same time, the style above is encouraged in lisp by functional features like anonymous functions and whatnot, so....

// posted at 23:24. permalink   comments

Sat, 20 Sep 2003

Return [/personal]

Just booked my return flight and already it makes it feel like I'll be leaving soon, even though I still have a good 3.5 months. Quite sad. *sniff* It's just so easy to get into a comfortable routine here that I'm really dreading any change to it. Well, then there's the obvious, having to say goodbye to some people.... :'(

They say the internet makes the world smaller, I say teleportation devices would make the world smaller. So someone out there, please make us a teleportation device?

// posted at 20:37. permalink   comments

Thu, 18 Sep 2003

Nationmaster [/misc]

Nationmaster. A pretty neat site that lets you compare some statistics on the nations of the world, from the Most Murderous to the Most Militaristic.

Now here's something interesting: top 100 Richest (GDP/capita) and Poorest (% below poverty line) nations. Notice the United States manages to be on both lists? Sure it's number 96 of the poorest countries, but none of the other top 10 richest nations even appear on the poorest nations list....

// posted at 01:40. permalink   comments

Tue, 16 Sep 2003

Verisign [/tech]

All your misspellings are belong to us. The changes finally propagated to our side of the world just a few hours ago too. Sad.

In other news, Apple Expo Paris has just kicked off 15 minutes ago and it's anticipated they'll announce some new products either in the form of iPod peripherals or revamped Powerbooks....

// posted at 01:19. permalink   comments

Mon, 15 Sep 2003

Cell phone pics [/personal]

Gotta love the 2-bit quality.... sort of like digital camera toys circa 1990.

That's me, Nagata and his friend Shitou.

// posted at 19:52. permalink   comments

Random thoughts [/personal]

There's an unbelievable breeze blowing through this window right now. All you have to do is stand there, close your eyes, and you're in Paradise.... Perfect mood for stream of consciousness rambling.

Mathematics. I confess it: I love mathematics. We had a brief stint over calculus and other more rote aspects of it, but once we hit proofs, I was back in the sack with math. Especially interesting is graph theory and the the more computational aspects of math like linear algebra, algorithms and complexity. The more you look at it the more parallels you find with doing proofs and the act of programming. No, they're not one and the same, but they're definitely related, and success in either results in the same joy.

Japanese. Onomatopoeic language par excellence. Hungry? Peko peko. Talk alot? Pera pera. Feeling a bubbling sensation on your skin? Sara sara. Imagine that, onomatopoeia for exfoliating products. Believe it. I saw it on a facial cleanser commercial.

Canada. I was digging in kuro5hin for an old op/ed article on the EU, and instead stumbled on "Canadian immigration programme must be halted". Imo, a somewhat lame article, but hidden in the comments was a link to a site about Canadian politics. And on the front page? Turning over a new leaf:

Most Canadians are not much maligned by the classic stereotypes of Canadiana: beavers, lumberjacks, maple syrop, hockey, beer, tundra, good manners and general affability. These symbols are a quaint mix of the historical and the apocryphal, and to most minds they represent no serious effort to define the national character. The polite, virginal Mountie in crisp crimsons is to Canada what the bonneted, braided mountain girl is to Sweden: a postcard.

It is even difficult to find a Canadian who is dramatically discomfited by more recent additions to the Canuck caricature: being clean, calm, diplomatic and, above all, fairly dull. While the points may be individually disputable, the overall impression isn't too objectionable.

But how do Canadians feel about being branded as a modern "hippie nation" of wanton copyright-infringin' draft-dodgin' dope-smokin' queer-marryin' freedom-pirates?

That's a horse of a different colour.

An interesting read on its own, but it eventually led me to this: My Canada, a Canadian's tribute to his country on Canada day. It crystallizes everything that I've always believed to be good about our country (and makes no mention of the negatives, but hey, it was a Canada day story)....

What we are seeing today is the beginning of the fruits of our labour. We set out to build a nation based not on a particular language or culture or even a particular geography, but as a set of background assumptions and institutions. Our national character is defined not by some fundamental founding document and predefined identity but rather by the institutions and measures we take in order to ensure well-being and harmony among our people.

...

And it is working. Our young people "are pursuing democracy in the workplace and in marriage. They are a global generation, committed to issues of tolerance and social justice. They are a generation led in so many ways by its women. They are, of course, the best-educated generation the country has ever produced, possibly the best-educated generation of young adults in the world. Look at them on the streets. Love is bubbling across racial and ethnic lines, and the Canadian post-ethnic identity is on its way to reality.

"And always keep this in mind about them, because it is the generation's most significant characteristic: They are not a sudden sociological phenomenon; they are a generation whose values have evolved from those of the generations preceding them."

I don't think any of us realize, until we leave the country, how differently we've come to see the world just because of the racial diversity we're faced with every day. People here in Japan, especially, look at me funny when I tell them you can get almost any type of food in Vancouver because of the diversity of the people who set up shop there. And when I mention that I grew up around a crazy mix of Asian and European people, they sort of shrink back like they're confused.

It's not perfect and I won't pretend it is, but we've instilled in younger generations like my own, a sense of openness towards multiculturalism that I don't think is matched in many other places in the world. One comment in k5 echoed the same idea, and that it's something heavily stressed as early as in the public school system. I never noticed going through it, but looking back now, I do remember countless times where multiculturalism came up through educational videos, antiracism campaigns, and most of all, by example... the teachers--never did they even blink when faced with teaching a classroom whose attendance list almost always proved impossible to read off correctly unless they knew a good dozen languages or so.

In the French immersion side of things, especially, even the teachers themselves were often immigrants. I believe some of the best teachers I had were a Russian, a Lebanese and a second or third generation Scandinavian.

Now maybe I've somehow been brainwashed by the education system, but I challenge any Canadian who doesn't share in my passion to go abroad... eventually you'll likely witness some form of racism or another, perhaps subtle, perhaps overt, but tell me something doesn't immediately click in your mind along with a reaction of anger, disappointment, or guilt, even.

We often joke that we must always make it obvious that we're travelers from Canada and not the US when going overseas, and I always shrugged it off as a silly anti-american joke. But now, I think, being Canadian really does mean more than just differentiation from our southern neighbour, it's carrying the legacy of an unbelievably diverse people who are willing to let go of their prejudices and give a damn about the people around them.

It is my hope that we don't forget this when we're faced with questions like Iraq... or even the attitude with which we approach America. Anti-americanism. I've seen it here on more than one occasion, and it's as stupid as any other over-generalization. But it's something even Canadians aren't innocent of doing....

// posted at 06:42. permalink   comments

Scheme [/personal]

After a long hiatus (read: procrastination), I've restarted my efforts to learn Scheme using a pretty funky book, The Little Schemer. It uses a strange dialogue kind of format in 2 columns with the left asking questions and the answers on the right. Makes things interesting, I guess.

The last time I read a Scheme book, my brain shut down on the chapter on continuations. We'll see if I last this time.

I've also been taking a look at the unbelievable amount of online books out there on mathematics. It might be fun to dive in and finally figure out what Category Theory is.... Yes, I'm a geek.

// posted at 02:12. permalink   comments

Sun, 14 Sep 2003

The EU [/misc]

Did you know that there's an anthem for the EU? Rather unoriginal that they just picked the Ode to Joy, but I guess it's difficult to find an anthem to represent so many states....

In other news... the EU is looking to put a stop to products made outside of the place implied by the name. Example: Parmesan cheese and Parma Italy. The EU wants nothing but cheese in Parma called Parmesan cheese. Seems like a lot of fuss over names, especially considering that they can be so arbitrary... *crunches down on a freedom fry* mmm....

// posted at 21:40. permalink   comments

Thu, 11 Sep 2003

Unbelievable [/tech]

One of the most thoughtful posts on functional programming I've ever seen on Slashdot: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77858&cid=6933753.

Like politics, studying the extremes in programming languages makes you understand the center so much better. In programming languages the spectrum is defined by the amount of state that a language has. In assembly languages you have to manipulate every bit of state, in a functional language, there is none. They represent the two extremes here.

...

Not only are functional languages used in a small or large way inside all the procedural languages you love, they are by far the most used programming languages in the world. Why? Because Excel is a functional language. So is the SQL query language to a large extent. You simply state the relations of the things what you want and you get it.

And there's even more if you click the link and read the original post. Click it!. What are you waiting for? A <blink> tag? Click click click click click!

// posted at 17:05. permalink   comments

Wed, 10 Sep 2003

I Miss You reprise [/personal]

Well, I think I'm beginning to see how the whole "You are not here, I am sad" construct works.... A fellow intern just left and now once more, I'm the lone 20-year old, quiet foreigner who doesn't speak the language and sort of tags along with the eating and the working. In short, he is gone; I am sad.

On a technical note, though, I still think it's something wholly different from missing someone. Being lonely or sad only requires one person; missing someone always involves two.

// posted at 21:13. permalink   comments

I Miss You Showdown [/personal]

After a few conversations with bilingual people and a trip to the movies, I've gotten some more input as to a good equivalent of "I miss you" in Japanese.... So here goes nothing, a showdown of translations.

1. 会いたい/aitai , 会いたかった/aitakatta

This simply translates to, "I want(ed) to meet you." Doesn't seem to have the magic of "I miss you", but I saw it written as the subtitling for "I miss you" between a girl and a guy during an American movie trailer.

2. ．．がいなくて寂しい/blah blah blah samishii

This one's the other translation I mentioned before.

Ok so it's not quite a showdown, more like a duel... but nevertheless, the new contender, translation number 1, is pretty interesting. Obviously I'm biased, but it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the English equivalent. Maybe it's just a reflection in the difference between the two cultures, but going the roundabout way and saying, "I want(ed) to meet you," to imply the real message that I felt the lack or loss of the other person just seems, well... weak. Although it is a step up from going even more roundabout with the "you are not here, I am sad" deal.

Sort of reminds me of the old teaching in English class where they always nag you when you use the passive voice when the active one could be used. Here, the Japanese translations resemble the passive "you were missed" rather than the active "I missed you". The latter is many times more intimate.

Then again, certain words in either languages have different meanings depending on what they operate on. Certainly, there's a difference between someone who says they miss their car and someone who says they miss a certain someone. So the same could be true in Japanese and "I wanted to meet you" implies more than I think it does.... *shrug*

Still, though, the English "I miss you" spoken genuinely and with emotion is not something to be thrown around. It just doesn't seem to have the same weight here given the tone it's spoken with and the frequency it's used....

Heh, welcome to Overanalyzing 'R Us.

// posted at 19:57. permalink   comments

OOo [/tech]

Been playing around with OpenOffice.org at work lately for all my office needs and I admit, it's fairly good. Not great, but good. Lately, it's even implemented a Export to PDF function a la Mac OS X. Working outside the MS office world, it's one of the most useful features of all time. OS X wins on being able to do it from any application with a print dialog, though.

// posted at 19:04. permalink   comments

Rich-Client-Like Web Apps [/tech]

Interesting story on slashdot developers about the Echo project. It has some pretty demos, although some of them subjugate the back button. *cough* yay continuations-based web apps *cough*

// posted at 01:12. permalink   comments

Tue, 09 Sep 2003

Mwahahaha [/tech]

Alright, Chris, it's on! Might not be front-page, but it's a start. And this one might bring back some comments relevant to us... or maybe it'll just start a flame-war. *shrug*

And for anyone who's wondering, Monty is an old old nickname.

// posted at 17:02. permalink   comments

Mon, 08 Sep 2003

Zoom interface [/tech]

Bizzarre. I found some demo (hope you've got a fast computer!) for a zoom interface concept. Sort of neat, sort of not. Honestly, it seems a little silly to have documents embedded into another; it overlaps with the functionality of hyperlinks, which is both faster to use and imo, more intuitive than this zooming concept. If you're an Apple fanatic, you'll probably recognize the name of the inventor....

Found this via today's daily sucker from "Web Pages That Suck".

// posted at 21:42. permalink   comments

/. banner ad [/tech]

Found this, reading /. this morning. A PHP cruise with over 50 hours of instruction; description introduced by a cheesy pun, no less. :P

// posted at 15:06. permalink   comments

Sun, 07 Sep 2003

Hmpf, served with cheese [/personal]

I was doing my usual grocery shopping today, apologizing profusely when I got in another person's way. I went and paid, then took my basket to the counter where everyone bags their groceries. I carefully placed the items that could let off condensation in their own separate little bags, then finally placed all the individually bagged items in a bigger bag, perfectly overpackaged, and it hit me--geez, I've become Japanese!

Later that night, I sat down to eat with a few Japanese friends. I took my time to eat, eyes on the tv, wishing I had a beer in my hand while the others ate noisily, seemingly inhaling their food and I realized, "Ah, no I'm wrong. I'm Canadian."

Finishing up with dinner, I return to my room. I open the door and head straight for the air conditioning controls. Lights still off, I tap the down button a few times, making a guess at setting the temperature control to a cool 23 degrees. Finally, I turn on the lights, sit down and wait for the room to cool down. I look back at the temperature display. It reads 24. "24," I mutter in Chinese, a homonym for the words, "easy death". Unlucky. I lower it down to 23. And then I grin, realizing, "Ah, yes that's right, I'm Chinese."

I sit back down at my computer and glance at the clock. It's Sunday. "Noooo," I groan, thinking about another week of work ahead of me. The commute, the 50-minute long commute in the sweltering heat, and Kenji's not even around to bear it with me. "Dammit," I think, "I miss that guy." And then I realize, "Ah... so I'm a human being."

// posted at 05:21. permalink   comments

Sat, 06 Sep 2003

特急 [/Japan]

特急が大好き。枚方から京橋まで十五分しか掛かりません。すごい。

// posted at 01:47. permalink   comments

Fri, 05 Sep 2003

CD price cuts [/tech]

Leave it to The Register to write a pretty scathing and bitter piece about the CD price cuts. Gotta love the reg.

// posted at 17:57. permalink   comments

/. Story [/tech]

Seems like my friend Chris got a story posted on Slashdot. The competitive geeky side of me is screaming, "Get your own story posted dammit!" And then another part is saying, "For the love of God, go back to sleep, it's 7.25!" And then the geek responds, "Just go buy an Aquada, that'll show him!"

Early mornings are weird.

// posted at 15:36. permalink   comments

Thu, 04 Sep 2003

The ultimate tea beverage [/Japan]

ティ・ソーダ / Tea Soda. Kenji and I stumbled on this little gem in the middle of Osaka while shopping for a pair of shoes. It's the best tea I've found here so far. A little on the sweet side, but then it's better than most of the other vending machine teas that are fairly plain and flat-tasting.

Problem is, I can't seem to find it anywhere else but that one vending machine....

// posted at 23:20. permalink   comments

FastCGI [/tech]

I've had numerous discussions over what's fast and what's not in serving up dynamic web content, without ever really having looked into any comparisons, so today I went out and found one: A Comparison of Portable Dynamic Web Content Technologies for the Apache Server. It compares FastCGI, mod_perl, PHP and Java servlets over Tomcat.

What's surprising is how badly PHP seems to perform for them, though I'd take this result with a grain of salt considering the paper doesn't even mention what version of PHP it used....

// posted at 19:53. permalink   comments

LL1 [/tech]

I've been following this neat mailing list for a while now, and there's been a good discussion coming up lately on recursion vs specialized looping constructs--specifically the argument that looping constructs are only specific cases of recursion. Yet without tail-call optimization, recursion in many languages is impractical because you risk blowing up the stack. So then in those languages, recursion is never really presented as being more general than the looping constructs, rather it's presented more as some seperate concept that you only use in specific cases.

Interesting eh? You know the geek in you says yes....! Someone just said this, too:

Taught properly, 5th-graders can get recursion, with less effort than it would take to teach them about looping constructs.

You have to wonder if that's actually true? I have no comments on it, considering I was more or less raised on looping and imperative programming. Thing is, I've seen this argument a few times from different people surfing around the net....

Oh, and there's a perl.com summary article on LL1, the workshop from which the mailing list originated:

What happens if you get a bunch of academic computer scientists and implementors of languages such as Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Curl, and lock them into a room for a day? Bringing together the academic and commercial sides of language design and implementation was the interesting premise behind last weekend's Lightweight Languages Workshop, LL1, at the AI Lab at MIT, and I'm happy to say that it wasn't the great flame-fest you might imagine.

It also mentions something pretty funny: "[Shiram Krishnamurti] countered criticisms that Scheme is just lots of insane silly parentheses by demonstrating how XML was just lots of insane silly angle brackets." Hehe.

// posted at 17:49. permalink   comments

New (old) pictures from Kobe [/announcements]

Finally got into posting some old pics from an office dinner cruise in Kobe. Pics were taken from other people's cameras, some of them a bit blurry. Hit the photos:Japan link at left to see 'em.

// posted at 15:24. permalink   comments

Wed, 03 Sep 2003

Ouch [/tech]

This has to be the most sarcastic piece of writing I've ever seen written about cpu's: Itanium fends off Opteron for slowest selling chip crown. Heh that just made my day.

// posted at 21:46. permalink   comments

I miss you [/Japan]

I know there's billions of different ways to say things in either English or Japanese, but the standard translation for "I miss you" is "あなたがいなくて寂しい/anata ga inakute samishii", which translated literally means "you are not here, I am sad/lonely". And when people ask me here if I miss someone, it follows the same pattern. Question is, isn't this different from what "I miss you" means in English? I see the two as implying slightly different levels of intimacy with the English one being higher up on the intimacy scale. Maybe that's why it's used so freely here between two men, whereas it is not quite the same in North America....?

// posted at 21:37. permalink   comments

Heat [/Japan]

It's been hot all week, and the forecast doesn't look all that great for the rest of the week:

I've seen all kinds of coping strategies with the heat and humidity--everything from sticking a towel on your head to incessant fanning. I'm not sure what works, but the golden rule seems to be this: don't move unless you absolutely have to, and when you do, move as little as possible. This has meant adopting a new style of walking... where you attempt as much as possible not to move the upper body any more than required. When carrying bags or other items, it seems best to be as relaxed as possible, just letting the arms hang to the side, and most importantly, not swinging. You can also slur all your words and prevent sweating around the upper lip.

I guess the theme, really, is excess movement = sweat. The tricky part is figuring out how to make your lethargy look natural and graceful rather than slothlike. :P

// posted at 17:39. permalink   comments

My job [/tech]

Whether or not you believe the goal of strong artificial intelligence is possible, the fact is that right now, we're not equipped to build a solution to the AI problem. Building a computer equivalent of consciousness and intelligence has long been known as one of the hardest, if not the hardest problem in computer science. That said, you have to wonder when someone thinks they're going to market with what is essentially supposed to be a solution to AI.

I'm not saying it's impossible, though that's subject to debate. But someone who approaches this problem with the idea that he'll solve it in a few years has likely already lost himself in his own grandeur....

A quick googling of "ai faq" later, and we have this:

Subject: [1-12] I have the idea for an AI Project that will solve all of AI...

Great! Welcome to the club and tell us all about it. Most poeple in the community genuinely want new people to be thinking about AI. You should be aware that you will probably not get a whole lot of enthusiasm from the established scientists for a few reasons:

-We receive or hear about such proposals about once a month. The vast majority are naive.

-Many smart people have been thinking about the AI problem for a long time. There have been many ideas that have been pursued by sophisticated research teams which turned out to be dead ends. This includes all of the obvious ideas. Most grand solutions proposed have been seen before (about 70% seem to be recapitulations of Minsky proposals).

-The grand ideas are almost always far too vague to implement. One of the tough lessons of graduate school is how to turn a vague idea into something that is implementable and testable. Unless you have experience at it, it is unlikely your first try will have the needed precision.

-It is the general opinion of the research community that we're just not ready to solve the general AI problem yet (cf. question on CYC). Why that is should be addressed in another question.

OK, now that we've covered the harsh reality, you shouldn't get discouraged. If you're having fun with it, keep doing it. You're guaranteed to learn something while participating in a fascinating hobby. Who knows- you may still come up with a really great and new idea. Finally, [and this is just Ric's opinion] most of the really interesting AI people started out because they had the same kind of idea to make AI better than it is now.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/general/part1/

// posted at 15:29. permalink   comments

Mon, 01 Sep 2003

Bye bye Outlook Express [/tech]

After 3 months, I've finally kicked Outlook Express out of my life. I'm ashamed it took so long. The only thing that kept me on it was the convenient hotmail access. Yeah, believe it or not, my hotmail account isn't the porn-infested spam cesspool that most hotmail accounts are. Though now that I've said that I'll probably get a flood of spam in my box in the next ten minutes.... *knock on wood*

Anyway, I've migrated to Mozilla Thunderbird, and for hotmail access, I'm using Hotmail Popper.

Goodbye Outlook Express, worms, exploits and all, and good riddance.

// posted at 17:04. permalink   comments

Chapter 38 [/personal]

Heh, as a follow-up to the last post.... The first line of Chapter 82 in the Tao Te Ching:

上德不德，是以有德
下德不失德，是以無德。

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

Or interpreted differently:

A man of the highest virtue doesn't talk about virtue, and so actually practices it. A man of the lowest virtue makes a big show and a big noise about virtue, and so is most likely a hypocrite who doesn't actually practice it.

Good explanation with a biblical equivalent here with a related passage on the same page under Chapter XVIII.

Apologies for the preachy tone.

// posted at 15:29. permalink   comments

Friendship [/personal]

So here's a question for you, if you take away two people's abilities to communicate to each other well, can they still build a lasting friendship?

Sounds cheesy, but if you think about it, you come to know people mainly through their words. Take that away and all that remains are their actions, which begs the question--can you know someone through their actions alone? Likely not. Imagine if one person is a racist maniac but the second person never witnesses any signs of it. Without words, he'd never know any better.

Why am I asking this? Well, given how little Japanese I speak and how little English the people here speak, how is that anyone here trusts me enough to be their friend? Obviously all this rambling has its roots in this and this. But really, for all anyone knows here, I could be some completely crazy person and they would never know because deep conversations are impossible to have across such high language barriers.

So how much do you get to know about a person through their actions and how much is discovered through spoken word? Does one reveal more than the other? Consider also that both should technically be merely reflections of your thoughts... although it's possible for a person to lose control of their actions or their words.

But more importantly, if you look past flaws and strengths, similar and opposing interests--is there more to relationships than just an unending list of pros and cons? Sounds boring, but this strikes at the heart of things like "love at first sight", or friendships that seemingly don't have any basis in the merits of character and personality. Without these two, what is there left that sets the wheels in motion for attraction and friendship? Is it some mystical who-knows-what? Fate? God? Random combination of circumstances? Sexual attraction?

Ultimately, answering this question is second to simply enjoying the relationship itself, but you still have to wonder... What in the world is it that draws two people together? And what makes those two people stick together for a lifetime? God knows there's plenty of the opposite--short-lived friendships and attractions....

// posted at 05:40. permalink   comments