rob was here.

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance of a family member, who happens to be an elementary school teacher who's starting off. She mentioned a funny story which happened to her recently where a child was struggling with learning cursive writing, and would rather print. The parent of this particular child then questioned, why does my child even have to learn cursive writing in today's world?

I strongly believe that a question worth looking into. I don't believe cursive writing should be eliminated all together, but I think it is certainly stressed too much in the school system, and gradually replaced with proper typing skills.

I print. I always have. There are two places where I write down characters using a tangable writing instrument: white boards and in my log book.

I'm flicking through my log book here now, and it seems that about 80% of my words consist purely block-letter printing, while the rest consists of hybrid print and run on printing. On whiteboards (where ideas are trying to be conveyed to other poeple), I exclusively use capital block-letter printing for clarity reasons, and it's grown into second nature to do so.

To me, it seems like we spend our early years learning the aphabet, and how to spell words using simple non-serif printed characters. Then they teach how to write in italicized serif victorian style lettering to write a few essays in our mid-schooling years. Then we try to recapture the simplicity of basic print as adults. We have even taken it to the next level: even Serif based fonts are frowned upon in the new Web 2.0 elite culture. People want plain-jane kindegarten-era fonts, and rightly so, they are plain and easy to read with little variation across how different people write them (comparted to cursive writing).

Another fork of this conversation is regarding phonetics. People laugh when I say this, but I don't see any reason why we spell phone, knife, know, and walk the way we do, and I would much rather see them written as fone, nife, no, and wok. Silient letters are a waste of characters, and the only reason we write and spell this way is the belief that traditional mechanisms for conveying information are the only correct way of doing so. I would like to see the english language revamped, and the focus placed on phonetics. People laugh at the AOL-kiddie way of saying "how r u doin?", but really, they are getting the same message across as with traditional spelling. They are even using less characters, key strokes and effort to do so. So who are really the suckers. We r.

Ahhh. Just when you think winter is over, life dumps a load of snow on your steps.

This is actually my first snow-day in around a year or so. Apparently my office was closed in January due to a storm, but I was on the road at the time and couldn't take advantage of it. So today, I took it easy.. Did some cleaning, caught up on some Sopranos, did a bit of recreational coding and drank lots of tea/coffee.. Tis' nice.

08:30 27/2/2006: Please Play Again (1)
08:30 28/2/2006: Please Play Again (2)
11:50 01/3/2006: Please Play Again (3)
12:40 02/3/2006: Please Play Again (4)
10:00 03/3/2006: Please Play Again (5)
10:30 06/3/2006: Please Play Again (6)
10:30 07/3/2006: Please Play Again (7)
09:20 08/3/2006: Please Play Again (8)
10:00 09/3/2006: Please Play Again (9)
11:00 10/3/2006: Please Play Again (10)
10:00 13/3/2006: Please Play Again (11)
11:00 14/3/2006: Please Play Again (12)
10:00 15/3/2006: Please Play Again (13)
09:30 16/3/2006: Please Play Again (14)
14:00 19/3/2006: Please Play Again (15)
10:00 20/3/2006: Please Play Again (16)
10:20 21/3/2006: Please Play Again (17)
10:30 22/3/2006: Please Play Again (18)
10:30 23/3/2006: Win/Gagnez Un Cafe/Coffee (19)
10:30 28/3/2006: Please Play Again (20)
10:00 29/3/2006: Please Play Again (21)
10:10 30/3/2006: Please Play Again (22)
10:20 03/4/2006: Please Play Again (23)
11:30 04/4/2006: Please Play Again (24)
10:30 05/4/2006: Please Play Again (25)
12:00 06/4/2006: Please Play Again (26)
10:00 10/4/2006: Please Play Again (27)
11:00 11/4/2006: Please Play Again (28)
11:00 12/4/2006: Win/Gagnez Un Cafe/Coffee (29)
10:30 13/4/2006: Please Play Again (30)
12:00 18/4/2006: Please Play Again (31)
14:00 19/4/2006: Please Play Again (32)
10:30 20/4/2006: Please Play Again (33)
10:30 21/4/2006: Please Play Again (34)
10:30 25/4/2006: Win/Gagnez Un Cafe/Coffee (35)
10:00 26/4/2006: Please Play Again (36)
10:30 28/4/2006: Please Play Again (37)


{23/3/2006} - I finally won something. A free coffee! Today, instead of flattening out the top of the cup like a normally do, I rolled it up with my teeth! That's the trick, baby! Oh, and I bumped this post up to today's date to get it on the main page of my blog again.
{22/3/2006} - Technically I should have won twice by now.. The odd's are 1/9.
{27/2/2006} - As seen on Jeremy's blog.. I'll keep track too.

My girlfriend and I went to the theatres last night to watch V for Vendetta. It was a great movie, but that's not the point of this post. This post is about something I noticed before the movie started; about people.

I propose that there exists a force beyond textbook Newtonian physics, that pushes people together in theatres. This force renders common sense and courtesy useless.. Even though everyone already knows these traits, in theatres, are usually checked at the door.

We got in the movie really early last night - In fact, we were the first ones in!! We took our seats at around half way up.. and sort of a little left to the centre. Awesome!







There we sat, eating our nachos (with salsa on the side) ... And an extra cheese. Hey - if you're going to actually spend the money to buy movie-food, you might as well splurge and get the benefits.

Oh, here comes some people. In walks four ganky looking bloaks who definitely appear to be the local hits at the trendiest LAN parties in town. They walk up the left hand isle.... and.. Good! They're gone back there someplace, past our isle. I didn't want people crowding up our isle this early in. But then what happens? - I notice them on the right-hand side of my peripheral vision.

What the!? They actually circled completely around an empty cinema?? What were they doing? Checking for monsters? Ack.. They are going into the isle behind us.. Okay stay over on that side. stay there.. stop.. sit down.. stop....

They sat down directly behind us. What kind of people do this? What do you say to something like that? Obviously I will eventually be sitting next to people when the theatre fills up, but the natural instinct of a human being is to respect yours (and others) breathing room in the meantime.. I mean.. there was still like 20 minutes till the movie started. I sort of glazed over my shoulder and gave them a quick scan, indicating utter confusion on my behalf.







Alright.. Well Whatever right? There's no understanding people. Me and my girlfriend continue eating and chatting (albiet in a lower tone of voice thanks to our recently purchased shoulder-monkeys).

...

After a while another young couple strolls in. Ah! People like us. If it were me and my girlfriend walking into this theatre right now, insead of them, I'd stay away from the creepy nucleus of people in the centre of the room..

Oh Jesus. What in the hell? They walk up the left hand side, into the row in front of us and sit directly in front of me and my girlfriend. They didn't even strafe just a little.

Surrounded.

What an ackward place to be. With fields of empty space in the room, we were in the dead centre of a pile of people.







This final arrangement lasted until we finished our nachos. Confused about the mental state of those flanking us, I figured there may be some other reasonable explanation for this madness. Maybe some sort of cinema gravity well was pulling people down to those awful seats. We moved left into seats 5 and 6. A little more breathing room goes a long way. After that the theatre filled up pretty normal as people wandered in.

At work, I recently installed the latest version of the Fedora Core operating system (FC5) which came out monday. Here's a quick run through of what my work station looks like now, and how I'm finding it.

There wern't a lot of new additions to the core of the operating system, per se. For the most part most of the advances were in the performance department, as well as features added to existing programs.

Below is my desktop. Fedora came with all of my favourite daily-use programs ready to use out-of-the-box.. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice - they're all there, and up-to-date to the latest stable build.




Here's me having an *important* discussion with a friend.. at least it started off that way. Gaim, the messenger client I'm using there supports jabber (google talk), msn, and several other major chat networks all in the one interface. It's neat. You'll also notice a bash shell and openoffice going on there in the background.




I've switched to Eclipse recently for all my java developing needs. Changing IDE's can be daunting, as you grow on one and others just seem foreign. However, I'm finally getting the bumps ironed out and it's turning out to be a really decent framework. Fedora comes with their own special build of Eclipse, which they built with the GNU Java Compiler (instead of the Sun one). They do this because Fedora is built out of completely free software (free as in freedom) and hence uses no propietary tools. I manually installed both Sun's and IBM's java development kits this week, to basically experiment with them. Here is a shot of the Fedora branded Eclipse loading up.



One of the nicest additions to Fedora 5 is a cleaner package manager. It's well organized and lets you visually hunt around for packages and programs to install or remove. And of course, yum is still alive and kicking, and works really well. There are already some updates available to core apps on the yum repository.



Overall, It's a good continutation from Fedora core 4, and a solid operating system (even as a desktop for non developers).. I highly recommend it if you want to enter the world of linux.. heck, i recommend it even if you don't.

It's time to get out your tinfoil hats. I just read an article on slashdot about how the US government ordered google to hand over all emails from a person's gmail account. Google complied and handed it over, and even supplied all of the emails which the user had ever deleted.

This goes to show, privacy on the internet is non-existant. Watch what you say and realize delete is only a function which hides an email from yourself, and not from anyone who wants to read it later.

Today is the Ides of March. Beware of it.
Especially if you are a Ceasar.

Warning: This post reeks of nerdly geekiness.

World of Warcraft (and other online rpg's) are too demanding in terms of price and time to be worth it.

I promised myself in engineering that I would not get involved in playing one until I graduated, and I totally succeeded in doing that. I ended up waiting until a few months ago. I'm glad I waited till school was over, because I'm pretty sure the mind would recoil in terror trying to cope with both at once.

I'm to the point now where I have a high-level character which has been built up, from weeks and weeks of gameplay (he's a gnome no less). The sad thing is that it takes a ridiculous amount of time to make advancements in the game with a high-level character. This is the genious part of Blizzards formula.. They make it easy and quick to make advancements early on (when you start to play).. but as you invest time into a character, it takes longer and longer to make progress.

Anyways.. As I said.. it's getting frustrating now (and not really even enjoyable), so I don't know why i'm paying so much to waste so much time trying to get a gnome to level 60.

If I work it out, I would spend:

$40 (game cost) + ( $20/month * 12months/per) == $280/year

$280 a year to play this game!!! - That is, like, a really decent set of 5.1 speakers or something..

So, I'm not renewing my subscription today. My gnome will have to be content being a level 49 or whatever sitting somewhere on Blizzards server until the end of time.

I use a lot of open source software in my daily life.

For those of you who arn't really familiar with what open source means, it generally refers to computer programs that have their source code available to the general public. This is much the opposite of propiatary software where a single or group of people hold the right of ownership of the source code, and they typically licence ready-to-use packaged programs to users in some manner (typically through sales).

Some people primarily believe that open source means free (as in zero dollars) software. This is, for the most part, the case with most open source programs - but doesn't have to be true.

Some example of fun and friendly open source technolgies I use every day are linux, gnome, open office, gaim, firefox, thunderbird, and many more. All of these programs are open source and free (as in zero dollars). Being open source, you or anybody else are allowed to download the source code behind these programs and try to help find bugs or make any changes you wish.

Today I took a very large step (with very little effort!) into the open source world. I modified and recompiled an application to suit my needs. For a lot of hardened linux users, this is a daily routine, but it's neat doing it for the first time. I'm typically the kind of guy who prefers downloading and installing rpm's instead of getting the source code of programs and compiling them all by my lonesome. But not today.

I was using audacity for some research and lab testing at work. This program is typically used by audio people to do music mixes and record voices, instruments and the like. It's basically a sound board for your computer. I've used it from time to time to record some guitar tunes and to try adding effects (although I usually give up pretty quickly after hearing myself play).

At work, I was trying to generate some very short high-frequency bursts (in the sonar range, around 30kHz).. Wouldn't you know it, audacity clips any large frequency down to 20kHz. Any 30kHz generated tone would actually be read as 20kHz when you recieved it on a scope.. Damn! What could I do to get around this I wonder?

As you guessed, I ended up swearing a bit and I downloaded the latest stable tarball of the audacity source code, and dug into it. I found the variable used to limit the sound maximum sound frequency to 20kHz.. Apparently (from what I'm told), this is probably because audio-philes don't like super high frequency's like that because they arn't healthy for normal speakers, and humans can't hear them anyways. With a few hits of backspace and few key strokes, I replaced it with a 48kHz maximum limit.

Now.. What the hell do I do to build a large project like this in linux? Thanks to jeremy for the heads up.

All it takes is a standard

./configure
make
make install

and I had a rob flavoured 48kHz output-capable sonar-ready audacity ready to roll on my linux box. Awesome! After checking an output signal with the scope, my first open-source mod was deemed a success. So simple yet so gratifying.

Huzzah!