Please watch this video if you can, it’s a documentary abour Arundhati Roy’s words, someone I’ve admired for a long time and would align myself closely to her values and humanity. It’s got a great soundtrack too. (Download it to watch full-screen: link)
Yep, It was nice knowing you. I have to concur with Jasdev that 2006 was a year of unlearning, unlearning loads of little prejudices or at least recognising them, not malicious prejudices against people, but rather assumptions on the validity of concepts I had taken for granted. In terms of actions, some memorable ones were going to the states, and switching to mac, but in actualality they’re probably drowned out by the noise of all the little things that make us the sum of the parts that we are. What are the important ones? - encounters with people and reading books - perhaps. Starting to really feel like an adult now, especially since becoming 21. It’s good, but there’s so much to be done and so little time.
New years resolutions are still in, mine is to get up at 5.30 every morning. Except it probably won’t happen tomorrow morning.
We recently covered the paper “The Generation of Optimal Code for Arithmetic Expressions” in compiler design class, so I thought I’d implement the first two algorithms described in it in Python.
The one and two functions are the names that he calls his procedures.
Anyone who knows me knows I have an interest in American politics. For quite a while now, I’ve been feeding that interest with The Daily Show and The Colbert report clips on the net, which are not only informing, but are hilarious to boot. Well, I’ve now started to pass my time when walking by listening to webcasts from UC Berkeley. I’ve begun by listening to polysci 179. They have excellent guest speakers every week, who are in good positions to talk about the American political sphere. It is even quite amusing at times.
Very disappointing today to see the new Thai ICT minister dismiss open source software off hand:
“With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated…As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source,”
The remarks show a total ignorance about the nature and reality of open source. There are many open source projects that have much active development even though people are not directly making money of it. There are other revenue streams - look at red hat. Why is it bad for anyone to be able to use it, surely in the interests of a better world that is a good thing. Ideas do not become public domain with open source, that is why the GPL was invented in the first place, people that choose to use your code must follow the terms of the license, including releasing any derivative works under the same license. There are many reasons to give your code away if you can write good code, most important of those are ethical reasons. Thailand might be able to do better source code with open source - by building on the many high quality libraries that exist. I hope minister Sitthical doesn’t use that buggy useless web browser called Firefox with it’s better-than-IE anti-phishing measures.
To add insult to injury, he is a staunch supporter of censorship, claiming that even the most avid freedom of speech advocate would change his mind if he sees doctored pictures of his daughter’s head on a naked body posted on the Internet. Invoking the now familiar terrorism/pedophilia excuse to reduce civil liberties.
I’ve been experimenting recently with time lapse photography using iMovie and my NVDS11b DV video camera. This was the result of a few minutes of rush hour on a Dublin Thursday evening (i added some iMovie effect to it):
This post, sent using the awesome OSX editor that is TextMate! I am behind a proxy server (actually using Authoxy), so I had to hack one of the Ruby files that the Blogging bundle uses. In blogging.rb I used the following statement:
@client ||= MetaWeblogClient.new(@host, @path, 80, 'localhost', 8080)
If you need authentication, the next two parameters in that function call are user and password. I might look into making this a UI thing or rather, get it to retrieve proxy settings from System Preferences. However, I notice that the Blogging bundle doesn’t even store weblog passwords in the keychain.
So, no posts for a long time. So much has happened in the intervening time between this and the predecessor post.
In a nutshell, I:
(also a nice 20″ widescreen Dell monitor)I just bought a copy of David Allen’s GTD so hopefully my personal productivity will have a sharp increase in the near future.
I went to see Buck 65 for the second time with Gareth last week in Whelans. Just like the last time, he autographed my ticket. Such a cool guy. I really have respect for modern artists like him, he’s not afraid of change, and knows his loyal fanbase will support him and bring him Winegums. He has a “mix tape” available from his website, although it’s not clear to me what license it’s released under so I assume copyright which makes derivative works impossible.
I’ve started playing with colinux on my laptop yesterday and got it to boot my dapper partition. I’m very impressed. It’ll come in handy sometime. (I usually run windows *yuck* on my laptop to play flash or some propriatary format or just to try out some software)
I’ve been wanting for ages to use my laptop display as an extra display for my linux desktop. I know there is at least 1 windows program that does this for windows. On linux, there is Xdmx. It acts as a proxy X-windows server connecting to multiple backend X servers. I managed to get an executable for cygwin, but after installing the 400mb of cygwin, realised that i was doing it backwards! What I need is to run xdmx on my desktop and connect to an x server on the laptop. Speaking of, xming seems way nicer than running cygwin as an xserver. Unfortunately, I have XGL running on my desktop and I think i’ll keep it for a while, so I’ll have to come back to this plan (unless someone makes xgl and xdmx work nicely, if even possible, probably aiglx would be much better). I now even have problems getting xdmcp to work, and I don’t see why, unless there’s something I’m not seeing in my gdm settings.
On another note, fonts for older applications like gnu-emacs, xmms and Gtk1 apps look terrible on my desktop and I can’t seem to find out why. It may be because my original install was from a beta. The fonts are massive, and worse really badly aliased.
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
makes no difference. Help!
