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00:02 (SAST), February 18, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Right. This is a bit of an experiment. We'll see how it goes over the next few weeks and if all goes well, I'll move it here. It, being a trial replacement for this blogging 'engine'. Currently, it lives here. |
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18:51 (SAST), February 17, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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14:55 (SAST), February 17, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Bruce Schneier pointed out this
photograph illustrating the principle of a weakest link. Whoops.
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14:16 (SAST), February 17, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I just don't understand some people. A hate crime? C'mon. |
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11:35 (SAST), February 17, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Sheesh. Spent the entire evening dreaming I was trying to explain to some of our customers why SHA-1 being broken didn't affect them. That lead into a discussion of what would be required to produce an SSL implementation that allowed our customers to plug in any hashing algorithm they wanted to. Clearly SHA-1 is more important to my subconscious than I'd realised. Ayeyayay. You know when you're in for an interesting time at this company when your boss asks you if your passport is up to date. As long as it isn't the client-from-hell-who-shall-remain-nameless then I'm fine with it. Maybe, if I'm really lucky, it'll be Ireland. Or perhaps Boston? In truth, I suspect nothing will come of it. A good rule of thumb around here is that the more notice you have of an impending trip, the less likely it is to actually happen. Of course, the inverse of that has had me in the air a mere four hours after we made the decision to send someone over. |
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14:54 (SAST), February 16, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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This looks pretty interesting. Basically, they're running a couple of hundred hardware random number generators around the world and finding inexplicable statistical deviations from the expected average which seem to correlate to 'global events'. 9/11, the Tsunami, those sorts of things. The project has postulated what they're calling a global consciousness and believe somehow they've accidentally tapped into it. Even if you ignore that, basically there's something going on here we don't understand. It's even more interesting when you realise that some of these deviations happened before the event they seem to be tied to. Voodoo? Magic? Proof of God? Decide for yourself. |
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14:36 (SAST), February 15, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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God I'm a sentimental schmuck. Digging through various boxes looking for bits and pieces I need to apply for my British passport, I came across this:
No doubt I will one day come to accept that you are gone. |
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23:59 (SAST), February 14, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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These intermittent outages are starting to annoy me. Hopefully they go away when our hosting solution firms up. Anyway, spent the weekend playing with code. Testcases actually, surprise surprise. Finally got mock objects, using Mocquer. Nifty little framework supporting dynamic mock object generation for almost arbitrary classes, something like J2SE 1.3's dynamic proxies. So it's been what? About 2 weeks, since I got involved in this open source project. I can see some benefits immediately. A lot of what I do depends (I believe) on practice, but it's not always easy to come by. It's something I often struggle with with my team. There are only so many opportunities for design, or new, or just interesting code to go around. I've actually written very little code so far for this project, mostly just looked around trying to absorb enough of the original designer's intent and the actual implementation. It's forced me to deal with code laid out counter to the way I tend to write it. It's provided me with an opportunity to practice taking in and understanding someone else's design. And a chance to look for places where it can be improved (there have been a few). I've also had the chance to play with some toys I might not have otherwise. Mock objects is one example. CVS is another. So thus far I haven't really 'contributed', certainly not code. And I'm some way away from even thinking about a first commit. But I think the design's been clarified a little, and I've made another developer think about some things he's not encountered before. And I've seen some things which have made me think about how best to accomplish an aim. Sometimes they're examples, sometimes they're counter-examples. Both are equally useful. So thus far I think it's been productive. And now I'm trying to decide (correction, we're trying to decide) if buying a machine for the loft makes sense. It's a little hard to justify, given the anticipated cost of repairing my bike. It's also a somewhat frivolous expense for me since I have a primary development box (the company laptop). The only good reasons for it are hosting (which I do elsewhere and that's looking to turn into fixed IP hosting option which makes it more attractive than hosting behind ADSL), and a personal development machine, which I'd like to set up but is hard to justify while my attention is focused on work (which is my principal focus simply because of the time invested there). I'm a bit bummed I don't have the cash for this to simply be a non-issue. But I suppose that's life for those of us not rolling naked in piles of cash (imagine the papercuts!). |
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15:26 (SAST), February 12, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Just delivered Mandy's bike to his place out in Scarborough. Of course, the bloodlust runs high again. Must. Have. Bike. Fixed. Sigh .... |
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20:28 (SAST), February 10, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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It seems I have a bit of a fan club ;-) |
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17:36 (SAST), February 8, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I had the most exhausting dream last night. I spent the entire night hiking up a mountain, base jumping off it, only to start the cycle again. Sheesh. |
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01:32 (SAST), February 7, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I've got a little experiment going at the moment. I've switched to a gmail account for my personal mail. Google has been pretty good at identifying spam (better than SpamBayes which has served reasonably well up until now). Anyway, Google automatically deletes spam after 30 days, and I'm too lazy to continually empty out my spam folder, so I figured I'd leave it and see where it settled. Basically, I'm waiting to see how much spam I get in a month. So far, since the 22nd of January, I have been the victim (like, we're all victims man) 2009 instances of spam. That's what, about 15 days? If I'd actually followed up on any of them I suppose I'd have a permanently erect 25 meter long penis and breasts too large to see over. Damn skippy, what am I waiting for? |
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14:04 (SAST), February 6, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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It just occurred to me that, while I may not own a webcam, I own a digital camera,
a small tripod, and software that supports remote shooting. All the necessary
ingredients. Now, if only I were more photogenic :-P ...
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13:44 (SAST), February 6, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I was going to start this with a stock phrase like "What is the world coming to?" but it's not like the World is any different now to a year ago. This was just random and sad and utterly pointless.
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01:39 (SAST), February 6, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I offered to assist with a Source Forge project a few days ago. I've been meaning to get involved in an open source project for a long time now, but I think it's quite hard to do without a serious home connection. It's also just hard. There just aren't the same kinds of incentives to 'get the job done' as there are in commercial software. Take this project for example. I offered to help because they need someone to plug in and test an FTP component. Not exactly brain surgery; something I can do very easily and quickly for them. However, I've now inherited a large-ish chunk of code written by someone else, with almost no comments, and formatted loosely based on Sun's recommended conventions, which in my opinion largely suck. Sun really got this one wrong. Just a few lowlights:
But enough of the Sun bashing. Point is, picking up someone else's code is usually quite difficult. There's the temptation to reformat it every-which-way and rename things because you wouldn't have used that name, and so on and so forth. In a commercial software house there's a little more impetus to just get moving, after all you get paid (or more correctly, you don't get paid until you get it done, loosely speaking). In short, I'm amazed that the open source world hangs together so well. I think one of the reason Source Forge has almost 100,000 registered projects is because many many people would rather work on their own version of XYZ, instead of getting involved in someone else's equivalent project. They have about a million registered users, giving a ratio of about 10 devs to each project. Since some projects have many more devs, there are plenty of projects with a single dev. So we'll see how it goes. I have to admit, one of the other things which I think I've long since realized is quite important to me is interation with other devs. Real, physical white-board based interaction. Not mail. Not IM. Whiteboard. Good old-fashioned hand waving UML-forget-UML-this-thing-plugs-into-that-thing-like-so style interaction. Not much of that available on Source Forge. It might be different in the states where there's a bigger chance you'll actually be able to work together, but I suspect not. Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot of projects with two devs and they're usually from the same part of the world. I suspect they're two friends who decided to open source their private project. That might be a more interesting prospect. |
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16:03 (SAST), February 5, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I don't understand why shopping centres (malls to our American Overlords) reduce the majority of otherwise ordinary people to one of two states: simpering, drooling idiots, or violent, rage-filled bastards. Earlier today I watched fascinated as an elderly lady nearly bit someone packing the shelves into the vegetable section because she got between the woman and something (her trolley, some carrots, her sanity, who knows). Utterly unbelievable how much both temperment and IQ seem to fluctuate in the vacinity of tills and groceries. |
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01:39 (SAST), February 5, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Oops. You know, the MPAA/RIAA just keep missing the point. Well, there are two (at least) significant points in my opinion. First, this whole piracy is theft campaign ignores the subtle difference between stealing say a car (there is only one, you've denied the original owner access to it) and pirating music/videos (a perfect replica is possible such that the original owner is unaffected, and more significantly, unable to distinguish between the two copies). The second point is that, at least for me, but I suspect this applies to a lot of people, it's not about getting stuff for free. I'm happy to pay for digital content. It's about the convenience you schmucks. I don't want to have to go out and dig through 200 copies of Britney Spears clones to find the music I'm after (assuming they even have it). But, that said, I want it unencumbered. Once I've bought it it should be mine to do as you please. It should not expire because I'm no longer paying a monthly fee. I want to own it free and clear. The lumbering dinosaurs that are the MPAA and RIAA fear what they don't yet understand and as a result, they're missing out on a potentially huge opportunity. These people annoy me. |
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01:15 (SAST), February 4, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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An extremely useful suggestion. |
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00:38 (SAST), February 4, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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22:25 (SAST), February 3, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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20:01 (SAST), February 3, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Two completely vaguely related topics to share on. Cars. Not really my area of expertise, but that's never stopped me from having opinions before. I've often wondered if there's some reason why right hand drive cars turn more easily to the left. I presume the handedness of the car is the most likely reason (although maybe indirectly; more shortly) because of the law (well, more like a rule of thumb) of symmetry much of physics is based on. If it's pulling in one direction then there must be something asymmetric as the root cause. And no, it's not the alignment. I get that checked more often than I really need to precisely because of this little oddity. I have a few theories here though:
Then, manual versus automatic transmission. I can't stand the thought of having to drive an automatic. It feels stupid, like I can't get it together long enough to coordinate a gear change and stay in my lane. Don't get me wrong, I can understand the appeal if you don't particularly enjoy driving. But I do, so zero appeal for me there. It's one of the things I like about biking. Changing gears with your feet, how cool is that? |
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04:45 (SAST), February 3, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Proclamations like this just piss me off. Basically he's saying that, despite not having actually looked at the language, he doesn't like it, for various reaons, including the fact that he doesn't know anyone that loves the language. It's even more annoying because on many topics he's very coherent and has some considered opinions. Java let's you play at a different level than many of the languages he's talking about. For example, I'm playing with a little framework I wrote a while back that essentially handles process shipping. You get to write a small thread implementation which can be serialized to another JVM instance and started there. Yes, this is possible with languages like Python (with it's pickle library) but Java has focused from day one on safety, since it was intended to be the language of choice for dynamic web content (in the form of applets). So it's possible (and quite easy) for me to restrict what those threads can do on another JVM. I don't think that's possible (let alone simple) to do in Python. I may be wrong, but I've always felt Java let's you work at a higher level of abstraction than a lot of other languages. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to say Java's better than Python (or any other language) but rather that they have different strengths and weaknesses. Like all languages. I doubt there will ever be a universally accepted 'best' language. There's just too much variety in the range of tasks we ask computers to do for us. I happen to like Java. But there are tasks I would do in Python before even considering Java. And there are tasks that I don't believe either are particularly suited to. Long live variety.
Now, how the hell am I going to multiplex a serialized object and a request-response
pair for it's bytecode on the same connection? It looks like a chicken-and-egg problem:
by the time you know you need the bytecode for the class, you still have stuff on the wire
that needs to be consumed before you can expect to get bytecode off the wire. But, to
consume it you need to return a |
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13:58 (SAST), February 2, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Little bit of unexpected downtime due to a blown motherboard. Hardware sucks. Why can't it be as reliable as software (hardeharhar). |
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16:45 (SAST), January 31, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Why can't people indicate? What's wrong with them that this simple physical act escapes them? If I don't indicate then I feel incomplete. I've taken indicating to extremes, like in a deserted underground parking lot. But that's because it's a REFLEX, which is exactly what it's supposed to be. And there's a causality requirement to. You need to do it before you try to occupy my lane. Changing into my lane (forcing me to slow down to miss you), then indicating, then limp-wristedly waving out of your window as if to say "Sorry old chap, ho ho, wasn't that a close one" is a sufficient condition for being declared an oxygen thief. |
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04:53 (SAST), January 31, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I think the world of Java development is getting itself into a bit of a twist. Too much abstraction is as bad (if not worse) than too little. If I have to play with one more library that has a top level interface and six layers of abstract classes for every little concept I'll, well I dunno, I suppose I'll just be a little more annoyed than I am already. |
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22:35 (SAST), January 29, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I try to resist posting links to sites here. I'd rather this didn't turn into a bookmark repository. But I've been at a bit of a loss since getting ADSL. While there are all sorts of things it makes possible, like regular access to personal email, regular blogging here, reference materials when someone asks you what febrile means, and so on, it feels like I had a lot more to do when I first found the Internet. And even years later, in the Firth Rd digs, with only a 64k line, there was always stuff to do. Admittedly, a 64k line means stuff just takes longer, and I suppose I was largely full time employed outside of varsity, but still. Dammit, where have all the websites gone? Where was I? Oh, yes, links. This site is quite interesting. Norma says hi. |
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20:26 (SAST), January 28, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Dropped the bike off yesterday. Everyone involved was extremely helpful. The guy I dropped it off with was extremely positive. Says he can't really tell until he takes it apart but he'd imagine something in the region of 10k. So we'll see. Never got round to the doctor. Always seems to be something more to do. Getting away from the office takes such an effort (yesterday was easy, I just didn't go in until we'd dropped the bike off). I'm on leave next week so maybe I'll get to it then. |
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00:22 (SAST), January 28, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Hmmmm. My side is still numb and I think it's more swollen than yesterday. I think I'll see a doctor tomorrow just to be sure. |
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19:47 (SAST), January 26, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Turning my attention to something other than bikes for a moment. My grandfather has been in hospital twice in the last few weeks. He's had heart trouble in the last few years and something somewhere just went wrong. His legs swelled up terribly and he's been in tremendous pain. Doesn't help that he stopped walking, and eventually started sleeping in a chair because it was more comfortable. The latter couldn't have helped his circulation. Basically he's been on international flights nightly for the past few months. It seems we've finally had a bit of a break through (hold thumbs). He saw yet another doctor who sent him to see a vascular surgeon who promptly removed clot after clot from his legs. I haven't seen him since the op earlier in the week but my grandmother says his legs are looking like they've shed 10kg apiece. I'm not really sure why I've said nary a whit on this page. I think I treat doctors like most other professionals. In general I have the utmost faith in them. It's there speciality. I know if someone brings me a problem in my domain that I'll figure something out. I may not be able to fix it perfectly, or even correctly, but there's always (in my experience) a plan to be made. The guy who's going to look at my bike is a case in point (sorry, I know I said I'd avoid this topic but it's relevant your honour). I expect that something can be done. I was completely surprised when Honda phoned me. I really honestly expected them to phone and say it can be fixed, it will be about this much. The upshot of this is that I suppose I don't treat illness with quite the respect it deserves. If I cast a beady eye over my past I've always been this way. I know what you're all thinking, blah blah unhealthy blah blah repression ... blah blah hasn't forgiven his dad blah blah first pet dog was a surrogate parent ... but that's just the way it is. (If you were seriously thinking any of that drop me a line, I suspect we'd get on famously). Tomorrow morning is trailer time, which means I might have this whole lot (the bike, yeah, sue me) resolved by the end of the week. At least in terms of knowing what my biking future looks like. Wish me luck (better yet donate cash). |
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22:53 (SAST), January 25, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Sheesh, I really am starting to feel stiff all over. The numbness on my left hand side is still an issue, but I'm told this is normal (unless it persists). Ankle is more swollen than I realised. One good thing is that I think I really appreciate what my bike meant now. It really is much more important to me that it can be fixed, even if it will never be worth a cent to anyone else. I think it would be hard to give up.
Entirely unrelated, I stumbled across
this
earlier. I think it's about time I taught myself a little Lisp (technically it's
Scheme here). Yes, *gasp*, I'm not fully conversant in Lisp.
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20:33 (SAST), January 25, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I think I may have arranged a trailer. So with a little luck maybe we can get what's left of my bike to the guy who's prepared to have a crack at it before the end of the week. Mandy and I took a drive out to look at a potential bike for him. It's a Suzuki RF400. Quite a bice bike, more of a sports tourer than a pure sportbike, which makes sense for the kind of riding he's likely to do. And given where he stays a trip into work is a mini-tour anyway. Nice bike. It was a little hard wandering through the showroom. I've given it some thought, and I think I'm resigned to writing off the financial side of things. I'll be happy if I can just get a few more years out of it. Even if I can't sell it, or have to sell it at a huge loss, I'll be happy. It's the experience, not the money, that's important to me. On a less pleasant note, William, the other party in the incident phoned me today, ostensibly to find out if I was okay, but in truth he just wanted to know whether I would pay for his repairs myself, or have my insurance cough up. His repairs consist of a small scratch on one door and a misalignment in his front right wheel. Now, given that both of these seem to imply that he was at fault (since they suggest I was quite a way alongside him when he began turning), and that he's looking at about R600 worth of 'repairs' whereas I'm looking at possibly having to write-off a 50K investment, I'm inclined to tell him he has a choice: back off and handle it yourself, or I'm going to make something of this and your insurance can cover my expenses. Given the generally positive experience I'm prepared to call it a day and just walk away. But if he's not prepared to accept that then, well, we'll see where it leads ... sigh. |
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23:15 (SAST), January 24, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Okay, so a little uncalled for optimism there. Sheesh. Honda just called to tell me that, in their opinion, it's a write-off. Apparently the engine casing is cracked all the way through and it's a single piece inside. #$%#$@#@#$ The guy I took it to for it's one and only service (Peter) is a bit of a local legend. Almost everyone I know who's owned (or who still owns) a bike recommends him. He's one of those guys who loves bikes. To bits (and then all back into a single piece again). An absolute fanatic. I mentioned Honda's position to him and he expressed his disappointment. I thought that was the end of it but then he phoned back with a name and number of someone to chat to. This guy apparently will fix almost anything. Chatted to him, and he sounded quite positive. He reckons almost anything is fixable and that it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg (just a leg). And if Peter reckons he knows what he's doing then I have complete faith in him. Hell, at least he's prepared to have a crack at it. Honda just weren't interested (they didn't even bother quoting me, reckoned it would cost more than the bike is worth). He's happy to look at it but I need to get the bike to him. This may present a bit of a challenge. Ah bugger. I'm holding myself together at the moment by chanting the magical warm-and-fuzzy phrase: I've got ADSL. Where would we be without porn? (That's a joke). Actually, it's not all bad. In most respects today was quite a positive experience. The traffic officer on the scene was fantastic, despite the fact that I couldn't find my license. I replaced said license in under 20 minutes. The guy across the road was incredible (we had a drink with them after work, they really are a terrific couple). Honda were unhelpful but Peter phoned me back a few times to check on me, and the guy he recommended me at was a voice of optimism at the end of a long, largely negative day. And now I know what it feels like to come off a bike (and walk away). It's hard to explain why that's a good thing. It's important to me because it takes away some of the unknown that makes coming off so frightening. It's not something I plan to do again but it's a good experience to have under my belt. Sleeping tonight will be a little uncomfortable though (my left side is bruised). |
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12:16 (SAST), January 24, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Well, everyone kept telling me it had to happen eventually. I suppose it could have been much worse. Yep, dropped the bike today (with some help from a 'friendly' car). A few bumps and bruises, but nothing major. The bike is going to need a little work though. The biggest damage is to the sump cover on the side. Ripped right off. We await the quote ... |
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21:01 (SAST), January 23, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Browsing this this evening. I'd like to raise a counterpoint. It relates specifically to leadership and it's not something that had ever occurred to me before I took over as team lead. One of the most important things, in my opinion, my 'elevated' position let's me do is take responsibility. This is probably the most valuable thing I can do for my team because it lets them focus on their problems, rather than on defending their solutions. I expect them to look at a problem, propose or collect various solutions, critically evaluate them and then bring a summary to me along with a recommendation. We have that discussion until we're happy with the chosen solution. At that point I 'take over' and it becomes my responsibility. What this means is that if anything screws up as a result of the decision, or if anyone important enough (or noisy enough) doesn't like it, I have to deal with it. Once I take over, my team can essentially forget about it. It stops being their problem. This allows them to be orders of magnitude more productive than I think they would be if I couldn't do what I do. |
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20:31 (SAST), January 23, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Just back from one of the Kirstenbosch Sunset concerts. Really shows off Cape Town at its best, especially when on a glorious Summer day like today. The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra was playing today. Listening to them started me thinking again about something that's been on my mind for a little while now. It started as a conversation about abstract art, something which has always gotten up my nose to some degree. The principle problem I have with abstract art is that I can't see how there can be any real measure by which one artist (or piece) is judged better than another. And no, I don't mean an all or nothing metric that applies to everyone, I understand and accept that one man's art is another man's toilet paper. But I do believe in artistic metrics that are to some degree 'universal'. By universal I mean that if you get a large enough (appropriately representative) group of people together, you'll see a consistent group consensus emerge. I believe this is absolutely essential before you can start to rank artists or art in any meaningful sense. If you can't achieve this kind of universal consensus then you have no right to proclaim one as being better than another; you have no right to put a particular artist or artwork into the Louvre, or the Tate Modern. And the last bit is the important bit. Based on most of my 'discussions' on this topic to date, it's the bit people miss. I'm not trying to take away your right to decide that a piece is better than another piece, or that you like one artist's work more than another's. What I'm saying is that you need something approaching a consistent group consensus before you have any grounds for elevating one above the other as a general statement (i.e. claiming it applies beyond your own personal universe). So how does abstract art fit into this? Well, simply put, I feel that if it's truly abstract art (squiggles and dots and little red triangles trying to get it on with blue squares; think Miro) then there's no root in anything universal. An abstraction of a sunflower (recognisable as such) is different because there's something universal in there (ok, universal within the group of humans who have seen a sunflower). Abstract art in the triangles-and-squares sense represents (in my opinion) something that happens (happened?) only within the artist's skull. As such, there can be nothing that I would consider universal. That doesn't mean you can't find it appealing, or beautiful. But it does mean that there's no way you can possibly find a representative group of people with which to stamp out a metric for ranking one piece above another In a nutshell, I don't think there's any reasonable argument for ranking Miro over another artist producing equivalent pieces. Ok, ignoring the historical context. I'll give you the fact that many of these artists were the first to try what they did. But that's worth nothing but a footnote if you ask me. Otherwise you need to give serious credit to the artist recently who produced a piece that consisted of a porn magazine covered in his own semen. Yeah, I didn't think so. Just in case you're considering labeling me a deconstructionist (or any one of a list of possible terms), let me assure you that I'm not immune to the wiles of art. But I believe good visual art has many parallels with good poetry. In both cases, my own measure of greatness comes down to how succinctly they capture what I would call the essence of something. Good poetry is the kind of poetry that seems to explain in a single line something which you couldn't get down on paper in anything short of a two page essay (and then clumsily; something like this lot I suppose). Similarly, good visual art takes a scene or an event and strips away all of life's 'verbosity', leaving only the core. The concert this evening had me trying to figure out where music fits into this. I've always believed that music that people consider to be beautiful is music which has a simple structure. And I've always equated simplicity with elegance (goes with the territory, simpler code is always better code). I believe this is pretty universal. We see it in math and physics all the time. It's a driving principle. The simpler an explanation it is, the more likely it is to be true (or at least widely applicable). And the Universe always chooses the simplest option. So now we have two theories to reconcile. But before we go there, I have to add another thought on the topic. I think one of the reasons that music seems to stand apart as a form of artistic expression is because it's not something the majority of people have anything more than a superficial exposure to. Myself included. Apart from listening to it and producing (or attempting to produce) it, ideally in the privacy of your own home. Very few people ever really get involved with music. Sounds are not something we're particularly well versed in. Words and pictures we're far better at dealing with. We have an established nomenclature for dealing with them. Witness how hard it is for the average person to identify common sounds in comparison to identifying written concepts or pictographic representations, however divorced from reality. So it's hard to see how universality fits into music. Well, no it's not hard, it's just hard for me to conceptualise what kinds of things might be universal to music. But that's with my limited understanding of music (and almost non-existent musicality). My working hypothesis at this point is that universality is driven by simplicity. If we recognize something then it's easier for us to grasp the whole. So a picture that contains a recognisable tree is simpler because we can file it away as a tree. Taking it in requires less processing and we have more free cycles to spend evaluating it. If it's random noise then it's much harder to 'summarise' it and there are fewer free cycles available for it. It requires 'more work'. Something else has just occurred to me. Maybe some of the appeal of the triangles-and-squares abstract art I've mentioned could be explained because its so simple, and maybe there is an aspect of universality to be had here. Perhaps some pieces are in some sense simpler than others. And perhaps some abstract artists are more prone to producing simpler pieces. I don't really feel like I've provided any clarity (universal or otherwise). But the great thing about a personal blog is that I don't have to. I don't even have to make sense. So consider this a page in my scratch pad for now. Perhaps I'll come back to this topic again. |
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13:53 (SAST), January 23, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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And after a massive redesign and refactoring exercise ... we're back where we started, in terms of output anyway. But it's better ... I promise ... |
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02:53 (SAST), January 23, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Reasonably successful, although I just ran out of useable
And useability might not be great. What works for the object model doesn't always suit the user. Off to bed. Maybe something will come to me while I chatter away (apparently I do this). |
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01:14 (SAST), January 23, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Haven't done this for ages. At varsity I never seemed to need any sleep. These
days I find myself going Sean-and-the-dead on the world by 10pm. I'd started to
suspect that late night coding frenzies were a thing of the past. But this evening
I started with a piece of code that's been rolling around in my skull all day, and
blink-blink it's gone 1am before you can say |
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14:32 (SAST), January 22, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Just plain cranky today. No idea why. Everything just seems to get on my nerves. |
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11:53 (SAST), January 21, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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If you're using FireFox
type |
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21:46 (SAST), January 20, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Following alongside a train in a car is the oddest sensation. Your brain knows the train is moving but as far as your eyes can tell it isn't. And then you hit a pedestrian and it completely breaks your train of thought (haha). |
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21:43 (SAST), January 19, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I don't understand cricket. Scratch that, I don't understand test cricket. What's the point? 5 days long, and statistically you're most likely to end in a draw? What the hell? Some time back I stumbled across a quote that sums it up perfectly.
"A game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity'"
-- Lord Mancroft Mandy and I are ex-office at lunch tomorrow looking at a potential Death MachineTM. |
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08:04 (SAST), January 19, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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The kiddiwinks (no you haven't missed a year, not my kids, "the kids" at large) are back at school. Excitement all round, even spilling over into their parents who, judging from some of the maneuvers I saw attempted this morning, seem to think they're the one on a bike, rather than me. Having lived over the road from the office for most of last year, I'd forgotten what a dog show morning traffic is in the southern suburbs. I'm not really complaining though. Biking in heavy traffic is an altogether different experience. One I quite enjoy now, although when I first started biking it was exceptionally stressful. In less than a year I seem to have progressed from timid little biker kiddie into The King Of The RoadTM (in my own mind anyway). |
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18:43 (SAST), January 18, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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I'm still trying alternate routes home. Fortunately, on a bike, I'm basically unconstrained as far as traffic goes. Today's route was entertaining. Dodging pedestrians on Claremont main road. I'm fairly certain they were doing their best to get an up close and personal tour of my headlight. The bastards move like lightning too. The trickiest variety is the 'yoyo'. They can't seem to make up their minds about where they'll be safest: "Oh oh, better cross quickly. No, maybe I'm safer waiting for him to pass. On second thoughts, the other side does look safer", and so on. Then there's the apologist, who stops in your path, gives you a long (relatively speaking) apologetic look as if to say "I'm terribly sorry but I got here first, better luck next time". Fair enough, but I'm moving at 100km/h and I have right of way. Trying to fathom out this non-operating system called Windows. Two identical laptops. Same spec, same configuration. Both are running Windows 2000 SP4. Same wireless card drivers. Same wireless card (same physical card). On one, the properties page for the associated network connection has three tabs. On the other, two. What gives? Mandy and I are going bike shopping at the end of the week. One down, ten more to go. |
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18:36 (SAST), January 17, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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And we appear to be all systems go. I'm typing this sitting in front of the TV (look ma no wires). |
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08:04 (SAST), January 17, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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They came, they saw, they connected me. Unfortunately, they did it on Saturday, instead of Friday. And the department responsible for issuing me with a username and password, she no work on Saturdays. Bugger. The engineer who did the installation left me with a guest account, but it's limited to telkom.co.za and there's only so much I can read about the anti-telco. And now there's a crackle on our phone line so they're going to have to come in and fix that. Bah. |
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14:34 (SAST), January 12, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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One ADSL modem. Now if Telskum can just get their act into gear and install my line. Phoned to enquire as to the status of my application and was told that they'd allocated a day for installation (without notifying me at all) and that someone would phone me on the day to tell me what time they'd be round to install the line. How does that work? I have a job. It's how I can afford ADSL in the first place. |
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08:33 (SAST), January 11, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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In retrospect, yesterday was a pretty bleh day. I find myself idle far to often at the moment, not because of a lack of work, but because of a lack of work I'm able to drum up enthusiasm to tackle. Once again I find myself questioning if I'm still doing what I want to be doing. Perhaps I'm a victim of the Peter Principle (or a variant). |
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07:53 (SAST), January 10, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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There's absolutely no better way to come into the office in the morning than by bike. Easily the best way to ensure I start the day in the right mood. Joined a local group of biking enthusiasts (calling themselves Pegasus) for a breakfast run to Darling where we feasted (well, okay, ate) at a local joint called Evita se perron. Quite pleast. The ride itself was good too, although the wind got unpleasant on the way back. Quite a range of bikes (and bikers). Everything from a sportbike like mine (in fact a twin to mine in a different colour scheme joined us) all the way through to a Honda Gullwing (two in fact). These are the bikes that rival a car for size and (certainly modern versions) come with aircon/climate control, surround sound, plush leather seats, enough space to smuggle a few refugees over a nearby border for a small price. The guys were a good bunch too. None of the strutting I expected from a group of bikers. All in all, about 25 of us went through and apparently there are about 80 regulars that cycle through the runs when they're available. And it seems like Mandy has given into the dark side. I feel a great stirring in the force. Muwahahahahahah .... |
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14:52 (SAST), January 4, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Rather an unexpected evening last night. Family are down for a week and we went for drinks with them last night, ending up at the house of the people they're staying with. I must be a little slow but eventually hubby comes home and it turns out to be none other than Trevor Quirk himself. Most amusing. But dinner was good and old Trev plied me with more white wine last night than I care to ingest again in a single sitting. Needless to say, this morning I'm the owner of one very delicate stomach. |
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08:31 (SAST), January 3, 2005, Cape Town, South Africa |
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Well, it's been a busy few weeks since I last wound up here. It's getting harder and harder to post anything simply because there's always something more important to do while I'm in the office, and dialup from home is such a schlepp. I'm in the process of remedying this. We moved into our new place (pictures just as soon as the above is resolved). Still plenty to do, but coming along. And of course, the holiday season saw all sorts of family and pseudo-family flocking in to visit. Leave would have been terrific if we hadn't both picked up the flu (or something resembling it) the moment we were out the office door. And my grandfather spent a few days in hospital for what it now turns out is cellutis. I popped in to visit him a few times, which wasn't that easy. We're both emotionally unavailable (I'm told) and hospitals are very intimate places. But I think he appreciated it and I'm glad I could be there. He's done a tremendous amount for my brother and I and I feel (willingly) indebted to him. And this weekend Marc got married. Eish, I see ends-of-an-era all around me.
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