Older blog entries for BenFrantzDale (starting at number 24)

17 Jan 2003 (updated 17 Jan 2003 at 05:38 UTC) »

A suitemate of mine from college won't be returning in the Spring. He's a Marine and is going off to war. Politics has never hit so close to home. Wow.

I went winter hiking for the first time today and climbed a few thousand vertical feet. That was quite fun; the view was beautiful.

It got me thinking about experiences. In particular, I think I've been trying to enjoy experiences that are non-trivial to enjoy. This is true from food to experiences. For example, hiking at less than 10 degrees Fahrenheit today expanded my sense of what is enjoyable; I think this is essentially because it was non-trivial. The same goes for things like martinis mentioned in my previous post. While I really can't say I like martinis, after having a few (not in the same evening, mind you) I am starting to understand what people like about them. And with food, if some population thinks some food is worthwhile, I really want to know why. After going from hating to loving mushrooms (among other things), nothing is sacred. I have started to come around on broccoli; beef with broccoli is quite good, for example.

This leeds me to consider the difference between saying “I don't like x” and saying “I cannot appreciate x.” My tentative stance is that the later is a sign of closedmindedness, as long as x is not dangerous and is appreciated by some group of people. I'm curious what others think about this.

Word of the day: shank (with reference to shoes): The part of the sole beneath the instep connecting the broader front part with the heal. Apparently these used to be made of metal which made for terribal insulation in old hiking boots.

15 Jan 2003 (updated 17 Jan 2003 at 05:16 UTC) »

I just got directed to Googlefight. Give some a try. Some entertaining ones: free software v. open source, Debian v. Redhat.

My grandfather pointed me to this:

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
After four I'm under my host!
   — Dorothy Parker
and this:
There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it's the gin.
   — A Drink with Something in It by Ogden Nash

I visited RPI today; I spent my freshman year there. It was good to be back, but I'm glad I transfered. I'm glad to be going to the school where people put this bar monkey together.

Winter Break: Good. I'm doing less computer stuff than I though I would be, but that's probably a good thing.

I'm almost done with GEB. It's still a great book.

I've been listening to lots of music and watching movies.

Music: I Baught Operation: Mindcrime by Queensryche. It's from 1988 (15 years ago now) so it's a bit of a guilty pleasure being an '80s hair band, but it's great none the less.

I also baught Images & Words by Dream Theater. This is also quite good, although their Scenes from a Memory is better IMO.

Operation: Mindcrime made me think about concept albums. Thinking about them, I've really liked every one I've heard. I like how the concept removes any expectation of a sensable story for a song, that way any hokeyness in a song's story can be discounted as part of the overall story. (At least that's how I see it.) Another cool concept album, though I've just heard some of it, is Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by the Flaming Lips.

As for movies, I liked Two Towers quite a lot. I also liked War Games (which I finally saw), Y Tu Mamma Tambien, and Donnie Darko.

We keep getting a dusitng of snow every night, which is great.

I'm home for Christmas. I havn't quite had enough of a break to do serious Gnome stuff, but I hope to.

I am attempting to learn Dvorak. I've gotten to the point where I don't have to see a key, but that doesn't mean I can type fast. Still, I do get the feeling that it requires much less finger movement.

16 Dec 2002 (updated 16 Dec 2002 at 03:45 UTC) »

Finals are upon us; I have lots to do before I go home.

Now that I have a handle on it, OpenGL programing is lots of fun.

I am loving Free Software these days.

I recently installed GAIM out of CVS, which gives me a panel docklet agin. It is just so nice. I've been talking with Sean Egan, one of the GAIM developers I met at the GNOME summit this summer. I encouraged him to change the default name colors from #ff0000 and #0000ff to something more gnome-like. Apparently he got two response: one “I think the old colors were much better” and one “Why does Gaim hardcode the colors at all?”. I tend to agree with the latter of those. If only the widget they use supported stylesheets of some sort...

The fact that Mozilla finally looks like GTK is great! If only the Debian galeon packagers would point Galeon to the “classic” Mozilla theme.

I also got Gimp1.3 installed. More wonderful GTK2 goodness. Plus, it's handling of selections seems much easier to get used to for those new to the Gimp.

I also have been using Rhythmbox. Unfortunately it's still crashing some (I submitted bug reports, of course). It does look cool, though. I'm really ready for something other than the Winamp interface used by XMMS.

I'm trying to experiment with Evolution 1.2's meeting planer, but wombat keeps crashing... (More bug reports.)

I took the CS GRE on Saturday. Something about not intending to go to grad school next year (and maybe not in CS at all) made it much less stressful.

The old techno instrumental song “Popcorn” is cool.

11 Dec 2002 (updated 11 Dec 2002 at 21:56 UTC) »
mathieu, what are you wondering, exactly? If you are looking for general information, try: The first two of these are particularly good and very concise. If you do much writing and care about how it looks, I would recomend all three.

While I'm on the topic, Edward Tufte's three-part series on visual explanation is also great.

...and my favorite pet peve: If you mean “to” by a dash, as in “1–10”, use an en-dash (– in html, “--” in TeX). Otherwise you get this ugly thing: “1-10.”

Cool stuff:

I got Gaim out of CVS yesterday. GTK2 Gaim with a panel docklet is sweet.

I got rhythmbox going yesterday too. Also cool, 'though I had some stability issues.

Put this in your makefiles:
grep -C2 -n -i fixme *.{cpp,h}

That way when you compile you get

setup.cpp-259-  *CCM = translate;
setup.cpp-260-
setup.cpp:261:  // FIXME... LookAt isn't fully implemented, but it isn't used by the
setup.cpp-262-  // viewer program anyway.
setup.cpp-263-

I had a good thanksgiving weekend; now I'm back at school for two weeks of all-out work before the end of the semester. Wee!

I flew United Airlines, which I'd never done before (and given their financial situation, I'm not sure if I will again). The cool thing about United is that they give you headsets and a bunch of channels of audio all of which suck except for channel 9 which is the cocpit radio. You get to hear what's going on, what the tower tells your plane to do, etc. I highly enjoyed it.

I'm working on an OpenGL programing assignment for Graphics. OpenGL-like rendering is a very clever way to do fast 3D graphics. For those of you wondering how it works but who don't know exactly, here's the gist:

  1. Start with a model made from polygons. (Colors are defined at verticies.)
  2. Clip the scene to fit your viewing volume.
  3. Transform the scene so that it fits in a regular viewing volume. (Also scale by depth for a perspective effect.)
  4. For each polygon in the scene, draw it on the scene, interpolating colors. (To avoid having to sort polygons by depth, which would be O(n lg n), keep track of the distance to every pixel written to and only overwrite a pixel when the new value is nearer.)
26 Nov 2002 (updated 26 Nov 2002 at 07:03 UTC) »

I've got lots of stuff to do before break.

My team for CS124, User Interface Design, posted our beta of a course search tool. It's pretty good, but more comments are always welcome.

I just had an idea for dealing with web bookmarks. The issue people always have is not wanting to sort bookmarks when creating them. Galeon's “Add bookmark to...” submenu is a big help, but sometimes I don't know where to put something. To fix this, you should be able to dump bookmarks into one pile but then be able to search them. When the bookmark is made, keywords could be grabbed off the page to aid in searching.

This would be particularly good for those “this is a cool link, I might want it later” cases.

baruch, ChkTeX looks pretty cool. I've often thought about writing something like that. I do wonder about some of what it's catching, though. For example:

Warning 38 in low-fidelity.tex line 137: You should not use punctuation in front of quotes.
another wanted ``all time slots except for those I've already filled.''
                                                                    ^
Warning 8 in low-fidelity.tex line 144: Wrong length of dash may have been used.
we used two colors for blocks---black for scheduled courses, and
                             ^^^
Warning 12 in low-fidelity.tex line 146: Interword spacing (`\ ') should perhaps be used.
conflict (i.e., more than one course listed for the same time slot). One
The last one I can see, I guess, but the first two seem corret. I'll look into that program when I have more time.
21 Nov 2002 (updated 21 Nov 2002 at 05:57 UTC) »

In my lack of free time I made a Perl/CGI script that queries Amazon's XML interface to give you (partial) BibTeX entries. You can try it out here: http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~ben/cgi-bin/AmazonBibTeX/show_bibtex.pl?asin=0201134489 The asin CGI field takes the ASIN number (or list of numbers) for any product Amazon knows about. (Apparently ASIN=ISBN for books.)

I wish Amazon had full publisher info like loc.gov does, but loc.gov's catalog doesn't have easy XML access...

I got pictures back from my dive on Saturday, but the camera apparently didn't work right, so only half of them even tried to come out. Oh well.

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