For some odd reason, I've been playing a bit of chess lately and enjoy it much more than I used to. I think my pattern matching skills have got better since I used to play it.
One day to go until I leave the country for the wedding. It's all so exciting!
Hey hub - I didn't know you were a member of RFF. I'm there myself but not for long. Am currently using Fed's 2 (Fed-50 lens) and 4(I-61 lens - superb!), Konica C35, and recently got my dirty mitts on a Fujica 35 EE which is a laugh. Waiting for the test roll to come out on that one, but the Russian twins work well. The Fed 4 in particular (rather the I-61) is surprisingly good. I'm getting A3 prints from Superia 200. Got some Reala (100) for my wedding to get the best picture.
And I have TeX installed on my new machine now: MikTeX precisely. It compiled my book on stats after downloading a needed module.
For music, I'm using Songbird which is an iTunes clone but much faster and under the GPL.
That's good because this open source stats project needs contributions and I suggested the code to my book - which is in TeX (lots of equations and code listings - the shallow learning curve is worthwhile!). There are 9 forms of quantiles in there for some reason - I think even SAS only does 5.
The problem is that I don't know which publishers I should aim for with this book - or even if self-publishing is the only way to go.
I've also been having some thoughts about extracting documentation from forums. With a popular piece of software, there is often a dedicated forum for it. But often, questions are worded wrongly (in ways that the people with the answers don't understand), repeatedly, and irrelevantly. A good piece of software would take the questions, work out which are along the same lines, work out responses to those questions, and compile them into a document with irrelevant information removed: like an automatic faq creator using forums. No firm ideas as of yet, but it would be a useful thing for open source to capture the community to provide documentation.
I have less than 4 days to go before I leave the UK! Then, 8 days later, I will be married to Jell. I'm quite nervous about it but also very excited. In fact, I think my nerves are more about flying there than getting married!
Lake Taal in the Philippines at sunset
I've been chatting to a man in New Zealand who is starting a new open source statistics program which sounds interesting. More details to follow. I suggested that the code I worked out for "PythonStats" (the book) could be useful for this purpose.
Am just reading about Antonio Rosmini and his philosophy. Curiously for a philosopher, he was also a Catholic priest which may explain why his ideas are less well known than others. So far, I'm working on his ideas of the problem of knowledge which is an interesting side-path from German critical philosophy and British skepticism.
Just been using the VLC player to watch a DVD. Sadly, it's almost unusable. Why? Because some bright spark decided to have the left mouse click force full screen (or a return to a window if already in full screen).
Clever? Not really. It just means that I can't use the mouse to select anything off the menu (though I can start the movie by clicking on a button, I can't, for example, switch on subtitles). It just sends me into and out of full screen mode. Can't seem to find any way to correct this either. Checking the VLC forums, it seems that a lot of people thought this was a kewl idea without actually thinking it through (ie, making a proposal that suits them but not considering other users). I could make a post to the VLC forums, but it means registering etc and frankly I'm bored and would rather watch a movie. So I used Windows Media Player instead.
Maybe I'll try to do something some other time, but missing something like this isn't impressing me. I'm sure there are hotkeys available somewhere, but again, life is just too short and I want to watch a movie, not search through badly made preferences dialogs.
Bad news. I've just been receiving my first load of spam where the spammer is (presumably) using someone elses email but this time has had the sense to use the emailers real name gotten from the email address.
Mismatches between the emailers 'name' and the name on the email address is one of the ways which I use to determine spam from real email. Quite often, I will get something like this:
See section SqRt. from Mislaid Intentionality <abby.smith@hotmail.com>
Now however, it is:
See section sqrt. from Abby Smith<abby.smith@hotmail.com>
This, for me, makes it harder to distinguish between real and spam emails, particularly when the subject seems technical. The spam checker we use at Cardiff University doesn't seem to be too hot either. It seems to get 100% correct rejections but a low rate of incorrect acceptances (so much less than perfect rate of accuracy).
I want to download some public domain movies to burn onto DVD for collection and the choice is surprisingly good!
From archive.org, I managed to find some real gems.
The last two are surprising. Escape from Sobibor because it's relatively recent, and Rashomon because it's such a well known and well respected film. However, a Japanes court apparently ruled that all films made prior to 1953 are to be given to the public domain. This should include a few of Akira Kurosawa's films though not quite the Seven Samurai (which I bought the DVD of anyway).
So I've downloadeda a bittorrent client to handle some of these downloads. My home connection is incredibly unreliable and breaks often make it impossible to me to resume downloads using FireFox.
Updated - except that archive.org doesn't do bittorrent downloads. :-( Never mind, I got a GPL download manager (based on wget) which seems to be handling things fine. I've already got a Stan Laurel film and Nosferatu, now for Rashomon and the 39 Steps (Hithcock & Robert Donat).
Well I have my new machine now. It's a jump from 700Mhz to 3GHz (and 8 times the RAM, faster bus, bigger cache etc).
It came pre-installed with Vista which surprisingly seems to work rather well. I was quite impressed.
However, my attempts to install Linux have stalled. The only moderately recent distro I have is ubuntu and there is a problem with my mother board. The Live CD (which I would use to partition the HD ready for install) gets so far and then isn't recognised. Checking the Ubuntu fora showed that it's a known problem with no effective work-around for me. :-(
The problem apparently occurs in a few Linux distros (Slackware etc) so I guess all my Linux goodness will have to wait, particularly as I know little about the programming needed to provide a fix. Shame really, because I was looking forward to getting my hands dirty again.
My old computer ("Marge") is dying like my laptop ("Homer") did last year. Shame. It's a work computer but quite old - maybe 6 or 7 years? I can hear the HD wheezing and the PSU seems to have problems too. The problem is that work doesn't have any more old machines for me to borrow.
So I'll have to get a new computer which isn't so good because I have my wedding, honeymoon and lots of new things to pay for and these have to take precedence. However, I should be able to stretch the finances a little more and get a new box (nb, without keyboard, mouse, monitor etc of course!).
But the good news is that I can get one with a decent sized HD which means I will have room to dual boot OS's. I'm wondering which OS to use and tend towards Ubuntu. I tried it before a few years ago and liked it. Being able to run Linux again will help me to get more involved in coding once more. I doubt I will get much time to do so because I will be embarked on married life (and my wife comes first), but at least the opportunity is there if I have a few spare hours.
The machine comes pre-installed with Vista. I need to use a version of Windows (some OS-specific software is needed for work - boo!) but I think it might not work on Vista. That means a retrograde to XP if possible.
But I can imagine me spending most of my time nestled back with Linux goodness - back to the Unix clone I know and love so much! :-) I always found myself being more efficient when working with Linux, and I imagine that it's improved in my time away.
And there are just 5 weeks until our wedding! I am so excited about this! Jell has been working hard preparing things (even making the invitations by hand - and she's done a fantastic job of them) and I wish I could help her more. But being the other side of the world, it's difficult to do so. I guess nobody can expect what married life will bring if they've never been married before, and it's going to be an adventure, probably unlike anything I've done before: But we will explore it together! :-)
Yuck - have been feeling very ill indeed over the last day and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's a combination of various stresses, poor diet, and too much smoking.
But all else is well. Plans for the wedding seem to be doing well and soon I'll be looking for a house for me and my wife to live in. Work is fun and I'm progressing towards getting the book done on time.
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