Latest entries in lifestyle

This is apparently what happens when I experiment with new technology for months and don't post anything. I can't say much more than that I am thankful I at least got one good dump out on the internet. Heh.

Anyone stopping by here are exempt of reading any of this of course. The following 7 posts (which is the likely number of unread updates given there's been, what, 4 months) are a short version of my experiences with certain bits of web technology. Essentially, my road from
1. PHP.CodeIgniter.SQL
2. Python.Django.SQL
3. Python.Django.MongoDB
4. JavaScript.NodeJS.MongoDB.
+ My experience randomly changing to a the Colemak keyboard layout. I am very happy to see that sufficient amounts of my rebellious spirit remains to do something so unnecessary. Something that ultimately just annoys the fuck out of everyone.

Anyway. According to the age old Irenicus quote on my profile; this is, and always has been, my manual brain organizer. It's likely not useful for you, but you are allowed to peek in for.. I don't know, 2050s historical reasons, perhaps you even need to document a hitherto undiscovered neural condition!

It's interesting to imagine what your legacy will be given the current evolution of the internet. I bet that at some point, there will be some sort of steam-like achievement to do have to read through certain internet journals to unlock a particular secret. I hope for your sake that journal is not mine.

but a man can dream..

It's been months. A record long break from my random core dumps here at clux.org. I have been busy - doing cool and very unnecessary things. First on the list is something entirely unnecessary; my change to the colemak layout.

For the first time in my life, I feel QWERTY is weird to use (and comparatively hard to type as well). Why, would I do this? I was reading first about the benefits of DVORAK (a similarly crazy layout) which aimed to reduce the number of awkward finger movements using analysis of language and layout experimentations. My problem with DVORAK is that they moved important shortcut keys like X, C, W, Q, S and T so far away from left CTRL that the benefit disappeared. That was a deal-breaker.

Brothar has been taunting me with his DVORAK wpm (a huge improvement on his dyslexic QWERTY speed), and while I wanted to change, my attachment to passwords kept me out for a bit. A few months ago, I figured out that I could bind Alt-Shift (in both Ubuntu and W7) to change back to QWERTY for passwords (because I have some ludicrously long ones that are pattern based). Anyway, this was a triumph. Albeit hard initially, I am now close to my old qwerty speed, but it feels much more effortless. Also, I get the added bonus of annoying everyone who wants to type on my computer to show off their skills. They will type in a few cool commands with their complete control of QWERTY, but it will of course come out as gibberish, soothing me greatly. I may not know a whole lot about debugging C yet, but at least I can use this really annoying keyboard layout.

So, how good is it? Take the 2 minute typing test (post you QWERTY scores please). I used to get around 85 before the switch after years and years of use. I am inching very close to that now, almost hitting the 80 mark, but I have a lot of improvement left in me. For the first time in my life, I am actually using some proper variant of two handed touch, not some 2x3 finger self-taught hybrid. As I wanted to properly learn that, one might as well go all the way. Colemak consistently beats Dvorak (by a little), and QWERTY (by loads) in the least number of finger repeats, and the least meters travelled metrics, and you will feel it eventually. But you might have to use it for a month before you can get the benefit of it.

Aim for 60wpm in the first two weeks

It’s been a while since my last status update on here, but unusually important events have been going on in my life. Events that might put this site under scrutiny. Scrutiny that can cast a shadow of self-doubt over any self-conscious blogger, not to mention one with the prospect of being hired. In all honesty, I should probably have cared more about leaving my inappropriate email on my CV. Incredibly surprising story short, I was hired, and am now known as the analsandblaster.

In the interest of preserving my defective cautiousness, I will only say that I work just outside of London, am supposed to be programming in C++, and there’s a ton of really cool and powerful technology in use over here. Excitement++ in other words.

There has not been much programming for me so far, as I have just received two giant books filled with specifications and standards required to understand anything. Which leads me to what I really came here to talk about.

I have discovered a pretty good recursive measure of how well you truly know a topic. Say you are given a technical book, and you are a good student who Wikipedias for everything that seems important but do not understand. If such a result returns a page containing other critical definitions also necessary to Wikipedia to understand the original, you would have to make a recursive Wikipedia call. If you average 3 recursive calls (or 3 sub-calls from the original in some branching fashion) then you will find it very frustrating to be a good student. If you average close to 0, you are an expert filling in the blanks, but anything over 1.5 means you know very little.

This number is essentially the measure. I was going at a pretty solid 1 today, so I propose we call this unit of measurement one clux after my mediocre performance, and measure it in sub-wikis per wiki, defining the edge measurement to be infinity for 0 wikis.

if this gets adopted, I am either bound for a new nick, or mediocrity

Recently tried switching from qwerty to colemak keyboard layout, and it is growing on me like a colony of e-coli on room temperature beef. Started out with around 86 wpm qwerty speed (with this test), and after 3 days of just occasional testing (still primarily on qwerty), I have my colemak speed at over 40 wpm already.

It feels like it has great potential for speedy typing, and with very few finger repeats, it provides excellent cruise control through my carpal tunnel. I might go through with changing to it. For now, however, here's a gem of attitude from the test (click in for image).

Bored with that whole facebook thing now; you know where to find me. I would explain a bit more, but in reality there are plenty of reasons why one might do this, and I know seeing this would summon at least some level of envy. The main reason though: it is just too stalky to have every tiny conversation saved (and shared with their ridiculous privacy policies), and be identifiable to anyone you just remotely know. If you read this, then you know at least enough about me to attribute my nickname to my face. That is, laughably, a stronger criterion than being a facebook friend.

If you want to build up your ego (e-penis) online, at least do it in public and with a measure (perhaps the Wiener measure) that actually means something!

I refer simply to the social networks tag in this post to see that my view has not really changed in the 3 or so years I have been on it. Has it really improved just because there are more people on there?

Also, a large part of my family is on there now. No offence to you guys, but it sort of kills the buzz.

In recent times, my brother and I decided to establish a tradition of using as many amazingly awkward Norwegian phrases as if they made equal sense in English as possible. One in particular I like is the word we have for domestic; the inside-country.

Now there is nothing wrong with this notion, but logically, if leads to the notion of the outside-country. This is actually used to describe issues that relate to the opposite of domestic, like, say foreign policies. To make it even better, we refer people not from the inside-country, as inhabitants of the outside-country. Confused? You shouldn’t be. It’s the kind of geographically simplifying notion you’d expect from the here be dragons crowd. I am simply an outlander to you, and if you took the only member of the opposite sex that is willing to associate with me (and is not above 40) hostage, you would actually be able to use the phrase:

Outlander! We have your woman!

Ahem. Today, on the other hand is one of those rare events that for some tenuous reason I have deserved to receive outlander mail. These reasons (and I use plural lightly here) are not forgetting family birthdays - which has actually become impossible with the advent of gcal. Anyway, these are the only things in the mail I get that does not want my money and they help maintain the very bloodied illusion of a thriving social life. The fact that in the last month, all my text messages came from two senders, and that one of them was orange, should be a good indication of how near extinct this illusion actually is.

I am getting to the point of my story now. Whenever my mail has been written by a person over 60, it is almost always indecipherable to me and any of my friends that I have asked. It is probably generation gap resulting from not being taught fancy handwriting properly in school (or that all my friends are also male), but when I look down at this eldritch font that they always use, I think to myself; this is the stuff old people would need to use if they ever wanted a section of the internet for themselves. Imagine a CAPTCHA, OCR-hard, but also indecipherable to young people. It would be epic (for them). If it ever is invented, let it be known that I first named it!

In the mean time, I use my own 60+ deciphering software I found on gtalk. It’s called mum.

As a break in the unusually frequent gaming focused posts popping up, here's some photos of the small aesthetic things in my life. These primarily consist of exquisite food, and the Syrian hamster version of Lord Nibbler - with the same name. Fortunately, the feast of a thousand hams for the hamster counterpart generally consists of leafs and carrots, as opposed to whole zebras and giraffes.

I get all the good food.

Vacation time is at an end, and the big freeze here in Britain is over - i.e. 3 cm of snow that forced people to take a day off due to ridiculous driving conditions. I say ridiculous, of course, with at least a slight hint of derision - the degree of which depends solely on to whom I speak. Yes, snow days are welcome, but for what normally represents a day to appreciate nature's beauty, having it replaced by a pathetic display of a culture - only a few more degrees south - completely unprepared for the slightest weather change. Variety. That is the keyword. If you don't get beauty, you at least get humour.

Photos from Yule 2009 have been sorted through at any rate. They should be up shortly. Nothing like the combination of a new camera and the rare perfect white yule. I loved it – see photos above – but it seemed few people shared my apprecition. It might have something to do with me sleeping past that vital part of the day where shoveling is required. I am, however, counting on the effects of a quickly pasted link to my snow shots to ameliorate my biased appreciation.

As for my camera. Yes, I finally have got a DSLR, and it will asymptotically consume at least 12/7ths of the space of my old one – counting only megapixels and not raw file usage. But while I am working on my 4th year project I will try to simply catch up on my backlog of photos first.

Had yule held up to our old gaming standards, there would be no photos up yet though. Fortunately, my Norway computer resembles the radio equivalent of something running entirely on tubes and hamster electricity. This was partially to blame for our short LAN party’s inability to produce the extreme amount of gaming we used to crave, but rather the necessary page of javascript and php to get the galleries up and running. After the stress test they recieved a few weeks ago, they seem to have no problems.

15 gigs of traffic. 4 photos.

epi-log-yule

My girlfriend posing in a bikini by Longum for your benefit. Hope you enjoy, and remember that when these kind of shots appear here, this should dramatically simplify your facebook stalking needs from our behalf. Go ahead, remove us from fb, do yourself a favour.

By the way, you really do not want to look at her like that, she might like it as much as you do.

Also, as a final warning to parents who still continue to defy my admonishments about browsing my site. Herein lies only semi-naked girls serving only as a depressing reminder of our bodily deterioration. For the normal internet demographic it serves different purposes. We youngsters call it research.

It’s Yule. I arrived back on Thursday to witness the Siberian frost wave creating a rare but welcome white holiday. The temperature ticks in at about -10 quite regularly, so while following my old photographic hobby is a welcome pastime, I am secretly glad the weather isn’t amazing all the time. Having got some good shots yesterday, a long lasting relaxation procedure has been initiated while the the swine flu innoculant roams my increasingly frustrated veins.

Yes, I got the shot, I probably wouldn’t have needed it, and it’s a bit of a ridiculous way to spend this kind of money overprotecting the nation, but it’s there now, might as well not go to waste. Also it just gets pretty annoying listening to the vaccination is a goverment tool muppets. Or the this isn’t properly tested alarmists. If anything, I would take the shot simply because I believe in statistics. 600 out of 400,000 (humorously enough this is about 1 in 666) reported side effects in Ireland, and most of them being flu like symptoms that I thought was the norm for flu shots. At any rate, one day later, my arm is a bit numb, but not significantly more than what you would expect after visiting the more explicit side of the internet.

We apologize for making such comparisons in a post called White Xmas.

Photos again. As you can see, they are gone. They were the (hopefully only) reason my family visited my site, so I can make statements like the above freely, but I also really liked having them here as well. No, not my family, the photos. Unfortunately, having completely rewritten everything, I put off including it in my original release to make time for studies. Hopefully, the seeminly arduous task of re-implementing it will not be quite as arduous and the photos will start to flow again. I am faced with two options however.

1. Keep the images on Picasaweb, fetch and display all, keep commenting internal.
2. Make a really good multiple upload script (single upload died the day picasa came out), which is a pain, but at least I get to keep everything localised.

The design will be the same for those two options, that shouldn’t be a problem. But I will change it quite a lot from the old clux.org look. Hopefully, something more akin to the boston bigpicture section (see links from today). Javascript based galleries are out.

That is it from the monthly status report. I’ve got cookie men, clementines, the original Yule soda, so presumably another calorific holiday awaits. Although, LAN is rumoured to commence on the 27th, so that might shift this trend into the more familiar malnourishment inducing gaming holiday.

Merry yule.