Planet IEEECS

CAPTCHA is back...

2008-08-28T16:18:28+00:00

So apparently I'm having issues with comment spam. Because of this, I had to put back CAPTCHA codes; it sucks, but it's a temporary solution until I get a better comment filter.

Comments: 0

Why we like H!P Kids

2008-07-31T16:15:55+00:00

So closely listening to the new C-ute single, Edo no Temari II (embedded below), I'm finding out why the Kids, esp. C-ute have been much more popular nowadays. Vocally they sound somewhat similar to old Momusu.

The current Momusu, though decently vocally talented (with the exception of Sayumi) sound very homogeneous. It's difficult to pick out their solo lines at times, but in chorus it's near impossible. Their sound has become choral like. However, the first and second gen members had very different tonalities that were able to harmonize with each other rather than blend.

The Kids are similar to old Momusu in that its members are quite tonally different and it's possible to determine voices in a chorus. I'm a big fan of harmonizing and there are just some dissonant parts in Edo no Temari that make me feel good. It's not the same level as Memory Seishun no Hikari, but I've enjoyed this song more already than Resonant Blue, which I liked a lot. Another thing I think that has helped this song has been how the line distribution is a bit more balanced, Airi doesn't have all the lines (thank you) and even Erika has a few.

As for the video, I really like it. It's quite well done, the costumes are pretty nice, the neon fits with the feeling of the song, and the closeups aren't too close. The closeups are probably one of my favorite parts of the PV; it's like a nice solo shot where I can see more than just their face. And as always, they're really good dancers, but from what I can see it's probably not an overly difficult dance, but I should probably wait for the dance version to make a final verdict there. (Considering how I was wrong about CC). Tsunku, you need to start treating Momusu like you treat the Kids or otherwise C-ute could become the H!P flagship group!

Comments: 0

Patents are broken

2008-07-30T07:53:08+00:00

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080723-nintendo-cant-fight-off-patent-metroids-faces-injunction.html

Looks like another company is losing to a patent troll. I keep thinking that Congress or the courts need to put a stop to this practice, but it’s so hard to define. Where do you draw the line between patent troll behavior and a legitimate inventor protecting his creation before he can bring it to market? No one seems to have an answer yet, but we need one soon. Perhaps patent lawsuits should have a stricter requirement for ‘standing’ - the patent owner must have a product that is damaged by the defendant’s actions? It would eliminate patent trolling, but it would also limit the usefulness of patents in protecting new products before they release.

Unfortunately, there is little emphasis on patent reform - it’s a complicated issue with a headline-generation-quotient of 0.0 for politicians. Plenty of reason there for them to stay away.

Cell Programming Difficulties

2008-07-26T20:06:13+00:00

So when IBM said that they traded programming difficulty for speed, they meant it, but probably not in the most obvious of ways.

The current philosophy for x86 architecture to increase speed has been to throw as much hardware as possible into the core to improve performance for existing programs and more importantly programming style. This has worked out somewhat well as GCC has matured over the years to provide highly optimized code to take advantage of the hardware but places a bottleneck on total throughput as the number of ALU's on a chip are quite small because of all the extra hardware added by out-of-order and speculative exectution, branch prediction, etc. IBM has decided to eschew the additional hardware to implement these features to use that room for more ALU's.

The SPU's on the Cell processor for example does not have any out of order execution, branch prediction or cache. This space for rename registers has been traded for 128 architectural 128-bit vector registers. The cache has been traded for a programmer accessible 256KB local store. And all the other space left over is used to fill the die with enough ALU's to get 25.6 GFLOPS of single precision performance.

So why's this an issue? For a program I coded to work on x86 to apply a filter to a 6min WAV file, it took a little over 10 seconds Although if run with -mno-sse2 it will take about a 1 min 10. A direct port of this code to my PS3 also took a 1 min 10 secs to execute. This shows how well GCC is optimized to run on x86. Unlike on x86, GCC is not quite optimized to automatically vectorize the code into Altivec. It gets even worse when run on the SPU, they have no scalar registers so the code took 7 mins to execute. All scalar operation are done by using a splat (copies one value into all places in a vector register) does the operation, then masks the value. Also since there is no branch prediction with a 21 stage pipeline, all my branches guessed incorrectly would incur a ~23 cycle penalty.

However despite all these shortcomings it is quite simple to achieve high performance but requires the programmer to think differently. If the programmer vectorizes as much code as possible, the program runs quite quickly. I was able to vectorize just the arithmetic and achieved a 30 second run time. The biggest trick to optimization is to avoid branch penalties by unrolling (which I've done somewhat) and using predication (which I haven't). Predication is where you execute both sides of the branch and select the right result. On a scalar processor this is time consuming because this requires 2 operations when you could do just one. However, on the Cell, scalar operations are costly as every instruction is vectorized so a vector operation that does executes both sides of the branch then using a vector select takes up far fewer cycles than branching incorrectly, flushing, then executing.

Currently I'm having quite a few issues with context switching as I tried to thread my filter program, which is an optimization I'll save for another post. Once I find the solution, I'll post my findings.

Comments: 1

Dark Knight

2008-07-20T06:36:34+00:00

I saw The Dark Knight today. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Every cast member is perfect. Heath Ledger really does deliver an Oscar winning performance, and the Nolan brothers wrote the best movie so far this year. Go see it.

Hamasaki Ayumi - GUILTY

2008-06-18T16:40:50+00:00

I just recently got the GUILTY album from Ayu, and I am pretty impressed despite some initial hesitation. It's quite a departure from her typical trance like music; GUILTY has a predominate rock sound to it. Typically when I find myself disappointed when pop artist try rock because the things I love about rock, such as the guitar solos are avoided as to not distract attention away from the pop diva. I think the greatest example of this is during American Idol's Chris Daughtry's debut single "It's not Over" where midway through the song there seems to be a nice guitar solo, but then is cut short when he starts singing again. This kind of behavior waters down the genre in my opinion. At least Daughtry had remnants of rock, unlike many of Avril Lavigne's music, but that's another rant for another day.

There is some of the watered down feeling present in a GUILTY; although the solos aren't cut short, they aren't exactly Dream Theater or DragonForce epic solos either. But, I think what made the album work is the same thing that makes the rest of her albums work (other than the gigantic marketing engine that Avex is), her voice. The dryness of her voice that worked so well for trance music translates strangely well to "rock" music such as in "Decision". The songs are laced here and there with the typical Ayu electronic sounds. Also in typical Ayu fashion, there are a few ballads that give nice breaks in pace. Another nice touch is the use of string instruments in a few songs such as "Marionette." I've uploaded a few songs from the album into the jukebox, it's worth checking out.

Comments: 0

Whose Money Is It, Anyway?

2008-06-10T06:12:55+00:00

In one of Barack Obama’s recent stump speeches, Obama made the following remark about John McCain’s platform:

“At a time when we’re fighting two wars, when millions of Americans can’t afford their medical bills or their tuition bills, when we’re paying more than $4 a gallon for gas, the man who rails against government spending wants to spend $1.2 billion on a tax break for Exxon Mobil. That isn’t just irresponsible. It’s outrageous.”

Obama’s point of view that a $1.2 billion tax break is an expense rather than a savings is fairly typical of big-party politics these days, especially on the political left. How exactly does that work? Why should a tax break be seen as an expense on the government’s behalf rather than money left in the hands of those who earned it? He’s talking about a tax break, after all. He never mentioned a rebate.

Whose money is it, anyway?

Suzuki Ami - ONE

2008-06-06T03:07:33+00:00

For all you Perfume fans out there, the mastermind Nakata Yasutaka has joined up (yet again) with Suzuki Ami to lay down some funky beats and just good electronic music once again. I provide the PV as well, but to get a good impression of it, just listen to it and don't watch it; the video is boring as hell. The choreography is lame, and she really isn't as cute as Perfume or Hello! Project offerings.

Honestly, I wanted to write more about this, but I could seriously copy and paste my Perfume review and that's what this song is like but with one voice instead of three. Her older stuff is completely different, and not to my liking.

Comments: 5

Netflix SQLite finished

2008-06-04T05:07:07+00:00

So it’s finally done. I have a ~4GB SQLite database file that has all user-movie-rating triples, along with indices on users and movies. It took almost a week to get all that data in and indexed. Most of that time was spent indexing. My next moves will be creating tables with per-movie and per-user average ratings. After that, I’m going to start working on SVD.

Security Theater

2008-06-02T21:56:28+00:00

So, I’ve now flown twice in 4 days. Austin -> Midland Thursday, and Midland -> Dallas -> Austin on Sunday. Each time, I had to empty my pockets, check my (smallish) duffel because I like my own toothpaste, shaving cream and shampoo, take off my shoes and remove my laptop from its bag. The more I have to do this nonsense, the more I realize how ridiculous it is. I’m all for safety and security on airlines, but I think we need to take a leaf out of the Israeli book: harden the cockpits, lock them, and train the pilots extensively that you never open the door, and you land as soon as anything goes wrong. Make planes a terrible target for terrorists, and you don’t need to go crazy checking people before they get on board. The liquids thing today is the most ridiculous part. Liquid explosives are terrible, expensive, and hard to get. The 9/11 hijackers didn’t use them. The just used box cutters. Blocking liquids from carry ons has also overloaded airlines/airports baggage handling. If they’re going to block something, why not block laptops. I bet it’d be easy to build a blade inside a laptop somewhere. With enough machining (not a hard skill to learn), it’d probably be invisible on an X-ray. Or a battery could be turned into a bomb pretty easily. Laptops with two batteries would even keep working. Who really thinks airport security is going to know to check that both batteries register to the operating system, especially if it’s Linux?

A few years ago, I took Amtrak trains between Washington, D.C. and New York. Never went through a metal detector. Never sent my bags through an X-ray machine. And, I never felt insecure, simply because trains are a terrible target. You can’t do anything with them if you hijack them, and they’re always on the ground. We need to either make planes the same type of terrible target, or we need to go back to trains. That’s the only way to actually secure our travel.

Let’s Not Get Riled Up, Now…

2008-06-01T18:16:28+00:00

Does anyone else find this rant absolutely hilarious?

If a middle-aged white woman from New York is a second class citizen, then what does that make me?

I just finished installing Movable Type 4!

2008-05-31T19:06:06+00:00

Because while I love Ruby on Rails, it’s just too damn slow to run my blog on my Slicehost 256 Mb VPS, at least with mod_rails, and I’m too lazy to figure out Mongrel or any of the other Rails systems. It also seems less than stable, especially with how much I’m messing with it. Plus, Movable Type has an iPhone interface plugin.

SQLite is slow

2008-05-31T19:02:37+00:00

Since this is such breaking news at this point. SQLite is really really slow creating indices on big tables. It’s still trying to create the first index on users. I’m about to kill it, wipe the database out, then set the indices up to be created while inputing the data. Maybe that will go faster.

NSTX

2008-05-31T07:22:51+00:00

So, NSTX is awesome. I started playing with this just before I left to come home, but my DNS changes didn't have time to propagate until tonight. It's actually quite easy to set up, and surprisingly fast - at least, from where I'm currently testing it (my home in Midland). Definitely usable. There's also an IP-over-ICMP program, I may look into it next. That system seems to have some advantages over the DNS system, and could be an interesting project to hack on. It looks easier to set up, too - no DNS changes that require propagation.

Netflix update: still creating the users index. I think creating the index while inserting data may have been a better idea after all. Top reports 34:54.75 runtime so far. I'll let it keep running and check it again tomorrow.

Netflix Update

2008-05-31T06:13:43+00:00

Importing the ratings took about 2 hours. That was with a little tuning, too. Now I'm trying to generate those indices. It's going to take just as long. Ugh. Too much data.

Netflix Prize Again

2008-05-31T06:12:47+00:00

So, I took another look at the training data for this contest. Absolutely freaking enormous. 100 Million ratings from 17000 movies and nearly 500K users. Unfortunately, the user ids run from 1 to 2.6M and have lots of gaps. So, importing the ratings as a matrix in a C app is not an option - the matrix would be over 8.5 GB, even using just chars. So, I thought SQL might be good - the biggest requirements here are being able to index in like a matrix. SQL allows that well enough, especially with indexes on both of those columns. I started with SQLite3, and it seemed slow. So now I'm trying MySQL. It's slower. A lot slower. Either I suck at configuring it (possible, but it shouldn't be this bad out of the box) or it's just slower than Christmas for lots of INSERTs. I may go back to SQLite. Either way, I need an easy read-only DB for this part. CDB seemed like a good option - they're really quick, read-only, and even fast to create. The downside is that is a hash-table only. Since I need a matrix-style system, that seems like a bad plan. I could just use "userid.movieid" as the key, but then I can't read in all the ratings from a user or ratings on a movie. Even duplicating the data in different views doesn't help. This needs to be either SQL or a matrix - there are things I'll need to do that only work with those access methods. The rest of this program can be done in C/C++ without databases, but this really needs to be a DB. Definitely going back to SQLite though. And then I'm going to let this run overnight. Because it's going to take that freaking long to import this data.

Netflix Prize

2008-05-31T06:10:17+00:00

So, the Netflix Prize has me intrigued. Really, really intrigued. I'm not good enough at machine learning, stats, or whatever to win, but I'm going to be playing with it in the future. Code to follow. I'll be implementing something like this at first.

Welcome

2008-05-31T06:08:53+00:00

So, I finally created a blog. We’ll see how this goes…I’ll post something a little more interesting later today. Just wanted to say Welcome!

First Homebrew Attempt

2008-05-30T05:06:32+00:00

It’s been at least a couple of years since I first toyed with the idea of brewing my own beer. Last week, my roommate and I finally bit the bullet and split the purchase of a basic homebrew kit with a large stainless steel pot from Austin Homebrew Supply. Yesterday (Wednesday) I finally took the time to head to the homebrew supply in person to pick up our first recipe kit. I settled on an extract kit, as suggested by one of the employees there.

After dinner that night, my roommate and I went ahead and sanitized everything and put together our first batch. After about 21 hours, the wort+yeast mixture has finally started fermenting and we’re seeing the very first traces of life: a bubble out of the airlock once every twenty-ish seconds.

Now, I’ve been told not to expect much out of the first batch. Very often, something goes wrong in the sanitization process or elsewhere and the beer is probably going to be not very good at best. But it was certainly a lot of fun, and the guys at AHS did a great job putting together a pretty comprehensive kit and great documentation.

I remain optimistic about the results. Regardless of how this batch turns out, I’ll be making another one by the end of the summer.

High King Part 2

2008-05-30T02:23:01+00:00

If at first you don't succeed, try again. When I heard Cinderella Complex, I didn't like it much, but that's a whole different story with the c/w track.

I've been playing Kioku no Meiro on repeat ever since I downloaded it. It has everything that made me musically like Hello! Project in the first place. It's catchy, it has a nice electronic beat and melody. Listening to this song is like listening to all that is good about Perfume without all the electronic voices and the best vocal talent H!P is capable of producing.

I'm really enjoying this song, I know I should stop playing the song because I might get sick of it too quickly, but it's just really fun to listen to.

On another High King related note, I decided to include the video of Cindarella Complex:

For a video as hyped up as this was, it was a bit of a disappointment. And the other insult to injury is that there is a lot of Reina in it... and she doesn't look as good as she has in other videos. The biggest downer of them all is that, you could tell that they easily spent the most amount of money on this PV compared to all the other PV's released this year, but it's just a gigantic letdown.

I personally thought the dancing was ok, but it wasn't as technical as they kept hyping it up to be or what these girls are capable of. (Come on Tsunku, you have Saki and Maimi, these girls know how to dance, they were your backup dancers for years!)

Comments: 1

Got a Problem? Blame it on NAFTA.

2008-05-28T06:27:09+00:00

In the following video, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) ties NAFTA, CAFTA, and the NASCO international highway to increased trade deficits, rising tuition costs, increased student debt, and, of all things, rising healthcare costs.

It seems to me that the advancement of free trade has been constantly and undeservingly bullied by Democrats (I hate to call them “the left”) lately. In contrast to the anti-trade rhetoric, an October 2007 study entitled Trading Up conducted by the Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute found the following:

In 2007,

There were 16.5 million more people working than in 1997,
Trade accounted only for 3% of lost jobs (most were due to tech and domestic factors),
Average real compensation increased 22% from 1997,
Median household income is up 6% at comparable points in the business cycle from 1997,
The net loss of 3.3 million jobs was overcome by a net gain of 11.6 million higher-paying (on average) jobs, and finally,
The median household net worth rose from about $71k in 1995 to over $93k

Drew Carey addressed the so-called “middle class squeeze” in one of his informative (and entertaining) reason.tv videos.

Are middle-class Americans really worse off now than they were ten years ago? If so, is free trade really to blame? If anything, it seems that free trade has helped to create jobs and enhance the economy, not destroy jobs and ruin the economy.

Two-Party System Woes

2008-05-25T17:35:32+00:00

A particularly cringe-worthy exchange took place May 21st on Larry King Live. The exchange was between Jesse Ventura, the former (independent) governor of Minnesota and a philosophical libertarian, and Charlie Rangel and Robert Wexler, two Democratic congressmen. A snippet of the transcript is included for those of you that missed it:

VENTURA: You know, people like me, who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, we’re made to choose the lesser of the two evils all the time. And, you know, if you’re — and it puts you in a precarious position, because there’s no real candidate that I could say represents my viewpoint and my lifestyle [...] because we don’t have more choices than the two that are offered, either liberal liberal or conservative conservative.

KING: Congressman Wexler, does he have a point?

WEXLER: No, he does not.

[...]

WEXLER: Senator Obama has offered a very fiscally responsible economic plan to both bolster the economic conditions of ordinary Americans. He’s talking about an ambitious energy plan to relieve our dependence on foreign oil. He’s talking about shoring up social security. He’s also talking about giving tax relief to working Americans. I believe that this actually is a very practical, important economic proposal for the country.

At the same time, he’s offering a different kind of foreign policy, which will make America safer, begin to extricate ourselves from the war in Iraq and engage, with a position of leverage and strength, with some of the most difficult parties in the world.

KING: I want Charlie Rangel to respond to what Jesse’s thoughts were.

Do you think that there’s a need for a third activist party here, Charlie?

RANGEL: Of course not. But he’s entitled to his opinion.

(CROSSTALK)

RANGEL: And I assume when he reaches the point that he can bring out the crowds that Obama and Clinton are coming, then it would mean that he’s been able to attract a lot of people to his point of view.

But right now, the country has done pretty well in electing outstanding leaders. And in this particular election, it is clear that Hillary Clinton and Senator Obama have captured the imagination of millions of people throughout the country.

So you can’t deny one who says he doesn’t want any of the options and he has the best view. And that’s what makes America so great.

I don’t even know where to start. I swear I become more of a Jesse Ventura fan every time I hear him speak. In fact, his first statement embodies my entire political philosophy and explains my seemingly perpetual dissatisfaction with our elected officials. As a “small-L” libertarian, I feel like the 2008 election will either boil down to a lesser-of-two-evils vote or, more likely, a vote “wasted” on a third-party candidate.

And what’s this nonsense about America doing “pretty well in electing outstanding leaders”? This is an interesting point to make, given the fuss that Democrats (rightly) make about our current president. Further, out of the last forty years’ worth of US presidents (Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon), we have had maybe two decent administrations. It’s quite a stretch to call them “outstanding.”

My primary gripe is this: the opinion shared by Wexler and Rangel that we do not need a viable third party for people that identify with libertarian values is just plain dumb. Rangel’s point about Ventura not receiving massive turnouts compared to a Democratic super-star is as mind-boggling stupid as it is shallow. Does Congressman Rangel completely discount the likely possibility that one of the reasons Ventura draws relatively small crowds is that he refuses to join a party and not the other way around? Is it completely inconceivable that if Obama hadn’t been a Democrat (or a Republican) then he wouldn’t be such a powerful politician? Does Rangel not understand that a primary factor in a person’s party identification is his or her parents’ political affiliation and identification, which further renders proof-by-popularity a moot point? I hate to succumb to Godwin’s Law, but the Nazi party enjoyed great popularity in its day, too.

Politicians have always been the sorts of people who have no qualms back-tracking over their own historical record to increase their own power. At a time when at least twenty percent of survey-taking Americans (that are, of course, susceptible to self-selection bias) hold libertarian beliefs, the statements by Rangel and Wexler are completely incorrect. One would think that the party that champions voter-fraud reform would want to see to it that the libertarian-leaning portion of America had its voice heard, not stifled. Plus, Rangel is a Clinton supporter and Clinton has been steadfast in her belief that Florida and Michigan votes should be considered in determining the Democratic nominee. What gives? Democrats in rule-breaking states should have votes, but the libertarian voice can be dismissed as a fringe that has no significant representation in society?

Or does disenfranchisement only apply to Democrats and Republicans?

The simple fact is that the liberal/conservative spectrum has a nice symmetry with our two-party system but it does an extremely poor job of accurately portraying the beliefs of many Americans. I’m for tax reform but against the drug war. Does that make me a liberal or a conservative? A slightly better partitioning of political philosophies is the two-by-two matrix developed by William S. Maddox and Stuart A. Lilie in “Beyond Liberal and Conservative”. A variation of this 2d matrix is used in the Enhanced Political Quiz. Even this approach is not perfect, but it is much better than the one-dimensional political spectrum. Perhaps a similarly “enhanced” version of our one-dimensional two-party system would work better.

The Republicans used to have people like Barry Goldwater. Until recently, the Democrats had Mike Gravel. But just as the one-dimensional liberal/conservative spectrum fails, so fails our two-party system. In a competition betweens Democrats (”liberal liberals”) and Republicans (”conservative conservatives”), libertarians like me have no viable party to consistently support.

Proof That God Exists

2008-05-24T01:16:29+00:00

It’s official — Hercules Double IPA is now available in 4-packs. Follow the link, scroll to the bottom, and head to your nearest Central Market. That’s where I got mine.

First Day of Work

2008-05-22T06:07:06+00:00

Well, I just finished my first day of my second internship at Centaur Technology. It was every bit as great as I remembered. In fact, my office was eerily similar to how I left it. My desk and computer hadn’t even been touched since I left last summer. I was still logged into a workstation remotely. There was even a box of free lemon-lime tic-tacs that I remember leaving on the table next to my desk.

Oh, and there were over 4,300 new emails in my inbox waiting to be sorted through, even after moderate filtering.

Oh well, I’m not complaining. The bureaucratic portion of my day (red tape and such — the necessary evils) lasted under an hour and, as always, I got delicious free breakfast and lunch. Go team!

High King

2008-05-22T04:43:07+00:00

I have to admit... it's growing on me.

I think the initial radio rip was so poor that my audiophile side of me wouldn't accept it. However, the rip is better this time around so the song is slowly growing on me. I've only been able to identify the voices of the Momusu members and Maimi. As much as I like Saki, I don't listen to Berryz enough to know her singing voice, so I can't distinguish between her and the egg.

I didn't like it much at first because I'm not a huge fan of the composition, the rhythm of the beat is not one that I take a liking to. The song also sounds a bit too hip-hop for my liking, and I'm not a fan of hip-hop music at all.

There's something about the harmonizing that I do like. And if there's one thing that H!P knows how to do, it's making catchy songs. (Not as well as Perfume does though, I just can't stop listening to them...) My opinion of this song is opposite from my opinion of typical H!P songs; typically I like the chorus but I like the verse much more in this song because the "Na na na" of the chorus is a bit lame and too hip-hop. But the switching of solo lines between the members for the verse kinda keeps things interesting and well I'm really starting to crush on Maimi's ...voice. (Well, with one of the best thighs in H!P, it's hard to not like her for her other... assets, man that was corny. In case you don't know she's the second on the right.) Overall, I'd rate the song somewhere around a 6.25/10 but it does make me kinda interested in seeing the musical.

Comments: 1

Free as in "Free beer"

2008-05-21T22:46:13+00:00

So I used to be saddened by smaller pay and less "perks" that Freescale used to offer compared to companies like AMD, Motorola, and especially Centaur, but no more!

The Senior VP of our division hosted a meeting and provided catering and even more importantly, provided free beer! Nothing like raising morale like a little alcohol at the end of the day. I suppose that's the perks of working for a division that actually makes profit for the company.

Comments: 4

ODF, Not OOXML in Office 2007

2008-05-21T21:45:26+00:00

So when I saw the title of this article (slashdot link), the first thing I did is check the calendar; nope, it’s not April 1st. Then I checked to see if it’s an article from The Onion; wrong again. So now I’m left wondering what’s going on. Apparently Microsoft will add support for ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, and not their new OOXML format.

What the hell Microsoft.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the part about ODF being supported natively is great news for people who understand why truly open formats are needed. Good job Microsoft for finally implementing it. But the whole OOXML part is very strange. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money conducted some questionable practices to get OOXML committed as an ISO standard. But you can’t actually USE this standard in Office until the new release?

There’s been a lot of articles online about this whole OOXML controversy, ranging from the various technical issues [pdf] with the standard to committee stacking and other irregularities in the actual voting process. I’m sure a bunch of this is just Microsoft hating, but with all the events and issues surrounding it, it makes you wonder. And the fact that you cannot use it in Office until Office 14 (release date TBA, of course) doesn’t help their case.

In reality, this doesn’t really affect me that much since I only use LaTeX for typesetting and PDFs for reading anyways. And really, it’s not that bad of a thing, since ODF is finally getting included as a supported format in Office. But this is not going to help OOXML at all, and so it begs the question as to why they’re not including it as a standard in Office 2007.

What has this world come to?

2008-05-20T21:52:06+00:00

You know it's bad when the vending machine has a credit card reader on it... ...you know it's worse when you're probably gonna use it all the time because of this.

So I was getting pretty tired today at work, and I had passed this vending machine a few times on my way to the restroom so I decided I'd get myself some "liquid motivation" and when I approached this machine I noticed something special... it had a credit card reader. At first I thought, "How convenient!" because I barely ever carry cash. (I did happen to have cash at the moment though.) But then it hit me, I'm gonna be wasting ~$1.30/day. In the past, the lack of cash stopped me from getting drinks, which is good for my wallet, but even more importantly, good for my health. Now, nothing is stopping me other than my conscience, and well I'm admittedly pretty weak-willed when it comes to these kinds of things. It's little things like these that make Americans so damn obese as a nation. Oh well, at least I won't fall asleep on the job anymore (hopefully, *knock on wood*).

Yes, I know you get free drinks at work, Doug; I don't, so get over it. At least the coffee is free, I should probably drink that instead.

Comments: 4

Quick WP Script Update

2008-05-20T20:45:21+00:00

Apparently os.popen() has gone out of style. I had no idea. I’ve replaced calls to os.popen() with the much trendier subprocess.call() and subprocess.Popen().

It also now won’t set your wallpaper to nonexistant wallpapers that you’ve deleted since you last ran the update script. If it picks a wallpaper and finds out that it no longer exists, it just tries again until it finds a suitable wallpaper or just gives up.

Grab the new tarball here.

John McCain is Funnier than Keenan

2008-05-20T08:08:22+00:00

And he’s probably the best thing to happen to SNL in the past decade.

In case you missed it, he just made a few appearances on SNL. I can’t directly embed the first clip (available here) but I’ve included the second clip from last Saturday as well as an older sketch that he did. Enjoy.

“Do I know how to sing? [pause] About as well as [Streisand] knows how to govern America.”

If this whole election thing doesn’t pan out in his favor, he should consider trying for a full-time spot on the SNL cast. He’s already funnier than the rest of ‘em.

Wallpaper Switcher

2008-05-20T00:16:43+00:00

I’ve put together a couple of python scripts to automate switching wallpapers at regular intervals in Linux. It uses localtime and the average color of individual wallpapers to try to choose wisely — the script should deliver bright pictures during the day, dark pictures during the night, and medium pictures in between. It’s currently written to use gnome but it should be easily modifiable for other DEs and WMs.

Grab the initial release tarball here.

Started Work Today

2008-05-19T19:21:02+00:00

So I started my summer internship today. I have a really big cubical and a really big monitor for my workstation. Oddly enough however is that the thing that struck out the most to me is the chair.

In the past, I've always had some really cheap and generic office chair, but this summer my "office" (if you will) is decked out with a super pimp Herman Miller chair. It has so many damn controls I don't even know what to do with it. For example, I like to lean back in my chair. At home my chair can lean back and forth, but it can only lock in place in the fully upright position, which is fine, but this chair I can control how much I want it to go back and forth and I can lock it in place at like almost any angle.

As you can tell I'm quite a bit bored at work right now mostly cause I still don't have all my IT related stuff set up with yet, and my mentor already left for the day. I guess I better get back to reading the reference manual...

Comments: 0

Ubuntu Problem Update

2008-05-18T08:21:04+00:00

So, I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and I’ve encountered the same bug. Again, X died when I middle-clicked a firefox tab to close it. I was using Firefox 3.0b5 with the Tree Style Tabs plug-in at the time. I’ve also got desktop effects enabled. I was viewing a flash video at the time with adobe’s !free flash plug-in.

In the meantime I’ve uninstalled Tree Style Tabs. If the problem ceases then it’s likely a problem with Tree Style Tabs and I’ll try to reproduce the bug and get some meaningful output. Otherwise it might be a Firefox bug and the situation might change if/when I update to RC1.

A Quickie

2008-05-18T03:24:45+00:00

So in light of the whole Debian random number generator bug, I give you the following comic:

Hilarious.

Anyways, I’ve been working on painting my room (which means sitting on my ass for a few days pondering it and then finally doing it today), so I’ll update in a few days with real info.

Compiz issues

2008-05-17T15:35:41+00:00

Lately I've been having a lot of problems with compiz memory leaks. After a few days I'd check the system monitor and it says that compiz is using over 500mb's of resident memory. I have plenty of memory, but the more memory a program uses, the slower it tends to be, and alt-tabbing runs dog slow once compiz passes the 300mb's mark. Anybody else have this issue and is using Gutsy? I think if I switched to Hardy the problem might go away, but I plan to upgrade my storage solution soon (to RAID 5) and I really don't want to install twice...

Comments: 0

Weird Ubuntu Problem

2008-05-17T04:22:48+00:00

My current laptop configuration suffers from a strange and frustrating bug.

It seems that on certain rare occasions I can kill my X session by hitting the middle-click button just above my touchpad. This has happened at least three times. The last two times (and maybe the first time, I don’t recall) have been when I was middle-clicking a Vertigo Tree Style Tab [ed: I wasn't actually using Vertigo] tab in Firefox to close it.

Anybody have any idea what is going on? I’d file a bug report, except I can’t reproduce it and I have a feeling that it could be due to some combination of an unstable firefox beta and a sloppy upgrade to Hardy Heron. It could be time to wipe my installation and reinstall Linux… If I decide to start fresh I might go ahead and give FC9 a try.

I Can't Wait for IE8!

2008-05-16T15:23:14+00:00

Ok, so that title is a lie. I really couldn't care less what the actual program itself brings to the table because as an end user it will never affect me.

First of all, I love Firefox. It's much easier to use and offers greater extensibility than IE. The Firefox 3 beta 5 uses less memory and renders much quicker than most competing browsers. However, although I may not benefit directly from the release of IE 8 (because I'm a Linux user), as a Firefox user, I still stand a lot to gain by Redmond's release. I do quite a bit of web development. Dealing with the headache of trying to make pages render correctly in older versions of IE and standards compliant browsers is enough to make oneself consider a change in profession.

Honestly, I don't know enough of the idiosyncrasies between how the browsers render CSS, but I do know enough about their Javascript differences. And while it's possible to do almost everything in old IE that you want to do in a standards compliant browser, it affectively means your code doubles because you end up writing another copy of your code that uses ActiveX specific functions. Also some versions of IE don't garbage collect correctly when a variable goes out of scope, so you have to write extra code to handle those cases as well.

Microsoft's new push for standards compliance as well as trying to set the next standard is admirable. Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, the IE8 beta still shows some minor non-standard behavior (at least from the screenshots I've seen) however with a standards compliant web page, it will render similarly enough to other browsers that it won't make me rewrite all my code. (this happened to me recently when I forgot to check this page in IE; most standards compliant browsers support SHORTTAG despite SHORTTAG not being in the XHTML standards)

So this brings me back to my title. As a developer, if I don't have to rewrite all my code so that it'll work on IE, then it gives me more time to make things look and work better for all browsers. As much as I love Firefox, a good majority of the world still uses IE (albeit, there's still a huge percentage of IE6 users which is a bit discomforting) and developers spend most of their time getting pages to work for IE rather than the other browsers. With IE becoming standards compliant, developers will start to code their pages to be standards compliant, which will benefit me as a Firefox user.

As a side note, I managed to get my page to pass the W3C validator so my page is now standards compliant!

Comments: 3

How To Win in November

2008-05-16T07:41:16+00:00

As a friend eloquently opined upon the upcoming election, “if the Democrats don’t win in November they need to pack up and go home.” I’ve always thought that a Hillary Clinton campaign is exactly what the Democratic party does not need — she is polarizing enough to convince more than just the rank-and-file GOPers to vote for McCain and, besides, you can’t win an election by simply not being the other guy (just ask John Kerry). They need someone that other Democrats can rally around, that Republicans don’t despise, and that independents can learn to like. That person, it seems, is Barack Obama.

The GOP, of course, has generally decided to nominate John McCain. This decision was not made entirely without reserve. In the West Virginia primary, for example, he recently managed to win an unimpressive 76% of the popular vote even though he’s the only serious Republican contender left in the race. In spite of that, he does have some favorable traits. He’s old, lackluster, and predictable. He is a political moderate. After Bush’s atrociously expensive eight year tenure in the white house, he is probably exactly what the Republican Party needs.

Assuming that Obama wins the nomination, I’m hesitant to commit to voting for either of the two major parties. All of my favorite candidates have left the race or are now seeking nominations of third parties. Both Obama and McCain have their high points. They also both have their resounding low points. I’ve outlined six issues below which I believe will help lead one of them to a victory in November. Many of these points have been completely avoided or otherwise unsatisfactorily addressed by both campaigns. They are arranged in order of importance, with the most important issues coming first.

The War On Terror

The War on Terror is a black hole for our money. Along with the War on Drugs, this is one of the only wars we’ve fought that doesn’t actually have a well-defined enemy. If there isn’t an enemy to defeat, then there isn’t any way to win. Waging a war on terror is as stupid and meaningless as waging a war on hypocrisy. Our goal in the next four years ought to be to leave Iraq as soon as possible without damaging their infrastructure. We should keep substantial defense spending in the budget in the interest of keeping our country safe.

The War On Drugs

This is another amazingly effective waste of resources. Ideally, the government shouldn’t have any control over what a person wants to put into his or her body. A person’s body is his or her property and, as such, it should be his or her responsibility to protect it. I know a total legalization of all drugs is wishful thinking, though. A less dramatic change could be to decriminalize relatively harmless drugs like marijuana and stop prosecuting drug users. The DEA would then be tasked with prosecuting drug traffickers. This approach opens up prisons to hold more dangerous criminals, doesn’t punish victimless crimes, and still actively curtails drug abuse in the US.

Tax Reform

Our tax code is a complete mess. We need to overhaul the system with substantial reform. If Barack Obama’s message of change were solely based on tax reform, he would have my vote in a heartbeat. Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game so, for starters, we should scrap our progressive tax system. The winning candidate should replace it with a sensible flat marginal tax rate with some fixed amount of untaxable base income per person. If the “powers that be” account for the laffer curve effect, it’s possible that we could pay a low flat tax rate and still see roughly the same amount of government revenue. Although, if it were up to me, the government would be taking in much, much less than it is now.

Leave Fewer Children Behind

Federal regulation of the education system doesn’t work. Scrap the Department of Education and put the power into the states’ hands. Each state should want to churn out the nation’s best and brightest, which is more than enough incentive to find a system that works for both teachers and students. If my genetic algorithm research has taught me anything, it’s that fifty autonomous states educating their own respective populations will find a good way to do so much faster than one slow political entity mindlessly trying the same damned thing over and over again. In short, Texas knows more about educating Texans than DC does.

The Nanny State

I don’t want the federal government protecting me from myself. In fact, I really only want protection from people taking my property or invading my country. The current state of Social Security exemplifies mismanaged government programs that do more harm than good. Nationalizing health care will only exacerbate the situation. A good short-term goal would be to deregulate health care and let the free market take over, increasing choice and decreasing prices. Nationalizing health care isn’t just bad for the economy. It’s also bad for health care in general. That anybody would want to entrust the same clowns that are responsible for the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, and Social Security with even more bureaucratic baloney completely baffles me.

Free Cuba

Our Cuba policy makes less sense than our tax policy. Cuba poses no threat to us. There is no reason that we shouldn’t do our best to have unrestricted trade and travel with Cuba. Even if we remove our restrictions on trade, it’s likely that the Cuban government will enact their own. As Jeff Flake (R-AZ) put it: “If somebody is going to limit my travel, it should be a communist. It shouldn’t be my government here.” A policy change in this regard might not help us a whole lot, but it will do wonders for the people of Cuba.

That’s pretty much it. I’ll probably end up voting for whichever candidate correctly addresses the majority of these issues. Feel free to post your thoughts in my comments. Tech posts will follow soon. I promise.

Why I Disagree With Socialized Medicine

2008-05-15T08:34:29+00:00

I’m very cynical of government. I think most people probably are. Henry David Thoreau said it best: “that government is best which governs least.”

Republicans aren’t shy about expressing their agreement. Reagan reiterated Thoreau (thanks, Katie!) with his famous zinger: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” I’m told that Ron Paul recently fumbled his way through a speech with similar meaning. It may or may not have been covered on C-SPAN 2.

Of course, not content with keeping the moral high ground, Republicans also want an overly meddlesome government. They reconcile this contradiction by asserting that the government ought only to meddle in the lives of others*. This is evidenced by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the promulgation and subsequent support of the so-called “Patriot” Act, an almost unanimously Republican base of support for the REAL ID Act, and a 63% increase in the federal budget between 2001 (Clinton’s last budget) and 2009 (Bush’s last budget).

Democrats’ views are equally confusing. Democrats in congress have voiced unwavering support of ending the war when their support has been absolutely meaningless. They’ve also continued to fund it. The Democratic Party berates the president over his deficit spending, touting Bill Clinton’s projected surplus** at the end of his term. In spite of this deficit-be-damned position that the Democrats take, both of the major contenders for the Democratic nomination (Barack Obama and the other one) are both championing nationalized healthcare.

Let’s take a look at some numbers on the 2008 federal budget taken from Wikipedia, the most credible source of information on the Internet:

Program	Cost, bns. (% of budget)

Medicare	$386 (13.3%)
Medicaid/SCHIP	$209 (7.2%)
Health and Human Services	$69.3 (2.4%)
Total:	$664 (22.9%)

US Dept of Defense	$481 (16.6%)
US Dept of Homeland Security	$34.3 (1.2%)
Global War on Terror	$145 (5.0%)

Total:	$660 (22.8%)

As it stands, the health-related functions of our government actually cost us slightly more of our budget than our military and defense spending. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Wikipedia continues to say, are funded by appropriations. If we add in the fiscal-year 2008 appropriation proposal (again, from Wikipedia) for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military number goes up by $190 billion to $850 billion. This number is 28% higher than the health-related spending portion of the federal budget, which didn’t include Social Security***.

The simple truth is that our government already spends a lot on healthcare, and the system we’ve got is still far from perfect. We also already spend a lot on military and defense. But that’s nothing compared to what we’ll be spending if we actually try to nationalize healthcare. And we already know that excessive government spending is a bad thing; either taxes go up which decreases economic growth, or taxes stay the same (or decrease) which weakens the dollar. Pro-social-health Democrats blaming Republicans for wasting Clinton’s surplus is a simple case of the pot calling the kettle black.****

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the CIA World Factbook’s rankings of countries by public debt as a percentage of GDP.

Let’s see… France, #19, has good socialized healthcare. Canada is #22, and their military comprises two tanks and a bunch of pissed off moose. The UK is #49. Sweden #52. Cuba barely squeeks in ahead of the US at #63. The US, with a debt/GDP of 36.8% comes in at #65. None of those other countries spend anywhere near as much as we do on their militaries. So where in the hell is the money for socialized medicine going to come from?

* Conservative/Libertarian columnist P. J. O’Rourke once wrote that “whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.” I find this to be quite true.

** I also find it funny that Democrats throw around “surplus” and “deficit” like neoconservatives throw around “theory” with respect to the “theory of evolution”. Evolution is a scientific theory, like plate tectonics and quantum mechanics. And just because we would’ve had a surplus doesn’t mean we wouldn’t still be in deep, deep debt.

*** Social Security costs another $600+ billion dollars, so it would’ve made the comparison much less flattering for entitlement spending.

**** According to CNN and Fox News, Obama has the black vote locked away because there are no black Republicans. Maybe a better metaphor to use would have been “the teacup calling the saucer white”.

I’ve Moved to WordPress

2008-05-15T05:55:35+00:00

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a comments system in PHP and MySQL for the past few weeks. I’ve even gotten started once or twice. But I think I can find a better use for my time than reinventing the comment system, so I caved and made a wordpress blag. I’ll be posting here regularly instead of on my other web site. I’ve updated the IEEECS Planet accordingly.

Fedora Core 9 on a Thinkpad T60

2008-05-15T05:27:44+00:00

Every time I come back to Houston I get brazen about testing out a new Linux distribution. I’m not sure what it is — likely some combination of not having schoolwork and not killing time at Posse or (lately) the Flying Saucer. The trend is especially evident around certain parts of the year, namely immediately after finals or during the summer when I’m not responsible for keeping track of lots of digital classwork.

Since Fedora Core 9 has been making the news lately, I decided to give it a shot. I began by downloading the i386 net install CD and creating a blank virtual machine with an unregistered evaluation copy of VMWare Workstation. The eval copy is free to download, and creates virtual images but is crippled so it won’t play them. I fired up the clean virtual machine file in VMWare Player, which is free (as in beer) software. No dice — for some reason the net installation wasn’t working for me, in spite of the fact that I had network access. Same with trying to install it in VirtualBox. I think it was probably an issue with the mirrors I was using, but I didn’t bother to follow it through.

My next thought was to actually grab the x86_64 livecd and try that. I got it working in VMWare Player. It seemed nice. I backed all my important stuff up (including my unfinished checkout of scart), and booted to the CD. Again, it seemed nice. Unfortunately, Desktop Effects weren’t working. I tried enabling them manually. No dice. I tried installing the ATI driver and restarting X. No dice. I searched for a fglrx package. No dice. I googled it. No dice.

Sure, it’s possible that desktop effects will start working if I do a proper install. Not having compiz, though, is kind of a show-stopper for me. So, in the meantime, I’m sticking with Hardy. If the ATI issues clear up, I might give FC9 another shot. But until I’m assured that I won’t have to deal with it, I’m not willing to scrap my current setup.

By the way, did everyone remember to RSA and DSA keys?