Sunday, July 24, 2011

Troubling

I just noticed that my bag of coffee beans from Aldi has clever badges stating that it is a gluten and lactose free food. I'm suddenly reminded of xkcd's take on this trend .

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Sadness

One of the worst parts about running a nonstandard operating system on a nonstandard architecture is compiled packages. Amazon correctly noticed I appeared to be running linux, and went more than half way in offering a compiled .deb file for debian/ubuntu. Alas, 4 seconds later, I find it's a 32 bit package, and can't find a 64 bit package. A few fumbling --force-architecture mistakes later with dpkg, and I now have installed a mess of broken dependencies.

How did I dig myself out of this? Launch wine, install firefox for windows, install cloud player/mp3 downloader, and go. Interestingly, wine (as close as I can tell) only supports win32, while my linux seems to choke on dynamically linked 32 bit executables. Years ago I had a debian 32 bit sandbox installed in a chroot environment for dealing with this, but the sands of time make even Ozymandias look weak.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Oh, L No!

Speak English or Cry

I was coming home from work on a weekday afternoon, 5:45 or so. The train was pretty packed — all seats taken, lots of people standing, but not crammed in tight. There was a guy near me sitting in one of the single seats. Late 40s, balding, librarian glasses, very old button-down shirt and faded jeans, the uniform of someone who’s worked 30+ years in one place. He’s staring out of the window, livid, clearly came onto the train with his own sets of worries.

Standing above him in the aisle were two early 20s men speaking in Spanish. Not loud, just conversational, no louder or quieter than anyone else on the train.

All of a sudden, the man turns to them, eyes bulging, teeth gritted, nearly in tears, and he loudly hisses “SPEEEEAAAAK…ENGLIISSSSSSSHHHHHH!!!!”

The two men, without missing a beat, start speaking English, but a very exaggerated, “Masterpiece Theatre”-style English. “Oh, very well…would this be the manner of speaking which I ought to be engaging upon, sir?” etc. They continued their conversation to each other in this exaggerated English accent for the rest of the ride, while the man stared out the window, fuming but clearly embarrassed at his outburst.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Street Fighting Mathematics

I stumbled on this book and course (18.098) available both in print from MIT Press and as a download (earlier edition) from OCW here . I'm perusing it a little now, if it contains half of the heuristic greatness it says it does, I expect to enjoy this and gain a good deal from it. In math, so much effort is wasted on fruitless approaches that a little reasoning would rule out early.

So, thanks to the author Sanjoy Mahajan for making this available to us all.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Priority Inbox

I'm always surprised when Gmail adds a new feature, as I mainly use IMAP with evolution. So I had to do a little reading to understand why I had a new folder called Important. I think I read about it a few weeks ago, and didn't think much of it. I don't know how much use I will get out of this, but it's an interesting idea. The problem I think is that I tend to save and read a lot of nonsense, which is anathema to the perceived use pattern they are training against. However, the evolution mail clients 'mark as important' doesn't equate to gmail's mark as important, so I think I may have to just ignore it.

Maybe it's because I have too much time, but I often do read all the lottery winning and bank transfer appeals. When a Nigerian prince finds his way to the important folder, I will truly have defeated the system (not the case, thankfully).

Monday, July 11, 2011

Alphascript Publishing

I'm horrified that someone has the brilliant idea to bind 80 pages of wikipedia content and sell it for $40. I'm impressed that someone used the terms of free documentation licensing to make a buck, but even with a giant medallion on the cover stating that it's 'quality content from wikipedia', I think I feel bad for the first dozen people who shell out for this. Don't I recall a nice little pocket wikipedia device running from a sd-card priced about $100? Curiously, the publisher's office is in Mauritius (a tiny island country off the coast of Africa), never suspected that to be a hotbed of literary creativity.

I hope their 'portfolio' includes more than just reprinting free content at high prices...

Philosophy
Nearly all media worldwide – such as newspapers, magazines, TV – use internet for their researches and as a basis for their texts. This is exactly what Alphascript publishing does. And we go even further: with the Wikipedia-texts at free disposal we create books on interesting topics.
There is hardly another platform for quick and better processing of information than by Wikipedia – and this is too for the benefit of the Alphascript publishing-readers who want to be informed on a specific subject. Of course you can have online everything free of charge, but for good reason you have decided for a book. Alphascript publishing is internet in form of a book. There can hardly be a faster process.