Star traveler

Check it out, my name is in space! It’s about 4/5ths of the way down the page. Cool.

Infinite Monkeys

So, it’s been shown that it may take a bit more than infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters to spontaneously produce the works of Shakespeare. However, all this study showed was that monkeys are not truly random animals. Apparently they have an affinity for the letter ’s’.

So that got me thinking: what if we used a source that was truly random? Are the works of Shakespeare contained in the irrational number e? Naturally, it is infinite. Not only that, but it contains no repeated patterns. So if you were to search for words, would you find them? The likelihood of finding even a single sentence in a random string of 10,000 letters is fairly low. But there’s no end to infinity. For each segment of numbers in e that could contain some Shakespeare, the probability is very low that it would. Vanishinly low. But when a nonzero probability is multiplied by infinity, the result is a certainty. Not only would you get Shakespeare, you would get Shakespeare repeated an infinite number of times.

Not that I can test this theory, but I cooked up a little script to play with the immensity of the idea: (using random letters, not e)
<br />
#!/usr/bin/perl<br />
$target = "the";<br />
<br />
for($i=0; !$done; $i++)<br />
{<br />
$randomChar = int(rand(25));<br />
@word[$i % 3] = chr($randomChar + 97);<br />
$word = @word[($i % 3) - 2] . @word[($i % 3) - 1] . @word[$i % 3];<br />
<br />
if($word eq $target)<br />
{<br />
$done = 1;<br />
}<br />
}<br />
<br />
print "Found $target in $i letters.
";

Now the word ‘the’ is the most common word in English, but to a random string of letters, they are all the same. The results were not too high; it could usually find it in under 10,000 letters. Occasionally it found it in under 500.

So I decided to step things up just a bit. How long would it take to find the word ‘hamlet’?

/>

It’s still going. I’ll see if it finds it while I’m at work.

You must come back home (Seo Taiji IV)

Today in class we talked of Dante’s Paradiso and what it means to be Home.

Obviously it relates somehow to being in your proper place, but what does that mean? The part of the answer we came upon was that necessary and sufficient aspects of Home include comfort, familiarity, order, and security. This seems like a good answer, but it is lacking something.

It’s been a long time since I had a home. I haven’t lived in a single place for longer than 18 months since I was fifteen. Even then, the home I had didn’t really fit me. In Indonesia I was a stranger in a strange land; somehow at once at home and not at home. I’ve been quite happy with that fact, yet it leaves me wondering what I missed out on. How important is it to have a home?

Alisha and I talked about things, and it seems the part of home our definition was missing was memory. Theory: it’s only when memories of a place outweigh memories of any other place that a place can truly be felt to be home. Another key aspect of Home is permanence. (Perhaps this is a part of security. Hmmm.) I’ve never been at home at Biola because I have always lived with the knowledge that I’d live in a room for a maximum of nine months. I knew I couldn’t get too attached to the place.

All the same, what is the importance of a strong sense of being at home? What do I lack? More importantly, how will this affect my own children? I think the key here is being able to understand our ultimate end. If you’ve never felt a sense of permanence at a home, our final destiny will probably not sound as glorious and meet as it could.

As far as familiarity and memory, I think C.S. Lewis explains it beautifully in The Last Battle. As the children go “further up and further in,” they are awed not by the sense of discovering new territories, but at the way in which the New Narnia brings to mind the old, only gloriously remade anew. (“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato, bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”) I can’t try to retell Lewis’s masterful account, but I encourage you to reread the final few chapters of The Last Battle; it’s one of the most powerful passages in fantasy.

Is that what it means to be home? I’m almost sure of it.

Exploration

I stumbled on the site of Jonathan McPherson the other day as I was looking for a tutorial for a mailer program. He’s a Christian CompSci grad student at UC Davis, and his site has some interesting insights on Christian living. Also check out his music; it sounds good.

In closing, I’m almost to 777 hits. A fortunate portent indeed!

Ceterum censeo Xanga esse delendam...

Why do people use Xanga? My current theory is it’s because they don’t know any better.

Xanga describes itself as a weblog community. Most Xanga blogs contain posts to the effect of the following pastoral remarks:

Then this chick comes up to me and she’s all, like,
“Hey, aren’t you that dude?”
And I’m, like, “yeah, whatever!”

So later I’m at the pool hall
And this girl comes up
And she’s, like, “awww”
And I’m, like, “yeah, whatever!”

Actually, I may have been thinking of something else, but you get the idea. Xanga tends to be populated by the type of people who don’t stoop to capitalize correctly (and I’m not talking about e e cummings) as well as people who post such ingenius insights as “Type your first post here, then click “Submit” to publish it to your Xanga Site”. I’ll leave you to ponder the wisdom behind that one.. I believe I have discovered one or two worthwhile Xanga sites. By my estimation, those are the worthwhile ones.

My other theory is that people start using Xanga when they don’t know anything about web sites. It looks fun, and they have friends on it, so they join. Then as they post and learn, the limitations may become clear. However, they won’t leave, because Xanga doesn’t let you link to sites that aren’t on Xanga unless you know considerable HTML. Aside from being idiotic and exclusive, it defeats the purpose of the entire web.

So, a web site that is antithetical to the web. Hmm, let’s think about that: no.

Always have hated Rabies

Yes, there are some things worse than Calculus. I have to keep reminding myself that. For instance, manure is worse than Calculus, as are most deadly diseases. (Hitting yourself with a hammer, however, is not.)

Thanks, now we all look dumb.

What, I ask, is to stop this from happening at Biola?

Basically what has happened is that a certain Grant Turck wanted to start a “Students against Homophobia” club at Pepperdine and was kept from doing so by their administration. He said he thought they would be receptive because of their ‘diversity statement’ and now wants to start putting the pressure on them to give in.

Now I think Pepperdine handled this situation quite poorly; they warned him not to tell anyone about their decision and refused to discuss it at all. This is within their rights, but it opens up the floodgates for criticism that Pepperdine actually is in favour of hating gays. It’s a subtle distinction between hating the sinner and hating the sin, so it’s an area in which a great deal more caution than Pepperdine used would be needed. The average reader is not going to pick up on that distinction.

This could create an avalanche of backlash. The response predicted on California Republic is something like:

We must weep for the downtrodden Grant Turck. We must force Pepperdine to shed itself of its medieval, so-called religion. The Clinton wing of the GOP must stand together and take up this student’s cause. It is another step for Americanism and the Constitution to dispense with the hobbling chains of traditionalism and the phony-baloney ‘natural law.’ ...Why can’t we be more like the French?

I guess we are only supposed to pay attention to the parts of the Constitution that are useful…. Thankfully most of the reaction I’ve read so far is more along the lines of ‘It’s their own university, let them set their own policies.’ We haven’t degraded that far into madness yet, as I first thought when I read the California Republic quotation seriously. Still, it hurts the credibility of Christians when we see prominent institutions set up to look like they are defending hate.

I killed Armed and Dangerous

So for the first time I posted on Eric Raymond’s blog in the beginning of March, and he hasn’t posted a thing since. It looks like I’ve killed it. Bah.

Give it a while

FreeBSD is not ready for the desktop…. I’m not entirely sure that people are saying it is, but I learned recently that it’s not. Ports is a great way to manage programs in some ways, but not practical for people with slow machines…. sigh. The package system is nice…. but how primitive compared with Debian! (I’m spoiled.) It also just seemed a lot less responsive, but I think that may have something to do with the fact that one of my DIMMS was loose….

So, it’s back to Debian for me. Things are running so much more smoothly. Woo hoo.

As I was doing the shift back to Debian, I decided to go all out with my music and get everything I have on CD on to my hard drive and backed up on mp3 CD. So that took like all week, but now I have 9 full mp3 CDs and a nifty fully-stocked Gnump3d streaming server (available on Biola’s network only.)

Anyone on web, call me web master.

That’s an ILL Mitch reference, BTW.


Last week I got my first real webmastering job. (ie non-volunteer) I’m doing the site http://www.theacademysite.org for The Academy, a classical-education style summer program for gifted highschoolers. It is based on the Torrey Honors Program at Biola University.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a prototype hosted here on Biola’s student server getting stuff laid out and redone. The old site was a mess of ASP and Javascript, so I’m redoing it in PHP, MySQL, and CSS. Should be a lot more streamlined and faster to load than the old one. It’s not fun dealing with messy code. (Although it’s not half as bad as johnmarkreynolds.com, another project I am doing, was.) It’s a good incentive for me to write good code that is easy to read and maintain. (I love CSS.)

In closing, listen to the wise words of ILL Mitch:
I have two sides, one happy, one anger.
You can ask a stranger, my board is fast and danger!

Automaton

I learned something about my subconsciousness today. At my job I do a lot of data entry, and on certain fields it can complete what you’re about to type if it’s known in a list (like all the cities in California or something like that). Anyway, when I’m typing the name of a city, I noticed that I somehow know exactly when I have enough letters for it to know which city I am typing. I don’t even have to look before pressing enter. It only works for those that I’ve already typed manually, though. And it doesn’t work when I try to do it or when I actually think about doing it. So my guess is that I know it subconsciously.

I end up doing a lot of things automatically without thinking at my job….

“The bane of my existence is doing things I know a computer could do for me.”

-Dan Connolly, The XML Revolution

I think this is the general feeling of anyone involved in computers. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad I have a job, and I’ll do it because we don’t have the technology to scan papers in very well yet…. But the hope of technology is that people will only do jobs that machines can never do. Hypothetically a machine could do my job much much better than I could. And I’d be glad if one such machine did so, because then I’d be freed up to do a job that the machine couldn’t do: think.

I tend not to be very sympathetic towards those who complain over losing their jobs to machines. If you are doing a job that a machine could do better at, then you could instead be doing a job that is uniquely human. It would be more fulfilling anyway. (Of course, life is rarely that simple, so in that I do sympathize—jobs aren’t the easiest thing to find.) But I think that is the vision of the technologist: humans freed to think. According to Aristotle, intellect is our highest capacity, and therefore use of it is where our highest happiness resides. Perhaps in some way technology frees us to be more human.

Subtle distinction

Jon just virus scanned his computer and found a load of spyware,
viruses, and trojans. He’s going to have to spend a lot of time cleaning
them off or lose a lot of data. I thought to myself that I was quite
glad I didn’t have to deal with that, but then thought that ironic
because I do end up spending more time getting my systems to work right.


After thinking about it, it made a little more sense though. There are
two reasons this is appropriate. For one, I want to get used to fixing
machines like mine, and don’t mind spending time tinkering with it to
get it perfect. It’s the field I intend to go into professionally.


The other reason is more interesting. When I spend time tinkering with
my system, it’s because I have to be very precise with what I do. The
machine does exactly what I tell it to with a maniacal accuracy, so I
have to make sure I tell it to do the right things. In his case though,
he’s being forced to make up for the shortcomings of his own machine. It
failed to function properly by letting undesirable programs control his
system. His time is spend fixing the problems, not instructing the
system.

You could make the analogy of learning how to drive a car. It takes a
lot of time to get yourself familiar with the demanding, precise
controls of a Ferrari, and it takes a lot of time to upkeep a pickup
that’s falling apart. I care about that sort of thing, so I’d rather
drive a Ferrari. I think most people are ok driving pickups because
most of them don’t break down every week. It’s not worth getting used to
finely tuned, precise controls if you just need to drive to the grocery
store and the post office every week.

Waiting for Moess

I love
used bookstores

Just wait till I get to Moe’s: the Torrey Mecca….

Meta-meta-blogging

Meta-blogging: the act of blogging about blogging.

I used to hate meta-blogging. Most meta-blogging happens in the form of some kid saying ‘Wow, I haven’t updated in a while….’ or something to that extent. News flash: if you haven’t updated in a while then either (A) I didn’t notice and don’t care or (B) I am an avid reader of your blog and am greatly irked by the fact that you haven’t posted in a while. In that case I would rather you post something interesting and worth reading, not restate the obvious. Yes, your posts are timestamped…. if I wanted to know, I could check how long it was since your last post.

Yes, attentive reader, you point out that I’ve been guilty of this a few times. ‘Look world, I just coded a better content-management system!’ I’m the only one who remotely cares/notices. Or the obvious ‘Hey, now there are themes’.... Yes, anybody could look around the site and see that.

But there’s an interesting side of metablogging that I am beginning to appreciate. That is the more generalized metablogging. Andrew Sullivan has a piece on why blogging is important: it’s the Napster of journalism, the ultimate peer-to-peer idea-sharing. Still more interesting to me is Hossein Derakhshan’s post about the creation of a specific blogging community. He outlines what such a community needs to start.

I’ve thought a bit about this myself. There are loads of Biola students who blog, and they sort of loosely have mutual readership, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be helpful to have a centralized place where the Biola web community could come together. Centralized linkage would help bring people together too; there’s no one place where you can find them all. There also could be some interesting discussions on different blogging software or sites that help. Who knows….

Just another of my crazy thoughts. I have many of them, most of which amount to nothing.

Gimme some of that ol time cosmology time cosmology

I think I finally get Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet

That was pretentious. Let me try again: I finally think I understand something about Out of the Silent Planet.

Much better. Most of this excellent book was lost on me when I read it in high school, but I’ve really enjoyed it my second time through. At first my impression was that it is a science-fiction book about science-fiction. His jabs at H.G. Wells and the general ‘tentacled-monster’ mood of early 20th century sci-fi led me to believe this. He asks why our imaginations bring forth hideous beasts and malicious creatures when we picture the inhabitants of the skies. It seems to be a critique of the dominant style of contemporary science fiction.

As the book progressed, however, I realized that the scope was broader. Lewis writes not only about science fiction, but about our whole cosmology. His background in Medi346val studies (see The Discarded Image) led him to question the prevailing materialist cosmology of naturalism in which any life out in the reaches of space would likely be hostile.

Lewis saw the heavens as a glorious place and Earth as a pocket of rebellion and corruption amidst the grand Field of Arbol. The heavens revolve in perfect harmony, and the intelligences set to govern each planet approach human greed and petty quarrels with a fitting innocence and naieve wonder that any creature could be so ‘bent.’ In the second book Perelandra the mere idea of wanting something in excess was foreign and exceedingly difficult to explain.

Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places, but it seems to me that our current culture lacks a strong coherent cosmology. A good cosmology would be scientifically sound, yet allow for the world to be the intricately designed system that it is. Naturalism fails to explain the inherent harmony and order (albiet subject to decay and entropy) present in the cosmos. The Med346val worldview is beautiful in its internal consistency, but things like geocentricism conflict with our observations. Without a cohesive cosmology, there seems to be a barrier between science and the Primum Mobile. Lewis tries to cross that barrier.

I think I get it. I get something, anyway.

Just say no.

It’s too late for America, but maybe Europe can curtail the madness before it begins.
I can only hope. What a mess.

Ceterum censeo software-patents esse delendam…

Incompetence

After spending time perfecting my elemental themes on philisha.net, I loaded up the site in Internet Explorer, and with a shock realized how broken IE is. There is no support for transparency in images, so my work spiffing up the buttons is lost on most poor fools. It can’t render Courier properly, so viewers stuck in their ways get this hideous pixelation when using the Fire element. There are loads of layout and alignment issues, but the most ironic problem is how the Mozilla Firefox button doesn’t even show up right due to the transparency issue. So they can see my invection in text instead.

I just about expressed my frustration by loading a popup to the Firefox home page whenever anyone looked at the site in IE, but decided against it. Punishing people for ignorance is not the answer, as satisfying as it would be.

Elemental distraction

Philisha.net: now with added themeability value!

So now you can customize your browsing experience according to which of the four elements is your favorite. Unfortunately due to the immense ineptitude of Microsoft, the Sky element is the only one that looks decent in Internet Explorer, that vile hideous machination that some people use to browse the web. Personally my favorite is the Fire element, although it’s hard on the eyes for extended reading.

Coming soon: Earth theme!

Celebrate the new dark age

Today I attended an Easter performance.

I think it was supposed to be a church service or something. It was a bloody concert. :sigh: We’ve got a long way to go. So what if church is nothing but a concert? People like concerts, right? And if you don’t like this concert, there are other concerts with different music that might make you happy.

Because that’s what’s really important, you know. Making you happy.



Quit trying so hard and everything will fall into place.

This is when it’s damn tempting to despair over the impotence of the church.
Must resist….

Announcements, announcements, announcements

I had my 100th post a while back. That was fun. I think I’ve passed Strong Bad now.

If years were measured in 1024-day chunks, I’d be about seven and a half years old. See how old you’d be.

http://philisha.net/wedding: check it out! I laid out the engagement page better and updated some of the wedding info.

Sorry Folk.

My apologies, the Biola servers died inexplicably and without warning a few days ago. Things are back now, but the problem is Biola has no uptime guarantees to maintain. Grrrrr….

RSS is the new HTML!

Faithful followers of my blog may notice a new orange icon in the lower left corner. Labeled ‘XML’, it allows users to keep track of what’s going on at philisha.net at a glance without actually visiting the site in the web browser.

A little background first. Ever since the beginnings of the Internet, technology has been used to get more and more information piped to its users. The paradigm has always been to get as much input as possible. We are now reaping the effects of such immoderation—from spam to always-on IM clients to popup advertising, only recently have we started realizing information overload needs to be dealt with.

What we now need are tools to sift through data. That’s why Google is the most powerful company on the web in many respects. People are now far less concerned with how much information they have access to, and the shift is over to narrowing down the information.

RSS responds to this need by providing summaries of sites that get updated often. Instead of getting email updates for your favorite sites, you subscribe to their RSS feed and you choose when you want to check it. But instead of going to their site to see what’s new, you get a quick summary: all the recently posted articles with a snippet from the beginning of the text. Advanced RSS readers even show you which articles you’ve looked at and how many new stories each site you’re subscribed to has.

I’d say it’s worth looking into an RSS reader if you spend a lot of time browsing the web. It can save a lot of time by cutting back the fluff, and you have a lot more control over what you read. I’m looking forward to watching this technology catch on at more and more news sites and blogs.

I use Liferea on my FreeBSD desktop and it seems to work fine. For users of another operating system Feedreader would be worth looking at.

Blog Comments

The comments page is dead.
Long live the comments page.

Nobody posts in the forums anymore. That’s why I added comments on a per-post basis. I figure people may be more inclined to post about something than just post on my site in general as it doesn’t really have a topic that inspires people to post about. Cool. It may have been a waste of time as on Jon’s Blog the only posts on it are me posting about posts…. But we’ll just have to see.

The Tech Mafia

This article Patently Absurd shows what’s wrong with the US Patent and Trademark office. Like I keep saying, beaurocracy is the mother of ineptitude…. and squelched innovation…. and extortion.

Ceterum censeo USPTO esse delendam…

Famous!

Yep, Captain Ribman listens to me.




I asked Strong Bad the same question, but he didn’t answer.

Streetmail

So I was thinking about the Metaverse the other day, (funny how often I do that) and the idea of being able to jack into a network on any street corner from a pay booth really appealed to me. Basically by my estimation there are tons of old computers from the 70s sitting in warehouses somewhere waiting to be tossed in landfills etc. Pretty much useless to anyone, but they have all the capability you’d need to get basic email connectivity.

Now what we need is some enterprising gentleman to go around and buy up all these obsolete consoles for virtually no cost, and then install a communications network to hook them up to the internet virtually everywhere. Imagine if next to every payphone was a Streetmail booth where you could drop in a quarter and send a quick email to anyone.

A similar concept exists in the cybercafes that have sprung up in many 3rd world countries and many developed countries that aren’t the US. The problem they have is that they try to be everything: email console, jukebox, arcade, and chatroom all in one. So naturally they have to slosh out the dough for decent hardware.

The advantage here is that these machines would be so cheap that it would be feasible to install them everywhere. There’s a huge resource of ‘obsolete’ machines that are just going to waste. The monochrome 80-character displays of the Apple ][ era are not good for much, but they’d be more than enough to provide widespread email access to anybody walking down the street.

Cool idea, I hope someone implements it.

World-class

|[Cities I want to visit at some point in my life]
Tokyo
Venice
Paris
Chiang Mai
Florence
Shanghai
Vienna

/>
London
Seoul
Jerusalem
Hong Kong
New York