just normal stuff: hair, basic clothes and sometimes shoes but not too much

From Achewood:
Current baby status, 3/29: I have discovered that I can work at the computer while wearing the new baby in a sling. I think we may be onto something, here.
Yikes.

From Phil:
Just switched to Ubuntu and loving it. Linux really is ready for the desktop now. According to recent tests done in the Alcove, Ubuntu is at least 10x easier to install than Windows 2003 Server. It’s finally gotten to that seamless, “it just works” stage.


You may have noticed I didn’t have anything that interesting to say this time. It’s true. I just feel bad for not posting in a while. Also, it’s been bugging me (and Alisha) that I’ve left the title of my last post on the top for so long. So there. A little self-indulgence at the expense of post quality. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Also, I want to make the ‘tech’ posts stand out somehow. I’m open to ideas; please suggest.

....only in my dream, i didnt have pants.t have pants.

Speaking of eggs, I had a thought about eggs the other day. I was doing some baking, and I considered recipes. Recipes always have rather even amounts in them. It is rare that you will see something as precise as 3/4 of something; usually measurements are integers or 1/2.

Now I was thinking to myself, “What if the perfect amount of a given ingredient is something really strange? What if to make the perfect waffle, you need to put in 2.57 eggs?” I don’t think anyone would ever discover such a perfect recipe. And that, my friends, is too bad.

In closing, Banana Guard.

a view of the rain

Alisha and I went out to tonight to enjoy a wet Fullerton. The way it glistened in the rain was quite enchanting. I’m so glad I got married in the wettest year in recorded California history—it almost lets me forget I live in a desert.

I took a few pictures, but none of them really turned out well. One interesting thing we did see was a Building Zoo. I had never seen a Building Zoo before:




Someone once said that you learn new things every day. I’m not quite sure if I’ll grant that, but I think days like today when I learned about Building Zoos make up for days like yesterday when I didn’t learn anything.

what we need more of is SCIENCE

Welcome back, Mr. Nye. We missed you.

In high school, people would call me “Phil Nye” because I was good at science. I pretty much ruled. For instance, I knew what nematacysts are. Do you know? Huh? That’s what I thought.

In closing, “Science Rules!”

plan to throw one away

From the Wikipedia article on The Mythical Man-Month:


The Second-System Effect: The second system an engineer designs is the most dangerous system he will ever design, since it will be disastrously overdesigned. Thus, when embarking upon a new project, a project manager should ask for a chief architect, who has at least three or more systems design experience under his belt.



With that in mind, behold my second system: Eigen.

It’s meant for Biola Students only, but you want to try it out, you can log in with the ID 1 and the password ‘eigenvalue’.


I learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and fixed most of them.

weekend

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I went into the desert with the Knights.

For details, see Jon. Although for some reason he wasn’t able to appreciate the beautiful refreshing rain, his account is accurate in most other respects.

suck it, IE!

From a recent project I’m developing at Biola.

Update 2005-03-21:

There’s obviously a huge divide between the average reader of blogs and the average person likely to visit a given Biola web page. From the statistics quoted in the comments page (Jon, Luke, and I) IE’s average is 20%. This is not all that surprising; among tech sites IE lost its lead a long time ago. It makes sense to me that blogs should follow.


What is surprising is that its share is so low among a relatively mainstream site like Biola. Biola is still not terribly representative of the world since it has a disproportionate number of Mac users, but it’s still encouraging.


Here’s why: since IE has lost its dominance, people will test their sites in more than just IE. This will be annoying for people who don’t know much about web design and have poor methods for design, but for ‘the rest of us’ it will be a welcome change. If sites are designed according to the rules, some might not look quite right in IE, which ignores several of the rules. If there’s enough pressure from dropping market share, the next version of IE might actually implement the standards.

In the end, I could be happy even if IE regained a majority, as long as the new version of IE is standards-compliant. It’s not that I hate IE intrinsically, I just hate the fact that it mangles sites that are properly designed and makes my job a chore. It’s possible for Microsoft to do something right. (You have to look a ways into the past to find proof of this, but Word 5 for Mac was actually an excellent product.)

elevation

I think it’s hilarious that Hagelberg is a mountain in Germany that’s really short.

(For those of you who don’t know me: I’m tall. About as tall in cm is Hagelberg mountain is in metres.)

why it is nice to work from home...

...the comfort just can’t be beat:

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a couple of notes

Note to self: when answering personal handphone, there is no need to greet with “Hello, this is Phil.”

Note to the rest of the world: the reason is that.
The reason is never because.

I feel better already.

retrospect part the second

Continuing a series on the wedding and honeymoon that I wrote up a while ago and haven’t posted, here are my thoughts on the Portland Classical Chinese Garden.

On Sunday, the inviting landscapes of Portland’s Classical Chinese Garden (or ‘Lan Su Yuan’: the Garden of Awakening Orchids) offered us a serene walk through exotic pavilions and lakes. This is the kind of thing that needs to be seen to be understood. The immersion was impressive: it was a block in the middle of the city, yet it seemed seperate and distant from the commotion.

The garden is billed as ‘never twice the same’, and I can see how the claim holds. The atmosphere changed even in the short time of our visit, but I can only imagine the shift a covering of snow or a blanket of raindrops would have brought about. The shallow water which covered about a third of the garden’s area made the view dynamic, and the reflections brought out the symmetry in the architecture in new ways. The way in which water, leaf, stone, and sky interplayed showed something subtle and unique about the eastern ideas of harmony that must be undeniably true, or it could not affect the viewer so powerfully.


The highlight of the trip had to be our visit to the Tower of Cosmic Reflections, the two-story tea house opposite the lake. As soon as we entered the building the atmosphere of calmness and relaxation took hold of us. We went upstairs and ordered a Jasmine Tuo Cha and a High Mountain Oolong with Ginseng. They brought us each our own individual teapots, and as our supply emptied, they would refill our water, allowing more tea to brew with the potent leaves that were left.

I enjoyed the drinks immensely, although I have to say that this method allowed my Jasmine to overbrew a great deal. I don’t know if I needed to be drinking it faster to avoid it, but it ended up being quite bitter before the pot was refilled with water. On the other hand, Alisha’s oolong was fantastic. I’ve never been too excited about the roasted taste of oolong, but this one was definitely different. Neither tea was sweet upon the sip, but after drinking hers, there was a terrifically sweet hint of flavour on the breath along with all kinds of subtle nuances. I can only compare it with Yogi Licorice Tea, only not quite so overpowering.

We had to start thinking about leaving when the sun hid because, well, Portland is definitely cold this time of year. Even the tension of being outdoors in bitter cold was affected by the walk through the beautiful scenes of the ancient Chinese display. An air of tranquility made me slow down and take things as they came. The contrast to the outside city was striking, and I welcomed the many sensations the garden left with us.

what is wrong with this picture?

findings

Lem! You need some of these!

The Savers Software Saga continues: I found MYST at Savers for $5! I was headed straight for the register when I looked inside and saw that it had all the manuals but no CD. What a disappointment! (In 2000, MYST was the best-selling game of all time. I don’t know if the record still stands, but that was very impressive considering it was 6 years old at the time.)

I also found a Windows 95 box, but it was completely empty. I will repress all snide comments I could make about that. (But you’re free to fill in for me in the comments.)

productive

Man, I need to spend time at home more often. I’m catching up with my friends on chat, researching new technologies, and blogging three times!

Actually, the most productive thing I did today was make some delicious treats. In the tradition of Achewood, The Rum Balls I Made Using Only Ingredients On Hand Or Available At The Dollar Store Across The Street:

You will need:

• A package (12 oz) of vanilla wafers


• A cup and a half of mixed nuts


• Four tablespoons of corn syrup


• About a cup of powdered sugar


• A quarter cup of cocoa powder


• Three ounces of marshmellow cream (half a jar)


• Half a cup of rum


• A bunch of brown sugar

Ok, the first step is to get crushing. You need to crush the wafers pretty hard. It helps if you start doing this when they are still in the packaging, if applicable. This keeps the mess from getting out of hand. Eventually you need to open it so air gets out, otherwise you won’t be able to get very far in the crushing because you will just be crushing air.

The next step is to crush the nuts. You just basically spill them out and then take a hard object (I used the bottom of a cup measurement) and just go at it. Crush those nuts like the dickens.

Ok, once you are done crushing the first two things (did you really crush them thoroughly?) it’s all downhill. Just mix together everything except the brown sugar in a bowl. You will need a pretty big bowl. Mix it nice and well; you don’t want large chunks of wafers. It won’t quite be like a paste until you let it sit for a while. I put mine in the fridge for half an hour. Then it should be nice and pasty, kind of like rice krispy treats.

From there, it’s easy. You can eat it straight as gooey stuff (mmmmm!) or roll it into balls for better storage. Take a tablespoon or so and roll it around in the brown sugar. Then you can store it for later. Be sure to put them on wax paper if you stack them. I’ve heard their flavour improves after a few days, but have been unable to verify this.

Enjoy!

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• - If you want to, you can use crushed pecans or walnuts, but they cost a lot more.
  
  
  
  • - This is the crucial ingredient that makes my rum balls the best.
    
    
    
    • - Adjust amount to taste. =D
      
    
    
  
  

raise your hand if....

I saw Garden State today. I have to wonder about those movies that are directed by their stars. Could it be that the entire production of the movie was an elaborate scheme by Zach Braff to make out with Natalie Portman?

Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time someone has done something crazy for a really beautiful woman.

As for the movie itself…. good but not great. There were moments when it captured the beauty of everyday life, but overall the message was very muddled. And then when it was clear about what the point was, it bordered on cheesy. Oh well. Overall it could have been more coherent in terms of theme, but it had some genuine beauty to it that counts for something.

a filter

Those of you who get bored by my inane tech ranting will be happy to see this new feature:

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It’s amazing! With the click of a link, my blog is transformed into something vaguely normal! Unprecedented!
There is a link on the bottom of the sidebar for future reference. Thanks to Tim Malabuyo for loosely inspiring the idea.

sad departure.

This just in: the Mozilla Foundation is dropping support for its suite (“Mozilla” as we know it) in favour of focusing development on Firefox and Thunderbird.

I used to be a Firefox user myself—Firefox made a lot of splash and has been gathering a lot of momentum. But when I switched away from web-based email and started using a desktop mail client, it didn’t make sense to run a separate program for mail. The Mozilla suite fit my needs much better. (For instance, using both Firefox and Thunderbird takes up a lot more memory than just using Mozilla, since the suite is just one program.) On top of that, the new 1.8 alphas included the latest Gecko rendering engine with some serious speed improvements.

So I’m kind of disappointed by this. On the one hand, Firefox is a really high-profile project that’s positioned to draw a huge user base. On the other hand, Mozilla is where all this came from, and most people don’t even consider it as an option, despite the fact that cutting-edge developments like the new rendering engine usually show up in Mozilla first. Still, the Mozilla Foundation has limited resources, so it could be a good thing to keep from spreading themselves too thinly.

what it means to be an American

There are very few things in the world like driving home late at night with the windows rolled down and Limozeen playing at high volume.

It is almost as good as driving up to Berkeley in green hills and fog with Simon and Garfunkel playing.

Good times.

a complex task

I was reading nat.org, and I came to the conclusion that blogs with more pictures are more interesting. On that note:




I used a neat trick in this photo where you do a Gaussian blur when only one color channel is selected. That way the image has a softer feel to it, but most of the sharpness is retained. Cool, huh?

Don’t worry, most future photo postings will not be of myself. I just had to start somewhere. Perhaps a more interesting background than just a wall would be a good improvement for next time?

...

Maintaining organization on a music library of considerable size is one of the most tricky problems I’ve recently encountered. The difficulty is compounded when you consider that my music library has three instantiations: one on my laptop, one on my desktop, and one on my on-campus server. These need to be kept synchronized.

My current solution is to just keep the ‘canonical’ copy on my laptop (that didn’t use to be possible, but I got a nice roomy one now) and then just manually record or remember every time I get an addition to the library. Then I copy the new music by hand to my home desktop and my server when I get around to it.

This works, but isn’t the point of having a computer to automate things?

There’s a nifty utility called rsync designed to help keep two archives synchronized. It goes over the two archives and calculates the differences between the two, and copies only the differences over to the new one.

In theory that’s what I should be using for my music. In practice it’s too slow to be usable on an archive of great magnitude. It takes so long to calculate the differences between my desktop and my laptop that I just let it run overnight; I’ve never timed it to see how long it takes.

Here’s my new solution: there’s a folder on my laptop called ‘recent.music’ that contains three subdirectories: ‘new’, ‘technomancer’, and ‘neobahamut’. When I get new music, it gets tossed into the ‘new’ directory. When I get home, I run a script that copies everything in the ‘new’ directory to technomancer, my desktop, and moves it to the ‘technomancer’ folder. It also copies everything in the ‘neobahamut’ folder to technomancer before moving it into my main music folder. When I am on campus, I run a similar script that simply reverses the roles of technomancer and neobahamut, my server.

       copied to technomancer
       placed in technomancer folder -- copied to neobahamut
      /                                    
new --                                     music library
                                          /
       copied to neobahamut          -- copied to technomancer
       placed in neobahamut folder

Then once my desktop contains an up-to-date copy of my music library, I need to be able to play it through my stereo. Ideally I would plug my desktop into my stereo, but it’s on the other side of the living room. Unsightly (not to mention unsafe) cables are a no-no. Another method is necessary.

I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to sell a couple older laptops I have around (contact me if you want one! 366MHz and 700MHz), so my plan is to hook one up to my stereo. It would be silly to make another copy of my music library on the stereo laptop (not to mention impossible—it only has a 10GB hard drive), but I can actually just serve up the music files on my desktop with a wireless link and NFS. But that leaves me having to walk over to the stereo every time I want to play something or change tracks etc. Something must be done. Enter MPD, a network-transparent music player. It runs in the background on the laptop playing whatever music it is told, and it can accept instructions from my desktop or my primary laptop running a suitable client.




Looking over what I’ve just said, it no longer seems absurd how much software has been written simply to deal with music. It’s a hugely complex problem that only gets worse as the scale increases.

And to think—people used to use physical media to store an album!

deal

Note to self: don’t blog with nothing to say before walking home. Walking home always brings new things to say—usually more interesting than what I didn’t have to say.

Nature and I have this deal going on. You see, it’s her habit to make things start to get warmer this time of year. Incurable habit, it is, and terribly annoying. To top it off, she also likes to make the nights shorter. The nerve! Anyhow, to make up for the irritation caused to me, she provides jasmine flowers, the blooming of which happens to be one of the most beautiful artifacts of nature still extant in La Mirada.

Astute readers will note that I am, in fact, getting shafted in the deal. The jasmine flowers, while nice, are rather transitory. The heat, on the other hand, only continues to mount until it’s almost unbearable.

Still, I play along, mostly because of all the cool stuff she’s done in other places, most of which are far from La Mirada.

stuff Im doingm doing

I’m doing stuff.

It’s not of much interest to most people, but I’m developing a framework to maintain a flexible web site from the ground up without having to know anything about web sites. Hopefully Joel will help me, cos he’s good at stuff like that…. keeping me from doing things my own crazy way.

Ok, ok…. I admit it. I just felt bad about not posting for a while. That’s why I’m posting this. Happy now?

Oh yeah, and Dragostea Din Tei frickin’ rules! I could listen to it over and over again. (In fact, I did! It was great!)

Ok. I need a break.

dont take this the wrong way...t take this the wrong way...

...but this* is pretty cool.

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• - This post does not imply anything at all other than an interest in nifty technology.
  

retrospect part the first

When we were in Portland on our honeymoon, I wrote up a bunch of my thoughts that I fully intended to put in a “honeymoon” section of the site. I never did write up enough to merit its own section, so I never posted them. I don’t want to have them forgotten, so here we go…. First in a series:

Wheeeee! The wedding was quite a success. Alisha and I are now married, which is by definition the result of a successful wedding. I couldn’t go on without giving a shout out to all the people who put effort into helping make the magic. Our wedding planners did so well that half the time I didn’t know what was going on, but it happened anyway. (....which is not a bad thing. I learned in Software Engineering that it helps a lot to hide implementation details and keep the interface so minimal as to only share information that is needed.) (I married a nerd!)

My parents were fantastic; the rehearsal and rehearsal lunch was smooth as anything. I had help from a few Singapore friends; thanks guys. But most of all thanks to my groomsmen. The way they stuck with me somehow made me mindful in the midst of all the excitement of the (lesser) good I have given up to be Alisha’s husband. You guys are the best male friends I could hope for.

Preparation was interesting. I got nervous when it was coming up on an hour before we would start. Luckily we had ways of loosening the tension. Dancing to Dragostlea Din Tei is a great way to just have fun. (I may be able to post a video of us…. heh. We’ll see.) My brother Peter’s DVD of the Batman animated series also helped me ease my mind. Batman is such a hero!

Once it started, the ceremony was surprisingly short. Of course the rehearsal gave me no idea what to expect as far as length; so much was skipped and out of order and rushed that it was a blur. But after staring into her eyes through the homily, blurredly pulling rings out of pockets and onto fingers, and grinning through a prayer, I was pronounced her husband.

It really was a beautiful sight. I’ll have photos up soon, but basically it was inside a castle with rain pouring down outside. It got heavier and darker as the night went on. The overall effect produced was that of a cozy feast inside while a storm raged without. The candlelight flickered on the stone walls as the guests turned their view up to the indoor balcony where I stood next to my radiant bride.

I don’t think I’ve ever shaken so many hands or been photographed so many times in such a short period of time as I did at the reception. It touched me to see so many of my friends and family all gathered together to celebrate with me. Still, after a couple hours it got to be fairly wearying, and I was glad when we finally got to run through the rain of rose petals to the waiting car.

repentance

For a long time I avoided learning Livescript (sorry, Javascript) because it was mostly just used for doing stupid things that should be better done in other ways. (Mouseovers, for instance.)

That was dumb. I will no longer be doing that.

mad DOM hacks

Post a comment. I dare ya.