Anthology of Interest

New photos from our trip to Vancouver and Seattle are now up. Serenity Photos and Vancouver photos are available. There aren't too many because I didn't feel like taking a lot of pictures while we were in Seattle for some reason. Alana took all of the dolphin photos.

I am deeply annoyed with Gallery for not using the loss-less JPEG rotations I made using gThumb. But then again, it might be gThumb's fault. I an also deeply annoyed with Gallery's brain damaged album and photo edit interface. More incentive to get to work on Resolution...

Our trip to Seattle to see Serenity started on Wednesday, when we sailed to Vancouver. Our escape from Victoria was hindered by a condo fire. A ladder truck fighting the fire took up two lanes of the north bound Pat Bay highway, and traffic was backed way up. We though we weren't going to make it, but BC Ferries has put up a sign that shows how full the ferry is just after Sidney, and it was only 37% at about 4:45, so it wasn't a problem getting on. Seattle is normally a fairly rainy city, but of course the day we go we get a heat wave. Five people in a small car with no air conditioning... adventure! Traffic was also quite backed up on the I5 due to a rather nasty accident, but we qualified for the HOV lane and made good use of it, squeezing by most of the traffic.

After finding the theater, we went to the Space Needle and took a few pictures. The admission to go up was $13 USD or something silly, which we decided was not worth the view. We wandered around and stumbled across the Science Fiction Museum and hall of fame, which is housed in a really crazy looking building. Being a bunch of sci-fi nerds, we decided that it was much more worthy of our $13 USD than the space needle, and we were not disappointed! There was a lot of exhibits on old sci-fi books, and newer ones like Neal Stephenson's baroque cycle. They actually had the hand written manuscripts, pens, and ink bottles Stephenson used. There were a lot of cool props, costumes, and so on.

After the super cool sci-fi museum, we drove over to the theater to see how big the line up was. This was about 5 o'clock, and since there were already people there, we decided to line up as well. There were lots of cunning t-shirts in evidence, and a few people even dress up as characters. After 4 hours of waiting, they slowly let us into the theater. They searched bags for recording devices, and took away one guy's batteries. Some people tried to just the queue, but some angry people near the front of the line yelled at them to go to the back. There could have been a riot if they had gotten in first, when everybody else stood in line all that time!

Finally seated, we found that lining up early paid off, as we ended up with five seats together in the middle about half way back, which is almost ideal. I immediately spilled greasy popcorn all over my blue sun t-shirt... argh!

The movie itself was awesome! There was only one bit of dialog that I didn't like. The film needed a little work, in terms of grain and colour, but I think that was just because it was a one-off print. Other people who know more about film than I know the finishing steps that have to happen. I was so engrossed in the movie that I didn't notice any special effects blunders or the filler music. Others noticed music from movies like The Fifth Element, but it worked fine for me.

This was not a two hour episode either. It's a self standing movie that contains enough information about the characters that people who haven't seen the TV show should have no problem following who's who. The story works well, and explains a lot of really interesting things. The dialog and acting is just awesome. So very, very funny in places, sad in others, subtle and nuanced.

It had less western elements than the TV show did, but I think to a degree there just wasn't enough time to go in to that. It may also help keep things on more of a sci-fi track, for those who think the idea of a space-western is silly, when in fact, it's awesome.

Marli and Walter both have some notes about Serenity, and some photos too.

I look forward to seeing it a few more times when it comes out in September.

Not that I've ever really had the need to include math in my web pages before, but the jsMath library makes it easy to do just that. jsMath is an implementation of the math typesetting engine orginally written for TeX. It uses native fonts to convert TeX markup into rendered equations, but the output is just ordinary text glyphs and a bunch of span tags.

Now I can do stuff like this:

Cool!

Another notable thing about George Dantzig, besides the simplex algorithm. He once proved previously unsolved statistics problems when a professor wrote them on a black board as an example of an unsolved problem, and Dantzig came in late and mistook them for homework problems (see Snopes). When he went to decide what to write about for his PhD thesis, his supervisor told him to put the "homework" problems in a binder, and he'd accept that as the thesis.

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith will probably break even on the merchandising and cross-promotion deals alone, even if no one goes to see the movie. Of course, it made a record amount of money on Thursday, and Tamara and I chipped in. We attended an afternoon matinee, and lined up outside for a while after arriving about an hour early. There were already people lining up for the 6 o'clock shows, but the line wasn't very long for us. Went we came out, it was practically wrapped around the theater!

For what it is, a cheesy, special effects laden, good vs. evil epic, it's not bad. I enjoyed it, perhaps in part because I was determined to. There are lots of naysayers out there talking trash about it, and from what I've read, their points are valid. I couldn't help but notice some continuity errors, and the droid personalities bothered me a bit. Star Wars has always had droid personalities of course, and the R2D2 / C3PO banter has always been enjoyable.

SPOILERS...

UNIX is cool for so many reasons, but pipes are just awesome. I think their potential is under-utilized, probably because it's kind of esoteric and unfamiliar to most people, even those that have been using UNIX for a longish time (say 5 years).

I had to add a copyright notice to a bunch of files, but I'm far too lazy to do it by hand. After all, changing a bunch of things in the same way is what computers are good at right? So, here's a script to do it, where it edits the file given as the first command line argument:

#!/bin/bash
echo -n "Editing $1... "
ed -s $1 <<EOF
1i
// Some cool project
// Copyright (C) 2003-2005 Matt Hughes 

.
w
q
EOF
echo "done."

ed is a program which can do scripted editing. The commands are generally the same as vi, so 1i goes to the first line and enters insert mode, the next three lines are the text to insert, and the line with the '.' tells ed to exit insert mode and return to command mode. w writes the file, and q quits. The <<EOF syntax is shell script for "interpret everything on the following lines until you see EOF as if it were coming from standard input". This is also known as here document syntax. The choice of EOF is arbitrary.

How can this be easily applied to a whole bunch of files? With this command:

find . -name "*.java" | xargs -n 1 sh /tmp/edit.sh

The above script is saved in /tmp/edit.sh of course. The xargs command is super-handy. Since find prints its results to standard out, but our script needs those file names on the command line, we can use xargs to re-arrange things.

xargs -n 1 sh /tmp/edit.sh means read from standard in, and for each line, execute sh /tmp/edit.sh $LINE. The -n M switch tells it to use M lines per call.

Another handy way to use xargs is to grep only the .cc and .hh files in a source tree. Since Subversion stores a bunch of extra files, Emacs writes ~ files, and so on, its helpful to limit the files being searched vs. using grep directly, i.e. grep -nr "pattern" . You could do grep -nr "pattern" .cc *.hh, but then it wouldn't recurse because none of the directory names are matched. Using find and xargs:

find . -name "*.cc" -or -name "*.hh" | xargs grep -n "pattern"

It's pretty handy. Of course, I hear those fancy IDE's can do this sort of stuff too... the grepping of only relevant source files anyway.

More info about batch editing is in O'Reilly's UNIX Power tools, or on google...

My email to shaw:

Did someone spill beer on the console again!?

Channel 9 and 16 have cut out in the last 10 mins of Desperate Housewives! 

Is this a plot to boost Global's ratings for Survivor? 

$!@#%@#$

Hey, no Jeff show on Survivor this year. Wierd.

My desktop computer, which has functioned pretty well up to now, has started to shut itself off at random. I think the fan is giving out and the BIOS is switching the machine off when the temperature gets too high. Because its been going down so often, I've moved the web serving tasks over to another machine. Blogs, photos, and Subversion repositories are now off of my desktop machine, and onto one running Ubuntu 5.04 "The Hoary Hedgehog". At the same time, I updated Serendipity to version 0.8. They are now using Smarty for templates, which is good.

While doing this, I fixed it so that the default page for virtual hosts that aren't set up is the spacemonkeys one, rather than the Larson family reunion. I also put our blogs at anthology.spacemonkeys.ca and rantastic.spacemonkeys.ca, but the old URL's still work. I also made a virtual host for our photo albums, gallery.spacemonkeys.ca. The old URL still works for that one too.

A side effect of this change is that everyone who uses our RSS feeds probably just got spammed, as all the entries will show up as being new. Sorry.

Hopefully this change will mean less web server downtime, since a) the machine doesn't shutdown at random, b) I won't be updating it and breaking things all the time.

The iTunes music sharing thing is really nice. I've been listening to all of "Bob Dole's" music over the last few days. He has Rob Dougan's Furious Angels album on there, which is very good. I like it a lot, except for the songs where he sings. The instrumental stuff is better. One of the songs (clubbed to death) was used in the sound track to one of the Matrix movies.

I first heard about William Shatner's Has Been album on Music (for robots) quite a while ago. I downloaded the together track from them and loved it! I mean come on! Lemon Jelly and Captain Kirk together in one song? Can things get any better!? Props to CJSW for turning me on to Lemon Jelly. Hey, CJSW is airing the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show, every night at midnight, between May 7th and May 19th. I guess I missed the start.

In any case, I found another Shatner track on somebody's iTunes share. This one is called, common people, and it is also very good.

So now Shatner and Dougan are battling it out in my head for earworm time. Fortunately for me, neither is annoying (yet).

I spent the day working on my thesis. Man, writing stuff up is hard work. Actually, I'm just doing literature review writing right now, and I'm not doing a very good job of it. Pre-supervisor review, it's tough to know how much detail to go into. Hopefully the writing up of my own actual work is easier. But then I would need to do some actual work.

I finally decided once and for all that I am not going to be doing a PhD after I finish my M.A.Sc. Not for a few year at the very least. I'll have to wait and see if I miss academia at all. Realistically though, I'd rather do cool stuff than try to publish papers about it, and I rather not have to teach or try to get grants etc. At first I was a little sad about it, but I think that was mostly just looking into an uncertain future. However, I have a few solid options, so it's not really very uncertain at all.

Tamara asked me about setting up my old Toshiba 220CDS for her to work on. She wants a machine with no web browsing capability, to force her to work on her thesis more and not get so distracted. So I installed Debian (Sarge is frozen!) on it, with X and Openbox3 (Fluxbox soon). Emacs, aspell, AUCTeX, and Subversion make a complete thesis editing package. I've ended up using it to write my thesis, even though I use the web to find references and stuff. I just ssh into my desktop and run Firefox from there, and it works like a charm. The only real problem is that the 800x600 screen is kind of cramped, especially for someone used to two side-by-side Emacs frames.

Great Gorilla of Manila! Tamara, that saucy minx, scored tickets to a Serenity trial screening on May 26th in Seattle. NIFTY!

Things are heating up here in thesis land. Results are starting to come in, show-stopper bugs are getting fixed, and outlines have been written.

That aside, I managed to find some time to track down a ssh agent for Mac OS X today. Ssh'ing is a breeze from my Linux machine, since I start ssh agent when I log in, which allows my to get into any server where my public key is in the authorized_keys2 file. On OS X, it's been a pain because I have to type my password where ever I go.

No longer: SSH Agent to the rescue. No more typing passwords for me!

I also tried out iTerm, but I found it lacking because I was unable to turn off the menu accelerator keys. Meta-b is supposed to move the cursor back a word, and meta-q is supposed to copy a region to the clipboard in Emacs, not quit the application. I guess I'll have to stick with xterm for the time being.

I came across a rather interesting article about the difference between people who do good and great research. I don't know that I'm modivated enough to do great research, or that I even want to do research at all. Perhaps part of the people is that I haven't talked to enough people and I don't know what the really interesting problems in any of my varied fields of interest are.

Like Marli, I can't decide if I want to continue with my academic career and get a Ph.D, or go into industry. I keep flip flopping and dithering (dithering is the new flip/flop).

I don't want to study myself out of a job. I don't want to get too narrowly focused. Nor do I want to get stuck in a boring job. Life is filled with big decisions.