tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50776372024-03-07T14:35:03.294-04:00The Hallwaya mixture of juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, tasteless nonsense and highly developed and artistic attempts to provoke outraged responsesalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.comBlogger3492125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-46683083407481949202012-11-19T00:41:00.003-04:002012-11-19T00:42:47.619-04:00Trying Out a New Blogging PlatformI like Calepin's super simple interface, and I really like writing in MarkDown, so I've written a few posts at <a href="http://alxp.calepin.co/">http://alxp.calepin.co/</a> . One about music, two about programming.<br />
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Enjoy.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-81390184916734660852010-10-04T09:33:00.002-03:002010-10-04T09:36:03.659-03:00Out on a Tuna BoatThere's a lot of controversy about tuna fishing these days, but there's also some hope for a future in the form of ca catch-and-release sport fishery on Prince Edward Island. A couple of weeks ago I went out on the water as a guest participant for one day of the Canada Tuna Cup tournament and I learned a lot about how tuna fishing works and really gained an admiration for the people who are good at it. Here's what I wrote in an e-mai describing how the day went.<div><br /></div><div><hr /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; border-collapse: collapse; "><div> had a fantastic day yesterday out on the water. We got to North Lake just at around sunrise. Not quite a proper fisherman's hour but close enough to feel authentic. All the fishermen had this air about them, you could tell they were more excited to be able to catch tuna again than the structure of the actual tournament. We grabbed a copy of the rule sheet at the very last minute as we were heading out the door of the little restaurant where they serviced us breakfast and handed us these huge home made boxed lunches to eat out on the water.</div><div><br /></div><div>My dad and I were invited as guests on one of the 6 boats entered into the tournament, along with a guy from the ministry of fisheries. We did our best to help out the three real fishermen with all the stuff that needed to happen on the boat, but tried to stay out of their way at the same time. Once we got out of the harbour the boat's pilot said 'hold on to something!' and engaged the engine and we just blasted off, faster than I had any idea a boat like that could go. I've never been out on a fishing boat before when it wasn't just a quiet tour of a harbour or something so this was totally unexpected but quite a thrill. I didn't even mind the water coming over the bow, over top of teh cabin and down on top of me on the deck, that's how rough the water gets when you're a normal-shaped fishing boat with that much power under the hood. </div><div><br /></div><div>Our first stop was to fish for bait to catch the tuna with later. That means mackerel. Before I knew what we were doing someone threw a fishing pole into my hands and gave me the 20 second version of a "how to catch fish" lesson. Release the catch on the right here, guide out the line with your left thumb. One second is about a foot of depth. The mackerel are about 30 feet down according to the sonar. When you get to the depth you want, engage the catch, and start jigging the rod up and down to get their attention. If you don't feel one grab on after half a minute try a different depth. When you reel it in bring it up fairly quickly; don't let a seagull grab it off the hook on you, chances are he'll get caught in the line and then we'll have to untangle a pissed-off bird. Grab the fish as you swing it overboard, pull it off the hook upwards, then throw it in the bucket. If it slips out of your hand just slide it over with your foot and we'll throw it in.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was the first one to catch something, unfortunately it was a too-small herring and we had to throw it back. After that, though, I got the hang of it really quite quickly. The fish are pretty small and the line goes down quite deep, so it's hard to tell at first if it's just the current or the movement of the boat that's causing your rod to pull one way or another, but as soon as you feel a real fish fighting on the other end you know right away. Granted, mackerel travel in schools and are pretty easy to catch, it's still a lot of fun to be good at something right away, and to be helping the rest of the crew get all the bait we need.</div><div><br /></div><div>After a few minutes of plentiful fishing and one close encounter with a gannet - a crazy enormous sea bird with a frightening-looking long bill and wings that make a swan look diminutive, we pulled our lines up and were on our way again. Now we were off looking for the bluefin. One was watching the radar, looking for some arrangement of waves and lines on the screen that translate to "giant fish on the hunt for food". We sped along, even faster than before it seemed, and with the deck now wet and slippery I was doing a full-time job of trying to stay balanced, while next to me one of the other fishermen was solidly planted by the soide of the boat cutting up some of the bait with what must be a monster of a knife. I consider my 'staying out of the way' skill a pretty valuable one at this point.</div><div><br /></div><div>That's the most excite we'll have for the next few hours. We had to try three different locations in all. They worked so efficiently you barely knew what was happening until you see the four long rods and heavy lines attached opposite sides of the deck and there's a discussion about how to launch the kite. Apparently the way to keep a live bait near the surface where you want him splashing around and drawing attention to itself is by suspending it from a kite. This also draws it away from the side of the boat so the bluefin isn't right under you when you hook it. It looked surprisingly tricky to launch the kite despite all the wind out on the water. The air blowing off of the cabin would get sucked down and cause a force of wind towards the deck and the water, Despite this they were able to get it launched and out over the side to do its thing, and we wait.</div><div><br /></div><div>Aside: I used to be indifferent to country music. The XM satellite station that was going the whole while we waited for the mark on the radar that caused us to stop to come back was the distillation of all that is commercial and crass about Nashville country music. Lyrics that enforced fatalism, heros of songs that just had stuff happen to them instead of about _doing things_ was a common theme. It seems that for the target audience of pop country life was something that happened to you, and as bad as it gets that's how things just are. I think I was the only one who had nothing to really do that could help with the fish-finding effort or had calls to make - mobile phone reception when you're halfway to Cape Breton was apparently not all that surprising. So I was left to just sit and listen to this whole new world of music I had ignored before.</div><div><br /></div><div>We hear over the radio that one of the other boats had a catch. a 750lb. fish, so they're done for the day. That this is now a catch-and-release tournament didn't seem to take away any amount of enthusiasm on the part of the fishermen. Our guys were thrilled that someone else had a catch already. That meant that fish were around and they weren't guarding their location or trying to be secretive at all. So we pulled down the kite, pulled up the lines and headed to one, then another spot to try to come up on a fish. Everyone was in it together and the more successful we all were the better case it will make to build a proper sports fishing industry here on the island.</div><div><br /></div><div>We had the best mark yet on our last stop and the ones who knew how to tell the difference were keeping up the hopes of those of us who were along for the ride. The little water bottle that we used in lieu of something fancy to mark where the line with the bait was bobbing below the kite was well beyond my ability to see, but as soon as we got a bite the rest of the crew came alive to they knew how to do better than just about anyone else in the world, I'm sure. 'Get those otehr lines up' 'Bring in that kite'. To the pilot 'he's gone under the boat, get us clear!'</div><div><br /></div><div>At this point I realized something I hadn't even considered before - to get the fish where you want him, when the fish is that big, you turn and move your whole boat. The whole time you have to keep the line from going slack, without jerking it or doing any number of things you might do wrong that I have no idea about that the fishermen knew in their muscle memory. That said, I still had the chance to man the reel for a couple of minutes. Big thick glove on my left hand to keep a huge on the tightness of the line, and massively difficult-to-turn reel to bring him in whenever he gives you any chance at all. Apparently they move through the water with only their tale in motion, which makes their already powerful bodies even more efficient at transforming strength into movement through the water. All I knew was I had to keep this line coming in and it involved more physical hard work in short but controlled bursts than I remember doing in my life. It took a pretty sadly short amount of time before I felt like my arm was going to give out and I passed control to someone else. Getting that reel around was a full-body exercise as you directly pulled against the something so massively more powerful than you, and your only advantage is classical mechanics. </div><div><br /></div><div>The boat scores points for various achievements while the fish is on the hook. At minimum you have to fight him for fifteen minutes for it to count. You get bonus points for getting it up beside the boat, for getting a picture, and for touching it. You also have to have all of the bits that involve the fish out of water done within 30 seconds or you're disqualified from the tournament. They take the catch-and-release part very seriously and seem to respect the intent behind the rules fully. We didn't get it up out of the water but we managed to claim three points in total, which kept our boat in the running going into the next two days, which I unfortunately won't be participating in.</div><div><br /></div></span></div>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-37464775283398049402009-04-27T13:25:00.003-03:002009-04-27T13:29:30.832-03:00I'm backOkay not that I have really left, but with life as it is I have not really been blogging, but I thought I would interupt Al's long run here. Just for fun!!!<br />I have many things out there that I would like to comment on. Like this new swine flu, the idea of biofuels, and possibly a nice long rant about service providers that can't take your payment method, and some how make it your fault....It is 2009, get past your self. I am the customer and i am always right.....okay not really, always right, but my issues should not be yours.<br />But for now i just thought I would reintroduce Binnie.Sabrinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15844713970708134283noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-22441082371063682702009-04-26T11:44:00.002-03:002009-04-26T11:49:18.729-03:00+1 to Tweetie supportThis is why I love indie Mac developers. I just got this reply to a feature request I sent to <a href="http://www.atebits.com/">atebits</a>, who make Tweetie for Mac:<blockquote><br />On 26-Apr-09, at 11:35 AM, atebits support wrote:<br /><br />Hey Alex We're going to add an option to do just this in a coming version.<br />:)<br /><br />~ash<br /><br /><br />--<br />atebits support<br />support@atebits.com<br />http://www.atebits.com/<br /><br /><br />-----Original Message-----<br />From: Alexander O'Neill<br />Reply-To: Alexander O'Neill<br />Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:01:19 -0300<br />To: featurerequests@atebits.com<br />Subject: Allow option to hide menu bar icon in Mac Tweetie<br /><br />Hi,<br /><br />I think it would be a welcome feature to add a preferences option in <br />tweetie to hide the menu bar icon. Most Mac users are quite picky <br />about what software does to their systems, and forcing the menu bar <br />icon seems out of place on the Mac.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br /> -- Alexander / http://twitter.com/alxp<br /></blockquote>Tweetie for Mac is just as good as Tweetie for iPhone, which I paid for and am very happy with.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-21379276208182016762009-03-24T10:11:00.001-03:002009-03-24T10:11:51.140-03:00Dear UPEI Library Coffee Shop<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/3381514159/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3567/3381514159_4f5fa1c7ef_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/3381514159/">Dear UPEI Library Coffee Shop</a> <br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/aoneill/">Alexander O'Neill</a>.</span><br clear="all" /><p>Cream Cheese is not a precious commodity. Be a little more generous<br />with it, please.</p>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-66352145568818490392009-03-08T01:59:00.003-04:002009-03-08T03:11:01.175-03:00Evergreen Patch AcceptedI love when this happens.<blockquote><br /> From: Dan Scott<br /> Subject: Thanks UPEI! Google Book Preview patch integrated into trunk<br /> Date: March 8, 2009 1:55:22 AM AST<br /> To: Evergreen Discussion List<br /> Cc: Alexander O'Neill, Mark Leggott<br /><br />Hello:<br /><br />Thanks to Alexander O'Neill and the University of Prince Edward Island<br />for posting their patch for integrating the Google Book Preview<br />feature directly into the record details page and making the code<br />available under the GPL v2.<br /><br />I just committed a variation of the patch to Evergreen trunk<br />(http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/changeset/12465) - it needs a bit of<br />internationalization work before it's ready for prime-time, but it is<br />a great feature.<br /><br />-- <br />Dan Scott<br />Laurentian University</blockquote>+1 to <a href="http://open-ils.org/">Evergreen</a>. I haven't been able to work on Evergreen since changing my focus to <a href="http://fedora.info">Fedora-commons</a> for now, but hope to get back to it when I can. It's a great project and it has absolutely the best-written and best use of JavaScript code I've seen.<br /><br />God it feels awesome to have your work included into the main repository.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-80722011151453793172009-02-02T01:15:00.002-04:002009-02-02T01:31:05.458-04:00Earbuds after a trip through the dryer.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/3245902521/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3320/3245902521_47a466de47_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style=" margin-top: 0px;font-size:0.9em;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/3245902521/">Earbuds after a trip through the dryer. RIP.</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/aoneill/">Alexander O'Neill</a>.</span> <p></p><b>Update:</b> Holy Jebus, they actually still work! Even the microphone. Amazing. Buying Apple stock immediately.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-39498071304934893762009-01-31T11:20:00.002-04:002009-01-31T11:24:02.653-04:00More Twitter ConfluenceThis was part of my Twitter feed this morning. Funny example of Twitter reflecting events in real time from different perspectives..<br /><blockquote><table class="doing" id="timeline" cellspacing="0"><tbody id="timeline_body"> <tr class="hentry status u-kgs" id="status_1164553563"><td class="thumb vcard author"><a href="http://twitter.com/kgs" class="url"><img alt="K.G. Schneider" class="photo fn" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/68192790/kgssmall2_normal.jpg" height="48" width="48" /></a></td><td class="status-body"><div><strong><a href="http://twitter.com/kgs" title="K.G. Schneider">kgs</a></strong> <span class="entry-content">Late start to the day. Turned on NPR and guy with squeaky voice was swishing wine in his mouth and spitting it out. Outlaw that sound.</span> <span class="meta entry-meta"><a href="http://twitter.com/kgs/status/1164553563" class="entry-date" rel="bookmark"><span class="published" title="2009-01-31T14:50:49+00:00">31 minutes ago</span></a> <span>from web</span></span></div></td><td class="actions"><div><a class="non-fav" id="status_star_1164553563" title="favorite this update"> </a><a class="repl" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=@kgs%20&in_reply_to_status_id=1164553563&in_reply_to=kgs" title="reply to kgs"> </a></div></td></tr> <tr class="hentry status u-garyvee" id="status_1164545613"><td class="thumb vcard author"><a href="http://twitter.com/garyvee" class="url"><img alt="Gary Vaynerchuk" class="photo fn" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/70520851/gv_normal.jpg" height="48" width="48" /></a></td><td class="status-body"><div><strong><a href="http://twitter.com/garyvee" title="Gary Vaynerchuk">garyvee</a></strong> <span class="entry-content">u can listen hear!!!!! <a href="http://tinyurl.com/b26vsm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/b26vsm</a></span> <span class="meta entry-meta"><a href="http://twitter.com/garyvee/status/1164545613" class="entry-date" rel="bookmark"><span class="published" title="2009-01-31T14:47:04+00:00">35 minutes ago</span></a> <span>from web</span></span></div></td><td class="actions"><div><a class="non-fav" id="status_star_1164545613" title="favorite this update"> </a><a class="repl" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=@garyvee%20&in_reply_to_status_id=1164545613&in_reply_to=garyvee" title="reply to garyvee"> </a></div></td></tr> <tr class="hentry status u-garyvee" id="status_1164536819"><td class="thumb vcard author"><a href="http://twitter.com/garyvee" class="url"><img alt="Gary Vaynerchuk" class="photo fn" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/70520851/gv_normal.jpg" height="48" width="48" /></a></td><td class="status-body"><div><strong><a href="http://twitter.com/garyvee" title="Gary Vaynerchuk">garyvee</a></strong> <span class="entry-content">I am on NPR's @<a href="http://twitter.com/weekendedition">weekendedition</a> in 2 minutes anyone have a link to a website where I can hear it? tune into NPR now!!!!!</span> <span class="meta entry-meta"><a href="http://twitter.com/garyvee/status/1164536819" class="entry-date" rel="bookmark"><span class="published" title="2009-01-31T14:42:35+00:00">40 minutes ago</span></a> <span>from web</span></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-36139332934147822422009-01-25T09:26:00.003-04:002009-01-25T09:54:59.107-04:00IslandScholar, UPEI's Institutional RepositoryOne of the things I appreciate about working in an environment where we use and create open source software is that I have the opportunity to talk about what I do outside of work. Unfortunately I just haven't had the blogging spirit much in general lately, so there are a lot of things I haven't gotten to write about yet.<br /><br />Fortunately Mark Leggott, our university librarian, who directs all the projects I work on, just posted a great write-up about <a href="http://islandscholar.ca/">IslandScholar</a>, which was launched in December. The post is here: <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://loomware.typepad.com/loomware/2009/01/islandscholar-launch-a-success.html">Link.</a> Mark outlines exactly what the repository is for and what we used to build it, in particular it is our most polished and customized use of the <a href="http://vre.upei.ca/dev/islandora">Islandora</a> front-end to the <a href="http://fedora.info/">Fedora</a> repository system, written as a module for <a href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a>.<br /><br />Mark's post describes it better than I would, but the gist is that IslandScholar will be a central location to show the research output of the entire UPEI faculty and related bodies, with as many as possible containing links to full-text versions of the published articles. We are using a form of crowd sourcing in that faculty can go to the site and view their own citations, and are able to upload the referenced documents directly to the site, with the rights from their journal publisher shown to them right on the page via <a href="http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/">SHERPA/RoMEO</a>, and the system will automatically convert their documents to PDF format and ingest them into the repository.<br /><br />Here's an example record with a full-text document included: <a href="http://www.islandscholar.ca/fedora/ir_full_record/ir:ir-batch6-305">Relationship between objective measures of physical activity and weather: a longitudinal study</a>.<br /><br />I really like the idea that we are helping to make information more readily available to the rest of the world. Getting to not only work on and create open source software, but to be furthering the philosophy of open access to information is quite a thrill as a software developer.<br /><br />More big news to come, hopefully. But either way I'll try and be more informative about what I am working on on this blog.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-3150446139008688302009-01-16T21:48:00.005-04:002009-01-16T21:56:45.136-04:00http://webcrawler.cs.washington.edu/Before webcrawler there really wasn't even a web. You had to basically know an address of a site and then type it in to get there, and to find that address you had to see it on TV, where the announcer would awkwardly enunciate "h t t p, colon, slash slash, double-you double-you double-you...." There was Archie for FTP and Veronica for Gopher (don't worry, kids, there won't be a test.) And of course 80%+ of your time online was spent on USENET anyway, so the web was more of a minor curiousity. <br /><br />Then along came webcralwer and changed everything.<br /><br />Which is why it's really incredibly sad that webcrawler is so crammed with ads that it can't even find itself on the frigging internets.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXxsMHjazvof_5bXUGijL9iFM3iHK9ctNOKGqOoEZtszbcepg8d9pRxOsHs8FSWmqBufl8dBybkf2lxgLSThmaPQWoCefxhyphenhyphenVuwFRbvnzcPtwumAmW7b976k0fKU9uBWzBbKnM4A/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 289px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXxsMHjazvof_5bXUGijL9iFM3iHK9ctNOKGqOoEZtszbcepg8d9pRxOsHs8FSWmqBufl8dBybkf2lxgLSThmaPQWoCefxhyphenhyphenVuwFRbvnzcPtwumAmW7b976k0fKU9uBWzBbKnM4A/s320/Picture+1.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5292074608454833410" /></a><br /><br />At least they don't force good old Spidey into appearing on this abomination of a zombie web search engine.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.thinkpink.com/bp/WebCrawler/SmallSurferSpidey.gif" /><br /><br />Rest in peace, little guy.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.thinkpink.com/bp/WebCrawler/History.html">More history here</a>.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-57814811733354596602009-01-12T11:32:00.006-04:002009-01-12T11:48:12.251-04:00Bash has C-like for loops?!My life just got a lot easier finding this out.<br /><br />We have an OCR package and 65 directories of tiffs we want to extract the text of, and we want to run a few jobs in parallel to get the work done faster and take advantage of all this multi-core business, but obviously we don't want to run all 65 processes at once, just 5 or so.<br /><br />The poor bastard who runs our scanners had a script where he had just copied and pasted the command line over and over with the different directory names. <br /><br />Here's a script that does the same thing in a nested 'for' loop.<br /><br /><code><br />#!/bin/bash<br />LIMIT=65<br /><br />for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT ; i = i + 5)) # Double parentheses, and "LIMIT" with no "$".<br />do<br /> for ((j=0; j < 5; j++))<br /> do<br /> imageList=" "<br /> for image in islmagfull/$[i + j]/*; do<br /> # Get all the files in the directory and build the image list to pass to the command line.<br /> imageList="$imageList -if $image"<br /> done<br /><br /> ./CLI $imageList -f PDF -pem ImageOnText -pfpf Automatic -pfq 85 -pfpr 200 -of "/usr/local/fedora/abbyy/${image%.*}.pdf" & # Ampersand means run the process in the background.<br /> done<br /> wait # 'wait' is awesome, it just pauses until all child processes are done. I love Unix.<br />done # A construct borrowed from 'ksh93'.<br /></code><br /><br />I should start a wiki to store code snipits, just using the blog as a scratch pad for now.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-60864531080698437142009-01-11T23:00:00.007-04:002009-01-11T23:55:56.762-04:001x09: The Battle<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp1UwOUilTxUqK-aFgGkqNne7YqiYG76clewzMoib-Y6B9KfQ6Bu6R1o7niJnN7mn8jhszjXzGzj7jC29gWDl_sBS_g4550mY9FjMucP9FdLW39y5ZNkUopzQzrpM8JCF6aaT68w/s1600-h/Picture+3.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp1UwOUilTxUqK-aFgGkqNne7YqiYG76clewzMoib-Y6B9KfQ6Bu6R1o7niJnN7mn8jhszjXzGzj7jC29gWDl_sBS_g4550mY9FjMucP9FdLW39y5ZNkUopzQzrpM8JCF6aaT68w/s320/Picture+3.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290240790297814130" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />I still love how the old Ferengi ships looked like angry cartoon characters with gritted teeth and red eyes.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzHhWZp-483sqBA7jcvltby7j8EHFk82mRQdXZwtuW0nbMLE91HAZ7wRHrAsItr8wuhmW90TUlEmUvXP50DJl7JY5okZxffM8pMzqf42uo8Rts961BOEUu1kEp6vY_6nrJzTkoCA/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 236px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzHhWZp-483sqBA7jcvltby7j8EHFk82mRQdXZwtuW0nbMLE91HAZ7wRHrAsItr8wuhmW90TUlEmUvXP50DJl7JY5okZxffM8pMzqf42uo8Rts961BOEUu1kEp6vY_6nrJzTkoCA/s320/Picture+1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290236994376508018" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In the future they don't get headaches, according to Dr. Crusher.<br /><br />And here we present the debut of Wesley's stupid outfit. Mostly I just feel sorry for <a href="http://wilwheaton.net/">Wil Wheaton</a> , who is an awesome blogger and honestly came out of this as well as anyone could have.<br /><br /><br /><br />This is still where they were trying to position the Ferengi as the series erstwhile villains, before audiences overwhelmingly found them hilarious.<br /><br />Ahh, this is the episode where they mention the "Picard manoeuvre". The Adama Manoeuvre, where he took the Galactica and brought it into the atmosphere to bomb the crap out of a planet, is a total rip-off of that.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjadrtOZg36tqGFnFKYKeUkPnSy2X81FK3SnVILxun00KGzo7SySxL_i8GxGjWclpsGUEp5lxo_hXk2o-gVkeulePN_zBO3hNKCl94M-U-XcqH8E-7yPry2KMjXVc1e33tIg_aFrw/s1600-h/Picture+2.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 234px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjadrtOZg36tqGFnFKYKeUkPnSy2X81FK3SnVILxun00KGzo7SySxL_i8GxGjWclpsGUEp5lxo_hXk2o-gVkeulePN_zBO3hNKCl94M-U-XcqH8E-7yPry2KMjXVc1e33tIg_aFrw/s320/Picture+2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290237553750309138" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The best part about this shot is that they had computers with colour displays in 1989 when the show was made, but chose to go back to green-on-black for something to look "computer-y".<br /><br />"Data, reading picard's log file from the USS Stargazer: "'we are forced to abandon our starship, may she find our way without us.' Apparently she did, sir. So Data can't figure out that "do" and "not" can be contracted to "don't" but he can make jokes anthropomorphizing starthips.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLn3iwx8Z3l3JftlVbpe9wk157q0ogG2Gbp6jEmpBOaeo7on1BWh4QpIZoGNj0llHkVeD0Jf-NDdvwOFOLvEof-PN2zGz8KG_UxThreoE_vyCrnQetclZALRvNuFytgVd859lpAA/s1600-h/Picture+4.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 243px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLn3iwx8Z3l3JftlVbpe9wk157q0ogG2Gbp6jEmpBOaeo7on1BWh4QpIZoGNj0llHkVeD0Jf-NDdvwOFOLvEof-PN2zGz8KG_UxThreoE_vyCrnQetclZALRvNuFytgVd859lpAA/s320/Picture+4.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290244011736797714" border="0" /></a><br /><br />"As you humans say 'I'm all ears'." LOLOLOLOL.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifNHrEnz5a6I6M6VZ9xDrZflpwRy71I57D1XB4vhce2PlsSGWrAN0o1q45gyG8Ye2y53HgQ3iceBPFp-XDatkWFDFsI4lo8mHLntpDa0Uzua-BtJCkkwyhv3MdzxxR6Qju1IPBDA/s1600-h/Picture+5.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 239px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifNHrEnz5a6I6M6VZ9xDrZflpwRy71I57D1XB4vhce2PlsSGWrAN0o1q45gyG8Ye2y53HgQ3iceBPFp-XDatkWFDFsI4lo8mHLntpDa0Uzua-BtJCkkwyhv3MdzxxR6Qju1IPBDA/s320/Picture+5.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290247545939549730" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Apparently the Ferengi have the power to project thoughts into Picard's mind. Somehow they forgot how to do this in their transition to comic relief. Quark could have used that power to fuck with Odo in supremely awesome ways.<br /><br />The ending to this episode: Picarad shoots the mind control device with a phaser. Yep.<br /><br />The good:<br /><ul><li>The Picard manoeuvre is frigging awesome.</li><li>Yarr didn't say very much</li><li>Worf didn't say very much</li><li>Troi didn't say very much</li></ul>The bad:<br /><ul><li>The Ferengi still trying to be the villains</li><li>The ending was basically "SNAP OUT OF IT, CAPTAIN". *sigh*</li></ul>The ugly:<br /><ul><li>Wesley's gay pride stripes</li><li>Yarr's haircut. This will be applicable for all episodes with her in it.</li><li>Riker without a beard still bothers me. WRONG WRONG WRONG.<br /></li></ul>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-57086468678293329082009-01-06T23:13:00.011-04:002009-01-07T00:30:40.910-04:001x08: Justice<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_%28TNG_episode%29">Justice.</a> Usually I have a pretty good recollection of what an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is about from the season it's in and the episode name, but this one is eluding me right now. The nitro is that they have stumbled on yet another previously unknown Class M planet while out ferrying passengers about and getting milk from the store. Won't the inhabitants of this planet be thrilled to hear they've been under Federation jurisdiction all this time and didn't even know it.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSvHPbbJZYiNNBTNFtoiX99YlLffUCVUgB4knLiKGQttOvYoSTlcC6aCE3rODhZxaCE70bvlfK5DdsqQPV1vUSJZZTyuJvKpjRrJc6pxaUsKdJyBtrEuAIB87shw8IWS9ojNY3kw/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSvHPbbJZYiNNBTNFtoiX99YlLffUCVUgB4knLiKGQttOvYoSTlcC6aCE3rODhZxaCE70bvlfK5DdsqQPV1vUSJZZTyuJvKpjRrJc6pxaUsKdJyBtrEuAIB87shw8IWS9ojNY3kw/s320/Picture+1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288385615976156418" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The director told Gates McFadden to cross her arms to contrast with Troi's soft demeanor.<br /><br />There are two things wrong with this frame:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLx-UjTygpYdLdilYl_gmDNioTZH_N2lrrAhMo5VcKIK6JuGGaNNXby3fFtcJeXFQdZw3qpjxrCRtwGTq3oYW-ElRiIt0U6dK3vJ201YNFV1_rdPdsDW9wfbEXhotmrlnGv9rNOA/s1600-h/Picture+2.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 241px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLx-UjTygpYdLdilYl_gmDNioTZH_N2lrrAhMo5VcKIK6JuGGaNNXby3fFtcJeXFQdZw3qpjxrCRtwGTq3oYW-ElRiIt0U6dK3vJ201YNFV1_rdPdsDW9wfbEXhotmrlnGv9rNOA/s320/Picture+2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288386701347281442" border="0" /></a><br /><br />1. They forgot to turn on the fake computer wall panels, so they just look like closets.<br />2. Wesley Crusher not being eaten by wolves.<br /><br />Geordi: "They make love at the drop of a hat." Yarr: "<span style="font-weight: bold;">Any </span>hat." These people on this planet sound very pleasant and therefore annoying. Please please please let this episode be about the crystaline entity coming to suck their planet dry. *fingers crossed*<br /><br />Oh shit they're sending Wesley down to the surface first. This is that one where he almost gets the death penalty but doesn't. Worst tease of an episode ever. I almost want to just stop watching now.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGGtXoc4uCqd71_9Zu6CNcb6Kz1EfstxNnr2faO9UQxthdekHPs_VDoBcX3yd4VOA3O_RMcMJIIXs9HXtshY0q5YsIHolAVwyXVNQj1EaCQGLfqlord13apcWmKgurByQLqZUl1Q/s1600-h/Picture+3.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 239px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGGtXoc4uCqd71_9Zu6CNcb6Kz1EfstxNnr2faO9UQxthdekHPs_VDoBcX3yd4VOA3O_RMcMJIIXs9HXtshY0q5YsIHolAVwyXVNQj1EaCQGLfqlord13apcWmKgurByQLqZUl1Q/s320/Picture+3.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288388180162609714" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Ahh the planet full of attractive Aryans. This was a good week for perpetual Hollywood extras. At least Worf knows they must be evil. Yes we get that Riker is supposed to be a horn dog, the 'we need to establish character' moments the writers are throwing in are getting old.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0E1l0UI_pUNR3g3Lu1APvUCGlevICReDCjuxOj2JcS5AcXm-ysEeKz58XNNkvHIMdesW3yzlYxlAMiZWHQaQio293XDE93Gowr2phi6LQVsJ3mnjQntlpvi7p4urvf85bv_65kA/s1600-h/Picture+4.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 237px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0E1l0UI_pUNR3g3Lu1APvUCGlevICReDCjuxOj2JcS5AcXm-ysEeKz58XNNkvHIMdesW3yzlYxlAMiZWHQaQio293XDE93Gowr2phi6LQVsJ3mnjQntlpvi7p4urvf85bv_65kA/s320/Picture+4.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288389361571033522" border="0" /></a><br /><br />They need to work this guy into the plot line where Yarr has a secret half-Romulan daughter a few seasons from now. He can be the godmother and hairstyle moral support.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8v1suFJ2jdTdQzgpzMGkAytVD8RSycZ0Df8vxhCzN7f3GGLp0FKrlqdCYq92EJZFFS668kdz-XpwpsZKaxZe7IZk1bkIlVJBY2W7ryW2Dh6b86x87HrytXuf0hq_LraSbQflBfw/s1600-h/Picture+5.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 242px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8v1suFJ2jdTdQzgpzMGkAytVD8RSycZ0Df8vxhCzN7f3GGLp0FKrlqdCYq92EJZFFS668kdz-XpwpsZKaxZe7IZk1bkIlVJBY2W7ryW2Dh6b86x87HrytXuf0hq_LraSbQflBfw/s320/Picture+5.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288390117763745730" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Is there a website that just collects pictures of Wesley looking baffled? I smell a meme.<br /><br />He only gets a hug from the alien whore, poor Wesley.<br /><br />Prime directive question: We are supposed to believe these people developed warp drive? Really?<br /><br />I'm pretty sure they kept this episode from being shown in syndication out of sheer embarrassment.<br /><br />Why is Data shaking his head while not looking at anyone in particular? He can display subtle physical signs of confusion but can't get that "do not" can be shortened to "don't"?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYyHGb5Sns9TqNflO23In8kf9FldkQgmDondPTfWi5DZ0RMEPj3861s4tM-CwaRicP1ycvXrnSPHxyzn1Q7uQivg2UycipDVGAU0No5y5EGhvkLZmePPW3cHC3-RPfKpd2qasc9w/s1600-h/Picture+6.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 239px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYyHGb5Sns9TqNflO23In8kf9FldkQgmDondPTfWi5DZ0RMEPj3861s4tM-CwaRicP1ycvXrnSPHxyzn1Q7uQivg2UycipDVGAU0No5y5EGhvkLZmePPW3cHC3-RPfKpd2qasc9w/s320/Picture+6.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288392984626511250" border="0" /></a><br /><br />This soap bubble is capable of rocking the entire ship. Once again: Inside federation space, and no one noticed before, or thougth of mentioning it afterwards. I love these old episodes for this reason.<br /><br />I think it's great that even Worf is offended by the idea of capital punishment. Oh Star Trek, you secret socialist fifth column, keep it up.<br /><br />Ugh, the bubble thing is "God" for the aryan rule freaks. There's some message about human exceptionalism in here but I'm not sure what it is exactly.<br /><br />Aaaannnd the climax to this episode is Riker saying "When has justice ever been as simple as a rule book?". He says that, they get transported off the evil planet of love and peace, and all is well. Endings were always the worst part of this series.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-28632914084214595702009-01-05T12:50:00.007-04:002009-01-05T13:00:46.076-04:00Neat patternWasn't expecting to see any sort of pattern when testing range operations in Python, this is super cool:<br /><br />>>> sum(num * num<br /> for num in xrange(1, 10))<br />285<br />>>> sum(num * num<br /> for num in xrange(1, 100))<br />328350<br />>>> sum(num * num<br /> for num in xrange(1, 1000))<br />332833500<br />>>> sum(num * num<br /> for num in xrange(1, 10000))<br />333283335000L<br />>>> sum(num * num<br /> for num in xrange(1, 100000))<br />333328333350000L<br />>>> sum(num * num<br /> for num in xrange(1, 1000000))<br />333332833333500000L<br />>>> sum(num * num<br /> for num in xrange(1, 10000000))<br />333333283333335000000L<br /><br />After that it started to take a long time to compute so I gave up.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-63749173430451950902009-01-03T11:22:00.002-04:002009-01-03T11:27:05.587-04:00The grilled cheese secretThis seems to blow people's minds when I tell them so maybe it's not as well-known as I would have guessed. Anyway, for the perfect grilled cheese sandwich, don't put the sandwich together first and then throw it on the frying pan.<br /><br />Instead, let the pan get nice and hot, throw in a healthy portion of butter and when that melts, lay two pieces of bread on to the hot frying pan and let them get toasty for half a minute. Then turn slice one over, put the slices of cheese (sharp cheddar, for god's sake) onto the now hot and buttery bread. Then quickly left the other piece and put the hot side down on top of the cheese.<br /><br />This lets your cheese fully melt without having to overcook the outside of the sandwich, and your bread is evenly toasted on both sides.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-55217793689533836542008-12-22T09:36:00.005-04:002008-12-22T10:30:13.168-04:00OutliersJust finished reading Malcolm <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Gladwell's</span> newest book, <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.amazon.ca/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017922">Outliers</a>, and I was totally impressed with it. I haven't read <span style="font-style: italic;">Tipping Point</span> yet but I did enjoy <span style="font-style: italic;">Blink</span>, so I was looking forward to this one, especially after seeing the subject matter was ironically about successful individuals and the book came out at the time when so many American success stories are being exposed as frauds.<br /><br />His thesis is that innate ability is not enough to get you to success, however you define it, which means that telling a child how smart he or she is constantly as a kid will actually do more to harm their future character and chances of success than not telling them at all what their real intelligence level is. Instead he cites example after example of people we all know of as huge successes, like Bill Gates and Bill Joy and the Beatles, and dig deeper into their background to find a crucial combination of unbelievable hard work - Gates and Joy would spend nearly all their time outside of class working on computer software, and the Beatles spend a few years playing for 6+ hours a night in Germany before they ever hit it big, getting more time playing shows together than most bands ever get in their entire careers -- and one more thing: luck. Joy and Gates, for all their hard work, didn't work anywhere near the orders of magnitude harder than a lot of young programmers to follow them to justify their success. Rather, they happened to be probably the very first people in the entire world who got to program interactively on a time sharing computer system, the first to come along after punch cards, and not have to pay for their time or compete with other members of a computer centre for precious little hours on the machine. So they had a massive head-start over their would-be peers, and were helped every step of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">teh</span> way by fortuitous events. This isn't a bad thing, it has to happen that someone is the first to come along and do the pioneering work when a new field opens up, or a new genre of music in the case of the Beatles.<br /><br />But the thesis of the book is that these are not extra-ordinary people who would have risen from any background to become the people they were just by their nature. That is the way the American individualist hero myth would tell the story. Instead, whenever you dig in and really see the breaks and good timing of birth and circumstances that allowed these people to have their hard work be meaningful hard work, that is what creates these great success stories. The last part of the book explains how other societies have ingrained meaningful work into their cultural psyche stemming from farming methods, and how cultural background can and should be actively studied and we should see what good and bad effects it has on one's ability to succeed.<br /><br />The last section of the main text is yet another go at trying to address what's wrong with the education system in America, and I don't really buy his proscription that students should be put into super-intensive year-round schooling to keep them from forgetting anything they have learned. Perhaps a glance toward successful education systems in Europe would be a better place to look than radically extending the time a child must spend in school and doing homework. <br /><br />Leaving aside criticisms of rote learning in Asian education, Gladwell is only talking specifically about math scores, and in that area Asian students are measurable, undeniably better.<br /><br />I don't want the fact that Asian education is also far from perfect to obscure the fact that we can learn a lot from other cultures' approach to knowledge, though. My favourite bit from the book was something that reminded me of my own experience studying math, when he described a video of a woman figuring out using a graphing program that it is simply impossible to graph a straight vertical line.. that it is undefined. It took her a long time, 22 minutes, but eventually the idea came to her and she will have an understanding of how graphing, and division by zero, works than she ever could have gotten in the usual time teachers allow students to struggle with a problem. For me in University I had a very difficult time in the classroom with some concepts, so I had to take them home and I ended up graphing every single problem assigned to me, whether it was called for or not, out on paper, sometimes doing slight variants as well. In the end it took me a lot longer to do my math homework, but I could eventually just look at an equation and instinctively tell how it should look if it was graphed out.<br /><br />That's the main key to success that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Gladwell</span> says is within all our grasps, if we just learn to work and work until we actually come to a meaningful step in understanding. Probably why I love tackling a difficult programming problem, even if I know I won't have the accident of timing of a Bill Gates.<br /><br />Here's a CBC interview with Gladwell about the book, let him tell it better than I can: <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2008/12/121408_4.html">Link.</a>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-32467652350211378362008-12-16T00:04:00.007-04:002008-12-16T01:19:19.980-04:00"Where No One Has Gone Before"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_No_One_Has_Gone_Before">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_No_One_Has_Gone_Before</a><br /><br />Finally getting back to watching old Star Trek TNG episodes, this is the one with the Traveller in it. Awesome. I actually don't remember seeing this one more than one or two times on TV, so it always had a weirdly etherial quality to it.<div><br /></div><div>Oh god Wesley Crusher is not 5 words in and I am already annoyed.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6ult-Kj7EjVOASp1lebZc42G-X_i-1M4I1kPpa3NHUWVn7OE6KNZpmuqtRkGi0J7V2s-wbQZnEb6MES56Tbb_FSMuMlOYElHmegADbsJLCLiksNjXiJybWoVgZ_w65dIN0YKQ2A/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 241px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6ult-Kj7EjVOASp1lebZc42G-X_i-1M4I1kPpa3NHUWVn7OE6KNZpmuqtRkGi0J7V2s-wbQZnEb6MES56Tbb_FSMuMlOYElHmegADbsJLCLiksNjXiJybWoVgZ_w65dIN0YKQ2A/s320/Picture+1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280235667286528290" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Love the shots of the old-school computer graphics and how they integrated simple graphics on top of lights to make it look complicaed. Amazingly it still stands up and doesn't look out of place. Very nice job.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj60wm37RWmzhs_Q7b-pZIgW3s8ULaabwlQOAej2innAjzjams0cBSe2KXSJGdQ-NoALsEo-2pYrXYnKhNuUbOeGsdMqFPXWO_TH4mbny0qLVXIcaiVx4NFw5Xa0mgzCwmpi8TJ5A/s1600-h/Picture+3.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj60wm37RWmzhs_Q7b-pZIgW3s8ULaabwlQOAej2innAjzjams0cBSe2KXSJGdQ-NoALsEo-2pYrXYnKhNuUbOeGsdMqFPXWO_TH4mbny0qLVXIcaiVx4NFw5Xa0mgzCwmpi8TJ5A/s320/Picture+3.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280237872211874226" border="0" /></a><br />Having Geordi as a lowly pilot and some random beardo as the chief engineer is all kinds of wrong. The actor is phoning it in pretty hard, too. I wonder if he knew his gig wasn't going to last.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcBUDnoGzwIFOf_bb9kt2oYAsKcyFjIoa1hTCan9kc51SzkeahdoPZ6LnTDvcRieZFqJ2lobkvXKLk0D1b7OBxxmWR3haFVXmvW2yIjEGPnQrS4IbImNMA5yl_9xxnCApVUelW_w/s1600-h/Picture+2.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcBUDnoGzwIFOf_bb9kt2oYAsKcyFjIoa1hTCan9kc51SzkeahdoPZ6LnTDvcRieZFqJ2lobkvXKLk0D1b7OBxxmWR3haFVXmvW2yIjEGPnQrS4IbImNMA5yl_9xxnCApVUelW_w/s320/Picture+2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280236532978683058" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Best effects of the early TNG run, for sure. Though the story behind the Traveller still doesn't make any sense, at least we get eye candy. I wonder what ever happened to the matt painting.<br /><br />Haha, oh Data, you still haven't learned not to quote time spans to the millisecond. One of the more charming old tropes.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibznuVO4mrDAWs_fg7nYNynAnWgkEV8jXQwyqA4rJORAMA1rVTmsqDOPMFDmf9U96yANpdsC9WrAOjelk-ZINTbeNn9NNovZ7BFN3UblOKYWysoJ5D_6Mlc3JqCLbhugET2kpg9A/s1600-h/Picture+4.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibznuVO4mrDAWs_fg7nYNynAnWgkEV8jXQwyqA4rJORAMA1rVTmsqDOPMFDmf9U96yANpdsC9WrAOjelk-ZINTbeNn9NNovZ7BFN3UblOKYWysoJ5D_6Mlc3JqCLbhugET2kpg9A/s320/Picture+4.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280238822259242386" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Silly Wesley quote: "you mean space and time and thought aren't as what they appear to be?" This Wesley as universe-travelling wunderkind thing could really have gotten out of hand had they persued this Traveller storyline any further.<br /></div><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzy3_IqjHjDbtJnBTshYZpvNa6UkeL-eJAd8ZLRP4tI9ccnCWpHyqslJNEoXOMdMj6k8tPm9LVLzeM' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br /><br />Had to throw in some video of the sweet "let's pretend we're 2001: A Space Odyssey" moment for a while. I do so love the original-series-ish tension-building music.<br /><br />The mentions of "rape gangs" on Tasha Yarr's home colony are totally out-of-place attempts at grittiness. Feels very tacky.<br /><br />The crazy hallucinations the whole crew is experiencing are pretty awesome, mostly for the bad French-Russian accent from Picard's mother offering him tea and teasing him about the nature of space.<br /><br />*sigh* the climax of this episode is for everyone on the ship to think happy thoughts so the Traveller can get the energy to bring them home. Endings were always the worst part of this series, this one is even worse than "reverse the shield phase arrays" bullshit, but they didn't really have much more room to do much else.<br /><br />Oh Christ, this is where Wesley gets promoted to Ensign and gets that goofy rainbow stripey uniform. Great episode, horrible consequences.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-70095301487685651212008-12-15T09:06:00.001-04:002008-12-15T09:06:35.277-04:00Lucene Search Engine Fail<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/3109756257/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3192/3109756257_33bf65be0f_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/3109756257/">Lucene Search Engine Fail</a> <br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/aoneill/">Alexander O'Neill</a>.</span><br clear="all" /><p>Lucene is Apache's search engine software project. You'd think they'd<br />trust it to search its own site.</p>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-5632831095344064092008-12-06T15:58:00.003-04:002008-12-06T16:15:43.578-04:00Always check for off-by-one errors<div style="text-align: left;">I just ran into a pretty basic error using a Drupal module, one that lets you post repeating events. Of course I just saw taht there was a release update and just threw it on the <a href="http://chancesfamily.ca/">CHANCES Family Centre</a> site I was working on without re-testing it. It wasn't until one of the site administrators tried to create a weekly repeating event and fortunately went to check the results that she saw there was a problem -- subsequent instances of a new event were appearing one day early in the week. This is a classic off-by-one error that every programmer on earth has made more than once in their time. ("Wait, should that less than check be a less than or equal to?")<br /><br />Unfortunately when something strange happens many users think that it's a problem with something thy did and they just don't understand this big complex piece of software and they never will get the hang of it and blah blah blah. And of course no user of a site should be expected to go to a <a href="http://drupal.org/project/eventrepeat">module's drupal.org page</a> and look at the open issues to see if anyone else is having the problem. My take-home from this is to be very wary of software module updates, and to not just trust something because it is an official release of a module. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Fortunately I have a good relationship with this particular client and was happy to put in a fix for them without too much trouble, instead of them just trying to muddle through posting events one day off intentionally, which is what users of commercial software that has a bug in it would have to do.<br /><br />The classic double-edged sword of open source software development, a developer might be working on a bit of code to suit his own needs, and just not do enough diligent checks that he hasn't broken some other feature unintentionally. Drupal is finally getting into <a href="http://drupal.org/project/simpletest">active automated testing,</a> but this won't help you if you are using a module that isn't part of the mainstream set of actively-developed modules. Maybe all this is telling me to take up the mantle of contributing in more active and complete ways to keep the modules I want to use alive.<br /><br />The slow hard but rewarding lesson of Open Source.<br /></div>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-72091225361067932092008-10-27T19:58:00.001-03:002008-10-27T19:58:57.690-03:00Rogers DST Fail<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/2979849668/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3037/2979849668_287bf8a38a_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/2979849668/">Rogers DST Fail</a> <br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/aoneill/">Alexander O'Neill</a>.</span><br clear="all" /><p></p>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-10191847225851669462008-10-25T01:12:00.002-03:002008-10-25T17:09:07.422-03:00Distraction LogThings I've been looking at while trying to get through watching one damn movie on my computer:<ul><li>The Wikipedia page for the movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgasmo">Orgasmo</a></li><li>The Wikipedia page for the movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgazmo">Orgazmo</a>. (Oh right.)</li><li>The FAQ for <a href="http://eatbabies.com/">eatbabies.com</a>.</li><li>Trying to find an etymological link between 'capricious' and 'goat'.</li><li>That <a href="http://www.prosebeforehos.com/alec/10/24/ashley-todd-fail/">dumb bitch who cut a backwards 'B' into her face</a> and tried to blame Barack Obama supporters.</li><li>The <a href="http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/antiphishing_phil/">Anti-phishing Phil</a> game.</li><li>Watching <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d98t2c2XZE">this vid</a> exposing paid volunteers of the McCain campaign acting classy as ever.</li><li>American? Liberal? Want to move to Canada? Check out the <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4su4t6">E.L.I.T.E. plan</a>.<br /></li></ul><div><br /></div>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-7640437642736728192008-10-11T15:46:00.001-03:002008-10-11T15:46:33.157-03:00Someone threw that ball really hard<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/2931513145/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3022/2931513145_b4198b2299_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aoneill/2931513145/">Someone threw that ball really hard</a> <br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/aoneill/">Alexander O'Neill</a>.</span><br clear="all" /><p>now</p>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-14677295870318216142008-10-02T12:18:00.003-03:002008-10-02T12:23:03.225-03:00Another Evergreen update: Google Book Search previewsJust thought I'd note my latest addition to <a href="http://open-ils.org/">Evergreen</a>, <a href="http://books.google.com/">Google Book Search</a> previews integration.<div><br /></div><div>The page about the update is here: <a href="http://vre.upei.ca/dev/node/422"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Link.</span></a></div><div><br /></div><div>And you can see them in action at UPEI's library site, a couple of examples <a href="http://islandpines.roblib.upei.ca/opac/en-US/skin/roblib/xml/rdetail.xml?r=228133&ol=4&t=freud&tp=keyword&l=4&d=2&hc=339&rt=keyword">here</a> and <a href="http://islandpines.roblib.upei.ca/opac/en-US/skin/roblib/xml/rdetail.xml?r=239271&ol=4&t=anne%20of%20green&tp=keyword&l=4&d=2&hc=131&rt=keyword">here</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Using Google's APIs is always fun since they are generally pretty easy to implement and their example code is nice and clean.</div>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-17048267491271116152008-09-29T19:55:00.003-03:002008-09-29T20:06:37.896-03:00Code release: Evergreen Customizeable Bib RecordsThis won't mean much to most of the people who read this, but I just thought I'd point to a bit of code I've released as <a href="http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software">Free Software</a>, it is a modification to the <a href="http://open-ils.org/">Evergreen</a> library information system that UPEI runs. This code lets an Evergreen administrator easily customize what information about a book gets displayed when looking at an item in the catalog.<br /><br />The project page is here: <a href="http://vre.upei.ca/dev/node/420">Link.</a><br /><br />I really love the fact that I'm being paid to work on open source software as my day job. It's a feeling that your work is meaningful beyond making a client more money while toiling away in silence under an NDA.<br /><br />I'm surprised how long it's taken for libraries to get onto the open source bandwagon, but UPEI is one of the ones at the very front of the pack, which is making it a very exciting place to work as a software developer.alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5077637.post-42550969200292238272008-09-26T05:19:00.002-03:002008-09-26T05:52:00.511-03:00Memos: September ember emberA few things I've been up to lately..<br /><ul><li>A few friends and I went to the Dayboat restaurant on Wednesday and all decided to go for the tasting menu. We were told by the chef before-hand to skip lunch and wear loose pants. I'll say after just the second course, which was goat cheese stuffed into little baby tomatoes, I was sure it was going to be in my top meals I've had my whole life. The wine we had recommended was <a href="http://www.evernote.com/Home.action#Note/28718305-a324-4e61-b480-aa92be84b69a">Teddy Hall chenin blanc 2007</a>. Next, they brought some teasingly delicate shrimp and scallops in a light batter and garnish that complemented it just about perfectly. There was also a beet salad that, just like most of the rest of the ingredients, apparently all were grown within about 20 minutes of the restaurant. The main course was a pork dish made au torchon, not sure what that means but it must have something to do with it being the softest, tenderest cut of pork that is physically possible to make. I'll say pretty confidently that the Dayboat is now the best restaurant on the island, ,hands down. Last year I never checked it out mostly because the menu, while all the local ingredients sounded amazing, just didn't have any dishes that I could get excited about. This year they've kept the focus on local food but the new chef has jazzed up the dishes considerably.<br /><br />The funniest part was while we were all enjoying the great food we kept coming back to talking about comfort food we all liked as kids and still do, like lipton noodles and which kind of no-name chocolate chip cookies were the best to the utter pointlessness of 'golden oreos'. Perhaps it was the pleasure in eating such good food that brought back genuinely pleasant memories of food taht wasn't fancy but still had pleasing qualities to it.<br /><br /></li><li>My thought about the US financial crisis is that the one thing Republicans know how to do well, and that helps them win elections, is to destroy hope. And they're shooting the moon on this one. The wave of Obama's enthusiastic supporters must have been so scary that nothing short of destroying the entire economy was enough to put a stop to it.<br /><br /></li><li>I just re-read <span style="font-style: italic;">Infinite Jest</span>. Sad that it took the tragic occasion of David Foster Wallace's suicide to get me to do it but I am glad I did. The themes of sadness and human struggle in the face of addictoin and bleak societal cynicism leave me shaking my head but feeling hopeful at the same time. The quest for genuine experience and expression, he seems to be saying, is what leads people to ever more harmful behaviour patterns. There's a 30-some-odd page sequence near the beginning of the book where a character overthinks himself into a state of paralysis while waiting for his pot dealer to show up that grabs you by the gut and forces you to experience the powerlessness of addictoin and the mental acrobatics we try to do to deny it.<br /><br />I want to some day either find or perhaps take some time and write a comparison of DFW's depiction of Americans and that of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's insitence on small words and straightforward sentences would seem to be anathema to DFW's embracing of esoteric technical terms, unapologetic use of precise jargon when talking about the progression of a tennis match or how a radio transmission works, but I had the same feeling when reading the two that this was the truly most expressive and full-bodied expression I had ever read. I want to find waht it was in both of them taht triggered my empathetic reaction in that wawy.<br /><br /></li><li>I just got some paintings I ordered from art.com back from the framer today, I'm very pleased with them, The Studio on Queen St. Sure I could have crazy glued and ebay'd my way to framing them myself but these are going to be on my wall for years so I think having an expert do the framing is probably the best way to go for me.<br /><br /></li><li>I spent the last couple of days adopting some pretty heavy JavaScript code to work on IE 6. And, while I still fully embrace the new movement to just plain drop support for the ancient browser in favour of more standards-compliant browsers, I am still glad I did it as it at least forced me to go over the code again in the same way a rejected article should proof-read every sentence of his work before re-submitting it. So the work is better in the end, even though my cruel master of an editor is the browser world's senile, stuck-in-his-ways boss who makes you write for an audience of reality-TV enthusiasts.<br /><br /></li><li>Heroes season 3 premier verdict: I'm still gonna watch, but the writers better break out of the arc they seem to be heading in and not repeat the same inter-character and internal struggles of the first season's main characters. I hope they still go ahead with the prequel series that they were talking about towards the end of the first season. Sylar is still my favourite character. "Eat your brain? Claire! That's disgusting!" : best one liner of the whole series so far.<br /></li></ul>alhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06800505504147841246noreply@blogger.com1