Abandoned locks

When people arrive back to where they locked their bicycle and find it vandalised, they often just abandon them forever, so you find bike racks with a certain percentage of rusting, ruined bikes.
Fair enough but... why do they leave them locked there, if they're never coming back? The locks are sometimes more expensive than the bike (or at least a new wheel). Why not take the lock home? Then a) people can recycle the bike if they want, b) people can use that parking slot and c) the victim at least doesn't have to buy a new lock for €€€ in future!

Thoughtless showers

(from Wikipedia article on brainstorming)
Some governmental organisations (The Welsh Development Agency and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Belfast) have reached the conclusion that the term 'brainstorming' is offensive to people with epilepsy (see political correctness) and have suggested the alternative "thought-showers".

Oh you stupid, stupid people. You hideously moronic, making-reasons-to-get-offended-about-clearly-inoffensive-things obsessive wankers. You waste public tax funds to research what existing terms could be deemed offensive to somebody by reading it in some contrived and obviously unintended context - something which is completely out of your mandate.

Happily, the article continues:

However, research by the National Society for Epilepsy found of those affected by epilepsy questioned, 93% considered the term inoffensive. A specific comment states that changes need not be made since that could promote an undesirable image of epileptics being easily offended.

Here's a tip for (predominantly) UK government-funded organisations: do your job. Don't waste your time and money determining which terms might offend somebody somewhere if viewed in some funny way. That's not your job.

Vote for against change, or something

Accidentally caught a political ad on BBC between/after snooker the other day, by the DUP/UUP or some-other-wankersUP. The guy went on about how if you let xxx in, they'd let all the Scottish and Welsh nationalists break up "the union", so you should vote him in instead.
Then, immediately after he says his piece, the words "VOTE FOR CHANGE" appear on the screen.

WAT??? Wasn't he just campaigning AGAINST change?

Opera 10.53 on the Mac: Crash central

The latest release builds of Opera for the Mac are atrocious, crashing all the time. All. The. Fucking. Time. And with seemingly random user interactions leading up to the crash, which kind of suggests a race condition, memory allocator or some other effectively random bug, although I have so many damn tabs open, many of which have JS stuff going on in the background, that it's hard to tell.

Another thing which makes it even harder to tell, is the rubbish stack trace provided when it crashes. A major downside to having closed-source software like Opera is that you can neither properly investigate these crashes nor solve them properly. Why not provide at least some kind of assertions or at least filename/line numbering in the stack traces? AFAIK, adding that sort of debug info, even for a shitty language like C++, isn't that big of a performance hit.

And if they're purposely obscuring debug info because Opera is closed source, then WHAT THE FUCK. Nothing "damaging" would be leaked by such information. Blargh!

Using tor/Vidalia to access BBC iPlayer (etc) outside the UK

There's a decent article explaining how to set up tor/Vidalia to access sites like BBC's iPlayer which only allow connections from certain countries (like England). Not mentioned in the article (although someone added a comment about it) is that now you do not need to manually select exit nodes in the UK - you can specify exitnode countries in your torrc files by putting a two character country code in braces. This makes the process much easier!

I'm running on a Mac with Vidalia, so the setting file (you can find the location of it in the Vidalia settings dialog's advanced tab - but it's probably ~/Library/Vidalia/torrc) ends with:

ExitNodes {GB}
StrictExitNodes 1

Note that the country code is GB and not UK, which a couple of posts/articles online misleadingly state.

There's another problem with the recent Mac builds - the geoip file is in the wrong place, leading to log messages like the following:

[Warning] Failed to open GEOIP file /Applications/Vidalia.app/share/tor/geoip. We've been configured to use (or avoid) nodes in certain countries, and we need GEOIP information to figure out which ones they are.

That was solved like this (from the terminal):

cd /Applications/Vidalia.app/
mkdir -p share/tor/
cp Contents/Resources/geoip share/tor/

Then stop and restart tor.

Update: StrictNodes should now be StrictExitNodes.

Opera and the CPU

Opera 10.51 is running on my work PC under Windows Vista, with 2gb RAM and 2.66ghz Core2Duo. There are about 50 open tabs, and one of them is playing a Youtube video. CPU usage is listed in the Task Manager as around 2-3%, with 300mb of physical RAM used.

The most recent Opera (10.10 I think... actually 10.52 was apparently released today, but 10.10 still reports that there are no new updates) on my 2.33ghz C2D Macbook with 2gb RAM in the same configuration except without any Youtube videos playing, uses 10% CPU according to top, and 20-30% with a video playing. And that's with the Flashblock userjs - before it was much higher.
Why? Is it because my PC has a half-decent graphics card and the Macbook doesn't?

US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus

(link)

A nice, measured treatment of the flaws (especially the common citations of bogus or non-existent work) in pro-IP surveys and studies, usually commissioned by "content industries" (organisations like the MPAA, RIAA, BSA etc) which often contain "specific and alarmist rhetoric".

It's US-centric but has some very sane and generally applicable points, like: "For instance, these studies ignore the obvious points that pirating goods leaves consumers with more disposable income, which is likely spent elsewhere in the economy. Effects on the economy as a whole, then, are terribly speculative and seem more likely to be simply redistributive".

Distinguishing between "choking" and "panicking"

If you've ever "choked" in any kind of performance (e.g. when you're far ahead in a snooker game and just need this one, simple shot to win, you can do this, just keep your shoulder down and your elbow straight, follow through with the cue and WHAT THE-), then this utterly superb article will have you nodding your head in acknowledgement, understanding and compassion.

Not only does it explain and separate the notions of panicking (reversion to instinct) and choking (loss of instinct) under pressure with dramatic examples, it introduces the interesting form of choke that is "stereotype threat" (which seems to correspond with something I wrote a while ago):

"Steele and others have found stereotype threat at work in any situation where groups are depicted in negative ways. Give a group of qualified women a math test and tell them it will measure their quantitative ability and they'll do much worse than equally skilled men will; present the same test simply as a research tool and they'll do just as well as the men."

Ultimately, we're faced with a Schrodinger-type paradox, whereby external, theoretically irrelevant variables (audience, expectations, prize, etc) influence performance on a task:

"We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one."

Redundant T&C's

(http://www.meteor.ie/terms_and_conditions/billpaymax/)

These fair use conditions are such that a Customer's usage of this tariff plan shall not exceed 45,000 minutes of calls and/or 5,000 texts per month.

1 month = (max) 31 days = 31*24 hours = 31*24*60 = 44,640 minutes.

Since it's physically impossible to exceed 45,000 minutes of calls in any 44,640 minute period... why have that condition in the contract at all?
It's like having a "friends and family" discount with a condition that you can only apply the discount to a maximum of 7 billion people.

Üter

Was walking to the train station with the childe on the way home from town, going by Leinster House. To prompt the dawdling girl into hurrying up I told her the Garda stationed at the gate would catch her if she was bold, which naturally caused her to sprint away at full pelt. As we passed, the young cop called out: "Ah don't make me run, I'm full of chocolate!"

Good to see a Garda with a sense of humour (and a decent knowledge of Simpsons episodes) :D

Subclipse: "An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host"

Subclipse "suddenly" stopped working, so I couldn't commit or synchronise to a svn repository anymore:

RA layer request failed
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: OPTIONS of 'http://big-long-svn-path': Could not read status line: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.

Maybe a recent update of TortoiseSVN bolloxed it up, who knows... anyway, I worked around it by going to Team->SVN in Eclipse's preferences dialogue and changing the client in the "SVN Interface" section from JavaHL (JNI) to SVNKit (Pure Java). Works so far, although I had to re-enter the username/password which had been stored before.

Interregnum

Saw a nicely vandalised sign in the DCU car park today which reminded me (pleasantly) that this is Ireland. Someone had crossed out three letters so it read:

NO SMOKING BEYOND THIS POINT

Chinese character frequencies

After a long time of somewhat naïvely trying to learn Chinese by adding production flashcards for new words (where the front side is a English term with hints to avoid guessing an answer that was correct but not the one on the back side, and the back side is Chinese characters and phonetic pinyin), I realised the task was far too difficult and time-consuming. For each of those cards, I'd write the characters on a graphics tablet and speak them, then flip the card and fail it if I made any mistakes in either the writing or speech. This was needlessly laborious since there was so much redundancy and opportunity to make small mistakes even if most of the answer was correct (writing out 印制电路板 (printed circuit board) many times was extremely tedious and unproductive).

So some reading on Glowing Face Man's blog led me to switch things around a bit, changing my deck so that the only characters I would write (production) were single characters, of which there are still very very many (over 20,000!) but the most common 3,000 account for over 99% of what you'll see in actual modern Chinese. All the other cards changed to recognition, where the front side is the Chinese characters and the back side (what I speak out loud before flipping the card) is phonetic pinyin and a (sometimes rough) English translation. Rather than mess about with Anki's deck format or exporting/modifying/importing, I wrote a dodgy AppleScript program to automate moving through the deck interface and sending keystrokes to cut, paste and rearrange the text... even crappy automation can be better than changing 2,500 cards manually. In fact, it would still be better even if it took the same amount of time, because of the sense of reward that it spurs.

This has helped immensely, reducing the pain and greatly increasing throughput and efficiency. However, learning the characters still takes time - my current plan is to go through the 3,000 most common ones and learn them as production cards before carrying on with sentence recognition cards.

But why 3,000 characters? Why not half or twice that? And which ones?

That's answered here - a computer program can quickly go through a huge corpus of text and produce a sorted listing of characters by frequency. Predictably, the first couple of hundred characters account for a huge fraction of written Chinese: 200 characters will get you 55% understanding (that's "most" Chinese already, heh), 400 will get you 70%, and so on. (Of course, when I say "understanding", I'm ignoring the fact that you need to learn the grammar, idioms and so on, and which of many possible meanings a character will take on in different contexts.)

A quick plot of the numbers provided produces a roughly logarithmic shape, showing diminishing returns (given the roughly constant time required to learn characters):



So it looks like the payoff is small by the time you're hitting around 2,500 characters (98.5%), but it would be nice to say that you only don't know <1% of written Chinese when you hit 3,000 characters (99.2%), and only add more unfamiliar characters to the deck as you encounter them during reading, less and less often.

Tip of the Tongue learning is bad!

This article came as a surprise - my default assumption was that "working through" this tip of the tongue state until I came upon the answer. The research demonstrates that the time you spend agonising and searching for the answer causes the same thing to happen next time - you're "practicing" the stuck condition.

So the best thing to do is to have a short timeout (10 seconds was better for future remembering than 30 seconds, in the study) whereupon you give up and look up the answer, or make a note to check later or something. Anything but keep struggling until you remember the answer the hard way, since it only facilitates the same wrong mental paths in future.

Two more suggestions...
1. When you struggle with a tip of the tongue thought, whichever way you manage to resolve it, make an entry for it in an SRS program like Mnemosyne or Anki.
For example, the researcher who carried out the study said that she often struggled to remember the word "obsidian". So when you notice that you tend to struggle with this word, you add a flashcard to your SRS with "glassy lava rock" on the front, and "obsidian" on the back. Then when reviewing the cards, if you can't remember the answer after 5-10 seconds, you give it a fail mark. If you remembered it quickly, give it a passing mark. The SRS program will take care of the rest, managing the transition of the properly-learned knowledge into your long-term memory.

2. When you see a friend (or a child!) struggle for a word and you can guess what word it is, put them out of their misery ASAP, and if they say "ahh, I would have got it, why did you tell me?" then explain why!

Blinkenwords

Uploaded a small utility called Blinkenwords on RubyForge. It's a simplistic RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) program which takes input from the clipboard (shortcut: up arrow key) and displays it (shortcut: down arrow key) in vertical chunks. You can change the number of words in each block (from 1-10 at a time) and change the speed in words per minute (shortcuts: -5 wpm => [, +5 wpm => ]).

There's lots of similar programs out there, some implemented as Javascript programs - I only wrote this because none of the ones I tried rendered text as I wanted to see it (i.e. reading in vertical columns, 3 words per column, but not scrolling a 3-line textbox one line at a time). It has a couple of very basic heuristics which insert a slight pause when a group of long words or end of sentence/clause is detected. Also, I took the opportunity to add easy keyboard shortcuts to streamline things (i.e. copy some text, switch to Blinkenwords, press up key (paste), press down key (play text), left/right keys (skip backwards or forwards)).

Whether reading this way helps or hinders speed and comprehension is questionable (see this blog post I wrote a while back on the topic of speed reading), so this is pretty experimental and YMMV (if you can even get it working - had some troubles with source file encodings and a couple of other things). Personally, I find it useful when there's lots of drudgery-reading to be done (e.g. catching up on forums/lengthy emails/news articles), but have problems with difficult, dense texts.




Update: You can download a Windows build of Blinkenwords is here. I used a very impressive program called OCRA to automatically bundle the Ruby interpreter and required libraries into a single 4mb(not enormous) packed executable.

Plink beta 0.60 broken

Spent about 20 minutes wondering why Plink (part of the free PuTTY SSH suite) was acting extremely oddly on my machine - not displaying help when run with no arguments, and completely ignoring PuTTY saved session configurations, and generally not working at all.

On the off-chance, I downloaded the snapshot release of Plink (from the same page) and it worked straight away. Argh! A completely useless buggy version has been the official release since 2007?!

Polaroid TLU-02241W blank screen oddness

Picked up a Polaroid TLU-02241W LCD flatscreen TV cheapish on eBay a year or so ago, intending to set it up for use with my Atari STe, which didn't happen until today (and is still pretty crappy with the horrendously low quality RF cable - will need to pick up a special 13-or-something pin DIN to SCART cable).
When I received the TV I did a quick test and it seemed fine, but turning it on this time only displayed the Polaroid logo on boot and then the display seemed to power itself off, even though the blue LED showed that it was still "on". Also, it seemed to pick up some analogue broadcast via the RF cable and produced a good sound output.

A quick Google indicated that this model (and many other Polaroid TVs) has serious problems, particularly relating to bad quality electrolytic capacitors in the power/control boards. While watching a series of videos on Youtube showing how to identify and replace the dodgy caps, I went back in and booted the TV again, this time repeatedly hitting the menu button on the remote. Surprisingly, it went from the logo to a blue screen with a working OSD. Problem solved, even after turning the TV off and on without the same button mashing.

Sounds like it will eventually fail, with all the bad reviews, but for now it seems ok. If you're seeing the same symptoms, see if this works.

Update: Problem not solved - came back again the next day and no amount of button mashing will help it. Also, tilting the screen backwards or forwards causes the power LED to flicker and go dim, which is disturbing. Looks like it's a painful capacitor replacement job which is somewhat likely to fail anyway if it turns out to be another problem.

Poor show, Polaroid!

Phone IQ test failure

*phone rings*
GF: "Hello?"
Caller: "Hi is that Danny?"
GF: "No, I think you've got the wrong number... Ok bye!"

...... *6 or 7 seconds pass... phone rings*
GF: [It's the same number, you talk to her this time]
Me: "Hello?"
Same caller: "Hi, Danny?"
Me: "Eh... no, I'm pretty sure you have the wrong number."
Caller: "Oh right! Sorry."
Me: "Ok, good luck."

...... *5 seconds pass... phone rings*
Me: [Just leave it, answer again if she does it in an hour or so]

*voicemail icon flashes, we check the mailbox*
Same caller: "Hi Danny, this is Anne-Marie here at Classic Cuts, just checking if 1pm on Wednesday is ok with you. Bye!"

---

Why would someone dial the same number twice and, after being told twice that they've got the wrong number, dial AGAIN and leave a voicemail for "Danny", even though the voicemail greeting clearly identifies as someone other than Danny?
What could possibly explain simultaneously having the ability to dial phone numbers and speak English, while being unable to comprehend the most obvious facts? If you call a number TWICE and are told that it's a wrong number, it's STILL going to be the wrong number the third time.

Top Tip: No amount of redialling the same wrong number will cause Danny to answer the phone.

Freeline skates... feasible for transport?

After my bike was robbed [smiley face indicating that I'm loudly shouting "cunt!"] in November or so, I figured I'd experiment with alternative forms of transport, hoping to find something more casual and less stealable (i.e. something I don't leave outside my house only locked to itself might be appropriate).

Doing a bit of looking around online, I was intrigued by so-called "Freeline" skates (Wikipedia article appears a bit anaemic), which are very much like the old snakeboard, albeit without the connecting bar between the two plates. To propel yourself forward, rather than kicking off the floor like with skateboards and inline skates, you use your hips, legs, shoulders, arms and whatever you can to swing your body weight around and turn your feet so the skates follow a kind of S-curve.
It's called "non-holonomic motion" and I found it very difficult to understand via textual descriptions which were far superior to this one, so basically you just have to try it until you get the knack, which took me quite a while on the Freelines.
So I picked up a pair on eBay around Christmas (very expensive too, ended up around €110 delivered from the UK).

The initial hurdles

1. Standing on the skates without doing the splits. As you stand on the skates, the axis of movement is just off horizontal so the skates want to slide out to your left and right and you accidentally do Jean-Claude Van Damme sidesplits. Most people, including myself, can't really do that without our legs falling off and exploding, so you quickly learn to control the relative position of the skates with your inner thigh muscles.

2. Rolling across the room with losing your balance. This is presumably the same with any kind of skates/skateboard, but exacerbated by the fact that these behave in a slightly more unexpected way due to the wheels being angled slightly differently: there is a distinct left skate and right skate, so when they're side by side the wheels make a shallow V-shape. Getting used to this means rolling back and forth on flat ground by a railing or low wall so you can pull/push yourself and keep steady with your arms, until eventually you can coast a few metres unaided. Or get a friend to hold one hand and walk back and forth, but that's limited by their patience since it can take a long time.

3. Launching from stop without pushing against a wall. It's difficult to even stand still on the skates - a little bit like on a bicycle. Sometimes you see bicycle couriers with gearless bikes and no freewheeling clutch, stopped at a traffic light (yes, many bicycle couriers actually stop at lights :D) and very slowly inching forwards and backwards on the spot rather than putting their foot down. You can do a similar trick with these by angling your feet into a T-shape, but it takes practice, and actually pushing off from that position to get moving is even more difficult (I tried it about ten times and succeeded once, and awkwardly at that).

Normally, to push off moving from right to left, you put both skates in front of you, then knock the right skate over away from you and step onto it so your toes are also touching the floor. Then you put your weight on those toes and place your left foot on its skate, and push in that direction (without extending too far or your right foot will fall off the skate), pulling the right skate upright with your foot as some of your weight moves onto the left skate.

4. Propelling yourself! After all the other challenges, this one is pretty easy, to begin with anyway. Your feet will probably start to do this automatically in step 2, when you're just trying to roll without falling. Essentially, as one foot is moving in an upwards curve, pushing it forward will increase your speed, and similarly when it's on downwards curve.

Then what?

Well, I only got them to replace my bike, so all the tricks people do with them (mostly pirouettes, riding on one foot and dropping/stomping the second skate, switching etc) are not really relevant. If I ever get supremely good at riding the things, maybe I'll experiment a bit.

Mostly, I want to find out if I can travel any kind of significant distance on them, somewhere between walking and cycling speed. A measly 8km/h for 4km (the distance between my house and DCU) would suit me just fine, but so far I have to stop riding after about 1km (about 10 minutes) because I get pains in the following places: the middle of the soles of my feet, my calf muscles, my instep. By then my thighs basically just run out of energy and I start moving more and more slowly and my form gets sloppy.

I don't know if this is poor general fitness (I'm a lazy, lazy man who likes sitting on his arse with a laptop or playing PS2 for hours on end), or specific muscle conditioning that needs to happen for everyone, or if I'm literally physically incapable of adapting to the skates for longer periods, or even if the skates are just not suited for that kind of travel, especially over the crap, laughable pavement conditions we have here in Dublin (stupid 1 inch deep, 3 inch wide drainage channels between every few houses, cracks and bumps everywhere, corrugated concrete driveways which make skates trundle and vibrate like a broken shopping cart).

That said, if you're going at a reasonable speed you can get over small cracks and drains by leaning slightly onto your back foot - that way the front skate can bounce past the obstacle and even if it gets caught and stops dead, you just hop off since they're not tied to your feet. If your front skate gets caught and most of your weight is on that foot, your balance can be thrown off badly.
And I've seen a couple of videos on Youtube which suggest that people can and do cover more significant distances on them - about 34km in this one.

One recent change that's working much better for me is focusing more on my back foot to push myself forward, rather than trying to drag myself with the front foot which causes it to slip out of position and seems to tire me out. Maybe it's just more efficient for the way I happen to distribute my weight on the skates. Who knows. Even if it turns out to be a complete failure, it'll be a fun failure!

Snappy?

(trying to reassure scared 2-year old daughter at 3am)

Me: Ok, if there's a monster there, just give it a kick.
Aela: How 'bout YOU kick monster.