It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

So I get on this plane and then on another plane and next thing you know I am on a tiny tropical island with sandy beaches, warm waters and cheap rum.

This is what I look like at the moment:

I hope to look more like this by the end:

The ocean is really nice. The food is also particularly good this time around. I had a beef curry on the first night, flying fish for lunch an an amazing blackened mahi mahi (which they call dolphin fish here for some reason).

There is also lots of rhum bottles going around and Banks beer. The first day of lectures was also fairly interesting. Anderson gave a review of information theory (quite concise) and also introduced the min entropy and the max entropy which I had always heard about, but never understood.

It will be a full week of Bit commitments, Oblivious transfers and more fancy stuff near the end. All from first principles. Nice!

Aint no two ways about doing this assignment thing. Sit down. Take pen in hand. Write write write.

Go.

I have two assignments to work on today. This means that, naturally, my morning reading of hacker news will likely get protracted indefinitely so that I can avoid actually sitting down and starting to work.

Two interesting articles piqued my attention and I want to share them with you. The first one is about how education creates cogs for the system. I.e. the high school — CEGEP — University chain combo has as its purpose producing employees for the corporations. I always knew it, but the author puts it in historical context and make some other good points also.

Then there is an interesting analysis of the Google Buzz fiasco. The main point the author makes is that the buzz launch wasn’t an accident or an deployment fuck-up by google, but rather an intentional strategic action by top management to capture market share. Many analogies with Microsoft-style leveraging of existing products (in this case gmail) to launch new products are made.

Ok… now that we have reached the bottom of this post there is nowhere else to go than to the assignments….

I don’t get the point of twitter. Why do people tweet? So they can share their exciting lives with the rest of the world? So that they can keep in touch with friends? So that they can exercise an influence over others? So they can feel as part of some #community?

I think a good portion of the users are blatant advertisers and self/friend-promoters. Check out my article… check out this website (which my friend told me to twit about)…. check out this product….

Then there is the self-interested group of people. “Just had a meeting with so and so” ok… good for you bro, why are you telling the whole world about it? Why don’t you tweet every time you go to the restroom. “I just had a wonderful piss, it was necessary too because of all that #beer”.

Now since I don’t have a need to promote any website (yet?) and I don’t feel like blogging about the minutes of my daily life, I just don’t get twitter.

There is another cool aspect though and that is link-sharing, or if you prefer the more buzz-word like name “collaborative filtering”. If you find a cool article that you want to share, you can post it to twitter. Real time news fit into this. Links to good news articles too. Links to thoughtful blog posts also.

It would be interesting to have some “twitter app” that can separate the wheat from the chaff.
You still “follow” someone, but filter their vanity-tweets (a.k.a i did this and that…) and their promotion tweets.
What remains should be only quality material no?

One could even rate users based on their Signal-to-Noise ratio.

This article has some good advice about entrepreneurship on the internet:

1. Make a product that a billion people will fall in love with and use for the rest of their lives.
2. Make it easy for a single-digit percentage of them to pay you a few bucks a month once in a while.
3. Make sure your variable costs are low enough that you can make a mountain of profit if you get #1 and #2 right.

Which of my projects are capable of doing this?

What are the other web-friendly business models?

Let’s say you have access to a free printer at work.
And you really want to work on that website idea of yours using django from the comfort of your home.
So you want to print the django docs as a big binder and take them home so you can lookup stuff when you need to.

No problemo. The docs come with pdf-generating scripts:


pip -E /Users/ivan/.virtualenvs/predemo/ install sphinx

or if you are the kind of guy who likes to pollute his “default” python repository:

pip install sphinx


then:

svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django-source-trunk
cd django-source-trunk/docs/
make latex
#...lots of stuff scrolls down...
cd _build/latex/
make all-pdf
#....
open django.pdf


Note: I assume here that you have latex installed on your computer (specifically the command pdflatex).

Is printing 900 pages on the office printer stealing?
Fuck man, you give blood and sweat to your employer — the least he can pay you is a good book….

Here enjoy my copy if you prefer:
PDF version
HTML files in a folder ZIPPED

I had a little thought this morning walking to school. Coincidentally, there was an article in the morning news which introduces a term that best fits my though: over-education.

Do we really need to use our brain so much? I mean I sure enjoy it (when it works, less so when I am stuck and unproductive), but isn’t there something better to do with it? The human brain has evolved through thousands of generations of life and grown to a hefty size. Lots of folds to maximize the cortex area. So over the past millions of years Nature has decided that it is better for survival to have more CPU power.

Mother Nature doesn’t say what you should use your brain for though. Should you be reading papers about quantum codes, LDA topic-models, cutting edge web-development or philosophy? Should I maybe not study ANY of these and go help people?

I think it is clear that every person must answer this question for him/herself. What I want to draw your attention to is that any choice you make comes with its consequences. Think too much and then you won’t be able to stop thinking — like that prof I saw on my walk to school, who seemed deep in it… to the point of not looking where he walks.

You have to also keep track of the forces that are influencing your decisions. If society says it is good to be smart you might adapt to this “requirement” and make choices in your life that make you too smart for your own good. (By smart here I mean having technical knowledge above the common person). I know of at least a dozen friends of mine who are very bright individuals with advanced technical skills and developed rationality, but who are in reality deeply flawed characters because of their lack of basic everyday life skills. What is really dirty in this whole story is that large corporations will always want to hire these people because they know that their lack of personal life is an asset. Personal problems and awkwardness with people means you can pour all your energy, frustration and pain into your computer terminal.

If I don’t want to end up like them, I better start diversifying. Where is the fine line of balance between theorizing and doing? Where is the fine balance between cooperating with society and doing what is best for you?

Definition: The “template life”

“Untemplater defines the ‘template lifestyle’ as the following: Work hard in school, get good grades, get a corporate job, work the 9-5 cubicle, get your MBA, work up the corporate ladder, retire, die. Sounds a little harsh but that’s the template that we’ve been given ever since applying to universities from high school. Our goal is to show undergraduates and young professionals that they have the power to break free from this template lifestyle and live life on their own terms.”

Untemplater is about self-employed tech workers and their interests.

got the coffee… not too much motivation, and definitely bad expectations (for God’s sake I don’t even understand the questions in the comp610 assignment!).

But this is nothing to fret about… I’ve been hit with assignments before and I survived. Surely I will survive again…

Since my root privileges have been revoked at my previous job, and my (10$/year) hosting will soon expire I thought it would be a good time to move more of my stuff onto my private VM.

The host where VMware server is running has a pretty good track record:

host:~# uptime
13:20:05 up 112 days, 4:40, 2 users, load average: 0.35, 1.64, 1.12

so I figure I can depend on it :)

I went ahead an did a dist-upgrade (etch to lenny), but lo and behold the machine does not come back on the network after the reboot. Raaz-clat! Why DID I have to change kernels? Surely I could have kept using the old stuff…. oh man… so then and there I start to feel depressed. The thing is I can’t access the console for my VM since I am not root anymore. All I can do is sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart and some sudo manual kills.

The root cause of this is that the lsilogic scsi controller is not supported in the 2.6.26 kernel out of the box in Lenny.

Luckily Pablo77 has the solution up at howtoforge. Simply edit the your_VM.vmx file replacing “lsilogic” with “buslogic” like so:


...
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "buslogic"
memsize = "376"
...


We are back in business….