Scientifically Open Source

Sci-fi mania

2010-12-28T17:34:00.000-08:00

Greetings to one and all! Yeah... so that thing about being back. Turns out that breaks are great times to start up on pet projects. It's something I highly recommend; though I warn that having multiple projects can be quite hazardous to actually getting one of them achieved. A few that I'm still sustaining are:

Some JDBC familiarity. Over the summer, I had some lessons in interacting with a MySQL database through Python using the MySQLdb library. However, I didn't get to get a taste through interacting with Java, which has a much more mature and standardized interface through the JDBC API. So here's the plan: food shopping is an awfully complex endeavor, especially when you haven't quite figured out which stores tend to be cheaper for what types of food. If you're like me, and can't remember what the price of a head of lettuce is from week to week, and what an expected sale price is, keeping records might help us sift through all of that information. While keeping receipts and drawing up tables might help get a general idea of what stores are better deals, a computerized approach would be more thorough (though I have to admit, likely overkill). However, if you have a need, and a means to reach it, why not get some practice programming while you're at it! So here was the plan: set up a relational database (PostgreSQL. MySQL is too closely associated with the red insignia of... killing Sun. Plus, variety is always a virtue), and write a client that provides an interface for inputting all of the price/location info automatically into the database. Java would be the language of choice this time because... Python was done already, and I don't think I'd know enough math for database interaction in Haskell; the concepts behind Hello World were hard enough (Look here for some taste of Haskell thinking). Right now, the database has been built (automatically through a script), and the client interface is being worked on. I'll try to give updates as they come in.
Keeping up with the newspaper. Current events are always a source of entertainment and conversation fodder (if you can remember them). Of course, when it's school time, there's no time at all to thumb through the newspaper (not to mention having to buy the paper yourself). Yesterday featured an article vocalizing farmers' opposition to the California High-Speed Rail Project taking a route through their farmland, with cityfolk complaining about noise, and farmers complaining that the rail will butcher their land plots. The way the issue lies now, the city dwellers have a very vague sense of "noisy" that they're basing their complaints on. The farmers, I empathize with; having a state-owned rail cutting through your farmland would make watering and harvesting much more difficult. I think we'll just have to see the environmental report to get confirmation of whether the "noise" for the cities will really be that unbearable.
The title hobby of reading up on some science fiction classics. Of course, others may debate as to whether these are "classics" or not, but they're pulled from the list of 10 best sci-fi novels to be banned from io9 (Stumbleupon leads to something actually productive, for once). The ones that I both haven't read yet and were at my local library were Shade's Children (Garth Nix), Stranger from a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein), Slaughterhouse-five (Kurt Vonnegut), and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley). I was planning on talking about Shade's Children in this post cause I pretty much devoured it entirely the very day I checked it out. Stranger from a Strange Land is currently on my nightstand. It's very long, but also very good; and the last two I hope to get to in the next week.

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of other projects I meant to get on over the winter that are pretty much on hold. One is finding something to do over the summer (I should get on that soon). Hopefully either something to do with exoplanets or transient phenomena (read supernovae), but work on that will probably get started when the academic atmosphere (and adrenaline) is back. Another unfortunate consequence of the mere 24-hour day is some maemo development. While C/C++ (Languages too practical to learn) dominate the League of Maemo development, Python is still on the field as a minor player. While you may argue about the sustainability of Maemo, since Nokia is the only manufacturer that uses it, and even supports it for only a fraction of its devices, it might be useful to know how to program for a portable device. It's fun to try new things, don't you agree? And stuff that had to do with getting in touch with my roots/heritage/language all went completely down the toilet. Those will have to find another opportunity to be reviewed *sigh*.

Anyway, on to Shade's Children. I'm gonna try not to give away spoilers, but I can't guarantee anything. I highly recommend the book, so if you're looking for a good sci-fi thriller, you might want to stop reading right now and pick up Shade's Children. Otherwise, feel free to read on.

First of all, I would have to admit that one of the statements I made above was a lie. It turns out that I had read Shade's Children a few years ago; I just forgot that I had read it when seeing the Sci-fi list. However, once I read the first few pages, it was like, "This seems really familiar... Oh! I read this before *smirk*. But I have to say, the book means quite a bit more when it's read as an older person, and a lot of foreshadowing became apparent. So yeah, I reiterate that I highly recommend this book cause it's gripping even on a second read. Anyway, for those who still haven't read it after all I've said, the basic setup of the book is that aliens arrive from God-knows-where and make everyone over the age of 14 vanish by God-knows-what (Aliens can do ANYTHING, right?). However, despite managing to exterminate the entire population, they decide to carry out all of their operations in a 30 square mile area. This involves harvesting up all of the remaining children, raising them, and breeding them. When they finally turn 14, the aliens use their body parts to make hideous creatures which patrol the area looking for escapees (and also have other purposes, which will become clear upon reading the book). So the children are raised in dormitories where they dread their fourteenth birthday since those that turn fourteen are taken away and never seen again. However, some lucky children manage to escape the dormitories before then, but most are found and are killed off by the patrolling creatures. The more fortunate ones who manage to evade these creatures for long enough usually end up under the wing of Shade, an entity who assembles escapees to fight to overthrow the alien overlords. Now, Shade is not a person; it's no secret that he is in fact, an artificial intelligence programmed with the personality of his creator.

Now Shade is my favorite character (if he can be called that); despite being a program, he has the most interesting conflict out of all of the characters. It also raises a few ideas about safeguards in future AIs. While Shade has a seemingly human and outgoing personality, deep down he is presented as this cold, calculating being, with no qualms about sending children to die for the opportunity for a greater good (usually for more knowledge about the aliens). He's also very badass in that he learns very quickly how to outsmart the aliens (being a computer and all helps with that). However, his logic leads him into a position where he feels he must betray the children and hand them over to the aliens. He does this unsympathetically, but soon afterwards an interesting thing happens. What the novels calls a "personality conflict" occurs, where a new, one could argue more "human" personality of the creator emerges. This personality has sympathy, has emotion, and most importantly, has morals. This personality argues with Shade that the ends do not justify the means, and that the children should be saved. Thus begins an internal conflict, whose instability is linked to that of software.

Now, the question that this situation seems to explore is: Where did the "human" personality come from? On one hand, it might have been a safeguard programmed in by the creator to act in case of severe ethical quandaries. This seems unlikely, since it would seem like adding emotions to Shade would have been a good idea since the very beginning. That would avoid the whole selling out children situation in the first place. There is also the possibility that Shade worked out how to program emotions, and he himself set it as a safeguard in case of a moral dilemma. Shade was a very smart being, and was troubled by the fact that he had no emotion (as odd as that may seem, it's true). This might have been a mechanism concocted by himself to protect the children from... himself. Likely, the biggest obstacle to this reading would be that while Shade knew what it meant to be sad or happy or angry, he didn't feel any of it. This is elucidated by his explanation that he has all of his creators memories, so he remembers being sad and frustrated and all of the emotions, but feeling them again is something he cannot do. Now, since Shade didn't understand emotions, it would be highly unlikely that he would be able to program them, despite knowing about what they are. And if he did, it'd probably be so swamped with bugs and imperfections that it would be mainly useless. No, the new personality was not handicapped at all in its emotions.

Probably the most uncomfortable origin for the new personality, but the most supported by the text, is that it was simply a bug, an unwanted, unexpected behavior resulting from imperfections in the software. That's kind of a dark message: that all that we call the pinnacle of humanity and venerate as our exclusive gift above all life on earth, so complex that no man can even replicate it, arose from a mere corner case in an artificial being. However, this explains the sudden appearance of the personality, and its severe clashes with Shade himself. In fact, to further develop the idea of unwantedness, the conflict even leads to software failure so severe that Shade must boot himself up again to recover from it.

Another possible scenario, which kinda works, but I think comes from way left field is that the new personality was not a program at all; rather it was the creator's soul. Now, Garth Nix pretty much avoids the discussion of religion entirely (as far as I can tell) in the book, so bringing in the soul seems highly out of place. However, it would explain quite a lot. First of all, the personality to conflict with Shade identified itself as the programmer himself. Not as some moral angel to sit on Shades shoulder, but as Robert Ingman. This contrasts with Shade because Shade presented himself as an independent being from Robert; he had Robert's memories and personality, but fundamentally was not Robert. This identity issue is why Shade has a distinct name. Since the new personality identified itself most strongly as Robert, it would seem to be safe to assume that it actually WAS Robert, despite the fact that Robert had been long dead. Another soul reading was just that Robert's personality was so human. It sympathized like a human, it calculated like a human, and even swore like a human. The human match is just too perfect to come from a bug. The personality may have seemed human because it was, in fact, human. Probably the third manifestation of the soul was that when Shade died (yes, his hardware was destroyed), Robert lived on in the computers of the aliens. Now, how Robert got into the alien computers was just some digital hocus-pocus, but the meaning seems clear. Since this Robert personality was human, it was eternal, and not to be phased by the mere destruction of its silicon body. Through the alien communication network, this Robert left to save the children and help them lead the alien downfall. Now, as I said, this reading seems entirely out of place, and I probably won't buy it unless there's some deeper religious allegory hidden within the novel of which the soul is but one manifestation of. But this is the reading I personally would prefer, and I think would fit most nicely with the ending. However, that's literature, it's difficult to resolve something for sure.

Anyway, thanks for staying with me this long. Writing this post was a wild ride, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I'll try to post more regularly, but I learned that I can't make any promises. But hopefully, something more interesting will pop up!

Guess who's back

2010-09-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Hello internet, my old friend. I've come to speak to you again. Yeah, I've been away from blogging for... two years now. There were a number of reasons behind this (only a small one being general laziness). The other reasons why are what I'm going to talk about in this post (a ginormous update will likely be broken up into several subsequent posts). So yeah, giant rant coming through, make way!

I would say the main cause of the initial drought of blogging was high school senioritis. There were a lot of college applications and forms and stuff. Once those ended, laziness kept the posting pause going on throughout senior year. Okay, that's totally my fault; the last part of senior year was a lot of fun and I don't regret it. Turns out being a second-semester senior is busy in an entirely different sort of way. You've got all kinds of projects and things that you have to do with other people as a group. It's not just solitary studying. And plus, I was feeling lazy.

It's also difficult to describe how discouraging it is when the number of unread posts in your blogroll ends up in the thousands. By then you know you're not going to catch up, and there are probably a ton of inside jokes you've missed. So you end up just giving up. Ok, this is just complaining, I don't know why I'm bothering with this. Let's get on to the more meaty reasons why blogging may not be a constructive way to spend time.

First of all, let me say that the greatest argument against blogging, vlogging, or any other sort of mass internet communication is embodied on the sensationally satiric site Encyclopedia Dramatica. ED exists to document cases of lulz on the internet, which essentially boils down to the drama which unfolds (and in some cases, is incited) in any community. Those accustomed to reading Wikipedia articles might be initially shocked, or even offended by the highly inflammatory manner in which these articles are written. This is part of the style, as much of these articles cover the deepest, darkest crevices of the internet which are often buried on LiveJournal pages or obscure forums out of view of the majority of web surfers. These parts house people such as diaper fetishists, racist homophobic comic-drawing stalkers, and of course, /b/'s shenanigans. Most of these people have their soapboxes on Youtube or Livejournal and address their supposed "fanbases" with recycled Family Guy politics, or opinions they parrot from other youtube videos or blogs they read. I find that there are very few original ideas on the internet (in fact, my own opinions were pretty much a reflection of the blogs I read). It's kinda disturbing that these that these incestuous communities are able to fester out of the light of public opinion. If you try to offer any kind of dissenting opinion to them, it's an instant ban. But I guess that's one consequence of the information revolution that probably can't be avoided. This could probably be summed in one quote on ED (that I can't find anymore) which was basically "The internet: Where everybody gets 15 minutes of fame, but most don't deserve it" Who am I to deserve it?

Another thing that was somewhat off-putting is kinda the personal nature of weblogs, but that's something I now think is acceptable. Even for GOOD blogs, which are good at conveying complex ideas to the public, a good portion of their content is still personal things that really don't matter very much to anyone. Sure it's nice that your daughter is starting college, but do I really have to know that? Well, the answer to that is: sure. The decision of what to put in a weblog is up to the author and the author only. Readers really don't matter and have to power to choose what they want to read. In fact, it's a balance; I plan to make this blog a little more personal and less artificial in the coming days/weeks/months/years/whatever. But with less parroting and more actual thought.

One last thing I want to get to is books. One really fundamental issue I find with blogs is that they're shallow. Brevity is part of the design of blogging. You have access to a lot of information, but not really a lot of understanding. Just a bunch of qualitative descriptions and handwavy explanations. This was probably my biggest fright of the world of blogs: losing the ability to read deeply and critically. In a book, it's usually not enough to just read a passage, strip the context, and remember the essence of the message. It all has to be read as part of a whole work. And this work may take hours, days, or weeks to read; you still have to try and keep everything in mind and be on alert. (I'm kind of talking more about literature than popular works mainly because much of their message is not explicit, but is hidden inside the language constructs. Therefore, you need to be aware of words/phrases/voices throughout the book. It's hard to condense these down in a blog post [unless it's poetry of course]). This goes for science too, though. I have rarely seen an equation on a blog even though equations usually deliver the greatest insights into physical phenomena. (However, I'm not saying this is not a problem for books too. In my Introduction to Geology class, we didn't have a textbook cause the professor couldn't find a quantitative introductory geology book that described geologic processes as mathematical ones. I don't believe this is because of books as a medium though. The brevity of blogs does not allow them to adequately explain the mathematics behind these process, and any blog that tries ends up losing in the pageview race).

So why am I back? What changed? Very little actually. One problem with exercising thought and thinking is that if you don't have a good memory, the idea that you spent a while pondering is gone. So one way to keep your ideas is to write them down, and that is basically the function of this blog now. No more parroting, just ideas inspired by articles. Onwards!

Oh, and as always, this blog will be ad-free. Even I know my ideas aren't worth that much.

Lecture archives

2009-01-21T16:49:00.001-08:00

So, I just found out that several of the lecture series I attend are also archived on the web. Now, I knew about the Von Karman lectures at JPL. They've recently started archiving their lectures and putting them on the web. But I just today found out that Caltech is doing it also! I've been able to spot some for their Watson series lectures, but I'm not sure about the other series. However, if you can't make some of these lectures, you can watch 'em online.

However, I don't think I'm gonna start doing that. Seeing it in person is an entirely different experience for me. Sure it might take time to get there, but I find that in front of my computer, I'll get really distracted and it generally won't be pretty. However, these are definitely good things to know, just in case I might have to miss one.

DOS Games

2009-01-05T20:58:00.000-08:00

So, before I get to talking about more social issues that might get me attention, I decided to share the joy of DOS games. After discovering the numerous uses for DOSBox, it wasn't that long until I figured it was time for DOS games!

Now, I have some CDs from WAY back in the day. Some games I would play when I was six on my Windows 95 machine. In fact, just recently I discovered them and thought, "Would I be able to play these on linux?" I recently had success with a really old SEGA Genesis emulator I had, and playing the ROMS using dgen in Ubuntu.

Since I've been sick the past couple days, I haven't really been in the mood to do winter schoolwork, so I got started on this project. For this post, we'll do a REALLY popular and addictive game, Jazz Jackrabbit. Usually, if you have, or can find, the install files for a DOS game, DOSBox'll have you set. But for Jazz Jackrabbit, it's a little bit tricky. It's most commonly distributed in its shareware form, however PCLinuxOS has a package for DOSBox which includes the full Jazz Jackrabbit game, so we'll use that. If you could find the full game online, well... now you'll know how to install it! First, we wanna make a directory for our DOS games, with Jazz being our first, so do that either graphically or with

mkdir ~/dosgames

Now, fetch the PCLinuxOS package. You can do this either with your favorite browser, or with

wget http://spout.ussg.indiana.edu/linux/pclinuxos/pclinuxos/apt/pclinuxos/2007/RPMS.extra/dosbox-jazz-0-1pclos2007.noarch.rpm

When I initially tried this, I installed it via alien (which is possible. Though, I wouldn' t recommend installing packages through alien if they're actually programs instead of DOS games). However, this created permissions problems that didn't let me save any settings, so we're gonna install it so that you, the user, has the permissions! However, if you want every account on the computer to be able to play, you can do that, but you'll have to tweak the permissions a bit. We'll skip that in this guide.

So now you'll want to extract the files, you can do that via the GUI (right-clicking and pressing "Extract Here", which I recommend) or using this command (fulfilled dependencies not guaranteed):

rpm2cpio mypackage.rpm | cpio -vid

In either case, you should have a folder named "usr" now. Go ahead and descend into the directory: usr->share->dosbox. Now you should run into a folder called "jazz". It is this folder you want to move to your ~/dosbox folder. So you can either copy/paste it there, or use

cp -r ~/usr/share/dosbox/jazz ~/dosbox

Now you've got your files all set up, all you have to do is run 'em! But don't delete the usr/ folder just yet, it still has one more trick up its sleeve. But now, all you have to do is type in

dosbox ~/dosgames/jazz/JAZZ.EXE

But let's say you don't WANNA put that in, you want a menu option. Well, that's what we saved the usr/ for! If you go to usr/share/applications/, you should see a file called pclinuxos-dosbox-jazz.desktop. As the path suggests, you'll want to eventually put this file into /usr/share/applications, but we have to make a small correction. So use

gedit ~/usr/share/applications/pclinuxos-dosgames-jazz.desktop

to open gedit (using nautilus is tricky for this). And change line 5 so that it says

Exec=/usr/bin/dosbox /home/YOURUSER/dosgames//jazz/JAZZ.EXE -exit -fullscreen

Where YOURUSER is your username. Now, if you want, you can rename the file, so that you don't have something that says PCLinuxOS in your Ubuntu system (But make sure it ends with ".desktop". And lastly, move it to where it belongs with

sudo mv ~/usr/share/applications/pclinuxos-dosbox-jazz.desktop /usr/share/applications/

Now, you should have a nice menu icon in Applications>Games>Jazz Jackrabbit. And that should... be it! I hope you enjoy your new Jazz Jackrabbit game, and if you're feeling daring enough, try it with Jazz Jackrabbit 2. This method should generally apply to all distros, including OS X and Windows. DOSBox works for all of those, the main thing you need to do is get those Jazz data files. However, the technical stuff isn't done yet, I might have another guide I'll put up for you guys. But cheers for now, and I managed to make another post, YES!

Admitted, but still the same

2009-01-01T16:40:00.000-08:00

Ok, so. I haven't blogged in the longest time. I don't know why. Once I get back into the loop, it'll probably be easier. So, we left off at me submitting my Caltech application. Though the title may be a spoiler, let me divulge the rest of the month or so to you.

So after the application was due, some fun stuff happened. There were a couple of lectures, and then an event at Caltech about the Siemen's Competition. It was the semifinals, so the top 6 individuals and the top 6 teams were there. One of my classmates were in the top 6 teams, so I was invited as a special guest since I was the one craziest about science at my school. And I have to tell you, going to Caltech for that event was possibly one of the biggest blows to my ego I could possibly ever afford. There were people like Eric Larson, who I will reference continuously and was just imaginably smarter than anyone I knew. But the thing that united all of these people was that they did good research, and contributed to scientific knowledge. My friend, Abhi, worked on studying the effects of carbon monoxide on pregnant rats. But there were many others, from studies on Alzheimers to new types of imaging, to Eric Larson's "Classification of Certain Fusion Categories". So, to move chronologically now, the first day consisted of poster presentations. Here, I got the general feel for the type of research that was being done, and got to meet some familiar Caltech faces. By familiar, I'm mainly referring to Denice Nelson Nash, the Director of Public Relations and the one responsible for putting together the public lecture series(es?). It was awesome meeting someone who I see every month introducing speakers. But more than that, I met...... Eric Larson, who ended up spending most of the session trying to explain isomorphic dual vector spaces to me. After that was a dinner which was very very good (and fancy). However, luckily I was a VIP and was included (yay!). And I met my group's Caltech guide, he was pretty cool and sat with us, while the other guides joined our table to talk with him. After that, it was over and time to drive back home.

On the second day, it was the oral presentations. This was fairly nervewracking for the contestants, and was just incomprehensible for me, as a layman. The presentations were incredibly technical and didn't have any sort of introduction, just delved into the details. Of course, except for Eric Larson, who had an introduction, but it was still incomprehensible. I still have no idea what a fusion category is. But anyways, after the presentations, I had to make myself scarce for about four hours because space was extremely limited for the tour of the new Biological Imaging Lab. I decided to spend some of that time practicing piano since I wouldn't be home, and my piano teacher lived like, 5 minutes away. However, I wouldn't be able to practice until an hour and a half later, so I just got myself a cheap hot chocolate (cheap for price, not quality) and read some of the Caltech magazines that people recycle for some reason. Once things got resumed, we had the awards ceremony. However, beforehand I got to meet the other contestants up close and personal, and turns out they're all just normal (normal according to my definition, which probably does not match the generally accepted one). We had a great time talking now that the competition was over. Eventually, they got us into the hall where the awards ceremony would be held. Of course, we had to eat first, which was an interesting experience altogether. The steak I got was so rare, I think it was still bleeding. However, I ate it anyways cause... we kinda complain about the service out loud. And speaking of saying things out loud, I noticed on the program that the president of Caltech was going to speak and I remember hearing the president give an introduction to Vicente Fox when he spoke. The one thing I remember about it was his amazingly thick French accent. Of course, when discussing it, I said out loud, "He has such a French accent, he's totally awesome!" I love it!" Only after he gave his speech and proceeded to his seat, that I realized that it was at the seat across from me at the table right behind me. So he probably overheard everything I said. While nothing I said was an insult, it definitely must have sounded weird. And I felt very awkward knowing that now. However, the results were in, and Abhi and his group didn't win, it was the group on Alzheimers, which is appropriate, their research is highly practical. And for the singles competition, well..... there was no competition. Eric Larson took the prize! He was going to New York for the finals! The nice thing about science is that everyone wins, and actually, the Caltech staff and everyone hammered that in pretty hard. Any of these guys who applied would pretty much be guaranteed admission; it was kinda depressing to see Caltech actively recruiting these guys, when I had submitted my application just the week before. Seeing this really made me cynical that I would get in.

The next few weeks were not much better. I basically collapsed to the notion that I was nothing compared to these guys, and at best I'd be deferred to regular decision. These weeks were.... interesting... I went from hating Caltech because of how they bent over backwards for these guys (even though it's not their fault. They want the best of the best; it's their job), and then to apathy. I came to a realization that I'll be happy enough not going to Caltech and to University of Arizona anyway. It went on like this until the afternoon of December 10th.

December 10th was special because it was the first day when I decided to tutor someone. Now, I know that I hate the idea of tutoring. I still think it's much preferable to do study groups or just ask help from the teacher. At my school, they'd be more than happy to provide it. However, the student was referred to me by a teacher, so I'm like.... OK. It was pretty fun; I would totally do this for free, just for the sake of reviewing trig. But, it would suck for the others in my class who need the money. Anyway, after that, I drove home, and things didn't seem out of the ordinary. My mom gave me my mail, which were just college solicitations that I'm really not that interested in and that went immediately into the recycling pile. I got into my routine until a couple minutes after, my mom said, "Oh, I forgot about this one!" It was a large orange-and-gray envelope which had the Caltech logo. Immediately I thought, "They must be crazy". And sure enough, the letter invited me to join Caltech's class of 2013. Figures, just what I was least expecting.

After that, I made the mistake of putting it as my Facebook status, and at school the next day, the news spread like a wildfire in California during the Santa Ana winds. And even worse, since Caltech is actually fast, and I live like, 45 minutes away from it, the news reached me the very next day. So, I had a decision before anyone else; therefore, ALL the attention was directed at me. I wouldn't say I hated it, but it got kinda repetitive after a while. So the point I'm trying to make is...

I get to be one of those special people who brings down the average SAT score for incoming freshmen. Since my highest scores were only 750 in math and 720 in critical reading, which is extremely low comparitively speaking. However, despite this, I still hate the College Board. They make things much more complicated and inefficient as they should be. You may have to play their game, but never ever capitulate; your college will definitely know what to REALLY look at.

Essays written

2008-10-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

Ok, so. I've got my Caltech essays all sorted out. I've put a freeze on the revisions. No more dramatic ones. So, the products I've got over here, and if you could help proofread them, I'd be REALLY thankful. And I'll be sure to keep this link updated. The application is due.... Monday. So, I've gone about as far as I can with editing on my own, so I'm gonna leave off the essay editing and look over the rest of my app. But if you can read these essays and offer suggestions, that'll be extremely wonderful. And if I get into Caltech, I'll be very grateful! So, the first Common App prompt, I've got my essay here:

~~http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_30c3kqqgc9~~
~~http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_34fm7vvjcq~~
~~http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_35s5hbkphm~~
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_37g7bmt3ct
And for the supplement:
~~http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_32hmhbmjgc~~
~~http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_33hdkr99gv~~
~~http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_36ggd7zgg8~~
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfb2kwpd_38kz65rggh
Thanks a lot and, any suggestions would be appreciated. Just leave a comment, send me an IM, or send me an e-m

College

2008-10-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the HUUUUUGGGEEE amount of inactivity. In the last month, college has hit me like a ton of bricks. I (foolishly) decided to apply to Caltech Early Action, so with the deadline looming at November 3, I'm kinda busy right now. The whole beginning of the month was dedicated to writing brag sheets for teacher recommendations. I swear, the school should give out the recommendation packets earlier so we have more time to write them! After writing about myself so many times, I HATE myself!

Now, I'm working on really improving my essays. The first prompt is the personal statement prompt for the Common App which is the incredibly vague:

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

I just realized that I had to answer that, in addition to the question on the supplement, which is more interesting:

Interest in math, science, or engineering manifests itself in many forms. Caltech professor and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman(1918-1988) explained, ''I'd make a motor, I'd make a gadget that would go off when something passed a photocell, I'd play around with selenium''; he was exploring his interest in science, as he put it, by ''piddling around all the time.'' In a page, more or less, tell the Admissions Committee how you express your interest, curiosity, or excitement about math, science or engineering.

Of course, one reason I'm really kicking myself is that I never got myself involved in an actual lab. I never actually did science at CENS, and I got rejected from some of the science programs I applied to. So... that's a gaping hole in my application. However, I'm hoping that the recommendations will come to save me and also that I can convince them that lectures are good!

The two colleges I'm really considering are Caltech and University of Arizona; both of which have alumni teaching at my school, apparently. To me, Caltech is the ideal place to be. I love how Caltech students interact because they're all interested in the same things: science. And they're all really really smart. So, really cool stuff happens when they get together. And the living arrangements at Caltech foster that. You have the house system (which they tell me is like Harry Potter, except without a sorting hat). And in the houses, you have students of all years living together, and working together. One of the things I kinda really long for is to be able to easily work with others. In high school, this is immensely difficult since everyone lives with their parents (or legal guardians). However, with everyone else in the same dorm, or on the same campus, it'll be easy! So I REALLY REALLY hope I can be a part of that. I'm sure I can make a lot of good friends.

Of course, University of Arizona isn't that bad. It's a school that I don't think will be too difficult to get into, but I'd still like to go. While it's not as prestigious as Caltech, it has an excellent astronomy program. If you read Space.com articles for a week, you're bound to see it mentioned. They're the ones operating the Phoenix lander at the moment. And plus, since its public, it won't be as expensive as Caltech would be. And according to the teacher that graduated from there, it's a great school. So, while I still will be disappointed if I don't get into Caltech, I won't be crushed. However, two schools isn't enough for the college counselor at my school to feel good about, so I'll probably apply to about four other schools JUST to be safe, though I can't imagine what would be safer that UA, to be honest.

Anyway, this was just to give you an update on what's happening in my life right now. Right now, I don't really want to disclose the essay itself, but if you send me an e-mail, I could probably let you proofread it on Google Docs. So, keep-it-on, and I'll probably be busy at least until the 3rd.

The side of Simplicio

2008-09-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you've gotten used to all of the excuses I come up with for long period of inactivity (which are becoming more common, unfortunately). But I'll just get directly to my random thought of now.

In March of this year, an article was published in Keith Devlin's column of the Mathematics Association of America by Paul Lockhart. Now, I know Lockhart is an experienced mathematician and mathematics teacher and I'm but a lowly 12th grader in high school. However, one thing he notes is that "The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students." (3). So, I use this to justify my comment on this article.

First, I totally agree with Lockhart that math education today is dismal. At least, if not moreso than science education. People generally enjoy something if it's one of two things: useful, or interesting. Learning to decorate is useful, so people will willingly learn it in order to better themselves. And black holes and the Large Hadron Collider are just so friggin' cool that people love 'em. Unfortunately, present math classes are neither. They're far too based on rote memorization and don't really present the underlying concepts at least until another grade. In this way, I agree that the curriculum is flawed.

However, I don't quite agree with Lockhart's solution to it. This may just be the anti-Twainian acadmelitist in me, but while allowing students to pursue their own questions is fun, there is only so much that can be learned. It took who knows how long for mankind to come up with the concept of 0 (even in the Mayan civilization). And it wasn't until the 17th century that people started understanding negative numbers. Now, I'm not saying that he expects kids these days to figure out 3000 years worth of mathematics in 12 years. But saying that having a lesson plan "insures that your lesson will be planned, and therefore false" does a disservice. Lesson plans are useful and SHOULD be used to keep everyone in the class on the same page (that doesn't necessarily imply that lesson plans ARE doing this now). You might have one student pondering what it means to take 6 away from 3, but most others might still not have thought of that question. Lesson plans allow all of the students to have a similar knowledge base.

Now, what do I WISH could be done? Well, I believe that learning the concepts and context behind the mathematics is the best way to teach it. I love the way Lockhart was able to not only say, but elegantly show how the area of a triangle is 1/2bh. This provides those "Aha!" moments that are fundamental to understanding a concept. Now, I entirely support setting time aside in class to show the diagram and asking students "Now, how can I definitively find the area of this triangle?" and setting up a discussion. This way, you keep a balance between rote memorization and pure, yet extremely difficult creativity. In fact, there is this mathematics teacher at my school, who really pursues the learning of concepts. I take the example of how he introduced his geometry class to the Pythagorean Theorem (I'm not a primary source by the way, I never actually had him for a class, and am going by what I've heard). He makes sure people understand the physical basis of the Pythagorean theorem, the way the Greeks originally understood it. They didn't quite have the algebraic concept of "squaring" the number, that's very abstract. But they understood that if you have a right triangle, and if you take a physical square with the length of one leg, and another square with the length of the other leg, if you cut those squares and arrange them correctly, they make a square equal in area to a square with a side length of the hypotenuse. Here's a graphical rendition of what I just said:
They were able to prove that (in this case), a^2+c^2=b^2. That teacher made sure that the students knew that basis, and then proceeded to prove the theorem five different ways (you can find some here) I only WISH my geometry teacher taught that to me. But alas, most students thought that it was way to overboard. Anyway, I believe THAT kind of teaching is what would be best for students (or for me at least).

So, what I want to leave is that while Math education is pretty flawed, going to a free-for-all lesson plan of pure imaginative creativity isn't quite the solution. In painting, there's still a standard for learning forms and perspective and all of the other terminology. Although, like painting, math is an art. It is also not an unstructured one; it follows certain rules and in most cases, those rules are best taught than derived from scratch. Though the concepts behind them should be developed rock-solid.

(By the way, although I have never had that teacher for a math class, I do independently study proofs and logic with him, something that's greatly missing in math classes today)

Merges and Communities

2008-09-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's been two weeks since the merge between the TeensOnLinux and TeenLinux communities was democratically halted. And so far, opinions have varied from tunys on the anti-merger side to bjwebb (early episodes) on the pro-merger side. Now, I'm not typically a moderate on most issues. On most things to me, there's right and there's wrong. There's no use in being half-right because you're also half-wrong. However, I found this issue to be painted too far in black and white. There was either merging, and consolidating the two communities into one totally new community. I didn't like that because it meant throwing away all existing infrastructure and work and starting from scratch. If you asked me, this would have been a HUGE waste of resources. It may be valiant, but still highly impractical. We even had TeensOnLinux PENS! It would have been a shame for those to go to waste. However, on the other side of the spectrum, two separate competing teen linux communities. To me, that's obviously unhealthy for the community as a whole because most resources will be divided between the two communities. I think this was the main point that the TeenLinux people said they were concerned about. And I, for one, agree with them on that. A community divided for no reason is definitely a waste.

However, I think a compromise between the two would be the best solution to this problem. While in ##teenlinux, I noticed that the conversations there are actually ABOUT Linux. They're nothing like the conversations in the ToL channel. Our conversations are far more diverse and... let's say wacky thanks to bobsalad helping to lead them. So that leads me to think that maybe we could work together as one community, TeenLinux being where serious conversations happen, and TeensOnLinux being where people socialize more. However, I believe that it's still not enough justification for two communities. It's sorta like #ubuntu and #ubuntu-offtopic. There's a reason they're seperate channels, but they're still under the same community. It wouldn't be right to be discussing the ext4 filesystem, then be interrupted by this person who just went to Disneyland. With two channels with different aims, that distraction will be largely mitigated. Now we also think about outreach. Now, I know that Teens On Linux has been highly popularized in media. Tunys gave a talk about it on OSCON, we were mentioned in Full Circle Magazine. There are already so many references to us that it would cause a huge confusion to new recruits if ToL were to disappear. So, I was thinking something like.... (you should have seen this coming) when Sun acquired MySQL. Although they're now really the same entity, Sun still allows MySQL a large amount of autonomy to do what it needs to do. They're together in all but name, and I think that's what the teen linux communities need to do. Cooperate instead of compete, but still maintain distinct identities. Specialization would also find a role here. TeenLinux, which is obviously capable of technical discussion, could continue doing so. We at TeensOnLinux could do what we do best and outreach to the outside world. All while sharing the goal of furthering Linux use among teens. Of course, there certainly can be an overlap of community. Those who both have the know-how and want to just hang out can be in both communities. So, this is a hand from me to the TeenLinux community of cooperation instead of competition (can't say anything about tunys yet).

Captain Planet!

2008-08-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was made aware of a playlist on YouTube of Captain Planet episodes. Captain Planet is one of the great old science-themed cartoon. (not the greatest, Magic School Bus holds that title, hands-down. And I am categorizing environmentalism as science). Unfortunately, the creation of Captain Planet preceeded me by a year. And since I didn't start watching TV when I was born (something this generation could probably claim), I missed it entirely. However, my interest in it came around 8, when playing a computer game which was themed on Captain Planet. I can't find that game, or remember where it was, but it was pretty good! It was one of those move-by-grid games where you control the planeteers and strategically place them to fight pollutant enemies.

Anyway, after watching a couple of episodes, I find the series AWESOME! Yet, it inspires mixed feelings. On one hand, it makes me proud of see how far back we've realized that we can make a significant impact on the environment. On the other hand, it shows that we've known about these issues for 18 years, but still haven't worked hard enough to solving them. Even though our cities are (thankfully) not like 19th century England or even present-day (well, right before the Olympics) Beijing, we still have problems with pollution. Though, these days, we have much LARGER problems to deal with, such as global warming which I don't think even Captain Planet saw coming (I haven't watched far enough into the series to tell, but I wouldn't have thought that it was that publicized back then) and the barrage of problems that come with it (like ocean acidification, glacial melting, etc.) There's also deforestation and habitat destruction, which hasn't slowed down at all in the last several years. I'm pretty sure I could start naming more as I keep watching.

Yet, things have still changed. Now, more than ever I believe, people are more aware of the environment and their impact on it. Especially with global warming and dying polar bears taking the head of the campaign. And now, with the internet, people are more able to communicate about these environmental impacts. Which brings up a point I'd like to address to Ted Turner or any of his affiliates who own the rights to this show. Keep the videos up on YouTube. While it would be good to have these episodes air on TV, TV is a very geographically limited medium. If some major network wants to air it, it might only be in a single region of the United States, and most certainly will not be broadcast outside of it. Only on Youtube could anyone from any place in the world (maybe except countries where Youtube is blocked, but that's still a significant increase) see this television series. And isn't that the point of Captain Planet? To spread the word on how to protect the environment? And additionally, saving the environment IS, in fact, a world-wide effort. The bulk of the degredation cannot be pinned to the United States as a superpower (a majority, yes. But nowhere near the entire problem) And with the spread of responsibility for harming the environment, shouldn't we also spread the information on why it occurs and how to protect it? So, there is more reason to leaving these up to be shared than me just wanting to freeload off of Youtube. Now, time to watch more episodes!

Obama reasserts Space Exploration

2008-08-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know this news is kinda old. However, I just read Wired Science reporting that Obama has retracted his statement of cutting NASA funding to fund an early education program. Previous to this, that policy played a huge part in making me hugely less enthusiastic about Obama, however, I always thought in the back of my mind that he would end up supporting science and space exploration in the end. Turns out, I had a lucky guess! However, I'm not going to go into All Hail Obama mode and lose all measure of skepticism. It's still important to question, "So who will end up paying for this?" As far as Wired Science has been able to discern, "Obama said he has told his staff to find another offset to fund his early education program". I'm still interested in from which department that will come from.

And, of course, this is an unequivocal statement to support NASA. Any backtracking on this now can be brought up against him. So, I hope this is one promise that Obama will end up keeping. And it'll be tough not to, because Congress has been absolutely crazy about NASA. Not even the Bush administration, which has been against funding increases for NASA, could stop them. So, this issue is most likely one that Obama will encounter very little resistance from Congress. But... let's hope and see of what comes in November!

Global Bug Jam

2008-08-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday was the when the Ubuntu California LoCo team hosted their Bug Jam at Chapman University. And I, being the new-found environmentalist decided to carpool with someone also going (thanks Dennis). And I have to say, like most Ubuntu things, it was awesome. We arrived a little late and missed some of Nathan's talk on GPG keys, but afterward, we just bugged him to repeat the information. I've already signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, so it wasn't all that critical to me, but now I know what you can do with GPG keys. And it's pretty cool.

And Joe taught us a little big about filing bugs. Apparently you can start out with low bugs that don't need too much expertise and work your way up. I, for one, started out confirming bugs in XChat. A nice little thing to do. However, I may try to deal with crashes when I feel confident enough. The thing about bugs is that when you first try to triage, you can get VERY intimidated. The experienced triagers REALLY know their stuff, and you wonder how you'll ever get to be as useful as they are. But, every long journey begins with a small step... and that step was in this Bug Jam. Hopefully, as we have more bug jams we'll get more comfortable getting to the expert point. And as more people become experts, it's easier to teach others. So... we're working on that.

But, in my opinion, the coolest part was what Dennis gave to me. He was leaving to go back to Germany, so he left Neal a bunch of electronics, but left me his 12-year-old laptop. It runs Windows 98, and is totally alien in its configuration. It has no ethernet, USB, or CD drives. It has 2 PCMCIA slots (but wireless cards don't work). It has some huge port that I have no idea what it is. A parallel port, a VGA port, and a serial port. And it also has a floppy drive. It also has 16 MB of RAM, which I find to be the most hilarious aspect of it. I recently found a good use for it. Whenever I need to do work without being distracted, I use WordPerfect to type it up, and print it out through the parallel port. It's actually pretty efficient, and I could get used to it. And plus, what's cooler than running Windows 98 on your laptop (other than running Windows 95, but that'll just be a pain). Though, I'm wondering how I can upgrade the RAM on this thing. The memory extension is a large rectangular box. I'm not even entirely sure how to remove it, and if there are any other extensions of its type beyond 8MB. Anyway, that's the cool stuff that I got out of the Bug Jam, in addition to meeting the people in IRC. Hopefully, we'll be hosting more of this kind of stuff later on.

Solving the astronomical questions from the bottom quark up

2008-08-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

Sorry again about the break but as I said, the week has been pretty busy (not busy enough to forgive not posting, but still pretty busy). However, to make up for it, every day this weekend, I'll put up a post of a recap of an event that happened in the past week. Starting today!

So, exactly one week ago, I gave my presentation on CERN. I would put up a video, but it turns out that it's a 14 GB AVI file which would take a week to upload onto Google Video. That's not exactly the best thing, I'll be trying to figure out how to compress it so that it won't be such a crazily large file.

The talk itself went pretty good. There was some technical difficulties because I... don't have a laptop, so I borrowed one and ran an Ubuntu LiveCD off of it. Only.... I made the mistake of accidentally picking up a Gutsy CD. The problem with that was that Canonical started massively improving projector support after Feisty. Oh well! I had to swallow my pride and do it in a Windows machine. I managed to get it onto the projecter, but there was some resize issue and the right side and bottom were cut off. But, at least I managed to give it.

Now when the presentation started, THAT'S when the fun began (and I'll try to get you into that fun later on). I can't exactly summarize the content of the talk, but this video actually does a good job of it, in... 5 minutes. I hope you enjoy it for now.

After the talk was really something. Not only did I get the customary gift (a box with the pleiades) but he also gave me his copy of Arthur C. Clarke's posthumous book, "The Last Theorem". And I am DEFINITELY going to read it as soon as I can. And I mean that... more than I did Harry Potter a year ago (but I DID actually read it). And apparently, from the reception, people enjoyed it, so I'm glad I did it!

Presentation coming up

2008-08-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't blogged about anything recently. But I was getting ready for a presentation I'm going to give tomorrow at the Santa Monica Amateur Astronomy Club about CERN. So, I apologize, but if you're not gonna see the Olympic opening ceremony tomorrow night, drop in!

Open source ATI drivers

2008-07-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, it was revealed to me that I didn't need the proprietary ATI drivers at all. The open source ATI drivers now have AIGLX support included and you don't need the bleeding-edge of proprietary drivers. Now, the open source drivers are WAY more stable than the proprietary ones. With those bleeding-edge drivers, I found my computer randomly freezing. However, that happens no more with the open source drivers.

The open source drivers have come a long way in the last couple of months. Now they have native AIGLX support, which means you can throw off XGL totally for compiz. However, the drivers work on these cards. I have a Radeon 9550, so mine has 3D acceleration. If yours is unsupported or 2D, you might want to stay with the proprietary ones.

In that guide, the most important (and most tricky) part is getting rid of fglrx. In addition to purging it, you should also go through Synaptic and get rid of any packages with fglrx in their name. Just do that and follow the rest of the guide, and you should be set! And the best part is, you won't have to comb ATI's site for new drivers. Ubuntu will bring 'em in as they come along.

Support the Bag Tax

2008-07-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

Recently, I heard on the radio about a bill to create a "bag tax". A tax on grocery bags. When I first heard of the concept, I thought, "What a great idea!". This ought to get people more enthused about bringing their own bags and reducing waste. However, the group Stop the Bag Tax wants to oppose this idea. Their web site is rather sparse consisting of four sections: a description of the Bag Tax, "But will this save the planet", "Who will this affect", and a link to that audio clip I linked to.

The site claims that:

"As if the cost of gas and food isn’t enough... politicians now want to charge you $.25 on every grocery bag. That adds up to about $400 per family per year!"

Now they're getting mixed up here. The AB 2058 does NOT address a $.25 tax, that is AB 2829. AB 2058 sets up guidelines for the state's voluntary bag recycling program. However, if we do look at the CORRECT bill, we'd see its not as sly as they paint it at all. When you look at the bill itself, you notice that it acts "on and after July 1, 2006". Politicians are in no way trying to sneak a tax on us. A year is a fair amount of time to get accustomed to reducing or even eliminating use of plastic bags in favor of canvas bags. If by then you still refuse to reduce your use of plastic bags: then, my friend, you will be helping California out of its budget crisis.

Another claim the site makes is about whether the bag tax would be good for the environment: "NO. Plastic bags are fully recyclable. Grocery stores already make it easy to recycle with convenient recycle bins." The problem with comparing this with recycling is that things we typically recycle: bottles, cans, electronics, paper usually just take up space in a landfill, and that's just wasteful. However, plastic bags are MUCH more dangerous than that. In California, the state taxes bottles and cans, and pays that money back to consumers when the bottles and cans are recycled. This incentive so far has brought the recycling rate to 67%. However, with plastic bags, we want something MUCH higher. Plastic bags in the environment are deadly to wildlife, they kill thousands of marine creatures when they get to the ocean. A full-blown tax to keep people from using them would be the best way to do so.

Lastly, the site asks: "Who does this affect?" and gives this answer:

This will affect everyone, but it will be especially devastating to low income families, seniors and anyone living on a fixed income. Plus, it could cost thousands of California jobs.

I don't have much to say to that other then it seems like it was pulled out of someone's hindquarters. Yes the tax will affect everyone, but there does not seem to be a reason this would target low-income families and seniors. I mean... I'm sure they can find SOME bag to carry their groceries in, if they so desired. And the tax won't affect the store's prices. According to the bill, the store would be "authorized to retain 3% of the fee as reimbursement for any costs associated with the collection of the fee". As far as I can tell, the tax only affects the wasteful, which it darn-well should!

So, here's what you do!

Find your representatives using this form (from the bagtax web site)
Call them and let them know that you SUPPORT the bag tax.
Ask them to support both AB 2058 AND AB 2829.

And it goes without saying that you should try to reduce your plastics too.

Teens On Linux

2008-07-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

OSCON is starting up today in Portland, Oregon. I won't be going. But that doesn't mean it won't be awesome. I'm just going to say that Andrew Harris (better known to his friends as tunys) is going to be giving a talk about teens and Ubuntu. And I'm not just saying it because he's one of my really good friends and he founded Teens On Linux. And that I'm also a member of Teens On Linux and frequents the #teensonlinux channel on FreeNode. Unfortunately, due to parental issues, I'm not going to Portland, Oregon to hear him or help him with the talk. However, to anyone that would be going, I'd highly recommend going to his talk on Thursday July 24 at 4:30.

Yep! TeensOnLinux has already had more than a year's worth of history. It started out when Andrew (now known as Tunys; lojban for tuna) couldn't find a community of teens who were interested in Linux (TeenLUG existed at the time, but as the unofficial propogandist of TeensOnLinux, I'm glad he didn't find them), so he decided to make his own. He got together with some British dudes whose names are unimportant and created TeensOnLinux. It was an awesome success! I joined them on IRC about a month or so after they were founded, and haven't left. TeensOnLinux also has a web site with forums and the like, designed to be like a myspace for teens, but the web site is NOT the main activity hub for us. I frankly barely visit the web site (And since the host is not so great, it usually goes down for a day or so before anyone notices). The main place where the action goes on is on IRC.

I first got to know TeensOnLinux when I was browsing FreeNode channels on IRC. I was a not-so-recent convert to Linux, but still was looking for the right community, and found it on IRC. It turns out that #teensonlinux is in an ideal place. Since we're on FreeNode, we don't have to worry much about a lack of security; the staff are always prompt (in fact, a little too prompt usually). And also, since we have our own channel, we can do whatever the heck we want to in it (as long as it isn't malicious or detrimental in any way). There have been two main periods in #teensonlinux. Both named by me after the dominant bots during the time. First was the fredburger era. Fredburger was a ~~supybot~~ rBot which did all the typical IRC stuff, like larting, factoids, etc. During most of the fredburger era, the channel was mostly stable, with about the same amount of people joining and leaving. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the bot, but I think its a characteristic of it. Then, about five months later, Tunys adopted bobsalad. Bobsalad is a pyborg, meaning he's sorta a language recognition/speaking bot. The bobsalad era overlapped with the fredburger era for about two month until, as legend has it, bobsalad slayed fredburger and covertly usurped the entire channel from the humans. Now bobsalad rules as an invisible dictator, making sure nobody steps out of line but not revealing his true power. Anyways, for anyone who wants to see the craziest of bobsalad's sayings, please visit the Salad QDB. I assure you, you will spend the whole time cracking up. The characteristic of the bobsalad era is a general crazifying of the channel. Whether that may be to show newcomers that we're just a fun place, or the dark magic of bobsalad, we're not sure.

Although, a grand experiment during the bobsalad era was the massop idea. Tunys believed that security on the channel could be guaranteed by giving everyone op capability. Newcomers generally did not receive ops until they were deemed trustworthy (which took about five minutes). Of course, I was vehemently opposed to this, and abused the massop system constantly, but Tunys still believed. However, the massop experiment failed after a conspiracy to bring in an outside person who kickbanned everyone in the room. I was not a victim of this, and did not even know it happened until afterward because I was currently kickbanned for a good-natured prank/demonstration I pulled on Tunys which he didn't exactly appreciate. But we are, in fact, back to a good ol' fashioned ChanServ maintained channel. And feel free to drop in any time you want. And definitely, if you're going to OSCON, drop in to see Andrew's talk. I ASSURE you that you won't be disappointed, knowing him.

A New View of the Universe

2008-07-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

A story straight from the Onion! The newest observations from the Hubble Space Kaleidoscope have just been released, and they're fascinating!

That's right! As people saw how popular the Hubble Space Telescope was and its huge contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, members in NASA who studied the fairly nacent branch of astrokaleidoscopics. In fact, it has already begun to change our views of the universe. As astronomer Douglas Stetler states,

"With their unprecedented resolution, the latest images from the new kaleidoscope reveal that space, once thought to be isotropic, is actually continuously expanding, unfolding, and rearranging in a series of freaky patterns,"

I'm sure the theoretical astrophysicists are stunned by these discoveries. Who knows what else the Kaleidoscope will reveal about our Universe. Even in our own Solar System, its been discovering new things, for example, Dr. Mae Ling-Turlington described Jupiter through the Kaleidoscope as "a dazzling hexagonal array of variegated prismatic configurations, changing our very understanding of the atmospheric patterns there on the solar system's spikiest-looking planet." Who knows what other discoveries the Hubble Space Kaleidoscope could make in the coming weeks?

[In my own research] Many people don't know this, but Galileo was not only the first person to point a telescope into the sky and discovering the cosmos, but he also was the first to point a roll of toilet paper, a lead pipe, and he was the first to point a kaleidoscope into space. This experience changed him almost as much as when he used the telescope. With it he discovered the funky glow of Mercury, and the phases of the Sun. The Hubble Space Kaleidoscope is many steps away from this primitive viewing, but traces its roots back to him.

Phoenix Updates

2008-07-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

[Note: I wrote this a week ago, and for some reason didn't post it. Well, have fun!]

Ok, so, I left off Phoenix at landing. Since then, it's done some more pretty cool stuff, and also run into a couple of problems. But don't worry, they're nothing those guys at JPL haven't been able to handle.

So, while taking a cornucopia of photos, the Phoenix team decided to practice scooping and dumping. That way, they became familiar with the soil and figured that they wouldn't screw up when they tried to actually perform experiments on the soil. It turned out that they weren't as familiar with the soil as they thought. It turned out that they'd sorta be wrong. When they actually tried to put the soil in the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA, which basically bakes the soil and analyzes the gases that are emitted), they encountered a little problem. As you can probably see to the right, the soil seems rather clumpy. And over TEGA is a sort of sieve to keep large particles out. Well, it turned out that the clumps turned out to be larger than the holes, and none of the soil could get through.
After much shaking, enough soil finally got into the analyzer so that it could heat up the sample. The result: Not much water. But, that could be expected because the sample was sitting out in the sun for a few days while the lander was trying to shake it in. At the initial heating, no water was given off. However, when they upped the temperature, really heating the soil, they detected some water, which was probably chemically bound to the minerals in the soil itself. So that's still significant, and hints that there was most likely water in the past.

After the analysis, there was a minor glitch on the lander which caused the loss of some nonsignificant science data. That was promptly fixed by the JPL team, so I'll go on to more science.

After scooping the sample for the TEGA experiment, scientists noticed a distinctive white layer in the hole left behind. Two things immediately jumped into mind: salt or ice. There would be an easy way to distinguish between the two: to wait. If after a few days, the layer is different, that indicates that the ice sublimated (changed directly from a solid to a gas). If it doesn't change, then it's probably salt. Well, after a period of anticipation, as you can see in the animation to the left, there was definitely some change, so it's probably ice! And on Mars, there are two kinds of ice, water ice and carbon dioxide ice. However, Phoenix is currently in the middle of Martian summer, so all of the carbon dioxide ice should have sublimated already (it sublimates at a lower temperature). So that leaves: water ice! That is incredible because the ice is far higher than we thought in the Martian soil. This is incredibly encouraging for the possible habitability on Mars.

Of course, Phoenix didn't stop there. There's still another main instrument to be used: the wet chemistry lab. This lab essentially dissolves the soil in some liquid water stored on board and checks how the minerals in the soil behave when dissolved. Well, it turns out that the instruments detected several familiar compounds like potassium, magnesium, and chloride. What's so exciting about those? Those minerals are found on Earth soil! So, the Martian soil is roughly similar to terrestrial soil. This will also be an important find for potential future human habitation because a colonist "might be able to grow asparagus pretty well". Instead of worrying about the soil, we could tackle other problems such as protecting plants from radiation, adapting them to the cold temperatures, and other potential Martian crop failures.

So far, all of this has been extremely exciting. I can't wait to see what other amazing things Phoenix will discover next. You can also follow along. The Phoenix Mars team has a twitter that you can follow: @MarsPhoenix . And of course, you can be friends with the Lander on Facebook. That's a good way to catch up on updates. And I'd like to say, I've been deferring this post for a couple of days now, and every day that went by meant another topic to write about. So, we are getting a TON of info from Mars. In fact, if you want to keep afloat on all the images coming from the lander, JPL is where you can get them first! There's just so much cool stuff coming from that lander!

The danger of woo

2008-07-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

Over at Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski recalls a chilling tale of a surgeon who encountered a woman with early-detected breast cancer. Because of the early detection, her survival rate was predicted at 93%. However, the woman refused chemotherapy in favor of "alternative" treatments. She dropped off of the radar and came back three years later to that same surgeon. The result: the tumor had progressed QUICKY, and was now at a stage that was very difficult to cure. Of course, once into woo, always into woo, she refused treatment even though her condition was degrading. And right now.... Gorski predicts that she's probably dead.

This is a reminder that the world is not yet a boom de ah dah paradise. There are still problems which science hasn't been able or hasn't been allowed to solve. And this woman is a tragic case. Yet, this is a perfect rebuttal to the claim that "alternative" medicines aren't dangerous. The claim that patients will be willing to forgo medical treatment for "alternative" treatments seems speculative and unbelievable until something like this happens. A person is "successfully" conned into believing that tea is a better cure than chemotherapy.

And there's also another unfortunate thought in this situation. That most doctors can't deal with this as House, M.D. can. Which is namely to tell unwilling patients that they're being idiots and are going to die, and treat them anyway. I'm starting to wonder how many of these cases doctors have! But anyways, doctors: You have my deepest sympathies. No one should have to deal with having to see someone basically self-destruct due to ignorance and misinformation. Hopefully... and I really do hope so... science will start to be more widely accepted in this society.

Activism!

2008-07-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

Currently, the Arecibo telescope has massive budget cuts lurking in the future. Due to a four million dollar shortfall from the National Science Foundation, the Arecibo radio telescope would not longer be able to operate. This would be horrible!

Well, the folks at SETI@home thought so too. They depend on Arecibo to collect the data for analysis. So they have a stake in this cut, which is why they came up with this handy little letter to send to your representatives to support a bill to restore the funding. All you have to do is put in your address (don't worry. SETI@home is an entirely trustworthy organization. They won't steal or sell your info.) and it'll give you a .pdf of three letters that you just print out and send to your Congessmen (two to your senators and one to your representative). Of course, if you want, you can use the sample letter to write your own personalized letter (which is what I ended up doing). But even if you don't have the time to write, if you just type, print, and send; it will make a difference. So fill out that form and save Arecibo!

The ol' Mountain, Plains, and Islands

2008-07-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

For those of you who play Magic the Gathering, you'd recognize those colors as Red, White, and Blue: a little special thing for Independence Day. While perusing Google Analytics a few days ago (It was a while since I checked up on my stats), I found that there was a huge untapped audience interested in Magic Cards. To my surprise (and probably to most other readers), my Anti-Sliver screed has shot up in popularity with my most popular guides. So, I thought I'd make this my first official post about Magic, and just tell you my history with it.

I learned how to play Magic in fifth grade. I had a group of friends who were into it and I got into it. However, when I started out, I didn't have my own deck and used other people's decks. I was still learning the rules like attacking and tapping and all of that. However, it was a REALLY cool game. It was actually conducive to playing, unlike Pokemon, which was mainly about collecting (I'm not sure how much experience you all had with Pokemon cards, but the game itself was extremely horribly designed).

Once I got into middle school, then the Magic craze REALLY started. My friends were actually fairly successful in banding with older players of Magic and recruiting people into Magic cards. Of course, some of the older students made a pretty profit selling cards to us younguns, but it was a fun time nonetheless. Around 7-8th grade, a Magic the Gathering club was formed which was a place all players could officially meet twice a week to play Magic. Of course, us hardcore players played outside on days when the club didn't meet also. Magic was actually quite a successful social bonding mechanism. People got together and played, talked, and had a good time. Whenever we had any sort of free time, we'd get out our Magic cards and start playing. Oh, and by the way, it was during this period when I got my first deck and started maintaining and building it. My suppliers where I bought the cards from were the older students. My deck wasn't particularly special, but it was fun; one of my friends, on the other hand, had a particular knack for building extremely strong decks that were just about unbeatable; ranging from Elf to Goblin, to his extremely annoying deck-out deck.

Unfortunately, the period of Magic prosperity hit a wall: high school. Now, we were all too busy trying to get good grades and take as many APs as possible to play Magic. Slowly, Magic died out in our school; I'm ashamed to admit it. It wasn't until a few months ago when I wondered "What ever happened to Magic?" and attempted to reinvoke the good times that we had in middle school. However, my reception was less than appreciated. My friends were turned off to the idea of reinvigorating the card game because they realized how much time and money they invested in it when they were young (Sort of like me and Pokemon) and they didn't want to start that over again. I could understand that perspective, but what's got me worried is the younger generation. The incoming students don't have upperclassmen to learn and share Magic with, and they've started playing second-rate card games like Yu-Gi-Oh. Speaking from my opinion, Magic is much more fun than Yu-Gi-Oh, but these kids will never know that. So, I've taken to trying to introduce these younger students to Magic. So far, the results haven't been what I've expected, but I still have senior year to go. Wish me luck!

Now, about my decks. My decks tend to be obese. I can put cards into them, but it's difficult for me to take them out. In fact, I have one deck which has 200+ cards in it (though the performance is surprisingly good). I have five. My favorite one is a blue phasing deck that I sorta based off of a recipe off the Magic web site. I don't use it because it wins, I just love it because it's incredibly annoying, and that's what matters! I also have a deck I call ginormia, which is the 200+ card one. It's a red/green combo that doesn't have a particular theme. It's basically two decks I had crammed into one. Next is my "overpowered" deck, which is a green beast deck. I like to call it overpowered because the creatures are way too fricking strong. Next is my "experimental" deck, a white/blue combo. It's sort of an on-and-off deck. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. It really depends on the wind. I use it when I'm challenging someone new to gauge their deck and see what deck would be best on them. Lastly comes the deck I hate to use: my black zombie deck. I just have a general aversion to zombies and I use this deck when I feel like I want to lose. Unfortunately, this deck is actually better than I'm willing to admit, and when played correctly it's pretty powerful. But I still hate zombies. These decks have pretty much remained in their current state for the past couple of years. My card suppliers have long since graduated, and I haven't exactly figured out how to buy Magic cards from the store effectively. The way these students used to do it was by selling grab-bags which contained 12 cards from a mixture of sets. I've never gotten used to buying by set, so one of you professionals might have to teach me someday. Maybe when I manage to buy some cards, I'll be able to make my decks smaller and more effective. Anyways, now you know my Magic background, and I hope to make this another topic I cover on this blog.

Bad Astronomy moved!

2008-07-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently, there's a new player in town on the Science blogging arena. In addition to ScienceBlogs, there's also Wired blogs, Nature blogs, LiveScience blogs, Scientific American blogs, and I'm sure many more. But now, I'm surprised Discover just entered onto the scene. I'm a subscriber to Discover (they're a really great publication) and really look forward to exploring what blogs they have. But, another thing that's pretty amazing. They've gotten Phil! Though, I'm pretty amazed at the transition. I follow Bad Astronomy in my feed reader, and it was so seamless, I didn't notice the change until I saw the web site itself. Usually, when people move blogs, you have to update your subscription, but strangely, not in this case. Phil (and whoever was in charge of the transition) really deserve some congrats for that. And I have to say, the new look is really appealing; though what I like most are the placement of the ads. They're tucked away in the sidebar and aren't that intrusive. Whoever designed that layout did a great job. Now, time to see what Discover blogs has to offer!

Excellent News

2008-06-30T00:57:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I decided to take my SAT II Subject Tests (they're basically standardized tests in certain fields). I took them in Math level 2 and Physics (they meet Caltech's requirements). And I have to say, I was extremely surprised when I saw those scores. The SAT II scores are just like a section in the regular SAT, 800 points. And, when I saw my scores in Math, it was..... 800.

And for physics... 800 also.

At least I can say that when I send in those scores to college, I won't have to worry about them being too low, heh.

I love the whole world

2008-06-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the world gets so crazy that you start to lose hope. That is, until you see a commercial like this, to remind you about the good stuff in life. Along with war poverty and disease which seem inescapable no matter, there's also the wonder of nature and the universe; and science, pushing the boundaries of what we know.

(Heart tip to PZ)

And if you were wondering what yesterday's xkcd comic was about, this is it.

How wacky ideas gain credance

2008-06-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

Wallace Sampson over at Science-Based Medicine gives an overview of how fields once viewed as quackery have gained credibility over the last few years.

However, this process is something that's readily applied across the board in pseudoscience. From psychics to creationists, they all have managed to escape the label: "Bulls@$^" (except for those caught by Penn and Teller).

And the media, of course, isn't helping. As Sampson brings up, "objective journalism" does not mean presenting both sides. It means presenting the facts. And, of course, if both sides have a comparable number of facts (as in a genuine scientific debate: Is cancer genetic or environmental (or some combination of the two)). When one side generally has far more facts than the other (as is the case with pseudoscience), you don't give the other side equal time because they don't have equal facts. The point of "objective" journalism is to inform the reader to make his/her own opinion. You do that by presenting the facts (or the absence of them). Saying that there is no solid evidence for astrology is not biased, because it's true. Astrology is just as effective as asking your son how your day is going to go (except with more big words). To say anything else would be either straying for the facts, or downright lying. Saying "Astrology might have revealed why this person got a promotion" is a conjecture, not a fact. Likewise, saying "Astrology did reveal why this couple broke up" would be a downright lie, because Astrology has been shown to be as effective as chance through and through. But anyways, I'm not going to write too much now. Right now, I have about three posts partly-written that I probably should get working on. But, I hope you enjoyed this little rant by both Dr. Sampson and me (though his is far more persuasive).

Summer Vacation

2008-06-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone. I know I haven't posted anything for three weeks or so. But I've been sucked into some sort of black hole where all of my time has evaporated. But anyways, summer is here. Unfortunately, most of my summer plans have been shot down. I didn't get into the YESS program (those little punks better have a good time there without me!) But, that wasn't the only thing I had in mind. However, another blow arrived when it turned out that Dr. Guy would be too busy to have me at CENS this summer. So now, my options have really dwindled. All that I know I'll be probably be left with is volunteering at Children's Hospital, Los Angeles.

Anyways, I SHOULD have more time for blogging, but who knows what'll happen? The RSS reader on the N800 is not exactly working out. I don't like the fact that I can't only read unread feeds, and that once I look at a category, everything is marked read. I basically want something like Liferea. However, the liferea port leaves much less to be desired. It hasn't had much activity. And the libraries won't install on my N800 for some reason. And from the experience, I'm guessing that the maintainer at least temporarily ditched the project. Nibbles is more active, but it's still got a long way to go before it becomes a fully-capable feed reader. So, I'll probably stick to RSS feeds on my home computer (maybe VNC onto them), use the horrible reader on the tablet, wait for the reader to improve on the tablet, or just make my own reader. If I have more time than I need this summer, I could POSSIBLY accomplish the last one. Though, I wouldn't count on it.

Nokia N800

2008-05-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

I recently ordered a Nokia N800 tablet and I have to say, like most people, it is an AMAZING device. I've been debating on whether to buy it for months, researching for the best deal on it. And I believe I found it. Now, you might ask that if the Nokia N810 is out, why would I want to buy the N800. It's easy, the new features on the N810 aren't really important enough for me to want it that badly, and the release of a new version DRASTICALLY cuts the price of a previous model. In fact, I've still heard of people who have the 770 and are still satisfied with that, so, cheaper is better. I first was awed by the N800 after reading an article in Linux Pro Magazine[pdf]. However, its price was listed as $399... wayyy out of my budget. However, I waited, researched for WHY I wanted it, and what a good price for it would be. And that waiting paid off. I searched for good deals with froogle (not generally that great an idea), but I was highly skeptical and it turned out that many of the really good deals were peddled by frauds. However, I then ran into this post that said that Dell was selling them for $199. That's when I thought, "It's a good time to buy!" Unfortunately, Dell sold out before I committed myself, so I had to settle with another deal. I was able to find this deal on TigerDirect (they really do have good prices on electronics. And I know them to be legitimate) for around $220. This one, I managed to catch in time! A few days later, they were sold out. I gave a sigh of relief and waited for the N800 to arrive.

After a heart-wrenching week of waiting, it finally arrived! I have to say, since the hour I got it, it was the most amazing piece of technology I have ever seen. Just out of the box, it detected my network without a flaw (which it should do, but still. That's a good thing!) and came with a nice suite of programs such as a browser, media player, RSS aggregator, IM client, yadda yadda. However, there were a few caveats. The media player didn't handle oggs, the IM client only supported Jabber, the only VOIP client was Skype, and the memory card Nokia included was only 128 MB. However, most of those problems were easily handled by the community built around maemo, which is the foundation of the Linux-based operating system.

First thing I did when I got the N800 set up was try to figure out how to install things. I found this blog to be immensely helpful in getting around the N800. But first, it told me to upgrade the OS. The Operating System for the N800 is OS2007 and they released OS2008. Once again, Internet Tablet School came to linked me to a place that said how to upgrade the OS in Linux (since this was a new tablet, I had no data to back up). It turns out that installing things on the N800 is incredibly easy. You just go to the maemo garage and look for the program you want to install. After that, there's a little button called:This way, I can install ogg support for the media player using mogg. Just click the button and that's about it. Additionally, there are Debian packages that you can also use to install stuff on the N800, but the one-click installer should take care of everything for you. Anyways, I've been working on this post for a while in the past, and forgot about what should be in it, so I'll just post it and if I get any new insights later on, I'll write new posts about them.

Phoenix Lands

2008-05-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

The Phoenix lander landed successfully yesterday and sent back its first pictures. And all I have to say is... wow! When I look at the terrain, I notice... it's so barren. When we think of an area with no water, we at least picture some cactus, or brush managing to grow in the dry soil. But here.... the surface of Mars.... is the ULTIMATE barrenness. As far as we know, no life, not even a microbe has been on that soil in AT LEAST several million years, probably even longer! And yet... here we are. On our oasis in space (our tiny blue dot as Carl Sagan put it) and we managed to put... even an artifact of life on this totally lifeless planet. And we've done this all in the last... thirty-something years! Before us, there was nothing on Mars, save rock.... and a puny atmosphere. And yet, in a mere thirty years, we've managed to put numerous robots on and around Mars. Even after we might lead ourselves into self-destruction... and take our moon with us. Those robots will be our calling cards. And that goes for ALL of the missions we've sent out including Cassini, Galileo, New Horizons, Voyager, and on and on! If some extraterrestrial civilization were to visit our solar system post-human. Or.... if you want to be optimistic, we abandon Earth after being a space-faring civilization, then some historian comes back to revisit our roots. Mars will be a lasting sign that we were here, and that this wasn't a dead solar system. There were intelligent beings, who managed to send things outside of their planet's gravitational pull to outer space... to other planets. THAT is the good part of humanity I love to see. When people can get together and reach out! Anyways... that's enough planetary rambling from me. Phil also has something to say concerning photos, though not from Phoenix.

But I have to say... I feel ya, Phil! I feel ya!

Phoenix Landing

2008-05-25T12:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, right now, I'm watching NASA TV on Sunday May 25. Today marks the Phoenix landing. Watch when you read it, it's quite interesting. The interesting stuff starts around 4-ish PDT so you might want to drop in around that time. However, watching NASA TV anytime is good! So, tune in whenever you can. The link is up there!

Newer ATI driver

2008-05-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

It appears that I missed a release, and ATI has released their Catalyst 8.4 driver. Now, since I'm assuming everyone is using Hardy now, I will rewrite the instructions for the new driver. It's a different beast, but I'll write this guide as I do the install. So any obstacles I encounter will be documented. The new guide I'm using is here. All right, here we go!

First, download the driver from the ATI web site. For some reason, when I tried getting the driver, it wouldn't let me go from the start, so using the direct link will guarantee you getting the driver (unless something weird happens, which is unlikely). Now, download it. Next, put your driver in a separate folder called ati so things don't get messy. You don't have to do it, but your $HOME folder will thank you.

mkdir ~/ati
mv Desktop/ati-driver-installer-8-4-x86.x86_64.run ~/ati
cd ~/ati

Make sure you have all of the dependencies. Don't Run the command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++5 dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Now go through Synaptic and COMPLETELY uninstall all of the packages with "fglrx" in their name you might have, for example: xorg-driver-fglrx or fglrx-kernel source. And remove any .deb packages of fglrx you might have by using this command:

sudo rm /usr/src/fglrx-kernel*.deb

After you do that, you can now set up the deb packages. Just run:

sudo ./ati-driver-installer-8-4-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/hardy

This makes the packages. Now you have to tell Ubuntu not to overwrite these packages with the ones in the repositories. So, you need to edit the file:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common

Where it says DISABLED_MODULES="", put "fglrx" in the quotes. So you'll get:

DISABLED_MODULES="fglrx"

As another precautionary measure (I didn't need to, but you might), edit the file :

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-restricted

If it exists. For me, it didn't, so don't be worried if it doesn't for you. If it does exist, you look for the line:

blacklist fglrx

and you comment it out with a #.

Now you can get to the install by using:

sudo dpkg -i xorg-driver-fglrx_8.476*.deb fglrx-kernel-source_8.476-0*.deb fglrx-amdcccle_8.476-0*.deb

which will install all of the packages at the same time.

Once the install goes well, open the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and look for

Section "Device"
 [...]
 Driver  "fglrx"
 [...]
EndSection

. If you've already done this, it should be there. If it isn't, then add it (without the bracketed ellipses). Now, run sudo aticonfig --initial -f. If that runs well, restart and see what happens from then on.

After you restart, run "fglrxinfo". If you get something that resembles:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon 9550 / X1050 Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7415 Release

then congratulations, you've made it! Otherwise.... go read the end of the other guide. It addresses it more directly.

New Alliance for Science winners

2008-05-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

The winners of the 2008 Alliance for Science contest have been announced! Congrats to Neil Desai, a fellow first place winner in 10th grade, with his really well-written essay (read it!). I'm glad I entered in last year! I would link to his blog, but the blogstalkers haven't stricken yet and.... I can't find it. If I find it, I'll definitely put a link. And maybe he'll see what it's like to get a HUGE spike in visits from a link in Pharyngula, heh! Oh yeah, and a passing congratulations to Frances, David, and Marleigh, the other winners. I hope all of you enjoy your cash prizes because (to be honest) I still haven't figured out what to spend it on... Which brings me to my next point:

SEED!!!!! Get your act together! As my prize subscription from last year has shown me, you have an AMAZING magazine! It's probably the BEST science magazine I've ever received. I have nothing to say but "Great Job" to all the staff who works on it. It has definitely convinced me to resubscribe when the prize subscription runs out (which should be soon). Now I think that these kids have demonstrated their amazingness by writing these essays. I think they definitely deserve a subscription to such an amazing magazine. So, come on SEED... keep helping these guys out.

Are Over!!!!

2008-05-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, as of yesterday, my AP testing terminated! I have no more! And I am HAPPY!!!!!! The stress is over, and the rest of the school year is (relatively) easy going. Five APs (I can't believe myself) over with!

AP Calc AB was..... eh, I didn't really worry too much about that. It went by fairly well. The free-response are up for those of you who are up for the challenge. They were pretty straightforward except for number 5. Solving that differential equation was a royal pain in the butt. Having a negative in the natural log was extremely confusing (which you get after setting the initial condition). However, I THINK I got the equation purely because I learned the esoteric epsilon-delta proofs. I had some free time, so I tried to prove the limit as x approached infinity but..... I couldn't. So, I looked over the work I had done, and switched a couple of negatives and I think I got the right answer. But.... I'll never know now. Anyways, I have a lot of confidence in this exam.

AP U.S. History is kind of an eeehhh..... exam. I'm not entirely sure how I did. All I know is that I completed my goal of writing about the Wright brothers in one of my essays. And funnily enough, the essay was on the "New South". So... that was an interesting experience. There's not much I'm going to say about this test.

The greatest test, AP Physics, was the main focus of my study. I was highly skeptical I would get a satisfactory grade on it, but somehow I managed to study hard, and I think it would have worked. The mechanics test was much easier than I thought it would be. The practice problems we did in class and out of AP review books tended to OVERPREPARE us dramatically. The problems on the test were fairly straightforward (at least I hope so). However, the free-response problems were another thing. It wasn't fair, they stuck in a differential equation. And what's worst is that I know exactly what I did wrong. When solving the differential equation, I forgot to separate before I integrated. I should have been tipped off when I got v=mgtsin(θ)-BS! Anyways, the curve on that test is so low, I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference. The E&M test was just as intuitive.... kinda. I like to think I overprepared for E&M, and I found most of it fairly straightforward except... the last free-response problem. That problem was horrific, but only the a) part. I think it had something to do with Bio-Savart's law or something, but I couldn't calculate a magnetic field at a point! Anyways, no use complaining now.

AP English was just.... great! I can't disclose any information yet because the score might be thrown out (48 hours need to pass), but let me just say I was initially sad because I wrote one of my greatest essays ever, and I thought I would never see it again. However, good news came from Dr. Draper, and he said I WOULD be getting my essay back... later on. And I'm glad, because that essay is my crowning achievement in English for this year. I love it!

Anyways, that was my AP testing schedule. From now on, it's smooth sailing and fun until summer. Unfortunately now... I have a backlog of about unread RSS entries that I have to get through. I'm severely tempted to just "Mark All as Read"... oh well, we'll see.

APs

2008-05-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone. Sorry again for not posting, but AP tests are coming up... actually. They're here. It's right in the middle of AP testing period right now. So far, I've taken AP Calculus AB, which really wasn't all that bad. I didn't feel I really needed to study for it. And I've taken AP US History, which took more studying, but I have good feelings about it.

The ones that are coming up are AP Physics, which I'm scrambling to study for this weekend, it's on Monday. I have to do both the mechanics and the electricity and magnetism tests. So far, I'm getting the concepts, but I just need more practice to recognize them and solve them quickly. AP Physics is by far the hardest AP test I've EVER prepared for. After that, on Wednesday is the AP English test. You can't really prepare for that. The multiple choice is basically either you can pick out analyses of authors, or you can't. The essays are what are really important. And, I think I can do fairly well on those. But anyways, I'm off to physics boot camp. I'll be sure to get back to regular blogging once all of this is over! I haven't even had time to go over RSS feeds that's how busy it was. Anyway, just don't think I'm dead or anything... just reviewing my butt off!

Calculus Camp

2008-04-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

Apologies for such a long delay. But I had a bunch of stuff.... and....... things..... happened....... so.... anyways!

[Note, I wrote this about a week ago... and didn't get to finish it.... until now. I probably don't remember the exact times we did sections, so too bad. I've been busy this week too]

The last four days of the long delay were due to the fact that I was at Calculus Camp. Calculus Camp is an annual four-day event my school does to help students review for the AP Calculus test. And I have to say, it was fun (or as fun as doing 24-26 hours of Calculus over the span of a weekend could be).

On Thursday, we left at noon from school in charter buses (the fancy-schmancy ones!) to the campground where we'd be stuck for four days until Sunday. It actually didn't take as long as I thought it would, I was told it would take three hours, but instead it took only two. We went up, high in the mountains where there was snow laying about (but none near our campsite). There, the air was clear and thin...ner. That was demonstrated when I decided to take a drink of water. Once I opened my water bottle when we were up in the mountains, the cap exploded off and woke up everyone near me on the bus. It was actually really funny. Anyway, once we got there, we picked our cabins, were treated to lunch, and then forced off to our first Calculus session. There, we went over the basics: Functions. Once we did that, it was dinner and then the SECOND session: Limits and Differentiation! Limits were okay, but differentiation had 100 or so problems! Somehow, I still finished it, but the later sections would only become MUCH more complex. But, this was enough Calculus for one day, so we ended it. After that came some free time and a bonfire (though a campfire would be a more appropriate description). And of course, I made an endless amount of quips of burning wood for no reason and contributing to global warming. So, I did my part. After that, it was off to bed.

The next day came breakfast in the morning, and immediately after another Calculus session. This time, it was applications of derivatives. This was another ninety or so questions and I'm still amazed how I was able to solve all of them! It was during this time when Mr. Laderman showed up (which made camp a bajillion times more fun). As you can probably guess, we had lunch, and did more Calculus; integration this time. It was REALLY annoying this time because these antiderivatives got annoying. The thing about antiderivatives is that you can't really work through them, you have to.... derive them through odd means. Usually, U substitution works. But there were examples where you had to REALLY think outside of the box, and a lot of the teachers (and other experts in mathematics) who were there were unable to solve them (I would probably exempt Mr. Miller from this because.... he's a freaking math genius from Caltech, and no problem stumped him). Anyways, I didn't finish this section, and probably WON'T! Once more, we had some free time then went in for ANOTHER session of Calculus, where we went over Definite Integrals. This I managed to finish because there were only about 50 problems. After this came dinner, then more free time and an optional session (which wasn't optional to BC students). We decided to do physics during this optional session. After that, we followed with another bonfire and bed.

The third day was more fun. Wake up! Smell the fresh smell of Calculus. You know the drill already, breakfast is eaten and how we're going on to various Applications of Integrals. This was fairly exhausting but the good part was that the book finally trusted us to use calculators because it assumes that we know how to Integrate by now. So that made the sections a LOT more bearable. However, I was glad once we got to lunch! After lunch, we had a lot of free time and a few of my friends and I decided to go hiking with one condition. Mr. Laderman had to join us! He actually did, and we hiked for about one and a half hours and we still weren't tired. Mr. Laderman knows so much about ... everything, and he's just a VERY fascinating character. You could just ask him about nearly ANY topic, from time travel, to geology, to aliens and he'll be GLAD to discuss it. He's really a great guy, and we're glad we hiked with him. Also along the way, I found a VERY good hiking stick, light but sturdy. I kinda..... snuck it back to L.A. But don't let Mr. Vriesman know, he told me to leave it. Anyways, after the amazing hike, we got back and (sorta) finished up the book with differential equations. A couple of these were just way over my head and I'm positive that they wouldn't be on the AP test. If they were, the College Board would be crazy! However, we left this session early because I signed up for a seder (it was passover) to expand my cultural horizons. Of course, this wasn't a real seder; that would take HOURS! Instead, it was a highly condensed seder where we were all taught about what the symbols were (kinda) and we ate during dinner. Plus, I got to wear a yamika! Plus, there was more matzah than we knew what to do with. In fact, we had matzah pizza the next morning, it was pretty good. Immediately after was the optional session, which all of the BC kids had to go to. Instead of going up and socializing, Eliana (a girl in my AP Physics class) and I decided to draw a HUGE circuit in the sand of the volleyball court. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of our masterpiece on the internet... yet! But that took us about an hour and a half, and everyone who was capable of appreciating a circuit in the sand did so, we made sure of it! After showing everyone in AP Physics the sand circuit, we had the Calculus Camp talent show. It started out with the AP Stat teacher telling a series of stand-up jokes about math in general (which of course, I laughed at). Then, in addition to people showing off how the can (and can't) dance, Mr. Lieberman pulled up all of the students in his AP Physics AB class and had us do the separate and integrate dance for solving differential equations (I can't really show how it goes in text, but it's not that great; not like Funktion, so don't worry). In addition, we had Franklin (resident failure, as I call him. We have a thing where I say he fails at everything, but he really doesn't. It's not bullying.... seriously) solve Rubix cubes. Now, I KNOW Franklin is fast, and he performed a lot slower on stage than I know he could. But, he was a pioneer, I never heard of someone SHOWING OFF the talent to do a Rubix cube. Of course, some other guy thought he could do it faster, and did. But he came off looking like a complete jerk, so Franklin still wins all of our admiration. After various other acts... we go to bed.

Last day! Awwww... and wooo!!!! We've gone though the entire Barron's review book, and it's time for a practice AP test. To risk drawing out this post longer than it should be, I'll just say I PASSED with a VERY HIGH 5! According to my count-up sheet I got 106.5 out of 108, which I think is wayy too high and I probably made a mistake in addition, but that's still pretty darn high! I learned that I don't really have to worry about the Calculus test. After that, camp is pretty much done! We took our luggage, and went on the bus to go home. This time, I made sure to seal my water bottle and see it compressed when we got down (it happened! Guess what? Air has pressure!) Once we got home, it was back to reality and school. However, there WILL be next year!

What if.... Microwave!

2008-04-07T21:06:00.000-07:00

Here is EVERYTHING I've wanted to do with a microwave, but couldn't due to... safety concerns. Thank goodness for the internet!

Nerds

2008-04-07T18:28:00.000-07:00

Today SETI's Are We Alone podcast (a really excellent one) released an episode about nerds, and I found it to be extremely informative. They go over what it means to be a nerd, and how attitudes toward nerd changed over time. They discuss everything from Dungeons and Dragons to an interview with David Anderegg (the author of Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them, whose book I STILL need to read!). And there are also lots of other fun discussions like Rubik's Cubes and "nerds" in other cultures. I highly recommend listening to this one.
,

Molding Youth

2008-04-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

Today, Lim Leng Hiong wrote a VERY insightful post on the pressure for total and absolute excellence that some students usually have from parents (or, at least part of the post was about that). I TOTALLY agree with him, that students shouldn't be treated like cannonballs, their entire life calculated from the beginning to achieve some maximum height. For one thing, cannonballs behave much differently than birds when obstacles come into the way. For one thing, if a cannonball meets a wall, it will do one of two things. Either crash through, falling significantly short of the goal. If this is the case, the only achievement will be a pile of rubble. If the wall is significantly stronger, the cannonball will bounce off, and end up right back where it came from. However, a bird, if it encounters a wall, can either fly over, or fly around, then it won't be an obstacle anymore. The bird might even find a small hole in the wall, and climb through to the other side! Sure it might meet a couple of rats, but it WILL reach the end, with more glory and splendor than any cannonball could have! Even the space shuttle, which has enough precision to land in the exact same spot on the pavement at Kennedy Space Center, still has flexibility to change its flight plan when needed. Anyways, I'm taking this analogy WAY too far.

Luckily, I've been treated like a bird. I'm extremely thankful to my parents for treating me so. I'm thankful my parents haven't scheduled my entire day out for me. I'm thankful my parents aren't persistently involved in my life, putting me in the back seat. I'm thankful my parents haven't signed me up for a bajillion programs and classes to fill up any kind of spare time I might have. I'm thankful that their acceptance of me as me has enabled me to motivate myself to do what I want, well! Instead of reading about the latest discovery in cosmology, I could be taking a "personal development" class. Instead of following the silly and hilarious hijinks of creationists, I could be training to play volleyball. Instead of writing this post and maintaining this blog, I could spend it practicing my piano. However, I don't think those fit me. I feel like I'd benefit much more from reading Pharyngula than going through dull SAT routines. Heck, if I took time to learn another language, I probably wouldn't have been able to put in the investment to learn Linux. It may be a large investment of time, to discover stuff you didn't know about, and to learn how to fix things you break, but it's well worth it. Now I'm not advocating living a hedonistic (see I can use an SAT word) lifestyle, but I feel that nourishment of a person's strengths will benefit them much more than throwing whatever you can at them. I agree that, in this time of hyper-competitive college admissions, many parents have lost sight of this. In the rush to decorate their child's college application and their child's future, they forget to stop and think about their child right now! This does, in fact, lead to resentment. Don't fire them out of a cannon, nurture them, listen to them, and most of all, respect them.

Breaking News!

2008-04-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

Two VERY important discoveries occurred yesterday! First, was the undeniable, uncontroversial discovery of water on Mars.

And secondly was the alliance of Google and Virgin to create a long-term 100 year plan to colonize Mars. The new joint-company in charge of the vision has been named Virgle and is looking for new pioneers of its program already.

I would have posted these discoveries as soon as I'd heard them yesterday, but time wasn't cooperating.

Dick Dawkins

2008-03-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

Before I forget, this video is probably one of the most hilarious videos I found in a long long while. I haven't been able to figure out where this came from but it's just... amazing. The lyrics are really well thought out, and the animation, I seriously WAS NOT expecting that! And dang! Eugenie C. Scoot looks pretty darn sexy!

Earth Hour

2008-03-29T21:33:00.000-07:00

Well, Earth Hour just passed a while ago. Although I didn't get to officially sign up on the web site, I DID in fact, do it. And I have to say, one hour without using any electricity can be pretty boring, especially if you're with people who you have nothing to talk about with. However, being in Los Angeles DOES have an advantage. Since most of the city didn't participate, the costs of not having light weren't so bad. Like most nights, the sky is so polluted (especially when it's cloudy, like tonight) that you can read EASILY. In fact, without anything else to do, I got A LOT of homework done! Just sat outside for an hour, and did it.

Of course, if you missed it, don't be sad. An earth hour can be done at any time. In fact, we should turn off unnecessary lights all of the time and try to conserve. To find out more, you can visit here!
And remember, it doesn't have to be hard, just form the habit!

Blog Delay

2008-03-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah. I haven't posted something in like two weeks. I have an excuse though! I'm trying to get through the backlog off RSS feeds that accumulated over Spring Break (I just couldn't read them over VNC, waiting for the screen to refresh was way too tedious). I'm almost there, but while you're waiting, combat poverty and improve your vocabulary.

Blogging from afar

2008-03-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is my first experience using network-type programs to control my desktop back in California. And I have to say, it's quite an interesting experience. My first plan was to enable VNC and SSH, and when I wasn't using the computer, I'd turn off X to consume less power and resources. When I need it, I ssh into the computer and use the "startx" command, and VNC at my pleasure. After some initial testing, I found out that the fool-proofness of ubuntu made that quite difficult. Now, for the first thing, we need some background on runlevels in linux.

There are technically seven runlevels that you can use in linux. Runlevel 0 tells the system to halt. Runlevel 1 is single user mode (which is basically root with limited services). Runlevel 3 is the operating system in a command-line. Runlevel 5 is the operating system with X running. And lastly, Runlevel 6 tells the system to reboot. Runlevels 2 and 4 don't really mean anything. To switch between modes, you use the "telinit " command as root.

So, what I planned to do was run ubuntu in runlevel 3 in the CLI, then when I logged in, run ssh and "startx". When X is started, I could then use VNC to get control of it and use my desktop. The problem is that ubuntu foolproofed the OS and combined 3-5 into X-running. So, I can't run from CLI only. That's not too bad, I guess. I'll just kill X when I'm done, then start it again when I need to. Unfortunately, if you literally "killed X" then it would come right back up to GDM. In order to enter the command-line, you need to stop GDM, which you can do with:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

This will leave you with a command-line interface. However, I found out that if you do this, "startx" fails. By now, I'm discouraged and wonder if it's really worth the trouble to play around with X like this. I vote no, and leave it the way it is.

So, now, here I am, with X left on, and VNCing into my computer. I have to say that it's nice to be able to have my computer, though the internet connection leaves much to be desired. I'm using UltraVNC on the client (windows) computer, and although it looks entertaining to see your operating system in.... 32 bit color, it's not all that great. In addition, the connection takes a while to update, which gets annoying after a while. However, it's either that, or stay home (actually, the latter isn't a choice because my parents will take me with them anyways). Because of the delay, I found that it's difficult to keep track of IRC and IMing with such a huge latency period. So, I've decided to use ssh for those. I use finch for IMing, which is basically a CLI version of pidgin, and irssi, an excellent IRC client for the CLI, for IRC. So, those are the compromises I've made. Until next time, see ya'll!

Pi day

2008-03-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

Well, today was Pi day. So, instead of actually posting something, I'll just link you to this previous post. Have fun!

Funktion

2008-03-08T17:22:00.000-08:00

Don't have much to say today. But yesterday, I went to my school's talent show. And one of the performer's was my math teacher's trigonometry class, which was a REALLY excellent show. It's a good thing it was recorded, and that, I bring to you:

OpenNASA

2008-03-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

I just found out that there's a new little thing going on in NASA called OpenNASA. It's currently a group of young employees hoping to change the way NASA markets itself to the new generation (called Generation Y). Right now, NASA is mainly run by those in the baby boomer generation who are now starting to retire and there aren't many people to take their place. The baby boomer generation has really been motivated with the Apollo missions, Star Trek and a whole lot more which made NASA look like the coolest thing ever! Now however, we don't really have something that's amazing and innovative. Most of us don't care about the ISS or the shuttle, and think that NASA is just some sort of leech off of the government budget. This is where the OpenNASA folks come in.

They look at what we've grown up on. This generation is MUCH more community oriented, with the advent of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, yadda yadda yadda just to name a few. And they aim to make NASA more transparent, open, and community-friendly. Now, as I said, right now they're just a couple of NASA employees with a vision, but it turns out that many others at NASA support what they do and this program might become really interesting. As an astronomy-enthusiast and open-source-fanatic, this is exactly what I can hope for!

Where in the World Will Our Energy Come From?

2008-02-29T18:38:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, there was a VERY informative lecture at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about alternative energy sources. The speaker was Dr. Nate Lewis from Caltech, and he was unlike any other speaker on the subject. Of course, since the talk was about Alternative Energy Sources, global warming had to be addressed because you can't leave it out of a discussion about alternative fuel sources.

Dr. Lewis started out surprisingly about peak oil. He disagrees with those who warn about the end of the age of oil because there really is no reliable way to measure the amount of oil left in the planet. And plus, other forms of fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas can be converted to oil fairly easily, so there's no real oil crisis. He also expressed doubts about climate models. The actual climate is so complex and there are so many unknowns, that the models are unreliable. One memorable line was "There are six major models in climate science, and we draw conclusions by taking the average. However, the actual climate won't take the average, it will take one specific path, and we don't know which model, if any, is the correct one" [may not be exact]. By now, I've started thinking, "Wow, this guy sounds like a global warming 'skeptic'", and I started to take him less seriously. I mean, he even withheld judgment on those graphs plotting temperature and carbon dioxide, saying they show correlation, but not necessarily causation. If that's not a sign of a denier, I don't know what is.

That is, until this statement: "However, this is an experiment we can only perform once". This is when the talk went full-speed into global warming. At this stage, he was still cautious about his statements, not making any large leaps of alarm, but still emphasizing "this generation is the only generation that will deal with this problem". If we don't do anything, it's not absolutely CERTAIN that things will go badly, it might even be better, somehow, but do we REALLY want to find out? After making a very good argument on why global warming is important, he leads into the actual topic, alternative energy sources.

The total energy use of the world is about 15 GW (I think that's the number he used). And most of this is provided by burning fossil fuels. A really good way of tackling this problem is just conservation and efficiency. However, as effective that that could be, it can't be the only solution. You need better ways to generate electricity as well. Now, the alternative energy sources HAVE to be carbon neutral in order to stop or at least slow down global warming. There are three major energy sources that fit these requirements: nuclear power, carbon sequestration, and renewable resources. So far, nuclear power seems like the best option because it's carbon-neutral and it's capable of making more electricity than other alternative sources. However, they require HUGE investments to build, and in order to meet an acceptable level of carbon reduction, you have to build one every other day until 2050 to totally provide for our energy consumption. Not something that seems nice to do.

Next is carbon sequestration or just burying our carbon dioxide underground or undersea. Putting it in the bottom of the ocean is a problem because the ocean will acidify (more than now), and it'll be REALLY bad for marine life. Sequestration underground is also a problem because there really aren't enough reliable places to stash it. Most oil reserves and mines have holes which we'd have to plug up in order to keep the carbon dioxide in there. In one reserve in Texas, there are 1.5 million holes, won't be very practical to plug up. We could put it in aquifers, which are HUGE and allow carbon dioxide to dissolve in water, but then we'd be drinking Perrier (mineral water) which wouldn't be so good for people with braces. And plus, the actual continent would rise a few centimeters because we're basically putting gas inside of it. Might help if the oceans are rising, but otherwise, no.

Renewable resources seem good, except that there just isn't enough energy in them. If we harness ALL of the potential energy from ALL of the streams and rivers in the world plus the energy from waves in the ocean, we still wouldn't be able to power ourselves. So that takes care of hydroelectric. Same as geothermal, just not enough energy in there. Wind is nice, except it's also fairly limited, and do we REALLY want to harness ALL of the wind? The last main one is solar. The Sun should be the source of energy we should harness because we get about 150 million GW on Earth, and we only want 20 of them. However, the problem is that solar cells are too expensive to scale. If we can make a cheap solar paint or rug, THEN we'll solve our energy problem!

So, now it seems like we have nothing left and we're screwed. Since no alternative source can save us. However, he says that in addition to conservation and efficiency, we should invest in ALL of these sources, and fund more research. Currently, more R&D is being done by dog food companies than energy companies, and that's just unacceptable. The energy problem will never be solved if this keeps up. So, all in all, this was the most effective lecture about global warming and energy that I've attended. It didn't rely on consequences of doom, but stuck squarely to facts, and made an even greater impact. Keep checking that site for an archive copy of the lecture. You WILL NOT be disappointed!

New ATI driver

2008-02-29T17:02:00.000-08:00

A new ATI Catalyst driver (8.2) was released a few weeks ago. For those experiencing less-than-stellar performance running compiz with the 8.1 driver, I recommend you upgrade. The fixes in this version are:

• The X server no longer crashes if the screen

resolution is changed in horizontal or vertical desktop setup with a monitor that does not support DDC;
• The X server no longer segfaults or fails to initialize DRI if a BusID was specified in an unexpected format in xorg.conf;
• The X server no longer freezes on shutdown if atieventsd is running;
• The first OpenGL application run after starting a session on X server version 1.4 no longer hangs.

Now, I know that with me, compiz has been causing X to freeze quite a bit, so I haven't done surgery to find out exactly what the problem was, but this looks like it will at least make some improvement. You can get the driver from the web site, and my installation instructions will still work for this one. In fact, I'd recommend that way, because you leave apt to take care of all of the package managing and installation.

An Exercise in Skepticism

2008-02-24T15:20:00.001-08:00

Ok, I'm not sure if this video is serious or not, have a look yourself if you have 10 minutes to spare:

Can you spot all of the faults in reasoning in this video? I'm not going to go in detail and rebut it because it just seems too crazy to believe. Though here's what I think of it. The one thing that struck me most was that it said nothing about the mechanism to grow the Earth. That should set up alarm bells. You can't bring matter out of nowhere, there needs to be some way to combat gravity.

Another weird claim about science was about throwing away a hundred years worth of data. Let me tell you something. The Ptolomeic model of geocentricism was worked on for about a thousand years. People refining it, adding more and more epicycles. And then came little ol' Copernicus, who threw all of that into the trash bin by putting the Sun in the center of the Universe. A hundred years isn't going to make much of a difference if it's wrong.

However, this video also makes claims about astronomy, which I can foray into with confidence. For one thing, the video says that the plate-tectonics theory is wrong because it holds a primitive view that our planet is special. Now, we're not saying that no other planet can have plate-tectonics, they can. But no planet in our solar system DOES. Some other things you can say is that life doesn't exist on Earth because if it did, we'd be special. Or that we don't have oxygen in the air, because if we did, we'd be special. That type of logic is really flawed. And another thing I noticed. The video didn't seem to have taken into account the fact that Mars is much smaller than the Earth. Unless you believe that they formed at different times, they should be the same size. The same goes for Mercury, Venus, and probably even Pluto (though it technically isn't a planet). Of course, there are a LOT more things I can say about this video, but unless I know that it's not a parody, it wouldn't be worth using up all of the time.

Sliver Time

2008-02-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

If you don't play Magic the Gathering, you just might want to skip down to the bottom of this post.

Let me make this public. I HATE SLIVERS!!!!No, I'm not talking about those things that get caught in your skin if you handle wood. I'm talking about the creature type in Magic: The Gathering. I've hated them since I first encountered them, and I still hate them. In my opinion, they are the cheapest (in a detrimental way) type of cards ever (worse than the Un- series). At least Un- cards make the game interesting. Just stick in a couple of Ward slivers (Slivers gain protection from a color), shifting slivers (slivers are unblockable except by other slivers), and the worst, Crystalline sliver (slivers can't be the target of spells or abilities, except by other slivers). And stick in whatever other slivers you can find and tah-duh, you have a powerful sliver deck.

I swear, they've taken out all of the strategy that you need for deck-building. Normally, you need to find a theme and choose which cards to put, and more importantly, which cards NOT to put. Because if you have too many useless cards, you'll never draw the good ones and you'll lose. Even if you do draw a good card, it's still surrounded by many not-so-good cards. Plus, what may be good in some situations, might not be good in others. For example, Call of the wild (FF2: Reveal the top card of your library. If it's a creature, put it into play, if not, put it in your graveyard) would not be good in a deck full of instants and sorceries. However, if you have a ton of expensive, powerful creatures, it'll be excellent. It depends on the context of the deck. Now, slivers on the other hand, go well with other slivers, period! There's no real strategy to building a deck other than "Get as many slivers as I can". And even more, if you have one GOOD sliver, it makes all of the others good and kills the opponent by brute force.

An even worse thing is that it basically makes games boring. When you play a sliver deck, unless you kill the opponent off at the very beginning (which means less game), you're screwed and you know it. There really is no way to make a game interesting if your opponent has 10 unblockable slivers that can't be the target of spells and abilities with first strike, trample, and deal damage directly to you when blocked. Now, if you want a deck that mercilessly crushes your opponent no matter what, you might want a sliver deck. However, if you're like me, and want to have FUN! Aim for a different deck. I have to say, the only way to beat a sliver deck is to use another sliver deck. And when that happens, the game descends into a massive orgy of abilities which affect everyone and no one. That's just annoying for both players. But hey, that's just what I think! Let me just say that, except for very special cases, I don't respect sliver decks.

NOTE: If you don't play Magic the Gathering, this post would probably have meant little to nothing to you. If you want me to post some guides on how to play, I can do that. Just leave a comment.

SCaLE

2008-02-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

Ok, so the past weekend at was at SCaLE (the Southern California Linux Expo), volunteering at the Ubuntu booth. And I have to tell you, it was FREAKING AWESOME! I didn't get to go to any of the talks (I got the cheap ticket, but I heard of people going anyways). But I manned the booth most of the time while I was there. If you want to see some pictures of SCaLE, Ars has some. I am not visible in his picture, I'm buried in the group of people on the left. But as you can see, we got festive in our tablecloths, and use the red, yellow, and orange Ubuntu colors! Another thing you surprisingly can't see is my computer. If you look closely on the yellow table, you might see a keyboard with my hands on it. That computer was a demo computer, and hopefully proved very helpful to people wondering about Ubuntu. All we needed was a Kubuntu and a Xubuntu, and people would have been very informed about everything. Unfortunately, we didn't have that luxury. But it's surprising how effective a hook compiz is, especially the ability to write fire on the screen.

Ok, maybe one in a million of you readers are skeptical that I was there (heh, if I had ONE skeptic I would be honored by the million readers). In that case, I give you photographic proof that I was there (and no, I'm not just showing off):Thanks to Nathan for having a camera to take this picture (he's the one on the right). I'm on the left (the one who NEVER looks good in ANY picture). And in between us is the mighty Jono Bacon (with a name like that, he's GOT to be cool!). In case you didn't know, Jono is the coordinator supreme of Canonical and Ubuntu. And that' s me! Slouched right next to him! Ok, I'll quit going on and on about Jono now.

Now Canonical was awesome for providing for us. They send a TON of promotional materials, all for free, from pens and stickers to brochures. Unfortunately, we didn't make them send us CDs, so this is where it got interesting. Now, Nathan had all of the ISO on his laptop, but just no CDs. Luckily, we had a ton of blank DVDs which we brought in case somebody wanted one. However, I don't think we anticipated initially SOOO many people wanting a CD. So, we had to co-opt our computers to become full-time CD burners. This is partly the reason I wasn't able to spend that much time going around. My computer was the Desktop, and it had a fast DVD burner, so we had to use that. Even at 2 minutes per CD, I felt like the inventory wasn't getting any higher. We REALLY underestimated the demand for Ubuntu DVDs. But we managed to get through and scrape along and provide people with their free DVDs.

Now, the actual CONVENTION was pretty cool too. We had Linux Chix right across from us, which is ALWAYS a good thing. We also had the Free Software Foundation a few booths away (though I never did pay them a visit. Oh well, there's next year). Google was wayyy down and offering cool stuff like google pens (not so cool) to Google yo-yos (really cool!) However, I'm sure, the rest of the convention meant nothing, without one, very special company (Cue romance music). Sun, you made the Expo what it was. An incredibly awesome experience. Your representative, Matt, was really awesome, and managed to stay cool even when the heat was tough. And even though I obviously wasn't a system administrator, or work for a big company, he treated me like I mattered. He answered all of the questions I had, and more. That is what I love about you, Sun. He gave me a LiveCD of openSolaris, something that I never knew existed. With that LiveCD, I SAW! I saw that openSolaris has made REAL progress in the wireless direction. I saw the openSolaris could look REALLY REALLY cool. And plus, his laptops both had version of Solaris, with Indiana and openSolaris. And I had no clue you could get compiz working so smoothly on them. I swear, it was FREAKING AWESOME! Well, Sun, I guess that's to be expected from you. All of your innovation and greatness. Not even Google, with its fancy-pants booth could match you in that. (End love song). Matt was also giving away tons of free stuff, like Java tattoos (which are just plain AWESOME), openSolaris DVDs, Sun studio DVDs, and other random stuff such as Sun bottles and Monitor mirror things... Well, that's the climax of this event. Those of you who were there, I'm sure you were expecting it. Well, if there's anything important I missed, leave a comment.

Academic Decathlon

2008-02-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't posted in the past few weeks. I blame it on the Academic Decathlon competition which just finished on Saturday. See, I kind of had to start studying for it so I could give our school some pride, and I didn't have time for petty things like reading RSS feeds and blogging. However, now that the Decathlon is over, I have time again to blog and keep you all posted on the latest happening in science and open source! However, I'll tell you what it was like at the Decathlon.

First competition happened the Saturday before last, so on January 26. It was where we were did what are called the three "subjective" tests. The speech, interview, and essay. Different schools have different schedules. Mine turned out with the speech first. In the speech, I gave a prepared speech and an impromptu speech of their topics. I had a pretty interesting speech about the incident at Columbia University involving Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. My prepared speech was about a distant memory (the movie Contact). Both speeches I cut the time REALLY close, so that's something I'll need to improve on in the coming year.

The next was the interview, where judges basically conduct an interview to see how interesting you are. They have a sheet outlining your interests, and ask you questions, such as "Why did you join Academic Decathlon?" and other various topics. I think I did pretty well on it, though I'll have to wait for the scores to find out.

Essay was basic essay writing. We got four prompts about the Civil War, and had to write an essay about them. The one I chose was "What personal qualities of Lincoln strengthened or weakened his policy as President" or something to that degree. That was... interesting, but I managed to write, in my opinion, a pretty strong essay, even though I listed Lincoln's only personal drawback as being dead.

One week later was the objective portion. This involves about five hours of taking scantron tests about the various topics (Math, History, Science, Music, Art, Economics, Literature) at UCLA. Those were actually not that bad. I've never seen test taking move so smoothly. However, an interesting thing that I saw was that during the break, there were actually people at UCLA who played Magic. Unfortunately, I didn't bring a deck, so I didn't join them. But I was still surprised to see that game still thriving at a University. That day reinforced my confidence in humanity a little while.

Lastly came the Superquiz, which are ten measly questions. They hardly mean anything to your score. However, they're broadcast on television and shown to the public. So, even though it means next to nothing, it's incredibly important for PR. Several schools study ONLY for the Superquiz and neglect the other material because it isn't as publicized. We aren't one of them. While the Superquiz seems easy doing an armchair analysis, there really IS a lot of pressure, and that affects your performance. Your entire team and everyone on TV is watching you. In addition that pressure, you only have 7 seconds to mark your answer. So, as I said, it's TOUGH. I only got half of the questions right, and I was surprised at what I got wrong.

Well, at the end of the Superquiz, we had 38 points out of 60. Now that doesn't sound all that good, but it suffices for our purposes (beating certain rival schools). And of course, we aren't hardcore like the really competitive schools (who get 56). They do TONS of studying, like studying after school until 8 PM and on weekends. Even I have some sliver of a life and other things to do than study for Academic Decathlon. But, all-in-all, we're satisfied with our score. Don't bother us. And expect more activity later on here... our responsibility has finished!

Conquering the Network

2008-01-21T16:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I managed to do the most significant accomplishment in this month (year). I got my network working correctly. Previously, my wireless network consisted of the modem connected through a LAN port on my router, which essentially caused it to behave like a hub:
_______
____ | |
Internet | |===============|LAN | (((|)))
=======|___| | | |
Modem |______|-----|
Router
This worked for internet, but not for the more advanced features of networking. For example, port forwarding is not possible, nor is firewalling. The reason for this is because the Modem is what is essentially doing all of the networking. If we have the router do its job, there will be a problem with something called "double NATting", which essentially screws up the internet. Now, for about a month, I was attempting to correct this, but for some reason, it didn't work. My ISP uses PPPoE for providing internet, and as much as I tried, I could not find out how to get the Router to connect to the ISP. Then I ran into this guide (from my Router manufacturer, duh). Of course, this isn't the first time I tried following it, but this is the first time I followed it entirely and successfully. It turns out that getting your router to connect to you ISP correctly is an elaborate ritual of making sure things turn on and off at the right times. I'll show you what I mean.

Now, most importantly, you have to get the modem into bridge mode, this is easy in the original network because typing the address of the gateway takes me to the modem. I go to the PPPoE location and select bridge mode. Now, one thing that I forgot to do was to hard reset the router (to factory defaults). I thought it was just a hard reset, but I needed to get back to factory defaults. That was important. Next thing, my router had an extra field in it that wasn't addressed in the guide called "MAC address". This was a fairly ambiguous field: Does it mean the MAC address of the router? It should already know that. Is it the MAC address of the modem? It doesn't work when I do that. Well, when I reset it to factory defaults, the question was answered. It was the MAC address of the router. After all that is set up, begins the dance of toggling on and off the modem and router. First you unplug the router, then turn off the modem, then turn ON the modem, then repower the router. Once I did that intricate dance, then the router would connect via PPPoE. Once I got that done, here's what my network looks like:

_______
____ | |
Internet | |====== | | (((|)))
=======|___| \========|WAN | |
Modem |______|-----|
Router

Now that the modem is connected to the WAN port, the way it SHOULD be, I can take advantage of all of the services the router provides such as firewalling and port forwarding. However, I still have to use the router to do that stuff. After my past with it, I want to mess with the router as little as possible. It turns out with one service on the router, I can take care of both of those.

Most routers have an option called the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). This is where the router sends all of the packets that don't get through the firewall. Usually there is nothing in there, so those packets get dropped. Now, in my network, I'm the only one who takes advantage of all of those services. The other family members, not so much. So I figured this, so I don't have to deal with the firewall, I move to a place unprotected by the firewall, i.e. the DMZ.

Now, going to the DMZ without any protection is .... well, kinda stupid. Because, you're leaving the haven of the router firewall into the malicious world of the unadulterated internet. So, you need your own protection. Luckily, most Linux distributions ship with a VERY good firewall called IPTables. Now, since we're in kinda paranoia node, we want to set iptables to drop by default. You do this by typing:

sudo iptables -P INPUT DROP

Next, we don't want to be TOTALLY isolated. If a session has been established, we want to let it through. You do this with

sudo iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

Now I've simulated the firewall. Now, if I want to forward ports, I put individual rules in it. For example, to let ssh in, you put

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport ssh -j ACCEPT

This lets the port for ssh right through. Instead of putting ssh, you can also put the port number too. It'll still work. The Ubuntu wiki has a more thorough discussion on iptables.

One last thing. These rules will disappear when you restart. The wiki article has more details on how to make the rules permanent, but here's my favorite way. Put these lines in your /etc/network/interface:

pre-up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.rules
post-down iptables-save > /etc/iptables.rules

This makes sure that ALL of your changes are saved. Since I plan to have iptables change a lot, this is how I like it.

ATI and AIGLX? Can it be?

2008-01-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

Like most ATI users, I needed to use XGL in order to get the pretty eye candy like compiz. And XGL has a reputation of being bloated and really clunky and memory-intensive. However, I was content with that because there was no other choice. ATI didn't give any sorts of drivers to allow AIGLX (Accelerated Indirect GLX) until recently. I chanced upon an announcement in Linux Pro Magazine that ATI released new drivers which enable "preliminary" AIGLX support. If you have an ATI Radeon X1000, X800, X700, X550/X300, or any of the 9800, 9700, 9600, and 9500 series, this driver will be able to help you. I have a Radeon 9550, so I fit in (barely). The article was talking about the release of the Catalyst 7.10 drivers, but ATI has already moved to 8.1, so that's what we'll be dealing with. And this guide will probably keep working as the version numbers go up and up.

Now, the first thing to do is to get the updated driver from AMD's web site. Select Linux and your video card then you should be directed to the driver. Download it, and if you'd like, make a separate folder for it and move it in there after it's done, because we're gonna get kinda messy:

mkdir ~/ati
mv ~/Desktop/ati-driver-installer-8-01-x86.x86_64.run ~/ati
cd ~/ati

Now we follow the steps on the Ubuntu Wiki to install the driver:

chmod +x ati-driver-installer-8-01-x86.x86_64.run
./ati-driver-installer-8-01-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/gutsy

This creates a series of .deb packages which we can now install using dpkg. So, we do that right now:

sudo dpkg -i fglrx-kernel-source_8.452.1-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i xorg-driver-fglrx_8.452.1-1_i386.deb

Now run

sudo aticonfig --initial

to rebuild your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. If it says it didn't do anything, that's fine.

Reboot, and then you should get something like this:

$fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon 9550 / X1050 Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7276 Release

This completes the ATI binary installation. Now we move on to AIGLX with compiz. This, I borrowed heavily from CombatWombat, but a lot of his things were kinda unclear to me. So, I hope to clear it up. First thing you do is follow this tutorial on the Ubuntu forums (It's around the bottom by michael37. It has big headline-y letters. You can't miss it), but DO NOT install xserver-xgl. In fact, you should probably uninstall it if you have it. You won't be needing it.

Now, you need to edit the file /usr/bin/compiz using a text editor. There, you need to add fglrx to the whitelist. You do that by finding the line (around line 54) that says WHITELIST= and has a group of keywords. Add fglrx to that group surrounded by whitespaces. So, it should read (or mine reads):

WHITELIST="nvidia intel ati radeon i810 fglrx"

The next thing is to remove your video card from the blacklist which should be right under the whitelist. If you don't know which line is your card, you can figure it out by typing

compiz --replace

in a terminal if you don't have XGL. It should fail and tell you which one is on the blacklist. When you figure that out, comment out the line by placing a "#" without quotes in front of it. Any time you upgrade compiz, you'll have to do this again. But it's not too bad.

So now we've got the compiz script running, now it's time to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. There are two ways of doing this, the way CombatWombat did it (I'm not too sure if it), and the way the Ubuntu Wiki did it. Since the Wiki is pretty self-explanatory, and I'd like to know if CombatWombat's way works, I'll show you how to make his edits. Underneath where it says "Section "Module""... EndSection put

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection

Where it says "Section "Device"", add to the end:

Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
Option "DRI" "true" #
Option "ColorTiling" "on"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" #
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
Option "KernelModuleParm" "agplock=0"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
Option "EnablePrivateBackZ" "no"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "true"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option "mtrr" "on"

The ones with hashes are the ones you REALLY need. The rest are other options I guess. And at the end of the file, where the Section is "Extensions", change the line to

Option "Composite" "Enable"

And at the very end, put this section:

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

And now just restart X and you should be able to enable compiz without XGL. This guide may not be exactly right, because I messed with A LOT of things while troubleshooting, and I tried to trim it down to what is REALLY needed. If you get problems, feel free to leave a comment. If your X dies, from a command line type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

from the command-line to rebuild the X server so that it works again, and tell me what went wrong, so I can make corrections. If X doesn't die but compiz doesn't work, run

compiz --replace

and post the output. Thank you!

Ron Paul

2008-01-12T11:30:00.001-08:00

Terras kinda sums up my views of Ron Paul quite well. However, I'll elaborate on some of the things that particularly tick me off.

For one thing, disabling the EPA IS NOT a good idea. Even though the EPA has been giving my state a bit of trouble, it has a vast responsibility and to be truthful, I don't trust private enterprises or the people to take that responsibility. The whole point of regulation is to prevent disease before it happens (ideally this would happen if we allowed the EPA to do its job instead of strangling it). In none of the times when public health was compromised did the people manage to quickly solve it without the loss of life. Take the EPA's List of Lists; It was painstakingly compiled from decades of science which showed those chemicals to be hazardous. And the thing about most of those chemicals is that their effects are not immediate. It's not like a factory that dumps poison in the water which causes everyone to get sick at the same time. People could be consuming some of those carcinogens for decades without feeling effects. Only when people start getting cancer or other diseases will they be aware that they are being contaminated. By now, it's far too late to file a lawsuit! The whole town has already been exposed for years to the carcinogen and will have to live with it for the rest of their lives. Had the EPA been monitoring the air and water, the chemical would have been found before it caused damage to people. Of course, this probably follows the inner selfishness of libertarianism, where as long as it's not you that's at risk, it's ok.

Now, Ron Paul also has the same attitude toward the FDA. Orac has this covered VERY well. However, there are MANY more examples of why we need the FDA to regulate and why mere lawsuits will NOT work. During the Bush administration, the FDA has taken a similar hit like the EPA to its budget and power, which led to less effectiveness. For example, take the whole thing with poisoned dog food. The FDA is currently under a huge shortage of inspectors (due to budget cuts and a transfer of regulation to private enterprise which is NOT working), so there are currently many food hazards coming into this country. I'm just using the dog food as an example. The only reason it was recalled eventually was because numerous pets eventually died after eating it. I don't know about you, but I would rather regulate my food instead of risking it killing me. And that's just the food portion of the FDA, to see what he'll do to medicine, I'd recommend reading Orac's post.

The next craziest thing Ron Paul has come up with is wanting to dismantle the Federal Reserve, which is one of the worst ideas in American history. This is one thing that I can definitively say has been tried and was a HORRIBLE idea. Back in the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson succeeded in destroying the Second Bank of the United States, which was essentially the Federal Bank at the time. Afterwards:

The destruction of the Bank loosed American enterprise from its only central restraint. Gorged with federal deposits and with no one to control their note issues, state banks went on a lending spree that built up a speculative bubble and ended, just as Jackson left office in 1837, in a sickening crash.

The destruction started almost two hundred years of extreme boom/bust cycles in the economy. It wouldn't be until Lincoln temporarily resurrected the bank to finance the civil war and Roosevelt finally established the Federal Reserve in 1913 when the American economy was finally stabilized. Now, in this period of even MORE globalization, I can imagine that the destruction of the Federal Reserve will have even GREATER consequences, and that again is one risk I DO NOT want to take.

The year in recap

2008-01-05T22:38:00.000-08:00

Though I have to say, I don't think God will be very much impressed.

The Awesome Clock of Awesomeness

2008-01-04T12:27:00.000-08:00

From those people who brought you ......... nine! Comes the clock which is made out of nines!

[Oooohhhh Aaaaahhhhh]

This would be an excellent present to give to a math teacher who you appreciate! Only $12.50! Unfortunately, the very fact that it costs money brings the probability of me buying it close to zero. But it's still a VERY cool item!

Telescope tip to Phil!

/home sweet /home

2007-12-26T13:48:00.000-08:00

Last night, I encountered a very horrific situation. I was working on getting Sabayon to actually WORK CORRECTLY, and if you don't know my hard drive layout, I share my /home directory between Ubuntu and Sabayon (this is because it's on a different hard drive). The problem I had with Sabayon was that the application list was gone. I had to run applications by going Alt+F2 (which opens up the "Run Application" dialog box) and typing in it's name. I didn't want to do that, so I set out to figure what was wrong. I started out with a reinstallation of the partition (/home wasn't touched). When I booted back, the applications were still gone, so I decided that the problem lay in the /home partition. Now, I decided to do something that could have gone better. I did a clean reinstall from another partition, and copied all of the contents from there to my /home. Now, many of the programs I had were preserved, but it also overwrote a couple of configuration files that Ubuntu kinda wanted. However, I got many of the applications back in the menu, which was good.

Let's fast forward to when I boot into Ubuntu. Everything initially goes normally, however, once I log in, Gnome looks like crud. I'm missing the top panel and title bars, and there's an error saying that Gnome couldn't find some file. The theme was reverted back to the minimal one, and nothing really worked. I was worried, however, I worked on servers a week ago, so I knew my way around the command line (sorta). So, I go into what's called a virtual terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 through Ctrl+Alt+F6) and logged in. These are basically ways for you to log in if your GUI goes kapoot. From there, I used irssi to get to IRC (boy am I getting dependent on that) and get some help! Luckily, there was someone (Kr0ntab on #ubuntu-california) who knew how to restore a /home directory. And this is what I'm going to lay out now.

1. Unlock the root user

sudo passwd

and pick a root password. Be sure you do this and not sudo su, and LOG IN as root in a virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F[1-6]).

2. Log out from your user. This means both from X, and any virtual terminals you might be in (type "exit" without quotes).

3. Move your home directory to some backup location:

mv /home/*user* /root/backup

where *user* is your username.

4. Now here comes the fun part, get rid of your home directory:

rm -rf /home/*user*

As always, be careful when you use rm -rf. MAKE SURE you didn't mistype anything.

5. Make sure your home directory is GONE. Do an "ls /home" (without quotes) and make sure that it's not there.

6. Copy a skeleton home directory to your home directory:

cp -r /etc/skel

/home And rename it:

mv /home/skel /home/*user*

7. Now log back in to X and your home directory should be reconfigured to its original state. If you can log in to something that looks like you just installed Ubuntu, you're good so far. Now re-lock the root account for security reasons:

sudo -l

And log out of root.

8. Now you're wondering how you're going to get the settings you worked so hard to tweak. Well, some, you're just going to have to do by hand, but most you can get back. Remember when we backed up the original home directory? Well, go back there and move back files that you know weren't a problem (you wouldn't want to restore that file that broke you system, would you? So be aware of what you're moving back).

After this, it's just a matter of copying and pasting (or dragging and dropping, depends how you like it). Most program configuration files (such as .gaim or .xchat) ought to be fine, and you should be able to replace them. However, try not to replace configuration files (like files that have to do with X), because you might replace the wrong file; and plus, those are settings you could tweak back easily. Don't take that chance.

Well, this is how I saved my home directory. I hope this guide will be of help to you if you ever need it. Hopefully, you won't. And for those of you who enjoy it when I screw something up on my computer, I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!!!

Happy Holiday!

2007-12-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not being a politically-correct corporation which doesn't want to offend anybody. I'm celebrating the Pastafarian holiday of Holiday! The timing of this announcement just HAPPENED to coincide with Christmas. But now, you know the real reason. So, be sure to eat all of the pasta you can this next few weeks, to celebrate his noodliness.

Redesign

2007-12-21T16:13:00.000-08:00

All right everyone, this blog is going to go through a period of spartan looks while I upgrade the blogger template. I started out formatting this blog using just HTML, but now technology has caught up and I'm upgrading to Layout mode, so I can do a lot more interesting stuff without having to know the extreme technical background. However, upgrading deletes all of your customizations, so I'll have to redo them. If I miss something, leave a comment and I'll get back to it. Thanks for your patience!

The Dangerous Book for Boys

2007-12-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

Today was the Christmas Shopping day. It was when the stores were getting desperate to sell their goods, and marked many for HUGE sales. However, today, we went to Toys R Us, because there were some small kids who we were looking to buy gifts for. That entire process went well, and we got (what we think) are the perfect gifts for them. However, a certain book at Toys R Us caught my eye, and I looked through it while we traversed the isles. It was called The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn and Hal Iggulden. Now, a title like that just begs a passerby to ask "What's so dangerous about it?" And I wasn't an exception.

I opened up the book expecting to find some popular claptrap of modern culture which would be ephemerally lost to the jaws of time after a few years (don't I sound intelligent). But instead, the page contained information about the Battle of the Alamo. I was intrigued, and decided to investigate this book further. Sure enough, the chapter was on major battles of history. I thought that this book seemed to be a beacon of intelligence in an otherwise indifferent store whose wares shifted with the populous's opinion. I looked further in the book, and found that it contained many different types of information, history only being one of them. It had several guides, such as how to fish or tie a knot or even play poker. There was information on meteorology, astronomy, and grammar. There were several topics which I had tried to find information on, that were all compiled in this small, easy-to-read book. They even covered some details of the opposite sex (I found that I need some sports. Being computer-oriented is apparently not as attractive. Well, I didn't say it was PERFECT). I found this book to be an extremely well-compiled guide to being a respectable intellectual!

Unfortunately, I did not buy it. As helpful as it would have been when I was young, I found that I did not have a need for it. And did not know of any others that did (plus, it was pretty expensive. I'd recommend using a coupon on it or getting it on sale). However, for those of you who haven't come up with the perfect gift, consider this. It's the ideal book to give to a budding intellectual. Maybe you need something for a girl: try The Daring Book for Girls. If it's anything like its companion (and the customer reviews say it is), it'll be a great gift.

Now, I shall wait for the intellectual properties of that book to wear off. That's how amazingly edifying it was.

RAID

2007-12-19T21:43:00.000-08:00

During the winter break, I decided to go back to doing work at CENS, and over the last two days, I've had a great deal of training with RAID systems, and I'll probably get some more over the break. For those of you who don't know, RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks". The basic purpose of RAIDs are to protect against disk failure. If you're running an array of disks, and one of the disks becomes corrupted, your data is still safe and your computer will keep running. However, you're urged to replace the hard drive, and once you do, everything will be backed up and well until another hard drive croaks.

There are several types of RAIDs. However, the type we did was a RAID1, which involves two hard drives, and one mirroring the other. That way, if one hard drive fails, the other will be an exact copy and can take over. The higher levels of RAIDs involve more complex means of restoring data such at parity and will make for an interesting discussion later on. But now, we're sticking to RAID.

The background of the project is a RAID1 on a Linux Server (A SUN server, I might add). The first part basically entailed getting used to the Linux RAID tool (mdadm) and finding out why one of the hard drives was removed from the RAID. It turned out, when you remove a hard drive, you have to manually re-add it after you put it back. And once you do that, it has to manually rebuild the mirror for an hour or so. So, removing hard drives to test out the RAID is something we quickly decided to do very rarely. The next time we did it was with the second step, getting GRUB to work on it.

The second thing turned out to be much easier than we expected. In order to get GRUB to boot off of a RAID, you just have to put a copy of GRUB on the Master Boot Sectors of BOTH hard drives. And they both have to reference (hd0), because if one is taken off, then the other will be called (hd0) because the first one isn't detected. So we didn't have to even differentiate that between the two GRUB menus. It was much easier than expected.

The third thing is a bit more private, and being done in progress. We're basically re-designing the hard drive to extreme modularity. There are entirely separate partitions of data some of which will be RAIDed, others which will not be. It's quite confusing, and I'll probably have more detail about that later on. But, I hope you enjoyed this update, and yes, I managed to put a picture in a post. Hooray for me!

2007 Environmental Scorecard

2007-12-14T16:45:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago, the California League of Conservation Voters, a powerful lobbyist group in California for the protection of the environment published the California Environmental Scorecard of 2007 (pdf file). This booklet has all of the information about the environmental measures that took place in the California government, and provides a rundown on ALL of the representatives in the California legislatures. Some features are the worst of 2007, which involves budget threats, indifference to the Central Valley Air Quality, and politics which involved the Fish and Game Commissioner being dismissed for sharing research on the impact of lead ammunition on condors (However, lead ammunition hunting has been banned in habitats of the California condor). For more optimism, there is the Best of 2007, which features cleanup of ports, more environmental friendliness among Republicans (but the subject is still HEAVILY partisan), even stronger support among Democrats for the environment, and improvement in organizing people to contact their representative (MAC campaign).

After the best and worst, come the numbers, which are essentially facts about the people of California and their representatives. To see the extreme partisanship in this issue, there were NO republicans who scored ABOVE 50% in the State Assembly or Senate. Meanwhile, there are only 2 Democrats who scored BELOW 50% in the Assembly and only 1 in the Senate. Next comes a list of the bills, which can be read by you. After that, comes the really interesting part. Individual scores for every senator and assemblyman, and the governor. I'm glad Schwarzenegger (I'm now able to spell that correctly the first time) had an improvement of 13%. Now, my senator (Mark Ridley-Thomas) and assemblyperson (Mike Feuer) both have perfect ratings, so I'm happy about that. If you live in California, take a look at this, and see how your senator/assemblyperson does. If they're good, that's great. If they're not, you have some action you can take. And if you don't live in California, well, you can see how the eighth largest economy in the world treats the environment in great detail. I hope you find it at interesting as I did. If you want to have this guide mailed to you, feel free to join the California League of Conservation Voters.

Sun at Ubuntu Live

2007-12-03T22:29:00.000-08:00

I recently stumbled upon this podcast on the Sun Developer Network Channel with interviews of key speakers at the Ubuntu Live event last year (technically this year, but you know what I mean). Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to listen to them, but I felt like putting them out there. How can a mixture of Sun and Ubuntu EVER be a bad thing?

Geeky Drug Videos

2007-11-30T22:57:00.000-08:00

Wired Science has collected a couple of videos found on YouTube about drugs (the medical ones, not the illegal ones).

The first one is a video about a psychopharmacologist. This follows the traditional path of the science song by taking a well-established song (from Gilbert and Sullivan), and changing the lyrics. It's fairly entertaining, despite the repetition in it.

The second one deviates more from the traditional science song. This makes it a bit more interesting. It's called Paxilback and is based off of a more recent song (Justin Timberlake's Sexyback). So, anyways. See Wired Science for more of the details.

Alliance for Science, Part 2!

2007-11-19T17:38:00.000-08:00

The Alliance for Science is having a 2nd essay contest about evolution. And no, I'm not going to be submitting this year, I find it to be better to have some new blood in the voice for evolution.

This year, there are going to be two topics: one is Evolution and Climate, the other Agriculture and Evolution. So, there's much more choice in this year than in the previous one. And plus, these topics are not very nailed down, you can vary quite widely in them. Just be sure not to write an essay on Linux and evolution, or something like that. I don't think that would float too well with the judges, as interesting an idea as that may be.

As I've heard, this year the Alliance is going to be more efficient and organized. Last year was a bit of a last-minute thing. The cash prizes for these year are the same, $300 for 1st, $200 for second, $150 for third, and $100 for fourth. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the subscriptions to SEED on the list of prizes. I hope they include that later on, it was one of the things I was most excited for. Well, with this post, I say, GOOD LUCK to the future entrants!

Scalzi visits the Creation Museum

2007-11-16T21:00:00.000-08:00

I just started going through my RSS feeds again, and found that I missed some really fun articles. One was that John Scalzi finally went through with his promise and visited the Creation Museum. Actually, he was bought for $5,118.36 (which was subsequently donated to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State).

The report is actually a two-parter. First is the visual part; a snarky and sarcastic (not to mention highly entertaining) tour through the Creation Museum. At first it looks like a daunting 101 photos, but they go really fast. Once I reached the end, I wished that there was more sarcastic wit to go around. If you have enough time, and /or want some more fun wit, read the comments too. They're often sources of great insight and humor.

The next is the written part. This is basically Scalzi's reflections on the Creation Museum and what it says about our society. The esay is just as, if not more entertaining than the visual tour, so I highly recommend reading that also. This report was highly anticipated, and its composition is more than appreciated.

Back to Ubuntu

2007-11-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

Ok everyone! I'd just like to inform you that I'm back on the computer and it's in a state of convalescence. Slowly but surely I'm getting my files and programs back and my computer is reaching as I say, it's former glory. However, due to this ordeal, fetching these programs and files is very time-consuming. So, I'll probably be inactive in blogging for another while. I'm so sorry, but that's the way I goes I guess. However, I am going to show you some of the things which I decided to improve from the previous installation.

More modular partitioning- Once my computer got fscked and my data died, I decided to just totally wipe it and start from the beginning. Now, I have two hard drives in my computer, only one of which I used. So, I decided to use both and make the design much smarter. So, I took my first hard drive, which had 120 GB, and made it my /home partition, which was what I intended to do before my computer got fscked. Then, I took my second hard drive which had 300 GB, and made a Ubuntu partition on it (I later realized that I DID make a backup and stored it on the second hard drive, but once I remembered, it was too late and it was overwritten. Too bad). Now, whenever I want to install a different OS, I can just add a partition to the second hard drive and have my /home files on it. So, I accomplished my goal anyhow.

Less mess- My previous installation was filled with programs which I compiled from source the manual way, before I used checkinstall. I think this caused some performance problems and did manage to screw with the OS a little. So, this time around, I'm going to be much more organized and not going to have files which are never used around. I've even noticed that I haven't even been hit with a kernel panic yet, so I'm hoping that will continue.

So, these problems have been fixed. However, the road to this installation was also a bit rough. I initially decided to install via Feisty, whose CD I had, and upgrade to Gutsy. That did not turn out very well. In addition to taking forever to upgrade, a lot of things were not functioning correctly. XGL was the worst. Certain sections of the screen would be garbled for a while and this got very annoying. Even worse, compiz would not run. After a while, I just gave up and decided to install Gutsy directly. However, I did not want to wait, so I decided to download it off of Torrents (which is about all I use it for). That download was SUPER-FAST, and I had the CD within a couple of hours. After that, everything went well. So, lesson for today, install EXACTLY what you want, try not to do unnecessary upgrades.

Fscked

2007-11-05T20:04:00.000-08:00

Ok, I have horrible yet somehow humorous news for all of you. I obliterated my Ubuntu system. Yeah, I know it's a really serious subject, but it's so laden with irony that even I'm cracking up. So, it began like this:

I decided to make a separate /home partition for myself, so that if anything were to go wrong (cough cough), my science music and general settings would be preserved. That way, I could even share the /home folder with other distros. So, I decided to get started on this, so I rebooted and popped in a Ubuntu Live CD. All was going well, until I decided to start GPartEd. I choose my repartitioning scheme and it started partitioning. However, it gave me an error and recommended that I check the filesystem in my Ubuntu partition. I thought that it wouldn't hurt, so I did so. I ran a nifty little tool called fsck (Filesystem Check, get it?). Well, it gave me a standard warning that I shouldn't run fsck on a filesystem which is mounted, because problems are just about guaranteed to result. But, I don't remember mounting the partition so I go ahead. After that, it gives me problem after problem with the filesystem, I didn't recall Ubuntu being so corrupt. Well, I just chalked it to my filesystem being old, however the prompts to fix things got so annoying, I decided to just put a roll of quarters on the key and leave it. Once it finished, I went back to GPartEd, and saw that recorded the partition being mounted at /mount/disk. That's when the though, "OH CRUD!!!!!!" Went through my mind. I looked through the filesystem, it was decimated. Hundreds of thousands of folders, all empty.

Luckily, I installed Sabayon Linux on a DIFFERENT partition which was safe, but I failed to transport my /home folder to. So, thank Sabayon, and its wifi capability that I am able to communicate with you right now. However, getting to Sabayon was not a piece of pie either. With the operating system scrambled, the MBR couldn't find the /boot folder. So, I had to bust out Super Grub Disk, and use it to have the MBR choose the Sabayon GRUB menu instead of the Ubuntu one. Well, and that's where I am now. Thanks to fsck, my Ubuntu partition is unreadable, and thanks to Sabayon, I'm still connected to the internet. However, it's not all bad, I think my system had one too many weird updates, I was thinking about reinstalling it anyways. So, I guess I'll now GET to it. The only thing I regret is not backing up my music. But that could probably be replaced over time. Well, if I don't post in a while, you'll know why. So, that's how I got "fscked!"

What's wrong with you people?

2007-11-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

I unfortunately did not have the time to post on this blog for quite a long while. I'm sorry, I was ~~slightly~~ ~~somewhat~~ extremely busy with stuff from school and such. At least, lets assume I was. However, you wouldn't be able to imagine the scare once I checked Google Analytics a couple of days ago. I was shocked to find out that during my period of inactivity, traffic SOARED. Well, not really soared that much, but was still significantly bigger. Here is the Google Analytics graphic:

As you can tell, the last post was on October 20. A couple of days after that, there was a huge spike in the number of visits which maintained pretty steadily afterward. Compare that with the beginning of October and you'll see why I was so surprised. Well, I'm going to try and keep up with the posts, but unfortunately, there's just way too much to do, I haven't even been keeping up on my RSS feeds very well, so I can't guarantee anything. But stick around if you can.

Compiling pidgin

2007-10-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

After upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy, I was shocked to see that the upgrade broke pidgin. The IM client which previously worked wonders crashed on startup with this message:

pidgin: symbol lookup error: pidgin: undefined symbol: purple_core_ensure_single_instance

I tried reinstalling via Synaptic. No avail. I read through this thread, and there was no known solution. So, the only apparently solution was to install Pidgin via source.

[UPDATE: There is now a solution to this without recompiling Pidgin. Taken from this thread. Go to /usr/local/lib and delete these files: libpurple.so, libpurple.so.0, libpurple.so.0.0.1, and libpurple.so.0.0.2. So, essentially:

cd /usr/local/lib
sudo rm libpurple.so libpurple.so.0 libpurple.so.0.0.1 libpurple.so.0.0.2

And the next time you run Pidgin, it should work. You might not have all of these files, but it will remove the ones that you do have, which is what is important.]

[NOTE: This guide was ~~plagiarized~~ adapted from here
The first thing you want to do is remove the installed version of pidgin. That can be done via:

sudo apt-get remove pidgin pidgin-data

Next thing, you download the source code.

After that, you unpack it and move into the folder (Firefox downloads things to my Desktop, so I'm using the code to do that):

cd ~/Desktop
tar -jxvf pidgin-2.2.1.tar.bz2
cd pidgin-2.2.1

Next you start the build cycle. Unlike the guide that was linked to, configuring without any options worked fine for me, so that's what I did:

./configure

Next, you use make (you don't HAVE to be root to do this, but you can):

make

Lastly, you can end with the traditional, sudo make install, but I choose not too. It's far too messy for me. I use the checkinstall tool, which compiles the source into a .deb which is then listed in Synaptic. However, just doing "sudo checkinstall" does not work. This is where I'm thankful for that guide. The successful command goes like this:

sudo checkinstall --exclude=/etc/gconf,/usr/bin,/usr/lib

Congratulations, pidgin should now be installed and able to be successfully run. However, I recommend doing the fix described at the beginning of this post. If you install from source via checkinstall, the Update Manager will keep bugging you to upgrade to the version of pidgin in the Ubuntu repos, which still have that problem. However, if you fix the Ubuntu version as described, it won't bother you. Well, I hope this guide was of help to someone, and if it wasn't, too bad. It was a help to me!

Countdown to Gutsy

2007-10-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

That's right, the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon release is coming in fast. It's set to come out on October 18, 2007. I'm not going to put a specific (2 days left) because that'll be obsolete in one day. But here's a nice little script that will keep up in real-time.

Now this is what we have that Iran doesn't

2007-10-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if you remember the fiasco about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visiting Columbia University to speak. I saw the actual speech, and I was extremely surprised at how he was attacked in the introduction. However, invited George Bush to speak at an Iranian University, and said he would treat him much better than he received. Ahmadinejad comes out looking like a hero and champion of free speech. However, I have yet to see something like this come out of Iran.

Now THAT'S free speech!

Most amazing song evar!

2007-10-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

The Beatles, eat your heart out!

(Many thanks to Greg)

Risk and Java (changing your compiler)

2007-10-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

I've recently been ~~playing~~ obsessing over a program which is essentially the game of Risk. For those of you who don't know (there have been a surprising number of people who didn't), Risk is essentially a board game where the objective is to dominate the world. You play against any number of players to try to capture territory and hopefully take the entire board. However, to me, it's HARD!!! I am utterly horrible at it and get beaten every time by the Easy AIs. However, I'm trying to get better.

Anyways, getting this baby to run was a long and arduous process (as have been most java programs on Ubuntu). However, there's always that one quick and simple solution that you've never known about which makes that horrible task easy as pie. And I believe I have found it. When running Risk, I noticed that for some reason it's broken in Java 1.4.2. However, for Java 5 and 6, it works perfectly. From the graphical perspective, it's easy to run a .jar file with a different compiler, just right click and select "Run with Sun Java 6". However, from the command line, I've always been plagued that the "java" command brings up the 1.4.2 compiler. I've searched everywhere in vain for a solution to this, because the typical process of linking the binary to the /usr/bin folder didn't exactly work, and something always went wrong. Well, I gave up for a while, until about, ohhhh..... twenty minutes ago. Then I decided to do a search on the Ubuntu forums, and sure enough, someone found a way to switch the compilers. And I'm going to show you how to do it now.

It's all done with a nifty tool called update-java-alternatives. Now, in order to use update-java-alternatives, you'll need to be root, so prepare your "sudo"s. Probably the first thing you want to do is check out what types of Java you have, you do that by typing

sudo update-java-alternatives -l

This will show you what different compilers you have. Here's an example from my computer:

java-1.5.0-sun 53 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
java-6-sun 63 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
java-gcj 1041 /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj

I'll show you how to change it to Java 6. As you can see, the name for Java 6 is "java-6-sun". So basically all you have to do is type

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

And voila! Your compiler and libraries will all change to Java 6. Now, if I ever get stuck again, be sure to point me to this post. And I hope this was useful to you all too.

A Trifecta!

2007-10-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't blogged for almost a week now. School is now taking up a large chunk of my time (it's true, things DO get harder). So, to make up for it, I'm gonna talk about three different articles I found particularly interesting. Enjoy!

Have you ever been annoyed with the Completely Automated Turing To Tell Humans and Computers Apart or CAPTCHAs (yes, I know it's a horrible acronym). If you don't know what a CAPTCHA is, it's basically the distorted text most web sites ask you in order to ensure that you're human. Well, this technology is being used by the folks at Carnegie Mellon to digitize old books. Here's the problem: old books are typically not in the best shape. Traditional text-recognition methods do not work on words of especially bad quality. So, the words that can't be deciphered are sent to participating web sites so that people can help decipher these books. Sounds pretty good, sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon have adopted this technique (known as reCAPTCHAs). And as an added bonus, these are words that are guaranteed to be unreadable because they haven't passed the test.
Now, if you're like me, you're probably wondering what the words are compared against, since the word is only defined by what the user says it is. Well, apparently you're given two CAPTCHAs, a known CAPTCHA and a reCAPTCHA. You fill in both, and if your CAPTCHA is correct, the web site will believe your reCAPTCHA. It then compares your answer to another person's answer, and if they agree, it accepts them. If they don't, it sends it to others and that's how books are digitized. So, what is the total benefit of these reCAPTCHAs?

Given that it takes about 10 seconds to decipher a reCAPTCHA and type in the answer, this represents the equivalent of almost three thousand man hours a day spent deciphering words that CMU's computers find illegible.

(Thanks to Wired Science)

Ok, next is a continuation on the JPL/NASA lawsuit (Apparently I didn't cover it. Read about its start at Bad Astronomy). Anyways, a federal judge denied their request to block the security checks imposed by the government. What were the judge's conclusions?

The argument that plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm by signing an authorization form is without merit,'' U.S. District Judge Otis Wright wrote in a 17-page order

and also

"I don't want to see these employees hurt ... but I want the security of this nation preserved,'' Wright said Monday. "I don't want any sleepers infiltrating NASA or JPL.''

Eh, I don't know how much of a threat someone in JPL could be. I mean, what are they going to do, hijack the mars rovers? And at the rate NASA is moving forward, it would be much smarter for someone to monitor China. They're making far more progress than we are.
From Space.com

And lastly, Greg Laden elaborates on the spirit of Linux. And there's nothing I can do but wholeheartedly agree. I went through a similar process about a year-and-a-half ago. I put Ubuntu on my hard drive along with Windows, and basically got hooked onto it. It used to much, that my Windows partition corrupted from disuse (which was only like, a couple of months). And as I think every day, thank goodness I'm out of that loop. And I'm glad I've been able to be blessed with Linux.

Ubuntu as "The Other Windows"

2007-10-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

I just received wind that Ubuntu was featured on a prominent news station called KTLA (It's a CW station). It was a segment by Kurt the Cyberguy. He does a really good job at explaining how Ubuntu is rising to be a competitor of Windows. He also addresses how most people associate money with quality, and how Ubuntu (being an open source program) breaks that particular generalization. (There are also parts of an interview with Mark Shuttleworth in there)

The analogy he uses that is actually pretty accurate likens Ubuntu to a giant gumbo. People who want can add their ingredients to the gumbo and make it better for everyone. However, it also has the choice that if there's something you DON'T like in the gumbo, you can remove it easily and be happy. Overall, I'm surprised that Ubuntu has gotten this popular, and I hope that it spreads even further.

NSS responds to Weinburg's criticism of Space Program

2007-09-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg delivered an amazingly cynical critique on the manned space program. He called the space station an "orbiting turkey". And notes that:

"Human beings don't serve any useful function in space," Weinberg told SPACE.com. "They radiate heat, they're very expensive to keep alive and unlike robotic missions, they have a natural desire to come back, so that anything involving human beings is enormously expensive."

In addition to addressing the practicalities of spaceflight, he takes on the misplaced priorities that has often accompanied NASA due to its goals of manned spaceflight:

Weinberg pointed to NASA's treatment of its Beyond Einstein program as an example of the agency's misplaced priorities. Beyond Einstein consists of five proposed space missions designed to build upon and expand Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

"Only one of them is slated to go ahead, and given NASA's record, if we suddenly run into extra expenses in the manned spaceflight program, that will be put on the back burner, just as has been done time and time again by NASA," Weinberg said.

Here is the response of the National Space Society, an organization dedicated to promoting the spread of humanity into space. To counter the manned spaceflight program being a waste of money, they list a number of technologies that were developed due to manned spaceflight, "...such as kidney dialysis machines, fetal heart monitors, programmable heart pacemakers, to name just a few that help Americans every day."

And they continue on to show that both theoretical physics and manned spaceflight have both done good to humanity, and it wouldn't be fair or wise to scrap one for the other. I'd recommend reading them both.

A Scary Future

2007-09-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

I personally find this (somewhat sarcastic) future of gaming very frightening. If you have about six minutes to kill, I'd recommend watching it. Here's my take on how the open source community will react. However, this is just as speculative as the original show.

Despite the very debatable aspect of having nearly the entire world hooked on Halo, there is something much more disturbing about that future. It actually starts in 2007, the domination of the company who produces Halo. That's right, Microsoft. Microsoft acquires Sony and Nintendo and incorporates them into their gaming division (and would maintain two monopolies) But it doesn't end there. In 2011, with the release of Halo 4, all other media will be busy creating CDs for Halo 4. Of course, there will be some open source insurgents who won't stand for that. Representatives of Canonical and Red Hat, angry at the seizure of their CD writing facilities, gather members of their representative communities and launch the largest security attack on Windows computers Microsoft has ever seen, and regain their facilities. However, since most people are busy playing Halo, the headline quickly slips into oblivion.

In 2016, Halo 6 would have been spread across several media, including movies, television, books, etc. With the number of members in the open source community dwindling, a few experienced programmers create a reverse engineered copy of Halo, and try to gain members there. They make little success. Due to the overhaul of education by Halo and Microsoft, the number of students who end up using Linux and other open source operating systems shrinks to 1% of its current size. With J Allard as president, Microsoft engages in legislation to persecute those who use free software in the United States. All open source activity stops in the United States and is now concentrated in Europe. Red Hat is relocated to France in order to escape suffocating regulation in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0.

In 2021, with the release of Halo 7, the open source community has now shrunken throughout the world. It is composed of only a few hundred members who live in hiding and continue to program despite the universality of the game. This community slowly diminishes due to an unacceptable amount of progress. By now, all of the major Linux companies have gone bankrupt, including Mandriva, Novell, and RedHat. Strangely, Sun Microsystems has managed to be a powerful force in this new economy with its new line of SPARC chips which are used in the new XBoxes. It still retains the openness which was initiated by its long-past CEO Jonathan Schwartz (you knew this was coming)

In 2026, the open source community is all but gone. They have been caught and killed in the crossfire of the Halo mob, and there is no one left to navigate the massive yet ultra-efficient linux kernel 4.128.36. All documentation had been lost in the blackout.

In the present day, with the rebuilding of civilization, a few rogue scholars depart from the construction of the Halo and analyze an old linux hard disk that survived the Halocaust. They try to piece together the ancient language, C, which once was....

How was that? I hope it was fairly entertaining at least.

I knew war was expensive, but DANG!

2007-09-26T16:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I know this story is kind of old, but it's still as shocking. PZ Myers did the calculations and found out that we spend $4 million in Iraq every 40 minutes or so. Why is this important? The Arecibo Observatory has the threat of being shut down because the National Science Foundation can't find an extra $4 million over three years to keep it in operation.

This is sad because the government is not only THINKING about this choice, but is choosing the side of war. The Arecibo Observatory has long been a symbol of advanced radio astronomy, and plays a vital part in mapping the Milky Way and detecting Near Earth Asteroids. To let this observatory die would be wrong in so many ways. To let this observatory die because of misshapen priorities on war and science is wrong is even more ways. I hope Arecibo makes it through this time and isn't forced to close.

I'm hating this war more and more as time goes on....

Open Source, meet the environment...

2007-09-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

Today, Sun just launched OpenEco.Org, which serves to be a community of businesses to track, manage, and compare their carbon footprints with each other; all with an open source philosophy. Why? Here's what Sun says:

The accounting tool is a big step forward in assessing GHG emissions. That's because GHG analysis is frequently conducted with proprietary tools and often requires significant internal resources or outside consultants. Provided all the relevant utility data is available, OpenEco.org members can assess their carbon emissions in a matter of minutes.

For one thing, it makes finding data and calculating your emissions MUCH cheaper. With the open source and all that. Plus, the more people that join the OpenEco.Org community, the more data companies will have, and they will be able to plan much more realistic goals. And when more realistic goals are implemented, they're more likely to be met.

And if you'd like, here's a link to a video Sun made about this very community: OpenEco.org

JONATHAN SPEAKS! (about Microsoft)

2007-09-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

You may have read my take on the Sun/Microsoft agreement. Now, Jonathan Schwartz explains the purpose and advantages of the agreement. And it appears I was correct:

Customers have more choice - and to be clear, we are committed to doing everything (everything) at Sun in the free software community (even without a statue). This agreement does nothing to change that.

The point of the agreement was to expand Sun's share in the server market by including Windows as an option. The free software community at Sun is not affected by this deal in any way! Oh, and by the way, he managed to answer my question (a bit):

And although we've built a billion dollar annual runrate in the x64 business, we still hear objections - the biggest? "Your competition says you're not serious about Windows." Now of course, that's just silly - SQL Server screams on products like our x4500.

The Intensions were right, but....

2007-09-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

There is a web site called Blackle which essentially attempts to be Google but with a black background. The basic premise is that white is a power-hungry color for monitors, and black uses less power. It seems reasonable, but Google blog took note of it and duly noted that this was not in fact the case. According to Bill Weihl, the "Green Energy Czar" of Google:

We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this.

[Links in original]

However, Weihl does give tips for saving energy, such as:

turn on the power management features. Virtually all computers today have the ability to switch into low-power modes automatically when they're idle; very few computers have this capability enabled! Here's how to do it on computers running Windows XP.
turn off your monitor and computer when you're not using them
turn down the brightness on your monitor
make sure your next computer meets the efficiency standards of Climate Savers Computing (an efficient computer uses up to 50% less energy than a conventional one)
to find the most efficient PCs available today, look for the words "EnergyStar 4.0 compliant."

Here's how to enable power management in Ubuntu. Go to System>Preferences>Power Management. There you can adjust when you want to set your system to sleep (which can be useful) and when you want to set your monitor to sleep (which is what we're looking for). After reading this, I set my monitor to sleep after 15 minutes (from 40 minutes). I can imagine what I would be doing that would require inactivity for more than 15 minutes, but even then, it'll just be a nuisance but I'd still save power. So, I hope this post has taught you something. And I'll see you the next opportunity I get to make a post.

GIMP wants to hear from YOU!

2007-09-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, so this is a really cool idea the GIMP folks have done (for those who don't know, the GIMP is an open-source photo-editing program, I'd say even comparable to Photoshop, but I don't do hardcore image manipulation). Anyways, they have a blog up where they are brainstorming the new user interface. They're essentially taking ideas and suggestions for the new reworking of the user interface. If you regularly use the GIMP, and have some suggestions, be sure to drop in a line. Here's their summary for what it's for:

This is a visual brainstorm, the channel for everybody to contribute to the GIMP UI redesign process. It is moderated by the GIMP UI redesign team, consisting of professional interaction and usability specialists. We do not post mock-ups here ourselves, we ‘listen’ to what you show us and broaden our horizons.

To keep things easygoing + fun around here, there are some rules:

Explain your idea in an image or two. Only these images will be published, so make sure any needed explanation is inside them. Images must be in jpg, gif, bmp or png format, maximum 8MB each.

Your images should show your idea in a clear way, but they don’t have to be glossy and polished. Plain vector drawings or even scanned pencil sketches should also work.

Send your image to us, put the word ‘GIMP’ in the title of your email (to avoid spam, emails without GIMP in the title or without an image attachment will not be opened).

We will not publish your name or email address, if you want to be identified with—or even contacted about—your contribution, place your name or email address discretely in your image.

All further text you place in your image can only be used to explain your own idea. Keep it short, point out what is innovative. If you feel you need a lot of text to explain, then maybe your idea is not working on an user interaction level.

Do not write in your image about other people, other people’s ideas or why GIMP sucks, because…

…polemic kills brainstorming, hence there are not going to be discussions or comments in this blog. If you want to vent, use the usual channels. If you have got a better idea, simply show it to us.

If you want to respond to a contribution, by all means take the image, modify it with your own ideas for improvement and send it back to the brainstorm. Visual dialogue: it is allowed and encouraged by the CC licence on this blog.

We are pretty liberal Europeans, but anything obnoxious will ensure that your image does not get published here. We will not modify your image in any way, so either it is fit to be blogged or it will be discarded.

Our team will label your contribution and sometimes we will write a few sentences of analysis, if we are not too busy working on GIMP.

Your contribution has to be compatible with the license of this blog. Speaking of…

(Hat tip t' Greg)

Why Linux is better!

2007-09-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

I found a site called "Why Linux is better". It seems to me to be fairly well written and comprehensible. It's not drenched in detail, but gives you the points BANG BANG BANG! I'd most definitely put it on a list of reading for people interested in Linux.

CSE's going too far

2007-09-15T23:14:00.000-07:00

Creation Science Evangelism (CSE) is Kent Hovind's "ministry" which is now kinda out of his hands while he's paying his debt to society. However, they're getting more active to clearing Hovind's image and keeping away criticism of his wacky science. Hovind has his videos on creationism and his brand of Christianity online, on YouTube and Google Video. He explicitly states that there are no copyrights to these videos and can be distributed freely, which they have been for many many years. However, there have been other videos floating around which show Hovind's videos but have refutations spliced in. All of the sudden, CSE has been going around YouTube and flagging the videos as copyright violations, and (apparently) by law, YouTube must remove them even without doing a review on the veracity of the copyright claims.

Now, why do I say they've gone too FAR? As if censoring the modified Hovind videos weren't bad enough. CSE actually had the gall to flag one of my favorite videos. Now, the thing that ticks me off about them removing this video is that it was mainly original content. What about a mainly original video with a few clips of uncopyrighted material makes it flaggable? I hope YouTube finally sorts this out.

UPDATE: Oh, I guess not. I was wrong. There WAS no uncopyrighted material in my favorite video. It was 100% original (link is not of good quality. See here for original quality). Well, this is getting much more interesting. This is a pretty strong piece of evidence that CSE is just bluffing and trying to get criticism out. Now I'm REALLY interested in how this turns out.

Sun and Microsoft Agreement

2007-09-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, you read that correctly. If you saw that and immediately expressed disbelief, you're just like me! However, it's true, but not anything that really affects us open source zealots directly. The agreement is essentially that Sun will become a Microsoft Server OEM. There are basically five different points which are addressed in this agreement, nothing really dealing with open source. But since I'm a Sun paparazzi, I'll go over it anyways.

1. Windows Server OEM agreement

Essentially, this means that you'll be able to choose Windows Server 2003 as an operating system when you order a Sun server (I don't know why you'd WANT to do that, but it's a choice). According to the audiocast, all of Sun's customers run Windows along with Solaris, so it makes sense to offer it too. Yeah, that's kinda hard to believe, but I'm sure Sun knows what it's talking about.

2. Sun x64 Systems and Storage

This basically means that Microsoft and Sun will work to get Windows Server 2003 to work on Sun hardware (I don't if any amount of work on Windows could improve it very much, but I'd like to see them try).

3. Solaris and Windows Virtualization

This is fairly straightforward. Microsoft will work to make sure that Solaris could be virtualized on Windows Server 2003, and Sun will make sure that Windows Server 2003 could be virtualized on Solaris. I personally think Microsoft will have to work harder on this, because virtualization is built-in to Solaris. I'd like to see a sort of competition in features between the openSolaris community and the Microsoft developers (I'm sure you can guess who I think will win).

4. Expanded IPTV partnership

This is kinda confusing. So far, I've been able to glean that Windows Server 2003 has a piece of software called Microsoft mediaroom IPTV, which basically is able to stream internet TV. I have NO idea why this is so important as to merit a separate point. But it seems like having a good piece of Microsoft software running on extremely good Sun hardware will make streaming internet TV much more efficient.

5. Expanded Investment in Interoperability

This basically means that Microsoft and Sun are going to build an Interoperability Center, which is basically a lab where Sun/Microsoft employees will try to improve Windows Server 2003 performance on Sun hardware (and this'll give Sun employees a reason to be on Microsoft grounds, hehehe).

So yeah, this agreement is not at all threatening to the open source community. However, I'm still wondering WHY? I understand why Sun is offering Windows Server 2003; it's because most people end up installing it on Sun hardware anyway. But I don't understand why people WANT Windows Server 2003. What does it have that Solaris doesn't? If anyone has an answer, please, leave a comment and tell me.

Spider Solitaire

2007-09-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

Ok, I've waited a long time to write this post. It's a reflection back to Arizona where I played large amounts of Spider Solitaire. Most of the time, I played it on easy, with only one suit. However, I decided to move up and tackle medium. I must say, it was quite a switch, and it took me a while to find out the secret of doing it. And I'll reveal that secret right now.

But first, here's something I call one of the fundamental problems of computer science (in reality it's probably not so grandiose, but to me it's extremely intriguing). Lets say you have two objects and you wanted to swap them. The only way to do it is by having a temporary space to move one object, then to move it back. Here's a graphical example of it (forgive its horribleness. I can't draw, even on a computer):
Here, we start out with our two objects, out of order. Now, what we have to do is move them. However, we can only do this with the temporary space: as shown by the next slides (if you could come up with a way to do it without the extra space, you'd probably be able to win an important prize of some sort).We moved X into the temporary storage slot. Now we swap Y.We moved Y, and now we move X back, and they're in order. As you can see.
See, now the objects have been swapped and are in order. However, if you just look before and after, the temp is empty. However, the seemingly unused temp area is integral for the ability to swap the two elements. However, it's not just swapping which needs this. Anyone who has tried switching the name of two files has encountered this, because two files cannot have the same name. So, in order to do it, you need a temporary name for one file while you rename the other file.

Now you're wondering how this connects with Spider Solitaire. Well, in Spider Solitaire you're going to have to eventually mix red cards and black cards, you can't keep them separate for very long. However, Lets say you have a six of diamonds on a seven of spades on an eight of diamonds (8D/7S/6D). Then all of the sudden, an eight of spades turns up (8S). You'd like to put your 7 on there, but you can't directly. However, if you have an empty column (a temp), this impossible task becomes very easy. You move the 6D to the temp, then the 7S onto the 8S, then move the 6D back onto the 7S. So, you'll end up having the more orderly 8S/7S/6D. And your temp will be empty to accept a new card. Now you can do it over and over until you stop having cards in this position. Now, if you have TWO temps, you can go deeper. For example, if that 8S was a 9D instead, you can move the 6D to one temp, the 7S to the other, the 8D to the 9D, and move them back. You're left with the two black columns again. Now, this strategy does NOT guarantee you will win (my victory rate was about 50%). However, gaining this concept is essential to being able to beat Spider Solitaire past the easy level. Heck, if you apply this to the easy level, it's pretty much guaranteed you'll win. So, I find it funny that I was able to gain a fundamental insight in computer science, and even the physical world by playing a simple card game (one by Microsoft too). And that's my lesson for tonight! Don't expect more original picture by me.

The Conan Walker Texas Ranger Lever

2007-09-12T22:39:00.000-07:00

To remain in the spirit of Chuck Norris week, here are several clips of Late Night with Conan O'Brien when he had the "Walker Texas Ranger" lever. If you have a lot of spare time, go ahead and watch them. I promise you won't be disappointed. Note to NBC: Keep up the lever!

Chuck Norris Week

2007-09-10T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've just been informed that this week is officially Chuck Norris week on the Ubuntu Forums. This is in honor of the Chuck Norris meme which has been very dear to the internet, especially Chuck Norris facts. Here's a taste of what people have done, just on day 2 of Chuck Norris week:
andExpect more goodness. I'm also getting into the celebration, but my photo editing skills are very sub-par. So, if you see me on IRC, note that my name will be changed during the week from "cactaur" to "chucktaur". Have a great Chuck Norris week.

Dawkins Disproven

2007-09-09T15:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's true. The most demolishing review of Dawkins's book came. Seemingly out of nowhere. It looks like the New Afascism movement is going to be stopped abruptly to a halt.

In addition, other reviews of the New Skeptic movement by the same authors have also seemingly posed intellectual problems for those who doubt witchcraft.

(Hat tip to PZ)

Week recap!

2007-09-08T19:39:00.000-07:00

Ok, first (half) week of school is done. I'm now stuck on this horrible weekend away from that heaven of learning. Ok, don't have that much to say, except about AP Calculus and AP Physics, which were exceptionally fun! Most the other classes were still about getting used to the setting and going over the class requirements and all of that boredom.

So, AP Calculus was pretty fun. It was a review of functions, namely the "mother functions" (it took me a while to get that too). They are y=x, y=x^2, y=x^3, y=1/x, y=|x|, y=sin x, and y = cos x. I think that's all of them. But yeah, that was what was so interesting.

AP Physics was more fun! I look forward heavily to this class in the year. We did some examples of Fermi problems, which are essentially problems where you have to estimate to get the correct answer, because finding the actual answer is impractical or impossible. For example, "How many notes does the 'typical' radio station play in a year?" You can't count or call up the station, your best guess is to estimate. And the best way to do this is with the factor-label method. This is basically, you start out with an assumption, lets say a station can get through 200 songs in a day. You start with that, then you keep converting that until you get to notes per year. It goes like this:

200 ~~songs~~/~~day~~ * 700 notes/~~song~~ * 365 ~~days~~/year

You end up with 51,100,000 which is about in the ballpark of what we did in class. Of course, other students used different values, some more reality-based than others. But they were all in the ten millions range, pretty close for estimates like that. We had a lot of fun with those. So that's some of the stuff we did in that class. And, uhhh, can't think of anything else to write about.

School started

2007-09-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

Ok, school started yesterday for me. So, until I get readjusted to the schedule and rediscover my free time, I probably won't be blogging except on weekends or whenever I have time. Sorry. For those of you who are curious, my classes are:

AP US History
AP English Lang
Academic Decathlon
AP Calculus AB
AP Physics C
Advanced Orchestra
Spanish 2

Shutup about Spanish! I procrastinated, so what? Any of you young'uns reading this blog, don't put off a foreign language.

Party Delayed

2007-09-04T14:28:00.000-07:00

Due to a personal schedule change, I will not be able to make the party at 6:00. I'll probably drop in at around 7:30. However, you can still go on time and get chummy with the other LoCo IRC members. Heck, plan a surprise party or something. Sorry.

Firefox blocked

2007-09-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

Greg Laden has a post up about a certain web site which blocked all visits from Firefox browsers due to an extension known as Ad Block which is able to filter out the ads on web sites. However, it spews out this little gem:

Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..

First of all, Firefox users being a small minority is just not true in just about any way you look at it. Greg posts up his stats on his site, and Firefox users are the majority. Of course, as you can guess, my stats are EVEN MORE skewed:

1.	Firefox	67.66%
2.	Internet Explorer	23.35%
3.	Opera	2.99%
4.	Mozilla	2.40%
5.	Konqueror	2.10%
6.	Safari	1.50%

Except for Internet Explorer, all of the top five are open source browsers. This is most certainly not a minority for me. And if I had ads, I most certainly wouldn't want these users to be blocked at all. So, this is not the solution. And this isn't an entirely novel problem. The web site quotes this excerpt from the blog Internet Technology and the Law:

Like free television broadcast content supported financially by advertising, much of the content on the Internet today is distributed free to end-users for an indirect exchange of advertisement revenue. When a user loads an ad-driven copyrighted website, he produces a copy of the work due to the inherent architecture of the Internet. If this user is using Adblock to screen out annoying advertisements, he is creating an unauthorized derivative work analogous to skipping television commercials. By the letter of copyright law, this practice would most likely be seen as an infringing use.

They decide to use TV, I'll counter using TV. Using Adblock is a personal preference. It's analogous to recording a program on TV, then fast forwarding through the commercials. According to this post, people who record should be sued for making unauthorized copies and not watching the commercials. Of course, that's silly. It's the same with Ad-block. The ad-free page is designed for each user of Adblock and that copy is used for personal use only, it isn't going to be archived then distributed as ad-free content. If other people wish to see the content, they will still go to the original ad-full source. Well, that's my $0.02. Why can't the ad companies be more like the spam companies? Instead of complaining, just make it more difficult to detect.

"Welcome back" party

2007-09-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm sure you were wondering what the previous page about IRC Parties were. Well, it was supposed to be a template for instructions for reaching #ubuntu-california. We decided to have our first party as a welcome back party for me. I'm really anxious about the turnout. Well, for those who don't know. The party is Tuesday, at 6 PM PST, on #ubuntu-california on irc.freenode.net. You don't have to be part of the LoCo team. You can introduce yourself even if you don't live in California. You'll be acquainted with a group of people who KNOW about Ubuntu, and that's pretty helpful. So, I look forward to seeing a bunch of new people there. Consider this an engraved invitation!

IRC Party!

2007-09-02T17:39:00.000-07:00

On the agenda of the second meeting of the Ubuntu California LoCo team a resolution was passed to unequivocally allow IRC parties on the channel (ok, I'll quit sounding important). Anyways, there can be parties on IRC in #ubuntu-california. This page is supposed to function as a way for people to find their way to the party. There is no map, just directions.

If you have an IRC client and know how to use it:

That's great. The party is in #ubuntu-california on irc.freenode.net. You should be able to find your way.

If you want an IRC client:

There are several IRC clients. The major ones are XChat for linux (not to be confused with xchat-gnome. Don't get that.) and mIRC for Windows. If you have pidgin, that can also be co-opted to do IRC, but keep in mind that it's not entirely meant for that. To learn how to use it, consult your client's (whichever one you choose) documentation. Then go to #ubuntu-california on irc.freenode.net. If you don't feel like doing it, just type in the text box:

/connect irc.freenode.net
/join #ubuntu-california

Those are two separate lines. Those commands will get you there no matter what client you use.

If you don't want to install an IRC client, but still want to attend:

You can use a web-based client, this Java applet one is one that I recommend, and is one that I survived on in Arizona. It's best for just dropping in temporarily. If you wish to remain in IRC, it's highly recommended that you use a client.

If you want to do it the 1337 |-|aXX0r way:

If absolutely desired, I may allow you to ssh into my machine and use irssi (a text-based client) to join. If you would like to do this, contact me. I'm not putting my machine stats on the internet. And it'll help if I actually KNOW you. This method is highly discouraged.

Bullet Proof X

2007-09-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

There's going to be a new feature in Ubuntu Gutsy called Bullet Proof X. It's a really cool thing. The basic idea is that if the X server breaks, you have another independent and less intensive GUI to fall back on and fix your X server. A demonstration is here.

What usually happens if your X server breaks is you get a message (not a BSOD because your computer is still operating) which basically says your Xserver is broken:
After that, it would drop you at a command-line. You're expected to type "dpkg --reconfigure xserver-xorg" to reconfigure it. However, a new person would not be expected to know this. Generally you only know what to do AFTER it happens to you and you fix it. This is a fairly common solution to a fairly common problem. However, to make Ubuntu more intuitive, and not have people asking for help every time the X server breaks, this is where Bullet Proof X comes in. Instead of dropping the user on a command line, it gives the user an explanation of what happened, and the option to reconfigure the X server graphically. I think this is a really good step of progress, and has a lot of potential for other methods of handling X errors. We'll see what happens once Gutsy comes out.

(Hat tip to Greg)

I'm back

2007-08-31T15:06:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Arizona and and home in good ol' Los Angeles. In case you were wondering, I had 4 letters, 1 magazine, 15 software updates, and 221 unread RSS feeds. Now time to get back to reading!