Assorted Math & Technology News

When I started studying at the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics, Comptuer Science was a (very large) department. About halfway through my studies, it became the School of Computer Science. I read a couple days ago that David Cheriton, an alumnus and professor at Stanford donated $25 million to the School so the University renamed it to become the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. (How does a university professor become a multimillioniare you ask? They finance Google in 1998 with $200 thousand in seed money, which is, of course, the definition of ROI).

I heard from my Mom that the Ontario Government is planning on dropping Calculus from it's high school curriculum. That's not very wise.

Lastly, The New Yorker has an interesting article, Blackberry Picking, about patents. In particular, it addressed the RIM v. NTP proceedings. It's concise and very well written. It's worth reading.

Lost

I finished watching disc one of Lost (which contained the pilot and the next two episodes, Tabula Rasa and Walkabout). I was impressed with all three shows. They have good pace, lots of intrigue and suspense. There are a lot of characters, but they devote a lot of time on building up their stories (and do a good job at it), which adds more layers to the show. I'm looking forward to getting the rest of the discs and watching them. (With seven discs, it might take me a while to watch all of season one. however).

Narnia

I saw The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe last night with Nabeel and a couple of his friends. I was disappointed. The characters were shallow. The story was shallow and predictable. The whole movie was style over substance and it's style wasn't even that original. (Granted, the animated animals were impressive).

Seattle's public transit is also disappointing. I had to wait 30 minutes for a bus home and it was the last bus ever going that way. (I was going from downtown proper to the edge of downtown were I live at 12.40 am. So I think it reasonable to expect some bus service). Sometimes I think Seattle has got to have one of the lamest nightlifes around for a major city.

More Movies

I liked Collateral. Jamie Foxx is a LA taxi driver who has the misfortune of picking up an assassin, Tom Cruise, for a fare. It had a good story, good pace, and interesting characters. Four stars.

In The Recruit, Colin Farrell is recruited into the CIA by Al Pacino. The story is a little weak and Hollywoodified, but the characters are okay and the thriller has enough action and twists-and-turns in the plot to keep you entertained. So I'll be generous and say four stars too.

Monster's Ball is the kind of movie that makes the Oscars confusing. Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Barry put on good performances and I like the implemention (e.g. cinematography), but the story is just plain boring. Hence, only one star.

Disc one from season one of Lost is suppose to arrive from Netflix today. I've never watched a TV show on DVD before(*) and a lot of things have been said about Lost. Hopefully it is as good as they say.

(*) Slight lie: I watched three Seinfeld episodes last year.

Climate Change

Kyoto accord won't hurt economies: Clinton [CTV]:
...

...the U.S. isn't one of the 157 countries that have signed onto the Kyoto accord...

But Clinton encouraged the delegates to press on.

"There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities. We are uncertain about how deep and time of arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear that they will not be good," said Clinton.

He put down the main U.S. fear about Kyoto -- that it would hurt the economy by chaining it to greenhouse gas reductions that were not achievable.

That claim, he said, "was flat wrong."

"And we know with every passing year we get more and more objective data (that) if we had a serious disciplined effort to apply on a large-scale, existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies -- we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economy," said Clinton to applause from the delegates.

...

Inuit sue US over climate policy [BBC]:
...

Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at about twice the global average.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a vast scientific study which took four years to compile, found that the region will warm by four to seven degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with summer sea ice disappearing within 60 years.

...

"The United States is the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter; it has turned its back on the Kyoto Protocol and has not put in place measures to limit its emissions," said CIEL's senior attorney Donald Goldberg.

...

The petition asks the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate the harm caused to Inuit by global warming, and to declare the US "...in violation of rights affirmed in the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and other instruments of international law."

...

Gripe

I really hate charities that phone me (unsolicited) and then start off talking really fast with "Thank you for your past support...". I just moved here. I've never even heard of your charity, yet alone supported you in the past. If you did even a half-assed research job to get your intro accurate (and talked a little slower), I might care. It would be nice if the Do Not Call Registry applied to all these groups who pester me.

Vancouver

I went to Vancouver this weekend with Nabeel. I needed to get some paperwork done at the (US) border and it was a good opportunity to visit Ju-Lian.

The drive there and back was interesting. There is a "stagnant air" severe weather advisory in effect for the area. Consequently, there were many large patches of fog along the way and in (Seattle and) Vancouver. One minute you might have blue skies and, but a few minute's drive lands you in dense fog.

Ju-Lian is doing well. He's working at EA and has bought studio condo. (You know you are getting old when your friends own where they live!). We weren't in Vancouver long, but it was a nice diversion. We stopped by Simon Frasier University briefly, had dinner in downtown Vancouver, and went to see a comedy show on Granville Island.

And now a few random thoughts: (1) The blinking traffic lights in Vancouver are weird and freaky. (2) We found a Tim Horton's and bought some Tim Bits. (3) Su Doku is cool.

To Do List

I can't believe that 2005 is almost over. With work being so crazy busy, I doubt I'll be able to do anything big outside of work before Christmas. So, here are some things that I want to do in 2006:

• Learn how to ski: I use to live where there was lots of snow, but no mountains. Now I live where there is no snow, but lots of mountains. So I should take the opportunity to go skiing at least once. I've only been downhill skiing once and that was when I was in grade six and on a ski hill. (Emphasis on hill). Last year there was little snow in the mountains, but this year is suppose to be a good winter. (Some of the ski resorts are open already).


• Visit Europe: I haven't really gone on vacation this year. My masterplan is to visit Europe again next year. Probably Copenhagen, London, and a couple other cities.


• Learn how to scuba dive: One of co-workers goes scuba diving and gives lessons once in a while. I should join one of his classes.


• Go to another chess tournament: It's been a while since I've played in a chess tournament. (Although I'm playing a game every week or two at work and doing well).


• Visit Crater Lake: I read that Crater Lake has the deepest blue water in the World. It's in eastern Oregon and I'd like to going camping and hiking there some weekend during the summer.

Not Honest and Trustworthy

Does President Bush lie to the public or do his senior officials lie to the public behind his back?

Bush says We do not torture [1], but In an important clarification of
President George W. Bush's earlier statement, [US national security adviser
Stephen Hadley] refused to unequivocally rule out the use of torture [2] and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was browbeaten by the press because he was unable to explain why the White House is asking for an exemption to torture from the Senate if the US does not torture people. [3] He couldn't even answer whether or not the White House asked exemption. (Even though it is widely known. [4])

I think it's the former. Bush should just come clean and admit that they torture people and also imprison innocent people [5]. After all, the US is reversing 790 years of human rights (habeas corpus) [6] , so it's not like their prisoners can do anything. ;-) And, I'm sure, that coming clean would help lift Bush's record-low poll ratings, where a majority of Americans rate him as not honest and trustworthy [7].

Rattlesnake Ledge

Photos obtained after hiking up to Rattlesnake Ledge.

Woodland Park Zoo

It's been a really busy month - my project at work launched, my sister and brother-in-law came to visit me for our birthdays, (my sister's birthday is the day after mine), and my friend Martin was at a conference in Portland and came up to see Seattle visit me for the weekend.

So aside from all the crazy hours, I've been to the aquarium, the Space Needle, hiking, the Experience Music Project, and the Woodland Park Zoo. I'm still organizing all the photos that I've taken, but for a start, here are some photos from the zoo.

Roulette and Weather

Last week there was a three page article in the Seattle Times about global warming (basically stating that it was an undisputable fact). In yesterday's paper the letter's to the editor had eleven letters about the article - five were critical, four were supportive, and two were written by smart asses who had nothing of note to say.

Sometimes reading letters to the editor are funny, because people are so dumb. Take this except for example: How can anyone predict the climate over the next 100 years when today's experts are so often wrong about tomorrow's weather?

Um, maybe 'cause large scale tends are easy to predict, but the specifics are not. I have no clue what day in February it will snow in Ottawa, but I'm pretty sure that they will be at least a foot of snow on the ground there by the end of February.

Or better yet, to see how dumb their argument is, let's turn it into a gambling analogy - A casino cannot predict where a roulette wheel will land next, so how can the casino make money over the next 100 beats I place? Surely I can't loose any money if I bet on roulette!

World Chess Championship

I was going to add the crosstable as a comment on my previous post, but apparently I can't use <pre> tags in comments.

WCh-FIDE San Luis ARG (ARG), 28 ix-16 x 2005             cat. XX (2739)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
                                     1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Topalov, Veselin       g BUL 2788 ** == 1= 1= 1= 1= 1= 1=  10.0  2889
2 Anand, Viswanathan     g IND 2788 == ** == 0= =1 01 1= 11   8.5  2811
3 Svidler, Peter         g RUS 2738 0= == ** 11 1= == == 1=   8.5  2818
4 Morozevich, Alexander  g RUS 2707 0= 1= 00 ** =1 =1 == ==   7.0  2743
5 Leko, Peter            g HUN 2763 0= =0 0= =0 ** =1 1= 1=   6.5  2706
6 Kasimdzhanov, Rustam   g UZB 2670 0= 10 == =0 =0 ** == 01   5.5  2668
7 Adams, Michael         g ENG 2719 0= 0= == == 0= == ** ==   5.5  2661
8 Polgar, Judit          g HUN 2735 0= 00 0= == 0= 10 == **   4.5  2606
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: TWIC

World Chess Championship

The World Chess Championship is being held in Argentina. It's the first "legitimate" championship in about a decade. FIDE - the world chess organization - has feuded with the top players, such as Garry Kasparov, and mucked around with the championship's format, so recent World Championships haven't included the top players. However, FIDE has finally put together a tournament with most of the best chess players in the World.

The tournament is a double round robin with eight of World's best 16 players. I don't really know the details of how they picked who would get to play. (Kramnik, Ivanchuk, and Shirov are the only notable absentees). Kasparov retired earlier this year, so the championship is up for grabs.

Anand, ranked second in the World, behind Kasparov, was the favourite to win, but halfway through Veselin Topalov (ranked third) is 6-0-1 and has a large lead. I'll have to look over some of the games later this month.

TWIC has daily coverage.

Rainy Season

It rained today. It rained yesterday. The forecast for the rest of the week is rain. I think Seattle's rainy season has begin. :-(

The Truman Show

Last night I watched The Truman Show (while doing some baking and cleaning). I was quite disappointed. I like movies that have solid characters that you can relate to (in some dimension) as well as compelling story. The Truman Story lacked both.

I've always disliked Jim Carrey. His acting is exaggerated and his characters are over-the-top simpletons, which utilize base humour. I was under the impression that he had received good reviews for his role in The Truman Show and that he portrayed a more serious (i.e. regular, or, perhaps even, dramatic) character. [For example, ...the film really relies on Jim Carrey, and it is his unexpectedly mature performance that elevates it to greatness. [Dan Jardine, Apollo Guide] and If you expect and want to see the hyper-wacky Carrey...you'll hate it... [Judith Egerton, Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)] (both via Rotten Tomatoes). However, his acting was still exaggerated and Truman was a shallow character, which could be describe at best as average, and certainly not great. And I think his going crazy and running off in a fake nuclear disaster and being subdued by men in isolation suits ranks as wacky. Almost all of the other characters were equally disinteresting. In fairness, I suppose that means that the actress playing his wife did an decent job, as she was playing the part of (faux) actress, but that lack of genuineness didn't help to make the movie captivating. The only character of any interesting was the show's director, played by Ed Harris, but his role was relatively minor and near the end of the film.

The story was subpar also and too confusing. It had a few good moments - in theory, the concept was good and, for example, I liked how a mechanical part falls to the street in front of Truman at the start of the movie and then on the way to work he hears about a plane shedding parts on the radio. Later, it is revealed the he really lives inside a giant set. (Implying that the mechanical part was really a light for TV set and weaving different parts of the movie together). But, what of Truman's (supposedly dead) father showing up, disappearing, and then reappearing in a grand introduction that never got past the build-up of seeing him in silhouette. After all that effort to create the portion of the plot about the return of hisfather, the only time the father was on camera was 30 minutes later when he has a one sentence line (and Truman wasn't even in the scene)! If Truman's life is on live TV 24-7, you'd think that his father, who was lost at sea and presumably dead for 20 years, would warrant some interaction with Truman!

The movie also didn't even try to be believable. At the end, Truman is onboard a boat when a giant storm (created by the TV studio) hits and washes him overboard. He utterly soaked and floating in the ocean. The (generated) storm ends, calm waters reappear and Truman climbs back on the boat (and then the edge of the TV studio). By all appearances, only a couple minutes have elapsed. So can someone please explain to me why Truman, clad in a sweater, shirt, pants, etc. is bone dry, without a drop of water on him?

Snoqualmie Falls

Last Sunday I went with Suor, Nabeel, and Tom to Snoqualmie Falls, ostensibly to go hiking, but the trail was more like a park trail than a hiking trail and it was only half a mile down to Snoqualmie River from the cliff overlooking the river. At the end there is a boardwalk leading to a look-out point (and lots of fencing along the boardwalk to keep people away from the power generation facilities). At the end of the boardwalk we hopped the railing and scaled down the trees and rocks to get closer to the waterfall, which was kind of cool. Here are eleven photos.

SuSE

On Saturday, I installed SusSE 9.3 (Linux), replacing Gentoo (which I installed in February). It look the entire evening, so, at this point, I can only really comment on the installation. Once I have a chance to play around with it a bit, I'll provide some more observations.

The installation is graphical and fairly intuitive, a nice change from Gentoo. However, tweaking things seemed harder than with Red Hat/Fedora and, unlike, most of the times I've installed Red Hat or Fedora, I had lots of annoying problems.

The installation is five CDs, so you have a zillion packages (programs) to choose to install (or not). Being a geek, I went through most of the lists looking for things that I would use. (The "base" installation is for a "regular" user's desktop (does anyone use Linux for that?), so things like gcc, etc. were not automatically selected). Along the way, I noticed various pacakges for xemacs. That got me thinking that I hadn't seem vim listed anywhere. So I went through every single category (KDE, Gnome, Apache, Development Tools, Games, etc.) looking for either vi, vim, or gvim to no avail. After the installation was done, I checked and there is vi and vim. (I have no no idea how they were described in the package list if they weren't under listed under the letter V). But, gvim was not installed. Five CDs and SuSE couldn't managed to included gvim. That seems like a major oversight. (And if it was on one of those CDs, then there packaged descriptions and categories are really bad as it was under neither 'G' nor 'V').

Probably the worse thing about the install was that it hung half way through one of the CDs. Clicking "Help" would toggle the contents of one the text panels and Alt+F5 would trigger a screensaver, but nothing else would trigger any response from the system. (And after waiting nearly an hour - I was cooking/eating dinner at the time - I don't think it was just slow). As a back-handed complement, I guess I can say that I was impressed that after rebooting, the installation was smart enough to resume at the start of that CD rather than kicking me back to square one (or, worse, trashing the system).

Compared to Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE was also less skilled at automatically configuring my hardware. One of the two network cards required me to click through a few dialogs (and select the defaults it provided) to configured it. (So why did it saw it couldn't configured it, if all the defaults it gave were right?!). Futhermore, I am very skeptical that it configured my sound card properly. It picked the wrong driver and rejected the right drivers. Moreover, the installation program didn't have an option to let you try out the configuration before accepting it. (Every version of Red Hat/Fedora that I've used got the sound card right and only Red Hat 7 had trouble with the network cards).

One of nice features of the installation program was it's ability to connect the Internet and magically figure out what packaged had updates and then install them. (It would have been better to do this before reading all the CDs, but that is probably asking too much). Red Hat seemed to do updates okay (but not at part of the installation), and Fedora somehow managed to regress several steps backwards with its ability to update packages. (Fedora was at best Beta-quality, and perhaps Alpha-quality in some areas, so it horrible-ness at updating packages prevented you from fixing these various bugs and annoyed you even more. Hence, I gave up on Fedora).

I almost forgot to gripe about CD #3. At the start there was some dialog about checking the media (i.e. CDs), but after I clicked on Accept, it seemed to keep going and didn't verify any of the CDs before commencing with the installation. (So either the interface was really poor, the installation has a bug, or I'm really dumb). Sure enough, Murphy's Law struck and the third CD was bad. (Windows thought it was okay, but the SuSE installation rejected it multiple times). So I had to re-burn a copy of the CD. (Between the hung installation and the bad CD, at least an hour was wasted).

Movies

Well, here's my first question. Do you think it's kind of dangerous handing out guns at a bank? Bowling for Columbine is a great movie. If you haven't heard about it you must be living under a stone. I think it was the first documentary that I saw. (Since then I've only seen about a half-dozen documentaries. However, about 15% of my Netflix queue are documentaries). It was on CBC tonight and I watched it again. It was just as thought-provoking and profoundly sad the second time.

Yesterday, I finally got around to watching Braveheart and Mel Gibson as the Scottish renegade William Wallace. I was disappointed. As a movie, it is well-implemented (in terms of cinematography, acting, sets/props, etc.). But, it was insanely long. I was watching it on CBC also, so, including commericals, it was over three and half hours long! That's way longer than my attention span! I also found the story to be too decadent. The story dragged on and on, taking obvious liberties with history, and the characters became over-the-top. If much of the last hour of the movie had been left on the ending room floor, a better story (and movie) would have resulted.

The last two movies I rented from Netflix were both good. Last week I saw Chocolat. Perhaps it can best be described as a "warm and fuzzy" movie. (i.e. What you would call an "exploration of the human condition" in English class). Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche) is an outsider who moves with her daughter to a French village to open a chocolaterie. She then takes it upon herself to try to help the villagers enjoy life. The story and characters make it worth watching, although there are a few minor oddities with both.

The week before, I watched The Untouchables. Kevin Costner is Elliot Ness, fighting prohibition and Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in Chicago with a small squad of cops (including Sean Connery, who earned an Oscar for his role). I really enjoyed it - the story had good pace and a healthy dose of action. The characters were decent too.

Tipping Point

The rocket scientists at NASA say Tropical Deforestation Affects Rainfall in the U.S. and Around the Globe:

...

Deforestation in the Amazon region of South America (Amazonia) influences rainfall from Mexico to Texas and in the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly, deforesting lands in Central Africa affects precipitation in the upper and lower U.S Midwest, while deforestation in Southeast Asia was found to alter rainfall in China and the Balkan Peninsula. It is important to note that such changes primarily occur in certain seasons and that the combination of deforestation in these areas enhances rain in one region while reducing it in another.

...

And even more scary, Global warming 'past the point of no return':

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

...

In September 2002 the sea ice coverage of the Arctic reached its lowest level in recorded history. Such lows have normally been followed the next year by a rebound to more normal levels, but this did not occur in the summers of either 2003 or 2004. This summer has been even worse. The surface area covered by sea ice was at a record monthly minimum for each of the summer months - June, July and now August.

...

Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.

...

Turn Up The Sun

Oasis is one of my favourite bands. Last night I went to their "gig" in Everett.

Kasabian and Jet opened. Kasabian was okay, but not really exciting. I had been expecting a little better. I wasn't really sure if I would like Jet or not, but they rocked pretty good.

Oasis was fairly rocking and put on a good performance. They started with Turn Up The Sun and Hey Lyla from their new album, Don't Believe The Truth. In fact, most of the songs were from Don't Believe The Truth and they played nearly the entire album. (Let There Be Love was the only notable absence). Definitely Maybe received some converage with a rocking Bring It On Down, Cigarettes & Alcohol, and one of my favourites Live Forever. They also played the hits from (What's The Story) Morning Glory - Morning Glory, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, and Don't Look Back In Anger. When they took the stage, Fuckin' In The Bushes was played and they closed with a great cover of My Generation. Perhaps the only disappointing thing was they didn't play anything from Be Here Now, The Masterplan, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, or Heathen Chemistry. All-in-all I had a good time though (even if the Everett Event Centre was freezing cold).

The End Of The Jungle Book Too?

From the BBC's Apes 'extinct in a generation':

...

"All of the great apes are listed as either endangered or critically endangered," co-author [of 'The World Atlas of Great Apes and their Conservation'] Lera Miles from the World Conservation Monitoring Centre near Cambridge told the BBC News website.

...

"The great apes are our kin," [UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan] writes. "Like us, they are self-aware and have cultures, tools, politics, and medicines; they can learn to use sign language, and have conversations with people and with each other.

"Sadly, however, we have not treated them with the respect they deserve."

...

The End Of The Life Aquatic?

The Washington Post reports that a Wave of Marine Species Extinctions Feared. It's worth reading the whole article, but in case you are lazy, here some "soundbites":

...For years, many scientists and regulators believed the oceans were so vast there was little risk of marine species dying out. Now, some suspect the world is on the cusp of what Ellen K. Pikitch, executive director of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, calls "a gathering wave of ocean extinctions." Dozens of biologists believe the seas have reached a tipping point, with scores of species of ocean-dwelling fish, birds and mammals edging toward extinction. In the past 300 years, researchers have documented the global extinction of just 21 marine species -- and 16 have occurred since 1972.

...

"It's been a slow-motion disaster," said Boris Worm, a professor at Canada's Dalhousie University, whose 2003 study that found that 90 percent of the top predator fish have vanished from the oceans. "It's silent and invisible. People don't imagine this. It hasn't captured our imagination, like the rain forest."

...

In some cases, fishermen have intentionally exploited species until they died out, such as the New Zealand grayling fish and the Caribbean monk seal; other species have been accidental victims of long lines or nets intended for other catches. Over the past two decades, accidental bycatch alone accounted for an 89 percent decline in hammerhead sharks in the Northeast Atlantic.

...

...Despite the sturgeon's fecundity, overfishing and habitat destruction have caused that population to dive as well. Beluga sturgeon, the source of black caviar, release 360,000 to 7 million eggs in a year, Pikitch noted, but [their population has] declined 90 percent in the past 20 years. Just this month, scientists in Kazakhstan reported that they failed to find a single wild, reproducing beluga female, leaving them with no eggs for hatcheries.

...

Leafs

I'm glad that the hockey lockout is over. Until now, the Leafs haven't been up to very much though. Today they signed Eric Lindos. It will be interesting to see if he can still play, or if he's Humpty Dumpty.

Olympic National Park

I'm terribly slow, but I've finally put up some photos from my camping trip to the Olympic National Park.

gvimdiff

Gvimdiff is a feature of gvim which shows the differences between two files. The value it adds to diff is that rather than tell you that given lines are different in two files, it shows both files side-by-side and highlights and colours the precise difference.

For example, if you have:

File 1:
Hello There
Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3
X Y Z

File 2:
Hello World
Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3
X Y Z
A B C

then the first line in each file is shown in pink (to indicate that the lines differ) while the substrings "There" and "World" will be highlighted in red (to indicate the exact difference between those lines). The line "A B C" will be highlighted in blue (to indicate that it appears in only one of files) while the remaining lines will not be highlighted (to indicate that they appear the same in both files).

However, gvimdiff does not run properly on Windows; you get the error message "Cannot create diffs". To fix this problem, you need to install the diff program and its location must be part of the environment variable $PATH. Windows does not come with diff. (It is a UNIX utility). You can obtain a copy by installing GnuWin32 DiffUtils. Then navigate to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced and click on the button "Environment Variables" and append a semi-colon (";") plus the installation location of diff.exe (default of "C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin") to the Path entry. Afterward, you should be able to run gvim and successfully use the "Split diff with..." option under the "File" menu to use gvimdiff.

Movie Roundup

The past week I've watched at lot of things - a performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (at the Fremont Troll), highlights from the Live 8 concerts, Fourth of July fireworks, and lots of movies. I've been disappointed with a lot of movies that I've seen in the past month or so (e.g. Spiderman 2, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but everything I watched the past week was good.

Man on Fire stars Denzel Washington as Creasy, a bodyguard in Mexico. I like Denzel Washington; he's a good actor and this movie is no exception. The start of the story is about the evolution of Creasy's character and his relationship with the young girl that he's guarding. While the later part of the movie is the "action" part. Overall I liked the movie, but at nearly two and half hours it couldn't quite keep my attention. So it only gets 3 out of 5 stars.

Somehow I've avoid watching all the Batman movies. Perhaps it's because they have a bad reputation, but I've heard good things about Batman Begins. So I went to see it on Sunday. I'm not quite sure how to describe it while keeping it brief and not giving anything away. So I'll just say go see it because it is good - 4 stars out of 5.

I saw Revenge of the Sith right after it came out. But I love Star Wars, so I went to see it again before it left the theatres. The second time around it was just as good - 5 of 5 stars.

On Wednesday, I went to see an advance screening of the Fantastic Four. (Despite my earlier praise of Batman Begins), I tend not to enjoy superhero movies too much. However, Fantastic Four is entertaining and funny. Perhaps it is a little short and doesn't have a lot of action sequences, but after three long movies, short and sweet is a good thing. So I'll give it 4 stars out of 5.

National Treasure is the most recent Nicholas Cage movie. I think that he is a little like John Travolta in that both of them overact. I can't recall a single John Travolta performance that I liked, but for some reason I seem to enjoy all the Nicholas Cage movies that I see. In National Treasure, Cage plays an adventurer who is looking for a treasure hidden by the Founding Fathers (of the US). I found the movie to be a bit hokey and predictable. (The story probably isn't that original either, e.g. Lara Croft, Indiana Jones, etc.). However, I enjoyed it. So I'll overlook my complaints and give it 4 stars out of 5 also.

London

A Long Anticipated Weekend

It's been a long and tiring week. I'm glad that I have a long weekend to rest.

Last weekend I went camping at the Olympic National Park with Nabeel and Suor. On Saturday (after some creative exercises involving getting keys to get other keys to recover keys that were lock into someone's apartment), we took the ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island then drove to Port Angeles on the Olympic Pennisula. (There is a bridge between Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Pennisula). We hiked up Hurricane Ridge then camped at the Heart O' The Hills campground. The weather was okay, but a little cloudy. There were lots of deer at the top of Hurricane Ridge.

The next day, we went to Second Beach (after a short hike) on the Pacific Ocean. It's a pretty good spot for photos, but it was raining fairly heavily the whole time we were there. (Kind of like last time!). I haven't sorted through all my photos yet, but I'll try to post some later this weekend.

On Tuesday I went to a Lifehouse concert at El Corazón with Suor. The setting was very "intimate". (i.e. Small, crowded, hot, and sweaty). I only recognized a small subset of the songs. (I have their album No Name Face, but have not heard either of their other two albums...well that's a small lie, I've listened to their new album once). Overall the concert was good though. (The opening act was decent (for an opening act) too...but we never figured out who they were).

Since my last post about 30 Days was popular, I guess I'll comment about this week's show too. :-) A (Christian) guy from West Virgina goes to Dearborn, Michigan to spend a month living with Muslim family and observing all of their customs, including, wearing a traditional outfit when he left the airport in West Virgina that made him popular with the airport security. (One third of Dearborn's population is Muslim). It was an interesting story, probably the most interesting of the three episodes that they've shown so far. He struggled with his stereotypes (but was open-minded) and (understandably) had a lot of trouble trying to reconcile the Muslim lifestyle with his Christian beliefs (in particular going to a mosque to pray). Next week's episode sounds very similar in it's approach - a straight guy goes to San Francisco to become a roommate with an openly gay man.

Global Warming, Grazing, Oil, and Fixing the Facts

From the Washington Post, U.S. Pressure Weakens G-8 Climate Plan:

Bush administration officials working behind the scenes have succeeded in weakening key sections of a proposal for joint action by the eight major industrialized nations to curb climate change.

...

One deleted section, for example, initially cited "increasingly compelling evidence of climate change, including rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures, retreating ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, and changes to ecosystems." It added: "Inertia in the climate system means that further warming is inevitable. Unless urgent action is taken, there will be a growing risk of adverse effects on economic development, human health and the natural environment, and of irreversible long-term changes to our climate and oceans."

From the LA Times, Land Study on Grazing Denounced:

A government biologist and a hydrologist, who both retired this year from the Bureau of Land Management [BLM], said their conclusions that the proposed new rules might adversely affect water quality and wildlife, including endangered species, were excised and replaced with language justifying less stringent regulations favored by cattle ranchers.

...

Eliminated from the final draft was another conclusion that read: "The Proposed Action will have a slow, long-term adverse impact on wildlife and biological diversity in general."

Also removed was language saying how a number of the rule changes could adversely affect endangered species.

"This is a whitewash. They took all of our science and reversed it 180 degrees," said Erick Campbell, a former BLM state biologist in Nevada and a 30-year bureau employee who retired this year. He was the author of sections of the report pertaining to the effect on wildlife and threatened and endangered species.

"They rewrote everything," Campbell said in an interview this week. "It's a crime."

Is there a pattern of "the intelligence and facts" being "fixed" to satisfy preordained policies?

The sad thing is that if we chose to do more for the environment, we could - From Homegrown Fuel Supply Helps Brazil Breathe Easy:

While Americans fume at high gasoline prices, Carolina Rossini is the essence of Brazilian cool at the pump.

...

"You save money and you don't pollute as much," said Rossini, who paid about $18 to fill her nearly empty tank. "And it's a good thing that the product is made here."

Three decades after the first oil shock rocked its economy, Brazil has nearly shaken its dependence on foreign oil. More vulnerable than even the United States when the 1973 Middle East oil embargo sent gas prices soaring, Brazil vowed to kick its import habit. Now the country that once relied on outsiders to supply 80% of its crude is projected to be self-sufficient within a few years.

...

Today about 40% of all the fuel that Brazilians pump into their vehicles is ethanol, known here as alcohol, compared with about 3% in the United States. No other nation is using ethanol on such a vast scale. The change wasn't easy or cheap. But 30 years later, Brazil is reaping the return on its investment in energy security while the U.S. writes checks for $50-a-barrel foreign oil.

"Brazil showed it can be done, but it takes commitment and leadership," said Roland Hwang, vehicles policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. In the U.S. "we're paying the highest prices at the pump since 1981, and we are sending over $100 billion overseas a year to import oil instead of keeping that money in the United States…. Clearly Brazil has something to teach us."

30 Days

Last night I watched the premiere of 30 Days, a TV series by Morgan Spurlock from the famous (or is that infamous?!) documentary Super Size Me. The concept of the show is very similar to Super Size Me - the results of 30 day lifestyle experiment are recorded (and accompanied by a social commentary).

In the first episode, he took his fiancée to Columbus, Ohio and they lived on minimum wage for a month. With the underlying point of the show being that a minimum wage job ($5.15 / hour) is inadequate to support someone, yet alone a family. They actually found jobs that paid slightly more than minimum wage (~$7/h), but had a quite depressing life. Despite living in an ant-infested former crack house (apartment), they ended up earning less than they spent in the month. (Mostly because of ~$1000 in hospital bills - it's kind of hard to pay that off when you only make ~$44/day after taxes)...it makes me grateful to have grown up like I did and to have a decent job.

I think in future episodes other people will be the guinea pigs and Spurlock will just narrate.

Daredevil

You learn something new each day. Today, after watching Daredevil I learned that dull movies and action movies are not mutually exclusive.

Crazy Question

Sometimes living in a big city is an adventure. I was at the grocery store, minding my own business while selecting some peaches [Yay! Peaches are in finally season. :-)] when a guys walks over and asks How do you spelling 'kidding', as in 'just kidding'...I look up and realized he is busy text messaging on his phone. (But, I'm not sure if that reduces the strangeness of the brief conversation though).

What We Still Don't Know

The BBC has made a list of What we still don't know (in response to the identity of Deep Throat being revealed). It's an interesting idea to ponder. However, the list is somewhat British (and a few items are fickle, such as the HP6 reference).

What do you think they left out from their list? (I'd go with the alleged 1947 Roswell UFO crash...)

Long Weekend

It's nice to finally have a long weekend. Saturday I went hiking with Suor to Franklin Falls. Some photos are here. Yesterday I went to party at Kevin's and today I helped Nabeel move. (His couch was bigger than the elevator. We had to carry it up nine flights of stairs. That was an adventure to say the least)...Being so busy, I don't think the weekend was long enough!

Mount Rainier

Some photos from hiking through the snow at Paradise on Mount Rainier last weekend.

Fog of War

I watched Fog of War last night. It is an interview with Robert S. McNamara about eleven "lessons" that he learned from his involvement in World War II with the Air Force as well as the Cuban Missle Crisis and the Vietnam War as Secretary of Defense.

For some reason I thought it was about Henry Kissinger. [How can you rent a documentary and not know who it is about, you ask? Well, it was playing at the Princess Cinema last year, but for some reason I never went even though it looked interesting. I know Ram went and said it was good, so that's sufficent :-)].

I found it to be interesting and thought provoking. It is also fairly topical. (i.e. It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to apply what he says to current US foreign policy).

It was good, but listening a single person talk for almost two hours stretched my attention span a little. Overall, I'll give it 3/5 stars. (3.5 if I wasn't limited to an integral amount of stars).

Episode III

Star Wars rocks. I watched Revenge of the Sith early this morning. I was impressed. I won't say anymore in case you haven't seen it yet.

Modern Library

An interesting list that I found: Modern Library's 100 best books of the 20th Century. (Actually it's four lists of one hundred - two fiction and two non-fiction).

Mount Si

Some photos from last week's hike up Mount Si.

Greatest Rock 'N Roll Band In The World

Last night I went to the U2 concert at Key Arena. It was awesome! Easily the best concert that I've been to. A good mix of rock, showmanship, and an enthusiastic crowd. They played a good portion of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb as well as a lot of their older material including New Year's Day, Pride, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Where The Streets Have No Name, One, The Fly, and Mysterious Ways.

A Farewell To Arms

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

I'm trying to become well-read. Last month I read Profiles In Courage by JFK and over the weekend I finished reading A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway. I'm not quite sure how to describe A Farewell To Arms. It's an interesting read to say the least. But, I also found it a little bit confusing. (Life was easier when you were in school and there was someone spoon-fed you the answers!?). I guess I'll have to ponder its meaning some more.

Politics-Oriented Software Development

Documentation is an essential tool in the twin goals of ass-covering and of managing management...strike the correct tone of opaque vagueness and unshakeable authority.

A kind of funny (but cynical) article about Politics-Oriented Software Development.

Inversions

Given a sequence x₁, x₂, ... x_n, we say that the pair 1 &le i < j &le n is an inversion if x_i > x_j.

Now, given a sequence sequence S = x₁, x₂, ... x_n, how efficently can you count the total number of inversions in S?

For example, if S = 1, 5, 4, 3 then S has 3 inversions - the pairs (5, 4), (5, 3), and (4, 3).

The straightforward algorithm is the compare all pairs of elements in S, which has a O(n²) runtime.

A better algorithm is to modify the merge sort algorithm to count the inversions that it undoes while sorting S. This yields an O(nlogn) algorithm.

Is O(nlogn) the best possible? That is, is counting inversions also &Omega(nlogn)? (This is true for (comparision-based) sorting, but one does not necessarily need to sort to S to count the total number of inversions).

Aquarium

I haven't posted any photos for a while. I took a lot at Christmas, but not much else this winter. Last weekend I went to the Seattle Aquairum. I took some photo. None of them are that great, but here are a few.

Gentoo

So I opted to try out Gentoo (to get a chance to muck around with stuff). So far, I've been a little disappointed. The installer refused to get eth0 operational, despite a few hours of coaxing. I switched my ethernet cable and got it to accept eth1, however.

The instructions are quite long with lots of steps. I finally waded through them and rebooted to get a system that didn't quite work. First, neither eth0, nor eth1 would work and it complained about devfs not being enabled in the kernel, but this was required for gentoo. It turned out that the instructions do tell you to enable devfs in the kernel (but the fact that there are zillion options on what you can compile into the kernel and the fact that it is explicitly listed as "OBSOLETE" lead me to not include it). I went to recompile the kernel and then I noticed that /boot wasn't mounted properly. Sigh.

After two recompiles of the kernel, devfs is included (and that error message is gone) and I have an network connection. I think the /boot think is a wrong option in /etc/fstab. (I can manually mount that drive fine).

So now I just need to figure out what else I need to install to get things going. (It seems that by default you get practically nothing - pick a command and type which and odds are it will say that its not in the path...)

Climate Change

An interesting article.

Linux

I'm thinking that I'll upgrade the version of Linux that I have installed on my desktop. I was using Fedora Core 2, but I haven't been impressed with it (or Fedora Core 1). They lack "polish" and seem to be beta-quality. So I'm pondering trying out a different distribution (e.g. SuSe, Slackware, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, etc.). I'm looking for something that is stable, mainstream, easy to upgrade, and come with a reasonable set of packages/software (that is fairly up to date). Does anyone have any suggestions (or an opinion about Fedora Core)?

Hockey

Canada destroyed Russia 6-1, winning the World Junior Championship. :-)

Canada totally owned the tournament. In 6 games Canada outscored their opponents 41 to 7 (outshooting them 259 to 105).

Canada is now the reigning champion in all the major international hockey tournaments: Men's Olympic Champions (2002), World Cup Champions (2004), World Junior Champions (2005), Men's World Champions (2004), Women's Olympic Champions (2002), Women's World Champions (2004).

Random

Canada won 3-1. :-)

100 things we didn't know this time last year is an interesting article from the BBC. Some highlights:

2. Farmers plant their crops up to three weeks earlier than 15 years ago. In the 1960s, temperatures from January to March averaged 4.2C; it rose to 5.6C in the 1990s.

This is a little distrubing. Especially since some people (e.g. George Bush) are Global Warming deniers.

19. The collective noun for rhinos is "crash".

Better store that one away for future use during Trivial Pursuit.

62. The founder of the Natural History Museum, Sir Richard Owen, was the man we have to thank for the word "dinosaur", literally meaning "terrible lizard".

The Natural History Museum is cool. I was there in May.

68. Bill Clinton revealed in his autobiography that he didn't learn to ride a bike properly until he was 22.

That's just plain funny.

70. And reports of UFOs have dwindled since the late 1990s. In the UK, sightings have gone from about 30 a week to almost zero; it's a trend echoed in the US and Norway.

Whom do you report a UFO siting to, exactly?

No Hockey

The Canada - Russia game is not on TV here. :-( For reference, ESPN is showing billiards, ESPN2 is showing "classic" boxing (aka Mike Tyson from the 1980s), and Classic ESPN has a documentary on about the USS Cole bombing (I have no idea what this has to do with sports; and no I don't have the channel wrong, it has an ESPN in the corner). That's a pretty lame sport lineup.

TSN's website says the score is 1-0 Canada after the first period though. :-)

World Juniors

I'm back in Seattle. I was home for Christmas visiting my family and friends and watching the World Junior Hockey Championship. Canada is having a very good tournament, destroying every team they've meet so far. (7 - 3 over Slovakia, 8 - 1 over Sweden, 9 - 0 over Germany, and 8 - 1 over Finland). They play the Czech Republic tomorrow in the semi-finals.

Sadly, American TV is very lame and it doesn't look like the World Juniors be available on ESPN. It seems they only show occasional games where Team USA is playing. However, the American team is bad and unlikely to advance far enough to meet Canada. :-(