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As a lover of both programming languages and facial hair, I found these blog posts quite entertaining:
Why Microsoft can Blow-Off with C#?
Computer Languages and Facial Hair - Take Two
The thesis here is that a programming language becomes successful if and only if its creator sports facial hair.
The image to the left is of Kenneth L. Thompson, one of the creators of C.
Apparently one of the creators of the language Ruby grew facial hair in response to the first blog post (see the comments there).
I’m currently reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I’m finding Dawkins’ arguments to be very compelling so far and have been pretty easily convinced by most of them. In certain parts of the book its as if he puts together in an organized way many thoughts that have been floating around in my head over the years. Here is an interesting lecture given by Richard Dawkins on intelligent design from TED.com.
I recently found this article in Newsweek that fits into his thesis nicely.
It is about the search that begins this summer for a particle called the Higgs boson, which is also called the “God particle” because its discovery could lead to a grand theory of the universe. Although the discovery would not be as big of a step as Darwin’s theory of evolution, it will definitely help hack away at intelligent design theory. The article contains an interview with theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.
I have been using GNUMP3d to allow me to listen to my music collection from anywhere over the internet. I previously tried out SlimServer but I thought it was terrible. It was very slow and unresponsive and behaved strangely. GNUMP3d, on the other hand, is lightweight and easy to set up and use. But one problem I have with it is that it is totally insecure. It originally had a password authentication feature, which was very easy to get around, but then did away with it completely in version 3.0. After looking into various ways of keeping the server secure, I found that the best way to do it is with SSH tunneling. I found this page to be helpful. I summarize what it says about SSH tunneling below.
Once you have an SSH server running all you have to do from the remote machine is SSH into the server using the command
ssh -L 9999:localhost:8888 <username>@<serverIpAddress>
assuming GNUMP3d is running on port 8888 on the server. You do not need to have port 8888 open on the server since the connection to the server will be through the SSH server port (usually port 22). The command tells SSH to establish a secure connection between port 9999 on the remote computer and port 8888 on the server. Then, to access the GNUMP3d server simply fire up your web browser and go to
http://127.0.0.1:9999
Its as simple as that!
Here is an interesting story about pi. We have come a long way!
Happy holidays! I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I would tell you about a nice site I’ve been messing around on lately, last.fm. Last.fm is the largest online music community. The idea is you input artists you like and it plays songs by those artists and similar artists. In this way it is very similar to Pandora, which I used to use a lot. One major difference is that last.fm determines what types of songs you like by looking at the songs that users with similar taste as you are listening to. One the other hand, Pandora determines your musical preference by analyzing features of songs on a fundamental level. This analysis is part of the Music Genome Project. I’ve noticed that the strategy Pandora uses helps you find more obscure music you might like than last.fm. However, it looks like last.fm has a much larger database of music. When I used to use Pandora I found that it repeated songs much more than I would expect.
But last.fm takes this a step further. You can have it track the music you listen to on your regular music player and determine the type of music you like based on what you’ve been listening to. It stores a log of your listening history, which you can choose to keep public or private. Some might not like the fact that it tracks what you listen to but I don’t mind at all. I like the fact that my friends can see what I’m listening to. Here is my last.fm page. I found this feature pretty amazing when I first started playing with it. In fact, Amarok, which is what I use to listen to music, comes with built in support for last.fm so I didn’t even need to install a plugin or anything. You can then have it build a personal radio station based on what you’ve been listening to on your music player, but for this you have to pay $3 a month for a subscription. You can have it stream this personal radio station to your music player so you don’t even have to use their proprietary or web-based music player. You can even listen to radio stations of your ‘neighbors’, who are users with musical taste closest to yours. Give it a shot!
The TV show Lost has recently started putting out 2-3 minute “mobisodes” called “Missing Pieces”, which they are making available via Verizon cell phones and the ABC website. Unfortunately, ABC.com’s video player does not support Linux (!!), but thankfully the videos are also available at http://spoilerslost.blogspot.com. So far, four of the thirteen mobisodes have been released. Some are better than others. I wasn’t too excited by any of them yet but hopefully they will get better in the future.
One of the important issues in the Hollywood writers’ strike is payment schemes for non-traditional-media content created to support or enhance traditional media like TV or movies. These mobisodes indicate that some progress is being made on this issue. Some details can be found here.
Last week I checked out Beowulf at the IMAX theater. I was totally blown away by the 3-D graphics from the second the Paramount Pictures logo came up. Although the story wasn’t mind blowing, like 300, this is a movie you watch just for the effects. I remember reading parts of Beowulf in high school but I have no idea how close the movie is to the original. Angelina Jolie looks amazing but she doesn’t have as many scenes as you would think given the ads for the movie. If you watch Beowulf in an IMAX theatre make sure you get a good seat. I recommend sitting as far back as possible. I sat close to the front and as a result the picture looked much darker than it should have.
I’m interested in seeing how they will release the DVD. Will the DVD come with 3-D glasses?
Last week I went to the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle. It was my first INFORMS and I had a really great time. I went to a lot of interesting talks and it was nice to actually meet in person many people in the applied probability community whose work I’ve been studying the past couple years.
I also gave a talk on my recent paper but unfortunately not too many people attended it because it was on the last day of the conference and at the same time as another applied probability session.
When I was not busy with the conference I got a chance to explore Seattle a bit. I tried out some excellent restaurants. We went to this place called Pike Place Chowder for lunch a couple days. Their clam chowder is supposedly award winning and definitely the best clam chowder I’ve ever tasted. We also went to this hole-in-the-wall place called Paseo that serves amazing Carribean/Cuban sandwiches. The two slightly more upscale restaurants we went to were Steelhead Diner and Machiavelli, which were also really good. I found Seattle to be a cool city with a unique vibe. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to return at some point.
Here are a few panoramic shots taken by a friend of mine. He used hugin to stitch them together. The first is the view from my friend’s apartment. The second is the view from Pike Place Market.
I recently did a clean install of the new version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 7.10 (”Gutsy Gibbon”). I wanted to go through my installation experience here for those who come across issues similar to those I had. Here is a nice review of Gutsy on Wired.com.
First of all, I was getting random freezes when booting into the Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD. I had the same problem when installing Kubuntu 7.04 a few months ago so I knew what to do. The freezes were caused by the fact that I’m using an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I solved the problem by adding “noapic nolapic acpi=off” to the boot command in GRUB. So my boot command looked like this:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=4c965522-4f5f-4ae8-878c-9565127aa70d ro noapic nolapic acpi=off
I also made the change to the file /boot/grub/menu.lst after installing the OS. I don’t fully understand why this was happening but some information can be found here and here. Other than this problem installation went smoothly.
After booting into Ubuntu for the first time I was not able to get the desktop effects working right away even though I knew Compiz Fusion comes with Gutsy by default. I’m using the Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics engine so I thought there would be no issues here. After poking around a bit I realized all I needed to do was to tell Xorg to use the i810 video driver. I did this by changing the “Driver” field in the “Device” section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel GMA 950"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
After this I was good to go. I noticed that Gutsy had no problem recognizing my external USB drive and my iPod. Then I just spent a bit of time changing the look of my desktop. I had to get rid of the ugly Ubuntu brown and the ugly default font. I decided to use the default Vista UI font, Segoe UI. I was surprised to find that it was available as a free download.
Here are a couple screenshots of my desktop:
The system monitor you see in the upper left-hand corner of the screen is conky. The weather widget you see in the lower left-hand corner of the screen is the ClearWeather screenlet. I just installed the screenlets package using
sudo apt-get install screenlets
and downloaded the ClearWeather screenlet here.
Another thing I did was install an ssh server using
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
I have an account on No-IP.com so that I can access my machine using a nice domain name instead of having to remember its IP address. The only problem here is that since I use DHCP everytime I reboot my computer my IP address changes. I found that all I needed to do was install No-IP’s dynamic DNS update client. I checked to see if this was in the Ubuntu repositories and I was amazed to see that it was so it was really easy to set up:
sudo apt-get install no-ip
Another thing I wanted to do was to set up a streaming media server. I’ve been playing around with SlimServer but I haven’t been happy with it so far. I will try out a few others that I’ve heard about including MPD and GNUMP3d and post what I think about them here. If you have any recommendations about what to use please let me know.
Overall, I had a positive experience getting Gutsy up and running the way I wanted. If you haven’t tried out Linux yet I recommend installing Gutsy. I admit that you may have to poke around a bit at the beginning to get things working like you want but its definitely worth it in the end, especially if you’re currently using Windows.
