Saturday 03 September 2011 at 11:20 am
I'm writing this from the Vancouver airport. It's 9:20 on Saturday, local time, but I'm trying to shift my brain to JST, so for me, it's 1:20 (am) on Sunday. This'll be the first of probably many updates during my trip.
I'm posting photos in my gallery, and you should look there regularly because I will sometimes post stuff there without posting commentary or links here. I think there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to if you want up-to-the-minute photos. Do come back and look at pictures you've seen before, too, because I may post comments or annotations on existing pictures. Uploading photos to the gallery is fast and easy; posting comments there takes more time, and posting entries here even more than that.
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Wednesday 31 August 2011 at 10:15 am
I like using Danjean and Legrand's latex-make package to handle automated compilation of my LaTeX documents. Unfortunately, there are several other packages with very similar names and functions, and this isn't the most popular one, so it's often hard to find on the Net when I want to install it on a new computer or recommend it to collaborators. In fact, I've ended up checking a copy into my own SVN repository so I can just check out from there when I want to create a new installation. Another gotcha is that it doesn't know about XeLaTeX, which has become an issue now that I'm using XeLaTeX for a lot of my newer documents (to achieve Japanese/Unicode and OpenType font support).
Below the cut: a Makefile fragment to add XeLaTeX support to latex-make. This can be used instead of the one-line default Makefile for a directory full of LaTeX document stuff, to replace the default invocation of pdflatex with xelatex.
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Sunday 21 August 2011 at 11:11 am
Today, after years of suffering, I finally managed to find a workaround for one of the several problems I'd been having with printing from GTK+ applications, in particular Firefox. Here are some notes for the benefit of others who may encounter the same thing.
BASIC SYMPTOMS: Every time I try to print something on my laser printer using a GTK+ application, I get inappropriate default settings (namely one-sided printing on card stock from the multi-purpose tray). If I don't change these defaults, the printer stops and waits for user intervention to insert card stock in the multi-purpose tray. Others reporting similar problems have often complained about letter-sized or A4 paper being the default when they wanted the other - sometimes adding a layer of chauvinistic slurs at countries following the other standard - but in fact I haven't had that particular problem myself.
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Thursday 04 August 2011 at 5:42 pm
Suppose you want to draw a curve with an Etch-a-Sketch. The idea is that you can move the pointer up, down, left, or right, by a precisely controlled amount, but you aren't coordinated enough to turn both knobs at once in a precise way to create a diagonal or curved line. So you want to approximate your desired curve, with one made up of stair-steps; a piecewise linear curve made up of segments that each go in a direction chosen from a small finite set of directions (in this case, the four directions up, down, left, and right, but I'm interested in allowing any arbitrary small finite set of directions).
![[illustration of an Etch-a-Sketch approximated curve]](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/images/2011-08/etchasketch.png)
How can you do this so as to get the best possible approximation?
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Monday 01 August 2011 at 5:01 pm
A friend's Twitter stream pointed me at this item on what
to say to someone who is sick (with cancer, in the authour's case) and
it touched me. It also reminded me very much of some of the things I've
read about the experiences of people fighting infertility, and it reminded
me of my own experience too. It seems no matter what problem someone
suffers, they can count on their friends and loved ones to make personal
contributions to the pain with ignorant, clueless, and hateful repeated
attacks that masquerade as caring attempts to help. I don't have much hope
that my writing about this here will change anything; the fact that not many
people really care what I say about such things is itself an example of
the problem. But I'm going to write about it anyway, this one time today.
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Thursday 21 July 2011 at 10:34 am
Anyone who's studied computer science should be familiar with the Landau asymptotic notation, or "big-oh" notation. But how well do you really know it?
Given two functions it seems intuitive that one at least one ought to be big-oh of the other; in some cases maybe they are both big-oh of each other, in which case they are theta of each other and in a certain sense can be said to be equivalent. It sure feels like a total order, with a place for everything and everything in its place, and it is a total order on all the kinds of functions we normally care about. I've certainly marked down plenty of students for incorrectly claiming that n log n can't be compared either way to things like n and n2.
But today I had occasion to wonder if it's really true that
O() induces a total order on all functions for which it is applicable. I looked on the Net and couldn't find anyone discussing this issue; I did find
this archived final exam in which someone asked it of students as a true/false question and apparently was looking for the answer "true." Unfortunately, the correct answer is "false."
Counterexample below the cut. If you've got a computer science background you might want to think about it a bit yourself before going further. It shouldn't really be hard if you look carefully at the definition.
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Wednesday 13 July 2011 at 2:19 pm
M. "Doc" Skala tries things so you won't have to!
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Sunday 03 July 2011 at 08:46 am
Here's the comment thread for my Bonobo Conspiracy archive posting.
Sunday 03 July 2011 at 08:30 am
In 2005 through 2008 I wrote and posted a Web comic called Bonobo
Conspiracy. I posted a new strip with a new joke every single day for just
over 1000 days, chronicling the lives, thwarted romances, and mad science of
Matt, Sun-Moon, Dr. Klaun, Algea, and a host of special guests. Although
most strips were designed to stand on their own, I also gradually developed
each character over the course of the run, and I ran a few multi-strip
specials and storylines.
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Friday 10 June 2011 at 09:53 am
I wonder: what percentage of current agricultural capacity is devoted to stimulant drug crops? I mean tea, coffee, tobacco, khat, areca, coca, cacao, yerba mate, and so on. It seems like it must be a pretty large percentage. I wonder how much food could be grown using those resources, and how that amount of food compares to the size of the food shortage.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it would be possible or desirable to make such a substitution. It seems like there must be a reason that nearly every human culture has a tradition of using stimulant drugs. Also, I'm well aware that different plants grow under different conditions, so the land and resources currently used for non-food crops can't necessarily be used for food crops. But it would still be interesting to know the answers to the questions.
Thursday 19 May 2011 at 3:45 pm
Fans of my fiction writing will doubtless remember my theory that in the Future, girls' school-uniform skirts will be made of "smart fiber," capable of changing colour under computer control to act as a sort of display screen, and the wearers will use that to encode personal information into the plaid stripes of something like a present-day 2D barcode. Such technology already exists today (it's closely related to "e-paper"), though it isn't cheap and rugged enough yet for serious use in clothing.
Well, in one of my nefarious projects I recently had occasion to actually use a data-to-tartan encoding scheme, and you might find the results interesting. Here's a sample:
![[Plaid code swatches]](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/pivotx/includes/timthumb.php?src=2011-05/plaidcode.png&w=140&h=140)
See if you can reverse-engineer the encoding that generated those swatches. It's quite simple, and has an historical basis.
Saturday 14 May 2011 at 11:26 am
Here's a simple online Tarot page I wrote a few years back. Very simple: choose a spread, you see the cards face-down, click on each card in turn to flip it face-up. You're on your own for interpretation. I'm taking the opportunity of the transition to the new site code, to add a Project Wonderful box - but if I'm not pleased by the bidding on that, I may remove it.
The card images used in this system are scans from the edition of the
Waite deck published in 1909 that collectors call "Pamela-A," and
they are public domain in Berne Convention countries. See John B. Hare's
comparison of the Pamela-A deck with another popular deck.
Friday 13 May 2011 at 07:04 am
I've been hearing a lot of grumbling about gasoline prices recently. People who ought to know better on my social-networking friends lists circulated that asinine one-day "boycott" message a little while back. My alarm clock wakes me with CBC Radio every morning, and today they were talking to someone from Consumer's Union who was hoping to pressure the Federal government to Do Something. I'm of the opinion that the Federal government has already Done way too Much in this matter, and they ought to butt out already.
One of Harper's talking points in the recent election was to accuse the Liberals of pressing for a "tax on everything" (a scary renaming of the carbon tax that anybody who cares about survival of the planet, including a clear majority of Canadians, actually supports). But when you fill up your car's gas tank and pay today's prices for it, you are paying the Conservative tax on everything, which they implemented without a vote and which never received proper discussion or coverage. Let's put the blame where it belongs.
Disclosure: I don't own a car, and I do own units of a real-return bond index fund, which makes more profit in nominal terms when the price of everything (including gasoline) goes up. I don't think that really means I benefit from higher prices, only that I lose less than some other people. I've written about inflation-indexed bonds before. I'd rather have prices stay low and my bonds not make so many dollars.
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Sunday 01 May 2011 at 5:07 pm
This is going to be a heck of an election. It already has been, in fact. I'm not going to do an astrological thing - and in fact I took down the one I posted for the 2004 election - because I care too much about the outcome to do it properly. I'm also probably not going to post a whole big thing about the issues and how I feel about them; by this point, anybody who could be swayed by my writings on that stuff already has been. But tomorrow night I'm going to attempt to sit back and watch the proceedings as entertainment, and for anyone planning to do the same, here are my top three picks for ridings to watch.
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Sunday 24 April 2011 at 3:02 pm
Here are a few notes on the current state of my life.
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![[Chessudoku]](/images/chessucvr.png)
![[Manekineko image for social-network shares]](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/i/manekineko-clipped.jpg)
![[Plaid code swatches]](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/images/2011-05/plaidcode.png)