Don't plagiarize your cover letters!
Monday 10 February 2014, 08:39The text below pretty much speaks for itself. Bold highlighting and numbered footnotes in [square brackets] are mine; all the rest is as I received it. Some irregularities of spacing and punctuation, visible in the original email, aren't obvious in the HTML. Names of the students are redacted because (after finding several more copies on the Web) I imagine the students are relatively innocent victims of bad advice. Name of the institution not redacted because I hope others who receive such letters and look for them on the Web will be able to easily find this posting.
TikZでマック・ペイントの床しいタイリングを描きましょう
Friday 13 December 2013, 13:09TeXとLaTeXで画を書いたらTikZは便利とポピュラーです。 みんなはきれいなグラフィクスを作っています。 たとえば、これがtexample.netから一つのクリスマスツリーです。
![[クリスマスツリー]](https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/images/2013-12/20131214-tree.png)
しかし、ただのグラフィクスには興味ありません。 今日は１９８４年からノスタルジックの画を書きましょう。 マック・ペイントを思い出しませんか？ そう…
プリティプリントの試作
Saturday 7 December 2013, 10:07今年「TeX & LaTeX Advent Calendar」に入りました。 １４日に私の書き込みを書きます。 それ前このサーバにGeSHiと言うプリティプリントソフトを備え付けています。 この書き込みはGeSHiのテスト・ポストです。
Photo gallery from TUG 2013 trip
Thursday 31 October 2013, 21:00Here's a photo gallery (salvaged from my old gallery software in June 2020) of my trip to Japan in 2013 to present at TUG.
Papers from the recent past and near future
Wednesday 21 August 2013, 12:03I just got back from a trip to multiple conferences in Ontario, and that makes it a good time to update my publications page. Most people interested in my academic work are likely to find out about it from other sources, but I'm going to post some brief and relatively non-technical introductions here as well for my general Web site readers. The official versions of these papers are mostly behind paywalls, but there are also unofficial "preprint" versions available to all.
Removing things from Firefox's location bar NO REALLY
Sunday 21 July 2013, 06:40The Firefox GUI becomes more annoying with each "upgrade." I don't know if they're taking bribes from Chrome, or if they took advice from the same "professional" UI designer who broke GIMP, or what, but it's really become a problem. For those who haven't given up on Firefox yet, however, and for my own future reference, here's something useful I managed to figure out after a lot of hair-tearing.
You start typing a partial URL into the location bar, and the drop-down list of suggestions appears. But there's a URL on that list that should not be there. Maybe it's something embarassing you don't want other users of your browser to see; maybe it's merely a site other than the one you want to be the match for the few characters you typed, and yet for some reason it keeps coming up as the preferred suggestion.
Kleknev: a coarse-grained profiler for build systems
Monday 11 March 2013, 19:12When I was preparing the Tsukurimashou 0.7 release, I had to build the entire package several times from scratch, to verify that all the necessary pieces really were included in what I was preparing to ship. When I run the build on my development machine it normally re-uses a lot of previously-built components, only updating the parts I have recently changed. That kind of incremental compilation is one of the main functions of GNU Make. But if I'm shipping a package for others to use, it has to work on their systems which don't have a previous history of successful builds; so I need to verify that it will actually build successfully in such an environment, and verifying that means copying the release-candidate package into a fresh empty directory on my own system and checking that the entire package (including all optional features) can build there.
Tsukurimashou is a big, complicated package. It's roughly 92,000 lines of code, which may not sound like so much. For comparison, the current Linux kernel is about 15,000,000. Tsukurimashou's volume of code is roughly equivalent to an 0.99 version of Linux (not clear which one - I couldn't find numbers I trusted on the Web just now, and am not motivated to go downloading old kernel sources just to count the lines). However, as detailed in one of my earlier articles, Tsukurimashou as a font meta-family is structured much differently from an orthodox software package. Things in the Tsukurimashou build tend to multiply rather than adding; and one practical consequence is that building from these 92,000 lines of code, when all the optional features are enabled, produces as many output and intermediate files and takes as much computation as we might expect of a much larger package. A full build of Tsukurimashou maxes out my quad-core computer for six or eight hours, and fills about 4G of disk space.
So after a few days of building over and over, it occurred to me that I'd really like to know where all the time was going. I had a pretty good understanding of what the build process was doing, because I created it myself; but I had no quantitative data on the relative resource consumption of the different components, I had no basis to make even plausible guesses about that, and quantitative data would be really useful. In software development we often study this sort of thing on the tiny scale, nanoseconds to milliseconds, using profiling tools that measure the time consumption of different parts of a program. What I really wanted for my build system was a coarse-grained profiler: something that could analyse the eight-hour run of the full build and give me stats at the level of processes and Makefile recipes.
I couldn't find such a tool ready-made, so I built one.
Cycle counting: the next generation
Wednesday 30 January 2013, 18:44Here are the slides (PDF) and an audio recording (MP3, 25 megabytes, 54 minutes) from a talk I gave today about one of my research projects. You'll get more out of it if you have some computer science background, but I hope it'll also be accessible and interesting to those of my readers who don't. I managed to work in Curious George, Sesame Street, electronics, XKCD, the meaning of "truth," and a piece of software called ECCHI. I plan to distribute the "Enhanced Cycle Counter and Hamiltonian Integrator" publicly at some point in the future. Maybe not until after the rewrite, though.
Abstract for the talk:
It is a #P-complete problem to find the number of subgraphs of a given labelled graph that are cycles. Practical work on this problem splits into two streams: there are applications for counting cycles in large numbers of small graphs (for instance, all 12.3 million graphs with up to ten vertices) and software to serve that need; and there are applications for counting the cycles in just a few large graphs (for instance, hypercubes). Existing automated techniques work very well on small graphs. In this talk I review my own and others' work on large graphs, where the existing results have until now required a large amount of human participation, and I discuss an automated system for solving the problem in large graphs.
Where do I draw the line?
Monday 21 January 2013, 14:49It's a very common pattern in the Han writing system that a character will be made of two parts that are themselves characters, or at least elements resembling characters, placed one above the other or one next to the other. For instance, 音 (sound) can be split into 立 (stand up) above 日 (day); and 村 (village) can be split into 木 (tree) next to 寸 (inch). This kind of structure can be nested, as in 語 (language). One can do a sort of gematria with the meanings, (what exactly is the deep significance of "village = tree + inch"?) but that's not the direction I'm interested in going today. Here's the thing: in the Tsukurimashou project, these two ways of constructing characters each correspond to a piece of code that's invoked many times throughout the system, and I thought it would be interesting to look at how often the different parameter values are used.
The fundamental attribution error
Saturday 12 January 2013, 16:23Here's a quote.
We see a sloppily-parked car and we think "what a terrible driver," not "he must have been in a real hurry." Someone keeps bumping into you at a concert and you think "what a jerk," not "poor guy, people must keep bumping into him." A policeman beats up a protestor and we think "what an awful person," not "what terrible training." The mistake is so common that in 1977 Lee Ross decided to name it the "fundamental attribution error": we attribute people’s behavior to their personality, not their situation.
