mind games

quietly
wistful
egalitarian
rivulet
tremor
yelp
undulate
idiosyncratic
opulent
post-mortem
anglo-saxon
signal
dire
field
great
help
jerk
kick
lipid
zoroastrianism
xylophone
clandestine
very
big
name
meander

those are all the first words that came to my mind when i looked at each letter on the keyboard. I expected there to be more small words (like "big", "very"), but others (like "zoroastrianism") just plain surprised me. I would like to know what Steven Pinker would have to say about this.

camera : fixed!

my camera died recently. i had dropped it a few times, but the screen didn't break.. instead, the buttons on the face stopped working. i opened it up, poked around, removed some dust and reconnected wires, and it started working! so i spent the next 1.5 hours trying to put the thing back together (those screws are tiny!)

sorry i can't provide a picture of the dismantled camera (i mean, c'mon... what do you expect?) but here are two parts that i couldn't find a home for. good thing the camera still works without them

down with responsibilities

I had a great realization while reading this article: The Power of the Marginal. Responsibilities are a bad thing. Being responsible is still good, but to have too many responsibilities makes you slow and weighed down. Getting things done without acquiring too many responsibilities is the way to go.

From the article:

"Responsibility is an occupational disease of eminence. In principle you could avoid it, just as in principle you could avoid getting fat as you get old, but few do. I sometimes suspect that responsibility is a trap and that the most virtuous route would be to shirk it, but regardless it's certainly constraining."

wow, I'm gonna try out this new tactic right away! time to get rid of some responsibilities, while remaining responsible

note about the picture: having a pic of guys drinking beer in the zoo is not what I mean by releasing responsibility. I put it there to sort-of paint the picture of being free and simple, but not irresponsible nor alcoholic

i'm movin' on

Come this Thursday i will be moving out of my current apartment. A good time to get rid of unnecessary things! My life will be simplified, and it will feel great.

So, with less stuff to think about, i am going to focus my attention on learning a few key skills this summer. I'm going into my senior year of computer science, and i realized that a lot of stuff we are expected to know when we get a job is not taught in classes, so i have some extra work to do. By the end of summer, i would like to have a working knowledge of how to:

• set up a Subversion repository and server (note: they DID teach this in cs311, but i kinda forgot)
• set up an Apache server
• use PHP and AJAX to create an interactive database display webapp (already part done!)
• use Python to create an RSS parser
• if i have time:
  
  • create a command-line/gui based dictionary in linux using mono or java
  • create a script to sort music files into directories based on id3/mp4 tag data
  • make an extension for firefox or gaim (like an OSD for gaim or something)
  
  

awk mass renames

Now that I'm back in linux, i've came back to the problem of picture management. But guess what, now Picasa is released for Linux! But instead of using that exclusively, I think I will compare it with f-spot for a while.

With importing pictures, I've come across the problem of importing several times to the same folder. I want the pictures to be numbered sequentially. Say, for instance, I import a bunch, numbered 01.jpg-42.jpg, then I want to import more the next day starting from 43.jpg. Well the current software I'm using (the default Ubuntu camera-importing app) doesn't do that, and instead puts everything in its own folder based on the time it was imported down to the second. So I wrote an awk-script to mass rename all the files, then I will copy-paste them to the directory. A little less convenient, but it was fun. Here's the script:

ls -d *.jpg | sort -r | awk -F. '{printf("mv %0xd.jpg %0yd.jpg\n", $1, $1 + z) }' | sh


1. ls -d *.jpg will list all files with the suffix .jpg


2. sort - r will sort the files in the opposite order (we do this so we don't overwrite files. For example, let's say we have 20 pictures we are renaming and we are starting counting from 15. We will rename 01.jpg to 15.jpg, but 15.jpg already exists, so it is overwritten. If we start from 20.jpg and rename it to 35.jpg and count backwards, no files are lost)


3. awk -F. '{printf("mv %0xd.jpg %0yd.jpg\n", $1, $1 + z) }' this is our awk script. There's a few variables in there to look out for.
   
   
   
   • %0xd.jpg is the name of the original file. In this case, it is some number with x leading zeros. if x = 5, then it would be like 00004.jpg or something.
   
   
   • %0yd.jpg is the destination file, with y leading zeros.
   
   
   • $1 + z is how we determine where to begin. If you want to start with 00043.jpg, then you would say $1 + 42
   
   
   
   
4. sh this will execute the commands that are output from the awk-script

This will mass rename all the files to whatever their name is to whatever you want it to be, with counting starting at whatever number you choose.

music addictions

Just like Flickr was, Pandora.com was also one of those sites that i knew about but never really tried out. It's great! You type in a song or artist name, and it will create a streaming radio station based on the musical qualities of that artist/song. Unfortunately you have to pay if you want to get it commercial-free, but if you don't mind a few commercials, it's a really nice service and in the 30 minutes that I've been using it, I've found at least 3 new bands that I would like to perhaps buy a cd of. That's 1 new band every 10 minutes! The web-interface is really smooth and easy to use as well.

As a free alternative (and supposedly better), last.fm is another similar service, but i can't try it at work because it requires extra software/plugins to be installed. I'll try this one out at home later.

if you like finding new music, give one of these services a shot

flickr experiment #2

So changing the tags to things that might attract (or repel... depends on the person) people did not seem to do anything to the amount of views. I got 1 view on the picture since I started, and I imagine it was somebody who read the previous post rather than someone who was actually searching for whatever the tags were.
here's the picture:

One thing I noticed was that flickr seems to have a sort of time-based decay of the relevancy/popularity of pictures. After the picture got that 1 view, it shot up to number 17 on my "interestigness" ranking of the pictures, up from last place at number 72. I noticed that some of my older pictures, which had gotten 15+ views, were among the "least interesting" pictures, only because they have not been viewed in such a long time.

Perhaps the way to keep pictures up on the rankings is to include them in groups (while they are new to the group, they'll stay at the top of that group). Also, I should include them in blog posts or other such things where they get some exposure. Sitting on the last page of my photo set is not the way to get recognition. However, they are on the last page because they are old, and thus they probably SHOULD be falling in "interestingness". Either way, it's something to consider if I ever have a need of reviving a dying picture.