Category Archives: life

Spring has arrived in suburbia! [Weekly Head Voices #40]

Posted on March 6, 2011 | 4 Comments

Allow me to start with two bits of good news:

  1. You have arrived at the 40th edition of the Weekly Head Voices! This blog will soon buy a black leather jacket, start riding around on a motorcycle that is far too big for it and see its therapist concerning its little “Is this all there is?” existential crisis.
  2. Spring has arrived in suburbia! Today was glorious, with zillions of little kids running around outside in the sun, and parents chatting contentedly about the barbecue potential of the coming season. See this camera-phone impression:

Scenes of spring, straight from the hood.

It’s been a really busy week, so let’s get started. In a surprising and innovative move, I’ll be using headings instead of bullets to indicate each new item in this week’s Weekly Head Voices!

Internet Video Conferencing

I had to organize a mini internet-video-conference, i.e. more than two people at different locations chatting with voice and video over internet. Skype you say? No sir, Skype wants more money for this functionality. I’m already paying them for Skype Access and for the odd VOIP call to a PSTN line, but I find this extra surprise inexcusable. Therefore, without any further ado, I bring you this week’s WHV Review:

  • Skype for video conferencing: SUCKS.
  • TokBox for video conferencing: RULES! I was able to set this up in 2 minutes, and it required no software besides flash-enabled browsers at all nodes. All conference participants get a link and can join immediately, without logging in. Unfortunately, TokBox is stopping their service in April, as they’ve changed their business model and are  selling their tech (OpenTok) to OEMs. After April, I will probably look at PalTalk for my free video-conferencing needs.

Powerline networking

Because one of my favourite WAB (Work Avoidance Behaviour) routines is to further optimise my home network (1 cable modem, 3 router / access points, 2 servers, 3 laptops, 1 media centre and 1 networked game console), I bought PowerlineAV adapters to bridge one of the wireless sections (pulling cables between the floors involved is a schlep). Hey, that brings us to this week’s second WHV Review:

  • Powerline / HomePlug powerline network adapters: SUCKS! Read all about it in this detailed blog post on my nerd blog.

Hacking

(NERD ALERT! NERD ALERT! skip this paragraph if you’re not an uber nerd.) I’m old school, so when I say hacking, I mostly mean doing hardcore programming. I fixed a nasty and long-standing bug in the GSVideo video acquisition stack for processing and wrote about in another nerdy blog post, and then I updated my multiple-marker modification to NyARToolkit for processing to support the P3D renderer. Huh?! You should’ve skipped this paragraph!

Fetishes

As is undoubtedly the case with all of you, I possess quite a number of fetishes, two of which I’m going to share with you today. Don’t worry, they’re relatively safe.

I used to be one of those die-hard Norton Commander users in the DOS days. Norton Commander was what is called an Orthodox File Manager, or OFM. My OFM-fetish has been dormant for years, but has come back with a vengeance due to my rather late discovery of Far Manager. What a crazy and wonderful piece of software! (To you Loonix-fetishists: MC doesn’t even come close. Unfortunately, Far is Windows only.) Check out the special effects:

Far Manager version 2. This thing has more hot-keys than you have keys on your keyboard. It can do ANYTHING.

My long-time musical fetish, the brilliant Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails ring a bell?) won an Oscar for his work, together with Attacus Ross, on the Social Network soundtrack. By the way, the movie also pleasantly surprised me, and would have done so even without Reznor’s brilliant work.

Conclusion

My brain has served up very little backyard philosophy this week, probably because I’ve been too busy acting like a little code-monkey, so I’ll limit my philosophising to the following:

  1. Thou shalt not link facebook and twitter status updates. These are two different forms of media, and you’re possibly alienating (that’s a big word for “ticking off”) your most loyal followers, i.e. the fantastic people following you on both networks, with duplicate status messages. See it as a challenge to drive each of your social networks in a way which most suits its nature, or see it as double the opportunity to express yourself!
  2. I’ve quoted this once before on this blog, but there are new readers, and it’s good to be reminded every so often: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. — Plato.

That’s it for this week kids. Have a beautiful and springy week!

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On the importance of taking notes. [Weekly Head Voices #38]

Posted on February 19, 2011 | 3 Comments

Post summary: Part one is about friends graduating from Evil School, part two is rather short mentioning vague bits of good news and part three is 100% time management and productivity boosting goodness! Feel free to skip, skim or reorder!

One

On Thursday, February 10, 2011, my dear friend Mister Krekel graduated from Evil School after years of hard work and evil-doing, and will henceforth go through life as the formidable Doctor Krekel. Please do watch out.

Evil School. (Photo by the talented fpixel.wordpress.com.)

The joyous transition took place in the Evil School’s Academiegebouw in Leiden, and this time yours truly (I’m referring to me in a round-about fashion) even had the great honour of playing a part in the formal proceedings. If you’re curious as to what exactly this ritual constitutes, see this previous edition of the WHV on the graduation of another terribly evil colleague. I believe that the bunch of us now constitute a bona fide Axis of Evil. No, the evil jokes can unfortunately not stop yet.

The Party was held in a secret cafe nearby. You will notice that I’ve capitalised Party, as it was not your average run of the mill Evil School graduation affair, but a social event of note. Here in Holland, the PhD defence and graduation are a combined affair, and so the whole day is dedicated to just one person. It is actually very special: People take time off from work, sometimes even temporarily put aside their differences, and travel from all over to attend the festivities. It’s like a wedding, except that there’s only one of you. I can only recommend it very highly. At the Party, everyone had clearly read the memo, and they were there with that singular goal in mind: Celebrate the freshly minted Evil Doctor. Presents were given, speeches were held, photos were shown, beer was imbibed and, flying in the face of all advice concerning the mixing of alcohol, cameras and social networking, the best evil photographer in town, who’s coincidentally also in Evil School, took the most amazing photos that you should be able to see on Facebook if you’re one of the privileged few to belong to The Network, also known as The Friends of the Axis of Evil.

Two

On the good news front, you’ll see (or not) on the list of EuroVis 2011 conditional accepts, that a paper by cool colleagues from far away, to which I contributed a small part, has been conditionally accepted, and hence has a significant chance of being presented at said event in Bergen, Norway (May 31 to June 3). We also have plans to submit a poster (or two), so there’s an even more significant chance that I will make an appearance at this fantastic conference! We’re also cooking up various odds and ends that will hopefully crystallise sufficiently by the end of March to be submissible for VisWeek 2011. Cross yer fingers.

Three

Today’s backyard time management section is in fact more about planning than it is about notes. However, my Pro-Tips involve combining them in an easy to implement productivity booster. When people start out in research, one of the first bits of advice they get is keeping some kind of lab journal. I think this advice applies to more than just research: If you do any kind of independent or project work, jotting down your activities, thoughts and results during the day is useful in helping to structure your thought processes, and also very helpful when you have to backtrack a complex multi-day procedure. During my Ph.D., I filled a number of real cardboard-and-paper books with notes. More recently, I’ve started using Google Documents for the same purpose. Besides all the other advantages, having to document explicitly your work output keeps you productive and on your toes.

Pro Tip #1: Keep a lab journal, even if you don’t work in a lab.

I’ve mentioned before that my resolutions for 2011 included more concrete planning. This has manifested in a work-in-progress planning for the whole year, including milestones, awards won, and so forth, but much more practically, it has manifested in a little lab-journal-compatible trick. Every morning when I sit down to begin the day, I spend a few minutes thinking and then start the day’s journal entry by writing down, as concretely as possible, the tasks that I plan to complete by the end of the day. This also ensures that I spend effort on the important things, and not only on the urgent things. So, that brings us to:

Pro Tip #2: At the start of each day, write down in your lab journal exactly and concretely what you plan to accomplish by the end of that day.

These pro tips appear to be quite straight-forward, but together they help one to focus, and to keep tabs on one’s effective productivity. In other words, just being terribly busy the whole day gets you nothing; the trick is being terribly busy in all the right directions.

P.S.

Somebody is clearly pushing the boundaries of awesomeness… cowboys AND aliens!

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Postmodern creativity. [Weekly Head Voices #37]

Posted on February 5, 2011 | 9 Comments

Post summary: Review humour, WhatsApp, SPA3102 gadget, hiking boots, happiness in the blue zones.

So there are people on the internets who have chosen as their creative outlet the writing of superbly entertaining fictitious reviews of real products on real e-commerce sites. See for example this customer review of a tub of uranium ore that was once available on Amazon:

You used to be able to buy uranium ore on amazon. You can still read the awesome reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Inc-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM/

I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty. — reviewer Patrick J. McGovern

For more examples, please do see this article on Cracked.com. What a fantastic creative medium! One day, when I grow up, I too shall spend time honing my review writing skills.

Because I’ve just realised that this post was never going to be more than a mishmash of odd but hopefully interesting tidbits, I shall now switch to bullet-list mode:

  • I’ve slowly started developing principles against sending texts (SMS), purely because I think the telephone companies are charging way too much for these 160 character micro-messages. Even if you do have a great big SMS bundle, usually when you text overseas, you still get whacked. WhatsApp does a pretty good job at being a texting substitute: It runs in the background on Nokia, Android, iPhone or Blackberry smartphones, and allows one to send and receive unlimited SMS-like messages via one’s dataplan to other WhatsApp users. Just like texting, it only requires telephone numbers, so directly after installation, one sees a list of all one’s WhatsApp-running contacts (from the phone’s database). Big advantage over for example BlackBerry BBM (ping) is that WhatsApp runs on many more telephones. In short: Try it, you might like it!
  • On the theme of sticking it to the man (and when I say “man” I mean “telephone company”), I recently acquired a Cisco SPA3102 Voice Gateway (used to be Sipura, then Linksys). It’s a tiny little box that sits in-between your broadband connection (ADSL or cable modem) and house telephone and, if configured correctly, routes all telephone calls via SIP (voice-over-ip) providers. In short: Seriously cheap phone calls via internet, telephone company never even sees you and hence can’t really bill you. The only problem is that this little box has the most complex configuration interface I’ve ever seen. There must be at least a few hundred configuration settings, and if you get any one of them wrong, your phone system simply stops working. I’ve written up what you need to know at my Even Nerdier Blog.
  • What’s the deal with hiking boots and engineers? Hiking boots are great for hiking, but wearing them to work (or far worse, to a social event) must be the most extreme way of showing your asymptotic support of function over form. I have to admit that I myself have sinned before, but usually I have a good excuse, such as that storm outside. There are some people however (and the matching hiking boots worn by in-love engineers / nerds are the absolute worst) that don’t seem to understand that form and function do need to be in some form of balance for the world to function and for me to maintain my non-nauseous state.
  • It is important to note that Timberland boots strike this balance just perfectly, as you can see below:

This is what form and function look like when they're in perfect balance.

To conclude this post, I’d like to summarise a lifehacker summary of Dan Buettner’s book on the factors that play a role in the happiness of people living in the world’s “blue zones” (countries / regions where people live long and contented lives): 1. work less, 2. keep your commute as short as possible, 3. have regular vacations, 4. socialise with your colleagues and finally, 5. make sure you work for a good boss.

No big surprises there, but sometimes it’s nice being reminded of the stuff we should never have forgotten in the first place.

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2011: A Cyber-Suburban Odyssey [Weekly Head Voices #35]

Posted on January 9, 2011 | 3 Comments

In spite of last year’s Space Odyssey also not quite panning out as Kubrick and Clarke might have hoped, I had a great year. Sure, it had its fair share of curve-balls, but in terms of personal growth (am I even allowed to use that term? I hope the cliché police are still on vacation) I am most satisfied. My traditional year-end vacation, as per usual filled with family, friends (slightly less than usual due to genetic offspring #2 related constraints), sun, sand, beer and deep thought, helped wonderfully in my subconscious processing (the most important kind) and integration of the past year’s events.

A boat peacefully floating on the calm waters of the New Harbour in Hermanus. The sky was more blue and the water more azure than you can imagine. Accompanied by S+R, I was experiencing what can only be called a perfect day.

I’m still working on my New Year’s resolutions, because I think it’s important to have excuses spend time thinking about one’s ways. There’s something in there about more concrete planning (I’m working on a secret list of milestones for 2011), and also about spending more time each day on the important tasks as opposed to the urgent tasks. How about you?

May your journey in 2011 be at least as cool as the cyber-suburban odyssey I have planned! To get you in the right frame of mind, here’s a track from the Daft Punk soundtrack of the new Tron: Legacy movie:

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P.S. I’m so old, I still vividly remember the first Tron movie. It played a significant role in the shaping of my young character.

P.P.S. I’ve put my beloved E71 in storage and am now the proud owner of a charge-me-3-times-per-day-please HTC Desire Z micro-laptop with built-in phone. I’m going to try and write a post about it soon. Short story: In spite of the battery, I’m in love again.

P.P.P.S. Go and memorise Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions. Go around correcting as many people as you can. Make new friends!

P.P.P.P.S. For the fetishists amongst you, here is the yearly my-feet-on-vacation photo:

My feet having a good time at the almost-Infinity pool on the roof of the Chapman's Peak hotel (you really have to go there).

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Focus. [Weekly Head Voices #34]

Posted on November 28, 2010 | 4 Comments

On Monday, I took a stroll in the autumn with genetic offspring #2.

A mysterious path in the autumn. mysterious path + autumn = double the pensive power.

It was a stroll of somewhat above average duration. As one tends to do during this sort of stroll, I was thinking. Not the modern kind of internet thinking during which one’s line of thought gets interrupted at least three times per minute, but the old-fashioned kind, with stately, fully-formed thoughts of some complexity.

In a meta-thought moment, I had a taste of focus. The kind of focus that enables one to be fully in the moment. All thoughts of other things that need to be done, or have been done, or of other moments that one might prefer being in, are displaced by complete acceptance of the now, and one’s undivided attention.

The following bit of D.H. Lawrence seems to be a suitable conclusion to this post:

Thought, I love thought.
But not the juggling and twisting of already existent ideas.
I despise that self-important game.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,
Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of consciousness,
Thought is gazing onto the face of life, and reading what can be read,
Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to conclusion.
Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,
Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.

P.S. I’ve just registered for the Dolphins & Teleportation Symposium in Hawaii. I hope to see you there.

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