I had to go to Ottawa last night to see Star Trek: Nemesis due to the complete lack of theatres in Brockville right now. The movie was alright, some good parts, some bad parts. I thought it was better than the last Star Trek movie, although maybe not as good as First Contact. Shinzon was a solid villian, probably the best since Khan.
Gallup released its poll indicating the most admired men and women in America. George W. Bush is leading the pack and Rev. Billy Graham is at number six, pffering a glimpse at the intelligence levels and priorities of the American people. Clinton is a smart man, Bush is a puppet.
I was checking out the Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003 at space and came across an article outlining the Ekpyrotic Universe as an alternative to our current model of creation. Chiefly the idea that there are no parallel universes or alternate worlds, rather just one universe with multiple dimensions. Their model has essentially five spatial dimensons (the fourth being time) with the ‘big bang’ occuring as a result of four dimensional membranes colliding in five dimensional space. Three cheers for theoretical physics.
Five dimensions is a bit of a mindfuck, so I embarked on a small internet quest to find out more about the concept. This article explains the Kaluza Klien Theory that postulates a fifth dimension in an attempt to unify electromagnetism and general relativity, I don’t really understand it. This description is a little bit easier to wrap the head around, less mathy more normal english. This article’s a little bit heady but it outlines trying to grasp the ideas of hyper and ultracubes. And another article outlining the ideas behind multidimensional space (probably the easiest to conceptualize out of all of them). Many of the multispatial concepts and ideas seem to be connected with superstring theory, which just leads to the opening of another can of worms. I’ll finish this off with some diagrams that offer an attempt at visualizing 4D space.
The Boahen Lab at the University of Pennsylvania has an overview of the problems faced in creating computers that rival/emulate the human brain.
Time is carrying a decent year-end review article . I thought it was well written, although I did skim parts of the piece. It’s somewhat snarky and probably appeals to me because many of the thoughts mirror my own. It’s all about encompassing a year in broad blanket statements so it all ends up as a nice neat package that the television generation can digest before complete boredom sets in.
The obligatory season’s greetings et al. I made an attempt at finding an html christmas card that I made for the family back in 1997 but it appears to have been deleted. It was on a geocities account (one of the old ones from back when they had the long neighbourhood concept addresses) and had christmas midi music, a snowman and multied text wrapped up in a nice minimalist design; I was impressed with myself.
PTHiTunesNotifier: a little utility that will show you the track information in an overlay box when the song changes in iTunes. It also has the option to display the track info all of the time.
I’ve been listening to The Streets a bit lately, it’s good stuff. The website is alright too, the nice grungy motif and all.
One week of exams wasn’t too hard to deal with, it kept me away from the site for a bit though. I made a couple of posts but just realized today that my hosts upgraded some packages which caused moveable type to break. The forums at Moveable Type helped my figure out the problem.
I ended up going to the midnight showng of The Two Towers last night. I really enjoyed it, although it seemed a tad longish. That might have been a sideeffect of watching the extended cut of the Fellowship of the Ring earlier in the day. I can’t say whether it held relatively true to the book or not, I haven’t read it in a few years. It stood up well as a movie, or at least as the second movie of an epic trilogy. It’s a challenge to make a good movie from a story when you don’t have a beginning or ending to work with.
The most mindblowing part for me was Gollum. Here’s an article detailing some of the processes used to capture and animate the character. Having just finished up a graphics course and being more aware of the problems facing 3D modeling, I was astounded. Gollum looked very real, not quite like I envisioned but not that far off.
Who wants to write an exam at 9 in the morning? Who wants to be awake? Apparently, a lot of people do. I guess they wake up before noon everyday. The one thing the books don’t tell you about this time of day is the cold. Sweet Jesus is it cold. In the wee morning hours that I’m accustomed to, there’s a least some residual heat left from daytime. Or maybe not, and maybe the books do tell you about the cold. Books.
I should probably get a little more studying accomplished in the next hour or two. It’s time for computer graphics: OpenGL, the rendering pipeline, vector spaces, ray tracing, all that jazz.
Earlier today, I read this review of a Snoop Dogg concert in Edmonton (it might have been two) and found that it didn’t make much sense. I went back and reread it just now, it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny though. My theory is that if you’re name is Fish Griwkowsky you can get away with writing whatever you want.
If you don’t rock out to Self Esteem by the Offspring, you’re a liar. That goes for the rest of Smash too. It doesn’t seem like a good study album but I’ve owned it for a long long time, so it doesn’t seem intrusive. Put it on the stereo and take a trip to back in the day.
Last summer I had my bike stolen, right off the front porch. I called up the police and told them about it, they never found my bike. However, they were nice enough to put me in their telephone directory. So, whenever they’re looking for money to host some event or produce a brochure they call me and many others I imagine. Policing is a business too. I imagine they pull a lot of people in too, the ones who feel guilty about something. Maybe they’ve tagged every occasion that I haven’t given them money, so that when I reach a certain point of non-compliance they can arrest me for something stupid and get the money that way.
An article outlining a prototype for a tornado in a can. It’s used to pulverize whatever goes in; diapers, chickens, jellyfish. I know if i had one i’d be throwing everything in it. Here’s a diagram from the patent office that shows the machine in greater detail.
Here’e and article detailing one of the few remaining companies that press vinyl in the states (and the related thread on slashdot. There are some insights into the resurgence of the medium, most of it fairly obvious; movies and djs. I picked up a record player this summer, as a result most of the music i’ve paid for this year has been on vinyl. When you can pick up albums like Ziggy Stardust for a dollar, why would you bother going out and buying the cd? You own the album, so you can grab the mp3s and make a copy on cd legally. And there is of course the album art on records; so much better (and bigger).
Just finished giving the links section a quick once over. Culled out a bunch of deadlinks (I hadn’t looked at it in awhile) and updated the stylesheet. Still need to update it with more of the sites that I visit semi-regularly, but that’ll take a bit of time.
On a side note, I love BBEdit. A text editor that codes things depending on the file and allows you to open/save via FTP? I can open up templates and such, hack away at them for awhile, save and have the changes take effect right away. Whee.
That title is probably a mistake, google’s going to run buckwild. Anyway, free porn from the Modern Humorist.
I’ve reverted to the default moveable type templates in an effort to get to know the system a bit better. I’ve started tweaking them a bit, rearranged the archives, attempted to implement a site search and started work on some ideas in my head. Figured that I may as well dive into the redesign and make changes gradually, rather than starting something and getting bored/frustrated with it before I’ve finished it all. There’s lots of pictures and things i’ve written for the paper that are sitting around waiting to be formatted and uploaded.
Go watch the 5 minute episode IV. Chewie is cool.
It took me awhile to figure out how to get gnome installed and running but I did. It wasn’t too hard looking back at it. There’s a lot of nice things to help you out, like Fink and the graphical FinkCommander. Here’s a guide to help get the the x11 system running with Fink. I guess the key for me is to read some documentation, i can’t just dive into things and expect to know what i’m doing. All in all, my system is doing some neat things: running OS X, with Virtual PC running WinXP and XDarwin running GNOME.
I ran into some file permission crap when I was doing all of this. I found a nice little calculator to help out with chmod values.
Here’s a good terminal guide for OS X, aimed at people with little knowledge of unix.
An interview with Richard Gabriel, he holds a Ph.D in Computer Science and an MFA in Poetry. There’s some good talk of how the way computer programming is taught should be changed to reflect the creativity necessary to develop software.
I’ve been playing around with some stuff this afternoon, including KungTunes. It allows me to get at the playlist data from iTunes using AppleScript, which basically means I can have this nice page that says what the last 25 songs I listened to were.
This guy has a little bit too much time on his hands.
This afternoon’s task after waking up was to convert the database from DB to mysql. I think all went well, but I could be wrong.
School kicked the shit out of me for a couple weeks. I didn’t see a whole lot of my house or computer. When I did, I seemed to be working on assignments. Exam season is here, which means slacking off for awhile before actually getting down to studying.
I’ve started getting ideas again for websites. It’s like a lot of my ideas were forcibly removed when I lost harddrives in the summer. I’m going to start updating things again and spend less timing staring vacantly at the monitor. I started off by upgrading to Moveable Type 2.51. Next in the pipes are some redesigns and work on various projects.
I seem to forget that I can jot down whatever stupid ideas come into my head. It seems that I’m always opening a text editor to write shit down in. Maybe I could script something between BBEdit and Moveable Type, so I could just do new entries like that. Hmm.
