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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

vayacondia

9:30p test test test

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vorpal

6:02p Ethnic cuisines you dislike? So... we've talked a lot about types of food that you like. Now how about what style of ethnic cuisines you dislike? For me, I like nearly everything I've tried so far, but I have to say that Latin cuisines of all types don't do much for me and I don't find them very interesting, memorable, or exciting. Mexican in particular really doesn't turn me on. I suspect the same would be true of some European cuisines, but I haven't tried them often enough to know.

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Monday, November 9th, 2009

chezmax

7:07p Best Picture Movie Reviews: 1940: Rebecca 1940: Rebecca [Zip.ca] [IMDB] [Wikipedia] This movie definitely has a different flavour then the others I've watched so far, being more of a psychological movie than the previous ones. It is based on a book by one Daphne du Maurier, and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and produced by David O. Selznick, who had also produced the previous years winner, Gone With The Wind. The young unnamed narrator, on a trip to Monte Carlo as a companion to Ms. Van Hopper, a wealthy but unpleasant American, meets the widower Maxim de Winter, and falls in love with him over the next few weeks, while Ms. Van Hopper is laid up in bed with the flu. Ms. Van Hopper receives a letter that her daughter is engaged, and makes haste to travel to New York. The narrator is distraught about leaving, and the aritocratic Maxim proposes to her, which she accepts, and becomes the new Mrs. de Winter. Mrs. de Winter moves in with Maxim at his Estate, Manderly, and the main part of the story unfolds. The title character, Rebecca, is Maxim's late wife, and her memory pervades the estate, and begins to colour her interactions in the house, with the staff, family, and Maxim. More intrigue unfolds, and I found the movie quite fascinating. The extent to which Rebecca has influence while never actually appearing in the movie and being quite dead is fantastic, and never feels force. The ending is not happy, but does offer a strange sense of closure to the film. All in all, I quite enjoyed it, and though it is not spectacular in any way, I feel it is one of stronger films in this collection to date.

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Sunday, November 8th, 2009

the2belo

1:19a Nighttime shots of Gifu Station Square (with wallpapers!) Click on each for 1280 x 850 wallpapers. The fountain in the new square, with the Oda Nobunaga statue in the background. From the walkway overlooking the square, an ocean of taxis. Christmas has come early to Gifu. .

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Saturday, November 7th, 2009

vorpal

7:04a Movies: 2012 Who here plans to see the movie 2012 when it comes out? Honestly, having seen a metric buttload of movies this year, I can honestly say that it seems like it's going to easily take the title of Most Retarded Movie of 2009, stealing it cleanly from Knowing, or possibly this year's Final Destination movie (which is the only movie I almost walked out of in probably over 60 movies I've seen, which I only attended because I was interested in going to a more "adult" 3D movie). Frankly, there is nothing I detest more when it comes to movies than action flicks and endless mindless violence / destruction. (This is why, despite the fact that it had many good ideas, I had a really hard time fully enjoying District 9). The previews for 2012 have made me roll my eyes so much that I fear I might simultaneously sprain them both. I would rather watch a fruit fly live its entire life and die than go see it. In other news, my favourite movie of the year? Easily Coraline. Loved, loved it. Only movie I liked enough to repeat more than once: I went three times.

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Thursday, November 5th, 2009

rauros

9:25p Pair Programming Exercise: Conway's Game of Life Tuesday I went do the ChicagoRuby meeting downtown. The event of the day was a random pair programming exercise. The exercise was Conway's game of life. Dave Giunta and myself got an (apparently) working implementation in about two hours. ( The algorithm )

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chezmax

11:18a Snow! Ewww, that looks an awful lot like snow outside. Very wet snow.

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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

vayacondia

6:12p I'd do this if either of my neighbors actually did decorations. see more Epic Fails

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rauros

10:45a Adventures in plugins: Disk Clock 2.0 The first stage of the massive Disk Clock refactoring project is complete. Features and disks have been slowly coalesced and excised into separate files. The change is so thorough I'm starting to call it 2.0, even though it isn't a publicized release. This implies that the public release will be some 2.n, but so it goes. From around 2200 lines, the main Javascript file is down to 700, though framing ceremony and modularity handling have undoubtedly increased the total size. In fact zip file size has gone from 147kB to 184kB, which says something about modern software engineering practice and the disappearance of small applications. The next stage is to get a switchable runtime/compiletime require mechanism working so I don't need the great litany of script tags in the html document. ( Read more... )

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Saturday, October 31st, 2009

vorpal

7:33p ATTENTION!!! NANOWRIMO WRITERS!!! If you're working on NaNoWriMo this year, could you just leave me a comment here letting me know? I'm going to create a special friends list for my NaNo buddies, and I want to add you to it! I'm going to try to use my procrastination time to keep up with how you're all doing and cheer you on and share the joy of NaNo together! If you're using a different LJ account for NaNo, be sure and let me know that too eh? *excited for the madness to commence!* Much love to all (those who are doing NaNo - the rest of you can choke on sunlight and die)! Conditionally yours, Sebbie current mood: agog

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vorpal

6:55p NaNoWriMo 2009 Woo hoo! Five hours away from NaNoWriMo bliss, yo! After very little deliberation, I've decided to follow suit with what I did last year and just write complete and utter random absurdist nonsense. Last year's story was one of the most fun things I've ever written, and I had a blast doing it precisely because it was so unstructured, weird, directionless, and over-the-top. I just farted out a couple brainstorming paragraphs in advance a few minutes ago, and this is what I've got so far: Unos J. J. Wickerbacker had decided, at some point during a rather bizarre and destructive youth, that if something was not making him money, then it must be costing him money. He did not particularly care for things that cost him money, and thus early on he came to the conclusion that anything that cost him money should be torn down. Unfortunately for humanity, J. J. Wickerbacker owned far more than his share of worldly possessions coupled with plenty of moolah and a rather hoardsome, greedy collector’s eye, so the passing of years left no shortage of ruined buildings, bridges, monuments, museums, and mothers in his wake; on his seventeenth birthday, J. J. realized that his mother hadn’t directly brought him a profit once during her life, being a stay-at-home mother (and a delightful cook, at that, her specialty being classical Italian with a focus on polenta dishes), and thus he ordered her to be torn down, as it were. The “incident” ended up being swift and merciful, if not perhaps a little too bloody, but it was all worthwhile to everyone involved, for they could rest easy knowing that J. J. would be able to sleep a little more soundly at night, content in the knowledge that he was one step closer in being one mother fewer in protecting his vast network of wealth. Dos The healing potions were rather pretty in their corked up glass bottles: a rainbow of colours sans yellow, since everyone knows that yellow potions and healing are two things that clearly, in no way, shape, or form go hand-in-hand together. “Do you want to drink one?” Francine asked with as obscene a wink as she could muster. “Look at the label on the bottle,” Hollister insisted insistently, pointing to a rather ominous line scrawled in ink and a font that was so insisting that one could not turn a blind eye to it, even should one be blind. “WARNING: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD HEALTHY PEOPLE DRINK THIS POTION. THERE WILL BE SEVERE, DIRE, AND REGRETTABLY PREVENTABLE REPERCUSSIONS. JUST SAY A VOCIFEROUS NO TO POTION ABUSE. PLEASE RETURN BOTTLE TO RECEIVE YOUR DEPOSIT WHERE APPLICABLE.” “Oh, they always put warnings like that on the bottle. How dangerous could it be?” Francine questioned mischievously, and if Hollister squinted just right (or wrong, rather), he could see not only one but a small army of grinning little devils perched on Francine’s left shoulder, all asking for Trouble with a capital T. Tres Every successful story requires a rich and buttery helping of a fringe lunatic religious cult. We shall call ours the Whackolanterns for reasons that, in not this story but another story, shall approach clarity but possibly never achieve it. The leader, who we shall name Jimberly, likes gardening, British television comedies, quiet walks on the beach, food architexture, speaking in Klingon, and inconspicuously dropping bombs in his wake. His biggest strength is that he is a strong and handsome man with great charisma and a generous endowment. His weakness is knots. He has two helpers: one for his ties and the other for his shoes. While two such helpers might seem overly extravagant and not in line with the stereotypical behaviour of a cult leader, due to union rules, it is strictly prohibited to request a tie-tier to tie a shoelace, and vice-versa except under extenuating circumstances, and thus, Jimberly had no choice in the matter. This frustrated him, but not enough to inspire him to evolve from complaining to doing something about it. L'End. current mood: amused

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Thursday, October 29th, 2009

vorpal

2:38p Yay! Fun with ramen reviews! So, for those of you who don't know (probably most of you), I'm in love with this guy's YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/tontantin Essentially, he loves ramen and reviews ramen and other instant noodle products from all over the world, which I think is really cool. He's rated over 4200 different noodles now and puts all his reviews up on YouTube. Anyways, I decided that it might be fun and good practice for my machine learning skills to extract the pertinent data from his reviews and use it to program a neural network. (If you don't know what that is, the idea is that you write a program that you train with his previous reviews, and then given a new instant noodle product, it can predict what his review will be, i.e. my program will learn to think like this particular ramen reviewer.) Anyways, I'm putting my data into a text file separated by commas with the following fields: Product Number Company Country Product Name Purchase Price Net Weight Energy Sodium Container Noodles Water Hot Dog? Kosher? Cook Time Rating Ingredient list For example, here's an entry: 4228,Nissin Foods,Japan,JAL Selection Ramen de Sky Japanese Soy Sauce Flavor,unknown,37,162,980,regular,fried,unknown,no,no,3:00,2,powder soup,dehydrated meat,dehydrated fish,dehydrated vegetables i.e. product 4228, which is made by Nissin Foods (a Japanese company) and is called JAL Selection Ramen de Sky Japanese Soy Sauce Flavor, is of unknown price, weighs 37 g, has 162 calories and 980 g of sodium, and comes in a regular shaped container. The noodles are fried, and an unknown amount of water was used in the cooking process, to which no hot dog was added. The product is not kosher. It cooked for 3:00, and the author awarded it a 2 out of 5. The special ingredients for this soup are powder soup, dehydrated meat, dehydrated fish, and dehydrated vegetables. Anyways, the joy of Python is that I can take my text file and using one line of code, I can read it into my program and convert it right into the format I need: A = [(i[:15],i[15:]) for i in [a.strip().split(',') for a in open('data').readlines()]] This converts the entry above into: (['4228', 'Nissin Foods', 'Japan', 'JAL Selection Ramen de Sky Japanese Soy Sauce Flavor', 'unknown', '37', '162', '980', 'regular', 'fried', 'unknown', 'no', 'no', '3:00', '2'], ['powder soup', 'dehydrated meat', 'dehydrated fish', 'dehydrated vegetables']) (Note: it also processes ALL the entries in the file in one swoop, not just one at a time!) Yay, Python! *humps* current mood: impressed

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