2,881 miles

That's how many miles of road Google says lie between my house and my new dorm. Tomorrow my dad and I will slowly start eating away at those.

Orientation starts in a bit over a week. First round of quals is in less than two weeks. Egads.

It's amazing how much of your life can fit inside a relatively small car...

kde 4.1

Well, I figured I might as well try out the newest KDE version. I'm not a KDE user, on my laptop I use XFCE and on my desktop I use GNOME + Compiz Fusion.


I tested it on my laptop (running Fedora 10). I just did yum groupinstall kde-desktop and then logged out of my xfce session and logged into XFCE.

First impressions:

• Aesthetically, it's not bad, though I don't like the window decorations and the widget styles and stuff. I tried changing them but none of the defaults really suited me. Getting rid of the ugly title stripes makes it look a lot better. The panels and plasmoids are pretty good looking though.
  
• The bottom panel is too big, imo. I tried resizing it, but it crashed, taking down nm-applet and my wireless with it. Oops.
  
• Kopete may have more features than Pidgin, but I don't like the way it looks/behaves. Lots of cool default plugins though, and it looks like it has video support?
  
• Konqueror is an ok browser, though I like my Firefox + Vimperator.
  
• krunner (alt-f2) is really nice, much better than the xfce and gnome run dialogs.
  
• I don't like the way the main menu is set up, though the searchbar is nice.
  
• The system settings is ok, kind of like the XFCE system settings but prettier. It's a lot like the Mac OS X dialog.
  
• 2d stuff is ... SLOW. Also I can't figure out how to enable compositing even though I know my card supports it (and compositing works without a hitch in GNOME and XFCE4).
  
• Dolphin seems ok, though I think I like nautilus better. The single-click to open default is very annoying. Split view is nice.
  
• I used to be an Amarok user before switching to Exaile. Amarok 2 looks nice and has a lot of potential... but it's still missing most of the features that made Amarok 1.4 great.
  
• Overall, I think KDE 4 is still very much a work in progress... it's usable, but it's not comfortable... and I don't think it's just that I'm not used to it.
  

grad schools...

CU Boulder uses paypal for grad application processing... lol.

In other news, I've so far submitted my applications for CU Boulder, Caltech, MIT, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and Berkeley. I've only Arizona and Washington left to do. For Washington, it's a matter of hitting submit and paying the app fee.

In worse news, one of my recommenders still hasn't submitted her recommendation for me... even though the deadline for some of these programs was 2 weeks ago. I realize it doesn't really matter that it's late, but I do wish she'd submit it soon.

Latex Flash Cards

I posted a new program (python script, really) I wrote a while ago on my program page. It's a simple flash card program that reads properly-formatted plain text files. Also, the flashcards may contain latex.

Screenshot:


If you want to use it, you'll need python, latex, dvipng and probably a Unix-ish environment (Linux, Mac OS X, cygwin, etc.). I've only tested it on Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora), though.

I don't think it will work on Windows proper because I don't think os.system() works properly on Windows (in my limited experience trying to get a python script running on Windows). Also, I use Unix-like command flags, whereas the windows versions of dvipng and latex probably use Windows-style command flags...

I originally wrote latex_flash.py this summer to help study for the physics GRE. To that end, I have included a sample deck of flashcards containing some physics formulas. I have a bunch of small utilities like this I've written over time, but most of them aren't in any condition to be distributed.

Making something fit for distribution is difficult and time-consuming: you need instructions, helpful error messages, comments, a simple way to configure (in this sense, latex_flash.py kind of fails... you have to modify the source in order to configure stuff), general polish, and a name for the program (again, here latex_flash.py kinda fails).

Under the bridge?

I can't tell if the author of http://sciencedefeated.wordpress.com/ is a troll or an idiot.

For example, here is an excerpt from a post entitled The Three Thousand Year Reich of Negative Numbers:

The curious reader might be interested to know that Diophantus and the Greek thinkers rejected the concept of negative numbers (and irrational numbers, of course) as “patently ridiculous” and “idiotic.” And we are a Greek-based society. So to borrow David Hume’s plaintive question - Then whence Negative Numbers? The answer to this question lies in the Orient. If there was ever a “yellow menace,” negative numbers are it. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Muslims gave us negative numbers. Not the superior Greeks. Is this a coincidence? I think not. These countries have had a vested interest in the concept from the very beginning.

Fortunately, however, negative numbers are behind a very thin conceptual veil. Once removed, it is easy to see the “Chinaman behind the curtain.” I’ll just say QUED ahead of time. Observe:

I can have three horses, but I cannot have negative three horses. Some people, suffering from Cognitive Dissonance (CD), suggest that “debt” is a manifestation of negative numbers. But that’s really just arguing semantics. Wittgenstein and Derrida disproved semantics back in the 20th century. In any case, what’s really going on in the situation is not that I have negative horses; rather, I owe some positive horses (Positive horses=horses that exist; countable horses. Who would want to be owed imaginary horses?). We can get by just fine without negative numbers. Besides, the Universe is full of stuff, not -stuff. ...

Godwin's law notwithstanding, it's astonishing to me that someone can stand by those statements. The entire blog is full of such nonsensical drivel...

The Wilhelm Scribble

Danny and I are starting a webcomic thingie. We'll see how long we can keep this up. Right now the art style is kind of sketchy; it will probably vary tremendously.

Right now, it's called theWilhelm Scribble. If the etymology is unfamiliar, click on this here link :)

Don't ask...

...but do click to make bigger. That is, if you can handle it.