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.

What you see

is what you get now. Including the cheesy header graphic. Until I change my mind. :)

I suck at wrapping things

So among clothes and some other stuff, I received a Wacom graphics tablet (A Bamboo, if you're curious... those are the cheap ones lol).

The stylus worked w/ hotplugging, but it took a little while to set up properly (apparently Fedora 10 has no xorg.conf by default, but system-config-display will create one for you, from which you can edit it in accordance to the instructions on the Linux Wacom page). Anyway, as is probably plainly obvious, I'm not quite used to it yet; the whole absolute positioning thing confuses me. Hopefully that will improve. At the very least, I can more easily transcribe my terrible handwriting to my computer.

My handwriting has always been atrocious. Even when it's legible, it's ugly. The worst things are ζ and ξ. When somebody dares use those as variables, I just draw squiggly lines because I can't do any better. I haven't run across them both being used in the same context, thankfully.

Winter Break

Kind of boring / uneventful.

Here are some things I've done:

• I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 10. For some reason the in-place update w/ the DVD meant for updating didn't seem to work (gave an error about a corrupt package, so could have been a corrupted {download | burn} I suppose), so I just did a fresh install. My laptop actually has /home mounted on a separate partition, which made the process pretty convenient. Unfortunately, my slow home connection (by my dorm room connection standards) made installing all the packages I use (who knew there would be so many?) kind of a pain. Some comments:
  
  
  
  
  • Plymouth is cool. I don't boot all that often, but it actually looks cool now (better than any other boot animation I've seen, IMO).
    
  • AMD/ATI needs to work on timely support. I have an x600 in my laptop, and though the open source radeon driver works pretty well, the proprietary driver is nice to have. I think it took something like four months for Fedora 9 support... hopefully it will be less than that.
    
  • Pulseaudio seems to work worse than it did in F9. I've played around with the settings a bunch and it works better now than at first install, but still not as good as F9. It seems to use a lot of CPU and it doesn't work well with Wesnoth (read, SDL) audio (though that may be because I compiled the development version of Wesnoth from source and missed some configure flag?)
    
  • Weird XFCE bug with scim (Smart Common Input Platform) that disables the use of the the XFCE Window Manager Settings and Window Manager Tweak dialogs... I think killing some processes fixed it, but I ended up removing scim altogether. Hopefully I won't need it.
    
  • Yay new Nautilus version with tabs w00t!
    
  • Supposedly PackageKit has improved? I think it has, it doesn't hang as often (though there was that dbus bug which stopped it from functioning). I still prefer using yum from the command line.
    
  • Overall, I thought it was a solid release, though perhaps not as solid as F9 (though I'll stick with it for updated software et al.)
    
  
  
  
• I've started playing around with mercurial a bit. I'm kind of hoping to use it for source control for a few classes next quarter (Why mercurial over git? I have to collaborate w/ Windows users, and mercurial has better windows support.) To get more used to mercurial and to kill some time, I've started writing a relatively unambitious 2-D top-down shooting game in python (using pygame). Maybe I'll finish it, maybe I won't... we'll see.
  
  
• My parents had a Christmas party (which, incidentally, just ended a few minutes ago), and they wanted to have karaoke. Now, we have this karaoke machine that plays CD+G's, but we've only the sample CD+G that came with it (which contains such smash hits as Take Me Out to the Ballgame and America the Beautiful). Clearly that would not do. Fortunately, it seems MP3+G's are readily available on the Internets. I found a python script cdg2bin (part of cdgtools) which was ridiculously useful for what I wanted to do. I just put the .mp3 and .cdg tracks I wanted to burn in a folder, ran cdg2bin.py *.cdg inside that folder and then used cdrdao to burn the generated bin/toc files. Easy as π
  
  
• Freenx is kind of cool, though I don't really usually want to forward over my entire desktop, so ssh -YC is more useful for me...
  
  
• I've offically read all of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Great comic, and it's inspired me to try out this comic-drawing thing again. Alas, I'm plagued by a lack of ideas that might appeal to most people:
  
  
  
  I guess most people don't make the same association between python and Duck Typing that I do. Oh well.
  
  
• I'm looking forward for a cessation of Christmas carols. Me no likey.
  

That is all for now
Except for some weird reason
I wrote a haiku

Ok, this didn't work out so well, did it?

Maybe I'll try again.