FineRedMist

Sigh--downtime

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:04:05 GMT

I've contacted the ISP. It turns out the problem is with the phone company and it is affecting a number of people in the Edmonton area. I would like to thank the person who left their wireless network insecure so I could post this.

Downtime on October 1st

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:29:28 GMT

The ISP is changing the VLAN (virtual network) I'm on at their end and the IP addresses will be changing. So there is downtime on the 1st for them to change it, and a little bit more for DNS to reflect the changes.

Happy Birthday!

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:04:33 GMT

Happy Birthday gaffetheorist!

Tiredness evidence

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:10:30 GMT

I've noticed I am excessively repetitive when tired.

This message was heavily edited to remove repetition.

GPS my kitchen

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:51:46 GMT

We are getting our kitchen renovated. I'll post who is doing it if I like the results and they don't continue to damage our existing floors too much.

One of the annoyances though was yesterday where they couldn't give us a time when they would be delivering the new cabinets. So it came to mind that it would be cool if a company could provide a generic system of having:
* GPS in every truck doing deliveries with an interface to select the next destination for delivery.
* A server that broadcasts to a user when their up for delivery next (IM, text message, phone call, whatever).
* Possibly include some statistical work to figure out how long it will be for the driver to get to your place (if the deliveries are ordered and you know the GPS coordinates along with average time spent at each location to deliver goods, then you could have a reasonable estimate).

Then people could actually get notified and leave work to be home only when they need to be instead of a four hour (or all day) "window". Most of the parts are already available too. I'm sure UPS and other delivery companies have tracking systems for what is on the vehicle and where it is. It wouldn't be that hard to tie it with a server that tracks progress and the people being visited.

Godel & Principia Mathematica

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 20:34:45 GMT

First, I will admit I know nothing and that this was a whacked out idea.

I just read an article by Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) in SEED and something he said tweaked a neuron or two and inspired the following:

Remember when you were shown in math (a + ib)(a + ib) = a * a + 2iab - b * b? Well, I was wondering if the "result" of Godel's self-referential contradiction could be treated like i here. Where we give it some symbol but can have interesting consequences when interacting with itself or other types of contradictions like the imaginary part above affectecting the "real" portion.

Anyway, monthly post of crazy thoughts complete.

Exposing inherited members in C# interfaces to COM

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:07:57 GMT

I ran into this today and it was driving me crazy.

I happen to like writing in C#. It's fast and easy and provides a lot of functionality that I use.

In this case I needed to expose the code I was writing to script, in particular VB or Java script. To do so then it made sense to expose the functionality I was writing as COM objects. This is generally quite trivial in C# by simply adding the ComVisibleAttribute to the interface or class. However it only exposes the methods on the actual class, not any methods that are public on subclasses or interfaces.

To clarify then, if you had:

[ComVisible(true)]
interface IBase 
{
    int IDoStuff();
}
[ComVisible(true)]
interface IDerived : IBase
{
    int IDoOtherStuff();
}

And you have an object of type IDerived in script, you would not be able to call IDoStuff(). Instead you would have to implement the classes as follows:

[ComVisible(true)]
interface IBase 
{
    int IDoStuff();
}
[ComVisible(true)]
interface IDerived : IBase
{
    int IDoOtherStuff();
    new int IDoStuff();
}

To expose IDoStuff(). It would be awesome if there was an easy way to explose the members and properties of an inherited class or interface at the same level without having to add a potentially arbitrary large number of methods and properties and maintain them.

If there is such a way, then please, please let me know. I find this solution inelegant in the extreme.

Evolution of Religious Belief?

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:47:44 GMT

I had already read Pascal Boyer's book on why we believe. It seems though the discussion is garnering more visibility as this graced the postings in /. to a New York Times article Darwin's God.

Now I have fulfilled my once a month posting.

Congrats Kevin!

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 19:23:41 GMT

Kudos for getting an assistant professorship at the prestigious University of Waterloo :).

Video Games Live

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:33:16 GMT

We went to see the Video Games Live concert on Monday night, which was really cool. Maybe even loosened some of the mucus in my sinuses (been sick with the flu for the past week and a half now). It's a touring show that uses the local orchestra and choirs to play music accompanied by a large video screen depicting scenes from the games the music was written for. A colleague has thoughtfully provided a link to some photos from the event at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16973533@N00/tags/videogameslive2007/. The event included a costume contest for game characters and a local programme change to include music from BioWare's Jade Empire.

Brain Out of Order

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:05:42 GMT

I stumbled across an article in December about various types of memory and thinking and about educating those that had issues with solving certain classes of problems because of how their brain works. For the life of me I can't find the article anymore. Anyway one of the points was regarding sequential problem solving and how some people are good at it and some, well, aren't. I'm now quite convinced I'm in the latter group. It at least adds a whole new dimension as to *why* I suck at certain things.

Science is like an NP problem?

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 19:56:15 GMT

This was just something that came to mind while at work on the walk across the building to the bathroom (washroom, restroom, loo, WC).

I visualise NP problems as having lots of locally optimal (as in constraining the region to a much smaller area) solutions and one globally optimal solution. Science sits at a locally optimal solution and as we expand the regions of scope of science, it eventually expands to include a new peak that is optimal for the larger region. Science (eventually) makes a jump to that new peak (not necessarily to the top of it)--sometimes climbing down the valley a bit between the two peaks to do so.

Anyway, something my brain connected oddly.

Software Pain

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 23:18:23 GMT

I've been living on Vista RC2 for some time. I had to go back to the NVidia August drivers to be able actually play the games Vista claims it was getting better for (the driver with RC2 is more recent). I finally upgraded to the full release yesterday and discovered that neither the driver that came with the release nor the updated one work for City of Heroes. Resulting in my 2560x1600 rendering to occur entirely in an 800x600 window in the lower left corner instead.

So now I'm back to reinstalling everything again except this time on XP. I think I'll wait a couple of months yet before I consider going back and trying it again. I've really lost faith in both NVidia and ATI for being able to produce a driver that actually work. I've found some annoying bugs in Vista as well (like in install paths such as "c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 8" if I select the space after "microsoft" and replace it with a "\" I get an "à" instead). F'n à!

Other gripe--installing Visual Studio 8. Since I installed Office 2007 first, I could no longer select the install path. WTF! So now I uninstall Office 2007 and am installing Visual Studio 8, then Office 2007, then install the office support for VS 8.

In a way, I wish MS still had their products being done in little silos so this sort of interop ordering pain didn't exist. What a fucking annoyance.

NeverWinter Nights 2

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 20:16:28 GMT

It took me a bit to recognise the visual style of the game. It appears to be a mashup of the original NeverWinter Nights and the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series (Xbox).

So far I'm enjoying the game despite the annoyances I'm hitting. The story has been entertaining so far and there are some amusing interchanges between the party NPCs.

First I'm really stunned by how much it chugs on my machine. I do run at 2560x1600 so I don't expect to always get the max visual settings, but I've had to turn down a lot of settings to get it to run. Oblivion seems to do much more visually without having nearly the same performance issues. I realise running Vista Beta 2 is also a variable (along with the NVidia beta drivers from September--the October ones leave a lot of visual artifacts and is horribly unstable).

However, there are some aspects that are most definitely issues in the game:

Quicksave doesn't pause the game while quicksaving--haven't managed to crash the game yet from this, but I've had my characters in the middle of traveling while doing this.
Saving over an existing game doesn't prepopulate the name of the save game with the original save game's name (pain to type it in every time).
Delay while clicking on anything. In NWN 1 I got used to doing things such as spinning the screen and clicking a point for traveling or on an NPC while the screen was in motion. That doesn't work in NWN 2--the click timing is way too slow. It doesn't register that there is a clickable such as an NPC so you end up traveling behind them or it doesn't seem to register this sort of click at all. Even just clicking on NPCs while walking is not guaranteed--it takes so long for it to determine there's an NPC under the mouse pointer that your character has moved on moving the mouse pointer away from the NPC.
Light penalties for Drow are being applied at night and in some indoor regions as well.

We have snow

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 17:06:26 GMT

I'm just feeling cold thinking about it.

PC problem identified

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:44:46 GMT

I took my PC to Memory Express which is where I bought pretty much everything in it from. They took it apart and tried each part individually.

Everything was working fine until the got to the video card. It caught on fire!

So just figuring out options since the brand and model isn't made anymore--but at least I'm covered for warrantee.

Partying too hard

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:42:19 GMT

Normally I try to restrain my amusement at the misfortune of others to a polite giggle. But this got a slightly louder laugh for those that know it. Perhaps because the victim is just soooo cute!

http://home.btconnect.com/lollipop/sobering.htm

Forecasting the life of the PC

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 17:42:26 GMT

I just saw another article today forecasting the death of the PC.

It's not going to happen.

Why? Where would our computing power go? It would need to go to big, well established corporations that provide processing power. And we would need to pay for it. But we don't trust corporations nor should we. The only other place I can think of that has the resources is government.

I don't see this happening for two reasons: security and privacy.

It is incredibly rare to find either one of them that makes a significant investment in security on behalf of their users. If we are paying for their service, then we risk having the financial information we use to pay for it at risk not only from external threats (hackers) but internal threats as well (employees that take the data). Furthermore, we risk not having a minimum amount of computing power because other corporations will have established better accounts to get the computing power they need.

This information would also be a boon for anyone that wanted to gather data on what people do to do targeted advertising, or perhaps just determine they don't like what you are doing. (GTA 3000? What horrible people you must be! Maybe your a terrorist--perhaps you would like to visit the expanded facilities at Abu Ghraib.)

There are also applications where this model doesn't fit. Games for example. Even if we were to just focus on MMO's, the amount of computational performance that exists inside your video card on its own is phenomenal. But the clients of MMOs do more than just feed textures to the graphics card for rendering. They aren't consuming all of your CPU busy-waiting for fun.

In fact, even more devices are becoming computers. The PVR I have is a linux box (thank you Panasonic and Shaw). The network attached storage I use for backups has a linux kernel on it (and is hackable for maximum personal customisation). As computing becomes cheaper, more devices are becoming computers than the other way around.

The best I can think of is as TVs start getting much better, they might replace the PC monitor. With people moving their PCs to the living room using wireless keyboards and mice to relax on their couch, that seems within the realm possibility.

*Might*

But I think I'll hold on to my Dell 30" monitor for a while. 2560x1600 is sweet.

Surprised? Not so much.

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 05:52:50 GMT

You fit in with:
Atheism

Your ideals mostly resemble those of an Atheist. You have very little faith and you are very focused on intellectual endeavors. You value objective proof over intuition or subjective thoughts. You enjoy talking about ideas and tend to have a lot of in depth conversations with people.

60% scientific.
100% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

If you would please bow your heads for a moment of silence...

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 05:36:03 GMT

Some days I go to work and I do something that makes me proud of my craft. I like those days. Sometimes though I'm horribly disappointed that my craft has so far to go to be so much more mature.

And some days it is the craftwork of others that causes me shame for my profession. For any heartache it may cause you I apologise for any such contribution I have made or that of any other.

So today I am saddened to announce that the power supply in my PC has abruptly died. At less than a year old, it was only about 25 in human years. At the prime of its life it was taken away from us and we do lament. However, we will not quit until the fans spin again and the electric flood of life flows again through the etchings of the printed circuit board. Platters will turn and ASICs will render. One day humble graphics will grace this monitor again.

Thank you.

I like this one

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:24:01 GMT

You Are Balanced - Realist - Powerful

You feel your life is controlled both externally and internally.
You have a good sense of what you can control and what you should let go.
Depending on the situation, you sometimes try to exert more control.
Other times, you accept things for what they are and go with the flow.

You are a realist when it comes to luck.
You don't attribute everything to luck, but you do know some things are random.
You don't beat yourself up when bad things happen to you...
But you do your best to try to make your own luck.

When it comes to who's in charge, it's you.
Life is a kingdom, and you're the grand ruler.
You don't care much about what others think.
But they better care what you think!

The Three Dimension Luck and Power Test

Having noticed the blogthings of others...

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:18:25 GMT

No surprise here...

You Are Pork

You like to think you're the other white meat, but many people don't want anything to do with you.
You probably smoke. And it's likely that no body part of yours is off limits.

What Kind of Meat Are You?

Continued thoughts on BNFs

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 17:33:08 GMT

Realised that I was missing expressing something from my last post.

If EXP is the root node, then doing the transformation requires a little bit extra:

_ => EXP ^ _EXP0

Where _ becomes the root node (however because it starts with an underscore it doesn't appear in the final parse). A single underscore is unique if you make sure that all other _'ed terms are derived from the LHS token in the rule it came from.

When an idea is too good to risk forgetting it for sleep

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 06:58:26 GMT

I'm messing around with BNF's, cause I'm just that kind of guy. BNF stands for Backus Naur Form or Backus Normal Form, and is used to represent context free grammers which describe programming languages. These are also used in compiler-compilers. Compilers for building compilers for other languages.

Now I'm playing around with them (don't I wish I paid more attention in second year now) and thinking of ways to do transformations to the BNF to make it as unambiguous as possible. One such issue that isn't necessarily ambiguous but kind of ugly are left hand expansions. For example if you have the expression A + B + C, is that considered (A + B) + C or A + (B + C). The former would be a left hand expansion, the latter a right hand expansion. In BNF you could represent that as:
SUM => SUM ‘+’ VALUE
SUM => VALUE
or
SUM => VALUE ‘+’ SUM
SUM => VALUE
respectively.

But expanding the first one is much uglier since it isn't clear how many SUMs you are going to end up with. With the second, you get a value. If there is a plus sign, there is another sum.

Unfortunately while in addition it doesn't really matter which way you go (at least for most number systems people care about), there are other types of expressions for which this is not interchangable so easily.

Ideally then we want to parse the above as the writer of the BNF intended. To do that I think I've come up with a nice solution (remains to be seen if it is actually elegant).

The example that illustrates the problem is the following:
EXP => EXP ‘+’ TERM
EXP => EXP ‘-‘ TERM
EXP => TERM
TERM => TERM ‘*’ FACTOR
TERM => TERM ‘/’ FACTOR
TERM => FACTOR
FACTOR => ‘(‘ EXP ‘)’
FACTOR => identifier

Where EXP represents a mathematical expression, TERM represents a group of products and divisions, FACTOR is either a sub-expression or an identifier (such as a number or symbol). I’ll leave identifier undefined since it isn’t relevant with the other operations here—we will just consider it a terminal for these purposes. Terminals are represented in single quotes (other than identifier).

Some of the previous BNF transformations I’ve been looking at are substitution and factoring to simplify and reduce expressions. I’ll be describing a new one shortly I'm calling condensation.

Factoring is doing the following operation:
EXP => EXP ‘+’ TERM
EXP => EXP ‘-‘ TERM
EXP => TERM
Becomes
EXP => EXP _EXP0
EXP => TERM

_EXP0 => ‘+‘ TERM
_EXP0 => ‘-‘ TERM

With the result that _EXP0 is now easily parsable—it takes only looking at the first term to decide what the expansion is. The use of _ before the identifier implies that when it comes to building the parse tree, the _’ed term does not contribute to the set of children. Instead the terms identified are added directly to the corresponding location amongst its siblings.

If we do this to the entire set we end up with:
EXP => EXP _EXP0
EXP => TERM
_EXP0 => ‘+‘ TERM
_EXP0 => ‘-‘ TERM
TERM => TERM _TERM0
TERM => FACTOR
_TERM0 => ‘*’ FACTOR
_TERM0 => ‘/’ FACTOR
FACTOR => ‘(‘ EXP ‘)’
FACTOR => identifier

Now we are at the situation that I wish to resolve. This is where condensation comes in. We are going to introduce a new symbol ^ to represent a condensation operation between terms.

If the algorithm hits the following expression say: A ^ B, that will be interpreted as:
1. Parse an A
2. See the ^. If I can parse the next symbol (B), then create a new A node with the original A and the (just) parsed B as its children. Goto step 2.
3. If I can no longer parse a B, then continue on past the B token.

This means we can do the following substitution in the BNF above:
EXP => TERM ^ _TERM0
_EXP0 => ‘+‘ TERM
_EXP0 => ‘-‘ TERM
TERM => FACTOR
_TERM0 => ‘*’ FACTOR
_TERM0 => ‘/’ FACTOR
FACTOR => ‘(‘ EXP ^ _EXP0 ‘)’
FACTOR => identifier

Convince yourself that this is results in the same parse tree with the advantage of now being dramatically more efficient to parse. Particularly if our B (_TERM0 and _EXP0) starts with terminals, as our expansion now does.

I want to sit down at some point and do some more analysis on this to be able to prove some useful assertions about the added functionality, but I'm already interrupting my sleep and I've now accomplished my goal of writing this down so I can look at it later without risking forgetting it.

Though of course I may look back on this in the morning and discover that my brain was on crack instead.

Morning addendum:
I'm not actually adding anything to BNFs. This is just some notation for expressing the transformation(s) being done to a standard BNF by the code.

Crazy talk of the day

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:41:51 GMT

I am convinced my subconscious is dramatically smarter than I am.

You know those gut feels you get about the circumstances around you? Well I've figured the particular cues my subconscious was picking up my conscious wasn't aware of (until today) for one of those gut feelings.

I was put on this track from an article in one of the science magazines I read where it they demonstrated that they could predict when people would move their muscles before the person was consciously aware they were going to move.

Which tied in well with my thoughts that emotions are generated from deeper parts of the brain to tell the conscious information.

That doesn't mean that emotions or the subconscious are always right, but I think that these parts of the brain are using different techniques to integrate information. By critically analysing the information from emotions/subconscious you take advantage of it when it is right, and you refine them by discovering when they are wrong and feed that back in. Then the results are better next time around.

Anyway, my couple of random brain thoughts for today (though I am ungracefully flipping between the terms for mind vs brain--but you know what I mean...)