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Wednesday, Sep 26, 2012 - 02:28 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Been Up To

It's been over a week since the last update, which tends to mean that I've been sort of busy, which might or might not be true this time. What is true is the altercation heard between two aunties on my routine bus trip to campus last Wednesday, apparently about inconsiderate luggage placement. This by itself is common enough, but it was the first time I can remember nationality being dragged into it. Interesting times ahead?

On the broad brush of the future of transport explored in the previous post, a piece on driverless cars came out on Wired two days later, as did an article on Japan's flirtation with ultra-compact vehicles that are "smaller than a golf cart". Certainly, none of these ideas are exactly that new, as a Google search will ascertain; it's more of when they will come to fruition for me. The Age of Exploration is over, anyhow.

The week's DotA adventure was with Centaur, Shadow Demon, Spectre, Magnataur and Terrorblade in that order, as far as I can recall. Raised the Wizard Roboms to Inferno too on Saturday, raising DPS to near 50k through pumping Critical Hit Chance and skilling Sparkflint and Force Weapon.

Sunday saw more Game of Thrones, during which I managed to complete most of Archer's Only Time Will Tell - the man has a gift for storytelling - before watching United limp to a completely unconvincing win at Anfield (but I'll take it). This meant that FAKEBERT remains ahead at 638.75/500 seeds in Man vs. Ham, while Mr. Ham has gotten off the ground thanks to Southampton whacking Villa 4-1, right before he was about to denounce the human conspiracy for anti-hamsterism.

In between all this, there was the Saga of the Archbishop; while there are various primary views floating around, the happenings should be able to be summarized as such:

  • The local Catholic Archbishop sent a letter, now returned, to Function 8, a citizen initiative that co-organized That We May Dream Again (for which Yahoo reported a "more than 400" attendance - so my estimate was not too far off) - the fact that a letter was sent, or that it supported the abolishment of the Internal Security Act, does not appear to be in doubt. Now, surely, a stand against indefinite detention is not such an odd one for a clergyman to take?

  • Very soon after, the Archbishop was summoned, alone, to face a DPM. While no details on the private meeting have surfaced, such as whether there was a free flow of kopi, His Grace emerged unscathed, though having assumed a newly-acquired diagonal gait on the chessboard of local politics; a request for retraction of that first, unsolicited, letter was swiftly delivered to Function 8, which the group complied with

  • The local "news" blares, in concert, a statement by the Home Affairs Ministry that Function 8 has been "disrespectful" in publicizing the withdrawal - second-hand on an established but frankly-not-that-well-visited blog, no less

  • Caesar, render unto, what's new, etc etc. But, as noted, His Grace may well be a canny operator after all, given circumstances and historical lessons


All that left me having to pull from my posterior on Monday, which happened to be the deadline for CodeForScience, which I had absolutely no idea why I had signed up for. Well, you gotta finish what you started, or so they say, so it was time to speedlearn Google Gadgets-type API (fortunately, I had some prior experience in this integration thing, if not on this particular platform). That said, it was a 24-hour hackathon the last time round.

Oh, there were issues, such as not being able to get the sciverseResultsView to work at all, and of course the question of what contribution could be made that had not already been done. For example, one of the Q&As discussed references, but this had already been implemented excellently by Turkish participants. In the end, I settled on the extremely basic idea of allowing users to compare multiple papers side-by-side (N.B. TeX may be beautiful, but it's hard to beat simple HTML for accessibility):



Getting the video out probably took almost as much time as the app itself, contrary to expectations. I was ready to do the voiceover (itself a right chore - haven't exactly practised my diction since the oral examinations back in secondary school, and it shows), when I found out that neither my home PC nor my lab one, both running Windows 7, recognized the microphone integrated into my earbuds!

In the end, I dragged out the WinXP netbook that probably cost barely more than the graphics card on both the desktops, and to my chagrin if relief, it worked perfectly. Microsoft, y u like this? Windows Live Movie Maker did work well enough, after I failed to get to grips with CamStudio's built-in captioning. Tip: switch the codec to something like Xvid before beginning, instead of generating gigabyte-sized files with the default settings.

Tuesday's lunch kindly sponsored by my supervisors - thanks!


Chicken rice within




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Next: The Passing Of Mr. Robo


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