Movies, movies, movies!

I've gone to the theatre 4 times this past semester, and discovered that happiness can be found in strange places. The first time was to watch the King's Speech, which I enjoyed a lot. Then there was Sucker Punch, which wasn't what I expected (not that I had seen any trailers or promotion for it), and left me ultimately a bit unsatisfied, and then there was Hanna, which was very well produced and acted and all that, but the story at the end went in a direction I didn't like. Finally, I saw Your Highness, which I also did an excellent job of avoiding promotions and spoilers for. It was surprisingly vulgar, but it beats Sucker Punch and Hanna for not leaving weme ultimately depressed. Hooray!

The end of winter and the start of Google Summer of Code

Hello my regular audience.

I finally finished this previous semester with a heroic effort. I'm almost done all the course work for my Masters, which is a huge relief. I'd provide details, but I'd like to relax a little and not think anymore about it :D

Also great news: I'm pleased to announce that this summer I'll be participating in the Google Summer of Code programme! I will be working on writing a new XML API for GNOME (we're going to wrap a good, non-GNOMEy one). Consequently, eventually there'll be a bunch of programming posts labelled under '#GDom' and you can probably just ignore those.

I'm pretty thrilled. I applied the first year they had it, but was young and stupid back then, and didn't stand a chance. I get paid a little, which is nice, too, and it's only a little less than a GTAship would have been, and will be a lot more fun.

Liv will be going away to Algonquin for most of the summer, so that will probably give me lots of time during the week to focus on development and Masters work during the summer.

Au revoir.

Passing Thoughts

"We are the whole grain fascists" and "the Crimean wars also killed my taste buds."

Passing Thought

5 years ago, I was reading one sentence stories. I am glad to rediscover them. :)

Passing Thought

The worst part about completing Google Reader is not having any brain candy left when I need a mid-work snack.

Passing Thought

Cooking with wooden utensils is a dream come true. I hope to get to make more dreams come true. (That's a lot of verb!)

Google's Earth Day doodle

I recommend going to www.google.com and moving your mouse cursor all over the Earth day doodle. (If you use a background on your Google main page, there should be 4 moving coloured dots near the Google logo that you can click to see the doodle.)

Beautiful Live Wallpapers

I've previously suggested to my girlfriend that she avoid Live Wallpapers on her Android phone (Oh, how I wish we had Live Wallpapers in GNOME!) to preserve her battery. However, given sufficiently awesome Live Wallpapers, what can I do but use them myself?

KittehFace Software creates very cool Live Wallpapers, and offer both a Free version and a Donation (about $1) version of each. I've liked the Free ones so much, that I've consequently bought several of the Donation versions, and will probably buy the Donation versions of all the Live Wallpapers I end up keeping.

	Blue Skies: this all started because I've seen screenshots of this one too many times without knowing what it was. I searched the market place a little and found it. The experience of floating in the clouds was more awesome than I expected.
	Snowfall: I actually found this one around Christmas, but I didn't bother to investigate KittehFace's other Live Wallpaper offerings. I kept the settings simple, no Christmas lights, a bit darker. It made me pretty happy.
	Bamboo Forest: This one I actually find kind of boring, but I liked the idea behind it. I probably won't keep it, but I'll try it out for a day just to make sure. It might be nicer if I could hear Japanese music in the background :D
	Friendly Bugs: This is cool. It is also kind of creepy, looking at your screen and seeing bugs crawling underneath the glass. At least they're humanity's most beloved bugs. If I get the full version, I'll hopefully be able to reduce their frequency. I think it should be a treat to find a butterfly, not a common occurrence.
	Silhouette: This one is pretty cool. I'm not sure how it interacts with the time of day, but I'll probably pay for the full version of this one pretty soon to find out. It reminds me of one of my favourite mental scenes, which involves fields and a lone tree atop a hill.

All those links go to the pay version, but in the side bar you can usually find a related link to the free version if you don't want to commit immediately. (I don't :D)

Passing Thought

Previously frozen vegetables and hot plain rice taste exceptionally clean.

This post is * than the last one

I just discovered that I can use * in Google phrase searches. Thanks XKCD. So, "I think * is awesome" will tell me just what things people think are awesome. Ok, that's contrived. I have no good, original ideas. Sigh.

Productivity and Parse Trees

Going to bed after a late night, but a productive day. I'm trying to finish up a NLP project and today saw a lot of infrastructure work, improving the organisation of files, code, building, the user interface, etc. Tomorrow I'll improve the output to make it more readable and let me figure out what's going on. Right now, I output in HTML a bunch of information about generated parse trees, but the information isn't presented in a format that lets me compare similar trees very well. I'm going to generate a comparison page with columns for each parse tree's derivation, allowing me to spot the places they first differ and why easily.

News, and how to divide it

Here is a neat idea Liv and I just had. News is usually divided into various sections by topic, but what I really want to see are two columns: news that is heartening and news that is disappointing. Perhaps a third for sports and other dull matters. It might be a fun NLP project. An interesting part was that how outraged or pleased someone is by a piece of news is dependent on their values. Hmm. Brilliant!

Passing Thought

In the summer you take short cuts, in the winter you take warm cuts.

Standardised Rich Edit Controls in Browsers

I might have writ about this already, I can't really remember.

I wish that there was a standard Rich Edit control in HTML. Something that enabled at least the basics of bold, italics, font families (perhaps not sizes :D), and tab indentation. I don't want to make a wish list. Perhaps have a simple one and a more advanced one, which would also include images (with drag and drop or copy and paste, not just a stupid uploader) and more advanced items.

Blogger's current Rich Edit control under Compose is almost painful to me. I much prefer Gmail's. Even that one has its deficits. Part of my problem is that everyone implements their own, so there are always differences. Things feel different in not-great ways. I get uncertain about what I can do, or how to make things spaced properly. (Is the underlying HTML using <p> or <br> for line spacing?) They're not all compatible with desktop word processors. (Which of these features will be retained when I copy and paste between these two windows?) Lots of websites that could benefit from some light formatting suffer for being incapable of easily incorporating one of the off-the-shelf solutions, and instead just use a plain text form.

I love plain text forms, but I'd appreciate consistency and a full feature set across most web sites, rather than spotty support, with this or that being alright. Let W3C standardise a feature set and define the HTML, let browsers implement it, and let web developers just do something like <form type="richtext"> :)

Taking a break

I still have a paper to write and a project to finish. However, I need a break.

Live Journal is in decay. Dreamwidth, a pretender to its throne, is born putrid. I have a few friends on who are syndicated on both, and I'm not sure which interface into their world to use, as neither are really desirable. Interstitial, audible advertisements are really inappropriate for web browsing. While a post can be syndicated on both, their comments won't be synchronised. It's a mess.

And it's all my fault. I've been a staunch Blogger supporter since right before Pyra Labs was bought by Google. Live Journal has always had one of the worst structured user interfaces I've had the privilege to suffer. I can only compare it to Government and University websites in how awful it is. Unfortunately, Live Journal does do one thing right: privacy and friend management. Google and Blogger is awful at this. So are almost all other services. Yes, I want to be able to micromanage who can see what on an individual post basis. Not being able to results in having multiple blogs, even with the broken Sign-in Required system Blogger has. What good is it to restrict access to a Blog all the time to the same set of people if you can't even notify them of updates automatically?

Blogger has gotten steadily better over the years. I have a hope that with Google's slow, incremental improvements to its social network, that it will get it right eventually. It actually has inside Google Buzz, but I don't really want to blog where I buzz. I don't know. Maybe I do? It doesn't help that Google's misintroduction of it earlier this year means that almost none of my friends use Buzz now. Sigh. I just hope they don't cancel it like they did with Wave. That cancellation remains ridiculous to me: hey, no one is using our unfinished and unrefined product, boo! Well, if they'd bothered to make it useable, I could have started! Sigh.

So, here is to the growing pains between Live Journal and wherever my friends move to replace it. If they need per-reader management, I'll suggest Google Buzz. I'm sure they'll linger with Live Journal for a little while, held hostage by their friend connections and communities and history of posts. Hopefully with the rising popularity of OpenID and (shudder) Facebook Connect and Google Connect, they'll be able to bring most of their audience with them. The best times always seem to be before, after, and now.

And now, the finale

School

My semester is coming to a close. I have one assignment left to finish. Classes are over. The course I'm TAing is ending: I've finished my marking for it and have no more labs or office hours. I don't have much reason to go to campus. I am a survivor :D

I think I'll still go to campus to get some work done. In part just to be social. I'm glad when I can drag Liv along with me.

I was one of two Graduate Student Representatives this semester, but I don't think I was very effective. I would like to try again next semester but be more proactive and organise communication with other graduate students better. Right now I feel a little like a black hole for faculty-student information :o It's not quite that bad, but there's much more I could do.

Summer

I'm not sure how I'll fund myself for the summer yet. I've applied to the Google Summer of Code, which would be great, but for which the competition is stiff. I've also applied to the few GTA positions there are over the summer, though there are a couple I'd actually rather not do :) I can't be picky, of course. The most interesting one might be one focussing on society and computing, but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently qualified, having not read the text book. I'd like to think that my active interest in the domain for the past many years might qualify me better, but there are many graduate students wanting work and few positions for the summer.

People

The summer might be lonely. Most people I know are heading away for it, or away from Guelph for good. Time to make new friends, I guess :D Liv is nagging me, so I'll quit writing mundane stuff and go away for now. Au revoir.

Friday night beverage

I've discovered that one of my favourite drinks is freshly thawed milk. It's as cool a liquid milk as I can reasonably get, and it's wholesome for me. (Unless freezing and thawing it ruins it, or something.)