Are you the kind of nerd that is forced to interact with “normal” people? Maybe it’s your boss. Or maybe it’s the postal worker from whom you pick up your Amazon deliveries. Whatever nerve-wracking situations you find yourself in, this guide will help you navigate the treacherous waters known as “social interaction” (colloquially known as “talking to people”) and help you pass an in-real-life Turing test like a ninja and pass yourself off as a human rather than being mistaken for a glasses-wearing inhabitant of uncanny valley.
Continue reading Social Skillz 4 N3rdz: Telling jokes
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A few months ago, Steve suggested I write a paper for a particular conference. He even gave me a topic. Brat that I am, I thought about for a few minutes and then flat out said no to that topic but thought of another one suitable for the conference. I decided to write on the ethics and legality of reCAPTCHA. While outside the scope of my academic oeuvre, I figured that even if my paper got rejected, it would still make for an interesting “Random musings” blog post. But it hasn’t come to that. Instead, you can look for it at PST 2012 in a couple of months. At seven pages (and possibly eight after further additions), this is longer than my typical blog post. You might want to get your favourite hot beverage ready before diving in. Have you ever tried playing a video from your local network using software such as VLC or MPlayer and had the video stop every few seconds? I have a solution (currently only available on Mac)! ScoutFS is a file system that will pre-fetch data to avoid this locking-up. Once a network share is loaded (or, indeed, any file system including a DVD or your own hard drive), ScoutFS creates a read-only copy of the drive in memory from which you can open the files without the choppy playback. Once it’s installed (I hope a fairly straightforward process), just drag a folder or disk onto the application in your /Applications folder and load the file from the newly mounted disk! I will be working on a few more iterations of this software over the next week or so. Hopefully I will have this running on Linux machines soon. Check it out at http://ScoutFS.heresjono.com! (Mac users only) Have you messed up an important system file that prevents you from running sudo to fix them? Or have you accidentally trashed some system files from the Finder that have broken the authentication system (that asks for your password when doing certain privileged operations)? Macs have two different systems for managing delicate operations — the system that powers the underlying UNIX-y bits and the stuff for nice Mac-y applications. The upshot is that you can sometimes perform brain surgery on your computer without any anesthetic: some problems can be fixed without rebooting into single-user mode. Continue reading Oops… was that file important? I’m too lazy to write a post for this week and I can’t even do a “Best of” since there’s so little good material on this blog… so I’ll link you to a town cross from a while back and throw in some new content. Namely, a bunny. It’s pink. Continue reading Happy Easter On Tuesday, while at the end of my office hours at UT Scarborough campus, I noticed the computer lab workstations I was using had some educational software for biology installed. I fired up the unit on Darwinian evolution. This involved a simulator depicting snails with different shell thicknesses and crabs. This might be my most Canadian post, yet… Toronto normally has four seasons: spring, summer, colourful, and blah. But this year, blah wasn’t terribly cold and spring seems to have made like a bunny and just hopped away. We went from blah to summer over night (Friday night to Saturday morning). We can’t pin this on climate change (after all, this is just the weather for one year — although it seems to be part of a climate trend). So what is it? I call weather witchcraft. I was going to write a supportive blog about Quebec’s resistance against the crime bill that the government has tried to ram down the province’s gullets, but I’m afraid of being put on some terrorist watch list along with the environmentalists and being tracked down by Mr. Toews. Instead, I will write about an equally timely (if more mundane) topic… Encyclopædia Britannica is going out of print and will soon be available only in its on-line version. I haven’t even seriously thought about print encylopædias since the late 1990s and the last time I used one was around 2002. While they may become collectible items a few years down the line from now, I certainly won’t miss them. |
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jonathan lung
Who votes for these people? — Part I
Sometimes, I wonder why certain people or parties are elected. No, I’m not talking about the election in Alberta. I’m talking about subways, subways, subways! It was brought to my attention over dinner last night that our mayor is enjoying (or at least has) a 47% approval rating from Torontonians. The question was raised about who supports this guy (no weight jokes, please).
Continue reading Who votes for these people? — Part I