Did I mention I love how this guy writes?

My world view is limited by the data that comes to me. I have my tiny slice of reality, a few friends, my work, then there are movies, news, documentaries, the Internet and so on. You will notice that I placed them in a certain order, it is the order that to me seems to go from more bullshit and less information to more information. I never believed the expression "Truth is stranger than fiction", so lets set the slice of reality aside. And, being first on my list... full of bullshit :)

Movies teach me a lot, but there is just as much untruth and deceit in them as there is stuff worth knowing. News are focused on a part of life that normally doesn't interest me, but they still have a higher percent of useful information. Then there are the documentaries, stuff from Discovery Channel and the likes. Well, I have mixed feelings about those. There are things that they teach me and they do it in a pleasant manner, yet, by the time they end, I feel like there is so much more that I wanted to know and that it all just stopped when it got interesting. On further analysis, it seems the quantum of information in an hour of film was something I could blog in two or three paragraphs.

And then there is the Internet. It is bursting with information, if only I knew where to look and only if I had the discipline of researching, summarising and storing that information. I am working on that, even this blog is used to store what I find, but I am still only an amateur. There is something that attracted me a while ago, something called Open Courseware. There were courses from the largest universities, freely available on the net. However, they left me feeling disappointed as they were mostly text, the few that were in media format were mostly audio and, in the end, they were only poor recordings of classroom courses, sounds of scribling on the blackboard included.

Enter The Teaching Company, a company that produces recordings of lectures by nationally top-ranked university professors as well as high-school teachers. The lectures are well done, they feature some guy or gal that present the information without having to write stuff on blackboards. If anything is to be shown, it will be a computer slide or animation, while the details on spoken information are added to the screen (for example the names of people). Wonderful stuff, only it is not free.

If you go to the official site you will find courses on just about anything, priced at around 35$ per download and 70$ per DVD if they are "on sale" and the rest of them going to about 250$, with a range of 20-40 lectures per course. Of course, there is the option of looking for "TTC torrent" on Google and see what you find there. For the people in Africa that just got an Internet cable installed, I mean.

I had the luck to start with linguistics (Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language by John McWhorter), lucky not because linguistics is so interesting, but because John McWhorter was really charismatic and had a very well constructed set of lectures. And because linguistics is an interesting topic, at least at the introductory level of this course. It was funny, too, the guy is what I imagine a typical New Yorker to be. He is black with a Scottish name, he talks a lot of Broadway plays and old movies, he is socially astute; very cosmopolitan.

Then I went for astronomy (New Frontiers: Modern Perspectives on Our Solar System by Frank Summers). If you like those National Geographic documentaries about the solar system, you will love this. Towards the end it got detailed in a bad way, but only compared with the beginning of the course, which was really well done. The lectures are about the Solar System, from the standpoint of a modern astronomer, in light of all the recent discoveries. Also, a very well made point about why the structure of the solar system was revised and Pluto got demoted. At the end it talks of other star systems and what are the methods to detect and study them.

Not all the courses are so good, though. I had the misfortune of trying out Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality by Sylvester James Gates, Jr. The guy is a black man in his late fifties who tries to explain Superstring theory without using any mathematics. He starts by repeating a lot of what he said in previous lectures and, indeed, in the same one earlier on, then goes asking these stupid questions that repeat what he said again. Something like "As I said in a previous lecture this and this and this happened. But why did this and this and this happen?". Ugh. If it was only about that, I would have finished watching the course, but it was something completely unstructured, boring and dragging. After 12 lectures out of 24 I knew nothing about string theory, except vague things like "if I imagine a ball that goes towards another ball and they shout at each other and the waves make other balls while the previous balls disappear but wait they appear again...". What I knew is that I had to stop watching. Sorry, Mr. Gates, lecturing... just not your thing. Stick to short appearances on Nova PBS shows.

Right now I am on Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft by Brooks Landon. It talks about constructing good sentences in order to improve one's writing. I have the feeling that the guy uses more detail than necessary. Like when he explains a concept he has to give at least 5 examples, when 2 or 3 would have been enough. But then again, maybe I am wrong. I will have to finish the course to give you a definite opinion.

Next on my list:
Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World by Benjamin Schumacher
Understanding Genetics: DNA, Genes, and Their Real-World Applications by David Sadava
Introduction to Number Theory by Edward B. Burger
Understanding the Brain by Jeanette Norden

Does all this make me a very smart person? Not really. Remember that most of these are introductory courses. They do not contain exercises or books that you need to read, nor do they require a very high level of previous knowledge in order to understand them. They are, pure and simple, like those Discovery Channel shows, only they don't end when they get interesting and they are not so full of bullshit. After watching one of these courses (or, indeed, listening to them as podcasts while you are going to work) you will have an idea on where to go digging deeper for the topics that interest you.

Good learning!

Ugh! The fifth book of the Revelation Space series , The Prefect, is the worst so far. Not only is it standalone, but it is also a prequel, something that happends pre-plague. All the characters seem to have been lobotomized some time in the past (possibly in an operation that also mixed their brains around so that they all sound and act the same), including the bad guys, and the story is completely boring. Nothing in this novel makes any sense, nor does it make you feel anything special, quite the contrary, the scenes that were supposed to bring out feelings for the reader felt really forced and had the opposite effect.

The only good thing in the book was the ClockMaker, all 10 pages of it or whatever. Couldn't you start with the ClockMaker, continue with the ClockMaker and end with the ClockMaker and forget all about the stupid and randomly emotional people, mr Reynolds?

I didn't know about this, however, through a weird series of events, I have read about this in a book, then heard about it from a friend, then wiki'ed it and got really disgusted, then found it in the news, as the UK government finally issued an apology to one of the great men of computing.

Here is the government apology link and (apparently, the apology was too much for the Brits to leave on their web site for too long. Instead, you have to read the text from the historical archives of the government site here) another link from a blog I am reading which says just about what I was going to say.

I have to say that governments scare the shit out of me. The things they can do are so horrendous that most people refuse to think about it. And as the sleep of reason produces monsters, they usually become monstrous. After all, what are they than a big clump of responsability that every citizen sheds in order to feel good about doing nothing?

So, sorry, Alan Turing, for being part of the species that did this to you! I truly feel ashamed.

Update 24 December 2013: The UK government issued a pardon for Alan Turing. Posthumous, a gesture that would be rather pointless if it weren't for the chronic inability of authority to admit to their mistakes (not to mention actually pay for them).

We all know that dogs are smart. They understand verbal commands and can make complex decisions in new situations. However, they can't speak. Well, there are some weird rare cases of dogs sort of snarling "mama", but it's not real speach.

Right now, though, I've had an epiphany: dogs WON'T SPEAK, because they simply are not equipped to. They are smart enough to try and learn from their failures. However, the dog that lives next to my office now howls to the same notes as the ambulances that pass by the building. Also there are numerous cases where dogs are howling in the tune of a song they hear.

Now this is my idea: what if dogs are able of speach, just not human one? What if a properly constructed highly vocal and high pitched language would work for dogs? WE could not speak dog then, but we are smart, we have devices and computers and stuff like that.

Update: Having thought a bit more about this I have come to a conclusion. It makes sense that dogs should be able to communicate by howling. Duh! They are descended from wolves. They are still, genetically speaking, wolves. What about the barking? Wolves bark when they are pups. Somehow, the domestication process makes canides retain some youthful characterstics. Therefore, it only makes sense that they should be able of communication at a higher level through howling rather than barking. Although, dogs being smart as they are, it is only one hypothesis that needs proof.

My friend, Meaflux, by his own description "an anthropology buff", reminded me of the other "smart animals", the Cetacea order, whales and dolphins and such. They sing, they use high pitched wails (whails? :D) to communicate. I agree, it makes sense underwater, but since they are descended from a wolf like ancestor and since fish don't use this communication system, I would say there is a strong connection.

So, in conclusion, it is possible that the pack communication method of wolf howling combined with the millenia old dog interaction with humans could result, with some training, in sone sort of meaningful conversation skills? If only people working with dogs and apes would read my blog...

Today I've updated my computer with the latest patches from Microsoft and then, starting a project, I noticed that it didn't look right in Internet Explorer 8. For example a table with an empty td of width 1px looked as if having 4px. Setting it to 2px or above made it look of having 2px or whatever value I had chosen. I have solved the situation by adding content to the td in question (a simple  ), but before today I have not had this problem.

Update: This blog post was previously called "Microsoft updates breaking changes?" but in the meanwhile I have determined what the problem was. It was the zoom! I had my IE set to 75% zoom. That caused the weird behaviours and appearance.

The solution is still working, but the problem should be rephrased as "Why do the widths of td elements behave strangely when setting smaller zoom in Internet Explorer?".

Just for kicks I tried duplicating the problem using the zoom:75% style setting on body and, even if it looked bad too, it was a completely different behaviour.

First time I've ever heard of cymatics and I am intrigued. basically you use some (physical) devices to visualize soundwaves. Here is a small TED presentation about it:



My question is simple: can this be used to "understand" sounds for deaf people or are the pattern transitions too complex? googling for cymatics I've found a lot of videos about water and cornstarch moved by sound and links to "sound healing" and even some technical papers that never seem to have left academia. I think this could be interesting enough to emulate on a computer, yet I have not found code for it yet.

This is mostly a rant, but also it should help people trying to do this as well to stop trying until there is some sort of solution from the VLC side.

I was trying to see how a web cam can be streamed over the web using VLC, a software that otherwise am very satisfied with as a video player. Recently they did a 1.0.0 version, which is quite something for free software that comes from the Linux world; usually they are 0.8 something and with a lot of alpha-beta-zeta afterward. So, as I was saying, recently VLC jumped from the 0.9.x version to 1.0.0, with a much more user friendly user interface and (at least so it seems to me) less adaptability than before. What I mean is that, in extreme cases, it throws errors that previous versions were able to circumvent, like when using partial or damaged video files. Also, it crashes on some older videos as well and I am forced to use the ancient (but sturdy) mplayer.

Back to business, I read the comprehensive command line help file that is almost 250k long, found what I was looking for, then tried. No success. I really felt like an idiot, as it wouldn't work whatever I did. In the end I just gave up and tried to start the streaming from the GUI, not from the command line. IT WORKED! Copying the exact command line parameters that the GUI would generate did not work. Saving the WORKING streaming to a playlist and then loading the playlist DID NOT WORK.

Here I have to say two things: when I say that it worked, it means that I had to fight it to be able to stream what I wanted and not HOW I wanted. Basically, the streaming will not work AT ALL if transcoding is not activated, which I personally think it makes it unusable anyway.

So, bottom line is that if you are trying to use VLC 1.0 from the command line, you are pretty much screwed. At least the flag that I was interested in (--dshow-vdev) would not select my web cam if its life depended on it. And it sort of did. Not likely I will use VLC in my business application.

I've even tried to go to one of those old style PHP forums that they have on the Videolan site. I waited for half an hour to receive the registration email and at that time I had given up completely. They had like 60.000 messages on the forums anyway and I doubt I would have gotten a reply any more intelligent than the usual RTFM. Yeah, I know, I sound very Linux unfriendly, but actually I am not, I've worked on Linux quite some time. What I am not friendly towards are the borderline psychotic assholes that only answer when they have nothing to actually say to help.

The fourth book by Alastair Reynolds that I've read recently, also set in the Revelation Space world, Absolution Gap follows the adventures of the ship Nostalgia for Infinity as it flees the "culling" of the Delta Pavonis star system by the swarm like machines called the Inhibitors. There is no purpose in reading the book without the others, as the story starts where it had left and continues to a more or less open ending.

This felt like the best book so far, however the enjoyment that I got from it had its very brutal ups and downs. While the beginning starts with full force and made me want to not let go of the book until I finish it, there was a side story that seemed not to have any connection with the main arc. When they finally met, they left me with that "What the fuck?" feeling. The ending was a jiggly up and down ranging from very cool and completely dumb. Not that the writing style faltered, but the behaviour of some of the characters really annoyed the crap out of me.

I would have to say that the ending was the most anticlimactic of all the books in the series, but the book is definitely the best yet.

Count Zero is the middle volume of the Sprawl trilogy written by William Gibson, which includes Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, all of them very good books and set in the same universe as the short stories Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel and Burning Chrome.

I had read this book when I was a child and I loved it a lot. Circumstances moved me towards reading it again and I am glad they did. In my youth I had barely understood it and I can't say I did a lot better now either; that's because Gibson is one of the mature writers, writing for the mind and heart of adults.

Count Zero in particular, it felt like something one must feel through bones, must sip the content like a good coffee and digest the content with one's soul. Alas, I am not that kind of a guy, so I read it fast in the subway while going to work, in big gulps, like the glutton I am. I highly recommend the former approach ;)

The plot itself is like a high tech detective story, but it is almost irrelevant. Gibson has such a clear and powerful vision of the future, that it subjugates all of its characters to it and makes it, the future, the main character. Many things are not said, but left to be understood, like the reasons while the world is the way it is and why people act the way they do. Read Count Zero, even if you are not a sci-fi reader, because beyond the storyline there are layers upon layers of worldliness and it is a great book.

It wasn't a very memorable trip, but I had to write this because of the Bohemi hotel in Arbanasi, which must most certainly be avoided. And it was, overall, a nice holiday. But let me take it from the beginning.

We took the car starting up from Bucharest and went towards Veliko Tarnovo. We passed through Basarbovo, to visit the rock monastery there. Very nice place, if you like churches. They have these small rock dug rooms where priests used to live and pray and then the monastery which was in renovation when we came there, but had a very lovely garden.

We then moved towards Cherven, where we visited the castle dig which is archaeologically active. It is a large XIV century Christian fortress, where one can see how people lived in the day: small one room living quarters and then a gazillion churches, large and small, then some administrative buildings and some defence walls and watch towers. There are about 200 stair steps to reach the castle from where the car road ends.

Next was Ivanovo. Some other rock monasteries, but everything set inside a natural reserve, a very beautiful place.

Then we went towards Arbanasi, a touristic area where there are a lot of hotels and where we arranged for accomodations. The hotel we chose was a three star hotel called Bohemi, boasting internet, minibars, outdoor oven, breakfast, etc, depending on the tourist site you search for it. Let me tell you how it really is: it's a two star hotel with smelly rooms, no parking, invaded by insects and spiders (and a scorpion which scared the craop out of my wife), no internet, no minibars, with a breakfast as the ones from the communist era: some bread and butter and jam and some salami/cheese slices. The hotel itself is one of many owned by the same people, so the person serving there is only an employee, put there to mind the place. In the room, after we got used with the stale odor of moist walls, we noticed that we has not enough sheets and two out of four light bulbs were not functioning. Really, I can't stress enough: 35 euros per night?! In times of economic crisis and with this kind of service? Avoid!

Arbanasi itself is not a bad place to stay, eat, sleep, and then back again. It would have killed me with boredom if I didn't have a car. They have a monastery there, but by then I got tired of any type of religious building. The restaurants where very nice, but service was consistently bad. I haven't seen dumber waiters in quite a while.

Veliko Tarnovo is a large city, once the capital of the second Bulgarian empire.

The stronghold there is a very nice place, where they don't allow sale people and where people can see theater and sound/light shows in the evening. Very large, beautiful and accomodating. Then there are some monuments and some nice streets.
The city itself is pretty cool. Lots of churches, of course :) I am sure that, being with my parents, I missed a lot of the hidden beauty of the town, but it was nice nonetheless.





That was about it. Take the links to get more information. My general opinion of Bulgaria is that it is a nice country, beatiful and wild, but rather poor. All the small towns and villages we passed through looked half abandoned, with many disaffected buildings and very few people. The economic crisis must have hit them pretty hard, too.

As I was saying in the last posts about the Revelation Space books by Alastair Reynolds, the guy has a problem with his own personality bleeding into the one of his characters. However, as the second book was better than the first, so the third one, Redemption Ark, seemed to be better than the second. It may be because now the main focus is on the Conjoiners, the fabled human faction that gave the star drives, facing the threat of the Inhibitors. Also, a very promising explanation of where they got the idea from in the first place.

We are seeing a lot of old characters from the previous books in this third installment, which bothered me a little because they weren't really needed, but it's not too annoying. Also, some of the awesome technological feats in the book are only partially explained and sometimes even completely ignored and left to a vague description, like "distant lights" when referring to a Hell weapons vs Inhibitors battle. But the focus, as always, was more on the human interaction than on the technical part, although there was blessingly more tech than in the first two books.

Since I've finished the book while away from home, I started reading another book, not the fourth in the series, so you will probably have to wait a while longer before I review that, but rest assured, I fully intend to read the entire saga.

Avatar is one of those animation series that you read about and think they're crap. I mean, first of all they are not Japanese :), they are actually US. And then they are shown on Nickelodeon and then they are about and for kids. I must be honest when I tell you that I accidentally heard about the series and I had no great hopes for it. However, as it turned out, it is a great show, one to be watched and enjoyed.

The show is mostly inspired from Chinese mythology, with Western and Indian bits thrown in when required. The world is separated into four nations. The people of each nation can control in various degrees a specific element magic: air, water, earth or fire. Unlike say, Naruto, there are no people that can control or mix more than one magic type, except a special and unique person, the Avatar. The Avatar has the job of protecting the world and, if killed, reincarnates into another person. The last Avatar, though, dissapeared a century before the show starts and no one has heard of him or any of its reincarnations. Meanwhile, the evil Fire Lord has started a war to conquer the world and he is about to succeed.

Well, you can see where this is going, right? The Avatar comes back, he is a goofy kid, and in the end he saves the world together with his friends. However, the animation, the stories and the teachings in this show are all high value and, for once, something a kid can see, enjoy, understand and USE in the real world. Well, all except the magic part :)

What is also great about the series is that it is not a work in progress. It did not end because the ratings went down or the economic crisis hit or whatever and it has very few filler episodes. It was a long consistent script that span three seasons of 20 episodes each and then ended with no significant loose ends.

In other words, this is one of those rare American shows that can rival the best Japanese anime series. Even my wife enjoyed watching it (well, most of the time).

Chasm City is the second book from the Revelation Space series written by Alastair Reynolds. It is set in the same universe, give a few hundred years, and it felt to me as a better, more mature book than Revelation Space. However, truth be told, the ending had the same flaw: the personality of the author bled through all the characters, transforming them into a do-good Scooby Doo gang, eager to solve mysteries and help people. Sorry, Mr. Reynolds, you're just too nice of a person! :)

Anyway, this time the plot revolves around issues of personal goals and identity, the very definition of a persona and of quality of life. While the story is intricate enough to make it a great book, I thought many of the concepts in it were very interesting, but insufficiently explored. Then again, explore any concept long enough and you never get to the other end, so at least having a complete coherent story that spans the entire plot is a big plus.

I just started Redemption Ark, the third book, which (finally! :) ) deals with the Conjoiners and a technologically advanced alien race. Or at least it starts that way. Happy reading!

I've had the priviledge recently to be able to watch two batches of horror movies from start to end without interruption, what I lovingly like to call FrightFest@Home. All my movie comments can be found here as well as another list, ordered by my vote here. The permanent links are in the top right of the blog as well.

However, after this, I felt compelled to also write a blog entry about them, since, as the horror genre goes (and, why not, the entire movie class), most of the films I have seen were rubbish.

So, these are the movies I have watched. I will cross out all the movies that are not worth seeing and bold out the ones that I felt need to be seen. I reiterate: all the movies in the list are horror (or at least marked as such on imDb). I would like to add a special thanks to M'hael from The Horror Club blog who recommended many of the films in the list. Here is goes:

• Sauna - very nice dark looks, but a bit too oriented towards the Finnish audience and slow paced.
• They Wait - a dumber remake of Poltergeist?
• Vikaren (The Substitute) - almost a kid adventure movie
• Eskalofrío - I loved this mystery thriller. Worth watching without reading comments.
• The Ruins - very nice horror, reminded me of a Serge Brussolo book.
• Død snø - Scandinavian Evil Dead with Nazi zombies.
• Acolytes - boring, serial killer dumb adolescent thriller thingie.
• One-Eyed Monster - if it wasn't about Ron Jeremy's cock being posessed by an alien, it would have felt less deep :)
• The Deaths of Ian Stone - if you loved Dark City, you should probably like this one.
• Baby Blood - low budget French flick with interesting feel, worth a watch.
• Angustia - I loved this movie when I was a kid. It's still creepy now, although a bit passée.
• Ils - set and filmed in Romania, movie about French people hunted in an isolated house.
• The Mad - you thought mad cow disease was called mad for nothing? Fun and unappologetic horror comedy.
• Shadow Puppets - Tony Todd stars in this one. And Jolene Blalock's cute bottom.
• The Changeling - eighties style ghost film.
• Occhi di cristallo - Dark police inspector investigates dark serial killer. Decent, but not much more.
• The Addiction - a philosophical metaphor on addiction, starring academic vampires.
• The Devil's Tomb - ugh! Clichée and bad.
• Near Dark - I just love Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen. A classic.
• The Children - this one is worth watching. True horror movie.
• The Brøken - what's with the IRC nickname naming? It had a nice feel, but ultimately very boring.
• Stuck - not a true horror but I graded it with a 10 out of 10. See it!

Have fun!