My mom and my sister are coming back this Friday. I gotta unweed the
front yard, mop the floor, take out the recycling stuff that's been
piling up for a month, etc., before Friday, 21:13. 
I should also go buy ingredients for making Shanghai wonton. The coming days are gonna be very very very busy.
- SwordAngel
Ah, summer semester is finally over, with the writing of my Principles
of Modern Management final exam last night. It's time to... wash my
car, unweed the garden, exterminate spiders, etc... I also need to do
some work on some software projects.
It looks like I'm going to run into a few competing commitment problems in the incoming fall semester. 3 major things:
What am I going to do...
- SwordAngel
This stuff is about a month late. I just realized it today when I
visited Ubuntu Linux's website. Anyway, it's a victory for the Free
Software Movement. The European Union rejected the software patent
bill. Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4655955.stm.
Had the bill passed, Europeans would risk having to buy overly priced
software applications from the big software vendors in the future, with
crappy quality and full of bugs, just because the big software
companies have the money to monopolize the software patents.
- SwordAngel
Visit SpamPoison to get your HTML code. All you have to do is paste the code somewhere in your webpage or blog. The way it works is this:
Nifty, eh?
- SwordAngel
I'm rewatching Kang Xi Dynasty, a 50-episode Chinese drama about the
life of the great Emperor Kang Xi of the Qing dynasty. Two of my
favorite passages occur in the very first episode and I would like to
share them with you (so you don't have to learn Mandarin then watch the
drama).
Little Xuan Ye (who will become Emperor Kang Xi): "What's harder? Farming or studying?"
Eunuch: "Scholars say studying is harder; farmers say farming is harder."
Little Xuan Ye: "Ha! If I become the emperor, I'll get them to switch
places: let the scholars go farm and the farmers go study; and see who
still dares to complain of hardship."
Note: Ci-Ning Palace is the living quarter of the Queen Mother Xiao
Zhuang (the mother of Emperor Shun Zhi and grandmother of little Xuan
Ye). The scene starts with Xuan Ye's mother complaining to the Queen
Mother about the Emperor's decision to make little Xuan Ye the son of
another concubine.
"The common people only know the pain and hardships of the mother
raising a child. But who understands the story of people like us? You
bear a child but you are not allowed to raise the child. Now THAT's
pain and hardships." - Queen Mother Xiao Zhuang, about the fact that
women in the Manchurian royalties are not allowed to raise their own
children, each child being put into the care of a wet mother soon after
birth.
- SwordAngel
Fantasia is here again! The
film festival hosted in Montreal every year, where you can watch lots
of Asian film works, from the bizarre kind to true masterpieces; live
action, anime, horror, you name it.
I went to watch Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho
(雲のむこう、約束の場所 - The Place Promised in Our Early Days) yesterday, with
Mai and Martin. I really enjoyed this excellent 90-minute anime, except
for being told about the technical difficulty that delayed the film by
30 minutes, after I had parked my car and ran like there was no
tomorrow to get to the Concordia Hall Building on time for the showing.
Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho is another work by not other than Shinkai Makoto, who got famous previously by producing Hoshi no Koe
(ほしのこえ - Voices of the Distant Stars) with one of the smallest
production teams in anime history. The attention to detail, the
intriguing story, the light
humor sprinkled here and there, all contributed to the success of this
anime. Once again, Shinkai-san has proved his talent as director and
script writer. I highly recommend watching this short feature.
- SwordAngel
The bug illustrated in the previous post has been fixed. It turns out
to be the result of a mistake in the original code base, where Windows
bitmap files are loaded with an alpha channel added, but the function
calls to rescale the image and generate the OpenGL texture object were
written such that the data is treated as though there's no alpha
channel. That has been corrected. In fact, we even decided to change
the code to use PNG's instead, for its insane lossless compression and
true 255-level transparency. 
Too bad the library we're using does not support 64-bit PNGs yet. 
- SwordAngel
Sorry for the general lack of update in the past weeks. Rumors of my abduction to the dungeons of Windspear Hills
have been greatly exaggerated. I was simply "busy" fighting multiple
battles all over the multiverse: some on the planet Char; some around
the region of Amn; some against the evil in the Kingdom of Baron; some
in my supercomputer grid composed of Melchior, Balthasar, and Casper
(a.k.a. my local area network of 2 laptops and 1 desktop); and yet some
more in my kitchen againsts undead chickens using the Wok +3
(Prometheus) given to me as a reward in a previous quest ("Drop Mom Off
at the Airport"), although my dexterity penalty and lack of resistance
to fire doesn't help. Finally, there's the computer graphics course.
Among all these battles, the ones on my computers are the most
productive. In fact, I have become an apprentice in the art of
spyware/adware removal and protection, under the guidance of Master
Mahmood, now a veteran in this ever growing battlefield. Apparently,
barring the case where they need someone who speaks Arabic, I will
probably be the next guy to be hired.
By the way, hopefully some of you still haven't gone to watch Star
Wars. Last time the big movie going that Eliott organized was cancelled
and some of you went in smaller groups. I heard good things about
Madagascar also, so that may be an alternative.
- SwordAngel
Here is my little calculus of life:
Imagine that life is a curve in space. The first derivative of this curve
is analogous to the change in you and in your environment from one time
in life to another. And, if you try to think of life in terms of some
"periods", then a "period" in life is a line segment, a part of the
broken line discrete approximation of this "life curve". A broken line
is obviously piecewise continuous. If you try to label your life with
some major
periods, such as infancy, childhood, teenage, etc, then your
broken line approximation will have only a few large line segments, and
the first derivative (the change) and the second derivative (the change
in amount of change) from one line segment (one life period) to another
are
likely to be large and very shockingly different, thus upsetting,
unsettling, and depressing you.
What happens if you think of your life in terms of shorter periods? The
broken line approximation gains more line segments, and it appears
smoother overall - the derivatives from one line segment to another
become smaller and less different. The ride through life suddenly feels
less bumpy. All of this suggests that if one looks at life in terms of
shorter periods (years, months, weeks, days, or even seconds), then
life may not be so shocking after all. Now, it would be perfect if one
can look at life really as a smooth curve and not label it with
periods; however, it is highly unlikely to happen due to our stubborn
consciousness, which always tries to look at the clock and the calendar
only to realize how much time has elapsed since the last time we did
something stupid or tried to hurt ourselves. The best that one can do
is really to choose smaller and smaller intervals, until there are almost *cough* infinitely many *cough* small periods and the
consciousness is fooled to believe that there is no difference from one
period to another.
Maybe there is a hidden message behind carpe diem:
I'm not drunk, but I guess it makes no difference.
- SwordAngel
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