Not Waving, But Flying

A Scandal of an Episode

2012-01-02T03:19:00.001-05:00

Here's my theory on Irene Adler: she is meant to be a mirror reflection of the Great Detective, with every aspect of her character defined with respect to some aspect of his. She is the Victorian answer to the question, "What if Holmes had been a woman?" She shares parts of his essential image--his ability to read and anticipate others, his mastery of disguise, his skills as an actor--but she reflects his nature; where he is "cold, precise" and incapable of love, she is happily married; where there is no mystery about his belief in justice and doing right, she is ambiguous about her morals and motives. She is the Woman in the sense that she is his only true rival because she is, in fact, a translation of himself.

With that in mind, I was very disappointed to see Steven Moffat's answer to, "What would a modern female version of Holmes be like?" Firstly, her profession came across as lazy writing. It was vital to the plot for her to obtain secret information from important men, and Moffat supposedly could see no way for an intelligent woman to be able to do this other than through seduction. Forget all of the possibilities that bringing the Holmes canon to modern times offers! Just choose the easiest, least meaningful, slightly sexist option anyway.

Worse still, though, was her romantic interest in Holmes and his apparent reciprocation. There is an interesting angle such a plot could take using the ideas that Holmes and Adler are mirror images and that Holmes has a pretty large ego; I wouldn't say a narcissistic Holmes is necessarily canon, but it could be well done and enjoyable. But what took place in Belgravia was neither. Adler seemed little more than a manifestation of a lovesick Molly Hooper trained under Jim Moriarty. Not an equal to Holmes, just an obsessive, albeit clever, woman in love.

And in love with what, to be exact? Sherlock Holmes is a thinking machine not a fully drawn out real human character. Not a person with whom it is even possible to be in love. The part of his humanity that involves loving and being loved just doesn't exist. What Moffat's Adler falls in love with is an image she creates for herself through news clippings and rumours and creepy stalking. She builds a myth around Holmes and finds herself attracted to it--as does Molly, as do all people who claim an attraction to Sherlock Holmes. The attraction is to a romanticized notion of him; Doyle doesn't give us enough of a person for any such attraction to be real. Yet, instead of making a point out of this, the episode ignores this entirely, resulting in a dynamic between the characters which is unconvincing and occasionally bordering on just idiotic. (Certainly, "I am Sherlocked" is high among the stupidest things I've ever seen on television.)

There are numerous complaints I had about this episode, but the ones pertaining to Adler and Holmes upset me the most. These writers and actors did such a fine job with the nuances of their characters last season that I was really disheartened to see yet another poorly done rendition of the Holmes/Adler relationship. Maybe one day I might find the adaptation that gets it right.

So Much Time and So Little to Do

2011-12-28T19:05:00.000-05:00

This Fall felt like the longest term ever, and technically it was, since for the first time I was in school (at work) until the very last day. Which means that this will also be my shortest winter break--just nine days instead of the usual two weeks. I spent the first few days of it poring through Emma Brennan's Making Vintage Bags and finally picking a bag to sew out of my newly acquired 0.75 metres of pretty houndstooth. But the pattern I chose ("Bowbelle Bag") required barely a quarter metre, so with the leftover fabric I made myself a matching hooded scarf. It took more or less a full day for me to draw a design that looked good, cut the pieces, and put them together, but that was because I've never sewn hoods before and I had no pattern to go on. In retrospect, this scarf hood is probably the easiest thing I've ever sewn. (I've been working on a knitted scarf hood in coincidentally a very similar pink for the past two weeks, and I still have about a week's worth of knitting left on that.) If I make this again and take process photos, I may post a quick tutorial.

I Made Fettuccine

2011-12-15T21:44:00.000-05:00

I never thought I would title a blog post such, unless I had, following Meraj's excellent example, learned how to actually make fettuccine, all mixing the dough from scratch and rolling it for hours and letting it dry and then boiling it. Because, that would be a "look at my impressive cooking skills!" post worth making people read.

No, I just can't tell the difference between a box of spaghetti and a box of fettuccine (I mean, the boxes look the exact same), so now, for the first time in my life, I am eating fettuccine for dinner. It tastes almost, but not exactly, the same as other pasta.

(This is my attempt to blog more frequently than I have been doing this term.)

On my linalg final this afternoon, there was a question asking us to find the SVD of a 3x1 vector. Not even the full decomposition, just a reduced one. It made me sad a little bit.

Wander With Me, Yo

2011-12-13T04:16:00.001-05:00

So, I've been working through 99 Lisp programming problems in an unsuccessful attempt to get myself to sleep. To make this somewhat interesting, my goal was to solve each question (in the first section) with a single line of code. I've gotten through the first 24, and only had to exceed one line for four of the questions. You can pass judgment on my code here.

I think, for the sake of my linear algebra mark (for which final I still have to study), I should go to bed now. I'll post an update when I finish more of these problems.

When All the Wheels of Being Slow

2011-11-24T17:30:00.001-05:00

Some photos I took today on account of feeling kind of miserable all week. All of these were taken on my cellphone with no post-processing. Click for larger versions.

Dead End. Taken on a sidewalk in downtown Kitchener, somewhere in the vicinity of where you would end up if you started at the Charles St Terminal and wandered for a while in a random direction.

Dumpsters Near King and Water.

Open Door. The reflections are distracting in this shot; maybe I should have lowered the brightness or something. When I remember to bring my fancy camera to Waterloo I will try to get a better version of this photo.

Recent Acquisitions

2011-11-12T17:31:00.001-05:00

The Law of Blogging Inertia states that a blogger at rest will tend to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. The longer the period of stasis, the more tremendous the required force becomes. For me, that force is the growing fear that this blog will die if I don't post something, so, rather than share stories about my landlady's cat, here is a list of things I have acquired recently.

The Little Schemer, 4th edition. Found this at Second Look in downtown Kitchener. It is pretty much the most adorable textbook ever, mostly because it is filled with sketches of baby elephants.

Introducing Fractal Geometry. It's kind of a comic book about fractals and chaos theory. The original price was $80, but the man at Old Goat's let me have it for much less. It contains illustrations of various mathematicians saying pithy things, including one of Bertrand Russell in gloves and a tux, dancing with a cane. Too bad that page is not part of the preview on Amazon.

Flatland, 6th edition. I started reading this on the Internet when I was in middle school but I didn't get very far. I'm hoping the print copy will be easier to finish. I've just gotten past the part about women Flatlandlers and actually still want to read the rest of this book, so I may just get to the end this time.

The Trotsky. There's this kid who thinks he's the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. It's a pretty good movie, and it's set in Montreal and Jay Baruchel's in it.

Classic Sherlock Holmes Collection. Nine Holmes stories starring Basil Rathbone... and some other people. Ian Fleming actually plays Watson in a couple of these. I haven't gone through them all yet, but they look exciting.

The Heart in Exile Proclaiming

2011-09-29T16:19:00.000-04:00

So I've been in a bit of a bad mood today because stuff I was supposed to have set up last night didn't get done due to my being locked out of the server I needed to set it up on. Then, when I finally got access this morning (an hour before I was supposed to present this!), all sorts of random nonsense wasn't working. So, I spent today's TA meeting making random hand-waving motions as I tried to train them on software that they had never seen before and that I couldn't show them. It went really well.

The ray of sunlight was that I had three separate conversations about knitting today, two of which were prompted by my multicolour shawl that I was wearing. (I think I mentioned it here in a previous post, but never got around to posting the finished product.) A former co-worker who wanted to know how I'd done the lace pattern got me thinking about the origins of knitting, crochet, macrame... How do you just one day pick up some yarn or rope and decide to knot it in some weird way, and turn that into the most beautiful designs? And really, every piece of knitting is just (more or less) one very long piece of string twisted around itself over and over... I think my co-worker was right when he said, "mind = BLOWN."

Dr. Seuss Does Math

2011-09-28T16:27:00.000-04:00

"So you have a polynomial function in some number of integers, whether they be letter-shaped or... actual integers..."

-Professor Zorzitto, talkin' bout the replacement principle

So three weeks into the term and Number Theory is starting to get exciting. I think, of all the people in the class, our professor is the most relieved that the course is getting ~~harder~~ interesting, given how impatiently he has been working through everything we've done to this point. Today's lecture was on rings of residue classes, which of course are fascinating in themselves-- (an infinite ring condensed into a finite one where every element is itself an infinite set? Yes, I find this really cool. Will the real mathematicians please stop laughing now.) --but what I immediately thought of when the prof put the lecture title on the board was... The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Because, remember there's that pink cake residue ring that he leaves in the tub? And so now I've been desperately trying to remember other details from the story to see if there might be any math hidden in there.

There's the mini cats that keep producing an even smaller cat from their hats, which you could sort of take as a simple demonstration of theoretically always being able to divide an object into a fraction of it's original size (except, the cats stop after 26 of them have appeared, showing that it's only possible in theory). There's also the pink stain itself which goes from a ring around the tub to covering the entire snow outside the children's house in mere minutes. Can we say "exponential growth" for that one? I can't remember much else from the story, except that there's a VOOM at the end that magically tidies everything up just in time. Like my prof when he insists on cramming one last proof into the last four minutes of class.

In other news, I finished my first (real) Graphics assignment yesterday, so here are some pretty screenshots from the final game. The assignment was to write a 3D interface for a Tetris game in OpenGL. The interface had to be able to be rotated around any of the x-, y-, and z-axes, be scaled up or down, and be rendered in either "regular", wireframe, or multi-coloured mode. We also had to implement "persistence", meaning that if the user is rotating the game and lets go while the game is still rotating, it should continue rotating on it's own until another mouse event happens. I'm sad that I can't really show this in action with screenshots, because it looks super cool. (And it's so dizzying to play while this is happening because every time the game rotates 180 degrees, left and right switch directions!)

Still Alive

2011-09-05T18:25:00.001-04:00

So, I've been silent for about a month due to my efforts to stay off the Internet as much as possible during Ramadhan. Now, my four month break is over. I have just moved in to my room in Waterloo; tomorrow, I start work (part-timing at ISG), and the week after, school. I'm pretty excited!

What Thoughts Should Thinkers Think?

2011-07-29T12:42:00.003-04:00

I've been doing lots of knitting in the past few weeks, and it seems the more projects I start, the more seem to get added to my list. I have a sweater that I started in late March which I haven't yet finished (just one sleeve left, then embroidery and assembly), but I'm already making plans to start on this excellence: Watson's wicked cabled sweater from "A Study in Pink".

Already on my needles I have an optical illusion double-knitted scarf, a white shawl that I'm planning to border with the "Smarties" Knitcol yarn I bought for some reason at a store closing sale, an orange lace cowl, and the aforementioned sweater. On top of this, I've been sketching out ideas for posters done in illusion knitting, which I just recently learned about and which is pretty much one of the coolest things. And then, just as the despair of not having enough knitting time per day was washing over me, I let my mum convince me that a trip to Fabricland was a good idea, and came home with 3 metres of (gorgeous) satin-back crepe to add to my depressingly high pile of Things Unfinished.

I chose a simple skirt pattern for my crepe so I at least finished that (in one day!). But as I was deciding what to do with it, I came across a great tutorial for circle skirts. So now I have yet another project in my list: a pi circle skirt!

Somewhere between getting out of bed and waking up yesterday, it occurred to me that the first 9 digits of pi add up to 36. Which means that a circle can easily be composed of 9 arcs such that each arc corresponds to one of the first 9 digits of pi (i.e., by making the angle of the ith arc 10 degrees times the ith digit). This revelation, combined with my new-found knowledge of how to sew circle skirts, means that all of my projects are on hold until I sew my pi skirt. I was going to do a test one out of fabric scraps this morning, but I live in a sad place that has protractors nowhere (nowhere!) to be found.

(After my discovery I of course searched for any other pi patterns that might be interesting to turn into designs, which eventually led me to the Cadaeic Cadenza, a great work of Pilish from which the title of this post is taken.)

The Perfect Mixtape

2011-07-16T13:42:00.003-04:00

I bought a packet of star folding paper yesterday. For some reason, it had music symbols printed all over it, so I stuck the folded stars in a cassette tape.

They Called Me the Hyacinth Girl

2011-07-03T13:24:00.005-04:00

Today I bring you a pattern for fingerless gloves! Because I already have two big knitting projects on my hands (a sweater and a shawl), I decided it would be a good idea to start these, but they actually work up pretty fast. The design is based on a hyacinth cluster motif from The Complete Guide to Needlework. I worked it in Bernat Satin Sport yarn that I had lying around from an abandoned afghan from about three years ago, but I might try these again with a lighter weight yarn.

Hyacinth Gloves by Huma

This pattern uses magic loop. See here for a tutorial if needed.

Materials:
sport-weight yarn, approx. 80 yards
size 7 (4.5 mm) circular needles
stitch holder

Size:
These gloves will fit hands of diameter 7 inches (around the knuckles). Finished length is about 5 inches.

Instructions:
M1: Make 1 stitch by lifting the strand between the needles onto the left needle and knitting through the back loop.
M2: Make 2 stitches by lifting the strand between needles onto the left needle and knitting through front loop and back loop.

Right glove
Cast on 32 stitches using the long-tail method. Split cast-on stitches so there are 16 stitches on each needle. Using magic loop, work five rows of 1x1 ribbing. (Feel free to make the cuffs longer than five rows--mine actually turned out a little shorter than I had wanted them to be.)

Row 1: K32
Row 2: M1, k16, m1, k16
Row 3-4: Repeat rows 1-2. (36 stitches)

Hyacinth cluster
Row 5: K1, * p3 together, (k1, p1, k1) into next stitch. Repeat from * three times more, k1. K18 to complete row.
Row 6: Knit across the row.
Row 7: K1, * (k1, p1, k1) into next stitch, purl 3 together. Repeat from * three times more, k1. K18 to complete row.
Row 8: M2, knit across row.

Row 9: M1, k2, m1 (thumb shaping). K1. For the next 16 stitches, insert the needle as if to knit, wind the yarn around the needle three times, then complete the knit stitch. Try to keep the tension fairly loose while working this row. K1. Knit the 18 stitches on the other needle to complete the row.
Row 10: M1, k4, m1. Knit across rest of the row, unwinding the extra loops from the previous row and letting them fall. There should be no increase to the number of stitches from the previous row to this one.
Row 11: M1, k6, m1. Work as for row 5 for remaining stitches in row.
Rows 12-14: Continue increasing 2 in each row, knitting 2 more stitches in between increases than in the previous row. Work the remaining stitches as for the clusters in rows 6-8.
Row 14: M1, k12, m1. Continue as for row 5.
Rows 15-17: Move 14 stitches at beginning of row to stitch holder. Work one repeat of rows 6-8.

Work two more repeats of hyacinth cluster (rows 5-8), or more if desired. Work three rows of 1x1 ribbing. Bind off. Pick up thumb stitches and work three rows of 1x1 ribbing. Bind off. Sew thumb seam.

Left Glove
This one is worked almost identical to the right glove, with the only difference being that the thumb shaping begins half a row earlier. Instead of increasing two at the beginning of row 8, start increasing in the middle of row 7. Keep increasing in the middle of subsequent odd rows (instead of the beginning of even rows) until there are 14 thumb stitches. Everything else is the same.

On Ravelry.

Let's Re-cover Books Like It's 1995

2011-06-29T12:51:00.020-04:00

I love buying used books. I love being inside used bookstores and imagining the histories of the volumes piled on their shelves. I love finding old and beautiful (or sometimes really strange!) editions of my favourite books, books that have been out of print for years, and especially books with inscriptions or scribbles inside that provide a view of their previous situations.

Boring covers.

But sometimes, used books don't come in such good condition. While I'm fussy about softcovers, I don't mind hardcovers that have torn jackets, or no jackets at all, since I usually remove them anyway. Even when I buy new books, I tend to take off the jackets because they are almost always ugly, and when they are not ugly, I still prefer the look of the plain cover. But, when I have accumulated many books like this, what I find is a shelf lined with plain and boring covers (instead of bright and horrible jackets), usually black or gray or some other bland colour.

So, in the process of reorganizing my shelves yesterday, I decided to take some of these boring looking books and re-cover them. I took three of mine and two of Meraj's, and chose new covers from a 1995 edition of Electronic Design (whose purpose back then, so far as I could tell, seemed to be to fill itself with ridiculous ads). Below are the results of my labour; you can judge for yourself how much of an improvement the new covers make.

Marge Piercy's To Be of Use, front, back, and inside:

The Greatest Pages of American Humor, Stephen Leacock:

The Infinite Book, John Barrow:

Golem in the Gears, Piers Anthony:

Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby (I actually got this one new, but hated the jacket so much):

Empress of Ice Cream

2011-06-25T17:15:00.010-04:00

I had a high school French teacher, whom we referred to simply as Monsieur, who enjoyed telling us stories about his long-gone childhood. He had a special style of recounting--somewhere between ranting and inspiring--and an East coast accent that slipped out when he got excited, that we never grew tired of listening to. One of his stories I remember was about the savage abuse that companies often make of the "ice cream" label, as little in the dense list of ingredients on most boxes can attest to being any relation of either of those words. (I'm almost but not completely sure this rant-story came out of a class discussion on Nestle's (then new) Real Dairy brand, whose name M. found offensive to his knowledge of real dairy.) He assured us that the only "real" ice cream was, of course, the kind he had eaten as a child: ice cream you could see being mixed, churned, and frozen yourself.

A few days ago, with the official arrival of summer, I decided to try some of this "mixing, churning, freezing" business myself. My previous frozen desserts experience extended as far as the kulfi form, which is something like a creamy popsicle and not nearly as complicated as actual ice cream. I had no ice cream machine, either, but I did some searching and found that the fanciest tools I needed were a spatula and a freezable container (oh, and lots of time).

I started with the simplest custard recipe to use as the base, and followed David Lebovitz' instructions above to turn it into ice cream. When he says "2-3 hours", what he means is "pretty much the entire day". It took a lot of churning and refreezing before the mixture finally froze. But the effort was certainly worth it.

Would M. approve?

The final product had a little bit of iciness to it, which more mixing would have gotten rid of, but it was quite nice and creamy, and with no unpronounceable mystery ingredients! I might try an egg custard next time, for more richness, or maybe something yogourt-based. I might also actually get a machine, so that enjoying real ice cream doesn't need to require staying near the freezer all day.

Mango Custard Recipe
Ingredients:
6 cups milk
1 to 2 cups sugar
5/8 cups cornstarch
1 can mango pulp (or 3 pulverized mangos)

Dissolve cornstarch in 1/2 cup milk and stir periodically, as the cornstarch will come out of solution if left alone. Boil the remaining milk with the sugar (less if you are using pulp which has already been sweetened). When it has boiled, pour in the cornstarch mixture, making sure to stir constantly to prevent it from burning. Cook until the mixture starts to thicken, then cook for a few minutes more, until it has reached the consistency of custard.

Cool slightly, then stir in the mango pulp.

Passing Secret Messages with Google Search Queries

2011-06-08T16:28:00.004-04:00

I think there was an implied promise at the end of my last post to continue talking about cool knitting stuff, but that thought I never got around to finishing is now somewhat lost. It'll come back, eventually.

Sometimes, I come up with ideas that seem idiotic, and then I excitingly find that other people have already been thinking about similar ideas for a while. A few months ago (probably after seeing something bizarre show up in Google's search recommendations), I started thinking about how Internet browsing history might be used to pass secret messages. On a public computer, one person might enter some message as a (seemingly innocuous) search query, or series of queries, and the other person could then receive the message by checking the history. But, this would require that both parties be located fairly close to each other, and would give the second party a narrow window of opportunity, as public computers probably clear their browsing history pretty often.

Then I thought, what about Google search recommendations? Could there be a way to manipulate those? (Say, by creating enough searches with a phrase so that typing the first few words of that phrase results in the full phrase being recommended.) If so, two people could agree on a single phrase to add in front of their messages, and then do the same trick with entering the phrase and message as a search query, repeating (probably automatically) as many times as required. Now, if one of them wants to read the other's message, he types their agreed upon phrase, and the message shows up as a "search recommendation".

I have no idea if trying to manipulate recommendations this way would even work, but assuming it does, the volume of searches that would need to be created suggests that this would be easy to detect and thus not a good system, even though it doesn't have the limitations of the first method. What would be optimal is if one person could make a single search--invisible in the myriad of regular searches--that the other person could somehow specifically see, without needing to be present where the search was made.

The answer lay in my Blogger stats page. Blogger (and many similar websites) provides a primitive statistics facility that lets me know roughly where my readership comes from, when they read my posts, and how they were referred here--including listing any search queries that got people to my blog. So, if you wanted to pass a secret message to me, it could be as simple as typing "not waving but flying hi huma!" into Google and then clicking on the link to my blog:

Innocent queries or secret communications?

It is (I think) pretty hard to detect unless you know exactly what you're looking for, but it also doesn't always work. For example, for those last three queries, typing "not waving but flying" didn't come up with my blog, so I had to use the Blogger address name in order for my site to actually show up in the results.

So, obviously, I'm nowhere near the first person to think about secret message passing. The associated field of study, if you're interested in further reading, is called steganography, a fancy word I learned today while browsing the CSC's calendar of summer events. I couldn't find much information on how much search queries are really used for communication, but I'm probably not the first person to come up with that idea, either.

Regular Knitting

2011-06-04T01:32:00.001-04:00

A while ago, I blogged about a paper on recursive knitting, of which I discussed a small part. I had meant to comment more on it, but never seemed to get around to doing so.

I spent Thursday morning wandering around the Bluffs and reading parts of John Barrow's The Infinite Book, and I came home inspired to do some infinity crocheting. The design I came up with was based on a simple checkerboard pattern such as the one discussed in the aforementioned paper, and I was reminded of the paper's discussion of the "regularity" of knitting patterns. I've seen it claimed in a few places that knitting patterns constitute a regular language, but what exactly is meant by that claim, I think, is unsatisfactory if not somewhat wrong. It is obviously true that any (knitting or crochet) pattern for a particular piece is regular; explicitly writing out all of the stitches produces a regular expression which matches the "language" (a single string) of that pattern. But, this observation is about as useful as saying that the string "hello world" is a regular language.

What Bernasconi et al state is that patterns can often be expressed more concisely using regular expressions or grammars, as they demonstrate by shortening a written description for a ribbing pattern to an RE like the following:

R = {| | | {- - | |}* #}* (| = knit stitch; - = purl stitch; # = end of row)

so that L(R) is then all patterns for pieces of all possible lengths made of this ribbing. This is far more interesting than the first statement, because here L(R) is an infinite (rather than one-word) language. But this is still quite limited. The "family" of patterns described by L(R) is really just one row repeated to different lengths.

Consider the checkerboard pattern, described as follows:

Row 1: *knit n, purl n*, repeat from * to end of row
Repeat previous row n times.
Row 2: *purl n, knit n*, repeat from * to end of row
Repeat previous row n times.
Repeat from beginning to desired length.

It seems easy to convert this into an RE for some given n; for example, the 4-checkerboard pattern can be written as the following (the powers are used as a convenient shorthand):

R' = { {| | | | - - - -}* #}⁴{- - - - | | | |}* #}⁴}*

But there's something wrong here, isn't there? We should make sure that the 4-knit, 4-purl pattern is being repeated the same number of times in each row, so what our expression really should be is

R'' = { {| | | | - - - -}^l #}⁴{- - - - | | | |}^l #}⁴}*

where 8l is the length of each row. If l is known, then L(R'') is still regular, so let's just assume that l is given.

But, I was talking above about (interesting) families of patterns. It's cool that I've got an RE for the 4-checkerboard, but what I would really like is a way to express all n-checkerboard patterns (and not just a particular pattern) with one expression. What I want is something like

R''' = { { {|}^k {-}^k}^l #}^k{ {-}^k {|}^k }^l #}^k}*

where k is any positive integer. But now, not only is L(R''') no longer regular, it's not even context-free! So a family of knitting patterns as (visually) simple as the checkerboard cannot be described with regular expressions.

I haven't yet gotten to the infinity crochet pattern and this post is already quite long and it's getting late, so I'll continue this discussion once I've had some sleep.

It Grieves Me Sore, the Things You've Done to Plane Geometry

2011-05-29T19:38:00.009-04:00

A straight line through three
non-linear points? No problem.

When is a straight line not straight? When you're playing in the awesome world of Portal 2. Straight lines are bent, and light is solid, and gravity (among other laws of physics) is defied if you have a portal gun and the wonderful imagination of the engineers at Valve.

That is, if you are playing, of course. If the game manages to run on your middle-end, three-year old laptop.

I ran into a problem earlier this week, which, according to the Internet, has been a common issue for people with Intel GMA cards trying to run Portal 2. Initially, the game wouldn't run at all after I'd installed it, but that was because my graphics driver hadn't been updated since 2008 (so it's not like I do anything more graphics-intense than watching dvds, okay). Once that was updated, the game ran fine... for a few levels. When I closed the game and tried to continue it later, it froze after the splash screen, the sound started getting stuck, and the screen went black. In the system tray, there was an error icon stating that my graphics driver had stopped responding. I had to kill the game from the task manager and try launching it again, but the same thing happened.

State of the art technology, like
my graphics card.

I tried reinstalling both the game and my graphics driver, to no avail. I even tried running my display and the game on the lowest possible settings (it's been too long, 640x480), but that didn't work either. After being heartbroken over the failures of my aging computer (playing the game on my brother's desktop for the meanwhile), and much searching, I came across this thread on the Steam forums, which eventually lead me to this fix. Adding those launch options to the game seems to have solved this issue for me, for now. Let's hope for good.

But, it seems to have been the Week of Computer Woes, because my troubles were not done there. I have a Wubi installation on my laptop (because Vista cries less this way) which was running Lucid Lynx until a few days ago, when an update to my NIC driver led to a series of events which ended in my deciding to update my Ubuntu to Maverick Meerkat. There was the new Unity desktop I had wanted to try out, and I mean, why not upgrade, right?

This was my frame of
mind at this point.

Well. I went to the update manager which happily informed me that a new release was available, so I selected the upgrade option and waited five hours for it to download the 1300+ required packages, install them, clean up, and reboot. When it came back, I excitedly waited for my shiny new system to load... but all I saw was a black screen with some brief flashes of an error message--and then the computer restarted.

What the f.

Speaking of surprises, what
a weird one this was.

Apparently, the updated grub bootloader was no longer working properly with Wubi installs. Simply replacing the wubildr file didn't work, so I reached for my 9.04 LiveCD to boot off of it and fix my grub configuration, but--surprise!--the cd was corrupted. So I spent another while downloading and burning a Slax cd (I needed something that would fit in 700 MB since I had no dvds lying around), then, after a brief struggle with loop mounting, deleted stuff out of my grub.cfg, rebooted, and Ubuntu is now back.

The best part is, after finally getting back into Ubuntu, this is the first thing I saw:

Yeah, I'll pass on that one, thanks.

Where is the happy part of this story? As you might tell from the title, I had originally wanted to write a post about the excellence of Portal 2, which has been my solace this past week. In addition to all the fun of soaring through chambers without a care in the world, the backstory to Aperture Labs is shaping up to be quite interesting; I'm excited to see how this is going to end.

(I'm currently on Chapter 7. For the record, let me say that I think it's too obvious if GLaDOS turns out to be Caroline. I think it would be cooler if Cave Johnson put himself in GLaDOS and killed Caroline. (The posters show CJ getting progressively more robot-like, and wasn't GLaDOS's first thought that Caroline was someone she murdered?) Or what would be equally cool is if Caroline was some sort of robot/android to begin with and "upgraded" herself to GLaDOS. Remember that "No Hard Feelings" turret? One of the phrases he babbles is, "Her name is Caroline... Just remember that." Could Assistant Caroline be connected to the turrets somehow?) (Text is greyed to avoid accidentally spoiling; highlight to read.)

Way Too Late to This Party

2011-05-24T10:01:00.001-04:00

Finally installing that copy of Portal 2 I bought some three weeks ago. Forgive me if I disappear for the next few days.

Lessons in Tucks

2011-05-23T22:45:00.002-04:00

I spent this morning playing capture-the-flag in almost rainy weather, and then was occupied with various things throughout the day, so I haven't yet gotten a chance to finish the sleeves of my shirt. They're the last thing I have left to do, and I'm feeling very lazy all of a sudden about doing them.

Below are some photos of what I've done so far, details in the title text.

WATSIX and Sewing

2011-05-20T00:32:00.006-04:00

I haven't been posting, but I've been keeping busy. I spent a few days this past week polishing the WATSIX* Math/CS event our quizbowl team wrote last term, to get it ready for this Saturday at UofT. In the slim chance that the intersection between my readership and those who might play the event is nonempty, I obviously can't say much about it here, except that, after a long deliberation, I decided to not to write a tossup on the "Look and Feel" lawsuits, despite really, really wanting to. (Okay, actually, I realized pretty fast that it was a bad idea, but then spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that it was only sort of a bad idea. In the end, I just cut the question I was trying to replace.)

I finished the skirt which was giving me grief in a previous post (though I had to give up on the pocket and replace it with an easier eyelet design), and I've spent some time since reading about proper fabric techniques--how to handle, cut, manipulate cloth correctly; how to press fabric (yes, this is not simple); why it's important to pay attention to warp, weft, and bias; etc. I do poorly with having to follow detailed instructions, so I've never really handled this stuff properly when I've worked patterns before (and things mostly turn out alright anyway). But, I'm realizing that "turning out alright" is not actually very good and I really should learn correct methods if I want to be anywhere near as good a seamstress as I would like to be.

I've been working on a shirt which I want to dedicate a full post to, possibly tomorrow. My next goal is going to be to learn to sew pants. Eventually, I want to make this exciting pair which I found the pattern for at Fabricland on Wednesday, but I think I'll practice with a simpler pattern before attempting that one.

*The name is an homage to our school's unapologetic history of making bad puns. Though, that's not as bad as our Math Society's official mascot which is a natural log.

Database of Books

2011-05-09T09:38:00.002-04:00

Today's project is to catalogue my books, which will necessitate first cleaning out the storage closet (among other places that my stuff has been scattered into while I've been at university). This will also give me a chance to practice working with PostgreSQL and OO Perl.

I'll stick to English books to start. Eventually, I would really like to organize my mum's extensive collection of Islamic literature (most of which is in Urdu), but I think that particular project is much more than a day's worth of work.

Time Remembered

2011-05-07T22:00:00.002-04:00

I've been trying to sew a Marcy Tilton skirt but the fabric I'm using is stretching too much and I'm at the point of giving up for the day. And so, with fingers aching from pulling and pulling seams, I seek to borrow from poetry books some surcease of my sorrow. I reach for Stevens first, but my mind is now too tired for Romanesque affabulations, so I end up, as happens not rarely, reading aloud from The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne.

I've enjoyed Swinburne's poetry since I was young. "When the Hounds of Spring" is included in one of two small collections my uncle sent me around my third birthday, from which my mum often read to me, and which I myself spent many evening hours curled up with on the couch once I learned how to read. I remember most loving the poems I could (and did) almost sing: Tennyson's "Song of the Brook" was an especial favourite; Longfellow's "Afternoon in February"; Wordsworth's ode to March; Whittier's "Indian Summer"; of course, Swinburne's "Hounds"; all among others I can't immediately recall. I didn't understand some of these poems very well (what can "clouds like ashes" mean to a five-year-old?) but what appealed were the sounds, the words themselves independent of meaning. Repeating the music-like phrases out loud, learning the rhythms, tones, motions of the English language before I learnt much of the language itself were my first (and most valuable) lessons in poetry.

I've learned to study the other side: symbols, imagery, metaphors, all the elements of good poems. Depth of meaning, rhymes and meters relevant only so far as they mean. I mean, I fully believe that appreciating poetry is not possible (not true) until that kind of deeper investigation is done, but, sometimes, I just dislike it. Sometimes, all I want is the roundness of Swinburne, or the whole sounds of Stevens without thinking about words, about images, about significance in any way at all.

Swinburne, in particular, makes it so easy to forget that words have meanings beyond music; reading him out loud is one of the most effective remedies for improving my mood, whatever the cause of my unhappiness.

Cabling the Butterfly Network

2011-05-04T15:19:00.006-04:00

The work described in this blog post follows from Bernasconi, Bodei, and Pagli's paper, "On formal descriptions for knitting recursive patterns" which can be found here on CiteSeer.

I've spent the past few days learning to knit an architecture known as the butterfly network. To construct a butterfly of dimension d, draw d rows of 2^d-1nodes. Label each node with the pair (i, w) where i and w are binary numbers representing respectively the row and column of each node. Connect two nodes (i_a, w_a) and (i_b, w_b) if one of the following hold:

i_b = i_a + 1, and w_a differs from w_b in the i_ath bit. (cross edge)
i_b = i_a + 1, and w_a = w_b. (straight edge)

Bernasconi et al describe an algorithm to recursively generate a knitting grid for a butterfly of some given dimension. They ignore straight edges for "aesthetic" reasons; since I couldn't find a nice way of working vertical stripes alongside cables, I did the same.

My first effort was a butterfly of dimension three (the simplest non-trivial butterfly) to familiarize myself with the cabling; for my second attempt I worked a 4-butterfly, adding colours to distinguish the graph from the background. The yarn I used in this piece was rough, but with a better yarn I think this would look really nice.

The grid that I mentioned being recursively generated is actually a "meta chart"--a grid made up of dark and light circles which gives only an outline of the pattern. The point is to then replace these circles with specific stitches to create a pattern with a chosen look, texture, etc. For example, for a flat pattern, dark circles could become knit stitches and light circles, become purls, or each could be replaced by stitches worked in different colours. But for cabled patterns, because the direction of the twist of a cable is important, the meta chart for the butterfly cannot be converted into an actual pattern so easily; a human knitter could look at the chart and reason without difficulty about which way to twist the stitches represented by dark circles, but any automatic conversion procedure would need to be somewhat more complex.

The authors refer to such a procedure as (part of) a "knitting compiler". Unfortunately, I couldn't find the paper that they cite in reference to this, and searching online for knitting compilers turned up nothing useful. But the concept is pretty neat: an algorithm (code) to generate a pattern is specified; the code is then "compiled" into a human- (or even knitting-machine-) readable format (executable); and this "executable" is then "run" to produce a piece of fabric. I'm not yet sure how far this analogy goes towards being useful, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.

The World's First Consulting Debugger

2011-04-30T19:50:00.003-04:00

116-Across from the Sherlock Holmes crossword I am doing: W[atson] had a pair of shoes of a type named after this word. As many times as I have read these stories, I have no clue what this five-letter word is supposed to be. The puzzle is from Peter Haining's A Sherlock Holmes Companion which I found while getting lost in downtown Kitchener two weeks ago, and which I've been itching to have time to read properly. Having (several editions of) the complete Holmes on my bookshelf already, I suppose it's time to start on books about the books.

I sometimes wonder if growing up on these stories helped develop my affinity for (of all things) debugging. Sure it's frustrating, but there's a secret thrill to unravelling the mystery, observing what's going wrong and deducing the hidden cause sometimes as arcane as the best of Doyle's concoctions. And the brilliant moment when you suddenly see what's happening and just want to shout, "YES I UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING NOW," is completely worth the anguish.

(Don't even consider laughing; you all know what I'm talking about.)

Being a consulting debugger would quite possibly be the best job. (I mean, in a way, this is what office hours really is.) I'll hang out in the third-floor labs after I graduate and charge (exorbitant!) fees to debug people's code. Just this crazy figure in the corner, solving the world's mysteries the way she knows best.

Saying Goodbye

2011-04-28T23:27:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow will be my last day of work at the Instructional Support Group of the David R. Cheriton School of CS. I've been working here since second year (all the way back in January 2009) and it's really hard for me to think back to when I first started. I knew so little and was so excited to be working as an undergrad TA, running labs and tutorials, holding office hours, teaching kids older than me how to do magic with Scheme. (Really, this job has kept my Scheme very sharp.) It's really hard for me to imagine that tomorrow will be my last day of doing all of that; of hanging out in the Davis Centre offices; of debugging the most insane problems; of being unbearably bored one moment and then running around the school trying to get a million things done the next. I've had so much fun and not believed for a minute that this job would ever end.

I've talked to my supervisor about coming back part-time in the future. In fact, I would be doing part-time this summer if I weren't taking the term off. For the past four years, I have been constantly working, either on a study term or a co-op work term, with no break, no summer holidays, no off terms, so I am exhausted. I'm converting my last co-op term (I've already completed the five I need for my program) into a 4-month break, a time to unexhaust myself before the exciting, dreaded Year Four. (Also, upper-year course offerings are pretty poor in the summer.)

So I keep telling everyone that I'm going to spend these next four months just catching up on four years' nutrition and sleep but they know I'm lying. I've got a list of projects and plans, half of which I might not start and half of which I know I won't finish, but all of which I hope to track my progress through on this blog.