Nexus 4 still live and kicking

My everyday phone for the past few years has been Nexus 4. I also have a Nexus 5, which is slightly larger and with a much better screen, but I never felt a need to switch (I did try to have "Let's use N5 this week" every once in a while, though). Last year's Nexus 6 simply felt too large for me. Besides, it is too expensive for me to buy.

I noticed that my N4 recently stopped picking up NFC and charging via wireless. Later I learned that this is a typical sign that its battery needs replacement. Not because the battery got too weak to hold charge, but because the battery started bloating, pushing against the back cover, which necessary antennas are built onto. By slightly raising the back cover by bulging out, the bloated battery breaks the connection from the motherboard to these antennas, which is made only by contact. And that is how NFC and wireless charging are broken.

At least, that is the story I read.

After learning how to, and getting a replacement battery and a few small screw/torx drivers, I opened the phone (which took me some time) and saw this bloated battery.







No wonder the back cover looked warped. After placing the new battery and closing the back, NFC started picking up very reliably and it charges properly on a wireless charger.

Happy ;-)

The Codebreakers

Every once in a while, I receive gifts from satisfied Git friends, chosen from my Amazon Wish list. And today was such a day. As I have been fairly busy cleaning up the fallout from our recent move and finally things are beginning less hectic, it turns out to be a perfect distraction gift for me, too ;-)

I only read the first few sections so far (it is a big, thick book and it would take me forever to finish reading and then write about it and thanking the person). Thanks, MTM!

Is there any science in Amazon pricing?

I keep a handful of stuff in the "Saved for later" category in my Amazon shopping cart. It is amusing to see that prices of some items constantly keep changing.

Take these earbuds, for example. I listen to podcasts while commuting with a pair of earbuds plugged to my phone, and for that purpose audiophile-grade fidelity is not a requirement. Ones from different brands I tried over time, including these, have developed frayed wire just outside the connector plug and died after several months' use. Cheap earbuds are consumables to me, and I keep a couple of unopened spares around, and restock every once in a while.

They used to be around $20, but among several colors, I noticed that one particular color started selling below $10 a few weeks ago. A few days ago it was at $8.26 and then this morning I saw it at $8.06. Another example I saw was that a deck of cards that lists at $45 fluctuated both upwards and downwards between around $30 to $45 within just a few weeks. I saw a similar pattern between $140-$160 for a pair of men's shoes within three weeks.

I am guessing one of the reasons why they keep changing the prices is because they want to encourage customers to come back to their shopping cart often. I however wonder how the price fluctuations are computed. Is it random-walk just to make sure that "The prices of items in your cart changed" notice appears often enough, or is there a deep science based on supply-and-demand and consumer psychology involved? Perhaps they are measuring how low they have to go before I move an item out of the "Saved for later" bin to see how bad a cheapskate I am?

I can understand why the price of this DVD that I kept in the "Saved for later" for the last three years gradually climbed before December 25th and then dropped soon after that day every year. But I do not expect there is much seasonality in demand with earbuds or deck of cards.

Getting an ultrabook

I've been happily using Dell Inspiron 1420, and it still is a fine laptop to run Linux on, but it started to feel a bit stale, especially with its 1280x800 display. So I got a Vizio CT15-A5.

Its 1920x1080 display was the primary reason I picked this over Lenovo X1 carbon, even though this is also quite larger; in fact, I do not think I would be willing to carry anything larger than this one.

Doesn't the manufacturer's logo look like U1210, as if it is screaming to get Ubuntu 12.10 installed?

Now, even though I am sufficiently old that tweaking machine configuration no longer excites me too much, I am still curious. It came with Windows 8 (without reinstallation medium). So instead of wiping and installing Ubuntu from scratch, I decided to keep the Windows for a while and see how it looks like, and dual-boot the machine.

Of course, before deciding that, I had to make sure that it worked with Ubuntu (which happened to be the distro I have been running on my 1420). Booting from USB key needed a bit of BIOS tweaking (and it came with no manual, so it needed a bit of Googling around to find out that hitting F2 was the way to fall into the bios settings screen while booting).

There are three places in the bios setting that affects the booting:

• Secure boot (on/off)
• OS support (Windows/other)
• Boot device (USB key, USB CD, USB HDD, USB floppy, Internal HDD, UEFI Windows Boot Manager)

After a couple of trial and error sessions, I found out that in order to boot from the USB key, I had to (1) turn off Secure Boot, (2) pick "Other" from OS Support, and (3) have "USB key" early in the boot device order. In fact, it did not allow me to do (2) until I turned off Secure Boot.

It felt funny to boot the "try it out" mode from a USB key, install Chrome browser in that environment, adding a plugin to do video hangout for G+ in it, all without actually touching the internal disk at all. All the usual suspects in Linux portability (touchpad, wifi, webcam, speakers, microphone, etc.) seemed to work fine out of the box.

Booting into the Windows and looking at its disk (Win-R "diskmgmt.msc") reveals that it uses GPT partitioning scheme, with bunch of garbage partitions (300MB Recovery and 260MB ESP at the beginning, 6.8G Recovery and 2G OEM at the end, with all the remaining space allocated for Windows C:). It also seems that booting from the USB key puts it into BIOS (i.e. not UEFI) mode, so it is understandable that Ubuntu installation USB key said that it does not see any bootable operating system on the disk, and there needs a dedicated "bios_grub" partition.

As a smaller configuration of the same ultrabook ships with 128G SDD (I got a 256G version), it should be sufficient to give Windows (and all the other garbage partition) 128G or so. I shrunk C: to 64G, carved out 22G for Linux (root filesystem), 4G swap, and created a 140G "Data" partition to be shared between the dual booted OSes. Also I gave a few megabytes to the bios grub partition.

The configuration ended up a bit strange albeit a workable one. When the firmware is set to boot from the internal HDD, because Ubuntu installation wrote the early stage of grub into the MBR (without corrupting GPT), it boots into Ubuntu. When set to boot with UEFI, it boots into Windows. I am guessing that I could install rEFInd and always boot with UEFI to dual boot from there, but I haven't felt the need for that step yet.

For now, I still have the Windows installation. I can run Putty to ssh into my primary machine, I can run Gimp, LibreOffice and GnuCash locally. I haven't found something I have to boot into Ubuntu side of the system to do, so I might end up keeping the Windows side much longer than I was originally planning to.  Besides, I'm tentatively enrolled in Amazon's Prime program, and their Prime instant video does not play on Chrome/Linux, so...

Naming a machine

When I came to Google, I asked my desktop machine to be named "linus". I was asked: "Do you really want your machine named linus?"

But the thing is, the requested name is not after Linus Torvalds. I name my machines using a dictionary. Let me explain how. I name my machines after some theme, and the machine "linus", just like my primary box "alter", is named after the primary activity I was planning to do on it, namely "Git".

The first thing to do is to find a bunch of dictionary words that have G, I and T in this order. We may find these words: afGhanIsTan, linGuIsT, aGlITter,...

Then remove these G, I and T from these dictionary words to obtain: afhansan, linus, alter,...

Finally, pick ones that can be pronounced and preferrably in dictionary.

That is how the machine was called "linus", and the primary box I use at home is "alter". My general purpose notebook is called "wing" (named after its manufacturer—can you guess who?).


Needless to say, I already know the name of my next Git machine: dial.

How do you name your machine?

Toilet Roll Effect

To put this in a more formal-sounding way, it can be observed when there are two independent cues that stop or start your behavior, and the behavior is something whose change tends to be one-way.

In order to wipe certain parts after you have finished doing certain things, you wind some length of paper around your hands, cut the paper from the roll, and use it.

Let's say you are used to use 1-ply toilet rolls, but you noticed that 2-ply rolls were on sale at the market, so that is what you bought recently.

What happens?

Because you are so used to the hand-motion to wind the 1-ply toilet rolls (say, you always wind 4 times), you still wind the same length of the stuff. Your backside starts to be comfy with the extra fluffiness your hands are giving it by using more paper. After all, you are winding the thicker 2-ply paper the same number of times. You may start winding the stuff a bit fewer number of times, but the rate of such decrease is slower. Perhaps you learn to wind only 3 times, but it would take time for you to go down to 2, which is the half of the original.

Next week, you notice that 1-ply rolls are on sale, so you switch again. By this time, your hands are used to winding 3 times, but your backside now complains because it no longer is rewarded by the same fluffiness. After all, you are giving it less paper. So you end up start winding the stuff even more, until your backside gets comfy enough. Your hands may learn to wind 5 times by the time this happens.

Notice that there are two cues that makes you stop winding when you do this. How many times you wind the paper around your hand, and how much fluffiness your backside feels by being wiped by it. And the change in the amount of paper you would use tends to be one-way (using more is easier).

Imagine if you switch to 2-ply rolls again. And then switch back to 1-ply rolls. The consumption of your toilet rolls tends to increase, and increase more if you switch between 1-ply and 2-ply rolls more often.

Exactly the same thing happens to cigarette usage, by the way. Two competing cues are how often you take a break, and how much chemical effect you get from a puff. Start from a weak brand, and your break schedule may settle for a break per 3 hours. Switch to a stronger brand, and your body gets used to greater chemical effect with the same 1 break per 3 hours schedule. Switch back to the weaker brand, and now your body will complain and wants more nicotine, and your break schedule ends up being more frequent. Switch back to the stronger one again, with the more frequent schedule, your body gets trained to more nicotine. Rinse and repeat...

The Double Helix by James D. Watson

This is a classic.

The scientific race between James D. Watson (the author) and Francis Crick at Cambridge vs Linus Pauling at Cal Tech to solve the structure of DNA is vividly described. The book was written not as an objective science history, but as a record of what the author thought, felt and experienced in the midst of that race, and begins its preface with this:

Here I relate my version of how the structure of DNA was discovered.

Because the author was in the centre of this adventure, there is no other way for him to tell his story than as a personal recollection. Nobody can be an objective third-person observer and reporter of important events around himself that changed the world. And because the book is written from that perspective, the author's adrenaline rush during the fierce competition feels even more real to the readers.

After examining the draft of a paper sent to Peter Pauling (Linus's son, who was then at Cambridge) from their competitor, Linus Pauling, in which Linus described his solution to the puzzle of DNA structure, the Cambridge group concludes that Linus's solution cannot possibly be correct, and congratulates that they haven't lost their race yet. Then:

On our way to Soho for supper I returned to the problem of Linus, emphasizing that smiling too long over his mistake might be fatal. The position would be far safer if Pauling had been merely wrong instead of looking like a fool. Soon, if not already, he would be at it day and night.

When I read this passage, this somehow reminded me of the excitement and tense sense of competition I felt during the early days of Git development. Of course, I was competing with the other  Linus (Torvalds, who is known for his Linux operating system, originally wrote Git and was actively developing it with many other brilliant software developers in collaboration) back then.

When there was an issue to solve, everybody rushed to present his own bright idea, and it was a race to show a clean, clever and useful solution to improve the system. When other guys went in a wrong direction and wasted their time, you had more time to polish your work and beat them to your better solution.

I do not think that the similarity between the way how the scientific race and the open source race work stops there. Even though the participants all want the glory of being the first to reach the right solution, at the highest level, everybody is working collectively towards the same goal, be it the advancement of their scientific field, or the improved user experience of their software. The subtle balance between competition and collaboration is the same in both endeavours.

The book depicts Maurice Wilkins of King's College, the other scientist who shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick, as somebody who had access to good X-ray crystallography data that eventually helped the discovery by Watson and Crick, but didn't solve the puzzle himself even though he was an expert in the field of DNA research.

Given that the way Watson's book is written from his own perspective, I suspect that the aptly titled book The Third Man of the Double Helix : An Autobiography by Wilkins himself is a must-read for anybody who reads this book to see both sides of the coin. It is already on my "To Read" list.

The book was a very satisfying read and I really enjoyed it. It was given by a happy Git user Ben (thanks!) as a present to me the other day, picked from my Amazon wishlist.

The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, by Dickson Despommier

This book was given to me by a happy Git user (Thanks, Michael!) as a gift, picked from my wish list at Amazon.


The book was fascinating and somewhat disappointing at the same time. Perhaps disappointing is not a good word, and I should say somewhat frustrating.

I found that the first half of the main argument of the book very convincing: conventional soil-based agriculture that relies heavily on agro-chemicals (herbicide, insecticide and fertilizer) and causes terrible damage to the environment due to run-off water, is not simply sustainable. The other half of the premise, however, looked rather sketchy, day-dreaming and hand-wavey: multi-story high-tech greenhouses can be built inside city boundaries, and using the state of the art scientific method (e.g. supplying the plants with purified water spiked with necessary nutrients and growing them aeroponically; lighting with OLED that emits only the wavelengths absorbed by chlorophyll; burning plant waste with plasma-arc gassification) sufficient amount of high-quality food can be produced, freeing vast farmland that we have been wasting back to the nature, while reclaiming as much water and energy as possible.


I am reasonably sure that the author has some solid numbers to convince policy people about the benefit and feasibility of his dream, but I found them solely lacking in the book. Here is only one passage with some numbers I remember:

One strawberry farmer who wishes to remain anonymous decided to replace his now destroyed 30 acre farm by constructing a high-tech greenhouse with a 1 acre footprint. Using hydrostackers, he was able to produce the equivalent of 29 acres’ worth of fruit, with year-round production. He elected to return the rest of his farm to its natural setting by simply leaving it alone. Within two years, the understory had returned and the biodiversity of the land improved dramatically.

That is a nice story, but isn't strawberry rather special? It is sufficiently high-value kind of produce that would pay for a farmer to invest in high-tech. If the book had some back-of-the-envelope attempt at some math, like, "To supply a small city of 20,000 people, we would need X tons of grains, Y tons of cabbage, Z tons of ..., and it would need to treat W gallons of black water a year. A vertical farm consisting of N buildings (M stories high) of L sqft footprint would be sufficient for all of the above. The net intake of water and energy, offsetting with the water and energy reclaimed, would be such and such", even if the numbers were qualified with "this is just a back-of-the envelope with my own optimistic assumption that in 5 years technology will sufficiently advance to solve this and that problems", it would have been able to convert me, a mere interested reader, into a believer, somebody who shares the dream.

In the chapter on funding, after discussing that not everything is money and governments will be the likely sources of sponsorship, Dickson alludes to commercial sponsorship possibilities, and there I found this passage:

Google would be my first choice. This giant has an altruistic streak a mile wide. Google could afford to promote the concept with significant financial aid.

This is what made me the most frustrated about the book, because that was exactly what I was feeling while reading earlier parts of the book. Google is a green company; it for example uses many solar photo-voltaic panels (1.6MW), supplying about 30% peak electricity in the four main buildings. Significant number of employees take company shuttles, instead of driving their own cars to work.


If I were to bump into Larry or Sergey at the campus tomorrow and have a chance to chat with them (not likely to happen, as my workplace is on the other side of the campus that is a mile wide), I would love to suggest them that we build an experimental vertical farm near the Mountain View campus, supplying all 20+ cafes and micro-kitchens. Even though the book managed to convert me enough to be very much attracted to the idea, it didn't give me enough to come up with an intelligently-sounding answer to a very basic question, such as "OK, we will go ahead with Dickson's idea—how much space and how much workers do you want?"


Nevertheless, the author's enthusiasm jumps at you from every page, while deep knowledge and experience in his professional area (the author is a microbiologist, ecologist and Professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University) showing through between lines. It was a very pleasant read, and I would highly recommend it to anybody.

Epson WorkForce 545

My wife wanted a new printer (as the old HP has been acting up), so gave a visit to a local office electronics shop after running a few product searches.

The printer should support Google Cloud Print (as both my wife and I carry Android phones), and also should be supported by CUPS. I ended up getting Epson WorkForce 545 which is an all-in-one wired/wireless unit, simply because HP does not have a good impression on me anymore, and because I never used Kodak printers.

After a few trial-and-error sessions, it was reasonably easy to figure out how to configure it.

I first tried to connect it via WiFi. One glitch was that there didn't seem to be any way to learn the MAC address of the unit (the WiFi router is configured to talk WPA/WPA2 but also to filter connections based on MAC). I however was happy to see that its panel display offered to print diagnostic after it failed to connect and there was its MAC address printed there. After that, it was easy to configure it to authenticate to the WiFi router.

As the unit will sit immediately next to the router, however, I decided to disable WiFi altogether and give it a wired connection with fixed address.

After connecting to the network, interestingly, it was much easier to configure the unit to work with the Google Cloud Print than with CUPS.

A newer Windows box of my wife (I think it runs something called Windows 7) found the printer without me doing anything in particular; just being on the same network segment seemed to be enough, and then the Windows box installed the printer drivers itself.
 
Visiting the IP address I gave to the unit with the web browser, there were a handful of controls, and the top one was to make it work with Google Cloud Print. It just redirected the browser to google.com for OAuth and I had the printer associated with my Gmail account. From there, I can share the access to the printer with my wife's Gmail account and with my work account.

As I do not print much (and nothing at home), this was the first time I added a network printer to CUPS. After blindly trying random URLs like http://ip-address-of-unit:631, ipp://ip-address-of-unit/, etc., finally figured out that this particular model (or perhaps recent Epson in this class in general) wants to be connected with socket://ip-address-of-unit as its URL, but I did not see this documented anywhere.

An older Windows box my wife uses to control her computerized weaving loom (I think it runs Windows XP) was a different issue. It didn't see and did not want to connect to the wired printer, even though it could see my Linux box that is running samba. Adding an entry for it in /etc/samba/smb.conf was a simple task after figuring out what needs to be done (which unfortunately took too long for my liking). In the printer's section I needed to add use client driver = yes for it to work.

By the way, at the office electronics shop, I saw the new models of Kindle family (including the Fire), Nook color and the Nook tablet. Somehow Fire looked too thick and unwieldy to me, while Nook tablet looked slim and very nice. I didn't buy neither, though...

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of... by Sam Kean

Every once in a while, I receive gifts from satisfied Git friends, chosen from my Amazon Wish list.

And today was such a day.

I enjoy reading history of science.  Thanks Miro!

Sleepless

Somehow I couldn't sleep (no, I am not insomniac) and ended up rising way too early at 4:30 which is too late to go back to sleep.

Which turned out to be a rather productive quality 2-hour Git-morning. A few patches sent, and a few reviews made.

I may not be insomniac, but I sometimes wonder if I am a bit workaholic.

Final Jeopardy by Stephen Baker

Finished reading Final Jeopardy, covering the popular game show match between IBM's Watson and human champions. The pace of the book was pleasant; not too slow to be boring, not too fast to be sketchy. I do not regularly watch television, but I recall people gathering in front of the large TV in our building in one afternoon watching it.

The author excellently described in easy terms why this "question answering" was a harder problem than just finding documents that contain words with search engines. The machine needs to understand (or at least "pretend as if it understands") synonyms and concepts to a certain degree to give plausible answer to clues expressed in human language.

I however found the "search engines are dumb, machine needs to go one level higher" a somewhat antiquated notion, after recently seeing results from Google and Bing for "cartoon about pc and mac users updating software", "movie in which scientists go to brain in submarine" and such.

More Fun with Nook Simple Touch

Earlier I wrote about my new toy, Nook Simple Touch. Using the instruction at nookdevs (which was originally written for Nook Color, so I had to improvise a bit), I managed to tell Market and Google eBooks who I am and now I have both working.


There are screens in Market that I cannot read anything (e.g. application description); I am guessing either the application is trying to render the text in a color that is too faint on the grayscale display (unlikely but possible), or wants to use specific font not available on Nook, but haven't dug into the issue (yet).

A purchased Google eBook can be downloaded (on a PC) in the format that can be read on Nook via Adobe Digital Edition, so I have the same book readable in both Google eBooks application, and in the native Nook application. The formatting in Google eBooks for the particular book I tried was miserable (but that is the same as on my XOOM and not the fault of Nook Simple Touch device).

Having fun with Nook Simple Touch

I've had a second generation Kindle for some time, but for the past 8 months or so I have been sampling eBooksellers different from Amazon, and unfortunately Kindle does not read anything but what comes from Amazon X-<.

Kindle for Android, Nook, Kobo and Google eBooks apps all run on a XOOM I happen to have. But when all I want to do is just to read, it is a bit too heavy, especially when I am horizontal facing the ceiling. Then recently I saw Barnes & Noble selling the "all new Nook", aka "Nook Simple Touch", which has a 6-in e-Ink display (the same size as the second and the third generation Kindle) and runs on Android 2.1, which was quickly followed by rooting instructions that allows applications to be side-loaded ;-)

Compared to the second generation Kindle, it is significantly smaller (the bottom fourth of Kindle is a keyboard which Nook Touch does not have) and lighter, but interestingly, I found out that the small size of Nook does not directly translate to easier reading while lying down. The rarely-used keyboard part of Kindle allowed me to hold it between my thumb and palm in one hand, and I had to try many different ways to hold Nook Touch comfortably without touching the screen (which unlike Kindle is touch sensitive). For now, I settled with holding it in its cover folded all the way back, but I am not yet quite satisfied.

As to the software, I have installed Amazon Appstore and from there Kindle for Android. Regular Kindle books are readable without anything else, but Periodical was hard to navigate without "Back" button. For that, I installed SoftKeys, as Nook does not have physical buttons.

I also have ADW Launcher EX (which I already use on my phones) installed. The native Nook application can read B&N Nook books (of course), and I read Google eBooks by downloading them in the Nook format (via the adobe digital editions).

I haven't figured out how to enable the Google services yet, so while Google eBooks application is already installed, it asks me to "Add Google Account" and then does nothing. For the same reason, I haven't bothered to install GMail yet (although I have K-9 mail installed and have it working).

Neither the native Browser application nor Opera Mini seem to give a good browsing experience on this slate, but I am not expecting to use it as a browser anyway, so that is not a huge dissapointment.

日本からのニュースは腹の立つことばかり

だいぶん前に、日本赤十字を通じて送った義援金はまだきちんと分配されていないのだそうで、難しいのは、被害の度合に合わせて分配する、でも、そもそも全体の被害がきちんとわからないので、割り算で言う分母が決まらない、というところなのだそうである。死んだ人がいる家庭は一ポイント、家を失った家庭は一ポイント、てな具合にポイントを足していって被害の度合を決めるらしいが、こんなコトを言って誤解されるのは困るけれど、なぜ死んだ人の数を数えるのであろうか。他の人は知らぬが、ボクは「お線香やお花代にして下さい」という積りではなくて、全てを無くして当座の生活にもこと欠くような生き残った人の助けになるように、という思いで募金した積りである。だから、被災後のいま、働き手がなくなった・働く場所がなくなった、その結果収入源がない、ということに対して一ポイント、とか、被災後のいま、家族4人が食べていかないといけない、ということに対して四ポイント、とか言って数えるのには納得がいくけれど、A家ではおじいちゃんが死んだから一ポイント、B家ではお母さんが死んだから同じく一ポイント、C家ではねたきりのおばあちゃんまで無事に避難できたから死者ポイントなし、では納得がいかない。全て失った残った家族が生活していくのに必要なニーズを算定してそれに応じて分配するのがココロなのであれば、A家とB家とを同様に数えるのはおかしな話であるし、これからの支援の必要はおじいちゃんが死んでしまったA家よりもこれからもおばあちゃんの世話をしていかないといけないC家のほうがむしろ大きいだろう、と思うわけだ。別におじいちゃんは経済効果として役に立っていないから早く死んで下さい、という積りではない。死んだ人が出れば悲しくもあるし、御葬式の費用も必要だろう。でも今は火事場であって、そこで生活を続けていかないといけない生き残った人のために送った義援金である。受けた被害の大きさ、を重要視するのではなくて、生き残った人の必要に応じて配分してほしいものだと思う。

原発汚染水の処理に4段階式の装置を使うのだそうで、第一段の油抜きは東芝製、第二段のセシウム吸着は米国製、第三段の除染は仏国製で、最後の淡水化は日立製ということだ。これが、各分野で一番のすぐれた技術を持った人たちに得意分野を任せた「オールスター」であってほしいものだと思うボクはおそらくナイーブであって、単に昔からの「日立は、東芝が一つ入るならウチも加えろ、と言う。仏国製品を使うならウチのも使え、と米国も言う」のに合わせるという日本のお家芸だ、というところが正しいのであろう。

菅総理をやめさせよう、というのは構わないが、その後、こういう展望でこういう政治をしたい、だから早くやめてほしいのだ、とは誰も言っていないようなのが情けない。そんなコトだから、「どうせ誰がやっても同じである」という国民の反応になるのである。

Trying VTA light rail

My wife wants to visit her friend in Mountain View tomorrow. Luckily the VTA light rail train stops within a walking distance from where we live, and it goes directly to downtown Mountain View.

She wanted to run a reconnaissance mission, and I was curious to try out public transportation. It was a pleasant 30-minute ride. It would have taken only 15 minutes if we drove, but we both hate driving, and we didn't mind the extra 15 minutes we spent together.

During the 10+ years I lived in Los Angeles (south bay area), I think I took public transportation only twice. It was more than twenty-minute walk from where I lived back then to the nearest bus stop. Even though where I was going was directly on the bus route, driving felt a lot more convenient. I never liked it. But I liked VTA light rail train ride. It was relaxing.

Perhaps my wife can take the VTA to the downtown in late afternoon and I can take the commuter shuttle to meet her after work, and we can have a dinner date and come home on train during the weekdays. We should have thought of it earlier.

A little bit of Fun with eBooks

I found this in a book I was reading: "His [Louis Pasteur's] reputation soared when he diagnosed a disease that had been decimating France's silk industry." The book didn't go into any details, as its topic was about later work of his, not about his work helping the silk industry.

But I got curious, so naturally this became my "Google a Day" topic. But I am unfocused when I am not working, and my attention wander around without bounds and easily stray into tangents.

"Louis Pasteur Silkworm" gave many hits. A Wikipedia article mentioned a silkworm disease called Pébrine but its description was a bit sketchy. I wanted to try something different today, so from the sidebar, I said "More", and picked "Books", and looked for "Silkworm Pébrine". There were many books listed, so I then narrowed them down with "Preview Available". There were still quite many books on the topic. I picked The culture of the mulberry silkworm, which is a bulletin issued by USDA in 1903.
 
It was an entertaining read.

No longer a youngster

I ended up wasting most of the day installing FC15 on a new VM. I used to feel thrilled and excited installing a new system on either a physical or a virtual hardware, but these days it no longer is an excitement, but just is a painful chore.

Last time I had to do this with FC13, NetworkManager got in the way, and this time they threw systemd in the mix. The casual desktop users who use the default system out of the box wouldn't need that kind of complexity, and they actively hurt somebody like me who simply wants to get a stupid non-X, fixed-address bochs with NFS mounted home directory without having to learn "the new and improved" way.

Needed to "systemctl enable/start sshd.service", same for rpc.statd.
Oh, and let's not forget SELINUX=disabled in /etc/selinux/config file.

Sigh, the price of progress...

Getting used to Blogger

I used to use LiveJournal but I was getting too many comment spam and switched to Blogger. I am not suffering from spam anymore (or not yet?). It could be just because not many people know that this blog exists (yet). Or perhaps Blogger is doing much better job than LiveJournal fighting spam. I don't know (yet).

One thing I very much like about this new location is that fairly detailed access statistics comes for free. It is fun to see accesses not only from North America but also from Japan and Europe, when readers are active, and whatnot. Also I notice that fairly large number of people used to come from planet.git-scm.com just after I switched here, but not anymore (for an obvious reason - they still point at the old LiveJournal site, whose last article was my announcement to move here).

The ads also come for free, but LiveJournal also had ads, so I think that it is not a huge regression. Looking at the access statistics from many different countries, I wonder if people are shown tailored ads depending on where they come from, and if their clicks are costing very different amount to the advertisers, things like that.

UnGit Weekend day 2

Again, I am trying to relax and take this weekend off from much Git activity.

Which usually means that I am doing some random reading and other learning activities that are totally unrelated to computers.

Today, I learned how to deconstruct the word "mesothelioma". Somehow I always thought incorrectly that the word has something to do with "stone" and related to "rock wool", but it is broken down to mesos above - thele nipple - oma tumor, and does not have anything to do with asbestos.

It's funny that I got interested in a topic so remote from my ordinary life. The topic happened to be brought up when my wife was talking about a TV drama she recently watched. The last time I saw asbestos was probably in a middle school science class where we heated a beaker with some liquid in it on a wire-mesh with the material in the center with a bunsen burner underneath the whole contraption. Luckily I do not have any contact with the stuff in my real life, and I assume that science labs these days use some alternative material, probably ceramics or something. I also recall using glass wool in science lab for something, but it seems that it also is considered possible carcinogen these days.

Times change. When I was in high school which admittedly was a long time ago, synthesizing nitroglycerin in science club's lab and using it in an explosive experiment on the rooftop of the school was considered no more than just a minor mischief. Probably teachers wouldn't let their students run so wild as our time these days, fearing accidents and litigation...