Looking back over some of mine, FreeRADIUS from a long time ago, and openjpeg more recently, it appears that my preference is to actually write them as untensed fragments. I think I'm answering the question "What does this change do?" from the perspective of the change. This would make sense, mirroring somewhat the comments I put in dpatches (and the overly verbose names that have been known to occur) which are usually the patch talking about itself in the plural. Unless that's the patch _and_ I talking about ourselves in the plural?
Posted in Linguistics, Mew at 12:15 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Went to see Race tonight. It's actually not marked on the Hoyts site, but it's Hindi/English blend with English/nonsense blend subtitles. It's mentioned on the IMDB front page, but I missed it looking for the comments on the plot. The front page comment was satisfyingly spoiler free, and very positive. Had I noticed that the commenter was Indian, I might have clicked. Ah, hindsight. >_<
As an aside, the Hindi/English mix was interesting. I haven't seen enough Bollywood films to know if it's particular to this film or is part of the style (a friend suggested it was the latter) although I noticed while researching this post that one of the actresses doesn't speak Hindi. I need to learn more languages, at least reaching the point where I can watch movies in Japanese, Cantonese and now Hindi. And of course I wonder if I can possibly swing a research project into a Hindi/English pidgin. A university-funded Bollywood movie collection would be a thing of beauty...
So I took a few friends, all of us completely unprepared. I really should have clicked to it being Bollywood, given I'd noted the Indian director, actors, etc...
On the plus side it's really good. Turns out that the best way to improve a twisty, turny, windy plot, double-plot, cross and recross fest (ala Wild Things, which I've raved about here before) is to have the actors stop to sing and dance about what they're feeling every so often.
I also want to get married in Cape Town, at the registry office.
If you haven't seen Wild Things or Race, go do so.
Now Playing: Wild Things. My housemate hadn't seen it! This is a revelation akin to discovering another friend of mine hadn't seen The Princess Bride. There's also a Princess Bride Game coming, although I'm a little concerned, after seeing the trailer.
And just in case you didn't twig, this post's title is of course related to revelations. I'm not harbingering the end of Bollywood...
Now, my Japanese is not exactly spectacular, and rikaichan proved unhelpful as well, but this appears to be to be a 3-month exercise cartridge for women to increase their 女ヂカラ. As the joke goes, you fuck just one goat...
(Japanese is my best non-native language, too. My knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese currently extends only to 你有好乳房 "You have excellent breasts" and 你的妹妹有十六歲嗎 "Is your sister 16?", although if pressed occasional other words, interspersed with Japanese and the occasional mumble will emerge. ^_^)
Now of course I need to go assert my masculinity by buying something like this: (The infamouswitch touching game)
Granted, I'd have bought this game whether Amazon was trying to make me buy girly things or not and I realise that my other purchases (Kakitorikun, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon DVDs, for example) may have given Amazon the impression that I was a female Japanese primary-school student, but seriously, who gives a credit card to an eight-year-old girl named Paul?
Of course, my last AmazonJP shipment went to a female friend who was in Japan, maybe they assume I've been pretending to be a foreigner all this time to avoid sales tax? (Which is the opposite of online games, where I usually claim to be from very very south Okinawa, on the grounds that they don't actually ask what country you're from, just which prefecture of Japan.... This isn't a problem, both because I am roughly south of Okinawa, and because Japanese MMOs lost their appeal to me once I realised that the Japanese seem to produce nothing but grinding MMOs.)
On that topic, I was disappointed to see that the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms MMO, at least from the two gameplayvideos posted on YouTube, looks like another grinder. A translation of a beta test announcement however suggests that some level of facitonality will enter into it. Shame, really. ROTK would have been an excellent setting for the MMO I've been dreaming of creating. And sadly, the link to Dynasty Warriors Wave on the Wii is still not actually a link, at the Koei site. They showed this at the Tokyo Games show in 2005. And after the wonder experience The Godfather turned out to be, I was so looking forward to uniting China under the kingdom of Wu with nought but a pair of chakrams, a Wiimote, and the sweat of my brow (and other body parts). I guess I'll just have to grab Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle when it ships somewhere in English.
I just now finished watching Dexter, (Warning, Wikipedia article contains unmarked spoilers) which I enjoyed quite a lot. I have to say though, I'd have been frustrated to be watching it week by week. And the second half of the season involved me yelling at him a lot for being an idiot.
Oh, and I joined Mensa the other day. I've spent all week telling people I'm a card-carrying genius, which is a bit of an exaggeration, as I don't know if I get a card (I've been too busy to check my post office box.)
Just to reinforce my genius status, I tonight completed all the character writing and drills for the grade 1 of Kakitorikun. That's 80 kanji, and technically I've got an academic transcript that says I know several hundred, but... yeah. That's not as impressive when I write it down, it turns out my level of Japanese approaches that of an particularly uncommunicative six-year-old. But I have gotten a stamp for every day this month so far. ^_^
I get proud about completely the wrong things, sometimes.
In somewhat more age-appropriate educational news, I'm finally getting back to uni this coming semester, taking Morphology part-time. Work's pretty good about flexible hours and stuff, so this will hopefully only consume time from my life, rather than life from my veins, as per my previous attempts at part-time study. It helps that this time I'm not travelling interstate to work and further again to study. However, I think I'm going to have to withdraw from the ANUAS comittee, as I'm going to be even more pressed for time than I am now.
If anyone from the ANUAS exec is reading this, sorry. I'll prolly make an official announcement this week, although given the way things are going, that's about as reliable as everything else I've promised I'd do for the exec.
Posted in LCA07, Linguistics at 6:43 pm by TBBle (Visited 167 times)
Oh you lucky things, today this blog becomes a photoblog!
Anyway, walking back from LCA07 to International House...
An unusual sign was seen in a UNSW parking area
This is probably what they actually meant...
They are of course referring to the same parking lot. But at least they're not in the parking lot of a department which has a large amount of contact with cars and the like...
Wow. "Later this week" certainly took longer than I expected.
As of July 31st, I'm a (junior, for now) programmer at Micro Forté's Canberra studio. Two weeks in, and it's the best job I've had so far. ^_^ My first task involved trying out installation of the BigWorld MMOG server system as a new user so we could see what state the documentation was in, and for those who know how pedantic I am, a four-page file called whinge.txt is actually a positive sign.
It's an approximately eighteen-month contract, so I guess Japan and University will have to be put off at least that much longer. Still, I've pretty much wanted to write video games since I was six, learning Applesoft BASIC on the family //c, so no regrets. ^_^
I'm no longer working full-time at CBIT Internet, although I am still maintaining the ISP's servers there.
This, plus the request of a nice young lady whom I only seem to face-to-face once every twelve months or so that I install Skype, got me playing with Skype again. Sadly, the 10 euros of credit I bought in 2004 and was unable to use (due to their system failing to transmit voice to the US at the time) have "expired", which annoyed me enough that I was boycotting them. The boycott ended the moment someone asked me to actually use it, mind you. ^_^
On the actual open-source side, I've been playing with SIP stuff again. I've had a SIP-based Asterisk server running here (You can try to call me via SIP although I don't always have a SIP client running) for a while now, and I recently got a chance to test it with some overseas friends, but due to poor codec choice, it quality sucked.
On codecs, I have to say that Speex is great and iLBC is awful. Both in voice quality, and for the fact that Speex is free open-source, while iLBC comes with a "no-commercial use" license.
Anyway, with a webcam, I've been toying with video-supporting SIP clients. For windows, the only free one appears to be X-Lite 3 which doesn't do Speex (although its commerical version, eyeBeam 1.5 does) but for my purposes (LAN to the Asterisk Box) I can do G.711 and let Asterisk do the Speex transcoding for me.
Under linux, Linphone has video support (although the 1.35 Debian package is compiled without, and the build-deps to build it wanted to remove texlive in favour of tetex...) which I've not tried yet, but which a brief glance at the source suggests supports H.263-1998. Ekiga, the successor to GnomeMeeting, also supports video, via opal, but only H.261. There's H.263 code there, but relies on FFMpeg 0.4.7 patched to support RFC2190 for its video support. (It's actually FFMpeg's libavcodec that's being used, but very few people make the distinction it seems)
A brief aside on the video codecs at play here. H.261 is the older ITU-T video standard for ISDN, while H.263 was a newer standard which drew from H.261 as well as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and which was the default video standard for H.323 computer video conferencing, thanks to things like Microsoft's NetMeeting and the open-source GnomeMeeting. However, along with MPEG technology comes murky and ill-defined MPEGLA patent issues. There's also H.263-1998, aka H.263p or H.263+, which adds some annexes to H.263 to support some more encoding features. For moving H.263 over RTPRFC 2190 was written. However, the stream format defined in RFC2190 couldn't support the data stream from H.263-1998, so RFC 2429 was published. Both H.263 and H.263-1998 can be carried in the RFC 2429 stream format, so in theory everyone should be using RFC 2429 streams, and we'd all be happy. Apparently, NetMeeting only support RFC 2190 and H.263 however, so that's the version that they implemented in Ekiga too (since Opal is a refactoring of the OpenH323 library's media interface, and Gnomemeeting's built on OpenH323. And the OpenH323 H.263 code was submitted by the same person who did the FFMpeg patch mentioned above.) Meanwhile, X-Lite supports H.263, H.263plus, and (according to my SIP debug logs on Asterisk) RFC 2429 streaming.
I spent most of today weighing up forwardporting the RFC2190 patch to FFMpeg, or updating libopal to support RFC2429. I didn't achieve much, but I weighed it up a lot. The final answer was wait for the current libopal refactoring (they've moved the video codec support out into plugins, and rewrote the H.263 code such that it's much easier to _add_ RFC2429 support) to reach my via Debian in some way, and then have a poke at it, if they haven't done it already. If it's not already done, I'm sure that submitted the code to make it work would make me an Open-source Telephony Hero
So to bring us back to the story, I've got a nice little Windows-based SIP client which does video but not Speex and needs to register with someone, a Linux-based client that does speex but which I haven't compiled the video for yet (Linphone), and a both linux- and win32-based client which claims to do Speex but barfs (Ekiga...) and which can't do the current video codec with the current video stream format, and depends on a slight fork of another library to do current video with the old format.
I can see why Skype's so popular...>_<
Incidentally, if you want a non-registrar-requiring Speex-supporting free but-without-video SIP client for Windows, I found PhonerLite seemed to work well. And frankly, if you're going to call me without warning at home, you might not want the webcam to show you whatever my current state of dress or undress is. ^_^
Talking to Chris Smart (of Kororaa) at CLUG's PSIG meeting last Thursday about webcams, Ekiga and kopete inevitably led onto the GPL and the Linux Kernel (he loves to talk about it, really! ^_^) and Chris pointed me at Greg K-H's take on Linux and Binary-only modules, which manages to draw the line between legal and illegal way way back there compared to where we all through we were. (On a sidenote, OLS looks like it would have been tremendous fun. I can hardly wait until I'm a jetsetting conference-attending Linux Kernel Hero.)
I've also been poking at the DeviceScape 802.11 stack for Linux. As well as happily running my laptop's Apple Airport Extreme2 card for the past few months, its software-based Access Point support appears to have progressed to the point at which I can start poking at it for Nintendo DS Wirelss Multi-boot infrastructure, which will bypass all the card-specific hacking people're having to do, as well as let it work on things that aren't RT25xx cards. It seems in the six months or so since I've looked hard at Nifi, a dude called masscat has picked up the ball and run with it, so I've almost 10 pages of forum thread, and then whatever code he's published, to catch up on. I'm pleasantly surprised, I thought with the advent of Wifi support for Nintendo DS Homebrew code interest in WMBing over Nifi would die. So here's my chance to get the dscape port done, and become an NDS Homebrew Hero.
I'm currently reading Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and it's reinvigorating my love of Perl. ^_^ Shame MicroForté is a C++ and Python shop... Still, it's a nice change from reading The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition which I was reading for the six weeks between my first job interview and pretty much the weekend before I started at MicroForté. Of course, this means I'm tempted to spend my free time ignoring all the above ideas, and tooling about with Perl 6 and Parrot Especially with sheer coolness like Z-Code support in Parrot.
And for one final note, the real-estate agent is coming around next Saturday to inspect my flat, so I had to clean up. Luckily, it was mainly a case of emptying all the bins, although I need to run a quick vacuum around the place, it's a bit dusty in parts. I expect this inspection is because my lease expires in the next couple of weeks, and they want to know if they should kick me out or not. Given that I'm not working days in Watson with occasional evenings in Belconnen, I'm looking at moving anyway. Anyone know of a cheap one-bedroomer or two-bedroomer in Watson or adjoining suburbs? I'd like to be able to walk or bicycle to work. ^_^
I pre-ordered Sin Episode 1: Emergence on the weekend. It was cheap (AU$23 or so) and included a Steam version of the original Sin. This is partly my fault, I was hoping for a steamy version of Original Sin... (Sorry if you were hoping for a different original sin joke. ^_^)
I actually own Sin, but I don't know where the CD is. The original box is still on my shelf. So I'm taking the opportunity to actually finish the game, since the new one is set four years later. And it's still as I remember, one of the best-fun first-person shooters I've played... Dragged me right away from Half-Life and its expansion packs. (Although I'm finished Half-Life and Blue Shift now, and I think I'm close to the end of Opposing Force)
A recent topic on Slashdot about The changing value of certifications. Beyond the somewhat inaccurate summarising of the arcticle on Slashdot (certifications still attract a pay premium, they don't actively hurt your career) I think a rather important oversight was made in much of the discussion (ie. that bit which survived my threshhold) --- and maybe this was covered in the original research, I didn't bother trying to track down the report mentioned in the article --- that for some jobs a certification doesn't attract a premium, because it's a neccessity.
Certainly the terms of employment at CBIT require that I hold a certification of some kind within six months of joining. It originally specified MCSE, but they happily let me substitute my LPIC-1. I since discovered that my Windows NT4 MCSE is still valid, so I'm putting the MCSE upgrade on hold to get my CCNA done.
Then a lot of the posters proceeded to confuse certification with qualifications. Having both, I'm amazed that this happens. On the other hand, the people generating this confusion were usually on the "I didn't need stuffy boring university or a do-in-my-sleep MCSD, I just walked in and told them how I've been running Windows since I was six and they hired me" side of the debate.
I'm going to get condescending here. I'll let you know when it's over. I really think these attitudes go hand in hand, and are usually closely followed by "Why won't <large company> hire me as their CTO? I know as much as all these highly qualified lawyers and managers. They'll fail now, and it'll be all their fault for not hiring me," and then later followed by "I've been working this same $30k/year first-level support role for ten years now, because management are too short sighted to realise that I was just too smart to waste three years on a degree."Done with the condescending bit.
And sure, I myself have been guilty of this. I still am, frequently. I think most of us in IT do it to some extent. This is also how we end up with the armchair lawyers, armchair managers, armchair accountants and armchair linguists that pervade our community. (I pick those because I've done them all myself. Ranter, berate theyself. ^_^) It might be a symptom of the type of person who succeeds in IT (self-confident, multi-skilled and widely read/educated) as compared to those who fail (obstinant, unfocussed and arrogant).
So why certify? I do it partly because I love training and learning, and having something to show for it --- Ignore that I waited five years to graduate my B.Sc --- and partly because it makes financial sense. I like to read when I go to bed... It settles me down and clears my mind. However, a $20 novel will only last two or three days. My CCNA INTRO book has taken me over a month to get about half-way into... I think because it's so dry, I can't read more than a few minutes. Either way, good value for $50.
Flicking through Planet Linux Australia as I do when I forget how much time it sucks up... Between the sordid tales of a Power5lying with a SunFire --- Oh I wish I had a project to throw at them... Where's my multi-threaded Sudoko solver? --- I came across this gem of an idea for a Canberra-wide wireless mesh network. This is something I'd heartily endorse, and help with where I could... I'll have to dig out my old Gungahlin-wireless-mesh plans...
A quick aside: Another Rich Web with PHP talk from Rasmus Lerdorf. The content aside, the template is sweet. The template aside, the content is fascinating.
Last aside... Two more links: One to make you cry: Even if the author is being facetious, someone somewhere belives this; and one to make you laugh: Every workplace should have a plan on its books for how to deal with Viking Raids.
But what of the bikinis, I hear you ask... Or would, were I narrating this out loud instead of in my head... And you cared about bikinis more than you care about Sun Tzu... OK. This is an IRC story. You've been warned.
On one of the IRC channels I hang out on, discussion turned to bikinis, and one of the channel regulars (Io) mentioned that she doesn't wear bikinis.
Pseudo-aside: This is Io. I knocked up this image that same evening, as it happens. MSPaint's so much easier to use than The Gimp... I did the whole image in the time it took me to give up the other day on finding a "Draw a square" button in The Gimp.
Anyway, it seemed sensible at this poit to consult with my new TzuBBot. TzuBBot being my Art-Of-War-based-advice-bot. Here's the results.
03:00 < TBBle> TzuBBot: Any advice on the best way to get Io out of Brazil and into a bikini?
03:00 < TzuBBot> THE NINE SITUATIONS: 55. Hence he does not strive to ally himself with all and sundry, nor does he foster the power of other states. He carries out his own secret designs, keeping his antagonists in awe. Thus he is able to capture their cities and overthrow their kingdoms.
03:01 < TBBle> TzuBBot: Any advice on the best way to get Io out of a bikini and into my lap?
03:01 < TzuBBot> THE ARMY ON THE MARCH: 45. If a general shows confidence in his men but always insists on his orders being obeyed, the gain will be mutual.
The TzuBBot gives useful advice so often, it's scary...
Final note: My goodneess, but the move from Yurika to Dino has made this website soooo much snappier!
Storyline patents -- Everytime I think the world has dug itself to rock-bottom, someone hits me on the back of the head with a shovel.
Educational
Kotodama, a video game research prototype for teaching Japanese to anime fans -- Now this is where I'd like to be taking my university education... I wonder where the project's going, and how I can get onboard... And of course, this led me to Julius, a speech-recognition system that I wish I had time to play with.
Thanks to Hellblazer via Slashdot for the heads-up on the patent.
Slashdot is prolly also the viaduct via which I got the Kotodama link, as well as a reminder about the Linux-based GP2X portable gaming doodad, and AnoNet, like FreeNet but built from VPN and SSH tunnels which leave you in control of your own machine's actions. I guess the difference is that on AnoNet, if someone does work out who you are and they seize your equipment, you don't have the I didn't know that was on there defense you get from FreeNet. There's also the issue that, if you do something heinous enough, such that international authorities can co-operate on it, then you can be tracked down.
One of the things AnoNet's Wikipedia entry suggests would be a good thing to protect on AnoNet is bnetd, the Battle.net Server that Blizzard Entertainment had shutdown in the US. Mind you, even on the regular Internet finding bnetd source was as easy as following the link from the bnetd Wikipedia entry, once again demonstrating how the Internet routes around damage. ^_^
I've left ActewAGL now. The projects have been handed over more or less, and therefore hopefully no longer my problem. I hope that doesn't mean they become no one's problem, but I guess I'll not know. Now my only remaining work is for BU.
I've spent the last couple of weeks doing some work at cbit, getting the web interface for the SOAP stuff I talked about below (months ago ^_^) going. They'd started one, but the guy doing the work has now been deployed somewhere else And when I say some work, I mean that took me about a week, and so far this week (it's been short, public holiday on Monday) I've just slacked off in the office, waiting for the web interface to break. Lots of time on IRC and email and it's been a good chance to do some reading. I've been reading up on integrating Linux into a Win2K AD Domain, preparing for my return to TransACT, subcontracting via BU.
I did a couple of months at TransACT, and am currently waiting on approval to do more time there. Working on an interesting project, and a less-than-interesting project. Happily, TransACT's standardised on Debian GNU/Linux as their Linux platform. I like to think I helped that by spreading as many Redhat scare stories as possible in my time there. ^_^ I was originally doing two-and-a-half days a week due to university commitments, but am now available full time...
I enrolled, started, and pulled out again from the ANU. I've finally bitten the bullet, and decided I'm not going to get through my final Japanese studies without spending some time there. I've applied for an eighteen-month deferment so I can do JET from August 2006, and be back roughly in time for semester two, 2007. I'm disappointed, I made a good run of it for the first four or five weeks, and that segues neatly into my next topic:
I had a four-week bout of depression. I basically only left the house every couple of days to buy more food, and when ActewAGL called me up to come in and do the handover. This was two weeks of uni, and then the two weeks of the lecture break, so a lot of lost work-time. Turns out that I'd neatly finished the TransACT pre-approved work, although I didn't discover this until three weeks in. I'm seeing the ANU Counselling Centre, which has been helping, as well as making what changes I can myself, including divesting responsibilities. I knew I had too many responsibilities, and it was highlighted by how good I felt when I went to Melbourne and put everything else on hold for the weekend I was there, during these four weeks.
I went to Melbourne for a weekend, to visit friends -- Anna and Naoko. Phil and Emma were unfortunately out of town at Phil's mother's wedding (Congrats to her) -- as well as visit my sister and see her in the MedRevue. It was really really really funny. I laughed so hard. ^_^
I had a good time in Melbourne, it was nice to be out and about without any particular responsibilities. I saw Sin City -- Yes, I went to Melbourne and went to the cinema, by myself -- ate all kinds of bad for me but very tasty foods, and took mobile phone photos of the places I ate. I need to post them somewhere. I really think that weekend without commitments was a really helpful guide as to how I could break out of the depression cycle I'd gotten into. The only downsides of the weekend were the bus ride from the train station at Cootamunda to Canberra (I enjoyed the train ride from Melbourne to Cootamundra, mind you, prolly more than I enjoy even flying) and the fact that I was out of town for the chibi.au.august05 convention.
Despite my best efforts to avoid responsibility in the anime.au conventions, after my poor performance as Events Co-ordinator for anime.au.05, I became Sponsorship and Vendors Co-ordinator for chibi.au.august05, although I was going to be out of town on the day. I did a pretty pitiful job of that, and probably will go down as the only Sponsorship Co-ordinator who ever managed to get nothing out of Madman for an anime convention. The convention itself went quite well, by all reports, and I'm currently Events Co-ordinator ("in charge") of chibi.au.summer05, in November (No one noticed this discrepancy for about a month. I originally coined the moniker because we were not sure if we were going to be November or December, kept it because it has a nice seasonal sound to it, and overlooked the fact that November is actually in Spring.) This convention's been a lot better organised, in large part because we've given ourselves a month longer to prepare, and because we've picked up a couple of enthusiastic people to look after promotions, volunteers and the website, which were noticably absent from chibi.au.august05 until the week before it was actually happening. Hmm. Now I think about it, the first day I skipped any classes at the start of my depression was the day I met with the just-mentioned enthusiastic people to bring them up to speed on what they'd let themselves in for... Prolly a co-incidence. The meeting was after my skipped class after all. These same people look like stepping up to doing stuff on the ANUAS exec at this year's AGM, too.
The ANUAS has of course been running along like the large locomotive of anime viewing that it is. I've managed to not derail it with a stance of "do as little as possible" which really should have been my presidential election platform. One new thing I've introduced is "Saturday Afternoon Drama", where we hold a marathon screening of a live-action series, one series a month. So far we (and by we I mean I) did Great Teach Onizuka in September (with the movie and OV on October 1st due to a scheduling error on my part) and will be running Gokusen over October 8th and 22nd. I do wish I'd thought of this six months ago, but I was actually inspired during and by the chibi.au.august05 preperation process. The ANUAS AGM was supposed to be tomorrow, but I have been browbeaten into moving it back to the 21st, largely because I completely forgot to check with anyone before calling it. In fact, that's pretty much the entire root cause of the move. Once the ANUAS AGM is out of the way, I suspect my only official ANUAS executive position will be Video Ad Creator.
I've spent a little bit of time knock up video ads, two for chibi.au.august05 and one for the GTO live action screenings. All done on Linux, with command line tools and The Gimp, except the picture-editing for the first "Recruit" video which was done using irfanview. The hardest part was getting them Internet-distributable, which meant finding either Creative-Commonsnon-NC or Gnu GFDL licensed-content (and you can't mix these two!), although I fudged the music on the first version of the second ad, because it just seemed to fit the pictures so scarily well. Kinda like the whole "Dark Side Of The Moon is a co-incidental soundtrack to The Wizard Of Oz" thing. The GTO one on the other hand was done just out of Google images one night, so I haven't put it up on the web for download. My current project involves teaching myself Blender3D, so I can produce a cooler ad. I've always wanted to get into 3D programming, and I finally completed the first step (putting Debian onto a 3d-enabled machine of decent speed).
I'm now running Debian when I can on my desktop box. The only things I use windows for now are Quickbooks (I've gotta get Quickbooks going in wine, I just haven't bothered yet) and video games. I've got the machine using libpam-mount (with a couple of patches which I submitted to the Debian BTS) to mount directories from Keitarou. I migrated my email from Outlook onto my fileserver with IMAP, and now use mutt-ng for all my email, which is a big improvement. This also means I revoked my old @Pobox.Com PGP key and added the email address to my newer GPG key. I can sync my phone against Evolution, although I never fire up Evolution, and I can print using CUPs happily to my HP LaserJet 1200. The only other thing I can't do on my desktop machine from Linux is wireless multiboot my Nintendo DS, and I'm working on that.
I decided it was time to spend some money, and I was intrigued by a talk at linux.conf.05 about GameBoy Advance programming, and had heard about recent developments letting people launch homebrew software wirelessly on the new Nintendo DS. So I gave in, and bought one. I played Mario64DS for a bit, and bought Another Code while in Melbourne, all the while getting involved in the DS Homebrew community. I played with my Prism54 wireless cards to get wireless multiboot going, and could get the DS to see my machine, but not boot from it. Eventually I got a hold of the rt2500-based card neccessary to use the only existing publically available wireless multiboot software (includes a custom driver for Windows) and found I could get further in the process, but not by much. I had some spare credit at Lik-Sang, so I got a GBA Movie Player v2, and with a bit of futzing about (which I'll document here later) I can now load a homebrew rom onto the CF card I borrowed from Shane and the DS will run it. ^_^ So time to start actually programming again. I've still gotta get some more work done on the WMB process, but I'm waiting on driver developments in the Linux rt2x00 driver project, since right now they can't transmit packets, at least in monitor mode, but progress is ongoing. I've been documenting the WMB stuff in my wiki.
One of the things that made this blog go quiet was the addition of a wiki to my site. Semi-static stuff (like the SOAP stuff below) is now going in the wiki, and I plan to migrate all the stuff from www.tbble.net into the wiki. It's just such a good platform for publishing stuff categorised, without having to code the HTML. I'm now over HTML coding the same way I'm over compiling my OS from scratch -- I did this in 1998, before I'd discovered Gentoo or Debian and got as far as upgrading to the latest libc, gcc and whatever else was in the base Slackware '96 install, when I discovered Debian, found a use for having a linux machine, and wiped it out in an afternoon in 2000.
Now that I'm back updating the blog, I'm going to have to see if I can make time to update all the old old old The Other Day's Mew entries. (Mew's got a new calendar coming, which I need someone to batch into an AmazonJP order for me at some point...) I was actually loading the Japanese text into my blog, but not publishing it because I was having trouble with the translations. This obviously is not a winning strategy. ^_^ Now I think about it, the other challenge to The Other Day's Mew was I was updating from ActewAGL, where I didn't have a dictionary handy, nor Japanese input support to use an online dictionary, and then they changed their firewall to block sites with 'blog' in the domain.
Which brings me full circle in this long rambling story. ^_^
Quick updates: Shane got a dog, and I'm seeing Machine Gun Fellatio tomorrow night. (Now tonight)
PGSM Act.ZERO arrived. Pretty box, haven't watched it yet.
Dropped my uni units, and gave ActewAGL notice I had to be out by July.
And in unrelated news, the government of Robert Mugabe has demonstrated that they are holding fair and transparent elections by using clear perspex ballot boxes. ^_^
Wow, what a wild weekend, and yet I did so little.
Slept in Saturday, played with the IPSec stuff more. I got that working nicely, except the wireless card with my laptop seems to have awful signal levels. And the Windows 2000 machine crashes the IPSec IKE daemon (pluto) when it connects. I've posted that to upstream with lots of logs and things, and spent large chunks of last night trying a CVS version to see if it helped.
Back to the chronology. Saturday night was at a friends' place for DVDs and booze. We were joined by a widow-for-a-night from a poker game run by another friend of mine. Those guys also had booze.
And back in the chronology, we had an Anime.au meeting on Saturday afternoon. It looks like the Sunday event's going to happen, and we finally have a date, and should be promoting the heck out of it any time now. ^_^
Skip forward again to Sunday, and I... played with IPSec stuff more. I also had a burl and discovered that Master Of Orion 3 works quite well with Wine, except for the sound.
I also switched World Of Warcraft over to Gamecard billing, but I've paid for a month from March 4th to April 4th, so I guess I have to have a burl at some point... Otherwise I've played a week out of two months paid for. >_<
Also managed to miss both Learning Languages on Monday, and Japanese Lexicon (right now. -_-;;;)
And I've got an assignment due Friday and an assignment due Monday. >_< >_<
It seems my misgivings were somewhat misplaced as far as Prof. Anna's artice on "Happy". Once the Semantics class got to that point of the lecture, our lecturer immediately observed that there is a clear difference between "Happy" and "Happy with X", which was a point I thought was completely ignored in the article. (See yesterday's Linguistics post.)
The ensuing discussion, and the 45-minute conversation with my lecturer (it would have gone much harder if a dear friend of mine hadn't already made me consider the nature of happiness and my relationship to it) highlighted that semantics is _hard_, and emotions is a hard facet of semantics. A psychologist is sadly not much help with this, as their approach to emotion generally involves trying to remove the language component and get at the thoughts, which semantics as we're studying it teaches that language and emotion are terribly intertwined. And this was highlighted in the ensuing discussion of facial expressions, and the difference between Anglo and Chinese expressions thereof. (Interestingly, the issue isn't a difference of meaning, but a difference in description. A Chinese person will describe someone's facial expression by the parts that make it up, while an Anglo person will describe it by the emotion it represents. I also got to show the lecturer horizontal smilies eg. ^_^)
Anyway, the definition of "happiness" my classmates came up with (or rather, "happy" as it relates to "happiness" rather than as it relates to "satisfaction") was something like: (Look, NSM in a blog! -_-)
Something good happened
Because of this, I feel something good
I don't want anything more/else
OK, it's not NSM, but the idea's clear.
On the other hand, my own interpretation of "happiness" is something like
I want some things
I have (achieved) some of these things
I am trying to (have/achieve) others of these things
I am able to (have/achieve) all of these things
Becaue of this, I feel something good.
It was an interesting discussion with my lecturer. A point I made was that I manage my own happiness by maintaining the list of things I want seperately from the things I'd like. When I realised that Computer Science (B.SEng) wasn't making me happy, I evaluated my wants, discovered that a second language, and academia, had crept up my list, and was unhappy until I changed into my current degree, and discovered linguistics. ^_^
Happiness isn't something you aim for, it's the journey you take to get there.
(Emotional enough? You know who you are. ^_^)
Oh, and I've started a wiki for information storage. (As opposed to this. If I do any _good_ explications in NSM for example, that'll go there.) The only thing there is the start of the documentation of my wireless setup, but I'm sure it'll grow. The WinNY stuff will appear there, as will... I dunno, whatever else shows up. Translations maybe.
Today in Learning Languages, we watched a video demonstrating the "Communicative" method of teaching English. It was focussed on making the students talk in English, under a particular situation, in order to acquire a particular function and structure in the relevant social context. It is characterised by having the students freely produce English, and with an almost complete lack of correction (barring recasting of mistakes). The theory behind it is that language can be acquired by practice at a level slightly above the learner's current level, based on the ideas of "Communicative Competence"
This was a marked difference from last week's, where we saw the "Audio Lingual Method" which is focussed on demonstrating and memorising a pattern. This method involved the class memorising and performing a set of lines, with a little bit of work with substitutions into the pattern. Any mistakes are immediately and directly corrected. This method is based on the Behavioralist idea that language is simply a set of habits which must be learnt.
Due to the hetrogenous nature of the class, the native language of the speakers is not given much of a chance to interact with the learning process, which is a shame as both methods provide different approachs to the inclusion of native language in second language learning and acquisition.
Coincidentally, on Monday afternoon driving home from the same class, I overheard a discussion in federal parliament (House of Representatives) on language, and from the hansard transcript, I got the following quote: (Pages 46-51 of the PDF, 30-35 nominally, this quote was page 51/35)
The argument is clearly that the best acquisition of English occurs when you teach as long as you possibly can in the first language. The literature is complete -- it is irrefutable -- in that the longer you teach in their first language, the better the acquisition of English is going to be.
(The debate was ajourned until today, but today's hansard isn't up yet.)
This is interesting, as it goes against all the theories of language learning we've considered so far. Admittedly, we're only up to the 1970's, so maybe we're building up to that point? I'll have to remember to ask Louise about it next week.
On the other hand, there's Semantics. I finallly did one of the readings, which was a piece by Professor Anna about "happiness" and "happy" in cross-cultural context. As I usually seem to find in Prof. Anna's articles, it was mainly a criticism of preceeding work (I've no problem with that per se.) along with what I feel was a fairly flimsy justification for an argument that "happy" in English is untranslatable to other languages, and is somehow disconnected from "happiness". The evidence comes from the fact that English, unlike other European languages, allows constructs such as "Are you happy with the decorations" which has little or no effect on one's situation of "happiness". This however highlights one of the issues I seem to come across a lot in semantics, which is the conflation of a word with a concept. In this case, "happy" w/out object and "happy" with a (possibly assumed) object (happy with/about OBJ) are different, and have different cultural scripts. The intransitive "happy" does to my mind tie directly to happiness. "Are you happy?" can hardly be said to have nothing to do with happiness, although the answering of it is often broken down into a categorised consideration of the various aspects of one's life, which then brings in the transitive "happy". The transitive "happy" can be seen as closer to "satisfied", and as Prof. Anna observes, does not have the "I cannot want anything more" effect that "happiness" does. Even so, I'm not convinced that happiness in English has this facet, either.
So in short, the article's main thrust (Proving English-speakers are happier by asking people if they are happy is flawed beyond doubt) is reasonably argued, but the NSM-ised details for me fall very short of convincing.
I'll put this to my Semantics lecturer tomorrow. It should be an interesting lecture.
I'm finally starting to read the Semantics textbook, hopefully that will hang together better than some of the bits I've read so far. (Well, everything else was done in Cross-Cultural Communications a few years ago, so my memory is somewhat coloured by the negative feelings I associate with that class. >_<)
(I also got the IPSec stuff working with OpenSwan and RSA keys, but not x.509. I moved to isakmpd, but haven't gotten that working with x.509 either. I haven't tried it with RSA yet though. I might go back to OpenSwan, I found that easier to work with.)
I was gonna talk about tonight's MGC screening, but it's 2am and I need sleep. ^_^
After last week's triumphant return to IRC, I wandered back onto IM (ICQ, MSN, YIM) tonight. The only people online were Matt Duggan (who immediately proceeded to make my head hurt with math) and a friend of mine from Singapore, whom I met on IRC last year.
While I was on IRC, gumbaloom sent me his and Aniko's latest Seramyu output, being the Shin Kaguya Shima DensetsuPromo and Fan Event, wanting feedback. Apparently it's been downloaded a lot, but in the usual places no feedback, good or bad, has appeared. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that it was excellent, and I look forward to the finished product. (I already enjoyed Aniko's translation of Kakyuu Ouhi Kourin in February at the MGC, but via a different fansubbing group). I watched another Seramyu, Last Drakul Jyokyoku, unsubtitled a year or so ago and it was OK, but it's _much_ better with subtitles. I highly recommend this when it comes out, and in the meantime, see if you can dig up the CVME sub of KOK. Be warned, KOK is a retelling of Sailor Stars, so if you've not seen it (or read it ^_^) then you might want to finish it first. Which reminds me, I must finish it sometime. -_-;;;
I managed to get a little BU work done today, but skipped out on ActewAGL since I was disorganised this morning, and by the time I left home I would have had to leave work after 90 minutes. So I stayed home, did more BU work, and went in to class. (And was still late. >_<)
Ah! I've finally removed shift-space as a shortcut to activate UIM. Now I don't flick into Japanese input mode every time I type a capital letter and then a space. (Yes, I have poor keyboard habits...)
Only class today was Teaching Languages, and today we looked at the idea that you can't learn a language just by listening to it, you need to apply it to learn it. We also looked at the various stages of word order that language learners master. These are apparently absolutely ordered, which lends credence to the theory that languages are acquired in a certain order, and teaching cannot influence that. Tomorrow we get to watch a class being run based on that theory. (I'll prolly talk about _that_ more tomorrow.)
Anyway, I've got a Japanese Lexicon assignment due tomorrow, and I just spent two hours doing it. I should have done it on the weekend, but I was seriously unassable for most of the weekend, apart from some time spent doing BU stuff. If there are any IPSec experts reading this, I'd love to know. I think I've gotten it conceptually wrong...
Still, at least my bag's packed, my laptop's loaded with MGC screening videos, and I've told the guy I'm meeting at ActewAGL in Fyshwick that I'll be there by 9am or I'll call. I think I'm gonna call, and get to uni by midday.
So, here's some links for things you can buy. Today, it's Seramyu. I'll link in the MGC shows once I actually talk about them. ^_^ (And of course, it's all Japanese. Like PGSM, there's no official English version.)
Time to get back into updating this blog, I guess. It's just that I've been so boring recently.
I'm back in ANU, taking Japanese Lexicon, Teaching Languages and Semantics. These classes all look interesting, and I've got the first Japanese Lexicon assignment to do over this weekend.
I handed in my Written Japanese D assignment at long last, and now once Ikeda-sensei has the time, I'll finally get some closure on that unit. ^_^
Still working for ActewAGL, despite my best attempts to get away. I guess the disadvantage of job security through irreplacebility is irreplacebility. >_<
The anime.au.05 anime convention is coming up, and I'm the Events Co-ordinator so that's taking up a bit of time, but not too much at the moment.
I've been playing with some wiki software (PMWiki, the only one I could find that didn't require anything not available on Debian/stable) but I haven't actually got a good use for a wiki on TBBle.net. Maybe when I get back to the Winny reverse-engineering project or something.
I picked up PGSM Volume 12 from DHL today, so now I've only got the one DVD to go. It's gonna be weird to not have $140 disappear from my credit card every month... And I'm still praying for a second series, some more OAV things, or a personal visit from Azama Mew. Of course, I still haven't watched Special Act yet. Nor the live action version of Great Teach Onizuka... Or the rest of Excel Saga. Or Poemy. Or... wow. My DVD collection is largely still in shrink-wrap. ^_^
OK, so I haven't actually been that boring. A friend of mine pointed out to me recently that having too much on one's plate is better than being bored, but I fear that may actually have been my own words being repeated back to me. (Hello, if you're reading this! I promise I'll update more often. ^_^)
Well, I got everything but tbble.com back. ^_^ >_< ^_^.
Oh well...
Also, due to psychotic work commitments I've had to drop my remaining university units. In the process of doing this, I discovered that I'm not enrolled in Japanese Pre-Honours anyway this semester.
Well, I got my Internet up, but now my domains are being screwed with. >_<
Anyway, this posting is mainly because I've just had a fascinating (enlightening, frustrating) discussion with Io on IRC about the status of -tai forms of verbs. I held that they are adjectives, and Io holds that they are verbs... I'll let Io make her own argument, in fact. Which is the point of this post.
We also diverged quite strongly into the relationship between meaning and syntax, (an area in which I am much less surefooted) and I expect that too will prove a lively debate here.
(And of course, here I am reminded of my Pre-Honours assignment to monitor a mailing list for a month. Better go subscribe to something...)
Happy to hear comments from anyone else, too. I'll present the best piece of evidence I could come up with for my position. Don't worry, it's short.
(Adjective) (1)
A: はなこが美しい。
B: めいこもそうだ。 (Constrasted to *B:めいこもそうする。)
(Verb) (2)
A: はなこがお菓子を食べる。
B: めいこもそうする。 (Contrasted to *B: めいこもそうだ。)
(Here, we can easily see that you can only use そうする cannot refer to a adjective, and そうだ cannot refer to a verb. そう itself appears to be a -する verb to me here.)
Those two examples were from Masayuki Ohkado (1991), "On the status of adjectival nouns in japanese.". The constrast in (1) is my own, for thoroughness.
My argument here is that from the following:
(-たい form) (3)
A: はなこがお菓子を食べたい。
This is possible:
B: めいこもそうだ。
But this is not:
*B: めいこもそうする。
Which implies that the -たい form is an adjective like in (1) above, not a verb like (2) above.
(My example here glosses over the other effects the -たい form has, such as not being directly applicable like that to the third person.)
I could happily extend my argument here to the -ない form of a verb, as follows:
(-ない form) (4)
A: はなこがお菓子を食べない。
But I don't know off hand which of these is good and which is bad, and which hold the same meanings and which the opposite meaning. ^_^
B: めいこもそうだ。(4-1)
B: めいこもそうじゃない。(4-2)
B: めいこもそうする。(4-3)
B: めいこもそうしない。(4-4)
For my argument to hold, then 4-1 would be correct, 4-3 wrong, and 4-2 and 4-4 ungrammatical irresepective of what came before.
Any native Japanese speakers reading this blog, and want to help out? ^_^;;
And to think this all started with the innocent question "How do I apply -saseru form to -tai?" (I answered that you can't, -tai is an adjective. This is what I love about IRC. ^_^)
Once again, instead of doing my very overdue linguistics homework, or even showing up on #pgsm and #solarmiracle to help distribute today's Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, I hacked away more at CenterICQ.
And lo and behold, it can now negotiate an audio conversation with MSN Messenger 6.2. A quick compile of linphone later (quick being relative. >_<) and I could hear my voice coming out of the speakers on the server a half-second after speaking into the microphone on Shane's laptop.
*dances*
Anyway, I prolly should go see what the #pgsm people are up to. Or I could eat breakfast...
Or put breakfast on, and while that's cooking, clean up the patch to deal with actually checking if the user _wants_ to have a voicechat before accepting the offer. And also allowing CenterICQ to cancel the chat when it's done.
"The Australian Idol top 12 is an exclusive club. Only six singers have made it in." -- Australian Idol commercial.
You'd think at first glance, proscriptive grammar would be hard, 'cause that involves telling right from wrong, and such judgements are not simple.
On the other hand, descriptive linguistics seems simple, since all that involves is recording what people are saying and how it hangs together.... Except that everyone time someone opens their mouth, that's more work.
