Kind of Heavy Stuff.

I caught an interesting interview on The Daily Show (er…I mean A Daily Show) this Tuesday. The guest was a guy by the name of Jim Wallis who was there to pimp his new book “The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.” It was late a bit late so I’m not 100% sure what all they talked about or even what the guest’s actual stance was, but yesterday I was left with the following impression of what Jim was trying to say. Morality should not be dictated by religion, but instead, religion should conform to morality.

I was driving around yesterday and all of a sudden it struck me how concise a message that is. It just sort of crystallized into a concentrated little mental sound bite. Again, I’m not 100% sure that exactly what the guest said. I could go back and watch the interview again, but I’m not sure what the point would be. If he didn’t say that - then he should have. I think most rational people can get behind that sentiment whether they are religious or not.

Sure it shifts the burden of establishing morality from reading it from a handbook to having to sit down and hash out the pros and cons of any action. Actual thinking may even be involved. I think I prefer that method of establishing morality to defining hatred, discrimination, or some other base act as moral because you found it written in a book.

That is all.

EEEnthusiasm

One of the main attractions of the EEE for me is the chance to get to learn a bit about Linux. I fooled around a bit with UNIX when I was in college, but then again who didn’t experiment with UNIX in college, right? Since then I’ve pretty much dealt exclusively with Windows. For those not in the know, it appears that Linux is a bright up and comer in the world of operating systems (I’m sure I could find lots of people who would argue with that statement). The thing about Linux is it’s free. It’s part of the whole open source, free software movement. Linux has been around for years with a rather unimpressive adoption rate (which is just one reason people might object to that earlier statement).

Why is it worth checking out Linux now? Well if you keep an eye out for this sort of thing you’ll notice a trend of local (and in some cases national) governments experimenting with swapping all of their desktops over to Linux. Wikipedia claims that the cities of Vienna and Munich have migrated all of their desktops to a Linux variants along with a host of other government initiatives by European, South American, and Asian countries. (I won’t bother typing in all the examples listed on Wikipedia). The reason is if you use Linux you don’t have to buy a license or pay to upgrade the operating system every few years. Even further, if you use Open Office you don’t have to buy or pay to upgrade Microsoft Office every few years. All that not paying Microsoft to license software adds up if you’re a government with 1000’s of desktops.

But I’m not a government with 1000’s of desktops, so why do I care? In a word: Google. Google builds and runs most of their technology on various flavors of Linux. Their search engines, Google Earth, their Andriod cell phone platform…all run on Linux. Chances are, if you doing some serious work with Google technology, you’re going to come in contact with Linux. So that’s more of my incentive to want to figure out Linux….that and it’s just plain fun to get to play around with a new computer. This last weekend with all of the reading of metadata registry specifications, predicate algebra descriptions, and natural deduction rule proving for school it was nice to be to sit down and relax with some recreational Linux tutorials.

So here’s the cool thing about the EEE - it comes with Linux on it, Xandros Linux to be exact. However, out of the box the Linux distribution is a bit crippled. Everything you need to run the full Linux install is there, but the EEE is configured to run a program that basically only gives you a limited GUI interface to interact with it. This is actually probably a pretty smart move on ASUS’s (the people who make the EEE) part. I’m sure they don’t want to field all the tech support calls from people who haven’t a computer before, not to mention all the people who haven’t used Linux before. The simple interface let’s you get to all provided programs easily and keeps you from getting yourself into trouble by playing around with options that probably don’t need playing around with.

But what if you want to get yourself into trouble? Good news. You just have to press Ctrl-Alt-T to open up a terminal window and after a bit of console wizardry you can enable the full Xandros Linux interface. The sky is the limit now. There are all sorts of strange things you can attempt to do using Linux and your EEE. I’ll cover one of those tomorrow.

EEExcitement.

Well I didn’t get any of the home improvement stuff I had hoped to accomplish this weekend done. I was simply not willing to tough it out in sub freezing temperatures in the garage. I am, after all, a delicate little flower.

I did manage to accomplish a respectable amount of reading for my classes and a whole lot of cooking. So I can’t say the weekend was wholly unproductive. I also got a chance to spend some quality time with my new toy… an EEE PC.

I got Dawn an EEE PC for Christmas to replace her old laptop. I became so envious of the gift that I eventually broke down and bought one for myself. Let me explain what an EEE is for the uninitiated. Basically an EEE is just a small laptop. There’s some debate on the correct verbal way to refer to the device. Some people say “E cubed”, some people just pronounce each letter “E E E”, but personally I prefer to simply squeal “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee” when I’m refereeing to it. Much to the delight of those around me, I assure you.

The EEE is a small form factor laptop. It comes with a lightweight Linux installation and is preconfigured for all the tasks you’re likely to use it for (web browsing, email, writing, etc). Let’s be clear about this up front. The EEE is not a workstation replacement and it’s not even a laptop replacement if you do serious work on your laptop. When I’m selecting a computer to do serious work on I place high value on screen real estate. The EEE simply doesn’t have much in the way of screen real estate (it has a small little 7” LCD screen). So the EEE is not designed to be the computer you reach for when you want to sit down and do serious work. It’s designed to be the computer that is so mobile that you’ll take it places you wouldn’t bother taking a serious computer. The EEE is smaller and lighter than a hardback book. It has a fast boot and suspends times. It basically is a device that allows people who need computers to have a small computer when they are in between their computers. How marvelous is that!

Now that I hammered home how the EEE isn’t a real work computer let me expound upon what it can do. It is a fully functional computer so you could do work on it if you wanted to. Most mobile devices sacrifice functionality for mobility, the EEE really only sacrifices on size. It has a full (small and cramped) keyboard so you can actually type on it. It takes a little getting used to, but actual normal typing is possible. It comes preinstalled with Open Office, which is a free competitor to Microsoft Office. Open Office comes with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint equivalents. They’ll even open and save documents in Microsoft Office format. It comes with FireFox as a web browser (the real full-fledged version, not some crippled mobile version of a web browser) and an honest-to-god version of Adobe Acrobat. So you’ll be able to do as much document reading, browsing, and/or writing as you want on the small screen.

The OS installed on the EEE is Linux Xandros with an easy to use GUI installed. If you get rid of the easy to use GUI (more on that tomorrow) then you have a full fledged Linux OS at your disposal. Basically anything you can do in Linux you can do on your EEE. I’ve managed to install all the software I need to create LaTeX PDF documents on my EEE! If Linux isn’t your thing then it also comes with Windows XP drivers so you can load a copy of Windows XP on it.

Oh the price? There are models that range between $300 and $500. The most popular models seem to be the $300 and $400 versions. For the record, I got a $300 model for myself (more and that tomorrow as well).

Props to Project Runway

I meant to post this yesterday but was too busy. I wanted to give props to Project Runway. I think this week’s episode was one of the best that they’ve had this season. I thought all the designers did a really good job generating a lot of interesting work in a very short time frame. In short, it’s the type of episode that originally sold me on Project Runway in the first place.

I did have one small issue to take up with Victorya and Jillian. At the beginning of the challenge it showed the two of them arguing over who got to be team leader. First off, I don’t understand why anyone would ever want to be team leader in a reality show. The risk of getting eliminated is instantly multiplied because you get held accountable for whatever someone on your team does. The people on your team know that you’ll be held accountable…so if they aren’t threatening to eliminate the whole team I suspect their incentive to do their very best might be questionable. After all it’s probably not their butt on the line. So I wasn’t sure why Victorya and Jillian were fighting over who got to be team leader (perhaps they have some of that artistic integrity I’ve heard about and really wanted to realize their visions).

When the show reminded me that Victorya had immunity then I was even more flabbergasted. Why was there an argument at all? I imagine that the initial team planning should have gone something like this: Do we both want to be guaranteed to get to the next round? Yes? Good. Victorya you be team leader because you’ve got immunity. We’ll work really hard on your concept so that if the judges are snorting bezaddler stones or freebasing bobbin lint then I can claim that I was implement the team’s vision and being a good team player. I’ll be safe. You’ll be immune. We both get a guaranteed by.

This little piggy got frozen and snapped off.

This was supposed to be the weekend I got tons of stuff done. Basically it was going to be the last weekend at home before I was sucked into the maw of the semester and spit out sometime in May. I was planning to build shelves in the garage and finish staining two more parts of Dawn’s bookshelves. So much planned productivity.

Then I saw the weather forecast for this weekend. The highs are in the thirties. Hmm… working in the garage while it’s in the thirties doesn’t not seem very ideal. I’m not sure how well the shelves will take the stain if they’re at near freezing temperatures. I’m not sure how well my fingers will take to manipulating power tools if I can’t feel them.

I guess we’ll see how bad the weather really is. North Alabama has been known to predict winter Armageddon before without any serious weather event occurring. I think it gives the local news stations some sense of relevance. Did I mention that they’re also predicting an inch of snow tomorrow? I bet it will be the worst inch of snow in history. The inch that killed. Women will openly weep and men will gnash their teeth as the thin blanket of snow suffocates the land. Perhaps I should go back to ignoring the local news.

Maybe the weather won’t be that bad. Maybe I’ll man up and go out and buy some work gloves (to keep my delicate fingers warm) and get the job done anyway. Or maybe I’ll spend the weekend working on class work (I already have homework and a project I could be making progress on). Or perhaps, as Dawn suggested, I could spend the last free long weekend of the spring “drinking scotch and playing Rockband by the fire.”

Story Time!

Due to the huge groundswell of support for LaTeX themed posts I suppose I’ll humor you for another day and give you what you so lustily crave - more information about LaTex. Perhaps you’ll find the history of LaTex to be of some interest. I think it’s pretty cool. It’s filled with giants (in the field of computer science) and is the stuff of legend. Those readers who are of the breading persuasion may want to take note and include it as a bedtime story for your young ones.

The story begins with Donald Knuth. Donald Knuth is a dashing pioneer of computer science. Did you know that when he received his Bachelor of Science degree the faculty also simultaneously awarded him a Master of Science degree because they found his work to be so outstanding? Yeah, he’s that kind of smart. Knuth also won the very first Grace Murray Hopper Award (Grace Hopper is the computer scientist often credited for coining the term computer “debugging”) and a Turing Award amongst many others (although Knuth had to settle with winning the 9th Turning Award).

[For those playing the giants of computer science game at home Turning is credited with being the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. That test to see if you can tell if you’re IM chatting to with a real person or with a computer is named after him.]

Anyway, back to LaTeX. Knuth wrote a book in 1969 called The Art of Computer Programming. In 1977 Knuth received the proofs for the second edition of his book and thought they looked horrible. When he inquired why the second edition of his book looked like crap he discovered that the first edition of the book had been typeset using 19th century monotype technology which had since been replaced with new-fangled photographic techniques. The new-fangled techniques kind of sucked though. He had also recently been exposed to digital typesetting which offered higher quality…if you could actually get anything into it. So in order for his book to be printed better he decided to sit down and develop his own digital typesetting system. Sure, why not revolutionize an industry so that your book looks a little better?

Knuth thought he’d finish his digital typesetting program, which he called TeX, in under a year….turns out that it became more of an ongoing development process. Development on it was finally frozen in 1989. Although, during the 80’s people started to use and extended Knuth’s TeX system, the most popular extension of which is LaTeX still uses the core TeX typesetting engine with a more user friendly interface (although I find that hard to believe). Your children’s’ faces are sure to light up when you tell them that LaTeX was developed by no other than Leslie Lamport…. Yes, that Leslie Lamport. The one who invented Lamport Logical Clocks which are the basis for the vector clocks that allow distributed systems to order their messages. [He’s also the man who’s laid a lot of ground work in the field of temporal logic.]

So that’s our story. Exciting isn’t it. I know if you’re like me the only thing more interesting than talking about computer science is talking about historical computer science. Good luck getting the kids to bed…I bet they’re all wound up now.

A New Dark Art

I was up till midnight last night attempting to get a character into a table. It took about an hour of fiddling around but I eventually got it to work. There wasn’t really anything special about the table, it had one row and three columns. The character in question was the logical symbol for implication, it kind of looks like a double-bar arrow.

One of my classes this semester requires that I use a software package called LaTeX to submit all of my work for the class. LaTex is supposedly pronounced "la-tek" but Dawn informs me that I’m a damn fool if I pronounce it anyway besides "latex" (we scientist and engineers do have our fun). LaTeX is a typesetting markup language that helps better reproduce equations than typical WYSIWYG word processors (Word). The quote on Wikipedia has a very high opinion of who routinely uses LaTeX:

LaTeX is most widely used by mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, engineers, scholars in academia and the commercial world, and other professionals.

Does that leave anyone out? It sounds like everyone must be using it. If you’re not using LaTex you’re probably a looser.

All kidding aside, I’ve been hearing about LaTeX for over a year now, usually in the context that it makes life easier to express things that Word makes difficult. I didn’t realize that the inverse was equally true. LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG (what you see if what you get) program. Instead you add lots and lots of markup code to your text and then you get to compile your document and then you get convert it into something you can actually read (like a PDF). Obviously there are a few programs that will help compile and convert the file for you…but the fact remains that you don’t get to see what it looks while you’re typing; you have to stop and hit a compile button and then open a PDF to peak at what you’ve actually done.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what the markup looks like. That’s only natural. I’ll give you a taste of what it takes to make a table:

\begin{tabular}{ c c c }
\hline
p & q & p \wedge q \\
\hline
\end{tabular}

That’s what I was trying to compile last night…but don’t try that - it won’t work. It will complain. The problem is the \wedge, which tells LaTeX that I want the symbol for logical conjunction (and operator). Perhaps due to diminished late night mental capacity or shear obscurity it took me quite awhile to realize that I had to wrap the special character in $’s in order to get it to work: $\wedge$... Duh.

When I was regaling Dawn with the story of my fun night this morning she nodded and simply replied “It’s amazing what you can get things to do if you’re willing to wrap them in dollar signs.”