Viraj's Weblog

Occasionally I show movies for team-building and just plain taking some stress out of the week. I'm an avid movie watcher and have tons. So what I usually do is send out a proposed list of 5 or so movies and let people vote on them. I was using a PHP script called LittlePoll. If that link is broken, try this one. Anyway, it did the job, however I got really tired of picking out 5 movies to show. Wouldn't it be better if I just listed all of my movies and let people vote on them? Sort of like a Digg/Reddit interface to a movie list. Also I had no form of authentication and relied on the honor system (and I found out early not too many viewers deserved such honor).

I figured this would be a good learning experience to do some web programming in Python. So I sat down and wrote one using Django. I picked Django as we use it a lot at work and it seemed like a good thing to learn. In general I like it, however I feel all of these SQL abstraction frameworks just make it more difficult to get the queries you want in the most optimized fashion. In fact I had difficulty trying to do a simple task via the SQL abstraction. You'll notice that thread is gathering cobwebs due to its silence. The end result? Screw the abstraction and use raw SQL, sigh. I feel these web frameworks concentrate too much on getting things up as fast as possible more than functionality.

Other than that Django is pretty nifty to work with. It is indeed very simple. In no time I had a SQLite database-backed site with authentication setup. We even built in a weighting system so that people who consistently show up for the movies get a higher weight applied to their vote. This was a problem because we'd have users voting but never showing up, thereby affecting the viewing for others. Now new users get a zero weight until they attend one screening. It seems to be working well.

I say we because a co-worker has helped with some of the coding. The main problem we currently have is the slowness due to it running on a very old Thinkpad laptop. But we've optimized it pretty well. In fact, working on such low end hardware really teaches you to do things as efficient as possible. I know if I were to move it to a high end server it would fly. Oh and there is the problem with UI design, which I am horrible at. It is simple and functional though.

Now we have a pretty good system for deciding what to watch at our movie showings. I encourage you to setup something similar and give me feedback/patches .

Here is a great talk by a computer graphics professor.

Today I saw a very good documentary called In the Shadow of the Moon. I'm always fascinated by anything about space exploration. This movie documents, from the astronauts' point of view, our voyages to the moon. The footage in this film is just amazing and awe-inspiring. Seeing rockets launching towards space with 'United States' and the American flag on them was something to be proud of. The whole world watched as the first man steps on the moon. It was as if the world was together working towards a common cause. The edict politically laid down by Kennedy, the moon was a goal to be reached.

If only we would spend money on space exploration instead of ridiculous wars. If only we realized just how fragile life is on this planet and how important it is to reach beyond it. I find it absolutely ridiculous we aren't putting all our efforts and budget into such goals.

Mind you, our race to moon in those days was fueled by America wanting to beat the Russians. But this type of race is a healthy one. Instead of competing on the battlefield, we were competing to reach an end goal that was essentially a goal for humanity. Competition can drive us to achieve amazing things. Nowadays with the private sector bent on exploring space, the competition is between companies and rocket ship designers. It's a different competition, and more importantly there is no public fascination like there was when we went to the moon. How many eyes will be on the billionaire space tourists as they look down on us?

When there is mandate given by president, the whole nation sets its eyes on it. In the movie, the astronauts describe how stomach-churning it is to be on the liftoff pad while the whole world is watching you. What if you do something wrong?

This is a great and inspiring movie. It's just amazing to see how we did it. I found very humbling the descriptions of earth as the astronauts looked at it from the moon. So small, it could fit behind their thumb. So fragile, the pale blue ball hanging in the emptiness. All worldly problems are meaningless from that distance. All wars invisible. Just blue oceans, white clouds, and brown land.

I've been wanting to buy a Linux laptop. There are a bunch of vendors now selling them from the high-priced Emperor Linux to probably Walmart. I felt like supporting a small Linux laptop vendor, and narrowed my choices down to either Zareason or System 76. I heard about both on the Linux Action Show Podcast.

I decided to go with System 76 as it was a bit cheaper. I purchased a Pangolin Value laptop for about $1k. Here are the specs:

1 x Pangolin Value (PAN-V4) = $998.00
       Bluetooth no Bluetooth
       Extra AC Adapter no extra AC adapter
       Extra Battery no extra battery
       Hard Drive 80 GB 5400 RPM SATA
       Hardware Warranty 1 Yr. Ltd. Warranty and Technical Support
       Laptop Bag no bag
       Memory 2 GB - 2 x 1 GB DDR2 667 MHZ
       Operating System Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Linux
       Optical Drive CD-RW / DVD-RW
       Portable Flash Drive no flash drive
       Processor Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0 GHz 800 MHz FSB 4 MB L2
       Wireless 802.11 abg

Sounds pretty nice right? Well I got the laptop and generally things were working. They installed Ubuntu with wifi drivers, etc. Immediately though I noticed one things: a super-sensitive tap-to-click touchpad. I straight off went to look for mouse preferences but could find no indication of tap-to-click. In fact, to the system it appeared I had a regular external mouse. So began my hell trying to get this laptop in a usable state.

You can see my cry for help on this support forum thread. Interestingly I think my original posting was deleted for some reason. Maybe they are worried about bad PR? The gist of it is they said there is no Linux driver and the 'solution' is to disable the touchpad. That's just fucking ridiculous, and I pretty much lost all respect for System 76. I mean, why even claim you are a Linux laptop vendor when you are selling laptops with proprietary hardware without Linux support?

This laptop was pretty much unusable to me. After some long hard searching I came across this Ubuntu bug report which eventually led to this kernel bug. That shed some light. Well at least it proved that someone else was going through the same pain.

I contemplated writing my own driver as it would be a good learning experience. But I'd likely need a Windows box to do any reverse engineering. I didn't have one, and this didn't sound like fun at all. A few weeks passed and then someone updated the bug stating that a driver had been written. The announcement was a patch asking for comments. I decided to try it.

Now I haven't compiled a kernel in a long time. I needed to find out the proper way to do so on Ubuntu. I decided to follow the steps on this Ubuntu page. After going through it, I think this howto would have been a better choice. Basically I had to manually apply the patch as the kernel source I got was different than what was assumed. It was only a few changes though. It took many hours to compile, and only afterwards did I realize it was compiling many different kernels for different architectures. Sigh, this whole package management stuff for kernels is a real pain.

Eventually I had a running kernel with the new driver. But I'm not at the end of the race yet. I'm in communication with the author debugging some issues. I did manage to disable the tap-to-click by writing the proper hex value to the registers provided via /sys by the driver. However there seems to be some problems with window focus where applications don't give up the pointer. Hopefully some debugging with Arjan (the driver author) will resolve this. Stay tuned.

I woke up with a strange thought. When we think of aliens and intelligent life in outer space, we always assume that their concept and values of time would be the same as ours, and we think our time periods for communication would be equivalent to theirs.

Let's look at plants. They move very slowly relative to us. But if we viewed plants in fast-forward, where they appear to be moving around, would we view them as some higher life form that's possibly intelligent? Or take the reverse, if I'm an intelligent plant looking outwards. I see millions of things moving around at seemingly light speed. Can I infer some intelligence on those beings moving around me?

I think that when/if we find life out there, there is no guarantee their concept of time would be equivalent to ours. 1 hour in our life could be a 1 second in theirs. 1 second in our life could be 1 hour in theirs. Or taken to an extreme, 1 year in our life could be equivalent to 1 second in theirs. We would appear to them as either a mass of ants frantically moving around at crazy speeds, or stone-like trees doing nothing. There would be a difference in our methods of perception and our gauge of movement. Any resemblance of communication would be largely misinterpreted or completely missed. Physically this would evolve different apparatuses for communication and perception that would likely be incomprehensible to beings "from another time."

Realistically I think there would appear to be no intelligence or communication at all when a world is looked at from this scale. There would be no difference between us perceiving ants running around and a higher being perceiving us as running around. At a grander scale beings would just look like different molecules with chemical reactions going on between them. It would be impossible to know whether these molecules are 'intelligent' because of the difference in time frames.

As of this writing, this movie is now in the top 250 at IMDB. I'm a bit skeptical of IMDB reviews, however I have to say this is one awesome movie. I'm a pretty big fan of the raw Westerns where it's not just guns blazing but actually mind battles taking place. This movie reminded me of Butch Cassidy, and the final scenes are almost an homage to it. Granted there is lots of violence, and if that turns you off you probably won't like this.

I would the say the characters are the best part of this movie. It's fairly clear who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, but the line is quite blurred. Each side harbors both good and bad qualities, and even the characters around them all cannot be put into any bucket. There is a great scene where just with some temptation of a little money, a whole town joins the bad guys. These are the really intelligent types of movies, where attitudes are more realistic and likely represent the culture of the old western desert towns. One scene has a gruesome 'operation' by the only doctor in town with prehistoric equipment. Seeing animal fetal development pictures on the walls, the patient is reassured when the doctor tells him it's nice to be able to have a conversation with a patient for once. Be thankful you have a nice modern hospital down the street .

A common theme throughout the movie is religion and morals, and criticisms of both. One supposedly good person who lives by the Bible justifying killing American Indians including children for revenge is no better than the thief and murderer who also quotes the Bible. Let's face it, during those times the Bible must have been the only book widely read. The son of the good guy looks up to the bad guy. There are just so many interesting conversations and themes going throughout the movie.

Both Russell Crowe and Christian Bale were amazing. Both characters undergo changes and the acting here is just great. At the end you are strangely rooting for both of them, and it takes real directorial skill to convince the audience to do that.

I'm reading Darkins' master work 'The Selfish Gene' and I find it rather amazing. This was written in 1976 and is less controversial than 'The God Delusion', but it is a really interesting read and explains Darwin's evolution in a very unique and logical way. It's a rather bleak outlook on life, but I can't help but feeling there is a lot of truth in it. Here is an interesting take on the battle of the sexes:

... In practice, however, it is unlikely that females would impose such arbitrary tasks as dragon-killing, or Holy-Grail-seeking on their suitors. The reason is that a rival female who imposed a task no less arduous, but more useful to her and her children, would have an advantage over more romantically minded females who demanded a pointless labour of live. Building a nest may be less romantic than slaying a dragon or swimming the Hellespont, but it is much more useful.

...

A female, playing the domestic-bliss strategy, who simply looks the males over and tries to recognize qualities of fidelity in advance, lays herself open to deception. Any male who can pass himself off as a good loyal domestic type, but who in reality is concealing a strong tendency towards desertion and unfaithfulness, could have a great advantage. As long as his deserted former wives have any chance of bringing up some of the children, the philanderer stands to pass on more genes than a rival male who is an honest husband and father. Genes for effective deception by males will tend to be favoured in the gene pool.

Conversely, natural selection will tend to favour females who become good at seeing through such deception. ...