The story begins with a young boy who had a pair of shoes he loved very much. They were the bestest and most durablest pair of shoes he ever did own.

And they were pretty too! My god, all the female shoes turned their heads as they walked by. The shoes were sporting a lovely black leather body with a red line or two in strategic places, topped off by a magnificent red Fallen logo. The shoe laces were knotted off at the base and survived most of their time being stunk up and walked upon by dirty socks as was the fashion of the time.

The shoes lived life together with the boy through all sorts of haps and mishaps. They were there when he got drunk, they were there when he decided it might be a good thing to do some sporty things like running and stuff. They bared it all!

Resilient little shoes that they were.

There were times when younger, more sexier shoes, almost took their place in the boy’s life. But it never happened, somehow, through some turn of fortune, they always came back to embrace the boy’s feet and make the nasty experience of walking all lovely and comfortable and just like he was floating about on a cushion of air.

But despite all, they were getting old.

There were giant holes gaping from pretty much everywhere. Their posterior was old and battered and nearly mashed up and eaten through like a pack of rabid wolves got their hands on them. Almost every time they made a step they tore through the boy’s socks in an act of defiance as if to scream “HEY I’M FUCKING OLD! I DON’T LIKE WALKING ANYMORE LEAVE ME ALONE!”

And the boy heeded their call and he did decide to buy a new pair very soon. But his mother heard them even more so one day she up and threw them in the trash. Alas, the boy now had not a shoe to put on his feet.

He decided to go for a run despite all. Do it barefoot so to speak.

Now his soles are kind of tender.

The end.

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• How to Transition from Running Shoes to Barefoot Running (walking-running-training.suite101.com)
• 5 shoes to rock your world (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Are Shoes That Simulate Walking Barefoot Better? (atomiurl.com)
• Barefoot Running – Baby (Forefoot) Steps in the Right Direction on Run #3 (runblogger.com)

Ok so today has probably been one of the crappiest days in a very very long time. Nothing spectacular happened, just a bunch of small very very irritating and annoying things, just enough to ruin your mood for a whole week.

Which is awesome since it’s Monday.

Even better, I’m going to London tomorrow and am expected to be all chirpy and awesome.

Because the day can speak for itself, I’m just going to list everything:

1. I got up quite a bit later than I intended.
2. It was cold and incredibly humid outside.
3. By the time I got to uni to have a grade officially noted down, I was dripping sweat.
4. Went to hackerspace to study, made tea.
5. 10 minutes later realised I’d forgotten my calculator at home, went get it.
6. Dripping sweat when got home.
7. This time get in car and go back to hackerspace.
8. Going for calculator took an hour. Made new tea.
9. Ten minutes later classmates called, let’s go study at a random open classroom.
10. It is now almost noon and I’ve only had a few sips of tea.
11. All vending machines at the faculty are out of energy drinks, everyone’s studying.
12. With the last change I’ve got I grab a coke.
13. At 3pm the exam starts and it’s a fucking assrape. I literally felt the professor’s dick go up my arse when I put my eyes on the problem.
14. Struggle through somewhat solving everything.
15. It took so long I couldn’t pick a time/date to go get my grade. Got one that is on a day when I’m in London.
16. Go back to hackerspace to mostly hang out, do some business stuff.
17. Laptop runs out of disk. Quickly empty trash.
18. Emptying trash takes two hours.
19. While emptying trash the only data file for my time logging app where I log pretty much everything I do so I can have an oversee of what I’m doing with my time … goes missing.
20. Fine I’ll just restore it from backups.
21. Mate beats me in almost every single game of Guitar Hero.
22. Get home, start restoring that file from backups.
23. Find out someone had turned Time Machine off on December 6th 2009.
24. Give up. The day is officially horrible. The only way it could get worse is if I magically break my leg while sleeping.

… and I never quite get around to doing them.

Fuck. This. Shit.

This year, I make a list and I fucking clear it by the time I’m 30. There is no sense in living if you aren’t having way over the top fun with it.

Also making a list, publicly posting it and putting a deadline on it is a sure fire way to have a really really really really crappy 30th birthday when you inevitably realise that you’ve done way too few of these things and have just run out of soup.

1. Bungee jump
2. Canyoning
3. Solo sky dive from plane
4. BASE jump the fjords
5. Flying suit BASE jump the fjords
6. Jump off a few other things with a flying suit
7. Climb Triglav
8. Climb Everest
9. Drive at least one official european rally race
10. Drive and finish the desert oldsmobile rally (I keep forgetting the name)
11. Ride the trans-siberian railway
12. Learn to do a no handed endo
13. Perform a double tailwhip with a mountain bike
14. Come to a board meeting with a parachute through the window

Noticed a pattern?

Well I’ve got 8 (although I like to pretend it’s 9) years to do all of this. Will happily take suggestions for things I haven’t thought of.

EDIT:

Oh and 15: Learn to ride a unicycle

It’s going to be a hellish few weeks and I’m already dreading climbing out of bed each and every day respectfully. Horrible horrible times are afoot.

This week I’m facing two midterms, one somewhat long paper and having to defend my homework before scrutiny. Next week it’s three rather not very easy exams. Yikes!

And then nobody knows! I fully expect the one exam that’s scheduled and the three oral exams partaining to the exams that are next week. Hoorah!

Oh well, the exam season will behave like the drunk daddy in a particular song methinks.

Disclaimer: I am writing this on my phone while walking to work

Reading a funny comic  on philosophy vs. engineering and a short discourse on twitter has got me to thinking.

Just why is there such a huge divide between engineers and philosophers?

Because philosophers are annoying brats.

Most of it comes from their general inability to actually think, that is to say, consider all the variables.

For example, a philosopher will natter on and on about how a copy of a copy is an original and completely indistinguishable from the original and arguing that it is now magically impossible to tell which came first.

All the while programmers have been copying variables left and right to good use and distinguishing them quite well for over 60 years.

The philosophers still don’t quite know whether a copy is an original or a copy.

Now while I do think philosophy has made some marvelous contributions to our society – like inventing mathematics, most of the time it’s just about being a colossal brat and regurgitating memorised thousands of years of actual thinking to look smart.

Then again, like a guitar, a good way to impress chicks.

The trick is to start it up when you’re home. Then after the warmup walk kill it and open it again. This time GPS connect is instant.

But the true lesson for today is that tracking runs is FUN. I even got a map and everything Sure it looks a bit weird where it decided I was running zigzag through houses and trees and cars and garages and pretty much everything at a sooper speed of 30! kilometers per hour.

But hey, it’s a blackberry not an iPhone (or Android), so I shan’t complain. I’m just glad I can finally use this crap.

Hmmm … for some reason wordpress won’t let me embed the map, so here’s a screenshot.

Then last year I started contracting the bug and sort of wanted to go a few times.

This year I totally want to go for a good hike at least once a month.

Weird right? Does this mean I’m getting old? Or just that I spend too much time inside?

Whatever it is, yesterday the girlfriend and I went for a lovely hike. The first of the season. The destination was this observation tower thing upon some hill above Vrhnika.

I foursquared when we were there of course

The hike was quite lovely through some woods and such, many birds were chirping and there were no mammals in sight except for some cyclist a dog or two and a few children. There were also some humans.

An hour of walking each way … it hurt a lot more than I thought it would. No soreness today, but it was surprisingly hard yesterday and I felt strangely sleepy as early as midnight. Maybe I’m just not at all in shape yet?

Anyhow, here are two photos of the purdiful view we got from the top of the tower.

Sometimes we’re given a stupid algorithm or two to implement at this or that course at uni. This time ’round they wanted us to implement something called external matrix transposition … the idea is that you have to transpose a matrix live from the hard drive because it is potentially so bloody huge you can’t store a single row in memory.

Which is a bit silly, who’s got 60+ gig huge matrixes these days? You’re doing it wrong if you need that many dimensions! VERY wrong!

But anyway, what really struck me as a bit silly is that they were big nazis when it comes to how we’re supposed to do this. Needs to compile with their specific command, can only be done in Java or C/C++ … yeah fuck you and fuck your grade, let’s learn something.

So I went and did it in Clojure … well not really since I didn’t finish, but I came close.

Surprisingly, it is in fact very very hard to process data live as it’s being read in a functional environment. Every library that’s already out there open-read-closes the file, at best you get something that can read lines and allows you to work on every line as it’s being read, but oh no, not characters. Nope, what sort of bloody idiot would want that?

Well … me.

So here is my implementation, probably not the most elegant thing out there since I’m new to this, of what Java people call “nextInt”. It returns the next integer in a file as a proper integer and so on.

(ns io (:require [clojure.contrib.io :as io]))
 
(defn read-char [rdr]
   (char (.read rdr)))
 
(defn delimiter? [c]
  (if (or (< (int c) (int '\0)) (> (int c) (int '\9)) (= c nil)) true false))
 
(defn digit [c place]
  (* (- (int c) 48) (Math/pow 10 (- place 1))))
 
(defn numify [seq acc]
  (if (= seq nil)
    (int acc)
    (numify (next seq)
	    (+ acc (digit (first seq) (count seq))))))
 
(defn read-number [rdr acc]
  (let [c (read-char rdr)]
    (if (delimiter? c)
      (numify acc 0)
      (read-number rdr (concat acc [c])))))

You call it with an open reader and an empty [] thingy because, the latter because I couldn’t figure out optional function arguments.

And if anyone’s interested, here’s the rest of the code that opens a file where the first number denotes the number of columns in the matrix and then contains the rest of it delimited with spaces or tabs or anything non-numerical, and copies every row into a separate file so a transposition can then be done (didn’t quite get to this part)

(defn copy-number [rdr writer]
  (.write writer (str (read-number rdr []) " ")))
 
(defn copy-row [rdr writer i]
  (copy-number rdr writer)
  (if (> i 1) (copy-row rdr writer (dec i))))
 
(defn break-row [rdr i columns]
  (try
   (with-open [writer (io/writer (str "podatki-0-" i))]
     (copy-row rdr writer columns))
   (break-row rdr (inc i) columns)
  (catch Exception e
    nil)))
 
(defn transpose-matrix [file-name]
  (with-open [rdr (io/reader file-name)]
    (let [columns (read-number rdr [])]
      (break-row rdr 0 columns))))
 
(transpose-matrix "/home/swizec/Documents/APS2/input.txt")

PS: that try/catch in there is fugly, but I didn’t know how else to check for EOF *blush*

Now this is the story all about how
My blog got flipped, turned upside down
And I’d like to take a minute just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I fucked it all up so damn well

In West Apache born and raised
On the playground where it spent most of his days
Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool
And all serving some blabber outside of the school
When a couple of admins said ‘we’re up in no good’
Started making trouble in my neighbourhood
I forgot one little date and my blog got scared
And said ‘you’re moving with your aunt and uncle in nginx’

I begged and pleaded with them the other day
But they packed my suitcase and sent me on my way
They gave me a kissin’ and they gave me my ticket
I put my walkman on and said I might as well kick it

First class, yo this is bad,
Drinking errors juice out of a config glass
Is this what the people of nginx livin’ like,
Hmm this might be alright!

I whistled for a cab and when it came near the
Licensplate said ‘Fresh’ and had a dice in the mirror
If anything I could say that this cab was rare
But I thought now forget it, yo home to nginx

I pulled up to a house about seven or eight
And I yelled to the cabby ‘Yo, home smell you later’
Looked at my kingdom I was finally there
To settle my throne as the prince of Bel-Air

Hai guise, long time no funky and interesting posting around here.

That’s all about to change.

‘Cause I’ve got something incredibly awesome and silly to tell all y’all.

Remember Pure Pwnage? That show about a gaming dude called Jeremy otherwise known as teh_pwnerer who is followed around by his noob brother Kyle and they make a show?

Yeah that one, the best fucking internet show ever devised by man. I loved that damn thing!

But then it sort of died, with T-Bone’s crash and everything. It also just so happened to jump the shark a little bit even before then. It was much awesomer when everyone still believed Jeremy was Jeremy and Kyle was Kyle and so on. Seriously, it looked totally legit.

Thing was, once they published that they were professionals, alright, doesn’t hurt the show and Jeremy was still a pretty heavy gamer IRL anyway. I mean they had to be to know that many jokes about games. Thing was, they suddenly felt the freedom of not having to be constrained by reality and it degraded the quality a bit.

BUT NO MATTER!

Because NOW, oh yeas, yes!, NOW they’re back! And.

it.

is.

fucking.

awesome!

They finally managed to become a proper TV show so the quality of everything is a bit better, but they’ve retained the good old format of behind-the-camera Kyle and Jeremy his brother and so on. I watched the season premiere last night and I recommend anyone and everyone who’s ever played a video game to go download it and give it a good watch.

Unfortunately, yeah, with becoming more proper they’ve also become moronic about copyright. In the old days you could just go to their site and watch it anywhere in the world. They had a huge worldwide fanbase and they really really took care of us fans methinks. Now you can only watch it from Canada and US or something. A huge waste.

They basically threw away the one thing that made them really popular and successful – openness. But oh well, at least there’s piratebay and such.

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• Pure Pwnage: This is what the nerds’ revenge looks like (nationalpost.com)

Dude seriously, the answer to that is “HaHa oh you” not all of that.

Oh well, kudos for proving that caring about paradoxes is just silly because they either don’t exist or they do exist and you’re a jackass.

Also, did you know that if you assume any paradox to be correct you can mathematically prove/derive anything.

Point of fact:

Just to help you embrace the herculean task this was: My goal was to make the algorithm’s runtime lower than 1.5 seconds for any realistic data sample. It was taking anywhere from 5 to 20 and even 30 seconds at the time.

So I set off. First some profiling and some tidbits here and there, then tweaking and poking and yanking and scraping code for hours upon hours upon hours.

Nothing, no increase in performance. Nothing even remote to sane behaviour at all. Even though the algorithm was working, my debugging/profiling data wasn’t making any sense.

And I said fuck this shit and went to chillax and rest my mind over Men Who Stare at Goats for two hours.

There were some good laughs and some pretty good chillaxing being done. My I-don’t-know-which-exactly-or-what’s-it-called part of the brain was probably busy processing the afore mentioned problem in the background. Or maybe it wasn’t, who knows.

All I know is that when I came back to the problem I noticed something funky.

HEY THAT FUNCTION ARGUMENT SHOULDN’T BE A FUCKING CONSTANT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!

Characters 1 and t look a lot alike …

So anyway, long story short. The meta-heuristic that used to take 1500 epochs to do something now takes only ten to do the same thing, but slightly better.

That’s a pretty fucking good improovement right there!

Now the algorithm is constantly taking about a second to do its thing and I’m happy. Pushed it into production where profiling data will be collected of a more varied sample of data to see if all is well.

Chillaxing! It really does work.

So let’s start by describing the problem. We have a base user model named pUser (yes stupid naming convention) that is tied to a cookie, which holds an id. These users are then tied to a number of different API accounts. In my case it is Delicious, Twitter and Facebook. The user_id is also used to tie a bunch of meta data in different other models to them.

The problem is that we do not want to trouble users with a special login for our service. But they are using different computers and browsers, so the same physical user can have multiple user id’s.

However through their Delicious et al. credentials we can tie them back together into a single entity. But we do not want to trouble the rest of the code with this detail, it should just work seamlessly because otherwise we’d be forced to introduce checking for this stuff at about 50 different places in the project.

My approach to solving this goes as follows; at the end will be the three tests that indicate that the solution is valid. A hardcore test through the actual UI also confirmed that everything works.

Funky geek stuff follows, you have been warned

First we introduce a model that connects different user id’s to the main user (i.e. the first id said user was given)

class UserNormalisation(models.Model):
	main_id = models.IntegerField()
	sub_id = models.IntegerField()
 
	class Meta:
		unique_together = ("main_id", "sub_id")

Then we give our Delicious model a ModelManager that will perform duplicity checking and tie different users together as needed.

class DeliciousManager(models.Manager):
	def create(self, **kwargs):
		try:
			old = Delicious.objects.get(username=kwargs['username'])
			new = super(DeliciousManager, self).create(**kwargs)
			try:
				UserNormalisation(main_id = old.user.id,
						  sub_id = new.user.id).save()
			except IntegrityError:
				pass
			new.delete()
			return old
		except Delicious.DoesNotExist:
			return super(DeliciousManager, self).create(**kwargs)
 
class Delicious(models.Model):
	user = models.ForeignKey( pUser )
	username = models.CharField( max_length=255 )
	password = models.CharField( max_length=255 )
	isScrobbled = models.BooleanField( default=False )
 
	objects = DeliciousManager()

Basically when the createfunction is called it checks whether a Delicious model with the same username already exists and if it does, then a row is added to the UserNormalisation table to tie the two user id’s together.

And here’s the real magic, the changes we did to the pUser model.

class pUserManager(models.Manager):
	def get(self, **kwargs):
		user = super(pUserManager, self).get(**kwargs)
		try:
			id = UserNormalisation.objects.get(sub_id=user.id).main_id
			user = super(pUserManager, self).get(id=id)
		except UserNormalisation.DoesNotExist:
			pass
		return user
 
class pUser(models.Model):
	username = models.CharField( max_length=50 )
	password = models.CharField( max_length=255 )
	creation = models.DateTimeField( auto_now=True )
 
	objects = pUserManager()
 
	def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
		super(pUser, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
		try:
			id = UserNormalisation.objects.get(sub_id=self.id).main_id
			self.id = id
 
		except UserNormalisation.DoesNotExist:
			pass

The pUserManager should have a few more functions that do essentially the same thing for other operations (filter comes to mind). Essentially whenever a pUser is fetched from the db the manager will return the real user as per the UserNormalisation model.

Another trick that makes this work seamlessly even when used as a connecting model (primary key for instance) in a different table is that __init__ function. What I’ve discovered is that there it’s enough to just change the user’s id in place and everything will work.

Here are the tests that confirm all of this funky stuff actually performs as expected

	def test_normalisation(self):
		user = pUser(username="test", password="test")
		user.save()
 
		user2 = pUser(username="test2", password="test")
		user2.save()
 
		norm = UserNormalisation(main_id=user.id, sub_id=user2.id)
		norm.save()
 
		fixture = pUser.objects.get(id=user2.id)
		self.assertEquals( fixture.id, user.id )
 
	def test_normalisation2(self):
		user = pUser()
		user.save()
		user2 = pUser()
		user2.save()
 
		user.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
		fixture = user2.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
 
		self.assertEquals( fixture.user.id, user.id )
		self.assertEquals( UserNormalisation.objects.get(sub_id=user2.id).main_id, user.id )
		self.assertEquals( fixture.user, user )
 
	def test_normalisation3(self):
		user = pUser()
		user.save()
		user2 = pUser()
		user2.save()
 
		user.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
		fixture = user2.delicious_set.create(username="test", password="test")
 
		norm = UserNormalisation.objects.all()
 
		Concepts.relate(user=user2, concept1="tag1", concept2="tag2")
		relation = ConceptRelation.objects.filter(user=user2, concept1="tag1")[0]
		self.assertEquals( relation.user.id, user.id )
		self.assertEquals( relation.user, user )

Take special note to the latter two examples. In test_normalisation2 you can see that when a delicious_set is created for user2, the two users become the same thing because both we’re using the same delicious username both times. Something similar happens in test_normalisation3, but there we see that creating a ConceptRelation for user2 actually creates it for the first user because they both behave as if they were the original user.

Size matters!

But obviously that’s a very lame argument so let’s work it out a bit.

Everybody knows that when it comes to impregnating homo sapienatic females any and all but the weirdest of male homo sapienatic instruments will do. It can be wide, it can be small, it can be whatever. As long as it’s longer than 5 inches you’re good and obviously since you’re here and we have this thing called evolution and inherited traits, chances are your phallic instrument is longer than 5 inches mister.

And 5 inches is quite alright, I wouldn’t want a 5 inch knife in my back …

But homo sapiens are smart cookies and they needed something more out of sex. This thing called an endorphinal high, we like drugs maaan, because after all, if sex would hurt nobody would do it and then we’d all be fucked. Not to mention that’s no fun at all.

So most of the time when a homo sapiens female and a homo sapiens male get together it isn’t to make little hobbits, it’s to make fun and create natural occuring brain drugs. Woo.

This however introduces a problem, the lukewarm hole most females sport is very stretchy and the more fun it’s having the more it stretches. The damn thing does not in the least care about what you’re putting inside, it just wants more and more and more and it gets bigger and bigger. Then the lady stops getting pleasure because she can’t feel anything.

Hell, there’s very little friction left!

What do? Well obviously you put a bigger instrument into the hands of the master male homo sapiens so that he could pleasure the female better. Problem solved!

By the by, many animal species have tricks to make the female more … uhm … willing. Like cats have spikes on their instruments and ducks have a spiral penis! Wow, amazing, shocker!

Ok so no bitching about “Size doesn’t matter, it’s how you use it” Sod off with those, size, in humans, is about 80% of the equation when it comes to pleasurable activities of the sort.

Therein lies the problem. The more the woman wants to have fun, the bigger instrument she needs. But how can you tell who’s got a big instrument when the damn bastards keep it neatly tucked away in their garment?

Confidence!

The more confidence a male sports the bigger their schlong! The mechanism for how big schlong == big confidence is probably self-evident so let’s leave it at this. The reason why bigger schlong equals bigger confidence is that lasses need a heuristic for finding bigger pleasure.

Yesterday was Halloween and as tradition goes, no this has got nothing to do with the americanisation of Slovenian culture, we’ve had halloween or some variation thereof for many centuries before america was ever discovered, people are supposed to dress up in scary costumes.

This year I decided to partake, it happens sporadically, and after a lot of deliberation I finally decided I’d dress up as an Emo. It worked out fucking perfectly, got confused for a female at least five times and I’m told I looked downright 16 … why I got liquor so easily though might be evidence against such claims. Unfortunately this is the only image I’ve got, I also had an emo backpack, emo fingernail job and some other tidbits that made me bloody awesome!

Halloween being the last day of October brings us to another topic – NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo is an annual event that started nigh on ten years ago in the US and soon spread over the globe. The goal is to write a [short] novel of 50k words in a single month. You’re supposed to write write write without fussing too much over perfection and details, those are for some other time. My first attempt was way back in 2005 when I actually managed to win by producing some utter garbage. Right the next year I failed.

For some reason or another, insanity being most likely, I’ve decided to write a novel this month. Of course I’m not going to win because I simply don’t have enough time and midterms will be starting in a few weeks. Yay. I also have no idea what I’m going to write about, but I’ve settled on doing something Steampunk in a Gonzo style (due to time restrictions) and the basic premise being Vampires, because @tamejhna said so. We’ll see what happens, but hopefully I’ll produce a novella of about 25k words, worthy of being published in Steampunk Magazine … been a while since I published anything there.

This month being November brings us to yet another bit of madness. Beardvember!

The first I learned of beardvember was through Paul Southworth (@southworth) and his rants underneath the Ugly Hill comic, it’s still a bloody shame he stopped drawing that). The idea here is that you leave your face to run wild with hair for a month and see what happens. If you’re silly enough you also take a photo every day and then make a gif from it, which I’ll attempt.

So, uhm, yes … THIS. IS. MADNESS! (completely unrelated to a certain popular meme of old)