This morning just as I was battling with the question of going for a morning run or not I came across this facebook status

<a status I am currently unable to find>

But anyway, it was of something called @runkeeper and a dude reported he just ran 0.00 kilometers.

So why would this matter?

Because it gave me the idea that hey, if I tracked my runs I could get empirical data on what I’m doing and being the geek that I am this would inspire me to run more, harder and oftener.

Yayz! \o/

Then I went looking for this RunKeeper app … well whaddya know, it only exists for iPhones, who cares about you dirty BlackBerry users. You all suck anyway, you never do cool things! (gee I wonder why)

Well, after minutes upon minutes upon minutes upon dirty minutes of looking for something I finally came across an app that supports blackberries in the seedy underbelly of the internet’s shady alleys where drug dealing pederast’s push their wares.

It is called SportyPal.

Hoorah!

I downloaded it, fired it up and went for my run. After half an hour I come back home, look at the app and … why the flying shit is this? The stupid thing didn’t even manage to start getting GPS data during this time. Yep, 30 minutes of running and it didn’t even begin tracking anything.

Then two minutes later it failed with a “I’m sorry”

This whole week has been one sluggish lazy blur.

Yes I know it’s only Thursday.

All week the earliest I ventured outside the apartment was at noon. And I just didn’t do anything very productive at all for some reason. Whenever I did do some work it was at a slow leisurely pace. A few clicks here. Tap tap there. Point point test yonder.

Like, for example, instead of working hard on building a testing framework for my machine learning frameworks last night I … invited the girlfriend over, had a nice and comfortable dinner (unfortunately not a very tasty one) then watched a movie or somesuch and went to bed earlier than midnight.

No, cuddling is not being productive.

And today we watched television, TELEVISION, until something like 12 o’clock and went off into the great wide open to find new adventures.

Yep, the whole week has been one big lazy yawn with a bit of running and exercise and a little productivity. Hell, it’s already Thursday and I’ve only been productive 43 hours this week! Ew! If I didn’t love it so much I’d almost be disgusted with myself.

But truth be told, I absolutely needed a week just like this. I don’t really deal well with proper vacations, get too bored. So this is perfect for me, have a week like normal people for once.

It’s nice. Guilty pleasures are always the bestest.

Do people really survive their whole lives on only 9-ish hours of productivity every day excluding weekends?

I don’t know if I can really believe that … someone enlighten me.

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*

Every now and then a new silly service pops up that helps people measure the length of their penis and compare it to others without being … you know … very ew about it.

’cause nobody wants that

nope.

So one of these days, doesn’t really matter when, but I found out about it today, a new service called MyTechne popped up out of the blue … and oh great, Zemanta just flashed me with a bunch of dicks in the recommendations media gallery, thanks guise …

The point is that you sign up and create a collection of all the different programming languages you’ve ever used and when you used them and so on and so forth. Marvelous!

Now the age long debate of who has the biggest coding schlong over at the pub can get fucking substantiated. Why try to remember everything when you’re drunk out of your mind? Just pull out an internet and SHOW them.

As Hugh Laurie would say in Blackadder’s fourth series: Hoorah!!

Anyway, here’s my coding schlong if anyone’s interested. For the love of god DO show me yours in the comments alright. Cheers.

And thus the three day easter weekend is behind us.

Finally.

Was getting a bit long to be honest.

But what’s more important than this is what I spent most of my weekend doing –> Videogames and piles upon piles of omnom yummy foods. Mostly junk foods like bits of smoked pigs and copious amounts of chocolate … very little eggs though, that’s a bit silly considering easter is supposed to be all about eggs.

No matter, food was omnom.

Now, how can a guy justify wasting so many hours on something as simple as videogames? Well, I could say I was trying to have fun … but that’s a cop out, way too easy.

The most importantest thing is the mechanics of my adventures. The game I was playing was Richard Burns Rally, known far and wide as being one of the most, if not the most, difficult and realistic rally simulation games. The map I was playing was Mineshaft from Australia, in my humble opinion the hardest fucking map in the whole game.

See in most of the maps you drive in some forrest or something and the worst that can happen is you ram a tree or lose time by going a bit wide and over some grass or something.

But Mineshaft is different. Most of that damn thing is comprised of a road with a sheer drop cliff on one side and a cliff on the other. It’s a bit like trying to rally over the Yungas Road (most dangerous road in the world FYI).

So what the fuck are you rambling about Swizec. Just get on with the fucking point already sheesh!

Alright alright.

My point is that ALL I did. For SEVERAL fucking hours. Was. Play. Richard Burns Rally. On. The. Hardest. Map.

But why on god’s fucking earth would you do something like that?

Well, because I could.

But the important bit is why I wanted to. The game is insane to play on keyboards and needless to say I never once survived to the end of the map. Out of ~200 plays. I never once finished.

Wtf, masochist?

No. Through endless repetition and stupid iteration I learned. I learned a whole fucking lot! By the time I got fed up with playing I was habitually achieving mid times several seconds faster than the world record for that stage. Yes, the realistic world record.

*gasp* *shocker*

But I still didn’t finish, so the quest continues.

My point is that this little experience teaches us a lot about life, the universe and everything. Life is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster

And that is all. Remember that. Whenever you are failing in life, you’re not failing, you’re learning. That’s what it’s all about. The more you fail the better a person you become, those times you dont’ fail you haven’t learned a single thing. So stop that.

Sometimes I wonder how to tell that I really exist, so imagine my creeped-out-edness when I found this.

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)

Yesterday I gave a guest talk sort of thing at the Jobfair on my faculty. The point was to perform the function of a live demo for my startup incubator and help them get more startups that way.

My personal point was to get some blokes to go “HEY! I wanna to help with that too!”, which of course did not happen because the audience was mostly electronics and hardware people. But nevertheless, it was a lovely chat.

Although, I noticed a very interesting trend. None of them felt very keen on becoming entrepreneurs while still at uni. They thought it was too hard, that next to classes and studying they don’t really have time to do anything else. Hell, I even got an almostpplause for being such an impressive lad that I can do both AND keep a girlfriend.

But seriously, it’s not hard at all. Just take this week’s Tuesday as an example:

On Tuesday I worked for nine hours, five of which were studying/taking a hard maths exam (I count school as work because it’s my “job”). I went to the playhouse and I watched an episode of House. I also helped my girlfriend prepare a presentation for school.

And I still went to bed by midnight.

See, it’s that fucking hard!

Not only have I never passed as many exams as I have now that I’m also an entrepreneur, I’ve also taken up a new sport (boxing), which takes six hours out of every week.

Sure it’s not all fun and games and many people find it difficult to jam 60 to 70 working hours into every week. But if you think being a student and an entrepreneur is hard, you’re trippin’ man. Seriously.

Just get off yer arse and do it. The television and alcohol can take care of themselves.