Tidbits 雜感

Inspired by Google's various sports calendars, I decided to create a public calendar for MMA events.

This MMA calendar lists events from UFC, WEC, Dream, Sengoku, and Strikeforce. Here are the various flavors: XML, ICAL, HTML.

I recently tried out the Kindle for Ipod Touch and Stanza, another (free) ebook reader for the Ipod Touch. I was pleasantly surprised by how well both worked; I'd say that reading on the Ipod Touch is no worse than reading on a full-sized monitor, with the convenience of having many books available in your pocket whenever there's any down-time (waiting in line, etc.). Of course, I'm sure it can't compare to reading on the e-ink of a real Kindle, but on the other hand, it's still smaller and more easy to have on you at all times.

One brief digression - I'm puzzled by people who view the fact that one can read books on the Ipod Touch in the dark as a positive point in comparison to the Kindle, which cannot be read in the dark. First, how often are you going to need to read in the dark? And why would you want to? Just turn on a light. Reading in the dark can't be good for your eyes, and moreover, the fact that you can't read a Kindle in the dark is a consequence of the fact that the e-ink more closely mirrors the experience of reading an actual book, as the screen is not lit and causes less strain on the eyes.

Anyway, back to the Kindle and Stanza. One neat thing is that you can download a lot of samples (I think generally the first chapter of books) from Amazon and read them for free on the Kindle, which is a good way to decide if you want to buy the book or not. In addition, there are a lot of good books in the public domain that you can download directly from Stanza, like Dickens, Twain, Swift, HG Wells, etc.

賢^2 (KenKen) - number based game similar to Sudoku

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Test your ability to hit keys roughly in correspondence with music in these poor man's versions of Guitar Hero:

Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2 (amateur, pro)
Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3 (my scores)

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The eyeballing game - test how accurately you can bisect an angle, draw a right angle, and other tasks. My first attempt led to an average of 3.51. I seem to be doing best on bisecting an angle and worse on determining the center of a triangle.

On my second attempt, I improved to an average of 2.57 (screenshot). For each trial, I averaged 3.31, 2.10, and 2.30. I was best at "bisect angle", averaging 0.73, and "right angle", averaging 1.23. I was worst at "circle center", averaging 4.23, and "midpoint", averaging 3.93. For the rest, for "parallelogram" I averaged 3.07, "triangle center" I averaged 2.73, and "convergence" I averaged 2.07.

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BBC Science & Nature Sex ID - take a series of test to determine how "male" and "female" you are. I got 20/20 on the angles task, 64% on the spot the difference task, 5/10 on the eyes task, 12/12 on the 3D shapes task, and an astounding verbal fluency of 2 words for the first task and 5 words for the second.

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Test your color IQ - On my first try, I got a 24, and on my second, a 3 (click here for spectrum results).

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American civics test. Sadly, it appears that both the American public in general, as well as US elected officials specifically, have failing knowledge of American civics, according to this article.

The overall average was 15 out of 33, for elected officials 14 out of 33, and for college educators 17 out of 33. Fortunately, I managed a 31 out of 33, so I can decry these results without being a hypocrite.

I'm amazed by the number of interesting people who have come to give talks at Google. In particular, I'm amazed because, as I found out from watching Peter Sagal give his talk at Google, apparently Google does not pay speakers to talk at Google, in fact, they don't even pay for travel expenses. Despite this, a number of interesting people have come to Google, and you can watch them all on YouTube.

Here's the main page - AtGoogleTalks.

Here's some talks that I've watched and recommend -

• Steven Pinker (Harvard cognitive scientist)
• Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor)
• Barack Obama (next President of the United States)
• Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great)
• Peter Sagal (host of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me)
• Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd)
• Ken Jennings (Jeopardy winner)
• Neal Stephenson (author of cyberpunk)
• James Randi (magician and investigator of the supernatural)
• Christian Lander (author of the Stuff White People Like blog)

and here are some talks I plan on watching -

• Noam Chomsky
• Paul Krugman
• Neil Gaiman
• Masuharu Morimoto
• Salman Rushdie
• Salman Rushdie (again?)
• Stan Lee
• Steven Levy
• Steven Levy (again?)
• Salman Rushdie (yet again?)

Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader for Windows is slow, often unresponsive, and the plug-in for web browsers causes a lot of problems as well. Here are two very good alternatives that are more stable and render a lot more quickly:

Foxit Reader: I use this as my first choice. A nice new feature is tabs, so multiple open PDFs all show up in one window.

Sumatra PDF view: This is available as a standalone executable, which is good for portability as it can be put on a USB drive. The other nice feature of Sumatra is that it automatically detects changes in the PDF file and reloads it when necessary. This makes it ideal when editing LaTeX files, which is good since there don't seem to be any good DVI viewers for Windows.

• kibosh
• kumquat (fake kumquats!)
• okapi
• scrod

• Nielsen, M. (2004). Principles of effective research. Technical note 0404, The University of Queensland, Australia.
• Randy Pausch - Time Management lecture
• Getting Things Done
• Positive Affirmations

Check this out - number 1 safest metropolitan area in the United States.

(In case the webpage gets removed: web archive copy of Morgan Quitno Awards: 7th Annual America's Safest (and Most Dangerous) cities)

I've learned this the hard way - Unicode UTF-16 encoding does not work well with Unix yet. I originally had my webpages encoded in UTF-16, and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get Server Side Includes (SSI) to work with them.

So I decided to replace SSI with a script using the Unix utility sed to fill in the menu in the sidebar. After debugging the script, I found again that it didn't work on my webpages. Fortunately, I thought about switching to encoding Unicode with UTF-8, and that seems to have solved the problem.

Incidentally, I went back and checked, and sure enough, using UTF-8 worked with SSI. However, I don't want to re-name all my files *.shtml, and I'm happy with my little script:

#!/bin/bash

for f in *_fill.html
do
  sed '/INCLUDE SIDEBAR/ {
      r menu.html
      d
  }' < $f > ${f/_fill/}
done

Emacs 22.2 now works well with Unicode. To set the proper encoding, type CTRL-x RET f, and then enter in the encoding, e.g. utf-8 or utf-16.

To check the encoding of the text file in Unix, type "file filename"

Massachusetts drivers are, on average, quite horrible. No distance is too close to tailgate, and no yellow light is too far away to speed through. Driving in Massachusetts always makes me a little bit more misanthropic.

It's not just my opinion though, the GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test ranked Massachusetts as the 4th worst state, coming in at a rank of 48 (including D.C.). In comparison, Wisconsin came in at 12th best.

In fact, Massachusetts has come in at 48 the past four years in a row, whereas 12th is actually the worst for Wisconsin in the past four years, coming in 4th best last year.