Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Prince of Fire

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

I have blogged earlier about Daniel Silva‘s books, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin and The Confessor, so it was with great anticipation I picked up Prince of Fire at the bookstore last week. It continues shortly after A Death in Vienna, which I regrettably haven’t gotten my hand on yet, but once more we follow the Israeli spy Gabriel Allon as events unfold in the grander scheme of Israeli-Palestine intrigues involving the both loved and hated leader Yassir Arafat.

Once more Ari Shamron arrives to meet Mario Delvecchio, Gabriels alternate identity, and he has to flee his beloved Venice and journey home to Israel. Something he has tried not to do from the moment we first met him. Once more evil Palestine terrorists threaten the Israeli state and the prodigal son has to lead the investigation into these threats. This will be a race through history, memories and relationships throughout the history.

Despite portraying some of the transgressions committed by the Jews then this story reads somewhat more one-sided as the earlier books involving the Israeli-Palestine conflict as being almost completely pro-Israeli. This is, of course, fine in works of fiction, but it does peel off some of the Gabriel in conflict that I found very fascinating in the other novels I’ve read. This will, of course, not keep me from having a look at A Death in Vienna and the sequel The Messenger as I really enjoy Daniel Silva’s writing style. The portrayal of a spy world where not everything is pure glamour, where everything isn’t black and white, where moral superiority hardly ever belongs to anyone, where unspeakable truths are put before your eyes and you’re forced to consider whether these things might give you moral justification to do what will be done. It is quite thought provocative at any length.

Tags: book, book review

Graph illustrations

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 | LaTeX, Personal | No Comments

When we typeset documents for publishing, be it articles, journals or books, there is another important aspect to it, apart from the content: the layout. The hyphenation should be sensible, it should use ligatures properly, and the fonts shouldn’t change throughout the document. It is this last quality that can be rather tricky to maintain if you are importing figures into your document.

In Computer Science there’s a fairly prevalent need to create illustrations of graphs-no, not the ones plotting x- and y-values on a grid, rather the one with vertices and edges-and we can use software solutions such as GraphViz to draw our graphs based on fairly concise specifications. However, as always, there’s a catch: GraphViz presumes that we’re doing everything using TimesRoman at point size 12. This invariably leads to a problem if we are using Garamond at point size 11, namely that the fonts differ between your document text and your illustrations and you have lost some of the quality of the layout, much like you would have lost some of the quality of your content if you consequently forgot to place commas everywhere.

Solving this is incidentally part of my latest paper, Workflow optimisation for graph illustrations (PDF), where I look at synchronising the fonts between GraphViz and documents that are typeset in LaTeX. The paper will also be linked from the research section sometime in the near future when the need to update the different pages of my site strikes me. For those of you who are interested in learning more about what LaTeX may do for you, I will look at the possibility of running a series of posts on packages in LaTeX you can use to alleviate a lot of your problems, for tweaking your layout, and to create stunning output, but don’t hold your breath waiting for these posts. They keep me busy at the university.

Tags: design, LaTeX, publishing, typography, university

Presenting for the academe, and miscellaneous thoughts

Sunday, March 26th, 2006 | Academe, Personal | No Comments

I think I need to work on posting more often than once or twice a month at best. A list of thoughts to post about would probably come in handy if I wasn’t so prone to misplace my lists of things to do. Alas.

One of my courses at DIKU has been on scripting- and domain specific languages, in particular how we can use them to solve recurring problems, when we develop them, and a long range of presentations on different languages and the problems they try to solve. This course is (/was) a seminar course, which means that students are meant to participate in the lecturing by giving one or more presentations. For this course we are (/were) meant to give two presentations each.

The last paragraph was, of course, the world’s best thought-out foreshadowing of getting to the point where I talk about what I talked about. Catchy, right?

My first presentation, and in my opinion the better rehearsed of the two, was on using the .NET framework as a platform for embedding scripting languages and creating domain specific languages for web-based pipelines. The .NET framework is indeed superb for doing these things, but not superb in the way that C is superb for it, nay, superb in the way that everything is easy and doesn’t require a lot of code. But if you do not believe me, you can look at the slides for yourself.

The second presentation was on domain specific languages for specifying illustrations. Now many people may ask why on Earth we would need something like that, when we can just draw stuff in Adobe Illustrator or equivalent. However, Illustrator does not lend itself kindly to automatically (meaning programatically) generating large-scale visualisations of systems. We could, for instance, visualise the internet using a program. We could visualise the order of page visits made by website visitors, and many other things. One of my great interests is typography and keeping fonts consistent between documents and illustrations and whatnot, but the presentation only touched briefly on this. In the presentation I discussed GraphViz, METAPOST and TikZ/PGF. The slides are available here.

This brings me to the second part (or third, depending on how you count) of this post: reactions. I have been teaching in different contexts over the past decade (God is it that long already). I have taught high school students maths, I have tutored grade school pupils in maths, I have given lectures on error handling methodologies for corporations, I have taught employees advanced/new programming methodologies in corporations, but this was my first real, terrifying encounter with presenting for the academe. But presenting here is different.

Lansky does portray the situation fairly well, except there isn’t a lot of taking notes in this course. Reflecting on it, however, I can see how right he is. We hardly ever react to any of the witticisms, puns or great revelations. We just sit there and try to embrace it all, catalogue it, connect it to existing material and just not fall behind in keeping up with the new information that is presented. We simply do not have time to pick up the small off-remarks that are meant to liven up the crowd. But God it’s frustrating when you’re the speaker as you haven’t got the vaguest inkling of whether the crowd is bored witless of what you’re saying, or whether it’s the coolest thing they’ve heard of since sliced bread. I have since received word from a couple of people that at least parts of my presentations were interesting, so that is something, at least.

There are, however, a few pointers I’d like to share with other people who are going to be presenting to the academe. Not so much pointers that I give because I have now done presenting to this particular crowd, but pointers that I have come to understand as part of listening to presentations daily for almost seven years in this world. The points are fairly simple: know your material, know it really well, rehearse before you speak, and rehearse multiple times before you speak, and lastly, make sure that your slides support your talk. Your slides should not be your talk. It is not interesting to have slides read aloud to you. Dazzle us with your message, use slides to underline your points, illustrate the key topics. If you wish to learn more about good presentation methods, I will warmly recommend Garr Reynold’s blog on professional presentation design: Presentation Zen. He has a lot of interesting ideas, but I believe a lot of them a better suited for product pitches, broad overviews and the like. Presenting a programming language will need more stuff on the slide, but there are still things to be learned. If you look at my slides you will see that I in particular do not honour his No more bullet points mantra. I happen to like a small number of bullet points to underline my message. But like humans then no two presentations are created alike.

Before I get overly philosophical, let us derail the discussion to the third (or fourth) and last part of my post: cool gadgets for doing presentations. If you’ve stuck with me this far then I will present to you: Trust Wireless Presenter TK-3300p.

The presenter functions as a wireless trackball mouse with dedicated buttons for page up and page down and it comes with a nifty red laser pointer. I used it for my second presentation and the flow of the presentation became a lot better than when I had to walk back and forth between the computer to change slides. The Trust presenter is fairly inexpensive, so even if you only have a small number of presentations each year, I will warmly recommend it as it makes your presentation just that much more well-connected, and it gives a better impression on your audience. Plus, of course, you aren’t interrupted every time you have to move to the computer. And, of course, it still has the cool gadget factor. The presenter is placed next to my Creative MuVo memory stick so you can compare size. The presenter is placed very nicely in your hand and it contains a left mouse button underneath that is operated with your index finger. The three top buttons can be a bit tricky to get right all the time, but with a bit of practice it is fairly easy. Alright, enough product placement and endorsement for one post, and back to my paper for me. More on that in a later post (I hope).

Tags: presentation, university

When the sprites go adventuring

Sunday, March 5th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Today started like any day: get up, go online (not necessarily strictly in that order), start working on school stuff (yes, even though it’s sunday and everything). However, peace, prosperity and focus didn’t last long as Rubin had the benevolent idea to introduce me to Kid Radd, the not-entirely-sprite comic. Very nice story and a humourous idea in the first place. Of course it probably helps if you did play these kind of games back in the day. So thanks, Rubin, for “wasting” my entire day on another webcomic.

Tags: webcomic

Love, poetry and romance

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

I’m slowly getting used to having time to focus on studying again without having to work all the time. It’s bit of a strange sensation, really, and quite pleasing. I had forgotten how great it feels to be a student. Now, as the topic might suggest, this post isn’t about me studying (if it was I’d have a serious problem with my priorities, I think).

Those of you who know me or read regularly know that I’m engaged to a wonderful woman, Ida, and that she bakes some awesome cakes. Ida is very remarkable in that she manages to deal with my odd interests and seemingly unlimited interest in boring computer stuff. She deals with it so gracefully that her only complaint ever has been that I don’t seem ready to declare my love to her more publically, so being the geek I am, what better way than to say it with my latest poem to her on my blog?

Considering I don’t get a lot of female readers (apart from my mother and Ida) the rest of you, go do something nice for your significant other. We don’t need a poor commercialised excuse to do so, right?

Tags: life

In the world of the living

Friday, February 10th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Over the past two years I have worked as an intern for a realtor company doing systems analysis, design and education of developers. There have been the usual ups and downs with fun projects and some not-so-fun projects. But there are other things in this world than working, namely trying to finish your degree. For those of you who have been following for a while then you might mutter it’s about time, those of you who haven’t been following will probably mutter the same as those pesky kids who just study are annoying, or something. So, goodbye work, and thanks for all the cake.

So what am I doing back at the ol’ university? I don’t think I’ve written about that much lately, so let me bring you up to speed. I’m working on my masters degree in computer science, specialising (so far) in programming language theory. As part of one of my courses we were required (more or less) to write a paper on a topic within types and programming languages and make a presentation on it. I chose to write a paper on static verification of downcasts in an object calculus that vaguely reminds of Featherweight Java by Igarashi, Pierce and Wadler, which is a minimal, functional core of Java (and C# for that matter). I try to portray further uses of the static verification in my paper, namely on how you could potentially use the static verification as a guide to translate from a monomorphic program into a corresponding polymorphic program without the downcasts – that is translated into a program in a language that has parametric polymorphism. This means, for C# 1.1 to C# 2 translation, for instance, that there are a lot of places where we can remove boxings and unboxings of value types and hence improve performance radically. Furthermore, as far as I can see there will be further analyses that can be useful with the subtype expression flow modeling that is being used in Smith and Wang’s DCPA algorithm (if all of this cannot be done as easily by reduction to let-polymorphism, I’ll have to look at that sometime). But, I digress. You can find the paper here in PDF format, if you are interested.

Finally, Ida and I have started to look around to buy a house, so I’m sure there’ll be some fun updates on the tormenting trials of buying a house, getting a mortgage (particularly with the amount of increase in value of houses there has been lately, it’s crazy!) and whatnot sometime in the not too distant future.

Back to Hoare’s CSP algebra…

Tags: life, university

Bird photography

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Doing bird photography is not easy, I am afraid. In fact, it is terribly hard as the birds are typically pretty small and not very interested in having their photo taken. Rather, they are usually fairly busy panicking away from where I am. So, typically I have to ensure a telephoto shot and pray that everything magically works out.

DMC-FZ3, 55.2 mm., 1/40 sec., ISO 200, 2006-01-09

Of course, having to use telephoto isn’t usually enough. I typically have to take the shot from some improbable location, sitting in some odd pose so as not to scare the bird. But having done all that, I managed to capture the great tit (which is in reality rather small) at 12x zoom. Through branches. Through a window. Against the light. All in all I think it went pretty well, if only it had turned a little more sideways. Oh well.

Tags: photography

Collaborative writing

Saturday, January 7th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

I have recently been investigating various forms of online, synchronous collaborative text editing, and have in my pursuits found the less aggravating program for Windows, moonedit, that allows one party to host one or more files, and others to connect to this person and edit these files.

As part of testing this editor, Jonas Öien and I have written a small short-story set in the typical crime novel style. It is, as the picture suggests, called The English Umbrella (PDF). For the interested parties there’s a small exerpt below.

The sky was dark grey, brooding, rain falling heavily and without mercy.
It had all day. I looked at my gold watch. It was fifteen twenty, almost
time to go home. I shuffled the papers on my large mahogany desk aimlessly.
Work had been scarce lately and my coffers were almost empty.
Another few days from now I would have to default on my rent. Where
was the glamour and excitement the other private eyes seemed to go on
about? God, I hate mondays.

I decided to leave a bit early. It wouldn’t matter, no one was showing
up today anyway. I was a failure at the trade, just like my father had
predicted when I proudly announced that I would become the greatest
private eye that had ever lived. How ignorant one can be.

I took my coat from the hall tree in the corner of the office. It was
looking worn and a few sizes too small, or perhaps I was a few sizes too
big. I tried to button it, but like usual I gave up after a few fumbles. I
reached out to take my felt hat when there was a careful knock at the
outer door. I stood still, not really sure whether I had heard the knock
at all. It came again.

Read the PDF for the full story and the captivating ending (or something). We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Tags: book, publishing

Reading and some lights

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

The busy christmas vacation has been, the world is slowly starting up again after all the festivities, and everything is just looking cold, snowy and January again. Fortunately I had planned to take a bit of time off from my studies during the vacation so I wouldn’t go entirely insane over the next six months. This time off was spent pondering over the new books I got for christmas: Daniel Silva’s The Kill Artist and The English Assassin. I have earlier read the third in the series, The Confessor, and I must say that they are all good in each their own way. The series start off a bit weak with The Kill Artist, but Silva has cleaned up his writing style a lot in the two latter books about the art restorer Delveccio who is, in reality, the Israeli agent Gabriel Allon. So if you like a nice thriller with some fun plot twists, pick them up from someplace and read them.

Since it’s winter and I’m up here in the semi-north it has, of course, been snowing. A lot. Oh and don’t try to bike in the snow unless you know what you’re doing. It’s tough. But that wasn’t really what I was going to say.

By request and because it’s always nice to take pictures of the snow, I brought my camera with me to work yesterday and had planned to snap some photos on the way there and on my way home as well, but I was too rushed getting there and going home was too dark, so I had to settle with experimenting with a few shots of the rush hour traffic on the motorway.

DMC-FZ3, 8.1 mm., 4 sec., ISO 100, 2006-01-02

The light streaks were done with about a two second exposure. Unfortunately I couldn’t hold the camera entirely steady so the streaks jump a bit more than they were supposed to. You can see how much my hand shook by looking at the light poles. It’s pretty decent for a first try of long exposure, but I will definitely have to try it again with our tripod.

The other picture came out a bit shaken as well, but you don’t notice it as much. It really is terribly hard to try to do panning photographs. In the dark. Without a viewfinder. Without any indication of whether your motive is still in the centre of your objective. So, considering all that, it turned out rather decently, I’d say.

DMC-FZ3, 27.5 mm., 1/4 sec., ISO 80, 2006-01-02

I’ll have to remember to try a more classic panning photograph from the side of the objective someday as well. But the night photos have a fascinating quality to them that I have always liked. Perhaps it’s because at night the geeks prowl. Who knows?

Tags: book, book review, photography

The errant wars

Friday, December 23rd, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

The dwarves are dead, the elves have isolated themselves from the world, the half-elves and the elves have battled for millennia, the humans have forgotten all but the fear of the elves. In a world of high magic, theocracies, supernatural assassins and ancient feuds we find Michael Poe’s Errant Story.

The errant story tells the story of a young girl Meji who is abnormally lazy and is about to fail her magic studies because she does not pay attention in classes. Fortunately there is an old clause in the school rules that if you manage to blow up the school and all the teachers you pass with honours. So what’s a young girl to do? Well, sipphon off the power of a deity and blow the hell out of the teachers. Sounds like a bad plot out of Hollywood? You wouldn’t be far off. However, despite the shallow initial plot the story and characters actually grow on you as you make your way through the archives.

My judgement? Absolutely recommendable for a nice afternoon of magical stories.

Tags: webcomic