Ying Tong Iddle I Po

I’ve installed 6 different Gentoo machines in all now and every
sodding time I’ve emerge-d mozilla without USE=”gtk2″ so that
epiphany et al refuse to install. Why can’t they make it a
default USE flag so that us stupid people don’t have to watch mozilla
compile twice? This time is doubly painful since it is on my little Mac
laptop which isn’t the fastest at the best of times. :(

I’ve probably already sent this to everyone who cares but just for my
own reference here
is a documentary on the EuroFoo camp I went to at
the end of August. complete with a little bit of an Improv session
Jennie and I ran.

OK, the Mirror toady tickled another pet-hate which allowed me to do a bit of ‘moan-therapy’:

To: r.sayid -at- mirror.co.uk
From: me

Interestingly your article on parents helping kids with their homework
itself contained an error in the answer to one of your questions. You
asked 'What are the primary colours?' and gave the answer 'Red, Blue and
Yellow'. This is actually incorrect. The correct answer is 'Red, Green
and Blue'. This can be verified by looking closely at your computer
monitor or TV screen and noticing that all the colours are actually made
up of red, blue and /green/ dots. Similarly when selecting colours in a
computer programme you have red, green and blue sliders.

For more information see [1]. Quoting:

  A primary colour is a colour that cannot be created by mixing other
  colours in the gamut of a given colour space. Primary colours may
  themselves be mixed to produce most of the colours in a given colour
  space.  Traditionally, the colours red, yellow, and blue are considered
  to be primary pigments. This is simply incorrect, however.

There do exist the 'secondary' or 'subtractive primary' colours which are
cyan, magenta and yellow which are often (again, incorrectly) stated to
be red, blue and yellow when talking about pigments. Indeed your own
paper is printed using the three colours cyan, magenta and yellow so how
can it claim that the primary colours are a totally different set?

Perhaps Mirror journalists shouldn't help their readers with their
homework either. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color

--
Rich Wareham
Signal Processing Laboratory
Univsersity of Cambridge Engineering Department

Sometimes things Just Work (TM). Thats what has been happening this week
in PhD land. I’ve been charged with making a website to cronicle the
lab’s brave new forrays into Geometric
algebra since I started my PhD two years ago. This week I finally
got around to it. The problem previously was the mountain of work
required to gt content there and the boring nature of writing HTML to
do so coupled with the knowledge at the back of your mind that someone
will want you to re-jig it later. Luckily, last week, inspiration hit and
I decided to make the site a wiki. This has the advantage that I only
need submit bits of content that are to do with me and write a little
style guide for everyone else. After two years arsing about the new site managed to
write itself in two days since everyone seems to have got the idea of a
wiki. Thanks to Wikipedia (for the
wiki software) everything seems to be running well. Hopefully a random
little academic site wont be a target for vandalls as well :).

Boring tech crap warning: The lab web-server’s hard disk died
over the weekend and I’ve been restoring
the lab’s site from backups today. I took the opportunity to use the
magic of Apache + mod_rewrite to manage a small miracle. I now have three
server directories; one has the new web-site, one has the
old site and one has the user’s home directory-based web pages from the
old-old server. Add to this the current user’s home directories and you
have quite a mix.

Well thanks to the powers of Apache you can now use either a URL from
the new site or the old site and Apache will pull the appropriate file
from the correct directory[1] (by first checking the new site and then the
old). This is a Cool Thing (TM) since it means that none of the old
links dotted around the net will break but the old website is still
stored in a seaparate directory on disk.

Similarly, if a user’s web page is asked for which doesn’t exist, Apache
tries to pull it from the archives. This means that lab members who no
longer have accounts still get their pages from http://…/~user/
without cluttering up /home.

I think this just goes to show the superiority of text-based
configuration files. I would not like to try to do this if I
only had point-and-drool dialogue boxes to help me. No matter how goo
the GUI design I don’t think there will be a clear ‘multiplex three
sites’ option :).

[1] I can’t use virtual hosts unfortunately since the site is proxied
through the departmental web-server so I only ever get requests coming
in from one IP for one domain.

The problem with doing an esoteric PhD is that there are no dedicated
journals to send stuff to. One of my papers got rejected this week for
not being right for the journal (I’m fairly sure its actually not
a load of hocum but these things make you wonder). I’ve decided to
bite the bullet and submit it to a Big Journal (TM) in a related field.
Certainly it is in the field suggested by the editor of the previous
journal. I hope it fairs better this time.

In other news, the Tech Report I’m writing is almost finished and is
weighing in at about 100-odd pages so that’ll be a good source of stuff
for The Thesis. Also I’ve a few ideas about how I want to proceed and do
things that are definately interesting to journals. One must
try to stay positive :).

I’ve also always wanted to write a little paper in a field not directly
related to my PhD. Any computing people out there know of any
‘Janitor’-type academic problems that I can work on in my spare time?

Further to the previous ranty post, are there any Queens’ people willing
to help ICE book the
Fitzpatrick Hall? We’ll give sweeties!

Aside from that, there are only a few other places that look possible.
Corpus and Peterhouse, unless anyone knows any different.

I simply cannot find a decent theatre venue in Cambridge for ICE to put on a show. The ADC is all booked up, getting the Fitzpatrick Hall in Queens’ appears to involve praying to the bat-gods and nowhere else has anything good that I can find. Does anyone here know if their college (or ex-college) has a lovely big theatre-like venue[1] that isn’t difficult to book if you’re not a college member? I can’t find one :(.

[1] Actually, Wolfson and Churchill both have nice ones but they are out-of-town. Also Christs’ and Peterhouse’s, whilst nice, are a bit small :(.

Something just popped into my mind when trying to fix the non-booting web-server here. Does there exist something similar to a KVM switch (or perhaps a real-life KVM switch) which can also plug into the network and run a VNC server? Thus you can do whatever you need do, in the cases where you can’t ssh into the server machine, from the comfort of your own desk. Surely this can’t be too difficult to do can it? I imagine the major problem would be somehow passivley capturing the monitor signal into a framebuffer since there probably isn’t commodity hardware for this.

Update: Of course after posting this I find the next page in the Google search I was doing informs me of such a product.