tasuki’s blog

I just finished reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I’ll wait for you to at least read the wikipedia description of the book.

Done? Ok… The main surprise for me was how many seemingly unrelated topics the book touches. Logic (Gödel), graphic art (Escher), music (Bach) to start with. But also mathematics, molecular biology, genetics, philosophy, zen buddhism, formal systems, artificial intelligence, programming, recursion and self-reference, various paradoxes, and much much more.

It is easily the best book I’ve ever read, although I can’t claim to have understood everything. If you want to borrow my copy, I’d be glad to help (the book is sort of expensive and really hard to get in Czechia).

I’ve wanted a DSLR for a while. At first, I wanted to buy an entry level camera like Canon 1000D, but after I found out that the price of a used Canon 20D (semiprofessional camera, about five years old model) was considerably lower than price of 1000D, I just had to buy it.

1000D has more megapixels, but that’s about where the advantages end. 20D is more sturdy, has better handling and controls, rubberized grip, bigger viewfinder, higher frameburst rate (5 shots per second) and better high iso performance.

I decided to buy two lenses (neither money nor space for more ). The first one was the kit 18-55mm with IS (maybe buying used lenses isn’t such a good idea… but hey — it was cheap). As the second one, I originally wanted to buy Canon 50mm f/1.8, but I wanted also a little longer lens (I already have 50mm covered by the kit lens) and after finding the new Samyang 85mm f/1.4 with manual focus, it was an easy decision. That said, I’m still fighting with getting the focus right (it is very very hard, as almost everything appears in focus in the viewfinder… I wish I had live view and could zoom in to get preview of focus).

I am really happy with the high iso performance. With Canon 20D at ISO 3200, the noise is somewhere between ISO 200 and 400 on my point & shoot Canon A590. Five shots per second is very useful whenever you are shooting something moving unpredictably (kittens!).

I hope I haven’t become an equipment-theoretician freak yet.

The good:

• Polish people are extremely hospitable and helpful.
• Either there is a very low amount of thieves or I am really lucky.
• Food (cheese, bread, yoghurt, chocolate) in shops is quite a bit cheaper here than in Czechia (though restaurants aren’t cheaper at all).
• Krakow rocks. Especially the shores of Wisła river next to the Wawel castle.

The bad:

• Car drivers drive like assholes. When you’re going by bike, they drive way closer than what I find comfortable (I thought I was used to this from Czechia, but in Poland it’s even a little worse). When you, as a walker, get to a zebra crossing, in Western Europe the drivers will do everything they can to stop and let you pass. In Czechia, they usually let you pass, but not always (not when they’re going fast and don’t want to halt). In Poland, drivers almost never stop at a zebra crossing. You can see them slowing down, so you step into the street thinking “finally a decent driver” and the next thing you know is that you are jumping back onto the pavement as the driver was just slowing down to take a right turn. Similar on red lights — just because there’s red lights shining 50 meters ahead of the passing car doesn’t mean that the driver will let you pass.
• No discounts for lunch menu in restaurants. Eating out is quite expensive compared to cooking yourself.

Yeah, both lists are incomplete. Does it look like I post this just because I haven’t posted anything in April yet?

If you are like me, you spend a lot of time using firefox. Chances are that you don’t use it as effectively as I do.

Let’s start with the look. First, use a minimalistic theme. I use full flat, but whiteheart is also kind of cool. Such themes simply don’t get in your way, which is exactly what you need.

You probably use several toolbars which take way too much of your screen space. Right-click on a toolbar and select “customize”. Then you can drag everything around and hide the unused toolbars. I currently have three rows of toolbars:

• First toolbar has File, Edit, View menu and others, back, forward, reload, cancel, home icons, location bar, and finally a search bar.
• Second toolbar contains quick bookmarks - just the pictures without any text, so that I can fit in as many as possible.
• Third toolbar is shared google toolbar (used mostly just for PageRank), webdeveloper toolbar, user agent switcher and adblock settings.

I often see people wasting their screen space by using the default configuration with menus in the first toolbar and action icons and location bar in the second one.

Speed up firefox by installing fasterfox or simply google around a bit to find out (enable pipelining, disable ipv6, etc.).

Learn to use keyboard shortcuts:

• ctrl+T — open new tab
• ctrl+L — go to location bar
• ctrl+K — go to search box
• ctrl+up/down — switch search engines when in search box (don’t forget to order them in a way that suits you)
• alt+enter — open the search from search box in a new tab
• ctrl+shift+T — open an accidentally closed tab (you can even repeat this shortcut — superb!)
• ctrl+b — bookmarks
• ctrl+h — history

If you use a mouse, install and learn to use mouse gestures. At least the few ones for back/forward and open/close tab. I personally prefer FireGestures, as that is the only gesture extension that actually knows what I mean when I perform the gestures.

Out of the helpful extensions that I use, I must mention at least Download Statusbar, Customize Google and Adblock Plus.

And I almost thought I wouldn’t make another post in March.

I was thoroughly bored with the previous theme, and although I tried to revive it with the new header image, it was still bugging me. So I created a new one.

I had a draft of a new theme lying around for quite a long time, so I made few adjustments to it: made the code much longer and much less clean. But it seems to work.

Features of the new design include, but are not limited to:

• big letters in headings (big letters rock)
• even less images (none, except the two links to flickriver, smilies and images in posts)
• half-fixed-width half-fluid design (the design is fixed width, but the sidebar is fluid — works well for many different widths of browser (800px — the sidebar isn’t displayed, it’s accessible through scrolling; 1024px — sidebar in one column, 1280px — two columns, more px — more columns (it is capped at three columns)))
• emphasis on typography (lists, blockquotes, etc. are styled properly)
• lines vertically in synch (left column, middle column and sidebar)
• the old color scheme, I mostly like it and more importantly — couldn’t find a better one at the moment
• justified text (I’m still very unsure here — justified looks way better, but left-aligned is more readable)

Bugs of the new design include, but are not limited to:

• IE6 sometimes messes up the sidebar, not quite sure why
• Opera doesn’t keep lines in synch when there are smileys (and I thought I had the solution, sigh…)
• IE doesn’t align the comment date in the comment list (will look into that later)

Also, I spent ages dealing with various bugs in IE that caused things to disappear.
One such bug caused the sidebar not to appear (it was an absolutely positioned element next to a floated element — don’t ever do that), another sometimes caused titles to disappear (they were relatively positioned, now that they are static it seems ok, but I have no idea why). When repairing the sidebar, I had to move it in front of the actual content in the markup, which is wrong and I know it. I am sorry to all lynx/links users out there.

Bug reports, remarks and suggestions are welcome!

Almost everyone, myself included, underestimates the basics.

If you want to be an expert in any field, you need very strong basics. When you don’t know the basics, you tend to make many mistakes which are hard to get rid of. We are ambitious so we dive deep into all sorts of advanced stuff, leaving the basics for later, perhaps thinking we will somehow figure the basics out along the way. This sometimes works, but more often it doesn’t.

So, back to the basics for me! (in what, you ask? — in everything!)

I first read Desiderata in Polish, at Letnia Szkoła Go. There’s a path that leads through woods. As you walk down, every few dozen of meters you encounter a slab with one verse on it. I found it hard to understand as my Polish wasn’t as great back then, but from what I understood I knew this was something special.

I thought it was just local folklore and so was surprised to find out that Desiderata was originally written in English almost one hundred years ago by Max Ehrmann.

Desiderata is a short prose poem, possibly the most powerful text I’ve ever read. Everytime I’m feeling down, angry, hurt, upset or desperate it brings instant calmness. Here’s a quote, one of my favourites:

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
–Desiderata

I felt an urgent need to print out Desiderata and cover the walls with it. As I haven’t used TeX for quite a while (a year or more?), this was a good opportunity to recall it a bit. You can download Desiderata (pdf) for printing.

The first time I saw square thumbnails (ie. thumbnails which are downsized and cropped to square) I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread.

The advantages of square thumbnails are obvious:

• they are really easy to align and never mess up your layout
• the layout will look more uniform and better than with irregular thumbnails
• they do not show everything so they invite the visitor to view the full sized picture

But there is a downside. Square thumbnails alter the composition of the picture. In some cases, when the photographer hasn’t thought much about composition, it can often actually improve the picture. But in other cases, when the composition is deliberate and well thought out, the square thumbnail can destroy it completely.

I use square thumbnails in my photo gallery (have you seen the pictures from my recent cross-country skiing trip?). And I keep wondering whether I should change it to normal thumbnails (normal = scaled down so as to fit into a given rectangle while preserving the aspect ratio).

Do you personally prefer photo galleries with square thumbnails (cropped) or with normal ones?

I am very picky.

I need a laptop which I will carry with myself on my journey accross Poland and then to the Netherlands. It should have screen with a nice resolution, lots of memory, large enough hard drive, and several other things. So far I picked up three candidates, which are incidentally more or less the same price (19k czk):

HP 6830s
17″ 1680×1050, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3430, 4gb ram, 250gb hd, Intel Dual Core T1600, Intel 802.11abgn, keyboard with numpad

HP 6730s
15″ 1680×1050, Intel GMA 4500MHD, 4gb ram, 250gb hd, Intel Dual Core T1600, Intel 802.11abgn

Clevo M765TU (Verified By Intel)
15″ 1680×1050 glare display, nVidia 9300GS, 4gb ram, 320gb hd, Intel Core Duo T3200, Intel 802.11abgn

So, while I’d like the 17″ display, I’m scared of the ATI graphics. And I hate numpads.

And I’d like the faster processor and bigger hard disk offered by VBI, but I’m unsure whether nVidia or Intel is better. And I absolutely hate glare displays.

I tried finding more about ati, nvidia, and intel on linux laptops, and among other things I found a very interesting benchmark. Reading all the discussions, I can see that everyone complains about ATI, some people complain about nVidia’s 2d capabilities (I also had some problems with that), and some other people complain that Intel cards are “not nearly as good as nVidia and ATI”). Intel seems like the safe choice — maybe it’s slightly worse, but it should work, and could be more energy-efficient.

Please do tell me if you know anything about current graphic cards in linux. Even better if you know something about the particular ones mentioned above.

It used to be that I could barely run few hundred meters. The two main problems were that I couldn’t catch my breath and that the side of my stomach started hurting.

I started running regularly few months ago in connection with my extra hour a day program. I abandoned early rising — nowadays I just get up at 9 during the weekend feeling completely drained, not to mention Mondays. Changing this to rising early again is definitely on my to-do list. It rocked, and it sucks now.

When I was starting, I ran a little over 3.5km at a very slow pace (almost half an hour). After reading few articles about running, I started paying more attention to proper breathing and few other things. I added a longer 6.5km route along the river to add variety to the routine. I found it surprisingly easy to run almost twice as far.

And now, feeling pretty comfortable with 6.5km, I connected the two routes to make it over 10 kilometers (I am not sure how far it actually is, but according to google maps it’s something between 10km and a quartermarathon (10.5km)). I ran it in 57 minutes on my first (and so far the only) try. I’ll try again the next weekend, if the weather is any good.

Running is good because:

• it is rather demanding and makes you tired quickly (so that you can get back to your beloved computer as soon as possible )
• you need no special equipment and you can run anywhere
• runner’s high is not a rumour
• it helps your health in various ways (I used to have half-asthma and after running few hundred meters I couldn’t breathe for another two hours (really), but now I trained my lungs and improved my breathing technique)
• you have plenty of time to think when running, so you are bound to get various good ideas while running

Also, running is simply fun.