tasuki’s blog

It all started by me stumbling upon a text file containing all Igo Hatsuyo-ron problems. Well, as you can see the format is not so great and encoding is obscure (GB2312). I used vim to transfer this garbage into something reasonable.

Now if you don’t know what regular expressions are, read on, if you do know, skip a few dozens lines.

:%s/replaced thing/replacement/g

The colon just tells vim that I’m going to write something longer after which I’ll press enter, the “%” means all lines in the file, “s” means substitute, the slashes are used for separating the expressions (you can use something else too, but slashes are most common), and “g” means that you want to do all occurences (on (each) line).

get rid of all the lines that are not diagrams…
:%s/^[^┠┏┗○●].*//g
no empty lines…
:%s/^\n//g
add some tex code before and after each diagram
:%s/┏/}\r\\hfil\\break\r}\r\r\\bigskip\r\r\\vbox{\\vbox to 100 pt{\\hsize= 190 pt\\goo\r┏/g
transfer the ascii goban into tex
:%s/┏/\\0??<
:%s/┯/\\0??(/g
:%s/┓/\\0??>
:%s/┠/\\0??[
:%s/┼/\\0??+/g
:%s/┨/\\0??]
:%s/┗/\\0??,
:%s/┷/\\0??)/g
:%s/┛/\\0??.
transfer the stones
:%s/●/\\- @+/g
:%s/○/\\- !+/g
very regular dents left – oups… forgot the star points…
:%s/╋/\\0??*/g

After this and adding a header we have a pretty much usable TeX code. There were a few things left to do – I found a few bumps because there were some letters in the diagrams, so I had to manually delete them (this was no big deal), I also found some duplicated problems and problems that shouldn’t have even been there, I compared it to the version on sensei’s library, and some japanese site using java. This was much worse, having to manually go through the problems (I admit I cheated a bit, I put eight problems on a page and only checked each eighth and if it was same I proceeded).

After finally having all and exactly the 183 problems that I wanted, I went to writing whose turn it was (duh, should have done that before, when checking) and change the sizes of the go boards so that it would fit nicely on the page. This was quite tiring, especially the repetitive process of checking “white to move” and “black to move” (I checkedgroups of four and tried to remember it, I was on the verge of my brain’s memory limits – trying to remember BWBW, or WBBB, or something similar for just a few seconds). Fitting diagrams aws a bit like solving a puzzle, so I enjoyed it much more.

And I cheated with the front page Japanese characters… I copied them from sensei’s library into OpenOffice, made the page small enough, and exported into pdf. Then used \pdfximage to embed it… Anyone knows how to do this better?

Well, that’s about it. Now you can download & print the entire Igo Hatsuyo-ron collection (and it’s for free, kids).

If, for some reason, you think that the problems are a bit too much for you, go with the Encyclopedia of Lifa and Death, that I made almost two years ago. There are 3 volumes with almost 1000 problems each (the creation of that collection was pretty much only automatical, I could never process such an amount (3000) by hand). Ok, links, finally: elementary problems, intermediate problems, advanced problems.

You shouldn’t use old (4,5, maybe even 6 (dunno, I use evince or xpdf anyway)) acrobat reader for viewing these pdfs, as I didn’t manage to convert the bloody metafont fonts into anything better like type1 or ttf (any help? anyone volunteering?), so they are included as bitmaps, which sucks.

I recently found a website called crime library. The stories there are very very disturbing. They are in fact so disturbing that I suggest you not to read it before going to sleep (or not to read it at all if you just don’t feel like it).

I will list a few stories that are particularly frightening… like Dennis Rader aka BTK, meaning bind torture kill; Ted Bundy, a well-educated and seemingly normal guy; Albert Fish, elderly man who was fascinated by eating humans; Christopher Wilder, beauty queen killer; or Pedro Lopez, who killed hundreds of young girls. There were also couples that tortured and murdered together, like Fred & Rose West or Paul Bernardo & Karla Homolka. Then there is a particularly disgusting story about necrophiles (if they don’t kill anyone I don’t think there’s anything ethically bad their actions, it’s just disgusting, but the ones mentioned usually killed).

One particularly weird story is about Issei Sagawa, who has killed and eaten a woman and is proud of it. Oh yeah, and wasn’t imprisoned… he still walks freely and enjoys a celebrity status in Japan…

Also, I never knew that there was a 10 year old girl, who killed other kids because she enjoyed it. That’s probably the scariest of all the articles. The violence in this one is relatively low, but the fact that it was all done by a 10 year old makes it particularly horrifying.

How? How is it possible that human mind can get twisted like that? Can they even be considered humans?

The poem on the left side was written by Christian Morgenstern. This version is the “German” original. The right side version is the “Czech” translation.

Well, anyone who writes poems only with words that have no sense probably suffers from serious brain damage. But maybe he was just making fun of people actually publishing and buying this crap…

But anyone who translates such a poem to another language must be a total moron. Yeah, go ahead and write your own bullshit poem, but please don’t call it a translation to sell better…

The participation at the Czech go championship used to be almost for free, sometimes we even got money for each won game (not much, but still).

This year, everything has changed – almost 100€ for entry fee + accommodation. I don’t want to spend that much money for something that should be free (I already placed third in the qualification tournament series and earned my right to play at the championship, why pay for it?).

When I complained about the price, I was told that: today it is not much money, and my go club could pay that for me. Well, I’m not going to ask my go club for any money, because I barely ever go there and don’t even pay the annual club fee… that would be just plain unfair.

The other day I learned that one guy (who wasn’t even qualified in top ten and but placed 18th in the qualification) got around 90% discount (because he was a student – but hey, I’m a student too).

If they think, that after this I’m going to help with transmitting the games on KGS… well… bwahahahahaha…

Saying that something will happen nexet weekend can be very confusing. What exactly does “next weekend” mean?

Say it’s thursday (it actually is, but that doesn’t matter). Now read this: “It will happen this weekend.” and “It will happen next weekend.” Is there any difference between those sentences at all? This weekend is obviously the closest one, but what about the next weekend? For me personally it’s the same, but some people perceive it as the weekend after this one. It’s similar with the last weekend: “It happened last weekend.” and “It happened this weekend.” Well actually I think that there’s no argument there, the last weekend just has to be the last one, or do you think that the last weekend is the weekend before the last weekend?

I don’t know how this works in various languages, but at least in czech it’s very unclear. I experienced several misunderstandings because of that. What’s your point of view? (and please don’t pretend that you are not here, it’s getting tiring..)

PS: When I write that I’ll post something tomorrow, it means that I’ll maybe post something during the next week (whatever “next week” means).

Next time you get stuck in a traffic jam, please realize that it could have been much worse.

Yeah, I know that this is what most of blogs look like: “hey look I found a link”, but I promise you are going to get a full post tomorrow (no promises about its quality though).