tasuki’s blog

First, I’m fully aware of the fact that my blog is public. I don’t mind people reading it, I even want people to read my blog — actually that’s mostly why I write it.

Why, then, is it so uncomfortable when people who sit right next to me are reading it? It’s not like I’d mind them reading it somewhere else, but them reading it when I’m nearby makes me feel really awkward.

I was thinking about this a lot, but couldn’t really come up with any reason. Maybe I’m scared of the possibility of immediate, real time confrontation? But there wasn’t anything much controversial on the front page at the time. Plus I’m generally not afraid of real time confrontation, as long as it’s either written or in person (I hate telephones).

So, to answer the question of how to read my blog: Please, don’t read my blog when I’m nearby. Go to the other room. Thank you.

Yay, I made it — one year without using Brno public transport. I walked, walked, walked and walked. Sometimes I used my bike when it was too far and when the weather was suitable. I only used car when it was because of someone else (such as driving my grandaunt to her home or similar occasions).

I had used public transport at Brno tournament one year ago, and now I had to do the same because the tournament site is too far to walk to and I couldn’t go by bike as I was going with my Polisz friends. The tournament was a minor disaster for me, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. Especially the moments not spent playing go.

While I’m not planning to break any more records as far as public transport is concerned, I still plan on trying to actively avoid using it. Walking is good.

And yes, j’aime français, why are you asking?

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone that I used to watch (English) movies with Czech subtitles.

About two years ago I found out that it was a really bad idea. Apart from the subtitles stealing my time because I had to read them, they also stole my brain cycles as I couldn’t avoid comparing what I heard in the English original to the Czech translation, looking for what I missed and what I’d translate better. While this might have been a good exercise as far as translation skills are concerned, it made me tired rather quickly. Plus I usually had no idea what the movie was about.

So I switched to English subtitles. That was a great improvement. No more time spent translating everything both ways three times. I could finally enjoy movies again. But still, I couldn’t help but read the subtitles anyway, just because they were there.

And so it happened that I almost stopped using subtitles for English movies alltogether. I still occasionally use subtitles for special things such as Monty Python, where there are a lot of jokes and puns which would be difficult for me to catch otherwise.

When asked by someone about my chance of beating you in go, you said it’s “basically zero”. And as if that wasn’t insulting enough, when asked about the exact number, you said “probably 1 in 40″ (for the curious reader — no, this is not Lee Changho we’re talking about, he’s not even a professional).

I’m not sure whether it was before or after, but the same person who asked you also asked me the same question, and I said 1 in 5. After rethinking it, I admit it might have been a bit on the optimistic side (not nearly as much as you though), but I’m not going to change it for following calculations.

Now that we have some numbers, we can find a fair middle value… x/5 = 40/x gives us x=14.142135624, so each of us is getting 2.828427125 times better deal than they wanted. And because I like you, I’ll make it 14. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?

You choose the time settings (I’m open to various possibilities, thought I probably wouldn’t like any of the extremes).
You choose the size of bets (when you win, you get 1, when I win, I get 14 — that’s fixed). Again, I’m open to various proposals, but it shouldn’t be ridiculously low (at least 2€ per unit) and it shouldn’t be ridiculously high (my budget for this experiment shouldn’t exceed 2k€).
I’d like to play at least a dozen games (possibly many more, basically as many as you want, as long as I’m within my budget )

Also, I can assure you that since then, I haven’t studied go for more than 2 hours a week and I do not plan on increasing that.

There are several ways out for you (sorted by lameness):

• pretending you haven’t read this post (lameness factor 100%)
• saying you were joking (come on, there were people around and everyone saw you were being serious, lameness 95%)
• trying to bargain a better course (look, I’m not a businessman and I’m not going to bargain, if you win just one third of what you claim you can win, you’ll be fine; lameness 90%)
• coming up with an excuse (lameness ranging from 80% to 110% depending on the excuse)
  • not enough money (first, you are going to win big, so this is not an issue, second, if by some chance you lost, I can wait and you pay with inflation corrected interest)
  • not enough time (come on, as we all know, you are too smart to be able to get a job, so you have plenty of free time)
  • any other lame excuse
• admitting that you were wrong AND that you are an arrogant asshole (lameness factor 50%)
• accepting the challenge (lameness factor 0%)

With love, always yours,
tasuki

PS: Feel free to respond here.

I have to deal with unreasonable KGS users all day long. They argue about totally insane things ad infinitum. I try to be patient and understanding, as far as it’s possible. I am even trying to be nice to people who complain about escapers.

I got used to KGS users being unreasonable, but I at least expected a bit reasonable behaviour from admins.

tasuki: if I say pretty please, will you move “Photography” room to social? (yes, I know I own way too many rooms, but there’s no photography-related room on KGS and I think it’s a pity)
anonymousadmin: ok, what other accounts do you have?
anonymousadmin: … gotta put you through the hoops
anonymousadmin: yikes… tasuki owns several rooms!
anonymousadmin: how did you get allowed so many??

Haha, good one (you know, admins like to tease each other a little bit). After some more discussion, I check the room and it’s still in “New rooms”. Well, turns out this wasn’t a joke after all.

To explain what’s going on: there are various arbitrary rules on KGS. My theory about these rules is that whoever invented them thought “our admins are pretty dumb so I have to create very concrete rules for the admins to be able to follow them and not to have to apply their common sense”. Unfortunately, the inventor probably wasn’t much mistaken.

One such rule is that for a room to be moved from “New” category to any other, it must have a description and the owner must not own any other rooms. Nice rule. Except that you can circumvent it by finding someone who has no room yet to create this one for you. Or you can simply stop being owner of your other rooms and only own this one.

In my humble opinion, these rules are being misused. For example, this particular rule was obviously designed to prevent certain individuals from creating many meaningless rooms. It was not created to prevent someone from creating a perfectly valid and useful room about something many people are actually interested in. But “we have to follow the rules”. Oh btw, the admin in question also owns several rooms. So sue me.

PS: Take this as an invitation to join the “Photography” room, under Social.

Do I spend too much time at work?

Let’s see:

First, I work eight hours a day and I sleep eight hours. That means I work half of my waking time.

Second, I only work two out of three days (counting weekends, public vacations and paid holidays adds up pretty close to one third). This means that I spend one third of my waking time at work. Not too bad.

Third, I’ll probably work around half of my life (I didn’t work during my first 20 years here and I won’t work when I’m old either).

That means I am going to spend about one sixth of my life at work (awake life, that is). That definitely doesn’t feel like “too much”, does it?

Oh, plus I got some tesuji up my sleeve… but more on that next time.

“What took you so long?”

Yes, I’ve returned from LSG a week ago. But I spent all my time either at work or creating the photogallery (I made over 800 pictures but my memory card got full so I had to delete the bad ones, I returned with over 650 pictures and the gallery is 187, so — as you can see — it was a lot of work).

LSG was great (you can see mroe photogalleries), and I really regret having to wait almost 350 days for the next one again. Last year when I came home from LSG I just sat there for several days doing nothing and waiting for the next LSG. Luckily, this year work takes care of that, it’s really good to have something concrete to do.

Sorry for a boring post, hopefully it was at least short enough. (and hey — it included links to photos… by the way, my favourite pictures from my own gallery are 4, 32, 94, 100, 109, 149, 152, 176, 178 and 181)

I haven’t written a post about music for a long long time. I wanted to write about Nightwish’s “new” album Dark Passion Play, but since it can be summed up with “pretty good album, too bad the new singer’s voice is nowhere near Tarja’s” and since everyone and their dog already knows Nightwish, it wouldn’t be too enlightening.

In January I was searching for some good French music (since I like listening to French language) and so I asked scurge (I’d really like to link him, since he’s starting a go school, but sadly he has no webpage yet — anyway, if you are looking for a go teacher, check out “scurge” on KGS (he’s way stronger than the kgs 4d he has)) for suggestions. He told me to try Louise Attaque and remarked that they are “a bit weird”.

So, yes, Louise Attaque are a bit weird, but they are also absolutely awesome. Their music is pretty original, I’ve never heard anything similar before. And I can listen to their songs over and over and over and over and over and…

They have released three albums so far:

Louise Attaque
This self-titled album is their first and in my opinion also the best. J’t'emmene au vent is my favourite Louise Attaque song (it also has a cool video). Other extremely good songs are Ton invitation, Les nuits parisiennes and Fatigante (funny changes in rhythm and speed all the time).

Comme on a dit
Also the best album. I haven’t listened to this one as many times as the other two, but I’m trying to catch up. The best song here is La plume, people say it has a clever text — I think it’s about time for me to start learning French. Other notable songs include (but are not limited to) Tu dis rien, Sans filet, Tout Passe, Comme on a dit and Du nord au sud.

A Plus Tard Crocodile
Their last album is not as fantastic as the previous two… nevertheless, there are several pretty good songs: Revolver, Oui non, Nos Sourires (except the last minute, which is horrible) and Depuis Toujours (the best song from the album, imho).

Oh well, at least I managed not to list all the songs from each album.

“Tone mapping reduces global contrast in images while increasing local contrast and shadow/highlight detail.” or so Gimp Addict’s Tone Mapper tutorial says. Go and read his tutorial, I will add few comments to it:
4) “radius of 100-500 is good” — yes, it usually is, but since we don’t know the size of the image, I’d rather say that 10% of image size (that is (width+height)/2) is a good starting point.
5) 75% is again a good starting point, but you might want to play around with the value.
7) It depends… if you want to increase the tonemapping effect, duplicating the “soft light” layer is the way to go (I’ve tried changing the layer mode and nothing else really worked at all).

So I wanted to create a script that would do this. After searching the GIMP Plugin Registry, I found Tone mapping script, which basically follows Gimp Addict’s guide. However, it only has two options – the amount of blur and the amount of layer transparency. That certainly isn’t enough for me. Luckily, the plugin is GPL…

(((GIMP’s Script-Fu) uses Scheme) (which is (a dialect) (of the (Lisp (programming language)))) ((Lisp is a (programming language)) (for people) (who (really (really (like parentheses))))))

And because I like parentheses almost half as much as an average Lisp programmer, I rewrote the Tone mapping script and created Advanced Tone Mapping script. Feel free to put it in your GIMP’s script directory (~/.gimp-2.4/scripts/ in my case).

There are four parameters for Advanced Tone Mapping script:

• Gauss. Blur (% of img size) — is the amount saying how much the blurring should be used for the tone mapping. It is in percents of image size (where image size = (width+height)/2). Ten is a good default, but different values might be interesting too.
• Opacity of blurred layer — this is the 75 default, which can be changed if you want stronger or weaker effect.
• Opacity of merged layer — the default is 90. If 100 is not enough, consider increasing number of “copies of merged layer”.
• Copies of merged layer — when one, it’s barely noticeable, you can deny any accusations of postprocessing easily. Three has a lot of “halo effect” and anything above five will completely mess all colours up.

The first set of pictures is simply a preview. The image on the left is the original image, and the image on the right is processed by Advanced Tone Mapping with Gaussian-blur set to 10, opacity of blurred layer equal 75, opacity of merged layer full 100, and finally three copies of the merged layer (note the way I use to show those values — it is also used for naming the layers, which can be handy if you later forget which layer is which or what you have done). The image on the right might be a bit over the top, but it shows nicely what can be done with Advanced Tone Mapping script:

The next example shows some pretty conservative tone mapping. The one on the left was created with almost none blur, while the one on the right has 10% blur. Note the difference: the one on the left has no halo but appears a bit flat, while the one on the right has a slight halo but also has higher level of detail.

Oh my… the following example shows what can go wrong with tone mapping (I’m sorry for all the people who already gouged their eyes out). The reason why image on the left appears so flat and awful is that almost no blur was applied. The image on the right is a comparison with healthy blur applied. Five copies is still a bit too much, but hey, at least it has kind of action-like look.

The last image shows the difference between the default blur and maximum blur available. As you can see in the right side picture, the halo is so huge it’s almost impossible to see. The bad news is that with maximum blur we lose a lot of detail near the borders of light/dark areas.

Ok, that’s it — now go and experiment with my script on your own photos.

PS: Underexpose your images — the dark areas can still be lightened, while the burned out areas are usually completely white and can’t be darkened.

PPS: The more contrast there is, the more layers you apply, the more blur you will usually need.

PPPS: Any kind of noise in your picture will be greatly amplified.

PPPPS: No, this is not HDR, this is just tone mapping of a single image (just jpeg, in my case). Tone mapping is a part of HDR, but HDR is not a part of tone mapping.

It’s been happening for longer time. I’m getting stupid. As in “not clever”. I’m learning new ways to solve specific problems, but my general problem-solving skills are very bad nowadays (in the timeframe of several years, not specifically at the moment (actually work helps a bit, I guess)).

I used to be good at solving easy problems that many people get stuck at.

Let me give you an example… There are two ways of making a thumbnail from a picture:

In the first one, you get width and height of the original picture and the boundaries (width, height) into which the thumbnail must fit. You resize the picture so as to preserve the width/height ratio. What is the width and height of the thumbnail?

The second one is trickier, but still falls into “must be easy” category:

Again, you start with width and height of the original picture, and width and height into which the thumbnail must fit. The difference is that now you must fill the whole thumbnail and cut off the exceeding parts. Suppose you want to have the thumbnail in the center. What are the left x-coordinate/y-coordinate and width/height of the area to cut the thumbnail from the original picture?

In case you say that I’m so dumb I can’t even describe the task, here’s a picture that (hopefully) explains everything.

Ok, now go and solve it. Seriously, take a pencil and paper, or fire up your favourite text editor and solve it. In case you “know it’s trivial but can’t be bothered to solve it”, don’t even bother to read on.

This kind of problem that doesn’t require (almost) any prior knowledge and has simple input and simple output is the kind of problem which used to be much easier for me to solve than for most people. Well, not anymore. And I wonder — can I do anything about it?

I thought that various logical puzzles might be a good way to force my brain to learn to solve problems again. So I searched a bit and found some excellent puzzles: blue eyes, three hats, and prisoners with hats in a long row (of course the comments under the post are wrong). The puzzles do not require any kind of “trick” to solve.

PS: Please don’t post solutions to the thumbnail problem. If you solved it, you know you solved it. If you are not sure, you haven’t solved it.