tasuki’s blog

I started trying to touch type about two months ago. I used Klavaro (if you are on linux it’s most probably in your distribution’s repositories) to learn, and I’ve also learned by trying to use the right fingers for typing and not to look at the keyboard whenever typing.

My typing speed was promised to increase dramatically in few weeks while practicing a little every day. No such thing happened, although I’ve practiced almost all the time. I still write considerably slower than I did before I started touch typing. Am I unhappy that I started touch typing? Not at all — let me explain:

The advantage is that I can just look at the screen while typing. That might seem like a single advantage, but it’s actually several in one.

First, I can read other stuff while typing or look at people who are talking to me while I type (I learned that from a colleague, it’s real intimidating).
Second, I don’t have to switch display, keyboard, display, keyboard, display, keyboard… I just look at the display. This is much cooler than it sounds — it enabled me to move the monitor cca 40cm above the keyboard (both home and at work). So I can finally sit straight instead of bending over the keyboard.

On a completely unrelated note, I finally switched from czech qwerty (writing !@#%$&^% characters with alt) to standard english keyboard layout. A lot of stuff in vim has become much more comfortable — such as the ; right under my pinky, which means that repeating f/F/t/T has just gotten even easier and better.

On a semirelated note, I never knew that to write the capital X you can press the right shift plus the x. It’s not that I thought you couldn’t do that, I just never realised it could be useful and no one ever told me “you are doing it wrong”.

Imagine you could get an extra hour every day. That means 365 hours a year. 365 hours is like 45 eight-hour work days. Wow.

I’ll start with a success story. Over a month ago, I read something very interesting about how to sleep properly. I used to have problems getting out of bed at 7am. I used to have those mornings when I felt like half asleep zombie for several hours after getting up. Now I have no problems waking up at 6:45, sometimes I even wake up earlier without the alarm clock. Oh, and I also started going to bed later (usually shortly after midnight but it really depends on when I start feeling tired).

Out of the last 8 days, I went jogging in the early morning 7 times. Today I woke up at 6:42, three minutes before my alarm would go off. It’s Saturday 7:37am and I just came back from my half an hour of jogging. I had a shower and am enjoying my breakfast, while all of you are asleep. These long weekends are amazing — it really is a measurable difference.

Here are the keys (more or less sorted by importance):

• get up at a regular time (yes, that includes weekends), go to sleep when you get tired (no earlier and no later)
• get enough sunshine and natural daylight during the day (bulbs will not cut it, you need real light)
• every day, do at least 20 minutes of increased physical activity such as running (most effective in the morning)
• drink a lot of pure water (it’s also generally good for your health)
• if you feel like taking a nap after lunch, do so (limit it to 20-30 minutes), naps are good for you
• never ever take sleeping pills (important, but rather common sense, isn’t it?), don’t drink coffee or overeat yourself before going to sleep

When I was starting with this I was called gullible. What is worse — I was called gullible by someone who believes in a three-in-one god that is supposedly omnipotent and sent his only son (who was actually one of the three) to save the mankind by dying on a cross in huge pain. Crazy stuff.

Such an amazing word! It can be used to express a myriad of different meanings, but they all have something in common — indifference. “Whatever” is possibly the most indifferent word in the world.

I’ve been searching for a Czech equivalent, but there simply isn’t anything similar. When you are asked whether you want chocolate or vanilla ice cream, you can say “I don’t care”, but saying “whatever” is way cooler. Unfortunately, in Czech language, we are stuck with “I don’t care”.

Whatever…

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.

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.

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.

Do you know what common sense is?

Common sense is:

• NOT setting fixed height for elements whose actual height can change anytime, and especially not setting this particular height to three elements next to each other, to keep them with the same height (common sense solution is to wrap it all in another element)
• NOT calling your database tables j_aidx_1, j_aidx_2 … j_aidx_n and calling the columns m_1, m_2, m_3, etc; which leads to people writing queries like SELECT a.m_85, a.m_167, b.m_17, b.m_56 FROM j_aidx_5 AS a LEFT JOIN j_aidx_8 AS b ON a.m_103 = b.m_42 WHERE b.m_58 = ‘1′ AND a.12 = ‘0′
• invoking the live server settings as default instead of using testing environment settings as default, because when something goes wrong in the decision process, you don’t want the live server to get fucked up
• NOT having the very same function copied to several different “modules” of the application so as to make it extremely inconvenient to change
• NOT calling your backups “new”, “!new”, “_new”, “____new”, “!!!!!new” etc, especially when each person uses a different flavour of this method
• using a version control system, and if you are unable to do so, calling your backups by date (preferrably in YYYY-MM-DD format, since it sorts itself naturally)
• using either tabs or any amount of spaces for indentation, but keeping it consistent (or at least, for fuck’s sake, keeping it consistent within one file)
• NOT internally calling files for inclusion 1.html, 2.html, 3.html etc., especially when you already went through the hassle of creating nice looking URL’s
• NOT totally breaking your URL’s and titles by adding a lot of random keywords just to game search engines, when that makes your site either unusable or extremely confusing for humans
• using one language (human language, like English or Czech) in your application, or at least avoiding mixing up several languages inside one particular variable or function name (findAllNovinky is just lame function name)

… do you know what frustration is?