I’ve completed an official Mensa IQ test a few years ago. When one of the organizing guys was telling us the results, he has taken me aside, which suggested something special – I scored 144. That means that I should be able to solve IQ tests better than about 99.8% of people. I considered it a pretty good result back then. I was even proud of it.

During recent years, I talked about IQ with several people. Turns out that all of my friends that I talked to have IQ 140+ (some even 150+). It was at least ten people, from different countries, but all of them (reasonably succesful) go players.

There are three possibilities (or combination thereof):

• Coincidentally, I am a genius and my friends too (and many of them even more so than me).
• There is a very tight connection between being good at go and being good at solving IQ tests.
• The tests are simply flawed.

I’d really like to know the truth, so please share your results in the comments (you can do it anonymously if you prefer).

PS: I don’t enjoy individually asking people what their IQ is, it makes me look like a complete idiot… the problem is that I really want to know the truth about IQ…

I’ve just returned from a four day cross-country skiing trip. It was great.

Although the snow was rather wet (temperatures above zero all the the time), the weather was nice and I hope we all had a good time (I did). We played various (mostly silly but funny) games, we talked a lot (there were some people with whom I haven’t talked for quite a while), and we were generally just having fun not having to do anything.

I was also happy to find out that I’m still able to survive a few days without the internet (actually I don’t miss it, it’s just a bit overwhelming to be back online and have dozens of people trying to talk to me).

Now I’m seriously tired and heading to bed… No, I’m not tired from skiing, I’m tired from talking to 3-4am (usually about religious or other quite difficult topics) and then getting woken up early (ie. before noon) by a guy who went to sleep before midnight (every day). Good night…

PS: Photos hopefully coming soon.

The creators of Amarok say “rediscover your music”… and I did.

I always thought that having playlists and just opening them with any simple player was enough for me, but now I thought I might try to use something more sophisticated. I tried Rhythmbox, it was simple, clean and working but nothing astonishing. On the other hand, I competely fell in love with Amarok.

Although Amarok is a qt application (I strongly prefer gtk and I don’t use any other qt ap, but Amarok is so good that I don’t care), I fell in love at the first sight. It’s a bit slow, but it has many nifty features like grouping/searching by various criteria, album cover preview, complete lyrics and info about author/album (it downloads all that from the internets, very kewl) just one click away. It can also pop up a small window with info about the coming song. The window is transparent and you can choose where it pops up. It will disappear after a short interval (set by you, of course).

And they get bonus points for this message:

One of Mike Oldfield’s best pieces of work, Amarok, inspired the name behind the audio-player you are currently using.

Go ahead and rediscover your music too!

When you are creating a design in css, you will often run into various problems. The problem is that you often don’t really know where the problem is. That’s where the problem is.

I was using “border: 1px solid red;” to determine where certain element was. This has several drawbacks… first, it adds 1px on each side of the element, which can cause problems, then it is not too easy to work with (you have to manually add it to every element that you want to highlight).

I have found a much better way to debug css. First, they use outline instead of border (duh), then they make very smart use of wildcard characters, so that out-commenting one thing gets all the css boxes highlighted. Priceless.

I’ve been playing with (pdf)TeX lately, and I thought it might be a good thing (tm) to transfer some of the Project Gutenberg e-texts to pdf. So I did. And now what?

The Project Gutenberg website seems quite nice on the first sight… even on the second sight… the books are neatly organized and searchable and what not. Ok, now try to actively participate… Where’s their irc channel where I could ask questions? (they have none) Oh well, what about a usenet group or a web forum? Nothing like that, only a maillist (here I could include a long essay on why I hate maillists, let me skip it while just mentioning that maillists are generally unnavigatable).

Now I’m sick after having spent about an hour trying to find out how to submit the pdf files to Project Gutenberg. I learned all about how it should be formatted and what exactly I have to do and what I mustn’t do and all stuff I am not interested in. I have taken a .txt from Project Gutenberg, spent some time mostly playing with regular expressions and a bit of hand work (not everything can be done with regular expressions), and now I have a .pdf that I want to submit.

So… anyone knows how to submit it? I don’t and I’m not going to waste any more time searching for it. Later on, I might decide to publish the pdf’s elsewhere (prolly here).

Blah, lately I’ve been getting upset very easily… this morning, I responded to a hoax email that someone whom I don’t even know sent to about 200 people. I sent the response to all those 200 people and made it quite clear what I think about the sender. I think he deserved the public humiliation.

Is it even possible that I forgot to advertize my new project on my own blog?

So… here it goes: I created tsumego collections.

Some people obviously like it, as I can see some traffic from sources like something.mail.yahoo.com (someone sending emails with a link to my page?). I wonder if I should write an ad into rgg or godiscussions.

Well, repeating informations that you can find there seems useless, suddenly I don’t really know what to write… hmpfh…

Anyway, big thanks to toxygen for transferring the go fonts from metafont to type1 (in pdf, metafont fonts get included as bitmaps, which sucks big time, and type1 fonts get included as vectors, which rocks).

The other day I had an exam. It’s almost half of January, technically middle of winter, yet the temperature was around 10˚C in the morning. My one-hour walk to school was nice and helped me to relax before the exam. After seeing the test I was even happier, most of it was real easy. So I concentrated on the easy parts, and seeing that I already have more than 75 points (out of 100) and being sure that it’s completely correct, I decided not to try to write anything to the remaining two tasks (I prefer to write nothing than crap, I think it just looks better).

After getting out, I discussed the test with other students and one girl said that the prefessor doesn’t really care about most of the tasks and doesn’t really count the points… That the only important thing is that you get the derivative right. Crap… Shit… Why does this always happen to me? Why didn’t I know it earlier? Why did I decide to skip differentiations when learning for the exam?
Endless waiting in a corridor. The percentage of oxygen ten times less than usual. Fainting every while. Students disappearing from the row, and then coming out of the room either very happy or angry or just plain resigned. Finally, my turn… I find my papers and present them to the professor: “Hmmm, where’s the derivative?”, “umm, well, somehow, you know…”, “without the derivation I can’t let you pass… why didn’t you do the derivative…?” think, think, think, what can I tell him? Silence. “Ok, you’ll get another function to differentiate, last chance”. Crap.

Luckily, the one I got was rather easy, so I managed to do it and passed, but… it was close…

If I failed I would have to spend another whole day there (not to talk about also having to learn derivations), thank god…

There are three desirable things, pick any two:

• No orphans and widows (meaning single line of paragraph is not cut off on one page with the rest on another)
• “Řádkový rejstřík” (that’s Czech, I have no idea what it’s called in english, it means that the lines ((not only) on opposing pages) should be corresponding)
• Text area height stays the same.

It is impossible to have all three, if the lines are corresponding and the text area height stays the same, then you are sure to get some orphans and widows. If the text area height stays the same and there are no orphans nor widows, then you definitely have to break “řádkový rejstřík” (please, someone tell me what it’s called in english). And if there are no orphans nor widows and corresponding lines, then the text area height will vary.

As orphans and widows are definitely a no-no, and “řádkový rejstřík” seems important, I think it’s best to break the text area height, but I’m not sure… any (qualified) opinions?

Also, when you are typesetting verses, “řádkový rejstřík” usually gets fucked up, but still it would be nice for it to be at least partially ok. :-)

Hanging has been very popular recently… last week USA hanged Saddam, and now I am going to hang punctuation.

I have learned recently that pdfTeX supports hanging punctuation, which is pretty neat. An example:

=2
pcode enrm\-=300<br /> pcode enrm.=220
pcode enrm`,=200

I have made a test of hanging punctuation (open the file and read on). There are six pages, first three typeset in Toruńska Antykwa (a very beautiful font) and the other in Palatino. There are three versions: complete hanging punctuation, half hanging and not hanging.

I like Toruńska Antykwa with hanging punctuation, but I’m not sure which one. Maybe the best would be to hang the hyphens and leave dots and comas inside? (or hang them only partially)

On the other hand, hanging of Palatino seems to be a huge failure. Hanging comas and dots are awful (maybe if they were hanging just a very little bit it would be ok), and hanging hyphens are not particularly beautiful either (maybe if they were hanging less than a half…).

Now, what do you think?

2006 sucked. Sure, it could have been worse, but I think I wasn’t very lucky throughout the year 2006. Most of the things that could have gone wrong indeed did go wrong. I hope it will be better in 2007 (and I am quite sure it will).

Happy new year to everyone! :woot: