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/¹.//g
no empty lines…
:%s/^\n//g
add some tex code before and after each diagram
:%s/┏/}reak}igskipbox{box to 100 pt{= 190 pt┏/g
transfer the ascii goban into tex
:%s/┏/??<
:%s/┯/??(/g
:%s/┓/??>
:%s/┠/??[
:%s/┼/??+/g
:%s/┨/??]
:%s/┗/??,
:%s/┷/??)/g
:%s/┛/??.
transfer the stones
:%s/●/- @+/g
:%s/○/- !+/g
very regular dents left – oups… forgot the star points…
:%s/╋/??/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 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…

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).

I only very recently discovered Nightwish (their official site is also worth visiting). The trick is that they have a real singer – Tarja Turunen (well, she’s not their singer anymore, but the past albums are sung by her). I’m not going to just copy wikipedia here (go read it yourself) so I’ll add my subjective opinions about the albums:

• Angels Fall First – their first album, I really like it, the best songs are Elvenpath, Beauty and the Beast, Astral Romance, Angels Fall First, Eramaajarvi
• Oceanborn – most the songs are a bit too fast but good nevertheless, particularly good are Gethsemane and Moondance (czesc kotasz); Sleeping Sun is one of the best Nightwish songs that can be found on new releases of this album or as a single
• Wishmaster – nothing except the Wishmaster caught my attention on this album
• Over the Hills And Far Away – only few songs, the good ones are Over the Hills And Far Away and the cover version of Astral Romance
• Century Child – there are some good songs: End of All Hope, The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty of the Beast; and there is one excellent song: Feel For You (I can listen to this one on repeat over and over again)
• Once – this album was a complete hit and contains many great songs: Dark Chest of Wonders, Wish I had an Angel, Nemo, Planet Hell, Creek Mary’s Blood, The Siren, Dead Gardens, Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan

Now they are getting a new singer instead of Tarja… I don’t want to say they can’t find anyone this good, but at least it will be very difficult.

While my spelling is generally good (it was always easier for me to remember how words are written than how they are pronounced) I always had troubles distinguishing vowels. I mean, I usually do know which vowel there should be, but I just sometimes make the mistake of writing a different one instead. I always realize it immediately when I see the word on screen, but somehow I don’t realize it when writing. So yeah, recently I’ve written ‘rondamly’ instead of ‘randomly’ in a chat and they thought it was a good joke… well, it actually wasn’t…

Sometimes I write a whole word differently, like writing ‘hojo’ instead of ‘toho’ (happened to me the other day). I don’t know the cause, and it’s not particularly annoying, it’s just strange and surprising.

I vaguely remember experiencing something a bit similar in some high school classes – I was very tired and trying to write what the teacher was saying, and as I was falling asleep, my hand somehow continued writing, although it didn’t write letters anymore, just random something that looked a bit like letters (and of course it had nothing to do what the teacher was saying as I was asleep by that time).

So it might actually be the same… you are still writing because of momentum while your brain already has a holiday…

Has anything similar ever happened to you?

I’m changing my eating habits!

Throughout all my life I’ve eaten much more than I wanted to. What is worse – I didn’t even realize it, I got used to that uneasy feeling of having full stomach and being all tired and sleepy because of this.

When my grandma asked me whether there’s a possibility of eating at school, I truthfully answered that there’s a cheap canteen for students. However, I didn’t mention that I usually don’t go there…

I’m not changing my eating habits to be more fit, look better, spare money or whatever, I am changing them because I don’t like eating when I feel it’s too much for me.

My brand new eating rule: eat when you are hungry and eat just enough not to be hungry, not less and not more.

Hello from Edgy Eft!
Recently I got a new disk and I decided it might be a good idea to make a clean new install (I had the previous system through warty – hoary – breezy - dapper). I didn’t want to upgrade the old system to something which is still unstable and I thought it might also be good to get rid of all the trash that I don’t use anyway… (well, yeah, I copied my whole home directory with a lot of trash, but at least I got rid of the programs that I don’t use).

And the first time experience? Magnificent! I encountered no serious problems, almost everything “just worked” out of the box and the things that didn’t were pretty easy to fix.

List of “nice and surprising”:

• sounds: the default intro sound of gnome was so horrible it was almost unlistenable, the new one just rocks, gaim also has different sounds, it will take a while to get used to it but they are better I think (and now gaim also has a volume control, w00t)
• new artwork: nothing spectacular, a bit better than dapper (which was pretty good, at least compared to previous “shit brown” themes)
• firefox: 2.0beta is just better (it has one small mistake that when I search by / it doesn’t let me highlight the words, which sucks, but maybe I can set it somewhere…)
• gaim 2.0beta… it simply rulez (hey, why is everything 2.0beta?)
• a lot of things stayed the same and 95% of my ~/.something configuration files work so I don’t have to reconfigure everything.
• many problems that I expected didn’t occur at all… wifi (which was borken in the 2.6.15 kernel), nvidia, wine (particularly fonts), X server, java, etc.

But that was a clean install, I will see what an upgrade looks like when they release the official version and I will upgrade my sister’s system, but after such a pleasant experience I don’t expect any problems either.

There is something really weird about abandoned places. I personally find them very scary for several reasons. First is that they don’t necessarily have to be as abandoned as they might seem, and if someone lived there it would probably be weird enough person to kill me. The second, less childlish, is that it just seems scary to see a place that used to be full of people abandoned like this. This is also the fascinating thing about these places.

I found a few interesting sites, one with pictures (and some additional info) by a girl riding her motorbike through the Chernobyl area. One made by Polish guys is called opuszczone (click “gallery” at the bottom), it contains mostly Polish buildings, but there are photos from other places too. And I couldn’t possibly omit a great site that goes by the name abandoned places, made by a Belgian pilot who seems to spend quite a lot of free time on abandoned places; although the design is a bit, errrm, original… just click around a lot and you are bound to get to occasionally see all the great photos.

Is there any website about such places in Czechia (particularly Brno)? I couldn’t find one, and I was trying quite hard.

I went to the tearoom to play go the other day and one very talented and promising 7kyu (he’s been playing for half a year I think, that’s a very good result) asked me to play an even game with him… I offered him a handicap, and he declined, saying that he wanted to “see the gap”. It made me a bit angry… of course there’s a huge gap, duh. So I played a bit unorthodoxly to crush him as much as possible and I was winning by more than 150 when he resigned.

I also always wanted to play an even game with a strong professional playing at his full strength, to see the gap. A few times I was even quite close to asking for it but luckily I never did so. And I think I’m never going to make fool of myself in this way, now that I can imagine what it feels like. Also, I am not sure if I really want to see the gap…