200th post

I'm not really sure if this would be worth a whole post. But here goes.

This is the 200^th post as far as Blogger can recall. Since I have a hard time remembering the first day on which I started this blog, I might as well create "anniversaries" of this blog every 100 posts (yes, I'm abusing the word "anniversary", which was intended to mean "yearly", so I'll try to avoid using it). It's easier that way.

As I might have mentioned before, the writing style in my blog changed quite often during the earlier posts, & gradually settled on a more "mature" (as I would consider) style - the one you see now. It changed from the "absurdly humorous" to "mildly serious". The changes are probably because of my audience, and changes in my personality itself. Of course, it's hard to tell how much or what has changed, since - to me - it's a gradual process.

As far as aspirations go, I'm still not sure what the main topic of this blog would be about. The subject of this blog has been in doubt since the very beginning, and it still hasn't been settled. SciLearn is slightly more focused, I think, but that just makes writing stuff less flexible (which reminds me, I need to post something there immediately; I haven't done that in a while).

I had made several tries at poetry, & soon found that I couldn't do it. I no longer have that emotional feel as I did before, and that hindered any progress in my poetry. So for now, "poem" is basically an abandoned category. Recently, I've been attempting to write some 'novel-like' stories, and I'm not sure how would that go before I get bored of them.

slow week

Again, I'm not updating my blogs frequently. Just to keep it updated, here's a list of things I did this week:

• Physics lab: we just had the first physics lab that actually had physics in it. It was called a "Behr free fall apparatus" and it produced a track on a piece of tape as a cylinder fell from an electromagnet. The dots on the tape are produced by an alternating current set at 60Hz, which zaps tiny dots on the tape as the electricity travels across the the falling cylinder (which had a ring around it to conduct the charges). In overall, it was a pretty fun experience, but the rest is just plain error analysis and stuff, which kinda took the fun out of the rest of the lab. It was such a pain trying to measure the dots on a meter rule, mostly because of annoying parallax errors and difficulty reading the scale (the dotted track was also slightly curved, so that didn't help).
• Emacs. It was plain cool. Yeah I never had an appreciation why this strip is so funny, but now I know why. The Ctrl key on my keyboard is more awkward than most keyboards, because it has flipped its place with the Fn key, but hopefully I'll get used to it. So far, I've learn quite a few basic commands that allows me to typeset LaTeX files. In the future, I hope I can learn to code Python with emacs effectively too.
• Ubuntu: I'm still exploring Ubuntu, finding unexpected features here and there. In overall, I still haven't got deep enough into the system, so I still consider myself a newbie in this new field.
• The sound and wireless problems are still not solved, because I didn't find time to do it.

apt-get install laptop

This post was supposed to be written on Sep 16, but the laptop installation and homework prevented me from writing a post on it.

Finally, I got my laptop (Sep 16)! It took quite a long time to be shipped, but it was a pre-order after all. Nonetheless, from my first impressions, the laptop looks nice and solid, and the temperatures are also quite cool.

The whole installation process of the hard drive wasn't as easy as I thought. The hard drive patch was easy to find and screw out, but the hard drive inside wouldn't budge. After some tinking, I realized I had to pull the laptop in one direction, and then pull it out. In the end, I bent a piece of metal on the hard drive container, but that was easy to fix since the whole container seems to be made of pure iron (i.e. it's soft). Oddly, the metal parts near the container on the laptop are magnetic, so the hard drive gets attracted to the slot easily.

So after I replaced the empty pre-installed hard drive with my own hard drive, I decided to load it. That was easy, except for one wee problem. Vista won't load. It just fails, even in Safe Mode. Ubuntu transferred without too much fuss though.

This meant I had to reinstall Vista, which was certainly a tedious process. The installer transferred the old Vista files to "Windows.old". It took several hours to get Vista up-to-date, including multiple restarts. After everything was all set, I installed all the necessary drivers. It wasn't without problems, but eventually all the drivers got installed properly.

Now that Vista is usable, I need to get back to Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the sound driver is missing, and so is the the wireless driver. For now, I don't need wireless (though I would when I use the laptop elsewhere), but without sound, I can't play my podcasts or music (like Astronomy Cast, for example). 2 more problems are: Ubuntu stopped responding when I restarted it from standby, and none of the TTYs worked (i.e. the consoles activated with Ctrl + F1 to Ctrl + F6). None of these problems are solved yet. Sigh.

It also took me a while to get used to the shrunken keyboard. The numpad on the right, while a useful thing, also caused the keyboard to be reduced in width. This means some keys are at the "wrong" places while others are shifted to adjacent spaces. In any case, I made a lot of typographic mistakes on my first day at typing. But I do seem to be getting used to it. I'm typing a lot better today than yesterday. The funny thing is that the Fn and Ctrl keys are also switched, which means I keep pressing the wrong keys at times.

Recently, I learned a lot about emacs and LaTeX, which are really useful tools for typesetting documents. They are harder to use than word processors, but they are supposed to make life easier once you get a hold of them.

These are what I have done with my new laptop so far. Hopefully I can get another SciLearn post out tomorrow, if my homework gets done, that is.

meeting Star Stryder

Today I managed to see Pamela in person! Woohoo! Now that just made my day.

She was visiting MSU for an International Astronomy of the Year 2009 talk. While the talk started at 13:40 and I was at my philosophy class at the time, I managed to get there at about 14:15 to hear the rest of the talk. I can say that she's a really good and entertaining speaker who doesn't bore people. I left at about 14:40 to get to my chemistry class (since I had to get there early to guarantee myself a seat at the front of 400+ students). Before I left, I also got a flyer & badges for IAY'09 (a flyer & a badge) and Astronomy Cast (a badge).

Later, after my chemistry class at 16:00, I met her again at the Planetarium (I asked Horace Smith @ Biomedical & Physical Sciences Bdlg to find out where she would be, and I guess he was right). The door of the room was left ajar, so I managed to peek inside and see her. It was such an awesome moment (that's what seeing a renowned person is like).

Just as a note, I also got my laptop yesterday, but I still don't have the time to blog about it. Hopefully I'll do that soon (possibly on weekend).

user-friendliness

There's millions of programs out there, written by different authors. None of them are perfect, because perfection isn't possible (okay, let's not discuss philosophical issues). But some are so horrendously programmed that you wonder if the programmer had the user in mind...

It's not a simple question of whether something is user-friendly or not, but a question of which aspects of user-friendliness exist and which don't. I might judge programs differently than some people, but here are programming issues that any program should deal with (in my opinion):

• Moderate learning-curve
  Many programs follow this basic rule. A program should be easy to use from day 1. It should not be so complicated and obscure that I have to read a help manual to get started. I must be able to apply my common sense to work myself around the program. But this doesn't mean that I should be presented with a long and boring tutorial either, though.
• Follow standards
  Programs should always follow basic user-interface standards, or conventions. It must also follow the format and other IO standards/conventions. I'm making a distinction between standards and conventions because standards are made by organizations, but conventions are things that depends on the popularity of the idea. For example, a bad UI-design would be one that uses Ctrl+X for exit. Ctrl+X is reserved for "Cut" and shouldn't be used for anything else.
  
• Shortcuts must exist for repetitive tasks
  This is #1 annoyance for many mature programs. If I want to be productive, then shortcuts (especially keyboard shortcuts) must exist. Imagine how life would be harder if Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V didn't exist. Programs must allow both the use of mouse and keyboard for most tasks (exceptions include drawing and typing, in which mouse and keyboards do better than the other).
  
• If it does anything, it must at least do it well
  I'm kinda copying this statement from the Unix philosophy. A program doesn't have to be packed with tons of features. If it can do one thing better than every other program, then it's good enough. I call this the "minimalist's approach". Sometimes we just want one thing to be done, but to get it done, we need to download a 100MB program that does a lot of other tasks that we don't need. That's what I mean by this statement. A program should be lightweight and not filled with unnecessary features. If a programmer wants to pack lot's of features, it should be done by separating them into different programs that, despite being distinct, are able to work together harmoniously.
  
• UI customization
  It's not a necessity to have a customizable interface. But if a program ever becomes popular, it must be customizable. The settings must also be saved into a file that can be transferred from one computer to another. This allows the program fit to the user's needs. A similar (but not necessarily related) concept is that of extensibility, in which a program's features can be extended or changed with the use of "plug-ins", "add-ons", or other 3rd-party software. (Of course, this would lead to a more complicated program, so it's not a necessity.)

No program is perfect. Sigh.

about me

I'm a 16-yr-old student currently studying physics at Michigan State University. I'm still a freshman, & Fall '08 is just my 2^nd semester.

I'm an international student, born in China and lived in Botswana for over half my educational life (so far). Although I lived my infantile youth in China, my primary and secondary education were mostly achieved in Botswana. Two of my vague educational milestones are: IGCSE in 2006 and AS-Level in 2007 (bio, chem, physics, & math). Right after that, I switched to the US education system & begin my college studies.

My interests are somewhat varied, but not so diverse. Despite being a boy, I don't find any form of interest towards sports or cars. Instead, I'm a geek with a fondness for computing, surfing the web, scratching my head over exotic math, & investigating sciencey-stuff. I'm also an pseudo-amateur pianist, with Joplin & Debussy being my favorite composers - so if you ask me what kind of music I like, my hesitant reply would be "classical music".

This blog is my main presence on the web. It's a place to spill random thoughts and occasionally I use it as a place to write my memories. As much as I wanted to initially, I find it extraordinarily difficult to focus on a single topic and to even talk serious about any particular topic - perhaps it's just my writing style or something. Regarding my views, I would like to emphasize that I now consider myself a skeptic.

If you ever want to contact me, just send me an email - and under normal conditions, I should be able to reply within a day or two.

HTML is wasteful

Edit: Sorry, the whole markup got messed up because Blogger misinterpreted all the "<" and ">". It should be fixed now.

Have you noticed how wasteful HTML (and other variations of XML) can be?

I type a simple tag:

<html></html>;

and it requires me to type "html" twice. Don't you consider that redundant?

I mean it would cost a lot less space if I wrote:

<html></>

Where </> signifies the end of <html>.

That would save quite some space. But I realized that doing so would also make HTML more cryptic and difficult to understand, as if it's not confusing enough. I guess that's the price one has to pay for the clarity of coding: file size. After all, the best storage method would be via binary files, but I don't think humans like reading them directly.

Luck us for having GBs of storage. I'm sure servers use much more space to store sound and video than to store HTML files, many of which might be dynamic pages too.

The main situation where this might be more of a problem would be storing large data via XML-type files. If an XML file is mostly just raw, chunky data, then tags won't use up much space. But if an XML file contains a higher percentage of tags than the data (which are enclosed within the tags), then this might actually be an issue. I think the only way to solve this, without affecting readability, is provide a method of compressing and decompressing XML files. I wonder if someone has already thought about this...

Just some recent thoughts.

drinking from a pipet

This is one of the yuckiest things I recall, and I seriously regret ever doing it.

Years ago, during a few of the chemistry practicals, we were supposed to do titrations with pipets. Unfortunately, the school doesn't have pipet-fillers (i.e. the rubbery thing at the top of the pipette that sucks up the liquid for you). This means we are forced to suck the acids/bases/whatever-that-was-in-the-beaker with our bare mouths.

Eek! I never want to do that again, ever.

Aside from the fact that the acids/bases might harm me, sucking from a glass tube that other people have put their mouths on is a gross experience. I don't care how that pipet was cleaned with (concentrated?) nitric acid - it's still a sanitary hazard.

I recently walked into a college lab last week (because I have chemistry labs in my class schedule), and one of the rules explicitly prohibit sucking chemicals from pipets. How ironic. Good thing they have pipet-fillers.

More fragments from my past to come.

out of sync

It's hard to keep a schedule. Really really hard. It's easy to lose track of time. So easy. And that's what happened yesterday. Although I didn't have as much guilt as I would've had since I did actually do some homework. So far I have a philosophy book to read (I warn you, it's very hard to read because of the style of the writing; the fact that it's a philosophical work only makes it more difficult). I also have some physics lab homework to do. I suppose those aren't as difficult since they're just basic error analysis questions).

chemical alchemy

Just a weird thought I had yesterday to enlighten whoever might be reading this on Labor Day.

While alchemy itself isn't any true science, I somehow found a humorous relationship between the "alchemical elements" and true chemistry:
earth - solid
water - liquid
air - gas
fire - plasma*

Now this isn't meant to imply anything about the validity of alchemy, just a strange thought I encountered. Apparently, people have already noticed this coincidental relationship.

*according to a source, fire does contain a small amount of plasma.