Wondering how to enable multitouch scrolling on your eee PC? It’s pretty easy.
Assuming you’re using XOrg:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "Synaptics"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
EndSection
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I’m not really a player of Flash games, but Fantastic Contraption is the niftiest thing since sliced bread. It plays like The Incredible Machine, only more down-to-earth.
read more…Spurred to action by a fit of insomnia, I decided to replace the software I use to host my blog, photo gallery and other bits of my digital persona. After two weeks of restless nights, you see the results before your eyes. My homepage is no longer a blog; it is now the world’s most underutilized CMS. Victory is mine!
If I had any loyal readers, they would agree that I don’t post much content on my home page. I don’t have much to say, I don’t get much traffic, and my needs vis a vis blogging software are few. But since I began fiddling with Rails and RIA development, I have been afflicted by the need to engineer away my software and replace it with homebrew Web 2.0 crap. I have two excuses for this behavior:
Actually, I’m a raving loony and I can’t help myself; writing code is my OCD tic, the digital equivalent of uncontrollable hand-washing. But I digress. About the blog…
read more…It was an off day for our intrepid travelers. I was on my last pair of pants and we’d walked across central Copenhagen in search of The Laundromat Cafe, one of a new breed of fusion cafes that serves coffee, drinks and full meals while you wait for your clothes to finish their spin cycle.
After taking care of chores, we decided to check out the nearby Assistens Kierkegaard, Copenhagen’s main burial ground where noteworthies such as Hans Christian Andersen are interred. Being that it was only a few blocks from the laundromat, we figured a bit of gravespotting would make for a nice, brief touristy distraction.
At the entrance was a placard with a map of “known peoples’ resting places.” We figured out approximately where to find Niels Bohr’s family plot and headed off to snap some pictures. That’s when our troubles began.
read more…When we landed in Norway, I began to notice an interesting pattern of interaction between me and the locals. For an example, let’s look at how I ask for a table in a restaurant.
read more…Hostess (presumably speaking Norwegian): Mxlkrmf tfiu?
Tony: Hi; we’d like a table.
Hostess: Blw dcij vcdhuhy for two?
Tony: Yeah; for two, please.
Hostess: Trsdj swofiu jasj ic kiscijds dij?
Tony: Sorry? I’m afraid I don’t understand much Norwegian.
Hostess: Oh, you’re speaking English!
Scandinavia is a singular tourist destination for Americans. Everywhere else we go in the world, we face culture shock. Not so in northern Europe. Virtually everyone in a service job here speaks excellent English and has a stunning command of the American slang lexicon (when’s the last time you heard a Frenchman say “you should take me up on it” or “where are you headed?”) Iceland’s national snack food is a hot dog, Norway’s most famous chain restaurant is an upmarket Pizza Hut, and all of these countries are immersed in our pop culture.
With all of these cultural affinities, we have no problem with culture shock here. In its place, we face sticker shock. Prices here are outrageous!
read more…On the morning of our arrival, the temperature in Reykjavik was a bracing -2 C with 90% humidity. Combined with the wind-chill factor due to a stiff breeze, the apparent temperature was, to use a meteorological term, “butt cold.” As we quickly discovered, the best survival stratagem in this kind of weather is to rush frantically between heated indoor spaces. Happily, Reykjavik is equipped with a surplus of cozy street-side cafés that are happy to sell you a $5 cup of coffee, usually with gratis wi-fi and unlimited lingering time included in the price.
Needless to say, the bus driver dropped us off several blocks from our hotel; also, our room wouldn’t be ready until 2pm – but the hotel was willing to hold our bags for us until then. We gratefully dumped our stuff and set out for a day of surrealistic, sleep-deprived sightseeing.
Truth be told, I don’t remember much about the museums and cultural sites we visited that day; I was so weary that I could barely keep my eyes open, and my most lucid memories involve sitting in a café drinking coffee, glad to finally be able to feel my face and limbs. Our hours of lingering afforded plenty of people-watching opportunities, and I began to drink in the culture and language of Iceland. Here are a few brief notes.
read more…In the hour or so we allow ourselves every evening to relax and play with the laptop, I spend most of my time diddling with Lightroom or planning the next phase of the trip. It turns out that Anthony is an expert travel logistician, adept at surfing Trip Advisor and Sidestep for the best hotel deals, figuring out which rail pass to buy, deciding which sights are worth seeing. Still, I try to do my part, and all of the planning leaves little time for blogging.
Because I’ve been so lazy, I’m going to have to cover all of Iceland – and all of Norway so far – in a few quick blog entries. In the process, I’m sure I will ruthlessly murder more than one detail.
Our journey began as always, with a trip to LAX in a rented econo-box. Virgin America had us checked into our flight and past security with hours to spare, giving us time to duck into an airport bar for a pre-flight drink or thre. Thus did I board the flight to New York well lubricated with whiskey, and somewhat less daunted by the 28 hours of air travel that lay before us.
read more…Having problems putting Ubuntu to sleep or (my case) waking it up again? Check out μswsusp, a killer user-mode suspend/resume utility. It eschews the trouble-fraught kernel ACPI code in favor of a simpler approach: halting the system and saving its state by streaming /dev/snapshot to disk. Magic!
Instructions for integrating it into Ubuntu available courtesy of Paul Betts’ blog
Just a little idea I’ve been working on over the past week. It seems that by combining Markovian models and Bayesian inference, it’s possible to do some really neat things with recognizing natural language!
By now, most geeks are familiar with the idea of Bayesian inference because of its use in spam blockers. The idea is pretty simple: build a statistical model of which words are likely to follow which other words in a “valid” text (e.g. anything that is not spam). Use Bayes’ inference rule to “chain together” probabilistic judgments about how likely successive pairs of words are to appear next to one another, and after observing enough text, you arrive at a conclusion about whether this text “valid.”
read more…When Apple’s FileVault home directory encryption is used in conjunction with Active Directory integration – or with any other sort of directory integration – some pretty nasty problems can result, if you’re not careful.
The basic problem is that FileVault derives its encryption keys from the user’s password, and it captures the password from the LoginWindow.
Upside: you can use FileVault regardless of the type of authentication your account uses, provided it’s password-based authentication.
Downside: if your password changes while your Mac isn’t looking, FileVault becomes desynchronized and your user can never login again.
read more…I consider myself pretty good with languages, but even I make mistakes. With a language like French, where the slightest change in the pronunciation of a vowel, a consonant substitution or a little slur can mean a big change, it’s easy to completely destroy a sentence. At the beginning of this trip, I decided to collect my most knee-slappingly horrendous mistakes for later contemplation. Most French are kind enough not to point out the obvious mistake (it’s usually pretty clear what I mean simply from context), but a few of my more unusual gaffes have produced chuckles, grins and once or twice, outright laughter. So, for your edification and for the greater good, I present to you my biggest mistakes over the past two weeks:
Aix-en-Provence was settled by Romans during the latter days of the empire. Its main claim to fame is being the home of Paul Cezanne during his most productive years; however, since none of Cezanne’s paintings will reside here until late 2006, this fact alone can’t explain its popularity. Nor can its 1,500-year-old cathedral which is built on the ruins of a Roman forum that dates to 300 BC (more on this later.) Its tourist office is a wash; our every visit there has been met with a shower of brochures on Cezanne, and a certain attitude from the staff that I’ll euphemistically call warm indifference. Do they know if Gregorian chants are sung in the cathedral on Sundays? “Perhaps,” they say with a quiet smile. How long does the bus to Arles take? “It depends.”
What exactly does cause Germans, English, Italians, Greeks, Americans and Persians to flock to Aix? Personally, I think it’s a combination of small-town charm and fabulous dining.
read more…After Versailles, Mom and I recuperated in our flat for a few hours before venturing out again - at 10pm! - to see the Eiffel Tower. We’d both had an extremely full day, but with only one more full day in Paris ahead of us, we were determined to get la Tour Eiffel (or “the metal asparagus” as the snobby French called it when it was first built) out of the way tonight.
Once we finally got to the monument, we discovered to Mom’s horror that the bottom-most elevator was closed. Our only choice was to climb 25 stories to the first landing!
read more…We began our day with a trip to Versailles, a magnificent palace 50km from the din of Paris’ center that served as the court of Louis XIV. The French have a real thing for Louis XIV—for instance, their generic cheap beer is called “1643” after the year he ascended to power, and to this day the fleur-de-lys, his royal insignia, can be found on basically everything.
Nestled between an old-growth forest, verdant pastures and a small lake, it was built originally by Louis XIII as a hunting lodge where he could escape the rigours of courtly life. However, the Sun King had other plans for the estate. Instead of residing in the middle of Paris surrounded by France’s people of quality, as had been the custom since the days of Charlemaigne, he would make the nobles and diplomats come to him at his retreat in the country.
After his ascension to power, Louis recruited most talented architect, civil engineer and interior designer in France and opened his coffers to the three men, ordering them to build the most opulent palace they could conceive of.
read more…It’s impossible to get a bad meal here. From $3 shwarma-and-frites (“spinning meat,” Mom calls it) to six-course menus that drain your wallet and leave you hung over, every spot of food in this country is sumptuously prepared. Sadly, eating here is as expensive as it is tasty. Whether it’s due to the high cost of labor, the big-city rent or the 20% sales tax, most eateries in Paris charge prices that are high when measured in euros and positively astronomical after converting to dollars! Eating out drains the wallet faster than a trip to the red light district at La Pigalle (or so I assume…) I can’t imagine that Parisians eat out on a regular basis.
Nonetheless, the streets are filled with eateries and dens of libation. There are so many restaurants here that the French have evolved special names to differentiate the varieties of gustatory delight they offer.
read more…I just spent four crrrrazy days on the tiny island of Shikoku, driving through the Japanese countryside. We had a car for most of our trip, and I can’t praise Max enough for his driving skills. He drives almost as crazy as the locals, which made things much easier (and more rollercoaster-like) on the tiny, one-lane roads that wind through Shikoku’s mountainous interior.
Our first day of driving found us in Ikeda, which I quickly declared the armpit of Japan. There is nothing interesting here; we only stopped because it was getting dark and we had no idea where else to find a hotel for the night. It took us half an hour of driving down random streets through town (sometimes the wrong way) before we found the train station and, eventually, a woman who spoke a few words of English.
The big problem with travelling on Shikoku is that they just aren’t equipped to handle foreigners. There are no foreign tourists that we’ve seen. As hard as this makes things for us, it also works to our advantage: we are exotic visitors, an exception to the rule of everyday life. I stopped counting the number of bug-eyed stares I’ve gotten from locals.
read more…Returning to our hostel after a day of exploring Kyoto and soaking in mountain hot springs, we ran into a couple of Scottish girls we’d met earlier in the day. We all spent some time watching TV in the cramped downstairs lounge, which also acts as laundry room, shower room, storage room, and the center of social life at Kyoto Cheapest Inn.
As travellers came home from the day’s activities, a bolus of foreigners formed at the table around us, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, sake or green tea. We made repeated trips to the Lawson (7-11 kind of thingie) to buy more alcohol, and the clerk there got more amused with every visit from the obviously drunk gaijin. Somewhere around midnight, the girls decided it would be a grand idea to go out to a night club. Lacking the facilities of reason or higher logic, Max and I decided to join them despite the fact that none of us knew more than a dozen words of Japanese. That was how we found ourselves in a genuine Japanese hip-hop club.
read more…I’m in Kyoto at a joint valled Kyoto Cheapest Inn. At $17 a night, it’s just about the cheapest place I’ve ever dared to stay while abroad. In any other country of the world, I’d be afraid to stay in something with “cheapest” in its name, or with a rating of two stars, or at a cost of less than $20 per night. But the place got good reviews, and my experiences so far in Japan have led me to believe that these people are incapable of anything less than perfect housekeeping. Everything in this country is spotless! Old places get run down, shabby, out of style – but they are almost always clean.
Cheapest Inn is a 40-bunk dormitory on the second floor of a WWII-era apartment building. The beds are traditional futon (a thin quilted mattress stuffed with down feathers) and the interior decor is done in a style I like to call “high modern whatever-the-hell-was-on-sale-at-Home Depot.” For $9 a night, Max and I staked our claim on the tatami-covered floor of the communal sleeping area.
read more…On a whim, Max and I took a side trip to the small town of Nikko, 100 miles north of Tokyo. Halfway there our train split into segments and we ended up in the wrong car, travelling far north of our goal. A kindly train conductor saved us from an uncertain fate and we arrived in Nikko at 8pm, long after the tourist info center and buses had stopped running. It started to snow on us as we waited outside the station! Then our luck changed.
read more…What are the buildings and environment like?
In Asakusa, the neighborhood of our hostel, everything is pretty downtempo. Buildings are small, crowds are about what you’d get in LA, and things have a shabby but impeccably clean feeling to them. Much of the Tokyo area is like that. Any neighborhood that wasn’t touched by the “economic miracle” of the 1980s still consists of 1950s-era low rise buildings with a few prefab skyscrapers thrown in for good measure.
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