Older blog entries for zealot (starting at number 20)

Today absolutely r0cked! I spent the day at the honda indy down the Gold Coast, roughly 45mins south of Brisbane. I The power of those machines is absolutely awesome. I'm still trying to figure out how those guys walk away from crashes, on the main straight if you looked directly in front of you across the track all you saw was a blur and the sound of a car screaming past at roughly 300km/h.

Ic /. mentions the linux conference in my home town Brisbane in February. Cu there

stuff

There is a good chance that I will be working at PLAS over the summer holidays on a genetic algorithm framework in java. This should be cool considering thats what my thesis topic is about, anyway the situation for graduates finding a job isn't the best right now.

rant

bjf: the goodwill bridge is the most thoughless piece of shit that shitstacks with the rest of the brainless ideas that the brisbane city council consistently erects in this place to appease the gods of the 1950's. The footbridge purely comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere, it was strategically placed by Stevie Wonder. This is gonna sound stupid, but this place is also polluted with parks, that secretly house the homeless, and in some of the most primetime commercial real estate. What Brisbane needs is a Tokyo or Singaporean business man to start building the city and not making it look like an amusement park, unlike the sheep herding arseclowns that are currently in govt.

I just did a presentation on my research topic "Genetic Programming for Technical Analysis in Financial Markets" to a bunch of information systems students in under 10 mins and man it was torture. First of all, doing a 10 mins presentation on what genetic programming is to a bunch of computing scientists is a hard ask. Secondly, there was no place to put all my notes coz of the uncoordinated design of where the presentation was held so out went the plan on what I was supposed to say and in came the John Cleese improvisation of a BBC special. What I said apparently did not matter, I could of talked about a 1960's adventure of the occult because all that did matter was eye contact, walking around why you talk and finishing on time. Last of all when my time was up, and the first 10 minutes that went by actually felt like 2, this jerk kept ringing the bell for roughly 4 seconds while I was answering someones question. I couldn't resist telling him, "yeah I get the point".

*sigh*

I've been busy working on my Research Proposal the last week or so and have had no time for coding. That includes completing the AI pacman demo using genetic programming but is on top of the todo list for holiday items.

I'm fortunate to live in a very culturally and educated neighborhood, the neighborhood news is run by a raging anarchist who runs one of the local bookstores and I never miss an issue purely for entertainment value. In the latest issue he mentioned Robert Frisk and Noam Chomsky, a google here and found this choice reading

There goes an old saying, "if you want something done then you got to do it yourself". This has been so true in the field of programming. This is one of the reasons why I like the open source model. I found a c++ library, genprog that completely suits my need in preference to galib although the amount of bugs running around in the thing is significant to a week or so in fixes and the last update on the thing was sometime in 1994. So I'm left to 2 options, fix all bugs and tell the maintainer or start my own library and release it myself.

I finally found the secret to getting work done, a healthy diet, plenty of excercise and the occasional lifestyle change. I'm aiming for 100 pushups straight by the end of the month, my alltime record is 120 back in the martial arts days. Ever since my bike rusted and snapped in half while I was riding it a few years ago and ran out of money for buying luxury item food, my productivity has fallen, and it's only taken me 3 or so years to figure that out.

stuff

Had my graduation ceremony yesterday, it was good. Took some photos with the family and recieved my degree.

I had planned and paid for over a month ago a 3 day trip to Melbourne to watch the AFL grand final with a friend, return airfare and hotel package with ansett who've recently declared insolvent, so as of last week it looked like I wasn't going, plus all the tickets to the final would be sold out. NOT HAPPY about that.

coding

It's amazing how much time can be wasted working on the wrong thing because of an assumption of mis-communication.

I think I've got a genetic programming demo of pacman worked out, now all I got to do is finish the damn code and post it in the usual places. This is gonna be real interesting.

rant -

blah

A high number of posts since last Tuesday have contained the words [terrorist|world|tragedy|ESR]. I think it's time we start getting back to the task at hand. We're shaken and most of us not hurt. Let's face it, the world is not a perfect place, wars have been a part of man for milleniums. The important thing is not to forget the victims and heroes.

I don't know how many ppl know or remember, but during the Sydney Olympics a group with a /bin/laden connection (symlink perhaps?) tried blowing up a nuclear reactor just outside Sydney, imagine the consequence of that!

A country has the right to defend it's borders and people. I must say in a comical sense, who America needs right now is Alexander the Great

There is no bigger hipocrate than a country, and it's just a fact of life.

Finally, I hope this poem I've had on my web page for a while make a positive difference to whoever is reading this post.

coding

Using galib for my honours project, haven't got any concrete coding done yet, but there is a possibility I will be porting parts of it to C# :O

some people are pathetically sad

Okay, so I thought approximately 11:30pm AEST was a dream. I was working on my Literature Review which I still have not finished and my Dad kept calling me to watch the news. After several requests I gave in and went upstairs to see the WTC buildings with smoke pouring out of them. This totally had to be a dream. Then the most unbelievable thing happened, I saw _live on tv Tower 2 crumble to the ground. I think my heart stopped a few seconds, and soon after Tower 1.

I remember my high school principal once said, the worst terrorist is the one that is willing to take his own life. When you have people believing that the more christians they take with them the higher you go in heaven then you have deranged lunatics and a recipe for disaster.

I think (without pointing the finger but let's be serious, this wasn't the work of boyscouts) parts of the Middle East in the next few weeks will be the world's largest sheets of glass.

On random side note, the linux kernel mailing list has had limited posts since this happened. I find it hard to do any work now, this is something we will be telling our grandchildren about and the events that are about to follow.

gwossum: I just did circles for 7 weeks deciding on a research topic in which I have to write a thesis for, but I won't start that until the beginning of next year. Currently I have to write a couple other assessments for my research topic though, and heavily weighted ones too, one due next week which I have barely started. I thought that I would rather wait around for a few weeks and choose something I liked than choose something quick and be stuck on something I don't like for the next 8 months. In the end I chose something that came along by chance. Patience pays off in the thesis topic decision, but lack of time to complete assessments will be the killer later. (Must confront research as a managed project)

Oh man, how good I've become at leaving things for too late. 2am and I'm still writing page 1 of 6 and that is not even research/thesis related :-P