non-Linux related!

To eat, or not to eat.

There's quite a bit I'd like to write about eating with regard to myself and this past year. However, I cannot find the time to write it! I will mention that last year I complained that I frequently ended up in situations wherein I felt hungry. This year, the opposite: I spoil myself instead.

Wake up, the sky isn't falling.

What a strange sleeping pattern I've adopted. It is now in synchrony with my girlfriend's, more or less. I will note that this particular T.A. experience has been exceptionally rewarding. One of the major benefits has been a revival of my sense of responsibility. Due to overwhelming school load, I was beginning to feel irresponsible enough to make me doubt myself.

I am my most responsible when people entrust me with responsibility. When I don't feel trusted, my performance is impacted. Trust me, and I won't disappoint you!

Wait, what does being a T.A. and awkward sleeping patterns have to do with one another? Right! I spent the night completing my portion of the exam marking. The third page, the one I marked, was the longest of the three, but pleasant heuristics developed to expedite the process. It is fun, to work throughout the night and have something accomplished before (or shortly into) the morning. However, Tuesday morning saw me waking up at 6:15AM and waiting 30 minutes for a 7:00AM bus to campus. And this was wonderful. The snow has melted recently and spring is new. It was warm enough for me to feel cool with just a sweater on. The sun slowly rose. I met some of my students on campus, and found one sleeping on a couch. ("Wake up, the exam is in an hour!" I said, as I swatted her with a newspaper.) I did a fair amount of running between buildings too, as I looked for the other T.A.s before the exam was given. Mornings are very nice indeed.

Milk - in a bottle!

I have started using Remember the Milk to maintain a todo list. As does my girlfriend, I find it lacking. Mostly, it is cumbersome, and is lacking in usability. My intention is to use it in conjunction with tasque when it's ready. I am actually mildly alarmed about potential privacy issues with Remember the Milk, so I should really look into that some more ... :D Right now, I am refraining from providing private details, but perhaps street names are even too much! Mwahaha.

The last goodbye.

Since I am striking out on adventure soon, I am trying to say Goodbye to as many people as I can in person. Frank, Kate, Victoria, Vlad, Shane, Emily, Ashley, Danielle, etc. Good night Ontario crew. I hope you all fare well in my absence. (A likely story.) I am concerned for my dog (he's very old) and my father (he just turned 39/72!). At least my brother won't be leaving Ontario any time soon, now with baby imminent! Wow, life is hectic.

Signing off

I have to sleep to start studying for an important Friday exam, so Good Night.

Can open termcap database file :)

So, after some struggling, I've decided that, for this assignment, it would probably be more productive for me to try and compile and install emacs as a user in my lab account rather than endure with vi. Compilation went much more smoothly than it had with synergy the other day, except that, afterward, when I tried to run it, I would get the following error:

emacs: "Cannot open termcap database file"

And the process would exit. That wasn't nice. I tried googling the matter, and couldn't find any solution in the first few pages. Well, there were solutions, just not ones I could use. A lot of them recommended installing libncurses or a compatibility library, neither of which I have the rights to do. It eventually dawned on me to read the the termcap manual, discovered the environment variable TERMCAP and, after a `locate`, found an example TERMCAP database file on my system for xterm. Copy, set variable, run emacs. Success!

I hope this helps someone at some point. I should really post this as a reply to others with the same issue. "If it can't find the database, tell it where one is!" Ah well, maybe during the weekend :)

A tool's tool

My laptop is ill indeed. On a fun note, I did look at the hard drive, and it is much better secured than in my tablet PC. I was sort of hoping they would be having the same problem. Consequently, I am stranded in the computer labs on campus using our HP workstations. They're not that bad, but it is inconvenient not having access to my regular environment, my regular tools. For instance, I enjoy emacs a good deal, but they don't have it installed here in the lab. I can compile it, but after trying a little and running through a number of dependencies, I think it might be high time to learn vi. Vi, a tool's tool. A tool for tools. That's my little jab at it.

I just went through vimtutor (we have vim 7.0 installed) and it wasn't as bad as I expected. Its modal nature definitely feels different conceptually, but so did emacs when I started learning that. At least with "the Single Unix Specification", I can expect vi to be installed on most PCs. I'm not sure what the value is of learning so many different tools. I enjoy a well-rounded experience, but when tools are to a large degree substitutes for one another, perhaps depth in one is sufficient.

Anyway, back to being productive. Let's go vi :|

Oh! And, it's pretty funny the errors I'm making hopping between Google Docs and vi. Perhaps there's a plugin I can use to enable vi key-bindings in my web browser's text entry forms? I don't really understand why browser's use their own, petty text input devices rather than launching a mini-editor. Oh pluggable components!

Productivity

I think I have done reasonably well with my networking assignment. There are ways in which it could be better, but it's effectively complete, and I have other work to do. I was hoping to start on the databases assignment (due Friday) this weekend. Instead, I'll read over one more time and go to sleep. I feel I'll know the distributed systems material fairly well for the midterm, given this assignment. Yay.

I suffer from a mild form of information addiction. Last semester I had instituted new policies on when I could access certain "addictive" information. Mostly, blogs and Slashdot. I still allow myself my to actively search out information. (Let's find out more about FTP on the wikipedia!) But I try to minimise information that wasn't directly solicited. (Oh, Google Reader!) I let myself do such pleasure reading on weekends now. Usually one day a week. I had done very well keeping that up after last semester throughout the break, but when school started again, that resolve dissolved. That wasn't much of a problem, because I haven't had much school work with which it could interfere. This next week, however, I have two midterms and two assignments due. This past week, it has been interfering. So, until next Saturday, no more pleasure news. Oh no!

The compulsion to keep up with the current is strange. The fellow(s) at Mindhacks.com don't seem to believe in Internet addiction very much, coming from a psychologist's perspective. But then I'm not sure what to call it. A very strong compulsion that usually wins out except when situations begin to seem dire, and sometimes even then. At least when it matters, it seems I'm capable of controlling it. I just wish it was easier still, so that it wouldn't be a detriment at all.

I am having an issue with a classmate and I'm not quite sure what went wrong. They gave a presentation (on OLAP) but I failed to understand whether there was anything distinctive about OLAP that separated it from regular DBs, besides the scale and potential visualisations. It seemed that everything discussed could be achieved through the use of comprehensive queries on a database, though the performance would be awful, and an attentive user, sprinkled with pretty visualisations. I feel I was misunderstood on two points, that I had a criticism of OLAP and the nature of multidimensionality with regard to a regular database.

I don't know enough about OLAP to criticise it or not. What I do have a is a question: what distinguishes it? And, I'm beginning to see how a focus on multidimensionality that exists in OLAP is absent (though possible) in a RDB.

Anyway, rather than making myself understood, I should I have opted to research it independently. However, I feel the classmate could have handled it more diplomatically theirself. Eventually, they decided that "we agree to disagree." That doesn't make much sense to me, as I never agreed to disagree, and I'm not sure what we would be disagreeing on. I don't dispute the arguments, I do want to know what makes OLAP different, though. Now I search.

I am implementing an 8-hour schedule for my day. I will spend 8 hours doing work. Perhaps a bit more if I need to, but hopefully not. It's difficult to do on campus when you have friends you only see on campus. At least with some of them, though, I've started seeing them more in the evenings which frees up most of my morning time. I also see them in a working capacity,so perhaps I will get extra hours of work in.

I'm also a T.A. this semester and I find it difficult to fit academic work in between marking sessions and labs. Perhaps I should exclude T.A. hours from my 8-hours of academic work. Treat them like two separate jobs. I am concerned I will overload myself, though. Well, let's see how it goes.

I've discovered that the lectures I probably want for association analysis are day 7 and day 8. The former spends the first half-hour on some basic statistics which was refreshing, though I had a CIS course last semester that dealt heavily with probability and statistics.

I eagrely anticipate the move to video lectures. They'll reduce cost, improve quality, and allow students more versatility in their studies. They might threaten a student's self-organisation, though.

Mine Me

I'm watching a lecture on statistical aspects of data mining given by a Goolge employee lecturing at Stanford. Some of it is supposed to be relevant to Association Analysis. A sad thing about video is that it's difficult to skip to the parts you need. Skimming is more difficult than with text at present :)

I wish the lectures at the University of Guelph were also available on-line. I would rather be paying almost solely for certification than for access to the knowledge. Is sitting in on classes you're not registered in a theft of intellectual property? What if you're not even a student? What if you're not a citizen of Canada? Does it matter whether a university is public or private?

Well, I feel that lectures can move on-line quite easily and will. It'll be much less expensive than paying lecturers at every university to be present. Instead, a few good lecturers will be hired to be recorded. There'll be greater quality control. Perhaps competing lecturers could produce their own series of lectures and sell them, meeting some curriculum requirements. Cheaper video lectures, fancier video lectures, all "guaranteed" to fulfill course requirements. Standardised exams. The worst aspect is the loss of diversity of course. Oh, what a tremendous loss, too! As my girlfriend suggests, have personalised lectures. "Data Structures by Xining Li" and people could subscribe to certain course approachs. That would be nice. Yup, the future, recorded here for your edification.

The video claims association analysis will be covered the week they look at chapter 6, which concerns it. The textbook is by a few fellows and Kumar. I think I saw that textbook available on-line (legitimately). I suppose I'll investigate.