Windows Live Writer

Although we have a net connection in the apartment, the wireless router we ordered a couple of weeks ago (that was meant to be delivered in 3-5 business days) hasn’t arrived, so we have to take turns plugging our computers directly into the modem. Pretty annoying. Consequently, I was looking for a solution to drafting posts offline in WordPress. WordPress supports Google Gears, but it just adds local caching functionality to speed up WP’s operation; it doesn’t permit offline blogging. I found Windows Live Writer, which is an impressive piece of software. It interfaces with WP (and a lot of other blogging platforms), and allows you to write and preview posts under the WP theme you’re using. It also allows you to insert pictures, and it will upload the pictures in the same way WP natively does. It also supports picture processing, such as cropping, resizing, effects, and so on. It’s pretty intuitive as well.

  12:46am  •  Internet  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

New Digs

This weekend I just finished moving into a new apartment in Menlo Park. Found a real gem – about 1200 sq ft (110 sq m) and cheaper than what I was paying back in Sydney or on campus. Leafy, quiet neighborhood, free laundry, a Safeway and Trader Joe’s within walking distance, central heating, and a bunch of other stuff. But the real luxury is that it’s within walking distance of work.

And it’s incomparable to the “transit” accommodation I had for the last 2 months. I had to find a place in a rush and I paid the price. Let me say that living in a 2-bedroom apartment with 3 other guys (2 of them literally living in the living room with questionable hygienic standards) is not fun. Here’s a tip: if there are food chunks all over the dish drying rack, you haven’t washed your shit up properly.

  12:22am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  • 

New Photos on Facebook

This is a bit of a self-reminder to find out if anyone has written a plugin which takes Facebook wall posts and pushes them into WordPress. But for now, click through to see:

  12:20am  •  Life  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (2)  • 

Survivor: Samoa post-season comments

Spoilers after the jump (sorry feed readers!)

» Continue reading whole article »

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Survivor: Samoa predictions

Finale is about to kick off for this evening, so here’s my thoughts on how it might go down tonight.

Brett came out of nowhere, and clearly he’s the biggest threat for the million. With the jury stacked with embittered Galu members, there’s going to be quite a bit of resentment there against Foa Foa. I don’t think Brett has put anyone on the jury offside, and he’s never had a vote cast against him. If he fails to win at the immunity challenges, he’s gone.

Foa Foa have had an amazing run, which goes to show how even if you suck at challenges, the social engineering side of the game is really the trump card.

They’ve all been under the control of Russell, who is one of my favourite all-time competitors (along with Yau Man and Yul). He’s the most impressive manipulator I’ve seen. The guy is cocky, but he’s not cocky to the point of being deluded – he knows when he’s in trouble. And you gotta hand it to him – three immunity idols with no clues. But even more impressive is he knew exactly how to use them. He played it when he should have. He displayed it when he should have. And the best part was in the last round where he was so confident he didn’t even bother playing it: “I’m keeping it as a souvenir, Jeff!”

I don’t know how he’d go down with the jury, but for sheer, “outwit, outplay, outlast” I think he deserves to win. So if I was Mick, Jaison or Natalie, I would be angling to blindside him if Brett wins immunity.

Jaison has been the biggest underperformer. I expected more from him physically and mentally. He’s pretty much been with Russell, which is fine, but it means he’ll get overshadowed by him when it comes down to the jury vote – unless Jaison gets Russell off first. If that’s his plan and he pulls it off, that’d be a masterstroke.

Mick is also nice, but he’s really part of the Russell coattails crew. He’s kind of in the same position as Jaison. Puppets – they’ve never really executing any gamechanging moves.

Natalie is nice… in all senses of the word. I’m not sure that she’s under Russell’s thumb as much as Russell thinks, especially as she has recently discovered that she and Brett are brothers and sisters in Christ. But the interesting thing is that Russell, Mick and Jaison are all pretty well off. Russell’s a millionaire. Mick is a specialist, who’s gotta be pulling in a healthy multi-six-figure income. Jaison is a law student at UChicago, and assuming he can find a job in this economy, will earn a healthy salary. I wonder if these things will play into the minds of the jury.

If I was Jaison, Mick or Natalie, I’d be seeking to ally with each other and try to kick off Russell and Brett. If either of those two make it through, it’s an uphill battle to get the most jury votes.

So, my predictions:

In a three-way with Russell, Brett, and one other, it’s a close call between Russell and Brett, but I think Russell can swing enough votes with that sweet talk of his. He’s a master manipulator, but he’s never really pissed anyone off except Laura and maybe Monica. He certainly hasn’t backstabbed any jury member in a way that would constitute betrayal (Shambo seems to be ok with what happened last week).

In a three-way between Natalie, Mick, and Jaison, it’s too close to call. I would be happy if any of them won.

In a three-way between Russell and two Foa Foa, I call Russell.

In a three-way between two Foa Foa (not Russell) and Brett, I call Brett.

I’m cheering for Russell.

  5:17pm  •  TV  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Videos from Shen & Xiao Min’s wedding

From last October in Sydney. Nicely edited together by Reuben.

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Cetera Audio Positioning Algorithm

The Cetera Algorithm is a sound algorithm that faithfully reproduces 3D positioning with stereo earphones or headphones. Although originally designed for use with hearing aids, if you have some earphones handy, you can hear some sample audio tracks (the barbershop one is great). The 3D positioning is pinpoint sharp and pretty startling. It doesn’t seem to be able to locate sounds in front of you though.

“Current hearing aids are miniature PA systems. They mainly amplify sound,” said Jerry Ruzicka, president, Starkey Labs. “However, while making sound louder, because of their physical presence in the ear canal, they obscure the clues needed by the brain to process sound. The results is that most hearing aids aren’t able to give the brain the data it needs to filter out background noise, to locate where the sound is coming from or to favor one voice over another in a crowded room.”

The algorithm is not new, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. I feel like getting a haircut now.

  4:35pm  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (2)  • 

Time Magazine on the last decade

Time has an article called “The End of the 2000s: Goodbye to a Decade from Hell“.

Calling the 2000s “the worst” may seem an overwrought label in a decade in which we fought no major wars, in historical terms. It is a sadly appropriate term for the families of the thousands of 9/11 victims and soldiers and others killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the lack of a large-scale armed conflict makes these past 10 years stand out that much more. This decade was as awful as any peacetime decade in the nation’s entire history. Between the West’s ongoing struggle against radical Islam and our recent near-death economic experience — trends that have largely skirted much of the developing world — it’s no wonder we feel as if we’ve been through a 10-year gauntlet. Americans may have the darkest view of recent history, since it’s in the U.S. that the effects of those trends have been most acute. If you live in Brazil or China, you have had a pretty good decade economically. Once, we were the sunniest and most optimistic of nations. No longer. …

Were we Americans alone in our troubles? Hardly. The Asian tsunami of 2004 killed more than 200,000 people. And our financial meltdown quickly spread around the developed world. Yet from our lofty perch overlooking the 20th century — the American Century, TIME’s co-founder once labeled it — the fall has been precipitous. Who among us is unscathed? Not many. Even if none of your family members died in combat, you had no money with Madoff and you own your house free and clear, you most likely still took a hit. To paraphrase the question Ronald Reagan posed years ago, Are you better off today than you were at the beginning of the decade? For most of us, the answer is a resounding no. …

There is no guarantee that the next decade (get ready for the Teens!) will be any better than this one. It’s likely that China will continue to grow faster than the U.S., and we may continue to see our global dominance erode. But very significantly, we still hold many of the world’s trump cards. We still have the world’s strongest military, which means we can and must lead in maintaining order and crafting peace. We are the leaders in technological innovation. And we are still the nation that most others emulate. If we remember those points and avoid the easy outs of deferral and neglect, then the next decade should be a helluva lot better than the last one.

It actually has been a pretty torrid decade, all things considered.

  4:02pm  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

A sense of scale in the universe

Recently, there have been a lot of videos showing the relative sizes of interstellar objects like this one, and this one. Documentaries have also made similar videos. There’s even a video which brands itself as the “Ultimate Universe Objects Size Comparison“. Unfortunately, it’s been produced with spelling mistakes and trite comments.

This one, called “The Known Universe” was produced by the American Museum of Natural History (embedded at bottom of post). It’s easily the best one that I’ve seen. But can anybody explain to me why the image of the “galaxies we have mapped so far” covers two conic areas, instead of a more even distribution?

These renderings remind of a poster I had on my wall as a kid. When I was really young, my dad used to subscribe to National Geographic, and the issues often came with nice glossy posters of various things. One of the posters, published in 1983, was entitled “Journey into the Universe Through Time and Space” and dad stuck it on my bedroom wall. I loved that poster. It showed a 3D depiction of our inner solar system, and then zoomed out by orders of magnitude to show our local group of stars, then our galaxy, then our local group of galaxies, our supercluster of galaxies, and then the known universe projected on a 2D plane. I remember staring at it, being amazed, and trying to imagine the sheer scale of it all.

Nat Geo has since produced an updated poster called The Universe (which looks fantastic), but I found some people who are selling their copies of the old version that I had. I also had this poster of Earth on my bedroom wall.

My dad was, and still is, an astronomy buff, and those things rubbed off onto me. Even though I was only 4 years old at the time, I vividly remember him taking me outside in 1986 to look at Halley’s Comet through some binoculars. I remember him showing me the landmarks of the night sky – Orion’s Belt, the Southern Cross, Sirius and Canopus (the two brightest stars), Venus (the brightest object in the night sky other than the moon, distinguishable from the stars as an non-twinkling reddish point of light), and the band of haze that stretched across the sky, from horizon to horizon like a cloud: a side-on view of our Milky Way. We used to drive out into the paddocks, far away from the town light, and lie on the car bonnet with binoculars, or set up a telescope in the field, and he’d point out the Pleiades, the Jewel Box, and Jupiter and its moons. He was a pretty hardcore amateur astronomer too. Back in the 80s, without the help of a computer, he’d pore through charts looking for obscure stellar phenomena. He’d calculate where and when they would appear in the sky, and then go out and find them. It was definitely under his influence that I developed my interest in astronomy.

Continuing on with the theme of this post, here are Discover Magazine’s Top 10 Astronomy Photos of 2009.

  12:06am  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Laptop shot three times

A few weeks ago, a part-Jewish American tourist was crossing from Egypt into Israel and was being questioned by Israeli border authorities. The authorities got a little suspicious of her and in particular her laptop, so they took it away. And shot it three times. Amazingly, the bullets, which each left huge gaping holes in the Macbook Pro, all missed the hard drive. The Israelis apologized and will be reimbursing her for her laptop.

  8:48pm  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •