Journal Entries
Some of my more local friends.
Posted Apr 12, 2005
A small bit of background: my childhood was lacking in trust and in pride; I believe this is why these two traits cause the strongest emotion in me, and why these traits are the most important ones for me to look for in a friend. That said, all of my close friends are people I can be proud of and people I can trust. All of my associates, or friends but not necessarily 'close' friends, are people whom I suspect hold these qualities, but I've never had reason or opportunity to test them.
As an added bonus, there are four or five people with whom I am also on the same wavelength at; we don't have to expend much energy in understanding each other, and so interesting discussions become more productive much faster.
There are people who I know will read this, that I consider close friends. Some of them aren't members of hootoo. I won't name who they are, because although they could reasonably be flattered by it, it might also conceivably be degrading for those who aren't named; even though there are people who I don't yet consider 'close' friends, I have no reason to think that they won't become so over time.
So, I would like to share with you all some of the specific traits I find most appealing in /some/ of my friends.
Just because he's in my mind at the moment due to an interesting discussion last night: J comes first.
He's a biochemist who specialises in the way that various chemicals interact with human systems. As I think I've mentioned before, he and I have been discussing how to create self-replicating nanotech assemblers for a variety of uses. Step one of this plan involves a large monetary investment, and some expertise both from his field, and from mine. After talking about this concept in more detail last night, I'm now convinced that it is perfectly possible, and that even completing only a small part of the first step of the process would make us incredibly, unbelievably, insanely rich.
As a parallel step we could also do things a different way, which would mean more work for me, but would grant us greater flexibility in the later steps of the process. It would also cause us to be incredibly, unbelievably, insanely rich. And could be done seperately as well.
We've also discussed a seperate project which would take a lot less capital and a lot less effort to start, and could give us a fair amount of acclaim, a large steady income, and the networks and skills necessary to develop the ideas which would follow. Which all means that we should do that one first.
J1 has been a close friend for almost as long, and is currently working as a firmware designer for a local company (http://www.endace.com). He and I are on the same wavelength to a scary degree. He is my doppelganger, to the point where his current girlfriend met him because she thought he was me (I'd already known her about four years at this point) and there was a couple of interesting weeks where our bosses couldn't tell us apart - we worked just down the hall from each other. I gave up and died my hair.
The only major difference we have is that he prefers working in hardware, and I prefer working in software.
About a year ago, our topic of conversation drifted around to operating systems, and whether we thought we should give the finger to microsoft and just write our own from scratch. We thought about it for a minute, and decided we didn't have all the skills we would need to create one.
Last weekend, the topic drifted to computer architecture, and embedded operating systems; we wondered whether we could create an entire computer and operating system from scratch. We thought about it for about ten minutes, talked about some of the subsystems we would need to design, and then decided we didn't really want to bother. It's amazing what you can learn in a year.
J1's workmates are mostly similarly skilled; D, a hardware designer, and G, also a firmware engineer, among others. We go drinking on the occasional friday night after they finish work, although usually we just end up somewhere with comfortable couches and fine imported spirits, and discuss interesting things.
My cousin R has not long ago completed her masters in some variation on the theme of chemistry; I remember her research project and although I can't remember the names for various things, it was to do with a topic like forensic chomatography. She is also /very/ switched on.
An aquaintance K is currently doing his doctorate in magnetohydrodynamics, and he's also really onto it when it comes to other topics too, to the point where he can keep up with a discussion between J1 and I on programming techniques for vector state machines using field gate arrays. Even though his degree is in maths and we're both comp. sci. people.
I was going to carry on talking about various other people, most of whom are currently students taking things like political science, or sociology; or have been students (some of them several times) and are just really clued up and interesting people; and I was also going to emphasise that these people all have beautiful beautiful hearts, but now I can't be bothered. You get the idea, and as long as I can keep track of them, and use them to mutual benifit at some point, then I'll be happy.
On a related note: I need a design for a chainmail machine; and then the snowball starts to roll. 
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Latest reply: Apr 12, 2005
I saw a dragon this morning!
Posted Apr 5, 2005
I heard its breath, soon after my alarm went off, and it took me a little while to figure out what the noise was. I looked out the window, but couldn't see anything in the fog, so I went back to bed, puzzled.
I heard it again, louder and closer, so I looked again and saw it this time!
Big and beautiful, it was lazily drifting above the river, barely moving the air, with a red belly, darkening to black on its back.
Still just a baby, and still learning to fly, it wasn't very good yet at keeping at the same height. It almost crashed into the bridge but saw it at the last second and rose above it in a puff of flame.
As the dragon curved away behind the trees, I saw a man dressed in black trapped in its claws, pedalling his legs as if he was walking in space.
Several other people on the bridge pointed and waved, and some called out to the man. I don't know whether he replied or not, but I won't forget the gorgeous baby dragon I saw this morning.
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Latest reply: Apr 5, 2005
I'm putting the call out for all creative people.
Posted Apr 1, 2005
This is me trying to track down some skilled, intelligent and imaginitive people. I know you're out there; I've met quite a few of you. But I want to meet more.
It's not just for selfish reasons; I want to make you rich too.
It's true that the area where advances (and money!) are to be made is in the interdisciplinery realm... Ray Kurzweil himself said: "...increasingly important work needs to be interdisciplinary -- to draw upon many different fields together." and: "Increasingly that’s [true] in the entrepreneurial field, where to actually achieve something of value, you have to be able to combine different fields."
So that's what I'm doing. I've already made inroads, towards many different goals:
I've discussed with musicians how we can create software which can produce music which responds to the mood of the listener.
I've discussed with psychologists how to build a 3D sonar map of a room using only a home PC and some spare microphones.
I've discussed with engineers how we can create the world's first immersive virtual reality environment, and I have plans to help create the world's first virtual-immersive movie.
I've discussed with biochemists how we can create nanotech self-assemblers from individual molecules.
And more.
None of these things would be possible if only one person was involved - they require skills from many different fields.
So come on! Stand up and be counted! I want to know who you are, what you do, and what you're good at. You may think your skills aren't impressive, but I'm sure you can shine with the right project... try me!
Please! 
And first of all, for me to be able to get the capital to build some of these prototypes... does anyone know someone who would consider designing me a machine? Perhaps an Engineer or a Toolmaker?
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Latest reply: Apr 1, 2005
Personal rant. Please ignore this.
Posted Mar 26, 2005
This journal is just a sketchpad for the current rant that I need to get off my chest. Well same as usual I guess, but this time I don't expect it to be constructive at all.
Incedentally, this journal is brought to you by the letter: 'Aargh!'
I've just spent most of the day (literally) trying to get the code for my current assignment to compile. Every time I think I've fixed it, I recompile and... one error. Only one error. I don't think I've had a second error in the same compile since about 2pm (it's now almost 8:30pm).
Admittedly it hasn't been the same error - it's been different almost every time - but it's still one error.
So I was most shocked when 
it compiled! About 6pm, I think it was.
Of course, it didn't /work/. I've just moved on to run-time errors instead of compile errors. But it's still nice to be able to play with the output and have functions which can do my bug-testing for me and so on.
Most of the problem I've had has been with interfacing with the WEKA package that the machine learning group has spent the last five years odd working on. Considering that one of the main programmers was the guy who was my lecturor in object-oriented programming techniques, the code sure has some terrible object-oriented programming techniques.
The use of set and get functions has been erratic at best. The copy function is missing in one of the major objects, and is replaced instead with a different type of constructor. (?!!) There are random errors without reasonable explanation whenever I try to alter the attributes of an instance in a way which is apparantly not the way they want them altered. And so on.
I wonder whether these guys have actually looked seriously at the HCI issues of their package. Probably not.
And now I find that after spending about a week trying to convert the raw data into something that their package can make use of, I then had to remove the classification attribute so that it didn't get converted into word vectors, and then put it back again afterwards so that the cross-fold validation can train itself with any sort of accuracy. But between the conversion to word vectors and the cross-fold validation I also have to run the data through an SVM filter, which breaks if there's any nominal values in the instances object. Including the classification attribute values. 
At the moment my program is crashing between the STWV conversion and the SVM filter, because for some reason if I have two files as datasets then one of them will have a classification attribute and the other one won't. I can't work out whether one of them has had it put back too early, or the other one has had it put back too late. I can't work out which one is the anomoly. And I can't work out how I can remove the classification attribute from the dataset for both processes, and still have it available to reinsert after filtering. It would be fine, but for some reason the WEKA package comes up with an error if I try to add an attribute object to an instances object. And trying to store the attribute object won't store the values for that attribute anyway. Which means I need to keep a copy of the original pre-converted dataset so that I can copy the attribute list across. But that means that I have more than 2x21 entire novels sitting in memory, which breaks the STWV conversion function. Without warning, of course. I'd hate to think what it would do to the SVM filter.
Once I've figured out what's happening with all these problems, and what I need to do to get around them, then I have to find a way of reordering the word vectors into a frequency list to be able to extract the most significant features of the texts.
Actually I wonder if the SVM filter can do that for me?
I'll find out when it starts working I guess.
And then I have to find a way to remove the most and least significant features programmatically.
And then I have to graph the thingumee ratio. Ten datasets for each block of text; which makes about 47,000 points of data. Hmm. Perhaps I shouldn't do that by hand.
Bugger.
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Latest reply: Mar 26, 2005
This is where I live.
Posted Mar 24, 2005
Before I get into this, I just want to get off my chest, again, that I wish it wasn't so darn HUMID around here! Gah!
It was raining this morning, and then it was a sunny high-twentys degree day, and at no point did the humidity drop below about 85%, at a guess.
It makes my legs So. Damn. ITCHY! 
It's so humid that you can actually tell the difference in the air when you cross a road or a bit of grass as you walk. Really; the air feels different. With a bit of practice, I might be able to navigate the city blindfolded, in the same way that Vimes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels can tell where in the city he is by the type of cobbles under his thin-cardboard-sole boots.
Anyway, the point I was getting to was that Hamilton is a city with an identity crisis at the moment. Well okay it has been for a while, but I was thinking about it this morning for some reason, which is why you get to hear about it.
Originally (or at least as far back as I can remember) Hamilton had the logo "Hamilton - Fountain city", which seemed okay until someone pointed out that most residents of Hamilton were only aware of two fountains in the city, and they both sucked. (Aparrantly there are more somewhere, but I haven't found them yet.)
So they changed the logo, after much humming and hawing and mild debate... to: "Hamilton - Where it's happening!"
Until someone pointed out that nothing ever happens in Hamilton. Ever.
So then they thought about changing it to: "Hamilton - rose city," but the residents of Te Awamutu (rose town) complained, saying that they have more right to use the name since a) they were there first, and b) they actually have more roses than just one garden like we do in Hamilton.
So instead they changed it to: "Hamilton - More than you expect," which just made people laugh heartily.
Aparrantly there's a city website forum thing somewhere where people have been putting forward suggestions for the new logo.
Currently running with the highest number of votes is: "Hamilton - meh," closely followed by: "Hamilton - it's easier to pronounce than Ngaruawahia."
I'm still putting my vote towards: "Hamilton - City of swamp."
Discuss this Journal entry [173]
Latest reply: Mar 24, 2005
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Jerms - a Brief flicker and then gone again.
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