orangegirl

Just finished reading this book: The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio.

It’s about phi.

The book is great about explaining the origins of phi and mathematics and how phi is found in nature and science, etc. I’ll write more about this book later.

I finished a few books in the past couple of weeks. Audio books are great for long road trips too. You can get them on Audible.com and the iTunes store. I’m just going to give a short synopsis of each one.

Time Traveler’s Wife:
This is Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel. This novel has 2 narrators: the wife, Clare and the husband, Henry, who can time travel. Because Henry can time travel both to the future and back in the past although he has no control over when and where he goes, the story gets really interesting. There’s alot of circular logic- chicken or the egg - instances. Ultimately the story is about the age old and basic philosophical argument of fate and free-will….determinism vs. nondeterminism. On top of that is a layer of morality. If you know the future, would you change the present? If you can go back in time, would you change things so they would be different in the present? Or do you have that power and things will be what they want to be?? Do you condone the horrible things that Henry does to survive? Was Clare really meant for Henry? It’s a good romance novel with a twist and it could have been shorter.

The Rule of Four:
This novel has been compared to The Da Vinci Code many times. It’s definitely in the same genre. It moves fast and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a film - even has an ending that would be fit for a movie. It’s well written but some of the character developments are annoying for me. It’s a fun read for a couple of days or on a plane.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything:
I listened to listen audio book and found it super interesting. The book focuses on incentives and tearing down conventional wisdom from an economist’s perspective. And it all comes down to statistics. Numbers don’t lie and may help in revealing true correlations and cause and effect relationships. Highly recommended read. If you like this one, I also recommend, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

Naked:
This was also an audio book. I have read both Me Talk Pretty Some Day and Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy. Naked could be by far the best. The emotions are…naked. The brutal honesty is what makes you able to laugh at his stories about his OCD and his dying mother. Sedaris has a gift of telling stories and letting the subtle messages float up in his narration. The audio is alot of fun to listen to too. His sister, Amy Sedaris, reads too and she’s hilarious.

Next on my summer reading list?

• Jared Diamond’s Third Chimpanzee
• Harry Potter book 6!!!!
• Kite Runner
• Middlesex
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night

Update 7/21:

The authors will be at Commonwealth club next thurs 7/28 at noon. checkin at 11:30. $8 for member and $15 for non members.

http://commonwealthclub.org/featured.html

I have tried reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond for almost 2 yrs now. Only half way through it.

Now there’s even more reason for me not to finish it….PBS has made a 3 part series based on Diamond’s book. Catch it on KQED 9 starting tonight.

Part 1: “Out of Eden”, 7/11, 10 pm
Part 2: “Conquest”, 7/18, 10 pm
Part 3: “Tropics”

7/13 Update: Jared Diamond will be in town on 7/15 at the Cowell Theater in Fort Mason. 7:30pm, Free admission.

I just bought a Terra Pass for my car. It’s a novel and simple idea. Basically you cancel out your car’s emissions by paying for it. That dollar amount is used to invest into projects that controls that output of greenhouse gases. I only drive my car 6K miles a yr and I paid for a $29.99 pass.

What makes the idea interesting is that we all feel that we can’t live without our car for whatever reasons like: driving to work, getting groceries, running errands, and taking the family around. At the same time we all know that cars are a major contributor to greenhouse gases. Most people are very conscious of this. This Terra Pass is a very effective way to combat the problem. Perhaps our fed goverment eventually will subsidize this process? Is time for us citizens to say, “Stop we found a better way to use our tax dollars.” Even better make our Terra Pass contribution tax deductible! Why is this any different from me donating money or goods and getting a deductible?

Also how can this apply in other parts of our daily life? What other things that we are doing that are necessities but cause alot of pollution or garbage?

Update 7/14: I just got my pass today. I also have a 10% discount code. Email me if you want it or post a comment here.

oh boy! can’t wait, but I have to…amazon is sending my copy soon. I can’t wait to disappear from the world for awhile…672 pages long!

If you’re like me, wanting more while you wait for your copy, check out these sites:
JK Rowling’s official site
The Harry Potter Lexicon
MuggleNet

Update 7/20: The book starts off differently this and I sets the tone that there is a war that even the Muggles are being affected. I’m on page 230. The action started around page 150. It’s getting really good. I already got to the first mention of Half-blood prince but no identity. The students are learning speechless spells. I wonder if the really good wizards/witches ever have to speak their spells.

The book cover now makes sense too…that’s Dumbledore and Harry looking into the pensieve. We find out more about Voldemort background. So far in the past 5 books we knew Tom Riddle is the boy wizard that eventually becomes Voldemort. We have a look at his ancestors. Now I wonder if Tom Riddle ever really fell in love or had children.

I’m going to try to read slower and savor each page. Although I’ve been going back to Book 5 to reread the final showdown and reread Dumbledore’s words to Harry about the prophecy. I don’t want to know who dies. Or maybe we do know. Maybe it’s Ron? There was the chess game in Book 1 that he sacrificed himself for Harry.

Update 7/25: I finished the book. I know who dies. It’s so sad. So the book is pretty dark. I’ll be eagerly awaiting for the final book 7. Will there be a Hogwarts left? It’s pretty clear what Harry has to do and he won’t be able to do it alone.

The authors of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner, will be at the Commonwealth Club this thursday 7/28 at noon. Checkin at 11:30 am. $8 for member and $15 for non members.

It’s worth missing lunch for… if you are curious to see the world from an economist’s perspective. It’s all about using statistics smartly to support correlations, cause and effect relationships, and tearing down coventional wisdom. The book demonstrates the power and the types of incentives used in positive and negative ways. Who knew it was Roe v. Wade that was the main cause in the nationwide crime drop in the mid 1990s. Does obsessive parenting give kids an advantage? Is your real estate agent really trying to get the best selling price for your house? Maybe think twice before you name your child.

Update 7/28:
I did go see them during lunch. I thought it would be very interesting to hear the authors of this book. It was recorded for the radio too and it was a soldout crowd. They started off by introducing themselves and how Dubner met Levitt and then how they didn’t think people would want to read their columns. Then there was the book offer. Levitt thought he would just get money for the book and no one will ever read it. Levitt also recaps the gang story titled, “Why drug dealers still live with their mothers.” It was amusing to hear him retell it. It was him that had the grad student keep going back to get more financial data.

They also told of a story that wasn’t in the book. It was about an economist at Yale that did an experiment with monkeys - teaching them to use money. They got so good at the concept that at one point the professor saw a male monkey pay a female monkey for sex…and then she turned around used the coin to buy sweets.

They also touched upon do carseats for children really work? It seems like they were questioning the conventional wisdom that carseats work, but at the end it was really about that parents spend $300 million a year on carseats that aren’t proven to work. Why hasn’t anyone come up with a better design?

There was a Q&A portion. Someone asked what kind of backlash or responses they’ve gotten. They said that they were all actually pretty positive. They said that once they had a chance to put their case studies in writing and explain and proved every piece, people understand them better. They were referring to the Roe v Wade and crime connection piece here.

Both Levitt and Dubner came across as witty and very engaging. Levitt is also a bit self-deprecating. He gave alot of credit to Dubner for writing the book by telling us that we would clearly see
Dubner’s contribution if we had read his college papers.

And yes Levitt named his last child from the list of the top ranked names.

(It’s a long one and for geeks only…so skip if you’re not one or you’ll figure it out pretty quick. )

First off, let’s say this: Eclipse was done by IBM cuz they wanted to ‘eclipse’ Sun. Get it? Eclipse? Sun? IBM vs. Sun? Yah, corporate humor and vengefulness, how nerdy and boring. Oh and first off sub one, I’m a command line Emacs/vi guy, so just giving you a heads up; I’m a little biased, but I try to be fair.

Ok, so why do I hate Eclipse? Little background first. I’m a consultant who (for now) makes a living coming into someone’s office, being nice and respectful and agreeing to be their rent-a-nerd for X number of months. With it, there’s a 50/50 shot you get to use your own tools (usually, frankly, if you’re ‘good enough’) or their tools. Eclipse seems to be the Java IDE du jour. Or better yet, IDE de l’annee (of the year). Hmph.

I try not to be biased. I’ve gone the IDE route before and only after I figured I rather spend my time typing in letters vs. driving the mouse and double-clicking did I swear off IDEs. Now I still have to use them cuz I’m not one to (most of the time) argue with the client.

I’m a firm believer in giving the client a good run for their money. And there’s nothing worse than some asshole who likes to argue about this and that vs. just getting their hands dirty and getting the job done. If the client says you’re using that crappy Pentium-60 in the the back with Windows ‘95, then, hey, it’s their money. My current client, however (and they’re a swell bunch of guys, really), has galvanized my dislike of Eclipse. It has eclipsed my view of Eclipse.

First, Eclipse is a do-everything-for-everyone in the most abstract way possible. Worse than Emacs, although, some would argue the opposite. I thought ‘buffers’ were abstracted or beyond 70’s coding terminology, but Eclipse has taken that in another direction: the future! Instead of ‘windows’ you have perspectives and views! I don’t
really know (still) what the difference is. And since there’s 5 billion menu items - only second to 10 billion Emacs Customization Groups options - it’s a real pain in the ass to figure out what does what. Sure, they’re labeled under the ‘Project’ or ‘Run’ menu items,
but it still just does not seem logical or very, dare I say, ‘intuitive’. Is anything really as intuitive as opening a door? Probably not. Needless to say, there are too many choices in Eclipse; too many icons, pictures and, er, words, sprawled all over!

Second, plugins. These are great in idea, but buggy in implementation. Whether it’s Tapestry, or Jetty, or Subversion (Subversion is a fun project in itself), there always seems to be some quirky thing going on. Like a zillion things to configure or some bizarro way to get a webapp to run (I have to double click on a ‘Run’ button in the menu bar or I can right click and selecting ‘Run’ from the project context menu). This isn’t necessarily the fault of the plugin architecture or premise, but it’s still goofy. Some people swear by it, but I think it’s like loading your Suburban (or Yukon, whatever) with as much shit as you can get and hope something,
somewhere doesn’t break.

Third, SWT. Ugh! In theory, again, maybe an ok idea. In practice, crap. First off, Java abstraction is there for a reason. Swing and AWT aren’t the easiest things to deal with. In fact, GUI programming is a pain in the ass all together. But the Java guys have done a lot of work on this and while Swing fonts *still* look like ass (yes, I know, wait for Mustang - finally 10+ years after Windows got AA fonts), they work. The slow stuff is old news as a lot of optimizations and bug fixing and tweaking, etc, have been done. I’m not saying Swing is the best, but it’s part of the CORE Java API, so Sun has a vested interest in making sure it works. And frankly, there are MANY more Swing apps than there are SWT apps. SWT however, it’s a bolt on library maintained by a third party with its biggest user being Eclipse. I’ve read all over the net problems GUI developers have had getting SWT updated or fixed and only being met with, of course, the dismissive nerd attitude - “I can’t duplicate that error, so I’m closing this bug”. Plus, SWT is a lowest common denominator widget kit. Even if your platform has cool widget X and Windows doesn’t, you won’t get it. SWT was built for Windows so Java people could develop on it and so IBM didn’t have to deal with Sun putting some kind of smack down or whatever on Eclipse. And SWT *IS* buggy! One day, while using my Powerbook, after having Eclipse open for about a week, I went to quit it and started getting these bizarro NullPointerException’s and the descriptive message was:
“Check the log.” The ‘human readable’ log said “Array index out of bounds in blah blah blah”. A quick googling yielded nothing. Yay. Now, whenever I quit or close a window, there’s always a nice little error box complaining about something. My Emacs or even vi would never do this.

Fourth, XML config files up the wazoo. Whose idea was this? Wait, lemmie rephrase that; XML is good, and can be good for configs, but if something bad happens (and what does Murphy’s law say?), then at least make some little tool, or better yet, some startup class that can fix or reset the config to a usable state. After the above NPE’s Eclipse just stopped even starting up and I would have to visit the un-friendly crash log, scratch head, and sigh. When my Emacs config breaks (and this is usually out of me f-ing w/it and not just outta the blue), it’s pretty good about telling me. I comment out the
offending line or replace the offending file, and I’m usually good to go. No such luck w/Eclipse. Believe it or not, after deleting the app and even trying a different version (in this case it was from 3.0 -> 3.1) there was still no joy. You would think the next point version would kinda tidy a few things up, but it didn’t.

Finally, I deleted the newer Eclipse, rebooted (this always works in Windows, right?) and re-installed the newest version. I even did a Spotlight search for ‘eclipse’ to make sure there wasn’t some stray text config laying around. The new version started, I re-checked out the code repo, then it crashed again after I closed some ‘perspective’. Then the same behavior came back. Might strange for a Java app that should be ‘abstracted’ from the OS level to still let you experience all the lovely ‘features’ of a full blown native app!

However, as much as I hate eclipse, I will admit the auto-build feature is nice. Now instead of a few seconds with Ant in my term window I get classes automagically compiled. However, sometimes, I’m never 100% sure if everything is up to date, so I still gotta tell it to do a clean, even if it says everything’s ok. But I suppose, this could happen with an Ant build file as well. Oh, and the Ant integration (yes, I’m back to complaining now) is a bitch to get working. I tried months before to ‘import’ my personal project via the Ant script and nothing would work right. I have to admit too that
NetBeans had similar issues, so it’s just some random Eclipse thing; it seems like a non-random IDE thing.

Some people love Eclipse. Some love little wizards that step them through things. Some love code completion (which I think makes you dumber really..). Some are afraid of the command line. Some just feel more at home in a GUI. Some like their tool to take up the whole screen and don’t mind driving the mouse any more than they drive the
car to go get Ben & Jerry’s a few blocks away. I’ll admit, I like a GUI OS for sure, and some apps, of course. I wouldn’t want a command line MP3 player. Yet some people love that stuff and would mock my iTunes, even if I told them I stripped out the DRM and had my own iTunes server their text client could listen to. In other words,
everyone’s different. But I have to say, I’ve had a tried and true .emacs file for about 8
years and it’s never failed me. From Linux to Win to OS X, it’s always worked. Maybe a little tweak here or there, but otherwise it’s been great. And whenever I go to work in the morning, Emacs just works. I have that editor open for months and it hums along, not degrading or acting weird. That’s one reason I like my Mac, it just works. Linux works, but it’s goofy and I only like it for server stuff. Windows is inefficient and a total security risk, so I avoid that like the [insert favorite plague here]. Plus, Windows is so
nerdy; it’s every feature you can think of in a sorta back-assward way and with no elegance. And that’s how I feel about Eclipse. Made for Windows people by Windows Java people. I know, maybe that’s not totally true, but that’s how I feel.

Emacs, while containing the kitchen sink as well, get’s the hell outta my way. It’s really good at editing text, colorizing words, saving ‘buffers’, indenting code properly, and just works. I feel like I can get in and get out if I have to with little trouble and good results. With Eclipse (and I feel it’s the case with most ‘modern’ IDEs), you always gotta do some goofy thing like create a project and then import your files or some shit like that. It’s like
you gotta do 50 steps in order to drive a car vs. open the door, put on seat belt, put key in ignition, turn, put in gear, step on gas, make oil execs smile, stop at red light every 25 feet. In my book, IDEs will never get it right. They just try to do too much. It’s the
classic Microsoft model. And as I get older, I feel like I need to simplify vs. complicate. I’m on a long journey to de-clutter my life. Emacs has been the little fat ferret that’s accompanied me along the way for almost a decade.

Some people love and swear by Eclipse and I’m not knocking them at all. They got their reasons and even tho I said code completion makes them dumber, they’re still prob ok and even smart chaps. But for me, I hate Eclipse and if a client wants me to use it, fine, hand over the Benjamins. But I’d never recommend it for any programming team. I’d recommend less driving of the mouse, more tapping of the keys and to save the abstraction computation cells for the actual code, not the environment.

I spent a lovely weekend with Brian in Carmel Valley this past weekend. We did alot of relaxing. Sipping wine in Salinas Valley at Hahn and Paraiso wineries. We had a very delicious dinner at Cafe Rustica. We also checked out a sand sculpture contest at Carmel Beach this past Sunday:

Check out the rest of my flickr pics by clicking on my flickr badge on the lower right side of this blog.

I finished 2 books in October: Ha Jin’s “War Trash” and Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. I highly recommend both novels. Both novels are based difficult subjects: one is being a chinese POW in the Korean War and the other one is about an autistic savant teenage boy.

While reading War Trash, the reader definitely gets a sense that the fictional story is based on pieces of real war experiences from the Korean War. It’s too gruesome and horrific that it seems all too real. You really empathize with the narrator who becomes caught in the Nationalist vs. Communist ideals and conflicts. You can feel his agony and his will to survive using his wits. All he wanted to get home to his mother and fiance. You can see the author spelling out to use the pros and cons of each side through each time the narrator ends up at a different camp. I felt like I understand a bit more about the Korean War too.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a cleverly written book. The narrator is an autistic savant teenage boy. To read from his prespective was amazing - you get transported into his world. The author has spent time with autistic children and it shows in his writing. It’s a short read and I finished it in 4 days.

Autistic people don’t share the same emotions as we do in certain social situations and there are instances in the book that demonstrates that point. There are points of the story where Christopher should be sad and he’s not but I defintely felt sad and angry for him. The story starts off with the narrator writing a detective story about who killed the neighbors dog. Soon the ‘mystery’ becomes another mystery - the adult world and their relationships. I can’t recommend it enough.

big pin

Originally uploaded by juliahu.

I went to the De Young Museum finally and I loved it. So different, so dramatic, and so beautiful. You just have to go and see. It is definitely a world class museum.