Testing Kblogger in KDE4

Well, KDE4 is a reality for a long time now actually. And I΄ve decided to test the KBlogger application.



KBlogger lets you write your blog article in a nice rich client application right on your desktop. When you are happy with it you publish it upstream.

Looks cool, works cool, lets see how cool it sends the article out there ;-)

Quanta, shadows and Newton's apple

I was driving at work this morning, and I was stacked in traffic (as usual). I was waiting for a traffic light to go green and I was looking at a side of the bridge that was a few meters above my head.

The side has small pillars, I couldn't see the traffic on it, but the sun was sending traffic's shadow to fall on the pillars. And then it happened... :-)

I must have seen the same (more or less) thing a million times before. But it was so clear now! Crystal clear.

The shadow of a track was moving along the pillars, I wasn't looking at it, just had it in peripheral vision. But it felt wrong, something felt wrong. Instantly, my eyes started following that shadow. It was so weird. The motion...well it was not a motion...it was little jumps, little hops, from one pillar to another.

"Like quanta" I thought. "Quanta? Holy crap" my next thought. Just because we perceive some motions in the microcosm as not as in the classical world, that does not mean they happen like that. We just see the pillars cause we simply can't see the traffic!

It is not an original idea, I am sure I read it somewhere...probably in a superstring theory context, that what we see (in our 3-D world is actually shadows of a N-D world), yet I've never read an example, I've never related it with a physical observation.

And it felt good! :-) You know the story with Newton, that he was (allegedly) hit by an falling apple and then he thought about gravity...well, that was my apple.

Delicious!

Paladin ftw :-)

Warcraft is an addiction. Yes it is. My first character is a paladin. Paladin levels slowly, but can do some pretty amazing things...like fighting a gazillion enemies at the same time.

Look at the screen shot if you don't believe me.

Now, I may be tired of my paladin. I play him the least, if at all. Still this screenshot feels so good :-)

Starting the GUI (again...)

I've hit a wall again on the engine of this thing, and I thought of going to the gui way for a little while.

Ok, so KDE 4, is in development. The new KDE is based on the Qt 4.x series. I've decided to start implementing the gui in qt-4.3. Given the effort I am throwing at this, kde will be ready way before I am. :-)

The screenshot is of the very (very) first draft. Nothing is set on stone yet.

I really like Qt. It's so easy to code in.

Anyways, that's it for now, I hope I have something new on this to show soon.

Bye bye spring...welcome winter

So, we've messed the climate of the planet...so what?

It's not like our kids are going to inherit the broken planet. Oh wait....

Greece used to have nice seasons. Not anymore. A lot of rain in the end of May and now in the start of June.

For those of you who need some information, try looking up global dimming and see for yourself why scientists have underestimated the effect of global warming.

No, really, go and see.

Doctors and stupidity

One blog. One cancer case. One scream. One end.

A young woman's opinion about doctors. A dieing young woman's opinion about doctors. And you know what? I had the same opinion about doctors, and I am not even sick (that I know of).

And then I changed my mind. This bad opinion that I had about the doctors, was misfocused. They are not worse than we are, they are not better than we are. It's easy to prove it. They are neither worse or better cause they are simply us!

They are part of us. They do what we do. They don't do their job well the same way we don't do ours. They avoid doing their jobs the same way we avoid doing our job.

Isn't it obvious?

They are no different than you or me.

It's what they have been taught to do, the same way you and I have been. There is no point single them out. We all have to change. Not just doctors.

Can we change? Not really. We had our chance and we blew it. You can't teach and old dog new tricks. But what about new dogs? We might be able to do that. Make the next generation better, and maybe they will do the next better, and maybe someday this misery and stupidity arround us diminishes.

That's the way to go, not by blaming doctors. We can blame ourselves..

SVN, C++ weirdness on floats

Ok, I've decided to revive the old tavli project that I had left somewhere in the middle.

Now, maybe I'll leave it again before finishing, but there is a bright side (isn't there always...if you really really look ;-)

So, I now have subversion server running and I am happily exploring how the things work both from the linux side and also from that other OS you (I mean YOU) are using :P

And finally, C++ had me scratching my head once again.
In that neural network project I was talking about (tavli) I have defined a type like this:

typedef float real;

so, I go ahead and use real everywhere. The point of all this being that whenever I feel I'll alter the definition (say from float to double) and all that it would be needed is a re-compilation. Now, the application saves the weights of the neurons to a file.

I've decided to switch from float to double. Filesize didn't change. Weird huh?
I went to 'long double'. Still no filesize change. Ok, something was obvious wrong.

How was I to have the higher accuracy when the std::fstream was handling floating numbers the same no matter what I've tried?

Anyway, to cut a long story short. Here is the solution:
file_op.precision( std::numeric_limits<real>::digits10 );

You have to tell the fstream object what accuracy you want. Dumb if you ask me. (Not that you are asking me :P)

Hugh Laurie Golden Globe 2006 acceptance speech

Hugh Laurie his first Golden Globe for his part as Gregory House in House, M.D. in 2006. This is his acceptance speech. Well done :-)

House MD tossing a Vicoden into the air

House MD is my latest tv addiction. Brilliant writting, acting.

Pretty girl time...

Well, I was watching a movie on tv and this girl caught my eye. "The in Crowd" was the movie (mediocre thriller wannabe), and Susan Ward is the beauty. Here, have a clip... :-)

Summer is moving on....

Well, summer is almost over...
I got a QTek S200 to play with in my vacation. Cool thingy.

Oh, and I am currently half-doing (*grin*) a kde screensaver.

Strange summer

This has to be the strangest summer I've ever lived.

The weather is tottaly messed up. More like autumn or something. Climate changes, huh?

Back to the Future...

How about this?

Back to the future style, huh? ;-)

Self-compiled KDE, stopped working on me...

I'd better wait for 3.5.3

i bought the Nokia N70 mobile phone. Not too much different from my Nokia 6600.

Still nice 2mp camera, nice video recording.

Still ugly symbian SDK. None linux native in C/C++.

Slow week anyone? :-)

Ok, so it was not only a slow day...it turns out it is a slow week.

Anyways, slowness and all, I come across the weirdest spam-email ever (..that I've noticed)

QUOTE
Good day, commander,
You are very good, thank you!
Swanson
Bye
QUOTE

Anyone can get it? What is it trying to sell here? I don't get it.

Geez, I must be getting older...I can't even "get" spam now...

Slow day

Slow day today.
I got up late. No mood for coding. Just silly browsing and ircing.
Maybe later it will come to me...

NN doesn't want to learn plakoto...

This is starting to get on my nerves. I just recently got into Neural Network programming and I am trying to make a few NNs that will evaluate correctly game boards of backgammon. There are three different game types of backgammon in Greece.

• Fevga
• Plakoto
• Portes

I've started the training with Fevga and it turned out quite good, say above average. And then I moved on to Plakoto...

Man, it does not want to learn how to play this game. I've tried everything. I increased the hidden layers neurons from 40 to 80. I went higher to 120 and 160. I let it train for 10 million games. No good. Always below average on strength of play.

There must be a bug either in coding or even conceptually. I won't give up. I'll get it.