the eXternal mind

Good luck at Carnegie Mellon! See ya in a few [units of time].

I was going to rant about how nothing good ever gets done at my work place because of tons of restrictions, complications, and just incompentacy, but when I started gathering thoughts together, I lost interest and didn’t see the point in ranting about that. I had to sit through about a two hour meeting where a current idea/process is being completed so inefficiently and poorly that I wanted to just take charge and say how it should be done. But the ideas were the result of hours of other people’s work, and they have been mostly finalized so I decided not to do anything. I was kind of annoyed that people whose jobs were to do this sort of thing (which I’m not going to mention) were using about 5 year outdated technology. They wanted to spend about $2000-4000 on something that wasn’t even necessary. (It would probably be even more of a hassle) But now that I think about it, it doesn’t bother me at all! It’s inconsequential to the big questions. Stuff like: What is the me4ning of life2? And: Why am I reading this blog?

I also wanted to rant about other stuff, but couldn’t say it how I wanted it to sound.

So, I’ll let you decide. Yes, you. You can post in the comments anything you want me to write about. You can ask me questions, suggest topics, … anything! (Within reason, of course. Obviously, asking about my secret identity won’t get you anywhere).

So, I’m finally getting around to listing some other books I read this summer. I’ll rant too.

• State of Fear by Michael Crichton (completed about three weeks ago): I’m a fan of Crichton’s books mainly because he does a good job blending fact (usually of the scientific kind) with fiction. However, compared to State of Fear, his past books seem almost deficient in science. State of Fear, if you remove the story part, is essentially about how our current perceptions about global warming is flawed and that most of our daily knowledge is false data we received from media/”special interest” groups. Throughout the whole book, Crichton argues that global warming does not actually exist. It’s something environmentalist groups crafted to further their agenda. However, Crichton does concede in his authors message at the end that he thinks global warming is happening.

  Before I read State of Fear, I didn’t think for a second that global warming was not real. I mean, duh, obviously global warming exists! Scientists have measured the temperature of the earth and the data shows that this is true. I mean, duh, more carbon dioixde is being emitted into the air every day and 2+2=5, more CO2 in the atmosphere contributes to the greenhouse effect which will cause a rise in temperature. That’s all correct, right? Well, wrong. In question and answer dialogue format, Crichton debunks each of these ideas in the story. Not only does he makes his arguments, Crichton also backs it up with tons of references and data gathered from real sources such as NASA, Columbia University, GISS, etc. The back of the book also has about 10 pages of just references. Most of the arguments have footnotes that point to scientific papers. With that kind of proof, I found myself being a little more skeptical about global warming. A list of Crichton’s points along with page references can be found in this PDF put together by CFACT (a special interest group, actually).

  So I would recommend State of Fear to anyone who wants to learn more about global warming and have their brain a bit warped while enjoying a good story along the way.

  However, to be fair, I was now skeptical of Crichton! Was it really true that most climate/environmental scientists do not believe in global warming? I wanted to verify the facts myself so I spent a lot of time online doing so. The data Crichton presents in the book is true and so are the references, of course. I found a lot of sites claiming that Crichton’s book was part of some conservative agenda to purposely confuse people about global warming, but those articles were mostly full of rhetoric which ironically plays right into Crichton’s point about special interest groups trying to scare people. In my research, I did encounter scientists who supported global warming and scientists who did not. I did, however, find a good response by Columbia University scientist Gavin Schmidt which renewed some of my confidence in the idea of global warming. Schmidt points out the flaws in some of Crichton’s arguments and backs up his own arguments with references too. Schmidt, too, uses scientific peer-reviewed journal papers and conferences. Those are pieces of information I can trust. In fact, I’m starting to think scientific papers are just about the only things I can trust these days.

• Deception Point by Dan Brown (finished 1.5 weeks ago): This book is generally about politics and the government but set to an exciting plot with action. More specifically, NASA made a huge discovery but consequently, there are some politics behind that discovery which lead to the assasination of people who could expose the dirty politics. Brown is kind of like Crichton in that he also merges fact with fiction. I learned a few things about surviving and such. There were also science tidbits thrown into the story so I learned a bit of science too. It’s a good book, but nothing monumental. If you are looking for entertainment and an easy to read book, Deception Point is very good.

  Dan Brown books are generally good. I read The DaVinci Code last year, and I’m currently reading Angel’s and Demons. Now, this brings me to my rant:

These “modern” thriller books are just about all the same! Sure they are good, interesting, and nice to read, but after you read about 3 iterations of similar ideas, characters, plots, and story structures, the books kind of get boring. For instance, I don’t really have that much enthusiasm to read Angel’s and Demons right now because I know that:

• One of the main characters will be a beautiful and intelligence girl over the age of twenty and is currently single. She has a nice job as either a: scientist/professor, laywer, or businesswoman.
• The other main chracter will be a “handsome” male (that’s how the books put it, I don’t make judgements like that on guys) who is, of course, older than the girl and is fairly intelligent himself. He’s usually has a different profession than the woman but still follows the rule of scientist/professor/laywer/businessperson.
• Like all romances (not that I read them–I’m just guessing here), the guy and girl are strictly on business terms in the beginning, but as the story progresses and they face obstacles together, they fall in love with each other.
• Somebody or something is trying to kill them. It usually involves something hi-tech or some covert agency.
• There is a plot twist. This usually involves some seemingly benign character who turns out to be t3h big evi1 at the end.
• There is merger of fact and fiction to make things interesting.
• There’s usually a situation where the bad guy leaves the hero and the heroine trapped in some impossible situation (usually a remote location such as Antartica) and decides to leave without killing them right away. The hero and heroine find a way to escape.

Okay, I think that’s enough for now, but you get my point. The plot reads like a book! Oh wait, it actually does ^^;;. Like in Roald Dahl’s short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, these stories are probably created using a simple framework and then the author runs some sort of script that generates the variations.

So I think I’m probably going to drop back to some of the classics. Literature that’s not written “for the masses” but written because the author wanted to write whatever he or she wrote. Does anyone have any suggestions for good books?

I spent a lot of time today porting Tenchi in Tokyo’s Image Gallery which is a perl script about 5 years outdated to the new Gallery PHP script which is on the cutting edge of photo gallery technology.

Everything was coming along fine until I decided to rename the gallery installation directory from gallery2/ to gallery/. Then all hell broke loose. Even though I reflected the changes in the config.php file, the urls of the script kept pointing to gallery2/. So I thought for a while and then realized that maybe since the template pages were cached, that the cached files weren’t being updated. So I deleted all of the cached files, but the problem still existed!

I found an FAQ on the gallery site that detailed how to move the files to another directory, and that was pretty much the exact same way I was moving my files. Therefore, I tried just about everything and nothing seemed to work. On a whim, I decided to disable the mod_rewrite module fully in Gallery. I had the settings disabled previously, but I didn’t have the module disabled since I thought it wouldn’t matter. Lo and behold, the links were now right.

Now, that’d be all cool and all if the first line of the answer to the FAQ moving question didn’t say:
1. Disable the mod_rewrite module.

Like Mario and Wario, I have an arch-nemesis called wikeXstudios. Yeah, that’s such a stupid name I didn’t even know this person existed until yesterday when Euge and I were on our way to work and we encountered this truck:
(Thanks to Euge for taking the pictures with his new Razr cellphone)

A close up:

From this evidence, it is clearly shown that if you take the wX style displayed prominently on the side of the truck and flip it vertically, the mX symbol will result. Indisputably, this must be the work of some being called wikeXstudios who mocks me. ph33r!