Why is it that my email server always dies right at the start of a long weekend? Well, probably the answer is that that when it fails at other times, it gets more rapid attention, or I have other things to worry about and don't notice. Still, it is rather irritating, and makes me wonder if I should look for a slightly more reliable service rather than clinging on to an address from a few years ago.
So instead of finally emptying my inbox, which is currently AWOL, I partook in my annual habit of data mining my email. I must admit, my heart isn't fully in it this year, for some reason, so just a few brief comments.
* Spam is UP! Or else I can count it better. I switched over to using spamassasin about a year ago, and as a consequence, rather than my old heuristic for counting spam (look for senders who sent me only one message), I instead switched to a new system whereby I just count the number of messages trapped by spamassassin. So this is probably a slight underestimate, since I still get a few false negatives but hardly any false positives. My previous estimates were about 1500 per month, but I'm now happily clocking 3000-6000 spams per month.
* Legitimate mail is UP! During 05 and 06, I was processing about 1200-1500 messages a month (and many of them were spam, since I had a lot of false negatives with my old manual procmail spam filtering). This year, I've been clocking 1600-2000 messages a month. Some of these are from heavy mailing lists, but that doesn't explain everything. I must just be more popular all of a sudden.
* Certainly, I'm sending more. One month I sent 300 messages (and this undercounts by loads, because I'm only looking in sent mail, and not in folders which some sent mail is automatically placed in based on recipient). Generally, the trend seems to be up and up. Amusingly, I used to send about 150 messages a month during my undergraduate days; the only exception was Novermber 1995, when I sent 230 -- and that was my second month of having email. Clearly must have had a burst of excitement that month.
* Am still missing loads of data, since I only have procmail logs for my academic email account, not my work email. So goodness knows what the real story is.
20071123
20071121
$1 for your thoughts
Hmm, apparently, I have to pay an extra dollar to hear amy swearing.
(Back to Black
Back to Black by Amy Winehouse (Audio CD - 2007) - Explicit Lyrics
Buy new: $13.98
Back to Black [Clean Version]
Back to Black [Clean Version] by Amy Winehouse (Audio CD - 2007) - Clean
Buy new: $12.99 )
(Back to Black
Back to Black by Amy Winehouse (Audio CD - 2007) - Explicit Lyrics
Buy new: $13.98
Back to Black [Clean Version]
Back to Black [Clean Version] by Amy Winehouse (Audio CD - 2007) - Clean
Buy new: $12.99 )
Things I Don't Like #21491
Sketch shows that have the same sketches every week, and have a little titles sequence before each sketch.
20071113
Britain, prepare yourself
OK folks, here are the dates for my upcoming trip to Englandland:
Dec 6: Bleary eyed in LGW
Dec 7: Cambridge
Dec 8: Cambridge
Dec 9: Cambridge
Dec 10: Maidstone
Dec 11: Maidstone
Dec 12: Maidstone
Dec 13: London
Dec 14: Longborough
Dec 15: Longborough
Dec 16: Longborough
Dec 17: Longborough
Dec 18 - Dec 22 Open
Dec 23: Maidstone
Dec 24: Maidstone
Dec 25: Maidstone
Dec 26: Maidstone
Dec 27 - 29 Open
Dec 30: Back to the United States of USA.
If you want to plug any of my gaps, then let me know.
Dec 6: Bleary eyed in LGW
Dec 7: Cambridge
Dec 8: Cambridge
Dec 9: Cambridge
Dec 10: Maidstone
Dec 11: Maidstone
Dec 12: Maidstone
Dec 13: London
Dec 14: Longborough
Dec 15: Longborough
Dec 16: Longborough
Dec 17: Longborough
Dec 18 - Dec 22 Open
Dec 23: Maidstone
Dec 24: Maidstone
Dec 25: Maidstone
Dec 26: Maidstone
Dec 27 - 29 Open
Dec 30: Back to the United States of USA.
If you want to plug any of my gaps, then let me know.
20071112
Embed this, mofo!
Oh, I've been really struggling with my fonts. I'm sure I've complained about this before, but I can't find the reference. A number of idiotic publishing companies (ahem, IEEE and ACM) have recently started getting really snotty about embedding fonts into files. In particular, they complain like crazy if you don't embed fonts like symbol and helvetica into your PDF files when you send them to get published. This is particularly idiotic, since these files are part of the "14 base fonts" which every PDF reader must be able to render without needed the fonts to be embedded. So it's a pretty ridiculous rule, and I've wasted some amount of my life whinging at them for having such a rule. In particular, because some perfectly nice PDFs generated by pdflatex have been rejected for this reason. These folks wouldn't give any useful suggestions about how to fix the problem, other than "send us the PS version, and we can generate the compliant PDF." But I'm using PDFLaTeX -- there is no PS version (not even a DVI version). Generating PS would be silly, I'd have to use pdf2ps or similar.
Finally today, I have worked out a clean solution which does not offend me.
Firstly, it turns out that most of the problem is actually coming from the embedded graphics. pdflatex itself does seem to satisfactorily embed most fonts, although you can force it to if necessary, and there are various sites around which say how to do this. But this doesn't help included PDF figures which don't have fonts embedded already. For xfig and so on (another tip: in xfig, the "view --> portrait/landscape" option will fix it so that your figure is output with the correct orientation if it's coming out twisted when you export it), just export direct to PDF and it should work. But some figures are generated in eps format, and then converted to PDF. Usually, I use epstopdf to do this, since it gets the bounding box right, but it doesn't seem to do the trick. So here is what you need to do: issue the command
and then all will be well. You can work it out for yourself why this will work.
Finally today, I have worked out a clean solution which does not offend me.
Firstly, it turns out that most of the problem is actually coming from the embedded graphics. pdflatex itself does seem to satisfactorily embed most fonts, although you can force it to if necessary, and there are various sites around which say how to do this. But this doesn't help included PDF figures which don't have fonts embedded already. For xfig and so on (another tip: in xfig, the "view --> portrait/landscape" option will fix it so that your figure is output with the correct orientation if it's coming out twisted when you export it), just export direct to PDF and it should work. But some figures are generated in eps format, and then converted to PDF. Usually, I use epstopdf to do this, since it gets the bounding box right, but it doesn't seem to do the trick. So here is what you need to do: issue the command
export GS_OPTIONS=-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress
and then all will be well. You can work it out for yourself why this will work.
20071107
Stating the Obvious
A letter falls into my hands from my gas supplier, with the following message emblazoned on the front: "Forecasts call for below-normal temperatures this winter".
I know what they mean (since they say the same thing every year), but that's not actually what they've said.
I know what they mean (since they say the same thing every year), but that's not actually what they've said.
20071105
Paxman, you idiot
More shocking ignorance from Paxman on University challenge, again leading to him claiming that a valid answer was incorrect. This time, from the program on 22nd October 2007:
Paxman: In statistics, data that are binomially distributed, individual values may be placed in one of two mutually exclusive categories so that the sum of the probabilities of occurring in the categories is what value?
Liverpool Ling: Er... unity.
Paxman: No, it's 1, or 100%
LL: (rolls eyes)
Something should be done!
Paxman: In statistics, data that are binomially distributed, individual values may be placed in one of two mutually exclusive categories so that the sum of the probabilities of occurring in the categories is what value?
Liverpool Ling: Er... unity.
Paxman: No, it's 1, or 100%
LL: (rolls eyes)
Something should be done!
20071101
Near Miss
I was getting very confused, since I had mixed up "Show Me Love" by Robin S with "Show Me Love" by Robyn. Youchoob embeds below:
20071028
Pledge
With all this fuss around "In Rainbows", and discussion of whether this is going to revolutionize the music industry, no one seems to have mentioned that there is an entire industry that has been running on essentially the same principal for decades.
Public Radio in the US (think Radio 4, only twee in an entirely different set of ways) basically operates in exactly the same way: it gives its wares away from free (broadcast radio), and requests the listener to make a donation. Since there's no necessity to comply, they perforce request 'whatever you think is appropriate', although they are keen to give suggestions as to what is appropriate ($10 per month, or 'just a dollar per day' are common examples). The model is a little different in places: since the good is a continuous stream, rather than an album, they periodically interrupt this stream to beg for money. Sometimes for days at a time. Moreover, the game theoretic aspect is slightly altered, since there is a greater incentive to contribute to NPR: fail to donate, and the service might go away, or at least become less usable (more begging, less content). Probably you can argue the same about Radiohead albums, although it's more discrete, and there are more competitors than there are for speech-based radio stations not broadcasting insane rants.
Public Radio in the US (think Radio 4, only twee in an entirely different set of ways) basically operates in exactly the same way: it gives its wares away from free (broadcast radio), and requests the listener to make a donation. Since there's no necessity to comply, they perforce request 'whatever you think is appropriate', although they are keen to give suggestions as to what is appropriate ($10 per month, or 'just a dollar per day' are common examples). The model is a little different in places: since the good is a continuous stream, rather than an album, they periodically interrupt this stream to beg for money. Sometimes for days at a time. Moreover, the game theoretic aspect is slightly altered, since there is a greater incentive to contribute to NPR: fail to donate, and the service might go away, or at least become less usable (more begging, less content). Probably you can argue the same about Radiohead albums, although it's more discrete, and there are more competitors than there are for speech-based radio stations not broadcasting insane rants.
20071027
Perspectives
Motivated by the sudden spurt of interest, I watched "Points Of View" this week for the first time in ages. It's, um, not how it used to be. Gone is the catchy version of "When I'm 64" from the opening, either because Paul McCartney now is 64, or else because "Send me a postcard, drop me a line" didn't seem to be easily replaced by "Write on my messageboard, post a snarky blog entry". Instead we get (youchoob embed):
I'm not sure that I particularly like their insinuation, that all the comments are nothing more than "blah blah blah". And that faux jazz tune -- I hope the composer is rightly ashamed of what he has wrought.
The show retains its short (10-15mins) format, but the issues raised seem much more petty than I remember. Perhaps they ever were, but it seems particularly unnecessary to whinge about scheduling decisions in this age of PVRs and timeshifting.
One notably irritating point: just as before, the letters seem to be read by actors. However, in an apparent attempt to fool the viewer, some audio manipulation is added to make it sound as if these are telephone messages. Apart from the dissonance of hearing carefully read speech (with no 'um's or 'ah's), many of these come in over the internet and so are attributed to pseudonymous names like "Bax of delights".
The highlight, though, was probably a rather bizarre segment in the middle which seemed to involve a cut-and-paste piece of found poetry on the subject of BBC cooking shows. I'll leave it to you to work out what that's really about.
I'm not sure that I particularly like their insinuation, that all the comments are nothing more than "blah blah blah". And that faux jazz tune -- I hope the composer is rightly ashamed of what he has wrought.
The show retains its short (10-15mins) format, but the issues raised seem much more petty than I remember. Perhaps they ever were, but it seems particularly unnecessary to whinge about scheduling decisions in this age of PVRs and timeshifting.
One notably irritating point: just as before, the letters seem to be read by actors. However, in an apparent attempt to fool the viewer, some audio manipulation is added to make it sound as if these are telephone messages. Apart from the dissonance of hearing carefully read speech (with no 'um's or 'ah's), many of these come in over the internet and so are attributed to pseudonymous names like "Bax of delights".
The highlight, though, was probably a rather bizarre segment in the middle which seemed to involve a cut-and-paste piece of found poetry on the subject of BBC cooking shows. I'll leave it to you to work out what that's really about.
20071020
Yoof TV
After Charlie Brooker's devastating take down of the current state of Yoof TV, I decided to remind myself of how things were when I was a youth myself. In particular, thanks to the magic of the internet I found a rather grubby copy of "Teenage Health Freak" from Channel Four in the early nineties. I ended up watching the obligatory "Drugs are bad, mmkay?" episode, which was just as cringeworthy as you might imagine it. The basic plot was that the requisite unattainable girl turns out to be regularly getting high on ecstacy tablets, and ends up half-inching some replica guns belonging to the protagonist's cowboy-obsessed father. He confronts her about her misdemeanours, and she takes him to her supplier to retrieve the objects, which ends in about as cheesily a brutal confrontation as you can imagine. The problems with this are principally: (1) there's only so much violence you can show in an early-evening teen themed comedy-drama (2) the sinister pusher and bowling alley manager was played rather unconvincingly by cheery ex-Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan, which rather made the entire episode entirely pointless.
The upshot is that after this confusion, the unattainable girl remains unattainable but at least renounces her life of illegal highs with immediate and lasting effect, and the show moves on with startling rapidity to tackle the equally serious topic of teenage eating disorders equally decisively in the next episode.
The upshot is that after this confusion, the unattainable girl remains unattainable but at least renounces her life of illegal highs with immediate and lasting effect, and the show moves on with startling rapidity to tackle the equally serious topic of teenage eating disorders equally decisively in the next episode.
Unhelpful tips
Lately, I have been waking up with a brilliant idea in my mind, only to discover on later reflection that it's completely useless. Here's one recent example:
Web programmers! Do you find it too tedious to insert comments into your hand-written HTML files! Is that open-bracket, exclamation mark, hyphen hyphen just too tiresome for you? Then why not try including comments simply by writing them following a # at the end of your embedded URLs, like:
http://www.blogger.com#link_to_the_blogger_website
It's easy, and fun!
Web programmers! Do you find it too tedious to insert comments into your hand-written HTML files! Is that open-bracket, exclamation mark, hyphen hyphen just too tiresome for you? Then why not try including comments simply by writing them following a # at the end of your embedded URLs, like:
http://www.blogger.com#link_to_the_blogger_website
It's easy, and fun!
20071016
Record Labels Sue Usenet
According to this story, it seems that a bunch of record labels are suing usenet.com. Although, reading the article, it gives the impression that the labels actually think they are suing usenet itself. Which is somewhat akin to trying to sue email. Wonder how this will play out in court.
20071014
Academic Spam
As an occasional bit-player in the world of Academia, I sometimes get special Academic Spam. Usually this is in the form of messages from arch-cretin Nagib Callaos inciting me to participate in his or her Serious Cybernetics Conference, or The Open Applied Mathematics Journal casually bombarding people with garbage. The irritating thing about these messages is that you at first think that you have been specially invited to contribute based on your reputation, and only later do you work out that it's a mass-distributed mail to all and sundry.
Well, I got another invitation yesterday, which had me puzzled for a while. It read as follows:
A little bit of rooting around for the website for this conference and for the conference for last year is enough to convince me that this is simply one of these rather dubious conferences where every submitted abstract is accepted (or "mathematics conferences" as they are sometimes known). The carefully worded CFP fails to mention that you will not be reimbursed for your travels. A check on the previous year's site fails to reveal any list of papers or program, which is a big warning sign.
Still, my paranoia runs deeper: what if this is actually a twist on the traditional con-trick of the 'internet pen-pal' scam, where the lovelorn sucker is fooled into flying off to some Eastern Bloc country to meet the woman of his dreams, only to be kidnapped, and extorted for his life savings in return for his freedom.
I can just imagine getting of the plane in Sofia to be met by "a member of the organizing committee", only to be bundled into the back of a transit van, and deposited unceremoniously in a darkened basement, to be greeted by the sight of a variety of other luminaries of the field chained up to radiators.
Well, no thank you, ICAMC. I think I'll sit this one out, if that's all the same to you.
Well, I got another invitation yesterday, which had me puzzled for a while. It read as follows:
Dear Professor Dr. Anchor
The Scientific Committee of the Fifth International Conference of Applied Mathematics and Computing (Plovdiv, Bulgaria, August 12-18, 2008) kindly invites you to deliver an 30 minutes invited lecture during the Conference.
You will be accommodated in a room in a five stars hotel (with usual facilities: fully air-conditioned hotel, direct dial telephone, satellite/cable TV, internet access, etc.).
A member of Organizing Committee will meet you at Sofia airport. He will help you with the trip from Sofia airport to Plovdiv.
A little bit of rooting around for the website for this conference and for the conference for last year is enough to convince me that this is simply one of these rather dubious conferences where every submitted abstract is accepted (or "mathematics conferences" as they are sometimes known). The carefully worded CFP fails to mention that you will not be reimbursed for your travels. A check on the previous year's site fails to reveal any list of papers or program, which is a big warning sign.
Still, my paranoia runs deeper: what if this is actually a twist on the traditional con-trick of the 'internet pen-pal' scam, where the lovelorn sucker is fooled into flying off to some Eastern Bloc country to meet the woman of his dreams, only to be kidnapped, and extorted for his life savings in return for his freedom.
I can just imagine getting of the plane in Sofia to be met by "a member of the organizing committee", only to be bundled into the back of a transit van, and deposited unceremoniously in a darkened basement, to be greeted by the sight of a variety of other luminaries of the field chained up to radiators.
Well, no thank you, ICAMC. I think I'll sit this one out, if that's all the same to you.
20071009
Columbus Day
I pause briefly to note that it is Columbus Day today, which commemorates my arrival in 2002 in this land. I commemorated the day by organizing all the new music I've acquired in the last year, ripping CDs, putting them into directories, collecting the cover art, integrating them into playlists and so on. Somewhat theraputic, although it seemed to take much longer than it needed to.
Part of the influx of new music came from a trip at the weekend to prex, for an annual scrimmage through the cheap CDs. Came back with a large selection of discs from the mid-nineties that I liked one or two songs from when I head them on the radio a decade and a half ago.
The experience was slightly marred by the witless other shoppers who insisted on making pointless comments about their own selections. And at the checkout, I noticed before I walked away that I had been double charged for the most expensive of my purchases (a sampler CD from Flight of the Conchords). The shop assistant gave me some weak excuse about a problem with the scanner, but I'm not convinced. I wonder if this is a trick they try on all the newcomers.
Part of the influx of new music came from a trip at the weekend to prex, for an annual scrimmage through the cheap CDs. Came back with a large selection of discs from the mid-nineties that I liked one or two songs from when I head them on the radio a decade and a half ago.
The experience was slightly marred by the witless other shoppers who insisted on making pointless comments about their own selections. And at the checkout, I noticed before I walked away that I had been double charged for the most expensive of my purchases (a sampler CD from Flight of the Conchords). The shop assistant gave me some weak excuse about a problem with the scanner, but I'm not convinced. I wonder if this is a trick they try on all the newcomers.
20071006
I have a beef...
Or, strange meat processing companies are trying to kill me.
I happened to get the train into the city yesterday and happened to sit in a seat which happened to have a discarded local newspaper in it which happened to have a story about a recall of meat tainted with E. coli. The brandname looked familiar, so when I got home, I looked up the recall online and after some hunting found a website with a PDF containing UPCs and dates of affected batches. Comparing to the box of burgers in my freezer, I found a match.
So now what am I surprised to do? I threw out the meat (although, since 3 of the 8 burgers were already consumed, I imagine already dodged whatever bullets there may have been; nevertheless, recollections of the Corned Beef Incident reminded me not to take any chances). I suppose I could follow the instructions, and mail in a copy of the UPC to the manufacturers, and be rewarded with a $5 refund, but it hardly seems worth the effort. And I have to go to the effort of finding some replacements next time I'm in the supermarkets, and moreover, finding a new brand since it seems that this producer has now gone out of business over this mess up. There's just no compensation for this sort of petty irritations.
I happened to get the train into the city yesterday and happened to sit in a seat which happened to have a discarded local newspaper in it which happened to have a story about a recall of meat tainted with E. coli. The brandname looked familiar, so when I got home, I looked up the recall online and after some hunting found a website with a PDF containing UPCs and dates of affected batches. Comparing to the box of burgers in my freezer, I found a match.
So now what am I surprised to do? I threw out the meat (although, since 3 of the 8 burgers were already consumed, I imagine already dodged whatever bullets there may have been; nevertheless, recollections of the Corned Beef Incident reminded me not to take any chances). I suppose I could follow the instructions, and mail in a copy of the UPC to the manufacturers, and be rewarded with a $5 refund, but it hardly seems worth the effort. And I have to go to the effort of finding some replacements next time I'm in the supermarkets, and moreover, finding a new brand since it seems that this producer has now gone out of business over this mess up. There's just no compensation for this sort of petty irritations.
20071002
Netflix entertainment value
I've been greatly enjoying watching the shenanigans on the Netflix prize leader board. There's been a great flurry of activity in the last week, which I think is because the deadline for the first year's progress prize was coming up. (it was Oct 2 00:00 UTC, which I think was midnight last night but I'm never sure how to interpret midnight). Team BellKor (who have finally set up the BellKor webpage) was leading for a long time, then just a day ago, Team Gravity and Dinosaur Planet teamed up to form When Dinosaurs and Gravity Unite, and pipped them. For a short while, they were on top, with BellKor so close behind that you couldn't see a gap. Then, overnight, BellKor came back with a winning blow, and just for good measure, introduced a team called KorBell at 23:25 to go another two hundredths of a percent. Gravity/Dinosaurs tried to rally, but only managed 8.38 -- the winning number is 8.43. This is about the only sporting event I am interested enough to watch.
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