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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Joshua Wise" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
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01:38 am
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and the rest
And the rest.
( more behind the cut )
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01:52 am
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buggy!
I promised a few more photos; here's a handful of buggy shots.
I also wrote some words, too.
( more behind the cut )
More photos of booth and concert tomorrow.
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02:28 am
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Hi LiveJournal. I went back to Pittsburgh for Carnival.
I have a few more pictures that are worth a damn. I'll post them later, yeah?
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02:28 am
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A thing
(click for more different)
Hi LiveJournal! I haven't posted a picture of a thing I made in a long time. I made a thing. Well, actually, I made two things: my job over the past n months was to bring the chip in the middle to life, so that was kind of "my" thing; and, I cast it into resin myself. This is sort of a prototype, but I intend to make them thin enough that one could conceivably put them on a keychain.
I also wrote a thing, and built another thing; I have to talk to some folks at work to make sure some of the stories in the thing I wrote is OK to share with the world before I can tell you, though. I'll have pictures of the other thing I built sooner or later, but it's not done yet.
I also post things about being a human being sometimes, but actually that goes more on Twitter nowadays. If I know you, I'll accept your follow request -- I am @jwise0.
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05:33 am
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on subtitles and learning behavior
I've always known that I learn better by reading than by listening, and for a while, I've suspected that that translates over to other aspects of my life. For instance, when I'm participating in a conversation, I often feel like I have an excessive amount of "dropped packets" -- times when I have to ask someone to repeat themselves, or in which an utterance that I wasn't expecting catches me completely off-guard. (I don't usually get comments on it, surprisingly, but I certainly feel like it's an issue; has anyone else noticed this in me?) But tonight, something happened that it all clicked.
I went over to a friend's house this evening to generally be unproductive, and after some hours, we settled on watching The Bourne Identity, which I had not seen before. After some time wrestling it onto a machine that could connect to the TV, we all sat down to watch it; when the first English dialogue started, however, we realized that VLC had subtitles turned on. By a unanimous vote of "can't be arsed", we left them on, and about 15 minutes into the movie, I realized something surprising: I actually had a god damn clue what was going on.
Now, this is unusual for me. I rarely watch TV or movies in part because when I do, I haven't a god damn clue what is going on. It feels like I have to pour intense amounts of resources into figuring out who's who, and what role they play; names mostly whizz past me. I mentioned this after I watched the movie, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) zagarus noted, "Well, that's what the first 15 minutes are for"... but in my case, it often seems like I'm still left piecing together crucial bits of plot for the first hour and 15 minutes, and if I can figure it out by the time the movie ends, I feel like I'm doing pretty well.
When I figured this out, though, it all made a huge amount of sense to me. I remember thinking something like this when I left the subs on at some point in the past -- but this time, it just made watching the movie so much easier and so much more enjoyable. I felt like I was spending more time with the content of the film, and less time trying to put it all together. The interesting bit is that it didn't feel simply like a "missing words" thing so much as a "missing content" thing; rather than a "I can't hear" or "I can't understand", I always felt more like there was a cognitive disconnect. Even though I don't use the subtitles as a primary source of information, having them on screen in my peripheral vision, so I can scan them after the character has spoken (or while the character is speaking), just seemed to make it that much easier.
Looking back, this makes sense, too -- it gives some level of reason as to why I always just did so awfully badly in paying attention in lectures, for instance. I'd hear just fine, but the content just wasn't really meaningfully making any impact on me; and if I gave the presenter any less than my full attention, I'd get about 0% of it, just the same as if I do anything other than pay rapt attention to a movie.
I wonder if this is common. I'd immediately switch to using subtitles when watching The Wire, but apparently the authors seem to think that's a bad idea, so I guess I won't do that; but I think that from now on, when I watch movies, I'll turn the subtitles on! I also wonder what other things I can adapt in my life to work around this whatever-it-is; I bet there are probably some simple things I can change that make me substantially more functional.
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09:04 pm
[Link] | Let's say, for instance, that you are debugging a program that embeds Lua, and you take a SEGV. Let's say that you'd like to know what was in Lua's head before this happened, too, since it might have been useful. Let's say also, that you're on Solaris, and you have an ancient version of GDB, so you don't have Python, generate-core-file doesn't work, and things like print some_c_function() are likely to kill your session. And, let's say that your bug repros once every 24 hours or so, so risking killing your session isn't something that you want to try.
Well, do I ever have the script for you. It's pretty arcane, but to my knowledge, nobody's done this, so I hope someone will find it useful.
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01:28 am
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More stuff I've done
Recently I just released an early snapshot of my branch of naim that supports OSCAR. naim is the original text-mode AIM client; I have used it since at least 0.11.6 (mid-2003), if not longer. Recently, though, AOL disabled the (ancient) protocol by which we connected to AIM. Last time they disabled TOC, they replaced it with TOC2, which required a little bit of change from us; but this time, TOC2 is gone for good.
So, after two months of hacking, I wrote a protocol driver for the modern protocol, OSCAR, and modernized the Lua support for naim.
This was a big effort, and I'm pretty proud that I managed to make a positive contribution to a project that I regularly use. I also debugged one of the toughest problems I have faced recently, although I guess that is not saying much, since I solved it in an evening.
Except that the maintainer has sort of fallen off the planet and does not care. Oh well.
But anyway. Yeah. Stuff I've done. Woo.
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11:24 pm
[Link] | It turns out that if you fight hard enough, you *can* get useful internal tools released to the world.
The MODS kernel driver is a toolkit something like UIO, but more suited for experimentation; it seems that it might make a good platform, for instance, for students experimenting with drivers without wanting to go too deep into crashing their system by writing bad kernel-mode code.
Although it was originally from NVIDIA, it is NOT an official NVIDIA release; any support questions (and patches!) should go to my personal e-mail address.
Enjoy!
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05:07 am
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Images and Words: The beauty of Israel.
(previous: A visit to
Israel.)
From May 18th to May 29th, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit
Israel as part of an program called Taglit-Birthright. Over these
11-ish days (of which 2 were really eaten up by an airplane), I visited 12
cities, spent 5 days with Israeli soldiers, ate infinity shawarmas, and shot
878 photos (after removing excessive duplicates, it drops down to about
580). In the previous post, I gave the tourist's perspective of inside
Israel; in this post, you'll get something of a reprieve from my writing,
since the content is dominated mostly by images.
( Images and Words: The beauty of Israel. )
Up next: Conflict.
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05:31 am
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Sketchin' up
OK, ICFP is over, and I am making progress on more text. In the mean time,
( here's something I did that I'm proud of! )
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