Planet Interface

Some people want to buy me music for my birthday. Again, do not feel obliged to buy anything, but if you do, then it may be helpful to know that some artists that I like are: Pink Floyd, mind.in.a.box, The Flaming Lips, Gregorian, Enigma, Radiohead, Scott Andrew, Jonathan Coulton, Evanescence, Oasis, trance[]control, Seal, Moby, Live, Breaking Benjamin, Robert Miles, Adiemus / Miriam Stockley, Moped, Bic Runga, Brooke Fraser.

Some information about what music I listen to can also be found on my last.fm profile. As for formats, anything digital without DRM is probably alright; CDs are certainly fine.

Yesterday afternoon xyzzy mentioned on a certain IRC channel that he was going to walk out to Turakirae Head to see the fur seals, and invited anybody to join him. I was persuaded, so postponed the study I had to do until later that night (I ended up working until about 2:00 am, I think) and we went. Nobody else ended up coming. He picked me up and we drove as far as we could, then walked for a while to the head where the seals are. It was good to get outside; I think I spent more time outside than I have over the last several weeks, and the fresh air and walking was really good.

I took a few pictures. xyzzy took many more of better quality with his DSLR; hopefully he will put them online soon.

It is interesting that this happened the day after my last blog post, though presumable was uncorrelated.

It seems that I tend to have more interesting conversations while walking than in other situations. A number of times in the last few months I have found that I have had really interesting conversations with somebody while walking to somewhere (with a group of other people), but once we arrive at the destination the conversation has stopped and I returned to my usual frustrated state.

I am not sure why.

Try walking with me somewhere sometime, perhaps.

Going through my head right now: ‘Hey You’ (Pink Floyd)

This is rather a disjointed post. Oh well.

I will turn 21 this year, so will have a party as is the tradition. Unfortunately it is not organised yet, but it will probably be on Saturday 20th September 2008. If you are reading this blog then there is a fair chance that you will be invited, so please try to keep that day free.

A minor but useful new feature: Geekpoints now has Atom feeds for points awarded by and to each user, as well as the feed of all points awarded. The feeds are linked in the usual way from each user’s page. For example, my Geekpoints page links to recent Geekpoints awarded by me and recent Geekpoints awarded to me.

This should be useful for integration with social networking and microblogging services: for example, you could add the feed of Geekpoints awarded by you to your Jaiku profile, so that your friends can see it along with everything else you have on Jaiku. I assume it would also work with FriendFeed, though I have not tried.

I recently started using Twitter, a popular microblogging service. It lets one post short updates (up to 140 characters) of one’s status or other comments. You can then subscribe to friend’s feeds, and see their updates via the web, RSS / Atom feeds, IM or SMS. I was impressed that the SMS service is free to receive updates, and works fine for me here on Vodafone NZ. You can see my feed here.

I have also signed up for Jaiku (my profile), which is a similar service (recently bought by Google) though with better handling of conversations and the ability to include RSS feeds from other services (such as blogs, last.fm or even Twitter). It is currently in closed beta though, so getting an account is a bit difficult.

I made this for dessert tonight, and my flatmates liked it. Maybe you will too. Here is the recipe in Krecipe format, or as a PDF. I recommend serving it with fresh hot custard.

I came across an interesting blog article recently, entitled Internet Arguments and the Search For Truth. It discusses the meaning of ‘faith’, and its relation to religion and science. The author has some interesting things to say about ideologues and debate, and I recommend reading it.

Whether science and religion can co-exist seems to be a common topic of disagreement and confusion, especially the divide manufactured between ‘Creationism’ and ‘Evolution’. Certainly it was a common theme to the questions people had to ask last year when the VUW Christian Union ran our Ask God in the Quad event here at Vic, and it has come up again this year.

Unfortunately some Christians have quite strong and loud beliefs along the lines of ‘God created the Earth in 6 (24 hour) days a few thousand years ago, this is the only possible way of interpreting the bible, and Evolution is an evil plot by Science to destroy people’s faith in God’. For their own part, their opponents often have equally fundamentalist views that Evolution conclusively disproves all religion, without even understanding very well what Evolution means.

I see no contradiction between science and Christianity. I am no biologist, and I cannot claim to have a terribly clear knowledge of exactly which of the claims grouped under the popular heading of ‘Evolution’ are generally accepted by the scientific community from what evidence. The closest I have come to studying evolution is the use of evolutionary computation techniques in AI (genetic algorithms, genetic programming, etc.), where they are a useful technique for optimisation and machine learning. My understanding is that there is a clear case from fossil records that there has been change with species throughout history, and a fairly clear case for speciation and common descent (at least to some extent), but there is no scientific consensus on how life came to exist in the first place. There seem to be a range of models for and hypotheses on abiogenesis, but no substantial evidence.

There are in fact quite a range of views within Christianity on the origins of life, based on different interpretations of the creation account given in Genesis. OriginScience.com gives one useful comparison of some of the views, from the perspective of a proponent of Old-Earth Creationism. TalkOrigins has a much shorter summary of some interpretations.

Christians have been thinking about these issues for quite a long time: Augustine of Hippo (a Christian theologian and philosopher who lived from 354 AD to 430 AD) had some interesting attitudes towards the interpretation of the Genesis account (as well as open-mindedness in general). He makes the excellent point:

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

Davis A. Young has written a good article about Augustine’s views that I recommend reading, both for non-Christians and Christians.

As one of the assignments for COMP425 (Computational Logic) we have to write an essay about ‘logic and computation’. We were discussing this in class yesterday, and it was suggested that essay writing is essentially graph traversal (or perhaps flattening). I wonder how true this is.

Following Patrick’s example:

At VUW:

andrew@rise:~$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
105 java
56 cd
51 mixerctl
39 git-branch
26 git-status
25 ls
19 ssh
15 git-checkout
13 xmms2
11 gitk


I am rather surprised that I have run git-branch more than git-status. I guess I tend to run it quite a few times in a row to see branches, create a new one and then check them again.

At home:

andrew@rata:~$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
114 sudo
49 ssh
31 less
30 clothes
28 kontact
27 cd
21 ls
19 ./ical2sqlite
13 ifconfig
13 aptitude


On my laptop:

andrew@rimu:~$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
83 ssh
74 sudo
39 ifconfig
31 xrandr
30 ls
25 sync_rata
25 cd
23 ping
15 iwconfig
15 grep


I now post on a couple of other blogs that readers of this one may also want to read:

• The blog for my flat, Kelp. All of us in the flat will be posting on this from time to time.
• I have started a blog for my Honours project, where I will be keeping a regular journal of my research. This is probably of less interest to the general public, unless you find optimising compilers exciting.

My cellphone number has changed. To derive the new number from the old, take the old number without the + as an 11 digit number (starting 64273) and add 577828525717. The result should be a 12 digit number, starting with 6421 for +64 21. I will keep the old phone for now, but will not check it often so I advise against calling or sending SMSes to it. Email, Jabber and IRC are still better ways to contact me when possible.

I recently read Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction.

It is set about a thousand years in the future, when humans have settled on planets in a number of other solar systems but no other life has been found on any of the many planets explored. Humanity has reached the point where everybody can live a comfortable life, but there is no longer any real progress. The main character, Dr. Kim Brandywine, works for an organisation aiming to find extra-terrestrial intelligence but does not really believe that there is any life in the universe beyond that brought from Earth. This slowly starts to change when an old acquaintance suggests to her that the failed SETI expedition in which her sister died may not have been what it seemed. She begins to investigate, and becomes increasingly obsessed with discovering what happened as she uncovers evidence that the four crew of the expedition were apparently anxious to hide something.

I moved out of my old flat yesterday, and into a new flat on Kelburn Parade. The new flat is quite a bit bigger (7 bedrooms rather than 3), though the bedrooms are smaller. It is of course much closer to the university. The flat is being run by TSCF, with people from VUWCU and ICF living there.

We do not have a phone currently, and I will not be online as much as usual as we do not have a proper Internet connection yet. For now I have a USB wifi adapter in middle of a parabolic wire mesh dish sitting propped in the window at a certain angle connected to my laptop to connect to the VUW network, then a cable between my desktop and laptop with my laptop routing so I can connect from my desktop. I then connect to SWANS with OpenVPN over that. This all results in a very flaky and unreliable connection.

We are planning to have a flat-warming on 2008-03-01, so keep that day free if you are my friend and live in Wellington.

I recently came across this blog post summarising a talk by Michael Schwern at BarCampBlock about communication among geeks and between geeks and others. I recommend it to all, geek or otherwise, as it makes some interesting points about how geeks tend to communicate. One point I found interesting was about ‘tact filters’:

Most non-geeks have outbound tact filters: they filter what they want to say and add polite noise as it passes through. Geeks have inbound tact filters: they take bare communication with no politeness and just wrap it in assumed politeness as they interpret it.

When non-geeks talk, geeks think the polite sounds they make are redundant.

When geeks talk, non-geeks just think they’re being incredibly rude.

Do you think that this is true, and had you already realised it? What do you think of the rest of the article?

This morning, at around 9:50 am, I was walking from the fruit and vegetable market to church (as I do almost every Sunday), when a woman came up to me with a small tree in a green plastic pot with gold-coloured foil around it.
“Would you like a free tree?” she asked.
I replied that I did not really have anywhere to put it, but she gave it to me anyway, putting it into the bag in which I was carrying 3 carrots and 6 eggs which I had just bought. She said something about going away somewhere, it being a bonzai of some sort, and that she was sure that I would take good care of it, then returned to her car and drove off, leaving me with the tree. I continued my walk to church, with one bag rather more full than it had been. A few minutes later, I removed the foil.

Some weeks ago, I was walking up Northland Road on a nice sunny day, minding my own business, when all of a sudden there was a loud BANG comparable to a gunshot. I looked at the road in the direction of the sound, and saw a cyclist riding carefully to a halt, with his front tyre completely separate from the front wheel. It was rather surprising.

I spent the last week (Monday 12th November — Sunday 18th November) at SLC, the Student Leadership Conference run each summer by New Zealand’s Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship. It was a great opportunity to take some time out both to study the bible and to consider the application of it to life in general and on campus. We had a mixture of talks and discussions in various groups.

A large part of this year’s SLC was focused around the book of Nehemiah, an old-testament leader who led the Israelites in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after their return from exile in Babylon.

One thing that particularly stood out to me from the conference was the connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

There can be a tendency to think of God as described in the Old Testament as judgmental and legalistic, while the God of the New Testament shows grace, love and forgiveness. This is not really true, however. God’s character remains constant: in the Old Testament as in the new he shows his grace time and time again.

Much of the OT, in fact, is about a cycle of Israel rebelling against God (often worshiping idols instead), God sending prophets to warn them, the prophets being largely ignored, and Israel finally losing God’s blessing and being conquered by their enemies (and often taken into exile and slavery). God then hears the prayers of the few remaining righteous, and grants grace to his people while they are still in rebellion. He then gathers them back to their land and himself, and they repent and turn back to him. They are then blessed and celebrate God’s blessing and provision. After a time, the cycle repeats.

The point here is that God restores his people undeservedly. While they are still in rebellion against him he sends leaders such as Nehemiah to bring them back to him, and blesses them generously.

This pattern is then fulfilled ultimately in Jesus, who is not so much a change in God’s actions towards his people but a final and perfect way of bringing them back to him. Jesus is not just a man like the earlier saviours and kings of Israel (although he is also a man), and does not turn away from and rebel against God as even Israel’s greatest king — Solomon — eventually did. Instead, Jesus lived a life in perfect obedience and service to God. He then once more went further than his predecessors in choosing to die to take the punishment deserved by everyone but him.

While I guess I knew all this already in a way, I certainly thought more about it and gained a better understanding.

On a less serious note, yomcat also got and then later lost a mullet. He looks rather unhappy, especially in the second photo.

Andy Shudall has also blogged about SLC, in case you want to read more.

This summer I will be working at Innaworks, through the CreativeHQ Summer of Code. Innaworks develop tools to help people to create games and other applications for cellphones, in particular ‘mBooster’ which automatically optimises Java programs to make them smaller and faster, and ‘alcheMo’ which automatically converts Java programs to run on BREW phones (which I am told are popular in the US). I will be working on a researching and prototyping a new part far one of their products. Unfortunately I am not allowed to say what exactly I am working on, but it certainly sounds like it will be interesting and challenging work.

I will be continuing a coincidental tradition of Interface presidents working for Innaworks: both Donald Gordon and Chris Andreae have been Interface presidents in the last few years (Donald is also the King of Interface) and now work at Innaworks. I am the current president of Interface.

I start on Monday 19th November.

I recently came across (on this blog, through Planet KDE) this rather impressive video, which demonstrates a dynamic image resizing algorithm invented by a couple of researchers at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel. It allows images to be rescaled without losing important details (e.g. people) by first removing unimportant parts (e.g. grass in the background), according to an ‘energy’ function. The algorithm is apparently fairly simple, but does give some quite striking results. It also allows to seamlessly remove unwanted parts of an image (e.g. a power pole obstructing a view), by giving it a negative ‘energy’ so that that part will be removed first when the image is shrunk, and then (if wanted) enlarging the image again. I highly recommend watching the video to see how it works, as it is rather difficult to explain otherwise.

There are already a number of free implementations: a standalone Java program with a similar interface to that demonstrated in the video (which is rather slow, but still fun to try), and a GIMP plugin.

I recently came across GTalk-to-VoIP, which is a free gateway allowing voice and IM communication between Google Talk, all SIP services, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and the PSTN. For example, I can use it to call Google Talk users from my SIPphone account, and Google Talk users can use it to call me or (for a reasonable price) phone numbers on the public telephone network. It also has lots of other features, and there is plenty of information on the site. I recommend having a look if you have any interest in voice communication.

Last night, I went to All Saints Hataitai’s ‘to drink or not to drink — Christian perspectives on alcohol’ debate. I saw it mentioned on a couple of blogs (here and here), so decided to go and see what they had to say.

Personally, I do not drink alcohol, but that is mostly because I do not see the point — why acquire a taste for something that is expensive, when there are plenty of nicer and cheaper things to drink?

Anyway, it was interesting hearing two different perspectives, even if they did both come to pretty much the same conclusion (having a couple of drinks is fine, getting drunk is not). A couple of scripture mentioned were Romans 14 and John 2:1-12.

Ben Johnson-Frow (who does not drink) talked about how he used to drink excessively in his teens before he became a Christian, and so he decided to stop completely when he became a Christian, as he would otherwise be temped to drink too much. He also talked about the New Zealand culture of drinking to excess and binge-drinking, and that not drinking at all was partly a way of protesting against that.

Sam Harvey (who brought a bottle of beer up with him to drink while listening to Ben talk) talked about how excessive drinking has never been an issue for him, and he finds it useful to relate to people. He has written a bit about the topic on his blog.

For more discussion, I highly recommend Paul Windsor’s blog post from last year, including the comments. He asks “What is one single redeeming feature of alcohol consumption?”, and some interesting discussion ensues.

This debate was apparently part of a series All Saints are running on the first Sunday of every month, ‘wrestling with some of the big issues of life and seeing what God might have to say about them’. Next month (Sunday 7th October, 6:00 pm) is ‘Truth, Love, Tolerance’, which sounds interesting. I plan to go if I have time, and I recommend it.

Here I give a brief comparison of a number of SIP clients I have tried. All will run under GNU/Linux; some also run under other operating systems.

Ekiga is a GTK based client, previously known as GnomeMeeting. As well as SIP, it supports H.323, the protocol used by Microsoft NetMeeting. It has an addressbook (which apparently integrates with Evolution), but no contact list (i.e. presence information) as such. The addressbook can also search in LDAP directories. It can login to multiple SIP accounts at once, with one set as the default. As well as voice calls, it also supports video and text, though the text chat is not terrible nice (it does not pop up if someone messages you — you have to open the chat window yourself).

Twinkle is a Qt3 based client. It only supports SIP. Like Ekiga, it can login to multiple accounts at once, but it handles this slightly better in that it allows to select which account to use when making a call, rather than having to change the default like Ekiga. It can look up SIP addresses in the KDE address book, but does not provide any way to edit or add contacts. It does not have a contact list with presence information, though the latest version (1.1, not yet in Debian testing) does have this. It takes up a significant part of the main window with a log of what has happened. This would be better relegated to the status bar and a separate window. The DTMF keypad is in a separate window, which can be opened by a toolbar button. Personally, I would prefer this to be in the main window, though perhaps hidable. It does not appear to support video or text chat; apparently the latest version does support text chat. It seems to have quite sophisticated options for call redirection. It also has two ‘lines’, to allow you to put one call on hold to take or make another. It also apparently allows you to join two calls together, to host a 3-way conference call.

WengoPhone (a.k.a. OpenWengo) is a Qt4 client designed primarily for the WengoPhone service. You can still use it with another SIP service, but a few of the features will be unavailable. It only allows to connect to a single SIP service at once, but also allows you to connect to multiple IM services, including MSN messenger, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo messenger and Jabber (e.g. Google Talk). It does not appear to support voice calls through these IM services, however. It has a contact list with presence information, and contacts can be associated with multiple SIP and IM addresses, as well as PSTN phone numbers. Annoyingly, there seems to be no way to hide offline contacts, which can be a pain if you have more than a small list of contacts. It supports video and text chat in addition to voice.

Kphone is a Qt3 client. It (at least version 4.2, the latest in Debian) tends to freeze often, sometimes locking up the keyboard and mouse and so affecting other programs as well. It only allows to login to a single SIP account. It has a basic addressbook, including a contacts list shown in the main window. It is not clear whether this is supposed to show presence information. It allows video and text chat, but the interface is not very nice.

Linphone is a GTK based client. It supports logging in to multiple SIP accounts, and allows to choose which one to call through. It has a basic address book, and a contact list with presence information. It has a DTMF keypad in a tab in the main window. It supports text chat, though the interface is not very nice. It supports video, which is shown in a separate window which will not close once it is opened.

Overall, I think my favourite is Twinkle, though Ekiga and Linphone are reasonable options for those who prefer GTK, and WengoPhone is a good choice if you only want to use one SIP service (especially if that service is WengoPhone) and also want a multiprotocol IM client.