Tag: geekish

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I recently ‘dented’ (tweeted on identi.ca) a question to a group of software developers: what music do they listen to that is conducive to coding?I received a variety of answers, with just as wide-ranging tastes as you could expect, really. Clearly, I hadn’t conducted a very economic experiment. Perhaps I was asking the wrong question.

The question I should have asked is this: which music do you listen to that evokes a calm, creative and logical state of mind? In other words, I needed to key-word the question to (a) elicit greater impact on the reader and (b) give the question more scope, more context.

The premise of the question is the science behind brainwaves. Apparently, alpha waves in the brain (those which occur at between 8-13Hz [cycles per second]) are the most conducive to creative AND logical thinking. It is commonly associated with a meditative state of mind, deeply relaxed, daydreaming, fantasizing and creatively visualising various scenarios.

This dispels some notion that left brain/right brain dominance exists. I can’t remember which is which, but it is said that the right hemisphere is more creative and the left, more logical/analytical. Or vice versa.

But this alpha wave state could, in fact, also support such dominance, if it allowed for the idea of submission of the dominant region during periods of relaxation. In other words, we will have one personality profile when active, busy, even stressed, and another profile when relaxed, calm, clear.

It follows, then, the people seeking to produce creative works – whether it be software code, writing, visual art or music, should always seek the best environment to create alpha brain waves. Music is just one component; meditation, light scents, lighting, physical comfort and staying hydrated also contribute, as does the avoidance of caffiene and alcohol.

But for me, most of all, it’s music.  And quite often, that’s trance. 😉

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Some time ago, mainly because my then-girlfriend bought me 3 Hacky Sacks (or ‘juggling balls‘, as they seem to be known these days), I took it upon myself to learn how to juggle.
An image of three juggling balls

The learning process is actually quite simple.  This is the method I have used:

  1. With two in one hand (e.g. left) and one in the other, throw up one (of the two) first and simply catch it with the other hand.
  2. Then, repeat but throw back from the right to the left.

    Completing just this first step is the key to learning how to juggle. 

    Continue to practice this method, tossing the sack from one to the other hand.  When you can always catch it, try the next step:

  3. When the ball is up in the air, throw the opposite ball up too.  The best time to throw it is just before the first ball reaches the parabolic peak (the top of the arc of travel).   Now that your second hand is free, catch the first ball.
  4. If you can, try to catch the second ball as well, using your first hand – just as you have already practised.

    Once you have got this far, you are well on the way to becoming an expert! 😉

  5. It goes without saying that, to improve, you need to throw the third ball into the air before catching either the first, or the second.

The paradox

This is the secret to success.  In order to successfully catch, time after time, you must successfully throw.  In other words, to hold on, you have to let go.

Perhaps it can be best summarised with a quote from Star Wars.  When Princess Leia is speaking to Governer Tarkin, shortly before he destroys the planet of Dantooine, she says (paraphrased), “the more you tighten your grip, the more will slip through your fingers”.

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In every day life, I come across a number of things that I find extremely useful.  Instead of clogging up my browser’s bookmarks, I’ll list there here for my reference.

I hope they might be of use to you too!

Programming

  • PHP
  • Flex

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    There is one thing I want from Org-mode more than anything: the ability to record the time I spend on various activities – even unplanned ones – and then see a summary of this time at the end of the week.

    Luckily, this is actually really simple.  I won’t go through the details of how to install or set-up Org-mode; that information is easy to read through at its rightful place.  Instead, it’s the key time-recording feature which I’ll briefly touch on here.

    How to start:

    1. Open up Emacs (not got Emacs? See the GNU web site or download it straight from the GNU FTP site)
    2. Start Org-mode by opening a .org file:

       C-x C-f  ~/org/work.org

    3. Start the clock on any item:

       C-c C-x C-i

    4. Leave it running for a minute or two and then stop the clock:

       C-c C-x C-o

    5. Now go into Agenda view:

       C-c a a

    6. When in Agenda view (commonly this opens in a second frame), just hit R:

       R

    Et voila! You should be able to see a summary of the time you have booked on your activities.

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    Apple’s attempt to sell me an iPad
    (the image has now been deleted, but depicted Apple’s QuickTime-only web site with the plugin not working – or failing-over nicely, in my browser)

    So, I can’t quite work out why I might want or need an iPad. Amusingly, a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to Apple’s “TV” adverts on its website.

    What I saw was the image, opposite.

    Hmm, strange. Is this product only for people who already use Windows and/or a Mac? Being unable to install QuickTime (which is for a “PC” or Mac only) means I am unable to view this product. Apple are unable to do the most basic thing with sales and actually demonstrate to me why this product is good.

    Which then led me to think, perhaps it isn’t.

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    Hot off the press is v1.4.5 of Mark Hershberger’s weblogger, an extension to GNU Emacs / XEmacs which allows blogging from within the Emacs editor environment.

    Early indications are good – for me at least. I have found the process of setting up and using weblogger a bit tricky, at times, so it’s encouraging to see that I can at least add this blog entry fairly easily.

    Now, which is that “publish blog” keystroke…? 😉

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    I love Linux.  Sure, it ain’t perfect; there’s still some things that could “feel” a bit more modern.  But at the same time, there is so much to its credit that it’s hard to ignore.

    Take, for instance, virtual memory.  All modern computers have it.  Mobile phones use it.  Basically any computer-oriented device probably used virtual memory paging instead of real address allocation.  It’s just more flexible and safer to leave all the memory management to the operating system kernel.

    The nice thing about the open source OS, however, is that you can determine just how “swappy” Linux is.  It’s a feature which allows incredible flexibility.

    For example, a recent filesystem and partition resizing operation that I undertook had the strange side-effect of rendering my swap partition strangely ineffective.  Being able to tune the swappiness of the kernel has allowed me to fix and test the problem in-situ.

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    I have two blogs hosted by Google/Blogger (a blog for work, life and general stuff that interests me) and WordPress (a blog just for work).  I differentiate these on the basis of content type as opposed to areas of interest.  That is, purely commercial (or tech-commercial) stuff goes to the WordPress one.

    And yet, I wonder, what is the point?  With the ability to group, tag, label and so on, I can collect similar articles together in a variety of ways.  Anyone with half a brain, left or right, would be able to see that any articles I have labelled “business” are probably more commercially-oriented that ones labelled “may contain nuts”.

    The problem is, I don’t want to miss the party – anywhere.  WordPress blogs seem, by some opinion, so popular that it makes me wonder if WordPress is more of a writer’s platform than blogger, and that blogger is something more akin to myspace for the blogosphere – a kind of scrawly, messy, throw-together-but-informative kind of creative jumble.  Perhaps I’m being harsh of others’ blogger blogs, even if I’m being slightly too kind to my own… 😉

    Conversely, the opinions cited in various threads (1, 2, 3) would suggest that Blogger is the way to go, at least for feedback options and template customisability. 

    Regardless, I am not entirely convinced that either system is, actually, tremendously brilliant. Maybe I’d be a better person to judge once I’ve committed a thousand or two- more articles to cyberspace and then regret/celebrate making the wrong/right choice.

    Then everyone would really thank me for my opinion.  Then disregard it.  😉

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    Short one today – I was looking for a way of converting all my ripped CDs to an alternative format for portable audio use.

    Here’s a useful link for doing scripted, recursive audio format conversion.

    Now you can rip all those CDs to FLAC format (which is lossless, unlike lossy mp3 – CBR or VBR) and then convert the lot to mp3 for the iPod, car, etc.

    Oh, and a copy of Fedora or Ubuntu would probably be handy too 😉

    Of course, you could pay for a commercial alternative or even – heaven forbid – “upgrade” your iTunes for DRM-de-restricted AAC files (which are still lossy-format files anyway).

    So, why bother, when a CD costs the same and has better sound quality?

    Forget digital downloads, until they respect your freedom.  Buy CDs!!

    Or, if you are 100% sure your data will always be safe and/or don’t have a hi-fi CD player (in addition to CD/DVD-ROM drive) to justify getting physical media, investigate these forward-looking alternatives:

     Enjoy!

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    It’s been a very busy start to 2010 but I have finally managed to get myself into gear with use of Emacs. I’m using it in console-only guise as far as I can, simply to learn the keystrokes as quickly as possible.

    One feature that I’ve been very happy to stumble across is this weblogger.el extension. It means you can simply open a new buffer in Emacs, blog and save – all in minutes, if not seconds! Much better than opening a web page every time you want to blog about something.

    The inspiration to really use Emacs in earnest comes from my new hero(in): Sacha Chua. A hugely popular and influential personality, Sacha is a true geek (in the best possible sense, of course) and a rising star for 2010 and beyond. I highly recommend reading Sacha’s blog at sachachua.com.

    Happy reading!