The online home of Appleman1234 / Benjamin Southall

The partridges return in their dance

Through the eye to the tiger, time flies

Black leaf of red tree leads to minimal satisfaction

The intertextuality replaced by misfortunate circumstances

Rapture still remains with Euphoria broken and crying

She wants to go home, but nobodies home, so there she lies broken inside

Tooth for a tooth, wrestling fairies endure suffering but don’t find Buddha’s wisdom

Still hassled by the askers and the silent placing their judgement as they blink , they fail to think , relying on good taste and instinct.

Misheard words echoing through a room till the resonance takes over, the symbolism lost like a isohedric clover

Mistrust, contempt along with licquorice over powers the bitterness that rests in my fingertips and pulses through the air currents as they float by me.

Psyche and Cupid’s wasn’t told, the lovers tryst, the gods rage, the plots to thick to fell and be processed into Disney gold.

Aghast and elated the chance so fickle quickly metamorphosizes   into hope, which like the Babelfish makes it so obvious, and the smokers of logic choke on their pipes, calling for plumbers

The boxer and Galileo suffer in silent penitentiary one ensnared by ideas, the other set free.

Words not said, packets dropped, lost in overhead, echos of silence, threats of violence  , as the zombies recur throughout the echelons

Wisdom comes and then goes, as pathetic minds have buffer overflows because their thought rate can’t accelerate and their actions only serve to exacerbate their clouded judgment.

The music and bird song that is supposed to soothe and calm, instead incites the brewing storm , disregard left the window open late last week. The monsoon comes , the rains begin, even after the floods are gone,  there remains the wind.

Today I saw the sunrise, and it made me realise, just how much I was missing living in the city, though they are gone, these words still remain, reiterating and proliferating through the thought palace.

As they say we are moving ahead, but to where and for what ? Points outside of a Cartesian space, clothes spun from invisble lace, black marks on a speckled face, the dynasty’s silent embrace.

May your checks not bounce and you resolve not falter, and may you always have a crying shoulder.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

How are you all ? I know I promised video blogs and things but currently I haven’t had lighting on my side, despite having the technology for a feasible implementation. Something about the darkness I find more comfortable then any light anyways.

My music is old, slowly growing and changing like most things, but it gives me inspiration to reflect, and support to deal with the emotions and illogic I encounter in the jumping , hopping and bouncing of everyday life or life everyday.

I have read all but one of the books great Aunt Jackie gave me for birthday / Christmas. Interesting what see classifies as regular / normal reading, given she is unaware of my reading habits.

Is it weird that tragedy seems normal ? Disasters seem to all ways make more news than happy things, and crisisses (I think it should be crisisi but dictionary disagrees with me, it must reserve the -i plural for -us suffix, so us becomes i) seem  to force people to action , instigating the choice of survival or death.

This choice of survival or death is just as easy of the choice of a cake or death, maybe that is because it a Boolean choice, with only two options (yes I am aware I am repeating myself / being superfluous, but an amazing number of people don’t seem to know what a Boolean / binary choice is) or maybe because one of the choices is death, and mortal beings as a rule generally like self preservation.

When you start adding other options into the question, it becomes more difficult for people to answer. For example Cake, Comfort, Liberty, Improvement, Death ? I recently watched a TED talk video on different the mathematics of the decision making and the speaker pointed out several interesting things.

The first being that when given a difficult Boolean decision with a default specified, because of the difficulty most people go with the default. (The example case was organ donation in different countries, the difference was largely because of the form for driver’s licenses being inclusive or exclusive)

The second was that given a Boolean / Binary decision, and then given a Ternary decision with the third option being similar but less than than one of the other two options, having the weaker option in the decision, made the stronger option more likely to be chosen then its alternative in the binary decision / choice.

For example, given the choice of a free trip to London, a free trip to Paris , and a free trip to Paris except you have to pay for your breakfast, the free trip to Paris would become more popular when the second option was included in the decision choices.

This leads me to think what result a survey that had the default option as death, would have in terms of its responses to the decision making process, would everyone be through in their filling out of the survey if they realised that their ignorance could cost them their lives.

Imagine for a second that every decision could that you make could cost you your life, would your choices be influenced by this addition ? Why ? Why not ? Suddenly the question of the what topping to have on your toast in the morning isn’t so trivial ? And what about the decision of whether to say Hello to someone or to not say Hello ?

We train ourselves to make decisions from an early age, but the basis and reasoning for our decisions isn’t always a rigorous as we believe or perceive it to be.

I am volunteering at the Lifeline Book Festival until next Sunday, and today I had the opportunity to work at the Helium tanks inflating the balloons, it was very interesting to contemplate and listen to the answers to the following questions

1. Would you like a balloon ?

2. If you would like a balloon, What colour would you like ?

Listening to the answers and asking the question soon lead me to the mental line of inquiry ?

1. Would you like to keep living ?

2. If you would like to keep living, What type of life would you like to lead ?

I would love to have the opportunity to ask various people these 4 questions and contemplate their answers and the motivation behind why they gave the answers they do / did.

I return to University for one more semester (hopefully)  in late February. Additionally I have various other side projects which I want to gradually chip away at.

This blog entry has already asked enough questions, and I don’t even know if my reader base still exceeds 1 (me), but you are welcome to comment / answer the questions asked if you wish.

Thanks for your time,

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

Had the cluster meeting yesterday, thanks to those who showed up. We have more hardware now, and a newer gentoo install , all we need now is for piggy to find the scsi drives and the ball will be rolling. Otherwise all that is needed is a few additional spare parts and to setup the SAN box on the Dell Poweredge 2500 rather than the Poweredge 6400 (which must be vampiric or emo, or both and a twilight fandell as it likes to cut me and not find disks. Our magnificent effort was in spite of the lack of internet and the rain . (prorata makes me rage, not to mention the raining on our parade). On the mention of twilight, it is an awesome song by bo(with the accent on top of it, that this wordpress install doesn’t render , because the server is ubuntu and  not gentoo and doesn’t get locales)a (boa, the british band) and nothing more.

Got results back, got high credit for advanced data visualisation, and 43% fail for partial differential equations, because I botched the exam. I really don’t feel like taking supplementary exam for it, so I will probably just try and get an RPL elective instead. At least  I can solve PDEs analytically now in non exam conditions. Looking back at my academic history, the more subjects I do the better I seem to do at them, chances are they are just getting harder towards the end of my degrees however.

Next on the schedule includes the UCSB iCTF which will have me busy most of friday afternoon and saturday morning till lunch, then Laningrad (Lost in Time ) on the 8th, then my 21st on the 24th. Filed bug upstream for intel compositing kde crash, and there is already one filed for the printer-applet crash, but noone seems to have heard of my font issues with firefox and amsn, guess I will be using pidgin for a while longer.

There will probably be another cluster meeting in January, not sure when yet. The Smartdevices V7 has finally made it to dealextreme so I have to decide whether I deserve / desire it as birthday / christmas present or not. I feel like cooking, mostly likely desserts including cupcakes, but I probably won’t get around to it.

Still looking for part time work preferably in IT, which means more cover letters and applications to submit. Neopets guild is awfully quiet which means I probably won’t be revamping / remaking their CMS / Portal until the activity resumes. Still haven’t unpacked my books yet.

Update: piggy / dell poweredge 6400 now boots in 5.5 minutes with memory check w00t !!!

Update 2: firefox / amsn font issues fixed my moving autohinter and subpixel rendering font confs from conf.avail to conf.d in /etc/ directory

Hope everyone is remembering to enjoy themselves in their busyness as Christmas approaches.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,
Discovered some really nice strangers on omegle.com, it was definitely worth trawling through the trolls and people searching for cybersex …

Since when did conversation or talk mean sex ? Honey , we need to talk ? …, Oh well don’t get me started ranting on oversexualisation of society.

It would be interesting to see what changing the underlying anthropological social structure would be however, but I doubt it would happen outside of communes.

Managed to move to a place with a pool and that is able to get internet, which is nice. Firefox is currently been replaced with Konqueror, as firefox seems to have flash, tab / nspr and uim crashs …… I haven’t gotten around to chrome yet. ivanhoe is fixed and the GIR cluster is relocated.

UPDATE: Firefox and AMSN and various applications (xconfig anyone) seem to have missing text syndrome, I have enabled subpixel hinting (something I hadn’t had to touch since KDE 3) and that brings some of the text back on Firefox but not all. If anyone knows what the fix is , I would appreciate it, as far as I can see freetype, xft, fontconfig are fine, as is mesa and libdrm with KMS on Intel, …..

A side note, the transparency of icons in GTK apps also doesn’t seem to be working. Weird ….

It is quite hot here and I find myself wishing that I was in Canada, Japan or Cyrogenics lab. Interesting things I came across include kysoh’s tux android, buglab’s bug embedded platform and smartdevicesq v7.

I started on backporting the dvb modules to 2.6.11.12 but had nothing but issues, so I may need to progress with plan b of porting all the official thecus interface inside the gentoo chroot and bumping up the kernel to something reasonable.

KMS and fbencoder are having fun (not working), strangely enough they worked with the previous kernel, maybe it is because the theme I am using doesn’t have a 1024×600 config, although I am telling it to use 800×600 one.

Not happy with VTK regarding the audio visualisation project I was working on, but at least I learnt Marsyas and QT, I may continue with Marsyas in attempts to write voice authentication for kdm / gdm.

Saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with people from uni, was quite disappointed in it, it reeked of Faustian cliche and the imaginarium wasn’t surreal/ phantasmorgical enough for my liking, you can show people aesthetics and beauty but unless you mind boggle and captivate them you are doing the entire bringing a person’s imagination to life wrong …

The deja vu of the series of the day’s events and the disparity and lack of cohesion between the conversation and other social dynamics didn’t ameliorate the circumstances, however a trip to candy store may have …

Currently job seeking and resuming project work that was suspended or delayed during the university semester.

Hope everyone is having fun,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

I am currently surviving. Zombies haven’t eaten me yet. I need to focus on the project I am working on for advanced data visualisation.  Words not said are currently interesting me at the moment. Golden drops of silence, as I attempt to diagnose which SSH no longer seems to work on my NAS (thecus n1200 , ivanhoe).

I currently blame the new firmware. I am hoping to either get it working again or end up installing Gentoo directly on the nas. But I need to focus on partial differential equations study.  I managed to scour various pdf texts on areas of interest, so that I can start reading again.

Raon Digital (The makers of the everun note), seem to have gone out of business, which reaffirms my decision to get an EEEPC instead of a the everun note, in spite of missing out on the dual core 64 bit 7 inch touchscreen goodness.

I have code to write now, but I hope to have recorded an audio or video blog later, so you can look forward to that.

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

Perhaps now I will recall what exactly I wanted to type about. I have been working quite hard on my advanced data visualisation project and have come to the abrupt realisation that spectographs/ spectograms are not effective visualisation methods for audio analysis, as they look cluttered and are visually difficult to measure or discretise. This means that I am going to be investigating various transformations / discretisations I can use on spectograph visualised audio data or alternate methods of visualising audio data.

Currently the software I have been looking into includes Sonic Visualiser, Wavesurfer (which I will probably eventually get working with TCL / TK 8.5 after lots of sed magic to remove the GUI effects that have been made invalid / redudant due to the graphic tile updates), sndPeek (which I haven’t found a use for , other than it being a realtime audio visualiser, still working out whether it takes files as input or only audio devices)  Marsyas ,bpM and Echonest on the analysis front. I am also looking at hooking into libvisual just to provide an aethestic visualisation option.

On the subject of spectral analysis and pretty pictures, on the way into the city, I saw a double rainbow in the sky. What was interesting about the second rainbow has the colour spectrum back to front due to the angle of refraction, another interesting thing is whilst people claim to see triple rainbows and quadruple rainbows the rainbows they see are actually double rainbows that both have a supernumerary rainbow each.

rebecca(my laptop) seems to be update package wise, and I now have scim autostarting along with KDE 4.3, my gentoo overlay seems to be slowly growing to. I really need to spend sometime on the cluster, not to mention my Partial Differential Equations study. Recently I discovered animedb.net, the fact that it has a random function, is something that I find quite impressive. Apparently I am /was/ still am insane for having the debug and doc USE flags enabled globally.

In terms of philosphy I tumbled across the Münchhausen Trilemma, which fits together nicely with various thoughts and gedakens I have been investigating. Another intriguing thought is that is not thinking that causes us to exist but rather believing that we exist or believing that we think we exist to is more likely to implicate existence. This has to do with the philosophical zombie and sentient thought gedanken.

My Japanese is improving to the anime exposure and my French from the movies on SBS, I still have to work on my Mandarin,Russian,Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. I also have to get comfortable with the style of coding that the programming competitions like ANZAC and ACM expect, particular given that chances are Visual Studio ends up getting used as IDE… (Visual Studio makes me ARGHHH…). I also need to revise my knowledge of dynamic programming and various other programming algorithms for ACM.

IOU seems to running ok, all things considered, and it is possible that the Kali-Ma campaign may be ressurected, so their is plenty of GURPs fun for me to find. I also have to get around to either writing or typing down some poetry/ lyrics or starting to formalise scripts, skits and storyboarding and dialogue for the various manga / anime in my head. I recently reheard the poem the arrival of the Bee Box, I like that poem, the absolute depth and varation of the imagery, meaning and metaphor align to the level of immersion that I have become accustomed to. (Having said this my brain is now think what it would like to be in MMRLEICE (Massively Multiplayer Real Life Emerged in Custard Experience or Extravaganza… take your pick …))

My question for this week, is what makes something taboo ? If something that was taboo from your phenomenological experience was considered a consensus reality or common place in another place you were experiencing what your beliefs and connatations of it change ? Why or Why not ?

Best of luck and best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

How is everyone ? I am back at uni and quite busy despite only doing two subjects this semester (Advanced Data Visualisation and Analysis and Partial Differential Equations). rebecca finally has scim with all the languages(I had forgotten to emerge scim-tables), it also has Tagaini Jisho (awesome Japanese dictionary of doom, so I can translate manga, anime, etc, if I want to ) . Either going to start running IOU campaign tommorow or as soon as all 6 players are in the same room and free to play. Laningrad was awesome. Happy Birthday to all those celebrating their 21st then.

I finally got to watch Kino’s Journey and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The questions and perspectives it immersed my mind into left me pensive and curious.  I was going to do a philsophical post a while back but I feel to excited to cohesively post one at present. Got to catch with lots of people either at Laningrad or uni. Also got to watch Seabiscuit with my grandad which was wonderful.

I still have to decide what I am going to do for my Advanced Data Vis project, but chances are it will probably be something with 3D, interaction or combining scientific and information visualisation.  I would put more here, however I can’t currently ascertain what I wish to type as it has gotten lost for the moment.

I do however have a question to ask …

If you only purpose in life was to make a pretty picture what picture would you make and why ?

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

All my assessment for this semester is completed and now I just await my results. Now my eyes / mind / various other squishy appendages turn to all the objectives and things that piled up on my floor or been pushed aside. (Actually my floor is clean, suprise I actually managed to clean my room whilst studying). Meanwhile I have been organising what needs to be achevied during both this gap from study and in the following semester.

Spent a large amount of time looking at networking equipment (switchs, routers, smart switchs,etc), (hacking NG GS608s via eeprom to enable the BCM5398 smart managed switch features, if NG has them turned off), as I have several LANs coming up and various purchasing decisions to contempt and iron out. Ironing makes me feel like eating waffles. I also have to organise some visual / video stuff inorder to work out a movie night I am having with a grandparent.

Was part of an interesting discussion the other day regarding the value of life ,whether the creation of life was just as immoral as the destruction of life and whether creating life, just lead to the newly born experiencing pointless suffering. ##philsophy on freenode isn’t what it used to be, in fact I don’t think it ever was what it used to be. As the semester ends, I have recently been answering various questions about my future and the possibilities. The more I think about it, the more I realise that the answer isn’t something static that is easier to vocalise into comprehensible means.

The steps we have control over are the steps we take, and we can only take one or two or three or possibly seven steps without falling over in an heap / queue / stack / <insert data structure here>. Incandescent featureless footprints taken in the fabric of time, make me wonder whether such blemishs have an impact in the grand scheme of things.

Best wishes and have fun

Benjamin Southall

Hey everyone,

I was going to write another joke post similar to my QUT IRC sketch, but then I realised that I wasn’t feeling as satirical at all today. So instead I have a few things to update people on and a few more things to mention and poke a sharp pointy non stick like object at for all to ignore. Firstly I am not blogging to you all live from Hamilton Island, and I am not from the UK. To my parents, my siblings, my grandfather, my godfather and anyone else that reckons I should attempt to masquerade as the Best Job in the World winner, I say thanks for the suggestion but no thanks.

Attempting to masquerade as this person, would probably involving me changing my appearance and gaining an English accent and hiding the person I would be impostering in some sort of underwater pressurised cell in my secret underwater lair in the Great Barrier Reef, and fun and awesome as this all is, If I actually attempted to do it, their would be several consequences which include

• One of my secret lairs would being no longer secret
• I would have to blog to world why the Great Barrier Reef is awesome and spend a lot of time snorkeling, which isn’t that hard to do but takes away time that I need to work on my university assessment.
• Eventually I would get busted as my English accent would be not good enough or I would get knighted by the Queen for services against the Global Recession and services in support of conservation for my English accent being too good

A second thing I should mention is my pagerank still seems to be intact despite families assurances that I had been bumped to the 8th page of Google when they used Macca’s Wireless to check emails and stuff (This is why you shouldn’t let your siblings get addicted to WoW and other online games, as then the shared internet connection goes away and the other family members have to resort to Macca’s wireless).

The amount of media hype regarding this job, got me thinking about it, particularly as the person who won it has a similar firstname and the same surname as me. He gets to housesit a luxury house in Hamilton Island for 6 months, to basically have a six month vacation and gets paid $150k for it.  Evidently it is a publicility stunt, apparently $100 million of publicity from the media hype on media hype has already been generated. And this very good for QLD’s tourism industry, to quote Ruth Apelt’s song “Tourist-led Recovery”, “yeah we’re banking on a tourist-led recovery, that’s what I know, that’s what I know, and in QLD we say, yo way to go!!”.

But is a paid vacation really the best job in the world ? I mean 150K for 6 months is approximately $834 dollars a day or $105 dollars an hour for an 8 hour work day. In terms of rate of earning there are plenty of other jobs that can earn people $105 dollars per hour for an 8 hour work day, so it doesn’t win there, but I do suppose it is rather cushy. However once that job is finished, the money stops, like all employment, however the personal publicity he will obtain, would probably help him find future work.

But is the rate of money earnt per hours worked the most important thing in making a job the best in the world ? From an altrustic perspective it certainly isn’t, from that perspective the best jobs in the world would involve the saving, supporting and development of other people’s lives. This would have people with Doctor’s without Borders and councillors and social workers as having the best job in the world. From a hedonistic perspective the Hamilton Island job isn’t the best in the world, because in terms of hedonism, there are other jobs that cause more pleasure for less sacrifice or pain. From an egoist perspective the job isn’t the best in the world , because it isn’t ultimately in the individual’s upmost best interest’s as if he was offered a better offer, he would be then obliged by belief system to take it.

Jobs are perceived by most people as a means to an end in earning an abstracted concept which humanity assigns value to. The best job in the world is when your occupation isn’t a chore or a job, but is a passion, so you don’t even perceive as being a job or a means to end, you do it because you love it, despite the consequences negative or positive.

What do you think is the best job in the world and why do you think that ?

I would love to write down some more on this question but I have to get back to work on my university assessment.

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Hi everyone,

From Fools and deception, to new life, remdemption and the Spring Equinox in the Northern hemisphere anyways, considering that most know this time for its church services and chocolate egg, I guess we haven’t moved that far at all.

Holidays are symbolic and holiday spirit and passion for holiday traditions is a state of mind. I don’t think Maple or wxMaxima (CASes) would be able to solve or derive the meaning of them anymore than most humans do.

It is so easy to get caught up in the hype and FUD (fear, uncertaintity and doubt) and lose sight of our heritage s human beings and the rituals that were so important long ago, that have since been misplaced. It isn’t hard to become engulfed into mass indoctrinism whether its purpose is economic in the supposed crisus or religious in times when a lack of belief ,faith ,hope and trust in ourselves is so common.

I have been almost as busy as the bees that helter skelter from spring flower to spring flower in search of pollen. My tasks however to be a less leisurely pace and are accompanied more with clattering of keystrokes and whirring of  computer fans.

Buses are fun to miss by two minutes. Puzzles are fun to solve, especially if your short on time. All the life and death carefully modelled with non linear ordinary differential equations and then steady states found and typed up into Latex via Lyx.

Balance is important in more ways than one, considering how much I was sneezing on Tuesday. I have rediscovered and given new life to some things that have been dormant a while including the LainOS revival project, several changes to how well rebecca(eeepc) is runnig from a kernel update, the acquisition of an 18plus card and various other things. (UXA causes Blender menus not work render properly, EXA causes title bars of windows to be slightly glitched)

After this LAN I am at ends today,I will probably catch up on sleep and then proceed to working a precarious pace towards the goals I need to reach. For the moment for  the buses missed, I will just have to catch the next ones.

Meanwhile I will just keep swimming, rembering, bideing my time, hoping that everything falls elegantly into place.

What does spring mean to you ? What puts a spring in your step ? Does your life feel redeemed by your existence ?

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234