New things :

•  Fixed second hole in umbrella
•  Darned hole in pants (Cloth hacking FTW)
•  Plenty of apricot nectar
•  More Icecream and Blueberries
•  Pineapple Juice
•  New Icecream Scoop
•  Got book I loaned back
•  Got new working headphones
• SSL update broke AMSN (still looking for fix)

Found someone’s special lost magazines and books.

Rescued someone that was lost.

Had 4 litres of Mountain Dew recently.

Work keeping me busy.

Was delayed by random stranger that referred to Australia’s heart as dead and didn’t appreciate subjective aestheticism.

Caught up with several colleagues from who I met at university. This was good. We talked about animals in pet shops, adoption, Advanced Microsoft Word,  the joys of working in software development, 90s ABC Television shows, the definition of trauma in the context of various forms of media, the nature of cliques and social dynamics and numerous other things.

Had serendipitous / funny moment when phone had no battery, and I was eating dinner at restaurant across the road from people trying to call me to invite me to dinner at that restaurant on the other side of the road. I had walked past the restaurant they were in several times and they didn’t notice me.

Wondering what the correlation between blood sugar level and type of dream someone has is ?

What are you dreaming of ?

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

AC adapter on for net book is damaged, managed to get it working for the moment, replacement should arrive next week. When it does I will probably order some tools so I can repair the old one using cable splicing.

Messed Ubuntu configuration on MID by updating a single package, then accidently reinstall older firmware including old Android, old GNU Linux and old bootloader, nothing starts up clean, and I will have to borrow or acquire a male to male USB cable to reupdate the bootloader.

Work is fun, lots of Telerik familarisation, and lots of tickets to keep me busy.Managed to spend the test card from work on USB sticks at officeworks, which will probably be used at work, if colleagues don’t borrow them first.

Jellybean consumption is at an all time record high, considering they arrived Tuesday and were gone by Thursday. Met Scott on the bus again, had interesting conversation largely about subjective trust in humanity, and we were up to the influence of whimisicality and the nature of human indecision.

He also mentioned a cooperative house environment started by bunch of Griffith students, which once again made me thing about cooperative living environments as a whole, and how to ensure their long term sustainability in general.

The cool weather is nice. I really enjoy it, in spite of the weird looks as I appear to be missing a pullover or jacket.

Have fun and best wishes with whatever you are upto,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

I could apologise for being late, like so many previous posts, or I can just keeping typing. I think I will do the later.  My eeepc’s screen is cracked and is still usable for the moment. 150AUD to buy replacement LCD screen, so at present I am waiting to see when the N570 atom are mass released here. (Given current CPU is n270).

Projects are happening slowly, still trying to find rhythm in the shift from student to employee, along with the search for continuous improvement both of self and of circumstance. Going to be setting up piece by piece progress so that stuff gets done gradually but eventually, otherwise it will get lost in the buzz of productivity that occurs in other components that interact with my existence.

Fixed this blog’s search functionality, ironically enough by deleting the theme specific search options. So now things should be searchable. I still need to get video and audio going , along with continuing the redesign and some other fancy javascript fun.

Course of action for the cluster, is getting the controller online, which involves updating the bios to support usb booting, by netbooting the floppy disk image, thanks to Redhatter  for the suggestion.

Work is C++ for the most part and is still fun. Had work trivia the other night which was interesting (we came sixth, with a difference of 5 points between us and the winners), but more interesting has been the various sagas of lost and found items or interesting people that have occurred whilst using public transportation in this city.

Books read recent include Japanese Things by Basil Hall Chamberlain (which I own thanks to Bookfest and have lent out to a colleague) (google books link here http://books.google.com.au/books?id=FEreXqAUAdIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=japanese+things+basil+chamberlain&source=bl&ots=YM57CF6K3p&sig=UyiXdYGefRZrLcAWyIN_uo0ZVjs&hl=en&ei=S-2XTYvZEYzCvQPiyfzzCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false, ). Things Japanese is a wonderful book. , Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers, and Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Had Bris2600 meeting last night, It was good. Lots of thoughts on my mind about some of the unanswered questions on my mind. Missing GURPS and other roleplaying dreadfully.

Lost wallet, found wallet, lost usb stick , found usb stick, lost umbrella, got new umbrella after normal shopping saga.

When I go shopping offline it works like this, I know exactly what I want, and most likely where it will be, but when I go to the merchant they don’t have the product I am looking for, I then have go to merchant , after merchant looking for said product which isn’t retailed here or is sold here but is only avaliable at one merchant, in one part of a multistory building.

Firefox 4 is interesting but I am so used to the plugin support I get from Chromium at this point, that I probably won’t rush back. Still need to get offline copies of LCA 2011 videos .

Hope your foolish first days of April weren’t riddled with serious consequences.

Have fun and best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Updates: I am slowly doing stuff with dvswitch, some of which will involve the new webcam I received (logitech hd c510, works with uvcvideo, though not with built in webcam in tandem yet). The dvswitch stuff is a side effect of my volunteering for linux.conf.au 2011, which was amazing.

Other side effects include the development of my OpenWRT knowledge (I did lots of flashing of them for LCA) and getting to have fun in patch closets as well learning the basics about recording digital video. Additionally I am helping review the videos as well.

Also got a yubikey or two from LCA haven’t done much with them yet. My headphones broke (the pin of the off aux broke in to the laptop slot) in the middle of Vint Cerf’s keynote, but after some partially disassembly the other night, my headphones audio is working again.

Also volunteered at Lifeline Bookfest, for more long days and even less sleep. Not as many fun conversations or balloon creations this time, but still plenty of book counting, pricing and sorting. Got reminded that my fan fiction forays needed further embellishment and development. Managed to restrain myself to about 8 new books for the entire Bookfest, self restraint++. Bookfest also involved get trolleys of books down stairs as elevators faltered from flood fiasco.

Need to continue the gradually redesign effort of this blog. Other news includes my trip to NSW for Cheater’s wedding, was a fun trip and awesome wedding. (pacman wedding cake and harp and flute wedding music kind of do that).

Daylight savings time is interesting, I didn’t feel tired or jet lagged. Learnt how to play darts properly in NSW, not that I couldn’t play darts before, just that it wasn’t up to another YHA patron’s standard.

If I spent to too long talking about malicious overflows and memory leaks in HIPHOP as a potential FB attack vector to  a teenage cousin of the groom, my apologies, I just couldn’t handle the whole b@t f1l3z in n0t3p@d l33t h@xx0r thing.

NSW double decker trains are more interesting than QLD trains, but have far fewer friendly fellow passengers.

Other news is I started work, so I know have a day job which I am currently enjoying immensely. So much to do and get done both at home and at work. But if you want to catch up with me , most of you know where to find me.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Year of the Rabbit as much  as I am. We had 火鍋 which was wonderful in its peppercorn and chilli goodness.   What new foods have you trying or experienced a new recently ?

Best wishes,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Long time no updates. That said…, I will probably be eventually starting a theme redesign of this blog / website, given that some parts of HTML 5 and CSS 3 haves started to catch up to some of the implementation ideas that I have had in mind.

Feedback about the Latin would be welcome as would suggestions for theme concepts, although I will probably keep the purple and the green colour scheme, albeit with a few modifications.

And now without further ado, updates, glorious updates, to paraphrase or parody Oliver Twist depending on your sentimentality.  Things I have been doing recently include, looking for work / job searching, working on various side projects including

• a now PyQT (formally PyTk) CBZ (comic book zip) downloader that uses Beautiful Soup as the parsing tool in the backend.
• Learning Perl 5 / Perl 6 by starting an ambitious project involving language templates and translation. (eg Language to XML, XML to Language) using various templates based on Language grammar and functional and object orientated programming constructs
• Further developing a software tool for Computational Manga (apparently that is what the university in Hong Kong that does research about it calls it), the idea that the tool is supposed take raw manga / comic images in, and then automate various processes regarding manga digitisation and translation through image processing
• Mathematical model for the dynamics of precorneal tear fluid with hard contact lenses
• Various different website design and development projects , one of which involves customising chromakode’s xkcd-cli

In other updates, I have been meeting lots of strangers recently including a cute red haired toddler with an Elmo doll that likes falling on the floor, a nice old lady waiting for a bus to return home called Jackie, a retired? architect whose father wanted him to be a doctor, an economist that learnt SAS many many years ago, and was quite happy to talk about cost and benefit analysis required for fiscally responsibly deploying Information Technology Solutions, not to mention freely give career advice.

More recently I attended a 21st birthday (costume party) dressed in my suit (purple and green like the blog color scheme, I went as the Joker, my face was covered in white face  paint, and my lips and cheeks were stained red).

It was funny that the person that came as Batman was just over a quarter of my age and probably that with regards to my height. Despite that, being the villain I was supposed to portray (or perhaps not, given that some people think you don’t play the character when you dress up ), I had a merry game of hide and go seek or chasey with me trying to avoid the Tiny and Cute Batman at almost all costs.

That day and night held copious amounts of deja vu, almost as if certain circumstances were like a scratched mental record on perpetual loop titillating my sense of the passage of time. Then I was asked the question of what made me laugh, which in all its irony came with a quite detailed and serious response.

I met a few more strangers today on my way to the Mana Bar for the first time, to catch up with a few colleagues, including someone that was in IT project management (moving datacentres). He told me to get on linked in and gave me his card.  After I had finished my conversation with him on the train, the card took on a life of its own, and promptly disappeared like a magic trick, eg now you see the business card and it is in your pocket, now it is gone …. Hopefully it reappears eventually ….

UPDATE: The card reappeared….

On the way home, I met an inebriated environmental science student named Luke, that was very eager to offer me chips and talk about nothing, his closing advice of enjoy yourself and his attempt to classify me given his state was interesting in itself.

Upon leaving the train I also met another student, that was doing his anthropology PhD (his name was Will) and was also able to have a nice discussion about the nature of morphisms and the perceived human condition before parting ways.

These experiences leave me pensive and reflective once more contemplating the possibilities and dynamics of  one’s interactions with strangers and the circumstantial dance in envelops.

Given that I don’t drink, the Mana Bar was an alright experience over all, whilst console games aren’t my forte. (given that stochastic time constraints and changing consoles, generally cause me to resort to a combination of jagged movement with some combo focusing interlaced with high levels of pseudo random button mashing).The environment did seem friendly and the conversation at least with strangers was amicable (discussing the realism of bear fighting in Tekken).

Other slightly older updates include, my investigations in to cloth and weave density in the quest to find a natural microfibre (eg one that doesn’t generate toxic / carcinogenic fumes when it is burnt), after various level of research I found that silk is the closest I would get.

If I really wanted it microfibre, then I need it to be spider silk. Unfortunately there is only one garment on record in the world made from pure spider silk and that is in Madagascar.

I then looked into the various genetic engineering things to increase the production of spider silk. The splicing with goats in an attempt to use the goat’s milk production system results in coarse weave that is worse than normal silkworm silk. Currently I think that the research would have to focus on spider  size and fecundity in order to enable the mass production of spider silk for human consumable items.

Had another short discussion with a protester, this one was from Amnesty International, afterwards someone raised a good point to me , that it would be easier to say no thanks and walk on, rather than tell them my justifications why I wouldn’t arbitrarily sign petition X  for cause Y.Upon stating my reasons, I am asked whether they should quit their cause or why my justifications where justified in a manner different than their often overly simplistic righteous view.

It did however get me thinking about human rights…, as humans with human rights, do we have responsibilities we much do in order to have those human rights ?

There were some other programming and embedded things I was going to mention however, I will probably save them for later.

Thanks for your time,

Best wishes to everyone,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

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

Got to attend the dawn service for Anzac Day, sprinting to it through the city at 4am after 21 hours without sleep, food and water(was coding an assignment) is an awesome experience. Anzac Day doesn’t really mean something to you until you have connected to those who you relate to who� suffered.

Just like out of sight , out of mind in the Beach and in Brave New World. After connecting with my great aunt and reading Monash and several other books on the Anzac legacy, and being told how my nose is the same as an ancestor of mine, who was in signals in France in WW1, their legacy feels more relevant and related to me as it stands.

My room is now clear and my trading card games are all sorted. I also got excursions into design of experiments using Haguchi methods and Fractional Factorial analysis.

I have also discovered that rss feeds , digg and reddit, delicious and other aggregators of relevant information make tradtional news information sources seem boring, irrelevant, biased and ridiculous. Newspapers and television seem gloomy, hypercritical and emotive wrangling.

I am aiming to get recording working again, so I can start audio / video blogging, and performing some of my skits. rebecca (my eeepc) is working� quite well other that the occasional DRI2, UXA , GEM Intel graphics glitch. I am allocating time to fix ulrica , but I really need to focus on the INB302 project, as not as much work got done of that during the break.

I learnt my lesson with this INB381, start early, and just use structs instead of C++ std containers, because the design we are given for polygon meshes leads to cyclic dependency which doesn’t mix well with constructors that take other classes, which depend on other clasess which take other clasess etc.

Forward declaration didn’t work, neither did layer 1 struct encapsulation, conversion to structs or layer 2 or 3 struct encapsulation may have worked but I didn’t have the time.� So at least in the second assignment I should do better.

Currently I am hoping that I get the chance to juggle everything well and that things blossom into awesome, because juggling awesome is fun.

Best wishes and best of luck

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

Last day before uni goes back, I guess the time has seemed to have flown, but really it just passed by occasionally knocking me off my feet, although more seldom than the random acts of dancing which emotivity throws at me.

The lines between the past, present and future seem gauche, and almost reveal in impressionist values as synaesthesia meets phantasmorgia in my minds eye, propelling me deeper in questions.

So much to accomplish in this year, as I quiet sat reading about General Monash, I reflected on commonalities and disrepencies between my life’s choices and the choices of the real and fictious characters in the stories I stumble accross and then unabashedly dive into, promptly misplacing my scuba gear.

The book on him, not only causes me to feel proud of him, but proud of the ANZAC spirit that he instigated and orchestraed, let alone bore witness to.
I wonder whether it is the same spirit now or like if all things it has been improved and modernised throughout the passage of time.

There are lots of new students with their dreams and illusions intact all queueing for ID cards, or looking cluelessly at maps, because despite graduating from secondary education, cartography, geography and orienteering weren’t their strongest points.

I begin to wish that the IOU GURPS would orthogonally project itself to reality, rather than just act as memory augmentation HUD in my minds eye.
People change but remain the same, the grace and class forlorn but hopeful given the current circumstances.

I also had the pleasure or misfortune of attending a book launch / meet the author session of a book that I thought would be relevant to my investigation on the definition and mathematical modeling of relationships and love, but instead turned out to be an attempt at mass simplication of determinstic hyperstereotypical numerology, but no justification was given for the choice of ruleset and significance associations.

So unlike the remainder of people attending I could see the author skillfully projecting, sight reading, physcoanalysing and hyperstereotyping the crowd before he got their birthdates, maybe my intuition is too keen, maybe my analytical ability spoils the magic of his supposed trick of divining what is best for people based on discrete set theory, linear algebra and largely astrology.

Of course knowing how the magic works, probably spoils the trick. When querying the author, I found that he had little interest in mathematics or indeed the causality of deterministic philosophy supporting his text (if you could call an A7 or A6 pink pocket size book a text ….) and that his origins were more rooted in Astrology and Palmistry.

Neither did he seem to appreciate my historical knowledge of number systems and the history and origins of numerology.

Personally as a recommendation to anyone who reads his book,that both you and you proposed partner undergone personality tests, have a realtionship discussion and identify both yourselves and each other, before deciding whether your love life really does add up.I also recommend that you believe in what you want to happen, because if you believe in it, it is more likely to happen, simply through your belief.

The bushfire seems to be all over the news,� and the public seems to be enthuastic to give despite fears of recession (which is interesting, the fact the we have known about� this recession for at least 5 before it was coming, and if I had my way, there would have been no ecomonic bailout, and society would be forced to regress to a prior state or to innovate in order to survive.), and it strikes me as odd at four particular things.

Firstly, the fact that arsonists give pyromanics a bad name. Pyromaniacs love fire, they like watching fires, lighting fires, feeling heat from fires. Most pyromaniacs know how to safely light and extinguish fires that won’t spread. This doesn’t mean they stupidly light fires that become bushfires and kill people. (I could say more on this point, but I won’t , else my rage ignite with passion and burn down people’s mentalspace)

Secondly, the fact that people are pretending to be victims and stealing donations, I mean come on, where is your respect, where is your honour , where is your pride ? Such everyone has their charity, but what else missing because of that ?

The IT Crowd says it best when they say “You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a baby. You wouldn’t shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn’t go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman’s grieving widow. And then steal it again”� (People do depraved things like this for two reasons, one for the lolz, two because they don’t think they just do ….)

Thirdly, the fact that people wait till disasters to help those that are victims of circumstance, instead of just always helping those who are victims of circumstance, day in and day out, why is quick fix charity to a temporary problem made more important than regular charity to regular people to constant problems.

Lastly, the fact that so many people were ignorant of the fires and hence it cost them their lives / their homes. The television media is all over the fires after they burned down parts of Victoria, but when the fires were burning and warnings and messages were broadcast over the Internet and radio, not many people got the message.

Ignorance has a significant cost. The weather on the news has flood warnings , so why not other disaster warnings. Also the ignorance of people to being aware that the area that they have residence is prone to bushfires / floods / etc.

Of course, my entire point is if people actually built biomes , then this wouldn’t be a problem as the atmosphere and environment would regulated but The Wilderness Society doesn’t seem to agree with that strategy for conservation, probably as something to do with their lack of influence and budget restrictions.

Best wishes,

Hope to catch up with people,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

With the Festive Season and New Year’s Celebrations now over, I have the time to pragmatically approach respite but that desire becomes enmancipated from focus, when I realise that given this was the Christmas we had when weren’t having Christmas, leaves me to marvel at unison between the best laid plans of mice and men being� sabotaged by hungry cats and implusive people and the irony of consistency that ensured our Festive chaotic hodgepodge that was our Christmas invovling lots of travelling, catching up with people and lots of interesting and curious surprises. (This sentence didn’t know when to stop, so I had just let it go or else it would have engaged me in a intextual battle for sentience)

I also realise know that despite the 6 or so weeks of deja vu and premonitions that frazzled my consciousness, the important reminders of Christmas were present regardless.

These included Gratitude, Respect, Hope, Awe, Tradition, Beauty, Peace,Truth,� Trust and Sacrifice. (As a side note I have deduced that sacrifice is quite important to the emotion called love, but that is a tangential interpolation for another time, an additional perpendicular side note, imagine cupid with a nerf missle projecticle instead his regular arrow).

The act of doing nothing implies that nothing is done, but inaction is still action just with a different direction.� The opposite of nothing is supposed to be everything, but yet how many of us manage to do everything� One always does something and that something can be anything, except it seems everything or nothing.

These concepts are such that when we intend or desire to nothing, we end up doing something. (This combined with the law of attraction, probably explains my Christmas, if you can follow it, if you can’t you could always get drunk or smile and nod politely as your mind boggles).

The Chinese Room gedanken got me thinking, the main of point it is that those that speak Chinese have both syntax and semantics in the transformation and communication of language, were as the person in the Chinese room only has syntax.

I wonder that if you gave him syntax that mapped syntax to semantics in a lookup mesh or table, would that make him just as capable at understanding Chinese as those outside the room.

I find that I often feel like Daria (I have been watching it lately) or I feel like the native speaker with understanding of the messages communicating wondering if what I communicate is actually reflected on and understood or just conveyed through Chinese rooms were the information is correctly or incorrectly parsed based on various syntax languages adopted by the systems and people around me.

I bumped my head the other day and it is still sore. Chance has nothing to do with Luck and the odds are such that given reason and choice, choice is taken regardless of purpose or rationality

Abrasive circumstances either result in dust or diamonds ….., which result is upto the the individual invovled.

Did you have a nice Christmas and New Years ?

Did you stumble across a surprise you didn’t expect ?

Best wishes

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234

I just discovered that the Queen St Mall Sizzler doesn’t exist. And that is such a shame. I remember when the Queen St Mall used to have a rollercoster at the top of it and used to have a LEGO playground. Such fund childhood memories.

As you probably know the words succubus and incubbus are names of demons that sleep with their victims and torment them. These words come from the Latin root cubare (“To lie”), and the prefixes in and sub, which mean on top and below respectively. Getting bored with just these demons, I began elaborating on less gender specific demons below using other Latin prefixes.

List of Demons

jugccubi I lie chained
juxtaccubi I lie beside
intracubbi I lie within
retrocubbi I lie behind
velocubbi I lie quickly
uncubbi I lie hooked
transcubbi I lie across
strepcubbi I lie twisted
fellacubbi I lie sucking
paccubbi I lie peacefully
regcubbi I lie straight
pravcubbi I lie crooked
phalacubbi I lie shining
percubbi I lie through
oedcubbi I lie swollen
odorcubbi I lie fragant
nudcubbi I lie naked
lenicubbi I lie gently
lacrimcubbi I lie crying
ignicubbi I lie on fire
contracubbi I lie against
concubbi I lie with
cirrcubbi I lie curled (tentacle)
aurcubbi I lie golden
augcubbi I lie growing
audicubbi I lie listening
ambicubbi I lie on both sides
amorcubbi I lie loving
abscubbi I lie away

I just finished fiddling around with indices referencing stuff, it is an a -1 , rather than a, just to spite you…

Saturday was spent with Aunt and Uncle from WA and was quite nice if not a very long day, I got up at 6am (went to bed a 1:30am) and then went to the Rocklea Markets…..

Hope you are having as much fun with assessment and other odds and ends as I am or am not,

Benjamin Southall aka Appleman1234