November 28, 2020 Incoherent ramblings lockdown, panic-demic, Toronto
Not everybody wants to live in fear, have their jobs, savings and livelyhood taken away by zealous authoritarian tyrants that are desperate to appear as if they are doing something:
I haven’t checked out the website above, but like the sentiment. If you want to be driven to substance abuse, or live life with all privileges doled out to you like a slave, then maybe lockdowns are for you.
November 27, 2020 Incoherent ramblings danger due to, lockdown, lockdown-2, not enough sleep, Toronto
Somebody appears to have left a blank “Danger due to…” sign at a local construction site.
There’s two captions, both apt. The second is also likely also a true harbinger of danger, since I’m sure not enough sleep is also a significant source of on the job injury and death.
November 21, 2020 Incoherent ramblings bitchute, covid-1984, graffiti, public service announcement
On Wednesday night’s Tessa walk, I encountered a very large piece of public service announcement graffiti:
This is on a very wide pedestrian bridge, spanning the DVP in Riverdale. I assume that bitchute is one of the uncensorable platforms like Dtube (a blockchain based video platform), but I haven’t actually checked it out. I guess I’m not the only one that is annoyed that the big social media platforms have made it their policy to regulate the set of allowed opinions. I wouldn’t have expressed myself with graffiti, but I guess that I’m not alone in my distaste for being told what I am allowed to think, or that some information is too dangerous for me to be allowed to look at it.
November 19, 2020 Incoherent ramblings doubled-vowels, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Joot, Peeter, Vanaema
The question of how to pronounce my names is frequently asked.
Joot isn’t Dutch, but is Estonian. I’m not sure what sort of linguistic crossover there is between the two languages, if any(**).
Dad was Estonian, and he wanted us all to have Estonian spellings of our names (Peeter, Krista, Erik, Karin.) Dad pronounced my name with the standard North American pronunciation for Peter. However, my Vanaema (grandmother) pronounced Peeter with enunciation of all the e’s in a way that I can’t actually vocalize myself. Estonian words have lots of doubled vowels (google finds me Kuulilennuteetunneliluuk as an example (a nice long palindrome (*))). Unlike doubled vowels in English, if they are there, it’s because they should all be pronounced.
If somebody named Peter says that I spell my name wrong, I rebut by calling them pet-er, since the long e requires vowel doubling per English spelling conventions (i.e. my name is spelled correctly, but their spelling is wrong.)
My last name Joot is pronounced as like “Yoat”, like oat. I can’t recall the subtleties of how Vanaema pronounced Joot, but I’m sure she also somehow enunciated both o’s. When I was a kid, I was very inflexible about the pronunciation of my name, and insisted on “Yoat”, not “Jewt”. That inflexibility was too much work, and I mellowed out considerably over time. I now flexible and respond to anything that approximates any possible pronunciation that I can recognize, and no longer correct anybody.
People correct the spelling of names for me all the time, as they couldn’t possibly be spelled right as is.
Originally I thought I saw an article that said that kuulilennuteetunneliluuk also meant palindrome, but cannot find that anymore. Instead, googling this word, I find it translated as “the hatch a bullet flies out of when exiting a tunnel“. If kuulilennuteetunneliluuk actually meant palindrome, that would be the most amazing word for palindrome in any language! I’m very sad that I appear to have gotten the meaning wrong. My hope for the future of linguistics, is that Estonians will start using kuulilennuteetunneliluuk as a word for palindrome, giving it a second meaning through popular use. If that trend can be started, eventually the Estonian language has the best word for palindrome in any language.
On the other hand, Dad said he could understand most of Finnish when spoken (but said that Finns couldn’t understand him.) I’m guessing that this means Finnish was probably a root of Estonian, but dialect could also be a factor, as I’ve since met Finns that said they could understand some Estonian. Dad talked about the dialect variation from Estonian town to town at the beginning of the 1900’s, which was apparently so bad that understanding somebody from a few towns away could be difficult. By the time he was born, radio was starting to obliterate that dialect variation. He also wouldn’t have heard that dialect variation first hand, since he escaped the Soviet invasion of Estonia with my grandmother when he was only 3. His refugee journey started in Finland (who had a pact with the Soviets to kick out refugees after some fixed time (i.e.: the Soviet’s said “kick out refugees, or else we’ll invade you too!”) After a few years in Sweden, Dad and Vanaema eventually landed in Canada.
November 5, 2020 Incoherent ramblings Dell, laptop, latex, MacOS, Mathematica, RAM, Windows, Windows terminal, WSL, XPG, XPS
It’s been a long long time, since I bought myself a computer. My old laptop is a DELL XPS, was purchased around 2009:
Since purchasing the XPS lapcrusher, I think that I’ve bought my wife and all the kids a couple machines each, but I’ve always had a work computer that was new enough that I was able to let my personal machine slide.
Specs on the old lapcrusher:
My current work machine is a 4yr old mac (16Mb RAM) and works great, especially since I mainly use it for email and as a dumb terminal to access my Linux NUC consoles using ssh. I have some personal software on the mac that I’d like to uninstall, leaving the work machine for work, and the other for play (Mathematica, LaTex, Julia, …).
I’ll still install the vpn software for work on the new personal machine so that I can use it as a back up system just in case. Last time I needed a backup system (when the mac was in the shop for battery replacement), I used my wife’s computer. Since Sofia is now mostly working from home (soon to be always working from home), that wouldn’t be an option. Here’s the new system:
This splurge is a pretty nicely configured, not top of the line, but it should do nicely for quite a while:
The new machine has a smaller screen size than my old laptop, but the 19″ screen on the old machine was really too big, and with modern screens going so close to the edge, this new one is pretty nice (and has much higher resolution.) If I want a bigger screen, then I’ll hook it up to an external monitor.
It doesn’t seem that long ago when I’d just started porting DB2 LUW to 64bit, and most of the “big iron” machines that we got for the testing work barely had more than 4G of ram each. The Solaris kernel guys we worked with at the time told me about the NUMA contortions that they had to use to build machines with large amounts of RAM, because they couldn’t get it close enough together because of heat dissipation issues. Now you can get a personal machine for $1800 CAD with 32G of ram, and 6G of video ram to boot, all tossed into a tiny little form factor! This new machine, not even counting the video ram, has 524288x the memory of my first computer, my old lowly C64 (I’m not counting the little Radio Shack computer that was really my first, as I don’t know how much memory it had — although I am sure it was a whole lot less than 64K.)
Incidentally, does anybody else still have their 6402 assembly programming references? I’ve kept mine all these years, moving them around house to house, and taking a peek in them every few years, but I really ought to toss them! I’m sure I couldn’t even give them away.
Remember the zero page addressing of the C64? It was faster to access because it only needed single byte addressing, whereas memory in any other “page” (256 bytes) required two whole bytes to address. That was actually a system where little-endian addressing made a whole lot of sense. If you wanted to change assembler code that did zero page access to “high memory”, then you just added the second byte of additional addressing and could leave your page layout as is.
It’s been 4 years since I’ve actively used a Windows machine, and will have to relearn enough to get comfortable with it again (after suffering with the transition to MacOS and finally getting comfortable with it). However, there are some new developments that I’m gung-ho to try, in particular, the new:
With WSL, I wonder if cygwin is even still a must have? With windows terminal, I’m guessing that putty is a thing of the past (good riddance to cmd, that piece of crap.)