Yesterday’s absurd computing task. I want to memorise the names of my pupils that I don’t already know. So I asked their class teachers for their photos. Some sent me a folder of photos with filenames matching the pupils’ names, so all I had to do was import to Anki using the Media Import extension and start memorising. However some teachers sent me the photos embedded in a document for a Korean word processor called ‘Hanword’.

Perhaps older versions of Hanword were at some point necessary because Microsoft Word and OpenOffice/Libre Office lacked features for writing Korean, but I’m pretty sure that that’s not true anymore. Unfortunately, Hanword is sufficiently integrated into the Korean bureaucracy that Koreans will default to it. It’s unfortunate because, extremely charitably, it tries to look like Microsoft Word with its ribbon interface, but subtle differences make it difficult for someone who has spent their life on more mainstream software to use. Less charitably, it just lacks features. So in this case the photos I wanted seemed to be backgrounds to table cells. But there’s no way that I can find to get them out of the document and into files again.

First I stretched the table out which, luckily for me, made the images bigger and improved their aspect ratio so the pupils were more recognisable. Then I took screenshots, and used the GIMP’s guillotine tool to slice up the images so I then had about 180 open files on my 2GB RAM school machine. Half of these images were of the table cells containing the pupil’s names, which were useless as they weren’t matched to the photos. So I had to close all these. Then the other half I had to export as PNG into the right folder and type the pupil’s name in Korean. There are over ninety kids in grade 5 so this took almost two hours.

What’s frustrating is that the classroom teachers presumably had the images like I did in the end, as images in a folder (admittedly not named with the pupil’s name), in the first place. I asked one of them to provide them in that form but he seemed to imply that it would take some time to do it, and I can’t really insist of anything because of the hierarchy which I sit at the bottom at. Especially since the teachers who provided their photos in a Hanword document are much older than me.

Posted Wed 03 Dec 2014 21:34:00 UTC Tags:

I have been told by a number of LGBTQ activists that there is a growing minority of people who publically identify as not being either a man or a woman, and who are therefore uncomfortable with any of ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘his’ or ‘her’ etc. being used to refer to them. I don’t want to sound dismissive or patronising by using a sentence beginning “I have been told…”. It’s just that I’ve never met anyone who cares about this: I’ve just had a lot of men and women tell me or write that another group of people care about it. I was formerly quite dismissive of these issues. I’ve changed my mind a little.

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Posted Thu 11 Dec 2014 05:44:00 UTC Tags:

It’s fashionable to write about how the Internet is “rewiring our brains” and sapping our ability to concentrate for long periods on difficult things, and I don’t have anything new to say on the topic.[1] I’ll just write concisely about my own experiences of the phenomenon. There are two issues. The first is the ability of the Internet to fuel procrastination that might otherwise be avoided, and the seconds is the issue of the Internet damaging the ability to concentrate hard for long periods of time on making something that’s hard to make or reading something hard. I intend to talk only about the former.[2]

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Posted Thu 11 Dec 2014 05:59:00 UTC Tags:

This morning when I got up I procrastinated doing something boring by reading some blog posts written by disgruntled academics.

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Posted Thu 11 Dec 2014 08:53:00 UTC Tags:

I just got back from seeing this with my girlfriend. I agree with this reviewer that there’s often a sense of missed opportunity for looking at some of the really hard stuff: there’s a lot of stuff about both of them, though especially Jane, that isn’t explored as deeply as it could be.

There’s one scene when Hawking has an idea about how he might prove that time has a beginning. He’s struggling to get into his jumper at the time. He lets his wife know that he’s got an idea coming on and she dutifully wheels him to the university, and his academic friends take over from her in wheeling the wheel chair. It’s presented very much as though Hawking is a conduit for the idea and it’s as if he’s being used by the academics around him to get that idea out. It reminded me of the novel Never Let Me Go.

Is this how new science is done? Is there a separate category for genius, or is all creativity like this, or is this just a popular fiction/myth about creativity?

Posted Sat 13 Dec 2014 14:06:00 UTC Tags:

Couldn’t find anything with a key feature I used to rely on from the GNOME 3 pomodoro timer: it shouldn’t start the next pomodoro until I tell it I’m ready to, because I try to stand up and get away from the computer during the break so it’s inevitably slightly more than 5 minutes and so I have to tediously restart the next pomodoro almost every time.

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Posted Sat 27 Dec 2014 02:44:00 UTC Tags:

I’m applying to fourteen universities for graduate philosophy this year. Last year I applied to around eight US institutions and this year I’m applying to nine US universities and five UK universities. The US applications are mostly just a repeat filling-out of forms, but the UK applications required a great deal of editing of my writing samples for length to fit their much tighter word limits. Here are some observations from doing this.

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Posted Sun 28 Dec 2014 10:54:00 UTC Tags:

I’ve been using Emacs with vim-style editing bindings for two months, and this morning I’ve decided to turn them off (which’ll take some time). The tipping point was last night, when I tried to connect to IRC briefly in order to respond to a MemoServ memo. I tried to fire up the Emacs IRC client rcirc, and immediately found myself in keybinding hell where I couldn’t even type my password for NickServ. This is because any Emacs mode which isn’t editing a text file needs special configuration to work with my vim keybindings; when I was a pure Emacs user, firing up such special modes immediately put me into an intuitive environment, even if some things always need to be tweaked. (The reason is vim’s modality.) This experience had me reconsider my priorities. Here’s why I think in my case, hacking vim into Emacs isn’t something I should keep in place.

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Posted Wed 31 Dec 2014 03:04:00 UTC Tags: