Posts on Bigger on the Inside

How I Write

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:16:56 +1100

I’ve been silent on this blog for a while. I’ve been reducing my time on the internet to “touch grass” more as the young-uns put it. I guess I’ll return to more active contributions on open source software and writing on this blog when the LLM hype thing dies down a little more. This post is more of a overflow piece. I was about to reply to Christine Lee’s post on Bsky but as usual I am too verbose, so I’ve transmigrated the content here, and expanded upon it.

Show Your Working

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 04:56:50 +1000

I just awokened from a really visceral dream of a time in primary school. Just need to write it down somewhere. When I was a kid in school, I hated showing my working. I recall one maths test that I did where I had scored a 100%, and the teacher marking my exam deducted 10 marks for not showing my working*Later when I was in high school I similarly had marks deducted from my physics exam for consistently not handing in my homework.

Reputation

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 09:46:54 +1100

I’ve been thinking a bit about reputation lately. This was spurned by a few events/incidents in my life: A startup founder I am consulting with threw a temper tantrum due to inconsistent results due to a combination of UI complications and machine learning algorithms. They claimed that “…We need to fix this in the next 24 hrs because our reputation is on the line here. If you aren’t able to fix it then I’ll need to make alternate arrangements asap” My GopherConAU co-organizer stressing out over the website design of Go Go Go Gogo, and stressing over pixel perfection of the sponsorship prospectus because she wants “the [prospective sponsors and attendees] to think we are professionals - our reputation is all we have” A work meeting with an external client about something got somewhat derailed for about 10 minutes because the one person from the other party recognized me as the author of Gorgonia and we (me and said other person) proceeded to talk about super-deep technical details of why their company ended up writing their own library.

Visually Validate Date Ranges

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 10:56:54 +1100

Two coincident things happened at work today. Both things coincidentally were solved by me using emacs to provide a visual depiction of date ranges. First, as part of a larger project, I wrote a bit of code to break up a date range into multiple intervals. A key issue of debate is whether it would be better to split up the full date range into a bunch of smaller intervals with gaps in between or to have gapless intervals.

Intense

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 21:52:27 +1100

Today was truly an intense day for me despite having minimal physical activities. I started my work day at 9 a.m.-ish having a bunch of discussions comparing random forests and gradient boosted machines and how we can get one process to converge onto the results of another process with similar-enough internal structures. This was then followed by another meeting discussing the inner workings of transformers and encoding tabular data into transformers.

GopherConSG 2023 - A Retrospective

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 12:24:15 +1100

I had fun at GopherConSG! It’s my third time at GopherConSG and after a few years of absence (thanks to COVID-19), it was sure good to see some old familiar faces like Valentine, Sau Sheong, Dave and Bill. This blog post is a retrospective on my GopherConSG 2023 talk: Man Bites Dog. My GopherConSG talk was way too long. I had to trim down my talk from 1 hour 45 mins to 30 mins, and I feel like I missed a lot of the Go content.

Ween

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 19:56:46 +1100

The English language needs a new modal verb denoting an epistemic modality - specifically one that expresses a modality of probability. I propose the word “ween” (/we꞉i꞉n/ way-in). The preterite form is “weend” (/we꞉i꞉nd/ way-ind), though I am uncertain as to when one would use the preterite form. As an example of expressing a modality of probability, here’s an example sentence: “Touching live wires ween kill you”, which means “There is a probability that you will be killed if you touch live wires”.

Letter to the Editor

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 19:13:56 +1000

Dear Editor, I am grateful to have been asked to provide some reflection on the eve of the 15th anniversary since the last publication by this journal, of a report written entirely by human minds. As one grows older, one finds more things to reflect upon. Perhaps then we should reflect on the most incredible journey that humanity has taken so far. As I write this, the budding field of scientific hermeneutics is now at its most explosive growth stage yet.

Quickly Annotate Your Machine Learning Dataset with One Weird Trick (It's Lisp)

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 22:13:56 +1000

TL;DR - I wrote annotation-mode, which is a emacs minor mode for annotating text documents for machine learning purposes. Recently at work I had to annotate some text documents for a piece of NLP work. The annotation involves marking regions of the text with a category, as well as a rectangle which represents the region. At first I thought to build a webapp to do the annotation. The webapp would load a text file would be drawn onto a canvas object.

Random Thoughts on Empathy and Compassion, and Neural Pathways

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 20:51:18 +1000

Earlier in my afternoon nap, I think I made the most interesting connection. It may well be wrong - my explanation is certifiably sloppy and unrigorous. It definitely needs a lot of refinement. Yes, this will be very bullshitty if you know anything about neuroscience or psychology. It also relies on some very unproved hypotheses of how brains work. I am mainly putting this brain dump down for myself anyway. But if you are a pop-sci author who wants to run with it, feel free to do so.

The BNF Dream

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 09:34:16 +1100

This post was originally a series of tweets I wrote on a dream I had last night. For posterity I’ll be re-describing the dream here. Words might be slightly different from the tweets given the lack of character restrictions. I had a dream last night. It was a weird dream. I dreamt that all human languages could be shrunk down into a CBNF (C is for Contextual, or Chewxy)*There aren't such things as CBNF.

On The Basics of Modeling

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 09:25:02 +1100

I had a very interesting chat with a few data science students yesterday. Part of the chat involved the idea of statistical modeling. Throughout the chat, it occured to me that the students didn’t have a very good grasp of what modeling is. To their credit, they were proficient in the techniques of linear regression, and deep learning, but I got the sense that they were very much pushing buttons and watching things happen rather than understanding what they were actually doing.

The SARS-CoV-2 Build Log

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 16:11:19 +1100

Happy New Year! 2020 was definitely a weird year. The majority of the year was dominated by news of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were mass lockdowns across different countries. International travel halted to a trickle. Jobs were lost. Lives were lost. I am very thankful to not have been impacted as much by the pandemic. I didn’t get the virus, nor did any of my close friends or family - we are all safe.

Double Your Linear Search Speed with This One Weird Trick

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 08:46:40 +1100

Recently at work I optimized key-lookup for Ristretto, a caching library for Go, effectively doubling the lookup speed with one trick. This post walks you through what I did. The benchmarks and code can be found here. Overview Ristretto is a fast concurrent cache library in Go. In the upcoming version, the cache is B-tree based. In this, the keys and values are stored in one flat slice of []uint64. Call this node.

Some Thoughts On Library Design

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 08:36:58 +1000

This post was [originally published in GopherAcademy](https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2019/pkgapi/) for their Advent 2019 series. It's been republished here for posterity. As programmers we use libraries a lot. But library design is hard. In this article, I will walk through some considerations in designing a library. We will start by bifurcating the acts of programming. We start by casting the act of programming as conversations. Then we examine the main activities that constitute what people call “programming”.

The Y-Combinator MBA Project

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 20:31:32 +1100

A friend of mine is doing an MBA. Her course this semester follows the Startup School model - each week they have lectures regarding issues a startup face while creating a startup at the same time. They have to create a product for the startup that they create. They first have to find customers and solve their customers problems, and create a product and startup around the problem. The problem her team discovered was this: Graduating MBA students from her school cannot find jobs in Management Consulting, citing the lack of project experience as the reason.

Writing Clearly is Clearly Hard

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 10:54:24 +0200

These days I am slow in my blogging. I am trying to write my thoughts out more clearly. I don't think I am very good at it. Consider this snippet of conversation: Chewxy: Star Wars is typical Campbellism. and here I use the word "typical" in the typical fashion which is to say, not the usual connotation of "usual" what I meant is "a representative of a type" where "

Go is a Pretty Average Language

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 05:54:24 +0200

I had a data visualization problem at work. I’ve been thinking about set coverage issues, and wanted to test some ideas for visualizations. I had wanted to visualize the space of aggregate measures (i.e. things like means, etc). It later transpired that I didn’t need it, because my thinking around the issue had been wrong to begin with. I had written some code, and was eager to check it out. By the end of it, it had morphed into something entirely different, but it was a good entertaining night last night nonetheless.

A Most Vivid Dream

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 27 Oct 2018 07:54:24 +1100

I have had the most vivid and unusual dream that I feel compelled to note it down for posterity. Or for future self-introspection. It’s too long to write in my notebook and I feel more comfortable typing it out anyways. In the dream I was at a birthday party of a friend of mine. It had gone particularly wrong - I was the organizer and I had arranged for logistics to cater for two children.

Deceptively Simple Is Deceptively Simple

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 26 Aug 2018 18:27:00 +1000

I recently used the words “deceptively simple” to describe lambda calculus. One person reading my paper sent a comment back: “do you mean ‘deceptively complicated’?”. What I had meant to say was on the surface, lambda calculus looks simple. But when you consider all the meta conditions of alpha-renaming and substitutions - you know, practical things about programming - then it isn’t. It turns out the phrase “deceptively simple” requires disambiguation - it means one of two diametrically opposite meanings:

Namespaces Are Useful

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:54:24 +0200

I was extending Gorgonia for a project of mine when I rapidly ran into a dot-import gotcha in Go. Specifically I was trying to implement a fused version of the Conv2d function that exists. The current Conv2d function works well, if you want to do image convolution related work. It could be quite a bit faster (if anyone from Intel is reading, I’d love some help in the same way Intel boosted the speeds of Caffe), but that’s not really the concern - different convolution algorithms have different performance characteristics, and should be used accordingly.

Do You Need Deep Learning?

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 09:05:24 +1100

As a guy who has his own deep learning library that aims to rival Tensorflow and PyTorch, the answer is: “chances are, no”. Around this time last year, I was running a startup and as a side hustle, I was doing consulting work for any parties interested in machine learning. I get a lot of requests from businesses who want to empower their businesses with “AI”. The results from any successful consults*Don't let terms like "

How To Use Go Interfaces

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 22:54:24 +0200

I occasionally give free Go consults and code review on top of my daily work. As such, I tend to read a lot of other peoples’ codes. And while this is really more of a feeling *Now, you should go, really? You're a statistician by training ffs, I’ve seen an increase in what I call “Java-style” interface usage.

This blog post is a Go specific recommendation from me, based on my experiences writing Go code, on how to use interfaces well.

For this blog post, the running example will span two packages: animal and circus. A lot of what I write about here is about code at the boundary of packages.

Tuples Are Powerful

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 10:54:24 +0200

In this post I lay out the unjustifyable reasons why Gorgonia lacks tuple types. Along the way we revisit the idea of constructing integer types from natural numbers using only tuples and the most basic functionalities. I then close this blog post with further thoughts about computation in general and what that holds for Gorgonia's future.

Over Chinese New Year clebrations, a friend asked (again) about the curious lack of a particular feature in Gorgonia, the deep-learning package for Go: tuples, which led to this tweet (that no one else found funny :( )

"I follow the teachings of Lambda Calculus turing times of hardship"

and

"I'm a follower of Church of Turing Machines"

are puns that should be considered the epitome of puns.

I may be a bit intoxicated. Just a bit
— Chewxy (@chewxy) February 17, 2018

The feature that was missing is one that I’ve vehemently objected to in the past. So vehemently objected I was to this that by the first public release of Gorgonia, there was only one reference that it ever existed (by the time I released Gorgonia to public, I had been working of 3 versions of the same idea).

Term Rewriting Chinese Relatives

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 10:54:24 +0200

I recently attended QFPL’s excellent Haskell course. Tony Morris was a little DRY*It's a joke. Tony kept mentioning Don't Repeat Yourself and being lazy but nonetheless was an excellent presenter *The course shook my confidence in my existing ability to reason in Haskell for a bit but it was for the better - I had some fundamentals that were broken and Tony explained some things in a way that fixed it... for now - I have no doubt some basics will be lost to the ether in the next few months. So for the rest of the week I was in a bit of a equational-reasoning mode.

Then my dad sent me a cute link to a calculator that calculate vocatives for Chinese relatives. Given English as my first language (hence not default mode of thinking), this kicked me off in to a chain of thoughts about languages and symbols (you’d find a high amount of correlation between my switching modes of thinking and blog posts - the last time this happened, I wrote about yes and no).

One of the difficult things that many people report with programming languages is that the decoupling of syntax and semantics. I’ve often wondered if we might be better off with a syntax that is based off symbols (rather like APL) - the initial hurdle might be higher, but once that’d done, syntax and semantics are completely decoupled. Then we’d not have flame wars on syntax, rather a more interesting flame war on semantics and pragmatics.

Another line of thinking I had was the hypothetical development of computing and logics in a parallel universe where Chinese was the dominant linguistic paradigms - it’s one that I’ve had since I visited China for the first time.

Combined, these trains of thoughts led to this blog post. So let’s learn some Chinese while learning some (really restricted) functional programming! Bear in mind it’s a very rough unrigorous version.

Go For Data Science

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 09:54:24 +1000

This may come as a surprise for many people, but I do a large portion of my data science work in Go. I recently gave a talk on why I use Go for data science. The slides are here, and I’d also like to expand on a few more things after the jump:

Data Empathy, Data Sympathy

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 10:54:24 +0200

Today’s blog post will be a little on the light side as I explore the various things that come up in my experience working as a data scientist.

I’d like to consider myself to have a fairly solid understanding of statistics*I would think it's accurate to say that I may be slightly above average in statistical understanding compared to the rest of the population.. A very large part of my work can be classified as stakeholder management - and this means interacting with other people who may not have a strong statistical foundation as I have. I’m not very good at it in the sense that often people think I am hostile when in fact all I am doing is questioning assumptions*I get the feeling people don't like it but you can't get around questioning of assumptions..

Since the early days of my work, there’s been a feeling that I’ve not been able to put to words when I dealt with stakeholders. I think I finally have the words to express said feelings. Specifically it was the transference of tacit knowledge that bugged me quite a bit.

Consider an example where the stakeholder is someone who’s been experienced in the field for quite sometime. They don’t necessarily have the statistical know-how when it comes to dealing with data, much less the rigour that comes with statistical thinking. More often than not, decisions are driven by gut-feel based on what the data tells them. I call these sorts of processes data-inspired (as opposed to being data-driven decision making).

These gut-feel about data can be correct or wrong. And the stakeholders learn from it, becoming experienced knowledge. Or what economists call tacit knowledge.

The bulk of the work is of course transitioning an organization from being data-inspired to becoming actually data-driven.

Sapir-Whorf on Programming Languages

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 10:54:24 +0200

In my previous blog post I had a brief mention about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and how it blind-sided me to an obvious design. In this blog post I’ll retell yet another story of how Sapir-Whorf blind-sided me yet again - just moments, actually. I’m getting sick of this shit, yo. Sapir-Whorf, Briefly Briefly, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the language you speak influences the way you think. The proper term for it is “linguistic relativity”.

Tensor Refactor: A Go Experience Report

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 10:54:24 +0200

I recently finished a major refactor of `tensor`, which is a package for generic multidimensional arrays in Go. In this blog post I will recount the refactoring process, and why certain decisions were made. Further more I will also share some thoughts with regards to generics in Go while trying not to sound like a complete prat.

There has been major refactors done to the tensor subpackage in Gorgonia - a Go library for deep learning purposes (think of it as TensorFlow or PyTorch for Golang). It’s part of a list of fairly major changes to the library as it matures more. While I’ve used it for a number of production ready projects, an informal survey of found that the library was still a little difficult to use (plus, it’s not used by any famous papers so people are generally more resistant to learning it than say, Tensorflow or PyTorch).

Along the way in the process of refactoring this library, there were plenty of hairy stuff (like creating channels of negative length), and I learned a lot more about building generic data structures that I needed to.

Garbage Collection is Also a Side Effect

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 13 Aug 2017 12:02:53 +1000

On Twitter a couple of days ago I posted this tweet which had this image:

21 Bits Ought to Be Enough for (Everyday) English

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 19:29:18 +1000

I was working on some additional work on lingo, and preparing it to be moved to go-nlp. One of the things I was working on improving is the corpus package. The goal of package corpus is to provide a map of word to ID and vice versa. Along the way package lingo also exposes a Corpus interface, as there may be other data structures which showcases corpus-like behaviour (things like word embeddings come to mind).

When optimizing and possibly refactoring the package(s), I like to take stock of all the things the corpus package and the Corpus interface is useful for, as this would clearly affect some of the type signatures. This practice usually involves me reaching back to the annals of history and looking at the programs and utilities I had written, and consolidate them.

One of the things that I would eventually have a use for again is n-grams. The current n-gram data structure that I have in my projects is not very nice and I wish to change that.

The Double Blind Monty Hall Problem

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 11 May 2017 07:29:18 +1000

Last night as I was preparing today's lunch, I ran into an interesting real life scenario that is a variant of the Monty Hall problem. As I thought more about the subject I became more and more convinced that the probability of choosing the right door by switching was 0.5 instead of 0.6667. I even sketched out a Bayes theorem proof of why that is. Then I realized an assumption that the original Monty Hall problem had. And so in this post, I'll sketch out two variations of the Monty Hall problem.

The picture above is of my lunch today: three muffins baked with MyProtein’s muffin mix. Two of them contain raisins, and one of them contains chocolate chips. I had forgotten which is which. I personally prefer raisins, as the chocolate chips had sunk to the bottom of the pan making a gooey mess that sticks to the muffin papers during the baking process. An initial thought that I had was concerning the probability of choosing a subsequent raisin muffin after I had eaten one. Naturally, in scenarios where there are 3 unknowns and one was revealed, my thoughts get pulled towards the Monty Hall problem.

The Handmaid's Tale

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 20:25:56 +1000

Hulu just released three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s book of the same name. I binged watched it over the weekend, and I had some difficulty being immersed into it. There was something about the world that didn’t sit quite right with me in this adaptation, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on it. Eventually of course, I figured it out.

The story is set after the fall of the United States into Gilead. Not much is known about the world at this point, and so much is still up for speculation. However we the audience are entreated to these details:

Pollution and toxicity is so bad that it caused fertility rates to drop.
Congress was slaughtered, martial law was enacted.
A theocracy hijacked the government under martial law.
Communications between the populace and government is reduced - it would appear that the Internet doesn’t exist.
Swift changes were made to the laws of the land, leading up to the scenarios we see in the show.

So what was it that made me unable to pay attention to the world building of the show? The speed at which things fell into place - it all happened within a few years of Offred’s lifetime.

Deep Learning from Scratch in Go

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 08:43:45 +1000

Note: This post was originally published at GopherData. This blog post is the exact same copy.

Summary: In this post I talk about the basics of computations, then I go on to show parallels between Go programs and mathematical equations. Lastly I will attempt to persuade you that there is a point in using Go for doing deep learning.

Welcome to the first part of many about writing deep learning algorithms in Go. The goal of this series is to go from having no knowledge at all to implementing some of the latest developments in this area.

Deep learning is not new. In fact the idea of deep learning was spawned in the early 1980s. What’s changed since then is our computers - they have gotten much much more powerful. In this blog post we’ll start with something familiar, and edge towards building a conceptual model of deep learning. We won’t define deep learning for the first few posts, so don’t worry so much about the term.

There are a few terms of clarification to be made before we begin proper. In this series, the word “graph” refers to the concept of graph as used in graph theory. For the other kind of “graph” which is usually used for data visualization, I’ll use the term “chart”.

New Blog

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:58:55 +1100

For about a month now, this blog has been a static site generated by Hugo. There had been a few issues with my wordpress installation at my previous host, and it left me unable to publish blog posts - they end up in “limbo” - some weird combination of plugins and tables. I had to hunt down all the posts I had published since the problem occured, and manually restore them.

What To Test

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 11:39:00 +1100

You’re in a rush. Your product demo was due three months ago. And you still don’t have good unit tests. What do you do? You prioritize.

You wrote a very complex piece of machinery with a lot of moving parts. You sorta know how they all fit together in your mind but there isn’t any good know if the program you wrote actually works the way you want it. The solution: unit testing. But how to test and where to start? What do you do? You prioritize.

This post is about how I prioritize what to test. I know how I write my programs, and I write them in a particular way. Feel free to adapt the following to your own process.

Since my program is made mostly of functions, I prioritize my tests by analyzing the function calls of the package/program. Some functions are called many times by different callers, some functions are top functions which calls other functions and outside of the package the top functions are never called. This forms a hierarchy of sorts - some calls are simply more important than others. Since I write mostly in Go nowadays, I’ll use Go as an example. The Go toolchain actually provide us with a lot of useful tools to analyze and prioritize tasks. The most important tool is the callgraph program. This is the invocation of the spell:

callgraph -algo=static -format=graphviz $(go list -tags=release -f '{{.GoFiles}}' | sed -ne 's/\[//p' | sed -ne 's/\]//p') | grep -P '\-\> "(PACKAGENAME|\(\*?PACKAGENAME\.)' | uniq > callgraph.dot

A Direct Way of Understanding Backpropagation and Gradient Descent

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 07:44:14 +0000

Summary: I believe that there are better representations of neural networks that aid in faster understanding of backpropagation and gradient descent. I find representing neural networks as equation graphs combined with the value at run-time helps engineers who don't have the necessary background in machine learning gets them up to speed faster. In this post, I generate a few graphs with Gorgonia to illustrate the examples.

Backpropagation has been explained to death. It really is as simple as applying the chain rule to compute gradients. However, in my recent adventures, I have found that this explanation isn’t intuitive to people who want to just get shit done. As part of my consultancy (hire me!) job* really, I need to pay the bills to get my startup funded , I provide a brief 1-3 day machine learning course to engineers who will maintain the algorithms that I designed. Whilst most of the work I do don’t use neural networks* people who think deep learning can solve every problem are either people with deep pockets aiming to solve a very general problem, or people who don't understand the hype. I have found that most businesses do not have problems that involves a lot of non-linearities. In fact a large majority of problems can be solved with linear regressions. , recently there was a case where deep neural networks were involved.

This blog post documents what I found was useful to explain neural networks, backpropagation and gradient descent. It’s not meant to be super heavy with theory - think of it as an enabler for an engineer to hit the ground running when dealing with deep networks. I may elide over some details, so some basic understanding/familiarity of neural networks is recommended.

Advent of Code/Go

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 06:58:10 +0000

Apparently today is the start of Advent of Code/Advent of Go. I’m not exactly sure what they are (AoC seems to be a bunch of puzzles, AoG seems to be a bunch of blog posts). Nonetheless I think this is a good excuse for me to get busy writing blog posts every day, if only to trigger my writers’ block away.

Numbers are Weird, Man

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 22:35:34 +1000

Numbers are weird, man. I have an amateur interest in the history of maths*That is to say, I can't be arsed to actually invest time and energy to do serious research about it, but I am interested enough to retain knowledge about history of maths that I read - to the point that in my book about JavaScript, I had a small section devoted to the history of numerical representation., and I’ve been thinking about numbers lately whilst on a flight.

How To Make Money

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 12:18:52 +0000

Hey Chewxy, what do you think will happen if one day everyone decides to move their money onto a blockchain and no longer need banks?

That was a question that a friend asked me last week. I thought about the situation, gave some answers based on my what I understood of the world and the economy, while sketching out in broad strokes, what would happen. Essentially the conclusion was “civil unrest and war breaks out"* There were other conclusions too, I give the alternatives at the end of the blog post .

Then came time to organize Sydney Python. Due to clashing meetup dates with Data Science Sydney, Girl Geek Sydney and other groups, there was a dearth of speakers. So I stepped up and gave a talk based on the hypothetical question. Here are the slides:

The code can be found in this the economics simulation github repository.

Gorgonia

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 09:08:26 +0000

I released Gorgonia on Thursday. Gorgonia is a library like Theano or TensorFlow, but mainly written in Go. It provides the necessary primitives for creating and executing neural networks and machine learning algorithms.

According to cloc, these are the stats:

chewxy@chewxy-Gallifrey:~/workspace/goworkspace7/src/github.com/chewxy/gorgonia$ cloc .
     357 text files.
     321 unique files.                                          
     604 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=0.83 s (296.5 files/s, 55471.5 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go                             219           6308           3924          30858
Assembly                        22            585            740           2128
C/C++ Header                     2             55             57            666
C                                2             17             39            458
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                           245           6965           4760          34110
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, it’s a pretty huge library. But the original version is about 80,000 LoC (though most of the lines of codes were different experimental variations of assembly code). I managed to cut down 50,000 LoC to something more manageable. In this post I want to outline the release of Gorgonia, and share some of the reasoning regarding the design of the library, as well as go thru some of the weirdness found in the library.

If you’re interested, here’s the video (otherwise, skip to the meat):

And here are the slides:

Yes and No

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 12:08:30 +0000

I was teaching my partner some mandarin recently and I came to the conclusion that "yes" and "no" are very weird constructs of language.

We were practicing one day, where I'd ask her questions in English and she'd reply in Mandarin. I asked her a yes/no question and she replied 不, to which I surprised myself by pointing out that 不 is ever only used in a negatory manner. People who know some Mandarin would interject and say, but there is 不(bù), 没(méi), and 无(wú) that can be used in stead of "no". Yes, they can, but they're usually not used without context.

Let's look at some concrete examples to understand.

On the memory alignment of Go slice values

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 07:32:06 +0000

TL;DR and Meta – I was playing around with some AVX instructions and I discovered that there were some problems. I then described the investigation process of the issue and discovered that this was because Go’s slices are not aligned to a 32 byte boundary. I proceed to describe the alignment issue and devised two solutions, of which I implemented one.

On Thursday I decided to do some additional optimization to my Go code. This meant writing some assembly to get some of the AVX goodness into my program (I once gave a talk on the topic of deep learning in Go, where I touched on this issue). I am no stranger to writing assembly in Go, but it’s not something I touch very often, so sometimes things can take longer to remember how to do them. This is one of them. So this blog post is mainly to remind myself of that.

The values in Go slices are 16-byte aligned. They are not 32 byte aligned.

On Binary Classification of Human Beings

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 11 May 2016 08:19:43 +0000

Over the years I have come up with some fun ideas of binary classifying people. They say “those who can’t do, teach”. That’s a binary classification – teachers and doers. I once did something like that, with a longer elaboration: Hackers and Engineers Abstract Thinking Capabilities Some people have better abstract thinking capabilities than others. I’ll use an example that makes this a particularly dangerous thought. Consider two young girls, A and B, who are playing with Barbie dolls.

Bloody Side Tracking Brain

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 03 May 2016 08:45:42 +0000

This morning I woke up with Hungarian Dance No. 5 by Brahms stuck in my head. In my head, it’s a superiorly orchestrated, super high definition audio – much like sitting in the concert hall and being enveloped by the music of a live orchestra. I also have a very high quality copy of Hungarian Dance on my hard drive. I woke up at 5.45 am, went to gym, and returned at 7am and showered.

Batman v Superman – A Quick Thought

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 20:19:20 +0000

I watched BvS today. I don’t know what to think about it. Overall, I think the movie was a bit of a mess. But I can’t seem to pinpoint why. Breaking it down by the standard things that people use to judge movies, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong. Characters Character-wise, I liked it quite a bit. Superman is at his Superman-est. Batman is also amongst the most Batmanest Batman I’ve encountered.

Not Enough

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:50:08 +0000

Do you sometimes feel like you’re not smart enough, not strong enough… not _ enough to do your pursuits? At what point do you give up? I am so tired. The alternative – not pursuing what I want to do… is worse. Argh,.

Naming Things Poorly

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 14:32:22 +0000

computer scientists have a very unfortunate way of naming things. Take S-expressions for example. They’re pretty a fundamental notation method for functional programming. I was re-implementing a variant of it recently, and obviously I named the package sexp Part of the implementation I wrote was that I had a “shortcut” way of representing the S-expressions internally – as slice (called List) and atoms, instead of actually making a linked-list (because child node access was faster, given that most of the trees are static).

On Buying A New Vacuum Cleaner

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 09:33:42 +0000

Just happened. Her: Ooh, Dyson is on sale! Me: Yeah, no. Dyson sucks. Her: So, we’ll buy a Dyson? Me: Er, I mean, Dyson doesn’t suck. Her: So, we’ll buy a Dyson? We’re buying a Miele instead. Because Miele vacuum cleaners are awesome at sucking.

Holy Crap I've Got Abs (Kinda)

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 09:51:40 +0000

In the span of a year, I went from looking like the picture on the left to looking like the picture on the right.

This blog post is what I did to get there.

I went from 80kg at about 24% body fat to 65kg at about 14-15% body fat. Most of this blog post will indicate a much higher start point (of which I didn't have a photo of), at 87kg and about 30% body fat.

YAGNI

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 09:37:42 +0000

This morning my computer crashed. So I rebooted it. I was in the midst of a project that had a lot of git branches (as I was working on competitive ideas to see which version would work best), and I couldn’t recall which branch I was on. I thought it would be a good time to update my .bashrc file to perhaps add a git status to my bash prompt. Afterall, there are some pretty nice prompt string hacks for git out there.

An Apology

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 26 Sep 2015 13:40:15 +0000

I made a mistake in posting a women-hostile picture on Twitter yesterday. This is an apology. But first, let’s start with a recap.

Yesterday I posted this tweet:

This: http://t.co/wo4gsU5NCT (By now you should know that I think gender/identity politics is a waste of society's time)

— Chewxy (@chewxy) September 25, 2015

I first saw the picture on /r/funny. And I tweeted the picture after a brief view. I mainly tweeted the comic because I believe that politicking identity issues is generally a waste of time* Politicking of any issue is generally a waste of time, in my opinion. . I had neglected to notice that it came from @AntiFemComics.

This morning, a shitstorm ensued. I woke up and the first notification was from Nick Coghlan:

@chewxy Seriously, dude? You're going to blithely ignore all the evidence of structural biases and claim women just aren't interested?

— Nick Coghlan (@ncoghlan_dev) September 25, 2015

Upon reading that, I went and re-read the comic. I realize the horror that I have in fact misread the comic. And the issue snowballed on. This blog post will stand as an official apology from me.

Go Test Files Are Part of the Same Package

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 22:10:24 +0000

Just a quick one. I was working on improving performance for a certain method of mine. I had found the hot loop * pprof is an amazing godsend. The days of dicking around in valgrind or cProfile are long a memory of the past , and I wrote a few benchmark methods to test some ideas. I was using the testing package’s benchmark function to benchmark the methods, and for a method, I had abstracted out some code so that it can run in a goroutine.

Whole Fruit Espresso

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 09:17:00 +0000

I’ve been toying around with new ideas of coffee lately. Here is one that I think went particularly well. It started with red-eyes: you put a shot of espresso in filter coffee, just to boost acidity and body of the coffee whilst still keeping the basic aromatics in the coffee (making espresso kills quite a bit of those).

I then moved on to the idea of making cascara red-eyes. If red eyes were flavourful, perhaps then using the pulp of the fruit will yield a different thing all together? And indeed it did. The hibiscus-y nature of the cascara tea does accentuate the espresso. Then I wondered if I could push it further – what if the cascara “tea” was made under pressure – i.e. espresso?

Intuitions From The Price Equation

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 13:00:40 +0000

George Price was a rather interesting fellow. A few months ago, I was reading a rather interesting piece about his life from HN. If you follow my blog posts (hello to the two of you), you’ll note that altruism and cooperative games is one of the things I like to blog about.

Following that article, I discovered the Price equation* Funny story. I was quite surprised I hadn't heard of the Price equation, so I hit the books. I found the equation being referenced very very very very briefly in Martin Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics, and that was all . While grokking the equation, it had suddenly occurred to me that kin selection and group selection were indeed the same thing. It was a gut feeling, and I couldn’t prove otherwise.

I recently had a lot of time on hand, so I thought I’d sit down and try to make sense of my gut feel that kin selection and group selection were in fact the same thing. Bear in mind I’m neither a professional mathematician nor am I a professional biologist. I’m not even an academic and my interest in the Price equation came from an armchair economist/philosopher point of view. And so, while I grasp a lot of concepts, I may actually have understood them wrongly. In fact, just be forewarned that this entire post was a result of me stumbling around.

So, let’s recap what the Price equations look like (per Wikipedia):

Simply put, $latex \Delta z$ is the difference in phenotype between a parent population and the child population. And that difference is a function of two things:

The covariance of fitness and phenotype — $latex \frac{1}{w} cov(w_i, z_i) $ where $latex w $ is the average fitness of the population, $latex w_i $ is the individual fitness of $latex i $, and $latex z_i $ is the phenotype shared in the group.
The expected value of the fitness of the difference between the group’s phenotype and the parent group’s phenotype.

The Skynet Argument Against Social Media

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 10:04:11 +0000

In The Terminator (1984), Skynet sends a T-800 to terminate Sarah Connor. And the Terminator had to look up a phone book to find three Sarah Connors, because it mainly didn’t know what Sarah Connor looked like or where she lived. That made sense in 1984. If the records had been destroyed in the war – records can be destroyed because physical drives were expensive and don’t have much capacity. Skynet wouldn’t have known how Sarah Connor looked like, or any other of her personal details.

Addendum/Errata for “Monads, In My Python?”

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 12:27:20 +0000

I gave a talk at PyConAU – about monads. This blog posts contains some thoughts about the talk, and some addendum/errata that I was not able to cover in the talk. But first, here’s the talk and associated slides.

Algorithms Are Chaotic Neutral

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 10:35:35 +0000

Carina Zona gave the Sunday keynote for PyConAU 2015. It was a very interesting talk about the ethics of insight mining from data, and algorithms. She gave examples of data mining fails – situations where Target discovered a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents even knew; or like machine learned Google search matches that implied black people were more likely to be arrested. It was her last few points that I got interested in the ethical dilemmas that may occur. And it is these last few points that I want to focus the discussion on.

One of the key points that I took away* not necessarily the key points she was trying to communicate – it could just be I have shitty comprehension, hence rendering this entire blogpost moot was that the newer and more powerful machine learning algorithms out there are inadvertantly discriminate along the various power axes out there (think race, social economic background, gender, sexual orientation etc). There was an implicit notion that we should be designing better algorithms to deal with these sorts of biases.

I have experience designing these things and I quite disagree with that notion. I noted on Twitter that the examples were basically the machine learning algorithms were exposing/mirroring what is learned from the data.

The Google example is merely algorithms exposing the inherent bias in the genpop #pyconau

— Chewxy (@chewxy) August 1, 2015

Carina did indeed point out that the data is indeed biased – she did indeed point out that for example, film stock in the 1950s were tuned for fairer skin, and therefore the amount of photographic data for darker skinned peole were lacking * This NPR article seems to be the closest reference I have, which by the way is fascinating as hell.

But before we dive in deeper, I would like to bring up some caveats:

I very much agree with Carina that we have a problem. The points I’m disagreeing upon is the way we should go about to fix it
I’m not a professional ethicist, nor am I a philosopher. I’m really more of an armchair expert
I’m not an academic dealing with the topics – I consider myself fairly well read, but I am by no means an expert.
I am moderately interested in inequality, inequity and injustice, but I am absolutely disinterested with the squabbles of identity politics, and I only have a passing familiarity of the field.
I like to think of myself as fairly rational. It is from this point of view that I’m making my arguments. However, in my experience I have been told that this can be quite alienating/uncaring/insensitive.
I will bring my biases to this argument, and I will disclose my known biases whereever possible. However, it may be possible that I have missed, and so please tell me.

Operator Overloading With Right Associativity In Python

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 11:03:33 +0000

It’s actually quite fun that after years of using something, you still find a new way to do something. So at the last Sydney Python meet up, there were showings of how Python interfaces objects. Consider this for example: class Blah(object): ''' skipping the __init__ and stuff ''' def __add__(self, other): # skips checks and stuff return self.value + other >>> b = Blah(2) >>> b + 2 4 However, it was pointed out by my friend Julian, that the other way wouldn’t work – that operator overloading was only left associative:

Writing... Again

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 17:41:24 +0000

This blog has been awfully silent the past year. I guess now that my job has been made redundant, I’m going to return to writing more. Hah! Here’s to hoping!

Designing SquatCoach

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 14:06:23 +0000

A few months ago, I blogged about my frustrations with logarithmic progressions with weightlifting. I highly enjoy linear progressions – who doesn’t enjoy work that is easy? But I was wrong about one thing: I hadn’t hit the logarithmic progression part. In fact as at the time of writing of this blog post, I am still firmly in the linear progression phase.

So what went wrong? The answer is form. I was basically squatting with exceedingly poor form. I was using all kinds of stabilizer muscles in an unbalanced way that left me injured often. I took notes and noticed that it was at around 55 to 60kg that I kept getting injured about and hence the weights I squatted lingered around there. There is an old saying goes: “Practice Makes Perfect”. That is wrong. The phrase that should really be passed around is “Perfect Practice Makes Perfect”.

The breakthrough came when I got got my partner to record me squatting for the first time. I had religiously read /r/fitness and /r/formcheck, so I had a fairly good idea of what good form is. I thought I had good form – I didn’t. One of the first things I noticed was that I wasn’t squatting anywhere near deep enough, despite the fact that I had all along thought that I was doing an ass-to-grass squat.

After years spending seated in front of the computer, I had no spatial awareness of how deep I was squatting. I had to learn what a deep squat was (learning the flexibility to do that is a tale on its own). I taught her how to check for correct form: the hip crease must go lower than the top of the kneecap to be counted as a good squat. And so she began to spot me. But this wasn’t fair for her as it was eating into her training time. So after a couple of sessions, I went about developing an app that used computer vision to determine if I was squatting with good form.

The thing about computer vision is while it’s easy to start, accuracy is a Difficult goal with a capital D. One indeed can spend a lot of effort to boost the accuracy a very miniscule amount. I cut down a lot of that by using various hacks like coloured sticker dots on the hip crease, knee and barbell tip to increase the accuracy of the app. By and large, I got it working, for me. But it wasn’t working for my partner, or a colleague who had begun to be interested about the app (he had separately approached me about the feasibility of an idea similar to SmartSpot, whose idea I love). The killing blow, I think was that I had irritated some fellow gym-goers by my wrapping of a gorillapod around their racks or bars in order to set up a static filming point.

And so it transpired I would need a new app. The app would have to do these things in order to teach me to have a better squat form:

Monitor my form as I squat
Inform me when I have hit a good form
Only one person involved – no interfering with anyone else in the gym

The Bane of Communicating Succinctly

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 21:46:55 +0000

You may have noticed I have not blogged for a while. And if you do follow me on twitter you’ll note that my tweet rate has also dropped. Ever increasingly, I find the need to share some ideas, but the ideas cannot be succinctly communicated in a pithy sentence or two. I have a lot of what I consider to be “dangerous” ideas (in the vein of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas), and I think it is imperative to be clear about the ideas.

Just Fair

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 03:50:25 +0000

Preamble: I have not blogged in a while. I have quite a few things to say, and have started at least 7 blog posts but never found the steam to complete them. Last Friday, I was having a rather interesting conversation with my colleagues, and that was cut short by a prior dinner arrangement. Having left the conversation topic unended, I decided that it’s a good point to jump off and continue blogging.

I lean slightly left towards Marxism, and I made it clear what it is that appeals to me. What appeals to me about Marxism is that it is most sci-fi in nature. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is probably one of the most Star Trek-esque thing you can say. Indeed, I dream about a future where society functions like this, and I am actively working towards making such a change in society.

Of course there are other bits of Marxism that are I think outdated - the concept of class warfare, and proleteriats needing to seize control of Das Kapital* by that I mean, means of production. I think this is a very good pun is in my opinion, a very 19th century view. I do however, note a similarity between today’s society and the society that Marx lived in, one on the verge of a technological revolution* Das Kapital was published just as the dust of the Industrial Revolution was settling. Its observations of course, were made by Marx DURING what we call now the Industrial Revolution . Just as I note that the philosophy of Marx’s time was that people find meaning of life through work, we are similarly in a period where the same has happened. Think of how you would introduce yourself to other people - it’s your name, followed by what you do.

And there we were, seated at the table. Me, J and P were discussing my Marxist leanings. J posited a very interesting question, which I have paraphrased to omit the amount of obscenities that are wont to come about around groups of male humans speaking:

Imagine if there were two students, A and B. A is super hardworking, and does all the work during the semester. A even does extra work to understand the subject deeply. B on the other hand is a party animal, preferring to skip classes and not study, and would rather spend his time partying.
Then comes exam time. Obviously A does better than B. But here’s the twist. The lecturer for whatever reason, approaches A and proposes that A averages out his grade with B.

If you were A would you do that?

This is obviously a variant of the legendary socialism classroom experiment story that has been floating around the Internet for some time now.

Logarithmic

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 20:17:29 +0000

I started lifting weights a few months ago after a bit of health awakening. At first, it was a lot of fuckaround. Eventually I got into a program, and a routine. I started seeing progress in my strength, and I kept a record of how much I can lift – I’ve got nice charts to show my strength progressions. It’s not much but I can bench press about 60% of my body mass now.

Naming Things (They're All Named Lucy)

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 21:56:21 +0000

Have you had an experience you couldn’t quite put to words? Or understood some things that cannot be described well, and everything you tried to describe it in feel like poor analogies of it? Or that you even have to resort to using analogies to begin with?

And then someone mentions a word that sounds familiar, and suddenly, the connection makes sense. It made sense for the word to mean the experience/series-of-events/phenomena that you had experienced/understood.

Earlier this afternoon I had that experience. I had experienced something that is really difficult to describe, and put to words. I took a lot of notes about it, but I wasn’t able to accurately or satisfactorily explain it with words. What the experience was and the topics it surrounded is not of much importance, nor is it profound because I spent the rest of the afternoon obssessing about the fact there are no names to describe exactly what I had experienced.

In fact, the whole meta-ness about names makes even writing this blog post a little difficult, but I hope I am able to express what I mean quite clearly.

Names are pretty important, because without them, we do not understand the world. In fact, when you name a colour, you actually start perceiving the colour as a separate colour, as did the Chinese and Japanese discovered when they named the colour blue.

Given that names are pretty important, there are a lot of problems with names.

Small Languages

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 15:24:10 +0000

“I like small languages,” said a friend of mine.

“Yeah, me too. Wait. What do you mean by small languages?” I replied

“You know, small. JavaScript. Lisp. Small, stuff… Not big,” he faltered as he struggled with the rest of his sentence.

That led to a series of discussions about what a small language is. We eventually enumerated a list of languages which we knew and could classify. Languages which we mutually agree are small are listed in small fonts; languages which we mutually agree are large are listed in large fonts:

C
Scheme
Lua
Python
Go
JavaScript
Haskell
Java
C#

The Dinner Party Around the World

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 10:37:37 +0000

TL;DR Last saturday I held a dinner party at my house. This is the recap, with the recipes.

For the last 3-4 months, I had been thinking a lot about holding a dinner party. I had been playing with several ideas in my head. And you know how ideas are like - they are screaming to come out of one’s head and into reality. So last month I decided to send out invites to 6 people, for a dinner party around the world.

For the dinner party I knew there had to be a theme. I originally started with the theme of “Layers”, but as time went on, I convinced myself that the theme would be too subtle. So I changed it to “Travelling Around Planet Earth”. But I still was very enamoured with the idea of layers in my dinner party. So I made a compromise. By the time the invites were sent out, the dinner party was called “A Trip Around Planet Earth”, with the theme of “Layers”

Alternate Names For TV Shows

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 20:55:46 +0000

Earlier this afternoon I mentioned to my partner that we should watch an episode of The Adventure of WASP Girl in the Land of Systemically Biased Sampled Population. Which was of course, Orange is the New Black. She got what show that was immediately though, but I don’t think most people would get it. I then recalled a time when my housemate couldn’t find House of Cards on my home media server because I had named the folder “Derps of Capitol Hill”.

The Nanjing Taxi

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 30 May 2014 03:02:46 +0000

I recently visited China (my writeup was in three parts: Part I, Part II, Part III). An incident of particular note was in a taxi in Nanjing. Picture this: The driver is on the left side of the vehicle. On left edge of the windshield, a Samsung Galaxy Note sits on windscreen mount, connected to the cigar lighter on his right. The cigarette lighter also powers another smaller feature phone which sits on top of his dashboard. Next to the air conditioner vent of the front panel, a walkie talkie sits on its cradle.

We were on a fairly long journey (about 20km ish), and the driver was talking to us, trying to upsell us his services for the whole day. We talked about the local sights, the museums and what nots. Then CRRSSSHHH, an incoming message from the walkie talkie – it was something traffic related. The driver pressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie, acknowledging the message. Then came a different TCHSSHH sound. A woman’s voice came into hearing. She asked about lunch. The driver leaned forwards, picked up the feature phone, and pressed a button and talked into it, explaining that he was with passengers and his general direction. Upon finishing that conversation, he continued our conversation, picking up from where he left off.

This continued to happen throughout the journey – the driver would be switching between different modes of verbal communications – real life, push to talk, walkie talkie and even his mobile phone. The driver was dealing with 4 different networks at the same time (walkie talkie – some kind of trunked system, since most of it were traffic related; the push-to-talk feature phone – which I assume to be some kind of PTT powered by cellular tech; mobile phone – full duplex radio; and talking with the passengers of the car). That sparked an idea.

Here’s a bit more background. I had developed an interest in trunked radio networks and half-duplex communications when my way-more-accomplished-than-me partner was working as an E&E engineer for the telecomms industry* I think she’s more accomplished than I am, given that she’s now working for a certain search engine company while I have tried and failed at least 5 times with that same company, twice within the last 7 months . So I had some good ideas on how CB and trunk radio networks worked.

At the same time I was having a bit of trouble with the VPN the previous night. The solution was simple – I ended up rolling my own VPN on AWS, swapping elastic IPs for the EC2 instance every few hours and updating encryption key everyday. In short, it was a mess.

So the idea was born: what if you could have an ad-hoc (read: P2P) chat network that was private (read: encrypted), and you could juggle different networks at the same time? After a few rounds of refinement of the idea, I started working on the prototype application that night.

Meta For The Last Two Posts

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 21 May 2014 09:25:38 +0000

The last two posts have been short stories (A Fantastic Account of Wanting To Change The World Through Literary Devices and The Long Term Plan).

They’re not the best written stories out there. But I still wanted to share some of the thought processes that went into writing the stories. Here are some trivia and notes about both:

The Long Term Plan

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 20 May 2014 11:31:37 +0000

“Bugger that plan,” Escher spat into the ground. He looked at his troops, positioned around him in a circle. “Have heart, grandfather. The long term plan, remember?” Escher the third looked up at his grandfather. Overhead, clear liquid from the chemical weapons used by the enemy rained down in large droplets, threatening to dissolve any organic matter that it came into contact with. Already, a pool of the corrosive liquid is gathering and slowly but surely making its way to the group sitting under the boulder.

A Fantastic Account of Wanting To Change The World Through Literary Devices

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 15 May 2014 23:39:49 +0000

Ellen McGuffin heaved a heavy sigh as she uncoupled the device from the battery and pocketed it in her lab coat. Wear a lab coat, it’ll make you look more professional and more people will buy into your story, she was told.

Fat lot of help that did, she thought to herself as she walked towards the exit of the garage. She turned her head to give the car one last look, switched off the lights and left the garage for the last time. It was a lovely evening – one worthy of stopping and taking in the sight. Ellen didn’t do that. Her mind was far too clouded by the incidents today. This was her sixteenth time in her attempt to raise funds for her invention, nay her sixteenth failure. She had succeded in closing a seed round a year ago, but tomorrow the burn chart comes to an end. There would be no more future for the device.

China Retrospective 2014

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 06 May 2014 13:26:22 +0000

TL;DR and Meta – I visited China for the first time. I enjoyed it very much. These are elaborated from notes I took while in China. This is part 3 of a 3 part series on China, concerning impressions about China as a whole. Part 1 concerns my week in Beijing. Part 2 concerns smaller visits to various parts of China.

So, I visited China for the very first time - in essence, looking at my cultural roots. Along the way I have gained some impressions about China, as well as new views on old topics. This blog post summarizes my impressions of my first trip to China.

The Ancient Great Capitals of China + Hangzhou Retrospective 2014

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 06 May 2014 13:24:12 +0000

TL;DR and Meta – I visited China for the first time. I enjoyed it very much. These are elaborated from notes I took while in China. This is part 2 of a 3 part series on China, concerning my explorations to other parts of China. Part 1 concerns my week in Beijing. Part 3 concerns my impressions of China as a whole

My travels to China also accidentally brought me to all of the four ancient great capitals of China – Beijing, Luoyang, Xi’an, and Nanjing. I had spent a lot more time in Beijing, hence the separate post. I didn’t spend as much time as I would have wanted to in the other ancient great capitals of China, but I had still taken some photos and notes.

Beijing Retrospective 2014

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 06 May 2014 13:23:34 +0000

TL;DR and Meta – I visited China for the first time. I enjoyed it very much. These are elaborated from notes I took while in China. This is part 1 of a 3 part series on China, concerning my week in Beijing. Part 2 concerns smaller visits to various parts of China. Part 3 concerns my impressions of China as a whole

It was a hot and sweaty night in the Nanjing airport. Cigarette smoke wafted across the waiting area in slow curls. Overhead, announcements were made that due to weather conditions, some flights were being cancelled. I waited, sweating, fervently hoping that my connecting flight to Beijing wouldn’t be cancelled. To much of my relief, it wasn’t cancelled, only delayed. I soon boarded my flight and arrived in Beijing, feeling very tired and worn out.

Exiting the airport, my travelling companions and I took a taxi to the hutong (胡同) where our boutique hotel was situated. To our dismay, the taxi driver simply dropped us off at the junction between the road and the hutong. His taxi couldn’t enter the small alley that is the hutong. At 1.30 a.m, we trudged into a dark alley, not even knowing where the hotel is – it was about 600m into the hutong. I was getting quite cranky at that point and my impression of China wasn’t very good at that point.

The next morning however, marked the beginning of a change of impression, of both Beijing and China on a whole. The booking of the boutique hotel was a good choice. In the light of day, I got to know the location, and it was impressive. The hotel is a siheyuan (四合院). The receptionist later intimated to me that it was built in the late Qing dynasty, making it about 140-170 years old. It was small (I would visit much larger _siheyuan_s later), but surely impressive. It was quite interesting to think about how a family would live in a building with such architecture and how the architecture of such buildings dictate social convention and dynamics in a family.

Two Ways of Thinking

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 16:39:00 +0000

I went to a shopping mall today and I noticed they had installed a new feature in the parking lot* They had actually installed it at the end of last year, but I never bothered to notice how exactly it worked till now – it’s one of those things that told you whether a lot was taken. If a lot was taken, a red light will shine, and a green light will shine if a lot isn’t occupied. I’ve seen a lot of those in parking lots, but this one actually interested me. Here’s how it looks like:

It’s a potato quality photo, but I think it shows how it works quite well. The system used is the ParkAssist M3. A camera is trained onto a parking lot. If there is a car with a licence plate in the lot, the system will know that the lot is taken, and display a red light. There are two cameras, so one light represents two spots.

As I walked past it, I had a hunch on how it worked – it uses computer vision, and one thought led to another, and I soon began to think about the two major ways of thinking about products. Well, technically there are three. If you were to give an assignment to any random guy off the street to design a parking lot monitoring system, there would be one of three broad response types: give up, innovation or invention. I’m not going to even deign discussing giving up.

This line of thought was quite influenced by a talk by Alan Kay I watched earlier this week:

After our shopping, I pointed out the cameras to my partner, who immediately asked “are those cameras?”, followed by “but that’s so wasteful!”. That was her inner electronics engineer speaking. Both she and I knew that there were cheaper, and probably more efficient methods of designing parking lot indicator solutions. She also highlighted her way of thinking: The innovator.

Eyetracking Jetpack Joyride, Smash Hit and Dungeon Keeper

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 09:52:49 +0000

TL;DR – I got a little upset that I didn’t get any jobs I wanted, so I decided to learn how to write an Android app to relax instead. The result is eyemap.io – Gaze Analytics For the Rest Of Us. The rest of the blog post chronicles how I got to that point.

The week before last was a terrible week for me. It was one week after I had published my books. I was looking to take some time off from updating the books. After about 6 months being self-employed, doing the things I love to do, I felt it was time for me to return to the workforce. Let’s face it, it’s not easy to be self employed and get a steady paycheck. So I started looking for jobs.

All was well. I had applied to a number of jobs that I was interested in. By the end of the week however, I had nothing – nobody called back. Naturally, coming off the high of having just published a couple of books, it was crushing.

Remember a few months ago, I was mulling over acquiring a tablet? Out of sheer coincidence, I came into posession of a Nexus 10 a few days after I blogged that entry. It’s an older model, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. Despite coming to possession of the tablet, I never really used it.

Anyway, back to the week before last. Combined with the fact that I got rejected for those jobs that I wanted plus a few more not so nice news, I was feeling pretty shitty about myself. So on Friday evening, I altered my state of mind chemically to relax a little.

After some drinks, I took out my tablet and fiddled with it while relaxing with pineapples. I decided to download my favourite game on tablets since 2011 – Jetpack Joyride. Now, when your brain is under the influence, time seems to slow down – your body appears to lag. Specifically my eyeballs felt like they were lagging. I kept looking at the right of the screen, and I could feel my eyes darting to look at the right and back to Barry on a very regular basis.

This led me to ask a question: what does Jetpack Joyride look like when one’s eyes are tracked? What would a heatmap look like? Clearly there are eye tracking devices out there like the EyeTribe or Tobii which is fantastic. But I didn’t have access to any of those. The front-facing camera of my tablet appeared to frown at me. Then it hit me: why not use it to do eye tracking?

So I dragged myself to the computer, and started learning how to write Android apps. To their credit, the Android developer page is absolutely easy to use – if an intoxicated person can read and create an app in about an hour, you know it’s bloody good documentation. I didn’t get far, except to capture videos and detect my face, which is easy stuff anyone can do. I went to bed.

Configuration Management Tools As Operating Systems

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 16:52:53 +0000

Last year I wrote a blog post comparing programming languages to driving experiences. Today in the chatroom, my friends and I were talking about config management tools. I’ve had the opportunity to use most of them, so I compared them to operating systems as such: CM Tool OS Feels Like Ansible Mac OS Here's the one way to do things, chosen Your Lord and God, Steve Jobs. You can do things other ways too, but be prepared for a little pain Salt Linux Do whatever the fuck you want to do.

JavaScript Books Published!

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 15:15:24 +0000

After a long time spent in the editing room, I finally published both books that I kept talking about for the past few weeks in my blog. You can get them here: Introduction to The Books Underhanded JavaScript catalogues the various kinds of “naughty” things that can be done with JavaScript. These are followed by explanations as to why they happen, and also how to maliciously use them (in tongue-in-cheek tones of course, I don’t expect you to actually deploy such code.

Overdrive

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 00:29:18 +0000

My brain is in overdrive mode again. I hate it. It makes me quite unproductive. I hate it when I’m unproductive. This post is a brain dump in bid to win my productivity back I spent the early part of the day editing my books – pretty good effort with 1 chapter left to go for basic editing. Future edits can be done once the books have been published. The rest of the day was spent with my brain in overdrive.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To A/B Testing

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:53:13 +0000

TL;DR: I split tested the titles of my book: Here's what happened

So, if you were following my blog (thank you to the both of you), you’d know that I’ve been writing a book on the quirks of JavaScript. I split tested the book across two titles: Underhanded JavaScript: How To Be A Complete Arsehole with Bad JavaScript Code; and JavaScript Technical Interview Questions. This is the story of the twists and turns and missteps that happened when I wrote the book.

Rubber Ducky Debugging

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 12:41:37 +0000

Oh wow, I’ve just had my first “satori” experience of rubber ducky debugging in a very very long time. I first tweeted that I ran into a bug in Go, where upon running my code (with go run): Oh wow, ran into my first indeterminate bug in Go. Same code compiled twice produces two different results. Amazing — Chewxy (@chewxy) February 26, 2014 I had a problem where when I ran the same code multiple times, there would be occasions where the program panics.

What Every JavaScript Developer Should Know About Floating Point Numbers

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:42 +0000

After I gave my talk on JavaScript (really, I was there trying to shamelessly plug my book - Underhanded JavaScript and its alternate title: JavasScript Technical Interview Questions), there was a Q&A session. I could answer most questions, but Khalid Hilaby asked me a very interesting and quite general question on JavaScript number types. He had simply wanted to know more about floats in JavaScript and why they act so strangely. While I could answer the question, I felt I didn’t answer it well enough. I loaded my article on Pointer Tagging in Go to explain the structure of a floating point number, explained a bit on floating point arithmetic, and how in the past they had to have special CPUs for floating points (FPUs)* Nowadays they're all integrated , and then sort of meandered from there.

Now that I am back in Sydney and well rested, I thought I’d give the question a second try. The result is the article - What Every JavaScript Developer Should Know About Floating Points on Flippin’ Awesome. This is the full unedited version before I edited down for length and appropriateness for Flippin’ Awesome.

You Should Roast Your Coffee In Two Stages (Now Comes With: OpenCV Tricks!)

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 04:29:49 +0000

If you follow me on Twitter (and you should), you will know that since about 3 months ago, I started roasting my own coffee. Yes, my coffee madness has culminated over the years to this. This was my first roast:

Since then I have roasted 16 batches. The variables I vary are: temperature, time, pre-roast mass, and technique. I use a regular $10 popcorn popper from KMart to roast my beans (I originally wanted to purchase a Behmor, but I decided that I should stay lean while learning how to roast coffee) – and I have a thermometer to roughly gauge the temperatures of the popcorn popper. Eventually I’ll hook the thermometer up to an Arduino, but that’s a story for another day.

Despite all the controls, I had problems with my roasts. They were okay to drink – not as bad as buying supermarket coffee, but they weren’t excellent. The main problem was consistency. My roasts were not consistent – some beans were darker than the others. Here were the factors that caused the beans to be inconsistently roasted:

Different sized beans – Can’t do much here.
Uneven heating – various causes:
- Popcorn popper too hot
- Popcorn popper doesn’t agitate the beans fast enough (too heavy? too light?)
- Popcorn popper doesn’t agitate the beans randomly enough
- Location of beans in popper

I eventually narrowed it down to the fact that the popcorn popper was too hot – it burns some beans before they could be agitated out. In fact, after the first two throwaway attempts of the roasting, I realized that 7 minutes or so in a popcorn popper as recommended by amateur roasters on the Internet would just burn my beans.

I did a quick lookup, and true enough, most amateur roasters on the web are Americans (or live in America). Are American popcorn poppers different?

The Switchless Switch

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 12:36:01 +0000

In my previous blog post about why a kettle costs so much, the one statement that perhaps riled the most people up is where I said Tesla Model S’ touch screen control panel was a stupid idea. In fact, the link to the Model S control panel is amongst the top most clicked links out. I do think it’s a stupid idea, but I must disclaim that I have never driven a Tesla, so I may be talking out of my ass based purely on logical reasoning and not a practical experience* P/S: Tesla, come to Australia already. .

The logical reasoning goes something like this: I am driving down the road at 110 km/h. My eyes are on the road, as all safe drivers do. The radio station suddenly plays Justin Bieber* I’m only using Justin Bieber as a punching bag because everyone uses him thusly. I actually have no opinions on popular music given that the music I regularly listen to are dated to 300-400 years ago , and the car gets cold suddenly because Bieber is a witch. I want to: a) change the current radio station; b) raise the temperature of the vehicle interior. But first I have to go to the media control app. Then I need to change my media playback from a radio station to a Spotify playlist containing all my favourite Tchaikovskys. Then I need to access the climate control app to raise the temperature by a few Celcius.

The question is this: How many times have I taken my eyes off the road, and how long for each time?

Javascript: Wat, Again

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 06:28:27 +0000

I gave a talk on Javascript recently at Javascript.my‘s unshift() miniconf in Kuala Lumpur. After regretting giving many talks without a recording to track my performance improvements when giving talks, I decided that starting this year, I would record and transcribe my talks. Here’s the first one for 2014. The slides are embedded here as well.

I had originally planned to record my talk and use an automatic transcriber to transcribe. But the recording quality was indeed quite poor as my phone battery was running out. I had to use Audacity to clean it up quite a bit. And despite that, automatic transcription with OS X’s Dictation didn’t work as well as I expected it to.

Anyhow, here’s the transcription of my talk. A lot of bits were filled in and edited (I really have a lot of uh, and ums when I speak) as the recording got quite garbled as time went on. Towards the end it was a totally unrecognizable warble. I was scheduled to give a 30 minute talk but I ended up talking for about 50 minutes. The last 20 minutes are not transcribed.

Why Does A Good Kettle Cost $90+?

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 04:33:59 +0000

Yesterday morning I woke up to a house without electricity - that meant I woke up in a puddle of sweat because the fan was no longer turned on. It turned out that my housemate, while making coffee, had tripped the mains of the house. The kettle had caused the trip. It was no longer safe to use the kettle and so I had to buy a new kettle.

The Dead Kettle

“I Should Get A Tablet”

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 09:22:28 +0000

“I should get an iPad”, I woke up this morning with that thought in my head. It was a strange thought to wake up to, and so I gave it some thought. If this question was asked a few years ago, I’d have said yes, and promptly acquired a tablet. But now, in 2014, I seriously questioned the need. I am no stranger to living life with a tablet. A few years ago, I had an experimental run with an Android tablet and briefly, an iPad 2.

What I Did When Hacker News Went Down

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 02:12:33 +0000

So… Hacker News went down for about a day. I lost my main source of procrastination (reddit contained all purple links). So what did I do? I got productive. I wrote about 20% of a book on Javascript. You should register your interest for Underhanded Javascript, Or: How to be a Complete Arsehole with Bad Javascript (there’s an alternate title that I’m considering: Javascript Technical Interview Questions). Here’s a quick blurb of the book:

First Trip, 2014

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 11:48:59 +0000

I took a trip to the beach yesterday with my housemates, my partner and Lucy. I laid there horizontally bobbing in the sea, starring into the deep blue sky. I thought about my accomplishments and failures in 2013 and see in 2014 I could find in the rough, to takeaway some diamonds. I love these trips as divorcing me from the computer allows me to think about things deeply and from different angles.

Programming is Fun

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 12:00:03 +0000

This thought came to mind as I was working on various miscellenous devop stuff for new Pressyo projects: Programming is fun and easy. Software development and engineering is tedious as fuck. I like to think of myself as a guy who programs for a hobby. I cannot see myself doing everyday what I just spent the last 4 hours doing. Devops is schlep. Sure, things like Vagrant and Docker makes things a lot easier, but it’s still extremely time consuming and quite honestly, soul crushing.

A Tale of Productivity

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 01:08:30 +0000

If you read my blog regularly, you’d recall that I can be quite obsessive over my productivity. I religiously track my productivity in a variety of metrics and tools – I have a premium account at RescueTime; I use Github to track the commit quantity and quality.

Yesterday was a very good day. The above screenshot shows the RescueTime dashboard report for the day. I had spent 89% of my tracked time on productive stuff. My Github records concur. Yesterday was a good day. I committed 14 commits to my project, and git diff --stat showed in total I wrote 1703 Lines of Code, and deleted 699 Lines of Code.

By comparison, according to RescueTime’s trivia bar, yesterday I was 20% more productive than my usual productivity pulse of 74. I also only usually manage to make one commit at about 200 LoC addition per day to my projects.

I was in short, on a roll. So how did I get so productive? This entire week has been rather productive for me. I believe I may have discovered what works for me when engaging in non-creative work.

Notes on Installing OpenCV in a Vagrant Box

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 16:45:37 +0000

I installed OpenCV in a Vagrant box for a new project. It was a pain in the arse. The basic box I used was Official Ubuntu 13.10 daily Cloud Image amd64. After many trials and errors, these are things to note when installing OpenCV in a Vagrant box: Build without GPU and OpenCL When building, don’t build with GPU options: cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -D WITH_TBB=ON -D BUILD_NEW_PYTHON_SUPPORT=ON -D WITH_QT=ON -D BUILD_opencv_gpu=OFF -D BUILD_opencv_ocl=OFF .

Pointer Tagging in Go

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 10:55:50 +0000

Let’s say you’re an idiot. You didn’t know about the interface{} type in Go. You didn’t know about switch foo.(type) {} in Go. Now you want to do something really fancy, like interpreting integers as floats (why would anyone do that?). Maybe you just want to circumvent the very excellent type system in Go. Or maybe you want a much faster type switching/assertion in Go. Or maybe you’re just a bit nuts.

A Tour of Coca Cola Amatil's Distribution Centre

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 03:53:24 +0000

The smell of cheese and sweaty shoes wafted in the air as I disembarked from the car. Ahead of me, a large sign that says COCA-COLA AMATIL. Walking past the three safety signs that lead to the office, the tour was about to begin. As part of a hackathon sponsored by Coca-Cola Amatil, I recently got the opportunity to learn more about logistics and operations. A tour of the CCA distribution centre was included in the hackathon and did I have a fun time!

A fridge full of Coca-Cola Amatil products greeted us as we entered the office. We were issued high visibility vests and were required to sit through 10 minutes of safety briefing, coupled with some safety tests. I sipped on a juice box as we took the safety briefing test. After that, our tour began. Our tour guide was Mark Hopkins, One Logistics Project Manager of CCA. He started off by rattling off interesting facts about the distribution centre while I furiously typed away my notes on Google Keep.

He explained that the distribution centre is entirely covered in 500kW solar panels. It was an investment that only recently paid off with the building of the new preform plant. Prior to the preform plant’s construction, the solar panels were generating excess electricity during down times, but now that the preform plant – capable of making 750 bottles per minute; and runs 24/7 – has been built and is running constantly, they now use their energies efficiently enough. Then time came for us to actually enter the warehouse.

Don't Be A Gearhead

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 15:14:00 +0000

I own a Canon 40D with a couple of large constant-aperture lenses. I also own a number of coffee making equipment, from the Aeropress to a nice Rancilio Silvia V2. I have a computer with a fairly nice processor and a fairly decent graphics card, with a large amount of RAM and 3 SSDs. While these things are slightly older now, I acquired them when them when they were rather new.

Thor: The Dark World

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:41:42 +0000

I never thought I’d blog about another comic book movie since my post on Man of Steel. But I actually found another movie that far surpasses Man of Steel in terms of enjoyability. Perhaps not as deep in subject matter as Man of Steel but far more enjoyable. I’m talking of course, of Thor: The Dark World. There are many things to talk about Thor: The Dark World, but mainly it’s the feeling I get from watching it.

Latte Art As Signalling

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:33:29 +0000

I had this thought the other day: latte art is signalling. To pour a rosetta in a cappuccino, you would need perfectly brewed espresso, and perfectly steamed and textured milk. If you do not pull enough crema in your espresso shot, or if the crema dissipates too quickly, you cannot pour a rosetta. If the milk isn’t properly textured, and there is too much air in the milk (or too little), you won’t be able to pour a rosetta because the milk wouldn’t drag across the surface of the crema easily.

etaoinshrdlucmfwypvbgkjqxz

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 01:39:21 +0000

My previous blog post must have lead many readers of mine (hello to the both of you) into thinking I had gone mad. I hadn’t. It must have been maddening, what with self-linking posts and complete and utter gibberish. This is the story of how I dreamt up an encoding for the English language.

I had been lying in bed, late last night, thinking about my own perception of time and space. I have often convinced myself that I perceive time and space rather differently than most people. Last night was one of those nights. I had an imaginary conversation with people in my mind, explaining how I perceive time and space. I gave an example: imagine a spoon falls from a table. Rather than perceive the motion of the spoon falling, I would often perceive it as a solid block between the table and the floor. The solid block would be in the shape of the trajectory of the spoon falling.

Now of course this is all mental. It’s an additional layer of processing my brain does for some odd and undocumented reason, and only under certain mental circumstances (for example, when feeling extremely relaxed). But it’s a good way of explaining to people how I very occasionally perceive time and space.

I then began to think about writing. Our writing is very much based on a deterministic pattern. If I write the rune ‘A’, I would expect the rune to only represent one alphabet (‘A’). What if, however, a rune would represent all possible representations? A good way to frame this would be to think: when you put a pen to paper, at that point an infinite possibilities of runes that could be drawn exists. As you draw more of your rune, the number of possibilities drop until you have a rune that represents one alphabet. Imagine if you will, a person who is able to see a lot of the possibilities would draw a rune that represents all those alphabets. Perhaps this clip from Fringe would help:

And as I thought about it, I too thought about ETAOIN SHRDLU. What if we could encode a rune based on its possibilities? ETAOIN SHRDLU provides a very good basis, given that it’s the frequency each letter is used in the English language. So, the question became: what if we could encode multiple letters into a rune and make a language out of it?

The thought stayed with me for the whole day and after work today, I decided to write a quick and dirty script to encode and decode into this language. To give it some extra mystique, I picked out 26 utf-8 symbols to form the basis of this encoding. Although there are 26 symbols, they do not map 1-1 to the English alphabet – as such, statistical analysis will not yield much. I’ve actually had some difficulties in writing the decoder myself!

This blog post will explain how I did it.

etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkjq xz

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 14:14:41 +0000

ᕜɷ ՓლᏜⵙᎺኡႣǬ ※Ꭴኡⴿ ՓኡփᏜ ᙢႣփᏜ ⵓⴾⵙᕶ Ꭴᕶⴾლ ᙢⴾᎺዯ ლᕶⴾӼᕶლփ ኡᗎ ᙢᏑǬᕶ (ⵓᕶӼᎤᏑ ᏜᏑ ᏜⵓᏜ ※ᏑᏜⵓ ኡᙢ ዯኡႣ) ᏑǬᏜᏑ ᏜⵓᏑᎺᖝᏑᎺⴿ Ꮡ ⵓⴾლ ⴿኡǬᕶ ᙢⴾӼ. Ꮡ ⵓⴾӼǬ’Ꮬ. ᎺᏜ ᙢႣփᏜ ⵓⴾⵙᏜ ※ᕶᕶᎺ ᙢⴾლӼᕶǬᏑᎺⴿ, ɷⵓኡᏜ ɷᎺᏜⵓ փᕶӼᗎ-ᎤᏑᎺᖝᏑᎺⴿ ՓኡփᏜփ ⴾᎺლ ᕜኡᕜՓᎤᕶⴾᕶ ⴾᎺლ ႣᏜⴾᕶⵓ ⴿᏑⵙ※ᕶლᏑǬⵓ. ᏜⵓᏑփ Ꮡփ Ꮬⵓᕶ փᏜኡⵓዯ ኡᗎ ⵓኡɷ Ꮡ ӼლᕶⴾᙢᏜ ᎤՓ ⴾǬ ᕶᎺᕜኡӼᏑᎺⴿ ᗎኡლ Ꮬⵓᕶ ᕶᎺⴿᎤᏑǬփ ᎤⴾᎺⴿႣⴾⴿᕶ. Ꮡ ⵓⴾლ ※ᕶᕶᎺ ӼዯᏑᎺⴿ ᏑᎺ ※ᕶლ, Ꭴኡⴾᕶ ᎤⴾփᏜ ǬᏑⴿⵓᏜ, ᏜⵓᏑᎺᖝᏑᎺⴿ ⴾ※ኡႣᏜ ᕜዯ ኡɷᎺ ՓᕶⵓᕜᏜՓᏜᎺኡǬ ኡᗎ ᏜᏑᙢᕶ ⴾᎺӼ ǬՓⴾᕜᕶ.

Why 1 && 2 == 2

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 01:05:07 +0000

This question was bugging me for a bit and I spent about 3 hours researching it: What is the result of the logical operation of 1 AND 2? Conversely, what is the result of the logical operation 1 OR 2?

Clearly upon first look, this doesn’t make any sense to evaluate in a vacuum. In normal English, if someone were to ask you “1 AND 2 equals?”, you’d probably reply “3”. Then the OR version of the question is asked… and then it devolves to non-sense. Formal logic, however, does provide us with some explanations. Everyone is familiar with the truth table:

P	Q	P AND Q	P OR Q
True	True	True	True
True	False	False	True
False	True	False	True
False	False	False	False

However, True and False are boolean values. Under the principle of bivalence, there can only be two truth values: True or False (in computers, they’re encoded as 1 or 0). I’m not going to discuss the philosophy of logic, so for the rest of this blog post let’s just accept that the logical operators AND and OR (generally) operate on boolean values.

Favourites

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 20:35:11 +0000

Interacting with new people do from time to time, make me somewhat anxious. Some questions in particular are especially anxiety inducing – A question like “what is your favourite X”.

The thing about favourites is that they imply a preference set in that one or more than one item in the set is more preferred than the others, usually in some kind of order. While it is true that for most categories of things I have a somewhat fixed preference set, problems arise from a few issues, which I will further elaborate below:

The preference set is subject to extrinsic variables
Too many tied orderings/too few tiebreakers
The humblebrag

Do Not Expect Breakthroughs

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:14:46 +0000

I run in multiple circles of acquaintances. Amongst my circles of acquaintances, one is a heavily transhumanist/futurist/post-human circle. I would often engage in discussion – over drinks usually – about the Singularity and what’s to come, our minds would meander amongst the hopeful and not so hopeful futures. There were many ideas floated. Most were interesting, but few were realistic. Being around transhumanist acquaintances gives me a feeling of hanging out amongst science fiction authors of the 1950s.

Man of Steel

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 15:31:47 +0000

I saw Man of Steel last night. It was excellent. I might watch it again on the big screen – that was how much I enjoyed it: much much more than Star Trek or Iron Man 3 that both came out this year. I liked it a lot because I felt it was more than your average summer blockbuster * it’s definitely NOT summer in Australia – a very wet winter indeed .

Dry Spell

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 13:39:00 +0000

I love being productive. Being productive really feels good – it’s an ego boost almost. If the product of being productive is tangible immediately or almost immediately, there is a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, being unproductive is the start of a spiral downwards. At least for me, being unproductive makes me fear being unproductive, which makes me even more unproductive. I really do not enjoy the feeling that comes with being unproductive.

I Want To Be That

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 09:12:32 +0000

Today marks the 65th anniversary of Baby. Baby was the world’s first electronically stored memory. It heralded the age of software. Here is a video discussing Baby. I watched this video early this morning, and I wonder what it is like to be one of these people — pioneers of world changing technologies. I use the term technology in the way an economist uses the term – institutions, laws, tradition, etc are all considered “technology”.

Enunciate

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 11:50:50 +0000

I don’t speak very clearly. If you have ever hear me speak, it’s as if the words could not get out of my mouth fast enough. Words slur into one another. I also have a bad habit of mixing my timing and rhythm when speaking, despite having English as my first language. This makes my usual rather flat accent into something that sounds very jumbled. While I would attribute the mixing of timing and rhythm to the rather odd rhythm my brain is used to, this is not very good for communicating, especially with people who are not used to my speech patterns.

Obsessive Frenzy

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:44:28 +0000

I like to think that I understand myself very well. But there are bits of me that even I don’t get. Over the past three weeks, the online advertising world had been rocked by massive incidences of fraud and malware. As part of my day job I have traced the sources of malware and fraud and we have ceased working with those companies behind them. At the same time I was also involved in a … let’s just call it consulting capacity to another potential fraud case (not within online advertising). I got into a frenzy working on both projects at the same time. Usually I would be happy that I’m highly productive, but this time round I felt rather miserable.

Hackers and Engineers

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:08:18 +0000

A very simple way of looking at the world is to consider a binary option. One can put out statements like “there are only two kinds of people in the world…” and make a gross oversimplification of the nuances that is life. With that preface, I’m going to state that there are two kinds of people in the world: hackers and engineers.

Agile All The Things

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:04:11 +0000

As part of the rethink of Pressyo, we’ve decided to adopt the agile methodology of running a business. I have my doubts about it (applying agile to running a business), but I was convinced by my cofounders that I actually went to read more about it. One of the people I’ve been following is Daniel B Markham. I’ve followed him since he was a prolific commenter on HN and does write interesting blog posts.

Out of Phase

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:57:43 +0000

Last week, in the Pressyo chatroom, we were discussing the idea of resonance. Resonance happens when a driving force is applied to a system with a frequency that is the same and in phase with the system’s natural frequency. The result is that the system oscillates at a much higher amplitude than normal. A typical example used in high school physics classes is that of a swing. Imagine a child on a swing and is being pushed by her parent.

You Mean You Didn't Know?

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:24:19 +0000

A few years ago, I attended an out-of-state wedding. I stayed with the bride-to-be and the groom-to-be. Not knowing the groom, I engaged in what I thought was an exploratory discussion into the groom-to-be’s life. I asked questions and let him talk about himself. Standard stuff you find in books on how to make friends.

I too have a problem. In real life (as well as online I suppose) I’ve built a reputation of being a stickler for accurate details — often to the point of pedantry I am told — there were quite a few things that he had mentioned that wasn’t quite right (as a lot of the things discussed had already been updated in the latest journals). A personality flaw of mine no doubt, was to point out that there was already updated knowledge about it.

I was later informed that the couple hadn’t been very happy with my visit. I was also told by my fiancee that I would constantly use the phrase “you mean you didn’t know?”. This phrase had become so ingrained to my speech that I hadn’t realized I had said it many times.

The problem with “you mean you didn’t know?” is that it sounds really condescending, even though I was genuinely surprised that someone didn’t know. Of course it could be meant to say that the other party is ill-informed, but it often was an expression of surprise, not one of condescension. Or so I thought anyway.

An Aversion To Ship

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:12:00 +0000

I have a confession to make. It had been slightly more than a month since I last committed any code to Fork the Cookbook. In fact, the whole team hadn’t contributed to Fork the Cookbook in about a month. Only the scant updates here and there. If you were to have a peek into what we were doing, you would think it was abandonware. Only that it wasn’t. For two weeks now, I have been actively writing code for Fork the Cookbook again.

Harper's Index

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:27:44 +0000

Short one today. In a previous post, I mentioned a simpler metric can be used to gauge civil liberties. A few days ago I found the Harper’s Index for April 2013. Here’s what I like about some of the things tracked: Percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born : 13 Percentage that was foreign-born in 1913 : 15 Change in the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States since 2007 : –900,000

The Importance of Staying Lean

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 23:54:31 +0000

This morning this video caught my attention:

It is a heart wrenching tale of a man so passionate about his ideas and gave up so much. Yet despite all his convictions and effort, he pretty much failed.

I posted this video not to point and laugh at Marc, nor do I intend to elicit pity for him. Rather, I’m sharing this video because it serves as a cautionary tale for the intrepid entrepreneur.

Startup Business Models: Advertising

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:52:08 +0000

There are many changes afoot Pressyo, my startup. This afternoon we were discussing business models, in particular, a deep discussion of the ad-supported business model. It is by coincidence that I work in online advertising as well, so here I will share some insights to the ad-supported business models. I will discuss other business models in future posts* If you’re a long time reader of this blog (one of the two who are not my parents), you may note a change in writing styles. I am writing this on my own free will. I swear Larry Page is not standing behind me with a gun pointed at my head.

Say you want to start a startup. Your investor asks you: what’s your business model? And you answer: oh it’s simple – advertising. You see your investor’s face go from 🙂 to :(. You wonder what’s up.

Objectively Piss Poor

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 23:21:18 +0000

I had an interesting discussion with a bunch of people earlier today. Don’t really remember their names now. But we had an interesting discussion over beer any how. We started talking about the typical dalliances of running a startup, but as any hacker will tell you, such discussion inevitably end up being a wankfest over what languages are the best * It’s clearly Haskell /sarcasm .

The discussion eventually went there. And one of the people in the group talked about how he had switched stacks from a Python stack into a node.js stack and is now considering moving back into the Python or Go stack. When asked why, the response was simply “Javascript sucks”.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:20:41 +0000

I use a lot of image-macro-like emoticons in my group chatroom in Hipchat. In particular, I tend to use rage faces a lot in my chat. These internet memes have spread way past 4chan and reddit into the pedantry of 9gag and your mum, and upon introspection I found it quite interesting I use rage face memes a lot in my chat. I’ve never really bothered with the memes on the internet. I’ve been around since the days of the dancing baby * yes I will admit that I am guilty of having gif images of dancing babies in my early websites... that and hamster dance gifs , and I’m not really interested in chasing more memes - I am aware of most of them, but I don’t use them. My rather excessive use of rage faces in my chats, however, presents a totally different reality.

I joked about this a few days ago on Facebook - that I use internet memes so much in my daily communication that I might as well go around shouting “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”.

Like a Bachelor

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 12:17:01 +0000

I had just came back from a mini Chinese New Year getaway and the missus is still away. Coming home to an empty house, I had the free reign to do whatever I like. Having been previously feeling rather in the dumps, I decided to pick myself up - do something for myself a bit more.

So I took time off working on my multiple startups. I cooked, played some games and did some thinking.

Lost Faith In Humanity

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 14:31:13 +0000

Today has been a generally dark day for me. Today, for the first time in almost 6 years, I lost faith in humanity completely. This sounds terribly pompous of me, but this is my blog and I can say whatever the fuck I want, although these sorts of posts are usually kept private and later deleted. Today will be different. Today my rant will be public.

Programming Languages as Driving Experiences

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 03:57:51 +0000

So we were just having a chat about programming languages. I was telling my friends, coming from C/C++/Python, how wrong javascript felt, despite having worked on node.js before. PHP felt the same.. something is just… off about those languages. So we decided to compare programming languages to driving cars. Here’s how we compared them (these are the languages we know and have written in them): Programming Language Feels like... C driving a old powerful manual sports car C++ driving a newer model of a powerful sports car.

Still Alive (And Happy New Year)

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:26:17 +0000

I’m still alive. I have a major writer’s block, hence no posts. But given it’s the new year, hey, happy 2013.

Random Documents from CouchDB

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:05:55 +0000

A few days ago I tweeted this:

I started the night trying to get couchdb to return a random document. I found myself writing a mersenne twister instead

— Chewxy (@chewxy) November 13, 2012

I was finding ways to return a random document from CouchDB. At a former project at Pressyo we had used emit(Math.random(), doc), but I wasn’t quite happy with it — mainly because I had convinced myself through a small number of experiments that I could actually predict the random numbers that were being emitted (Spidermonkey I am giving you so many ಠ_ಠ now). Anyway, the conclusion was I wanted to find a better way of returning a random document (or more) from CouchDB.

The Best. Really?

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 02:59:32 +0000

I read this from Dan Crow, about how Apple has hit its peak this morning:

Steve was famous for his “reality distortion field”. I saw it up close and personal, and it was amazing. But Steve knew that when he turned on the hype, he needed an outstanding product to back it up. The reason he could seemingly bend reality to his will was that products like the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad really were exceptional, breakthrough products. Steve’s showmanship was justified

I followed with a discussion with Simon about this issue. He agrees with that statement whereas I mentioned that all Apple has to be is be outstanding enough, where as other companies won’t do well with just being outstanding enough as they lack Apple’s reality distortion field. He then brings up the fact that ‘outstanding’ means a different thing to different people. Which was what I disagreed on.

Coincidentally I was reading Dustin Curtis’ blog post about seeking the best. In the HN discussions, he too brought up that ‘the best’ means a different thing to different people. Again, on this, I disagree.

How Long Before 1st Accepted Answer on StackOverflow?

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:49:40 +0000

I had started work on a new project recently. After committing about 200 lines of code, I decided to check HN to reward myself. It was then I found Guillermo Winkler’s blog post about programming languages on StackOverflow. It was quite an interesting analysis. I read it and went back to work. But I couldn’t quite concentrate. My inner statistician was whinging. It thinks that Guillermo didn’t answer the question. And my inner statistician wasn’t satisfied.

Fine With Utilitarian Dining

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 05:49:41 +0000

Last night I was treated by my partner to dinner at Cara and Co – a place where I can call ‘fine dining’. The food was incredible. The textures and flavours were modern and refined; complex yet tastes clean at the same time. One can observe the obvious thought and deliberation that went into each dish. It was brilliant. We woke up this afternoon to a previously-frequented Indian place for lunch.

Magic, Lost

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:36:36 +0000

I have about 15 draft posts in my drafts for this blog, some are at over 1000 words, and I’m still not publishing them. I can’t seem to bring myself to publish them, so instead, I’ve pledged to write something light today, just to get my groove back. Today I’ll write about magic lost. When I was a child, I would watch a show called Magic’s Greatest Secrets Finally Revealed. In that show, the Masked Magician (now revealed to be Val Valentino) would reveal the stage tricks of magicians, and at the end of every episode, I would feel much cleverer, having known the secrets.

A Fictional Account of a Group of Men Changing the World

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 15:55:13 +0000

Sometimes I wonder, what it is like standing in the precipice of changing the world. Do those people know they’re changing the world? Did the Dutch parliament in 1602 know the significance upon the world when they decided to charter the Dutch East India Company (hereupon I shall use VOC – Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie – in its stead)? Was it merely driven by pure capitalism and a drive to compete against the English East India Company?

Not Everyone Shares Your Passion and/or Commitment

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:07:38 +0000

This post is a rant. I need to get it off my chest – it may disappear in the future if I deem this post’s tone too negative. Increasingly and lately, I have come to realize that not everyone shares your passion or commitment towards something.

How My Brain Runs Away

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 02:44:04 +0000

Zybler and cfgt were having a perfectly normal conversation about the rumoured liquid metal tech being used for the next generation iPhones. I barge in with nonsense. This was the resulting chat: Chewxy: T-1000 reporting for duty Zybler: it would stay that shape cfgt: yes Zybler: it won’t change into other shape at will right cfgt: no Chewxy: T-1000: ARE YOU JOHN CONNOR cfgt: unless well you dent it lol Chewxy: T-1000: JOHN CONNOR WILL BE TERMINATED cfgt: we’ve heard the rumours since god knows when Chewxy: Dalek: YOU WILL BE EX-TERMI-NA-TED!

A Better Passenger Boarding System (BTW, Jetstar Sucks)

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:34:36 +0000

TL;DR: The fastest method of loading passengers onto a plane is to group passengers based on the oddness/evenness of their seat row numbers. Board passengers with odd numbered rows through one door, and passengers with even numbered rows through another door.

I went to Melbourne last weekend for GP Melbourne (don’t ask – I lost badly). But I very nearly didn’t get there. My flight was originally at 5pm, so at 2pm, I decided to do a web check-in. To my surprise, I found that Jetstar had changed my flight from 5pm to 11pm without actually telling me. I checked all my email archives, and I had not received any communiques aside from their stupid weekly sales email. I had a dinner meeting in Melbourne at 8, it was unacceptable that I leave Sydney at 11pm. So I called Jetstar, and after a frantic 40 minutes, I managed to get my flight changed to 7pm. I had still missed the meeting though.

Anyway, so I was at the airport, having had 2 hours sleep the previous night, waiting, half asleep for my flight. Then came an announcement – that there was going to be a delay in the flights. I felt slightly frustrated, but I was short of sleep and felt tired, so I didn’t bother. When it came to boarding however, I was surprised, as Jetstar had changed their boarding method. I thought about it for a while and then I tweeted about what I thought to be Jetstar’s inefficient boarding method:

This method of boarding the flight is inefficient. Off the top of my head I can think oof at least 1 better way. #jetstar

— Chewxy (@chewxy) March 30, 2012

If I werent so sleepy I'd work out the math to show that this method of boarding can be improved. #jetstar #fail

— Chewxy (@chewxy) March 30, 2012

Despite that, I did work on a simulation while on the flight. I fell asleep after the first few lines of code of course, but on my trip back from Melbourne, I completed the code but never actually ran it… until today. You see, I didn’t think about it for a while until yesterday and today, when I received a number of Twitter mentions. I hadn’t checked my twitter mentions earlier, and hadn’t noticed Jetstar actually replied to my tweet:

@chewxy Sorry to hear boarding is a bit slow. Please send details of your method to our Customer Care Team: http://t.co/yNEdKbmS We'd (cont)

— Jetstar Airways (@JetstarAirways) March 30, 2012

Pie All The Things!

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:36:59 +0000

This blog post is way overdue. It was meant to be posted on Pi Day (March 14th, thanks to the screwed up date format the Americans have). Anyhow, my partner and I celebrated Half-Tau Day with a dinner full of pies. We had shepherd’s pie for dinner, and for dessert, we had a strawberry pie/tart. The shepherd’s pie on 3.14159266 Day was pretty run-of-the-mill, but the strawberry pie/tart was a little novel, and so we documented us making it. (You can jump straight to the shepherd’s pie recipe if you’re interested)

Strawberry Pie

First off, here’s a picture of all the ingredients:

Yes, you saw that right: Balsamic vinegar AND coriander were in the pie. I did say it was novel didn’t I? My partner and I don’t normally eat sugar, and we had to buy some for 3-as-defined-by-the-Bible Day.

500Words # 1 - The photos on my phone

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 05:08:29 +0000

Earlier, I had read a great productivity trick – that is to say, start everyday as a producer, not a consumer of content. While it is not before 8 am, nor have I just got up, I’m stuck in a productivity rut right now, and I shall attempt to “restart” my day with 500 words (or so, since I can be rather lengthy). I shall also try to do this everyday (not necessarily on my blog). I’m going to choose a type of content, and talk about it on my blog. Today’s topic is varied – it will be derived from a few photos I found on my phone — think of it as a photo essay of what I found interesting and took picture of.

Of Milk Bubbles and Problem Solving

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:53:31 +0000

At work, the milk frother had started acting up again. No one was having their morning coffee. And everyone was cranky. Our milk frother came as a set with the coffee machine – a Nespresso Gemini CS 20 – was making milk bubbles instead of foam for our cappucinos. Not keen on waiting on a Nespresso technician, various colleagues have taken to trying to fix the machine themselves. Alas, their efforts were to no avail. I came onto the scene, stared at the machine for a while, thought for a bit, and accurately deduced the problem.

Now, lest you think this is a self-congratulatory tale of my own brilliance, rest assured it is not. Instead, it is a cautionary tale about pragmatism.

Two Letters

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:38:36 +0000

Here’s two open letters I thought up of while on the flight back in to Sydney.

Some parts of the narrative has been edited to preserve the identities of the peoples involved. Some situations have been slightly exaggerated for dramatic effects, but they mostly happened.

4.2

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:23:21 +0000

If you’re a regular reader, you might notice that this blog’s layout has changed again. Fact is, I’ve moved hosts to Webfaction. They’re awesome as a host and beats my previous host in terms of performance and value for money. So, enjoy the new blog!

Appearances Matter (Ergonomically)

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:45:09 +0000

I’ve been writing code quite a bit lately. I used to be the kind of guy who would work on any IDE with any appearances because they didn’t matter much to me. I would code with the default IDE themes (from Visual Studio to Eclipse to Aptana). But then, something changed. I became the guy who tells everyone: appearance matters (I still have colleagues at work using the default Visual Studio theme)

Getting Into the Flow of Things

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:56:28 +0000

Productivity and motivation gurus always talk about flow. Flow is a psychological state of being immersed and concentrated in doing something that everything outside doesn’t matter. It is very difficult to explain the concept of a flow, until one actually achieves and experiences it.

I’ve heard about flow for many many years – when we were younger, my father used to bring us kids to motivational seminars where we’d learn how to get into the flow – and on many occasions I thought I had experienced flow. But I had not. I only truly experienced flow once in late 2008. And immediately, it clicked and I instantly understood why it was called flow.

The experience came with my first ingestion of Ritalin. Ritalin (aka methylphenidate) is a drug used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It was (and still is I believe) rather used and abused by university students who want to concentrate while studying. All I did was have a slow release of methylphenidate and I achieved flow while studying Game Theory. Since then I realized a few things: a) flow is the way of getting things done; b) I probably have ADHD that was never treated.

That however, is besides the point. You see, once you have experienced the flow state, you tend to want to experience it again – afterall, you typically exit the flow state with positive results at hand. I was familiar with the standard advice on how to achieve flow:

Have a clear objective
Said objective must be challenging enough
No interruptions
Instant feedback on the subject matter (to form the feedback loop that will feed the flow)

Easier said than done. I remember many a days when I was in primary school, setting aside blocks of time of solitude to do my homework, but still end up sitting on the TV reading (yes, kids, back in the days, TVs were made of cathode-ray tubes and they were large, and I have a vivid memory of this incident of me ending up sitting on the telly while reading a Secret Seven book by Enid Blyton when I was supposed to be doing my homework or revising for exams). The same continued up to my university days, when I would set aside time to have no distractions, no internet, and yet achieve not much.

Advice from the Wise

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:02:43 +0000

Chewxy: I am sleepy cfgt: I’m about to sleep. Good night. Not even day9 can keep me awake anymore Chewxy: I need to figure this shit out cfgt: You should sleep too. I don’t really want to wake up and get an explanation for an algorithm that only works with spherical chickens in a vacuum. Chewxy: lol cfgt: Or even worse – an algorithm you claim works on spherical chickens in a vacuum but really only works on alternate universe chickens And hence I shall sleep.

In Which I Brag About Brand Safety

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:26:25 +0000

I read with slight amusement this afternoon this article: Google, ANZ, GE Money ads caught on porn sites. Why? Because it’s within scope of my job, and I couldn’t help but felt I had done quite well. In short, it gave me pride in my job* It's a strange feeling. I don't usually feel that - I usually feel that my work could improve - I felt good. And yes, because of that, I am going to write and brag about it.

You see, the company I work for (hereforth: my company) is not a large company with a lot of resources, and it is quite comforting to know that bigger, better-resourced companies face the same problem too. We’ve recently been pursuing brand safety as a selling point for the agency-facing side of business. Come to us, we say, for we would sell you only brand-safe inventory, and we only show your advertisements on brand-safe sites. It is a bold claim for a medium-sized company like ours. I happen to be the one who is doing quite a bit of the work in the brand-safety side of things (no, I’m not the only one. My colleagues also play a large role in creating our brand-safety policy). Join me, as I regale to you, my dear reader into the world of online advertising.

What You Love; What You Are Good At

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:51:51 +0000

Several discussions I had throughout today has brought me into this funk that I am in right now. But first, let me regale you with a tale of yonder. In my university years, I concentrated my study on two ‘streams’ of economics – the microeconomic ‘stream’ and the econometric ‘stream’. In the microeconomic stream, I did stuff like experimental economics, game theory and the like – you know, micro stuff. In the econometrics stream, I did stuff that had to do with data analysis.

No Longer Sleeping On the Floor

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:03:31 +0000

For almost 3 years, I didn’t sleep on a bed. I slept on the floor. Why? Obviously, I didn’t have a bed. And beds, in case you haven’t noticed, are expensive. There is really no use buying a 100-dollar bed from IKEA and breaking it from vigorous… nocturnal activities. And mattresses, don’t get me on them – they’re expensive, and the minimum quality mattress I was going to go for was way above my willingness-to-pay.

So, I slept on the floor. Until today. From today on, I shall be sleeping on corrugated cardboard.

Behold:

Polish, Passivity, Privacy, Pressyo

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:29:50 +0000

As many of my readers know (that is, 5 out of 5 who read this blog), I’m actively involved in the startup space – our startup is Pressyo, and we have a couple of projects sitting on the launchpad, some with ignition already. My startup team is a very good team. We’ve went through multiple projects, failing most of the time (and the occasional success we’ve had rapidly degenerated into failures), and undoubtedly, we will fail many times to come in the future. For every failure we make, we dissect the failure, and find pain points, and fix them with tools. We argue a lot over why we failed, but the important thing is that we learn. This article is >2300 words long. If you want, you may jump to the TL;DR of Polish, Passivity, Privacy, Pressyo instead.

Polish, or the Cool Cam

One of the things we recently argued about is with regards to polish – as in, a product must look polished in terms of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). One of the things we agreed upon early in the inception of the company is the unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. And it was my argument that polish was not part of the philosophy. I argued vis-à-vis project success, that polish was not necessary. Google was just a simple HTML text box with a button* Google will of course later be hyper obsessive-compulsive about everything ; Reddit still looks terrible, but accounts for a majority of web traffic users; Facebook looked terrible when it first began… and so on and so forth. The counter argument was Apple. iPhones were terrible. They did not have all the features of contemporary phones (and still don’t, really, if you really want to compare). But they did one thing really well: user experience. If they did another thing really well, it was marketing.

My father, ever the gadget lover, used a smartphone before the phrase “smartphone” existed. Remember the O2 XDA? He had one of those. He went on from smartphone to smartphone, from O2 XDA to a HTC Touch to a HTC Diamond 2, which was last stolen in Dubai. Then he switched to an iPhone. Despite the lack of features, he had still found it a better phone, simply because the iPhone does what it is supposed to do very well. The user experience for the iPhone surpasses anything my dad had ever used.

I too, had been using smartphones from the time they were called PDA phones. My first was a HP h2210 hacked together with a CF-based GSM receiver. I then moved on to other phones, and finally settling on a HTC Desire. If I ever upgrade any time soon (damn you Telstra and your restrictive contracts), I would probably upgrade to a similar Android device. Because to me, Android phones do one thing really well: flexibility. Heck, I once pulled data off a csv off my work email and wrote a regression analysis while en route on a flight from Sydney to Brisbane on my phone.

The difference between the iPhone 3Gs and my HTC Desire? They cater to different people. The chrome of the polish shows differently to different people. I like to tinker * and while doing that I sacrifice artifacts with stuff. I am tolerant of terrible user experiences – the worst of my smartphone experiences comes from dropped calls and terrible hacking of my HP h2210 (I literally took a program* PocketPC and Windows mobile programs were called “programs” not “apps” apart, figured out what was wrong with it and tried to recompile it to no success) – even my Symbian experiences with Nokia, whilst traumatic, wasn’t as bad. My HTC Desire has been a far cry from all that. Were I to present the modern day Android phone to someone of my father’s caliber, he would, I guess instantly like it, but probably not as much as the iPhone. Likewise, while I like the iPhone, I find it frustrating at times given that I can’t hack around to make it do things the way I want it to.

So you see, polish is not a single facet (as my prose may have led you to think). Androids are polished on their flexibility end. iPhones on the other hand, are polished on the UX end. If I were mean, I’d say the UX of the iPhone is the sizzle that sells the slightly-overcooked steak; while the Android is a perfectly cooked steak but because it was cooked _sous-vide_* which for the record, in my opinion is the best way to cook steak , has no sizzle.

Despite this, I agreed thoroughly with the counter-argument. The crux of the argument is that polish is necessary, and whilst I don’t agree that the polish on the UX is as necessary as the polish and chrome on the actual features, I have come to learn that UX can more often than not, act as the cool cam. I don’t think I will ever place as much of an importance of the external polish factor as Steve Jobs put, but I’ve thought through this myself long and hard, and concluded that UX (and other external polish like cool interface etc) are required, even at bare minimum. I think of it exactly like the situation as described in the Daily WTF, except, instead of board members, executives or investors that you’re thowing the product at, the people who judge you are your users of your product. Give them a cool cam, and they will shut up for a bit while they learn the ropes of your system.

The Economics of Andrew Niccol's In Time

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:42:47 +0000

In Time poster. Copyright of 20th Century Fox

I watched In Time a couple of days ago and while I’ve been a huge fan of all four of Andrew Niccol’s big name movies (In ranking order: Gattaca, S1m0n3, Lord of War, Truman Show), I must admit that In Time let me down quite a bit, but also strangely I loved the rather nicely realized version of an economic model. The movie was fine – Cillian Murphy’s acting was top notch, but the same cannot be said about Justin Timberlake. I loved the premise of the story, I loved the setting of the story, and I am fine with the story being all over the place. They kept hinting at more (I personally was hoping for a Logan’s Run-esque payoff – i.e. something larger than themselves), but there was no satisfying payoff in the end, and I was fine with that. I give In Time a 6.5/10. The following will be an exploration of the economics in In Time. Needless to say, here is a spoiler alert

What really bugged me though, was the mechanics of the currency. The premise of the movie is as such: time is now a currency, and intrinsically linked to their lives, and the lower class of society has to fight for their lives. They live from day to day, working just enough to earn them one more day of living. Another premise is that at least nominal price inflation happens. At the beginning of the movie, we the audience are told, and shown with rather emotional consequences that the prices of things are rising. A third premise that I think is fairly important in considering the economics of In Time is that the currency is spent every living second of a person’s life. Let us not consider to whom first, and assume that the currency evaporates. It is on these premises the plot of the movie was built upon. Essentially what bugged me the most was this: Given the premises of the movie, why was there even inflation to begin with? I try to give reasons in this article.

Dynamically Loading Content in Twitter Bootstrap Tabs

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 09:27:07 +0000

Achtung! This is an old post, written before Bootstrap was in 2.0. The current version of Bootstrap is 3. You probably do not want to use this. The general idea is still the same though. I highly recommend reading Jake Spurlock's book on Bootstrap and the Bootstrap documentation instead, and use the basic principles of this post to figure it out on your own.

So, today's blog will be slightly off the norm. I had been working on a project for some time, and over the weekend, we had decided to port it over to the very excellent Twitter Bootstrap from JQueryUI. With a new framework, comes new learnings. You see, in JQueryUI Tabs, you could dynamically load your tab content with this:

Question Time Visualized

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:06:40 +0000

Last week, I tweeted that I was in Canberra. I was there to acquire some documentation required for my visa (and they better goddamn give me my visa – I’ve been waiting for about 2 years for it already, and my partner already has her permanent visa). And of course, this tweet about a commotion from the gallery of the House of Representatives would indicate I was in the Parliament at that time. Of course that was a delayed tweet since phones weren’t allowed in the gallery. The following tweet would then give clues to what I thought about the visit to Question Time.

Yes, I decided to make a visualization on Question Time. I sat through the entire session, and I thought it might be interesting to do a dataviz on what I saw. I went to the Parliament Hansard records site * The words “Hansard records” comes from the redundant department of redundancy , picked out the hansard for the day I went (September 13), and processed the Question Time transcript. The day I was there, I noted only two main topics of interest – Asylum Seekers (a.k.a the Malaysia Plan vs the Pacific Solution) and the Carbon Tax * As an economist, I must say the carbon tax is a brilliant idea . I also noticed that for the Carbon Tax/Climate Change questions were from government backbenchers, and that the opposition rarely asked questions (only ridiculous interjections). The Malaysia vs Nauru plan for refugees however, had brilliant responses from both sides * no actually, not really, both sides’ arguments are utter and total crap – I can see so much better solutions for both parties to join together and opt for. Seems like politicians don’t think out of the box . This to me indicated that there would be two ways to visualize Question Time.

So, without much ado, I present: the Carbon Tax/Climate Change visualization from parliament Question Time on 13th September 2011:

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One Point Five Hours

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:52:45 +0000

The conversation went something like this:

Me: I’m bored, and I have a writer’s block – I have so many things to blog about and absolutely nothing to blog about.

Friend: You know what you should do? You should blog about work.

And here it is – my first work-related blog post. But first, let me treat you to an image, the result of preparing for this blog post:

Just a Regular Conversation

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:41:20 +0000

– rei – says: they just posted on reddit that they’re going to make an announcement whoever guesses the announcement gets a free t-shirt! LOL Chewxy says: … time to misuse time travel – rei – says: you have a time travel machine? Chewxy says: tardis! – rei – says: where did you get a TARDIS from Chewxy says: Gallifrey – rei – says: and you would know where Gallifrey is, how?

God, Queen and Country - A Rant on Fairness

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:30:35 +0000

My partner made a joke earlier when we went out for dinner. It was something along the lines of “do your duty for God, Queen and Country”, to which I replied, “but I don’t believe or endorse any of those concepts to be good concepts!”. Of course she knows that I am agnostic to all of these, and hence the joke.

The concept of fairness plays a bit part in my mind, and what I consider my values. Yes, despite the fact attitudes may be made up on the fly, I do think that I have some values and attitudes I hold on to – and I like to think I have carefully analyzed and reanalyzed those values I hold to. In short, I think I have reasoned myself into holding some values and chucking some other values. In fact if you had read this blog since its inception in 2004, you would have known I have blogged less, and appeared to be less opinionated on some things – it was partly due to having less time, and also partly due to a lot of re-evaluation of my values and knowledge (essentially there was a period in 2008-2011 when I thought I really didn’t know enough to comment on anything)

Part of why I disagree with the concept of “duty to”, “God”, “Queen” and “Country” is because of fairness, and in one of the cases, a very recent event has left some bitterness and hence triggered this post.

Onwards, shall we?

First World Problems

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 14:43:35 +0000

I have many things to do. But I am simply bored out of my mind. These are the things I want to do, and the excuses that I have for them: Work on [Codename: EY], [Codename OX], [Codename PY], [Codename CN] I am too lazy to open Eclipse – it means I’ve gotta get out of bed, go to my workstation in my home office, open Eclipse and write code. I’m feeling a bit too lazy for that Have sex The booty call(s) are unavailable due to multiple reasons.

The Burqa is Immoral

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:49:32 +0000

I had been watching Ten’s latest offering – Can of Worms, and one of today’s questions was “Is the burqa out of place in Australia?”. And then I tweeted this:

the burqa is dehumanizing, and alienating – the burqa is immoral. But echoing Don Burke, I’d fight for the rights [for women] to wear it. #canofburqas

140 characters, unfortunately is not enough for anyone to expound their thoughts, or even qualify their statements, and so I thought I’d blog about it more.

First things first, let’s get the initial question out of the way – yes, I think the burqa is out of place in Australia, and pretty much any where else in the world, even in Afghanistan. It is out of place both in Australia and anywhere in the world because what it stands for is immoral.

Questioning My Sanity and Ethics

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 01:19:55 +0000

Lately, I have been questioning my own actions. Actually, for the majority of the last month I have been bogged down by a lot of work, and a lot of work means I start questioning myself a lot more – my sanity, my ethics, etc. I meditate a lot, and I can quite confidently say that I am quite fully aware and mindful of my own thoughts, which of late has become more of the “YOU ARE A CRAZY PERSON” thoughts.

So, I decided to write them down, and today I am publishing it, because hey, the Internet needs more pollution, amiright?

In the past, when I faced exams, I rarely panicked, even if I was severely underprepared (incidentally the only exam I ever panicked for was also the only exam I failed). The moment after the exam though, the panic sets in. Thankfully for me, I had fairly solid basics – toss me any derivatives and given enough time I could work it out. Which worked out okay for me in exams – because you know, there was a set syllabus, and the curviest of curveballs I ever had was a sneaky metric spaces question in a microeconomics mid-semester exam.

Right now, my life is going past me at breakneck speed, and like exams in the past, I am not panicky. And this troubles me greatly.

A Response to “Atheism is a Faith”

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 01:56:26 +0000

A few months ago a Christian friend posted a note on Facebook, and I replied. He however, has not chosen to respond properly, opting to dismiss everything I wrote as “It is sad when one can’t see the forest for the trees”, which quickly degenerated any possible discourse into nothing substantial. Reproduced here are the exact original post and my response. Since I also respect the said person’s privacy, I have chosen to not reproduce his full name.

Original post – Atheism is a Faith & Agnosticism willful ignorance:

An agnostic will rightly say of God that ‘we cannot know’ if he exists. I agree, and I can’t prove that he does exist – so in a sense I am agnostic – but I differ in that I believe he does. The fence-sitting agnostic however has to actively and wilfully ignore the topic of God altogether, and I cannot say that they are right or wrong for doing so – only that should they continue, they might find out too late. An Atheist, on the other hand, ‘cannot know’ that God does not exist because they cannot prove it.

As much as I have a faith that God is real, the atheist has a faith that he is not real. Atheism, therefore, is not a lack of belief in God, but a proactive decision to believe he does not exist – which by virtue awards it no lesser or greater merit than any other faith.

The idea that Atheism & Science go hand in hand and that consequently Atheism is somehow more intelligent & less ignorant is misleading and deceptive. Scientific discovery can for the atheist lend support to his/her beliefs, and for the Christian lend support to his/her beliefs.

Of-course I want others to have what I have, or else why would I have it myself? But regardless of your stance please give careful thought to what Science is, and what it is not. It is a limited and finite tool by which we can discover many things, but not all things.

It's About Organ Donation, OK?

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:59:48 +0000

So, my girlfriend and I were watching the 7pm Project just before MasterChef started today, and there was a segment about organ donation. Naturally, my ears perked up. I’ve always had been interested in organ donation. Call it a perverse interest, but I like to think about how to match up organ donors to recipients – an obsession undoubtedly sparked by Al Roth. Amongst the thoughts of organ donation, I too often think about stuff like the liquidity of the organ market – that is to say, how many willing/able organs are there which at any given moment are able to be donated – and how to increase such liquidity. Of course, when such questions posed in a less-than-delicate manner, had led some colleagues of mine to wonder if I am actually sane * I’m not crazy, my mother had me tested . Today I’ll talk about some of my views on organ donation.

Here’s the 7pm Project video in question (starts about 5 minutes in):

Startups and Opportunity

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Mon, 30 May 2011 23:49:37 +0000

I run a startup. And today opportunity knocked on my door. Right in my phone – someone had called me up and offered my startup a ridiculously awesome opportunity. And I had to turn it down, because we were not ready.

Needless to say, it was a bitter 2 hours for me. 8.30 a.m – an acquaintance called and offered me a good opportunity for the startup to grow at ridiculous pace. I told him to give me a couple of hours to check to see we were all systems green for this opportunity. Within that 2 hours, I had checked, double checked and triple checked with all my colleagues, to see if we were good to go. Alas, we were not. You see, one of the requisites for this opportunity is that we were live and open. We were not. 10 a.m, I rejected the opportunity and helped in giving it away.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Over the last 1 year, we’ve been afforded opportunity after opportunity – so much so that I have once considered myself a very lucky man. And over the past 1 year, I’ve had to turn down opportunity after opportunity, some big, some small. And all for the same reason. Today’s opportunity is as large as they come – someone wanted to offer my startup a booth at CeBit Sydney for virtually free * It burns me even now, to think that I had to put on a smiley face and offer this opportunity to someone else I know .

Minority Game Applied on the Long Weekend

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:53:38 +0000

It was the longest long weekend in Australia last week – a total of 5 days holiday – it’s a combination of Good Friday, the weekend, Anzac Day and Easter Monday. There won’t be another 5 day long weekend in Australia until 2038. I had spent the long weekend in the Central Coast of New South Wales with my partner and made some very interesting observations.

We had left the house at about 8 a.m on Friday, to try to beat the traffic jam to the Central Coast. Feeling a little peckish, we decided to have some yum cha for brekkie. Alas, there were no shops within a 7 km radius that was open for yum cha. I live in a suburb with a fairly high concentration of Chinese food places, and none of the shops were open. That perhaps, would have been indicator of what was to come next.

We arrived at our destination at about 11 a.m, and feeling extremely hungry, decided to look for brunch. The whole town had only one eating place open. Like the yum cha places, most shops had decided to close for the long weekend. As I munched on my $40 lunch (yes, it was a case of supply and demand – but that’s not the point of this article), I began to ponder upon the shops being closed.

Etymological Misrepresentation

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 02:07:35 +0000

Hey you, pop quiz. What shits me the most that I have to blog about it at 1 a.m despite not having an Internet connection at home yet * This post was brought to you by a better-than-the-iPhone HTC Desire tethered on a Telstra connection ? If you guessed religious evangelists, you guessed right.

You know, for all the honesty and good that they supposedly preach and represent their religions, religious evangelists can be quite dishonest. They are willing to lie and misinform people. And that seriously shits me.

So what happened was this: someone sent me a link to a Christian apologetics site that claimed that Chinese characters proved the Bible’s authenticity. Accordingly the ancient Chinese people worshipped the Christian god, and that the evidence is in the characters.

Here, I shall dissect the person’s bad arguments and then proceed to tear them to pieces. One by one. I shall be using Richard Sears’ very very awesome Chinese Etymology site (and seriously, we should donate some money to this guy, who put up 20 years worth of research up online FOR FREE). The lower the characters, the older they are – as you scroll down the page, you’ll see a word reverting back to its original form.

Let’s begin.

Hainanese Chicken Rice, A Recipe

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 13:37:56 +0000

So, I got pretty ranty in my previous post about Channel 7’s “Hainese” chicken rice in their My Kitchen Rules program. So I decided to make Hainanese (again, note the correct spelling) Chicken Rice myself. I set myself the challenge of bringing it down to its utmost basic, that is, celebrating the Chicken.

Hainanese Chicken Rice – A History

Hainanese chicken rice has a long history. The Hainanese were a people of food * other Chinese sub-ethnicities too have good food, but as a gross generalization, the single characteristic trait of Hainanese people is that they are brilliant restaurateurs . When they left China at the beginning of the early 20th century, they brought with them their flair of running restaurants. However, being immigrants with limited resources, they conserved every bit they can, which lead to chicken rice.

Chicken rice is an interesting dish in the sense that it is in my opinion, a celebration of chicken. Virtually everything about chicken rice involves, well, the chicken. So I thought to myself, knowing how traditional Hainanese hawkers cook, on how to make good chicken rice. You will notice that one single chicken goes everywhere in this dish.

You Don't Mess With Food

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:36:31 +0000

I watched My Kitchen Rules for the first time tonight. And it will probably be my last time watching it. This is why:

YOU DON’T MESS WITH FOOD

It’s this simple. Channel 7 is a poor channel and My Kitchen Rules is a sad pathetic lame excuse for a cooking competition show. And I’m pissed about it, for reasons unknown. How pissed? I thought that a 45 minute Magic the Gathering game with 2 very close matches against cfgt would take my mind off it. It did not.

What got me so pissed off? Firstly, if anyone from Channel 7 is reading, it’s spelled “HAINANESE Chicken Rice”. Note the spelling. You spelled it on screen wrong. TWICE * Evidence 1. Evidence 2 . And everyone pronounced the word wrong countless times. Is it so hard? Hai-nan (IPA: ˈhaɪˈnæn)

Hainan?

The etymology of the word ‘Hainanese’ is as such: the root word is Hainan, which is a place in China. Hainanese describes a situation where something is of Hainan. Hainanese people are a sub-ethnicity of the Han Chinese (oh yeah, there are more ethnicities in China than you think). Hainanese food are foods typical of the Hainanese culture.

Now that the primer is done, here’s some more interesting things. Hainanese chicken rice is not exactly Hainanese. You see, the Hainanese people moved south from China into South East Asia. They settled in places like Malaysia and Singapore. And with them they brought their cuisine, which having passed through a different geography, mutated on its own. Ingredients not found in the place of origin were added (like pandan/screwpine leaves).

The original inspiration for Hainanese chicken rice was the wen chang chicken (文昌鸡). And what was it? Chicken blanched in hot water. What’s special about it is the sauce, made of ginger, garlic, spring onion, and soy sauce.

That was the original inspiration for Hainanese chicken rice. As previously mentioned, the recipe mutated. Chicken was boiled in pork stock instead of just water. The sauces had a dash of sesame oil. As such, it can be said that Hainanese chicken rice is almost exclusively a South East Asian fare, although I’d grant you as far as saying it’s Hainanese.

But this is not what the judges say. Here is a transcript of what they said:

One Million

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 15:53:22 +0000

1,000,000.

Doesn’t seem like a lot does it? Some cultures – like the Pirahã in Central America, or the Walpiri in Australia – use a one-two-many system * This should be noted that one-two-many is a generalization. There are subtleties in the counting methods of both cultures, that upon deeper inspection, may not necessarily conform to the normal understanding of the one-two-many theory . I would contend that all humans use a superset form of one-two-many.

Misrepresentation and Respect

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:55:55 +0000

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it. Not even if I have said it, not unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense.

The quote above is often attributed to Siddharta Gautama, aka the Buddha, in the Kalama Sutta. If that quote were presented to me, I would have an issue with it.

The reason why I would have a problem with it is because “your own reason” and “your own common sense” is not at all very helpful. An asylum full of people have their own reasons and their own common sense for doing things. A schizophrenic person has his/her own reason to stand in the middle of the road and start stripping stark naked – after all, that voice that tells him/her to do things are his/her own reasoning talking back which is simply perceived as an external voice.

It is here that I must pause, and raise a point – I feel that the Buddha had been misrepresented. Of course I am no translation expert but pretty much the experts agree that in the original Kalama Sutta, common sense and one’s own reason are the sources where one should not rely upon – specifically the original Pali * Yes, I have nothing better to do than to learn a completely dead and foreign language to read books. Same reason why I learned German: to read Marx phrase “Ma anussavena, ma paramparaya, ma itikiraya, ma pitakasampadanena, ma takkahetu, ma nayahetu, ma akaraparivitakkena, ma ditthinijjhanakkhantiya, ma bhabbarupataya, ma samano no garu ti” [ref] which translates (as literally as possible to)

Not because it is repeated information
Not not because it is tradition
Not not because it is common knowledge (more in the tune of “it’s common knowledge that…”
Not not because it is scriptures (literally: not text, but given that the only text back then were scripture, it’s fair to come to this conclusion)
Not not because it is axiomatic reasoning (or more literally: not because logical inferences are made without support – i.e. surmises)
Not because it suits one’s beliefs (common translation includes inferences, and conjectures)
Not because it seems to be right (i.e. common sense)
Not because of one’s bias to an idea (more literal translation: not because one likes the idea)
Not because it seems acceptable
Not because the teacher says so

[/ref]

While I am by no means skilled in hermeneutics * it’s also my personal belief if something needs deep interpretation skills, said text is worthless , I believe the spirit of the sutta refers to one of radical skepticism – i.e. question everything. The latter part of the Kalama Sutta (it’s a very long and tediously repetitive work) says something about after analysing and observing the facts, if the implementation of the idea is good for one and all, then it can be considered a good idea.

It can be read as an early form of peer-review (the phrase “if it’s praiseworthy by the wiser ones”)

For Your Curiosity

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:09:16 +0000

If you have ever wanted to see how my teeth look like:

Run by a Scientist

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 09:38:05 +0000

The awesome Neil deGrasse Tyson (follow him on Twitter) once said that if you’re scientifically literate, the world looks very different to you. And last night I ate at a place that was very clearly run by a scientist and there are evidence to show for it. What does an eating place run by a scientist looks like? Firstly, superfluous signs that explain even the obvious. For example, there was a sign that says “Dining Area” (the shop had two entrances – one for takeaways and one for eating in).

Brain Chemicals

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 01:18:55 +0000

I’ve been giving brain chemicals some thought recently. What is it that makes us think the way we do? Make us feel the way we do? Why do we sometimes feel anxious or fear or elation for no reason? Obviously, the chemicals in the brain, like serotonin and dopamine causes these feelings. We are after all, (more than) the sum of our brains, comprising of individual neurones. You may have noticed the use of parenthesis for “more than”.

2011, New Blog

chewxy@gmail.com (Chewxy) — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 10:09:22 +0000

It’s the new year – hence it will be a new blog. I’ve kept my old stuff though, just thought I’d give my blog a reboot. I think it should be more serious, and I think I’d be blogging more serious topics, rather than silly fun and nonsensical stuff that I did in the past (like fitting nonsense distribution curves). Here’s to 2011