Posts

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

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.

[Read More]

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.

[Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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? [Read More]

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.

[Read More]

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! [Read More]

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

[Read More]