Ok, it's that time of the year again. ICRA07 is coming closer and closer. The clock is tick-tock and my own deadline and a promise to my dear professor that I will show him the full-baked paper is almost gone. (In fact, there is 49 minutes remaining at the time while I was writing this very sentence).

My new method just broke down this morning. After a careful consideration and a series of Lemma to be proven, I found out that there exists a case where my O(N) could not work. Ok, fine, I can change to O(N lg N) and the result is still cool, although less than it should be. A few minutes lates, I was hit by the fact that there still some more case that O(N lg N) could not save the day. It is pointless to do O(N^2) since another published method would be better.

I am down.

Until I met my advisor. He said that, why don't you do it in the continuous space.

Ok. I have to give some intro first. The core operation which is the main point of my work is to check whether cones achieve force closure. Nevermind what is force closure but concentrate on the cone. A cone is..... everybody know Cornetto?... The cone is exactly like the cone of cornetto. Mathematically, a cone can be expressed by quadratic equations. Normally, researchers in the field feel that cones are too hard to cope with and they usually linearize the cone into a regular pyramids, to get its linear description so that we can tackle it with a plethora of tools already exist in Linear.

I also thinking the same. That is my doom.

Since I am doom, then I consider the continuum as my last resort. I then changed my mode to continuous instead of discrete. Whala, the solution is found almost immediately, although a basic of solution. It looks very promising and I believe that it can be done. More work to do but my mood is much much better.

I always feel reluctant to work in the continuous space. I am not excel at Calculus. I prefer to tackle the N instead of X,Y,Z. Yesterday, while my old method still looked promising, I even sweared that I am very fond of discrete space, I won't step outside to the continuous space.

Shame on me. It is the continuous space that save my ass today.

Scumm is Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. I am explaning a word by a series of more words yet to be defined. Ok, start with Maniac Mansion. It's an adventure game from Lucas Art. The Scumm is a script engine of the game. The script is so well popular in Lucas Art such that almost all adventure game after that implement it. For example, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, Monkey Island series, The Dig, to name just a few.

I hit upon Scumm from today's article at Slashdot. It said that ScummVM is banned from PayPal since it aims to be an emulator allowing the game to be run on the system it wasn't designed for. This case is quite spetacular since ScummVM itself is "actively supported by the original developer and studio themselves", at least that is what the ScummVM developer said in their homepage.

Anyway, I am always looking forward to a chance that I could sit down and play those long love adventure game once again and Scumm might be the choice, if DosBOX can't save the day. One more option is the FreeDOS which I myself never tried. It was installed on many new notebook but it life on my hand is very short. Usually, it was immediately replace by WinXP :p (sorry for Ubuntu fans).

Our dear soon-to-be-doctor Mr. Sun is asking for a Win98 CD today. After a rather long conversation, we know that he actually need a Win98 boot diskette. Sadly, I have no floppy drive anymore but I could make one easily since I have VMWare machine that is installed with Win98SE. With rawwrite, I could make and send image to him.

However, I stumbled upon a better web. http://www.bootdisk.com. Check it if you just ever need any bootdisk. Dos, Win9X,NT,2K,XP, Linux, etc. You name it. Really save the day.

Viva internet....

I have subscribed to the Google Analytic for long but didn't use it to any fraction of its total potential. I merely look at the first page only. Today, I read the blog of puri and learned that it also stores the record of visiting browser. Obviously it should, if it won't I would be very surprised. However I never bother to look at it before.

It turns out that, since our cp-24 planet is registered with Google Analytic, we have a total of 82% firefox, 9% opera, 8% IE and 0.12% safari visiting browser.... IE drops far behind firefox....

Long live the fox.

<span class="inline left"><img src="http://our.obor.us/files-dae/images/talk.PNG" alt="google talk logo" title="google talk logo" class="image thumbnail" height="82" width="116"><span class="caption" style="width: 114px;">google talk logo

Today's googletalk logo.

Is today the birthday of googletalk?

Today I got a chance of being in the lecture of Nobel laureate in Economics 2005, Prof. Dr. Robert J. Aumann. The topic is War and Peace in which he study the conflict in the spirit of Game Theory, a very common theory in Economics. I don't understand most of the talk but essentially, he extends the game theory to cover multiple round of decision. In that situation, equilibrium is not the likely outcome but the cooperative choice is more propable, since equilibrium in single round might lead to unfairness perceivable by some party and could result in a choice that punish all players. In that case, the cooperative outcome is more plausible, even though it is not equilibrium.

However, what makes me write this entry is not the talk but the Q&A session after the talk. Prof. Aumann is a mathematician working in real world where clear definition is hardly exists. Obviously, he faced a lots of real world questions such as Religion, Vengence, Lebanon Conflict, etc. One of his answer is "Religion is a beautiful experience", which I partly disagree.

I had been ordained in Buddhism and I can tell you that being in a monkhood is not a beautiful experience. The practice of monkhood is, to some extent, is a good experience, for example, mediatation. But the real spirit of being a monkhood, being one who study and follow the code of Buddha is largely lost its sanctity, especially in the city temple. I had been in the temple for only a week but it did not give me any impression on being a monk. Only a few monks give me the faith of being a monk. Some were still attached to the world of material, some collected clocks, some still watched after-news dramas, etc. I always wondered why I were there. When my family came and invited me back to my family home, doing some ritual and they bowed me with respect, I felt so terrible because, I, being there, is nothing but a man who is but a man claimed to be a monk.

A beautiful experience of our religion lies in the study of the canon and the teaching of the buddha, not in the practice of monkhood. You might try ordain in the rural temple, the so called วัดป่า and you might face the different experience.

Today I watched V for Vendetta. 've heard this one for long, since the day of the conflict between Taksin and http://www.manager.co.th. My friend told me that the movie is good, suiting the current situation back then. Well, I have had no chance to watch it until it appears on the local rental shop. This weekend is 3 days straight so it is a perfect timing for a good long movie day.

What hit me is not the plot. The plot is good but other things catch my attention more. Again, what makes movie stand ahead in my mind is its dialogue. The character "V" in the movie usually spell out a lots of memorable qoute. For examples, this one was when he introduced himself.

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.

Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

There are 49 words that begin with "V", most of them require the use of WordWeb, for me. And here is another one, the one just before excessiveness of 'V'.

. Evey Hammond: Who are you? V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask. Evey Hammond: Well I can see that. V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation, I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

It's a nice one. It also refers to The Count of Monte Cristo (1934). I am too lazy to find the 1934 version but the 2002 version is also available at my local rental. Will give it a try someday.

Yesterday someone post a youtube link on a forum I usually pay a visit. The video is about a street magic in Japan. The show is performed by an american-born with a perfect Japanese accent. I first saw this guy in a Japanese TV program when I were doing a research in Japan last two year. At that time I don't even know his name but his performance then is very mind blowing. The same feeling appear again in the youtube video. Thanks to youtube, I finally know his name. It is Cyril Takayama. Well, it is simply cool. Check it out.

No, not mine. Bo will make her trip to the state in a little more than a month from now. Undoubtly, we need a new Laptop. At first, she aimed for a low cost model from Compaq, the one that costs just less than THB 24,000, equipped by a Mobile Sempron. (That was the first time I realised that Sempron is also available in a mobile edition). After a long badger that we should push for a more recent model, she finally changed her mind, providing that I allow a little subsidy. We ended up at the HP Pavillion dv1729tu sporting an Intel Core Duo at its nitty-gritty. The price tag is THB 34,5000, VAT included. Everying seems good to me, except the display is Crystal Brite (or some fancy-name of that shiny glass screen). However, that kind of display seems to be de facto standard for now so I won't complain. Initially, it comes with 256MB ram which is far from adequate so I added another 512MB at the cost of THB 2,000. It has SATA 80GB hdd. VGA is from intel but we don't plan to play F.E.A.R. on the laptop anyway. The laptop looks far from ugly. In fact, it looks great and I am very positive about it.

A week has passed and that BSOD constantly popped up almost everytime I did anything deeper than changing a desktop wallpaper. The notebook had gone through numerous installation of windows and, sometime, the good-old BSOD appeared during the installation of Windows. I was doomed.

Yesterday I took it to the lab and Chang told me to use the memory test from the Ubuntu CD. It has Memtest86+, so I tried and wha-la... a lots of memory errors were reported at the very first 1% of the test duration. The root of all evil is the new 512MB module.

The brand is RCmemory.

I went immediately to the service center of the Global Solution, the shop that we bought the notebook. They said I can change the module into Kingston, which will cost THB 400 additionally. They can also change to the new one for free. That's wierd because RCmemory module cost me 2,000 while the listed price of the module is 1,700 (it is 2,100 for Kingston, that is where the additional 400 comes from).

Okey, the saleman of Global Solution that sole RCmemory to me at 2,000 took too much of the profit. After argueing awhile, I knew that I cannot do anything. I definitely went for Kingston. Don't get me wrong, RC might not be bad because they let me try the new RCmemory module and the test turned out perfect. However, I won't take another chance. Kingston is ALWAYS dependable.

Ok the wisdom of the story are as follows.

• When upgrading a notebook ram, always go for Kingston.
• Do not let the low price of notebook fool you, always bargain for a lower price when upgrading a notebook ram. At least, for Global Solution, do it.
• If the BSOD appears and you don't know the explicit cause, try the memory test first. Thanks Ubuntu. (Other distros also have Memtest in their setup CD. I saw it once in SUSE but at the time being, we have only Ubuntu at the lab.)

Another story, on the same day that we bought the notebook. I also bought a new 550W PSU from tsunami at the price of three digits. Very cheap. The PSU looks great. It has one big fan and a speed controller. Its weight is very heavy (does heavy mean good?). It has both 20 and 24 pins connector. The bad thing is that Tsunami think that it is nice to adorn their PSU by a placing a bright blue light inside. Now my PC might look like a superintelligent shade of the colour blue.

Of the three things defining [CP24] AccBLue, I have no proficiency nor passion in Camera. The heart of photography, the composition, is not a thing I am interesting. However, the other two, Manga and Game, are what I am fond of. Sadly, it is usually regarded as things-not-for-grown-up. Nevertheless, they are still dear to me. Two weeks ago, my lab friend were moving and thought that he has too much of "not-my-style" manga. He then brought some to our Lab, hoping that someone might find them interesting and then adopt them. Amongst other, the first volume of PLANETES was lying there. Planetes is one of my favorite manga but seems like it does not touch my friend's heart. However, Peam seems to like it and asked me to bring other volumes for him, that was a week ago. Well, I managed to dig it out of my pile of books today.

<span class="inline left"><img src="http://our.obor.us/files-dae/images/planetes_v_01.jpg" alt="Planetes_v1" title="Planetes_v1" class="image thumbnail" height="150" width="100">

The story of Planetes is not much in detail because it has only four volumes but depth and thought are shining like a diamond in this short manga. This is quite exaggerated because I have a strong tilt on it. It is the story of the space, a story of a small man living on the space not in a far future. I do not know why but the space is always a thing that touches me. It has grandness giving the sense of adventure, the sense of uncharted land, etc.

That also reminds me of Homeworld 1 & 2, a game from relics studio that I love it so much. Homeworld is a RTS that allows you to take control of a space armada ranging from a small fighter, a hundred-time-larger frigate to an enormous battle cruiser. The media, backdrop, music help the player feel the gigantic size of the space. Peam are also falling in love of the Ur-Quan master, a free (as in a beer) remake of the Star Control 2, a game of space exploration made by an MIT student. It contains a lot of nerd-like puns and humors but at its core, the vastness of space is greatly depicted. Despite its dated graphic (it is only 2D, if you care), the game play are one of the best. I watched Peam play this game too much so that I cannot bear losing time playing this one since the climaxes of the game are mostly spoiled.

<span class="inline left"><img src="http://our.obor.us/files-dae/images/starcon2-c.gif" alt="Ur-Quan master" title="Ur-Quan master" class="image thumbnail" height="170" width="140">

I wish that a manga, or better, a game, that also giving this same feeling are constantly published. Unfortunately, I never heard that there is a sequel of Homeworld. Galaxy 999, a reprint is still a classic but I did not love it as much as I was when I was much younger.