Archive for August, 2007

101 Ways of Hearing a Dog Bark

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on August 28, 2007
in Music
. 0 Comments

From
The Way of Music : Aural Training for the Internet Generation
By: Robin Maconie
ISBN: 0810858797
Published 2007
Scarecrow Press
437 pages

A fantastic book I would recommend to anyone. Simple to read, easy to understand, yet profile, much logical thinking, literature rich, psychology rich.

Here are the barks

1
What you hear is the truth.
The rest is up to you.

2
A dog barks:
Woof! Woof!

3
An unseen dog that barks
is still a dog.

4
If you can hear it,
then you can hear.

5
In a bark,
a dog exists.

6
A dog exists,
you exist.

7
In the bark of a dog,
the world exists.

8
A bark, a dog, a person listening,
a world in relation.

9
A dog barks
in order to hear

10
The sound of its voice
is the sound of its world.

11
The sound of its voice
the sound of your world.

12
A dog, a chicken:
what’s the difference?

13
A dog may howl at the moon
but a chicken commands the sun to rise

14
A dog barking
is a sign of life.

15
At the time of barking
a dog hears only itself

16
To anyone listening, the sound of dog barking
is like pebbles rattling in a wooden box.

17
To a dog, its bark
is the sound if its universe.

18
Woof! Woof!
Once for surprise, twice for emphasis.
Continue reading ‘101 Ways of Hearing a Dog Bark’

Week @ A Glance

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on August 27, 2007
in School and Updates
. 2 Comments

What I have been doing in and outside school the past week.

Scheduling my time.
Didn’t really find a good timetable software so used excel to do up my weekly timetable (like doing training programmes in army). Later played with Google Calendars and Mozilla Sunbird. Google’s very good alternative for outlook calendar, you could sync calendars with others, integrated with gmail, accessible anywhere and I love its Quick Add Event feature. Timetable pretty good for a 1st semester student. Latest first lesson is 9am and schools ends at 4pm latest of my 4 day study week, except CCA on wednesdays.

Configuring my emails.
I’ve 2 school email accounts, 1 unix account, another outlook exchange account. I wanted so mail forwarding so all mails could be read from a individual place. The “.forward” file was added in unix, and a rule for outlook was added to forward all mails to my gmail account.

Attending lectures.
2nd week has no tutorials so I basically go to school for lectures. So lectures are boring (perhaps I couldn’t understand, perhaps I learn’t those before) so I used FreeMind on the laptop to create mindmaps.

Swim.
I decided not to renew my Safra my membership knowing I could access the school’s swimming pool. I lost my new goggles on of my sessions.

Rain and stars.
Days of rain causing numerous soaked socks. However, rain’s a very pleasing sight and sounds. One night walking home after the rain, the sky seemed to move the clouds aside, and the rolls the curtains for a bright moon accompanied with sparkling stars. I revised my stars glazing techniques. My bro mentions a “blood red moon”, or a lunar eclipse (earth between sun and moon) happening soon.

Port forwarding puzzle enlightened.
Over months of being puzzled why the port forwarding on my router didn’t seem to work, I discovered an issue after honeypotting ports and debugging telnet sessions. The 2wire router didn’t seem to establish the connection if you call its external address from the internal network. The port forwarding works fine for others though. I confirm my findings using a proxy server and my unix account from school

Listening to music.
I plugged my usb speakers into my server. SSHed and ran screen -R. I use juke on a jukebox full of baroque music. I remembered WCPE and ran mplayer on its streams. The music keeps playing even turning off the computer. If my computer’s on, I would perhaps Naxos online music library, subscription prepaid via school fees.

Books.
Borrowed some books on listening from YST library in hope to understand music better.

GPS.
Retrieved GPS nmea logs on my phone, converted to GPX and uploaded to different sites for different reports and maps.

Computers in my home.
Networking devices has reached to a record. Counting the main ones,
3 Laptops - 1 a touch screen tablet, all connected wireless except the power cables
3 Desktops - all connected via ethernet port
1 Server -Running linux as well as server as a network switch
2 Networked printers -1 Ethernet connected, 1 Windows-shared Laser Printer

Surfing the net.
Firefox add-on Timetracker on my mom’s laptop says I’ve been surfing the net for 62hours since start of this month, 4th August. MeeTimer reports about an average 1h 45mins a day.

Lights Off, Laptop!

Published
by
Zz85
on August 20, 2007
in Technology and WebLinks
. 0 Comments

Based on our experiences use gadgets like handphones, digital cameras, DS etc, we probably guessed bulked of the batteries usage went into the LCD screen.

Personally I find little electricity used in turning the colours of the pixels, but much in powering the backlight. A digital watch I had exceeded its estimated battery life without its light used often. The DS Lite new brightness levels consumes the battery much faster than if you use the less bright options. When I use the DS for music listening, closing the lid usually turns off the LCD and allow much longer battery stamina. Digital cameras usually have an option for switching on and off the LCD screens, but what about laptops?

Let me go through the different options.

High-end models would have the LCD poweroff button: Hit “Fn+Battery Key”. If you don’t, you could dim it manually hitting the brightness buttons.

Why not close the laptop lid? Remember the reason why we just want just the lights of is for the computer to go doing what it needs to (play some music, transferring files using wifi, do some virus scan etc). Closing the lid but default usually means suspend, sleep or hibernate, so you need to change the power saving schemes if you like the lid shutting action.

Windows have this Blank screensaver which turns the screen black. Or you could download the freeware Power Dimmer which mimics iBooks screen-fading-energy-saving feature. Take note that these 2 doesn’t turn your screen off, only changing the screen black so the lights in them are still on. Anyway a tip for those who like to turn on their screensavers by demand, create a shortcut (on the desktop) to the screensaver file, double click it or assign a hot shortcut key to run them.

Next, in the windows energy saving section, you could specify screens to turn off after a period of time. Good, and I usually set it @ 2 minutes and power dimmer @ 1 minute. However, your media player may forbid the system entering power saving while you are listening to music.

Here’s more cool tools to the field. NirCmd is a command line based swiss knife for windows. Type nircmd.exe monitor off or create a shortcut for this command to turn off your screen at demand.

Need a easier software? There’s a software called MonOff but I’ve not tired it. However, my favorite software for controlling windows shutdowns called PowerOff also does the job for screens. Its a very small, no-installations-needed file, and after running it you task it to poweroff your screen/windows immediately or a specific time, or decide later at the icon-tray.

Further readings: 1
2

Lights off, sleep tight, keep dreaming, so don’t drain my battery, screen, eyesight and brain cycles too much.

Food Eaten During Week 0 and 1

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on August 18, 2007
in Food, Photos and School
. 0 Comments

Mostly in NUS… See slideshow below

or

if you want to.

First Week - Lectures

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on August 18, 2007
in School
. 0 Comments

First week of school, no lessons really except lectures.

Here are the interesting points I remember from the lectures:

FNA1002X - Financial Accounting.

Perhaps the reasons why professionals usually run Partnership ownership are:
1. Do not need disclose their financial status
2. Less taxation

Big 4 (Singapore’s big accounting/auditing firms)
1. Deloitte and Touche
2. Ernst and Young
3. KPMG
4. PricewaterhouseCoopers

MA1301 Introductory Mathematics

“You can’t say you don’t know, you can only say you forgotten”

The lecturer claiming we should read up our primary or secondary mathematics textbooks if we couldn’t remember the essential maths. I guessed this is what they meant as “at university level”. But at least Ratio theorem was something new I learn that day.

CS2301 Business and Technical Communication

“Remember Atari”

Was the speaker’s case of poor documentation leading to the fall of the legendary company.

CS2103 Introduction to Networking
Perhaps I heard the concepts before, so I found it boring until the lecturer showed us the interesting flash movie of

Epic 2015

CS2105 Software Engineering

Listed Ariane 5 as example of a very costly software failure. See here for more “buggy” stories

Revision on Recursion

Interesting famous computer puzzles were describe like

Hanoi tower, Fibonacci sequence, GCD (Great Common Divisor)

Other than lectures on the first week, I did some other activities in school: Orchestra practice, swimming, Nus Run

The week ends with fireworks watching and a tired body sinking into deep sleep.