Ron Gross' blog 2007-2015
Archive for March 2008
here.
This reminds me of a good book I’ve read once, The Death of Grass (or ככלות העשב in Hebrew). Basically the grass/wheat of the world dies, then animals who depend on it, then the human race comes to cannibalism and rioting.
Better stock up on food while you can…
Anyone using LaTeX will sooner or later want to embed images in his paper. LaTeX only accepts EPS files – no standard support for jpg or png images. In order to use such images, you must first convert them to EPS. I’m using ImageMagick’s ‘convert’ utility for this.
The problem was I was converting a 20kb png file and got a eps file over 1 megabyte in size! Reducing resolution and quality didn’t help. Today I found the source of the problem – it appears that the eps format has 3 versions, and the default version is 1 – a very old format that pretty much saves everything as uncompressed ASCII. Once I told ‘convert’ to use EPS 3, the result was a 20kb eps file 🙂
Usage is simply:
convert fig.png eps3:fig.eps
Update – it appears the link I gave is simply a table of contents of an ACM symposium. So where is the actual paper?
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One of the feeds I recently subscribed to is Papers Written by Googlers, (the web version is here). Apparently every link on the page is to some Google search instead of a definite link to a paper. I wanted to check out a paper titled Towards Temporal Web Search, by Marius Pasca and got a strange result page containing totally unrelated papers. Only the focused search I ran myself for the exact title gave me the actual article.
Rarely do we appreciate enough the little things in life. I believe this sentence is true on many levels, and today I want to focus on one of our basest assumptions. We live in this physical universe, and are gifted with the unique ability to influence it. Firstly, this universe has a dimension of time to it, our lives are not static, boring, never changing. Instead they are dynamic, changing for good and bad, giving us a steady flow of new experiences. This is a basic requirement for the very definition of good and bad, because in a constant universe there is no differentiation, and everything is just plain zero. Living in a dynamic universe, we give meaning to each experience in relation to the previous ones and to the experiences that follow, and are thus able to observe and appreciate these changes, and enjoy at some of our moments in time, in contrast with other, worse moments.
Secondly, we are not simply watching our lives go by as if it were a movie playing in a theater. We are conscious, living beings, who can act of our own intent and purpose, and bring change to the physical world surrounding us. I’m not talking about grand plans and designs, I think we should be grateful about our simple ability to pick up an object, move our hands and feet, throw a ball and marvel at the effects we cause. The simple Newtonian rules of cause and effects govern our day to day lives and give us the simple pleasure of mobility. Furthermore, we wield tools to our every whim, and can rule over other physical objects. Of course this causes problems sometimes as some people forget that other people are not merely objects but willful beings of their own, and their will conflicts … but I digress.
Before thanking God, chance or math, whichever you believe is responsible for creating this universe (I believe that physics is a subset of math) for gifts like wealth, happiness and health, remember to first appreciate the more basic qualities of our existence, without which there would be no questions of health, illness, happiness or sadness.
For those of you not subscribed to my Shared Items, here is some silly research on the economics of interstellar travel.
First Fundamental Theorem of Interstellar Trade: When trade takes plaec between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest costs on goods in transit should be calculated using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not by clocks in the frame of trading spacecraft.
Second Fundamental Theorem of Interstellar Trade: If sentient beings may hold assets on two plaents in the same inertial frame, competition will equalize the interest rates on the two planets.
I’m considering doing my grocery shopping online, and I’ll probably use this website (Hebrew). I was browsing it today, when I came across this – they charge you 1 NIS more to ensure your lettuce is worm-free.
Hello guys, today we have several topics:
Shared Items
I finally really settled on Google Reader instead of a desktop feed reader. The advantage of being able to read RSS everywhere without any hassle outweigh the downsides. Also I get the benefit of easily exporting a Feed of Shared Items (both RSS and Email.
I think I will stop/reduce posting links to interesting items that I find on my RSS and instead just mark them as shared, so if you want to keep using my information filtering services be sure to register 🙂
In addition, here is a link to all previously shared items.
Google Notebook
If you’ve recently Googled you may have seen the “Note this” added to every link.
It’s a useful new very useful. Upon clicking it copies the current content of said web page into your Google Notebook, a cool service that organizes your web clippings.
It opens up right on your search result page and has a full page interface as well.
Unfuddle free SVN hosting
If you’re doing any non-trivial software assignment with partners, you should consider using source control. So far, I’ve used source control for large projects of course, but never in an assignment from Technion – back when I was an undergraduate student I was largely oblivious to source control and I didn’t take any programming courses in my 2nd degree – until now. Now I actually have a few non-trivial homeworks at Managing Data on the WWW (writing an http proxy is one of them), and so far I didn’t take up the trouble of setting up a source control. Well, it appears it is no hassle at all, at Unfuddle you can setup a project page, SVN server, RSS and email updates on checkins, project management and more in less than 5 minutes and no cost. Unlike some alternatives, putting your code there doesn’t mean it’s now open source and free to the world, you get control over who accesses your code.
