She's not a member of the lab. She hasn't undergone the difficult process of being a member. She doesn't clearly know the rules obeyed by members. Not being a member, she doesn't deserve anyone's time or attention... just the minimum kindness any stranger gets. And yet she is usually much noisier than the rest of us. Like suddenly we had a noisy mother. An annoying noisy mother of some spoiled child. She even gives errands to other lab members who are not members of the subgroup that hired her. Even to the god (first time I heard a god said "why me?"). She is a disturbance to those who are trying to do research. To those who need silence and concentration. Her squeal is a pain to our ears. Usually her squeals are of a non research nature. She must be disciplined. She must be aware of the code of silence that MEMBERS of this lab practice. She must respect that. She must be sent away otherwise.
Under Republic Act 9492, most holidays would be moved to Monday. Of course the rationale, as usual, is to prolong weekends in favor of non productivity. Aside from deemphasizing the spirit of some holidays, this act also shows the Philippine government's lack of priority to the educational sector. In the University of the Philippines, and many other universities as well, for example, some classes are scheduled on Mondays. Some Monday classes are even scheduled once a week. What this act means is that Monday classes will definitely lag behind by an amount roughly equivalent to the number of declared non-working holidays. This is far more worse than the fairly distributed suspension of classes into different days of the week. At least with the past scheme, different classes will be delayed by a more or less equal amount. As if delays are not bad enough already.
I was finally annoyed enough to figure out which file was causing that annoying sound on errors on KDE. On Mandriva 2007, the file is located on:
/usr/share/sounds/KDE_Glass_Break.ogg
I renamed it.
I really did not like that noise. Especially when I am wearing a head set, the broken glass effect is just too sudden (very high rate of change derivative). It sorts of hurts my ears. To add to that, customizing sound schemes does not look simple (if not possible). So I was forced to rename the file to hide it from the system.
Here is a preview of CSRC's ganglia cluster load monitor The problem with public servers... Anyone just gets to do anything no matter how reckless their programming habits are. With 512MB of memory and 10GB of swap, on each node just imagine how much greedy a program/(group of programs) could get to use more than 300% of these resources.
If someone else (aside from myself) will complain that he/she cannot run his/her program, then I will have to kill...
It's ironic that some people are on a high with their problem solving skills but could not interpret their solutions into feasible/efficient programs/code.
Scientific computing environments such as Matlab, Scilab, Mathematica, Maple etc... are good since they shorten the transition from solution to code to results visualization (especially the lazy man's symbolic Mathematica that does most of the thinking for you). However, their ease does not promote efficient programming. I even know someone who worries about his/her very long complicated equation. As if he/she has to evaluate it's value in a single blow. Most formulas involving two or more terms can be broken down into parts.
"The whole may not be greater than the sum of the parts"
I was annoyed one day while watching a TV program featuring Filipino inventions/inventors.
Although some of his inventions may deserve respect, the concept of vitamin beer is totally . (I'm giving you the privilege of filling in the descriptive words).
Third Prize (P20,000) Patent No. : 1-2002-02291 Title : Beer Fortified with Multivitamins (Vitamin Beer) Inventors : ******** Address : ******** Tel. No. : ******** Abstract : A beer fortified with multivitamins to give it supplemental nutritional value. The multivitamins are stirred in after the primary fermentation stage when alcohol has been formed resulting in a robustly pale-yellowish appetizing pale pilsen bouquet, malty and hoppy brew supportive and supplemental in nutritional states.
Mix and match child's play should not be considered as inventions unless the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There's nothing new about vitamins and there's nothing new about beer either. And there's nothing special about combining them. You get the same thing if they were taken separately, plus the bonus of being at a reasonable price (you get what you payed for). It's just like combining the thirst quenching property of plain boring water and the sweetness of sugar's taste, and voila-eureka!, you invented sugar water! It wasn't even mentioned whether they have done a chemical anlysis of the action of alcohol on vitamins it can dissolve.
In lay terms, an invention is a novel device, material, or technique [1]. It is an innovation that is both novel and non-obvious[2]. At best this might be called an innovation that is painfully obvious.
It is clear that this is something done to promote alcohol drinking, a large cause of crime and accidents, also health problems (that it claims to solve), a cause of temporary decrease in alertness and intelligence, a direct cause of so called beer bellies, a direct cause of loss of money due to addiction. Unless the mixing of such vitamins cancels these bad effects, it has done no improvement either. Not all alcohol drinkers are responsible enough. But yet we have a government agency encouraging this people. But who is to blame, most of our government officials are tomadors (alcoholics) themselves (take for example the expelled Joseph Estrada or his henchmen). It is disappointing that a good amount of cash was awarded to this.
He's lucky to live at Sucat, Parañaque, making it easier for him to submit such things to DOST.
The Filipino attitude of "palakasan" (the favoring of someone because of his/her past reputation or relationship to the one who is giving a favor and not necessarily because he/she is actually favorable at present) can also be seen here. Had he not had previous 'inventions' and a reputation to keep, and a familiarity to the DOST officials, vitamin beer would surely be a flop.
For several days the clamwin antivirus applet on the system tray had been bugging me about it's new scanning engine version 0.88.6 (also, at about this time, I had already been recieving nags about the new AVG free 7.5). Unfortunately when I download it using clamwin itself (or atleast clicked the Ok button, assuming that's what it does...), it doesn't install and thus will remind you again about the new version the next time around. Although I could have searched the file or monitored/sniffed/snooped the download process (or just did anything else to stop the nags), I was just too busy to do so. Eventually I just downloaded it using a web browser and istalled it manually.
It might be annoying, but not as annoying as the people who create virus, spyware and spam.
It is a truth that stupid people still do exist. They think they could fool others by making them transfer cellphone credits to their balance. 27, November 2006, 12:37:01, when I got this stupid message from a stupid sender:
Congrats!!! You win a 500 load from PAMASKO PROMO of SMART, just type 09183287002 (space)15 and send to 808, claim your load now, thank u, SMARTZED*
Unfortunately for the sender, not everyone is as stupid as him. When I have enough balance, I usually have a one word reply:
GAGO!!!
Another number of another stupid person is 639283937266
You can't say that they are doing this because of poverty. How would they have the money to send their first pranks in the first place (unless they are supported by other stupid people), assuming they initially have no victims.
I guess they're just simply, plainly, appropriately deserving to be called GAGO.
How I always wished that cellphone service providers have something like spam protection.
Ever experienced losing your work since window$ update restarted your pc while you are running your 1 million iteration root finding program, or while you were away for a coffee break, expecting that your machine will keep on running?
