“My name is Linus, and I am your God.”

I have this feeling that I'm not going to write anything long or meaningful this month, so I figured that rather than not writing anything for a month I may just as well do a few totally random and very short posts ;-P
So here's proof that computer geekdom is way more interesting than it sounds ;-P Or to be a bit more specific it's 10 quotes by Linus Torvalds - the father of linux. Apart from being an extremely intelligent man, he is of course totally insane (I think one has to be to be the initiator of something like this) and has a very sarcastic wit. This makes reading through his 10 best quotes entertaining regardless of whether you have any idea what he's talking about ;) Enjoy :)

My absence, my laptop and my Japanese film phase

As you may have noticed my promised comeback to the internet has not happened ;-P (apologies to anyone still waiting for replies to e-mails, you will have to wait longer ;-P). In fact this month it got so bad that I haven't even been using my RSS reader which has resulted in a total ignorance to current events (and I'm usually totally addicted to my RSS reader!).
If anybody wants an explanation for this behaviour (am I correct in thinking that nobody gives a damn? ;) ) then lets blame it on me having bought a laptop. I've become totally obsessed with it, or should I say obsessed with tweaking it (it's been 2 weeks - I still haven't tweaked it to the state I want it to be in ;-P). Does anybody care that I have a distribution called 'Arch Linux' on it currently? ;-P or that is has a firewire? ;-P oh, and it's an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R61i and it has a trackpoint, wheee! Anyway, my laptop has become such an important existence in my life that I just had to mention it ;)

In terms of other stuff, I've been slipping in and out of a Japanese film phase for the last few weeks. It started with Japanese TV dramas and Matsumoto Jun (courtesy of Kinga ;) ), but I think it's going to lead me into the territory of cinematic films also. I've revisited what was my favourite Japanese film uptil now - Gohatto - and reminded myself of how much I like Matsuda Ryuhei. This in turn has resulted in me hopefully getting a DVD of a film I haven't yet seen called Big Bang Love, Juvenile A by the end of next month (also starring Matsuda Ryuhei).
Frankly, it seems like the kind of film only me and Ziggy could enjoy (it seems artsy enough for Ziggy's snobbish side to appreciate it and if his snobbish side fails then there's still hope in the homoerotic content ;) ). I do have some hope for Kinga too (after all, she's weird enough to enjoy Peter Greenway films), but I'm fully expecting them to be the only people in my acquaintance, who have a shot at liking it ;-P However, I've been surprised before ;) so I will post a list of reasons why you may be interested in the film even if you are not Ziggy or Kinga ;) (the trailer will for sure scare you off, but you haven't gotten that far into the post yet ;-P):
1) There is Matsuda Ryuhei in it ;) ok, maybe that's not an interesting enough reason for somebody who has no idea who I'm talking about ;-P But I think he's pretty much the only actor I've seen, who is *truly* eye candy to me. Usually I cannot tell whether I find a guy attractive or not just by looking at a photo. I have to see them move, talk, smile and so on and then I can tell you. Matsuda Ryuhei is the only guy I know of who I can just see a photo of and say he's beautiful (perhaps beautiful more in the way that I would find a woman beautiful, but that's still something, right? ;-P). His effeminate looks are probably why he keeps getting cast in homoerotic films (if I'm not mistaken this is his third such film). What is more in this film they've cast him alongside a guy who looks more masculine and rough, so the aesthetics of his looks are going to get even more showcased. If I have gotten you curious about him at all then check out some pics - this is from Gohatto, the only film of his that I've seen and incidently his debut film (he was only 16 at the time) and this is from Big Bang Love which I hope to own on DVD in about one month's time (it was made 2 years ago, so he would have been about 23).
2) You get to see sexy Japanese men naked ;) (you can see a little bit even on the trailer ;-P) Oh, and in case anyone's curious - yes, you get to see Ryuhei in the nude too (not on the trailer though).
3) It's a Takashi Miike film. For some people I guess that will be a turn off rather than a turn on, but I thought it was worth mentioning ;-P Frankly, for me when I initially hear a film is by Takashi Miike it is a bit of a put off (I know him as the master of gore since the only film of his I've seen is Ichi The Killer - which I didn't dislike, but it did nothing to convince me I want to see more). Big Bang Love, however, doesn't seem to be of the gory sort at all (at least none of the reviews or clips seem to indicate this) - so if it's the gore putting you off (as I assume it would be for most people) I think you are safe :) (yes, Kinga - this is largely directed at you ;) ).
4) It looks a bit claustrophobic. For some reason I have a soft spot for films which have a "trapped" sort of atmosphere. I can get through even a bad prison sort of film for this reason (and prison is precisely the setting of this film). So for any other weirdos like me I guess it's worth mentioning.
5) It's homoerotic, but I guess you've gathered that by now ;-P I guess for many people again this would be a put off, but I think there's quite a few people reading this blog who have either a contrary reaction or a neutral one.
6) Aesthetically it looks beautiful (and I'm not just talking about Ryuhei - though he adds to it ;-P).
Having done my best to get anybody other than Ziggy and Kinga interested enough to at least see the trailer (and probably doing the contrary - i.e. putting off even Ziggy and Kinga ;)), here it is:


I imagine that more of my Japanese film phase is to come on this blog as I have yet to gush about Matsumoto Jun ;) (who I actually like more than Matsuda Ryuhei ;-P).

P.S. As Ziggy has been heavily mentioned in this post, you may be interested to learn that he has updated his blog for the first time in about a year ;)

Speech Recognition on Windows Vista

There are certain problems that computer technology might never be able to solve. Speech recognition might get further than it is today, but I think it's unlikely that a computer will ever understand fully natural speech. That is unless AI will become reality (which I very much doubt).
Serious work on AI started in the 1950s so it's been over 50 years with relatively little progress comparing to other areas of computing. After all 50 years is like five centuries in computing history (the World Wide Web was not made public until 1991!). The web evolved to the point it is at now in only 15 years (I bet nobody in 1991 even imagined things like blogging or youtube), but as far as AI goes there are still no computers that can pass the Turing test which was introduced in 1950!
The concept behind the Turing test is that a human judge chats by text to two "people" in a different room. One of them is a human and one is a computer. If the judge is not sure which is which then the computer has passed the test. Alan Turing who thought of this test (and did a number of other amazing things relating to computers) apparently predicted that computers would eventually be able to pass the test thanks to memory power alone, but so far it has not happened.
(Alan Turing is btw a very sad story. He was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexuality and then committed suicide - or so many think - in 1954 aged just 42. Quite a way to lose somebody of such importance to science, ha?)

Anyway, really what I wanted to post is not all these ramblings (which to be honest I'm in no way qualified to be writing and may have just as well given you incorrect information :-/), but a video of how Speech Recognition works on Windows Visa (and I mainly wanted to post it because I think it's funny ;)):

Very geeky article about how google works

A bit of a follow-up to my previous post. You can read a very geeky article about how google's search engine works here. I didn't read the whole thing (too mathematical), but even reading just the beginning where they explain about page rank I thought was very interesting.

My favourite part of the article is the opening:
Imagine a library containing 25 billion documents but with no centralized organization and no librarians. In addition, anyone may add a document at any time without telling anyone. You may feel sure that one of the documents contained in the collection has a piece of information that is vitally important to you, and, being impatient like most of us, you'd like to find it in a matter of seconds. How would you go about doing it?
Posed in this way, the problem seems impossible. Yet this description is not too different from the World Wide Web, a huge, highly-disorganized collection of documents in many different formats.

Something (from the article) that I found particularly cool to play around with is this page rank checker. It's only an estimate, but it's fun to play around with. Can you find any pages with rank 10? :D The only one I tried that got 10 was google itself ;-P But I found a couple of 9s (wikipedia, IMDb,yahoo).

Search Mash - the new Google (literally)

Google is always changing and developping (and it has to if it's to stay the biggest in its field). But of course whilst it's testing new things out, it can't afford anything to break. This is where Search Mash comes in. It's the bleeding edge version of google.
It's already quite cool, so you might want to try it out. If you want to find out more, check out this article.

Security in Macs

Just because I can be a bit geeky about computers (that's what I'm studying after all), I thought I should introduce that side of me onto this blog as well ;-P
I came across an article about security in Mac computers and thought it was interesting. With adverts like this:

One does get the impression that Macs are much more secure than windows - this is not true. Every system (as the article underlines) has security threats.
However as I'm a biased Linux user, I'll just say that IMO there's one aspect of security that open source systems (like Linux or BSD) have over ones with closed code (OS X and Windows) and that's a much faster response to security threats (as the article tells us, Mac developpers are particularly slow, despite advertising security as one of their biggest assets).

The Kinsey Institute says Linux users have bigger penises

Clearly this is an excellent reason to use Linux rather than Windows - especially if you're female like I happen to be ;) Mention of this fascinating fact is here.

How to save video from youtube, google etc.

I just found out that it's possible, so I'm sharing the info.
You can do this via a site called Keep Vid. Also apparently there is a firefox extension that does the same (but I haven't tried it).

The downloaded file will be in *.flv format which I think can be played by the vlc player in windows (in linux it hasn't worked for me, but there's a command line player called ffplay which works for me).