This gem by The Kinks is SO (e:matthew). haha

We are the Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliates
God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards!

(But I love the Kate Rusby version a lot!)


She infuses something indescribably rustic and precise into the classic.

The already super-awesome Classic:

Welcome to my Candara and Droid Sans Obsession. I am completely sold on these fonts.
Candara


Droid Sans


Love the way the letters curve, everything about these fonts is so perfect.

Candara is native to windows and droid sans is native to Android. But I want them both on both of my windows and linux systems. So here goes:

Installing both fonts on Linux.
From:

• Copy the fonts in their own folders under /usr/share/fonts/truetype
• Make these fonts available to the system: chmod 0775 -R droid/ candara/
• Cache the fonts so they are loaded on all the applications: chmod 0775 -R candara/ droid/

Installing droid fonts on Windows.
This is way simpler.

• Just download the fonts from this
• Extract to the Windows/Fonts folder.

While hunting for stuff, I found this, a complete image of a running android system ripe for hacking.
Hmm...

I read with interest this nifty commentary by Steven Wittens on his extreme redesign of the concept of the bland linux terminal.

One of the Unix principles is nobly called "Least Surprise", but in practice, from having observed new Unix users, I think it often becomes "Maximum Confusion".

From:

And I can't help laughing. How true.

I would love this on my system. I think it's still in development (on not). It's SO confusing to find out what's good to install and what isn't on linux sometimes...


I also want the CLICompanion: But again, is there a Debian port? or isn't there? Who knows... See the confusion here? Basic questions like "Alright, can I install this application now?" grow into gargantuan complex flowcharts on linux. For eg. the simple question above can only be answered after ALL the following have been sorted.

• What distro are you on?
• What kernel are you on?
• What architecture are you on?
• What are the dependencies of the program you want?
• What are the versions of these dependencies specific to the program you want to install?
• Do you have the source repository of the versions of the dependencies that is best suited to the program in your sources.list?
• Do you have an updated sources.list?

Fine then, you can install the program but... I can only give you the source code because I am SO open source. Here you go, my precious tarball lovingly gift-wrapped in some cryptic archival format for you: Sourcecodeblablaobscureversion000.tar.bz

Which leads to:

• Can you compile this source code on your system?
• What are the developer tools you need to compile the code?
• What are the dependencies of the developer tools you need?
• Are these dependencies in the repositories on your sources.list?
• Do you have the requisite linux kernel headers (what the hell does that even mean?)

And finally, you compile the source into an executable binary and you are met with more challenges because some of the other dependencies can STILL be missing and you have go hunt all round the internet and repeat the above algorithm for each dependency.

God forbid, you find an easy way to do things on Linux. Because you see, the great Linus Torvalds didn't plan on the system being used and abused by novices and nobodies like you.

I took a break and read some fun studies that came out this week in Science (pdfs below). A professor at Columbia conducted some experiments about how our memories operate in the presence and absence of assured information sources online such as Google and Wikipedia.

She found, not surprisingly, that our priorities have moved not towards memorizing trivia but towards more efficient ways to retrieve this trivia from where it might be stored online. And since remembering trivia is a relatively easier task than remembering techniques and algorithms to retrieve this trivia, our IQs are actually getting sharper as technologies progress and our environments become richer with information.

As (e:paul) said to me not long ago, Google has pretty much become everyone's mother. And we are constantly thinking of ways to jog her memory and get relevant information out.

Science is an interesting magazine/journal. For people in academia, publishing in Science and Nature are the pinnacle of achievement. But somehow, a large number of studies from humanities and behavioural sciences which do get published in these journals (Science way more than Nature) seem to get away with the simplest of experiments, approaches and super-obvious hypotheses. More arduous basic and clinical science that takes a ton of effort to perform gets rejected routinely.

I often wonder if we, as basic and clinical scientists, place undue importance to getting published in these so-called lofty journals, and agonize too much about where we get published. After all, some of the finest nobel-winning impact-making science was not published in these journals but obscure journals with lowly impact factors when they first came out. (It's another matter however that these "lowly journals" have since become really prominent and elitist.)

Academia is a funny twisted world.
---
Refs:
::READ PDF::
::READ PDF::

I wanted to go to the BPO concert on canalside today. But I had forgotten what Beethoven's 5th sounded like... So I just put it on and it's too much military turmoil packed into one symphony. I am not sure it fits well in my mind with a perfect sunset on a balmy summer's day.

Why can't they have chosen Beethoven's 7th instead?! It's so much more stately, beautiful, nostalgic and fitting.


Or even some of the Strauss family waltzes...


I am not going. I cannot hear mismatched music over sunset.