Sound & Complete

The Deceptive PR Behind Apple’s “Expanded Protections for Children”

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Update Dec 7, 2022: Apple scrapped the plan of CSAM-scanning iCloud Photos libraries.

My wife is pretty tech-savvy. While not a software engineer and not a computer scientist, she has a good understanding of computing technologies, statistics, formal methods, and an intuitive (but quickly growing) grasp of machine learning. She’s also able to code in R for her research, and she’s highly addicted to her iPhone 12 Mini, her iPad Pro, and her 12" MacBook, despite its slowly but steadily failing keyboard. With all this being said, I spent about 30 minutes yesterday evening trying to explain to her, what’s all the fuss about Apple’s new CSAM (child sexual abuse material) prevention features that are being introduced in iOS 15.

The point of the anecdote is of course not to show that my wife is dim, but rather to illustrate the issue with said CSAM features. In contrast to how easy it is to explain to “an average Joe” why Google’s or Facebook’s business models pose a threat to people’s privacy, it’s very hard to explain why Apple’s new mechanism is even worse.

Actually, as I was working on a draft of this post, Matthew Green and Alex Stamos wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that makes a good attempt at trying to concisely explain the issue to a non-technical audience. There’s hope.

I don’t want this blog post to be an exhaustive explanation of what exactly Apple is planning to do, because many other excellent articles have already been written about it over the last week. In essence, iOS 15 will introduce a mechanism that allows for checking user’s photographs against a CSAM content database, and this will happen on the device. That’s the big difference between Apple’s approach and what every other company that hosts big libraries of photographs online has been doing for a while now. A paragraph from Ben Thompson’s article that was published yesterday sums it up pretty well:

(…) instead of adding CSAM-scanning to iCloud Photos in the cloud that they own and operate, Apple is compromising the phone that you and I own and operate, without any of us having a say in the matter. Yes, you can turn off iCloud Photos to disable Apple’s scanning, but that is a policy decision; the capability to reach into a user’s phone now exists, and there is nothing an iPhone user can do to get rid of it.

You could of course say that it’s “a slippery slope” sort of argument, and that we should trust Apple that it won’t use the functionality for anything else. Setting aside the absurdity of trusting a giant, for-profit corporation over a democratically-elected government, we should bear in mind that Apple’s record here is much less stellar than they’d like us to think. The company is already cooperating with the Chinese government, e.g., by storing personal data of Chinese citizens only on servers run by a Chinese company, and has previously cancelled their plans for iCloud backups encryption under the pressure of FBI. Apple released an FAQ document yesterday in which it tried to clarify and address the issues, but if anything, they confirmed what we all assumed to be true: that the only thing stopping any government agency or other malicious actor from substituting some other image hashes (e.g., photographs of homosexual couples in countries where homosexuality is illegal) for CSAM, is Apple’s internal policy. The technology that would allow that to happen is already there.

Those posters won’t age well, will they.

In the world of computer security this technology has a name, it’s called “a backdoor.” A well-documented and well-intended backdoor, but still a backdoor. Installed and enabled by default on millions of devices around the world.

So why on Earth would Apple, a company that’s been building a brand as privacy-protecting over the last few years, go for such a solution? And why now?

The hypothesis that I have is that Apple wishes to distance itself from checking users’ data. They’ve been fighting with the FBI and the federal government for years, they’ve been struggling with not reporting CSAM content to the NCMEC, they don’t want to be involved in any of this anymore. They want to create a situation in which they could offer end-to-end encryption for iMessage, iCloud Drive, iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Backups, and at the same time remain compliant. This might be the only way to have your cake and eat it, too, in fact. And it gets better: due to how the mechanism is implemented, Apple will never see the actual user data. It will only know whether there’s a match against the data on the phone and the data on the server, so in its own marketing campaigns they can still claim to respect the user’s privacy. And if this mechanism ever gets used for anything else, they can always claim that they are simply complying with local regulations, and that they themselves neither censor nor even look at the data on their users’ phones.

Sadly, due to the intrinsically technical nature of the problem, which I mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article, I believe the public will buy it, and during the next public Apple event Tim Cook will triumphantly announce some privacy-enhancing features, like protecting your personal data against cross-app tracking or offering VPN-like, anonymized connection for Safari or Apple Mail. All this, while there’s a backdoor installed on your phone, and you can do nothing about it.

It pains me as a self-proclaimed Apple fanboy, a loyal customer of many years and even an evangelist of the brand to see the company making a step in such a dangerous direction.

The worst part is: how do I put my money where my mouth is? Am I going back to using Linux on the desktop (2022 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, remember), debugging wifi drivers and tirelessly trying to make resume-from-suspend work? Am I getting a Pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it like a total nerd? FUCK.

I can only hope that the backlash caused by the screeching voice of the minority, will make Apple nonetheless reconsider, and perhaps change the implementation in future versions of iOS.

Discussion on HackerNews.

The LSP Revolution

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Remember the days when you had to look for plugins for your editor to support your favourite programming language? Or even the language that isn’t your favourite, but which for some reason you need to write in? Well in case you didn’t notice, those days are gone. They aren’t “long gone,” but the are gone. I thought they weren’t gone, but they are. Gone. For real. Because there’s LSP.

What started as an interface between VS Code and completion engines at Microsoft, became the godsend for all of us that want to declare “dotfile bankruptcy” every couple of months. There are many implementations of LSP for many editors, and so far I tried two for neovim (coc and nvim lsp) and I’m amazed. I was a bit skeptical at first, because LSP runs on Node, and installing a JS runtime as a de facto dependency for vim feels so wrong, but… it works! I no longer need multiple plugins with complex configs! The future is here! Just look! I install two plugins for LSP in latest neovim:

Plug 'neovim/nvim-lspconfig'
Plug 'nvim-lua/completion-nvim'

which load support for LSP, which I can then configure:

autocmd BufEnter * :lua require'completion'.on_attach()
" below we configure which language servers
" we want to support, a more comprehensive
" list is here:
" https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig#configurations
autocmd BufEnter * :lua require'completion'.on_attach()
lua <<EOF
require'lspconfig'.bashls.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.ccls.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.dockerls.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.gopls.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.hls.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.html.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.jsonls.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.solargraph.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.vimls.setup { }
require'lspconfig'.yamlls.setup { }
EOF
nnoremap <silent> <c-]> <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.definition()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> K <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.hover()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> gD <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.implementation()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <c-k> <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.signature_help()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> 1gD <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.type_definition()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> gr <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.references()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> g0 <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.document_symbol()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> gW <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.workspace_symbol()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> gd <cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.declaration()<CR>

and we’re done!

OH, complicated? A bit, but the shortcuts above will work for every language supported by LSP, which essentially means every language. There are even language servers for Bash (hello, shellcheck) and YAML (one more evidence for the existence of “YAML programmers” ☝️). And once nvim detects that you’re loading a file that is supported by LSP, it will even install the appropriate server for you (well, kinda, sometimes, it’s a work in progress). Just today I had to dive into a large-ish project in Ruby, which I never worked with, and nvim told me to gem install solargraph and I was good to go. Code navigation, documentation pop-ups, jumping to definitions like crazy, it all just worked without me needing to configure plugins for Ruby.

So yeah, LSP is indeed amazing. It works on Emacs, too, and probably a bunch of other editors (not that anyone cares).

You should start using it TODAY, and shave off hundreds of lines of your init.vim or init.el.

Thanks to Gergő for introducing me to nvim-lspconfig 🙇‍♂️

Bargaining with my left-wing indulgence

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Yesterday I read Rutger Bregman’s excellent opinion piece in The Correspondent, and today is Tuesday. Tuesday, in my household, is the recycling day. Why Tuesday? Because the island we live on only has 2 paper trash containers. They are emptied on Tuesdays midday-ish, so on Tuesday evenings I pack all the paper trash in the house (along with all the glass and plastic) into the trunk, and I put them into the container before it gets full (it’ll be full by Wednesday night at the latest). And then, feeling that my duty as a responsible, eco-conscious citizen has been fulfilled, I reward myself with a short drive over to the Polish store in a different part of town, where I buy 4 cans of Poland’s finest honey beer.

A-HA! But hold on there just a second, why did I put trash in the trunk? (Ok that’s an easy one, because it’s bulky and I don’t have a bakfiets) Why do I drive, especially in a city like Amsterdam? Why do I even have a car? Didn’t Bregman write just about that?

I’m talking about the idealist who, as soon as personal responsibility comes up, starts shouting that we have to talk about the structures before anything else. That we first need an analysis showing that it can all be blamed on the fossil industry and the multinationals, advertisements and algorithms, capitalism and neoliberalism – anything and everything that lets us avoid looking in the mirror.

Ah, so it’d seem all the French and American socialist thinkers of the XXI century have been lying to me all along! I do have to change my ways!

But to what degree?

We don’t eat meat and our diary consumption is minimal. Ok, I guess it could be even more minimal. But no eggs, seriously? Fine, what about eggs twice a week? Once a week?

And the car, come on, it’s not like I’m driving a GMC Sierra, mine has a small petrol engine. It’s small, I promise, I’m getting 42 miles to the gallon on average.¹

And I don’t drive it daily, so that’s okay. But does it mean I have to buy an even smaller car next year? Or no car at all? What if I bought an old V8 American muscle car, but drove it once a month? Is that okay? Do I really have to get a Prius? I can’t afford an electric car, and living without a car is sad. Oh you’re saying I shouldn’t have a car? Fine, I could still rent I suppose, for the occasional road-trip. But if I rent, it’s okay to rent a BMW 5 series, right?

And does that mean I cannot go on holidays to the American Southwest next year? It’s not like I’m a McKinsey consultant, I don’t fly often anymore. It’s okay to take an inter-continental flight once a year. Ok, once every two years? Three?

And what’s the most reasonable way to visit family in Poland? Driving with two people is surprisingly CO2-efficient on a long-distance journey, especially compared to flying. But I suppose I should be taking a train? Maaan but the train takes forever, it’s unreliable in the winter and I’d have to stay overnight in Berlin, and…

Everyone goes through this bargaining in their head after they read an article like Bregman’s, right?

Right?

50 mpg UK, 5.6 l/100km in normal European countries, 17.8 km/l in weird European countries. I’ve no idea why I defaulted to American units, must be the joy from SNL’s cheerful post-election sketches. ↩︎

The Four Stages of Staycation

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Planning

I’m gonna read a book a day. I’m gonna go through SICP (including all the exercises) and Kurt’s new Haskell book. I’m gonna learn how to play bass. I’m gonna buy that wardrobe for the guest room so that we could get rid of the ugly coat hanger there.

Depression & self-loathing

Weather is really shit, I should have and could have gone somewhere nice. COVID-19 situation in Spain cannot be as bad as they say, people travel after all. Can’t get drunk in a pub with Ivan and Félix. SICP is really hard. Haskell tooling sucks. Bass arrived, I tried playing scales; it’s really hard to press those thick strings. I wish I could have a bass with violin strings (wat). Laptev Sea hasn’t frozen and Donald Trump could still stage a comeback (again) (why do I even pay for that subscription). Oh and my homeland is on the verge of a civil war, it seems. I don’t like the novel I’m reading now, it’s very disappointing even though it’s written by one of my favorite authors. And Karolina recommended it to me, it’s all her fault.

Everything sucks.

Acceptance

Ok, so playing bass is actually straightforward if you’ve been playing another stringed instrument for 25 years. Karolina is OK, we play horrific renditions of old Polish rock songs and Audioslave in the evenings; neighbors love us. It’s a lot of fun, butchering good music. I started reading another book, it’s good. I gave up on programming, I code for work so a week away from vim won’t kill me. An oliebollen stand opened in front of our Albert Heijn. I spend loads of time doing nothing, playing TTD and re-watching old House MD episodes.

I became one with the couch.

Despair

OMG IT’S OVER TOMORROW

“Twilight of Democracy”

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Here’s what’s good about Anne Applebaum’s new book: it’s anecdotal in all the right places.

This is a book that attempts to explain the authoritarian turns across Europe and in the United States and Applebaum, as you’d expect from her, provides a convincing, well-reasoned and insightful explanation as to why they are happening. And since she’s a well renowned international journalist and a wife to Poland’s former minister of foreign affairs, she’s been at the center of many of the important political events of the last decades (hence the anecdotes). It’s a very good book, well worth a read if you’d like to get a better understanding of what’s going on with the world, and it’s so up-to-date that it even covers the beginning of the pandemic.

One caveat though: Applebaum is what American political scientists would call a neoconservative, and thus her view of the events of the last 20 years is McCainy a bit. It’s not wrong and I’d say she keeps relatively neutral. But if you want a very different take, try Monbiot’s “How did we get into this mess?”—a worse book, but a somewhat fresher (i.e. left wing) view on things.

Ah and one final note: this book is short. Not too-short short, but short enough for people like me who use Piketty as a monitor stand. Digestible, that’s the word I was looking for. This book is digestible for software engineers.

VS Code

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0100

The best, most entertaining and immortal topic in software engineering is back! Editor Wars!

After reading Roben Kleene’s blog post I realized that I’ve been using VS Code all-day every-day for over a year now. I’m not willing to admit it because in my mind I’m a die-hard (n)vim user, but the reality is this: VS Code is brilliant. Kleene makes many great points about key ingredients of VS Code’s success (popularity/MS backing, plugin ecosystem, client-server architecture), and you should read his post.

Then today I read about “modernizing” Emacs, and I saw the discussion on HN, and this comment in particular made me think:

I think VSCode is more than yet another editor, it’s more than what Textmate and Sublime were. There are two major reasons, I think.

First, it’s the plug-in ecosystem. Yes, Emacs and vim have had “plug-ins” for a long time, but VSCode makes discovery, installation and development of plug-ins much easier than anything I’ve come across (sans Atom perhaps). If I need to setup a new computer for coding, all I need to do is grab VS Code, click “install” on 4 plugins, and I’m ready to go. My only obligatory hand-crafted line of configuration is this:

"gitlens.currentLine.format": "${author} wrote that shitty piece of code ${ago}",

Compare that to hundreds of lines of my old init.el or even my current init.vim, and I start to see the appeal.

Second, it’s the client-server architecture. This is, surprisingly, a killer feature that made me finally abandon vim. Among many other things the client-server architecture of VS Code enables “devcontainers,” i.e., having a client on your local machine with its nice fonts and working suspend-to-RAM, but compiling and testing continuously on anything from a Docker/WSL container to a Linux host. Having to work with networking equipment I’m at the mercy of horrible router vendors (hello Cisco, Juniper and Arista! 👋 I hate you all!) and my software often depends on low-level libraries that really don’t work well on anything other than Linux. I need to work in containers all the time, and sometimes I need to work on a Linux host in a networking lab (hello Eve! 👋 I hate you too!). Being able to stick to the same UI, same extensions, same keyboard shortcuts, same everything, simply switching the backend is blissful. Of course I can run vim with all my plugins anywhere, I have a script that automates its installation (“Of course you do.”), but it’s a hassle, and VS Code is great at eliminating hassle.

Ok, there, I did it. I’ve been using Emacs for years, afterwards I’ve been using (n)vim for even more years, and now I’m praising an Electron-based Node.js monstrosity that is VS Code. I didn’t see it coming, but I know I’m not the only one.

Non-classical music playing guide for classically trained musicians

Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

I went to music school as a kid. Ages 7 to 13 I studied classical violin and basics of music theory. I played in duos, trios, and orchestras. Even as a college student, despite my amateurish skills, I’d still find decent orchestras I would join and play many concerts with. All this, despite my slight disdain for classical music with its pompous ethos and pretentious audiences. I stopped playing after moving abroad about a decade ago, leaving my violin behind me, thinking the music performing chapter of my life was over.

Imagine my surprise when some years later I found myself jamming cave music with my friends, now a software engineer at the age of 34.

What if you are, like me, a classically trained musician who’d, too, like to indulge themselves in cave music? What’s your path? And how hard would it be?

(Before you get upset and start writing angry comments, bear in mind this post is written in good will. I know that I’m not experienced, and that there’s a ton of information this silly little guide doesn’t cover. It’s fine. I still think the advice below can be helpful.)

First thing you need to know, is that you’ll have it waaay easier than people that never went to music school. You know the basics of music theory, you know about chords and maybe some harmony, and you can read sheet music. Heck, maybe you can even play your instrument relatively well! But what nobody ever taught you is the engineering side of music. You probably don’t know how to play with amplification. And you most likely have no idea about what you need to sound good with instruments that are amplified, how to be able to hear yourself play, how to record, and how to venture beyond your own instrument, perhaps into the realm of synthesizers, samplers, and other magnificent ingredients of electronic music. In my case, becoming relatively knowledgeable about those things took a better part of two years, and lots of trial and error (with an emphasis on “error”). What follows is my advice, written from a perspective of a violin player who plays sort-of-jazz, so that you don’t have to spend as much time (and money) on errors of your own.

Electrifying your instrument

If you want to play rock or jazz or some sort of electronic music, chances are you’ll need amplification. Even if your instrument is relatively loud, once you add a drummer into the mix, it likely won’t be loud enough. And sure, you can just play very loudly, but that will make hearing yourself difficult.

Wind instruments have no choice, and they have it hard: you need a microphone, a preamp, and then you feed either into the PA or an amplifier, depending on what sort of sound and control you want. Why is that hard? Because microphones and preamps aren’t cheap, and they aren’t necessarily easy to setup. If you play a brass instrument, for jamming purposes going without a mic will likely be fine, especially if you talk to your drummer. (Bribe them with beer!)

Piano players have it a bit easier. If you really want to, you can rent rehearsal rooms with grand pianos in them, and if they have grand pianos there’s a solid chance they will be setup with microphones, so you’ll have your work cut out for you. At the same time, if you’re a piano player, buying a good, portable, electric piano or synthesizer will cost you less than €2k, offer lots of sonic possibilities and usually a built-in preamp that will let you connect straight to the PA. So just get that Nord electro and be happy.

Finally, we get to string instruments. String players have it best, because they are offered a choice: electric instruments or amplification via pickups attached to acoustic instruments. You can go either way, but as a beginner you should probably go for the electric instrument. Here’s why.

Acoustic violins, violas, cellos and double basses are expensive and fragile. They are fussy when it comes to humidity and temperature, and they don’t like having beer spilled on them in a bar you’re playing at. You don’t want them stolen, either. Acoustic guitars are less expensive and offer a vastly different sound and style, so they’re a bit of their own thing, but fragility argument applies to them as well. An electric violin/cello will cost you a fraction of what a decent acoustic instrument will, and you can toss it around without worrying about damaging your precious 100+ year old investment. They are easy to amplify, they usually come with built-in preamps, and their sound is easily moldable by effects. Often they are also relatively silent when unplugged, which makes them handy for practicing at home.

My Yamaha SV-200 I bought in 2012. Solid instrument despite somewhat heavy weight (compared to acoustic instruments, not other electric ones which are often heavier) and an abysmal dynamic performance. Also I kinda like the way it looks and I’m shallow like that. Also this photo is of poor quality, but I’m putting it here anyway because I took it moments after I received the instrument. I think it’s in my girlfriend’s apartment in Groningen.

Getting a good amplified sound using pickups attached to an acoustic instrument is expensive. You need a quality pickup and a preamp, which will likely set you back at least €1k. It’s cheaper than buying an electric instrument (guitar being an exception), though, and a well-amplified acoustic instrument offers superior dynamic range and sound (unless you really want that fusion sound).

Amplifiers

Here’s what I learned after a couple of years of playing my electric violin: I don’t need an amplifier. You may need one, especially if you play the guitar, but you probably don’t need a big expensive one.

First use case is home practice, and let’s be honest, you won’t be playing too loud at home, and you can get by with a small amp. Get a used one and you’ll find something decent for less than a €100. For practicing with a band you’ll likely be renting practice rooms or studios, which will come equipped with PA systems and amplifiers. For gigs, well, in small venues your small amp will probably be fine, and bigger venues have their amps and PA systems.

Pedals

I’ve seen musicians plugging their newly acquired electric or amplified instrument straight into the amplifier, I was one of them. It’s OK to do it, but you’re missing out. Effects pedals not only broaden the sonic capabilities of your instrument, but can also vastly improve the sound quality, allow looping, controlling other electronic instruments, and all this for relatively little money. The thing you need to know about pedals (which I did not) is that their behavior varies significantly from one instrument to another. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it: a sound wave produced by a pluck of an electric guitar string differs greatly from the one produced by blowing into a saxophone or bowing a cello. That’s why most of the advice you find online about what pedals you should buy applies mostly to electric and bass guitars, but not necessarily to bow instruments or the brass section. Here’s my advice:

Reverb pedals. By far the most important pedal you can buy if you play your instrument with a bow, also an amazing pedal for wind instruments. Reverb pedals give your sound room and body, and in my opinion no other pedal will improve the sound quality of your amplified instrument like a good reverb pedal will. It’s worth spending extra to get a great one if you can afford it.
Equalizer (EQ) pedals. EQ pedals let you shape the sound by specifying which of the frequencies should be boosted or reduced. This can be particularly useful for violin players that want to get more low- and mid-range sounds out of their instruments, or cello players that want to sound more like a double-bass.
Delay pedals. Short delay can be great for staccato sounds in wind instruments, also for pizzicato in strings.
Octaver/pitch shifting pedals will possibly allow to expand the range of your instrument, and can be a powerful creative tool.
Finally the overdrive pedals—you’d think there’s no use for them outside of blues, rock and heavy-metal styles, but you’d be wrong. An overdriven sax or slightly overdriven strings can sound amazing, but they require a good quality overdrive. Look for midrange-heavy, crunchy ones.

On the left, my small pedalboard from May 2019. Signal comes from a wahwah pedal (not pictured) and goes into a boost pedal, through the overdrive, into the Whammy pitch-shifting pedal, and into the EQ, then delay and finally through the reverb into the amplifier.
On the right, my even smaller “pedalboard” from May 2020. Signal comes into the tuner, and then to Line6 multi-effect stomp box. And there’s an expression pedal. And that’s it.

There’s of course many more types of pedals that can be fun to play with, and I employ you to dive into the /r/guitarpedals community to learn more about different setups people have, but at this point you might be asking yourself: why don’t I just buy a multi-effects pedal instead?

There was a time when you’d be sacrificing sound quality, but, controversial as it may be in some circles to say it, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. There are some great multi-effects pedals out there and while they cost plenty, they are still cheaper than buying a lot of individual good quality pedals, and you don’t have to worry about pedal boards, power supplies, different polarities and voltage requirements, etc. It’s a matter of personal preference and to some degree convenience. I’ve actually been using a multi-effects pedal for a while now, and while I appreciate the fact that it’s compact and easy to setup, the directness of controls of individual pedals is certainly something I miss.

Recording

Recording is hard.

If you just want to record yourself, all you need is an audio interface for your computer (those needn’t be expensive) and some way to connect your instrument into it. This is where it gets slightly tricky. If you play an amplified instrument, like an electric bass or generally something with a pickup, all you need is an amp that has a line out, or, preferably, a DI box. Here’s a pro-tip: many multi-effects pedals come with line-out and built-in DI capabilities, some even serve as audio interfaces so that you can plug your instrument on one end and connect USB to a computer on the other. Think about it if you’re on a budget and recording is important to you.

Now, if your instrument cannot be easily amplified with pick-ups and you require a microphone, you’re in trouble. Microphones are expensive. And recording via microphone requires an audio interface that supports 48v phantom power, so make sure you don’t get a very cheap one that don’t. And on top of that once you record using a microphone, you need to take into account the acoustic properties of the room you’re recording in. Like I said, it’s hard. But there are some cheap and reasonable options out there, so do some research, talk to the people on reddit, and you’ll be fine.

Finally, we come to the sad topic of recording bands. Recording bands sucks. It’s very hard to do right, and… my unpopular opinion is that you shouldn’t even aim at that. Cheap-ish portable recorders will do a great job, hell, even new smartphones (iPhones are particularly good at that) will record a band well enough so that you can use it for tracking down mistakes and learning from them. Because that’s what you really want, you need to record your band continuously so that you know what to improve. It’s your best “debugging” tool. Once you have enough material and are ready to record something, my advice would actually be to… rent a real recording studio with real sound engineers. I know it sounds silly, but in western Europe rates are around €1000 per three hours of recording which should do the job for an amateur. It’s certainly possible to build a recording studio for under a grand, but it will involve a lot of work, cost a lot of time, and require tons of knowledge. So, food for thought.

Playing something else than your main instrument

Now that you amplified your sound, found an amp or connected to a PA system, chose your pedals and you are able to record, it’s time to figure out how to build a “band” on your own. And I mean a band where you play all the instruments.

I mention this because my target audience is adult, which means that perhaps the ability to play with friends on a regular basis isn’t something that should be taken for granted. I know it wasn’t in my case, and I’d imagine I’m not alone here. So how do you play on your own and not be bored? Let me walk you through what I’ve experienced.

First, loopers. Loopers can be amazing, and are an invaluable practice tool. Think of them as metronomes that aren’t boring first, and the best exercise in harmony second. Loopers come in all shapes and sizes, the bigger they are, the more complicated they get. There are videos all over YouTube of creative musicians doing amazing things with loopers, but they do have a limitation, namely that it’s tricky to make interesting music that consists of more than 3 chord progressions even with the most advanced looper. Which brings us to computers.

Most of us have some sort of laptops or desktops that are fairly new. They don’t even need to be particularly powerful these days, unless you’re mixing Kanye’s latest album. Any relatively new computer will be able to run a digital audio workstation (DAW) of your choice effortlessly, and that DAW in turn will allow you to create tracks, scenes, patterns, etc. There’s a lot of choice when it comes to software, and despite it looking very complicated at first, DAWs aren’t hard to learn. And once you know one, you’ll be able to adapt to a different one relatively easily. Pro-tip for Mac users here: every new Mac comes with Apple’s Garageband pre-installed, and it’s actually a pretty decent piece of software.

There’s a recent trend online of getting away from a computer for music production, which it appears to me is particularly strong amongst the non-professionals. We, amateurs, that is, don’t necessarily need the robustness and feature set of Pro Tools, because we’re not producing music in a professional studio. Our jobs however increasingly require us to spend whole days in front of a computer, and we appreciate getting away from it every once in a while. Also it’s fun being able to get that tactile feedback of hardware that’s made for making music, it gives a feeling of playing an instrument rather than operating software. There’s great choice available both when it comes to standalone synthesizers, samplers, or groove boxes, as well as physical DAW controllers, and playing with them is a lot of fun. And then of course there are synthesizers in pedal form, that can allow you to alter your sound or even simulate a small band. And then of course there are pedals that allow you to control synthesizers and other instruments via MIDI. Possibilities truly are endless here (watch out for that credit card limit though).

After reading all this (if you even made it this far) you might be wondering: what’s the point of me writing an article like this with a classically-trained musician in mind?

It has been my somewhat surprising experience that many people went to some sort of music school as a child. They play the oboe, the piano, or the trumpet, and since they stopped their musical education, they stopped playing. I was one of those people and I thought that my situation was somewhat unique, but it wasn’t. There’s so many musicians that don’t play anymore. I thought that’s sad, because music is the best thing there is, and I thought I could encourage those that, like me, thought their best jamming years are long behind them, to rekindle their relationship with their instruments and make that bass droppp.

Also, seeing that we’re all on lockdown, in the words of the poet:

It has to start somewhere
It has to start sometime
What better place than here?
What better time than now?

Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

Sunk cost of my iPad Pro

Tue, 05 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

In January 2019 I bought an 11-inch iPad Pro. It’s a magnificent piece of hardware that you can read many reviews of online. The screen is brilliant, the portability and battery life are unmatched, the performance is swift (until you’re trying to perform a long-running CPU-intensive operation, that is).

The iPad Pro was always meant to be my “personal computing” device. I don’t really code in my free time anymore, so issues of not being able to run VS Code on it are not my issues. I do some music production, lightweight photo editing and I write, that’s all I require from my personal computer. (ah yes, and the “occasional Netflix”) So at first glance the magnificent iPad Pro should be amazing, shouldn’t it? Turns out that for me, it wasn’t, for many tiny reasons. Tech reviewers sometimes refer to this as “the 10%” of things you need to be able to do on your computer, because indeed the iPad Pro can often handle that 90%. Yet even with iPadOS (aka iOS 13), which made it much more a real computer than any previous software upgrade, there’s still a ton of things that it either doesn’t do well, or doesn’t do at all. I agree with Gruber: the iPad didn’t fulfill the potential that was always in the hardware itself, even after 10 years of being on the market.

With a bit of effort you can code relatively productively on the iPad, and by “the iPad” I mean a small AWS instance with mosh and some goodies on it. Yes, there are probably some SSH keys leaked in this photograph, HACK ME NOW.

Of all the issues that I’ve had, there were two major ones:

Input. Apparently I’m not an Apple Pencil person, I find handwriting on the screen awkward, even with absolutely brilliant apps that take advantage of it in a spectacular way. I need a keyboard, and none of the keyboard cases I could find pleased me. Probably the new Magic Keyboard could do the trick, but I won’t buy one and I’ll get to why in a moment.
Limited connectivity with external hardware. Yes, the iPad Pro has a usb-c port which is much better than having a Lightning port, but a) there’s only one, so you’ll be living the #donglelyfe even if your peripherals actually use usb-c, and b) iPadOS limits the kind of protocols it allows the apps to use for transferring data over usb-c. So if your hardware uses a custom protocol, it won’t work on the iPad.¹

It baffles me now when I think of how much time and money I spent trying to make my iPad setup work well for me. Any obstacle I encountered I tried finding a workaround for, or I’d buy some accessory to help me deal with it. I also kept believing that Apple will gradually improve the software and, by doing so, address all my concerns. To be fair it did happen to a certain degree, but the starting point of the reasoning was flawed. I bought a product for the potential of what it could one day be, and not for what it was. And once I did, I fully committed to my “investment,” not wanting to face the hard truth that it simply did not work for me. It’s a perfect illustration of two economic or psychologic principles: post-purchase rationalization and the sunk cost fallacy.

The first one we’re all very familiar with, it’s the fallacy where humans generally try to remember their past choices as better than they actually were. We do this with many of our decisions, and the bigger the cost of making a choice, the more our brain supports it later. The second one is famously attributed to Concorde development—the British and French governments took their past investments as a factor when deciding on whether to continue the project. It applies to human relationships, too, and, as I experienced, to consumer decisions.²

This post, then, isn’t a caveat emptor, I’m not trying to discourage anyone from buying an iPad, nor am I saying it’s a bad purchase in general. On the contrary, it’s amazing in many ways. The reason I wrote all this down is that it took me by surprise how far I’d gone into my sunk cost, and it made me reevaluate many of my past choices (no, I’m not divorcing my wife). I invite you, dear reader, to do the same, and now please excuse me while I go to the Apple store online and spend an insane amount of money on a new laptop.

There is a 3rd but very niche yet infuriating problem that relates to both of the issues above that not many people care about, as it relates to me being Polish. All the Polish Mac users I know install Karabiner-Elements as one of the first apps after getting a new Mac. This software allows for remapping the keyboard, most importantly swapping the right ⌘ with right ⌥ key, in order to get Alt Gr (which is required to input Polish characters) right next to the space, so that you can press it with your thumb and not die. There is no way to achieve the same thing on the iPad with an external keyboard. Unless you make the keyboard yourself I guess. This niche problem remains niche, but illustrates perfectly what’s wrong with the iPad. ↩︎
Side-note: how often does sunk cost fallacy apply to software projects? How many projects were you part of, dear reader, when a decision was made to stick to old, buggy, messy ways of doing things simply because “we’ve already invested so much time and effort into this system”? Food for thought. ↩︎

A false sense of security

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Marc Andreessen writes about how ill-equipped the United States is to handle the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and concludes that it’s due to the fact that the America lost its ability to “build” things, be it medical equipment, infrastructure, or financial mechanisms that’d allow the federal government to support its citizens better.

There’s a particular paragraph that stood out to me and made me think about a particular lack-of-readiness aspect of COVID-19 epidemic, not only in the US, but all over the world and in particular in Western Europe:

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

It is indeed unbelievable how poorly is the United States prepared to face an outbreak such as this. European countries aren’t much better, with photographs of improvised hospital wards and morgues in worst hit areas all over the news, stories of medical professionals being forced to work without protective gear, etc.

I can’t stop but think that “the Western world” couldn’t fathom this would happen simply because of its false sense of security. We are the richest countries with highest medical standards, enormous amounts of money and best infrastructure in the world. If China, Taiwan and South Korea can handle it, surely we can, too. Sadly, some of our leaders didn’t take the threat seriously, with Donald Trump famously and foolishly comparing the outbreak to the common flu. And that’s March, when signs that the virus is indeed extremely contagious were clearly visible already.

And it’s not like there weren’t any warning signs. The world knew it wasn’t prepared, and at least in the US the last 4 administrations didn’t do anything about improving the level of their country’s preparedness, and Donald Trump’s administration cancelled early-warning program to detect coronaviruses just months before the current outbreak. They even did pandemic-response-exercises that modelled a situation very much like the one we’re having now, but the administration ignored the findings.

Silliness of Trump aside, many European politicians minimized the threat as well, with UK or Sweden being the most visible examples, and I sincerely believe the real reason behind the delayed response was a belief that our advanced healthcare systems will simply “handle it.” Some—like The Netherlands or Germany—indeed avoided overcrowding its hospitals and ICUs. Others didn’t, like Italy, Spain or the United States, despite having one of the highest critical care beds per capita in the world.

If COVID-19’s outbreak could teach us anything, it should change the way we approach threats, and the way we heed to experts’ advice. Because our lives and our economies were turned upside down overnight, which means we’re not ready, and the sense of security is indeed false.

dotGo 2019

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 18:26:57 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I went to Paris to attend dotGo (thanks, MessageBird!), one of the biggest Go conferences in Europe. dotGo lasts only one day, and it’s single-track, but it’s a solid offering with great organization, excellent venue and awesome talks. I realize I sound like a dotGo commercial, but as a former academic I remain amazed at how much better professional conferences are, and in the case of dotGo we’re talking orders of magnitude.

Not all of the dotGo 2019 talks were brilliant, but I see even that as an advantage; it’s easy to make a good conference by putting an all-star speaker line-up. It doesn’t allow for younger, less known people in the community to present anything, though, and I think dotGo organizers’ decision to present a mix of established engineers and newcomers was very successful. They also succeeded in having a variety of topics, and many of the talks weren’t necessarily Go-specific. Sure,

advanced, Go-specific topics

were prominently represented, with Daniel Martí’s optimization talk a prime example, and Dave Cheney’s talk about constants, probably the best talk of the whole conference. There was also a perfectly mediocre talk about Go GC, because, as we all know, no Go conference is complete without a GC talk. These are the kind of talks everyone going to a Go-related conference expects. You can learn more about internals of the language and some of its more obscure features, and that’s great. But then there’s the second kind of talks, my personal favorite, a “meetup-talk”, or

“I had this problem, and I’ve been trying to solve it”

-talk. It’s when an engineer comes on stage, and tells us about an unusual problem they’ve been having, and they walk us through their reasoning, and iterative attempts at finding a solution. Basically, something we can all easily relate to as developers.

Ignat Korchagin, a systems engineer at CloudFlare, spoke about his attempts of using Go as a scripting language, and ended up taking a deep dive into how the Linux kernel executes “shebang” lines that start all scripts. An excellent talk that everyone should watch, not necessarily only engineers interested in Go.

But then there was Ellen Körbes’ excellent talk about “phallic object generation” (oh yeah). Ellen, a transgender woman, gave the coolest background story for her talk:

Installing a vagina makes the body go “oh noes there’s a huge gash here I better close it asap!!” To avoid that happening, there are dilators, and not dilating for even a single day may be catastrophic. Problem: Airport security loves to take them away. Solution: Let’s make 3D printable dilators… with Go!

Well if you want to captivate your audience’s attention, waving a 3D printed penis-shaped object is definitely one way to do it. And if you thought Körbes just wanted to be sensational and didn’t really have much to say, you’d be wrong; her “let’s try to 3d print with Go” journey was very interesting and her presentation very well prepared. Go watch it.

dotGo is of course a major conference, so it naturally attracts big names from big companies, working on huge projects. That’s the last talk category, aka

“I’m a big-shot working on big problems, and I wanted to show you something cool.”

We had three highlights that fall into said category:

“Multi-module repositories” by Google’s Jean de Klerk, which covers an interesting situation of having multiple Go modules within single repository. A problem, hopefully, nobody but giant corporations should have.
“A dive into RISC-V” by Jess Frazelle, of Docker/Google/Microsoft/Github fame. It was a bit of a disappointment, because Jess “xrandr goddess” Frazelle’s Linux laptop refused to work with the conference beamer, and instead of live demos of RISC-V Go binaries, we got a long historical rant about computer architectures and firmware. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
and finally “Better x86 Assembly Generation with Go” by Uber’s Michael McLoughlin. That one deserves more than a <li>.

What McLoughlin presented was, at least to me, jaw-dropping. He works on optimizing cryptographic operations, and is the author of avo, which is basically a DSL for generating assembly from Go. avo lets the user take advantage of Go native types, function signatures and control structures, thus making writing assembly from within Go (something you should never do unless you work on cray things) much easier and safer. Seeing McLoughlin present how to generate assembly code for SHA-1 hash function with avo was quite spectacular. 😶➡️💥

Wrapping it all up,

going to dotGo was an excellent idea. We got to listen to awesome talks, meet fellow Gophers from all around Europe (actually that’s not true, we didn’t network, because we’re shy), and eat French baguette. Can’t put a price on any of that! Or actually you can, and it’s not expensive; it’s all a 4-hour-long train ride away from Amsterdam and the conference fees are very reasonable, so there’s really no reason for other Gophers not to go next year.

See you all at dotGo 2020!

Auto Emoción

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 18:26:57 +0100

Most of you probably don’t know, but about 5 months ago, Karolina and I bought a beautiful, red, 2013 Seat Leon coupé. We sold it today, because of our upcoming move to the Netherlands where we won’t need it, and also because it’s a major hassle moving a car to NL (a proper European federation cannot happen soon enough). It was our first car and despite the fact that we’re both pretty left-leaning, bike-riding, train-loving hippies, we were surprised how much our car–a petrol-burning, city-clogging thing–grew on us. Here is a couple of observations we made about it.

Karolina preparing for yet another hike, somewhere in central Italy.

We didn’t use our car on a daily basis. In fact, it lived in the garage for the great majority of time, even though all of our friends told us we’d start using the car for commuting once we got it. That didn’t happen, but we did end up putting more than 6000 kms on it during our 5 months of ownership, which could be considered “a lot”. We’re thus happy to report that it is in fact possible and, given that you live in a densely populated city, easy to have a car and not use it on a daily basis. And we’re happy to report that our little Seat completed its mission of taking us on numerous Alpine trips flawlessly.
Cars are expensive. Really expensive. And it’s not only the costs of ownership, but taxes, windscreen replacements (long story), winter tires, check-ups and insurance all put a major dent on a monthly budget. And the thing is, you don’t really realize it until you get rid of the car, take a look at your expenses and see how suddenly you’ve a lot of money to spare. Or at least we didn’t, but food for thought, car owners–calculate how much money owning a car costs you and if you’re really getting the expected value out of it.
This being said, we grew attached to our car. Even Karolina, who is definitely not a car person, started referring to it as “auto emoción” (she even started doing a decent Catalan accent, Sergi), and we kept anthropomorphising it, which is something one should really be ashamed of. I guess I was always a car person, but until recently one without a driver’s license, so I kinda forgot about it, and kinda didn’t realize how deep my love for cars is. Well, it’s deep. It’s deep to such a degree that I’ve spent a whole day today browsing autoscout24.nl and marktplaats.nl. (I’m staying home because I’m sick, okay? I’m not that bad.) So I’m afraid I will buy a car again once we settle down in NL, despite the fact that we don’t need one, and that it makes no sense to own one. I guess I’m embarrassed to admit that a perfectly capable rental VW diesel is so off-putting to me that I’d rather spend much more money on something else, simply because I like it better.
Finally, for all the petrolheads out there: our Seat had a 1.8 petrol engine with 177 bhp, a dual-clutch automatic gearbox, an FR sports trim and was the perfect teenager’s car. And yes, 177 bhp in a golf-sized car is plenty, it went like stink once you put your foot down. Is that an important property of a car used primarily for long-distance trips? Not necessarily, although it is fun, and paradoxically safe, because you will always make it off of the on-ramp on the autobahn, and you’ll never have trouble overtaking trucks. Would I buy a car like this again? Probably not. Sport suspension is cool when you’re 18, or when you actually intend to take the car onto the track on weekends, otherwise it’s just uncomfortable. The whole teenage-targeted features like “sport mode” and paddle shifters (yeah) end up being used every once in a blue moon, and I wouldn’t go for any of that again. If you’re looking for a relatively cheap, good looking, sporty hatchback, though, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Leon SC. I also recommend going for the 1.8 engine, because it revs so happily, and isn’t that much more expensive to run if driven normally most of the time. (Consumer advice: I’ve driven the 1.4 and it’s fun, too, but lacks oomph. Cupra, on the other hand, is very expensive and too brash. And diesels suck, because, well, they are diesels.)

So yeah, we bid farewell to our car, and we hope the new owner will treat it well. And since, after finding a job, a flat, and booking a truck, this was our last item on the checklist, we are now fully ready for moving to Amsterdam.

ECM is finally streaming, and I'm here to tell you what's good

Sat, 02 Dec 2017 18:26:57 +0100

As some of you might have heard, the legendary Munich label ECM finally jumped on the streaming bandwagon. Yes, Manfred, I wholeheartedly agree that the beautiful music your label publishes demands to be listened on CDs and LPs, but these are harder and harder to take on a plane. With iPod Classic not sold anymore and iTunes morphing into Apple Music, music lovers will soon be left with only 3rd party solutions to keep actual music files on their smartphones. So thank you, herr Eicher, for allowing us to stream your whole catalog in 96 kbps Ogg Vorbis Spotify streams. (Did Keith Jarrett sign off on that btw? Nevermind, I know he didn’t. )

The New York Times recently published a list of their 21 “essential” ECM albums, and I agree with many of their picks. But at the end of the day they are just The New York Times, so what would they know? Here are my favorite ECM albums, which you should listen to at once. My list is of course highly subjective, but my taste is known to be notoriously better than NYT’s. In no particular order:

Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous, Roy Haynes—“Trio Music Live In Europe” (1984)

This album, recorder live in Switzerland and published in 1984, captures Chick Corea’s trio with Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous and the legendary Roy Haynes in fantastic shape. Corea’s rhythmic style is perfectly matched by Vitous’ virtuosity and Haynes’ explosive madness. The album contains great interpretations of standards, as well as compositions written by each musician (notably the fantastic “Mirovisions” which closes the record), but the real gem of “Trio Music Live in Europe” is Corea’s solo piece, which he starts by a heretic interpretation of Scriabin’s Prelude No. 2 (Op. 11), and then transitions into a wild improvisation.

It is, in essence, everything I love about Chick Corea. The untamed energy of rhythm, a complete disregard for the tradition of piano as a classical instrument, and free mixing of musical styles. The man is the Tarantino of jazz piano. ❤️

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette—“Standards, Vol. 1” (1983)

Of all the legendary “Standards” albums by Jarrett’s famous “standards trio,” this one remains my favorite. Partly for nostalgic reasons (this was the very first time I heard Jarrett’s piano), partly because it’s perfect in every conceivable way.

Rumor has it that when they recorded the “standards” no one understood why would you release a double album consisting solely of standards. Wasn’t this a bit boring? Turns out it wasn’t, turns out it was a beginning of one of the most famous trios in the history of jazz music. Keith Jarrett Trio, as it’s become known as, was all about subtlety and playful improvisation, building tension and emotions with delicate details, careful articulation and subdued dynamics. Here, in their masterful interpretation of Bobby Troup’s “The Meaning Of The Blues” which opens their first “standards” album, you can hear it all.

If only the pianist kept his mouth shut, right?

Pat Metheny Group—“Offramp” (1982)

Pat Metheny was already cool in 1982. He released “Bright Size Life” with Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses a couple of years earlier, and the record made him and his bandmates famous in the jazz world. He had a great sound, kinda fusion but somehow more fresh. And he played the guitar—not saxophone, and not trumpet. And he was avant-garde enough to be interesting, but pleasant and easy-to-listen-to enough to become a staple of music libraries of people who don’t really care about music, but want to have “tasteful” albums in their “tasteful”, post-modern homes.

This was the very key to success for his new band—the unimaginatively named Pat Metheny Group—which he formed with Lyle Mays, Steve Rodby, Nana Vasconcelos and Dan Gottlieb. But before Pat Metheny Group became stale and boring, they released a couple of great albums, and my favorite of those is “Offramp.” It’s fantastically played, very eclectic in its musical influences, but most importantly it contains “Are you going with me?”, which might just be the most famous composition of the group.

It’s not only about the amazing sounds of Mays’ synthesizers and Metheny’s guitar, but also the expressive improvisation that spans almost 9 minutes without anything that could resemble a theme. It’s a record that really changed the way I think about music. Brad Mehldau says it’s his favorite, too.

Keith Jarrett—“Sun Bear Concerts” (1978) and “Rio” (2011)

6 hours and 35 minutes, that’s how long this album is. Originally released as a 6 CD set costing around €60, can now be yours for €9,99/month, and you can have it in your car and in your pocket—exciting times we live in. But I digress.

This is a mostly unknown set of concerts recorded in Japan in 1978, a couple of years after the famous Köln Concert, which established Jarrett as a solo piano improviser emperor (at least it did for me). There are five concerts here, recorded in Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo and Sapporo, and the 6th CD contains just encores. Here’s one from Sapporo:

As you can hear, the record captures Jarrett’s “rhythmic” and “percussive” phase, reminiscent of his Köln sound, but more… free? (“Free” as in “free jazz”). It’s amazingly good, although I admit I’ve never been able to listen through the whole 6 hours. A challenge for my Christmas roadtrip perhaps?

Anyway, now that we can just click on our laptops browsing through ECM’s entire catalogue, it’s exciting to observe how Jarrett’s solo concert sound and style evolved. There’s the “percussive” phase I mentioned that started the whole “solo piano improvisation for over an hour” thing with Köln concert being the most famous and prominent example of; there’s the “classical” phase which covers Paris and La Scala concerts, and of course the absolute masterpiece which is Vienna concert (1992); and then there are his new concerts, like “The Carnegie Hall Concert”, “Paris/London (Testament)”, and “Rio”.

“Rio”, to me, is a special one, because of how mature an improviser it presents. “Rio” is melodic and playful the way “standards trio” very often is, classical the way his late eighties/early nineties concerts were, and rhythmic just like the first concerts. “Rio” captures Jarrett at his very height of improvisational skill, a virtuoso musician with seemingly infinite imagination. Easily one of my favorite albums ever.

Tomasz Stańko Quartet—“Soul of Things” (2002)

It’s amazing that ECM, being such a prestigious and high-profile label, was always open to artists from, hm, unusual countries, Poland included. ECM helped to promote some of Poland’s greatest names in jazz, and Stańko is definitely the biggest of them all.

I remember I used to hate Stańko’s music, because he felt boring and too mainstream (he was always the “default” jazz musician in Polish media), until I saw him live in Warsaw, and later in Bergen, and later in Munich.

He was once asked by a talk show host in Poland whether he heard that his music is considered perfect music for sex, to which he answered that if that’s true then he considers his work to be done. Well if there’s any album of his that would make for great sex music (wait wat?), it’s the Soul of Things.

Dave Holland Quintet—“Extended Play: Live At Birdland” (2003)

Dave Holland’s “Extended Play” is my go-to record I play to people who say what I claim is jazz doesn’t really sound like jazz. Dave Holland Quintet sounds like jazz. In fact, it sounds like a miniature big band, with Robin Eubank’s trombone ❤️ and Chris Potter’s saxophone, with Steve Nelson’s marimba and vibraphone, and Billy Kilson’s drums. Dave Holland himself doesn’t have to do much here. He plays great, and his compositions are of course awesome, but we’ve heard them before and Holland doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore. However, on “Extended Play” we hear that the new jazz, the kind that went through “free” phase, the kind that abandoned be-bop, hard-bop and post-bop sound, the kind that outgrew fusion, can be very fresh and yet still sound like… jazz.

It’s also my go-to energy-bomb album. Nothing has the energy of “Metamorphos”. Except for Shostakovich’s 11th symphony of course, but that’s too long.

“And the Weak Suffer What They Must?”

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 22:26:57 +0100

I always slightly disliked Yanis Varoufakis. Strike that, actually I always thought he’s a bit of a clown. Motorbike-riding, leather-jacket-clad, attention-seeking, populist, arrogant clown. Worst of all, he was part of that annoying movement of European politicians that rejected the narrative I believed in, namely that:

One must always pay ones debts.¹
EU and its institutions always know what they’re doing.
Countries must be extremely careful with public spending and apply strict austerity measures when facing economic difficulties.²

Varoufakis, an outspoken critic of European Union and its institutions, and a prime minister in a populist government was in stark opposition to that narrative, and thus to everything I knew about public-sector economics (gives you an idea of how deep my knowledge was). I really hated the man, and felt sorry for the Greek people that they had a politician like this, in as critical a function as their finance minister, in the midst of such an enormous crisis.

But then one day I was stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere. In wealthy Germany, where trains always run on time, and they never stand for hours in completely random villages of Bavaria. And as I was silently swearing to murder every DB employee on the planet, I stumbled upon an article in The New Statesman, by none other than Varoufakis himself. The article, click-baitily titled “Exclusive: Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece” looked like a perfect way to kill some time and amuse myself a bit at how silly the former Greek finance minister was.

Then it turned out that maybe he wasn’t silly after all. The article was good. It was actually excellent in the way it shed light on the inner workings of the European Union and its secret, behind-close-doors-only meetings of the informal “eurogroup.” It didn’t play well with my strong belief in the sanctity of EU and Brussels bureaucrats, but something told me there might be some truth to it. Also, I saw no reason for Varoufakis to lie; his political career was over anyway. So when I recently found his book that gives his first-hand account of the €-crisis, I bought it, and read it. And boy was I in for a treat.

“And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future” is a fascinating, in-depth dive into the history of the common European currency, but also the history of post-war global economics, and the economic underpinnings of what we now know as the European Union. In a similar way to David Graeber’s “Debt”, Varoufakis’ book is an enlightening text, especially to a reader unfamiliar with nuances of global economics (i.e., 90% of the world population) and its history. But while Graeber’s book dives deep into concepts and ancient history, Varoufakis is all about here and now, and what we can do about it. Why did I find particularly interesting then, and what made me change my mind about Varoufakis?

For one, he sticks to the facts. Yes, he peddles a certain ideology, but unlike your average TV-populist, Varoufakis actually knows what he’s talking about. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, he points out systemic problems in EU’s core design, which allows it to be run by anonymous bureaucrats that aren’t subjected to any political scrutiny or indeed any form of democratic process. The image of European Union that Varoufakis’ account presents is not the European Union I though I knew, and not the one I like. Politics aside, it’s a fascinating book that debunks many myths of pop-economics. It describes in detail how the global trade was shaped by the Bretton Woods system and how Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard destroyed the world order. It reminds us that the EU that we know today was born out of a “European Coal and Steel Community,” which Varoufakis calls a “cartel” and makes a pretty good case for it. It finally offers a very detailed account of how the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Found (mis)-handled the €-crisis. And it’s not all horror and despair, oh no—the author actually offers some reasonably compelling political and economic solutions in the appendix (although you still want to pack your bags and flee to Australia after reading the whole book).

“And the Weak Suffer What They Must?” is an excellent read, one that every European should get acquainted with (unless of course they are afraid of big spiders; then again I hear Canada is nice, too). It made me hate my continent a little bit more, but I learned a valuable lesson: never judge an economist by his political affiliation, his clothing style or affection for motorcycles. ❤️ you, Yanis!

Not a big believer in that for a while now. ↩︎
This is something that resonates with many Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, because all our economies went through “shock-therapy” economic plans with extreme belt-tightening policies that, some say, saved our economies. ↩︎

Jazz Music in 2016

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 19:19:57 +0100

2016 was, as The Verge put it, “a good year for weird jazz.”¹ I’d go even further: both 2015 and 2016 show that jazz is an evolving genre, and that it became more exciting than ever before. Influences of hip-hop and electronic music are becoming more visible, new artists pop-up in places you’d never expect (I’m looking at you, LA) and push music into new territories. So while I do appreciate The Verge’s recommendations (especially Shabaka and The Ancestors),² I had to add some of my own. All of them represent that very shift in jazz’s esthetics, so if you’re looking for a review of Redman & Mehldau duo, you’ll be a bit disappointed. If you enjoy fresh sound, however, read on.

My number one most-often listened to jazz album of 2016 is “Red Sky” by the Brooklyn band Moon Hooch. What Moon Hooch does is difficult to define. Sometimes you find their albums listed under “jazz”, other times under “dance” or “techno.” They got two saxophones (Mike Wilbur and Wenzl McGowen), a drum kit (James Muschler), electronic effects, and tons of energy. They are funky, and even though they don’t improvize much, I’d still say it’s jazz. The right kind: weird, entertaining, new. Also the kind you can (have to?) dance to.

Together, As One by Dinosaur

My second recommendation is from the UK. It’s “Together, As One” by a British quartet called Dinosaur. Dinosaur is a new band led by one of my favorite performers and composers, Laura Jurd (of solo-career fame). It features Laura on the trumpet, Elliot Galvin on keyboards, Conor Chaplin on the bass and Corrie Dick on the drums.³ All these artists are very young, and I think they are all somewhat associated with Chaos Collective—a label and, huh, a loose association of musicians. I don’t know what else to call them, but the bottom line is, these people play together a lot in different bands, various configurations, and it’s always at least intriguing, and very often excellent music. Dinosaur’s debut is no different. An impressionistic, contemporary jazz with a lot of electronic sound, folk melodies and soul. I know it all sounds unlikely, but they pull it off.

Channel The Spirits by The Comet Is Coming

And finally, we come to the last recommendation, and we’re back to square one, i.e., back to Shabaka Hutchings. For those of you who don’t know, Hutchings is a London-born, Barbados-raised saxophonist mostly known for being the leader of one of the hottest new jazz bands, Sons of Kemet, where he plays crazy Caribbean-infused jazz alongside two drummers and a tubist. He is also the leader of the aforementioned “Afro-futurist” jazz band Shabaka and the Ancestors, and on top of all that he plays with the electronic jazz trio The Comet Is Coming. He is as restless as he is creative. “Channel The Spirits,” trio’s debut, is a psychedelic album that takes inspiration from jazz, electronic and science-fiction (yup, you read it right). Much like Dinosaur’s strange mixture of styles, The Comet is Coming manages to positively surprise. It can be slightly exhausting, but listening to it is a very rewarding experience nonetheless.

So these are my three favorite jazz albums of the passing year. I’m looking forward to seeing jazz evolve even more in 2017, and I’m hoping it will be only musically, and not politically or economically surprising year. Have a great 2017, everyone!

Seriously, though, how is it that The Verge publishes articles about avant-garde jazz music? And that recent piece on Adam Driver? Unexpected. ↩︎
There are only three compared to last year’s six; I didn’t really listen to jazz music much this year. Whitney, Baroness, Radiohead, Sleater-Kinney, Kendrick Lamar and O.S.T.R. dominated my iPhone in 2016. ↩︎
It’s worth mentioning that Corrie Dick recorded a magnificent album last year. I regret I didn’t know it earlier, it would’ve made the top of my list of best 2015 albums. ↩︎

bora—an AWS Cloudformation wrapper

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 21:42:23 +0100

Last weekend I spent some time working on a small project: bora.¹ It’s a simple wrapper around AWS Cloudformation, so obviously everyone’s question is: why the hell would I want yet another Cloudformation wrapper? tl;dr answer is: because all the ones which are available suck. But let me elaborate.

Troposphere-based tools are inelegant. Troposphere itself is poorly documented, and I dislike how the Python code mixes with actual Cloudformation JSON code in it. It’s also very often non-lintable (or gets unreadable after linting).
I ❤️ Python just like the next guy, but it’s not very well suited for things like CI/CD pipelines. I see this a lot in clients’ setups: first your jenkins job needs to pull the code, then create a virtualenv and pip the requirements, then lint (hah!), and then, hopefully, run. With compiled languages (and Golang especially), you only need to download a binary and run it. The only thing you have to care about is the underlying architecture and OS (which, in 99% of the CI/CD cases, is elf x86_64).
I want to embrace Cloudformation’s new neat & clean YAML capabilities. JSON is ugly. Troposphere, as mentioned already, is ugly too. Combining YAML with some Jinja-like markup for variables and loops, we could end up with something very elegant and readable.

With these requirements in mind, I began hacking, and I’m happy to say that bora, even though it’s in its earliest stages of development, fulfills all of them already.

Bora is written in Golang, which makes it fast, cross-platform, and portable. While you do need to setup a build environment for Golang if you want your jenkins job to build the tool (not sure why, but whatever), you only need to build it once per version. Other than that, all you need to do is put it some place your CI/CD can curl from, et voilà, you’re ready to run the binary. For pipelines that involve many Cloudformation runs, this saves a significant amount of time, and reduces run-time dependencies to a bare minimum.

Furthermore, bora takes YAML templates as input, but also accepts YAML meta-templates augmented with Golang’s text/template markup, which allows for setting variables and looping. It’s especially convenient when you need to deploy, say, multiple EC2 instances that differ in some details.

At this point bora is able to generate YAMLs, deploy, update and terminate stacks, and handle errors gracefully (you’d be surprised how few Cloudformation wrappers do this). Assuming roles for multi-account deployment is coming soon, along with other neat features. Stay tuned!

Because winds, because clouds, because cloud formations… ↩︎

“Between the world and me”

Sat, 19 Nov 2016 21:31:23 +0100

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.

My recent disillusioning trip notwithstanding, I am still very much in love with the US, but Ta-Nehisi Coates puts things into perspective. Much like sexism is often difficult to notice for males until a woman points it out, white people tend not to realize just how huge a problem racism in America still is.

Coates’ book is bitter and sometimes hard to read (especially that it’s in a form of a letter to his son), but you should read it nonetheless. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

(I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, so please don’t take it as a comment on recent presidential election)

iPhone 7 Plus and its Two Lenses

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

To some, Apple’s yesterday keynote wasn’t all that impressive. After all, the new iPhone 7 doesn’t look all that new, the new Apple Watch looks exactly like the old one, and minor improvements aside (water resistance, GPS for the watch, new processors), there wasn’t really anything impressive shown in San Francisco last night. Except one small detail—the camera(s) on the upcoming iPhone 7 Plus.

This is the photograph Apple showed during the keynote, initially leading everyone to believe it’s been taken with a “high-end camera”:

only to later explain it’s been shot with the upcoming iPhone 7 Plus, which features two lenses—one wide-angle, and one tele—that are then used by iPhone’s software to infer the depth of field, and to create the bokeh effect. While far from perfect (there’s something wrong with how the face of the model is separated from the background), this, to me, is a major breakthrough in smartphone photography. As the technology matures, we will see the “bokeh software” improve, and the dual-lens technology perhaps applied to other areas (VR?), but most importantly it’ll render cameras obsolete, to most people at least.

I can’t wait for this day to come.

Hi, 🇺🇸

Sun, 28 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

(I’m biased towards everything American, so despite a relatively US-critical tone, you may be offended by this post if you’re too European.)

I remember watching “The Cosby Show” with my parents in the nineties. It was a crazy time of massive political change in Poland, and my parents were always pointing at the fictional Huxtables as role models. Me and my father were even replicating Cliff Huxtable’s way of making chili, and we’d make tons of inside jokes that we’d always gladly explain to any guests we’d be having. We didn’t realize at that point how controversial The Cosby Show was in the 80s in the US. What was lost on Polish viewers was that the show’s depiction of black people was atypical to say the least. The Huxtable family wasn’t poor, hell, it wasn’t even middle class. A lawyer (a black woman!) and a senior obstetrician, raising a family of 5 in a fantastic brownstone in Brooklyn Heights—that’s how all well-educated Americans lived, right? We didn’t see the controversy, and missed out on some of the social commentary, but we still enjoyed Bill Cosby’s jokes, his colorful sweaters, his fictional family’s great parenting advice, etc. Of course not only the Huxtables were our role models, but the US was depicted as the promised land, which in the 90s it clearly was. They won the cold war, they became the sole superpower, Fukuyama announced “the end of history”—no one had any doubts.

Then at the break of the century, a new world begun. 9.11 happened, W. & co. took power,¹ the 2008 banking crisis hit the world hard, the US middle class shrinked, Wall Street was occupied, and, as a proverbial nail to the coffin, they now tell me that Bill Cosby, my beloved Dr. Huxtable, is (allegedly) a sex offender. America of my childhood is gone for good, along with the post-cold-war Reagan-Thatcher world order formerly known as “new.”

Yet besides all that, there has never been a country I felt so emotionally strong about as the United States.

Brownstones in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Huxtables lived in a similar one in Brooklyn Heights. Sadly, they wouldn’t be able to afford one these days.

I think the thing that I always found most attractive in the US is its inclusiveness. Yes, there’s Donald and the Tea Party, and yes, my view as a white male is definitely biased, but I can’t think of any other country in the world where you’d be able to blend in like you can in the US.²

I landed on JFK and took a cab to Manhattan from there, and my driver was Tariq, a Pakistani American. “Immediately after 9.11 it was really hard for us here,” he said while we were stuck in traffic on Grand Central Parkway, “but now things have changed and in New York I don’t really feel anyone would ever doubt I’m as American as gooseberry pie.” Tariq spoke very fondly of Europe, too, where some of his relatives live, and was very curious about how we’re handling the migrant crisis. He was very happy to hear it’s my first time in America, and wished me a great vacation, and in the end offered me his phone so that I could call my friends in East Village from a US number (sadly, there’s no T-Mobile store on JFK and all the sim-cards available at the airport aren’t exactly good value).

It’s a cliché to write it, but the cultural and ethnic “melting pot” you witness in New York is, again, incomparable to anything I’ve ever seen, and I did quite some traveling. From African American Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn to Asian (mostly Korean and Chinese, I presume) neighborhoods of Flushing, Queens, New York city has it all. All races, all languages, all cuisines. And yes, America definitely has a problem with racism and class society, but from my perspective it seems they are better at acknowledging the problem and trying to do something about it. Can’t really say that about, e.g., France or Sweden, or many other European countries.

Flushing, Queens. You can have great dumplings around here.

I’ve been living in different European countries for about 7 years now, and I felt welcome everywhere. People generally speak good English, and there are little to no bureaucratic or administrative issues moving around thanks to the miracle of the European Union and the Schengen agreement. But somewhere in the back of my head I know I will never be able to become German. Or Norwegian, or Dutch, or French. Probably not even British. Europe’s tormented history and still largely national-centric politics take its toll, and it’s just much harder, if not impossible, to “fully integrate” (which can mean different things to different people). US is much simpler in this regard. If you speak at least some basic English, respect American values, wave the flag on 4th of July and eat turkey on Thanksgiving, you’re one of them. So much easier in a country built on immigration I guess, where around 80% of population identifies with foreign ancestry, and where millions of immigrant visas are issued and hundreds of thousands of immigrants are naturalized every year. It’s funny that, it would seem to me, Americans are one of the very few nations that is able to reconcile this inclusiveness and multi-culturalism with national pride. In Europe, you’re either a nationalist or left-wing, there seem to be less and less room for middle ground.

American flags are everywhere. Here decorating a façade of a beautiful townhouse in Charlestown, Boston.

But no matter how much in love with the US I am, I must admit that after the initial elation at seeing the NBC studios building and traveling every day on the N line across Queensboro Bridge faded, disillusion kicked in.

Greyhound express bus from Boston to New York goes through rural Massachusetts and Connecticut, which are relatively boring, but then enters the state of New York in Bronx county, and the first sight of glorious New York City are housing project high-rises. Plenty of these in Europe, too (though nobody calls them “housing projects”), but not like this, not like in South Bronx. You can really see the poverty there, although it’s difficult to put a finger on how you’re able to see it. It doesn’t feel safe there, either.

Crime in New York city and most of the US has been in decline for many years now, and nothing seems to indicate this trend would change. But income differences get bigger every year, especially in New York. The issue of America’s shrinking middle class is nuanced, but from a European visitor’s perspective the income differences are vivid. And if you have friends in New York, you know the dinner conversation will be mostly about the insane living cost in the city. The NY Times article I linked to above said that “about 45 percent of New York City households said they spent 35 percent or more of their income on housing.” Seeing how the new 432 Park Avenue (with One57 not far behind) rises like a middle finger towards all the poor in the center of Manhattan, I can see why so many New York residents opposed to its construction.

View on Upper Manhattan, with super tall 432 Park Avenue prominently on the right, and One57 on the left. They were built so that all the billionaires could have a good view on those poor souls who were only able to afford apartments on the Upper West or Upper East Side. Have a look at the full-size picture.

But it’s not only that the US Economy has been going through hoops since 2008 that the US became less attractive to us Europeans. It’s also because Europe became so good that we take it for granted. That we have clean, cheap and reliable public transportation, that there’s universal free (or very affordable) health care, that 25 days of paid leave per year is nothing special and that decent education is for everyone—we expect all that. From an Eastern European perspective the fascination with the United States is of course easier to explain. For decades, we were very angry with Western Europe, and we felt it’s been looking down upon us, whereas the US was the land of opportunity. It still very much seems that way, because reactions to people hearing “I’m Polish” are very different on both sides of the Atlantic. But it’s us, Eastern Europeans, that especially forget how great Europe has become, and how vastly Poland itself improved compared to the country ~~our parents~~ we grew up in.³ So the disillusionment stems from a comparison between how “sooper-freaking-awesome” we expected the US to be, and how “awesome” it actually is.

Because it still, undoubtedly, is.

This was a very personal trip to me for sentimental reasons (where sentiment comes from watching television and movies, of course), and it couldn’t have been as great as it was if it wasn’t for the many friends that made it such. Huge thank you from me and Karolina to Yvonne, Martijn, David, Karen, Friederike, McCoy Tyner, an anonymous fireman from Cambridge, MA (whom we exchanged opinions about firetrucks with), and the whole Cloudreach NY team.

As Polish neo-conservatists, my whole family was initially a strong supporter of both wars. I am ashamed of it now. We all are, right? ↩︎
Except, perhaps, London. ↩︎
Let me give some extra context for the non-Polish readers. Poland, these days a strongly anti-socialist country, has always been very close to the US in terms of political cooperation and general admiration. Polish political class has always been looking up to the US, the US has also been historically our strongest ally (or at least it is very often depicted as such). Polish political scene itself is very bizarre by European standards, because it lacks any sort of left-wing party (except for post-communists that don’t have any credibility after numerous corruption scandals and young, new parties that haven’t gotten much traction yet). So while Poles generally acknowledge higher living standards and better economic conditions in Western Europe, when it comes to socio-political issues they are much closer to the program of the Democratic party in the US (and much more on its conservative than the socialist end of the spectrum; no one would vote for Bernie there). After 50 years of communism the general distrust towards welfare programs and state-owned enterprises is pretty easy to understand, and as a side effect I’d say most Poles esteem the US much higher than Western Europe, considering it a more “noble” emigration destination. ↩︎

Dehydration—a cautionary tale

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been riding bikes for a very long time, and although I’ve had breaks, I can safely say I’ve been riding bicycles throughout my whole life. I am lucky to have never had any serious accidents or injuries while cycling, other than the occasional my-shoes-are-still-clipped-into-the-pedals thing,¹ I’ve never been doored, I never smashed with my bike into things that generally don’t like being smashed into (that’s a lie; it’s just that injuries were never serious), and I was rear-ended by other bikers only on a few occasions.

Today I went for a quick ride. It was a short one, but since I only got a non-city bike a couple of weeks back,² I’m still building up my strength and endurance, and, sadly, 50km-long rides are my standard for now. It’s a sunny Sunday in Munich, with a temperature of about 31°C (this is like 88°F, ‘Mericans), clear skies, and I decided to explore some trails around the Isar river. It was all going well, until I reached a part of the trail which was really more akin to a single track than a road of any sort. Riding there on my 32c tires, and climbing even small hills, and being in the proximity of a river which makes the climate hot-and-humid was very exhausting. When I reached the asphalt road and headed towards Neufahrn, I realized I’m running out of water. By the time I turned into Olympiastraße, I was getting a bit weak, and about 10kms from Munich I had to stop.

What do you do when you have no food, no water, there’s little-to-no shade around, the temperature goes up to 32°C, and there’s no shop or creek or anything like that within a kilometer?³ You call your wife and cry for help, that’s what you do. You call her, apologize for being an idiot who only took one 500ml bottle of water (17oz, ‘Mericans) and no food, and ask her to bring you some. And then you fall on the ground and just lie there, trying not to pass out. And then luckily a group of cyclists stops by seeing you dying, and they give you water and sport-bars (which are just like regular chocolate bars only more expensive and in a more shiny packaging), and you jump on your bike and slowly ride home, and you meet your wife on the way and everything is fine again.

It’s an embarrassing story with a happy ending, but I’m sharing it here as a warning for anyone trying to be as stupid as I was. Dehydration in cycling is a serious problem; it actually is a direct cause of many deaths during famous road races, and should never be taken lightly. I got lucky, because some very good people stopped and helped me (even though I wasn’t able to speak; I was in a really bad shape), and because I have a wonderful wife that rode to my rescue like a knight in shiny armor on a white horse. But I was lucky, and it could’ve ended in a hospital.

Stay hydrated, kids!

The thought process is always the same: “Will I manage to clip-out on time? I surely will. Definitely. There’s still time. Just a bit more. Oh shit.” ↩︎
There’s a post about the bike coming. ↩︎
In my defense, years of cycling in Western Norway don’t really prepare you for riding in the heat. ↩︎

MFA tokens in your terminal

Sun, 26 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

All the stuff described here I learned from my dear colleague Giulio. I’m sharing it here because it’s cool, and because I don’t think he’d share it anywhere other than our internal mailing list.

Do you use MFA a lot? Are you tired of reaching for your phone to check those codes on Google Authenticator app? Perhaps you’ve been logging to too many different AWS accounts because your work requires that? 😔 Here’s a couple paragraphs of advice that will ease your pain.

First, install oath-toolkit. On OS X you can get it with homebrew. Once it’s installed, you’d want to define a function for your shell, like this perhaps:

function mfa () {
oathtool --base32 --totp "$(cat ~/.aws/$1.mfa)" ;
}

This specifies an mfa alias which calls oathtool and expects one argument: name of a file (sans extension) inside your ~/.aws/ directory which contains a string that is the base for computing your time-based one-time passwords. To continue the AWS-based example, you can find the code in the AWS console while setting up a new virtual MFA device.

Once you click on “Show secret key for manual configuration,” you’ll be presented with a 64-character string, which you’ll need to put in a ~/.aws/account-name.mfa file. After that, whenever prompted for the MFA token, type mfa account-name in your terminal.

“Hunger makes me a modern girl”

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I know Carrie Brownstein through “Portlandia,” a quirky sketch show she’s been doing with Fred Armisen for the last couple of years. I’m a huge fan of how accurately “Portlandia” pokes fun at alternative-culture so commonly associated with Pacific Northwest.¹ What I learned later, only after doing some research on Fred and Carrie, is that they were both well-known before the show even started. Fred, to a perhaps lesser extent, through SNL, and Carrie, probably to a much greater extent, through Sleater-Kinney.

SNL is obviously not very popular in Europe, but the fact that during my teenage years I have never heard about Sleater-Kinney was always a bit surprising to me. Sure, alternative-scene rock bands from Seattle like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam made its way to (even Eastern) European radio stations, but the much larger phenomenon of what’s known as the “Pacific Northwest scene” remained rather unknown, or at least not commonly known. This way one could, as it turns out, live one’s life all through the crazy 90s and only discover Sleater-Kinney in 2012. Oh, and what a fantastic discovery that was.

“Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl” is Brownstein’s memoir, but really it’s a book about Sleater-Kinney, and what it meant being an indie-rock band member in the 90s US. It’s full of personal stories of struggle, yet written in a way that is neither pretentious nor self-loathing. Carrie Brownstein is a very natural and genuine writer, insightful and funny. “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl” is obviously a book aimed at Sleater-Kinney fans, and as such is most enjoyable for readers familiar with the band, but anyone curious about the independent rock scene of the 90s will find it interesting. I certainly did.

Ok, so this blog entry really isn’t about “Portlandia,” but please go watch it. It’s absolutely brilliant in every way possible. ↩︎

zlib

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Abhishek Jain asks Stack Overflow about the differences between zlib, gzip and Zip, and gets a fascinating and very insightful response from none other than Mark Adler. I particularly like the comment Adler made when the OP asked about referenecs for his answer.

I am the reference, having been part of all of that. This post could be cited in Wikipedia as an original source.

This, to me, is a perfect example of the enormous impact of open source and free software libraries developed in the 80s and 90s have on modern-day computing. All these small components of Linux or *BSD systems that were developed over the years now play such crucial parts in so many complex systems we rely on every day.

Free/open source software developers are the heroes of the internet era, and as such should have monuments built to their glory and schools named after them.

AlphaGo wins with Lee Sedol

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Google Deep Mind’s AlphaGo won two games against the world go champion, Lee Sedol. This is a ginormous triumph of statistical methods in general and machine learning in particular over “symbolic AI.”

I remember writing an essay for a class in philosophy some years ago about the progress of AI game engines and the somewhat unimpressive achievements of Deep Blue. It was of course exciting to see a computer beat a reigning chess world champion, but underneath all the heuristics IBM implemented for chess, it was all “brute force.” Chess has a game tree complexity of 10¹²³, which is huge, but still “traversable” by modern computers using good heuristic functions. Go, on the other hand, was deemed unsolvable by any “brute force” methods, because its game tree complexity is 10³⁶⁰—far too big. I don’t think anyone in 2006 expected that within ten years a computer program will beat the best Go player (I know I didn’t), yet it just happened.

And most importantly, it happened in a more, hm, “intelligent” way. AlphaGo doesn’t just search the state space, it analyses patterns and learns how to play. Again, I cannot stress this enough what an incredible achievement this is for deep learning (aka neural networks). The fact that Google Photos can quickly learn what my photos contain so that I can search for “mountains” even though I didn’t tag/categorize anything in my photo library is very impressive. But the fact that AlphaGo can learn patterns of the most complex board game is just mind-blowing.

All this is not to say that logic-based AI is without merit. Yoav Shoham is right that what he calls “applied philosophy” is an underrated branch of AI these days, but I think the success of machine learning is astonishing in how much it can deliver vs. traditional, logic-based methods, and I don’t agree with Shoham when he says that the “the pendulum has swung too far,” and that there’s too much emphasis on ML in AI research. Given how much ML can deliver, I think the emphasis is well justified.

I, for one, welcome our future AI overlords.

update, Mar 15, 2016: AlphaGo won the match 4:1.

Go vs. Scala

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of Go’s features is that it doesn’t have an excess of features, and frankly, I think that feature is undervalued.

There’s an interesting discussion on Quora about the differences between Golang and Scala.

As a former academic with tendencies towards functional programming, I used to be very tempted by Scala.¹ It offers all the functional goodness without the exoticism of Haskell, and came with reasonably good tools and frameworks. Like Clojure, it’s a functional language you can actually do some work with.

The problem with Scala is, the more advanced you get, the more complicated (unreadable?) your code becomes. I remember that back in grad school the dude who was able to doodle the craziest and mathematically most challenging solution to some problem in Haskell was someone everyone looked up to. But it turns out in the “real world” simplicity always trumps virtuosity and sophistication, which is one of the many reasons I love Golang so much. A language with no “magic,” good concurrency support, great documentation and community that compiles into machine code and runs faster than Python? Yes, please.

Read the whole Quora thread, though, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.

This is not to say that I don’t like Scala. I really do, it’s just that my love for it is, hm, not as unconditional as it used to be. ↩︎

No more LaTeX

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I made jokes about this before, but it actually happened: since I no longer use LaTeX, I removed it from my laptop and got rid of the config from my .vimrc. It’s nothing unusual, but I somewhat feel that the departure from LaTeX marks an important (sic!) moment in my life.

LaTeX was my “gateway drug” to programming. I kid you not. Since I was interested in publishing as a teenager (even ran a small but successful magazine for a while), got very disappointed in MS Word’s DTP capabilities, had no money or supported OS to run Adobe or Quark, LaTeX was for me, sadly, the only option to put my magazine together. A Polish magazine called Linux+ published an article about LaTeX, I went through the tutorial, then through lshort2e.pdf, and got hooked. I was of course impressed by the quality of the output, but most importantly I understood the powerful concept of source code and compilation. LaTeX is of course technically markup and not code,¹ and it’s not exactly compiled but parsed, but still the process and concepts are easily translatable to programming. So then came going through AWK tutorials, and later came C and Perl. And much later came a lot of other stuff, but it all started with LaTeX.

I owe LaTeX a lot. It made my silly little magazine look good, impressing people at the printshop and everyone else who had the slightest idea about publishing. It made writing technical notes on formal logic for my classes in philosophy so much easier. I wrote my master’s and my doctoral theses using it. And yeah, it also made my blog’s most popular blog post.² It is then with a heavy heart that I am writing that I really, really hate LaTeX and am very happy that I don’t have to use it anymore.

I’m not saying “switch to MS Word” or something silly like that, no. But it saddens me that after so many years the open source/free software community did not produce anything more modern, easier to use³ and simply more elegant. LaTeX is a mess, and the underlying TeX typesetting systems dates back to the 70s. It comes in huge tarballs or installers. It has an annoying syntax. Its fonts are as beautiful as they are painful to install. Its error messages are cryptic. The list of problems goes on.

I was actually hoping that the academic community would adopt Pandoc and restrict LaTeX usage to its math formulas syntax, but that didn’t happen. And I suppose Matthias Ettrich hoped the academic community would adopt LyX (which is actually surprisingly good), but that didn’t happen either.

I guess the beauty of leaving the world of academia is that I no longer have to care.

Or rather: it’s most commonly used as a markup language, but is in fact a Turing complete programming language. ↩︎
It is actually astonishing how many people read and share this howto. I never expected to end up in lecture notes for CS and physics classes in places like Colorado State, not to mention reddits and HN of course. ↩︎
By “easier to use” I don’t necessarily mean a GUI. Having a markup language is good. ↩︎

Best Jazz Albums of 2015

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the spirit of 2015 summaries, I felt like sharing my recommendations for the best, in my view, jazz albums of yesteryear. The list is, of course, highly subjective and biased towards contemporary and European jazz.¹ I also admit that the great majority of what I listen to comes from ACT Music label, since many of my favorite artists record for them, and thus it’s somewhat easier for me to explore their catalogue. Nevertheless, I tried to be broader in my picks, which was really easy this year thanks to some very surprising albums from relatively unknown artists. Below are my 6 favorites, with three in the “must listen” category additionally marked with a “💣” (how did internet function without emoji, eh?).

💣 Kamasi Washington—“Epic” (Brainfeeder)

Ok, get this: a relatively unknown artist from Los Angeles *(wut?)* releases his 3-CDs-2hrs-52minutes-long debut which, in my opinion, is at the same time the best jazz album of 2015. Yeah, "Epic" really is, *nomen omen*, quite epic. Kamasi Washington achieved something unique here: he managed to create a very "mainstream" sounding, easy to listen, contemporary jazz record with a lot of free-jazzy, Ornette Coleman-inspired solos and hard bop rhythms. Oh, and he managed to do all this on a 3hr album and not make it boring in any way. Washington is known for recording with hip-hop artists (most notably for working with Kendrick Lamar), and arguably the biggest advantage of his debut is introducing free jazz to younger audiences, but regardless, the album is as exciting, refreshing and enjoyable to just about any audience I can think of. Play it at home, in the morning or evening, on the bus, on the plane and at work. Absorb it.

Michael Wollny, Christian Weber, Eric Schaefer—“Nachtfahrten” (ACT)

Michael Wollny is a well-regarded pianist, at least on the European scene, and his "Nachtfahrten" album solidifies his position as the band leader, improviser and composer. A much calmer, contemplative, and less experimental record than his previous [solo albums](http://michaelwollny.com/michael-wollny-wunderkammer-xxl/) or [[em] trio](http://michaelwollny.com/michael-wollny-wasted-wanted/), "Nachtfarhten" brings beautiful melodies with a touch of melancholy, but never boring or smooth-jazzy. Wollny's lyrical piano is actually closer to Jarrett's "standards trio" than anything else on the jazz scene today, which makes me love his music even more. Play this album in the evenings. Enjoy with a glass of good wine, but skip the book and just contemplate the music.

💣 Adam Bałdych & Helge Lien Trio—“Bridges” (ACT)

Another ACT recording artist and my personal favorite-of-all-favorites, Adam Bałdych, this year with a Norwegian trio led by Helge Lien. I am obviously biased towards Bałdych, because I'm Polish and a weekend-violinist, but I honestly think he's the most interesting jazz artist of the European if not worldwide jazz scene. His folk-sounding acoustic violin, his energetic, sometimes post-bopish Seifert-like improvisations, and the wonderfully melodic support of Helge Lien's piano-double-bass-drums trio make "Bridges" the most original and interesting jazz album I've heard in a very long time. Play it all the time and watch yourself head-banging to the sound of acoustic violin and acoustic double bass. Yeah, that's gonna happen.

Sons of Kemet—“Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do” (Naim Jazz)

Sons of Kemet took the European jazz scene by storm with their 2013 debut ["Burn"](http://www.naimlabel.com/recording-burn.aspx),[^2] so the expectations were really high for their second record. "Lest We Forget..." doesn't dissapoint, but presents the band in a bit of a different style. Yes, they're still a crazy combo of saxophone, tuba (albeit with a new tuba player) and two drum kits, but while "Burn" was pure energy with a small hydrogen bomb on top of that, "Lest We Forget..." is slightly more difficult and much more free in the sense of improvisation and form. To me, it's also more rewarding. Play it *loudly*.

Julian Argüelles—“Tetra” (Whirlwind)

Julian Argüelles comes back with a new band called Tetra to introduce an album titled... "Tetra." This is the most mainstream/conservative album of the 5 recommendations I compiled here, but it's still full of Julian's great improvisations and I'm pretty sure many of his pieces will soon become standards. Play it at a party, play it to people who say they don't like contemporary jazz.

💣Marius Neset—“Pinball” (ACT)

Marius Neset is a genius. He's 30 year old Norwegian saxophonist (from Os near Bergen, mind you), and he likes playing with big bands. "Pinball", his latest album, is full of complicated yet melodic pieces, youthful energy with a touch of "world music" sound. He's got violins, cellos, vibraphones, marimbas, flutes and tambourines, so it is easily the most original sounding jazz album of 2015. And Neset's virtuosity is simply *astonishing*. "Pinball" is fresh and engaging, and next to Bałdych's "Bridges" the album I most frequently listened to last year. Play it carefully, it's a noisy album. Don't get districted, and don't get carried away; you don't want your neighbors hear you dancing to the sound of tenor saxophone and marimba solos.

Honorable mentions

There were of course other great albums I enjoyed. Get The Blessing’s “Astronautilus” (Naim Jazz) was definitely decent, although much less spectacular than 2013 “Lope and Antilope” and their earlier “OC DC” (2011) or “All is Yes” (2008). Another interesting album was “Let Go” (Efpi) by a young, London-based punk-jazz quartet Let Spin. It’s closer to punk than to jazz most of the time, and much more spectacular (and loud) live than in the studio, but still worth checking out. Finally, Brad Mehldau released a compilation of his solo records called “10 years solo” (Nonesuch), which is definitely interesting, but to me somewhat exhausting to go through. His interpretations of rock music favorites are still spot on, though.

I provided Spotify links to all the albums mentioned above (unless they weren’t available on Spotify) to make checking them out as easy as possible,² but I would kindly ask you to consider buying the albums you enjoy. They are all available on iTunes and Amazon, and if you don’t like either you can always use my LossLessFinder to get quality files from other sources. Support new jazz, people, and have a great 2016.

Actually the bias is stronger and deserves a longer explanation, even if it’s just a footnote. I am slightly opinionated when it comes to jazz music, namely I feel jazz should remain exciting, energetic and involving, and expanding its reach rather than looking back. Thus I despise smooth jazz for its way too laid-back supermarket-friendly sound, and generally avoid swing and big bands. I also prefer jazz music being played in cramped clubs by young artists to concert halls full of older audiences in suits (with a notable exception of Keith Jarrett who can play wherever he likes for whatever ticket price and I will still be a happy camper if I get to go to his concert). ↩︎
I even created a playlist which consists of single tracks taken from all the albums recommended here and available on Spotify. ↩︎

AWS Cloudformation template for OpenVPN server creation

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Are you traveling for Christmas to a country where Netflix/Hulu isn’t available? Are you worried you might resort to violence against your own family once you’re fed up with them? Here’s a VPN server template to help the situation (and keep you away from prison).

update Jan 6, 2016: Oh, well. VPN servers can still be useful for other purposes.

Netflix is brilliant and there’s no better time to catch up on your Jessica Jones episodes than Christmas break. But what if your family resides in a country where Netflix isn’t available yet? 😱 Fear not, there’s a way to circumvent geolocation-based legal barriers that protect, in my case, Eastern Europe from excellent comic book-based television. First, you’re gonna need a fast internet connection.¹ Second, a VPN server into the country where Netflix is available, e.g., Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

To create one really quickly and cheaply (and destroy it as easily once it’s not needed), it’s best to use Cloudformation, an orchestration/templating tool that AWS provides. With Cloudformation, all the details² of your stack are included in one JSON file which, once uploaded via AWS Console, deploys the stack defined by the template. The JSON file below defines an EC2 instance together with a security group suited for OpenVPN:

{
"AWSTemplateFormatVersion": "2010-09-09",
"Description": "OpenVPN server template",
"Mappings": {
"AWSRegion2AMI": {
"ap-northeast-1": {
"AMI": "ami-5ea72b5e"
},
"ap-southeast-1": {
"AMI": "ami-365c5764"
},
"ap-southeast-2": {
"AMI": "ami-831d51b9"
},
"eu-central-1": {
"AMI": "ami-507f7e4d"
},
"eu-west-1": {
"AMI": "ami-03644074"
},
"sa-east-1": {
"AMI": "ami-4fd55f52"
},
"us-east-1": {
"AMI": "ami-5fe36434"
},
"us-west-1": {
"AMI": "ami-8bf40fcf"
},
"us-west-2": {
"AMI": "ami-9fe2f2af"
}
}
},
"Parameters": {
"InstanceType": {
"AllowedValues": [
"t2.micro",
"t2.medium",
"m3.medium",
"m3.large",
"m3.xlarge",
"m3.2xlarge"
],
"ConstraintDescription": "must be a valid EC2 instance type.",
"Default": "t2.micro",
"Description": "Instance type for EC2 instance.",
"Type": "String"
},
"KeyName": {
"ConstraintDescription": "must be the name of an existing EC2 KeyPair.",
"Default": "openvpn",
"Description": "Name of an existing EC2 KeyPair to enable SSH access to the instances",
"Type": "AWS::EC2::KeyPair::KeyName"
},
"Project": {
"AllowedPattern": "[\\x20-\\x7E]*",
"ConstraintDescription": "can contain only ASCII characters.",
"Default": "OpenVPN-server",
"Description": "OpenVPN-server",
"MaxLength": "255",
"MinLength": "1",
"Type": "String"
}
},
"Resources": {
"OpenVPNInstance": {
"Properties": {
"ImageId": {
"Fn::FindInMap": [
"AWSRegion2AMI",
{
"Ref": "AWS::Region"
},
"AMI"
]
},
"InstanceType": {
"Ref": "InstanceType"
},
"KeyName": {
"Ref": "KeyName"
},
"SecurityGroups": [
{
"Ref": "VPNSecurityGroup"
}
],
"Tags": [
{
"Key": "Name",
"Value": {
"Fn::Join": [
"-",
[
"EC2-VPN",
{
"Ref": "Project"
}
]
]
}
}
],
"UserData": {
"Fn::Base64": {
"Fn::Join": [
"",
[
"public_hostname=openvpn\n",
"admin_user=openvpn\n",
"admin_pw=openvpn\n",
"reroute_gw=1\n",
"reroute_dns=1\n"
]
]
}
}
},
"Type": "AWS::EC2::Instance"
},
"VPNSecurityGroup": {
"Properties": {
"GroupDescription": "Enable SSH access to the instance and VPN access via configured port. ",
"SecurityGroupIngress": [
{
"CidrIp": "0.0.0.0/0",
"FromPort": "443",
"IpProtocol": "tcp",
"ToPort": "443"
},
{
"CidrIp": "0.0.0.0/0",
"FromPort": "1194",
"IpProtocol": "udp",
"ToPort": "1194"
}
],
"Tags": [
{
"Key": "Name",
"Value": {
"Fn::Join": [
"-",
[
"SG-VPN",
{
"Ref": "Project"
}
]
]
}
}
]
},
"Type": "AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup"
}
}
}

You can download it, and use it whenever you need to quickly deploy an OpenVPN server. In order to use it, you need:

an AWS account (this costs money, but not much, and only when it’s being used);
to accept the terms of use for the OpenVPN Access Service AMI; it’s free for not more than 2 VPN connections at a time;
to have at least one key pair for the EC2 instance that will be deployed;
to configure the OpenVPN server and optionally create another user (the default username and password is openvpn as defined in the template);
to configure a VPN client software capable of connecting to OpenVPN servers; on a Mac I recommend Viscosity, Linux users need the OpenVPN plugin for Network Manager, Windows users need to get a grip and change the OS (seriously though, I don’t know any VPN clients for Windows, but for sure there are many good ones).

That’s it! To access the control panel of your VPN server, browse to https://yourEC2_public_IP_address/admin and accept the OpenVPN license. To get the client.ovpn configuration file for your client software, look up https://yourEC2_public_IP_address/?src=connect (you may need to tweak the settings depending on the client you’re using).

If you’d like to change the Cloudformation template, I recommend using Troposphere package for Python rather than editing the raw JSON file. Here’s the source I used to generate the template above.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Now you’d think it’s difficult to get a fast enough internet connection in the poor Eastern Block, but my experience shows that on average the quality of internet providers is orders of magnitude better in, say, Poland than in, say, Germany/The Netherlands/Belgium/Norway/UK. ↩︎
Ordinarily, yes, CF templates should include all the details of a given stack. The template presented here is as bare as possible, though, using a default VPC, default subnet etc., to keep it simple. ↩︎

Blogging Again

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Manton Reece:

By creating a blog, you’re making a statement that you care about something

I haven’t been blogging on a regular basis for many months now, primarily because I was busy with my PhD, depressed with my PhD, depressed about looking for a job or busy with my new job, but also because I wasn’t really sure there’s a point in having a blog in the first place.

I’ve read Manton Reece’s post about female bloggers’ in the tech community (linked to by Brent Simmons’ post on the subject) and the above quote made me think that I do feel like I have something to say on the subjects I care about, and that I do have the need to put it in writing. I also notice a trend of some of my favorite blogs dying out slowly: Marco Arment’s blog has seen much less activitiy recently, because he prefers podcasting as a medium, and Tikitu de Jager’s blog is also rather inactive.

I’d like to go against the trend and resume blogging, then. I no longer care whether my content is focused on a particular topic or not, as I noticed that blogs which contents reflects the personality of an author are more appealing to me as a reader. This is the true essence of blogging to me, the somewhat personal relationship you can build between the reader and the blogger. I’ll do my best to achieve just that.

London

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago my company sent me over to London for 6 weeks to do some project work for one of our clients. I’m back in Munich now, but everyone’s been asking me how it was and I have surprisingly many things to say about my stay in the UK. Thus, to ease my pain of having to tell everyone the same bunch of observations, I decided to group them all neatly into a blog post. Here goes.

London is big and crowded

Depending on the definition, the London metropolitan area has between 8,5 and 14 mln inhabitants. By European standards this makes it a huge city, and having never lived in a place that had more than 2,5 mln people, you can really feel the difference. The most visible effect of that enormous size is of course overcrowding.

I remember visiting London a couple of years back, admiring the architecture of old tube stations with the small, nomen omen, tubular size of the trains, and finding it all adorable. Well, tell you what, it loses all its charm when you try to get on a Jubilee line train at 8:30 AM.

Moving around the city during morning or evening rush hours means standing in some sort of a line most of the time. You queue for the trains (I never managed to get on the first or even the second Jubilee line train in the morning, not to mention the Central line), you queue to the stairs, and then in many other places you also queue even when you leave the station; for example at Faringdon station if you want to cross the street in the direction of Leather Lane the queue (~50m long) to the zebra crossing starts right at the station exit.

A queue to the first escalators, Canary Wharf station at 8:50 AM. People of Munich, if you think that U6 gets crowded in the mornings, think again.

This is not to say that TfL, the non-profit organization that runs London’s public transportation system, isn’t brilliant. For the great majority of the time the trains run on schedule (and even if they don’t, TfL is really good at informing passengers about issues on any lines), and they run often, so if I say that I had to wait until the 5th train arrived to get on one it doesn’t mean I actually had to wait that long. The problem London has is that there is no limit to the amount of people that want to move there. An example that illustrates this is the contruction of Crossrail, London’s new East-West underground link. The company that builds it expects Crossrail to reach its full capacity on day one of operation, which will be sometime in 2018, and that Crossrail will improve London’s public transportation by mere 10%.¹ Another line, Crossrail 2, is planned to alleviate the problem, but if the city’s population keeps growing at its current pace, London’s gonna need Crossrail 4 by the time Crossrail 2’s planned opening.

The overcrowing obviously translates to traffic jams in central London. It is absolutely bizarre, but you can be stuck in a traffic jam on a Sunday at 11 AM, as well as on Friday at 11 PM, not to mention rush hours. The city center is permanently clogged, its narrow streets completely incapable of handling the amount of traffic despite the congestion charges.

London’s cultural offer is unmatched

As much as annoying the huge size is, it comes with massive cultural benefits. For a jazz enthusiasts such as myself, the offer is magnificent. The Vortex, Ronnie Scott’s, and Cafe Oto, just to name a few, have great concerts every weekend (sometimes every day), they’re not expensive (modulo Ronnie), and they present a whole spectrum of jazz, from traditional big bands and swing, through post-bop influenced quartets, all the way to the latest avang-garde punk jazz trios. And that’s only jazz. There are dozens of classical, rock, electronic, r&b and basically any-other-kind-you-want music concerts all the time. Visual arts fans can go to Tate Modern which always has great exhibitions, theatre afficionados can choose between 40 different theatres in the West End alone, and really, when it comes to culture, the sky’s the limit in the city of London. Or rather, your wallet.

London is beautiful

Londoners tend to forget about it, because they live their busy lives running from one tube station to another, but London is a beautiful city with magnificent history and a fantastic mixture of the (very) old and the new.

London is diverse

The team in a project I worked on consisted of myself (Pole), a Finnish-Italian, a French-Portugese, an Indian, a Kiwi, a Canadian, and a Brit from South England. And it’s not unusual by London standards. The ethnic, cultural and national diversity of the city doesn’t just make it more exciting or interesting to be there; it makes becoming a Londoner much, much easier. As a person who left his homeland 7 years ago and has been living in many other countries, I have to say those 6 weeks in London made me feel at home very quickly. Being able to speak fluent English definitely helped, but being surrounded by locals who were either (a) expats like myself or (b) used to interacting with the likes of me really made me feel like I could become an integral part of that, if you pardon my expression, melting pot. Something I cannot really say about Munich or Norway, or Belgium, or The Netherlands, sadly.

Wrapping it up

When I visit places for a longer period of time, I also wonder whether I’d be happy to move there. I came to London in the summer of 2012 and back then I thought it’s an absolutely perfect city in every way, and that I’d move if an opportunity came my way without hesitation. Now, after living there for six week and experiencing the life of an ordinary Londoner,² I’m not so sure any more. Staying in London for a couple of weeks only made me appreciate Munich’s laid back atmosphere much more, and even though I don’t have solid data on the subject, I’m pretty sure the average living standard here in Bavaria is much higher than in London. Still, even with its terrible overcrowding and ridiculously expensive beer, I can see the appeal of living there. And given many work opportunities for K, we might relocate to London some day.

Until next time, then.

This is what the Guardian article says, but apparently it’s controversial. ↩︎
Well, not entirely ordinary, I got to live in Zone 1, my company got me a really nice apartment. Did I mention we’re hiring, and that we have a picture of a naked man on our careers page? ↩︎

New Atheism

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen LeDrew wrote an interesting post about the influence the so-called “New Atheism” movement had on society, pointing out some intriguing similarities between our militant atheists and, surprisingly, the far right wing conservatism. The one observation which I don’t find completely accurate, and I think it’s because I live in Europe, is that the “New Atheism” isn’t regarded highly in well-educated circles any more. I found a surprising number of people working in philosophy, logic, computer science and especially in natural sciences to still cherish Dawkins et al., which was always rather surprising to me. It most likely has to do with a rather loose coupling between “New Atheists” and any political movements in Europe (modulo UK perhaps?).¹

In any case, the article is worth a read, and LeDrew’s book lands on my wishlist.

Thanks for the link, Truls.

K made a good comment here by pointing out another difference between aggressive atheists in Europe and in the US: here they don’t have an aggressive counterpart. Religious fundamentalism especially in its protestant form is extremely rare in Europe, and there isn’t much political debate in which Christian fundamentalists would be visible. This may also explain why “New Atheists” don’t see themselves as avantgarde on the old continent. ↩︎

Spacemacs

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was about to write a blog post about how indifferent I became towards different text editors, and how I don’t really care anymore whether I edit code with emacs, vim, Sublime or even Atom. And then this happened:

It’s called Spacemacs and it’s a beautiful hybrid between emacs and vim, or at least it looks like it. Will explore how it works in the course of the next couple of days, i.e., no work will be done and I will spend my days playing with the configuration of a text editor.

And I thought those days were over. Silly me.

update, Sep 9: I’m back on ~~ST3~~ vim with my old config. I still think Spacemacs is a great idea, it’s just a bit too bloated for my taste.

The dawn of my camera

Sat, 15 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I like taking photographs, and I love cameras.

My grandfather was the first professional photographer in my hometown,¹ and I loved playing with his cameras. His darkroom was my favorite place on Earth, filled with cameras, lenses, and a huge enlarger in the middle of a table. I spent hours playing there, and perhaps that’s what sparked my interest in photography, but it was definitely what sparked my interest in photographic gear.

My grandfather gave me my first camera. It was a DDR-made Praktica B100 semi-automatic SLR with a 50mm Pentacon f/1.8 lens. It was so superior to all the Soviet Zenith SLRs my high-school friends had, and its optical performance made my poorly composed photographs look at least decent. I cherished that camera and enjoyed every minute with it, and I actually still do, although sadly I haven’t shot film since 2010.

I learned a ton² shooting film with the Praktica B100, and I learned to love bokeh of f/1.8 above all, like every mediocre photographer. Shooting film was, unfortunately, expensive, and when I finally got a part-time job in college in 2006, I was able to afford one of the greatest cameras ever made—the Nikon D40.

Nikon

Nikon D40, which I bought with a first generation, terrible 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, was brilliant because, like its rival Canon EOS 400D, it was very cheap. It was the first of Nikon’s DSLR to “feature” the lack of AF motor in the body, which meant you had to buy the newer AF-S series lenses if you wanted to use autofocus, and it looked cheap and funny compared to bigger DSLRs. It produced decent images, though (especially the RAW files), it was easy to use and ergonomic, and sold very well. Funny thing about this cheap, entry-level DSLR is that I still have it today. It’s been with me on many, many trips, thrown around, used in rain and snow (which I neither recommend nor condone), and it didn’t once break.

I bought a big, “all-purpose” lens for the Nikon in 2011, which was still optically almost as poor as the kit lens, but gave me the 18-250mm focal length and a sore shoulder every time I had to haul it somewhere. I liked that, though. Despite the fact that my photographs weren’t particularly good, I felt that the more gear I have, and the more serious it looks, the better. I took a lot of nice pictures during the many, many travels, but the more time passed, the more I realized that the Nikon stays at home quite a lot, simply because it’s too big, and too heavy.

It was 2012 and the whole mirrorless revolution was at its peak, with all major manufacturers embracing either the micro 4/3 format or trying to put APS-C (or even full frame!) sensors into smaller bodies. I wanted to jumped on that wagon.

Fujifilm

I bought a Fujifilm X10. It had a sensor smaller than micro 4/3, it rendered pleasing colors (hello, Velvia!), was portable, had a lot of manual controls and was a very enjoyable camera. It had a fixed lens, though and couldn’t really produce any shallow depth-of-field, which I, as a still mediocre photographer, really missed. I liked Fujifilm colors and manual controls (and, yes, retro aesthetics), so I bought another mirrorless camera, the X-E1, together with two absolutely brilliant lenses: 14mm f/2.8 and 35mm f/1.4.

I loved the X-E1 despite its numerous flaws, and I really enjoyed shooting with it; it was a camera that, through its manual controls and well thought-through interface, made you want to go out and shoot. Still, it wasn’t exactly pocketable. Yes, the body was relatively small, but the lenses were big and heavy. So I sold both my Fujifilm cameras, all the lenses and accessories this Spring.³

The smartphone revolution

I’d say there are three types of photographers.

The type that shoots candid photographs with a smartphone, didn’t have a camera before the iPhone era (or had a cheap compact one), doesn’t care much about the quality (either artistic or technical) and just “takes photos.” I.e., the great majority of world’s population.
The photographer, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. This person takes great photographs and takes great joy and pride in that. The gear is completely secondary. This category is represented by the small minority of world’s population, but somewhat includes my girlfriend.⁴
And finally there’s the enthusiast. Enthusiasts know about the gear, know about composition (which doesn’t necessarily mean their photos are well composed!), and know about technical aspects of photography. They can distinguish a bad image from a good one, and some of them are also photographers. Sadly, not all, and I’d even say most enthusiasts are in it for the gear. I am a proud member of this category. I like taking pictures. I envy the photographers their skill and talent. I take hundreds of photographs and every now and then I take a good one. I’d say it’s about 1% of all the pictures I take, but that’s okay. Once I do get that great shot, though, I want it to be of great technical quality, so that I can print it and proudly hang on my wall. That’s why I’m into gear. That’s why I didn’t want to take photographs with my smartphone.

Fig. 1: Amsterdam covered in snow. Taken in December 2010 with an iPhone 4.

Craig Mod was right when he wrote “Goodbye, cameras” back in 2013 already, but I didn’t believe him.⁵ I did take some nice shots with my iPhone 4, but they were never really sharp, and the colors never really looked right. Years of using (D)SLRs also made me addicted to using a viewfinder, and I always found framing pictures without it uncomfortable and inaccurate. But the smartphone cameras got better and better, and their displays grew bigger and brighter (which made using them for framing photographs much better) I always had one in my pocket, too.

It’s not only the optics and sensors of smartphone cameras that are improving as technology progresses, but the software, too. I’d go as far as saying that it’s the software that lets you get the most out of smartphone photography. Take a look at the photograph below.

Fig. 2: View of the Dolomites from Lago di Dobbiaco, shot with Samsung Galaxy S5 (HDR on) last weekend.

I have shots of the very same place at the very same time taken with the Nikon DSLR. Despite the Nikon having more than twice the size of a sensor, shooting RAW and pulling shadows in post-processing, it can’t beat Samsung’s subtle-but-effective HDR mode’s dynamic range. In these conditions even the Fujifilm’s excellent X-Trans sensor would struggle, yet my smartphone’s tiny sensor aided by great, built-in HDR software manages very well. Here’s another one.

Fig. 3: View of the Dolomites from the Drei Zinnen, shot with Samsung Galaxy S5 (panorama mode).

Galaxy S5’s HDR mode gives exactly the amount of detail and dynamic range for photographs to look more than decent, yet the fact they are shot in HDR is not immediately obvious.

After coming back from the Dolomites I transferred all the photographs to my computer, and realized that the majority of great shots from that trip are from the phone. It renders colors better than the Nikon, it has better dynamic range (thanks to its clever HDR mode), it’s orders of magnitude smaller and lighter, I always have it with me, it geotags the photographs, and can back them up to Dropbox on the fly if I so wish. I understand of course that this particular comparison is unfair towards the DSLR, because our D40’s sensor is 7 years old.⁶ Still, the sole fact that this comparison is possible made me wonder if I still need a camera. The truth is, I don’t. I would actually sell the D40 setup if it was worth any money.

The dawn of my camera

I love cameras. I love that they’re purpose built, precise tools. Modern Japanese DSLR are of course very much like computers, in as much as most of their operation is controlled purely electronically, but then again a lot of camera elements, like shutters and of course lenses require very precise craftsmanship. That’s pretty rare when it comes to consumer goods available in the 21st century.

Smartphones have smaller sensors, which currently causes problems with depth of field control and noise, but as the technology matures, these may no longer be issues in, say, 5 years from now (I’m looking at you, Lytro). I don’t think the problem of having a single focal length will ever be solved, so obviously in situations when you either need a very long lens (nature, sports photography) or a very wide one (architecture, landscape to some extent), good old cameras will remain the best, if not the only option. For the great majority of people, they will stop making sense. Suddenly it turns out, I’m one of these people.

My first thought after coming back from Italy was to go on Amazon and take look at some new cameras to replace the aging D40. I looked at full-frame offerings like the D610 or Sony A7, then also at my favorite Fujifilm with its spectacular X-T1, and then I took another look at the pictures taken with the Samsung, and realized I won’t be buying a new camera. And while I feel a bit sad about it, because of how much cameras mean to me, I’m feeling optimistic about the future.

It’s definitely a bad time to be a imaging equipment manufacturer. But it’s a very exciting time for photography.

It is probably worth mentioning that my hometown is a bit of a shithole, a city of almost 50,000 inhabitants in central Poland, half way between Warsaw and Łódź, essentially a big bedroom for both. Still, I always considered my grandfather’s achievement of being a professional photographer no small feat, given his complete lack of education (because war and such). ↩︎
No, really, I learned a lot about photography back then. With my high-school friend Leon we even took some crazy multiple-exposure night shots using flashlights; I’m pretty sure he still has these photos somewhere. Great times. ↩︎
Actually the direct reason for why I sold all that was because I was in a financial ruin and needed some money. This is what happens when you spend too much money on photography gear, kids. ↩︎
“Somewhat,” because I don’t think she’d describe herself as a photographer, since her interest in photography isn’t that great. She’s also pretty dumb when it comes to technical aspects of photography, but it doesn’t matter how poorly the settings are set on her camera—her photographs are always at least good, and sometimes brilliant. Paradoxically this also means that my girlfriend’s best photographs came from her iPhone, because there were no settings to set (i.e., mess up). ↩︎
Take a look at his own follow-up essay as well. ↩︎
Mind you, the Samsung Galaxy S5 is also not the latest generation technology. To see what the iPhone 6 Plus is able to produce, head over to Austin Mann’s website. ↩︎

Ornette Coleman Dies at 85

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It is with great sadness that I read the news about Ornette Coleman’s death. Ornette was one of the first jazz musicians I ever heard of, an artist that inspired my love for jazz but also profoundly expanded my understanding of improvisation and free jazz.

There are a lot of great anecdotes about Ornette Coleman, like those about other musicians reportedly paying him not to play during his early days, and those about him studying music theory in an elevator while he had a part time job as an elevator operator.¹ To me the greatest story about Ornette Coleman is his concert in Warsaw on July 18th, 2007, which was the first “big” jazz concert I ever went to. I remember I needed to get a leave from my part time call-center job explaining to my manager who Ornette Coleman is,² and that I actually needed to save up the money two months in advance to be able to afford two tickets. And when the day came, an elderly man walked on stage of the Roma Music Theatre in Warsaw, and, together with his quartet, performed the most energetic jazz performance I have ever heard in my life, which was even more surprising given the fact that he was already 77 at the time and had difficulty walking.

It’s a great loss for the world of improvised music, but luckily Ornette Coleman’s legacy lives on strong, with so many records, concerts and young musicians inspired by his genius.

Ornette Coleman didn’t have any formal music training, and did not know, among other things, that he needs to transpose the saxophone parts before playing with a piano. ↩︎
I also remember being shocked that my American manager did not know who Ornette Coleman was. ↩︎

Done

Sun, 10 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, April 30th I successfully defended my thesis on “Agents that Play by the Rules” and was awarded the title of PhD.¹ It was 4,5 years of work,² and the last week was definitely the most stressful and exhausting one I had in my entire life, but now I’m done. There’s no more school to go to, no more exams and no more courses to take.³

The overwhelming feeling of completion is a very pleasant one. For the first time since March 2010 there is nothing hanging over my head. There are no papers to be finished, and no talks to be given. No students to teach. Hell, I might even comment out LaTeX-Box from my .vimrc.⁴ It feels good.

Completing the PhD was my dream, but at the same time it’s the end of my adventure with academia. I reached my goals, and I don’t intend to pursue further academic appointments. At the same time I stand by everything I wrote back in 2011, and I don’t feel there’s any conflict between that and my current situation. Having to choose once more whether to embark on the PhD journey I wouldn’t hesitate a second. I was given the opportunity to work on very interesting topics within theoretical computer science, formal logic and game theory, and most importantly I had the pleasure of meeting and working with fantastic people, many of which are now my good friends. If the price to pay for all that is a ~5-year setback to my non-academic career, it’s a price I am very glad to pay.

Last Monday I started a new job, joining a British cloud computing consultancy called Cloudreach as a systems engineer. It’s all very, very different than academia, but in a good, fast-paced⁵ and exciting way.

The future looks bright, as they say.

(thanks for the photograph, Hege)

Technically I was “recommended for the title”, as in Norway PhD defenses do not include any graduation ceremony, and the official letter stating that I am indeed a doctor will be mailed to me soon. Still, there is nothing now that could happen to prevent the degree from being awarded. ↩︎
I was about to write “hard work,” but let’s face it, writing a PhD thesis, while not an easy task, ain’t exactly coal mining. ↩︎
Except for a driver’s license course. ↩︎
I hate LaTeX. And “research” shows you should hate it, too. ↩︎
Yes, industry works at a faster pace than academia, or at least the European academia (never been to a US campus, but I heard stories of what pre-tenure jobs in American universities are like), and everyone in my office seems to be working a lot, but as a newbie I’m not exactly flooded with obligations or deadlines. I guess this will change soon. ↩︎

Dr. Karolina

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My girlfriend Karolina defended her PhD on Monday, and shall be referred to as Dr. Karolina from now on. It was an excellent defense and you’ve missed out if weren’t there. You still can (and should) read her book, however. It’s very good (and I’m not biased) and available (for free!) on her website.

“Under the Skin”

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the spirit of 2014-summaries I’d like to mention Jonathan Glazer’s film “Under the skin”, which was definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, and one of the very best sci-fi movies I have ever seen. If you have some winter holidays now, rent it on iTunes or Amazon or something and watch it. It’s very disturbing, but great.

(Also I think it’s a perfect example of that new video Mitchell Stephens talks about.)

“The rise of the image, the fall of the word”

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to read as many books as I can these Christmas holidays since I have plenty of free time and the weather outside is particularly cold,¹ so another book that I’ve read is Mitchell Stephens classic: “The rise of the image, the fall of the word.” It’s obligatory reading for anyone studying journalism and new media these days, as it tries to argue for cultural significance of television, or specifically something that Stephens calls the new video. A very interesting book indeed, and although I don’t quite agree with some opinions about montage and fast cutting, Stephens’ book is well worth reading if only for the very insightful analysis of history and significance of the written word, and then later development of film and video.

But there’s one other interesting thing about this book. The second edition was published in 1998, before the age of ubiquitous high-speed internet, YouTube, Netflix, the iPhone, the iPad, Snapchat, Vine and Instagram, and in the era when television was at its highest—in everyone’s home and at the center of home entertainment. It is surprising to see how much things have changed within the last 16 years,² and it is astonishing how accurate are the predictions about the future of video the author makes. Stephens basically predicted YouTube, Netflix, and the iPhone/iPad. He also somewhat predicted the rise in quality of original programming on television, which is what many now refer to as the “renaissance of TV.” The only new, revolutionary technologies he didn’t foresee were high-speed internet in our smartphones, and the Kindle-driven e-book revolution³ that delays the death of the word,⁴ but I guess nobody saw it coming. Stephens also mentioned that video games will become more mature and will evolve into something more than teenager entertainment, which is also happening, although at a pace slower than expected. It would be interesting to see if he’d want to change anything in his book if it were to be written now, but I doubt that.

Again, a recommendation. Read this book especially if you love books and hate TV.

Also, I’ve been trying to win a bet with Karolina (no luck so far I’m afraid). ↩︎
I’m not an expert here, but I suppose it’s even less than that. I’d say things started happening really quickly once high-speed internet connectivity became a standard, once internet streaming services appeared (YouTube was created in 2005, Netflix and Hulu started offering video-on-demand streaming in 2007), and once the iPhone came out, so around 2005–2007. So then it’s basically the last 7–9 years. ↩︎
I wonder if there’s any research behind the increased readership and e-book reader sales. Do Kindles increase it, or are they bought solely because they’re an attractive gadget? ↩︎
One could also point out that the internet itself fuels a lot of text creation, with its blogs (who knew there’s gonna be so many bloggers in societies in which apparently nobody reads?), tweets, reddits, etc. ↩︎

Stop using LaTeX, switch to MS Word

Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A hilarious article appeared in PLOS ONE recently (thanks for the link, Pim). StackOverflow already made some good comments, but here’s my two pennies’ worth.

While I find the study methodologically flawed¹ and I have a strong dislike for MS Word for numerous (un)sentimental reasons, I cannot disagree with the fact that LaTeX sucks. It has a complex syntax (take a look at Markdown or reStructuredText for comparison), meaningless error messages, it comes as a ginormous zip file full of obsolete stuff and it’s not exactly easy to customize (even installing new fonts is non-trivial). Yes, it has great syntax for mathematical symbols, very good output file quality by default and good default typographical settings, but it doesn’t stop to amaze me that it’s been around for so long and no one has come up with a better alternative.

Well, I guess we should just embrace MS Word and stop wasting taxpayers’ money, as Markus Knauff and Jelica Nejasmic suggest.

update, Dec. 29th: Also, this:

The Word vs. LaTex efficiency argument is in line with microwave food vs. actual cooking
— Michele Lanza (@lanzamichele) December 26, 2014

Copying an already written text is waay different than writing it from scratch, tables are notoriously LaTeX’s weakest point, as is customizing anything, the article doesn’t even touch upon the topic of editing long, complex documents, the list goes on… ↩︎

“Where the Conflict Really Lies”

Thu, 25 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Since it’s Christmas, I feel it’s only appropriate to share some thoughts about a book on philosophy of religion I recently read.

Written by contemporary analytic philosophy’s chief theist and protestant, Alvin Plantinga, “Where the Conflict Really Lies” is a careful and systematic study of the (alleged) conflicts between science, naturalism and religion.¹ As far as I am aware, this book is the only such comprehensive and earnest account of what exactly Christianity says about, e.g., theory of evolution and natural selection, among other controversial topics. I don’t feel competent enough to argue about some points and original arguments Plantinga makes about naturalism, I think it’s best I refer the interested reader to a long review by Thomas Nagel, but at the same time I can wholeheartedly recommend Plantinga’s book to atheists and theists alike—to the former, because it’s good to know what you’re fighting against, and to the latter, because it’s good to know what it is exactly that you believe in. And it really is surprising to see how poorly researched are the many arguments made by scientific, militant atheists of Dawkins-kind. Actually, regardless of whether you agree with Plantinga’s religious stance and his strongly theistic point of view, you have to give him credit for defending theism and Christianity in a strongly atheistic environment which analytic philosophy most definitely is. It really is a shame there’s so few serious religious analytic philosophers.

So, whether you want to feel stronger about your atheism or want to get better at fighting off those pesky atheist’s attacks, read Plangina’s book. What better time to do this than Christmas holidays?

Merry Christmas everyone!

Plantinga argues that his points are not Christianity-centric and can be applied to theism in general, although he stays away from “indecisive deism” or agnosticism. And he is himself a Christian, and can’t speak for Muslims or Buddhists, or others. ↩︎

“I went to jail for my cause”

Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Sunde writes a guest post for Wired:

Only a few activists left are actually doing things. We’re way underfunded, we’re getting older and we’re getting lazy. We’re trying to work smart while still having a family life, managing our lives with boy- and/or girlfriends, thinking about careers.

A sad piece in which one of The Pirate Bay’s founders shares his disheartened view on the status of Internet-related legislation and general public’s indifference on the subject.¹

The sad part is that it all boils down to convenience. In the world of cheap Netflix, HBO, Spotify, Rdio and others, taking the time (and possibly risk) to download torrents just doesn’t make that much sense.² I don’t really have any statistics to back this up, but I observe the same trend amongst desktop linux users/contributors. When I installed linux for the first time on my desktop computer (late 1998, SuSE 6.0), the alternative was the buggy and ugly Windows 98, or the insanely expensive and also buggy MacOS 8. Now lots of developers switch to OS X, with its UNIX-based environment and excellent hardware, or even to Windows, which, beginning with XP I believe, became stable, fast and relatively fuss-free. There’s simply no need for linux on the desktop, because it’s trying to solve a problem that isn’t there. I’m afraid it’s the same with The Pirate Bay.

I kinda like Sunde, and sort-of sympathize with his cause(s), but I feel like what The Pirate Bay crew tried to stand for in recent years isn’t exactly the same what it represented in the beginning. I feel perfectly fine with using PGP to encrypt my emails, running linux on my home media server, using open formats for documents, supporting government transparency and openness, and yet being opposed to the illegal downloading of TV shows using p2p networks. The fact that people stopped caring that much about The Pirate Bay doesn’t necessarily entail they no longer care about other aspects of Internet freedom. ↩︎
That is, unless you’re one of those unlucky millions that don’t have access to these services. Remember that Netflix, Internet’s biggest on-demand video-streaming provider, is available in only 40 countries, excluding such big and potentially lucrative markets as, e.g., Australia & New Zealand. Spotify’s slightly better, being available in 59 countries. ↩︎

“Shaka, when the walls fell”

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Bogost writes about a famous Star Trek TNG episode:

On stardate 45047.2, Jean-Luc Picard leads the crew of the Enterprise in pursuit of a transmission beacon from the El-Adrel system, where a Tamarian vessel has been broadcasting a mathematical signal for weeks. The aliens, also known as the Children of Tama, are an apparently peaceable and technologically advanced race with which the Federation nevertheless has failed to forge diplomatic relations. The obstacle, as Commander Data puts it: “communication was not possible.”

The funniest thing about this particular episode is how polarized opinions about it are. “Darmok” is by far the most controversial of all TNG episodes. While (as Bogost points out) the episode touches upon the very essence of Star Trek and Gene Rodenberry’s vision of utopian human future, most controversy that surrounds it concerns how… unserious it is. I think this might be the only TNG episode that I felt slightly uncomfortable watching, because of how silly it felt.

But Bogost’s piece reminded me of a book I read some time ago, which touches upon the issue of understanding vs. comprehension, the nature of intelligence (yes, there’s even a discussion about Searle’s Chinese Room in there) and difficulties of “first contact” in a much more intellectually demanding yet satisfying way. This book is Peter Watts’ “Blindsight”. While I don’t agree with many of the points the author makes throughout the novel, I can’t think of a better “hard sci-fi” that I’ve read in a long, long time. “Blindsight” most definitely isn’t an easy read, but if you like good old science-fiction that really tries to do science justice and packs loads of facts, you won’t be disappointed. Oh and best of all, the novel is available online for free (CC license).

Spotify, Pandora and how streaming music kills jazz and classical

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“All of my colleagues — composers and arrangers — are seeing huge cuts in their earnings,” says Paul Chihara, a veteran composer who until recently headed UCLA’s film-music program. “In effect, we’re not getting royalties. It’s almost amusing some of the royalty checks I get.” One of the last checks he got was for $29. “And it bounced.”

Scott Timberg writes about how the recent rise of streaming services like Spotify, Rdio or Pandora affects royalties in the world of niche music. It’s sad, but not unexpected. However, at least in Europe a jazz/classical music enthusiast observes a growing number of websites that sell uncompressed audio files from small labels. There’s the German Highresaudio and the Norwegian Gubemusic, and both these services have a pretty big catalogue (at least compared to the American HDTracks).¹ They are also both targeting the narrow group of listeners, and their catalogues contain mostly jazz and classical music. Which brings us to the second quote from the article:

Here’s a good place to start: Say you’re looking for a bedrock recording, the Beethoven Piano Concertos, with titan Maurizio Pollini on piano. Who is the “artist” for this one? Is it the Berlin Philharmonic, or Claudio Abbado, who conducts them? Is it Pollini? Or is it Beethoven himself? If you can see the entire record jacket, you can see who the recording includes. Otherwise, you could find yourself guessing.

My question is: why hasn’t anyone figured this out yet? It’s an at-least-decent business idea, and there’s a consumer group that can be easily targeted. Jazz fans complain about Spotify’s lack of content all the time. They also tend to be affluent (or pose as such, or are willing to spend more money on music), so you can charge them more. And they’re often suffering from audiophiliac illness.

Create an elite, expensive streaming service for jazz and classical lovers. Take our money!

Yes, I know high-res downloads make no sense. I don’t care. I only care that it’s lossless and that they have albums others don’t. ↩︎

Jazz icon Charlie Haden dies at 76

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am very sad to read that Charlie Haden died last Friday.¹ He was one of the first jazz musicians I ever heard about, when my dad bought the now legendary “Beyond the Missouri Sky” (Verve 1997) record, and I immediately fell in love with his great bass lines and compositions. Then I learned about Charlie Haden’s history with Ornette, and I also realized he played with Keith Jarrett’s quartet in the 70s. A versatile, curious musician who always enriched any jazz album he appeared on with his lyrical bass lines. His death is a terrible loss. Seems sadly prophetic that his latest duo album with Jarrett is titled “Last Dance” (ECM 2014).

Below are a couple of my favorite tracks by Charlie Haden or with him as a sideman. Listen and admire.

Not a long time ago Paco de Lucia passed away. Seems 2014 is a very bad year for jazz music. ↩︎

Speed and aerodynamics

Sat, 14 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Companies selling "speed" and "aerodynamics" to dudes who only ride on the weekends, rather than selling them an experience.
— John Watson (@JohnProlly) June 10, 2014

I used to laugh at people paying $7k for bicycles with handmade steel frames and all the hype that surrounded the whole NAHBS community. After some months of reading PinP aka The Radavist, however, I’ve changed my mind completely.

Modern competitive cycling is, to me, completely uninteresting sport. I don’t watch the big races, I don’t care about the pros.¹ Doping is so prevalent that following these events makes no sense to me, and in the same way I don’t give a shit about carbon frames designed in wind tunnels. What John Watson’s community represents is the opposite: yes, it’s nice to crush KOMs² and go as fast as you can, but that’s not why we ride. We ride, because riding a bike is rad, because the experience of being outdoors in beautiful mountains is fantastic, and because riding a bike is part of our lifestyle—we love bikes. And yes, if I’m to choose between a Taiwan-made carbon frame wind-tunnel-developed bike from one of the major manufacturers versus a steel frame bicycle US/UK-made by guys who love the work, I’m gonna pay those guys, and I’m gonna pay them more than I should. And I’m still gonna be faster uphill than the 50+ overweight fellas on their Pinarello Dogma bikes.

Except for Maja. Maja is awesome. ↩︎
Though even Strava says that riding is not only about KOMs. ↩︎

Strava is helping to build better bike lanes

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Wired:

Current methods of counting cyclists take a ton of time or a ton of money. The DOT can videotape traffic and have someone sit at a monitor and count cyclists, or it can send someone to sit on the sidewalk and watch them go by in real time. Neither method is terribly efficient.

You’d think that the problem of building cycling lanes is a simple one, right? Well, it’s not. Apparently most cities struggle with obtaining data; no one really knows where and how many cyclists ride, and the only method available until now was installing bike counters, but these are expensive and measure bicycle traffic only at fixed points. So now, apparently, you can buy data from Strava, and this is brilliant.¹

Strava is my favorite sport-tracking service (I wrote about it before), and it’s found a new and somewhat surprising source of revenue – selling “heatmaps” to cities.² Heatmaps are created by analyzing publicly available GPS data from users’ rides and mapping them to frequency. For example, this is a heatmap for Bergen:

Some say that Strava isn’t popular amongst commuters, and that it’s mainly used by people who treat cycling as sport, and not just a mean of transportation, but as is clearly visible on the screenshot above, racers need to get through town just like anyone else; I’d conjecture they need to do this even more often than others.

Anyways, I just wanted to point everyone’s attention to the Wired article, because:

it’s very good and you should read it;
I envy Strava the brilliant idea of “heatmaps”;
it makes me wanna seriously consider a career as a Data Wrangler.

Cheap, too. Only $20000/year. ↩︎
Some people get upset with Strava selling “their” data, but they don’t realize the data is anonymized completely, very useful, and publicly available anyway. ↩︎

Wayne Shorter Quartet at USF Verftet (NattJazz 2014)

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I first heard about Wayne Shorter when my dad bought the brilliant “1+1” (Verve 1997) album he recorded with Herbie Hancock. I listened to it and was blown away – the soprano saxophone in the hands of Wayne Shorter sounded like nothing I heard before. I had a “jazz band” in my music school at the time,¹ and I told the guys “Look, Shorter and Hancock play without drums and bass, so we can do it too!”, but obviously we couldn’t, and we all quickly understood that we know nothing about improvisation.

I haven’t bought any Wayne Shorter records for a couple of years. Some time ago I bought two of his classic albums – “Juju” (Blue Note 1964) and “Speak No Evil” (Blue Note 1965) – and enjoyed them, but of course this was the old post- hard-bop sound of late 60s, significantly different to Shorter’s current music which I didn’t know. That is, until last year’s release of his new² quartet’s “Without a Net” (Blue Note 2013).

“Without a Net” reminds me of “1+1” a lot, even though it’s a quartet with piano (Danilo Perez), double bass (John Patitucci) and drums (Brian Blade), but the music is so much alike – somewhere between aggressive hard-bop and contemplative free, on the intersection of the best of classic 60s jazz, and the new, contemporary, and somewhat intellectually challenging music. I loved the album immediately, even though (as with “1+1”) I realized that I didn’t fully understand it, and it took me some time to fully appreciate the music. So when I heard Wayne Shorter Quartet is coming to town, I knew I had to go and see them live.

They played last Friday at our local Spring jazz festival NattJazz, and the concert was excellent. The music, as Hannah put it, was “enchanting”.³ The contemplative and delicate sound of Wayne Shorter’s saxophone juxtaposed with energetic, aggressive sound of the trio created what can only be described as magic, and it lasted for a 1,5hr concert and three encores. Next to Keith Jarrett Trio, Uri Caine Trio and Ornette Coleman quartet’s performances, Wayne Shorter Quartet’s Friday concert was one of the best one’s I’ve ever been to.

Here’s what their recent concert in Vienna looked like, the Verftet concert was quite similar.

We were 13. It wasn’t even remotely close to “jazz”, we were barely able to play the notes. ↩︎
Actually, the quartet isn’t so new, they’ve been playing for 14 years now. I didn’t know. ↩︎
“It’s the PG-13 description. " ↩︎

Hit & Run

Sat, 22 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Last Sunday night I was walking home and I got hit by a car on a zebra crossing.¹ It was pretty late (around 11:30pm) and there was very little traffic. I was on a green light and while I was in the middle of the road, a black car came from behind me (he was making a left turn). I stopped, turned right, and as I was facing the car it hit me on my left leg knocking me down, and then just drove off. Before we get any further, I am happy to assure everyone that I’m perfectly fine, and that I did not sustain any serious injuries. But here are some of my thoughts about the accident.

I remember very vividly how I felt immediately after the accident – I was mad. The guy didn’t stop. In Norway. The best country on earth. I mean, seriously. If this happened in my lovely homeland or anywhere else in the world, I would still be outraged, but perhaps less surprised. But it happened in Norway – someone² just hit me with a car on a zebra crossing, and then ran away. So yes, my very first feeling when I was lying there in the middle of the street was outrage mixed with bewilderment. This feeling didn’t really pass when another car stopped and called the ambulance – “Call the goddamn cops!” – I yelled – “I don’t need a doctor, I’m fine, just get that guy who nearly ran me over!” Luckily the person who rescued me was a little more lucid and called the ambulance first – “You got blood all over your head man, you need an ambulance.”

Right after the rage came fear. I didn’t realize what happened until 10 minutes after the accident, I didn’t realize how lucky I was and how close to a very serious injury (at best) I was. While sitting in the ambulance and later in the emergency room I kept thinking that it really was a close call – thoughts that the doctor confirmed. And then I also realized that it all felt highly unreal. You know, one of those things that happen to other people. Like cancer, tsunamis or losing your house. Being hit by a car coming out of nowhere is one of those things. And I immediately realized that I wasn’t prepared for it at all. I had medical insurance as anyone who pays taxes in Norway has, but did I have any accident-specific insurance or life insurance? I’m not sure, probably not. I think I have some insurance from my work, but does it cover such cases? Unlikely. I don’t know. And of course I was lucky that it didn’t really cost me much, except for drugs, a cab ride back home and the fact that I need to buy new glasses.³ I had a computer in my bag but it sustained only minor injuries. Then again – what if it sustained some serious damage? I wasn’t prepared for that. I guess it’s like with backups, that there are two categories of people: those that have accident & life insurance, and those that will have it. Now I’m becoming the former.

The police told me there are virtually no chances at finding the driver, because I am uncertain about the car and I haven’t seen the registration plates, but they did say they would look for him and even notified the local paper. It’s been almost a week since the accident now and I haven’t heard from them, so I assume the driver will not be found, but as time passes I am feeling less angry and more grateful for how benign my injuries were.

Finally, I was and still am overwhelmed at how friendly, helpful and supportive everyone around me has been. Huge thanks go to:

Hannah, for showing up at my apartment the day after, helping me with the police, cooking chicken zoup for me and leasing Toby;
my parents, for calling me twice a day to check how I’m doing (and for my uncle and aunt for calling on their behalf when necessary);
Truls & Samia, for providing me with premium quality chocolate;
Karolina, for helping me wash my head in such a way that the bandages stay relatively dry;
Erik E., for sketching plans of capturing the driver and bringing him to justice (I believe we agreed that the penalty in this case was hanging);
my sister and her husband, for reminding me that Rambo had it worse;⁴
Erik P., Maja, Pim, Thomas and Beata for being worried and making sure I was alright.

It’s really sweet of you all. You made being hit by a car a genuine pleasure, almost. I’m not planning on being in a similar accident again, though, and as we know it is unlikely I will have such an accident again. It’s just one more thing I can cross off my bucket list.

For the locals: it was a zebra crossing on the corner of Carl Konows gt and Fyllingsveien. ↩︎
As we agreed with Truls and his father while discussing it, it must have been a driver from Oslo (or Poland, or Lithuania), for it is impossible that this was a local. As pointed out by Hannah, it is also impossible for the driver to be from Kristiansand. ↩︎
This one is actually a potentially big expense, but then again I can buy glasses in Poland with my mom. Me and my mom like going glasses shopping. It’s our thing. ↩︎
I tried finding a clip from “First Blood” of Rambo stitching his own arm, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. The only thing YouTube has to offer is his “Nothing’s over!” speech. ↩︎

put.io

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

put.io is a service that lets you download and seed torrents, and also watch the downloaded movie files, in the cloud. An obvious question that such a business model raises is a matter of illegal downloads, and that spawned an interesting discussion on HN.

Whenever I read discussions about illegal torrent downloads, I immediately think of three issues.

The first one is convenience – as a Netflix and HBO Nordic customer I miss the comfort of watching great quality mp4 files so much that I… became an IPredator customer, and I download the movies/shows I already payed for simply to be able to watch them without my laptop fan spinning like crazy.¹

The second is the whole issue of what’s right, and how human beings aren’t necessarily entitled to watch the latest episode of “Mad Men” whenever and however they want. I used to support this claim and I still think that the argument of “I can’t get it in any other way so I’m gonna download it illegally using bittorrent” is weak, but I find it very unpragmatic to simply forbid downloading. I’m also starting to believe that contemporary TV shows and movies are becoming a significant part of modern culture to a degree that it’s just not right to deny access to that part to people who don’t have Netflix in their countries, or can’t afford going to the cinema very often.

And that brings me to the third issue, which is especially visible in the HN discussion linked above: it’s astonishing how many people (mostly Americans I guess) don’t realize how little digital content is legally available outside the US and the UK. The “if you can afford a modern computer and a fast internet connection, you can afford paying for TV/movies” argument is probably one of the weakest arguments against internet piracy, and is in fact the crux of the whole problem. What MPAA or RIAA don’t acknowledge is that the vast majority of the world’s population simply has no means of paying for a great number of TV shows or movies, because these are unavailable in their respective countries.² People also seem to forget that high-speed internet became very cheap to most people of the world, same as computers, but digital goods are still hardly available anywhere outside the US. It’s baffling.³

So yeah, the whole piracy discussion aside, put.io is actually an interesting service, and I wish it well, hoping it won’t be seized by the Dutch police any time soon.

Yeah, both HBO Nordic and Netflix’s streaming hogs my macbook’s CPU incredibly. Both services also regularly crash my Safari.app, either due to bugs in Flash or Silverlight. Also, HBO Nordic’s iPad app is one of the worst things in the entire universe. ↩︎
Or available after years of delays, with terrible dubbing. ↩︎
Unless you’re a lawyer. Then I guess it’s no longer baffling but obvious, because the obstacles are clearly not of technical nature. ↩︎

Winter Sports

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t ski,¹ and every winter doing any sorts of sports becomes a major problem. This year I’m trying to change that. As anyone will tell you, riding a bike or running in bad weather is simply a matter of attitude. One should just embrace Rule #9 and keep on pushing, but I’ve never been able to do that myself. Every year I promised myself that I won’t be paying any attention to rain or snow, but year after year I failed, bought that monthly bus ticket and locked my bike at home.

This year, however, things are different. I just got the lamest Strava badge for 150km ridden in a month, but it’s the very first time I got any kind of badge for January.

The surprising thing is, once you convince yourself riding in winter is possible, it’s not that bad. Granted, my times on all segments are considerably worse, but I realized that neither rain nor cold bothers me that much.² The trick is to convince yourself that it’s ok to ride in bad weather, and that still comes pretty hard to me, but I found another way – I take an indirect and much longer route home from my office, thus having some extra exercise, because I’m carrying a heavy bag on my back, and riding on a cyclocross bike. But it works, I am finally riding in the winter.

Which is kinda wrong. I’ve been living in Norway for almost 4 years now, and only went skiing once. I have a tentative plan of trying snowboard this year, but then again I have this plan every year. ↩︎
Most of the time winters in Western Norway are very wet, and not that cold, contrary to popular belief. ↩︎

How I traveled from Norway to Poland for Christmas this year

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I traveled by train, and this post is an account of my experiences and a warning for others who might be attempting the same thing. It costed a lot of money, but most importantly, it was a very exhausting and stressful experience. So if you’re reading this and planning on doing the same thing – don’t.

First of all: why did I do it? Well, there’s a couple of reasons. First was curiosity – I like trains, and I really wanted to try that kind of long international train travel. Second was finance – plane tickets have a tendency of becoming ridiculously expensive before Christmas, and I had a hard time finding the sort of tickets I wanted (BGO–WAW, POZ–BGO), so I figured that trains can be cheaper. In the end they weren’t, but they weren’t significantly more expensive either, and given that I’ve had a lot of flying last month, I decided I’ll give the train a chance.

Secondly: how did I do it? Well I checked a couple of possible connections via the best railway connection finder in the world, and I decided to go like this:

morning train from Bergen to Oslo;
Oslo to Katrineholm;
night train from Katrineholm to Lund;
Oresund train accross the sea to Copenhagen;
ICE 38 from Copenhagen to Berlin;
and a EuroCity from Berlin to Poznań, where I’d meet with my friends and continue to my parents’ place by car.

So that was the plan, and it looked good. In the end I managed to arrive in Poznań on time, but there was a lot of stress and some adventures on the way.

I took off from Bergen at 8am. Bergensbana is probably one of world’s most beautiful train routes, but not in December. The sun doesn’t rise until ~9:40, so you can’t see any of the beautiful fiords of Western Norway.

By the time it’s daylight, the train reaches Hardangervidda, and everything’s just white, but you won’t even see that, because the train goes through the snow like a giant plough, and in effect all you see through the windows is a giant white cloud.

It gets better in Eastern Norway as the train approaches Oslo, but then again the landscape becomes a bit boring there. But apart from all that, the Bergen-Oslo train was one of the best parts of my trip. The train itself is comfy, there are power outlets in 2nd class, and it was on time.

So, Oslo S. It’s nice there. I went upstairs to grab a bite, and while I was waiting for my burger the big display that lists all departures showed that my train to Sweden is cancelled. ‘Fantastic’, I thought, ‘but let’s finish the burger first and then think what to do next.’ My immediate thought was to call SAS, book a one-way ticket to WAW and forget about all that train non-sense. This is also the moment of the trip when stress comes into play.

See, because when you travel by plane, you can book travel with multiple legs operated by different carriers and have it all on one ticket, so if one part of your trip gets cancelled or delayed, the rest of it gets adjusted somehow and it’s not your problem. With international train travel it’s different. I tried booking everything with Bahn.de, but that’s apparently impossible, so I ended up having tickets bought from 3 companies: NSB, SJ, and DB. If I got lost somewhere in Sweden due to delays, I’d lose my German tickets and seat reservations, because it’s not their fault SJ fucked things up. So when I learned that the train to Stockholm is cancelled, I got worried. But I figured it could still all work out fine, because I booked my tickets with generous transfer times.

I walked towards platform 19 at Oslo S and jumped on a bus¹ to Karlstad, where an inter-city train number 58 to Stockholm would await all the passengers. And despite it being a relatively old and crowded bus, it brought us all to Karlstad pretty quickly. Actually there were two buses – a lot of people. We all stood on the platform and waited for the train (which couldn’t have been late, because that where its route started), and then someone announced through the speakers that the train will be delayed, 1 hour. There wasn’t even enough room at the station for all of us to fit. The train arrived after about 30 minutes, so it wasn’t all that bad, and even though the carriages looked very old from outside, they were very comfortable and modern on the inside. The problem was the train number 58 didn’t really move anywhere. We stood in Karlstad for an hour or more, so I was getting worried again that I won’t make my night-train connection in Katrineholm. I had 2 hours allocated for the transfer, but in the end I only spent 20 minutes there because of all the delays. Mind you, there was no snow in Sweden, so I’ve no idea why there were so many problems with SJ.

Katrineholm is the Swedish equivalent of Koluszki – apparently the only reason to be there is to get off of one train and get on another one – but the night train Stockholm-Malmö arrived on time, and it was way more comfortable than I expected. I had a couple of hours of sleep and got up at 5am to get off in Lund Central and make another train – Øresundståg to Copenhagen. This part of the trip was relatively uneventful, and when I got to Copenhagen, I finally had a decent morning coffee.

Copenhagen station was pretty busy, and, as always, full of junkies. Anyways, I finished my coffee and went to platform 4, where an ICE 38 train to Hamburg/Berlin arrived and took me to Germany.

So here’s the thing about ICE. It’s advertised as high-speed, premium service by DB, and it usually is. I mean, I hope it usually is, because my ICE experience was definitely the worst part of the trip.

First off, ICE 38 is nowhere near high-speed. It’s a diesel high-speed train, geddit? It’s diesel, because tracks in southern Denmark aren’t electrified, and because it has to be loaded on a ferry (!) in order to cross the Fehrman belt (from Rodbyhavn to Puttgarden).

On top of being slow, the ICE 38 was late. It left Copenhagen on time, but was late for the ferry, was 20 minutes late in Hamburg Hbf, and then it simply broke down. It took another 35 minutes before we left for Berlin. The ridiculous thing about ICE is that it was hands-down the most expensive leg of my journey – the ticket from Copenhagen to Berlin costed €140 (in comparison, the NSB ticket from Bergen to Oslo costed 300 NOK (which is ~€35), the SJ ticket from Oslo to Copenhagen costed 800 SEK (which is ~€90), and the last part from Berlin to Poznań was ~€40 (bought that one very late, would have been much cheaper if booked earlier)). For €140 I’d expect much more.

I arrived pretty late in Berlin Hbf and only managed to grab a shot of the Christmas tree:

and had to run to catch the EuroCity train to Gdynia which was already waiting. Didn’t even manage to buy any Hanutas, and it’s all your fault, Deutsche Bahn.

Now comes the final part: a Polish train operated by PKP InterCity. If you ever lived in Poland or known any Polish people, you’d know that PKP has the worst possible reputation in my homeland. So it came as no surprise when I saw the train looked pretty bad from the outside,

but it came as a major surprise that it was brand new, roomy and comfortable inside. More than that, it was fast, on time, and they served free snacks + coffee/tea/juice in 2nd class. So, yeah, turns out that PKP InterCity was the cheapest and best part of my whole journey, by a fat margin.

In the end, I wanted an adventure and had one. I remember I used to enjoy traveling crazy routes with many transfers when I was a teenager in Poland, but doing the same on a European scale is much more annoying and possibly much more expensive (thus also stressful). Also, winter in central Sweden is never warm, and people tend to have more than one piece of hand luggage before Christmas. My one-way plane ticket from POZ to BGO with SAS costed less than a €100, and the flights+transfers will most likely take less than 40 hours.

So if you’re thinking of doing what I did, just don’t. Happy New Year.

Kudos to NSB staff by the way. When trains get cancelled/delayed in Poland, no one knows anything. NSB handled everything very well and there was a lot of helpful people that explained where the buses are and where you should get off. ↩︎

The Best, Most Elegant iPhone Games of 2013

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For those of you having Christmas holidays, The New Yorker¹ recommends some “elegant” iOS games. I must say I’m not much of a gamer (except for an occasional CS:Source), and I actually never played any games on my iPhone or iPad (except for LetterPress, in which I always lose to Karolina), but still I decided to test some of the games mentioned in the article and, frankly, had my mind blown away. Just like Rothman says: it’s unbelievable how beautifully designed and perfectly engineered these small games are. Stickets is a highly annoying (for the less intelligent among us) and innovative puzzle game (a sort of “twisted” tetris, if you will), Device 6 is a work-of-art adventure game, rymdkapsel is one of the best strategy games I’ve ever played (despite its rudimentary, but aesthetically pleasing² graphics), and Blek is super smart and has a fun and original game mechanic. So, in other words, each of the games I’ve tested so far is a marvel.

What perhaps is the most beautiful aspect of all these games is that they were developed by small, independent studios, sometimes even by one or two persons. Just like with games sold by Humble Bundle, I realize I enjoy these independent titles much more than big, blockbuster games these days, which means I’m either getting old, or that I’m seeking what Rothman calls “elegance” in gaming, which big titles seldom provide.

Anyways, happy Christmas, and play some games when the family starts getting on your nerves.

Mind you: The snobby New Yorker recommends video games. We live in interesting times. ↩︎
Like an Ikea table. ↩︎

What AI Should And What It Should Not Be

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done.”

via The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think.

A long and interesting read about AI’s most brilliant mind – Douglas Hofstadter – his FARG research group, and the current state of mainstream AI research.

I must say I was rather conflicted reading the article. While I think GEB is probably the most important book I’ve ever read,¹ and while Hofstadter is definitely a genius, I’m not entirely sure I agree with discrediting the “small steps” approach present in the article. Coming from a philosophy background into computer science I find that a lot of philosophical research in AI-related fields (like epistemology or logic) is somewhat wishy-washy or superfluous, as is “philosophically-inspired computer science” research.² Then again I realize that the single most harmful threat to my own community of logics-for-AI or multi-agent-systems is creating various formalisms (algorithms, logics, diagrams…) solely because “we can”, and because it’s always better to have more theorems and proofs, even if no one knows what they’re for. The article linked above provides a somewhat fresh and broad perspective on what AI is today, while trying to answer a question of what AI should be. And these are the issues keynote speakers at big AI conferences should be addressing, trying to inspire people and make them contemplate on the big-picture issues; we don’t need another keynote on SAT solving and ILP.³

Confession: I have never read the whole book. There is a partly interesting story behind it: I started reading it when I was a freshman at MISH, but unfortunately there was only one copy on load at the university library, and I could only borrow it for a month. So I would borrow it, read a couple of chapters, return it within a month, wait until it’s available again (someone would always borrow it), and then go back to reading. After some time I got a bit tired of the routine and stopped reading GEB. I bought my own copy when I was finishing my masters, but my knowledge of AI and logic was broader by then, and I found some later chapters of GEB a tad boring, and thus never finished it. Still, GEB was the very main reason I wanted to work in AI. ↩︎
By “philosophically-inspired” CS I mean researchers in computer science who claim doing philosophically relevant work by attempting to capture certain notions in formal ways. Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, these attempts result in work that is philosophically shallow, and not applicable from an engineering/hard-AI point of view. (I feel I just made a lot of enemies by writing this footnote). ↩︎
There you go, now I won’t get a post-doc at HKUST. Shit. ↩︎

New Zealand

Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I came to New Zealand for COIN@PRIMA workshop and PRIMA-13 conference. It’s the first time I’m on the southern hemisphere, and I have a couple of observations about New Zealand and the whole Oceania region I’d like to share.

First off, New Zealand is soooper far away from everything. It took me more than 45 hours to get here from Bergen,¹ and I just talked to a Kiwi friend who told me that Wellington is the most remote capital city in the world, being furthest away from any other capital city. The feeling one has here is that while the country seems rather Western (lots of post-British architecture, English as the official language, lots of familiar products in the shops), it’s very exotic. You see Fiji Airways planes at the airports, and there are weird looking trees, birds and plants everywhere. Also, New Zealanders seem to often (implicitly) refer to Australia as the “big world.” Australia’s where the big cities are, it’s where you go to do your post-doc or PhD, and it’s where many people transfer for intercontinental flights. Still, from a European point of view, Australia is the end of the world in many ways—it’s vast, sparsely populated,² and very far away from, well, anything.³
New Zealand has remarkably beautiful nature, but… somewhat less impressive for someone coming from Norway. They have fiords and mountains, but in contrast to Norway they have nice, sandy beaches, and bush forests with much more biodiversity. You could say that most of New Zealand is geographically perfect: it has all the beauty of Norway, and at the same time the climate is so much better. Dunedin, where I am right now, is often described as rainy by the Kiwis I know, where in fact it receives half the amount of rainfall Bergen does. It is also significantly warmer, and it’s in the south of New Zealand’s South Island—North Island is even better. So there you go: perfection. If only it was closer to the rest of the world…
Traveling to New Zealand from Europe means crossing 12 time zones (UTC+13), which creates a rather weird kind of jetlag, because night and day swap completely. I got used to it much quicker than I thought, and it results in a somewhat optimal work/holiday environment: people in Europe sleep during my day, so I get all the email communication during the night, read my emails in the morning, reply to them, and am not disturbed all day until late evening when they wake up.
On a related note, going to the souther hemisphere in December is a bit confusing, but in a very pleasant way. While my friends in Norway, Netherlands and Poland shiver from cold, I was enjoying a fantastic MTB ride in 23°C yesterday. I thought Christmas decorations in the summer looked silly, but I don’t mind anymore.
It’s a surprisingly expensive country. Food/restaurant/beer prices are more or less comparable to Amsterdam.
Finally, I’ve fallen in love with Dunedin. It seemed a bit dull at first, but after getting to know it better I really enjoy it. It’s compact, has lots of nice restaurants, it’s easy to get out and enjoy the mountains or the beach, and it has the most fantastic botanic garden I’ve ever seen.

So that’s it. I’m writing this post on a Sunday afternoon (NZDT), and I leave on a plane to AKL-PVG-AMS-BGO tomorrow evening. I’m gonna miss you, New Zealand!

p.s. For those of you who like photographs, you can take a look at many of the shots I took in New Zealand here.

To be fair, you can get from BGO to DUD in less than that (I just had some unnecessarily long layovers), but it’s way more expensive, and you won’t go below ~35hrs anyway. ↩︎
Interesting factoid: I didn’t realize until now that Australia only has approximately 23 mln inhabitants. That’s about half the population of Poland, itself not a big country, spread over the area of 7,692,024 km². ↩︎
And yes, technically the most remote capital is a tie between Wellington and, surprise surprise, Canberra. ↩︎

Breaking Bad finale

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Despite what you might hear me saying, I like TV shows. I don’t own a TV set (in fact I haven’t lived in an apartment with one for many years), and I avoid mentioning my interest in some shows, but that’s mostly due to my somewhat snobbish nature – I would like to be seen as a person who doesn’t fall for easy entertainment, and isn’t interested in anything less than a Booker prize winning novel, an inaccessible contemporary jazz album, or modern art exhibition. But in the privacy of my own blog I am willing to admit that there are certain things on television that I really enjoy, and one¹ of these things – AMC’s Breaking Bad – just came to an end.

Breaking Bad is a simple show. It’s not very sophisticated, like Mad Men. It isn’t as spectacular as Game of Thrones, and not as intellectual as Girls. The story is in fact very similar to Weeds (at least in the beginning), but in contrast to the light-toned Showtime series, Breaking Bad is seldom funny.² It is fantastically written, it has great characters, awesome cinematography, and, above all, amazing actors. But all this doesn’t explain the Breaking Bad phenomenon to me, i.e. I can’t understand how is it possible that a relatively simple TV series like that gets so much media coverage.

It’s not just the sheer amount³ of words that have been written about the show that amazes me, but also where the pieces were published. That BoingBoing regularly publishes posts about Breaking Bad isn’t that surprising (although these are relatively long-form essays, featured columns if you may, unlike most short notes that appear on BoingBoing), but if The New Yorker writes about shows other than Girls and Mad Men, it’s a serious matter. And it’s not only the Culture Desk, oh no. There are longer pieces in the magazine itself, as well as a recently published profile of Bryan Cranston. That The New York Times, The Guardian and even FAZ have published articles about the show doesn’t surprise me so much, but once I stumbled upon Breaking Bad in The Economist, I realized there’s no where to run, no where to hide.

Other shows I admire are Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Girls, and House of Cards. (shit, that’s more than I thought.) ↩
Despite significant differences between Weeds and BB, Vince Gilligan mentioned that he wouldn’t have made Breaking Bad if he knew about Weeds. Luckily for us, he didn't. ↩
Apparently you should wear a spoiler helmet if you haven’t seen the show yet (thanks, Karolina).↩

Switching season

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Every couple years I get the urge to peek out of my Apple-furnished hole and survey the landscape of alternative devices and operating systems. I call this urge switching season […] I figure that the least I can do when the urge to switch strikes me is to share what I’ve learned in the hopes that it saves other people some time.

via Alex Payne — Switching Season Report, 2013 Edition.

I have it exactly like Alex Payne – I’ve been living in the Apple-ecosystem for the last 3 years, and I am sorry to admit that the 2010 13’’ Macbook Pro is hands-down the best computer I have ever used. It’s fast (especially after having an SSD upgrade last summer), silent, portable, has great keyboard, and its software is boring like hell – it doesn’t crash and I don’t have to tinker with it to make wifi work after resuming from suspend. Despite all that, whenever I see a nice Thinkpad,¹ I’m immediately browsing the best second-hand computer store in the world searching for a used X201 or X220 in good condition. It’s partly nostalgia, partly the love of XMonad, and to a small extent dislike of Apple.² And every time it happens, I’m performing an analysis similar to the one Alex Payne did, arriving at mostly the same conclusions: Android sucks, Linux on the desktop mostly sucks, Windows is not considered due to it not being unix-based, and Apple sucks least on all fronts.

It’s all rather sad.

A friend just recently bought a used X201 Tablet. He’s running Ubuntu on it and says everything’s fine and dandy. I love the way this machine looks. ↩︎
However, I am not pro-Dell, pro-HP or pro-Google either. All corporations are evil, it’s their duty. ↩︎

Keith Jarrett Trio 30th Anniversary Tour at De Doelen, Rotterdam

Mon, 08 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last Thursday I went to a Keith Jarrett Trio concert in Rotterdam. It was probably the best jazz concert experience I’ve ever had.

The very first “contemporary” jazz¹ album I’ve listened to was “Standards, Vol. 1” (ECM 1983). My dad bought it when I was a teenager and played it to me, because I wanted to know other kinds of jazz than swing and bebop. I didn’t like it at first. It seemed chaotic and difficult to listen to. The melodies I knew were lost somewhere, and I didn’t understand how is this interpretation better than good old big bands. The more I listened to it, though, the more I understood, and the more I liked it. You could perhaps say that Keith Jarrett Trio’s standards taught me most things I know about jazz. I learned a lot about how a jazz trio works, how the bass underlines the chords of the piano, and how the drummer keeps things in control. But most importantly, Keith Jarrett Trio’s records opened my mind to a whole new kind of music: contemporary improvisation.

As I was growing up, I kept listening to all kinds of new jazz music. I bought some John Coltrane records and fell in love with hard-bop, only to discover Ornette Coleman some years later and enjoy the hell out of free jazz.² I also kept reading about new artists, buying albums and even developed taste for some sorts of avant-garde music, but when it comes to classic jazz trio consisting of a grand piano, double bass and the drums, I kept coming back to Keith Jarrett’s band and always thought of it as the model trio. Sure, there are many great ones, Uri Caine’s and Marcin Wasilewski’s being among my favorites, but the level of mastery achieved by KJT seems unachievable by anyone else.

When the concert ended, I realized that writing its “review” won’t be an easy task. Reviewing KJT’s concert is like talking about Velázquez’s paintings. Of course you enjoy them, otherwise you’re an idiot, and of course they’re perfect — everyone knows it and there’s no point in restating the obvious. The only 2 things that can possibly go wrong when it comes to KJT:

The condition of their leader, who, be it for mood- or health-related reasons, can sometimes underperform.³
The sound engineers can potentially screw things up.

Last Thursday night it was definitely the latter, but I’ll get back to that in a minute. Let me first explain why would one want to “review” such an event.

While I was listening to the concert, I realized it is rather hard to put in words why this particular trio is so awesome, and not, for example, Brad Mehldau Trio. “How is it better?”, I asked myself and tried to come up with an answer in my head.

KJT is the very, very best jazz trio in existence primarily because of the novelty of interpretations. What I took for chaos and even noise as a teenager is indeed a number of sublime improvisations. Keith Jarrett, being a brilliant fucking pianist, wraps the themes and melodies we all know so well inside his twisted, complex and melodic improvisations like no one else. During Thursday’s performance it happened so many times that a known theme emerged out of nowhere, and the audience was left stunned: “Where did that come from? How the hell did he do that?” All jazz pianists improvise on melodies from The Great American Songbook, but neither gets even close to Jarrett’s creativity and sensitivity.

Secondly, KJT’s perfection comes from the level of connection between musicians that is hard to match. Some critics argue that Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette have been playing standards for too long⁴, and that is somewhat true, but then again by doing so they have reached an absolutely perfect connection. No other trio has this.

Thirdly, Keith Jarrett Trio is one of the few jazz bands (if not the only one) to be able to easily move between different types of jazz aesthetics in terms of improvisation style. They are equally good at traditional, straight-ahead and free jazz, and they are even able to mix these together during one concert.

And finally, as you might have expected, there is the way they complement each other. Keith Jarrett plays almost like a classical pianist, and in fact many of his solos resemble something of a classical piano concert. His inclinations towards classical music are the signature of his sound.⁵ Then there is Gary Peacock on the bass, who’s role here is to do much more than your usual bass player does. Peacock is highly melodious, and his solos are very lyrical, especially for a bass player. Both Jarrett and Peacock are very soft and that’s why they need the big guy on the drums — Jack DeJohnette — who’s definitely the most aggressive element of the trio. DeJohnette’s style is still rather withdrawn compared to other drummers, but he’s the one who adds that chili pepper to the sauce.

If I were to describe their style with one expression, I’d say they’re sound is that of subtle, gentle virtuosity. That’s what they are, and that is why they are so exceptionally good.

Back to the concert: it was much longer than I expected, it lasted for more than 2 hours, and there were 3 encores. Jarrett seemed to be in great shape (given his age and health problems), and even though the drums were much too loud during the first part of the concert, sound engineers fixed the issue after the break and the second part was blissful. It was, as I mentioned in the first line of this post, the best jazz concert I’ve been to (Ornette Coleman Quartet I heard in Warsaw in the summer of 2007 is the 2nd best now).

As a final note, I’d like to thank my girlfriend Karolina who got the tickets and invited me to the concert. A fantastic experience I will probably never forget. Thank you.

Sorry for the quotation marks, but does anyone really know what is contemporary jazz? ↩︎
Speaking of discovering artists, the funny thing is I got my hands on Miles Davis’ albums pretty late, and for whatever reason he never got the love he apparently deserves from me. I adore “Bitches Brew”, but not much more. (Weird). ↩︎
Calling Jarrett moody is actually an understatement. Go google him and you’ll see plenty of stories about his, hmm, erratic behavior. ↩︎
It is in fact their 30th anniversary tour! ↩︎
That is even more visible in his great solo concerts, the best example being The Vienna Concert. ↩︎

On Racing Bergen-Voss

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

That’s me riding the final climb of Bergen-Voss 2013 race, the famous road from Granvin to Voss and its hairpins around Skjervsfossen. It was the second time I did this race, and although I had a better time than last year, I’m still at the very end of the “top 4000” list.

It’s a relatively easy, amateur race. The distance is about 165 km, but there is some climbing on the way (about 1800m), with 3 distinct climbs, one of which is rather serious:

There are two types of reactions I get when I tell people I do Bergen-Voss:

‘Ooh, you must be amazingly fit/strong! I would never be able to even finish such a race!’
‘Why the hell would you do such a thing?’

Ad 1): You’re wrong. Any healthy person can ride 165 km in under 10 hours. Yes, it requires some training and yes, it’s best if you have a racing bike (although there are people on mountain bikes, cyclocross and even city bikes too), but no, it does not require superhuman strength, endurance or spending 30000 NOK on gear. You can just do it, if you really want to. Remember Rule 5 and Rule 6, and you’re good.

Ad 2): Because I can, and because my job require little to no physical effort from me. I’m an academic, and this means (among many other things) that if I don’t teach, I don’t even have to leave my house. As a kid I was very bad at sports (I’m the classic case of a football player who plays for the team that picks last), and never really liked any physical activity, but these days, at the age of 28, I feel restless if I don’t bike or run a couple of days a week. Karolina has the same.

Also, when it comes to Bergen-Voss in particular, I do it because it’s an amazing experience. The route takes you through the mountains, valleys, and along the fantastic Hardangerfjord. Breath-taking nature, people ringing cowbells on the streets, and great atmosphere all the way. I wouldn’t regret it even if I came last.

Next June I will probably no longer be living in Norway, and thus I probably won’t take part in Bergen-Voss again. You should, though. All you need is a roadworthy bike and some months of training. Riding all the way to Voss is not necessary, but doing a couple of 100km-long trips before the race is a good preparation. Get on your bike and ride!

“Cosmos”

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So here’s the thing: I didn’t want to read this book. It’s been on my girlfriend’s shelf for a while, and even though the younger me would certainly read it eagerly, the current me avoids such titles. I read it though, and even worse, I’m writing a review.

The problem with books like ‘Cosmos’ is that you can either give 5 stars or 2 (or perhaps even 1). Giving 5 makes you a pretentious intellectual, giving 2 means you didn’t understand the book and you’re trying to rationalize it by saying you don’t want to be a pretentious intellectual. Fair enough. I’m giving 5 stars primarily because it’s been the first book that I managed to read almost in one seating (with interest and joy) in a long, long time, and of course because I am a pretentious intellectual.

This book is about the relationship between language and meaning, reality and thought. It’s a story of two young men visiting the Polish countryside somewhere in Tatra mountains, trying to get away from problems they have in Warsaw. The narrator is a paranoid fella who obsesses over dead sparrows and disfigured lips, and as the story progresses, over his own thoughts and phrases. This is what Cosmos really is about: an illusion of oppression created by human mind, a paranoia fueled by words, sentences and phrases. There is no other plot here, it’s essentially a plotless story. While some may find Gombrowicz’s style annoying and tedious, I found it absolutely brilliant. It serves the purpose of creating an atmosphere of absurd paranoia perfectly well, and manages to create tension (and humor) out of thin air.

‘How many sentences can one create out of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet? How many meanings can one gleam from hundreds of weeds, colds of dirt, and other trifles?’

(I read the Polish original, so if you’re reading the English version you should probably try to get Borchardt’s 2005 translation)

What Happens When You Live Abroad

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The anxiousness that was once concentrated on how you’re going to make new friends, adjust, and master the nuances of the language has become the repeated question “What am I missing?”

via What Happens When You Live Abroad.

Good post, good observations. As an ex-pat since around 2008 I’d like to add a few of my own.

Firstly, something weird happens to my “national identity” sense. I feel Polish of course, and that means I’m interested in what happens in Poland, I read Polish newspapers online, and I’m very much interested in Polish culture¹, but I no longer use Polish on a daily basis², I no longer feel that the political situation of my home country affects me in any way, and I really don’t see a situation in which I’d decide to move back to Poland. At the same time I hardly feel Norwegian, and I don’t really think I’d ever become one even if I lived here for 30 years. So I feel somewhat stateless.

Secondly, I think the whole “mastering a local language” thing is a myth. Yes, when all the signs suddenly become meaningless and you can’t say if what you’re looking at in the grocery store is actually butter or margarine, it’s an obstacle of sorts. Most foreigners I know here in Norway attended courses of Norwegian as a foreign language (at least to some degree), but of all of them only one speaks Norwegian fluently (and it’s a somewhat special case, because this person wanted to stay in Norway permanently since he got here). The rest is able to have a basic conversation about how the weather is bad and how beer is expensive, but that’s it. Interestingly, it seems the amount of work put into studying matters little. While it’s obvious that I can’t speak Norwegian (finished only level 1, with a strong D), all my other friends that finished all the possible levels of the course still don’t speak the language (even if they’re German). Same goes for Karolina – she completed all the levels of Dutch, but she still doesn’t speak it. We all use English because it’s so natural, convenient and easy. And there’s always someone around who doesn’t understand Norwegian at all, so what’s the point? That’s why I find the observation made by Thought Catalog so spot on: ex-pats gather in communities regardless of their origin. I hang out mostly with Norwegians, but at the same time with folks from India, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, South Africa, Algeria and China³, and we all speak English fluently. Perhaps this is what happens in Scandinavia simply because the average level of English fluency is so high, and I guess this wouldn’t happen in France, Spain, Italy or Germany (or any Eastern European country for that matter). Then again I’d still expect ex-pats from many different countries hanging out together, regardless of their country of origin.

Finally, I wonder how different my experiences would be had I not stayed in academia. Academic environments are naturally diverse when it comes to nationalities, and unfortunately most contracts are short and tied to some grant money. This means most people won’t consider investing time and/or money in learning a new language. I’d expect this to look differently in the so-called industry.

It is somehow sad, that whereas reading news, listening to the radio, buying CDs and books from Poland is fairly easy whilst abroad, watching new Polish movies is very hard. Foreign cinemas naturally seldom show them, and online services either don’t allow foreign IPs or don’t have new films. Since there is approximately 20 mln Poles abroad, I’d consider creating a paid online service a reasonable business idea. SV people, get it done (and cut me in for 30% if it works). ↩︎
I skype/facetime with Karolina ~daily, that’s right, but given that she also uses much more English than Polish, our mother tongue is becoming a scary pidgin-like talk. Mind you, this is what happens after ~4 years of continuously living abroad in the age of Internet. It’s frightening to think what it was like two decades ago. ↩︎
There is of course something special about the Chinese: they always stick together. But then again, I suspect it’s simply because English is so hard for them. ↩︎

“Debt”

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

David Graeber’s Debt is one of the best books I have read in my life.

It is a thorough historical and anthropological investigation into the nature of money and, nomen omen, debt. Across about 400 pages Graeber analyzes all aspects of these: moral, economical and philosophical. He lays out a fresh and somewhat bold view that challenges classical economic theories, namely that debt has been the true essence of human economies for at least 5000 years now, and provides lots of compelling evidence to support this claim. His original analysis is very thought-provoking, and makes the reader wonder about the very foundations of our society, global economy, and certain aspects of human nature (like greed and love).

To a reader unfamiliar with economics and anthropology (such as myself), Graeber’s book is also an eye-opener when it comes to explaining how the world works, and even more, how it has been working for the last couple of thousands of years. The author is a true erudite in how he manages to show numerous connections between religion, economy, history and human nature. And through last chapters, where he relates his historical presentation to present day and the financial crisis of 2007–2008, it is also a bit scary to read (again, to a poorly educated person such as myself) about how global economy ‘works’.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in economics and history of money and markets, but also to those who’d like to read about the history of the world from a different perspective.

Previewing LaTeX symbols without preview-latex

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This blog’s most popular post is the Emacs howto entry, so I thought I’d share one more LaTeX-related tip for all your Emacs needs. Besides the traditional preview-latex way of generating TeX formulas inside Emacs buffer, there’s a faster and neater way to do this using Emacs’ unicode support. My friends Erik Parmann and Pål Drange made a simple package that turns many math symbols and Greek letters commands into corresponding unicode characters. Here’s a sample of how this looks:

If you’re running Emacs 24, you can get the package from MELPA repository. Otherwise you can get it from Erik’s bitbucket, put it somewhere in your load path and load it with (require 'latex-pretty-symbols). There, happy TeXing!

(also, you can make similar tricks with Haskell mode and have all your lambdas displayed properly).

Blogging is hard

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I started blogging quite a long time ago, in 2006. The first platform I used was Polish Jogger — a blogging engine centered around Jabber (aka XMPP) protocol. It was very cool (and unique) at the time, you could interact with your blog via IM (posting new entries, replying to comments), and it gathered a specific crowd of open-source/linux/free software enthusiasts which made for a nice community. My blog at the time was called Das Nichts¹, and it was like most other blogs at that time — about everything. It was written in Polish and my audience were mostly friends from high school and college. Das Nichts later moved to Wordpress, and finally evolved into a tumblr, but in 2009 I stopped writing it, considering it too childish and wanting to switch to English.

I did. I created Sound and Complete, a blog in English, and hosted it on Wordpress.com. I tried writing about more technical subjects (linux and free software and the like), but quickly realized there’s a ton and a half technical blogs on the internet written by people closer to interesting communities (in my case free software communities), with deeper knowledge, and more engaged into certain projects. Obviously I could have become one of those people, but I was just about to start a PhD in logic, so my efforts concentrated more on modal logic, model theory, recursion theory etc. I figured that perhaps I could write about academic subjects, but I ran into trouble. With academic subjects (and logic/mathematics especially) you can either write introductory posts about things you know/you’re learned (but that’s a bit boring and not really something people want to read; modal logic is not as exciting as quantum physics, so it’s hard to become Brian Cox), or you can try publishing posts about details of your work. The latter is definitely more tempting, but in practice not really feasible, because it requires looong texts, lots of technicalities and it’s best suited for academic papers. So I ended up writing about everything again, just like in college. And that’s in principle ok, as long as there aren’t as many social network users as there are today.

The other day I took a good look at my blog’s archive and realized that out of a ~140 posts published here, about 15 is of decent quality.² The rest are either links to other material on the web or personal entries that would work much better as Facebook updates or tweets. Linking to other sites is, as Guy English writes in the 1st issue of The Magazine, specialty of a certain well-known blog, and imitating it isn’t easy. Some tech bloggers find their own formulas, but I wasn’t able find mine. I’ve tried many platforms, from WordPress through Posterous, Octopress and Tumblr to Squarespace, and even Medium³ or Branch, but it didn’t really matter — my blogging was never not good enough.

I once asked my friend Szopa why he doesn’t blog anymore⁴, and then he said something I remember very well — he said he doesn’t blog, because he wouldn’t read his own blog. Whereas I used to treat my own blogging very lightly for many years, I’ve recently tried looking at it the way I look at texts in The New Yorker, The Magazine⁵, The Economist, or simply the harsh⁶ way I review academic papers. Szopa was right — I wouldn’t read my own blog if it wasn’t my own.

This is not to say there were never any good entries here. No, some of them I actually find insightful, others are helpful, and others interesting even though personal. That’s why I’m keeping them here, but there seldom will be any more posts, unless I really have something to say (i.e. more likely there’ll be something long-form). You might be wondering why wouldn’t I simply leave the blog as it is. Well, my website used Squarespace lately, and Squarespace is a paid service. That’s why I decided to simply move my homepage as a static html file, put it in a Github repository and leave some of the posts I find valuable here as static html as well. That’s not to say I won’t write anymore, but it does mean posts will appear only a couple of times a year.

That’s due to my favorite TA in our Ontology class in the Institute of Philosophy, who’d notoriously ridicule Heidegger’s “das Nichts nichtet” quote (out of context of course). ↩︎
I found some more after trying to be really indulgent with myself. ↩︎
Even though still not fully open to the public, Medium seems like the most attractive and innovative publishing platform these days. I’m really looking forward to see it launch. ↩︎
He used to have 3 blogs if I correctly recall. ↩︎
The Magazine is actually something that deserves a blog post (sic!), because it’s a new type of a publication: a periodical distributed solely via Apple’s App Store for iOS Newsstand. Featuring texts by known tech bloggers it attempts to become a high-quality publication comparable to good old weekly magazines. Personally I applaud the idea, subscribe and read, but find that even though the texts are of relatively high quality, they’re nowhere near the quality of The Economist, The New Yorker or even The Atlantic. I am the worst kind of a critic, obviously, because I would never be able to produce anything even close to what John Siracusa or Marco Arment write. ↩︎
Not really. ↩︎

How Would You Fix the Linux Desktop?

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How Would You Fix the Linux Desktop?

aussersterne:

The culture of Linux remains the culture of 1993 mid-range computing—but we no longer live in a world in which CS students can’t afford the hardware/software they use at school and mainstream OSes can’t do the fun stuff. Quite the opposite. It’s funny to think back at how thrilled I was to have X11 on the desktop (compared to Windows 3.1) versus how I feel now, twenty years on, comparing KDE or GNOME on Fedora or Ubuntu to OS X 10.8. The tables have been exactly turned. Linux is still essentially the same in architecture and philosophy, while the rest of the world has moved to a completely different paradigm in which computing is essentially appliance-driven. In 1993 Linux was ahead of its time. In 2013 Linux is a decade behind.

These days, I want an complete, polished, turnkey appliance at low cost and with no labor time investment, not a set of building block. Today’s appliances are fast, intuitive, stable, durable, powerful, and integrated like the iPad (which I do, yes, use for serious work about 5-6 hours a day). For most users (which is where I have always ultimately fallen), Linux is solution in search of a problem that no longer exists.

Ask Slashdot has an interesting discussion about current state of the linux desktop, which has become (again) a heated debate after Miguel de Icaza’s blogpost and Linus Torvalds’ reply. There are some very insightful comments, like the one by aussersterne above, but more importantly the discussion gives a good picture of the linux/FLOSS community, with different views on what linux desktop is or should be, different backgrounds, ideas and problems. The first comment sums up the problem, or meta-problem to me:

Hatta:

I’ve been using Linux on my desktop for 13 years now. It works just fine for me.

Right.

How the iPad ruins my travel experience

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I travel a lot, be it for work or pleasure, and one of the things I particularly enjoy when I’m transferring at my favorite Schiphol airport is visiting bookstores. I browse magazines, bestsellers and non-fiction, and usually buy an issue of The Economist, The New Yorker or a book. Or actually, I used to buy.

Ever since I have the iPad¹, I stopped visiting bookstores. I no longer buy The Economist or The New Yorker, because there’s an app for that. Well, not only there are apps, but magazines are usually much cheaper if bought in “the newsstand” rather than in printed form. I no longer buy books there either, because I prefer using the Kindle app for reading while traveling (cuts the weight of the bag significantly). You might then say that there are no cons to this situation, and it is indeed a typical first world problem, but there are two observations I made today that I’d like to share here.

First off, I realized I don’t really read magazines as much as I used to, even though I have them cheaper, everywhere, and whichever I like. It’s a typical paradox of oversupply, so often noticed by music enthusiasts — back in the age of CDs (especially when they were expensive and not so easily available) we used to listen to music more carefully, knowing each album’s track titles, reading booklets that were inserted into CD cases, etc. Nowadays if I want an album, I can click “buy” in the iTunes store, and I have it immediately, but I don’t spend as much time on each record as I used to.² It’s the same with magazines on my iPad. I subscribe to a couple of them, but don’t have time to read every issue. Some issues I miss completely, unaware that they were downloaded automatically. Some weeks ago the situation was a tad better, because Polish magazines weren’t available in the App Store, but now I can get Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka and even Uważam Rze there as well, so I don’t buy any paper issues of anything anymore, and, paradoxically, read less magazines.

The second observation is that I truly miss walking around bookstores, browsing, looking at covers of books, reading abstracts and reviews on the back, and buying. It’s probably just an illusion, but I think I used to read more before I actually had the iPad. I might be reading more blog entries and things I save with Instapaper, but less magazines. And I actually don’t like reading books on the iPad, because of reflections, because the Kindle App’s poor design, and because they always ask me to switch it off for taxi, takeoff and landing. And I won’t buy an ebook reader, because the iPad is more useful for me in other areas, such as emailing, web browsing, and, most importantly, reading and reviewing academic papers.³

So while thinking about all that and strolling around Schiphol this fine afternoon, I stepped into a bookstore and spent some time there. How lovely it was! I could browse the latest issue of The Economist (pointless, since I have it on my iPad, but still fun), laugh silently at people picking up Very Bad Books from bookshelfs, and finally wandering around the “non-fiction” section, and picking up two titles: one that is supposed to teach me about modern(-ish) physics once again (never too much of that, quantum mechanics really is twisted), and another one⁴ that is supposed to convince me that Dawkins isn’t as silly as I’d like him to be.

Kindly supplied by Høgskolen i Bergen’s Department of Computing, Mathematics and Physics! ↩︎
Not to mention certain Swedish websites that give music for free. ↩︎
I honestly haven’t printed out a single PDF ever since I got the iPad. ↩︎
Only now I read that this book is aimed at children and “young adults”. Oh well, buying wrong books is an important element of the whole physically-buying-books-in-a-bookstore experience. ↩︎

New Violin

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing violin since I was 7. I went to music school in my hometown, Skierniewice, and spent six years there, finishing what is called a 1st stage music school in Poland. I did not continue to a 2nd stage school and never became a professionally trained musician, but I’ve spent many years playing in different orchestras, first in Skierniewice, later in Warsaw. I enjoyed improvising jazz¹ with my friends in high school, but that ended when I moved out from Skierniewice. Ever since then my only contact with the instrument was through weekly orchestral rehearsals, some practice in between those, and occasional concerts. And when I moved out from Poland in 2008, I left my violin there and did not play since then.

Having an electric instrument was always a dream. I enjoyed listening to Jean-Luc Ponty’s old albums, I was² a big fan of Mat Maneri’s avant-garde free jazz, and of course I loved (and still love) the very best jazz violinist of all time, Stéphane Grappelli³. At some point a very good friend of mine (whom I spent many years in a couple of orchestras with) bought herself a Fender electric violin, I even had a chance to play them, but did not think of buying an electric instrument for myself back then.

Why have I stopped playing violin after so many years of practice? I guess the main reason was I did not have much time, and I no longer had an orchestra or any other kind of band I could play with. Also, at some point playing violin became a very frustrating experience. Not necessarily because my technical abilities worsened, I feel I’m more or less at the same level of playing technique as I was a couple of years ago, but because my expectations significantly outgrew what I was able to play. I kept listening to a lot of records, and each time I tried playing a piece, I was so disappointed by how bad my performance is that I simply hid the instrument back in the case and played some CDs instead. ‘I am not a professional musician’, I would tell myself, ‘it’s not my job, I shouldn’t be wasting my time on this.’

Then during one of my visits to Groningen, I met Karolina’s friend Tim. Karolina is a cello player⁴, and Tim sometimes plays oboe. Every second weekend or so, they meet at one’s apartment and play music. (Karolina, Tim, if you’re reading this, please skip this paragraph.) Neither is a professional musician, and, seriously speaking, neither plays good. They’re often out of tune, they miss some bars every now and then, and they make a number of other mistakes. Still, their performances are what I’d call decent, or what my friend Erik would probably call adequate. While listening to them I realized it doesn’t really matter if they don’t play like pros, because playing music together and having live music at home is simply an enormous joy. I also realized I miss that. I wanted to go back in the game, wanted to go back to playing music.

There was a problem with an instrument though. Of course I had my old violin back at my parents’ house in Poland, but the instrument was in bad shape (years of neglect) and it actually never was particularly good. One could say that you don’t really need a great instrument if you’re a crappy musician, and that’s one way of looking at it, but then again a bad instrument doesn’t really help if you’re having difficulties playing harmonics or double stops. And then I also recalled that I always dreamed of having an electric violin. I checked the balance of my savings account, looked at how cheap the euro is, went on to http://thomann.de, ordered a Yamaha SV-200 silent electric violin, a carbon bow, a good rosin, a decent (or adequate) shoulder rest, and a lightweight case, pressed ‘buy’ and waited.

Before I tell you how the whole setup feels and sounds, let my give a few words of justification: why this violin and not other?

First off, a silent violin allows me to practice technically whenever I want. While unplugged from an amplifier the instrument produces a hardly audible sound, unnoticeable to anyone in another room, allowing me to play late at night using headphones.
Secondly, this instrument has a line-out socket, which makes recording multiple parts of a string quartet possible without the need of an expensive microphone (cheap mics + violin = the sound of slaughtering a cat). I always wanted to play Shostakovich’s 1st string quartet, but never had a quartet to play it with. This is no longer a problem.
The SV-200 can sound any way I want. If I’m practicing Wieniawski’s caprices, I can make it sound like an ordinary acoustic violin. If I want to imitate Ponty, it produces a full-blown 70s fusion sound.
And finally, some practical considerations. It seems it’s much more difficult to damage this instrument than an acoustic violin. It’s less fragile and less sensitive to temperature or humidity.

So now, how does it feel? A bit weird. The fingerboard seems to be a tad shorter than on my acoustic violin. The strings (D’Addario Zyex) seem to be easier to press (the difference is not as big as between an acoustic guitar and an electric one, but still), and of course the sound highly depends on the amplifier. The instrument doesn’t feel at all heavier than an acoustic violin, although according to technical specs it is ~100 grams heavier. I haven’t used a Kun shoulder rest before, but it seems to be better than my old Wolf Forte Secondo. The strings I’ll probably need to replace, I don’t like the sound. In fact I plan on buying a set of Dominants and some Pirastro, and compare which one sounds better. Also, I’ve tested recording a couple of minutes into Garage Band, and it sounded pretty good.

But most important of all, I played some parts of The Four Seasons together with Karolina today. We played together for the first time in many years. It was by all measures musically terrible. But it was an awful lot of fun, too.

I suppose calling what we played jazz is a bit of an insult to any serious jazz musician, but that’s how we thought about it back then. ↩︎
It’s not that I don’t like his music anymore, but I guess I wouldn’t consider myself a fan. ↩︎
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure if Grappelli ever played an electric violin. Still, his violin sounded electric enough on some records. ↩︎
She’s as amateurish as I am. In fact, we met in the 1st stage music school in my hometown, and played in an orchestra together — me as the 1st violin, she as 1st cello. Doesn’t get any more romantic and cheesy than this. ↩︎

Disabling a minor mode

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I like auto-fill-mode and even have it customized for LaTeX-mode in my Emacs configuration. However, while working with other people via a distributed version control system, like I do with my friends, auto-fill-mode can be a real pain if not everyone uses it. Whenever the ones that do commit any code, others are annoyed because it’s difficult to see the changes in the diff file, since auto-fill-mode reformats paragraphs (hence producing ‘more’ changes).

The most straightforward solution is to put some local variables into the file, like (auto-fill-mode -1), but today at StackOverflow I saw a much neater solution: one can put a function that searches for a specific string inside a file and sets minor-modes accordingly. So now there’s a coauthors search function in my .emacs:

; auto-fill is enabled for TeX...
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
; ...unless I work with the gang
(defun my-auto-fill-disabling-hook ()
 "Check to see if we should disable autofill."
 (save-excursion
 (when (or (re-search-forward "truls" 1000 t)
 (re-search-forward "sjur" 1000 t)
 (re-search-forward "erik" 1000 t))
 (auto-fill-mode -1))))
(add-hook 'find-file-hooks 'my-auto-fill-disabling-hook)

A eulogy for Maemo/MeeGo

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A long, long time ago, when I was still very enthusiastic about desktop linux and free software in general, an idea of a linux-based cellphone or a ‘palmtop’, as they were called back in the day, was something the FLOSS community dreamed of. There were numerous software and hardware projects (does anyone still remember OpenMoko?), and one of them, Android, was acquired by Google in 2005, and later became one of the most popular operating systems for mobile devices in the world.¹

I never liked Android. Not because I didn’t like the interface or the phones, or the logo, or Google – no. I didn’t like Android because it was a fork of the linux kernel and a linux distribution that didn’t (and from what I know still doesn’t) support the full set of standard GNU libraries or X window system.² And because there was a much better alternative developed by some Gnome project programmers and Nokia, called Maemo, that already in 2005 provided a nice touch-based interface, supported many well-established linux technologies (X.org, Gtk+, ESD, etc.), and was actually used by a device you could buy, namely Nokia’s N770 Internet Tablet. Granted, it wasn’t a phone, but the software was mature compared to Android at that time (first Android devices available to the public were offered in late 2008), and was much more hacker-friendly and linux-friendly. It was easy for desktop linux programmers to integrate their apps with Maemo and to write Maemo software. At least that’s the way I thought about it back in 2006.

In 2009 Nokia released the first smartphone that ran Maemo – the N900. But that was 2009, and Android already had an established user base, and new Android phones were released every couple of months. I’ve seen many N900 phones at FOSDEM in 2010, free software hackers really loved them. I remember everyone being excited about the potential Maemo had, but people also seemed to begin to realize that the battle was lost. Nokia was late, Android was good (or good enough) and popular, and the N900 remained a smartphone good for hackers and hackers only.

However, in February 2010 Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin merged, creating MeeGo³, and then in June Nokia announced that all its smartphones will run MeeGo. There was hope, but not for long. In February 2011 Nokia changed its mind, and decided to team up with Microsoft, and have its new smartphones run the new Windows Phone 7.

It therefore saddens me to read the review of the latest MeeGo-based smartphone, the fantastic N9. It seems like a terrific device, both hardware- and software-wise. Engadget sums the software up in the following way:

MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is such a breath of fresh air it will leave you gasping – that is, until you remember that you’re dealing with a dead man walking. It’s impossible to dismiss what’s been achieved here – a thoroughly modern, elegant, linux-based OS with inspired design that’s simple and intuitive to use, all developed in house by Nokia.

That’s exactly how things are with N9: it’s awesome in so many ways, but so fundamentally flawed because it’s a dead platform. Dead to most people, that is, because hackers will definitely find ways to upgrade the software, they’ll write apps if they need to, and will be happy to use the wonderful hardware that N9 features. The rest probably won’t even notice such a phone existed, because Nokia said it will not release the N9 in US, UK, Japan, Germany or Canada.

And I will shed a tear, because what seems to be the most innovative and fresh mobile platform today is being buried alive. And why? Probably even people at Nokia do not know.

Discussion on HackerNews.

Actually Canalyst reported that right now (October 2011) Android is the best selling operating system for smartphones. ↩︎
I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing for an operating system for smartphones to support all that any more. But in 2005 things looked a bit different. ↩︎
It’s easy to get lost. Now MeeGo merged with some other projects and became Tizen. ↩︎

Macbook Pro After 6 Months

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Some readers of this blog probably know that for a very long time (ca. 1998– 2010) I’ve been a devout linux user. I’ve been using this system exclusively on all the computers until the Fall last year, when I decided to give Macbook Pro a try (mainly for hardware-related reasons). I’ve written about it a couple of times already, but it’s still a subject I keep thinking about, and about which I’m being asked by my friends constantly. ‘Why have you bought a Mac?’, they ask, ‘how is it any better? Don’t you miss freedom? Don’t you miss Gnome?’

Yes and no. But let me elaborate on that.

(This is a rather long post, so if you’re not interested in the topic or simply don’t want to read the same old rants over and over again, let me offer you a one-sentence wrap-up of what’s written here: Linux is cool, Mac is uncool, but then again Mac is also cool or even cooler.)

I miss the freedom of choice I love so much. When you’re running Ubuntu or Fedora, or any other linux distro for that matter, and you’re annoyed/bored by your current graphical interface, you can just switch it to something else. Don’t like Gnome? Give KDE a try. Don’t like either? Go for LXDE, Openbox, Fluxbox, WindowMaker, Xfce, Enlightenment, FVWM, Awesome, Xmonad – you name it! I know that tweaking and playing with your computer’s operating system kills productivity, but that’s just the way I am: I like to be able to change things a bit. Here on Mac OS X it’s either the Apple way, or the highway.

Furthermore, it seems like I’m a man of habits, and I can’t get used to some OS X-specific features. For example, the distinction between applications and windows. Let me tell you how this works: in OS X, if you’re running Mail.app (a default e-mail client) and you’re having the main program window open plus you’re composing a new email (that’s another window), you can’t switch between these two with Cmd+Tab keyboard shortcut. Cmd+Tab will switch you to another application you’re running, for example Firefox. If you want to switch between windows within the same application, you need to press Cmd+`, and there’s no way around it. You can’t disable it, you can’t force OS X to cycle through all the windows of all the apps with Cmd+Tab. I understand some rationale behind the distinction, I sort of see the point, but… I hate it. If I’m writing this post in Firefox now, and I want to switch to another window which is within another application and it’s not in the foreground, I need to first Cmd+Tab and then Cmd+`. In Gnome or KDE it’s just one shortcut. Also, if you minimize a window with Cmd+M, you cannot switch to it either with Cmd+Tab or Cmd+`, you have to click on it’s minimized icon in the Dock, or invoke Exposé. It may be clean in terms of design and logic, but it’s all just terribly impractical.

Ok, let’s get to the hardware now. The aluminium unibody Macbook Pro is incredible. It’s sturdy, lightweight, compact, beautiful and absolutely noiseless (unless you’re playing Half-Life 2, but then it doesn’t really matter because the noise coming from your shotgun drowns all the other sounds). It has a fantastic backlit keyboard, and its screen produces a crisp, vivid image. But: the super-duper-magic-buttonless touchpad is just bad.

Some features of the touchpad are actually nice. It’s nice that it’s so big, and I like the inertial scrolling. But it’s imprecise, way less precise than a proper trackpoint. Also, I don’t usually use the gestures, which are so revolutionary. They’re neat if you want to show off to some friends who don’t have a Macbook, but in daily use I find them… difficult to perform. Perhaps it’s just something wrong with my hands, or my fingers – I don’t know. It’s just not comfortable. It’s funny that what I was initially afraid of hardware-wise was the super glossy screen, but I actually got used to it. But not the touchpad.

And it would be even ok if the touchpad sucked – they all do – if OS X was better suited for keyboard control, but it’s not. Many, many things require mouse usage. You can’t open up a terminal and do an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. You can update your Macports from the terminal, but any other updates you want to perform (via OS X’s internal system’s update mechanism or via the Mac App Store) require a mouse. Finder (a file manager and a shell for OS X user interface) is ok, but again – you have to click everything, you can’t use the keyboard for most tasks (or at least I don’t find it as comfortable as moving around the filesystem using Gnome’s Nautilus). There is no built-in interface that allows you to run an arbitrary command in OS X, like Alt+F2 that invokes a “Run program” window in Gnome/KDE. Sure, there are great 3rd party apps like Quicksilver, Launchbar or Alfred, but only Quicksilver is free, and its development is rather stagnant (maybe not when compared to Gnome-Do, but definitely when compared to Krunner). Managing windows sucks. There’s no way to maximize a window with a keyboard shortcut other than using a 3rd party application. Keyboard shortcuts are sometimes inconsistent amongst even standard apps that Apple ships with OS X, for example I’m never sure whether it’s Cmd+F or Cmd+Shift+F that I should hit to enter fullscreen mode. Oh and one last thing: in Gnome I can Alt+click any window in its arbitrary point, and then move it. This is very, very useful, and you can’t do it under OS X.

It’s not all that bad, obviously. The biggest strength of the Mac is the way the apps are integrated. You can drag and drop everything into/onto anything. OS X is also very fast compared to Ubuntu+Gnome on a similar (or even faster…) hardware. Apple of course makes some other devices than computers these days (well who knew, huh?) and if you happen to have one of those, you’re living in an ecosystem where everything stays in sync. Your email (and not only Gmail-based), your contacts, your photos, music, videos, calendars (and not only Google Calendar!), notes, todos, and what have you. The iPhone can be a remote for your iTunes, and it can also be a remote for your presentation if you’re using Keynote. It’s being constantly backed-up every time you sync it.

Another enormous advantage over the FOSS world here are the applications themselves. Sure, I’m just a PhD student and not a graphics designer, and it’s true that most of the time I use free tools available for both platforms, such as Emacs, TeX, Mendeley, Firefox, etc. But if you like photography, then no matter how amateur your skills are you will probably prefer using iPhoto rather than any photo management program for linux. Be it F-spot, Digikam or Shotwell, they’re no match for iPhoto. And there really isn’t any app available for linux you could compare to Aperture or Adobe Lightroom. It’s not all about graphics-related software, there are tons of great productivity apps, like Things. And if you hate OpenOffice as much as I do, you will definitely appreciate the speed, polish and overall neatness of iWork (which is very, very cheap these days). The App Store has a terrible interface, but it’s very easy to buy programs using it, and most of these programs are cheap and good (quite often they’re brilliant). And in contrast to linux there are even games available for Macs. I know, there aren’t many, but then again compared to the linux market I feel overwhelmed (not that I buy or play any of these games, but the sole possibility of buying and downloading CoD feels good). It’s also funny that some of the free apps I know from linux actually run better on a Mac. Mendeley is more stable here. LyX is faster (probably due to better 2D graphics support).

And finally, OS X is stable like hell. Ok, this may not be the best comparison, but let’s just say it’s very stable. I reboot it only when I travel by plane, because I’m a very paranoid and obedient person, and when the flight attendant asks to switch all electronic equipment off, I do actually switch my Macbook off. Other than that, it’s always on or suspended, or hibernated, or whatever. I don’t care about the uptime, and I’m never worried about any system crashes or colorful artifacts on my screen after I open up the display lid. Ubuntu 10.04 I’m using on my now-office-based HP EliteBook is generally also stable, but it likes to crash every now and then, especially after resume. My previous laptop, Dell Latitude D430 liked to crash as well, especially with the newer versions of Ubuntu. And my Thinkpad T40 was, how to put it, un-suspendable. I always had to shut it down if I wanted to close the lid, and then boot it up again.

Ok, so why have I written it all down in such a lengthy post?

First and foremost to show to my dear friends at the Dept. of Computer Engineering, that I’m not yet as much of an Apple fan boy as, for example, my supervisor is.

Secondly, I wanted to put my thoughts in order, and blogging works miracles for me in this manner. You see, for me being part of the whole FOSS community was an important part of my life. The decision of going to Eplehuset, entering my PIN, confirming and leaving with a white paper box wasn’t an easy one. When I came back home I felt pretty sad, no excitement about the new hardware whatsoever (that is of course until I finally unpacked it). It took me a couple of months to convince myself that this was the right decision, and I had to share this with everyone who reads my blog, because (a) that’s the way I am and (b) because what is written is properly confirmed in existence.

And finally, I wrote this post as a last of the I bought a Mac, look how (un)cool it is series. There will be no posts about these matters, and I don’t want to hear any more questions about it. Cheers.

In Defense Of The PhD

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Recently there’s been a lively discussion on why do people pursue PhD studies, is it good (for them and for the society), is it optimal (for the society and for the universities), and so on. The whole topic is by no means new, but since The Economist’s recent publication, other people expressed their opinions.

I’m 25, I’m a full-time PhD student, and I’d like to put in my oar now.

First off, while The Economist’s article has a number of valid points, it’s very US- and UK-centric. Even though the author refers to some case-studies outside the Anglo-Saxon world, like Germany, Slovakia or Belgium, some of its arguments do not apply at all to most European countries. For example:

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

We all read the PhD Comics and we all hear about how many hours of coursework or admin-duties a typical US grad student has. I don’t know how does it look like in other countries, but in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium this is definitely not the case. At some Dutch universities, even if PhD students want to teach, they can’t do that (e.g. because there’s too many of them, or because they are considered underqualified, or whatever). My contract clearly states that I have to spend 25% of my time on teaching, and that’s exactly what I do. One quarter of my overall work time is not much, yet I still gain valuable teaching experience, so it’s a win-win. I know many of my friends who are PhD-students work as TAs for courses taught by their promoters, and that’s usually also not too much work. Apart from all that, a little bit of teaching looks good in your CV, especially if you want to apply for post-doc or other academic positions after finishing a PhD.

There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings.

There probably is an oversupply of PhDs in the US and in the UK, fair point, but there isn’t one in Norway, and as far as I know not in any of the Nordic countries. Maybe it’s a peculiar situation here, but then again I hear that there’s too many PhD students in The Netherlands, yet all of my friends who recently graduated managed to get post-doc positions in the same country (yes, in some cases it took a while, but still). So let’s talk about the subject that generates most controversy: money.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.

Again: US is not the whole world. I’m not going to quote numbers here, but a PhD student in Norway gets a very decent salary, even compared to industry salaries in technology sector. I’m not saying I earn more than a senior programmer at Google, but the money is more than good enough to rent a nice flat (not shared with anyone), eat out from time to time, travel virtually wherever I want and still being able to save some of my monthly pay. The article fails to understand a basic thing behind PhD students’ motivations, though: we’re not after the money. If we were, we wouldn’t be studying philosophy, logic, theoretical computer science or quantum physics. We’d go for an MBA, law or something similar, only to end up working our asses off for McKinsey, Boston Consulting, E&Y or PWC. That is simply not our goal, and while many PhD candidates like to whine about how little cash they have, they either lie, or they simply shouldn’t be doing a PhD at all.

One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were postdocs. About one-third of Austria’s PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.

Right, but the OECD study doesn’t show how many people without a PhD are on temporary contracts in Slovakia five years after receiving their degrees, be it bachelor or master’s.

A major thing the article fails to understand is that most PhD students pursue an academic career for two reasons: because it’s their passion, and because they don’t seem to be able/willing to do anything else. Take a philosophy graduate for example, with a master’s thesis on German, late 18th century idealism. This person has two choices: either he goes for a lowly occupation, as the OECD study puts it, or enroll in a PhD program. Statistics suggests that our poor philosopher might still end up working for the man, somewhere in a call center selling insurance to people who don’t want to buy it, but going for a PhD is still better, because he can have 3-4 years of joyful academic life and then try his luck getting a tenure track job after a couple of years. Even if he fails, at least he tried.

PhD students/graduates are usually lousy at finding jobs outside the universities not because they have a PhD degree, but because they’re different. Normal people don’t study philosophy, and if they’re into computer science, they don’t care whether P≠NP – they just learn Java, Objective-C, Python or whatever else they find useful for becoming a successful software engineer.

And then finally, there’s one last thing everyone seems not to understand: once you finish your PhD, get done with the damn post-doc contract, and become a tenure-track researcher, you’re in the best job there is. You’re doing what you love, you have most of the time a flexible schedule, you supervise master’s and/or PhD students, you go to conferences all over the world. You write papers others comment on, and at some point you might even write a book (or co-author one). How amazingly cool is that? Oh you’re saying I’m a dreamer, and that simply never happens? Well what about those thousands of internet start-up companies? They waste their time as well, trying to become another Facebook or another Google. Yet they still do it, because it’s their dream to pursue.

And so is academic career ours.

Discussion on HackerNews.

Why I Can't Stick To One Web Browser

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Because they all suck.

I think Opera is my favorite browser. I’ve been using it for many years, it’s fast, cross-platform, it was the first browser to support tabs, [speed dial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_ web_browser#Speed_Dial) (with keyboard shortcuts – very useful!), and it’s always easy to block an arbitrary item of a website with Opera. However, among all the browser I’ve been using, Opera had problems with the biggest number of websites. Be it banks, Google Picasaweb, or some other sites – I can’t use Opera as my only browser. It always needs a helper program to handle the sites it doesn’t display properly, and that sucks. Especially that it’s always been a problem with this browser, which, given its other fantastically well designed features and its maturity as a software product (it’s been initially released in 1996!), doesn’t stop to amaze (and sadden) me.

Then there’s Firefox, which I’ve first tried when it was still called Phoenix. Firefox, upon its initial release, appealed to me because it was “like Opera, but more compatible”. Unfortunately, even early Phoenix builds seemed slow and bulky, and current versions are perhaps not as slow, but you can’t call them fast either. Another flaw of Mozilla’s flagship product is the variety of versions, and incompatibility of extensions from version to version. It happened to me many times, that after upgrading the package or the whole linux distro I was using at a time, some or all of my extensions in $HOME/.mozilla stopped working and didn’t want to upgrade. After one of the upgrades, FF didn’t even want to start, forcing me to erase all my personal settings, and, in consequence, to stop using it.

And then a couple of years ago the almighty Google released its Chromium-based browser: Chrome. Chrome is cool, because it’s fast, renders most websites properly, supports extensions, has something similar to speed dial (although doesn’t support keyboard shortcuts, which is a bad, bad thing), and it’s manufactured by Google, which makes it the trendiest browser among geeks and hipsters. But jokes aside, Chrome really is a great browser. The problem I’m having with Chrome it is that its tabs freeze quite often. Or even if they don’t freeze, their behavior is very often… erratic. I can’t explain it any better, and I really can’t think of any other reason not to like Chrome, but when I end up with 12 tabs that suddenly become unresponsive, I’m mad.

So then I can switch to Apple’s browser – Safari. I bought a Mac a couple of months ago, and an iPhone¹ followed, so it’s kind of neat having all this synchronization, speed and… power efficiency (seriously, my Macbook Pro’s power estimates rise significantly when I’m running on battery and I quit Chrome and start Safari; seems quite reasonable to think that Safari is very well optimized for Mac OSX). However, Safari doesn’t run on linux and it probably never will, which is a major problem since I’m still using Ubuntu on my office computer (and I’m not willing to stop it). Furthermore, there are these small annoyances, like the fact that you can’t tell Safari to remember tabs’ contents from session to session, or that it doesn’t support keyword- based search queries in the address bar (or at least I don’t know how to make either of these features work). Oh, and when Safari crashes, or suddenly eats all the CPU and memory, and I have to kill it, there’s no way to recover anything from the lost session. And no dialog window asking if I want to submit a crash report either. Weird. Then again Quakelive supports Safari, and that’s crucial for my PhD.

So here I am: a web-browser-hopper. Frustrated by flaws of one browser and tempted by advantages of another one, I keep changing them every now and then. And I sometimes wonder: why isn’t there one browser I could simply use all the time? Or is it something wrong with me?

(I apologize my readers for more than 2 months of silence here; blogging is about writing in regular units of time, but I was a little bit busy lately; hopefully a hiatus that long will not happen again)

I was actually about to write a post about my iPhone acquisition and related topics, but I realized that writing about how awesome iPhone is would be kinda lame. I might still write something about it at some point, but not today. ↩︎

Linux frustration

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve already mentioned my linux-related laptop problems some time ago. Some things changed since then. Canonical released a new version of Ubuntu, 10.04, which in my opinion is a huge improvement over 9.10, and I got a new laptop (kindly provided by HiB), an HP EliteBook 6930p. Old problems are gone, but new have arisen.

At first it all seemed ok. I’ve installed Ubuntu 10.04 and didn’t have to tweak anything. Wireless, bluetooth, suspend/resume – all worked automagically. Except graphics.

My laptop has a built-in Intel 4500 graphics board. Most of the time it works fine, hardware acceleration and dual-display mode included. It’s also quite fast for my needs – flash videos work with no frame-dropping, HD films as well, and Quakelive works smoothly (the last one especially relevant to my research). But from time to time, completely randomly, weird annoying things happen.

First weird annoying thing is the Non Existing Display problem (which we shall henceforth refer to as NED). It goes like this: I power on the machine, the kernel boots, plymouth loads, and the GDM screen… well, it also loads, because I can hear the bongos, but it’t not visible. The thing is, GDM login window is being displayed on the NED. If I simply press enter and put my password, it will log me in, and in most cases I will see my desktop. If not, I can use Gnome-Do to evoke the display configuration panel. Once it opens, the screen usually flickers and realizes that there’s only one display connected, or, ontologically speaking, that the NED indeed does not exist (as the name clearly suggests). If it can’t realize the obvious truth immediately, it will do it after a couple of clicks in the display configuration panel. If not after a couple, then after a couple more, but anyway after some time the display works correctly. That doesn’t mean Ubuntu won’t have any doubts as to the NED’s ontological status anymore, and that’s the most annoying part.

The second weird annoying thing is the Proper Resolution Holding problem (which we shall henceforth refer to as PRH). Imagine a situation like this: you have your Emacs open and you’re working on some non-trivial piece of code. As any programmer will tell you, this requires utmost concentration. I often have situations like this, perhaps even more often than other people, because most programming problems are non-trivial for me, since I’m a bad programmer. Anyway, I have my Emacs open, and I’m thinking deeply about some problem. If I keep thinking for more than 9:59 without touching the mouse/keyboard, e.g. reading the algorithm description from a printed article, the screensaver will go on. And then boom!, the displays go crazy. Oh right, did I mention I’m using dual display configuration? I guess I didn’t, but I don’t think having an external display connected to your laptop is something fancy in 2010. Anyway, when the screensaver wants to switch on, X.Org turns the mirroring mode for my displays, and sets 1024x768 resolution on both screens. Unfortunately, the only way to solve this situation is to save any work I have, switch to a virtual console 1 with Alt+F1, execute sudo service gdm restart and hope for the best.

Display problems occur randomly while trying to change laptop screen’s brightness too. And of course after resuming from suspend, but thankfully this happens really seldom, like one in fifty suspends. When it does, however, the only way to bring your display back to work is to forcibly reboot the laptop.

There are more problems, like the silent microphone (no matter what I do it’s just too quiet for most people to hear me via voip), short battery life (i.e. much shorter than on windows), and terribly bad trackpoint/touchpad support (i.e. much worse than on windows), but these problems I could live with. The graphics related annoyances are just too much. And the worst thing is that I no longer know which graphics board should I recommend to people who want the best linux experience. Nvidia? Yes, but only with closed-source drivers, although some people claim that nouveau work well. Ati? Well, I remember both mine and Karolina’s problems with our Radeons, so that’s a no. Intel? As far as I recall everyone always told me that Intel chipset based products (graphics, wifi, ethernet) are always best for linux, but ever since the introduction of KMS-enabled drivers this is apparently no longer true. By the way, my case is nothing compared to a case of a new PhD student in our department. He’s new, so he’s got a newer laptop. Good for him? Not quite. Not a single linux distro supports his brand new Intel HD graphics.

Now the obvious question is: did I try to fix my problems? Yes and no. Yes, I’ve searched the forums, and yes, I’ve tried some solutions. None of them worked. There probably are some new tips, new kernel releases I could compile, new patches I could apply, but no – thanks, I don’t want to. I’m too old. With all my previous computers it was tuning and tweaking all the time. Thinkpad T40 needed a custom TuxOnIce-patched kernel for suspend to disk to work (suspend to ram made no sense, the battery was too old and I was loosing too much power even during suspend). Dell Latitude D430 had huge problems with newer Intel graphics drivers. There was always something I needed to tune. It’s like this joke about Lancia owners – they like tinkering with their cars in a garage, which is only a nice way of saying that their cars won’t work unless tinkered with.

I’ve been a linux user since about 1999, and during that time I’ve been using linux exclusively on all my computers. First it was SuSE 6.0 and RedHat Manhattan (was it 5.1?). Then different RedHat versions for a short while, then Slackware for a long time, then Debian, Gentoo, Arch, and finally Ubuntu, since somewhere around 2005. In fall 2010 I’ll stop using a linux-based operating system on my home computer, and I don’t mean switching to some BSD (huh, been there!). I need a second computer, so I won’t have to carry my laptop in a rucksack all the time (I moved to Fyllingsdalen and I work at HiB – everyone who knows Bergen sees the reason). It will be some Windows 7 based computer, or a product of one Cuppertino-based company.

Either way, I feel sad.

Continuous list enumeration throughout the document with LaTeX

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Karolina asked me today to create a macro for having a continuous list enumeration throughout the whole document, i.e.

This is the first list:

Item;

Another item;

And here goes the second list:

Third item;

And yet another item.

You can obtain an effect like that by using LaTeX counters and a custom definition of your own enumerate environment. First, we need to \usepackage{enumerate}, and then define the following counter and an environment in the preamble:

\newcounter{enumi_saved}

\newenvironment{myenumerate} {
 \begin{enumerate}\setcounter{enumi}{\value{enumi_saved}}}
 {\setcounter{enumi_saved}{\value{enumi}}\end{enumerate}}

After that, you can use myenumerate and you’ll have a continuous enumeration in the whole document.

Oh and some credits: I wouldn’t come up with a solution if I haven’t read this post, and this website. Huge thanks to the authors for their tips!

On Haskell

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Although I’ve always wanted to become a professional programmer, I never became one. I studied philosophy and went into a PhD programme in computer science because of my interest in formal logic. I like computers very much, I have professional experience in UNIX administration, and I’ve done a lot of Perl/Bash/Tcsh scripting, but I’ve never actually written any non-trivial piece of programming code. Whether you want to model something, verify, or check your proofs, being able to write a computer program that helps you with some task really comes in handy. And then there’s this question: what programming language should a person interested in logic/mathematics (without any CS background) learn?

The first obvious choice for people interested in logic is Prolog. It’s relatively easy to learn, but after some time playing with it we discover that it’s quite limited, and not too efficient. Java is faster, easy as well and more versatile, but for very high-level programming (theorem provers, model checkers) it takes a lot of time to implement ideas, especially when compared to Prolog. Then there are other nice suitable languages like Python (very generic), LISP/Scheme (rather old, yet still very powerful), and finally Haskell.¹

Haskell is a general purpose statically- typed purely functional programming language. It supports lazy evaluation, typeclasses and type polymorphism. It provides an enormous set of tools for the programmer, while being far more efficient and flexible than, say, Prolog. Due to its nature it also imposes some discipline on the programmer (for example, static typing prevents a number of errors on the level of compilation), making programming more rigorous and efficient. ESR recently wrote about Haskell:

Haskell is built around a handful of powerful primitive concepts and a pons asinorum. The most pervasive of these, purely functional programming without side effects or variables, is generally described in introductions to Haskell as the most difficult barrier for most programmers arriving from conventional imperative or OO languages like C, C++, and Python. And yes, if your mental model of programming is all about for-loops and static variables — or, for that matter, objects! — learning to think in Haskell is going to be quite a wrench. There are reasons to make the effort. Haskellers (Haskellites? Haskellians? Haskellators? Haskelletons?) maintain that imperative programming relies heavily on side effects that push proving the correctness of programs to somewhere between impractically difficult and impossible. They also like to point out that side effects make programs difficult to automatically parallelize across multiple processors, an increasingly important consideration as multicores become the rule rather than the exception.

That’s true, Haskell is not a trivial language to learn. I’ve been learning it for a while now, and I’m still far from saying that I actually know Haskell. Lazy evaluation and purely functional approach make it especially hard to switch from imperative way of thinking in the beginning. It’s difficult to learn, but the effort is worth taking. “Discrete Mathematics Using a Computer” justifies the effort like this:

Pure functional languages like Haskell, as well as mathematics itself, are demanding in that they require you to think through a problem deeply in order to express its solution with equations. It’s always possible to hack an imperative program by sticking an assignment in it somewhere in order to patch up a problem, but you cannot do that in a functional program. On the other hand, if our goal is to build correct and reliable software — and this should be our goal! — then the discipline of careful thought will be repaid in higher quality software.²

I can also add that Haskell forces a programmer to study some aspects of theoretical computer science in a way other languages don’t. It’s a bit like with LISP – you have to know something about lists, trees, recursion, higher- order functions, etc., otherwise you won’t be able to learn it. On the other hand I’d risk saying that it’s possible to learn for example Perl without getting into theory of programming too much (but perhaps I’m wrong here).

So if it’s all so hard, how should one learn Haskell? That very much depends on your level of programming literacy (in general, not necessarily functional programming literacy), amount of time you want to spend, and your motivations behind learning Haskell. I once told my PhD supervisor that I actually know of 3,5 good books on Haskell programming:

“Learn you a Haskell for great good” – not a book really, rather an online tutorial with lots of funny pictures; among the free tutorials it’s the best one I know;
“Real world Haskell” – currently the most famous Haskell book I guess; it’s a bit like Seibel’s “Practical Common Lisp”, only on Haskell; even if you’re not into web development or databases, this book is the best introduction to Haskell and functional programming I found; oh, and it’s free for online reading, but you can always grab a printed copy for ~$50;
“Discrete Mathematics Using a Computer” – this is definitely a must read for anyone interested particularly in using Haskell for solving logical and/or mathematical problems; it’s really great and focuses on logic, recursion, set theory and so on, and still provides a good introduction to Haskell;
“The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming” – another book focusing mainly on logical and mathematical applications; it’s good, but I found it very difficult and although authors say they don’t assume any background in functional programming, they actually do assume quite a lot (at least that was my impression).

All the books listed above are good, but I think the order in which I put them corresponds to their difficulty level. Not exactly, though: “Real World Haskell” can get pretty dense, but it introduces everything quite gently. “The Haskell Road to Logic…” on the other hand is in my opinion difficult throughout its whole length.

I strongly recommend everyone (especially to fellow logicians) to at least give Haskell a try, it’s definitely worth it. And if you happen to live in Bergen and would like to meet to discuss some Haskell-related stuff, there’s an informal group of people, consisting of me and three of my friends. Let us know if you’d like to join us in haskelling.

Let me make one thing clear here. This post is not against other programming languages. I acknowledge Java, Python and Prolog’s usefulness. The post is just about emphasizing Haskell’s pros. No war intended. ↩︎
O’Donnell/Hall/Page, Discrete Mathematics Using a Computer. ↩︎

Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor

Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This article gets a lot of hits, but it’s been a while since I wrote it and I haven’t been using Emacs or LaTeX in years. I’m sorry, but I can’t provide any support and won’t reply to emails about it.

Everyone knows, that GNU Emacs is THE Best Programmer’s Editor. Not everyone knows, though, that when you combine it with AUCTeX macros, it also becomes THE Best Editor for LaTeX.

The biggest problem with Emacs is that it’s not a particularly intuitive piece of software, to say the least, hence many users flee after their first encounter with it. Emacs has its complicated keyboard shortcuts, enormous documentation and config files written in a Lisp dialect (called Emacs lisp), so at first it might seem very unpleasant using it. However, once tamed, it becomes your best friend.

I’d like to present some tips that customize Emacs making it a perfect and very sophisticated editor for LaTeX. Most of these ideas are taken from various config files, howtos and other resources found on the web. Some of them are mine, but I can no longer tell which.

First things first: you need to get Emacs and AUCTeX, and get it running.

Every major linux distro comes with both Emacs and AUCTeX available via package systems. In Ubuntu, you just type sudo apt-get install emacs23 auctex and you’re laughing. Emacs is also available for Windows, and AUCTeX website has instructions on how to set it up with Windows systems. Mac users have a choice of setting up either Carbon Emacs (a version closer to original GNU Emacs) or Aquamacs (an Emacs variant supporting tabs and other nice tweaks; preferred Emacs package by all Mac users I know, Karolina included). Full comparison of Mac Emacs variants is available here, so you can make your own choice. Both Carbon Emacs and Aquamacs come with AUCTeX bundled, so there’s no need to download additional packages.

After running Emacs and loading a TeX file (C-x C-f file_name.tex), AUCTeX should load itself automatically. If it doesn’t happen, you can invoke it with M-x tex-mode, or you can put the following into your $HOME/.emacs file:

(setq TeX-auto-save t)
(setq TeX-parse-self t)
(setq TeX-save-query nil)
;(setq TeX-PDF-mode t)

(all the code snippets from this post are available as a Github Gist)

The options above will make sure, that AUCTeX macros are loaded every time a TeX file is opened. The last option, ;(setq TeX-PDF-mode t), is commented (all lines beginning with ; are a comment in Emacs Lisp), but you can uncomment it if you want to have PDFLaTeX mode enabled by default for all documents.

AUCTeX has a number of nice features, the two I use most often are:

automatic formatting of a section: C-c C-q C-s;
section preview: C-c C-p C-s; (see the screenshot on the right)

Preview function is very nice, because you can see the commands that are behind preview images, edit the code, apply preview again and see the results — no need to parse the whole file too often, and most importantly no need to switch to a PDF/PS viewer to see if your math formula/xypic tree is formatted correctly. Trust me, this saves a lot of time.

(update 27.12.2012: there’s another way of previewing LaTeX symbols inside an Emacs buffer, take a look here)

AUCTeX has many many more features, and you can always consult its documentation if you want to learn more. It’s a little bit overwhelming, but learning it is a very good investment, especially if you work with TeX a lot. But there are more packages that provide features which make your life easier.

Flymake is one of those packages. It enables Emacs to check the syntax of your TeX file on-the-fly. To turn it on, put the following code in your $HOME/.emacs:

(require 'flymake)
(defun flymake-get-tex-args (file-name)
(list "pdflatex"
(list "-file-line-error" "-draftmode" "-interaction=nonstopmode" file-name)))
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'flymake-mode)

Beware, though — flymake consumes quite a lot of CPU power, especially when used with large files (and paradoxically large files make it most useful).

On the other hand, spell-checking while you type isn’t so cpu consuming, and you can turn it on with:

; could be ispell as well, depending on your preferences
(setq ispell-program-name "aspell")
; this can obviously be set to any language your spell-checking program supports
(setq ispell-dictionary "english")
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'flyspell-buffer)

Another nice package is the Outline Mode. It allows the user to hide some parts of the text file, which makes working with large files much easier. To enable it, put the following in $HOME/.emacs:

(defun turn-on-outline-minor-mode ()
(outline-minor-mode 1))
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-outline-minor-mode)
(add-hook 'latex-mode-hook 'turn-on-outline-minor-mode)
(setq outline-minor-mode-prefix "\C-c \C-o") ; Or something else

Now you can fold sections, subsections, chapters, or the whole document. To hide all the contents of your current section, use C-c C-o C-l. You can apply it to a chapter, subsection, etc. You can also move to a next unit of your document with C-c C-o C-n, or to a previous one with C-c C-o C-p. If you’re lost and want to see the whole document again, use C-c C-o C-a.

Folding and unfolding parts of the text might be confusing, though, but there’s another way to navigate through a big TeX file, and you can use Reftex mode for it. Reftex is a mode that helps with managing references (full documentation), but it can also be used to create a table of contents for a TeX file and to navigate using it. Here is my configuration for Reftex from my .emacs file:

(require 'tex-site)
(autoload 'reftex-mode "reftex" "RefTeX Minor Mode" t)
(autoload 'turn-on-reftex "reftex" "RefTeX Minor Mode" nil)
(autoload 'reftex-citation "reftex-cite" "Make citation" nil)
(autoload 'reftex-index-phrase-mode "reftex-index" "Phrase Mode" t)
(add-hook 'latex-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex) ; with Emacs latex mode
;; (add-hook 'reftex-load-hook 'imenu-add-menubar-index)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)
(setq LaTeX-eqnarray-label "eq"
LaTeX-equation-label "eq"
LaTeX-figure-label "fig"
LaTeX-table-label "tab"
LaTeX-myChapter-label "chap"
TeX-auto-save t
TeX-newline-function 'reindent-then-newline-and-indent
TeX-parse-self t
TeX-style-path
'("style/" "auto/"
"/usr/share/emacs21/site-lisp/auctex/style/"
"/var/lib/auctex/emacs21/"
"/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/auctex/style/")
LaTeX-section-hook
'(LaTeX-section-heading
LaTeX-section-title
LaTeX-section-toc
LaTeX-section-section
LaTeX-section-label))

Once Reftex is loaded, you can invoke the table of contents buffer with C-c =

All right, enough. If I mention any more packages, I guess it will scare off those who aren’t already scared. I know that Emacs is a bit peculiar with its complicated keyboard shortcuts, enormous documentation and thousands of modes. It’s not easy to learn, but definitely worth it. I remember that switching from Vim to Emacs for LaTeX editing wasn’t easy, but I never regretted that, and I hope whoever’s going to switch under the influence of this post will not regret it either.

Norway in the eyes of a foreigner

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

After a long period of searching for a PhD scholarship I finally got a great offer from Bergen University College, and in the 2nd half of March I’ve joined the staff of Department of Computer Engineering as a member of DISTECH research group. This means a lot has changed in my life, because apart from changing a job/school I’ve also moved to another country. This country happens to be Norway and I have some thoughts about it I’d like to share.

It’s expensive, but in a peculiar way. Let me explain what I mean. Coming from a relatively poor country that Poland is (at least by European standards) to Belgium last year was difficult, especially when Euro was so strong. But Belgium (and Leuven especially) is not a very expensive place to live. Coming to Bergen I expected to pay 200% of Belgian prices for everything, but it’s not like this. To my surprise, Norwegian prices are only a little higher than Euro zone prices, at least for the most basic products like food or clothes. But mind you: this applies only to the food you buy in a supermarket. Once you want to go out and have a lunch in a restaurant, expect to pay extra. And if you happen to like beer or alcohol in general, expect to pay even more. I’m a beer enthusiast myself and I remember the great choice of fantastic beers in Leuven — you could hardly find one that would cost more than, say, 5 EUR for a bottle. Anything above this price would either be very rare, or served in an expensive bar. In Bergen, you can easily pay 8 EUR for a bottle of beer in a bar, and the prices go up (sometimes much higher). What’s peculiar is that the structure of product prices is different. The food is generally expensive, but clothes, furniture, high-tech (computers, electronics, good bicycles) and home equipment isn’t. I’ve seen more iPhones and people wearing good quality headphones on the bus here in Bergen than in Brussels. So to sum up: an average Norwegian is able to afford a newest smartphone without any problems, but he will think twice before having a dinner in a restaurant.
One other thing about costs of living and money in general that is specific in Norway is that there are no big differences in salaries. For example, a person working as a researcher in my school doesn’t get much more money than a janitor (or at least that’s what my Norwegian friends told me). Still it doesn’t mean that researchers aren’t paid good money; in fact my salary as a PhD student is bigger than that of my colleagues in western Europe. And even though the cost of living here is much higher, I see that a PhD student in Norway is generally able to afford more than a PhD student in Belgium. Sure, the flat structure of wages has its disadvantages, but you hardly see any poor people on the streets here (not a case for Brussels).
Also, one last point about the money: having a salary paid in Norwegian kroner makes every other country cheap. And that’s a big advantage if you’re travelling a lot.
Ok, let’s get to some more important matters: The Nature. To say that Norway is stunningly beautiful is not enough. I’m about a month here so I haven’t seen much, but every time I go anywhere outside Bergen I keep staring at the mountains with my jaw dropped. Heck, I don’t even have to leave Bergen — the mountains are everywhere, I can see them through the windows of my office, I can just walk outside and start climbing them anytime. But when you head northeast it gets even better; we went to Myrkdalen by car last week and I had my face pressed up against the window all the time, with only one thought in my head — how to get a permanent residence permit and how to buy a house here.
Norway seems like a homogeneous society. Perhaps you don’t see it if you’re in Oslo, or if you’re working for some international company, but in my school, where there aren’t too many international students, blending into Norwegian society is a must. What it means in practice is that it’s hardly possible living four years here without learning Norwegian. I know it’s possible not to know a word in Dutch while living in The Netherlands or Belgium, but it would be very hard here. Not because Norwegians don’t speak English, in fact everyone here does it really well, but since there aren’t that many foreigners there’s not much practical information in English — bus company websites, banks, festivals, newspapers, etc. — it’s all in Norwegian. Not a case for Belgium, where most things are presented in four languages (NL/FR/DE/EN).
Oh, by the way, some of my friends asked me if it’s true that Norwegians are generally shy and quiet. I don’t know where this came from, but they’re definitely not shy. And let’s just leave it like this without getting into details.
[updated 18.04] Just one more thing I forgot about yesterday: Norwegians are carnivores. Being a vegetarian here is virtually impossible. I’m not a veggie myself, but I try to eat as little meat as possible. Fish are easy to get of course, and cheap, but I remember ordering a pizza last Friday, and among 20 different pizza types there was only one vegetarian. And not only do Norwegians eat meat, they eat a lot of fat meat. And sheep heads in Voss (literally sheep heads — with eyes and everything). If you’re a vegetarian, either don’t move here or stop being one.

I guess I should also write about my research, but there’s not much to write about yet. I still have a lot to learn, the most important thing is that I can learn things that really interest me, and that I have great support from my promoter and my colleagues.

Stay tuned for more Norway-related posts!

I can't read fiction anymore

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Every day I consume thousands of words. I read essays (like the ones published in The New Yorker magazine, The Atlantic, etc.), news (usually just Slashdot, HN and Reddit), blogs, comments, emails, tweets and status updates. Apart from that, I read scientific articles, technical books (Haskell road to maths, logic and programming, anyone?) and sometimes documentation. But I can’t read fiction anymore.

When I was in high school, I used to read at least a couple of novels every month. Now whatever I pick up, I’m either quickly bored with, or stop reading for another reason. Some novels I find too depressing (Coetzee’s Dusklands), others secondary (Pilch’s Wyznania twórcy pokątnej literatury erotycznej), and the rest simply bad. I tried many different types of novels, yet the only ones I’ve read during the last few years were crime/mystery novels (Mankell, Krajewski, Marinina), and I really have enough of those since they’re all basically the same. I even tried going back to science-fiction, which I used to be a fan of, but the results were even worse – after reading 250 pages of Dukaj’s Black Oceans I gave up.

The problem is not that I don’t read novels, but that it doesn’t give me any pleasure (and it used to give). I came up with a number of theories that explain this situation:

I read too much serious/difficult non-fiction literature and hence am not able to make an effort of reading 300 pages filled with fiction (rather unlikely, since I don’t read that many scientific articles);
I spend too much time browsing the internet which creates a habit of reading relatively short content (even the longest essays usually don’t exceed 3000 words);
I simply can’t find an appropriate novel.

Explanation no. 3 seems most plausible, therefore I ask my readers: any suggestions? I’m able to read in Polish and English, please go ahead and recommend me some fiction to read. I still have at least 2 weeks before starting a PhD, and I’d really like to read something interesting until then. Thanks in advance!

On the subjective hi-fi quality

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Every now and then different people ask me about an opinion on buying hi-fi components. Be it headphones for their portable mp3 players, amplifiers or mini-systems, I’m a local authority (a proud one, I must add). Perhaps it’s because I’m a nerd obsessed with sound quality, or perhaps I’m judging people by their hi-fi systems, anyways I thought I’d share a few general advices for everyone.

First of all, let me remind everyone one more time, that buying hi-fi is by no means similar to buying computer hardware. There seldom happens a situation, when one can compare e.g. two amplifiers and say that the former is better than the latter in every aspect. Bad components happen, very bad happen as well, but the majority of hi-fi produced nowadays is at least good. Some of them are very good, and few are exceptionally fantastic, but those devices that occupy the last two categories are amongst most controversial, since not everybody likes the same sound.

The most apparent example is with vinyl vs. laser discs. There is a significant number of people, who claim that a good turntable outperforms (whatever this means) every CD player. These people hold this view even though they know about obvious limitations of a gramophone record, and I respect them the same way I respect insane people. However, I am able to acknowledge that someone may just like a sound of an LP rather than a CD. And that’s the way it works.

I’m an insane person too, in a way, i.e. I claim that electrostatic loudspeakers are superior to any other loudspeaker technology. They’re expensive, they lack bass, they demand a big room (or rather: they can’t stand right next to a wall) and can be dangerous (especially if you have kids or keep animals at home), but the sound they give in return is so amazing that no traditional construction can match them. It’s my opinion, though, and I don’t intend to force it on anyone. The same goes for transistor vs. valve, integrated vs. separated amplifiers or CD players, and so on. Bear that in mind before you ask me once again what is better, or if you once again try to convince me that gramophones are the best source for a hi-fi system.

Now shortly, a number of tips that I’d give to anyone asking me for advice.

If you’re not willing to spend too much money on a hi-fi system, don’t expect huge differences amongst different amplifiers or loudspeakers. You might pick a terribly sounding component, but the chances are low.
Keep in mind that among budget hi-fi manufacturers there are some which are usually a safe bet, i.e. their products will sound at least decently, and that includes some European companies (NAD, Creek, Cambridge Audio) and some Japanese (Rotel, Marantz).
Don’t be cheap on the loudspeakers, their quality is very important. Also, when it comes to cables, don’t use the default ones. You don’t have to spend hundreds of euros for Van den Hul, but get an entry-level Monster or Ixos, and you’ll certainly hear the difference.
If it’s the first time you’re buying hi-fi, you might want to read some reviews. British “What Hi-Fi” and “Hi-Fi Choice” are a start, but watch out – they tend to be very enthusiastic about most stuff they review. American “Stereophile” (personal favorite) on the other hand is usually very cautious.
Reading the reviews you will probably end up with choosing the most universally sounding system, which is good for a start. Later, if you upgrade or replace it, you’ll know what sound you’re looking for, and the reviews will just be a bit of a guide, but nothing more.

Finally, always remember that it’s your call as a listener to choose a system. You’re your best advisor. Bear in mind that no hi-fi is 100% neutral (perhaps except for some insanely expensive hi-end systems), although theoretically that’s the goal. And lastly: remember that once you start searching for The Perfect Hi-Fi System, this search will probably never be over. Good luck!

How I stopped being a desktop linux enthusiast

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s actually about “how I’m stopping to be a desktop linux enthusiast”, because I’m still using linux on my desktop/laptop, and I still think it’s a much better solution than any Windows OS. It’s just that I’ve been using various linux distributions for many many years (since 1998 I guess) on every computer I’ve owned and thought it is a nearly flawless system. It’s not, and in fact it’s getting on my nerves.

It’s all about hardware, you know. I’ve never had any problems with a desktop computer running linux, but on all the laptops I’ve owned (all two of them), there’s always been some issues. When I was a teenager in high school, I could spend months recompiling the kernel, optimizing, patching, searching for solutions. But I’m an old man now, and I get really mad when something simply doesn’t work.

I gave up on getting quite a basic feature of a modern laptop computer to work, namely on suspend/resume (I’ve tried really hard to get it working, but I just couldn’t manage). It works 9 out of 10 times, but when I open the lid up it’s always a lottery: will it work this time or will I see a kernel panic message? I also got used to the inefficient power saving, but what the heck – I’m not flying over the Atlantic ocean every week, so I guess I don’t need 6 hours of battery life.

What I can’t get used to is the fact that my graphics card (00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)) works slower and slower. After updating to the newest Ubuntu 9.10, Xorg keeps eating up to 50/60% of CPU, I can’t watch a movie without frame dropping (or wait, I can, but then I have to plug in the headphones, otherwise the fan gets so loud it drowns the sound of the speaker), and if I run _too many _applications at once (emacs, opera browser, email client, IM and one terminal instance open), the system slows down so much that it’s hardly usable.

A linux enthusiast’s argument right now would either be, that I’m using cheap, unsupported hardware, and that I can’t blame anyone for that, or that I haven’t searched any forums/mailing lists for help. Well, unfortunately it’s not true. I’ve chosen my current laptop very carefully, precisely because I didn’t want to have any compatibility problems, and I’ve looked for help – I just couldn’t find it.

Hopefully Ubuntu team will fix the issues with intel graphics with 10.04 Lucid Lynx release. Or hopefully I’ll soon get a job that will enable me to replace my current hardware with the one that has an apple logo on it (yes, I’m aware of the fact that I’m betting my soul here). Suddenly the highly glossy display of the new 13’’ Macbook Pro doesn’t seem so glossy anymore…

duplicity

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m paranoid about backups and I have good reasons for that. I’ve tested many open source tools for automatic backup available for linux, but none of them fulfilled all my requirements.

I liked Déjà-Dup a lot, but it wasn’t able to abort a backup once the destination directory (portable hdd) wasn’t present (or rather: it did abort, but tried to prepare a backup anyway, consuming some cpu on the way). Second thing about Déjà-Dup I didn’t like is that it divides backup files into 5 megabyte archives — opening a directory containing 20 gigabytes of such archives takes a while (I understand the reason for such small volumes is handling Amazon S3, but for local backups it makes no sense), and finally, Déjà-Dup can’t make automatic backups more often than once a day (did I mention I’m a bit paranoid?). However, Déjà-Dup integrates with Gnome very nicely, and since it uses duplicity as a backend, I was able to come up with a simple script fixing all the problems in a couple of minutes.

#!/bin/bash

BACKUP_SCRIPT=${0##*/}
DUPLICITY="/usr/bin/duplicity"
DATE="/bin/date +%R-%d-%m-%y"

BACKUP_COMMAND="$DUPLICITY --exclude=/media/backups --exclude=/home/piotr/.cache --include=/home/piotr --exclude=** --no-encryption / file:///media/backups --volsize=250 --archive-dir=/home/piotr/.cache/deja-dup"

# Sanity checks
if test -z "$BASH" ; then
 printf "$DATE \n$BACKUP_SCRIPT:$LINENO: please run this script with the BASH shell\n" >&2
 exit 192
fi
if test ! -x "$DUPLICITY" ; then
 printf "$DATE \n$BACKUP_SCRIPT:$LINENO: the command $DUPLICITY is not available - aborting\n" >&2
 exit 192
fi

# Create an incremental backup if the portable drive is connected
if test -d /media/backups ; then
 printf "\n\n\n\n\n`$DATE` \nBacking up!\n-------------------------------------------------\n"
 $BACKUP_COMMAND
else
 printf "`$DATE` \n$BACKUP_SCRIPT:$LINENO: portable drive not connected - aborting\n\n" >&2
 exit 192
fi

# Cleanup
printf "`$DATE` Files backed up successfully\n-------------------------------------------------\n"
exit 0 # all is well

The best way is to first configure Déjà-Dup according to your needs, then copy the duplicity command it uses while backing up (it’s visible in STDOUT once you set an environment variable DEJA_DUP_DEBUG=1), paste it into the script, tune it (I’ve changed the volume size), and simply put it to crontab — this way it’s easy to control how often your backups are done.

Feel free to use the script if you need it, and if you’re better in unix scripting than I am (and I believe you are), send me any improvements and/or comments.