Switching torrent client

I don't know about you but once I've found a way to do something I tend to stick with it. If it works OK why should I change it? It's probably because I'm lazy. Or that I don't want to be bothered. I have so much to think about anyway that my brain is totally overloaded. I don't want to spend time and brain power on learning something new when I have something that already works.

But recently I've tried to be a little more open to new solutions and to learn new ways of doing things. I think it started sometime during 2003. For some reason I told my supervisor that I was using Pine as my email program (it's a text based program, dating back from the 80's). I thought it pretty hard-core to use it. But my supervisor wasn't impressed at all. He told me that technology has improved, that better alternatives exists and that it can be very productive to switch. Which I did. And I haven't missed Pine since.

After that I've been trying to learn the lesson from my supervisor. I shouldn't be afraid of learning to do new things as they can help me a lot. Usually new tools help to boost productivity. One such switch I made about a year ago it from CVS and Subversion to darcs. Maintaining my code is now a joy compared to before.

So where am I heading with this rambling? I'm heading for the day before yesterday. I made another switch. A switch that I am particularly happy about. I switched torrent client.

I've been using Azureus for some time and I have been quite happy with it. It is a feature packed client that also sports plugins which means endless of functionality. Nice of course. But then I read about a torrent client at digg.com which a lot of people there seemed to like. It was called uTorrent. Since so many people seemed to like it I decided to check it out. From what I read it seemed to be a very small client with very modest resource consumption. So I downloaded and installed it. Once I had installed it and tried uTorrent it took me less that a minute to decide to uninstall Azureus. While Azureus has a lot of nice features it is also rather bloated and resource hungry. It takes the computer for quite an exercise. Not so with uTorrent. It's binary is only 130kB! Can you believe that?! It takes up very little memory and is blazingly fast. You won't notice that you're running it in the background. And despite having such a small footprint it is packed with features. It has everything I ever needed when downloading or seeding torrents. The switch to uTorrent was not only easy, it was liberating.

Discovering uTorrent also gave me some hope about current and future software. A lot of programs nowadays are rather bloated and resource hungry. Why is that? When I was programming in assembler on my c64 we could squeeze in a lot of functionality in just a couple of kB. Now, I don't claim that we should always program with resource efficiency in mind. Correctness and programmer productivity are more important. But I often find that making a program small makes it easier to make it correct and can often boost my productivity. There need not be a tension here. I think many programmers and companies have things to learn here. There's a blogpost at zdnet about this which uses uTorrent as an example.

Finally, the switch to uTorrent wasn't made any more difficult by the fact that Ludvig Strigeus, the author of uTorrent, is an old student of mine. :-)

MythBusters on Star Wars

There's a great article about the MythBusters over at Star Wars Community called Putting Star Wars to the MythBusters Test. It gives some nice background info about the MythBusters and their involvement in the Star Wars prequels. They also talk about various things in the Star Wars movies they would like to try on the show.

"And the nominees are ..."

It's that time of the year again. Time to guess who's going to win an Oscar. Today the Academy announced the nominees for the 78th Annual Academy Award. Here is a list of the nominees from imdb.com.

Many of the nominated films I haven't seen but I'll comment on some of the nominations and non-nominations.

First of all I was very sad not to see Gwyneth Paltrow nominated for her role in Proof. I really liked her performance in that movie. But I guess the movie producers didn't hire enough lobbyists to get a nomination.

The movie which got the most technical nominations is King Kong. I guess the Academy is tired of handing out those Oscars to Star Wars movies. Revenge of the Sith only got one nomination. And that's for makeup! A bit of a disgrace for Mr. Lucas.

The one Oscar I'm really crossing my fingers for this year is Best Animated Feature Film of the Year. It just has to go to Wallace and Gromit! That film is absolutely spectacular! I've preordered it on DVD to make sure I get it quickly.

Apart from that I'm rather ignorant about the other nominations. Which really means it's going to be a pretty boring event for me. I suppose I could go and watch some of the nominated movies. But I really don't feel like seeing any of them. Oh, well. I'll guess I just have to wait till next year.

A load of Quotes

Since I simply can't resist a good quote or two I was just ecstatic to see the page Quotations for CS1. It has a ton of computer science related quotes. I would have picked some favorites told you about them but there are simply too many quotes in this page to digest in just a day or two. I'll make sure to come back to this page from time to time when I feel a quote urge.

Install fonts easily on Windows XP

There is one task that I occasionally do with my Windows computer which I think is horribly complicated: installing a font. The official way to do it is so long and tedious that I refuse to spell it out here but if you're interested click this link. All that it needed to install a font is to just copy it to the right directory. I could of course copy the fonts manually but that is only a little more efficient than the official way and then I need to remember which directory the fonts should go into.

So, instead of just complaining about the problem here is a tweak for Windows XP which makes it painless to install fonts. When implemented, this tweak enables you to install a font simply by right-clicking on it and select 'install'. Couldn't be easer. Here's how it's done:

1. Open Explorer. Open the 'Tools' menu and choose 'Folder Options'.
   
2. Click the tab 'File Types'.
   
3. Locate the file type 'OpenType Fonts' in the list and select it. It has extension 'OTF'.
   
4. Click 'Advanced'.
   
5. Click 'New'.
   
6. In the first field write 'Install'.
   
7. In the second field write 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\xcopy.exe "%1" C:\WINDOWS\Fonts'
   
8. Click 'OK' and then 'OK' again.
   
9. Now, locate the file type 'TrueType Fonts' and select it. It has extension 'TTF'.
   
10. Repeat steps 4 through 8.
    
11. Click 'OK'.
    

And you're done!

Now you can easily install your fonts from explorer by simply right-clicking on them and select 'Install'. If you want to try it out here are some web sites with free fonts that I can recommend:

• FreeFonts is a huge resource of free fonts.
  
• TypeNow.net has some nice movie and music fonts.
  
• Divide by zero fonts has some really weird but cool fonts.
  

Beautiful pictures

I'm a new and happy user of the photo site Flickr. Flickr lets you easily upload and share your photos over the internet. Organize then, label them, search others photos and so forth. It's a nice site.

Today I found a spectacular set of photos. The thing is, I very much like clouds. Mostly Cumulus. But clouds in general. And the photo set I found has the most amazing pictures of clouds above green fields. I could sit and watch these pictures hours on end. They're absolutely beautiful.

I'm a genius!

I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius! I'm a genius!

I'm a genius!

Just so you know.

According to the MENSA Intelligence Test anyone who scores 19 or above on the test is a genius. Which is exactly what I have done. So, therefore I'm entitled to call myself genius.

I'd prefer if anyone who reads this post and talks to me or writes me an email henceforth call me "The Genius". Otherwise I might not respond.

Commodore 64 forever!

This is just too good to be true!

During the late 80's and early 90's I spent quite a lot of time on front of the computer. And not just any computer, the Commodore 64. By today's standards it's not even a pocket calculator and when I used it it had gotten pretty old already. But even though it lacked speed and features it was still possible to make great games on it. The games you found for the c64 was just awesome! Some of my favorites where Giana Sisters, Wizball and Wonderboy.

Now I can play these games in my browser! Some geniuses has created a Java applet which can run those old c64 games. Brilliant! They've made it available on the site c64s.com.

The game companies don't make these kind of games anymore. They probably feel that it would be an insult to the hardware they're programming on if they made simple games. Yet many people spend endless hour playing the simplest games such as Snood and the games that comes with Windows. Well, I suppose that's a segment of the market which the big companies have decided to hand over to the shareware crowd.

Waiting, waiting, waiting

I just new it! I've had the feeling for a very long time but I haven't been able to figure out just why it had to be like that. I seem to spend an awful lot of time waiting for the tram (or bus). But now I've seen a very good explanation for it. The short article is called Why You Are Always Unlucky With the Public Transport. The explanation seems just to be a corollary of Murphy's law. No matter if the bus is early or late, any change at all will be bad for you.

The Lazy Way to Success

I just bumped into a blog called The Lazy Way to Success. The blogger pushes the thesis that one should only do things that makes one happy and otherwise take it very easy. Stay healthy, stay happy and things will be much better.

I can't help feeling a bit provoked by this message. I've been told from childhood that I should work hard and contribute the best I can. So I try to work hard. But I've now worked so hard I cannot contribute the best I can because I'm on sickleave. Which just proves his point. This blog will be good for me to read since I find it so thought provoking.

Watches and Chronometers

I don't wear a watch. Often I don't wear any kind of chronometer at all. They only make me feel stressed out. And I keep looking at them every half minute or so for no apparent reason. Stopping to wear them is an attempt for me to be a little less stressed out. I think it works.

But I'll admit that clocks are useful at times. When I need one I make sure I either bring my Palm Pilot or my mobile phone. Since those are useful anyway I have less stuff to carry around.

Which is not to say that I totally dislike watches. I do like them. My favorite one is a piece I bought at Boston Museum of Fine Arts which is carried using a span-hook. As my supervisor so elegantly put it, it is "sexy". But I just found a new watch which I certainly could imagine wearing. Take a look at this one. It makes me drool.

No more structural induction for you!

I've just got home from a three day trip together with people from my work. We stayed in a hotel which had a nice lounge with a grand piano. There where a few of us who spent some time there playing and singing and having a very nice time in general. After having heard me playing a particular piece one of my colleagues from the algorithms group told me he thought I was really good at playing. I responded that I don't play that much anymore, maybe just once a month. He thought that was a real pity and gave me the following comical yet very nice exhortation:

You should stop doing structural induction and play some more piano!

It's a very nice quote.

Calvin & Hobbes

I'm rather picky about comics. There are a few that I like but most of them I find to be a complete waste of time. Writing good comics is really difficult, you need only to open any paper with a few comic strips to see what I mean. I usually find maybe one or two that I like.

But the best comic strip ever to be made and which never has let me down is Calvin & Hobbes. I haven't seen anyone coming even close to it. For several years I subscribed to a comics magazine just to read the Calvin & Hobbes. The other day I found this very fine tribute to the best comic strip of all times, a collection of some peoples favorite Calvin & Hobbes strips. It's also annotated with comments from the fans. Read and enjoy!

The first strip that I started reading and that I became a fan of is Garfield. Now I don't find it very special. The only other strip that I enjoy at the moment is Zits. It's good but nowhere near Calvin & Hobbes. One Zits strip actually contained a reference to the fact that Bill Watterson (the creator of Calvin & Hobbes) had stopped making comincs. I found that very sympathetic.

Aeon Flux; My verdict

Since I was so skeptic about the movie Aeon Flux a while ago I guess I'll have to give my verdict now that I've seen it. And I'll give it 2 out of 5. It was an OK way to kill 1 1/2 hours but that's about it. The characters in the movie are totally under developed and I found the story rather contrived. (Not to mention that it's based on factual errors. The DNA of a person doesn't contain its memory.) So it's pretty clear that they've targeted an audience which just wants to see some action. But the action is not all that exciting either.

There was things that I liked about the movie though. They seem to have put some effort into the architecture and style of the city where the movie takes place. Or maybe they haven't, they may just be lucky. But I liked the environments, the building and the trees. That was probably the best thing with the movie.

You might wonder why I think that an action movie such as this needs well developed characters. Well, I don't think that all movies need it. Some action movies might pass without it. But in Aeon Flux the main character is (in the beginning of the film at least) seeking revenge for her killed sister. But we only get to see the sister in one short dialogue and then she is killed. Which means we have not yet grown attached to her and our sympathy for the main character will not be that strong. The movie is quite short (1h35m) and I think they could have added some stuff in the beginning of the movie to add to the characters. They could also have used that time to flesh out the prolog of the story, to explain how the world turned into that place. All they have in the beginning is Aeon Flux as a narrator telling us rather quickly about the state of affairs. Ten of fifteen minutes more in the beginning and the movie could have been quite OK.

And for the record. No, the movie is nothing like the original animated series.

More Web 2.0

Some time ago I wrote about Tim O'Reillys article on Web 2.0. Now Paul Graham has also written a piece on what he thinks about Web 2.0. First it seems that he is really negative towards the whole concept. But in the end I think he manages to sum it up very well:

Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used.[...] It just means doing things right, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that.

While Paul Graham is rather negative to the term "Web 2.0" he is very much in favour of all the things is stands for. He sums it up as "Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users." And that doesn't sound so bad to me either.

Linux as a Windows screensaver.

Oh, the beauty of it. A guy at IBM has Linux running as a screensaver on Windows. The fact that it is so meaningless makes it even cooler! Via slashdot.

More Mythbusters

Finally! The answers from Adam and Jamie, the Mystbusters, has arrived. A month ago the slashdot crowd could submit questions and the best ones would be forwarded to the dynamic duo to answer. Lots of fun things to read about. For example, I'd love to see an episode where they try to send something to the Moon, and so it seems, would Adam and Jamie. It was also interesting to read about how long it takes them to shoot the episodes and various myths.

Also, I just cannot resist to quote a sig from one of the comments. It's just brilliant.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Proof

Yesterday I went to see to movie Proof, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. It's about a great mathematician who just passed away and the heritage he leaves behind. During his last years he was very ill, or rather insane and he was taken care of by one of his daughters. She is also a very gifted mathematician but had to give up her studies to take care of her father. Now that he is dead she has to face her own life and problems as her order sister tries to help her in her own way and one of her father's students wants to go through his books in the hope of finding some valuable math in between all the crazy scribblings.

It is a very good film and I can highly recommend it. The cast is spectacular and my guess is that Gwyneth Paltrow his getting herself and Oscar for this performance.

After the movie we had a little discussion about mathematics in movies and tv shows. One of the things that this movie does right is that it doesn't try to explain any of the math the characters are working with. All attempts that I've seen to do that have failed miserably. Present day math is just so far away from peoples' comprehension that trying to explain it is doomed to fail. Another movie which deals a lot with math successfully is Good Will Hunting which also never tries to explain it. The math is just there as a backdrop to the story about the characters. The tv show Numb3rs also does this pretty well. All these examples of math used right have their story mostly circling around the characters. It's more drama than math sci-fi.

One temptation is to trivialize the math in a movie just to make it understandable and part of the plot. But while that will appeal to math interested highschool student it looks a bit childish to anyone who's done math at the university level. One example is the movie Pi which I saw recently. I'm not saying that this movie is a total disaster, I thought it was quite OK. But the math part wasn't really that believable.

One of the reasons I went to see Proof was to see how they portrait mathematicians in Hollywood. I was a little afraid that it would be mostly the crazy genious stereotype that was shown. Indeed, both Gwyneth Paltrow's and Anthony Hopkins' characters have a bit of that in them. But the late mathematicians student, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is far from crazy. He is a very sympathic everyday guy with some small geek tendencies. And the movie makes a bit of fun of the geekiness of math students, but it does so in a very friedly way.

How Google treat their workers

Having a company full of nerd can be a difficult thing to manage. Google is one of those companies that do it really well. They have accepted that they have nerds (or "knowledge workers", which is the politically correct term) and that these people have special needs. In the article "Google: Ten Golden Rules" they explain how they take care of their employees. Man, it would be nice to work at Google.

Tabs in Browsers and Operating Systems

I've been thinking more about using the web browser as an operating system (and a window manager, which is really what this post is about). There's been a lot of focus on tabbed browsing in the last couple of years. Mostly because Firefox and Opera has it while Internet Explorer lacks it. Today it occurred to me that Windows have had tabs for quite some time. At the bottom of the screen there is the bar with the start button and that contains a tab for each application. If we wish to start using the browser as a operating system it is only natural to add tabs.

One thing that I've constantly found frustrating with the tabs in Windows is that I cannot reorder them. They show up in the order the applications were started and stay that way (except for when Windows occasionally freaks out). I find this very annoying. The mind is good at remembering spatial relationships and therefore I try to keep a certain order between the tabs of the applications I use most often. For example I always have Firefox first. But if I need to restart it for some reason it ends up as the rightmost application and the only way to fix that is to close all other applications. Silly. In Firefox I prefer to have the Gmail tab first followed by the Google Reader tab. In version 1.5 it is easy to reorder the tabs if they should end up out of sync which I was very pleased to see.

But the oddest thing I noticed when I realized that Windows also have tabs is that Windows and the browsers don't agree on the placement of tabs. Windows have the tabs at the bottom of the screan while all browsers I know of have the tabs above the web page under the menu and status bar. Isn't that funny? I would think that there would be a most natural placement but so far I have heard noone complaining about either placement. But since Windows allows you to change the placement of the tabs I've now put it at the top of the screen just to see what it feels like. And if it works out I will keep it that way to that I always have my tabs at the top. But now in the beginning it is a very weird experience. I am totally unused to it and it feels very unnatural which surprises me. I suggest you try it too. It remains to be seen if I can manage to keep it this way or if I will have to change back eventually.