Busy

November 2nd, 2009

image  image
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in 2 minutes

Screening

September 27th, 2009

Fall premieres:

I’ve also watched the entire third season of HIMYM in about 21 hours. It was a lot better than season 2.

Finally, a few comments on the latest instance of the ‘Final Destination’ franchise:

Blogging

September 27th, 2009
A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order

Heh. “Regular entries” and all? Really? Well, <chuckles>, let’s get moving and bring an answer to “what happened in J’s life since last time”

Amelie and Emilie came on vacation in the Bay Area. They stayed at my place and also went to Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. We also did a bike ride from SF to Tiburon. Pics

On Labor day week-end, I went to spend a couple of days around Lake Tahoe. I camped in Tahoe City and took a bike ride to South Lake Tahoe. I fell, banged up my left knee even more and broke my right pedal. Tahoe’s really nice, though it’s hard to find your way around with all these towns with almost identical names (N|S|W|E)? (Taho(e?))(ma| City). Anyway, I had to wash in the Lake because the camping I was had no showers. ‘twas quite awesome. Pics

Adrien came to visit and we went to Oahu. Hawaii is ridiculously beautiful. People there are indecently nonchalant or tourists. The sun was really strong. No, REALLY. So strong the ocean is really warm. The last day, we ended up in Waimea valley and bathed in the waterfall at the end of the botanical garden. It felt like being in a commercial for a shower gel or gums or something. And as a matter of fact, Jurassic Park was really shot there. Pics

I went to see 9, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, It might get loud, The Informant. All good movies.

Bank of America deserves to die. They won’t – but when it happens, it will be without me.

Landslide

August 16th, 2009

Nature has its own ways to reward riders who try to beat it. It’s called endorphins. The higher you get, the higher you get.

Bumblebees and dragonflies are all you can hear when you’re sitting on your ass on the side of the road, 3200 ft above sea level, 15.6 miles into the climb. Because you’re just too exhausted and all you think is ‘geezusfuckingHchristwottehfuckamIdoin’here?’. You see those bushes moving and wonder if it’s a squirrel or a mountain lion. Do I want to be here to find out? Let’s get back in the saddle.

When you can feel your skin burning under the sun, like that burnt-up dust sitting on the pavement and that will be a bitch on the way down. When you see a turkey and her babies walking on the road on your way in, and a vulture eating roadkill that barely avoids your 30mph descent. That thing must have been 5ft wide.

And fuck the GPS. That thing is only here to tell you you’re too slow and too far away from your goal, and your heart is beating too fast. How many riders passed me on the way up and saw me on their way down, still struggling? I don’t care, I don’t even know why I’m here. Endorphins are wearing out.

Water is becoming a scarce resource and you’re saving your last deciliter for the last mile. But frankly, that last mile will take more than that and you don’t even have saliva anymore. And when you passed those stores this morning and thought you could do without energy bars? That wasn’t very smart of you.

Nature also has its own ways to tell you to piss off. Like when it gives you a knee-ache three weeks ago and it wakes up in the last 4 miles of the ride. Or when it designed your spine for primates who couldn’t stand upright and even less ride a bike. Bitch.

And then you’re on the top. It happened in two minutes, that big white half-sphere is right there. You take a nap on the concrete because that’s all you have. Taking a few pictures. Looking at the moon and thinking it’s a bit closer to you than to other folks in the world. (384 000 -1.2) km to be precise. Landscapes to die for.

And two hours later, you’re back in town, still a bit sweaty and smelly and barely able to walk normally. People see the tanned skin and the sweat and the dirty hair and must think you’re a beach bum and they don’t know. For 20 minutes this morning, I was the highest man in the Bay Area. Literally. Can you tell I’m still high a bit?

A ride up Mt Hamilton.

[Update: pictures available here]

 

Late, late, late!

August 12th, 2009

Yesterday at night, I overheard people talking about the Perseids happening tomorrow and thought “Folks, you’re a bit off, it’s only happening mid-August”. Five seconds later, I was like “OMFG, it’s the 13th already!”

X-Static

August 10th, 2009

I know it’s a cheap way to get my weekly blog update out but, hey, it’s still an update. That’s what my week-end looked like. It was pretty intense, satisfying and very tiring.

image

Pagemill up to Moody was a pretty fun ride, especially the downhill part. Top speed at 33mph, but I could easily have gone 40 or so, I was just being cautious because I didn’t know the road. Next time maybe.

I rode back from work tonight, trying to beat my last time. I did beat my record, only to realize once I was home that I had blown my rear wheel along the way. One of the spokes came out and the wheel is out of true. I have no idea how it happened (except, well, I was going fast on not so good suburbia roads). I have no idea of the extent of the damage at this point, but I seem to recall that Trek guarantees the wheels for a few years. I’m hoping the bike will be ridable again by the week-end. Still, it’s a bummer.

Feel Good Hit of the Summer

August 2nd, 2009

Yesterday, I went for another round of one of my favorite bike rides: across the Golden Gate and up to Sausalito. Except this time, I didn’t start from the Ferry building in San Francisco but from my hometown of Menlo Park, 45 miles south of that. I met with Craig at 8:30am and up we went on Sandhill, Whiskey Hill and Cañada. The route we took had us ride on the shoulder of a freeway, with cars passing us at 60mph. We also cycled on Skyline near South San Francisco, and the fog was thick enough to put big droplets on my glasses. After two and a half hours of riding, we are nearing the Golden Gate park, where we are meeting Andrew. A quick run through the streets of the city later, we are in the Presidio and we can start seeing the pillars of the bridge in the fog. The weather clears up as we reach Marin County and we end up having brunch in a confidential danish place. <Homer Simpson>Hmm, salmon bagel.</Homer Simpson>

I recently bought a Garmin Edge 305 in order to track my rides. You can follow them by subscribing to http://connect.garmin.com/feed/rss/activities?feedname=Julien’s%20Bike%20rides&owner=jsilland

I learned this week that my sister will be moving to Melbourne, Australia in the fall. This means two things to me:

  1. Sadly, I will not get to see my european friends in a while. If you were waiting for an invite to make the move, well, just show up at my door with a printout of this post.
  2. Luckily, I will be in fucking Australia for Christmas.

Just shuffling things around

July 26th, 2009

[geeky stuff warning—- geeky stuff warning—- geeky stuff warning]

You were warned.

On Saturday, I found myself in a position where I needed to randomly shuffle the lines of a file. On my Linux workstation, there’s a command-line utility called shuf that does just that. But it’s not packaged with Mac OS X at this time, so I was left with the options of manually shuffling the file or write it myself. Guess which one I picked. I originally set to only implement a very basic version of it but having made the choice of Python, I had a pretty rich and friendly environment at my disposal, and after my file was shuffled, I set on writing a full implementation of shuf in Python. It was a pretty simple and agreeable exercise, which encompassed a fair number of programming tasks and tricks, some specific to Python and some not. Thinking about it, I think this is exactly what I would have liked my programming learning days to look like. It was something that actually ends up being useful, with some constraints and getting a grasp on new stuff. This would also be a good introduction to test-driven development; given that it is a reimplementation of an existing tool, the first task would have been to write a torture test suite for the existing implementation and make sure we are compatible.

#!/usr/bin/python

import getopt
import math
import random
import re
import sys

def usage():
  print ”“"NAME

shuf - generate random permutations

CONTENTS

Synopsis
Description
Author

SYNOPSIS

shuf [OPTION]... [FILE] 
shuf -e [OPTION]... [ARG]... 
shuf -i LO-HI [OPTION]...

DESCRIPTION

Write a random permutation of the input lines to standard output.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

   -e,—echo
       treat each ARG as an input line
   -i,—input-range=LO-HI
       treat each number LO through HI as an input line
   -n,—head-lines=LINES
       output at most LINES lines
   -o,—output=FILE
       write result to FILE instead of standard output
  —random-source=FILE
       use FILE as a source of random data used to determine which permutation to generate. (defaults to /dev/urandom)
   -z,—zero-terminated
       end lines with 0 byte, not newline
  —help
       display this help and exit
  —version
       output version information and exit

AUTHOR

Original version by Paul Eggert. Python port by Julien Silland.
”“”
  
def generate_random_source(source):
  def random_gen():
    value = int(open(source, ‘r’).read(8).encode(‘hex’), 16)
    return value/math.pow(2, 64)
  return random_gen

def main():
  try:
    opts, args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], “ei:o:n:vz”, [“echo”, “input-range=”, “output=”, “head-count=”, “random-source=”, “help”, “version”, “zero-terminated”])
  except getopt.GetoptError, err:
    print str(err)
    usage()
    sys.exit(2)
  limit = 0
  output = sys.stdout
  terminator = ’\n’
  source = ’/dev/urandom’
  mode = None
  interval = None
  for option, value in opts:
    if option == ”—version”:
      print “shuf v1.0.0”
      sys.exit()
    elif option == ”—help”:
      usage()
      sys.exit()
    elif option in (”-e”, ”—echo”):
      if not mode:
        mode = “echo”
    elif option in (”-i”, ”—input-range”):
      if not mode:
        mode = “interval”
        result = re.match(r’(?P\d+)-(?P\d+)’, value)
        interval = (int(result.group(“start”)), int(result.group(“end”)) + 1)
    elif option in (”-n”, ”—head-count”):
      limit = int(value)
    elif option == ”—random-source”:
      source = value
    elif option in (”-o”, ”—output”):
      output = open(value, ‘w’)
    elif option in (”-z”, ”—zero-terminated”):
      terminator = ’\0’
    else:
      assert False, “Unhandled option”
  lines = []
  if mode == “echo”:
    lines = args
  elif mode == “interval”:
    lines =  [str(number) for number in range(interval[0], interval[1])]
  else:
    if not args or args[-1] == ’-’:
      input = sys.stdin
    else:
      input = open(args[-1], ‘r’)
    lines = [line.rstrip() for line in input.readlines()]
  random.shuffle(lines, random=generate_random_source(source))
  if limit:
    lines = lines[0:limit]
  for line in lines:
    output.write(line)
    output.write(terminator)
  sys.exit()
  

if __name__ == “__main__”:
  main()

Of course, my implementation has a lot of room for improvement (speed, most notably) and is without a doubt buggy when it comes to its randomness - I haven’t tested the RNG adapter very well. But nonetheless, it kept me distracted for a small part of the week-end (which I have mostly spent cleaning my apartment so, yes, coding is better) and made me want to investigate if other people had the idea of reimplementing some coreutils tools in Python. Even though some of the coreutils are bound to be useful only in a unix environment, other could run on Windows, which I suppose could be useful when cygwin is not an option. Anyhow, it looks like another guy already had the same idea but his set of implementation doesn’t look complete at this time. It also looks like he transfered the project over on to Google Code but the access is restricted. What’s up with that?

Bastille Day 2009

July 14th, 2009

There’s no better time to storm prisons and cut your monarch’s head. Optionally, you can listen to the Dead Weather’s album or Tom Morello’s Street Sweeper Social Club or St Vincent’s Actor. As for myself, I’ll be bringing a sample of French cheese and some bread to work and heading to Cafe Bastille for the evening. National holidays are just an excuse to have some good time, aren’t they?

The worm in the apple

July 11th, 2009

I went to see Food Inc. tonight. It’s a documentary in the same vein as Fast Food Nation and to some extent Super Size Me, as it tries to draw attention to the problems the food industry is causing to the health of consumers, to the farming business and to the environment. The movie itself is not as remarkable as the fact that the small theater at the Aquarius was actually jam-packed. This small independent theater which usually shows foreign movies with subtitles was almost sold-out tonight. Sure, the director was interviewed a few weeks ago on the Daily Show, but I was quite surprised. The marketing has been really low-profile so far - it seems people start to really take interest in what’s in their food. Let’s hope this movie can be the Inconvenient Truth for the food industry.

As said earlier, the movie is not Earth-shattering. Anyone with a minimal education about food will already know everything that is being shown here. It goes a bit far in playing the emotional card with extensive sequences of archive footage showing a two-year old playing right before he was infected with a deadly strain of E. coli. I don’t think we need that to understand that the processed food is bad for us. The fact that 1/3 of the of the current U.S. youth will be affected by type II diabetes is a much bigger health concern in my opinion, and is directly attributable to the way food is designed and produced. The movie successively takes multiple routes and points out various facts about practices in the food industry, lawsuits from Monsanto, lobbying in D.C. and trends in the public health, but I think fails to establish the connections between all these. Leaving it up to the viewer is not fair, otherwise it’s just a matter of conviction instead of a scientific demonstration.

At the beginning of the year, I took a vow of getting healthier and lose weight. I started to go the gym twice and then three times a week, picked up biking with the goal of participating to the Tour de Cure, and ended riding a century in the meantime. I’ve turned weekatarian for the past three months, which means I’m consuming about a tenth of the meat I previously was. I’ve also been dramatically reducing my intake of snacks and focusing on eating vegetables and low-calorie food. I can’t remember when was the last time I had a 2500 calories day. And the results have so far been pretty spectacular. I’ve lost 60lbs (~ 27kg) in six months, lost three pants sizes and can now wear XL shirts rather than the XXXL size I got accustomed since I moved to the states. If it wasn’t for that damn clot, I’d probably be in the best shape of all my life. I still intend to lose between 15 and 20 lbs, but the hardest is probably done. Proof that paying attention pays off.

A while ago, I bought four apples from Safeway which I kept on my kitchen’s counter. A few days pass and I ate one of them. From the outside, it looked fresh, clean, big and green. But even after only one bite, I realized the flesh was hard to chew and absolutely tasteless. I threw the apple and decided to keep the remaining ones just to conduct a little experience. Fast forward five weeks: I threw the three apples this morning. The apples had lost some of that bright green shine they had but frankly, they looked perfectly edible. Which is why they’re now lying in my trash can. The worm in the apple? I didn’t see it in the apple but actually found it right outside, stuck on the skin. It was a small blue label that said “Organic”. Still a long way to go…

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The views expressed on this blog are not connected with my employer in any way.