Friday 10 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Ah, TeX. A wonderfully sophsticated and powerful formatting engine, to be sure. Pitty the user interface is so infuriating to use, eh? :-p

I just spent three hours trying to figure out how to solve an utterly trivial problem. I placed three images side by side, and to my horror, TeX insisted on aligning them so that the \emph{bottom} edges line up. Not the top edges, as any reasonable human being would suppose. As I say, it took just over 3 hours to figure out how to force TeX to do what I wanted.

I tried inserting elastic space and using tables and minipages and invisible rules and all sorts of really random stuff to try to force TeX to put the damned boxes where they should be. I was utterly astonished to find that there isn’t an option on the graphics insert command to say “oh, hey, align it by the top, not the bottom”. But sure enough, no such option exists. WTF?

Perhaps even more astonishing than that is the fact that, as far as I can tell, nobody else has ever hit this problem! I found all mannar of tips and tricks for tweaking TeX layout, but nothing even remotely related to my problem. I’m not sure how on earth that can be correct, but there we have it.

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Tuesday 07 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

How many Ada programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one, but first it takes 85 beauracrats to decide whether the expense is justified.

How many Haskell programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one, but he doesn’t actually do anything until you try to turn the light on.

How many Prolog programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
No.

(That last is, IMHO, pure comedy gold, right there!)

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Monday 06 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Ah, what fun! Due to a post on FlipC’s blog, I just wasted my entire morning looking at the Nikon D-series of digital SLR cameras. The baby of the range, the D40, can apparently be purchased for a mere £250.

Of course, I already have a digital camera. It has a nice big lense and takes reasonable pictures. However, it does have several problems.

* It eats batteries. Put some batteries in a torch and leave it switched off and a year later it’ll probably still work. But put some batteries in my camera and they’ll all be flat within an hour or two, even if the camera is never switched on. (WTF?)

* It’s very insensitive. Taking pictures requires absurd lighting levels, or you just get dark murk. I don’t know why.

* It will not focus on small objects. No matter what you do to it, it refuses to focus on any object less than a meter away from the lense. (I don’t know whether this is a hardware or software limitation; maybe the lense assembly physically can’t get the focal length that short?)

* It has a modest degree of shutter lag. But then, as far as I can tell, you need to spend thousands of pounds to avoid that.

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Monday 06 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

So, for my sins, I tried the factory restore DVDs I burned. It turns out they do indeed restore the laptop to almost factory condition.

I say almost, since this time all the graphics came out in the wrong aspect ratio while I was setting up Vista. After I logged in for the first time, a little Acer window popped up and spent over an hour installing various things — the first of which was the nVidia graphics driver! Vista was reporting the Windows Experience Index as 1.0 due to not having that driver. Once the driver was installed, the screen aspect changed back to what it should be, the LCD switched to full brightness, and I reran the test and get an index of 3.4.

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Friday 03 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, I already have a laptop, but it’s an ancient thing with a 32-bit single-core processor (and a busted battery). I don’t use laptops very much, because I’m almost never away from my bedroom. But even so, I decided it was time for a better laptop. (It was a toss-up between that, a better camera, or the parts to make a new desktop PC.)

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Wednesday 01 Apr 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

So last night I watched Horizon. The premise was quite simple; take one Professor of Mathematics from Oxford University, plus one idiot who knows nothing about anything. Have the boffin try to convince the idiot that mathematics is fun, cool and interesting. Much hilarity ensues.

Overall, more psychology and philosophy than actual mathematics. They touched on all kinds of interesting stuff, but not in any real depth.

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