How does it feel to have a normal life?

Call your mum. Your bro is in the precinct jail. Since Saturday night.

Why?

Oh I can't explain the whole thing. Just call her. She is not emotional at all. I think she is keeping everything inside. She will burst if she continues like that.

Ok. I will call her now.

I was thinking hard. How do I call her and make her tell me these things without letting her know I am aware of it?

Hello, Ma. Sorry about yesterday. My flight was delayed. So I came back really late.

You were away for days and not even one phone call!

I am sorry.

Oh nevermind. So many things happened in those few days. Your brother has been locked up. Since Saturday night. The police came and handcuffed him away. I am not going to care this time. You hear me? I don't care anymore. I didn't even go see him. Until this morning when dad's friend beg me to. Why should I? I am not praying for him either. Let him be. Let him feel it.

She sounds angry.

What is the story this time? Oh... that... Well you know what? I think he deserves it. It's karma. I believe in it. He should too. We don't get away all the time if we are not good people. That is what I think.

Ya. Let him stay there for some time. He needs to learn on his own. We can't keep rescuing him. You know that place is really new and clean? I went there, and they were very fast. I just gave them my name and the person I want to see, in half an hour, they escorted him out. If it was the old place... takes a full day and you don't even get to see his shadow. Just keep telling you to wait. Apparently visitors can bring food for them. I saw the rest of the families came with food. I did not. I asked but he said he is getting meals. So I guess it's ok. The hearing keeps getting delayed. One moment they said it's on the 7th, then the next it's on the 20th. They just looking for an empty slot for him.

Ok.

I didn't ask her how she felt because I can guess. She is angry and disappointed. She has given up on him.

Oh. I have an incoming call. Talk to you later, alright?


This is our lives. This is how drama it is. We've learned to become very detached, emotionless because we have to deal with it. But it's not fair, is it?
Why don't I have a normal life? Why can't I just have a normal life?
And why can't I cry? This is huge. This is bad. And I can't cry. I am not able to cry when things get seriously fucked up. I'm just calm and logical. And I do what I have to do. I become a robot. I am not even sad. Luigi asked me if I am sad. I said no. I don't expect anything less from him.

But why don't I feel anything? I don't feel sad. I just don't feel anything! Strange thoughts came to my head. Like I am glad he has so many tattoos because he is such a pretty boy without them. Pretty boys don't last in the cell. Pretty boys become their play things. Pretty boys get raped.

Why's everyone so shocked and more emotional than me? I just don't get it. Luckily I can still cry. At stupid, useless things.
If I don't, I am most probably a real robot and I don't think I like the thought of that at all.

I thought about how we were as kids. Where did it start to go wrong? Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like walking in front of a car. I am not suicidal or anything. I just feel numb. But then the thought of my mum being sad stop me from doing that. So I just continue with this numbness and crying over small things.
Oh... and I torture myself with work and school.

Had a huge migraine this morning. Saw a doctor who prescribe the migraine pills but also gastric pills because the former will cause gastric.
Such is the irony of life.

Biologically Inspired Model

There's a really hot research topic on this saliency model in Computer Vision. But I am not doing or reading up on it. Maybe during school holidays.
Anyways was telling Apie about this. The thought that came to both our minds were, "Oh we can collaborate!"
She is in brain research and I can do this from computer engineering point of view. Inspire me to want to graduate and finish school.

Want to read these books

http://www.geekculture.com/ultimatebb/Forum12/HTML/000343.html

I don't ever want to be a game programmer. But I am having too much fun
and of course, definitely:

Flatland by Edwin Abbott. So funny, about 2D and 3D mathematics.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card


------- still compiling the list.

Sad day: Setup Visual Studio 2005

http://www.microsoft.com/express/2005/platformsdk/default.aspx

Download PSDK from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/psdk-full.htm

Related to Lighting

All about lights
http://jerome.jouvie.free.fr/OpenGl/Tutorials/Tutorial12.php

Basic readings for 18 lights & shadows
http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/lights.htm

http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~patrick/csc418/notes/tutorial6.pdf

Related to Bump Mapping

Simple bump:
http://www.paulsprojects.net/tutorials/simplebump/simplebump.html

Related to Texture

Extremely simple GL for texturing:
http://resumbrae.com/ub/dms423_f07/14/

Could be useful in our texture tile:
http://www.opengl.org.ru/docs/pg/0902.html

Download & read this:
http://www.cs.tcd.ie/courses/baict/bass/4ict10/Hillary2003/pdf/Lecture6_27Jan.pdf

http://www.nullterminator.net/gltexture.html

Step by step to texture tiling:
http://www.meandmark.com/tilingpart1.html


Simple drawing to a texture:
http://steinsoft.net/index.php?site=Programming/Code%20Snippets/OpenGL/no9

Detailed Textures...but Java?
http://jerome.jouvie.free.fr/OpenGl/Tutorials/Tutorial5.php

Simple to understand texturing:
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=246959

Texture Mapping Tutorial Framework, Reread this!
http://gpwiki.org/index.php/OpenGL:Tutorials:Tutorial_Framework:Texture_Mapping


Misc:

Hidden view
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/OpenGL-MacProgGuide/opengl_offscreen/chapter_5_section_3.html

Mac idiosyncrasies

glTexSubImage2D v. glTexImage2D
"On the Mac it was necessary to make the glPixelStore*() calls before invoking both glTexImage2D() and glTexSubImage2D() -- I now make those calls before every invocation."

Calculating Normals

Ok I have no idea how to do that except that I have to find the perpendicular point from each triangular plane.

http://www.spacesimulator.net/tut5_vectors_and_lighting.html

Game Programming Wiki: gpwiki

Good Matrix & Vector FAQ: http://www.j3d.org/matrix_faq/

Now, please! Will you guys quit disturbing me so I can graduate and work in a sweatshop like Blizzard?

Let's Just Be Friends

Feb 7th, 2006

You say: Let's just be friends.
I say: Aren't we already?

You say: I don't want to get married.
I say: Neither do I.

You say: This can't go on. I know you do.
I say: It's not important.

You sob: I am sure you can find someone more worthy of you.
I choke: I've found you.

You plead: You know I love you.
I mutter: I never stop telling you.

You wonder: How sad are you?
I answer: I don't know.

You whisper: Please don't cry.
I weep: I can't stop.

I muse: I will never find someone better than you.
You brood: I will never find someone madder than you.
We hug.

To you, my mouth braves, I am alright.
To me, my mind breaks down, I am abandoned.
To you, I smile cherrily.
To me, I smile woefully.

If you're even slightly capable

You're going to get all the workload. Seems like that's how it works here.
Damn... I've been working average 12 hours a day and weekends!
I really need to do my laundry. I've ran out of underwear.

-ND

"Huh? Ah! Hahaha!"

A dream within a dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

An ode to Space Invaders

Zin was asking me for a name for her mobile game application.

Even though it was actually a bird hunting game, her description reminded me of space invaders. So I told her she should name it that. Totally strange but quite funny.
Space invaders is the only game I like on our Atari 2600. My bro is pretty good in all the games but not me. I will start scratching my face because my Mario just can't jump high enough to get the mushroom. But I like space invaders. It's the only one game I am actually good at.
Sounds like a long time ago? Yes, it is a long time ago...

The other day we were playing Wii and Xbox 360.

Reminds me of so many things... because I am not as l33t as him, this is all I can say when he told me he had a Commodore. I gave him my heart and 7 (or was it 8? or 11?) years of my youth.

Wearing my heart on the sleeve

I don't cry easily.
But there's one person who could make me cry with the snap of his fingers. Today, he made me cry again. And I cried. And cried. And cried.
Do I seem weak because I cry?

It feels so good to cry. There's so many things in my life that I should cry about and I never did.
I can't stop crying because he has this power over me.

Let there be tears!

And I obey. I cry for everything that I should but never.
I cry because I am depressed at work.
I cry because I feel useless.
I cry because I am disappointing.
I cry because I am in pain.
I cry because I miss mum. And pa. And pa...
I cry because my heart is in pieces.
I cry because I am tired.
I cry because I cannot pretend anymore.
I cry because this is really how I feel.
I cry because I have no friends.
I cry because I am sorry for how it all turned out.

I cry because I realised all the above.

I cry because I don't cry much at all. In the end, I just want the tears to keep on flowing. I cry because I need to.

I need a hug

I just need a hug....

Thanks, Luigi.

They want the sofas!

What? The owner's taking the sofas back? And the coffee tables too?
Hello?
And what? Giving us a leather couch and $300 dollars to get something?
I can disagree, you know. It's a breach of contract. I don't like leather couch. They make my ass sweat.

Excuse me. I don't think that is right. We have a 9 seater sofas and 2 coffee tables. How's that fair? Just because there's only two of us in the house doesn't mean we don't need all the sofas! For all they know, we are having gang-bang parties every other weekend and we need all these sofas.

I hate reading!!!

I am not cutout to ever be a researcher.
Wait. I never want to be a researcher!

Yucks!


****************
Extract from Meebo Blog.

There's an entire system of measurement that's almost exclusive to typography (1 inch = 6 picas = 72 points; ems and ens depend on the size of the font), and entire vocabulary to describe fonts and layout (kern, glyph, serif, dingbat, recto, verso, ligature).

It's all a bit pretentious, it's true, but art students are used to that. One of the more pretentious constructs is the colophon - a page at the back of some nicely designed books that describes the typography and production processes used for that book. In closing, I offer a colophon for meebo:

Meebo's logotype is set in Monotype's Arial Rounded, a sans-serif font designed in 1993 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders. Text type in meebo.com is Tahoma, a humanist sans-serif font designed in 1994 for Microsoft Corporation. Logo colors are Pantone 151 and Pantone 647. Meebo.com was launched in 2005 and is produced using JavaScript, Python, and C. Production systems run Linux.

****************
Ho ho... I actually pay attention to this kinda crap.

My half of the biscuit!

Me: Have you seen a half of my cookie?
He: What cookie?
Me: I ate half of a cookie and kept the other half for my journey to Mordor. Wrapped in a tissue. It's elven cookie. You only need to eat very little and it will give you enough energy.
He: I guess now you will be eaten by orcs.
Me: Where's the other half of the cookie? *search everywhere*
...
He: I threw it out.

Ray Tracing

As I was reading on K-nearest neighbour, for Comp Vision; kd-tree came up as a simple solution to spatial index / access method for nearest-neighbour search. Very interesting!

All about Matrix

Matrix multiplication

REMEMBER!

AB != BA ==> matrix multiplication is not commutative.
Cols in A == Rows in B (right, down)

Inverse

For a matrix M to have an inverse, it's determinant |M| != 0.

Given M is a 2x2 matrix.

m1 m2
m3 m4 = M

3 2
6 4 = M

det[M] = |M| = (m1)(m4) - (m2)(m3) = (3)(4) - (2)(6) = 0 _QED

!! Remember this arrowing only works till 3x3 matrix. Anything more will need to manually compute. Will come back to this.

Matrix inverse

M^-1 = 1/ |M| x (adjoint M)
... Crap... So hard to draw matrix. Ok Nvm. Come back to this later.

Mathworld Wolfram does a better job explaining it. Here: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MatrixInverse.html


Ok... I should not spend so much time on this. Gotta hand in computer vision assignment in 10 days. Come back to this later.

Yum Char: Discussions over dim sums

Had lunch with Quark. Haven't seen him in a long time. He's only free this week.(Oh ya, Quark, if you are reading this, the site I was telling you about is www.modepass.com).

Talked. Mostly on computer graphics, computer vision, AI and machine learning. Even in the computer engineering field, there's so many different classifications. We had a lot of ideas for a lot of things. We just need to sleep less to get things done.
Also, Quark and I come from the same school of thought. At least I am not alone. One of the first thing we have to realise as grad candidates is the fact that we are... grad candidates. So we have to think like researcher and less about application. However, I do not believe in wasting my time on things that is not useful in life. Quark agrees with me. We're more of the bottom-up than top-down people. Cool. Well, he finished his Masters way back and he still thinks like this.

Anyways, tried the annotation joke about Web2.0 on him. He totally gets it! Lol. I tried it on my colleague a few days ago. Fell flat.

So good talking to someone who understands what I am doing now!

I tried with some of my colleagues but heck, they don't even have a strong grasp of telco knowledge. Wait. that is not true. The only idiots I've met are all from this company. Oh well enough of that.

Anyways one of the idea we had was how to convey mathematical theorems and algorithms in human language. The tv series NUMB3RS did that moderately well. (I have the hots for Prof Eppes but that is another story altogether).

Here is a site: http://www.weallusematheveryday.com/tools/waumed/home.htm, deriving the whole idea from NUMB3RS to teach maths. I think it's alright. But definitely worth a visit.


Season:
2: Episode 14 - Harvest -- Hidden Markov Model.

Markov Chain Links - predicting probability of certain states in the future from what we know of the present. (Ex, was the weather yesterday: sunny, cloudy or raining. therefore what's the probability that it will rain today?)

Hidden Markov Model - In the event when we are not able to observe the actual state but only the outcome that is connected to the state by a certain probability distribution. (extend from above example, we do not know if it rained yesterday but the sales of umbrellas for yesterday was high).

Yuki Isoya's Seeds of Happiness

From her latest album.

My addiction and studying music. Her youtube mv's all been removed.

But I found the song again in imeem. DON'T LEAVE ME AGAIN!




Her other music list.
http://www.imeem.com/artists/yuki/?arpa=t