I give up. I was writing a post here a while ago which is simply a copy of my post on Blogger which has a photo attached to it. I tried to adjust the presentation by adding CSS commands on the HTML, particularly, a style="float: left;" to align the photo to the left of the text without creating a big space on the right. The i.ph HTML parser (or whatever you call it) simply removes that style tag. So, that post, along with the nice photo I shot today, is not gonna be here. I'm sad to say but of the 3 best blog sites I've found so far, this is the decreasing order of user-friendliness: Blogger, WordPress, and i.ph. Obviously, i.ph isn't cutting it. Here are my major complaints:
1. Speed — actually, the lack of it. I'm willing to accept the assumption that maybe the last Taiwan earthquake is still causing this speed problem now, but it's about the same speed I'm getting as before the quake. Oh well…
2. Misformatting of photos, as I've mentioned above. And oh, it doesn't just eats away the CSS, it also degrades the quality of the photo I uploaded.
3. Google Adsense. Of course, this requirement is biased towards Blogger, which is owned by Google. But, hey, it should still be allowed. The i.ph support said in my post in the forum that they'll support it soon but no exact date.
4. The way the blog presentation/template is being managed is not too intuitive nor creative (at least, not to me). The blogger can only be glad that the readers don't see the ugly side bar that comes out when you click "Edit On" and the "New Post" button.
There are probably other things that bother me when it comes to my i.ph blog but that's all I'm writing for now. I know, I know, I should post about it on the i.ph forum. But hey, I have to enjoy the sunny weather outside. After all, it's winter in France. Au revoir.
I was thinking of writing about a French word every day (hence the title of this blog) when I saw a web clip link in Gmail to Dictionary.com. There, they featured the Words of the Year 2006 in three categories: (1) Top Voted-on Words, (2) Top 10 Looked-up Words, and (3) Top 10 New Looked-up Words.
The Top Voted-on Words included a lot of very new words, often related to events in 2006, to wit (the ones I found funny): truthiness, Wikiality, it-getter, grinchitude and factinista. All these I mentioned here are so new that they are not yet listed in any dictionary. The first word listed in this category that actually had an entry in the dictionary was (taraaaaann…) "love".
In the Top 10 Looked-up Word, the first one is (of course) also "love". It's amazing, don't you think? People have to look at a dictionary to find out what "love" is! And there, you can just look at the various ways that the word is defined and used: from sports to sex. It was even listed in "CancerWEB's On-line Medical Dictionary"! Hmmm… It is a sickness now?! Hehehe…
Dictionary.com actually looks up other on-line dictionaries for various word definitions and on "love" I find the entry on the Kernerman English Multilingual Dictionary particularly interesting: the same word, in different senses (as a noun, a verb, etc) and in different languages. They have about 30 major languages there!
I then found out that the Indonesian word for it is "sayang" (a feeling of great fondness) and "cinta" (strong attachment with sexual attraction). This is actually closely related to Filipino words "sayang" and "sinta". Although "sinta" still has similar meaning to "cinta", "sayang" in Filipino is an expression close to "What a waste!" or "What a pity." It implies that something is of value.
Love, obviously, is too valuable to be wasted.
I've been working on my event display program for days now and I've made some good progress. First off, it's written in C++ and uses the ROOT data analysis framework for the GUI, data manipulation, histogramming, drawing events, and the LCIO libraries to have access to my detector/physics simulation data which are stored in this format. Before getting to work, I considered using CrystalSpace or OpenGL for the graphics but I decided that it would be just too much work for me.
A while ago I tried playing with XML parsing in ROOT and I was able to parse the GEAR XML file that describes the detector geometry and get the parameters I need. I simply wrote a handler class for ROOT's TSAXParser and stored the parameters in a STL map.
Then came the GUI part and so I had to learn the concept of signals and slots in ROOT which are similar to that in Qt. Maybe later I'll use Qt, but for now I'm not so inclined to add another dependency. The GUI is still far from perfect but it works now and so on with the detector geometry drawing.
For the drawing, I've decided to keep the detector view as simple as possible. I kept in mind that the purpose is to visualize events — the detector hits, tracks, Monte Carlo particle vectors, hit clusters, PFOs — and the emphasis should be less on the detector geometry. It could be made more detailed later (although I doubt its usefulness) but for now I stick to the KISS (keep it simple, sucker!) rule. However, I must admit that a few more whiz-bangs would be nice to have for the first release:
So this is how I spent my first Christmas season in France. I call it wallowing in C++. A rather good way to kick the blues though, if you ask me.
I have a more anecdotal C-story today though. You see I'm not allowed to cook at the campus hotel I'm staying in and so I have to go to a student dormitory's kitchen. After lunch today, I went to buy some groceries, more food to cook over the new year break just in case the stores don't open. When I came back to the kitchen with the stuff I bought, the kitchen's door lock combination didn't work anymore! I had to email my colleague, who's now comfortably at home in Germany, to figure out that perhaps someone played with the lock before and that all I had to do was just to press the "C" button before I enter the correct combination.
C-lly me.
I was up all night hacking away my event visualization program which I hope will be very useful for my physics research work here in France. So in return my eyes screamed for sleep by noon today. Even my fingers, that can usually navigate the keyboard without visual assistance called for time out, pressing keys longer than they neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed too. You get the idea, right?
So I slept all afternoon in my hotel room and woke up at 7PM, cold (I apparently kicked away my blanket) and famished (didn't have a proper breakfast nor lunch). So I went immediately to the dorm kitchen, braving the fog that has settled on the way, to conjure up something to eat. I had rice (oh, shit, I left some in the rice cooker again!), roasted pork chops and scrambled eggs. It was rather good but the Chinese guy, Li, who was cooking at the same time at the kitchen wondered if I was okay with what I was eating, hahaha…
When I left the dorm, it was snowing! My first snow in France! There are a few lamp posts around and the yellow light and the dark background made the snowflakes sparkle as they fell like tiny feathers on my jacket and on the ground.
I murmured a short prayer of thanks to God for the beauty I saw tonight. It was really something to remember. Now that I am alone and far away from my family back home in the Philippines, I have learned to appreciate the good little things that nature and people do. A couple of days ago, on the train to Lozere, I saw two boys (both less than 5 years old, I guess) who were with their father probably on the way home. They were both talking and bantering as would any pre-schooler do. Then just before the train stopped, they both tried to push that button that would open the door of the train but apparently both were too short to do it and their father, visibly amused, decided to push it himself. I let out a chuckle as their father guided them out. They were both very cute and I picture myself to have something like that in the future (although Matthew is 4 years older than Andrew).
The thing with cooking in the dorm though is that you'll end up with clothes smelling like the food you eat. There's smoke swirling in the room and you only notice the smell on your clothes when you have gone some distance from the kitchen. Ahhh, bon… C'est la vie. Ma vie en France, en hiver.
I have just learned that there has been an earthquake today (Dec 27th, 1226 GMT) in Southern Taiwan and it affected many of the undersea cables that connect many of the Asia-Pacific telecommunications systems. Being alone in France, far away from my family in the Philippines, I was wondering why I wasn't able to get any text messages from wife to my PC. We're using Chikka text, you see. I could not even call because the phones are not working as well (I use Telerabais for discount calls from France). Now I'm worried as one source said that repairs could take weeks!
I believe this incident should cause telecommunications experts to re-assess how robust the telecommunication systems are to calamities such as this, and to implement measures in order to mitigate, if not prevent, any damage in the future.
I used to have a blog hosted on my own PC/server. I like the idea of being able to create my web log just the way I want it. After leaving Japan at the end of March 2005, I have been looking for a great website that allows me to blog with just the right features that suits my taste. I have found the following sites to be great:
I still have to figure out which one I really like best. Each one has its own quirks. I'll suspend judgment for now and just blog. The site that allows me to blog in the best possible way wins. Alors, on y va!
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