Not quite Pixar, but nearly there

After a harrowing Saturday that involved poor scheduling and dinner planning and thereby subjecting ourselves to having to suffer through A Good Day to Die Hard, it was with great relish that the wife and I looked forward to watching Wreck-It Ralph on the following Sunday.

I had been following the general positive buzz on the interwebs about the movie, but had successfully steered clear of any major reviews or discussions about it so that I could go in with a completely open mind.

We ended up thoroughly enjoying ourselves, starting from the delightful Paperman short right up till the credits rolled. (One complaint we had here is that we were eagerly awaiting the credits to see the cast of voice actors, but this took far too long in coming as Disney had decided it was more important to credit nearly everyone in the technical crew first.)

I believe with this movie, Disney has finally successfully integrated a Pixar-like quality to their output by incorporating several Pixar-ian touches:

1. Right from the beginning, an animated short as a prelude to the main feature. (Incidentally, fans of Disney -- like me -- will instantly notice the similarity between the girl in Paperman to the Disney princesses, and between the Paperman guy and Mowgli from Jungle Book -- one of my all-time favourite Disney films)
2. The trope of 'make someone want to subvert the status quo in their world' -- toys, cars, insects, monsters, fish, superheroes, and now video games.
3. The animation is distinctly Pixar -- the ray-tracing and rendering appear to have been done using Pixar's RenderMan software.
4. One of the executive producers is John Lasseter (who's come full circle -- he started his career off with Walt Disney, moved to LucasFilm, then Pixar and now back as creative head of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios)
5. The sound design (which is absolutely gorgeous in this film) is by Gary Rydstrom, also a long time Pixar sound designer.

To echo the good doctor, it isn't Toy Story, but nevertheless, both of us completely loved the film and wouldn't mind going around to watch it again.

Mmmbop

Sensory overload. Sounds are louder and more distinct. Lights are brighter. Things feel more tangible. Sweets taste sweeter.

This is where I get off.

...and then climb back on and continue from where I left off. Personal challenge to continue this line of investigation even when the investigatory incentives have worn off.

Much better, but only by a little. Running around in the sun does one's constitution a world of good. It's so beautiful today that I think I'll head to the park instead of stewing at home?

No no, IPL changes to be made. Park can come later.

And the stream of consciousness continues. Trippy trippy trap.

IPL ditched, park idled in, lake walked by. And most of the day is still left to enjoy. Been a great Sunday thus far. People must be thanked, activities and recipes must be repeated, and further fun must be had.

Over and out.

Last night

All these ideas floating around. They all seemed brilliant at the time, but are nowhere to be found now.

No sounds or voices, but the suggestions came over in a thick waterfall anyway. Not much food was eaten.

Oblivion. Thought it was Moon with a soap opera thrown in, but turned out to be The Matrix as well. And then seemed to swerve into a time loop of sorts. Really need to watch the movie again while in a less... profoundly analytical frame of mind. Maybe on Monday?

The train is at Knightsbridge now, and I need to get off at King's Cross. The attempt is to make it to the game successfully and then NOT run around with arms flailing wildly. And hopefully not forget and leave important stuff behind.

Everyone in the tube seems to be eyeing my backpack. I'm suddenly glad I didn't leave the wallet in it. Any minute now somebody could grab it and run. I'm hyper aware of the avenues of possibility around this event, and fully prepared to indulge in fisticuffs with the potential perpetrator.

Like the Peep Show title song, exactly! I'm not good but I'm not well, 'cause I'm in hell. Not entirely sure those are the words, but it'll have to do. But the key line is "paranoia paranoia, everybody's out to GET me!".

I'm actually literally amazed I've managed to ramble on this long with very few spelling mistakes. I could credit the reasonably OK predictive keyboard on the Nexus 4, but screw that. It refuses to predict profanity, even when the words are added into the dictionary. That's messed up, and another unfortunate example of Google overstretching in imposing their values on their users.

However, I, for one, welcome our smartphone overlords and don't particularly care for the underperforming, underpowered and one dimensional dumbphones of yore. Progress is a good thing, even when it isn't.

Kurt Vonnegut was right

Tralfamadorians are real. I am one now. The doppelganger watches from a safe distance the miracles on the revived bodies.

Only one difference. They can see all points in time at once. I can do the same, but have no credible way of communicating across to you chaps that my extortionate pricing may not cause the ever seeked elusive retail footfall and heavy walletted poseurs. Buy outside of that you're actually quite nice.

Early in the morning.

Just to continue

It never ends. Just comes and goes. But then all the stories come true and bounded rationality is violated.

It would be almost interesting to put these up on tumblr but enough.

How can I unify identity while still maintaining the decentralisation aspect of many identity providers?

Everyone always seems to have strong opinions on everything. I feel quite envious of such thorough convictions held about an entirely new field. Either genius or successful self deluders. Same reasoning as the .. .

Will sleep help? Don't want to, can't let go just yet. Tripolata. Lots of food, but tandoori chicken was missing. Would've gobbled that up by the bucketful.

Football is OK, NBA is OK. But playing is definitely better than simply reading and commenting.

Some people just sit and eat. They can be watched with interest too, because they may magically turn into zombies. Then we have to place plants that spit seeds out to kill the psychotic attacking flower army.

It's all good.

Posting this from the blogger app on android.

One is not entirely of sound mind. But one is of fun mind.

Repeal everything. All is well. You may say that I'm a dreamer. So... Wonderful and naïve.

Great weather today. Great for the indian good that was gorged on. Sleepy now, but still attempting to document all this.

Actually not sleepy. Somehow everything is more.. Everything stands out more. Smell, hearing, pain, sight. All existence is magnified.

Seems late, but so much to do, so little time. The woods are lovely dark and deep.

Hagrid never had these problems

Why is is that I'm so absolutely indecisive when it comes to facial hair?

The only serious attempt I've made has been to "wear" a goatee for a few months. All other experiments with beards and moustaches have been cut short for various reasons.

For the most part these reasons are borne out of a general "fear of the unknown" -- save for aging, my appearance has remained pretty much static for most of my life. Right at the beginning of adolescence, there was a brief period of a year or so when I was "rockin' a 'stash", as the kids call it these days. (Do they..?) But after I discovered the wonders of a good razor, it was wiped out.

Since then the only sort of facial hair I've allowed has been the occasional overgrowth of stubble due to (usually) laziness, (less usually) convenience, or (not applicable any more) religious reasons.

The other times I had to abort any experiments, has been due to "human error". I'd be on the path to an interesting new appearance, when the razor blade would go astray and lop off a crucial piece of carpeting. Initially, the attempted method of dealing with this was to balance out the mistake, but that -- without exception -- always led to merely doubling the error. This would force me to stop fixing errors and just wipe the slate clean. Eventually I gave up drawing on the slate altogether.

During the goatee period, I also realised that maintaining a consistent appearance is just as hard as remaining clean-shaven. This further levelled the playing field, as the amount of effort wasn't a deciding factor any more.

I wonder when I will come around to giving the whole facial hair thing another shot. I suppose the best time is now, unencumbered by professional requirements. Will I, won't I?

Go learn something new!

Over this recent period of "underemployment", I have been attempting to do multiple things.

The major effort here has been to acquire new technical skills, primarily around data analysis. One thing which I was unsure of was the approach to take, and this is where Coursera has been immensely helpful.

Initially, after I had signed up for a few courses, I was a little doubtful about them -- particularly because I have tended to find classes largely boring throughout my life.

The first couple of courses were quite hard to stick with, especially because I was travelling in India, and access to the Internet was patchy. There was a block of a few days in Bangalore when I was practically disconnected from the world, sustaining myself with the occasional borrowed hour of Internet.

The real turning point was when one of the quiz submission hard deadline coincided with a day on which I was flying out to Bombay. This was after I had used up all my "late submission" days, so missing this would mean the grade getting docked.

The submission was due by 11.30, and my flight was leaving at 13.30 on the same day. The house that I was leaving from didn't have any Internet, and tethering was out of the question on a ridiculously limited short-term mobile data plan. I left for the airport way earlier than I needed to, reached at about 10.00, rushed through all the formalities and finally took a seat at the gate, and connected to the airport Wifi. (On a side note: the number of power outlets in Bangalore airport is abysmally low.)

By this time it was 11.00, and as it turns out, this was just exactly the right amount of time to ram a perfect attempt through (each quiz in the course allowed 3 attempts, with a varying set of questions each time!).

After I boarded the flight, I had some time to think over my actions. I had put in a lot of effort to maintain a solid level of what effectively amounts to imaginary Internet points, and all because I really enjoyed the course I was doing, and was genuinely learning. In pretty much every other class experience before this, the focus was more on figuring out "the system" to maximise test performance, petty one-upmanship and sometimes just remaining awake through a monotonous drone.

It now appears that self-study is the best course of action for me, with the occasional group interaction. Using this approach, I've managed to pick up the fundamentals of R, Python, Django, and git over the last 3 months. Now, all that remains is to focus all of this into an appropriate work environment...

Figuratively speaking

Just a quick post to make a collective note of some of the few graphing libraries I am attempting to try out over the coming weeks. Base frameworks like D3.js and Raphael.js appear great, but might just be involve too much work if all I want to do is throw together a quick few visualisations.

dc.js
A multi-dimensional charting library built to work natively with crossfilter and rendered using D3.js.

NVD3
Re-usable charts and chart components for D3.js.

Polychart2.js
Graphing library that takes many ideas from the Grammar of Graphics and the R library ggplot2, and adds interactive elements for usage on the Web.

Highcharts
Interactive charting library supporting many, MANY types of visualisation!

Chart.js
Simple HTML5 Charts using the canvas element. Currently doesn't support interactivity, but looks great.

Flot
Plotting library for jQuery, with a focus on simple usage, attractive looks and interactive features.

Rickshaw
JS toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs.

YUI Charts
A charting module based on the YUI library.

xCharts
Yet another D3.js based library. Some of the examples don't appear to work currently.

Flotr2
A fork of Flotr which removes the dependency on Prototype and a few enhancements.

Now it may turn out that most of these end up going unused, but hopefully that means I would have found the best fit library and will stick with it!

Editors of the textual kind

The one key component of any computer system I could call "mine" has been a solid text editor. Not a word processor -- most of the time, unless I'm working with "official" (work or school) stuff, I have no need for mixing fonts faces, sizes, colours, or inserting images into the document. I would just like to read information, or type out something without wasting time on bells and whistles.

Kudos to Microsoft for shipping such an absolute lemon of a text editor in Notepad, which couldn't open large text files or acknowledge that text files can be produced and used in non-Windows environments. This pointless truculence spurred on some great little projects in the Windows world.

NoteTab
This was the first ever Notepad replacement I discovered. It wasn't particularly lightweight, but solved the annoying problem of the standard Notepad being unable to handle large or binary files.

Metapad
Metapad was the Notepad replacement I used, while in Windows 95/98. It was super light, opened everything in sight, and the ideal candidate for text file management on my underpowered (and -- although I didn't think so back then -- somewhat ugly) desktop. Syntax highlighting was for wimps, and on the occasion when it was badly needed, SciTE appeared to suffice.

Notepad2
Once I managed to scrape together enough competition winnings and had the security of a job assured (this was in 2004), I decided it was time to get my hands dirty and build my own desktop. While not quite from scratch, some reasonably smart hustling for parts meant I was able to put together a very decently powerful machine at a tight budget. This resulted in Metapad getting the boot from the brand new Windows XP install, and making way for Notepad2 (after a brief period of experimentation). This still-awesome marvel of a tool had a few more text manipulation features, and bundled in syntax highlighting, for the same relative load on the system as Metapad.

Notepad++
Ah, what can I say? This is the most indispensable tool for anyone using any flavour of Windows. Syntax highlighting, code-folding, lightweight project management, session management, powerful regular expression searching, file comparison, and an FTP browser. Everything anyone could ever want when dealing with text files, and then some more, aided by the rich ecosystem of available plugins. It's still around, being actively improved, and a permanent fixture on any Windows install I have to use.

Honourable mentions
EditPlus and Textpad -- these two somehow kept cropping up on a lot of other tech people's computers, and I had cause to use them sporadically. It was a little weird because these weren't free tools, but the nag screens were easily dismissed and no functionality was crippled. I would call them the WinZip of text editors -- mostly competent, gets the basics right, nags you to buy, but gets out of your way if you don't want to.

Current situation
gedit (the Notepad++ equivalent for Ubuntu) in the GUI, and vim otherwise. Not much exposition is called for here, except perhaps for smirking at emacs.