I wish you a truly happy 2016, filled with learning and helping other people! Neil deGrasse Tyson, exemplary human, said it best:

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

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(Post updated on January 8, 2021. See section at the end.)

The whole world is using WhatsApp to message each other. I often do too, because I want to inter-operate with the rest of the world.

However, WhatsApp belongs to Facebook.

Although Facebook has promised otherwise (fast-forward a few years: Yes, they did break that promise. See updates at the end of this post.), the temptation to link all of your WhatsApp messages with Facebook logins (a straight-forward process, as they have the mobile phone numbers of a great number of their users) must be quite tempting to the people at Facebook. Imagine how well they would then be able to target their advertising, based on their access to both your Facebook profile and your private WhatsApp messages!

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This is without a doubt my favourite animated GIF of all time (go ahead, click on the play button!):

I am eternally grateful to Twitter user @ftrain for granting us this gift. In the process, I also learnt that:

1. Twitter automatically transcodes animated GIFs to MP4s to save bandwidth, and for other reasons. I’m in two minds about this, because these are good reasons, but GIFs are really handy to be able to paste into HipChat and Slack and everywhere else.
2. There is no real consensus concerning the pronunciation of GIF. The author of the format says JIF, a whole bunch of (vocal) other people say GIF.

This is our last week in this house. It was a beautiful base for our return to South Africa, but the time has come to move on to a new home and to new memories. Moving out of places is decidedly not my favourite state of being. I think I might still be traumatized by the experience of moving out of our Dutch hood.

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This, the ninety eighth edition of the WHV, looks back at the week of Monday August 10 to Sunday August 16, 2015.

Today we took a brief walk up into the mountain, as one does around these parts. This is what False Bay looks like from the Helderberg Nature Reserve:

When life hands you lemons, build a battery

Genetic Offspring Unit (GOU) #1 had to do a show and tell at school, so I helped her to construct a battery from 4 lemons. Besides that because of this I got to refresh my own knowledge (can you remember exactly why a battery such as this works?!) we got to chat about molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, atomic numbers and the periodic table.

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This, the ninety seventh edition of the WHV, looks back at the week of Monday August 3 to Sunday August 9, 2015.

• John Scalzi (famous and successful SciFi author) describes how he works in this post on lifehacker. What I found really interesting was that when he’s working on a book or other project, he switches off the internet between 8 and noon.
• I just discovered that Four Tet’s mom is South African-born.
• This week my work time was divided between having to analyse someone else’s quite complex application and bits of their domain in order to implement new features on the one hand, and designing a new relational data representation for workflow provenance on the other. I perceived both of these activities as challenging, and hence (I think) my work week as very satisfying.
• After the whole day programming at work, I often relax at home in the evenings by programming some more. I’ve noticed that the after-dinner beer (or two) make architectural and design-level work more challenging.
• On the topic of programming for relaxation, this weekend I had the feeling that my longest-running side-project was finally getting off the ground, at least technically. When it grows up, it really wants to be a non-linear graphical personal knowledge management tool – the crazy and colourful glue linking together all of your digital stuff.
• On the topic of beer, I made you a photo of my weekend craft beer (the Skeleton Coast IPA by Jack Black) with a rainbow in the background. I call it a beerbow:

Have a great week everyone!

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The week has resulted in a terribly nerdy list of bullets. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK! (there’s a beer recommendation or three at the end to compensate)

• It turns out that the terrible Samsung trim bug which would eat all of your data, as discovered by Algolia, was a Linux kernel bug after all (now patched by Samsung) and that it would only affect RAID setups. Let’s hope there are no surprising new turning outs.
• Found out that the fastest ADSL lines available at my new place are a whole 2 Mbit/s. We’ve called off the transaction and we’re now searching for a new house.
• I’m joking. It was really shocking however to consider the world as seen through a 2 Mbit/s connection. Now it seems that I will soon be entering the wonderful world of 5 GHz wireless connectivity, which should give me a fast enough connection, at least until fibre is rolled out in the year 3047.
• Started watching Mr Robot. I don’t normally do series, but the pilot was just that good. I like the story, I really like the socially very strangely adjusted hacker protagonist and I love the cinematography. Up to episode 3, I give it 4 out of 5 Linux Distributions!
• Continued fighting with OSX to get it completely working with my Dvorak and Emacs keybindings, also in Java apps such as IntelliJ IDEA. Two weeks ago I mentioned karabiner as a solution to most of these problems. The final piece of the puzzle was unbinding keys like Alt+W (or Mod+W as Apple calls it) in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to prevent OSX from turning it into a \(\Sigma\) (sigma); as everyone knows, M-w is the Emacs shortcut for copying the selected region! You can use this trick to prevent OSX from turning any of the other Mod combos into completely unwanted special characters. (My base dict file is that of Jacob Rus.)
• I guess OSX only Just Works(tm) if your time is worth nothing. Err…
• My first Kivy pull request, a fix for a Mac-bug (go figure), was recently merged into master. I’ve been using Kivy in the third or fourth generation of my current and probably longest running side project.
• I’ve also been screencasting some of my night-time coding sessions using one of the more prominent livecoding sites (bonus points if you can find these sleep-inducing performances). It has been an interesting and strange experience programming with people watching over one’s shoulder as it were.
• On Sunday, I ended up at the Root44 Market in Stellenbosch for another of those really terrible balmy winter days. I had so much fun in the sun, tasting Devil’s Peak First Light Golden Ale and their King’s Blockhouse IPA, and Stellenbrau’s Craven Lager, all from the tap, that I forgot to take a photo of the beautiful surroundings.

Have a beautiful week dear readers! Just remember, I’m never gonna give you up.

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• NERD-ALERT: There are a whole bunch of awesome SciPy 2015 presentations online! I really liked these so far (due to good work and good presentation):
  • A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib by Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt – Besides the fact that Stéfan is a friend AND SOMETIMES EVEN READS THIS BLOG (!!!1!), this work is a super useful contribution not just to matplotlib, but to general awareness and practical application of sensible quantitative colour maps! If you’d like to know more about why we shouldn’t use rainbow colourmaps, you could do much worse than read Noeska Smit’s post Rainbow Colormaps – What are they good for? Absolutely nothing!
  • VisPy Harnessing The GPU For Fast, High Level Visualization by Luke Campagnola – I was impressed by the bag of GPU tricks demonstrated and I really liked the dry presentation style. I checked out VisPy examples afterwards: What I saw looked like the right mix of shader code and Python scaffolding for fun experimenation.
  • Rapid Accurate and Simple Segmentation of Objects in Medical Images by Ross Mitchell and Wenzhe Xue – I still remember seeing some of the first work on GPU levelsets being presented by Aaron Lefohn at the Vis conference some years ago, but the work demonstrated by Ross Michell at SciPy was really impressive in terms of ease of use: A stroke here and a stroke there on a few slices of a 3D medical volume, and presto – 3D segmentation deforms while we watch! Wehzhe Xue tweeted me his presentation notebook which include a link to their MICCAI IMIC workshop paper.
• On Tuesday, I attended the monthly Helderberg Software Developers and Entrepreneurs meetup, which was a ridiculous amount of fun. As you might be able to see from the meetup page, there are mentions of wrestling. I’m still not sure which of the developer or entrepreneurial components contributed most to this occurrence (I observed, but chose to concentrate on beer and conversation), but my backyard anthropological senses are still tingling.
• Sunday was one of those really difficult Winter days, so we spent it in the glorious sun at the V&A Waterfront. The highlight of the day was going up in the Cape Wheel, a beautiful engineering artifact with really stunning views:

Have a great week peeps!

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• This WHV deals with the weeks from Monday June 29 to Sunday July 19. I skipped an edition or two whilst away on vacation, as I was quite busy with, you know, being on vacation. So, about that vacation:
• Last year I explained about the Kruger National Park, or KNP. Well, we went again this year, and again it was lovely. It helps that in the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces, “winter” at this time of year seems to mean “lovely balmy days with temperatures between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius”. What completely and utterly seals the deal, is being surrounded by this particular permutation of natural vastness. You should go there to see for yourself, but here’s a taste:

• EXTREME-NERDERY BULLET: If you’re a Dvorak typist using Java-based tools on the Mac (e.g. Eclipse, IntelliJ, AppCode, and everything by JetBrains) you might have noticed that keyboard shortcuts fall on the spectrum somewhere between extremely wonky and plain infuriating. Besides that you now know that this subset of persons is not limited to just you, here’s an SO answer that I wrote up based on information in the JetBrains bug threads. In short, a long-standing (as in years) bug in Java on Mac means you have to use an open-source tool called Karabiner instead of Mac’s built-in Dvorak support.
• Here, have a photo of a stealthy leopard to recover:

• A Sunday lunch at the Thirsty Scarecrow led to at least two new discoveries. Citizen Beer, a craft beer brewery I have not ran into yet (it’s not for lack of trying, really) makes a pretty delicious amber ale called Alliance (their wonderfully-named Saboteur IPA is not too shabby either):

The week of Monday June 21 to Sunday June 28 as seen through bullets:

• On Monday I received a super sweet email from an ex-student of one of my DataVis courses at the TU Delft. My course got a “one of the best” rating, but more importantly, the gentleman in question explained that it had inspired him to make a career in DataVis (and judging by his work record up to now, he’s doing a really good job of it!). It’s hard to explain how much good such a thank you mail does to my heart.
• This reminded me accutely of the concluding life advice the American author David Sedaris gave to the guests attending his edition of the Dutch College Tour. The advice was:

Write thank you notes.

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The week of Monday June 15 to Sunday June 21 in bullets:

• Ran around organizing all kinds of things for the new house. The various institutions have been cooperating very nicely.
• Spent days trying first to fix an implementation of a GPU algorithm to simulate car paint, and then to implement an alternative algorithm by the clever boys and girls at NVIDIA. A team-mate finally got everything working by realising that the float16 texture coordinates (long story) we were using to sample a noise texture needed to be float32. Lesson learnt: If you’re seeing splotches when you’re supposed to be seeing snow, check your float precision!
• Spent the rest of the week fighting with wkhtmltopdf, a tool that converts HTML into PDF. Unfortunately the tool is 50% webkit, and 50% black magic. Lesson learnt: wkhtmltopdf 0.12.2.1 renders internally at 74.8dpi. Accept it, calculate with it, and move on. The upshot of this is that the IP Dashboard is now 37% better at exporting charts.
• For some time now, when I have to make decisions, I actively optimise for experiences and not for possessions. At some point in the past I read in the blogosphere that experiences make people happier than possessions, and since then I’ve been paying more attention to this. IT REALLY WORKS!(tm) Tonight I wanted to look up the sources of this idea for you (and for me). Here are the two academic papers causing most of that online discussion, and a summarising blog post::
  • The Relative Relativity of Material and Experiential Purchases (2010), Travis J. Carter and Thomas Gilovich.
  • I Am What I Do, Not What I Have: The Differential Centrality of Experiential and Material Purchases to the Self (2012), Travis J. Carter and Thomas Gilovich.
  • Study shows experiences are better than possessions -- summarising post on phys.org. Carter and Gilovich’s research (based on on a number of tests and questionnaires they did with a sample of Cornell students) demonstrated that experiences were more satisfying than possessions. Their results also support at least one explanatory mechanism: Experiences are more closely connected to the self. This makes sense: Anybody else can buy the same thing you bought, but, by definition, your experience of some event or adventure is quite unique to you. To my mind, the idea of focusing on the experience rather than the cake at the end is pleasingly complementary to the adage that Life is a journey, not a destination, which I have just learned is due to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• I’m still terrible at bullets, I know.

Dear reader(s), have a beautiful and experience-filled week!

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