Ganesh Swami

The winds around the Burnaby mountain area were so bad yesterday. First, I was kept awake until 3 by the constant howling. When I finally fell asleep, I was abruptly woken up at 6am when my feet froze up. The winds had taken a bunch of power lines down and my building and the entire locality around the Lougheed Town Center was out of power.

Civilization just comes to a halt with a blackout. I couldn’t shower (electric heater) or groom myself, couldn’t make breakfast or lunch (electric cookers) or even see myself (sun rises at 9am and sets at 4pm). All of the stores around my place were closed. Just think of the lost opportunities.

Stanley park is in a state of chaos. There are fallen trees everywhere with power lines below them. There’s no power yet, so the place is pitch dark. A dangerous place to be.

Apparently, even MSFT¹ was shut down today due to winds in the Redmond area.

1. check out their new spiffy homepage (↩)

Dr James Anderson, a researcher from the University of Reading’s computer science department recently came up with a new way to represent the result of dividing zero with zero. I’ve long relied on signaling Not-a-Number (NaNS) to look for unstable or ill-conditioned numerical problems. I don’t see how this changes things the way they are right now.

Computers simply cannot divide by zero. Try it on your calculator and you’ll get an error message.

But Dr Anderson has come up with a theory that proposes a new number - ‘nullity’ - which sits outside the conventional number line (stretching from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity).

I’m passing along two counter-arguments that point out succinctly what’s wrong with the approach. Well worth a read:

• Open letter to James Anderson
• Nullity - the Nonsense Number

One of my favorite minor-modes in emacs is the flyspell-mode. It continuously marks all words not found in the ispell-dictionary as you type. It’s particularly useful with AucTeX because it skips comments and TeX markup.

If you want to invoke flyspell-mode everytime you go into LaTex-mode, add this hook to your .emacs file:

(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode)

Upon the recommendation of a business leader I highly respect, I read the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This book talks about uncorrelated incremental changes that lead to a giant change (think runaway process.) Malcolm’s background is in disease propagation. The tipping point is when an epidemic reaches critical mass, at which point it becomes very difficult to contain it. You can see similar trends in nuclear reactions, word-of-mouth viral marketing, and ofcourse rumors.

On a related note, over the last few months, I’ve noticed an increased interest in running Linux as the primary platform. People seem to be amazed that a default installation of a modern distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu comes with so much fully functional, free software. Is this the tipping point for the adoption of Linux?

I find this very intriguing. A couple of years back, my friends and I started a Linux User Group at SFU called SFLUG. Back then, there seemed to be artificial roadblocks to the adoption of Linux (most important of these were the “free” availability of Microsoft software.) Having used Linux for over half a decade, I didn’t understand this at that time. Now I think I do.

I stumbled upon a problem with the Mac OSX Preview program today. The print dialog hides the current page number when it pops up. This is a big problem when you want to print a single page, and the page numbers on the PDF do not correspond to the actual page numbers.

The two screenshots, with and without the print dialog open: