Icosahedron

On April 22, 2008, R 2.7.0 was released. The R Project for Statistical Computing is a statistical software package similar to SPSS, SAS, and S-Plus, but there is one difference: it is free (libre) and open source software. You can get it for free off the internet and you can do what you want with it, modify the source code, and redistribute it under the same license. Now it comes with antialiasing for X11 displays.
Continue reading ‘R 2.7.0 Gets Antialiasing For X11′

Surprisingly it snowed today, but only for about ten minutes. Actually, it was cold enough to wear a winter jacket today. That’s my news for the month!

Since the summer has started I’ve been doing mostly programming and going to the gym. I’m working on a fairly large project but it’s going to be a secret from my Icosahedron audience, sorry. I also finally found out who won the prize…wait, let me tell you about that.

I may have mentioned that earlier this month I had to give a presentation on my final project for a class in mathematical modeling. I prepared for it well in advance and I think I did pretty well with it. Aside from me, there were three other people presenting. The professor had announced prizes were to be given out for the top two presentations.

Long story short: I didn’t win. Ah, I think you were expecting me to announce that I won. Sadly I got second prize, which I suppose is still a win in a sense. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. Better luck next time right?

Gee, I’m really straining for something interesting to say to you guys. I just had a snack. There. I’ll write soon.

Flubox is the best window manager ever. For ages I was searching for some way to make a window shade (hide all the window but the titlebar) but I just didn’t think it was possible. But it is. I don’t know how I missed it, but it’s possible. Edit the .fluxbox/init file and find the line that says:

session.screen0.windowScrollAction:

And change it to:

session.screen0.windowScrollAction: shade

Now if you scroll up on a titlebar it will unshade and scrolling down will shade. I like it the other way and to change it go to:

session.screen0.windowScrollReverse:	false

And change it to:

session.screen0.windowScrollReverse:	true

Then go to the Fluxbox Menu>Reload Config. That’s all there is to it. Go Fluxbox!

Holy crap, I’m finished all my exams. I wrote the last one today, and it was at 7pm. Unprintable blasphemy I know. I mean, who scheduled that one? It wasn’t that great but acceptable I think. But there were lots of problems. First of all some individual left their cellphone on and it was either dying or reconnecting and disconnecting repeatedly to a network, or something like that, because it kept on making the most annoying sound ever, at regular intervals. ???. Geez I miss the old days when no one had a cellphone.
Continue reading ‘Finished All Exams’

I went this morning to write my formal languages exam. It was quite easy. Not only was 90% of it absolutely straightforward, 24% of it was multiple choice. To the left by the way is the answer to one of the questions. In short, I vaporised this one. Yay! Just one more tomorrow, and it’s an easy one. So now I just have to find a job.

I’m also going to practice more on the piano, and read lots of books. Ins’t that cool? I also might take a course and I have about eight days to decide (I think). Maybe not.

Near exams my room always gets a bit disorganized. Okay, it’s a disaster area. Today I’m going to make it better, but where to start? I’m standing here and I think the mess has reached fractal level. Within every mess there’s a smaller mess, ad infinitum. So I just can’t start anywhere. It’s so bad that if you clean it, it looks worse. That’s how bad it is. Ah well. I won’t post pictures.

My last two exams are easy and then I have my summer! But I have to find a job. I need some $$$ and I’m quickly running out of what I have, ’tis most unfortunate indeed. I need money for lots of things, but first and foremost I need it to live and to buy furniture when I move away. So I’m going to go searching after I finish my last exam. I think I’m going to take a course this semester (another $500+ for that :( :( ). Oh well. I still have a little bit of money left. And lots of PC points. That will help.

BTW, my exams are formal languages (theory of automata, regular languages, CFGs, and TMs), and vocal music appreciation. Wish Me Luck.

For my hundredth post I give you my results on the complex analysis exam! I don’t know exactly how I did but I can say I did well. Surprisingly, there were no questions on evaluating real integrals with the residue theorem. Kinda sad, because I studied most for that part.

Other than that…well, life is ok, whatever.

I’ve finished studying for complex analysis, which is tomorrow. I can’t believe I didn’t just study earlier. Why do I always have to do things the hard way? It feels so frustrating sometimes. On the other hand, I just started (a few weeks ago) taking Seroquel and I feel a lot different now. I can pay attention to one task and filter out the other tasks lingering in my mind like flashing lights in the dark.

I feel a bit ill. I’m so stressed out sometimes that I just feel a bit ill. Do you ever get that?

Over the past four days I went over Cauchy’s Theorem, Cauchy’s integral formula and variants, series representations and Laurent series, classification of singularities (pole = only finitely many of the coefficients of the inverse powers are nonzero, essential singularity = infinitely many of the coefficients of the inverse powers are nonzero, removable = can be represented as a Taylor series) and finding residues. After that the residues are used in the Residue theorem and the calculation of definite improper integrals such as and . Essentially the entire course in four days. No I’m not manic - it’s normal.

So enough of that. I am a tad scared. Honestly, I think if I lived back in the early days in small tribes I wouldn’t even have a problem. I could probably live like that without medication. Today’s society is just so fscked up I think. Everyone at the university just seems so tired, especially the profs. Everyone is so driven and stressed out by grant applications and form filling and a whole truckload of other crap.

What’s wrong with it all? I dunno.

Maybe later I’ll write a post on how to evaluate weird looking integrals. Maybe.

So, I did pretty well for this course. There were six questions, summarised as follows (obviously I don’t remember the details):

1. Prove that multiplication by elementary matrices is equivalent to row operations in Gaussian elimination.

2. For a real inner product space with inner product (.,.) and induced norm |.|, prove the identity 2(|x|^2 + |y|^2) = |x-y|^2 + |x+y|^2

3. Find the normalised and unnormalised QR decomposition of a matrix.

4. a) Find the change of basis matrix and its inverse for a given vector space and two bases.
b) Prove one norm is equal to another norm, given two norms.
c) Calculate the norm of some linear map.

5. Prove that if p(x) is a polynomial and h is an eigenvalue of the matrix A, then p(h) is an eigenvalue of p(A)

6. Diagonalize a matrix.

Surprisingly no question on singular value decomposition! Not hard, although I didn’t 4b and only partially did 4c. But tomorrow’s complex analysis, also at 0930, will be a bit harder. Shit.