art with code

2009-09-22

Mobile internet speed beats ADSL

Upstream-wise, that is. The Nokia CS-15 HSUPA wireless Internet USB stick has a maximum 10.2 Mbps downstream bandwidth and a 5.76 Mbps upstream bandwidth. You need fiber to beat that upstream, at least here in Finland.

And a Huawei stick doubles the downstream to 21 Mbps. If the latency is low enough and the network infra can take the load, that'd totally kill ADSL.

2009-09-21

Also on the INTERNETS

The final solution to piracy


Books


Ditched the sediment & river books from my reading queue, as the library wanted them back. Replaced them with two writing course -related book-like objects about simulated annealing, in addition to An Introduction to the World's Oceans (hey, 71% of the planetary area can't be wrong, right?) and Climatology - An Atmospheric Science (ooh, a pretty painting on the cover.) Both being introductory textbooks to their subjects.

The oceanography book gets extra points for the oceanography department probably having coated their whole library in tar, supposedly to protect it from the vagaries of the high seas. As a result, there's a smell to the book. There were also a few books from late 1800s and early-to-mid 1900s in the oceanography shelf, which I briefly looked at before putting them back to the shelf, carefully. If something survives a hundred years of students, it must be lucky!

I'm reading these non-CS related textbooks because CS gives me a headache and a neckache and a backache and they're actually interesting. Plus maybe I'll be able to use the knowledge gleaned as a way to slither my way into an outdoors IT job... Oh wait, the plan was to totally spruce up my drawing skills (a couple hours of daily practice actually works, whuda thot) and get an art/graphics job. Well, at least they have lots of pictures to draw.

Maybe a couple hours of daily practice would work for Swedish grammar as well. There's a thought.

Today's quote

"it isn't right for children to steal words"

2009-09-16

Back to programming

I've been hacking a bit on cakejs and canvas recently, making a paper doll animation system. The paper doll -part was actually pretty easy, but now I need tools for making the animations. Which might be less easy. Let's see :)

Also, cakejs is really lacking in the documentation & tutorials -department. I will try and fix that by pasting the code comments to wiki pages. Tutorials might be easy to write by taking the demo page scripts and adding narration.

Still sustaining a drawing routine of 1-2 A4 pages per day, which is awesome. Plein air drawing is a lot of fun and sunshine, and works great as practice. What I should also do is grab a book on machine illustration or some other really constructive ID method of drawing and work through the exercises.

Jogging has plateaued at three one-hour runs per week. I don't know if I should try to push it beyond that as I seem to get knee ache at around the 10 km mark. Maybe it's caused by bad technique? Fix by muscle training to sustain a better posture and lots of intervals to improve running technique?

Added shutdown -h now to root's crontab at one-hour intervals in the evening to boot me off the computer and go to sleep. And... it's working. Two weeks of <9am wakeups already. I had the tendency to latch onto a 25-26h daily rhythm before, which is really not conducive to getting to Swedish class at 9:15am.

2009-09-08

Reading list summer 2009

Started off with some scifi, three novels by Iain M. Banks from his Culture series: Consider Phlebas, Player of Games and Matter, and David Petersen's book of fighting mice; Mouse Guard: Fall 1152. Followed by borrowing the Banks novels to roommate in exchange for Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Chasm City. Stayed at the family cabin by the lake Saimaa for a month or so, and played the first two stories of Odin Sphere and some hours of Valkyrie Profile 2. On returning home, read Frank Herbert's Dune (courtesy of aforementioned roommate), then raided the university library for a change of pace with World Regions in Global Context. I'm currently reading Coastal Sedimentary Environments and The Practice & Science Of Drawing. After that I have queued up Rivers and Floodplains, and the next three books of Dune.

Now if I could find a monitor that works with the PS2, I could go back to wasting my evenings with games instead of boring myself to death on the computer writing blog posts like this...

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