A man of birds

If only more professors share his perspective on scientific archiving. http://shankarraman.in/2021/03/31/why-i-will-not-review-or-write-for-elsevier-wiley-and-other-commercial-scientific-journals/

My take on this, knowing that sci-hub has already  had such broad impact on scientific dissemination and it won't go anywhere anytime soon, there are some things we can do [prolly] right away to sort things out, harmonizing the need of academia and the openness of knowledge:

• entrust articles archiving to public libraries, they know how to index things,
• article processing fees go to paying those librarians (just add a floor to the amount so that if the journals aren't very popular, those librarians can still get by),
  
• hire server space from the likes of Google, just like porn sites do,
• stop making citation counts (IF, h-index, CI, etc) as a measure of how capable a person is in their field; just do an actual interview,
• start making friends in the academia, exchange emails, do actual discussions!
  

Academia should realize that scientific reputation goes much more beyond citation counting (it probably tells a bit about the article's in-site readership though, but not much more).

Recovery story

I-35W Mississippi River bridge

After 40 years of a faithful service, she collapsed due to some undersized gusset not being able to bear the increasing load.

 

I-35W Saint Anthony Falls Bridge 

Then the replacement is a well-loved and praised bridge.

Such a story.

Forgot what I was doing

But most likely that numpy array works so inefficiently compared to item/itemset on opencv-python, here. 

 

A practicioner's view

Bridge maintenance and safety: A practicioner's view

C. Seim is one hell of a guy. :) His paper (talk?) talked about how bridge maintenance progresses from analyses on primary effects (static loading, force balance, material properties, etc.; all that is incorporated into bridge design); to secondary effects (dynamic loading properties, time-dependent [finite element] analysis of the members; towards tertiary effects (material behavior to temperature, resistance to corrosion, bearing durability, the list goes on)

 I have not listed any references, as these are my thoughts alone, based on my own experiences.

That's one smug remarks from him, he deserved it.

python opencv VideoWriter results in invalid video file

Little did I know that OpenCV's VideoWriter could not handle saving into oddball-frame-sized video files. Python's not so verbose output doesn't help at all. Your program will still run fine like nothing wrong is happening, in the end it produces not-supposed-to-be file size like 578 kB or sth.

I bumped into similar SO articles [1, 2] which mentioned the case. I confirmed that VideoWriter works nicely when the frame dimensions (both height and width) is multiple of 8.

I am just so bad with farewells

I, indeed, am.

byte offset to pointer (C/C++)

I had the same question as this guy. I need to add some byte offset to a variable of struct something dataypes.

struct something data, *ptr.
char *helper;

ptr= &data;
helper= ptr;

&helper +offset ; // these two will do the same:
& helper[offset] ; // advances the helper by offset byte
*ptr + 1 will advance by the whole sizeof(struct someting)

openezx

openezx.org used to be a place to share things development of EZX phones. The project was active mostly from 2004 to 2008. Went under in 2011/2012, just to be archived on Github and Open Source Mobile Communication Consortium earlier this year.

The original openezx.org now is a lesbian porn site. D'oh. The time of registration is somewhat close to the date the Github and OSMCOM went up.

pidof

I am still doing
kill `pidof <some thing>`
instead of pkill <the thing>

Am I old shool already?

Taking My Subscribers for Rides in the DriftStang (for Charity)

For a cause

100 years

Some associated this song with 100 years mark of women in UK being able to cast ballot or #MeToo. 

I find this song telling about amidst whatsoever conflict happening in the society; people having different stances; our protagonist is trying his/her best to survive, allegedly being helped/manipulated by hands. Well, arts... are always open for multiple interpretations.

 

 

My mom has always been a strong woman. Dad passed away when I was five, she has raised me then on.

I cannot get you close enough
A hundred arms, a hundred years
You can always find me here.

I've been married for a year this day. She said she's gonna cook some chicken soup tonight. Last night, it marked the fist time she recorded 0.7 kg heavier than me, being 6" shorter. We fight quite often, I guess that's just the way we are. :D

And, Lord, don't let me break this
Let me hold it lightly
Give me arms to pray with
Instead of ones that hold too tightly

Also, I will listen to this song together with my kid.

We have no need to fight
We raise our voices and let our hearts take flight
Get higher than those planes can fly
Where the stars do not take sides

4 days: JRM

DOI:10.20965/jrm.2019.p0671

[Received September 19, 2019; accepted September 22, 2019]
That. was. quick.

linux-related music parody

Nostalgic feeling hits me hard.
I've used linux since I was twelve-ish.

Slackware's Pat having financial issues last year.
I am running only Ubuntu boxes.

Windows10 is on my daily laptop.
Zenwalk is on my second laptop, not being used, dual-booted with Windows7.

Time often passes faster than we grow up.

academia is skwd in many ways

Some reading for food for thought: Renewal model in academic knowledge systems 
The cited papers in the paper are also worth following. 

 This is why things like sci-hub is worth keeping: keep academic knowledge open (at least monetarily: no paywall), one-layered (a bit anarchist you might say), and keeping things identifiable.

I am not saying that academic publishing contributes nothing to the academic knowledge system itself, but everyone can actually learn to establish their academic publishing-indexing service themselves for their academic materials. There shall be no thing such as publish or perish, it should be publish for greater good.

Practical C++ Sockets

Good read:
http://cs.ecs.baylor.edu/~donahoo/practical/CSockets/practical/

I used the code for sending images between computers. Initially header information using a struct worked just ok, a day later it stopped working. I had to use simple array of ints to do so.

It reflected in my github commit:
0cff14c
2e7ba9a


fvcked up

Life lived up just for the sake of conformism is just sad.

this

passing argument to scilab

I've used scilab quite a while now, but never properly know to do basic things with it. Here's some redemption. 

>> file argument.sce
args= sciargs(); 
for argc= 1:size(args,2) do 
  printf("%d %s\n", argc, args(argc)); 
end
exit

Then you can run it from console liek:
$ scilab-cli -f argument.sce -args 1 a b $ scilab-adv-cli -f argument.sce -args 1 a b

The output:  
1 /usr/bin/scilab-cli-bin 
2 -f 
3 wa.sce 
4 -args 
5 1 
6 a
7 b

Knowing the argument sequence can be a bit of guesswork if the way you pass argument is inconsistent between runs, though.

kite runner

...[we] cherish custom but abhor rules...
--Khaled Hoseeini, Kite Runner

Building LinuxCNC

LinuxCNC (formerly emc, and emc2) is a great tool to control your CNC controller, in my case a ST-V3.

Documentation on building the software is here, but it barely tells the whole dependency list and the automated dependency checker script simply wouldn't run on my Ubuntu 16.04 /LinuxMint 18.3 machine.

So far, here's it is for you apt-get install
autoconf
libmodbus-dev
yapps2
libxenomai
intltool
libtk-img
tclx
libreadline6-dev
libxmu-headers
libxmu-dev
tcl-dev
tk8.6-dev
python3-tk
python-tk

Go to the source directory and invoke:
./configure --with-realtime=uspace

Should've read these first:
https://forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc/32193-complete-how-to-linux-mint-18-1-32-64-rtai-or-preempt-with-rip-install-or-debhttps://forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc/32193-complete-how-to-linux-mint-18-1-32-64-rtai-or-preempt-with-rip-install-or-deb
https://forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc/33521-building-linuxcnc-dev-on-ubuntu-16-04-preempt-rt-kernel

Ahilavati

She's my current daily ride. She's the first bike I own since coming to study in Japan. We had some on-and-off relationship for a while: I'd been going with another bikes for times, and she'd been with other guys too. Well, no jealousy here. She was also in another city for a while I was involved in a rural revitalization project, which in the end I went home with another bicycle [in addition to her still in my possession] by the time the project concluded.

I use the bottle cage for a light rain jacket as I rarely do any ride which requires me to bring some water bottle. The pannier rack is for grocery and other weird things I transport on errands. Saddle isn't that high as I often ride her with pair of slippers/crocs rather than proper shoes. The stem is slammed to the bottom 'cause the clampable portion of the fork is already so short, even without spacers and stuff.
 
The fork she originally came with was broken, she once had a suspension fork, but now I settled with 700c fork with V-brake bosses. V-brake is nice that you can fit a wider tire. But with lever designed for dual pivot caliper brake, you need to true your rim really nice to avoid rubbing, or just ignore it as long as it isn't so serious. She sports 25c at the moment which is getting duller everyday, I am a broke student.

I am learning to bunny-hop with her. I can now lift my front wheel, I can lift my rear wheel, but linking the latter while the front wheel is still on the air is not in my curriculum vitae, yet. Neither is  proper manual.

 

Sorry for the chain, I am such a poser T_T