things are often not quite right

Ikigai is (even) cruel

Ikigai is occupation-centric, hands down.

A mother might say that her reason to live is to watch/nurture/care her kid growing up. Well, she loves the cause (the kid); she may be either a good or bad parent; in the big picture, the world might not need that particular kid; and parenting costs bunch of money, time, energy, understanding, patience: all kind of resources, in short.

So, parenting is either mere love or passion. But I will take "my kid is my reason to keep on living" as wholly valid reason--not an excuse--to live your life.

Ikigai isn't even complete

You perhaps once stumbled upon this Venn diagram portraying Ikigai: "reason for being", "purpose of life", "reason to live", or whatchamacallit raison d'être. The word is represented by the character (生) which means disciple, livelihood, potential, unripe, or things along this line.

The "purpose" is divided into four dimensions: whether one is adept at it, whether one is paid to do the task, whether the thing is something others actually need (hence beneficial), and whether one is enjoying it. But somehow, the depiction of this "purpose" using this Venn diagram kinda incomplete albeit you can still dwelve deep into it, make an essay out of it, and give TED-style talks on it. Still, technically the diagram with four circles here only features fourteen sections (including negative value for all factors), while permutations of four factors yield sixteen different values in total. So where are the remaining two?

This oval-ey diagram is definitely better. But two sections are left unexplained: "good job" (what you love and earns money, but you aren't necessarily good at it nor others need you to do it) and "contribution" (what you are good at for precisely what others need, but you kinda loathe it and doesn't get paid). The first definitely sounds wasted and the later sounds like one is being "used".

So what may these two be in real life?

prostitution is a good job: screw, hump, get paid; you don't need to be a proper porn star and definitely doing solicit sexual act isn't socially desirable conduct. If you are getting good at it, it is now either your passion or profession (or both, which is your now self-imposed ikigai). If somehow society accepts it, it is now your ikigai imposed by others, unfortunately, by being a prostitute.
being altruistic as a matter of contribution: do good samaritan out of good will, you are quite adept at it, then you are getting tired, experiencing burnout, later running out of resources (time, energy, money, etc) to do so. Your way out being this miserable is either to start to love it for good or get some money out of it (which makes you an entrepreneur at this stage)
entrepreneur: you aren't necessarily good at it but people needs you, you don't necessarily love it but somehow you get paid to continue doing it. So how you manage to do it? Let others with proper passion on it to do so and use others' resource to do your case, you connects will and energy, resource and passion, talent and demand.

So what's the take on this, or at least, my take on this?
Your raison d'être doesn't have to be wholesome and "complete" with love, money, talent, and acceptance of others at once. You can always define it yourself, being content with the moment, but always open up your mind for changes you are working on for the better or changes simply imposed by constraints, as things are often not quite right.

Kudos to guys at dreamstime/Toronto Star Graphic, Mark Winn, Dan Buettner, David McCandles for the wonderful graphs.

You... and (perhaps) me

Isn't it beautiful, to lead and to protect your cherished one?
Still, who shall I be? Renshaw, Hincapie, Rogers, or Martin?

migrating to larger SSD with GPT partitioning

My daily driver is Acer Aspire Switch 11, a convertible laptop with SSD on the tablet and 2.5" drive beneath the snap-on keyboard. Mine came configured with Lite-On 64 GB M.2 SSD (L8T-64L9G) and 500 GB hard drive. Soon I swapped the disk drive for 1 TB model from HGST (HTS 721010A9E630) when I got it for quite a good deal. But the SSD got to wait, I am a poor student.

The laptop comes with Windows 8.1 (later upgraded to Windows 10) with UEFI configured which spells GPT partitioning.

Then the time for the SSD upgrade came, it wasn't that difficult. You just need the right tools for the job: replacement SSD, a bootable USB drive with Linux Mint 18 (Sarah, Ubuntu 16.04), USB 3.0 adapter for M.2 drive, and AOMEI Partition Assistant. The laptop would get a nice upgrade to 256GB SSD (Transcend TS256GMTS800)

plug the new SSD to USB adapter
boot the laptop to LinuxMint which you can create with rufus for UEFI booting
dd the whole old SSD into the new one. 64 Mb block size is nice, I got 250 MB/s.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdd bs=64M

out with the old SSD, in with the new
reboot into Windows 10
install AOMEI Partition Assistant

move and resize your partition

I tried several partition managers on Windows 10:

EASEUS wasn't able to detect my not-so-matching partition table
MiniTool wasn't able to move the partition (perhaps it wasn't recognizing the end of disk address properly just as EASEUS)
lastly, AOMEI works just great with moving Windows recovery partition (located to the end of the disk) and resizing my system (C:) drive to its full size.

GPT table stays intact and the laptop boots just fine. I am a happy boy.

We... all of us...

Skylar Grey wrote the lyrics for both the feminine (Rihanna) and masculine (Eminem) of "Love The Way You Lie".

The story revolved around a relationship painted with chaos, oblivion, passion, and (subtle) harmony. The song would still be great without the repetitive chorus IMHO, i.e. it'd be have more points on poignance given the song features only its hooks, lines, and raps. Also, I don't think anyone in the song was lying to each other, they simply couldn't explain how they were feeling and expect what'd happen next.

Here, ppl elect Grey to sing the second part (and chorus. if that matters) better than Rihanna. Grey supposedly gave it Rihanna cause the Chris Brown thing. I guess this is what we call sisterhood, no?

_______
Lala introduced me to these songs, The Pekalongans'd listened to this non-chalantly over the course. But now, every now and then I recall the feelings more personal and dismayed when I listen to these songs.

How'd you read your code?

How'd you read your code?. The /. article got various responses:

some simply don't read their code (think of shell scripters),
some go with high-level tech-like abstraction,
some go with word by word substitution to daily words, mostly English,
some read the each symbol and token of the code,
some got angry/sentimental/high when reading a piece of code they wrote themselves previously,
some got into their zen analytic mental concept.

The problem is largely how to translate analytic construct to communicative linguistic construct.

Programmer/engineer/code usually have easier time with charts and graphs. Still, programs' linguistic construct is also important in conveying how the things should be used (not how it works) and explaining to new-programmers, like from lecturer to students (or you to your SO, if it matters).

I'd suggest explaining the arithmetic-logic process with natural language, one block (lines of code delivering particular function) at a time, somewhat in between between usage-and-purpose-driven and value-and-function-driven. Hopefully we can actually learn how the the code works, what purpose lies beneath, and what to alter/modify/add in the code to suit one's specific usage scenario.

Realtek RTS5129 module

Cards weren't detected on Latitude 3540.
Embedded card reader was Realtek RTS5129.

# modprobe rtsx_usb rtsx_usb_sdmmc

did the trick.

Sandwich finish

This year's Giro d Italia: stage 18 finish was exhilarating.

Here is the photo finish.

1-3 finish for Etixx Quick-Step (Matteo Trentin and Gianluca Brambilla) with Moreno Moser on the sandwich. Other than manly victory salute of Trentin, we can also highlight Brambilla's genuine and honest smile.

So here is how the final sprint unfolded:

Brambilla and Moser were cooperatively pulling on damn 20% climb away from the break,
Brambilla was pulling hard to the (second-to-last?) final bend with Moser trailing right behind, Trentin was like 5 seconds behind,
Moser opened up his sprint, Brambilla followed. Moser took over to lead the sprint,
Brambilla didn't really push on the sprint and pulled a bit, Moser was little bit confused as...
Trentin simply surged to the finish line.

Moser was pretty much like, "Damn, they got me!"
Brambilla was like "Aha, yay!"

EQS played their (Italian) cards right, unlike Spain on 2013's UCI World Elite Men RR.

映画『ちはやふる』主題歌「FLASH」（Perfume）PV

Chihayafuru's anime series is one of my favorite despite I have never read its original manga. Poetry as main theme was strong at the time of its release, I was also wathching Utakoi at that time. For quite a while I was waiting for 3rd season, then lost interest, and now we are having Chihayafuru live action adaptation.

Perfume did well for theme song, it serves you ample dose of optimism and melancholy at the same time, to the flavor of the anime.

Despite being currently in Japan, watching its premiere is still no-go for me as things may got lost in translation (my Japanese sucks, literally like a black hole). I'll just wait for D-Addicts for English subtitle and re-watch in Japanese later on.

Too bad the pronunciation is closer to "flush" rather than "flash".

GPT for good

Just tonight, my friend and I were tinkering with two new hard drives (4TB each) on Dell PowerEdge T320. The box was already configured with 4 500GB drives on RAID5 for system parititons (boot, swap, root for Centos) and 2TB drives for data.

Putting in the new drives was pretty self-explanatory: open the bay, plug them in, open the system setup (press F2 upon system boot), and make your way with virtual drives. I configured the two 4TB drives in RAID0 as a single drive. This was just the beginning...

initialized the 8TB drive with DOS partition table,
ran cfdisk, made a single LVM2 partition with "100%" capacity (I was just hitting 'Enter' repeatedly :D ) and didn't bother to double check its actual size after partitioning,
pvcreate,
vgextend,
lvextend (to the 2TB 'data' partition),
found out that the resulting partition is only 4TB,
found out that additional LVM physical volume was only 2TB big,
vgreduce: failed,
...
...
more screwing up
...
...
yanked out the new drives,
reboot: broken volume group,
removed the broken logical volume from broken volume group,
realized that only GPT can handle partition larger than 2TB
redoing everything with GPT: disklabel with parted, pvcreate, vgextend, mkfs,
...
working 10TB partition

online shell ftw

These guys at tutorialspoint are just great. The site has free programming courses, and free shell!
--the online bash shell also has gcc on it (too bad they won't give us network access, though :D)

Definitely worth frequent visit.

Braced against impact

Not much, just a broken fork. The wheel was also damaged (to lesser extent).

The steering tube is so thin, pretty much designed to break upon front impact to absorb the force.

PS: Always ride carefully (or at least responsibly), especially in the night.

USB Killer, wut?

Long story short, some Russian guy made USB-pluggable device to burn your computer; exhibiting high current on your USB port. Here's the story from Ars: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/usb-killer-flash-drive-can-fry-your-computers-innards-in-seconds/

His personal statement are http://kukuruku.co/hub/diy/usb-killer (English) and http://habrahabr.ru/post/251451/ (Russian).

Most USB ports already have positive current limiter (simple diode to your GND, which serves as the current sink); this guy got around by using negative voltage on VCC or data pins (any pin will do given the high current); also supported by the fact that N-channel transistors allow higher current compared to P-channel counterpart on the same physical dimension.

Manufacturers better start equipping our USB ports with transistor-based current limiter making it dual-bias if necessary (adding another pair with reverse bias), or putting in some (small) user-replaceable fuses.

All in all, those small caps aren't that small!

Spring Air Japan

I just bought plane ticket for my mom and her friend from Hiroshima to Tokyo: Narita. Then I realized my google-translate-fu wasn't good enough (or literally my Japanese simply sucks).

I purchased extra checked-in baggage for two they won't probably need (3000 JPY each). When I tried to revise the order (somehow I managed to put my credit card credentials without a hitch in the first place for the order; my Japanese is pretty good for shopping in general :D ), I stumbled upon: * 支払済みの製品はキャンセルできません Good grief!

6000 JPY wasn't that much (that's pretty much more that one month of food for me though); one that hurts more is my own stupidity and carelessness. Though I suppose this was intended (the only confusing part to me on the site is only the baggage allowance): the UI design of the web, non-refundable additional feature (I ordered 2 weeks in advance if that matters, you can add features but not remove them from your order).

All in all I was just stupid (and I still really am).

Leatherman Skeletool

I had Leatherman Sketelool from March this year. I remember clearly when I used it to reshape the heel part of my friend's shoes which he said was hurting him quite so much in its first actual use.

And today I lost it.

I managed to smuggle it last week from Hiroshima Airport (Mihara, Japan) to Hazrat Shahjalal Airport (ZIA, Dhaka, Bangladesh) with no hitch as I put it on checked-in luggage. I've did this in several occasions with my more trusty Surge,

Last night, I tried something different from Dhaka to Bangkok (transit before coming back to Japan). Rather than stashing it on my checked-in luggage, I kept it on my carry-on baggage as my baggage doesn't even exceed 5 kg.

Things happened.

In Hazrat Shahjalal Airport, you will need a specific sticker for your checked-in luggage; as I already checked through the ticket counter by the time I knew this; I was too lazy to get it and just proceeded to take it as carry-on baggage.

Still I managed to get it through in Hazrat Shahjalal Airport and board Bangkok Airways.

I landed on Suvarnabhumi (BKK, Bangkok, Thailand) and they did extensive check on my baggage looking form something knife-like. I tried to buy some time but they eventually found the tool (I was claiming it as pliers though) and confiscated it. They must have had some feeling of achievement to be able to fish a solid metal :D

I (more likely) wouldn't lose the tool if I just put it on checked-in baggage. But from this I learned several things:

some airport care less, some care more: Suvarnabhumi require you to strip even your belt, shoes, and watch, that is not the case with Hazrat Shahjalal,
those guards are dedicated to their job even at 1 AM; they are willing to fish through your smelly and dirty clothes,
they were looking for solid metal thing, by solid I meant SOLID; it will appear as dark blue or black in the scanner,
they used divide-and-conquer approach to find specific item from a suspicious baggage,
they know how things look like--they weren't not really interested in my multimeter and umbrella and kept focusing in finding the tool.

I could go to arrival lobby rather than transit lobby to complicate things a bit, but they can always check even if I put the tool in my checked-in luggage if they have enough spare time, dedication, curiosity, and motivation.

Kudos to airport safety crews who worked hard to make every flight safe.

you've served me faithfully smally. but another skeletool is no-no for me atm.

Also, I never really love you anyway, Skeletool (the pliers suck and multitools are overpriced in Japan). But anyway, quite a (an expensive) lesson I've learned today.

I was clearly disappointed

Recently I was staying in a hotel in Dhaka, Bangladesh on a study trip, and by second night there I had the chance to eat in its restaurant (allegedly serving Thai and Chinese menu),.

First I've browsed around and asked my trip advisor, finding out that tipping isn't really necessary in Bangladeshi restaurants.

By the time I got to the place (I was also staying in the hotel it's attached to), I ordered simple fried rice and coffee. The waiter asked me about my nationality, purpose of visit, occupation, college (probably because I definitely look like a student) in interrogative and rather offensive tone. This is already very unpleasant to me.

After I finished my meal; I simply paid the bill (the waiter--he--didn't hand me the bill before taking my money; I had to do as he ordered me to).

After that he was nagging, required me to give him tip (which I think wasn't really necessary). I had to settle on 40 BHT (after first refusing then bargaining for 10 BHT which he refused), after that I talked to him that he needs to brush up his English not to sound offensive to customers. He actually mistook "offensive" with "friendship" (how?!) then proceed with saying that he wasn't being friendly with anyone from my nationality. What?!

I badly wanted to express my frustration right in the place, but that's definitely uncalled for; instead I just walked out.

He should definitely learn to show actual Bengali hospitality (which people in village I visited showed us how beautiful it is).

IEEE: Notice of Retraction

I was browsing through IEEE Xplore for papers on wireless sensor network; for term report due this Friday.

Then I stumbled upon a paper containing unusual first page, it says:

Notice of Retraction
After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE's Publication Principles. We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper. The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Scary, definitely.

But still, the content looks normal: it shows model on residual energy consumption on circular direction propagation from actually-used and wasted energy to propagate the waves. It then compares total energy consumption on grid and non-grid cluster of wireless-networked sensors.

It was pretty interesting read.
O, poor folks.

FYI, it's DOI 10.1109/ETCS.2010.342.

Phone on Bike (2015 Letour Grand Depart)

From Letour Grand Departure this year. Several professional riders brought out the camera cellphone while riding to stage. They did this purposely more likely to cherish this special moment with fans and everyone--which is a good thing. But something is missing.

The act isn't really educational. You shouldn't use cellphone while your bike is moving, despite one-hand bike handling on low speed isn't that difficult (they are pros anyway); but it's just distracting--and disregard to such kind of problem may further precede ugly accidents (hope not).

Jeremy Roy is a nice guy, he had bike cam instead of cellphone.

Lastly, it'd be great if helm maker could make small camera mounted on helmet, which just fit in the the helmet rather than making obstructive appearance and giving wrong impression on speed and distance.

lseek()

If you ever wonder how to use basic open, seek, read/write operations on native file descriptor (in Linux), here's a brief example. It should give general overview on how it's done.
I was actually not quite sure how to lseek() before writing this post myself.


#include <unistd.h>

#include <fcntl.h>



int fd;
int main(){
    fd = open("foo",O_WRONLY | O_CREAT, S_IRWXU);
    lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_END);
    write(fd,"abc\n",4);
    }

See, the offset and whence value can be played around. I can do {SEEK_SET, SEEK_END} to get exactly the same result. :D

Anyway, it's nice to see OR operation on enum values.

IBM 7094 Daisy Bell

It was dubbed "first computer to sing"; a bunch of guys hacked into IBM 7094 to make it sing (or make some mass-understandable beeps in this regards). It probably involved some degree of speech and music synth. The song was Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two) written in 1892 by Harry Dacre.

Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do!
I'm half crazy,
All for the love of you!
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.
...
Harry, Harry, here is my answer true
You're half crazy if you think that that will do
If you can't afford a carriage
There won't be any marriage
Cause I'll be switched if I'll get hitched
On a bicycle built for two

I wish she's willing to be my stoker.