Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in kaol's LiveJournal:

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Monday, November 23rd, 2009
4:51 pm	I wish I really knew what I was doing at work. VAR models were an easy first step, but I haven't got much farther than that yet. I transformed the data into logarithms of differences. I saw that in a book and I suppose that works to normalize the data. Then I took 30 year long samples from the data and calculated models of those and took the logarithms of the ratios of its matrices rows' and columns' absolute values' sums. I didn't even try to explain that well. What I'm doing just seems so arbitrary and ad hoc to me. If I knew the underlying theory better I could get some results that I could actually explain. Even so, my boss liked what I had already. I'm spending most of my time at work reading various course materials, PDFs and books. At the same time, they're already waiting for results. I was expecting to see my job end by the end of the year but it seems like I'll be continuing after all. I was pretty frustrated with the job some time ago and would have happily quit then, but somehow I'm feeling better about it now. I'm learning new things, even if I have to start with applications, not basics. I'm still feeling that I don't have much traction with all this material. I still have to wade through terms that I only know vaguely. But it's not hopeless either. A few more months of this wouldn't be all that bad. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
9:25 pm	I've got to act as a social scientist this week. They've given me yearly stats on GNP, population and the amounts of students at various levels and have tasked me with finding causalities from those. Maybe even doing some simulations. Of course, I had no idea about how to approach anything like that. I still don't have much to work with, but I got started with a Granger causality test. Initially I couldn't make any sense out of that but that lead me to VAR models, which just means getting a least squares solution for a set of linear equations. That part was easy, even if I still don't know how to interpret that matrix. I guess it means something if the coefficients are larger one way. I'm still trying to figure out what a VARMA model is. Supposedly those describe the data more accurately but their definitions talk about covariance matrices and random variables and I can't quite make sense out of those yet. Nor am I familiar with thinking that starts with a null and an alternative hypothesis. Looks like I'm starting to have something where I can put numbers in and I get some other numbers out. I still don't know anything much about what any of it means. I haven't even heard the word "econometrics" before I started working on this. There must be a real shortage of people in this field if they want me to work on this. I'm hoping that I'll learn something that'll turn out to be useful outside of this job, though I hardly expect to become an expert on any of this. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
12:19 am	I've been leafing through my thesis. I enjoyed working on some parts of it quite a lot and I got a few parts of my own added to it and didn't just copy from the reference materials. But only now I saw that I made a rather bad error in it. I claimed that \Gamma(G) = IR(G) and wrote a proof for it, but it was incorrect. I couldn't think of a graph where \Gamma(G) < IR(G) back then but those do exist. A paper written in 1980 by Cockayne, E.J., Favaron, O., Payan, C. and Thomason, A.G had an example of one. Neither my thesis advisor nor the assistant, who also read it, caught my error. Not that that makes it any better. I've found myself considering continuing my studies. I don't know if a licentiate's degree would serve me any better than my master's, but I miss doing math. I'll have to explore my options there. Asking that friend who finished her doctoral thesis more about what postgraduate studies are like would be a good starting point. I feel pretty uncertain about my chances in that field. I may be able, with much effort, but I wouldn't be great. Nonetheless, I have to try. Assuming that I can get some funding, since postgraduate students won't get unemployment benefits. I went to Slavonic Tractor's concert today. They're good. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
2:22 am	I've grown pretty disillusioned with my job. I'm not qualified for it, not even enough to tell if what they want makes any sense really. It's highly frustrating. If I'm to do something, then I want to devote myself to it, to feel the flow. If I don't even know how to start, then I don't have anything. They put that ice hockey project on ice, for now. Now I'm supposed to work something that's actually got something to do with sociology and education. It'd be heavily based on statistics. I don't have any experience of such coding and nothing I've studied was aimed at anything like that. Presumably it's nothing I couldn't learn, but I can't help but think that they should rather have someone else do it. There's surely something somewhere that would require the skills that I already have. I'd rather have studied what's needed for this thing during some semester, years ago. I can learn and do learn. I can look at some of my more recent code and see that I wouldn't even have understood what it was about, earlier. But I don't even have any starting point with this. I have wondered even before whether I would have been better off, studying applied math, statistics and other subjects like that. I never reached a level where I could have made a meaningful contribution as a postgraduate student or a researcher and didn't really feel that I would have had a ready venue for pursuing that further. I was attending a friend's doctoral thesis defense today. It was a rather melancholic event for me, sitting among professors, lecturers and former fellow students, all slightly older since I've last seen them, talking to each other happily. Watching a defense, sometimes feeling like I could almost understand what they were talking about. I had wanted to be a part of this world, for a long time. Overall, I don't feel like I have much to be happy about, currently. I could use a break. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
7:50 pm	The move went okay. My ISP botched their part of connecting the ADSL to the new apartment and they bumped me back to the back of the subcontractor's queue. They're too cheap to even have their own technicians for that. I've been underwhelmed by their level of service before but I haven't bothered to do anything about it so far. This time, I'd say that they lost a customer. The novelty of having a job has worn off since some time ago. At least I feel that I've switched to a better one with apartments. Somehow it just feels nicer. Now I just need to finish unpacking and moving the furniture where I want it. It wouldn't take that long if I just got to do that. At least I have the new GHC's source code to amuse me at home. I don't need a connection to read a diff. I'm at a friends'. They're playing some annoying rock star game. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
1:01 am	This afternoon I coded yet another statistic and graphed it and was disappointed to see it type check and work on the first try. I always feel robbed of the feeling of accomplisihing something when that happens. This is supposed to be hard. I had plenty of time left so I turned the stat computing routine to a parallel computation. All it took was one using statement. Too easy. I wish I had more time. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 12th, 2009
11:48 pm	I'm running low on ideas about what to do at work. I've spent the last two days largely reading books about statistics, pattern recognition and analysis of spatiotemporal data. A major part of my research seems to be coming up with the correct key words for searching material. I still only have the test data I had when I started. I can do only so much with that. I'm hoping to find some new direction for my work soon enough. I'd rather not spend the rest of my gig staring at PDFs and books, trying to come up with something, anything. I'm no expert at what they hired me to do. I'll be moving this weekend. I hope it'll go smooth enough. I can help it a lot if I pack my stuff well, in time too. Hopefully life will settle down a bit more once that's over and done. I'm wishing that I'll find the time for my own coding projects again. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
6:46 pm	I'm going to move. I just got the key to the new apartment. The new apartment is slightly smaller than my current one but it'll have storage room, which my current one has none. Enough room for all the useless cruft that I have accumulated. Much of it is books that I have never even read. That something is almost free doesn't mean that I have to carry it home. I'm still enjoying the work. I spent the Friday trying to get a handle of radians and sectors. I wish I knew why I am able to code for 8 hours a day now, when I couldn't do it before. Be as it may, it is a certain morale boost to see myself get that done, even if it is someone else's project now. (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
10:03 pm	The work's been fun so far. The work environment is relaxed, coworkers are nice and nobody's told me what to use to implement the project, nor have I asked about that. Not necessarily what they had in mind, but I deliver. I'm better off using something I'm most comfortable with while I'm still trying out various approaches and seeing what works, ripping out as much as I write. I'm telling myself that it's faster to start this way even if they want me to reimplement it with something else later on. If only I wasn't this tired all the time. Hopefully I'll get used to it. I'll have to see just how flexible that book budget I have is. It's not hard to find plenty of books with "pattern matching" in their names. (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
10:12 pm	That was fast. I was offered another perl coding job on Tuesday and then shortly after I was contacted from my old university and they offered a job, too. I had an interview for the latter one today and got hired. I didn't even go to the perl coding job's interview. More specifically, I'll be working for the Research Unit for the Sociology of Education, even if my job description doesn't sound to me like it had that much to do with either sociology or education. Except in some broad sense. Of all things, my problem domain will be ice hockey. I'll be writing software to analyse the game positions. Someone else takes care of the computer vision part and my input data is already just coordinates and vectors. It's going to be rather open ended and a part of my job is to figure out what kinds of information there could be mined out of the raw data, in the first place. It's research. The job lasts until the end of the year, at first. If I have come up with some useful results by then, then the job may continue. I have pretty mixed feelings about this. It's academia. Even after going through it all once, I'm still pretty much in awe of the whole institution, even with its flaws. Even if what I'd be doing would have little to do with what I studied. Saying "mathematical background" sounds rather vacuous on its own. I have no particular experience with this sort of problem domain. I'll be ordering books and searching for information as the first task. Nonetheless, it makes me feel like I'm a fraud. I don't know if I can deliver. I don't care if they said that a null result was ok, since it still matters to me. I'm certain that there are plenty of people around the world who are already familiar with this kind of a thing. Even if there apparently aren't any around my university. I was left feeling that I got this job too easily. Like when they asked me what discrete math is and I mostly just stammered at the question. On the other hand, I would have preferred to have been interviewed by someone who would have known it already. Likewise with graph theory, which was my thesis' topic. I could have thought that anyone working with computers would have at least heard of it. I know that I'm showing a bias at this. I'm the one with the mathematical background, they wouldn't have needed me if they already knew all about that. There's that too that I still would want to bring metaxslt to some sort of a conclusion. But I know that I'm only kidding myself with that one. It doesn't have any acute blockers with it at the moment but progress is still atrociously slow with it. I feel that I should be able to do better, much better. Some of my friends are telling me that getting pressure off that project would help. Both with my well being and with its progress. At least I won't be signing any NDAs this time around. Once again I wonder whether I talk about some things too freely here, considering any career that I may have now or in the future. But I prefer it this way. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, September 4th, 2009
11:02 am	I felt anxious about going to the employment bureau but I didn't need to go further than to the front desk this time. They only asked whether anything had changed and when I said no, they gave the next date in April. The official said that she'd give me some paper but she only peered at her letter box for a few seconds and said that she couldn't find it and sent me off without. I'll find something that works out, eventually. It may even be employment, a work place and a salary. I don't intend to live on benefits indefinitely. I went to that job interview a week ago but I haven't heard anything from those yet. I guess I won't. I've applied for a course about starting a new business via the employment bureau. It may be worth a while, even if I'm still ways off from turning metaxslt into a product. I hate that word. I'm considering giving up on seeking a new apartment. I went to see a few this week but every time there's been ten or more other people there. I should go ask for a discount on my rent for those three months. Even if I didn't get one, it still wouldn't end up costing that much extra since I'd be likely to have to pay rent for two apartments for at least one month, if I moved. I'd stay some of the time with my parents, some with my friends in Turku. I may even end up moving after a job instead, reluctant as I may be. (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
10:37 pm	Some very fine tea, a mild buzzing feeling in my head and coding. I can live with that. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 28th, 2009
11:25 pm	I've been asked, occasionally, about why I participate in the free software community. Some of it is due to a youth spent reading sci-fi. It's not hard to pick up a utopistic undercurrent from that, of possible worlds, of solved problems and of improvement of the human condition. Another factor in it is my love for math, which naturally led to coding. It was not hard to get to know computers, with an older brother who went through that track first. Though I did little but play games with computers for years. Once I got mostly past that, I got into learning to use Linux. I explored all the commands and the file system until I found a collection of text files which were distributed along with Emacs. The GNU philosophy resonated strongly with the ideas I had encountered in sci-fi. Science has the potential to solve any material problems, some day, but here I saw opportunity for something that could be done today. In any utopia that I can think of, all software will be free. I could participate in that, now, not in some deferred future. There's more to what led me where I am today. I'm certainly not waiting for technology to solve everything anymore. GNU may have been an early encounter, but I don't much care about their recent doings. Take GPL, for instance. Version 2 reads like a statement of principles, more than a license. Version 3 is mired with contemporary minutiae. Some battles are better left unfought, as they will be superseded and made moot by the tide of the history. Have faith in the community. I find myself more in the BSD camp nowadays. Our way is better, they just need to find it for themselves. It's all bits, in the end. Such principles aren't exactly making my life easier. I feel that I'm part of the problem, every time I end up coding proprietary software. I'm not too happy about sitting on Piperka's code base either, but I know that opening it up would take more than putting the code online. Not to mention that I'm not confident that the code is secure enough to stand open scrutiny. Don't tell me about the faults of security through obscurity. (Comment on this)
3:05 pm	I had a job interview today. I suppose it was worth a try. At least I have something to say next week, when I need to visit the employment bureau. Seeking the apartment isn't going too well. I've seen 3 already and I expect to see more next week. The one I went to see today was actually rather nice, but I didn't bother applying since 2-3 other people were interested in it too. If I had a source of income, then seeking an apartment would be a breeze. The above two paragraphs may be related, somehow. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
5:08 pm	I spent a week at our cottage. I think I got a part of metaxslt's design to click together while there. Now I'd need to act on that idea. I've been pretty disappointed at myself, lately. I've looked at what I've got done and I see how little it is. I need to confront that again next week, when I need to go to the employment bureau. That pipe renovation has come to this building. I knew it was coming when I moved here but I expected to be paying off the mortgage for some other apartment, by now. Seeking a new apartment is more difficult this time, since nobody would prefer an unemployed tenant. I can't say that I'm too happy right now. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
12:05 pm	I decided to package gearhead2 first. I still haven't filed an ITP but I very much doubt anyone would grab that one before me. I still wish to update the rest of my packages that need it. After that, I'll try to focus on metaxslt again. The next problem I have with it is to come up with a template language for it. I could, in theory, get away with a thin layer over XSLT but I'd like to do better than that and come up with something more expressive. Also, I'd like to avoid having to support full XPath. A combinator library approach like Text.HTML should work, but I can't copy the design outright. There would be three types of output for the language: XSLT as text, a function that returns HTML and a function that seeds the cache with resources. As an input it takes a description of available resources. I expect that the resources' description is static, so that it can know the types of resources beforehand and won't need to parse XML or walk through parse trees dynamically. Resources can have presentations as XML or internal Haskell types. I'd like it all use ByteStrings internally and not Strings. I'd be using Template Haskell for all this. I can't make the template language a monad, since the control flow will need to be known at compile time. I'm still not sure if Control.Applicative could work. I spent some time looking into that, but found nothing conclusive. Applicative needs to work as a container, but I'm not sure what it would hold. Just using () would be pointless. I would be better off with a monoid, then. Monoid may work for some things, but I'll still need more combinators besides that. That's a brain dump and a recap, mostly for myself. Hopefully I'll make better progress than what I did a few months ago, once I really get back to this. I dread that, just a little bit. I shouldn't have anything to prove to myself. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
9:40 pm	I spent the weekend in the middle of nowhere, doing things like grating carrots, setting fire to the sauna and carrying food to the dining hall. Also, I looked rather good in a black robe. I had no intention of going there despite having some local friends actively organizing it right until the last moment. I got drafted, but it was a welcome thing. Look up "Fantasiapidot" on Google Images if you like. It's not a LARP but a fantasy themed gathering, with events like dwarf toss. The poor dummy lost its shirt, an arm and its head, spilling its innards, dried peas, all over. Who knew dwarves were made of that. Lots of kids too. I'm no good with kids but I didn't freak out either when one mom plopped her toddler on my lap while she adjusted her clothing. I got to turn off my computer before going there. That makes it a vacation. I got sick with a flu on Thursday, making the weekend that much harder. I got ordered to go to rest a few times but I didn't come there for that. Nonetheless, I didn't mind the plentiful opportunities to sit in the sauna. Now that I got back home I turned the computer back on and compiled a new kernel and rebooted, like any self respecting Linux user would do. There some mess going on with GHC library rebuilds, with fed up RMs and all sorts of nasty fun. I'm not even looking at that. I'm starting to feel that distributing Haskell libraries as source and compiling them on users' systems would be a better option. I've heard that that's what Python packages in Debian do and I seem to remember that Haskell libraries did that at some point too. Right now, I wouldn't mind if haskell-* disappeared from my developer.php altogether. This weekend was good as an intervention. I guess that I've been taking coding far too seriously lately. I'm not my code and I can't measure my worth in LOC. That sort of thinking is depleting and, ironically, only ensures that I get very little of it done. I'm just afraid that I'll fall into that kind of a pattern all too easily, again. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
10:20 pm	I'm wishing now that I would have gone to Debconf. Nothing prevented me from going but my own timidity. I can see people chat on #debconf the way that only people close to each other do. There would have been a few people whom I consider as friends, there. I didn't see them last year and next year is even more unlikely. At least I got ghc6 off my hands, for the moment. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 20th, 2009
6:02 pm	It's a change. I took that custom mess I had on my hard disk and turned it into something usable. That took me a week or so, what with the distractions I made for myself, playing Gearhead. My cyborg monk has stats over 25, already. Even so, I enjoyed working on something that felt manageable. I've missed going to bed and waking up with a problem in mind. On to package GHC 6.10.4. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
7:53 pm	I had to do some adrenaline-laced coding on Friday. We finally updated Piperka's vserver to run Lenny. I tested the transition on my laptop and got it running there but forgot some steps and had the server give out "403 forbidden" for all pages for half an hour, until I remembered what else I did locally. Then I ran into #366124. I'm slightly confused about why Apache devs wouldn't have set close-on-exec on the file descriptors in the first place, but talked about some apr API thing that sounded to me, at least in this context, like a yet another poor reinvention of unix. This didn't happen with Apache v1.3. Fixed in unstable, but for my uses I just closed any stray file descriptors that I found in /proc/$pid/fd. There may still be various bugs and glitches around. Like that I was told that people couldn't log in. Debian makes new releases too often. I'm still rather tired at working on Debian. Perhaps it would be for the better if I offered all my Haskell library packages up for adoption, to have that team maintain them. ghc6 and haddock are the only ones I'd really need to maintain, if I wanted to take care of the former. I'll request an account on Alioth and learn to use git, eventually. I somehow wishing that I'd concern myself over something that nobody else would care about, again. But I already know that that wouldn't work, either. (1 Comment |Comment on this)