Archive for the 'Psychology' Category

I’m always impressed by the power of visual representations. They seem to be much more natural and intuitive than formal representations. The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license is probably one of the best examples out there how one can harness this kind of power the most efficiently:

Of couse everything that is powerful in our universe can be well-used and abused also. Marketing exemplifies the best how one can selfishly abuse visual power by notoriously emphasizing the benefits of his/her products or services while neglecting their disadvantages or putting them in the footnote written with the smallest font size that nobody can really read without a microscope.

From now on I will consciously strive to make my blog more visual by including related images in my posts.

I'm very interested in Myers-Briggs typology. These are the best related sites I found:

• http://www.keirsey.com
• http://www.personalitypage.com
• http://www.personalitytype.com
• http://www.typelogic.com

If you wanna know what's your type, I recommend you the free Jung Typology Test which everyone seem to use. If you don't have half an hour or so, a shorter version of it is just for you.

One of my best friends has just pointed out to a very good online self help book. It has got some interesting topics and statistics in it.

StrongDC++ Rulez

Are you using DC++? It's time to upgrade to StrongDC++. It's full of usable features. The GUI is much more intuitive, supports segmented downloading, and has many more cool features.

It's a shame that there isn't exists a quality DC client for Linux. Some would say Valknut is good enough. In my expericence, it's far from the truth.

It was a long time to blog. I hadn't really much time for it. Well, to be honest the situation is the same this time too, but I wanna write a few words because of informational purpouses and for fun also.

GCC Finished

I've finished the GCC job. There would be other things to do, more specifically generalizing some aspects of the algorithm, but I've done the basic task and I hadn't really much time to go on. What was it exactly? I've implemented the special hoisting case described in the Proceedings of the GCC Developers' Summit paper, page 81, Figure 2 at the Tree SSA level. It's good to try different kinds of jobs because it makes me realize what kinds of works fit me best personally. GCC has some ugly aspects and I generally didn't enjoy this work much. That's for several reasons, namely 1) I don't really like C, it's too low level for me. Of course in case of compiling, speed really matters so one has no choice, 2) GCC is full of macro definitions which need to be used extensively throughout the code. My main problems with these is that I cannot tell the signature of a macro call. I don't know what types I need to give and what type is returned so it's like a chaos for me. One can tell their signature at some degree because macro names are well-chosen, but the exact signature is a hard stuff to find out.

On the other hand it was a good lesson to get to know the internals of GCC. I hadn't ever thought of how many intermediate internal representations and transformations are there which make up the whole process of compiling. GCC is probably one of the largest and most complex free software project in the history.

Multiuser rdesktop

Windows XP has a feature called Remote Desktop which makes you able to remotely administrate your WinXP box (suprise!). The evil aspect of this thing is that you are only allowed to run one user session at a time. Yeah, that means if you wanna log in, you must kick out another user who was already logged in at that time. It's a bad, bad thing. Microsoft states you need to use Windows 2000 or 2003 to be able to use one Windows by more users. Thanks God, one have not to spend any money to do that, since some clever folks out there had figured out some ways to tweak this thing. You may check it out yourself too. Search with google on "windows xp concurrent sessions termsrv.dll".

Insecurity

I've found an extremely helpful site on insecurity. I'm talking about psychology, not computer security. You might wanna check it out along with all the related materials on this site.

Sometimes I feel that I live in a strange kind of world. Today I had two such moments.

When I arrived to Szeged to the flat I ate some food and went down to the school. As I stepped out of the building I noticed our neighbour. She is a middle-aged woman. She seems quite sick to me because of her looks. Her voice also sounds pathetic and the way she breaths. It's maybe asthma, I'm not sure. In the moment she went out, she took a cigarette and began smoking. I noticed her red painted nails too. I was thinking about this scene for a while. She's sick, that's apparent to me, yet she doesn't care with her health, she damages herself with this toxin. She even has time to paint his fingers which doesn't make her look any nicer, maybe only in her reality. She can also think that this is the expectation of our culture. Hell knows.

The other time was when I was sitting in the English class an hour ago. There was this girl. She always makes me laugh with her very colorful, crazy clothes. It's hard to me to describe the way she looks but imagine a childish girl in all kinds of very vivid wearings. Orange, Green, Pink, whatever. I almost cracked up in smiling when I saw her star-shaped earrings. Their diameter could be around 5 centimeters and 1 cm thick. They were semi-trasparent. She could even built in them some kind of light source or some radioactive fluid which would make them even more funky.

WordPress

WordPress almost made me mad this time also. I couldn't login because I didn't change that unmemorizable password that I've given during the registration process I suppose, so I almost reinstalled the whole thing. Fortunately I successfully found the cure for my problem just in time.

I've browsed through every interesting Stubleupon groups that exists which is a looong job. There are probably several hundreads of them. Yeah, I'm surely a maniac. So let's see the interesting stuff I found here:

• EBay is a complete freakshow.
• The Best Page in the Universe is truly an original site which I found from The Real Men Club. It's a power house of arrogant humor.
• Swearing is popular. This group has some nifty threads. The Urban Dictionary is also a useful resource. Likewise the The Alternative Dictionaries where I found some expressions in my native language I didn't know about. Am I maybe some kind of a dork?
• Some really nice fractals.

And now comes the part I almost couldn't believe: the Personality Group page.

I've done a Jung Typology Test which is a personality test. It basically puts you into one category out of sixteen. At first it sounds kinda lame like some horoscope stuff you may think. I turned out to be an INTJ which stands for Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging. More specifically by the test I am 22% introverted, 33% intuitive, 44% thinking and 33% judging. You can find the INTJ personality analysis writings here, here and here. It's so damn exciting because it's all me. These descriptions are so deep, insightful and true. This way I can understand myself better. Interesting stuff.

But it's already 04:16 and I should really get some sleep so good night everyone.

There are several types of people in the Free Software Community. One significiant type is the minimalistic geek. The minimalistic geek is... minimalistic. You can easily recoginize him. He lives in a strange kind of world. His universe complies to certain minor rules that he deems to important. Several examples:

"My home page needs to be written in a way that anyone could see it using lynx." Actually one can browse his homepage in lynx, but the HTML is so messed up that with IE, it is not browsable. He doesn't care. Everyone should use a non-IE browser. Well, I neither love MS or its products but 90% of the world still use it. And his homepage is exposed to them (it is not a technical site).

Or here is another one: "C# and Java is evil. I'd use C for everything. It's fast unlike those languages." I argued that C# is garbage collected and he can serialize an obect instantly without writing any code. I want to be more productive so I won't use such lower level tools. He told me that it's not such a big business writing some serialization code for every class, it really isn't. I asked him why should I waste my time writing any bits of code if it's not essentially required. But C# and Java are extremely slow and resource hungry he answered. Well, computers getting faster and VMs getting more optimized every day so why should I suffer using ancient tools? Maybe because my software should run on his Pentium 200.

Summarizing in a few words, these folks live in the past when computing resources were very scarce. They are intimitated by new tools/languages/whatever, especially if those are resource hungry. Most of these people will never make any big things happen because they are so attached to their limiting attitude.

Plone

Plone. This thing is *too* easy to use. Seriously, I installed it in some minutes and I haven't slept enough yesterday so it's hard to me to concentrate. I've already installed Zope some months ago, but that was pretty easy too. When it comes to archiving a Plone site, you can export your folder into a .zexp file and that's it. Damn, I almost couldn't believe how simple it is.

Cool Mono Applications

Two artices about cool Mono applications:

• Seven Cool Mono Apps
• Twenty Third Party Gnome Apps you Can't Live Without

Real Life

Eszter (my sister) and me were running to Szelid be honest we were walking most of the time, but who cares? We had a good time. By the way did you know that running decreases the probability of depression three times. I read that some time ago.