Change of address

I moved out of my old flat yesterday, and into a new flat on Kelburn Parade. The new flat is quite a bit bigger (7 bedrooms rather than 3), though the bedrooms are smaller. It is of course much closer to the university. The flat is being run by TSCF, with people from VUWCU and ICF living there.

We do not have a phone currently, and I will not be online as much as usual as we do not have a proper Internet connection yet. For now I have a USB wifi adapter in middle of a parabolic wire mesh dish sitting propped in the window at a certain angle connected to my laptop to connect to the VUW network, then a cable between my desktop and laptop with my laptop routing so I can connect from my desktop. I then connect to SWANS with OpenVPN over that. This all results in a very flaky and unreliable connection.

We are planning to have a flat-warming on 2008-03-01, so keep that day free if you are my friend and live in Wellington.

Interesting post about geek communication

I recently came across this blog post summarising a talk by Michael Schwern at BarCampBlock about communication among geeks and between geeks and others. I recommend it to all, geek or otherwise, as it makes some interesting points about how geeks tend to communicate. One point I found interesting was about ‘tact filters’:

Most non-geeks have outbound tact filters: they filter what they want to say and add polite noise as it passes through. Geeks have inbound tact filters: they take bare communication with no politeness and just wrap it in assumed politeness as they interpret it.

When non-geeks talk, geeks think the polite sounds they make are redundant.

When geeks talk, non-geeks just think they’re being incredibly rude.

Do you think that this is true, and had you already realised it? What do you think of the rest of the article?

A tree

This morning, at around 9:50 am, I was walking from the fruit and vegetable market to church (as I do almost every Sunday), when a woman came up to me with a small tree in a green plastic pot with gold-coloured foil around it.
“Would you like a free tree?” she asked.
I replied that I did not really have anywhere to put it, but she gave it to me anyway, putting it into the bag in which I was carrying 3 carrots and 6 eggs which I had just bought. She said something about going away somewhere, it being a bonzai of some sort, and that she was sure that I would take good care of it, then returned to her car and drove off, leaving me with the tree. I continued my walk to church, with one bag rather more full than it had been. A few minutes later, I removed the foil.

An interesting occurence

Some weeks ago, I was walking up Northland Road on a nice sunny day, minding my own business, when all of a sudden there was a loud BANG comparable to a gunshot. I looked at the road in the direction of the sound, and saw a cyclist riding carefully to a halt, with his front tyre completely separate from the front wheel. It was rather surprising.

Student Leadership Conference

I spent the last week (Monday 12th November — Sunday 18th November) at SLC, the Student Leadership Conference run each summer by New Zealand’s Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship. It was a great opportunity to take some time out both to study the bible and to consider the application of it to life in general and on campus. We had a mixture of talks and discussions in various groups.

A large part of this year’s SLC was focused around the book of Nehemiah, an old-testament leader who led the Israelites in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after their return from exile in Babylon.

One thing that particularly stood out to me from the conference was the connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

There can be a tendency to think of God as described in the Old Testament as judgmental and legalistic, while the God of the New Testament shows grace, love and forgiveness. This is not really true, however. God’s character remains constant: in the Old Testament as in the new he shows his grace time and time again.

Much of the OT, in fact, is about a cycle of Israel rebelling against God (often worshiping idols instead), God sending prophets to warn them, the prophets being largely ignored, and Israel finally losing God’s blessing and being conquered by their enemies (and often taken into exile and slavery). God then hears the prayers of the few remaining righteous, and grants grace to his people while they are still in rebellion. He then gathers them back to their land and himself, and they repent and turn back to him. They are then blessed and celebrate God’s blessing and provision. After a time, the cycle repeats.

The point here is that God restores his people undeservedly. While they are still in rebellion against him he sends leaders such as Nehemiah to bring them back to him, and blesses them generously.

This pattern is then fulfilled ultimately in Jesus, who is not so much a change in God’s actions towards his people but a final and perfect way of bringing them back to him. Jesus is not just a man like the earlier saviours and kings of Israel (although he is also a man), and does not turn away from and rebel against God as even Israel’s greatest king — Solomon — eventually did. Instead, Jesus lived a life in perfect obedience and service to God. He then once more went further than his predecessors in choosing to die to take the punishment deserved by everyone but him.

While I guess I knew all this already in a way, I certainly thought more about it and gained a better understanding.

On a less serious note, yomcat also got and then later lost a mullet. He looks rather unhappy, especially in the second photo.

Andy Shudall has also blogged about SLC, in case you want to read more.

Working at Innaworks

This summer I will be working at Innaworks, through the CreativeHQ Summer of Code. Innaworks develop tools to help people to create games and other applications for cellphones, in particular ‘mBooster’ which automatically optimises Java programs to make them smaller and faster, and ‘alcheMo’ which automatically converts Java programs to run on BREW phones (which I am told are popular in the US). I will be working on a researching and prototyping a new part far one of their products. Unfortunately I am not allowed to say what exactly I am working on, but it certainly sounds like it will be interesting and challenging work.

I will be continuing a coincidental tradition of Interface presidents working for Innaworks: both Donald Gordon and Chris Andreae have been Interface presidents in the last few years (Donald is also the King of Interface) and now work at Innaworks. I am the current president of Interface.

I start on Monday 19th November.

‘Liquid rescale’ algorithm for content-aware image resizing

I recently came across (on this blog, through Planet KDE) this rather impressive video, which demonstrates a dynamic image resizing algorithm invented by a couple of researchers at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel. It allows images to be rescaled without losing important details (e.g. people) by first removing unimportant parts (e.g. grass in the background), according to an ‘energy’ function. The algorithm is apparently fairly simple, but does give some quite striking results. It also allows to seamlessly remove unwanted parts of an image (e.g. a power pole obstructing a view), by giving it a negative ‘energy’ so that that part will be removed first when the image is shrunk, and then (if wanted) enlarging the image again. I highly recommend watching the video to see how it works, as it is rather difficult to explain otherwise.

There are already a number of free implementations: a standalone Java program with a similar interface to that demonstrated in the video (which is rather slow, but still fun to try), and a GIMP plugin.

Gateway between Google Talk, SIP and others

I recently came across GTalk-to-VoIP, which is a free gateway allowing voice and IM communication between Google Talk, all SIP services, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and the PSTN. For example, I can use it to call Google Talk users from my SIPphone account, and Google Talk users can use it to call me or (for a reasonable price) phone numbers on the public telephone network. It also has lots of other features, and there is plenty of information on the site. I recommend having a look if you have any interest in voice communication.

Christian perspectives on alcohol

Last night, I went to All Saints Hataitai’s ‘to drink or not to drink — Christian perspectives on alcohol’ debate. I saw it mentioned on a couple of blogs (here and here), so decided to go and see what they had to say.

Personally, I do not drink alcohol, but that is mostly because I do not see the point — why acquire a taste for something that is expensive, when there are plenty of nicer and cheaper things to drink?

Anyway, it was interesting hearing two different perspectives, even if they did both come to pretty much the same conclusion (having a couple of drinks is fine, getting drunk is not). A couple of scripture mentioned were Romans 14 and John 2:1-12.

Ben Johnson-Frow (who does not drink) talked about how he used to drink excessively in his teens before he became a Christian, and so he decided to stop completely when he became a Christian, as he would otherwise be temped to drink too much. He also talked about the New Zealand culture of drinking to excess and binge-drinking, and that not drinking at all was partly a way of protesting against that.

Sam Harvey (who brought a bottle of beer up with him to drink while listening to Ben talk) talked about how excessive drinking has never been an issue for him, and he finds it useful to relate to people. He has written a bit about the topic on his blog.

For more discussion, I highly recommend Paul Windsor’s blog post from last year, including the comments. He asks “What is one single redeeming feature of alcohol consumption?”, and some interesting discussion ensues.

This debate was apparently part of a series All Saints are running on the first Sunday of every month, ‘wrestling with some of the big issues of life and seeing what God might have to say about them’. Next month (Sunday 7th October, 6:00 pm) is ‘Truth, Love, Tolerance’, which sounds interesting. I plan to go if I have time, and I recommend it.

A brief review of SIP clients

Here I give a brief comparison of a number of SIP clients I have tried. All will run under GNU/Linux; some also run under other operating systems.

Ekiga is a GTK based client, previously known as GnomeMeeting. As well as SIP, it supports H.323, the protocol used by Microsoft NetMeeting. It has an addressbook (which apparently integrates with Evolution), but no contact list (i.e. presence information) as such. The addressbook can also search in LDAP directories. It can login to multiple SIP accounts at once, with one set as the default. As well as voice calls, it also supports video and text, though the text chat is not terrible nice (it does not pop up if someone messages you — you have to open the chat window yourself).

Twinkle is a Qt3 based client. It only supports SIP. Like Ekiga, it can login to multiple accounts at once, but it handles this slightly better in that it allows to select which account to use when making a call, rather than having to change the default like Ekiga. It can look up SIP addresses in the KDE address book, but does not provide any way to edit or add contacts. It does not have a contact list with presence information, though the latest version (1.1, not yet in Debian testing) does have this. It takes up a significant part of the main window with a log of what has happened. This would be better relegated to the status bar and a separate window. The DTMF keypad is in a separate window, which can be opened by a toolbar button. Personally, I would prefer this to be in the main window, though perhaps hidable. It does not appear to support video or text chat; apparently the latest version does support text chat. It seems to have quite sophisticated options for call redirection. It also has two ‘lines’, to allow you to put one call on hold to take or make another. It also apparently allows you to join two calls together, to host a 3-way conference call.