Below are the 14 most recent journal entries recorded in jhorey's LiveJournal:

Thursday, February 10th, 2005
5:32 pm	Evolution of the Human Soul The title of this entry is from Vienna Teng's song "Soon Love Soon". The song is more or less about the struggle of humanity and how one day, we might be "one people". It's an absolutely beautiful song, as all of Vienna's music tends to be. Hearing it live at the house concert a few months ago only made me have more admiration for this singer. I sincerely hope that she will continue to succeed as a singer. However this entry is not about her music, although I suggest everybody go to her website right now, download some of her songs, and then buy her albums. This entry is about whether we, the human species, are conscious enough to be able to fufill Vienna's dream of becoming one people. I chose the word "conscious" because I believe it is a matter of consciousness, not necessarily willingness or capability. Wars occur all the time and at all scales. From one individual fighting another individual to countries fighting other countries. We are even so imaginative to think that one day far in the future, if we are lucky enough, we might even have wars involving planets against other planets. Just think how exciting it will be when humans can come together and blow the damn Cardassians out of space! Why is this the case? Why must humans insist on fighting each other? Now at this point, some intellectual snob will think to themself, "well I am above such things. I do not resort myself to such base behaviors." Perhaps then it is a cultural issue? Children that are raised in violent societies (perhaps the United States) will grow up to be more violent. Other children that grow up pacifist societies (perhaps Belgium or Sweden) will grow up to be pacifist and abhor violence. I do not believe that this is the cause. All human societies at one point in time have engaged in some form of war. Even in the most pacifist societies, there exists laws against exteme violence. Laws only exist because someone in that society may attempt to perform that action. If no one ever murders anybody in Belgium, then they have absolutely no need for a law that says no one should murder anybody else. Obviously this is not a bullet-proof argument. For space reasons however, let's move on. So why do people fight if not cultural? I argue that it is instinctive. We are genetically programmed to be exist in large social groups. Once a person joins such a group, the person instinctively believes that the safety of the group is as important, if not more important than the individual. This makes sense evolutionarily. If my family+friends all die and I'm left alone, then I'm pretty much screwed. Some other group will come by and steal all my resources. As importantly, humans tend to form hierarchies within groups. A group of humans left alone will most likely choose some sort of leader. Even now in the great democratic age, a random group of people that are left to solve a task will most likely choose a strong leader (I point to the show "The Apprentice" for some evidence). Of course humans compete with each other as individuals within a group. I try to show my friends and family that I am strong and desirable, and hopefully pass my genes to the prettiest lady I can find. When confronted with other groups of humans, we defend our group and our resources so that once again the individuals have some chance of passing on their genes. So far my description fits wolves as well as chimps and humans. But we are *obviously* more intelligent than chimps and wolves. We are evolved. So what evidence do we have that we are more evolved (whatever that may mean). Well we've built great cities and created technologies that allows more of our species to exist and propogate. Individuals live longer now than ever before. In developed countries, nearly everybody lives a higher standard of life than the great emperors of only a few centuries before. The greatest evidence of our intelligence however is something that many intellectuals make fun of. This great evidence is God. To make these intellectuals feel more comfortable, perhaps I can rephrase that as: This great evidence is the concept of God. Why God? Well God and angels and demons and everything else associated with most major religions contains idealizations of most people's reality. In reality, I do not look perfect and I most certainly do not live forever. However, I can imagine that there exists some creatures that are more perfect than me. Angels are beautiful, live forever, and of course are conscious (just like me). Angels are idealizations. I claim that only very intelligent creatures can create such idealizations. My cat doesn't think to herself, "I bet there exists beautiful, perfect cats that live forever and eat the most amazing cat food..." She is bounded by her intelligence. I suspect that she only responds to the current moment, and most likely doesn't think too much about her impending death. These idealizations speak tomes about our intelligence as a species. We humans can imagine what it might be to *not be human*. This is quite amazing if you think about it. The ability to imagine our species as being something more than what we are now is what inspired Vienna's song. She can imagine a world where people don't fight each other like chimps. Really what she is hoping for is an idealization much like imagining humans may one day go to heaven. Now at this point, some people will get mad at me. They will say, "heaven and God and such depend on unrealistic things, while peace on earth *can* happen if we humans get our act together". Unfortunately, these people have very little evidence for this. Historically humans groups have always fought with each other. Human groups have exterminated other human groups without the influence of Europe and such. Due to the lack of evidence, it seems to me that peace-on-earth is an idealization. They are attempting to make heaven more real by placing it on earth. So we are conscious enough to imagine what we are not. The big question then is: Are we humans conscious enough to become what we are not? It's the next logical step. If I could imagine a more conscious creature (say Q from Star Trek), I suspect that it is more conscious than me by virtue that if it can imagine being something, it knows how to become that thing and eventually become that thing. Can humans accomplish this? How must humans change so that we have peace on earth? Or become angels? The answer is not as simple as one might think. Just saying that well humans just need to be less violent isn't enough. If we had a potion that made us less violent, there may be ramifications that we as humans aren't prepared to deal with. Look around you and ask what are the simple things that you value. At this point saying something like peace-on-earth doesn't count. It's too abstract. What are the simple things? Family? Friends? Sports? Ever heard the line, "for God, Country, and Family?" How would these things be affected by whatever changes humans need to make to accomplish our idealizations? I do not claim that I know the answers to these things. I do claim however the problem is much more difficult than one initially suspects. I suspect that *if* humans are willing to artificially evolve, it will require more sacrifices than anyone thinks. In the end, we may have peace-on-earth and realize that we are no longer human. Perhaps the price of being human is to deal with the fact that humans have wars. (Comment on this)
4:34 pm	Alison's Poor Finger Most mornings, I wake up having a reasonable expectation of the events that will occur that day. I get up, take a shower, get ready for school, and plan out what I actually want to accomplish at school. For instance, this morning I thought that I would work on Patrick's programming assignment a bit, read a few papers for tomorrow's seminar, and maybe work on some research. Overall a normal, slightly boring day. Well... today turned out to be special. As Alison and I were about to leave for school, she fell and broke her right middle finger. I won't mention the details of the events that caused her to trip since she might get angry at me, but I will say that it looked quite spectacular. For several minutes I couldn't stop laughing, but once it was obvious that Alison hurt herself pretty bad, I was forced to stop. After examining her finger, we decided that it was broken. So instead of driving to school, we drove to the emergency room. Alison informed me that she had never been to an emergency room. I could it in her eyes; she was having visions of the show ER... lots of blood, screaming, and angry people. She started getting nervous and almost started crying. I had to reassure her that her finger did not warrant any life threatening surgeries and that everything would be alright. I'm not quite sure whether my words had any soothing effects. Once we got to the emergency room, it was obvious that it wasn't anything like the TV show. Of course we were there at 9:30 in the morning, so perhaps people don't start shooting themselves until the sun goes down. From this point on, it was pretty boring. Alison got her finger x-rayed and the doctor informed her that her finger was fractured. She would have to wear a splint for several weeks. So we left the hospital after about two hours (most of the time was spent sitting and staring at crying children). Later that day, I had to drive Alison to see a finger specialist at the ER doctor's request. The specialist informed Alison that the break was worse than initially suspected and that her finger was broken in two places. Apparently Alison narrowly missed having to go through surgery. I also learned that my insurance has a $250 premium that we'll have to pay. So now here I am trying to figure out what I can salvage from the rest of the day. At this point it doesn't seem I can salvage much. I have some time (obviously), but all the motivation is gone. What a weird day. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 9th, 2005
2:01 pm	Google Maps I'd say that this is the fourth major Google improvement*. Of course the first improvement was search. Can any of us remember a time before Google search? More importantly, of those that can (ahem), does anybody want to remember what searching was like? Even if you don't use Google search, both Yahoo and MSN Search has benefited from the competition. The second major improvement was WebMail. I remember getting a hotmail account about 10 years ago and thinking how great it was. Since that time there was no substantial improvement in web-based email until GMail. All of a sudden I can search my web email efficiently and never have to worry about receiving an attachment that would push me over the max storage limit. Again, users of Yahoo and MSN email services have benefited from the competition with more storage space. Recently Google released scholar.google.com. Computer Scientists have benefited from the cool-ness of CiteSeer for some time now, and now the rest of the research community can enjoy similar benefits. Scholar has become a regular tool I use along with CiteSeer even though it's been out only for a few months. Finally a few days ago, I've learned of Google Maps (maps.google.com). Using Maps taught me how crappy the other online map tools I used were (Yahoo Maps and MapQuest). For instance, the actual map graphics look so much better than anything on Yahoo or MapQuest. I can even drag maps around seamlessly with reloading the page. The little balloon marks on the map provide useful information using Google Local (another cool tool). Overall I am very impressed and am left wondering what other improvement Google will make to existing web applications in the future. * There are other cool things that Google has done, such as the Calculator, Google Local, Google Images, Google Suggest, etc, but they are more like appendages to the current Google system. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
11:33 am	Blogs and Research It's been a long time since my last blog. This makes me feel kinda bad as I don't want to be one of those people that have a blog just to say they have a blog. Then what the hell do I want a blog for? Well first it seems like a nice exercise in writing. I rarely do non-scientific writing these days, and I feel as though unless I practice writing things like this, I might lose the skill forever. Second, I need some way of recording various things in my life that can't readily be captured by still pictures. Finally, I need a distraction from my research once in a while. That brings us to today's topic... Research and blogging are mutually exclusive things. If a blog a lot then that probably means I'm not doing a lot of research. If I'm doing research I just don't have the time or inclination to blog. In fact, the only reason I'm blogging now is because my network simulations take *forever* to run. Otherwise, I may not have posted another entry for another couple months, since I have several conference deadlines that I'd like to make. Another thing that is mutually exclusive to research are programming projects. For instance, I played around with the idea of a search framework for KDE, but alas my research got in the way and I lost interest and time. It's still a good idea, but I think I'll have to leave it to people that actually regularly program on KDE... So I leave this entry with the following thoughts: first, if you know a friend that is supposed to be doing research, but instead blogs too often or programs silly things too often, well I bet he/she isn't doing too much research... second, people that think they are the only ones doing research and that everybody should worship them for it are annoying as hell. Current Mood: annoyed (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 19th, 2004
12:34 am	A new laptop So I bought a new laptop. It's a Gateway 4520GZ and I'm beginning to like it more and more. Before I bought it though, I went to Best Buy and tried to play with Knoppix. The guy at Best Buy was pretty nice about it and seemed fairly interested in Linux. Good for him. The only thing that didn't work perfectly was the sound, which although seemed to play didn't emit any sounds. Overall a good positive experience. So I bought the thing about two weeks ago and I finally got it. The first thing I noticed was how small it was. Only 5.5 lbs and and 1.1" thick. It's mostly black with a gray lid. It won't win any style awards, but at the same time it's a nice relief from the gaudy Dell's floating around the world. I found the keyboard to be nice and snappy as well. Another nice surprise. Anyway, after making reducing Windows to live on a ten gig partition, I started playing with Linux. Being lazy I installed Knoppix. The sound worked after I pushed a button called "turn off external amp", and after a little fiddling, the pcmcia and the builtin centrino began working. Overall I didn't do too much to get this things working. The touchpad worked after installing Synaptics, the DRI worked without doing anything. In fact, I feel almost cheated that I didn't do enough to get this laptop working with Linux :) (Comment on this)
Friday, August 13th, 2004
5:26 pm	Finding a good backend For some reason the subject title seems really bad and conjures up some unpleasant pictures. Besides that I really am having a hard time trying to figure out a backend for my search engine. So far I've been using MySQL. This is for no other reason other than I get to use MySQLCC to easily view results and edit tables. However, I get the impression that MySQL is definitely the wrong way to go with this project. I'm thinking something lighter and faster would be preferable. So what are the options? - PostGresql - Ok, this one is a little more *free* than MySQL. Big whoop. Still big and slow. - SQLite - Seems better. Quite small and quite fast. No network transparency, but hey, am I using that feature anyway? The big question is whether it scales well or not. - Lucene - The more I read, the more I like. Gnome's Beagle project is using a port of Lucene to C#. Unfortunately I'd have to use C# or Java... But then again, it is fast, small, and does relevance all by itself. So it seems SQLite is just the easiest one to use that's sane. I wish I knew more about Lucene though before I blow it off. Perhaps it could be do both. Use SQLite for most of the work and then use Lucene only for full text searching (text, pdfs, office docs, etc). (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 6th, 2004
2:17 pm	Bad Dreams and Appointments I want to write about two things today. First about bad dreams. I think ever since the whale incident, I've had a phobia of drowning. I had a nightmare last night where I was kayaking near a medium sized sailboat. The sailboat was capsized and many people were in the water. They proceeded to upturn the boat and after several minutes succeeded. (This is a dream so no one can tell me that five people can't turn over a good sized sailboat). Afterwards, I paddled closer to them to see how they were doing. All of a sudden they capsized again, except this time I was on the side of the boat that hit the water. All of a sudden I'm under the boat in the water. I try to get the skirt off, but can't manage to. The boat is slowly sinking and pushing me and the kayak down. I have this hopeless feeling that I'm about to drown. I woke up from this dream sweating and breathing pretty heavy. It was probably one of the scariest dreams I've ever had. Anyway, I may not kayak for a while... Now on to bad appointments. I had an appointment to see a doctor at UNM to refill some prescription medicine. My appointment was for 3:30 and I ended up waiting for an hour an a half to see someone. It wasn't just me, there was a line of people angry that they were being forced to wait. I'm not sure I can blame the doctors. I blame the programs and secretaries that set up the appointment. If it so happens that appointments always go over an hour late, why don't they just fucking tell you?! (Comment on this)
Friday, July 30th, 2004
1:15 pm	The case of the resetting DVD drive So I started my computer up this morning and everything seemed fine. Then Alison handed a CD for me to look at. I inserted it into my Pioneer DVD drive and mounted the cd. All of a sudden my computer just reset itself. Thinking that this was some sort of weird fluke, I tried again... and again. Then I thought, perhaps the DVD drive is set to a weird mode. So I started playing with hdparm and adjusting various settings. Over and over again, nothing I did fixed the problem. Perhaps it was the Linux drivers for this drive? Nope, I noticed that the DVD drive resetted the computer randomly even on the GRUB boot screen! Ok, so it's not Linux... So I start playing around with the BIOS settings and still nothing. I check the power cable and still nothing. At this point, I was pretty sure the drive was messed up. Randomly I decide to replace the IDE cables. Now my computer hasn't restarted even though I've been accessing the DVD drive regularly for over an hour. So perhaps it was the IDE cables. This is really stupid considering I've replaced the IDE cables on this computer once before (for the Master; this time it was the Slave). What the hell is wrong with my computer?! Why does it keep burning the IDE cables?! Lesson learned: IDE cables suck. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 27th, 2004
3:56 pm	Riding a Humpback Day 2 of the kayaking trip in Prince William Sound. We were paddling near Glacier Island. It was surprisingly hot and I had forgotten my suntan lotion.It's pretty early in the morning (around 10:00 I think) and overall I feel pretty grumpy that we've just paddled several miles. All of a sudden Alison yells out "whale!". She points about in front of us to the left. Josh (our kayaking guide) and I look ahead about a quarter mile and we see humpbacks coming up for air and dive again. Overall I was impressed. We sat there maybe for ten minutes watching two whales surface and dive. After about ten minutes both whales just disappeared. Josh thought the whales were still there since neither had taken a deep dive. So we waited and waited for about ten minutes. Eventually I got bored and stared off into the water to my right. All of a sudden I see this huge gray mass coming from the water below the boat. Before I knew it Alison and I were three feet in the air and screaming. Before I fully realized what had happened the boat was capsized and I was underwater. I remember specifically staring up at my kayak skirt and I thinking, "If I don't pull this skirt I'm going to drown. Pull the damn skirt off". By the time I got out Alison was already floating in the water. Our guide, Josh, was as terrified as we were. For a few seconds he seemed to be a bit spaced out. He kept muttering "Oh my God, I can't believe this". Anyway, eventually he came through and a few minutes the boat was turned right-side up and Alison and I were paddling for the beach. Everybody that we subsequently met couldn't believe that we are actually tipped by a whale. How often does this happen to first time kayakers? Overall a fairly pleasant memory considering I only lost my rubber boots. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 7th, 2004
12:09 pm	More Searching Instead of adding indexing capabilities to an existing file system (usually done in userspace), why not do the opposite? For example, MySQL and other relational databases already provide strong indexing, searching, and sorting capabilities. So why not use MySQL has as the underlying system and provide a filesystem abstraction on top of it? Perhaps in my ignorance, this idea seems simple. Even if file insert/deletes are slower, how good will be the speed be compared to a traditional filesystem + userspace indexing? The only real concern I would have would be traversing the pseudo-filesystem, but if all you did was use the searching instead of traditional traversing, would this be a problem? Finally, perhaps it would be possible to abstract userspace programs to take advantage of whatever filesystem you provided. So for example, if you are simply using ext3 or reiserfs, the userspace programs would automatically index the files for you. Otherwise, it would skip the indexing completely. Oh as a sidenote, I realized that Gnome's Storage project also has a nice NL translator. It would be nice if both KDE and Gnome could use the same NL translator. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
5:34 pm	Exposé and Couvert I just read an interview with some guy that implemented Virtual Desktops for OS X (http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000300.html), and he mentioned an interesting idea called "Couvert". He or the interviewer, I forget which, described things called window wells". It seems fairly similar to virtual desktops, but with the added benefit of 1) various windows would be updated in realtime (like in Exposé) 2) you wouldn't have to entirely switch to a new desktop to access certain open windows 3) you can dynamically create new window wells and place programs in them So basically, I think of this as virtual desktops with some handy and flexible features. It would go along well with Exposé so that whenever you exposéd your windows, it would divide them into logical desktop groups. Selecting one window would just maximize that window in your current desktop. It would even be possible to have several taskbars (one for each window well) until KDE got Exposé like functionality (although that would be clunky to say the least). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 3rd, 2004
5:24 pm	Things I want for KDE4 This shouldn't be too hard... 1) I think someone is trying to replace the Control Center with a more functional one. For everybody sake, please do this. The current control center gets slammed more than any other KDE program for good reason. 2) How about some D-Bus integration so that KDE can begin to use tools like HAL? It's about damned time that KDE gets a nice Volume Manager... 3) Whatever the hell happened to KPDF and KMyFirewall? I remember getting excited and then realizing how uncool these programs were. KPDF has lots of rendering issues and I just didn't have fun setting up KMyFirewall. Since MS is finally getting on top of the firewall bandwagon, perhaps KDE should get a *very easy* to use firewall setup tool too? How hard would it be to create a firewall tool that warns users when a program is accessing the network? 4) Gnome, WinXP, and OSX all have nice transparent rectangles when you select things with your mouse in the file manager. I want one too! (Ok this request is fairly shallow, but what the hell). 5) These things are from the Gnome camp. When you try to rename a file, it really does make sense that only the name and NOT the file extension is selected. Also, I like the little ovals behind the names of files on the desktop. As far as I understand this is not even possible with KDE right now. While I am listing things I'd like to see in KDE, I might as well talk about stuff I want in general... For instance, is it really necessary that OO.org take 10 seconds to load?! There are some files that I have that take forever to load and save. I realize that OO.org version 2.0 will fix a lot of these problems, so hopefully soon I won't have more to complain about. Then there is fdo's xserver. I see pretty pictures but when will users see the benefits? When will KWin take advantage of those X extensions? All I want are real drop shadows and maybe some Exposé like functionality. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
5:04 pm	Desktop Indexing and KDE4 So it seems these days that everybody is interested in search. Of course the idea of indexing and searching isn't new, but it seems that people (or at least companies) are finally beginning to realize their importance (or marketability). So now we have MS's WinFS, Apple's Spotlight, and Gnome's Storage. So what about KDE? Gnome's Storage at the moment, seems well... to be a Gnome technology. Plus, I'm not sure if it's even possible to separate the Storage program from the actually indexing engine. I think it would make more sense to have a indexing server (possibly DCOP or D-Bus) that applications can then query. That way, it may be possible to replace the indexing server in the future or add some sort of plugin technology without affecting the apps. Plugins would just be other DCOP/D-Bus servers so that user can dynamically add/remove indexing schemes. For instance, there could be a "google" plugin that was a simple wrapper for google.com. Other plugins could consist of mp3 indexers, image indexers, etc. The indexing server (and associated plugins) should be able to use dnotify or FAM to determine if a particular directory should be re-indexed. Of course the user should be able to configure the server so that only the directories he's interested in would be re-indexed. It would be even nicer if the indexing servers would only update their indexes during low computational and low I/O periods so as to not distract the users. Anyway, most of these thoughts probably aren't original, since I just read some nice articles on this: http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~abreschm/designs/ubiquitous_searching/index.html http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~abreschm/designs/file_selector/index.html Perhaps if I'm ambitious, I will try implementing these things. Of course this won't be easy for a while with the wedding, research, and school... (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 26th, 2004
3:45 pm	Migration of blogs I have a real blog now, and I will begin by migrating some messages here from my old website. (Comment on this)