Geek news warning: sane people and anybody for whom such acronyms as PHP or GPL merely evocate some brand new drugs the kids might be into these days: you are probably better off skipping this one.

I’ll try to keep it short.

Spam Karma 2 is now released as GPL v.2. This essentially means you can do anything you want to it, except claim you made it (copyright and attribution notice must remain there). You should also note that any attempt at deriving some ill-deserved profit from it through harebrained web marketing schemes will earn you both my long-standing scorn and a nut-shriveling decrease to your actual karma.

I suppose another angle to that post’s title could be:
Officially discontinuing Spam Karma’s development: so long and thanks for all the fish
as this is what this truly is about.

But, such a title would be slightly misleading (and no doubt heavily quoted out of context): Indeed, I am hereby officially announcing that I will no longer support, maintain or further develop Spam Karma (beside some very occasional, very limited poking, until the transition to a self-maintained project is completed). However, thanks to the magic of free software, all the unsung heroes of the Open Source world will soon rise to take over and bring you a stronger, better, more closely supported version of Spam Karma!

Okay, what’s more likely to happen is that nobody will really bother taking over, except perhaps a handful well-intentioned but utterly clueless beginner coders who will quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the task and next be seen running away screaming at the top of their lungs. Hey, I’m not blaming anybody: I wouldn’t waste my time on a non-paying, open-source community project either…

But on the off-chance that you would (and trust me it won’t do anything to help you get laid either), I have set up a Google Code repository, which could become the jumping point to some magnificent community-based development effort (or not). If you are interested in participating in any way, contact me (mail or contact form) with a *brief* description of who you are, what you can do and what you wanna do. I don’t need a resume (I am not hiring), just a very quick idea of what level of responsibility you’d be willing to take on the project. I’ll put in the first couple people that seem to know what they are doing (and do not sound like they’ll be selling everything to Russian mafia-owned spam sites) as administrators of the project, and hopefully from there on, things will work by themselves…

If you think you’d like to tackle any aspect of SK2 development (including possibly porting it to other platforms), here is your chance. Speak now or go back to more fruitful and life-rewarding endeavours forever.

Oh, and as for the “reasons”, well, here they are:

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One little-known feature of the Japanese Input tools on OS X is the ability to easily access a whole lot of unicode symbols without having to go dig through the Character Palette each and every time. If you enable Japanese Input (also known as Kotoeri) on your mac, hitting a keyboard shortcut (apple-space by default, I think) will toggle kana input on and off, whereby you can type japanese words in kanas and press the spacebar to pick a matching kanji (followed by ‘enter’ to validate the transliteration).
The nifty bit comes from the availability of UTF-8 characters that are not kanji, but nonetheless useful in a lot of situations. Just as any other kanji, typing a kana sequence (usually the name of the symbol in Japanese), followed by a press of the spacebar, will automatically let you insert the desired symbol.
Note: Apparently, most of these work equally well on Windows Japanese Input system, but I haven’t tested it.

For example, any Japanese girl knows all too well how to obtain the following cutesy icons:
おんぷ[onpu]　→　♬♩♪♫
ほし[hoshi]　→　☆★

On a more pragmatic note, you can also choose from a very complete set of arrows:
やじるし[yajirushi]　→　↑↓☝⇔ etc.

And one of my personal favourite: european currency symbols that would otherwise take half an hour to find on a standard US keyboard:
ゆーろ[yuro] →　€
ぽんど[pondo] →　£

Another very cool set for your scientific paper-writing needs:
すうがく[suugaku]／えんざん[enzan]　→　√∃∀≠±∇

Not to mention the entire greek alphabet:
あるふぁ[arufa]　α
べーた[be-ta]　β
がんま[ganma]　γ
でるた[deruta]　δ
しぐま[siguma]　σ

etc. etc.

You will find even more of these in this large (albeit probably not exhaustive) list of special character shortcuts.

Don’t you think?

I mean, the alcohol, the drugs, the neverending nights of feral sex, the uninspired blogging… it gets old, really.

Alright, so maybe not the booze, drugs and sex part. But the blogging part: definitely. I don’t mean the part about writing inane crap that nobody in their right mind should care about, in between two intense navel-staring sessions. I don’t think I’ll get tired of that part any time soon (I’m trying though). I mean, the sterile format that this blog has come to follow.

Oh, trust me, I am very aware of it. Sure, I have many excuses as to why my posting rate has dwindled to the levels of Bangladesh’s strawberry production on a bad monsoon year… Work, life, love (or pursuit thereof), happiness (idem) etc. But we all know there’s more to it. Truth be told, blogging here bores me, most of the time. There are a couple reasons for that, chiefly among them are:

• This blog started out on the wrong foot.
  When I decided to open my first self-hosted online space, it started as a bastard mix of for-friends-only (“hey guys, long time no see”) news reports and travel-journal (“lookee all the whacky things they have here”)… Both rather boring genres in the long run, neither something I really felt like doing much. But I have been pulled toward these roots ever since.

• It is read by all the wrong people.
  Quite expectedly (although I originally never intended it to be), this has become the place where all people who either have invested some DNA into me, or were court-ordered to stay at least a continent away, come to get their life update on Dave. Knowing that both your genitors (hi Mum! hi Dad!), extended family, past love interests (and potentiall future ones) are all reading this, puts a serious cap on any attempt at spontaneity.
• And therefore… I write elsewhere.
  Yes, I know, it hurts, but I have been seeing other people. In other locales, other languages even. Usually with completely different style and contents. Don’t even try to search the web: believe me you won’t find it. Those other writings are all that this isn’t: personal, fun, hyperbolic, unauthentic, uncensored etc.

Then why bother?

Good question. I suppose because this still serves a purpose for some writings, in some contexts. Also because I hate giving up. And closing that blog before I turn 50 would feel like giving up.

But things need to change. Not sure what, but they do.

Still working on details. I technically have about 10 days before the official 5 year anniversary of this blog. Do not expect grand announcement or sudden changes, just be warned.

Sorta.

• Vita
  • Find a home.
  • Get my Gaijin Ausweiß.
  • Resume working out.
• Academia
  • Finish all unfinished uni projects.
  • Get seriously started on my research.
  • Make up my mind on the whole PhD thing.
  • Pick a subject.
  • Pick a country.
  • Pick an advisor (not necessarily in the above order).
• Technica
  • Fix WP Plugin DB.
  • Ditch Wordpress.
  • Drop Spam Karma (see item above: sorry folks, we had a good ride).
  • KanjiBox port for iPod Touch/iPhone.
• Et caetera
  • Sushi.
  • Beer.
  • Music.
  • Art.
  • Et alia caetera.

“By eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised.” [sic, emphasis mine]

… four of them at once join a Facebook group entitled:
“This is not a group because its members do not have an inverse“

In a word?

Experiments.

Allow me to illustrate:

Situation 1. Computer science paper:

“Mmn. These graph mapping simulations are really taking a while to complete, maybe I should get a new laptop.”

Situation 2. Cognitive science paper:

“Yes, hello, I’d like to order a dozen rhesus monkeys with proper wiring and electrode setup. Do you deliver?”

Protein 1: Cytochrome P450-Terp (412 residues)
Protein 2: Cytochrome P450 (Bm-3) (E.C. 1.14.14.1) (457 residues)
Iteration #4: RMSD_c=3.36383

My first α-carbon-based protein alignment!

I’ve got a lump in my throat…

How can xkcd always be so spot-on?

It’s irritating.

Having the opportunity to pick a class slightly outside of my main curriculum, I signed-up for an eight-week pluridisciplinary session on bioinformatics in genetics. I had my first lecture on Friday.

What I’ve learned so far:

1. This particular area of bioinfo (applying advanced AI algorithms to genetic research) is absolutely fascinating. With its mixing of cutting-edge results in biology, mathematics, physics and AI, it’s tough not being sucked in by the way they all combine into truly sci-fiesque results.
2. About 3 month away from graduating into a field I have planned to pursue my researches in, I am suddenly starting to wonder about a switch in research paths. Yes: yet another existential academic crisis. Just what I needed now.
3. During the introductory part on gene decoding patterns, when asked about information entropy in gene sequences, the lecturer: “Oh, it varies a lot between life forms. Viruses, for instance, have an extremely high entropy: lots of genes are coded using both directions of the helix”.
4. What this means in layman’s term: viruses’ use compression in their genetic code… Yes, your flu virus may come in its own zip archive, just like your e-mail viruses!
5. “Viruses are amazing things”, she concluded with an earnest look of admiration on her face (maniacal laughter did not follow, however).
6. Yes, there is something ever so slightly chilling about hearing a respected biotech researcher uttering such phrases.
7. I think I want to go into bioinformatics.
8. Viruses are, like, totally cool.

My not-so-great hosting company having unilaterally decided to move the cluster my account resides on. This website, and all other websites on my account, as well as email and everything else, will be out of reach for about 8 hours starting at 10pm PST.

This sucks, unfortunately there isn’t much I can do (not like DH bothered offering any temporary hosting elsewhere: just a very helpful “going down tonight, deal with it” announcement).

Back in 24 hours.

You know those “time-capsules” you buried in your backyard as a kid? The ones you unearthed the following week, upon realizing it was your favourite GI Joe’s action figure you put in that box (and cynical, anti-imperialist, you-of-twenty-years-from-then would probably discard it with a sneer, anyway)…

Well, I got my time-capsule back two weeks ago. Seventy kilos of it, to be exact. It wasn’t buried in my parents garden (I’m pretty sure my mum wouldn’t had let me dig a hole that size), but sitting in a storage facility for the past 15 years, whence I was kindly asked to come pick it up for good, last month.

Half is stuff that I should have binned, long before I even embarked on my current regime of bi-yearly intercontinental moves. The other half, I probably cared for, but decided wouldn’t fit in with the furniture of a decrepit London warehouse. At any rate, I have already started working my way through, slimming it down to a box and half, which, according to current life principles, will also have to go to before next Spring (OK, maybe I’ll keep some of the books).

But before I complete my last round of recycling/discarding, I felt I could document some of those memorabilia, if not for their historical value, at least for the sake of providing a few laughs at the expense of the hopelessly dorky 11-year old I was. Yes, I know this might come as a bit of a shock to you, dear reader, but I wasn’t always this shiny beacon of elegance and hipster good-taste that I have matured into over the years. To tell the truth, only one thing comes to mind when contemplating some of the evidence: how the hell didn’t I get beaten up more often as a kid?

Sure, I could just play it cute and show you all those wacky serious adult books I read back then and marvel with mock-disapproval at little young prodigy Dave’s precocious readings (yes, I read all those Nietzsche’s books when I was 12, no I didn’t understand half of it, but it sure pissed the hell out of my grandmother and that was good enough for me)…

But when I say dorky, trust me I mean it. And it is with no secret pride whatsoever that I present you with:

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So you have decided to learn Japanese? Perhaps you have even signed up for this year’s JLPT and parted with their robber baron’s fees in some foolish hope that it will motivate you for the month-and-a-half revision time that is left until then (oh wait, that’s me. never mind).

Now, there are many ways you could go about harvesting the Web’s boundless resources to help you in that quest.

You could for example do aerobics while watching awkward multicultural multilingual 80’s lesbian action:

…

Or you could sign into your Facebook account and add my latest online realization.

Kanji Box will fulfill your most secret kanji fantasies: it does absolutely everything, short of showing up for the test for you (gory details here). To top it all, it will let you compete against your friends: nothing like a bit of competition to get you worked up on the kanji skills (cue uplifting karate training montage).

[for all Facebook-haters out there: I feel you. I am not myself overly smitten with the concept. But I must admit Facebook sucks marginally less than its competitors, and its 3rd party API took most of the drag out of developing Kanji Box' multi-user features... so do not expect a standalone version too soon, sorry]

Because Big in Japan is so 1995, I am proud to announce that I am now also officially Big in Estonia. Secondary to my being featured in this month’s issue of arvutimaailm, a computer magazine so big in Estonia, it doesn’t even bother putting its content on the internets.

The article is signed by Elver Loho and features, as far as I can tell, some collected ramblings of mine on miscellaneous items of computer security and spam, as well as a scarily huge photograph, that must by now adorn the wall of every single Russian mafia hitman east of the Volga. My command of Estonian being unfortunately very low, I can only assume the article bears no reference to my habit of drinking a bowl of fresh kitten blood every night before sleep. I will try and post the PDF here, but need to make sure it’s ok first (and also get the final version, as I only have a working layout).

Which reminds me there’s been lately a couple articles, newspaper columns and books bearing mention of my name and/or one of my miscellaneous ongoing evil plans. Unfortunately, I have been pretty bad at collecting clippings for my mom’s trophy wall and haven’t really kept count, but I still wanted to recommend Maria Langer’s book, since she was so kind as to send me a personal copy (long, very long ago now… sorry Maria…).

I have only one ambition in life.

Well… Two ambitions, but the other one is more of a long-term goal. For now, I just want to become the first search result on Google for my given name. This in itself being a crucial step in my larger world-domination’s plot, since we all know Google controls the world already.

As it is, I already have pole position for my old ‘dr Dave‘ moniker. But, and you read it here first, I am hereby setting in motion the switch in online identity from ‘dr Dave’ to just plain ‘Dave’.

No, I wasn’t sued by the American Board of Medicine, or any equivalent local institution. Beside, that Honorary Ph.D. in Curse Removal and Sexual Healing from Kinshasa’s University of Black Magic is all but legit.

However, crazy as the idea may sound (I have a hard time believing it myself), I might one day not too long from now be a bona fide doctorate student: it is likely that my honorary ‘Doctor’ title would by then confuse many people (not that it hasn’t already) which was never the intent. Hence the shift to unambiguous, simple, likable ‘Dave’. I’m guessing there are only a couple millions of us out there, someone has to be the one.

So, how are we doing on the Google front? Well, guess what: not so fucking bad!

Six, if you count them, six people (or things) are standing in the way to intercontinental online stardom.

Of course, I could rely on the quality of my content, my shining bright personality and ever-increasing public appreciation to slowly climb to first place. But I know better.

Instead, I have devised an infallible 6 Steps Program that shall shortly take me there, whence I will finally be able to rest and contemplate the world at my feet, laugh and move on from that Internet fad once and for all.

Please allow me to develop. Note that for obvious reasons, I cannot allow my now mortal enemies any extra link publicity and you will therefore have to Google their websites for yourself. Do it while you still can:

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