To keep things fresh I have nuked all old content (1999–2003). It seemed to be handy for hotlinking by various random Web forums and not much else.

One has recently reached the dreaded blog cringe: the moment in the life of every Web journaller [sic] when either he stops posting due to ‘real life’, or realises that perhaps past posts were too unpolished (i.e. crap) to ever have been put online.

As we all know, blogs are due to die a slow and painful death. Syndication allows you to subscribe to thousands of your favourite sites and to be informed whenever they have new content, without ever going to the sites again. This is pretty nifty, but as they say “where is the love?”. I’d conjecture that in fact the love is not there.

The author of a popular RSS-less site tells me it is nice that people have to actually visit the site to see if there is anything new.

Blogs that indulge the author’s need to write about news and current events without discussing his or her personal life will be the first to go. Yes, this means that most LiveJournals are safe for the time being, as people often have a need to transfer their emo feelings to a diary and LJ is simply another medium for that. Thanks, LiveJournal (thiveJournal).

Eventually, the blog cringe will end those ones as well, as more and more people take their blogs offline to stop family members or prospective employers reading them and finding out their secret desires and crazy revenge fantasies.

Indeed I started this journal to give myself an opportunity to write, because neither my study nor my job really required any real writing to be done. That has now changed due to this being my honours year, and thus there is much thesis (and other) writing to do and not quite enough time to do it.

A few people have asked me about honours and some of the questions are answered here, so some of this may be informative so anyone looking to follow the increasingly-seldom-beaten track to an honours year in CS or IT.

So how did you get into honours anyway?

This is a good question. I’m something of a reformed slacker and getting into an honours program generally requires some kind of sustained academic performance. However, IT at UQ only requires you to have an average grade of 4.5 across the final year project (CSSE3004) plus your four most recent ‘third year’ courses. I kicked all kinds of arse in third year so that allowed me to get in. Basically, as long as you got at least 4s and 5s across those five courses, you can get in—it’s as easy as that. Nonetheless there are still very few takers.

What’s your thesis on?

Video similarity search: using video to search for video, as opposed to using text to search for video. Just as one can gauge the similarity of two text documents, by counting the common words for instance, so too can one compare two videos using some measure, from a simple concept like colour or texture to a more abstract one like places or faces. I’m aiming to build a simple video similarity search engine predominantly using techniques that already exist.

Is that a one person project?

Yes; it started with two, but the other guy seems to have cracked the shits with honours after just six weeks and didn’t return to uni after the mid-semester break. I haven’t heard from him since.

Was that a pain?

You bet. It wasn’t a show-stopping problem, but it did scale back the scope of the project to (in my opinion) little more than a glorified assignment with the time I am able to dedicate to it.

Not to give the guy a hard time, I wish him well. But if you are thinking about doing a shared project, choose somebody who you are positive is focused on honours and hasn’t got huge work burdens competing for his time. Ideally this will be somebody you knew and worked well with in previous years.

Would you recommend it?

I’ll just say “know why you are doing it”. I’m doing honours partly to set myself apart from the crowd, and partly to set right my appalling academic record from when I was fresh out of school and didn’t really want to be there. That’s probably good advice for school leavers actually—if you aren’t positive you want to go to uni or are not sure what kind of career you want, it’s better to leave it for a couple of years and go travelling or something, rather than to plunge into it anyway. It’s always important to start with the end in mind. Of course some people do honours as a gateway to a PhD or an academic career, which is not altogether bad if the university atmosphere agrees with you and you’d like to keep working there. At this point, I’d rather get pushed in front of a train.

See you in another six months.

Love,

King Smo

If Chinese New Year is on January 29, then logically Chinese Christmas falls on January 22. So, my sincerest season’s greetings to all.

Yes, this is my half-arsed way of acknowledging that my site (or at least its predecessor insom.cx) is, or at least was at some time, banned in the People’s Republic of China, recalling the much-superior Communist Party makeover of Kewn’s World that I can’t seem to find the URL of anymore.

Well may I snicker now, but I have no desire to visit China yet. Someday I might, though, and the idea that I’ve said stuff on my humble Web abode that would get me thrown in the slammer with a guy named Wang is cause for concern. There is a site with more information on Internet filtering in China, including a lot more examples of blocked sites.

Having upgraded WordPress, I thought I got rid of Bugs. This post is really just to test a theory that I have—that applying the patch I just downloaded, then posting an article, will fix the RSS problem. Currently, RSS is returning a blank document, which is not good.

So… what’s in the news today?

• Kylie’s cancerous can
• Schapelle Corby and the suspiciously benevolent random Gold Coast businessman
• I have a new iBook
• My favourite (probably) tooth got broken in half by an errant squash racquet. Goggles you would think of as typical squash safety wear, but dude, get a mouthguard if you play this game.
• I think there’s some sort of a row in the gov’t about how a woman was detained for awhile because she wouldn’t give her real name and no one knew who she was

Okay, that’s enough random shit. Hope this works.

Edit: success!

insom.com is back. Please insert liquor.

WordPress 1.5.1 fixes the problems I was having with permalinks—such as the link above this article that says “insom.com — Large and in charge”—as well as the monthly links. They all now work as they should. The other stuff was working anyways and is as such unaffected.

So if your site was shafted by WP 1.5.0, upgrade post haste, and feel the love. Also, enjoy the default Kubrick theme, as I accidentally deleted Old Red in the upgrade.

Now, an introduction to the things that are occupying my time currently, when I’m not posting here:

• COMP3401: Compilers and Interpreters.
• CSSE4004: Distributed Computing.
• INFS3101: Ontology and the Semantic Web. Did you know that a brute fact counts as an institutional fact in a context?
• CSSE3004: Introduction to not committing to a software project that hasn’t been fully planned, scoped, and costed, and the resulting documents signed by all parties, lest the whole thing become a big money hole. I swear that’s its title.
• Incidentally, working on a software project part time. Behold, as this unplanned, ever-expanding money hole sucks time and money like some kind of productivity Hoover.

Stay tuned for partial excitement!!!

The new WordPress 1.5 is out, featuring more bells and whistles than the Mardi Gras. WordPress is maturing as a web journalling tool and starting to sneak in some content management system-y features as well.

So read up on that if you are interested.

Point is, I have upgraded to 1.5 and the monthly archives and permalinks are suddenly not working, and will not work until either:

• the bug is fixed by the WordPress people, or
• it turns out that it is my fault, and I fix it.

So if you are looking for monthly archives or permalinks, sit tight. If, however, you are simply waiting for me to update this journal, then this counts as an update.

Peace.

People often ask me, “Lachlan, why don’t you update your site more often?”

Well okay, to be honest no one asks me that. Nonetheless, to silence those people I have changed 2 letters, in the name of this site, so that they can’t tell me I haven’t updated the site.

And so it is that my humble site changes from insom.cx to insom.com. Same site, same look and feel, same exact content for months at a time.

I would like to thank the people of Christmas Island for their support over the years. The old domain will continue working until it expires about this time next year.

In other news, Turtlebox are performing again! I always wanted to see them, but they disappeared off the face of the earth before I really became old enough to go to concerts. Now, many years later it seems they have a reunion gig, at Ric’s on Monday 21st June. If the weather is clement and I’ve kept up with my study commitments, I’ll be all over that like flies on shit.

Turtlebox rule.

Now, bugger off and don’t come back until semester is over. Muhahahaha.

“Fear is the path to the west side“

So, funny story, I’m upgrading WordPress, and whilst backing up the previous version, I accidentally issue the following command:

mv index*.php

Meaning, move indexsomething.php to someplace, without specifying where that place is. Which, of course, overwrote index.php with index-geo.php.

Leaving me without a backup copy of the file that controls this site’s layout. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the new James look and feel for a few days!

Happy new year!

Today marks the first anniversary of this web journal. In one short year, this site has:

• Been a runner up for a Webby award in the category of Least Updated Site, with a special commendation for Out of Date Photographs
• Frustrated hundreds of people using Google to search for things that they would not ultimately find on my site
• Served as a medium for me to improve my writing skills, at the expense of its readers, if any.

The passing of 2003 also marks the departure of Kewn’s site. Bigger than the UN, the US Government and Microsoft put together, the homepage of Lachlan Kuhn was the single most important entity in existence, regularly receiving visits from the Almighty himself, gaining favour within the highest ranks of the IOC for Tingalpa 2008’s nearly-successful bid, and reluctantly spawning a grassroots promotion campaign whose catchphrase “Come to Kewn!” has become ubiquitous in every language.

Taking its place in the links section is Juan Closque’s site, which includes the very cl(_(_)y Snippets series, and what appears to be a word-for-word duplicate of his live journal. How handy.

So, the upgrade is complete.

WordPress is the successor to b2, with more features and a slightly better management interface. One notable new feature is that it converts typed quotes into “6” and “9” quotes, and facilitates the proper use of “em” and “en” dashes, instead of having to use the hyphen for everything like a caveman. Thus, web journals can now approach the typographical correctness of a Word document.

Mortified, I quickly corrected all of the incorrect dashes in my journal so far, and swore an oath never to abuse the dash again, on penalty of torture.

The latest post to the b2 web site mentioned that there was a new security update for b2, for those people too chicken to upgrade to WordPress.

I had a chuckle at this, because I had never even seen WordPress mentioned on the b2 site before.

However, I’ve decided to make the great leap into the 21st century, and I’ll be making the new script look and feel like my old site again over the course of the evening.

Now this is my kind of online test.

Well, a couple of hours after having put it online, James has wasted no time telling me my site sucks. His site has also gone the b2 route, but with few if any modifications. This of course means that folks can leave comments and even post articles.

Comments are cool. I am looking into enabling comments here, and maybe articles, but I don’t want some random posting a big stream of obscenities on my site. Only my friends can do that. So I’ll figure out how to make this happen.

If YOU have something to say — drop me an email. This site conforms to XHTML 1.1, so it should not make your browser cough and splutter if it is up to date.

This is the first post hopefully of many.

People often tell me that they visited my site often, waiting for it to be updated in some way. This is the update that you have been waiting for, and that I have been putting off so diligently. It represents about two months of very sporadic toil. The monumental paradigm shift required for this site to become something I could update often, was worth it because I am giving something back to people who still bother coming here.

This site will not be a “livejournal”. Not to belittle folks that use those, but I personally do other things with my feelings and personal minutiae. Sometimes I write them down. Good ole–fashioned pen and paper is marvellous for that sort of thing. So you won’t find any of that here. It would no doubt be boring anyway.

Having said that, it will be a place for my thoughts, ideas and rants. Kryz has proved that this format works very well. More recently, James and Squik have been having a stab at it as well. I hope to evolve something unique and worth reading here, for folks I know, and perhaps for the folks I don’t.