Out of my hat

And hence stress levels: almost down.

Have the abstract book/programme in hand; small typo in the schedule, which is annoying but hardly a problem. Sent the “dedication” flyer to Print Services today. Time was that I could spend three days straight doing desktop publishing and not feel it, but maybe I’m getting old. Or maybe I’m selectively editing out the card-game and Scrabble breaks I took during my editorial days. Silly party favours have arrived. Still some question about who’s picking up the not-paid-for-by-the-University beverages tomorrow for the reception, but for the most part my role is done as far as organizational duties go.

I was playing around with some new ideas earlier this week; that’s usually a sign that my research brain is swinging from asleep to awake and hollering. In this case, it was prompted by my having to proctor tests without any other diversion than a pen and a pad of paper. Anyhow, in my musings I came up with sort of a neat construction. Specifically, I figured out that every simple graph can be found as an induced subgraph of some Kneser graph.

What that means for those of you who don’t do this stuff for a living: I work with graphs, which are configurations of dots and lines. That’s not much of a definition, and so it admits quite a lot; any random, irregular collection of dots, with pairs either connected by a line or not, qualifies as a graph. An induced subgraph is what you get when you take a graph and only concentrate on a part of it: some collection of dots, and any lines only involving those dots. And a Kneser graph is a highly regular, symmetrical sort of structure.

And hence: any graph, any configuration of dots and lines – no matter how arbitrary it looks, no matter how irregular – can always be seen as a small part of something ordered and balanced. Contrariwise, highly structured configurations can, when looked at closely enough, be made up of the strangest things.

And I thought that was kind of cool.

This appeared in my mailbox tonight: not spam, so much as the template for spam.

Subject: Never-seen {SPUR_2} Take pleasure from

Dear user.

{SPUR_1} 

{SPUR_3}

 {SPUR_4}

 Find what you need: {SPUR_DOMAIN} 

 Come on in and get it all very cheap!

There’s a lot about mass commercial e-mail that strikes me as essentially pointless – the mangling of language to get e-mails past spam filters, for instance, to the point of illegibility – but a spammer who can’t even be bothered configuring their mass mailer? I’m almost prepared to believe at this point that the computers are doing this themselves, and that this is some AI’s cry for help.

I am drunk on the power of networked library systems. While they won’t quite deliver books to my door, the results are generally close enough.

So remember how last month I posted about iTunes 7? This post was presumably sucked in by a search-engine spider (as all blog posts ultimately are), and was thus found by a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The reporter in question was apparently researching for a story on buying movies from the iTunes Store, and wanted to know more about the problem I mentioned in the last bullet-point of my post. So she interviewed me, and has apparently cited me in the piece. (I don’t subscribe to the WSJ, so I can’t really say for sure that this is the case.)

So there’s a lesson worth remembering: the Internet forgets nothing and forgives nothing. If you write something on the web, eventually someone on the web will read it. That thing might get you interviewed, or it might get you fired.

(Secondary lesson: rig up some site stats that record search strings from referers. I’m kind of curious exactly how the reporter found the Nutshell now.)

What today was supposed to be: Get up, drive to Chicago, hang out with Moebius Stripper and some of her friends, see a play, and generalyl have fun.

What today was: Get up, feel like crap, cancel on MS, and spend the rest of the day fighting off headaches and mild dizziness.

Wouldn’t it be great if hypotheticals were actual more often?

Orange guesting at Bitch Ph.D has posted a day’s worth of her grateful journal. I’m something of a cynic about such things (which, it could be argued, leads to something of a vicious cycle), but let’s try it.

1. My furnace works much better on my first attempt with it than did the A/C at the rental house. It was down into single-digit °C last night and will be again tonight, so that’s pretty significant.
2. No classes on Wednesday. While I generally don’t end up accomplishing everything that I might wish to, I appreciate the opportunity mid-week to collect thoughts and write math.
3. Speaking of opportunities to think, giving tests in class also qualifies, and it’s test week for all of my classes. Being stuck in a room for seventy-five minutes with nothing but a blank pad of paper to amuse oneself is great for brainstorming.
4. Friends, no matter how far away. It sometimes amazes me a little bit that I have so many, and that they’re all so great.
5. The dude at the campus coffee-shop, charging me the regular coffee price for my au lait rather than the nearly-double list price. Yeah, it’s petty, but when the milk’s already been steamed the price difference is a little unreasonable. It’s a small attack on pointless irrationality, but every bit helps.

That’s all for me; now I get to go and price out make-shift deli buffets. Later.

At this point, I’m willing to say that version 7.1 might be pretty cool. At present, though, I’ve got some issues. My impressions

• As I mentioned in my horrified first impression, cosmetically iTunes has been re-arranged to more closely resemble the interface for Mail. Since the original iTunes interface was then used as the inspiration in later OS revisions, I’m guessing that 10.5 (I can’t be bothered to look up the big-cat codename du jour) will have a lot more apps that look like this, and that will make me slightly sad. More specifically, the navigation strip on the left has been cleaned up a bit to separate major elements (library, playlists, devices, etc.) from each other; this make some sense to me.
• One kind of nice feature is that the “Podcasts” item in the library now has an indicator for how many ‘casts haven’t been listened to yet. Though it does drive home how very far behind I am on CBC Radio 3 podcasts (warning: sound on linked page).
• The “browse” button has been moved from next to the search box to the bottom of the window; it’s been replaced by the “view” button-bar. Your choice of views are: the standard list; the “group by album” with album art thumbnails; and the “cover browser”, which is supposed to emulate flipping through a rack of CDs or something, I guess. Seems silly, but for some reason it’s one of the big points that they’re pushing. The latter two views are much more useful if you set your preferences to group compilations together while browsing.
• Oh, album art: another big innovation is that you can tell iTunes to go searching for album art for tracks in your library that lack it. This isn’t as cool as you might think; my main difficulty with it is that it seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition, in that if you ask it to do such a search, it does so for your entire library, rather than just selected songs. (Or, for that matter, just songs that lack it; I’m reasonably sure that a couple of my album-art pix got clobbered because iTunes/Apple couldn’t figure out what the album in question was.) Also, there’s no facility to tell iTunes that it’s barking up the wrong tree, or (in some cases) just plain barking. I’d like it if there were an option to approve of found artwork before having it attached to the library.
• The Music Store now rates its own menu. Seems reasonable.
• “Gapless playback”, where you can tell iTunes not to cross-fade between tracks on a live album, is a good idea. A quick test on Nighthawks at the Diner indicates it works pretty well, too.
• The Help pages all have a “did this help? e-mail us!” link at the bottom, which is pretty neat. On the down-side, the “what’s new with iTunes” only gives a list of selected new features, rather than all of the major changes. The help pages also seem incomplete.
• I guess the really big news in this edition is the iTunes Movie Store. Movies seem to run for 10 USD; a 100-minute movie takes up 1.2 GB or so, but alas! I don’t know what that means in terms of resolution. Instead of previews you get trailers, which is a good idea; the trailer-delivery system seems buggy, at least at a casual glance, and that’s not so good.

Overall: while a lot of the changes are fairly unimpressive, it’s still iTunes, and it does what it needs to do. And (thanks to the magic of the Cocoa framework, no doubt) programs that interact with iTunes seem blithely unaffected by the changes, which is a plus.

Dude. iTunes version 7 is ugly. I don’t know whether they’re standardizing with the (ugly) Mail interface, or if this is a hint of horrors to come in the next version of the OS, but I really preferred how it was.

More substantial commentary to follow, after my music library’s been updated to conform to the new version.

Dr. Matt’s Law: Crossing the border always takes much longer than you anticipate, even if you take Dr. Matt’s Law into account.