Today I cycled to some places I don’t usually go to, and I managed to take some nice pictures. The weather was good and my bicycle was willing, so I managed to climb the mountain and make it down to the beach in time for sunset. Great day for cycling! Here are the pictures:
Pic of my bicycle near the mountain
Back at the seaside for sunset
Sailboat in front of the coast
And finally, here’s a pic of the tower.
For the past week I have been completely immersed in progamming. It’s a great feeling to start development on something from scratch, and to see it grow into a beautiful work of art. Every day, every hour, every minute there is something to add or to improve. The end results is getting better and better and you can still clearly see the improvements every day, quite unlike software that has been under development for months or for years. What could be better than designing a huge-scale program all by yourself, given full freedom to do whatever you like and a code library that you made yourself? I can think of no better job than that, and that is absolutely what I want to keep on doing in the future. Ah, these are my best programming years, when the ideas still spring to mind freely and the body writes code almost automatically without having to conciously think about it. Later, when I will be filthy rich and manager of some super-huge multinational company I will have forgotten this skill…
Half unrelated note: the wiki page of the game of life is a great starting point for a wiki quest on recurring patterns and randomness in nature. Check it out 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_creativity
http://www.see.org/e-ms-dex.htm
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve
And here’s something terrible from the wiki page on koans that made me laugh:
“If you have ice cream I will give you some.
If you have no ice cream I will take it away from you.”
(It is an ice cream kōan.) <– T_T
Tonight I was randomly wandering around online when I bumped into something quite peculiar: Piet. It’s a programming language named after Piet Mondriaan, the Dutch abstract art-ist. In this programming language, a program is actually an image where each color determines what to do. The color decided where the instruction pointer will go next, what to do with the stack and what to output to the user. It doesn’t serve much of a purpose, but it’s one of the most interesting esoteric programming languages I’ve encountered. One program in particular made me smile, which I can link here as a bitmap.
Besides being a picture of a circle, this is also a Piet program that calculates the number pi. The best part is: if you increase the image size, the approximation of pi becomes more accurate. Brilliant!
</geek>
This is probably useful for anyone in the Tokyo/Kanagawa area: I found a huge train line chart online that shows all/most of the lines in Tokyo and Kanagawa. Normally no single chart shows all lines because they are owned by different companies, and it’s even harder to find a good map in English, so I’m quite happy with this one. It’s fan-made so it’s not 100% reliable, but from what I can tell everything in there is absoutely correct. So useful!
http://www.mukiryoku.com/Tokyo_suburban.jpg
Today I was supposed to go look for a new apartment, but I went to bed late last night and woke up at 1PM. Then I somehow got caught up in reading Wikipedia’s articles about trains, which lead to me finding aforementioned chart. After that I found out that Microsoft Train Simulator actually includes the Odakyu line which I have to take to get to Tokyo, so I installed that and gave it a try. Driving trains is easy, except when you’re on a tight schedule, and in Japan every second counts. Literally. Leave one second too late and you’ll be too late at the next stop.
MS TrainSim’s graphics seriously suck, though, and it’s quite difficult to recognize any station on the Odakyu line except Shinjuku. I looked around a bit for better trainsims but it seems difficult to.. ‘acquire’ in a fast and internetty kind of way, so I gave up. I did find a great flash applet that takes a quite different approach to train simulation. Take a look at it here. Why bother to design a 3d world if you can just take a movie of the actual train driving the route, right? Can’t be more detailed than that 
As the title says, I love them. Especially when it comes to stuff I am interested in, like photography. I found this program called ExposurePlot, which analyses all your pictures’ EXIF info and graphs properties like focal length, aperture and shutter times in very clear charts, that show you exactly how much you use each setting. Here’s a picture of my stats:
Click to enlarge. This picture shows how many times I used each focal length, aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I usually shoot in P or Av mode, so the shutter speed is mostly determined by the camera. Cool stuff!
(thanks to sister’s nagging I finally updated the photography page with my new stuff )
