Ben Murrell

November 14th was a bit of an outlier as far as traffic goes. And that’s a huge understatement. I usually get between 200 and 300 visitors a month according to the stats from StatPress. On November 14th, it’s reporting that I had 120 visitors and 1200 page views. I have no idea where the traffic came from or where it went. I haven’t gone digging yet, but I’m hoping it isn’t the result of some exploit due to my not being up to date on Wordpress patches

Just a quick update on my life today. I just moved into a new apartment (my first actually!) down on the Plaza. It’s pretty sweet, and a lot less noisy than at my parents’ house where there are almost always at least three TV’s within earshot. My TV doesn’t even have cable. Actually all it has is an Xbox360 hooked up to it. I’m working on getting XBMC or Boxee up and running, but I haven’t decided which I like more / am going to stick with yet.

Anyways, it’s pretty sweet living here, because:

• I’ve always loved the Plaza – I even wanted my mom to bring me here during the same snow storm that Derrick Thomas died in in 2000
• It’s not Lee’s Summit – Lee’s Summit’s a great place to grow up, but the demographics are really skewed towards really old (50+) and really young (18-). Also, it’s really far from everything else in KC.
• I’m 10 minutes closer to work, but still comfortably far enough away to not feel like my job is my life
• I no longer have to drive 30 minutes to get home after a night out with my friends (or crash couches… haha)
• I wake up every morning and look out the window to the Giralda tower replica & flash back to Sevilla… which is nice now that it’s all cold weather!

I’ll post up some pictures when I finish getting unpacked. I still have a couple of boxes laying around that I need to take care of.

Besides that, life is life. I’m pretty surprised my car hasn’t died yet… one of the tires keeps losing air, but not quickly enough to worry about it. It’s funny how something always went wrong with it when I had no money, and now I have a job and no car problems.

In my last post, I promised to give the details of how I’m going about learning French. I’m studying independently, alone.

When I decided I wanted to learn French, I thought a bit about what the biggest hangups were for myself and for other people in my classes in school. In my mind, it boiled down to a few things:

• Unwillingness to learn the language – A lot of people in the classes were there because they had to be.
• Unwillingness to use the language – A lot of people were reluctant to speak the language. This was probably a combination of being embarrassed about not being able to speak properly and factor #1.

The preceding two factors probably apply to learning anything, be it math or chemistry or anything else – if you don’t have an attitude of wanting to accomplish something, then you’re not going to accomplish it. The next factor is more language learning specific:

• Spelling over speaking – After five years in Spanish classes, there were still people that were mispronouncing the “ll”, “j”, and “ñ”. People that couldn’t properly emphasize syllables with accents. I think this was because of the way the language was taught to us – my class was one of the first to be taught via the TPRS method. In theory, the TPRS method should have avoided this issue… but in school, teachers are all too eager to give out busy work style worksheets to give students something to do outside of class. As a result, pronunciation was being poisoned by seeing the words and trying to read them without having internalized the word already.

Going into learning French, I wanted to avoid these hangups. The first factor I already knew there wouldn’t be an issue with – I’m in it to learn it for myself. I knew that the second factor would be an issue – perhaps not out of unwillingness but just because of a lack of an environment to use the language where I live. I’ve resolved that issue by immersing myself in French material even when I’m not actively learning. To help with the third factor, I’ve chosen my learning methods carefully to focus on pronunciation and speaking over writing and reading.

Learning Methods:

• Pimsleur’s Audio Courses – Since I made pronunciation my number one priority in learning French, I decided that an audio course would be best to start off with. Pimsleur’s involves no reading of the words – there is a reading booklet, but I haven’t been doing the reading exercises yet. Occasionally in the beginning, the speaker would mention silent letters at the end of words and how they trail into words that start with vowels. This isn’t something I’ve considered consciously after the first week – I just do it. And I have no idea how to spell most of the words I’m saying. I think that Pimsleur has been working really well for me.
• Rosetta Stone – I had Rosetta Stone available to me, so I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t think it’s nearly as useful as Pimsleur – it doesn’t have me speaking and practicing as much. It has certainly boosted my vocabulary, but I’m not sure how much I would be retaining if it weren’t so similar to Spanish. The biggest advantage to Rosetta Stone I think is the writing portion – it does force me to consider the spelling of words. Also, there is no English at all in Rosetta Stone’s teaching method. This means they’re not explaining things like difference between le and la… they just keep penalizing you until you get it right. It also means they can only really teach you things that you can convey in a picture or series of pictures. In Pimsleur, they’ll cut in and say things like, “The French consider it more polite to ask ‘Would you like to …’ rather than ‘Do you want to …’ and for this, you would use the form of the word, ‘voudriez’ rather than ‘voulez’.” I’m half way through Rosetta Stone French I and nothing like this has come up yet.
• Easy French Reader – I bought a book called Easy French Reader. It is what it says it is – I haven’t had any problems reading it. There are notes in the margins when they introduce non-obvious new words… but the story isn’t very interesting. Every couple of pages, there is a question section with true/false, fill in the blank, and short response style questions along with the occasional crossword. I’ve been avoiding it because I don’t know how to pronounce most of the words properly and I’ve noticed monsieur go from a smooth (phonetic english) “messieur” to a more butchered “monseeur”.

Immersion Methods:

• French Music – I have acquired quite a bit of French music. For me, it was hard to find music that I could actually pick words out of at first, so maybe this short list of French music will help someone out there find it more easily than I did. “Un Jour Noel” by Marie-Elaine Thibert (Christmas music that’s easy to follow). “Donne-Moi Quelque Chose Qui Ne Finit Pas” by Stephanie Lapointe (Slower music with mostly simple words). Traditional Quebec music is folk music that is pretty easy to follow and pick words out of, and that’s pretty easy to find. There’s a Quebec group called Les Cowboys Fringants that have a more modernized folk feel – it’s pretty fun to listen to and (again) it’s easy to pick out words and phrases. I haven’t found anything else that I’m to semi-understand and listen to passively while at work, but I’m sure that there is more out there. I’m still holding out for some Raffi style songs!
• French Movies & TV – I have Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain. I’ve watched the first half but haven’t found time to watch the whole thing. The first time I tried, I didn’t understand much. The second time, I was surprised at how much I understood. I also have a couple of seasons of the Friends tv show that are dubbed in French, but I haven’t tried watching those yet.
• LiveMocha - A cool website where you can get feedback from native speakers on your writing and speaking. I haven’t submitted anything in French yet, but I have given feedback on English submissions.
• LibriVox - LibriVox is a website that is in the process of recording people reading books that are in the public domain (much like Project Gutenberg, except for audiobooks). I have downloaded Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires, and I’ll be listening to them at work – initially I won’t be listening for content, but just to build the ability to listen to French and be able to break the steady flow of sounds into words and sentences, even if I don’t know their meanings.
• The Kansas City French Connection – This is a meetup.com group that is based in Kansas City. I went to my first event last Saturday at a French cafe called Aixois. There were seven of us ranging from beginners like myself to a few native speakers from Belgium and Quebec. Basically it’s a French conversation group, and based on my first meeting with them, it’s going to be great. I’ve already learned of a new source called “TV-5″ which is a French channel that I can get here.

I built up the basics of my plans for learning French from this website: How To Learn Any Language. The creator is a Swiss man who loves languages – it’s full of interesting information like how similar certain languages are and the relative difficulties of learning different languages. There is also a forum component where people give advice on how to learn languages and where to find resources to learn languages.

I spent a few hours typing out the journal entries leading up to Barcelona last night. Phew… almost done! I decided to hold off on Barcelona because my interest was waning and I didn’t want it to bleed into Barcelona’s entries – I loved Barcelona and I really want to leave you with that impression. Once I’m done typing all of the posts up, I’ll go back and add pictures to them – that’s another time consuming process, but worth it. It really makes some of those boring, short entries worth looking at at least (I’m looking at you, Berlin). Also, if you’re friends with me on Facebook, you should be able to see the pictures I have put up on there. Even if you’re not, you should still be able to see them… it’s just a matter of finding them. I’ll post links to the albums once I’ve put up pictures from the whole trip (I’ve done pictures on Facebook up to and including Prague).

And the French bit from the title – about half way through the trip, I decided I wanted to learn another language. I was split between Italian, French, and German. I’m hesitant to say I “know” Spanish, but I can definitely hold my own in a conversation… this pushed me towards the romance languages. I knew my knowledge of Spanish would help out with Italian and French, and I decided I wasn’t really that into German… so I had it narrowed down to French and Italian by the time I got back into Germany when I visited Munich.

When I landed in Spain, I was elated to finally speak the local language. For a while, I resolved to just improve my Spanish and not pick up a new language. Then a flurry of things happened that lead to French. On my first day in Seville, I met two guys from Paris – they were really cool guys. By then I was used to being told that I don’t come off as the typical dumb American, but hearing it from two Frenchman (from Paris at that!) came as a surprise. Anyways, the conversation eventually got around to women, and women loving French accents in English. Thihaud and Matthew then dropped this one on me: French girls love American accents in French. On my second night in Seville, I ended up eating dinner in the middle of a French conversation between a large group of people. So here I was eating shrimp with their heads attached… and listening to French. I felt left out, for sure, because they were speaking way too fast for me to be able to pick up anything – even the words I could usually pick out because of Spanish. I gave up on understanding and just listened. I decided then that I really liked the way French sounds.

In Granada, I met Margeaux from Paris. She didn’t really speak any French in front of me, but I really liked her accent. This was the start of me deciding that the French accent is the sexiest I’ve heard. On my second night in Granada, there was a group of three French Canadians staying in my room – two of them barely spoke any English. That was interesting, but then I met another French Canadian couple when I went out that night. Again, really cool people. I had a great time with them and everyone else that went out for tapas and sangria that night.

Finally, on my second night in Barcelona I met two awesome Quebecois girls. I ended up spending two more nights with them after that – at one point I brought up my interest in learning another language, and how I’d narrowed it down to Italian and French. Audrey had plenty of practical reasons for learning French over Italian, including that Italian is only spoken in Italy whereas French is spoken in Black Africa, France, Sweden, Belgium, and Quebec. Then she went on about how I should learn French because France played a huge part in the settlement of the Americas – she couldn’t believe I didn’t know about Jacques Cartier… among other things. Pretty hard to say no to I told her I’d learn French in six months, and that was that. On this front, I’m unfortunate because I now spend one to two hours a day learning and practicing French and inevitably I’m reminded of her. I think some of my friends can attest to my inability to get this girl out of my head, and my efforts to learn French certainly aren’t helping!

So, on top of all of the immediate (and somewhat shallow, yet still valid and driving) reasons for learning French, there are some fundamental reasons for learning a new language. I like languages – I think Elliot rubbed off on me. I’m having a great time learning French. The trouble with Spanish is that I don’t ever see myself living in Spain or Mexico (perhaps there are more promising countries further south…) so I don’t ever see myself using Spanish more than for basic travel communication. The thing with French now is that I could see myself visiting France for an extended period of time, and having the ability to adventure into Africa is also intriguing. Finally, there is just some intrinsic value to knowing a language. It makes me more happy and satisfied with myself – probably because I’m picking up more than just a language, but a whole new culture and set of possibilities. In a sense, I’m expanding my view of the world, and I like this.

Anyways, French is coming along nicely. I feel like my French after three weeks is comparable to my Spanish after three months. I think my attitude and motivation behind learning the language is probably partially responsible for this, and already knowing another romance language is definitely helping out. I’ll throw up another post with my methods later for those interested. I’ll just let you know for now that I can speak with (in my opinion) relatively good pronunciation and speed, I can kind of read, and I can hardly write. I’ve been avoiding reading and writing in French for now because I have a feeling that seeing the words is going to poison my pronunciation… which in my mind was going to be the big sticking point for French.

So, a common interview question I’ve been asked is to write a function that will return the nth number in the Fibonacci Sequence. I think the question is meant to test two things: first, have you retained enough math to know what the Fibonacci sequence is; and second, do you know how to write a recursive function. Last week in my Combinatorics class (this is my Spring break, why am I writing this??), my professor introduced a closed form formula for calculating the nth number in the Fibonacci sequence. This is why I’m writing this now – when I saw the formula, I thought it’d be fun to memorize the formula, then whip it out in those interview questions. Not that I’ll ever get a chance now that I have a job lined up, but that’s another matter.

The formula goes like this:

where (the golden ratio).

I haven’t spent much time reading over the Wikipedia page, and we didn’t spend any time in class on the derivation… but it’s interesting that given integer inputs, the function produces integer outputs even though the square root of 5 is used throughout.

I was thinking to myself, “What would make the most sense in a programming context?” The answer wasn’t (and still isn’t) immediately clear. In the future I intend to do an actual comparison of three different methods of generating the nth number in the Fibonacci sequence (Closed form, recursive, and non-recursive). At first glance, for very small n the recursive and non-recursive forms should beat the closed form. For large n, the closed form should dominate the other two methods with the non-recursive method being faster than the recursive method.

One downside I see to the closed form method is error propagation – even with integer inputs, I would still expect a need to round to the nearest integer due to the small roundoff error incurred by using floats/doubles for the golden ratio.

I bought an OCZ-520ADJ SLI 520W power supply in March, 2006. The power supply had a three year warranty – over the last few months, one of the fans inside has been failing. It’s pretty noisy and isn’t spinning very well; the fan will die completely soon if it’s like any other fan that I’ve seen go through this.

Anyways, I requested an RMA with about a month left on my warranty. They asked me to send it in, I asked if I could get them to cross ship it so I wouldn’t have to deal with a long period of downtime. They did. The replacement just showed up today – it’s an OCZ700MXSP. Wow!

So I traded the ability to adjust the voltages of the power supply (that I never used) for modularity and a higher power rating (my old power supply technically didn’t have enough amps on the +12v line for my Nvidia GTX 260). I have yet to install it, but it looks promising. Thanks OCZ!

It got up to 54 today, so Nick Pegg and I decided to go out for a ride. Nick’s got a scooter, I’ve got a 250 Kawasaki Ninja. After I shoveled the ice out of our steep driveway, we brought ‘em out of the basement. We rode around town for the most part, and I left my blinker on a couple of times which prompted Nick to pull over thinking I was in distress (oops!) I haven’t ridden since the end of November, so it was a blast. It’s not supposed to be this warm until next Friday, but I’ll probably take it out again then.

I got a new jacket as a birthday present – my original jacket is a mesh jacket with a waterproof / wind breaker insert. Riding in the original jacket under 70 was chilly, and under 60 was downright freezing. The new jacket is a textile jacket, and it goes further down my body – it’s made for riding in cooler weather, it’s supposed to be more water proof. Well, riding around town with Nick, my jacket kept me really warm (but never too warm). When I went out on the highway, my feet / butt were getting really cold since my shoes and jeans weren’t doing much for me, but my chest and arms were really warm. Towards the end of the highway ride, I could feel my arms cooling down a bit – this was my first time with the new jacket and I didn’t spend much time putting it on and adjusting it so I’m going to chalk it up to that.

Anyways, it was a good ride.

I’ve been learning OpenGL and the SDL over the last few weeks so I can build the visualizer for the Missouri S&T ACM MegaMiner AI tournament. It’s interesting, but not as conceptually interesting as my foray into device drivers / kernel modification / rootkits. In practice though, I am able to see the results of my work. With the basic rootkits, I could see a process disappear from the task manager or get a response to a packet from code I had embedded into the Windows kernel, but the feedback wasn’t nearly as fun to look at. I wrote a 3D Sierpinski Gasket generator, then I wrote a really basic simulation of a ball bouncing – even though they’re simple projects, the end results are rewarding and keep driving me to do more.

I’ve been following Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach Using OpenGL (4th Edition) pretty closely – I feel like I’ve learned a lot. It covers everything from the just getting started, to the conceptual stuff, to the nitty gritty math details, to the OpenGL API usage – it’s pretty nice. I remember the basics of the linear algebra, and I’m seeing a lot of familiar terms from Linear Algebra class… but this book brought it all together. Now a lot of the transformations make sense… things like projections, rotations, etc.

This week Berto and I are going to start working on one of my project ideas. I don’t want to go into great lengths about it since all we have is a basic idea and some prototype code I wrote over break, but it deals with stock markets, automation, and genetic programming. It will be interesting to see how far we get with it.

I was desperately in need of a new drive, so I bit on another Seagate 1.5tb drive. My old drive was making weird noises and had seek/read/write measurements at about 2x (so half for read/write)  that of my current storage drives. What made it worse was that it was my primary drive (Apps, Windows, etc).

The new Seagate drive seems to be holding up fine now. It came with revision SD17 firmware on it, and Windows installed without any hitches without updating the firmware. I updated the firmware to SD1A after the Windows install so I wouldn’t have to deal with it in the future, and so far everything is going well. I’m settled in on the new drive, but I’m keeping the old drive around just in case…

I ran into a problem with Google Reader. I was working on another Wordpress installation for my ACM chapter (http://acm.mst.edu/) – I wanted to have a calendar with our upcoming meetings on it. The plugin that did the closest thing to what I wanted was Event Calendar 3, but it doesn’t do it quite how I wanted the ACM site’s calendar to behave. It has the ability to put future events on the calendar. But all calendar events are tied to posts on the site. I don’t really want to make a post for every meeting / activity we will be having and have those posts show up on the main page all at the same time. Fine – there is an option in the plugin to hide posts that are in the “Event” category. The problem with that is that I’d have to have two posts for every meeting – one that contains the calendar event, and another that is published later that is our advertisement for the meeting. Having two posts would mean a lot of duplication of content and effort (calendar event posts still need information about the event, but the real meat of the information ends up being on the announcement/advertisement pages). I tried adding posts that would be published in the future so that the events would show on the calendar, but the posts wouldn’t show on the site until the publish date – no go.

What I eventually ended up doing was adding the “The Future is Now” plugin so that all posts are published regardless of their publish date. Then I modified my theme to not show posts on the main page that have publish dates in the future. Ok, great. I added all of the future dated posts for the upcoming ACM meetings, and it was working like a charm. Then I clicked my live bookmark in Firefox – all of the future dated posts were in the feed! I quickly realized my error and went in and edited Wordpress’ feed functions to not show items that are in the future. My live bookmark reflected this change.

The next morning, I got an email from another officer explaining that all of the future posts were on the feed. I checked my live bookmark again, and it had the correct entries. I eventually figured out he was using Google Reader. Welp. Google Reader cached all of the feed entries as soon as they went up. Apparently Google Reader caches feeds then never uncaches them (this is due to a shortcoming in the Atom/RSS specifications apparently – if a post disappears, Google has no way of knowing if it just fell out of range, or if the post was deleted). So now anyone that uses Google Reader gets an RSS feed full of future events – the info isn’t private (all of the pages are accessible through the calendar anyways) – it kind of defeats the purpose of a feed though. Now when new posts are added to the feed, they’ll be added below the future dated items – essentially hiding them from the user that checks the top of the list for new entries.

I put in a request to Google to purge the cache – we’ll see if that gets anywhere.