cat /proc/claus

After a short break, an inter-pacific trip, two inter asian trips, and a change of work, finally, it is that time again!

Ludum Dare, the charming challenge where you have to design and create a game in 48 hours from scratch, is coming up again. Last time, even though I was proud of my result, there were many failures in my cute little game. This time, I decided to prepare myself more carefully:

• Last week I’ve worked on a very simple warm up game, to refresh my libraries in my mind.
• Then this week I did some research on automated music creation tools (since my last game had no music).
• Today I made my song list for the event
• Tomorrow I’m going to buy a bunch of food for the weekend, since last time I ate way too much junk food.

Wish me luck, and please follow my updates during the weekend in my LD Journal!

After two months working as an assistant professor in the University of Tsukuba, things are starting to shape up.

After a short dry spell, I got plenty of research projects going on. A tutorial paper with my former advisor, an application of GA/GP for cancer research with a professor I met in Morocco and some theoretical GA work with a CS professor in my department. Also, I got into a technical project with the International Relations office. So much stuff to do!

I’m getting a lot of support from my “bosses” (I got two of them, long story) — the professors are making their best to add me to the “iinkais”, which are workgroups inside the department. This means more work for me, but it’s also great for my standing in the university.

People often ask about my classes. My coursework hasn’t started yet. I probably will have no classes until October, then I will give two intensive courses in October and December. Things might change, but this is what is planned anyway.

My apartment is almost “complete” — or at least not lacking any of the essentials. This week I bought a bookshelf and a couch, which should complete my living room. My bedroom has mostly used furniture, but my living room is looking pretty cool. Maybe I should hold a party on Sunday to celebrate.

Talking about parties, today I met the new brazillian students in Tsukuba University. It was pretty cool, they are so excited about their new environment. Two of the students are in my department, and at least one of them is interested in using GA in his research, which is great — my mad plan to have EC take over tsukuba progresses

Yesterday was the Geocaching Hanami. I haven’t geocaching for a long time, which was a big mistake. Geocaching is so fun. So after doing some caching again yesterday in Ueno, I got the taste of blood in my mouth, and today I found 3 more caches. I also had a chance meeting with a big name Geocacher who happened to work with me during the Morocco trip. Awesome.

In the first floor of the building that I work, in the University of Tsukuba, there is a TV screen that shows the current energy usage, comparing it with the average from the previous year.

So far, the energy usage has always been around 80% to 90% from the previous year — but since my return to morocco, it has jumped to over 160%. At first I thought it was some sort of weird experiment going on, but as this repeated day after day, I realized something else was up.

Then I got it — they compare it with LAST YEAR’S averages, and after the 3.11 earthquake, Tsukuba (and in fact most of japan) were under a serious blackout, brownout and energy conservation regimen. I guess we will keep going over the previous year’s average for a few more months.

I suppose that you just installed kubuntu 11.10 in your box, and english is your default system language.

1. Install the following packages: ibus, ibus-anthy, ibus-gtk, ibus-m17n
2. Go to the “K” menu -> applications -> system -> input setting framework
3. A box will show up with the ibus configuration options (and maybe asking you if it should start ibus, say yes)
4. configure your desired shortcuts in the “general” tab. Make sure to configure keys for “enable-disable” and “next input method”. In the “input methods” tab, add “Japanese->anthy” and “other->latin pre”
5. Close the configuration screen. Right-click on the ibus icon in your tray bar (a little keyboard with a ball) and select “restart” — you are good to go!

I always had difficulty getting both japanese and portuguese to work in my systems, it has become so easy now! How far have we come

Today I was checking my blog’s spam folder - and I was surprised by what I saw.

When I first set up this blog, spam comments would be giant list of links. It was completely unnatural and easy to spot.

Then they changed into big collection of random words. Those would avoid pure “block multiple links” filter, but were also trivial to spot.

Then they evolved to constructed paragraphs about the products they are trying to sell. They were completely out of context with the post they commented, so it was trivial to spot them.

More recently, I was getting a lot of “your blog i very good” spam, where a praising comment would come together with the spammers webpage as the webpage of the comment’s poster. Now a few of them actually did look like regular comments (at least until I got used to their general structure), but it was easy to see that they were completely out of context (and always had that marketing link in them).

Today, I saw some really “interesting” spam - the spam was tailored to the blog posts that I wrote! In one where I wrote about my house hunting, the spambot said “this city is easy to live with so many hotels”. In another one, where I mentioned I was reading sherlock holmes, the spambot commented on the most recent sherlock homes movies. There were 5 total such spams in my spambox.

Of course, a quick glance would spot all of the robotic grammar in the comments, and the context was still not really there. And the random ad link was still there in the “http” section. Still, it is impressive to see the evolution of spam. I wonder if it will eventually come to this.

Also, credit where credit is due: My spamfilter, Akismet, is also getting smarter, and keeping itself one step ahead of the spammers - It has been more than a year since a single spam message fell into my “comments” box.