cat /proc/claus

After almost one year and a half living in Rio, tomorrow I’m boarding for Japan. I’ve been hired as an Assistant Professor at the G30 Computational Science Program at Tsukuba University.

I’m looking forward a lot for this move. For me, more than any “january first”, this signals a new year. Moving has always been accompained by a rush of productivity and energy, and I have been planning to use these to start (or re-start) a number of projects that were on the back burner. The things I want to do in this new start include: Going back to the Gym, getting better at Starcraft, Learning to program indie games, reading more technical books. Not to mention updating all my websites

This last year in Rio was great from an academic point of view. I had a very interesting research project, with awesome work mates. I will miss that. But I also look forward to my new position. The prospect of having students under me, and a bit more of academic freedom gives me all sorts of ideas to work with.

Recently I have read news that the Japanese government will again reduce the stipend of international graduate students under the scholarship of the Ministry of Education (MEXT).

So, as expected, a lot of people start to complain about it, saying they can´t live anymore, they are getting screwed, etc. And then, also as expected, a lot of OTHER people start to complain about the complaints, saying that the complainers should be happy for being given any money at all, that they are just guests, among other things.

This amount of missing the point, it hurts me so much.

Graduate students often have this terrible misconception that because they are ¨students¨, they are not working. This sometimes shows as an inferiority complex, where they think that what they do is not work; that any money they receive is not earned; that they should hurry up and get a ¨real job¨. No, the academic career is as real a job as any other, even though is not seen as one. You, as a PhD student, is no less a worker than someone who just joined a company. Your research will be used by your advisor to justify the grants that he receives, and his standing inside the university and funding agencies. You are working, results are expected of you, and you are being paid for those results. That stipend is your earned salary.

Of course, as in many things, there is another face to this coin. I´ve seen people use the ¨I´m just a student¨ mentality to avoid responsability. These people will act as if they were on extended paid vacations. For them, the same thing applies: Your stipend is your salary, and you are expected to work for it. A PhD diploma and a thesis is nice, but the body of your work/contacts/classes/research activities is what is really being expected of you.

Back to the fact of the scholarship reduction itself, I think it is really unfortunate. Yes, it is possible to live in Japan, even in Tokyo, with the new current scholarship. But this current value means that you will earn almost as much money flipping burgers in Mac Donalds in Japan (or, as is more often the case, making sandwiches in some bento factory), than you will performing research. Going to Japan for a PhD is not exactly an easy decision to make (language barrier, social barrier, distance from family and friends), and the high scholarship should reflect the incentives for taking this decision.

Of course, Japan is not exactly in an economic golden age at the moment, but I think it would give much more bang to the buck if they reduced the number of scholarships, and improved the selection process.

Finally cutting the scholarship for those who are already mid-way through their courses is just a dickish move any way you see it.

“Very Well. And I say, Doctor, there may be some little danger, so kindly put your army revolver in your pocket”

– Sherlock Holmes, The Red-Headed League

The height of adventure and excitement in the 1900’s, this is so cute! ‘would you please take your gun, my friend? we might have a little danger in our way’. So different from the muscle-bulging, always-scowling, badass macho heroes of our days. Although I guess that this extremely gentlemanly behavior is what was imagined of a macho-hero of that time and place. Still, I love this quote.

As you might have guessed, I’m now reading Sherlock Holmes stories. I got the entire collection from Project Gutenberg, a wonderful website where they archive and organize classical literary works that have fallen into the public domain.

Talking about public domain, it is a good time to remind everyone of the list of works that could have been in the public domain this year. Take a careful look at this list — it is the list of works that would be now in the public domain, under the old 24+24 year rules. Notice that many of these works (specially music and Disney cartoons!) used a lot of inspiration from works that were in the Public Domain in THEIR time! In other words, authors that at the time used the Public Domain, are now NOT giving back, by supporting the crazy copyright system we have in place today.

If you are interested in this subject, this book is a great way to get introduced to the matter of intellectual property, what is wrong with it, what is write with it, and what we should do to fix it.

Happy new year everybody!

Timelapses are videos where many successive pictures of a subject are put together, ordered by date.

The first one I remember seeing was that guy who took pictures of the front of his home, every day, for a couple of years. There is another very cool one of a guy who travels around china, always taking pictures of his face. Those videos of crossings in large towns, where you see everybody moving very fast, are also a sort of time lapse.

Besides having a very cool effect, time-lapses can show in a pleasant and interesting way how something was made. One example are the games of Ludum Dare (a challenge to make a game from scratch in 48 hours), that are often followed by a time lapse of how the game was made.

I wanted to add a timelapse video of my own entry to LD, and at first I thought it would be a very complicated affair. Turns out it was really simple.

First thing you need to do is to set up your system to take regular pictures of your desktop. You can do this with a single command using xwd, imagemagick and date:

xwd -root | convert xwd:- -resize 800x800 `date +%d%H%M%S.png`

This will create a screenshot of whatever is on your screen, and name it “dayhourminutesecond.png”. The 800×800 part resizes the screenshot so that the largest size will be 800 pixels (you don’t want full-sized screenshots, unless you don’t care about running out of disk space).

Now you need to set up your system to run the above line every minute. I tried to get CRON to do that, but it * * * * * wouldn’t work for some reason, so I wrote a shell script and left it running in the background:

#/bin/bash
while true; do
i=`date +%d%H%M%S.png`
xwd -root | convert xwd:- -resize 800x800 $i
sleep 1m
done

No magic here.

After you are done with your screenshots, you need to put them together in a video. You do that using mencoder. I took this line from the Cenolan blog (originally for web cam time lapsing):

% ls -1tr > files.txt
% mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o test.avi -mf type=png:fps=10 mf://@files.txt

Note the bolded part. You need to change these lines if you save your pictures as something other than pngs, and if you want a different speed to your timelapse. I find that anything under 10 fps gets a bit too slow. The script runs surprisingly fast for 3.000 pictures.

Now go make some time lapses! Here is mine.

If you graduated in computer science or computer engineering, you have, at least once, thought about writing a computer game.

And if you are like most people, and like me, you never went through with that idea. What a shame, I know how it feels.

But this weekend, I was vindicated. I decided to plunge into the Ludum Dare. The Ludum dare (or LD48 as it is also know), is an open challenge to develop a game in 48 hours. The game must be done from scratch: code, graphics, sounds, everything. Also, each edition has a theme, that should be followed. The theme this time was “Alone”.

Since I’ve never completed a game before (and I suck at GUI programming), I was not very confident that I would be able to complete the dare. Fortunately, that was not the case at all. Not only I completed my game, but I was also rather proud of it, given the constraints, and I also got very excited about the whole LD48 community.

I think one of the big things that helped me along was having a friend do the dare with me. My Milked Eek, from the Mafia Scum Forums, participated in the Dare too, and we would exchange messages every time we had a problem, or reached a milestone, or just had a lol-worthy thought. That helped me keep my motivation up in those 48 hours.

It was a great experience. I managed to learn a lot about Java, and about Slick, the gaming library that I used. I gained a lot of confidence in my programming skills. And I made a game! I made a gaaaameeee

So, here are some links:

Maze Explorers, my Ludum dare entry. You run it with Java. Works in Linux/Mac/Windows

A time lapse video of me making the game

Courage Quest, a fantastic entry for this edition of the LD48. If I didn’t tell you, you couldn’t say that this game was made in 48 hours.

Stay tuned!