R's Circus

As http://blog.posthaven.com/the-posterous-migration-guide...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:52:00 +0100

As http://blog.posthaven.com/the-posterous-migration-guide helped me, they deserved to be mentioned besides http://justmigrate.com:

Hi,

I just moved my posts from Posterous! Do go though my blog for all the new posts.

Its easy to migrate try JustMigrate

Opera going to be acquired by Facebook?

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 12:17:00 +0200

As rumors are going around, that Facebook is going to acquire Opera, I’ll push VimOperate to github. I hope this plugins get’s some traction, because if FB is really going to acquire Opera, which are said to have a bad Q1/2012 financial state, I am not sure, if I am still motivated to program for FBOpera. This step was on my mind for quite a while, so it’s good to have it done anyway. ;-)

Github repo:

https://github.com/rawland/VimOperate

Thanks again to the Opera-Team and the guys from Vimium.

Being almost deaf

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 13:20:00 +0200

Being almost deaf

Before you read this article, you might want to read this article by David Peter before. While I read the article, I felt reminded about some things I also experienced earlier in life – David is 21 years old while writing his article – and as we share some common experiences I thought I might sum up my view and give an outlook.

29:

At 29, I identify myself with many things beside my work. Nevertheless, at my workplace, same as David, I’m also their first almost deaf employee, as far as I know. And I think many young people with hearing impairments feel likely always to be the first in their environment. My hearing impairment is single-sided deafness and similar to deafness, single-sided deafness has a prevalence of 0-5 of 1000 people (in the US).

There are many certain things about being hearing impaired that people don’t understand. How could they? They will not understand until advanced age. Besides that, I think those who know, forget in this distracting world which imposes so much different things on their minds so they simply forget/oversee as it’s a rather non-obvious handicap and everybody is busy.

Technically:

Suffering under single-sided deafness means three things:

Localisation of sound doesn’t work
Not hearing conversations on the impaired sides
Almost no understanding of speech in the presence of background noise

But what are the implications of such a view? What would the world feel if you technically weren’t able to see (these letters for instance)? How much different would your world be? Think a moment about such a world, before continuing to read this article.

Solitude:

A younger and much less self-confident version of me felt quite alone. Especially as teenager and adolescent and even more especially at the time I understood to a wider degree, what was wrong with me and why I had such weird communication experiences. The whole range of comorbidity applied and grounded on my self-esteem. There exist even some horrible studies, explaining me why and to what horrifying degree I hear so much less to nothing in noisy conditions compared to the ordinary human – don’t forget, that I can’t really compare and only approximate by observing, reading and understanding the data.

This younger me also failed in all language subjects. My parents decided to not put my in School for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and let me go the ordinary normal way. With hindsight that was a good, but though and not easy decision for them, I think. However, at that time people were telling me, that they can’t understand me and that I’m mumbling and I had the worst grades in language subjects and almost had to repeat a class, because I failed so much below average in these. On the other hand I was quite good in all STEM subjects. To my lucky favour my physics and maths teacher of that time arranged it that I passed to the next class what had quite an impact on my future life.

The main difference between an obvious handicap and deafness is, that when you are hard of hearing or deaf, people don’t see that something is wrong, but they perceive a weird reaction, which somehow is inappropriate and especially younger folks label you as an idiot quickly. In the end, it makes a huge difference if you are lonely voluntarily or forced to be so.

Sports:

Another thing, which massively helped me getting, was competitive sport. After I enjoyed some very bad and embarrassing events in team sports due to my lack of spatial hearing I moved over to endurance sports.

Sports gave me friends and enriched my life enormously.

Sports brought back my self-esteem, too. As it was something I was quite good at people started to cheer me on after the first good results. I was not “left ear” any more. I was a strong-willed sportsman, although I was almost deaf and a weird Linux fan!

And finally an endurance sport like competitive cycling, with very large training volume calmed my irate soul. It is a repetitive movement one does several hundred times during a training session, while breathing and moving through the world. It was and is quite meditative. Seeded and still seeds mindfulness. I can’t imagine a world without.

Group conversations:

To some degree I massively failed, still fail a bit at and hate group conversations. The latter has never changed. Particularly when I have more than the task of listening to multiple people with all help, like lip-reading, body language and visual cues, I can get. This covers conversations like moderation or taking the minutes or even all combined. I hate it, because I was very bad at it and I am still not as good at it as I wish to be and I feel more than exhausted afterwards. On the other hand, and oddly enough, I still get better at it. Even these days at the age of almost 30 years and these small wins are the reason to almost always get out of the comfort zone and do it nevertheless. And luckily cmmncatn is _rr0r tolernt to some degree.

I need to admit, that I have most fears and am still uncertain and cautious from time to time in this area of life as the brain sometimes makes up stupid (mostly funny ;–)) things, which never fit the situation, to fill the gaps. My siblings both have a gift for language and music, which doesn’t make it easier. But they always pushed me and still do today what I am very thankful for. Though I am really jealous sometimes. Compared to my childhood, the most significant change in group conversations is that I see more communication than I hear. As I can’t rely on speech, my mind became more sensitive to body language, facial expressions and lip-movement as hearing aid. This helps a lot and I still get better at it. Heck, the visual focus of mind became pretty extreme. A few weeks ago I started to learn Mandarin. I am drinking the letters but hardly can memorise their sound.

Another thing, which is important in group conversations are jokes and humor. I really like to do jokes and take the world with a twinkle in my eye. But almost all time in my life, there is one or sometimes even more persons around me, who do jokes at the expense of others. Gosh, this totally stresses me, when I get in that focus, due to my built-in capacity to respond awkwardly, because I simply misinterpret the situation because of low signal-to-noise ratios. I guess everybody experiences something like that. Pity enough, when it happens more often, this is then integrated in that game and interpreted as fail. The skeptical mind might call that mobbing, but I don’t think that most of them mean it that way, it’s just another way of teasing and testing people. I think that I am ready witted, but how can you react to missiles, when you don’t know where they are coming from or even just guess from the faces around you, that someone launched such a joke-missile? Currently my solution is to avoid that and not join the game or stop it, if it already happened. Again, at best with a twinkle in the eye, but some times with sharp words, also.

As this topic is important at the workplace, one last note considering the work environment: I discovered that I need an work environment which is tolerant towards my weakness. And I worked in environments which made me implode before. Today I am blessed with an environment, which is very considerate. It’s a very important decision affecting happiness more than anything else. And I am very thankful for my current situation.

Love:

It’s true, that it’s hard to have awesome conversations when you have to repeat every other thing you say, people complain about your mumbling (a singing teacher and now good friend fixed that ;–)) and are not sure whether you responded appropriately. However, as love in most cases is an one on one relation, it’s rather easy to remove all barriers hindering the conversation if one isn’t too close to absolute deafness, I think.

But it also happened to me, that I was sitting at some place (read: bar) and a friendly good-looking girl or woman approached me and I had to ask three times, what she actually said while the situation was becoming more and more uncomfortable, with the girl leaving with a bemused to vexed facial expression. At the beginning it felt as hard as every other rejection. Today I think that a human who can’t handle that – even after explanation – doesn’t deserve my attention and move on. I can’t believe, I just wrote that, but it’s true. This attitude came with the years too and I wish it to everybody with a handicap.

Sidenote: In Germany a book from Christiane Rösinger was released in March, entitled: “Liebe wird oft überbewertet” (en: ‘Love is often overrated’) – It’s true in a way… and a fun read.

Job interviews:

They sucked and still suck. I totally agree with David. But after many career, speech and presentation workshops I got better at these, too. Today people are surprised, when I tell them, that I suffer under single-sided deafness. Considering job search, the relevant abilities came along with the ones described in the previous paragraph by the way. Ignore the haters. Haters gonna hate anyway.

Learning, Talks and Teaching:

Doing my diploma in physics during a time, which wasn’t affected by the Bologna Process and thus having much more freedoms than the students today, I had luck. Working in the academe world myself today, I don’t know if this younger version of me could have handled that system I am working in now. Actually, I don’t think so. I missed almost all classes and worked mostly in solitude. Lecture as an oral presentation of information simply isn’t useful for (almost) deaf people. Alone again. Sports helped. Again.

Oddly enough during the last two years I was told, that I am quite good at presentations. However this is a different thing. It’s more like acting. You don’t have to interact verbally that much, because you are part of a choreography and the nervousness raises at the end, when I have to identify questions in a large crowd. It’s totally opposite to most ordinary people. They are always nervous at the beginning of a presentation.

Nevertheless, I still dislike lectures and talks today! Very often, it is still like a game of telephone to me.

Deaf Culture:

Sometimes I become angry about the world and it’s unfair peculiarities and me not being able to hear as good and thus not to react as a ready witted and whatever as all the perceived others around me. Thus I am surprised to read that some deaf people don’t think that deafness is a disability, but a way of life. I am out of that and never was in. I still feel ‘inferior’ to the healthy normal human on that level. Maybe it’s a good protection for the selves of the deaf culture. Hard to say. I feel like I belong to the whole world and don’t feel the need to restrict myself to that culture only. But this might also have the root in me being almost deaf and not living in anacousia. Nevertheless, I plan to learn sign language in 2013.

Friends:

The most important thing in my life, family included. It’s the same for all of us, except those lone wolves I meet from time to time. But even they have some. We’re still all human.

The other most important thing:

David Peter cleared up to explain what being deaf means. Himself being deaf, and regaining hearing to a certain degree by cochlear implants. Though I am not that much older be assured: David, you are not alone and it will get better! In certain areas you are superior to the ordinary human. And times change. Just this year I got a hearing aid. A CROS hearing aid which – compared to the one I tried five years ago – helps me. One hour after wearing it, tears were running down my cheeks.

Addendum:

As you asked how it felt: My field of view expanded to the left and my world got bigger instantly. The main difference I felt was truly that I saw more and of course – to a certain degree – understand the people around me better now. However, I will never forget that incredible walk from the acoustician back to my workplace.

FAIL FAST and GREAT SUCCESS!

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:43:00 +0200

Nah, two months and still no 0.4 considering VimOperate. However, not much people care, as the plugin is still liked somehow at addons.opera.com - nevertheless, I failed to deliver. I hate that. Excuses there are, but let’s not mention this.

Currently there is a sheet of paper beside me, I hear the rain falling against the rooflight above me and I scribble down some notes reviewing my GTD-system, which basically spins around org-mode. Actually it spins around my head and sometimes my head joins that spinning. So when the latter happens, the moment is right to grab a pencil, a sheet of paper and some thoughts to think about all this productivity p0rn once again.

This time I had a nice read at Matthew Cornell’s site, which dates back to 2006, but reads as fresh as it could be (kudos to matt!). As far as I got out of the context, Matthew struggles with some bipolar (type 2) disorder and fights for a normal live, with all the tools he can get. I am always in awe, when I read about the background of some people after reading their work first. It makes me think, that the greatest people, pay the highest price - contrary to the general perception.

Nevertheless, finishing that and some other articles, here I am again - wondering why I didn’t stand up to the last commitment: Publishing VimOperate 0.4 and sinking in work at work instead. Maybe Paul Graham knows the answer.

One funny last thing: After reading all this and more, I know about turtles and turtle “touch downs”. But you know what? Org-mode still beats all of them, as I am a hater of all mouses and lover of all keyboards. The one and only difficult thing still is: Staying in sync with the thoughts, which emerge, when there is no keyboard and terminal around. Maybe I’ll buy a power-glo light pen - likelihood of losing that thang and syncing back to my org-files included. All your ideas are welcome! :-)

VimOperate: Next major release to come on Sunday.

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:15:00 +0100

Currently I am gathering the feedback and issues I received from some users and fixed the google-misbehavior. After ironing out the last bugs, I’ll upload 0.4 on Sunday Feb. 5th 22:00 CET or something. It wasn’t possible to do it earlier as I struggle with a thorough von-Neumann Analysis with an odd Navier-Stokes Problem at work and didn’t have much time for different things. Thank you for being patient.

Edit: I have to postpone one week, as I got sick and don’t get healthy since two weeks by now. :-(

Development Cycle (VimOperate)

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:15:00 +0100

Being published a bit over 24h ago, I really enjoy people already giving feedback on that obviously missing extension for the Opera Browser. However, I need a reasonable development cycle. That means that the best I will and can provide is a 7-day, maybe even 14-day, update cycle incorporating feedback and own ideas.

Keeping in mind that this is dev time for free and I have a full-time and a part time job besides. How do you, as FOSS dev for instance, handle this?

VimOperate got published today!I am happy to announce, that...

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:27:00 +0100

VimOperate got published today!

I am happy to announce, that VimOperate got published today and is now downloadable. ;-)

And you can get rid of your mouse, while browsing! Press “?” for help and everything should work out fine.

As this is rather fresh (v0.3), feel free to write feedback and - if you like - good debug reviews, as I tested it on Opera 11 Linux with US Keyboard-Layout solely.

Download here!

Creating VimOperate for OperaHell, with lots of passion I am...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:59:00 +0100

Creating VimOperate for Opera

Hell, with lots of passion I am back to the art of coding. And years after doing nothing significant for the web I pay back to one of my favorite browsers: Opera!

Sending this nice package I hope it meets Opera’s strict and well-thought-out publishing guidelines. However one criterion seems odd to me, as many words contain ‘Opera’, namely this acceptance criterion:

It must not include ‘Opera’ in the title or any other Opera branding that can indicate the extension was created by Opera Software.

However, I think this Opera-tion should work out, or?

Edit: After checking in the forum, it’s OK.

Joining the Qt-Project

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:08:00 +0200

On September 12th Lars Knoll announced the release of the Qt-Project from Nokia to a new foundation during the Qt Developer Days. However there still existed some discussion in the comments of the given post considering the Contribution License Agreement with Nokia, which basically hands over your code for commerical usage, though the LGPL allows that already, as far as I know.

As I want to get fit in C++ again, I joined the project and am reading through the governance model currently. As the community is meritocratic and consensus-based, it seems to be compulsive.

Having used Jira previously and played along with git, I am eager to check out gerrit and see the upstream work flow in action, around which Nokia is creating so much buzz. But first, it’s time for emptying the cup.

Python Zen

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:08:00 +0200

Imagine your programming language thought you Zen. Serenity in mind with hardly any effort.

Assuming you have ipython installed, try this in your console:

R@elephantsdream{~]]}:ipython

Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Apr 12 2011, 16:15:16) 
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

IPython 0.10.2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
?         -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features.

%quickref -> Quick reference.
help      -> Python's own help system.

object?   -> Details about 'object'. ?object also works,
?? prints more.

In [1]:import this

And watch the magic! ;–)

Try Python before Project Euler

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:00:00 +0200

After the first initial problems at Project Euler one is faced with quite complex tasks at hand. Imagining that a curious lone wanderer passes by without a deep foundation of tackling any of Project Euler problems, trypython.org might be a good start.

However there are also other nice alternative programming languages worth checking out.

ascii-art

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:15:02 +0200

Remember the moment you discovered ascii-art? It brought creativity back to the console in my eyes. And now there is:

www.asciiflow.com

to bring back this moment to flowcharts I miss in my vim sessions.

Project Euler

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 23:08:00 +0200

Just a few days ago I stumbled over Project Euler, which is a set of problems, one can use to learn a new programming language. After signing up one even get’s a box to fill with answers with not a single solution given!

My current one is (Problem 3):

The prime factors of 13195 are 5, 7, 13 and 29.

What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143 ?

This really got me jazzed!

Hello World!

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:51:00 +0200

Markdown-ing the compulsive “Hello World!”:

in C#:

using System;

public class HelloWorld
{
    public static void Main()
   {
      Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
   }
}

in Delphi:

procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
  Caption := 'Hello World!';
end

and most beautifully in python:

print "Hello World!"