Know Your Place

Stumbled Upon this from GraphJam:
Oh ya! Go Pink!

Creepy or No?

Seen while driving around Toronto today:
Creepy or no? Pedophile anyone?

EDIT: Though as a friend pointed out 18 is legal, but this is still creepy.

Ubuntu CPU Scaling Annoyance

I have a dual boot Windows XP/Ubuntu 9.04 thing going on. I mostly sit in windows, for a variety of reasons I won't get into, but every so often will drop into Ubuntu. I started this in school where all of our assignments were compiled and run on linux and so it was just safer (and easier) for me to use linux when working from home.

Now, Ubuntu has a nice CPU scaler, allowing you to set your CPU to different speeds to save power and such. The only problem for me is that whenever I reboot into Windows, whatever the CPU was scaled to at Ubuntu shutdown sticks. I sometimes boot into Windows and fine myself with only a 1 Ghz processor because I forgot to crank it up before shutdown. The is made worse by the fact that "Ondemand" appears to be default scale setting.

So, I decided to try and change the default. A tad annoying since most references I found were to changing the gconf "apps->gnome-power-manager->cpufreq" setting, a setting which apparently no longer exists. So I spent a fair bit of time on this problem, getting a little annoyed. Surely someone else dual boots and has this happen? I eventually hit upon someone who wrote a script he ran at startup to change it:

echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

I was about ready to do this, even though I thought it was ridiculous that I had to, until I decided that something had to be setting it to ondemand at startup and scanned through the files in "/etc/init.d". Sure enough I find one call "ondemand" which contained this:

for CPUFREQ in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
do
[ -f $CPUFREQ ] || continue
echo -n ondemand > $CPUFREQ
done

Finally! Getting rid of this file fixed the problem. So, if any one else is as stuck and confused as I was, there it is.

Our Best Testing Indicates

My fiancee recently sent me a few choice selections of English responses handed in by her students. The first:

Reasons why fast food shouldn't be banned from being near school as written by a young ESL learner.

1. In order for the children to eat fast food because from is in order to eat a school lunch.

2. The map which will be to the place where the plague fast food store is dangerous in if is in order not to know.

3. Plague fast food the children make eat plentifully and is because making become.

I think this one must be a result of an automated online translator. I really can't fathom how else it could be quite this mangled. My one co-workers response: "I hope she gave him an A, because that just blew my mind. Way to go young learner!"

And next:

Q: What might happen if all of the forest are cut down? How might this change our planet?

A: Maybe in 2050 we can live in Mars. So we plan trees and flowers. We live in there. Government make don't cut trees rule in Mars. And we are not spend school supplier.

Awesome. Mars? Wow, where did that come from? I like though that the English, while not correct, is understandable...till the end at least. I think my friend Alex said it best:

Hah! I actually really like that. It shows a level of thinking ahead and depth of thought which you might not expect :p

The school supplier part has me stumped though.

As amusing as this is, the best though is this post a Korean ESL teacher forum wherein a native English speaking ESL teacher complains that his Korean teacher "incorrectly" corrected him in front of the class:

but she said this sentence is wrong....
"The most fast land animal is the cheetah."

Nice. This sparked off a rather ridiculous thread, that's probably not worth reading, but I will post the first response only because I still can't tell if the poster is serious or sarcastic:

Well, in academic English, which is the dialect of English that we are teaching, it is wrong. Poor form to correct your co-teacher in front of class, however.

Come on, that has to be sarcastic, right? The "Academic English" dialect? Poor form to correct a teacher in front of the class? I feel like this needs to be sarcasm, but sadly I don't think it is.

The Future Mac

New Mac vs. PC commercial. In this one, PC travels to the future, 2150, to see if PCs are now more stable. Sadly, it turns out they aren't. But really, you can spin these commericals in any way you choose. What find more interesting are these:

1. PCs seem to have vastly superior technology than Macs, with the ability to time travel. In fact, not only does the Mac lack this technology, but he seems surprised at its mere existance. Clearly inferior.
2. Apparently in the year 2150, Macs still have such a low percentage of the market share that they still must contend with PCs in these commercials. Further, Apple has yet to come up with a new innovative advertising campaign, instead relying on the same old format used since 2006.

Hotdocs

Hotdocs, Toronto's yearly documentary film festival, has been running for this past week. Hot docs offers this awesome late night pass which, for only $10, lets you into all 9 of the late night showings at the Bloor Cinema. I think it was a good buy. I saw several of the films that I wanted to see, as well as a couple that were awesome but I would have never gone too otherwise. There were a few bad ones though; Wednesday's showing had a large number of people walk out during the first half hour.

But, overall an excellent experience. The only real drawback was the fact that I only got 4 hours a night of sleep during the week. I somehow remained productive at work though, so it was all good.

The late night pass is a button! How awesome is that?

We were talking about our favourites last night so I've decided to rank the 8 films I've seen as of this posting:

1. Best Worst Movie - Troll 2, worst movie ever = awesomeness
2. The Wild Hearts - Danish moped club, lots of young male nudity
3. The Yes Men Fix the World - Two guys pose as corporate spokespersons telling it like it should be.
4. Soulwax: Part of the Weekend Never Dies - Electro-punkumentary
5. Ascension - Soviet space program footage
6. Graphic Sexual Horror - About insex.com
7. Grass - A film about the US drug war against marijuana
8. Aka Ana - About Japanese sex workers. This was Wednesday's show

I have to say, Best Worst Movie was awesome. I highly recommend it if you ever get a chance to see it. Hell, I say buy the DVD as soon as it's out.

The Wild Hearts was very fun. Perhaps a little too much drunken Danish male nudity, but fun.

Soulwax was not a film with a plot of narrative. It simple tried to show the audience a Soulwax experience. It was awesome for it's editing. The cuts and interweaving of countless shows was pretty cool.

Anyway, Hotdocs was a good week.

UPDATE: Best Worst Movie scored #4 in the Top 10 Audience Picks. (From Michael Stephenson's Twitter stream)