Happy Belated Canada Day

Wow, It's July 2nd, I'm back at work and not eating French Cuisine at my boss' expense. Oh Dominion Day, how do you oppress me so?

Seriously Montreal was great. I saw Lyndon LaRouche people. Seriously
Hmm.... Not much to say other than remarkably the country is still intact as I attempted to speak French. Perhaps attempted and speak aren't the words I should use... Something alongside of unmitigated disaster might suffice.

Anyways, I is happy and tired and had a good time a presenting and eating and working. My boss gave me more work which isn't good, but I got a few days rest after the conference.

Hmmm. Not much else I can say, other than hope everyone is having a good time as I am,

His Grace

Woo hoo

So, my boss decided that I should go to another conference in an undisclosed location that is totally not Montreal and, well, I am flying there this evening.

Yes I am presenting. Yes I am still very pretty.

Oh and I had to apply for some funding for it, in which I had to write reasons why the University should help pay for my trip. And for some reason I couldn't just write "give me a free trip to Montreal on St Jean Baptist weekend" and leave it at that.

So I'm excited and experiencing delusions of grandeur. And this technically counts as work or perhaps better as a working vacation.

I must have poutine... Of course, if I eat too much, I'll never want to leave

His Grace

Sunday Funnies

The above just rocks.

That is all.

His Grace

Know-it-all

Sometimes, the burden of being as awesome as I am*

It was an interesting day at work when a friend of mine stopped by my office to totally not distract me from my job or anything. He was working on a philosophy paper for a summer course he was taking. And he was like "Do you, your Grace, know anything about Philosophy?"

And I was like "Well I took an introductory course on it ten years ago?"

And he was like "Well can you tell me how it is useful? That's the question we have to answer."

And I was like "Hmmm it's bull-poopie time"

The sad thing is that my answer, how ethics are based on philosophical underpinnings and philosophy's ability to let you look at many sides of an argument can help a person grapple with complex moral issues, was apparently very useful.

So here I am, expert** at everything again...

Probably get a C for my efforts,

His Grace

*really, I am like THIS [holds hands five inches apart] awesome

**no, not really.

A good idea

This is a great idea.

Corel® Home Office is a sleek new office suite for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation projects. Designed for the work you do at home, it features a fresh and simple interface with tabbed toolbars for quick navigation. Corel Home Office is easy to learn and use, compatible with Microsoft® Office*, and available at a fraction of the price of other leading office software.

Now, I am forced to use Microsoft Office because well, it is standard. Now luckily because of a really nice program by Redmond, I get the full version at a tenth of the price. But if you are a parent and just need something for the kids school and to occasionally write a document or need to open that spreadsheet the local curling club sent you, (assuming it does what it says it does) for $80 bucks that ain't bad. Home and Student version of office is $150.

Now I know people will ask me, what about openoffice? What about Symphony? Well I do like their products, but at least from the brief tour I have taken, it looks like Corel Home Office looks a heck of a lot like Word/Office. Which is nice for a learning curve. Most people learn computers that way and are shocked and dismayed when the newest version/thingy changes every process they've learned.

Assuming that Corel Home Office is actually a decent product and fulfils the needs of its target audience, then it's a great idea, especially given the contraction of people's wallets.

Corel want to give me free copy to demo for my blog of two readers? (I do own Corel Wordperfect Suite X3, X4 so you wouldn't be losing money)

His Grace

Wow I need an ego trip.

So, for those of you who follow the blog, you may realize that I am actually at the low end of the totem pole in terms of Acadamia, but I am a research assistant, well, all year round. Woo hoo, I have a job that is cushy, irrelevant and pays well better than minimum wage. And I have actually been asked to use facebook while on the job.

Anyways, the other day a fellow research student who is working on projects unrelated to me, let's call him Prince Caspian, had a weird problem invovling the calculation division of large factorials MOD n.

For those of you not in mathematics, factorials are explained here. Long and short of it is they can become very big numbers quickly. (10! is 3,628,800). Of course you also need to know what mod is, so look here. It's a remainder operator, so 7 mod 3 is 1. 18 mod 2 is 0. 17 mod 5 is 2.

Anyways, he had a big number / another big number mod some other big number.

Needless to say this is hard to program since as I said 10! is in the millions. It's easy to get big. Now the nice thing about the mod operator is that for addition and multiplication are operation preserving.

Thus (a * b) mod n = a mod n * b mod n... and (a + b) mod n = a mod n + b mod n. Hurray, abstract algebra! Everyone rejoice.

Why am I telling you this? Because if I have a big number * another big number mod some third big number, then I can take the "a big number" mod it by some third big number and get a smaller number and then multiply it by the smaller number produced by taking "another big number" mod "some third big number" and I get an equivalent result.

Huh?

OK, take (5 * 7) mod 3. 5 * 7 is 35... 3 * 11 = 33, so 35 mod 3 = (33 + 2) mod 3 = 2 mod 3. 5 mod 3 is clearly 2. (1*3 + 2 = 5) and 7 mod 3 is 1 (2*3 + 1= 7). This is a very useful property because if we have bigger numbers, we can mod them first and get smaller numbers, which our computers can then handle. Thus if I want to calculate n! *(2n)! mod n, I only need to calculate n! mod n and (2n)! mod n rather than the whole huge number.

OK, I sorta kinda get your fun lunacy... Wooo hoo math is fun, but you were talking division, what then?

Well, mod n has a neat property in that if n is prime or that if for any x mod n the greatest common divisor of x and n is 1, then x mod n will have an inverse.

You lost me

Well, yes... This is abstract algebra. Everyone hates it. But think of division as the reverse of multiplication 1/7 * x is the reverse of multiplying x by 7. In modular multiplication, if the gcd of x and n are 1, then there exists some number b between 1 and n such that b * x = 1.

ok, I don't understand but so how is this useful?

Well if we are calculating "a big number" / "some other big number" mod n, if we could convert it to multiplication we could write it as "a big number" mod n * "some other big number" mod n... both of which would be nicer smaller numbers to work with.

OK, but how do we do that?

Well if the GCD of "some other big number" and n is 1 then some other big number has an inverse in the ring of integers n. so 1/"some other big number" mod n can be written as "some inverse of another big number mod n."

Huh?

Let's try and do this with small numbers. Say I have 2 / 3 mod 5... 3*7 = 21 mod 5 is 1, therefore 1/3 = 7 mod 5. thus 2/3 mod 5 = 2* 7 mod 5 = 2 mod 5 * 2 mod 5 = 4.

Ok, I have no idea what you did there, but I'm assuming you are actually sane today so that the above works, what is the point of this story anyways?

Well, the point is that my method allows for the calculation of the big number / another big number mod n for really big certain numbers. And my other point is that I came up with this last week, and worked on it with Prince Caspian in my spare time, even though I am an edumakation researcher. The neat thing is that the prof he's working with on this told him TODAY to use the method that I a lowly undergraduate came up with.

So you wrote this incredibly long winded post which defies comprehension merely to gloat about how you came up with the same thing a prof did for a mathematics problem?

Yes... and was told by Prince Caspian "I think we know where you're going."

Smartypants...

His Grace.

Computer Issues

Well, Vista service pack 2 came out a little while ago. Like any computer geek, I wanted to try it out right away... I downloaded the standalone version and attempted to install it. Instead, it gave me an element not found error. I searched the interwebs, attempting to fix the issue, but none of the things that were mentioned, which included disabling my antivirus worked.

So Microsoft offered free support for me to deal with this, so I decided to take them up on it. My guess was something was corrupted and perhaps the best thing was just to wait and reformat/reinstall on the weekend, pain as that is.

Reformating/Reinstalling is always a pain for anyone. The advantage I have over most people is that when I do it, I a) don't have to pay someone to do it and b) I can save my data unless there is a damaged hard disk in play. The worst thing about it is it just simply takes time to back up all the data, reinstall windows, install all the updates, install the service packs, install your security programs, install device drivers, install the other programs you use, restore your data and then tweak everything so it is how you want it.

For me, it usually takes about 1-2 evenings to get a working environment and then a week to get everything back so (or in a new so, in case I feel like experimenting).

Anyways, I thought I'd test out the Microsoft Tech support... They had online chat and took my computer over from me from India. They did a bunch of things, and couldn't fix the issue, so they promised a real technician would call me.

So he did. And he told me to uninstall sp1... And I went to installed updates to do so and couldn't find it... And he was flustered and thought it would be there. He kept pressing me to do this though so I went and found manual uninstall commands from the internet here... And I did so, though I was a bit worried about how he was explaining that Vista was corrupt and b) things were behaving a bit weirdly. So I decided to trust him... command executed, reboot and, well, black screen explaining that windows could not boot.

I attempted to use my Vista cd to repair windows, but it reported that it could not do that. He asked me to attempt a system restore, but that was a'screwy anyways. His final recommendation was that I should reformat/reinstall, which at 9:15 pm was not going to do, seeing as it would take another day and I had work in the morning.

Honestly it wasn't the tech's fault, though I remain convinced that I knew as much as he did. I'm just annoyed that he couldn't have given me options in the beginning... it was only at the end that he was like "can you get a SP1 CD?" and recognized that I might have a clue as to what I was doing.

It's not his fault that 99% of the people he deals with aren't screwy. I just wish that there was some sort of aptitude test I could pass so that I could get flagged as someone who has a clue of what to do. It would save headaches. "Hi, it's not working" "K windows is corrupt, can you get your hands on a sp1 cd? Otherwise you'll have to attempt to uninstall sp1 and if that doesn't work reformat/reinstall" That would have saved me a couple of hours.

Also, Microsoft, would it KILL you to easily provide ISOs for windows Vista online? I could enter my product key and after registering somehow (.net passport? You use that with dreamspark afterall) I could download it. I'd even pay a small fee if you needed to offset bandwidth costs (or perhaps you could look into private torrent tracker-like technology). I know I can order DVDs, but I asked and they aren't ready yet with SP2. Either that or make it easy to slipstream service packs onto your own Vista dvds... I've tried vlite, but perhaps because of my computer troubles, it didn't seem to take... I could slipstream XP easily though (and yes, I know the technical reasons because of the image like nature of the Vista DVD, how much harder it is... still Microsoft could release a tool that could do it and make your own ISO).

The good news is that my baby is up and running again... And yes SP2 is now installed. I am happy. Now hopefully this version isn't corrupted and that the image I made with Acronis isn't either.

His Grace