Gnosis

"All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they find the time. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because accomplishing these tasks is a way of not doing something more important.
...
At this point, the observant reader may feel that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This clears the way to accomplish several apparently less urgent, but eminently achievable, tasks. And virtually all procrastinators also have excellent skills at self-deception -- so what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the effects of another?"

"We need to refocus out energies not on producing the most highly-qualified generation in history, but the most highly skilled and highly satisfied. Only then can we really start to change the world."

Configuring recent versions of toirtoise SVN to work with non-standard ports is a bit tricky. I tried editing the “subversion config file” through Settings->General->Edit, to using an ssh command line, like the one I’m using on Linux for the same repository, but that didn’t work.

A quick hack-style solution is to go to TortoiseSVN->Settings->Network and [...]

Continue Reading on my Blog→

http://michail.flouris.net/2011/10/using-tortoisesvn-with-svnssh-tunnel-over-non-standard-ports/

A VM disk image in Virtual Box (version 4.0.6) can be cloned using the command line “VBoxManage” tool with the “clonehd” command. Unfortunately, cloning a VM that already has a registered UUID in Virtual Box fails like that:

#> ‘C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe’ clonehd .\MyVM.vdi .\NewVM.vdi

VBoxManage.exe: error: Cannot register the hard disk ‘C:\VMs\MyVM.vdi’ {601b44ed-a301-45a7-8b17-9b2185040a1e} [...]

Continue Reading in my Blog →

http://michail.flouris.net/2011/11/virtualbox-vm-disk-clone-uuid-problem/

"Ever since the advent of graduate school, students have complained about their advisers. It is almost an article of faith. The adviser is never available or is too available; gives too much feedback or not enough; is too critical or isn't providing enough direction; and so on. Exchanging horror stories with other students is a great way to bond. But advising goes both ways — and if, after careful reflection on their own studies and progress, students determine that they are not getting the guidance they require, they must address the deficiencies."

"You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own."

"The Tau Manifesto is dedicated to the proposition that the proper response to “π is wrong” is “No, really.” And the true circle constant deserves a proper name. As you may have guessed by now, The Tau Manifesto proposes that this name should be the Greek letter τ (tau)."

[This article is a re-post from Michail's personal blog]

Today I solved the problem of properly indenting my Python code with my favorite editor (Vim 7.2).

I've had this issue for some time, because I had tuned Vim for writing in C/C++, which of course proves quite annoying when trying to write Python code (no braces darling!).

Googling the issue I came up with the article "Indenting Python with VIM" which proves quite useful, but unfortunately did not work out of the box for me.

The issue was that the "ftplugin" solution suggested in the article was not enabled on my Vim. After some searching I found out that I should enter the following commands in my .gvimrc:

"enable filetype plugin and indentation
filetype plugin on
filetype indent on

After that the settings in ~/.vim/ftplugin/python.vim and ~/.vim/indent/python.vim (downloaded from http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=974) script files worked as described.

Problem solved. Now let's write some code!

http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?page_id=193

"Really, we should think of ideas as connections,in our brains and among people. Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters."

"Kelly: I think there are a lot of ideas today that are ahead of their time. Human cloning, autopilot cars, patent-free law—all are close technically but too many steps ahead culturally. Innovating is about more than just having the idea yourself; you also have to bring everyone else to where your idea is. And that becomes really difficult if you’re too many steps ahead.

Johnson: The scientist Stuart Kauffman calls this the “adjacent possible.” At any given moment in evolution—of life, of natural systems, or of cultural systems—there’s a space of possibility that surrounds any current configuration of things. Change happens when you take that configuration and arrange it in a new way. But there are limits to how much you can change in a single move."