Terminally Incoherent

Most Lost fans would agree that the last few episodes were top notch. Lost was getting back on track with interesting storyline, action, mystery and answers. They are back, we said! They really got the spark back, and the show will be totally awesome from now on. No more stupid filer episodes where we get no answers, and the plot doesn’t even move an inch!

And then they pull the Nicky and Paulo episode on us. For those of you who don’t watch Lost, let me explain you. Nicky and Paulo are sort of like the Jar Jar of Lost. They were introduced in season 3 and the writers just decided to work them into the story using “they were here since season 1 - it’s just that they didn’t really do anything meaningful”.

This weeks episode was essentially an attempt to retcon these two into the core Lost continuity. So we saw flashbacks of them “injected” into the original footage the plane crash site on day one. We saw them listening to Jack’s speech re: cave. They also interacted with Ethan, and Dr. Artz (or whatever his name was) - another retcon character introduced in season 2 for the sole purpose of blowing him up with the Black Rock dynamite to illustrate it’s potency.

Let me break this down for you:

“Oh, hai, we’ve been here all along” is totally lame.

“Look at me, I’m at the crash site standing next to that guy who is gonna get sucked into the engine turbine” is so lame that I actually laughed while watching it.

Retcons are absolutely the worst tools in the TV writer toolbox, because let’s face it. When you retcon something into existence, you are just fucking with us. We know Nicky and Paulo were not there in season 1 and 2. We spent hours carefully dissecting all these episodes, looking for clues, easter eggs, references, links and etc. Lost fans are meticulous bunch who finds meaningful clues in everything. Now you are asking us all to just go along and pretend Nicky and Paulo were there all along?

I’m sorry but this is just wrong. They should have known better than that. We all half-expected them to be Others anyway. Having Nicky and Paulo outed as Other spies would be more plausible than artificially injecting them into the storyline.

Not to mention that this episode was just a filler. Nothing happened. Let me summarize for you the events from this episode that may actually have some impact on the future.

Spoilers below, highlight to read:

Other than that, nothing happened. It was all retcon work, and some flashback scenes from Nicky and Paulo’s life.

I hereby nominate this episode for the Worst Lost Episode Ever award. It is a complete throwaway. If you decide to miss just one episode this season, miss this one. In fact, I think they we should convince them not to put it on S3 DVD’s at all. The sooner we forget this monstrous abomination of an episode the better.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Lost. I just hate Nicky and Paule. And Jar Jar. Fortunately, the ending of the episode suggests that we hopefully won’t be seeing much of these two in the future episodes.

Note: I wanted to put an image of Nicky and Paulo in this post for reference but they suck so badly that Google image search can’t find them, and the only google hits for them are from message board posts where people discuss how lame and irrelevant their characters are.

If you visited this site in the last 2 hours you might have encountered the default wordpress database error message. My host was experiencing some issues tonight, and while the server where all my files live stayed up, the database machine went down. Hence, no blog in the last few hours.

Those of you who subscribe to my /dev/random feed probably saw this notification already. I also twittered about it.

Sorry for the downtime.

I just realized that not everyone has an online presence. For example, if you google me by either by my full name, or one of my online handles you will get bunch of hits. First of them are usually this website, from which you can find links to all other kinds of stuff related to me. Users of myspace and facebook can also fine me with relative ease. I’m also on twitter, flickr and etc…

I’m a fairly private person, and I never really post about my private life on any website or social network. Sometimes I do rant about clueless users, or annoying people I know - these are the kinds of things I don’t mind sharing. But even then I usually avoid using real names, specific locations and etc..

But I do have an online presence, and if someone wanted to know what I’m up to, they could easily find this website, check out my pictures on myspace, flicker and facebook, and follow me on twitter. In fact I had some people I lost touch with long time ago will sometimes randomly find me on one of these networks and send me a note. Which is really nice. The one good thing about all these social networks is that you can find people this way and reconnect with them.

Sometimes I forget that not everyone has this kind of online presence. If you can’t be googled, you are not on myspace or facebook and you don’t participate in any other social networks, you are essentially dead to the world. This might be a good thing if you are in a witness protection program of some sort. But having some sort of minimal presence out there really pays off in the end.

I’m not saying everyone should divulge their deepest secrets in their blog or journal. I’m just saying that having your name indexed by google, and pointing to a valid site with your contact info is usually a good thing.

Of course posting to much of your shit online might not be good either - seeing how recruiters now do research on potential candidates online. If your facebook page has 600+ pictures of your drunker debaucheries it will probably count against you. But if on the other hand it includes a link to your different projects it might actually work in your benefit.

I think I lost my train of thought here. I’m not sure anymore what point I was trying to make here. I guess it is this: a positive online presence is a good thing - the benefits outweigh the potential risks, and apparent loss of privacy.

Thoughts? What do you think are the pros and cons of having some sort of online presence, versus completely flying below the radar?

The output of some of the tests I do in my research produces pages upon pages of log files detailing what is happening to my data. This was very useful during debugging, and now it just helps me to gather and analyze data about the test runs. Since the actual output is human
readable, I usually need to extract the data itself out of the log files using few simple awk scripts. What I end up with are basic files with a single numeric value on each line. I graph these files using gnuplot.

Sometimes the stuff I want to graph is spread over several files that need to be merged. I’m posting this here because the other day saw someone opening bunch of these files and copying them one by one into Star Office spreadsheet to make a composite graph of all the data. Ugh…

That is way to much work. Not even mentioning that Star Office takes like a full minute to open, while flashing you with some ugly splash screen. I hate fucking splash screens. But I digress. There is a much simpler and easier way of merging simple list files on the command line.

Let’s assume we have two files. Our first file will look like this:

file111
11
111
1
111
1
111
11

Our second file (file2) will be tab delimited list looking like this:

file222 3333
222 33
2 3
2222 33333
22 333
2 3333
222

We want to merge them both and create a file with three columns. How do you do it? There is nothing simpler than using the unix paste command:

$paste file1 file2 > file3

The output of this will look as follows:

file311 22 3333
11 222 33
111 2 3
1 2222 33333
111 22 333
1 2 3333
111 222
11

There is one small issue that you need to watch out for - when you “paste” together two files with different rows (lines), you need to be really careful. For example, see what happens when I do the following:

$paste file2 file1 > file4

The output will look like this:

file422 3333 11
222 33 11
2 3 111
2222 33333 1
22 333 111
2 3333 1
222 111
11

Note how in the last row, the value ended up in the second column instead of the third. This is because paste doesn’t actually know about columns. It just glues together all the lines from the input files and puts tab in between them. You have to remember this little caveat when you paste together many files.

The quick workaround here is to put the “bigger” file as the first one in the command, and thus making it appear as the leftmost column. It’s probably best to pad the smaller file with an appropriate number of tabs. For example if one of your files has 25 more lines than the other one you can do:

for i in `seq 1 25`; do echo -e '\t' >> file2; done

This might be enough to make paste to do what you want it to do. For safety, paste to standard output first, before you write it to a file to make sure it looks right.

Oh, and if you messed up the loop, you can easily delete all the blank lines at the end with vim. Open the file, and type in \^\n\|^\t and hit enter to find the first line that either starts with a newline or a tab. Then press dG to delete everything below that line.

I bought a new memory stick. I kinda did it on a whim - I saw a tiny 2GB one on amazon for $14 so I just bought it. I got it in today, and it is actually even smaller than I expected. It’s essentially the size of a stick of Trident Gum:

It’s amazing how easy is to hide this thing somewhere. I think this would be a perfect vector for smuggling some top secret data out of a top secret facility.

I lined it up against some of my old flash memory sticks and took this picture:

The big black one with the strap is an old 64 MB device that came with my Dell laptop back in the dark ages. The silver one is 256 MB. You can see that it is really worn down from being carried in my pocket all the time. The new one looks really flimsy and brittle next to these two.

I’m kinda afraid that I will break it or loose it. I put the strap on it so that I don’t forget to pull it out of the machine after use. I plopped it in my wallet for safe keeping. I’m kinda afraid to carry it in my pocket - it looks like it could break easily.