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La Côte sauvage
Annabel, her boy-friend, Xiao-Xia, and Xuan-Xuan, and I went
to Amsterdam. We did a canal cruise, some shopping and went to the
Van Gogh Museum.
(On the way going there, I put one step inside bookshop De Slegte.) We saw the "Van Gogh at Work" exhibition. At one point I noticed a painter that looked like one of Monet, and when I came closer, I discovered that it was the painting
La Côte sauvage by Claude Monet. At home I concluded that this
must Wilderstein number 1100. On the way back, I went into
bookshop Selexyz Scheltema, but had to leave
at the moment I saw some interesting books.
Visit of Xiao-Xia and Xuan-Xuan
On Friday, May 31, Xiao-Xia and Xuan-Xuan arrived with flight 345 from China Southern from Beijing. The plane landed at 4:44 AM.
I went to get them by car. Well before eight we arrived in Enschede. In the
morning, we (including Annabel) went to visit
Li-Xia at the nursing home. For Xiao-Xia it was rather
emotional to see her sister after almost three years. But they felt Li-Xia was
better than they had imaged. They asked her many questions, but Li-Xia gave
conflicting answers and it was not very clear if she recognized them for who
they are. She did smile all the time, which might be a sign that she did
recognize them, and that she was happy that they visited her. We also took
Li-Xia on a walk through the building. In the afternoon we rested. For dinner
we went to Sensazia, a wok restaurant. Then I showed them my office and the
first room of Li-Xia on the campus. There we met with the Chinese couple who
also have visited Li-Xia several times in the past year. It was nice for
Xiao-Xia to talk with them, because they too have seen Li-Xia and know
about her condition.
On Saturday, June 1, we took them to the inner city, to see the open air
market, many shops. We had lunch at grillroom Camel, where we often used to
eat doner kebab and falafel. I prepared sauerkraut for dinner and afterwards
we watched some family photos and videos.
On Sunday, June 2 in the afternoon, we celebrated the birhtdays of Li-Xia
(May 27) and Selina (May 29), my niece. Some of my family members arrived
around 2 PM. We had some cake. Around three we went to the nursing home and
stayed in downstairs while I went to get Li-Xia. We had some tea and drinks.
Li-Xia looked a lot at Xuan-Xuan and seemed to avoid looking at Xiao-Xia,
maybe out of embarrassement because she became a little emotional again.
We stayed for about an hour and went home again, were we ate soms snacks
and had a Chinese takeaway dinner.
On Monday, June 3 early in the morning, I took them to the nursing home to be
with Li-Xia when she was having a bath in the special snoezelen room. Xiao-Xia stayed with Li-Xia for all the time. Xuan-Xuan
only took a short peek to see the room. I stayed for the latter part.
Li-Xia was very relaxed, almost sleeping. When she was getting dressed,
Xiao-Xia and I took care for her hair. Back in the living room, Xiao-Xia
dried her hair. In the afternoon we did show shoppings (for presents)
in a local mall. I made cauliflower with steak for dinner.
On Tuesday, June 4, we (including the boyfriend of Annabel) went to
Amsterdam by train. At noon, we took a one hour canal cruise. Then we did
some shopping and walked to the Van Gogh Museum and saw the Van Gogh at Work exhibition.
Xuan-Xuan told me that it was impossible in China to see so many (real)
paintings together. We walked back to the center looking around some
more shops and had dinner at China Sichuan Kitchen. A little spicy, but very authentic Chinese
dishes. Very enjoyable dinner.
On Wednesday, June 5, we did some more shopping (for presents) in the city
and had our lunch at La Place, the restaurant were Annabel now has a
part-time job. In the afternoon, we visited Li-Xia again. We took some
nice pictures with her, one of which is show here on the top. We also took
her on a walk around the building, because the weather was very nice. Then
we went to get Andy from school, who had been on a
three day camping trip. In the evening, I made spaghetti. In the evening, I
show some photo albums to Xiao-Xia and Xuan-Xuan went with Annabel on the old
bike of Li-Xia to get some ice creams.
On Thursday, June 6, we took it quiet. In the afternoon, Xiao-Xia and I
prepared jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) as is a custom on the day before the
departure. Annabel went with Xuan-Xuan to the city for some last shoppings.
In China you are still expected to give presents to your family, friends
and relatives when you have been on a trip, especially abroad. The jiaozi
were nice. Then we went to visit Li-Xia for a last time, leaving Andy
with the boyfriend of Annabel at home. We let Xiao-Xia go in first when
we arrived and Li-Xia responded with surprise when seeing her. This
clearly proves that Li-Xia still recognizes her sister, at least as someone
she knows. We had brought some jiaozi with us, and I helped Li-Xia eating
two of them. Then we had so say goodbey. One of the personel of the nursing home
walked with us to the elevator, and stayed with Li-Xia so that we could
wave to her, while leaving the building. Li-Xia laughed a little before
she turned away. A kind of laughing to hide her sad feeling maybe?
This morning, we got up at six and left just before seven by car to the
airport with the five of us, where we arrived at a quarter to nine. After
cashing some tax refunds we said goodbey at the check-in. They very much
enjoyed their stay in the Netherlands, especially the quiet atmosphere.
To them it felt like a real holiday. They are impressed by the facilities
and the personal of the nursing home and now feel much more at peace with
Li-Xia staying there (and not with them in China). Yet they said goodbey
with mixed feeling, hoping to return in the future. They took
flight 346 from China Southern back to Beijing.
Extreem Luid & Ongelooflijk Dichtbij
I have been analyzing the phone spell in
Extreem Luid & Ongelooflijk Dichtbij, the Dutch translation of
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. It seems that
only the first few sequences, are translated from Enlgish to Dutch. "4, 2, 5,
5, 6" stands for "hallo" (Dutch for "hello"), "2, 3, 6, 5, 4, 5, 4, 3, 8, 3, 2,
4, 8?" stands for "ben jij het echt" (Dutch for "is it really you"), "4, 3, 5,
7" stand for help, "5, 4, 3, 3, 3" stands for "liefde" (Dutch for "love"),
except that it should have been four 3's instead of three, and "3, 6, 6, 3"
stands for "dood" (Dutch for "dead").
The large sequence is just the same, except for a number of small differences,
and the fact that an additional four 'sentences' are added at the end
appearantly to fill up the page, just like in the English version. The small
differences consist of twice an exclamation mark changed into a question mark
(sentence 36 and 38), a question mark changed into a exclamation mark (sentence
58), a two changed in three (sentence 66), a five changed into a three
(sentence 86), and another exclamation mark changed into a question mark
(sentence 118). However, when I verified these differences with my English
copy of the book, I discovered that these were all caused by errors in
the corrected OCR output. Now I will
have to see how these errors affect the rest of the analysis that I performed
earlier on.
Merging in distributed version control
Distributed
version control make use of Optimistic concurrency control and merging. This merging involves conflict
resolution. Distribute version control has many advantages and, of course, also
some disadvantages, one of them being conflict resolution. In case most of the
changes are in the contents of the data and not the structure, as is the case
when it is used for software development, conflict resolution consists of
textual merging of differences. This too can be complex, but in most cases it
is no big problem. However, in cases where there are many changes in the
structure and where there are references between elements (objects) that need
to be kept consistent, things become complex.
An interesting question is whether merging should take into account the history
of changes or not. When not taking into account the history, simply two versions
are compared and the differences need to be resolved. Usually the elements have
a unique identifier and a timestamp that can aid in the process of resolving.
One could also keep track of which elements have been deleted with a timestamp,
to know if elements that are present in one version are newly created elements
or old elements that are deleted in the other version. What this process
actually involves is the reconstruction of a common ancestor version.
Instead reconstructing a common ancestor version, it is also possible to
explicitly keep track of this. In a distributed systems, this means keeping a
log of all changes, where each set of changes is given a unique identifier.
The most simple system would just keep a list of these unique identifiers,
and replace the time-stamp on each element by the unique identifier. Now when
merging two versions, one can determine the newest common change set
identifier and from this see what are the changes made in both versions.
But how should the list of changes of the merged version look like? Should it
incorporate information of the changes made in both versions? If the intermediate
changes are simply discarded and a new change set is created and all the changes
since the common ancestor version are assigned to this new change set, this
leads to the situation that the common ancestors are getting older and older
especially in a distributed environment with many cross merges. Or in other
words, the number of conflicts that need to be resolved are getting larger
and larger.
A better solution seems to keep a collection of change sets and dependencies
between these change sets. Two change sets have a dependency when changing
the order would result in a different final state or when an intermediate
state would violate one of the consistency rules. For example, a change set
which introduces a strong reference to an element, depends on the change set
in which this element is created. When change sets from different versions
are compared it is possible that they have no dependency, in which case
they both can be put into the merged version. But if they have a dependency,
then there is a conflict which needs to be resolved. This can be done in
several ways: either by discarding one (or both) of them or by merging them
into a new change set. Probably this new change set needs to keep a reference
to the original change sets, this in case when the merged change set encounters
one of the other conflicting change sets through a different route at a later
stage. But again, there is no end to the complexity, because after many
merges, the structure of this information can also become very complex. How
much should one remember and how much information is useful. What is the
right balance between having to perform the same merge more than once and
the added complexity of avoiding this.
Moving is swapping
I have been thinking for many years how one would implement semantics
based locking with respect to moving elements in an ordered collection.
A practical example of this is when two people are moving parts of text
around in a document, under what rules can these be merged, such that
both find that the changes they have made are not applied correctly.
This afternoon, I realized that moving an element should be seen as
swapping of the element and all intermediate elements. Two swappings
commute when either their outer ranges do not overlap or when one of
the swappings is completely inside one of the two inner ranges of the
other swapping. Of course, when both users perform several swappings,
things become a little more complicated, but I believe that all
situations can be covered with the basic principle. Also operations
as adding and removing elements can be integrated.
(Improvement)
This evening, I went to see Star Trek Into
Darkness at Cinestar Wolff together with a colleague. Before the break a
felt that the movie was a little far fetched, but afterwards I concluded that
this was indeed a great movie and a good sequel of the previous one. It made me laugh less, but it still had a very good
balance between drama, action and humor.
Calendar and zen
At 13:35, I bought the calendar Van Gogh 2013 by Allaluna from bookshop Broekhuis for
€ 2.50 as a gift to Annabel because
it has one of her favourite paintings by Van Gogh, The Starry Night.
At 13:50, I bought the book Osho: Zen en de religeuze
ongelovige (translated from the English Osho: Nirwana, The last nightmare
by Prem Abhay and Willem Pronk) by Osho, ISBN:9789059801110 from booshop De Slegte for € 3.49. I found this outside in the last
copies stand which are sold with 50% reduction.
Corrected copy analysis
After, I recently found some errors in the the corrected OCR output of large sequence of phone spell in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I have
made some corrections to the copy analysis I did presented on August 15, 2011. For most the corrections are minor, with the exception
that I am quite sure now that the sentences 34 to 39 are copied from sentences
44 to 49. Below the correct analysis with the changed lines made bold, and
with the an additional line covering the additional numbers given in the
Dutch translation to fill up the page. Maybe the translators have been given
the instructions to fill up the page with some random part taken from the
rest of the sequence.
- S1 is '696263473543258626345878277483328843247767846333863463673465357!'.
- S2 is '6432267425638726343?'.
- S3 is '5763' and S1[13-48] with 1 mutations.
- S4 is S3[25-34].
- S5-S7 is copy of S1.45-S3.24 with 3 mutations.
- S8 is S1[25-58] with 4 mutations and S1[25-58] with 7 mutations.
- S9 is '526265952?'.
- S10 is first 27 of S1 with 8 mutations and '42552924526'.
- S11 is '42' and S10[3-36] with 5 mutations.
- S12 is S11, '472272', and S8[52-66] with 2 mutations.
- S13-S21 is copy of S4-S12 with 15 mutations, "love?" inserted before S7, and
S8.30-S10.23 replaced by '!'.
- S22 is '65557!' (or end of S5 with 1 mutation).
- S23 is first 11 of S6 with one mutation and '526'.
- S24 is S20[15-19] with '?'.
- S25 is '5765', end of S20 with 1 mutation (S20 = S11), '455652', and S21[21-27].
- S26 is S25[25-32].
- S27 is "love?".
- S28 is S3 with 9 mutations (or S13 with 3 mutations and start S14).
- S29 is S28[25-36].
- S30 is "love?".
- S31 is "love?".
- S32 is "love!".
- S33 is first 28 of S20 with 2 mutations, '4524', and last 22 of S7.
- S34-S39.7 is copy of S44-S49.7.
- S39.5-S43 is copy of S8.27-S12.
- S44-50 is copy of S22-S26 where "!love?" is inserted before S25.30.
- S51-S52 is copy of S10.28-S11.7 (or S19.6-S20.7) terminated with '!'.
- S53 is copy of S28.
- S54-58 is copy of S13-S17.
- S59-S66.30 is copy of S21-S28.30.
- S66.31-S72.4 is copy of S49.6-S55.4 where S51-52 is replaced by '6545!45?'.
- S72.5-S78 is copy of S6.6-S12.
- S79-S85 is copy of S44-S50.
- S86-S90.5 is copy of S14.5-S19.5 where '!' at the end of S14 is replaced by ','.
- S90.6-S103 is copy of S72.5-S85.
- S93-S118 is copy of S40-65.
- S119-S124 is a copy of S28-S33.
- S125-S129 is a copy of S92-S97 with S94.8-S95.24 replaced by '5652465552'
(which is the end of S116, S102, S84, S63, S49, or S25).
- S130-S133 is a copy of S39.8-S42.3
Non-verbal communication
Earlier this week something happened that made me aware again, that my
social skills, especially with respect to non-verbal communication, are
below average. I often feel insecure in social contexts that I am not
familiar with, afraid that I will interpret some signal wrong or to
say or do something that is improper. I am sometime well aware that
others communicate on a different level (in a different manner) but I
find it hard to compensate for this. I know that I am able to imagine
what others must be feeling and to realize that they have a different
point of view. But I have to admit that often this does require some
thinking from my side, and that the insight sometimes only comes
afterwards. Sometimes, I am even able to make clever observation, and
there are definitely people that are close to me that I can read very
well. I came across the articles Activation of the fusiform gyrus when individuals with autism spectrum
disorder view faces and Abnormal Activation of the Social Brain During Face Perception in
Autism by Nouchine Hadjikhani (in collaboration with others), that explain how
people with autism and a normal intelligence do process faces in a normal
way but that something goes wrong in the higher level processing, and
that this leaves room for training. It is also possible that people with
high functional autism (and/or Asperger's Syndrome)
are simply slower at learning to read and/or respond to non-verbal signals
in faces and body language. I wonder how this is equivalent to a very
introvert brain that is more focued on internal signals (often in the form
of day dreaming) than external signals.
Art?
These are (processed) close-up pictures of a painting that Andy brought home recently.
Polare
I brought a short visit to the bookshop
that I have visited most often (so far), because today it name has changed
from De Slegte into Polare. This after the shops merged
last December with the Selexyz shops.
These too have been rebranded into Polare, which means that many of the
shops that I have listed on my bookshops page
are no named Polare. I have decided to keep the old names in the title
as a reference. The name Polare is derived from "Stella polare", Latin
for Polaris, the
current pole star. I find it sad that the name De Slegte has
officially disappeared, but I think it will still be used for a long time
in a colloquial way.
8 by 10 solutions
In the past four weeks, I found all solutions for the Chinese Wooden Puzzle for the white and orange pieces and two of the
four other possible pieces within a 8 by 10 frame using five pieces for
each colour. Below a table is given with the numbers. One could conclude
that the green and red pieces are difficult and the blue pieces are easy
in use. The solutions (except for the two combinations with the largest
number of solutions) are given on the page Chinese
Wooden Puzzles in 8 by 10.
Remark: On November 18,
2015 I discovered that these numbers are incorrect, too low probably in
most cases.)
USB 3.0 card
Early today, I installed a two port USB 3.0 PCI express card in the
johan PC. I bought this
card yesterday together with a
500GB Seagate external drive which supports USB 3.0.
This months interesting links
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