Acrobat's Terrible PDF Renderer

Honestly, I cannot get over how terrible the PDF rendering is in Adobe Acrobat vs Apple's Preview.app:

Adobe's rendering (ignore the comment) -- Note the jagged edgiest, the varying width arrows, the bizarre aliasing artifacts. 

Nice smooth, even lines. Nice rendering of fonts, no aliasing etc. 

It's embarrassing that Adobe of all people can't seem to get PDF rendering looking good. I don't know what magic Apple is using, but for this diagram, their rendering is an order of magnitude more faithful to what I actually drew.

Finished

So I defended my thesis yesterday. Let me tell you, it was surprisingly anticlimactic. Once it's done, no confetti streams from the ceiling. Just some handshakes and a few smiles.

The ride into the thesis defence looked something like this:

Well, I suppose I haven't quite hit the exit.. I'm presuming here that nothing is going to drive my stress levels sky high. 

The stress levels started climbing as I rushed to finish my thesis for submission to my committee. Then there were the three weeks while I waited for the defence itself. The start of that period found my stress levels dropping, right up until I started preparing my presentation. 

Preparing a good presentation is an art form. I've had a lot of inspiration from watching my supervisor master presentations, and I took a lot of his techniques in order to try to keep the thesis presentation interesting and lively.  Managed to get a few laughs during the presentation, which broke tension and kept me going. 

I was pretty happy with the presentation that happened. I realized at the time there were a few points I needed to cover, and managed to weave them in on the fly largely OK. Aside from a few tongue trip ups, I felt like it went smoothly.

The defence was largely cordial, and I felt like I answered the questions with a good amount of confidence (and correctness). 

Then it was done. 

I suppose at this point I have my masters, barring the needed revisions. Still, it feels very anti-climactic. I wonder if this is just me; I didn't feel nearly as much stress about the defence as I had felt stress about the presentation -- so perhaps in my head I'd already written off the degree as a foregone conclusion.

My master's was a huge amount of work, and I'm very proud of what I accomplished. It was a struggle at points, and there were certainly times where I felt like giving up might have been the best option. Yet I did it. I finished it up. Maybe I just wish there has been some fireworks (just kidding). 

The final piece of my graduation timeline drawn on the whiteboard in my office. Everything else was erased as it was accomplished. Yet, I won't be wearing a mortar this year, as I plan to miss my convocation. 

Nerd Culture is broken

Your Princess Is In Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement and Nerds: A great article by Arthur Chu.

I think for me, this is a disheartening reminder that nerd culture is broken. It’s been broken for a long time, but it is broken. Its ascendency in the culture has perhaps made things worse, not better.

I remember being the guy who had the entitlement. Who wondered why the girls ignored me, the nice guy. I remember the books and stories that told me that I could get the girl if only she'd notice me.

I still see the culture soaked in this.

Read Chu's post. His final quote resonates strongly with me:

We are not the lovable nerdy protagonist who’s lovable because he’s the protagonist. We’re not guaranteed to get laid by the hot chick of our dreams as long as we work hard enough at it. There isn’t a team of writers or a studio audience pulling for us to triumph by “getting the girl” in the end. And when our clever ruses and schemes to “get girls” fail, it’s not because the girls are too stupid or too bitchy or too shallow to play by those unwritten rules we’ve absorbed.

It’s because other people’s bodies and other people’s love are not something that can be taken nor even something that can be earned—they can be given freely, by choice, or not.

We need to get that. Really, really grok that, if our half of the species is ever going to be worth a damn. Not getting that means that there will always be some percent of us who will be rapists, and abusers, and killers. And it means that the rest of us will always, on some fundamental level, be stupid and wrong when it comes to trying to understand the women we claim to love.

What did Elliot Rodger need? He didn’t need to get laid. None of us nerdy frustrated guys need to get laid. When I was an asshole with rants full of self-pity and entitlement, getting laid would not have helped me.

He needed to grow up.

We all do.

The culture needs to grow up too.

We need to take a look at our news media, and really consider what it is and what it does. The fact that we all know Elliot Rodger's name, but not the names of his victims says something about our culture. Mass killers should go down a memory hole, not discussed ad-infinitum. We expect the media to tell us everything about a killer; Maybe we don't need that. Maybe as a culture it's time we grow up and realize that this isn't helpful: it's purient.

We need to call out sexism: Every article that avoided talking about the misogyny behind Rodger's motives should be lambasted as revisionist-sexist bullshit.

Thinking about Chu's article, maybe we need to have some critical discourse about power fantasies and the normalization of rape, as part of our school curricula.

Nerds: We have to start looking seriousy at our media, our culture, and we need to start changing it. If nerd culture is ascendent, then this is our chance to do good in the world.

Let's not miss this chance.

We Are Sorry to Inform You

A collection of reviews that recommend rejection for seminal computing science papers:

Publishing this would waste valuable paper: Should it be published, I am as sure it will go uncited and unnoticed as I am confident that, 30 years from now, the goto will still be alive and well and used as widely as it is today. Confidential comments to the editor: The author should withdraw the paper and submit it someplace where it will not be peer reviewed. A letter to the editor would be a perfect choice: Nobody will notice it there!

How to stop hurting -- and start helping -- women in games

An excellent talk from Brianna Wu. Worth watching.

Do better.

There is a twitter hashtag conversation going on called #YesAllWomen, talking about the various dangers that are uniquely faced by women -- a counterpoint to the Not All Men defence.

I got into an argument on twitter about the efficacy of these kind of things. A charitable paraphrase of the tweet that I took umbrage with is essentially: "If I don't do bad things, and I don't know people who are doing bad things, I can't effect change"

Given that I got into an argument, you can understand I think this to be a terrible notion. There's huge numbers of ways you can effect change, and generally help causes even if you aren't part of the problem, or don't know people who are part of the problem.

A common complaint made when issues come up on twitter is that "Twitter won't change anything". While I think that history has started to show us that this isn't entirely true, a thought occurs to me:

If you agree with my thesis on an issue, criticize the crap out my efforts on said issue... but if you really want to change my mind, show me up. Do better than I am. Be more involved than I am, do more than I am, donate more than I am, fundraise more than I am.

I would much rather have you acknowledge that something can be done, and show me how to do it better, than complain that nothing can be done, and that my efforts are wasted and pointless.

What advice do you have for people who are new to this kind of discourse around the tech industry?

I offer this advice to all of the dudebros disturbed by Model View Media and other people and organizations like it: Follow the advice of your Successories poster and do something that scares you every day. Listen to someone who isn't a white man and, this is the tricky part, don't respond. Don't offer your judgment, don't correct, elaborate, or dismiss. Just listen. It's scary, but like anything, it gets easier with repetition. Go on Twitter and follow some new people. Just listen every day for a while -- a few weeks or months -- and resist the urge to explain and correct. Your life, and the lives of those around you, will be immeasurably enriched.

-- Moran Sandquist on Model View Culture

Finishing up my thesis