I trained with D in the gym today. Both of us have not been well physically and have been skipping training together, so this was the first time since October 17th.

I was pleased that at least my right high roundhouse kicks are getting usable. I can kick the opponent's head with an okay force, if not a knock-down one. That's if he is about the same hight as me. Unfortunately that does not happen very often in the US.

D noticed that I was holding my breath during the process of a kick, and advised that I not do it. I followed his advice by exhaling throughout the process, and I think the impact somehow got bigger. Of course, it could be just within the expected range of fluctuation. When your skill is not well established, it fluctuates within a range. Since my roundhouse kicking skill is far from being established, not only does it fluctuate, it does so much. So it may not have anything to do with breathing. But this is worth further investigation.

Today I read a Japanese martial art magazine at Kinokuniya Bookstore in Uwajimaya. It reported a seminar on Systema, a Russian martial art system. It looked quite interesting. The seminar was about how to deal with multiple assailants. You start with figuring out how to position yourself in the best place when they are approaching. You then build on it by gradually adding one tool after another (such as one-hand parrying, one-hand punch, etc.) to deal with it better.

According to the entry on Wikipedia, Systema is more an umbrella term and the style can be different from a practitioner to a practitioner.

SystemaSpetsnaz.com has interesting videos. I really like their fluid movement. An Aikido practitioner talks about his encounter with Systema.

R from the gym is a Mac user. He referred me to DEVONThink and Yojimbo, both applications only for the Mac platform, as possibly similar systems to what I have in mind.

Well, they are not. The bottom line is that they are everything-in-one-place data clearinghouse with limited pre-defined data types. Both support full-text search and tag-based search, but DEVONThink supposedly goes further.

DEVONThink's "AI" makes automatic association of keywords, and finds items that do not have the words/tags you supplied, but are related none the less. I am not sure how this automatic association is done. Is it done by analyzing data, or does it make use of some thesauri? Either way, I personally think calling it "AI" is a bit of a stretch. R told me to read this article, which shows how an author uses this software.

DEVONThink can work as a Web server to publish your data and optionally let others to contribute also. Nice feature.

Evernote is also in the same line, but with support for multiple platforms including iPhone and Palm Pré, it looks more sophisticated.

Yesterday, I suspected that kicking, in particular, side kicks, might help you achieve better flexibility for side splits ("Kicking Can Improve Your Hip Flexibility?" (Monday, November 02, 2009)). I did more experimentation tonight and now I have a different theory.

First, some background info: When I attempt side spits, I have an exercise bench in front of me. The length of the bench is placed perpendicular to the line formed by my spread legs. So seen from above, the bench and my body together form an upside-down T. Hope it makes sense to you. I use this bench to prop up my upper body with my arms, so my entire weight will not be on my legs.

Tonight I did kicking practice (including side kicks) before I attempted side splits. My flexibility was not particularly good. Then I had someone else pull my feet (one by one) outward to the sides so I would spread my legs more, like I did two nights ago, I could go as far as I did then.

Hmm, OK, so it seems that it was not the prior kicking, but the external help that made the difference. Then I had this epiphany: it's the fact that I had most of my weight on my arms that helped. This relieved the legs from the most of the duty of supporting my body weight. The muscles (in this case adductors mostly) thus did not have to flex much, which ultimately made it easier for them to stretch. To increase the stretch, having someone else do it is crucial; if you try to do it by yourself, you will end up contracting the target muscles. Why didn't I think of this sooner? Of course it's difficult to stretch muscles when you are flexing them!

We often use the gravitational pull to our own body as the force to stretch for splits, as I was doing in the videos in "Update on My Splits, or My Miserable Attemps for Them" (Sunday, February 10, 2008). In the videos, I did put my hands down and had them support my weight partially, but I was trying to leave as much weight as possible on the legs. At that time, I thought that'd help me stretch better. It still worked to a certain extent (after all, I got there that way), but the process was quite painful and unpleasant.

Even if you consciously shift most of you weight to your arms, you have to shift your weight back to you legs when you want to go deeper in the stretch if you are doing this kind of stretching alone. That's how this kind of self stretching works. But the moment you try to do it, your target muscles contract to support the weight, and you have to overcome it to stretch them. No wonder it is so hard. This means it is not just desirable but imperative to have the optimal results that you have someone else's help when you increase the stretch. This might be the same underlying idea of the Mattes Method ("Active Isolated Strengthening: The Mattes Method" (Wednesday, September 23, 2009)), whose primary M.O. seems to be assisted stretching, not solo stretching.

By the way, I now have another reason to consider such gravitation-driven solo stretching not good: not only is it hard to address asymmetry in your right-side flexibility and the left-side and balance them, but it could make it even worse. Unfortunately, though, I do not know if any effective "one-sided" stretching for adductors. Well, there is one (shown in the illustration at the end of "Pain in the Shin" (Saturday, October 03, 2009)) but I think I've already gone as far as I can go with it.

Yesterday I could go farthest in my attempt for side splits. And it was not even painful; it felt quite easy. Today, I tried to replicate it but could not. The only possible reason why it went so well last night was that I started out yesterday's workout with practice of footwork, punches and kicks before moving on to stretching. Did practicing side kicks help me achieve more flexibility for side splits?

If you practice kicking before you stretch, your initial hip flexibility will be better when you stretch than when you do without prior kicking. That's just natural and that's not what I am talking about; I am talking about the final maximum flexibility for the day. What I find puzzling is today I could not reach yesterday's level no matter how much time I spent on stretching. Today I did not practice kicking but I spent good 30 minutes doing cardio in the beginning. That makes me think that it's kicking, not warm-up in general, that made the difference, and that its effect may extend beyond the initial flexibility.

This sounds almost backwards. You stretch to kick better. You don't kick to stretch better. But it may go both ways. This is definitely worth further experimentation.

 

Talking of my hip flexibility, in "Health Update" (Wednesday, October 28, 2009), I wrote the pain I used to get in my right inner thigh when I stretch with my right leg propped up completely disappeared after taking a break from workout for 10 days or so because of illness. I had some pain back tonight. I wonder if it is because I am not stretching correctly.

Postscript: I had a different theory the next day. See "Less Flexing Seems to Be the Key" (Tuesday, November 03, 2009).

GNU readline library enables command history and command-line keyboard editing. It adds tremendous usability. It is used in bash and many other command-line programs.

However, not all command-line programs come with readline. What should you do when you crave for the good ol' readline functionality?

Enter rlwrap. It gives instant readline functionality to any command-line program. Suppose you have an interactive command cmd, by invoking the following:

you can interact with cmd as if it has a built-in readline support.

On Windows, you cannot currently install it from the Cygwin installer, unfortunately. But if you already have basic tools of Cygwin, compiling and installing rlwrap from the source code is a cynch.

A good friend of mine, upon reading "Concurrency in Lua" (Tuesday, October 27, 2009), advised me that I check out Scala. Scala runs on JVM and seamlessly integrates with Java (a huge plus for Java programmers). Yet, it is not Java; it was designed with the objective to incorporate recent advances in programming languages since the inception of Java. Some might called it modernized Java.

It seems to have caught attention when Twitter developers switched to Scala when they realized their Ruby code did not scale well. 

My first question was, How can it scale just because it runs on JVM? I am not entirely sure, but it seems to me that it is because someone made it work with Terracotta. If my understanding is correct, Terracota achieves JVM clustering. If that is true, does that mean anything that runs on JVM can potentially be used for scaling?

I read up a little about Scala, but man, it's hard for me to understand. There seems to be strong influence from such languages as Haskel and Erlang, but I know nothing about them. Oh, come to think of it, I hardly ever know Java either. So just understanding Scala will be a major project for me. I can understand why Scala is gaining popularity among programming language researchers. It could also be used for intermediate-level college courses for programming languages. (Of course, I will have to take such a course!)

By the way, someone writes why he thinks Twitter developers did not need to switch to Scala.

I am hoping that I will be able to use Metakit from within Lua. Unfortunately, for the Windows platform, the Metakit source is only intended for the Visual C++ family. I have to use MingW.

This page gives an instruction on how to do it. What I did not know is that in the Visual C++ world, there is a library called "import library," which the MingW toolchain does not need. From the above page:

There is also ways to create an import library using MingW tools.

So referencing this page, I did manage to create a Metakit DLL. But there seems to be a long way till I can access it from Lua.

I have been sick since Sunday, October 18th. I really did not think it'd drag on and on like this, but I do not think I have recovered fully. I am really bummed because I've had to cancel many appointments during this time.

I finally started going to the gym again. I went there this Monday and tonight, but both times I had to cut the session short because I get unreasonably tired quite quickly and dizzy also.

I still have a slight pain in the left thumb, which I hyperextended. Not a major problem; I am just hoping it'll heal completely.

Not everything's bad, though. I do weird stretching for hip flexibility in the cage, using the Olympic bar as a prop (I talked about it vaguely in "C.'s Advice on My Roundhouse Kicks" (Sunday, October 04, 2009)). When I got my right foot off the bar at the end of the stretching, there used to be a sharp pain shooting in my right inner thigh. When I did it tonight, though, there was absolutely no pain. This is good, really good.

Another unexpected good change is that somehow I can sleep much, much better. No complaints there.

I came to know this through a Japanese review. doubleTwist is a multi-media management system like iTunes, through which you can download/upload/sync your image/audio/video with your cell phone. It supports a variety of devices.

What I find impressive about this product is that it transcodes the media files when you download them to your cell phone. Cell phones nowadays are getting more and more like personal computers, but they typically have limitations in which media formats are supported. doubleTwist can make sure that media files you download to your cell phone are playable/viewable there.