Penduin's Pen

The People of Utah: Mr. Ice Fisherman

2012-02-09T12:24:00.000-08:00

I overheard a (Mormon) guy talk about an ice fishing trip he took recently. This is either a quote or a very near paraphrase:

"It's fun for the first hour, but then you're like, it's really cold here and there's not much to do."

...Well, I suppose those things would be true if you forgot the beer, or if your religion forgot the beer for you. What's next, beerless inner tube rafting? Silly Mormons.

Censorship, Freedom, Soapbox

2012-01-19T11:46:00.000-08:00

I don't want this blog to be primarily a political soapbox, so I won't harp on this topic again at least until the next specific outrage. But I have my own two cents to say about the specific power grabs Hollywood is currently pursuing, and about the shift of power to the elite in general.

In the 1990s, the DMCA was enacted in the name of fighting "piracy". It was wrong, it was overreaching, and it was immediately abused. It remains so today. The discussion should be about how much of it to dismantle, not how to give those same for-profit actors even more power over a fundamentally democratic, peer-to-peer network.

In the broader picture, here on Earth, speech and money are not the same thing. Corporations and human beings are not the same thing. The discussions should be about how to protect speech from money, and humans from corporations, not how to grant human rights to non-human entities while denying them to humans.

The great equalizer in an alleged republic like ours is that every citizen has his vote, and his voice. But this has been overturned: the strength of any citizen's voice is now directly proportional to his wealth. If your individual ability to spend political money makes a blip on a scale populated by billionaires, then you've got a voice. If not, then you have only your vote, and in fact that will be influenced by the voices you're able to hear. The wealthy voices. The voices which can coerce an otherwise deadlocked government into supporting broad, unaccountable, no-due-process censorship. These are voices we should fear, avoid, or at least hear with the heaviest of skepticism.

But we don't.

We keep looking for the next quick fix, the next promise of competence in a pool of puppets, the next lie we wish were true. And we keep ignoring the truths we don't like. We respond to marketing better than we do to fact, maybe because it's more seductive, maybe because we're just plain stupid. In poetic and political terms, we deserve the government we're getting, because we did nothing to prevent it. The government I refer to is of course not made of senators and presidents and governors, it's made of CXOs and boardrooms of corporations, accountable not to voters, not to justice, not even to popular opinion, but to profit.

Perhaps I'm just old now (I'm certainly younger than the old white men making the claims and decisions that bother me so) but I no longer can reconcile the world I live in with the loudest voices within it. They seem alien and factually null. But they've got nearly all the power, and can seemingly co-opt anybody as necessary.

Well there's my two cents. I need to give my brain a break from this stuff, it's just too draining. I'll translate that into giving my (admittedly puny) readership a break too. If I've made you depressed, my advice is to read up on something awesome and optimistic for a while, for example NASA's newly-launched Mars Science Lab mission.

Censored.

2012-01-17T10:54:00.000-08:00

I've babbled about the rise of the wealthy and the corporate at great expense of the populous, a number of times. Well here it is again.

Today, myself and a few other folks who care about individual freedom are blacking out our websites in protest of some truly horrific stuff that our corporate overlords have in the pipeline, namely SOPA and PIPA.

Watch the videos, read the commentary, and if you value anything about the internet as it exists today, voice your concern.

[edit: if this is new and/or confusing to you, there's another good article on slashdot.]

The Curse of O-Eleven

2011-12-31T16:14:00.000-08:00

We've had an interesting year. For values of "interesting" that border on comedy-of-errors. And for values of "comedy" that border on "tragedy". We actually started (and stopped, and started again) keeping a list of things as they went awry. I won't bother posting that, but here are a few highlights...

Things that destroyed themselves (or each other, we suspect):
- TV
- DVR
- Dish receiver (suspected of killing a crappy TV and a beloved DVR)
- Dryer
- Refrigerator
- Car (ruled a sudden suicide - melted its own engine)

Things that simply broke:
- Kim's tooth
- Kim's elbow and wrists (not "simply"; there was a spectacular fall)
- Bathroom light bulb (also not simple, burned Kim's fingers first)
- Neighborhood sprinkler control system
- UPS (details here)
- Internet access (including several entire weekends)

Things found in unusual, fun places:
- Detergent: entire bottle's worth, laundry room floor
- Orange pop: half can's worth, Kim's purse
- Wasps: old car's mirror

This year also marked a number of "firsts":
- Kim turned 30 (plans to do this many times)
- Owen published his first phone/tablet apps
- Owen made his first pony tail (Kim's hair, see her broken arm above...)
- We bought (instead of received for free) a television
- We now have the first "nice" car either of us has had

Plenty of other stuff happened this year, which we either can't think, of or refuse to speak of ever again. But from this point on, anything that goes wrong can no longer be blamed on the Curse of O-Eleven. We'll have to blame it on the upcoming end-of-the-world instead. ;^)

Happy 2012!

Uninterrupted Power Supply, Interrupted

2011-11-29T11:52:00.000-08:00

Preface: a UPS is something a guy like me plugs his servers into. Picture a big heavy battery combined with a short power strip. If the lights flicker, stuff plugged into the UPS stays on.

Admittedly, I bought my last UPS in a rush. I don't actually remember doing so, but I must have picked it up somewhere last-resort-y since it has emblazoned upon it the logo of a certain squad of geeks who shall remain unmentioned. So it was definitely not the best ...purchase, I could have made.

But let us ponder a simple question not even of electrical engineering, but of common sense.
When the device eventually fails, should it become:
a) a heavy, non-battery-backed-up power strip
b) a brick through which no electricity passes whatsoever

I'll give you all a few minutes to think about that, a few more if you work for a blue-and-yellow price-gouging store or their branded-Volkswagen-driving subsidiary.

Did you get it? Do you think that a device, whose entire purpose in existing is to provide uninterrupted power, should be designed to fail in such a way that power will still be supplied? If so, good for you! You have the intelligence of a human being. Have a cookie!

If you got it wrong, then no, I don't wish I'd bought your damn extended warranty, so stop asking! The last thing I want at this point is another identical UPS with aspirations of one day growing up to be a brick.

Freakyforms

2011-11-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

Since before I can remember, all through school and well beyond, my notebooks and whiteboards and every hotel memo pad I have ever encountered has gotten filled with scribbled creatures. In elementary school, Kris and I filled a notebook with aliens whose names all end in "ork". The closest thing to a "party trick" I know is to have somebody scribble some random lines, and I'll make a drawing out of them. Nearly every time, it turns out to be some sort of weird-but-cute, possibly human-esque, creature.

Nintendo has just released a $7 toy (as a download for the 3DS) which not only encourages me to create all the critters I can dream of, it brings them to life.

Non-creative types don't get it at all, and perhaps the only audience for this kind of thing is a sufficiently weird person like myself, but I don't care how many peers I have; this thing is pure magic.

All the critters that make their way out of my brain and onto the screen spring to life and are at my command. They walk, swim, fly, and drive around a world inhabited by other stuff I've drawn, collecting gems for Ork or making deliveries for the Shmoe. Collectibles, secret blocks and hidden treasure chests are everywhere, often revealing yet more stuff to draw and customize as they're found.

I've been known to animate a handful of my drawings. Some have even found their way onto the web. But now, anything and everything I can scribble can be automatically animated and made interactive. I still want to tell stories and do some old-fashioned animation, but the bang for the buck here is unreal.

Thanks, Nintendo, 'cause releasing a new Super Mario, a new Zelda, and a new Mario Kart all within a month here apparently wasn't getting you quite enough of my money. ;^)

Election Day

2011-11-08T07:39:00.000-08:00

As usual, I advise you to get out and vote. This time I will also add, "while you still can".

Of course I don't expect the institution of voting to disappear anytime soon. There's voting in all kinds of places where there is no actual representative government. The US is simply en route to becoming one of those places. Not that voter suppression efforts aren't also underway.

My guess is that historians and intellectuals, so long as either are permitted, will remember 2010 as the moment the fatal blow was struck to US Democracy. "Money is speech", said the supreme court. "Corporations are people". With that, the influence of us 99-per-centers is on its way out, and the richest of the rich have carte blanche to buy up control and run things as they see fit.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

This is actually not a partisan matter, but depending on your views, it's bad for different reasons.

This state of affairs is clearly bad for us progressives, since it means if there's no profit in X, X won't get done. Medicare, social security, education, any and all regulation intended to keep a spark of human fairness alive... If nobody gets obscenely wealthy from it, it's out. Privatize any and all remaining programs. "Privatize" is simply another way of saying "unaccountable government for-profit".

For the "conservatives" (an odd term since they do very little conserving) the picture is no less bleak. Make no mistake, corporate-sponsored government is still government. You hate taxes, but I'm guessing you also hate being nickel and dimed by fees, getting gouged by inflated rates, and being trapped in unfair contracts with no alternatives. And if you think the "free market" will save you, remember that all pretense of fair competition would be long gone if the richest companies had their way. Think it's hard to start a business now? Let's see how it goes when those you'd be starting up against get to write all the rules. You can elect and recall people who tax and regulate you. When corporations pull this stuff, there's not a thing you can do about it.

Of course, there are some things we can do about it at this point, if enough of us realize it in time. We have to understand that from this point on, a great deal of money is going to be spent lying to us, and trying to buy us.

An obscene amount of money. But it's a drop in the bucket to the top 1%.

We still have the vote, and the rich aren't in charge simply because they're rich. Not yet. The campaign will now be to convince us to tear down the things that stand between we the people and unbridled corporate greed. Labor unions and collective bargaining. Environmental regulation. Transparency. Public services and utilities. And most critically, education. The messages will be crafted by the best marketing money can buy. Much of it won't even look like marketing. Those of us seeking to be well-informed will have a steep, uphill battle, since the process of discovering who funded what is already disastrously opaque. We will be lied to every which way. In many races for public office, whether they realize it or not, every single viable candidate will have already been co-opted by profit-driven forces.

Besides the vote, we can move our money away from the giants and into local institutions. This is a pain, but there's help available. Since money and power now have a direct exchange rate, voting with our dollars is one of the few real retaliatory tools we have. Not that there's much stopping the big multinational guys from buying up the small local ones.

The endgame here is simple, and it is the goal of all business: profit. It will be the task of all citizens to be productive and create profit. Not for ourselves, mind you. Profit for those few who already have everything. In order to maintain the status quo and prevent an armed revolt, just enough civil liberties and profit-sharing will be maintained and well-promoted, dressed up in feel-good, patriotic and probably religious language. But liberty as we knew it will have passed. The fatal wound from 2010 is already looking pretty infected. Just look at all the teabaggers elected since "money is speech", currently making great strides in breaking down the government and handing over all the control and money to corporate giants.

Prove me wrong. Go out, vote, and for Pete's sake prove me wrong. :^)

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T20:36:00.000-07:00

We carved our pumpkins...

We put on our costumes...

We had ourselves a very successful Halloween as Pirate and Parrot.

...and Cat.

More Carving

2011-10-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

As of this morning, Halloween Artist appears in the opening, "Recommended" section of the HP app catalog.

To celebrate, here are some designs courtesy of numerous anonymous Jamba Juice workers on Utah Valley University's campus:

No shortage of good jack-o-lantern designers out there. :^) Some pictures from older releases are making the rounds on twitter as well:
http://twitpic.com/74zvqw
http://twitpic.com/74e7ax
http://twitpic.com/74d900
http://twitpic.com/74d4u7
http://twitpic.com/74av37

Thanks for your interest (and downloads) everyone, and keep carving!

Halloween Artist

2011-10-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

I've put together an app for the HP TouchPad called "Halloween Artist". It was fun to develop, and it's even more fun to play with. It went from being an idea I was pretty sure I wouldn't have time for a week or two ago, to being available in the App Catalog as of yesterday.

Kids in particular love this thing. The idea is very simple: draw face shapes on a pumpkin, hit a "carve" button, and boom, your design gets cut into the pumpkin and has a nice flickering candle glow behind it. Undo if you mess up, save a JPEG file if you like the result.

There's a little demonstration here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV_pYYDJCF8
...and a young friend of mine doing some beta testing here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9SJGFrM7w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKh-4b8tdDU

This is, I guess, just the latest in my established line of cute Halloween projects. :^)

Happy Blasphemy Day!

2011-09-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's a real thing...

Let's celebrate today the idea that every once in a while, maybe we could be not so damn uptight about religion. I personally don't consider anything truly blasphemous, with the possible exception of operating a grill without a cold beer in your hand. I'm with Socrates here, the unexamined life is not worth living. So, I'd like to share some personal favorite life-examining "blasphemies" of mine with you, and what better day than today.

http://www.joelwest.com/tagged/Bible_study
Joel's a guy I used to work with. Great guy, and very dedicated. He's also extremely funny. This link is to a subset of his blog in which he explores the idea of not interpreting the bible as stories and lessons, but taking it as literal history and fact. Hilarity ensues.

http://www.jesusandmo.net/
"Jesus and Mo" is a favorite webcomic of mine. It's very smart, and very direct in holding up its societal mirror. It's also quite humorous, provided the reader has a sense of humor.

http://www.venganza.org/
Ah, the church of the flying spaghetti monster. Not much needs to be said about this; it's well-known enough that I can say things like "let's just pray to the flying spaghetti monster that it works this time" and people don't look at me with any more confusion or concern than usual.

I don't have much cleverness to contribute to this fine blasphemy day, but I will say that if forced to choose a god, I prefer organic, free-range deities to the ones kept in cramped, steepled cages. I just don't like the idea of cutting off a god's beak and pumping it full of artificial growth sacraments. Seems blasphemous.

Penduin's Ping Pong Paddle

2011-09-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

The office got a ping-pong-slash-air-hockey table, and we all got paddles. They may be miniaturized sports, but I'm still massively bad at them. We all scribbled on our paddles to identify them though, so I do have something to bring to the table. :^)

The Yukon Blind Dream

2011-08-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

I had many excellent teachers at UWRF, often taking the listed professor into greater account than the course description when signing up for classes. It's with no lack of respect for any of them that I single out Dr. Imtiaz Moosa as one of my absolute favorites. I may be a programmer by degree and vocation, but it's his philosophy classes I remember most vividly.

When I was in his classrooms, Dr. Moosa's eyesight was pretty lousy by most standards, but he could see. More importantly, he opened up students' metaphorical eyes by the roomful. This guy will make you think, hard, to the point of discomfort. And to me, that's a necessary and welcome element of growth.

Today, my dear old professor can no longer see, but he's as strong and bombastic (to use one of his favorite words) as ever. I recently got back in touch with him over email, and learned of a pretty extraordinary adventure he took this summer:

http://blog.mailasail.com/theyukonblind

There's a lot of reading there, but it's well worth the time. He and a friend chronicled their Yukon journey, along with some hints of the fascinating discussions they had. I feel like I knew Dr. Moosa pretty well, for a student anyway, but reading his co-adventurer's account showed me some new sides and surprises along with the classic, familiar moments:

He insists on walking without being connected to me, and is quite happy walking into the odd bush / tree for that freedom. I describe the terrain and scenery, and he just responds with: "I just love this".

That's him, all right. It's even a good metaphor for those of us who loved his classes - we may not have had all the faculties to fully appreciate what he presented to us, but there's nothing we'd have traded for the journey.

Dr. Moosa and I talked a fair amount outside of class, with topics covering a full spectrum, but as I read the second-hand story of his vision permanently failing, I recalled a conversation we had that at the time seemed pretty insignificant. He and I both had pretty good-sized bald spots (though his was much more age-appropriate) and he was telling me how it was a source of embarrassment. My view was, and remains, "Well, it's only hair; I could be losing something useful". I remember him being impressed with my attitude, and maybe even a bit comforted. And now of course, he has lost something useful, and it feels like a pretty stupid thing to have said.

But it wasn't his hair or his eyesight that made him my favorite professor. If today we were to get into a good old-fashioned debate, and he were to bring my old words back to me, then I think I could argue my way around them. ...And that's as much his fault as mine. :^)

Negotiations

2011-07-25T11:36:00.001-07:00

I've got it! I have figured out where the Democrats learned how to negotiate. Behold:

...If you or your browser don't want to play the clip, here's the highlight: "As a gesture of good will, I'm gonna give you another hostage."

Failure in Lyrics

2011-06-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

Once in a store, and once in an airport restaurant, I have recently encountered a certain song. I have no idea who sings, it and I don't much care. It's catchy, but not my style. In any case, the song fell onto my growing list of "terrible crap that needs to go away" because of the following lyrical tragedy:

Just wanna make the world dance
Forget about the price tag

...So, an alleged songwriter somewhere needed a two-syllable finance word that rhymes with "world dance". A two-syllable... finance... word... Oh! I know, "price tag"!

Come on.

Airport Breakfast

2011-06-16T08:00:00.001-07:00

Oatmeal is still breakfast when it's a stout, right?

GIMP Color Range Mapping

2011-05-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

[note: This first section was typed in early February]

I've been a fan of the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) for a looong time. It's helped me create and modify and fake many, many pictures over the years.

A while ago, one of its features vanished. The code behind it was a mess, and the developers didn't see its value. It would have been a pain to go through and make it work the way a modern GIMP plug-in should, so it (along with other stuff which richly deserved to get culled) was lost. Overall, GIMP got better, but a handful of people including myself really wanted our color range mapping back.

We had some tricks. An old binary of the plug-in would still load and run happily on newer versions of GIMP until pretty recently. But GIMP has moved on, and at this point, that crufty old plug-in just won't cut it.

Well, long story short:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641893

I fixed up the code, and submitted a patch. With any luck, future versions of GIMP will include my refactor of that good ol' plug-in.

Here's what it does, if you're curious:

You define a pair of source colors (usually colors from your current image) and another pair of colors as a destination. All areas of the image that match your source colors get changed to your destination colors, and, most importantly, all colors that are in between your source color pair get translated as colors between your destination pair. It's very useful for altering images that have anti-aliasing baked in, or large patches of color with subtle-but-important variation.

...As you might see from the discussion on gnome.org, even the developers don't really understand why this is so great, so don't feel bad if you didn't follow all that. :^)

[note: the following section is from today]

I've given up trying to convince the developers to take my patch. Or even look at it, it sounds like. It's too bad, but anyone else like me who wants the feature back can apply my code and have it. I'm tempted to babble about some of the common things that open/free software gets wrong when dealing with its community, but they're largely known.

Probably, I should have brought it to them as "here's a new feature" instead of "this went away and I've revived it". Then I'd only have had to climb the shallower "not-invented-here" incline instead of the steeper "we already decided no" one. Either way I'd have still faced "why would you want to do that", which is particularly obnoxious and spans all of software (and many other areas, I'm sure).

Ahh well, live and learn. Or, just live. :^)

[update: 2011-08-19]
to patch against stable release code (as opposed to the latest from the git repository) give this a try:
http://penduin.net/projects/color-range-mapping-2.6.x.patch

He's Dead

2011-05-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

Holy crap. I've felt a lot of things upon hearing the news that someone has died, but this time, I feel like the world is lighter. Better.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/01/135905185/osama-bin-laden-is-dead-officials-say

How to Fix Ubuntu 11

2011-04-29T21:36:00.000-07:00

I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 11 today, but I should have first tried a liveCD or something. The new "Unity" UI is a complete and unmitigated disaster. Maybe it would work ok on a little netbook or a tablet or something, but it's atrocious on a "real" computer. Anyway, here's what I've done to get myself back to a working, sane interface, should anybody else find themselves as shocked and horrified as I did:

1) Login with "Ubuntu Classic" instead of the new default. Duh.

2) Change Audacious's horrifying new interface back to winamp-style. Also duh.

3) Turn off Compiz's evil/disruptive/wrong/horrible "Grid" plugin.
(`apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager` to do so)

4) Get rid of the clumsy new "overlay" scrollbar.
(echo “export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0″ >/etc/X11/Xsession.d/80properscrollbars)

5) Not technically an Ubuntu thing, but fix FireFox's status bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

There was also some cleanup to do with my toolbar, but it was pretty minor and the new layout actually has less clutter. Anyway, in the words of Dr. Zoidberg, "Life was bad, but now it's good! Forever!"

Grillin' in the Rain

2011-04-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

We're grilling in the rain
Just grilling in the rain
What a glorious bratwurst
We're stuffed if not sane
Cramped below an overhang
The entire workplace gang
We're grilling, and drinking, in the rain

The 3DS

2011-04-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

As is apparently tradition now, I picked up the latest Nintendo system right away. The 3DS doesn't have very many games yet (though it does still play the older DS library) but it does feature some pretty slick built-in stuff including a Mii creator (a superset of the Wii's) and a 3D camera.

There are also some "AR" (augmented reality) games and toys included, which are pretty crazy in technical terms. This is the kind of device that you really need to see with your own eyes, but I've pulled out the 3D pictures I took and put together a little web viewer for them. These are pictures which literally make you go cross-eyed while looking at them, but I can't think of any other way to show you 3D pictures through your 2D computer monitor. :^)

http://penduin.net/3ds

Also: anyone with a 3DS, I hereby encourage you to import my Mii from that QR code on the right.

Cinematic Word Abuse

2011-03-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Hollywood, we've talked about this. Stop it. Just make up your own words when you need some hocus-pocus to happen. Don't steal our real words and abuse them.

It's bad enough in police mystery shows. "Encrypted pixels" and stuff. Don't use or combine words that you don't understand. It's bad writing, and the resulting scenes are bad. But now, there's a film whose very title is wrong.

"The Source Code", the generic deep voice says, after the entire plot is shown in a 30-second TV spot.

I've glimpsed plenty of ads for this movie, which only means it could be anywhere from six months before the theatrical release to sitting in the DVD bargain bin at the grocery store. But "The Source Code", which is English for human-readable instructions for a computer, written in C or Python or Java or whatnot, here means "some magical means of time travel". Do me a favor, while you're in your web browser. Hit "View"->"Page Source" to open the source code for this page; there's some JavaScript near the bottom. See if you go hurtling back in time. Did it work? No? Hm.

See, instead of "modern day vampires = $$$", the lesson that should have been learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is this: Set the show up on a hellmouth, or some other place where magic and demons and impossible-but-fun nonsense is real. Don't say the computer is magic. It's not. While we're at it, no more loser-in-a-tree vampires either, 'kay?

But back to my point, don't hijack real words and phrases! Source code is very important and useful for many reasons, but time travel is not among them! I'll even go one step further and try to be constructive. Call it the Ghost Minutes Spell, or the Past Injection Curse. If you really want to have computers involved, stick it in a Matrix-like setting and call it the Crisis Backtrace or the ... actually, I can't come up with any computer words other than "backtrace" that even vaguely could have something to do with time travel.

But who am I to tell Hollywood producers anything, huh? I've only been writing source code since I was six. ...And, come to think of it, I also wrote two terrible movies, complete with crappy (though not outright lying) titles. At least I had the decency to not be able to finish shooting the second one. ;^)

Religion in America

2011-03-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Of developed, post-industrial nations, the US has an unusually high amount of religion, per capita and in terms of individuals' levels of devotion. I've heard a number of reasons this might be true, but this morning I heard one that seems pretty valid.

Religion in America is business.

We have no "national religion" here, and the sane among us would like to keep it that way. What we do have is carte blanche for businesses to do and to grow in any way they're able, and this presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs: figure out how to keep the pews filled.

Insert a Mark Twain quote here about all the people of the world united in worshiping money. Business is the American national religion, and vice-versa. In a way, churches are just about the only Main Street businesses left. Attempts have been made at Wal-Mart-style mega-houses of worship, but they largely haven't caught on. Who knows whether that's good or bad, but it's what the invisible hand of the market has determined.

Religious disagreements and intolerances are, in this society, less about traditional persecution and holy wars, and more akin to brand loyalty. I'm glad there are less western-society-on-western-society bloodbaths and flame-happy witch hunts these days, but just like its relationship with politics, religion's pairing with business seems only to distort and cheapen it. What Would Jesus Sell? Evidently, he's a key spokesperson for guns, homophobia, and censorship of evolution and climate science. It's a bit hard to imagine the pacifistic, middle-eastern Jewish philosopher sitting on the board of directors going over the return on investment of these branches.

Personally, I have neither business acumen nor religious faith, but it makes me glad to see either used to help others. My employer, Messaging Architects, just matched all of its employees' donations to help out in Japan. At the same time, I find very depressing the common power grabs and the systemic corruption and the excuses to be extremely crappy to one another. I guess the lessons are the same. Our religious and/or corporate collectives have their own agendas, and can be measured better by the quality, not the quantity, of people under their umbrellas.

Gah, Spam

2011-03-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since this (low, low traffic) blog had any attention from spammers, but I got a batch today, every post on the front page was suddenly linking to some lovely pyramid scheme.

The good news:
I cleaned it all up, and now have changed the comment settings. Moderation is on, and so are public comments. So now anyone can post, but it's got to survive the filter known as me. :^)

The bad news:
Just as I was deleting stuff I think I saw a legit comment or two, which I also haven't had in quite a while. So if you commented and I blew it away, it was nothing personal! Try 'er again and as long as you're not selling the opportunity of a lifetime, I'll pass it on through.

Daylight Wastings Time

2011-03-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

Grumble grumble... outdated idea that made no sense to begin with, stealing a precious hour of sleep every year...

Franklin had lots of good ideas, and Arizona lots of bad ones, but in this case I've got to come down on the side of not screwing around with the already arbitrarily-defined clocks twice a year.

For that matter, I'd be perfectly fine moving the entire planet to 24-hour UTC (or GMT, whatever you want to call it), maybe start chipping away at the mass delusions we seem to have about each being at the center of anything.

posted at: Sun Mar 13 18:44:04 UTC 2011

Pride

2011-03-11T14:28:00.000-08:00

I'm proud of my home state of Wisconsin, for its good people being properly outraged by the recent disgraceful actions of its senate and governor. Keep fighting the good fight, fellow cheeseheads! Don't let these corrupt, backwards bastards get away with their bullshit.

I'm proud of my current-home state of Utah today too, not over anything political, but because when I pulled into the liquor store's parking lot today (in preparation for brat Friday) I wasn't the only one waiting for its doors to open. There was even a lady who took her kids in there, which I guess I've got more mixed feelings about, but salutations to we the few drinkers here in Utah valley.

I'm proud of the people in the middle east fighting for their freedom, and I'm proud of our president and everyone else who is sending aid to Japan and other devastated areas. There's a lot of frighteningly bad stuff going on at the moment, but we have to keep a level head and support the good guys.

Banterly (plug for a buddy)

2011-02-23T13:17:00.000-08:00

My friend Proby has put together a service called Banterly. It's a live chat hosting service; you can join or set up public or private rooms for any topics you like. At the moment it uses Twitter for authentication, so I haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure he'll appreciate whatever little publicity I can give him. If you're a twit- I mean, if you ... use twitter, give it a try!

http://www.banter.ly/

Gee Wiz

2011-02-11T20:14:00.000-08:00

A while ago (a year? I don't know) I bought a GP2X Wiz. It's a little Gameboy-like device which, unlike most others, is designed to be open for all developers. My first reaction to reading about it was, "hey, I could get TONG to run on that!"

...If that was gibberish to you, TONG is a game I wrote ages ago in which you are tasked with playing Tetris and Pong on the same screen at the same time. It's very hard, and I apologize to anyone who has gone insane while playing it.

Anyway, so I bought a Wiz, with the primary purpose of porting TONG to it. But I got busy, and it became a lower priority, and then it just kind of sat there neglected and forgotten for a long while.

A week or so ago I came upon it and decided to charge it up again, and load it with some games from the internet. Time to see what people who hadn't forgotten about it had accomplished. As I was browsing and downloading various free games, what did I find but TONG! Some crazy person out there had found my game, played it, enjoyed it (at least enough to want a portable version), then dug into the source code and data, made some modifications, cross-compiled it for the device, then shared the resulting package with the Wiz community. That blew my mind a bit.

Anyway I'm very pleased. It's a bit of a quick and dirty port, using a slightly older version of TONG and the music was missing, but it runs great! I'm distributing a version of it myself now, with the music intact. I've played around a little bit with cross-compiling a version of my own, something a bit more complete and using the latest code. I'm sure I'll release it at some point, but I've sure gotten a kick out of my little game getting around even when I'm not involved at all.

Has anyone seen TONG spring up anywhere else? I was hoping to get it running on the Wii at some point, has somebody done that already? :^)

Actualized!

2011-02-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

It was right! I was going to take a photo of this, type some stuff in, and post it, but I didn't even need to! I just affirmed it (whatever that means), visualized it, believed it, and this post, complete with photo, just actualized itself! ...Oh wait, no it didn't.

And isn't "actualize" an accounting word?

Anyway, dumbest "fortune" so far. I've followed its instructions to the letter but it hasn't caused even a single beer to materialize before me.

New Morning Routine

2011-02-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

"Cat... Move, I have to go through the door."

No. Is mine sunny spot.

We done. You go way now.

Really?

2011-01-31T08:13:00.000-08:00

You have a quiet and unobrusive nature.

2011-01-21T13:31:00.000-08:00

That's my "fortune", according to the cookie I got with lunch today. Really more of an observation cookie, I'd say. At least it was pretty accurate.

I do have a "get out of the way" trait. I don't know if it's a recessive expression from the absence of the dominant and common "me-first" gene, or an overdeveloped sense of personal space, or what. But it causes problems when trying to buy stuff at concerts or when I have something to say but there's never a silent beat in a conversation.

Part of it is as simple as the golden rule. I hate being interrupted, so it feels hateful to do it to someone else. I don't much care for loudness either.

Part of it is basic courtesy. At a busy four-way stop, I can count to four without even having to take my hands off the wheel. Many people cannot, chief among them drivers of large pickup trucks. I find that annoying, but not enough to get assertive about it. Not against vehicles and people that thick.

In fact, my "quiet and unobtrusive nature" is fighting against this post being published. I'm not penning any meaningful statements, making any insightful observations, or even sharing any funny thoughts. I find myself asking why I should pollute the web with this, why I should waste the time of anyone who happens to read it.

Well, nuts to you, recessive genes! I'm posting! That's the way the fortune cookie crumbles!

Weight

2011-01-20T16:30:00.000-08:00

I'm about 20 pounds heavier than I thought I was. My clothes still fit the same. Maybe it's all beard?

Sony, Go Sue Yourself

2011-01-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

Warning: geekiness and venting ahead!

A few years ago, a very fancy (though unimaginatively-named) gaming machine was released, the PlayStation 3. I got one, for gaming reasons (Metal Gear, primarily) and because it had a novel feature for a gaming console: the ability to run GNU/Linux (or other operating systems as well) out of the box. I get to write and run my own code on a high-end 7-core CELL system? Yes please!

Of course, games are the primary business of the system, but the "Other OS" feature was widely advertised and very appealing to people like me. Recently, though, Sony saw fit to steal that feature away from myself and thousands of other geeky, premium-paying, early-adopting, target-audience technophiles. A mandatory system update removed the functionality completely. (I sure hope Ford doesn't remove my emergency brake, just because relatively few people use it...)

So there we were, a bunch of geeks who want to write our own programs to run on our own fancy PS3s, with the rug pulled out from under us. Well, turns out that us geeks, we're kinda geeky. And some of us are pretty clever. (I use "us" rather broadly there; I personally have only a little knowledge of how the PS3 works.) Long story short, some very bright people figured out ways to once again be able to load and run our own programs on a PS3. What Sony taketh, the community giveth back.

Now, Sony has filed for restraining orders against several of the lead geeks who won us back our freedom. As best I can tell, it amounts to nothing more than a scare tactic. Nevertheless, let's boil down this chain of events:
- Sony: Buy a PS3! You can even write your own software for it!
- Geeks: Yayy! Here's lots of money!
- Sony: Mmm, money...
- Geeks: This machine is great! Gaming AND homebrew!
- Sony: Actually... no more writing your own stuff.
- Geeks: What?! We paid for that, give it back!
- Sony: No.
- Geeks: Oh look, we can still write our own stuff.
- Sony: Lawyers ATTACK!

From Sony's point of view, the new ways of running homebrew are cause for concern, because some folks will very likely figure out how to copy and play retail PS3 games they haven't paid for. (In fact, they already have.) But that's not why I care about it, and it's not why most other geeks care about it. We care because we bought a machine that we could code for, and we intend to keep it that way. We were quite happy with Sony's sanctioned, non-piracy-enabling "Other OS" feature. Once they removed it, what were we supposed to do? Stop being geeks and give up on something we already had? Have you ever met a geek? That's not how we roll.

There is a class-action lawsuit concerning Sony's mass theft, or bait-and-switch, or whatever one wants to call it. But it won't succeed; the law protects wealthy (and foreign, in this case) corporations, not consumers. The homebrew community, all of us still fans of the PS3, simply want the machine we purchased: a beefy system that plays games, shows blu-rays, and runs homebrew.

[update: the class-action case was indeed thrown out.]

That's what you sold us, Sony. That's what we all agreed to. You stole part of our own PS3s from us, and we've taken it back. If you want to sue someone for opening roads that could lead to piracy, go sue yourself.

Young Claus and Sharp Claus

2010-12-30T17:43:00.000-08:00

"Young Claus" and "Sharp Claus"

Some say my too-lazy-to-shave beard has earned me the appearance of a young Santa (or possibly the ghost of Christmas present). And the cat, well, you maybe can figure out that pun for yourself.

Anyway, Happy Holidays!

Edit:
I've been asked a few times what that shirt says. It features a Nintendo controller and says, "I have control issues."
...but I like the sentence it forms in the photo: "I have... cat."

The Blind Blinding the Blind

2010-12-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

I've had more occasion to drive at night lately, so in addition to dealing with the usual Blind-spot Billy, Cell-phone Cindi, Double-lane Doug, Lane-weaver Lenny and Slow-merge Stella, I get to contend with another faceless freeway stereotype: Nova-beam Ned.

You've seen this guy, right? Who could miss him?

Now, I'm an engineer. I understand and appreciate that the task which falls to headlights is one of cruel difficulty. A car's headlight must illuminate (well into human-eye levels) a relatively flat surface (which is usually black), as great a distance as possible, without melting its surroundings (in fact, there's a nice hot internal combustion engine inches away), from an angle that's approaching zero degrees.

It's a ridiculous job. So, in many vehicles (see: status symbol pickups) the headlights play fast and loose with the low angle. Mount 'em higher, and the other problems shrink. Of course, it means that the driver of that car gets to see better, while the drivers of every other car on the road get two retinas full of blinding glare.

A second (and even more evil) tactic is to replace the light bulb with a dimensional portal, connected via space-time-bending wormhole to a massive star currently going supernova. ...Or maybe it's just a really powerful blue bulb, I guess that's possible. Whatever they are, I hate them, and if you have them in your car, I hate you, and you are a bad person.

Nova-beam Ned: To call you a heartless sociopath would be an insult to the heartless sociopath community. I want to mount a heavy and expensive adjustable parabolic mirror on my car, to reflect the torrent of angry light blasting from your evidently nuclear-powered car down to a fine point, focused like the sun through a magnifying glass, directly into your eyes. Once your irises are vaporized and your corneas aflame, I want to shatter those blue bulbs of death, and grind the resulting mess of broken glass and high-voltage wire right into the raw, bleeding cavities once home to your eyes, wreaking havoc on the remaining nerve tissue and sending unholy wattage into the optic center of your brain.

Do I want to do these things because I'm sadistic? Well maybe. But mainly, I want karma to balance. I want done unto you what you have done unto others. ...Actually, I just want you to use regular non-nova-beam headlights like a sane person. Would that work for you?

(see? So much nicer...)

A Moment of Silence For Cheese

2010-12-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

This has been a difficult week for my stomach to ... stomach. Village Inn no longer serves their cheddar soup at all, and Training Table (also known to me as cheese-fries-with-hickory-sauce-place) has closed and is being torn down.

Got plenty of good cheese at home, so life as I know it hasn't fundamentally changed, but what's a blog for if I can't sometimes whine about little things that make me sad?

Bad News Is Neutral News

2010-11-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

I've gone on about Utah drivers before, but today it got personal. I had to swerve well outside the rightmost lane in order to avoid a very speedy weaver. There was plenty of room in all lanes, but I guess he thought the space I was occupying was where he had to be. In any case my jumpy heart sank as I heard what I was sure was the side of my car scraping against a concrete barrier. Little punk in his little phallic low-rider black car sped off.

When I arrived at the office a few minutes later (in a pretty foul mood), I saw no damage at all. I'm thinking I must have just winged one of those solid-looking-but-flimsy orange drums, and the sound I heard was adrenaline-distorted or something.

Later, I took my wife out for lunch at one of our usual haunts, only to be horrified that my usual Wednesday soup (Wisconsin cheddar) was not on the menu. I guess I could have ordered something that wasn't the lunch special, or tried one of the not-Wisconsin-cheddar soups. But hadn't I been through enough today?

When the waitress came by and I asked if the cheese soup was truly gone, she said no, they did have it today. I was so happy, I didn't even have the presence of mind to find out whether that meant they had it today only or if they'll keep having it every Wednesday.

But I'm alive, the car's alive, and I got my cheese. So, scary moments notwithstanding, I'll still call this day a success. In the words of the great Dr. Zoidberg, "Life was bad, but now it's good! Forever!"

Stars

2010-11-10T18:12:00.000-08:00

While playing around with bits of a campaign sign, I noticed something I hadn't before. Stars (the shapes, not the flaming balls of gas) come in two varieties. There's the happy right-side-up twinkle-twinkle star...

...and then there's the upside-down, goat-sacrifice, satan-worship star...

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to see which variety was chosen for each of the major party emblems.

I won't make any further commentary than that. Just thought I'd share.

Election Fun

2010-11-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

This morning, when my wife and I went to vote, we came across a campaign sign, right there on the public school grounds of our polling place. Across the street on someone's private property, I'd be fine with, but no. Not at the polling location. Not cool. I wasn't about to stand for that. So I knocked it over.

After voting, on our way back to the car, I swiped it.

During the morning meeting at work, my coworkers and I sliced it up and made it better. So, I hereby present our improved campaign signs:

Rodders asked, after we'd had our way with the sign, whether I'd taken a "before" picture. I hadn't, so we pieced it back together as best we could. So in case you're wondering what started this little adventure, here's the sign more or less as we saw it, inappropriately standing outside the polls:

Best of luck to your opponents, Mike. Your supporters have no class.

Anyway, everyone who hasn't already: Get out and vote! Even if it's for this goon. Vote! Do it now!

VOTE.

2010-11-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.

-Socrates

Get out there and vote, even if tragedy is inevitable.

-Me

Happy Hal`10ween!

2010-10-29T20:23:00.001-07:00

It's that time of year again! That time of year we buy up bags of candy "for trick or treaters" put out our cool little flag, and take knives and fire (and, this year, foil) to shapely orange vegetables.

They make a cute couple, don't you think?
After my squarish pumpkin had its face, Kim noticed it looked a bit like Frankenstein's monster. Some extra slices and aluminum foil experiments later, he had neck bolts and some stylish head stitches. Go ahead and zoom in if you like, but don't look too close - I just noticed the bolts are threaded backwards!

Kim's nearly spherical pumpkin got a happy ghost face, and doesn't even seem to mind being checked out by Frankie. It's really enjoying itself; it knows it's a special time of year.

Both of these characters gave us a good supply of seeds too (Happy Ghost's are especially plump); here's hoping we can cook them up as good as last year's.

eStuff, iThings...

2010-10-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

In the '90s, it was eStuff. eBooks, eMachines, eBay, "E" was the little letter to stick on your brand. Then, it was on to the next vowel.

In the '00s, it was iThings. iPods, iMacs, iPhones... Heck, the world's best-selling video game console is nothing more than a "W" with two little "i"s tacked on.

I've got the next one. Vowels are on the way out. I mean, who wants to be seen in public with an oFace or look up their contacts on a uWho? Obviously, the next big trend in naming is ...

π (yes, "pi".)

I've already begun work on the πPod, which obviously will be used to play MP3.14159 files. (You may have already read about that compression algorithm.)

You've been told WHAT?!

2010-10-12T19:18:00.000-07:00

Got something interesting (for certain, grotesque values of "interesting") in the snail mail:

If you don't feel like zooming in, the letter begins:

If you're the Republican I've been told you are, then I need you to...

Now I don't know who's been spreading such rumors, and I've been called a lot of things in my life, but never "Republican". That's just low.

A short while ago, my wife got the same insulting letter, and she figured out the proper response (once she quit cursing). Since this was a solicitation for campaign money, obviously the correct thing to do was was to turn around and give money to the Democrats. And so she did. These folks didn't learn their lesson, they sent me the letter, so now I did too.

We suspect our names were collected from the DMV or something. Just because we live in Utah doesn't mean we're Republican. Or Mormon. Oh, and I only have the one wife. I'm white, that's about all you get.

I suppose it could have been worse. The Teabaggers could have written asking me for money. But apparently the rumors about me haven't gotten so bad that anybody's accused me of being an ignorant-as-hell-and-proud-of-it, racist, homophobic, corporate-puppet, doomsday-cult zombie.

Not sure who to donate to if that letter comes.

Vacuum

2010-10-11T20:21:00.000-07:00

Two quick ideas for vacuum cleaners.
<accent type="british">Ones that work properly.</accent>

Cordless Upright Vacuum
This one, I could build. I'm tempted to. Get me an off-the-shelf energy-star vacuum cleaner, a home office uninterruptible power supply, some warranty-voiding tools, a few yards of duct tape, and an afternoon, and I'll give you a vacuum that doesn't try to trip you dozens of times with its big stupid clumsy power cord while you use it. Actually I won't give it to you, I'll keep it. Even if it kind of sucks.
(...Did a quick Google search... no, not a little pretend vacuum, not a dustbuster, a real friggin' cordless vacuum. I don't care if it's heavy. I'm as strong as I am clumsy. Lose the wire.)

Spot RoomBot
We don't have a roomba, but the idea is appealing. We do, however, have a spotbot, and it is worth its weight in gold because it cleans up after our runt of a cat, who can't eat anything other than one kind of prescription food, but does anyway. A spotbot which could seek out the next area of barfplops and tailsmears would be worth its weight in ... something else super-valuable.
...This one's quite a bit harder. It would need to be able to refuel itself with water and detergent (and dump out the cat-barf-tainted water) as well as deal with taller solid masses in addition to spill-type floor-level stains. Sign me up for version 2.0 of this one; working out the kinks in this design would be more gross than my current techniques.

Happy Anniversary to Us

2010-10-08T16:38:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, this happened:

...It actually happened in color, but you get the idea. A Minnesota girl and a Wisconsin boy got married. They're not usually ones to get all dressed up (he also doesn't normally shave) but they'd fallen in love and grown to mean the world to each other. Five years ago today, they became husband and wife.

Thank you, Kim, for the last five years, for the time we were together before that, and for all the time we'll have from here on out. You're amazing, and you make me feel like I can be amazing too.

Happy anniversary to us!

On the Preparation of Bratwurst

2010-05-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

Years ago I moved from Wisconsin to Utah for work purposes, but you can't take Wisconsin out of the man, it seems - I started up a Brat Friday tradition, to make coworkers happy by clogging their arteries. I have become known as "the brat whisperer", and probably other more colorful names I'm not aware of. Anyhow, folks tell me that the results are good, and I've recently been asked about the process by several people. I think of it more as an art than a science, but for those who are curious, I'll jot down here some notes on my technique (if it can be called that).

Mark of a Wisconsinite #1: The bratwurst itself
It's hard to buy a bad pack of brats. When they're good they're great, and when they're bad, they're still pretty good. (Surely this applies to other things in life too, I leave that as an exercise for the reader.) Small sausage shops (even sausage-and-cheese-shops, or sausage-cheese-and-beer shops) are pretty easy to find in Wisconsin, but a bit more rare in Utah. I've had great luck with Colosimo's. (http://www.colosimosausage.com) Plenty of yummy flavors out there - Italian style, Polish, red wine, apple, but my default is always the original German style. Absent a mom-and-pop sausage shop, supermarket brands are fine too. If they have a deli, ask there first. But even the worst wurst can turn out very yummily.

Mark of a Wisconsinite #2: The beer
As far as I know, the proper thing to do with a brat is to boil it in beer to the point of being cooked before it ever approaches the grill, if indeed it ever does. Time and laziness, however, push me towards substitute behaviour for this step. What normally happens is I'll put fridge-temperature brats in a bowl, slice up a yellow onion into it, then dump in a couple beers. I've had great luck with Cutthroat, but I suspect any pale ale or other hops-heavy beer will have a similarly yummy effect. Any beer will do, but for soaking purposes I'd try not to go too light or too dark. I leave 'em in the beer+onion stew for a while, until the first wave of people get impatient. (Call it a sloppy 5 minutes, no penalty on either side.)

Hint of religion: Starting the grill
I'm not sure what the gospel according to Penduin would read like, (poorly, I'm guessing) but I'm pretty sure one of the cardinal rules would be that thou shalt open thine beer before starting thy grill. Ideally a propane grill would have a bottle opener that serves as its ignition switch. Mormon coworkers tend to overlook this step, but they shouldn't - a grillmaster without an open beer is ill-equipped. Not only is he not fully enjoying life, but he cannot immediately deal with flare-ups in proper, beer-smoke-generating fashion.

Spice of variety: Beans and onions
While the grill is warming up and burning off last week's grease, I'll throw on a pot of baked beans (top rack, give 'em time) and a tinfoil boat of onion slices stolen from the soaking bowl (bottom rack, get 'em tender). Bush's makes several flavors of aptly-named "grillin' beans", all of which are quite good, but a coworker of mine makes the best baked beans himself... they include little chunks of hamburger and bacon, and several types of beans. Anyway if you serve beans with your brats, cooking 'em in the smoky grill is highly recommended. To avoid burning the onions, double-up the foil and soak them in beer. This is another reason the grillmaster must be equipped with an open and non-empty beer at all times; the onions in this foil boat should never go dry, even if a leak springs.

Art of grilling: Meat hits iron
I'm a disciple of Hank Hill, at least when it comes to grilling. I keep the propane on pretty low, because a lazy, slow-cooked sausage is happier and yummier than one that's burnt outside and pink within. I've also used charcoal, which for me just meant moving everything around even more often. No matter the fuel, I'm very hands-on. I turn 'em over often and stand 'em up on their edges to try and darken them evenly all the way around.

Touch of planning: The pipeline
When the first pack of brats is out of the beer and onto the flames, the next pack goes in the bowl. I tend to cook for a decent crowd now, so this is usually a one-way assembly line. When there were fewer packs of brats feeding fewer people, I used to toss brats from the grill back in the drink a time or two before finishing them, operating on the principle that a hot brat will more readily absorb beery, oniony flavor than a cold one. In practice, this probably matters more with weaker/lighter beer. Beer with sufficient bite seems to give the brats enough flavor with just the one soak.

Trial of patience: When to say when
Slow cooked, a brat will be safe to eat for a good while before I call it "done". There's golden-brown, there's brown, but basically I like to call it good right around the time the first spots of black are showing up. I don't want to feed people a lump of charred carbon, but the very ends or the bits that have been over the hottest parts of the flame should be a little blackened, I think. If you try to unbend the sausage to fit it into a straight bun, it should split open.

Ultimate mark of a Wisconsinite: The cheese
Everybody has their own idea of optimal bratwurst garnishing. For me it's simple: put a nice slice of cheese on the bun (pepperjack and muenster are my current favorites) and let the brat melt it once it's wedged in there. I also like to experiment with various mustards; gotta love a good grainy brown mustard. Others like me to grill their bun for a minute first, or to pile on the beer-boiled onions, jalapeno slices, or of course sauerkraut. Some folks will spoon some baked beans right on there. Can't screw it up, really. I'll frown at someone for using ketchup, but I guess I can't really call it "wrong". For the experimental and/or indecisive, segmenting the brat with several different mustards or cheeses is to be encouraged, and rewarded with beer.

I think that's about it. I don't claim to be an expert in the preparation of bratwurst, but at the very least I've been able to fool some of the people some of the time. :^) If anyone actually reads this, post your own grilling stories and suggestions. For grilling is not about instructions and procedures, it's about chatting and sharing stories. And beer. ...Oh right and sausages. Tasty, tasty sausages.

Projects

2010-03-31T13:33:00.000-07:00

Since I have such a great deal of free time, I have some little side projects going. That there was half sarcasm. I have what feels like no free time at all, and quite a few projects on distant back-burners, most of them having been idle for some time.

Tong, my little brain-hurting game
After "finishing" 1.0 years ago I've added some tweaks and fixes, but I never released a 1.1 because I'm waiting for some custom background music to get finished, and I hate pestering the (very friendly and talented) fellow who was writing it.
Status: long-stalled

Bontz, a much bigger brain-hurting game
So many false starts. I had some wind last year with scanned, hand-drawn graphics and a brand new engine (two new engines, actually, a "real" C one and a "prototyping" Python one), and even threw together most of a spin-off minigame, the 8-bit looking Mucka Munch. Then work kicked into high gear and I haven't been back for months.
Status: stalled

The End, a sci-fi series and/or film
A work buddy and I have a pretty fun concept worked out and I've started work on a proper screenplay. It would be incredibly fun to find some local actors and spend whatever our wives would let us shooting this as some independent project. It would also be incredibly fun if days lasted 32 hours instead of 24, so I'm guessing a series of scripts is as far as this will go.
Status: crawling

Flipnotes, various small animations
On and off I get an itch to make silly animations, and in the tradition of Fantavision and Mario Paint, Flipnote Studio on the DS is a very fun creative outlet with a really big double-edged sword: internet connectivity. Sharing and building on animations as a community is great fun, and I've had a few #1 ranked cartoons, but they're never the ones I'm actually proud of or put lots of effort into.
Status: slow trickle

Megabot, a free and open Megaman engine
I had a little steam and created a handful of graphics, including most of the player animations (all inspired by 8-bit Megaman games but not direct sprite copies) and even built a Python prototype running a slightly-interactive title screen (using a Wii remote, even) but haven't plunged into the tedious blocks of code that lie between getting something happening on-screen and having a workable engine I can add content to.
Status: stalled

WarioWare DIY, various micro-games
This just came out, but it's pretty obvious that I'll be logging a lot of insomnia hours here. Nintendo has gone and made a DS game about making DS games. The mind boggles, and my first collection of random challenges is grilling-themed.
Status: alive and well

This blog, the thing you're reading right now
Three months and change since my last update, which was puny, and another two months from the also-puny one prior. On the odd chance I think I have something interesting to say, by the time I get around to starting to say it I've lost either the interest in whatever I had to say as being share-worthy or the momentum to flesh out something worth reading. I figure I'll tackle the former first and post some crap, and maybe work my way up to read-worthy once I've defeated my digital hermit-ism.
Status: highly neglected

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-24T18:37:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas everybody!

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T16:36:00.001-07:00

We'd sort of forgotten about it until just after Halloween, but recently at a pizza joint we bought me a brilliant cosume from a gumball machine. At least, for my own strange values of "brilliant". A fake moustache, to be worn over one's real moustache... for some reason I find that kind of thing very amusing.
But this 25 cent, entirely-convincing disguise didn't stop there. Behold, as the rest of my little family is rendered utterly unrecognizable by its moustachy magnificence!

Approaching Three Oh

2009-09-11T12:15:00.000-07:00

For some time, I thought of 30 as a scary age. An age beyond which I would be old and unrecognizable. Given how far along I already am in the feeling-old department, and how little my appearance has changed (I've been fat, bearded, and bald since college at least), I'm less concerned about that. The number 30 still had a bit of psychological weight, though, so I decided I had to look at things differently.

In a week or two, "30" will be the layman's way of describing my age. The finger-counter's perspective. But to me and any other system software engineer, I'll be 0x1e. I'll be 00011110, and that's according to the first computer I ever hacked on. By today's standards, I'll be 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000011110. Just look at all those insignificant digits. How could anybody who knows anything call me "old"? :^)

Point is, I won't need an extra binary digit until I'm 32 in decimal. 0x20 hex. And the extra-bit logic works just fine for me. Time flies when you're young, so you get extra bits pretty frequently. At 2, at 4, at 8... but the next bit you need is at 16, which in my case is still holding out just fine. If I use this reasoning and set my scary "old" age at 32, then I won't have to bother with a midlife crisis until I'm 64! Then I can pop my meds, buy a hotrod hovercar and blast that Beatles song loud enough to drown out the tinnitus.

After that, I can measure life as a countdown to 128. Anything beyond that's an awfully big bonus, at least by modern reckoning. Even with leaps and bounds in medicine and cheese-healthification, I don't see having any chance of overflowing even the trusty ol' Apple II's native integer. And, if by saying that, I'm jinxing my own life upon turning 256, well, so be it.

But thirty? Hardly seems worth mentioning. Multiples of ten are for chumps. In fact, forget I even said anything. ...Thirty. Pff.

Good News

2009-02-13T12:13:00.000-08:00

There aren't enough positive news stories these days. It's all "tumbling economy" this and "damn politicians" that. Well today I feel good. And in true journalistic oversimplifying form, I'll tell you why in three bullet points.

Messaging Architects: To quote another fat balding madman: "I love this companyyyy!"
Bratwurst Friday: Everyone, from my coworkers to the folks up at Colosimo's Sausage to the fictional Hank Hill, has to crack a little smile at our little tradition.
Beer: Rand brews a lot of really good stuff, and the double IPA I had today was no exception. I'd go so far as to say this is the bulleted list item that had the greatest effect on my happy mood right now, though the others are surprisingly close runners-up.

No real personal news today, and I haven't thought of any clever commentary, nor have I made any big breakthroughs with my pet projects, and I'm not angry enough at anything to write something funny and/or interesting. But with a belly full of bratwurst and beer, I feel the need to spread some good will and a message of relaxed "ahh"-ness. At this time slice in the great mass of pointless information, what's this one little message going to hurt anyhow?

Friends, family, countrymen: don't forget the little stuff. ...And never underestimate the positive psychological effects of good cheese.

:^) 0x7d9

2009-01-05T14:59:00.000-08:00

(That's "Happy 2009", for anyone who doesn't speak Slackware-flavored smileys or hexidecimal.)

What better way to celebrate 2008 being over with than to prattle on about things that took place while it wasn't? ...Don't answer that. Surely there are countless better ways. But that's what I'm going to do anyway.

In 2008 my wrist got a little messed up, having grown a mysterious extra bit of bone or something. I posted a cool x-ray here (see April) and have files from the following inconclusive CAT scan, which I still mean to build a little interactive widget for sometime. I got a shot of cortisone, which helped. It's still not 100%, but it's not bad.

In 2008, I was sent to an artsy/geeky conference in Florence, so the missus and I got to hang out in Italy for a week. Still haven't finished the full online photo album, but we did post some stuff here (see April).

In 2008 my little sister got engaged, reminding me once again that I am very old. I can still call her "little", however, as she's all thin and whispy whereas I am ... not.

In 2008 Kim and I thwarted prescription pet food manufacturer Hills' attempt to murder our cat. They changed her only known compatible food, but we eventually did find one other. Go Eukanuba!

In 2008, Obama got numerous campaign contributions from both of us throughout his campaign. To everyone who thinks we forgot to send a Christmas gift: you're welcome!

In 2008 I won the "ownership" award at work for putting in some ridiculous hours and getting the job done no matter the task thrown at me. At least, that's what somebody thinks I do.

In 2008 the author of the IMAP protocol was hired at my workplace. He and I are building M+Guardian's new IMAP server together, which, I'll be honest, was a bit intimidating at first.

In 2008, I got sent on a business trip to Montreal just before Christmas, where Minego and I demonstrated why engineers shouldn't be allowed to participate in gift-stealing parties: our algorithms are superior to those of salespeople.

This is a rather pitiful way to keep in touch with everybody, but happy late holidays one and all! I hope 2009 treats you well.

:^) 0x7d9!

Vote!

2008-11-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

Get out and vote! Go now! Yes, you!

Even the Shmoe knows you've got to vote today!

Boo!

2008-10-31T09:44:00.000-07:00

Boo! Yes, it's those little cute ghosts from the Super Mario games, lovingly crafted out of styrofoam by yours truly, with no small amount of help from the missus. For reasons unknown even to me, I was compelled to put these little guys together for Halloween decorations.

In low light they're not especially easy to photograph without lots of blur, but you get the idea. They hang out on our porch, spinning slowly or quickly depending on the wind, and generally look the other way when I try to line up a nice shot. :^)

The girl boo is probably my favorite. Kim thought we should give one a bow, which she put together beautifully. It's crazy how much personality is added with the slightest modifications. Say what you will of Nintendo's G-rated attitude, their character designs are super-fun.

As much as I hate flash, those pictures had a much higher success rate. It totally gives away the use of fishing line though. :^)

The big guy, the King Boo. My original idea was to make one big King Boo out of paper macche, so we were tooling around a craft store looking for all the supplies I'd need, when Kim found a soccer ball-sized styrofoam sphere, as well as some teardrop-shaped pieces. It was too small, I thought at first, but suddenly instead of one big messy process with a likely-rather-ugly result, I imagined a little swarm of boos, all hanging around their relatively big king. I think it turned out much better this way, and I've already had a blank-check offer from a work buddy to turn these into a mobile for his kid.

I thought I'd throw in some making-of shots, you can see the teardrop-shaped bits and some random shavings of previous pieces here.

They don't know it yet, but these things are arms and a tail of a cute little boo!

Our basement bathroom floor became more interesting as the paint on the boos' faces had to dry. The cat found this all fascinating too; we've had to keep the door shut for a couple weeks now.

The first foam boo and its maker, holding the bits together while the glue dried...

King Boo's crown, after being cut out of a foam cone but before being painted a nice shiny gold.

Progress! The boos, including the girl boo, are finally coming together.

Anyway I had a lot of fun putting together these little guys. Tonight is their big night, they're hanging out on our porch ready to greet (or, more true to form, turn away from) trick-or-treat'ers as we get pillaged for candy.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Human Nature: Annoyance Response

2008-09-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

Something odd struck me the other day. No great epiphany, just a few pieces of data falling near each other in my brain.

domesticated cat meowing for food
car honking
baby crying
television/radio/web advertising
alarm clock
telephone ring

These everyday things and plenty of others take advantage of a peculiar human behaviour: Annoy us and we'll capitulate. Whatever it is we don't really want to do, just make annoying noises to wear us down, and we'll give in.

Then there's the second layer of annoyance I get from realizing that. I'm annoyed, I'm feeding the cat, and I realize that I've just given in to this ridiculous behaviour, which further annoys me, but what am I going to do about it?

Of course sometimes this is a good thing. If somebody's stopped to send some text messages at a green light, they deserve to be annoyed by honking until they agree to look up at the road and drive. The trouble, of course, is that sound goes off in all directions. Now people in other lanes are also annoyed, whether they deserve it or not.

A crying baby probably needs something, and annoying noises are its only way of communication, so it's hard to get too upset at them. (This coming from a non-parent, your mileage may vary.) But by the time the kid's four years old, if it's throwing a hissyfit in the grocery store until the annoyed parent gives in and buys it whatever toy or candy it was whining about, then we've got a problem.

NOW IT'S COME TIME FOR ME TO TRY THIS OUT MYSELF. SINCE I DON'T HAVE ANY CLEVER ENDING IN MIND FOR THIS POST, I'M GOING TO WRITE IN ANNOYING ALL-CAPS UNTIL YOU STOP READING. THE QUICKEST ESCAPE ROUTE IS TO CLICK THE LINK BELOW, A TOTALLY UNRELATED PAGE SET UP BY MY SOON-TO-BE BROTHER-IN-LAW. CLICK THAT AND STOP READING NOW. WHY HAVEN'T YOU GONE TO HIS PAGE YET? GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT EH? WELL, WHILE I'M STILL ANNOYING YOU, I RECOMMEND THAT YOU ALSO POST A LINK TO THIS PAGE. POST IT ANYWHERE, HE'S NOT FUSSY. POST IT WITH THE LINK TEXT AS "ABALASTOW COMPENDIUM" FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT. BUT NOT IN ALL CAPS. OK REALLY I DON'T HAVE ANY MORE TO SAY. JUST CLICK THE LINK AND ALL THIS ANNOYING TEXT WILL GO AWAY. DO IT! DO IT NOW!

Link: abalastow compendium (www.abalastow-compendium.org)

Starship Enterprise

2008-06-05T12:32:00.000-07:00

Another short, pathetic excuse for a post. If you pry a fidgety geek like myself away from his keyboard long enough for a meeting and a second-hand smoke break or two, while he's armed with a dead floppy disk and a swiss army knife, then he might remember seeing this years ago, and subsequently wind up with this:

Incidentally, flip one of these upside-down and it passes for a podracer. Beat that for geekiness!

Intoxicating Aroma

2008-05-29T08:28:00.001-07:00

Somebody on this side of the building has waffles.

It's maddening.

Italy, day 8

2008-04-16T15:36:00.001-07:00

On our last full day in Florence, tourguide Kim took me to the Duomo so that I too could take in just how huge the thing is. Her pictures from actually going up into the large dome tell the tale better than my little shots do, but here they are anyway.

The fact that there's an indoor sundial helps illustrate this place's size a bit. It was darker in here than these photos suggest; that's just the piece of reality a long exposure trades away I guess. That and, the people walking around weren't actually all that blurry. :^)

Il Porcellino! The custom here is that if you pet the pig's nose, you're destined to return to Florence.

Sounds good to us.

The remainder of the day was mainly spent at a couple of art museums, the Accademia and the Uffizi. Again, no pictures allowed inside. I would agree with a no-flash policy, but renaissance art belongs to the world. Anyway I'll skip the soapboxing and just say that no matter how many times one has seen photos or videos of the Birth of Venus, David, or any of the less-famous pieces housed there, it's quite incredible to walk up and let your eyes drink the stuff in in person. The sheer size of some of these works is impressive, let alone the detail and how well so many have held up over time.

Sunday would have been day 9, though we didn't take in much to share. We woke up prior to the crack of dawn, caught a taxi to the train station, took a train to Roma Termini, rode another train to the airport, stood in a bunch of lines, got picked out for bag inspection several times, flew for an inhumane amount of time, ran from one end of the airport in Boston to the other and back to just barely catch our connection, flew again in increased discomfort, waited for luggage that, as it turned out, had never left Boston, came home and collapsed.

To the credit of whatever airline or agency deserves credit for such things, our luggage did get delivered the next day.

Epilogue

The idea of running off to Europe to find oneself (or whatever the cliche is) has always had a curious appeal, but living and eating and working and walking in Florence for a week has given me some real interest in that kind of travel. We got to do both touristy-type stuff and explore things on our own, the latter of which was especially satisfying. I've long been aware of some of the cultural and practical differences one encounters when leaving this melting-pot of ours, but physically experiencing a slice of Italy has made those a lot more tangible. Some differences I very much enjoyed, others not so much...

Population and traffic and transportation are basically solved problems in Italy, at least compared to our situation here. I think the US is a young enough country that we tend to flail wildly between different approaches, be it in our politics, how we deal with social problems, or in our city and suburban development. Italy has had a long time to sort these things out. At least that was my impression.

Italians are thin. :^) Of course, they walk everywhere while smoking, which I'm sure helps. But the meals there are several courses, not skimping on the portions either. These meals do tend to be composed primarily of actual food (as in, not chemicals), which probably factors in somewhere.

Speaking of meal quantities, the drink-to-food ratio is much lower in Italy. If I were to venture a not-very-serious guess, I'd say this might be partially attributed to the scarcity and scariness of public restrooms. (Some public toilets feature paid time slices and automatic doors, which neither of us dared try, and others are apparently locked doors with no handles, which stumped us entirely.)

I'll take plazas and markets over strip malls and retail giants any day. Even when the merchants are selling mass-produced items, walking around shops with atmosphere and personality just feels much more human than the karts and registers and aisles of boxes we've got here. Kim told me about a shop she walked by that had someone inside making puppets. It's more cost-efficient to have colossal stores of stuff made by third world laborers, but there are more kinds of costs than hard numbers.

...Wow, this has gotten long. Anyway, we had a great time. We'd love to learn the language and return someday. (Wouldn't want to let down il Porcellino!) Anyway, back to my usual, infrequent, unfocused blogging about random nonsense. When we have a proper full album up, I'll be sure to toss a link here though.

Italy, day 7

2008-04-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

With the conference finished and a few more days until we return to Utah, (by the way: what a downer! From ground zero of the renaissance and cultural hotspot of western civilization ... to Mormon country in the desert. Plus 8 time zones' worth of jetlag again) we got to finally do some serious looking around the city of Florence together.

Kim already had a pretty good sense of some places and where they were relative to each other, where I basically knew how to navigate a straight line between our hotel and the conference location.

My scribblings there aren't accurate at all, but you get the right idea. Anyway, we started out the day by heading south and crossing the Fiume river.

I didn't know (and still don't know) what this thing is, but it looked cool, which was reason enough to take its picture.

This old tower struck me as ... striking. The place on the right is the site of the next picture.

A fountain, with the edge of the tower over my head:

Some Florence flora provided free framing:

Woah! The southern part of Florence is very green!

Looking back at the bridges, from pretty high up:

Up in the garden area at Piazzale Michelangelo, another self-portrait:

Looking out from the Piazzale, this wall and the large variety of plant life prompted me to take some shots. We'd been in the main part of the city all week, and just hadn't seen this kind of Tuscan country... But more about that later!

Three shots in one, or at least, you'll be able to see more shots of several elements here when I post everything in a proper album. Kim's next to a fleur-de-thing made of flowers, you can see the big wall again, and then, sharp contrast at the edge of urban Florence off to the right.

We visited the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte, which Kim had seen from below on a previous day, but hadn't gone in.

Ok, this probably shouldn't have made the cut for this digest version of our pictorial, but I'm just so impressed that our camera was able to take shots of this detail inside the basilica. It was very dark, but 1-second exposures with the camera held steady against a wall or some such let us capture a little of the beauty we found inside. (I hate to use flash, if that isn't obvious already. It washes everything out, turning beautiful and dynamic places flat and boring.)

More very dark areas, this time with some very bright daylight pouring in:

A shot from the floor at the steps leading down into a smaller room at the back:

Hard to get a really good sense of the place, but this reasonably captured the columns and walls of the main area.

I set the camera down lens-up at what I could see was a detailed ceiling, though I couldn't make out what those details were. One second of light on 7 million pixels of CMOS revealed much more than my naked eyes...

Back outside, rural southern Florence on the left, urban northern on the right:

Before leaving we checked out the cemetery, which was again very beautiful and unlike any we've seen before.

On our way back I decided I had to grab a shot of one of the little cars that frequent the streets of Florence (and, I would assume, lots of other, similarly-tight old cities).

Back to our hotel just for a bit, and a shot of the giant mirror at the entrance:

Then it was off for an afternoon guided tour of Chianti, as in wine. :^) We were first brought to a castle known for its wine-making.

What we saw of Florence was beautiful, but it wasn't the image the mind conjures up when thinking about "Tuscany". Out in Chianti, though, we saw plenty of Tuscan countryside.

We got to go up and be near the castle's crest, but when we came back down and the sun poked through the clouds, it was pretty obvious that this was the correct view.

Inside, many many barrels of wine ferment in oak and await their destiny. Cool thermometer, too!

The mother of all barrels. Floor to ceiling. One doesn't get a great sense of just how huge this thing is from the photo, but it was worth a try.

Many, many bottles:

I had just promised myself I'd start conserving the camera's battery and memory, as neither were infinite and I'd been taking pictures all day. Then, we walked outside on our way to the some wine tasting, and this thing showed up. Honestly, what sort of chance did that give me?

My memory is fuzzy after this one:
...Kidding. But we did try three of the wines shown above. My mouth even experienced one of those cheese+wine moments that I believe is the point of consuming those things together. I'm still a cheese+beer guy, but have warmed up quite a bit to red wine now that I've had some good stuff.

Back outside, near a church in Chianti:

We have a handful of other pictures from our tour Friday, but this one was near the end, and has "blog post ending" written all over it.

Italy, day 6

2008-04-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

Thursday, 10 April. Last day of my conference, which had a lot of interesting stuff crammed into it but just wasn't as compelling as the whole of Firenze itself...

Again, Kim was the chief photographer on Thursday. I can get shots of geeks talking about technology anywhere, but nowhere else could Kim have visited the church of Santa Maria Novella. For being not exactly huge fans of organized religion, we've sure found the churches here fascinating.

The church exterior:

The fleur de thing! ...Or, whatever it's called here.

The entrance:

...And the exit:

No photography allowed inside, unfortunately. That came up several times as we've been here, sometimes to my annoyance. Then again, mobs of tourists all flashing our little cameras doesn't exactly add to the dignity or atmosphere of these old treasures.

Italy, days 4 and 5

2008-04-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

More of Kim's pictures, from Tuesday...

...and Wednesday...

Italy, day 3

2008-04-07T10:52:00.000-07:00

A few select photos and videos from Kim's tour (and a couple shots from the balcony of our hotel)...

Italy, days 1 and 2

2008-04-06T04:08:00.000-07:00

For anyone not in the know, my job has taken me to Florence for a week, to attend a fancy CHI conference. I got to bring my wife along, so before and after the conference we get to take in some local flavor together.

Before getting here, we experienced two different classes of air travel. First there was the kind we are accustomed to, sardine-like accommodations and enough discomfort to open for any stand-up comedian. For the trip across the Atlantic, though, we were put on a plane seemingly designed for human beings. I might have even caught an hour or two of sleep, which I'm pretty sure nobody has ever done on a sardine-class plane.

Italy, day 1.

I actually didn't take any pictures. But I'll describe our brief time in Rome:

waiting for trains
wondering why "Florence" doesn't show up anywhere in the English UI when trying to purchase a train ticket to Florence
train interiors
train tracks, garbage, grafiti
from distant to close: grafiti, garbage, train tracks

Someday we'll come to Italy again and see Rome properly. But it wasn't to be this time 'round. Saturday concluded for us by being driven through very narrow, windy roads and arriving at our hotel, the Residenzia Casanuova, and collapsing for the night. We can whole-heartedly recommend staying here to anyone and everyone; it's easily the nicest place we've ever stayed at in Italy. ;^) Really though, we love it here.

Italy, day 2

First things first. A very nice breakfast is provided here, so we had some food before heading out.

I had to savor the cheese both visually and ... eatingly. As with everything else, it was very tasty.

We didn't go very far on our little self-guided tour; our primary mission was to find an ATM so that we could have some euros with which we could buy, among other things, some actual tours and excursions, including visits to some of the museums we saw but didn't yet enter.

Not the real "David", though it isn't far from here...

Lots of impressive statues of lots of impressive people.

We trekked down to the Arno river and back, crossing a couple of very cool bridges.

There's a learning curve to wandering the streets around here but we're picking up on it. Placed in a car here, I'd give the average Utah driver 15, maybe 20 seconds before killing somebody and/or wrecking something very expensive. Thankfully, the people who do drive here are much smarter. Everything's very close-quarters, though. Our camera's wide-angle lens has been very handy so far.

We passed this gigantic and old church (which is right next to a smaller, even older church) on our way out and on the way back. So we saw it both having little to no bearings and having a pretty good sense of direction.

We've got plenty more pictures and will continue to accumulate them I'm sure, and I think they deserve a dedicated album with proper annotations. I'll have to get on that once we get back. But for now I hope these were enjoyable; it's certainly enjoyable being here. :^)

Update: Italy, day 2 (continued)

Just a couple quick pictures from heading out to dinner. First, the cool stairway we take if laziness doesn't prompt us to use the elevator.

And finally, myself enjoying an Italian beer. :^)

Spare bone

2008-04-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

My wrist has been hurting for the last few days, enough that I finally went to a doctor for the first time in ... well years, not sure how many. I spend what's probably an unhealthy amount of time with my hands at a keyboard, so I was worried about carpal tunnel syndrome and such. But enough chatter, the point of this message is to share a cool x-ray image. :^)

It turns out that I have some "calcification" going on, some extra bony tissue showing up where it shouldn't. If I move my wrist the wrong way (which is, basically, too far in any direction) this extra chunk starts annoying whatever nerves and stuff that are around it. I'm wearing a brace now and will have to hunt down an orthopedic doctor at some point.

Here's the little bugger highlighted:

I'm not so sure about this whole getting old stuff, I think I liked it better when my body wasn't falling apart, but I think I'll keep at it, see if this getting old business gets any better with age. ...Wait a minute...

Preserve the Ratio!

2008-03-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, in brew pub in Salt Lake City, some work buddies and I noticed that the widescreen TVs showing the game (don't ask which game, or even what sport; I don't know) were actually set up correctly. As it turns out, all of us share a pet peeve, namely the practice of buying a fancy widescreen TV, pumping a 4:3 picture into it, and setting it to the wrong display mode, distorting and fattening everything shown.

An iPhone (is that the proper capitalization?) was present, and we determined that "preservetheratio.com" was indeed available, a vacant soapbox from which we could complain about the vile practice that distorts the images so many see every day, a home base upon which we could collect written and photographic accounts of these public displays of stupidity, a domain name which, though basically useless, we could indeed secure and have for our own.

Unlike most bar talk, this actually led to one of us going ahead and registering preservetheratio.com. He hadn't actually been drinking, even. But apparently it was obtained for next to nothing. Upon hearing this, I snapped a few quick pictures in my office and threw together my own personal rant on the topic. It's not the multitude of articles and arguments and pictorials we imagined when beer was present, but for now it's the only content on the site. And it's a little creepy 'cause my picture is sitting right there on the front of a something-dot-com.

Anyway it's pretty silly, and contains more complaining than humor, but here's a link anyhow:
http://www.preservetheratio.com

More Shmoe

2008-03-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Shmoe has his own website now. Not much there yet, and it'll never be pretty.
http://shmoe.mine.nu

...that is all.

Have fun with your internets

2008-03-06T15:38:00.000-08:00

This is a dumb story. But I'm overworked, sleep-deprived, and need a break. Some coworkers and I have been writing a new web-based setup for M+ Guardian. (As in, you buy a Guardian appliance from Messaging Architects, plug it in, hit it with a browser the way you configure your router, and set up the system.) Its implementation is quite slick, and we've spent some really long nights on it. Once everything is set up, the appliance will start up its services and begin dutifully making your corporate email safe and unspammy.

But that last screen, nobody gave me any text for what should be said there. The current placeholder is something like "M+ Guardian is set up, you may now do XYZ". Not great. And in our quickie meeting today, nobody gave me anything better, except Thane who jokingly suggested "Have fun with your internets". After the meeting, I scribbled our new internal M+ slogan and an accompanying drawing on the whiteboard.

...And now, on the other side of the picture, the other side of the story. The dude in the scribble is the Shmoe, who apparently doesn't even deserve a "c" in his name. He first appeared in some high school notebooks, in French class. He was meant to be the guy on the hissy, stretched-out cassette tape telling us to listen and repeat... In any case, he's surfaced around the office lately in various situations. This time he's using his beer belly as a table, and looking up what appear to be either boobies or eyeballs on his super-modern computer.

happy = new Year(2008);

2007-12-31T08:25:00.000-08:00

There it is again, the end of this year and the beginning of the next. It's only an arbitrary marker in time, which is already measured arbitrarily, but the programmer in me has to stand down for a moment and let the Sol-3-bound human in me enjoy the idea.

So, to anyone and everyone, have a happy New Year!

Happy Halloween!

2007-10-31T20:02:00.000-07:00

This was our first Halloween at our own house, and it saw plenty of trick-or-treat traffic.

Our neighbors went all-out with decorations and special effects, which we couldn't match, but we did have a jack-o-lantern I felt mildly clever coming up with, and a cute little skull-on-the-grill display.

Happy All Hallows' Eve!

Approaching Democracy

2007-10-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

I swore this blog wouldn't turn into a political soapbox. I'm breaking that for two reasons: I'm not taking any politically-charged sides here, and it's an idea that's simply too good to go unmentioned.

For as much as we throw around the term "democracy", what we (and all other "democratic" nations) have is a republic. We don't make the decisions; we elect people to make the decisions for us. That's no bad thing necessarily, but that layer of indirection has can be very thick and frustrating at times.

http://senatoronline.com.au/

This is brilliant. It's a hack for an existing republic to inject a bit of direct democracy. All registered voters may vote online on any and every issue that passes through the senate. The senator (human or software) then blindly votes accordingly. If the idea works, clones and variations of the system will also get elected, slowly replacing, to whatever extent citizens are comfortable with, the old republic with a true democracy.

Variations that deal with introducing bills in addition to just voting on them could be very interesting. How to best immunize these systems from party poisoning could become key in how useful and effective they might be in the long term. If nothing else, this conjures a mental image of replacing senators with small shell scripts, which should bring a huge smile to any geek's face.

Them's Fightin' Words!

2007-08-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've put up with a lot of crap since becoming a homeowner, but I don't think I've ever been directly insulted before. That changed yesterday. If I were to try to come up with the optimal, most derogatory insult per syllable, I don't think I could do much better than this:

Are they serious? "Utah driver"! What cruel joke is this?! Suffice to say, I won't be signing up for this particular brand of auto insurance. Not that I'd have considered it anyway, I suppose.

Next up:

Junk mail from cosmetics companies addressed to "Fugly Resident"
Church newsletters to "Hell-bound Soul"
Discount store catalogs to "Dirt-poor Pauper"
GED pamphlets addressed simply to "Dumbass"
Cologne and perfume ads to "B.O. McSmelly or current occupant"

I suppose it is possible that most people around here wouldn't take so much offense to being called a "Utah driver". ...But after further reflection, I just don't see how that could be so.

The Best Wurst

2007-07-05T09:25:00.001-07:00

That title's a Red Green-ism, by the way. Credit where credit is due. Anyhow, this post is mostly a pointless anecdote, but can also serve as a series of tips for any bratwurst-grilling newbie. :^)

We went to an Independence Day party last night, and I was charged with bringing and preparing the brats. This is a responsibility which I gladly accept anytime, and which I take quite seriously. After all, I'm representing Wisconsin out here. We cheeseheads are a proud, brat-grilling people. We have a rich tailgating culture. Here in Utah, though, there would be no beer dulling the senses of these Latter-Day Saints. Their taste buds would tell no lies. My brats had to stand on their own.

Luckily, I was not without help. A week or two ago, a work buddy introduced me to a local family-owned sausage shop, Colosimo's. A quick drive up towards Salt Lake scored us three packs of high-quality bratwurst. Not to knock the big-name brands; you can get a decent brat anywhere, but these small places survive by being the tastiest, not the most cost-effective and well-distributed. Not surprisingly, mom-and-pop sausage shops are a bit harder to come by in Utah than in Wisconsin.

Now, to someone like me, it's pretty non-controversial that in order to grill the best wurst, one ought to soak them in beer and onions at some point(s) during their preparation. Pre-boiling is common practice, for good reason. I didn't dare go that route though, as I didn't know if the various Mormons I'd be feeding would be comfortable with it. As it turned out, nobody objected to their brat having a good soak in some appropriately-patriotic Samuel Adams lager.

Cutting up an onion was murder on my eyes, but that was good - it meant the little bugger was potent enough to quickly impart its flavors to the hot brats swimming around in the pan. Surface area's the name of the game, the more thin slices the better. Tears of joy, right? :^)

I also made sure to capitalize on my tendency to micro-manage the grill. Rather than turning once or twice, I made sure every brat got plenty of rotation, including being balanced sideways. (You can actually see that going on in Proby's picture up there.) A curved brat can't be cooked perfectly evenly, but it's pretty easy to do better than two charred sides and pink everywhere else.

Using cheese as a brat condiment is a very Wisconsin-y touch. If you ask me, get plenty of colby-jack melted between the bun and the sausage, and there's no need for mustard or sauerkraut or anything else. Cheddar was more popular yesterday, and I won't argue with cheddar. That would be folly. Point is, cheese and brats go together like ... actually, I can't think of much else that goes together that well. Beer and brats, maybe. Or beer and cheese. Oh, got it. Cheese and bratwurst go together like fireworks and the 4th of July.

I received a whole bunch of compliments on the brats, so I must have done something right. We got to digest while watching lots of pretty fireworks go off, both amateur and professional. Celebrating the nation's birthday with grilled meat and explosions, who could ask for more? :^)

Prior Art

2007-07-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

One of the memes buzzing around the hippie geek community lately is a way to stick it to those greedy corporations who think they can own math and such, and who bully everybody with patent infringement lawsuit threats and backroom licensing agreements. How? By brain-dumping ideas publicly. If proof exists of prior art or even that an idea has been published, a patent on it can be struck down.

I don't have any brilliant ideas, but i have some mundane ones that are much more clever than half the crap that gets awarded patents these days. So here they are, at least the ones I can remember off the top of my head, and if any greedy corporation is reading, go ahead and make these things happen, but you can't have patents on 'em. Not for long anyway. They're braindead ideas, documented here as prior art.

Video Projector With Smart Auto-Adjust
Implementation 1: Infrared beacons or reflective tape is built-in or can be attached to all 4 corners of any reflective screen, a small infrared camera in the projector (much like the one in a Wii controller) detects the positions of the screen corners, and software distorts and adjusts the projected image to be the correct shape and size.
Implementation 2: No beacons, but a small camera built into the projector feeds data to software that scans for a big, bright, 4-sided polygon, and adjusts the projected image. Probably the better implementation for most cases. A single unit could be capable of using both methods.

Product Placement in Photo/Video/Art Sharing Sites
My friend's Flickr account contains a photo of someone clearly holding a branded pop can. He deserves ad revenue-per-view as much as advertising agencies do. Better yet, pay individuals for stuff like this and stop polluting broadcast and print media with loud and obnoxious ads.

Non-Fling Fingernail Clipper
The otherwise-standard clipper has a soft, spongy clamp behind the blades, which holds a clipped nail until released, rather than ejecting it at a random, high-velocity trajectory.

Pi Compression
(see earlier post)

AI-Engineered Codecs
(see earlier post)

Incompetence Profile: Dish Network

2007-06-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

Oh Dish Network, how I loathe thee. Let me count the ways...

Advertising: incompetent
Lies, damned lies, and Dish Network promises. Free installation, they say! "Setup fee" though, that's different. And not mentioned until you've signed up. Up to 4 receivers free, they say! "Free" apparently means "extra $5 a month" in certain contexts. Only $30 a month, they say! Well, $40. Same thing right? $45 if you'd like local channels. No hidden fees, they say! Well, except for a $10 per month "programming access fee" if the phone line isn't hooked up. Even if the installation techs promised that's not the case. Which brings us to...

Installation technicians: incompetent
New house, no TV sets there where they will be yet. Not a problem, says the phone rep. Different story in person. They only have a big utility van full of equipment; it would be silly for them to include a little TV for testing. So my wife, already wasting her day waiting for these jokers, had to drive back to the apartment, grab our small TV, and drive it back, while these guys poked around on the roof and in the utility room, where they knocked out our DSL just to be cute. "One dual receiver in the bedroom, another in the basement" was the order. But my earning-her-3rd-college-degree wife probably didn't know what she was talking about, so they called me at work. Yes, I built a DVR so we want a dual tuner downstairs. As for the other, we might add a TV somewhere else at some point, and the dual tuner costs the same as a single anyway. Bedroom, basement. You install, I'll take it from there. So, naturally, they installed one in the bedroom, and the other ...in the office, two floors away from the basement. My wife was understandably sick of dealing with them by then, so I sorted things out when I got home, no thanks to their unmarked cables. Well, to be fair, a few cords had labels on one end. Not correct labels, but still.

Phone maze design: incompetent
I don't even need to go into details here. All phone mazes are defective by design. Any organization that installs such an abomination is incompetent. No exceptions, no excuses. We'd all honestly rather be on hold listening to muzak if the alternative is trying to appease some robot telling us to punch numbers and speak and roll over.

Customer service: incompetent
Beyond the phone maze await more robots, this time in the form of human beings in India reading from a flow-chart script. The phrase "I do apologize for the inconvenience sir" is used as punctuation, and to fill the silence when calling up the next part of the script. I'm not looking for an apology. Just take this fee, which you promised wouldn't be here, off my bill.

Hardware engineering: incompetent
Ahh, a nice compact dual tuner. What's this? S-Video output? Cool beans! Oh wait, it only works on the RF-remote tuner, which would by definition be elsewhere in the house, tuned to a UHF channel. Well, whatever. Composite's not so bad. No home automation control port, huh? That sucks, but I guess I can get an infrared blaster for my MythTV box. Oh, lovely. The tuner's IR sensor is fickle and ignores digits when it feels like it. Great job guys, wouldn't want to build a sensor that's a few % forgiving, 'cause surely your $3 made-in-Taiwan remote control powered by two AA batteries has more accurate signal timings than a friggin' PC motherboard.

Software engineering: incompetent
Finally, everything's set up and mostly working. Wait, what? We recorded a friggin' screensaver with a bouncing Dish logo instead of our shows? Every night in the wee hours, program guide updates are downloaded and the tuner reboots and comes up not with the last-tuned channel, but with this ridiculous "press select to continue" mode. This also happens if you don't press any buttons for 4 hours or so. Augh! There's an inelegant workaround I can and do use, but would it really be that hard to just boot up into the last tuned channel? Or update channel listings without a reboot? (What is this, Windows 95?) Or allow numbers to be punched in instead of ignoring all but a "select" signal? Or not have that useless screensaver mode in the first place?

It smells a bit of conspiracy theory, but Dish offers their own, reportedly-awful DVR (for a monthly fee, of course) which could explain the hardware and software issues that make it such a pain in the ass to set up a Dish receiver with an external recorder. Who knows if DirecTV would have been any better; their pricing lies were even more infuriating than Dish's. Don't you just love the "freedom" of choosing between two corporate overlords?

Dish Network. We put the F.U. in T.V.

The Great Beeping of '07

2007-05-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

My wife and I got home later than usual last night, welcomed by six smoke alarms blaring just as loudly as their manaical speakers would allow. According to the neighbors, this had been going on for a good long while. Just to get it out of the way, no, there was no fire. There were no dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. There was just noise. Massive, massive decibel levels of noise.

I flipped the breaker ever so helpfully named "Smokeys" or some lame thing, and we set about hunting down each of the unholy ear-gouging devices. Grab, twist, pull it down, yank the AC plug, flip open the side and rip out the 9-volt. As if to add to the surreal nature of this process of systematically finding and killing these hateful abominations, several of them hissed with static and gasped with high-frequency squeals as the last watts bled from their capacitors. Die! Why won't they just DIE?!

Our poor cat was already neurotic and jittery, so this whole episode was just terrific for her. I hate to think what being showered in that acoustic magma feels like after hours and hours, let alone for a critter of super-sensitive hearing. My tinnitus is noticeably worse, my wife could barely focus on her homework, and our neighbors would be quite justified in either pitying us or hating us, all because someone thought it would be smart to design a system of smoke alarms that:

Never shut up no matter how long they're raised
Connect to each other and all go off if one is triggered
Are each, individually, deafeningly loud
Cannot be turned off remotely by cutting power
Give no hint as to which unit's faulty sensor started the whole mess

Yes. Brilliant.

So far, home ownership has been just fantastic. What's next, I wonder? Wait, I know. All the light bulbs simultaneously explode, raining sparks down on carpet and furniture and starting fires on every floor. The smoke alarms aren't replaced yet so nobody is warned, the pipes all magically route natural gas instead of water, and the entire place goes up in a huge plume of smoldering annihilation. Oh, and then our insurance company turns out to be a subsidiary of Enron and vanishes without a trace, our cat miraculously survives only to sue the bejesus out of us, and the homeowners association fines us for burning without a permit.

mv /home/apartment /home/house

2007-05-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

Moving sucks. Never again, at least not until we can afford to hire movers. All my stuff and all my wife's stuff is at our new home, though most of it's still globbed on the main floor, waiting for us to muster the energy and the giving-a-crap to move things to more sensible places.

I did figure out a good way of explaining RAM and some other concepts to people who aren't computer literate, though. RAM is your computer's tables and counters. If you've got lots of counter space, you can do things. Things like put down a plate, remove the lid of a peanut butter jar and set it down, little luxuries like that. When all your counter space is full, you need to start swapping. Typically you have to swap stuff from the table (RAM) to the floor (hard disk). Holding things in your hands (CPU registers) is handy for juggling a few things at a time, but you have to set them down sooner or later.

The analogy is silly, but its implications are even sillier...

When we first moved in, all our stuff was compactly stored in two rooms on the main floor - the beginning of a disk. We're now seeking to fragment our housedrive on purpose, moving things bit by bit off into the far corners of our available space.

The seek time on our house is ironically much slower than in the old apartment, even though we have three platters as opposed to just one. Then again, the head count hasn't increased so that still makes sense.

DMA would be awesome. If things could get from any floor space to any counter or table space without having to be carried by our sore CPU registers, that would save a lot of time and effort, which I suppose is the entire point of DMA.

Wouldn't it be nice if extra hard disk space could be turned into RAM just by putting a table there? Not swap, but actual, useful RAM. Growing extra registers would be very useful too. Most people would just wind up using them to play solitaire though.

Our cat is a virus who will indiscriminately puke on both RAM and the hard disk. Her runtime is some sort of virtual machine which doesn't make any distinction between the two, it's all just trottable and sleepable surface area.

~ mv /home/apartment /home/house
Permission denied.
~ sudo mv /home/apartment /home/house
~

"Sudo" must be the 16-foot truck we rented. It was powerful and a little intimidating to use. A person could get used to that level of power and potential disaster, but most of us should stay in user mode most of the time, and only fiddle with the stuff we own.

Does Not Compute

2007-03-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

I grew up with an Apple IIe. Six expansion slots, color graphics, dual 5.25" floppy drives, but most importantly, BASIC in firmware. I was writing programs before I even really understood what that meant. To use the computer was to program it, and I couldn't have been happier. Sure, pre-compiled programs like Print Shop and Mario Bros were fun, but making my own stuff, that's what I liked best. That's where the magic was.

I was really, really lucky. I grew up at just the right time. To own a computer was to be a computer enthusiast. It wasn't a means to an end; the point of having the thing was to mess around with it. It could certainly be used to do useful work, but it was every bit as common (and easy) to use it as a toy.

(Begin hearing the "old man" voice in your head at this point.)

Modern computing does not compute! Computers nowadays don't come with any (programming language) interpreters built into ROM. Or pre-installed on their hard disks, as might be more appropriate. The closest you can come to writing programs out-of-the-box today is to use a featureless text editor to write some javascript and run it in a web browser.

<script type="text/javascript">
alert("Hello World, this sucks!");
</script>

Now, the way I learned to be a programmer isn't the only right way. But doing BASIC, being taught C, and picking up on everything else was a pretty fun and natural progression. There are entire college computer science tracks now that don't teach C at all anymore, instead using Java or something. It's not bad to learn Java, but I would argue that learning C is more important, if what you care about is computer science. If you care about crafting cookie-cutter corporate apps quickly, Java's where it's at. But if you care about what's going on, or if you like the idea of a computer as a toy, C is really important. The rub is that it's an awful language to write your first program in. My brain, anyway, wasn't ready for it until I'd done something simpler first.

That's where BASIC came in, and where something like Python could come in today. A person's first program shouldn't be graphical. It shouldn't be run in a web browser. It would be nice if it didn't have to import any libraries. And it would be great if there was a realtime interpreter console, something to try out commands and code chunks before saving them in a file. Apple's flavour of BASIC did all of that, and Python does too.

Python is free in all senses of the word, and runs on any platform. The only problem is, it's not just waiting there on any computer one might buy. Before you can do anything with it, you must learn of its existence, find it, download it, and install it. To me, that's tragic. That's depriving little 5-year-old me's all over the world of something really special. It would be trivial to include in any desktop operating system, and could be presented much more nicely than BASIC was back in the day. In the Start menu, or the Apple menu, or on the desktop, or at whatever handy spot user consults regularly, there ought to be a "Create Programs" menu/folder/whatever. It should contain an interpreter, a decent text editor, a language reference, and a quick start guide to explain what those other things are and how to use them. Why isn't this done?

I understand there's not much consumer demand for this kind of thing. Joe Schmoe wants to buy a computer in order to click around on web pages and print term papers, not as a toy to write his own programs for. But I think that could change, if it was widely understood that software can be made by individual people in a matter of minutes. Sure, it won't be the same as software that comes from big corporations on 18-month release cycles, but why does that matter? MySpace pages, YouTube videos, and blogs, aren't the same as designer-comissioned websites, Hollywood films, and professional journalism. It doesn't matter. Joe Schmoe cares about that stuff anyway.

Microsoft, Apple, Dell, HP, somebody... Put Python on the desktop! Add a notice that you don't provide Python support, with a link to python.org, and you can forget all about it. It wouldn't even have to be Python, that's just my opinion of a good introductory programming language. But for cripe's sake, make it happen! There should be a way to be introduced to programming on every computer out there. The fact that there isn't, just doesn't make sense. It's illogical. It doesn't add up. ... Oh, surely there's a phrase that explains the situation.

Token Microsoft Rip

2007-01-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling sick today, which has several direct consequences. Firstly, I bet I'm wicked-good at Tetris. Haven't tested that, but generally the worse I feel, the more mad spatial skills I possess. Secondly, and more to the point, my brain scatters when I try to convey a message. It logically follows that this is a perfect time for a blog post. :^)

I was complaining to a friend that a link he sent wouldn't work for me, on either my workstation (GNU/Linux) or my other test box (Mac OSX-point-something). I conjectured that the site authors assume a homogenous world comprised only of those who have drunk the Microsoft kool-aid. Rather than to stay on-topic, I was compelled to rant thusly:

The Windows keys were just the first step, you know. "Vista" keyboards will have no letters, but instead, pictures of various barnyard animals. When the user presses one, a soothing Microsoftie voice will say, "The cow goes, 'Moo'!" And then the system will reboot.

I had gone almost two days without teasing Microsoft about their depressingly shitty software, and maybe it's just my illness-ridden state of mind that leads me to find it amusing, but the idea of a barnyard-noises keyboard to compliment the shiny-jingling-keys UI was too delicious not to share. ...You know, with ...all two of you who will read this.

Unanger

2007-01-12T14:07:00.000-08:00

I haven't been a faithful viewer of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart or its younger sibling The Colbert Report, but every once in a while I'll catch something on one of them that really hits home. Mixing political news with comedy is really healthy, I think, and certainly has made the news easier to stomach on those particularly groan-worthy days.

The other day, Stewart had on a guest author, Mike Huckabee, and his book "From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 Stops to Restoring America's Greatness". If I may paraphrase / butcher his own words, Huckabee is "conservative, but not angry about it". He talked about how our elected officials often get distracted with politics and power at the expense of practical matters, and in so doing are failing at their duties to help their people and their homeland. His passing comment about being conservative but not angry about it was a good light-bulb moment for me.

Politically, I would label myself progressive, if I were to pick one label, and as often as not during the last several years, I've been pretty angry about it. Looking at things practically is much more effective, though, and would let me have less heated and more fruitful arguments.

A good example might be my beef with the restrictions on stem cell research. We could argue about when life begins and the ethics of using of embryonic cells until we're blue in the face, but the reasons I think the research should be given some liberty are actually entirely practical. My wife is type-1 diabetic, and I want us to grow old together. I know and have known several cancer patients. I'm fully aware that stem cell research is no guaranteed silver bullet for magically healing these people, but I think that their lives are worth a great deal of effort in trying to save. We owe it to ourselves and to each other not to dismiss or over-restrict science with this much potential. Now, I have no doubt that practical arguments can be made against my position as well, but I'd rather discuss and weigh those than political and religious arguments; all those seem to accomplish is to stir up anger.

In any case, I have a late New Year's resolution, and that is to be less angry where I could instead be practical. Here's hoping a few politicians give the idea a try, too.

Chow Anecdote

2006-12-28T16:21:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't even bother posting this, except that it involves cheese. All which involves cheese is worth speaking of.

It came to me in a dream: I was making some broccoli cheese soup, and added too much milk by mistake. Milk is of course a good thing, but too much of it screws up the viscosity of the soup; I like it good 'n thick. So, unconscious problem solving prompted my imagined self to add some flour. That thickens stuff up, right? Not bad for dream-logic.

So the next time I made broccoli cheese soup in waking life, sure enough I added more milk than I'd intended. Applying the well-worn scientific principle, "oh-what-the-hell", I mixed in one of those little fancy measuring spoon's worth of flour.

Worked like a dream.

GPL: DRM for source code...?

2006-12-01T18:02:00.000-08:00

Over a very nice lunch with a gang of work buddies, the topic of GPL3 and proprietary versus open versus Free came up, and eventually led to a comment that the GPL is "DRM for source code". If you know me, and you know what that means, then you know that it rubbed me the wrong way. :^) Granted, this was said by someone who is no stranger to playing a devil's advocate role, but it got me thinking, and it's been a while since I've posted anything with even the slightest hint of substance.

First of all, I would define most implementations of DRM the way Richard Stallman and the rest of us pinko hippies do, as "Digital Restrictions Management", as opposed to its intended expansion of "Digital Rights Management". Chunks of code and signed keys wrap the stuff you buy on iTunes, the DVDs you buy, and other things where some party is claiming exclusive "rights" to the distribution of whatever we're talking about. The effect is that you can't use the thing you paid for in just any old manner you see fit. (Say, making a copy.) You can only do with it what the rights-holder sees fit. To me that smells more like "restrictions". It's an artificial and arbitrary limitation. I understand why it's done, but I find it insulting, so I whine about it.

The GPL is something of a bill of rights that someone can apply to the software they write. The Linux kernel is GPL. The GNU utilities are GPL. My silly game Tong is GPL. The authors of those programs have decided to use a software license that says, "I give you this program and its code, which you have the freedom to use and modify as you see fit." Most importantly, the GPL also states that if you turn around and give the program (as it was, or your modified version) to someone else, you must afford them all the same freedoms. Technically speaking, that is also an artificial and arbitrary limitation.

So yes, the GPL places restrictions on what can be done with a program's source code: I can't modify it and/or pass it on without also passing on the right to modify it and/or keep passing it on. (That should already sound pretty different than DRM.) The still-being-drafted GPLv3 adds some further stipulations, because people (well, businesses) have found ways to distribute GPL code while following the letter of the GPLv2 but not actually passing on those freedoms in practice. Tivo is the obvious example. It runs GPL software inside (GNU/Linux), but if you grab the code, tweak it, and try to run that, the hardware won't let you, because it only runs software digitally signed by Tivo's developers. You still have the right to modify it and/or pass it on, but now, that doesn't do you or anybody else any good. GPLv3 spells out that doing that sort of thing is cheating, and closes those loopholes. This is naturally upsetting to businesses who gain from their use of GPL code but don't agree with the spirit of the GPL, so they whine about it.

Now, suppose that all media and all programs were public domain. Neither DRM nor GPL exist, and there are no artificial or arbitrary restrictions on any set of bits. Film studios don't try to equate copying movies with robbery and murder on the high seas, and Richard Stallman doesn't get his undies in a bundle over businesses locking up and selling their own secret-ingredient versions of the software he and the rest of the Free Software Foundation's contributers created. That's total freedom. It isn't particularly respectul, but it's complete and unrestricted freedom.

I bring up respect because that's the key conceptual difference between the licensing restrictions of DRM'ed media and GPL'ed code. DRM respects only the initial provider. DRM says, "You can't do that, because I must have total control." GPL respects everybody, on the condition that everybody also respects everybody. GPL says, "You can't do that, because everybody must have control." I guess they both say, "you can't do that," but it hardly seems like the same deal.

There's another face for all this, the unsettling idea of using legal agreements to dictate ethical behaviour. In principle that's not desirable, at least to me, given the number of legal agreements made by parties whose ethics I would call into question. As it works out, however, I would much rather (and have done) enter a license agreement that tries to guarantee freedoms for myself and others, than one that leaves me and my activities at the legal mercy of, say, a large publisher. Now, if someone can come up with an ethical argument against the effects of the GPL that's not a form of "but I want money!", then I'll be glad to entertain it. (If money's what you want, then Free software is at best a means to an end for you, not an end itself.) Otherwise, at least it's a positive set of ethics that the license is imposing.

In any case, I can see an abstract similarity. But look into it from any direction, and I just don't see GPL and DRM having anything substantial in common. I guess they're both buzzy TLA's.

("Three-letter acronyms." I was attempting to make a joke...)

Wii!

2006-11-20T09:28:00.000-08:00

As of 8:05 yesterday, I'm a proud owner of a shiny new Nintendo Wii.

Along with two friends (and some 40+ strangers) I actually camped in a line outside a local Target to get my hands on this thing. Even as a gamer, I've never camped out for high-demand stuff before. It's a completely insane thing to do, but my justification for it was this:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I've always been a sucker for Zelda games, and this one may well be the best yet. I've played enough already to have myself convinced that waiting out in the cold all night was worth it. The controls are both natural and precise, the story's progression is surprisingly powerful, and the art direction is like nothing I've ever seen before. But I didn't expect that I would also be playing a lot of this:The included-for-free Wii Sports, tennis in this case. Turns out, my wife can't get enough of this game. And there are good reasons. It's ridiculously simple to play - just use the Wii remote as you would a tennis racket. We got to create and play as little caricature versions of ourselves, which are pretty amusing even when they're not doing anything. So when an instant replay flashes in showing a little plastic me (Mii, actually) jumping and swinging wildly at the ball only to land hard on its exaggerated face, and my wife's avatar stepping in to save the day with a scoring lob, laughter ensues. Very simple elements, but very rewarding gameplay.

I'm not posting to make any point really. I just had to shout out, "Wiiii!" :^)

Happy Halloween!

2006-10-31T16:39:00.000-08:00

Pi compression

2006-10-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

This idea I've had for a long time, and if it were mathematically and computationally feasable, it would probably have already been done. But never mind all that. I still like the idea, and I'm still going to spout it off.

I chose pi because I just like it, but e or any of those other fun infinite-digit, non-repeating numbers would probably work, and possibly be better. An unfathomably good pseudo-random number generator might even work. But let's call it pi for now, because the important thing is that it's this infinite sequence in which, theoretically, every possible sub-sequence exists. Somewhere in that infinitely-long series of digits, there'll be a hundred sequential zeros. Somewhere, there'll be a million. And somewhere, there'll be a sequence that matches the sequence of ASCII values for this blog entry, and every other text you've ever read (and ever will read... but that's a different story).

The idea is, whatever data you have, your term paper, that movie you swear you didn't download, or that log of leaked AOL searches, that data is already encoded somewhere in Pi. It may be several centillion digits out, but it's there. Theoretically, you just need to let a grep algorithm slide along Pi until it finds a match, and then just remember the offset and the length to get it back out. Suddenly all files, all volumes, all anything, can be represented by two numbers.

Parts of this have already been implemented, though on a scale much too small to be useful. (Four billion binary digits of Pi? Pff, weak sauce.)
Finding sequences in pi:
http://pi.nersc.gov/
Getting hex digits (half-bytes) out of pi:
http://www.geocities.com/hjsmithh/Pi/PiQPCpp.html

Our CPUs' abilities to crunch numbers aren't advancing as fast as our networks' abilities to pump big bunches of data around, so this whole thing isn't terribly practical. Still, you could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette. The idea is fun even if it wouldn't be worth doing.

Let's take it a little further, though. Maybe we can still do something useful with those first four billion binary digits. Play around with that Pi-search link above. It only uses a 5-bit character set rather than ASCII's 8, but let's experiment anyway. I'm going to search for "penduin".
In 5-bit-per-character binary, that's:
10000001010111000100101010100101110
The sequence is found at 8748556 binary digits in. 8748556 in binary is:
100001010111111000001100
...that's a noticably smaller sequence than the binary representation of "penduin". Our data is 7 "bytes" long, which in binary is:
111
Those two numbers, the offset and length, happen to take fewer bits to represent than the string "penduin", in ascii or even in 5-bit characters. Houston, we have compression! But hang on, let's say that sequence didn't happen within 4 billion bits of pi (according to that site, an arbitrary 7-character sequence has just an 11% chance of being found that early). We could still find "pend" and "uin", though - the odds of finding three or four letters are essentially 100%. If we do that, though, we'd need more bits than the raw ascii just to keep the two offset/length pairs, let alone any padding we'd need for any sanely-packed descriptor.

That packed descriptor would be 35 bits per chunk: 32 bits (maximum value: 4,294,967,295) for offset, and 3 bits for length. Why 3? We're unlikely to find an arbitrary 8-letter pattern (8 is 4 digits, 1000 in binary) in just the first 4 billion bits of pi, so our algorithm won't even try. So every 35 bits in our "compressed" file points to the next up-to-7-letter chunk of our data. On a good day, that'll beat ASCII, which would take 56 bits to store 7 letters. But, we're still playing with 5-bit characters, a paltry subset of ASCII. We're also playing with odds where only 11% of our chunks will be able to point to the maximum 7 characters.

Looking at hex digits instead of 5-bit letters gives us a better picture of how useful this might be. Any byte (8 bits) can be expressed in 2 hex digits. Any four sequential bytes has about a 60% chance of being found in these first four billion bits of pi, and sequences of three and a half (7 hex digits) are pretty much guaranteed. 7 was the maximum length of our chunks from before anyway, so let's keep using that. So, to recap:
With our 35 bits descriptor, we can know where in pi to find up to three and a half bytes, or 28 bits, of data.
...
As far as compression algorithms go, that doesn't seem particularly good. :^) But we're chopping into 3.5-byte pieces or less because of the near statistical certainty of finding any 3.5 bytes in the first half-gigabyte of pi (four billion bits). Give us twice as many digits of pi, and we'd only need one more address bit, plus another bit or so for length, as longer patterns would have improved odds of being found. Keep bumping up the searchable pi digits and we could eventually hit a sweet spot beyond which we'd actually be able save disk space. Once that happens, we can keep on increasing the available pi digits to achieve better compression, but more interestingly, we can add another layer of logic in which we take our packed bits, chunk them up, and look for those sequences in pi. If we're going to do that, we need to pack an extra bit for each chunk to say either "I point to data" or "I point to a pointer", but if we've got so many pi digits to search that we're actually saving space every time, we can still wind up with simply a pi digit offset and size, which would lead to a lot more lookups, and eventually, chunk by chunk, the data we care about.

A tip of the hat to the first person to find this post within pi. It's there! Extra points if you also find my next post before I post it. :^)

Free Driver's Ed, part 2

2006-10-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Lesson # 2: Speed Matching
Here we go again, Utahns. You can keep right on driving like that, but I'm gonna keep on complaining and attempting to educate you. Because I know that under your tough facades, at the bottom of your low-mileage hearts, you really do give a rat's ass.

Merging
Picture this. You're not on the freeway, but you want to be. You find one of those big ramps that gets you there. Great! You notice the right lane of the freeway isn't moving. Dumbasses. You zip past all those slowpokes and merge in either at the very last moment or several hundred yards past where that line painted on the road suggested. You can do this, because you are the single most important person on Earth.

But wait! The story isn't done! Turns out, those dumbasses weren't moving because several people in front of you were also the most important person on Earth. Rather than matching speed and slipping in undisruptively, they waited until the last moment or went several hundred yards past the line. The "dumbasses" who were already on the freeway had to give them room to merge, and the dumbasses behind those dumbasses, not wanting to crash, had to slow down too. Maybe they're not the dumbasses after all.

The merging technique that involves the least amount of dumbassery is, astonishingly, to match the speed of the lane you're about to merge into. If they're booking it, you should too. If they've come to a grinding halt, you should too. I know, you're super-important, you deserve to dart ahead so you can be "first", but that leads to the dark side... and to you being a dumbass. If even a small fraction of you 'Tahns would merge correctly, everybody's commute would be an awful lot smoother.

Thunderbirds
Behold, the amazing Utah formation-driving Thunderbirds! You can't help but smile as you approach these adorable blockades. The perfectly-synchronized motion soothes the soul. And it doesn't stop there -- you too can be a Thunderbird! Find your buddy in the next lane, and maybe even the lane on the other side, and lock in! If they speed up, you stay right beside 'em. If they slow down, you make damn sure to follow along. Herd behaviour is a sure path to safety, as well as a live exhibit of your vast intellect. Unison! Parity! Brotherhood! Thunderbiiirds!

Come on. Formation driving is about as cool as Utah Valley's bar-to-church ratio. If you don't want to speed up when you use the passing lane, then don't use it.

Lemma

2006-10-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

lem-ma [lem-uh]
noun; a situation requiring a choice between desirable alternatives.
antonyms: dilemma.

AI-engineered codecs?

2006-08-29T08:44:00.000-07:00

Someone else has probably had this idea, and someone else has probably explained it better than I'll be able to. Someone else yet has probably proved that the whole thing's implausible. Nuts to them; I have a fleeting thought and I'm going to publish it! :^)

I'm not very well-versed in either genetic algorithms or neural networks, but neither are those just buzzwords to me - I have written genetic and neural equivalents of "Hello world". The techniques differ, and stacking layers of these algorithms has different effects, but the thing that makes them interesting (to me, at the moment) is that we wind up with a computational system without the programmer having to actually solve the problem. A typical neural network will take a piece of input (say, a scanned image of a paper) and produce some output (say, a set of bounding box coordinates of each interpreted dark blob on the image). These outputs may then be the input of another neural net which produces some more output (say, ASCII characters interpreted given those dark blobs) and/or a non-neural algorithm that just looks for patterns (say, a spellchecker). Writing an actual algorithm to turn an image of a paper into a text stream would be massively hard, but writing and training some neural nets is much less painful. Let the computer do the computing.

In the world of Free software (free as in liberty), a world in which I happily live, there are some struggles happening around various proprietary formats. A while back, Unisys declared to the world that they owned math and thus we all had to pay royalties if we wanted to use .gif files. That particular software patent has since expired, but nowadays there are companies convinced that they own the math necessary to encode and decode MP3's and such, and even worse, there are widely-used formats like Apple's "Sorensen" QuickTime and Microsoft's Windows Media for which no Free codecs exist. There's not much motivation for someone to hack such things up, either, as they'd be sued into oblivion the moment their code became useful. God bless the US, eh?

Forget reverse-engineering, forget exploiting the closed code, and especially forget paying big corporations royalties for the privilege of doing math. I propose that it might be possible and worthwhile to write some AI to figure out these pesky formats for us. We have input, say a QuickTime .mov file, and we have the desired output. (Scrape all the raw bitmap image data and all the output audio. It'll be huge, but that's our target.) I don't know what sort of scale, how many layers, or what ghastly amounts of memory and floating-point muscle it would take to set up and train a neural net to get from point A.mov to point B.raw for any given movie, but I doubt it's impossible. Flip the input and output to train an encoder. Not too shabby!

I know even less about genetic algorithms than I do neural nets, but maybe they are better equipped to solve the problem. Plenty of other AI techniques are out there too; perhaps some combination of them would be the optimal approach. The idea is to have a program reinvent codec wheels for us, since others won't share their wheel understanding.

Shackles begone! One way or another, we need to get to the point where the format is irrelevant, only the data matters.

Save your ears if Mars attacks

2006-08-23T12:22:00.000-07:00

I like to say positive things, to point out, "hey, this is cool" or "try this out". But sometimes, something will come along that requires a little negativity. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. In this case I feel obligated to put up a little warning, a warning about a band whose music is capable of decreasing the quality of your life, and should thus be avoided.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers put on a good show. The music is great, and the multimedia display is mind-boggling. The band that opened for them on this tour, however, was bad enough that I feel motivated to urge you to avoid them. The Mars Volta, as they're called, apparently have plenty of history with the Chili Peppers, but that's no justification for what they did to my eardrums. And my wife's eardrums. She was about ready to leave and hide in a nasty bathroom until they left the stage.

Edit: After hearing more about this band from a friend, I'm willing to permit that this show may have been a very, very off night. It warrants further investigation, but it does not change our first impression...
'Nother Edit: Yeah, they sound much better on their albums. Still not really my thing, but entirely listenable. This warning post stands, however. They put on a crap show once, they could do it again. :^)

To illustrate our criticism of he band's sound a bit more clearly, allow me to list some things their noise managed to remind us of:

The voice of any adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon
"Freaky Outie", a song performed by 8-year-olds in Home Movies
A room full of people playing Electroplankton without headphones
Master Shake's misguided birthday song
Family Guy's stoned talent show performance (at the end of this clip)

Some of the songs themselves sounded fine, at least until the singer piped in. Like his fellow Texan "The Decider", this guy would do well to just shut the hell up. But worse than the songs themselves was the painfully drawn-out chaos that happened in between. I understand the desire to bridge songs, especially during a live show; that can be lots of fun. Less so, however, when the many members of the band do not figure out beforehand which song they'll actually be bridging into.

Each instrument was normally doing something decently musical on its own, but the band members didn't seem any too interested in what the other guys were up to. Maybe it was some high-minded eclectic design style applied to music. I don't know. But it didn't work. I suspect even the band members realize this. At one point the singer was convulsing on stage - a seemingly epileptic fit from which he unfortunately recovered, and went on to do some more shrieking.

So we had a shrieking, unintelligable singer, and instruments feuding over which song was being played, all while two bizarre images like this were shown on a screen behind them. All that was stuffed through the most irritating reverb effect I've ever heard. Somewhere around two or three hertz, its presence was, sadly, the most consistent part of the band's sound. During relative calms in the traumatic bridging progressions, there was an almost whale-like quality about the effect. As a result, I think I actually hate whales.

If I have failed in my warning to you, or if you are morbidly curious (in which case I have also failed) you may hear some of the things I apparently heard here:
http://www.themarsvolta.co.uk/
The samples on the site haven't been stuffed through the aquatic reverb, nor is anything being bridged to several acoustic destinations at once, but it's still pretty hard to follow.

The following film has been ruined.

2006-07-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

I despise all forms of censorship, which leaks into the greyer area of movies getting butchered. Usually this is seen when a television network wants to show a movie, but doesn't want to show anything that might upset anybody. Well, that and they have to stop it every few minutes to let the advertisers scream at you. Anyway, there are other places this happens. "Family-friendly" video rental shops and other small businesses will sell or exchange for censored versions of movies. It's just been ruled that such businesses are infringing copyright:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/07/09/film-scrubbing-ruling.html

...I'm not sure how I feel about that. Sure, a little part of me dies when I see television butcher a movie by cutting off the sides of the picture, dubbing horribly cheesy dialogue over four-letter words, and skipping over intense scenes altogether. I think it does the filmmaker a disservice. But I'll bet that that same filmmaker either agreed to or signed off permission to a studio for the contract that let that movie be shown in a butchered format. Plus, it's generally understood that if I want to see the real deal, I can go buy a DVD or order pay-per-view or something. Now, these "family-friendly" rental outfits and other small businesses wear it on their sleeves that they are peddling modified movies. I personally would never set foot in such a place. But the guy who has a van full of kids to keep entertained on a long trip, or a practicing Mormon who never watches R-rated movies, might see these places much more positively. Butchered Matrix is better than no Matrix at all. ...Was that even R-rated...? Well you get my point.

Part of the problem is that society is full of prudes. This wouldn't even be an issue if there wasn't a sizeable part of the population who decides to get offended by certain words and images, who thinks anything sexual or violent is inappropriate, who picks at the details but misses the bigger picture of context and the notion that some stories simply deal with heavy subject matter. Another part is that many Hollywood studios toss in language and gore where really it isn't accomplishing anything. And then there's the problem that big media corporations want to have total control over how we see anything that comes out of their studios. Hence DVD encryption, unskippable previews, and the whole ridiculous ongoing fiasco around high-definition formats. If I honestly want to watch a butchered movie, I think I should be able to do so. Especially if I've paid just as much as I would for the real thing.

This particular ruling is sort of the worst of both worlds. If we bring the idea to its logical conclusion, there will be no more pan-and-scan and/or butchered-for-tv versions of movies, which would be fine by me, but we'll also be in a world where parody and other fair-use stuff is completely thrown out the window, which is absolutely not fine.

Preserving an artist's vision, hooray to that. But a giant boo to the idea of big film studios working with the government to restrict what we do with our own stuff. Here's hoping this judgement gets overruled, because it's totally wrong, even if it was made for the right reasons.

Hell hath no fury like a programmer patronized

2006-06-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

Oh, the hell of technical support. The hell of corporate procedures. The hell of futility in convincing an idiot that I'm not another idiot. Praise be to any/all deities that I've had as few of these encounters as I have, and eternal damnation to every agonizing minute of the process.

A little over a year ago, my wife and I craved a new laptop. I particularly craved one that would play nice under GNU/Linux with its wireless hardware, still more rare than it ought to be. Our search led us to Circuit City of all places, where we got a decent deal on a nice little rig that has treated us pretty well. My wife's paranoia won out over my penny-pinching and we also got an extended 3-year service plan for another $300 or so. This has turned out to be a good thing. Sort of.

The hard drive's going bad. It powers up happily, it reads and writes, but when it arrives at a growing number of troublesome sectors, it fails. A failing hard disk is nothing new to me. Been there and done that many times. Scrape off all the data I can, replace it, restore or reinstall, and move on. But right now I'm stuck at the "replace it" step.

Circuit City does a huge amount of business, apparently mostly with idiots. Their unskippable phone maze starts with a very fake-looking (800) 555- number, and goes on to include this menu: "For troubleshooting with your keyboard, press 1. For troubleshooting with your mouse, press 2. For all other troubleshooting, press 3." I wish I was kidding, because that would be pretty funny if it weren't true. As it is, it's just depressingly sad. So after 5 minutes of maze navigation and 30 minutes of mind-numbing hold music punctuated by ear-scorching reminders of how important I am and how busy everybody is, I spoke with a human being. It's pathetic how little things improved after that point.

It gradually dawned on the rep that I knew what I was talking about, but he was powerless but to go through his script and force me to waste my time and his. Had to rule out the possibility of a boot sector virus, for perhaps the disk isn't going bad at all. Perhaps I've been hallucinating that fsck gave me a list of which sectors were bad, and that the list has been growing. Also, apparently lots of boot viruses manage to install themselves in Lilo, perfectly mimicking my specific multi-boot configuration, 'cause not only would that be worth a virus-writer's time, but viruses can work seamlessly across any operating system. ...That's sarcasm, by the way.

The guy I was talking to didn't catch any of my sarcasm, which is fine I guess. He's just doing his job, and probably doesn't understand that he'd save us both a hell of a lot of time if he'd skip the bullshit and listen to me. 'Course, he wants Microsoft-formatted voodoo output from scandisk or chkdsk or whatever goddamn thing windows uses, and what I have is fsck telling me what's actually going on. To his credit, he called my bluff that I had done a bunch of time-wasting steps he'd told me to do. (Hey, it's worked before.) So he knows how long it takes a Windows recovery console to boot up. Whoop-de-freaking-doo. But, until my time has been thoroughly wasted and their ridiculous steps meticulously followed, Circuit City will remain in stubborn denial that I'm looking at bad hardware.

So I get to call back again tonight after running scandisk or whatever, assuming windows lives long enough on the eroding disk to spit up a magic log file with Microsoft-colored descriptions of which sectors don't work. For the love of God, I already did all this homework. I know empirically that the disk is going bad. I paid good money for extended service, now let me send it in, and give me a new one. It's not hard. Maybe I should play the I'm-an-engineer-at-Novell card or something, I just can't believe they make everybody go through the idiot channels no matter what. Then again, I guess I am an idiot after all, for buying anything at Circuit City to begin with, and for paying out the nose for support that they'll do anything to avoid providing.

Free Driver's Ed, part 1

2006-06-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

Most people I've met on the roads since I moved to Utah have had no formal driver's education. They logically cannot have done, because people who know a few basic things do not drive in the manner I bear witness to daily. Therefore, as a free service to my community, I'm offering right here on my blog some free driver's ed.

Lesson # 1: the self-explanatory car pool lane
There's a new lane along a few miles of I-15 in Utah Valley. It's marked off with a solid white line, and has huge signs dangling above it, every mile or so, that mention something about how a "car pool" means "more than one person per vehicle", and possibly clarifying "motorcycles ok". Some mention fines for car pool lane violations. It's basically impossible to misunderstand what's going on.

I chose today to give this lesson because fully half of the cars that passed me this morning via the car pool lane contained only the driver. No passengers. How interesting, that so many people I share the road with on a daily basis either cannot read, or do not care that they are assholes.

So concludes my first and mildest installment of Free Driver's Ed. Stay tuned, Utah drivers. I ain't through with you yet.

Utah Valley's asteroid belt

2006-04-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

It's not a question of "if", it's not even a question of "when". It's a question of "how often". Not long ago, on my way home from work, I heard a loud smack and noticed a chip on what had moments ago been a pristine windshield. Not just a little glass divot, either; the impact had caused some small crack lines to fan out immediately. Lovely. Not a week later, it happened again. How strangely fortunate, I thought, that I hadn't spent the money on a new windshield yet. The universe's reaction to this thinking was to toss yet another rock at almost the same spot not 30 seconds later. A crack twofer. Apparently my commute leads directly through an asteroid field, and the Ford Taurus has significantly less shielding than the Millenium Falcon.

Yesterday, I was struck yet again. Same story, chip plus initial cracking all at once. All of these battle scars are in non-critical spots visually, which I suppose is some manner of silver lining. But with every hit, my enthusiasm for replacing that big pane of debris-magnet ("glass", some call it) dwindles.

This is no "woe is me" anecdote - the whole of Utah Valley suffers the same pain. There are some good reasons why it's such a common thing around here, as it turns out.

Where there are mountains, there are quarries
Where there are quarries, there are trucks carrying chunks of stone
Where there are regulations for covering truckloads, people are lazy

To amplify the matter, there are a grand total of two roads in Utah Valley, I-15 and State Street. The freeway and the old freeway. Both are under construction at all times, just in case there isn't enough loose debris around already. It also tends not to rain much here. Any washing away of debris from those two roads occurrs at pretty distant intervals.

This problem actually has a wonderfully-oversized solution:
http://www.defense-update.com/products/t/trophy.htm
Unfortunately, further arming Utah drivers would cause more trouble than it would fix.

Cinerepetition

2006-04-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

I love movies. I'm even happy to pay bloated prices for tickets, sugarwater, and popped vegetables, only to buy the special-edition, extra-profit director's cut when it is released on DVD later. But some trends in big-studio filmmaking just leave me shaking my head.

Why, for example, do we need not one awful Hot-girl-beats-people-up-in-a-futuristic-setting movie, but a whole bunch of them in a row? (To be fair, I've seen only previews, but they all look genuinely awful) Why were there several A-meteor-is-going-to-hit-earth movies released within chronological spitting distance of each other? How about all the Guy-seeks-to-deflower-the-girl-but-they-fall-in-love movies that came out over the course of a summer? And lately, it's been a wave of Cute-computer-animated-animals-share-heart-warming-fart-jokes films.

I don't mean to just pick on stupid movies either. I'm all for stupid movies. Adam Sandler generally plays the same sweet-but-troubled guy every single time, but God help me, I continue to find 50 First Happy Waterboy Daddy Singer Deeds funny, time and time again. I make no claim that all cinematic repetition is bad.
You can do it!

But when the pitch for a two-hour movie is something like "this redneck guy acts obnoxious" or "bratty kids laugh as their dad is on the receiving end of pies and other standard-issue slapstick" or "it's been a while since Titanic, let's do another sinking-ship, tragic-romance picture", I just have to wonder what exactly causes these projects to get the green light.

The content of so many films isn't even the whole story. Now they're even packaged in an obnoxious way. The thoughts running through film executives' heads has to go something like this: "Keep the exhorbanant ticket and snack prices, but now show twenty minutes of loud, extended television commercials to anyone who dares care enough about the movie to want to get there early and find good seats. Not only that, but talk down to them about how illegal it is to copy movies." Know what? If we're still coming to the theatre, even though the DVD will be out next week and we'll be able to not have noisy kids and cell phones around us while we watch... If we're still coming to the theatre, when it's ridiculously easy to download a fairly high-quality version of the movie before it even opens... If we're still coming to the theatre, how about showing some appreciation? Respect, even? A blaring, two-minute Coca-cola ad? This theatre doesn't sell Pepsi. If I'm thirsty, Coke's already got my money.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to see Scary Movie 4.

Scary-ass gliding kids

2006-04-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

Is this just in Utah valley or is it everywhere? Admittedly, I see more kids around here than anywhere else I've been. But the rabbit-like procreation rate of Mormons is, for the time being, beside the point.

Whether it happens at a grocery store or a restaurant or anywhere folks bring their kids, which is everywhere, it scares the bejesus out of me every damn time. Kids are sorta scary anyway, with their unnaturally loud voices given the scaled-down size of their vocal cords, their ability to change direction and velocity with no warning, and their complete and utter lack of any sense of context. But now and then I'll catch a glimpse of one that's gliding. Gliding! A kid who's running at least gives you some aural cues that something's about to come tearing out of the next aisle. These new ethereal, gliding mutants not only have the added speed from their roller-shoes, but they move almost silently, darting out of nowhere or stalking their prey in a near-perfect stealth.

I ran a quick search for images of these ghastly munchkins, hoping that some photographer out there had captured the correct sense of terror. While I did learn that apparently this phenomenon is this man's fault, bupkis on the photo front. There are some ads featuring somewhat-scary kids, and some snapshots of way-too-old-for-this kids "grinding" on various public surfaces using these shoes as skateboards, but I think it needs to be seen in motion to be understood. Imagine the last kid that was whining at a restaurant or otherwise attempting to spoil your day. But now imagine him/her standing perfectly still. If that wasn't suspicious and bizarre enough, now imagine the perfectly-still kid silently gliding straight ahead at high speed, moving nary a muscle. Catch this in the corner of your eye and your confidence in everything from the laws of physics to any sense of justice or compassion in the universe will be shaken to the core. Did the Matrix just glitch out for a moment? Is someone using your grocery store as a set for some drug trip film? No, they're here, and they're real, at least real enough to run into you and get kid slime on your good jacket.

Soon we'll know everything

2006-04-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

My wife came across this little gem while changing channels. For childish reasons still unclear to us, we felt it necessary to photograph it.

Just a silly little "anic"dote. Oof, sorry.

My Tetrises bring all the girls to the yard

2006-04-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Nintendo made magic happen with the DS. Not the 3D graphics, not the wireless networking, and not the 10-hour battery life. After lunch, my work buddies and I can whip out these little shiny devices and get all competitive, spouting off enough random banter to occasionally make my eyes water.

Today was less of a Tetris contest than a competition of who could say the most random and off-the-wall things during play.
"I just did something totally retarded"
"I'm offended by the word 'retarded'"
"I'm offended by the word 'water'"
"My ancestors came here across water"
"Mine didn't, my ancestors hovered"
"They must have had very advanced technology"
"My ancestors were from the future"

This has been a test of the emergency blog posting system. Had it been an actual emergency, this nearly-inactive blog would be the last place any reasonable person would expect to find warning.

HIC!

2006-02-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

Hiccups. What a dumb ailment. The diaphragm decides, "Today I'm going to try something different!" Breathing becomes a game of musical chairs, halting everything at random intervals. And for some of us, apparently, it's not manifested as the silly little symptoms that deserve the cute name "hiccups". For some, like me, it just friggin' keeps happening for hours on end, sometimes a day or more. These aren't little humorous I've-had-some-beer noises I make either. They're oh-shit-my-lungs-are-imploding noises.

For the longest time I tried to imagine what on Earth would cause a person to enter such convulsions, seemingly at random. A few years ago I finally stumbled upon an answer that made some sense. Like most biological curiosities, evolution sheds some insightful light on the situation:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Hiccups.html
So if I were a tadpole or a lungfish, I'd be a ridiculously strong breather. Oh, the oxygen my body would process. Oh, the majestically brute strength my gills would have. Oh, if only I were a partially-evolved, creepy-looking fish, I wouldn't have spent most of yesterday feeling like I was going to die.

I had long since given up hope in drinking water quickly, eating bread slowly, spoonfuls of sugar, swallowing upside-down, all the standard "cures". I won't even try gargling, because one good extra-strength hiccup during that time and I'm reasonably sure I would drown. All the same, yesterday my wife convinced me to give sugar a shot. So, I downed it, as I would a shot of tequila, coughed up a cloud of white dust, and once my vision returned, the hiccups were gone for an hour or two. Bliss, I tell you.

Umm, so to anyone out there suffering from horrendously hellish hiccups (or allegedly alluring alliteration), I feel for you.

UPDATE:
The evolutionary stuff is all well and good when explaining how the muscles and nerves are capable of hicing-up, but my wife found something that much better explains how a person gets into the predicament in the first place and why they continue:
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/columns/?article=BN_Hiccups
It's still not much comfort, but knowing is better than not knowing. :^)

Distreligioubution

2006-01-31T07:51:00.000-08:00

This probably isn't a new idea, but it's new to me so I'm gonna have a little fun with it. Lately an evangelical buddy of mine has persuaded me to give Ubuntu Linux a try. It's now installed on my secondary workstation as well as my personal laptop. My friend is becoming something of an Ubuntu evangelist around the office, and he's also a Mormon who's done the whole missionary thing. That got me thinking about what parallels could be made between various theologies and various flavours of GNU/Linux. Don't get all antsy if your favourite distribution and your favourite religion don't match up in my little blathering - the tendancy to get uptight about one's adopted distro or beliefs is the first and most obvious similarity.

I've been a Slackware guy for a long time, so I'll begin there. Slackware has to be agnosticism. You don't pray to any server to get your packages, you go and grab the source and build it yourself. You don't have any omnipresent dependancy checking system, though you're entirely free to install one of your own choosing.

Debian seems like Catholicism or something. It's old, it's conservative, its decisions and public statements sometimes cause excessive head-scratching. But, its followers are pretty hard-core, and apt-get is a form of "ask and ye shall receive" if I've ever seen one.

That would make Debian spinoffs like Ubuntu some sort of protestant sects, I suppose. A bit more agile, a little more in tune with the common man's modern issues. Keep the tried-and-true concepts, but bring some sensible defaults and some new ideas to the altar.

GNU/Hurd isn't a "Linux" distribution, but I have to go there because of its striking similarities to Judaism. Both concepts have been around for about 4000 years, and both are still awaiting the messiah. Many decided when Linus came along with his kernel that the saviour had appeared, but others remain unshaken in their conviction.

Red Hat may be Hinduism, based on the whole "many manifestations of one supreme being" thing. In Red Hat, I was offered a binary, development libraries/headers, and source code, for the same program, all as RPMs. Source code in an RPM just sounds weird and counterintuitive to a western-thought person like myself.

I work at Novell, so either I should definitely try to say something about SuSE and NLD/SLES/Code10/Whatever, or I should definitely ... not. All I know is when a SuSE-based distro sounded like it was dropping KDE, I half expected to hear shrill hollering and AK-47s being fired skyward. Percieved blasphemy and infidels stir hate not only in extremist sects, but across Slashdot and mailing lists as well.

Some distros highly encourage spreading the good word by providing live CDs, and though burning an .ISO file is less conspicuous than someone in black handing out novelty miniature bibles on the street corner, I guess it's sort of the same thing. I've seen USB flash memory drives pre-loaded with bootable GNU/Linux systems, and I've seen others pre-loaded with indexed, searchable scripture. Religious scholars with no time for technobabble and hackers with no time for religion take note, your worlds are more similar than you may realize. :^)

I lost? I lost!

2006-01-30T20:38:00.000-08:00

Mario Kart DS is probably the ideal lunch break distraction. We usually straight-up Versus mode until someone (me) breaks 100, or sometimes 200, or sometimes until we get to race on Tick Tock Clock. There's no better way to begin the digestive process.

Today didn't go quite as usual. When I broke 100, Proby broke it further. He explained that he'd been practicing all weekend, but the "why" does not concern me. I lost. Me! Mario Kart! Lost! Entropy is leaking into the universe, my friends.