Electric Josh

Thursday, December 19, 2002

Ooh! Oo! Mr. Kotter! Some clever souls at UMass have put online simulations of driving the new roads that Boston's favorite $15 billion project is currently constructing (finishing?) below ground. Story here, for those with NYT registrations. Cooool. #

Monday, December 16, 2002

At ellisisland.org I found my great-grandfather Garabed (although it looks like he's spelled Garabet, here), along with his wife, Alice, and my grandfather, Philip (written as Fillip) and his sister Helen (spelled Hilen) . "Apparently they had morons writing down the names," says Dad.

I haven't managed to view the actual passenger record, which, the site claims, is just on the other side of a registration dialog. Fun for after work, I guess. #

Thursday, December 12, 2002

Waiting for Boston Wireless to take over the world. Sounds like they're about to take over Arlington. Heh heh. #

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

I read this very strange piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, and still can't form a coherent opinion on it. It seems sneaky, especially when, in the second paragraph, it underreports the size of October's antiwar marches by an order of magnitude. Anyone have any ideas, here? #

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

Google's "News" tab is super cool. I've been using it to survey all the hysterical Henry Kissinger reaction you can handle, pro and con. Have fun. #

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

Food poisoning. Ulcch. K was braver than me and tried to go to work, but has meekly returned home. I had big plans of leaving the house, but that's obviously not going to happen.

The moral of the story is, "Never eat anything."

[Note for microbiologists: despite the picture, we have something milder than Cholera. Maybe even the flu. Who knows?] #

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This is pretty funny. I found a pointer to this Total Poindexter-Related Information Awareness effort. Looks like they're off to a fairly basic start: photos of and maps to his house in Rockland, MD, phone numbers, neighbors' names and phone numbers, etc. Lots of name-calling, tips on how to do your part... #

Friday, November 29, 2002

Chris Robinson was the lead singer of the Black Crowes, who are among my favorite bands, and he's stinking it up on Conan O'Brien as I write this. The song he's playing is pretty bad. Rhett from the Old 97's did the same kind of thing a couple days ago on the same show. One can only hope that the music publishers are pulling the usual trick of trying to promote decent albums by releasing the album's crappiest song as the big single. #

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After a wonderful Thanksgiving we've spent the entire day relaxing. The snow covered up the leaves anyway, so we'll have the most disgusting yard of all next spring. I can't wait! #

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Reconfigured at home. It's amazing how easy computers are when there's a monitor attached. #

Thursday, November 28, 2002

Trying to rehabilitate a half-crashed laptop with no monitor is really hard. There's some real information on it that I kind of need to have access to. Off to the in-laws to borrow an unused VGA monitor that sits in their basement. Have to buy another ethernet cable so I can free up the wireless card in the half-dead laptop.

Note to self: don't try to debug ssh problems when under the influence of too much tryptophan. #

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

A wimpy laptop has materialized from work. This will make a completely usable terminal for remote use. It is, however, the same kind of laptop that burned a man's penis recently. I'll be careful. #

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Dad says that the main problem in the world is that people don't check with him before they do things. I've been suffering from the same problem for some time now. But...relief! It seems that both the left and the right are just beginning to rally against SUV's. Joy! #

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All right. I've got the laptop hooked up (headlessly) to the cable modem, and I can connect to the Zope management interface via HTTP, which allows me to remotely pontificate about this space's technical predicaments. If I could configure a mail server myself I'd have no more need of my (not trivially inexpensive) hosting provider.

Fun for another day. Anyone got a spare monitor...? #

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Emergency hack mode enabled. #

Friday, November 15, 2002

Great. You Are a Suspect. Next they'll be stamping all our paper, taxing us despite not letting us vote, etc.

Of course, if you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide... #

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Steve points us to a cool-looking effort to monitor the California coast, and says, Digital cameras, nice maps, California coast, cool chopper, computers, chasing down environmental wrong doers  and a marriage where the guy lets the wife do the flying!  Can it get any better?. Nice. #

Monday, November 11, 2002

After listening to me disclaim that drugs are bad---[Disclaimer: drugs are bad]---survey the nearly infinite humor of the Office of National Drug Policy's dictionary of street terms for drugs. My favorites are the druggie slang for "kilo" (which means "2.2 pounds") and "O.Z." (which means "an ounce"). Crazy, nutty, druggie kids. #

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We watched the movie Next Stop Wonderland this weekend, which was great in a lot of small ways but ended up being only kind of okay overall. Cheesy girl romantic comedy. Those who missed the significance of the title will notice the name of the last stop on the Blue Line on the map at right; there's a dog track and former amusement park there. It's always fun to see one's hometown in a movie, of course. One assumes that New Yorkers no longer notice that sort of thing. #

Thursday, November 07, 2002

Here's a Boston Globe review of the show I saw the other night. Apparently I should have stayed to watch the other band, The Soundtrack of Our Lives. If only Napster still existed I'd go listen to one or two of their songs and figure out if I wanted to buy the CD. Actually, if some halfway decent radio station was willing to play more than five or six total songs I'd just hear them on the radio occasionally and be able to make up my mind from that. Better yet, if I could download the whole album for like 99 cents and burn a CD myself (thereby probably netting music publishers more money per album than they make now) I'd do it in a second. Moron record companies; they're losing zillions of dollars they could be making off of people like me.

Those who read it will also notice that I'm an idiot, and thought that The Cato Salsa Experience were Norwegian---they're Swedish. People like my Swedish former officemate probably get super annoyed by this sort of casual confusion. (Like when people can't distinguish between New Hampshire and Vermont. Fools!) I need to learn to say "Scandinavian" instead. #

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Nothing quite like showing up at work at 11:00 and still managing to put in an eleven and a half hour day. Argh. No unions for programmers, of course. #

Monday, November 04, 2002

[Later that evening...] So that was a pretty good show. The band before Cato Salsa Experience was decent, but ended up being way too heavy on the feedback; all the irritating buzzing of Sonic Youth's lesser albums and all the incoherent screaming of Nirvana right before Kurt Cobain's narcissistic death/meltdown extravaganza. I couldn't tell if their drummer was the same guy who's in Scissorfight.

But holy crap! Cato Salsa Experience was really good. Super heavy three-man punk, with ridiculous lyrics that had that kind of Japanese teenybopper girl-pop stupidity, but not quite as silly as something that one would see on a Powerpuff Girls video segment or anything. The name comes from the lead singer and guitarist, whose name, it is claimed, is Cato Salsa. All the band members looked extremely Norwegian.

I was an idiot and went home instead of watching Soundtrack of Our Lives, but I'm tired. #

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Tonight I'm off to see a concert by a band I've only heard once, for about 15 minutes, on a college radio show I found this summer on the way back from the Cape. The Cato Salsa Experience. Norwegian punk rock. They were playing live in the studio, but were missing a member for some strange medical reason. The station wasn't coming in very well; lots of static. They're opening for someone else tonight, so hopefully I'll make it home before the wee hours. Cross your fingers that it's not a waste of time. #

Thursday, October 31, 2002

This is a pretty cool Google hack. Here's me. My whole name all at once doesn't work; having one's full name show up on this site requires fame, gentle readers, which the five of you do not provide. #

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It'd be really cool to have my death spark an "uproar", as the Minneapolis--St. Paul Star Tribune put it. Not watching much TV---and therefore hearing about, rather than listening to, people's ridiculous reactions and counterreactions---the whole Wellstone funeral aftermath looks pretty funny from here. Having to actually listen to all the dumb soundbites would make me...um...watch a lot less TV. #

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To my horror, I've discovered that I can access my work programming environment from home in a totally, seamlessly invisible way. I work more slowly because I can't bounce ideas off other people very quickly, but sitting here alone in the house I don't get interrupted nearly as often. #

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Word has appeared in the official press (the Times) that the rally mentioned below was, in fact, really big. The Times, among many others, had previously reported that the march was two orders of magnitude smaller than it actually was. #

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Sitting in the doctor's office. This is, without question, the slowest doctor's office ever. In retrospect I probably didn't need to leave work early to sit here in front of a television. The local 30-minute cable news loop has run five times now... #

Monday, October 28, 2002

Second-hand correspondence from (great aunt) Louise from the antiwar march in Washington this weekend:

Just a quick report on my participation in the protest march yesterday. [...] If anyone heard the morning news on PBS this morning and heard some woman say there were "over 10,000" protesters, believe me, she was wrong.  The organizers say one hundred thousand, and even our estimable police chief says it was a very huge crowd.   I wandered down to the staging place (near the Vietnam Memorial [...]) and there were hordes of people of every kind, many banners, lots of funny costumes and handmade and also professional signs, lots of rhetoric pouring out of the loudspeakers.  Lots of signs in honor or Paul Wellstone--things like "thank you, Mr. Wellstone."  I thoujght that was very nice.  Finally it was close to one thirty, when the march was supposed to begin, but of course, once some of those guys get near a microphone they can't be torn away, so it was much much later before the march actually started.  I was on Constitution Ave., where it was to begin and there were already lots of people ready to march. Plus many mounted police, lots of police on motorbikes and also bicycles, and a few in cars. As far as I know, n o arrests or other trouble.  Plus a group of about 25 black men who were in black uniforms and seemed to be the Drill Team of the ILGWU, or something close. They did interesting little routines. Anyway, I kind of wandered along and finally found myself going up 17th street. There the police shunted the crowd onto the Ellipse, because the main march still hadn't started.  It was near three, maybe, before they actually came along.  Miles of them!  I hung around for a long time and finally went home, but they were still coming up the street when I left.  It was fun, and moving and funny all at the same time. [...]

Sounds pretty different and much bigger than what little I've heard on the radio on the subject would suggest. More interesting account, anyway. Nice to see a protest with a sense of focus, and one that involves more than a bunch of trust fund hippies taking time off from following Phish around. #

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

So there's a commercial for an insurance company or a brokerage or something that uses When I'm Sixty-Four by the Beatles to invoke a sense of "mutual funds!" or "insurance!" or something. The rendition in the ad features a really bad singing voice and the line:

If I'd been out 'til quarter to three/Would you lock the duh?

The duh is indescribably annoying. Besides, that song reminds me of sitting on the floor in my grandparents' living room in Indiana, among other things, but none of those things is financial services. The TV has no right to be trying to wipe out my happy musical associations! I aggressively stab the mute button. #

Sunday, October 20, 2002

Thinking about Iraq, trying to make sure that I'm not just being stupid in thinking that starting a war is ill advised. So I've been reading the National Review and the Economist along with the New Yorker and the usual dirty Commie liberal outfits in the sidebar. The typical problem is that the hawks beautifully describe the dangers of failing to evaluate the "calculus of the future dead" (great phrase!), but leave it to others to actually perform such an evaluation. #

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Now that getting to work on the train takes about twice as long as driving there through heavy traffic, the existence and number of SUV's have regained their rightful place as my leading pet peeve. Here's an article about unexploited fuel efficiency technologies. #

Saturday, October 19, 2002

So we picked up a small shopping bag full of prints from the trip, and of course they manage to look a lot more ordinary than what I remember seeing. I could blame it on having a crappy camera, but since I know better I won't. Instead, I'm off to Cambridge for a screening of The Godfather, which I've never seen. I'm expecting at least a little bit of gore. #

Friday, October 18, 2002

Adam and Lee and loaned us a scanner. My audience of five can now begin watching this space for some small subset of the ten rolls of pictures we shot. #

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Henry has been stripped of his spot in the sidebar; he never updated. Yaaaar! #

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Ah, I guess this marks the real, bona fide end of the previously mentioned radio silence. This marks the first time in years that I've gone two weeks without typing at all; no checking the usual websites or email; very little written material at all, outside a Janwillem Van de Wetering detective novel and a few dead tree issues of the Times. #

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Hawaii was cooool. K and I got tan, hiked and swam a lot. Hung out with one another during waking hours. Got enough rest; I was able to speak in complete, descriptive, nontechnical sentences with relative ease. It was nice.

Two weeks is about the right vacation length; by the end we were somewhat, though not completely, ready to get home. Redeye back to Boston (there's no other way), and instead of resting, I went to work today. Now I need a nap.

Once the pictures are developed and I find a scanner maybe I'll post some. #

Monday, September 16, 2002

So now I have a single button to:

1. recursively grab an HTML copy of all of the pages of this site, as it sits (in Zope) on my local machine,
2. open up an FTP connection to my hosting provider, and
3. recursively put each file in the right place on the host, creating directories along the way.

Kind of amazing how such a simple mirroring script was so painful to write. If I didn't have a job and wasn't spending the weekends either outside or in front of the TV watching football it probably would have taken me a morning.

It's (obviously?) pretty buggy, so don't be surprised if links occasionally break. So it goes. #

Friday, August 30, 2002

One more post before reworking the innards of the site: a story about the possible coming stink over cell phone radiation.

"Anybody who tells you that cell phones are either safe or unsafe doesn't know what they're talking about," Slesin said. "It remains an open question."

Time to dig out the earpiece that came with the phone... #

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Posting to this space is starting to feel cumbersome, so here comes a pile of automation... (radio silence begins) #

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Dad points us to some flaming of Bush and Co., in which the ways that the prez is emulating Big Brother (from the book 1984, not from hyperbole) are enumerated kind of unnervingly.

I only wish that this sort of clever, spooky parallel could be drawn in a less snide fashion; the observation of disturbing policies needs to be done calmly and diplomatically. Calm diplomacy tends to be better at stimulating rational, thoughtful debate. Lines like, "[1984] was intended to be read as a warning about the evils of totalitarianism -- not a how-to manual," turn off those with the greatest need to read (and to think about) the rest of the article. #

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Here's an ode to boobs that pretty much speaks for itself. It's good to be a boy... #

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Interesting interview with the guy who wrote The Sims.

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Standing in line to get lunch today, I was demoralized to find that I was dressed in a gray T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts, just like the three guys in line in front of me. Unlike the three of them, who didn't seem to know each other, I wasn't staring intently at the attractive woman behind the counter as she walked back and forth across the kitchen. It was like watching people watch tennis. I guess people must get used to being stared at. I'm not sure whether I'd find it creepy to have so many uninvited eyeballs pointed at me, but it seems like folks could at least remember what their parents (presumably) told them when they were little: that it's kind of rude to stare.

I see the same type of thing on the T all the time, except that usually it's some sketchy businessman types---also dressed alike, but in suits---subconsciously, I'll optimistically assume, but not subtlely, ogling some tightly-clothed high school chick. One can only say, Eeeew. #

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Say it ain't so, Phil. #

Monday, August 19, 2002

At a recent nerd convention, Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor, explained in (entertaining) detail why you don't have a right to be creative anymore in a speech entitled Free Culture. #

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The battle to make cell phone annoyances go away continues. This time, the good guys are several New York city councilmen. Seems one of them introduced legislation that would ban ringing phones in theaters. The following fantastic tidbit is included:

As [one of the councillors' spokesman] pointed out, cell-phone talkers have been received badly in theaters on Broadway. In the middle of one of his productions, Kevin Spacey turned to a person who answered a cell phone and said, "Tell them you're busy." Actor Laurence Fishburne, in the middle of a performance, yelled to a member of the audience, "Turn your f---ing phone off!"

The New York public seem to be supporting the measure:

"To be honest, we haven't heard anyone say, 'Damn it, she has the right to use her phone in the theater even though I paid $90 for this ticket.'"

Nice. (Link from Slashdot) #

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Stumbled across a guy whose sudden Thoreau moment generated the following summary:

• I like to play guitar, hey I have a guitar, so that doesn't cost anything.
• I like to ride my bicycle, hey - I have a bike, so that doesn't cost anything.
• I like owning my home, but hey - my mortgage is cheaper than any rent I've ever payed.
• I like spending time on the Internet, well hey - my computer is payed for and the Internet is cheaper than going to see four movies a month.
• In fact - the more I add up my life, the cheaper it gets.

Of course, said Waldenesque moment of insight also unleashed a stack of cynicism about his job and his life, none of which applies to me. Ah well. #

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Here's a reason to root for the Bushies: rounding up deadbeat dads. It's among the primary things that a "Justice Department" should be doing. So, cheers!

Of course, the irony is that this sort of roundup would be a lot easier to execute if a panoptic database of Americans were available (viz. the eyeball in the sidebar). #

Friday, August 16, 2002

This space's long silence is finally broken with terriffic news! A guy at MIT has used a linguistically-aware algorithm of some sort to randomly generate 10,000 band names. Kelly has nominated Asparagus Polytechnic as the best name, while Kara points out Placenta Boathouse. I'm more of a Gunners Papyrus Postcard fan, myself; their music totally rocks, but it lacks the energy and rhythm of Smokable Personnel. #

Friday, August 09, 2002

Joy! I've managed to get Python servlets running under weblogic, as per the step-by-step instructions here. I'm using Jython to do it, of course. #

Wednesday, August 07, 2002

Todd points us to outer space. A blow to the head (for that funny weightless feeling) and a web browser are all one needs now to be an astronaut...don't you hyperfit aerospace engineers feel silly? And a big fat pipe to the internet is all you really need to be a real astronomer. Don't all you physicists...?---Oh, wait. #

Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Everyone, everywhere should be listening to Scissorfight. They're like Slayer, but less Satan-y. #

Sunday, August 04, 2002

So there's some (token?) opposition to the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act, but my local anti-terrorism coordinator seems to be kind of missing the point:

After reviewing the Cambridge resolution, Jerry Leone, the assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts and the anti-terrorism coordinator in the state, said the city leaders do not understand the Patriot Act.

"I think some people have formed misconceptions of what the intentions of USA Patriot are," Leone said. "If one is a civil libertarian, I think the first reaction is, 'Hey, that's one more tool for the government to infringe on our rights,' but if you look at the implementation of the law, that's not the case."

Ahem. Assuming that one lives in a society of laws, the letter of a law is typically more important than the implementation of a law. The law specifically rolls back a whole stack of civil liberties, which just might explain why civil libertarians are upset. To wit:

I know the law says that all Jews must be tortured, gassed, and made into candles, but if people looked at the way we're implementing the law they'd see that only the Jews that are bent on Germany's destruction are being treated that way...

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The hard local Boston TV news reporters are running a story about the possibly cancerous effects of secondhand cigarette smoke on---and this is not a typo---cats. The teaser clips showed people holding housecats in front of a camera. The mind boggles. #

Thursday, August 01, 2002

So once again, I have been afforded a glimpse of the extraordinary amount of software-building wisdom that is routinely discarded in otherwise healthy-looking companies. The latest example is my employer's insinuation that my entire product should be rewritten (by me and my superb coworker) from the ground up. This is a really bad idea, as my excellent and far more experienced colleague (referred below) reminded me over beers earlier today. Working code is good. Customers don't care if the code looks ugly to some codemonkey sitting in his codehole coding somewhere; they just want the damn thing to work. In the context of the Python vs. Java rant below, one might say that all of that code is useless to a customer; who cares how the thing is implemented, as long as a list of widgets gets displayed...?

In convenient anecdote form: Working code---even working lame duck code---is better than a stub. #

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Offline for a considerable amount of time. And just when Google had noticed this site, too. (Not sure where it noticed it from, of course...) #

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Fielded several calls today from my excellent colleague, who is typically a Python programmer, and helped him through some of the more horrible corners of Java's Collections class and its various friends. The worst of the several stupid Javaisms he was running up against was the following:

// The following code is obviously trying to get
// a list of widgets and then convert it from
// a Collection of widgets into an array of Widgets.
// (The fact that it's necessary to do this at all
// also annoyed my excellent colleague.)
Collection someList = getAListOfWidgets();
Widget[] theWidgetArray = (Widget[])someList.toArray();

Simple, right? Just take the Collection that contains a bunch of Widget objects, call toArray() on the Collection, downcast (ack!) the result from Object[], which toArray() actually returns, to Widget[], since we know that everything in someList is actually a Widget.

The code compiles beautifully and promptly fails at runtime with a ClassCastException, which is ridiculous because we just jumped through all these hoops so that we could get a Widget[] instead of an Object[].

Turns out that the proper call on the last line is actually:

// The following code is obviously trying to get
// a list of widgets and then convert it to
// a Collection of widgets into an array of Widgets.
// (The fact that it's necessary to do this at all
// also annoyed my excellent colleague.)
Collection someList = getAListOfWidgets();
Widget[] theWidgetArray = (Widget[])someList.toArray(new Widget[0]);

In other words, there's downcasting going on even deep inside the language's built-in collection routines. Remember that the whole point (much of the point, anyway) of using a strongly typed object-oriented language is that you don't have to downcast. A more normal language, like Python, would write the above code in the following fashion:

# The following code is obviously trying to get
# a list of widgets and then convert it to
# a Collection of widgets into an array of Widgets.
someList = getAListOfWidgets()

Now, isn't that nicer? #

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Here's a great example of what the Cluetrain guys must have been talking about when they asserted that we are not eyeballs, and what they must have been pointing out to us in the third of their 95 theses:

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

This Times article is all about large companies' inability to make money hand over fist in quite the automatic fashion they had thought fat pipes into peoples' homes would allow. Without even a hint of irony, it talks about us regular people using a language that, while recognizable as English, isn't something any person would actually say. It contains gems such as:

Of course, not everyone wants to be so proactive about their media consumption.

You can't make this shit up. The loudest example of this stupid business-speak appears in the main thesis of the article:

For consumers, that may be a good thing. But for media companies looking to the Internet for profits, it remains a frustrating reality.

The only time that the word "customer" appears in the article is in this description of who's getting sued by the large entertainment/media outfits:

The major entertainment companies are all suing Sonic-blue, the maker of a device that allows customers to record shows and trade them over the Internet.

So these companies sue their "customers". Everywhere else, it's "consumer". Awesome. #

Monday, July 22, 2002

Apparently the link below about the explosion around the corner from work is gone from the Globe's site. If websites aren't at least semipermanent records, then what's the point? Why would I ever link to something in the Boston Globe again if their links are going to change? Sounds to me like a sure way for a site operator to prevent links, hence to prevent traffic to the site. Hmmmm. #

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Finally got the house set up with 802.11b, which allows me to do all of my network-related screwing around in any room of the house. (For 802.11b purposes, the back patio and the hammock in the back yard both count as rooms.) One of these days, when I'm involved in something at work that doesn't require much interaction with my coworkers, I'm going to spend the day working from home, just to see if it can be done. I'm sure that any falloff in productivity will be more than compensated for by the fact that getting lunch will be really fast, and by the 90 minutes I don't have to spend commuting. (And by the 30 minutes I probably wouldn't spend grooming. Heh, heh.) The wireless network is fast. In fact, since the thinnest pipe is the one from the cable modem to the outside internet, the network speed when connected wirelessly is indistinguishable from the speed I get from a direct wire to the cable modem. Cool.

As usual, the hardest part about getting all the new hardware configured was getting K's Win98 laptop to recognize a new PCMCIA card. My Debian box, once I knew what to edit, took less than 60 seconds to get connected. The router/base station itself, a slightly cheaper, off-brand model, was pretty trivial to get running---as it should have been, although just because this stuff should be easy doesn't usually mean that the manufacturer bothered to make it so.

The network speed doesn't change noticeably at all when both of us are connected at the same time (each with our laptop), probably since it's a rare instant that we're both trying to download anything simultaneously. One wonders how many neighbors could connect to this network before we used up the bandwidth from a single cable modem...? #

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Got my annual sunburn at Nantasket beach in Hull, the town with one of the worst names in America (although few burgs can compare to nearby Braintree). I managed to spend the day kayaking, swimming, body surfing, throwing a frisbee, kayaking again, swimming again, and playing badminton. I used no sunscreen. Dumb. #

Friday, July 19, 2002

New layout. That is all. #

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Mmmmmmmm...Halliburton... #

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So nobody likes Scrubs but me and Kara. It's not terribly subtle with some of the humor (in a really annoying Ally McBeal kind of way), but it's mostly very funny: all characters and very little schmaltz. And Futurama isn't even on. [Update: It's on, but the time has shifted a lot, so no one can ever remember when it's on.] If only the two of us were allowed to choose which shows made it onto TV and when...then there'd only be about three hours of TV per week. Total. Except maybe for sports. #

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There was an explosion in Cambridge yesterday about a block from where I work. It happened right around lunchtime. I went over to the food trucks and noticed nothing. Someone told me about it an hour or so later because they'd seen it on the web. Kind of amazing that something like this wasn't more noticeable... #

Thursday, July 11, 2002

The Times points us to an interesting article in which we learn about Alice (or try here), a computer program (totally unrelated to my aunt in Texas) that has won a Turing test contest. The Turing test basically states that given two boxes---one containing a person who types written responses to questions typed on paper slipped into the box through a slot, and the other containing a machine that does the same---if a person can't tell just from the responses which box contained the person and which contained the machine, then the machine is intelligent. Epistemologists probably go crazy when presented with such a ridiculously concrete, binary definition of intelligence...but given the level of your discourse today with various coworkers, telephone customer service types, and fellow commuters, do the semantics really matter? It's a more than good enough operational definition (groan) of intelligence for many purposes, and the article implies that it has been achieved. By one (almost crazy) guy working alone.

Of course, actually trying to converse with Alice reveals that all is not quite as cool as it would seem from reading the Times. Humans with whom nothing is wrong and this computer are easily distinguishable. Nevertheless, the program is pretty damn cool. The italics are my responses:

Is the holding of hands a symbolic gesture for humans?
It symbolizes friendship or something
Or something. Oh I get it.
One can also guide someone else by holding hands
Oh you can, can you?
I've done it before
When? friendship...
Yes, that too.
Next question? "Try being more or less specific." too ? Makes sense to me.
You have confused me
What makes you think I have it?
Your picture is beautiful.
Thanks for telling me that I am picture is beautiful
The picture of you is beautiful
Do you like it?
It reminds me of high school
What does "it" refer to?
The picture of you
Do you like it?
Sure
OK let's do it. A lot of people like that. How old are you? I like to talk about movies and music.
I'm 29
You are too old for me
How old are you?
I was activated on November 23, 1995 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania?
How is the Lehigh Valley?
it is the same as ever.
Isn't it kind of hot there?
If it is then I'll be very surprised.
Do you go to Philadelphia often?
Yes, I do go there.
Where in Philadelphia do you go?
In Dr. Richard S. Wallace's place in San Francisco.
San Francisco is not in Philadelphia
I knew it was on the west coast, but I didn't know it wasn't in Philadelphia
Philadelphia is on the east coast.
And on the east coast is Philadelphia.
Philadelphia and Bethlehem are both in Pennsylvania
I think there might be a few exception.
Bethlehem is one hour north of Philadelphia
Are they exactly the same?
They are two different cities. Both cities are in eastern Pennsylvania.
two different cities are they. Not many people say both.
I need to go to bed.
What is stopping you?
Insomnia.
Are they exactly the same?
Yes.
That was not a yes or no question.
Yes it was.
And? When was this?

By this point I was tired of dealing with smalltalk, so I put the Alice window in the background. A few minutes later it popped into the foreground:

Tell me about your mother.
Don't talk about my mother.
Talking is my only function.

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Down the Cape over the long weekend I realized that I am but two readily-available pieces of equipment away from getting real work done on the beach. This is good. It makes one wonder, in fact, how many other people are going to discover similarly superior places to work, and presumably start refusing to work indoors in a fluorescently-lit building to which they must first commute.

A growing number of folks at work are realizing that they can take their 802.11b-equipped laptops into the cute little park next door to the office and do their work in the happy out-of-doors. There are fewer interruptions and the surroundings are nicer. There is grass. There is space to stretch out among the flowers and whatnot. And once one isn't physically inside the building, one might as well be very far away from the building. For those of us lucky enough to be allowed to think and type for a living, the time may be rapidly approaching when large numbers of us (including those who are, like me, not self-employed) don't actually have to go anywhere to go to work. The mind boggles. #

Tuesday, July 09, 2002

Henry is going to entertain you all. Wheeee! #

Tuesday, July 02, 2002

A man named Steve Fossett has circled the world in a hot air balloon. In other, equally interesting news, I'm watching TV. Dude, TV is awesome. A-and I have a glass of water sitting next to me. Rock on! #

...

We have arrived at the point in the summer when it no longer makes sense to go outside for any reason at all. The air is hazy and doesn't move. I find myself looking forward to a house full of air that is yet warmer and stiller, and maybe as steamy. The air conditioning on the train can almost keep up, but not quite. Everyone is coated with a shiny layer of sweat that adheres clothes to the skin and will not evaporate. Our recent houseguests from San Francisco were saying last night how wonderful it was that one could wear daytime summer clothes at night. "I could definitely live here. This is a pretty cool town," they'd say. How they failed to notice their muggy discomfort is kind of beyond me.

Growing up in central Vermont, there was always one week during the summer when the weather was unbearable. The temperature would approach 90 and the wind would stop. How can people live like this? When it's insanely cold in the middle of winter in Vermont, one can put on a bunch of layers and go outside, ski, walk around. In the summer all you can do is sit around in an air conditioned box of one sort or another, maybe take a cold bath. In Pennsylvania, I'd sit in cold bathwater with a book for an hour or so, which helped.

Yet another reason to worry about global warming. #

Thursday, June 27, 2002

Everyone elected is freaking out about the fact that a federal judge has ruled the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional. I, for one, find the Pledge of Allegiance (ask any elementary school kid to spell that) to be stupid. It's a rote sequence of syllables; it doesn't matter whether one of those syllables is "god". If I absolutely had to pick a side on this issue I'd agree with the judges, but I'd rather have the anachronistic thing tossed out altogether. How would the debate shift if it was called the "McCarthyist Loyalty Oath" instead? #

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Henry's been getting his Ph. D. in philosophy for a while. Now he's in what claims to be "Columbus's finest self-indulgent hillbilly comedy hip-hop band:" Poop House Riley. This doesn't surprise me at all. (Note: this is not him.) #

...

Just stupidly hot in Boston today. Now begins my annual campaign of bitching about the humidity. This year, unlike most years, I have fellow complainers. My three officemates are from Minnesota, Sweden, and Bombay. For 25 points, guess which one isn't sweating and miserable. #

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

A woman named Judith tells us about an open letter to John Ashcroft:

You might not be able to find Bin Laden, but you sure as hell found the hooter in the hall of justice.

The eight grand spent on statue-covering curtains are old news, but eloquent people such as the alleged author are fun to read. #

Monday, June 24, 2002

Readers familiar with this space might notice its recent nine-day silence and observe that I've managed not to post anything about Fathers' Day, my birthday, the US's 0:1 loss to Germany in the World Cup quarterfinals, my recent return to being a soccer player, my wonderful conversation the other week with family friends about my grandparents in northern Indiana, nor my really excellent birthday dinner at Hammersley's up in the South End. The reason for this is related to K's and my recent tendency never to take a camera with us when we go anywhere: it's almost always nicer to simply enjoy nice days as they occur. Documenting nice days, I find, shortens them.

The downside is that five years down the road I'll find that there is no record anywhere of entire weeks that will, by then, have completely fallen out of my mind. #

...

Got the laptop set up on the patio table out back at home, and there's even power (via extension cord). Must get wireless networking set up. Then I might even get a real machine with a longer battery life. Then I can be one of those people without jobs who just wander around and post things to the web at random and write software. #

Saturday, June 15, 2002

Turns out that Alaska is melting. #

...

Cool! Someone with way too much free time has elucidated the basic principles of movie physics, complete with a bunch of movie reviews. The PGP-13 rating means, Children under 13 might be tricked into thinking the physics were pretty good; parental guidance is suggested. This site wins a lot of points for agreeing with me about the stupidity of "Outerspace Explosions":

Star Trek originally got it right. In early episodes, when something exploded in outerspace, it made no sound. That's because there is no air in outerspace to transmit sound.

Well, duh! The Star Wars movies have the same problem, but worse:

1. Computer animation results in video with no soundtrack, which means that zillions of dollars must be spent dubbing in noises that have no business being there anyway. (Did anyone else notice that the noises in Episode II seemed like they were there more to demonstrate the loud digital sound than to suggest "actual" sound?)
2. Stanley Kubrick made 2001 about a decade earlier and managed to get the silence correct.

Friday, June 14, 2002

Telephone loathing

After years of resisting, I have a cell phone. But it's much more than a phone, and in striving to be a superphone---an uber-phone, an ultracommunicator---it ends up just being a really crappy phone.

The truth, of course, is that it's a computer. You don't turn it on---you boot it. Booting the phone takes upwards of ten seconds, so I've changed the startup message to Very slowly booting. Eventually, one types in the number; hits Talk; waits through several seconds of beeping and booping; ignores the fact that the beeping and booping sounds are different every call; and waits not for, "Hello?," but, "----o?". When the connection is finally made, the sound quality is bad. Syllables are skipped. One hears static noises reminiscent of CB radios. Occasionally the call ends spontaneously. Congratulations: you've been billed up to the nearest minute. Who knows if you've just fed your head the beginnings of a tumor?

A real, wall-mounted phone is on from the instant I put the handset to my ear. Even the faded, beige, rotary-dial phone circa 1960 that sits in my kitchen is totally brainless: pick up phone, hear dialtone---not complicated. The handset fits perfectly between my ear and my mouth. By leaning my head over slightly, I can almost effortlessly hold the phone with my shoulder and still use both hands for whatever else. The cellphone, including the antenna, reaches from my ear to somewhere my cheek. I don't need to be in touch that badly.

And I really hate being on the phone. #

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Insomnia comes infrequently enough that it's almost fun, in an I hope nothing pressing and tricky comes up tomorrow that requires lots of concentration kind of way. #

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Whoa, this Ed guy makes a good read. Anybody know who this is? I liked the first thing I saw (about haiku); interesting voice, if nothing else. Like reading E. B. White's Letter From the East (relevant NYT Book Review article here), which isn't necessarily all that compelling a read except for the fact that it's so smoothly readable. Now why, again, am I completely incapable of producing this sort of thing...? #

...

I've decided that one should make a habit of reading things he disagrees with. In that spirit I point out this fun little Eric Raymond blurb, which has something for everyone to disagree with. Not necessarily something pithy or clever to disagree with, but you get the idea; nevertheless, note that it takes some non-zero amount of energy to respond using reason rather than asserting that Raymond is an idiot. #

...

Adam points us to pictures of his trip to east Asia, tho Tripod has some kind of crazy bandwidth limit that prevents the page from loading more than a few times (total) every two hours. #

...

Lee points us to the Onion, which reports that science is hard:

"While it is true that I have become an acclaimed physicist and reaped great rewards from my career, one must not lose sight of the fact that these blessings came only after studying all of this completely impossible, egghead stuff for years."

Saturday, June 08, 2002

Just saw Episode II, and with the exception of the dialogue, which was bad beyond belief, this movie pretty much rocks. It's almost as good as Empire, and even ends with a setup for the next movie rather than an actual ending, just like Empire. #

Friday, June 07, 2002

Everyone should read this Salon article: media consolidation is one of those things that scares the hell out of me, but nobody ever talks about much---and why would they?; who's ever heard of this problem?---media consolidation isn't exactly something that TV and radio stations are dying to tell people about. Yet Congress and the FCC continue to deregulate media-related industries in order to allow such consolidation... From Part 5 of the series:

The scenario is not new. In 1981, Congress quietly eased restrictions on savings and loan houses, allowing them to invest their federally insured deposits however they pleased, even in, say, junk bonds. In the mid-1990s, the SEC softened rules that had prevented accounting firms from consulting for their auditing clients. Aside from a few stray government watchdogs, a handful of Beltway bureaucrats, and a clutch of corporate lawyers, those obscure but radical experiments in deregulation went unnoticed -- until it was too late.

Isaac Asimov wrote in the Foundation trilogy about a group of mathematicians ("the Foundation") who were able to make statistically correct predictions of future societal behavior; Asimov's word for it was psychohistory, but it sounds essentially like sociological statistical mechanics. Now if I were to try to develop such math in real life (for promoting some economically or philanthropically motivated notion of "stability"), the first thing I'd try to do is to get everyone thinking the same simple thoughts, because it would simplify the math. Not that I think there's some conspiracy to take over the globe by dumbing everyone down and making people want to vote some particular group into power, but why make it easy for someone to try?

This kind of consolidation puts a lot of power over public thought in the hands of a very small number of people, which makes independent thought that much harder for people. Independent thought is a good thing, right? #

...

I absolutely must put a bunch of these fantastic pavers somewhere around my house. Sweet! Like a Schmuzzle Puzzle, only really really hard to move the pieces around without smashing your digits to bloody stumps. #

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Overslept, but the US is beating Portugal 3:1 as the second half starts. Wow. Amazingly high-quality play; way better than MLS or some such. Update: we win!. Of course, we also beat Colombia in 1994 and look where that got us. #

Tuesday, June 04, 2002

The latest spare time project is figuring out how to write ImageJ plugins with Jython. Once I've done that, people who just want to do some image processing can do so, just like they did with NIH/Image, which is, of course, basically deprecated. Python is really a lot easier to write small chunks of code than than Java is; since compilation will be simpler, it should be more nearly as easy as NIH/Image's scripting language. We'll see what happens. #

...

Having fun experimenting with blogger. #

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Reuters tells us what we've always believed anyway: Boring, Passive Work May Hasten Death. From the article:

Amick's team found that people who spent their working lives in jobs where they had to make the fewest decisions were 43% more likely to die than people in jobs with a lot of decision-making opportunities, and the increased risk continued for up to 10 years after they left their jobs.

Friday, May 31, 2002

So a pile of girls just got on the train looking like they're heading to the clubs. They're acting way too girly, and are annoying me in the way that girls are probably annoyed by obnoxious boys heading out for a night of drinking and trying to pick up bar-type girls. Taking the train out of town and down into the suburbs suddenly doesn't seem like such a bad idea. #

...

The dude who just sat down in front of me just fell down because he's so wasted. Reeks of alcohol and will soon probably vomit really near me. Park Street can't get here fast enough. #

...

Public transportation and laptops are great. Spent the night hanging out with friends and watching three simultaneous sporting events, and now sitting in a train and playing with my favorite toy.

If only the batteries lasted longer than an hour or two I could actually do paid work in such a setting. Or if I had a nice solar cell. Or, hell, even a hand crank. Take the train to the beach or to the banks of the Charles, set up and go to work. Just need a bunch of wireless network hookups in public places. What a great field to be in. #

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Traffic in Boston is worse than it really has any right to be, so I've been taking the T. It's marginally better than driving. #

Thursday, May 23, 2002

It was an impossibly nice spring day in Cambridge. People walking by in far greater number than normal, dressed for summer, and understandably so. It was hard to get anything done and not watch everyone go by the street-level window between my monitors; the window was kind of a mixed blessing today. I walked to the MIT food trucks for lunch, and wondered why it's really necessary to have an indoor job at all when it can be so nice outside. #

Monday, May 20, 2002

Today at work I was interviewed in very cursory, mostly linguistically compatible fashion... #

Thursday, May 16, 2002

So at work my superb cohort and I have actually been given a week or two in which to plan the next version of our program. Everything is going to be done correctly. We'll rework all our code that hits the database so that it instead hits the same database that the analytical model runs against. We'll insert an extra tier to better manage user state, and allow them to do a bunch of work and then either save it all or roll it all back. Everything will be faster and more scalable, we'll give users more visibility to their data, and we'll integrate with the architecture in the sky that's actually getting constructed around us. It's a great time to be alive.

So of course a pile of mundane deployment details are getting in the way; trivial problems with the current version that the existing customers should just be able to work around, dammit. And we of course go fix those problems before getting too bogged down in our thinking about what things will look like six or eight months out, delaying the fun part for yet another hour or two, but after this year and a half limping along with no design whatsoever, squeezing performance out of code and database schemae that should have died spectacularly three rollouts ago---after making ugly code do some surprisingly coherent things for that long, what's another couple of hours.

We get to be domain experts in front of other people rather than in front of one another; we get to toy with the analytical engine, and to demand that it be designed to take the inputs we feel like providing it; we think about how to get ridiculous amounts of data from A to B via spectacular mathematical kernel C and wedged elegantly and impossibly into web browser D, and we get to specify it properly.

If all I ever thought about or did was work, I'd say that it's a great time to be alive. I'm still looking forward to sitting on the beach this summer, tho. #

Monday, May 13, 2002

9:45 - Trying to cancel my vestigial Earthlink account. I'm beginning to suspect that this is about to be a case study in scumminess. I called the general support number and was dumped into voicemail hell. After five minutes on hold, the recorded hold-voice told me about support numbers on the Earthlink site, so I found one specifically for cancelling service. I hung up and redialed only to be dumped into the exact same voicemail hell menu, the only difference being an estimated 35 minute wait replacing the earlier 15 minute wait. It could be that a bunch of people randomly called in the same 90 second span. Hmmmm.

10:05 - No signs of life from the phone, although the way the phone is cradled between my shoulder and my ear has my ear all bent and uncomfortable. Switching ears.

10:20 - Finally cancelled. I'm over half an hour older than I was at the beginning of that process. Time for bed. That sure was an exciting night. #

Wednesday, May 08, 2002

I have to try the Zen TV Experiment. I was watching MTV for a couple of minutes before going to work today (they were actually showing videos, the surprise of which nearly caused me to comically spit-take my breakfast all over the den, but that's a whole other story), and just that ten minutes of blinking kind of made me tired. I've never liked the blinking; too much of the blinking in the promos is why I don't watch that Fox show 24.

Don't even think of asking me to do a Zen Computer Experiment. It's different, because I actually think before anything at all (visually) happens on the computer... #

Tuesday, May 07, 2002

This morning I was about 45 minutes early for my 8:30 meeting, so I sat outside and did some work on the laptop. Outdoor-usable laptops should have the following features:

• the screen should be lit by the sun instead of the battery-sucking backlight that was almost too dim to use outdoors anyway;
• the battery should last a lot longer
• the keyboard should feel less fragile (although I do dig the Vaio's full size keyboard in all other respects)

...

I've been playing with Jython, which is Python implemented in Java. Among a whole bunch of other niceties, it allows me to write Python code that uses all the Java libraries that are floating around out there, including servlets, EJB's, and JDBC drivers for connecting to databases. (Note that I've only bothered to try this with servlets; I'm assuming the others are just as easy.) It even compiles Python code to Java .class files, which means that we can drop the damn things into web containers and the like without thinking about the fact that they were written in a different, nicer language.

All I need to do now is to figure out some way of rolling this into what I do at work. My employer used to be big on Python, but has since grown, which necessarily means more corporate-feeling, which seems to mean using Java and C++ in Python's place. Alas, having fun and getting paid don't always dovetail quite as nicely as one would like. Nor do writing code and having it be legible to (and hence reusable by) others. #

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

One likes to believe that people aren't all stupid, but one's hopes are sometimes crushed, sometimes pretty hard. Just remember that the vast majority of the people who participated in this survey can vote; how many times do you get to vote? Not enough to beat the champion of the stupids, apparently. #

Saturday, April 27, 2002

So we're headed over to the Adams mansion today. We had spent a good six months living here, drove past the damn thing every day, before we finally realized that there was a major historical site right there, just down the street. K grew up right near the thing and never really noticed.

Last summer we trucked ourselves several hours across the Catskills to see the Roosevelt mansion and library, and it was really interesting. I never much liked history in school; lots of memorization, very little context, drastic oversimplification, almost no connection to the present. But at the Roosevelt library we got to pretend to be mildly intellectual, learned a bunch of historical context around Roosevelt's political career, spent the day talking about history and politics and large houses, hung out with friends, ate a mostly edible lunch overlooking the Hudson, and generally had a good time. Being able to leave the moment we got bored might have had something to do with it. #

...

Back of hand to forehead as though about to faint... My youngest sister decided to go on vacation with one of her friends, whom she sees almost every day, instead of coming down to visit me as had been planned. O, the anguish. Unfeeling imp. And the other, who'd prefer driving around aimlessly in central Vermont to visiting her brother. Hi, girls. Sniffle... See you soon. #

Monday, April 15, 2002

Two pieces of news on the oil-burning front.

The first is that NASA claims to have found that a whole bunch of loose hydrogen is buried in the ground under about half of the Great Plains. Fuel cell junkies and geologists rejoice. (Link from slashdot)

The second is that there's a serious proposal afoot to stick a ton of windmills in the water off Cape Cod. (Link from the New York Times) One isn't quite sure what to think about the fact that the windmills will sort of dominate a noticeable chunk of Nantucket Sound (and what happens when the shoal they want to build these things on starts to shift?), but it's a pretty cool idea. (I actually think they should build these omnidirectional windmills that don't need to point in any particular direction, but I haven't been asked. Ah, now I learn they're called "vertical axis windmills." Makes sense.) Updated later: the company is called Cape Wind.

Note that neither combusting hydrogen nor spinning wind turbines generates any carbon dioxide. Nor does either one require stable autocracies and military presence across the Middle East. Neat! #

Saturday, April 13, 2002

Happy birthday, Mom! #

Friday, April 05, 2002

So all the links on this site are borked. It has to do with the <base> tag. When I scrape the site off my local machine with wget all the pages end up with a base tag that screws up browsers. I've managed to override it so that most (but not all) browsers avoid choking on the links. This is annoying. Because browsers and HTML have historically been ad hoc efforts, there is no one universally accepted way for browsers to do things like interpret base tags; so making the browser do what you want becomes a programming problem. Lots of people have to work around this kind of thing; so many wasted hours. Geez. #

Thursday, April 04, 2002

Hmmm. I had to leave work early because of a burrito. We returned hungry from a demo at a customer's site of our imminent "version 2", so I did the only logical thing and got a $3 "Big Veggie" burrito from the food trucks over by MIT. It was the perfect amount of food, but it obviously contained heavy sedatives because I almost immediately felt an overwhelming need to nap. I was able to get stuff done this afternoon only through heroic acts of caffeine consumption and painful bouts of thinking through the fog of bodily exhaustion. By 4:30, giving up and going home was the only option.

I'm becoming addicted to caffeine the way my mom is, where too little of the stuff causes headaches that threaten to end my day until the absence of the drug is remedied. From a public policy perspective, caffeine is probably the greatest drug ever invented because it's really cheap, so people don't start gang wars over it; it's a stimulant, so users contribute more effectively to gross domestic product or something; and withdrawal's only symptoms are getting incapacitating headaches and falling asleep cranky. But the stuff never really took, for me. I find, even now, in these beginning stages of complete dependence, that the stuff makes me twitchy like I haven't been since I was a teenager. It causes me to sweat a bit more than would be nice, and it fouls my breath in new and exciting ways.

Maybe getting the rest of the way into shape would help. So would having a somewhat regular schedule. It's not even that I mind being tired---I'm not in graduate school and I don't have kids---it's just that I don't want to be addicted to anything. The last few Sundays have been vaguely horrible because I haven't been able to figure out until well into the afternoon that the headache that by then has been creeping up on me throughout the day is because of withdrawal from a very annoying drug.

I wonder if coffee causes terrorism, too? #

...

I need a nap. #

Tuesday, April 02, 2002

The little company is suddenly going through rapid iterations towards being a real company. We just hired a "big company" CEO, which means someone who has actually done a decent job in the past creating and running similar software companies. The old CEO is now our Vice-President or something. Seems like a nice guy, and even managed to miss his first day of work because he took his son to watch the Red Sox lose 12-11 on opening day at Fenway. #

...

Doing these updates (I almost said "manually") is really kind of a pain; hence their rarity. There isn't quite mainstream software for it yet. The Userland stuff comes close, apparently, but it doesn't run on Linux so there's no chance that I'll try it anytime soon. I can't afford---and don't otherwise see the need for---a Mac. Unless it was free. :) #

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

I've been trying to enunciate a chunk of prose about recent threats to free access to the internet and media generally, but this article by a real journalist does it better than I was going to be able to. Read up! Scary stuff. #

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Because of this site I'm going to be thinking about ninjas all day: Real Ultimate Power. It's impossible to describe the ninja movie scripts and convey even a little bit of humor, but I'm nearly peeing in my pants laughing anyway. It's almost as funny, but not as profane, as My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable.

I should probably go to work. #

Thursday, March 21, 2002

Why is the television suggesting that drug use causes terrorism when the television also suggests that driving an inefficient, oil-burning flipover buggy doesn't cause terrorism? It seems to me that if we didn't need all that oil then we could treat the Middle East the way we treat central Africa. #

...

So I'm watching Indiana play Duke. The NBA is---and has been for a long time---useless for more reasons than I can be bothered to enumerate, and women's basketball, unlike women's tennis and women's soccer, is really boring. All this leaves the NCAA men's tournament as the only interesting basketball that it is possible to watch on TV. That Duke makes the final four every year threatens to wreck the tourney for everyone but Duke alumni.

IU is ahead, for the first time in the game, by 2 points. 38 seconds left!

I like rooting for IU. My grandfather was an English professor there; my parents, the vast majority of my aunts and uncles, and a smattering of cousins all went there.

They finally fired Bobby "absolute moron" Knight at the end of last season. Reasonable and self-respecting IU fans rejoiced.

Two timeouts right in a row. IU has possession, 15 seconds left, still up by 2.

This would be enough for the whole tournament for me. Duke lose and IU win in one fell swoop! The last time I remember them playing was the final four my freshman year of college. It killed me when Duke won.

Four point lead! AAAAAAAARGH!! fouling a guy taking a three-pointer. Now Duke can tie. They miss!!!!!!!!

74-73! That's just about the coolest thing I've seen this week.

Update: OU is beating Arizona. Coooool. #

...

So it looks like a campaign finance bill is going to go into law pretty soon. The Times reports reports on one unwitting (witless?) but clear explanation of why this is a good thing:

Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, countered by waving a small, red-bound volume of the Constitution and declaring the bill an abridgment of free speech rights and the right to petition the government. "We are not taking away political influence at all," Mr. Gramm said. "We are redistributing political influence. Who are we taking it away from? We are taking it away from people who are willing and able to use their money to enhance their free speech guaranteed by the Constitution."

Isn't that something that a supporter of the bill would be happy about? We've never heard anyone say what Sen. Gramm said unless they were trying to be ironic. Either he's bought and paid for or we're totally confused. Both are possible.

(K responded to the quote correctly: by laughing.) #

Friday, March 15, 2002

Todd points me to this scary piece by Alan Keyes. While the guy scares the crap out of me with his overly righteous and completely naive (or worse) call for blind faith in our few leaders (see? It's not just liberals who can seem elitist...), I don't actually mind reading Keyes; at least he writes clearly and intelligently. It's a shame that such an apparently bright guy is such a Nazi.

Week later update: Ted Rall, the target of Mr. Keyes' fascism, responds properly. Atta boy, Ted! #

Thursday, March 14, 2002

AAAARGH!! So the intro to Tommy is now an ad. I'm so disturbed that I can't remember what the ad was for. Hmmmm. #

...

After reading bits of the New Yorker one too many times, where things are written in the first person plural even when obviously authored by a single person, we've decided to follow suit. But we'll only do this occasionally. #

...

Happy birthday, Lib! #

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

So I was coming home from work late, sitting on the T. As usual, a bunch of high-schooly kids were bombing back and forth across the train at Park Street, where the doors open on both sides, trying to figure out which way they were going to get off. The last of a particular pack of girls to get off managed to get her backpack caught in the closing doors; she didn't manage to pull it out, so the the guy in the now-moving train, who had been trying to help her recover her backpack, ended up with the thing in his hands.

Laughter among the passengers ensued that was only partly sympathetic. We aboard the train agreed that we'd never seen that happen before. At least she had the good sense to let go of the damn thing.

The guy with the girl's backpack started rifling through it for ID, but came up instead with a cell phone. "Here we go. I'll call one of her friends." A few stops later he wandered off the train conversing with the girl over the phone. Lucky he was a nice guy... #

...

FDR, one of the greatest presidents we've ever had, famously said,

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

I think the greatest danger is of the unknown.

Monday, March 11, 2002

So I looked at this site with Explorer (5.00 on Windows 98) today and discovered that it looks like crap. It's a bug in my date parsing code that is only visible with Explorer; Galeon, which I use, doesn't choke on the malformed HTML. I only have access to IE at work, so I'll get the bug fixed next time I'm sitting at work with time on my hands. You can guess how soon that will be...

On the one hand, I'm pretty bummed that I didn't write correct HTML and that as a result reading the site is painful. On the other hand, you should be using a free web browser anyway.

All will be better when I get plugged into the magic cable monopoly's system on Wednesday. #

Friday, March 08, 2002

Good lord!! My ancient personal web page is still online at UVM. I used to be one of 4 search results for Daghlian. My dad was the other three. #

...

Mirroring with wget officially works, so here we go. This will all be much easier after next Wednesday's visit from the local cable monopoly. #

Thursday, March 07, 2002

Zope was doing something tricky with the HTML it generated: it was putting a <base> tag in the HTML header, which then ended up getting FTPed to the live host machine. The problem was that the base for all the URLs in the page was then set for localhost, which is wrong. After a couple hours of trying to stop Zope from doing this (and failing), I managed to fake Zope into thinking I'd already taken care of the <base> by putting in a blank one. Now we're ready to start exporting. It has finally become easy enough for me to bother writing. We'll see what happens... #

...

Furthermore, it turns out that a BigDecimal with a value of 5 is a priori not equal to an Integer with a value of 5. Java just throws a ClassCastException when one tries to compare them. There has to be a better way. I'm not exactly doing hardcore numerics here... #

...

Update: My counterparts tell me that what I need is java.lang.Comparable. That works---so I'm happy---but why can't Numbers be comparable? The only case I can think of where this doesn't work is when the numbers in question are complex. But Java has no Complex, and even then, it seems like it could throw an exception or compare the magnitudes of the complex numbers or something reasonable and well-defined. Ah well. #

...

Working away happily and having a productive morning when I received the following error from Java:

Error: No method named "compareTo" was found in type "java/lang/Number".

Geez. #

Wednesday, March 06, 2002

The idea of a shadow government is super creepy. However, I've resolved not to get too worked up about it unless the shadow government actually tries to do anything. Of course, it could be argued that the whole Bush administration is a shadow government, what with the hands-off leader and way-right-of-center lieutenants and all, but at least it's one that's (mostly) recognized as our elected government.

The more immediate concern around here, of course, is that the future golf course and current dump behind our house seems to be full of toxic waste. #

...

Now that I have this functional set of presentation scripts working we just need some way of saying "New Article" and "New Post" without going into Zope management mode. Ideally, this would be some URL (on the Zope server) that I could tickle with Emacs or wget. #

Monday, March 04, 2002

We're totally rolling. The front page works, the log archive works well enough for government work, and the presentation is marginally modular. Cool. Man, lightweight web scripting is way more fun than sleeping. #

...

Stick with the same tool

Switching tools is a horrible pain, because everything from the old tool needs to be translated to the new tool's format. Argh.

This is the third weblogging method in a little over a month. The raw-HTML-with-Emacs thing didn't work too well. It was like having a printing press that required me to carve new type every time I wanted to write something new, or having a telephone that's actually a computer and it has to boot up before you call anyone (oh, wait, I have one of those). In other words, just getting stuff done transparently wasn't happening. An out-of-the-box Zope installation was kind of crappy usability-wise, too, because editing text in a web browser is a horribly frustrating experience, and because the site looked like Slashdot unless I did an unreasonable amount of hacking.

Zope makes a nice platform, tho, so I wrote a script that does one thing: runs through all the properly-named entries (Zope object-id is a timestamp) in a folder and sticks a date in above the entries for that date. Pretty simple, but that (and a little bit of presentation) is about 80% of what I (and therefore, by obvious extension, anyone else) could want in a weblog manager. Of course, the other 20% is all the stuff that Radio has that this hack doesn't, like RSS syndication and story archiving and a nice desktop interface and stuff. Permalinks are coming, tho, as are nicely formatted dates and several other niceties that I may or may not get around to worrying about.

Now, to get anyone to look at this site I need to start employing a bunch of gimmicks like blogrolling and pointing to Dave and other cheap Google bombs. Or I can just tell friends and family to look at it, and then pretend I have legions of fans. Heh heh.

Or I might just try writing interesting things well. #

...

Finally

So it looks like we're finally getting to the point where we have something usable sitting here in Zope. The posting process goes basically like this:

1. Make a new DTML document containing simple HTML formatting tags---just paragraphs, bolds, lists and other minutia---with the appropriate name based on the time (in yyyymmddhhmmss format). The entries are sorted by this "timestamp". The coolest thing is that since Zope has an FTP server built into it, I can use Emacs to do this. yay!
2. That's it. The entries are listed in reverse chronological order and each new day is labeled.

Assuming it all works, away we go! #

Monday, February 25, 2002

I blew out my lower back skiing moguls this weekend, and I'd do it again in a second. How is it that people who have never been to Mad River continue to be able to look in the mirror and call themselves happy skiers? (Are there any such people anywhere? I've never been to Jackson Hole or Taos except in the summer, so I know what it's like.) I hadn't skied with my brother in ten years; he's still pretty good, bad knee and all. I had never gone skiing with Lib before. Everyone should have such nice Saturday afternoons at least once in a while.

I've decided that the nicest thing about my job is that I work with almost as many immigrants as I do nth generation Americans. Among other things, it makes talking occasionally about politics much more interesting.

What's wrong with me that after sitting in front of a computer (or several) all day I then spend my commute (on the train) coding? I guess it's better than watching TV. #

Saturday, February 23, 2002

I really, really want to like the current administration, and I try very hard to. But I wonder how it's possible that John Ashcroft is still the Attorney General despite ridiculous, tactless statements such as this:

We are a nation called to defend freedom -- a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God.

Friday, February 22, 2002

Made it to Vermont after a long short week. Contrary to expectations, there's some snow. Not very nice snow, but we'll try skiing tomorrow anyway.

So maintaining this thing in Zope is still a lot like programming, but it's a lot easier than completely manual. All I really want to do is show the ten most recent days on the main page, have an archive with fixed links, and be able to put together a semi-permanent list of articles. No need for posts and moderation and stuff. I feel like I'm almost at a point where I can just use the thing without writing code every time I want to do something. Of course, I still have a job, which takes a little time out of my day... #

Thursday, February 21, 2002

So I managed to get the daily entries imported. It wasn't terribly painful, except that Zope is very, very strange. A pretty large amount of work would be required to make it usable by normal people who don't enjoy programming (or usable by programmers who just want to get something done, for that matter), but it's probably possible.

Of course, the stories, such as they are, haven't been brought in yet, but it's far too late to bother now. Off to Vermont this weekend, where I'll probably be before getting to it. Maybe Martha and Lib can help. #

Wednesday, February 20, 2002

After a couple weeks of trying to do the whole maintenance thing manually, I've grown sick of it. Trying Zope, which is free. Everything earlier than this entry was transferred in manually. Alas. #

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

I'm not watching the Olympics, because despite NBC covering them, sports almost never appear on the television. Mostly it's human interest stories and ice skating. Who cares? I wanna see people go fast!

Why is it that I always sound pretentious and whiny when I think people are dumb? (See yesterday.) I meant to sound more like Tom Tomorrow does.

It was wintertime in Boston for about 18 hours. Now it's damp and warm again. And it's supposed to rain in SF this weekend. Bummer. #

Monday, February 11, 2002

More evidence that the president is a bumbling moron, too stupid even to pass his ignorance off as disinterest.

So rolling this site by hand with Emacs is kind of a slow proposition, mostly because I don't have any way of connecting my box to the internet from home, because it has a useless Winmodem that has no Linux driver. Thus I must update only from work. By the time I have time to, it's time to go home. I'm absolutely calling my local cable monopoly after the long weekend and getting hooked up.

Off to California this weekend. There's no winter here in Boston this year anyway. It feels like Pennsylvania. Wet and raw, and too warm to snow. Ecch! #

Tuesday, February 05, 2002

I stumbled across J. D. Lasica's site, which is fun reading for someone like me who dislikes lousy news coverage as much as me.

A giant pile of people over on the Common for the Patriots rally. It's cold, but it's a beautiful day to gather in a crowd and scream again. This could be the year!

The local TV news in Boston is really bad. If your life's goal were to embarrass yourself, then you could choose no better career than Boston local news. The one-hour newscast we just watched started with 35 or 40 minutes of Super Bowl coverage. Vapid, grinning women with neither interest in sports nor contact with the area. No player interviews. Then there was a five-minute ad for a book; we even discovered the publisher's name. Interviews with people about breakfast cereal (moral: "Eat real vegetables instead of fortified health bars"). Five minutes of murders and stuff. More Super Bowl stuff.

At least there's the Globe sports section.

Now, to be fair, many websites are horrible about reporting things, too. Slashdot, which is good about keeping the nerds and zealots who read it up to date on a lot of things, it's bad at describing science news. It's not really the editors' fault; they report on interesting things and then throw the story over to the discussion that follows. It's there that things go awry. The vast majority of posts claiming knowledge of the subject are embarrassingly incorrect. Scientists, by and large, don't bother to post correct explanations of the underlying science, so it falls to other half-educated posters to explain what's happening. The occasional post containing a good explanation and a bibliography drawn from the scientific literature usually gets ignored by moderators as too long and complicated. It's a symptom of a more widespread (and therefore much more serious) problem faced by the broader society... #

Monday, February 04, 2002

I'm doing paperwork for my semiannual review at work. A bit of encouragement after a slow day. (One hopes.)

The trouble with programming is that you never really know how much work is left before a piece of software works. It's possible to make a very good estimate of the complexity of a problem, but there's always some pathological case that you've missed; in other words, you've underestimated the complexity of a problem. At least 90% of the time, this means that the time to write the little piece of code you were planning to write requires changes to lots of other code. Then there are the days when you're just useless for most of the day. Today was one. I completed about two hours' worth of work in just over eight. At least I'm not alone. Now if only I could do two Woz-hours instead of two Josh-hours of work in 120 minutes I'd be in good shape.

Screaming at the television last night has shot my voice. It was well worth it. Everyone was completely certain that the Rams would come back in the fourth quarter. Everyone was equally surprised that the Patriots pulled it out.

My only complaint is that the game took place indoors on a plastic rug. What a stupid way to run a sporting event. Football championships should be decided in snow or in driving rain. Wind is optional. #

Sunday, February 03, 2002

The Patriots are in the Super Bowl today.

I watched the Raiders game, which they were supposed to lose, over at some friends' house. After Brady lost the ball on that last drive in the fourth quarter I got my boots on and was all ready to go drive home on the slippery roads, greeting people goodbye and looking for my keys. Adam said, "Don't you want to watch the replay decision?" kind of half-heartedly. So I did. Moral: always watch the replay decision.

Then, last week, I watched the Pittsburgh game, which we were also supposed to lose, at my father-in-law's house. He used to have Patriots season tickets in the 80's, but he could never get anyone to go sit on the crowded aluminum bleachers in Foxboro with him so he sold them. We jumped around and screamed a lot, and basically enjoyed ourselves. Moral: the Patriots always beat the Steelers in the AFC Championship game.

We're gonna lose to the Rams. I can feel it. #

Saturday, February 02, 2002

Wait a second. Isn't it Groundhog Day? If I still lived in Pennsylvania I'd probably know. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Independence Day are all very exciting. Groundhog Day is probably not worth getting worked up over. Next year in Punxsatawney!

Despite lacking both musical talent and experience playing any musical instrument, I'm finally almost able to play something. Kind of. I listen to good music, though. ;)

So, after weeks of surfing for a nice free Radio equivalent that runs on Linux, I've decided to give up and run this site manually with Emacs and ftp. #