beautiful book

yes! my copy of beautiful code: leading programmers explain how they think just arrived. it includes essays by brian kernighan, karl fogel (subversion), jon bentley, tim bray, elliotte rusty harold, michael feathers, alberto savoia (testivus), charles petzold, douglas crockford, henry s warren jr (hacker's delight), ashish gulhati, lincoln stein, jim kent (parasol), jack dongarra (netlib) and piotr luszczek, adam kolawa, greg kroah-hartman, diomidis spinellis (code reading, code quality), andrew kuchling, travis e oliphant, ronald mak (martian principles), rogerio atem de carvalho (erp5) and rafael monnerat, bryan cantrill (dtrace), jeff dean and sanjay ghemawat (mapreduce), simon peyton jones (haskell), r. kent dybvig (chez scheme), william r. otte and douglas c. schmidt, andrew patzer, andreas zeller, yukihiro matsumoto (ruby), arun mehta, t.v. raman (emacspeak), laura wingerd and christopher seiwald (perforce), brian hayes.

i am impressed with some of the essays even after the preliminary scan. i know i would want another volume, with essays from, say, jeff bonwick, henry spencer, sam leffler, richard stallman, marshall mckusick, william clinger, guy steele, radia perlman...

see also: bryan's blog entry about the book.

[sigh, i did not know about the book until i saw it on geoff arnold's now reading sidebar. thanks geoff!]

serendipitous naughts

welcome news: ann coulter's recent pulp contribution to right-wing fantasy and malediction literature is now out in softcover with an afterword. the copy i accidentally bumped fell open [no doubt a sign from assorted fictional deities who wish to brighten my day] to page 269 where i read this 5-star howler:

the path between darwinism and nazism may not be ineluctable, but it is more ineluctable than the evolutionary path from monkey to man.

[ineluctable: lawyer-speak for inescapable]

rocks

none of the rocks were set up by a photographer. all natural occurances found in bokbalbaii, south africa. all images copyright ozan s. yigit.
see ancnd
prints available.

tosses back blonde hair...

roger ebert's uproarious spoof of ann coulter: chris curveball and blonde bomb

Well, then, let’s face it. You’re a porker yourself. And then the liberals sue doctors to keep them from delivering babies! At least that’s an improvement. Liberals used to eat babies. Maybe that’s why they got so fat.

very good to great books in the pile

bernhard edmaier, patterns of earth
richard morgan, black man
loise antony (ed), philosophers without gods: meditations on atheism and secular life
jerome groopman, md, how doctors think
natalie angier, the canon: a whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science
gerd gigerenzer, gut feelings: the intelligence of the unconscious

[for sf readers, black man is very highly recommended, but be warned that it is not a lightweight read.]

cars

all images copyright ozan s. yigit.
see ancnd
prints available.

recently noted quotes

the inhabitants of this great wilderness may live and die without ever having contact with humanity. long may it be that way. -- david attenborough [planet earth]

You know what I love about the GPL? Regular lawyers can't understand it. -- groklaw

attention conservation notice: i know nothing about music and have no taste. -- cosma shazili [random notes from the tail end of the montreal jazz festival]

Q: You have run into criticism from certain religious groups who regard you as subversive, with the Catholic Herald describing your work as 'worthy of the bonfire.' Do such emotional responses concern or upset you or does it please you to generate strong reactions?

A: I'm delighted to have brought such excitement into what must be very dull lives. -- philip pullman [about the writing]

precious! precious! oh my precious we loves you. we loves you! -- brent on his new iphone [pvp]

whether or not the jesus phone achieves worldly success, it will succeed in its own way by convincing people that the world can be different. -- ed felten [behind the iphone frenzy]

no man treats a motor car as foolishly as he treats another human being. -- bertrand russell [has religion made useful contributions to civilization?]

release early, release often, repent! -- me

do not eat or open desiccant
do not consume if having certain allergy -- san feng yuan peanut package warning

the frenchwoman has become americanized; she speaks seriously about serious matters, she takes life seriously, she rides on the rigid saddle of modern manners, dresses poorly, tastelessly, and wears corsets of galvanized tin which can resist most powerful pressures. -- jules verne [paris in the twentieth century]

turn off everything. patrol your house to pull the plugs on the tv, the radio, the fax, the e-mail-transmitting computer and its ingrown internet. go sit on your porch with a glass of vodka lemonade, a pad and pencil, and truly think. -- ray bradbury [bradbury speaks]

from the nose of the buddha

john scalzi's utterly useless writing advice is actually pretty good advice.

ursula leguin on serious literature and on a sad critic named ruth franklin.

new scientist environment: climate change: a guide for the perplexed. [a pointer i need to send to at least one canadian right-wing rag in denial.]

council of europe's report on dangers of creationism in education, june 2007.

song of hakawatha

duncan sinclair kindly preserved f.x. reid's very funny spoof of hiawatha, song of hakawatha:

Type the login and the password -
Found the system even slower
Even slower than the first time
(Just as though some evil spirit
Had reprogrammed all of UNIX
In the language LISP or OCCAM -
Which among the cognosenti
Are not fames for running quickly
Rather for their ponderous slowness
Like a third year CS student
Trying to make out a theorem
Such as that of Church and Rosser).

name dropping: peter's flame

this year's usenix flame award was given to my friend peter honeyman.

Peter's often highly unconventional stewardship of the countless students, researchers, and advisees he has touched is the stuff of graduate student legend. His penetratingly insightful (and potentially hazardous) questions and comments, combined with a paradoxically unflinching loyalty, consistently have led those under his tutelage to the pinnacle of achievement in security, systems, and networking.

congratulations peter!

council of ex-muslims in britain

council of ex-muslims in britain launched. here is the manifesto of the council, and a specific paragraph i must quote...

Those of us who have come forward with our names and photographs represent countless others who are unable or unwilling to do so because of the threats faced by those considered 'apostates' - punishable by death in countries under Islamic law.

mercurial next version

happy to see mercurial 0.9.4 is now available

• support for symlinks
• improved tag handling
• improved merge handling of file and directory renames
• improved named branch usability
• numerous improvements to commands
• generic pre- and post-command hooks
• improved Windows support
• basic BeOS and OpenVMS support
• numerous bug fixes

[now nearly a year into using mercurial. all my previously cvs/bk/svn/etc kept repositories have been converted.]

related reading: mercurial book in progress

recently noted quotes

lisp: no description provided -- freebsd package install

if there is one lesson that i have learned well along the way, it is simply this: the place to live is in the here and now. -- freeman patterson

obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. -- Dawkins’s Law of the Conservation of Difficulty

If I see another compact camera where the down-key on a Direction pad brings up a Focus menu so that you can get to the Close-up focus mode, I think I’ll puke. -- thom hogan [thom's compact challenge]

i like dull. it lasts. -- glod glodsson [soul music]

why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating? -- terence parr's motto

we have met our alien overlords, and they are us. -- cosma shalizi

it had a tossed-in-the-air-fruitcake quality ... -- owen gleiberman [on dead man's chest]

best rodent ever...

it is hard to write anything about ratatouille without turning into an gushing, adjective-filled cliche machine. it is one of the finest pieces in the history of animated story telling [that i have ever seen] would just about do it. it is truly a historic moment for disney and pixar: a new rodent is in the house.

at the end of the movie, adults and kids were standing up and clapping...

pencil marks

inimitable cosma shalizi, in different voices and those voices again

Q: So the analogy suggests that IQ scores are...?
A: A proxy for the skills and habits encouraged by a bureaucratic society; skills and habits which can be at once highly heritable (because of strong transmission through family and neighbors) and highly learned (within the scope of what it is biologically possible for humans to learn and internalize). Innate ability needn't enter into it at all. The implications for democracy would be nearly nil.

rolling stone, record industry's decline (part 1)

While there are factors outside of the labels' control -- from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs -- many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels' failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster.

mark danner, a study in the rhetoric of george w. bush

What we can say is that if torture today remains a “scandal,” a “crisis,” it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.

notes found in a recycling bin

recycled the text of the very, very strange larry wall talk titled perl, the first postmodern computer language, but not before reading the crunchy bits one last time. this quote seemed to jump at me:

recall that the essence of modernism is to take one cool idea and drive it into the ground.

reflecting on this in light of the once and future perl, it dawns on me that the essence of post/perl-modernism is to take many ideas, cool or not, and drive all of them into the ground, until a colorless puddle is formed.

recycled assorted past versions of suse documentation and media. once a favored now fading distro: so unwelcomed, so embarrassing. [my one machine that ran suse [briefly] is now running debian etch, and will soon run freebsd.]

o'reilly's cvs book. (poof!) i have no idea what this was doing on my bookshelf. it looks like i actually paid for it, which is sad.

recycled a b/w printout of a paul haeberli page on paper folding. this is from a very interesting [but now decade-old] graphics notebook called graphica obscura that used to be at sgi.com somewhere. it disappeared briefly and now re-appeared in its own site.

hmm, there goes some java program listings from my previous job. ah, here is the code i wrote to do [relatively trivial] application configuration using xml. [yep, some think this is a really good idea. i hated, hated, hated it.] i guess this needs to be shredded to tiny little pieces. this incidentally reminds me of a good essay by terence parr, titled humans should not have to grok XML.

thom's compact camera challenge

thom hogan has an excellent note on the poverty of current compact camera designs and how it can be remedied. yes, nikon [or canon, or olympus or panasonic]: i would pay $450 for a compact that meets thom's design specifications.

Simply put: larger sensor, high-quality lens, and user control. Virtually every specification I list basically falls into those three categories, which tells you something about just how miserably the current crop of more than 60 million cameras being sold a year fails. The one thing that isn’t in those categories is a dedicated autofocus system (rather than double-purposing the imaging sensor as almost all current designs do), and this requirement basically points to the other failing of all current compact digital cameras: they aren’t responsive enough.

recently noted quotes

along the way she mistook a cramped sense of of personal grievance for a coherent philosophy: a common error. -- mark kingwell on ayn rand [nearest thing to heaven]

a reasonable theist is a theist in violation of reason. -- david eller [natural atheism]

sitting in her own backyard in her bathrobe was one of those things that seemed worth the risk. not that she would have tried it unarmed - she wasn't that stupid. --p. j. tracy [monkeewrench]
[ps: this backyard is located in merriam park, st. paul]

I don't want to know what you think. I want you to think what I know. -- tom duff

idealists who begin sentences with, "can't we all just..." should have their guitars smashed and their flowers trampled. i don't want to buy the world a coke and live in perfect harmony; harmony means unanimity, and history shows unanimity is a scary thing. -- jay heinrichs [thank you for arguing]

Excuse my while I mop up the sake that I sputtered all over my keyboard… -- geoff arnold

I never recommend as policy a position that I have been paid, either directly or indirectly, to recommend. -- lawrence lessig [disclosure statement]

• Most exciting ideas are not important,
• Most important ideas are not exciting,
• Not every problem has a good solution, and
• Every solution has side effects.
-- dan geer [1994 usenix conference]

all idioms must be learned; good idioms need to be learned only once. -- alan cooper [about face: the essentials of interaction design]

doctorow reading sterling

cory doctorow is now reading bruce sterling's the hacker crackdown.

This book changed my life — and the lives of countless others. It inspired me politically, artistically and socially. Last week, I saw Bruce at his home in Serbia and asked him if he minded my reading this aloud for the next 20 weeks or so. He gave me his blessing — so here it is.

registering way low: orlowski

the register's andrew orlowski [who made a career by writing hack pieces on sun at every available opportunity] recently wrote a piece on a lessig debate on the value of copyright in the 21st century. alas, orlowski's usual rat-tat-tat innuendo and sound-effects reportage is completely dismantled by lessig's corrections. [as a side effect of this register piece, lessig posted a disclosure statement that is well worth reading.]

[orlowski's drivel on sun was the reason i stopped reading the drooling feather-bag a few years ago...]