recently noted quotes

how do you spell "mediocre"? -- a guest [top chef]

i've come to realize that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it is an aptitude. -- joel spolsky [the guerrilla guide to interviewing]

when the Singularity comes, the first AI to transcend will be a Panasonic toilet seat. No, really ... -- charles stross [conclusion #1 from the Japan trip]

SF is a literature of energy and wary ambition. It will rise wherever people are facing the future with courage. And it fades wherever people lose their nerve and turn away from tomorrow... as has been happening in the USA, ever since this #$@*! century began. -- david brin

I'm not impressed with moments of silence or candlelight vigils or noble rhetoric about this event. If you want to do something to remember that tragedy, the best thing to do is to simply stop living your life in fear. -- p. z. myers [in honor of 9/11]

X-Message-Flag: Microsoft: the company who gave us the botnet zombies. -- anon

To regret that we cannot be done with superstition is no more than to regret that we have a common ancestry with apes and plants and fish. -- christopher hitchens [review of lilla's stillborn god]

being a philosopher means never having to say "oops, i was mistaken". -- oz

too much idealism, and the work never ships -- not enough, and little change is brought to the world. -- scott berkun [the myths of innovation]

grayling on irrationality-based schooling

anthony grayling's commentary on the recent attempt to introduce faith-based schools in england comes just in time for those of us about to vote in ontario. this very topic has [one would hope] destroyed the chances of conservatives winning the provincial election.

griffin and censorship

censored for emmy award comments :

lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus.

kathy griffin should try subtlety next time. of course jesus had nothing to do with her win; it was probably some other deity more interested in award ceremonies. she should have thanked allah, or tao, or vishnu instead, and (a) jolt everybody (b) have her words broadcast fully [censorship does not apply to (pro) religious drivel] and (c) possibly have more fans amongst the related faith groups.

for exactly these sorts of mind-boggling situations, salman rushdie [who knows a thing or two about mortal forms of censorship] once wrote:

there is a fault in reality. do not adjust your minds.

indeed.
related link: atheist group protests emmy awards censorship

quote of the day

joel says:

I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system -- it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

logic and me

a neat little three-minute self-assessment test says:

You Are Incredibly Logical

Move over Spock - you're the new master of logic You think rationally, clearly, and quickly. A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!

How Logical Are You?

norvig on mind over mind

norvig examines the healing power of prayer and related self deception in this superb essay: evaluating extraordinary claims: mind over matter? or mind over mind?. see also, his warning signs in experimental design and interpretation

[i hope norvig publishes a collection of essays someday. this is the kind of stuff that needs to be on every computer scientist's shelf]

recently noted quotes

win first. then cut. -- ohmi sensei

There will be a SlaughterFest of Horror, an Orgy of Bloodletting, Partial Nudity, Flammable Liquids, Unspeakable Misuse of Power Tools and Small Woodland Creatures, and the Plaintive Wailing of the Doomed. It will make Altamont look like Lilith Fair. -- anthony bourdain [about the next episode of top chef, where he is a guest judge, in bourdain's blog]

first you have to be a cook. than you can become a food critic. -- eren yigit [age nine, in response to whether he would become a food critic when he grew up.]

sure enough, once you've got enough food, people will invent etiquette. -- nanny ogg [nanny ogg's cookbook]

If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. -- richard dawkins [review of god is not great]

sagacious saint of sacrosanct sayings, sardonic sultan of sarcasm and of scrappy satirical sounds swung slowly or savagely scandalizing shallow society softies with soaring scarlet scherzos, so scholarly, so scintillating. -- wynton marsalis [on sydney betchet, jazz a.b.z]

Bwahahahahaha! He's a Dänikenite! This could be fun. -- p. z. myers [pharyngula]

You can't make people believe in the impossible. All you can do is make people feel very guilty that they can't make themselves believe it. -- christopher hitchens [hitchens and donehue on hardball]

I say it as calmly as I can—the Church should have had the elementary decency to let the earth lie lightly on this troubled and miserable lady, and not to invoke her long anguish to recruit the credulous to a blind faith in which she herself had long ceased to believe. -- christopher hitchens [teresa, bright and dark]

People's noses are a difficult subject for research; we don't get to define human crosses, people tend to be a little snippy about telling them who to breed with and taking their genes apart, and humans are awfully slow to breed. -- p. z. myers [phayrngula]

doctorow on cbc

one of my favorite authors is now a regular in CBC's search engine.

I've started a new gig as an essayist/columnist for Search Engine, a new show on CBC Radio. They've got me reading adaptations of my Guardian columns, starting with my piece on Digital Lysenkoism. They've done a great job with the editing -- it's nice having other people around to help me sound smart!

mp3 file
Search Engine podcast feed
guardian column on digital lysenkoism

[hmm, i doubt cory needs any help to sound smart. in fact he is one of those rare individuals that make everyone around him feel smart. note on the image: copyright ozan s. yigit. it is licensed under the creative commons "attribution shareAlike 2.0 canada" licence. link to wikimedia]

recenty noted links

dawkins reviews hitchens's wonderful god is not great [this one is in my list of best books of 2007]

a system for interactive fiction: inform 7. [last time i looked, this field was littered with the leftovers of clumsy and unimaginative systems that could barely visit dave's cave. i have no idea how far this one has gotten.] zoom is a player for z-code.

i am a big fan of stephan martiniere's art.

collection of articles about plan9, inferno, v9fs et al. grave robbers from outer space [especially see introduction to using 9p under linux and creating dirtab-based synthetic filesystems]

secular student alliance's book list found in secular seasons: freethought booklist [it needs to be updated]

geek counterpoint, an antidote to "soundbite science" does an incovenient truth teardown [movie survives]

mozart and cicadas [haikus]

mozart #29 in A -
even cicadas
know the piece.

summer nightfall -
mozart clarinet
cicada chorus

[oz/07 - a memorable summer evening gift: i am listening mozart symphony no. 29 in A major, followed by the clarinet concerto, with a full accompaniment of cicadas. somehow the cicada rhythms matched mozart's tempi.]

recently noted links

james boyle's excellent article on open access to scientific publications: the irony of a web without science

so you want to make things look like miniatures: tilt/shift photography links

a remarkable newsweek article on global warming denialists. [on this side of the border, the post has been the unsurprising mouthpiece for denialists.] [ipcc report for those who prefer to read first, argue later.]

adam leventhal's what if machine: dtrace port looks into dtrace license issues for possible/hypothetical port to linux. [i think that the amount of hand wringing, bad mouthing and churn around dtrace in linux circles now amounts to dtrace denial, or dtrace envy. it is deeply embarrassing.]

john allen paulos on religion and math: math: gift from god or work of man?

I wonder if the school teaches that non-Euclidean geometry is the work of the devil or at least of non-Christians.

cheese sandwich or frameworks

a selection from leonard de quirm's recipe for a cheese sandwich, found in nanny ogg's cookbook. it is eerily reminiscent of some software development projects using frameworks.

...
design breadknife. design machine for making breadknives. design an improved wheel bearing, using small balls of, e.g., steel. design shot tower for making steel balls of any size. devise a small hand-cranked machine by which bread of any size and thickness can be smoothly buttered to any depth.
consider designs of milk churns, and improve them. hear that temperature regulation in dairies is vitally important for the manufacture of good cheese; design a device for regulating temperature by means of expanding metal strips, coupled to pulleys.
...
send out for pizza.

related reading: benji smith's uproarious 2005 why i hate frameworks.

prismatic bullshit

publishers of prestigious and very expensive science and medicine journals are annoyed at the possibility that publicly funded research results may be open, affordable and accessible by the public that funded it, so they attack it with fear, uncertainty, and doubt on their miserable prism coalition website [and alas, put their publishing credentials to shame]

Various initiatives and proposals have been put forth by special interest groups and some legislators that would force private sector publishers to surrender to the federal government all peer-reviewed articles that report on research supported by federal research grants.

Such undue government intervention in scholarly publishing poses inherent risks and problems, including:

• Threats to the economic viability of journals and the independent system of peer review
• The potential for introducing selective bias into the scientific record
• Government data repositories being subject to budget uncertainties
• Unwarranted increases in government spending to compete with private sector publishing
• Expropriation of publishers' investments in copyrighted articles
• Undermining the reasonable protections of copyright holders

let's follow the droppings, shall we, in the manner of amazon. here are the negatively charged words and phrases intended to distort, misinform, and mislead: special interest groups, force, surrender, undue government intervention, inherent risks, threats to economic viability [whoo, this is a big one], threats to peer review, selective bias, budget uncertainties, unwarranted budget increase, competition with private sector, expropriation of investments, undermining copyright protection.

this sort of FUD is just stupid and embarrassing. none of their prestigious journals would publish it...

[why do i care? because more than a decade ago, i had the unfortunate task of helping university librarians and computer science faculty decide what journals to drop because the university library could no longer afford them. this was not because of a library budget cut, but because of the obscene increases in the library subscription costs for such journals. as far as i am concerned, their comeuppance is about a decade too late...]

here is a very good summary of reactions and responses from the science bloggers: This PRISM does not turn white light into the beautiful colors of the rainbow

recently noted quotes

you have a quality that just draws us in as an audience. absolutely incredible! -- nigel lythgoe [prophetically commenting on sabra johnson's audition]

it's a simple rule. If your possible choices are: 1) a shatteringly momentous event occurred in science, and 2) the journalist doesn't have a clue about what is happening, it is always wise to hold the latter as your working assumption. -- grant canyon [comments for clearly, bloggers need to take over science journalism]

I feel that I have just started to do some decent Iaido practice after more than 50 years of learning. -- iwata norikazu sensei

the way you think affects what you think about and what kinds of thoughts you get. -- jack foster [how to get ideas]

the big ideas are a small part of the process of true innovation. -- scott berkun [the myths of innovation]

You know things are bad when questions about a technical matter like security are answered by a public-relations firm. -- ed felten [e-voting ballots not secret; vendors don’t see problem]

moral of this story is left as an exercise for the reader. -- charles stross [why DRM sucks: redux]

To speak of the compatibility of science and Islam in 2007 is rather like speaking of the compatibility of science and Christianity in the year 1633, just as Galileo was being forced, under threat of death, to recant his understanding of the Earth's motion. -- sam harris [correspondence]

[i sometimes note quotes that i find amusing, even if not wise, such as the one by sam harris. problems of science and islam are well covered in a superb book by taner edis, an illusion of harmony, to which sam can only add sound bites.]

nikon d3!

finally, my dream full-frame nikon is here.
thom's comments and thom's q&a

update: thom's navigation through chaff [... and bs. required reading]

[i was very tempted to switch when canon 5d came out, but now i am glad i stayed with nikon and those exceptional nikkors, eg. 85mm f/1.4, 105mm f/2 DC and so on...]

books on my future shelves

tom flynn, the new encyclopedia of unbelief [i know, i know, amazon thinks it is not available. amazon is out of date; prometheus books announced its availability in the latest issue of free inquiry]

john w. loftus, why i rejected christianity: a former apologiest explains

bruce sterling ascendancies: best of bruce sterling [a review of this book appears in this month's locus]

mignola and golden, Baltimore,: Or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire [mignola is amongst my top 10 comic illustrators. that list also includes bachalo, cho, giraud (moebius), alan davis, skottie young et al.]

clay shirky, here comes everybody: how digital networks are transforming the ways we connect and cooperate [anyone who has read clay's insightful writings would be ordering this sight unseen...]

allen steele, galaxy blues

cass sunstein, worst-case scenarios

clearing mind [haiku]

moku-so -
clearing mind
ankles in pain.

[moku-so is the brief meditation before starting a training session in some martial arts]

new cds in the pile

james hunter, people gonna talk
prince, planet earth
ne.yo, because of you
kat deluna, 9 lives
john legend, once again
richard hagopian et al. gypsy fire
madeleine peyroux, half the perfect world
buddy guy, bring 'em in

recently noted quotes

three stooges were more grounded in reality. -- richard roeper [review of rush hour 3]

I'll have you know, though, that I took the test [asperger test] and scored a 24, an "average math contest winner." You need a 32 to suggest Asperger's, and a 15 is the average. So there. I don't have Asperger's, I'm just cruel and insensitive. -- p. z. myers [i'm mostly normal]

i'm an entropy buff. -- george carlin [napalm & silly putty]

i would pay a premium to stick with [windows] xp. -- ron winacott

you ought not to be regarded as the light of the world when even your most eloquent defenders can say only that your record is not quite as bad as that of the greatest monsters or most pernicious ideologies of history. -- keith parsons [atheism: twilight or dawn?]

what really distinguishes dance from other shows -- including idol -- is contestant quality. fortunately for us, dance is a criminally underappreciated art -- being a good dancer is just harder than being an idol-style pop singer. -- alynda wheat [happy feet, EW jul 20]

instead of wanting to innovate, a process demanding hard work and many ideas, most want to have innovated. -- scott berkun [the myths of innovation]

the secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help. -- scott berkun [the myths of innovation]

when one accepts that the natural world is the only world, one can see that it is actually better than any that can be made up.
...
but when you are done, you are done - read your lucretius. - jennifer m. hecht [a conversation, free inquiry]

books on my future shelves

charles stross, halting state and merchants' war [book four of the merchant princes]

john allen paulos, irreligion: a mathematician explains why the arguments for god just don't add up [i have been reading paulos since innumeracy, one of my all time favorite books. i am happy to see his entry in the ongoing discussion of imaginary deities, and their mathematical [im]possibilities.]

arnie and cathy fenner, the comic art of frank frazetta

karen paik et al. to infinity and beyond!: the story of pixar animation studios

dick grune and ceriel jacobs, parsing techniques (2/ed).

connie willis, the winds of marble arch and other stories [i had the privilege to meet her in ad astra a few years ago. she is extremely smart, and very charming. i have become a big fan.]

terry pratchett, the wit and wisdom of discworld [wonderful, but only 178 pages!?] and making money

karl schroeder, queen of candesce: book two of virga

alberto manguel, homer's the iliad and the odyssey: a biography

slightly aged notes...

down the drain: i had noted scalpel magazine a couple months ago. alas, it died horribly. here is a large part of the story [i tracked the site with some interest and can confirm the publicly visible parts of the story] it was/is a worthy goal: criticism of genre fiction without [as bill stott once put it] the gobbledygook of bad social science, slobbering professionalism and good old b.s. double sigh.

art in motion: two of my favorite pieces from so you think you can dance were dominic and sabra's hip-hop routine [shane sparks] to ne-yo's make it work, and lauren and danny's contemporary routine [mia michaels] to celine dion's then you look at me. both thoughtfully choerographed, and both very affecting. [i think sabra johnson is a remarkably talented and charming dancer, and i hope will go far]

i laughed, i coughed: pete lacey's spot-on skewering of the soap/wsdl madness [from last year] is here.

legalize it: according to 2007 world drug report, 16.8 percent of canadians between the ages of 15 and 64 have used cannabis. this, in a country which had the historic opportunity in 2003 to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use, but missed it. [it is unlikely that the current [wannabe-republican] conservative minority government will open the issue before the elections; to reverse-echo the post, another profound reason not to give the conservatives a majority.]

hmmm: a few weeks ago, i posted a particularly funny bit from an a.c. grayling essay on a rather bizarre tag used by some christians [eg. oxford apologist alister mcgrath] to try to discredit strong and vocal atheists. it turns out that the essay can an atheist be a fundamentalist? is available online. [related reading: james morrow's hilarious towing jehovah, where the humor of "a divine foot or buttock" gets its full perspective...]

flew over...

i keep an eye on up-and-coming titles on atheism; i pre-ordered hitchens (ed) portable atheist. i also noted a new one by anthony flew, once a "leading atheist", now a believer in some form of god apparently not bumper-stickered by existing religions: there is a god: how the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind.

Flew earned his fame by arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He now believes that such evidence exists, and There Is a God chronicles his journey from staunch atheism to believer.

[i have no doubt philosophy students can hardly wait for, say, a variant of principle of sufficient reason, therefore god. let's hope it is less turgid than some of his earlier writings and provides sufficient novelty.]

related readings for the philosophically inclined:

• everitt, the non-existence of god [a very thorough, very accessible critical assessment of arguments for and against the existence of god]
• oppy, arguing about gods [also very thorough, more graduate-level volume]
• parsons, god and the burden of proof: plantinga, swinburne, and the analytic defense of theism [a very useful, if costly volume on two of the more recent, technically interesting philosophical arguments]

[update: fixed the missing parsons book link]

recently noted quotes

Indeed, boredom could be considered one of the driving forces of ingenious invention, not only in science fiction, but in our rambunctious civilization as a whole. -- david brin [singularities and nightmares: extremes of optimism and pessimism about the human future]

i would say that gumbo is more indicative of american cousine than apple pie is, probably. -- alton brown

Here's what you can still do: just sit there and don't make any sudden moves. Pretend you are using Microsoft software instead of GPL'd software. Don't think. Don't modify. Don't share. Don't explore. Don't improve. Don't innovate. Don't distribute. Don't sublicense. Don't do "unauthorized" things. Don't do nuttin' or you might get sued. -- feldegast [on disgraceful microsoft/lispire patent deal]

politics is when you sell your daughter to bandits and your daughter and yourself are then both set free. -- ka'a Orto'o, gnomic utterances, xxxi ii [the tough guide to fantasyland]

please restart any running iceweasels, or you will experience problems. -- debian apt notice

from newfies to yorkies, from weimaraners to water spaniels, from dalmatians to dachshunds, as i incredulously close this book i seem to hear mocking barks and deep, baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs - every one descended from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by geological standards, instantaneous. -- richard dawkins [inferior design]

to differ from the "different," make no claims. to photograph is enough. -- david vestal [being different]

DRM is Lysenkoism for the digital age. It's an ideologically correct lie that's been concocted to bilk the entertainment industry out of a fortune. -- cory doctorow [copy killers]

there is something in the way i think that women can relate to. that comes from growing up in a house full of women. it was me, my sister, my mother, my grandmother, and about five of my aunts all in the same house. so any drama that a woman can go through, one of the women in my house went through it, and i was right there to soak it up. i just might have a little more insight than the average guy. -- ne yo [music interview, globe and mail]

the thing is, when it comes to things like flavor, you can't sort of chop it up and be all nice about it; you have to bash it up, you have to make a bit of a noise... -- jamie oliver [jamie at home]

blogspotty

• firefox can no longer properly display the OK button for an image download in blogger's editor. i suppose this is not noticed by anyone except people like me who often use the native inteface to create entries. the image for the beautiful code entry was initially linked from picasa, because it could not be blogger uploaded.
• omniweb cannot even run the blogger editor properly. edit html and compose tabs are missing, so are the font controls, link and quote in the editor bar. check spelling and add image are present, but the latter does not work.
• safari has the same rendering problem as omniweb [no surprise, as they share rendering engine] but at least the add image button actually work. [this is how the dicey image got on this page]

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...]

markcc on behe's new old book

markCC has a detailed review focusing on the mathematics of behe's new old book: "the edge of evolution" [sorry no links to junk; i have skimmed the book long before this review, and decided it was an obnoxious re-thread of his earlier fiction, "darwin's black box"]:

... the new book is based on what comes down to a mathematical argument - a mathematical argument that I've specifically refuted on this blog numerous times. I'm not mentioning that because I expect Behe to read GM/BM and consider it as a serious source for his research; even if I were an expert in the subject (which I'm not), a blog is not a citable source for real research. But I mention it because the error is so simple, so fundamental, and so bleeding obvious that even a non-expert can explain what's wrong with it in a spare five minutes - but Behe, who apparently spent several years writing this book still can't see the problem. (In fact, one of the papers that he cites as support for this ridiculous theory contains the refutation!)

implementing the luhn checksum, differently

recently i came across some discussion and implementations of luhn's mod 10 checksum algorithm in comp.lang.scheme that puzzled me and piqued my interest. wikipedia has a useful entry including a straight-forward c# implementation based on an informal description, and pointers to other implementations.

alas, this description seems to have encouraged everyone to implement the algorithm more or less the same way, with minor variations: mostly right-to-left scan with a toggle to decide digit processing, but sometimes the string is reversed, or processed from left-to-right with a toggle. [some schemers have done the usual: convert string to a list of digits, reverse it and scan it with a toggle. cool!] wikipedia entry helpfully includes the pre-computed table to eliminate the unnecessary multiply/compare/subtract, but evidently this has gone unnoticed.

lunh checking again

here are some rather basic [for me anyway] observations on implementing the algorithm:

• if we know the size of the string, we know enough to scan the string left to right, without a toggle, without reversing or backwards [right to left] scanning.
• if the size of the string is even [eg. most credit card numbers] we can scan normally from left to right, two digits at a time, first one transformed, and next one untransformed.
• if the size of the string is odd, the first digit is always an untransformed digit. initialize the sum with this digit, and process the rest of the string normally [as above]
• if we do not have the size of the string, we can still check the string in a single left-to-right pass.

here is an implementation that uses the pre-calculated numeric transformation table, and a toggle-free left-to-right scan. [for simplicity, i excluded the isdigit check but assumed string length is not known in advance.]

static int ltab[] = { 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 };

int
luhn(char *str) {
        int sum = 0;

        if (!str || !*str || !*(str + 1))
                return 0;   /* less than minimum */
        /*
         * if the length is odd, add the value of the
         * first digit and skip
         */
        if (strlen(str) & 1)
                sum = *str++ - '0';

        while (*str) {
                sum += ltab[*str++ - '0'];
                sum += *str++ - '0';
        }

        return (sum % 10) == 0;
}

even with isdigit check implemented as a first pass (during which we can also calculate the length of the string) this runs almost twice as fast as most naive implementations seen around.

suppose we do not know the string length in advance, and maybe it is costly to do multiple scans [assume many long strings or list of digits as some lispers would have it]. we want to see if a given string is (a) all numeric, and (b) passes the luhn checksum, all in a single pass. since we cannot decide if we have to perform the luhn transform for the first digit or not, we do it both ways and calculate two sums:

static int ltab[] = { 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 };

/*
 * luhn without prior pass for string length
 */
int
luhn(const char *str) {
        int sum[2] = {0,0};
        int flip = 0;
        char c;

        if (!str || !*str || !*(str + 1))
                return 0;
        /*
         * calculate two alternating sums. we do not know
         * which one we will end up using until the end
         */
        while (c = *str++) {
                if (!isdigit(c))
                     return 0;
                int n = c - '0';
                sum[flip] += ltab[n];
                sum[flip = !flip] += n;
        }

        return (sum[flip] % 10) == 0;
}

luhn checking in awk and python

when i first decided to implement the algorithm, i used awk to prototype several of my approaches, including the two above. here is another approach with an extended lookup table that works well with awk and python and possibly with other scripting languages i like less.

# luhn - checks if a string of digits is a valid credit card number
# unlike other right-to-left scanning toggle and calculate
# implementations, this one does less than half the work
# author: ozan s. yigit
# insert bsd copyright here

BEGIN {
# generate all two digit sequences, with appropriate
# luhn translation of the first digit.

    for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
        for (n = 0; n < 10; n++) {
        t = i * 2;
        if (t > 9)
            t = t - 9
        pairmap[i n] = t + n
    }
}

function luhn(digits,    sum, n, i)
{
    i = 1           # index
    sum = 0
    n = length(digits)
    # if the length is odd, save+skip the first char
    if ((n % 2) > 0)
        sum = substr(digits, i++, 1)

    while (i <= n) {
        pair = substr(digits, i, 2)
        ## print i ": ", pair, "->", pairmap[pair]
        sum += pairmap[pair]
        i += 2
    }
    ## print sum
    return sum % 10 == 0
}

/^[0-9]+$/ {
    if (luhn($0))
        print $0 ": ok."
    else
        print $0 ": no."
}

here is basically the same thing in python.

# author: ozan s. yigit
# insert bsd copyright here
pairmap = {
"00": 0, "01": 1, "02": 2, "03": 3, "04": 4, "05": 5, "06": 6, "07": 7,
"08": 8, "09": 9, "10": 2, "11": 3, "12": 4, "13": 5, "14": 6, "15": 7,
"16": 8, "17": 9, "18":10, "19":11, "20": 4, "21": 5, "22": 6, "23": 7,
"24": 8, "25": 9, "26":10, "27":11, "28":12, "29":13, "30": 6, "31": 7,
"32": 8, "33": 9, "34":10, "35":11, "36":12, "37":13, "38":14, "39":15,
"40": 8, "41": 9, "42":10, "43":11, "44":12, "45":13, "46":14, "47":15,
"48":16, "49":17, "50": 1, "51": 2, "52": 3, "53": 4, "54": 5, "55": 6,
"56": 7, "57": 8, "58": 9, "59":10, "60": 3, "61": 4, "62": 5, "63": 6,
"64": 7, "65": 8, "66": 9, "67":10, "68":11, "69":12, "70": 5, "71": 6,
"72": 7, "73": 8, "74": 9, "75":10, "76":11, "77":12, "78":13, "79":14,
"80": 7, "81": 8, "82": 9, "83":10, "84":11, "85":12, "86":13, "87":14,
"88":15, "89":16, "90": 9, "91":10, "92":11, "93":12, "94":13, "95":14,
"96":15, "97":16, "98":17, "99":18
}

def luhncheck(number):
    n = len(number)
    if n < 2:   # less than minimum
        return 0
    i = 0
    sum = 0
    if n & 1:   # odd length
        sum = int(number[i])
        i = 1

    while i < n:
        s = i
        i += 2
        ##      print number[s:i], "->", pairmap[number[s:i]]
        sum += pairmap[number[s:i]]

    return(sum % 10) == 0

## print luhncheck("1111")
## print luhncheck("8763")
## print luhncheck("446667651")
## print luhncheck("471036814")
## print luhncheck("23813103131311229292929228")

for fun luhn and duff

this is the fastest version of luhn checksum in C i happen to have. not surprisingly, it uses duff's device.

/*
* luhn check using duff's device
* author: ozan s. yigit
*/
static int ltab[] = { 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 };

int luhn(char *str, int len)
{
        int sum = 0;
        int loop;

        if (len < 2)
                return 0;

#define LUHN    ltab[*str++ - '0']
#define NORM    *str++ - '0'

        loop = (len + 8 - 1) >> 3;

        switch (len & (8 - 1)) {
        case 0:
                do {
        sum += LUHN;
        case 7: sum += NORM;
        case 6: sum += LUHN;
        case 5: sum += NORM;
        case 4: sum += LUHN;
        case 3: sum += NORM;
        case 2: sum += LUHN;
        case 1: sum += NORM;
                } while (--loop);
        }

        return (sum % 10) == 0;
}

[notes: alas, code you see here is copyright. you can do anything you like with it so long as you give proper credit. (creative commons attribution, share alike) i usually leave trivial code of this sort in the public domain, but i am increasingly unhappy seeing public domain code being smothered with GPL that hides the original intent of its authors.
]

recently noted essays

both from peter norvig:
how to write a spelling corrector
mistakes in experimental design and interpretation

quote of the day

what would a non-fundamentalist atheist be? would he be someone who believed only somewhat that there are no supernatural entities in the universe - perhaps that there is only part of a god (a divine foot, say, or buttock)? or that gods exist only some of the time - say, wednesdays and saturdays? -- a. c. grayling [from can an atheist be fundamentalist in against all gods.]

recently noted quotes

certainly most xml i've seen makes me think i'm dyslexic. it also looks constipated, and two health problems in one standard is just too much. -- charles forsyth [9fans mailing list]

in OSS, eyeballs are very easily distracted. think of typewriting monkeys, but with more bananas and shorter attention span. -- anon [overheard in yet another "given enough eyeballs" theory discussion]

"nice try" is worthless. -- gregory house

"Playing God" is where you do absolutely nothing, take credit for other entities' work, and don't even exist — scientists don't aspire to such a useless status. Besides, creating life is mundane chemistry, no supernatural powers required. -- pz myers

it was music that went down to the feet by way of the pelvis without paying a call on mr brain. -- terry pratchett [soul music]

if there is anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it's a movie made from the scraps of good ones. at least with the trash we don't have to suffer through the noble intentions. -- roger ebert [review of instinct]

nimoy can make anything sound plausible. -- philip k. dick ["introduction" to the golden man]

quick notes on mediocrities

shrek the third: alas, third time is the chasm; this movie is not just tired and unimaginative, it is actually boring; it is now the kind of movie the first shrek was gleefully making fun of. when you see your eight year old not laughing, and paying more attention to the popcorn bucket than the movie, you know you have a serious narrative flop. [with the money not wasted on this wreck, buy the animaniacs or pinky & brain dvd sets instead. your family will thank you for it.]

gray's anatomy: at one time, this used to be a guilty pleasure. now it is a classic soap that just happens to have a few good actors. they should leave the hospital, and the show should appropriately move to afternoon tea time, next to young and restless.

stephen harper [canadian prime minister, sadly]: this wooden pen pusher continues to receive accolades [especially around the pages of screamingly right wing national post] for assorted smart political feet shuffling. sort of the way we give high praise to a surgeon for the choice of music and a necktie during a heart [or a brain, in the case of canada] transplant surgery, even though he is drunk and can barely hold the blade. sigh.

macbook reg or pro: i would like to see one of those hodgman/long spots to make fun of the ridiculous power consumption and heat generation of the lovable macbooks. long could be in shorts with a sunburn, or actually spontaneously combust into flames... [oh how i miss my cooler powerbook]

recently noted quotes

gaze upon my opposable thumbs and fingers -- hugh neutron

two things every Python programmer needs to do in life: 1) Reinvent Lisp 2) Write a web framework -- Jason Huggins

Religious points of view must never be allowed to dictate public policy and limit fundamental freedoms. -- from CFI bulletin on gonzales vs carhart

If you work at IBM Global Services, ask your boss outright if you are on the list to be fired. It puts the boss in a bind, sure, but might lead to a sort of "Alice's Restaurant" effect in which hypocrisy is confronted and exposed. -- cringely [lean and mean]

You cannot, of course, gradually build a self-supporting, free-standing arch by using only the component stones, piling them up, one at a time. But if you have scaffolding – and a pile of rocks will suffice to support the growing structure – you can build the arch one stone at a time until the keystone is in place, and the structure becomes self-supporting. When this occurs, the (now redundant) scaffolding can be removed to leave the irreducibly complex, free-standing structure. -- niall shanks [God, The Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory]

it seems a few high school students are far smarter than the entire gang of evolution deniers at the Discovery Institute. -- pz myers [pharyngula]

Jini is a service architecture. OSGi is a service architecture. Both have ways of dealing with services written in Java. So why are there two?

This, of course, is a classic example of what I have called the Highlander Fallacy, which briefly stated is the principle that there can be only one. If any two technologies can be described using the same set of words, then there is no need for both of them, and only one will survive. I call this a fallacy because, to use a technical term, it is total crap. -- jim valdo [jini and osgi, yet again]

sharp reviews, interviews: scalpel

scalpel magazine is a sf/f/h review magazine that just launched. from its reviewerfesto:

Our purpose is to allow reviewers to utilize the rigor and tools of literary criticism in order to properly assess genre fiction, while discarding the elevated tone and reliance upon jargon that often mars academic criticism.
...
At Scalpel Magazine, we believe we are continuing a great tradition set into place by the likes of James Blish, Damon Knight, Algis Budrys and more.

i have my special integer. do you have yours?

ed felten is offering special 128-bit integers through his virtuallandgrab technology. i just picked mine, a really nice sequence with B8 and 8A...

1C FC BF 1A 62 B8 28 E1 B3 87 34 0E 4B CD 63 8A

thanks, ed.

stupidiest opening line of the day

found amongst the half-digested bits of news at the register: was gerry adams in the IRA? don't ask wikipedia

The wisdom of reliance on Wikipedia as an information source has been further questioned.

really. one can almost hear the anti-wikipedia rally outside reg offices on the matter. [what would we do without the wisdom of an information source that appropriately feeds on the rotted remains of imaginary magnitudes?]

related reading: is it worth being wise

on a leafless branch

a few years ago, i posted a fairly comprehensive collection of basho's crow haiku translations to my old blog. here is a new entry from an interesting recent collection by takafumi saito and william r. nelson, 1020 haiku in translation: the heart of basho, buson and issa

on a leafless branch
a crow -
autumn dusk.

i like the saito/nelson collection because of its excellent selection of poetry though i am a bit surprised by some of the unusual, at times ESL-like phrasing in its translations. for example:

the first snow
at a hermitage
happily i am.

march against dark ages and betrayal...

from today's toronto star, turkey split in bitter struggle:

At least 700,000 people marched against Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul's candidacy in Istanbul yesterday, waving the red national flag and invoking Turkey's long secular tradition. Powerful generals hinted they might step in to resolve the deadlock over Gul in parliament, which elects the president.

i wish i was at that march...

[reports from family members put the attendance numbers well over a million...]

recently noted quotes

You must not use ReiserFS v3 for your recordings. You will get corrupted recordings if you do. -- MythTV howto

my nephew kept saying he didn't want anything to do with fista. what is fista? is it a street gang thing? -- anonymous elderly

I've been using UNIX & Plan 9 for 26 years, and not once have I wanted to chop the tail off a file. -- tom duff (2000)

Many (open source) hackers are proud if they achieve large amounts of code, because they believe the more lines of code they've written, the more progress they have made. The more progress they have made, the more skilled they are. This is simply a delusion. -- suckless.org (about)

meat is food.
vegetables are what food eats.
fruits are vegetables that try to trick you by tasting good.
fish are fast moving vegetables.
mushrooms are what grows on vegetables after food is done with them.
-- source unknown [told by henry]

I asked why no recognized experts on radiometric dating were invited to participate in the conference, given that none of the speakers had any training or experience in experimental geochronology. He was candid enough to admit that they would have liked to included one on the team, but there are no young-earth geochronologists in the world. -- todd feeley [reporting from RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) creationist conference.]

the unfortunate and inevitable concomitant of "bring it on" is "how do you like it now?" -- david mamet [bambi vs godzilla]

recommended reading: security engineering

ross anderson's highly regarded [and somewhat expensive] book security engineering: a guide to building dependable distributed systems is now available online. there is even an audio book in progress.

some good new books in the library...

most anticipated books this month were hitchens's god is not great: how religion poisons everything, taner edis's An illusion of harmony: science and religion in islam and hofstadter's i am a strange loop. hitchens is proving to be one of the most important and stimulating reads of the year for me. edis's book is very familiar in many ways; turkey [author's and my country of birth] is a convenient and dominant source for the book, and i read some of the draft chapters last year. i thought he was pulling his punches a bit. [i like edis a lot. his previous ghost in the universe is an excellent addition to an atheist's library] alas, all this is taking my reading time away from the other 327 books on the pile... [but i shall first finish onfray's intensely sharp and entertaining Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.]

recommended reading: mercurial book

a good book in progress: distributed revision control with mercurial by bryan o'sullivan. source code is in a mercurial repo at http://hg.serpentine.com/mercurial/book.

boing, boston, banned, boing, boing...

ah, of all places, this has to happen in boston...

recently noted quotes

an individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. to the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. -- ivan d. illich (tools for conviviality)

you are coming to a sad realization. cancel or allowed? -- vista security guy

there is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it. -- roger ebert [review of the mummy]

there is music in everything, if you know how to find it. -- imp [terry pratchett, soul music]

It's always "but why do you want that" and "you don't want that" or "we can already do that" or "we tried that, it didn't work" and back to "but why do you want that". -- ron minnich (plan9 mailing list)

We all want our lenses to be tack sharp, period end period. -- bjørn rørslett

Unspeakable and unpronounceable Norwegian words, often with the odd Finnish phrase inserted, then rip apart the darkness around me. -- bjørn rørslett

minsky quote of the day [from 1974]

I cannot state strongly enough my conviction that the preoccupation with consistency, so valuable for mathematical logic, has been incredibly destructive to those working on models of mind. at the popular level it has produced a weird conception of the potential capabilities of machines in general. at the "logical" level it has blocked efforts to represent ordinary knowledge, by presenting an unreachable image of a corpus of context-free "truths" that can stand almost by themselves. and at the intellect-modelling level it has blocked the fundamental realization that thinking begins first with suggestive but defective plans and images, that are slowly (if ever) refined and replaced by better ones. -- marvin minsky [conclusion to AI memo no. 306, a framework for representing knowledge, june 1974]

recently noted quotes

i have invented some very powerful ways of wasting time. -- john d. conway

we have no idea what "the center of our being" is, but i hope it is chocolate cream. -- penn gilette [penn & teller bullshit]

brevity is the handmaiden of force. -- jack hart [a writer's coach]

"Intelligent design" is a science stopper. Once something is explained as "designed" by a disembodied invisible "intelligence", we can proceed no further in our inquiry. Intelligent design proponents themselves state that science is not allowed to pursue the identity or motivation of the designer. -- jeffrey shallit

sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known. -- terry pratchett [going postal]

If you feel exhausted, it's not necessarily because there's something wrong with you. Maybe you're just running fast. -- paul graham [is it worth being wise?]

we don't stop questioning because we grow weak; we grow weak because we stop questioning. -- anon [based on a quote by g. b. shaw]

songs are simple. voices aren't. -- simon cowell

I assume goosebumps are good. -- melinda dolittle

I feel like one big goosebump. -- paula abdul

recent bookish disappointments....

ruby on rails, up and running: away, for the most part. like spolsky, bruce tate continues to be taken seriously while remaining voluminously underwhelming. this is basically a weak how-to book; there are many authors in computing, like pulp authors of another era, who can produce these mediocre volumes during their coffee breaks. these people do not lack technical skill; they just lack imagination, depth and rigor. i am barely keeping his beyond java not because it is well written (it is not, though hard to tell if you go by the google found reviews) but it is a classic of what i these days call nudge, nudge, wink, wink critique, a mixture of proof by repeated, unsubstantiated assertion and appeal to nodding masses. we all know what we are talking about here, aren't we? heh heh heh. nudge, nudge. let's ask john about it, shall we? ...

core python programming: i have rarely come across so much verbiage for so little effect. it is like having a proverbial fire hydrant nearby that spews wet sand. this is not a bad book, just a small one stuck in a very large one. wesley can do better with a good editor, and python certainly deserves it.

two mac utilities - an ounce of prevention

my dual g4 mac started locking up lately; i had some fleeting indications that one of the two disks was not entirely healthy. first i installed julian mayer's smartreporter to monitor the s.m.a.r.t. status and get alerts with email. when it finally started reporting that (sigh) the boot disk was getting close to failure, i brought in mike bombich's carbon copy cloner [essentially a wrapper around asr apple software restore] to make a bootable clone of the failing boot disk. [not wise to wait as long as i have] an hour later, a bootable clone is created and the system is running from the second disk.

phew. both utilities are free (ccc is donation-ware), simple to deploy and are recommended.

more images from the phone

quote of the day

found in david mamet's bambi vs godzilla: on the nature, purpose and practice of the movie business

A duck decoy does not need to look like a duck.
It needs to look like a duck to a duck.
Wisdom, therefore, lies not in the phenomological question "What does a duck look like?" but, rather, in the practical "What is a duck looking for?"

[i sometimes wish mamet wrote about computing too...]

doctorow's "pwned" lectures on podcast

doctorow's first six lectures from his undergrad class at the University of Southern California, "pwned: is everyone on campus a copyright criminal?" are now available.
feed
podcast subscribe link
internet archive repo

images from the phone...

sometimes, all i have with me is the 2mp camera built into my sony/ericsson w810i...


square crop, minimal color correction and sharpening in photoshop.

funny quote of the week

What is sticking in your foot is a Mitzy "Pretty Lucretia" four-inch heel, the most dangerous footwear in the world. Considered as pounds per square inch, it's like being trodden on by a very pointy elephant. Now, I know what you're thinking; you're thinking, "Could she press it all the way through the floor?" And, you know, I am not sure about that myself. The sole of your boot might give me a bit of trouble, but nothing else will. But that's not the worrying part. The worrying part is that I was forced practically at knifepoint to take ballet lessons as a child, which means i can kick like a mule; you are sitting in front of me; and I have another shoe. Good, I can see you have worked that out. I'm going to withdraw the heel now. -- miss dearheart (terry pratchett, going postal)

i like pca.

using a new tool to analyze some of my legacy sol8 systems for their patch levels. of all the patch tools i have used in the past [that of course includes sun's own tools that come and go with some regularity] martin paul's pca script is one of the nicest and easiest to use.

Patch Check Advanced (pca) generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads patches. It resolves dependencies between patches and installs them in correct order. It can be the only tool you ever need for patch management on a single machine or a complete network. Just one perl script, it doesn't need compilation nor installation, and it doesn't need root permissions to run. It works on all versions of Solaris, both SPARC and x86.

nice.

# pca
Using /var/tmp/patchdiag.xref from Feb/08/07
Host: xyzzy (SunOS 5.8/Generic_108528-13/sparc/sun4u)

Patch  IR   CR RSB Age Synopsis
------ -- - -- --- --- -------------------------------------------------------
108434 05 < 22 R-- 999 SunOS 5.8: 32-Bit Shared library patch for C++
108435 05 < 22 R-- 999 SunOS 5.8: 64-Bit Shared library patch for C++
112396 01 < 03 R-- 301 SunOS 5.8: /usr/bin/fgrep patch
108987 08 < 18 RS- 296 SunOS 5.8: Patch for patchadd and patchrm
111111 02 < 07 R--   4 SunOS 5.8: /usr/bin/nawk patch
108528 13 < 29 RS- 999 SunOS 5.8: kernel update  and Apache patch
108569 05 < 08 --- 999 X11 6.4.1: platform support for new hardware
108576 14 < 52 R-- 490 SunOS 5.8: Expert3D IFB Graphics Patch
108604 16 < 35 --- 999 SunOS 5.8: Elite3D AFB Graphics Patch
108605 15 < 37 --- 519 SunOS 5.8: Creator 8 FFB Graphics Patch
108606 10 < 39 --- 519 SunOS 5.8: M64 Graphics Patch
108693 07 < 28 --- 199 Solstice DiskSuite 4.2.1: Product patch
108714 05 < 08 --- 999 CDE 1.4: libDtWidget patch
108723 01 < 02 --- 284 SunOS 5.8: lofs patch
108725 09 < 25 R-- 143 SunOS 5.8: st driver patch
109147 14 < 43 RS-  24 SunOS 5.8: linker patch
119067 -- < 05 RS-  73 X11 6.4.1: Xsun patch
108773 13 < 27 RS-  37 SunOS 5.8: IIIM and X Input & Output Method patch
108806 04 < 21 R-- 301 SunOS 5.8: Sun Quad FastEthernet qfe driver
108808 30 < 44 --- 984 SunOS 5.8: Manual Page updates for Solaris 8
...

[wow, there is even a nawk patch. be still my heart...]

fat construction workers and opera

what kills me is those software commentators whose limited observations and twisted metaphors border on postmodern literary drivel. take joel, for example, who writes amusingly and even convincingly about fat construction workers whose interest in structural matters include external and internal human elements in the service of entertainment, either in swimming or singing form. [one obviously involves a wish to participate, the other, to procreate, but joel does not clarify which is which]

What kills me is the teams who get into the bad habit of holding meetings every time they need to figure out how something is going to work. Did you ever try to write poetry in a committee meeting? It’s like a bunch of fat construction guys trying to write an opera while sitting on the couch watching Baywatch. The more fat construction guys you add to the couch, the less likely you are to get opera out of it.

very funny stuff. it seriously confused my cat.

enough noise...

no, this is not about iphone critics. i am just referring to the increasingly nutty number of pixels on those wee sensors of digital point-and-shoot cameras. the photographic result of this numbers game is a disaster and an embarrassment to photography: at ISO 400, many of the latest crop of 8 and 10mp cameras produce images that are inferior to what we can [still] get with a plastic throw-away film camera with the same rating film. as always there is a silver lining to this cloud: given the usually mediocre sharpening algorithm in these cameras, at higher sensitivity, one gets lovely watercolor impressionism without needing silly photoshop filters. who needs sharp detail? just look at those blotches of color: a family picture where you can only guess who is who.

sure, i exaggerate, but not by much.

it would be really good to have a pocket-size digital camera for half-serious photography, say something with nearly as good images as a kodak one-use camera...

recently noted quotes

mmmmm, i love the smell of commerce in the evening! -- francis [player vs player]

a mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable disease in the third world, arms sales, opression, injustice. -- a. c. grayling [the form of things]

think collectively, not selfishly. -- karim rashid [design your self]

zen, which i must treat with skeptical care, is a relatively conscious kind of skating on thin ice. -- david vestal [from an essay on intuition]

necessity is the mother of self-delusion. -- thomas lang [hugh laurie, the gun seller]

everybody's got a gris-gris. -- penn & teller [bullshit!]

since we played chess, you got a better child. it is a miracle! -- eren yigit [jan 2007]

we possess no positive term to describe the man who does not worship phantoms of the imagination. -- michael onfray [atheist manifesto]

if hellfire is the stick, mystery is the carrot. -- dan dennett [breaking the spell]

friends don't let friends use raid-0 -- richard elling

practice simplicity with constant repetition and you'll do all right in your life -- john wooden [quoted by hoops coach dale brown]

quote of the week

from michael parsons review of iphone on times online:

I want one. All the geeks I know want one. Once it's been delivered I'll wager long odds we'll discover some tragic flaws: perhaps battery life, perhaps screw-ups with carriers. Maybe one of the sensors will fail, and there will be mass recalls. Who cares? It won't matter. I'm on my third iPod. The first two broke. But I keep going back for more because I, along with several million other love-lorn geeks, have been utterly, utterly had by a sweet-talking billionaire in a black polo neck. We love him. He completes us. And he had us at scrolling.

[i want one too, as soon as possible. neat: we are finally getting near those ST:NG tablets...]