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.
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