CODeDOC. Computers. And aht, dahling. How can it not go on these pages?
11:55:40 PM  #  comment []

Seattle, and more precisely, Mike Whybark, has recently had a flood of Ken Goldsteins. One can feel the very space-time continuum of humor inexorably skirling towards the Great Northwest, leaving New Jersey awash in a flat plain of staid old humor. Oh, wait, Ken’s back. Never mind.
10:28:44 PM  #  comment []

Contest time

What was I saying? It was Lady Crumpet’s Armoire who brought Theory Trading Cards to my attention, before the MT changeover. I usually get to the site browsing through Mike Wolf or Zeebah. The choice of theorists and theory is rather uneven.

No one even commented on that little poem of Avalle. Of the Towers. That’s hint one. More hints until someone gets it. Rone? Ravenwolf? Felicity? Now I am not saying that any of you had read it, but you ought to be aware of the author. That’s hint two. I will send any one item from Paul Frankenstein’s schwag shop to whomever puts the full, unalloyed poem in the comments.
11:57:56 PM  #  comment []

Quotidian

This morning, I could not remember whether I had taken my allergy medicine, a medicine that several people have told me doesn't work well, and, having been using it for some time, I would tend to agree, but I prefer taking it to something much stronger such as a certain anti-allergen a certain medico friend of the family gave me that saved my face from becoming a gelatinous puff ball by the Sea of Galilee from a killer Israeli orange petsicide that I somehow had worked into my eye while fixing to get a mouthful of pulp. I looked in my pocket, and found two or three tablets, and could not for the life of me remember if I had actually taken one or not with my coffee. I searched the trash and the tabletop, but no empty counter. Yesterday I was pretty much all right: Yea though I walk through the valley in the shadow of cherries, I will fear no sniffles. Is it more dangerous to take an overdose or to take an underdose?

Since I have come back from Philadelphia, I have been shocked by how changed one of my favorite eating places around John Street is: Solace had been remodeled, new management, new workers, and only last week started serving noodle soups again. Not as good as before, and their signs say they only serve udon, but if you ask, they will give you soba or ramen. I prefer zaru soba, but they don't make that yet, so to add variety to the ramen I've been eating

iTunes4: not in my updater, so I had to download myself. iPod is updated from the updater.
11:32:42 PM  #  comment []

You can wordify anything if you just verb it.

9:58:45 PM  #  comment []

Still wondering where those theory cards came from.... Nope, not Paul, though he does point to a Chaucer link...with...side-by-side translation? Why would anyone need a side-by-side translation? Perhaps some glosses, but it looks more like an attempt to pass someone’s re-working of the Caunterbury Tales off as a legitimate attempt at kowtowing to modern audiences.

“...sweet showers fall...”? Pfah.

I said my piece on April earlier in the month, but it looks that little Powerbook battery mishap (note to Jay: it’s all better now, thank AppleCare) on the 17th ate my Radio April archive to any point earlier than that. Gr. I’ll get them back. Give me tonight.

Yes, Felicity, I can quote the intro to the general prologue by heart, not quite exactly, but still, no need to help. I hope the move goes well.
8:24:08 PM  #  comment []

I could have sworn I culled these Theory Cards from either Tutor or the below-mentioned Cosma, but I can’t find it in either!

(Sorry if I threw your stats off, Tutor!)

Caterina? Nope. Cheesedip? Nope. Pitchaya? Nope.

Sigh. Gr. Sorry for not attributing, whoever-I-stole-this-link-from!
8:08:19 PM  #  comment []

The mind works in funny ways sometimes. Walking among the cherry blossoms at the park today, and driving to Church, it was not Housman on my mind at all. Stuck in my mind was something like this:

Springtime in Avalle
and I don’t care what the priests do say:
I am taking my little boat
and I shall sail the river away.

Recognize it, or rather, does it ring a bell? My brain has mangled it in the ten plus years since I read the original. I’ll answer tomorrow if no one gets it today, but I would be disappointed in y’all if not one person gets it.
6:55:58 PM  #  comment []

Whoops, late for Church gotta go bye.
5:28:09 PM  #  comment []

I’ve asked this before, but I keep wondering why I bother to keep a news aggreggator when Jay Han works so effectively?

He pointed out that a certain notebook keeper had gone weblog.

Cosma mentions that he had hoped that science would be disinterested and refuse to play politics. I had had the same hopes for poetry before Dodge and Hamill. Sigh.
5:27:34 PM  #  comment []

“The problem with trying to child-proof the world, is that it makes people neglect the far more important task of world-proofing the child.”

5:17:47 PM  #  comment []

και συ, τεκνoν

This is kind of late, being way past the ides of March, but Doc Weevil mentioned some time back that when Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, he probably quoted a Greek play rather than speaking good ol’ Latin “alea iacto esto” (the degenerate snob). Well, same thing when he died: You as well, child (literally, and you, child). This is not so much “not you, too, Brutus,” as “live by the knife in the back, die by the knife in the back, youngster.” Tough ol’ degenerate.

Of course, now that I write this, I can’t find a reference to it. Sigh. So take it with caution.

Discovery channel seems to be doing something on Caesar tonight though. TiVo!
5:05:10 PM  #  comment []

Cherries!

Those of you living hereabouts in the tristate know that yesterday’s plan was a wash, but I’m going pasyal-pasyal to the park today! See ya later, with hopes of cherry petals in my hair.
12:38:55 PM  #  comment []

Birthdays etc

Liz’s one year blogiversary yesterday.

Watson and Crick’s paper fifty years ago today.

Mozilla about ten years ago.

Dad’s was on Sunday. Mmm, Chinese food, sizzlin’ steak ’n’ broccoli after a long long Lent.

The sixteenth was Ron Echeverri’s blogiversary. Sorry for the late um, “shout out,” er, Ron!
11:52:22 PM  #  comment []

Both Mr Wiseman and Mr Robertson mention Alan Kay’s talk at the O Reilly Emerging Tech. J J had the link to the text, though.
11:45:28 PM  #  comment []

Magnolias and cherries and dogwood, oh my! ah choo!
11:37:07 PM  #  comment []

...but I blog naetheless. Is my judgment impaired? Probably. Will I be indiscreet? One can only wish that my being indiscreet would be of any interest to anyone...

...but I blog naetheless. Tomorrow I hope to go to the Branch Brook park for cherries.

When I was one and twenty, I heard a wise...no, no, wait.

Erm, apologies to Housman:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
TwentyThirty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a scoretrente,
It only leaves me fifty more
It’s some forty for which I’m meant—eh.

And since to look at things in bloom
FiftyForty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Huh. I used to be able to do that by heart, but I had to run to the library to do that.

Yes, Aaron, I am sure the meter is just as heavy-handed as the original. But I liked the original. Yes, it’s tripe, but, as I just said, I am quite drunk.
11:35:17 PM  #  comment []

Ah’m suh drunk

Sometimes Bill just keeps pouring the wine....
11:15:27 PM  #  comment []

Meesh looks to be back, with new stuff starting April 12, though I could have sworn I checked last week.
11:30:49 PM  #  comment []

Long work day, tying up loose ends, leaving at nine, but I got to the station by 9:15 or so, which meant I was able to grab a bag of Nantucket double chocolate chip cookies: dinner!
11:22:27 PM  #  comment []

Tuning in Smalltalk is the same as in any language. you either:

• do expensive things less often, or
• do less expensive things.

12:00:30 AM  #  comment []

Allergies

A chill breeze blowing from a summer sky,
And flowers live and dead hanging from trees,
And pollen in your nose and in your eyes—
And all the world converging on your sneeze.
11:40:36 PM  #  comment []

Here’s something sad. Well, not sad, but certainly disheartening, at least to me. This is an example of a book that used to be prevalent in the early to late eighties. Books like this, and A. K. Dewdney’s column in Scientific American, taught children, enthusiasts, and amateurs not to fear computers, but to actively engage with them, as sort of partners in thinking or imagining.

Nowadays, how many of these kinds of books do you find? I cannot think of anything right now that would fit this niche. Most books on computers are geared either to the professional or the consumer, that is, gamers and end-users. The Idiot’s and Dummies imprints are for professionals thrown into a field in which they feel out of place. There are no mass market paperback books for computer enthusiasts. There are no perfect-bound trade paperback books under twenty dollars for the computer enthusiast either.

If a child were to look up and say, “Daddy, Mommy, computers are interesting. How do I find out more about them?”—what would you do?

As the power of our personal computers has gone up up up, have we seen a corresponding rise in amateur literature? It is painfully obvious that it has not. While there have been individual projects that have focused on the experience of learning, there have been fewer and fewer books published for the enthusiast.
11:54:38 PM  #  comment []

Easter

Switched Masses back again, but neglected to mention it at the 5:30 Mass last week, if I recall correctly, which is perhaps why several people came at the altered times.
11:59:33 PM  #  comment []

Chocolates!
11:52:17 PM  #  comment []

Finally, Neil Gaiman has permalinks, and just in time for this, too:

There's a marvellous photo and explanation here of the phenomenon of Solar Tadpoles, which is something I'd sort of missed until now. Scientists, we are told, now believe the tadpoles are superheated magnetic voids in the plasma. I, on the other hand, believe that they are the infallible early warning system of an upcoming plague of Solar Frogs. This is why scientists are scientists, and why my daughters look suspiciously at me whenever I try to explain the universe to them.

10:37:40 PM  #  comment []

Beta tester blues

So I opened up my OmniWeb browser 4.5 sp 2, and it tells me that sneakypeek 6 (6?) is available. So I follow the link to the sneakypeek directory, where it shows sneakypeek 8 (8?). I shrug and download, and go through my updated links list. When I am done, I restart the browser, only to find out that sneakypeek 9 (9?) is in the same directory I just downloaded. Omnigroup is certainly rapidly evolving this thing.
1:38:43 AM  #  comment []

Good Friday

I thought I would go home early today, but Bad Things intervened and I got left holding the bag. I hope I executed my charge properly. Sigh.
11:34:14 PM  #  comment []

At GameDev:

Monday, April 14, 2003

Galaxy Dynamics Computer Simulation Posted by: Anonymouse at 18:50

The paper over at OSNews considers a mathematical model of the behavior of an assembly of N stars. The 'Kepler' Windows demo application based of this model enables to perform real-time simulation of star clusters dynamics for N~=2500. The paper also estimates the efficiency of the IPP application and provides an example of C-code with the IPP functions calls. Computer-simulated images of the spiral galaxy forming process, as well as the real galaxies photos, are presented.

Emphases mine. Heh. Considering getting a cluster of 2500 stars and the distances between them and the motions relative to each other in keeping it in a 1152x768 pixel screen, I could probably do a real-time simulation of 2500 stars by hand. What I want to do is get a faster-than-life simulation, say, a million years a second or so? :.)
9:30:28 PM  #  comment []

Maundy Thursday

A sudden chill: does not bode well for the cherries. And almost out of power...
10:18:25 PM  #  comment []

Left power cord at work and the Genius is was tapping his foot impatiently. No part in store.
10:17:26 PM  #  comment []

Whoops, no go. I’ll need to call in and have the battery shipped.
10:14:57 PM  #  comment []

Finally brought the laptop in to the Apple Store to have the batteries checked. More later.

[update: The Genius reset some things, including the Power Management Unit and PRAM, I think—thus the date—and the battery is still only about five to ten minutes. He sent up the case number to Apple.]

[further update: I changed the date here through weblogData.root, as it was messing with the rest of the April 2003 archive. It originally showed the Unix epoch date that I posted under when the Apple Genius reset my Power Manager and PRAM.: Wednesday 31 December 1969 7:10:58 PM]
7:10:58 PM  #  comment []

If you’ve noticed that I’ve been frequenting your blogs more of late, yes, my little learning project collapsed like a 20th-century Iraqi regime. I got to a certain point, and failed to push through. Sigh. Perhaps a second go at it in a few months.
12:59:25 AM  #  comment []

What was I saying? New specifier found. [by way of Graham Leuschke]
12:55:20 AM  #  comment []

Gratuitous moxie link. Come prepared to quote old Nicholson movies. Er, go prepared. Be prepared?
12:45:34 AM  #  comment []

Cherry buds about. Almost time for the Newark cherry blossom festival.

Speaking of which:

161

People commonly say that the full blossoming of the cherry occurs on the 150th day after the winter solstice, or a week after the vernal equinox, but the 75th day after the beginning of spring is generally correct.

Though I really don’t know what he’s talking about. When’s springtime in Japan?
12:44:24 AM  #  comment []

Every Maundy Thursday, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City hosts an all-night reading of Dante’s Inferno. I haven’t been there for quite a while, seven, eight years; I’m still not sure if I’m going. It starts at nine. Decisions, decisions.
11:53:52 PM  #  comment []

Last week I started watching Lucky on FX and World Poker Tour on Travel.

Lucky looks like it will be a much less deathly serious John Laroquette Show. “You’re a degenerate gambler.” “I’m me and you’re you.” “If you need me, I’ll find you.”

Shana Hiatt WPT seems much better than the ESPN2 coverage of similar events, like the WSoP.
10:49:44 PM  #  comment []

Safari, 1.0 Beta 2 (v73): Nice, and not so hypothetical tabs anymore.
12:05:11 AM  #  comment []

Tax time

Yay! It’s tax time. It’s time to tear off the plastic off the Macintax, download a copy of my state forms (NJ and NY), and mail off my three extension requests (plus the estimated owing, natch).

More updates on this three or six months from now.
11:56:01 PM  #  comment []

Here’s an interesting tidbit: Peter van der Linden, who wrote one of my favorite C books (Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets) has apparently left the Sun compiler group for Apple. He recently posted on Usenet (comp.sys.mac.programmer.misc) looking for an intern with some very high qualifications. I was skeptical of the e-mail (a Yahoo account) but the Apple employees seem to be backing him up. It looks to me from the job description as if they want someone to do automated testing frameworks using Java, perhaps JUnit—no, “internal Apple automated GUI test tools,” and Applescript and shell scripting, also C/C++. Java would make sense if it were PvdL, who did some work on Java. Hm. Automated test suites, and they’re expecting interns to handle the test plan? Pfft.

Message-ID: <8f515400.0303270555.3662a9e9@posting.google.com>

Quality automated testing is so hard to find. Oh, wait, no it isn’t—here we are! It’s just rather expensive.
12:16:22 AM  #  comment []

Palm Sunday

The Passion play today.

Father La Bonte’s (God rest his soul) replacement (or was he a guest priest?) had the 5:30 Mass; I did not catch his name. His Indian accent was thick, but not as thick as Fr. La Bonte’s was when he first came to us.
11:56:17 PM  #  comment []

Spoken in an outrageous French accent:

We wanted the characters to have real depths. Of course, it’s kind of stupid, whacky, cartoony depths...

(Host’s gratuitous remarks on the character of the French deleted)
11:35:07 PM  #  comment []

This is all approximate, from this morning:

Blitzer to Christine Amanpour: I understand that you can’t get out, but what is the looting situation there?

Amanpour: Well, we have been out, and we have witnessed along with reporters from other stations [emphasis mine —Ed.] some of the...

I believe that that’s going to be an oft-repeated phrase over at CNN for quite a while, anywhere they report in a repressive regime, eh?
3:32:15 PM  #  comment []

Is anyone blogging the People’s Poetry Gathering? I’ve let my Poets House membership lapse yet again, and forgot to check up on this.
1:09:31 AM  #  comment []

They walk among us

Deep in the recesses of the human heart, lurking guiltily beneath the threshold of consciousness, there may lie a depraved craving for the taste of human flesh. By Nicholas Wade. [by way of New York Times: National]

12:39:12 AM  #  comment []

This afternoon, Bill, Matt, and I were reminiscing about performance testing tools.

Ah, preVue-X. Performix? Mercury and Segue, sure. But the RadView tool... QALoad is... Load Test did... Which one? Whatever Rational’s calling it now... Yadda yadda.

How many kinds of geek does that make us?
4:02:16 AM  #  comment []

Speaking of Al Lewis....

SHADOW:What's your secret for success, for a long, healthy, happy life? LEWIS:My secret for success? I don't know what the hell success means. (Laughs) I'll tell you what my secret is. It took me a long time to find this out. Find something that you absolutely love to do. Not you like it, or it's pleasant, something that you absolutely love to do. And along the way, if you're lucky, get to love the way you do it. Then you're home free. And you're looking at a man right now. I got a spine made out of stainless steel. Nothing shrinks it, nothing, nothing. Because I know who I am. I don't have to brag. I know what I contributed. I know what I did. You think you can do it better? Hey, go right ahead. The stage is yours. But find something that you absolutely love doing. And then get to love the way you do it. That's the uniqueness of all of us. That's it. Albert Einstein, one of my favorites, said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." And if that cat say it, it's good enough for me.

3:06:50 AM  #  comment []

Thursday Roy and I had a rollicking argument about the war. We argued for what seemed like two hours, until 8:00pm, when we left work. Fun stuff. He pulled Al Lewis’s radio show on me; I pulled Michael Novak’s arguments before the pope on him. In the end, I got him to admit the possibility of just cause, after which we agreed that our thresholds for the prudential judgements of last resort and relative benefit-to-harm ratio differed.

I love arguing with the guy; he’s just so quiet about things usually and so agreeable, that when he has a firm opinion on things, he goes on such a roll. I suppose the same thing applies to me.
2:58:40 AM  #  comment []

Go commiserate with Felicity over the unintentionally fresh new start to her Goliard Dream blog.
6:56:17 AM  #  comment []

157

If we pick up a brush, we feel like writing; if we hold a musical instrument in our hands, we wish to play music. Lifting a wine cup makes us crave saké; taking up dice, we should like to play backgammon. The mind invariably reacts in this way to any stimulus. That is why we should not indulge even casually in improper amusements.

Even a perfunctory glance at one verse of some holy writing will somehow make us notice also the text that precedes and follows; it may happen then, quite suddenly, that we mend our errors of many years. Supposing we had not at that moment opened the sacred text, would we have realized our mistakes? This is a case of accidental contact producing a beneficial result. Though our hearts may not be in the least impelled by faith, if we sit before the Buddha, rosary in hand, and take up a sutra, we may (even in our indolence) be accumulating merit through the act itself; though our mind may be inattentive, if we sit in meditation on a rope seat, we may enter a state of calm and concentration, without even being aware of it.

Phenomenon and essence are fundamentally one. If the outward form is not at variance with the truth, an inward realization is certain to develop. We should not deny that this is true faith; we should respect and honor a conformity to truth.

Now, no Catholic believes in salvation through works, or rather, only very uninformed ones; but through the ages the fundamental character of man has not changed, and from the patristic sources down to this day we are informed that actions become habits, habits become character. And a person of good character recognizes, accepts, and trusts in truth, more especially, Truth.

The formation of a good conscience and good character is essential to the formation of faith. Good actions beget good character, and faith is just as much an act of will as any good work is. Knowledge has no salvific power, but without it, without Truth informing behavior, how can salvation occur? ...erm, edit later.
6:40:25 AM  #  comment []

Let our tears be turned into laughter

Hm. Dancing in the streets of Baghdad.

Last thing before sleep. Here is a poem by Frederick Turner on the—“fall?” “rise?” let’s be optimistic—liberation of Baghdad.

Frederick Turner is one of the few poets I know of to attempt the epic form and science fiction tropes at the same time. New World, with its Gerard Manley Hopkins-inspired five-beat line (not entirely successful, imho) detailing the sojourns of a man on earth after the anti-bourgeois wars have left farmsteaders and prole cities on earth, and the Genesis poem, in iambic pentameter, about the colonization of Mars, attempted, if I recall correctly, in a "fractal" organic form. Rachel corrected me gently when I confused him with Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the frontier, but I remember her corrections to this day. Who else has attempted the sci-fi epic? Besides James Merrill and his radioactive bats? [grace to Disch, though I’m not too familiar with his work]

Here is Frederick Turner’s response to the Hamill-led idiocy, touching on points that Dana Gioia recently called “corrected” or otherwise ameliorated in his update of his Matter book.

Five thousand poets against the war? Who ever heard of five thousand poets agreeing on anything? But then I guess any old poem qualifies you, even that excrescence jotted on a napkin in a cafe that you ducked into after the protest. Happy the poet who has written one poem, wrote poet Robert Francis in one of his Satirical Rogue books; one can bring it up in conversation, saying, that reminds me of a poem I wrote once, or defend it saying, but what can one expect of a first poem?

What can one expect, indeed?

By the way, I’m posting this with the Omniweb 4.5 sneakypeek 2 (v442), which apparently uses the Safari WebCore rather than the decade-old SGML framework it was using since it was a NeXT product. Scratch that; it just ate this post, and put up a crash report e-mail. Here I am retyping this crap again. Sigh. I wonder if they will maintain the SGML framework to render the rising XML technologies, such as MathML, OPML, GeoML?
1:33:25 AM  #  comment []

Blogs save lives

If you’re sufficiently indiscreet, blogs save lives. If I get more of a personal life—if I had any—remind me to start sharing more of it.
11:17:26 PM  #  comment []

Supershapes!

By way of Slashdot. Seriously. Here are more details. Here are some formulæ. Here’s a Java app implementation allowing you to tweak parameters to see what it can do.
11:15:36 PM  #  comment []

Someone drove a green Camaro into one of the columns supporting the front of the A & P grocery store. Luckily he was only bruised; apparently he worked at one of the stores next to the CVS. The whole right front side of the engine had disintegrated on impact, and much of the brick and tile surrounding the metal pillars had been stripped away.
11:07:34 PM  #  comment []

Today I watched The Fifth Element on cable and, right after, the Wasabi DVD. It turns out they’re both Luc Besson flicks. A nice action-packed evening, if you consider sitting in front of the television for several hours an action-packed evening.
11:36:00 PM  #  comment []

“[Michael Moore]’s going to wake up every day for the rest of his life, and he’s going to tell us how he hates everything about this country except his right to hate it. And then we say that we love it and he’s going to tell us what naive sheep we are and that he’s the true patriot because he hates it and he sees all the problems in it. Yeah, right, Mike. You know something, if my yawn got any bigger they’d have to assign it a hurricane name, okay? Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron’s right to be that utterly, completely wrong.”

[also by way of Gawker]
12:11:15 AM  #  comment []

First Laura Palmer, now the Hilton sisters. What next, Samuel Pepys?

[by way of Paul Frankenstein and Gawker, respectively]
11:59:55 PM  #  comment []

What was I saying?

Oh, right. Lichtenberg quotes and aphorisms!
8:00:55 PM  #  comment []

Just found this on a former professor of mine. The one time I could have seen her was in Philadelphia, and I had not known about it, and I had not noticed it in the Key Reporter. She once tried to encourage me to study the classics, and I suppose eventually I did, but not rigorously or in a disciplined fashion. And certainly not in the source languages. Yet.

Except for my decaying, useless Latin. Except I never used it for the classics, even when I had it.
1:15:00 AM  #  comment []

...so priketh hem nature in hir corages...

Sigh. Wrestled with obsessive nature, but failed. Tried to do the same thing I did Monday, left an hour and a half later, but just missed the subway I had taken that day; nor did I see her among the crowd.

(mumble mumble) petals on a black bough...
1:00:16 AM  #  comment []

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...

Ah, skip it.

Whan that Aprille...

Eh.

April, the ghetto month of the McPoem.

(I couldn’t find an online copy of Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition” essay; go buy the collection—the other essays are worth it.)
11:49:27 PM  #  comment []

Kitty, or, “Toss me another....”
12:11:37 AM  #  comment []

Kingdomality: Prime Minister

I don’t think this is me at all. Oh well.
10:46:45 PM  #  comment []

Happy birthday, Apple Computer Company!
9:40:40 PM  #  comment []