| "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." |
| "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." |
I saw a couple hours ago that Randy Pausch had died.
He knew that life is a gift, both his own and those who touched his. He managed to pass along that knowledge, far beyond what he anticipated.
Somehow, knowing that Jai, Chloe, Dylan, and Logan are grieving their loss... it just makes the sunlight a little less enjoyable today.
I think I finally figured out the moral of A Christmas Carol. And it isn't, "It's better to be charitable."
Ebenezer Scrooge didn't just magically become a charitable soul. His own guilty conscience drove him into the fringes of insanity. Patrick Stewart's portrayal of the Scrooge character captures this well.
The moral is, "It's better to embrace charity by choice, than to be charitable out of guilt."
Go see it.
If you liked The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe you will probably also like Prince Caspian. C. S. Lewis, being a WWI veteran, understood finely both the cost and the ultimate necessity of war among fallen men. In the Pevensie children, he gives voice to all views, disdain to none, and still keeps them as siblings who love one another.
Never once was I tempted to look at my watch. This tells me it was a good movie.
Shortly after Luciano Pavarotti's passing, I read some carping about how he squandered his talent on "lower" forms of entertainment, like singing "I'm the Man" with James Brown.
Notwithstanding the common European roots of opera and American jazz, what business is it of anybody besides Luciano and his Lord how he used his God-given talents? Luciano will answer for it on Judgment Day. Not I, not anyone else. He made a good life for himself with his voice, and he donated his voice for many charity concerts, some of which he organized. I dare the naysayers and pikers to make the same claim about themselves.
I've given some job interviews. Using what I've learned from job interviews I've gotten, especially the distasteful rote Q&A so common in the job market, I've crafted two simple bits that quickly show the kind of job candidate I'm talking to:
The first question shows what kind of thinking a person has. The second shows how honest the person is.
The first time I used those questions, I had two job candidates to interview. The first candidate answered both questions reasonably candidly (without violating her previous NDA's). The second candidate tried to tell me that, in six years of professional programming, he had never encountered a problem that defeated him. Either he lied, or his experience was based on such simplistic situations that he was unqualified anyway. Based on that one response, I rated him negatively on the interview.
We hired the first candidate, who immediately began challenging assumptions and streamlining the user interface.
My very first programming job challenged me to create a solution that I'm still proud of. I needed to maintain two indices for a customer appointment system: index by name, and index by customer number. I had to support insertion, retrieval, deletion, and save, but all internal structures were up to me to devise. The indices would load when the program started, and all modifications required an immediate save-to-disk for persistence.
I had no problem with saving, loading, deleting, and lookup. Actually, the saving and loading were the simplest parts of the library, with simple write-from-memory and read-to-memory calls. However, the insertion turned into more of a problem than it should have been.
The standard C library includes a function called qsort() which is supposed to implement C. A. R. Hoare's Quicksort algorithm. One of its parameters is a pointer to a function to do the actual comparison of two elements. The function can return -1, 0, or 1 to indicate that the first element is greater, they are equal, or the second element is greater. (Or you can reverse the 1 and -1 to get a reversed sort.)
Despite my best efforts, and some of the best hacking I've ever done, I was unable to get qsort() to work for me. In order to get the job finished on time, it became obvious I would have to make my own sort function.
I initially tried to re-implement the Quicksort, but gave it up as too complicated for the task at hand. I considered the bubble sort but even it wasn't appropriate for what I needed. I had an almost-sorted list, with just one out-of-place element in the last position. What did I need?
In retrospect, it almost seems silly, but I spent almost two hours pondering this. When normal thinking failed me, I decided to think "backwards": what would get me from a sorted list to what I had to contend with? Well, I only needed to move the one item out of place...
Of course! I merely had to swap the new item with the one before it, until it was between the two elements which were less than and greater than itself!
No full-blown sort needed, no need to examine every single element of the list, no need to consult with some programming text on standard sorting algorithms. It was a particular solution to a particular problem, and when my customer put the code in place, it worked beautifully.
To this day, I am pleased with myself for having come up with such a functional solution on my own. It was one of the first times I managed to "think outside the box," and it remains the standard against which I measure my own creative thinking.
At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it. (G.L. Glegg, The Design of Design)
Most of what passes for "art" today is undisciplined, anarchic, and pointless. Classics remain classics, by presenting reasonably consistent impressions while transcending their original contexts. A church icon drawn with charcoal and chalk on brown paper is more "art" than just about anything found on the top level of the San Francisco MoMA.
In this New Criterion article (via Power Line), Roger Kimball dissects the "art" world's poverty, brought about by artists' refusal to acknowledge their audience. If the intention of art is communication, modern art is the tree falling in the forest, with nobody around to hear.
Update 2007-06-05: Roger Kimball blasts Dartmouth for proving his point.
I just finished a small photo essay, A River in Time. The flow of the water, the mud and rocks on the river bottom, and even the effects of a car driving through the water, all show up with just a little image processing.
It started out as an experiment, but I got more than I expected. Check it out.
The three most beautiful drives I've ever seen:
Each has its own visual beauty, but the Pacific Coast Highway had some of the most brilliant hues I've ever seen, bar none. In the rainy season, the trees are bright green. Against the ocean's blue, it makes for some breathtaking sights.
One of the most impressive acting scenes ever has to be Sarah Connor's escape in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Imagine this: You're in a mental hospital because, like the ancient Cassandra, you know the future, and everyone else is betting that you're wrong. Your son, your whole reason for living, is with foster parents whose neglect and hostility send him into a world of denial and delinquency.
You plot your escape, learning from previous attempts and failures. Then, one day, boom! you are on your way out, ready to rescue your son and, with him, the world's fate. Joy and elation energize your strides, until...
The greatest terror you have ever known appears in front of you.
In a half-second, all that joy and elation melts into a "flee at all cost" instinct.
Watching Linda Hamilton's facial expression transform, just like that, in slow-motion, is perhaps the most striking performance I have ever seen on film.
I stumbled across this while perusing some help-wanted ads:
Solid understanding of basic web technologies like HTML, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash
Shockwave/Macromedia/Adobe Flash is not a "basic web technology"! When will you managers learn the difference between eye candy and substance? Between intelligence and a stuffed suit? Between "interoperable" and "broken" web sites?
Gah, what fools these managers be!
A "humor" column by Automotive Report's Buster McNutt actually touches on a deadly serious matter:
Call me old fashioned. But where does all this need-to-drive but don’t need-to-know-how-to-drive madness end? The ability to parallel park falls way toward the bottom on the rocket-science to eating-dirt intelligence scale. My generation learned how to do it on vehicles not even equipped with power steering!
That's right. People need to have an intimate understanding of how their vehicles behave: where the wheels are, how the turning radius changes with the steering wheel, what kind of braking response they can expect.
But what can we actually expect to see on the road today? People in their SUV's following at less than a half-second distance, people yakking on their cell phones (or worse, dialing), people who think their anti-lock brakes will save their sorry butts from a wreck...
In short, people who think the laws of man and physics don't apply to them.
(H/T: Cox & Forkum)
Iambe: Intimate & Interactive is coming to an end. *snif*
I joined the community in 2000, after discovering UserFriendly.org in 1999. I found Iambe to be loyal opposition and confidant, willing to use her position within "her" community to find help and suggestions for some interesting, sticky situations. Now, the I:I&I community is plodding along without her, 9 months having passed since her last appearance.
It feels kind of wrong, but the User Friendly system is about to get an upgrade. If the site is all but stale, then it's time for it to go away. The community can move to another site (already set up... and no link here).
Fare thee well, Iambe, i nazdrovya.
A lot has happened since the last posting. For starters, I moved into my own apartment. About bloody time! Well, I'm "mostly" moved. Most of my stuff came from storage at my parents' place. Every time I think of a list of things to pick up, I end up forgetting something. Two days ago, it was my work shoes. Yesterday, it was the wastebaskets. I wonder what I'll forget today?
As for movements in the world, I'm noticing more and more that the limits of tolerance have been reached with regards to Islam. A couple weeks ago, the six obnoxious imams in Minnesota got kicked off a flight, and further investigation has turned up some nasty terror ties. (Notice that the link goes to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, not exactly the most conservative newspaper.) That's just the most recent prominent example; others are occurring more and more often.
Even in Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad isn't safe from criticism from his own. Who'da thunkit?
During a rather "interesting" conversation with my mother about politics in public education, the topic of Sesame Street came up. We both agreed that in the past ten years, the CTW has taken their political correctness a bit too far (Near! Far!), but then she said something that surprised me:
"Even in their early days, I didn't like their attitude about inner city life."
Now, this is my Mom we're talking about. My semi-liberal, pro-life Mom, who practically embodies the "live and let live" approach to life. I asked for an example, but she couldn't give me one. The best she could offer was the people on Sesame Street who seem unnaturally satisfied with life in the concrete jungle.
A couple minutes later, I found the perfect example of what's wrong with Sesame Street: Oscar the Grouch. Think about it:
Worst of all:
These are not things I would want my kids to learn. That is, if I had any kids.
I picked up Crisscross, thinking I was getting some light personal reading. It wasn't light, and it wasn't right. F. Paul Wilson's cosmology is completely backwards.
[Spoiler alert.]
In Repairman Jack's world, the supernatural forces at war are the mostly apathetic Not So Bad and the hostile Truly Awful. The Not So Bad is already here, and the Truly Awful is trying to elbow in and take over. Repairman Jack spends most of his days trying to maintain the status quo. Near the middle of Crisscross, he tells a reporter about this fight, and explains that the Truly Awful is often called "The Other" by those who have become acquainted with it.
This runs completely counter to the Biblical world-view, as summarized in Ephesians 6:12:
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
This world is already the (temporary) dominion of Repairman Jack's Truly Awful.
The Other world, from which we alienated ourselves with sin, is the realm of our true allies. The Greek word for "holy" is hagios, which is composed of the prefix "ha-" (not) and the root "gios", meaning "earth." Hagios means "unearthly," or more broadly, not of this world.
Repairman Jack is not for me. I propose that Repairman Jack is not for anyone who is serious about filling his mind with the good things of Christ.
Update 22-Oct-2006: Lots more discussion, including a couple comments from me, at the Repairman Jack Message Board.
From the as-seen-on-TV dept.:
As U.S. citizens are fleeing Lebanon (as the realities of terrorist war hits them), many are telling their stories for the TV crews, before they even get out of the airport.
One particular reunion in Cleveland appeared to me as not very joyful. The girls came down the escalator, as their parents stood at the bottom. The mother had no tears, showed no joy at the relief that her daughters were home alive, and merely walked up to the girls as they stepped off.
Something about the whole scene just wasn't right. The camera operator had no trouble following the mother as she walked up to the girls. Was the mother performing for the camera? Or was it more like disappointment that the girls had to leave their friends and family, in order to avoid exposing their support for Nasrallah?
Go read Debbie Schlussel for more info. The next time something like this gives you pause, you'll understand why.
I spent a few bucks to see a movie last night, something I haven't done in a couple years. I made a good choice in seeing Cars, a thoroughly American movie and quite possibly the best movie from Pixar in their 20-year existence.
Cars is very rich in its presentation, with treats for everyone and a humble sense of gratitude to the inhabitants of the cultures which provide the movie's backdrop. The big towns, the small towns, the forgotten towns, all get a respectful tip of the hat, and a knowing wink.
The character of Tow Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) steals the show, as a kind-hearted but naive tow truck. The most off-color line in the whole movie was when someone mentioned the Piston Cup, and Tow Mater responded, "What did he do in his cup?" The action continues quickly after this line, providing the adults safe cover for some chuckles.
The first morning in Radiator Springs is greeted with Sarge's flag waving in the breeze. This shot is either live action, or an incredibly realistic rendering.
Movie buffs will want to stay through the credits, to see the special dedication to the memory of Cars writer Joe Ranft, and the special thanks to the people who inspired the story and characters.
Score: 5/5
How to bring lots of traffic from MichelleMalkin.com to your weblog, in three easy steps:
MySpace.com seems to be in many crosshairs lately, for facilitating meetings of adults with minors for unlawful purposes. Parents are up in arms with panic and outrage... with good reason. The following may shock those who know my stance on Free Speech:
I believe it is time to shut down MySpace.com. And I think I know how to do it.
There are two important pages on MySpace.com: the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy. Both pages are full of legalese any law school student would love. However, missing from both of these pages is any mention of parental consent. In fact, "parent" and "guardian" are never mentioned at all!
This is particularly disturbing in light of the legal claims of the Terms and Conditions:
By using the Services, you represent and warrant that (a) all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate; (b) you will maintain the accuracy of such information; (c) you are 14 years of age or older; and (d) your use of the Services does not violate any applicable law or regulation.
Fourteen? Are fourteen-year-olds allowed to enter into contracts, or any legally binding agreements, explicit or assumed, without parental consent?
Are any state attorneys general paying attention? I'm not the lawyer, you people are.
Shut down MySpace.com. They are targeting minors and deliberately undermining their parents' authority.
[Update 2008-05-26: Fixed stale links.]
As I type this, emergency crews are cleaning up an accident about two hundred meters from my house. Someone hit a utility pole, causing a couple bright flashes when the wires touched, and then the car flipped over, crushing the roof pretty bad. I called 911, and about three minutes later, the first siren arrived.
Yay for the Jaws of Life(tm). And yay for the cell phone with 'net access.
Update 8:44pm EST: Power was turned off for about three hours while the utility crews attached a crutch to the pole.
Google has knocked BMW off its pedestal, by zeroing their page ranking. The reason for this was their violations against the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines, specifically the first point about "cloaking."
I'm not very fond of Google right now, but I don't mind seeing them be the means of karmic payback to BMW. They act like the rules for the rest of us don't apply to them, and they encourage their customers to think the same way. It's kind of satisfying to see someone call them to account for their behavior.
I just saw this in an instant message service ad banner:
Oh yeah, I wanna use an IM service that will turn me into an undead zombie. Riiiiiight.
I heard Drudge railing on Rob Reiner last night about the dismal ticket sales of Rumor Has It... this weekend.
Look at the movie poster. I don't think it's only Rob Reiner's direction that's causing problems; it's the way Jennifer Aniston looks like her bad life in the Pitts is affecting her photogenicity (?!?). She looks like someone who just kicked out her boyfriend for the Nth time, and just can't muster the right look for the picture.
For the third time this year, Iraqis are voting. Omar is live-blogging. Keep an eye on his site for updates.
For an easy show of support, Raise a Purple Finger for Freedom.
For some reason, I wish I had something webloggy to say right now. But I don't. I'd just be re-hashing old rants.
Dammit.
Melanie Moss has declared what we already knew: Geeks prefer comfort over style.
Then again, Melanie Moss has no sense of a geek's life:
Ms Moss believes money should be no object when it comes to dressing well.
Oh, excuse me, we aren't all multi-millionaire fashion mavens. We prefer to make our millions in ways other than appealing to personal vanity.
Help-desk staff were named as the worst offenders, followed by those working in technology start-ups, many of whom had continued to wear T-shirts to work as a consequence of the casual web culture of the '90s.
That's because T-shirts and jeans are durable. We don't care if they get torn while we're replacing network cards in PC's. (Of course, if she wants to buy my wardrobe in exchange for fixing her PC, I won't argue. Until then, why should I care what she thinks of my clothes?)
T-shirts and jeans are also comfortable. After dealing with Ms Moss's high-maintenance attitude all day, a high-maintenance wardrobe is the last thing we need.
I don't believe it.
Crap.
Stores are already playing Christmas music and putting out candy wrapped in red and green foil.
That wouldn't be so bad, except that people in the stores are getting that edgy attitude as well. It must be time to put on the Cashier Avenger cape and tune up the sharp tongue.
(I'm filing this one under "Miscellaneous" simply because I don't know where else to put it. Maybe it's time for a separate category.)
She finally admits she's an exhibitionist:
when I got arrested and the officers lifted me out I was afraid that America would see my underwear and that tickled me.
She is addicted to the public exposure, and the networks are enabling her. Here is the proof, in her own words.
Peter Jennings has passed away, a scant four months after announcing his lung cancer.
I still disagree with his politics. However, he acknowledged the role of religious faith in people's lives, and sought to make it understandable to the consumers of mass-media. Any time Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather talked about Christianity, it was with a snide tone of condescension. I never picked up any of that from Peter Jennings.
Mr. Jennings, if this was simply something to be studied before, I hope you have adopted it now.
I got the user manual finished, with two days to spare. I'll do laundry this evening. Bush knocked one out of the ballpark last night. And then...
This.
Edloe the Majestic (just ask her) passed away yesterday. The cat with nary a care in the world, other than the occasional "am I supposed to care?" look, left the world in the arms of a woman who loved her.
I know cats. They're part of the family, whether you like it or not. Odd how they leave us liking it, every time, whether we like it or not.
I heard this morning about some imams complaining that the non-existent "Koran desecrators" should be handed over to an Islamic theocracy, to face their non-existent "justice."
When these same imams hand over the assholes that pissed and shat all over the church in Bethlehem, then we'll think about it. In the meantime, this "call for justice" rings totally hollow.
This kind of nonsense is why only the ACLU and other Lefty Liberals give Islam any credence. It will likely stay that way until the imams grow up and act like rational adults.
I've been to busy lately for a good rant. Today the pressure let up a bit, as I got another cluster up and running. So, without further ado, I present some serious carping.
Dan Rather—All I can say about him is "good riddance."
Solaris documentation—Horribly lacking in so many ways. I've already covered it, but it's worth a few more comments. Come on, guys, can't you document actual processes, not just "this is what should happen"? You assume everything will be peachy-keen, but in my experience you're batting only about 0.004. I don't know how many times I had to re-boot in the past week, either to apply a configuration change, or to get control back on runaway machines.
Michael Schiavo—I can't use the words in my mind to describe him, without violating the TypePad Terms of Service. Let's just say that anyone who wants a brain-damaged woman dead at any cost, through the most torturous means possible (starvation), has no business walking the streets as a free man.
Freaky weather—The buzzards have been in Ohio for the past month. Mt. Fuji's peak is exposed for the first time in human history. Chinese glaciers are melted and run off. Washington is ready to declare a water emergency.
California drivers—The laws of physics still apply, even if you're in a BMW. Too bad so many BMW drivers don't understand this. There seems to be some correlation between owning a BMW in California, and thinking you own the road as well. Maybe it's to cover up an inferiority complex. (Note: I am specifically limiting this to California, where image is everything. BMW drivers in other states need not worry.)
Home Depot—Boycott! Well, OK, not that I do much shopping for home renovation. But if I ever need hardware, I'll make a point of going to Lowe's or Ace or somewhere that isn't Home Depot.
Linux—It's becoming a memory hog. My laptop can't run the 2.6 kernel and X.org without lots of swapping.
AOL—Backing down on the AIM ToS was the smart thing to do. Smarter still would have been to leave well enough alone. I was happy not to use anything AOL, and I'm even happier now.
BIG SCIENCE BY LAURIE ANDERSON
Warner Bros. 3674-2
Three years ago, I caught the tiniest sliver of "O Superman" and was instantly mesmerized. The steady honk-honk-honk introducing it laid a very plain foundation, upon which an exquisite structure would be built... and then the sliver ended under a voice-over with Suzanne Vega. Nothing against Ms. Vega, but I wanted more.
Well, I got my "more" last weekend. I got this thing that was meta-avante-garde, if there can be such a thing. You see, Laurie Anderson wants to create an impression. She doesn't throw out the rules of music. She takes them to a new level, with a healthy dose of irony (not the wimpy post-modern stuff—yes, I get it), social commentary, and cerebral engagement. She wants her audience to be angry ("From the Air"), worried ("Let X=X"), tender ("O Superman"), dismissive ("Sweaters"), and just plain scratching their heads ("Example #22"). In short, this isn't something a typical stoner would listen to while lighting up.
Not to be missed are Ms. Anderson's innovative instrument mods. For example, she replaced the horse-hair on a violin bow with magnetic tape, then mounted a recording head into the violin as an electronic pick-up. Every track demonstrates this ingenuity for those interested.
Yes, I like this album. In a time when ABBA was breaking up, social commentary had to be political, and subtlety was hibernating, she refused to spoon-feed her audience. This commitment to communication—her craft—has kept her work as fresh and relevant now as it was in 1982. Her more-popular peers became passés, but Big Science could have been released yesterday.
My rating: Supreme!
Part of my silence is due to being very busy at work. (Yes, I've been known to post from the office.) And part of my silence is due to recent events in the "blogosphere," namely the news that blogs have made recently.
I'll say it again: I'm all for Free Speech, and the more Free Speech there is in the world, the better. I have no problem with Markos Zuniga spouting at the Daily Kos, even if I am diametrically opposed to everything he says. I'm more of a Lizardroid myself, although I'm not registered as such. The latter has it in for the former, and the feeling is mutual with the former as well. In theocracies and the like, one of them would be in prison for disagreeing with the official line.
But I like being unique. I like being me. And lately, most of what I would say has to do with blogging. No, thanks. I'm not into talking about blogging. I'm into doing it.
(I'm also into doing new blog designs on occasion. That particular itch is starting to demand a scratch.)
As a follow-up to the previous entry, it looks like Mervyn's has backed down. We're still waiting for Target to see the light.
I'm not holding my breath. Even if they relented tomorrow, I doubt it would redeem them in my eyes. Hell, I still haven't forgiven the United Way for what happened with William Aramony. I just have no patience with people who mess with citizens' charitable giving, whether taking advantage of it, or telling the givers that they have to do it elsewhere.
I hate going to the local Wal-Mart. It's crowded, noisy, full of bratty kids and clueless adults, and generally not really a friendly place to shop. But suddenly I hate it considerably less.
Richard Ducote at the Arizona Star points out how the Target chain has suddenly started enforcing their "long-standing" rule prohibiting solicitation on store property. This effectively says no to the Salvation Army. No kettle, no bell, no personal sacrifice to help those who need it.
And no patronage from me is going to Target. If they're going to be that hard-assed about it, I'll take my money to the noisy, un-friendly Wal-Mart instead. The Salvation Army's work has indirectly touched my life, and they'll have my loyalty, and all my pocket change during the Christmas season, to my dying day. I'm sure it has helped many Target employees as well, but I guess Target just doesn't care.
(Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt.)
I don't usually comment on sports matters, because I put very little stock in the sports world. But now that the dust is settling after the NBA brawl, I'm putting on my contrarian gloves.
Four players suspended for fighting, four more for "deserting their posts." Of all the major professional sports, I had the least respect for basketball. After this incident, I know why. The players, the spectators, and the administration have all behaved badly. But I think Ron Artest behaved least badly of all. I'm not really sure who behaved worse, the Commissioner or the fans.
Artest was a victim of assault and battery. He was lying on a table, posing no threat to anyone in the arena. The video shows plainly that a spectator threw a cup at him. Apparently, nobody has considered that it could have cost Artest an eye. A harder projectile could have resulted in a broken nose or a fractured skull. Yet, no security moved to restrain the assailant. In any other sport, the players would have been sequestered while the crowd was brought under control. But in the "bad attitude" sport of basketball, keeping the players on exhibit was practically required. It was a recipe for disaster.
Artest stepped out-of-bounds when he punched the spectator. I don't think it was worthy of suspension for the rest of the season. And I hope the assailant steps forward to press charges. Nothing would satisfy me more in this case than for Artest to press countercharges.
When the Commissioner made his ruling, "unanimous, one to nothing," I have to wonder if he's on a power trip, or just has an axe to grind. He says that "players cannot lose control and move into the stands," but I have yet to hear anything saying that spectators have to let the players do their jobs.
Good luck, Ron. I hope you win your appeal.
This will be one of those free-flowing entries. I'll type just whatever passes through my mind.
I went to a church service this evening. The sun was already down, and the church was a sanctuary of light in a world of darkness. It's one thing to be in church on Sunday morning, when the sun is shining in and everyone is freshly awake. It's something totally different, when the light is coming from inside the church, and the normal workday is finished.
Google is good for so many things. I've searched for Oracle answers, looked up old friends (and even an old girlfriend), and even just typed in semi-random characters, just to see what would come up. I just now sent an email to someone who might be my high school gym teacher, thanks to Google.
And speaking of Google, I might take a look at the Google Aptitude Test in this month's Linux Journal. It has some powerful questions that I wouldn't mind answering. (If I take the challenge, I'll post the answers here.)
Another challenge I gave myself today, was to design a logic circuit which would simulate a single cell's next state for Conway's Game of Life. Basically, the circuit has 9 inputs (the main cell, plus the 8 neighbors) and 1 output. Having just read the linked article, I realize that the rules are much more subtle than I originally envisioned. But the original rule set shouldn't be difficult to design.
Sometimes, my brain just works too much. Why else would I want to design a "Conway's Game of Life" co-processor card?
Okay, my stream of consciousness is starting to dwindle. Pretty soon, it'll be a trickle.
I've been really busy at work. Between that and getting my new (old) laptop working, I've been a busy puppy. Since a lot has been going on in the world, I'll just throw out a few comments here.
On the election: The Jon Stewart video from CNN's Crossfire is most revealing. He exposes the talking heads for what they are: divisive operatives on par with Communism's agents provocateurs. Once the nation is stratified, the Democrats point to the "disadvantaged" and scream about disenfranchisement, oppression, and the mean Republicans. And again, I point out: the mainstream press has the gall to ask why their ratings and reputations are going down the toilet.
On the Swift Vets: Over 250 of John Kerry's comrades-in-arms question everything about him, from his stated accounts of his time in Viet Nam, to his current fitness to be the President. Even his Boston Brahman accent is a fake; he was born and raised in the corn belt. If we are spared a Kerry presidency, the nation will owe a debt of gratitude to these men.
On the incumbent President: I don't like his domestic policies. So, on that point, he has no advantage over the challenger. On the other hand, the challenger's stated positions on foreign policies have so far demonstrated very little vision, and even less true commitment to leadership. Bush/Cheney '04.
OK, enough about politics. Listening to Drudge right now has raised the level of politics in my system to nearly toxic levels.
On my life at the moment: Tasha got me to admit that, in a nutshell, I'm not really happy with my life right now. It's up to me to do something about it. I can change the situation, or re-define the requirements. The latter is easier; the former, more permanent.
On faith: It's time to either put up or shut up. Am I Orthodox, or some half-arsed kinda Orthodox thing that can't give up being so Westernized? I made the choice almost 14 years ago, and now the account is due: I'll be Orthodox, or die trying.
Well, we'll all die trying. That's the point.
On weblogs: After RatherGate, and now with even more undeclared weapons, weblogs are gaining more and more crediibility (although not always justified). In Soviet Russia, samizdat (the underground press) published the truth about world events, unfiltered by the state's censors. The mainstream press all over the world now has its own version of samizdat, thanks to the unfettered exchange of information made possible by the Internet (a US invention, by the way).
On sleep: I could really use some right now.
I try to have something coherent to say when I post. I don't always succeed. This is one of those times when I have just some shallow thoughts that I still want to put on the 'net.
On database testing: If your test uses stored procedures, it helps if you have them in place before launching your test. It took me only six hours to figure this out.
On reducing the RSS of a running program: Don't link the DLL until you actually need it. If you don't call any of its routines, don't load it into memory. The GNU project's glibc (the standard code library for Linux) needs to do this, after breaking apart the various related functions into separate libraries. An earthquake simulator has no need for pattern-matching code; why load it along with the code to print your results?
Actually, I think I'll post the code for this in the next entry.
On speed limits: The laws of physics trump the laws of man. If everyone else is going 70mph, there's no way I'm going to insist on driving at 55mph.
On staying up late to write a weblog entry: It's a bad idea. I suggest you not do it. You may get a bunch of unrelated things all running together, without rhyme or reason.
The cute little images are gone. They made the articles more difficult to navigate, by creating a smaller target for mouse clicks. Users with visual difficulties or muscular coordination problems in particular would find the site less friendly. So, back to text links.
Cute images!
See the little icons under each posting? The links are derived from an image in the GIMP. The others are made by me. Considering I have nearly zero visual artistic talent, I'd say they aren't bad.
So much has happened in the past three and a half months, that a mongo posting is in order. I don't have any particular order, or even any particular category for it all. Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpty ride!
Without a doubt, these are the most scandalous events reported in the press. The events themselves are shocking. More so is the obvious difference in how they were reported. We've seen lots of images from Abu Ghraib in the mainstream press, showing the world how horribly we treated the prisoners. Some pictures even show corpses. We've seen many pictures of Nick Berg in the press as well, but only one of him as a prisoner of al-Qaeda. His headless torso is nowhere to be seen on ABC, CBS, or NBC. Somehow, the demands that we apologize for Abu Ghraib are ringing hollow.
Just one bit of advice for Bush: Don't squash Monsieur Kerry until it's too late for a replacement.
Then again, the way things are going, Kerry might pull a Howard Dean if the Dems don't rein him in soon.
IBM played their hand very well. SCO dug the hole, and while they're admiring their work, IBM is standing right behind them, ready to push them in. Lots of FUD doth not a court case make.
(For more information, check out Groklaw. And don't believe any of SCO's press releases until they provide evidence of their claims.)
My favorite karaoke spot closed down a couple weeks ago. I guess the economic recovery came too late to save The Echo. I enjoyed going there on Sunday evenings, for two reasons:
So now it's closed, and here I sit, doing web stuff and trying to impress my bosses with my HTML skill. The company website desperately needs an overhaul. Mostly, it needs to be cleaned up visually. That includes removing the hard-coded fonts from Front Page. That alone will do the most for making it more readable.
What does HTML have to do with karaoke? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I don't have a problem with someone not liking the President. I couldn't stand Bill Clinton for eight years, and I still gag whenever I hear his voice. But the transparent hypocrisy regarding the military is truly pathetic.
Our soldiers are in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to secure for their residents the same right to Free Speech (among others) that we now have. The leftists in Hollywood, Big TV Networks, and Academia are completely self-contradictory when they use their Free Speech rights in an attempt to deny that same Free Speech to others in the world.
Sure, they try to hide behind "Give Peace a Chance" rhetoric, but heeding their words will result only in the continuation of tyranny. For that, and for inconsistency, I reject the Left's attempts to make political pawns of the military.
(Side note: The Left certainly didn't mind when Bill Clinton sent the military into Bosnia, did they? But look at the hissy fit they're having now that GWB has liberated several million more than Clinton.)
I'm glad to see them. (Calm down. I'm not done yet.) I don't have to acknowledge them as "marriages," but that's not the point. The point is that the state should not be in the business of granting legal authority to clergy, some of whom will recognize a gay couple as married, while others won't. That's a religious concern, and the State is specifically enjoined by the First Amendment from expressing a preference in the matter.
Whew. More later, I'm sure.
Peter Jennings will celebrate his first Thanksgiving as a citizen of the United States tomorrow. He and I disagree on most political and philosophical matters. That's all right. In the name of freedom and our Constitution, I welcome him, and thousands of others with him, to the bounty of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in our nation. Welcome, Mr. Jennings.
I've never done this, but what's happening to this woman is immoral, reprehensible, and a dangerous indication of our national attitude towards life.
Two days after I installed it, the Comment Queue Script Hack stopped working. I had tested it with a test posting and a couple comments, and it seemed to work fine. When a monstrous comment arrived, it went into the comment queue... and got stuck. Oh blargh. So I'm trying out Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin. It's much more easily configured than the CQSH, and it blocks comment spam immediately. (Note to spammers: attempts to put your trash on my site will be logged!)
Wow! I picked up some college textbooks today. They were castoffs from the 2002-2003 school year, free for the taking. I made out like a bandit!
| Title | Price |
|---|---|
| An Introduction to Management Science | $70.00 (est.) |
| Premier Edition Calculus | $50.00 (est.) |
| The C++ Programming Language | $65.00 |
| Calculus Activities for the TI-81 Graphic Calculator | $12.00 |
| C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications | $20.50 |
| An Elementary Introduction to Database Management | $15.00 |
| Data Structures: Form and Function | $5.00* |
| Computer Programming and Architecture: The VAX | $28.50 |
*This book is missing 30 pages.
So there it is. Eight books worth roughly $266.00, in exchange for about $2.50 in gasoline. I'd say that's a good deal.
Dan didn't die of a heart attack. I wish he had; it would be easier on my mind.
He died a violent death, of a gunshot wound to the head. The best information I have at the moment indicates that it was suicide, committed in the rage of the moment. The police are investigating. I just hope they run the fingerprints from the gun.
I may (and probably will) never know in this life what really happened. I'm prepared to accept that, even if I don't like it.
