News You Can Bruise for 1999 June

Wed Jun 02 1999 20:28: Hoo-hah! Josh and I got the first part of the CS111 project done today, and it's not even due for a week! If you want to see us working on it, there are some archives of Josh's webcam. Those were the 3 that we saw that we thought were good enough to keep. It's really like watching someone else's webcam because you're not aware of all the stupid things you do until one of them gets caught on virtual film.

Josh is at his computer now! Go spy on him! Wait, he's gone. He was there a couple minutes ago. Oh well. Spy on whoever this is, with the Cup O' Noodles.

Josh also taught me the rules of cricket today. I finally understand what a dull game it is. Seriously, what other game has an average playing time of six days? Trying to understand why it took so long, I asked Josh "Is it a for loop or a while loop?". I pity the poor sap to whom that makes sense.

Thu Jun 03 1999 13:26: This Sunday's sermon at the Westwood Hills Christian Church: FACING UP TO THE EMPTINESS OF LIFE. There's really nothing to add to that.

Taco Bell's "Fire" sauce is hot enough to make my Mountain Dew taste bad, but not hot enough to actually qualify as 'hot' in any sense of the word. They must formulate it for people in Ohio or something.

I'm sure Ohioans have some terrible stereotype for Californians, so let 'er rip.

Thu Jun 03 1999 21:23: More CS111 work means more webcam wackiness, including 3 shots in a row where I look like a high-fashion supermodel sexing it up on the runway. I emphasize that these were the scenes at particular two-minute intervals, none of them are posed. Josh tried to pose for one and we forced him down. The last picture is particularily interesting as it was taken just as Josh and I were turning to observe Justin's retelling of his rock climbing story. Rock climbing.

Justin is not on our project, he just dropped by Josh's dorm for a while.

Thu Jun 03 1999 21:30: I forgot to mention that Josh doesn't "get" Pokey the Penguin or Zippy the Pinhead. He must be destroyed! Just kidding.

Thu Jun 03 1999 21:56: One more thing before I hit the stain; The Race for the White House, a satirical photoessay I did for my high school paper. When I was in high school, obviously. Not recently. I think it's still pretty funny.

Fri Jun 04 1999 11:10: More old stuff that's (hopefully) stll funny: The Deficient Adventures of Captain Planet (don't ask me to explain that title, but it fits so right), a five-page comic by Kris and me from... gee, it seems like ages ago. A year, at least. Enjoy it. Don't miss the Archie the Roach and Mr. Funersize cameos.

Sat Jun 05 1999 07:20: New in Debian:

vrms - Virtual Richard M. Stallman

The vrms program will analyze the set of currently-installed packages on a
Debian GNU/Linux system, and report all of the packages from the non-free
tree which are currently installed.

Future versions of vrms will include an option to also display text from
the public writings of RMS and others that explain why use of each of the
installed non-free packages might cause moral issues for some in the Free
Software community.  This functionality is not yet included.

I'm doing a big uprade today, including moving over to the 2.2 kernel.

Sat Jun 05 1999 15:55: The only allowable exception to the Nathan Hale Specialty Beer joke standard is the following:

"Try Nathan Hale Soylent Green Beer. It's people."

Sat Jun 05 1999 18:07: Garrison Keillor sounds weird. I think he might have a cold or something.

Sat Jun 05 1999 20:51: Argh! I missed the first 40 minutes of the DS9 series finale! Oh well. I can get Mark to fill me in.

Mon Jun 07 1999 18:45: As previously reported, I missed the first 40 minutes of the DS9 series finale. However, I saw enough to make this judgement: it really, really looked like two episodes pasted together; a battle episode which was really good, and then a wrap-up episode which wasn't as exciting. It stopped being exciting when Garak left, IMO, early in the second half.

I did like it, quite a bit. I haven't been following DS9 until recently, but both the Cardassians and the Federation were made much more well-rounded cultures in DS9 than they ever were in TNG.

The downloading is long done, but the upgrading of my system continues. I switched from stable Debian to unstable Debian, so not only am I having to upgrade every single package, I'm having to run the Install thing multiple times to get rid of all the order dependencies which haven't been worked out yet. I crave the 2.2 kernel the way I crave tacos.

Mmm, tacos. Mmm, html2latex. Mmm, abiword. Mmm, other things on my new system.

Speaking of programs with 2 in their names, I wrote a program on Saturday called bbs2ansi which converts Wildcat! BBS display files (of which I have a million, some of them very funny) into standard ANSI (actually highly nonstandard ANSI, just because I can't be bothered to do efficient ANSI) display files, for piping into iCE's 31337 convansi program for putting on the Web. It works great, although it appears to have problems with blinking sometimes.

Mon Jun 07 1999 18:48: Peter is afraid of the "unstable" designation. Don't you be. Debian "unstable" means "unstable compared to stable" and "stable" means "mission-critical production-quality". There is little to no connection to the meaning of "unstable" in the Windows world, except possibly immediately after a new stable release, when people dump a bunch of stuff in unstable and break everything.

Obviously, if you're running a production server, you don't use unstable, for the same reason you don't use NT. But I'm not.

Tue Jun 08 1999 06:23: RAISIN BREAD! I love it! Complex carbohydrates and fructose! Worship the raisin bread!

Thu Jun 10 1999 06:56: Aha! I could never find the GNU manuals except in the impossible-to-use info format! Here they are in HTML and other readable formats, like ASCII!

Thu Jun 10 1999 20:03: More nutty CS111 Webcam pictures, including leonardr_is_dead. These are from Monday. There is a final one we took today upon completion (of the Brooklyn bridge?), which Josh has yet to send me.

Fri Jun 11 1999 10:34: It is Fun With Perl... yeah!

$a^=$b^=$a^=$b

I thought it was impossible to swap two variables without using a third variable, but there it is. I forgot who posted this to the Fun With Perl list, but I am eternally grateful to them.

Fri Jun 11 1999 10:37: You could make the case that that implicitly uses a third storage space to store the results of the xors before it is put into one of the variables, but even if that does happen, you could design a computer that didn't do that.

I feel like a new xor!

Mon Jun 14 1999 07:52: "Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature." -- Michael Faraday

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true." -- Michael Faraday, as quoted above the entrance to Kinsey Hall

Mon Jun 14 1999 08:17: My experiment to get the phrase "lemonade and birthday cake", and all permutations thereof, indelibly etched in Jake's mind, has succeeded. Now, who will be my next victim?

BTW, Jake's page is updated, for the first time in a year (more than a year if you don't count updates I did). It is Pokeyfied and contains many new occurances of my name, which I fixate on in an unhealthy manner.

I flipped between DS9 and X-Files last night. X-Files was very funny. But I felt weird flipping between two television shows, as though I had nothing better to do with my life.

Mon Jun 14 1999 10:07: I need to register for LinuxWorldExpo by the 21st, on the off chance that I'm able to attend.

Wed Jun 16 1999 11:48: That can of shaving cream (be nice and clean) lasted me five or six years.

AI final tomorrow. OS final Friday.

Thu Jun 17 1999 09:58: I had a personal steel cage appointment with the father of each and every one of my CS161 problems. Except the first one, which might be slightly wrong but I'm fairly sure the idea is right.

Fri Jun 18 1999 08:24: Gogol is approaching 100 days uptime. That 100 days includes a major system upgrade including a libc6 upgrade. Yes, here in UNIX land, you can upgrade your system libraries without rebooting. Join us... join us...

The rollover will occur tomorrow at 1600, I believe.

Fri Jun 18 1999 08:36: Oh, yesterday I became the first person to compare drugs to Microsoft Word, rather than comparing Microsoft Word to drugs.

Fri Jun 18 1999 17:33: Woohoo! I am done with finals! Done with finals am I! It's all done with finals!

I predict straight As! No, not really. But I have a better chance of straight As this quarter than any other quarter so far.

Now, I have a week until summer school starts.

Fri Jun 18 1999 20:16: I have a whole bunch of things to complain about, and they all involve movie billboards. Here we go.

First off, the South Park billboard has a Canadian flag on it, but the red parts of the Canadian flag are invisible because the background is red. The person who designed the billboard was looking at it real close up on their PowerMac and didn't think about how it would look as a billboard.

Secondly, the Austin Powers bus billboard says the following:

BIGGER, BETTER FUNNIER
   THAN STAR WARS

The Pokeyfied parts are crossed out in red (thanks Jake for showing me the way to the S tag). Thus, we are supposed to believe that the billboard originally said

BIGGER, BETTER
   THAN STAR WARS

and that someone then crossed out BIGGER and BETTER individually and wrote FUNNIER just where there coincidentally happened to be some space by Austin Powers' feet. They tried to make it look good by indenting the second line, but it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work, period.

Thirdly, the Big Daddy billboard, in which Adam Sandler and the kid who plays his adopted son are supposed to be standing and urinating against the billboard. Fine. But they're just standing there in the male urination position, there's no actual urine happening. It looks like they're too emberassed to pee on a billboard with all of Los Angeles watching them, which is the wrong impression to give if you are advertising an Adam Sandler movie. I mean, I doubt I could do it, but I'm not the wackily obscene Adam Sandler. If the city officials are not going to let you put an actual urination photo on the billboard, you shouldn't go for the urine pose. It's not going to work.

Fri Jun 18 1999 20:54: I updated my music site. All my released songs have lyrics and (if applicable) chords or tabs, except for Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generik, which I still have to tab. Not that it's hard to tab or anything; that's the whole point.

I hadn't done anything with Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generik for a long time, and so I was unprepared when I read its silly title this morning. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I laugh really hard at really trivial things. Other people's trivial things as well as my own. There was something Josh said this morning that was really trivial and made me laugh and laugh and laugh. Actually that reminds me of the "this laser has committed an invalid operation and will be terminated" joke which I made at LinuxWorld Expo and which cracked up Scott and Garrett despite being really trivial. So I guess I do it as well.

Musically, I'm putting off Ow, My Prostate! 24,996 Years of Porcelain Puppy Oppression until I am able to record onto the computer (I have a beta version on tape which is in Jake's hands and which he is supposed to be MP3ing). I am writing the songs and librettos for the two follow-up albums, Porcelain Puppy vs. Demon Dog, which is a wacky musical comedy tour de force, and the sequel to that, Revenge of Porcelain Puppy, where it gets really mean and actually somewhat gross in parts. But gross in a refined, artsy way, not in a slasher movie way. I hope. Anyway, those two will also be recorded once I get recording on computer working. Hopefully this will happen during the summer. But we've heard that before.

Fri Jun 18 1999 21:00: You can now thrill to Techno Schmeckno wit DJ Generic, as I have put up the tab.

Sun Jun 20 1999 07:42: Ewan McGregor is James Joyce!

Sun Jun 20 1999 08:22: I should probably point to my public PGP key, in NYCB as I have started signing all of my messages. In case the URL to it in the actual signiature isn't clue enough for you where to find it. The Josh-Campbell-Leonard entity is also capable of sending encrypted mail among its consistutent parts.

Sun Jun 20 1999 13:20: The summertime cleanup continues, as I have finally gotten ansiconv to work. I had to add an option to my BBS2ANSI program to throw away the blink data, as convansi interprets "blink" to mean "white background". That's not as dumb a mistake as you'd think, but it's not what I want. I'm working on an ANSI viewer and sorting out the ANSIs that I actually want people to view, as opposed to the ones that are just shameless appropriations of preexisting ANSIs (as opposed to lame parodies and minor changes made to preexisting ANSIs), and ANSIs I did that I now find highly emberassing.

Sun Jun 20 1999 16:34: The viewer and 45 Da Warren ANSIs are up at the new Da Da Warren Memorial Memorial. The new Gumby! More will be up eventually.

Sun Jun 20 1999 21:09: Tonight's Futurama was the story of me trying to watch Futurama. When my PC is turned on it scrambles Fox.

I'm officially done with sampo. I've been moving stuff over all evening. The trend will continue now that Futurama is over.

Tue Jun 22 1999 07:40: Here is Jake's notebook. Here is what Jake's notebook would look like if I did the decorating. Jake has no taste.

Tue Jun 22 1999 08:48: I'm trying not to obsess over the fact that Bill Gates is nearly three times as rich as the world's second-richest man. It's difficult.

Tangentially. Eben Moglen, who is the legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation, has an article called Anarchism Triumphant in which he makes a number-theoretical argument against the concept of intellectual property. I'm pointing you to it because that's what I am pounding on at the moment.

Tue Jun 22 1999 18:40: I now longer have any hair on my head. Well, I have some, but not much. I went and got a crew cut after work. My hair hasn't been this short for fourteen years. It feels good, especially in the heat of summer.

I got a B+ in 111. Not bad for what is universally considered one of the hardest CS classes. Hopefully I'll make the dean's list this quarter.

Wed Jun 23 1999 07:09: Today's kids think the IT industry is just too geeky. What's the solution? Institute "Techies Day"! Good job, McCloud!

Wed Jun 23 1999 08:33: Hey, look at me! And again! What a world I live in in which I need a webcam in order to look at the back of my head.

"May contain Mike" is a joke from high school. I'll explain it someday. But it does pertain to those pictures.

Thu Jun 24 1999 07:26: A- in CS161. I bet Campbell is steaming mad at {dirt, that news}.

Thu Jun 24 1999 11:25: Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! See the ncurses documentation allow leonardr to port a mountain of colorful DOS code!

Andy knows what I'm talking about. Watch for BOOZE For Linux to be out soon.

Thu Jun 24 1999 19:43: Could Steve Wozniak possibly kick more ass per unit time?

Thu Jun 24 1999 19:56: It's time for me to point once again to my Dylan-esque protest song, The Flag Burning Amendment Makes Me Want To Burn The Flag. As much as I like that song, I wish I didn't have to point to it.

Thu Jun 24 1999 20:48: I'm bored, and tired from packing up stuff for moving tomorrow, so I will take some time to explain "may contain Mike".

It references Mike Howard, who I went to high school with and who started me on playing the guitar. He had the coolest haircut in the world. I can't explain it, but it was really cool. Then one day he shaved his head, and he kept it shaved for the remainder of high school. Which is fine, but not as cool as his old haircut. The point of this paragraph is that Mike Howard shaved his head.

There is a video Mike and I made on May 10, 1996, of us playing our respective guitars in my bedroom. The two highlights of the video are 1) the really stupid faces I make when I sing, and 2) two of the three versions we did of the improvised song "Streethouse Rock" (the first, and superior, version, was lost to a dead battery). It involved the phrase "Streethouse Rock is back again, we've got x and all {his,her,its} friends" a lot. I no longer find it as funny as I used to, but it's pretty funny. Anyway, at the end of the song I do this stream-of-consciousness thing expanding on the station identification for KMPH Fox 26 (man, as soon as I start explaining one bit it brings up another bit), going into all this disclaimer stuff, and ending with (literal quote) "Caution! May contain small parts. Caution! Caution! May contain parts. Caution! May contain explosive material. Do not eat. Caution! May contain Mike. Do not shave head."

Aren't you glad I explained that to you? Now I have to explain the KMPH Fox 26 bit eventually.

Fri Jun 25 1999 09:28: I might get one of these free home automation kits, but man, look at that copy! It makes it sound like this hypothetical guy has his family in some sick animal behavior experiment! Can't home automation be used for good instead of evil?

Actually, I'm not going to get one of those things. I already have too much crap I don't need.

Fri Jun 25 1999 10:55: My mother has printed out my travelogue, and is going to find and scan photos for me to put up. She was complaining that the scanner was telling her that she was out of memory. She was trying to scan pictures at 1200 dpi. I talked her down to 600 dpi, and told her that I don't want anything above 300dpi.

Fri Jun 25 1999 16:32: Well, I'm moved in. My feet are killing me. Now it's runaway with the rich and famous as I go down to Riverside with Mark of LWE travelogue fame to play networked games until all hours.

Texas travelogue pictures are coming along, although they are being scanned at too high a resolution to be Webable. I may have said this already.

Mon Jun 28 1999 07:37: In the LA Times: Computers Used to Make Science Fun. Nowadays they just make it more boring.

Mon Jun 28 1999 11:23: I will probably regret this, but I'm going to stay in the Linear Algebra class despite the better time-coordinates and superior easiness of the Differential Equations class. I just don't want to deal with differential equations anymore.

The Linear Algebra class is easier to justify to UCLA as a technical minor in conjunction with my two number theory classes, anyway.

And then there's that chilling sentence on the top of the DE instructor's homepage...

Mon Jun 28 1999 14:40: Someone spent a little time doing a Jar-Jargonizer. Fine. Wholesome family fun. But they didn't spend just a little time on it, because they spent enough time on it to exhaust the conceptual space to the point where they came up with a hook for the phrase "Austin Powers" (See my page). And who knows what else. I dare say someone spent a whole weekend on this.

Mon Jun 28 1999 15:23: In my Texas travelogue, I make reference to a bit on an old Cowboy Copas tape in which Cowboy Copas and his pal play the same little country riff over and over again, calling it by names like "The Great Speckled Bird" and "Dreamin' Tonight of my Blue Eyes". I had thought that the bit was that they were making up many different titles for the country riff and calling them different songs, but it turns out that those are real country songs which all use that same riff, and the bit is making fun of the repetitiveness of those songs. It's still a funny bit, though not quite as funny as I thought it was. Cowboy Copas needs a page on mp3.com.

Mon Jun 28 1999 15:53: Woohoo! An A in 199 means a 3.66 GPA for the quarter, which (I think) means I get on the dean's list. I don't know why I'm excited about that, but I am.

Tue Jun 29 1999 07:08: I'm back in the segv-story-publishing saddle again, due to unspecified personal problems on Scott's end. Several good stories published so far.

I'd better take a shower before Danny wakes up and wants to take his.

Wed Jun 30 1999 08:36: I'm wondering if NYCB qualifies as a weblog. Here is my reasoning on the subject:

Me #1: It's on the Web, and it's a log. Thus, it's a weblog.
Me #2: It's not a log, you freak!
Me #1: It's a log. Try Nathan Hale Weblog Beer. It's a weblog. Beer.
Me #2: NYCB is not a weblog, dammit! It's you talking about the stupid things that happen in your stupid life!
Me #1: Me? It's you who does that! I bring the weblog to life with witty anecdotes and hot links with the freshest commentary around!
Me #2: Yeah, well weblog this! [hits Me #1 in the face]
Me #1 Why I oughta... [jumps Me #2]
[rumble ensues]

I think if you sliced NYCB a certain way, you would get a weblog, but that would be a mighty poor way of slicing it, as you would miss all the weird entries like this one. Well, this particular one you would probably get.

Wed Jun 30 1999 08:50: I thought I had the encryption argument whomped with respect to Moglen's article, but then along comes {Mary, Eric S. Raymond}, who I still believe to be merely a sophisticated AI, and rephrases the argument in The Magic Cauldron (just incidentally, it's not the main thrust of the article or anything), and I don't know if the same counterargument applies or not.

I really like the verb "to whomp". Also "to whomp on". I'm not sure where it comes from. I may have made it up. It means "to leap on from a great height", metaphorically, "to trump or defeat". cf "To meet another's father in a steel cage".