Sat Jan 01 2000 00:03:
Let's drink a toast to Crazy Legs!
Sat Jan 01 2000 08:11:
I restrung the electric. It sounds a lot better now.
News You Can Bruise for 2000 |
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Sat Jan 01 2000 00:03:
Let's drink a toast to Crazy Legs!
Sat Jan 01 2000 08:11:
I restrung the electric. It sounds a lot better now.
Sat Jan 01 2000 20:38:
I changed robotfindskitten to use ncurses 5. It also comes with a
binary now. It's still in devel.
Sat Jan 01 2000 20:39:
I refurbish verbed the noun. It posesses some new
quality now.
Sat Jan 01 2000 20:44:
The date format is kinda icky at the moment. Today's date looks like 20000101.
That's five zeroes in a row. Eew. Cooties.
Sat Jan 01 2000 20:50:
Hey, I have a bit part in the
new ZZT/Megazeux saga. And it's a singing part! And it's one more
cavern in the canyon.
Here is the fortune I got just now:
The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and
not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could
have materialized -- and never knowing.
-- David Viscott
I think I will die without learning this lesson. So many lessons I will die without having learned. Like "don't die".
Sun Jan 02 2000 11:14:
Susanna's friend's nephew has a wooden duck which "goes waddling
across the floor making 'realistic duck noises'" and which,
bizarrely, is named after me. "They were deciding what to name it and Clark shouted
out the first name that popped into his head, and you are the only leonard
he knows, or knows of at least.", says Susanna.
Mon Jan 03 2000 08:01:
Huzzah! My Be Dope
story made Best
of Be Dope!
Mon Jan 03 2000 10:08:
eCow is back online. We apologize for the convenience.
Mon Jan 03 2000 10:24:
Hrmph. Scott ripped off the intentional-Y2K-breakage code I wrote
for Segfault, and put it on his own
{platters,site}. The joke is gone from Segfault, but it will
remain on netsplit until time immemorial, if I may mix my metaphors,
probably.
Mon Jan 03 2000 11:34:
Oh yeah, the new Mentos commercials are pale shadows of the old
Mentos commercials. I'm afraid Mentos may no longer be The Freshmaker.
The question is, if so, what is The Freshmaker now? (There must be a
Freshmaker, by the Law of Conservation of The Freshmaker)
Mon Jan 03 2000 14:08:
Scott claims that he didn't rip off my fake Y2K breakage code
(which is good, as the code was terrible), he just ripped off the
idea. I stand by my previous statement of "Hrmph."
Tue Jan 04 2000 08:21:
Wired
News has the story:
VA Linux Systems Inc., a developer of systems and services tailored to the alternative Linux operating system, said Tuesday that it will create a hosting service for so-called open source software projects.
Why don't they take care of the real open source projects before going on to the so-called open source projects?
Tue Jan 04 2000 11:35:
Behold Marvin Minsky's page! With all the third-person
biography you can stomach, and fun articles besides.
We all know the legend of the great mathematician who [was] warned that his proof would lead to a paradox if he took one more step. He replied "Ah, but I shall not take that step."
Wed Jan 05 2000 09:28:
First, there was Extreme Pizza Eating! Now, there's
Extreme Programming! The
geek population may never recover!
Wed Jan 05 2000 14:52:
I feel really, really bad that I couldn't think of anything funnier
than "Extreme Pizza Eating" to put in the previous entry. That entry
deserved better.
Wed Jan 05 2000 14:54:
I don't feel that bad. I feel a lot worse for other reasons.
But I wish I could have thought up something funnier.
Thu Jan 06 2000 06:26:
Is it fair to publish something like this?
I think it is. But why are they only picking on 4 or 5 guys?
Thu Jan 06 2000 06:35:
I don't understand the Amazon boycott thing. They take a loss on
every purchase you make, right? So the way to hit them where it hurts
is to buy a whole lot of stuff from them. The worst thing you
could possibly do is boycott them.
Fri Jan 07 2000 08:10:
Excellent. I was going to start writing Mahjongg Carnage and never
finish it, but someone else has written xmahjongg,
so I don't have to.
At one point Dan and I had a big argument over whether or not the solitaire version of Mahjongg was a "bastardized American version" (his exact words) of Mahjongg. I held that it was actually a different game that just happened to be played with the same materials, like Shisen-Sho, and that if you wanted a bastardized American version of Mahjongg you would have to look into the rule changes introduced upon the game's importation in the 1920s. Dan insisted on calling solitaire Mahjongg a bastardized American version of real Mahjongg, despite the fact that by the same logic, Klondike is a bastardized American version of Blackjack.
Fri Jan 07 2000 08:19:
Wait, never mind, xmahjongg is just another version of the solitaire
game, albeit one the authors of which are aware of the original game.
Fri Jan 07 2000 14:36:
All you trendy people who are getting pointed to Hyperdiscordia's Jusanotoron calendar
by your trendy web sites, be sure to also read the
rebuttal to it I wrote and Hyperdiscordia published, way back
in 1996.
Sat Jan 08 2000 17:28:
I bought this little bag of legumes for 79 cents at Trader Joes, wanting
to make soup with it. The rest of the stuff you need for the soup
(vegetables, tomato sauce) cost about $5. I didn't even get the celery.
Sat Jan 08 2000 18:32:
Guess what? I ruined the soup.
Mon Jan 10 2000 05:55:
I have class in 2 hours. Bleah.
Mon Jan 10 2000 06:39:
I think this guy might be the coolest person with an AOL homepage,
so cool that if you didn't know he had an AOL homepage and someone
told you, you'd say "No way!". Even more astounding, he actually has two AOL homepages, each of which contains one of the things I'm going to mention, and nothing else. On one is his
essay on the "bowling noir" art form, which is from his
book on The Big Lebowski. Just that ratchets him ten
notches above every other AOL page I've ever seen. But then he goes
off into this great rant:
By the time you finish this slim but magnificent volume, you'll have everything you need to know in order to make your very own Coen brothers film!
You heard us right! Who needs those two skinny Minnesotan oddballs? After you've read this paginated treasure trove of Coenana, you'll be able to create your very own offbeat, inaccessible, yet exquisitely crafted cinema that will leave audiences everywhere stupefied with delight! ...Right, boys?
Magnificent. I may or may not have to have that book.
Mon Jan 10 2000 07:50:
Whoops, I don't have class til 10. My EE discussion is tomorrow. Conveniently, both my discussions
conflict with my lab so I don't have to feel bad about not going.
Mon Jan 10 2000 14:11:
Inspired by Leonardonics, Scott James Remnant has posted
Scottish.
The page gives the impression that Scott's life is a continuous
sitcom in which strangers on the street proposition
Scott for sex, to which propositions Scott reacts with comic
astonishment.
Mon Jan 10 2000 18:36:
Apparantly the guy from whom my mother bought my Stop The Cascadia Megathrust
Subduction Event T-shirt (see /pix/1999/misc/) was predicting the Cascadia Megathrust Subduction
Event for the end of last year. He wrote a letter to the Sequim Gazette (forwarded to my mother by my great-aunt, forwarded to me by my mother)
explaining why no Cascadia Megathrust Subduction event had occured.
Surprisingly, the explanation was not that we had successfully Stopped
it. The explanation is that high atmospheric pressure had temporarily
deterred the Cascadia Megathrust Subduction Event, but that it
was still coming, mark you.
If I were this guy I would cut my losses and move onto something else, like model ships, but I don't have the emotional investment in the subject that he does. If I were to devise and implement a plan to actually Stop the Cascadia Megathrust Subduction Event once and for all, he'd probably punch me in the face.
Wed Jan 12 2000 06:51:
I'm working on getting the Totally MAD CD (which my mother gave me, thanks Mom) to work
under Linux. The first CD, which I assume to be a model for the others,
has a huge 500M file containing large numbers of JPEGs. There is also a
25M file which appears to contain an index. Unfortunately I can't
view the JPEGs because they're some weird nonstandard kind of JPEGs.
I sent one to Mike and he's going to get the graphics format guru at
Be to poke it with a stick. In the meantime, I'm going into the
CSUA lounge and installing in on the games machine, and seeing what
sort of temp files it leaves on the hard drive.
Wed Jan 12 2000 06:56:
I thought that Scott's quotes file only had Terry Pratchett
quotes in it, but just now I found one from me in there. So,
me and Terry Pretchett, pretty much. Living it up in Scott's quotes
file. Quotes database I should say.
Scott also put up the pictures of himself, myself, Garrett, and sometimes Illiad, so I can link those again from my never-to-be-finished (seriously) LWE travelogue.
Thu Jan 13 2000 06:42:
Blargh. My best current guess is that the JPGs are in some undocumented
format proponented (that's not a word) by a company called Pegasus,
which company is helpfully mentioned on the box the CDs come in.
Dan from Be says that the data might be encrypted somehow. That'd be
all I'd need.
I think that there are two factions within Be locked in a low-grade sort of mortal combat; one consisting of people with dull American names like Mike and Dan; and the other consisting of people with European names like Jean-Louis and Benoît, and that this internal struggle is what gives the BeOS its distinctive flavor. One day one side will triumph over the other, everyone on the losing side will change their name, and the BeOS will be altered forever.
Thu Jan 13 2000 06:43:
That last entry was not intended to offend anyone at Be. The people
at Be can take it, I know, so I guess this entry is to stave off anyone
who thinks they need to be offended for the people at Be.
Thu Jan 13 2000 16:54:
OK, the mystery is solved. One byte of the JPEG was obfuscated; adding
16 to it fixed the whole file. Only problem is, the files on the CD
are encoded using arithmetic coding, a Super-Huffman-Coding technique
which is patented by IBM. According to the data compression FAQ, this technique
offers 5%-10% greater compression than the normal Huffman coding
technique. Well, I (or my mother) may have been bilked out of $70, but at least
I learned a lot about the JPEG file format.
Fri Jan 14 2000 06:10:
OK, this is good news. I've plugged for Steve Ballmer in this space in the
past, and I'm doing it again. Steve Ballmer is perfect to head up Microsoft.
He's evil, he knows he's evil, and he's got a sense of humor about
it. He's like the ultimate Bond villan. Gates was just some
dork who tried to pretend he was a regular guy. You felt bad
ridiculing him, just because it was so easy. Ballmer knows where he
stands and he can take it as well as he dishes it out. Ballmer knows
the score.
Fri Jan 14 2000 06:22:
I have a strange tendency toward beginning entries with "OK," or "Hey,".
I think it's because when I write one of these entries
I feel like I'm sitting down at a table where you are already seated
and bringing you up to speed.
Fri Jan 14 2000 16:45:
Mike writes to say "btw, congrats on your 'Beanie' nomination".
I can't find any references to this so-called nomination on Slashdot,
and I even logged in on my account and everything. I await something
less vague from Mike.
Fri Jan 14 2000 16:53:
OK, the nomination is for me personally, "Best Deserving of a $2000
Award". at
this looooong URL which I had to type in because GPM isn't working
on kuato. Vote for me, even though I won't win, and even though
I couldn't tell you how to go about voting for me if my life
depended on it.
Mon Jan 17 2000 17:46:
Hey, that link doesn't work anymore!
I gotta go to the LUG meeting now.
Mon Jan 17 2000 20:02:
I'm going to stubbornly ignore the fact that the images on the MAD
CDs are encoded with arithmetic coding, and get to work on cracking
the index. Eventually, the patent will expire or I will move to
Korea, and when that happens I want a program that will work.
Tue Jan 18 2000 12:23:
Why does Scott always refer to me as "people", and say I'm complaining
when I'm not?
Certain people have complained that I always refer to them as "people" and that I say they complain when they're not complaining. These same people have swiped the style of the smarmy response to these pseudo-complaints so I can't do it. Bastards!
Wed Jan 19 2000 06:06:
I'm reading this article about
water
on Europa. And it occurs to me that it would really suck if there
was water on Europa but no life. Because let's not fool ourselves,
the only reason we care about water on Europa is because that might
mean life. Until we start strip-mining moons like in Fiasco,
anyway.
Wed Jan 19 2000 07:31:
I have to go print my resume (which hopefully I can get to fit on
one page) for the job fair today. And at 6, Dr. Rittel from Sun
will be speaking on "What I Wished [sic?] I Had Learned In Engineering
School". I guess that's not [sic], since he knows it now, and
therefore no longer wishes he had learned it in engineering school.
My left shoelace for some reason became all ragged, so I had to cut it up and restring my left shoe. Lousy shoelace!
Wed Jan 19 2000 07:43:
One of the things Dan keeps going on about is how bad the movie
High School High is. He goes on about this to the extent that
he will not believe that Jon Lovitz is actually pretty funny, just
because Jon Lovitz was in that movie. (I ask you, is it fair to judge
someone's entire comedic career based on one failure? No! Because
if that were the case, nobody would be funny.) So last night, to
silence these murmurings, I sat him down and we watched Manos: The
Hands Of Fate. After the movie: "I submit to you that that movie
was worse than High School High." Dan: "It was bad in a different
way." AAAAARGH!!!
Wed Jan 19 2000 09:01:
Guess who added this to kuato's motd:
Motd is archaic and unnecessarily restrictive. Text is so 70s!
My resume fits on one page, and I'm fairly sure the address is right. Now, to make copies!
Wed Jan 19 2000 16:46:
There's an actual game of Make Dan Complain going on in kuato's motd
now. I told Dan to work on bringing MDC to you, the Web public. My
idea is that he keeps a list of past complaints and people can query
them or request a new complaint.
I love this keyboard. It has great tactile and audible feedback. It says it's an MCL Micronorth. They don't make them anymore. I can say this with confidence because this keyboard does not have those damn Windows keys.
Thu Jan 20 2000 14:57:
Woohoo! I'm graduating in June! I just have to submit a petition
for my philosophy class, and declare my degree candidacy on URSA
Telephone, which I'm doing right now.
There, it's done. The candidacy part, I mean. I still have to submit that petition.
Thu Jan 20 2000 15:01:
Woops! My graduation evaluation report prints the year as 1900!
Fri Jan 21 2000 11:13:
The question is... what
are the other nine algorithms of the century? Seems like a list of
the top ten algorithms of the century would be very similar to a list
of the top ten algorithms ever.
Which reminds me, there is a talk being given by the Graduate Outreach group of the math department on "The Partial Differential Equation of the Century", "in the style of TIME Magazine". I'm not going to go because I hate differential equations, but I thought the flyer for the event was funny.
Fri Jan 21 2000 14:00:
Leonardonics: Demon Dog,
That was a good
x. I'm not too happy about the copy for those entries, although
the Aerosmith part is great (but it's a great bit, and I've been
kicking it around my head for a while).
Domain names consisting of numbers are good to deal with because
1) they're easy to enumerate (the smallest untaken number I can find is 2151.com), and 2) they tend to be owned by people who
think or hope that owning a domain name is the key to riches. Look at the sales pitch of the person who owns 500.com. Fri Jan 21 2000 14:37:
I'm low-key looking at the web sites that have numbers as .com domain
names. It's sort of a function mapping the natural numbers onto
the set of web pages. As you might have expected, this function is
neither one-to-one nor onto.
Sat Jan 22 2000 07:32:
See! The frustration of this guy who wrote a Linux development
environment for the Playstation and has to put "This is not a game and this
is not a Sony product and it's not Linux for the PlayStation." in the
Freshmeat entry!
Wed Jan 26 2000 04:45:
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.
Wed Jan 26 2000 04:59:
I added a section about dealing with questionable complaints in
Make Dan Complain.
I'm thinking about maybe making the penalty for questionable complaints
greater than it is now, to add some balance to the game.
Fri Jan 28 2000 11:28:
I got mail from Andy. The reason Andy is so hard to get a hold of is
that he's in England (or will be soon). Wowsers! He's
doing a research-type deal. "It all came sort of like a mandate," says
Andy. Andy's the only person I know who could say "It all came
sort of like a mandate."
I want to make a trailer for a movie called "How's It Goin', Andy?" I don't want to make the movie, just the trailer. I don't know what the trailer would involve, but it would definitely have lots of people saying "How's it goin', Andy?". I love that phrase. I want to have the following conversation with Andy:
Leonard: How's it goin', Andy?
Andy: It all came sort of like a mandate.
Fri Jan 28 2000 11:32:
YESterday I was talking with Josh about Space Ghost. And about
Brak. Yes, Brak! It all started because I have a Space Ghost quote in
my sig. Brak! Josh revealed that he has huge amounts of Brak quotes
and skits in MP3 format. Here is the FTP site: Brak Attack!
It has some other comedy stuff too, but who needs comedy when you've
got Brak? Brak!
Fri Jan 28 2000 15:01:
The LUG is having a Nethack tournament on xorn (kuato's replacement,
donated by VA). Nobody is particularily good, but I'm way ahead of
everybody else. Dan's going to beat me when his character finally dies,
though. He's been working on one character since yesterday afternoon.
Sat Jan 29 2000 17:03:
All my clothes are clean. And the sky is grey. My part of the room
has been invaded by ants so I bought things that you set out which contain food such that
the ants take the food home to their queen and it kills her. Presumably all
the other ants die when the queen dies, or there'd be no point in engaging in this bit of political intruigue.
Last night Josh invited me over to watch Space Ghost. It was tasty.
Sat Jan 29 2000 17:54:
I forgot to mention that Josh is in awe of my mighty Space Ghost
impression. My best line is "Ya like the Zorak, do ya?"
Sat Jan 29 2000 20:43:
The theology of Nethack is somewhat confused. I'd elaborate, but it's
almost time for "My Word!".
Wed Feb 02 2000 08:17:
Shoot, I gotta pay the rent.
Wed Feb 02 2000 08:50:
My favorite Daily Bruin headline yet: "Greed for knowledge grips
campus". That one's a keeper.
Thu Feb 03 2000 11:44:
I got a 96th percentile on the CollegeHire UNIX administration test and
76th percentile on the HTML test (damn frames questions tripped me
up). Hire me!
I still have to take the Java test.
Thu Feb 03 2000 18:04:
Mike snuck in another link to Crummy in this
BeDope article.
Fri Feb 04 2000 06:40:
Aaaaaah! Godzilla
2000 is attacking the city!
I love that site because THEY PICK VITAL STATISTICS FOR GODZILLA AND STICK WITH THEM!!! Something that the Americans never figured out how to do.
Great blurbs from the producer and directors on that site as well, such as: "I want people to leave the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility." But the very best thing is that it looks like this Godzilla story brings back the Gamera thing where Godzilla destroys everything but it's somehow okay and he's our friend. I can't get enough of that.
When can I see this movie, you ask? Not until summer, unless you live in Japan. (I got that from IMDB, it's not on the Godzilla site that I could see)
I gotta see what else is on this site.
Fri Feb 04 2000 06:42:
Actually, there's nothing else on the English site other than a list
of the Godzilla movies.
Fri Feb 04 2000 07:06:
As long as I was at the IMDB, I checked something that had been
in the back of my mind. In Unforgiven, the 1992 Clint Eastwood western, one of the characters
is a fat sheriff's deputy with a horribly ugly beard, who gets shot in an outhouse
near the end of the movie. In Laserblast, of MST3K fame,
one of the characters is a fat sheriff's deputy with a horribly ugly beard, who...
gets shot in an outhouse near the end of the movie. Now, Laserblast
is a 1978 film, so it's obviously
not the same actor. But I just wanted to make sure, because if it
were, talk about typecasting!
Other things I learned from IMDB today: Laserblast had a 1985 sequel, Laserblast II, about which nothing is known other than who wrote it (some guy). It was remade in 1989 as Deadly Weapon. Apparantly, by the late 80s all the bad movie scripts had already been made into bad movies and it was neccessary to remake bad movies of the 70s. Also, Pod People was originally a Spanish (as in Spain) film.
Fri Feb 04 2000 07:17:
One more IMDB thing: Get to a movie's IMDB entry and change the number in the URL
around to get movies at semi-random (it's ordered by year and then
alphabetically).
Fri Feb 04 2000 13:20:
I just took a look at the Godzilla 2000 trailer. The movie looks really
nice. What's even better is the fact that the people who made the
trailer worked so hard to make it an intense and exciting movie
trailer so that people in the theater would clap when Godzilla came
on the screen, etc.; and then some jerk narrator comes on after the
trailer and tries to sell you cheap plastic Godzilla toys, complete
with a cheezy sound effect that mocks the trademark Godzilla roar (in
the commercial soundtrack, I mean; I don't think the toys could actually
make any sound more complicated than a squeak),
and you can just hear the people who did the trailer start to cry.
I don't know if that is standard procedure in Japan or what, but
I thought it was funny because I didn't expect it at all, and isn't that what funny is? I'm outa here.
Sat Feb 05 2000 16:08:
And look what else I found (also not yet avaliable in the US):
Gamera
2: Advent of Legion and Gamera 3: Gamera Vs. Irys (That link
has a funny Gamera caricature as well).
Review
of Gamera 2 at Stomp Tokyo gives it 4 lava lamps.
"Ten thousand cases of beer wasted? How horrible!"
Sun Feb 06 2000 09:54:
Daniel Hsu sent me a link to GDancer,
a plug-in for XMMS. XMMS is evidently an MP3 player of some kind.
What GDancer does is it makes Space Ghost dance to music.
I've never heard of XMMS, but strangely enough I
had it on sal despite having recently gone through and trashing
every package I'd never used. I had to upgrade the package anyway,
and install xmms-devel to compile the plugin.
And what do I get for all this trouble? I'll tell you what. Like The Young Ones, Space Ghost does not dance to music. He just stands there like Napolean and occasionally lunges at the table as though he is about to vomit.
Experimentation shows that it totally depends on the song. The program has four pixmaps of Space Ghost and shows one of them depending on what range of frequencies is most prevalent at a given sample point. The only MP3s I have that made Space Ghost do much of anything were some of Kris'. Even then, it wasn't really dancing.
I don't know how you'd go about actually making a thing that made Space Ghost dance (Space Ghost Ghost Dance), but I'm afraid this technique (and it would have to be something like this technique) doesn't work. I can't recommend GDancer.
Mon Feb 07 2000 06:21:
I want to make a trailer for an action film called "Otherwise Engaged". It
may or may not star Wil Smith and Sean Connery, but either way the
trailer narrator will say, "Wil Smith is... Otherwise Engaged!
Sean Connery is... Otherwise Engaged!"
Mon Feb 07 2000 06:50:
Some people, such as my mother, are confused by my CollegeHire
entry down there. CollegeHire is a recruiting front-end for about
30 tech companies. You give them a resume and take some tests on
their Web site, they interview you; that works as a first-round
interview for all 30 companies. The ones that are interested in you
subject you to a second interview, then make an offer or don't.
The end.
Tue Feb 08 2000 07:18:
I got this joke as a fortune and I'm not sure whether I don't get
the joke or whether I get it but it's not a good joke. Here is the
joke rum:
Q: What does a WASP Mom make for dinner?
A: A crisp salad, a hearty soup, a lovely entree, followed by
a delicious dessert.
Send me your interpretations of the joke. It's a joke interpretation circus! Festival. Contest. Colloquium.
Tue Feb 08 2000 07:38:
Jake sez: extra
extra. duchamp rocks like a sly fox. Mom, Steven Jay Gould
co-wrote these articles.
Tue Feb 08 2000 07:39:
I was adressing that last sentence to my mother. My mother did not
write those articles with Steven Jay Gould.
Tue Feb 08 2000 16:21:
In the lounge today, we were generalizing Mr. T. From "I pity the
foo!" we get "There exists an x such that I pity the x!"
That's basically the joke. There were a couple other jokes but they
all reduce to that one.
Speaking of jokes, I've recieved three interpretations of the WASP joke. Mike's is probably the right interpretation, although it means that putting the joke into written form can only confuse. We're still manning the phones to take your joke interpretations.
Tue Feb 08 2000 17:09:
Gdancer got updated. It's a lot smoother now. I can now recommend it.
Get it. It still depends on the song, though.
I think the reason there are so many MP3 players is that there is a contest among programmers to come up with the worst conceivable graphical user interface, and MP3 players are the field of battle.
Tue Feb 08 2000 17:11:
Dan says that the same thing that goes for MP3 players goes for
window manager themes. So it looks like the graphic
designers are in on this contest as well.
Tue Feb 08 2000 17:21:
I made a graphic for Mike on Mike's suggestion that Be CEO Jean-Louis
Gassé wear a T-shirt bearing the "forward-looking statements" disclaimer Gassé must
place after every utterance (lest he run afoul of the SEC). Mike
turned the suggestion into a
story and used my graphic, despite the fact that the lines
of text on the graphic don't line up, because I'm a lazy bum. The
T-shirt comes from copyleft's picture of a Segfault T-shirt.
Tue Feb 08 2000 20:56:
I am grooving on Kris' latest single, No Alternative. It's a
great song, even though it inevitably recalls the compilation disk
of the same name (circa 1993) which had a decent Pavement song (I
think it was Pavement) and the hard-rockin' Verse Chorus Verse
and everything else on it sucked.
Wed Feb 09 2000 07:00:
The joke interpretation colloquium is over now. We will surely miss
you. If you want to see us again, just turn on your TV to... Channel
2!
Mike Popovic presented a breathtakingly transgressive and hermeneutic interpretation of the joke. For those of you who weren't here yesterday, the joke is:
Q: What does a WASP Mom make for dinner?
A: A crisp salad, a hearty soup, a lovely entree, followed by
a delicious dessert.
Mike's analysis:
obviously a big joke in entomolgy circles, the jokester counts on his victim not thinking outside his field when he hears the word "wasp". thus, hilarity ensues as the other meaning dawns upon the listeners upon hearing the punchline.
I think this is the correct interpretation. The fatal error of the joke manufacturer was to write down the joke, thus showing his or her hand too early.
Many were confused by the acronymic expansion of WASP. WASP is an acronym for a simpler time, expanding to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. There used to be a time at which the ethnicity "white" was considered to have sub-ethnicities, "Anglo-Saxon" being one of them. This view of things stopped being feasible around 1975, so the term "WASP" is something of a verbal coelacanth.
Wed Feb 09 2000 09:43:
I just realized that I've been misspelling "Jean-Louis Gassée".
I have to go take a midterm now. It should be easy.
Thu Feb 10 2000 18:48:
Ancient Chinese secret!
Fred extracted that file for me. You drink it yourself! I've had
enough!
I rearranged misc just for the occasion.
Fri Feb 11 2000 11:07:
The fourth anniversiary issue of the Apache Week newsletter
consists of an article talking about the fact that it is the
fourth anniversiary issue. It reminds me of the tenth issue of the BWAH!
newsletter, in which the publication of the tenth issue
of BWAH! was commemorated.
Fri Feb 11 2000 15:08:
Can you get any kind of comprehension out of reading a large
piece of text at the rate of one a sentence a day? Francisco
Roque, author of FoSaT,
thinks you can. I like that idea (on the paragraph level) but I honestly don't think it would
work.
Sat Feb 12 2000 10:50:
My mother, who would know, responds on the reading comprehension
issue:
The answer is an emphatic NO. Research has indicated that the #1 factor in comprehension is reading speed.
Sat Feb 12 2000 15:36:
I've spent the last 2.5 hours in the lab, redoing the Adam/John/Leonard
digital design project. Most of the stuff I could just copy, but I
wanted to have a clean version because the old version was horribly
messy and disorganized. I'm not sure if it was worth it. I don't
know if it works yet. It should work, since I didn't make any actual
design changes, but there's always one or two things that you screw
up. Right now I'm waiting for Adam to call me. I don't know whether
he's going to come in and help me or if he just wanted to know
when I was working on it.
Sat Feb 12 2000 15:42:
Adam is going to come over and help me. He's also bringing me food.
Fryyyyyy, you're my frieeeend.
Sun Feb 13 2000 09:12:
Stories on LinuxToday: 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks,
1 talkback, 6 talkbacks, 55 talkbacks, 0 talkbacks... gee, I wonder
what that article was about?
Sun Feb 13 2000 11:35:
Leonardonics: x (not x).
Mainly there for completeness. There's nothing incredibly funny
about the entry.
Sun Feb 13 2000 18:26:
Waiting for a CD from Jake; Peter is keen on learning Python so he
ordered Learning Python for himself and Programming Python
for me. Looks like a week of packages.
Mon Feb 14 2000 07:15:
"It's becoming increasingly evident that Linux caught most analysts
completely by surprise," reveals APCNews.
You know, there's not a single thing that happens but catches most
analysts completely by surprise. I'm not even sure how analysts make
a living, with their miserable track record.
Sun Rises; Analysts Stunned
Mon Feb 14 2000 08:36:
I actually turned Sun Rises; Analysts Stunned into a decent
Segfault story. It'll have to wait for a day with a visible sunrise,
though.
Mon Feb 14 2000 08:37:
Barbecue potato chips. Whose sick idea was that?
Tue Feb 15 2000 20:32:
Here's my challenge. Will you take the Mr. Sparkle Challenge?
Put up a site on mp3.com. Record 250 songs and put them up on your site. The songs are subject to the following conditions:
First person to get to 250 songs (or however many if they add more genres to MP3.com) wins. Anybody who actually accomplishes this... well, I don't have words for it. So a scoring thing would probably be better, something like:
Ideas? Rule changes? Anyone actually want to try this? Is this challenge not as stupid as it sounds, or is it in fact stupider? Or is it exactly as stupid as it sounds? I'm not sure. It may be just another sign of my impending insanity, but I think this actually sounds like an interesting project (obviously, it would take a long, long, long time, but an interesting project it would be nonetheless).
Tue Feb 15 2000 21:01:
I got a hit today from a webcrawler called Crawl of the Dead. It
made me laugh. Good job, h139-142-200-234.cg.fiberone.net.
Wed Feb 16 2000 07:05:
Vital STATS
tastes good, like a (click, click) statistics newsletter should. Who
asked you?
Wed Feb 16 2000 07:07:
Nice try, Daniel.
Wed Feb 16 2000 09:48:
Is it just me, or is it disconcertening to hear Leonard Kleinrock
consistently referred to as "Mr. Kleinrock" throughout an article
as long as this
one? Maybe that's the way they do things over at the Chronicle
of Higher Education.
Wed Feb 16 2000 15:58:
Island of Bali is not actually magical.
Thu Feb 17 2000 07:38:
According to some bogus study or other, Linux has 4% of desktop
market share compared to Mac OS' 5%. I can't wait for Linux to pull
ahead, not because I hate the Mac OS (although I do), but so I can
say "Ah yes, the non-desktop OS that's on more desktops than the Mac."
Thu Feb 17 2000 15:54:
I asked Peter in our weekly write session how the world would be different
today had the Library of Alexandria not been burned. Because of
our write conventions and his lowercasosity, his answer looked a lot
like a free-verse poem:
not too different;
the world was not ready for all that truth
by which i mean, all that enlightenment
the barbarians left little when they were finished
sacking rome;
europe was a dark place;
byzantium wasn't too much better, especially once the
muslims took over;
we got just about the right doses of antiquity into europe as it is;
but about the database you suggested;;
Thu Feb 17 2000 18:18:
I forgot to mention that they tore down the Sherman Oaks Galleria,
beloved of Moon Unit Zappa's character in Valley Girl and
absolutely no one else.[0] This ended my tradition of singing the
"Sher-man-Oaks-Gal-le-ri-a" line from Bull + Swamp = Cow
whenever I was in a car that drove past it. I am now reduced to
singing that line whenever I'm in a car that drives past where it
used to be, confusing the heck out of the other people in the car,
who see no Sherman Oaks Galleria in sight.
I remember the first reference I ever saw to TCP/IP. I was 14 or 15. It sounded really mysterious and scary.
[0] I've been in some bad malls in my time, but none as bad as the Sherman Oaks Galleria.
Fri Feb 18 2000 06:51:
I made a bad pun to Dan on Wednesday. I mentioned the pun to Jake
on Thursday. On Friday, Jake wrote a poem expounding on the bad pun.
Monday's child is fair of face. Here's the poem (doggerel, Jake
calls it. It is doggerel. It's a doggerel beer.):
in a very special sort
of suit the waiter served a torte
that poisoned was and so with poise
he passed it on to his employs
but later found and malice proved
the coppers followed suit and sued
and from the bistro to the court
they served a special kind of tort
and when it looked like he was beat
the waiter did retort the heat
the waiter did reheat the torte
and ate it then and there, in court.
he never broke a single plate
cussed or drank or came in late
in court he threw his only fit:
"you cannot fire me- i quit."
This site is turning into a poetry corner or something.
Fri Feb 18 2000 07:15:
Jake's latest album, Ordem e Progresso, is out. I still haven't
gotten the CD, but you and me both can get the
MP3s at Jake's MP3.com page. Also
downloadable from there: Many MP3s from Jake's previous effort
Robot Moped Dehumidifier. Ordem e Progresso contains
something resembling a cover of my own Liquid
Crystal. Also includes Pterodactyl Attack and
Susanna's Webpage. If this trend continues, Jake's next album
will have 5 tracks on it that are covers of my songs or otherwise
related to me, and eight albums down the line I won't even have to
do my own albums because Jake will do them for me.
Kris' album is also out, although a couple of the tracks are mysteriously missing from his MP3.com page. Oh, "four tracks unavaliable anywhere else" if you buy the CD. I see how it is. I see. Also not on the album (not on mp3.com either for copyright reasons (I don't see any copyright reasons, but Kris does)) is Kris' fab cover of Asia Carrera, which I plugged in this space a while ago and which I can now link to.
leonardr's picks: For Kris, Solid State, Shot Down Again, Border,
No Alternative. For Jake, There's A Mirror On My Grave
("Your shoestring budget will be the death of you!" YES!!!),
Hot Stuff, Susanna's Webpage, My Pal Foot Foot,
and I Sing Because I Live With Satan. For the man who
has everything, I recommend more of everything.
Sat Feb 19 2000 05:45:
Funny Nethack bug: If you hit a shopkeeper with a cockatrice corpse
and then reanimate him with Stone To Flesh, he loses his name.
So when you talk to him it says " complains that business is bad."
He also no longer recognizes his shop, so you can't buy anything
from him (but you can just walk out with everything in his shop).
Sat Feb 19 2000 06:14:
Oh, and another funny message: if you kill a monster inside a shop
and it leaves a corpse, the shopkeeper gains ownership of the corpse.
So when you pick up the corpse, he says, "You be careful with my
corpse!"
Sat Feb 19 2000 11:43:
Why is sound called "multimedia"? It's one, count 'em, one medium.
Sat Feb 19 2000 12:01:
I heartily endorse The
GNU Virtual Fridge. Beware of imitations! Only the GNU Virtual
Fridge will let you access /fridge/freezer/icetray/cube1!
Sun Feb 20 2000 14:26:
Ever notice how you never see Clark Kent and Superwoman in the
same place at the same time?
Mon Feb 21 2000 17:25:
I did not know that there was actually a cereal called Fruit Brute.
I thought it was a pun on "Froot Loops".
Mon Feb 21 2000 19:14:
Corrections to my music recommendations: Quantum Mechanic by
Kris is very good, although I wish he'd redone the first part with a
more apropos physics book quote after he had the idea. Jake's Vivo
Sonhando is better than Hot Stuff. I didn't like Jake's
Vivo Sonhando voice, but now I realize that's the only way
to do that song.
Mon Feb 21 2000 19:22:
I have my rights! I have my rights! It was David O'Callaghan, he did this to me! He forced me to add
another entry to The Best Of Dada Pokey!
Mon Feb 21 2000 19:48:
Be in my video, darlin', every night. Everyone in cable-land will
say you're outa sight. You can show your legs while you're getting
in the car. And I will look repulsive while I mangle my guitar.
Reen toon teen toon teen toon tee-noo-nee-noo-nee.
Tue Feb 22 2000 06:49:
I'm aware that Daily Pokey is not being dailified. The command
I have in my cron file, when run manually, works correctly. So
for some reason my cronjob is not executing. I'm working on it.
Tue Feb 22 2000 18:29:
I gotta say, I must be just about the funniest guy in the
world. Just look at all these people who have ripped off my
"open sores" joke:
I know I'm overly protective about this. It just makes me think that I'm doing things the hard way thinking up my own jokes.
Tue Feb 22 2000 19:43:
Joe Mahoney reminds me that the low-tech version of Slashdot
in the pre-Y2K After Y2K! comics was called The Open Sores
Newsletter.
Note: I'm not mad at these people. It's just weird and disturbing to make up a joke and then over the next two years see the joke percolate up to appearing in newspaper comic strips like Foxtrot.
I'm fairly sure no one made up the joke before me. I first used it a year before I saw anyone else use it.
Tue Feb 22 2000 19:49:
I should link to Joe's page. Here
it is. Joe is from New Zealand. This uniquely qualifies him to
write about life in New Zealand.
Tue Feb 22 2000 20:51:
YES!!! fscktris!!
Of course, this only got thought of just before everyone moves to
a journaling filesystem.
Wed Feb 23 2000 08:56:
You know how when a piece of research confirms or purports
to explain some piece of common knowledge, it gets reported as
"Hey look, the eggheads finally discovered that aspirin relieves
pain!" or "Professor Newton's learned theory demonstrates
to the unwashed masses that, should one drop a coin or a ball, it will unfailingly
strike the
ground without undue delay." Boy, that steams my toast. That's not
really the point of this entry. The point of this entry is that
if research really worked the way it gets reported, we'd see papers
like my new Segfault story,
What
If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit By A Bus? -- An Empirical Study.
Wed Feb 23 2000 09:24:
Mike says that the "open sores" joke has probably been developed
independantly of me. That's probably true. I just like to complain.
For instance:
I used Graphtool to do the graph for the Segfault story. Graphtool is what people who don't like free software wish all free software was like. It crashes for no reason, it's hard to use, and it's oriented towards the same type of math graphs that gnuplot is oriented towards, which means no {hamburgers, pie charts or real bar graphs}. And it depends on gtk+extras, a GTK library that I'd never heard of which I had to find and compile (but which is pretty cool).
Hoom, there is a new version of Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice. I mean edition. I wish I had money.
Wed Feb 23 2000 09:37:
I just realized that I forgot to put units on that graph. Oh well.
Wed Feb 23 2000 09:52:
This is an approximation of the phone call I just got:
leonardr: Quite frankly, I couldn't have less use for that.
Lady: I'd like to tell you about our fabulous call waiting service call waiting has many wonderful features such as feature 1 and feature 2 and if you sign up now you get feature 3 so let's sign you up for call waiting right now, okay?
leonardr: Look, I know you're just doing your job, but I have no use for any of that.
Lady: I'm calling to tell you about our wonderful system where--
leonardr: Are you a person or a recording?
Lady: No sir.
leonardr: Because I don't need anything. I'm fine.
Lady: Are there any services I can help you with?
leonardr: No, I'm fine.
It took about twenty seconds after that point to convince her that I didn't need any of GTE's services except the ones I'm already paying for. I don't even need the ones I'm paying for, but Dan needs a phone.
I've gotten telemarketing phone calls before, but never one where the person just went into another sales pitch after one was rejected. She really did sound like a recording. I wasn't asking to be rude.
Wed Feb 23 2000 15:16:
Segfault link and nice little mention (with the inevitable
Onion comparison) on Salon
last week.
Thu Feb 24 2000 06:25:
Today's
Zippy is very good. That link will only work til Monday because
the Zippy strips get reset every Monday. I really wish the Gate
had an archive.
Thu Feb 24 2000 06:45:
Breakfast of Pathogens! I love this T-shirt.
Thu Feb 24 2000 16:15:
Me to Mike: how science reporting should be done.
I think that news reporting of research results should be done as though every trivial result shattered prevailing theories and had been the subject of bizarre cover-ups from the government and the scientific establishment.
NASA SCIENTISTS IN ELECTROMAGNETIC SHOCKER!
INFRARED EMISSIONS IN LATE-PHASE TYPE M STARS -- WE EXPOSE THE COVERUP!
THE SPECTROGRAPHS THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE!
Thu Feb 24 2000 22:52:
You know that old song, "A woman is a woman but a man ain't nothing
but a man"? I don't know who wrote it, but I believe Jimi Hendrix
covered it at one point. Well, today, Adam and I discovered that you
could sing that Fig Newtons slogan to the tune of the song: "A cookie
is a cookie but a Newton is figs and cake."
Fri Feb 25 2000 07:11:
There is an article in Newsweek about increased rates of interracial
marriage among Asian men, and generally how Asian men are "movin' on
up", as it were. Mike was showing it to everyone on his laptop,
which is how I read it. There was this big section on stereotypes
about Asian men, which Mike basically summed up as "Asian men are
like Mike.". Mike said I should write a Segfault story on the subject.
Me: "Yeah, I'm gonna look real good writing a story with a bunch of
Asian stereotypes in it."
I was also shocked to find out that Jackie Chan is not considered to be a sex symbol. C'mon. He should be. Ladies, write him in on your ballot.
Fri Feb 25 2000 07:14:
Geez, too many people named Mike. The Mike in the Asian stereotypes
entry is Mike Chan of the LUG. The Mike in the science reporting entry
is Mike Popovic of Be Dope. Am I going to have to go back off a first-name
basis with Mike Popovic?
Fri Feb 25 2000 07:16:
I had a really good Nethack wizard, but a rock troll kept clobbering
me. I'd kill the troll, start to eat it, and the troll would come back to life
and clobber me some more. So I'd kill it again etc. It got pretty ridiculous. I've got another
wizard I'm working on now that's pretty good, though.
Fri Feb 25 2000 11:42:
The brash exuberance of yesterday's "Breakfast of Pathogens!" T-shirt
gives way to the congenial lame-duck satire of today's "University
of Canada" T-shirt.
Fri Feb 25 2000 11:56:
I found that
Newsweek article, if you care. Even if you don't care, I found
it.
Fri Feb 25 2000 19:40:
Celeste wrote me an
explanation as to why Jackie Chan is not a sex symbol. Apparantly
the sociologist in the Newsweek article was right about him.
Who'da thunk it?
Fri Feb 25 2000 21:09:
I squashed various bugs in the Daily Pokey lister which was limiting
you to viewing Pokeys for the first year (1999). Not that it matters,
since there are no Daily Pokeys for 2000 to speak of due to the cronjob
weirdness.
Fri Feb 25 2000 21:21:
My URSA enrollment appointment (My last one! I hope.) starts on the
28th. Don't let me forget!
Sat Feb 26 2000 08:04:
Daily Pokey works again now. I also retroactively added all the Daily
Pokeys from December 1999 to the present.
Sat Feb 26 2000 23:09:
I finally beat Dan's nethack score. His score: 264237. My score:
726876. Cause of death: impatience, as always. I had four wishes I hadn't used
when I died.
Mon Feb 28 2000 03:47:
Today's
Astronomy Picture of the Day is awesome; a galaxy viewed edge-on.
Mon Feb 28 2000 04:04:
People in Britain (possibly the Commonwealth at large): pick the
thing you understand least about Americans.
This is
your analogue for me. It eludes all attempts at my
describing it. I know it's done tongue in cheek, but that doesn't
make it any less weird. I can't even pick a good quote from it.
Mon Feb 28 2000 04:09:
Oh, that same group is the group that published the excellent
Passport to the Pub.
(I didn't recognize the site because I read PttP in Lynx)
Mon Feb 28 2000 07:57:
Daniel Hsu has an editthispage site.
I like editthispage because it encourages people to do the kind of
site I like to read (ie. sites like this one).
Mon Feb 28 2000 09:31:
You know, the scandal of American slavery really pales before the
scandal of Thomas Jefferson fathering children by one of his slaves.
Mon Feb 28 2000 09:42:
Before I forget: I got an 85th percentile (90% absolute) on
CollegeHire's Java test.
Tue Feb 29 2000 07:17:
I have an account on SourceForge (for the SLIIME project), so
I guess I'm an Official Open Source DeveloperTM now.
SLIME is the Segfault-Like
Interface Made Easy. The name has been around for about a year,
the code for about a week (but it's about the 5th incarnation of the
code, so it works out). Scott has put me on the database abstraction
layer. I'll do it after finals.
Tue Feb 29 2000 11:38:
Rather than broadcast crap with dubbed-in canned laughter, why don't
they broadcast whatever it is they used to create the canned laughter
in the first place?
Wed Mar 01 2000 08:35:
Sourceforge looks really nice. I have to learn how to use CVS now.
Wed Mar 01 2000 09:57:
Josh on his Australian heritage: "I come from good convict stock."
Thu Mar 02 2000 06:47:
Hi. I'm trooper Leonard Richardson. You know, I've seen it all--stared
into the gapin' maw of death--and I'm here to tell you of the horror
that lurks everywhere. No, don't get up.
Thu Mar 02 2000 18:31:
As the guy from Zelda 2 once said,
... ...
Sat Mar 04 2000 17:56:
Dan made an astute observation: Dan
Gillmor is what Jon Katz should be.
Sun Mar 05 2000 07:22:
I really like advogato, but I
always spell it "advagato". A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Mon Mar 06 2000 05:13:
Is there a book or Web site dealing with inconsistencies in Ulysses?
There should be, just to annoy the sort of people whom that would
annoy.
Mon Mar 06 2000 07:57:
ElfStone Attic Treasures.
What a great concept. A CD of old, obscure Linux stuff. The Linux counterpart
of the Da Warren CD Dave and I are working on, I suppose. And it's
got this great marketing on that page, which I will translate for you:
Mon Mar 06 2000 08:47:
Yesterday I was in Hollywood and I passed a store called Gay Mart
USA ("America's Favorite Gay Superstore"). What does one buy in a
gay superstore? Gay power tools? Big tubs of gay laundry detergent?
No, just the usual boring gay
clothes. If there was another gay superstore on the market,
Gay Mart USA would no longer be America's favorite, I'll tell ya that
for free.
Mon Mar 06 2000 08:54:
For some reason I'm really in the mood today to make fun of
marketingspeak. It must be spring! Yes! Spring is here again!
Tue Mar 07 2000 06:19:
My mother says it is my glorious duty to write the book on inconsistencies
in Ulysses. I think I'll save that for some English major
who has nothing better to do than nitpick Ulysses anyway.
Tue Mar 07 2000 06:27:
A starts-amusing-and-degenerates article
the original title of which (as seen on Newshub) was "Reptile diverts royal". I had to
look at the article because I had forgotten about the use of "royal"
as a noun so I thought "diverts" was being used as a noun and it was
like "This reptile's diverts are just plain excessive!". Whatever diverts are.
Tue Mar 07 2000 19:35:
Here's an idea: the Drinking Game Drinking Game. [Andy Rooney]D'jever
notice how drinking games are all kinda the same?[/Andy Rooney]
What if you could abstract the various mean-spirited tropes found in
drinking games into a set of rules that was itself a drinking game?
eg. "Take one drink every time you drink because someone exhibited
some mannerism of speech or annoying quirk." If a drinking game was
going too slowly, this would be a perfect way to up the ante, as it
were.
Tue Mar 07 2000 19:36:
I'm using square brackets instead of angle brackets because the
notebook program doesn't deal with editing lts and gts correctly, and
I'm too lazy to fix it.
Wed Mar 08 2000 06:26:
The Mozilla people cleverly do
not actually say the words "Open Sores", for they fear my string-searching
wrath. But all in vain, for the mighty Scott is
upon them like a whirlwind.
Wed Mar 08 2000 06:26:
I need to get my links page up so I don't have to link to people's
pages whenever I mention their names.
Wed Mar 08 2000 07:08:
What do these
five articles have to do with each other? I have no idea. The first three set something up and the next two knock it down.
And there's no email adress for that guy, so I can't contact him to ask
why he brought them together under the rubric of "economics".
Wed Mar 08 2000 08:19:
Industrial automation has gone too far! They've fired Mike Popovic
and replaced him with a
big glass of water!
Hey Mike, can I link to your webcam?
Wed Mar 08 2000 08:48:
jwz's Webcollage is
being used by people who are not jwz, and two separate people using it hit
the same one of my sketchbook cartoons within the span of a few hours, making
causing two Altavista image queries from Webcollage to appear in my access log and causing me to think there was some connection between the two hits when
there wasn't. A coincidence worthy of Lem.
Wed Mar 08 2000 08:50:
It may not be jwz's webcollage, since I can't find the source for
that on jwz's page. It may be one of the zillions of other programs
called "webcollage".
Wed Mar 08 2000 09:50:
Coming soon (this afternoon) to Da Da Warren
Memorial Memorial: Ace reporter Dave Griffith has the chilling
story of...the Theobrominator!
Wed Mar 08 2000 11:02:
I live in mortal fear that I'm going to be walking past some short
girl and she's going to put my eye out with her umbrella.
Thu Mar 09 2000 06:26:
I had two emails waiting for me when I woke up. One is from Scott.
The other is from Fred. Both are 2,108 bytes long.
You: That was an amazing story.
Me: I know.
Thu Mar 09 2000 06:48:
For years, science has mocked at the venerable notion that the
moon is made of green cheese, preferring their ridiculous "rock theory". Now, those hoity-toity eggheads must
eat their words, as the latest evidence shows that the
poles of Mars resemble different kinds of cheese! Vindication for
green cheese selenology! It's time to take our classrooms back from
rock theory and its Communist proponents!
Thu Mar 09 2000 06:53:
Dave says he has to think about my putting his Theobrominator story
up on the Memorial. Take your time, Dave. Jeepers.
Thu Mar 09 2000 07:11:
Yesterday I was setting Mark up with a copy of NOWB, and I decided
that the fact that he needed the author of the program to set it up
for him was not a good sign. So I need documentation. And the reason
I have been holding off on writing documentation is that the notebook
program is a mess. It's written in two different languages and it
has a lot of legacy stuff from when I tried to generalize it in the
wrong direction. So I'm thinking of taking an afternoon and rewriting
it all in Python, and then doing proper documentation, and then Mark
can set it up himself.
Mark made mention (alliteration!) of some feature (I don't remember what) that many weblog scripts have. I dismissed it by saying "Well, when I wrote this there were no weblogs," but now that I'm rewriting NOWB and there are weblogs now, I might as well listen to feature requests. One thing I'm definitely going to do is put in anchors for each entry, eg "20000302-3" for this one, so that you can point to, chop up, etc. particular entries. One thing I'm definitely not going to do is bring a database into the fray. {Cuba, XML}, maybe. {Castro, Database}, no.
Fri Mar 10 2000 06:35:
The moon entry I published yesterday reminds me of a Winnie The
Pooh apologetic in which the strange tilt of the planet
Neptune was forseen by Pooh and Co.'s expedition in search of the
East Pole.
Such an apologetic does not exist. Nonetheless, "reminds" is an appropriate word in this situation.
Fri Mar 10 2000 10:57:
The Humnet backbone is having problems since yesterday afternoon,
so mail sent to me yesterday I probably didn't get. Please send it
again since I don't know when the Humnet problem will be fixed.
Fri Mar 10 2000 12:12:
Susanna is writing in her notebook again;
unfortunately, the news is not good.
Fri Mar 10 2000 21:01:
What is the common tie between the
latest Segfault story and Liza Dei, my
latest recording? The world will know eventually. It's a lame
connection, but there is one, and I thought it was interesting that I'd
get that kind of article submitted when I was working on a song from
Revenge Of Porcelain Puppy.
Problems with Liza Dei: Couple weird vocal artifacts near the end, song gets cut off instead of fading out (3dSound doesn't {do fades, know Susie} the way I {want it to do fades, know Susie}), vocals a little too soft near the beginning. Other than that, it's a nice little tune.
Fri Mar 10 2000 21:05:
The new version of the notebook program (now called Newsbruiser) is
coming along okay. I have the design in place and now I just have to
roll up my sleeves and finish the implementation.
Fri Mar 10 2000 21:11:
The humnet backbone is back up. I have your email. Do not panic.
Fri Mar 10 2000 21:13:
Dan went out to watch Mission To Mars. I can't afford such
luxuries, so I must stay inside. I wonder whether Mission To Mars is the pseudo-realistic Mars movie or the 1950s-style Mars movie.
Fri Mar 10 2000 21:31:
Dan just came back. Me: "Man, you got ripped off." No, the theater
was sold out.
Sat Mar 11 2000 06:40:
I got new sunglasses yesterday. Let's see how long before I lose them.
Sat Mar 11 2000 11:58:
More Newsbruiser work. The only big chunk that still remains undone is
the chunk that actually changes the files around. Now I have to
take a shower and go work in the lab with Adam.
Sat Mar 11 2000 16:05:
Me glasses are broken. This has got to be some kind of record.
I did not mistreat my glasses in any way. They just broke.
Adam says Mission to Mars was more ridiculous than Armageddon.
Sat Mar 11 2000 18:17:
Is there an XML DTD for notebook entries? I don't want to reinvent
the wheel. I don't know where to go to find DTDs.
Sat Mar 11 2000 21:36:
I recorded a great theme and fantasia on "Popeye The Sailor Man",
but BeOS won't boot, so I can't put it together. Grr.
Sun Mar 12 2000 09:23:
Opus, the sad truth is that Lo Wang from Shadow Warrior is Uncle
Pennybags from Monopoly on his days off.
Sun Mar 12 2000 20:32:
I have Newsbruiser writing entries to files. Once I do the editing
frontend, editing will magically work as well.
I did not spend all day doing this. Just so you know.
Mon Mar 13 2000 06:37:
I like the phrase 'The thinking {man's, person's} x". It lets you
say 'This is like x except it's good', kind of clearing the room of
the foul presence of x by taking the moral high ground and acknowledging
its similarilty to whatever you've got.
This is my new "It's a beer." Whenever anyone attempts to prevent
me from getting x, I will say "When you're asking the greatest
question ever, you need x." It worked for this guy. Only he is
asking the greatest question ever. But still. I'm too cool for
silica clouds, baby. Mon Mar 13 2000 07:30:
Words to live by: (from this fab article):
As early as 2011, NASA hopes to launch what may be the most ambitious
telescope ever conceived: the Terrestrial Planet Finder. Scientists hope it can be
used to answer the question of whether life exists on planets beyond our solar
system. "When you're asking the greatest question ever, you need a great
telescope," says Charles Beichman, project scientist for the telescope.
Mon Mar 13 2000 22:04:
leonardr sez: check Susanna's homepage every day for
Susannalicious goodness. Jake endorses it as well: "it's bad she
altered her perfect little page, but other than that..."
Tue Mar 14 2000 06:45:
Great Planetfall quote: "I see nothing special about the mobile man-eating plant."
Wed Mar 15 2000 16:37:
I am King
Online The First! Demand for me is overwhelming! Thank you, my subjects!
Wed Mar 15 2000 16:56:
You may or may not be interested in hearing about
VA's
latest acquisitions.
Thu Mar 16 2000 05:49:
See what I mean?
Ballmer: he's evil, but he's a good sport.
Thu Mar 16 2000 06:09:
I'm sick of people complaining about free software taking away
programmers' jobs. One, it hasn't happened, and two, the
free market does not exist to serve the every whim of programmers.
It exists to serve consumers. That's the whole reason we have a free
market. If there was some magic way of making food for nothing
and farmers and agribusiness started protesting that this would drive them out
of business, wouldn't you be pretty pissed off? It's not the
best analogy, I know, but it's servicable.
I have three Netscape sessions open and in each of them I have a large TEXTAREA into which I am supposed to enter a message which will be displayed on a Web page. All the TEXTAREAs are the same size, too.
Thu Mar 16 2000 20:06:
Another call from GTE. I now know to ask to be put on the no call list.
Thus should end the era of the annoying calls from GTE.
Fri Mar 17 2000 05:23:
My job offer letter was sent Fed Ex, so of course it wasn't delivered
properly. They're sending it again regular mail, I think.
Fri Mar 17 2000 06:23:
Regardless of what you may have been led to believe, I'm not
Chris Duarte.
Fri Mar 17 2000 07:31:
Those
ancient snake species unfortunate enough to redevelop rudimentary hind limbs were often mocked
by their peers.
Fri Mar 17 2000 10:31:
Who's
marking up Mars? And why aren't they using Mars Markup Language?
Fri Mar 17 2000 10:53:
I have Mike to thank for the
earthquake map. "What happens when I click on an earthquake?"
DON'T!!!
Fri Mar 17 2000 13:33:
I bought a jar of marionberry preserves at Trader Joes. It's made
with real crack. Just kidding. About the crack. It really is called
marionberry.
Fri Mar 17 2000 13:58:
I accidentally rm -rfed my head of hair. That's okay. It'll
grow back. And it only cost me $6, unlike the more conventional crew
cuts which cost $12.
Fri Mar 17 2000 14:13:
Marionberry jelly is very good on peanut butter sandwiches. No seeds,
mildly tart, excellent all around.
Sat Mar 18 2000 07:47:
Gaaah!
I look like the guy from The Onion!
Sat Mar 18 2000 10:00:
Newsbruiser plods closer to completion. I really have to resolve that
notebook DTD thing now.
Sun Mar 19 2000 02:07:
Actually, I can just kludge together a file format. Which I did.
Why is the generation of XML documents treated as a second-class
activity? Python's XML parser comes with the system, but there's
only a half-assed XML generator which comes separately. Am I wrong in
thinking that I should be able to give a DTD and a data structure
to an object and have it spit out an XML document? Doesn't that
seem reasonable? Is there some module that I'm overlooking that
does it?
Mon Mar 20 2000 18:49:
Today I wrote UCLA the last tuition check I will ever write them.
Of course, I don't have enough money in my bank account to cover it,
but let's keep that our little secret.
Mon Mar 20 2000 18:53:
Mail from Andy on the harsh
conditions he finds in the UK. As always, Andy knows exactly which bits of information will interest me the most.
Tue Mar 21 2000 19:06:
Dan and I were discussing how dull the game Missile Command
is. One of the few games that actually makes doing homework seem
fun in comparison. The question is, what are the worst games
ever made? Arcade classics, CGA clunkers, right up to the
state of the art. The worst. Let me hear what you think.
Thu Mar 23 2000 20:42:
Gotta finish my philosophy paper and final tonight. Tomorrow morning
I'm flying to Austin for a job interview. Gonna hang out with Joe Barr,
check out the used bookstores. Jake, you need to get back to me pronto
on the hep places to go in Austin as I don't know if I'll have email
when I'm there.
You know how you'll be writing a paper and you'll get the feeling like "I have no case with this argument, the prof is going to see right through me."? That's how I feel with this paper. I've had that feeling before, though, and so far it's yet to mean less than a B on the paper.
Fri Mar 24 2000 00:08:
The final is done, and I just have to fix the intension of the
truth predicate. I mean fix the bibliography of my paper.
Fri Mar 24 2000 00:14:
Oh boy, time to act like a frikkin' loon.
Fri Mar 24 2000 00:17:
I'm done. Before I go to sleep, let me point you to
this
funny article (part 1 of 2) on corporate food mascots. Fitting,
as the 1996 Andy/Leonard skit "Interview with the Doughboy" has been
a topic of discussion between me and various people as of late.
I almost forgot to credit Mike for bringing that link to me in a basket.
Must sleep now. After pie.
Fri Mar 24 2000 07:29:
No one's biting on the "worst games ever" thing. Odd. I would have
thought that would have sparked a Katzian outpouring of email.
Sat Mar 25 2000 14:00:
I'm at pcOrder now demonstrating my notebook program.
Mon Mar 27 2000 15:05:
I gotta say, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome has the most
inappropriate soundtrack I've ever heard.
Tue Mar 28 2000 07:31:
Mike, who apparantly goes to Salon every day and reads the articles,
sends me part 2
of the advertising mascot shenanigans. I quote the thing Mike quoted:
General Mills has already taken steps to ensure that the enigmatic confectioner isn't perceived as a "ridiculous bumbler," Delahanty adds. "One thing we've done is we've reestablished that the marshmallows are a creation of Lucky. Although they have magical qualities, they never take on a personality of their own. They are inanimate objects. That's an area where in the past, there's been a little zigging and zagging. But we've refocused after our most recent equity study. Now, we've reestablished that Lucky is totally in control."
This is how we beat the Soviets, kids. Be proud.
Wed Mar 29 2000 07:09:
Photographic
memories of Jake are now avaliable.
Wed Mar 29 2000 07:13:
TreeDoc could finally put
an end to the annoying practice of clicking through subchapters
of HOWTOs and the like.
Wed Mar 29 2000 11:08:
I feel that I must speak out about the movie The Truth About
Cats and Dogs. It has the most ridiculous premise of any movie
I've ever seen, viz., that Uma Thurman is prettier than
Janeane Garofalo. What kind of twisted parallel universe spawned
this film? One in which giant insects wear sinister moustaches and bark
orders to coal-mining humans, no doubt.
Wed Mar 29 2000 20:52:
I forgot to mention that the inhabitants of Austin are obsessed with
Andre the Giant Has a Posse.
Thu Mar 30 2000 08:52:
A in EE103! A+ in CS152B! Whee!
I just got a nice letter from Bill Softky of Treedoc fame. In formulating a meaningful response I'm... able to get through to the server to review the project. There goes that complaint.
Fri Mar 31 2000 07:23:
I'm finally going through and reading all the old BOFHs.
So good. There should be a BOFH movie. I'm thinking something shot in
long real-time scenes, with the dull walking-down-hallways scenes
livened up by impromptu user interaction. During the course of two
hours, the threads of twenty or thirty simultaneous BOFH/PFY plots
(in both senses of the word) would intertwine, and they'd all come
together to form a huge crisis which would be solved by a particularily
masterful application of bastardness.
Sat Apr 01 2000 05:01:
I still had nothing to do with it, although I can endorse it this
time.
Sat Apr 01 2000 05:12:
I never thought about this before. As with any series of objects
ordered in time, there must be a first picture taken by humans
from space. And
here it is. That's entertainment!
Sat Apr 01 2000 05:55:
That picture was not taken by humans, but rather under the
direction of humans. But if you're going to get technical about it,
no picture has ever been taken by humans because humans don't have
the hardware.
Sat Apr 01 2000 07:01:
I'm going to Frisco in about an hour (I call it Frisco precisely to
piss you Frisco people off) for another job interview. I'm being
flown back to LA immediately so there's no time to hang out with
Mike or Mae Ling (who is across the country anyway) or anyone.
Oh well.
Sat Apr 01 2000 07:11:
Think I'll spin a little Devo.
Sat Apr 01 2000 11:29:
I'm at myzack showing off the notebook program.
Sat Apr 01 2000 17:24:
I'm back. Dan's back. We're all back. For ice back.
Sat Apr 01 2000 17:38:
I'm experimenting with putting links to other people's sites at the
bar at the top of the page. The links are links to sites that
a) belong to particular people, whom I know; and b) are updated on a fairly
regular basis.
I don't know why I didn't realize this before. Supernova's song Daredevil has the same melody as Devo's It's Not Right.
Sat Apr 01 2000 17:58:
I picked up Hazel's second (and last) album, Are You Going To Eat That? for cheap in Austin last week,
so I'm going through that right now. Jody (see NYCB 19990531)
got just a little too butch for me between the first and second albums,
but she still has the sexiest singing voice.
Sat Apr 01 2000 18:02:
Bill Softky and I are low-key delving into the crazy world of Javascript. (I'm low-key, I don't know the height of Bill's key)
Who wants to point us to a decent Javascript tutorial? How about for
Microsoft's version of Javascript?
Sat Apr 01 2000 18:07:
Did I mention that the notebook program is in beta? Beta meaning
"Mark has it".
Sat Apr 01 2000 20:22:
Now that Jake has pictures avaliable I can do the graphic for the
Jake Berendes West Covina story. In fact, I just did.
The story will make no sense to anyone but me--just the way I
like it.
Sat Apr 01 2000 20:53:
Leonardonics: I win!
Sat Apr 01 2000 21:02:
Celeste has given me permission to link to her
webpage, which features many entertaining pictures of her. I find
them entertaining, anyhow. And bless her heart, she actually said the
phrase "so serious", allowing me to do a The Guy Who Thinks He's
Jeff Lynne.
Sun Apr 02 2000 18:39:
Before Babe Winkelman, there was Tux on
the Run. I found that at freearcade,
which is interesting in its own right.
Sun Apr 02 2000 19:37:
Guppy Races
is probably the best game on FreeArcade; it's cute.
Sun Apr 02 2000 20:06:
Joe Barr sent me the picture he surrepetiously took of Mae Ling
and myself at LWE last August. It probably won't be the last image to
go into /pix/1999/misc.
Mon Apr 03 2000 07:07:
I miss Geek Site of the Day.
Mon Apr 03 2000 08:07:
Duh. Maybe I should link to foaf's
essay on a horrible game after I put it up.
Mon Apr 03 2000 10:29:
While doing research for a page I'm working on, I came across
a wargame (eg. Axis and Allies) type game called
A Mighty Fortress (scroll
down that page to see reviews). That's gotta be the most original
wargame (if the term applies) ever. Like the Bunnies and Burrows
of wargames.
[NB: Bunnies and Burrows is/was a role-playing game based on Watership Down. From Andy's latest dispatch, I think we now know who was responsible for that game.]
Mon Apr 03 2000 10:44:
Before landing a job at the Free Software Foundation,
he hawked cereal for Kelloggs.
Tue Apr 04 2000 07:47:
I long to taste the taco that is impro,
but my speakers aren't hooked up.
Tue Apr 04 2000 08:06:
Someone should write an ncurses version of that Matrix screen saver
using ASCII characters.
Tue Apr 04 2000 11:53:
Michael Yount comes out of hiding to point me to CMatrix. AFAIK,
CMatrix doesn't use ASCII characters. CMatrix was what inspired me
to call out for a program that did use ASCII characters.
Tue Apr 04 2000 21:32:
I have been informed that CMatrix does in fact do what I want it
to do. The description I read made it sound like it did something annoyingly
close but not quite. News You Can Bruise regrets the error.
Tue Apr 04 2000 21:58:
It would appear that GTE uses its no call list as a "deluge with junk
mail" list. I guess the thinking is that I tell them not to call me
because I want to hear about their great offers in some other medium.
Wed Apr 05 2000 07:19:
What a great
URL. It's the only CGI I've ever seen that has a "court=xth" GET
variable.
Wed Apr 05 2000 07:23:
The microwave in my apartment is down, so every time I want to heat
something up I have to take it to school or to work. It's pretty sad.
Wed Apr 05 2000 09:18:
Oh, did I link to
this
6th Circuit Court decision? I meant to link to
this
6th Circuit Court decision.
Wed Apr 05 2000 15:18:
Another dispatch from Andy, to which
was attached the promised Watership
Down comic. Prince Valliant it ain't.
Adam has graduated and is working at drdrew.com. His girlfriend Kim is working at hollywood.com. They're a [dehlorwy]*\.com couple!
Thu Apr 06 2000 07:28:
Not only does this guy
have, among other programs, a program that automatically breaks the highly popular and oh-so-secure XOR-encryption,
but some of those other programs are 'script-kiddie safe', requiring
a fix to the code before they'll work. I think this should be a new
buzzword.
Thu Apr 06 2000 07:36:
This is the sort of headline we need:
The
lunar eclipse: What you didn't see
If there were a Marine Biology Picture of the Day to go along with Astronomy Picture of the Day, I would be a happy camper.
Thu Apr 06 2000 08:41:
I'm looking around the Web site for Westminster
College, where Andy is. Not only are there a lot of missing
pages, but at the bottom of the pages that are there it says
"This page is periodically monitored for updates." Why are they
just monitoring for updates when they should be actually doing the
updates?
The whole thing looks a little shady. Look at this: it's right out of a spam.
The Diplomatic Academy of London (DAL) has enacted this mission as the longest established British institution that pioneered integrated training programmes in Diplomatic Studies and International Relations (MA, MPhil & PhD Degrees ) IN THE HEART OF LONDON and PARIS!
Thu Apr 06 2000 08:46:
Fred tried to think of a good domain name for a porn site yesterday, but
all the ones he thought of were taken.
Thu Apr 06 2000 08:49:
I should link to CMatrix
since I mentioned it.
Fri Apr 07 2000 05:48:
Kris on the porn site naming issue: butttown.com isn't taken, but
buttown.com is. "That leads me to believe they misspelled the domain
name when they were registering it."
Fri Apr 07 2000 15:42:
My customary twice-yearly sickness has set in, and I am deliriously
doing odd things. When I left to go to class, I put on my backpack
and reached back to yank my ponytail out from between my backpack
and my back. I haven't had a ponytail for well over a year.
Sat Apr 08 2000 08:00:
foaf on The Pirates of Silicon Valley:
They way Ballmer was portrayed made it seem like he's only using evil as a means to an end, that end being chicks and beer money.
Exactly. This is why you gotta love Ballmer.
Sat Apr 08 2000 08:06:
B in CS181. A- in philosophy! That's incredible! (The A-, not the B).
I believe this means I make the Dean's List again.
Sat Apr 08 2000 20:54:
Folks, this is a full-fledged bonanza. Via an exclusive deal I make avaliable
for you, the listening public, not only TWO albums from well-known attic band
crupper scupper supper
upper and the flupperdupper maleatora ("The best thing they ever
did was break up." -- Variety), but also FIVE FULL FREAKING ALBUMS
from well-known person and former crup bassist Jeremy
Bruce from his solo act Off Gabbt ("We wish Off Gabbt would break up so we could say something mean about them." -- Variety). This is over TWO HUNDRED
SONGS in MP3 format, over 350 megs of stuff all told. I'll be working
with Jer and Jake to put up track lists for the albums that don't
have them, but in the meantime you can start your downloading engines
by going to /music/hosted/crup/ and
/music/hosted/jbruce/. Enjoy,
sucka.
Sat Apr 08 2000 21:21:
The listener's guide to the temporal ordering of those albums: On the crup side,
the albums go My Dinner With Andre Nguyen -> What Do You
Call Those [sic] Pork Things. For jbruce, I believe it
goes I'm not playing with you or you ever again till next friday ->
Smally Creative ->
Off Gabbt ->
Largely Creative ->
it smells really bad in here.
Sun Apr 09 2000 08:24:
I don't have lilypond, so I can't use impro. A look at the source
reveals that it isn't as intelligent as I was hoping an improvisation
program to be, anyway. Oh well.
Sun Apr 09 2000 10:15:
Pluto and Charon:
giant
alien disco balls?
Sun Apr 09 2000 12:59:
Deitel, Deitel, Deitel. I made him out of clay.
Deitel, Deitel, Deitel. It's Deitel I shall play.
Sun Apr 09 2000 13:49:
My scanner will now remove comments from source code. To
celebrate, I give you The
Theobrominator!
Sun Apr 09 2000 18:49:
The scanner is just about done. C++ is not nearly as horrible as I
remember it. Since C++ has not changed in the past 3 years, I must
be a better programmer than I was then. This is not hard to believe.
Sun Apr 09 2000 18:58:
As far as I can tell, the scanner is done. Of course, the spec
will probably change on me, since we're not technically supposed to have
even started on the scanner yet.
Mon Apr 10 2000 07:08:
Geez, I gotta recommend particular tracks so that people (such
as daniel) will download them. Uh... there's some controversy as
to whether the crup albums should actually be released as MP3 (So
far it's me and Jer versus Jake) or left to die a slow, agonizing
death on tapes, and besides all they have are track numbers so I'm not sure
which tracks are which songs. So let's do some recommendations
for Jer's albums.
I'm not really into instrumentals, but Cerve Basil is very good. A lot of the songs on it smells really bad in here are excellent, like Lady in Red, I want to marry a tall man, you know what? It's really annoying to make all these immensely long links so I'm just going to mention albums and track names and you can go to /music/hosted/jbruce and figure it out for yourself.
Who's the Grey Man, Got Kicked in the Balls and Cooking up the Tofu are also good. My knowledge of the other albums is limited because Jake once sent me a tape with a bunch of songs from them and no track list, but here are the ones I can associate: From i'm not playing with you..., for vintage jbruce get Cheese Fondue, Heath Bar (Crunch), Bennetts [a crup cover]. From Off Gabbt: Amy, Dave Moore, Ted Lin [one of the best jbruce songs IMO], Mara. i'm not playing..., off gabbt, and smally creative have HTML files in their directories that talk about the songs, so you can look at those and d/l whatever strikes your fancy. Other than that, you know as much as I do.
Oops, I forgot to mention the best jbruce song of all: Karl Malone. Get that, if nothing else.
Mon Apr 10 2000 12:17:
I'm giving an introductory talk on Python this evening at the
UCLALUG meeting. Be there or be somewhere else. I know I will.
Mon Apr 10 2000 13:21:
Martin Sheen is Frank Zappa! Emilio Estevez is
Frank Zappa!
Mon Apr 10 2000 21:31:
My Python presentation went pretty well. Notes and pictures soon.
Tue Apr 11 2000 06:52:
Jake on the crup MP3s:
re: crup songs. let's make a selection. not all the songs. only some. i will make a list, as i am the one who will be embarrassed. and i will be embarrassed.
I don't want to suggest anything, but... no, I said I didn't want to suggest anything. So I won't.
Tue Apr 11 2000 06:58:
Microsoft
and Ralph Reed - two great tastes that go better together!
Tue Apr 11 2000 09:09:
Jake's new sig (the quote is from the last email I sent him):
=====
www.nindy.com "It's finite... like a precious jewel.
That said, the chord progression is C F C5 G5+7. Sorta."
-Leonard Richardson
Tue Apr 11 2000 11:21:
Mike [Chan] is being polled by Microsoft right now (for "Microsoft" equals
"somebody paid by Microsoft to conduct a poll that shows popular
support for Microsoft").
Tue Apr 11 2000 18:35:
Jake says Sausages
is the best jbruce song. And it's an easy download!
Tue Apr 11 2000 19:44:
It was a long time ago (like, over a year ago). Kris said something
about sportsmanship that I thought was very profound. It's been
going in and out of my head ever since, but I never thought to
write it down. That's why I wrote this song. No, that's why I'm
writing it down now (paraphrased, obviously):
The difference between sportsmanship in wrestling and sportsmanship in other sports is this: If you see an interview of someone who lost at a real sport, they're like "Well, I guess the best man won, uh, I've just gotta push myself a little more and work on my defense and, you know, go out and try harder next time." But if you see an interview of someone who just lost a wrestling match, they're like "YOU ARE SCUM, MIGHTY MIKE MUELLER! YOU ARE BOOTLICKING SCUM! I AM GOING TO HUNT YOU DOWN AND SLASH YOUR TIRES AND KILL YOU!!!"
Tue Apr 11 2000 19:56:
I have been reduced to installing Quake on my computer, because
Dan refuses to play any other networked game with me.
Wed Apr 12 2000 09:56:
Quake wouldn't install. A box upon it.
Boy, the things you miss when you use Lynx. The Register's BOFH columns have cool cartoon pictures of the BOFH. And they've got an even cooler BOFH/PFY cartoon squirreled away which they've never used.
Wed Apr 12 2000 12:30:
I hadn't been to Joel Hodgson's site in a long time, but I
went there this morning when Peter Hodgson asked me if there
was such a person as Joel Hodgson. There is, and now you can
download the
coloring book.
Thu Apr 13 2000 12:24:
Dammit! eCost backordered my digital camera! The only reason I bought
from them was that they said they had it in stock!
Thu Apr 13 2000 12:30:
Also, the TA changed the format of the language just to break
my scanner. In particular, things like "123abc" are valid now (two tokens, "123" and "abc").
Whitespace, folks. It's your friend.
Fri Apr 14 2000 08:04:
Another game in the famous Leonard and Dan Carnage Signiature Series:
City Destroy Carnage. The computer haplessly attempts to defend
its cities from your endless barrage of nuclear missiles by firing
intercept missiles.
I think this is the only way a Missile Command-type game could be made fun.
Fri Apr 14 2000 08:29:
From the ever stallwart ACM
To the bold IEEE
We're the folks on whom you can depend
To keep our country strong and free
Fri Apr 14 2000 20:58:
There's a Captain
Planet fan site that links to The
Deficient Advantures of Captain Planet. TDAoCP is so good. It
still makes me laugh out loud.
Fri Apr 14 2000 21:16:
I was just putting up the 50th Best of Dada Pokey, when I
realized that we have over a year of Daily
Pokey: it started on April 9, 1999. Huzzah!
Sat Apr 15 2000 15:51:
I haven't gotten email from Celeste since last night. I hope she's okay and
she's not mad at me.
Sun Apr 16 2000 08:05:
Celeste was mad at me but she's not anymore. :)
Sun Apr 16 2000 09:05:
The new improved lexer is done. I just have to put it in the framework
that the TA wants it in. This is made difficult by the fact that the
campus backbone is undergoing planned downtime so I can't get the
documentation I need. I can't get email, either.
For some reason the TA wants to make sure we don't use malloc or new in the lexer. Why? If we were allowed to use malloc or new, would the lexer suddenly become incredibly easy? I don't think so.
You probably already know this, but a lot of Hannah-Barbara cartoons are just homomorphisms of Scooby Doo.
Sun Apr 16 2000 14:28:
Four [score and seven] years ago, I wrote a C++ program to answer the burning question:
what are the odds of winning at craps? Today, the legend continues
on the Web with Fast Jack's Floating
Hall of Craps. In the spirit of corporate megamergers, FJFHoC has
joined forces with the venerable Monty
Hall's Hall of Doors to form Crummy.com's
Hall of Halls.
Mon Apr 17 2000 07:39:
I have been given a catalog from eLinux.com (I don't know if they
have a web site). In it is a bit that might possibly win the "evading
the question" award:
Why do we sell hardware with Windows pre-installed?Linux users are helping drive the Linux movement by taking popular systems from well-known manufacturers and installing Linux on them. We know that buying the hardware to "test" Linux compatability can be expensive, thus we want to make products avaliable to you at extremely low prices! We'll also give you the resources to get Linux working for you!
Get this IBM 240 ThinkPad at $1,069! We'll tell you how users got SuSE up and running on it and were even able to use the winmodem.
We'll also give you a copy of SuSE.
Mon Apr 17 2000 09:38:
Looking through the list of python modules I saw "math" and
thought "Hmm, must be some kind of authentication module". I need a more
ergonomic chair.
Mon Apr 17 2000 11:16:
Arrrgh! My camera won't be shipped until the 28th! I'm going to
look elsewhere.
Wed Apr 19 2000 21:57:
This is a placeholder entry.
Thu Apr 20 2000 07:16:
Here is an innovation which, if you are looking for something
useful to do, you may use: There are about ten "x Weekly News" or
"x-URL" newsletters which give the status of various free software
projects. The innovation consists of a site which gives a brief
summary of them as they come out and perhaps provides the most interesting
link from each.
It should be obvious to regular NYCB readers that a great many of my so-called "innovations" come about just because I like modifying nouns with themselves (in this case, "Weekly News Weekly News"). What can I say? At least I don't buy up other people's ideas and call it innovation.
Thu Apr 20 2000 07:32:
For some reason, my story
about Linus Torvalds going back to work on Minix
is very big in French-speaking countries like Canada and, well,
France. I don't know why, but there are about five French-speaking
sites that have linked to it. The French for "operating system"
appears to be "systéme d'exploitation". This was the sort
of thing I never learned in high school French class.
Hm... one of the sites specifically states that it's a hoax ("canular"). Maybe some French dude is circulating email reports to the effect that it is real. Maybe Minix, like Jerry Lewis, is just bigger in France, so people there are more likely to think my story is funny.
Thu Apr 20 2000 07:37:
Lemme link to that site I was
talking about so you can see for yourself.
Thu Apr 20 2000 08:04:
And so I says to the guy, I says, "Oh, you wanted a character
pointer! I thought you wanted a string!"
Thu Apr 20 2000 08:36:
Okay, FINALLY the parser has been put into the weird magical
yacc framework and it does the right things to the symbol table
and the string table and everything. So I'm done. And the project isn't
due til midnight!
Thu Apr 20 2000 11:23:
In case you haven't already seen it, let me also point you to the
fabulous Matzillah
Segfault story, which is better than my Minix story to the extent that
I feel guilty about linking to my story and not linking to it.
Thu Apr 20 2000 12:30:
This has been annoying me for a while, and I think it's a bug.
When I type "lynx newshub.com/tech/", lynx responds as though
I had typed "lynx news://newshub.com/tech/". Seems like it should
look for the :// before rashly assuming it's a netnews resource.
"lynx mailtohub.com" and "lynx gopherhub.com" work as you would
expect, so I think it's a bug. Maybe I should try to fix it instead
of just complaining about it on my webpage.
Thu Apr 20 2000 12:55:
It definitely appears to be a feature. There's a function
that specifically does it (LYUtils.c's LYAddSchemeForURL).
I was wrong about other URLs beginning with schemes working correctly;
the URLs I tried before don't really exist so lynx crapped out before
prefixing a scheme onto them. I'm not happy about this. How am I
supposed to be lazy when lynx stands in my way?
Thu Apr 20 2000 13:09:
I you like The Hunger Site
and you like generalizations, you'll like the generalization of
The Hunger Site, FreeDonation.com.
Thu Apr 20 2000 17:07:
I thought Peter only had The Name of the Rose in Italian,
but just today I found a paperback translation to English! Woohoo! Now I can {drink, read it}!
Thu Apr 20 2000 20:01:
The Linus-goes-back-to-Minix meme infected enough people that
Linux Weekly News felt the need, the need for speed! I mean the need to publish
a pointer to my story so that its satiric content would be
obvious.
Thu Apr 20 2000 20:18:
Going home to Bakersfield tomorrow. As those of you who follow
Susanna's journal know, Susanna is also
going home (in fact, she's probably home already). Between the two
of us, there will be no food in my mother's house when we leave. Not
that there will be any when we get there.
Fri Apr 21 2000 07:31:
I now have an account on Advogato, although I'm not sure what benefits I
obtain from such. I don't feel comfortable certifying people as one thing or another, and I already have an online journal.
Fri Apr 21 2000 07:43:
I guess certification isn't so bad so long as you stick to certifying
people you actually know.
Fri Apr 21 2000 09:01:
Scott explains the Lynx feature
that allegedly lets people other than me be lazy.
Newshub doesn't work anymore anyway.
Fri Apr 21 2000 17:26:
I'm getting a ride with Josh up to Bakersfield. Woo!
Sun Apr 23 2000 09:10:
Now in Bakersfield. Going back (again with Josh) today. Before
that happens I will see all of my Richardson relatives. Except
for Rachel, who is unaccountably in Paris. I was told about
Rachel's impending trip to Nebraska but not about her current trip to Paris. Where are the priority snows of yesteryear?
Sun Apr 23 2000 09:11:
I've never even been to Nebraska.
Sun Apr 23 2000 09:20:
Something seriously needs to be done about the "news and satire"
classification of Segfault stories. Every time a story is published
under its rubric, either some idiot reads it on our site and thinks the events described in the story really happened, or it gets forwarded and forwarded and our credit for it gets stripped until it reaches someone who doesn't know the source.
I don't know which, and it may be one or the other on a case-by-case basis, but whatever happens the inevitable result is that someone slaps the text of our story onto a real news site and it wreaks havoc. I'm worried because this does not bode well for online journalism and also because it gives the impression that segfault.org are a bunch of hoaxters.
Well, we are a bunch of hoaxsters, but our hoaxes are planned well in advance and we don't put them on our front page as news articles. That's the difference, you see.
So I'm seriously considering dropping the "news and" from the category title and just making it "satire". I think this is what should have been done in the first place, but we were distracted by that nifty "news" icon that Garrett drew. I didn't design the type system, though, so I don't know how much rewiring that will take. I'm consulting with Scott on this.
Sun Apr 23 2000 09:48:
I rearranged Susanna's journal, under her direction. I just now put up a little HTML help thing for her as well.
Sun Apr 23 2000 10:54:
I finished Name of the Rose yesterday morning; great book! Read it! Foucault's Pendulum was better, though.
Yesterday Susanna and I went to the Goodwill and I got two really nice surfer dude type shirts (those are my new favorite kind of shirt). I also replaced my copy of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (lost in the huge book disaster of 1996) and got the O'Reilly HTML reference (which I will likely never refer to as it only covers HTML 3.2, which I understand completely). Both books were $.35, so I got the O'Reilly book for about 1/80th its cover price.
Then on to the used bookstore, where I got Pebble in the Sky (continuing my tradition of reading Asimov's Robots->Empire->Foundation series completely out of order), The Colour of Magic (Hi, Scott!), and Across A Billion Years (which I'd never heard of before and which wasn't very good). TCoM, which I got only because I figured I should know something about Terry Pratchett, turned out to be the best of that lot. All of those I read yesterday afternoon.
Sun Apr 23 2000 19:14:
There's a halfhearted but decent interview up
with Eric Hovland of the SCLUG. I'm mainly linking to it to promote
the SCLUG, who do a lot of cool things.
Sun Apr 23 2000 20:14:
Josh tells me that everyone in this quarter's CS111 (Operating Systems)
class has been given a free copy of Windows 2000 Professional by
Microsoft. I honestly think Microsoft has just missed the point here. Even if their operating system were great, it couldn't be used in that class.
Sun Apr 23 2000 20:29:
It's time for vision and leadership!
Okay, it's no longer time for vision and leadership.
Tue Apr 25 2000 17:22:
Jared Diamond is giving a talk at 5:30 but I'm not going to
go see it because I'm lazy.
Fri Apr 28 2000 17:42:
Back on the air, kinda.
Sat Apr 29 2000 17:52:
The new version of NewsBruiser is sufficiently operational for
action. I converted 2000, 1999, and part of 1998 to the new format.
I'll link to the viewer once I set up the infrastructure for it on
this webspace.
Sat Apr 29 2000 17:56:
Some testing entries will likely clutter up this space in the near
future. I really need to stop working on this and start working on
my 132 project, though.
Sat Apr 29 2000 18:08:
Quick links for those who want to see the new interface:
view
add
edit. I love the
edit interface (inspired by "Edit This Page", of course). The navigation bar at
the top of view is killer too; I want to add search to that
and to give edit a navbar as well, but both those changes will require
more API changing than I have time for right now.
Sun Apr 30 2000 15:51:
Spent all afternoon rewriting the notebook interface.
Now I can devote my energies to making the edit screen look nicer.
Here's a cool trick that works now: Daily
View, Daily Edit. Except the header and footer still think it's monthly. One
more thing I have to fix.
You can download a tar.gz of NewsBruiser here. Sun Apr 30 2000 18:03:
Susanna's notebook is up and on the new
system. Jake, I'll get the gang's notebook on the new system probably
Tuesday. I really need to get ready for my collab.net interview
tomorrow. The main reason I spent most of today wrestling with NewsBruiser
was so I'd have a decent-sized OO project to show them.
Sun Apr 30 2000 18:29:
I've always liked House of
Fun by Madness, and now I know the lyrics. "This is a
chemist, not a joke shop!" is a good nonsense rebuttal for when
you want your nonsense rebuttals to have a bit of British flair
to them.
Sun Apr 30 2000 18:31:
William S. Burroughs, programmer:
The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera... But C is electricity through the brain, and the C yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling. The C-charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flashing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm. C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first stirrings of hideous insect life.
Mon May 01 2000 04:22:
There are lots of movies about the filming of a movie, and lots of
plays about the staging of a play. But are there any operas about the
staging of an opera?
Mon May 01 2000 05:19:
Gotta get ready to fly up for my collab interview.
Mon May 01 2000 14:36:
At collab.net now. The plane flight up was outstanding; we flew along
the coast all the way up.
Whee!
Mon May 01 2000 20:34 It Failed Miserably!:
Hey, this is Leonard. My real site (crummy.com or crummy.segfault.org) is down right now due to circumstances beyond my control, so I thought I'd step over to the world of editthispage to see how the other half (that which does not write its own webpage management software) lives.
I've been thinking of making my news management system interoperable
with all the nifty syndication features and whatnot of Manila, so now's as good a time as any to get my test site up and running.
This is a news item. Apparantly this feature just came on the scene yesterday; until then, all entries on the front page for a day were stuck together in a big blob of HTML. I'm incredibly disillusioned about this. I thought the whole point of this software was to organize one's Web writing. The format of scripting.com and editthispage sites
has been a big influence on my own website management software, and
now I discover that said format was much less structured than I believed it to be.
That said, now that the feature's here on editthispage, I suggest
that everyone use it because it really is much nicer to have each
distinct thing you write as a separate entry than to mantain a whole HTML page. It makes it a lot easier to quickly add an entry, for one (although there's the annoying process of having to approve a story before it's posted, which is fine for a site like Segfault but which doesn't make much sense in a context where one person is doing all the entries).
Until late 1998, all the news sections for my sites were done by the
add-to-HTML-page method. On September 11 of that year, I flipped the switch, started using Notebook Of Web-Basedness (now NewsBruiser), that "nitro-burning remote publishing mobile", and never looked back. I initially thought I'd still be adding entries the old way as well, but I never did. It really is a better way, folks. (Perhaps I am missing something because my impression is that editthispage has a very sophisticated syndication system, and it doesn't make sense to syndicate entire days of material; it makes sense to syndicate individual entries. Right? So maybe there's something else that does entries?) Is anyone else plagued with broken pipe errors? Wed May 03 2000 08:27 News Items You Can Bruise:
Good, I got rid of the URL. Now, to get the time on here like
I'm used to. Wed May 03 2000 08:50 It's another tequila news item:
Must every entry have a URL? Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Wed May 03 2000 09:12 Smile!:
My digital camera has (finally!) been shipped. Stand by for an avalanche of photos. I love taking photos and I love being in photos taken by others.
Wed May 03 2000 10:56 Let each urchin whet his spine for we breach the thermocline:
And at dawn we make our conquest of the land. Gotta get a Scantron for the marine biology midterm tomorrow. Also
a reminder to myself that I have to lead the discussion on the 23rd.
I attempted
to explain Devo to Josh, but was unable to. I ended up saying "They're
the 80s, only more so.", which is technically correct
but doesn't really explain anything about Devo per se.
Help me out.
Some of Devo's lyrics make me wince (eg. the part about the dog in
the title song), but on the whole they're excellent. And Devo rocks.
Even if they had nothing interesting to say, Devo would rock. Wed May 03 2000 17:40 It's what you've got!:
I'm obsessed with the Devo album Freedom of Choice. I'm listening to it over and over again.
Mike wants me to write a CGI that lets one submit captions for pictures a la MST3K's Caption This!. I may do it over the weekend. I tell you, this guy is bleeding me dry.
Also: I forgot what I was going to put here. Oh yeah. Not only is Mark a NewsBruiser beta
tester, but he's also using COPOUT. In fact, he's ripping off one of my old polls. How's that for gratitude? Mark, I will hunt you down and steal your RealHamster doll! Thu May 04 2000 04:59 Caption This and That:
If you click on the picture you will get a larger version in which you can see that Terry is a KDE user, like me. Thu May 04 2000 05:32 Hi, I'm Terry Chow:
I just found Terry Chow's homepage, and, as a consequence, this picture of him doing "The Terry Chow Look" which I've never seen anyone else do. It's his look of pride or surprise. It says "Hi, I'm Terry Chow.". It's fabulous. He looks a lot different in person, though, for some reason.
Thu May 04 2000 06:40 omne animale triste:
"dinosaur" means "terrible lizard". So "dinoflagellate" must mean "terrible flagellate".
Thu May 04 2000 13:12 I directly apprehend that this sucks!:
Done with my philosophy paper, an hour before it's due. As usual, I
hate it. As usual, it will probably get a B. I'm so glad I'm not a philosophy major like Dan is. I couldn't stand that.
Thu May 04 2000 18:09 Photo, photo, photo mania:
My camera finally came in, and in accordance with prophecy I am madly taking photos of everything. The fruits of my labors, including a tour of the Leonard/Dan apartment and a picture of my fabulous Elvis votive, are avaliable in pictures
Fri May 05 2000 06:03 %left BLEAH:
My parser works, kinda. I can't get the operator precedence declarators
to do anything, though, so I've got 26 shift-reduce conflicts. I know it's ignoring the precedence declarators because I can, eg., make + nonassociative and it'll still parse 1+1+1. Nonetheless, it parses all the example programs,
although it's still probably
got bugs (I thought my lexer was perfect, but the writing of the parser
uncovered four new bugs in it). It's due at noon.
In other news, I now have only 4 shift-reduce conflicts. Fri May 05 2000 07:49 When copywriters make technical decisions:
My camera's three settings of picture quality: "Best", "Better",
and "Good". Stop it! For one thing, I don't need to be reassured that
even though I'm taking pictures on the lowest quality setting, the
quality is still acceptable. For another, "Better" is not an identifier.
"Better" is a function. Knock it off, marketing people!
Fri May 05 2000 08:28 Uh-oh...:
Not good. The SEAS network is inaccessible from outside. My parser is due at 12. This
basically means I'm turning it in as-is. But how? I can go on-campus
now and do it and then waste a whole lot of time until my class at 2.
I can wait til 11 and then go and fight for a place in the lab. I
suppose I'd better go now. This class is very strict about deadlines
and I don't think "The SEAS network
was down" will be accepted as an excuse.
I like the way our projects are graded in this class. The TA writes a bunch of test programs (which we don't get to see) and then tries to clobber our lexer/parser/compiler/bytecode generator with them. Your grade is based on how well your program avoids clobberation. It's very objective, in contrast to the lower-division classes in which you had to turn in your source code in a manilla folder and the TA would go through it and dock you points if you didn't have enough comments (I once got docked for having too many comments!). Fri May 05 2000 09:36 I hate thinking up titles for everything:
I'm in the lab now. I finally figured out how to do {chicken, precedence} right, so I am rid of all the conflicts. I've submitted my project now. I don't know if it works 100%, but it should at least pass all the tests.
This is all I need, since I won't be using my own syntax to do the rest of the projects. At noon, we'll get a standard syntax which we are all to use so that it will be easier to grade the other projects.
Don't make
someone run an application to do all this for you; hijack Outlook
and do it yourself. Melissa had the right idea. Scan for interesting
keywords and send messages that match to a randomly selected set of 1-3 email addresses (out of of 10,000)
100 of those email addresses are controlled by you, throwaway accounts and whatnot. The
other 9900 belong to random people. You now get lots of juicy
email and implicate lots of innocent bystanders.
Encrypt all these lists of email addresses, fragments of subject
lines, etc. Use real encryption and not pansy XOR encryption so that
it will take a couple days instead of a couple minutes to get your plaintext.
Is this so difficult? I can figure out how to do a good email
worm and I'm not even particularily evil. What's up with these evil people
who foist lame email worms upon the Windows world? Fri May 05 2000 10:55 Sissy email worms must go!:
Enough with these sissy email worms! I'll tell you how to write
an email worm, dammit. Don't just look in the victim's address book.
Look in their mail archive. Use the mail archive to a) find more
emails to send the worm to, and b) create a plausible subject line
for each address. If you can't find a plausible subject line (if there's
no recent thread for that address), generate one at random. Use a
CFG that can do a couple million different subject lines of twenty different major types.
To change the subject: as great as editthispage is, I miss NewsBruiser. It takes less
time and fewer actions to publish an item with NewsBruiser than with
editthispage. The disparity is multiplied when I'm using lynx, as I
usually am. Editing an entry is easier with editthispage (I should
certainly hope so!), unless you want to edit an old entry, in which
case it's a toss-up.
I dis not editthispage. It is good, especially if you don't
have an account on a server.
I'm working on the caption script for Mike. Not as fun as I thought
it would be. Oh well. I have to study for my compiler midterm as well.
Celeste is coming over this afternoon to help me study for 130. Sat May 06 2000 07:36 I'm not only the server... I'm also a client!:
I'm very excited, because... well, I shouldn't say until it actually
goes through. Suffice to say that I am excited. I'm struggling to keep quiet because there are many associated stories that I want to tell and I'm afraid I'll forgot them.
Sat May 06 2000 08:03 The Loan Arranger strikes again:
I got a packet of stuff from Sallie Mae (a loan company, not a southern belle) about the loan I got
from them in 1998. I have to start paying the loan back on the
first of next year. I can conveniently make my monthly payments
electronically, or I can go for a longer-term payment schedule,
and I'll get 2% off the interest rate if I make my first 48 months
of payments on time and blah and blah. The funny thing is that
all of this is completely irrelevant since by next year I'll be
able to pay the loan in one lump sum. It's only a $1500 loan.
I don't know an incredible amount about package creation, but
it seems that if you can automate "make install", you can automate
"make rpm". I want to say that this would be revolutionary, except
it wouldn't. But it would be damn nice. Any piece of software that uses autoconf:
you can build into an RPM, build it into a DEB,
package it as a source RPM. No more waiting for RPMs to come out.
No more programmer-hours wasted in mantaining packaged versions of software.
Remember the Programmer's Creed: Any sufficiently boring task
can and should be automated. Package management is boring. Let's automate it.
Hey, it could happen. Sat May 06 2000 08:50 make woooorld!:
I just realized something. In addition to "make" and "make install", the makefile
generated by autoconf should have "make rpm" and "make deb".
"I mantain packages for program x" should not be something worthy of being put
on your list of contributions to free software. "What's to mantain?" That should be what people ask Dan. But it ain't.
Sat May 06 2000 08:53 It's Time For Spiritual Buffy:
KatzDot is still
hilarious. Experience it!
I can't concentrate on my compiler book but I can work on
Foucault's Pendulum. I'm over halfway done. It's good that
I read it immediately after reading Mackay's Extraordinary Popular
Delusions, as I now recognize many of the historical personages
(Cagliostro, Dr. Dee, &c.). In general, I'm understanding much more
of what's going on (eg. I caught the Name of the Rose reference(s? are there more than one?))
than I did when I read it a year ago. A few things still puzzle me,
though.
It's a shame that there's no bibliography for Foucault's Pendulum.
I know that works of fiction don't generally have bibliographies.
But Foucault's Pendulum definitely deserves one.
Oh, minor question. I reread Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency, and I finally understand everything in the book, except
for one little detail: how did what they did actually save the human
race? I don't see how the effects of Dirk's actions at the end prevented
what originally happened from happening again. I know what
happened, but I don't completely understand how it helped. I can't go
into too much detail because I don't want to give the ending away. Sun May 07 2000 21:01 Jezebel, Malkuth, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes!:
That's me, sick as a dog. I communicate with Dan via email, even
though he's just across the room, because it hurts too much to talk.
Bleah. And I have a midterm tomorrow. I sincerely hope I will only
be asked about regular expressions, DFAs, and emperical questions
like "write a yacc grammar for language x". The portion of the
exam in which I will be asked to trace the actions of ye Parser
will be failed miserably by me.
Mon May 08 2000 08:57 I am in fact a stunt goldfish:
Mike and I figured out why the stuff at the end of Dirk Gently
was what needed to happen, so there's no need to write in.
On the bright side, I'm feeling a lot better. Disease-wise, I
mean. Also, the midterm was only 25% of the grade, and the final
is noncumulative, so if I start going to class I'll do okay.
There was something I wanted to put here, but I forgot.
I'll put it in here when I remember what it was. Tue May 09 2000 07:07 When midterms attack!:
The CS132 midterm met my father in an arbitrary number of nested
steel cages. I think some of my early calculus midterms may have
been worse than that midterm, but apart from that... Oh, the pain.
There was one question on regular expressions/DFAs and all the
rest were on recreating the jovial antics of the parser.
Tue May 09 2000 13:01 And who's this Crick fellow?:
James D. Watson is coming on campus today to talk about his
new book. I was staring at the promotional flyer thinking "Hmm,
that name sounds familiar." Duh.
Crummy also requires the cooperation of two of the most sluggish
forces on earth: Network Solutions and me. Fortunately, I'm on the
ball and have already sent my form in to NSI so that they can tell
me they can't accept it.
Network Solutions: Because someone's got to employ all those
ex-Soviet bureaucrat refugees. Tue May 09 2000 21:12 So close, and yet...:
The machine that hosts segfault and crummy, project.linux.com, has been moved.
Unfortunately, getting segfault back on the air requires the cooperation
of two of the most sluggish forces on earth: Network Solutions and
Scott James Remnant. I have to contact Scott (I'm probably going to
have to call him) and then he has to change the IP and DNS info
for segfault.
It's been great to live on editthispage for a while, but it will
be better to live on NewsBruiser. Whee! Tue May 09 2000 21:42 Automation frees the workers!:
Hm, looks like all the bureaucrats have been put out of a job. I
actually changed my nameserver information correctly. Of course,
it'll be a while til it {heals,propagates}.
Thu May 11 2000 10:10 What law says we can't?:
Finished my rereading of Catch-22 yesterday. I've never seen a book be going so well and then go downhill so suddenly. That book plays out Joseph Heller's writing career in miniature. In high school I read Catch-22 and was captivated. Then I read We Bombed in New Haven and Closing Time and they sucked.
He's written other stuff and, although I can't say for certain, I'm fairly sure that all his other stuff sucks as well. Except for the screenplay for Casino Royale, which he isn't credited for so I doubt he did a whole lot of work on it.
I stand to do a lot of good work and make a lot of money. I'm very happy about this. The downside is that, not only will I still be in California[1], I'll be in San Francisco. Bleah! Even this has an upside in that I'll be able to hang out with cool folk like Mike Popovic and all my rowdy friends who also come up to the Bay Area after they graduate.
[0] I heard innuendo that in the new Shaft movie, there is no
"Shut yo' mouth!" in the theme song, with the predictable result. What's up with that? Shaft is about the 70s and "Shut yo' mouth!", and the new movie has neither. Not the way to do a Shaft remake, my man.
[1] I love California. It's great. But I've lived in California all my life and I'd like to try living somewhere else for a while. Thu May 11 2000 10:27 Now it can be told!:
OK, here's the big thing. I've accepted a position at collab.net, the O'Reilly software spinoff that's a funky sex machine for all the chicks.[0] My boss is Apache lead developer Brian Behlendorf. I'll be working on the tigris.org set of tools for distributed software development. Everything I write will be released as free software.
Fri May 12 2000 05:12:
Okay, this is super weird. Please send me email (leonardr@ucla.edu)
if you can see this.
Sat May 13 2000 09:52 Pack up my troubles in my old kit bag:
crummy.com is back up. Go there
for updates.
Leonardonics: Ancient
Chinese secret!
An explanation of the horrible things that have been going on
will be forthcoming. To catch up on what's been going on in the
absence of crummy.com, check out Crummy:
The Backup Site. All further updates will take place here.
Sat May 13 2000 09:53:
Disregard the request in the previous entry
Sat May 13 2000 15:28:
This might go into Leonardonics eventually, but it's a little too
new to do it right away: Josh and I came up with a new acronym: AEM,
Ass Extraction Method. It's how you come up with bogus constants
like the constants for the COCOMO equation: "We'll obtain that
data through AEM." Why simply "pull something out of [your] ass" when you can
"utilize AEM"? A message from the AEM Council.
Sat May 13 2000 16:39:
Yesterday, the guys in the CSUA lounge were drooling over photos of the
booth babes at E3. I'm ambivalent about the whole booth babe thing.
Well, "ambivalent" is not the right word. I feel uncomfortable about it in
two different ways. First is the standard way. Second is the way in which
they remind me of the refrigerator booth babes of the 1950s and 1960s.
"Miss Betty Firnesse and the new Westinghouse!" and all that.
Refrigerators, cars, computer games: what happened here?
One of the non-bands I fronted in high school was called "Jerry Mavis and
His Amazing Trained Seals". My stage name was a mix of Jerry Mathers and
Mavis Beacon.
Sat May 13 2000 21:01:
Remember Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing? The lady on the box (presumably Mavis Beacon) was a very
dark black lady. I'm looking at an ad for the latest version and the
lady on the box has much lighter skin and looks more Hispanic.
Mavis Beacon is obviously a shapeshifter, or maybe a fictional character of some kind.
Sun May 14 2000 17:29:
I found a reference to the Canned
Whole Chicken that once inhabited the pantry of Andy's house, so I am happy.
Mon May 15 2000 20:10:
Celeste brought up the subject of flower-eating today. She says
she {read it in a magazee-ee-ee-eene, saw it on an "extreme cooking"
show}. I don't think that an "extreme cooking" show is the proper
venue for discussing the consumption of flowers. I'm picturing some
big burly guy with tatoos and a Karl Marx-style beard jumping into
the camera's field of view, slamming two ham-sized fists together,
and growling "AND NOW WE'RE GOING TO EAT SOME FLOWERS! THE
FIRST FLOWER WE'LL BE EATING IS THE GERANIUM!" It doesn't
work that way. It doesn't work, period.
Fortunately, only one other person has started on the project
(as of yesterday's meeting, anyway), so it's not like everyone is
further along than I am already.
I'll be {crushing your house, designing the AST and symbol table}
today and hopefully implementing it tonight and tomorrow.
Tue May 16 2000 07:25:
I'm going to have to write all the abstract syntax tree code and
symbol table code and symbol table stack (actually a linked list) code before I
even get started on the semantic checking. You're supposed to use
the sample code, but the sample code is poorly designed, and the
TA says:
If you feel there is an error
or inadequacy in skeleton, it is not a problem of skeleton itself,
it is your challenge! Fix it or elaborate it.
The story looks a lot better in lynx, except for the fact that
you can't see the graphic. I wonder what can be done about that (making
it look better in non-lynx browsers).
Tue May 16 2000 10:48:
My first short story since 1996's critically inflamed Grunion Time
is complete and ready for reading. Behold the best-seller of the
future, Jake Berendes
West Covina! There's an accompanying song (the song inspired the
story, not the other way around) which I hope to record soon.
Tue May 16 2000 12:18:
Segfault is back up at the proper IP address. If only crummy
were so lucky.
Wed May 17 2000 06:39:
I love the
latest Segfault story because it plays on your preconcieved notions
of what a Segfault story is like.
Wed May 17 2000 07:12:
B&N
Sharpens Elbows For Same Day Delivery. "Sharpens Elbows"???
Wed May 17 2000 17:05:
Mike, former New York native, explains the
obscure practice of elbow sharpening.
Wed May 17 2000 20:12:
I made Jake Berendes West Covina look nicer in non-Lynx browsers.
Let me know if it looks weird in your browser.
Wed May 17 2000 20:41:
Why does my neck hurt so much?
Thu May 18 2000 10:07:
Seriously, what did I do to bring on this terrible neck and back
pain? I didn't sleep upside down or suck my own toes or anything.
Fri May 19 2000 07:30:
I've decided that it's not a good idea to brag about how incredibly
long your Linux system has been up. You're just announcing to the
world, "Hey, look at me! I have such-and-such kernel vulnerabilities!"
I think there's a patch to replace the kernel's RAM image without
rebooting, so soon the world may once again be safe for those who
like to gloat.
Fri May 19 2000 07:54:
It took me forever, but I finally found a decently sized version
of the map of the known universe mentioned in
this
BBC article. The large version is actually somewhat of a disappointment,
as the BBC added shading to their tiny version of the graphic to make
the map look a lot nicer than it does.
Fri May 19 2000 08:14:
Ancient
alien technology! I would be interested in that game but I'm
not interested in playing games with people I don't know personally.
Fri May 19 2000 08:28:
For the past week I've been trying to get a working symbol table
and abstract syntax tree. I'm almost there, but I'm also very
worried that I've wasted a week getting a pretty symbol table
and syntax tree and that by the time I get it working, I won't have
time to do any semantic analysis.
Fri May 19 2000 11:22:
The symbol table works now. I have now succeeded in getting rid of a whole bunch of crap
associated with the table presented in the sample code,
including the fact that it had to know about the AST and the fact
that two of the classes were not done as classes but as typedefed
structs with associated functions. So, with six days to go on the
project, I have a very nice symbol table which is 10% of the
grade. Did I mention that I have a philosophy paper due in a week?
I keep moving responsibility for the symbol table between the
scanner and the parser. It was in the scanner, then I moved it to the parser, then I decided I could
do it in the scanner after all, then I decided that I couldn't. I'm still
fairly sure that I couldn't, because the parser doesn't know whether
an identifier is part of, eg., a declaration (in which case it goes in the
symbol table) or a statement (in which case it's an error if it's not
already in the symbol table).
Sat May 20 2000 11:49:
The abstract syntax tree construction code is about to start
working, I think. Programming in C or C++ is like building a watch
with a million little gears. You build all these components and then
you try to get all the gears to mesh together. I get sick of this
very quickly. I'd much rather be building things with Legos. Metaphorical
Legos, I mean. Or real Legos, for that matter.
Sat May 20 2000 11:58:
I currently have 2218 errors in my code. This is a record. The
2218 errors were caused by the fact that I thought C had an "until"
construct like Perl, and I put such a construct into my yacc file.
Sat May 20 2000 15:01:
I'm now ready to begin filling in my Check functions. This is (almost)
where everyone else is. Good job, me.
Sat May 20 2000 18:45:
Dan is posting comments on Slashdot. I do not endorse this practice.
Sat May 20 2000 19:20:
Inscrutable: "not readily investigated, interpreted, or
understood". I love this word (cf. Jake Berendes West Covina).
The semantics of the language are defined primarily through test
cases. Right now there are 33 test cases. The TA has a bounty on new
test cases but no one is biting because a new test case means more
semantics and therefore more work for everybody. Some of the test
cases are really easy to make work and some of them are going to be
nightmares.
The various array assignment cases (where you have to
make sure that two arrays have the same dimensions, or that an
array has a certain number of elements) and the function call case
(enforcing the requirement that the number and types of arguments
to a function correspond to the formal arguments to the function)
look like the toughest ones.
Sat May 20 2000 21:40:
A lot of semantic checking code has been written but it doesn't work
yet. Same old story. Bleah.
Sun May 21 2000 05:47:
Past the impasse that stymied me last night. I just fixed yet
another bug in my scanner. It didn't recognize the modulus operator.
How did I get this far with that kind of bug? That probably cost me
5% off the last project.
Sun May 21 2000 06:11:
I realize that my struggles with the semantic checker do not make
for thrilling reading. But such is my life.
I swiped Dan's headphones (he's asleep) and put on the Mass in
B Minor, but I can still hear that annoying techno drum machine.
I curse the guy who invented the drum machine (forgot his name). It doesn't take much
skill to play the drums (I speak from experience), but even the
modicum of talent required to do so would be enough of a barrier to entry to
prevent much techno music from being produced. Jumping frogs? I
must avoid this technology!
Jake is going to come to the defense of the drum machine in
an impassioned plea, I just know it. Celeste too, probably.
Sun May 21 2000 09:10:
There is someone in the building across from my building who has
two techno albums. They've been playing both of these albums every
day since the start of school. The intervening distance and walls
cut out most of the treble and midrange, making the songs sound even
more like each other than your average techno song sounds like your
average other techno song. I think that sometimes they repeat a track they
really like, but I'm not sure. It might be a different song.
Sun May 21 2000 09:21:
On reflection, I have decided that cursing the drum machine is
not the answer. The answer is cursing people who play loud music
without headphones, especially when they keep playing the same
two albums for months on end.
Sun May 21 2000 09:25:
Also, the phone always rings at around this time, it's always someone
different, it's always for Dan, and Dan is always asleep when it happens. I don't
understand it (I do understand Dan being asleep, since he goes
to sleep at 6 AM).
Mon May 22 2000 03:53:
You don't even want to know what I spent all day doing. Oh man,
it was painful. I was a nervous wreck by the time it was done.
However, I FINALLY have the infrastructure needed to do all the
semantic checking, and I have a good chunk of that code written
from last time.
This compiler has more pointers than anything else I've ever
written. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
Thanks to Celeste for calling me last night when I was a nervous
wreck and talking me down.
Mon May 22 2000 04:02:
That entry makes it sound like I spent yesterday as an unwilling
contract killer or something. I spent yesterday tearing apart my
abstract syntax tree and symbol table code and putting it back together
again.
Mon May 22 2000 08:03:
The phone rang at the appointed time today. Amazingly, it was for
me.
ACT I
Pope John XXIII: In 1917, three Portuguese shepherd
children were visited by the Virgin Mary and given three secrets.
The first and second, which predicted World War II and the Bolshevik
revolution in Russia, were made known to the Vatican in 1943. It's
now 1960, and time to reveal the third secret. The envelope, please.
[Pope John XXIII opens the envelope and reads the secret.]
Pope John XXIII: Whoa, better let that one sit for a while.
[Pope John XXIII reseals the envelope.]
Panicked Masses: Rhubarb rhubarb, end of the world rhubarb,
sex scandal rhubarb, too horrible to mention rhubarb.
ACT II
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano: It's
now 2000, and time to finally reveal the third secret of Fatima. The
envelope, please.
[Cardinal Sodano opens the envelope and reads the secret.]
Cardinal Sodano: Ah! The secret speaks of the 1981 attempt on
the life of his holiness John Paul II. Specifically, it speaks of
'a bishop clothed in white' who 'falls to the ground, apparently dead,
under a burst of gunfire.'
Awe-struck Masses: Rhubarb rhubarb, power of prophecy rhubarb.
I think there's a lesson here for all of us.
Mon May 22 2000 09:38:
The Condensed Story of the Third Secret of Fatima
How did I grow up calling Susanna silly names and never think of
Soaky
Susie?
Mon May 22 2000 09:48:
My timestamp is an hour early. Wonder what can be done
about that.
Mon May 22 2000 10:21:
I hear that Battlefield Earth isn't very good.
I have no idea where the "Yummy" in
"Yummy Moby" came from; my only justification is that I said "yummy"
a lot when I was a kid, probably more than I should have. I blame
those motivational children's song tapes. Oh boy, I've got joy.
Mon May 22 2000 19:40:
On the silly names for Susanna thread, a bit of prehistoric Leonardonics:
the original names I called Susanna were "Moby", "Yummy Moby", and "Mo" (rare). They all came
from a riddle in a book of dumb jokes given me to pass the time
on a car trip. The question was something along the lines of
"What's large, yellow, and stabbed at from Hell's heart by Captain
Ahab, spat at for hate's sake with his last breath?" Obviously
that wasn't the original question, but there may have been reference
to Melville's masterwork. The answer was "Moby Banana". Susanna
had a nickname (not a name-calling name) "Susanna Banana", so I
started calling her Moby.
Tue May 23 2000 06:48:
It's finally working! It works on 12 of the 35 test cases! Woohoo!
Tue May 23 2000 08:05:
This is so good. It took me forever to do this design, but now
that I have it, adding semantic checks is a piece of cake. Even
something complicated like "in a function, all return statements
must return a value that can be coerced into the return value type
of the function", which requires you to scan every single statement in
a function, only takes a few minutes to write.
Tue May 23 2000 08:08:
Also, I just discovered that my philosophy paper isn't due until
Friday!
Reminder to myself to work on cases 14, 18, 13, 17, and 11
tomorrow. If I can get these working, my estimated grade will go
up to 74%, which I'm fairly sure will be above average.
Tue May 23 2000 21:11:
My semantic analyzer now works on 21 of the test cases. I believe
the TA has chosen 25 of the 35 which he will use, so probably
15 of those cases will be ones that I can handle, which gives me
an estimated grade of 60%.
Wed May 24 2000 05:37:
Test case 14 (Love potion #14) had a syntax error in it (a comma
instead of a semicolon). I fixed it and my checker caught the
semantic error right away. Woohoo!
Wed May 24 2000 09:02:
All those test cases work now. 31 and 32 also work. If I have time I
can do #12 and #22. Right now I should work on my paper, since my
expected grade on the semantic analyzer right now is 83%.
Wed May 24 2000 09:28:
Segfault: If you had feelings about US
Considered A-Bomb on Moon, it's likely that US
Bombs Moon; Soviets Not Affected will also invoke feelings.
Wed May 24 2000 17:35:
I have one successful submission of my semantic analyzer. If I
decide to work on it some more I can do another one. From scuttlebutt
and general attitude around the class, I'm pretty sure that
very few people have even been able to start on the semantic analysis portion of
the project. So even though it took me an insanely long amount
of time to get a design that worked, it took less time (and was
probably less frustrating) than it would have to have gone with the
original horrible design.
Wed May 24 2000 17:49:
I should point out that "Yummy Moby", "Moby", etc. are
impersonal nouns, not titles. So Susanna was not Yummy Moby, she
was the Yummy Moby.
Wed May 24 2000 18:57:
Another night of wackiness at Leonard and Dan's house:
Leonard: Angband is the only open source project I know of that has fragmented to the extent that people who want open source projects to fragment want open source projects to fragment.
[Long pause.]
Leonard: Can you think of another?
Dan: I'd have to parse what you just said first.
Wed May 24 2000 20:01:
Why do people think they can send arbitrary press releases to
editor@segfault.org? What do they think is going to happen? Weren't
they paying attention when I mocked
them?
Wed May 24 2000 20:21:
I want to know about a diet I can live with and what is in the news message at news://news.jpl.nasa.gov/8gg0mv%243aq%241%40nntp1.jpl.nasa.gov.
We got 5 hits on Segfault from it today, but it's not a public newsserver
so I don't know what the article says. Does anyone read this who
has access to JPL's news server and can copy me on this message?
Thu May 25 2000 06:14:
Segfault got 24,999 pageviews yesterday. That's a record for as long
as I've been keeping track. But come on, 24,999? The impersonal forces
of the universe mock me.
Thu May 25 2000 08:10:
Wow, the people with the two techno albums are really loud today.
I can almost hear the vocals. Fortunately, I'm just about to leave.
Thu May 25 2000 10:56:
Is it unreasonable for me to avoid the geek news site kuro5hin because
the 7331sp33k (a bad idea in and of itself) makes it look like "kuro
five hin" (which is actually a better name for a geek news site
than "corrosion")? I understand it's a really good site, but the name
makes me want to stay far, far away from it. And vomit. Lots of
wanting to vomit.
Fri May 26 2000 05:53:
Spamming tip: When spamming someone, imply that they signed up
for your service and agreed to let you spam them. Many people
will figure they must have done so, even if they don't remember.
Fri May 26 2000 11:38:
It's not often that you see Richard Stallman actually being
sarcastic, but here it
is. "Surely it took a real clever guy to think of this?" Ouch.
Sat May 27 2000 19:39:
I found this
great golem picture. That's one pissed-off golem.
Mon May 29 2000 10:14:
I think even in air shows, the planes stay higher above the
ground than 200 feet.
Mon May 29 2000 10:29:
NTK isn't responding, so 1) I can't read the new NTK, and 2) I
can't see their link to the "Perl is finished" Segfault story (I'm
assuming it's that one as that's the only one that's gotten linked
from anywhere this past week).
Mon May 29 2000 15:40:
There's a point at which you come to realize that it's not all
part of your rock and roll fantasy.
Mon May 29 2000 15:59:
Are we really supposed to believe that a film called "Changes" is
about surfing and only about surfing?
Mon May 29 2000 16:24:
Thanks to Scott for emailing me the NTK in the UK. At least they referred
to us as Segfault and not SEGFAULT.
Mon May 29 2000 17:22:
Following the traditional redesign (it only took an hour this time),
I have successfully turned a program in the made-up language into
Java bytecode. The program in question assigns five to a variable.
Tue May 30 2000 06:14:
NTK Link (it works now).
[0] "our hero" being Conan the Barbarian, of course.
Tue May 30 2000 06:46:
When we last left our hero[0], "Hello world" worked, as did "Hello 5",
but "Hello 0.4" did not, since the JVM handles floats in a weird way
which I have yet to take into account. I don't have time to work on
it this morning, since I have to read my stupid news clippings for my
stupid Oceans discussion. I can say that because I'm fairly sure that no
one connected with my Oceans class will ever read this. Man, I hate
that discussion. It's not because of the people. The professor and
the TA are both excellent. I just hate talking about news clippings.
My collab.net interview was my only interview which consisted in
part of debating the merits of BSD-type vs. GPL licenses.
That essay also has a lucid explanation of what the GPL actually
requires: "that
software authors should be required to make their source code
available to the same extent that they make the object code available."
Tue May 30 2000 07:02:
I found an essay
on the ethical motivation behind BSD-type licensing. Good timing,
as many of the collab.net people like that kind of license. I don't
care one way or the other. If someone's going to pay me to write non-copylefted free software, I'll
do it. In actual fact, someone is going to pay me. Therefore, I'll do it.
Ray Carney: Those movies were crap.
Interviewer: But a lot of people liked those movies a lot.
Ray Carney: They were still crap. What people need is
movies like John Cassavetes' Faces.
Interviewer: But a lot of people walk out of Cassavetes'
movies because they're so depressing.
Ray Carney: It doesn't matter. That's what people need, and
if people had any sense they'd realize it.
At times I don't think the term "consumer advocate" is appropriate
for Mr. Carney, and at other times I think that it's perfectly
appropriate.
Tue May 30 2000 12:37:
Interviewer: I'm talking with the Ralph Nader of the film
industry, Ray (not Art) Carney. A real consumer advocate! Tell me, Ray,
what did you think about movies like Forrest Gump, Schindler's List,
and Pulp Fiction?
In high school and junior high I wrote great papers, but my
standards were much lower. I wrote great poetry then, too.
Tue May 30 2000 20:40:
I can't believe I {ate the whole thing, got an A- on that philosophy
paper}. For four years now I've been writing terrible college papers,
and, with only one left to go, I've yet to get
less than a B- on a paper. Some people might say that this empirically demonstrates
that my papers are not terrible. I scoff at such people.
Wed May 31 2000 07:35:
I can now assign to variables and print them out. I'm making
good money in my spare time!
The crazy thing is, that's easier to do in Smokey than in C or C++
(because Smokey has a built-in string data type).
Here's the code for that:
Wed May 31 2000 09:52:
What is your name?
Jake Berendes
Hello, Jake Berendes.
hello;
begin
var a: "What is your name?\n";
var b: string;
write a;
read b;
write "Hello, ", b, ".\n";
end
end hello
So this works now:
Thu Jun 01 2000 07:59:
All the arithmetic operations work now. String multiplication (as per
Perl (M-M-Ma-M-Max Headroom)) and modulus were the toughest since I had to implement them in Java assembler
(there's no operation or provided function for either), and I suck at writing assembler. String multiplication takes 19 instructions and modulus takes
12. They could be done in fewer... this assembler syntax must have
an unconditional jump! Unconditional jumps? I must have this assembler syntax!
Modulus program: calculates a%b
Enter a:
1049
Enter b:
203
1049 % 203 = 34
Confused? You won't be, after this episode of Soap.
Thu Jun 01 2000 10:07:
In Oceans today I learned that it takes 8 tons of water to raise
8 tons of beef (yes, this was relevant to the lecture). I also learned that it takes 2500 gallons of water
to produce one hamburger's worth of meat. Unless I made a conversion
error,
this means that the average hamburger patty weighs
20,781 pounds. No wonder Americans are so fat!
Fri Jun 02 2000 06:13:
The Towers of Hanoi example program compiles and runs now.
This means that conditionals and subroutine calls work. I still have
to do some work on conditional expressions, and then work arrays into
the picture, and then I'll be done.
Fri Jun 02 2000 07:08:
I'm a koala, I'm a small marsupial, I eat eucalyptus and I'm REALLY INTERESTED
IN THE FATE OF YOUR ORGANIC COCOA!!!!!
Madonna's Agent: One
of Madonna's singles was leaked out onto the Net yesterday. Madonna
is extremely peeved about this!
The Record Company Madonna Works For: That's right,
Madonna is very pissed off!
Reporters: "Madonna livid" rhubarb rhubarb... Fri Jun 02 2000 09:13:
Fri Jun 02 2000 12:28:
To do: array creation, array element emit, operations on whole arrays,
a > b > c crap.
Fri Jun 02 2000 17:52:
Oh yeah, I also have to do comparisons on strings. Bleah.
Fri Jun 02 2000 17:54:
Oh yeah again, Jasmin has an "unconditional jump" instruction.
Surprisingly, it's called "goto".
My main task was writing the database API so that the other people could
hook the static pages up to it without having to write SQL. Thomas:
"When did you learn ASP?" Me: "This morning."
Sat Jun 03 2000 20:05:
I just spent the last 14 hours working on our nonexistant (as of
14 hours ago) CS130 project. It now exists in large measure, and it's
now mainly a matter of hooking the pieces together, which Josh,
Namson, and I will do after this two-hour break.
Sun Jun 04 2000 08:29:
I need to go buy some more food (watch them go buy some more food).
The only things I ate yesterday were
a Baja Fresh burrito that Josh brought in, and a chocolate soy bar.
I have cereal but no milk. I am making a pathetic attempt to bake
a pizza in the oven (no previous attempt to bake anything in the oven
has resulted in actual baking). The pizza almost fits in
the toaster oven but not quite; I'm hoping that a sojourn in the oven
will make it bendy and flexible so that it will fit in the toaster
oven. It's a square pizza, and I distrust square pizza in general,
but I am starving.
Sun Jun 04 2000 08:44:
Jimmy was a cricket, a cricket was he.
Pollywog, corn dog, pudding in the mix.
Sun Jun 04 2000 13:52:
I don't know about you, but I'm going to attend
Euro-BLECH 2000.
I gotta say, CS130 was the most useless CS class I ever took at UCLA.
I was hoping to learn about UML and stuff. All I learned was how to
waste a whole lot of time generating paperwork and then
at the last minute rush to put together a system that bears a passable
resemblance to the system described by the paperwork. That may be how
things work in the real world (my experience is otherwise), but I could have easily learned that
on the job.
Sun Jun 04 2000 21:26:
The CS130 application is done. In the spirit of last year's
CS111 webcam
wackiness, there are some pictures
up of us writing the app. Josh has a few more pictures; send them
my way, Josh, if you please. I don't have any descriptions for those
pictures, but I will soon. I'm not in many of the pictures because
I was generally the one taking the pictures. Sorry, Celeste. Josh
has more pictures of me.
Sun Jun 04 2000 21:46:
The thing I love about
Livejournal comment trees is that they so
often look like Forum
2000 comment trees.
Mon Jun 05 2000 06:09:
Collab.net has obtained funding
from Sun, but the news is not on collab.net's front page. I
don't know why. Maybe they only link to their own press releases.
Mon Jun 05 2000 08:55:
It's not just Sun; it's (among others) Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle, and
Turbolinux, and this is the actual second round of financing.
This is good news, although as I understand it, it would have been
better news had I gotten my options before this happened.
Mon Jun 05 2000 09:00:
I discovered this morning that Jasmin has modulus instructions baked right in. Oh well. (We present)
My modulus works fine.
BTW, if i1...in are the indices of the array element, and sk is the size of dimension k in the array, than the mapping is: a[i1, i2, ... in] =
b[i1 + E{j=2..n}(ij * T{k=1..j-1}(sk))]
The E and T are symbolic of summation and multiplication
summation (I forgot the term, but it's the pi summation as opposed
to the sigma summation), respectively. Damn these non-MathML-supporting
browsers.
Now I need to use this to make my ArrayElementNodes capable of figuring
out where in the actual (one-dimensional) array they reference. Then,
they will become self-aware and take over the world! AH HA HA HA HA!
Or maybe they will just help me get my compiler done.
Mon Jun 05 2000 09:15:
Why does it {hurt when I pee, take me so long to derive the mapping
of an element of an n-dimensional array to an element of a one-dimensional
array}? It's not difficult, yet I must needs fill up a whole page with
poorly drawn diagrams and equations to figure it out.
Mon Jun 05 2000 12:37:
I don't think I've ever had richer chocolate than the chocolate
in this chocolate pudding. It reminds me of those coffees (cappucinos maybe?) that Adam
drank last quarter in our digital design lab. They smelled nice
at first, but by the end of the quarter, every time he bought one it
was like he was loading up a syringe with caramel, sticking it up my
nose, and pulling the plunger.
Mon Jun 05 2000 12:43:
Dammit, UCLA, I am not going to give you any more money! Stop trying to sell me alumni crap I don't need!
I've already paid you upwards of $20,000! I've taken your classes
and gotten good grades, so give me my diploma and stop trying to get
more money out of me!
Tue Jun 06 2000 05:26:
Thanks to Josh, I am Shark
Boy! "Too much time coding can make you crazy," says Josh.
News to me.
I'm not too crazy about the actual deadly
onions; too much like killer tomatoes. But even that makes the whole
thing seem like a goofy, poorly-translated video game in which you
are a fighter pilot commanded to "defend attack of deadly onions from
planet deadly onion!" and when you beat the game you are told "attack
of deadly onions is repelled! but this is not the end of your quest!" and
then it makes you do the whole thing again, only with cabbages or something.
Tue Jun 06 2000 06:34:
I made up and used the throwaway phrase "attack of deadly onions from planet
deadly onion" a few days ago in an entry in Jake's notebook, and I
can't get it out of my head. I love the redundancy. I love the lack
of any articles in the sentence. I love the implication that someone
named a planet "planet deadly onion". I love all phrases of the
form "Attack of the x from Planet y" (especially "Attack of the Good Ol' Boys
from Planet Honky-Tonk").
Tue Jun 06 2000 13:41:
It looks like the only things my compiler has to do now are a < b < c
and string comparisons. The big complicated test program compiles
and runs fine (except for the a < b < c expression in it). This
is good, as it will give me time to study for the final (which is
on Friday (It's Friday!)).
I know I shouldn't be awake right now, but I am. Wed Jun 07 2000 02:56:
I put up (a slightly edited version of) an email from foaf regarding
how software development works in the real world.
Wed Jun 07 2000 03:02:
My latest KatzDot:
Open Source Sex - It's About Time
Eating lutefisk for Christmas seems to me like eating unleavened
bread for Passover, except that unleavened bread can be made appetizing.
Wed Jun 07 2000 04:31:
Jake on lutefisk. Jake, it might be
better for you if you don't read about the preparation of the
lutefisk.
Wed Jun 07 2000 10:50:
a < b < c works. It was actually pretty easy, because what I did was
sneak in before outputting the assembler code and change a < b < c to
a < b && b < c, which the compiler already knows how to output as
assembler. Still to do: operations on whole arrays and string comparisons.
Wed Jun 07 2000 14:54:
Cyborg
lampreys! In what other field are new developments described as
"laudably perverse"?
Wed Jun 07 2000 18:32:
My grade on the semantic analyzer: 84. Average grade: 36.4. I kick
ass! I don't quite understand the syntax of my grade email, though.
I get five points off for "infinite loop" (when?) and after the
list of test cases my analyzer failed on it says EXITS 09. Why,
Spock, why?
Thu Jun 08 2000 01:27:
Get out of Mordor free! Fred was talking about a site
that compared lembas to Twinkies, and I found it:
Tolkien
Sarcasm. Also includes such gems as misleading summaries of Tolkien's works
and 10
Rejected Lord of the Rings Plot Twists: "Balin emerges from the depths of Moria, claiming he 'fell asleep in
the tub'."
Thu Jun 08 2000 02:11:
Strangely enough, string comparison seems to already work. I'm
not complaining.
Thu Jun 08 2000 07:39:
Test cases that fail: 8 (integer division is done as real),
9 (similar cause), 10 (weird constant thing), 11-13 (division again!!)
15-17 (operations
on whole arrays), 19 (integer division gives same results as real
division (bleah!!!)), 20 (nonexistant label). That's not good (there are 22 test cases, which means I correctly compile only half of them).
I really have to fix the division. The weird thing is that the TA
says we don't have to implement division, yet it's used in 9 of
the sample test cases. If I fix the division I suppose I can call
it quits.
Thu Jun 08 2000 08:05:
8, 9, and 11 work now. I have to go to class.
#10 also looks hopeless because jasmin doesn't seem to want to
accept negative values for its constants.
I'm working on the whole-array operations now. Then I'm going
to quit.
Thu Jun 08 2000 10:40:
I'm not going to fix #19 because I object to its semantics (also, it's too hard). I
fixed the conversion problem, but I'm not going to make the type of a division expression
depend on what type the result is being assigned to rather than on
what type is being divided by what type. I mean, come on.
Thu Jun 08 2000 13:09:
I have a compiler submission in. I spent all this time getting array operations
and printing out of whole arrays to work, and only one of the three
test cases that uses that now works correctly (the other two have
subtle things wrong with them). Bleah. I've been up since midnight.
Double bleah. I have 16/22 right now, which isn't bad. I just realized that the lecture I'm going to go to
right now is my last lecture ever. Yay!
Thu Jun 08 2000 20:09:
I don't know what the people in the other building are doing, but
I'm fairly certain that they could do it at about 3% of their
current shouting level. Unless, of course, what they're doing is
shouting.
Thu Jun 08 2000 20:38:
17 works now. 15 still doesn't work and isn't going to work because it
assumes that arrays are stored in column major order and I store them in row major order.
Therefore, the test cases that have stymied my compiler are 10, 12,
13, 15, and 20. I'm working on fixing 10, but it will be ugly.
The compiler takes forever to make. I blame the Internet.
Specifically, I blame HTTP v1.1.
Thu Jun 08 2000 20:51:
The great thing about having two techno albums is the
variety! One techno album might get monotonous after a while,
but when you have two, one or the other is always appropriate!
Thu Jun 08 2000 21:04:
I fixed the problem with 10 but it shamelessly manifested another
problem, so I give up. 17 out of 22 isn't bad. I'm testing the
compiler for turnin now.
Fri Jun 09 2000 06:10:
For some reason, editor@segfault.org gets an incredible amount of
Japanese spam.
At some point I'll tell you about the Henry Samueli School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences (couldn't they have changed the name after
I graduated?) letter they sent to my mother at my address.
Oh, and look at this hilarious non sequitur from the class ring
propaganda booklet:
I'm sure that made more sense in the original Russian.
Fri Jun 09 2000 06:38:
UCLA is operating under the dual misimpression that:
After all, tradition isn't just about what each student receives
from UCLA - it's about what they leave behind. As upcoming graduates take
a particular joy in putting on the enduring symbol of a revered
university, this university finds an equal joy in the caliber of
those people who will be wearing a UCLA ring for many years to come.
Fri Jun 09 2000 07:24:
"Jackson's findings suggest, however, that not every moment of
Microsoft history should be viewed with pride."
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Fri Jun 09 2000 09:17:
For the life of me I cannot obtain a follow set by using the algorithm.
Fortunately, I figured out a rule of thumb that should work so
long as the grammars given on the final don't have a lot of
rules or a lot of terminals (which they probably won't, since
the professor has to grade the exams).
Fri Jun 09 2000 11:49:
I just now noticed that the Tolkien Sarcasm page has a
serialized parody
of Lord of the Rings which, among other things, explains
why they're called "High Elves".
It's probably strep throat. I have a fever of 101.3 (power FM)
and I don't even feel it. That's how sick I am. I'm sick and tired
of being sick and tired.
Oh yeah, the CS132 final was easy.
Fri Jun 09 2000 17:42:
UCLA's student health center doesn't accept any insurance other
than the student insurance they try to sell you every quarter. I
think I've bitched about this before. They can't stand the thought
of ripping off an insurance company instead of you directly. So when I
went to see a doctor about my horrible sore throat (the actual
visit is paid for by my registration fees, thank goodness), I got
a prescription for antibiotics, took it to the drugstore downtown,
and was told it would take over an hour. I really don't
think it takes them an hour to get a bottle and put it in a bag.
The big time consumer is probably paperwork. I'm at home
right now waiting for them to call me.
I hear tell that there are so-called "emergency" medical situations where
if you don't get help to someone they die. I hope I never end up
in one of those.
Fri Jun 09 2000 18:42:
There's some problem with the insurance (it took them 2 hours to
discover this, so the question re-arrises, what exactly is taking all
this time?). They can't find out what the problem is because the insurance company is closed. I may have to actually buy the damn medicine with my
own money tomorrow. At least UCLA won't be getting it.
Fri Jun 09 2000 18:48:
I'm complaining because I can complain. Apart from my being sicker
than a dog and not being able to get any medicine, everything in
my life is great.
I can't wait til I start my job at collab and I get real
insurance. I'll finally be able to get glasses and braces.
Sat Jun 10 2000 06:02:
I feel a lot better today. I may not need to get that medicine at
all. I'm certainly not going to get it if I have to pay $70 for
it. OTOH, I keep getting sick, recovering, and then immediately
getting sick again, and antibiotics might stop this pattern. OTOOH, the doctor said this was because I'm in a situation
(UCLA) where I come into close contact with hundreds of people every
day. Since that won't be happening anymore, I should be fine.
Sat Jun 10 2000 08:30:
My insurance card is a medical card only. Obviously, prescriptions do
not fall under the rubric of "medical", so they can't be billed to
a medical card. I'll just have to get better on my own.
Sat Jun 10 2000 09:17:
Here's my schedule for next week: On Monday at 8 I have my
Oceans final, which should be laughably easy as it's a lower-division
class. My CS130 final has to be turned in between 3 and 6 on Wednesday.
The CS130 final looks pretty tough, mainly because it requires that
I read through all the crap paperwork we produced. I have to turn in
my paper on Wittgenstein (who was, indeed, a beery swine) by noon on Friday.
Then I'm done. Yay!
Sat Jun 10 2000 10:57:
I finally got my insurance to go through. The punchline: the co-pay on
the insurance is $78, which is $6 more than the student health
center wanted for the medicine (without insurance) in the first place.
Is there even a point to having insurance?
Sat Jun 10 2000 16:22:
I finally got my rip-off medication (it's Mendocino County &tc.).
I have to take it with food, so I got a pizza too. The pizza is my
first real food in 2 days, and I think I ate it too quickly because
I feel sick. Well, I feel sick anyway but you know what I mean.
Sat Jun 10 2000 19:16:
My mother explains how health
insurance works. I love the way my mother writes, although
I never really saw her write like that while I was living at home.
Sat Jun 10 2000 19:26:
I'm completely full of pizza but I couldn't stop eating because
food is so good. I had to take the box down to the fridge so I'd
stop eating and bloating myself with food.
Sun Jun 11 2000 06:17:
Dan is reading Snow Crash. First posting Slashdot comments
and now Snow Crash. Tsk tsk tsk.
Sun Jun 11 2000 09:20:
Leonardonics: Oh,
I said that already
Sun Jun 11 2000 11:15:
Here's Adam's
bio on drdrew.com. Confirms everyone's worst suspicions:
yes, Adam is originally not from California, not from Texas, but from Joisey.
Mon Jun 12 2000 05:49:
Dimi Shahbaz, who is on the LUG list but whom I've never met,
says my site is "addictive". "You would imagine
that some guys log of his life (mostly complaints about stuff) would be
pretty boring, and no one would read it, but damned if I don't enjoy
it," he goes on to say. He closes by saying "A lot of your jokes I don't get but I pretend to anyway."
Nobody gets my jokes, Dimi. That's why they're so good. I don't know
why I quoted huge chunks of that mail rather than putting it in /mail.
Mon Jun 12 2000 07:08:
Aha. My 132 final is the final I had today from 8 to 11. My Oceans
final isn't until 11:30. I'm wondering if I should stay here or go
home and come back.
Mon Jun 12 2000 07:16:
Fred: I have learned how to parse XML!
Leonard: Isn't that the parser's job?
Fred: I have learned how to use the parser!
I met Dimi today.
Mon Jun 12 2000 15:53:
The first time I've ever seen "NBC
is a partner in MSNBC".
Mon Jun 12 2000 18:40:
My cousin Allison, justification for the trip that brought us the the Texas travelogue, had her first baby yesterday afternoon. His name
is Atticus. Atticus! Atticus!
Mon Jun 12 2000 19:26:
There was a time when Americans designed and manufactured good,
reliable helicopters. Helicopters which did not explode when shot
at. Personally, I think it's a shame that those days are now behind us.
But professionally, I must admit it does make my job a good
deal easier.
Tue Jun 13 2000 06:41:
Yesterday, my mother was having problems connecting her new scanner
to her Windows machine. So of course she decided to call me for
help. I begged her not to torment me in this fashion. "It's like
you're asking me to fix your Macintosh. It's like you're asking me
to repair your car. I can't do it." Fortunately, it was just
a case of a missing DLL, so I managed to fix it over the phone in
a mere hour.
I'm almost done with my 130 final. Now I can start rereading
Anscomb for my paper. Wittgenstein's assertion is that you can
hold a false belief without having made a mistake. I don't see what the
problem is or how this implies any kind of idealism. You can
speak falsely without lying, but the fact that you weren't lying
doesn't make whatever you said true. But I can't make that last 6 pages.
Tue Jun 13 2000 11:19:
Disclaimer: My mother does not own a Macintosh.
I prefer to assume that all hypothetical people are of a particular
gender. I don't care which. It just makes the grammar easier to deal
with. If there are multiple hypothetical people I'd like to give them names and
refer to them by name, which I could do in CS (there being a precedent
in the zany antics of Alice and Bob) but not in philosophy. Fortunately,
in philosophy, the hypothetical people generally hail from different
camps of philosophy so I can refer to them by the position they
are advocating.
Wed Jun 14 2000 11:13:
I just realized something interesting. When I write text for my CS classes (not a common occurance), I
assign hypothetical people the ambiguous gender of "him or her".
When I write text for philosophy classes (a common occurance), I
assume that all hypothetical people are female. I think that this reflects the practices of my CS professors vs. my philosophy professors.
Wed Jun 14 2000 13:04:
The CS130 final says I have to either hand-write it or use my favorite word processor. I wrote it in Emacs, but is it cheating to put it into Word format to print it out?
Wed Jun 14 2000 14:15 PST:
Only one man now stands between me and graduation... Ludwig Wittgenstein!
Thu Jun 15 2000 04:49:
"This suite is far more than it appears to be. And that's a good thing,
because it appears to be quite lame."
Thu Jun 15 2000 05:14:
I tried peas with Pasta Roni once and didn't like it.
I guess it would only be a Liar's Paradox if the open source guidelines
said that an open source license could contain no false statements.
Thu Jun 15 2000 05:51:
I just realized that the Liar's Paradox could be embodied in a software
license. You'd have a license that met all the open source guidelines
but which said "This is not an open source license." (That's an Empirical Liar, by the way) Dan says that
this isn't a Liar Paradox, it's just lying. Maybe. But what would be
the legal status of such a license?
Thu Jun 15 2000 05:54:
You know you've been using Lynx too long when you forget that
Slashdot has a poll.
Thu Jun 15 2000 05:56:
ZDNet:
"Somehow, the Linux
doldrums seem to have little impact on IBM's Linux commitment."
Yeah, IBM's usually so reactionary.
Thu Jun 15 2000 06:00:
Demon Dog almost makes an appearance in
Today's
After Y2K!.
Thu Jun 15 2000 06:03:
As long as I'm linking to articles that contain quotes I think
are funny, I should link to Mike's
latest:
"These actual-dog/sock puppet-dog relationships rarely go beyond
the fling stage, and are in fact illegal in thirty-seven states."
Thu Jun 15 2000 06:49:
This kicks a large amount of ass per unit time. A guy (Carey Bunks,
I assume, since he's the contact for the site) made an
annotatable,
searchable index of NASA, NOAA, and FWS graphics. Somebody
should give this guy a million tons of bandwidth for his site
and pay him to find new sources of copyright-free images.
Thu Jun 15 2000 11:02:
24 hours to go!
Thu Jun 15 2000 11:13:
I've been going through On Certainty all morning looking
for quotes so that I can piece together Wittgenstein's definition
of "mistake" and paint him as an idealist. Here's the fabulous section 430:
I meet someone from Mars and he asks me "How many toes have human
beings got?"--I say "Ten, I'll shew you", and take my shoes off.
Suppose he was surprised that I knew with such certainty, although
I hadn't looked at my toes--ought I to say "We humans know how many
toes we have whether can see them or not"?
Thu Jun 15 2000 17:56:
I was going to have this horrible equivocation at the end of my
paper, but then I realized that if I changed it around a little
it would a) be a suggestion rather than an equivocation, b) be a good twist to end the paper, and c) bring Wittgenstein in line
with my own philosophical preconceptions. Woohoo!
I have to write a couple hundred words more near the beginning of
the paper, nailing down a definition of "mistake". Then I'll probably
have 1600 words, which is five pages. Any more I can add while tightening everything up will spill
onto the sixth page, making my paper meet the length requirement (especially
since my previous two papers were also too short).
Thu Jun 15 2000 18:00:
YES!!! Linux
And Open Source Software Is Mentioned In Cynical Attention Ploy.
Their only problem: they used an extraneous non-extraneous word ("is"). Technology
reporters like words to be missing from press release headlines so that
when they print the press release as news, they can put the missing
words back in the headlines and get the feeling that they've done
something.
I'm obviously not as good at recognizing these terms as a native
speaker would be. I wonder how much of a language I would have to
know before I could recognize terms in it that are translations of
English terms.
Thu Jun 15 2000 18:17:
I'm pretty good at spotting terms that have been translated from
Japanese or Korean, and thanks to Wittgenstein I'm getting
good at spotting terms that were obviously originally in German.
Case in point: "language-game". German words remind me of those big strings of sausages that dogs pick up in their mouths and run away with.
Thu Jun 15 2000 18:48:
I just found out that the guy who played Murdock on The A-Team
was Dwight Schultz, who also played Barclay on Star Trek: The
Next Generation.
mistake (n): A misapplication of the rules of one's current language-game.
That's my working definition.
Thu Jun 15 2000 20:15:
Paper's almost done. I've got about 1750 words. I just have to
actually hammer out a good definition of "mistake". I have a lot of
quotes I can use (which I got this morning) but I don't want to
overrun this part of the paper with quotes, but I do need to get a lot of support from Wittgenstein on this because he never gives a definition of "mistake". Why not? He says he can't be done, the concept is too vague. Well looky here, pal:
I'm actually pretty happy about the way this paper turned out.
That can't be a good sign. I probably degraded into all sorts of
sophistry in the paper. But I'll pass the class regardless of what happens (I have an A-
average on the midterms, which counts for 60% of the class, so
even if I get a C on the final I'll get a B in the class).
Woohoo! I'm done!
Tip to students: How can I be so confident that I'll get at least
a C on this paper, even if the arguments are terrible? I make no guarantees. All I can say is that this has worked
for me consistently through four years of college, nine paper-writing classes, and
about 25 papers.
Let me reiterate: Woohoo! I'm done!
Thu Jun 15 2000 21:49:
The paper's done. I just have to whip up a bibliography for it
and print it out. Word count: 2038. (What the?!) Wow.
First time in a long time that my paper has not been shorter than
the recommended minimum length.
From the APOD FAQ, the best statement
I've ever seen of this non-question: "What if I used to be a millionaire
but then I believed something I read on APOD and now I own only a single
dented bucket?"
Neimroff recently co-wrote a paper called
Accuracy
of Press Reports in Astronomy, because that's the kind of
guy he is.
Fri Jun 16 2000 05:31:
The home pages of unsung heroes Jerry
T. Bonnel and Robert
J. Neimroff of Astronomy
Picture of the Day.
Fri Jun 16 2000 08:06:
The code to program my remote for my TV is 026.
Fri Jun 16 2000 10:42:
All done!
Sat Jun 17 2000 06:04:
Dan is leaving today or tomorrow. I'm not leaving til Wednesday.
By convention, this means I have to clean the room. Argh.
The text claims to be "erotica". Maybe it was, in 1930. The ban
on Ulysses wasn't lifted until three years later. Actually
the Satyricon is sort of the Roman version of Ulysses.
Me #2: No, The Aneid is the Roman version of
Ulysses.
Me #1: No, The Aneid is the Roman version of
The Odyssey.
Me #2: The Odyssey of whom?
Me #1: Nobody.
Me #2: D'oh! That joke was old when Homer made it.
Me #1: So was that one.
Me #2: That wasn't a joke, it was a reference.
Me #1: This split personality bit is over.
Sat Jun 17 2000 06:45:
Cool! The Satyricon
of Petronius has an English translation online! (Here it is
in Latin.)
Sat Jun 17 2000 06:49:
This charming report
on RMS has the interesting headline "Computer Guru Advises Against Hacking".
"Charming" may not be the right word.
Sat Jun 17 2000 08:30:
Dr. Wernher von Braun seems quite happy surrendering
to the Allied forces in 1945. "A man whose allegiance is ruled by
expedience", indeed. It was us or the Soviets, I suppose.
My "Attack of Myself" obsession is of course merely a subobsession
of my "Attack of x" obsession previously mentioned.
Sat Jun 17 2000 09:33:
I need to do something with the phrase "Attack of Myself". It's
stuck in my head and I've found that the best way to get a phrase
out of my head is to use it in something.
Sat Jun 17 2000 16:39:
Dan went and took away the phone and the DSL box, so I have no way
of communicating with the outside world. I'll try to come on campus
and check my email once a day or so. Bleah.
Did I say gphoto? Sorry, I meant Adobe Photodeluxe.
gphoto has an 800-kilobyte
RPM, is GPLed, and talks to over 100 models of camera.
All kidding aside, why should I have to install 60 megs of software
to download pictures from a digital camera onto a Windows machine?
I'm feeling generous, so I'll throw the GIMP onto the Linux side,
even though it provides about an order of magnitude more image
manipulation functionality than does Adobe Photodeluxe. That's still
under 20 megs. How do people live this way? My conclusion: gphoto was
developed by people who were pissed off at Adobe Photodeluxe.
If you'll excuse me, I now have to save each of my 40 pictures
individually, convincing the program each time that I want to save it
in JPEG format (the way they're stored in the camera) instead of the
proprietary Adobe Photodeluxe format.
Thu Jun 22 2000 08:30:
I want to use gphoto to obtain pictures from my digital camera, but
it's horribly designed, over 50 megabytes in size, requires an 8 meg
helper app to talk to my particular model of camera, makes me agree
to an onerous licensing agreement, and puts me through the trouble
of making up fake personal information so that the authors of gphoto
won't be secretly sent my real personal information and my
personalized gphoto serial number the next time I connect the laptop
to the Internet.
I can only even get 12 of my pictures out of the camera before
the "scratch disk" (Everyone knows you have a separate hard
drive just for swap) fills up. These images were 45K apiece
when they were in the camera; I saved a PPD file just to look at and
it's 900K.
Foster Brereton, I love you like a brother, but the company you
intern for makes shitty software.
Windows people: How do you live?
Thu Jun 22 2000 08:37:
It gets better (worse). Adobe Photodeluxe doesn't even have an
option to save a picture in JPEG format. Apparantly I don't need
that. I can choose between version 3.0 of the Adobe Photodeluxe
proprietary file format, and the original recipe, version 1.0 of
the Adobe Photodeluxe proprietary file format.
I think I can say with confidence that if they didn't have to say
"With Adobe Photodeluxe, you can export your photos right to
the Web!", there would be no way to get my photo into JPEG format.
It's at this point that I leave to set up my real computer
and get my photos with gphoto, the way God intended.
(If you're wondering why I have a Windows laptop and why I never
mentioned it before, it's because I didn't have it before, and it's
not technically mine. I have it on loan from MAP, where I no longer
work. The people there want me to be able to fix the software I wrote
for them if something goes wrong, so I was given an old laptop on
which to fix it. I will also be given money on a per-incident
basis, and now that I am a professional with a real job I will
probably command a higher rate.)
Thu Jun 22 2000 08:54:
The saga continues. I can save a picture in JPEG format (they quaintly call it "exporting",
but I have to save it in the crap format first and then export it
to JPEG. The online help recommends that if I want to send my picture
in a format that people on a Mac or UNIX machine can read, I should
export it into PDF format. Yes, PDF, the recognized cross-platform
standard for digital photographs.
No descriptions for the pictures yet, to be added as usual in
my copious free time.
I miss you, Celeste.
Thu Jun 22 2000 10:29:
Ah, sweet Linux booze. I had to copy all the files over to my
mom's computer to get them onto
the Net, but it was so much easier than wrestling with Adobe
Photodeluxe, which now symbolizes to me all that is wrong with
proprietary software.
Thu Jun 22 2000 10:35:
Those pictures weren't transferred as binary. I could probably blame
this on Windows' stupid FTP program, but I'm sick of blaming things
on things. I'll get pscp and redo them now.
I was explaining what I'll be doing at collab.net to one of
my mother's cousins and I was flailing around to try and explain
the concept of open source development, and she suddenly says "So
it's a lot like the way Linux is developed.", and I was so relieved
that she knew what I was talking about after all, that I immediately agreed wholeheartedly
with her, and she then started thinking that I was working on
some competitor to Linux and the whole thing started over again.
Hopefully this interview
with Brian Behlendorf will clear things up for those who
are curious.
Steve from the UK wrote a song inspired by Segfault. I haven't
listened to it (it's a 4 meg download), so I can't recommend it or not,
but you can listen to it at his
mp3.com site and let me know what you think. He wants me to mention
it on the site, which I probably will do.
Thu Jun 22 2000 11:08:
The pictures are up now.
They are pictures from yesterday when my great-uncle Justin
Call took Celeste and me sailing. There are also some pictures of
my mother and her cousins.
There's a lady who's in charge of the paperwork who stayed at her
desk and with whom I got more done in five minutes than I had in
hours of talking to the other guy and waiting for him to run
around talking to his superiors seeing if this or that was okay.
This lady should be selling the cars.
I do have insurance now, at least, so I should be able to get
my car by Monday. It's a gold Saturn. I don't like cars, but I need
to get one.
Fri Jun 23 2000 16:40:
I am not in a good mood. I spent yesterday and all of today trying
to get a car. The guy my mother put in charge of selling me a car,
a man with whom she has dealt with in the past, is completely
incompetent. At several points I thought he was trying to cheat me, but he
is just incompetent. My mother says she "feel[s] sorry for him".
If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that you do not enter
into large-scale business transactions with people because you feel
sorry for them. There's probably a reason why you feel sorry for
them. I am amazed that my mother has not learned this lesson.
I always wanted to be the originator of one of those things that
gets forwarded around; maybe this will make it happen (with the Cap'n).
Apparantly, in the Windows world, the term is not "screenshot"
but "screen capture". This is weird because the term was
"screenshot" in the early 90s when I was using DOS and Windows.
Who changed it?
Sat Jun 24 2000 06:23:
Many armchair remedy-makers in the Microsoft antitrust case would
have liked to see Windows released as free software. But as
this screenshot shows,
that's not a workable solution.
Sat Jun 24 2000 06:35:
"Installing GnomeHack is about as simple as you can get. Currently, there are no binaries available or
packages, so you'll need a C compiler." Did I miss something
here?
I must remember to write a Segfault story about the
Commission of Advertisers for the Responsible Regulation of Online
Trade (CARROT) reforming as the Society for Tormenting and Incapacitating
Consumers (STIC), following the failure of the incentive method
for convincing people to give up their personal information to
marketers. That's the sort of thing that would normally go in
my personal notebook,
but I like those acronyms so much that I feel the need to show
them off even though I don't have an actual story yet.
Tra la, tra la, the tiger. He told a terrible tale. The turkey
tipped over the teapot, and toppled away with the snail, the
snail. And toppled away with the snail.
Sat Jun 24 2000 17:02:
Susanna cut my hair with her haircut kit. It actually looks pretty good.
It's the crew cut, not the buzz cut. I don't know if Celeste objects
to the crew cut, but I know she objects to the buzz cut. I object
to the buzz cut, in fact. It's ugly. But I really like the crew cut.
A lot of the collab.net people (including Brian, I think) are where
I was in 1998, haircut-wise. Think Penn Jillette.
Note: I'm not asking you to forward it. It may be too technical
a joke to forward around. It may be not graphical enough to forward
around. I just thought it was a good DOS counterpart to those silly
UNIX commands like %blow and ^did you switch the^regular
coffee with Folgers?.
Sat Jun 24 2000 18:29:
ACTUALLY, I think some of my Segfault stories have been forwarded
around. But I meant graphical forwarded around things.
purple has gotten the
forwarding madness going.
Why is it so hard to find Windows programs that do what you want them to do and nothing more? I mean, organize my photo album. I'd love to do that. Write another program to do that. Don't put it in the video camera capture program.
You could argue that the whole idea of "program that does what you want it to do and nothing more" is a UNIX idea, but I don't buy that. I remember plenty of utilities in the DOS and Windows 3.1 days that were like that.
Then I thought that maybe Windows software authors are enamored of the shareware idea, so they put in lots of stuff so people would register (not that people ever do). But although that's probably a part of it, many of the good old utilities I just mentioned were shareware. Even modern shareware doesn't neccessarily manifest this problem a lot; I haven't used WinZip much, but it's shareware and it doesn't get in my face with features I don't need.
Then I thought that the sort of person who wrote that kind of utility probably doesn't write for Windows anymore, having moved in general to the free UNIX platforms. I think that's the most reasonable explanation, although I'm sure there are others. This is kind of a shame, because if people have to put up with Windows they shouldn't also have to put up with lousy application software.
If I wanted to be sarcastic and Microsoft-bashing I'd say that the authors of Windows software are trying to emulate Microsoft by smushing programs that should be separate into one big blob. But I won't. Even though I just said it by implication, I don't believe that's what it is.
Sun Jun 25 2000 11:07:
I found a program on TUCOWS called MediaCenter which, while it has the usual crop of useless features I don't need, is about 70 megs smaller than the Adobe program, and recognizes that the preferred format for graphics file transfer is JPG. It puts the JPGs in a stupid place and is not very elegant because the actual transfer is done in the helper app for my particular model of camera, but it's good enough that it won't pain me excessively to use it once a day during the trip.
Sun Jun 25 2000 11:20:
Susanna has a login name for some website or other of "perfect insomniac". This is close enough to Joyce's "ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" to arouse suspicion, but she claims never to have heard of that phrase. Hmm.
Sun Jun 25 2000 13:15:
I'm downloading the Windows version of Python so that I can write real scripts for the laptop. If there are any useful Windows tools you use, let me know of them.
Mon Jun 26 2000 08:10:
Bleah. Rose mulch bleach.
Mon Jun 26 2000 08:18:
My mother wanted me to watch Harold and Maude, but I cannot endorse it. It reminded me of the comedy version of The House of Yes (which I also cannot endorse). All I can say good for it is that it accurately reflects for me the mood of the early 70s, and that it wasn't one of those pseudo-comedies where the characters can do a wacky thing but then they have to deal with the consequences of their actions for ten minutes. The wacky thing gets done, the scene ends, and that's all we hear of it. The only problem was that I wanted them to have to deal with the consequences of their actions because I didn't like the characters very much.
It's probably illegal for me to say that. I was kidding! Let the record show I was kidding!
Some new pictures in misc; one of Mrs. Irby (whose Dylan bootlegs I returned today, after having had them for over 2 years), and one of me doing the jigsaw puzzle as per Celestial request. Susanna also has a pictures section now.
Mrs. Irby's picture is sideways. Woop, not anymore! Thank goodness for Chef convert 0626-001.jpg -rotate 270 0626-irby.jpg!
Mon Jun 26 2000 16:22:
Despite the car salesman's best efforts at dissuading me, I now have a car. I am also $16,000 in debt. When collab.net goes public be sure to buy lots of stock to drive up the value of my options so I can pay off my car.
Tue Jun 27 2000 11:11:
I have As in software engineering and philosophy, and a B+ in compiler construction (I didn't get an A because of my miserable showing on the midterm). No Oceans grade yet, but it will probably also be a B+ since I skipped discussion a lot and it's the sort of class where you get points for going to discussion. So I'm pretty sure I'll get my final GPA above 3.3. Woohoo!
Thu Jun 29 2000 08:14:
But sir, have you considered the many advantages of the non-legit lifestyle?
B in Oceans. Bleah. Shoulda gone to discussion. My total GPA looks to be 3.288. Oh well.
Thu Jun 29 2000 08:29:
Wow, I went to foaf's page and he also had a reference to Dynamite Hack's Boyz in the Hood, albeit a more conventional reference. I only know of that song because when we were working on the 130 project, Josh was constantly serving it from the laptop to the computer with the speakers, forcing us to listen to it.
President Clinton: I'm pleased to announce the completion of the human genome map.
Jon Katz: My God! What a setback for troubled teens!
Suggestion for a Segfault article: a story about the human genome map headlined "Security Through Obscurity Loses Again". The rest is at your discretion. No one will do it, of course, and I won't be able to.
Thu Jun 29 2000 19:29:
I'm leaving tomorrow.
So this is really, seriously, the end of Internet access for me for quite a while. Will I survive? Tune in next week, same bat time, same bat station! Wait, I've been handed an update... it will in fact be a different bat station!
Fri Jun 30 2000 05:23:
Hey everybody! I'm Dr. Nick Riviera! I have to move all my stuff back into the truck and into my car. Then I have to drive up to Frisco (nyeah) and unload it (bleah). Then we keep going north, I think, although we might stay the night at my uncle's house and go north tomorrow.
Get out of jail free.*
* Certain restrictions apply to claim.**
** Certain restrictions apply to previous disclaimer.
My mother got a cooking equipment catalog with a little cover cover (another cover on top of the real cover) which had a disclaimer disclaimer of that form. It said "FREE DELIVERY" but it had to qualify "FREE DELIVERY" to such an extent that the disclaimer itself was misleading, and another disclaimer had to be written adding more qualifications to the disclaimer.
In case you haven't noticed, I love disclaimers. I also love modifying nouns with themselves. Pizza pizza.
Fri Jun 30 2000 05:30:
Fri Jun 30 2000 06:41:
You'd think that a story called The Ecology of the Xorn would be the greatest story ever written, but it's... not.
I should also point you to the wondrous Rogomatic, predecessor to Angband's Borg.
Fri Jun 30 2000 06:56:
Continuing my Google search for "xorn" brings me this
"Vade-Mecum"
for Rogue, which reads like a standards document and from which you could write a clone of Rogue version 3, 4 or 5. Also offers the official justification for why you can't go up stairs in Rogue until you get the Amulet: the stairways are not stairways but holes in the floor, "the elevators have been out of order for centuries", and the Amulet lets you levitate (but not in the way that the potion of levitation lets you levitate) so you can go up the holes. Yeah, right.
Fri Jun 30 2000 10:03:
I'm off, but not to see the wizard. We represent the Screen Actors Guild.
Sun Jul 02 2000 20:55:
I'm at my great-aunt's house, setting up Putty so I can check my email.
The collab.net office (until it moves in August) is right down the street from Pac Bell Park. It's a really nice ballpark.
My time has been largely divided between driving the car and sitting in the car taking pictures out the windows while someone else drove. The resulting travelogue will therefore probably have a lot of poorly-shot pictures of things I think are funny and lots of paragraphs that just go "I drove from x place to y place."
"Why do you take so many pictures of signs?", asks Susanna. Because signs are funny. When you're driving down the freeway and someone wants to sell you something you don't need or convert you to their religion, they use a sign. And since you're driving past the sign at a fair clip, the copy on the sign needs to be snappy. And since it's so difficult to come up with snappy copy, signs are a gold mine of unintentional hilarity.
I-5 in Washington goes through some Indian reservations, and the inhabitants of the reservations set up these Quartzite-style booths on the side of the road and sell fireworks from them. They have names like "Ill Eagle Fireworks". I got some great pictures of that and of other things today, including a bizarre billboard near the Washington border that had a big Uncle Sam on the right and a plastic-letter "DO DEMOCRATS HATE MICROSOFT?" attached to the left. Do Democrats hate Microsoft? Well, it's pretty universal outside of Washington.
Sun Jul 02 2000 21:10:
The San Fransisco Giants portal has the same sort of appeal to me that I imagine your average portal having to someone who is new to the Internet.
Sun Jul 02 2000 21:20:
Oh yeah, I turn 21 a week from today.
It gave me an idea for a genetic programming type program which evolves a winning blackjack strategy by selecting for good lookup tables. The only problem is that some of the entries on the lookup table want you to calculate some function of the game state, a "count", and take one action if the count is positive and another if it's negative. I don't know how to calculate this function of the game state.
I've tried searching the Web but all I get is people wanting to sell me books on how to calculate this function; I don't get any actual explanation of the actual function. Is it such a complicated function? If I knew anything about genetic programming I'd evolve the count function as well as the lookup table, but I don't. Does anyone reading this have one of those books that they bought at some point and can explicate the function to me?
Also, I remember seeing a Python module containing deck-of-cards logic, but I can't find it. Anyone know where it is? Nevermind, I found it: cards.py.
Mon Jul 03 2000 20:17:
Among the stuff that my great-aunt is getting rid of is a thing that came with a piece of software written to help you learn how to beat blackjack. (Blackjack, apparantly, can be consistently beaten; that is, there are strategies that result long-term in you gaining money and the house losing money.) The thing is basically a lookup table which maps the current state of the game to the action you should take. I guess you're supposed to memorize the table and then go to a casino and get kicked out because they can see you're playing according to the system.
Tue Jul 04 2000 16:42:
What better way to celebrate Independance Day than to go to Canada? That's what we did. We spent as much time on the ferry to Victoria as we did in Victoria, but apart from that it wasn't bad.
Wed Jul 05 2000 06:50:
As a preview of the travelogue I am sure to write, I put up about 30 pictures taken over the past five days. Enjoy.
Wed Jul 05 2000 11:07:
Everything in Washington and Canada seems designed for someone several inches shorter than myself. This is very strange, as I am not particularily tall.
In the car, Susanna read out loud a joke she was reading in Our Dumb Century, But I was sitting in the front seat, away from her, and when she said "cannibalism", I heard "catapults", which ruined the joke. The thing was, it not only ruined the joke but it also made the joke about ten times funnier, and I started laughing hysterically. After Susanna discovered that I was laughing at a misinterpretation of the joke, she grew sullen. "I tried to share my humor, and they laughed at me!", she said.
Wed Jul 05 2000 16:48:
Pinball games suffer from incredible point inflation, such that even someone who is terrible at pinball, such as myself (I'm not a pinball wizard, nor must there be a twist) can score 17 million points over the course of a typical game.
Wed Jul 05 2000 18:48:
I just put up 4 new pictures taken today.
Thu Jul 06 2000 04:11:
We're supposed to leave in an hour. My mother was going to wake everyone up. I'd better go wake her up.
I'm at collab.net now. Three... why did I type "three"? I don't
know. I have a computer with a huge monitor. Lynx looks so good in it.
I'm going to go publish some Segfault stories while I wait for Brian
to get here.
Mon Jul 10 2000 10:18:
My mother was awake, but not out of bed. Just so I don't get accused
of slandering my own mother.
Mon Jul 10 2000 10:58:
Ahh... now I can drink!
Mon Jul 10 2000 15:06:
The "Applets" icon for Helix-Gnome looks like Sputnik. Is it Sputnik? I assume it's not since that makes absolutely no sense. But what is it?
Mon Jul 10 2000 15:38:
Correction: Terry Chow does not use KDE.
Mon Jul 10 2000 15:59:
Wohoo! My cumulative UCLA GPA is 3.303!
Mon Jul 10 2000 18:10:
The boom box here is playing a reggae version of "Autobahn". It has stunned me into submission, like a large frog smacked on the head by a two-by-four.
Tue Jul 11 2000 15:06:
Too many portable MP3 players, not enough potable MP3 players!
Tue Jul 11 2000 15:22:
My current task is reading O'Reilly's Java Servlet Programming. The guy who wrote the book is sitting at the desk across from mine. This is weird.
Wed Jul 12 2000 09:17:
Got my birthday present from Jake: three CDs.
Wed Jul 12 2000 10:01:
Whoops, it's not a cover, it's the original tape recording of 68 Dead Ones I sent to Jake years ago, with some samples dubbed on top of it. How emberraske (for me).
Wed Jul 12 2000 14:14:
What if I kept track of every single URL I came across in print and post them at the end of the day in a big list? Answer: there would be something seriously wrong with me.
Wed Jul 12 2000 14:31:
Microsoft's .NET not bid to control Internet - CEO See? Even the CEO says so!
I was reminded of Celeste by the song Sara on One Hand, the Drug Store on the Other on the IwaF audio issue. It's the best song on that CD. It's so beautiful, it moves me to tears. The only problem with it is the inclusion of a sample after the song is over.
Wed Jul 12 2000 15:01:
I forgot to mention that Celeste sent me a bunch of cool shirts and two very sweet cards for my birthday. Thank you so much, honey.
Wed Jul 12 2000 15:44:
"LinuxWorld Conference & Expo has moved the registration deadline to July 21 to accommodate the new software rage." Huh?
Jake in his notebook: "everyone agrees- i should've removed the last "late afternoon" form the sara jon & the drugstore song. %#@$!"
Thu Jul 13 2000 07:46:
MP3 of Sara on One Hand, the Drug Store on the Other. It's exactly the sort of song I would never, ever write (lyrics-wise, I mean; the music sounds very me-ish), but I wish I had written it, which makes me feel very weird, and may be why I love it so much.
Thu Jul 13 2000 08:40:
I find this very funny, although I probably shouldn't (from The Washington Post):
No nation provides so clear an illustration of the dangers of irony as France: You sit in a cafe long enough, wearing black and muttering ironic observations on the passing scene, and one day the passing scene is the German army, again. Isn't that ironic?
Thu Jul 13 2000 08:56:
Added Mark Fasheh, Michael Yount, and foaf's new weblog (One weblog, okay, but two???) to my outside-link bar.
Thu Jul 13 2000 13:16:
On the way back from the Bryant office, I saw a big red double-decker bus belonging to the same tour company that owned the big red double-decker bus we took sightseeing in Victoria. It must be a chain, or that bus is seriously lost.
Thu Jul 13 2000 14:21:
As long as I'm ripping people's songs off the IwaF compilation, I should rip my own 68 Dead Ones, which was not a premonition of the exploded whale, but which could have been.
Thu Jul 13 2000 14:50:
I finally got my laptop. It's {Mendocino County &tc., a Thinkpad}. It's faster than my desktop at home, which should make for some wild times.
IT'S A WHOLE NEW BAG!
How'd we pack so much FLAVOR and CRUNCH into something so
MINI?
One bite and your family will know this
BIG TASTE
is something
DIFFERENT.
QUAKER CRISPY MINI'S
[sic] are
OVEN-BAKED
for a
LIGHT, CRISPY
texture you'll love to
MUNCH.
It's the
SNACK
that's a
TREAT
to
EAT.
At a party or simply watching TV, it's the only
MINI
that's
BIG
where it counts.
Wanna add some
CRUNCH
to the taste of
CARAMEL?
You've grabbed the right bag.
CARAMEL CRISPY MINI'S
[sic] bring to mind swirls of thick, rich caramel. And, better still, they've got
CRUNCH!
Now you can really satisfy your family's sweet tooth. So c'mon! Crunch into
CARAMEL QUAKER CRISPY MINI'S!
[sic]
This opens up so many questions. Like, why the unhealthy obsession with my family? Why the Pokeyfication? Why the apostrophe errors? Whose idea was it to write the copy as though "flavor" and "crunch" were cancer preventatives?
Thu Jul 13 2000 15:33:
Thu Jul 13 2000 16:12:
This is incredible. I'm actually remembering peoples' names.
Fri Jul 14 2000 09:37:
Josh Lucas, who started at collab.net the same day I did, has a
web page which meets
my criteria for top-of-the-front-page placement, so I put it there.
What a long, convoluted sentence.
Fri Jul 14 2000 12:30:
Nathan (a Segfault fan from way back) got my printing and my sound card working on the laptop. Woohoo!
That's just one of those things that comes to my mind once in a while and which I have to post here so that I'll stop thinking about it.
Fri Jul 14 2000 12:59:
It may interest you to know that in the Nethack source there is an extensive routine for pluralizing English nouns.
Fri Jul 14 2000 16:13:
For the first time in my life, I have a huge box of business cards with my name on them. I have a feeling that this is like handing me a machine gun that shoots candy.
Mon Jul 17 2000 09:51:
If you thought the tsunami of embedded Linux in Tokyo last week was devestating, wait until you read about the
European outbreak of Linux devices. This stuff is dangerous, folks.
Mon Jul 17 2000 10:45:
perl.com Is Not www.perl.com.
There is so much food here. Never before have I had so much food at my disposal.
This book looks very interesting, but somehow I came away from the review without feeling as though I had read a review of a book. Weird.
Tue Jul 18 2000 08:46:
The fruit and nut trail mix here has chunks of dried mango in it. My, this is a yummy dried mango!
Tue Jul 18 2000 09:50:
Salon article about Advogato: Even Better Than Slashdot? There are certain assumptions implicit in that headline.
I met Cameron Barrett today. He wants me to go to Webzine2000 on Friday. I normally forgo events which promote themselves via cartoons of girls holding cans of spray paint, but I may make an exception in this instance.
Tue Jul 18 2000 11:23:
I'll be at The O'Reilly Open Source Convention tomorrow. Their motto, "Innovate - Collaborate - Discover", is obviously a rip-off of mine.
Tue Jul 18 2000 13:36:
Gnutella is very cool, but I don't really want anything.
Tue Jul 18 2000 15:05:
What comes to mind when you see the headline South African Attacked By Great White? That's probably why they appended "Shark" to the headline.
Tue Jul 18 2000 16:10:
I have a bottle of green hair dye from my first year at UCLA. I work at a place that doesn't care what color my hair is (Ed Korthof, one of my co-passengers on the trip to Monterey tomorrow, has blue hair), and my hair is now short enough (its darkness in color is directly proportional to its length) that the green would probably actually show up. So, the question is, should I try the green hair again?
Happy birthday, Scott!
Thu Jul 20 2000 08:32:
I think this is the funniest thing Scott (JR, not H) has ever written: (from
his journal)
I mean, its not as if the Queen Mother is destructible anyway. If you blew her up, she'd reassamble and walk out of the flames
Terminator style.
Thu Jul 20 2000 09:35:
The open source conference was great. I have pictures which I can't seem to get onto my laptop, including many pictures of Larry Wall making a fool of himself. Larry Wall has many of the mannerisms of Weird Al Yankovic, and he also had the Weird Al glasses and Hawaiian shirt (and old-school mustache). Also Brian, Tim O'Reilly, Richard Gabriel (me: "Is that the Richard Gabriel?" Jon: "Yeah, although I'm not sure what he's known for."), Andy Hertzfeld, and other greats. Actually, I think that's it as far as the greats go. But I also have lots of pictures of my friends.
Thu Jul 20 2000 09:39:
I got a paycheck yesterday. This is not good, as my money was supposed to be directly deposited into my UCU account. This means I have to go over to the BofA and open an account there so that I can make my car payment.
(I have an interest in Scour because I went to UCLA with the people who founded it.)
Thu Jul 20 2000 12:28:
RIAA:Napster::MPAA:Scour.
Thu Jul 20 2000 12:33:
Today's Zippy (which will only last until Monday) has a nice touch: the building in the cartoon is the Griffith Observatory in L.A.
Thu Jul 20 2000 13:04:
Does anyone know the original source of the fake news story "Metallica's New Album Is Napster-Proof"? I thought it was from modernhumorist.com, but it's not. Someone tried to submit it as a Segfault story. The story posits a Metallica album with one, really long, really crappy song.
In other news, my CARROT/STIC
Segfault story was profiled on Tasty
Bits from the Technology Front. Woohoo!
Fri Jul 21 2000 06:39:
Thanks to Celeste for tracking down the
Metallica article.
Fri Jul 21 2000 07:42:
Segfault: DVD Zone Encoding Has Gone Too Far! I actually wrote that story a long time ago (on paper, waiting for the plane back to LA after my Zack interview), but it still works.
Fri Jul 21 2000 09:27:
Recipient of tiny heart pump goes home after transplant. Do they run a story every time anyone goes home after a transplant? Are they going to run a story about me when I go home?
Fri Jul 21 2000 09:38:
This organization is one of the SourceXchange sponsors:
Future Captains of Capitalism. When I was a kid, it was Future Farmers of America.
Fri Jul 21 2000 12:47:
Wow, Mike cut his hair.
Fri Jul 21 2000 13:42:
I'm going through the DSL shenannigans again. Hopefully I'll have it within a week and I can start working from home.
I'm not sure what the expectation is. Do the CEOs of most companies acquired by Microsoft suddenly start supporting the antitrust action?
Fri Jul 21 2000 14:37:
Even before the merger [of Visio and Microsoft],
[Visio CEO Ted] Johnson was an outspoken defender of
Microsoft in its fight against the Department of Justice. He [sic]
opinion hasn't changed.
Fri Jul 21 2000 14:42:
Town Searches For Monster Snake. A truly monstrous snake would not require much searching for.
Fri Jul 21 2000 14:48:
Just spoke to Cameron Barrett again, at somewhat greater length than last time. He seems like a really great guy.
Fri Jul 21 2000 15:02:
It's gotten to the unfortunate point that every time I see news of a natural disaster, I think of it in terms of embedded Linux. I guess you ridicule what you don't understand, and I understand neither natural disasters nor embedded Linux. When San Francisco is destroyed by earthquake, my thoughts as I fly across the room will be "Oh no, an embedded Linux earthquake!"
Fri Jul 21 2000 15:05:
Since I moved here, I've been wondering why the fog clears up in the afternoon only during the week. The weekends are inevitably shrouded in perpetual fog. The only reasonable explanation is that the fog clears up in the afternoon in the downtown area, where I am during the week, but not in the hills, where I live and where I stay during the weekend.
Mon Jul 24 2000 07:12:
Hey hey. Taking BART knocks 20 minutes off my commute. And it's much more comfortable than the bus (but a lot more walking).
Mon Jul 24 2000 07:17:
Vivendi Chief Says He'll Crush Pirates. These poor people. They're banging their shoes on the table and threatening to crush their customers.
I'm so behind on writing pages for all my sets of pictures. Now I know how my mother feels with all her scrapbooks. Except I don't clutter up my pages with stickers. If I did, it would take even longer for me to find all the appropriate clip art.
Mon Jul 24 2000 08:07:
Pictures from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Jon has a couple pictures of me. I'll add those when I get them.
Mon Jul 24 2000 08:42:
Woohoo! Segfault has been declared a federal disaster relief area USA Today Hot Site! I took the opportunity to put up that old Linux Magazine Top 100 Linux Web Sites award, as well.
Mon Jul 24 2000 08:50:
Linux To Remain The Same Sized Threat To Microsoft, Study Says. Dang it! I mocked their headline and then they went and changed it! That's not the way it's supposed to work!
Mon Jul 24 2000 08:57:
Where does that bear bile you love so much come from? It comes from bear bile farms! Shame on you!
Mon Jul 24 2000 09:52:
Joe found some Linux games which I wish I'd known about earlier so I could have played them with Dan: Emperor Penguin (a clone of the fabulous old-school Empire) and Craft.
Mon Jul 24 2000 11:04:
Excellent. My copies of Peopleware and Open Source Development with CVS have come in. OSDwC has a starburst on the cover that says "Portions Of This Book Available Under The GPL". Yes, nothing sells books like the licensing of a portion under the GPL.
Rick: You put that back! That's my intellectual property! Mon Jul 24 2000 12:12:
Neil: You just said all property is theft, Rick.
Rick: Well, yes, it is.
Vyvyan: So I'm nicking it.
Not to be jingoistic about forms of understatement, not to wave the red, white, and blue of understatement, not to wear the big belt buckle and drive the gas-guzzling SUV of understatement, but this kind of innocent understatement is a nice compliment to the traditional dry, worldly British brand.
Mon Jul 24 2000 15:36:
Collab.net is getting lots of press coverage due to the Sun openoffice.org and Oracle developer exchange annoucnements, and I (along with everyone else) am getting lots of forwarded news articles. Here's a gem from the Wall Street Journal which demonstrates a form of understatement I find distinctly American (as opposed to the traditional British understatement):
Sun's StarOffice open initiative is a way to attack the ubiquity of proprietary desktop software such as Microsoft Corp.'s popular Office product, which wasn't developed using open-source models.
The banner ad for that page when I went there had epilepsy-fit-inducing camels flittering around it, so of course I had to click.
Mon Jul 24 2000 16:18:
What does it say? More importantly, why is "datanerd" not a word in English?
Tue Jul 25 2000 07:13:
Another great George Speight quote:
"At least we're not killing people like in other coups." Why is he so sensitive about other people's coups?
Tue Jul 25 2000 07:37:
More lovely understatement: "They [the dinosaurs] dominated this planet for 140 million years yet never developed a technological civilization."
Tue Jul 25 2000 08:10:
I asked on IRC if "R2-D2" had a hyphen or not, and Jon pointed me to
R2-D2's official character page, which reads like R2's resume. "As Skywalker's trusty companion, R2-D2 continues to play an important and ongoing role in helping the Rebels thwart Imperial forces, specializing in GTK development with C++."
Tue Jul 25 2000 08:14:
The reason I asked was that a guy submitted a Segfault story involving R2. As long as I'm linking to Segfault stories, don't miss the hilarious RFC 31337.
Tue Jul 25 2000 09:48:
Why is the History of UNIX spread out over twenty bazillion pages? The normal rationale for this behavior is to sell lots of banner ads, but there are no banner ads on that site. Maybe they've been paying too much attention to Jakob Nielsen.
Tue Jul 25 2000 11:44:
I thought I would be free of techno music when I moved out of LA, but no such luck. They play it even at work here! Argh. It's not as annoying as the stuff I was subjected to in LA, but still. Argh.
Tue Jul 25 2000 12:46:
I'm fleeing to mp3.com for music to listen to to drown out the techno. There are a lot of silly children's songs.
I screwed up on that at one point (Liquid Crystal used to have a line that implied that evolution was goal-directed), and I just rewrote the song. Is it so difficult?
Sorry. Go there and listen to that music. It's good.
Tue Jul 25 2000 13:15:
Wonderful "Eclectic Science Rock" from
Mike T. and the Trilobites. My only concern is that it seems that people who actually know how evolution works can't translate that consistently into a song.
Tue Jul 25 2000 15:29:
My second Be Dope story in as many years. (here's the other one)
Wed Jul 26 2000 06:52:
I bet I forgot my sandwiches. Nope.
Wed Jul 26 2000 07:02:
An interview with my hero (in a Penelope Pitstop sort of way),
Scott Fritzinger of gPhoto. If you like Garrett LeSage's Segfault icons,
he's also the guy who does all the graphics for linux.com. Even if you don't like them, that's what he does. He's not going to stop just because you don't like what he did for Segfault.
Wed Jul 26 2000 07:03:
I love you too, Celeste.
Wed Jul 26 2000 07:07:
Crud. I really gotta write up descriptions for the O'Reilly pictures, as Cam has linked to them.
The big push now, apparantly, is P2P. Pseudo-acronym for "person-to-person" (with Edward R. Murrow). This is by analogy with the previous big pushes, B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer). Note that Cs must share a 2-bond with a B, or they become Ps. It's like chemistry.
People are floating business plans for P2P schemes, which is interesting as P2P has no B in it, just Ps. So why the business plans, rather than just a standards document that Ps agree to follow? The answer is probably that the actual business plans are for C2B2C schemes, which are pointless because there's little or no value in them (versus a comparable P2P) for anyone outside the B.
Napster is a good example of a C2B2C business. Gnutella is a much better implementation of the idea (although it doesn't have as many users), and the reason is that it's P2P instead of C2B2C. This saves everyone a lot of trouble because it lets the Ps get on with their 2-binding without having to become Cs beholden to a B for their 2.
The one good thing that has come out of this silliness is a sort of taxonomy of business plans. Expect in the future to see P2C2B2C plays, C2B2C2B2C partnerships, and B2C2C2P2P2C2B2C supply chains.
Wed Jul 26 2000 09:15:
People visiting from Camworld: you probably want me to pontificate about industry trends, so here goes.
Wed Jul 26 2000 09:31:
The problem with Carnivore is its name. If you're ZDNet, it's easy to take "Carnivore" and run with it in headlines. It would be much more difficult to expose the evil of Carnivore if it were called something like "LTOW".
Wed Jul 26 2000 12:19:
While at lunch I received 10 copies of the same spam mail.
Wed Jul 26 2000 12:27:
Some pictures of Brian and other dev people at collab, taken yesterday.
Wed Jul 26 2000 12:31:
And 4 more copies. I think this guy's spam-bot might not check for duplicates.
Wed Jul 26 2000 13:46:
Another 5 copies end the spam, at least for now. Mike says he got 6 copies.
What's with the ellipsis? Why do people think their understatements need ellipses? Am I even spelling that right?
Thu Jul 27 2000 07:37:
Time for some old-school understatement, from
LWN:
Exactly two years ago, two new distributions were turned loose. One was "maXimum CDE/OS" put out by Xi
Graphics - it integrated the AccelleratedX server and Motif/CDE, was aimed at corporate clients, and was expensive. The
other announcement was for a thing called Linux-Mandrake - then a version of Red Hat 5.1 with KDE integrated. Two years
later, one of those distributions is doing rather better than the other...
Whenever I see NO WET TICKETS on a BART ticket-taker I am reminded of the mythical (in that I've never seen an actual instance) T-shirt that says NO FAT CHICKS. Which is really a weird T-shirt because it implies that the wearer is constantly being propositioned by fat chicks. It says, "Fat chicks dig me to such an extent that I must take special measures to defer them."
Thu Jul 27 2000 10:23:
The BART has a system where you put your ticket into a slot and then retrieve it to get in and out of the station. Every single ticket-taker has a handwritten sign on it that says "NO WET TICKETS". The inability of the ticket-takers to handle wet tickets has been independantly discovered at every station, and someone dispatched to put signs on the ticket-takers. It's not a warning label that came printed on the ticket-takers.
Fri Jul 28 2000 07:43:
var'aq: the warrior's programming language!
Fri Jul 28 2000 15:05:
Wow. After a lifetime of accomplishments, you get a
lousy obituary like this.
Mon Jul 31 2000 06:49:
If people want to say that I look like Howie Long, I won't stop them.
I'd say there are probably 30 versions of those custom football Santas, each with its own customized form letter from the Dansbury Mint. Santa is spreading himself awfully thin, but then what else is new?
Mon Jul 31 2000 07:23:
Now that I've graduated, I was going to be mellow and lenient towards UCLA's wacky attempts to cheat me out of my money. But they're going after my mother as well, so tally ho! Behold the UCLA Santa!
Mon Jul 31 2000 13:15:
The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook is corrupting our children!
Mon Jul 31 2000 14:48:
My site is now the all-powerful clearinghouse for O'Reilly Open Source Convention pictures. Here are Cam's pictures. (I should probably link to camworld on the top navbar; since I know him now, he meets the criteria.
Mon Jul 31 2000 15:22:
It is very hot here. And humid. Bleah. Manoj and I are united in our preference for cold, foggy weather. I think he's the only other person I've ever met who had such a preference.
Tue Aug 01 2000 06:18:
Technocrat (unintentionally) spins the news:
Naval-strength submarine-finding SONAR may be able to damage or destroy a whale's inner ear,
causing it to become disoriented.
Go to the Linux Today discussion page for that story to see people use it as an excuse to write the same stuff they always write.
Tue Aug 01 2000 09:19:
Mike said: "not a segv story, but it could be". I agree wholeheartedly. I also endorse the breaded clams.
Tue Aug 01 2000 12:55:
What's there to live for? Who needs the Geekcorps?
Tue Aug 01 2000 13:08:
EMonks is like Project Gutenberg (in fact, it has all the Project Gutenberg texts), but without that old-fashioned insistence upon only transcribing public domain works.
Tue Aug 01 2000 13:28:
There is a business model by which a company puts up an e-commerce site which takes your orders and throws them away. Then you call their 800 number to complain and they ask you for all the information that their Web server tossed into the bit bucket the first time you gave it to them, and you perform the actual business transaction on the phone. I'm not sure where exactly the value to the consumer is in this, but it's a very popular business model, so there must be money in it.
I'm pretty sure this only happens with IE 5 users, which is why I pin the blame on IE 5.
Tue Aug 01 2000 15:05:
There is a bug in IE 5 which I curse, even though I've never used IE 5 in my life. This bug sends the page you were on as the referrer to the page you go to, even if you typed in a new URL or selected a bookmark rather than clicking a link on the old page. This means that my tidy referrer logs are cluttered up by IE 5 users who go to my site or to Segfault and tell me what page they were on before, even if that page has no links to my site or to Segfault. It annoys me.
It's sort of the anti-Katzdot, I guess.
Tue Aug 01 2000 15:48:
Mike and I are trying to think up the ultimate slanderous headline. A slanderous headline is one designed (as is its child article) to bring in page views from angry zealots who flame the author and increase the site's hit count. ZDNet columnists do this a lot, more due to a natural flair for showmanship than any edict from above, I believe. Anyway, my working slanderous headline is "Mac Zealots: Mozilla-Loving Dupes of Napster Linux Communists". Mike praises it as "concise and highly inflammatory."
Wed Aug 02 2000 07:06:
I was expecting to get set up with DSL sometime within the next two weeks. Ed informs me that if I wanted that, I should have ordered my DSL in April.
Wed Aug 02 2000 08:21:
foaf on browsers:
I can't tell you what my default
browser will be on any given day. Both netscape and IE
fight for ownership of my browsing experience and I
have decided to go with the flow rather than choosing
between the two. When either asks to be my default I
just say "Sure, why not".
Wed Aug 02 2000 11:38:
Leonardonics: Singing animal naming convention,
Then you endorse the breaded clams?.
So when I saw "Licking your wounds may soon take on a whole new meaning. It could even be a pleasant and tasty experience!" on Sci Tech Daily, I thought "There is no way the actual article says anything like that." Think again, Leonard. That is a verbatim quote of the actual article, which discusses potential uses of honey as an antibacterial agent. This usage of honey has the blessing of Aristotle, who as we know is always on the cutting edge of medical science.
Be that as it may, I don't think that licking one's honey-covered wounds would be either tasty or medically advisable.
Thu Aug 03 2000 06:24:
Science and Technology Daily and Arts and Letters Daily are not above writing eye-catching summaries of the articles they link to, summaries which have only a passing resemblance to the content of the articles.
Thu Aug 03 2000 07:52:
Mark has a cameo in this summary of the VA Linux Printing Summit, where agreement was reached between the superpowers to halt construction of orbital laser printers.
Thu Aug 03 2000 10:30:
It's not difficult to infer the licensing terms of software packages from their name and their Freshmeat description.
Thu Aug 03 2000 10:41:
With the sales department sitting behind me, I am privy to all sorts of industry dirt.
Thu Aug 03 2000 10:55:
You know what cracks me up? If you go to a map site and get a map, there will be options to show on the map locations of, eg. Dennys restaurants or Honda dealerships. "Yes, I'm planning a trip from Pittsburgh to Chicago and I want to know the location of every Honda dealership along the way." I don't get it. Companies pay to make this an option for users of the map service. Why?
Again, I'm not sure where the money is in this model, but the people who run these businesses must be pretty happy with it.
Thu Aug 03 2000 11:36:
In my attempts to get Susanna a laptop, I have discovered another popular business model, where you set up an e-commerce site which falsely implies that the item your customer wants is in stock and/or that you will actually be able to sell the items in your catalog when someone orders them. The idea is to prevent your customers from buying what they want to buy, and to annoy them so that they wouldn't buy from you even if you had what they wanted.
Fri Aug 04 2000 06:20:
Between the BART station and the office there is a large marble building which a glorious stone-cut mural on the front lets on to be the Marine Firemen's [sic?] Union. I don't know what to make of this building, because I can't see there being so many marine firemen in San Francisco that they need this big union hall. I think they subcontract the building out so that other unions can use it as well, because there is a banner in one window which says "PACBELL HONOR OUR CONTRACT", and I can't imagine why Pacific Bell would be dealing with the Marine Firemen's union.
Fri Aug 04 2000 08:06:
I know that this is funny, but I don't know how or why.
(All of those appliances are really old, but (and this is why I wasn't surprised) it doesn't matter, since the new models look pretty much the same.)
Fri Aug 04 2000 08:25:
This site claims that American washing mashines are inferior to their European counterparts. [Goofus designs heavy cars to meet weight quotas more easily.] I was disturbed (but not particularily surprised) by this, so I took pictures of the washing machine I use in my uncle's house so that, in the interests of international cooperation, its design could be critiqued by the readers of this site. I also took pictures of the dryer and the refrigerator, for good measure.
Fri Aug 04 2000 08:30:
Pictures from San Francisco: what passes for "gardens", dawn.
Fri Aug 04 2000 08:37:
Katzdot: Can Sex Stop American Lurkers?
Fri Aug 04 2000 09:04:
Things You Wouldn't Expect to Find on an AOL Homepage, part 430:
Design Reverse-Engineering and Automated Design Pattern Detection in Smalltalk.
Fri Aug 04 2000 15:28:
Hey hey. Mike invited me to a book burning beach
bonfire tomorrow. I'm there. I will be, anyway. Mike lives in my ZIP code (Is that a
big deal in SF? It would be in LA.), just a few miles away.
Mon Aug 07 2000 06:33:
Protect us from the laws of supply and demand! Bring back the days of socialized electricity!
Mon Aug 07 2000 07:02:
Hacker crackdown, or cracker hackdown?
Mon Aug 07 2000 07:09:
I have to know: Who are Liam and Patsy?
On the way home from the bonfire, I got lost and somehow ended up on the 280 (yes, the 280, myeh) and had to turn around. I know I'm going to get flak for complaining about the street layout of San Francisco, so I will acknowledge that there are parts of LA where the streets curve and split off and do weird things. And, by the same token, there are parts of San Francisco where you can drive for nearly two miles without running into a three-way stoplight or some other unholy freak of traffic control.
Mon Aug 07 2000 07:22:
On the way to the bonfire I saw a Korean (?) church which advertised itself as "The Home of Christ" the way a restaurant would advertise itself as "Home of the Big Bacon Burger". I took a picture of it, but, unlike my other pictures, it didn't come out.
Mon Aug 07 2000 08:59:
I forgot to mention that on the way to Mike's house, I saw the famous dog with chef's hat statue from Zippy the Pinhead. I would have taken a picture, but there was nowhere to park.
Mon Aug 07 2000 10:09:
Consecutive Slashdot headlines: Linux In A Box, Linux on a Wrist Watch?. I predict Linux on a Wrist Watch In A Box? next.
Mon Aug 07 2000 12:56:
Windows: Wave of the Future or Sack of Bile? is not the follow-up to my Linux: Windows Avenger or Worm-Ridden OS of Filth?, but it could be.
Mon Aug 07 2000 13:51:
Wow, now that I've graduated, SEASNet offers Solaris. Which reminds me, I'd better move my Smokey compiler off the SEASNet machine before they shut my account down.
Mon Aug 07 2000 14:14:
I just committed my first line of code to an open source project. (There was a method added to another class at my request, but I didn't write the method, I just called it.)
Mon Aug 07 2000 15:11:
Wow, where did the day go? It went on the rails, of course. It couldn't have gone...anywhere else.
Tue Aug 08 2000 06:56:
After many false starts, Susanna now has a computer. Huzzah!
Oh yeah, I have a history of Rome. I got it in Washington. I'm reading it on the BART, which moves me through at the rate of about 10 pages a day. I really should read it while not on the BART, but I don't want to, on principle. I shouldn't even read it on the BART, cause it's a big book and it takes up a lot of space in my backpack. I should find a smaller book to read on the BART.
The book was published in 1939 (I {met him, got it} in {a candy, an antique} store), and is filled with underlinings and marginal notes that date to late 1944. So much of the text is underlined that I really have to question the value of the underlining, and most of the margin notes take parts of the text and put it into list form.
There's one margin note that made me laugh out loud when I saw it. The relevant passage (it's circled) is:
This passage has a big note off in the right margin saying "Jew". Why?
I think the reason it made me laugh out loud is that it reminded me of an old Dr. Katz (is that still running?) where the guy on the couch is talking about a stand-up audition he did. "So I go up there and I'm doing my act, and the guy says 'don't be schticky.' 'Don't be schticky.' You know what that means to me? We hate the Jews. 'Don't be schticky, Jew.'"
Tue Aug 08 2000 07:11:
Anachronisms in my history of Rome book:
[Republican] Rome had also become the Mecca of fortune hunters from every corner of the Mediterranean world.
Except for the Jews, then victors over Antiochus in Palestine, the Carthaginians were the last great representatives of the Semites until the rise of the Arabs under Mohammed in the seventh century A.D.
Tue Aug 08 2000 07:41:
These guys moved in a few weeks ago two floors below us.
Norton Utilities.
Tue Aug 08 2000 10:09:
wmNetscapeKiller: a new web browser? No, it literally kills your Netscape session. It's a sure sign of a problem with your software when third-party applications spring up to compensate for and recover from its shortcomings.
Tue Aug 08 2000 11:44:
Manoj's DJ name is "DJ Big Indian". Everyone should have a DJ name, and everyone's DJ name should be some obscure geeky reference.
Tue Aug 08 2000 11:46:
Pictures from San Francisco: The only bar I've ever seen with a mission statement.
Tue Aug 08 2000 13:06:
I got an honorable mention in the Be Dope Haiku Contest.
Tue Aug 08 2000 13:49:
Joshua Uziel (of uzi fame) has coined (?) the term "booth unbabe" to refer to Mark in his role as VA rep at Linux World Expo, and, more generally, to anyone who both works a trade show booth and is knowledgeable about the product he or she is representing.
Tue Aug 08 2000 14:55:
Jon finally sent me his pictures from the O'Reilly conference.
Tue Aug 08 2000 15:46:
I saw this in the Segfault referer log, and soon realized that the writing style was oddly familiar. Yes, Kris wrote it. Hi, Kris.
Wed Aug 09 2000 07:51:
Life imitates
Segfault.
Wed Aug 09 2000 08:42:
And more Segfault, this time from me: Industry Unites Around Vague, Poorly-Defined Vision
Just for the record, I was affected in the same way as Josh. Although I would have said it a little differently. I would have said "Sometimes, decisions which seem to be little ones...", because grammatically that looks better.
Uh, the sentiment still stands, though.
Wed Aug 09 2000 11:07:
Co-Worker Josh wrote:
Sometimes, what seem to be little decisions can drastically effect an employee's performance and attitude... in this case, it was in a good way
Wed Aug 09 2000 13:48:
I'm worried about artificial intelligences that share the prejudices of their creators. I'm worried about plaid clothing and Espedrils. Do you know me? I'm professional Jack Gale. Your shoestring budget will be the death of you.
Wed Aug 09 2000 13:59:
Here is Twain's wonderful Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
Wed Aug 09 2000 14:59:
This morning I was smelling a really nasty smell which I only remember smelling in Peter's office while I was sick. It's gone now, though.
Mark says Nick Moffit says I'm a genius. If only he [Nick Moffit] knew.
Mark also was unable to give me a definite answer to my question, so I pose it here (although I doubt there is anyone who reads this more qualified to answer it than is Mark). On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, did they ever deal with the fact that gold-pressed latinum and all the other goodies for which the Ferengi sweat and cheat and lie can simply be obtained from a replicator for the trouble of asking for it?
Thu Aug 10 2000 06:45:
Wow, I got a whole lot of mail from real people (as opposed to mail from mailing lists I'm on) yesterday evening after I'd gone home. That doesn't usually happen.
Thu Aug 10 2000 07:14:
This is quite the bizarre banner ad, but it appeals to me. There's something about a fish swimming into a thought bubble that I find hilarious.
Thu Aug 10 2000 09:38:
That blasted smell is back. It's got to be psychosomatic.
Thu Aug 10 2000 15:20:
-1 on the rocks! -1 on the rocks!
Fri Aug 11 2000 06:26:
Consensus (from Daniel Hsu and Sumana Harihareswara) is that gold-pressed latinum can't be replicated because its structure is too complicated. Sumana says you just end up with regular latinum. I find this highly unconvincing. There are not many things simpler than gold. In fact, there are exactly 78 things simpler than gold. But that's the semi-official explanation (Sumana got it from a Trek novel).
Note however that I said "gold pressed latinum and all the other goodies...", but I'm tired of talking about this, so never mind. {NTK, NYCB} regrets that this correspondence is now closed.
Fri Aug 11 2000 08:29:
The gold-pressed latinum issue is finally resolved, as the mysterious Steven points me to a page which exists for the sole purpose of answering peoples' snarky replicator questions.
Fri Aug 11 2000 12:58:
Report on Microsoft confuses. So does headline.
Fri Aug 11 2000 17:17:
The same person who wrote that headline probably also wrote Linux Desktops set.
Weird spacing, but it fits the joke.
Mon Aug 14 2000 11:10:
Joke forwarded from my mother:
A Brit, a Frenchman and a Russian are viewing a painting of Adam and
Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden. "Look at their reserve, their
calm," muses the Brit. "They must be British."
"Nonsense," the Frenchman disagrees.
"They're naked, and so beautiful.
Clearly, they are French."
"No clothes, no shelter," the Russian points out,
"they have only an apple to eat,
and they're being TOLD this is paradise.
Clearly, they are Russian."
Mon Aug 14 2000 14:36:
Gamera: Huge monster who destroys everything we hold dear, but it's somehow okay and he's our friend.
Also, is "1.00 foos" correct, or "1.00 foo"?
Mon Aug 14 2000 15:12:
Is it too difficult for Linux Today to put a conditional into their code so that it says "1 comment" instead of "1 comments"?
Mon Aug 14 2000 16:49:
Bruce Schneier plugs my Segfault story 13-Year-Old 'r00ts' Popular Polynomial, in his latest Crypto-Gram, probably because I'm the only person on record to have spelled his name correctly.
Mon Aug 14 2000 17:01:
I almost had to go to Windows to use Visio for my E-R diagram, but I was saved at the last minute by Dia. Plus, it's hosted on the lysator server, host of the beloved FTP site of my high school days.
Tue Aug 15 2000 10:10:
Segfault:
IEEE Releases Floating Log Standard. Bryan Douglas (who didn't write that story but who did write Symantec Announces Genome Defrag) is writing Segfault stories faster than I can publish them. I may have to declare a Bryan Douglas day or something.
I, too, want to put meat on the online bone.
Tue Aug 15 2000 11:52:
Funny headline watch: Omaha Steaks Puts Meat on the Online Bone. It's the sort of story you'd have seen in 1997.
Tue Aug 15 2000 14:22:
Forum 2000 vs. Forum 2000... there can be only one!
Wed Aug 16 2000 12:39:
Here I am at the VA email garden with Mark and Nick Moffitt. "Mark is a k00l rad d00d," says Mark.
Thu Aug 17 2000 08:23:
Speaking of k00l rad d00ds, does anyone else remember that old "Geek Wars" ANSI animation? I think it was called "Geek Wars".
Continuing the "faith" theme, Scott forwarded me "Life imitates Scott's mad ideas", Holy Qur'an in our DNA! Absolute Proof Islam is True!, all aspects of which were unfortunately made up out of whole cloth by this fellow, rather than being accreted over time so that no one person has responsibility for it.
Thu Aug 17 2000 09:27:
I thank the nonexistant gods for having sent me two of the funniest emails I have ever read. First, Earn $50,000 in 90 days!! BY FAITH!!, which is your standard pyramid-scam pitch but which just goes on, and on, and on. It's like ten different spams all strung together. It comes to an end and then just starts up again. And again. And again. Someone read through this before sending it out to everyone on earth and said to him or herself, "You know, this is a consistent narrative. It really holds together well!"
Thu Aug 17 2000 10:29:
I'm going to write a Java applet which lets you put meat on the online bone. I announced my intention at LinuxWorld Expo, where the idea was hailed by the Linux community (well, by Mark).
Thu Aug 17 2000 15:08:
I'd forgotten all about Saucer Smear until I saw a link to it today. Lots of fun stuff. I'll have to catch up on the back issues when I have more time. In the meantime, here's my favorite Smear cartoon:
Thu Aug 17 2000 15:40:
Funny Headline Watch: Security gates held open for "Love" virus, mutants.
Fri Aug 18 2000 07:56:
I don't know how this ended up in my referrer logs, but I'm glad it did. I guess that IE 5 bug can be a force for good as well as for evil.
Fri Aug 18 2000 08:06:
My two goals for today are to reach consensus with Jason and Ryan on the new Helm/Tigris database schema, and to use the phrase "Shall he/she/I dance for your amusement?" in a sentence.
I've always felt sort of bad about this, since OS Opinion has the same reader-submitted article system that Segfault does. I like this system a lot, and I want to support it. But I don't need to read about other people's wild speculations. It's the equivalent of stretching Slashdot comments into full-length articles.
That said, there's an osOpinion piece published today which starts out with a very good line: "In the realm of computers, history will record the names of four significant men: Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling." I would have used words other than "realm" and "significant", but that's a really good opening line which is unfortunately left stranded at the beginning by the rest of the article.
Hey Dan, what do you think about osOpinion?
Fri Aug 18 2000 08:15:
I have a confession to make. I don't like osOpinion. I can't read an OS Opinion piece all the way through. Just the fact that an article was published on osOpinion means, to me, that it is no good.
Fri Aug 18 2000 08:35:
Sci Tech Daily gleans from an article the question, Could your next ski holiday be on Titan? My sources say no.
Fri Aug 18 2000 09:37:
Oh, that's how the Atari docs got into my referrer log. They were posted on Slashdot beforehand. Damn that infernal IE bug!
Fri Aug 18 2000 09:40:
FHW: Scientists Advance on Tiny Computers. They're wily, those tiny computers.
I'm not trying to pull some ideological stunt here. I'm just trying to clear up the terminology. I ran a BBS for three years, and offered for download hundreds of packages of non-commercial but proprietary software. Nowadays, I get paid to write software which is both commercial and free. If I can't express these facts, there's a problem with the terminology.
Fri Aug 18 2000 10:24:
A plea: when talking about software, please don't say "commercial" when you mean "proprietary". A lot of people do this. A lot of free software people do this. Hell, people from CollabNet do this.
Commercial/non-commercial and proprietary/free are axes of a plane, not ends of a continuum.
Fri Aug 18 2000 11:31:
Good Segfault article from foaf: VAX Retirement Bodes Ill for Windows 2000. He snuck in a plug for Unuseless, and I let it stand, even though a link to the relevant Infoworld story would have been more appropriate.
Fri Aug 18 2000 14:26:
Debian-Advantages HOWTO. Is this really a HOWTO?
Fri Aug 18 2000 14:33:
I got that spam again. It's not as funny the second time. They should at least have varied it a little. Someone who was bored could implement that spam in the Dada Engine.
Fri Aug 18 2000 17:01:
I love you, Celeste.
Fri Aug 18 2000 18:47:
Manoj and I finally bothered to decode the Segfault background graphic (I don't know where we got it; I've got a message to Scott in the pipe about it). I recommend you try it.
Mon Aug 21 2000 07:09:
I might have dreamed this in one of my bizarre dreams last night, but I think there are people whose conception of vegetarianism (or, more likely, veganism) precludes the consumption of yogurt. I am eating yogurt right now, and I gotta say, it's pretty good. But wouldn't you want to stop eating plants before you moved on to not eating bacteria?
Mon Aug 21 2000 08:38:
Boca Burgers are good. I endorse the breaded clams of the species Boca Burger.
Mon Aug 21 2000 08:49:
My Vision story was mentioned in Network World Fusion (that link will break in a week), but is it the print version or just online? Probably the latter. Still, good job, McCloud.
Mon Aug 21 2000 09:02:
Jake reminds me that yogurt is a dairy product. A "Duh" is in order for this, but it turns out to not be relevant, since the thing I remember is people not eating soy yogurt either. (Soy yogurt includes "starter culture", which, like "beef", is simply a code word to get us to not think about the organisms we are massacring. So yes, it is real yogurt.)
Mon Aug 21 2000 09:21:
Some folks at work got Aeron chairs from eBay, which arrived today. Every startup that purchases Aeron chairs for its employees is doomed to failure, so they had to get the chairs with their own money. I hope that the mere presence of the chairs is not what dooms the startups.
Mon Aug 21 2000 11:06:
I hope I never become the sort of person who goes to Burning Man.
Mon Aug 21 2000 13:34:
FHW: The next piracy panic: software. Software piracy?!?! Who would have thought?
Mon Aug 21 2000 14:33:
I should mention that the Aerons in this office come from a startup that folded, so perhaps the curse has run its course.
Mon Aug 21 2000 15:22:
It's not often that a news story includes the phrase "This reporter actually felt his esophagus constricting under the crush of an unseen Force."
By the way, I spoke with Dan and he said he's going to do a Katzdot update in the near future. He's also working at LinuxCare for the summer.
Tue Aug 22 2000 07:05:
You may have noticed that the main page now gives you a Katzdot headline underneath the random quote. This is to better serve you, the Katz-craving consumer. I heard your cry, "Why do I have to click down into features and then go to another site to view Katzdot headlines, when you could just install Katzdot on your machine and give me a Katzdot headline on the front page?" Well, that seemed pretty convincing, so I went ahead and did it.
Tue Aug 22 2000 08:07:
Michael Salmon just started work here yesterday, and he's already pointed out that what I thought was a CD player on my Thinkpad is actually a DVD player. If only I had some movies on DVD, I too could violate the DCMA by watching them on my laptop. But that would require buying some movies.
Yes, I'm only linking to Tim O'Reilly's weblog because he came up with a kludge for the "department" feature rather than turning it off.
Tue Aug 22 2000 08:20:
Tim O'Reilly has a weblog which runs off of some Slashdot-style software, in that entries have a MAD Magazine-esque "department" field (which is different from the story type, the thing you run searches on). The thing is that every single story Tim O'Reilly publishes to his weblog is from the "worth thinking about" department. I think what he really wants to do is just turn that feature off.
Tue Aug 22 2000 08:27:
Porno spam is funny. Japanese spam is, if not amusing, at least incomprehensible. Japanese porno spam is completely uncalled for.
Tue Aug 22 2000 08:59:
I forgot to mention that Scott did the Segfault graphic his own bad self.
Tue Aug 22 2000 09:33:
Tim also has a "something i just wrote" department. It turns out that Manilla departments are not like Slashdot departments; they're like Slashdot news types and Tim's site shows them like Slashdot departments. Damn, now I can't engage in petty semantic nitpicking. Or, more precisely, I have to find something else about which to engage in petty semantic nitpicking.
Tue Aug 22 2000 10:57:
Squeak Tragedy, with the obligatory bashing of my terminology. Okay, I know nothing about Squeak! I admit it! I should have used Python instead!
Tue Aug 22 2000 14:08:
Miniperl: because a bad pun is its own reward.
Tue Aug 22 2000 15:35:
Another sentence you don't often see in a news article, but which is always welcome: "Profanity has been restored and the style modernized."
Wed Aug 23 2000 08:35:
How is it that I keep hurting her? I try so hard not to.
Wed Aug 23 2000 08:53:
I have only good things to say about the people at Scour, but at the same time, I'm glad I don't work there.
Thu Aug 24 2000 06:32:
Segfault: Security Vulnerability Ignored: Name Too Boring. My heart wasn't in it, unfortunately.
Thu Aug 24 2000 08:54:
Linux Weekly News takes a stand on a controversial issue: Let's move towards easier software installations.
Thu Aug 24 2000 11:07:
Today is Segfault's 2-year anniversiary! Huzzah!
Thu Aug 24 2000 12:22:
The June issue of Linux Magazine is finally on the web, and Segfault gets a whole paragraph devoted to it. The Onion comparison reminds me that I should get working on that story...
Thu Aug 24 2000 15:36:
I got Mike to draw up an info-graphic for Segfault that brings you up to date on a vital conflict of our time.
Fri Aug 25 2000 06:48:
This osOpinion piece is actually pretty good, mainly beacuse it has very little to do with anyone's OS opinion.
Fri Aug 25 2000 07:25:
I love the way the BBC publishes three stories on the same theme at once, viz: Pokemon virus contained,
Economics lessons the Pokémon way, and
Scientists Probe Cartoon Seizures.
I also have little interest in what I've seen of embedded Linux devices. I don't really want an MP3 player for my car or anything like that. I think the stuff we're doing with Indrema is really cool, but I'm not into gaming qua "gaming", so I don't need a game console.
So why am I so fascinated by embedded Linux? I don't know. I know why I'm fascinated by Lego Mindstorms, and it's for a related but different reason than the one I can't articulate. I think that my subconscious has a really cool idea for an embedded Linux application, but before revealing it to my conscious mind, it needs a lot of information, thus causing in me a desire to read a lot about embedded Linux.
Fri Aug 25 2000 09:00:
I have a bizarre interest in embedded Linux, apart from the variety of natural disasters associated with it. I say "bizarre" because I have very little interest in Linux per se. I'm not really interested in operating system-level stuff. I also have no interest in soldering wires and molding plastic casings and doing the other things that usually result in embedded Linux devices.
Fri Aug 25 2000 13:37:
"This has had a devastating effect on the credibility of music generally: it is no longer a socially unnacceptable art form." I don't know if that's a mistake or not.
Fri Aug 25 2000 14:15:
Celeste ordered me lunch from kozmo.com. She's so sweet.
Mon Aug 28 2000 10:41 Bleah:
crummy.com is down due to some weirdness or other with my transfer of the domain away from Network Solutions. So here I am again, hopefully not for long.
Mon Aug 28 2000 12:20 ph33r by induction:
My Segfault script kiddie polynomial story leads off the latest RISKS Digest. R0x0r!
Tue Aug 29 2000 06:58 Not much meat on a nematode, but them's good eatin'!:
Underground, Meat-Eating Plant Found in Florida. The underground was good...and the meat-eating was the icing on the cake!
The reason I don't update this as often as I do NYCB is that I'm lazy. I designed NYCB to accomadate my laziness, and Manila cannot match it. I have to click about 5 times and type in a bunch of fields to add an entry on crummy.editthispage.com; NYCB lets me do it in one click (I have a patent on this), and, although it makes me type a password, the password (unlike the title I have to supply to Manilla) is the same every time. Wed Aug 30 2000 15:45 Another one for my scrapbook:
Celeste and I have a brief mention in This LinuxWorld story.
Thu Aug 31 2000 08:51:
Hey hey. Crummy is back. Thanks, Dan [Cox].
Thu Aug 31 2000 10:35:
Bizarre Press Release Watch: Shuffle
Master Receives GLI Approval For Press Your Luck(TM) and Operating System.
Look closely, kids. Someday you will tell your grandchildren of the
days in which people who wrote press releases thought "proprietary"
was a good word to use when describing their own products.
Thu Aug 31 2000 13:00:
We had a 401(k) meeting today. As of October I can sock away pre-tax income in an equity index fund, which The Motley Fool says is the best bet. I am inordinately excited about this. I am finding myself becoming excited about very strange things (strange things for me to get excited about, that is). I'm starting to worry about what my subconscious has planned. Something that brings together embedded Linux, bizarre press releases, and my 401(k).
Fri Sep 01 2000 09:59:
Whenever people find out that I like Python, they always ask me the same question: "Is that your real hair?" No, wait, that's not the question. The question is "Don't the whitespace restrictions cramp your style?" THE ANSWER IS NO. It's something which you get used to. Every language has such things, and at least Python's whitespace restrictions serve a useful purpose. By the way, you know what bugs me about Perl? The damn brace restrictions! Every time you want to do any kind of conditional, you have to type a curly brace. Then you have to match it up when the conditional is done. C and Java have this problem too.
Fri Sep 01 2000 10:40 Follow me to Wal Drug:
Crummy is back up. Until next time, go to the real site.
Fri Sep 01 2000 10:57:
Ego roundup for the time crummy was down: Celeste and I were briefly mentioned in a LinuxWorld story, and my polynomial Segfault story follows up its mention in Crypto-Gram with a featured appearance in RISKS Digest. Plus, I just got confirmation that it's been reprinted on Usenet in the rec.humor Canonical List of Math Jokes. I have no way of verifying this, unfortunately, as I never use Usenet and Deja doesn't show the post.
Other people: you never saw this entry. I'm not allowed to talk about this program. Only Mike and JoeM and Celeste can know about it.
Fri Sep 01 2000 16:55:
This is probably not the best venue for this thing, but I don't really have anything else. Mike: I sent you the new version of the top-secret app this morning, but then got a "could not be delivered for last 4 hours". Tell me if you got it; otherwise give me a number I can call you at tomorrow so we can arrange a pickup.
Hi. I'm working today.
Sat Sep 02 2000 07:00:
My greatest polynomial triumph yet: a reprint on J. Orlin Grabbe's home page! Truly, that article has something for everyone.
Sat Sep 02 2000 07:51:
Thieves make off with rare snake. A more catchy headline would be "Thieves make out with rare snake".
Tue Sep 05 2000 06:28:
I like the mental image I get of Richard Stallman saying "Go get 'em, gnomes!" This is not a good day, and a funny mental image like that cheers me up some.
Tue Sep 05 2000 07:32:
The Free Software Pattern is brilliant! I'm glad I get to publish stuff of this caliber.
Tue Sep 05 2000 10:07:
Last month I said that I wouldn't want to work at Scour. Now, it turns out that I couldn't if I wanted to. Wow.
Send me your "Ribeyes of Texas" songs and I'll do a Ribeyes of Texas charity album. Yippee! (See The appropriate section of the Texas travelogue for more information about the Ribeyes of Texas)
Tue Sep 05 2000 10:34:
I got a fabulous fan mail about my Texas travelogue from Jim Dunn, who lives in Wichita Falls and, somewhat strangely, identifies himself using his eBay username. This mail really cheered me up, partially because he wrote another "Ribeyes of Texas" song!
The Ribeyes of Texas are upon you,
All the live long day
The Ribeyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.
You know you cannot escape them,
Rise up so early in the morrrrrrrrnnnnn,
The Ribeyes of Texas are upon you
Til Gabriel blows his horn.....Tah dah dummm...
Wed Sep 06 2000 15:17:
My car was vandalized on Monday. Someone stabbed two of my tires with an icepick or something. After many trials and tribulations, my tires have been replaced.
Wed Sep 06 2000 17:41:
Manoj wanted this story, so here it is: RSA Move Sets Happy Precedent: Corporations Pledge To Monopolize Vital Technologies For Only 16 Years, 50 Weeks
Yes, they didn't have time to cook for themselves, but they had time to set up a company that does the cooking for a whole bunch of other people.
Thu Sep 07 2000 07:56:
On the flap of the box of microwave shepherd's pie I bought:
After the birth of our daughter Amy in 1987 we found there was little time to prepare the wholesome nutritious food we normally ate. Realizing there were others like ourselfves we set up Amy's Kitchen to produce delivious, nourishing frozen meals for health conscious people too busy to cook.
Thu Sep 07 2000 07:57:
Also, there's a bus ad for the Volkswagen bug that says "One more gear and it's a time machine." For heaven's sake, put in that extra gear and sell it as a time machine! I don't want to tell them how to do their jobs, but man.
Fri Sep 08 2000 07:04:
Everyone is in shorts because it's been so hot lately. We have the radio on and Madness is playing. I'm setting up Helm on our pre-production machine so I can test my new servlet. Life is good.
Fri Sep 08 2000 07:08:
The Moral Minority linked to my Segfault story. That looks like a site with some promise.
Fri Sep 08 2000 08:48:
An article by Terry Jones on... uh, not much, but it's a fun read.
Fri Sep 08 2000 08:50:
From my 401(k) booklet: "But if you're like most people, you may be in a lower tax bracket during retirement." Putting two hedges in the same sentence pretty much makes that sentence meaningless.
Fri Sep 08 2000 10:34:
Foaf on travel:
I definitely recommend seeing your own country
- although it is a hell of a lot easier when your
country is roughly the same size as one of the smaller
American states.
2/$3.00 Yes, they printed the "regular" price on the package underneath the "discounted" price. I've decided to assume that the designer of the package was really stupid and thought people would fall for that, since that's more parsimonous than the assumption that everyone in the world is really stupid and would actually fall for that.
I remember a furniture place in LA that, when I was a kid, had a "CLOSE OUT SALE!" banner hanging permanently on the side of the building. This banner was not intended for years and years of constant use, and I remember it being old and tattered. It's probably still up there, although between then and now it may have been replaced by a similar sign in Korean.
It occurs to me that the gummy bear package might be intended to fool little kids. I can't see little kids buying these huge packages of gummy bears, though.
Mon Sep 11 2000 08:12:
I bought some gummy bears (not Gummi Bears) yesterday. On the bag it says:
Reg. $1.75
Mon Sep 11 2000 08:21:
Kevin Maples sums up our current problems with a Futurama quote:
I had this awful nightmare - there were all these ones and zeros all over the place ... I think there was even a two.
Mon Sep 11 2000 08:27:
It's odd to see praise of LyX on a page as poorly-laid out, stuck in the newspaper metaphor, as this one is.
Mon Sep 11 2000 08:44:
Has anyone ever purchased and eaten a sopapilla within the state of California? If so, tell me where. I find it very strange that I've been unable to find sopapillas anywhere in California, but that you can go five miles into Oregon and every Mexican restaurant has them (they're terrible, but they have them).
I'm going to get some books at the used bookstore in Bakersfield when I go there next week, and then I'm going to hold off until I finish all these books.
Mon Sep 11 2000 09:03:
Every weekend I use my newfound wealth (still my interpretation of a regular salary) to buy books. This week I got more David Brin (Brightness Reach, I think--second Uplift trilogy, first book), Ringworld, Interesting Times, and the literary equivalent of one of the things in the "1000 Things You Never Knew Existed" catalog, Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before. I had no idea he'd written another novel.
That's all for now.
Mon Sep 11 2000 12:55:
Listen up. I'm only going to say this once. Nature is not your friend. Nature wants to see you dead. The best you can hope for from nature is total indifference.
Tue Sep 12 2000 07:35:
I like the rhetorical device at the end of this article. I don't think I've ever seen it before:
And when members of Congress recognize the constitutional flaws in a bill like the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 but vote for it anyway--in the expectation that the Supreme Court will clean up their mess...
JBWC is #1 on a Google search for "jake berendes". Tue Sep 12 2000 07:57:
Slightly updated Jake Berendes West Covina, adding a footnote and changing a URL. "That's him, officer! He's the one who sold me tasty New England confections at an unbeatable price!"
SUCCESS!!
Tue Sep 12 2000 08:38:
I know this isn't as funny as it sounds to Americans, but I laugh anyway.
"As Australians we've got a proud tradition of taking the piss to uphold."
Tue Sep 12 2000 09:20:
Andrew Leonard was at the CollabNet office (I'm assuming he didn't just look at pictures of the kitchen) and I didn't meet him? That sucks.
Tue Sep 12 2000 10:52:
Mike points out that that Salon article and the distributive law allow me to put "'[Leonard Richardson is] almost too cool' - Andrew Leonard" in my .sig.
Tue Sep 12 2000 12:50:
Don't Trust Everything You Read, Even on the Internet. What's this "even" business?
Wed Sep 13 2000 09:29:
Senate blasts 'culture of carnage'. Looks like a job for Dan!
Thu Sep 14 2000 11:31:
This is probably the meanest Segfault story I've ever written:
_descramble_.mp3 "Inappropriate"; pissing_in_the_ladies__sin.mp3 "Okey-Dokey"
Our time in Bakersfield corresponds to the timeframe of a project in which people with weblogs (whose numbers I have de facto joined by Cam's inclusion of Crummy on his list of weblogs) take pictures of their boring, worthless lives. [0]
It costs me no effort to join this project, since I'll be taking lots of pictures during that timeframe and putting them on the web anyway. The problem is that the site refers to this activity as a "shoot" and the resulting product as a "virtual gallery"; not exactly actions I want to encourage.
So, I've made it into a poll; vote on whether I should take part. Or take all, for that matter. The deadline for entering is the 17th, so the poll will probably run until tomorrow evening.
(By the way, the name of the weblog is "News You Can Bruise", not "Crummy", which is the name of the whole site. But I won't complain because "Crummy.com" is closer to the top of Cam's list of weblogs than "News You Can Bruise" would be.)
[0] Lives may not actually be boring and worthless.
Thu Sep 14 2000 14:46:
Joe is leaving for Christchurch to catch a plane to San Francisco. I'm picking him up at the airport Saturday morning and then driving him down to Bakersfield so he won't get a bad impression of America during his time here.
Our AOL friend comes from a parallel universe dominated by proprietary Unices, in which segfault.org is an underground newspaper for those who illicitly copy and configure software. I don't understand the voting 25 times thing. Since I don't know anything about the URL namespace of his universe (except that segfault.org and aol.com exist), I can't really help him.
Perhaps freshmeat.net and happypenguin.org correspond to underground download sites in his universe. If you're from that universe and you're reading this, please help this guy.
Fri Sep 15 2000 08:04:
As the guy who gets mail addressed to editor@segfault.org, I have to be understanding. I get Japanese porno spam, stupid press releases, offers to make Segfault part of some extremely minor new media conglomerate, offers to give other sites free advertising, and the occasional letter pertaining to something published on Segfault. But sometimes I get a message that was addressed to a parallel universe version of me and was somehow misdelivered to this version of me. I got such a message today, from an AOL account:
Nowadays everyone are profiteering pigs. The only site that i knew of that had any good downloads and info was shut down. Do you know any sites that you don't have to vote 25 times to download something. any assistance would be helpful. thank you
Fri Sep 15 2000 08:19:
By unanimous popular demand, I have signed up for the BTC project. Now I have to think of a different poll.
Fri Sep 15 2000 08:32:
Kris did a thing for Adam's birthday that cracks me up. It's like a live-action Pokey the Penguin starring Adam! YES!! Happy birthday, Adam! And thank you for being on appendectomy drugs, Kris.
Fri Sep 15 2000 09:48:
Susanna (my sister, for those not in the know) suggested the new poll. I should put in a disclaimer that the poll is for entertainment value only.
I guess I've been in weblog denial. I don't like being in groups of people that Jon Katz writes articles about. Being a geek is okay, because I'm not the teenage Quake-playing goth from Nebraska that is the Jon Katz archetypal geek. But I've been in denial both about my running a weblog and about my presumed unpopularity in high school. I honestly don't think I was unpopular in high school. I was very depressed all the time, but not unpopular. Of course this just goes to show how deep my unpopularity denial is.
Fri Sep 15 2000 09:55:
I'm now on the list of participating BTC weblogs.
The astounding thing is not that Thom Wood wears tie-dye to work every day, but that it took me three weeks to realize this.
Fri Sep 15 2000 10:09:
Call me dense, but I just realized this. Thom Wood, whom we hired to work on CVS and Subversion (the best software project name ever), wears tie-dye to work every day. Every day. I thought he just wore it a lot, but he wears it every day.
Fri Sep 15 2000 15:31:
Okay, I'm off. The next entry will be from Bakersfield with neon Joe in tow. Probably tomorrow evening.
Mon Sep 18 2000 07:53:
This entry exists only so that Joe can take a picture of me typing it for the BTC project.
Spam I got today: "Your internet shopping can help us elect Republicans to the White House!" Reaction #1: Oh no! Reaction #2: I didn't know the White House had multiple vacancies this year.
In Bakersfield I bought 8 MST3K tapes. So many episodes I haven't seen for years, and three (The Atomic Brain, Catalina Caper, and The Unearthly) I hadn't seen at all. The only Comedy Central MST3K episodes I haven't seen are The Human Duplicators and The Painted Hills. Does anyone want to trade?
Sorry, Dave, that I didn't get to meet up with you while I was in Bakersfield.
Thu Sep 21 2000 07:38:
Dropped Joe off at the airport today. My windshield was really dirty and the thing that's supposed to spray water on the windshield so you can run your wipers apparantly didn't work. So I drove there and back with terrible dirt glare.
Fri Sep 22 2000 07:48:
In my mini-AIR today I was pointed to an incomparable comparative review of the Institute for Creation Research's "Bomby the Bombadier Beetle" and the Harry Potter books. "Bomby has to learn everything from older male family members through oral history, and appears to have no instinctively hard-wired behaviors (definitely a higher vertebrate trait)."
Fri Sep 22 2000 11:47:
Breaking news from PC World: THIS IS A TEST STORY--PLEASE DELETE ME.
Mon Sep 25 2000 06:58:
My page has been linked from the BTC site. The actual pictures are linked on the little buttons to the left of people's names. The real pictures site is at /articles/travelogues/2000/foaf/, but I had to do a symlink to /btc2000/ because the real URL wouldn't fit in the little box I was given. And I can never take that symlink down. Bleah.
Mon Sep 25 2000 08:31:
A very useful article: Variable Mangling in Bash With String Operators.
Mon Sep 25 2000 16:01:
FHW: Deadly Hot Springs. I say, it's deadly hot!
Tue Sep 26 2000 07:35:
I finally got around to rotating the graphics properly in the BTC gallery.
Wed Sep 27 2000 09:08:
This unrepentant monopolist abused its power. This unrepentant monopolist stayed home. This unrepentant monopolist had roast beef. This unrepentant monopolist had none. This unrepentant monopolist cried "Wee-wee-wee!" all the way home.
Has anyone tried the AD&D third edition yet? I still have all the first edition books... uh, somewhere.
Wed Sep 27 2000 09:37:
"The truth is that nowhere in any published D&D material ever
has there been a rule that states you must kill yourself if your character dies." I'm glad we've cleared that up.
Thu Sep 28 2000 09:41:
My latest Segfault story, DOJ Cracking Down on Freedom to Innovate, is rated a 2. Ouch.
The fruit of my efforts will be publically avaliable on the 2nd. Which is Monday. I had to look that up.
Thu Sep 28 2000 15:20:
Tomorrow, the project that has taken up all of my free time for the past two months will be done. Just in time for me to have no free time whatsoever.
You're going to go there xpecting something really cool, but it's not particularily cool. It's just weird.
Fri Sep 29 2000 08:31:
This site is weird. My eyes just seem to skid off it. It's like there's a force field around the page.
Sat Sep 30 2000 10:59:
Jupiter: America's dairyland!
For the past few months I've been working on an Inform game for entry into the 2000 Interactive Fiction Contest. Right now you can see my game on the list of games, but that's about it. The games will be downloadable tonight, so I encourage you to play and vote on them all.
This week's cheese is Fontina. Last week's was Gorgonzola, which was an unmitigated cheese disaster. I think I might have had Fontina already, but no matter.
Mon Oct 02 2000 07:40:
Grr. I wrote this entry and lost it and now I have to write it again and now there's gum in my hair. This yogurt is so runny I can drink it. In fact, that's what I'm doing. Anyway.
Mon Oct 02 2000 09:04:
A terrifying vision of the future. A slightly less terrifying vision of the future. A terrifying vision of the past. From the ever-wonderful APOD.
When Joe was here, he bought a TV Guide and a copy of USA Today. I think he's just trying to make Americans look bad.
Mon Oct 02 2000 10:28:
FHW: It's "2001 Mars Odyssey" For Nasa's Next Trip To The Red
Planet. I like it because it sounds like a promo for next week's episode of a TV show. "It's '2001 Mars Odyssey' as Nasa plans a trip the the Red Planet! But when Sharon shows up, it's a space battle of the sexes! Men are from Mars... on the next Nasa in the City!"
Mon Oct 02 2000 16:42:
It is as I feared. My DOJ/innovation story was not written correctly. It was supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of Microsoft's "DOJ vs. the Freedom to InnovateTM" rhetoric, but it was widely interpreted as a pro-Microsoft satire. As evidence, I offer the fact that it was mentioned in the editorial section of a Libertarian online rag. It's only a matter of time now before it shows up on moraldefense.com.
Mon Oct 02 2000 17:04:
I may or may not have mentioned this before, but David Brin's two Uplift trilogies are excellent. The traeki/Jophur are the coolest alien species I've ever encountered in any medium.
Correction: this week's cheese is Havarti. I have had Fontina before, but that was a few weeks ago.
Mon Oct 02 2000 19:34:
The competition games are out. Get them, play them, and vote on them. Woohoo!
Tue Oct 03 2000 08:01:
Celeste tells me that I made the Dean's honor list for Spring 2000! Huzzah!
Tue Oct 03 2000 08:06:
Wow! And I just discovered the reason why I made the dean's honor list! My grade in my compiler class was changed to an A! That gave me three As and a B for my final quarter, my best ever. Now I really wish I'd gone to those Oceans discussions. :)
Tue Oct 03 2000 09:00:
How many Space Shuttle flights have there been? Would you believe 99? The shuttle program is marginally younger than I am; I find this hard to believe. I don't remember a time with no Space Shutle. Interesting double negative there. I didn't steal no bike, neither!
Wed Oct 04 2000 07:15:
"People are getting rehired faster than they're getting laid off." And how exactly does that work?
Speaking of gifts, I have been remiss in not mentioning the generosity of my friends (by which generosity I get by). Actually, I may have mentioned this before, but I dunno. My mind is goind, Dave. I can feel it. Jake sent me a CD of the 30-minute magnum opus PI Jake's Birthday Party which I sent him a couple years ago and then lost my copy of it. Also a stylish Fujichia T-shirt (which I'm wearing now) and another CD which is Dickens Hotcackes live (which I can't make heads or tails of) and unreleased crup. Hooray for unreleased crup!
And I need to mention the Footrot Flats book that Joe sent me so long ago, which I have not yet gotten around to reviewing.
So.
Wed Oct 04 2000 07:38:
Susanna mentions that I got here a Piglet pillow for Christmas, but what she doesn't mention is that I stuffed Piglet into a big plastic zip-lock bag and wrapped the bag, so that it looked like a normally shaped pillow. Then when she unwrapped it, the zipper of the bag split open and this huge Piglet crawled out. It was really cool. I think that was the most successful gift I've ever given.
Wed Oct 04 2000 08:02:
It's time to Guess The Verb! Inform source now avaliable!
That story is a year old; but they're re-running it like it's new, presumably because they don't have anything on this year's Ig Nobels yet.
Fri Oct 06 2000 09:14:
Brits take the biscuit. That was my biscuit, damn you!
Fri Oct 06 2000 13:28:
Mike sent me a link to a wonderful comic: Diesel Sweeties.
Fri Oct 06 2000 17:24:
"So? Write your Congressman!"
"I am my Congressman!"
Fri Oct 06 2000 17:25:
I have to work this weekend. Bleah.
Lejeune was in the army during WWII. She achieved a rank which seemed to me considerable for a woman in the army during WWII; corporal, maybe. She has a wonderful house in Washington with a jaccuzi and a deck that looks out over light forest from the top of a hill which you can see here. I wish I'd been paying more attention when she was telling war stories.
Fri Oct 06 2000 18:15:
My mother sent two pictures that her aunt Lejeune took of me when we were in Sequim. They go into the black pit that is the Sequim travelogue directory, which will eventually (I promise!) have all the Sequim pictures I took, and an actual travelogue to describe them.
Also, I like that Vitamin B6 is actually another name for pyridoxine hydrochloride. This could be the foundation of a great hoax of the "dihydrogen monoxide" form. "Stop! Don't you realize that that banana contains pyridoxine hydrochloride?"
Mon Oct 09 2000 07:19:
It is as I suspected: Neal Stephenson is a much better writer when his imagination is constrained by historical fact. I started reading Cryptonomicon today and have yet to be gripped by the urge to put the book away in disgust.
Mon Oct 09 2000 08:15:
Another tale of the DOJ's never-ending crusade against innovation.
Mon Oct 09 2000 12:02:
FHW: Red Hat Responds to Quality Allegations. Damn those persistent rumors of quality!
Mon Oct 09 2000 14:44:
Giant Trilobite Passes Horrible Prehistoric Judgement Upon Puny Humans. Uh, I mean, Giant Trilobite Discovered.
I remember Adam saying that the way John Goodman says it at the end of Barton Fink. It's probably my favorite memory of Adam.
Mon Oct 09 2000 15:24:
I'll show you the life of the mind! I'll show you the life of the mind! Look upon me!
Mon Oct 09 2000 16:57:
Mike wants me to make Guess the Verb! T-shirts. He even pointed me to cafepress.com (which I think Kris uses, and which is really cool) to tempt me. I personally think he's just a little too excited about Guess the Verb!. T-shirts would be cool, though.
Mon Oct 09 2000 19:46:
I forgot to mention: this week's cheese is Gruyere. It's of the Swiss family, but not as good as Jarlsberg and probably not even as good as Swiss. It doesn't melt very well. It's not bad, though.
Tue Oct 10 2000 07:35:
I'm on page 118 of Cryptonomicon and it's still good. At page 118 of Snow Crash, reading it was a chore borne of my idealistic... idea that if you started reading a book you should finish it (see NYCB 1999-05... I never finished it). Of course, Cryptonomicon is twice as long as Snow Crash, so in terms of comparison I'm really on page 59 of Snow Crash, but even at page 59 I knew I was in for a long, hard slog. Also see NYCB 2000-06. I really need to get a search thing going. It would be so easy to do, too.
Tue Oct 10 2000 08:56:
Sometimes you get a headline which, due to word compression, verbed nouns, etc., can be read in nearly x! ways, x being the number of words in the headline. Here are two such headlines: U.S. sex partner tallies excluded professionals, Call to jail bird persecutors.
Wed Oct 11 2000 07:40:
(Intentionally) FHW: Tiny Pin Scrubs Shuttle Launch. That tiny pin is nuts! He doesn't play by anybody's rules! But he gets results! Next week: Ordinary Table Salt Scrubs Shuttle Launch.
But Jake Berendes is not one to take this lying down. The Jake empire struck back with a brilliant coup in which he obtained a student ID in my name with his picture, the better to commit heinous acts in my name. Just yesterday, for instance, he attended a musical event, and sent me this dispatch:
I still have to fix Jake's MP3 upload thing.
Thu Oct 12 2000 08:28:
I meant to mention this, but never did. Whenever anyone whom I don't want to talk to asks me what my name is, I tell them that my name is Jake Berendes (but not that they call me Jakey B). Whether they want me to sign a petition, give them money, or match me with my sandwich order, it makes no difference. My name is Jacob, Jacob.
Subject: you like party music
yesterday's blackalicious concert was free to clark
students, and any worcester college student. but if
you don't go to clark, you had to sign in. so as far
as the records go, _you_ enjoyed the show, and vouched
for greg nixon, your fellow student who forgot his id.
also you're not very confident in writing your name
and you almost spelled it wrong.
Thu Oct 12 2000 08:32:
I'm working day and night. Cam's job is to make my life miserable. But it's okay. Because I'm doing cool stuff.
Thu Oct 12 2000 11:53:
I'm off the Mountain Dew wagon. Jason offered me one and I accepted. Soon I'll be knocking over convenience stores to get Mountain Dew money.
Thu Oct 12 2000 12:46:
I registered a domain yesterday, which inspired me to do another project along with Mike. I won't tell you which domain it is, but I'm sure you can find out with the right tools.
Sat Oct 14 2000 10:36:
Celeste and I are having lunch today. I should probably get off the Internet so she can call me.
Sun Oct 15 2000 11:00:
Cryptonomicon is history. I'm now trying to decide what in my huge stack of books I should read next. I don't feel ready to tackle Heaven's Reach yet. Possibly Annals of the Former World.
Mon Oct 16 2000 07:25:
Is Marriage to Unix the Answer to Enterprise Linux? You don't ask that kind of question unless you already have an answer handy.
Mon Oct 16 2000 08:43:
The standard model: Gotta catch 'em all!
Mon Oct 16 2000 13:25:
Does anyone know of a hosting service which would sell me a disk allotment of x megabytes, and allow me to host arbitrarily many domains within that quota? I forsee a future in which I have a million tiny domains, and I don't want to have an account for each domain.
Mon Oct 16 2000 17:34:
He's an intriguing bow-shock. She's a poorly understood gas cloud. Can they get along in the suburbs?
Tue Oct 17 2000 06:17:
Dave forced me to read Gold Key. By "forced" I mean "wrote me an email with subject line 'key dada' and said that he remembered seeing something like it on Da Warren". I think Dave is mentally smushing up a couple things that were on Da Warren, which is basically what the authors of Gold Key did.
Tue Oct 17 2000 09:10:
I've gotten many email raves for Guess The Verb!. Of course, why would you email someone to say "Your game sucks"? Only a month to go before the results are released and the true metier of Guess The Verb! is lade bear. I may not have used "metier" correctly in that sentence.
Tue Oct 17 2000 18:07:
Dave wrote a Segfault article which is very useful: Laundry Hampers Considered Inefficient.
Tue Oct 17 2000 18:08:
Metier, noun. 1: vocation, trade. 2: an area of activity in which one excels. I did not use it correctly.
Tue Oct 17 2000 18:21:
I'm wondering if that entry violates rule 5 of the comp rules. I don't think it does, since this is not a public Internet forum, newsgroup, or bulletin board, and since I wasn't really discussing the merits of the game--just saying that some crazy people had sent me email about it. If someone complains, I'll block it out until after the voting period.
Wed Oct 18 2000 07:37:
Segfault was honored by a Dork of the Day award today. The thing is, the award links to one particular article, so is the award going to Segfault or to the author of the story?
Wed Oct 18 2000 09:06:
Who thought up these Pentel mechanical pencil designs? With the little eraser cap and the annoying tiny eraser that you constantly have to adjust? It is, in the schoolyard parlance, weak.
It's not a question of price. That stupid metal cap costs money.
Wed Oct 18 2000 09:10:
The previous entry refers only to the Pentel P205 model. I just got a Pentel AL15 from the supply cupboard, which is a much better pencil design.
Wed Oct 18 2000 11:26:
It's alive! ALIVE!!!
Wed Oct 18 2000 13:03:
I found an an essay Andy wrote about his trip abroad, where, among other things, he met William H. Macy (the Leonard/Andy film actor idol). I have an email in the pipe to him, but who knows whether he'll ever answer it.
Thu Oct 19 2000 09:35:
FHW: Anti-genetic coalition says U.S. breaks protection laws. Down with genetics!
Thu Oct 19 2000 09:38:
And more FHW: Web site to sell books of black interest. It's called "Amazon", you may have heard of it.
Thu Oct 19 2000 17:00:
Brian reminds me of Andy. He has the Andy hair color and high school vintage hairstyle, and he turns the same shade of red when he's blushing or laughing. The trained Andy spotter will notice, however, that Andy, unlike Brian, has curly hair; and that Brian, unlike Andy, is a core Apache developer.
Fri Oct 20 2000 06:57:
I fixed a bunch of bugs in Guess The Verb!, but I'm not going to do a new release until I fix the big bug, which causes the wheel to behave strangely. One thing that is not a bug is my use of the word "haft". It is a word, and it means "the handle of a weapon or tool". It's not "shaft" and it's not etymologically related to "shaft". So there, I guess.
Fri Oct 20 2000 07:31:
Jake, I can't send to your email address. Your account is over quota. Go ahead and use Interesting Places To Die.
Fri Oct 20 2000 07:50:
The Dinosaur Hunters... this fall on NBC! I want this book. I will buy it when the stack of books I have yet to read is depleted some more.
Fri Oct 20 2000 16:34:
I'm about halfway through The Mote in God's Eye, which is sort of a less frustrating (for the characters and for the reader) Fiasco. Fiasco is a great book, but sometimes you'd like some actual communication to go on between the aliens and the humans. Anyway, I checked this book out of the library when I was maybe 10, and there are about three passages from the book which I remember but I don't remember anything outside those passages. I never finished the book and I think I'm further along this time than I was last time, so I don't think I'm going to remember any more stuff.
Sat Oct 21 2000 06:48:
Good morning.
I don't think I understand the genre of the book review. I thought the point was to talk about the book, but inevitably that seems peripheral to the real point of the review, which I'm not sure what it is.
Mon Oct 23 2000 08:09:
I almost bought this biography of Franklin yesterday, but it costs $35 and I already had $50 worth of books. Perhaps later. There was a biography of Orwell which looked good as well.
Tue Oct 24 2000 07:07:
Happy birthday, Celeste!
Tue Oct 24 2000 17:13:
This week's cheese is Dry Monterey Jack, which is almost Gouda-like and much better than last week's inedible selection, Mizithra. Curent book: Pigs Have Wings by P.G. Wodehouse. How did Wodehouse escape my grasp for so long?
Wed Oct 25 2000 10:33:
New version of Guess The Verb!. Actually the new version dates from Monday but I didn't put it up until today.
Thu Oct 26 2000 07:08:
Hey hey. Monty Hall's Hall of Doors is linked to by the web page for a statistics class.
Thu Oct 26 2000 08:36:
I finished Pigs Have Wings yesterday and have embarked on The Road To Mars. Reading Pigs Have Wings was like watching a complex data structure, possibly a graph, being constructed and then dismantled.
Thu Oct 26 2000 12:06:
I forgot to mention that yesterday I got a package from Celeste containing the ultra-cool Transformers T-shirt she had a picture of on her page earlier. And some socks. And a very sweet card. Huzzah!
Fri Oct 27 2000 07:37:
CollabNet is moving out of its San Francisco offices into a big office in scenic Brisbane (Brisbane, California, not Brisbane, Australia). All my stuff is packed (not that I have a whole lot of stuff) and on Monday it will be in the new office. Anything that means I spend less time in San Francisco is fine by me, although I don't understand how the BART shuttle there and back is supposed to work.
Fri Oct 27 2000 08:45:
Hey, not bad. Segfault is on top of Yahoo's "most popular sites" in the Entertainment/Humor/Computers_and_Internet category, and just under The Onion in the Entertainment/Humor/Parody/News category.
Fri Oct 27 2000 13:40:
I'm gonna leave pretty soon, since the machine I do development on has been taken down for the move and there's not much for me to do here. Stay well, do good work, and don't melt.
Sat Oct 28 2000 06:27:
Fabulous! Rick Miller wrote a great story for Segfault called Hackers Strike Again, Tap Linux Secrets Too! And since Rick works at Transmeta, he was able to get a picture of Linus hamming it up to go along with the story. As previously stipulated, fabulous!
Sat Oct 28 2000 06:49:
My mother indicated to me the second half of this music column from the Bakersfield Californian. Yes, just when you thought it was safe to be Christian. The band Korn is from Bakersfield, by the way. There are probably people in Bakersfield who are proud of this fact.
Tue Oct 31 2000 07:20:
Can somebody with an account on the Wall Street Journal Online tell me what's behind this link? Segfault is getting a lot of hits from it. I spoke with WSJ columnist John Dodge a while back, but I had my doubts as to whether anything would come of it. Apparantly it has. Tenative woohoo!
Tue Oct 31 2000 08:12:
Aha. Dodge managed to get the info he needed on mslinux.org and went ahead with that article. But he tossed in a link to Segfault, so that's fine.
Wed Nov 01 2000 08:08:
Last night I recorded a song for Jake's birthday tape (which is currently about 3/4 full of songs and spoken word pieces and which I should be able to send off soon, a mere few months late) called Jake's Answering Machine Message, which is supposed to be sung all in one breath but there's no possible way anyone could do so. It goes:
good morning this is jake berendes i am not here at the moment i am at the chinese bakery i am at the outdoor market i am at the ymca i am at the barbeque and i am playing in the park and at the worcester petting zoo i am not here to take your call please accept my apology i am here at the museum of science and technology i have a lot to do today and several places i should be so if you'll leave a message i will pass it right along to me i need to fix my bicycle i need to build a robot which will destroy all my enemies if i will only flip a switch i need to find a postcard of a record of a movie of a novel that i heard of while i was drunk at a party when i have completed all these tasks i will hijack a limousine and take it to a place in pennsylvania that i've never seen i'll hitchhike home and push a button which will play the words that you should whisper to your telephone regarding what you called me for beep
I'm quite proud of it [the song].
Thu Nov 02 2000 06:27:
Several people have emailed me saying that they managed to sing Jake's Answering Machine Message in one breath. To avoid further damage to peoples' lungs, I am obliged to state that it is indeed possible if you speed up the tempo a lot. Which I may end up doing.
Thu Nov 02 2000 06:59:
If the plot points in 50s B-movies were covered by the BBC, you'd get headlines like Double-Headed Creature Revealed.
Thu Nov 02 2000 09:26:
I'm going to write an arcade emulator. Existing emulators emulate specific games, but only my emulator will emulate the entire arcade. It will be very loud and cost a lot of money and all of the good games and pinball machines will have been replaced by dumb fighting games.
Thu Nov 02 2000 10:42:
You too can Guess the Right Verb!
Thu Nov 02 2000 21:08:
In foosball, is it legal to rotate and move your opponent's shish kebabs of players? Best to settle this before it comes up, methinks.
I unsubscribed from the Freshmeat newsletter because it was just too much information. I have no idea what new software has been released in the past five months.
Fri Nov 03 2000 05:24:
I keep wanting to unsubscribe from the NewsTrolls newsfeed, but they, like the Tourbus Internet-for-newbies newsletter, come through with enough good stuff to keep me on there. Like this usability study of Magritte's The Betrayal of Images: In Color!, complete with preachy disclaimers.
Fri Nov 03 2000 08:52:
A while ago, Google turned up Microsoft on a search for More evil than Satan himself. Be Dope did a story on this, and correspondingly Mike informs me that Be Dope now turns up tops on a search for More evil than Satan himself. Behold how the barbs of the ungodly turn and strike those who launched them! Or words to that effect.
Fri Nov 03 2000 09:26:
I read a post-mortem from the Diablo 2 dev team on a game site, and it looks like a really cool roguelike game. I like roguelikes like Zangband and ADOM that give you a bunch of interesting places to die, and Diablo 2 looks like it fits that bill. So I'd like to try it; the only problem is it's a Windows game, and the only Windows machine I have avaliable is the clunky old laptop I got from MAP, which is currently upstairs providing Leonard's dial-up Internet access. So it looks like it'll be a while until I try Diablo 2.
Fri Nov 03 2000 13:14:
The subject matter of the previous entry but one has been immortalized in a Be Dope story.
Mon Nov 06 2000 08:33:
A fun toy I found linked to on Technocrat: Spam Mimic stegonagraphically encodes short messages in spam mail.
Mon Nov 06 2000 15:10:
I've been able to laugh along with everyone else at the way George W. Bush puts sentences together, but it wasn't until today that the realization hit me. He uses the same algorithms used by the early versions of KatzDot, when it was Dan's goal to have it generate first paragraphs of Jon Katz articles as well as headlines. All it did was smush orthogonal sentence fragments together to give sentences like "Unapproachable information is over-reaction," so Dan gave up, but I think Dan (a known Nader supporter) has since gained control of some mind-control technology and is using it to influence the outcome of the election.
Tue Nov 07 2000 16:30:
From CollabNet IRC:
<leonardr> the electoral college makes me think of the knapsack problem
<leonardr> in fact it is the knapsack problem
<susank_h> Knapsack the band?
<leonardr> no, "the knapsack problem" like "the p=np problem" or "the halting problem"
Wed Nov 08 2000 07:51:
I found a great site with lots of Chinese propaganda posters; very cool, as I had previously seen only American and Soviet propaganda posters. My favorites are the ones featuring guys who create hazardous workplace conditions due to their penchant for showing off their copies of Chairman Mao's Quotations at inappropriate times.
Fri Nov 10 2000 06:13:
I'm staying home this morning waiting for someone from Covad to come and set up my DSL. So I'll be working late tonight. Like I wouldn't be anyway.
Fri Nov 10 2000 17:11:
More IRC fun:
<susank_h> I have to go EXTREMELY soon
<leonardr> susank_h: can you hold it til the next rest area?
<susank_h> no
<leonardr> pull over, dlr
<dlr> hehehe
<susank_h> not quick enough!
* dlr offers susank_h an empty milk carton
<susank_h> the back seat is drenched!
<leonardr> geez, susank_h
<susank_h> sorry!
I'm hoping to get some work done on the Sequim travelogue today.
I've put up the first three days' worth of photos. Includes many photos not
previously released, so act now for great savings. I'm going to make breakfast now.
Oh yeah, the Roaring Penguin PPPoE client has a nice set of default
ipchains firewalling rules. Pretty nice. I can't get it to let SSH traffic
through, though.
Sat Nov 11 2000 07:48:
I have DSL working, at least on the Linux machine. Total size of
Linux PPPoE RPM: 60k. Total size of Windows PPPoE setup software: 4.25 megabytes.
I decided it would be faster to set up PPPoE on the Linux machine,
download the Windows software, split it up, and move it over on floppy
to the laptop. But I haven't done that yet.
*Size of shot may vary.
Mon Nov 13 2000 15:04:
I've been real busy today, too busy to write in here, but I should mention that Daniel Rall did a big merge yesterday, with the effect that we're now doing Helm development on the public tree at tigris.org instead of the internal Sourcecast tree. This means that I am now a big-shot* open source developer, with thousands of lines of contributed code to my name.
Mon Nov 13 2000 16:03:
Enterprise headline-writing solutions with KatzDot technologies: Comdex to confirm rise of open-source Linux
Mon Nov 13 2000 16:54:
The UK's Home Secretary is named Jack Straw. For the longest time I thought this was not the name of a real person, but rather a name given to a personification, like Johnny Reb or Uncle Sam. Reading all the Register stories blasting his policies, it seemed too ominous and stereotypically English to be someone's real name.
Tue Nov 14 2000 04:37:
I figured out the problem. I was denying all TCP packets to privileged
ports, so I needed to give ssh the -P option to have it run on an unprivileged
port. So woohoo! I'm going to try working from home today.
Tue Nov 14 2000 11:58:
Today's bonus for insane people with lots of bandwidth (a very profitable demographic): You can now download a 33-megabyte MP3 of my 1998 magnum opus Jake's Birthday Party. Notlame makes it easy! (To encode huge MP3s, not to download or listen to them.)
Wed Nov 15 2000 16:22:
"For 30$ USD [sic], you get a nice big blanket that's warm." I should hope so.
Tomorrow the results of the IF competition. Since everyone will
win a prize (due to a surplus of prizes rather than to any touchy-feely
views on competition), it's only a matter of who gets the best
prizes. I've got my eye on The Age of Wire and String, or the
cold hard cash.
Wed Nov 15 2000 18:32:
A headline I've had for years but have never been able to turn into
a Segfault story: Katz to Rampage, Destroy All in Path.
Thu Nov 16 2000 07:10:
Woohoo! Guess The Verb! got 11th place! I almost beat Andrew Plotkin's entry!
Thu Nov 16 2000 15:28:
I don't want to be the sort of person who makes notebook entries consisting of quotes from IRC, but here... is a quote from IRC.
<Manoj> if someone stole my desktop box's IP address, I will murder someone
<ms> will you murder the person who stole the ip, or just some arbitrary sucker?
Thu Nov 16 2000 16:52:
I put up a brag paragraph on the GTV page... I guess "11th place" doesn't really sound like a good thing to brag about (you can't say "in the top 10"), but I think it is when there are 53 entrants.
Thu Nov 16 2000 18:13:
robotfindskitten, like Dada Pokey before it, has been featured in a little tiny blurb on Pigdog Journal, the editor of which I am a couple degrees of separation from via three completely unrelated routes (Mark Fasheh, Mae Ling Mak, and Pete Peterson II). I don't know exactly how many degrees it is because I don't know who everyone knows directly, and even if I knew I'd probably get an off-by-one error expressing it (am I zero degrees of separation from everyone I know, or only from myself?)
Sat Nov 18 2000 19:36:
YES!!! Kris has started doing Checkerboard Nightmare cartoons again!
Sun Nov 19 2000 05:25:
Argh! Please, please, no more Segfault submissions of political satire on the Presidential election! I published a couple because it was a special occasion, and that opened up the floodgates. No one seems interested in writing anything else. No one even seems interested in tackling the debacle from a technical point of view.
Mon Nov 20 2000 07:57:
Pete Collins said in an email to appsdev "Improvise and respond directly to feedback." It was sort of tangential to the topic of discussion, but words to live by nonetheless.
Mon Nov 20 2000 08:17:
Here is a picture my mother sent me of someone who is some relation to me but I'm not sure of the terminology. His name is Sydney and he is very small. He looks even smaller because he's being held by my cousin Brian Richardson, who is his father and who is a big guy. To Sydney's left stand Tina, Brian's wife, and John, the pastor.
Mon Nov 20 2000 17:47:
My mother informs me that Sydney is a girl. Who names a girl Sydney?
My cousin, that's who.
Tue Nov 21 2000 16:16:
Today Cam described me as "The five-time reigning champion dungeonmaster, world-renowned flamethrower
and sword-swallower, Leonard Richardson, creator of the award-winning crummy.com and segfault.org, master of all, god of none." This
makes me laugh almost as hard as does Paul O'Brian's review of Guess The Verb!, and for the same lack of any reason.
Wed Nov 22 2000 13:45:
Today's classic quote: "Do you mean 'a lot' as in a million or 'a lot' as in two?"
It's one of those things Wittgenstein was concerned about, things
you know are true even though you've never thought about them. For
me it was "It takes a lot longer to get several people going for a road
trip than it does to get one person going for a road trip." Here I am,
in my pajamas, It's 6:20, I want to leave by 7 and I know I can do it.
That would be impossible if I was taking three other people along. This
could be Brook's law in action.
I was soooo looking forward to seeing Celeste tomorrow, but it looks
like that won't happen. :( :( :( But never fear, I have a devious plan...
heh heh heh. Or nyeh heh heh, to laugh the Steve Buscemi way. Learn
from the great Buscemi and let him guide your patch.
You know, I made a bunch of pop culture references in that entry,
but they were all sort of erudite and highbrow. Not like Moesha or Blair Witch references,
anyway. Hmm, maybe not. YOU MAKE THE CALL! Okay, that ruined it.
Thu Nov 23 2000 05:32:
True to his word, foaf has sent me a copy of Monty Python Sings,
the follow-up to the critical flop Monty Python Does Not Sing.
Unfortunately, it's region-coded to the UK, so I can't listen to it.
I'm kidding, of course (but for how long?). I'm going to listen to it
on my way to Fresno today. The reason foaf sent me this lovely gift
was so I could listen to the Oliver Cromwell song, which is apparantly an Alan Sherman-style sing-along to a classical piece.
Wed Nov 29 2000 08:40:
Before listening to the Oliver Cromwell song, I questioned foaf's sanity in sending me a CD just so I could listen to one song. However, now I must admit that it is quite a song. I recommend it. The CD also has all the great Monty Python songs, as well as all the terrible ones which, like The Road To Mars, never should have been done.
I need to get a new computer, but I think the current prices might be artificially high, and that I should, like Pitch, lay low until after the holidays. What do the people who actually know about buying hardware think?
Thu Nov 30 2000 07:54:
The hard drive on my home machine is going downhill. Yesterday it wouldn't boot. I was quite disturbed because that hard drive has my post-Guess The Verb! IF game on it, and it's the only game in the world that cannot, even in theory, be recreated from scratch if the most recent version is destroyed. Fortunately, the fabulous bootable business card from LinuxCare took care of things.
Fri Dec 01 2000 06:30:
Welcome to December 2000. Before this month is out, we will put a man on the moon, and bring him safely back to earth.
Fri Dec 01 2000 09:07:
'Fossil fish' in dramatic sighting. Fossil fish performs live to sold out crowd!
Fri Dec 01 2000 17:10:
Celeste is on her way to Washington. I'm thinking of her as I enter my 12th hour of hellish debugging.
Sat Dec 02 2000 06:45:
It is my considered opinion that the Angband games are not for playing.
They are for hacking on and for writing intelligent agents to conquer.
This strikes me as a more reliable source of fun than playing them.
Sat Dec 02 2000 18:42:
Research for my game brings me to the coolest hostname ever devised by man:
properties.copper.org.
Mon Dec 04 2000 06:16:
In honor of our code freeze, I will sing:
A golden build is a soaring soul
As free as a mountain bird
His energetic fist should be ready to resist
A dictatorial word!
Mon Dec 04 2000 07:51:
Celeste's interview is ongoing as of about ten minutes ago. I hope it goes well.
Mon Dec 04 2000 08:20:
You... underfed... monkey! From a clip art site Mike pointed me to.
Mon Dec 04 2000 13:30:
I heartily endorse the breaded clams that is Tales of the Lambda Expressway.
Mon Dec 04 2000 15:21:
Registered at the Post Office as
"a personal page of...stuff?"
http://www.msu.edu/~montero7/wordsmeat.htm
Tue Dec 05 2000 08:24:
Try some of my delicious culture jam!
Tue Dec 05 2000 09:04:
FHW: Microsoft forges acquisition of Xbox developer. With all their billions, you'd think they could acquire the Xbox developer for real.
Wed Dec 06 2000 10:17:
Yes! Celeste got a great job offer! And now another company wants to try and match the offer! Celeste rocks!
Wed Dec 06 2000 12:12:
If you are afraid that you might not get enough sarcasm today, this article should do you for a while.
Celeste's job search has caused me to reminisce about my own, as you can tell.
Thu Dec 07 2000 15:26:
This is the first news article I've seen that mentions Zack Networks. Zack is the company I was going to work for before CollabNet made me an offer. Joshua Barratt works for Zack, or did as of mid-1999. I also had an offer from Tallan, which I would have preferred to the Zack one, but they put a really tight time limit on my accepting the offer, so I decided to take a risk and hope I got the CollabNet offer. And it paid off. Whee!
Fri Dec 08 2000 09:04:
Oh, it's that old "Good Pope, bad Pope" routine.
Fri Dec 08 2000 11:14:
Man arrested for threatening Zappa. You're a dead man, Zappa! No, actually it was Moon Unit Zappa.
Fri Dec 08 2000 13:34:
A link Mike sent me a long time ago that I never got because of mail forwarding problems: Secret Nazi Relic to be Destroyed. Mike:
are they not aware that once they cut down the offending trees, they will
have a swastika of black (empty space) on green visible year round, instead
of the yellow that is only visible a few weeks a year when the leaves change
color? unless they are going to take out some pines as well, or plant new
pines, which i doubt they have planned...
Fri Dec 08 2000 13:35:
Mike also points out that the headline about the Xbox developer has been changed.
For those late to the party, here is the canonical rfk page and the sourceforge project.
Fri Dec 08 2000 16:00:
A monster beyond my control:
robotfindskitten.org.
Sun Dec 10 2000 06:23:
New release of Guess The Verb!, this one the official Release 2. Now includes hints! Cf. my first Usenet posting ever. I could probably have posted the announcement from some UNIX account or other so as not to have looked like the Usenet equivalent of an AOL user, but what the hell.
Sun Dec 10 2000 09:30:
Grr. I had to update Guess The Verb! again because of a mis-statement
about the Second Incompleteness Theorem. The version on gmd.de
will make me look like a spaz.
I'm hoping to start a January beta-test of this game, and release
it in February. But now, I sleep.
Sun Dec 10 2000 21:28:
The most complicated part of my next game is now implemented. Only one other part is anywhere near as complicated.
Mon Dec 11 2000 05:48:
Celeste's queuing theory final is today. Actually it's in less than 2 hours. I answered her questions this weekend but I had to punt on a lot of them because I don't remember things as basic as how to calculate second moment. I wish I could have done more to help her. All I can do at this point is wish her luck.
Someone from la.inreach.net has been stuffing the polls. I don't know which is worse; that someone feels the need to rig these useless polls, or that I care.
Oops, I accidentally overwrote the last poll with this poll. Oh well, it wasn't a very good poll anyway.
Mon Dec 11 2000 06:04:
Today's poll is in honor of our gonzo buildmaster, Josh Lucas.
Mon Dec 11 2000 06:10:
This is a rather amusing article. Biotech patents are "making a mockery of the world patent system", not because said system deserves to be made a mockery, not because biotech patents are generally evil... because biotech patents are really long and use a lot of paper! Yes, you read it here first. Actually, you probably read it at Sci Tech Daily first.
Brilliant.
Mon Dec 11 2000 06:36:
This long article on Bach would be worthwhile even if the only thing it supplied to me were this previously missing detail:
The great Mass in B Minor could not be played at all during Bach's lifetime: a Latin mass was not
possible in a Protestant church, and at that time a performance with an orchestra was banned in Catholic
churches.
Mon Dec 11 2000 07:12:
The definition of "good press": An article headlined "All hail [your company's product]".
Mon Dec 11 2000 09:57:
The queueing theory final is nearly over. Celeste said she'd call me afterwards. I am waiting with bated breath for the call.
That's all for now.
Mon Dec 11 2000 13:20:
Kevin Maples showed me a cool slot machine which he wrote in C.
Mon Dec 11 2000 14:31:
There was an alarm which was set off earlier, and which produced an inscrutable alarm message. We evacuated and the fire department came. They futzed around inside the building for a while and then left. I have no idea what they did. All I know is that I lost over an hour of my afternoon. Kevin and I walked down to the marina, though, so it wasn't a total waste.
Tue Dec 12 2000 14:14:
I feel terrible, so I'm filling myself up with junk food, even though I know this will only make me feel worse. Not only in a self-esteem sense; it will make me feel physically worse. So why do I do it?
The link going around CollabNet is this graph of OpenOffice compile dependencies. I think it would make a good technology graph for FreeCiv, although you'd have to get rid of that big bottleneck. Every sentence in this paragraph containes at least one BiCapitalized word.
Wed Dec 13 2000 06:49:
I feel much better today.
No, the thing that really pisses me off about that game is the characters. The Snark and the Boojum are two completely different creatures with completely different habitats. Hello?
Wed Dec 13 2000 07:35:
American McGee's Alice: It's like Alice in Wonderland, but it's really twisted! Coming soon, American McGee's Juliet: It's like Romeo and Juliet, but they both die in the end!
Wed Dec 13 2000 14:12:
<susank> fancy icons miss the point
<susank> except for dangergirl ones
Wed Dec 13 2000 15:05:
I believe that this is the first time I have seen the phrase "a senior executive played electronic music he had written" in a news article.
Thu Dec 14 2000 09:42:
I'm starting to think I should have actually attended the CollabNet holiday party; there are a million press articles about it; here's the latest.
I even got to bond with the
dashing engineer Manoj, who confessed that he would rather not code for users, or clients, or even for hardware. "Actually, I think I should just be pure energy," he proclaimed grandly.
Fri Dec 15 2000 06:10:
Hunt me! Kill me! Turn my hyde into a faux leather handbag! As usual, that link will work until Monday.
Fri Dec 15 2000 08:32:
The preachiest Segfault story I've ever written: Genetically Modified Teosinte on the Loose. Yes, even preachier than
last year's heat death story.
Fri Dec 15 2000 10:50:
Celeste's last final is ongoing now. Then she's done with school! My final act as a UCLA student was to drop a paper on Wittgenstein into Professor Hsu's mailbox, and I liked having there be one defining moment, which wouldn't have happened if I'd been taking a final (and which I could take a picture of).
Fri Dec 15 2000 18:15:
Plausibly deniable spam from Amazon: "Since we haven't heard from you recently (at this e-mail address), we're
passing along our solutions to common eleventh-hour holiday headaches." Well, that
certainly makes... huh?
Mon Dec 18 2000 17:22:
The site was down for a while but now it's back. I have not yet heard from VA-Dan about the cause of the downage. Celeste wanted me to post something, so here it is. Hi, Celeste!
Mon Dec 18 2000 18:50:
A link for my mother: Steven Jay Gould's final essay for Natural History.
Tue Dec 19 2000 17:26:
I have an essay-like thought bubbling in my mind, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to write anything down.
Hey, wait a minute... I am one of the people he's talking about. Argh! I know that Konami cheat code as well as anyone. When will my similarities to the Katz-kissing-up demographic end? I'm an adult! I have a bloody college degree! This isn't right!
Tue Dec 19 2000 17:59:
Whenever I hear Jon Katz talk about young people, I fear for the future. But then I remember that I was easily as obsessed with video games as anyone he's talking about, and I turned out fine. And I realize that, once again, Jon Katz is full of it, and everything is as it should be.
Tue Dec 19 2000 18:29:
Kevin's SSH woes:
<kmaples> see what I have to deal with?:
<kmaples> Warning: Server lies about size of server host key: actual size is 1023 bits vs. announced 1024.
<kmaples> where's my bit!
Tue Dec 19 2000 19:21:
Just a couple more days until I get to see Celeste... even less time until I get to see my mother and sisters again. Huzzah!
Tue Dec 19 2000 19:47:
I know IRC humor is wrong, but I can't resist. Here's Manoj's latest:
I think for Christmas, we should buy Ed a Ford Expedition with a built-in TV tuned to QVC, with "Partnership for a Drug-Free America" and "Bush/Cheney 2000" bumper stickers. Oh, and we'd take him to SoCal to pick it up.
Tue Dec 19 2000 21:23:
I'm all packed to leave tomorrow but I have yet to get my camera to work with my Thinkpad. So I guess I'll be limited to 60 or however many pictures this coming 5 days. Oh darn.
Fri Dec 22 2000 17:01:
I had such a wonderful time with Celeste yesterday. :) I can't wait until I see her again.
Mon Dec 25 2000 06:01:
Segfault silliness: String, Boolean Passed to Function.
Mon Dec 25 2000 06:20:
Oh, I forgot to mention that I saw Celeste *twice*! I saw her on Saturday too! Her dad took here up here and dropped her off, and we took her back home that night. It was so wonderful getting to see her again. We surprised her with a Christmas stocking my mom made for her. It has the cute little onion guy from her homepage on it.
Mon Dec 25 2000 07:18:
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coens' latest, is out! I'm trying very hard not to read that review because I already know too much about it for my taste. I went into The Big Lebowski knowing nothing about it except the lines that Adam, Kris and LJ continually quoted out of context, and it was fabulous. Let's retain that innocence. For the laughter, for the music. For the boy.
I cleaned up as regards Christmas gifts, by the way. I got a Clango T-shirt from Celeste! Yay!!! And lots of other stuff--I have pictures which will go up. But I think the Clango T-shirt was the best, even though it wasn't technically a Christmas gift.
Mon Dec 25 2000 13:36:
I'm glad this is online because I was going to type it up the way I did The Late Benjamin Franklin, and now I don't have to: Mark Twain's The Awful German Language. Don't miss the gut-wrenching Tale of the Fishwife and its sad Fate.
As my free gift to Jake Berendes, I finally finished the album I was supposed to give him for his birthday. I hope to mail it to him eventually. To make up for its lateness, the album has no less than five titles: A Credit to His Demographic (the main title), Things I Broke on the Way Out, A Harvest of Death, A Vote For Me is a Vote For Food Reform, and special bonus title I Jake Berendized West Covina and All I Got Was This Lousy Tape. I made four track lists for it; you can see one of them. Jake, beware that some of the track names are fake names so that you won't know about songs you've already heard of until they're on top of you, metaphorically speaking.
I'm all packed up to leave tomorrow. I'm taking tomorrow off and will be in work on Wednesday. Back to the daily grind.
Mon Dec 25 2000 16:50:
As my free gift to you, I have scanned an old magic catalog I got at an antique store on Saturday. Within the next few years it will become nice-looking and have a paging system with narration, but you can see the raw scanned images here. Fun for the whole family! Except for you.
Wed Dec 27 2000 08:02:
More picture dumps from Thanksgiving and Christmas.
For Guess the Verb! I was fortunate enough to have Mike
around to help me write all the descriptions and whatnot. But for
this game I'm writing everything myself, and it's haaahd. Tedious,
more like. Maybe it's because everything I write in this game has
to be written in a particular style which is very different (though
not as different as you might think) from my regular style.
Yes, I like teasing you by talking about my new game but not actually
saying anything about it.
Thu Dec 28 2000 07:52:
The programming for my next IF game is pretty much done. All that
remains before beta testing is for me to write a veritable encyclopedia of reference material for
the game world. Bleah. Oh yeah, I also have to program all the interaction
for all the NPCs. But they don't do a whole lot, so I'm not terribly unhappy
about that task.
Thu Dec 28 2000 09:13:
Finally, more email from Andy. He's applying to graduate schools and whatnot. Andy is the ideal victim for my next plan but he might not have time for the irregular goings-on it entails.
She has officially passed all her classes and graduated! Yay!
Thu Dec 28 2000 19:15:
It's been a nightmare at work today. Our provider had an intermittent problem with one of their routers (or something) which led to hosts being accessible basically at random. I didn't get to commit any of the code I wrote today, and I didn't get to say something on here that I really wanted to say, which is...
Congratulations, Celeste!
Kevin is the owner of the spiceweasels.com domain name, where you can see horrifying pictures of the Turducken. When I say "horrifying" I am not kidding. View at your own risk. In particular, view this picture at your own risk. That is of Kevin's friend Fred, who masterminded the Turducken.
Kevin is also the boss of lfino.com, which could be a weblog (which I could then link to on the navbar) if he tried a little harder.
Thu Dec 28 2000 19:42:
Today's quote: "I laugh in the face of hubris!". Kevin also had a great quote today but I don't remember it. Help me out, Kevin.
Thu Dec 28 2000 20:50:
I finished Terror of Mechagodzilla this morning. It was pretty good, except they never got to the terror. It had the likable Andy Kaufman-like guy from Godzilla vs. Megalon in it. Katsuhiko Sasaki, that's the one.
Fri Dec 29 2000 09:51:
There is a cool thing about to be started at CollabNet which I get to be in charge of, sort of. Woohoo! I'm already sort of in charge of Helm (although I haven't embarked upon the modernification of the web page and writing of tech documents that I need to embark upon). I've discovered that I like being in charge of things a lot more when it's part of my job to be in charge of them.
Sat Dec 30 2000 09:26:
Behold the extent of my geekiness. Last night Celeste was telling
me about the menanggalan, a member of the Filipino undead which
takes the form of a woman whose head and internal organs separate from
the host body and fly around at night. Instead of being frightened by
this gruesome depiction, I was elated to have discovered the source
of one of the weirder monsters in the 1st edition AD&D Fiend Folio.
They call it a penanggalan there, but it's the same thing. You can read a conversion
of the monster to 3rd Edition AD&D here,
or read about the folklore and cinematic appearances of the [mp]enanggalan in an article here. Plus,
I now know how to pronounce the name! ([mp]en-a-nang-ga-lan) Jake,
take note.
Sat Dec 30 2000 09:34:
My game is ready for Mike to beta-test, but not for an open beta-test. I need to calibrate it on Mike first.
News You Can Bruise for 2000 |
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