News You Can Bruise for 2003

I don't know how the French figure into this.

[0] I really have nothing against the French, but it's fun to make fun of them.

Now whenever I see a map of the Underground I have a partial mapping of the stations onto memories, which is a nicely weird experience. If I were to go on another vacation to Washington DC and take the subway there I could observe the formation of this mapping in near-real time. As it is, I have only a couple vague memories from my trip when I was 6: being between stations underneath the Potomac, imagining humidity and dripping water; being told by my father that Foggy Bottom was called that because it was actually underwater, at the bottom of the Potomac; standing on the Triangle platform watching a train arrive.

Of course, I have memories of various kinds associated with over half of the BART stops. There must be a point at which you've used a subway system so much that the stops stop being useful as mnemonic devices for remembering things you did.

Bonus game: without looking at the source code, can you find the link to Crummy on kottke.org?

1. NewsBruiser uses the Unix-specific crypt module to encrypt passwords. Fortunately, there is a pure Python implementation. This is also good because crypt isn't included with the default Python package on Unix, so bundling my own crypt will increase portability on Unix.
2. NewsBruiser uses the Unix-specific fcntl module to lock the list of pending index updates. On Windows it can use a method in the msvcrt module instead.
3. I made the assumption in a bunch of places that the path separator character is '/'; I need to go through and fix those, or NewsBruiser will generate horribly broken URLs and have problems finding files.

Pretty good, I think. I'm also thinking seriously about a paper topic. I think I'll probably go with demonstrating the simple web interface to the configuration file, focusing on the technique rather than the specific tool (I think the specifics of web apps differ too much for such a tool to be both understandable and generally applicable, but I could be wrong).

• Bash: echo $USER > /dev/murder
• Python: import murder
• Perl: use Death::Murder;
• E: Alice <- murder
• Basic: 10 MURDER MEMORY
• Lisp: (murder 'lesser_languages)
• C: #import "murder.h"
• Objective-C: [NSProgrammer murder]
• O'Reilly: Murder: The Definitive Guide

Update: Scott James Remnant adds Murder In A Nutshell

Cracklib Rosie, get on board...

1. The mysterious Sean Neakums
2. Me and Pete Peterson II showing off our hopelessly out-of-date driver's licenses.
3. The game of Settlers of Catan

Anecdote: during the game of Settlers, Pete got a harbor that gave him two-for-one trades for sheep. The conceit throughout the game was that this was not a harbor for trading sheep for other things, but an offshore sheep rendering plant which produced sheep-fat brick, wooly wood, sheepwheat, and decidedly inferior sheepbone ore.

Story found via another weblog (why don't I write down the credit along with the link when I make notes to myself?!?!) There's a minor Baker Street Irregulars-ish subculture pertaining to Soames: Teller of Penn and Teller wrote an article about him for The Atlantic, and various bodies have produced appreciations of his work, or at least Web pages professing the existence of appreciations of his work. (Caution: big spoilers in all three, and not the kind of spoilers that don't really spoil the fun of the story)

I lived a half-mile from the site during the work, and they completely gutted it. Tore out everything, even the walls, and turned it into office space, mostly. There are a few restaurants and a movie theatre and a record store there now, but it's unrecognizable.

Before the work began, they stopped re-newing leases, so the number of stores kept dwindling. It was a ghost mall, with only the movie theatre open at the end. It had endless parking and you could show up just a few minutes before the show and if you didn't mind the possibility of being set upon by refugee Sunglasses Hut employees, it was great.

I was only there once, in my mid-teens, and it was utterly deserted. I remember my sisters and I getting running starts and sliding across the slippery tile floor on our stomachs in a mad act of pointless, consequenceless mall-hogging. It was like the mall in Rock 'n' Roll Rebellion after the humorless owner and his reactionary security guards abandon it to the plucky gang of high-school stereotypes.

Susanna and I have discussed it, and we don't remember sliding through Sherman Oaks Galleria on our stomaches. She says that the one time she was there, she believes, was when we got picky at "pick a pet" and neither if us remember you being there. I say if you're not careful you'll end up turning into mom in terms of story telling!!!

Maybe I was there without my sisters, or maybe we were all there but only I body-surfed across the floor. Maybe I made up the whole thing for a jacket cover bio and then forgot about it (as, indeed, the people who were going to publish my putative book seem to have).

Update: I am beset upon! In a Senate hearing, my mother testified as follows:

I dispute both your and the girls stories. We got Picky at Fox Hills Mall. The only time I have ever been to the Sherman Oaks Galleria was once when you and I went with Andy and Nancy. You and Andy may well have slid on your stomachs, but I don't remember it.

Yeah, me and Andy. That's the ticket. If Andy disputes the story, I'll still have won (unlike the terrorists), because I'll have re-established contact with Andy.

OK, apparently I have to actually write this entry. 2002 was a bumper year for uninformed speculation and hysterical fearmongering. I admit that many of the predictions in my Weekly Standard article, "2002 Predictions for 2002 (Not That You'll Be Around Next Year To Verify Them)" were off the mark, and may even have irresponsibly contributed to the year-end rush to stockpile dog collars and refried water. My assertion that by May we would all be sweeping diamond dust in the gem mines of Aldebaran was clearly off by a couple of years, and I can no longer mantain with a straight face that hair lasers are only months away. However, according to Lexis-Nexis my predictions for the hottest buzzwords of 2002 ("if", "the", and "and") were spot on, and my tepid attempt at an Enron joke prediction remained trite and boring the entire year.

Longtime NYCB readers will not be surprised to learn that for another year my warnings against the dreaded giant clam went sadly unheeded by both parties in Washington. My Pulitzer Prize-winning article, The Sociology of The Continental Shelf proved invaluable for filling up that section of the Times-Picayune they print on Mondays even though it's only about four pages long, but its policy recommendations never reached the right ears. Admittedly, Congress passed several anti-bivalve bills last year, but none of them credited me for being the first to call the attention of the public to this vital issue. The only bright spot was the retirement of Senator Strom Thurmond, for many years notorious as the best friend in government of Big Clam.

2002 was surely the Year of the Blog. Turning now to my own prodigious output, I find over 1200 "entries", each crafted with the care and political acumen which an old hand like myself can draw upon. As the tumultuous events of 2002 unfolded, it was blogs like NYCB which brought you the voices of real people on the front lines. In 2003, as more print journalists discover the possibilities of the Web, will we see the democratization of media and a closer connection between author and audience? If this old dog can learn new tricks, then perhaps the best answer is... stay tuned.

Next: readers nominate the best NYCB entries of 2002.

My mother's favorite is the putative description of Kiss Me Kant.

That's it (unless you have an email on this subject that you've been holding off sending).

• Bright Noise, a counter-Tempest program for the terminal. Has the side effect of making your terminal look like a pointless special effect out of a movie, which raises the intruiging conjecture that many of those pointless special effects are actually counter-Tempest measures (think about it; can you ever make anything out on those screens?).
• soundmosaic is the aural equivalent of a photomosaic program. It doesn't work as well with sound, because sound has a time dimension, but it's a cool idea.
• Diet Monger Ass Kicker is a nice-looking interface to the USDA nutrition database. I actually think the nutrition database is the star of this entry, and that DMAK is only along for the ride because of its cool name. DMAK is written in a programming language called Euphoria, which I'd never heard of before.

• Polyroids is a cross-platform port of an old Asteroids-ish SGI game. In this game, you must prevent the sentient shapes of Flatland from taking over the universe. Space Command has equipped you with a ray which will reduce the many-sided Flatlanders to successively lower castes until they die of shame. Unfortunately, there's a bug (?) which makes it easy to cheat, even inadvertently. It's still a difficult game, although I find all Asteroids-ish games difficult because I never move around the screen.
• Senken is a Simcity-style game. It's too micromanage-y for me, but others might like it.
• Kamikaze is a nice-looking KDE Bomberman clone.
• The Perl BlackJack Engine does what I was going to do, only in Perl.
• Gnome Attacks, a game worthy of the "Carnage" brand. In fact, it's very similar to City Destroy Carnage except that the cities can't fight back.
• I should mention PoopmUp, "An Urban Flight Simulator", and leave it at that.
• AirStrike is a clone of some Amiga dogfight game or other. I think all such games should have a Snoopy vs. the Red Baron mode, but this one doesn't (in fact, I don't think any of them do, unless there's a special licensed game which only has that mode).

One of my remarks in the review was that I wished people would come up with interesting puzzles combining objects from the different games cloned by Rocks'n'Diamonds. Well, a while ago I heard from a fellow who calls himself Equinox "Eq" Tetrachloride. He's written a bunch of R'n'D levels, and sent them to me to try out. They're the cleverest levels I've played yet, and they mix items from different games in interesting ways (in one exciting level, you must complete the first level of Sokoban while being chased by a butterfly monster from another game). Hopefully Eq will put up his R'n'D levels for general consumption.

Eq has this to say about the mysterious yellow gemstones into which you decompose when you die in R'n'D (Yellow gemstones are made from people! THEY'RE PEOPLE!):

It was originally a Boulder Dash thing, as you probably know. [I didn't. -ed. Me neither.] I suppose it's like Sonic the Hedgehog being hit and losing all the rings he collected. In R'n'D, the other coloured gems come from other things, like player 2 being killed or a mole being smashed.

The other thing that makes me think that my life is a nutty sitcom is that today at lunch Kevin spilled coffee on me.

Well, it's cooler than the actual California quarter options. Though I do like the idea of putting concentric grooves on a quarter.

Maybe North Dakota could have the blank quarter.

Thanks to Jason for proofreading the abstract and giving me lots of help on how to write an abstract. Thanks to Kevin for making it all the way through the motivation before falling asleep.

Right now (or sometime around now), Sumana is introducing Bruce Sterling. I wonder how that's going.

What? I'm outraged!

• Recipe Circus, a chaotic Geocities for personal recipe lists. Goes first on the list because it's run by JB Hiller, my old co-worker from MAP.
• RecipeSource, which takes the prize for sheer number of recipes. This is what I use most often. Sumana is on her way over to my house right now and we're going to make pasta with tomato-avocado sauce. It also includes silly recipes for extinct arthropods like Ammonite Chowder and Trilobite Creole.
• Michael Witbrock's Recipe Archive Index is very old-school and includes recipes from the uncanny valley of food, like sourdough chocolate cake.
• I don't really trust the fancy interface to Epicurious' recipe index, {but, and} the recipes therein are taken from fancy cooking magazines, so the recipes are more highbrow; not many recipes there in which pudding is an ingredient. However, there are good-looking recipes for fancy puddings, like pumpkin bread pudding and Lemon Surprise Pudding ("[T]he surprise being that it's chocolate").

[0] Also, I really like the self-published cookbooks that you see in tourist traps and restaurant gift shops while on road trips. I've never bought one, though.

At the very least, Leo is the outline editor I've been looking for, and I can pretend to be one of those people, like Joseph Allen, who uses an editor named after them. At most, I will become one of those people who is a fanatic about Leo on wikis.

Note: I had to recompile Python to get Leo to work, because my preinstalled Python defined Py_UNICODE as wchar_t even though wchar_t on my system is 32 bits, in direct contradiction to what The Python/C API Reference Manual says. I mean, geez.

• CollabNet Finalizes $13 Million Funding Round
• CollabNet Lands $13 Million From VCs And Oracle (InformationWeek)

From clickolinko: Swappington's, a cultural-artifact-trading site with a minimalist interface, an interesting (and, I fear, exploitable) economics, and a goofy animated GIF demonstration. (Incidentally, if you decide to get an account there, list me [leonardr] as your referral, since referrals are the only action I can find that create money.)

From Boingboing: the passive-aggressive approach to protesting workplace patent requirements.

Does everyone name their first SimCity Funkytown? I have a suspicion that this is true. What if you run that city into the ground, creating a hell on Earth that subverts God's divine plan? When you wipe that town, do you name the new one New Funkytown? I'm just wondering how common this is.

That's exactly what I did in first FreeCiv game with Dan, way back when.

It reaches a climax with a space battle high above the Atlantic, as Irish nationalists and Martian dissidents duke it out with laser pistols.

I never was a really big fan of tetris, so I'm not sure why I decided to create this.

This bolsters my "spontaneous generation" theory of Tetris clone creation.

The 1997 "Jack Frost" has had a sequel made of it; I don't know how that fits into the experiment hypothesis. Stomp Tokyo review (I should check Stomp Tokyo more often.)

Ingredients

• 1 can black beans
• 1 can small olives
• 1 tomato
• 1 small cucumber
• 1 avocado
• 1/2 bunch spinach
• Caesar dressing (or whatever)
• Shredded hard cheese (optional)

Peel and chop cucumber. Cut tomato. Put spinach, cucumber, tomato, beans, and olives into a bowl. Dress and shake the bowl around to mix up dressing. Cut up avocado and put in (if you put it in before shaking the bowl the avocado will become part of the dressing). Put cheese on top, if you want cheese. Serve with rice pilaf.

I wrote a little CGI for NewsBruiser what implements the MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC APIs. It needs a little refactoring before I commit, but it works. Soon you'll be able to... do various things. And the company that'll bring it to you: NewsBruiser, Inc.

Me? Still nothing.

BTW, why does Google News only keep a 30-day window of news? To keep its sources from becoming angry? ("The news source seems to be getting angrier!") It already archives all that stuff on the web side of things.

Pounds melt away jnkgjhr

As with so many others, my dream job would be something for the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center. My dream job that actually exists (again, as with many others) would be doing cool things for Google. (Today I actually thought of a cool thing to run against Google, of which possibly more anon, but it won't work without angering Google because it won't work within the rather limited Google API).

My belief: we should homestead the moon and other heavenly bodies. You can own the land if and only if you terraform or otherwise do work on it. Very Lockean.

Right now you're thinking "Leonard, why are you bringing up the durian? I already know all about the durian! I hit your site with my mondo RSS reader to read your witty comments on completely irrelevant topics, not to see you link to the durian site that's already #3 on Daypop!" But unless you've been reading NYCB since 1998 (or have read the archives), you don't know that I had a physics professor at UCLA whose name was Doug Durian. He was a good professor, but I did horribly (C+) in the class; this was entirely my fault.

In a bizarre turn of events, this NYCB entry is not the first time Doug Durian has been mentioned in conjunction with the durian fruit; it's been done before, in greater detail, here.

PS: I do untold amounts of research for each and every NYCB entry, except the ones clearly labeled with the blue triangle which means "completely unresearched". Reading my UCLA transcript to find my E&M grade I get the uncanny impression that as I progressed through my time at UCLA I actually got smarter. I don't know why I find this so uncanny as this is exactly what's supposed to happen when you go to college.

No, I didn't either. It looks like a fun Phantom Tollbooth-ish yarn, and Uin's part in it is generally well-received by the critics. I'm thinking of getting it and reviewing it here.

[0] First seen in Tales You Can Bruise, Issue #55.

[1] I found that one elsewhere and was going to link to it anyway, but this forms a useful framing device.

I want to get my game (which I last mentioned, let alone worked on, about 9 months ago) finished before the end of this year. I am somewhat distressed to, for the first time in my life, be thinking "Well, that's going to take more than a year," and even more distressed not to be feeling that that year represents a large chunk of my life.

My only hope for actually finishing the game on schedule, or at all, is that Leo will make Inform programming a non-hassle (I have a huge problem finding things and cross-referencing related parts of Inform code, and I think Leo will help), reinvigorating my jaded palate.

[0] For purposes of exploration, Mars must also be made of Lego.

Stoner says, "Call now, we're open" vmcgspgimrypn

I immediately thought, "What happened to Weedmon?! Bring back Weedmon!" But now it's obvious: "Weedmon" was clearly the alias of Omar Mendez, the dealer half of this transaction.

(Found via referer logs thanks to Mike's tendency to mention GTV! and Degeneracy everywhere; thanks, Mike!)

1. Squished Frog Blog
2. zen frog blog
3. frog blog
4. Electric Frogplate - Frog Blog
5. frogBLOG
6. Ribbity Blog
7. The Boiled Frog Blog
8. frog's blog
9. Frog n' Blog
10. A Frog in the Valley

• BART IP Address #1
• BART IP Address #2
• Can't Believe It Butter

Today my car thought "That Leonard thinks he's pretty smart. He's fixed the gas tank cover latch hook, but now it's time for LEVEL TWO!" I went to the dentist this morning, missing the shuttle, so once again I drove into work. As I drove out of the parking lot this evening I heard a crunch. One of the little plastic connectors that keeps the front spoiler[0] attached to the car had busted off, and my spoiler was dragging on the ground. I retraced my steps, found the connector, and drove gingerly home where my tools[1] are. It turns out I didn't need my tools because the connector is an ingenious two-part assembly, and once you figure this out you can just reattach the spoiler to the car with your bare hands. Success again!

Tune in tomorrow, when my hubcaps fall off and must be replaced with dinner plates.

[0] This is the second time this spoiler thing has flaked out on me. The first time this happened I didn't realize it until the connector was long gone, so I had to take my car into the shop, and that's what the guy called the thing in the front of the car. I don't think "spoiler" is the right word for it, but that's what he called it. I'm just sayin'.

[1] These are computer- and minor-home-improvement-geek tools, not car tools.

How often at night when the heavens are bright
With the light from the glittering stars,
Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours.

That doesn't even make sense! "If their glory exceeds that of ours?" What does that mean? "If their glory exceeds the glory of our glory?" How about "If their glory exceeds even ours."?

The previews included one for a film that looks cool, despite being called "a darkly comic masterpiece" on the webpage: Divine Intervention. It features an actor who looks like Siddig El Fadil, and a pink Yasser Arafat balloon. I thought Big Shot's Funeral looked good, though[0], so what do I know.

[0] I haven't actually seen Big Shot's Funeral, but every review I've read was either really negative or (worse for my prospects of wanting to see a film) damning with faint praise.

For some reason, the closest Mongolian BBQ I could find to San Francisco is Colonel Lee's. Without knowing anything at all about why this is actually the case, I blame archaic health regulations against communal ingredient choosing and leaving frozen meat out in the open.

There's also a nice used-bookstore-that-tries-to-look-like-a-new-bookstore right across the street from Colonel Lee's.

The Scientologists, who have an office near Civic Center, were capitalizing on the march to sell Dianetics books.

--Zack's weblog

Scientologist Anti-War Slogans:

• No Body Thetans For Oil
• Clears Against The War
• I'm OT3 And I Vote
• BUSH = XENU

Couldn't it be "of our star"?

"I looked at Public Knowledge's Internet connection, and I wondered whether its bitrate exceeds that of ours."

I told Kevin about the painted Los Angeles river cats. He didn't believe me. I showed him this web page. "I cannot believe the lengths you have gone to to pull this hoax off," said Kevin.

"It is very exciting to be associated with a fun brand like Lay's. I am sure Saif-n-Kaif Hot & Sweet Chilly, Caribbean Style with its spicy, tangy taste is a flavour that will go down well with the younger generation," said Saif.

This reminds me that in Trader Joe's, Sumana and I saw some fliers for Tom's of Maine mouthwash. Only they weren't consumer-oriented fliers, they were fliers that tried to convince stores to carry the product. They said:

• Ginger flavor appeals to cultural creatives.

I was just thinking, "Ginger-flavored mouthwash, that's an interesting--gaaah!" If there's one thing us cultural creatives hate, it's to be identified as such.

My dream useless 'convergence' machine would be a combination Geiger counter/GPS system/ham radio. Fearmongering use case used to sell this device: "Help, I'm trapped near an old Soviet test site in Kazakhstan!"

Anyway, I released NewsBruiser 1.12, "Remote Control Rhino". It's got the XML-RPC interfaces and many bug fixes and enhancements. In fact, I'll be using it right now to import my old editthispage entries.

Update: Success! Eg. "dinoflagellate", The Even Newer Economy.

I've got several of these websites and I'm thinking of doing one every once in a while as an NYCB mini-feature (suggestions for mini-feature title welcomed). Today's entry is one I just found: Jeff Lee, one of the authors of Q*Bert, has a Q*Bert page. I have never been any good at Q*Bert, but I've always admired its sheer strangeness and eclectivity, and the page demonstrates how this occurred: it looks to have been designed by a committee of geeks with no management pressure to make it coherent and marketable. Other interesting fact: an early version of the Q*Bert code was equivalent to that OpenGL screensaver with the Slinkies.

I know many noted political theorists read NYCB, and I'm interested in hearing what these people think of this system. Is it interesting at all? How vulnerable is it to attack (assuming it's implemented well)? The main problem I can see is coercion to designate someone as your proxy.

[0] Ha ha.

I got my AS&S catalog in the mail yesterday, and I'm looking forward to another romp through the cheap but useless. I recommend signing up for the catalog; it's a lot of fun, and they don't seem to sell your address to other catalog companies.

Pete Peterson II is also in the enviable position of having the actual AS&S store "just down from the street" from where he lives. I used to imagine the AS&S store as an enormous warehouse in the middle of an Illinois cornfield, maybe next door to a pesticide reseller with a corrugated metal roof, but Pete says "it's just a medium sized store inside a strip mall that is wall to wall packed with stuff."

Am I the only one this happens to? The only one who talks about it on their weblog?

Example (this happened to me just now):

Then I saw her face
Now I'm a subscriber!

• Liero-AI is a side-view fighting game with an enormous number of weapons. No other game that I know of lets you use Iridium satellites as weapons.
• Enigma is seemingly a clone of an old DOS game called Oxyd. Oxyd was a very smart puzzle game which endeared itself to me by not using the same moving parts for every puzzle; there was some basic thing different about the game engine for just about every puzzle. This game deviates from that somewhat, but it's still got that great Oxyd gameplay (you toss a black sphere across the screen with your mouse; it's really fun).
• Trackballs is a Marble Madness-ish game. I couldn't get it to run, but it looks fun.
• Mojotron is suspiciously similar to Robotron and Llamatron. Sadly, is less bizarre and frenetic than Llamatron. Contains fake Engrish on title screen!
• Iter Vehemens ad Necem is a graphical roguelike with a realistic damage system ("Realistic damage system" == "There's gonna be dismemberment"; I think Penny Arcade once did a strip on this topic) and a properly roguelike obsession with fruit. I recommend it, and I usually don't recommend non-ASCII roguelikes.

#1 COLON CLEANSER LOSE 10-15 LBS PER WEEK gzgrhpjbi ncabj

"Bothered by unsightly internal organs?"

• I Was A Teenage Hyphen
• Semicolon Without A Cause
• Forbidden Comma

Update: Sumana says, "Semicolon Without A Clause!". Wah wah.

i need a girl(female version)

Your text 1 151 Name0230 Random word of digits with length 1 to 20 0868824163630871610 Random word of digits with length 1 to 17 664 Random word of small letters with length 1 to 16 uoy Random word of mixed symbols with length 1 to 27 7i0V8W1AG1rp1EFCKbm8O

There's more.

• Ada Norton
• Joel Alan St. Arnaud

• PixiePlus harnesses the well-known graphical acumen of pixies to display many popular and unpopular graphics formats. You can also use pixie dust to generate HTML image galleries, which I suppose makes sense; why should I have to create my HTML image galleries in a command line context where I can't even see the images?
• CVSHistory is a useful plug-in for CVSWeb that lets you slice the repository history in various ways. The more ambitious Bloof runs software metrics against a CVSWeb repository.
• Emacs MP3 player. Unfortunately, it's just a front-end to mpg123; it's not the whole MP3 player in Emacs Lisp.
• To me, mainly interesting for its name and pedigree: Enemies of Carlotta, a mailing list manager written by Lars Wirzenius.
• The cunning twocrypt encrypts two files, the real file and the "plausible deniability" file, into one; sort of like Rubberhose.
• LinPacker is a genetic algorithm for solving the bin-packing program. The website has a really cute navigation menu... but what operating system is it for?
• FormKit for Python crushes LOMP like a molehill of Japanese steel.
• Should I ever decide to implement the LiveJournal protocol in NewsBruiser, I can use ljchk to test it, because ljchk is an interface to the liveJournal protocol. The end.
• rb.log, a blogging program written in Ruby.
• Python Desktop Server, a weblog/RSS aggregator/dashboard for your Digital Lifestyle^TM.
• jSight The Freshmeat entry promises "A code generator set to create a user-defined system of Web robots", so watch out! Somewhere the author is cackling, "At last! My code generator is set to create a user-defined system of Web robots!" The page is all about using it in bioinformation applications, but either I completely misunderstand what it's for or it could be interesting in many other contexts, whenever you have a variety of related web applications with different interfaces.
• Comment, a minimal note taker.

• There's a new version of Nethack out.
• Catch The Furball is a combination graphical adventure/icebreaker discussion game. It's got disparate elements which work together well.
• Consider if you will, Intelligent Tetris, the Tetris clone that includes a Tetris AI. Yes, it can think!, says the Web page. It used to be a DOS game, and I have a soft spot for games that used to be DOS games. This is very convenient; now the computer can play Tetris while you get useful work done.
• Ashwin N. finally cleaned up Alan Cox's old, segfault-prone Linux port of Rogue, and gives us LinuxRogue. Rogue is apparently some sort of roguelike game.
• The Valley. Eto retro! This game was originally published in a computer magazine in the '80s, and the author has recently rewritten it. I originally thought it was an Oregon-trail-like thing, but it's more of an Ultima/BBS door type game.
• gtk-manix is your standard Pacman clone with a very Unixy-looking Pacman. I have no facts to back this up, that's just my subjective impression. He looks like a Pacman who accepts energy dots on standard input.
• Slune, a car racing game in which Tux the penguin and a certain Gnu team up to deliver AIDS drugs to Africa. The Gnu, in particular, has a wry buddy-cop-movie sense of humor that I never envisioned him having, but which fits pretty well.
• There is no escape from Sokoban 3D! Come back, you! I said there was no escape!

• People who make jokes that seem a little over the line, "the line" being defined by context and the makeup of the joke audience.
• People who still live with their parents, but they're trying to get jobs and they're still in their mid-twenties so it's not incredibly pathetic or anything.
• People who cultivate little everyday superstitions, and try to perform them in unobtrusive ways so that people don't notice and ask them why they always eat their food in alphabetical order.
• Women Who Love A Little Bit Too Much, And The Men Who Love Them, But Not Quite Enough.
• The audience members from any other given talk show.

Eventually the talk show would become desperate for ratings and go all sensationalist, but when it did it would only be as bad as a regular talk show is now.

The other thing I think talk shows could do is form a Talk Show Wrestling Federation like the WWE, have talk show hosts bad-mouth each other and every once in a while get into a ring and hit each other with folding chairs. They could orchestrate rivalries and make up story arcs about how host X had stolen host Y's guest, or whatever. I don't know whether this would help ratings, but I figure it's a good test case for this alleged superpower of mine, where I can trick arbitrary people into hitting each other with folding chairs.

don't fall to destuctive viruses rcogosqmvwgoayc g

I wanted to make NBNFAO a goofy-looking pseudotainment site like Cool 2B Real, so that the younger generation would be tricked into sampling hot NewsBruiser tips, not knowing that I was secretly underwriting the whole affair in hopes of boosting their NewsBruiser consumption. That fell through because I lack the neccessary design skills, so it's the same (admittedly icky green, which might play well with males 5-8) scheme as the rest of Tigris, and the NewsBruiser Flash hangman game will have to wait. Instead, I'm going the Astroturf route, like Dr. Pepper before me, recruiting key bloggers to discretely shill for NBNFAO on their sites. Unfortunately, that's not going too well either; I've only been able to convince one blogger to agree to the formatting and tone requirements that best reflect the sheer extremeness of the NewsBruiser brand.

"Married By America" is a new reality show where a woman has "volunteered" to have her spouse selected via the viewers of the "reality television" program of the same name. At the end of the show, they'll get married. At least for a few blissful minutes.

I think that "Married By America" should be cancelled so that we can start using "by America" as a down-home oath like "by gum", as in "You two lovebirds should be married, by America!"

[0] Obscure comment follows: the inevitable sequel will be called "Married By America: With Children".

"Leonard!", he said. "How did we get into this mess? Give me some facet of modern society whose negative features I can extrapolate into a source of blame for our current predicament!"

"We were too smart, Bob.", I said. "We were too smart to begin with and we kept making ourselves smarter. If we'd never figured out agriculture we wouldn't have these problems in the first place; we'd still be on the first set of problems. But now we're stuck in the loop."

"What do we do now?", asked Bob.

"Well," I said, "there's always post-futuristic death disco."

Instant Rebuttal: That only works because the top of the egg is itself a river. Nobody lives there because that whole area is desert.

"Ninety-five percent of the world's consumers live outside the U.S.," said Maria Cino, Assistant Secretary and Director General of the U.S. Commercial Service.

There's also another for my collection of accumulated-through-serendipity lists of recipes.

The point of this little stroll down memory lane is to point you to an essay Rohit Khare wrote, called Who Killed Gopher? Gopher is still being developed, at a stately pre-bubble pace. It's like 1993, only with Subversion.

The author is very concerned with the poor realism of allowing humans to become mages...but does not bother to explain why hobbits and half-elves are shop-keepers in down-town Minas Morgul.

• I meant for Sumana to rent A Slight Case of Murder, but instead she rented A Slight Case of Murder. The latter is a made-for-TV movie starring (and partially written by) William H. Macy. However, it's interesting in its own right. First, it's what Very Bad Things should have been. Second, it was made in 1999 and it's a lot like The Man Who Wasn't There, which leads me to think that the following happened:

  William H. Macy: I enjoyed my slow burn performance in Fargo, but my character cracked under pressure and didn't get enough screen time. I know! I'll write a movie full of homages to the noir genre, in which my character does the Fargo schtick the whole time!

  ...

  Joel and Ethan Coen: How dare that Macy fellow do such Fargo-esque schtick in a non-Coen-brothers-approved film! We've got it! We'll make our own movie, similarly full of homages to the noir genre, and release it in theatres! Everyone will watch our movie and forget about his!

  ...

  William H. Macy: Damn! They're on to me! My only hope is to release my movie on video and give it the same name as the classic noir comedy A Slight Case Of Murder, in hopes that people will rent it accidentally!

  ...

  Joel Coen: What's for dinner?
  Ethan Coen: You were supposed to make dinner.

• The Apartment: Jack Lemmon is at his put-upon best, and occasionally gives voice to that aspect of his personality that is Professor Fate in The Great Race, which is how I will always remember Jack Lemmon. Good jokes and banter, incredible office sets. The villain of the piece is Fred MacMurray, and the movie came out the same year "My Three Sons" debuted, which adds a completely new subtext to "My Three Sons"; the movie could almost be a prequel.

• Shall We Dance?: Cute, inoffensive, and fun. A lot of memorable characters. As so often happens, I didn't think the lead actress was as good-looking as everyone in the movie did. Several characters try to steal the show, but the one who walks off with it is the friendly gumshoe who plays a bit part early on and then just hangs around for the rest of the movie to see how it turns out. I didn't think there was any way to top the cowboy in The Big Lebowski, but the gumshoe in Shall We Dance? does everything the cowboy does while actually being part of the movie world.

PS: The actor who played the gumshoe (Akira Emoto) was in Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla! I knew I recognized him from somewhere.

What's more, last year there was another Godzilla movie that hasn't made it over here yet. The list of release dates for both movies stop abruptly in South Korea. Stop hogging Godzilla, South Korea! (Never mind that I'm so lazy that I haven't yet seen Godzilla 2000.)

Today's story is about Saudi Arabia's own Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi, who recently was posthumously slapped with an enormous divorce settlement. Actually, this story is about his old house. That CBS news article will tell you that al-Fassi had a house in Beverly Hills which was burned down in 1980. What it won't tell you is that there's still nothing there[0]. It's a vacant lot with some statuary lions or something near the Sunset sidewalk.

My mother said this was because the Beverly Hills zoning laws prohibit any new development whatsoever, but I don't think that's true. I admit that the inhabitants seem interested in turning any arbitrary piece of fire-scorched land into a park, but assuming the house is zoned R-1, I see no reason why you couldn't build a new gaudy mansion there if there was a gaudy mansion there before.

I think a more likely explanation is that the land has been a pawn in the divorce proceedings, and that now that a judgement has been rendered, something will be built there. If development is in fact being held up by the restless natives of Beverly Hills, it's surely only because of their superstition that anything built on that lot will be as tacky as al-Fassi's place was.

Incidentally, on my trip through the Beverly Hills Municipal Code I discovered that the city enforces a blanket ban on mining and severe restrictions on oil drilling, presumably in some sort of preemptive anti-Beverly-Hillbillies move.

[0] As of the last time I passed by that way, which admittedly was several years ago.

If I, myself, were planning to commit suicide by eating myself to death, then I, like the characters in the film, would want the relevant food to be really good. Unfortunately, I would then feel guilty about putting the cooks (for such there would have to be) through all this trouble to make all this food that I was just going to use in a suicide attempt. The characters in the film cleverly sidestep this problem by enlisting among their number a gourmet chef, whom they all assist in preparing the food. I really like this idea, and to me it's the most touching part of the film. It's not a big, wasteful, impersonal catered bachanal like I was expecting: the characters are intimately involved in preparing the instruments of their suicide.

Oddly enough, the last half-hour, the climax of the film, is pretty boring. But there are some funny scenes near the beginning, and great French movie lines like "Le deluge universal... du merde."

There is lots of pointless French movie sex in this movie. Also, the characters die like Muppets (I don't think I'm giving away anything when I say that people die in this movie). They're living, living, living, then suddenly they sort of thrash around and stretch out, dead. This fits into my mental picture of Muppet death, in which the animating force, or "hand", leaves the Muppet body and lays out the Muppet prostrate on the nearest table.

To get into the spirit of the film, I gorged myself on the following food while watching it:

• 1 bowl pasta with cheese and avocado (aka "I Have No Vegetables And I Must Eat" Pasta, similar to Trader Joe's Super-Carbohydrate Monopoly Pasta)
• 1 slice toast
• 1 can Hansen's grapefruit soda with added grenadine
• 5 Girl Scout Cookie Thin Mints

I was pretty full after that, but I survived.

[0] Three of the Frenchmen are actually played by Italians. Sure, why not. I couldn't tell.

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The interrupting cow."
"The interrupting--"
"Timing!"

I call this "When Jokes Collide".

This happened with the "kitchen sink" Mozilla example I linked to earlier, and I don't think that's even really an Easter egg; it's an interesting example of what you can do with Mozilla. It just looks like an Easter egg because it's not boring like the other Mozilla examples. Other cases of this I can think of: there was a rather lame Easter egg in the xclock application of Red Hat 4.2 or something, which caused a similar rash of complaints. A later version of Red Hat offered "Redneck" as a localization option, and I'm sure the same people complained about that. [0]

This is the point at which I cast aspersions on the amount of code the people who complain have committed to open source projects, but that's an ad hominem argument which doesn't address their actual argument, which is that open source programmers should optimize their actions to devote their energies to the next most important thing. Sure, if open source programmers were perfect utilitarians (and their idea of what is important were the same as yours), that's what they'd do. But they're not. They have the same desires as real people, and they have an additional weakness for cool-looking things like sinks implemented in XHTML and Javascript, and you have no right to try to allocate other people's voluntary labor, blah blah blah.

At the same time, I don't think putting Easter eggs into an open source application fulfills any psychological need. Most of the time I've seen this it's been a parody of feature catch-up ("Windows has Easter eggs, Red Hat 4.2 must have them too!"), or of an application's reknownedly robust feature set ("{Mozilla,Emacs,Nethack} has everything but the kitchen sink!").

Proprietary software programmers create Easter eggs are because it gives them an outlet for creativity they feel they're not expressing, or because it's the only way they can get their name into the software they wrote. If an open source programmer feels like they have leftover creativity, they can switch projects or work on a side project for a while. And of course open source programmers get their names all over their software. So the same dynamics don't apply.

I personally don't put Easter eggs in my code (except for my text adventures, which I sort of see as a command line interface to an enormous number of Easter eggs). In general, I'd rather implement the Easter egg idea as a separate program, or just write a NYCB entry about it. In lieu of Easter eggs, I give my projects silly names, and sometimes I put in silly comments where only other programmers will see them.

The silly project names make people who like catchy names remember the project, and where my software is in danger of being used by humorless people who think "catchy name = crappy software", there's invariably a marketing department conveniently placed between me and them, who will create boring aliases for my projects no matter what I call them.

I have no data to back this up, but I imagine most open source programmers who have the urge to Easter egg fritter away that energy in separate, more whimsical applications. The Unix philosophy, after all, is no friend to Easter eggs, and thanks to the Internet, your cool little program doesn't need to piggyback on your big boring program with an established delivery mechanism.

[0] Adding "Redneck" or some other bastardized version of your native language as a supported language is actually useful when you're adding localization support to an application, because it allows developers who only speak one language to use a "foreign" localization bundle that they can understand. That's probably not why Red Hat put it in, but I'm just saying.

PS: I left the Mozilla sink running in another tab while I wrote this entry, and when I switched back to the tab and noticed this, I momentarily panicked.

PPS: I forgot to mention that the whole reason I wrote this entry was to mention the following Easter Egg comment in Java Cracklib; it looks to be taken from the original C source:

 /* 
  * alternative use for a boomerang, number 1: a standard throwing 
  * boomerang is an ideal thing to use to tuck the sheets under 
  * the mattress when making your bed. The streamlined shape of 
  * the boomerang allows it to slip easily 'twixt mattress and 
  * bedframe, and it's curve makes it very easy to hook sheets 
  * into the gap.
  */

It is possible... that the recent trend in congress [nb. he means this] will extend from fries and toast to film (France's other great export to the States); in which case, you should get on the bandwagon early and switch your "French film" references to "Freedom film" references. To facilitate this, I wasted the following time:

http://adamparrish.warped.com/cgi/french-to-freedom.pl

(I suggest trying it with the following URL: http://www.lambweston.com/company.asp?navid=29&chain=7,29 ... tee hee)

I think this proves that the marketplace of ideas has disintermediated our elected officials, whom we used to pay to think up this sort of picayune gesture of international chumship or saber-rattling. Perhaps someone should tell them... but they're having so much fun!

Coming soon: this.

Update: Pete Peterson II says: "That's actually quite a bit like how my offshore sheep rendering plant worked!"

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The interrupting time traveller."
"The interrupting ti--"
"Knock knock."

Not as good, but more meta:

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The."
"The who?"
"The punchline."

re: Don't get hacked nm mjgymckaeqewzk

• Falsoyd is a fun, pointless space dogfighting game.
• Dodgin' Diamond 2 is a fun, pointless space shoot-em-up.
• Abe's Amazing Adventure!! is a game written for the author's son, whose birthday is in April. Happy birthday, Abe! The game is a Super Pitfall-ish underground jumping sort of thing. It also has monsters like the "dungenous crab", and settings on the settings screen called "CRAP" and "OTHER CRAP". I think CRAP controls the speed of the monsters and obstacles, but I don't know what OTHER CRAP does.

Who might be interested in acquiring the letters? (assuming they're willing to use the Intraspect logo as an O)

• Mr. T, for his private detective agency: INSPECTOR T
• A fast food Mexican restaurant: TACO SPRINT
• The hemp lobby: STONER PAC
• Good Vibrations: PORN ETC
• Apple fanatics: A PC IS ROTTEN
• They already have a sign on their building just across the office park from my building, but they could replace it with recycled letters: STENTOR
• Mike Popovic, for his roadside stand that sells fresh baby Maine lobsters: PINCER TOTS
• An exterminator: INSECT TRAP
• A death metal band: PAIN ROT SECT
• Makers of Jello molds in the shapes of Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti: TENOR ASPIC
• And many more!

In light of industry-wide budget decreases: I.T. RENTS A PC

did you know we used to have the Intraspect VW Bug?: CAR? SPENT IT

Walking by some (nameless) colleagues' cubicles: A SCENT TRIP

on reviving the company: IN A CPR TEST

is this ?: PC NITE TSAR

on <married couples at work>: PART INCEST (oops, I meant "NICEST PART")

our spam problem: SEPTIC RANT

just because I liked these combos: PAST CRETIN, SPIT NECTAR

what you were hoping I wouldn't do when dressed as a Brownie: ENACT, STRIP

<employee>'s new "night club": TITS EN CRAP (sorry, but how could I not use it?)

and, finally, on the state of our sign: IN PARTS, ETC.

kathy's wild weblog

"x's wild weblog" is a good construction, and as far as I can tell it's never been used. Go to it!

The reason the "ect" is still up there is that to take it down they'd have to move their sign-changing apparatus, and they need it in its current position to put up the new sign.

Office scuttlebutt has it that the sign-on-building rent is $1.3 million over I don't know what time period.

Energy Brands, is looking for hip water drinkers

[0] You have a handkerchief because a gentleman should always carry a handkerchief. If you're a woman then you should also always carry a handkerchief.

Like any language-learning neural network, I was able to incorporate the unfamiliar aspects of that sentence into my vocabulary without having to know the formal rules of what everything meant and how everything fit together. So a while later, maybe a couple months, I announced to my mother, "There's not a demand thing to eat in this house!"

She thought I learned it from my grandfather. For all I know she still thinks this. Hopefully this entry will clear my grandfather's good name.

1. All my troubles seemed so far away.
2. I went to see Seth.

At Seth's place I showed him my PyCon presentation. Then we went through my code. Both presentation and code were well-received. Seth complimented my use of object-oriented design, and we came up with some minor improvements to I Want Options (for instance, IntegerOption should be called CountingNumberOption).

Then Seth showed me the features of Movable Type he likes. I have all of them except for user accounts and permissions (which isn't going to happen anytime soon) and a clever entry list in edit mode. I also like the category list in edit mode.

I passed along to Seth the copy of The Bug, about which more later. I have to pack for DC.

TSG has their own commentary on each rider, and how can you not agree with the analysis "All hail Foo Fighters"? FF's rider is Berendian in parts: "**Dearest reader-This rider is comprised of the things that make the band rock you like a proverbial hurricane!".

The common-denominator corporate beneficiary of all these riders: the Solo Cup Company.

Today I talked with the author of PyCheck, who is a good guy. I may have volunteered to write an ncurses configuration interface for PyCheck's millions of options.

We're spending Saturday with my uncle and cousin. We're going to go to the National Cryptography Museum, which is I don't know where (not a joke).

Listened to many talks. Summaries when I get back to the big (key)board.

They're still working on the Pentagon repairs.

Today I realized that my hotel is practically across the street from the Saudi Arabian embassy. Gah!

I forgot to mention my talk. It went well. I'll link to everything when I get back, and mention all the other interesting things seen at PyCon (including the presentation that compelled Guido van Rossum to say, "I don't think our insurance covers this.").

On the plane ride back, the guy telling us to store smaller items underneath the seats in front of us sounded a lot like Peter Lorre. I envisioned Bogey responding, "Nobody tells me where to store shmaller items."

"How do you define 'comics' in today's post-cyberistic infra-sequentialized media context?"

"By rejecting cyberistic sequentialization, that's how!"

• Leonard Is Paranoid
• Sumana And The Mail Chute
• One of The Arts of Peace statues
• The Republic Is Under Construction
• Thecodont Eryops in the limelight (may not actually be a thecodont; I always thought it was called a euryops but that's a plant) Update: It's an eryops.
• In Soviet Russia, spacesuits wear you!
• Sumana in colonial Fredericksburg

Wow, I think I got Kris' nightmare by mistake.

The pacing is off on those skits near the beginning, in which the same scene is repeated numerous times. There's also a weird Palestinian-nationalist fantasy sequence near the end which turned me off. The filler, as previously mentioned, is boring.

The trailer is much snappier and has almost everything that's really funny in the movie, except for the license plate skit and the tank skit, and the fact that the balloon skit goes on and on with James Bond music playing the whole time. My recommendation: just watch the trailer. It's great.

• Whacked On The Head By Python
• Python In This World And The Next
• Bowling For Objects
• Lists Suck!

• 1 large tomato
• 1/2 blue styrofoam tray store-bought mushrooms
• 4 green onions
• Some pecorino
• Some pasta
• Olive oil
• Basalmic vinegar

Heat up water for pasta. Chop up onions. Chop up tomato. Chop up--aah! The mushrooms are rotten! They are deformed, twisted into mockeries of their former shapes! What kind of mold preys on a fungus? Shouldn't a fungus be able to hold its own? Uh-oh, the water is boiling! Quick, throw in the pasta! Now, quickly find

• A can of olives

Open the can, drain the olives. Chop up half of the olives. Heat up the olive oil in a saucepan. Stir the pasta! What if you had just mushed up the remaining olives and used that instead of olive oil? Would it work? Would it taste better? If you made olive oil out of canned olives, would it cancel out the cannedness? For that matter, does store-bought olive oil count as "canned" food? Put the tomato, onions and olives into the olive oil and swish them around to cook them. Stir the pasta again. You forgot the garlic! Get

• 2 cloves garlic

Chop them up and put them in the saucepan. Grate the cheese! The pasta is done! Drain it. Add a splash of vinegar to the pasta sauce and cook a little more. Serve the pasta with the sauce and cheese. Halfway through eating it, decide that it needs some basil.

• 1 pinch basil

Add the basil. Enjoy the remaining portion.

• Agar is a C library for writing pseudo-RPG[0] games. Written for the in-progress game Trek To The Cave (motto: "Okay, we'll make the links visible, but that's it.").
• Nethack-el lets you play Nethack from within Emacs. As always, it's not an actual port of Nethack to Emacs, but it does patch Nethack so that it can display the Nethack messages, etc. in different Emacs windows.
• Bankiz is a multiplayer top-level fighting game in which your penguin kills other penguins with sundry weapons. This demonstrates my theory that in the absence of natural predators, penguins will develop ways of killing each other. The life bar on top of your penguin makes it look like the penguin is toting around a girder or something on its head.
• Genuts Cheese Indigestion Puzzle wins the silly name prize for this roundup, and also the triviality prize: the puzzles are all really easy. However, that mouse is indeed going to have some serious indigestion, and kudos to the game for recognizing that fact in the title. What if Pacman was like this? What if Pacman was one of us?
• DIE is "deathmatch with cars". I think this makes obvious the problem with every previous deathmatch game: you are not a car. This could be the first game with a "crush a mountain of Japanese steel" mode (of course, someone would have to write it, but that's never before stopped me proposing ridiculous modes).

[0] "Pseudo-RPG": TwenCen[1] Leonard/Andy term for computer games which have the trappings of traditional tabletop RPGs yet which are not actually RPGs. They're usually just tactical games. Not that there's anything wrong with that! There's no reason you couldn't implement an actual RPG in Agar, except for the inherent difficulty of doing role-playing with a software DM.

[1] Obvious nomenclature for this sort of stupid fake future slang, which I came up with last week while reading David Brin's Earth: "Newslang".

Eryops wasn't a thecodont, but a labyrinthodontid amphibian. Thecodonts, I gather, were reptiles.

Why did I think it was a euryops? Because of Trans-kingdom Speciation Through Typo Codon Insertion.

• Xrmap lets you view and zoom in on a hugely detailed vector map of the world as you cackle maniacally like a B-movie villain. Changelog includes the phrase "Xrmap no longer complains if the CIA_WDB2.jpd vector data are not found." Sunclock, by the same author, gives an interface to various other maps of the world. Both very cool.
• Process Change Detection System watches for new processes on your machine.
• Draco is a web application framework. I think there was some talk of it at PyCon. [Hey, what about PyCon?-ed. I'm working on it.]
• Continuing the "useful thing ported to Python" trend, cracklib has been ported to Python.
• Albumshaper, one of the myriad of photo album software packages. I'm putting it here because I should at least *try* other photo album software packages before deciding that I don't understand them and writing my own.
• DPROG is a German industrial band, and also a language which generates C++ implementations of algorithms using dynamic programming (Dynamic Programming: The Coolest Thing Ever™).
• Autodia turns source code or other text into Dia diagrams. It can't be more aggravating than dragging boxes around in Dia! [0]
• SCons is a build system written in Python.
• CVSTrac is a bug tracker that lives on top of CVS.
• netrick is a colorful text-based Web browser that features partial ECMAScript support. They said it shouldn't be done!

[0] This is not really a problem with Dia. It's a problem with having to drag boxes aroud.

I fully believe that flowers spring from concrete wherever you walk. It totally works!

Huzzah!

Some samples:

• Strata pictures for my mother: 1 2 3 4
• Kevin curses the sun, which vows revenge.
• A nice little valley with an inlet to the ocean.
• Kevin and I spent much of our daytime free time trying make it to the bunker on top of the hill. This is as close as we got (we didn't have a whole lot of free time).
• Caution! Low voltage!
• A splendid sunset. Kind of showy if you ask me.
• I call this island "Sleeping Walrus Island".
• We kept a close eye on San Francisco.
• Remember the site of entrances to hell in and around the UK? Well, let me tell you that we have some pretty fine entrances to hell right here in the States. 1 2
• Kevin was bold enough to brave the entrance to hell.
• Here's Kevin in hell, which turns out to be pretty much as depicted in the old DOS game Doom.
• We also found hell's loading dock. Here I am in my tacky shirt at the loading dock.
• The food was generally pretty good.
• Another sunset picture to keep you on your toes.
• At one point the trail just stopped, due to having been washed away in a mudslide or something. Kevin and I collaborated on this daring depiction of the drop, a picture which makes it look like there is no drop whatsoever. Is it something about my camera? Every time I take a picture of a precarious drop, the resulting picture makes the drop look not that precarious at all.

I believe I saw those strata on a geology class field trip when I took geology at DeAnza. What's scary is there are more of them in the ocean, which only show at low tide. They make a dangerous reef if you were a Spanish galleon.

I have a feeling that the cause is that your camera has a very wide depth of field. If the stuff beyond the drop were out of focus, and the precipice itself in focus, then the precarioutiveness might thus be captured.

We're simple folk 'round these parts. We just point and shoot. Sometimes we zoom.

Some call Jason the patron saint of UML users. I think that rather than being the patron saint of any particular thing, he should be canonized as the PatronSaint design pattern itself.

The reason your precarious picture doesn't look precarious is perhaps a lack of context: you know that the drop is steep, but there is no non-steep stuff in the shot. If you had got the horizon in there it might have looked more precipitous.

Incidentally this is why everyone who stands at the bottom of a building and takes a shot up at it is disappointed with the lack of looming in the final image. You need some context.

Someone get this man a cable talk show!

Members of Congress.
They've got powers.
They fight crime.

I call it "The Supermajority".

All of this is completely irrelevant to the fact that NewsBruiser now has an entry in the prestigious FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory (UNESCO? They just got involved, apparently.)

[0] Actually, I am kidding. Before my initial NewsBruiser submission was approved, I was interrogated by the Freshmeat admins as to what was so great about NewsBruiser that they should put up another pointer to a weblog program. I think this is a good idea, and I think Freshmeat's reputation for being a repository of pointers to useless, unfinished software is mainly because they don't want to go back and deal with all the packages they added in pre-interrogation days. I check the new packages on Freshmeat every couple weeks for Software Roundup, and even the stuff I'm not interested in is pretty original. Compare SourceForge, which doesn't even care.

"Fellas, we've got some new Joes just out of boot camp. I'd like you to give a big G.I. Joe welcome to Blowtorch, who'll be heading up our pyrotechnics efforts.

"Also new to our team is Cross Hair, an expert sniper. He'll be working on disabling the COBRA network of spy satellites.

"And this is Private First Class Jimmy Hightower. He's eleven feet tall, and he speaks Navajo."

• Freshmeat is the one that everyone knows about, and the main source of my entries for Software Roundup. I have filters set up to show me new applications, and I clear out the list every couple of weeks. I'm not sure why other people don't do this; it's interesting and easy material for your weblog.
• The Linux Game Tome provides supplemental material for Game Roundup.
• The aforementioned FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory is practically useless for Software Roundup purposes, but since AFAIK a third party has to deem a package "useful" to get it included, the average package is of higher quality than elsewhere.
• Sweetcode updates very rarely, and if you check Freshmeat you can usually find the programs before they get to Sweetcode, but because every Sweetcode program is unique or innovative in some way, it's a great place to browse.
• O'Reilly's Open Source Directory is the runner-up. It is aggravating (but not particularly difficult) to navigate for Software Roundup purposes, and it has few applications listed.

Any that I missed? (I'm deliberately excluding Windows software sites like download.com.com because 1) I am a snob, and 2) I prefer linking to Linux software because that's what I use.)

[Addendum: I update this weblog entry as I remeber or discover more application directories. Do not let this disturb you. Just think of it as a Wiki that only I can edit.]

• Scapy is a Python tool for packet manipulation.
• drumpiler is a drum machine program with a little mini-language that includes functions. Sure beats writing a Perl script to generate Csound, like I did for Annoying Techno Music.
• emo2html is a script that turns a file generated in Emacs outline mode into HTML. Actually, here's otl2html, which is in Python, which trumps Perl.
• Wheel 'O Yum [sic] is an elaborate scheme to make it easier to decide at which nearby restaurant to eat, yet it merely solves the problem of negotiating between persons; individual people are still supposed to vote for their preference, and what if they can't decide? Argh!
• Brainfucker, a compiler for brainfuck. Transforms to assembler, C++, or an executable, all in <3k.
• Simple Blog System is written in PHP. It has a cool theme which I might ask to copy.
• darcs is one of those experimental version control systems (written in Haskell!).
• monotone is another experimental version control system which is probably the closest I'll ever get to "Napster As A Version Control System"; rather than keep the code in a central repository, everyone keeps their own copy of the code and decides from whom they'll accept patches.
• Kodos, which was recently reviewed in LWN, is an interactive tool for defining regular expressions. Because Python uses basically the same regular expression syntax as everything else, it's not Python-specific, but unless you're into Python it's unlikely you'll put up with installing all the software on which Kodos depends.
• TinyTools is a bunch of handy add-ons for Emacs.
• Capon is another Python build system. Okay, Python is the best for build systems! It's the best for everything! You win! Torment me no more, spirit!
• simplisite is one of those programs for generating a static HTML website with a consistent look and feel. I should start using something like this instead of the horrible Noodle-esque thing I currently use.

• Zinc is an IF interpreter front-end (it does both TADS and Z-code) with network support, so that people can connect across the network to collaborate on a game.
• There's a new Celestia, which now comes with a user's guide.
• Langband is an Angband clone written in Lisp, which aims to contain existing and new Angband variants as plugins (what has happened to the good old technique of just cramming every single feature into the same game?). The Langband logo also demonstrates the debilitating effect on Roman discipline of imported Greek culture.

1. He now has a weblog.

   Still, Mike Godwin is not someone who exaggerates the seriousness of a situation. Slashdot does, though!

2. He sent me and Kevin a link to reviews of a hot sauce written by people who have not yet recovered from the hot sauce.

   I WANT TO SEE THE PEOPLE IN PERSON WHO SAY THIS IS NOT HOT I WANT TO SEE THEM BURST INTO FLAMES AS THEY LIE ABOUT THIS VOLCANO EXTRACT IN A BOTTLE.

   I envision Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf saying that about some wimpy Tabasco.

(Cf. the elephant.)

May I help you with your cell phone axjtsizpfb uygt

The candidates will need to be CORGI registered...

PS: PAP is the second game I know of in which feature creep is a bogeyman.

The food here is okay; the decor, kitschy. I can't say how the apricot pie is, because it turns out I don't like apricot pie.

Back on the road.

I have not looked into whether or not this actually exists, because the longer I put it off, the longer I can pretend it exists in some dusty section of the HTML spec. I assume it doesn't exist because I can already feel the people who are in charge of adding things to the HTML spec breathing down my neck, telling me to use one user-visible control per hyperlink destination. Don't make me use Javascript!

Also gave a bunch of old stuff I don't need to the Salvation Army. It's Get Rid Of Stuff Daze here at Leonard's house, because I might be moving soon. More as the situation develops.

"You'll like our crust!"

i was very, very well read in my youth, before i forgot everything. all of that reading did not prevent me from trading 10 or so ratty paperback editions for one fine hardbound, sewn-in-signatures, best translation/commentary extant version of a personal favorite, over and over again. i was ruthless and systematic.

the result is that i have a personal library reflecting well below 10% of the harder books i've read, mostly in immaculate editions that quite naturally show no sign of use. the ones i chose to get the immortal versions of tended to be the ones that spoke most to me at the time. i wish i had the scribbled-up profusion around to remind me of important things from time to time, now that i'm older.

I'm noticing the same sort of thing, except that I buy good copies of things, new or used, at random intervals, and the rest of my library is distilled at intervals from a large number of cheap paperbacks to a smaller number of different but equally cheap paperbacks. Most of the stuff I want to keep is well-known and public domain, hence already on the web, and I'm not sentimental about paper, so it can go. Exceptions for particular authors I'm collecting, like Chesterton, and my awesome hardcover copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is available Gutenberg-style but which I hang on to with the slim justification that there are woodcuts not reproduced in the ASCII edition.

Second, Todd on links with multiple targets:

there is a specification called xlink that matches your description for links across xml-based documents, including xhtml (1.1 and later) potentially: http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/ . like most xml fabulousness, the existence of some how-to documentation, schema etc., does not imply the existence, much less wide deployment of software designed to support said fabulousness. mozilla does support some xlinkish stuff - not sure whether the bits you describe: http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/xml/#linking . in the meantime, there's javascript. <shudder/>

I've barely played with Mozilla's XLink support, preferring to waste this evening writing a syndication feed file writer for NewsBruiser, but the functionality covered by Mozilla's single test case didn't fill me with confidence. Here's an article on XLink which I find only slightly opaque. Perhaps there's hope for me yet; it took me years to comprehend XML, but once I finally figured out the left angle bracket, the right angle bracket was easy.

[From time to time, "Software Roundup" will appear in a bonus edition, evaluating according to obscure criteria the members of an overly bifurcated software category. Only Crummy Premium subscribers ($24.95/year) will be spared this exclusive content.]

By my side-of-the-envelope calculation, there are more Python templating systems than there are Rocks 'n' Diamonds levels. I've skimmed some web pages and tried to get a few of them to work, so I am now an expert on Python templating systems, at least as regards whether or not I can use them in NewsBruiser.

Here are my showstoppers for any module I might want to incorporate into NewsBruiser. The first two are born of my design goal of making NewsBruiser work for anyone whose hosting service has Python available and who can unzip a tarball. The last one is due to the unfortunate reality of software licensing. I've looked at the template systems with these showstoppers in mind, which means that often I'll simply dismiss a possibly deserving module without really looking at it; this is not a reflection on the module.

• Not-obviously-fixable incompatibility with Python 1.5
• Requires separate installation step
• BSD-incompatible license

First, the ones I can't or won't use:

• Cheetah: Beautiful Velocity-like syntax. Seems written for Python 2.2 from beginning to end, unfortunately, and it's a lot of code. Otherwise I would definitely use this.

• Zebra: XML-based. Somewhat language-independent, which is a cool idea. GPLed, so I can't use it.

• PSP I couldn't get to work.

• empy is GPLed.

• htmltmpl is Python 2-specific.

• XIST looks like a good idea but is Python 2.

[STOP PRESS! Crummy Premium subscription now only $24.91/year! Such a deal!]

• Yet Another Python Templating Utility works, but I really don't like its template format. XYAPTU is much better-looking, but contains a 2.2ism which I can't get rid of. If I could make it 1.5-compatible, XYAPTU would be a contender; stay tuned.

• PyMeld has some of the control flow logic in Python, but not as much as template (see below). It's 2.2-only, though.

• Wasp is a whole web framework, and the syntax is acceptable, but again: Python 2.

Now, the actual contenders:

• template has all the control flow logic in Python rather than in the template, which I don't like, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't do the job.

• AHTS has a slightly awkward API, and the examples don't work as is, but otherwise seems to work. It looks like it only accepts variable substitution by name, though.

• tinpy took just a little work to get working in 1.5. It has a ?SP-like syntax, which is okay, but you can't access members or make method calls from within templates; it has to be variable references, dictionary lookups, etc. Otherwise, I think this is the best one for me.

So, unless I find something else that's better (do you know of any?), or I can get XYAPTU to work, I'm probably going to hack up AHTS or tinpy to fit my needs.

I wouldn't mind so much, except that I have photographic evidence that Amazon is showing this same page to everyone, and trying to pawn it off as my work. For shame!

I was disappointed, because even though British and French taxpayers will no longer bleed billions of dollars per year, the rest of us lost a great shorthand for fallacious investments :).

• Pictures of random old goods from the 1950s, to be auctioned.
• Covers of records of the cast-off sort I used to buy and keep around despite not having a record player.
• Bad covers of old comic books. Awful cover aside, "Chaplains At War" could be interesting; sort of a "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" thing. Probably wishful thinking. There's also the greatest comic book covers of all time, but who wants to read about the good and the beautiful? (link from Todd)

Today I got the following spam:

Subject: Unless you have a PhD, READ THIS E-MAIL h zt b

Oh Kay.

John Brown's body lies a-moulderin' in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-moulderin' in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-moulderin' in the grave
A-moulderin' in the grave

Chorus:

Moulderin', moulderin', moulderin' moulderin'
Moulderin', moulderin', moulderin' moulderin'
(etc.)

TEoM reminds me of the Troll Book Club order forms I got once a month or so in grade school. My friends and I had great fun erasing or crossing out letters to turn "time" into "tie", etc. and making hash out of the descriptions of Caldecott winners. There is no EoM mode to do this, but I might write one and recapture those halcyon days.

(PS: format taken from They Have Blogs, a web toy of about a year ago).

Perhaps the real message of his work, then, is a critique that makes a mockery not just of the entertainment industry, but of the very notion of meritocracy in America—his success being the most damning evidence to date that the marketplace of talent is a sham.

Before you write code, you're supposed to write unit tests. It turns out I can bring myself to do this most of the time, but I do it grudgingly because I don't like writing the infrastructure for a new type of test. The way I generally do it is to write the tests but leave the expected value for the assertions blank (unless the expected value is really easy to figure out, or is actually defined and not just the result of applying some transform to some data I just made up). Then I write the code and all the assertions fail. I use the code I wrote to figure out what the asserted values should be, fixing bugs as I do, and paste in the final, correct values for later use.

Where unit tests are really great is when you find a bug in your code. If you've put in the work to write that infrastructure for that sort of bug, it's easy to record your finding of the bug in a way that will automatically notify you if it ever shows up again. This is lesson one: unit tests give you a place to codify the results of the debugging process. By putting in some incremental effort you can ensure that you're notified should the bug you're fixing ever recur. Usually it doesn't recur, but your real worry is not the bug recurring; it's the bug recurring without your knowledge. With unit tests, you know.

Sometimes when I refactor code I worry that some portion of the code I never exercise has broken due to refactoring. This is the worst thing about Python: unless you're using Leo (which I'm still not, despite my earlier touting of it), when you refactor the code the indentation changes, and when that happens you have to redo the indentation because the automatic indenter never works right, and all sorts of problems can crop up.[0] Unit tests find the problems, and if there are any you fix them and that's that. Lesson two: with unit tests, instead of worrying about code you broke while refactoring, your mind is free to worry about less rational things, like bloodthirsty packs of feral hamsters roaming the streets.

I have unit tests for all my Eaters, and some decent coverage for the HTML parser, but nothing yet for the user interface (even though I wrote the user interface to be drivable from Python code) or the thing that grabs URLs. This is because of lesson three: the closer a piece of code is to an actual user, a piece of hardware, or data from the outside world, the more aggravating it is to write unit tests for it. I am convinced this demonstrates a close affinity between unit tests and Lisp.

The big wrapper lesson is that unit tests are a way of creating a grammar with which to describe the behavior of the system so that you can offload to the computer the task of checking that behavior. Unit tests are easier to write when the elements of the grammar have simple APIs that you control, and harder to write when the elements are complex things with outside dependencies, like URLs and mouse movements. Even if you only write unit tests for the simple stuff, it means your agonizing over the more complicated stuff will be untroubled by the suspicion that the problem is something lower-level and simple (of course, then it turns out to actually be something lower-level and simple, and the code says "Gotcha!" like Lucky Ducky and struts off, but I can't help you there).

[0] Eventually I'm going to write my own autoindenting Emacs hook which operates on the very simple principle of moving the cursor line to where autoindent takes it, then moving every child line left or right the same number of spaces. I don't know why other indenters have these fancy algorithms that don't work, when that algorithm works fine. With my algorithm you have to go down arbitrarily many lines before moving the first line, to see how many lines are underneath the first one, then go back up to the top and go through all those lines again, but on the plus side it actually works.

Crud, it just got linked on MetaFilter. I was going to talk about unit tests but I should work on a cache instead.

Update: OK, much better.

PS: the name "Eater of Meaning" comes from a song I wrote called "Eaters of Meaning". I've had that song stuck in my head for the past 3 days.

I sent the link to my mother and asked if the Square Foot Gardening guru was for real or some sort of gardening crackpot. She said "His book and methods are the ones I go by. Have for years." That settles it--he's a crackpot! When I was a kid I was always having to dig plots in my mother's garden or weed or rototill, or mow the lawn or wash the windows or some such thing. This fellow's claims of an end to workaday drudgery and washday blues are clearly nothing but hogwash oil!

Actually, I am (mostly) kidding. My mother doesn't do the grids but she does plant in wooden boxes, which now that I think about it makes things a lot more manageable than just planting things willy-nilly or in enormous garden-spanning rows. I think that if she planted grids it would become proportionately easier to manage. And it would look a lot cooler (but the boxes would be harder to move).

Of course, time has once again left unicode.org in the dust, as there are now websites that show you Unicode characters in your web browser. Take heart, though: I don't yet have a font for Byzantine Musical Symbols, so for that it's gotta be the PDF.

Update: Josh sent me a screenplay site in the good old U.S. of A.

cvs admin -m "#.##:`cat /path/to/new/commit/message`" path/to/affected/file

Where #.## is the version number for the file.

If you need to retroactively change a CVS commit message for a commit that affected more than one file, you are doomed to repeat that action for every file. A little utility script would be useful here.

Did you know the Government gives away money for almost any reason?

The best part, in that "'the best part' that's not actually the best part" sort of way, is that the expedition leader is named Artur Chilingarov, and his penchant for firing his pistol into the air could signal his future metamorphosis into a Bond villain. Unfortunately, his goal is insufficiently sinister:

"Let people dream not only of being managers, let's have as many people as possible becoming polar explorers," he said.

PS: for the "triumph of capitalism" file: not only has Pravda found its true calling as a Sun-type tabloid, but it now has a Cafepress store.

PPS: bonus links I was unable to fit in here anywhere: Polar Philately, a collection of postmarks from the north and south poles; and The Antarctican, a newsletter from Antarctica.

Earlier, I mentioned that a program called Curator was the best of the lot, but after I wrote that the pangs of conscience began to eat at me. Had I really evaluated every damn image gallery program that fit my arbitrary requirements? Hadn't I just looked through Freshmeat and picked the first one that looked good? And what of Marsha? Will she love again? Etc.

So you know where I'm coming from, I will reprise my award-losing technique for reducing a cluttered field of programs to a manageable number, and present the criteria by which I decided which programs to even look at. I like image galleries with the following properties:

• They were generated by an easy-to-hack Python script, probably using some sort of templating language.
• They generate static HTML or run in some sort of non-CGI container so that CGIs aren't being run all the time when they don't have to be.
• If they generate static HTML, they link directly to images, not to an HTML file containing the image.
• They keep a sense of history. I order my galleries by year and then by date within the year, and sometimes within a big event like a vacation I split things up by day or theme, so I like a NewsBruiser-style access to the directory tree.

None of the programs I've reviewed do exactly what I want them to do, and in the rough-and-tumble world of photo album generators the approved way of doing configuration is to hack the generator. This brings up an interesting point about reviewing such software: it what point does it become fair for me to complain about the lack of a feature, when I could just add the feature? Obviously there's some cutoff point, or I would dump plaudits upon an empty file. I have chosen to review the default behavior, and talk about how easy it seems to make the program do what I want.

To complete this review I need your help. You, the NYCB reader, are also the consumer of my photo albums (there's also the people who come in through Google image search, but they're only going to look at one picture, which Google already found for them, so I don't need to make things easy for them). So let me know what you want my image galleries to look like.

Dear Leonard,

I really like shredded coconut, but I feel strange eating it. It's as though it's fish-flake food for humans and there are powerful aliens sitting on their perches in another dimension watching me eat it. Can you help?

Signed,
Observed in Omaha

Dear Observed:

The aliens will lose interest if you stop eating the shredded coconut in big handfuls directly from the bag, and include it as an ingredient in food where they can't see it. Try my

Chocolate Pudding a la Way Too Much Shredded Coconut

• 1 box instant chocolate pudding
• 1 3/4 cups milk
• Way too much shredded coconut

Prepare the pudding as per the instructions on the box, but use less milk than it calls for. Instead of remaining milk, substitute coconut. Chill and serve. Serves n.

• Angels from Another Pin linked to a great site about medieval writing. Includes explanations of what the ancients thought they were doing when they went through all that trouble to put into manuscripts stuff that now seems like fancy superfluous junk. I'm talking to you, illumination!
• Stormcaller.net has occasional roundups in categories "Science/Tech", "Geek", and "Stuff", which is partly stuff you've seen on BoingBoing, and partly stuff that could go on BoingBoing but hasn't. Highlights include a one-man cruise missile project, a UK-based site for less destructive tech status symbols, and the awesome, already-linked-everywhere to-scale renditions of fictional spaceships (the cool thing is not just that they're to scale but that they're all drawn in the same sort of semitechnical style, so you could see them all engaged in one enormous, canon-shattering space battle).
• relicious linked to Blogmatcher, which is like an automatic version of The Blog Twinning Project which uses some weird algorithm to decide that your weblog is like other weblogs that link to the same thing. (Incidentally, TBTP now pairs Crummy with The Cynic's Tea Party) I think that Blogmatcher should not consider my links to things which are themselves weblogs, but other than that it's useful (but doomed to be assimilated into Technorati and forgotten about).

  Also from relicious I found an archive of Transformers. I'm not some kind of Transformers freak or anything, but I enjoyed the prototypes and the Transformers Knock-Offs page. The latter does not cover entire lines of Transformers knockoffs like the Gobots; it details actual copies of actual Transformers with pathetic filed-off serial numbers of names ("Ancient Animal?" Give me a break!). It also reminds me how pointless a lot of the later Transformers were. How was a Transformer that turned into a dinosaur supposed to fool anyone? "Oh, it's just an ordinary titanium Triceratops, nothing to worry--GAAH! IT TURNED INTO A ROBOT WITH A GUN!"

• I don't think 101-280 actually linked to TEoM, but they get an honorable mention for being named after the freeway junction I traverse every weekday going to work and back.

The other primary author of Visicalc, Dan Bricklin, has on his website a wealth of VisiCalc reference material, including a less technical history with photos, all with a really cool navigation system that makes it feel like the future. Dan has his own weblog, and he and Bob collaborate with some other folks on the popular SATN.org weblog, where they talk about telecommunications, copyright, and other curmudgeonly topics.

[Note: this entry inaugurates "Heroes of the Elder Age", the new series of Crummy trading cards and weblog entries (trading cards not available). HotEA honors the authors of cool old pieces of software and does a sort of "where are they now" showcasing of their current web sites. There was a previous entry in this series, on Jeff Lee, one of the authors of Q*Bert, but the series hadn't been titled yet, so it doesn't count as inaugural.]

This may be due to the collapse of Communism in the real world: hive minds can now be considered more objectively, rather than as crude political symbols.

It's true; I always thought of hive minds as swarming embodiments of "Much like in your Earth Soviet Russia" didacticism, but that was all in the old stuff: starting with the Borg, that didn't really make sense.

Leonard, I think you've stumbled onto something diabolical... the Charter Oak fell in a storm and died...

... in 1856.

I think you might be on to something.

We're doomed.

More similar word lists at wordlist.sourceforge.net, including a list with part-of-speech data which made me waste time this evening writing an eater that replaces a word with another word of the same part of speech. It's not up yet because I'm not yet sure how good it is.

"PERHAPS DESTROYING THEM ALL WOULD BE PREMATURE!"

• "Screw you, Kim Jong Il!"
• Deploy the employees. Repeat: deploy the employees.
• Proof that professional photographers share my fanciful framing obsessions: 1 2

1. 20030512: N. Korea claims new drink for techies
2. 20030516: N. Korea training hackers, Seoul says

"Success! We've taken the capital!"

"Wait, let me see that map. We went northeast? This is P'yonggang!"

Fortunately, it turns out countermeasures have been in place for years.

Q: Where do they keep the pirate Constitution?
A: In the National Arrrrchives.

Q: How do they protect the pirate Constitution from deterioration?
A: Arrrrgon.

Q: What's a pirate's favorite web portal?
A: Yoho!.

And two of mine:

Q: What was an evolutionary precursor to the modern pirate?
A: yo-ho-homo erectus.

Q: What is a pirate's favorite physical constant?
A: Plank's Constant.

(Apparently I can't remember any of Riana's pirate jokes.)

Also, when I came in, Zack mistook me for Cory Doctorow. Cory did not show up, leaving the nagging question in the back of my mind: could I have succesfully impersonated Cory Doctorow for the duration of the party? Maybe there's a story on the possibility.

I showed Seth and Nick Moffitt my new game, and they laughed uproariously. Hopefully I'll finish the game tomorrow, and then you too can laugh uproariously or not get it.

The stereotypical example of this is the shopkeeper who wrings his hands and says "You must save Freedonia!" and then tries to nickel-and-dime you on the beef jerky you're trying to buy so you can freaking save Freedonia! I've often felt Nethack deities were acting the same way: look, do you want me to get the Amulet of Yendor or not? Then give me a hand, stop me from turning to stone!

That's why I wrote this songgame: What Fools These Mortals. It lets you simulate being the deity in a game of Nethack. The unexpected thing was, while writing the game, I actually figured out why the Nethack gods are so capricious: it's a lot more fun to smite the player than to help them out, and they're probably just going to die anyway, so why not? This also explains the attitude of the shopkeeper: he's seen heroes come and go, and if he gave beef jerky discounts to everyone he'd go out of business (I don't know why the shopkeeper's financial affairs are persistent across games, when nothing else is, but maybe not all the heroes are you).

Anyway, try out the game; it's got some fun stuff. The code is a mess, but it should be easy to hack if you're so inclined.

• Degeneracy
• Guess The Verb!
• The Eater of Meaning
• ksethdavidschoen
• The Me Software Map
• Tonight's String
• What Fools These Mortals

More coming soon (don't worry, I won't list here every single one I add). I put some work into importing old backup codebases I had for my IF games, so if you're interested you can poke around in the history and find old design docs, like the stream-of-consciousness trancript which was the first thing I ever wrote for Guess The Verb!.

Also, please let me know if I've made some horrible CVS-hosting mistake.

Then there's the awesome ezPyCrypto, a GPLed (so beware)library which makes it incredibly easy to do crypto in Python. Encrypt everything, just because you can! Encrypt your own source code in some sort of obfuscation/trusted computing thing! Encrypt the very name of your program! Encrypt your cat!

Update: Sumana's suggestions, in helpful outline form:

1. You know that it has been through a factory at some point, and that it is not plain tap.
   1. prestige
   2. safety, quality of water (my hypothesis on why Russians want their bottled water carbonated)
2. Costs more (prestige).
3. Flavors. Like an Italian soda without the calories.
4. More "festive" so teetotalers can fit in at a party.

Update #2: A. Cairns writes on the topic "Why I drink sparkling water":

It's like drinking deadly, alkaline poison -- without all the messy dying!

It calms my fears of mortality.

1. Kick-spinning tripod of death
2. Technology enabling "Post-Feudal Ninja Industrialists" to be the first movie filmed in NINJA-VISION!
3. Neighbor to the Temple Mount

Q: How much does pirate corn cost?
A: A buck an arrr!

What would the game "Monopsony" be like?

• BashDB is a debugger for the Bash shell.
• The Apache DoS Evasive Maneuvers Module has a cool Star Trek-ish name and also throttles requests that look to be part of a DoS attack. That same page has a Baysean anti-spam filter for download (what doesn't, these days?).
• ht://Check is a link checker that exposes its data store as a database so that you can do crazy things like make a list of all the links on your entire site. Inexplicably, its logo is Tux the penguin wearing a Harpo Marx wig. LinkChecker is a link checker written in Python which can output to SQL, so it sort of has the same functionality. I don't know which is better because my link checker steel cage is in the shop. Time for another patented Leonard's Prejudices Smackdown! I don't like Harpo much, so I say Python beats C++, and the title goes to LinkChecker.
• DBMonster puts loads of random data in a database for stress testing purposes. Rawr!
• I don't know why I didn't mention Spyce in my Python Template System Roundup; I knew about it, and it seems to work on Python 1.5 and it has a BSD-compatible license. It does templates with real embedded Python, and it has a cute logo.
• WebTK lets you pretend that a web interface is just a GUI interface with a very limited widget set and incredibly slow response time. Pretty cool.
• mod_design is a simple templating system in an Apache module.
• maxq is a really cool tool for doing functional testing of Web applications. A Tigris project.

Special Emacs Insert

Hey there, Emacs fans. Here are some Emacs packages and resources.

• When geek buzzwords collide, you get Emacs Wiki. Also check out EmacsWiki.org for an actual Emacs Wiki with lots of resources.
• EMacro provides a wealth of helpful Emacs macros. So does tiny-tools.

And now back to our show.

• I love maps! And Jim Richardson (no relation) has written a program that interfaces with the US Census' TIGER map server.
• FindBugs is like PyChecker (Google: "Did you mean paycheck?") for Java. Includes academic paper! Academic paper includes funny Shakesperean-sounding section title "Wait Not In Loop", and gossipy footnote "Sun's Hotspot Server VM really does perform this transformation."; also introduced me to the phrase "bug patterns".
• dbtoyfs lets you mount a relational database as a filesystem and browse its data in XML format.
• The Zero Install System, starring Zero Mostel. It's like Java WebStart, but it's not Java-specific. The FAQ sounds like the author is pretty pissed-off at people who won't recognize that TZIS just automates what people do with software anyway.
• cvsdelta provides a number of useful summarizing and project manipulation tools for CVS, tools which should be in CVS in the first place.
• My live-and-let-live philosophy prevents me from making snarky blanket statements like "'Biological applications' and 'PHP' are not phrases I'd ever anticipated encountering in the same sentence." but I'm going to sort of gesture meaningfully and reproachfully towards BioPHP. I must admit that their biology class diagram is awesome, though.

Special Meta Insert

Today we have two applications which put a thing in another thing of the same type. These were the days of the Special Meta Insert, when nested things ran arbitrarily free. Come back with us now to that lawless time--hey, my Palm Pilot!

• Do you crave the great taste of a window manager, in a regular X application? Try framer.
• Old Segfault stories come to life with the JarJar Classloader. It lets you include a prepackaged JAR file (like a library) in your application's JAR file, so you can just distribute one file.

And now back to our show again.

• WebLog is a Python library for parsing webserver logfiles. It's like the Perl script I hacked up a long time ago, but understandable.
• Beanshell is a scripting interface to Java objects, like Jython without the Python syntax. (Found via Kalyp, which will soon be reviewed in a Game Roundup).
• I love it! The Java Curses Library gives you a way to write text-based windowed applications in Java. (Also found via Kalyp).
• BFilter is a web proxy that gets rid of popup and banner ads. "But Mozilla already does that!", you say. True, but does Mozilla get rid of web bugs that you can't see? "Probably," you say, "since such web bugs are liable to be served from a server that also serves banner ads, which are blocked." But does Mozilla get rid of Flash ads? "It effectively does," you say, "if you install the Null Flash Plugin." But what if there were a server which served both banner ads, which you wanted to block, and non-banner graphics which you wanted to see? Mozilla's ad blocker would block all those graphics. "That seems pretty unlikely," you say, but your will is wavering. "Anyway, a proxy is easier to hack to do other things than Mozilla would be," I say. "Checkmate!" You see, we were playing chess the whole time! Each of your responses corresponded to a chess move, but you had no knowledge of this, which allowed me to beat you! I hate playing dirty with the narrative like this, but you see, I'm not terribly good at chess.
• Codestriker is a CGI for doing collaborative code review. It basically lets you annotate proposed and actual diffs. I deem Codestriker the champion of this Software Roundup, and as per newly initialized tradition I will write a poem about it.

  "That patch is no good, you old bore!"
  --Thus I kick off another flame war.
  Codestriker allows
  Me to comment and browse
  But your code is as bad as before.

• Wolf Pacman is the Pacman clone that makes you realize that Pacman is just a Rocks 'n' Diamonds-like game. It does this by removing features that distinguish Pacman from Rocks 'n' Diamonds, like compact boards and enemies that chase you. One new feature in this game is that you can't stop. I can't stop! You bounce off walls like a Breakout ball. I'm pretty sure this is intentional. In the default theme, you are Tux the penguin, and the ghosts are little bitmaps of Bill Gates from xbill. (Incidentally, did you know there is a new xbill? Me neither. It still uses the Athena widget set, which was always my favorite thing about it.)
• Molecule Man is a maze game in which your character moves way too slow, but the graphics are great, quirky and cartoonish. Plus, the documentation is hilarious. "The multi-perspective 3d maze is hiding the very life pills that can bring you salvation... In this cruel world extra time can be bought - with cash!" You need to download some weird Borland developer libraries to run it, which control the frame of the game but not much about the actual game, such that the toolbar be all walkin' down the street like "La di da, I'm Windows XP", whereas the game window itself be all walkin' down the street like "I be kickin' it with the EGA old school," and what's up with that? Tip your waitresses!
• Speaking of isometric views, Pyplace is an isometrics library for use with pygame. It makes me want to write a game in which overbearingly superior beings of pure light visit old Roman ruins and dispense hokey cosmic wisdom despite there being no one there. I'm not sure how the gameplay would go.
• Speaking of pygame, pygsear has some very simple pygame games and demos to use as starting points.
• Stop me before I segue again! Stone's Throw is an Arkanoid clone in Java. "Why write yet another Arkanoid clone?", asks the author. This one has a physics engine that models the universe in which you and I live. But where's the escapism if the game is just like reality? Already as it is I throw a ball at disappearing bricks all day!
• Any Door Is Closed simulates the game you always wanted to play as a kid, where you divided people into two teams and you tried to lock each other into the rooms of an enormous house. This never worked in real life because there weren't enough kids, there weren't enough rooms in the house, the rooms weren't interconnected enough, the doors were openable from the inside, or there were present pesky grownups or safety inspectors who prohibited you from playing. ADIC gets rid of all of these problems.
• Onyx Ring has a good general-purpose Inform library (a supplement to the standard library) and an Inform guide. From Onyx Ring I also found Platypus, a replacement for the Inform standard library.
• SCAM is a sprite collision library. It's been discontinued, but the webpage is worth a visit due to the author's great design sensibilities; check out the logo, and the "happy face insanity" benchmark screenshot.
• In the misty shadowlands on the edge of the space of all games, lives the space of all puzzles. Now, Raymond Hettinger Productions brings you a puzzle-solving framework so generic they said it could not accurately represent puzzle state! But it can! Get it now! Includes representations of "boring jug filling puzzle" and "boring rowboat puzzle". A great example of my philosophy that computers should automate tasks humans (ie. me) find boring.
• Feuerkraft could be the top-view drive-around-in-a-tank-and-blow-things-up game you've been waiting for. "You can only drive around in this demo and destroy a few buildings," says the README, but what else would you want to do? Perhaps if there were some way of destroying vehicles as well, such as other tanks, or airplanes on an airstrip. Or if it used XML somehow. Yes, yes, XML.
• Kalyp is a Roguelike written in Java. In this game, "[G]enerated items can be cursed" (be still, my heart!), but the great thing is that it's the first Roguelike I know about that has unit tests!
• Vertigo is a great Java applet game where you, a blob, inhabit a void full of blue tiles which you must paint purple as stars whiz past you like in Star Trek: The Motion Screensaver. The slightest false move, and you plummet into the void. Includes two-player deathmatch mode. Includes single-player deathmatch mode, in fact. Great gameplay, great mix of puzzle solving and reflex action, greatest bottomless pits in the history of gaming. I can't say enough good about this game, and it wins the coveted Palm d'Rassemblement De Jeu for this episode of Game Roundup. It also gets a poem (I honestly don't know if I'm going to keep doing this, but it's a good gimmick.):

  An reddish and amorphous blob
  Had the world's most dangerous job
  "Meet our tile-painting needs
  At superluminous speeds?
  You're hired, reddish amorphous blob!"

The second best pasta in the world might be ziti, but I'm not sure.

You obviously didn't grow up in the Pacific NorthWest. A killer whale is not a whale. It is actually the largest member of the dolphin family. I still maintain that there is no such thing as a whale/dolphin hybrid, and challenge you to prove me wrong.

Lousy killer whales! I knew there was a reason why I didn't like them! They're actually dolphins in disguise!

The father of Kekaimalu, the wholphin, is NOT a killer whale (orcinus orca), he's a FALSE killer whale (pseudorca crassidens)! That doesn't actually make a difference, since they're both dolphins, but I thought I'd chip in.

I saw this but originally thought a false killer whale was some weird type of whale I'd never heard of. But of course it's not any kind of whale at all. Now I'm on a dolphin witch hunt! Belugas, narwhals, pilot whales--they all look like dolphins! I have in my hand a list of 200 dolphins working for the State Department!

I thought the whole thing was a hoax at first anyway-- that top picture looks suspiciously like the back dolphin image with the false killer whale's skin photoshopped on.

Seems pretty unlikely that someone would make a hoax about a dolphin interbreeding with another dolphin. I find it believable, given the liger (which I know exists).

• flounder, trout, red drum flounder, trout, red drum flounder, trout...
• 'Trap door' nets save dolphins
• Baby dolphin stranded in Georgia recovering in Panhandle

There's also Waters thick with ravenous fish, which is non-dolphin-safe, but I like the headline.

Figure 1: Relative Coolness Of Two-Headed Things

Thing	Coolness
Ettin
Pushmi-pullyu
Two-headed snake
Two-headed tortoise

(Inevitable reader response:)

Dear Sir,

It seems clear you've never spent any time in South Africa. The Wellington Garden Weasel, it is true, bears a strong resemblance to a two-headed tortoise. However, the secondary "head" is merely the weasel's fifth leg, which can be shed like a lizard's tail in a bid to escape from predators. The similarity between the weasel and many famous tortoises has led some zoologists to compromise by placing it with lampreys in the family Petromyzontidae.

Hoping this finds you,
Yours etc.,
Brigadier General Macro Kowalski, O.B.E. (Ret.)

Hey, everyone from New Zealand that I've met has been cool and friendly. Are there any right jerks in New Zealand at all? Do you keep them down on the farm where they can't harm nothin'? Or have I just been fortunate?

There's also a Chinese Restaurant Name Generator which comes up with better names than the one I wrote for my PyCon paper, but it's some weird Javascript thing that only works once, like the guy's variety act in that Warner Brothers cartoon.

One great use for Downhill is finding new weblogs. That's also a great use for writing Downhill and having people link to it. Once the buzz dies down, an Eater-style postmortem where I talk about new weblogs I found (also coming soon: the not-really-that-shocking results of an ad hoc experiment I ran against the readers of pyblagg). I hope the announcement that I'll do a postmortem won't affect the way people link to me.

Finally, the vowels in my phrasebook have all sorts of weird lines on top of them, like sprigs of linguistic parsley. So Kevin and I are starting our own phrasebook, dealing with situations likely to occur specifically in Belgium, and with no funny accents on the characters to confuse things. The English phrases are Kevin's; the French, my half-assed translations.

"Give me the large waffle with herring."
"Je voudrais du grand gaufre des harengs."

"Please place the kippers under my shoe in the morning."
"S'il vous plait, mettez les kippers sous mes chausseures le matin."

"You heard me; you know where the damn kippers go."
"Tu m'entende; tu sait ou vont les kippers!"

"Get out of my way; I'm heading to France."
"Allez! Allez! Je vais au France!"

The stuffed elephant has been to Belgium, too.

(Via AMAI, another in the endless series of weblogs found via Downhill browsing)

Incidentally, they built a new Library of Alexandria. Unfortunately, their website requires Flash.

PS: Check out this cool, FreeCiv-esque map from medieval China.

Regarding the foreign countries of the barbarians southeast of the South Sea, and northwest of Mongolia, there is no means of investigating them because of their great distance, although they are continually sending tribute to the court. Those who speak of them are unable to say anything definite, while those who say something definite cannot be trusted; hence I am compelled to omit them.

Unfortunately, both of the authors were the ones who got stuck with fixing this problem. Also, because one of them is a big whiner, he kept complaining that `we knew this all along ­-- something really stank for iterations and now I'm stuck with fixing it.'

--Recognizing and Responding to 'Bad Smells' in Extreme Programming (from Jeremy Hylton)

We audition for people with skills associated with how-to shows: cooking, home improvement, gardening, etc. Our ideal candidate is someone who thinks he or she is very good, but who by any objective measure is awful. We film a "pilot" with each candidate, which is broadcast as an episode of the actual show. For instance, we'd have a cooking show set where people would do their cooking show pilots. We'd have everything they might need, but they'd be done in by their lack of skills and/or imagination.

The show is awful, both in a cruel way and in a campy way. The audience watches both to vicariously enjoy the victim's incompetence and to secretly hope that they'll actually do well and put one over on us. However, we use deceptive editing to eliminate any aspect of that.

The other idea from our group I liked was Jason Brittain's "The Great Weiner Dog In The Sky Show", in which a troupe of trained dachshunds perform death-defying high-wire and trampoline acts.

The old electric is still available; I'm going to give it to my grandmother to use in a garage sale, so in the unlikely event that anyone wants it, let me know and I'll rescue it.

[0] Also the "Kobayashi Maru" way.

Subject: We are giving away business cards.

"Why have you taken me here, spirit?" The hooded figure said nothing, just stared at the blossoms that floated across the pool in a fragrant scum.

There was a grimy barbecue grill off to one side of the patio. A garden hose stretched halfway across the lawn like an exhausted snake. The sky was blue with a couple smears of clouds, looking as though they had been put there to distinguish the sky from other blue things. All these were facts about the area, but which one was the important one?

I played it cool. I turned on the garden hose and watered the lawn for a little bit. There was a white metal gate to an unused side yard with lawn chairs stacked in it. I ran out of lawn and started spraying the cinder blocks with water, my thumb over the mouth of the hose.

The figure turned and pointed a finger at me. The finger, the hand, the arm that held it up were shrouded in a darkness as deep as the void.

"At the age of fifty," it said, "your fingernails stop growing."

Now I knew the game. I dropped the hose and parried.

"If the pancreas fails," I said, "the liver can take over some of its functionality."

"Jellyfish are chordates, like tunicates," said the spirit.

"Some wasps make honey, the way bees do," I said. "But you shouldn't eat it because it'll make you sick."

"That's very interesting," said the spirit. "I never knew--". It shook from the bottom up, like a movie hologram. It fell, or leapt, into the swimming pool, which swallowed it whole. A slick remained on the surface, which I dispersed with the hose.

Wasp honey. I'd have to look that up. I went into the house.

News You Can Bruise: Is there any artifact of our youth for which you wouldn't write a treatment?

Tom DeSanto: Well, there was already a He-Man movie, so that's out.

NYCB: But the He-Man movie sucked.

TDS: That's because it was made too early. It was made in the 80s, when only ten-year-old dorks would see it, so it was a dorky movie. Now those dorks are 25 and have disposable income, but the market's tapped out. He-Man is a joke.

NYCB: So, would you write, say, a Gobots treatment?

TDS: No, because the Gobots were a pathetic ripoff of the Transformers. Let me give you an example. You know how the boss of the good Gobots was a fighter jet named "Leader 1"? Well, one of the merchandising tie-ins for the Gobots was this Gobots activity book for kids. One of the activities in the activity book was a word search where you had to find the names of the Gobots. In the first place you have an activity book which is destined to show up at the Pic 'N' Save in six months. Second, that activity book contained a word search, which is simply busy work to gets kids to be quiet for a while. Finally, you'd look at this word search and there'd be all these random letters and right in one of the corners there was a numeral 1. And that's where Leader 1's name was.

NYCB: Wow.

TDS: Totally amateurish!

NYCB: So, in a live-action context how do you plan to deal with the fact that there are effectively no humans in the Transformers universe?

TDS: Well, there are humans, but nobody cares about them. They just fix things and get into trouble. So I'm going to introduce a new human character, Humie the Human. He's someone the audience can relate to.

NYCB: Does he transform?

TDS: Yes, he transforms into a tugboat. No, he doesn't transform. Ha!

NYCB: Ha! What are the difficulties in doing a live-action treatment of something as essentially cartoonish as the Transformers?

TDS: I don't understand the question.

NYCB: Well, like so many cartoons of the 80s, the Transformers cartoon existed only to sell toys. The cartoons were basically renditions of what you might see in your imagination playing with the toys, and that's why you suspended disbelief. But if you see it as a live-action thing you're not going to see them as toys, and you're going to wonder why the Transformers were built in the first place.

TDS: Uh-huh.

NYCB: Like with X-Men you could suspend your disbelief because mutants don't have control over what abilities they have. There's not some Rawlsian preexistence where you decide what sort of mutations are good and then everyone is born and gets one of the ones you decided on. You take whatever your genes give you. But Transformers are constructed beings, and you gotta wonder why anyone would decide to build this combination bulldozer/battle robot, unless they were just making a toy. The X-Men had this super plane, but it was based on the SR-71 Blackbird. It didn't turn into a robot.

TDS: Uh-huh.

NYCB: So how do you plan to resolve this problem, of suspension of disbelief?

TDS: Well, there are tricks of screenwriting you can use to induce the suspension of disbelief. For instance, for the first twenty minutes you can have it be a perfectly normal movie about a normal modern person's life, and then the first plot point happens and kablooie! It all goes to pot.

NYCB: Wow! Has nobody ever told you how boring that is?

TDS: Well, keep in mind that during the first twenty minutes of the movie a lot of people are still coming into the theater, or they go out to get popcorn, and if something weird is happening when they arrive you get a lot of talking in the theater, which nobody likes. But sometimes test audiences react negatively to this extended normalcy sequence, so the standard procedure is to put a flash-forward scene at the beginning and then treat most of the movie as a flashback.

NYCB: But that's just a sop thrown to the audience to get them to sit through twenty minutes of boredom! You should start right in the middle of the action and not let up!

TDS: Okay, but the other problem with that, and I probably shouldn't say this, is the musicians' union. You know how every movie has this wishy-washy opening music that's all heavy on the woodwinds? That's because there is otherwise no place for the flute and the piccolo in modern moviemaking, and the flautists and piccoleers become angry. That wishy-washy music requires a mundane introductory sequence over which to lay the credits.

NYCB: There's a conflict I've felt goes to the very heart of the Transformers mythos, and that is Grimlock. Grimlock is a T-Rex, which is awesome, but he's also a Transformer that looks like a dinosaur, which is even stupider than one that looks like a bulldozer. So my question for you, is, do you want to improve on the rather simplistic notion of good and evil presented in the original Transformers series?

TDS: Wow, you got me.

NYCB: Yeah, you thought it was gonna be some lame fanboy question about Grimlock.

TDS: Usually interviewers don't get so involved in the creative process.

NYCB: I do because I care about the movies.

TDS: Well, I don't think the Transformers have a simplistic morality at all. You have good Transformers, and you have bad Transformers.

NYCB: Yeah, but take Magneto for example. He wasn't evil the way Megatron is evil. He did things that were evil, but they served towards a goal; he wasn't doing them just to be evil.

TDS: But every single movie has that sort of villain nowadays. So if you have someone like Megatron who just wants to wreak havoc for no real reason, it's a refreshing twist. Because you have no idea as to his motivation, you never know what's coming next.

NYCB: Bizarrely, you have a point.

TDS: When reviewers say that a character is "mysterious" it just means that they liked the movie but this character had no motivation. It's completely independent of whether or not the movie is good. People who say that characters should have motivations are just exposing their inability to tolerate the mysterious.

NYCB: What's the one thing you want moviegoers to take home from their live-action Transformers movie experience?

TDS: I want people to leave the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility.

TDS: Wait a minute, I never said that. That was Shogo Tomiyama, producer of Godzilla 2000! Don't you do basic fact checking?

NYCB: You never said any of the other stuff in this interview either.

TDS: Fair enough.

NYCB: It's been a pleasure, Tom.

TDS: Well, I'm not sure what the ontological status of this conversation is, but if it had actually involved me the pleasure would have been all mine.

• GPSFET lets you modify the firmware of a GPS device. I can't think of any GPS hacks, but I'll keep thinking and let you know.
• With polyb you could explore the world of my crazy Tetris idea.
• Celestial Bodies Mini-Roundup

  A few entries about things that orbit other things.

  • Now that Celestia exists I'm more sympathetic to software that displays the sky as we see it trapped on Earth. Satellitarium shows you where to look for satellites. Like Heavens-Above for your desktop.
  • Boom simulates the collapse of a type II supernova's iron core. I know absolutely nothing about this, and "like most one dimensional hydrodynamical code, it does not produce an exploding supernova," but at least it uses Subversion and has a wiki.
  • XCore deals with a different kind of core: the kind you get by drilling a chunk out of the earth. It uses the earth itself as its user interface!
  • MyMoon gives you information about your moon. (This is the moon that we all share, so don't hog it.)
• Nice gives design by contract and various Python-esque language goodness to Java.
• ep perverts the notion of Unix pipes in a way not seen since the unveiling of tee caused riots at the 1913 USENIX. It lets you define redirects of output to input using configuration files or command-line switches. It looks like you can feed the stdout of one process into the stdin of another, and then feed that process' stdout into the stdin of the original process, in a reign of madness with no end. I say this because there's an item in the TODO: "Add end to reign of madness."
• Condenser finds and removes duplicated code from your Java programs.
• Thanks to Sumana I have an old-school XT keyboard that I use, but if you're using those aggravating modern keyboards with funky buttons that start up Outlook or play the CD in your CD drive, you can use eventd to get those keys to do something.
• RSS Mini-Roundup

  Today we pause in our labors to look at RSS aggregator programs with funny names.

  • I've been trying out Feed On Feeds by Crummy reader Steve Minutillo. It's a server-side aggragator, it's good, and it's getting better. I may be using it as the framework for the mega finder-of-new-content-I-like thing I'll write eventually. Steve, if the RE-based implementation of Magpie doesn't work out for you, you might want to try lastRSS.
  • RSS Mix Tape is a Python/KDE RSS reader. But there's more! You can pick posts you like, add comments to them, and generate your own RSS feed with the comments. It's like having a weblog that only exists as an RSS feed!
  • rawdog, the RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur, generates an HTML page full of aggragated goodness, much like pyblagg.
• FilterProxy is what you think it is. You can use it to change webpages on the fly.
• Verbiste slices and dices French verbs.
• Mathomatic is a portable, fast CAS. It differentiates better than I do. Has bonus "tally" mode where you just type in numbers and it keeps a running total.

Because the poem I came up with mentions a bunch of different programs from this week's roundup, the poem is not a prize. My favorites of the roundup are ep and FOF.

While trying to get to the bar
I got lost in the core of a star
My GPS reads
Only RSS feeds
Which is useless when driving a car

• Game Roundup: 4 hits
• Software Soundup: 16 hits

Clearly, pyblagg readers preferred the great taste of Software Roundup by a hefty margin. This is a shame because the poem I wrote for Game Roundup was a lot better. SR had more stuff though.

Also, what has the same sort of semiarbitrary, dependency-ridden semantics as a ZIP code, but Europeans know what it is?

Disclaimers: Advice may not be helpful. I know nothing about interpersonal relationships, yet my pronouncements will be delivered with the cocksure air of authority. Your email may be published in full or in part. Not valid for US residents living underseas.

Belgium, eh? What a dazzling array of people hovers nearby, just across the Channel. GBP14, return, sans taxes. Although it's a pain getting out to the not-really-in-Brussels airport, and into London from the slightly-outside-London airport. All the same, you should demand of all your contacts within a reasonable radius of Belgium that they come see you.

Yes, scenic Belgium. Centrally located to... other countries.

Consider the archetypal replicator command: "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." Captain Picard never orders anything else from the replicator, yet either there's no way for him to get the replicator to know that when he wants tea he wants hot Earl Grey; or there is such a way, he can't figure out how to set it up, and he's too proud to ask anyone for help.

What's more, the captain's utterance implies that if he just asked for "Tea. Earl Grey.", either the replicator would give him iced Earl Grey or the ship's computer would ask "At what temperature do you want the Earl Grey?" like a text adventure parser. How come they had time to do a molecular scan of a cup of Earl Grey but not time to put into the 24th-century equivalent of Cyc that Earl Grey is the sort of tea you drink hot?

This is not rocket science; it's the sort of thing that contemporary programmers use as fanciful examples in their EuroPython talks. "Let's take a hypothetical Person, Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc likes Tea, so he sets that as his default Drink, but there are many different kinds of Tea, so he can set a default for Tea as well..." It wouldn't be hard to do the interface either; after you got your elaborately specified tea you could say "Bookmark. Tea." and thereafter it would just be "Tea." Except for the inevitable wacky malfunction, where the attempt to bookmark tea would give you a tea-colored bookmark, you would be fine.

Next time: I tackle the question of what happened to all the industrial designers between Enterprise and TOS.

I went to Amsterdam. I've been hanging out a lot with Jarno and his girlfriend PrustiTaina, because their travel plans have overlapped with mine to an unbelievable extent (eg. they planned to go to Amsterdam the same day I planned to, they chose the same hotels that I did, etc.) I also ate a waffle. My French is only good for reading and not for hearing what people are saying, nor for talking because when I try to talk to someone in French they just respond in English.

I talked with Moshe Zadka a bit after my talk. I talked to some other people as well but I bring up Moshe because there were several talks he was going to give yesterday but he didn't get here in time. These include his "text steganography" talk and his "Writing web clients in Python" talk. I've asked him for copies of the notes for each, and they'll be part of the inevitable EuroPython roundup, coming sometime next week to this space. I was able briefly to recharge my battery, but it's only at 50% and I want to write another rambling, incomprehensible entry tomorrow, so I'll sign off now.

Best talk so far: a talk about PyPy, a Python interpreter written in Python, which is currently up to 20,000 times slower than the one written in C. Armin Rigo, author of PyPy, also wrote his own presentation softwareusing PyGame, which presented his presentation as a brainstorm diagram that he navigated as he gave his talk. It's only a matter of time until Steve Jobs steals that idea.

At dinner last night I had an ice cream dessert, like a giant Mochi, called a "Tartouffe". I do not know anything about it or why it is named after a Moliere character, but it was tasty.

The last deserves some explanation. There are people who have big dirt bikes which they race down the twisting streets of Brussels. They avoid condemnation from the superstitious natives, who believe them to be the characters from Power Rangers Ninja Storm.

The bad news is that at that roadside stand in Gilroy or wherever that has a whole shelf of hot sauces, there are probably only a couple, if any, which will survive this decision procedure. The good news is that you won't waste your money on that shelf of hot sauce.

To run this decision procedure, you must ignore the funny graphic on the front of the bottle and the "This is the hottest damn thing you've ever tasted in your life! Not for sissies! This will blister your tongue and the tongues of your ancestors!" bravado on the back of the bottle. Those things are a constant on every bottle of hot sauce, no matter how un-hot or foul-tasting it actually is. Instead you must look at the ingredient list on the side of the bottle, where by federal law an honest reckoning of the contents will be found, and answer the following questions:

1. Is the first ingredient habanero peppers? The first ingredient should be habanero peppers, or be somehow based on habanero peppers. If it's some other kind of peppers but all other conditions are met, then it might still be good (if you like that kind of pepper), but it probably won't be as hot.
2. Is the second ingredient some kind of vegetable matter? The second ingredient should be a non-pepper member of the vegetable kingdom, such as carrots, or mangoes. This is the 'base' of the sauce, a nonreactive substance which prevents it from being merely a habanero relish. Note that the base must be something you like: if you don't like mangoes, you won't like a mango-based sauce.

   "Why do you have this rule?", you might ask. "What non-member of the vegetable kingdom could possibly be the second ingredient of a hot sauce? Venison? Drywall? The set of all natural numbers?". No, I refer to that scourge of this decision procedure: vinegar. If the second ingredient of your hot sauce is vinegar, this means you have what we in the business call "a vinegar-based hot sauce", which is no good. Most hot sauces I've seen are vinegar-based, for some reason I cannot comprehend, so you need to be careful about this.

   Now, some of you may like vinegar-based hot sauces, and at this point you are probably seething with vinegary rage. "You'll get my vinegar-based hot sauce when you pry it from my cold dead hands!", you might be saying. Well, THAT'S JUST FINE, because NOBODY WANTS your lousy vinegar-based hot sauce, and if we did we could just BUY SOME FROM THE STORE, so stop being so touchy.

   It is okay for vinegar to show up later in the ingredient list. All hot sauces I've seen contain some vinegar. If you like incredibly hot sauces there might be no hope for you but to go with a vinegar-based sauce.

   NOTE: Sometimes the non-pepper member of the vegetable kingdom comes first in the ingredient list, and the pepper comes second. In my experience, this is fine. It just means that there's more base by weight than there are peppers. If there are a bunch of vegetables in the ingredient list, and then the pepper, then what you probably have is a salsa rather than a hot sauce, which is fine. In fact salsa is generally better than hot sauce because the vegetables are fresher.

3. Does it contain the bonus ingredients? The bonus ingredients are garlic, lime juice, and onion. They are not neccessary for a good hot sauce, but they make it taste better.
4. Does it not contain the malus ingredients? The malus ingredients are things like sugar, corn syrup, cornstarch, and drywall. Most of these are put into a vinegar-based sauce in the misguided hope of thickening it. This is misguided because 1) they should have given it a vegetable base in the first place, and 2) it just makes the sauce taste worse. If you have these ingredients you probably also have a vinegar-based sauce. If nothing else, try to find a vinegar-based sauce that doesn't have this junk in it.

The following sauces are known to pass the decision procedure, and meet with the approval of Kevin and myself:

• Sontava! brand hot sauce. This is a very flavorful, fairly hot habanero sauce, and I use it as the gold standard for other hot sauces, because it was the first one Kevin and I found that was really good. There is a hotter version which we haven't tried yet.
• Mo Hotta Mo Betta puts out at least one good sauce, the mango-based Red Savina sauce. It's hotter than Sontava!, and it has a sweet flavor to it due to the mango.
• "Voodoo Queen" hot sauce. This is an alarming macaroni-and-cheese orange color, but it tastes good, and slightly hotter than Sontava!. Kevin and I call it "Zombie Queen" for some unknown reason.
• The 85% Pain and Batch #37 sauces are put out by the same company and are basically identical except that Batch #37 has more garlic. Both are good, but Batch #37 is better because of the bonus ingredient rule. Both are a little hotter than Sontava!.
• Melinda's brand hot sauce. I was actually going to give this as an example of a vinegar-based sauce that tastes okay, but when I looked at the ingredient label it turns out that it's actually a vegetable-based sauce with vinegar in it. So the decision procedure works better than my own memory, and there are no vinegar-based sauces I recommend.

This has been Which Is Funnier?

John Jay plays the eccentric next-door neighbor.

I call it "The Federalist Capers".

News You Can Bruise: Hello.

Coffinfish: Hello.

NYCB: Is it true that you can walk on the ocean floor using your fins?

CF: You'd better believe it.

NYCB: Where do you usually walk?

CF: Just around.

NYCB: But like where? Like to the store?

CF: There are no stores in the depths of the ocean!

NYCB: Well, have you ever thought about opening a store?

CF: Why?

NYCB: Because it's never been done before. The market is completely open. I think it would be a good business for you if you opened up a convenience store off the coast of Australia. You could sell to the other deep sea fish and to the squids and crabs and whatnot.

CF: Look, do you know what fish use for money?

NYCB: No, what?

CF: Nothing! 'Cause we're fish! We have no economy! Our relationships with other fish are predator/prey relationships or mating relationships or rival relationships! So stop with the store idea!

NYCB: Do you think that the ocean as a whole would be more productive if you had an economy?

CF: No.

NYCB: Why not? Humans have an economy.

CF: Yeah, and what do you get out of it? You have to work all day to get your "money"!

NYCB: But you have to work all day as well. All day you lure smaller fish to their doom with the glowing bait atop your head.

CF: That's not work! I just sit back and the fish fall into my gaping maw! It's fun!

NYCB: And then you have to evade predators.

CF: To evade predators, I simply swallow an enormous amount of water! I bet that doesn't work for you!

NYCB: No, but if a predator did get you, how would your family survive without you to provide for them?

CF: That is a moot point because I don't provide for them now.

NYCB: I'm saying that maybe it would be a good idea if you took out an insurance policy or something.

CF: I have an insurance policy!

NYCB: Really?

CF: I am insured against theft, and damage from earthquake!

NYCB: That's pretty useless.

CF: We fish trade only in things that have no value! If we have something valuable, we keep it for ourselves.

NYCB: But what about symbiosis?

CF: Symbiosis is for sea anenomes!

NYCB: You're a very unpredictable interview.

CF: You are a very unpredictable interviewer. Why do you ask me about economic activity all the time? Why don't you ask me some more stupid human questions about how I walk, just like you do? Huh? How about anthropomorphizing me some more? Blaaah! I'm a coffinfish! Blaaah!

NYCB: So, uh, when you walk, are you all walkin' down the street like this, or are you all walkin' down the street like this?

CF: The first one.

NYCB: 'Cause that one's cooler?

CF: Yeah, whatever.

NYCB: Look, you wanted more questions about the walking thing.

CF: Why don't you ask me about my new book?

NYCB: You have a book?

CF: Yes, it's called "Passion and Power: The Political Houses of the Great Barrier Reef 1951-1956".

NYCB: What's it about?

CF: It's got it all: politics, food, sex, budding, intrigue, all set against the stunning backdrop of the postwar Great Barrier Reef.

NYCB: So is it a history?

CF: It's more of a fictionalized memoir. It takes place from the perspective of a young polyp who grows unobserved in the chambers of the ruling class of corals.

NYCB: I'm intrigued.

CF: It also has my favorite recipe for fish. I call it "Fish a la Fish".

NYCB: Would you like to share the recipe?

CF: Yes. First, you stay very still with your mouth open. Then, you eat the fish.

NYCB: So, it's more a means of acquiring fish than a recipe.

CF: It's both. The second part is the recipe.

NYCB: Your book sounds very interesting. Do you have a publisher?

CF: I was planning on disseminating it through oral tradition.

NYCB: You should get a publisher.

CF: Is that another economy thing?

NYCB: Sort of. I think a lot of humans would pay good money for a book written by a coffinfish.

CF: And what would I do with this "money"?

NYCB: You could buy a bunch of really tacky knicknacks and scatter them over the ocean floor, and then show them to other fish.

CF: Your human ways have corrupted me! Now I too must have these tacky knick-knacks!

NYCB: Sorry.

CF: Tell me where are the knick-knacks!

NYCB: Like what do you want?

CF: A little castle! I must have a little castle that gets algae in it! And a treasure chest that opens to reveal fake treasure!

NYCB: That sounds like classic aquarium store material.

CF: All right, I will try your aquarium "store".

NYCB: Thanks for inaugurating this series, coffinfish.

CF: Blaaah! [swims off]

Q: What has four legs and is a dog?
A: A dog.

Definitely supervillain and superhero. Their marital problems could be expressed in their super activities or interpretations. E.g., "This diamond thief has no taste in jewelry, just like my husband. And, he rushed in with inadequate preparation, then once he was satisfied with the booty, he selfishly withdrew and rolled over to the dark side of the city. He's probably snoring away over there right now."

It might also be funny to have a mother/daughter relationship. E.g., "What kind of a supervillian would pierce the noses of Mt. Rushmore? And, this villian is leaving clues all over, just like my daughter leaves her clothes on the floor." "Missy Mid-drift may be misguided, but why would she break Lex Loser out of prison? I don't know, but one thing is sure: Lex is going to be a bad influence on her." Missy Mid-drift: "When I block out the sun, curfews will be impossible."

The story also contains the hilarious sentence "They have a tube which comes out of their mouth to perform the feeding, like this (Warning: annoying midi music ahead)."

• You thought there was only one of these pictures.
• But there's a bunch.
• There's more.
• etc.
• What's he doing?
• OK, enough elephants. Here are some elephants.
• And an elephant.
• And some safety elephants.
• How'd he get in here?

If I were doing an article on Brickshelf I would have to do stupid journalistic things like talk about how people were using Brickshelf to sell Lego paraphanelia. But since this is just a weblog entry, I can point you to the Lego trilobite and the Lego soccer game, complete with Lego soccer hooligans.

Ray-Traced Lego Mania is also great; its glorious raytraces of retro Lego sets take me back to the days when I had to do a bunch of yardwork to get a really cool set. It's also got some funny joke sets: the Blacktron Ice Cream Disseminator and my favorite, the satirical BURP Adventure.

I have a book, so there's no reason to keep rambling on. See you later.

PS: My mother called all in a panic. I'm just checking my cholesterol level and lipids and whatnot. Don't worry.

"Should the player who controls the crank perceive a player upon the street desirous of joining in the game by entering the car, his object should be: primo, to run over him and kill him; secundo, to kill him by any other means in his power, tertio, to let him into the car, but to exact the usual philopena."

Good stuff to read while you're waiting for me to update NYCB like I never do.

[0] The inevitable-decline curve is the curve which quantifies the delta of quality over time reflected in the statements "I prefer his earlier work," "Things were better back in the day," etc. It generally looks like this:

q |
u | ---_
a |     ~\
l |       |
i |        \
t |         ~---__
y |_________________
         time
 

The inflection point is precipitated by some event which you take to be the day everything started going to pot, eg. when Dylan went electric or when they started making different faces for different Lego people.

Anyway, rather than making the warnings so big that no one can tell what brand of cigarette they're buying, I think anti-spam filter mechanisms could be employed to make more people read the warnings: SPAMMER GENERAL'S WARNING: leonardr, Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks To Your Health onkaecpjrmzddw

Yeah, I've been dealing with the government a lot lately. A couple weeks ago I went to the DMV. The Latin Library and Perseus mainly have the original-language versions of the stuff that's been translated into English, but Intertext has more of the obscure stuff.

What? You say that stand-up-comedy-style segues only work if they have some relationship to what comes afterwards? But if I can connect two irrelevant things with a segue that's only relevant to the second one, why shouldn't I be able to connect two mutually relevant things with a segue irrelevant to either? Sounds to me like you're in the pay of Big Comedy!

I didn't want to struggle anymore! lp scg

And one for the "tepid irony" department, "choked on a tin of spinach" subdepartment:

I chose life instead of fat nhiwaxzgxpk lyhotz

Those were from Sumana. Kevan sends in "Speech Therapy Spam"

Do You Say: "I Wish I Knew How To Be A Seller On E B A Y" qybaygdswxhc m

Here is a boot. Consider the encoding UTF-8. Now instead of an encoding, visualize it as a Japanese TV show, "Ultra Terra Force-8", with spaceship battles and dumb-looking aliens.

That's it. It just sits there, like a sleeping alligator, planning to live off Google royalties (a hit for "japanese tv" here, a hit for "'gold rush' boot" there) for the rest of its life, not contributing a bit to the intellectual quality of this website. Well, out with it, I say! It has no place on my glamorous weblog! Now, if I could only work this electronic doohickey... there, "Publish". That should do it.

Mormon Tiramisu

The goal of this recipe is to make and then combine three things:

1. Marscapone filling
2. Shaved chocolate
3. Soggy ladyfingers

It is based on this recipe for root beer tiramisu by Mitchell Rohrbach, whose mother apparently lets him eat anything he wants for breakfast.

Marscapone filling

• 1 cup marscapone cheese (marscapone is named after Mars Capone, the space gangster)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2/3 cup of whipping cream, whipped up with powdered sugar and vanilla
• An egg yolk
• A whipped-up egg white

Put the cheese, brown sugar, and egg yolk into a bowl. Mix it up. Mix in the whipped cream. Mix in the egg white.

Shaved chocolate

• 4 squares chocolate from a candy bar

Shave the chocolate with a grater or zester.

Soggy ladyfingers

• 1.5 cups milk
• 2 packages instant cocoa
• 24 ladyfingers

Heat up the milk. Add the cocoa and mix well. Pour the hot cocoa into a shallow dish and put ladyfingers into it. Turn them over to make them all soggy, but not so soggy that they fall apart when you try to pick them up.

Assembly

As you soak the ladyfingers, you will also be assembling the tiramisu, because there's nowhere to store soggy ladyfingers except in the actual tiramisu dish. I used a 9-inch circular dish and arranged the ladyfingers like so:

          ===
         |===|
         |===| (top view)
         |===|
          ===

(Note that this arrangement will leave you with 3 leftover ladyfingers. Either cram an extra ladyfinger in there per layer, or dispose of the remaining ladyfingers safely at a recycling center. Ladyfingers are not good for anything except being turned into tiramisu, or possibly being fried in cheese sauce and turned into giant Cheetos (I have not tried this, but it should work). Under no circumstances should you eat a raw ladyfinger. Keep out of reach of children.)

After arranging one layer of ladyfingers, apply the marscapone filling and shaved chocolate. Do two more layers. If you have leftover hot chocolate, dump it on top of the last layer of ladyfingers. Dust the top layer of marscapone with cocoa powder, because it looks cool. Chill for several hours. You now have tiramisu!

"You've ruined the tiramisu!", you might say, clutching your opera glasses to your chest. That may be true, but how come almost all of my tiramisu is gone, and your tiramisu still sits under plastic wrap in a display case next to the fruit salad, a lonely gold leaf adorning each forlorn square slice? Because my tiramisu tastes better, that's why! Also, you made the mistake of trying to sell your tiramisu in a restaurant for $4.50 a slice, while I was giving mine away.

Tiramisu is really just a trashy cake, like eclair cake (recipe for eclair cake, from Susanna, coming soon) which works by reappropriating some other, store-bought dessert (stipulating for the moment that ladyfingers can be considered a "dessert"). This fact is disguised by the fancy cheese, coffee and booze it contains. But once you look at tiramisu in this light, a wide range of variants become visible. For instance, if you wanted a specifically Rocky Mountain Mormon tiramisu rather than an ideologically-compatible Mormon tiramisu, you could use Nila wafers instead of ladyfingers, and, I don't know, cream cheese instead of marscapone.

There are all sorts of store-bought junk foods with which you could replace the lady fingers, and many of these foods have flavor. For instance, I used to like dipping those Nutter Butter peanut butter cookies into hot chocolate. Why not use them as the soak base in a peanut butter tiramisu? Or those big Pepperidge Farm cookies. Put Twinkies in there for a surefire rich-uncle-killer. Or, and this is where it becomes too crazy to even contemplate: instead of buying, bake chocolate chip cookies, then include those same cookies in a tiramisu. Your refrigerator will explode![0]

[0]With flavor.[1]

[1]I hope.

A link to keep you at bay: Muji Online, a company that sells stylish things made of recycled materials shaped into the wrong dimensions. At a Muji store in London I got a notebook for Sumana from a two-story Muji store, and the notebook paper was about two inches by six inches. It looked like Sir Humphrey Appleby's margin-shaped notebook paper from the Yes, Minister book. In fact, it looked like the Muji store itself, which was two stories high and about ten foot by thirty.

For weeks I've been meaning to make fun of the poster for Bad Boys 2 where Will Smith has his arms stretched out like Christ crucified, but I can't find a picture of it anywhere.

Nutellamisu!

This is like my Mormon Tiramisu, but instead of being tiramisu-flavored it will clobber you over the head with the great taste of hazelnut. As before, there are three main parts:

1. The filling
2. The soaked cookies
3. The interlayer topping

Filling

• 1 cup marscarpone cheese
• 1/2 cup Nutella
• 1 egg yolk
• 2/3 cup heavy cream, whipped with powdered sugar and vanilla
• 1 egg white, whipped

Mix the cheese, Nutella, and egg yolk. Mix in the cream. Mix in the egg white. Add a little more Nutella because Nutella is tasty. Keep adding Nutella until it tastes like you want. The filling should have the consistency and color of chocolate mousse.

Soaked cookies

• 1.5 cups milk
• 2 packages hazelnut-flavored instant cocoa
• 24 dipping cookies (NOT ladyfingers!)

As previously discussed, ladyfingers are tiramisu's own worst enemy. Instead of ladyfingers, use those Italian butter cookies that you're supposed to dip into your drink. You'll be dipping them into a drink, all right--a drink of nutellamisu! Those cookies would cost about $1.50 for two at a coffee shop, but I got a package of 24 for $3.50 at the grocery store. Maybe you could even use biscotti, if you can afford/make it. Before I found the Italian cookies, I was about to use some shortbread cookies which were much more expensive; that probably would have been good too.

Heat up the milk and add the cocoa mix. Use an eggbeater to get it properly mixed up. Then pour some into a bowl on top of some cookies. Flip the cookies to get them soaked. Butter cookies soak faster than ladyfingers, so watch out.

Interlayer topping

• 1/8-1/4 cup hazelnuts
• 3 squares chocolate from a candy bar

Chop the hazelnuts very finely. If you want a crunchier nutellamisu, use more hazelnuts. Shave the chocolate with a chocolate shaver or cheese grater. Interosculate chocolate shavings and hazelnuts.

Assembly

You can assemble the nutellamisu as in my Mormon Tiramisu recipe, but this time I made two small bowls of nutellamisu using a base of 4 cookies each. This let me use all of the cookies, and the result is easier to transport. As before, assemble the nutellamisu with a layer of soggy cookies, then filling, then interlayer topping; then repeat that; then do another layer of cookies and filling.

Topping the whole thing with cocoa powder is not a good idea from a presentation perspective, because the Nutella makes the filling brown and there's no contrast. So what I did was I chopped up some of those little spiky hazelnut chocolates that look like typewriter balls, and put that on top. You could instead top it with more chopped hazelnuts.

"Beats any tiramisu I've had before." --Muthu Krishnan

I was going to unveil this recipe this afternoon at a gala event at Seth's house, but I never heard from Seth or Nick, so I'm unveiling it now and I'm going to eat all the nutellamisu myself. (Actually I am giving some of it away at work.)

Prior art: Hazelnut Tiramisu Parfaits and Tiramisu Alla Nutella, which according to Babelfish incorporates "a beautiful one manciata of the most fine tritate nocciole".

They went their separate ways, but the laws of statistics entwined their fates as tightly as if they knew each other. They formed an equation in one hundred variables, a cross-section of humanity sent on a rocket ship into the future, each filling a niche as surely as does the cold woman scientist who'd be beautiful if she only removed her zero-gee glasses. To look under the covers of causality and say, this hundred people, this one of the hundred people--this is the power that we want, forever out of our reach. For this reason I cannot tell you their names, or give you faces to put with the names; the group made sense only as a group.

As spring became summer their numbers began to dwindle. The 25-year-olds celebrated birthdays and moved into other groups of a hundred, a thousand. By autumn the group was no longer statistically viable, and its members' behavior became erratic and unpredictable. And when March (or perhaps April) came around again, the group contained only a single unmodellable member, his behavior and circumstances defining the norm for the set containing only himself.

It's not very good, but believe me, it's better than the story in the brochure.

I knew a man named Ramblin' Bob
He saw a big green shamblin' blob
Late at night out on the old flood plain
Well, now he's beseiged by noises
And horrible whispering voices
In the Arkham Home for the Clinically Insane

Chorus:
He's in the madhouse now
He's in the madhouse now
What a shame for one so young
Just a-babblin' words in an ancient tongue
He's in the madhouse now

Anyway, here's a taste of Etext Roundup: The Moon Metal, a piece of early science fiction which attacks the gold standard. Since the very title reveals the secret of the story, I have no qualms about reproducing this portion of the climactic paragraph to give you the flavor:

"I made up my mind as soon as I had penetrated Syx’s secret that he obtained the metal from those mystic white streaks which radiate from Tycho, and which have puzzled the astronomers ever since the invention of telescopes. I now believe those streaks to be composed of immense veins of the metal that Syx has most appropriately named artemisium, which you, of course, recognize as being derived from the name of the Greek goddess of the moon, Artemis, whom the Romans called Diana."

Clearly, earlier eras had a more relaxed and open attitude toward spoilers.

Fitz and I [kfogel] were just speculating about what various programming languages sound like when you drop them.

Fortran       crunch
Perl          *thud* +bounce+ ~quiver~ (fading into silence)
C++           loud and messy, like if you took everything in a
              junkyard, connected it all together with cable, and
              dropped the whole mess from a cliff.
Lisp/Scheme   same sound as dropping a slinky
Java          no sound, already been dropped

The Inevitable Update: From Brendan.

PHP            sproing sproing ("stupid blasted") sproing ("off my 
               lawn") sproing
Python         Just like anything else, if air was Jell-O
Smalltalk      "Ouch!"
Pascal         *Crash.*  Now, did you notice how that sounded?  If you 
               were actually dropping something, it would have sounded 
               a lot like that.  Let's try again.
COBOL          (THUD)
Visual Basic  "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you drop me."

TEASER: Susanna: married? I have the story! After this!
CONTENT: Susanna got married. I wore a tuxedo. So did John (ye groom), and a bunch of his young cousins. We all stood around at Tuxedo Junction and had pictures taken of us. It was jolly good fun. The next day there was a reception in Bakersfield. Everyone who was anyone was there, except for certain someones. Sumana looked glamorous in various dresses. Susanna looked glamorous in one dress. Life became a dizzying blend of cake, sliced fruit, and more pictures. Party followed the previous portion of the same party. Would it ever end? Yes, but not til pretty late.

Next week: I head to Utah to attend a second reception there, and then to sneak up on some trilobites with a geologist's hammer. Try to hide in the sedimentary rock, will you, trilobites? Take that! Whap!

I got a Tivo, and it is a lot of fun. Instead of a taskmaster determining the times I can do exercise without being bored, basic cable is now an obsequious chimpanzee offering me delicacies off a salver. Then I crack my whip and send it scurrying into the underbrush, and fifteen minutes later it comes back with a rabbit between its teeth. I don't know where I got a whip.

When you buy a Tivo, it starts out completely unusable because its commercial-skipping functionality is crippled at the implicit behest of the broadcasting giants. Basically, you can fast-forward so slowly that you effectively see all the commercials without sound, or so quickly that instead of skipping commercials you skip the pesky intervals between commercial breaks. However, there's a secret cheat code, just like in the game "Contra", which lets you reinstate the famous 30-second skip functionality. There are lots of other cheat codes which aren't as useful, but some are cool.

Originally I thought I'd like some way of doing a 10-second skip, because that's the way I would ideally watch TV: is this program more interesting 10 seconds from now? How about now? But after about two days Tivo had enough stuff recorded for me that now I can just pick something I'm pretty sure will be good. If it turns out to be boring I can just delete it and watch something else. I don't have time to watch everything it records, but who cares? I don't want to; I'd turn into a couch legume. Tivo is a prefetching cache, and when the thing being fetched costs a fixed amount, there's no need to complain about a prefetching cache.

A lot of times people will say "I don't watch much TV, except..." then rattle off a list of about five or ten programs, their desire for accuracy trumping their need to seem hip and TV-illiterate. That used to be me, except for me it was just two programs, so I managed to avoid embarrassment. Now it's five or ten. The difference wasn't that I was purer before Tivo, but that I was lazy and couldn't be bothered to stay up 'til midnight to watch Space Ghost. Now it's in my queue and I don't have to

I sort of wanted to be really cool and build my own PVR using off-the-Sourceforge-shelf technology, because then I could then 1) affect a superior attitude to nearly everyone, and 2) implement neat things like my ten-second skip and a smarter preference-guessing system (for some reason it thinks I like 1960s television Westerns, possibly overcompensating for the negative publicity caused by "My TiVo thinks I'm gay"). But it turns out I actually went and bought a Tivo; ostensibly to test the waters but actually because I couldn't justify spending all that time making a hacked-up free software PVR when I might not use a PVR at all.

It turns out I will use a PVR, but with the 30-second skip in place the Tivo is good enough for now. Send me mail when your cool open-source PVR product costs less than $300, or when it costs more than $300 but Tivo does a 30-second-skip-crushing software update, and I'll look at it.

PS: One thing I don't like about Tivo, but which is probably unavoidable due to the underlying technology: you can't record two programs simultaneously, and you can't watch one program while recording another.

The Canadian government wanted to create a province for the indigenous peoples of Canada, but they would have Nunavut.

Leonard: 凹! 凹!
Chinese Person #1: What is he saying?
Chinese Person #2: It appears he is saying "Concave! Concave!"
Chinese Person #1: Look, he is writing it down!
Chinese Person #2: What brushwork!
Leonard: 美国使馆在哪里是?

Timo's installation story is pretty harrowing, but only one of his problems was directly caused by NewsBruiser (and it's been fixed in CVS), so I feel a little better. It's always painful setting up a web application on a machine you don't control; I tried to design NewsBruiser for that situation because I know the feeling. Anyway, I hope Timo has a great time with NewsBruiser.

Incidentally, the download URL I gave Timo is this one, and here's the patch against nb/NewsBruiserCGIs.py which fixes the infinite loop problem in version 1.13.0. I guess I'll have to release a version as soon as I get Internet back:

131c131
<         while not os.path.exists(dir):
---
>         while dir and not os.path.exists(dir):

From: Your Resume Is Excellent (yourchance@togrow2.com)
To: joboffer@believeuss.com

Update: Riana writes:

Note amusing typo on p. 5 of the PDF that causes the phrase "the underling problems." I'm sure Prince Michael thought/thinks his underling ex-CTO is a problem :)

Also check out HQ9+, from the same author.

Will there be rainbows, day after day?

No! There will not be rainbows, day after day! Que sera, sera, my eye!

(Not originally a pop song, but there was a pop version on one of Rachel's CDs, so it is fair game.)

More information about my trip coming soon. If you want a trilobite, talk to me. If you want pictures, wait until I get my DSL equipment (I called today and discovered that someone forgot to push the damn button that sends my equipment, so the guy filed a Request To Push Damn Button, and hopefully that will be the end of it), or check out Seth's cool pictures from Germany.

PS: Carrot Cheesecake tries but cannot wrest the carrot crown away from Carrot Cake Soup (nice recipe format there, BTW; is it for some kind of Iron Chef home game?).

As always, press release also available in InfoWorld flavor.

The company that owns the trilobite quarry is U-Dig Fossils. They have no web site but there is a fan site which is probably better than their actual web site would be.

The quarry is about 50 miles from Delta in central-west Utah. The whole area used to be a lake and it looks like the quarry is sort of near the north shore of the ancient lake; it's in the foothills of some small mountains.

To get to the quarry you go about 30 miles down highway 6 from Delta (Delta itself is about 100 miles from Provo), then turn onto a dirt/gravel road. The road goes north about 20 miles with some twists and turns. On the way there and back we saw some deer and some penned-up cows.

The actual approach into the quarry is pretty scary; it's a very steep downhill slope. We made it fine in my mother's SUV, and people on the website talk about making it in their rental cars.

We were the only customers at the quarry. The guy in charge was working down in the quarry under a tent. He came up to the office (a shack), showed us some samples, gave us buckets and hammers, and made us sign waivers. My mother brought an old geologist's hammer but the ones they gave us were better. He then took us to a hill on the east side of the quarry, above where another man was working under another tent, showed us how to find the "bugs", and left us to dig.

The modus operandi of the quarry seems to be to dig up a bunch of small rocks with a backhoe and leave them in huge piles. You then climb on a pile, pick out a likely rock, and split it open. Try to get as many slabs out of your rock as possible; every time you split a slab you have a new chance of finding trilobites. The quarry employees reserve especially rich trilobite veins for themselves; they have a sideline selling trilobites to rock shops (actually, their sideline is probably letting people come to the quarry and dig).

The trilobite vein was very rich; I found some sort of fossil in perhaps half of the rocks I cracked. A lot of the fossils were the tiny Peronopsis interstricta which I eventually started ignoring because they're not as cool.

Unfortunately, in my inexperience I ruined several trilobites and caused several others to become disloged from their stony homes. There are a lot of trilobites, so the loss to science is not great. When a trilobite is knocked out of its matrix, it skitters away into the pile of rock chips at your feet and becomes less valuable, like a comic book taken out of its wrapping. Sometimes I was able to recover the fleeing trilobite; other times I was left with only its impression in the rock. If you pick through the fragments you can find loose trilobites lost by others; my mother and sister started doing this when they got tired of wielding the hammer.

The literature says to wear safety glasses but I found it was too hot, and the flying rock chips weren't getting anywhere near my eyes, so I got rid of them after I filled my first bucket. I wore garden gloves the whole time; that is definitely a good idea. I was wearing shorts but came to regret it. It's pretty hot, but it's more useful to wear pants so that you can kneel and lie down on the rock without getting scraped up. Also, bring lots of water--I went through two big squeeze bottles in 2 hours. We brought back 7 bags of trilobites. I had the most because I worked longer, by my mother's looked the best as she has more experience collecting rock samples. Total cost for 3 people: $36.

After the dig we were dirty and exhausted. We are not cut out to be full-time trilobite diggers. We went back to Delta and crashed at the Best Western.

Last night I cleaned the trilobites with my nonexistent trilobite cleaning tools. I used a hammer and screwdriver to chip away some excess rock where I could (I ruined the screwdriver; good thing it was just a dot-com giveaway), and wiped off some dirt with water and cloth. One trilobite negative dissolved when I tried to wash it; I wasn't expecting this and felt bad about it.

I probably have a total of 20-25 non-Peronopsis trilobites, mostly Elrathia kingi. 15 of them are loose or in their own rock matrices, and the rest of them are hiding in two big chunks of fossilized lakebed.

The trip was a lot of fun. I definitely recommend it if you want to go fossil hunting or have a day to spare on a Utah or cross-country vacation. If you were going from San Francisco through Salt Lake City on the 80 it would be a doable 1-day detour.

Then I started thinking about all those stupid chess sets where the pieces look like Simpsons characters or Civil War soldiers or Wizard Of Oz commemorative plates and it doesn't make any sense. I thought, "I want in on this not-making-sense action!". So I decided to bring the game of chess into the modern world by changing the pieces to depict a political battle between two parties in a constitutional monarchy.

The chessboard is a country with a thirty-member parliament. There are two parties, the Social Democrats (white) and the Democratic Socialists (black).

The purpose of the game is to get the king to put his support behind your platform. Each side has a piece representing one of the positions the king could take, and you must corner your opponent's representation so that the king has no choice but to accept your side's position.

Each player controls eight non-cabinet members of parliament (the Pawns) and a seven-member cabinet or shadow cabinet (depending on whether or not they are the party in power).

The King, as previously discussed, is the king (more precisely, your party's wish as to the political position the king would take). The Queen is the prime minister or shadow prime minister. The cabinet positions are:

• Minister for Finance (prime minister's side Rook)
• Minister for Defence (prime minister's side Knight)
• Minister for Foreign Affairs (prime minister's side Bishop)
• Minister for Internal Affairs (king's side Bishop)
• Minister for Agriculture (king's side Knight)
• Minister for Education (king's side Rook)

If you have more pieces on the board than your opponent, your party is in power and your ministers are actual ministers; otherwise you are in opposition and your ministers are shadow ministers. In the event of a tie, as in the beginning of the game, the Social Democrats are in power. This is because the king breaks ties and he is a Social Democrat. Unfortunately, none of this has any direct effect on the game.

Let's consider an example to see how Constitutional Monarchy Chess livens up the dull chess notation. "Qg7" would instead be "PMg7" or "SPMg7". The unspeakably boring "Bxe5" might become "SMfFAxe5". Now that's excitement!

I also forsee doing a brisk business in my specialized Constitutional Monarchy Chess pieces, which depict people in black and gray suits and dresses who can only be told apart by the ministerial logos on their briefcases.

BACK OFF, I'M A POSTAL WORKER

Probably not really a postal worker.

root is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

Sumana: Can I come in? I promise not to talk about The Great Gatsby anymore.
Leonard: Okay.
...
...
Sumana: You know how sometimes you promise not to do X, and then all you can think about is X?

Subject: Warning: E-Mail viruses detected

HH: I will master this frickin' game! I gotta take this home.

From 101-280 (our paths cross again, mysterious stranger).