News You Can Bruise for 2003 March

• 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!"