News You Can Bruise for 2003 June

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.