News You Can Bruise for 2004

Dear Leonard,

Your newsbruiser was introduced in one of the magazines published in Korea, and

This looks like some kind of ancient Rube Goldberg chain reaction, where the only reactants are dinosaurs shooting lasers at other dinosaurs.

If that doesn't get you to click, I don't know what will.

Subject: 91,426,295 0rders filled & counting... 8 jksbxvbdohahv
Subject: 13,771,942 0rders filled & counting... 4 kbvqhbc

"For service to an existing building, press 1."

What should have come next:

For service to a building that has yet to be built, press 2. For service to a demolished building press 3. For service to a hypothetical building, or to the concept of buildings in general, press 4.

Perl farm woman. I'll cast you to array. Perl farm woman. Cast you to scalar too. Perl farm woman. Don't you know I'll cast to hash... hash!

Wouldn't it be neat if you could do that, plant some food and nurture it into more food? Well, I guess it does work that way. But not for cake.

"What animal are you?"

"Human."

[GLARE]

It turns out I am actually a sheep. I was thinking it would be nice to vary the Chinese lunar calendar to give other organisms a chance. We would have cool years like the year of the elephant, year of the saber-tooth tiger, year of the mola mola, year of the E. coli, etc. Just another idea from Leonard Labs, where we're always working orthogonal to your best interests.

True to legend, The Dude is warm and weird and possibly half-crazy, and he loudly promotes films that he's passionate about.

Huh. I don't remember that. [Googles for script] Ah, here we go.

DUDE

Walter, I sincerely believe this could be the most groundbreaking short film of the twentieth century. I am truly excited about this project.

WALTER

Dude, your level of excitement is not the issue here.

DUDE

All I need is thirty thousand dollars. If I don't come up with it by Monday, they're going to kill this project!

WALTER

"They're going to kill this project! They're going to kill this project!"

Adam and I were the only ones who truly captured the essence of Dudeness in our bathrobes. (Dave went for the "picture on the movie poster" Dude look, and merely looked like a non-Dude slob; sorry, Dave.) I bowled three frames, doing horribly (top score: 107) and having a great time. Last evening, I lived the dream: I was the Dude.

I got so excited about this that I started considering a "Jeff Lebowski, Cable Repairman" Halloween costume, until I remembered that I don't do Halloween costumes.

Update: Wes Clark gets in on the action.

• Preparing the anti-monoliths. (or Icehenge)
• The Ice King, aging and infirm, has his slaves prepare the materials for an enormous Egyptian-style pyramid tomb. Unfortunately it MELTS the year after his death because it's MADE OF ICE.

• lanotone
• wovabaza
• tuhadalu
• molaweca

Bonus: To make fake Nutella, or "Notella" (Ha! I am hilarious!), mix peanut butter with cocoa mix. Note: I have not tried this.

PS: Let me restate my plea for a news photo wire where the photos don't go bad after a month. Anyone? Should I just set up my own silent, copyright-infringing filcher?

In the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (or thereabouts), the Breen attack Earth and destroy much of the greater San Francisco area. Later we see a map of the targets in the Dominion control center, and if you look at the map you'll see that of the targets was Colma. Ever since I saw that I have been wondering why the Breen would want to blow up Colma. Are they really big on desecrating their enemies' graves?

PS: If you see me, ask me to perform my uproarious impression of a Breen.

Update: I don't think this entry deserves to be on the Daily Python-URL, but I'll take what I can get.

• Once they do an episode where the author makes a cameo appearance, it's all over.

PS: Tool is also useful if you want to get a map with one state or country highlighted. Why would you want to do that? Because of Wyoming!

After throwing the beans, people eat the same number of beans as their age to wish for good health that year. For example, if you are 20 years old, you will eat 20 beans.

Hopefully you eat different beans from the ones you threw.

I haven't tried this one either, but I might have to soon.

As long as I'm complaining: these pens keep falling apart. They are Staples "Comfort Stic^TM" pens. Don't buy them!

PS: I also didn't comb my hair. At least my fly was up.

Update: Man, that was quick. Here's Andy.

We are going to MAMMOTH CAVE tomorrow.

Demonstrating that that visited-states map thing is a general, flexible tool, here's the result of Brendan and I playing the license plate game (Bonus Canadian addendum). And here's the map of all the BART stations I've visited, where the list of BART stations has been ASCIIbetically sorted and mapped onto the similarly sorted list of states.

1. Does the restaurant serve more than one flavor of ice cream?

The reason this is important is that good milkshakes are made out of ice cream that's the flavor of the milkshake. Bad and mediocre milkshakes are made out of vanilla ice cream blended with flavored syrup. This is in defiance of the Fundamental Theorem of Ice Cream Flavoring, which is that you flavor your ice cream while you're making it and not afterwards.

You can apply this decision procedure by looking at the dessert menu and seeing if they ever hint at the possibility that ice cream might exist in more than one flavor. If you're at a fast food restaurant there is no dessert menu, but come on! Fast food restaurants are the classic case of a restaurant with bad milkshakes--they pull vanilla ice cream out of a soft-serve machine and add syrup to it, right in front of you. You can't even pretend it might be good.

NOTE: Unlike the hot sauce procedure, which has been confirmed dozens of times since publication with no known failures, this decision procedure goes to press with a known flaw. In-N-Out Burger flagrantly violates this decision procedure (you can actually see the syrup in its finished shakes), but its shakes are pretty good.

The only thing I can think of is that if you start with good vanilla ice cream, you can make a decent shake out of it by adding syrup. The decision procedure explains the fact that you can't even get a good vanilla milkshake at a restaurant with only vanilla ice cream by assuming that if you don't care enough to get multiple flavors of ice cream, you don't care enough to get good vanilla ice cream either. I guess this assumption doesn't hold for In-N-Out.

• Mother Of All Gravity Games should be called Child Of All Gravity Games since by its own admission it is based on other games. If you can't get enough inverse-square-law action, Luola is another new game of that type.
• Speaking of gravity games, Linux Lunar Lander and Linux Shuttle Lander each let you land some spacecraft on some planetary body.
• Skystreets is a vaguely Hover Carnage-esque game. It shouldn't be a gravity game, since it takes place in outer space, but somehow it is. It's pretty difficult to control your racing ship, but the background graphics are really nice and you have to wonder who would go through all the trouble to set up racing platforms in space.
• The Bub's Brothers [sic] [sic] [sic] is a really slick clone of Bubble Bobble, the best game in the Metreon arcade. It's easy to set up, it's got multiplayer network play, random level generator, crazy new powerups etc. I don't think it comes as any surprise that this game is written in Python. "A powerup that briefly turns the game into Breakout? Sure, why not? How hard can it be?"
• Roguelike Mini-Roundup

  Several new roguelike games in this roundup. Let's take a look.

  • Avanor is the prize of this mini-roundup. Its interface, feature set, and use of color owe a lot to ADOM (but the interface is not as polished as ADOM's). The only problem is that it's really hard. You play and play, gaining level after level and fancier and fancier gear, but you never get past the point where a little skeleton can kill you by poking you with a stick.
  • Xenocide is a Roguelike... set in the future! For me, Alphaman is the gold standard of such games,. Includes dismemberment ("There's a Human Hand lying here."), takes screenshots in HTML format.
  • Porrog is a promising (=="items don't work yet") new Roguelike with heavy Angband influences. Only Porrog will dare to bring you fearsome enemies like the land plankton!
  • The Sword of Fargoal is a slavish remake of an old C64 game. See remakes.org for more slavish remakes.
• Njam is a Pacman clone with nice squiggly graphics. In multiplayer mode you can eat the other Pacmen like so many ghosts. The indignity!
• Relive the dot-com heyday with foosball on your computer.
• Some games shouldn't be cloned. Other games should, like Spacewar. I'll always relish the old black-and-white Spacewar, but spacewar-sdl is a pretty faithful translation to the modern age.
• Gtkboard is an open source game engine a la Zillions Of Games. It has a clumsy game selection interface, but it dares do what other generic game engines do not, by representing games like Pacman and Tetris. It doesn't seem to know how to play Pacman or Tetris, though.
• My monster truck rally fantasies come true with Soccar, "soccer for cars". I think a lot of games could be improved by replacing the human sprites with cars, actually.
• My other monster truck rally fantasies come true with the Robot Auto Racing Simulation, where you program car-driving behavior into a racecar and then race it against other, similarly-programmed cars. The community has been running races since 1995.
• Tower Toppler is a clone of a game I remember being reviewed in a video game magazine in the late 80s, thus proving that every game in the world will eventually be cloned. You play a green creature who feels that underwater towers these days have gotten just too tall and been built up too far out of the water, so it decides to knock them down. Fortunately things have been arranged so that getting to the top of the tower knocks the whole thing down to the waterline, so that's all you have to do. Then you get in your little yellow submarine and shoot missiles at fish (Seriously! Was that in the original? I was thinking "This is a nice cut scene, but it's going on too long," hit the space bar, and blew up a fish.). The game is cute and fun, but difficult in arbitrary ways (things coming out of nowhere to knock you over); I played for far too long before toppling my first tower. The boards have cool names like "Tower of Eyes" and "Realm of Robots", though.
• Updated Games Mini-Roundup

  These games have already been featured in a Game Roundup (and/or they're games I talk about all the time outside of Game Roundups), but I'm mentioning them again because they've been updated recently.

  • Gnocatan apparently now does Seafarers of Catan.
  • Rocks'n'Diamonds is now even more customizable by level creators. I think there is now a little Rocks'n'Diamonds tour of Versailles.
  • Old standbys Nethack and FreeCiv have been revved since last I checked. FreeCiv is still a solved problem, unfortunately.
• Death awaits you in the CAVEZ of PHEAR, an ncurses version of Boulderdash that really captures the look and feel of an old ANSI DOS game (and thus meets my standards of excellence).
• Bad Onion is a platform game where you play an onion who supposedly has an "attitude", though he doesn't let it interfere with his work. Not that exciting, but the graphics make you feel good about stomping on the enemies. They deserve to be stomped!

Today's winner: The Bub's Brothers, hands down. It gets the traditional prize of a limerick:

While playing that game with a bubble
My keyboard was worn to a nubble
So much time had elapsed
Civilization collapsed
And I was surrounded by rubble

Some of the road trip pictures are bigger than your average crummy.com pictures because of their extreme spectacularity (eg. the radioactive truck). A lot of the campaign pictures are really, really big because Josh Lerner is going to put them on a CD. I will probably scale them down once he downloads them.

The point of this entry is that there are three brown signs we saw that point to things that should exist, and that we would have visited had we had more time. The first is the Abraham Lincoln birthplace in Kentucky. It apparently has a Lincoln Memorial type marble building which protects from deterioration a log cabin in which Lincoln was not born.

The second thing is the Agriculture Hall of Fame near the Kansas/Missouri border. Untrue to its name, the Agriculture Hall of Fame is not the destination for which the state fair is merely the semifinal. It does not house the World's Largest Grape. It does have inductees, who are pretty much who you'd expect. It has a lot of old farming implements. It has tours. It has a large collection of barbed wire and Harry Truman's boyhood plow. Speaking of which...

The third thing is the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, where it turns out Truman is buried. A little weird. The online-but-not-really gift shop lets you buy "The Buck Stops Here" desk sign replicas.

Niggly sub-rules: when you choose a cue ball, the other cue ball is the eight ball for the duration of that shot (so if you sink one cue ball using the other, you lose unless it's the endgame and you were trying to sink the eight ball). If the other player sinks the cue ball they used, you have to put it somewhere appropriate on the table as in regular pool, but you don't have to use it on your next shot.

Rules for the horrible pool variants Andy and I used to play (with rules for cue ball bowling, bonuses for making a ball jump off the table and hit the potted fern, etc.) not forthcoming.

Q: What pet does a vampire keep?
A: A coffinfish!

I can't believe Big Book Of Jokes For Kids didn't accept that joke.

I used to hate squash and zucchini. I still hate bell peppers, but I might not in a year.

Tomorrow: I plan to make the ice cream of madness. Turn back!

SORRY: this message is created by robot!

Well! That's okay then!

On the other end of the What Would Be Nice supply chain, It Would Be Nice If Freshmeat's XML-RPC interface could be used to grab the newly added/updated projects listed on Freshmeat instead of only being usable for submitting new versions of projects. This would make my Software Roundup rounds a lot easier.

Maybe you can secure the notebook by hiding it in a book safe, except the title of the book is "Book Safes And How To Make Them".

PS: stack's day job project is out.

I can understand county fairs where people show off their enormous pumpkins, because at least you can eat pumpkins.

All that was seemingly a big lead-up to the fact that I've had to start putting up "misc" directories to contain pictures that don't correspond to a "big event, better take the camera" thing. Here they are for February and March. These sets include hilarious moments like At least they didn't park in the handicapped space.

Bonus for Joe: this Ad campaign for New Zealand found near the Apple store which opens up new fields in tautological advertising. "Don't even come," it says. "We won't let you in."

Bonus bonus for everone: for some reason they're ripping up all the greenery around the building where I work. I assume they know what they're doing. Anyway, I call this picture set The Scouring of the Shire, and it should satisfy those of you who were hoping Return of the King would be even longer.

"Well, if I'm driving to New York I should be able to stop by Massachussets and see Jake. Right? Well, let me check the map. Hm, I don't... seem... to be able to read... a map."

(The map wasn't even right.)

I think staring into space is probably my best option here.

If there were a Weyoun action figure I would buy two, just so I could have one of them face the other, and say "Oh. An action figure of me. How banal." Also, if one of the action figures were to break I could replace it with the other with no problem.

Note to self: put more business cards in your wallet. You lost all previous business cards when you put your wallet in the washer. That's just the way it works.

PS: Here's Seth's email advice, which is better than the use I got out of it:

Maybe you should prepare a short list of (as the PR people say) talking points -- or an outline -- that you can use if an appropriate time comes for you to make remarks. ... how you got involved, what technology people at the Clark campaign worked on, the campaign's attitude toward technology, etc.

People at seminars also hate generalities and love gossip. Being concrete (I should say being specific) is very desirable for attracting audience interest. I have a hard time with that sometimes. For example, when talking about trusted computing, I tend to assume that people think that things like "reverse engineering" and "interoperability" are good, and then talk about how reverse engineering may interfere with those abstract classes of activity. But for many audiences, it would probably be more helpful to say "suppose you had some spyware on a Windows machine, and you wanted to understand exactly what kind of personal information it was transmitting...".

Despite much gossip likely being off-topic for your panel, the inside of a presidential campaign is a place most people never get to see at all (like the inside of a nuclear power plant, or the inside of the Library of Congress, or something), and I'm sure many people in your audience would be hungry for general narrative about what it is like to help somebody run for president.

Another thing I think people can appreciate -- especially people who have been subjected to endless amounts of marketing here in the Bay Area during and even after the technology boom -- is a frank discussion of limitations. (It's refreshing to read Peter Neumann's RISKS stuff, for example, as an antidote to boundless optimism about particular technologies.) I suspect this kind of honesty can go very far just on the strength of the contrast with the way professional marketers talk about things. It conveys an honorable sense of "I am an engineer and I'm going to talk to you about what's really possible and what isn't".

Sumana loves this, as you might expect. Almost as good is the fact that the automatic ad at the bottom of the page tells you to make out your will. Because next week, Law and Order is all new, ripped from the headlines--and YOU'RE the body!

Enough levity! The movie was okay but not great. I wish there were some way to edit these movies down to 45 minutes. The movie's saving grace was John Turturro in a role where he looks like Dennis Kucinich's evil twin.

Fun trailer fact: science has run amuck! We never should have put I, Robot and The Caves of Steel into the supercollider just to see what would happen. A Will Smith movie was produced that scientists estimate might have a half-life of up to 50,000 years. Is this the kind of world we want for our children?

Dessert: They were out of tiramisu, but they comped us some panna cotta because apparently they're still trying to figure out how to make panna cotta. I thought it was good because I'd never had panna cotta before, but Sumana said the texture was weird.

PS: please do not do a Google search for "Sexy John's" until this restaurant becomes very popular.

(#1, #2). Why do I keep doing this? Because I keep changing the titles of my mini-features, that's why.

If your childish preconceptions were not so laughable, perhaps you could be an object of pity. For behold! Lebowski Fest is coming to YOUR TOWN (if you are Brendan), and its Star Trek convention-esque geekiness scatters to the wind like ashes from a Folger's can any aspirations you may have had for having your master's thesis The Dude Abides: Lebowski as a Mithras/Christ Figure in Modern Mythology taken seriously. You should have picked on Barton Fink instead. Nobody dresses up like Chet the bellboy. Well, if you do, I don't want to hear about it.

The new theory is that the hippie Muppet is trying to communicate with the Snowths, but the only thing he can get across in their language is the phrase "Manahmanah", a context-free friendly expression that translates roughly to "Hey hey!" So the lyrics of the song, translated, go something like this:

Hey hey! (It's good to see you)
Hey hey! (I said it's good)
Hey hey! (It's good to see you, to see you, to see you, it really is a good thing that you came)

Then the hippie Muppet whips out his Advanced Snowth and starts talking about how lovely the Snowth country is, and asking where are the most beautiful landscapes, and they can't understand a word he's saying.

There must be little cartoons where the lines of ideograms frolic and interact in vocabulary-building ways.

Anyway, it turns out aircraft carriers have the same kind of colorful division of labor. Lots of (official Navy) pictures on that site, including one of Daniel Green, who out-Ts Mr. T.

Tip your waitresses!

Willfully obscure entry. Oh, all right, here.

• Samoa Samosas
• Tagalog Tagalongs
• Wheat Thin Mints
• Double Dutch Apple Pie

The first two are the only ones I can think of ways to make appetizing (crushed Samoas + banana wrapped in phyllo dough and fried, Tagalongs + coconut cream + canteloupe or avocado + etc., some sort of halo halo thing; needs work).

Anyway. Today I made ice cream of madness (coconut-banana-lime, not the ice cream of madness I'd originally intended to make), as well as two other dishes I'd never made before (fondue and bread pudding). Remind me to tell you about it when I'm not asleep.

The Asian elephant is very sad because her friend had tuberculosis and was euthanized. We did see the African elephants who were happier, partly because they'd just had bales of hay stuck tucked between their tusks so that they would walk around and eat from a sort of beer hat of hay. I think when they complete the "African Savannah" habitat they should put the Elephas in with the Loxodonta and verisimillitude be damned.

The lake in the "South American Rainforest" habitat had been drained for no reason I could see, so there were no vegetarian piranha and the sole caiman was crammed into an isolation chamber along with the giant python. No turtles either, but elsewhere in the zoo they had Madagascar spider tortoises walking around on the grass, the tiniest chelonians you've ever seen.

Also, I recently found out that Zack makes candles, so I brought and gave him my now-ruined "Powerful Elvis Prayer" devotional candle for him to recycle. It's nice to be rid of it in a way that makes me feel like someone will appreciate it.

New comment features: you can automatically shut down comments on old entries, and you can turn on comments for specific entries instead of for the whole site.

Joe says that there was a glowing review of NewsBruiser in the UK magazine Linux Format. Since they don't do aspiring weblog software authors the favor of putting their glowing reviews online, Joe is sending me the magazine and I'm gonna type it up. And as long as we're discussing Linux magazines with weird names, how about India's Linux For You?

Read the Books that Will Impeach Bush & Sign the Petition

Them are talented books!

Idea follows. Compute a one-way hash of your email address. For instance, "8zhkqqkZ.A9tg" is a crypted version of "leonardr@segfault.org". "b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3" is the MD5 sum of "leonardr@segfault.org". You get the picture. Then give out "b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3-whatever@mysecretemail.com" to someone from whom you want to hide your true email address. When you want to see if they sent you mail, go to mysecretemail.com and say "Hey, I'm leonardr@segfault.org". mysecretemail.com thinks "Oh, that's good old b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3.*@mysecretemail.com," and forwards you all the accumulated mail.

It's cool and secret-agent-ish, but like I said I can't think of a real use for it. Also you could break it if you had a way of generating a specific hash collision, which you kind of do.

PS: more useful, less cool variant: leonardr-at-segfault.org-whatever@mymyriademails.com. This lets you get get infinitely many forwarding accounts for one email address.

One day, robot asked the head monk how to find kitten.

"The kitten that can be found is not the true kitten," said the head monk.

"Then why do we search for kitten?" asked robot.

"Why did you drop kitten?" asked the head monk.

At that moment, robot found kitten.

Update: Your Earth FAQ has the answer.

Coming soon, if you're interested: easily-derivable-from-first-principles secrets of how to get the most bang for your Freshmeat announcement buck.

Anyway. check out this free stock photo site. What's the catch? Well, this page conveniently lists the main catches, but photographers may reserve the right to attach additional catches to their photos. Not too onerous.

"...in the musique-room the boy that was to sing a song, not singing it right, his master fell about his ears and beat him so, that it put the whole house in an uprore."

Just another way in which my life is less exciting than Pepys': fewer random onstage beatings.

This year's crop of papers includes some of the standoffishness I think makes for good paper titles, like "Scripting Language" My Arse and Twelve Thousand Test Cases and Counting. (Wasn't that a Johnny Cash song?)

Until this week, all the 'shout-outs' were to and from people in the East Bay. leading me to do high-larious impressions of Obaid Kalwani reciting shout-out locations: "A shout-out from Walnut Creek... here's one from Hayward... shout-out from Concord... this is a Fremont train. Doors are closing." This week they had shout-outs from Los Angeles and East Brunswick, putting the lie to our hypothesis that they recorded a different shout-out segment for each media market.

Sorry, no spectacular thing to show you today. I've got only one of the three things working that I wanted to have, and (sad to say) it's not the one that hits people in the gut and makes them think This Is Important, insofar as any of them do that.

This is an HTML document.

->

["This is an", [TAG name='a' attrs={href: 'http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/', title: "Brought to you by HTMLCorp"} child=[TAG name='b' child=["HTML"]], "document"], "."]

Update, much later: I wrote Beautiful Soup because I wasn't happy with any existing parser.

But the Japanese always think big, even in miniature. That's why they built the entire world to precise scale at this odd site about two hours by train from Tokyo.

Sadly, that is hyperbole. The entire world is not represented to scale at Tobu World Square. It just has a bunch of scale models of famous buildings. They're nice models, though! Check out the pictures. They even have Tom, the famous 150-foot tall beefeater.

I look forward to the exciting future, where terraformed planetoids recreate Earth at scale. But I had this mental image of the portion of the model world in Tobu World Square that contained a tiny model of the model of the world in Tobu World Square, ad infinitum, and you can't get that on no planetoid.

Thing I've learned from talking to reporters: they will get you to talk their ear off and then use one sentence of what you said. It's not their fault. They're just bored. They're hoping you'll say "You know what I hate? Cute puppies!", because that's a story. Not your lame software whatever.

Anyway, Sumana suggested I could make an April fool as a dessert today. As far as I can tell no one has ever thought of doing this before, though there are lots of April Fool's Day themed recipes for tormenting your kids with. I don't have any specific April ingredients, but there were key limes at the grocery store yesterday, which there usually aren't, so unless they've started selling the runts as key limes those are probably seasonal.

This was my thinking way back this morning, when I thought a fool was a kind of sponge cake or something. It turns out it's just cream whipped with flavored syrup. Now it doesn't sound like much of a dessert. Sounds like the thing Brendan got in the Sizzler clone in Illinois that he thought was pudding but turned out to be Cool Whip and Oreos. Wait, that was hilarious! If I could somehow harness the power of that incident, I'd have the perfect April fool April Fool!

Joe says that there was a glowing review of NewsBruiser in the UK magazine Linux Format.
...
Joe is sending me the magazine and I'm gonna type it up.
...
Just another way in which my life is less exciting than Pepys': fewer random onstage beatings.
[Nb. I guess that's the subplot?]

And now, the continuation...

Got the package in the mail today. I thought "Huh, this looks like a magazine. I didn't order a magazine! Huh, this looks like overseas mail. Who would send me a magazine... from another country?" I forgot that my life has continuity. Anyway, the article is as glowing as Joe said it was, and as promised I've typed up the review and plan to shamelessly exploit it for promotional purposes. Some choice quotes from the review:

"[O]ne of the best blogging utilities doing the rounds."

"Installation is brilliantly simple..."

"[T]he whole system runs like clockwork."

"Friendly, organised, versatile and great to use."

How do you like that bookending? Thanks, Joe!

PS: Confidential to everyone. Who do you and I both know who looks exactly like Florian Lukas?

PS Update: Jarno, was it the guy from Denmark we met at EuroPython whose name I don't remember?

[Now] you look at the PlayStation 2 or Xbox controller and there's, like, 27 buttons on the thing and three or four joysticks.

"Madden 2004" is a hell of a lot like "Madden 1004."

There's 3,000 channels of everything out there and there's just a million games where you're running around in tights with a sword and you're playing in 1542.

Really, what it's about is the five people that actually send the 3 million letters to their congressman.

It sounds like he wouldn't approve of Burrell Smith's Defender strategy. Incidentally, how does Smash TV fit into your anti-amoral gaming philosophy? Smash TV fascinated me and my pre-adolescent peers precisely because it presented such an amoral world. Does Defender somehow cancel out Smash TV? Are you going to reach for the 'heavy-handed satire' excuse? Answer me, dammit!

Wait, I'm not the one interviewing him.

My experience is that every time you encounter an opt-out system in real life, it is because there is a weasel who won out over someone who wanted to do the right thing. In a given situation there might not be anyone who wants to do the right thing, but the decision to create an opt-out system can only be made by a weasel. I know some such people and I'm sorry to say this: you can be a great person in other respects and at other times, but when you choose an opt-out system your head briefly turns into that of a flesh-ripping weasel, just as it briefly turns into a big lollipop when you fall for the old Bugs-Bunny-in-drag trick.

Why? Because if the thing you're letting people opt out of was so great, people would opt in after you told them about it. It would be what we call a 'service' that you could 'offer'. Opt-out is a way of turning a 1-10% positive response rate into a 50-75% negative nonresponse rate. There will be maybe 5-10% of people who would like the service, yet who wouldn't have opted in. That's who you'll point to to justify your behavior, but all the time you'll be thinking about the 30-40% of people who won't use the thing and won't opt out. That, to me, is the mark of the weasel.

When cornered, the common North American Opt-Out River Weasel will employ its traditional defense: weasel words. It may try to dig its way out of a hole, but its webbed feet are not effective digging tools.

By Tuesday, however, Mathison had adopted a more conciliatory tone. He said Schwab is following up on the letters by calling every single recipient and explaining the contents in detail.

Good job! A hidden charge and a phone call to explain it! Now they'll really love you!

PS: if you must use opt-out, here are some less weasely ways to do it:

1. Let people out of reversible things, ie. things that don't cost money or result in you giving other people information about them.
2. Sound sort of apologetic when you bring up the fact that there's opt-out involved in something. People love this.
3. If you have one of those web signup forms that has an opt-out box, say up front what the opt-out means instead of being so vague that it looks like you yourself have no idea what you want to do with the information you collect.
4. Come up with an idea so brilliant, so useful, so pure, that everyone on the planet must have it, that screaming mobs rip off their clothes rather than go without it. Then market it and charge money for it. Ha! You're rich, and not a weasel! What? You say it's no fun that way? There, there.

PPS: A couple years back there were little online brouhahas about some web signup form with a checked-by-default "I love having my data shared!" checkbox. If you entered invalid data into the form and unchecked the checkbox and submitted the form, it would redisplay the form with errors highlighted and the checkbox would be magically checked again. If you wanted to opt out you'd have to be sure to uncheck it every time you submitted the form. This is not because the designers of the form are weasels; it's because HTML checkboxes don't work the way a lot of people think they do.

Then I realized: these were the real tortillas. Tortillas are now the designated low[er]-carb alternative to bread. It's only a matter of time until someone sees Dr. Atkins' face scorched into a tortilla.

Silver Lining Department: the SCOWL Word List seems to have a very high percentage of real words, as opposed to strings found in trusted pieces of text. Maybe I'll grab it for the Eater.

Sour Grapes Department: Who cares what words yield other words when ROT13ed? The real question is, what words are composed of a string concatenated to its ROT13 equivalent? There are five common words that fit this vital criteria, not counting proper nouns:

• an
• boob
• earn
• near
• vain

Also the abbreviations "Re", "PC", and "SF", and the editor "vi".

Before the explosion buy at any price qfrlcbg el sbskp

Too late!

Give it a try. It's easy and artichokes are cheap right now. You don't need a special set--just make it in a saucepan and dip the bread or whatever in with forks. Cheap non-trendy fondue!

Next time: hearty ad hoc soup that inevitably makes my housemate say "this is squash?". Like I would lie about squash, and it's really caramel.

Let me know if you see anything I missed.

PS: Coming soon: more Kevan mania. Wait til you see the link he sent me! You won't believe the twist! Because it's based on a counterfactual!

PPS: Already here but not actually released: mine and Peter's weblog-ish hypertext versions of Gogol's Diary of a Madman. There's also fifty contemporary weblogs with the same title, most probably named after the Ozzy Osbourne song rather than directly after the story. Find the next trend before it happens!

6. Volunteers to take care of details that you should handle. Picking up signature cards when you open a new bank account, for example. The more details the bookkeeper handles, the more theft opportunities, and the easier it is to cover things up.

Pretty useful, no?

Uh, I gotta go.

Now that the scales have been lifted from my eyes I see that all those stale game genres can be revitalized by refocusing them on their rightful subject. Imagine a first-person shooter that's actually a first-person mauler--you are a dinosaur biting or clobbering other dinosaurs. A real-time strategy game in which you deploy your herd of dinosaurs against a rival herd. Even, say, a Monopoly clone in which everything has some strained connection to dinosaurs!

Since the pure, eternal "idea" portion of a project is the hard part, and since the implementation work and will to see it through to completion pales in comparison, I expect these games to start coming out next week now that I've done all the heavy lifting. Hey, I'll even help you out. Look--I started a SourceForge page! It's as good as done already!

Update: despite their British origin, Kevan assures me in comments that the dinosaurs are playing American football. I was kind of wondering where the goalie was in that screenshot. This conclusively identifies the dinosaurs as Paralitian stromeri.

I think there's a resemblance (I used to think I looked like a concrete pillar).

This relieves me of the need to come up with an awesome dessert named after Stack for my "dishes named after programmers" diner menu.

Incidentally, if you're a Yankee in the South and you see "fried pie" on a menu, you might think that it's an eccentric dish made by this particular restaurant where they take slices of pie and deep-fry them. If you find this idea simultaneously repulsive and compelling, you might dare to order a fried pie, hoping and fearing to see a golden pie wedge breaded like a shrimp and plopped onto your plate with some whipped cream. If this is what you are expecting, you will be simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Fried pie is actually a completely standard dish that is basically a better version of those inedible $0.25 Hostess fruit pies. I'm not saying don't order it, but know what you're getting.

For programmers about to enter the real world (or otherwise about to take responsibility for software projects), it's a good technical companion to the more lifestyle-oriented Things I Wish I'd Been Told. Along with How to Build a Fort That Girls will Visit, these two documents form the essential post-college geek starter kit trilogy. (Thanks to Paul for looking in the Internet Archive when I was too lazy.)

[0] Supposedly you learn to work in a team in college, but it doesn't work. Working on an open source project is better preparation. You could pick up pair programming in college, if you went in determined to learn that way.

This has been The Problem Is.

SPANNING 330 SQUARE METRES.. THE CLUB SUITE.. LOCATED ON THE 19TH AND 20TH FLOORS..IS THE PERFECT ENTERTAINMENT SUITE.SPORTING A SNOOKER TABLE.. COCKTAIL BAR AND DINING TABLE FOR 6 PEOPLE WHILE CLEANING.. THIS GORGEOUS SUITE I DISCOVERED $20 MILLION IN US DOLLARS LEFT.. BY A PREVIOUS OCCUPANT BENEATH THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE WHICH LEADS UP TO AN ADDITIONAL LOFT COMPLETE WITH SITTING AREA CONTINUING INTO THE BEDROOM WITH ITS KING SIZE BED.. I WRITE THIS FROM THE COMPLETE BUSINESS CENTER CONSISTING OF A WORK DESK..LAPTOP..PRINTER PRIVATE FAX AND TELEPHONE SERVICES AND DATAPORT ..

More fun to look through the Factbook for tiny territories like Howland Island, which features tourist attractions like the historic Earhart Light beacon (named after Amelia Earhart, who was headed for the island when she disappeared) and... nothing else. The only thing on the island is a thing that helps you stay away from the island. Fortunately, "the laws of the US, where applicable, apply."

OK, starting to babble. Time to turn off the computer.

"I had that 'hip deer in the headlights' look."

"Yeah, I know that one. 'Oh, I'm too cool to--[whump] Aaah! My trucker hat!'"

Kris figured they took down the interactive portion because of 9/11, which makes total sense. Previously, terrorists would only have had to obtain a nuclear device if they wanted to blow up a city. Now, they have to obtain a nuclear device and a map and compass! But what about other methods of horrible destruction, as yet out of human control? Are there convenient, non-terror-enabling online forms that show you how dead you will be? I decided to do some searching and find out.

• Earthquake: You can find out when you felt the tremors from past earthquakes, but that doesn't do you much good. However, see Asteroid Strike below. Update!: If you live in the SF Bay Area, Adam Parrish has a deal for you! Maps and everything!.
• Volcano Eruption: All I could find was this distance calculator to volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest. If you don't mind doing a little web browsing, you can locate volcanoes in your area at this Smithsonian site or this USGS site, which is less comprehensive but has maps and other volcano freebies.
• Tsunami: Nothing I could find.
• Asteroid Strike: Here's what I'm talking about. Takes projectile characteristics and calculates all types of damage: crater ejecta, shock wave, thermal radiation, etc.

  Plus, since an asteroid strike causes an earthquake, you can work out a rough correspondence of impact criteria to Richter scale magnitude and simulate any kind of earthquake that way.

  My only complaint: With the right asteroid you can create an impact crater bigger than the earth. Indeed, you can specify an asteroid much bigger than the earth and it doesn't, as it should, treat the collision as a minor inconvenience to the asteroid.

• Tornado: Well, if you know the windspeed of a particular tornado, you can plug it in here and it will give you an index on the meaningless-except-to-tornado-geeks "Fujita Scale". But it will also give you wiseacre Midwestern comments, a decent proxy for "How dead will you be?" (Eg. "Too late to head for the cellar!")
• Flood: Well, this is pretty interesting. It's not a calculator per se, but a tutorial and script for simulating flooding in a GIS system. The reason I say it's interesting was I've been wondering how to do the same thing on a grand scale: see what the world would look like if the sea level were to rise or fall.
• Godzilla attack: Nothing. Not even a damage table you can roll on.

Well, I think that covers most of the SimCity disasters. Maybe the raw power of a nuclear explosion or an asteroid strike are what let you make a calculator that doesn't get hung up on the topography of the landscape or the size of a particular volcano.

If you're interested in the progress of the Brendan/Leonard logo collaboration, check out the Gallery of Rejected NewsBruiser Logos. The dimetrodon was my original idea, and in the face of all evidence I still think we could have gotten it to work out somehow.

I'd love to find more English-language weblogs written by natives of non-English-speaking countries--please post your favorites in comments. I want English-language weblogs because I want to read them, not collect them, and unfortunately I don't speak all the world's languages. I'm a failure!

Anyway, while we were having our little jokes, the real Brian Kernighan was riding high at Lucent, lording it over Kevin and giving interviews to fans. Years later, Adam sends a pointer to me and Kris as a reminder... of what could have been. Ach, it's a sad story, and one told for no apparent reason.

PS: confidential to Adam et al. Is it okay if I link to your Livejournals? You don't really advertise them and I know Kris has his own non-Live journal, but sometimes I'd like to link to something you write and I don't know if that's okay or if you want to keep them semi-private or if you even know I know about them, in which case, oops.

ROASTED SQUASH AND THE LIKE

• 3 large squash or more than 3 smaller squash
• Pepper
• Brown sugar

This can be any kind of squash or any other vegetable that's stringy and fleshy and you didn't like when you were a kid. The more squash you use, the heartier the soup. Tonight I used a butternut squash, some other kind of squash I don't know what it's called (it's yellow and shaped like a Keystone Kop's billyclub; it might actually be a zucchini), and two sweet potatoes.

Peel the squash and bisect them so as to maximize the exposed surface area. Scoop out any seeds and sprinkle the squash with pepper and brown sugar. Bake them on a cookie sheet in the oven until they're hot and you're sick of waiting. If you don't peel the squash you'll just have to scoop out the flesh once you remove them from the oven, when they're hot enough to ignite human flesh. There's no need to bake the squash skin! Anyway, once the baking is done you are ready to chop up the squash and dump them into the simmering

BROTH

• 3 cups of vegetable broth, more or less

I use two 14-ounce cans of vegetable broth. Using less broth is another way to increase the heartiness of the soup. I don't think any other kind of broth makes sense for this soup. While the squash cooks in the broth, mash it up with a potato masher. When it's good and mashed, transfer a few cups of it to the blender and blend it. Pour back into the soup pot and repeat until the soup is the consistency you want. If you're like Adam and Kim and you have one of those fancy hand blenders, by all means, use the fancy hand blender. Once you have a good thick soup you are ready to add the

DAIRY

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 cheese rind or 1 cup shredded cheese or whatever (I use the heel of the Jarlsberg from the most recent time I made fondue).

The cream is a double-edged sword. It adds richness (because of the fat) at the expense of heartiness (because of the liquid). It's fine to use less cream, or none. I add the cheese because I like the flavor of a Swiss cheese in the soup, and I also like getting rid of old cheese.

SEASONING

• Pepper
• Nutmeg
• Grated ginger

I like a lot of different flavors, so every time I make this soup I add more stuff. Last time it was the cheese. This time I added toasted sesame seeds, which worked pretty well. Toasted squash seeds would have been more thematic. I bet you could also add garlic. (Side note to self: come up with dessert involving sesame seeds baked in brown sugar.)

Stir it all up, and you have soup! Serves 6, I guess (me + Sumana + Housemate 1^TM + Housemate 2^TM + me or Sumana having seconds + me or Sumana having a bowl for some other meal).

Next time: I am actually going to make Samoa Samosas. I have the ingredients and everything.

Job responsibilities include assimilating humans into the BORG collective in order to gain their power and knowledge...Strong improvisational skills are necessary because BORG do not have minds of their own.

The whole site is great, in an over-the-top Ferengi-run kind of way. I'm curious about the employees' prosthetics--they have to be fairly realistic in a less forgiving setting than a sound stage, and not take hours or lots of skilled labor to apply.

This isn't like a drive-up Elvis chapel that you do on the spur of the moment. You have to schedule this thing. And if you're deranged enough to want a Star Trek wedding, you're deranged enough to go on and on with your nitpicking and ruin it. Little details like the fact that your Star Trek wedding is nothing like a Star Trek wedding. None of the long-suffering Starfleet officers attending your wedding are in their dress uniforms, and you're getting married on the bridge--not the best place on a starship for a wedding, since people tend to be there trying to get work done. The sample pictures have people in 21st-century wedding clothes standing in front of the putative Enterprise viewscreen, making it look like they're negotiating with the Romulans over mineral rights. What should be an immersive experience ends up making you feel like an anachronism in someone else's world.

Well, that's my preemptive review. When I actually get married there I'll let you know how it went.

Filling:

• 6 Samoa Girl Scout Cookies
• 1.5 bananas
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon shredded coconut
• dash vanilla

Dough:

• 3 sheets phyllo dough
• 1 tablespoon melted butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mash up the bananas. Chop up the cookies. Mush everything together.

Spread 3 sheets of the phyllo dough out on a cookie sheet. Brush each layer with melted butter and cut into 4 triangles. Distribute the filling between the triangles and fold into a vaguely samosoid shape with the filling in the middle. Brush top with butter and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 10 minutes. Makes 4 samosas.

This is a scaled-down recipe. We actually made 6 samosas with 2 bananas and 8 cookies. We used 1 more sheet of phyllo dough to fashion the other 2 samosas. It's complicated so I didn't put it in the recipe. Just eat the other banana half.

I still have 14 sheets of phyllo dough, and it's not as hard as I'd feared to work with. Maybe I'll make some weird baklava or warbat (warbat!).

We shared two great appetizers; southwestern bean cakes and a "spring sampler" with walnut bread, bleu goat cheese, walnuts, and dates. I had a great polenta-in-soupy-stuff entree, and Sumana had shish kebobs which she didn't like as much. I ordered a chocolate mousse torte for dessert, which I haven't eaten yet. (I couldn't eat it yesterday due to my new "jam every other day" diet.)

Total cost of meal was $60, which I think is pretty good for an upscale dinner in San Francisco. That $60 does not include the enormously expensive cookbook I bought. I'm going to end up one of those people with a bookcase full of cookbooks. A cookbookcase.

There's a "Peace Grove" below the observation deck in which certain trees have been provided the local Rotary Club with plaques comemmorating peacemakers (from a Rotary Club point of view, I guess) like Desmond Tutu, Anwar Sadat, Adlai Stevenson, and Edward Teller. Kevin claims Henry Kissinger has a plaque, but we couldn't find it.

The Peace Grove is great because there's no trail through it, no list of plaques, and no guidebook references--just a marking on the trail map and the word of your (not particularly trustworthy) guide. I probably shouldn't even be talking about it, lest I spoil the fun of crunching through the brush looking for plaques. It's like a monument plus a geocache.

Even so, I would only care in an academic sense, but sometime in the past Wikipedia surpassed the point where the articles were tedious clean-room implementations of preexisting encyclopedia entries. Now they tell me about interesting things like The Fundamental Theorem of Poker (which inspired me to seek out other fundamental theorems) and what the SysRq key is for.

In celebration of the article and the server-crushing load it will no doubt send Wikipedia's way, I declare today WikiDay on News You Can Bruise. I can think of two other Wiki-related things to write about, which should be good enough for a Day.

Unfortunately, WikiDay is on hiatus due to insufficient funding. How will I tell the children that WikiDay has been cancelled? Please, think of the children.

Suppose you want the glory of Wiki contributorship, but you also crave the greater proportional glory that comes from contributing to a Wiki that lacks thousands of contributors. Check out the Wiki Cookbook, the most promising of the WikiBooks. It has few specific recipes, but as with Wikipedia the potential is there to focus our individual obsessions on a single semicanonical web site. Check out, for instance the Caesar salad recipe--they have the original recipe from Caesar's Bar along with a bastardized modern version. Completeness mania strikes again! Huzzah! A global namespace ensures that variants of recipes will be explored within the context of the larger dish rather than stuck somewhere else. I hope.

My only complaint: I can't find any way to get any of the special Wiki pages (random page, recent changes) for a particular book (ie. the cookbook). There's one big dataset of all the changes made to every WikiBook from which these pages take their orders.

PS: If you know of any cool Wikis, post them in comments.

There was an old VR game (that was what we called these games before we called them "first-person shooters") that ran on Amiga hardware, called Dactyl Nightmare. It had a sequel called (surprisingly) Dactyl Nightmare 2. The ad copy promises you will be "plunged into an ultrareal setting trying to avoid the menacing intentions of giant swooping pterodactyls in this game of unprecedented realism" and "You won't sleep through this nightmare."

Hey, wake up! Nightmare! C'mon! You're missing it!

OK, good. Here's a contemporaneous review of Dactyl Nightmare from an Amiga separatist site. The other thing I wanted to show you is this screenshot from Dactyl Nightmare 2, in which the pterodactyl has had big posters of herself printed up and hung in her nest. An egg theft countermeasure?

Man, what a great name. The trademark has been cancelled; does that mean I could write a completely different game with the same name and get away with it?

Now, let me just publish this...

Another departure from the Brussels norm is that, though perfectly fluent in English, she had no idea what I was talking about. I had to show her the poster in the window to convince her that such a movie existed. Thus convinced, she started rooting around in the back and I started scouring the shelves. We talked a little. "My accent is very bad," she said. "My French is very bad," I pointed out.

Finally we found the movie on a shelf behind the cash register. So, that's why I have a Region 2 DVD of Shaolin Soccer dubbed in French. How come Region 1 DVDs all have multilingual subtitles and dubbing, but a DVD from any other region has nothing? I am starting to suspect that certain DVD regions are freeloaders.

Next time I get nostalgic, I'll tell you about the Italian restaurant in Charleroi where I accidentally ordered a salad. Yeah, that should cure my nostalgia.

"Your honor, my client was never trying to con people with a scam page."

"Objection! May I refer the judge to People's Exhibit A, THE URL TO THE DAMN WEB PAGE."

Did someone unzip a handy prebuilt phishing tarball (The Pocket Phisherman?) into the webserver root and not rename the directories?

With that in mind, here is my baklava recipe. This is not at all like traditional baklava, which I think I've mentioned I don't really like. It's really dry and I can't help but think it is a complete waste of an opportunity to use figs or dates. The consensus from the salon.com tasting lab is that these are like brownies, so I dub them Baklava Brownies. They are probably healthier than fudge brownies, because they're basically made of dates and nuts, the sort of things that if you cornered a doctor and asked if it was healthy to eat a lot of them, the doctor would give sort of an equivocal answer versus a straight "no".

The goal of this recipe is to prepare FILLING, put it between sheets of BUTTERED PHYLLO, and bake it before adding TOPPING. First, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Then start assembling the

FILLING

• 2 cups walnuts
• 12 dates, pitted
• 1 chocolate bar, shaved

Chop up everything in a food processor. You should have a big sticky mass. This is going to have a browniesh consistency and taste, but it's not going to have any structural integrity. That's why you're going to employ it as filling in a

BUTTERED PHYLLO ASSEMBLY

I'm not going to get into the mechanics of buttering phyllo dough. Suffice to say that you need:

• 5 sheets of phyllo dough, cut in half
• About 3/4 a stick of melted butter

Layer three sheets (actually half-sheets) of dough on the bottom and spread half of the filling on top. Layer three more sheets on top of the filling and put the rest of the filling on top of that. Top with three more sheets. Butter every side of every sheet of phyllo dough.

I built my baklava on a cookie sheet, but it should be small enough and would be more in keeping with the brownie theme to put it in a brownie pan. Anyway, according to some online sources you should cut squares out of the baklava before you bake it--just cut the top layer of dough, don't cut into the filling. I did this and it turned out fine.

You've got a half-sheet of phyllo dough left. Cut it up, butter it, and smush it along the sides of your assemblage so that the filling doesn't run out when you bake it. Then bake it, for about 10 minutes. While it's baking make the

TOPPING

You really shouldn't trust my recipe here, because my topping never reduced and thus didn't turn out too well. But it's equal parts honey and sugar (about 1/4 cup of each), reduced in an equal amount of water with a tablespoon of lemon juice. Spoon it over the baklava when you take it out of the oven.

Like brownies, you can eat this hot or let it cool. It's good either way.

Until 50 years ago, the book's paper wrapper was there to draw attention in a store, and to protect the book until someone actually sat down and read it. At that time it was commonly discarded[.]

In conclusion: ha!

If a person is very happy, the player can "suck" some of that person's happiness (or sadness) and give it to some unhappy sod by rapidly hitting the circle button.

Update: the consensus is: "People at weddings, sometimes, and also me if they weren't so expensive."

Sensors also available in "boring box" edition. Maybe it has a compartment for you to hide your house keys in, or something to make up for the fact that it doesn't look like a frog.

Site does some stupid Javascript thing so I can't be bothered to find better links. Produit de France.

Myth: Pesto is just olive oil and basil.
Fact: Pesto is also three other things.

To make pesto you combine basil, nuts, cheese, and garlic in a food processor, then, with the food processor on, drizzle in olive oil until the mixture becomes semi-liquid. There should be a lot of basil, the same amount of nuts as cheese, and garlic to taste.

You can add pepper if you want. I wouldn't add salt if I were you. There's plenty of salt in the cheese, and if you are some kind of salt vampire or humanoid deer you should just keep your freakish lifestyle to yourself. There is no room in the blues for your petty sentimentality!

Myth: You must use hand-carved pine nuts.
Fact: That doesn't even make sense.

You can make pesto with any kind of nut. Panic Pesto was made of half pine nuts and half walnuts. Does it make a difference? Sure. In the way it tastes. Not in whether or not it's pesto. It still tastes fine.

Myth: Only Parmesan cheese is acceptable.
Fact: The previous statement is a myth, whereas this one is fact.

Panic Pesto was made of 1/4 Parmesan and 3/4 Jarlsberg fondue leftovers. If Jarlsberg works, then any white hard or semi-soft cheese should work. Maybe bleu cheese would work. Maybe even cheddar would work.

Myth: The non-use of basil in pesto will anger the pesto king.
Fact: The pesto king is an imposter and a fraud. So who cares?

I have only ever made pesto with basil, because both Sumana and I are crazy about basil. But you could make it with parsley instead, or spinach, or anything that's leafy and green with some flavor. You could even make mint pesto, though I wouldn't put it on pasta.

Myth: Blah blah blah.
Fact: Just put whatever you want in pesto. Make it with walnut oil. Substitute some other aromatic for garlic. Make hummus instead. You could probably come up with a combination that is awful, but my feeling is you'd have to ignore some other common-sense rule of cooking to do it.

I made vanilla/coconut/mint ice cream yesterday using the paste, and it was great. More on this later.

PS: There must be a more effective way to do this?

I actually bought a coconut, thinking that the stuff inside was "coconut milk" (the way... well, I can't think of any foods that work that way), then discovered that it's actually "coconut water", and that "coconut milk" is what you get when you simmer coconut meat in water. So I started buying the canned coconut milk with the elephant on the can, since some negligible percentage of the money I spend on the coconut milk goes to an Asian elephant sanctuary. (Incidentally, if you want to eliminate the middleman and give money directly to an elephant sanctuary, check out this one in Tennessee).

So now I have nice coconut-flavored ice cream but I also have a coconut I don't know what to do with. Ideas? I was thinking maybe I could put a lime in it and drink it all up.

Now, it's already received wisdom in parts of acadamé that video games are a form of aaaaht, but I guess not in the English department. Perhaps they resent video games intruding on their turf, so they lash out in anger at the most story-like form of game. This book is intended to soothe them and get them thinking about IF using whatever vocabulary is hot in textual analysis these days.

I, and everyone who expressed interest in this book to me, is in another group: people who self-interestedly stipulate that interactive fiction is a form of aaaaht, and who are interested in figuring out the theoretical underpinnings so they can make better artifacts. This book is not so good for us. I will demonstrate.

Twisty Little Passages starts off promisingly for us by comparing interactive fiction to another folk-art-ish form: the riddle. I recommend reading this part because while I don't think the analogy is complete, I think the comparison is useful; that by examining what makes a good riddle you can get some insight into what makes good interactive fiction.

But unless you want a refresher course in the history of IF I recommend not reading past page 80, where after an interesting take on IF precursors, ELIZA makes her appearance and the book takes a plunge into the canonical. The well-known-to-us history unfolds (Adventure, Zork, Scott Adams, Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, bust, post-bust independents), with nary a reference to the riddle analogy. You think it'll be used as a lens through which to view the history of IF, but it's not used for anything, really. Over time it becomes clear that the riddle comparison was mainly intended to get the people in English departments to start thinking of IF in terms of other art forms. It's like a skeleton key in a game that only has one locked door; you carry it around to the end wondering why you only used it once.

The book closes with a roundup of references to interactive fiction in non-interactive fiction, hoping to clinch the argument with the awesome power of intertextuality. This section is a little embarrassing, like those late-80s letters to Nintendo Power touting the hand-eye-coordination benefits of video games. But it too is easily explained if you consider the market: antsy English majors who see a new form of writing intruding on their turf and eroding the overall quality of literature. People who will feel a little better if they know that non-interactive authors have sponsored interactive fiction by inclusion in their works, if they see that not all thinking on the subject has been done by dragon-obsessed, spaceship-loving nerds like me.

The best I can say for this book is that it should get more people thinking about interactive fiction, writing the sort of books that will be fodder to the minds of those of us who write interactive fiction. Maybe Nick Montfort will write another book for you and me, a book called Hey, Remember That Riddle Thing? Well, Have I Got Some Ideas For You.

The current law is that if you don't do anything special to something you right, it's under the generic copyright license. Therefore, making the generic copyright license the default would be the safest option, but I don't like the current law. I think it's too restrictive, and I don't really want to ratify it by making it the default license for a weblog.

What's more, NewsBruiser already embodies my assumption that anybody who writes a weblog is willing to give more latitude to readers than they'd get from fair use. It makes the full text of entries available in various syndication formats, which is more or less an open invitation for people to cache, archive, and mangle your entries using their own programs. I do this because syndication feeds that aren't full-text feeds are nearly useless. I figure that reasonable people writing weblogs won't mind giving a little more leeway than copyright law in its full scope allows..

My current thinking is to have the default for a public weblog to be the most restrictive Creative Commons license (attribution required, no derivative works, no commercial use), and the default for a private weblog to be regular copyright law. Does this make any sense? My guiding principles are: I don't want to imply to people that full copyright is the best thing for their weblogs (I think it's not). I don't want stuff to be under full copyright when the author wouldn't mind a less restrictive license. I don't want someone to give away something they thought they weren't giving away.

The last two are in conflict, and I feel I must tread carefully lest I become a sort of copyright Opt-Out River Weasel. Looking at that old entry, maybe the way to do it is to "Tell people about [the licensing options]" rather than hoping they go to the configure screen and find them. What do you think?

Update: Man, this entry is a big mess. But people seem to understand what I'm talking about, so it's doing its job.

At the same time, I'm curious as to how much people are willing to send my way in this post-purchase economy, but that by itself is not a compelling reason to ask for donations. Thus, the brilliant solution: I set up a Paypal or Paypal-like accont, and expose donation buttons all over the place, except that all the money donated actually gets sent to some deserving charity.

How to do this? I can think of four solutions.

1. The vim/"In lieu of flowers" method: I just say that if you feel the urge to give, you should do such-and-such. Advantages: I don't have to do anything much. Disadvantages: High activity threshhold for donation precludes rash impulse donations. I don't find out how much is actually being donated.
2. The "money laundering" method. I funnel donations to my own Paypal account and every n months I cut a check for the balance. Disadvantages: I have to cut a check every n months. "The balance" likely to be emberassingly small. If I use Paypal for other purposes it gets all mushed up.
3. The "cross-site scripting" method. I put up the little Paypal buttons except they don't go to my own Paypal account, they go to some charity's Paypal account. Advantages: Mwah-hah-hah sneaky. Easy to donate. Disadvantages: most charities don't have Paypal accounts. I don't find out how much is being donated.
4. The "Unix pipes" method. I get an account on some Paypal-like site and specify that all incoming funds be funneled to various other accounts. Advantages: does exactly what I want. Disadvantages: does not exist.

Any others?

Incidentally, I've noticed a worrying difference between email spam and weblog spam. With email spam, the spammer can maybe approximate your spam list (after all, even spammers get spam), but they can't see your non-spam list without cracking your email account. On the other hand, with weblog spam no one sees the spam you deleted, but all the non-spam comments are right there for everyone to see and parse. It would be trivial for a comment spammer to post an exact repeat of someone else's comment but with Viagra links all over the place. In the long run, a Bayesean filter for comment spam might degenerate into an IP and URL blacklist. Is there any algorithmic defense against an attacker who has access to everything previously blessed by the algorithm?

I guess I knew about metal combustion before, because I'd seen the pretty spectrographic colors metal dust makes when thrown into a fire. And it's not surprising that for metals with nearly-empty outer electron shells, a fine line would divide oxidation from combustion. But never before had I envisioned metals catching fire on their own and wreaking havoc, or conceived of high-tech fires deemed worthy of their own fire class (D) and requiring special fire extinguishers to appease. Even though your aluminum foil isn't going to catch on fire, the idea has a certain cutting-edge cyberpunk allure.

CORRECT: "Thanks."

INCORRECT: "I don't need your pity!"

And if you like to import things, you're in luck. Not only can you hook a NewsBruiser weblog up to a Moveable Type weblog and suck down all the entries, comments, and trackbacks; it now comes with a lumbering Tor Johnson of an HTML machete (deserving of its own post, tomorrow) that you can use to exhume weblog entries (and things-that-should-be-weblog-entries) from their nonstandard HTML coffins.

You'll forgive me if all that functionality makes me wax poetic for a bit. Over the past year or so I've been thinking about weblogs, syndication, online communities, information retrieval, the next step in computer-mediated communication... the whole bit. I haven't been talking about it much, because I don't do the grand vision thing well. In my experience, a grand vision is largely a pheremonal advertisement for the person with the vision. I see instead a lot of little strategies and experiments. The world doesn't need another wannabe visionary, but I figure if I can make some incremental improvements and implement some ideas, I can hold my head high with the rest of them.

This ties into NewsBruiser like so: you know how a lot of open source software projects start out with an idea to write a program to do one task, then get it into their heads to do a generalization of that task, and keep integrating the task over some variable and never get anything done? I am fortunate and happy to report that the history of NewsBruiser development has been the good twin of that phenomenon.[0] All this time I've been envisioning and implementing slight tweaks to NewsBruiser concepts that open up new vistas, restricted liftings of restrictions that make it more powerful. Such changes add up, and somewhere during the past year the application became capable of being a platform. Those slight tweaks are becoming more powerful, and my crackpot ideas for fearsome electronic beasts are resolving themselves into simpler and simpler transforms on the NewsBruiser codebase.

But as they say, talk is cheap. I'll let you know when the killer app is done. For now, we've just got a really good weblog system.

[0] The urge to generalize is natural, and it's not hard to generalize without biting off more than you can chew: you start with a working system; you make incremental improvements; you make sure all improvements have a working system as their endpoint; and you try very hard to make the new system as simple to use as the old system, assuming you don't care about the new features. Above all, be patient. It will be better and come faster, and you'll get a better understanding of the problem domain if you don't try to do everything at once. Slow and steady wins the race. A stitch in time saves nine. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

PS: Zack, Mike, everyone else who's interested: give this version a try. Let me know if you have problems or feature requests.

Note that rewriting goes both ways. If you use rewrite rules you also need to create a Python class that rewrites the URLs NewsBruiser generates, so that it outputs the nice URLs that will trigger your rewrite rules. I can help you with this too, if you want.

You may be surprised to learn that none of my faithful readers' helpful suggestions met with the approval of my demanding eye, and so I wrote my own library, which I like to call Beautiful Soup and which I mentioned in passing yesterday. It's the HTML parser that just doesn't care. If you give it perfect HTML, it'll give you a perfect data structure, just like the big-name parsers. But other parsers know too much about HTML. They choke on or try to rewrite bad markup. They assume you care about the whole document. A pirate might make you walk the plank, but only a parser would make you walk the whole tree.

Not so with Beautiful Soup. What you wrote is what you get. If the HTML is horrible, so is the data structure you get--but you get something, and if you're screen-scraping, you don't care about the whole data structure. You're not writing a web browser. You want to grab some data and get out. Beautiful Soup hides all the tree traversal behind a couple of methods that let you slurp up all the links, all the headings of a certain class, the specific span that contains the train schedule time, whatever. It's similar in philosophy to Aaron's xmltramp.

If, like Lucy Ricardo, you got some 'scrapin' to do, give it a try. I love it. But then, I love all my children. The ones I designed to go on rampages no less than the ones where it just happens.

PS: Since Beautiful Soup knows very little about HTML, and it's based on SGMLParser, you could probably use it on anything that looks like HTML, eg. XML or your domain language that has the same structure as HTML but different tags.

I looked at eight different hummus recipes on the web and tried to factor out the commonalities and tally the differences. I came up with the following generic set of ingredients:

Generic Hummus

• 1 12-ounce can garbanzo beans
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1 or 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tablespoons tahini
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• pinch salt
• pinch pepper

Process all ingredients except for olive oil in food processor or blender. Use water or reserved garbanzo liquid to lubricate the hummus if the blade won't catch. Slowly drizzle olive oil (as though making pesto) into the vortex until hummus reaches desired consistency.

Simple enough. Then there were the secret ingredients: cumin, soy sauce (?! But it was in two of the eight recipes!), ground sesame, oregano, paprika, chopped parsley, chopped chilis, coriander, plain yogurt, cayenne, turmeric, and cilantro.

I decided to use yogurt instead of water or reserved liquid, because it would both lubricate the hummus and add the tangy flavor you get at a restaurant. I bought cumin and coriander to put in the hummus, but I am a spice spaz and I couldn't find the coriander. I used marjoram instead, because it smelled nice.

What I got was pretty good. It's smooth (a little too smooth, actually; I used too much yogurt) and tasty. Since I got it pretty close, I think my one experiment entitles me to take a guess at the two secrets to smooth hummus:

1. Add 2 or 3 tablespoons of plain yogurt to the generic recipe.
2. Use the blender, not the food processor.

I started the hummus in the food procesor (a teeny 2 cup model that makes me work in stages; wedding gift overflow from an anonymous source), but I wasn't happy with the consistency so I moved it to the blender to finish it. I'm almost certain you could get the exact same result by just dumping everything in the blender.

All the herbs and spices affect the way it tastes, not the consistency. I do not claim to have made the tastiest hummus in the world; just one that has a good creamy consistency. As for flavor, I have not tried this, but adding a tablespoon or two of peanut butter might be good.

You might balk at buying plain yogurt just so you can use a little bit of it in hummus. The solution is to buy a lot of plain yogurt and make tzatziki with the rest; then you've got the complete Pita Fun Pak.

Incidentally, after smelling my post-hummus breath Sumana wants me to make it clear that a little garlic goes a long way in this recipe.

Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true.

Now that suffices! Maybe there's hope for me yet!

Also, even though it might sound clever, don't bring your hummus to the party in a leftover Trader Joe's hummus container, or people will unintentionally insult your wondrous hummus by thinking it's the grainy Trader Joe's stuff.

The top five licenses are all Attribution-type licenses, with the most popular being Attribution-NonCommercial with nearly 25,000 hits. The least popular Creative Commons license, with only 13 takers, is the CC-GNU LGPL license.

License Design Implications

It looks like Creative Commons has enough licenses. The core licenses have proven very effective at meeting people's needs, and there's no need to keep minting new ones because as far as I can tell the new ones don't get used. This might indicate that the new licenses are created in response to "You should have such-and-such a license" feedback rather than in response to people who don't like any of the existing Creative Commons licenses.

For instance, consider the Creative Commons "Music Sharing License", which is effectively the same as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. It's a lot more popular than its forlorn twin, but here "popularity" means 177 hits on Google instead of 16. It's dwarfed by its own commentary: Googling for "music sharing license" gets you 530 results talking about the latest license from Creative Commons. Compare to a string search for, eg. "Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike". You get people actually using the license, not talking about it. Creating a new license gets Creative Commons some buzz, but not much more; it looks like everyone who wants a license already has one they like.

The GNU licenses were probably created on behalf of GPL fanatics who kept bugging the Creative Commons people "why don't you have a GPL license?". Now that they're here, few people use them. My guess is, most people who want to use the GPL are using the actual GPL.

I didn't include them (or Music Sharing) in the survey because they're for music, but the URLs to the Sampling and Sampling Plus licenses are also mentioned almost nowhere on the web. This might be because no one uses them, because they're newer, because they don't get used correctly, or because they get used in ways that Google can't pick up. My methodology isn't as good for licenses not used by web pages (which probably also affects the GPL/LGPL numbers), so I will reserve judgement on these--but again, I searched for links to the URL I'd link to if I were licensing something under that Creative Commons license. The fact that the most popular licenses get tens of thousands of hits indicate that there's not some systemic disconnect where people don't link to the license they're using.

On the flip side, it does look like the CC public domain dedication is getting some good use--it's the sixth most popular license. I think this and the Founders' Copyright license (about which below) feed into a core competency of Creative Commons--being a trusted repository for copyright assignments.

UI Implications

If you want to let someone choose a Creative Commons license (in addition to whatever non-CC licenses), you don't need a bunch of orthogonal sets of radio buttons like the Creative Commons license picker has. You can provide four individual radio buttons and an 'other' field. This will handle 84% of the cases without greatly inconveniencing the other 16% of the people. (You want an 'other' field anyway, since people come up with all kinds of crazy non-CC licenses for their stuff.)

I couldn't measure the success of the Founder's Copyright because I couldn't find one canonical URL for the license. However, it's a good idea and I'm going to make it an option in NewsBruiser. This brings up my other UI design factor: in addition to the four most popular Creative Commons licenses, you can add whatever ones you like and think people should use. They'll be more likely to be used if they're options and not an 'other'.

Data below, if you're interested:

Relative popularity of Creative Commons text licenses
License	Google hits	% of total	First result
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike	24900	31.63	Photographers' and Illustrators' Artist Corners | Creative Commons
Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial	21000	26.68	molly.com
Attribution	10300	13.08	Photographers' and Illustrators' Artist Corners | Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike	10100	12.83	Tools
Attribution-NonCommercial	5060	6.43	MSNBC - GlennReynolds.com
Public-Domain	3080	3.91	Mike Linksvayer
Attribution-NoDerivs	1460	1.85	Among Other Things
ShareAlike	1060	1.35	ACM SIGWEB - Conferences
NonCommercial-ShareAlike	769	0.98	Trademarks, Free Speech, and ChillingEffects.org
NoDerivs-NonCommercial	479	0.61	blog@garogreen.com
NonCommercial	323	0.41	Search Engines Directory
NoDerivs	126	0.16	Browse Top Level > Moving Images > Brick Films > LEGO
CC-GNU-GPL	31	0.04	blogkomm: download
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs	16	0.02	Photographers' and Illustrators' Artist Corners | Creative Commons
CC-GNU-LGPL	13	0.02	Carlsbad Cubes - Wolf Paulus' Web Journal

The two engines give pretty similar pictures, except that Yahoo says public domain usage and the "Attribution" license are much less popular. Note the following:

• Every Attribution license is more popular than every non-Attribution license.
• The non-Attribution licenses are popular in approximately the same order as the Attribution licenses. The exception is the ingeniously perverse "Sharealike" license, which is sort of like a viral public domain.
• Yahoo and Google agree that the the top 4 licenses have about 84% market share, and that the top 5 have over 90% market share.

It's well-known that typos spawn ideas. Such an idea: the I Want Options library should spawn a knockoff called I Want Potions.

This is, incidentally, the best thing about Alton Brown's style of cooking pedagogy; he shows you the makeup of dishes, how to analyze them, and the connections between them. One of the best examples of this is that in some episode or other of Good Eats he points out that a cheesecake is structurally a custard, not a cake. It needs to be cooked in a hot bath, not just baked in a pan just because it has 'cake' in its name.

Anyway, for some reason I didn't buy that book! It cost $10 and I guess I decided it wasn't worth it. Later I changed my mind, but the last time I went to that bookstore it was gone.

Today I idly searched Bookfinder for "cooking patterns" and I found it! I don't remember the (long, unwieldy) title and I can't search for it anymore because I bought it and there are no other listed copies, but by a fortunate confluence of minds the author put "patterns" in the title so I was able to find it. And at about the same price it was being offered at the used bookstore! The $3.00 extra I'm paying to have it shipped to me I will chalk up as a "lesson learned" surcharge. The relevant lesson, of course, is: never take chances! Buy EVERY BOOK!

If I ever write a cookbook (which I might) it's going to be a synthesis of this cookbook I've got coming to me in the mail and Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For The Food. It'll be organized around the principles of recipe schemas and recipe transformations based on ingredient or technique. If you can make x, you can make y by applying a transformation. You can start slow, gradually build a repertoire you're comfortable with, but always keep experimenting within the bounds of the known if you don't want to learn a whole new skill to make something different.

I think cooking should be more like quantum chemistry and less like high school chemistry. There's always going to be a subjective element, but I think it can be factored out and that you can learn even from reading about transformations that involve stuff you don't like.

Other cookbooks I found that have similar ideas: "How to Cook without a Book" by Pam Anderson (no, not Pam Samuelson); a completely different "Cooking Without Recipes", by Cheryl Sindell and Joachim Splichal; "The Blue Strawbery Cookbook" [sic], by James Halle. I've ordered them according to my guesses as to where they fall on the continuum that travels from Recipe Refactoring Metropolis to the Random Improvisation Olde Tyme Country Farm.

Honorable mention goes to similarly-named Cooking Without a Kitchen, which, aiming for the MacGuyver wannabe niche market, features gourmet recipes you prepare in the hotel coffeemaker.

arizona,and he accompanied,audrey,he went down,meadowland,some inexplicable loathing,checkmate,ratslayers mutilated face.

I kind of wish I'd written it.

Oh, today we went to a multifamily yard sale where they tried to sell me old Collier's Yearbooks on the pound-for-pound principle; rather the books-by-the-foot principle, claiming that I could impress my friends by filling up yards of empty bookcase space with these old instant-history books. Since this would require getting new, empty bookcases and new, easily impressed friends, I declined. I wonder why they were selling them? Did their friends tell them "You know, those books used to impress us, but the novelty is kind of wearing off."?

I bought two Ian Fleming James Bond novels, and they were kind of pushy about me buying more books. I compromised and bought their ugly 1970s copy of the card game "Pit" that you always find in some distant relative's shelf of games. I guess I'm going to be that distant relative for the next generation.

Oh, I should mention the awesome yard sale (I love yard sales!) Sumana and I went to last weekend. There were lots of antiques, including a player piano, a Polaroid Land Camera, and a lovely 1950s refrigerator ($350, due to its tiny freezer compartment not really practical as your only refrigerator). The woman holding the garage sale said that swarms of antique dealers had descended on her garage sale and that what we saw was merely the carcass they had left.

I bought a hand-made tablecloth and Sumana bought a folding chair. When I'm rich and have my own house I want to do my kitchen in that can-do 1950s industrial aesthetic. To me, "retro" will always mean the 1950s, the first style I can see someone wanting to get back as opposed to just liking because it's old. The same way "modern" art as a term of... art... is stuck in the 1920s.

I bring this up because in the odd "randomly placed bookcase" exhibit at the dinosaur museum in Utah, and then in the same used bookstore where I bought Infinite Jest, I found a 1981 book called After Man. It takes the relatively short view of 35 million years in the future, but it's a nice book because it's imaginative, illustrated with watercolored line drawings and written like any other zoological monograph. I can't find any information on this kindred spirit, but I know it exists and it's preventing me from doing a proper NYCB about After Man. Does anyone remember this?

Exhibit A. In the US, when you order an "x salad sandwich" (eg. "chicken salad sandwich"), you get a sandwich made of x salad, which is x mashed up with mayonnaise and celery and other unsavory things. I'd never order any kind of "x salad sandwich" here.

But in the UK "x salad sandwich" means "do you want a sad little slice of tomato and piece of lettuce on your sandwich, or do you just want the bread and cheese and meat and whatever?" And clearly you want the x salad sandwich in preference to the x sandwich, because you need that tomato and vegetable to lubricate the sandwich which is otherwise pretty dry or slathered with some obscure Qwghlmnian sauce.

Exhibit B. I ran into some confusion between "chocolate" meaning a candy bar and meaning an individual, unwrapped piece of chocolate candy and meaning a piece of candy in general. I never did figure this out, and in the end I just went chocolate-less rather than navigate what seemed to be another country's "Want a Coke?" "Sure, I'll have a Sprite" issue. Now that I think about it it's kind of weird that it was easier for me to buy chocolate in French in Belgium than in English in England. Anyway, can anyone clear up this point? It's possible I was merely faced with a surly or inexpert cashier.

In this spirit is Brian Fitzpatrick's broken-keyboard.el, which sneaks around your Emacs keybindings breaking one key at a time. It's one for the ages, or at least all ages that have keyboards.

I'm surprised I wasn't disqualified for going to college with Kris, but since the 'contest' was actually just a thinly disguised auction there was little room for favoritism.

Good tabloid-science headline: Origin of Enigmatic Galactic-center Filaments Revealed!

Accuracy not guaranteed.

Lego and Maersk might have some Scandanavian corporate synergy; maybe the container ship set was a cross-promotional deal. Update: Looks like it's been going on for a while, along with other promotional tie-ins.

Parodius 2: An Unlikely Champion. Tonight, we'll trace this mild-mannered Gradius parody from its obscure origins, through development, to its current height of fake fame caused by its exploitation of the cheap button-pushing trick of letting you play as a mola mola. And whose idea was it to create a hagiographic documentary for a video game? Not even one anyone's ever heard of?! We pull no punches as we investigate our own sorry selves!

Coming up next: Kirby Kirby Kirby: An Unlikely Runner-Up.

Ok, back to fixing that NewsBruiser comment bug.

Incidentally, the Rijksmuseum is under renovation and has a sort of "greatest hits" exhibition going in two big rooms, so you can get a discount and a much quicker tour that gets all the famous stuff, at the expense of not being able to see the non-famous stuff that's often more interesting.

On the plus side, while seeing if anyone else had duplicated my puny results, I came across the awesome Trading Agent Competition, best described as Core Wars for those intelligent agents we hear so much about that look for the best prices online. In fact, that link deserves to be the star of this entry. Okay, I'll move this paragraph above the diagram so you'll see it. I couldn't find source for the agents, but here's an overview of the strategies employed.

And here's the chess diagram:

+--------+
|33333333|
|33333333|
|23333332|
|11111111|
|11111111|
|11111111|
|00000000|
|00000000|
+--------+

The only thing remotely interesting about that diagram is that it's not symmetrical, because of the positions of the king and queen.

Another chess-mentioning entry coming later today, if I write it.

Anyway, on one of the trips coming back from Bakersfield, what should be beamed down from the XM satellite but a song called "Cool Off", by New Orleans ensemble Galactic. It was nice, funky, jazzy. But it just went on and on. For minutes! And there were no words.

I don't know how much you know about me, random weblog reader, but I've got to have words with my music. When there are no words, I get cranky and I skip the track or change the station, or I start just making up words and belting them out. In this case the beat was groovin', so I made up words and had impromptu karaoke.

I was in me a boat crash
I crashed into the shore
Flew out of the cockpit
I wasn't drivin' that boat no more

Chorus:
You better cool off, cool off daddy,
Cool off daddy-O.
Cool off, cool off daddy,
Cool off daddy-O.

I was in me a chess match
Moved knight to queen's rook three
My opponent got angry
Started beatin' the tar out of me
He said:

Chorus:
"My name is Kulov, Kulov, daddy,
Kulov, daddy-O.
Kulov, world chess champion,
Kulov, daddy-O."

I was down me in Bolivia
Said some things made some people upset
That's when they pushed me against the wall
Offered me a last cigarette
I said:

Chorus:
You better cool off, &c.

Eventually the guy on the recording started thanking everyone for coming out tonight, so I assume the song was the last track on a live album and its purpose was to "cool off" the audience after a hot jam session. My words are still king, though.

Confidential to Jake: let me know if you're interested in laying down some jazz mix for my goofy lyrics, and I'll send you a vocal track. Think of it as like "What's A Godly Person?", except I know you're doing it.

Well, my career plans changed and I'm not likely to discover any dinosaur soon, but I did discover this dinosaur news website fair and square. It's from National Geographic and it descends into software-bug or cross-promotional news that has nothing to do with dinosaurs, but up at the top are arrayed for my vicarious enjoyment all the dinosaurs other people, sweatier than myself, have been discovering. Artists' renderings and everything.

I'd like to see a nice concise expose of the dinosaur discovery pipeline where people find the bones, analyse them, write the paper for Nature, get the artists' renderings done. Who pays for the artists' renderings?

Also, can you still get those novelty newspapers done or has that racket been shut down by humorless lawyers, driving you to use desktop publishing or make fake CNN web pages?

• 1 pint strawberries, hulled and chopped
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract

Macerate[0] the strawberries in the juice/vinegar/vanilla for an hour. You can add any other flavorings you want; I tried a little almond extract because I have this huge thing of almond extract I bought and I'm trying to figure out what it's good for. Once it's good and macerated, add:

• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup heavy cream

Mix well. Smush with a fork or potato masher if you want. Put in an ice cream maker, and there you go. No cooking. Strawberry seeds are very small so you don't have to worry about seeds in the ice cream.

I have had the ice cream but I am not sure how it tastes. I just don't know! Is the balsamic vinegar good or bad for the flavor? Would it be better as just a standard strawberry ice cream? It's a very complicated flavor and I need more time to decide.

I think my final verdict will be it's good for small dishes on the veranda but not for big pints that you eat while watching Sex in the City and generally being a big stereotypical chick. Ususally I wait to post up a recipe until I know whether or not I actually like it, but Sumana is doing a taste test and she always wants me to have the recipe put up in advance.

Other recipes coming up: pestoast, vegetarian risotto.

[0] This is cook-speak for 'soak'. I don't know why there are so many cooking terms that mean the same thing. "Marinade" and "macerate" imply different types of soaking substances, but since you have to say what the soaking substance is, I don't know why they don't just say "soak" except in those really terse recipes that are really just descriptions like you see in those pocket French cookbooks: Strawberries macerated in balsamic vinegar, made into ice cream. Here "vinegar" implies a marinade, but "macerated" makes you know that you have to add sugar and rare liquers and whatnot.

More NewsBruiser meta-stuff later.

I almost said Jake's program worked in a Dissociated Press fashion. It doesn't, but I bet that would sound really neat. You could turn a music library into an insane never-ending medley by analyzing the waveforms, finding smooth transitions, and pasting together one-second chunks.

I was going to do a minor NewsBruiser release tonight, but it misbehaves really badly when you install it on Python 2.3, so I'll do it tomorrow.

The other two one-offs are all mine, and will reveal my tragic, George Lucas-esque dramatic overdependence on mysterious cloaked figures.

I want to start doing less work on NewsBruiser in the short term. I am about to move (for real this time) and I also want to go work on a tangential project. I'll try to spend one day a week on NewsBruiser, and I'll also try not to spend more than that on NewsBruiser.

I believe it was Shaw who said: "The voting machine pays nobody except him that designs it. Nevertheless, a passion for voting is common, though a passion for designing voting machines is unknown."

From Vice Squad, which mostly deals with vices that do not overlap with my obsessions.

"Hmmm... refreshingly cool!" has been my mental catchphrase for a while now, but for some reason it never turns out to actually be refreshingly cool.

Eating bugs sounds disgusting? If you have ever eaten a crawfish, lobster, crab or shrimp then you have already eaten members of the class Arthropoda, of which insects are a part. So there.

What? I had to make it exciting somehow.

At least they're not turkey Graham crackers.

Today is also the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. At some point in the past few years I decided that I would spend today in Dublin being a middlebrow literary tourist. Well, that didn't work out either.

When I was 13 I got to page 72 of my mother's copy of Ulysses and then I found a copy of Finnegans Wake in a used bookstore and I never went back to Ulysses. From this you can figure out what it was I thought was interesting about Ulysses. I should try it again now.

• "That special someone loves to see the look in your eyes."
• You will have good luck and overcome many hardships.
• Don't worry about money. The best things in life are free.
• Your work interests can capture the highest status or prestige.
• Take that chance you've been considering.
• Ask a friend to join you on your next voyage. Lucky numbers 4, 6, 21, 23, 40

The last two bookended my life's intersection with the Clark campaign.

The other thing about moving is it makes me tired and makes me write irrelevant cop-out NYCB entries like this.

The point is I'm not going to have a permit anytime soon. Now, the purpose of the permits is to prevent people who don't live in a neighborhood from using the streets of that neighborhood as long-term parking. Since I live in my neighborhood, I'd be within the spirit of the law to park there.

My question is, how vigorously are the permit laws enforced? What is, realistically, my chance per unit time of getting ticketed if I just park in front of my house before I have my permit? Do the people who ticket you if you park on the wrong side of the street on street-cleaning day spend all the other days cruising the streets looking for permit violations? Or is the purpose of the law just so if someone parks their beat-up hippy van in front of your house and leaves it there for a month, you can call and complain and get it towed?

I'm leaning towards the latter explanation, due to the logistics of enforcement and the way the permit website seems to be written half for people who want to get a permit and half for people who want their street to require a permit so they can get rid of some specific non-native car-parker. I realize that you get ticketed for violating the letter of the law, not the spirit, but if I'm unlikely to face the consequences I might do it anyway. Yes, the moral decay of the kids these days, it's horrible.

The other thing I can do is just drive to work every day, taking my car out of the danger zone, since unpermitted parking is permitted on weekends. I don't really want to do that, though. Right now I've got my car parked on a nearby permit-free street. I've seen unpermitted cars parked on my street, so I don't know how big a deal this is.

Unfortunately it's hard to arrange for synths music originally written for different synths, so there's some unneccessary ornamentation in the tape tracks. Example: this version of the Metroid intro makes it feel like the opening music to a Jerry Bruckheimer film, rather than the creepy civilization-overrun-by-weeds dirge that fits in with the game. And there's a weird tooty synth patch that I'd only previously heard in actual video games trying to be cute. It's not cute, guys.

Incidentally, in addition to having the coolest NES game music, Kid Icarus and Metroid used the same game engine and were released on the same day. Metroid became a huge hit and remains a Nintendo cash cow; Kid Icarus, like its namesake, plummeted to a watery death. I certainly appreciate the greatness of Metroid, but sometimes I wonder what the world would be like it things had happened the other way around.

In conceptually related news, you might remember how a year or so ago I was obsessed with configuration interfaces. I even wrote a paper about them. Well, today Anthony Baxter talks about his client-side GUI implementation of a configuration interface.

• Smokey O'Doob
• T.H.C. Butz
• Kim Bong Il
• Rolo Mellowman
• Potsy McJoint
• Hemprey Bogart

I know what you're thinking: "Great, another hacker trying to use the hammer of technology to hit the non-nail of law. Also, he has poor personal hygiene!" Well, hear me out before you judge, hoo-mon. My personal hygiene is actually quite good, and look at this hypothetical complaint constructed by the EFF to demonstrate how awful and exploitable is Orrin Hatch's INDUCE (now IICA) bill[0]. I'm sure my prattling to Seth had nothing to do with this, but it is the perfect example of what I was talking about.

Note that in a twist rarely seen in the technical realm, sometimes the people writing the law are actually using the law as cover to enable some new attack. In that case it's even more important for outside reviewers to find and expose the backdoor in the law. Also, all laws should be written in my Leibnitzian Python wonder-language that contains no ambiguity.

[0] Leonard's Analogue to Leonard's Analog[sic] to Brooks' Law: "Renaming a bad law makes it worse."

I made banana-buttermilk waffles today, and they were a big hit. I thought about making banana-buttermilk-cornmeal waffles but I don't know how many adjectives you can pile on "waffles" before the waffles start to fall apart. I got a Belgian waffle maker as part of my getting-a-kitchen shopping spree; Belgian waffles are the least soggy and I can't stand soggy waffles. My particular waffle maker is designed to be flipped over after you put in the batter, in an obsessive bid to spread around the air bubbles and prevent any possible sogginess. My kind of waffle maker!

The waffle maker instructions say to put chili on top of a waffle and have it for lunch. I guess that could work. Seems like the gateway to waffle obsession, though.

But spam was quite boring before about 2000, and it would still be boring were it not for the Wacky Racers type race between spammers and spam filter authors. Lately the spammers have been having a rough time of it due to the invention by anti-spam scientists of the text-analysis spam filter. The Bayesian filter is the best-known example of this, but there are other methods of text analysis. To try to foil these filters spammers have had to make their spam weird and interesting by mutilating it and adding random elements which by amazing coincidence oft make the spam sound like the death rattle or final King Lear insanity of the spammer.

And yet--why should I be at the mercy of lowly spammers for my entertainment? In my day we made our own fun. "My day" being yesterday, when I made my own fun in the form of the "with a side of spam" filter for the Eater of Meaning. Now I can make any web page look not like I requested it but like there was a concerted attempt to smuggle it to me under false pretenses.

This Eater uses the same text-mangling tricks found in real spam to destroy meaning not as effectively as most of the other Eaters, but more effectively than last year's "scramble all but the first and last letters" insta-fad. Could it be turned to an evil purpose and used to create real spam? Probably not, because the results are too hard to read. Any piece of real spam chooses a few anti-filter tactics and has thematic consistency. A bouquet, if you will. Okay, you won't.

I really like the idea of trying to resurrect Shaw in a The Frogs scenario, but look at those excerpts. You can actually see the play get less funny with each remake. (I am not a total purist; I think those attempts to translate the Greek puns are awful.) I bet the frogs in the most recent version all look like Michigan J. Why not just make a new play about Shaw that pays homage to The Frogs? (I know, name recognition).

Bre-ke-ke.

Not related to this definition of "temperature safe" (ie. "safe temperature"). Also, don't inject drugs into your friends' beer. It's no safety!

I had Steve and Jenny Minutillo and Sumana over for dinner at my new house. Finally gave me incentive to clean all the junk out of the living room. I grilled corn and made salad dressing and was generally LE CHEF.

The having-people-over madness continues next Saturday with my birthday/belated 4th of July/housewarming party. If I know you and you want to come and I haven't already sent you an invitation, then send me email. Either I forgot you or didn't think you would want to come or thought you were too far away to realistically come. There will be games and chocolate ganache cake, among other things.

If you're coming, let me know what time you want to come so that I can maybe reduce the duration of the party to the lowest common denominator.

At my mother's house for the holiday. Crickets are chirping and fireworks going off. Now going into the hot tub.

It was, indeed, your father's Oldsmobile.

The coins said "In God We Trust", but as Dave had learned, the trust did not go both ways.

Leanne

Parked, he decides he wants to see what it's like when she drives. He jabs the second button, the one she presses when they get out to stretch their legs and switch seats.

The odometer reading flips from total to per-trip and the radio beeps as it reboots with changed presets. The A/C goes on. The seat whirs and moves in toward the pedals, headrest declining, back straight as an old soldier. But the relative positions of his body and the seat don't change at all.

He adjusts the mirror from its preadjusted position. He's got red hair and red lipstick.

PS: Sumana should write an Anacrusis entry about her friend Ana Cruz.

[N]o one ingredient is by itself critical. Each can have another ingredient substituted for it and the sauce will still work (although the name may need to be changed).

I'm just beginning to appreciate the French genius of totally exploring a well-defined culinary combinatoric space and naming everything differently just to intimidate people with 6000 names for sauces or soups.

I don't really have a T-shirt with the periodic table on it, though I did tell Kris why the periodic table is shaped the way it is, in keeping with my recent role as person who tells his friends why weird-shaped things are shaped the way they are. In return for a similar service, Kevan provided me with the choice bit of information that it's very easy to inadvertently hang the Union Jack upside down.

I got spam from the best spam name ever: "Gay Ponce".

PS: Bonus fanboy quiz: IMDB trivia for Enterprise says that T'Pol was originally named T'Pau in tribute to the T'Pau character in "Amok Time". They changed her name so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to Theodore Sturgeon (author of AT) for every episode of Enterprise. To my knowledge this is the second time this (renaming a Trek character so as not to have to pay royalties) has happened. What's the other time?

Anyway. Check out this SciAm article on the Voynich manuscript, which argues a mechanism by which Voynich-like text can be created. These disturbing new developments indicate that Voynich is a hoax... perpetrated by Cthulhu!

I think the author of that article gives up in triumph way too early. "The binomial distribution of word lengths can be generated by mixing short, medium-length and long syllables in the table." Sure, but why would that happen? An generation mechanism from which a binomial distribution followed naturally would be a lot more convincing. It's not something that needs to be explained away; it's a clue as to how the text was generated.

What to do? Slice some bread, spread pesto on it, put it in the broiler, and you've got pestoast! It's like Vegemite toast, but not gross. Also a good way to revive old bread because the olive oil in the pesto revitalizes it.

The container ship's probably the biggest Lego set I've ever put together, and it only took me about 2.5 hours. It was a pretty easy set, though, since 1/3 of the pieces turn into shipping containers. If I had more pieces I'd make hollow double-size shipping containers and have them carry tiny Lego pieces across the Lego ocean to my Lego model of Hong Kong.

I had some extra pieces left over, so I decorated some of the shipping containers with lights, and my ship is now the only container ship to have a plank. Arrrr! Actually I think I know where the plank pieces are supposed to go, but I'd rather have a plank.

The del.icio.us plugin is in NewsBruiser, but I think it's stretching the limits of what should be in NewsBruiser. I can't see that many other people really wanting to echo certain of their weblog entries to their del.icio.us accounts. Am I wrong?

Wait, how did that happen?

Sometimes it takes a day or so for me to remember that I wrote a plugin-based system and not just a system where you have to put new features in a directory called "plugins", but eventually I figure it out.

I wish it didn't take a whole weekend to make sourdough bread or I'd be able to make all my bread. Eventually I'll try my hand at quicker non-sourdough loaves. Susanna sent me a recipe for 'ninety-minute rolls' which looks great.

It's also been hard for me to do X Roundup because it just plain takes a long time to find and test and review a lot of pieces of software. So I've decided that once I have five Games/Softwares, it's Roundup time. Here we go.

Slag Panic is a Qix clone with the featuritis that comes from games being written in Python and features thereby being easy to add. It's got more interesting enemies than your average Qix, obscure bonuses, and an aggravating between-rounds roulette wheel that decides your fate for the next round.

The record will show that I usually only review Tetris clones with a good twist. Not a random slight-game-mechanics change twist like "everything's colored and you have to match colors", but a real twist that changes the way you look at Tetris. bastet is such a game. It uses heuristics to figure out what piece will be hardest for you to place, and always gives you that piece. You have to change your strategy from planning for completed rows to creating situations where the computer can't help but give you a piece that will complete a row. The traditional 'next piece' window isn't possible (or desirable), so instead it gives you the piece it deems the most useful, just to tease you.

The unfortunately named Kraptor is a decent arial combat game. What was the original game in this genre? I want to say "Xeyes", but obviously that's not right. My biggest complaint about this game is that most of the weapons get mounted on the sides of your aircraft, so it's impossible to hit anything directly in front of you. That's always where I aim when playing these games. So except for the huge end-of-level ship I always use the cheapo unlimited-ammo weapon.

Aklabeth is a clone of the prequel to Ultima. I always thought the Ultima games were an incongrous blend of fun overhead 2D adventure and dull underground 3D maze-mapping. Guess which one came first. Written by the same guy who did The Valley of previous-roundup fame.

Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid offers the most realistic depiction as yet of blobs at war. You are a blob commando who must repel an alien invasion and rescue quivering blob MIAs. In a nice postmodern twist, the aliens are also blobs--they look just like you except they're green. I had a great time until I got on the wrong side of a lava pit with no way to cross, and then I gave up and wrote this review.

The game's intro movie uses the actual game mechanics, which is to my mind the only way to do intro movies. It's very gory (insofar as a game about blobs can be gory, which is actually a fair amount), but you can turn of the gore. There is a variety of weapons, though I couldn't find any way to switch between them--it looks like you have one weapon at a time, which can be aggravating because there's a puzzle element to the game that sometimes requires you have a specific weapon.

As for the limerick prize: it's hard for me to decide between bastris and Blob Wars, and I'm tired, so I'm going to punt til tomorrow. Suggested limericks are welcome.

Update: Ok, I came up with a poem finally, about Blob Wars. I was not in a poetry-writing mood today because POLLY CALLED ME FAT! I don't know, what causes people who write poetry to not be in the mood?

There once was a blobbish commando
In many exploits had a hando
He rescued his maties
And made time with the ladies
(See also: Calrissian, Lando)

I discovered this site a couple months ago while researching the old VR game Dactyl Nightmare, when I became enamored with the idea of creating something out of the wreckage of the "Dactyl Nightmare" trademark (or, as it says on the site, "Disclaimer: NIGHTMARE"). But there are so many other possibilities. For instance, did you know that Dactyl Nightmare is now metallurgically balanced? Part of this complete breakfast! Go on, give yourself a Hydra-lift--you deserve it!

Side note: why is this obvious? I don't know! I can't describe this pairing without resorting to terminology like "meaty" and "woody" that seems very unscientific. But at the same time I think that the statement "walnuts go better with blue cheese than pine nuts" is closer to objective fact than to totally arbitrary opinion or taste. If I knew more about food I could find out what compounds give those two foods their flavor and say that they complement each other, but that doesn't explain why and it can't be made into a useful general rule. This drives me crazy.

He won an Oscar for The Omen in 1997, and for six years he wrote the yearly Oscar theme song itself, which should qualify him for a meta-Oscar. He's gone now, but he'll be stuck in people's heads for as long as we watch movies.

However--and this is a big however--despite what certain online yellow pages say, Grand Products is not a Garden Center or Seed Merchant of any kind. You can't buy a shovel there, or mulch, or seeds (not even bamboo seeds). So don't go in there thinking it's a garden supply store, or you will be horribly embarassed.

• This train is bound for Gorey, this train.
• What's your function?

Update: looks like a local problem. Dang universe.

I thought this was universal among American politicians until I heard on the radio Al Gore properly enunciate the phrase in his speech at the DNC yesterday. Admittedly, he was saying "Vice-President of the United States", and also he's Al Gore.

Oh, I've found that it's easier for me to talk about things if I'm responding to questions, so if you have any questions about the profession of politics or my experience in particular, leave a comment.

But why is this? Why do they print so many calendars, so many that most of them (I can only assume) don't get sold and get shipped off to used bookstores? Are calendar manufacturers in a constant state of self-delusion that surely this year the teddy bear calendar will sell 50% more copies than it has sold every year for the past five years? Are the calendars we see in used bookstores merely the unpopular ones? Does selling old calendars to used bookstores actually form a secondary, but still profitable market? I wants to know!

I had ravioli with pesto, because I'm all pesto mania this week (tune in later for the exciting conclusion, to take place tonight). The ravioli was great and the pesto was just OK. There was some cheese substitute they put in the pesto. They should have just left the cheese out. And I should have ordered the lentil loaf instead; it looked pretty good even though it was a vegan copy of a dish that is itself pretty weird.

Sumana had some big french fries and some tacos. I tasted the guacamole on her tacos and it was great.

I got German chocolate cake for dessert. It was really good and I got full before I could finish the slice, which means that I'm being satisfied by smaller portions of sweets, which is good.

We ate dinner with Sumana's old friend John Morearty, and his wife. We recommended movies at each other; one Lone Star for one Spirited Away. Universal touchstone of I've-been-meaning-to-watch-that: The Man in the White Suit.

This was the main reason I wrote Beautiful Soup, so it's been in my head a while. I've been building it up in pilfered snatches of time and it's good enough to release now. It's also the first project created under the aegis of the new Center for High-Energy NewsBruiser, the name I like so much I'm going to use it for my other NewsBruiser-as-web-platform projects.

Give it a try if anything there interests you. I'm especially proud of the text excerpts in the Gutenberg feeds, and the clickable maps in the piracy report.

I always pictured opposition research as kind of an amoral game. You scour all available documents for scraps of your opponent's impropriety (actual or seeming). When you find something, you put on your Concerned Citizen face and release it to the media or make "Shouldn't this be investigated?" inquiries to the appropriate authorities. The goal is to get the media to bite, to get them to Discover An Issue and then try to finesse it into a snowball effect.

It's sad and depressing work, but all campaigns do it. Everyone's hoping for a Whitewater-scale jackpot, something where their opponent will look up in surprise and say "You sank my battleship!" and drop out on the spot. But the more common result is a constant stream of fake scandals and fiascoes that nobody remembers three days later, to match the equally forgettable stream of positive political theater coming out of your own camp.

I'm not talking about negative ads. This stuff is an order of magnitude too flimsy to use in a campaign ad. You'd get an ad like "Senator Bedfellow says he's for American jobs. But this one time, he ate a Toblerone! What's next, Senator--the killing of adorable kittens?"

You can't retroactively change what your candidate said twelve years ago in Rat's Ass, Missouri (though that's a good idea for a time travel story). On the other hand, it's easy to avoid this one particular type of embarrassment by simply treating patriotism as a sort of brand loyalty. But why put so much effort into avoiding such a flimsy fake outrage?

Well, this tiny subgenre of opposition research has a well-defined beginning, according to the campaign worker lore I am now intermittently versed in. It dates back to the 1992 presidential primaries, when Pat Buchanan suffered a fiasco because his campaign car was a Mercedes. A Mercedes! The champion of protectionism using a foreign car, ripping the bread right out of little Johnny Crankshaft's mouth and sending it overseas to the dour offspring of some unsmiling Hun! Fetch the smelling salts! Fiasco!

You can see (assuming this apocryphal tale is where it began) that it didn't start because some random politician had a Nokia watch. It was Pat Buchanan, and it was a car, the very symbol of the decline of American manufacturing. But now everyone is paranoid about it, because it's something they have control over.

Apparently this fiasco--a fake fiasco identical to the fake fiascoes that beseige every campaign every day, one remembered now only by campaign workers--was like the 9/11 of political campaigning, the moment everyone woke up and said "Holy crap! We must henceforth engage in ELABORATE, SUPERFICIAL RITUALS so that this will NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!" Except since the fiascoes are themselves caused by the elaborate, superficial ritual of opposition research (and not by eg. a real enemy who wants to actually kill you), the counter-ritual is actually effective. As far as I know (which is not far at all) there have been no foreign-product-use-based attacks since the Buchanan fiasco. But if you ask me, the real reason is that other candidates are not Pat Buchanan, and these attacks would be less effective on them.

Here are the examples of this Brand America type thinking on the Clark campaign that I can remember. Because I was not privy to purchasing decisions (or indeed any other kind of decision) I'm guessing there were many more decisions made on this scale. I do have two that were kind of weird though.

• All the computers we bought were HPs or Macs. Not a big deal.
• We got Blackberries for all the brass to carry around and message each other with, except they weren't Blackberries. We couldn't use Blackberries because Blackberry is a Canadian company or something. They were these things called Goods (Geed?). But everyone called them Blackberries, because that's what they were.
• When I was looking for a weblog/news software package to run the Clark Community Network, one of the criteria I used was whether or not the software had been written by Americans. It didn't really matter, because Scoop (coming out of Maine, IIRC) was the best choice for what I wanted to do, but it was weird. And not even neccessary--the Dean campaign used Drupal, which was written by a guy in Belgium, and nobody got on their case.

I'm not sure how we justified using Linux for everything. Maybe because everyone else was also using it, and because creating a fiasco around it would require explaining what an operating system was. I think it just doesn't apply to software; only to things that can have incriminating pictures taken of them.

Anyway, the first and less viable of the two politics-related business opportunities I'm going to tell you about is the one where you buy cheap the sort of equipment a campaign needs, change the logos, and resell it as genuine American Brand Tech. Yeah, it's a pathetic sham, but having to explain why it's a pathetic sham makes the issue too complicated for your opponent to use it against you. Complexity: make it work for you in politics!

Well, I thought, I'll encode the numbers x,y as a product of powers of primes 2^x*3^y, just like you would to encode a formula into Gödel numbering. Then I'll have one number that, by the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, uniquely represents some list of numbers. On the other side I'll "just" decode the list from that number.

Then I figured out that the real answer was to put the numbers in a list and pass in the list.

To access the database, a group of the remaining employees gathered together, and in what must have been an unbearably wrenching session, recalled everything they knew about their colleagues: the names of their children; where they went on holidays; what foods they liked; even their personal idiosyncrasies. And they managed to guess the passwords.

If you choose a good password, the terrorists have won!

Well, the deal is that most of those games are clones of games I've been playing off and on for the past fifteen years. They don't have that much play left in them. Even for the ones I like, there's usually some DOS version that is the focal point of my nostalgia, and the new GUI versions don't measure up.

Because of my general policy regarding saying things when I can't say anything nice, I had never even thought about reviewing them. But surely a review, even a cursory one, is better than unthinking deletion. So here is the first in a series of Game Roundups that focuses on games that are probably already installed on your machine. For this reason, I'm not giving links to most of these. Here we go, with the "Games > Arcade" section of your Start^TM-like menu.

• GNOME Robots: First, this is not an arcade game (indeed, it's filed under both "Arcade" and "Puzzle" in my convoluted menu layout). It has the layout of an arcade game but it's turn-based, which no arcade game is. (I would be very interested if anyone has any counterexamples) Anyway, this implementation is not as menacing as the DOS robots clone my uncle Robert had on his PCJr, where a robot with a Cylon eye would taunt you between levels. This version has two types of robots: the "Type 1", which you all know and avoid, and the bloodthirsty, double-quick "Type 2". Doesn't use numeric keypad by default--you're going to put GNOME on the desktop by using vi keys for the robots game? Bad idea, dude.

  Has an idea of "safe moves", where if you try something that would get your little guy killed, it just beeps at you instead of letting you do it. That would be great if I had any emotional attachment to my guy. As it was I was wondering why I couldn't just die and get the game over with. You win, evil shortsighted robots trying to kill one guy!

  Oh, here's a feature I'm excited about. You can change the icon of the things beseiging you. So you can play being chased by shell-gnashing eggs or tail-tapping mice.

• KAsteroids: I always liked this Asteroids clone. Good rock graphics, and some of the rocks have powerups in them (asteroid mining on the cheap, I guess), which adds a different element to the game. There's also a "break" key, so you don't have to turn around and fire your jets in the opposite direction to slow down. Has a pretty silly method of pausing--a modal dialog box pops up saying "KAsteroids is paused". Is that in the usability guidelines? I'm keeping this one; I like Asteroids and this is the best Linux implementation I've played.
• KBounce: "Press Ctrl-N;Space to start a game!" But may I end my turn early? No, because it's a Qix clone (subgenre: mouse-controlled). I think icebreaker (coming soon to a not-installed-by-default Game Roundup near you) has more class, with its near-ASCII graphics. Does bonus score allocation with a dialog box, which I'll admit is easy to program and explains everything well, but doesn't have the visceral thrill of a game where one number goes down as your score goes up at the end of a level. Frippery: Lets you select a background image.
• KFoulEggs: Color-matching Tetris clone (actually a Puyo Puyo clone) with blobs. Points for the name, and for multiplayer mode. Points off for being a clone of a boring game.
• KGoldrunner: Lode Runner clone. Didn't respond to my attempts at keyboard control, then popped up a dialog saying "You have pressed a key that can be used to move the Hero. Do you want to switch automatically to keyboard control!" Now that's service! Except for the automatic part.

  The implementation is not bad--you don't have to stand still while digging a pit; you can move on and the pit will still happen. Unfortunately this means if you're running you can easily fall into your own pit. The sprites for the people are kind of blocky compared to the rest of the sprites; did they copy everything from the old Broderbund game and those sprites don't stand up to the test of time?

• KSirtet: Servicable Tetris clone. Nice block graphic. Its distinguishing feature is that it features an "arcade" mode that's just like the arcade game. No, I did not know this either. The difference is that the arcade version of Tetris clears the board when you "level up", as the kids say.
• Gnometris: Sounds like one of the lesser-visited science labs on the Enterprise. Preferences let you configure the random filler blocks in excruciating detail. A high-class stone finish to the blocks and excellent control makes the act of wasting time playing Tetris seem restful. The game was written for the author's wife, so awwwww. Winner of KDE/Gnome Tetris smackdown: Gnome! But KDE wins for sheer number of Tetris clones bundled with the desktop; see above (and below!).
• KSmileTris: Another PuyoPuyo variation, with smiley faces on the blocks. The best thing about this game is that of course you can change the distinguishing graphics on the blocks, but in a feat of graphics recycling one of the graphic sets consists of the icons for the other comes-with-your-system games reviewed in this roundup. Genius! Sheer misused genius!
• KSnakeRace: I was dreading this one, because I hate these snake games. But this one has nice EGA style graphics and an enemy snake who wishes your doom--and really, who can blame him, after all the horrible things you said about him? Since, if you really think about it, snake games kind of look like Qix, there are red balls bouncing randomly around the playing board. In a biblical twist, you eat apples instead of the featureless energy pellets you see in many snake games.

  My big disappointment was that your inevitable death is not treated with the same drama as the death of the enemy snake. When you run into a wall it just starts the level again, but when the enemy snake gets stuck its tail flows back into its body until it disappears. Also, the snakes have rattles but there's no way to use them. Anyway, I came in with really low expectations but this implementation was cute enough to get me to keep it installed, which is saying a lot because I thought you couldn't pay me to play a snake game anymore.

  PS: What was the name of the original snake game? This has broken my streak of "X clone" comments because I don't know the name of the original progenitor of snake games.

• GNibbles: Not as good as KSnakeRace. Impossible to see your snake on the dark playing board. Graphics in general seem dystopian, though there are side-of-board warps like in Pac-Man. These mean that when you get tired of playing the game (elapsed time: 15 seconds) and start writing the review, your snake can go across the screen over and over again like a dead EEG. Winner of KDE/Gnome snake game smackdown: KDE!
• Gnome Stones: I think this used to be called Gnome Mines but it was changed because it was too similar to gnomine (of which more in the next exciting episode of Games You Already Have Roundup). This is a Boulderdash clone which can't lift a candle to Rocks 'n' Diamonds. The gameplay is jerky, your character is is a freak (okay, he's kind of endearing; I like the Commander Keen-esque mannerism animations when you're not moving him around), and I have it on good authority there are only 60,000 levels. Best part: psychedelic between-level fades. Get Rocks 'n' Diamonds instead.
• KSpaceDuel: A SpaceWar clone, made ridiculous by the fact that the contestants are satellites with little solar panel wings, and not proper spaceships at all. Two-player only, but has space mines.
• KTron: The Tron lightcycle game is just a deathmatch version of the snake game, so I think it's even less interesting. But check out the "Appearance" configuration panel for this implementation. It lets you change the line style and line size and color, as though it were a chart program.
• Kolf: Ok, this one I actually hadn't seen--it's new in KDE 3.2, so I'm providing a link. The wacky Modernist splash screen intrigued me. And it's a lot of fun! It's a mini-golf game with water hazards, moving platforms, pinball bumpers, teleportation, Excitebike-style acceleration panels, and other things that would be impractical on a real miniature golf course.

  My generally horrible scores were balanced out by a good many holes in one. (In the anti-frustration sense, not in the below-par sense.) It's probably a clone of something, but I've never played the original (much less 10 variations of the original at various points throughout my life), so it's new to me. Includes "USA Pro" tour which replicates actual miniature golf holes with probably no degree of accuracy whatsoever--wait, I get it. They are miniature golf recreations of places, like the Grand Canyon and Lake Tahoe (Tahoe?!?! One can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and-- Calm down, Sam). This is a great game.

Greetings, already havers of the following games. Today we look at computer versions of games usually played on boards. "Board Games", they are called. Man, it's hard to fill up a whole introductory paragraph. Did you ever notice how arbitrary the "board game" term is when games are categorized in a Linux installation? The category includes solitaire Mahjongg, which is not a board game and uses pieces from a board game that has no proper board. It includes Yahtzee, which is put out by a board game company but is played entirely with dice. Yet it does not, and this is the real travesty, it does not include my groundbreaking multiplayer mudfest "Bran's Brother Has Flipped!: The Home Game". Where's the justice? Not in this life, my friends.

That's why I'm imposing a strict rule on this episode of Games You Already Have Roundup. No matter what the menu classification says, if the game does not feature competition, ie. you versus some human or AI opponent, it is not a board game. It will not be featured in this episode, but rather in the next episode, Games You Already Have Roundup III: The Search For Puzzle Games. Hopefully the people who write Debian post-install scripts for these games will take this as the stinging rebuke it undoubtedly is, and will get their act together in time to avert game-categorization catastrophe on a grand scale.

Don't thank me; I'm only doing this so I can put off playing those awful marble games. And now, with further ado, the games.

• KWin4: Give me a break! I thought I could go the rest of my life without having to play Connect Four, but then I got this crazy idea to review all these bundled games. Hm, I never realized how quickly this game degenerates into a holding pattern where you fill up all the useless rows to the top.

  Actual title of this clone: either "Four wins" or "Kwin4", depending on what part of the application you believe. You can play over the network. I hope that was fun for the author to implement. Nice animation, on the opening screen and in the game. It's really well-put-together, but it's Connect Four. What's next? Operation? The goofy game for dopey doctors?

• Four-in-a-row: Argh! OK, this one's actually not a good game. It looks like every other Gnome game with marbles on a grid, but it's got the logic of Connect Four. Again the inconsistent naming: help claims it is called "Gnect". I also can't help noticing that I never win. Is it a solved problem or am I just no good at this game? This version has AI settings, which implies the latter. Winner of of KDE/Gnome Connect Four clone smackdown: damn you, Connect Four! The only way to win is not to play. I hate to admit that there are degrees of "better" and "worse" here, but the KDE one is a lot better.
• Iagno: Scraping the bottom of the Gnome pun barrello is this Othello clone. I started wanting to eat the pieces; they look like delicious mints. I tried various buttons to see if one was the "eat" button. I searched the settings for an option that would let me eat the pieces. Then I gave up and switched to a slick sun-and-moon graphic set which I think would give the implementation a lot more character if it were used as the default. Two local players or AI.
• KReversi: Graphics not nearly as good as Iagno's can be, and what's more the animation is annoying. In Iagno all the pieces you capture turn over simultaneously. In KReversi they turn over piece by maddening piece (I later found out you can speed up the animation so fast it goes away). However I perservered and by pressing the one Othello hint I've learned since I was 9 and playing a BASIC Othello game ("go for the corners"), I was able to rack up what I think is my first Othello win ever. One player against AI only. Winner of KDE/Gnome Othello clone smackdown: Gnome!
• GNOME Tali: It's Yahtzee, despite the name which tries to connect it to the ancient Roman game of knucklebones. For once, I believe the game conglomorate official history. It's fun. I don't need to defend Yahtzee to you. I like the interface by which the dice you want to re-roll turn into pumpkins when you select them. AI and/or human players. Keep it.
• Ataxx: Uses the same graphics as Iagno. And it's a little like Othello: you're trying to convert your opponent's pieces to your color. But you have a choice: you can clone a piece by 'moving' it to an adjacent square, or you can jump a piece and convert all neighboring enemy pieces. There's a point at which the strategy abruptly switches from always cloning to always jumping, and at that point the game can go on for quite a while. There's nothing wrong with this game, but I think Othello has a better-defined win condition.
• KBackgammon: To review this I thought I would have to relearn how to play backgammon, but it turns out this is not the case. This game is a mostly GUI wrapper around GNU backgammon, which in and of itself is fine. There are also GUI wrappers around eg. GNU chess. But the GUI wrappers to GNU chess don't have a text adventure-esque interface surrounding the chessboard where you interact with the GNU chess engine. You don't have to enter a special command to castle; the chessboard and the pieces and the drag and the drop constitute the whole user interface. Yet tragically this seems not to be the case with KBackgammon--sometimes nothing in the GUI will advance the game and you have to type a command. So even if you know how to play backgammon, I think you will find that KBackgammon is not nearly as usable as it should be. However as I flailed around trying to understand this state of affairs I was treated to comical output like "Only 3 beavers are permitted (see `help set beavers')." Who will deny me additional beavers?!?!

  PS: Why does chess not come with every system? It's the single most popular chess in the world! Could it be because "gchess" and "kchess" are already taken as names?

• Atlantik: I remember the halcyon days of 1998 when Linux was a doomed fad and this program was called "kmonop". Yes, I remember well those halcyon days of 2001, when Linux was just a flash in the pan and this program was renamed to Atlantik under legal pressure. I stood by on the sidelines for years and watched via the project go from its original goal--to be a Monopoly clone for Linux--to being an all-singing, all-dancing all-client-server Monopoly®-like board game framework, allowing you to play any arbitrary game so long as it was homomorphic to Monopoly. Well, I get quite enough of that philosophy in the world of physical games. I managed to avoid Atlantik, to keep it in the realm of free software nostalgia and out of the realm of free software installed on my computer, until this installation with its new version of KDE. Even now I have managed to avoid actually playing it due to the server not working (admittedly, I am not trying very hard to make it work). So you can say this is not a fair review if you want. Maybe if I actually started playing I would find some features to tickle my fancy.

  Looking at the board designer, which does work, I see that your games can differ from Monopoly mainly in the number and names of squares, the cards, the rents charged, and the locations of the special squares. Frankly I expected more from a project that seems to have fallen victim to hacker mania for abstraction; it looks like it just lets you design your own local version of Monopoly. Whereas if I were to design a Monopoly-like game it would have fluctuating rents, mobile properties, and monstrous beasts that roamed the streets destroying houses and hotels on your command. On the other hand, Atlantik is bundled with KDE, and none of my stuff is. So they must be doing something right. PS: Linux is too hard to install! There's no application support! Where's the GUI?

• Kenolaba: Where chess is a battle this is kind of a mob scene, or a really big wrestling match where all the down-home "good" wrestlers take on all the effete, pretty-boy, villanous, or downright foreign "evil" wrestlers at once instead of going at it one-on-one or tag-team. Or maybe a real battle instead of the abstract battle that was planned beforehand. You have to push your opponent's pieces off the board using your own pieces. Really nice click-and-drag interface. I was wondering "What kind of game played on a big hex board could justify its inclusion in kdegames?" But this is a... wait, I just figured it out. This is that game "Abalone". I never checked out that game and now it's been KDEized. Anyway, a good game worth your attention.
• kbattleship: You sunk my kbattleship! OK, I got nothing. This is your basic Battleship game. Has several nice improvements over the overpriced Milton-Bradley version. Apparently you're not allowed to put your ships touching each other (I never knew this), so when you destroy a ship it blocks out all the surrounding squares so you don't waste time on known bad squares. This is pretty good, but I don't think the AI is too smart.

• Mahjongg (Gnome): The tiles look cheap, like they're made of parchment wrapped around Altoids tins. If I'm going to play I want the tiles to look classy. Otherwise: has hint, random number seed, etc, the same as the Amiga Mahjongg I played at my uncle Jon's house (I seem to have a lot of history with games played on my uncles' computers. Also, I only assume that was an Amiga, but I think it was). Background color sucks, but you can change it. Has a "shuffle" feature that shuffles just the tiles you haven't already removed, which is a good way to avoid frustration, and it's not cheating if you decide that's the game you're playing. Nonetheless, this implementation is no match for:
• KMahjongg: Now these are some slick tiles. It's probably just because the tiles are more stylized, so I don't try to see them as photorealistic. But they look like they're made of sandstone or something. Also, the KDE Mahjongg tile set has the awesome fire-breathing (a Westernism?) dragon tiles to represent "C", "F", and "P". Whatever those are. (PS: aha!) In its turn, no match for:
• Shisen-Sho: Like the solitare remove-the-tiles computer Mahjongg (not to be confused with actual Mahjongg as played by bored housewives of all nations), but much better. This should be the standard Mahjongg game, but it won't be because it doesn't look as cool in screenshots. Instead of nice stacks of tiles you have a big board. Tip: turn off gravity; the game is pointless unless you can see yourself taking chunks of tiles out of the board. Did I mention that this was the game I played in college when I was bored? Winner of KDE/Gnome Mahjongg smackdown: It's Shisen-sho, in a blatant display of favoritism! The crowd goes wild for Shisen-sho, master of games played with Mahjongg tiles! Woooooooo!
• KHangman: This game made me laugh harder than any other game in this roundup, but unfortunately the laughter was unintentional. When you start up the game you are treated to the sight of an uppercase K which has met an untimely demise at the end of the hangman's noose. The interface eschews drop-down menus in favor of buttons along the side of the panel, and one of the buttons is "Child Mode". If you click "Child Mode" the interface simplifies drastically and the background changes to a nice picture of rolling hills and sun and flowers. But there's still that purple-tongued K dangling in the noose! I thought Child Mode would sanitize the game, but it merely moves the death-fest to an outdoor venue! Comic highlight of the Roundup!

  Oh yeah, the game. It's hangman. It focuses too much on building the scaffold rather than hanging you piecemeal, and the UI isn't up to code, but it works. I couldn't lose, even on words like "ethnography", but a thing about hangman that a lot of people don't appreciate is that longer words are not neccessarily harder unless you're counting on someone not knowing the word.

• Imagine if Bastet were taken seriously as a game, not as an exercise in sadism. Imagine if it were used as an example of a simple game you too could write, if clones were indeed written of it, if small children pledged allegiance to it each school day. You would have Color Lines. This whip-wielding dominatrix of puzzle games will titillate you with lurid personal ads in the "Alternatives" section of the local weekly and then prove unable to deliver anything beyond simply hitting you with the whip a lot. Originally written for Windows, it has infiltrated your red-blooded Linux system in not one but the requisite two incarnations: Kolor Lines for KDE, and Glines for Gnome. Now, in this review, I shall have my revenge.

  In this game you are faced with a grid containing some colored balls. You get to move one ball to any accessible empty square, and then three balls are placed randomly on the grid. When you line up five or more like-colored balls they disappear and you get to move again. When the grid fills up you lose.

  The source of my frustration with this game is that it is impossible to win, or even to keep playing indefinitely. With Tetris you could imagine having superhuman reflexes and playing forever. With Skee-Ball you are given a certain number of shots up front and you do not resent the end of the game. In some games like golf, the game is played out to a series of goals which has a predefined end. But none of these are true of Color Lines; while in principle a game could go on forever, the laws of statistics say that no matter how good you are, the board will always fill up and you will lose. To stay in a steady state you would have to consistently be able to create a line of 5 balls by moving 2 2/3 balls (since you get a free move after completing a line). Good luck can keep you going for a while, but this just makes you feel more helpless. It is a depressing game.

  As for the implementations themselves: The Gnome version lets you change the graphic used to represent the balls; the KDE version lets you set the difficulty level. Choose the feature that's right for you. Now all that's missing is a game that combines Bastet with Color Lines (putting the balls in the worst possible spaces), creating the game of ultimate frustration. The "Very Hard" setting on Kolor Lines comes close, but I think there's still room for improvement.

  Winner of KDE/Gnome Color Lines smackdown: in the true spirit of Color Lines, this smackdown will have no winner. Oh, all right. In the slightly less true spirit of Color Lines I have chosen a winner at random. random.choice(['KDE', 'Gnome']) == 'KDE'!

• GNOME Klotski: More on the puzzle end of the spectrum than the game end. Like Sokoban played via telekenesis; you have to move little blocks out of the way so the big block can be moved. It reminds me of a wooden puzzle my father had, but that's about all I can say about it. Oh, it also dares to, on the high score list, represent the number of moves to two decimal places. Fun if you are crazy about Sokoban (and I assume there are people who do). Come to think of it, why is there not a GNOME Sokoban clone and a KDE Sokoban clone bundled with all my installations?
• KDE Atomic Entertainment: Nice name. Sounds like a production company. This is a game played on a Sokoban type board where you move atoms around to form molecules. It's not Sokoban because the defining game mechanism is reaching down from the third dimension and sliding an atom in one direction until it hits a wall, not pushing an atom one square in the opposite direction from where you're standing. Anyway, I like Sokoban better as far as gameplay, but I really love the concept here.
• KBlackBox: It was with great forboding that I opened up this "logic game". It was frustrating at first, so much so that I started wondering why I cared about a box full of lasers, and when that happens you know the game's in trouble. It's a clone of an Emacs Lisp game that I'm sure resembles the original in great detail, but is not very helpful to people who don't know the other game. This must be how people feel about remakes of eg. Lode Runner if they've never played Lode Runner. Anyway, after some initial futzing around wondering what "R" and "H" and "1" meant I finally read all the instructions and seriously went about the task of locating the reflective balls in this box full of lasers, and wouldn't you know I got it almost entirely right. But I didn't think it was very fun. If you like Minesweeper but think Minesweeper is too simple, you might like this.
• Tetravex: When you look at these squares with a number on each side you think "Great, I'm going to be rotating these squares and doing small-change arithmetic til the end of time." But actually you're just arranging those squares in a grid so that the numbers match, and you'll be done long before the end of time. It's basically the same as the puzzles-on-cards I used to spend ages with on long car trips, so it evokes a certain nostalgia, but the numbers still make me feel like it should be one of those math puzzles where you need to make everything come out at 21.
• kmines and gnomines: OK, both of these games are slavish imitations of the old Windows 3.1 standard. They work the exact same way. They have the same sort of graphics. I am going to give the smackdown prize to kmines, even though gnomines' flag graphic is far superior, for the following two reasons:
  1. gnomines' happy face tries way too hard to be cute and doesn't fit in the happy face button, so it looks like someone's peering through a window at you.
  2. In general, gnomines has UI spacing issues. The bottom of the minefield is way too close to the status bar for my taste.

  You see the kind of tiny distinction I have to make to turn this into a proper smackdown?

  UPDATE UPSET: gnomines takes it back! Shocking details inside!

• klickety: The closest thing I've seen in years to Tear Down The Wall. You are faced with a jumble of colored bricks subject to gravity. Click on a group of adjacent blocks of the same color and it disappears. The only problem is that now I feel dirty because this game turned Tear Down The Wall into something sort of like Tetris.

  When you get a high score, says "Congratulations, you have won!", which makes me think of the Nirvana song Opinion. Actually this is true of many of the kde games; it must be in the library.

• SameGame: I think this was the game that started the KDE/Gnome clone wars. Maybe I'm just making that up. Anyway, now that I think about it this game is a lot like klickety, but on a smaller board. There are marbles on the board and clicking on a set of adjecent like-colored marbles removes the whole set and compacts the board. Nice rotation mouseover effect. This game has an 'undo' feature, unlike...
• SameGnome: Same game as SameGame, but themeable. I always liked the "planets" theme, but the colors aren't as distinct. Maybe they should use Neptune instead of the moon. Winner of smackdown: Gnome, just for the planets.
• KMessedWords: I thought this would be Boggle, and then when I loaded it up I thought it was the game equivalent of that software that looks at redacted text and tries to figure out what the text is. It turns out it's a game that shows you a scrambled word and makes you unscramble it. Unfortunately the word shows up on my screen as black-on-black, so I can't play except by guessing words randomly from the configurable word list. Same UI sensibility and same original author as KHangman.

Bonus: I should have reviewed these yesterday, but they were classified as puzzle games even though by the standards set out yesterday they're board games, so I missed them.

• KJumpingCube: A territory game that features a stack of pieces on each square. That's how I think of it, anyway, but the game chooses to represent the number of items in the stack as a face of a cube. Each turn you can put one piece on a square/increment the ordinal of a square by one. A square with fewer pieces on it than enemy pieces surrounding it is taken over. Two players or human vs. AI.
• Konquest/Galactic Conquest/GNUlactic Conquest is a great multiplayer game that's kind of like a mini-FreeCiv. Both Sumana and I are big fans. I like it due to its mix of its mix of strategy, tactics, and bluffing. Sumana says it's the best two-player computer game since Puzzle Fighter. You send ships across the galaxy or GNUlaxy, I suppose (maybe a GNUlaxy is just a very large solar system) to conquer planets and crush the inhabitants in fists of various hard materials. But your real target is your opponents, both the humans who share the computer with you and vicious AIs like Comp1 and the sinister, monocled Comp2. "The once mighty empire of Comp1 has fallen in ruins." Ah, music to my ears.

What are they doing, anyway? About two-thirds of the documents they put in the database are not online, and lack even a reliable bibliography link, so I haven't been able to put them in the RSS feed yet. Are there 75 and only 75 new documents published by the government every day? I have no idea whether or not that number even sounds right.

Supposedly the GPO is required to keep a master index of everything the government publishes, but is that really all of it? They're still releasing documents from 2000 and 1994. That implies that there's a big delay in getting some information from the government agency to the GPO. It's a mystery. I am driven by the cool idea of having an RSS feed listing every document the government publishes, but even if this feed had all the not-online ones I can't shake the feeling it's only scratching the surface. Does anyone know?

• AisleRiot: Starts off as a slavish Klondike klone of the Windows 3.1 Solitaire that made "computer" synonymous with "productivity drain". Fortunately, can be turned into about 80 other card games a la pysol. Nice acronym, and by default uses the Knuth font for the card labels. As go attempts to tug on pysol's coattails, pretty good.
• Patience: KDE's attempt at a pysol type framework. Also starts up as Klondike. Not as slick as AisleRiot, and only has 18 games, including three difficulty levels of Spider. I like the card-flip animation though (but not the card-turning-over animation, which I find disturbing and smacking of witchcraft). Unlike AisleRiot, it can play games on its own (and is actually easier to watch doing this than pysol), though it can get into an infinite loop. Winner of KDE/Gnome pale shadow of pysol smackdown: Gnome!
• Blackjack: Actually, this one's not in pysol. And this is a good implementation. In a fit of anti-realism, will actually help you improve your blackjack game by showing you the odds and giving you hints in case you don't understand what the odds mean what with all the confusing numbers between zero and one. It even does card counting for you, and doesn't kick itself out (though I was able to crash it).

  Downsides: somewhat unintuitive interface requires that you click the dealer's hand to stand. Keeps your winnings (or losings) in some Gnome persistence cubbyhole so it's like one eternal round of blackjack your whole life unless you clear out the file or whatever gconf uses. Figures out the optimal strategy for blackjack every time it loads, which is a bit slow.

  Since you have an unlimited amount of credit, I was thinking it would be actually possible to do the thing where you double your bet every time you lose and thus have an expected take of zero no matter how long play or how unlucky you are. Unfortunately, a 500.00 (in a nod to internationalization, there are no units; but I assume it's not like 500.00 baht) per-hand limit stymied my plans, but I'm still 652.50 ahead after a few high-stakes rounds. This game is fun and glamorous and statistical, but I can't stop thinking about the dealer in the old BASIC blackjack game who would give lame excuses like "THE CARDS HAVE TURNED AGAINST ME" when he lost. Is there no place for heart in your cruel modern technology? The heart provided by lousy twenty-year-old technology?

  Oh, I forgot to mention that there are a lot of rules knobs you can tweak, but the rules are gathered into groups like "Atlantic City" and "Vegas Strip". You can't tweak them individually. Anyway, this is a good game and I wasn't expecting it.

• Freecell: I was worried this would be a whole nother program from AisleRiot, but it's actually just AisleRiot set up to run Freecell instead of Klondike. Good call, Gnome people. Next!
• KPoker: Can be played video-poker style or against one computer opponent. I won $82 off the computer, which I know it has because I paid several hundred dollars for this computer, but it won't pay up. Deadbeat computer! When you win, has a little screen-saver like wavy effect on the notification that you won which is a little queasy.

  Remember, you click the cards you want to keep, not the ones you want to discard. I traded a straight in for two pair by keeping the one card I wanted to discard. Also, the computer is not a real poker player--it never folds in response to an agressively played hand, or does anything besides match your bets and optimize its hand. So really it's just another type of video poker when you play against the computer. But still not bad.

• Lieutenant Skat: I think this was one of those wartime movies where Mel Tormé joined the army. Anyway, it's also a card game implemented for KDE with a splash screen that looks just like what you might see on the big LCD of a Vegas marquee in between ads for cheap surf-and-turf. I always thought it was a solitaire game, but it's actually a two-player game that is what War would be like if you tried to make it into an actual game with real strategy and kung-fu grip. Amusing German-sounding error messages like "This move would not follow the rulebook. Better think again!" add to the Teutonic flavor.
• xmille: I don't know if this still comes with systems, but it should. Consider it a bonus. Before KDE and Gnome and their big bundles of toys and games, there was a big bundle of toys and games that came bundled with X Windows. This game stood among them. Someone should write a modern GUI version of this because not everyone can stand the unadorned X widget set, but I love this game. It's Milles Bourne, which is a classic card game even though I've never played it with cards. It simulates a car race where both contestants are trying to sabatoge their opponents. It's a fun game, but a little weird, frustrating, and often capricious; as with running for president, you can win the race yet have thousands of points fewer than your opponent. Who wins? It doesn't say.

So, that's all the X games that come with your standard Linux install nowadays. Stay tuned for Games You Already Have Roundup V: The Final Toys.

Your eyes already know to invert an image (since an image hits your retina upside-down), and how to merge two 2D images into a 3D image. Unless this is an inate ability, your brain must learn to do this by coordinating your sight with your other senses over time. So unless this behavior is fixed in childhood, it should be possible to change the way your brain processes your visual input. It should be possible to wear such goggles all the time and eventually adjust to having full-circle vision, perceiving things as though you actually had eyes all around your head.

Simpler experiment: If you wore lenses all the time that inverted everything, would your brain eventually learn to process the image exactly as it appeared on your retina?

More complicated experiment: could you also add cameras above and below the ring of cameras that formed the panoramic camera, creating a near-complete sphere of vision? At what point would your brain be unable to handle the additional information?

Who will volunteer for my monstrous Beholder-Man experiment (funding request pending)?

• Tea Cooker: This is a timer. It is preset for various types of tea steeping. Has a little, hard-to-read pie-chart display in the deskbar window (is deskbar a word or did I just make it up?). You can choose your own custom time. As a timer, it's not bad.
• KDE World Clock: Displays a geographic map of the world with the in-daylight portion shaded. You can add flags to various cities, which would be nice if you were homesick or separated from your loved one. The best feature is the ability to change the map graphic to an irrelevant false-color map of the earth that shows eg. the amount of rainfall.
• AMOR: The only in this series of Roundups to which I have made an (unofficial) contribution. AMOR creates a little animated icon that wanders around the active window and does tricks. My favorite is the segmented worm; it's cute.
• Mousepedometa: an odometer for your mouse. It measures how far (in inches or centimeters) you've moved your mouse pointer. The help claims the next version will be USEFUL, which I assume means it will have a keystroke counter as well. Has a trip odometer, just like the odometer in a car. Old-fashioned analog flippy number graphics, not the harsh digital graphics of the modern era. Would you believe I racked up 10.8 inches on the mouse writing this review?

  Oh, also if you had your WACOM tablet pen acting as the mouse, you could use it to do things like see how long your signature would be if it were a straight line.

• Moon phase indicator: The moon is new right now. That's all it says, so that's all I'll say. Lets you see the moon from any Earthbound angle, not that it matters at the moment.
• KTuberling: A Mr. Potato Head for KDE. Hacker Abstraction Syndrome (henceforth to be abbreviated HAS) has added "penguin" and "aquarium" modes, but has yet to turn it into a KidPix like collage/drawing program. A lot of fun. To the right you can see Sheriff Tater, my own creation.
• xeyes: The sailor's favorite. This classic demonstration of non-square windows in X (this used to be a big deal, but I think everyone has it now) is a pair of googly eyes that follow your cursor. It would be kind of funny to have a background be a famous painting and put xeyes on top of it so that the painting's eyes really did follow you (r cursor) across the room (screen).
• xlogo: It's the X logo. Useless! Except, I suppose, as an example X program.
• xearth: This doesn't come with enough systems. It pretty obviously inspired the thing in Snow Crash that's exactly the same but fancier. Like KDE World Clock, but shows the earth as a globe in space. Has lots of options (with or without starfield, markers, etc.). Good clean fun.

  PS: if you are interested in this sort of thing, check out Fourmilab's Earth and Moon viewer. I think I've mentioned that the Fourmilab website is what Crummy merely aspires to be. On that happy note, we end this roundup.

Did I miss something that came with your system? Let me know and I'll review it, unless it is not a game or (catch-all) I don't want to review it.

I'm spookily intrigued by the possibility of applying this (very simple) algorithm to 'real' news headlines. But right now I'm more intrigued by the possibility of sleeping. Enjoy, all-night surfers and people on the other side of the world.

There are some good ones, though, like "Flying ants End Airbus Subsidies", "Ruling Resigns, Admits Gay Affair", and "Category 4 Charley Raises $2.4 Million Near Seattle". In recognition of this, I decided to just get it to not use the most morbid headline fragments. See what I've done? I'm already making the compromises that result in offbeat news in the first place.

Ingredients

• 4 Russet potatoes, diced (do not peel!)
• 2 ribs of celery, chopped
• 3 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 3 ears corn, cut from the cob
• 1 can creamed corn
• 2 cans vegetable broth plus water to cover
• 2 large leeks: soaked, chopped, soaked again (this is to get rid of any dirt or sand)
• 1 cup cream
• Tarragon
• Thyme
• Salt and pepper

Procedure

Put everything except the leeks and the cream in a pot and start a-simmerin'. Saute the leeks in butter and put them in the pot. Once the potatoes and the corn are cooked (maybe 30 minutes), mash the soup with a potato masher. If you want, blend it a little with a stick blender. At the last minute, stir in the cream to turn it into a chowdah.

This is the only recipe I know of that is both a potato-leek soup and a potato-corn chowdah. That's right, it's two soups in one. Step right up!

PS about stick blenders: they cost about $30 except for one particular brand (I forget which) that costs $10. It's not worth $30 to have one but I think it is worth $10. So get the cheap one. It is useful for: soups, whipping cream, light drink-mixing duty.

PPS: Susanna, I made your ninety-minute rolls this morning and they were so good that I made another batch in the evening.

Update: Bizarrely, it works now.

Of course you don't really need the list. Once you've read and written enough political speech the buzzwords just flow from your fingers as you type. But all sorts of irrelevant, non-buzzwords flow from your fingers as well. How can you be sure people see the buzzwords?

Enter the Eater of Meaning. Since political writing contains little meaning to begin with, this eater works a little differently from the others. It simply highlights the buzzwords (green for positive buzzwords, red for negative buzzwords), and leaves everything else alone, letting your readership see the tone of the document at a glance and be appropriately alarmed, reassured, or inspired. Kind of the way Onion articles work, come to think of it. I don't have a good Eater-themed name for it yet; any suggestions?

Examples: #1, #2, vs. a control site in case you think I'm kidding. The list of buzzwords is kind of dated, but on the whole it holds up well. Enjoy.

Update: Danny calls this "'They Live' style shades for political hotwords", which is an excellent summary but which is not Eater-related. My eating metaphor has backed me into a corner while simultaneously painting that corner!

Sorry, that turned out to be a sentence fragment. IF [previous paragraph], you will be pleased to know that there is a way to feed your craving that involves real food. A couple days ago I made Alton Brown's Stovetop Mac-n-Cheese recipe, and it was as though the genie of the lamp had said "So, you want it cheesy? I will grant your wish, but with an ironic twist--it will be TOO CHEESY TO EAT!" And it is, almost. I planned to cut it with frozen peas, but my only box of frozen peas expired almost a year ago and looked like it had been defrosted more times than was good for it. I composted the peas and ate it straight.

By the time I was done I was sick of macaroni and cheese and never wanted to eat it again. I packaged up the leftovers and took it to Sumana's house, hoping she would eat the rest. Now, two days later, I want to eat the rest. It's that good.

The only downside is that it's 2-3 times more expensive than the boxed kind. At least it is around here. It's probably proportionately less more expensive (huh?) elsewhere, since the boxed kind seems to cost a dollar everywhere in the country. It's still cheap compared to other dinners you could be having. My faith in Alton Brown is vindicated! Maybe his baked macaroni and cheese will finally live up to my mental image of "baked macaroni and cheese".

It turns out it was a lily, and that lilies are made of poison. The previous tenants must have planted some lily bulbs that suddenly decided to grow even though the stuff I planted is not growing that well. Anyway, I washed my mouth out with a lot of milk and have so far not died.

The lesson is, don't put something in your mouth just because it grew in ground you now control.

He has scanned comic-ads from Tinkle, the folktale-packed foolishly-named ACK adjunct magazine that Sumana has but a few copies of. I've always liked it nonetheless, due to its providing a home for Doob Doob and Kalia the Crow (Caw, caw.).

• The one from the previous entry, where you buy brown eggs especially for boiling and white eggs for leaving alone and not boiling.
• There's some way of distinguishing good eggs from bad eggs by holding it up to a candle or other bright light and looking at the size of the yolk or something. You should also be able to use this to distinguish boiled and raw eggs.
• Just crack the egg and, if it turns out to have been raw, go back in time and stop yourself from cracking it.

• Gearhead is a great Roguelike with Omega-like nonlinearity, excellent character development for a Roguelike, and many wacky touches like randomly generated dialogue, which throws it all away by being a mecha game. Because it has the potential to be so great and its fatal flaw is so simple, I am going to take this opportunity to make a detailed argument about UI design which you can skip if you find it boring.

  In case you came late to the party, a mecha is a Godzilla-sized robot (such as, well, Mechagodzilla) operated by a person who is usually riding in the robot. The point of a mecha game is to do a game on a large scale, where you can crunch through entire cities wreaking havoc. People who like mecha games also seem to like drawing lots of pictures of mechas (mecha? mechae?), which is not my cup of tea, but that is not relevant to this discussion.

  In your standard Roguelike game, you push buttons to control a simulated person. When you play a mecha game, you are pushing buttons to control a simulation of a person pushing buttons to control a second machine. Sometimes people have wacky ideas about what it would look like to have a video game about playing a video game. Well, here you have it. It looks like a mecha game, and it is annoying.

  It doesn't have to be this way. Mechas are, by conceit of the genre, vaguely humanoid. The best interface is therefore the one you've spent your whole life using: your own body. Forgo the buttons and use motion capture and force-feedback to tie your mecha's movement to your own, as in Fiasco. Indeed, some mechas are refered to as "suits", implying this very mechanic. In game terms, this would be implemented by letting you use the same commands to move your mecha in battle mode as you use to move yourself in non-battle mode.

  If you absolutely need to simulate additional clunkiness (eg. so you can have a notion of "current facing direction", as Gearhead does), do it by reducing the directional key controls to the Clunky Three: rotate left, rotate right, and thrust (move forward). This time-honored trio shows up in innumerable games all the way back to Spacewar, and nothing does a better job of connoting "the thing on the screen does not represent you, only a machine you control". I don't play a lot of mecha games, but this was used in the only one I ever liked--a DOS play-by-modem maze chase that Andy and I used to play.

  Gearhead, in the worst mecha game tradition, forgoes both these mecha-motion strategies in favor of a menu system. When you're just walking around with your feet, you can use the arrow keys to move. But when it comes time to stand and fight mecha-style, you can't directly move your mecha at all. Instead of letting you use the arrow keys for left, right, and thrust, there is a menu system which has options for left, right, and thrust. You use the arrow keys to select your option from a menu, and hit enter to rotate or move. It's Microsoft Mecha 98. Just don't do this! There's no reason to! Factor out the aggravation for a better game.

  Someone who likes mecha games might say that this is part of the the game; the human is subsumed into the machine and must operate it in clunkiness. I would say that misses the point. You are already interacting with a machine in a clunky way. It's just that it's a real machine, not a simulated one. Treat the player sitting at the computer as though they were the character sitting in the mecha, and you've got big mimesis wihout sacrificing usability. You can bet the character in the game is not selecting "Rotate left" from a menu; it's not that bad to drive a mecha. Take advantage of the clunkiness of the standard Roguelike controls and kill two robo-birds with one mecha-stone.

  I've picked on Gearhead enough. As I said, I pick on it not because it's a bad game but because it's a really, really good game made virtually unplayable by a bad UI decision. It's a game where talking to the world-weary shopkeeper is quick and fun, but where even small battles play at a crawl. Admittedly I have a preference for the world-weary shopkeeper type interaction, but that doesn't mean I want the battles to be slow and hard to play.

• icebreaker is interesting because of the skill with which it uses nice iconic graphics to conceal the fact that it's another Qix clone until you actually start playing. There's also a convenient webpage which details all the ways in which this game is different from Microsoft's Jezzball, pioneer of the mouse-based Qix clone.

  As previously mentioned, this is a lot better than KBounce. It has penguins--the bouncy balls are penguins and you're trying to cut up their ice floes so they can be transported to zoos or some lame excuse like that. I like the penguins, but I don't like the linear way it gets harder, adding one penguin each time.

• Freebooters: Lovely nonsensical name disguises a game that is more atmosphere than game by a wide margin. It's set in the Caribbean region, and who's to say but that certain piratical impulses might be indulged in the course of the game. That's what it promises, anyway. What it delivers is a game where you, a legitimate businessman, go from port to port buying and selling rum and other commodities (in a welcome deviation from realism, there is no slave-running). Occasionally you run into a pirate ship and have it out, but the having-it-out action scenes have weird controls and look like boats fighting in a bathtub. It reminds me of a nautical version of North And South, but not as good. Great graphics in the non-real-time parts of the game, though.

  This game is a clone of "Pirates!", one of Sid Meier's pre-Civilization games. There was a real chance here for the clone to improve on the original, but it just plays like early Sid Meier, the kind of game that would be fun if it were the late 80s and similar, better games didn't exist yet.

• Komi is not actually a Qix clone, but I can't shake the feeling that it's somehow homomorphic to Qix. You are a frog with an arbitrarily long tongue, a frog who lives in a swamp--of madness! Alien spaceships and vicious robins patrol the air, protecting the yummy fireflies that are your food. To retrieve these morsels you must dare to expose your tongue to the alien/robin joint assault for as long as it takes to move your tongue up the screen and then back down--but wait! The water itself teems with vicious herons who will peck at you, and fish that will gobble you up! I'm taking liberties as to what the sprites are supposed to be; they don't look like herons or fish or fireflies (but they do look like alien spaceships). The web page says you are a "space frog", which might explain things even as it makes things more confusing. Anyway, it's very hectic and it's fun for a while.
• Laby: Fun roguelike, very customizable with skillset. Has a kind of SNES feel to it. Hard to find items, instant death got me twice. Really feels like there's something missing in terms of game balance, but I still want to play even though I know I'm just going to die. A little work could turn this into a classic.
• Dead Mobsters has a great idea (mobsters come back from the dead in a Marley-esque quest to undo the damage they did while alive... okay, it's not quite that good) and excellent funny graphics, but it's way too hard. The undeath factor explains the old video-game conundrum of how you can take ten bullets to the chest and still live, but it doesn't explain why your un-undead opponents have the same ability. It's doubly frustrating when your opponents can fire off those ten bullets all at once, while you're stuck with the crappy one-bullet-on-the-screen-at-a-time gun they issued you in Mobster Hell. Fix this, and you've got a fun shoot-em-up.

Wow, there are a lot more X Pictures of the Day than the last time I checked. How about a roundup?

"There is GNOME Sokoban already implemented as a set of caves within GNOME Stones." Of course there is. I should have seen that coming, since the exact same thing happened with Rocks 'n' Diamonds.

Re the Minesweeper clone smackdown where I didn't care: he tipped the scale hugely in favor of Gnome by pointing out that the Gnome version lets you choose a board of up to 100x100 for a huge Minesweeper experience, while the KDE version limits you to a puny 50x50 board. New winner of KDE/Gnome Minesweeper clone smackdown: Gnome! That happy face is still a little creepy, though. Reminds me of the Pac-Man cartoon.

More interestingly, it turns out that most of the weird Nethack shopkeeper names are names of towns in various parts of the world.

Oh, and the Kingdom of Loathing now has a Nethack dungeon.

This is one of the projects and to be honest there's not much on its notecard except the name--that's how lazy I am. But phase one is now complete: you can now take arbitrary RSS feeds and aggregate them into a NewsBruiser weblog, a la my arch-rival Scott's Planet.

Viola! I give you the long-promised Richardson/Chadwick/Matkin/Whitney/Walch recipe weblog! Right now it only has me and Susanna since we're the only ones with a category where our recipes go. If you've got a weblog on this site and you want in, send me mail and I'll show you how to create a category. You don't have to do anything special to get recipes to show up in this weblog; just post to your category and they'll show up within an hour.

• 1 cup cream
• 1 cup milk (whole cow milk in this case)
• 1 cup sugar (brown sugar in this case)

I'm experimenting with heating the sugar along with the cream and milk. It worked out well this time, so heat all that up in a pan.

Now, the rest of my mneumonic (patent pending) is '1 cup flavor stuff'. However, the flavor of butter pecan ice cream depends in large part on the brown sugar we're using, so that kind of counts as 'flavor stuff' and we actually want less than 1 cup. What I used was:

• 1/3 cup chopped pecans
• 1 tablespoon butter

If you're offended by the idea of deviation from the mneumonic I made up, then 1) that's kind of weird, and 2) you can probably do 1 cup of nuts and 3 tablespoons of butter without ruining the ice cream.

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the pecans and toss to coat. Toast the pecans. I dunno when you stop exactly; generally you stop toasting nuts as soon as you smell the oils being released, but something is wrong with my sense of smell today so I just stopped when they looked right. Dump the nuts and butter into the cream/milk/sugar mixture. Stir in The Old Standbys:

• 1 or 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 teaspoon salt

When you've got nuts and sugar and cold, you know there's got to be salt.

There's your mix. Let it cool and then machine it. Very tasty.

Evidence: this contest where you have to make up a headline for the B-movie quality photo. Lots of sites have photo caption contests, but you get the feeling WWN is using the caption contest to figure out the best angle on the story that will eventually go with the picture. Also, every week someone submits "Michael Jackson's New Shocking Look" as a headline, and it's got a pretty good win/loss record, which is just sad.

The other thing is that if they should stumble upon an actually interesting fact, they obfuscate it. Look at this article on typos in printings of the Bible. Now, typos do happen in printings of the Bible and there are lists of them. But the WWN article, while clearly based on such a list, bears the marks of the writer saying "I can think up funnier typos than this!", failing, and publishing their list anyway in preference to the real one which is funnier. It's like they have some code of reverse journalism where they can't publish anything true.

Anyway, I didn't write this to pick on WWN, though it turned out that way because honestly the magazine itself as a physical object gives me the creeps--it's something about the paper. Okay, gotta concentrate. Get to the point and don't say anything else negative about WWN. THE POINT IS that I added a couple more news sources to Dog Bites Dog, on an auxilliary page. It's got WWN headlines and a huge conglomoration which mixes up headlines from the 3 other news sources, and which is quickly becoming my favorite.

Does anyone have more suggestions for sources? It has to be something that usually uses "Crazed Noun Verbs As Bystanders Look On Helplessly" type headlines, because that's all it can parse.

Also, I had a dinner party last night, and I made an ice cream pie which was one of the tastiest things I've ever eaten. Also an artichoke-spinach-cheese dip which I'm having for dinner tonight with my first loaf of French bread. Anyway, at the party were Riana and Seth and Riana's friend Alexey. Riana and Seth have this parrrrrpetual Talk Like A Pirate Day thing going on when they're arrrround each other. Like that. Eventually I pointed out how easy it would be to add a mode to the Eater of Meaning that did the same thing, and well, one thing led to another and before you could say "Let us time how long it takes for you to implement the mode of which we have been speaking", Seth had started his stopwatch and I was running to the computer room. Elapsed time: 3 minutes. Though I put some more time into it afterwards fixing edge cases so that you can discuss things like the aRRRRRTs sound server.

Also, the Eater of Meaning goes further and further off its original goal of destroying all human communication, and is quickly becoming just a framework for writing web filters really quickly. I swear I don't plan these things, they just happen.

• Pasta: regular penne with a pesto sauce. See pesto post passim.
• Corn: corn soaked in water and then grilled on my tiny charcoal grill.
• Dip: based on this recipe. I used Fontina instead of Monterey Jack because I think Monterey Jack has no flavor, even though it's the only cheese named after a place in California. I used garlic instead of garlic powder because I don't have any garlic powder. I didn't use salsa because I find that idea kind of creepy, and also I wanted to make everything from scratch. Not having a slow cooker, I baked it in the oven for about 30 minutes.
• French bread: sliced very thin and served with the dip. I used the recipe from The Baker's Apprentice, which is pretty basic. The secret the book taught me is to make half the dough the day before and let it ferment in the fridge, then mix it in with the other half. It presents this as two separate recipes due to the structure of the book, but that's what it boils down to.
• Salad: this was a disaster so I did not assemble it and we did not eat it. However I was able to salvage part of it later in the evning, when I baked the jicama slices in the oven and made jicama chips which were much tastier than raw jicama. I've had jicama in restaurant salads and it was delicious, but they must marinade it or something because when I tasted it raw it was disgusting. Let's move on.
• Ice cream pie: Graham cracker crust made using the America's Test Kitchen recipe where you toast unsweetened coconut and whirl it in the food processor along with the graham crackers. I used chocolate graham crackers. You don't see enough graham cracker crusts. I think it's better than a pastry crust for just about any kind of pie (and it's certainly easier), but maybe that's my American cook heresy.

  Two batches of ice cream: chocolate on the bottom (flavor stuff = 1 cup grated chocolate), and butter pecan on top. Also hot fudge sauce, where I abandoned my family's traditional fudge sauce for a recipe I can't find at the moment, but it thickened the sauce with flour, like a roux. I was a little dubious about this but I like the extra thickness.

  As we were eating the ice cream pie we started talking about Dr. Graham and his crackers. Seth said that Graham was ahead of his time. "He said you should eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and whole grains, and not eat sugar." There was a long pause, and then Riana raised her bowl full of hot fudge ice cream chocolate graham cracker pie. "Here's to Dr. Graham!" she said.

Somewhat relatedly, some of my readers may not know (and others may know all too well) that there's a whole sub-economy based on gaming search results. The currency of this sub-economy is units of Google PageRank, and it is kind of weird.

The system keeps two sets of books, and you can get it to display tallies from the fake set instead of the set that reflects people's actual votes. Paper verification ballots are useless, because the software knows to use the real data for spot checks and only uses the fake data to report aggregate results. This is really bad. It undermines the integrity of the election system.

Something like this has long been suspected, and it is a general problem with electronic voting and vote counting systems, but it is no longer a hypothetical problem. The attack actually exists and has been demonstrated. (That link has a very detailed article about the problem which I recommend you read.) The system has been in place for four years in 30 states. It's possible it has already enabled election fraud.

As in accounting, keeping two sets of books is not something you do unless you want to cheat or are being pressured to cheat. It's not a bug--it's a whole other system designed for cheating, hidden inside the system the states were sold. The authors of that article pin the blame on a specific person, who had means, motive, and opportunity. But who specifically did it is not as important as the reaction to the discovery of the problem, which has been just awful.

Let's suppose I did something like this at the company where I work, and play out the scenario that would happen once someone found out. Obviously I would be immediately fired. My now-ex-employer would inform all our clients about the problem, and they in turn would demand that 'we' fix the problem immediately. Most of the bigger clients would ask that their sites be shut down until the problem was fixed. Everyone would take the problem very seriously.

While it would not be in my now-ex-company's interest to have information about the problem made public (at least until it had been fixed), it would also not be in their interest to let the problem remain unfixed. It would also not be in the client's interest to ignore the problem. If anyone ever exploited this hypothetical problem it would cause enormous damage to the client, and if we didn't fix it quick they would fire 'us', quickly.

Now let's exit that hypothetical and see what happened in the real world. As far as I can glean from that article, (it's a little vague), the person they blame doesn't work at Diebold anymore. I don't know if this is because he was fired, or because he got sent to prison for (unrelated but motive-providing) embezzlement.

But that is all that's happened. Nobody seems interested in fixing the problem, and according to the people who know how to exploit the problem, a lot of the time they can't get the interested parties to even watch a demonstration.

What's wrong with this picture? Here's my guess. Note that I'm going to explain this situation without claiming that any of the parties currently involved want to rig elections, which is certainly a possiblity but which explaining things that way tends to get you dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Anyway, the problem exists and is exploitable whether or not I'm a conspiracy theorist.

Diebold is (in my explanation) trying to keep the counties and states from demanding action because any effective action would result in Diebold losing the contract--remember, this back door has been in the software for years. It's already way past "fix this now or else" territory and into "we don't trust you and we never can" territory--if the state wanted to take action.

The state officials don't want to take action because they don't want to admit that such a huge problem could happen on their watch. They know that if this knowledge becomes widespread the public will blame them (with some justification). A lot of them also have a lot of political capital invested in "information superhighway" type electronic voting rhetoric, and the states have put a lot of money (by state budget standards) into these fancy systems. It would cost a lot of time and money to switch. And for what? So you can say "Yes, this election was secure."? Well, you can say that no matter what, and save the time and money.

There's also no upside to solving the problem for the state officials. They are not directly damaged by bad elections so long as no one finds out they were bad (unless their opponent rigs the Secretary of State election against them, which would be ironic but also difficult). The only reason they should try to solve this problem is that their job is to not let this problem happen. California's secretary of state, Kevin Shelley, is the only official I know of who is doing his job in this respect.

If there were consequences for ignoring the problem, there would be incentive for the state officials to fix it. We wouldn't have to depend on government officials wanting to do the right thing. Right now there are no consequences because for the most part the ultimate bosses of everyone in this scenario (the citizens of the states) don't know about the problem yet. If the state officials watch a demonstration of the problem, they destroy any plausible deniability they might have had, and they create a news hook for media investigations into the problem. That's why they don't want to even look at it.

I am posting this entry to do my part to get rid of the plausible deniability. It's very important that the states secure the application as best they can for the coming election, and switch to a more secure system as soon as possible.

The name is Kris'. He came up with it in 1998 when I was complaining that the algorithms I was learning about in class didn't live up to their cool names, like the gift wrapping algorithm and Graham's Scan. Since any interesting name I could give this library would set the user up for an anticlimax, I figured I'd go all the way. Thanks, Kris.

In retrospect, though, Graham's Scan is pretty cool.

Basically you add Godzilla(tm), or my non-licensed, freely-usable character Freezilla... uh-oh, let's call him Lizardbeast and get rid of the spikes on his back. There, we're perfectly safe! Anyway, as I was saying. you add the loveable and completely original character Lizardbeast as a player in your Monopoly game (tiny metal Lizardbeast tokens sold separately). When the first building is placed he is placed across the board diametrically opposite that building. For instance, if you build a house on New York he is placed on Boardwalk. Subsequently he rolls the dice (actually, the banker rolls for him) and moves as any other player, after the last player has moved. The only differences between him and a human player are:

• He does not collect or spend money, because he favors the gold standard and is against the use of fiat money. For him it is a matter of principle.
• He does not draw cards, because his hands are too big.
• He cannot go to jail, because, and I hesitate to point this out because you may have noticed this already, he is an enormous radioactivityfire-breathing lizard.

If Lizardbeast lands on a square that makes you do one of these things, he stays on that square and does not do them. When he passes Go, he does not collect $200.

If Lizardbeast rolls doubles he gets to move again, just like a human. If he rolls three doubles in a row, he does not move the third time, but neither does he go to jail. How is that supposed to work anyway? "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the facts are clear. The puppy dog you see before you rolled two threes. Then he rolled two ones. Then, in the presence of numerous witnesses, he rolled two sixes. The state rests." Anyway.

If Lizardbeast should ever land on your property, woe betide you! He will crush one building on your property. If your property has no buildings on it, nothing will happen. You may collect rent as usual while Lizardbeast is on your property.

"I noticed you said 'one building'," you say tenatively. "Does that mean--" Yes! Build a hotel, if you dare, in your hubris! When Lizardbeast checks in, your hotel does not check out! He will stomp it as easily as he would a single house!

Should Lizardbeast succeed in destroying all buildings on the board, he becomes bored (so you don't become bored moving him around all the time when he can't do anything) and leaves until such time as someone once again dares to develop their property. At that point he is reintroduced opposite the first erected building, as before.

Discussion: This variant alleviates some of the rich-get-richer that makes a Monopoly endgame infuriating if you're losing and boring if you're winning. However it does this by simply disrupting the endgame at random and moving you back into the middle game. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the endgame where it turns into a stochastic grind and you just want to make the computer finish it, but you're not playing on the computer. My current thinking involves buying Lizardbeast bait to leave on your opponents' properties, but it is as yet unformed.

Crap, I forgot to change the name of the game.

Does anyone have any suggestions of how to get more getCosmos()-like behavior without actually cheating? All I can think of is to scrape del.icio.us instead, but that puts me in a del.icio.us ghetto. I may end up building my own private mini-Technorati.

I turned on the light on Sunday night to see how it would go. The only thing that happened was I forgot to turn it off Monday morning. I should have seen that one coming. I like the idea in principle, but I need a timer or (as Sara suggested) a motion detector.

Of course, all they did yesterday was give fancy names to post offices. Maybe we should be grateful for that, actually.

Eventually this system will expand to consume Dada Pokey and its spin-offs, and I'll also add a Five-Card Nancy style game and more different webcomics, and everything will be happy because I'll have finally gotten rid of that horrible 1998 Dada Pokey code. For now, at least most is happy; love those comics!

Update: in personal communication, Ryan North says Dadasaurus Rex is "FANTASTIC".

libxml2's tree object looks like something I could use as a model for a future version of Beautiful Soup (I do need to rewrite a big chunk of it; I'm painfully aware of numerous embarassing flaws, but it's still the best screen-scraping library IMO).

People have mentioned this to me before, but I haven't read the book yet. It's on my list, because it's an incredible coincidence. Especially with the Utahraptor: it's such an obscure dinosaur! The dinosaurs were actually picked because I liked the way they looked. I had to go back and look up what they were when it came time to name them.

There you have it. Most amazing coincidence I've seen in a while. I left my copy of The Diamond Age in Arkansas (actually I gave it to Geoff, which means it's probably in San Francisco but I don't know where), so I can't go back and check, but my half-recollection is that it's really very similar to the archetypal plot of Dinosaur Comics.

I read the eulogy, and everyone said I did great, but I just tried to make eye contact instead of just reading off the paper.

In addition to the eulogy, the Californian ran a news piece on my grandfather.

Let's think about recipes. Every time you make a recipe you perform a ritual corresponding to the recipe. A recipe is generally written as a narrative, but except in very simple cases you never make the recipe simply by reenacting the narrative. If you want to get it done in a reasonable time (and, if heat is involved, if you want it to work at all), you have to set multiple things going simultaneously, the ordering merely hinted at by the use of words like "meanwhile" in the recipe.

Even when the recipe is divided into sub-recipes, you need to read the recipe as a whole and figure out how best to use your time, what the prerequisites are, and how the recipe will take shape. The idea of mise en place is, in my opinion, partially a hueristic to make this step easier by moving a lot of the decisions to the front so you don't have to place them elsewhere.

That's the state of the art. Now imagine writing a recipe for a hypothetical cooking robot, something that knows about ingredients and cooking techniques but lacks planning skills. You'd get a representation similar to one you'd find in an MMORPG cheat-sheet. This representation describes the recipe in terms of the ritual, depicting a series of steps in which you combine and transform old items to get new items. I bumped into this idea a year ago, the way a ship might bump into a mola mola, but didn't actually understand that it could be used to represent real recipes until I played Kingdom of Loathing.

These recipes look like trees. The vertices of the tree are items of food. The leaves are the ingredients, and at the root lives the finished dish. The edges of the tree are operations. Some of them are unary (melt the butter), some are binary (brush the dough with butter).

This is the cool part. You can do all sorts of things with a tree representation of a recipe. Some of them have to do with the fact that your representation represents the cooking ritual, and some have to do with the fact that the ritual is now computer-parsable.

The more complicated actions now naturally correspond to a longer branch of the tree, making it easier to get a feel for how the recipe ritual is going to go. If you have times associated with each operation, you can calculate which actions you need to start first. You can, if you know enough about ingredients and their properties, perform a transformation on the recipe. (This is the part I am really excited about.)

As far as I can tell, this idea originated in Computerized Cooking, a gloriously cranky but un-ignorable document from the '80s which reminds me of Ted Nelson's stuff. Recently it found new life in insta-hit weblog Cooking for Engineers, which does a lovely tree presentation that is a tree but doesn't look like a tree, or RPN, or have a lot of internal cross-references. The ugliness of the recipes was my main problem with Computerized Cooking, and I really admire the way CfE solved it.

So that is how, in my opinion, you should think about recipes if you want to make money from recipes (as opposed to food) in the twenty-first century. On a higher level of abstraction lives the meta-recipe of the culinary design pattern, which I think looks like a templatized recipe. And above it in a different direction you have the meta-recipe of the meal, which I still have no clue about. I think it would look like a set of recipes with interconnected techniques and ingredients, but I'm starting to sound like Frank Chu so I'll leave that alone until I figure it out.

3 yams, peeled and diced	Bake on sheet for 30 minutes at 325 degrees		combine
1 cup mixed dried fruit (eg. cranberries, raisins)
1 cup nuts (eg. walnuts)	toast
2 Walla Walla or other sweet onions, diced	saute in olive oil
ground cinnamon
cumin
2 cloves garlic, diced
2 cups water or broth	boil	combine and fluff
2 cups couscous

Discussion: I added more stuff to the recipe than to the dish I actually made, because the awesome expansion power of couscous made the end result look like a desert of couscous which expeditions of yams and cranberries had unsuccessfully tried to cross. Couscous can hold a lot of other stuff. I also added some garlic to the recipe because the couscous I made was too sweet and lacked bite. Put in the garlic when your saute is almost done so it doesn't burn; that's just a general rule of garlic. I used Hawaiian sweet onions because I couldn't find Walla Walla onions.

Not bad, for a first couscous recipe. And until I find a better one, I declare that this has the best name of any dish ever created.

Update: Rianna contributes "All your meme are belong to us".

Okay, where was I? Here are three things in recent Clickolinko history that caught my eye.

This one was directed toward me by name: Google Memewatch dares to ask: What are you cooking with?

websay does what eCow (which doesn't even work anymore due to various venue changes) does, only it actually works and has a better interface. This is my ultimate win; I come up with an idea and get the credit, and eventually someone else does the same thing and I can pass off the mantainance duty on to them.

Finally, it turns out that The Onion generates its headline graphics with a PHP script. A nice, juicy, usable-by-anyone headline graphic generation script. The API is pretty simple, as this API demonstration.... demonstrates.

"Is he an alien or does he just have a big wart on his forehead?"

• Widelands looks like a lot of fun, but it's a clone of another game and one of the things they cloned is that you can't figure out what's going on without looking at the manual. Tooltips are essential to any real-time strategy game.
• From the makers of Dead Mobsters (see Game Roundup passim) comes Egg Blaster, a solitaire Bomberman clone in which you are a chicken who lays exploding eggs. Isn't there a joke along those lines? Also includes two-player Bomberman destruction goodness. Better play than Dead Mobsters, but still the unhealthy obsession with only letting me have one damage-dealing item on the screen at at time. Note: not open source (actually Dead Mobsters is probably also not open source).
• From the same namespace as Egg Blaster comes Alien Blaster, another entry in the hold-down-the-fire-key ship fighting genre. Lets you play as the small fast ship or the big tough ship. The two subgenres of this game are the anachronism-ridden WWII game and the futuristic spaceship game. This game cleverly fuses the two by putting spaceships in pitched battle over the islands of the Pacific. Only has two levels, after which You WIN ! ! ! The perfect length for a Game Roundup reviewer, but you might crave more alien blasting action. In that case, there's Arcade mode, which is futuristic spaceship all the way. There's also a two-player cooperative-mode. Pretty solid, with nice powerups like the "Kick-Ass Rocket".
• Netrok is a very fast-paced and surreal platform game. Has a cackling Zorak sample when you lose, but the ideas in the game are a lot better than the game mechanics. Kind of reminds me of Karnov for some control-related reason I can't put my finger on.
• SuperTux: in the hilarious demo mode, a fat little penguin goes across the board systematically missing every chance to get points. Nice pentatonic jazz intro song. Nice generic NES storyline, too.

  Okay, this is almost exactly like the Mario games, which makes sense because the Tux character has been spread even thinner over more even games than the Mario one, so why not start enroaching on the latter's turf?. It's got the same power-ups and the same enemies. The third level of SuperTux is nearly identical to the first level of Mario 1. Graphically the enemies look more like Mega Man robots, but it's pretty obvious who in Mario-land they correspond to. The fire flower power-up sound is a great gargling noise. All the music is really good.

  Oh, you know how a lot of games have numbers that float up indicating how many points you got for something? I somehow got one of those that said zero points. That's the best floating-point joke since "Jack Flash: Mutiny of the Things", a Duke Nukem parody in which everything was worth one point and wherever you went you were surrounded by floating 1s.

  I don't know what it is but the levels seem really repetitive. Okay, Mario-style green pipes started showing up. That's a sign that it's time to end the review. Oh, it's got that dang icicle too, the one that waits til you're right underneath it and then quivers a bit and falls on you. One of the few non-Mario imports.

• Auto-Nethack: Big disappointment. You think it'll be like Autorogue or the Angband Borg, but it's just a port of Nethack to autoconf. There seems to be a big trend towards writing Nethack utilities that aren't as cool as they sound (cf. Emacs Nethack or whatever it was called).
• Pac's New Adventures looks like Pacman, but it feels more like Crystal Castles, one of the most underrated old-time arcade games. It's got unconventional board layouts and the graphics are not too bad. A good first effort, especially when you take into account that it's only 80K. My only complaint: it runs way too slow, especially on a CC-like board that's packed with a huge grid of tasty energy dots.
• I Have No Tomatoes: makes you install the unfree fmod library, then doesn't work with your sound card, then goes to a blank screen right after "Loading" and won't do anything. Sorry, I Have No Tomatoes, but all the cool screenshots and silly ideas in the world won't save you if I can't even get the game to run.
• Crossfire was one of the games on my first computer. When I say that I mean that one of my father's co-workers put a bunch of games on the computer for me, thus starting me on my lifetime of disregard for intellectual property (I always want to write "intellectual popery"). I lost all those games when I foolishly took apart the 20-megabyte hard drive they lived on, and they probably wouldn't run on a modern computer anyway. But they're gradually being remade, which is great.

  My only complaint is that this Crossfire is not exactly like the version I played. It seems harder (maybe my reflexes are slower), and the graphics aren't as cool (the enemies are different colored blobs instead of menacing robot-looking things). Minor complaints. It's good to have this game back. My current high score: 430. I like the music even though it's kind of just generic electronic music, which actually explains why I don't like electronic music much: I'm listening to it, yet I'm not playing a video game. Such tragic oversight!

Since I'm not afraid of power outages due to ext3, it's now sitting on my computer room floor enjoying an undeserved retirement. That's the story of the deadbeat UPS.

If we can learn to take Stephenson's works on their own terms, our appreciation of them can only be enhanced. But his aesthetics are in this respect foreign to mine, or there wouldn't be a problem (this is especially bizarre because in most other respects his aesthetics are aligned with mine). So what is the deal?

My nominee for interesting government site is Microgram, the bulletin of the drug war, which features in every issue a roundup of new ways drug entrepreneurs have come up with of smuggling drugs into the country. This includes innumerable "Put cocaine inside random object" schemes, but also weird things like fake Viagra that's really an amphetamine (didn't I get spam for that? And isn't the attempt to get spam past a spam filter analagous to smuggling something into a country that doesn't like it?). Also hilarious implausible-deniability marijuana products with stoner parody labels like "Splif" peanut butter, labels probably designed by the same people who design those stupid stoner parody logo T-shirts and trucker hats.

However, I think the food is pretty bad. I had a tamale which in retrospect felt like just a big chunk of lard, and I was not happy because I ate lard. The menu said you could get the tamale with chile, which I misread as saying you could get it with chili, and I was very excited until my tamale came with a line of red sauce down the middle, dashing my hopes of a Doe's-esque tamale. It also came with black beans, which were pretty lackluster despite having intermingled onion slices; spanish-rice-tasting basmati rice, which was very good, and the generic California Random Greens Salad that makes you think you're having a fancy dinner.

I had cocoa which, as happens in some restaurants, wasn't sweet at all; it's like they make the traditional Aztec cocoa and you have to dump in a bunch of sugar from the sugar container to make it taste like cocoa, and you feel un-hip. But hey, that's me to a T.

The signature dessert was rice pudding; I didn't have any because I'm trying to get rid of this peach cobbler in my fridge, but it's probably good. My verdict: come for the atmosphere, leave for the atmosphere.

Many readers have written in to ask why am I so hostile towards The Onion in these pages. It's because the founders of The Onion are incredibly wealthy, whereas I am merely moderately well off. It's inflation-adjusted class warfare!

Link found via Dog Bites Dog, which I can't tell from one minute to the other whether or not it needs to have its algorithm rewritten for more yuks per headline.

But wait! Surely the fact that it's such an old joke is the key to how best to use it. In this computerized age, can we not automate the rituals that, while not actually giving us satisfaction, give a sort of second-order satisfaction when we see that others still perform them? Do we dare treat a running gag not with the deference due to age but with the surgeon's eye of the seasoned refactorer?

Indeed we do. Now that I [still Seth] use Leonard's NewsBruiser weblog software, all sorts of crazy plugins are within my reach. If only Leonard would write a NewsBruiser plugin that implemented this bizarre in-joke! Then my [Seth's] birthday would be complete!

Well, far be it from me [Leonard] to interfere with the completeness of Seth's birthday. The Birthday Incompleteness Theorem notwithstanding, I present NB-SethDavidSchoen, the most useless NewsBruiser plugin ever, and the first to come in a standalone package (the two are related). Furthermore, I've flipped the switch on my own weblog for the remainder of Seth's birthday.

As are we all, I'm Seth David Schoen.

Man, if only the power of flash floods could be turned to some useful purpose. Like setting up encounters between flash floods and flash mobs.

Think about it.

Incidentally, you can do base conversion in Python by passing in the base as the second argument to the int() function. Pretty neat, huh?

Lost weekend. Where did it go? Now it's occuring in the past.

There's a Darth Vader grotesque (via, with picture) in the National Cathedral. Which makes sense, since pop culture is what we have now instead of myth and folklore. I thought about browsing the NatCat (ooh, good newslang!) site to see if there were any other interesting grotesques, or even if they had a list of the ones there were, but "Darth Vader" was its own menu option so somehow I doubt it.

This reminds me of one of my co-workers telling me about a cathedral they're building in Barcelona (?) which has statues of businessmen and other average contemporary people. I was only half paying attention so I don't remember any details or even who told me this, but I thought it was a good idea. This happened at a disappointing lunch at Chili's restaurant. If you ordered something with bleu cheese and chipotle peppers you'd expect it to have some flavor or at least make your breath smell bad, but that's not how they do things at Chili's restaurant. Anyway, does anyone know anything about this cathedral?

The movie takes place in the present day or at least in the late '90s, but aesthetically everyone in the movie seems ten to fifteen years behind the times. They all dress like my junior high classmates. I don't know if this was a conceit of the movie to make the characters look dorky or if it was a way of making fun of rural Idaho or if rural Idaho is actually stuck in the early '90s (Do you guys need help? Wait, actually, can we join you?). What goes on here?

It was a good character study movie and I recommend it. It starts out looking like a lot of set pieces, but the set pieces cohere into a story, but the story doesn't really have a plot because if there were a plot the characters would find out what it was and then try to ruin it for various reasons.

Lebowski watch: there was a brief bowling alley scene which can only be explained as a Lebowski homage. Why else would characters in a movie enter a bowling alley?

Sumana, I think the reason the theater is spooky is that nobody goes there, and it's supposedly part of a mall but it's actually across the street from the mall on the edge of a residential area.

That made me curious as to what other programming language names you could give a kid. Despite (or perhaps because of) my own better judgement I am limiting the list to reasonable names and avoiding names like "Bullfrog" that I like, and individual people might like, but that a couple would never agree on.

Girls' names: Ada, Alice, Alma, April, Aura, Bliss, Charity, Claire, Eleya, Ember, Emerald, Envy, Euphoria, Ewe, Friend (if you're a Puritan), Glee, Godiva, Hope, Io, Ivy, Jade, Joy, Juliet, Lakota, Leta, Libra, Lua, Maple, Mary, Maude, Mila, Miranda, Muriel, Onyx, Pandora, Pe[a]rl, Ruby, Sally, Theta.

Boys' names: Ace, Al, Alan, Alf, Alvyn, Bob, Cecil, Chuck, Crow, Darwin, Dino, Dylan, Euclid, Heron, Hugo, Igor, Kermit (not really a programing language, but it's got an embedded scripting language), Kid, Mercury, Oberon, Occam, Pascal, Peter, Pike, Rene, Rex[x], Slate, Saul, Tom, Yorick, Zeno.

I promised Seth I'd add some other feeds to the Automat, so I'll probably do that this weekend. It's good easy useful work.

Update: that's better.

Because I've been able to remember to update it for a while, the deliverables weblog is back in business. Let me know if you actually find it useful.

Sumana wanted me to put up the recipe even though there's nothing special about my recipe, so here it is. Maybe I can help with technique.

The recipe uses my patented "1 of everything" measurements. I call them Rustic because to save time I dole them out with a spoon instead of a pastry bag, so they are a little lumpy. As all restaurant-goers know, Lumpy equals Rustic and vice versa.

• 1 cup water
• 1 pinch each salt and pepper
• 1 stick butter (only half a cup, but at least it's 1 of something)
• 1 cup flour
• 4 eggs, at room temperature (nb. since a large egg is about 2 ounces this is 1 cup of eggs! But you probably won't remember that.)
• 1 cup semisoft cheese, grated

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put the butter, salt, and pepper in the water and boil it. As soon as it comes to a boil, dump the flour in and stir it into a big ball. Transfer it to the mixer bowl, or use a hand mixer, because you're really going to need to clobber this dough. I'm pretty sure that insufficient clobbering was the cause of the flatness of my earlier attempts (my other guess is cold eggs; I haven't yet run an experiment to see which it is).

Start clobbering and add the eggs one at a time. Once the mixture looks thoroughly clobbered, add another egg. Then add the cheese and clobber some more.

Scoop with a spoon onto a cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes. Parchment paper or a Silpat mat on the cookie sheet help a lot. Knife the puffs when they come out of the oven so they don't get soggy. Then either eat them or let them sit a while, cut them open, and fill with something. My favorite filling right now is duxelle (basically sauteed mushrooms and onions) and MORE CHEESE. I am trying to think of something with kalmata olives. For truly lowbrow cheese puffs you could just fill them with Cheez Whiz.

This makes 24 cheese puffs, or 2 cookie sheets' worth.

My original plan was I would host it and let people have accounts on it, but as it turns out, it requires a lot of processing time to keep one user happy. (I have optimized this a lot but it's still pretty high.) I can't host it for more than ten or twenty people without buying a dedicated server, and a dedicated server will probably only let me go up to a couple hundred users. I don't want to enter the realm of running dedicated servers because that means the project has taken over my life, and unless it's my actual job to run the project I don't like that.

That's the one option. Now, this is a piece of software that sometimes reads other people's web pages. If somehow I got it all set up and everyone in the world were using it, it would use up about as much of your average web page author's bandwidth as, say, Technorati does. This I could live with. On the other hand, if I gave it out as open source and n people ran their own instances of it, it would be like creating n/k Technoratis for some fairly large k. If n got bigger than k I would have unleashed a monster upon the world. A monster! Usually you can count on nobody caring about the software you release, but I don't want to take that risk. The people I've shown this to really like it.

My current inclination is to just write a paper detailing all my secrets and making this someone else's problem, or at least making me look like a visionary when someone else comes up with the same idea. My ideal outcome would be selling the idea and the current implementation to someone, where I get some money up front and they make a lot more money by setting up servers and taking subscriptions and generally letting the project take over their life. I know that's not likely to happen. What's the next best option?

Second: I have been overwhelmed with links to this story, reinforcing my delusion that NYCB is the preeminent mola mola weblog, when the fact is that I am just the preeminent mola mola obsessive. A huge mola mola has washed up on the shores of New Zealand. Why? Perhaps because of Joe Mahoney's dark secret. I don't know; maybe it was a bodyboarding accident.

Maybe Demon Dog is Quiet Coyote's evil brother. Or I could see them in an Odd Couple type matchup.

Then I realized that you could use the exact same mnemonic to remember this as well. In spring you go on Daylight Savings Time, and in the fall you go off it. Spring on, fall off. Pretty slick, no? Too bad they already gave out the Nobels this year.

The other thing you can do is live in the UK, where the name of the Daylight Savings timezone is British Summer Time.

Monday Update: Kevin got Flu shot alternative! As the alternative, Kevin recommends getting the flu.

"You know what would be awesome would be if a container ship went right underneath us."
"Yes, dear."

It almost happened, too.

I remember having an intense dislike for Suck back when it was publishing (this stemmed from similar causes as with my once intense but now merely simmering dislike for Wired). However I'm really liking the unofficial "nine years later" RSS feed.

This has a couple causes. One is nostalgia for nine years ago, when the web was new and exciting. FishTalk or Annoying Hum--which browser plugin will conquer the desktop? Did you hear that some people are putting their journals up on the web?!?! What's next, copies of physics papers? It all seems sort of ridiculous, now that every compressed food-pill, government mind implant, and virtual sexbot has its own web site. As I once said to Pete Peterson II:

Funny how nostalgia depends on less information connectivity, less bandwidth, less knowledge, less sophisticated tools, scarcer resources in general. Instead of figuring out new ways to use our brains, we just use tools to make old jobs easier and wish there were more challenges. There are new challenges but we can't think of them.

The other is that I have become very interested in the idea revisiting old news, as a corrective to the arbitrary demands of the news cycle. This is why I have a Today In History on top of NYCB, so you can go back and see the foolishness of my previous self in daily installments. Old Suck is more entertaining than copies of pre-eWeek PC Week, but with its leaf-in-the-wind contrarianism it makes all the same mistakes as that more august rag.

Not only is this educational, it's just fun to watch people get it wrong, such as when Suck sorta-praises The Doom Generation and writes Kevin Smith off as a one-hit wonder, when as we in the future know that The Doom Generation only existed in people's articles about it, and that though Kevin Smith is indeed a one-hit wonder he has managed to pull off the same hit multiple times.

The same principle could apply to other types of news. I like Scientific American's huge "x years ago" archive, but they focus on the things that turned out to be important. I think there's as much to be learned from a regular dose of what people used to think was important. For a while I've been kicking around the idea of presenting an old front page as though the things on it still mattered, but I'm not sure where to start. What are news organizations with deep archives? CNN? Do they keep track of the old front pages or do I have to figure out for myself what the past thought was important?

Also, I just noticed that Daily Kos is using my old Clark Community Network rolling open thread code for sites where people love to have huge random conversations. I assume it's my code because the wording is almost exactly the same. Neat.

1. The 204 HTTP status code, "No Content". In addition to denoting an extremely boring website, you can return this and the client will stay where it was instead of expecting a new page from you. This is great for control panel type pages, in conjunction with some Javascript on the client side to mantain displayed state (I know, I've been seduced by the Javascript side, or perhaps just the client side).
2. Python open source job opening writing test automation software.

(from Sumana)

I can think of a couple reasons for this, though both are based in speculation. The personal reason is that a lot of people have careers in politics; it's usually not a one-shot deal like it was for me. I think expressing any doubt in the sureness of your cause hurts your chances for being enlisted in future causes. Nobody likes a loser, but in politics you can't help occasionally being a loser. What you can help is predicting your own impending loserdom.

The other reason is that if you ever admit weakness, that becomes the media story about your campaign. Why are you staying in the race if you're not going to act like you've got it locked up? It's like the emperor admitting he's naked! Endless fun for the press.

I'm almost positive about this, but I never actually saw it happen, because--stay with me here--nobody ever admits any weakness in an election. Even poor Joe Lieberman, in the Democratic primaries, went around smiling and talking about having the "Joementum", long after it had become clear that "Joementum", while real, was a new phenomenon totally unrelated to "momentum" (am I the only person in the world who still makes "Joementum" jokes?). It was embarrassing to watch, but he had to do it or get out of the race.

I imagine what I'd do with the gift of a political opponent admitting, in a speech to the three undecided voters in an evenly divided state, that his triumph (thanks to the unswerving support of the good people of that state) was less than a sure thing. I'm a lousy speechwriter but I'd say something like "My opponent said recently that this election is going to be close, heh heh. Well, maybe he's a little too far from what's happening on the ground with Michigan voters. I've been talking to people all around this state and I know what's coming. The only thing close about this election is how close [opponent's name] will be to the unemployment line when it's all over! [Note: use non-unemployment joke if you are the incumbent.] We're going to win, because the voters of Michigan are going to show [campaign-specific boilerplate about what you're going to show whom]!" You could be forty points behind and give this speech and press coverage of it would studiously avoid the fact that you were obviously deluding yourself or lying. You would only get weird looks if you gave this speech outside of Michigan.

I am not good at seeming confident even when I actually am. My instinct as an engineer is to plan for the worst case and bring up enough possible pitfalls to fill an SEC filing. So once the Clark campaign started losing primaries I became even more glad that my position didn't require me to interact with the public beyond fielding tech support questions.

Hey, sometimes this charade works. Look at John Kerry. In December 2003 John Kerry's campaign was a joke. He had to mortgage his house to keep going.[0] His staff was putting out feelers (privately, of course!) trying to defect to us. But now all my friends from Clark are working for Kerry and he's a swing state away from the presidency. Why? Well, because the Kerry campaign had a really good ground operation in Iowa and got a snowball effect from it. But the thing that kept everything from falling apart again was the unwavering public confidence.

One of the things I've learned is that politics is made of two different professions: campaigning and governing. I have never experienced the governing firsthand, but a lot of the people who work in campaigning are auditioning for a job in governing--not just the candidates.

A lot of the problems with politics are in my opinion problems with confusing the two professions. People move to the governing profession and don't learn or don't want to learn the new skill set. An example is governing with the goal of getting re-elected instead of serving your constituents.

An opposite mistake is this belief that acting like you've already won will help you win. Unwavering public confidence is a prerequisite to success in politics, but it does not bring success. In my opinion we made the mistake of thinking otherwise, and this was a big reason why we didn't turn the Clark campaign around; coincidentally I also think it's a big reason why George W. Bush has been a lousy president.

[0] Funny (I hope) side note. Jordan and I and I don't know who else spent some dinner time making up silly fundraising graphics for the various candidates. (These would be web page graphics that show how much money the website visitors have raised; see for instance the one on Daily Kos; left-hand corner, scroll down). The Kerry one we came up with was "pay off the mortgage on John Kerry's house". The Lieberman one had a cup of coffee with "fill the cup of Joe". His fundraising goal was $2.50 for coffee. Man, I could do a whole entry just making fun of Joe Lieberman.

[0] Okay, so it wasn't deadly. What of it? I thought you liked sensationalism! At least that's what I heard from your ALIEN LOVE SLAVE!

The feature was written as part of the del.icio.us integration (thus the shortness of the shrift), but you can use it standalone. Instead of selecting categories from a list you can just type in their names. Categories that don't exist get created. It's so easy to use, no wonder it's #1 (for del.icio.us interfaces). If I didn't have so much invested in my baroque system of long category names, I'd start using it for NYCB. I may do so anyway. I'm a loose cannon, Richardson! Turn in my badge!

1. Make pie
2. Make ice cream mix
3. Put both in ice cream maker.

Try it with a better pie than the weird one I made, and you might get lucky.

My ice cream pies, however, are turning out great. I've made a couple since my debut effort, and since ice cream pie is even simpler than pie ice cream, most of my mental energy goes into making it a showcase for new kinds of ice cream.

1. Make 2 batches of ice cream
2. Make graham cracker crust
3. Put #1 in #2.

The trick is to make it with two contrasting flavors of ice cream. Butter pecan is outstanding in ice cream pie, and my most recent concoction features a great peanut butter chocolate ice cream, but I think there's a little bit too much nuttiness with both in the same pie. Still good though.

Whenever I do research on this topic I come back to this list of ice cream pie recipes, but I've never really been happy with it. Most people seem to think an ice cream pie is kind of lowbrow, the kind of thing you make on the cheap from a store-bought half gallon of ice cream (this person kind of excepted). I like a subtle dessert sometimes like a sorbet, but my favorite kind is one that beats you up with flavor. For this it is hard to beat an ice cream pie.

Re peanut butter and things of similar viscosity. I haven't yet been able to get swirls in ice cream, but it turns out that swirls are decadent and unneccessary. If you soften in the microwave the thing you were thinking of swirling, and put it in the ice cream mix before it goes into the mixer, it'll actually be better; the flavor will permeate the ice cream instead of being in big arachibutyrophobia-inducing lumps. Swirls were probably invented to get away from this homogeny hegemony, but I prefer it this way.

"A tract that has a ghoul on the cover might really speak to a kid who's been dabbling in those kinds of things, but we may not be able to sell that to the Christians. We stay away from the occult stuff and tend to use more innocuous costumes, like pirates."

Sumana is sad that pirates are considered innocuous, but I think this opens up new possibilities. "Arrr! I'll pillage in strict accordance with the teachings of the apostle Paul!" If I weren't so busy dabbling in ghouls, I'd work some religiousinspirational angle into the walktheplank.net business plan.

I also brought my robotfindskitten page back to life as the Ultimate robotfindskitten Fan Page. There's got to be one, so why shouldn't it be mine? It's got some files of NKIs for use with the Python version.

Then on October 28 I got flu, Cancer, SARS and HIV! (well, I got a spam that said that). As you can see, spammers are still on the SARS scaremongering bandwagon when even BoingBoing is tired of SARS. What's next, alar in apples? The Ford Pinto menace?

Then I went to one of the mortgage spam websites and it all fell into place. It's a phishing scam. They just want your personal information for some other purpose. Not nearly as interesting as I'd hoped.

Also mentioned before were the weirdos who make careers out of politics (they are actually no weirder than computer programmers, though their personality disorders tend toward more the extroverted end of the Table of Mental Abberation). These people are trying to gain political power, almost certainly at your expense. But they're working on it full time and you're not. What they know is that political power is a pyramid scheme, and that while you almost certainly cannot get as much as you want, you can get more than you deserve. There is a secret, but not a hidden one. The secret is voting.

"Yeah, right, get real," you say. "Voting? There's no way my vote will count!" Yes, this is true. Even if you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote tomorrow will count so little as to be negligible. Some people in my rhetorical position would counter this argument by bringing up obscure Alaskan elections decided by a margin of one vote. I think this does a disservice to democracy so I prefer to stipulate the point and lure you into a false sense of complacency.

The reason your vote counts for so little is that you're not the only person in the country. You're just one person and there are hundreds of millions of other people who could vote if they wanted to. Many of them do! We each think of life as a narrative where we are the star, but the surest way to shatter that illusion, besides looking up at the night sky, is to look at election results.

If you live, like me, in a state like California or Texas, you have seen this happen in many presidential elections. The people of most states have such similar demographics that their electoral votes are taken for granted and nobody pays attention to them. Sure, their votes are important in the aggragate. Without their electoral votes--the accumulated votes of you, the New Yorkers and Tennesseeans--the campaign taking those electoral votes for granted would surely falter. But your vote? No.

A standard response to the my-vote-is-meaningless complaint is that you should make sure your vote reflects an informed decision on your part. This almost makes sense but not quite. Obviously you should decide how to vote via some rational or at least emotional process. Flipping a coin to decide your vote is about the same as not voting at all--the only thing your vote has going for it is that it's yours and not some lousy coin's[0]. Even voting based on a last-minute gut instinct (which is what I do when I can't decide) is better than voting randomly. But the system of elections won't treat a coin-flip vote any differently from a well-considered vote.

However it does treat two votes differently from one vote. What you need to do is create or take advantage of a vote multiplier. Once you reach your decision, you need to somehow convince more people to vote the same way. Then in a sense you'll all share that block of n votes. Your own vote will still count for basically nothing, but mentally you'll take credit for all n of the votes. You'll feel better, and in a real sense you'll have more power.

Before the Internet this meant convincing other people in your state to vote with you, and most such attempts were crushed into dust by large margins of victory and the Electoral College[1]. But now, thanks to HTTP and SMTP, you can reach people in the states over which the Demographics Fairy has waved her swing-state wand. Assuming you can afford it, it's even easy to even go to such exotic locales and help run get-out-the-vote operations, where you get people who were already sympathetic to your cause to actually go into the dang voting booth already. And thanks to a polarized electorate, your efforts might actually make enough of a difference to satisfy your average-citizen-level lust for raw power!

This feels like you're gaming the system, but it is actually how the system is supposed to work. People aren't supposed to be furtive about voting, as though it were an annual bout of flatulence. You're supposed to argue and convince other people. I don't do this because I am really really shy, but that's how you do it if you want to do more than just pull the lever. Working for a campaign, or running for office yourself, is just an attempt to get a bigger vote multiplier. A good campaign uses vote multipliers to best advantage and helps people create their own vote multipliers.

I have made out amazingly well on this score with respect to this presidential election. I spent three months working for a political campaign which ultimately failed but had some long-term effects on the race. Some software I wrote for that campaign got picked up by one of the major campaigns (thanks to Josh Hendler) and provided vote multipliers to lots of other people. My totally random estimate is that I've had as much effect on the political campaign as maybe 100 or 1000 people actually casting votes in Ohio, which is huge and way more than I expected. That plus the California vote I'm going to cast tomorrow, which would be useless even if I weren't going to vote along with most of California. But I'm not complaining, because I now understand why my vote is useless and I know what I can do in the future to feel like I made a real contribution to an election cycle.

The other way to get a bigger vote multiplier is to lower your scope. Stop obsessing over the national election! That's where everyone is paying attention. Look at a state or local election. Because fewer people are interested, your vote counts for proportionally more and any vote multipliers you get are automatically increased.

Unfortunately, the reason people aren't as interested in local politics is because usually, local politics are incredibly boring (this is eg. why Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California). Some say that lowering your scope is not for them precisely because local politics are incredibly boring. What they do not realize is that all forms of politics are incredibly boring. A major political technique is making your opponents so bored that they give up. Anything exciting is probably a distraction put up by one faction, or something that hundreds of people are already working on and that you can't get close to unless you want to make a career out of it (I don't say this to denigrate making a career out of such things, but it's not for me). This can have a real effect on your life, though often more than portions of politics that get orders of magnitude more attention.

I wanted to get this one out now, but soon I will do a companion piece to this one talking about the other half of politics and how to get the most out of your government dollar. The election is tomorrow, but the government we will always have with us.

Also, go vote tomorrow if you're American. I trust you to be reasonable, and I don't know any of you who live in swing states, so I'm not going to lecture you about who to vote for. But think about this for next time. I don't want you to think that you are powerless, because it's not true. You just don't have as much power as you need to set everything right. You need to get some other people on your side.

[0] Anyway, coins have previous presidents on them, which opens them up to bias. If you flip a quarter you're likely to find yourself voting a straight Federalist ticket.

[1] Let me state for the record that I think the Electoral College is a bad idea and that I will still think it's a bad idea even if it gives me a result I like, say, tomorrow.

PS: There is a whole darker side to get-out-the-vote operations, where you run the vote multiplier equation in reverse and try schemes to get your opponent's supporters to not vote. I know from experience there can be a huge temptation to think "Man, if only the other guy's supporters would just not vote, we'd have it made" (I had similar thoughts during the Feb. 2 primaries, and I was trying really hard not to). There's a big gap between thinking this, though, and saying it, and another big gap between saying it and doing something about it.

I could go on and on about this and the anatomy of GOTV pathologies (even on the non-darker side) in general, but this piece is already long enough. I can go into more detail if you want. For now, I will end on a partisan note by pointing out that one of the major American political parties benefits, on average, when one more person votes; the other one benefits, on average, when one fewer person votes. Even with my cynical view of human nature I would rather align myself with the first party or, if I couldn't bring myself to do that, try to make the second party more like the first in this regard.

Study of the sources and this helpful document showed me the way to creating new Nethack monsters, and I was ready to zap my wand of meta-create monster. But which dinosaurs to pick? I thought about that old AD&D monster manual table that lists about 50 kinds of dinosaurs in great detail and somehow manages to make dinosaurs boring. No, I would only pick a representative sample of dinosaurs.

My patch provides but three painstakingly selected lizard-beasts: the fastest dinosaur ever, the smartest dinosaur ever, and the most popular dinosaur ever. The balance is probably off and there's a lot more that could be added (treatment of the fact that, while many dinosaurs have hands, they can't really do much with them; also, I guess you could saddle and ride the smaller dinosaurs), but it makes me happy.

PS: if you're new, the coffinfish is one of NYCB's most beloved and least marketable creations. Reminds me a little of Bill the Cat, actually.

It's not just called an eclair cake to make it sound fancy. The crust is made of choux paste, the same stuff you use to make eclairs. Except instead of pastry-bagging it into eclairs, you spread it onto a baking sheet and bake it into one big quadrilateral eclair. Then most of the other stuff is cheap versions of the stuff that goes into eclairs (cream filling, chocolate, etc). It is like a big splayed-open eclair. Anyway, it's very tasty and I recommend you try it.

So what to do with the persimmons? The only thing I can think of, apart from weird things like persimmon chutney and hollowed-out persimmons filled with tuna, is persimmon cookies. Now, I tell all kinds of lies in my songs but one of the biggest whoppers is in Confectioner's Sugar where I say I like persimmon cookies. I don't.

Fortunately I have a good recipe from my great grandmother Jesse Clark that other people like, which means I can foist my cookies off onto others. Also fortunately, Zack and The Poor Man and The Claw have somehow been invited to dinner tonight, so I can make them take cookies home. If you find yourself with persimmons, make these cookies and you'll soon be rid of them.

Ingredients

• 3 or 4 persimmons, peeled (about 1.5 cups; this is messy)
• 1.5 teaspoons baking soda

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• .5 teaspoon cloves
• 2 cups flour

• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 egg

• 1 cup raisins
• 1 cup chopped nuts

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mash up the persimmons or puree them in the food processor. Sprinkle the baking soda over them. I don't know how it happens but somehow the persimmon puree absorbs the baking soda and turns into a perfectly smooth gelatinous mass. For all I know you are not supposed to do this, but I like doing it because it is the only time I ever say "Persimmons! Awesome!"

Sift together the dry ingredients.

Cream the shortening. Add the sugar and cream the sugar. Add the egg and beat some more. Add the persimmons and beat some more. At this point the dough will look like extremely soft granite. Now's the time to incorporate the dry ingredients. After that's all done, incorporate the nuts and raisins.

Drop spoonfuls of the dough onto a greased cookie sheet. Flatten the cookies slightly with a fork (I always forget this part). Bake for 10 to 15 minutes--that's what the recipe says, but I always end up baking them for 15 minutes and sometimes on to 20. But then, I don't eat the cookies, so I'm just going by looks.

Said monitor tries to get a picture of how people respond to spam by graphically correlating spam that advertises a stock with the price of that stock. I chose this because stock spam isn't as obscure as other spam, due to a gentleman's agreement with the spamees, a greater need for verisimilitude, or some nearly-toothless SEC rule (a la "The publisher of this newsletter discloses the receipt of ten thousand dollars from a third party... for the circulation of this report."). Also because it's the only kind of spam I know of where the sales numbers during a certain time period are public knowledge.

So far the results are not very enlightening, but I'll keep watch over it for a while and eventually we'll figure out just what happens when someone sends out stock spam. Maybe nothing happens! I bet those third parties would like to know that, before they continue shelling out ten thousand dollars a pop for the circulation of this report. Yes, I think they'd indeed be interested third parties.

Send me some links to post so this doesn't turn into my spam obsession weblog.

• Interactive Go Tutorial. Pretty slick. Java applets galore. I'm afraid to learn about go because I want to do it very slowly while taking copious notes about my thought processes so as to obtain some insight into how a computer would learn go.
• The Particle Adventure is from the government, and it's here to help... help you learn about subatomic particles, that is! It's some flash thing so I can't see it, but there's a Standard Model chart.
• Riana's birthday party is tomorrow. Clearly what she needs is a pirate ship cake.

• Murderkill River
• Pepperbox
• Wequetequock

That reminds me of the town I found in New Hampshire called Sandwich Landing, which brought to mind The Young Ones.

To increase the interactivity of this site I have provided an interaction for you. If you didn't go to Riana's party, never fear. You can digitally insert your mug shot into one of the pictures, with only marginally less effort than it would take to insert your mug shot into any other picture.

That page has all sorts of other mixes and looks like, but is much more interesting than, the fake phobia web site. I think there's a whole mix-making subculture I'm not in on.

I must draw the line at the raspberry cocoa mix that's store-bought cocoa mix plus raspberry Kool-Aid. I've made my own cocoa mix and it's awesome and that's not it. That site has good recipes for cocoa mix and they're not it either. Even the Kool-Aid Man won't touch that one.

This entry is to let you know that it's true. I went to Bookbuyers in Mountain View a couple weeks ago and they had 2004 calendars for a dollar (it would be an even better deal if they had 2004 2004 calendars for a dollar). Some pretty good ones, too. So if you want cheap, square posters with convenient holes for tacking them to your wall, now's the time to act.