Tue Jun 01 2004 13:50 Cruel Macros For Dear Friends:
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.
Tue Jun 01 2004 13:50 Cruel Macros For Dear Friends:
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.
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Wed Jun 02 2004 05:55 A Winner Is Me:
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.
Wed Jun 02 2004 15:19 Leonard's Pop Science Minute:
Good tabloid-science headline: Origin of Enigmatic Galactic-center Filaments Revealed!
Accuracy not guaranteed.
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Wed Jun 02 2004 21:31 I wonder how they ship the sets?:
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.
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Thu Jun 03 2004 20:13 It's WikiDay in June!:
Fri Jun 04 2004 17:46 The Game Of Molas:
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.
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Fri Jun 04 2004 23:09 Note About Old Paintings:
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.
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Sat Jun 05 2004 08:43 Problems That Aren't That 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.
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Sun Jun 06 2004 21:03 Cool Off:
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 moreChorus:
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.
Mon Jun 07 2004 22:55 NewsBruiser, Citoyen du Monde:
Tue Jun 08 2004 15:23 I Demand Satisfaction!:
Tue Jun 08 2004 20:55 Leonard Richardson Discovers Dinosaur Website:
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?
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Wed Jun 09 2004 10:34 Strawberry/Balsamic Vinegar Ice Cream:
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:
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.
Wed Jun 09 2004 13:48 What should you make every day?:
More NewsBruiser meta-stuff later.
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Wed Jun 09 2004 22:13 Movie Night:
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Thu Jun 10 2004 21:52 Alto on Altoids:
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.
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Fri Jun 11 2004 22:35 Anole Analogy:
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.
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Mon Jun 14 2004 17:46 About half of my dreams are like that:
"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.
Tue Jun 15 2004 19:16 Tofurkey Has Gone Too Far!:
What? I had to make it exciting somehow.
At least they're not turkey Graham crackers.
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Wed Jun 16 2004 14:36 Anniversaries:
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.
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Thu Jun 17 2004 18:12 In bed:
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.
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Mon Jun 21 2004 17:05 Everything Permitted Is Compulsory:
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.
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Wed Jun 23 2004 12:37 There is no Baum in Gilead:
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.
Thu Jun 24 2004 18:29 Leonard's Test Kitchen:
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.
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Fri Jun 25 2004 11:17 High-larious Fake Marijuana Names:
Fri Jun 25 2004 14:58 And Another Thing:
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."
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Sat Jun 26 2004 06:39 Endorsement:
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Sat Jun 26 2004 11:24 Waffling:
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.
Tue Jun 29 2004 13:07 It's Not Easy Being Greek:
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).
Wed Jun 30 2004 11:30 Mene, mene, tekel, uparsin cognate cunard pronounce bimonthly:
Wed Jun 30 2004 16:12 Someone Write This Paper:
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Wed Jun 30 2004 17:38 Weird Warnings:
Not related to this definition of "temperature safe" (ie. "safe temperature"). Also, don't inject drugs into your friends' beer. It's no safety!