Author: Michael Alan Dorman

Yogi, brigand, programmer, thief, musician, Republican, cook. I leave it to you figure out which ones are accurate.

OK, this is fucked-up

Little Miss Sunshine leads to The Last King of Scotland?

As shown at right, Netflix is suggesting I should get _The Last King Of Scotland_ because I liked _Little Miss Sunshine_. One suspects their algorithm contest has not borne the sweetest fruit.

Truly, it must be a lot of work to suck as bad as Internet Explorer

You know, IE7 looks like a reasonable browser, but it’s not. To prove this it’s not even necessary to resort to something like CSS compliance, where no one else gets it entirely right either. It doesn’t even get HTTP right. That is, when confronted with a perfectly legitimate 204 status code if fucks up. Spectacularly.

Now why would someone be using a 204 status code? Well let’s look at “the language in the standard”:http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html:

bq.. 10.2.5 204 No Content

The server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an entity-body, and might want to return updated metainformation. The response MAY include new or updated metainformation in the form of entity-headers, which if present SHOULD be associated with the requested variant.

If the client is a user agent, it SHOULD NOT change its document view from that which caused the request to be sent. This response is primarily intended to allow input for actions to take place without causing a change to the user agent’s active document view, although any new or updated metainformation SHOULD be applied to the document currently in the user agent’s active view.

The 204 response MUST NOT include a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

p. Needless to say, if you’re doing ajax-style processing, and, say, letting people delete stuff out of a list, then having a code that let’s you say, “Yeah, we succeeded, there’s nothing more for us to say, nor any need for you to redisplay or anything, though.” is pretty damned useful.

Would you like to know what IE does to the 204 response code? It *changes it to 1223*.

For those not inculcated in the minutia of HTTP, all response codes are three digits, with the first digit indicating the general category of response (1 is informational, 2 is success, 3 is redirection, 4 is for client errors, 5 is for server errors), and the additional digits giving more specific information. 1223 isn’t even on the map here.

This has been a problem for at least five months, since that’s when “a bug was filed in the dojo toolkit’s trac about it”:http://trac.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/2418.

How can Microsoft be taken seriously? All that money, all those programmers, and they can’t do better than this?

Where was this when I was trying to get through poetry classes?

I wish I had had “Rhyme & Reason”:http://rhymereason.net/ back when I was actually writing poetry. From the FAQ:

bq. Rhyme & Reason is a suite of online tools for poets and lyricists. It includes an editor for writing verse, an integrated dictionary, rhyming dictionary and thesaurus for finding words, metrical scanning tools for identifying meter and rhyme scheme, as well as features that allow you to share your work with others and comment on other writers’ poems or lyrics.

Now I don’t really give a damn about rhyming dictionaries and thesauruses–I already know too many words, who needs more–but I was always having to look up the metrical stuff (what’s the stress pattern in a “spondee”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondee again?), and having this done automatically would have been _excellent_.

Dearly departed

The most devoted Tucker

At a few minutes past 11am today, we put Tucker to rest. He had just turned 19 on May 1st. He was unimaginably old, but up until the last week or so, he seemed comfortable and happy. He was still climbing on top of the television to get in his basket, and climbing up the stairs to visit me in my office when he got lonely.

Tucker had been with Anne since before I was, and he was always undoubtedly _her_ cat. Over a period of years, though, he came to regard me as an adequate substitute if she wasn’t around.

Especially as his health had gradually declined the last couple of years, I spent more and more time taking care of him during the day–feeding him when he was hungry, trying to make up for the attention he no longer got from “Ford”:/2006/02/all-things-must-pass.html, etc.

To say it’s wrenching to not have him around doesn’t do it justice. I know that, in time, the acuteness of the loss will fade. But right now it’s fresh and raw.

Gaps

One of the more interesting things about the Great CD-Ripping project (I’m within 30 discs of being done!) is realizing what I have never gotten around to ripping. Frankly, some of it baffles me. For instance, I had never gotten around to ripping my Stevie Wonder material, despite the fact that it’s some of my favorite music on Earth (it’s the stuff from the 70’s, when Stevie could Do No Wrong). I never ripped either of the Who discs I have. Or the Los Lobos collection Chet got me umpteen years ago, even though I think that _Kiko and the Lavender Moon_ may be one of the most perfect songs ever.

There have been any number of other single disc things that I’ve noticed, but those are the biggies that I remember right now.

I do have to admit that I worry sometimes that new stuff isn’t going to get its due, in amongst the 30-days-of-continuous-music that I’ve currently got access to. For instance, _Year Zero_ hasn’t yet made a real impression, and I don’t think I’ve even listened to the new _Modest Mouse_. Hmmmm.

_Supersize Me_ meets Edwardian England

I have to say, the sheer quantity of food being consumed made me more than a bit green. I’m not paragon of restraint, but there’s no way I could eat this much for one day, much less seven. “Read all about it”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/healthy_eating/article1640930.ece.

“Via”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_04_22.html#006667

Stickers on laptops

You know, I thought I was the only one who did this.

Back in ’01, I slapped a big King Crimson logo on my Thinkpad; ostensibly to make it easier to track it through the then-new airport x-ray dance, but, I suspect, really as a throwback to grade-school. It accumulated a couple of “I Voted” stickers over the next few years, and then I slapped a number of Kerry/Edwards stickers on it while I was in DC.

I was actually kind of sad when I passed the notebook on to someone last year.

So when I bought the T43p, I immediately started decorating it. “Giblets Is My Co-pilot”, a Debian logo and a couple more “I Voted” stickers now adorn it. if I could get a new KC logo, I’d drop that on, too.

Anyway, sitting here in the coffee shop, I see at least four laptops with things on their lids. One “California Republic” sticker, one that says “Don’t Stop Believing”, one with some vaguely skater-looking logo that I can’t read from this distance, and one with a logo for this very coffee shop.

I guess I’m not as unique as I seem.

I hate to say it, but I’m not surprised…

“Twitter is apparently finding that Rails doesn’t do massive scaling well”:http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/, at least not the way that all the books will tell you to write stuff for it.

That doesn’t really surprise me. Making applications that scale well is _hard_. I’ve done it twice (though only one of those is a web app), and in both instances, what I found was a need to be able to muck around with the lowest-level code to be able to create app-specific speedups–whether that was writing my own hand-tuned demented-but-fast SQL or being able to back stuff up against memcache that most people wouldn’t think to put in there, like mutexes (and yes, I know it’s not a reliable storage medium, but given the rate at which it fails, we were willing to face potential issues).

And, honestly, I think “Catalyst”:http://catalyst.perl.org/ brings most of the great stuff about Rails while letting you get to the bare-metal if/when you need to.

“Via”:http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/2007/04/12/ruby-on-rails-pain-at-twitter/

Why your USB-connected Palm stopped working with Debian etch

This is mostly one of those “maybe my googlejuice will help others” posts.

So, a few weeks ago I went to sync my Treo with j-pilot, and nothing happened. Normally I press the ‘sync’ button on the cable, wait a second, then hit the ‘sync’ button on j-pilot, but suddenly, nothing. I haven’t been worrying about it–I’ve gone much longer without syncing, and I’ve been awfully busy.

Anyway today I decided to figure out what was going on. There are some oblique references to the problem in some bug reports, but I’ll lay it out explicitly here.

It turns out that etch just recently got the pilot-link 0.12 packages, which have deprecated the old ‘visor’ kernel module in favor of direct communication via libusb–and when I say deprecated, I mean it: the libpisock9 packages add a file in /etc/modprobe.d that blacklists the visor module so it simply won’t get loaded. So, suddenly, attempting to sync fails without any real indication what’s wrong.

Now don’t get me wrong, using libusb is much better in many ways (faster, moves code from the kernel to userspace that is better located there, etc.), _but_, it means that you need to change the port your pilot-link-based apps are using from /dev/ttyUSB1 (or /dev/pilot or whatever) to simply ‘usb:’ (yes, the colon is important).

Do that and suddenly things should work again.

Tufte was a piker

I’m sure it’s been blogged hell-and-everywhere, but this plot of US housing prices in the last century realized as a (literal) roller-coaster, “is just too good not to note”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2757699799528285056

The best thing about the big CD-ripping project

…at least so far: I finally sat down and listened to the Ani DiFranco CD my sister got me, maybe a decade ago.

Before I continue, one funny note: I knew about Ani DiFranco before she did; I remember, albeit hazily, seeing video of a bald chick playing ferocious acoustic guitar in weird tunings on a public access channel in Boston. As is often the case with seeing things in weird venues like that, they never told me who the fuck it was I was watching. So, you know, years and years pass…

Anyway, I’ve had this on the shelf forever, listened to it once or twice, and I let it sit. For whatever reason, I wrote her off as too earnest, too literalist, I dunno, too unsubtle.

As often seems to be the case, I wish there were some effective way to reach back and slap the me of ten years ago.

Which isn’t to say that I think the music will appeal to everyone; it’s demanding in its lack of sentimentality–I think that’s what I had perceived as earnestness before–and at least in her older material, well, it’s mostly the narrative of intrapersonal relationships, so it’s not entirely outre to suggest that it sometimes sounds like a few songs repeated endlessly. And it’s all pretty specifically political. And sometimes It seems lyrically awkward, though sometimes that very awkwardness comes, after repeated listening, to seem inevitable and necessary.

But it’s also music that speaks of joy and hope and possibilities in a very unambiguous way.

And she can play the fuck out of a guitar.

What do you mean firsthand accounts are better than conventional wisdom

In response to someone making a comment about “the Osborne Effect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect (how scary is it that you can guess URLs for Wikipedia entries with a reasonable assurance that they’ll be there?) on a photo forum, one of the people who was at Osborne at the time makes “a post to set the story straight”:http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=22319970

Basically: corporate infighting brought things to a halt in a company that _always_ had problems with cash-flow, since they were undercapitalized and in manufacturing.

“Via”:http://use.perl.org/~Matts/journal/32588?from=rss

So, I stumbled across this interesting juxtaposition during the Great CD-Ripping Project

So maybe everyone else on the planet earth already knew about this, but the idea that one of Judas Priest’s signature songs was originally a Joan Baez tune was somewhat, err, startling.

I am intensely curious to know what Joan Baez thinks of the cover version.

NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo

There is no way it can be a good thing to have “an emulation of the Amiga written in javascript”:http://www.chiptune.com/.

“via”:http://ajaxian.com/archives/amiga-emulated-in-javascript-2

I paid only peripheral attention when it was announced on linux-kernel

But now I’m staring down the barrel of building a new box for holding a lot of media files, and suddenly, the notion of being able to expand your RAID5 array started to sound important–especially when the case I initially intend to use won’t hold more than 3 drives, but I would like to be able to expand later.

As is almost always the case in the geek community, “someone has documented their experiences”:http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2006/09/09/raid5-online-resizing-with-linux/ doing just this. Its sounds extraordinarily painless. Even resizing the filesystem on-line was a no-brainer.

So, the related question is whether or not the Areca hardware-raid card I have laying around is actually capable of doing this–the data sheet suggests that it’ll even convert, say, a mirrored drive pair to RAID5, but that mildly strains my credulity. I may have to actually, *shudder*, _experiment_.

You may remember _Point Break_…

or maybe you were lucky and sustained a blunt-force trauma to the head that swallowed that memory.

For those of you who remember it, though, “you can catch an absurdist stage production”:http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/section/synopsis/show/128881, and, if you’re lucky, _you_ could play Keanu’s part because the lead is selected from the audience each night, to:

bq. read their entire script off of cue-cards. This method manages to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance, even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting.

Oh, yeah.

Might _The 1/2 Hour News Hour_ succeed?

“Mark Evanier”:http://newsfromme.com/ (a funny guy in his own right, as co-creator of “Groo the Wanderer”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groo_the_Wanderer (yes, there’s a Wikipedia article for it (YNCAN))) “has a couple of points”:http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2007_02_19.html#012963 about the attempt to create a conservative version of _The Daily Show_.

The one that made me laugh was simply on conservative comedy:

bq. It’s like (I’ve said this before) making a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one.

And, of course, there’s a much more devastating point:

bq. The Executive Producer of The Half-Hour News Hour has been quoted as saying he looked around and didn’t see anyone making fun of Hillary or John Kerry. Which only tells us he’s never seen Jon Stewart’s show, the program he’s supposedly replicating.

And yeah, that producer is the same guy who produces _24_, and who was written about in “the recent _New Yorker_ article”:http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070219fa_fact_mayer wherein he suggests, among other things, that all those professional intelligence-gathering guys don’t know anything about interrogation, and really, they should do like Jack Bauer and just beat the information out of suspects.

Because you never pick up the wrong guy or anything.

Gaaah, I only read half the article on the web, finished it in the print edition last night, and I’m still vaguely nauseous.

The Comprehensive _Pogo_

Walt Kelly’s _Pogo_ has never been collected in its entirety–something less than six years were collected by “Fantagraphics”:http://www.fantagraphics.com in the ’90s, but that was something less than it’s full 24-year run.

Well, they’ve decided to do to _Pogo_ what they did to Charles Schulz’ _Peanuts_ (and several other strips)–“publish the whole run, in order, in a series of hardback books”:http://www.fantagraphics.com/blog/archive/2007_02_01_fantagraphics_archive.html#2583732417830212795.

I’ve heard reviews of _Pogo_ that suggested that it wasn’t always as great as people remember it–and really, what is? But it’s hard to ignore a newspaper comic strip that was considered threatening enough that, “his [Kelly’s] phone was tapped and the US Government corresponded with a newspaper reporter who claimed that the eccentric patois Kelly created was a secret Russian code.”

It’s certainly a tempting option.

My uncomfortable relationship with Robert Heinlein

You know, if, at 18, I had needed to choose a favorite author, it would have been RAH, hands down. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve read everything he’s written except for his first novel (that was only published a couple of years ago).

So, a couple of months ago I was browsing my shelves and picked up _Stranger In A Strange Land_ for the first time in probably a decade and a half.

Boy, it annoyed the crap out of me.

Now it’s funny, because I mentioned this on a mailing list I’m on, and someone who knew me in college mentioned that he found that interesting, since I had once said it was an incredibly important book that had changed my life.

The thing is, though, it _did_. And all the things in it that caused me to change are still there. But I couldn’t get over all the things about it that annoyed me so–the awe-inspiring condescension of the main characters towards everyone else, the spectacularly patronizing attitude towards women, oh, it drove me crazy. But you can draw a very straight line between what I believe now and what that book exposed me to.

Just the other day I picked up _The Number of the Beast_ which I haven’t read in at least as long as _Stranger_, and found it absolutely unreadable. I skimmed it, but basically had to hold my nose to read any of it. And yet I remember liking it immensely.

There are others that I’ve read more recently than that that didn’t offend me. Basically, the simple adventure stories still work for me; there are things that occasionally annoy, but in the main they’re no worse than a lot of pre-new-wave SF. But most of his later novels–his largely “high-concept” output post-_Stranger_–I now find mostly unreadable, because of the absurd didacticism.

Except, and this surprises no one as much as me, _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_ and _Starship Troopers_. Yep, Heinlein’s famously “militaristic” novel, and his novel of libertarian revolution–two things that, in general I have no time for.

I guess it’s like family. They may annoy the hell out of you, but you’re still related.

This might be a compelling reason to really set up an asterisk box

So, I was recently in Best Buy, and noticed a Panasonic “phone system” “that could interact with your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to receive and initiate calls over your cell line transparently”:http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/vModelDetail?storeId=15001&catalogId=13401&itemId=100551&catGroupId=34154&modelNo=KX-TH111S&surfModel=KX-TH111S&cacheProgram=11002&cachePartner=7000000000000005702 when it was in range of the base station.

I was deeply enamored of this idea…but they don’t admit that they work with the Bluetooth implementation in Treos, and they seem to promise dire consequences if you try to use an unapproved phone. Uniden has “a similar system”:http://uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=ELBT595, and it seems much more liberal, though, so all is not lost.

Except…well, then I started looking at prices. $180 for the base unit. More than $100 per handset, and we’ve got phones stashed all over the house.

Yeah, that’s what I thought, too, no goddamn way.

And then the new Linux Journal arrived, and it’s devoted to “Asterisk”:http://www.asterisk.org/. Now I dutifully bought “the O’Reilly book on Asterisk”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/asterisk/index.html when it came out a year and a half ago, and I read through some of it, but honestly, I haven’t had the time or, really, the impetus to pursue it.

But it occurred to me a few minutes ago, “Hmmm, I wonder if Asterisk can link up with cell phones, etc., etc.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, “it can”:http://www.thetechguide.com/howto/asterisk/chanbluetooth.html. I still don’t know if I’m going to have time enough any time soon to monkey with it–and it would require buying some hardware (though less than one of these proprietary things would cost, at least up-front)–but it is interesting that it is at least a possibility.

And, you know, there’s _source code_.

Harper Lee as Hott Older Woman

OK, that was mostly to get your attention, but I do find it interesting that in both of the recent movies about Truman Capote (“Capote”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0379725/ and “Infamous”:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0420609/), Harper Lee–who was born in 1926, and thus 33 at the time of the events in each film–was portrayed by a woman _at least_ a dozen years older than she was.

I mean, what’s up Hollywood, did you forget you’re supposed to cast younger? Not that I’m complaining, it just seems bizarrely atypical.

_The Last Picture Show_

Anne and I have had a copy of this out from Netflix for, I’m not kidding you, three months. We _finally_ got around to watching it last night.

To say that I’m glad I didn’t grow up in a small town–I spent a fair amount of time in small-ish towns, but always as a transient outsider–is perhaps obvious.

It’s got a lot of the flaws I anticipated, but that anticipation is at least partly informed by the existence of this movie–it isn’t impossible to see how it would have been fresh and new, oh, you know, around the time I was born. So it’s worth seeing, even if only as a historical document.

I must say, though, what the hell happened to Timothy Bottoms? Looking at “his bio on imdb”:http://imdb.com/name/nm0000961/, I swear, it seems like this is the only movie he’s done (perhaps other than _Texasville_) that was really worth doing. Weird.

Honya Budo

I am obviously not enlightened, for while I occasionaly show signs of being an adept at “Honya Budo”:http://liw.iki.fi/liw/log/2007-01.html#20070116b, I often fail to be able to even master the “Way of the In-Out”.