Radios Appear

Basics of ~consult~ and ~embark~

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I finally fixed the images in the blog; I had never really dug into where Hugo was storing them, so all my references were broken. I finally did some searching around, gained some understanding of what's going on, and fixed things (for the moment, all images are in the static/ directory, however I may eventually move them to assets/ in order to be able to do things like automatically generate smaller versions).

Moving my photos to Immich

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I have, unfortunately, been lax about managing all my photos: not so much that I haven't been careful with them when I knew where they were—I do have an actual backup regimen—but that somewhere along the line I lost track of where a large tranche of them were, because I hadn't centralized how I was storing them.

As a consequence, I don't have any of the several dozen photos I took between 2001 (when I first bought a digital camera) and 2013, when I got my first replaceable-lens digital camera and reasonably ubiquitous cellphone. This actually makes me really sad sometimes—I had pictures of friends who are no longer around that I'll never get back.

King Sorrow (Book ~n~ of 2025)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I don't know what n is this year, but it's embarassingly low. I intend to do better.

Anyway, I read King Sorrow by Joe Hill. I enjoyed it—much like his father, Joe tends towards producing books that I find compulsively readable, even if both tend to do it in doorstop increments. The premise was interesting, the characters were likeable, and since he's part of the same early 70s clade as I, the feel of the time where the story starts—1989—felt familiar.

Sly Lives!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Last night we watched Questo's new documentary, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) on Hulu. It is undeniably worth watching if you have access to it.

I was actually acquainted with much of the early biographical information from A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs's two-parter on Everyday People. And I was at least vaguely aware of his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame appearance—I remember reading an article at some point in the early-to-mid '90s (when I still subscribed to Rolling Stone) that was describing him having to wear a back brace and other mildly harrowing things.

Re-reading Planetary (…and other things)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

So, yeah, Warren Ellis (not that one) seems credibly accused of being a creep, though far less of a monster than Neil Gaiman has been accused of being.

And I might have gone quite some time longer before I re-read anything of his…but John Cassaday, the artist on Planetary passed away last September, so when I was scrolling through things looking for something to re-read (because the world is on fire and it's hard to concentrate on new stuff), I decided to give it a spin.

Trying to join the Fediverse

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I've decided to configure things so that the WP site can be my Fediverse presence, at least for the moment.

I can certainly subscribe to other users, this is to see if I can spit things out into the void.

22 Years! WTF?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Under just the tiniest bit of duress, I've moved this blog to a new host. OK, maybe not duress, but it was something I might otherwise not have done because, as you might notice (or probably not because I don't know that anyone at all reads it), posting has been pretty light for ~~years~~ a while.

However, while I was taking stock of all the things that are broken (to a first approximation, every post before ~ 2013 is going to be poorly formatted, but otherwise things seem OK), I stumbled across a post that referenced the fact that this blog was started on February 10, 2003.

My own little Iron Man Blog challenge

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Ignoring a post made to verify that some unintentional breakage was fixed, this blog has been silent for more than 18 months. It wasn't overly active even before that, though.

I've decided that, one way or another, 2019 is going to be it—either I will manage at least one post a week, or else I'm just going to walk away.

I'm not sure which outcome I'm hoping for.

"Does it improve upon the silence?"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0400

I might have something more to say, but for the moment, I'm just running a test.

Books of 2017, #12 & #14: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, by William H. Patterson, Jr.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

It was inevitable that I would read this two-part biography of Robert Heinlein.

Though my feelings about him are more complicated than when I was a teenager, to pretend that my exposure to Heinlein in those years didn't have a profound effect on me would be dishonest in the extreme.

Reading the two fairly doorstop-like volumes, it's hard not to see this as hagiography; one is left with the impression that Heinlein never seems to have done anything wrong:

Books of 2017, #13: The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

At this point my feelings about John Scalzi should be clear: when I want a book that will be smart, entertaining, absurdly readable and maybe, occasionally, a little profound, I could do a lot worse.

The Collapsing Empire is in this regard no different from any other. It's a strong start for a new series (though I do hope for another Colonial Union novel one day), and if the the characters are recognizably Scalzi-esque, they're not retreads. And one of them is hilariously profane.

Books of 2017, #15: The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Even after my mild disappointment with the tone of his last book, The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island, which struck me as often sharp or even mean-spirited, I still have an affection for Bill Bryson. What better way to guarantee a more pleasant encounter, then to go back to the beginning (almost) to The Mother Tongue.

So I'll say at the outset that I have no idea how much of the content of this book is still considered…correct. I mean, like all of Bryson's books (that I've read, at least), it's a mostly coherent-ish narrative drawing a line through a metric ton of facts, and all I can really speak with authority about is the value of the narrative part.

Books of 2017, #16: The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

And a little more Scalzi—just a novelette this time.

What if being murdered violently delivered you back into your bed in the state you were a short time before you died?

At the very least, it opens up some interesting new career options.

It's a fun, if light, read in a world that seems like it has more depth than just a novellette would require. I wonder if this world might make another appearance?

Books of 2017, #10: One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band, by Alan Paul

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0500

I was born in the South, and I have lived most of my life in the South, but I moved around as a kid, and lived other places besides, so I think it's fair to say that I'm not really "of the South".

I suspect one of the better arguments bolstering this assertion is that I never listened to the Allman Brothers Band until I was in college. And while they're still not a band I listen to on a daily or even weekly basis, I own their core albums, and know most of the material pretty well…even if I first knew "Whipping Post" as a Frank Zappa performance.

Books of 2017, #11: Miniatures, by John Scalzi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0500

So this wasn't actually my 11th book of the year, it was the 9th. It was a nice light, airy palate cleanser that I promptly forgot; I think that's mostly the intent though. Perhaps not the entirely forgetting part, but certainly the light, airy part.

Books of 2017, #9: The Case Against Sugar, by Gary Taubes

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0500

I am well aware that there are plenty of people who think Gary Taubes is bad at what he does—that his writing is too biased (such that it displays the same failings of fitting evidence to theory that he calls out in others), or that he is out-and-out untruthful, whatever.

On the other hand, I've now read all of his books regarding diet, and I find his writing to be open and honest about the possibility that he has incomplete or incorrect information, and that his hypothesis does seem to represent far simpler and more believable explanation for—to borrow one of his book titles—"why we get fat".

Books of 2017, #6: Nemesis Games, by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse #5)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Yeah, it's all about the characters.

Which is to say: my ambivalence about various of the viewpoint characters in the last two books made them both feel like something of a slog. On the other hand, the use of Amos, Alex and Naomi as viewpoint characters helped make this book zip by—and it's not just that I care about them, but that they are voices that I'm already accustomed to.

Books of 2017, #7: Babylon's Ashes, by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse #6)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

If you got to #5 of this series unsure if you want to continue, I'm not going to convince you.

The vast majority of this book is a great example of the Space Opera genre in action—I literally found myself unable to put it down even though I really, really needed to get to sleep.

But it doesn't quite stick the landing, IMHO: even though the authors had carefully set up the scenario that allows our heros to triumph in the prior book, it ultimately feels a little too Deus Ex.

Books of 2017, #8: Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon, by Peter Ames Carlin

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

When I read about people whose work I admire, I am almost always reminded of the Buddhist admonishment, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him"; which in this instance I think of as reminding us that the person is not the teaching or the product, and it lives independently of them.

To say that I admire Paul Simon is an understatement.

I've seen him perform three times: during the 1991 Born at the Right Time tour, in Birmingham, Alabama; in 2011, during the tour behind So Beautiful, So What; and then in 2014 during the On Stage Together tour with Sting. I haven't seen anyone more than that, and although there's a few other acts I've seen that many times—Concrete Blonde, King Crimson, Adrian Belew are the only ones I can think of right now—none of them hold quite the same place in my heart.

Books of 2017, #5: Cibola Burn, by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse #4)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Cibola Burn is my least favorite book in The Expanse.

I think, in the end, it comes down to the primary antagonist, Murtry—he's not just an antagonist, he's a villain; too obviously a psychopath, too mustache-twirlingly pleased with behaving in an almost inhuman manner.

Even Captain Ashford in Abaddon's Gate is clearly…well, at this moment in time, I have to say, he's Trumpian—obviously mediocre but placed in high position for reasons other than competence, and thus given to defensive, authoritarian, megalomaniacal behavior, because he mistakes being a strongman for being strong. It's ugly, but it's all too understandable. Also, he's just not in the story that much, so you don't have an opportunity to get tired of him.

Books of 2017, #4: Abaddon's Gate, by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse #3)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

So here's the thing: when you have books that, in order to really justify being re-read, are dependent on the characters being compelling enough that they will minimize visibility for the plot happening, you damn well better make each and every one of those characters awesome.

Now The Expanse has compelling characters—I could read about Holden and his crew for extended periods without any complaint. And Bobbie Draper and Chrisjen Avasarala are a similar delight to read. Clarissa Mao starts to get interesting, but mostly right at the end of the novel. Pastor Anna and Carlos Baca…just aren't.

Books of 2017, #3: Caliban's War, by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse #2)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

I've read critiques of Leviathan Awakes that felt the Noir backdrop for Miller didn't work, and that they were happy he was gone by the end of the first book.

Although I certainly found the crew of the Rocinante more fun, I still kind of liked Miller; still if we had to lose him, could we do better than gaining Chrisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper? Easy answer: No. Especially Avasarala:

Books of 2017, #2: Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse #1)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

By any measure, I was late to the party with The Expanse. I hadn't heard of the author (either pseudonymously or individually), the books, or the SyFy Channel adaption until it was well underway—and I assumed, since SyFy hadn't done anything of interest to me since before they changed their name, that it was probably going to be crap.

Still, I saw a review at Tor.com that was quite complimentary, so I set the TiVo to pick up everything and waited for the earlier episodes to come back around, and then started watching.

Books of 2017, #1: Last Year, by Robert Charles Wilson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

I didn't expect to make a first post in this series this quickly—but I started this book around 6pm yesterday, and ended up finishing just after 11pm. A little late for me, but I wasn't inclined to stop.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised—I've found most of Robert Charles Wilson's books compulsively readable, and one of their virtues is that they don't carry a lot of fat; although reading ebooks can obscure relative length, he simply doesn't do doorstops.

Books of 2015, #51: "A Fire Upon the Deep", Vernor Vinge

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500

I'm a little bit behind. OK, a lot—I read this back at the end of September.

Anyway.

I don't actually remember when I first read A Fire Upon the Deep; probably 20 years ago or so. I've read it three or four times since—maybe more—but it's been a while since the last time.

It's a better than average adventure story. It features a lot more alien aliens than most similar material, it doesn't hinge on anyone being particularly stupid, and while there is, arguably, a deus ex machina, it's virtually laid out as such on the first page, so I'm not sure it counts.

We all had favorites, right? Right?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

There's an old Tom Waits quote (that I can't seem to source) about the Chamberlin: “It's a beautiful instrument that dies a little every time you play it.”

When I was growing up, vinyl had a special place in the house—because, like a Chamberlin, every time you played an album, you deformed the record groove just a little bit; whether from too much down-force on your stylus, or the uneven force applied to the inside and outside of the groove when using a fixed tone-arm, or dust or fibers getting in the way, not to mention the possibility of scratching it taking it out of the sleeve, or even a strong enough jolt near the record player causing it to skip.

Books of 2015, #50: "The Three-Body Problem", Cixin Liu

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I have a hard time articulating my reaction to this novel.

Something about this book evoked the late-90's "Otherland" series by Tad Williams for me—I'm not entirely sure why, insofar as the narrative trope of having events in some virtual world paralleling and ramifying out into the outside world verges on hard to avoid these days, and that's about all the connection I can make between them.

On the one hand, I found myself drawn in by the plot and intrigued by the way society seemed to influence characters' outlooks and behavior in ways that felt very different from the norms to which I am accustomed. Interested enough that I intend to read the second book in the trilogy soon.

Books of 2015, #49: "Make Me", Lee Child

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

For about the last year, I've been trying to understand why I have taken the time to read all 20 books in the Jack Reacher series.

They're competently plotted. The execution is fine. The characters—even the title character—aren't usually all that deep, but Jack Reacher does have an interest in the trivial that appeals to me: it's present in the first book, where he gets off a bus because he dimly remembers that the town it's stopping in is where Blind Blake died, and it's present here, where he gets off the train because he wonders about the origin of the name of the town in which it's stopping.

Books of 2015, #44-48: The "Tiffany Aching" Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky
Wintersmith
I Shall Wear Midnight
The Shepherd's Crown

I'm writing this on a laptop named 'aching'. The routers in my house are 'weatherwax' and 'vetinari'. My local server is 'carrot', and my prior laptop was 'ogg'.

I have named cloud servers I manage after guitarists I admire, but my home machines are all Terry Pratchett characters.

I haven't written any "book reports" in two months because the prospect of writing this one was too depressing—until reading his last book, I could always pretend that Terry Pratchett wasn't gone, that the world wasn't a poorer place for his absence.

What 'Internet K Hole' does for me…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

So if you haven't browsed through Internet K Hole (Occasionally NSFW), and you are more or less of an age with me, you should seriously consider it.

More than anything, for me it has caused years of self-doubt to vanish in moments.

While I might have, at the time, regretted not being particularly cool—not investing heavily in any particular trend, not spending time trying to achieve some particular "look"—in retrospect, this seems like the sanest possible path.

Books of 2015, #40-41: Stay & Always, Nicola Griffith

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

A consistent—and in most cases spot-on—criticism of comic books is that Nothing Ever Really Changes. Characters of any significance have too much economic value to risk alienating their audience by having them change signifcantly. More ambitious authors may make some changes, but when they move on, the narrative always seems to muddle its way back to the status quo.

Thus Wolverine, having "died" near the end of 2015 will almost certainly be back, no matter Joe Quesada's assertions of "Dead is Dead"; in fact, by any strict interpretation he's already back, insofar as there's a…nah, I don't want to get into that.

Books of 2015, #42: The Book of Speculation, Erika Swyler

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Two books in one year with "of Speculation" in the title. Weird.

Remember what I said about not quite buying the fated aspects of Rose Red and Snow White's relationship when talking about Fables? I have the same sort of reaction to this novel.

The prose is lovely, the atmosphere is interestingly off-kilter, the central narrative conceit—a narrative of the lives of two late 18th century carnival performers and their early 21st century descendent—is interestingly done…and yet the central action seems set up to make a lie of the title; there's no speculation here. It's ultimately all about fate, and even the defeat of the heavy hand of fate ultimately leaves me cold.

Books of 2015, #43: Farthing, Jo Walton

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I will always be grateful for Jo Walton, because it was her reread for tor.com of Patrick O'Brien's "Master & Commander" series that finally got me to read them, and I enjoyed them immensely.

I read her Hugo-winning novel Among Others when it came out, and while I enjoyed many parts of it—it is, after all, a love letter to the genre of SF—it didn't quite hit for me.

So I'm uncertain why I picked up her earlier novel Farthing, but I did, and I'm glad.

Books of 2015, #39: Fables, Bill Willingham & Mark Buckingham & others

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

My first actual memory of Bill Willingham dates back his work with TSR—1982 or so for me, I think; Wikipedia has the evidence, as usual. I liked his style, and his signature was distinctive enough that I kept noticing it in the intervening time.

I remember reading at some point the Green Lantern Corps story he did with Alan Moore; perhaps in 1987 when it first came out.

And then as far as I was concerned, he disappeared. It doesn't hurt that for the period between 1996, when Sandman ended, and 2003, when The Sandman: Endless Nights was published, I didn't set foot in a comic shop.

Well, I had no idea…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The other day, on a lark, I picked up a copy of David Lee Roth's Crazy from the Heat, which I first bought on vinyl Holy! Fuck! 30 years ago.

Welp.

Anyway, the bit that I had thought most surprising until just now was the roster of backing musicians: Wikipedia has the run-down, of course.

To be clear, it's not so much the calibre of people who are involved, which is unsurprising—given that DLR was, at that point, an incredibly high-profile rock-and-roller—it's who.

Books of 2015, #37: The Annihilation Score, Charlie Stross

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

So, the latest of the Laundry Files novels.

The Annihilation Score is certainly of a piece with the others, though it does distinguish itself by having a different narrator— which is, as you could probably infer from my comments regarding the prior books of the series, a fine change in my view.

I think Stross' recent observation on his blog of the need to move beyond the starting templates he worked with for the first few books—Linux, bureacracy and otherworldly horror—is well taken, and I'm interested to see where things go, but I do not feel immediate warmth toward this installment.

Books of 2015, #38: The Cartel, Don Winslow

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I am given to understand that this is a big book; I don't actually know, because it's the same size as all my other books, because I have more or less given up on reading things printed on paper.

It certainly didn't feel like a big book, because I zipped through it in, I think, three days—it was more or less impossible to put down.

Its compelling nature is surpassed only by its depressing nature, because this book is bleak as fuck. While not quite an "everybody dies" narrative, it comes pretty damned close (though I'm willing to guess that you'd be surprised by some of the handful of characters who make it out the other side, you will be saddened by many of the ones that don't).

Books of 2015, #32-36+: The "Laundry Files" novels, Charlie Stross

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The Atrocity Archive
The Jennifer Morgue
The Fuller Memorandum
The Apocolypse Codex
The Rhesus Chart
Short Stories/Novellas: Down on the Farm, Overtime, Equoid

I think it had been pointed out to me before, but for the first time I seemed to notice for myself—while being utterly unsurprised—that, in a series of books that mix Technical Neepery–specifically of the Linux variety—Bureaucracy, Lovecraft and Espionage, the initials of the main character's Nom de Sysadmin are BOFH.

Books of 2015, #31: The Blue Place, Nicola Griffith

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I guess this falls in the same basic genre as Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" novels, though I'm not 100% certain what that genre is: Crime Fiction? Thriller? Vigilantism?

Regardless, having plowed through Child's oeuvre last year—and it being the only real example of the genre I've read—I cannot help but make comparisons between Aud Torvingen and Jack Reacher.

Both have that air of almost-super-human competence coupled with extraordinary physical conditioning and a capacity to absorb punishment. Both have a companionable attitude toward violence. Both are situated so that there are few long-lasting consequences to their actions; Reacher by being rootless and drifting, Torvingen by being independently wealthy.

Books of 2015, #30: The End of All Things, John Scalzi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

So, John Scalzi and Tor decided to once again serialize his latest Old Man's War novel—as they did for The Human Division a couple of years ago—though into rather fewer installments this time; 4 versus 13. So I really started four weeks ago, and just finished this past Tuesday.

As you might expect given that I re-read the entire series in the run-up to the release of this new book, I find them enjoyable.

Books of 2015, #29: Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The truth is, I didn't know a damned thing about Hawaii's history other than the fact that it was "discovered" by Captain Cook, and it was made a state in the same year my wife was born.

I was, in some ways, happier not knowing anything more than that—since to know more than that is to have to once again face the realization that the United States of America is not Reagan's "shining city on a hill", so much as (pardon the mixing of metaphors) a fucking lighthouse warning people away from the headlands of that famous road to Hell. You know, the one paved in good intentions?

Books of 2015, #28: Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, Josh Karp

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

There is plenty of interesting information and history here, but in the end I didn't quite find it compelling—hence (as I alluded to in the last entry) taking five days to read five other books in the middle.

I think part of it is that there is some definite fat that could have been removed—there's a few anecdotes repeated almost verbatim, and there's a lot of repeated verbiage that could easily have been cut.

Books of 2015, #23-27: The "Old Man's War" novels, John Scalzi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I was travelling last week (to Berkeley then Sonoma, and yes it was very nice except my first ever time in Oakland saw the rental car's passenger window get smashed while the car was parked in broad daylight on a major thoroughfare in front of the coffee shop in which Anne and I were having coffee) and I was a little bored with the book I had started—which I have subsequently finished and will be #28—and the first of four new novellas in the "Old Man's War" series was to be released on what was then the next—but is now this past Tuesday—so I decided to indulge in a little lightning re-read to prepare myself.

Books of 2015, #21: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

This was actually been book #20. Or maybe book #19. I let myself get behind on writing these entries, and thus they have ended up out of order.

I remember reading, several years ago, the New Yorker article on Geriatric Medicine that serves as the basis for an early chapter in this book. I remember it in part because it started to transform my yoga practice.

I have now spent many years learning to do ridiculous circus tricks—and don't get me wrong, I still adore them; when I had hernia surgery a couple of years ago, and a bunch of them were no longer accessible, I started marking time until the day that I was able to do them again. It took a couple of years, but I'm once again able to do all the same silly stuff as before.

Books of 2015, #22: Seveneves, Neal Stephenson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The first two thirds of this book—the near-future bits—feel incredibly fast-paced, which always feels surprising in Stephenson's novels since, as one reviewer put it, he does seem in love with describing things.

The book that that first two thirds reminded me of was Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, which is perhaps not entirely surprising—it's a late 70's disaster novel involving a comet that hits the Earth and the scrambling of various people to survive and even rebuild society. Seveneves is that writ somewhat larger, since it takes the human population and reduces it to a couple of thousand, and it's from nearly forty years later on, which means it actually gives a lot of women actual agency, even as it recognizes that they need to make lots of babies to restart the human race.

Books of 2015, #18: The Affinities, Robert Charles Wilson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 17 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

First, a side note: I am always a little bit surprised at the consistency of Robert Charles Wilson's authorial voice.

Most authors find consistent voices at the cost of being idiosyncratic, or put more kindly, "instantly recognizable".

On the other hand, Robert Charles Wilson voice is so neutral it disappears…and yet, of his novels that I've read, I couldn't tell you with certainty which were written in the first person and which were written in the third—in memory they feel far more similar than they could ever be different.

Books of 2015, #19: The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Elio Garcia, Linda Antonsson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 17 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I think you have to be a very particular kind of person to think reading something that's fundamentally intended as a reference book can be edifying.

I picked this up on a lark—I have, in the past, read and even enjoyed reference works on other sprawling fictonal worlds (I'm thinking Middle Earth and the universe of Dune here), why not this one?

It took me a couple of sprints—both associated with trips that involved medium-ish flights and occasional bits of downtime to fill—but I finished it. That doesn't really say much, though: I can still count the number of books that (as an adult) I've started but not finished without taking my shoes off.

Books of 2015, #20: Radio On: A Listener's Diary, Sarah Vowell

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 17 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The Wordy Shipmates was a book I enjoyed immensely, as was Assassination Vacation. The piece that Sarah Vowell did on This American Life regarding the "victory lap" Lafayette's did of the US 50 years after the revolution—that is presumably the basis for her new book coming out in October—moved me to tears. She's always a fun guest on The Daily Show.

Radio On was a bit of a slog, though not without points of interest.

Books of 2015, #17: Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

If you want to know how much the internet has changed things, simply consider that until last week—when I looked this novel up on Wikipedia, while re-reading it for the first time in two decades—I had no idea that Claudia was in part inspired by Rice's own daughter, Michele, who died of leukemia at age 6.

There were certainly avenues through which that information was available, but they were fewer and much more dispersed. It was an interesting moment of contrast.

Books of 2015, #16: Without You There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea's Elite, Suki Kim

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

This was a Daily Show pickup. Totalitarian regimes have always fascinated me—too much reading about the Russian Revolution while acquiring my Political Science degree, I guess.

The setup is simple: Korean-American woman talks her way into the faculty of a college set up and run in North Korea by an Evangelical church in order to (covertly) observe and report. After roughly 9 months—a summer term and a fall term—she can't take it any more.

Books of 2015, #13: Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests by James Andrew Miller, Tom Shales

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I originally read this not too long after it first came out in paperback—so probably a decade ago.

In anticipation of SNL's 40th Anniversary, the authors added a not insubstantial amount of additional material representing the ten years since its initial publication.

I think it should be obvious that an oral history like this can't really be expected to present some sort of objective truth—at the very least, some of the recollections contradict one another, so someone has to be wrong. Whether they're wrong because it was a long time ago, or they were over-indulging in recreational drugs or they're recounting events whose narrative they've gradually re-shaped to make themselves look better, it's impossible to know.

Books of 2015, #14: A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment by Scott Carney

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

In April, 2012, Ian Thorson died near the site of an ongoing three year Buddhist retreat in Arizona. His wife, until recently the leader of the retreat, watched as he became more and more ill, waiting until too late to call for help.

I caught part of an interview with the author on NPR a week ago, and i had to pick up this book, because…well, I wanted to find out if the author had an explanation for how people who belong to organizations like the one Ian Thorson belonged to, end up giving up their autonomy so completely as to die for their belief.

Books of 2015, #15: So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

I would be just as happy if you didn't go searching for some of my earliest public emails. I know they're out there, and while I'm sure many of them are fine, I also have clear, visceral memories of being embroiled in any number of flame wars. I'm not even going to try to suggest that I didn't know better at the time—I did, and I'm not proud of my behavior, and I try to do better today. And still sometimes I fail.

Books of 2015, #12: Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The narrative style is interesting-ish.

The narrative…I have problems with.

I think the question upon which my level of dislike hinges is, "Am I supposed to think that the narrator is suffering a period (perhaps years long) of some sort of mental illness?"

The narration moving from a fairly conventional first person, to a profoundly dissocciative third-person—wherein the narrator, who I think is intended to be the same person throughout, begins to refer to herself as "the wife"—and then, in the last few pages, back to first person, coupled with repeated references to medication, would seem to imply both the period of illness and recovery.

Books of 2015, #11: Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400

A few years ago, for my birthday, some friends of mine got me a t-shirt that bears the inscription, "The book was better," because I'm that kinda guy.

I would, in many cases—perhaps most—rather read Roger Ebert writing about movies than see the actual movies. Sadly that option is now only historical.

The only Bond novel I ever read was For Special Services by John Gardner when I was, I dunno, 13 or 14. I remember, 5 or 7 years later, being surprised that this same guy wrote Grendel.

Books of 2015, #10: On Writing by Stephen King

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Even in college—as I was using fiction and poetry writing classes to maintain the possibility of graduating—I think I knew I wasn't going to be a professional writer. It was a few years out of college that I realized I wasn't even going to be an part-time writer: I can crank out a hell of an email, perhaps even a worthwhile blog post now and again, but my expectations of being paid to put words in a row are, at this point, zero.

Books of 2015, #9: The Monopolists by Mary Pilon

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Two of my primary sources for books to read turn out to be my friend Chet, and NPR.

Last Monday, I think, while driving in to work, I heard part of an interview with Mary Pilon regarding her book, which concerns itself with laying out the rather byzantine origins of the game Monopoly—and since I could just about visualize the text from the pamphlet included with the game that described how Charles Darrow single-handedly created it…I was hooked.

Books of 2015, #8: Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I've been amused by Phil Foglio's work for more than thirty years—back to the strip "What's New with Phil and Dixie" that appeared in the back pages of Dragon magazine in its heyday of the early '80s.

I've known about Girl Genius for several years at this point; I think I ran across it while looking for a way to acquire the remainder of the Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire series from the early '90s, because I never got to find out what happened to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winslow][The Winslow].

Books of 2015, #6: Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

It is a very weird thing, my relationship to Neil Gaiman's work.

More specifically, the fact that his novels often leave me pretty cold, but I find his short story collections to be wonderful.

I mean, how could I like an author as much as I like him, and yet I have read his second novel Anansi Boys precisely once. For me, that is seriously weird—I am inveterate re-reader. There are books I own that I haven't read at all, but the list of books I've read just once is very, very short. The only list that's shorter is the list of books that I didn't finish.

Books of 2015, #7: The Martian by Andy Weir

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I picked this up based on my friend Chet's review. I read it over the course of about 8 hours while our power was out because of a winter storm.

The only thing I have to add to what he said is that I think a huge part of the attraction of the book is the narrative voice. It strikes a nice balance between levity and tension.

Eminently readable.

Books of 2015, #5: The Deep by Nick Cutter

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Reading, say, one of the Jack Reacher books is interesting to me, as someone who once tried his hand at writing fiction, in that they are relentless, always pushing forward at a fever-pitched break-neck pace, but they never feel monotonous.

(Though there's a whole essay to be written about how that thriller genre, and its close relations, are the real "adolescent male power fantasies" that, for my money, demonstrate actual comic books for the utterly benign influence they are.)

Books of 2015, #3: Brain on Fire, by Susannah Cahalan

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

There's not many things that I fear, at least in terms of things that could happen to me; in fact, the only one that really scares the hell out of me is losing my sense of self.

My fear is, I know, partly grounded in the fact that it's almost certainly in my future; though only one of my grandparents has passed away as a direct consequence of Alzheimers, it lurks in the background.

Books of 2015, #4: Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I generally enjoy these sorts of books—the sort of things Bill Bryson specializes in, where he choses some through-line that gives him a lens for presenting some particular view on a bunch of events through history.

And in fact Mark Kurlansky's Cod is a great example of the genre.

To say that all of the things mentioned are a direct consequence of the great durability and fecundity of cod would be to take things too far—but its influence seems clear, and while there may not be causation, there certainly seems to be correlation.

Getting our ducks in a row

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I have plenty of ideas of how to proceed, but I like to actually implement things in a fairly methodical fashion, especially if I'm doing it in public.

I spent some of the day before yesterday getting a GitHub project set up; you can now find all the code associated with this project at https://github.com/mdorman/couch-simple. I was pleased to find that TravisCI provides access to a CouchDB instance, which means that our testing story can be very clear—unwanted dependencies on the configuration of my local CouchDB server won't be an issue.

Books of 2015, #2: Silver Screen Fiend, by Patton Oswalt

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I picked this up because it was indirectly referenced in a blog post of Chet's.

I think the first time I ever saw Patton Oswalt was in a review of Young Adult on Roger Ebert's show. Prior to that my only conscious knowledge of him was through Ratatouille. Until I read this, I still only really knew him from that and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I find his subject—the period of years where he was obsessed with watching movies—interesting in large part because it's simultaneously so antithetical and yet still related to my own relationship with movies.

Initiating a new project

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I've been working on a personal project in my spare time for…an awfully long time now. Although a huge part of what it does is necessarily server-based, I want the UI of the project to be offline-mobile-first—that is, in addition to mobile first, it must be able to run offline seamlessly, etc.

I don't have the time or the energy or expertise to seriously consider building my own infrastructure for doing such things, so I've elected to go with CouchDB+PouchDB as my data storage solution. I will admit to a tiny bit of concern about PouchDB—not so much whether it's good, but whether it's capable of handling the data storage needs I envision. Still, even if it's not, it provides a starting point, and there are other options (TouchDB, or Couchbase-Lite or whatever it's called right now) that I can consider.

The core of the library

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

If you're interacting with CouchDB, you have to speak HTTP+JSON.

Even if you send an Accept header that said you only read text/plain values—which, I should point out, the Couch documentation says is a valid option—it will send you back JSON…that is just marked as text/plain.

The HTTP requirement is even more inescapable—the only port open speaks HTTP, Full Stop.

With regard to the JSON requirement, I don't think there's any real competition: the aeson library is far and away the most popular JSON library, to the extent that one might be forgiven for not realizing that there were any others. Although I know the json package exists, I've never had occasion to so much as read its documentation.

Books of 2015, #1: Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, by Jon Ronson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Unlike the other books of Jon Ronson's I've read, this is a book of discrete essays, without a specific central theme. However, if I were to try to sum it up, I would try something like, "Oh, what inventive ways we humans have invented to interact with the universe, often thereby doing badly by one another."

Perhaps not surprising from a guy who wrote a book titled The Psychopath Test.

Coming Round Again

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Hey, welcome to 2015!

Isn't it wonderful how, even with just two glasses of good Champagne and getting to bed at 10:30, you can still wake up with a headache?

No, it's not wonderful, but whatever—I assume it's my body just tapping into some underlying gestalt.

I've decided that 2015 will be the Year of Not Holding Onto Shit.

This is a widely-applicable principle. Books overflowing your bookcases? Don't hold onto that shit. People at your job annoying you? Don't hold onto that shit. Overeating out of habit? Don't hold onto that shit.

I just broke up with my comic shop…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500

I feel horribile about it—it's a classic "death of small businesses" story—but I've finally gotten fed up with dealing with actual physical comic books. I've been flirting with the idea of going digital for a while, but I figured that this was the time to cut the cord.

I will admit that there's a preparing-to-be-vindicated element to it—the biggest comics publishers (DC and Marvel) do not, at present, allow you to download copies of issues you "buy" for offline storage, though some smaller ones (Image), do.

How I would start out with Emacs now…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0500

I've been toting more or less the same emacs config file around for most of 20 years. I have occasionally sliced it up into multiple files—and then inevitably reintegrated it back into one file—and I have certainly added to it, removed from it, etc. The fundamental way I approached Emacs' configuration, though, always stayed the same—a bunch of require statements, a gigantic setq invocation, a few miscellaneous functions copied from elsewhere, etc.

Replacing Nothing values with Just values in a nested structure

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400

This is what I expect will become the first of a series of posts where I detail some of the solutions I've arrived at, based on the test programs that I've written to work through the problem.

The situation I was running into was this:

I was writing tests for some parsing code. The output of the parse was a nested data structure. Some (well, many) parts of the data structure were optional. One in particular was giving me a hard time, though—it was a default being set from a dynamic value being passed into the parser. Obviously I had to get that same dynamic value into the test data as well, in order for them to match.

Books of 2014, #11: The Phoenix Guards, by Steven Brust

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Some days, you just need you some Dumas pastiche. Or, at least, I do.

I've read this, and its immediate sequel, 500 Years After a dozen times since it first came out. My affection for it runs deep and wide. If it is not a profound work of literature, it is an exemplary entertainment (which, really, I would say about Steven Brust's entire oeuvre).

That said, there is An Incident that this book will always remind me of.

Books of 2014, #12: 500 Years After, by Steven Brust

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400

The immediate sequel of #11. 'Nuff said.

A Representation Theorem for Second-Order Functionals

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

by Mauro Jaskelioff, Russell O'Connor

Link

Books of 2014, #10: Locke & Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

I suppose you could say that I'm cheating a little bit here, insofar as Locke & Key is a comic book. But at this point it's finished—36 issues from beginning to end—and I read it through in its entirety.

I'm definitely going to recommend this book; I only picked up the first volume a few months ago, and I've been waiting for the conclusion to be collected ever since.

The story builds methodically from page one. In re-reading the earlier collections, I was impressed with how dense it actually is—in this era of decompressed storytelling, there is no filler here. I suspect that on future re-readings, I will continue to notice more subtle details from the beginning and middle that have ramifications for—or are referenced in—the end.

Books of 2014, #9: The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

I guess you could say this was a guilt read.

I read Cory Doctrow's first three novels (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town) and found them all perfectly enjoyable…but I've never re-read any of them, which is actually very unusual for me; I've even been known to re-read books I didn't like the first time around. Anyway, something about them just doesn't inspire a desire to re-experience them in me.

Books of 2014, #7: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, by Malcolm Gladwell

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

So, I am on record as being somewhat skeptical about Malcolm Gladwell's books: with with a style that demands that he work to demonstrate his thesis across a broad set of subjects some of which his knowledge must be necessarily shallow…it is perhaps unsurprising that on subjects where I have deep knowledge, I often feel like he has let a desire to fit his thesis distort the facts. Probably not intentionally, but it still feels like it means you must take all of it with a grain of salt.

Books of 2014, #8: Tripwire, by Lee Child

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Yeah, another week, another Reacher novel. I could probably do something more productive with my time, but you can only bang on your drums for so long before the other inhabitants of your home call "enough!"

Books of 2014, #4: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, by Reza Aslan

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Whoa.

I'm a little surprised that the entirety of the kerfuffle that this book seems to have kicked up (at least as far as I'm aware) was an moronic challenge from a Fox News idiot.

Now, any realistic review should note that this book is doing a lot of extrapolation—as Aslan himself notes, the historical record on Jesus of Nazareth is spectacularly minimal. However, the few facts we have, when placed in the historical context—of which we have much more of a record—suggest that the constituency and central tenets of the bevy of sects that hold Jesus as their central focus are far removed from anything he intended.

Books of 2014, #5: Die Trying, by Lee Child (Jack Reacher #2)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

The "Jack Reacher" novels are causing me to realize that I haven't actually read a lot of conventional thrillers in…well, maybe ever. I mean, I read Tom Clancy's first few novels—basically, the ones that were published before I finished college—and that's about it.

That said, I've seen plenty of movies in this mold, so the conventions of the genre are pretty familiar. And truly, these don't seem to be bad renditions of the type…except for the sex elements.

Books of 2014, #6: The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500

My e-readers says this book is nearly 400 pages. That sounds improbable to me, since I think I read the whole thing in no more than 6 hours.

It is a perhaps telling irony that I started reading The Fault in Our Stars in the same week that my Mom started chemotherapy for a recurrence of the breast cancer that had been in remission for nearly 15 years.

Anyway, it is sad, funny, impossibly earnest, full of lies and woven through with truths. I know that it's positioned as a Young Adult novel, but I think that's a lack of imagination on the part of reviewers as much as anything—the idea that any book featuring teenagers could be anything else being hard to process.

Oh, the awe-inspiring horribleness of it all…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

For as long as I remember, I have been a fan of the Beatles.

But in my youth, that love may have expressed itself…in unnatural ways.

For instance, I can remember in 1979 or 1980 watching Sergeant_Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band repeatedly, almost obsessively on HBO.

Haven't seen it in the intervening 30+ years.

I noticed at some point in the none-too-distant past that it had showed up on Netflix, and I felt compelled to watch it…you know, For Science.

Frankie Boyle interviewing Grant Morrison…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

OK, there's a certain amusement from the fact that much of this interview verges in incomprehensible because, well, Scottish accents. Serious Scottish accents—none of this Hollywood Scottish accent shite.

But I actually think this interview is worth your 30 minutes. As a hook, I'll point to the moment when Frankie Boyle suggests the idea that all the Batman stories ever written are just the dying moments of Bruce Wayne, age 5, dying in the street when he's been shot along with his parents.

Disinterring the past…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Going through a bunch of old files with the intent of scanning what was needed, and shredding what wasn't, I ran across this interesting artifact, from my first PC (which is, of course, distinct from my first computer):

I even took advantage of it…

Even more amusing was the detritus of my 20-years-gone flirtation with OS/2.

Books of 2014, #2: Nicholson: A Biography, by Marc Eliot

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Over the last few months, I've ended up reading a few biographies of entertainment figures. The best, hands down, was ?love's Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove which I will recommend to anyone anytime.

Nicholson: A Biography doesn't rise to that level—not by a long shot. I wonder if it's because Jack Nicholson is simply not someone who will ever really let you in—certainly the patterns of his interpersonal relationship suggest that to be the case.

Books of 2014, #3: Killing Floor, by Lee Child (Jack Reacher #1)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

If anyone wasn't completely certain that I was reading (and am now ripping off) Chet's posts about books last year, then this book selection will probably eliminate any doubts.

I was looking for some low-effort entertainment, and based on the fact that the movie had been completely watchable, and that Chet has apparently read all of them, I figured that the Jack Reacher novels were at least unlikely to offend me terribly, since Chet tends to be somewhat more sensitive to such things than I.

Books of 2014, #1: One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

The other day, I found myself describing Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to some friends, and admitted that as much as I enjoyed his work, he was an author who never met a digression he didn't like.

Bill Bryson occupies a niche that allows him to produce books that are often the accumulation of their digressions. I don't say that negatively—I enjoy the style and the content, and he does it well, diligently making the connections that thread the digressions into a narrative.

2014-01-03

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

The world outside my window

2014-01-02

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

The world outside my window

2014-01-01

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

The world outside my window

The unusual cast of Alien

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Hey, it was the 70's, so maybe it wasn't that unusual, but all of the men in Alien were surprisingly old, at least compared to what I would speculate would be the case now: at the end of the year of it's release (1979), they were, in order:

John Hurt - 39
Yaphet Kotto - 40
Tom Skerrit - 46
Ian Holm - 48
Harry Dean Stanton - 53

There's only two guys on that list who were younger then than I am now. Harry Dean Stanton is just shy of 90 these days.

Using an ESDL as a strategy for eliminating bugs

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Stop Regression Testing is perhaps a little strong, all things considered, but I do find the idea that if you're expressing your application as a language, you're in a position to work around certain sorts of bugs once, in one place, kind of compelling.

Corporations are not people

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500

So I was watching the Daily Show a few nights ago, and they were discussing the many problems that seem to arise from this odd notion of regarding corporations as people, when I finally realized the appropriate test to apply.

I direct you to The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1:

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Had we but world enough, and time…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I knew guys in college who, I think it's fair to say, worshipped at the altar of Lou Reed.

The truth is, I don't own a Lou Reed album. Not Songs for Drella, not Transformer, not New York, not Metal Machine Music or Berlin. None of them. And while I own all the Velvet Underground albums, I don't pretend to be all that intimately familiar with them.

Still, I know so many people I am personally devoted to—that I love and admire, whose music is burned into my soul—were among those mythical thousands who started bands after hearing The Velvet Underground & Nico.

A book so good…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I saw Questlove on The Daily Show. I knew who he was in a general way—in fact, his signature drumsticks are my favorite sticks when I'm playing—but I hadn't, to the best of my knowledge, ever heard a single thing by The Roots. Ever.

Thinking back on it, my memory of the interview was that it was a little awkward. Re-watching it on the web just now, though, suggests that my memory is shot to shit—I mean, I didn't even remember that it was John Oliver, and while it was a low-key interview, it wasn't really awkwardness per se, or at least not on Questlove's part.

It was all a horrible dream…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

This has been a post a while in the making—one of the problems with writing the software that lets you post to your blog is that it puts you on the hook if something changes, and I wasn't timely about handling that, so I've got some posts that have been stewing.

Anyway, It's not without slight embarrassment that I admit that I like the new Van Halen album. It's not great, mind you—it's no Fair Warning, or frankly even a Van Halen II (what I think to be the weakest of their Roth-era albums)—but there's a swagger, coupled with a wink and a grin, that is really fun to witness.

You should read Young Avengers. Full stop.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I'm going to be honest—my first serious encounter with Kieron Gillen was his current stint on Iron Man. It has not been knocking my socks off, though I recognize that some of that is because it's coming on the heels of Matt Fraction's run which quite liked.

That said, I was well aware he was capable of doing great things—not everyone can make the Internet cry, as he did with the finale to his 'Kid Loki' storyline in Journey Into Mystery. But I hadn't been picking it up as it went along, and it hadn't been collected yet, so I waited. I bided (bode?) my time until the entire run was collected, and then followed a guide that lays out the appropriate reading order to start at the beginning and follow it through to the end.

Using user authentication with CouchDB and couchdb-conduit

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I've started getting back into working on my Sekrit Haskell Application, for which I plan on using a CouchDB back-end.

This left me with a choice between couchdb-conduit and CoucbDB. I went with couchdb-conduit for a couple of reasons.

A large part of it was simply that conduit is a well-supported, fairly well-documented base for building this sort of higher-level library. The other part was that the older CouchDB library was using the json library, and I wanted to use aeson.

An afternoon at the Museum

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I'm in Santa Clara for the week, meeting and planning for the next year with my colleagues at the new gig. In order to be here bright and early on Monday morning, I flew in Sunday late morning (when the only non-stop flight between the Bay Area and RDU arrives).

This left me with most of a day to myself, so I went to the Computer History Museum for a couple of hours.

Moving to the 8.0 exporter

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

One of the TODO items I wanted to finish before making an org-blog 1.0 release was to convert to the new exporter present in org-mode 8.0.

A couple of weeks ago, I looked at turning a buffer into a post structure. I commented at the time that I wasn't 100% certain why the code even worked. I also commented in a later post that there was some unfortunate redundancy in the way certain things were being done. I'm pleased to say that both issues are addressed.

I love it when a plan comes together

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I'm basically done.

OK, that's a total lie—there's plenty more to do. But I am to the point where I feel like (except for one bug I'll mention later) doing an actual release—say a 0.90 release—would make sense.

Today, we'll implement org-blog-save, which is all about getting what you wrote onto the server, and the server's output integrated back into your post. It starts out with a couple of boilerplate XML-RPC wrappers:

The gateway to the server

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Although I don't have any immediate plans to implement a back-end for anything other than WordPress, I want to make sure it's possible, so I have created a list of operations I want to be able to do on posts (well, OK, I haven't actually written it down or anything, but it's in my head. Somewhere). Each back-end needs to implement each call (even if it's just a no-op).

If that was the only abstraction, though, we would end up with a lot of boilerplate code—or we would define some macros, which I'm not yet familiar with—because each operation would have to take care of pulling out whatever information it needed from the arguments it was handed—which will always include a blog structure as the first item.

Beginning to weave things together

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

This is really the last stop before the rubber starts to hit the road—we've got various small bits of functionality implemented, now we have to weave them together into actual operations.

The first thing we need to be able to do, given a buffer in which someone has written a post, is figure out where we might go posting it. Remember, in the buffer, the blog is identified with a simple #+POST_BLOG: <name> property. It's value is just going to be a text string. And it may not even be present!

Everybody Lies

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I miss House. What could be more fun than watching Hugh Laurie verbally abuse people for an hour each week?

Anyway, we've gotten to the point where we want to start pushing data to the server. Which means we're going to have to start pulling data from the server. Specifically, configuration data for the blog, because some of what we need to have on hand to create or otherwise manipulate posts isn't always obvious or easily discoverable—so we need to try and figure it out for ourselves.

And now I will turn this hat into a rabbit

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Before my digression about optimization and more idiomatic structures, we had just implemented the conversion of a post structure into a structure suitable for handing to WordPress. In a system like this, though, transformations always come in pairs, so we know that the complimentary WordPress to post structure operation has to be around here somewhere.

However, it's important, I think, to realize that what WordPress returns to represent a post is a lot more than we put in. So here's an example of what a WordPress post looks like, retrieved through XML-RPC and cast into sexps (automatically by the elisp xml-rpc module):

And now a slight diversion…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

So rather than continuing on with our next section, I'm going to take a moment and look at some refactoring I did to several bits of code.

I would say that some of the issues with the original code stem from me being relatively new to lisp—I don't always recognize the potential idiomatic versions of things, or I don't have a visceral notion of exactly what a particular function is doing.

And now to turn this rabbit into a hat…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

It's probably a consequence of my recent study of functional programming—first with Haskell, and then, to a lesser extent, with Emacs Lisp itself—that I structured most of the important bits of org-blog as data transformations.

Really, one of the fundamental insights I gained while teaching myself Haskell was that it is extremely empowering to be able to know that when you call a function, nothing should be altered—that immutability really does increase your confidence that your program is doing what you think.

Creating a new post (redux)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Now that we've got a way to ask the user to choose a blog, as well as ways to extract a post structure from a buffer and merge a post structure back into a buffer, we can actually write our function for creating a new post.

It turns out it's pretty simple:

(defun org-blog-new ()
  "Create a new buffer primed for a blog entry.

Get a name for the blog from the user, and create a new buffer
with the name of the blog, a timestamp reflecting the current
time, and a number of other empty fields that the user may wish
to fill in."
  (interactive)
  (let ((name (org-blog-get-name)))
    (switch-to-buffer (generate-new-buffer (format "*org-blog/%s*" name)))
    (org-mode)
    (org-blog-mode)
    (org-blog-buffer-merge-post `((:blog . ,name)
                                  (:category . "")
                                  (:date ,(current-time))
                                  (:excerpt . "")
                                  (:format . "post")
                                  (:status . "publish")
                                  (:tags . "")
                                  (:title . "")
                                  (:type . "post")))))

The docstring lays it all out, really—get a blog name, set up a buffer, turn on org-mode and org-blog-mode and merge in a basically-empty post structure.

Creating a relationship between a buffer and a post (part 2)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Last time, we looked at what was involved in extracting the information we wanted from our buffer and putting it into a post structure. Today we'll look at the complimentary operation of merging the data from a post into a buffer.

This is a very important part of the process—there are certain things that we must record, like the id that the post is assigned by the blogging software, if we're going to be able to really maintain the blog from within org-blog. While it would be very simple to skip this part, imagine if, once you had posted an entry for the first time, you had to log into your site in order to edit it? That would be a failing user experience. So, merge we must.

Creating a relationship between a buffer and a post (part 1)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In order to support multiple blogging back-ends, it is necessary that we work at some level of abstraction. One piece of blog software's notion of tags isn't necessarily going to line up with another's, etc. So we introduce the notion of a post:

A post is an alist consisting of the fields:

:blog (#+POST_BLOG): A string naming an entry in org-blog-alist
:category (#+POST_CATEGORY): A list of strings naming categories to which the post belongs
:content (body after export): A string containing HTML-formatted content
:date (#+DATE): A date and time for the post
:excerpt (#+DESCRIPTION): A string containing an optional excerpt of the post
:id (#+POST_ID): A string containing a unique ID (generally numeric) for the post
:link (#+POST_LINK): A string containing a link to the permanent location of the post
:name (#+POST_NAME): A string containing the canonical name for the post
:parent (#+POST_PARENT): A string containing a unique ID (generally numeric) for the parent of the post
:status (#+POST_STATUS): A string denoting the status (`draft', `published') of the post
:tags (#+KEYWORDS): A list of strings representing the names of tags
:title (#+TITLE): A string containing the title of the post
:type (#+POST_TYPE): A string containing an optional format for the post

It's not absolutely essential that every field be present; parent and excerpt, for instance are pretty thoroughly optional. Some fields are really intended to be filled in by the blogging software, like id and link. One thing I did do was, whenever it seemed to make sense, I used a standard org-mode property name—so :date is derived from #+DATE, for instance. Whenever I "make up" a property name, I keep it in the #+POST_ namespace, to try and avoid collisions.

Creating a new post

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Picking up from where we left off yesterday, let's think about what we want our work-flow to be.

In terms of how the user uses org-blog I want it to get out of the way as much as possible, so I'm going to try and keep the majority of the user's interaction focused on two actions: starting a new post and saving it.

I have a couple of different blogs I post to, so I also want to make sure that org-blog seamlessly supports managing content for more than one blog.

John Scalzi does not have to die

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

When I finished reading the ultimate chapter of The Human Division this morning, I was…upset. Not that I hadn't enjoyed the ride so far—it made Tuesdays quite a fun thing to look forward to, in fact. But dammnit, that was a resolution that was no resolution at all.

I figured John would know enough to realize that to not announce that there was going to be at least one more novel in the Old Man's War series would be to put himself in mortal danger.

The design and implementation of org-blog

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

So, after some quantity of hacking, I have produced a first, basic, working version of org-blog (currently available on the dirty branch on github).

However, its git history reflects all the twists and turns and dead-ends and unfortunate omnibus-commits I did along the way. I really don't want to have that be the basis for future development, etc., so I'm going to start filtering things into the master branch on github in logical, digestible, clean chunks.

Roger Ebert is dead, alas

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I was sad, if not entirely surprised, to hear that Roger Ebert had died.

I don't have—and I don't think I will ever have—the relationship with movies that he had; while I find movies entertaining, I also own a T-shirt that sums up my feelings startlingly well: "The book was better."

Roger Ebert bridged the gap for me. I enjoyed reading his reviews and essays enourmously. He made me want to be a better, more informed, member of the audience.

The return of 'Do You Even Lisp?'

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I didn't expect to drop off the face of the planet for nearly two months.

But I decided to go off and learn lisp "in my spare time"—which took a while. And then I decided that the best way to do that was to write a minor mode for blogging to complement org-mode. And then I decided that to give myself incentive, I wouldn't do any blogging until I had it working.

Keeping what I need to know at finger's length

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I've been trying to cram in so much information so quickly, I'm starting (hah!) to realize that it's not all sticking.

So, what better tool to use than Emacs to solve my problem with not remembering Emacs commands?

My solution is simple—create a cheat-sheet. The great thing about Emacs is that this doesn't have to be a piece of paper, it can be a file that I can maintain in org-mode, just like this blog. In fact, I can also maintain it as a page on the blog. And with the most trivial bit of elisp, I can make sure that I can get to it with no more than two easy-to-remember keystrokes:

The joy of an integrated environment

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Most of my GNU Emacs learning time has continued to be spent writing elisp. I am very slowly starting to retrain myself on a couple of basic keystrokes: M-g M-g (goto-line) and M-% (query-replace) are two biggies, because my use of ido-ubquitous mode actually means that my default use of M-x to get to both of those is disrupted—the minibuffer no longer autocompletes in the same way, so if I'm going to have to relearn how to get to them, I should really re-learn the short versions.

Weekly Wrap-Up #3

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

So this is the two-days-late Weekly Wrap-Up #3. I spent the last two days doing my first real batch of elisp hacking of any significance, so I don't feel too bad about missing the normal rhythm of things.

My big winner for this week is C-M-@ (mark-sexp), which made several moments in elisp hacking bearable—there's inevitably a moment in any lisp code where the right parens start to pile up, and good luck with trying to figure out what to mark by hand.

Refining org2blog

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

No updates to be made, because I spent the entire day working on org2blog. I actually kinda liked it. A lot.

I've now rewritten the XML-RPC back-end to use the new, documented, WordPress API. Right at the moment, this is just running-in-place, but I hope to use the new code to simplifying things more.

Simplify FAIL

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

So I said yesterday that I really wanted to find a better way to do our by-hand mapping of XML-RPC structs, because doing it by hand—and, specifically, repeating a bunch of information multiple times—was tedious, error-prone and ugly. Here's a smaller struct we're working with, for WPCustomField—smaller, but it's still a bunch of boilerplate:

data WPCustomField = WPCustomField {
  cfId :: String,
  cfKey :: String,
  cfValue :: String
} deriving Show

instance XmlRpcType WPCustomField where
  toValue struct = toValue $ [("id", toValue (cfId struct)),
                              ("key", toValue (cfKey struct)),
                              ("value", toValue (cfValue struct))]
  fromValue v = do
    struct <- fromValue v
    a <- getField "id" struct
    b <- getField "key" struct
    c <- getField "value" struct
    return WPCustomField {
      cfId = a,
      cfKey = b,
      cfValue = c }
  getType _ = TStruct

So I started thinking about it. It seemed obvious to me that I would want to start with a list of tuples—each tuple establishing a mapping from XML-RPC attribute name to accessor function, and put in a list because I was going to need to keep their ordering in order to feed them to the data constructor in the proper order.

Choosing the API and defining some ADTs

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

As I said in the previous article, for wp2o2b, the plan is:

So, the task is to download all the articles in my existing sites, reformat them into org-mode files with appropiate metadata for org2blog, store them locally in a hierarchy that mirrors the one on the server.

WordPress implements an XML-RPC interface for accessing your blog programatically. It supports older legacy styles of access (Blogger, MovableType, and metaWeblog), but recommends that for new development you work with their new API which, incidentally, has the nice benefit of being well-documented.

No Weekly Wrapup today

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Instead, I spent the time I would normally allocate to writing something for "Do you even lisp?" to enhancing org2blog, the software I'm using to manage this blog.

Well, enhancing might be saying a lot—since I've been doing a little WordPress hacking in other contexts, I've become aware of WordPress' new (released with 3.4, so only six months old at this time) "native" XML-RPC API, and I chose to start moving org2blog to use that, and move it away from the hodge-podge of Blogger and MoveableType and metaWeblog APIs that are currently in use.

Beginning of wp2o2b

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I recently made the decision to start doing my blogging using org2blog. I've been using WordPress to host a couple of blogs (Radios Appear and Gurave, as well as my friend Chet's blog Miscellaneous Heathen) for the last couple of years, but I've always done my writing in Emacs (using Textile for formatting), and then simply cut-and-pasted what I wrote into WordPress's text entry box: of course a more integrated solution based entirely in Emacs sounded attractive.

One ring to rule them all

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I suppose I might have once read that GNU Emacs had a mark ring—that is, a capped collection of marked locations in the current buffer. But I've never really thought about it.

I can see a lot of possibilities in the idea, though—it's implicitly a list of nominally important spots in the buffer, so of course it has the possibility of being useful.

There are two commands that have a lot of potential. Both are variations on C-SPC (set-mark-command).

Building blocks

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The two tasks I do most in Emacs (which are two of the three tasks I do most at the computer) are read email and write programs.

I probably spend far more of my time in those tasks editing than I ever do writing—that is, I may write a first draft of a paragraph in an email, or a function in a program, in five minutes, and then spend fifteen getting it right.

Welcome to Functional Paradise!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I first started programming in 1980 on a Heathkit H-8 in Basic (Benton Harbor) when I was 10, and in the intervening 30-odd years I've programmed more-or-less competently in Basic, Modula-2, C, Turbo Pascal, Clipper, C++, Rexx, Bourne Shell, Perl, PHP and Javascript.

I've also been exposed to many other languages—Forth, COBOL, Fortran, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, and so forth. By exposed I mean I can read and perhaps divine the intent of simple, straightforward code, but wouldn't easily understand complex code or write anything of any significance.

Do it again (again)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Q: How did I not know about this? A: You never read the manual.

(A close friend of mine from college with whom I've worked professionally now and again, once suggested that the secret to our individual successes was that we were the ones willing to read the manuals. Obviously in this instance I failed.)

Oh, good lord, the number of times I've done M-x UP RETURN RETURN to re-do query-replace on a new buffer, when I could have just done C-x ESC ESC (repeat-complex-command).

Banging out the HTML

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I suspect I heard about the Emacs zencoding mode from its (I believe) original author, Chris Done—he did a screencast about using Emacs for Haskell development that I found interesting, and I imagine that I found a reference while looking at his material about that.

Anyway, I created a Debian package for it, and installed it…and didn't use it for squat. Although the idea makes great sense—use a CSS-selector like language to create HTML (an idea I was first exposed to with Kris Zyp's put-selector JavaScript library)—I never even bothered to learn the keystroke to activate it.

In which I humble myself terribly…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

This is how poor a user of Emacs I am: I still habitually use C-@ (set-mark-command) to set the mark. I mean, on what planet is that easier or more ergonomic than C-SPC (set-mark-command)?

I actually started retraining myself to use C-SPC a while ago, and it's mostly taken—but I still occasionally catch myself going for that awkward pinky-thumb-middle-finger chord that fires C-@.

More interesting for me to learn how to use effectively is C-x C-x (exchange-point-and-mark). I know I spend a lot of unnecessary time scrolling around the screen rather than targetting where I want to go. Internalizing C-x C-x is, I think, the first step in moving a little faster.

That's why the editor is a tramp?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I suppose that was the obvious joke.

Here's something that I've known about for awhile, and used occasionally, but have only now decided I will learn and retain: you can edit local files as another user (including root) using TRAMP and sudo.

All you have to do is C-x C-f (find-file) to open a file, then type /sudo:. This will start prompting you for the user and host information, and then a password (your password), at which point you will be able to use filename autocompletion and such to your heart's content to load a file that you would otherwise not be able to access.

Weekly Wrap-up #2

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

This week saw me get very behind on writing these posts—I had a lot of other commitments, and I didn't work hard enough to make the time.

I did find myeslf using C-o in the minibuffer a few times, and I did use M-<num> a couple of times when using numeric prefixes, but I didn't make any great progress in efficiency.

One thing I did do, that I'm not quite ready to talk about here, is work a lot on my Org-mode setup. Though there are things about Org-mode that I do not love—the biggest of which is that it's free-form-ness often leaves me feeling like good structure is impossible to find—it's an astonishingly useful tool once you begin to adapt to it. I've been doing more of that of late—my use of org2blog for this blog is part of this—and I hope to do even more, perhaps even getting into writing some elisp.

Even faster ways to get through the minibuffer

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I am a long-time user of short-lived Emacs sessions who is now trying to take advantage of having a browser that runs for days or weeks at a time—I've configured my desktop shell to auto-start emacs --daemon when I log in, and I rarely restart it (though it's probably still do it more often than a really hard-core Emacs user would).

As a consequence, my minibuffer history starts to fill up with good stuff that I want to re-use in order to increase my efficiency.

Staying on home row…

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I've long known about using the UP (previous-history-element) and DOWN (next-history-element) keys to move through the minibuffer history. It's always been a little jarring that C-p (previous-line) and C-n (next-line), which I'm very habituated to use (perhaps even more than the actual arrow keys, since I touch type, and can use them without moving my hands) don't work in the minibuffer—Emacs just beeps unhappily at me.

I was pleased to find out that, in addition to the dedicated arrow keys, M-p (previous-history-element) and M-n (next-history-element) scroll through the minibuffer history. The should be much more easily accessible to me—and I do scroll through the minibuffer a lot.

Do it again

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

C-x z (repeat) is a little bit of a mystery to me.

That is, I don't know when you would use it.

I mean, if you need to kill five lines, giving a numerical prefix to the kill line command, like M-5 C-k, makes good sense to me—you have an idea of how much you need to delete, do it all in one fell swoop.

Or if you've got a simple set of commands you need repeated, whip up a small keyboard macro, and then repeat it with C-x e (kmacro-end-and-call-macro), and then keep hitting e until you're done.

Further remedial keystrokes

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

As I've mentioned before, the first systems on which I used Emacs had keyboard support that was spotty-to-nonexistent for anything but the most common keystrokes.

Consequently, I learned to use ESC for a lot of stuff where you'd use Meta. For most of those things I've retrained myself, but until I was actually reading the GNU Emacs Manual, I didn't know that you didn't have to hit ESC to do a numerical argument.

Closing down the competition

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Well yesterday I talked about C-o (open-line) that opens up additional lines beneath the line you're currently on, and how little I used it.

A related key that I use even less, but could see more opportunity for, is C-x C-o (delete-blank-lines), which collapses repeated lines of whitespace into a single line.

The first thing I find myself wondering, though, is "Why C-x?" It seems to me that most other commands like this—variations on a shorter set of keystrokes—use the C-u prefix to say, "do the opposite-ish".

Walking the Dead

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Where Are We Now? is not my favorite David Bowie song. Really, not by a long shot.

Favorite or not, though, I'm happy to see him making new music—I had all-but given up hope of ever hearing the words "new music from David Bowie" used in a sentence together, and that made me sad.

Opening up your document

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I'm actually a bit of a fan of whitespace in code. I know a lot of people who…are of a different opinion, to say the least. Perhaps it's because I don't have some of the more sophisticated code-motion keys down in Emacs, but I like to have the whitespace to break up semantic units and help me understand how lines of code are interrelated.

So it's surprising that I haven't ever really cottoned to C-o (open-line).

Weekly Wrap-up #1

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

This blog is supposed to be about what I'm learning and how the process of refining my use of Emacs is going, so each week I'll be looking at what I wrote about in the past week (or perhaps earlier) and assessing how much I've been able to change my habits or otherwise make use of my new knowledge.

So this first week has gone pretty well—using M-g M-g (goto-line) instead of M-x goto-line has come up a couple of times and I've remembered the new way of doing things, and similarly C-/ (undo) for undo. The change back to the prior handling of line-move-visual hasn't come up as much as I expected—I have a much wider terminal these days, so it's less of an issue—but I'm nonetheless glad to have made the change back.

The existential pain of naming Backspace and Delete

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

When I first started using uEmacs, one of the most confusing things was the fact that the adaptation had not been entirely completed, or at least on my platform (an Atari ST), the keyboard mappings were not entirely idiomatic—they hadn't kept up with the differences between VT-100-style keyboards and, well, everything else.

I think this explains why I got very habituated to the alphabetic keys for deleting stuff, but don't have the non-alphabetic keys as deeply ingrained.

I thee undo

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

For years I've been using C-x u (undo) for undo. As much as I use it, though, I really need to get C-/ (undo) under my fingers.

I never remember revert-buffer, since I rarely get myself to the point where I want to just nuke everything from orbit—so perhaps it's not surprising I rarely think about it.

In fact, I think the interface of GNU Emacs' undo facility is one of the few places where it falls dramatically short of its potential. I really don't know what sort of facilities that other editors have, but given the way that Emacs stores the history, I'm surprised that the baked-in functionality provides no way to access it more efficiently—I mean, there's not even an explicit redo command, you have to just undo your undoings, ad infinitum. I've often accidentally started redoing things when I hit an injudicious key, etc.

Visual versus logical lines

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

In GNU Emacs 23 the default line-movement behavior changed with regard to wrapped lines.

Not that I realized it at the time, entirely—like not realizing that I not only knew M-f (forward-word) and M-b (backward-word), but used them every day, I was so habituated to the prior behavior that I couldn't articulate what had changed, I just knew something was different that was annoying me to no end.¹

It was only when I found a reference to line-move-visual in the GNU Emacs Manual, that I realized exactly what it was that had changed—and, more importantly, how to change it back:²

Just getting around

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The this blog had its genesis when I sat down to read the GNU Emacs Manual while we were travelling over the holidays—I figured I could skim it, maybe pick up one or two new things, but, really, it would mostly be just speed-reading.

What it actually proved was that I had never tried to read the manual recently, perhaps ever. I would stumble across basic stuff I feel like I should have known all along, and then an hour or two later would have to work very hard to remember what it was that I had stumbled across.

Welcome to 'Do you even lisp?'

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I was first exposed to the Emacs command set some time in 1990, while I was a sophomore in college; I owned an Atari ST, and stumbled across a port of Conroy's uEmacs for TOS. It was a good little editor—capable and easy to use. In fact, as I was learning C at the time, I spent some time converting the source to ANSI C as an exercise.

I have used and even become pretty facile with a couple of other editors—I spent a lot of my last couple of years of college using Turbo Pascal, whose embedded editor used a command set derived from WordStar, and in my first job out of college I spent a lot of time writing Clipper code using Brief—but I've always had Emacs hovering in the background.

The vision that I suspect religious groups really fear...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I would recommend you read this whole post from Brian McLaren, where he responds to someone who has decided they can no longer consider themselves his ally because of his acceptance of homosexuality. It is sad, affectionate, understanding, gentle and accepting. I've never heard of him before in my life, and despite not considering myself to be a Christian of any stripe—I'm of the Gandhian "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians" school—I like this guy. He demonstrates in this response those attributes I would wish to be able to embody myself.

Of course the only thing that could be cooler...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

than an all-female Iron Maiden cover band (seen here performing Aces High)

would be an all-female Metallica cover band. Oh, what's that? There is one, you say?

"Did I get it confused?"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Apparently some people didn't like, or at least did not look upon Quantum of Solace with anticipation.

I think they express their issues concisely and amusingly in this proposed theme song.

Personally, I thought many things about it were very beautifully presented—the chase that opens the movie may be the finest one ever done in a Bond film; it certainly takes my breath away—though the overall plot is…weird. Not the "water is the next great resource to control" part, which actually makes sense to me, but the "there is a great big pervasive conspiracy" bit that is supposed to drive the whole film, but doesn't quite cohere enough to work as its engine.

The prank gone wrong

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

It was a hot day anyway…

Don't ask why

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

There's no answer that's really going to be satisfactory, so just enjoy this video of homemade lava being poured onto a sheet of ice.

Via

It's not quite as dense as the studio version...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

but this live performance of "Wondaland" by Janelle Monae still makes it crystal clear why you should be buying her music.

Tying a bow around the Ringworld...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

In the last three months or so, I've read every book of Larry Niven's (some in collaboration with Edward M. Lerner) that deals directly with the part of his "Known Space" universe that concerns itself with the Ringworld. So, in order, Fleet of Worlds, Juggler of Worlds, Destroyer of Worlds, Betrayer of Worlds, Protector, Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children and finally, the newly released Fate of Worlds.

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Or: I think I have finally figured out why Robert Heinlein makes me so nuts

At the age of 17—the year he died—my most favorite author in the whole world was probably Robert Heinlein. I don't think anyone else came anywhere close. I had read just about everything he had ever published, and (with the exception of Farnham's Freehold, I loved it all.

Some of these books had enormous implications for my attitude toward the world—Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers being the most obvious. They marked me indelibly. They helped make me who I am today.

This is why the Hulk rocked in the Avengers, and has sucked in every other movie

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Between Ang Lee directing one, and Edward Norton starring in the other, you'd have thought one of the Hulk movies would have been great. Or at least really good. But they both fell somewhere between boring and tedious—even while being well acted and well directed.

Because, I would suggest, they didn't understand the character's value. I have a vague memory of a review—I thought it was Roger Ebert, but a quick check suggests not—that suggested that watching a guy who feels like he can't get mad get chased around was going to be fundamentally boring.

Happy Birthday, Debian!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Debian GNU/Linux turns 19 today.

I estimate that I did my first install some time in late 1995, perhaps early 1996. I haven't really used anything else as my day-in-day-out OS since. I've never had a Mac of any stripe, and haven't used Windows with any frequency other than for World of Warcraft since '99.

I can pin my first contribution to Debian with far more accuracy: September 3, 1996. That's the date on the first Debian changelog entry in the libwww-perl package, which was, I believe, the first package I ever made. It still exists in Debian and Ubuntu (and other derivatives) and if you have it installed, you can look at /usr/share/doc/libwww-perl/changelog.Debian.gz, and right down there at the very end, you'll find my grubby little fingerprints.

Buffalo Stance

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

So twice in as many days I've found myself channel surfing to the video for Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance"—a song I hadn't heard in at least a decade:

Incidentally, did you know she underwrote Massive Attack's first album I didn't.

Anyway, that reminds me of one of my few regrets from college—the time I didn't go see Michael Hedges. This would have been in 1990, right after the release of Taproot—my favorite of all his albums.

This guy makes beautiful guitars

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I have to say, I also agree with his tagline redefining custom—some of his guitars are pretty damned strange, though still beautiful.

But what I really like is that he's done a series of videos on youtube taking an absolutely beautiful guitar from start to finish. It is fascinating.

If only there was a transcript...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Some days I forget how strange Frank Zappa was.

"From Bavaria."

Tosin Abasi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Mostly, I'm having one of those, "How have I not heard of this guy?" moments.

Anyway, I was, no kidding, looking through some Guitar Center catalog I got in the mail, and saw an Ibanez 8-string guitar being endorsed by this guy whose name rang absolutely no bells at all. And I kind of wrote him off, because it seemed like senseless "more is better"-ness.

And then he, and his band, Animals as Leaders started showing up in my YouTube feed.

New X-Men

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I sold off my copies of Grant Morrison's run of New X-Men from 2001-2004 in a big purge a couple of years ago, thinking to get the Omnibus to replace them…only to find out that it was out of print. I dragged my feet on picking up new copies in trade in the intervening time, until I found out several months ago that they were going to re-print the Omnibus—which I had understood never to happen, so yay procrastination.

The Disappearing Spoon

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

There are, broadly, two categories of science books; those that focus on one thing, with only enough digression to perhaps explain background or competing theories (I'm thinking of The Elegant Universe, for instance), and those that have a theme that try to tie together many disparate bits of scientific knowledge or history.

Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon is definitely in the latter camp. Though it certainly takes the periodic table as its jumping-off point, it's really a broad overview of the formalization of chemistry and physics as their own, separate disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries, seen through the lens of our relationship to the not-as-fundamental-as-we-think (or, for that matter, most of the scientists being discussed thought) components of our universe.

This is how it begins...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

With a lot of peppers and chilis

These are the most ridiculous and disturbing commercials I've ever seen...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

In fact, I assumed that they were a joke, they were so weird and creepy. I assumed that the web site would be a big put-on.

It's probably not fair or appropriate...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

to suggest that it's ridiculous to learn to play "Flight of the Bumblebee" at 600bpm. And yet, I cannot escape the sense that it is just that.

The payoff, such as it is, is at 5:23.

And I understand the pizza is great, too.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

You owe it to yourself to read this article on why Machiavelli was really important. It's long, but it's deeply interesting, and occasionally quite funny.

Erik the Viking (and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I'm not sure Erik the Viking necessarily counts as a great movie by any metric, but when I noticed it had appeared on Netflix, I immediately dropped it in my queue.

I remember having a great deal of affection for it a couple of decades ago, when it first came out—though I probably haven't even thought of it since college—so it seemed worth watching.

It's certainly not without some virtues; the story isn't as quite as fluffy as you might expect (however you might regard the Pythons, they're not intellectual lightweights, just silly), and the actors do what they can with a script that is certainly geared for laughs—the moment when Erik and company are trying to take in the differing notion of life on Hy-Brasil is played a little broadly, even though the point it's making about cultural assumptions is pretty funny.

Given sufficient time...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I'm sure I could come up with a jazz cover of a rock song that seems more unlikely than this cover of Queens of the Stone Age's "Hanging Tree". But it might take a while. Of course I'd be lying if I said I didn't like it, especially as the saxophone is stating the vocal line in the first verse.

TV on the Radio

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I am, at this moment, kicking myself for not having made the time to go to Moogfest so I could see them live.

When I have five minutes, I sit at my drumkit and play Golden Age, because it is currently my favorite song in the whole universe:

/Being Elmo/

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Definitely a movie worth your time. Kevin Clash's story is wonderful to witness, the way his obvious passion took him to exactly where he wanted to be. If you're like me, the insight into the backstage part of how Muppet productions work is intensely interesting.

But none of that is really what stuck with me.

The idea that a large percentage of make-a-wish children want to meet Elmo makes perfect sense to me–if he's so firmly associated as a source of gentle, physical, unconditional love, and you're sick and in pain and everyone around you seems unhappy, of course that's what you would wish for. And yet the idea of doing that even once would terrify me for reasons that I suspect many could understand: what if I couldn't provide what a child needed? How could I stand knowing that this child will be gone before his or her time, and soon at that?

/Redshirts/ by John Scalzi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

If the title carries meaning for you, you are, arguably, the intended audience.

I found the main story to be a fun little meta-fictive romp, and not a lot else. In tone it very much reminded me of his earlier novel, Agent to the Stars–deeply aware of, if only to have fun with, genre conventions. As utterly unconcerned with the "science" part of "science fiction" as its purported source material.

First taste of Intelligentsia Black Cat Organic

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

First taste of Intelligentsia Black Cat Organic

On the impermanence, and importance, of things

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

This is one of those infinitely digressive posts.

I refrained from using a metaphor about the induction of Guns 'n' Roses into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an avenue for exploring Patanjali's Sutra 1.9 in class this morning.

But, of course, I mentioned that I had thought about it–because I think people should laugh in yoga class, and think in yoga class and connect with one another in yoga class, because hell, you're going to have to try and do all of those things at the same time under even more stressful conditions outside of yoga class–which led someone to ask, as we were heading into the home stretch of the practice, how, exactly I had intended to do that?

Thank God they at least got rid of the commas

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Someone created a bestiary of List Code Typography and my immediate gut reaction upon seeing the earliest possible examples was that the only thing that could ever have been more confusing than all the parenthesis in the world was if you had to put commas in-between every goddamned thing.

The language I'm currently learning, Haskell, has its roots in the Lambda Calculus as well, but goes entirely in the other direction–no punctuation at all.

On becoming more mainstream...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I'm realizing that 17 years ago turns out to be a pretty pivotal time for me professionally. In addition to being the time period when I found what has been my primary programming language ever since, it is the time when I threw caution to the wind and embraced Linux as my primary desktop OS.

As out-of-the-mainstream as that decision has been–and it was far more radical back in the '90s before KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu and what-have-you–I have often constructed my desktop out of components that were considered outre even by Linux standards. I ran FVWM 2.X when people were still thinking that 1.x was the way to go. I ran IceWM when a lot of people were embracing Enlightenment or one of the NeXT-step based WMs. Even when I was using components of Gnome on a daily basis, and even trying it out from time to time, I never committed to it, figuring out how to use those components from within whatever unusual setup I was using.

Choosing a new language

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I have been programming primarily–for long stretches, almost exclusively–in Perl for the last 17 years or so. I seem to remember starting to use it around mid-1995, with 5.001–during that long, awkward time between when Perl 5 came out and when the 2nd edition of Programming Perl finally arrived in late 1996.

I've kept with it because I'm fluent in it, I am productive in it, and at this point, I can make it do some fairly absurd things (ask me about writing event-driven servers in Perl, I dare you). In fact, I like the language. I understand the complaints people have about it, but the subset in which I write these days is pretty clear while remaining concise and expressive, and the ecosystem that exists around it is simply unparalleled.

Jeff Beck, Live at Ronnie Scott's

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I've just TiVO'd and watched this for a second time in about nine months.

I have to admit to knowing a fair bit about Jeff Beck, while knowing almost none of his music.

The performance here convinced me to pick up some of his best-known albums…which mostly disappointed. I guess part of my mistake was getting some of the "Jeff Beck Group" albums, because while those are certainly well known, I wasn't particularly interested in his work with Rod Stewart. But even with the solo instrumental work, it seemed sometimes a little sterile.

Midlife crisis?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I am fully expecting to suck at this for months if not years. But boy, there is something inherently fun in hitting things with sticks as recreation.

Jason Segel makes me laugh

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Anne's Carrot Cake

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This started life as the carrot cake recipe from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Revised Edition. And then Anne tweaked it. Heavily.

Carrot cake

Ingredients

2 ¹⁄₂ cups spelt flour (all-purpose flour is acceptable)
1 ¹⁄₄ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 ¹⁄₄ teaspoons cinnamon
¹⁄₂ teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
¹⁄₈ teaspoon ground cloves
¹⁄₂ teaspoon salt
4 extra large eggs
1 ¹⁄₄ cups light brown sugar
³⁄₄ cup granulated sugar
1 ¹⁄₂ cups coconut oil (melted)
1 ¹⁄₂ cups walnuts, toasted and chopped
1 cup raisins
2 pounds carrots, washed and grated (use a food processor, seriously)

Recipe

Make sure the oven rack is in the middle position and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Lightly coat a 9x13 cake pan with butter then line the bottom with parchment paper.
Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and salt together in a large bowl and set aside.
Whisk the eggs and sugar together in a very large bowl until frothy and the sugar is dissolved, 1 to 2 minutes with an electric hand mixer.
Continue whisking the eggs and sugar as you add the oil, until the mixture is completely emulsified, about a minute.
Gently whisk the flour mixture in until there are no streaks left.
Stir in the carrots, walnuts and raisins. This will be an upper body workout.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
Bake until a wooden skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, assume a minimum of 50 minutes. Rotate the pan halfway through baking.
Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack, about 2 hours.
Run a paring knife around the perimeter of the pan, invert the fake onto the rack, peel off the parchment paper, then invert the cake again onto a serving platter.

Icing

Ingredients

8 oz cream cheese, softened
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 tablespoon plain yogurt
¹⁄₂ teaspoon vanilla extract (you can be liberal here)
1 ¹⁄₄ cups confectioner's sugar

Recipe

Blend the cream cheese, butter, yogurt and vanilla until combined, 5 to 10 seconds.
Add the confectioner's sugar and continue to blend on low until smooth, scraping the bowl as needed, 15 to 30 seconds.
Spread icing on cooled cake.

Black Sabbath press conference video

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

There's really not much of particular substance here, but I just wanted to call out that when you see the table with Sabbath and Rick Rubin, against all odds, Rick Rubin is the oldest looking guy there.

Treat your cast-iron right...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

and it will be kind to you.

Sheryl Canter has a very specific technique for seasoning cast iron cookware that is supposed to produce amazing results. Like all the best techniques, it's grounded in science rather than hearsay.

But don't take her word for it–Americas Test Kitchen tried her technique, and found that after treating a cast-iron skillet based on her technique, you could send it through a commercial wash cycle–with degreasing agent–and the finish was undamaged.

Kim Kardashian

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Oh, pop culture, why would I care?

In fact, I don't–other people's marriages are of interest to me only to the extent that some people are unfairly excluded from it on the basis of their sexual orientation–but this does seem an opportune moment to make an observation.

Kim Kardashian's mockery of a marriage seems to me less about the failure of morals in a liberal society–a subject upon which I would not be surprised to hear many pundits bloviate in the coming days—and more about the allure of money and the type of action to which its pursuit often leads. Kim Kardashian was simply doing what was necessary to make sure she was one of the 1%. It seems worthwhile to consider whether others, too, might have fallen into immoral behavior in its pursuit.

Stanley Fish's Life Report

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I understand Stanley Fish is a controversial character. I don't rightly know why–I gather something about academic politics and maybe being on the wrong side of people who like to call other people fascists or something–and I'm pretty sure it doesn't concern me.

What I do know is that I find this essay he wrote about the things, in retrospect, he wishes he had placed more importance upon during his life to be compelling stuff.

Thor

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

…was never one of my favorite characters. Still, I had read some favorable comments about the movie, and Hell, it was directed by +Henry V+Kenneth Branagh, so it should be OK, right?

I think Kat Dennings was probably my favorite part of the movie, really–cute, sassy and way more interesting than either Jane Foster or muscle-boy.

Yeah, that's right, the two-dimensional sidekick was way more interesting than the main characters, who managed roughly 1.5 dimensions.

My Chai recipe

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I knew that I had posted "my" chai recipe at some point in the past, but when I found it, I discovered that it was an old version. Time to update it, especially since as I've been getting more and more requests for the recipe of late. Something about cold weather.

The single biggest difference between the version I posted before and this one is that I've been using rooibos (aka redbush) tea for the last several years. This started because I was making it for a bunch of yoga practitioners, some of whom had sworn off caffeine. The unexpected benefit was that 1) rooibos is very tasty, and 2) unlike black tea, rooibos doesn't get bitter if you steep it more than a couple of minutes. This means it's possible to steep it for a long time and make a strong tea that stands up well to milk or milk-analogues.

As always, slacktivist has a way with a turn of phrase...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This is the sort of inhuman behavior that clarifies that, regardless of what five Supreme Court justices may say, corporations are not people. They have no soul to save, no body to incarcerate, no heart to break and no ass to kick.

Also includes graph as to why the 99% might be justified in being a little peeved.

This could not be more brilliant...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Halloween, the best of all possible times to combine the worlds largest pumpkin and zombies.

10 years gone

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Ars Technica has a retrospective about Windows XP's long life that I found very interesting.

Until reading it, I couldn't have told you when XP was released. I was out of the Windows biz by then—all of my personal work machines had been running Linux for two or three years by that point, and I had given up all but the most peripheral contact with Windows when I left the University of Miami in '99.

The Hunger Games

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Yeah, so I started it on my fathers Nook while we were visiting with them in Panama City, FL, early last month. When we got home, I put it on my list of things to get at the library, and then prepared to wait.

However, the Sunday morning yoga class I teach has also taken on something of a book-club character—really, I guess you could say it's taken on a circle-of-friends character, as we often end up talking about one thing or another, books and food are just persistent topics.

Stations of the Tide

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I have a hard time even describing this book. I guess it reminds me most of something Gene Wolfe might write. You come to distrust the narrative, feeling it's leading you astray even as it tells you the truth.

I don't know that I would recommend it, and I don't know that I would re-read it, but it was worthwhile to have read the once.

Unfolding

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Slowly we unfurl
As lotus flowers

– Radiohead - Lotus Flower

BSG S1:E3 - “Water"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

What do you do when you don't remember what you've done?

There are real incidences of people committing murder while in a somnambulistic state. Can you imagine what that would be like, to wake up and find that you'd done something you had no memory of, that you would never have chosen to to? Even in the world of BSG, your first thought would not, could not be, "I must be a Cylon." To doubt your own identity at that level seems unthinkable. In a way, I think Boomer (and the Chief) don't go quite crazy enough.

He even has a book.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Good Lord, Maru is adorable. I am quite loyal to Siamese as a breed, but the Scottish Folds are so charming they should be illegal.

And now he has a book

This could not be more brilliant

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

BSG S1:E3 - "33"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Way to ratchet up the tension.

If the second half of the mini-series seemed like a little bit of a let-down (and I've not yet got my commentary on it up, so this is a spoiler), this first episode of the actual series kicks things right back into high gear.

Even if I find it implausible that the Colonials are able to even pretend to function after 130+ hours, medicated or not, the actors do their considerable best to give the impression that these are people who are beyond even working on autopilot. Even the best of them have moments of staring off into nothingness as their minds are unable to keep going.

The truth isn't always what you want it to be.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

So, there's this video going around of Al Franken (whom I truly admire as one of our more sensible-seeming Senators¹) taking Tim Minnery–who services in some sort of capacity with the anti-gay Focus on the Family organization–to task for misrepresenting a study about the correlation of the well-being of children and the type of family they come from.

Getting a good copy of the org-mode refcard on two-sided Letter paper

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Dear lazyweb,

Perhaps this was just an oddity of my printer, but here's what I had to do to get a good print of the org-mode refcard onto Letter paper. From within the org-mode sources, I did:

make doc/orgcard_letter.tex
cd doc
tex orgcard_letter.tex
dvips -O "-.5in,.25in" -t letter -t landscape orgcard_letter.dvi

This got me a .ps file that seemed well-centered on the page. To print it, I did:

ps2pdf14 orgcard_letter.ps
evince orgcard_letter.pdf (print, duplex flipped on the short side)

I probably could have done (using lp directly, but since I was also using evince to eyeball the layout first, it was easiest to do it from there):

Continued hilarity in Transformers reviews...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This one from Tor.com:

On it's 3D-ness:

Weirdly, because it's exactly the same as a normal Michael Bay movie, the 3D camerawork seems almost understated, because there's none of the usual “wooooooo, look at the threeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-deeeeeeeeee” foolishness. It actually makes his visual compositions a little more legible; being able to see what's going on in a Michael Bay action scene is a novel experience, even if what you're seeing confirms your prior thesis that what's going on is giant robots beating the crap out of each other.

BSG S1:E1

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This is some insanely taut storytelling, and while it tries to be clear what is happening at any moment–it's only about the jump cuts during space battles, which is probably an appropriate place to do that–it's happy to wait until later to reveal to you the implications of what you saw. Which I regard as a good thing–not assuming your audience is stupid is still refreshing.

As an example, we see Six on the space station, seemingly destroyed, and then we're shown the same person with Baltar, and although we get that this is a signal that she is probably not one of the good guys (not to mention the incident with the baby–which I still can't decide whether to interpret as mercy or as the equivalent of pulling the legs off a spider¹ just to see what happens), they're happy to wait half an hour to let us know that they can upload their consciousness–and we're still not told whether the one on Caprica is the same one as on the space station.

The funniest line out of a movie review I've read in a while...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

From a review of Transformers: Whatever the Subtitle Is on Bleeding Cool

The main action of the film revolves around the good guys slowly coming to understand the monstrous improbability of the villains' plan while Bay smashes all his action figures together and makes the smaller ones say annoying Jar Jar Binks stuff.

Heh.

TV on the Radio

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

So, I posted about my feeling that pop music today was a retread of stuff that wasn't even the best there was the first time around. I got some pushback on that, to the effect that I, being over 40, would have to be an exceptional specimen to appreciate music that wasn't of my youth, and of course I thought things might sound like other stuff, but that was just a natural consequence of having listened the first time around (tell me if you think I'm mischaracterizing your argument, Chet).

I hate Cook's Illustrated

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

OK, so that's not actually the whole story.

In fact, I love the magazine Cook's Illustrated. I learn all sorts of stuff, they have great recipes, good reviews–on all technical fronts, it's a winner.

But there are few organizations that make me regret being their customer as much as Cook's Illustrated does. In fact, I can't think of any. Charitable solicitation annoys me, but I'm not their customer, so it's sort of a different thing.

Finishing The Dark Tower

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Well, I guess it's technically not finishing it, since there's now an 8th book on the way, scheduled for next year. And I may well read that when it comes out–checked out of the library, of course–but the seven books I read were obviously the main story.

I appreciate the first four books a fair amount. In part, I suppose, because they were the four that still felt…/lean/. The first two because I don't think he'd yet gotten into the habit of writing long books. The third book starts to get a little piggy, but as I was still getting immersed in what's going on, I didn't find it as noticeable. By the time I hit Wizard and Glass, the text is perhaps a little more Stephen King-y (which is not necessarily a negative, in my view, but it's a marked contrast to the first two books)–though I think even Wizard and Glass may have been reined in by the fact that he was, in many ways, working in a genre that was not his own.

The God Engines

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I guess you could say this was my "rebound book" after the heavy commitment of King's Dark Tower books. As it is a novella, I suppose it really just constitutes a fling, which seems about right.

John Scalzi goes all omniscient-third-person-+which is a departure from the "Old Man's War" series, which is basically everything of his that I've read-+ on this tale of betrayal. It's a fun, fairly light read. You can infer all sorts of Deep Thought About Religion if you so choose, but I think that might be going a little far.

Kick-Ass

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It had slipped my mind that last weekend while Anne was out of town, as part of my Festival of Dubious Movies, I also watched Kick-Ass.

In its comic-book form, this was the title that finally made me realize that I mostly don't like Mark Millar's writing. It's not sarcasm-over-a-layer-of-caring like Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan). It's not dark and compelling like Frank Miller in his heyday (Elektra: Assassin, The Dark Knight Returns). It's not dense like Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), or deep and beautiful like Neil Gaiman (Sandman). It's not convoluted and mystical and self-referential like Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Doom Patrol). It's not clever (even if it never quite delivers) like Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina). It's really just middle-of-the-road superhero comic stuff–the sort of thing that Geoff Johns (Green Lantern) or Brian Bendis (Avengers) do, and do pretty well–but with a big old helping of super-violence.

I just don't understand

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Insane Clown Posse would be just another act that I didn't care for–in a world littered with them–except for the Gathering of the Juggalos. Just watch the apparently legitimate "informercial" for the 2011 Gathering of the Juggalos:

(Incidentally, life must be rough for Vanilla Ice).

Who is more foolish...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

the fool who makes the bad movies, or the fool who watches them?

While Anne was gone, I spent my Saturday afternoon doing the thing I always seem to do while she's away: watching bad movies. And boy were some of them bad.

First up, Resident Evil: Afterlife. Remember: if the Director is married to the Lead Actress, the movie is going to be horrible. Yeah, sure, you can come up with a couple of possible exceptions–Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps (though it still had Keanu Reeves in it), maybe others–but in general, you're in for bad news. In fact, this fourth installment in the already-three-movies-too-many Resident Evil franchise amazes me in that it even got made. That there's a fifth on the way leads me to despair.

Sometimes you run out of milk

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Straight espresso

Then you have to rough it.

At least I'll make it to 41...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Like the release of a new version of Windows, or a movie that's undergoing Yet Another Rewrite, the end of the world has been pushed back 5 months to October 21st. At least I'll make it to another prime.

(Truly, I feel sorry for these people. Who could pine for the end of the world? What does it even help to know when it might come?)

On creeping censorship, the chilling effect, and reading documents you sign

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Ars Technica has an article about a dentist's office requring you sign over the copyright of any statements you make about them online before you may receive treatment. There is apparently a company that is dedicated to making this a regular feature of all of our health-care encounters.

Ars' dissection of why the contract cannot fulfill it's stated purpose is spot on: the dentist's office says the contract is supposed to prevent "competitors and disgruntled employees" from posting fraudulent reviews–but competitors certainly will not have signed the contract, so how could it govern them? Disgruntled employees might well have signed such a contract, but given the semi-anonymous nature of posting information to the web in this day and age, how could the office make the determination that a particular poster was a former employee in order to request that the statements be removed?

Commencing The Dark Tower

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

One of the writers on tor.com elected to take on Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. The significant difference is that where most of the posters on Tor are doing "re-reads"–guiding others through the books–this is a read-along, so you get to watch as someone else encounters the book for the first time.

Of course, I could do that just fine by myself–I'd never read it, though I remember Patrick talking about it when the first volume was finally widely-released in a trade paperback format in '88–so I figured what the hell, I'd follow along. Unlike my recent plunge into Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books, though, I decided I would take advantage of my local library. I don't necessarily see these as being evergreen re-reads.

Despicable Me

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Nobody does it quite as well as Pixar. The Minions amused me, though.

Live the questions

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The original was the first thing I ever recorded on our TiVO, something on the close order of 9 or 10 years ago (I probably just jinxed my HDs, and should expect them to fall over any moment, I fear).

Still, I should have known better. Jennifer Connelly looked good and tried hard, but everything else in that movie sucked.

The Interpreter

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I caught a chunk of this movie while channel surfing a week or two ago–from about 15 minutes in for about 20 minutes–that seemed pretty decent, so I TiVO'd it.

I am not all that discriminating a movie viewer–which is funny, because I don't bother to watch them very often, either–and I have to say, this was horrible.

I mean, it would be cruel to suggest that this movie actually killed Sidney Pollack, but I was thinking just that an awful lot, especially toward the end.

The Middleman

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

So, to counter the extremely negative review I just did, as well as the one I'm about to do, from the department of things that I would like to recommend: The Middleman

I wrote about The Middleman a few years ago, shortly–very shortly–before it got cancelled. The ABC Family network it was broadcast on never even re-broadcast the original episodes–I saw two and three quarters episodes, and that was it.

At some point, I noticed that Netflix had the DVDs of that lone season, so I put them in the queue. They finally came up.

The pop music of my youth isn't getting rehashed

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

TL;DR: You kids get off my lawn!

From 1981-1986, I was a devoted listener of Casey Kasem's American Top 40. We were living in (West) Germany at the time, and that broadcast on AFN was a primary means of keeping in touch with music back in the 'States–though MTV was rising to power back home, we didn't have it there, and besides, the alternative was hearing 99 Luftballons again (remember, Nena was German, and (rare for a Continental act) had a hit in the US. It was inescapable, and to this day that song still makes me cringe).

I don't enjoy the days...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

when I'm reacting, instead of responding. Thoughtless action that you know is just going to bring you unhappiness is such a waste.

That is all.

"Even Santa Claus believes in you"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It's interesting how simultaneously humbling and empowering it can be to realize that people you know assume that you can achieve something about which you yourself are still uncertain.

Enmeshing yourself in the web

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

One of my long-time students mentioned that she had been away visiting family, and took a yoga class with a local Anusara-Inspired teacher during her trip, and that she had really enjoyed the class.

Now, I'm sure there are yoga teachers out there who so self-assured that they know that if a student doesn't show up the next week it is obviously an issue on the students part, but I don't know if I'd enjoy studying with any of them, personally, because I'm not sure I'd be able to fit in the room with their ego.

Christianity and Ayn Rand

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Fred Clark comments on an article regarding the incongruous support among the Religious Right for Atlas Shrugged, a novel written by a woman who had nothing but withering scorn for Christianity.

What made me laugh, though, was this comment:

Yeah, that's always been one thing that boggles me, that folks thinks you can hold a Bible in one hand and a copy of Atlas Shrugged in the other. It's like they want to hurry American Christianity into it's final resting place as The First Church of Kicking People When They're Down. They've almost got Christ completely removed from their teachings, he's just the name on the letterhead you keep for tax purposes.

This is what I love to see in live performances

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

To say that David remakes "Andy Warhol" in this performance is kind of an understatement. I mean, I love the original, but if I wanted to listen to that, well, I've got the CD. This is something that lives only on this tour, perhaps only in this moment.

"Andy walking, Andy tired, Andy take a little snooze."

What a difference two years make

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post about my view of the web server software landscape under Linux, concluding with how I'd ended up sticking with Apache despite having tried most of the other reasonable candidates because they all seemed lacking.

It's interesting in part because I never recorded when I moved that server from Apache to Cherokee (which I had tried to poor results, as noted in the post), which would have been not too very long after I wrote that post. Oh, well.

Zero History

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Done. Enjoyable. There's a sense of humor in these three books that I don't remember from any of his prior novels, though it's been an admittedly long time since I've re-read any of them.

That said, the distinguishing feature of the trilogy begun with Pattern Recognition–and Zero History make sure you know that it's truly a trilogy, with the three books tied quite firmly together–seems to be that when I'm done with them, I don't feel like I've really been presented with anything new. More like I've been given a tour of exotic locales, with an interesting plot to tie them together, and characters who interest me. But it's a stark contrast between this and, any of the Sprawl books, or even the eschaton presented in the Bridge novels. That's not bad, but it confounds my expectations somewhat.

Is there anything they touch that they won't corrupt?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Investment banks create food crisis

Heaven help us if someone figures out how to put a price on oxygen.

Osama Bin Ladin is Dead

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

And I have to say: "So what?"

As many of the news stories are pointing out, many thought he'd been dead for years.

On a long enough time-line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.¹

The question is, are we doing what we need to do to be safer, and considering that large parts of American foreign policy still revolve around shooting at people, I suspect the answer is still, "No." Considering that large parts of American security theater is ineffective and pointless, I suspect the answer is still, "No."

Pattern Recognition

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Now that Zero History is out, I decided to go back and re-read the prior two Bigend Books.

I first read Pattern Recognition, on a trip to Miami in 2003 just after it came out. At the time, I thought it might be my favorite of William Gibson's books. Now…well, I still enjoyed it, but it felt a little light on substance. Perhaps it's that it was trying to posit something changing just a little too close to the present, and as a consquence, it seems more glaring when it misses the mark. The whole idea of the Sekrit Footage, when considered in light of YouTube just doesn't quite have the resonance it did 8 years ago.

Spook Country

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

From Pattern Recognition I moved on immediately to Spook Country.

I enjoyed this more the second time through, though if I hear the phrase "locative art" again, I may scream. It's another one of those ideas that doesn't seem to have gotten any traction in the last four years, and in the end just served as an annoying distraction from the rest of the book, which I quite enjoyed. It made me look forward to Zero History, which I started yesterday.

WordPress, day 3

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I finally found something to make me want to wail and gnash my teeth.

Having exported the content from Movable Type, I spent some time working on a script to clean up that content–I had made some errors when I move to Movable Type that meant my articles were often not in the format I wanted them to be, so I took the time to correct that, getting everything moved back to its original Textile source, and even converting some things that had started life as hand-written HTML to Textile.

Don't install new blog software in the evening

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

If you're inclined to love the software, you're going to want to take the time to dump a bunch of content in it to see how wonderfully it performs, and end up staying up late.

If you're inclined to hate the software, you're going to want to take the time to dump a bunch of content in it to find that one thing that it does so horribly wrong you will have to remove it, and end up staying up late.

Sugar, threat or menace?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

So, the New York Times had an article about sugar.

Much of it wasn't news to me–I knew about the interactions of fructose and the liver, for instance–while some of it was embarrassing for me not to have realized, like the fact that refined sugar is, effectively, 50% fructose (so, in that sense, those commercials the pushers of HFCS have been putting out lately are are right–there's very little practical difference between cane sugar and corn sugar, though the fact that the fructose in HFCS isn't bound up with anything else may mean it puts more stress on your liver).

WordPress? Perhaps.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

There isn't a lot of love lost between me and Wordpress. There are things that it sometimes seems to do specifically with the intention of driving me out of my mind.

But I am quickly getting to the point where the only other option I might consider is writing my own blogging software, again (that would be round 3, I believe), and I'm not quite prepared to fall off that particular wagon.

Buttermilk Pancakes

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The best buttermilk pancake recipe we know of is in the August 2009 issue of Cook's Illustrated. They even call it that.

Scala Web Frameworks

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Looking for Scala web frameworks, I came across the following projects:

Lift

Scalatra (Sinatra-like)

Pinky

Spiffy

Bowler

It's not a comprehensive list, and I think some of them may actually
be moribund, but at least lift and scalatra seem active.

Hull Zero Three

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I wouldn't claim to have read everything Greg Bear ever wrote, but I've ready a lot of his books. Generally I have found them intriguing, or at least compelling. Unfortunately, Hull Zero Three just didn't do it for me. I read through to the end, but it felt more like work than pleasure.

A shame.

The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Incomparable:

Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand.

Go read all of it.

An excellent guide to building Debian/Ubuntu packages across many platforms

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Runs through how to set things up so that you can easily put together a number of packages for different distributions, architectures, etc.

Go read it.

Linus Torvalds goes to an Oscar party

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Oh, my, it just doesn't get better than this..

MS-DOS 5.0 to Windows 7 in a number of easy (though time consuming) steps

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The one thing the video glosses over is that there's no way that you would ever do this in real life, since you were almost guaranteed to have had to reinstall Windows at some point.

Heard it from Chet

ZOMG, Cthulu meets Hello Kitty

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The only sad thing is that this is a cross-stitch pattern, not a T-shirt, otherwise I would totally be buying this.

Check it out.

I'm a man and need nice work clothes. WTF do I do?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I don't generally hang around on Reddit, but this thread is full of useful info about where to get good grown-up clothes that'll last. I think it's pretty credible because I, too, have had insanely good experiences with Brooks Brothers no-iron shirts.

Give it a browse.

Using git-annex for music storage

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Julien Danjou talks about how its ability to do partial checkouts on large quantities of files makes it easy to keep a subset of music on his laptop while the majority stays on his server.

Give it a read.

Wow, the things you don't remember

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I just ran across a mention of my name in the Changelog to memcached, from 2004. I had forgotten ever contributing anything. In fact, I was having a hard time figuring out what I would have been working on in 2004 that would have been using memcached.

Mind you, I remembered after a moment or two, but it took some serious thinking.

The interesting thing is to realize that I was apparently a fairly early adopter–the entry for my bug report is almost exactly one year after the first entry in the changelog.

I really am impressed...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

somehow the Wachowski Brothers succeeded in making a movie of Speed Racer that was even more creepy and inexplicable than the original cartoon series.

What I don't understand is why they thought they would ever make any money off of it.

Tsung is an open-source multi-protocol distributed load testing tool

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Has the capability to test a number of systems that we use regularly. Worth remembering.

Check it out

Org-Mode contacts handling

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

An alternative to the moribund and largely unmaintained BBDB codebase, using Org-Mode files as the storage location for email contacts.

More things from Julien

ZOMG, Wikipedia truly knows everything

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry for the 1983 German Monsters of Rock concert, which was my first ever concert.

I have vague memories of Whitesnake, but couldn't even tell you what they played.

Blue Oyster Cult was what I was there to see, though I remember it being somewhat anticlimactic–I think I knew a lot less of their music than I had thought. I would probably enjoy it more now.

Really Slow Motion

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Ah, the things we can't see. A number of silly things filmed on a ridiculously high-speed video camera, and then slowed down so we can perceive the things that normally see continuous.

Jake Shimabukuro covering Bohemian Rhapsody. On ukelele. Solo. Wow.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

You know, I haven't seen any ukelele covers that have been less than respectful of their source material. Sometimes they are obviously showing off technical acumen–there's a couple of places in this video that might qualify–but it all seems done with a lot of affection for the original.

Strange Disclaimer

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

An interesting point about the thoughtlessness of some of our legal forms–the silliness of standard boilerplate suggesting that Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle wasn't connected to actual events and persons…right after many pages detailing exactly how it was.

Noted by Yglesias

Axe Cop: The Movie - Part 1

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Ummmm…yeah.

The Axe Cop comic strip is deeply, deeply weird–as you might expect given the author is 5. The movie is astonishingly good at capturing that weirdness–that sense of things just happening one after another with no actual, err, plot–and even a lot of the visual style of the original.

Look at it this way, it couldn't possibly be worse than the upcoming Green Lantern film is likely to be.

Michael Ford: Ayn Rand and the VIP-DIPers

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

It doesn't surprise me in the least to find that Ayn Rand abandoned her principles when the time came that they were truly tested–many, perhaps most, people would do the same.

The thing that annoys me is that she, and her followers, would actively seek to deny others the same option of which she took advantage, justifying it with a "philosophy" suited only to tedious jeremiads masquerading as novels.

Read it and weep.

open social networking: federated channels

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Who knows if this will ever go anywhere to speak of, but it's an interesting idea of how you might arrive at distributed social network.

Check out the spec.

Problem Solving

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

A foundation principle of creative thinking & problem solving is this: unless we are able to hold two contradictory positions simultaneously, solutions will escape us.

– Robert Fripp

What we're really getting at...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I still can't read this short bit of rumination without feeling shivers down my spine. I can't speak it aloud without a hitch in my voice. Go read it all, and think about how anything–anything!–can challenge you to dig deeper.

Strip away pretension, propriety, insecurity, fear and the bills you have to pay.

Hiding

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Love, grief and money cannot be concealed.

– Patrick O'Brian, in H.M.S. Surprise

Awareness

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Awareness is a more powerful tool than effort.

– Hannah Byrum

I feel like this shouldn't make me snicker so much...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

but if you've ever worked on contract this will resonate. Whether you will want to laugh or cry will probably depend on whether you're still doing so.

Reality

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

– Philip K. Dick (unverified)

Why yes, there is a Google Maps extension for Emacs...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I mean, seriously, how could there not be

From 0 to thunderstorm in 1:40...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

You've probably seen this video already, but if not, check it out. The speed with which the beach goes from "nice day" to "black as night" is pretty intimidating.

Incidentally, I already had a category for "weather". WTF?

A couple of Frank Herbert quotes

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I went to re-read Dune, and ended up re-reading Dune: Messiah as well, and picked up a couple of quotes I wanted to hold onto:

It was mostly sweet, and you were the sweetest of all.

We're all in this beauty together!

Bored with rock-paper-scissors?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

If so, I give you, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock-Friends-Pie

A thing of beauty it is...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I've spent about the last three weeks converting much of the infrastructure code for AnteSpam to use AnyEvent.

One of the small bits of fallout from using AnyEvent is that we now have a large number of anonymous code references as callbacks, and in our logging code, these all have the same name: __ANON__.

This makes debugging output a little less useful.

In browsing some code in AnyEvent::SMTP, I happened across the trick of locally setting the __ANON__ typeglob to the name you want to use used in stacktraces and the like:

Mister Rogers

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I vaguely remember being entranced with the show when I was very young. At some point, I guess I started to feel that it was stuff for "little kids", and came to view it with something a little like contempt.

I kind of wonder what I'd make of it now, because the person behind the show is someone I might have liked to meet.

Perhaps I should watch Animal House again sometime

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I don't think I've watched any significant portion of Animal House in two decades or more. But I happened across a note in Wikipedia's page on Robert Cray that notes that he was the bass player in the band performing "Shout" at the party.

That, plus the always amusing scene of Donald Sutherland dissing John Milton seems worth a re-watch.

The process of making a vinyl album

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Part 1:

Part 2:

Pretty darn cool.

I have been flown...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Yeah, so I missed a day, but that's because by the time I got home last night, after a day pretty full of AcroYoga, it was late and I was exhausted.

But I also got to fly, for real, yesterday and today. Video is forthcoming.

Mind you, I am now contractually unable to make fun of any of my flyers if, say, they can't tell their right from their left when we're working together–when you do some of this stuff, it is impossible to tell which way is up, down, sideways, whatever.
It was amazing.

Addressing the New York Times article about John Friend

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The New York Times Magazine has a profile of John Friend up on the web (and presumably soon in print). As an Anusara-Inspired yoga teacher, who has met and studied with John many times, I was interested to read it.

Overall, I thought the piece was pretty good.

Most of the things that Ms. Swartz writes about John–and yes, everyone in the Anusara community calls him John; it seems like name-dropping until you meet him, and then it seems pretty natural–ring true to me. But not all.

More Beatles, I suppose

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

So, Jack White performed "Mother Nature's Son" at the White House. Not my favorite rendition of it ever–Jack's voice is great in other contexts, but doesn't quite work here for me–but still a particularly gutsy move, when you consider who's in the audience (look to the President's right at about 1:45):

Why hasn't anyone done the obvious?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

So Kanye West samples King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man for his new single power. But while I was watching a documentary about The Beatles today, it occured to me that what someone really needs to sample or borrow is the drum track to "Tomorrow Never Knows." That would beat the famous samples from "When the Levee Breaks" easy.

For when you need fun in your comic books.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I give you Atomic Robo's Free Comic Book Day 2009 comic.

Having read the three collections so far, I can say that it's all great fun, though Dr. Dinosaur is definitely the villain that makes me laugh most.

"Shut up, I'm a Time Travelling Genius!"

90 to 40

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I am now 90 days from being 40 years old.

I think these decade birthdays always loom especially large because I'm a decade baby.

Over the last week I've been considering what I'm going dedicate myself to for the next 90 days, so that perhaps by the time I actually hit 40, they will feel more like habits and rituals and be easy to maintain.

One that I've actually already started on is blogging every day. It doesn't have to be significant or insightful or, I suppose, even coherent. Perhaps it will just be a picture of the latte I have in the afternoon, or whatever coding problem I solved (or didn't ;) that day.

At the mercy of excessive choice

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I want a new cell phone. In fact, my Treo 700p, at a solid 3 years old, may be old enough that I could say I need a new cell phone.

Apple isn't even an option–with their hostile attitude toward non-Apple software interfacing with the iPhone, I will never be able to work with it effectively in Linux. So no go.

That leaves Android.

Normally I wouldn't worry excessively about whether my phone was upgradeable, but the just-released Android 2.2 sees such a significant performance boost for so many applications, it becomes even more important on an older, slower phone.

What really matters on the Internet

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I've actually thought it for a while, but it took a post by John Scalzi to get me to write.

What really matters on the Internet–blogs, twitter, Facebook, what-have-you–is that it acts as a place we can remember what really matters to us.

I've read memorials for people's pets–dogs, cats, what-have-you–parents, grandparents, unborn babies, friends I've never met and will never have a chance to meet, and they've all been worth all the spam and blink tags and chain letters combined.

Reconsidering...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

As so often happens, we resist things we don't understand, in favor of those we do, but if we only take the time to learn…

Geek-dom ahead, you have been warned.

I do almost all of my programming in Perl these days–in fact, for the last decade and a half or so. I'm not interested in getting into a langage war here–I know Perl's weaknesses as well as its strengths.

When everything you know is wrong...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Despite growing up in the '70s, I had no clear memory of the 10cc song "I'm Not in Love"; my first encounter (as far as I knew) with the song was on Tori Amos' Strange Little Girls (and I'm going to try and ignore that this album is now 9 years old–where did the time go), where, frankly, it sounds like a musical rendition of a suicide note.

When BoingBoing linked to a documentary about the making of the song, I was intrigued enough to watch it.

Happy Bastille Day!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Yeah, I know I'm probably late to the party on this one. I haven't finished the book yet, and if I knew just a little less, I might find it very convincing. As it is, I am left with significant doubts.

Simply put, there are basic factual errors and what I think are meant to be simplifications or glosses on complex topics that are so gross as to misrepresent things, in subjects about which I know a fair amount, which lead me to be suspicious of everything else in the book–because why would he just play fast-and-loose-and-ignorant with the stuff I happen to be familiar with.

Obama may be better than Bush or McCain, but that ain't much of a bar, and he's doing the absolute minimum to clear it

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

What better evidence than "Patriot Act renewed".

Parenthetically, you want to know what's destroying our way of life? It's not Healthcare Reform, (which would save lives and money and infringe your freedoms not at all), and it's not the fiscal stimulus (which even Republican economists agree helped keep unemployment from growing and the economy from slowing even more than it has), it's the continuous encroachment of the law-enforcement elements of our government on our civil liberties under the guise of making us safer. It is the intelligence agencies conspiring with communication companies to relieve us of our right to privacy using warrantless surveillance who are then let off the hook for breaking the law. It is our willingness to approve of immoral acts done in our name.

I've been on the internet an awfully long time...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

More than two decades, in fact, though most of the earliest stuff was on borrowed accounts–I don't think I had my own email address until twenty years ago next year.

The funny thing is that there are people I know from my very earliest ventures on the 'net with whom I still cross paths.

In no particular order:

Steven Grimm, who is now a member of Facebook's infrastructure team working on memcached (which we use very extensively at Ironic Design) was very active in the Atari ST community back when I was first getting on the net.

Why many anti-flu vaccine people annoy me

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

So, a friend on facebook posted this, and it pisses me off enough that I really need to vent:

I've held my tongue about a lot of the anti-flu-vaccine talk that's been flying around because while I think it is pretty baseless, ehh, it's the flu, who cares–as long as you're pretty healthy going into it, you're going to endure a week of feeling like crap, and maybe if you're unlucky, a nice bout of pneumonia.

Of course they knew each other

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

I think it's clear that their work is of a piece–wildly innovative, to the point of being totally incomprehensible–so it should come as no surprise that Frank Zappa and Jack Kirby not only knew each other, but apparently hung out a bit

Via

Why Health Insurance is simply different

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Jim Henley has a post that points to and condenses a couple of other posts that I think do a great job articulating the fundamental difference between health insurance and other types of insurance.

I think that understanding that health insurance is a fundamentally different beast from, say, your car insurance is an important part of being able to have a rational conversation about what an appropriate place for the government might (or might not) be.

Today's bizarre youtube path

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

I was listening to Jeff Buckley's Grace, and was looking for lyrics to "Mojo Pin", and my quick google search included a link to a youtube video of a live performance video:

From there, I followed a link to footage from the same performance of "Last Goodbye" because, you know, it's a lovely song:

Our new coffee grinder

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

An Ascaso i-1 in the cow print paint job.

The old grinder broke. It probably wasn't more than a year old, but what do you expect when the most abused part of the machine (the doser lever) is plastic? Just another reason I will never buy anything with the name Gaggia on it again (the espresso machine being the other).

I did a quick check on the web, and no one would admit to having the parts I'd need to repair it, so I did a little modification with a Dremel to make it usable for a while, until I could figure out what to replace it with. Of course, a friend who has the same model and had the same breakage later told me that he was able to get replacement parts. Oh, well.

100 Bullets

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Last week the last collected edition (#13) of 100 Bullets arrived. So I started back at the beginning and read all the way through.

This is not a shiny, happy story. To give you an idea, if you look at the Wikipedia page listing the main characters, there are only three who are not at least presumed deceased, and of the ones who are marked indeterminate, I, personally, would only consider one of those to be truly likely.

Highlights of Free Software Documentation #1

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

When someone undertakes something for fun, or out of passion or deep commitment, the end result is often, I think, more reflective of them personally.

This is generally true of Free Software, and in the Free Software universe, I think this is sometimes even more true of documentation–you're not obligated to write it, no one's paying you, few people enjoy writing docs, so if you're doing it at all, it's because you believe.

It's hardly coincidence...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

that as my grandfather was dying, I was probably talking about him–my dad had mentioned that he stopped eating at the beginning of the week, so it wasn't like I didn't know it would be soon.

Still, for class yesterday, I had had a notion to talk about something else, and gotten it all planned out in my head, and when I sat down that all pretty much went out the window, and I really ended up talking about my relationship with my grandfather.

Upon re-reading "Fables"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

So, over Memorial Day Weekend, instead of getting together with people (well, there was some of that) or cooking a bunch of food (though there was some of that, too), I organized my comics.

I am embarassed how many I have–I have, somewhat unfortunately, gotten back into the habit of reading them, and damn if they don't pile up. But for the last couple of years, I have not been in the habit of keeping them organized. Things got shoved in boxes or stacked up on boxes or generally just hidden and neglected. Finding things was a non-starter unless I was feeling absurdly energetic.

Someone should start the First Church of Fabulousness

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The only tenet of which should be, "Two people who love each other should be allowed to marry." Maybe two tenets, the other being, "Be excellent to one another," which has its plusses, too.

At which point, the opportunity to have same-sex marriages becomes one of religious freedom. To restrict such marriages becomes a first-amendment issue, which carries more weight than equal protection, apparently.

Of course, I would hope that many heterosexual couples would also want to get married in the First Church of Fabulousness–it being fabulous, see–but, you know, they, too, could exercise their right to choice.

Kindle 2, redux

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Just a little shy of two months ago, I noted that I really, really liked the looks of the Kindle 2, etc., but that I simply could not in good faith allow someone else to hold my content hostage via DRM.

No doubt people scoffed at the possibility. Two months later, it happened to someone.

And I'm sure as hell never buying one.

Via

I might have read a copy of Starlog a quarter of a century ago...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

but certainly not in recent memory.

The news that it's ceasing print publication and trying to make it as a web-only publication really doesn't impact me at all. But Mark Evanier linked to a post from Lee Goldberg about the magazine that includes an amusing anecdote about covering the premeire of "The Living Daylights" while writing for the magazine:

bq.. All the journalists were invited by the studio to the premiere, which Prince Charles and Lady Diana were attending as well. We had to wear tuxedos and were driven to the event in limos. There were huge crowds being held back behind barracades in front of the Odeon Theatre as we pulled up. I got out of the limo just as a short young lady was emerging from the limo in front of me, so we walked in together. People were going nuts, taking pictures of us and waving. I leaned over and whispered to her: "Makes you wish you were famous, doesn't it?"

Cocktailians

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Something new for the feed reader.

Complete with video of Rachel Maddow (yes, that one) making a cocktail.

I think I just had a moment of personal revelation

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Listening to Blue Oyster Cult's "Cities on Flame", I realized that the reason all of these older albums I love have comparatively wimpy-sounding drum tracks is because the drummers are too good–to make a big goddamned noise, you have to hit so hard that you lose any notion of subtlety.

John Bonham is arguably the prominent exception. Even when he's beating the crap out of his kit–on "We're Gonna Groove", for instance (though listening back to it, its drum track is less in-your-face than I imagine it to be)–he's still got a very subtle way with timing.

How did I ever forget?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I happened to catch Don Johnson's Heartbeat while surfing by VH1Classic's nostalgia programming. The only reason I stopped was because I had totally forgotten who played guitar on it:

Warning, this might not be worth it to find out.

Saturday Morning Watchmen

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

This is brilliantly bad. Right down to having Bubastis actually speak.

Imperative

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Obviously, seeing the Beatles has been an impossibility for most of my lifetime. I saw the Stones on one of their last tours with Wyman, though, honestly, I fall on the Beatles side of the great divide.

Why, then, have I not bothered to see the band for whom I have more affection than either of those?

Yes, if the Kinks do a reunion tour, I will find a way to go.

I would like to think that I would laugh

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500

A visitor to Japan put her camera into video record mode and sent it around the sushi conveyor belt. It's fun to watch.

The thing that always strikes me about videos like this is how few people seem to find amusement at this person's creative engagement with her world. To me, this seems delightful, but so many people either never notice, or don't fine amusement, it makes me a little sad.

If it weren't for the DRM

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

…honestly, I'd probably have already ordered a Kindle 2. It looks like it resolved all my aesthetic issues with the original Kindle, and watching Jeff Bezos sling one around on The Daily Show, it looks light and easy. Oh, to be able to easily search books. And all that jazz.

But I'll be goddamned if I'll put myself in a position where someone can suddenly declare that I can't read the book I damned well paid for.

Weirdest probable homage

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

On the Eagles of Death Metal's new CD, Heart On, there's a track named "Now I'm a Fool" whose vocal line is not without a resemblance to Steely Dan's "Only a Fool Would Say That".

The presence of "Fool" in both titles leads me to suspect this is intentional, not coincidental.

First time in a while...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I actually rather liked TV on the Radio on SNL last night. The last musical guest who didn't annoy me into fast forwarding was, I kid you not, Duffy. Which kinda surprised me too.

Filing-cabinet Zero?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Well, my experiment with Inbox Zero is going swimmingly (even if I am only five days in).

I was spurred by comments to look at ways to try and use the same strategies for paper–which, I have to say, is an even more oppressive burden than email. We have a big filing cabinet full of stuff that's organized in rather idiosyncratic ways, and Anne's and my idiosyncracies don't always match up exactly to boot.

Kurt Vonnegut motivational posters

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Quite a banner day around here, what with two whole posts. But still, I couldn't pass up letting you know about Kurt Vonnegut Motivational Posters. Truly worth checking out.

Web server software on Linux

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

So there has always been a multiplicity of web server software for Unix/Linux.

It certainly feels like I have, at some point or another, played with all of them. And I keep coming back to apache, which I've been using since 1995, when I first became responsible for running a web server (this site, if you care).

Incidentally: Holy crap, 14 years.

Anyway, as I stare around the unix landscape, I see four general-purpose web servers with some mind-share: apache, lighttpd, cherokee and nginx. Yes, there are others, but they are niche players, or they are not general purpose. So here's my issues:

It's nice to know The Daily Show isn't in the tank for Obama

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

It would be easy for people of a certain mindset to assume, given the last 8 years, that The Daily Show is simply a liberal outlet, happy to roll over and play dead now that there's a Democrat in the White House.

The very evening of the Inauguration, they went to work to dispel that, neatly skewering Obama's speech and it's use of language that sounds, in many instances, reminiscent of Bush's speeches:

Handling email differently

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I've started experimenting with Inbox Zero as a way to handle the email I get.

The idea is simple enough–when you get an email, you deal with it in whatever way it needs to be dealt with–read and reply, delete, otherwise act upon it–and you get it out of your inbox.

Oh, and all those emails currently in your inbox? Well, you can do what I did–browse through them and guess that they were all archiveable–or you can do the "DMZ" folder that they talk about above, or whatever.

I'm actually waiting to be able to watch it all in retrospect.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Yeah, so the new BSG episode maybe didn't have the impact on me that it was intended to because it's been so goddamned long since the last episode.

In fact, I'm looking forward to BSG being over so I can go back and start at the beginning and watch it all start to finish–to date, I've watched each episode as it came out, and I while discussion with Chet suggests that this makes some of the less-wonderful episodes from Season 3 a little less glaringly bad, it means that after each break, I don't remember all the nuances of the story so far.

Surely Chet knows about this...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

And yet, the fact that he hasn't yet mentioned Bacolicious to me suggests that maybe he hasn't.

Mmmmmm, bacon.

Now, it's 11pm, I need some fooking sleep.

Is we incapable of learning our lesson?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I mean, am I the only person who, upon hearing about Cantor Fitzgerald's application to create an exchange for speculation on the financial performance of movies thought, "My, that sounds a lot like the idea of getting CDOs on bonds you don't hold?", which, of course, is a feature of our recent financial meltdown.

Oh, and regarding the latter, unrelated half of that story, about a site called WeSeed whose co-founder suggests:

Avoiding reverse lookups in dojo 1.2's dijit.FilteringSelect

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Sorry, geeky post ahead, but I've been having one of those headache-y times with a piece of code I've started to play with, and in Googling, I found enough others who were having the same problems to want to have a concise note of a (possibly hacky) solution.

If you are using dojo, specifically a dijit.FilteringSelect, and are frustrated that, upon selecting an item, your FilteringSelect tries to do a reverse lookup on your label (which may or may not have an easily reversible relationship to the value it represents), then let me point you to the genesis of a solution (mostly to establish credit, since I did have to refine what was presented there for dojo 1.2)

I suspect dancing will never be my thing

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Anne and I, and several other of our friends from yoga, went to salsa lessons last night.

The good news is that many things were easier than when we did swing lessons, since I already had some good habits from that experience.

Still, I really wanted to, I dunno, so some silly backbend as it to prove that while I may be absurdly incompetent as a dancer, I am able to do plenty of other impressive stuff. Somehow I resisted.

Ejacs

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

OK, so the thing about today's hackers is that they're often strikingly funny.

So even if you don't care about javascript or emacs, much less javascript and emacs, you should go read Steve Yegge's discussion of implementing javascript in emacs lisp because all of the digressions and other silliness are sure to make you laugh.

I mean, here's Steve discussing the name:

In that blog I mentioned I was working nights part-time (among other things) on a JavaScript interpreter for Emacs, written entirely in Emacs Lisp. I also said I didn't have a name for it. A commenter named Andrew Barry suggested that I should not call it Ejacs, and the name stuck.

I've decided that it doesn't mean anything bad...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

that I assumed, when Justin Timberlake made an unannounced appearance on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, it would be funny.

"First you cut a hole in the turkey," indeed. So young, and yet so wise.

I guess a nation of millions wasn't enough...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Sorry, with all of the "Fear of teh Negro" crap that have been let fly of late, making a Public Enemy reference seems my patriotic duty.

I am still hopeful that North Carolina will break for Obama–I don't want there to be any question that Obama has a mandate to do what needs doing. Every electoral vote will make the message that much less deniable.

Dogs-n-vomit

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

bq.. Note: This is an old article from 2005 that I never got around to finishing. Considering it recounts my experiences working for the Democratic National Committee on Election Day 2004, I figured it was time to fill out what I remembered, edit it a bit and publish it.

Most of it was written in Murky Coffee, exactly one year after the ignominious end to three months of my life I'm not necessarily hankering to repeat.

Oh, the weird coincidences

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Over on the Washington Monthly site, Hilzoy, in talking about some crazy conspiracy theorist stuff about Obama over at The National Review made a reference to When Prophecy Fails.

So, when you consider that the the name of this blog comes from a Blue Oyster Cult song, it should be no surprise (to those who know their catalog as well as I, at least) that I immediately assumed that he was making a reference to their song Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

100 Bullets

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Brian Azarello and Eduardo Risso have created something pretty amazing–a distnictly noir-influenced comic that I like despite the rampant, generally brutal and often graphic violence.

I picked up the first collection about a year ago, and read all the collections to that point over the course of about a month–picking up the next collection or two each week. The twelfth (and, I suspect, given the significance of 13 in the story, penultimate) collection just came out last week, so over the last couple of days I re-read the whole story–I thought about waiting until the last collection was going to be out, when I realized it was going to be another year. I sure wasn't gonna wait that long.

2008 Elections Survey

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So, I'm not sure I buy it just being a 15-minute survey, but NYU is doing a comprehensive survey concerning the election. I think the survey itself was pretty well balanced, though shoehorning my positions into a number was, as always, a bitch.

Via

Anathem

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The cover to Neal Stephenson's Anathem

I'm sure I'll get around to reading it eventually. But I got about 100 pages into it and just kind of lost the thread. I've read, I think, three books in the interim, so it's not like I've not been reading.

I have read comments from some people that I respect saying that it's a great book, but what inspired me to mention my problems with it was recognizing a pertinent reference to it in the newest xkcd.

An Evil Guest

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The cover for Gene Wolfe's An Evil Guest

Gene Wolfe makes me feel…dense.

Not stupid, per se. I find that his prose is always clear, if sometimes antiquarian, and eminently readable. This is in contrast to, say, Pynchon, who often seems to revel in obscurity.

No, I just end up feeling like I am not smart enough to ferret out the subtext in his writing. I know it's in there, but I'll be damned if I can see it clearly.

There's something about the day today

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

It started out brisk–almost too brisk for my bike ride to the coffee shop (since the Gaggia's on the fritz)–but it has warmed up to merely pleasant with lots of sun.

I am suddenly pining for the Bay Area. Badly. It's been nearly two years since our last trip out there–it's feeling like it might be time for some travel.

Axis

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I ran across Robert Charles Wilson's Spin right about the time I ran across Charlie Stross' Accelerando–in thinking about it, I suspect I heard about both of them at Making Light. I know that's where I heard about Spin.

Having read the first book, I picked up its sequel, Axis, though not before it was in paperback.

On the one hand, it's not badly done, but on the other…I just can't recommend it.

I was actually listening to Pink Floyd's Meddle

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

when I read that Richard Wright had died.

Weird coincidence.

The Republican I find myself unable to dislike...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

is Mike Huckabee.

I know that on certain issues we stand diametrically opposed–I would never vote for him, and I wouldn't expect him to vote for me if I were running for President. But at the same time, he strikes me as being most truly thoughtful and compassionate. Maybe that's why the press seemed to paint him as a rube during the Republican primaries. He also has a pretty good sense of humor. He seems like someone you could actually work with, even if you did disagree on certain things.

Glasshouse

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Charlie Stross' Glasshouse"

I "discovered" Charlie Stross about, oh, 2 years ago. The first book I picked up was Accelerando. I judged it to be well-written, but not entirely to my taste.

Iron Sunrise I liked somewhat better. Not one of my favorite books of all time or anything, but a solid story, actual characters, you know, all the stuff that a good book should have.

Then I found The Atrocity Achives, which amused me greatly. Lovecraft meets computer geek, complete with Linux, Palm Pilots and bureaucracy. Ah, joy.

I can't remember the last PowerPoint presentation I saw

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Nor have I worked in an office for years. This is why I probably hadn't heard of PowerPoint Karaoke. I would have to have an awful lot to drink beforehand. Still, sounds a hell of a lot more fun than the regular sort.

Via

These are the things that yogis think are crazy...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

We were in class earlier, and several people were talking about this clip.

Mind you, the way she's doing it, she's only able to do most of that stuff because she's really young. It takes skill to do it (and I can do most of it except for the bits involving the actual bow) when you're twice her age. :)

What Sarah Palin wants

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Sarah Palin wants your daughter to be given abstinence-only education about sex–which seems to have not been very effective with her unmarried five-month-pregnant daughter.

Sarah Palin wants to make sure every woman or girl who becomes pregnant is legally bound to deliver her child no matter whether she was raped or a victim of incest.

I will piss and moan about FISA and the bankruptcy bill and whatever, but, in the end, I will vote Obama/Biden for these reasons.

I'm sad to hear Middleman isn't doing well

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So, on the recommendation of a total stranger, and, honestly, because it is so easy and free of downsides to try stuff this way, I started TiVOing The Middleman.

I have a vague memory of actually seeing ads for it, but seriously, "ABC Family" isn't generally targetting me as their demographic.

Except, apparently, when they are.

The show is funny and smart–some of the jokes really make me reach to catch them. That puts it in a league with Thomas Pynchon. How the hell did something like that end up on television?

Obscure comic-book note

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So, I watched Superman Returns. Oh, Bryan Singer, how did you fall so far?

But rather than dwelling on its many issues–starting, I think, with its desire to reference the 1970s movies to a fault, and ending with it's conveniently fluid take on the effects of kryptonite on Superman–I will take the time to note that James Marsden has played a comic-book character on screen (Cyclops) who, in an issue of the comic book (X-Men #176) has also ended up in a bad situation in an amphibious plane.

OK, it's a clever idea, I wonder if it'll find developers...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The OpenStomp Coyote-1 is now shipping.

It's a clever idea–most guitar pedals are just software these days, why not have one where you can blow new programs onto it when you want. Especially when it's heart is an 8-core processor targeted at the application in question.

The question is, will the community that it needs in order thrive come into existence. Since the software for managing it is currently Windows-only, I don't expect to find out any time soon.

Was there ever a more accurate description?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

This cartoon does an amusingly spot-on job of showing the tensions that seem to inhere in the software development process.

A tire swing indeed.

Via

An excellent choice for children!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

From Sci-Fi Wire:

Vin Diesel told reporters that it's still his ultimate goal to produce and star in a live-action film based on the life of Hannibal, but that in the meantime he's producing and directing Hannibal the Conqueror, a children's animated series about the third-century B.C. Carthaginian general who rode an elephant across the Alps in order to attack the Roman empire.

This sounds cuddly as all hell. I'm sure there will be lots of funny elephants, and probably a second-in-command who's just a little bit dumb, but is always amusingly abashed when he figures out he's gotten things wrong. And a moral for each story. And probably lots of stabbing and trampling and people falling off the sides of mountains.

Are You Somebody?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody?

When she died earlier this year, Fresh Air rebroadcast an interview they had done several years earlier with Nuala O'Faolain. I caught part of it on the way home from, if I remember correctly, a yoga class.

I think the thing that struck me most about the interview was about how she spoke about the problem of finding a meaning and a center to your life if you reject the things that traditionally define women's lives–marriage and children. Effectively, she said, you have to go it alone, figuring out the meaning for yourself, because the answer is going to be different for everyone.

Surely, surely, surely this is blasphemy?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I pass along the Balloon Jesus pictures. Via

Incidentally, as a consequence of this post, The Catholic League wants Bitch, Ph.D. to be de-credentialed at the Democratic National Convention.

No, I'm not kidding.

Of course, the Catholic League are apparently not smart enough to figure out that Bitch, Ph.D. was actually commenting negatively on the pictures, suggesting that it is so bad for presumably-practicing Christians to show such a trivializing attitude attitude toward their savior–in this case making balloon figures of Jesus being crucified–that professed non-believers find it offensive.

You just _know_ the privacy advocates are going to have somethign to say

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I, on the other hand, am mostly going to laugh and laugh and laugh: RFID-activated retrieval system brings urns up for viewing

I note with some amusement...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

…that in the movie Shampoo, the music that is playing when Carrie Fisher meets Warren Beatty is none other than Paul Simon.

Ah, life imitates art.

Because what everyone needs is a stuffed Kali

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Sanjay Patel's Little Book of Hindu Dieties has been passed around amongst our friends a lot over the last couple of years.

I was, thus, amused to see someone had created a plush toy of Kali based on his design.

Via

So, um, yeah, Obama is winning

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

There has indeed been a lot of hand-wringing on the Left and crowing on the Right about the fact that "Obama's lead is within the margin of error," as if this somehow means he's not leading.

Please go read Kevin Drum so you can understand why Obama is still in the lead.

Whoa, that's weird

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So, there's an Anusara Yoga Teacher Training I just applied to that's going to be held in Cambridge, MA. I figured I'd apply to it because I know the area well; in fact, I might even be able to crash with people in the area, thereby making the overall experience much cheaper.

So I got the address for the place the event is going to be held and brought it up on Google Maps. Turns out it's right next to the Porter Square station on the Red Line, which is convenient. I know many great places to eat not but a couple of stops away from there.

Bike geeks

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I do believe bike geeks can be even more withering towards the novice bicyclist than computer geeks are towards the novice computer user.

Just sayin'.

Stumbling on Happiness

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness

No doubt I'm late to the party.

Nevertheless, I just finished Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I'd certainly recommend it to people, though, like Daniel Pound, my late, admired Professor of Political Science, I doubt it'll really change your mind, but it'll give you a better vocabulary with which to articulate your assumptions.

It has many compelling things to say about the wild divergence between reality and how we, as humans, deal with the prospect of the future, and how our focus on the future influences our ability to be happy in the present.

The easy way to set up postfix and mlmmj

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I needed a mailing list manager for a new project, and, honestly, I'm a little sick of Mailman–it has tons of features I don't use, but one fundamental feature I'd like, archive indexing and searching, is grossly deficient (the only option, which has been maintained as a patch for the last 7 or 8 years, only really supports ht://Dig, which has been moribund for about that whole time)–so I decided to try something that might be no better, but at least was lightweight. So I installed mlmmj.

How did I miss that?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Michael Chabon wrote the story that became the screenplay for Spiderman 2? I mean, it's not entirely surprising to me in retrospect, but I apparently was asleep for the credits.

Watchmen is either going to rock...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

or it's going to suck so badly no one will be able to escape its event horizon.

In the "hope for the former" arena, we have side-by-side versions of the original ads and movie posters that show that there's a fair bit of attention being paid to the source material. It's almost slavish, except, honestly, I like it better than Dave Gibbons' art, which was always the low point of book for me.

A demo painting of Hellboy, at high-speed.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Tor.com has a high-speed rendition of Greg Manchess doing a demo painting of Hellboy at ComicCon.

Interesting to watch the painting come together over the course of 10 minutes. I do tend to laugh at the painting hanging on the wall behind the easel that is very visibly shifting–I'm sure it wasn't really perceptible at regular speed, but at high-speed it's pretty distracting.

Rockwood Filling Station

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

On a lark last night, Anne and I went to the Rockwood Filling Station, a new pizza place in Durham.

The pizza was very good. I do think you have to think a little differently when you're talking about wood-fired ovens–don't expect to get a pizza with lots of vegetation on it, because they're a pain to par-cook, but pizza is in the oven for such a short time, they'd still be crunchy if you tried to cook them using its heat.

CD Purchases

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I've been dividing my purchases of late between new material by artists I enjoy (Nine Inch Nails, Daniel Lanios, others) and old material that I used to be able to borrow from Chet and Patrick, and thus have had no real contact with for the last 16 years or so.

With that in mind, I picked up Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Greatest Hits and the Doors L.A. Woman. It's funny, because I picked up the Doors disc in order to be able to, eventually, get rid of the Greatest Hits collection I have for the Doors–I still need Soft Parade and Strange Days–while I picked up the Heartbreakers disc because I didn't want to embark on the task of working through their catalog.

A fascinating video concerning abortion protesters

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Someone interviewed anti-abortion protesters. The inverviewer asked them, politely, for the most part, the logical question: "If abortion were to be made illegal, what should the punishment be for those women who would have them anyway?"

Admittedly, there may have been people who had coherent, affirmative answer to the question and weren't included in the video, but the only person who ended up in this edit that was willing to actually say yes was obviously conflicted and unhappy about saying so.
Cognitive dissonance like that is, in my experience, a sign that you're on the wrong track–if you're driven by your conscience to do something, but your conscience also tells you that the logical outcome of your actions is wrong, you must step back and reasses what you really want to achieve.

I guess it's just as well I've been throwing away the Emily's List solicitations

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I mean, if they're going to support candidates that indulge in race-baiting I just don't think they need my money. And I'm happy to make sure that people know what they're involved in.

The funny thing is, I actually hold those with whom I have more in common to a higher standard than I do those with whom I disagree. It pisses me off a lot more when people that I am (generally) ideologically aligned with sell out than when people who I am in opposition to do. I guess it's a soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations thing.

Also, "Stranglehold"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

How is it that I end up watching two things (Season 3, Pt 1 of Entourage and Superbad) inside a couple of weeks that have Ted Nugent's Stranglehold in the soundtracks?

I seriously, seriously cannot come up with an epithet.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

All the ones that spring to mind are laden with too much irony for a link to Hal Lindsey proclaiming that Barack Obama is to the Anti-Christ what John the Baptist was to Christ.

Seriously, even for Pre-Millenial Dispensationalists nut-jobs, that seems to be putting a little too much weight on the fact that he made a speech in Berlin.

I was Evan. Or maybe Fogell.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Superbad was, to my high-school experience, what Dazed and Confused was to Anne's.

And 1.6 instances of the word "Fuck" per minute. Heh.

"Just McLovin. That's badass."

Not one, but two "Does not compute" items

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

First, Helena Bonham Carter is on track to be the bad-guy in the next Terminator movie. Which is frigging bizarre and inexplicable. I mean, Christian Bale has been in enough stuff like that (Reign of Fire anyone?) that I didn't bat an eye–but other than Planet of the Apes (which I've always assumed was the casting equivelent of a mercy-fuck for Tim Burton), HBC has generally steered clear of quite such popcorn-y movies.

Circuit City would appear to have a thin skin

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The story is going around that Circuit City has called upon all stores to destroy copies of Mad Magazine containing a parody strip called "Sucker City".

Man, that's not the way to resolve the problem.

So, a long time ago, I'd do links to random Flickr tags

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

It was amusing, and just a little bit dangerous.

I went back to the list and checked out some of the results now.

And ran across this picture under the tag "wedding" that amuses me to no end.

One party looks uncertain, and the other party looks like they know it.

This is what being a kid should be about.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Tinkering School sounds like the appropriate antidote for over-protective parents. Every kid should get to have experiences like this. And yes, it might be risking life and limb, but, you know, life's tough, wear a helmet.

Two things I did at the beach

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Perhaps I should say, two unobvious things I did while we were at the beach.

I played Super Mario Kart on a Wii. I suck at Super Mario Kart. In fact, I think I just suck at most fast-twitch games, period. They just move too fast for me. In SMK this manifested as a tendency to run into walls and off the road. Oh, well. Just as in college, where I would happily drink beer and watch Patrick and Joe play Sonic the Hedgehog, I was perfectly content to watch and enjoy.

Ah, the beach

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Three days of sun, surf and siblings and their children.

I'm not without a desire to be home, but it's fun nonetheless.

Comments should be working

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Thanks for the heads-up, Chet.

Howard Chaykin's American Flagg

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So, four years after the initial announcement, the first collection of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg is out.

The first of Chaykin's work I ever read may have been the original Star Wars adaptation he did for Marvel. 30 years later it's hard to be sure, but I can actually remember, for instance, issues in the later series credited to Carmine Infantino.

After that, the next thing I would have seen, strictly speaking, was Heavy Metal, for which he did some design work, but I'm not sure that counts.

Sent off my application...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

…and there's no reason for me to believe that, after some short amount of time for processing, I won't be able to stick RYT after my name.

Amusingly–perhaps amazingly, considering the industry I work in and its obsession with credentials–the only other such thing I've ever done is my college degree.

Our new yoga room!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So, nearly a year ago, I moved out of my office above the garage–our "bonus room"–and took over the bedroom that had previously been Anne's office. This fairly torturous process happenned because we were going to make the room over the garage a dedicated yoga space.

Well, after much foot-dragging and slow-moving, it's done. Thanks to my parents, who (in April) got us over the initial hump of doing something–specifically, taking down the hideous wallpaper.

Well, that was a bit of a kick in the gut

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I saw The Dark Knight. It was well-written, generally well-directed, fairly well-acted (except for Heath Ledger, who was amazing), and I have no immediate desire to see it again.

Let me back up a bit: I liked Batman Begins a lot. A lot. It was one of the finest super-hero movies ever. I think X2 may have been a little better, but I have more affection for the characters. Factor that out, it's a dead heat.

Considering Warren Ellis' "The Guts Of Dr Horrible"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I don't know why I'm surprised when Warren Ellis drags out his critical skills. I suppose it's because his default mode is so often dismissive.

Still, while we do get the admission that "Musical comedy makes [his] balls itch", he's more than willing to take on Dr. Horrible on its own terms and makes an interesting point about how hubris often derails inexperienced creators: Everyone wants to write some epic-length piece with tons of Deeper Meaning, and forgets that–to take a recent successful example–the first Harry Potter book was short and self-contained.

Archives imported, links corrected...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

At least, the links for articles on the site. There are still a bunch of image links that I probably need to go back and fix up.

So far I'm kinda liking Movable Type, though I still need to figure out how to setup fastcgi support for it–you don't notice it when you're just browsing the site (since it's published to static HTML) but using regular-old CGI for the interface can be a leetle bit poky.

In cleaning up various loose odds and ends--

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

You know: finding the images that need to be re-installed in the blog posts, removing ancient copies of the blog from its days running under Blosxom, so forth and so on–I ran across a .wmv of the song "Shake Your Blood" by Probot.

And I thought to myself, "Why am I keeping around a copy of this video–I know it must be up on YouTube." And then I looked at the date, and realized that I had had it since before YouTube existed.

Moving over to Movable Type

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

After years of running my own blogging software, I think I am finally done with that whole business. Too much work, too few features, etc., etc. I've installed the Movable Type Open Source package in Debian, and whatever its flaws, it's going to be more featureful and useful than the various packages I've used over the years.

So, Chet, how about you?

My archives will move over in time

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I'm feeling lazy, so I probably won't move all of my deathly-important archives over until this weekend at the earliest. Just so you know.

Presumably designed for Webb Wilder

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Yes, I know that Chet is the only one likely to get the joke. Still.

I was never a Buffy guy.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The movie amused me, especially Paul Reuben's death scene, but there's something about the TV show that never grabbed me. And although I liked Serenity I haven't yet actually gotten around to watching Firefly.

I am a very, very bad consumer.

Furthermore, I was not entirely pleased with the end of Joss' run on The Astonishing X-Men. I want my superhero comics to be brainless, loud and immature, not glorious, beautiful and heart-rending. Besides, what is it with killing off the female characters? Someone should look into this.

Err, it's been done...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Weinstein Co. is developing a bunch of stage projects. Including a stage incarnation of Pink Floyd's album The Wall.

I hate to break it to them, but it's been done. It was, in fact, the tour for the album.

A funny thing I read in comic books today

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

From The Incredible Hercules #118:

bq.. Snowbird: A fine pup. What's his name?

Cho: Kirby. Short for Kerberos.

Snowbird. Ah. The three headed guard dog of Hades.

Cho: And the network authentication protocol.

Ah, geekdom.

Two funny things I saw in the car today...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

One police car had rear-ended another police car.
What I thought might be a badger, but, upon looking at some pictures,

was obviously too thin to be one. Anyway, crossing the road, whatever it was.

Law and sausages

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Supposedly–though you can find cites on the 'net, well, it's the 'net–Otto Von Bismark said, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

I got to see a little bit of the lawmaking process firsthand, and I will agree with him that laws are like sausages, but I would suggest that, as a smart, ethical consumer, you should be very aware of how both of them are being made.

Why writing a technical book has no appeal for me

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Baron Schwartz has a long discussion of the genesis of High Performance MySQL 2nd Ed that goes into some detail about what's involved in producing such a book.

There's a reason Free Software often has dodgy or incomplete documentation–documentation is hard!

Thirteen

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

No, not Friday, the song by Big Star. I hadn't heard it in a long time, and it just showed up on the big shuffle.

Oh, and while watching some footage of the Sex Pistols, I realized that my Father-in-law has an eerie resemblance to Johnny Rotten. And no, I'm not making this up–Anne agreed.

So riddle me this...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

if, as an expert being consulted on Talk of the Nation just suggested, it is impossible to abridge Habeas Corpus through any act committed overseas–since the Constitution only applies in US territory–is it then also impossible to commit treason when outside the US?

Obviously I think it's ridiculous to say we, as citizens and/or part of our contituted government, can pretend Habeas Corpus doesn't exist when it's convenient. But it seems to me that the two issues are directly analagous, and if you admit to one, you must admit to the other.

Eventually I will write a blog post

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Wherein I will describe how to set up a cyrus-imapd cluster in fairly straightforward, and mostly reliable terms. It will probably include lots of invective concerning cyrus-sasl (the scourge of my existence) and openldap (which is like a little kid that tends to get the pointy scissors and stab you over and over with a gleeful smile on its face).

For the moment, I will just note that I have moved email for a couple of my secondary addresses to our little cluster. That represents a certain optimism on my part.

I don't think I mentioned before

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

While we were in New York in January, we went to see a production of The 39 Steps on Broadway.

It was a tour-de-force of clever stage technique, and quite funny in a sly, clever way–all the more so because it is exactly the same story as the Hitchcock film of the same name, but with everything slanted just enough to make you laugh.

I just thought of that because on the link in the Sandman story just now, there was a pointer to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier which incorporates elements of the same story.

I look forward to November

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The fourth, and final, volume of the Absolute Sandman is released. I will take a few days and move slowly through the whole series, front to back.

I really don't expect it to be easy–not because I expect it won't hold up, but rather the opposite; every time I go back and re-read, it pulls me in deeper.

Does the world truly need another?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

You know, I like the novel Dune, and I even have some affection for the 1984 film version, as horrifyingly flawed as it was, and thought the Sci-FI Channel miniseries was decent (the sequels covering Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were better, IMHO).

But fook, those are all arguments against the world needing another film version of the novel.

I bought a 1GB iPod shuffle a few weeks ago

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I wanted it for walking around, where the 80GB Classic I've got is just too clunky and insufficiently solid-state.

There was the requisite monkeying with LInux and its somewhat fractious relationship with iPods, and then I started putting stuff on it.

I've been so used to dealing with my music collection in its entirety, or at least in very, very large chunks-~~I started ripping things en mass in mid~~'99–that it was sort of interesting to realize that I could get maybe 150 songs on the thing. I had to really think about what I wanted on there.

Simple pleasures...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

It amuses me to think that clusters of very fast machines are being used, in their idle time, to produce universal solutions to Rubik's cubes

So I've always obsessed about my music's tagging...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Which is why I've pretty much only ever used stuff I've ripped myself. I don't even like the way Nine Inch Nails has tagged their own stuff with the last couple of releases.

Thus I was amused to find out about a form that last.fm have to show you some of the wild-ass stuff that people's mp3s have tagged in them.

Via

Wha?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Moog Music is making a guitar. As you might expect, it's all sorts of bizarre.

52

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

It was 52 weeks ago that I taught my first yoga class. I now find myself on the hook for four, at three different studios. I think I'm going to be gradually cutting back just a bit, as that's at least one, perhaps two more than I really need to be teaching.

Everyone's a building, burning...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Guardian has a gallery of portraits of people immediately before and immediately after death.

The sense of repose in the after pictures is wonderful. The varied expressions of life in the before pictures are beautiful. It's 11 pairs of photos; it might be a lot to go through in one sitting, but you need to look.

It makes me a little sad that in their statements accompanying so many of the people–all of whom, I believe, were suffering from terminal illnesses–felt cheated.

I just threw away...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

the copy of Microsoft Word 2.0 (with Bookshelf) that came with the Gateway 486dx2/66 that Anne and I bought in 1994.

Yeah, there's a little bit of a packrat in me.

Of course, I still have the CPU from the system, as well as a 166Mhz Alpha, sitting on my desk. Can't get rid of the important stuff.

Happy New Year

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Rang it in with good food, good company, and discovering that I actually did know the definition of the word howdah

Spent most of yesterday and today cleaning up the house. Actually, that's understating it–it's been purge time here at Chez Klinefelter-Dorman. That said, right now my office is a wreck, but that's because we actually got a lot of stuff out of my old office and (assuming it's going to be kept) into my new one so that, before too long, we can finally rip up the carpet, rip off the wallpaper and turn it into a proper yoga studio.

Just FYI...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The aftermath of having a vasectomy is like the moment 20 seconds after you've been kicked in the crotch–the point where the really serious nausea-inducing pain has passed and it's starting to fade into a dull ache–except it goes on for hours and hours.

At least, that's what I think it's like–I have to admit it's been a long time since I've gotten kicked in the crotch.

Navigating the medical system (Part 0)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Almost exactly three years ago–shortly after getting back from my stint in DC–I got a physical. I wrote about it at the time because I found out I had a hernia. As I said in that article, the doctor didn't think it was a big deal, and so as much as it freaked me out, I didn't worry about it much.

A couple of months ago in a conversation, the subject of a friend's hernia came up, and I commented that I had one and it didn't seem to be that big a deal. A long discussion that made me feel more than a little green ensued, and I ended up convinced that I needed to get it fixed. But it's been a crazy couple of months, and I just haven't gotten around to it.

In fairness, the real Chet is more handsome...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

But label aside, I cannot help but be amused at the existence of a hot-sauce-that-is-too-hot-to-use (they go so far to say it's not a condiment, it's a "food additive"–or, apparently a decent anesthetic that is named Chet's Gone Mad

Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarsts, Cat's Cradle, 2007-10-30

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The absolute high-point of the show for me was the rendition of Blockhead, which, with 10 Crafties and Robert Fripp to boot, was quite powerful. The most beautiful was easily the piece done entirely acoustically as the final encore. The most whimsical was the theme from "Mission: Impossible".

There were pieces, certainly, that didn't move me. But at the same time, watching an ensemble like this perform holds its own energy–to watch a group of players working in such synchronicity is amazing.

Another one of those "which part of this is weirder" moments.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Specifically, is it weirder that someone is making a movie of Radio Free Albemuth or that Alanis Morissette has just been announced as having joined the cast

I can certainly understand why people were unhappy about the IBM/Lenovo deal...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

And yet, my experience in having my T43p serviced last week–the fan had started being noisy, sometimes obtrusively so, several months ago, but sounded like it was truly dying on Sunday morning–was virtually identical to having my T22 serviced three years ago:

I called, described the problem, they agreed there was a problem
They sent a box, which arrived the next day
I put the laptop and dropped off at a collection point
The laptop arrived at the repair center the next day
The laptop was repaired that same day
The laptop was shipped back to me that same day
The laptop arrived the next day, fixed

Well, OK, this time I called on Sunday, so the box didn't get sent until Monday. And then I didn't have a chance to actually get the laptop boxed up and sent until Thursday. And I didn't hear the DHL guy ring the doorbell yesterday morning, so I ended up going to the DHL depot to pick it up.

The natural progression of kernel hacking

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I don't think this is the first time I've quoted Rusty Russell:

I think Willy did it because this is for printk. It makes more sense than
everyone opencoding an -ENOMEM handler, which will have to be replaced by
some mildly amusing string like "I want to printk but I have no memory!".
Next think/sic/ you know 70% of the kernel will be bad limericks as everyone tries
to one-up each other.

And another thing about that Lovecraft movie...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Did I miss the 28th Amendment to the Constitution where anybody making a horror movie is obliged to quote the last two lines of Yeats' The Second Coming Because by the Father, the dead gay Son and the Holy Spigot, that is beginning to drive me around the fucking bend.

I suspect Stephen King started it (for the horror genre, I mean, the Wikipedia page makes it obvious that everyone in the universe with an ounce of eruditory pretention has quoted this poem at some point) with The Stand–but you'd think people would also have noticed that he also quoted Blue Oyster Cult and taken it somewhat less seriously.

In a way it's appropriate...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Most of H.P. Lovecraft's best works with something that is maybe a little odd, becomes decidedly strange, and then slowly descends into madness.

That pretty much described my reaction to seeing that 1) there was a film supposed to be released this year called Cthulu, based on Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (though the screenwriter seems to be suggesting in this interview that gay people are more aware of the horrors of small-town life than us straights, which seems somewhat myopic), 2) it had Tori Spelling in it.

Happy Birthday To Me

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I guess I didn't do a last-year assessment last year. I was probably scared to.

I dunno, how do you assess, "Was this the best year ever?"

I mean some things are unambiguously good, like beginning to teach yoga: six months in an I'm still enjoying it, perhaps even becoming skillful at it. And the yoga kula continues to grow and become more cohesive, which is a great source of joy and support.

Just. Fucking. Wow.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Robert Love is a kernel-hacker (and former GNOME guy) whose blog I see through Planet GNOME.

He has posted some pictures of New England in Fall the first of which is almost artificial in its drama.

This, ultimately, is why I subscribe to all these planet aggregators–weird, unexpected stuff shows up.

North Carolina really does feel like home

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I honestly don't know that there's every been a time when I sat in a room with, at a guess, 80 people and knew most of them. Maybe 16 years ago when I was VP at Mallet, if absolutely everyone I knew came to a party I could have managed it. But only maybe.

I spent most of the weekend at a yoga workshop, with 80 or so people in the room, and you could count the number of people whose names I didn't know without taking your shoes off. And I could rattle off the names of ten or twenty other people I know who are part of the kula but weren't there.

I note this just because Chet has had interchanges with him in the past...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Steve Gibson, of SpinRite fame has come up with sort of a super-simple variation on the little RSA keyfobs where you instead carry around a little business card that you can print up yourself that has a bunch of possible second-factor entries you can use for auth.

The part that makes me laugh a bit is that it is–as you might expect if you remember the ads for SpinRite back in the day–a Windows .DLL coded in assembly.

My amazing brother-in-law (and less fun things)...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

In an attempt to break the rather somber mood surrounding the announcement than my paternal grandfather–suffering from last-stage Alzheimers–has just been put into hospice care, my brother-in-law revealed that in order to get into the Chukker to see Dick Dale before he was actually 21 he went dressed in drag…because apparently they didn't card drag queens.

I have to admit that I have nothing to say to that, other than to note that the ceiling mural looks nothing like I remember. But I didn't go to the Chukker that often because it was across town and, well, you know, drinking and driving is pretty dumb.

It's hard to blog when you can't type...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Which was my initial reaction to this video of a man making farting noises with his hands to perform along (horrifyingly accurately) Iron Maiden's The Trooper.

You. Must. Love. The. Internet.

It includes the guitar solo. That happens at about 1:45 left. It is indescribable. And he's just so into it.

Tai Chi

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

So a friend of mine and Anne's wanted to take a Tai Chi class at Inside/Out (where I teach yoga on Thursdays). This being one of the couple that we invited along to swing dance classes earlier this year, they invited us along to Tai Chi classes.

It's funny how much yoga stuff I have to not do to Tai Chi correctly–it's a much more relaxed, softer practice than yoga. So in that sense, it has been valuable to highlight habits I've acquired and make me think about them once again.

Thinking about it, what _is_ a super-high-volume mailing list?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Martin F. Krafft posts some stats about the debian-devel mailing list.

The long and the short of it is that over its 12-year history, it's averaged one message ever 25 minutes. Put that way, it sounds like no big deal, but then thinking again, what mailing lists are going to be able to show that sort of volume over such a long time-span?

I never would have thought Damian Lews is was British, either.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I caught the first couple of episodes of "Life" and found it intriguing enough to drop a Season Pass in the TiVO.

Some things are a little overdone–they seem to believe that every episode requires a scene where Charlie is able to make a nigh-magical connection with someone they need to talk, presumably because of his time in prison–but hopefully the writers will see fit to abandon those more obvious tics.

Blosxom development is apparently moving again

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Not, obviously, that this is of real importance to me–it's been years since I used blosxom myself–but Chet's still using it, though I know he'd started talking about moving to something else. Maybe now he won't feel the need.

I had no idea that block stacking was a long-standing mathematical problem

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

But apparently it is. Well, long-standing, at least, since it is apparently no longer a problem

Via

Incidentally, I wrote my first ever bit of python code today...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Funny enough, it was a fix for a bug in the software (gnome-blog I am using to write this post.

It was mostly a matter of figuring out what was failing–a GConf interface was failing when the app tried to store an integer–and then searching around Mark Pilgrim excellent (and freely-available) Dive Into Python.

If I was really together, I'd post a patch, but I didn't back up the original.

New blog software

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Still Catalyst, but this time with a database back-end that also does asset (aka binary files) management.

For about 30 seconds during development the software actually had 100% test coverage.

How to setup Horde applications (IMP, Turba, et. al.) under apache and mod_fcgid

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

This is one of those times when I hope whatever pathetic amount of google-juice I have can aid others.

Googling around, I have found many oblique references to running horde/imp/turba/etc. using fastcgi, but very few specifics, and what specifics I found are mostly about using lighttpd (which is a fine server, but we're not using it yet), and those for apache seemed wrong, or at least way over-complicated.

For maximum applicability in today's world, I'm going to do this using mod_fcgid under apache2, since mod_fastcgi is basically dead.

I am probably the only person in the whole world who registered this...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

but the GNOME Project and Anusara Yoga both date their foundings to August 15, 1997. Which was, incidentally, my father's 48th birthday.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Well the reviews aren't making me want to run out and see it...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

as they all seem a little tepid…but maybe the the appearance of Stardust on the big screen will get me to finally go out and buy the original comic.

And who knows, maybe I'll just go see it for the helluvit.

But what got me to write this entry (the first in far too long) is that I ran across a review in the Austin Chronicle that made me laugh with the first line:

OK, this is fucked-up

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Little Miss Sunshine leads to The Last King of Scotland?

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

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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:

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

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I wish I had had Rhyme & Reason back when I was actually writing poetry. From the FAQ:

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.

Dearly departed

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Gaps

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Just in case you didn't know Stevie Wonder was a serious badass

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Check out his drum solo:

_Supersize Me_ meets Edwardian England

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Via

Stickers on laptops

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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 guess not buying stock back at the beginning wasn't the only mistake you could make...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

A law professor's story about Microsoft.

I hate to say it, but I'm not surprised...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Twitter is apparently finding that Rails doesn't do massive scaling well, 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).

Why your USB-connected Palm stopped working with Debian etch

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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.

I hurt myself today...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Laughing at this, that is.

Tufte was a piker

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

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

The best thing about the big CD-ripping project

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400

…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…

What do you mean firsthand accounts are better than conventional wisdom

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

In response to someone making a comment about the 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

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.

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

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

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

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

There is no way it can be a good thing to have an emulation of the Amiga written in javascript.

via

Because I am too lazy to make something this fucktarded up...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

A Christian/American version of Wikipedia, complete with such brilliant statements as:

Did you know that faith is a uniquely Christian concept?

Via

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

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

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 doing just this. Its sounds extraordinarily painless. Even resizing the filesystem on-line was a no-brainer.

You may remember _Point Break_...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

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, and, if you're lucky, you could play Keanu's part because the lead is selected from the audience each night, to:

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.

Might _The 1/2 Hour News Hour_ succeed?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Mark Evanier (a funny guy in his own right, as co-creator of Groo the Wanderer (yes, there's a Wikipedia article for it (YNCAN))) has a couple of points about the attempt to create a conservative version of The Daily Show.

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

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:

The Comprehensive _Pogo_

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Walt Kelly's Pogo has never been collected in its entirety–something less than six years were collected by Fantagraphics 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.

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."

My uncomfortable relationship with Robert Heinlein

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

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.

Harper Lee as Hott Older Woman

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

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 and Infamous, 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.

If you're creating the position of Poet Laureate

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

of course the law has to be written in verse!

I applaud the state of Minnesota.

Via

It was ever thus

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Tech support through the ages.

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

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

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 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, and it seems much more liberal, though, so all is not lost.

Who is more uncomfortable, Frank or the host?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The idea of Frank Zappa on a mainstream game show is pretty much incomprehensible from the start. I wonder what his mom thought.

Honya Budo

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

I am obviously not enlightened, for while I occasionaly show signs of being an adept at Honya Budo, I often fail to be able to even master the "Way of the In-Out".

Home

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

It's always good to be back.

That we stepped off the plane and immediately drove to the opening of our friend Lila's new yoga studio, where, much as we expected, we ran into a bunch of people in the kula, and got to tell them about our trip and hear about how we were missed during free week and generally catch up, and then we went to dinner at an excellent pizza place, well, it definitely made us happy to be home again.

I'm in ur coffeeshop eatin' ur breakfast

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

My favorite coffee house/cafe in DC

Well, on the one hand, I'm sorry that the 2-hour practice class that I had intended to go to isn't on today–I found this out from the teacher at the class that we went to yesterday.

But the class last night, after a lot of walking, has left me worn out anyway. So instead I'm enjoying tasty food.

I had no idea

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

You learn something new if you pay attention

This is the bridge that lies between our hotel and Adams-Morgan. As many times as I've crossed it, I'd never noticed the name.

Mmmmmmmmm

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The best sushi place I've ever gone

If I lived in DC, I'd end up awfully fat from eating like this at lunch. As it is, I try to make a pilgrimage to Sushi Taro when I'm in town, because it's the best sushi I've ever had. From left to right, there's eel, smoked salmon, amberjack and two kinds of mackerel. I'm not sure what the last probably says about me.

MySQL continues to play catch-up

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

So, slashdot had a story about the new Falcon storage engine for MySQL. I don't care for MySQL for a number of reasons, but some–though not all–could be alleviated with a better storage back-end. So I cruised over to check out the Falcon feature-set.

Funny enough, with the exception of the next to the last point–which is a potentially non-trivial point, I admit–this is all stuff that PostgreSQL has had for years.

How popular is _your_ name?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

So after the Water Callers' performance the other night, I said hi to one of the performers, Bart, and after greeting me by name, he expressed some surprise at having, in fact, remembered it. I, in turn, made what in retrospect sounds like a bit of a graceless comment about how it was a good guess, regardless, since it was the most popular name for male children around the time I was born.

What a different person I feel like

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

So, last night we went over to some friends' house to celebrate the end of 2006 and the advent of 2007. And as the fateful moment approached our timezone, in an effort to keep ourselves awake, we discussed our respective worst moments of 2006.

It's unsurprising, really, that, as couples who've both been together for some time, each pair came up with lists that were more or less identical. And 2006 wasn't the best of all possible years for any of us.

A little late

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

#+:CAPTION: A few minutes before midnight, 2006-12-31

Already the well runs dry

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Well, I'm sure not going to blog about Saddam Hussein, and I've already blogged about the Vietnamese restaurant we went to yesterday, and while an amusing experience, the hispanic supermarket we went to yesterday:http://www.comparesupermarkets.com/ wasn't that earth-shattering (having been to one of the Fiestas in Houston, it's pretty small potatoes, really).

And I'm otherwise occupied with making tortilla using this Cook's Illustrated recipe (warning, it's behind a membership firewall, but you can find a copy someone's put on the web here.

_Sous vide_ on a budget

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Ted Tso known as a Linux kernel hacker–documents a way to do sous vide cooking using a slow cooker.

This is the technique that you occasionally see on Iron Chef America, using special units that heat and circulate water at very precise temperatures. Using a slow cooker makes it a bit more accessible as a technique.

Funny enough, I seem to have just gotten one of those for Xmas…

Divestiture

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I've decided to get rid of a lot of books. Mostly, but probably not exclusively, technical books. Many, but not all, fairly up to date. The fact is that for years I've bought them simply out of habit–I browse them, or maybe even actually sit down and read them, and discover that there's little in them that I didn't already know. And then they go on the bookshelves, or the floor, and take up space.

The Water Callers

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I was involved in the prior discussion while at a performance by The Water Callers, a local pair. If you go to the myspace page, I would suggest you listen to In The Moonlight, which I think is the best of the tracks they've got posted, though not the best they've written.

It was fun, even if it does end up with me posting this after midnight. We saw a number of people from the kula there, some expected, some not. I don't think we've been as likely to run into people we know out of the blue since living in Tuscaloosa.

Busy as hell

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I truly have been busy as hell the last few days. It's a pretty good sort of busy, I suppose–I've rewritten huge chunks of code (we now no longer have a stand-alone spam checking daemon, it's instead managed through postfix, which makes a certain sort of sense), implemented a number of new independent processes, etc.

And that's just what's happening in my little intense development branch; Chris and Dad have been working away on web stuff, with me providing the occasional prod to keep them on course.

Moving to TypePad

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I have decided to get out of not only the blog-software-writing habit (a bad tendency anyway, and one I never really had the spare time to give proper attention), but out of the blog-software-hosting gig.

I've got all the old posts imported (ah, beloved perl, an hour to hack together something to convert 500-odd posts), and I'll be redirecting the URL to typepad shortly.

So, one of the things I was looking for...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

was moblogging capabilities. Typepad even provides a Treo app to facilitate it. This is the obligatory test.

Mapping lyrics of songs

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

What if your song lyrics were a state machine?

The Gods don't want me blogging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I finally post the first item here in, what, three months, and the next day things come down the pike that virtually guarantee I won't have a lot of time for the next however-long.

All I will say that if that old saw about "When a door closes, a window opens." is true, I'm the guy whose efforts to open the window just went from vigorous to mildly frantic.

Schroedinger's Ball, Adam Felber

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Although I've not succeeded in catching a broadcast in a long time, I maintain a great deal of affection for NPR's Wait, Wait… Don't Tell Me!. As a result, when I was in Quail Ridge Books on Friday–it being perhaps not entirely surprising that the onset of the Christmas season tends to drive me more to local retailers, even though I'm generally content to browse at Barnes & Noble most of the time–I picked up (among other things), Adam Felber Schroedinger's Ball.

Ah, Andre, we hardly knew ye

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

OK, so guest starring on ER would have hardly been a significant feather in his cap, but oh how it hurts to hear that Andre Braugher turned that down to be in the second Fantastic Four movie.

I rented the first one, and still felt a bit cheated. I can't imagine the second would be any better. But who know, I suppose they could really pull out the stops and Do Galactus Right.

The Jim Henly one-two punch

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Jim Henly has, first, a solution for when your 17-year-old wants his girlfriend to sleep over. Best of all, it should be fun for the parents in a number of ways.

Second, he has the fortune cookie response to neoconservative fortune cookie plans.

And the newsmedia wonders why no one takes them seriously anymore?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

What a bunch of fucking slackers.

No, I'm not talking about their shitty reporting on the run-up to war, or their unwillingness to hold a crap administration's feet to the fire for what they're not doing for the American people.

No, right now I'm talking about unattributed theft of text from Wikipedia. To wit (from the Fetus In Fetu article on WP):

Fetus in fetu (or Foetus in foeto) describes an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. It continues to survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin's blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

But could they really make it incoherent enough?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

So, apparently Christopher Nolan is almost on board to direct a movie version of The Prisoner.

Now I don't really remember much about the original show–even though MTV rebroadcast it while I was in college (I had no TV, and, honestly, I really didn't miss it)–but the lasting impression I have is one of a show playing "hide the ball" with important bits of information to the point of incoherence. While I don't mind that per se–and maybe it wouldn't have seemed so had the show not had a very short run, meaning they perhaps weren't able to explain things they intended to later–I have to wonder how that would play with mainstream movie audiences.

Haven't looked at the stats in a while

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Given my repeated and persistent absences from posting, it should come as little surprise that I also haven't bothered to look at my web stats either. Given that this whole edifice is about my narcissistic need to make my snappy patter available to the web, how could it not hurt to find out that my never-exactly-legion fans had abandoned me?

Anyway, just because I haven't looked at them doesn't mean that the stats haven't been collected, and after a week of blogging a couple of stories a day, I figured, "What the hell?"

How could I not share?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Anthrax pays a surprise visit to the set of Battlestar Galactica.

With tracks paying homage to comic books (Judge Dredd, horror novels (Misery in "Misery Loves Company"), and movies (Blue Velvet in "Now It's Dark"), can a track dissing Cylons be far behind?

NPR to the rescue

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

So, my dad and I have had a long-running debate over whether or not we should be including spam with so-called "Poison Paragraphs" in the corpus we hand-manage for AnteSpam's Bayesian database.

I've long maintained that the right solution is to just bung it in there–the text that is generally being inserted is generally far too atypical of real emails to make a difference. Dad was more hesitant.

With this in mind, I tried to be gracious when he called to mention that NPR had a story, including an interview with Paul Graham, the guy who first proposed using Bayesian analysis, who confirmed that it really wasn't a problem.

Wow

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

OK, so Chris Toshok has apparently been dinking away with making Turtle, which I gather is a GPS-monitoring package of some sort, hook up with F-Spot, so that, based on timestamps in your photos, you can pinpoint where they were taken.

And then you can export the locations of the photos to google maps and the like.

It's apparently all very much under development, doesn't yet work for anyone else, etc., and, for all I know, it may already be a feature of every commercial photo management package in the world. But damn, it sure seems like a neat idea.

Just so you know: that lock on your door? More-or-less worthless.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

At least, I have no reason to believe that the author of this paper has any particular reason to lie. And the ubiquitous YouTube even has video of someone demonstrating the technique:

Oh, hooray.

Oh, those silly GNOME hackers

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Davyd Madeley hacked together a small GNOME applet to measure and rate his contributions to the GNOME Bugzilla and set boudaries for levels and such.

Heh.

I had an interesting realization the other day

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

As I was tooling around the UNC campus, playing musical subversive (that is, playing whatever mix CD I had in the car at moderate-to-loud volume in the hopes of making the lives of people I passed a little more surreal when things went from, say, Beck to Earth, Wind & Fire), I came to a stop sign. At these points I usually turn down the stereo a little, and I kind of idly noted that this was probably a kind move for the older, almost elderly gentleman passing in front of me, though it was just Dear Prudence on at the time, so it's not like it's all that abrasive.

They're more like cows in India

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The Guardian, of all places (think: newspaper from cold & dreary nation reporting on happenings in subtropical island paradise), has a story about the US DOA possibley fining the Hemingway House $200/day for its cats.

Having been there a couple of times, I know that I would not want to be one of those cats–there are 46 of them, and there's no real way even an institution can really claim to be taking care of them. Sure, they're putting food out, and I have no doubt that many of the part-time docents really do care about particular cats, but there's just not enough attention to go around.

If you like Alton Brown

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Consider setting your TiVo to record Alton Brown's new show Feasting On Asphalt (there's no good link, sadly).

I watched the first episode last night (I had recorded it on Saturday or whenever it first showed), and it was interesting–the discussion of how mass culture has impacted regional food and small establishments, how changes in the automobile did the same (listen closely for the comment on the '57 Chevy Bel-Air), so on and so forth.

It is unreasonably fucking great

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Apparently Tim Bray's Mac died. While it's in the shop, he elected to use Ubuntu on a Sun Ultra 20. His experience appears to have been positive so far, but the best line is almost certainly:

You know, this has been said a lot, but it bears repeating: Apt-get is just so unreasonably fucking great. Why aren't we using it for Solaris updates? I managed to pull together the whole witches' brew of OSS that makes ongoing go without ever leaving Synaptic. Oops, not quite true, I cruised past CPAN to get DBI and DBD::MySQL, but I'm not sure I needed to, because when I got MySQL, I saw a lot of perl-related stuff go flying by.

Since I contain multitudes...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

..it is entirely possible for me to view the whole Harry Potter business with a certain benign affection, even while agreeing with A.S. Byatt's rather negative assessment of the books (though perhaps I'm biased by the fact that she recognizes the skill in Terry Pratchett's work.

But mild affection would never move me to public declarations (well, aside from this), so I can only assume that Stephen King and John Irving feel something more than this. What a world we live in.

I agree with the article, I suppose

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

but what Ryan Bigge doesn't seem to realize is that being outside the 18-34 demographic should help you you get the "More Cowbell" sketch–I mean, Don't Fear the Reaper dates to 1976, so it's only people who are at the top end of that demographic who are likely to remember it as anything other than a track that had AOR traction when they were 10.

I find myself cutting back

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Not about stuff like work and coding and so forth, but about trying to keep up with so much stuff.

I purged about a dozen blogs from my reader yesterday, mostly political ones, some of which I had been pulling for nigh on two years. I find myself deleting Daily Show episodes from the TiVO unviewed. I am still reading The New Yorker from cover to cover, but it can be a bit of a slog.

Having a Fred Brooks moment

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

So, one of my consistent gigs is working on AnteSpam for Ironic Design. We use SpamAssassin as our engine, but we (well, mostly I) have built a bunch of infrastructure around it that allows us to do high-volume, redundant, high-availability deployment for domain customers, present held mail through a web interface, so on and so forth.

For the last 18 months or so, I've been embarked on a big rewrite, taking everything we've learned from having this system in production for the last three-and-a-half years and synthesizing it into a system that will run more accurately, more smoothly and with less maintenance and upkeep.

Dwarves. Hunchbacks. Samurai. Tarzan. Cowboys. Napoleon. Transvestites.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

It's been a long running joke with Chet that if I am unaquainted with some particular bit of American culture–movie, TV show, what have you–it is because I was in Germany at the time it happened.

In many cases, of course, this is actually the reason, but it eventually morphed into an all-purpose response.

So, after Chet pointed me to a Stevie Wonder video, I ended up doing a little YouTube archaeology (which spawned another post from Chet to find something I'd always heard about but never seen because, well, I was in Germany when MTV launched.

You never know how long it'll last...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

I mean, I don't think anyone expected them to be gone for two months. But just for the moment, Fafblog is back.

bq.. "I always used to figure God would show up at the end a the world an beam me up to Raptureland in his magical funk-powered mothership," says me. "But that was before he got eaten by Supergod."

"Serves him right!" says Giblets. "If God wanted to go to heaven he should've accepted Metajesus as his personal lord and savior."

I was fortunate

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 31 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

My parents were willing, and able, to pay for me to go to college, even though I spent four years doing what would certainly appear from the outside (and often from the inside) to be drinking and goofing off.

I'll ruminate on what I learned in college, and how differently I would approach it now, some other time. Right now, I'm here to note that the interest rate of student loans has been raised 35%.

Chicken and eggs. And Orzo.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

While I was working up in DC, Alex–my primary partner in crime–and I would often go to a greek restaurant a on Pennsylvania Avenue a couple of blocks down from the Senate buildings. I don't remember the name. It was not particularly distinguished in any way.

Their spanikopita were kind of scary–they looked more like burritos, if you can somehow imagine that–but the had good gyros, and Alex introduced me to avgolemono soup: the restaurant made one that was just wonderful, especially as October wore on and the days started to get colder.

Gypped, kinda

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 16 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

So, I had earlier commented on the premiere of Ben & Jerry's Black & Tan Ice Cream with some shock.

Though I was uncertain of the palatability of a stout-based ice cream, I am mildly disappointed to report that there is, in fact, no beer in this ice cream at all. Cream stout is apparently just a bit of clever marketing to refer to the most horrifyingly rich–mind you, not a bad thing–sweet cream ice cream they've ever done.

So, I had occasion to rebuild a 3ware RAID array under Linux

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

And as I had a damned hard time getting it to go, I'm noting what I did here so that it might benifit myself and others. This is using the 9.3.0.X version of the 3ware CLI software–though it says that it's for the 9500 series of controllers, it's really for any kernel after 2.6.10: the 9500 controllers introduced a new way of talking to the controller, and the driver for the 7/8000 series was retrofitted with it.

Diane Lane with baby fat

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Seriously, Streets Of Fire is not too good a movie. This may or may not really surprise anyone, but I hadn't seen it in likely 15 years and when I stumbled across the fact that Diane Lane was in it, along with a positively young looking (though 29) Willem Dafoe, well, I decided I had to see it again.

So I fast forwarded through most of it because, well, that's what it deserved. I can dream about you is still a pretty good song, but boy, just not a great movie.

OMG! WTF? Holy shit!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

OK, that may seem excessive, Black & Tan Ice Cream I love Guinness as much as the next guy (depending, I suppose on who the next guy is, but damn, stout ice cream? That's demented.

BTW, thanks to Tim for introducing me to "Ode to Guinness" which is one of the cleverest songs I've heard in years.

Prototype really is that cool

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I've been stuck in javascript hell for the last couple of weeks, and Prototype has been a large part of keeping me sane. That people then write all sorts of extensions for it, including one for using data structures to generate HTML is just great.

Ruby On Rails 1.1 is out

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Ruby On Rails 1.1 has been released.

Although I'm not using it now–my current project has too much code that's always going to be Perl for me to consider switching languages–it's something I'd seriously consider using for the future. It does seem silly that they just came out with a book about using it and then introduced a major upgrade, though.

One of the Debian developers got a serious camera lens

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

So what did he do? He used it to take a picture of an ant that is so detailed you can discern the structure of the eye. Not that I needed to see an ant that closely, but damn.

So, I dispute the author's claim to have "invented" the Flash Mob

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

since, as everyone knows, the concept appeared in a Larry Niven story in the 70's. But, I have to admit the article, online from Harper's, is kind of interesting.

Sometimes I miss Miami

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

While it's true that I love where we live, sometimes I feel a burst of nostalgia for Miami. It's especially true when I read about a an exhibition of Dale Chihuly's sculpted glass at the Fairchild Tropical Garden (we have the map of the FTG that we got when we joined hanging up on one of our walls.

Fortunately, GNOME guy Luis Villa was there and he took a lot of pictures.

Simon Willison teaches about JavaScript

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Or, more accurately, taught about javascript at the ETech conference. And he has very graciously made both his slides and his notes available from his blog.

These are mostly oriented towards people who already know how to program, but haven't taken JavaScript seriously. I'm definitely in that camp, and I found his notes to be a very clear, consise introduction to some of JS's more advanced programming features–some of which I'd been exposed to already because of my spelunking around AJAX code, but I'd just been inferring their use rather than knowing exactly what was going on.

Coming back from being AWOL

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

An interesting article on coming back to things you've fallen away from.

Although it's couched in terms of a graduate student and things like theses and dissertations, it all rings true for me and my experience in being AWOL from a side-project (I was AWOL from Debian far too often) or even from blogging or just keeping up with email. I think it's influenced in part by my mildly hermetic lifestyle–it's all too easy to draw in and ignore things–but it's also a learned habit.

All things must pass

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

He was a little big to be a shoulder-cat

So, around 8:45 this morning, we had Ford put to sleep.

It's been about three years since he was first diagnosed as diabetic, and just over two since he finished radiation treatment for the tumor that caused his acromegaly. The treatment wasn't an unalloyed success–though we never had them do another CAT scan to verify it's continued presence, his need for insulin never left, and there were other issues–but without it, his prognosis was closer to 9 months than the 25 we had.

I guess I'm going to be learning how to use this eventually.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Ingy has produced a javascript-based templating engine that can actually use templates intended for the Perl-based Template Toolkit. He talks a little bit about it on his blog. The scary part is that this may have just made it much more reasonable for me to support both an Ajax-based and a "conventional" implementation of the AnteSpam front-end; no more having to maintain two ways of presenting data, etc.

This could not be real

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I don't think most of these colors actually appear in nature. Check it out

Well, in general, people are still No Damn Good

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

But as my friend Laura discovered, in specific they can be pretty damn good.

Now why didn't Mr. Lovecraft think of this?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

It's really quite scary how well this little scene is done

Taking things to their logical absurdity is a public service

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Paintings designed by committee. No, really. Admire their unrepentant badness.

I literally don't know what to say

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Well, "Wow" for a start, I suppose. "Huh?" follows along sharply thereafter.

Microsoft is using recordings of Robert Fripp in one of their Windows Vista sound themes, and they've got the video to prove it.

Now, Linux-head that I am, I'm not really all that anti-Microsoft, I just don't see why people put up with it. Maybe this is a good reason. :)

Oh, I lied, I do know what to say. Fripp uses a Mac.

I don't even think Fafblog could make me smile over this

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Under the guise of collecting signatures to change Massachusetts blue laws to allow grocery stores to carry beer and wine (the lack of which I don't remember from when we lived there, but we came from AL, where it's similarly not allowed), some people have been fraudulently gathering signatures for a petition to ban same-sex marriage.

This is the first bit of news I've read in a while that has made me want to go be violently ill. All I can say is that these people have given up their souls if they're willing to go to such lengths to forbid people to do something that, as the saying goes, neither picks their pocket nor breaks their legs. Some day I hope to be enlightened enough to be sad for them, but right now all I can manage is revulsion.

Warren Ellis takes on Casino Royale

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

You should read the whole thing (don't worry, it's quick), but the part that made me laugh the most was the last line:

I suspect Patrick wouldn't go as far as me. But he is essentially Small-Time, and I am Internet Jesus.

So, did you know the Kinks were banned from the US for four years?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Well, yeah, at least two people who might read this do know, but for the rest of you, witness the lovely protectionism of mid-to-late-60's America:

In 1966 the American Federation of Musicians, convinced that British bands were getting a disproportionate share of musicians income, had the Kinks banned from touring in the United States. The organization finally relented in October 1969.

Presumably the AFM pressured the government to deny them work visas. The part that seems so frigging weird to me is, well…/The Kinks/? I mean, were they worried that if they banned the Beatles or the Stones there would be riots (not that weren't anyway :), so they picked on someone who was arguably less-popular but still better known than most of their contemporaries?

Strap me to the mast...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The Denial Twist by the White Stripes is the siren song–it will lure you onto the rocks, yes indeed. Save yourselves, I am lost!

My God, It's Perfect.

If you think that a kiss is all in the lips
C'mon, you got it all wrong, man.

A recipe for the new year

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

So, over the last couple of years I've developed a taste for spiced tea, but haven't ever found one pre-made option that I have favored unequivocally–the ones that had as much ginger as I liked were too sweet or what have you. So I decided to try making my own.

I don't remember the original source for this recipe, but I've mucked about with it a bit so I don't know that I'd be doing any favors if I credited them. :)

And, since I'm thinking about it, another...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

So, I'm actually doing this here because it's the easiest way to make this available to the people in the yoga immersion, many of whom have asked for the recipe (some in more amusing circumstances than others).

The original recipe is from Martha Stewart. It called for heavy cream and sixteen pans (OK, maybe just three) and other things with which we (mostly Anne, who first did the recipe) did not wish to bother. Plus we wanted to make it vegan, for maximum acceptance. As with the prior entry, blame us, not her, if it ends up unsatisfying.

I had forgotten where I first read about ferret-legging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

But I did some googling around as part of a conversation I was having with someone on YM, and came across a transcription of the Harper's article that I'm fairly certain is where I first read about it.

It seems pertinent that the conversation was of the "Why are men so damn stupid?" variety.

Incidentally, I did not piss my pants re-reading it, but I came awful close.

Happiness is a warm gun, bang, bang, shoot, shoot.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I don't know that there's any more obvious lead in to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a movie I heard described as "beautiful people shooting at one another". That does pretty much sum it up, but I think Roger Ebert is right when, in his review, he says:

None of this matters at all. What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they're able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments. There are many ways that John and Jane Smith could have been played awkwardly, or out of synch, but the actors understand the material and hold themselves at just the right distance from it; we understand this is not really an action picture, but a movie star romance in which the action picture serves as a location.

I just need to point out...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

That long before he was Dumbledore Mk. II, Michael Gambon was the thief in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

That should creep out anyone who's taking their kids to those Harry Potter movies.

So the phone rings...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

And someone comes on the line and tries to tell me I owe someone $2K+. I asked what it was about, they said, "A card with citibank that was in default." I told them they had the wrong guy, never had a card with them. The guy said, "I have a social, last four digits XXXX". Nope, not me. Sorry. :)

I must admit I had to get the guy to read the number off twice because the first time my head was so full of voices shouting "Identity Theft" I couldn't concentrate on what he was saying.

If you have to ask...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

then you would surely not understand why there would have to be an entire web page devoted to Iron Maiden album covers with Spongebob Squarepants inserted into them?

But rest assured, there must be such a thing.

I should have noted this yesterday (obviously)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, at least according to Wikipedia. no one knows why it's named Boxing Day. It's silly, but in a wonderful sort of way–it's apparently centuries old, but no one knows why the hell it's called Boxing Day.

Fafblog doesn't make me laugh quite so much any more

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Not because it's not as funny as it used to be ('cause really, it is), but because it's just harder to get me to laugh now–I look around and sometimes think things have truly come off the rails.

But their bit of commentary on the attacks on Christmas is great. I especially liked:

"On Secularmas, they do not exchange presents," says Giblets. "They exchange identical cardboard boxes filled with rocks and mold and broken childhood dreams and nothing!"

Turns out I was wrong

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The default theme that RockBox uses is much less pretty than that of the default iRiver firmware, but as you might have guessed from the way I said that, RockBox is themeable, and the non-default themes are at least as pretty as the iRiver firmware.

In other words, RockBox, err, rocks, in every conceivable way.

Mmmmm, yummy rockbox goodness

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, today I installed RockBox on my iRiver IHP-140.

It's not as pretty as the original firmware (which, incidentally, I can still get to because, well, the RockBox guys are pretty smart), but it has two feature that I always wished for that the original firmware never had–1) the ability to use .m3u playlists that also work under mpd (that is, ones that use forward slashes, as $DEITY intended), and 2) the ability to create playlists on the fly by queueing up tracks interactively.

I spent all weekend at a yoga retreat

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

You might then think that at this time more than any other, I would be able to make a distinction between those things that I think I might want want–largely because they're "neat"–and those things I need.

But damn, it sure does feel like I need a nixie tube clock that looks like an H&K amp head

Wow

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

John Goerzen is a Debian developer for whom I've got a lot of respect. He has also recently been let in on the secrets of underwear drawer rotation.

And his workplace just had a big fire, and he's logged the thrills of working IS during times of crisis.

On the one hand, I feel a little guilty

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I mean, some guy posts an insanely inane idea for a movie he thinks Pixar should do to Bruce Perens' old email address at Pixar, and CC:'s the debian-devel list. Really, I should have more compassion, and not post a link to his message for the purposes of ridiculing him in public.

But I'm not yet enlightened, and it's so excruciatingly bad. How bad? Read it yourself.

Gaaah, I think I became stupider just reading it.

I wasn't going to link to this...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

…insofar as I can only stomach about five seconds worth of cultural criticism at a time these days–since that's about how long it takes me to look at Anne, shrug my shoulders and say something about how the cultures on the skids or vice versa.

I don't have the energy, and besides, what the fuck to do I have to be outraged about? I do stupid shit, you do stupid shit, "they" do stupid shit, this is the human condition. Laugh a little, or a lot, but calm down. You will be happier if you accept that stupid shit will be perpetrated for as long as the race is viable.

I try to be polite to telemarketers

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It's not that I care so much about the people who are trying to push products through telemarketing–I am on the do-not-call list and all–but it seems to me the people who are actually on the other end of the phone deserve some compassion.

After all, I can't imagine that it's anything other than a job that combines mediocre pay and soul-crushing work. I suppose that in some cases it may be a specific choice someone makes because it leaves them free to do other things, but in most I expect it's what they do because it's all that's available.

The myth of rural ignorance, set alight by small children.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, Ogged links to a Guardian column that has an amusingly incisive commentary that reminds me of a line from The Stand which Stephen King quoted in his introduction to trade edition for Sandman: World's End collection, "Country don't mean dumb."

bq.. At university I once came across the following true story in a textbook. A young teacher from Leeds had accepted a temporary job teaching a class of four-year-olds out in one of the most isolated, rural parts of north Wales. One of her first lessons involved teaching the letter S so she held up a big colour photo of a sheep and said: "Now, who can tell me what this is?" No answer. Twenty blank and wordless faces looked back at her. "Come on, who can tell me what this is?" she exclaimed, tapping the photo determinedly, unable to believe that the children were quite so ignorant. The 20 faces became apprehensive and even fearful as she continued to question them with mounting frustration.

Now this is what Free Software is all about

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Earthlink has produced a customized firmware image for the Linksys WRT54G router that will allow you to get IPv6 addresses on their network. Many IPv6 addresses, apparently.

I don't think it's going to displace the Sveasoft firmware I'm using (though I might try to figure out how to get the IPv6 addresses using that), but it's awfully cool that Earthlink 1) took the time and 2) was able to hack the firmware like this and make it available to their customers.

If you like guitars...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500

…I don't see how you couldn't find Taylor Guitar's Factory Fridays anything but interesting. Take a look at how some awfully fine guitars are built.

Doonesbury is 35

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I haven't really read it in years because, well, I haven't read the newspaper in years. But Mark Evanier mentioned that today is the strip's 35th anniversary, and he links to a decade-old essay he did on Trudeau that's really quite a funny read.

Batman Begins

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

So, I saw the original Batman once all the way through in the theaters. Every other time I've tried to watch it, I've gotten bored or fallen asleep (no, I'm not kidding).

I remember Batman Returns as much because I saw it with Anne and Dave McGhee just before he left town for another co-op stint that was going to keep him out of town beyond when I was planning to graduate (let's be honest about my level of certainty :) as anything else. It was certainly more interesting than the first, but kept a cartoonishness that I found a little off-putting.

Constantine

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Well, I expected watching this movie to be a bit of a chore, and it was. I guess you could argue that such expectations are self-fulfilling, but getting Keanu Reeves to play a character who was originally modelled on Sting–both in his blondness and his Britishness–was just stupid.

That said, Rachel Weisz sold the absolute goddamn fuck out of her role. Shame it was in such an otherwise mediocre movie.

If you can't laugh at yourself

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

who can you laugh at?

Which is to say, the linux-themed, despair.com-styled poster you can find here are really quite amusing. Especially the Mandrake and Ubuntu ones.

Implementing VERP for AnteSpam v2

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

My big accomplishment today–it was an otherwise fairly busy day, still catching up from the last couple of weekends–was adding VERP handling to the AnteSpam daemon process.

Those of you who don't hang out in email handling circles probably don't recognize the acronym¹, but if you're subscribed to a mailing list these days, you've probably seen it in action.

What happens is that during the SMTP delivery process, when the mailing list server hands the message to whatever server hosts your mail, it is given a special address as the originator of the mail. This is often, but not always, of the form =bounce-mdorman=tendentious.org=bounce.antespam.com@–the important bit is that the address to which the mail is being delivered is included (albeit mangled) in the address from which the mail seems to be coming.

Tuesday Flickr blogging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Because it's time.

So, to stimulate those neurons of yours: boxer, alabama, evolution.

I think everyone should know...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

That, if you really want (or, alternatively, if your wife just feels like amusing herself), you can get Orange County Chopper Boxer shorts:

American Chopper often amused me

IE team calls for the end of IE hacks...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The IE 7 team is calling for people to stop using hacks to work around issues with IE.

It seems to me that the problem is that people with actual websites they want to behave have to use the hacks until IE 7 actually, you know, ships. Even on this site, the overwhelming majority of browser-based hits are still for a version of IE that has all these defects.

It had to happen...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The Flying Spaghetti Monster can now ride on the back of your car:

Who needs a Jesus-fish?

Perdido Street Station

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

because of the Mieville Seminar (or perhaps more accurately, the knowledge of its existence). Enough interesting stuff was said in the bits I read that I figured it couldn't be a bad book.

And, indeed, it's not. Neither, though, is it a great book. I'm hard pressed to articulate the things I didn't like about it. I think it's the prose. It's not that the prose is bad, it's just…too much. There's so much going on, and sometimes the prose gets in the way of the story–not by clanging and making one cringe, but just by being a little too self-obsessed.

So: 35 (An assessment of the last year)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Well, 34 started off pretty horribly, really–the last half of October was a blur of work and yoga, with maybe some sleeping in there, leading into disaster on November 2, for which I had a sleep-deprived ringside seat. I basically came home and hibernated for two months, without even the comfort of some good yoga classes–while I had been gone, our yoga teacher started teaching at a new studio with whose proprietor we had some problems, and I ended up putting the ten pounds I had lost in DC back on. On the upside, Chet and Erin got engaged that month knew about it, say, four hours before Erin did.

Back from "October Weddings" Part Deux

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Back from a cousin's wedding in Birmingham. It was, as our travel down to Alabama often is, a whirlwind of seeing everyone we could, if only fleetingly.

The bride was beautiful–the prerogative of all brides, but Corley was especially so–the groom, in his Navy whites, was handsome, and the ceremony was faster than I've ever seen before–something about which the bride privately expressed satisfaction–while also being attended by more people than I've ever seen at a wedding.

Oh, and another thing...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Chet and Erin's wedding had, without a doubt, the best food of any wedding I've ever been to. I mean, even though I think my wife took to feeding me cake to stop me from talking to other women, I didn't really mind.

I've been to hell. I spell it...I spell it DMV.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I've been to hell. I spell it…I spell it DMV.
Anyone that's been there knows precisely what I mean.
Stood there and I've waited, and choked back the urge to scream.
And if I had my druthers, I'd screw a chimpanzee.

Well, OK, really, it wasn't that bad. I got my license renewed in about 20 minutes from start to finish.

Really, the only bad bit was the realization that the next time I get my license renewed I'll be 40.

Nostalgia, AKA misplaced friends

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

This is a post I started writing several months ago, but never quite finished. A recent post of Patrick's, plus the occasion of seeing people I literally hadn't seen in a decade at Chet's wedding made me think to give it a quick brush-off and shove it out the door.

Someone stole the name of an old friend of mine.

At least that's how it feels. Occasionally, over the last decade, someone would occasionally post a message to one of the numerous Debian GNU/Linux mailing lists I read under the name Damon Buckwalter.

Oracle vs. MySQL

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I guess at a certain level, I'm only noting this in sort of a thumbing-my-nose-at-MySQL way, but the sale to Oracle of the company that creates the only transaction-safe storage back-end with referential integrity available for MySQL has some real implications for MySQL. I, of course, am largely unaffected because, well, I don't use MySQL.

What can you say about Chet and Erin's wedding?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Some might have decided against having their family photos done as human pyramids, but Chet and Erin were going to have no ordinary wedding.

Some might have shied from having jugglers hide the happy couple from the sight of onlookers behind a wall of flaming chainsaws during their kiss, but Chet and Erin were going to have no ordinary wedding.

Some might have refrained from having Mark Twain deliver a homily (or perhaps a jeremiad) preceeding the wedding regarding the dangers inherent in heterosexual behavior (viz. sex and death), but Chet and Erin were going to have no ordinary wedding.

Wow, tough day for Aardman

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Just a couple of days after Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit goes number 1, Aardman Animation lose their warehouse with props and historical material. Brutal.

We actually went to see the movie on Saturday, with Patrick and Diane. It was enjoyable enough, although I would have to agree with Richard Roeper that it moves along just a little too slowly.

And tomorrow...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I promise a painful reconstruction of Chet's wedding.

It is painful, of course, because of all the alcohol that was liberally applied during various stages in the process. Self-inflicted pain being the best sort, of course.

Other than that, it was great. As I said, more tomorrow.

I am perversely proud...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

That I knew exacty who was being referred to in this rather amusing post.

Monday Flickr blogging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

In honor of Chet and Erin's wedding in Houston, I present to you Houston, wedding, Erin, Chet.

Beautiful woman

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

It never would have occurred to me to wish for an instrumental Daniel Lanois album, even though the music, rather than the lyrics have often been what attracted me most.

And yet, here it is, an instrumental Daniel Lanois album, Belladonna, and it is amazing and beautiful.

Hiliarous troll of the day

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Seen on linux-kernel:

bq.. From: Ahmad Reza Cheraghi
Subject: Why no XML in the Kernel?
To: linux-kernel
Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 02:41:42 -0700 (PDT)

Can somebody tell me why the Kernel-Development dont
wanne have XML is being used in the Kernel??

Regards

Ahmad Reza Cheraghi

I Luv Halloween

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Zowie.

I Luv Halloween is a most violent, disgusting and hilarious book.

I mean, how else can you describe a comic in which a group of children, disgusted with the apples given them by an old lady, put razor blades in one and give it to a cop?

Or this little exchange at the end of the night:

Pig pig Y'know that whole zombie thing you were talking about earlier?
Finch Did a lot of zombie talking earlier.
Pig pig About coming back as zombie slaves?
Devil Lad You hoping this lot'll come back as your zombie slaves?
Finch I think you have to have a direct hand in killing them.
Pig pig Oh.
Devil Lad There's still Nips.
Pig Pig Nah…she used to babysit me 'n' all, y'know?
Devil Lad All the more reason to want her dead.

The Shorter Nat Friedman

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

How to become a hacker? Hack

Mourn your TV

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

So, my friend George just told me that his family has been selected to be a Nielsen family.

Those who know him can only suspect that TV is about to get a lot…stranger and more obscure. I mean, this is a guy who rents old John Waters movies for fun. I had never even heard of Two Lane Blacktop before I met George.

One can only wonder if the Nielsen people have any idea what they're getting into.

Michael Hedges

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

It's strange how you can have almost your entire CD collection on your ersatz iPod, everything no more than a click of a mouse away, and yet some things will go un-listened-to for long periods of time.

So I put Michael Hedges on rotation for the first time in a long while.

Some of it is, indeed, too new-agey for my tastes. But some of it resonates in ways it never would have for me before–there are pieces that remind me of Satie, which isn't something I used to have as a reference point. And some of it is more bludgeoning than you would think you could achieve with an acoustic guitar. The Rootwitch seems to involve beating the guitar within an inch of its life.

Is running your own box really all that sexy?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I'm posting this to a LiveJournal account. I'm giving serious thought to making tendentious.org a "virtual" domain–that is, run services on other machines, rather than taking responsibility for keeping them up on my own.

Part of this will revolve around whether I can find services I like enough, of course–which is part of why I'm posting this on LiveJournal. The other part, of course, is whether I'm too much of a control freak for that.

Occasional C hacking (aka, Why I Love Free Software)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

So yesterday I found myself in an unfortunate situation–I had just spent several days doing a significant revamp and cleanup of a clients LDAP tree (to better support multiple-domain email handling, mostly, but it had accumulated several years of cruft) when the client called me in a tizzy because their WebDAV access–necessary to modify a number of their websites–had stopped working.

Well, it turns out that Adobe GoLive! URI-encodes any (presumably, I didn't check) non-alphabetic characters in the username it sends over for authentication. But these usernames aren't decoded before they're handed to mod-auth-ldap, so the lookup fails because there is no record for 'foo%40example.com'.

Why I love living in Durham

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Without wanting to seem disrespectful of the upbringing I was given, I think it's reasonable to say that my parents attitudes towards food while I was growing up were fairly conventional, and maybe a bit shy on the vegetables.

Not that I envy any parent trying to get their child to eat vegetables–there just seems to be too much substance to the cliche. Maybe it's just their bodies telling them what they need to grow, and protein is higher on the list, and fats are just tastier, making kids natural Atkins followers.

I am a JavaScript slacker...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

That is to say, when I'm working on web stuff, I think almost exclusively in terms of what I can do on the server side–I have been known to use JavaScript to do simple pre-submission validation of forms, but that's about as far as I go.

However, there's an interesting article on how to have your ajax-enabled site degrade gracefully that uses the incredibly sensible strategy of shipping all your documents as HTML that works, if mundanely (what I'm used to doing) and then, if it's available, using javascript to make them full-on-robot-chubby ajax-enabled masterpieces. You won't even enable the ajax capabilities unless that particular promise can be fulfilled.

Helpful advice from Yog-Sysop

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Jim MacDonald has a non-comprehensive list of Things I've learned from British folk ballads. It includes such gems as Avoid situations where the obvious rhyme-word is "maidenhead."

Heh.

Alex Chilton is still missing

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I don't know why it didn't occur to me to wonder before, but apparently as of today, Alex Chilton is still missing. He lived in the 9th ward, one of places the levees broke.

Fook.

Lest I worry people unnecessarily...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

…there are second- or third-hand reports that Alex is alive and well–or at least, was spotted in a bar in the Quarter on Wednesday, talking about getting out of the city.

Not much to say about Katrina...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I remember being quite happy on Tuesday morning, as it appeared that New Orleans was spared the worst treatment–not to minimize the damage that had been done to Biloxi and Gulfport or even Hattiesburg, but New Orleans is 1) closer to my heart, and 2) seemed like the place that held the most potential for going from a disaster to a clusterfuck.

I was actually happy hearing that the worst damage in the Quarter, which had really seemed like it would take it in the shorts, was that a bunch of trees around the cathedral had fallen (incidentally, refraining from taking out a statue of Jesus).

Kepler's closes it's doors

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

It's ironic that Neil Gaiman's blog would be the place I would hear that Kepler's, an independent bookstore in Menlo Park that I went to not-infrequently when I was working the gig out in SiliValley, closed suddenly, since that is where I got copies of American Gods signed for myself and Chet in 2001.

Bob Moog, 71, dies of cancer

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Oh, man, that sucks. Just three years after he regained the right to use of his own name in his company (Moog having become a trademark of another company when he was forced to sell off the assests of his original company), he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Three months later, this.

I would guess you have to have to be an afficianado of a certain period and style of music for Moog to be a household word, but you've heard the sound of his synthesizers whether you know it or not.

I heard about this at dinner

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Tonight we went to a wine tasting dinner at Panzanella (featuring the wines of Hanover Park Vineyard, which were quite good, incidentally, as was the food). We went with a couple of friends, but ended up, as one would hope, talking with the other people at the table quite extensively.

One of whom mentioned, apropos of something that I forget, the existence of the Rap Canterbury Tales.

I really don't know what one can add beyond the obvious, that the existence of such a thing is both delightful and horrifying.

I suspect this is the longest break I've ever taken

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Almost six weeks with nary a post. Nothing at all for July.

I'd love to have some excuse–that I was busy with work or something–but the changes to my schedule that did, in fact, happen are not actually the cause. I just haven't had much to say.

Delay compares Houston to Iraq...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

…in a Houston Chronicle story. The story includes this paragraph:

"You know, if Houston, Texas, was held to the same standard as Iraq is held to, nobody'd go to Houston, because all this reporting coming out of the local press in Houston is violence, murders, robberies, deaths on the highways," DeLay said.

Which prompted this exchange between Chet and I:

(11:13:32) Michael Alan Dorman: Shit, I didn't know you needed a $35K escort to get to and from the airport. That's gonna make getting to the wedding a whole lot more expensive.
(11:13:59) Chet Farmer: yeah, yeah, yeah. I got guns I can loan.
(11:14:22) Michael Alan Dorman: Guess we'd better get the full coverage on the rental, though.

Zowie

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

A fairly spectacular ajax-based web calendar. I wonder what it's using as a storage back-end?

So everyone knows that in the real world, vegetables are seasonal

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

That is, it is only because of inordinate use of petroleum products to ship produce from wherever it might be growing that you are able to get tomatos (yes, yes, I know they're actually a fruit) in January in North Carolina.

What you might not realize is that milk is seasonal, too.

Bean Traders uses milk from Maple View Farm, a local dairy. When I walked into the shop on Monday, Christy, the owner told me not to be surprised if my cappuccino was a little less foamy than normal, because the cows had changed feed for the summer.

While I have no particular interest in seeing the movie...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

it's interesting to read an article on the process used to restore Bambi for re-release.

If you're using SpamAssassin and PostgreSQL for Bayes data

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

You should know that you can see increased performance by making some small changes to your database schema.

Specifically, you should run the following set of SQL commands on your bayes database:

alter table bayes_token drop constraint bayes_token_pkey;
alter table bayes_token add constraint bayes_token_pkey primary key (token, id);
drop index bayes_token_idx1;
analyze table bayes_token;

If you are running SpamAssassin <= 3.0.4, that last statement will probably complain that bayes_token_idx1 doesn't exist–in which case you should fasten your seat-belt because your bayes database is probably going to get a lot faster very suddenly.

A Pretext For War

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Hmmmm, what to say, what to say. The picture James Bamford paints, both of the failures leading up to 9/11 and of the failures leading up to the Iraq war are depressing. If you feel some need to go over this material again–if, say, you've been living under a rock for the last four years (in which case, good on you!)–this is a book you might consider.

That said, this, like his last book Body of Secrets (and perhaps his first book The Puzzle Palace, though it's been long enough since I read that that I don't have a clear memory of the prose) seems to be in need of some more careful editing. Not so much copyediting, or even structural editing (in the sense of stringing things together in a way that makes sense), so much as redundancy editing.

The Lavender Hill Mob

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I caught this listed on TCM, mostly because of it's proximity in the listings to The Ladykillers. I've not finished it yet, but it occurred to me to look it up on IMDb, which led me to look at some of the external reviews, which led me to this review.

Now I really have no complaint about an organization with a particular bent doing its own film reviews–as long as they don't mind me mocking them if I feel it to be necessary. And, in fact, the review is actually pretty reasonable, even if it does seem to contain some mild moralizing.

Ah, Google

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The combination of channel surfing and googling brings me to The Unholy Biblical Subtexts and Other Religious Elements Built into Superman: The Movie (1978) and Superman II, in The Journal of Religion and Film.

Anne Bancroft died

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I wouldn't generally note this except, well, first, she was in The Graduate, and second, she was Mel Brooks' wife for the last 40 years.

Interestingly, in doing the inevitable searching around IMDB that one might expect, I learned that Richard Pryor helped write the screenplay for Blazing Saddles. This is not surprising, in retrospect, but I certainly had no idea until now.

Debian 3.1, "Sarge", is released

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

It seems obligatory that I should note this, even though I'm currently an inactive developer. Lots of people put in lots of time to make this happen, and as I sit here using a machine that is running Sarge, responsible for something on the order of 20 machines that run Sarge, I don't have much else to say than, "Thanks."

Stranger Than Fiction

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

On the trip to Atlanta, I took along Chuck Palahniuk's Stranger Than Fiction, a series of odd essays and stories. I enjoyed it, though it's not the most substantial book I've ever read.

But, you know, where else are you going to read about the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival?

Other than the web, of course.

Hmmm, feeling old.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

So I went to my cousin Ben's wedding in Atlanta. It was nice to see people, it seemed to be the ceremony they were looking for, boy, the suit I was wearing sure was hot, hotter than it was when I wore it in New Orleans in May a couple of years ago, etc.

The odd thing for me is that it was the first wedding I've been to that actually made me feel old. Not decrepit or anything, just…old. I think this is because this is the first wedding for someone I actually remember as an infant.

Sunday Flickr blogging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

In honor of my cousin's wedding in Atlanta, I present to you cousin, wedding, Atlanta

I am watching...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

…the White Stripes discussing Nikolai Tesla. I don't know that there is a good way to get across the deep strangeness of this whole movie.

"No, I didn't blow a capacitor, Meg."

I don't think you have to be a lit major...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

…to appreciate the hilarity of Notes toward an Infernokrusher Manifesto, but it certainly helps, I think. I mean, surely this is funny to everyone?

bq.. I blew up the plums
that were in the icebox
and which you were probably saving for breakfast
forgive me
I like fire

– Dora Goss

Really, not a good movie

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I mean, let's be honest, Charlie's Angels isn't really a good movie by any rational standard. But, the image of Bill Murray and Tim Curry wrestling in padded sumo suits is, as far as I'm concerned, worth the rest of the two hours.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I've been a big fan of Umberto Eco since reading Foucault's Pendulum (which I really must re-read soon) in '92 or so. I find his shorter non-fiction pieces incredibly funny, and I'm fairly certain I own all of his novels.

That said, I never actually finished The Island of the Day Before, and although I did finish, and even enjoyed, Baudolino, it was not the compelling read I had expected. Still, hope springs eternal, so when I happened across The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana just before we were going on vacation, I picked it up, even though it was hardback (and I was going to have to schlep it around).

"Theologically Unsound"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Seems to me the Anglican Church was taking the wrong tack when denying the movie production of the Da Vinci Code the opportunity to film in Westminster Abbey. I think they should have used the even simpler-to-understand argument that, "It's an unreadable piece of shit".

I don't generally enjoy Memorial Day very much

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I don't generally go to barbecues or the beach or whatever it is that people tend to do on Memorial Day, in large part because, well, my dad was in the Air Force from before I can remember until I got out of college–I knew too many people in the military to feel like a day meant to honor the fallen was a day you could really devote to fun.

Murky Coffee Appears in novel. Oh, and naked women.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I've mentioned Murky Coffee a couple of times before (but I'm too lazy to link to it), but I was amused to see a link to them on Wonkette that led me to the information that a) it's mentioned in Jesicca Cutler's "novel" The Washingtonienne, and b) their Arlington branch is hosting a somewhat political photographic commentary that also includes naked women.

Hey, Wotcha

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 31 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Yeah, I'm back. I don't want to think about how long it's been since I've posted. I swear, baby, this time I'll post every day, just come back.

No, I'm not going to go full Ike on you. Not right now, at least. Instead, I will leave you with an amusing quote from Jon Carroll:

In my youth (and still, today, in Las Vegas), all the rules were available in advance. The nature of the problem was known. The solution to the problem depended on many variables, but the variables were also known. Many unexpected things can happen in poker, but none of them is that a Merkon Death Ray will turn all the cards into lizards. It is never true in poker that your only hope of survival is to steal the belt of the man sitting next to you.

Two posts in...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 05 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

and r0ml's blog is already pretty damned interesting.

I mean, from universal software literacy to the fact that heavily-processed packaged 'food' is much more expensive and not as good for you as, you know, fruit in one smooth motion.

Wow. What can you say?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

A play that derives from Brecht and features Emacs, the RIAA, Bill Gates, Slashdot and various others as characters. I mean, wow.

This has got to be a joke

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter is a Missle Defense Analyst Wha?

Caesar and Cleopatra

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

So, Saturday night we went to see Caesar and Cleopatra at Playmakers

I was looking forward to it quite a bit. I read the play when I was perhaps 14, and although, honestly, I couldn't remember huge chunks of it–as in almost any of it–a couple of things stuck with me for the last two decades.

One was Britannus, Caesar's Briton slave, obviously intended as a stand-in for a modern (which I believe would be Victorian) Briton, being affronted by the strangeness of other cultures. He is a useful and amusing foil for Caesar, though, as in this exchange:

I didn't look at Google Maps for a while...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Frankly, since I got back from DC, I haven't needed a lot of directions to places, and everyone was just jabbering about how cool the technology was, and I only have so much tolerance for such things for their own sake.

Yeah, I know that's surprising.

Anyway, I have to admit that I am impressed with things people are doing with Google Maps, especially since they put the sattelite images up.

I really hate to do it

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

But if you're using sveasoft firmware in your Linksys or other router, don't upgrade to Talisman/Basic.

At least, not yet. It looks good–even this first release has a number of things that look to be nice add-ons to the feature set that was in the Alchemy series–and I'm sure that it will stabilize shortly, but I blew two hours fighting it yesterday before getting it to limp along well enough to be able to download the last Alchemy release and put that back on.

No Cadbury Eggs for me, thanks.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I don't actually care for them that much anyway, but Curly Wurly bars are another thing. Anyway, I refuse to support a corporation that is so fucking stupid as to try to trademark the color purple.

No, this is apparently not a joke.

Yeah, things are getting back to normal

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

After my dental surgery, well, for obvious reasons–well, obvious if I tell you they gave me a prescription for Vicodin–I was in no fit state to post, and then after that started healing and I wasn't hitting the narcotics so hard, I had a burst of productivity on the Great AnteSpam Rewrite, and then after that started subsiding to a more normal pace, well, the weather turned nice, and I started doing some walking to try and keep off the ten pounds I lost after my surgery–ah, the wonders of not being able to eat anything solid. I should write a diet book.

Hey, all you atheists out there...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Need something to help keep the kids in line, since you don't have access to Satan, Hell, or even the milder "making Baby Jesus cry?".

Steve Loughran has the answer: Cthulu for three year olds.

I especially liked the caveat, though:

The hard part is striving a line between providing the minimum of lies necessary for total obedience, without reducing the child to having a deep fear of darkness, docksides, attics, cellars and the wind rattling the shutters.

What if you had a language that was all cut-and-paste

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Anyone worth their salt as a programmer will tell you that programming by cut-and-paste is always, always, always a mistake. You might do it for expedience, because reworking whatever you're cutting-and-pasting to be more generic might take longer than you have to deliver your result, but there is never a situation where it's a good thing.

But the subtext language has a demo that posits the question what if your language was built to handle all the issues for you?.

Sunday Flickr blogging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Yeah, yeah, Sunday Flickr blogging doesn't actually seem to happen on Sunday that much. What can I say, though–calling it "Sunday Flickr blogging" creates anticipation of it happening, and that's all you really need for marketing purposes.

So, for your amusement, disgust or apathy: moustache, carnation, hendrix.

Yeah, I've got Hendrix (specifically, The Wind Cries Mary) playing right now.

If there was any doubt I was going to Hell...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

…I guess my practice of yoga is really only confirmation. I had absolutely no idea (not, in fact, that I cared), but Laurette Willis, Founder of PraiseMoves assures me that yoga is likely to lead people away from Christ.

In fact, she links to another resource, that classes yoga as a cult, and another that has several articles discussing its incompatibilities with Christianity.

You know, I am sometimes amazed that certain stripes of Christians are allowed to use computers because having to, say, type, distracts them from their necessarily constant focus on The Lord.

Yeah, it's a couple of days late

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Sunday Flickr blogging was delayed by my dental surgery, about which I will spare you the details other than to say that I could really get to like Vicodin. How convenient that there are so many people on the Internets who would like to sell me some.

Anyway, for your delectation, I give you pho, gums and tuba.

Sunday Flickr blogging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I'm about to head out to Huntsville, to do some work for i.e. (bringing up a new server, shuffling a bunch of other stuff around, etc.), and I hope to get some AnteSpam work in, but I didn't want to miss the second installment of Sunday Flickr Blogging: turnip, whip, dalmation.

Perhaps on the plane I'll make some headway on the several half-finished posts I have laying aroud in my head.

BTW, the kid in the dalmatian clothes is amusingly cute.

I wouldn't have minded to be at ETech to see any of this...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Edd Dumbill is a Debian guy, plus an O'Reilly author, and has some amusing notes on what he would have done had he gone to ETech this year.

42pants. Heh.

Elijah Newren distinguishes himself

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I guess first I should make the observation that I don't know who Elijah is other than some random Gnome hacker.

However, the last couple of days in Gnome-land has involved huge, horrendous amounts of dumping on someone named Eugenia for saying some unconsidered and unkind things in the most public way possible. Lots and lots of dumping. I mean tons. It certainly seems like everyone on Planet Gnome has made a comment, and though most of them have been minimally civil–no shouted obscenities, no ad hominiem attacks–I think it's fair to say most of them feel unfairly attacked.

Another reorganization of the sound system here at Tendentious Towers.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Well, it's not that much of a reorg, really, other than to remove the ihp-140 from the laptop itself, and attach it to the micro-server, and use mpd on that system for actually playing things.

It's kinda fun, too, to be sitting downstairs, tweaking the playlist for what's going on upstairs.

Interestingly, I also get much better sound out of the audio hardware on the micro-server than out of the audio hardware on the laptop. Less noise, especially during quiet passages. Now if only the processor weren't so dang slow for actually encoding to OGG, I'd be all set–the DVD drive is plenty fast for ripping.

It's the current big meme

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

But who am I to resist?

So, the rules are, underline places you've lived, bold places you've visited, italicize where you live now. I daresay that mine is not a too-typical liberal profile, seeing as how most of the places I've lived in my life are "Red States", including the place I currently live:

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C

NPR had an interview with Donald Knuth

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Even more amusingly, Chet called me to make sure I knew–though I had, in fact, already heard part of it. Specifically, the bit about using graph theory to remodel the kitchen.

Anyway, the story is here

Hey, you!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Yeah, the person who found my site by searching for holly hunter unattractive. Dude, you're just wrong. Wrong I tell you!

On the other hand, one on one sex chet video software is just funny.

One last selection: elephants anatomy porn.

whimper.

In honor of Chet's Birthday

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

(which honesty forces me to note always sneaks up on me because it has somehow gotten lodged in my brain that it's the 21st, which is, as you can probably calculate, 8 days from now) I link you to pictures on Flickr tagged with 'Chet'.

Heh.

Sunday Flickr blogging

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Inspired by my idea to link to pictures on Flickr tagged with "Chet", I give you the first installment of "Flickr Blogging".

palomino, sugar, torch

Note: This may be safe for work. Or it may not–I'm picking words out of thin air here, so there may be nothing but a big blank canvas.

At the end of some comments about working with free software hackers

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

which is an interesting bit in itself, Jakub Steiner drops a couple of links to some resources on writing (and, for that matter, why to write) functional specifications, one from Joel Spolsky and one much more elaborate one that really leads you by the nose.

This all seems especially germane to me right now since I'm going through the throes of writing some specs for the great rewrite of AnteSpam.

Colorization using optimization

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

This is apparently all over geek circles today, but I got it from Miguel.

Researchers in Israel have developed colorization techniques that are almost freakish in their ability to produce natural-looking results using an incredibly simple-seeming marking-up of the original image.

Needless to say, they have a web page devoted to it.

Lime & Basil, Chapel Hill, NC

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, I made myself sufficiently hungry writing about Pho Cali that I was going to go there for lunch. But, I figured I'd check with Anne to see if this was going to be an unforgivable transgression, and she suggested that I drive over to Chapel Hill and try Lime & Basil.

I'm happy to report that it's good. It's not as good at Pho Cali, but it is more than acceptable, and it's a whole lot closer. I don't know that we'd sacrifice our weekend trips to Pho Cali to go there, but for during the week, it's a very reasonable alternative.

More Ajax

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It's the hot new thing, even cooler than Ruby on Rails.

Pho Cali, Raleigh, NC

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, poking around the search stats, I notice searches for "Pho Cali Raleigh" landing here–and, indeed, I seem to be the fourth result in Google.

So let me just state it here, unambiguously–I think Pho Cali is really, really good. It may not achieve the levels of excellence that, say, The Slanted Door aspires to (and mostly achieves), but I'd put it up against the one other Vietnamese place I know well and like–Saigon City, in San Mateo, CA–any day of the week.

Adventures in building Perl modules (a short, short primer on extending Module::Build)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Over the last few years, it has been a presumption that when I work on a project in Perl, I will use the standard Perl tools– ExtUtils::MakeMaker and, later, Module::Build –for managing the Perl library code I write.

But yesterday, for the first time, I looked at extending Module::Build to do more than just the stock actions. And you know what, it was easy.

Now the specific issue I was running up against was that I needed to insure that the database I was running my tests against was installed and clean. I had been using a Makefile, but that was a hack–for instance, I wasn't actually checking the presence of the database or anything, I was looking for a file I wrote when I created the database. I probably could have made make check for the actual database, but it's imperative, rather than procedural, style makes this kind of ugly.

I don't think I've mentioned Laszlo before

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I remember when it was first freed, late last summer–right about the time I was starting in DC–and it was the subject of much enthusiasm and lots of "wow, this is just what we've been waiting for" posts.

It would appear, though, that the bloom is off the rose, and all we're left with are the thorns.

I'm not sure I truly qualify as a Bacontarian...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Though I have to say that there's few, if any, sorts of dead animal flesh I find more satisfying than a good piece of well-cooked bacon. Especially this variety we used to be able to get in Miami, cured with Juniper.

Still, if you are "a person who supplements an otherwise normal diet with large amounts of pork", perhaps you should check out the Bacontarian site

For what it's worth, I'm aquainted with one of the posters on the site–dug–although I'm just mentioning this for the amusement factor. Of course, you never know–if I were given an opportunity to whore myself out, I might take it.

James Wolcott on Kirstie Alley

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

What's amazing is that Alley can look and behave so slovenly and yet remain so stylized, like a Pedro Almadovar diva demento written with the late Divine in mind.

It never would have occured to me to link Almadovar and Divine, but it's just so right.

Miguel de Icaza goes to the middle east.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Miguel de Icaza, apparently-never-sleeps mastermind behind Gnome and Mono, went to Turkey and Lebanon.

Yeah, that Lebanon. During the protests. And since Miguel is the sort of person who seems to be at home in any situation, he went and saw the protests. And talked to people. And took pictures.

There's no deep analysis here, he just relates what the people he talked to told him. And, as encounters with people most often seem to be, it's interesting.

My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

If you start on the project page, the garish, hideous, eye-burning truth will sneak up on you. Or you can go straight to the pain.

Spring is coming

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The view from our driveway up the street.

A couple of weeks ago, Anne cut back all the grasses on the patch of our lot up near the street. I'm really just posting this picture in order to be able to make a comparison a few months from now–by say, September, this will be a veritable riot of vegetation.

Build your own PBX for ~ $20

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

John Goerzen points to an article about building your own linux-based PBX. This isn't just some VOIP solution, either–that apparently wouldn't even cost you $20–but a full-fledged runs-over-POTS-lines system.

Hmm. Maybe if I get that Micro-ATX Pentium-M motherboard that I've been thinking about for my little server system, I could then shove the Mini-ITX motherboard back inits even smaller case and use that…

Well, I would be late...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

…insofar as she was born on Saturday (9:46pm, weighed 8lbs 5oz, 19.5 inches long, ever notice how easy it would be to mistake this for a fish someone caught?), but I didn't hear until now–and second-hand at that, I'm hurt, I tell you, hurt!–that Chris and Aimee have actually decided on a name for their new arrival, Kayley Nicole.

In fact, looking at the last announcement, two days versus three days doesn't make me seem especially tardy, at least not according to the miserable benchmark I've established.

JavaScript Templates

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

There is now an templating system implemented using client-side Javascript.

Normally this would be boring an tedious to contemplate, but, as Ian Holsman observes, combined with liberal use of XMLHttpRequest, this could be interesting.

Gonzo but not forgotten

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Err, I've already forgotten where I saw this link (that's sad), but there's a short piece on HST by George McGovern.

It is accepted wisdom that Europeaen TV is awfully silly.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

SNL has sketches built around the premise. And, having lived in Germany for five years, I would tend to agree, though I would also add that they also allow nekkid people.

Anyhoo, Jerry forwarded me this fairly absurd clip from some popular-music show. Since Anne was home sick, and I had no idea what it might turn out to be, I viewed it without sound. I suspect it is better that way–less painful, but no less strange.

A fun little bit of Flash

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

An 'infinitely' zoomable image

So I've started ripping some of my classical music

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

This is hardly a huge portion of my CDs, and it has heretofore been utterly neglected–and I've figured out why: it's a real bitch to tag those tracks. The track names are all inordinately long, and no one on CDDB seems likely to have done it the way you want it, whatever way that might be.

And then you have something like the disc I have by Elaine Funaro (not one of those listed) that is all her playing, but she's doing stuff by a number of different composers.

Something to file away for future reference

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Apparently, the upper left corner of your page is the best place to put your google ads.

Football, racism and suppressing speech

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It was a grim joke during my time at the University of Alabama that we only ever got in the news for football and racism–because of our revolving door policy on coaches and such lovely incidents as parties at sorority houses involving girls in black-face respectively.

Now it appears that UA's going to add another negative category: suppressing speech.

So, the story would seem to be that some student decided to stick a confederate battle flag in his window. Whatever your feelings about the conflict of 1861-1865, whether you call it the Civil War or the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression–and I have to say that, over time I have come to believe that the third construction may not be that far from the truth, however much I am disgusted by what the South was fighting to preserve–you have to be an idiot to not realize that the flag has been appropriated by racist bigots as their symbol. To display it, whatever your motivation, is at least impolite.

Live Sex Chet

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

OK, so the single best reason to analyze ones weblog access logs is not to find out how many people are hitting your site or any shit like that–although I have to admit to a certain bafflement at how many hits I get, even if you carve out bloglines.com's constant polling.

No, the best reason to analyse ones access logs is to see the absolutely hilarious searches that people follow to your site. I've mentioned "milla jovovich naked" before–I don't think the person using that got what they wanted, since it was a result of me bashing Resident Evil. Anne and I spent a few minutes a week or so ago lauging about some.

Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Though it pains me somewhat to say it, I cannot recommend this book.

Let me first emphasise that it's not that there's probably not a lot of good information in it–there is. I have continually stumbled across interesting tidbits about how Perl 6 will do things.

The problem is with that verb: stumbled. The book eschews a reference-book sort of setup, and in its own words:

[…] I wrote this book in the style of a plain programming-language manual with basic concepts coming first and later chapters building on them.

Could it really be?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

A table-less, standards-compliant, three-column liquid page layout with masthead and footer? (yeah, I'm kinda stealing Ugo's lead, too).

Apparently so.

Gigaram sucks?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Hum. Ironic Design runs several machines. We've got seven servers for servicing AnteSpam, plus three or four others doing miscellaneous duties, like hosting this blog.

Anyway, having all this hardware that we pretty much keep going 24/7, and especially with the AnteSpam servers, which get driven hard (2 emails per second, which doesn't sounds like a lot until you consider that means 20x that in various database lookups and inserts (for logging) plus, oh yeah, actually running SpamAssassin means we have some fairly strong ideas about hardware.

Heh.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Brad DeLong goes to Chez Panisse, then has some fun with it:

"We went to Chez Panisse for lunch last week."
"Ah! The rough life of a Berkeley professor."
"The dish they were pushing was chicken-under-a-brick. But i told them my wife had made it just a couple of weeks ago."
"Did you tell them that what I made was actually chicken-under-a-cast-iron-Le-Creuset-casserole weighted with three soup cans?"
"No."
"That would have given them their opening. 'Well, sir, be assured that at this restaurant, our chicken-under-a-brick is made with real bricks…'"
"Real bricks, made by hand by the artisan brickmakers of Sonoma County…"
"'Sonoma County? You jest, sir! Alameda County. Those who lose big at the local Indian casinos must work off their debt by gathering dung and straw from Shattuck Avenue to hand-make adobe Mission bricks…'"

I cannot, honestly confirm or deny...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Chet's recollection of me screwing around with people who kept calling my number in error. It has a vague sense of familiarity, but, honestly, it might have been Patrick–simply taking reservations seemed a little subtle for me, I was much more the "beat the phone against the wall" sort of person at that point.

I'm much better now. Unless you're a telephone solicitor. Or a wrong number calling me too early in the morning.

My new favorite source for recipes

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, it was a total impulse buy when I picked up the March/April issue of Cook's Illustrated and I had gotten my sister a subscription for Christmas a few years ago, and our friend Chapman had gotten us a cookbook by the same people a year or two ago, but I'd never really looked hard at the magazine, and, well, the checkout line isn't the place to do it.

However, we've tried two recipes from it–one pasta dish (a spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, olives, capers, and pine nuts is actually on the web, which was judged excellent by us and the friends we had over, and their take on tortilla soup–and they've both been incredibly tasty, and, even more amazing, easy. Their tortilla soup recipe is as good as any I've ever had–although I'll admit that I don't live in, say, Houston–and it's structured in such a way that if you had three people to work on it simultaneously, you could be done in maybe 30 minutes from start to finish.

The Eyre Affair

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Oh, I don't know that I have all that much to say about The Eyre Affair. It's lighthearted escapism that has some fun with famous literature–the idea of a Shakespeare play being put on as if it were The Rocky Horror Picture Show is awfully amusing to think about, especially if the play in question is Richard III.

As further proof–if 'twere needed–that nothing ever changes, there is a plotline that revolves around the fact that the Crimean war has been running continuously to "present day"–which is to say 1985–that has all sorts of weird echos in this time and place, even though the book was released in January, 2002, meaning it had to have been finished before September 11 and well before the whole subject of Iraq came up.

Comic Book Fact Checking

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

What more needs to be said than Have at it

For the bizarrely technically-minded among you

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, the Perl 6 implementation on top of Parrot continues to chug along. At least, I suppose it does–since Piers Cawley doesn't write his weekly summaries any more, I have no idea. I guess I need to subscribe to yet another mailing list.

However, regardless of that, a "competing" implementation is being worked on. The weird, mildly disturbing part of it is that it's being implemented in Haskell.

Now I don't have anything against Haskell, per se–in fact, I considered learning it as a new language, although I ended up going with C#, which is a whole other story–but everything I've seen about it suggests that it is, if not an anti-Perl sort of language, at least a very un-Perl sort of language. To use one to implement the other seems, masochistic.

I guess this is almost exactly the opposite of the "fly-over"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

From the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, with a stop for a photo at every mile marker.

It's a big, weird country out there.

OK, you have to admit it's funny

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Safe for work, but you must be familiar with things that are not safe for work for this picture to be as funny as possible.

So, O'Reilly's got a magazine coming out

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Make describes itself as:

The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.

Sucker that I occasionally am, I suspect I shall subscribe–apparently the first issue will be subscription-only, with the second appearing on newsstands.

So, the HD in my laptop is "alive and still dying"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The new laptop is still supposed to ship out on March 09, so I'm just crossing my fingers. However, I might have an idea what to do with it once it does die. Windchimes!

The silliest thing since the Hamster Dance

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It's a MIDI sequencer–really, it seems more of an interactive instrument to me–that uses six hamsters to control three channels of pitch and rhythm.

There are wav and mp3s of the output. I wonder if you could get the base MIDI files for use as a ringtone?

Now running on a new host with new software

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, um, I took a week off, more or less, from any real, sensible, useful work to write my own blogging package.

This choice, believe it or not, was not undertaken lightly. Well, that's not entirely true–the need to resolve the issues I'd been having bit me in the ass one day, and I just couldn't concentrate on anything else until it was done. But I'd been thinking about moving for a while, because there were issues with the software I had been using, but the software, Blosxom, is basically dead.

As always, Fafblog somehow gets it just right...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Hunter's not dead, he's just going hunting

OK, so I wasn't able to get through Engine Summer...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I bought a trio of Jonathon Carroll novels in a single volume, and just haven't made it to it yet, even though John Clute says they're spectacular.

Sometimes these things happen. I'll probably try again in six months or a year and wonder what stopped me before.

On the other hand, two posts in, and I find Jonathon Carroll's blog absolutely fascinating. For instance, the post on 2/9 (you have to go to the February page and then scroll down).

On this St. Valentine's Day, ponder this...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

"A good woman is like a fine cheese," says me. "Or a large hat. Or an aggrieved sasquatch. Or an elephant made outta trees an ropes an lotsa smaller elephants."

What more do you need to know?

Reviewing history of Amtrak with John Goerzen

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

John's a Debian developer, and I keep up with his blog through the Planet Debian aggregator.

I was very interested to read his post on Amtrak funding.

I think having public transportation is a significant public good–one of the things I have liked most about the times I have lived in large cities (Boston, Miami, DC) is the ability to get to places without a car. That public transportation occasionally provides Chet with an opportunity to note, "That woman had pierced nipples." (a fact I had not noticed in my still-somewhat-hung-over state) is just icing on the proverbial cake.

Truth is, once again, stranger than fiction

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Yes, Virginia, there is a band named Frickin' A.

Words fail me.

It is, as they say, everywhere.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The multimedia system in Airbus airplanes apparently runs Linux.

OK, let's get one thing straight.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I found it preposterous that anyone could believe there was any urgent need to go to war with a tinpot dictator who wasn't even in control of the northern third of his country.

And I'm pissed that we've dragged our own good name through the mud, with lies, torture, allies who are no better than who we were fighting against, and a stack of civilian bodies that's got to be quite high, no matter which of many numbers you cotton to.

The Young Woman's Guide to provoking a panicked look from Michael Dorman

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

It's easy. Walk up to me and say, "Do I know you from somewhere?"

You see, the problem is that's either the most cliched pick-up line in existence–and, being realistic, I don't generally assume women are trying to pick me up–or you at least think you know me somehow, and now I have to figure out how.

So the wheels begin spinning furiously, and if they can't find any traction, well, it's like beginning to slowly drift backwards in your manual transmission car in San Francisco–not a good feeling.

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I wasn't actually a reader of TMFTML, but when I noticed a reference to it, I went to see if it had re-opened because Chet had been a fan.

Mostly, I just want to echo the assessment of Modest Mouse's latest album, Good News for People Who Like Bad News, which was an album I listened to quite a lot during my stint in DC.

I can't express my feelings towards Modest Mouse. They are an untelegenic band, the lead singer is rather older and not nearly as scrawny as I had imagined. His voice isn't that great–it's better than mine, but that says fuck-all–and he mutters indistinctly, and the guitars twang in odd ways, but Lord, the lyrics make me feel 19 again when the lyrics to songs meant everything in the world.

Were-hippos

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Heh.

I'm not sure that there is any response to the state of the world that is more sane than Fafblog!

There's a time when this might have seemed fun

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I've been through a blizzard or maybe two in Boston. I have to say, though, it never occured to me to jump out my window into a handy snowbank.

So, Laura, how you holding up?

The new lead paint?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, Slashdot has an article about paint that will help you protect your wireless network. By lacing the paint with copper and aluminum fibers, they're hoping to create a simple Faraday Cage (hey, that's my first-ever link to wikipedia!), thereby reducing or eliminating the amount of RF passing through your walls.

Hope you don't watch broadcast television.

But, much more worryingly, am I the only one who remembers the decades of issues we've had in this country with lead paint–lead having been a great pigment for getting a nice bright white color–and small children eating the paint when it chipped off, and the neurological problems that that engendered, and at the same time remembering that copper can be poisonous, and aluminum may be connected with Alzheimer's (though Wikipedia's article on Aluminum suggests that that's been refuted)?

What strange things you can be lead to on the web

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So I idly look on Amazon to see if there's a release date for the new Nine Inch Nails album With Teeth. No, but there is an album by the same name by another band, so I wonder if I got the name wrong, so I go to nin.com, and look at the pseudo-blog section, which contains a comment about Dimebag Darrell and someone named "Jhonn". So hit google, and end up being pointed to (among other places) blogofdeath.com, which turns out to be much more serious than its name might imply.

Adventures in wine country

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The morning started off early–no appreciable acclamatization to the time change had taken place.

After a nice breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel, Anzu, I went across the street to National Car Rental, got a car, and headed north.

I must say, the drive is fast when you're going opposite prevailing traffic–I was in Sonoma in roughly an hour, and took the time to stop in a little net cafe there to download some email and post yesterday's entry.

An unexpected development.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

OK, I reported before, with some trepidation, about plans to make a move of V for Vendetta.

It has become more interesting in that Natalie Portman may feature in it.

She's an interesting actress–her willingness to get involved in the massive charlie-foxtrot of schlock that is the Star Wars prequel trilogy aside.

I dunno.

Flying

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

So, we headed out to Cali yesterday morning. Our flight to Newark was uneventful, as was our flight to SFO, although we sat next to a painter and her cat–her husband and her other cat (in a bizarre coincidence, a male named Tucker) were across the aisle.

Her website has some interesting material. She was very interesting to talk to.

We also saw The Bourne Supremacy and Vanity Fair. The Bourne Supremacy seemed a perfectly reasonable film of its type–a reasonable way to pass an hour and a half. Vanity Fair actually left me interesting in reading the book for I wonder how the book itself treats Becky Sharp.

Ah, the glory of otherwise-unemployable english majors

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Seen on Sci-Fi Wire:

Is Bosworth Superman's Lois?

I had one of those back-in-college dreams...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

…but this one was different. I was taking a course in writing Humorous Essays, but most class discussion consisted, perhaps unsuprisingly, of one-liners. I was concerned that my work was too bitterly ironic; I wanted it to be a little more generously funny. And Tina Fey was in the class. And she had a habit of standing uncomfortably close to me.

There was more, but I couldn't remember it by the time I actually got up.

Watch the computer thinking

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

[[]]

A shot from a computer chess applet that shows a graphical representation of it's analysis.

Via Nick Lothian

Secondhand Lions

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Although there is definitely a soft white underbelly of overblown sentiment in this movie, there's also a good chunk of Michael Caine and Robert Duvall appearing to be having–and if you credit Caine's appearance on The Daily Show, having–a lot of fun, along with pretty decent work by Haley Joe Osment, who gives every sign of growing into a credible actor.

I was surprised to find, browsing on IMDb that one of his first film rolls was as Forrest Gump Jr. Oh, well, there's no accounting for coincidence.

Happy New Year

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

I hope everyone reading is well–all two or three of you.

We had a day of beautiful weather–it was more like January in Miami than January in Durham. Of course, I spent too much of it inside playing World of Warcraft, but Anne and I still got a walk of a bit over an hour and a quarter in midafternoon.

On an amusing meta-note, I can only guess that the person who found this site by searching for "milla jovovich naked" did not get what he (presumably) was looking for, since it probably wasn't snarky comments about Resident Evil.

Hawking Technology makes some interesting router hardware...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

…but I'm not sure I'd go to them for web development.

It is a tiresome fact of web development that you can't trust anything the user enters, and you really must validate input you get from your users. Unfortunately, the message you get from following this link (which I didn't construct–it was on their site) seems to show that they're not doing a very good job of that.

(Not that I've ever been perfect, either, but I try hard.)

So what does "Christmas Spirit" really mean?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The question is kind of tongue-in-cheek but the fact is I'm starting to think that for me the answer is "mild depression".

Now I'm really not trying to cause anyone concern–this is not "I'm going to go jump off a bridge now" material. I don't feel unhappy or anything–which even now makes me wonder if I'm wrong–instead, I'm just totally and utterly apathetic. I have no energy, no desire to do anything active at all–I'd happily sleep, eat and watch television, maybe read and play World of Warcraft.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

"I hope your children turn out to be as perfect as you are, sir."

– Bill Clinton, quoted by the New York Daily News, allegedly to a man "pushing a stroller" in Central Park who called him "an embarrassment."

I don't have anything insightful to add...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

…but I will note that during the three months I was in Washington, the two local, non-political things that dominated the news were the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Dupont Circle and the jubilation of some that they would no longer have to drive to Baltimore to see pro baseball.

Nevertheless, I don't see how paying for a new stadium for a team would be anything other than a boondoggle.

It's all Chet's fault...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

…that postings have dried up, insofar as he hectored me into buying Worlds of Warcraft, which is interfering with me getting any, you know, work done.

I haven't spent this much time with a video game since '95 or '96, when Quake came out.

Josh Marshall pretty much sums it up

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Read it here.

Discussing the Bush Administration's plan to privatize Social Security:

In other words, we have to start phasing out Social Security now because if we don't we're going to face some big borrowing in a few decades. But we can avoid that horror of horrors by doing some big time borrowing now to finance abolishing Social Security we won't have to face that terrible fate a few decades from now.

Nine Inch Nails has a new album coming out

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I've become resigned to the 5 year cycles that are all Trent seems to be able to achieve–yeah, yeah, I know that there's always a ton of sub-releases in the intervening time (I've got a shelf full of them), but let's face it: Pretty Hate Machine was 1989, The Downward Spiral was 1994, The Fragile was 1999–crap, this one's going to be 6 years. He's getting deep into Paul Simon territory here.

They must pay you to take Ben Affleck movies

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Now, I wouldn't encourage anyone to invest in DVDs of Tom Clancy movies, but pudge notes Ben Affleck's negaive value in terms of such things.

Warren Ellis has a blog

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Find it at http://www.diepunyhumans.com

This should be important to anyone who's read Transmetropolitan (bet that one came out OK, Nova), and, well, everyone should read Transmetropolitan.

Oh, and that link where he says don't look–seriously, don't look. Nothing good can come of it. Nothing. I need to go spend about three hours in the shower now.

via William Gibson

Brad DeLong has hypotheses about the roots of Free Software

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

You can read the whole thing here

In response to another article, wherein someone notes–mostly without suprise–that Linux is becoming a real contender for desktop use, Brad puts forth the following:

There are two theories about open-source. The first is that while it has always been possible for a charismatic leader to call forth immense team effort and accomplish great things by force of inspiration and example alone, such enterprises are never stable. In the long run you need either the stick of potential punishment–call it the authority of the state–or the carrot of material reward–the market–in order to maintain a large social division of labor and preserve a project across any substantial length of time. Call this process the routinization of charisma.

What a potentially interesting site

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

After reading that there was some sort of connection between the Allman Brothers' In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and Miles Davis, I did a quick google search, and stumbled across songfacts, which has the potential to be an interesting site.

He's big and red and files his horns

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

reprint series. In fact, looking over a list of his published work, that's about all I think I was likely to have seen. I'm actually amazed that I've read so little of his stuff, because he certainly made an impression on me.

Well, I've also enjoyed reading Hellboy, with its wisecracking take on neo-Lovecraftian horror, but I just picked that up in the last year.

So, as I said some time ago (before the movie came out in theaters), I wasn't sure how I'd like the movie adaptation.

The blessings of obsolete computer systems.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

My el-cheapo wedding ring.

As I had occasion to be reminded today, I needed a new wedding ring.

Now, I went the first 6 3/4 years of my marriage without one. For the first couple, well, it would have given it away–although, in retrospect, there could have been a lot of fun in watching people figure it out–and for a good while after that we just had more important things upon which to spend money.

There is nothing I can do to make this funnier

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Just go read it for yourself.

via Matthew.

Cool.

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

is one of the definitive Computer Science textbooks. It was also, for years, the book that defined the scheme language. It's big, and dense and fairly expensive.

Imagine my suprise, then, that MIT Press has apparently made the entire thing available for free on the web.

My days of router hackery are over...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I broke down and did what I'd recently recommended to someone else–I bought a Linksys WRT54GS, and then I ponied up the $20/year for the subscription to sveasoft.com's super-firmware.

(Yes, I know there's some conflict about GPL compliance WRT sveasoft.com, although from my understanding of the issues (that they want to restrict circulation of betas), I don't have a problem with it, really.)

Boy, I am awfully pleased.

For < $100 all told, I got 802.11g (though I am having one bastard of a time finding a cardbus card with an in-kernel driver), a four-port switch (though I'm really only using one), a router, a VPN server (albeit PPTP), a dhcp server that'll do static address assignments, a local DNS server that cooperates with it, and no doubt a bunch of other stuff I haven't discovered yet.

No rest for the wicked

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

This is a little tardy, but I feel I must mention that as of roughly 10 PM CST November 22, 2004, I have a new nephew, Nigel Sanford Berry.

On the subject of the name, I can only speculate that my brother in law (Hi, Cory!) didn't think that naming his first son Calvin Rufus Berry was sufficient revenge on his parents for naming him Corlis–I wish, though, he had opted for therapy instead of a path that willguarantee his sons get beat up every day after school. It's just a little too "sins of the grandparents" meets Darwin.

21 Dog Years

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

So, in an amusing coincidence–given that I had just spent three months among ex-Amazonians–Anne's friend Chapman got me a copy of this book as a birthday gift.

It is not the book I was thinking it was–there is apparently some other Amazon insider that mentions my friend Alex by name. It's a quick, light read. A fair amount of dot-bomb silliness can be recognized.

Yet, at the same time, I guess it's the final proof that I'm not a slacker that I find the main character unlikeable. Self-centered, uninterested in doing work, a dilettante who doesn't even do a good job of that, he pretty much offended me.

I am so putting a couple of these on my list...

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

For various hysterical raisins two of my primary guitars have old-school Stratocaster tremolo bridges.

However, I hate them. I don't use them, I don't have the bars screwed into them, I'd basically rather not have them. But there's always been the problem of what to replace them with.

Now there is an option, and it's fucking cool to boot!

Why do they do it? (AKA avoid the Netgear WG511, Linux users)

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Hardware manufacturers seem to be obsessed with rejiggering the internals of their products without putting any markings on the packaging (or hell, on the card, or even in its top-level PCI information) to indicate that something has changed. This screws Linux users on a regular basis.

The particular case in point–which I suggest you avoid–is the Netgear WG511. The original (v1) iteration of this Cardbus 802.11g card used the Intersil PrismGT/Duette chipset which is well-supported under Linux–it has a driver (prism54) that's been in the kernel for several months now and it's apparently fast and reliable.

How cool was that?

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

U2 always seems to just take over SNL when they show up. Their 2000 performance (the day after the 20th anniversary of John Lennon's murder) had Bono walking through the crowd, incorporating bits of Instant Karma during Elevation! (IIRC).

This time around, they did three songs (and the broadcast cut a fourth) and if you watch at the end of I Will Follow, well, let's just say that some fan will one day be able to tell kids about her lap dance from Bono.

Delicious Monster

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

I have to say, Delicious Library is almost enough to make me want a mac.

My local NPR station has a problem with the phrase "reproductive health and rights"

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

A local organization was told that it would have to remove the word "rights" from its on-air sponsorship spot.

The conflict between Ipas and WUNC has drawn national attention. Last month WUNC informed Ipas that it would have to remove "rights" from its on-air acknowledgement, which had read, in part, "Ipas, a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit that protects women's reproductive health and rights at home and abroad."

Joan Siefert Rose, WUNC's general manager, said the phrase could be interpreted as advocating a political position, potentially running afoul of Federal Communications Commission regulations.

Unfogged links to Antic Muse

mdorman@ironicdesign.com (Michael Alan Dorman) — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Antic Muse was Ana Marie Cox' site before she became Wonkette.

I hit the link on Unfogged, and then came across a review of Liz Phair's latest album she reproduced from the Chicago Reader. I guess I'm not sorry I haven't bought it.

From Robert Fripp's Diary