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”:http://cowcotland.free.fr/modules/Forums/conneries/russes.mpeg. 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.
“An ‘infinitely’ zoomable image”:http://www.ebaumsworld.com/supercoolpicillusion.html
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”:http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.asp?CTR=820258 (not one of those listed) that is all her playing, but she’s doing stuff by a number of different composers.
It’s a nightmare. Because, of course, you *must* get the tagging exactly right, or better you not rip them at all–the sound’s not the point, it’s the tagging!
Apparently, the upper left corner of your page is “the best place to put your google ads”:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/3/prweb213516.htm.
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??”:/2004/09/dinner-rush.html. Anne and I spent a few minutes a week or so ago lauging about some.
You must see where this is going…
I can’t say how amused I was to find the all-time-best-search today: Live Sex Chet.
Chet, of course, demanded that I make it the headline, which I’ve agreed to do for a day or two.
I have to say, there’s an awful lot of other amusing ones, and some that I just don’t understand how they got to me:
* gas treatment dupont (no frigging idea)
* kernels that stick in your teeth (err, linux + new Nine Inch Nails album?)
* free porn that you can watch for free (no idea)
* a boy bow down to his parents (the old title, bet this wasn’t what they expected)
* all sorts of warts (no idea, don’t want to think about it)
* dogs fuck women novels (whoa, where’d that come from!)
* naked librians (yeah!)
* wachowski brothers and sex change (v for vendetta and…uh…)
* how to tell someone you hate them (I’m kinda amused, but baffled)
* get out of this shitty marriage (this kinda makes me sad)
* how to give a lap dance (u2 + who knows)
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.
Oh, well, so much for Southern manners.
Anyway, this would have been bad enough–being yet another score in the second category of the title–but the University decided, in response, that they would arbitrarily ban all window displays.
So a bunch of other students put the stars-and-bars in their windows as a protest. Which apparently led some dolt on the Volokh Conspiracy “to assert that they were prohibiting the display of American flags on campus”:http://volokh.com/posts/1109629158.shtml, which is, at least, a misstatement of the situation.
Me? I wonder who the protesters were. I’d like to think that this is just sort of Molotov cocktail that would be lobbed by the “Mallet Assembly”:http://www.mallet-assembly.org/, an organization to which I belonged (and for which I still do stuff, like hosting a few mailing list and maintaining a domain registration), because I think they’d do it for the right reasons.
But you never know.
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:
bq. […] I wrote this book in the style of a plain programming-language manual with basic concepts coming first and later chapters building on them.
But if the point of the book is to show moderately-proficient Perl 5 programmers how to do things in idiomatic Perl 6, I don’t believe you need that build-up. And even if you do think it’s appropriate, consider that on that same page (xxix) there is a diagram of how the chapters relate to one another, and _it’s not anywhere near a straight line_.
So, I find myself wondering why the author made the choice to impose what seems an inappropriate structure on the material.
And then there’s a lot of material that seems to be either filler or just out of place. For instance, Chapter 7 runs from page 105 to page 127. Of this, 3/4 of page 106 covers Perl 6, while all the rest is about using PDL with Perl 5. That’s not what I wanted from this book.
As I said before, I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff buried in this book, but it’s been a disappointing slog to find it. I couldn’t recommend this to anyone.
Hum. “Ironic Design”:http://ironicdesign.com/ runs several machines. We’ve got seven servers for servicing “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/, 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”:http://spamassassin.apache.org/) means we have some fairly strong ideas about hardware.
Our current systems are all Opteron-based (though we’ve not made the jump to 64-bit mode yet) with “Tyan”:http://www.tyan.com/. Our storage controllers are all “3ware”:http://3ware.com/ and our drives are all WD Raptors–not, honestly, that I love WD, but I like the 10K performance.
And our ram is all “Crucial”:http://www.crucial.com/. And, for the forseeable future, it will stay crucial, because so far our one experiment with another vendor, Gigaram, has really sucked. We’ve had two pieces of our very nice ECC ram fail–and one of them we tried in another machine, and it failed there, too.
Now I don’t want to make blanket assertions off of relatively little data, but I will note that it’s going to take a long time for us to consider going back to Gigaram, because we take our uptime pretty seriously, and they’ve had an adverse impact.
Brad DeLong goes to Chez Panisse, “then has some fun with it”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000433.html:
bq. “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…'”
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”:http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/skidoo_too/index.html.
“Chet’s recollection”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/life/050224phoneshenanigans.html 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.
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.
So, it was a total impulse buy when I picked up the March/April issue of “Cook’s Illustrated”:http://cooksillustrated.com/–Anne 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”:http://www.cooksillustrated.com/article.asp?articleid=763&bdc=9156), 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.
They also have a roast chicken recipe that I’m dying to try, but for the moment, we’re going to try one of the other pasta variations. Maybe we’ll do the chicken next week.
Regardless, I highly recommend this. We have a shelf full of cookbooks, and they’re all interesting for one thing or another, but we’ve made as many dishes out of this magazine–admittedly, a $7.95 magazine (no ads, though)–as we have out of all too many of our cookbooks, and they’ve been easy and good. This is hard to overrate, IMNSHO.
What more needs to be said than “Have at it”:http://comicfacts.blogspot.com/?
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”:http://profgoose.blogspot.com/2005/02/how-ironicalor-perhaps-this-belongs.html.
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”:http://www.pugscode.org/.
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.
“Make”:http://makezine.com/ describes itself as:
bq. 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.
From the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, “with a stop for a photo at every mile marker”:http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/onTheRoad/home/index.shtml.
It’s a big, weird country out there.
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!”:http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~wing/wingie/tech/hdchime/hdchime.php
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”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/eceprojectsland/STUDENTPROJ/2002to2003/lil2/.
There are wav and mp3s of the output. I wonder if you could get the base MIDI files for use as a ringtone?
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”:http://blosxom.com/, is basically dead.
Well, perhaps that’s overstating the case. It still has a community of users, and many of them are quite happy–heck, I was _mostly_ happy–but it has no leader to keep development moving forward, and the prior leader, “Rael Dornfest”:http://raelity.org/, released the last alpha version of the “big new update” nearly a year ago with a restrictive license that forbids anyone from picking it up and continuing development.
And the idea of hacking on the prior version, of which I’ve done a little, was not attractive.
So I decided to take those aspects of Blosxom that I really liked–mostly using the filesystem as your database–and build my own. And I have, and it’s not really ready to be released just yet (there’s still a ton of rough edges), but I can talk about the design a little bit.
The single biggest thing I like about Blosxom is that it uses the filesystem as its database of articles, which are all just text files–you type them up, give them silly names, dump them in directories, and it picks through it all to find stuff. This works great for me, with my devotion to Emacs, and it allows me to easily and reliably do all my editing locally, and then push my changes up to the real server using rsync or sitecopy or what-have-you.
Where my too begins to differ is that Blosxom considers the first line of your file the title, and the rest is the body. For various reasons, I got in the habit of separating those with a line, and I decided to exploit that. So my tool considers anything up to the first blank line to be a “header”, while the rest of the file is the body.
Now, at the moment, I actually prefix this header text with the string “title: “, and then split the whole thing up on the colons, much like one would a mail header. This allows you to define arbitrary properties for a message. You can put:
bq. This is a title
Foo: Fee
author: Jiminy
Etc., etc. The body part of the message gets run through “Textile”:http://textism.com/tools/textile/, which is a very nice, very smart formatter that takes a lot of the scutwork out of the sort of text I’m writing. It gives me back xhtml.
From all this, I can produce a chunk of XML to represent the article, including those arbitrary properties from the header. This all gets glommed together with some header information for the whole feed into a big XML document that represents the semantic content I want to produce.
Then, depending on what sort of output you requested (this is the “flavor” in Blosxom parlance), that XML is cranked through a stylesheet that will produce well-formed XHTML, or RSS (of any type), or Atom, or conceivably other things.
Even though this is all written in perl, it’s pretty damn fast–all the XML tomfoolery is done using the XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT libraries, which are wrappers around libxml2 and libxslt1.1, which are lightning-fast C libraries for doing this stuff.
I also think it’s ridiculously flexible, for the usual reasons: it divorces content from presentation (mostly), so it’s easy to support multiple formats with a fair shot at producing optimal results in them.
I also have ideas for “plugins”–the fundamental thing to realize is that we can dump as much stuff as we want into our “source document”, and then use XSLT stylesheets to tailor things for presentation. So that list of days with number of posts can be put in some arbitrary place and the XSLT (probably plus some CSS) can move it to be a sidebar.
Overall, I think it’s going to end up being a nice system–perhaps not perfect, but close. But for the moment I need to go to bed.
Hunter’s not dead, he’s “just going hunting”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_02_20_fafblog_archive.html#110897122984416138
bq. “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?”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_02_13_fafblog_archive.html#110841400293602113
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”:http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog/2005_02.html and then scroll down).
Contrast this, most amusingly, with “Warren Ellis’ explanation of where his ideas come from”:http://www.warrenellis.com/index.php?p=328.
And then contemplate the notion of:
bq. …and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.
So, decided to cave in and get that grocery store discount card that makes Ben & Jerry’s a buck cheaper, but hate the fact that you’ve just given them a window into your buying habits?
Benjamin Mako Hill “has the answer”:http://mako.yukidoke.org/copyrighteous/projects/20050208-00.html. He and some compatriots put together “cardexchange.org”:http://cardexchange.org/ so you can meet up with people and swap cards. Yeah, they’ll still collect information, but it’ll be kinda strange.
John’s a Debian developer, and I keep up with his blog through the “Planet Debian”:http://planet.debian.org/ aggregator.
I was very interested to read his “post on Amtrak funding”:http://changelog.complete.org/node/230.
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.
That one of the few downsides to the place I live now is miserable air quality because of excessive automobile traffic just reinforces this for me.
Yes, Virginia, there is a band named “Frickin’ A”:http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?userid=eAF3LEDLCL&EAN=676517101822&ITM=3.
Words fail me.
The multimedia system in Airbus airplanes “apparently runs Linux”:http://primates.ximian.com/~jimmac/blog/Misc/airbuslinux.
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.
Now, in some situations, the questioner might have a name-tag, which is handy except, in one of the universe’s many ironies, in almost all cases trying to read a woman’s name tag is virtually indistinguishable from staring at her breasts–which, while fun, is something you generally don’t want to do very obviously, but it’s hard to be covert when it’s all in small print.
All of which is about the last situation I expected to find myself in today.
You see, I skipped out of much of the morning to go to the Southeast Regional Barista Competition (sponsored by “SCAA”:http://www.scaa.org/), because David Chapman, co-proprietor of “Bean Traders”:http://www.beantraders.net/, the coffee shop I go to, as well as two of his employees (who I know less well), were going to be in it. I went last year, and it was fun, so I decided to go again.
So, I was standing in the door to the room the competition was in (insert plug for “Southern Season”:http://southernseason.com/ for hosting the event) when an attractive young woman came up and hit me with the aforementioned question.
In the end, though, I braved social stigma, and was fortunate that, in fact, her name tag gave away the answer–yes, in fact, she did know me, as she was one of the baristas at “Murky Coffee”:http://www.murkycoffee.com/, which was my purveyor of choice in DC, and which I would highly recommend to anyone in the Capitol Hill/Eastern Market area.
I still want David to win, but I was happy to wish Katie and Ryan (I never met Aaron while I was there) well. Maybe there’ll be a Murky Coffee/Bean Traders showdown on Sunday. In which case I will show up and do my best to cadge drinks from all concerned.
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.
But if you really, really want to see my blood boil, nothing beats the shitty treatment soldiers have been getting from the government that sent them into harm’s way.
From a soldier sleeping in his car because his credit report was ruined because the Pentagon expected him to pay back his signup bonus even though he was discharged as a result of wounds suffered during his stint in Iraq, to the head of the House Armed Services committee saying he thought it was just fine that families of navy personnel stationed in San Diego–a notoriously expensive place to live, and I suspect they don’t get a higher housing allowance for being stationed there–had to stand in lines at the local food bank, it makes me want to shoot my TV.
This, though, “really takes the cake”:http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2005/01/i-find-this-outrageous-but-i-guess-its.html.