I have a book

…the title of which is ??Queen Elizabeth I??. Originally published in 1934, the frontspiece–at least, that’s what I think it is, I don’t pretend to be excessively familiar with book anatomy–has the note:

bq. A new hardcover edition appeared in Britain in 1952 when the title was changed to _Queen Elizabeth I_

This is, of course, because 1952 was when QE II assumed the throne.

It turns out (and this has been an awfully long setup for what it probably going to be a somewhat disappointing link) they needn’t have bothered since “neither of them should ever have been queen”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3368731.stm.

Ah, royalty.

Surely, we have not fallen this far

“Daily Kos”:http://dailykos.com/ has a link to “a Washington Times story”:http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040105-103754-1355r.htm claiming that the Club For Growth–you know, those jokers who think that the answer to every problem is tax cuts–has prepared an anti-Dean ad described as:

bq. In the ad, a farmer says he thinks that “Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading …” before the farmer’s wife then finishes the sentence: “… Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.”

Ken MacLeod on Beagle 2

bq. The apparent loss of Beagle 2 doesn’t mean the end of British attempts to reach Mars. The Brits, after all, owe it to themselves to make the chaps with the heat-rays and tentacles sorry they ever heard of Woking.

Thank God that’s over

It’s been quite a year. Let’s hope 2004 comes out better in all sorts of ways. Yoga class this morning started it off pretty well, but then I watched ??Identity?? and discovered some reference to it I’d run across wasn’t joking when it said words to the effect of, “Remember that scene in ??Adaptation?? where Donald Kaufman is talking about the chase scene in his movie, and the killer, the cop and the victim are all personalities of the same person–this is that movie.”

So someone on /. mentioned it…

…and I realized that we had a copy of Dan Brown’s ??The Da Vinci Code?? sitting around–Anne’s mother had read it and sent it to us when done with it (all hail the First Sale doctrine).

So, looking for something to keep me busy while my brain was idling, I read it. Didn’t take particularly long, which is just as well, since I would have to begrudge more time spent on it.

Me, I’ll take Umberto Eco’s ??Foucault’s Pendulum?? any day. That’s a book that takes a lot of the same base material and does something that is not pat and predictable and Hollywood.

I mean, it’s not that ??The Da Vinci Code?? is _bad_, per se–the writing is perfectly workable, doesn’t clang on the ear like, say, Tom Clancy, the plot is internally consistent, etc. It’s just that it’s a perfect movie in book form, and if you know me well, you’ll know that that’s really not intended as a compliment.

It’s like listening to ??Kingdom Come??, who could never in a million years have produced anything like the first four bars of Led Zeppelins ??We’re Gonna Groove?? (why that track? I just saw the new live LZ DVD, and that opening just blew me away). Just go to the source.

I call your attention to Josh Marshall…

who makes this “terrifyingly good one-sentence argument for why our efforts in Iraq may well fail”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2003_12_21.html#002351:

bq. Is it really reasonable to expect that the values which undergird liberal democracy in America will be effectively spread abroad by the most illiberal people in America?

Christmas for Spammers

Ken McLeod has an update on the classic carol, “The Twelve Days Of Christmas”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107219567161242201

No, I haven’t seen that movie.

I still feel a little scarred from the second one. But “this review of ROTK”:http://aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=16641 had me laughing right out of the gate with its discussion of the inevitable disappointments of third movies in trilogies.

That its derision for such is generally couched in homophobic terms is unfortunate and deplorable, etc., etc., but was ultimately not enough to stop me from nearly spewing coffe out of my nose.

bq. This movie will make you forget that if you stick a knife in your belly you’ll bleed to death so do not bring a knife to this movie.

So much for Uma Thurman…

What can I say, “I find intellectual narrowness unattractive”:http://scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2003-12%2F16%2F12.00.film.

I guess Hollywood’s self-obsession taints everyone eventually.

Yeah, sure…

“Blender gets raytracing”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03%2F12%2F12%2F224259&mode=thread&tid=152&tid=185, blah, blah, blah. I just think these are the coolest sample images I’ve ever seen: “monkey1”:http://www.blender.org/bf/monkey_shad.jpg, “monkey2”:http://www.blender.org/bf/monkey_mir.jpg

Things you learn on IMDB

First, Ozzy Osbourne was apparently “very seriously injured”:http://news.google.com/url?ntc=0M6B2&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2FnewsArticle.jhtml%3Ftype%3DentertainmentNews%26storyID%3D3981005 in what sounds like a daft accident.

I’ve watched the Osbournes precisely once. I can understand the amusement factor, but it made me kind of sad to see Ozzy being portrayed as a mumbling, bumbling buffoon, even if he knew it was being done and didn’t mind.

I sincerely hope he recovers completely–I think he’s a very important person in the history of rock and roll.

I know it sounds silly, given popular perception of the music he’s made, but I think a lot of those perceptions are a result of the sheer number of slavish imitators and mediocre knock-offs of his early stuff, both with Black Sabbath and on his own. It would be like talking about Led Zeppelin based on listening to Whitesnake or Kingdom Come–Black Sabbath, right up to the bitter end of his tenure with them, is unlike anything before or since.

In lighter news (considering it must be one of the signs of the impending end of the world), Baz Luhrmann is working on a movie about Alexander the Great “starring Leanardo di Caprio and Nicole Kidman”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0327405/ while Oliver Stone is working on one starring “rather a larger number of famous people”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0346491/.

Stop. Think. _Baz Luhrmann_ and _Oliver Stone_ are both working on a picture about Alexander the Great.

Put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

Yeah, well, fuqueue!

Let me first note that I have the greatest respect for the gigantic volumes of people who work on the linux kernel, and communicate on a daily basis using a technical vocabulary in what is *at least* their second language.

Hell, Linus’ command of idiomatic english is actuall pretty goddamn scary, and has been as far back as I can remember.

None of which makes this less funny.

bc.. Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 17:30:31 -0600
From: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
To: inaky.perez-gonzalez@intel.com
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, robustmutexes@lists.osdl.org
Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH] FUSYN 5/10: kernel fuqueues

On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 12:51:34AM -0800, inaky.perez-gonzalez@intel.com wrote:
> include/linux/fuqueue.h | 451 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> include/linux/plist.h | 197 ++++++++++++++++++++
> kernel/fuqueue.c | 220 +++++++++++++++++++++++
> 3 files changed, 868 insertions(+)
>
> +++ linux/include/linux/fuqueue.h Wed Nov 19 16:42:50 2003

I don’t suppose you’ve run this feature name past anyone in marketting
or PR?

—
Matt Mackall : http://www.selenic.com : Linux development and consulting

McCain-Feingold has been upheld.

I could give you my rant about how the stupidest thing that was ever done in this country’s legal system was extending legal status mirroring that of actual individuals to corporations–which gives them a pretext for claiming that their “First Amendment Rights” are being abridged.

However, I will just sit back happy that the Supremes didn’t let us down, while meditating on Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor’s all too true assessment that:

bq. We are under no illusion that (the law) will be the last congressional statement on the matter. Money, like water, will always find an outlet. What problems will arise, and how Congress will respond, are concerns for another day.

Eisenhower, on Vietnam

bq. Without allies and associates the leader is just an adventurer, like Genghis Khan.

This in response to the desire of many in his administration to get the US involved militarily in Vietnam in 1954.

So, I’ve been reading Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

bq. The outcome at Ap Bac aggravated the friction then growing between the American government and the news media. Neither Kennedy nor his successors would impose censorship, which would have required them to acknowledge that a real war was being waged. Instead, they wanted journalists to cooperate by accentuating the positive. Just after the Ap Bac battle, when Peter Arnett of the Associated Press asked him a tough question, Admiral Felt shot back: “Get on the team”

Of course, Ap Bac–this is the January, 1963 battle of Ap Bac–was, in terms of the engagement itself, utterly unlike anything in Iraq, if only because US troops weren’t actually involved.

That last bit sounds just like Rummy and the rest of the Imperialists, though. I wonder if they would sound like that if they’d actually served in Vietnam?

Ah, the joy of logic.

Some people complain about biased newsmedia.

The newsmedia operate in a free market as for-profit enterprises.

It is reasonable to assume that the majority of the market favors the existing media model, since, in a free market, entities that produce inferior or unpalatable products will lose market share to those who produce superior or more palable products.

Therefore, anyone who complains about biased newsmedia must have expectations that do not reflect the majority of the market.

The market is never wrong.

What to set on my IBM T22…

…so that I will get actual ACPI?

I played around with my laptop this morning, after I got back from dropping Anne off at work (she took her car in for service today).

I installed the HostAP driver for my wireless card, as opposed to the orinoco driver that I’d been using–it *almost* works, but I think the problems may not actually be driver problems–as well as an updated ALSA driver, which has shut up a cosmetic message.

I compiled a kernel with ACPI, which is supposed to be the great APM-killer/cure for bad BIOS’. Unfortunately the ACPI tables seem to give the ACPI code indigestion, so it doesn’t actually enable itself properly.

That’s probably why the PCMCIA slots on my laptop don’t work, while those on the docking station do. Oh, well, at least the ALSA and HostAP stuff look OK. More as I know more.

When I was…um…13…


(I had no memory of the exact time until I read the dates off the paperwork)

…I went to Berlin. This was 1983, well before the wall came down, and my father’s mother and sister and her husband had all come to visit–we’d been in Germany a little over two years at that time–and so we all went to Berlin.

Berlin was an interesting place, although like so much of our time in Europe, I really wasn’t old enough to truly appreciate it. It was definitely the biggest city I’d ever been in, even with a wall running through it.

I guess it says how much of a geek I am that, although I do have some fuzzy memories of seeing the Berlin Flughaven, and Checkpoint Charlie and KaDeWe, and the wall itself, my most immediate memory is actually of sitting on the troop train in…Frankfurt, I guess, although that could be wrong, waiting to leave, reading the new issue of ??Compute!?? magazine.

And no, I never actually got to see East Berlin. In order to be sure to not get picked up by the Stasi for spying, Allied service personnel had to wear full unform when actually in East Berlin. My dad forgot his regulation tie, and had nowhere he could get another, and we were advised that it would be best not to take any chances–if it wasn’t a regulation tie, it was better not to go.

Anyway, this reminiscence was provoked by going by a box of old stuff in my closet (part of the aforementioned office cleanup project), and finding a copy of the orders that were required for us to be able to cross East Germany to get to West Berlin via the troop train.

The individual images are kinda big (300K+), so be warned.

Reeling in the years…

So, as part of my ongoing quest to have as spare an office as possible (you must understand that I mean spare by my usually cluttered standards–I do not intend to get rid of, say, the four large bookcases full of books, or the several hundred CDs, say; I just want to get rid of all the superfluous shit), I often grab a stack of old magazines I’ve kept around, and start going through them, looking for anything worth cutting out, and recycling the rest.

Yesterday I did some _WebTechniques_ from 1999-2001, and boy, were they amusing–very much of their Internet-bubble time, and rife with flavor-of-the-month software and technology that no one even thinks about any more.

Today I started in on my old _Dr. Dobb’s Journal_. The oldest issues I have are from ’97 (I have the CD-ROM that had the text of articles up to that point), but boy, even that’s a heck of a time capsule–for instance, one of the big articles has to do with the Pentium II math bug, which I hadn’t thought about in years.

Also of interest are some of the authors, who I now know of from different contexts–for instance, I just noticed a C++ article from Nathan Meyers, who I know from both the gcc development list (not suprising), and from the occasional Debian list.

What’s really wierd, though, is how irrelevant it all it seems to me in retrospect. You have to understand, this is a magazine I’ve been reading off and on–mostly on, though I let my subscription lapse a couple of months ago for the first time in a decade–since I was, say, 15. That is more than half my life.

And yet, the vast majority of the stuff in these issues I’m looking at hasn’t had much to offer me–I mean, I do believe that some of it has indirectly made me a better programmer, if only by making me cognizant of some of the “big picture” issues of programming, or talking about language- and platform-neutral issues and such.

I guess this really drives home to me that I work outside the mainstream, and I don’t have any desire to move towards the mainstream. Dr. Dobb’s had become a magazine where articles were either oriented towards the mainstream–programming Windows stuff, or how to use whatever new Java interface Sun has dreamed up–or they were too specific to do anything for me–how to compute elliptic curves across 3D spaces or other such hyper-specialized stuff. So I don’t read it any more.

Wierd.

At least there were no Ewoks

I’ve never been any sort of partisan of the ??The Matrix?? and its follow-ons.

Honestly, I didn’t even see it until it had been out on DVD for at least a couple of months, and although I thought it was a fine adventure flick, I certainly didn’t think it was quite deserving of the rabid following it developed–just about anything ??The Matrix?? seems to get cited for, I think Philip K. Dick did better.

Still, when ??Matrix Reloaded?? came out, I did actually go see it at a matinee, and while I thought it got mired down in exposition that sounded like it was right out of 50s pulps, it had some visuals that were interesting and wasn’t really, well, _bad_, so I didn’t feel cheated or anything. Maybe that would have been different if I hadn’t gone to a matinee.

However, ??Matrix Revolutions??, really leaves me cold. It’s not a horrible sequel, per se–it’s hard to have a truly horrible sequel without Ewoks, or obvious Ewok stand-ins–but it succeeded in being boring even when there was action going on. Quantity of shell casings do not translate to interest, no matter how much you want it to. Chase scenes with zillions of sentinels, no matter how important the outcome is to the future of the human race, have already been done. Neo and Trinity’s tender moment: vomit.

Glad I went to the cheap show.

Chili Recipe

bc.. From: hartmans@mediaone.net (Jack and Kay Hartman)
Subject: Re: REQ: Vegitarian Chili Recipe Please
Date: 1999/04/08
Message-ID: <370c4b58.59101453@nntp.we.mediaone.net>#1/1
References: <370a0a15.4637265@news.cyberbeach.net> <370BA9CF.2769@ic.ac.uk>
X-Trace: clnws01.we.mediaone.net 923552813 24.130.84.29 (Wed, 07 Apr 1999 23:26:53 PDT)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 23:26:53 PDT
Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking

On Wed, 07 Apr 1999 11:54:07 -0700, “A.Ferszt”
wrote:

>Marmalade_Man wrote:
>>
>> Looking for a Vegitarian Chili Recipe.
>
>Actually any chile recipe you find in a normal cookbook will do…just
>leave out the meat and add beans or tofu or Quorn or soy chunks instead.

Here’s one that we like. This recipe is from the July 1993 Bon Appetit.

Kay

Vegetarian Chili with Chipotle Chiles

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 cup chopped carrot

1 cup chopped red or green bell pepper

1 cup chopped onion

3 large garlic cloves, minced

1 tablespoon chili powder

2 teaspoons cumin

1 28-ounce can Italian-style pluc tomatoes with juices, chopped

1 15- to 16-ounce can red kidney beans, rinsed, drained

1 15- to 16-ounce can cannellini (white kidney beans), rinsed, drained

1 15- to 16-ounce can black beans, rinsed, drained

2 tablespoons canned chopped chipotle chiles in adobo sauce

Heat olive oil in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add carrot,
bell pepper, onion and garlic and saute until vegetables are light
golden, about 10 minutes. Add chili powder and cumin and stir 2
minutes. Add tomatoes, red, white and black beans and chipotle chiles
and bring mixture to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until vegetables are
tender, stirring occasionally, about 20 minutes. Thin with water if
mixture is too thick. Season chili to taste with salt and pepper.

If you don’t know about Wait! Wait! Don’t tell me!…

Well, first, derive anything you can from my pity. Then “go listen to some episodes”:http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/index.html.

Watching them do the show at the “Carolina Theater”:http://www.carolinatheatre.com/ in Durham was fun. Besides the usual amusement that is the show’s stock in trade, it was something of an eye opener–although I guess I had unconsciously know that there had to be a lot of editing and other stuff going on behind the curtains, I never imagined how much.

Oh, and Charlie Pierce is probably right–“Elihu Root”:http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1912/root-bio.html has to be the funniest name in the history of American politics.

Quicksilver

Well, I finished it. All told, I think it took me two weeks, which is, for me, an awfully long time for _any_ book. I did read a couple of other things at the same time, but it was all fairly light stuff.

The first and most obvious question is, I think, “What is so pathetically wrong with the way that books are sold in this country that a novel reputedly written with a fountain pen, taking place entirely between 250 and 350 years ago, involving various and sundry historical events and persons, is going to end up shelved under _Science Fiction/Fantasy_ in most bookstores?”

But the ghettoization of literature is not something I feel any great need to rant about right now, so please just take it as read.

I think the writing is better than ??Cryptonomicon??, which seems sometimes too clever for its own good, and much, _much_ better than ??Snow Crash??, which is far too precious.

The characters are compelling and human, if at times improbable. The settings are interesting–both in terms of physical location and thetime and events surrounding them. Overall, I enjoyed it, but at the same time, Neil Stephenson seems to have a deep-seated need to try and address everything under the sun all at once. I can imagine a lot of people who would never consider slogging through such a book, with the promise of two more to follow, almost certainly of similar heft. At times I wasn’t even certain _I_ was up to it.

So, ultimately, it’s worth reading, but if I were restricted to a single historical novel by traditionally other-genre author(s), I would go with ??Freedom and Necessity??.

So, how old is your drink of choice?

At least in the hard liquor world, my alcohol of choice–gin–is a mere 353 years old. Amusingly, a google search for ??franciscus la boie gin?? will find, among other things “an annotation from Pynchon’s ??Gravity’s Rainbow??”:http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/o.html (look under “oude genever”).

I know I don’t drink as much of it as Russians do vodka, which “celebrates its 500th anniversary”:http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/10/10/russia.vodka.anniversary/index.html

b5. From Jerry, the source of all strange things

Oh, those “fiscally responsible” Republicans…

You know, these days, terrorism doesn’t scare me much.

Really, it has never scared me all that much. When I was 10 I spent 3 hours on a school bus outside of Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany because “a bomb had just gone off in the parking lot of Headquarters USAFE”:http://www.usafe.af.mil/news/news01/uns01289.htm. I had soldiers with M16s inspect the bus I rode into school on every day for the next five years.

For that matter, I was in the air on September 11th, and ended up grounded for three days in Milwaukee. Although I understand Milwaukee to be a wonderful place, the area around the airport is in the middle of nowhere. Not recommended.

And, frankly, the statistics are with me–your chances of dying from terrorist activity in this country are fairly low. You’re in a hell of a lot more danger being in a car, and I suspect you can die in a car in a fashion every bit as horrible as anything a terrorist could cause to happen to you.

Anyway, my views–unpopular, I expect–on September 11th and so forth are not, per se, germane to my real point, which is that this administrations fiscal policies look like they are going to engender “one hell of a payback”:http://billmon.org/archives/000758.html, and that scares the _shit_ out of me.

It’s almost enough to make me vote Republican next year, so they can preside over the trainwreck they’ve created (why do the words of ??Casey Jones?? suddenly begin to waft through my head), instead of doing what Nixon did, and passing the buck onto a Democratic administration that then had to do the real work of correcting things.

I’ve said it for years–Democrats may be “Tax and Spend”, but Republicans are “Borrow and Spend”, and I know which one _I_ consider “fiscally responsible”.

If you’re in the same basic age bracket as I am…

(nearing the bottom of the slope leading towards 33, in my particular case), then I suspect you will have at least a moment of nostalgia (perhaps combined with some quick calculations about just how easy it would be to afford) when you see this “Atari 2600 console with 10 built-in games, all in a slightly oversized "classic" joystick”:http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/Products.aspx?DeptID=446&CatID=12110&CatTyp=DEP&ItemTyp=G&GrpTyp=PRD&ItemID=0816230&ProdSeq=2&OffSet=2&ProdCount=3&Cat=plug+%27n+play&Dep=toys&PCat=video+games&PCatID=1174&RefPage=ProductList&Sale=&NumMatches=3&RecPtr=&Search.

Wow.

Courtesy of Jerry, expert finder of amusing time-wasters