# posts

title: Tenth Monday Update
date: 2007-07-23 19:20:00.000000
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  So, a lot has happened in the past two weeks. Is anyone else simply amazed it's already almost August? WHERE IS SUMMER GOING???<br><br>Summer: Week 8 + 9: Finished<br><strike>Go to SPSU to work more on transfer credits<br>Call Sonya<br>TVS<br>Dentist at 3:15<br>Crash at Chris' house.<br>Beach</strike><br>Unexpected: Read three books and sizable portions of three others. Saw Sonya 4 times. Racked up crazy amounts of minutes on phone. Skateboarding and Guitar. Find out that Burke might be moving back and would potentially like to live with me. Sweet!<br><br>Summer: Week 10: Schedule<br>Monday<br>Call Sonya<br>Apple Interview at Noon<br>Laundry<br>Bank<br>Gym<br>Call SPSU about housing with Burke.<br>Order Justin's Birthday Present<br>Tuesday<br>Figure out what happened to my paycheck.<br>TVS<br>Sonya?<br>Work on importing Livejournal Entries to wordpress.<br>Guadec Videos?<br>Wednesday<br>TVS<br>Sonya?<br>Gym<br>Thursday<br>TVS<br>Sonya?<br>Friday<br>Chill. Sonya?<br><br>News for 7/16/07 and 7/23/07:<br><a href="http://www.guadec.org">Guadec</a> happened. Hopefully videos will be online soon.<br><a href="http://pyrodesktop.org/">Pyro</a> was announced at Guadec, as was the <a href="http://online-desktop.org">Online Desktop</a> project. Both of these groups are trying to push things forward. Keep an eye on them.<br><a href="http://njpatel.blogspot.com/2007/07/so-now-that-we-have-some-depth.html">Njpatel announced a new AWN release</a> and it is pretty. Keep hacking!<br><a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/tribe3">Ubuntu Gutsy Tribe 3 was released</a>.<br>An update has been released by the <a href="http://www.reactos.org/en/newsletter_28.html">ReactOS team announcing that 0.3.3 will be dropping soon</a>.<br><a href="http://www.ign.com/index/e3/2007/">E3 happened and lots of cool games were announced</a>. The burden is on you to research that one though.<br><a href="http://www.songbirdnest.com/node/1915">Songbird released a new Windows nightly</a> with builds on other OSes soon to follow. Good progress, guys.<br><a href="http://www.pcsx2.net/#i2050">PCSX2 announced that new plugins are available</a> which emulate the analog sticks of a PS2 controller with your keyboard. Not the announcement I've been holding my breath for, but interesting.<br><a href="http://tirdc.livejournal.com/14188.html">The ATI 2d driver is set to see a release soon</a> and <a href="http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/?q=node/86">MPX is also seeing good work</a>.<br>Compiz Fusion has been relatively quiet the last two weeks because they're gearing up for their website launch. I'll keep my head to the grindstone and keep you all informed.<br><a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19068/">Someone finally invented the mechanical flying spy</a>. I don't know whether to smile, clap, or laugh.<br>There's also <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=19045">research into erasing memories</a> of late. Did no one watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?


title: Tenth Thursday Literary Lines
date: 2007-07-27 16:56:35.000000
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  Thursday Literary Lines<br>Today's piece is from the Neruda book that arrived while I was at the beach. It is titled Ars Poetica.<br><br>Between shadow and space, between trimmings and damsels,<br>Endowed with a singular heart and sorrowful dreams,<br>Precipitously pallid, withered in the brow<br>And with a furious widower's mourning for each day of life,<br>Ah, for each invisible water that I drink somnolently<br>And from every sound that I welcome trembling,<br>I have the same absent thirst and the same cold fever,<br>A nascent ear, an indirect anguish,<br>As if thieves or ghosts were coming,<br>And in a shell or fixed and profound expanse,<br>Like a humiliated waiter, like a slightly raucous bell,<br>Like an old mirror, like the smell of a solitary house<br>Where the guests come in at night wildly drunk,<br>And there is a smell of clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers-<br>Possibly in another even less melancholy way-<br>But the truth is that suddenly the wind that lashes my chest,<br>The nights of infinite substance fallen in my bedroom,<br>The noise of a day that burns with sacrifice,<br>Ask me mournfully what prophecy there is in me,<br>And there is a swarm of objects that call without being answered,<br>And a ceaseless movement, and a bewildered man.


title: Tenth Tuesday Quotables
date: 2007-07-24 11:20:34.000000
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  "I had always assumed that any attempt at my contact with God would be not only presumptuous, but actually contradictory: since, obviously, if I am his creation, then I experience God through the gift of life, and my obligation is to take care of the gift.The giver, presumably, delivered the gift, or sent the gift, or I inherited the gift from him. Present in the gift, the giver remains nevertheless outside of it, beyond my comprehension. To separate the giver from the gift is, perhaps, to diminish the gift. It is this miracle of life and the supreme mystery of being that unites me with my fellow beings; any speculation about the miracle and mystery of the Supreme Being tends to separate me from them. That is how I have looked at it as a boy, and, frankly, I still look at it that way." - Jerzy Kosinski<br><br>"My prayer is my exaltation in life's moment; it comes to me moment by moment, always concurrent with the act of life, and it's the sole way in which I acknowledge what's spiritual in my existence. I consciously narrow my life to the acts of my faith in it-acts which are spiritually significant-and I keep setting aside anything which is insignificant, which obstructs my awe of creation. This is my prayer; other prayers are creations of others and I look at them the way I look at religions, books, poems, works of art-they are all manifestations of spiritual life. In my life and for my life, I have chosen one particular form of spiritual worship, and I manifest it as I go along." - Jerzy Kosinski<br><br>"I am convinced, and I see it manifested in almost every phase of modern living, from the corporate to the Woodstock ends of the spectrum, from the hard-hat executive to the professional revolutionary, that we are a culture of the denial of the self." - Jerzy Kosinski<br><br>"The entrapments of collectivism are overwhelming: TV and radio, which permeate our privacy and destroy the aloneness out of which it becomes possible to learn to build a self; drugs, which smash the mirror of personal identity; the virtual disappearance of creative self-employment, and of professions and opportunities which ask for the use of the self; the terrifying featurelessness of the modern physical environment; the debilitation of the arts; the great gray educational machine; the devaluing and disparaging of the imagination: the "own" things of the eroded self." - Jerzy Kosinski<br><br>"He was one of those in our society I call 'Dead Souls'. At best, I find they share situations: they sit and watch films or television or listen to music in a group, thus isolated by a collective medium which permits each of them to escape direct contact with the others." - Jerzy Kosinski<br><br>"I think of such fears and wants as obstructions of life-of deprecating the worth of me as a man. To counteract them, I remain grateful for what I have-my life and my awareness of its spectacle-rather than fearful of what might happen, regretful of what I don't have or what pains me. Perception of pain has always contributed to my awareness of myself. Sin is allowing pain-any pain- to damage the sanctity of life, to regress the drama of my spiritual redemption." - Jerzy Kosinski


title: Tenth Wednesday Songs of Summer
date: 2007-07-25 15:42:35.000000
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  Spoon - You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb<br>Notorious B.I.G. - Mo Money Mo Problems<br>Incubus - Stellar<br>Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass<br>Aesop Rock - Catacomb Kids


title: Thanksgiving Greetings
date: 2007-11-21 18:44:02.000000
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  Wow. I've been just terrible about posting in here lately. I'm alive and excited to be on Thanksgiving break though. Now, let's see if I can't update this thing without creating a disgusting mega-post.<br><br>The news:<br>- I am not going back to school next semester. For sure. I'm taking some time off and studying programming and math in my free time. I'll also be working full time and the odds look pretty good that'll be at TVSA. Awesome!!!<br>- I still don't know where I'm going to be living though.<br>- You probably already know I'm dating this really cool girl Teresa Finn. She's cute and nerdy and good to talk to and...ahem. Yeah.<br><br>The questions:<br>- If you still read this thing what do you enjoy hearing about? Do you primarily read it to know my crazy business or do you like my thoughts on specific subjects (poetry, computing, etc)?<br>- What are you dying to get for Christmas?<br><br>The upcoming posts:<br>- One about architectural changes and shifts in the computing industry. Expect to hear all the standard fare about CPU/GPU convergence, multicore hoo-ha, virtualization, the shift towards mobile and open, and other smatterings as well.<br>- One about the education system, creativity, entrepreneurism, innovation, and everything else under the sun by the sounds of it.


title: The 08 Vote
date: 2008-11-04 16:59:59.000000
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  I just voted. I'll repeat what I said last night: You should too. If you're eligible that is. Anyone interested in coming over to keep an eye on the prediction markets and the rolling numbers for the polls is welcome. I'm setting up a bit of a command center here in the basement with my 22" LCD watching <a href="http://www.gigamonkeys.com/election/election.xul">Peter Seibel's data mashup</a> or fivethirtyeight, if you insist, and the TV ready for CNN or what have you later.<br><br>Also, I'll be baking brownies. That's right. Brownies. Maybe even some fried chicken. We'll see. Now come over and let's do this.


title: The Big Day
date: 2007-05-01 12:57:00.000000
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  It finally happened. The first big vendor flipped over. OEM Linux here we come.<br>Dell will be selling computers with Ubuntu Linux preloaded and support them fully this May 2007.<br>Quoth Linus:<br><a href="http://lolgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/lolgeeks007.jpg"><img src="http://lolgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/lolgeeks007.jpg" /></a>


title: The Funniest Man Alive
date: 2007-08-08 15:55:24.000000
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  Seriously, he is. Today:<br><br><a href="http://www.xkcd.com/300/"><img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/facebook.png" title="XKCD - Facebook" alt="XKCD - Facebook" height="544" width="342" /></a><br><br>Additionally, yummy things from reddit.com and the collective planets:<br><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pmarca/~3/141925469/age-and-the-ent.html">Marc Andreesen on Entrepreneurs and Creativity</a><br><a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=262509&amp;cid=20136383">A Slashdot Comment that Doesn't Suck. Almost makes me want to start reading slashdot again. Not quite enough somehow.</a><br><a href="http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148">Good Linux Kernel Mailing List discussions about how Disk I/O is handled. Kerneltrap coverage.</a>


title: The Generic Quick Post
date: 2009-02-19 21:20:53.000000
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  I didn't even realize I hadn't posted in over a week. I just got through the first big "crunch period" in school and did pretty well. This weekend will be relaxation and unwinding to a pretty large extent. So what's happened besides the school stuff?<br><br>I got <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter_IV">Street Fighter IV</a>. I am planning on throwing a tournament...details forthcoming. I already think I prefer my Smash Bros tournaments.<br>I'm enjoying <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_Foxes">Fleet Foxes</a> and also <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stills">The Stills</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_Weekend">Vampire Weekend</a> at moment. Mmm, mmm, music.<br><a href="http://archlinux.org">ArchLinux</a> finally put out a new release for the first time in a while. They're also going to try to drop releases with each Kernel release from now on which would be pretty damn cool. A distro that releases 4 times a year? Watch out. Not that most of us Archers don't just install and roll along...<br><a href="http://freeshells.ch/~revence/par.txt">This is my jam</a> and beautifully and entertainingly explains what I'm trying to say about parallel programming and the future. It also advocates haskell a bit which is nice.<br><a href="http://notes-on-haskell.blogspot.com/2007/02/whats-wrong-with-for-loop.html">This just generally talks smack about for loops</a> which is not a bad thing. I'm so sick of for loops. I'm not going to get into my snobbery right here. Just know that the fact that I ought to learn C for the future so I can deal with the past is a little frustrating at times.<br>Finally, I'm 3 for 3 on my <a href="http://theberrics.com/">berrics</a> predictions and with any luck I'll be 4 for 4 this weekend when Marc Johnson <strong><em>finally</em></strong> fights Steve Berra.


title: The Good Things
date: 2009-10-22 15:54:41.000000
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  This is a test of something a little different. This will be a personal post detailing some good things that happened to me yesterday. Ya know, because that perspective is good.<br><br>Good Things that happened to me today:<br>My algorithms test got pushed to next Wednesday. Two days is time for me to learn more.<br>I setup plans to see Where the Wild Things Are with Max (possibly others...) this weekend.<br>I got to listen to a lot of good music: Bill Evans Trio, Bibio, Four Tet, Memory Tapes, Deerhunter, Two Door Cinema Club, French Kicks...<br>I wrote a simple wrapper macro on with-interrupts for ECL&lt;-&gt;SBCL portability.<br>I just enjoyed seeing people: Alisa, Bansri, Christian, Elisha, Kelly, Trevis, Professor Snook, Professor Brown, pretty much everybody.<br>Don Gerz made a funny post on my wall.<br>I enjoyed reading some news on reddit and hackernews. I also enjoyed Chris Cole week at the berrics.<br>My financial aid finally came in. I need to check up on that Friday.<br>I got warned about a quiz on Friday. Always better to know in advance.<br>A bug I found in ECL got confirmed by Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll. Might not get fixed right away but hey, that's something.<br>I defeated some (but not all) of my Algorithms homework. It's progress.<br>I felt attractive.<br>Teresa felt like making a grocery run. There was Sorbet for dessert.<br>Teresa.


title: The Last Mile
date: 2009-07-12 16:20:06.000000
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  So, I'm really in the home stretch now. I'm spending all day today trying to get something like 7 pages written on Weapons of Mass Destruction which I painfully don't care about. I've finished and submitted all my other finals and assignment. It's the only thing left. I have to give a presentation with my group on some questions about China's specific stances with regards to WMDs on Tuesday and then we have a group ~25 page research paper to turn in Thursday. My group and I really want the 25 page paper wrapped up by Tuesday so we can just sit around between Tues. and Thurs. and then hand it in and walk away. Then I'm off for a bit. I'll probably whine about how one month isn't enough of a break in the near future. <br><br>I haven't managed to get to the skatepark this week or write much lisp. I have watched some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_Bebop">Cowboy Bebop</a> during evenings with Teresa and I've enjoyed it. It's also got me looking into the music of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Kanno">Yoko Kanno</a>. Which in turn is pushing me to try and start exploring Jazz. I've always put that off because it's a huge and rich genre...hell, I put off exploring a lot of older genres (Jazz, Classical, 60s and 70s pop and rock) for that reason. The depths seem too great to plumb. It's still good fun to try. Aside from skateboarding at brookrun, I hope to play videogames a bit, catch up with friends and finish a screencast of a lisp solution to project 2 in CS once my classes wrap up this week.<br><br>I've been positively eating it on my berrics predictions lately. <a href="http://theberrics.com/dailyopspost.php?postid=1179">At least Mark Appleyard won</a> today. I think that makes me 3 for 6. Round 1 and I'm already eating it. Awesome. I'll try to do a revision in the interlude between Round 1 and Round 2. I also hope I'll finally catch up on a <a href="http://trashed-ideas.net/">blog</a> <a href="http://krow684.livejournal.com/">or</a> <a href="http://justinthefunnyrobot.wordpress.com/">three</a> that I've had a hard time keeping up with. Hopefully, <a href="http://dongerz.livejournal.com/">Don</a> will start posting again too. It's like he's a ghost! What might he be up to these days? Later, folks.


title: The Latest
date: 2007-12-13 05:04:46.000000
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  Yesterday a certain lovely friend of mine noted that I hadn't been writing on here lately. I admit it. It's true. I've sort of disappeared from the vast expanse of the net as the semester has drawn to a close. I'm preparing more substantial and interesting updates for later but for now here are the important notes.<br><br>Dad: Dad's starting on chemo, I believe, next weekend. What he has isn't curable but it's also impossible to state how long it will take to kill him. It could take as little as a year but it could take as much as a decade. As we know more I'll try to keep you all filled in and in all likelihood Mom, Dad, or both of them will set up a blog for the express purpose of keeping everyone up to date. I'll post here when that happens.<br><br>School: I've got one more exam next Monday which I was supposed to take this Tuesday at noon but for some reason thought was on Wednesday. After that I'm done with school for a year. I've been self-educating with lots of nerd (math + programming) stuff lately and will be doing much more in the year to come after relaxing a bit over Xmas break. My amazon.com wishlist made in my Xmas list post a week or two back is, in essence, my syllabus. I'll be posting notes, discoveries, and more here as I go.<br><br>Work: Two big things have happened on the work front. One, the Joomla-based intranet that I've been working on for the past two months or so went live today. It's in production and 300 people are using it. That's pretty cool. I built that. Two, I spotted a 2008 Help Desk schedule that has me working from January 11th through the end of 2008. I haven't been officially told that I'm hired but if I'm not they need to revise their schedule. I'm sure more details are forthcoming. :-)<br><br>That's it for now. Have any thoughts on that? What have you been up to?<br><br>Note: Nerd articles and rants to return soon.


title: The Music
date: 2009-06-06 20:17:59.000000
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  Somewhere along the way, the music stopped.<br><br>It used to drift in from across the hall<br>in citrus hues and lilting arpeggios.<br>There was no exhaustion and sleep<br>was restful. We woke up, dogwood<br>blossoms falling from our lips,<br>sun streaming through the windows.<br>Sundays there was french toast<br>and the wind was always behind us.<br>Camellias and magnolias filled<br>our home and we moved about as though<br>buoyed by hummingbird wings.<br><br>But now there is no hall there.<br>So then there are no harmonies,<br>no gentle crescendos.<br>Once suffused by sweet melody,<br>we dim. Stars go out.<br>And just like that, the words all slipped<br>from my mouth to the floor.<br>I wish I had something more to tell you.<br>I don't. The music has stopped.


title: The Obligatory New House Post
date: 2008-06-04 19:36:53.000000
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  Well, I've been talking about doing this for a while but I'm just now getting the time to sit down and do it. For reasons of security, this will not be a full photo tour of the house. Only a few photos of the interior and exterior. If you want to <em>know</em> where I live (the address to drop by or what have you), do feel free to ask. Particularly, It's easier to get me to tell you if I already know you somehow.<br><br>So, living in the house is really nice. I like my roommates, I like the location, I like the price, I like the Static IP from my ISP that keeps this website up. I'm in the basement of the house and I think that's awesome. One reason is that it stays pretty cold down there and I like it relatively cold. Another is that the downstairs is just a bedroom, bathroom, and a combination kitchen/living room with a washer/dryer room off to the side. I think of it almost like a studio apartment separate from the upstairs and that's perfect for me. We also have newer appliances than the upstairs folks. The biggest problem is just keeping it clean, mostly because my roommate Ben has some...deficiencies when it comes to taking care of himself (cooking + cleaning, frankly). I knew that from rooming with him at Oglethorpe though so it hasn't been a surprise. Any messiness in these photos beyond the floors needing to be mopped I attribute to him. :-)<br><br>Beyond here there be dragons...or something like that. Click for the photo tour.<!--more--><br><br>So, this is the house from the outside. <img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/innocent_home.jpg" title="Innocent Home" alt="Innocent Home" /><br><br>It's a cozy place to hang your head. While you're wondering about the exterior I'll just mention that we have a fabulous screened in porch and patio in the back...<br><br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/patio.jpg" title="Patio" alt="Patio" /><br><br>And the basement generally looks something like this when I come home. At least the couch and chair are comfortable.<br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/couch.jpg" title="Couch" alt="Couch" /><br><br>Perhaps my favorite thing in the house and certainly something my roommate and I have enjoyed discussion and heated debate over is the library. We have a bookshelf each stocked with pure goodness (according to our own tastes, of course). We've argued about more than books though. I recently attempted to rigorously argue that books should be sorted categorically on the shelves as opposed to by size or author. Clearly, we have way too much fun being nerds. For future reference, his bookshelf is on the right and mine is on the left.<br><br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/sexy_shelves.jpg" title="Sexy Shelves" alt="Sexy Shelves" /><br><br>Clearly, mine is better. The top shelf is devoted to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen">The Watchmen</a> (Don I've contemplated buying you a copy. You should definitely read it...), skateboarding photo annuals, video game strategy guides, novels and biographical works of individuals and companies. The second shelf from the top is devoted to popular science, political science and philosophy, essays, short stories and poetry.<br><br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/bookshelf_top2.jpg" title="Top 2 Shelves" alt="Top 2 Shelves" /><br><br>The third and fourth shelves are quite excellent themselves. The fourth is certainly the pride and joy of my collection thus far being my <a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/bookshelf_cs.jpg" title="CS Books">programming shelf</a>. The gold book that's somewhat difficult to read is Dasgupta et al's <a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html"><em>Algorithms</em></a>, by the way. The third shelf is devoted to Open Source, Intellectual Property Law and Mathematics. I'm planning to write articles soon on "ideal" self-study undergraduate book collections for Computer Science and Mathematics. Keep an eye out.<br><br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/bookshelf_bottom2.jpg" title="Bottom 2 Shelves" alt="Bottom 2 Shelves" /><br><br>With that out of the way let's proceed into the bedroom dungeon.<br><br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/the_bedroom.jpg" title="The Bedroom Dungeon..." alt="The Bedroom Dungeon..." /><br><br>To be honest, I sleep here maybe once every few weeks hence my bed being unmade. I'm mostly upstairs with one of my, er, roommates whom you ought to know by now... (<a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/she_is_hardcore.jpg">hint</a>). I have the far bed and Ben has the near one. It's hard to tell in this shot but his side is vastly dirtier than mine especially with regards to things on the floor. I'm omitting other photos to avoid embarrassing him (read: BANDWIDTH USAGE!!!). Let's proceed to the kitchenette thingy...<br><br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/stove.jpg" title="Kitchenette thingy..." alt="Kitchenette thingy..." /><br><br>And from here the fridge is behind you and the kitchen sink is to your right (I'll spare you). The bathroom I've succeeded in keeping clean but you don't get to see it unless you come over. What you will see, in all likelihood, is me trying to stay productive and have fun at my usual workstation spot. I look forward to seeing you.<br><br><img src="http://www.redlinernotes.com/images/house_post/living_mess.jpg" title="The Usual Spot..." alt="The Usual Spot..." height="576" width="768" />


title: The Occasional Mashup
date: 2009-06-11 14:42:47.000000
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  So, whether you like mashups or hate them I do think they can be original and fun. Case in point: Modest Mouse vs. Ratatat. <a href="http://boxstr.com/files/4481662_4zkun/Modest_Mouse_Vs_Ratatat_-_Beat_%236_Vs._The_World_At_Large.mp3">Charming</a>. The entire Modest Rat corpus can be found <a href="http://teenageriot.tumblr.com/">here</a>. Scroll down to the Jan 24th entry for a link to the zip file with all the MP3s. Nothing like artists giving away music.<br><br>Whether mashing up pop (rap) acapellas and instrumentals a la Girl Talk is something that requires talent or is musically good or not I'll leave to others to debate. I thoroughly enjoy Girl Talk.<br><br>I will say that I wish there were acapellas and instrumentals for the more indie stuff I listen to. It's kind of sad, I'd love to sample Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man...but there's not an acapella of it anywhere. There are other Marvin Gaye songs...but my mind tends towards mashing up stuff that doesn't have acapellas. And DIY acapellas never do sound quite right. Maybe someone will eventually make software that can extract vocals properly...I'm not holding my breath.<br><br>Off to class for now, I've got a Computer Science midterm at 5, a Professional Practices & Ethics midterm due Saturday and then CS Project 1 due Tuesday. Those 2 CS assignments (midterm + project) make up 45% of my Data Structures grade. Good times. Back later. Probably will finally touch up and post something I wrote about Dad.


title: The Real World
date: 2007-06-11 07:22:00.000000
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  I feel like my parents and a lot of my friends' parents are obsessed with mentioning the "real world" where they have been to their children. It's sort of held over our heads isn't it? The whole thing has just gotten built up to the point where it's ridiculous. Naturally, I relate it to things I've observed in computing, particularly hacker pissing contests over things like who has made good contributions to the field and what the technically best solutions are. That has also gotten built up to the point where it's ridiculous. I don't know whether I feel like I'm living in a different world than my parents grew up in or not. There is clear evidence that in many respects things are different but just how different and what it's effects on my life will be seem impossible to predict. But if I'm bothered by anything tonight it's how ridiculous the notion of success is and how I have no idea what to do with the thought that I'm at a supposed "make it or break it" point in my life.<br><br>Earlier tonight my mom said something to the effect of thinking I was on a path and that her and dad had faith in me so they support me. I have no idea how to react to this. <em>I don't think I'm on "a path".</em> I don't know what the hell I'm on most the time. I certainly don't think that I have any more of a shot at not failing at this whole "life" thing than anybody else. A lot of our debate earlier centered around the fact that I'm leaving Oglethorpe to go to a school to study Computer Science and that if I don't like that or am not good at it I'll pretty much be directly entering the workforce. Moreover, I'm going there to learn about Computer Science. If I get a degree, it will be coincidental. Frankly, that's what I want. And it scares the shit out of me. Of course, my parents are concerned about the number of doors that close when you don't have a college degree. I understand that. It concerns me too. I also am aware of the number of people working in computers that lack one. It's somewhat higher than that of other fields and I think that relates to the fact that Computer Science and <em>Hacking</em> have historically been fairly rebellious and were born out of a lot of countercultural elements in the 60s and 70s. The computer industry tends to be more open minded about your education than a lot of other industries. Your portfolio is a significant metric.<br><br>Anyone who knows me knows I'm obsessed with computers, perhaps to my own detriment, and I can fix them or wax nerdosophical about them to my heart's content but I have never programmed them. If it turns out that I'm not good at programming I don't know what I'll do besides tech support. Basically, I just want to do something that I can make a reasonable amount of money at (I don't know what this is for me but I suspect under 40k a year,) am good at and enjoy doing. I don't know if I'll end up being that lucky. Worse still, I don't know which one (or ones) of those criteria might be the ones that fall through. I feel like things are changing. I think a lot of old power structures are showing their age and new systems are slowly working their way in. I do feel like technology has a lot to do with that and I try to keep up pretty well with technology. I don't know what it takes to "make it" when you're trying to make it outside the established system of get a degree, get a job, get a house with a white picket fence. I know that I feel like I'm part of a subset of my generation that is vastly more interested in genuinely learning and doing new things than the majority of the group and that the educational system isn't great at supporting that. Most people I know are interested in going to school, making money when and how they can, and partying or having fun the rest of the time. I do this for fun. I try to figure things out or educate myself about something (often technical). I feel like that has to be worth something. I have no idea how I get from here to the hypothetical there of "success" and yeah, I'm scared. But I don't know how to do anything else. So I'm hoping that this path actually leads somewhere and that I'm not just some stupid naive little kid who hasn't met up with the real world yet.


title: The Right Thing
date: 2015-05-09 03:35:00.000000
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  I've been programming for 8 years now. Only half that time professionally.
  It seems like a long time to me but is a drop in the bucket compared to many in this industry.

  If I had to pick two big lessons from the past 8 years to tell someone
  getting into Software Development for the first time, I would probably say:

  1. Software is never finished.
  2. Software is never "right".

  ## Software is Never Finished

  Software is never finished because it exists in a social context.
  Software is an accessory to daily life and life changes.
  As our needs evolve, and the context around software shifts, so must the software itself.

  Not to mention the fact that the teams working on software and the organizations around it shift.
  We cannot forget [Conway's Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)!

  I often cannot imagine how the Software industry will ever settle with regards
  to tools and practices, when I see our tumultuous past 50 years.
  But even if our techniques and tools settle, I don't imagine our codebases will.

  ## Software is Never "Right"

  You might imagine that this section is redundant. Certainly it sounds similar to "Software is Never Finished".
  But I mean something different. I mean that there isn't a single right way that all software should be written or made.

  The internet would lead you to believe otherwise. Programmers are nothing if not evangelists, even zealots, about their
  tools and techniques, their pet styles and practices, their esoterica.

  The most important thing you can do is ignore this. Ignore the hate, Ignore the hype. Do not second guess yourself.

  Tools, practices, and domains of knowledge are just that. Even if Software wasn't a moving target (see: Never Finished),
  we still do not have a single methodology understood to always produce the ideal code. Indeed, there isn't some ideal code
  we're after. The code *is not* the most important part, it's just the part we're paid to obsess over.

  So don't sweat the folks who insist everyone should follow their "better" way. At the end of the day, good documentation
  and happy customers are probably more important than most particulars of your codebase.

  By all means, don't stop learning and write the best code you can.
  But chart your own path through our tangled maze of lore.
  And remind yourself that it's okay to be an [average programmer][average].
  We've got to find time for families and lives, after all.
  Speaking of which ...

  [average]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE

  ## The Right Thing

  It's tough to try to plan for retirement. I'm still
  too young to think confidently on decade plus time scales.

  It's tough to decide how to teach my students and gauge assignments.
  It's tough to decide what to learn next to become better at programming.
  It's tough to decide what I want from my career, how to nourish it and have it nourish me.
  It's tough to decide what's worth doing in general, when our lives are so busy and full.

  But there's one decision I make that's really easy, even when it makes my life harder.

  It's coming up on six years since Dad died.
  I cannot measure the amount I've grown since then. I know he'd be proud.
  But I'm proud and that's even more important.
  The biggest lesson I might have learned from John Glenn is this:

  **Loving other people is so obviously the right thing.**

  I cannot think of a time when I am as confident in my decisions
  as when I am loving and supporting others.

  I'm not proud of my programming skills or code, though cl-6502 is kind
  of neat. I'm not proud of my job or relationship, though I am thrilled
  with those aspects of my life.

  I'm proud that I handle hard situations with all the grace I am able.
  I'm proud that I treat others with respect and care because I didn't used to.

  Most importantly, I'm proud that when I see someone struggling, I love them.

  We do not get to have many easy decisions in our adult lives.
  But loving those around us, pleasant or unpleasant, in good times or bad
  is an enormous undertaking. I certainly fail at it, but I never regret it.

  It's unfortunate that with our busy lives, in the sea of our alerts and notifications,
  it is so difficult to focus on the simple and important things. But I truly believe
  loving others is the most important thing that I do.

  I have failed many times before and in many ways and modalities.
  I have character flaws. I have shortcomings.
  But if I have helped those around me through difficult periods in their lives
  and supported them when they were in need? Well, then it's all probably worth it.


title: The Rubber Meets the Road…
date: 2008-01-25 05:33:05.000000
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content:
  and I find the resources to read. This SICP studying is harder than I ever could have imagined. I have done approximately nothing in my math, putting me about two weeks behind tomorrow. My focus has been entirely on SICP. SICP, I'm only a few days behind on thankfully. It's really hard stuff. And as somebody noted, charmingly, at this stage it practically is math. And proof by induction, recursive functions, golden ratios and Fibonacci sequences math. Not your grandpa's arithmetic.<br><br>Anyway, I've dug up some resources hitting snags here and there. It's what I do. So far, I've found a really great SICP Wiki (but it's half Russian), and a pack of people that have studied it from the Open Courseware over the past year.<br><br>That pack is as follows:<br><a href="http://www.kendyck.com/solutions-to-sicp/">Ken Dyck's Solutions</a><br><a href="http://blog.petersheats.com/sicp-exercises/">Peter Sheats Solutions</a><br><a href="http://nothinghappens.net/index.php?s=SICP">Chuck Hoffman's Blog</a><br><a href="http://www.michaelharrison.ws/weblog/?cat=8">Michael Harrison's Solutions and Commentary</a><br><a href="http://ozten.livejournal.com/">Ozten's Solutions and Commentary</a><br>and finally, <a href="http://lispy.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/mastering-higher-order-programming-techniques-with-sicp-chapter-1/">The Lispy Solutions and Commentary</a> which so wonderfully motivated and inspired me tonight. Particularly with regards to a remark on Section 1.1 "just lulling you into a false sense of security".<br><br>Of course, there is also the aforementioned <a href="http://histoma.com/sicp/FrontPage">SICP Wiki</a> and <a href="http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/lisp/sicp/">Eli Bendersky's Blog</a>. Long story short, I really owe it to Lispy for encouraging me. Half way through section 1.2 I was bogged down. Roughly on exercise 1.13 which apparently gave a few other people trouble too. And I felt all alone.<br><br>Anyway, I'm going to try to push my schedule back a week and see if by next Friday I can be up to lambdas and through 80 pages of Discrete Math and then continue as planned. At the very least, I've known from day one that the one thing I want most to accomplish this year is wringing as much as I can out of SICP. So if it takes the whole year just to do that, schedules be damned, so be it.


title: The Spirit of Lisp (some young kid's impression)
date: 2010-11-12 20:13:28.000000
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  Disclaimer: I am not speaking for the CL community. Hell, depending on who you ask there *is* no Common Lisp community. If you're an old hat lisper, this article will probably make you groan, scratch your beard, kick something and mumble something like "Lisp just smells funny, News at 11". I'm posting it because I haven't put the words down before and the thoughts bring me joy. But *this is not news*. Because news is at 11. If you're a not-yet (common) lisper who has some interest in the language, my hope is that if you show up on #lisp or otherwise begin investigating or playing with lisp, you'll arrive with a slightly more informed perspective.<br><br>I recently read something on Zach Beane aka xach's blog that made me quite happy. He was posting about this year's International Lisp Conference and discussed (among other things) the low attendance this year and some possible causes of that. But then he went on to write this wonderful bit,<br><br><blockquote>"I really like getting together in space and time with other Lispers. An ideal future Lisp conference for me, personally, would ... attract hundreds of cheerful and enthusiastic Lisp nerds...Navel-gazing and nostalgia would be at a minimum. People would talk about what they're doing today and what exciting things they plan for the future. Everyone would get together at dinner and swap stories about Lisp, life, and whatever else came to mind.<br><br>I know people are doing fun stuff with Lisp because I talk to them every day about it online. It would be pretty special to talk to them for a few days about it face-to-face."</blockquote><br><br>...which in part led me to tweet the following just because I thought it embodied some things I really love about the lisp community:<br><br><blockquote>"(loop (awhen (build-something) (release it))) ;; Wake up #lisp ers. Your time is now. This message brought to you in part by #quicklisp"</blockquote><br><br>Nikodemus Siivola nailed this too at some point with the quote, "Schemer: “Buddha is small, clean, and serious.” Lispnik: “Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs.” Scott Fahlman's statement that "Common Lisp is politics, not art." seems similarly indicative of this in some ways also.<br><br><div id="deref-1">There are two things I'm really trying to get at. One is agnosticism, a very serious take on multi-paradigm, "you want it, you got it" programming. Opinionated languages are great as are languages or communities that are pursuing other goals, be they some abstract notion of elegance, minimalism or anything else. But...Common Lisp *is* a programmer amplifier. It subscribes to no preordained or predefined notion of what elegance is.<a href="#ref-1">[1]</a> Hell, a <a href="http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/11/3-programming-languages-you-need-to.html">recent article</a> talked about 3 different kinds of languages you need to know and I might add an unopinionated language and an opinionated language to that list. Whatever the opinions you ought to see the difference.</div><br /><br><br><div id="deref-2">My other point is the more important one, the emphasis both in the language and community on practicality, productivity and getting things done. People often show up on lisp.reddit or the #lisp channel on Freenode/IRC and ask if Lisp can has monads or Lisp does functional programming or if people have built big things with it and so on *before* trying to learn lisp or using it.<a href="#ref-2">[2]</a> Almost always the first response is "Why are you asking that? Why does it matter? Why do you want to know?". This tends to dissatisfy the visitors whose real agenda, in my humble opinion, is usually to ensure they study the thing that will "make them good" or get them furthest ahead of the curve. Why waste your time with "the wrong language"?</div><br><br>Generally, the whole conversation devolves. The parties are coming from totally different points of inquiry. But whether the visitors are "<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778585">flamed so hard they die</a>" or gently dealt with until agreements are reached things end pretty quickly and everyone goes on about their day. Paul Snively calls lisp the "<a href="http://www.cliki.net/Paul%20Snively">cockroach of programming languages</a>" and I'm not sure if he means Common Lisp or just the Lisp family genes. But when people ask if lisp is dead or "shouldn't I just use/study language X?" I'm relieved and pleased that we're too busy having fun and building things to worry about it. Who cares what language wins tomorrow? This language works today, we're using it and when we see other languages with something we need, we grab it.<br><br>To me this is something refreshing about the lisp community that isn't internally or externally recognized quite enough. Which isn't to say that we should go around beating our chests and talking about what rock stars or great programmers we are. I'm certainly not one. I remain a wet behind the ears programmer. I'm not writing as much code as I should and as a consequence still have little useful stuff to release. But I've been privileged to watch and try to help Will Halliburton with a lisp-powered startup and work with Leslie Polzer on Weblocks and Paktahn.<br><br>Really it's most likely that there's so much more noise than signal regarding "lisp" and often so little clarity as to whether scheme, lisp or genetically 'lispy' languages are being discussed on online forums that the public image about Common Lisp is horribly out of whack. Hell, I've said terrible, stupid, ridiculous things about Common Lisp in the past. Why? I hadn't seen the community, I hadn't seen the language, I didn't understand *what* it was. And maybe we can't change that or it's just not worth the effort. The people who have heard something from x, who heard it from y, who heard it from z will keep repeating old wives' tales forever. But here's my attempt at getting down why this language is in no danger of dying anytime soon:<br><br>We're all just having fun building things. And if that sounds like something you'd like to do, please come in, visit #lisp and ask us questions. Message me personally if you want, I'm on freenode as redline6561. I promise the water is fine. Just don't ask if this is the right way to use your time. Figure that out in advance. As far as I'm concerned, between great open source implementations like SBCL and CCL, great editing solutions like SLIME for emacs, Slimv for vim and the new Textmate bundle and easy access to libraries through quicklisp, there's never been a better time.<br><br><div id="ref-1"><a href="#deref-1">[1]</a> This certainly is not to say that you can't use or practice other languages notions of elegance in lisp. Drew Crampsie aka drewc has been perfectly happy working on a <a href="http://paste.lisp.org/display/115977">monadic web request dispatcher</a> of late and Francois Rene Rideau aka fare happily does Purely Functional Programming in CL and came up with an "Interface Passing Style" which <a href="http://fare.livejournal.com/155094.html?thread=526550">simulates the parametric polymorphism of Haskell's type classes</a>.</div><br /><br><br><div id="ref-2"><a href="#deref-2">[2]</a>If you're doing that, you're missing the point. Part of the reason that happens is surely the endless blog articles and old reddit comments which endorse SICP and "learning lisp" as a way to expand your mind and reach some ersatz programming enlightenment. Part of it is that you might just be getting started in programming and looking for ways to skip to the end. And that's understandable, I've been there myself. But remember the words of <a href="http://norvig.com/21-days.html">Norvig</a> and <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061101">Nostrademons</a>.</div>


title: The State of State
date: 2007-08-29 13:20:44.000000
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content:
  So, I've been having and alluding to discussions with Tim Sweeney of late. I sent him an e-mail a little over two weeks back and I received word back from him about a week ago. It's taken a while for me to digest it a little and ask his permission to post it here but he has been kind enough to grant said permission. So, without further ado, the transcript:<br><br>Me:<br><p id="mb_0">Tim,</p><br>My name is Brit Butler. I'm a college student in Atlanta, GA and an admirer of your work. I was very taken with your POPL talk on The Concurrency Problem but curious as to why you mentioned both the message passing model and referentially transparent functions but then went on to mostly talk about the latter with Haskell. I'm certain that you've used and read about Erlang and other message-passing systems and was wondering if you could explain your position on them to me, vis-a-vis Transactional Memory or some other method. I'm assuming you wouldn't be in support of STM because it's ultimately still about sharing state. Thanks so much for your time.<br><br>Regards,<br><span class="sg">Brit Butler<br><a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com//" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" target="_blank">http://www.redlinernotes.com/</a><br></span><br><br>Tim:<br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d">Hi,</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"> Lots of applications and reasonable programming styles rely on large amounts of mutable state.  A game is a great example – there are 1000’s of objects moving around and interacting in the world, changing each frame at 60 frames per second.  We need to be able to scale code involving that kind of mutable state to threads, without introducing significant new programming burdens.  Transactional memory is the least invasive solution, as it allows writing pieces of code which are guaranteed to execute atomically (thus being guaranteed of not seeing inconsistencies in state), using a fairly traditional style, and it scales well to lots of threads in the case where transactions seldom overlap and touch the same state.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"> Message-passing concurrency isn’t a very good paradigm for problems like this, because we often need to update a group of objects simultaneously, preserving atomicity.  For example, within one transaction, the player object might decide to shoot, issue a command to his weapon, check an ammunition object, remove ammunition from it, and spawn a new bullet that’s now flying through the world.  And the sets of objects which may need to atomically interact isn’t statically known – any objects that come into contact, or communicate, or are visible to each other, may potentially interact.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"> When implementing that kind of code on top of a message-passing concurrency layer, you tend to get bogged down writing numerous message interchanges which really just turn out to be ad-hoc transaction protocols.  That’s quite error-prone.  Better to just use transactions in that case.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"> This argument for transactional memory is limited in scope:</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"> For algorithms which can be made free of side effects, pure functional programming (or “nearly pure functional programming” as in Haskell+ST) is cleaner and allows more automatic scaling to lots of threads, without committing to a particular granularity as with message-passing.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"> For algorithms that need to scale to multiple PCs, run across the Internet, etc, transactions seem unlikely to be practical.  For in-memory transactions on a single CPU, the overhead of transactions can be brought down to &lt;2X in reasonable cases.  Across the network, where latencies are 1,000,000 times higher, message passing seem like the only plausible approach.  This constrains algorithms a lot more than transactions, but, hey, those kinds of latencies are way too high to “abstract away”.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"> The existing Unreal engine actually uses a network-based message passing concurrency model for coordinating objects between clients and servers in multiplayer gameplay.  It even has a nifty data-replication model on top, to keep objects in sync on both sides, with distributed control over their actions.  It’s quite cool, but it’s inherently tricky and would add an awful lot of complexity if we used that for coordinating multiple threads on a single PC.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d">-Tim</span><br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: #1f497d"></span><br>So, there you have it. More on all this later. I've got to go play around with Erlang a bit more. I'm hoping <a href="http://algorithm.com.au/blog/">Andre Pang</a> and <a href="http://patricklogan.blogspot.com/">Patrick Logan</a> will help me dig into this a bit deeper in days to come. Who else wants in on the conversation? Comment below.


title: The Thing At The Bottom
date: 2008-09-16 19:01:55.000000
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content:
  I'm finally getting to that point where I'm really curious about math. To be sure, I'd really like to beef up on my high school math (Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus) as I haven't done any in <em>years</em>! That said, I'm really more curious about Set Theory and Abstract Algebra and at least a little interested in Linear Algebra. Topology and Number Theory can wait.<br><br>What I really think I'm curious about though are Algebraic Structures. There's a great FAQ on them <a href="http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext/node6.html">here</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_system">the Wikipedia entry</a> also looks pretty thorough. Once I read those maybe I can look into Type Theory and Formal Systems and the relations between them. That said, I'm sure I won't understand anything about <a href="http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/LieAlgebraCohomology.html">Lie Algebra Cohomology</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory">Category Theory</a> any time soon.<br><br>At least there are good video lectures to be had. Math, Algorithms and Data Structures here I come?


title: The Unexpected
date: 2008-04-08 17:40:24.000000
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content:
  This poem was unexpected but I blame it's inspiration on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop">Hofstadter</a>, <a href="http://www.dreamsongs.com/Feyerabend/Feyerabend.html">The Feyerabend Project</a> (particularly the Sussman quote at the end, NO ONE pays enough attention to the Sussman quote at the end), and <a href="http://www.alphamagazine.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=1897101">the quants</a>.<br><br>There is a dim luminescence<br>on the edge of the world<br>drawing close. I hardly<br>see it's call but hear my<br>heart rise on approach.<br><br>The things unnamed we<br>can't contain, powerless<br>we act in vain. The systems<br>built stay brittle, break<br>when under stress they<br>cannot take. The deeper<br>message anathema to our<br>craven fantasies.<br><br>It may come for ill or gain<br>and is not my place to complain,<br>I know not what instruction awaits<br>so idly move at pleasant gait.<br>I hope the best for all of us,<br>for meritocracies in which to trust,<br>but utopia has no need of randomness<br>with which the universe is enamored.<br><br>The glamor and gore of that<br>midnight show I will not see<br>and will not know. I'll laugh<br>a good deal as I go but it<br>speeds like a star's falling.<br>If we find whatever defines<br>the space where interaction<br>takes it's place and emerging<br>from names is a trace<br>of self I shan't be surprised.<br><br>PS: I discovered that the Sussman quote at The Feyerabend Project was sourced from <a href="http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:qhMMWmbNuEAJ:swiss.csail.mit.edu/projects/amorphous/workshop-sept-99/robust-diversity.pdf+robust+diversity&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;cd=3&amp;gl=us&amp;client=firefox-a">this paper</a>. It may give some insight into all this.


title: The Way It Is
date: 2008-07-14 16:53:26.000000
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content:
  There was a fragment of Milosz stuck in my head the last 24 hours that I wanted to track down and get out of my system. It was originally printed as an Inscript in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unattainable-Earth-Czeslaw-Milosz/dp/0880011025">Unattainable Earth</a> but I found it reprinted in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Collected-Poems-Czeslaw-Milosz/dp/006019667X">New and Collected Poems</a> on pgs. 412-413.<br><br>What did I really want to tell them? That I labored to transcend my place and time, searching for the Real. And here is my work done (commendably?), my life fulfilled, as it was destined to be, in grief. Now I appear to myself as one who was under the delusion of being his own while he was the subject of a style. Just as they were, so what if it was a different subjection. "Do you want white peacocks?-- I will give you white peacocks." And we could have been united only by what we have in common: the same nakedness in a garden beyond time, but the moments are short when it seems to me that, at odds with time, we hold each other's hands. And I drink wine and I shake my head and say: "What man feels and thinks will never be expressed."


title: The Week After
date: 2009-05-26 14:18:37.000000
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content:
  I want to thank everyone who commented or sent messages for their love and support over the past week. It's been most appreciated. Things are slowly returning to normal. I wrote something substantial about Dad last night but I'm going to hold off on posting it for a bit. I want to make sure it's of the right quality. There was a write-up in the AJC, in print and <a href="http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/obits/stories//2009/05/22/John_Glenn_obituary.html">online</a>, which is alright but the obituary by Dad's college roommate (which is unfortunately not online) hits the mark much better I think. That or Mom's tributes to him on <a href="http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/johnmglennjr/journal">Caringbridge</a>.<br><br>Quick (but serious) pop quiz, Compare and contrast these two quotes. They may be my two favorites. Tell me what they make you think in terms of their different approach to the benefits and drawbacks of the advance of human knowledge. I think the dichotomy between them pretty neatly encapsulates my scattered thoughts and feelings about human progress.<br><br>Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. - Alfred North Whitehead<br><br>We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends. - Aldous Huxley <br><br>I'm mostly enjoying my summer courses, particularly Data Structures. It's given me an excuse to relearn <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_(computing)">pointers</a> and learn <a href="http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/gccintro/index.html">how to actually use gcc/g++</a> and makefiles. I'm still a long way from being any good or knowing what the hell I'm doing though. C'est la vie. The Sixteenth Edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities report is out, in PDF and <a href="http://haskell.org/communities/05-2009/html/report.html">HTML</a>. I was mostly excited to see a progress report on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler which is some top notch technology if ever there was any. Just <a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/May09">look at the stuff</a> they're working on! I've been poking around the <a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/">Computer Language Benchmarks</a> game recently, too. Gotta love SBCL and GHC.<br><br>There are a few pieces of software I'm anticipating a release of. Here they are with links to the blockers for each: <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&keywords_type=nowords&keywords=fixed1.9.1+verified1.9.1&resolution=---&chfieldto=Now&field0-0-0=flagtypes.name&type0-0-0=equals&value0-0-0=blocking1.9.1%2B&field0-0-1=flagtypes.name&type0-0-1=equals&value0-0-1=blocking-firefox3.5%2B&field0-1-0=resolution&type0-1-0=noop&value0-1-0=INVALID+WONTFIX+WORKSFORME+INCOMPLETE+MOVED+EXPIRED">Firefox 3.5</a> because I live in it, Chromium's <a href="http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list?can=2&q=Mstone:LinuxBeta">(Google Chrome) Linux Beta</a> and <a href="http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap">Songbird</a> which I don't really use but track with some interest. I'm also looking forward to a new Pitivi release (which should happen today, actually) and GHC 6.12 but that's months out still. Emacs 23 should also be fun because emacs releases are so punctuated but it's a pain to find a release schedule anywhere or even a list of blockers! GEEZ! Outside of software, I'm really looking forward to Peter Seibel's book Coders at Work which appears to be <a href="http://www.codersatwork.com/endgame.html">reaching it's endgame</a>.<br><br>Speaking of Emacs I've been spending a bit more time in that incredible editor trying to become more proficient and found the <a href="http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-12-02T01%3A35%3A00%2B02%3A00&max-results=7">Emacs-Fu</a> blog to help immensely. There was also a <a href="http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/en/writings/emacs-vcs/EmacsMercurial.html">guide to using the extension that ships with Mercurial</a> that I found pretty helpful in getting off the ground quickly. I'll wrap this up by posting three songs I enjoyed listening to this morning.<br><br><div align="center"><style type="text/css"> @import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);</style><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><TR> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topleft"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topleft.gif"/></TD> <TD CLASS="sk-toprow">Max Richter - Horizon Variations</TD> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topright"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topright.gif"/></TD></tr><TR VALIGN="MIDDLE"> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightleft3"/> <TD CLASS="sk-lightback3"> <embed class="SkreemRPlayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://skreemr.com/audio/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="290" height="24" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0xF06A51&rightbghover=0xAF2910&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http://sneakmove.com/audio/sneakmove-maxrichter-horizonvariations.mp3"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://skreemr.com/images/skreemr_logo_small_name_only.png"/> </td> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightright3"/></TR><TR><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomleft.gif"></TD><TD CLASS="sk-bottomrow">Found at <a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=605B415351596B&source=embed">skreemr.com</a></TD><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomright.gif"></TD></TR></table></div><br><br><div align="center"><style type="text/css"> @import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);</style><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><TR> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topleft"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topleft.gif"/></TD> <TD CLASS="sk-toprow">Andrew Bird - Anonanimal</TD> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topright"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topright.gif"/></TD></tr><TR VALIGN="MIDDLE"> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightleft3"/> <TD CLASS="sk-lightback3"> <embed class="SkreemRPlayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://skreemr.com/audio/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="290" height="24" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0xF06A51&rightbghover=0xAF2910&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http://stereoscope.fm/melody/020909_abird_anonanimal.mp3"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://skreemr.com/images/skreemr_logo_small_name_only.png"/> </td> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightright3"/></TR><TR><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomleft.gif"></TD><TD CLASS="sk-bottomrow">Found at <a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=625F4655565F6417&source=embed">skreemr.com</a></TD><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomright.gif"></TD></TR></table></div><br><br><div align="center"><style type="text/css"> @import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);</style><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><TR> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topleft"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topleft.gif"/></TD> <TD CLASS="sk-toprow">School Of Seven Bells - Iamundernodisguise</TD> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topright"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topright.gif"/></TD></tr><TR VALIGN="MIDDLE"> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightleft3"/> <TD CLASS="sk-lightback3"> <embed class="SkreemRPlayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://skreemr.com/audio/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="290" height="24" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0xF06A51&rightbghover=0xAF2910&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http://kissatlanta.com/music/121508/01%20Iamundernodisguise.mp3"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://skreemr.com/images/skreemr_logo_small_name_only.png"/> </td> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightright3"/></TR><TR><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomleft.gif"></TD><TD CLASS="sk-bottomrow">Found at <a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=625A4553525D6318&source=embed">skreemr.com</a></TD><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomright.gif"></TD></TR></table></div>


title: The Weekend Story
date: 2007-10-29 13:09:14.000000
format: html
content:
  Monday's here and while I'm not tremendously enthused about this week there's less to do than last week as far as I can tell and the weekend was pretty fun.<br><br>Friday night it was the Halloween party at Oglethorpe. It was my standard no drinking fare but I dressed up this time (now that I'm not actually enrolled at OU anymore, ha!). Anyway, hung out there for half an hour or so I figured and generally had a leisurely evening. Think there are photos on Facebook. Yeah. Me in a bathrobe and slippers. Classy.<br><br>Saturday I had a lot of fun going with Burke to the Ubuntu Gutsy <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GutsyReleaseParties">Release Party</a> at Meehan's on Roswell. <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boredandblogging/planetubuntu/~3/176472956/">Nick took pictures and put them on planet.</a> The best part was I re-learned how to configure wireless over the command line and heard stories about working with old Unix systems (specifically HP-UX) from Josh. Anyway, good times.<br><br>Afterwards, I hung out with Chris Blair who's now interested in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing">Distributed Computing</a> (specifically <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@Home">Folding@Home</a>). And then I installed Linux on my PS3 which I'll likely redo with Burke Tuesday because a Gutsy PS3 release was actually made and is on <a href="http://www.psubuntu.com/">Psubuntu</a>. Sunday was again pretty much low-key but I sort of got some Java coding done. Just a little. Blech.<br><br>There's tons of cool stuff happening around PS3 and Linux lately. There's also been a lot going on in the ReactOS project and I haven't been keeping you all informed about that. Ah, well. One does what one can. I've gotten a bit addicted to reading <a href="http://programming.reddit.com/">reddit</a> as well, or maybe just <a href="http://weblog.raganwald.com/">Raganwald</a> and <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/">Coding Horror</a>. <a href="http://www.xkcd.com/">XKCD</a> has also brought much joy of late, as always.<br><br>Finally, I'm pretty much sure that if I continue school it will be at GA Tech (not that I can necessarily get in). I'm really not interested in continuing at SPSU. We'll see how things go and next semester may change this some but I'm not expecting it too. It's not challenging or interesting enough and I'm not studying or learning the things I want to. Next step is to see what can be done to make next semester more challenging or interesting by either transferring or taking classes at GA Tech. More on that later. Also, that opens a new problem: How does one get out of school? And, assuming I want to, how the heck does one "go back"?


title: The Years All Askew, The Year In Review
date: 2008-12-21 05:23:11.000000
format: html
content:
  It's been a big year. Of course, it's not over yet but I'm already anticipating the year to come. I'll be back in school after my out of school "experiment". Whether or not it was successful or not is a difficult question. I have a better take on the pros and cons of being in and out of school and am perhaps less naive about the "real world". I think I'm a bit more responsible and prepared for full time work and bills. I can cook. My experiment was also mostly successful. I know a lot more about computers and programming than I did going into this and I think the "play with obscure languages like lisp" bug is mostly out of my system. I'll at least be able to tolerate the Java classes better.<br><br>That said, there were mistakes along the way and things I could've handled better. My curriculum was a bit too ambitious, especially in the face of full time work. It would've been better to start with HTDP than SICP in all likelihood given my level of programming experience. I could've done better (i.e. tolerated) hanging on to my job in spite of the recession though it's probable I wouldn't have re-enrolled in school if I'd followed that route. Perhaps most importantly, I think I could've thrown myself into a real programming opportunity with my friend Will more than I did. I maintain that a lot of that stuff was way over my head but I probably could've managed if I'd just tried hard enough. So I'll keep trying harder.<br><br>I've been meaning to write a post for almost two months now called almost mistakes. I'm not sure if it's failed to materialize because I don't know what I want to say, don't know how to say it or some other reason. The original inspiration came from a night of conversation about education over at Oglethorpe and from me looking back on the last few years. A lot of times I feel like an idiot for following my heart. Leaving Oglethorpe to play with computers, leaving SPSU to study Lisp\CS, mentally checking out from TVS because I found it soul-sucking whether that was my own fault or not. The last few years are a blur. So much has changed and I remember it all so differently. It seems like a discontiuous function in which the line disappears between -2 and 2. I know there are good reasons but sometimes I think I should've just buckled, hunkered down, procured a degree and moved on. I'd at least be making decent money now, right? Not relying on student loans and such. I'm not sure when that post will materialize, or if, but it's been on my mind a lot.<br><br>Other than that there's plenty of interesting news afoot so I'll try to talk about that a bit tomorrow. I've been trying to do at least something with myself lately though it's been very hard these last two months. I had a pretty good structure September-October. I was unemployed but productive. It got harder late October to present. Granted I re-enrolled in school, went through financial aid for the first time and got loans sorted out (what a mess) but I really haven't flourished otherwise. Motivation is tricky when the future is uncertain, I suppose. I'm enrolled but it still hasn't picked up. Enough for now.


title: Thinking is awesome.
date: 2007-08-09 19:04:22.000000
format: html
content:
  So excited right now. So many awesome things happening. I can hardly wait to write the news on the next monday update. Hell with it, I'll post some things I've looked at read or thought about in the last 48 hours.<br>A couple of things.<br><a href="http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/">Kristian Hoegsberg is amazing</a>.<br>I'm starting to think that <a href="http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=139">given time</a> Ubuntu/Linux can <a href="http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/">out</a>-<a href="http://www.launchpad.net/awn">Mac</a> <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/">Mac</a>. More explanation necessary. I'll get to you. Note that this is not the same as saying they can out-Apple <a href="http://www.apple.com/">Apple</a>.<br><a href="http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2007/08/open-source-and-scratching-itches-in.html">Web 2.0</a> is...auhweiruhaudsf. <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/08/03/Web20IsTheNewVendorLockin.aspx">Free data</a> is...oiajdsofiewaofm. <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/yahoos_bet_on_h.html">People are crazy</a>. <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/scratching_itch.html">Tim O'Reilly finds the words for the stuff I've been thinking</a>. <a href="http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/08/07/freedom-for-users-which-users-did-you-mean-exactly-or-of-users-user-deployers-and-user-consumers/">Freedom is complicated</a>. <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2004/10/06/SocialSoftwareIsThePlatformOfTheFuture.aspx">Delicious</a>, and prescient too! But what about <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/08/01/lolwreck">open spectrum</a>...<br>Certain companies actions do make it a <a href="http://ipaction.org/blog/2007/08/at-demonstrates-its-trustworthiness.html">legitimate concern</a>...<br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack">Carmack</a> is a <a href="http://www.techjamaica.com/forums/showthread.php?p=336114">genius</a> and <a href="http://www.shacknews.com/docs/press/20070803_quakecon_carmack.x">anything he says</a> is <a href="http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identiferID=9357&amp;action=flatview">gold</a>. Need to find out what his kool aid is and drink some.<br>Been thinking about some security with regard to <a href="http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33207/108/">wireless cookies</a> and <a href="http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30114/98/">WEP Cracking</a>.<br>Still <a href="http://abock.org/2007/06/27/my-hack-week-the-new-banshee/">waiting on news of Banshee trunk improvements</a>.<br><a href="http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9757417-16.html?part=rss&amp;tag=feed&amp;subj=TheOpenRoad">Sun is serious about Open Source</a>. Maybe more so than anybody else. And yet they still act funky with Java. <a href="http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9757417-16.html?part=rss&amp;tag=feed&amp;subj=TheOpenRoad">I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about this</a>.<br><a href="http://rescubuntu.info/node/1">This looks really useful</a> for next time I encounter data loss. It <a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=472">does happen</a>.<br>Between <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/41475.html">academics lining up to help</a> and the <a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070627-german-government-agency-to-fund-accurate-wikipedia-articles.html">German government</a>, I feel like Wikipedia is going to be pretty hard to make ridiculous generalizations regarding quality about "real soon now". It's not just wikipedia tough. <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/google_uses_cro.html">Everyone is getting in on the peer production action</a>. Peer production will only become more visible.<br>There <em>are</em> lots of books that should be written about software. <a href="http://www.third-bit.com/notontheshelves.html">These are some</a>. This is interesting as a look at where things are\might be headed.<br>I continue to be torn up about the language wars. Are they in some ways just plain silly? <a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=287">Yes</a>. All the same, furthering our tools matters. A lot. Competitors still include <a href="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?showComments=true&amp;printTitle=Erlang,_the_next_Java&amp;entry=3364027251">Erlang</a>, <a href="http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/27253">Haskell</a>, <a href="http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/">etc.</a><br>I tend to think of the web server market as being kind of stagnant. Or at least I did until this summer. Of course, I basically just heard about Apache and IIS until this summer. I'd never actually run/setup/worked with web servers until this summer. I kind of feel like that market is in the <a href="http://www.lighttpd.net/">midst</a>/<a href="http://www.cherokee-project.com/">outset</a> of a <a href="http://wiki.codemongers.com/Nginx">shake</a> <a href="http://www.mortbay.org/">up</a> though. <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/JamesGovernorsMonkchips/~3/142380249/">Observe</a>.<br><a href="http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/08/03/amazon_fps/">Amazon's hardware as a service stuff</a> just gets more and more interesting as the days go by. We're going to wake up one morning and this will have changed the world.<br>There are some real shifts happening. There are <a href="http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/04/19/busyness-vs-burst-why-corporate-web-workers-look-unproductive/">different work styles</a> emerging. We'll see what comes of it.<br>I'm really excited that <a href="http://blip.tv/file/319044/">there is video of Steve Yegge talking online</a>. I can't believe I haven't looked for some before. He's so damn smart I'll listen to anything he says. It links to all the other OSCON 2007 content too which is great because I've been wondering why GUADEC, OSCON, and Ubuntu Live content is all over t3h int4rwebz. Conferences are good because of mindshare but please share your geniuses keynotes with me. Imitate TED.<br><a href="http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2007/08/02/online_desktop/">Keep working at those Online Desktop chestnuts</a>. Even if it doesn't turn out to be the right problem, it sure will help our platform stand out.<br><a href="http://www.linux-ha.org/ClusterIP">I'm really glad this exists</a>. It seems like it could be much more elegant than a reverse proxy or other load balancing solution.<br>It's always good to know what other people are reading and if anyone is exploring a critical literature then it's Worldchanging. <a href="http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003677.html">So I'm assuming I'll find something lifechanging on this list</a>.<br>We really can do <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/asc_using_ladar.html">just about anything</a> these days. Between this and some 3D printing reports from Siggraph 2007 I have high hopes for what will be possible by 2020.<br>Lessig is awesome. So is <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/code_looks_like.html">proof of how awesome he is</a>.<br>If you think the web isn't almost an OS layer itself, <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/your_web_browse.html">you're wrong</a>. Now let's do <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/oscon_yahoo_rel.html">performance analysis</a> on it!<br>Social media really does matter. Open Source is naturally on the leading edge of that too. <a href="http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=373">Video</a> and <a href="http://www.songbirdnest.com/blog">Audio</a> included.<br>We really are moving away from the desktop. Whether it's the web(Online Desktop), mobile (iPhone, OpenMoko), other embedded or home theater, or some strange new device (OLPC XO, <a href="http://times.usefulinc.com/2007/08/04-zonbu">Zonbu</a>, zareason, minis and micro-atx, etc) there are strong currents in this sea.<br><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2007/08/07/im-excited-about-the-future-of-gnome/">Gnome and Linux really are doing good things</a>. I'm really excited about watching us <a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2007/08/07/experiments-with-runtime-less-app-bundles/">surge</a> <a href="http://przanoni.blogspot.com/2007/08/soc-progress-report-august-07-2007.html">ahead</a> on <a href="http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/2007-08-09/megaphone-applet">so</a> <a href="http://log.emmanuelebassi.net/archives/2007/08/flying-teapot/">many</a> <a href="http://hughsient.livejournal.com/32386.html">fronts.</a><br>Emerging worlds are cool and it's only going to happen more and more in games and serious apps. <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/sharkrunners_re.html">Mash up the virtual and the physical</a>. It's all code. What distinction?<br><a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/payscale_where.html">Knowing job projections is useful</a>.<br><br>Kernels are interesting, you've got Linux, BSDs, Solaris, Darwin\XNU, whatever powers XP and Vista. But they're really just parts of the stack. All the same, they're really important parts of the stack. Infrastructure will always matter. It's just not the focus now. What we're building with it is the focus. The OS is irrelevant in so much as it's just an enabler. This sounds obvious and stupid. I need to think more on what I'm trying to say.<br><br>Maybe the processor industry going massively multicore is the only way to force software developers to take advantage of the power that's already there. By forcing them to adopt new programming conventions they force out 30 years of cruft code and development methodology that is bug-prone. Goodbye imperative, hello functional.<br><br>Okay, that's it for now. Sorry for the linkflood\social braindump.


title: Third Friday Linux Lesson
date: 2007-06-02 07:23:00.000000
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content:
  Happy Friday my fellow netizens! I've been meaning to write a piece about Linux on the Desktop and perhaps it just may surface this weekend. If anything though it has become more of a Linux and Mac perspective piece for me. I don't want to say anything just yet but I will say that it is more about what each has to offer than who's going to win on some higher level. That said, we've got some Linux Learning to do.<br><br>This time I'll be focusing on the concept of configuration files. Configuration files are more useful than you might think. Indeed, it may seem that any configuration that can be done should be done through nice pretty graphical toolkits but text file configuration can be incredibly helpful. Especially when for some reason the system won't boot and there's one little edit you could make in a configuration file to fix it if only Windows or Mac tried to let you boot to a command prompt to fix things. Not that you can't, it's just a bit of a pain in the ass compared to Linux. Then again maybe it happens more in Linux. Ok, I promise to save the rest for the Mac\Linux article. So, now that we've covered how to move around the filesystem with cd and how to act as the superuser with sudo we need a practical task to use those commands with. I've got just the thing. Say you install some nice new graphics drivers...but then your system won't boot into the GUI after the command prompt. Odds are good that those new drivers aren't working right. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just use the old ones? Well, you can. That's why text configuration files are useful. So, let's see how to solve this state of affairs with this week's application: nano.<br><br>The configuration file that tells the computer what graphics driver to use is stored on your system at "/etc/X11/xorg.conf". Open a terminal (as covered in our first lesson) and cd to the directory that holds the configuration file "cd /etc/X11/xorg.conf". Now, to edit it with our text editor (nano) type "nano xorg.conf". It will probably spit back some error about you not having adequate permissions to touch that file and go to hell. That's why we have sudo. Type "sudo nano xorg.conf" to tell the machine to open xorg.conf, with nano, as the superuser. It'll ask for the password and if you enter it correctly nano will start right up. Now, alternatively you could've skipped the whole cd step and just given the full path to the file at the start "sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf" but I figured I'd employ as much that we've covered as possible. Now, you'll see the file in the editor, which won't remind you much of Microsoft Word by the way. Look on the bottom of the screen to where it says "^W where is". This is a shortcut. The ^ represents the control key. Hit Ctrl-W and nano will ask what you're looking for. Type (Section "device") (without parentheses) and hit enter. Notice how the list of shortcuts at the bottom changed. Under that there should be a line that looks something like (driver "some_driver"). Erase the some_driver part from quotations and type vesa to load a basic graphics driver and get your system running again. It should look like this (Driver   "vesa") again, without the parentheses. Look at the shortcuts again. The one for saving (here referred to as "writing out") is ^O or Ctrl-O. Type Ctrl-O and hit enter when it asks for the filename to save it as the same name. Now reboot and you're all done but...ah wait...you don't know how to reboot do you? Ah well, I guess it'll have to wait til next week won't it?


title: Third Monday Update
date: 2007-05-29 05:46:00.000000
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  Summer: Week 2: Finished<br><strike>Music Library Reorganization</strike> (Begun)<br><strike>Further Arch Linux Configuration<br>Including unexpected crazy reinstall and Openbox experimentation<br>Unbelievable Amounts of Sonya Drama<br>Withdrawal from OU Fall Courses<br></strike>Still Didn't: Programming Chapter 2, GYM! Shame on me.<br>As mentioned: Arch hacking involved much more experimentation than expected, also more learning.<br><br><strong>I also haven't mentioned to anyone yet that I had a job interview Thursday and I got the job and start tomorrow. I hope someone reads this and congratulates me cause it's a pretty bad ass job. I'll be helping with the Linux Systems Administration (working with everything to VMware ESX Servers to Apache\Tomcat machines). It's with a pretty reputable (from what I gather) sustainable architecture\design firm called TVS on the corner of Peachtree and 15th high up in the Promenade Building. I even get a parking pass...woot. Anyway, my hours are initially 7am-3pm T,W,Th. TVS also has offices in Dubai and Chicago and have worked lately on the new CDC campus.<br></strong><br>Summer: Week 3: Schedule<br>Tuesday<br>TVS<br>Sonya before\until 5<br>GYM<br>Reading\Hacking?*<br>Wednesday<br>TVS<br>Sonya<br>Reading\Hacking?*<br>Thursday<br>TVS<br>Sonya<br>GYM<br>It's my friday night party out probably.<br>Friday<br>Chill.<br>Blog.<br><br>*= Summer Reading has begun. I've gotten a number of the books on former lists or syllabi I've made. So far the summer reading list is as follows: Just for Fun by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Emergence by Steven Johnson, Sync by Steven Strogatz, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler (YES!YES!YES!), Infotopia by Cass Sunstein (also great), Worldchanging by Alex Steffen, Code by Lawrence Lessig, Introduction to Computing Systems by Patt and Patel, and The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Pike.<br><br>News for 5/28/07:<br>First off, <a href="http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/05/24/15994.aspx">Dell finally made their big announcement</a> this past Thursday. We've known it was coming since "<a href="http://redline6561.livejournal.com/2007/05/01/">the big day</a>" which I kindly added some insightful commentary to in that link. I promise I'll actually try to say something useful about this finally in the next day or two. Also, I might just delve into a lot of the mac\linux thoughts I've been having lately.<br>Compiz and Compcomm Gits have grown somewhat quiet...and a <a href="http://www.ubaight.com/pipermail/compcomm/2007-May/000741.html">poll went up on a name for Compcomm</a> just today. Packages are soon to follow.<br>NJ Patel has done a lot of work on the <a href="http://avant-window-navigator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ChangeLog">Avant-Window-Navigator codebase</a> and dropped a few updates.<br>And Oliver McFadden, that champion of men, is back in the Mesa git tearing up the R300 code. <a href="http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=mesa/mesa.git;a=shortlog">My hero</a>.<br>Kerneltrap posted some <a href="http://kerneltrap.org/node/8261">interesting commentary on crash dumps</a>.<br><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/view/xclaesse/2007/05/25/0">Empathy 0.5 was announced</a>. There are no packages yet but I'm definitely keeping my eye on this.<br><a href="http://blogs.gnome.org/view/lucasr/2007/05/25/0">The GNOME roadmap was also released</a>. <a href="http://www.ssnsase.ac.in/hipaac2007/selpaper.html">And people are still doing work on semantic filesystems</a>, which makes me happy. But I also say just port ZFS already. <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html">Apple's doing it</a>. They want a free ride.<br>Novell is sorry for their patent blunders and idiotic agreements with Microsoft. <a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/May-23-1.html">Really</a>.<br>A <a href="http://aruiz.typepad.com/siliconisland/2007/05/why_the_free_so.html">very interesting commentary</a> slipped through the cracks on me.<br>Someone has brought up one of those <a href="http://beuno.com.ar/archives/23">good ol' ideas</a> that seem to be ever kicking around under the surface.<br><a href="http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?src=rss&amp;id=1540">Sun says screw Microsoft's patent threats</a>, if nothing else, we've got your back (to Ubuntu, Red Hat, et al).<br>It sounds dumb <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/18771/">but nanoglue</a>. Nano-scale manufacturing needs something.<br><a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18784/">Hydrogen fuel from starch</a>. That's one way to get abundant energy. Maybe.<br>Some good work on <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070527101905.htm">embedded electronics in textiles</a>. Here comes fashion.


title: Third Thursday Literary Lines
date: 2007-06-01 23:29:00.000000
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  Livejournal hasn't let me post from my computer since late yesterday so I had to log on to a friend's computer to make a post to fix the problem. Today I'd like to share the third of (what are probably) my three favorite Milosz poems.<br><br>Winter<br><br>The pungent smells of a California winter,<br>Grayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.<br>I add logs to the fire, I drink and I ponder.<br><br>"In Ilawa," the news item said, "at age 70<br>Died Aleksander Rymkiewicz, poet."<br><br>He was the youngest in our group. I patronized him slightly,<br>Just as I patronized others for their inferior minds<br>Though they had many virtues I couldn't touch.<br><br>And so I am here, approaching the end<br>Of the century and of my life. Proud of my strength<br>Yet embarrassed by the clearness of the view.<br><br>Avant-gardes mixed with blood.<br>The ashes of inconceivable arts.<br>An omnium-gatherum of chaos.<br><br>I passed judgment on that. Though marked myself.<br>This hasn't been the age for the righteous and the decent.<br>I know what it means to beget monsters<br>And to recognize in them myself.<br><br>You, moon, You, Aleksander, fire of cedar logs.<br>Waters close over us, a name lasts but an instant.<br>Not important whether the generations hold us in memory.<br>Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of<br>the world.<br><br>And now I am ready to keep running<br>When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death.<br><br>I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest<br>Where, beyond every essence, a new essence waits.<br><br>You, music of my late years, I am called<br>By a sound and a color which are more and more perfect.<br><br>Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love.<br>Be young forever, seasons of the earth.


title: Third Tuesday Quotables
date: 2007-05-30 07:38:00.000000
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  "He didn't use very many arguments. He just basically took it for granted that I would be interested. He was clueless, unable to imagine that there could be entire segments of the human race who weren't the least bit concerned about increasing the Mac's market share. I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had - or how big a market Microsoft has. And I can't blame him for not knowing in advance how much I dislike Mach (the microkernel on which Mac OS X's XNU kernel is based)." - Linus Torvalds<br><br>"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." - Linus Torvalds launching Linux on a small mailing list in 1991<br><br>"There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong." - Linus Torvalds on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_SCO_-_Linux_wars">SCO</a><br><br>"Personally, I'm _not_ interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid." - Linus Torvalds again<br><br>"2.6.x<odd>: still a stable kernel, but accept bigger changes leading up to it (timeframe: a month or two).<br>2.<odd>x.x: aim for big changes that may destabilize the kernel for several releases (timeframe: a year or two)<br><odd>x.x.x: Linus went crazy, broke absolutely _everything_, and rewrote the kernel to be a microkernel using a special message-passing version of Visual Basic. (timeframe: "we expect that he will be released from the mental institution in a decade or two")." - Linus Torvalds making a joke about kernel release numbering schemes</odd></odd></odd><br><br>"Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce." - Linus Torvalds<br><br>Okay, okay. I won't do that again. I'm done with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds">Linus</a>. I swear.


title: Third Wednesday Songs of Summer
date: 2007-05-31 00:39:00.000000
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  Jason Mraz - Did I Fool You?<br>Andrew Bird - Dark Matter<br>The Spinanes - Kid In Candy<br>Modest Mouse - Dashboard<br>The White Stripes - Little Bird


title: Thirteenth Monday Update
date: 2007-08-13 21:25:07.000000
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  Summer: Week 12: Finished<br><strike>Turn 21<br>Kris<br>Battery<br>TVS<br>Gym<br>Fix Ken Boa's Computer<br>Ren and Dani<br>Bria's Going Away Party</strike><br>Unexpected: Speeding Ticket, Bailing Hay for Six Hours on Saturday, Saw Chris B., Got in touch with Jeff Taylor, Actually wrote a decent technical essay.<br><br>Summer: Week 13: Schedule<br>Monday<br>21st Annual Checkup/Physical @ 9:45<br>Dental Appointment @ 2:30<br>Gym<br>Read and\or listen to Google TechTalks on Concurrency.<br>Tuesday<br>TVS<br>Program a little Erlang?<br>Talk to boss about fall schedule.<br>Wednesday<br>TVS<br>Gym<br>Cousin visiting for dinner.<br>More programming?<br>Thursday<br>TVS<br>See Ren and Dani?<br>Start tying up loose ends before school starts back.<br>Friday<br>Chill.<br>Gym.<br>Career Services at SPSU.<br>Start packing. See people?<br>Saturday<br>Burke is in town! Help him move in?<br>Sunday<br>Move in. School starts. Oh, boy.<br><br>News for 08/13/07:<br>A lot has been happening folks.<br>Compiz Fusion made their first release.<br>WINE has pushed out a new release as well.<br>PCSX2 has some progress updates.<br>Fedora 8 Test 1 was released as well.<br>More later. Links too!


title: Thirteenth Thursday Literary Lines
date: 2007-08-16 17:09:45.000000
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  "Past" by Pablo Neruda:<br>We have to discard the past<br>and, as one builds<br>floor by floor, window by window,<br>and the building rises,<br>so do we keep shedding-<br>first, broken tiles,<br>then proud doors,<br>until, from the past,<br>dust falls<br>as if it would crash<br>against the floor,<br>smoke rises<br>as if it were on fire,<br>and each new day<br>gleams<br>like an empty<br>plate.<br>There is nothing, there was always nothing.<br>It all has to be filled<br>with a new, expanding<br>fruitfulness;<br>then, down<br>falls yesterday<br>as in a well<br>falls yesterday's water,<br>into the cistern<br>of all that is now without voice, without fire.<br>It is difficult<br>to get bones used<br>to disappearing,<br>to teach eyes<br>to close,<br>but<br>we do it<br>unwittingly.<br>Everything was alive,<br>alive, alive, alive<br>like a scarlet fish,<br>but time<br>passed with cloth and darkness<br>and kept wiping away<br>the flash of the fish.<br>Water water water,<br>the past goes on falling<br>although it keeps a grip<br>on thorns<br>and on roots.<br>It went, it went, and now<br>memories mean nothing.<br>Now the heavy eyelid<br>shut out the light of the eye<br>and what was once alive<br>is now no longer living;<br>what we were, we are not.<br>And with words, although the letters<br>still have transparency and sound,<br>they change, and the mouth changes;<br>the same mouth is now another mouth;<br>they change lips, skin, circulation;<br>another soul took on our skeleton;<br>what once was in us now is not.<br>It left, but if they call, we reply,<br>"I am here," and we realize we are not,<br>that what was once, was and is lost,<br>lost in the past, and now does not come back.


title: Thirteenth Tuesday Quotables
date: 2007-08-16 13:59:39.000000
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  Two day late. I know. I'm a terrible slacker. I actually had some stuff pegged Monday but I just didn't manage to post it until now. These are pulled from some recent reading, <em>Open Sources 2.0</em>.<br><br>"In a commodity world, technologists need to think about innovating in their business models as much as (if not more than) innovating in their technology." - Ian Murdock, <em>Open Source and the Commoditization of Software</em><br><br>"Open Source propels software toward Commodity Land, a happy place where customers pay for real value and vendors compete on that value, not intellectual property lock-in." - Matt Asay, <em>Open Source and the Commodity Urge: Disruptive Models for a Disruptive Development Process</em><br><br>Hmm...kind of sounds like something I remember Spolsky writing a while back. "Strategy Letter V" was it? Google that.<br>Eh...on second thought I'm going to dig around for more insightful quotes for next week. These aren't blowing my hair back.


title: Thirteenth Wednesday Songs of Summer
date: 2007-08-16 14:14:40.000000
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content:
  Muse - Supermassive Black Holes<br>Queens of the Stone Age - Tangled Up In Plaid<br>John Mayer Trio - Out Of My Mind<br>Outkast - Ghettomusick<br>My Morning Jacket - Run Thru<br>The Crystal Method - Bad Stone<br>John Mayer - Wind Cries Mary<br>The Good, The Bad, and The Queen - Soldier's Tale<br>Folk Implosion - No Need to Worry<br>Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space


title: This just in
date: 2008-11-08 21:07:53.000000
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  This shouldn't particularly surprise anyone and I should be more surprised that it's taken me so long to ditch my old hotmail account. Embarassed even. It is my own fault to be sure that I'm using crappy lock-in focused webmail.<br><br>The short version: Hotmail (now Live Mail) won't allow users on Linux platforms to type in the body fields of e-mails rendering the service useless. The quick fix (on my comp at least) is to disguise yourself as a non-Linux user. Type "about:config" in the address bar and acknowledge any warnings you may get. Then type "useragent" in the filter and change the vendor value (if it's there) and the general.useragent.extra.firefox value to "Firefox 3.0.3".<br><br>Here's a general note to anyone working on a web site/platform: If you're doing HTTP header checks to see the platform and browser the page recipient is using and warning them if they're not using the Browser/Platform your site is designed for, you're doing it wrong. I don't ever want to see another warning or sorry this page won't work for you. That's fundamentally not what the internet is about. That's not the way the web works. It's called openness bitches. Get used to it.<br><br>I'll dump my messages out of hotmail, switch a few services to use something else and move on with my life. This account has been around way too long. Not that I couldn't just keep fooling them by modifying my useragent strings.


title: Thoughts Scattered, Smothered, Covered, etc.
date: 2007-09-10 13:38:49.000000
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  I have gone about dedicating myself to invisible empires.<br>I rise and the day brings visions of struts jutting out<br>of the soil to sustain immeasurable edifices to man.<br><br>I am having fun. I can say that much.<br>To Do list:<br>Cookies.<br>Essay on Radical Visions.<br>Lots of Discrete Mathematics to prepare for Wed test.<br>Java Programming and C Programming.<br>Figure out what days are with whom this weekend. Note: skate will be out.<br>Gym and Laundry.<br>Read one of the following good things: The Wealth of Networks, Programming the Universe, Open Sources (1 or 2), Infotopia. Also Milosz and Neruda.<br><br>Morning Reading:<br>http://crookedtimber.org/category/benkler-seminar/<br>http://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/07/long-after-the-new-economy/#more-2316<br>http://blogs.msdn.com/devdev/archive/2007/09/07/p-complete-and-the-limits-of-parallelization.aspx<br>http://www.thinkingparallel.com/2007/09/06/how-to-split-a-problem-into-tasks/<br>http://rc3.org/2007/09/my-old-friend-p.php<br>http://khigia.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/different-dbms/<br>http://blog.snaplogic.org/?p=94<br>http://o20db.com/db/setup/<br>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html?repost_reason=current_meme<br>http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&amp;articleId=9034619<br>http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/are-you-red-shifted-aka-do-you-use-utility-computing-web-20-and-every-other-cool-thing/


title: Tip of the Day
date: 2007-06-19 16:25:00.000000
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  If you ever need to use IRC at school or work and you're firewalled just google "cgi irc" and use one of those. You might have to try a couple. I've been enjoying http://www.chriscole.info/cgiirc/irc.cgi<br>I'll post a solution for the more commonly used AIM sometime in the future.


title: To New Beginnings
date: 2009-09-08 02:38:12.000000
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  Something changed. Right under my nose, in the middle of everything, something changed. I just realized it tonight. It was me. Specifically, I can say something now. Something that I couldn't say for the first 21 years of my life: There are things I want to achieve and obstacles in my path.<br><br>For the longest time, there really wasn't anything I wanted to achieve, anything I was too deeply invested in. I was pretty uninterested, more inclined to giving up than choosing a direction and moving forward. Sometime around last August, that changed. I'd say as early as last January but I feel that's too generous. The important thing is I'm doing something that I really do want to do: learning about computers and code. I'm moving forward. And I didn't even know it. It's funny, obstacles don't seem like that big a deal once you know the path you're on.


title: Today’s Anthem
date: 2008-01-15 16:32:48.000000
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content:
  <div align="center"><style type="text/css"> @import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);</style><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr> <td WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topleft"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topleft.gif"/></td> <td CLASS="sk-toprow">Yeasayer - Red Cave</td> <td WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topright"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topright.gif"/></td></tr><tr VALIGN="MIDDLE"> <td WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightleft3"/> <td CLASS="sk-lightback3"> <embed class="SkreemRPlayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://skreemr.com/audio/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="290" height="24" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0xF06A51&rightbghover=0xAF2910&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http://storage.comfortradio.org/12-07red.mp3"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://skreemr.com/images/skreemr_logo_small_name_only.png"/> </td> <td WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightright3"/></tr><tr><td WIDTH="16"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomleft.gif"></td><td CLASS="sk-bottomrow">Found at <a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=675A4B565C5561&source=embed">skreemr.com</a></td><td WIDTH="16"><img style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomright.gif"></td></tr></table></div><br><br><em>I’m so blessed<br>To have spent the time<br>With my family<br>And the friends I love<br>In my short life<br>I have met<br>So many people I deeply care for</em><br><br>EDIT: I should note they're playing a concert Friday at 10pm. <a href="http://www.ticketalternative.com/Selection.aspx?item=3118&amp;sch=9068&amp;AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1" title="Yeasayer Tickets for Ten Bucks!">Tickets are ten dollars</a>. I'm strongly considering going. Anyone else interested?<br><br>More to follow after work.


title: Top 5 Hackers
date: 2008-07-14 16:18:53.000000
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content:
  I got sort of preoccupied this weekend with the question of who my Top 5 Hackers are. They're not necessarily supposed to be the world's best hackers. Rather, they're programmers who I respect both technically and individually. There are plenty of people doing great work on interesting things and that wasn't the primary motivation behind this list. I'm not going to go too deeply into my reasoning or try to order the list in any particular way. I'll just lay it on you. I'm sure it will change some over time.<br><br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz">Aaron Swartz</a><br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack">John Carmack</a><br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel">Justin Frankel</a><br><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds">Linus Torvalds</a><br><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20070621112839/http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/">Luke Gorrie</a>


title: Topping off the day
date: 2008-04-22 04:59:45.000000
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content:
  <p>Okay, so today has been pretty excellent. I've really gotten a good bit done. I fixed my problem with MIT-Scheme on Hardy by just <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/liarc-build.html">compiling a new version from source</a>, I figured out how to <a href="http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mit-scheme/utilities.pkg/xscheme.el">get Emacs to behave like edwin</a> when evaluating s-expressions (at least with MIT-Scheme) and I tidied up the first two <a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/blog/?cat=4">SICP entries</a> with 1.3 left for tomorrow. Finally, I installed a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control">revision control server</a> and moved all my code into it.</p><br><p>I'm really pleased about it because I've been meaning to do it forever. You may remember me babbling on about "git". That was what I initially intended to use as my RCS but I settled on mercurial and I'm quite taken with it. At any rate, to see the fruits of my labor just navigate to the <a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/code">new code section of my website</a>. You can see the two different changesets I've uploaded so far and browse through the files by clicking the "manifest" button at the top, then going to books, then sicp, then chapter01. I'll do a more thorough writeup tomorrow. Hope your days were as joyful and productive.</p>


title: Touching down
date: 2009-02-10 23:39:13.000000
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  Things have been fairly ridiculous for the last 10 days. I won't go into details because they concern some other people that might not want them discussed. That said, things have been fairly ridiculous and I've had a hard time focusing on doing schoolwork or anything else. I'm trying not to get overwhelmed by everything. I feel like I can't keep up with school and personal pursuits but that's far from the truth and I'm slowly trying to get my head together. That means it's time for something uplifting though and I've haven't posted any Milosz in a while so here we go.<br><br>Earth Again by Czeslaw Milosz, excerpted from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unattainable-Earth-Czeslaw-Milosz/dp/0880011025">Unattainable Earth</a> pg. 8<br>They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.<br>The lure of waters. The lure of fruits.<br>Lure of the two breasts and long hair of a maiden.<br>In rouge, in vermillion, in that color of ponds<br>Found only in the Green Lakes near Wilno.<br>And ungraspable multitudes swarm, come together<br>In the crinkles of tree bark, in the telescope's eye,<br>For an endless wedding,<br>For the kindling of the eyes, for a sweet dance<br>In the elements of the air, sea, earth and subterranean caves,<br>So that for a short moment there is no death<br>And time does not unreel like a skein of yarn<br>Thrown into an abyss.<br><br>PS: My bracket predictions have been correct for <a href="http://www.theberrics.com/dailyops.php">the berrics</a> two out of two times thus far. Post some <a href="http://www.theberrics.com/batb.php">brackets</a> people!


title: Towards a new HR
date: 2008-05-21 17:33:06.000000
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content:
  It's time to post on something other than code for a change. The last time I posted something non-technical was a music-related post in mid-April. I've had a strong urge lately to say something about this blog's title, "Improved Means for Achieving Deteriorated Ends". I've never really explained what that means to me before. It relates somewhat to a a fairly recent post about my "<a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=871">emerging philosophy</a>" and I definitely have more to say but am still searching for the words to get it out. While searching for those words I've stumbled on an idea that I think is worth discussing and that perhaps serves as a more concrete example of the sorts of issues I'm thinking about.<br><br>So, what's the grand exciting topic in store for today? Hiring practices. I'm sure your first thought is that hiring issues are inherently boring. I'd agree if we're talking about staffing a company of 75,000 people. For example, I talked to a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-Fil-A">Chik-fil-a</a> manager today and asked him for a ball park estimate of how many people worked nationwide at Chik-fil-a. He said that he had a small store with about 25 employees but stores vary between 10 and 100 employees and average about 50. There are 1,300 stores nationwide and then you've still got whoever works at corporate facilities and not in retail.<br><br>The truth is, in this setting the product (and your company's success) are not a function of the quality of your individual employees. In fact, if you could sell people Chik-fil-a sandwiches without stores it'd be a huge cost savings provided you could figure out the distribution. You really just need people to fill a non-contributory role. If there were robots that could do the job and customers didn't mind the difference that would be just as good. The point being that the person working the register's chief contribution to the product is handing it over once you ask for it. I'm not generalizing to all retail here but you get the idea.<br><br>Now, the difference in the hiring problem occurs when you <em>are</em> looking for contributory employees. Employees whose contributions fundamentally shape the final product that the success of your company rides upon. Careers like architects, programmers, teachers, or journalists. Since these people make or break the success of your firm you can't hire based around basic arithmetic and serviceable grammar. Architects, for example, need to have a sense of design, an understanding of how buildings work, and working knowledge of the tools used to make designs become paper and then reality.<br><br>To be as successful as possible you don't just want to hire decent people. You want to hire talented people. To whatever extent possible, you want to hire the <em>best</em> people and this is precisely where we start running into problems. Spotting the best people is very hard and in some ways analogous to The Blub Paradox. That is, I wouldn't trust a person who'd never programmed to hire programmers. Moreover, if an incompetent or only decent programmer is hiring other programmers it's not evident that he'd be able to spot the programmers better than himself. He might not know how to recognize them.<br><br>Most companies have two chief hiring practices that I'm aware of, the resume and the interview. The resume process is a screening process. It really exists so that you can weed out candidates based on a standard set of assumptions about the things they need to be successful and whether their qualifications seem to match up with those assumptions. It's pattern matching. This is why it's more difficult to get jobs sans <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma">sheepskin</a>. People who pass the initial screen are interviewed by a member of the department with some experience (generally a manager) and evaluated for competency based on the interviewer's (hopefully reasoned and up-to-date) understanding of the job requirements.<br><br>One problem with this strategy is that you wind up with false positives in both directions. Any hiring manager has a story about a sure thing hire that turned out to be a nightmare working with the team or the long shot employee that wound up turning around two lagging departments. The real problem, I'll argue, is that current hiring practice is not evolving. You don't learn from your false positives. How would you do that you might ask? I'll tell you how. Treat employee hiring like investing. Companies, especially companies that sell products derived from their employees' creativity, like to talk about how their product is their people or the people are the difference. I say put your money where your mouth is.<br><br>If you turn an employee down for a job, I want someone to be able to tell me in two years whether he's gone on to have a very successful career at another company or has wound up working in a different industry. If I hire somebody and they turn out to be a disaster I want to dig up anything I've got on their initial interviews, write the eventual problems on the transcripts in red and put it in a separate filing cabinet for future reference. Do you see anybody going that far to hire good people? No. I won't argue that there's no reason for this. One reason is: it would be a full time job.<br><br>Let's take this idea a little further though. Let's say we don't just track our false positives. Lets keep in mind that there are different classes of applicants to begin with and, just to stick with our investment theme, let's call them low-risk, medium-risk and high-risk. Why not? After all, that kid without the diploma <em>is high-risk</em>. At least, that's the reason you gave for not hiring him wasn't it? Oh, that's right. You didn't have to give a reason for not hiring him. Nobody checks up on hiring decisions. There's something else worth thinking about. If you miss a candidate that could've netted your firm an extra 10% last quarter should your ass be on the line or not?<br><br>Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, right. A standard reason that most hiring managers avoid candidates without diplomas is the amount of risk. It ties back to a famous IT saying, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." If it seems like a sensible decision to hire a diploma holding guy, hire him. At least if he turns out to be a disaster a bunch of people can say he doesn't look like an obviously bad candidate and they might've done the same thing. If a high school dropout turns out to be a bad employee people will say you should've known from the get-go. So, let's just call the kid high-risk. But keep in mind that high-risk goes in both directions because even though he never got his GED he's been programming x86 Assembly since he was 7.<br><br>Now, obviously this isn't practical all the time. It wouldn't work for Chik-fil-a and I'm sure there's some point where it wouldn't work even for a company whose product depends on their creative, contributory employees. You could only scale a process like this so much and whether that's a function of the number of employees or something else I couldn't say. In fact, doing this internally in a firm might be suicide. It might have to start as an HR firm exclusively though what we're describing probably sounds more like a scouting agency. You'd also almost certainly have to stick to a certain industry since, as I mentioned above, you have to be a good programmer to recognize a good programmer. Additionally, you definitely would want to spread your portfolio of hires across risk segments but let's move on before we get bogged down.<br><br>About now you might be wondering how this all ties back to my "emerging philosophy". It ties back because of the chain of impact from the corporate world to the academic one and beyond. I think a lot of problems exist in the educational system because we think absolutely everyone has to go through it. Parents are convinced that without college diplomas their children will not find gainful employment or have successful lives. I don't claim that hiring practices alone account for this but they do play a part. More importantly, the overall impact of this is one of waste in society. It's waste of compulsory schooling on those that may not need or desire it and it's a waste of those who excel through nontraditional means. It's time to find as many of these little bits of waste and inefficiency as we can and fix them. I think if we'll do that we'll find that the problem isn't that we need to produce more to satisfy demand but that we need to figure out a more equitable and beneficial distribution of the copious resources we already have.


title: Towards Comprehensible Computing
date: 2013-04-10 17:07:00.000000
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  ## A Recent Obsession
  > "I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, <br/>
  > but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries." <br/>
  > - Czeslaw Milosz, *Nonadaptation*

  When I started programming, I quickly became fascinated by a question that many of us ponder at some point. Why isn't there a 'best' programming language that makes it simple to express our thoughts and intents to both each other and the machine? That transformed over time into a different question, "Why is programming so hard", but that still wasn't quite right. I think I've finally settled on the real question which is, "Why is modern software so incomprehensible?"

  ## On Modern Software Systems
  > "As far as his own weak head is concerned, the thought of what huge heads <br/>
  > everyone must have in order to have such huge thoughts is already enough." <br/>
  > - Soren Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*

  I recently informally looked at [the size of my software](http://blog.redlinernotes.com/static/size_of.txt). The answer was predictably both bewildering and unsettling. The day-to-day software I use is comprised of about 35 million lines of source code.

  All of that software is free and works well. By that measure alone, we might judge software engineering a success. It is popular in some circles to rail against software engineering methodologies and, often, modern software as well. We must acknowledge, however, that the demands placed on modern software far exceed the demands placed on the software of yesteryear.

  This is also reflected in the way we teach Computer Science now. For example, [MIT's new undergraduate curriculum](http://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program/) shifts focus towards building systems with unreliable, incompletely understood components. The fact that we can build software this way points to a culture of [library reuse as our chief abstraction](http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20120429T1019Z.html) rather than the humble function.

  ## Defining Comprehensibility
  > "When you have a problem with X, have you pulled up the X server internals? <br/>
  > Have you dug into the problems with your drivers? <br/>
  > No, because the kernel is 10 million lines of code and the only way in is grep! <br/>
  > Fuck that, that's not helping me." <br/>
  > - Brit Butler, [*Wanting Types, Demanding Mirrors*](http://redlinernotes.com/docs/talks/wtdm.html) (video coming soon)

  But I still yearn for the days when you could conceivably understand your computer soup-to-nuts. In October, I'll have been doing "real programming" for 4 years and I **still** accept a large portion of the day-to-day workings of my machine as magic. How many of us really have a complete picture of what is going on under the covers? We don't wrap our heads around the workings of a [1-billion transistor processor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count), much less the massive body of code atop it.

  I'd wager 100 kloc is the upper bound on a well-organized system I think I could mostly keep in my head. That's 2000 pages or 5 400-page volumes at 50 lines/page. While prose is very different than code this would seem to be roughly the same order of magnitude as prominent fiction series like LOTR, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, etc.

  There is a torrent of [OpenGenera](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)) floating around that contains about 870 thousand lines of Lisp. It should be about 20 years old. That means my current desktop is a 40-fold increase in size over Genera. Windows 3.11 is probably bigger than Genera and the size of a Desktop OS probably hasn't doubled every 4 years for the last two decades...but it is an interesting figure.

  [MenuetOS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS) is a more provocative example. Menuet is a desktop OS written exclusively in x86 assembly. There is an open source 32-bit version and a closed source 64-bit one. I haven't read it so I can't say whether or not it is comprehensible. It is only 36 kloc for the kernel and 58 kloc for the apps though. Even with limited hardware support, 94k for a graphical OS is a noteworthy point in the design space.

  ## What I Want
  > "So. I ask: how many people does it take, at a minimum, to maintain <br/>
  > our current level of technological civilization?" <br/>
  > - Charlie Stross, [*Insufficient Data*](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html)

  I am explicitly not asking for a world where desktop OSes are limited, comprehensible systems over full-featured ones that can't fit in one human's head. I'm not worried about [bus factors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor). But an Operating Systems and Hardware/Software Interface course are not enough!

  I want a [completely open](https://twitter.com/datagrok/status/309723323175153665/photo/1), comprehensible system that does something [cool](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RTWI9RXP2_s/S9smGPwuQvI/AAAAAAAAADQ/4QadW6DuvHQ/s1600/MegaMan2.gif). It doesn't have to be [self-hosting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting). It does have to be something I can study and change, observe and modify at *every* level of the system. It should be something that actually shipped to consumers at one point. The absolute lack of such a system for people trying to learn frustrates and disappoints me.

  ## My Little Contribution
  > "We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only <br/>
  > that which everyone knows by heart." <br/>
  > - Hugo Ball

  All this is exactly why I started working on a Nintendo emulator in lisp. It's still early days but it's my [forever project](http://www.dev.gd/20130122-the-joys-of-having-a-forever-project.html) until it's done. 6502 emulation is done, some basic Nintendo functionality is working. Once the NES is 90% complete, I plan to try writing a simple lisp-like language that targets the NES. I'll then use that to produce an annotated, high-level reconstruction of my favorite childhood game, Mega Man 2. It is a bit ridiculous and probably overreaching but it's worth a shot. And in some way, it's the computing toy I've always wanted.


title: Trial by Triangle
date: 2008-01-24 02:31:11.000000
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  <p>Today was not the easiest day. It wasn't terrible either. The news was decidedly mixed. And it's not about Dad though if you're wondering he's doing well. He's undergone chemo and lost most of his hair but he's generally upbeat and energetic.</p><br><p>Two things have been wearing on me today and the first is work-related. Since January 11th I've been working full time at TVS. The news was that I finally got the paperwork for my benefits package today. It's nice having benefits. Benefits are good. All the same, this meant I could start doing budgeting and working out my finances.</p><br><p>Finances are some scary shit. If I didn't know better I'd swear I'd die without a sizable chunk of money a year.  For now I'm still staying with my parents until summer (at their behest more than mine) and I'll find a place to live then.</p><br><p>I really am making enough to be okay. It's just that there's not a lot on the margins. I don't want a whole bunch of stuff. I just don't want to worry about suddenly needing money for any reason.</p><br><p>Anyway, the other struggle has been that of the triangle. I'm getting behind on my schoolwork and hoping to catch up by/over the weekend. And I was pretty distressed because I spent like 4 hours obsessing over <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.html#%_thm_1.12">exercise 1.12 in SICP</a>.</p><br><p>The problem is to write a procedure that computes the elements of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_triangle">Pascal's Triangle</a>.</p><br><p>That shouldn't be a big deal, you know? But I obsessed over it. And now I've got a silly over-engineered solution that I'm more fond of than I should be. It's an interesting problem though. Hopefully I've learned something from it.</p><br><p>Mine still isn't quite working and I know there is a simpler way to do it. I cracked after a while and read about how one might solve it but I didn't peek at any code. Still, I'm stuck on doing it <em>my way</em>. I'm such a bastard. Anyway, it's coming together and I expect it'll be done by the end of the hour. It'll be in the week 2 recap for sure.</p><br><p>Long story short I realized what I've gotten myself into today. And it's still where I want to be. It's just that I think it's going to take more work and time than I might have been able to understand.</p>


title: Trouble Man
date: 2009-03-24 13:28:12.000000
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  It's a Marvin Gaye morning. I love the song <em>Trouble Man</em>. If I could sing it like Marvin some days I would just walk around singing it.<br><br><div align="center"><style type="text/css"> @import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);</style><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><TR> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topleft"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topleft.gif"/></TD> <TD CLASS="sk-toprow">Marvin Gaye - Trouble Man</TD> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topright"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topright.gif"/></TD></tr><TR VALIGN="MIDDLE"> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightleft3"/> <TD CLASS="sk-lightback3"> <embed class="SkreemRPlayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://skreemr.com/audio/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="290" height="24" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0xF06A51&rightbghover=0xAF2910&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http://www.snuhfiles.com/sound/marvin_gaye-trouble_man.mp3"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://skreemr.com/images/skreemr_logo_small_name_only.png"/> </td> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightright3"/></TR><TR><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomleft.gif"></TD><TD CLASS="sk-bottomrow">Found at <a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=6A5D4657565565&source=embed">skreemr.com</a></TD><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomright.gif"></TD></TR></table></div><br><br>How can you be against that? While we're on Marvin Gaye here's a version of Inner City Blues with a little surprise if you get to the end.<br><br><div align="center"><style type="text/css"> @import url(http://skreemr.com/styles/embed.css);</style><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><TR> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topleft"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topleft.gif"/></TD> <TD CLASS="sk-toprow">Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)</TD> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-topright"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-topright.gif"/></TD></tr><TR VALIGN="MIDDLE"> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightleft3"/> <TD CLASS="sk-lightback3"> <embed class="SkreemRPlayer" wmode="transparent" style="height:24px;width:290px;" src="http://skreemr.com/audio/player.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="290" height="24" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="playerID=1&bg=0xCDDFF3&leftbg=0x357DCE&lefticon=0xF2F2F2&rightbg=0xF06A51&rightbghover=0xAF2910&righticon=0xF2F2F2&righticonhover=0xFFFFFF&text=0x357DCE&slider=0x357DCE&track=0xFFFFFF&border=0xFFFFFF&loader=0xAF2910&soundFile=http://hbronner.org/Music39/Marvin_Gaye/Inner_City_Blues_(Make_Me_Wanna_Holler).mp3"></embed> <img style="padding:0;border:0;vertical-align:bottom" src="http://skreemr.com/images/skreemr_logo_small_name_only.png"/> </td> <TD WIDTH="16" CLASS="sk-lightright3"/></TR><TR><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomleft.gif"></TD><TD CLASS="sk-bottomrow">Found at <a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=6258435657556717&source=embed">skreemr.com</a></TD><TD WIDTH="16"><IMG style="padding:0;border:0;" SRC="http://skreemr.com/images/corner-bottomright.gif"></TD></TR></table></div><br><br>Last thought, does anybody else wish there was a version of House for programmers in which "Dr. House" told everybody to just shove their Gang of Four and Design Patterns, think about the problem and actually do the job right? (Note: This does not mean unstructured programming or something. Mostly just anti-kneejerk-OO. He's a cynic looking for simple and obvious solutions, not a curmudgeon.)


title: Trying to Focus
date: 2009-03-16 18:19:24.000000
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content:
  I've put myself in a rough position over the past few days. I should've been getting more math done but that's the past. I'm having a fair amount of trouble with inductive proofs but not because induction is tricky. Induction makes sense. Remembering how to transform equations with algebra is tricky and I'm quite rusty which makes it mostly frustrating and/or embarassing.<br><br>Anyway, there's a test on Thursday and I've got 5 sections of Homework problems to get through by then. Hopefully, if I can pull that off I won't do too poorly. I got an 89 or some such on the last test. I had some extra credit that bumped it up to an A.<br><br>I've been worried about <em>my</em> future a lot lately. I know that to some degree I went back to school just to know I'd be able to make money when I got out. In some ways, it was a move of desperation. In others, I thought it made sense to wrap up. Trying to teach yourself to code and working full time in IT wound up being a bit conflicting for me.<br><br>The important thing is I don't just want to make it. I don't want to just get out of school and be employable but I'm not learning enough or coding enough on my own to be more than that. So I'm looking at how to impose more structure and have more discipline to get more real coding done because <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/code">this shortlog</a> is just ridiculous, even though I did write <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/code/rev/5b8bc8cbfa98">a decent amount of Haskell</a> over the break.<br><br>I want to see commitment and I want to see commits. I want to turn this guilt into motivation and that motivation into code. I can't say I love programming yet, I'm just fascinated by it...but I think if I keep at it one day I might get there.<br><br>PS: Listening to Gorillaz, their debut album. Definitely quality. Listening to Tim Hecker's new stuff. It's nice, particularly "Borderlands". A bit of Jaydiohead. It's nice. And Panda Bear...it's weirdly pleasant, particularly "<a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=605D4A5D505C&amp;artist=Panda%20Bear&amp;title=Comfy%20In%20Nautica">Comfy in Nautica</a>" and "<a href="http://skreemr.com/link.jsp?id=675946575C5F6B&amp;artist=Panda%20Bear&amp;title=Bros">Bros</a>".


title: Trying to Stay Ahead
date: 2009-03-04 16:31:57.000000
format: html
content:
  There are a bunch of links I want to dump out of my browser and I can't think of a coherent way to do so. Here we go:<br><br>The berrics has finally wrapped up. Unbelievably, <a href="http://theberrics.com/dailyopspost.php?postid=836">I predicted Benny Fairfax's defeat of PJ Ladd</a>. What a Long Shot. That match was awesome. Similarly the <a href="http://theberrics.com/dailyopspost.php?postid=837">PJ Ladd vs Billy Marks</a> match was damn fine. I feel a little robbed about Marc Johnson still but I made decent predictions.<br><br>The <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/doj-releases-abjures-bush-administration-surveillance-memos.ars">Bush Administration's legal counsel was the devil</a>. I don't really have any good words for this. I told you so maybe? *sigh*<br><br>This is a <a href="http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/back-by-popular-demand-the-minimal-compact/">minimal social compact for the 21st century</a>. I've only read bits and pieces of it and need to go through it again but it's hella cool.<br><br>Copyright is really going to struggle to figure out the 21st century and the consumer products it's bringing. Just check out this <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/kindles-and-creative-machines-blur-boundaries-of-copyright.ars/">Ars Technica piece revolving around the kindle</a>. New media is continuing to eat old media's face. (See: newspapers folding)<br><br>Miru Kim takes pictures of herself in abandoned industrial complexes and urban ruins. It's rather interesting and at the very least there are some <a href="http://www.mirukim.com/nakedcityspleen/freedom.html">good photos</a>. She feels compelled to take them nude though so it's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSFW">NSFW</a>. She also <a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/miru_kim_s_underground_art.html">gave a lecture about it</a>. The Bennett School is interesting and the Catacombs and St Jacques are just crazy. I don't know what I think.<br><br>I believe I posted a link to this before but just in case I still find a bunch of futurists bantering on about the direction of things to be interesting most of the time. So here is <a href="http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/343/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page02.html">The State of the World in 2009 with the Well and Bruce Sterling</a>.<br><br>While we're on futurism I might as well mention that genetics is exploding and it won't be long before we're all seeing it. For the record, I do think we should be careful and concerned but if we take the right precautions I promise that <a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/scientists-learning-to-program-synthetic-life-with-dna.ars">synthetic biology will be flipping awesome</a>. Also <a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/storing-solar-energy-by-turning-over-a-new-leaf.ars">maybe solar power will close the gap at last</a>. Go figure that the simple, elegant solutions are the right ones.<br><br>If you think Computer Architecture isn't in the middle of drastic upheaval for the first time in two decades, <a href="http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/atom-cant-feed-rd-monster-intel-outsources-chips-to-tsmc.ars">read this</a> and then punch yourself in the face. Okay, so maybe that's not as indicative of the upheaval as it could be but I don't have a solid link explaining the shift to multicore architectures (probably) featuring simpler individual cores. Anyway, it's fairly interesting that the industry heavyweight (i.e. Monopoly) may have to completely reinvent itself depending on what the market does at this crucial juncture.<br><br>I know you readers care about multicore support in Programming Languages. Neat GHC mutterings in a <a href="http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/new-paper-runtime-support-for-multicore-haskell/">new paper</a>. Can we expect GHC 6.12 in the next few months? While we're on Haskell, I thought that <a href="http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2009-February/021052.html">this library</a> to automatically generate typesafe bindings to C code was pretty f-in awesome. If we have to deal with the legacy of C code, this should help tons. Hackage gets more useful by the day. Other papers? You got it. Lambda the Ultimate helped me stumble on this <a href="http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~rtate/publications/eqsat/">interesting approach to Compiler Optimization</a> from some smart doctorate seeker named <a href="http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~rtate/">Ross Tate</a>.<br><br>A while back an article called <em>Hard Work and Practice in Programming</em> got posted to both <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404775">hackernews</a> and the <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7kvax/hard_work_and_practice_in_programming/">programming reddit</a> and generated a lot of comments. It was both discouraging and motivating at the same time. I'm afraid of all the work I'd have to do to know all I want to know but I'm slowly moving in the right direction. That's actually what's been distracting me lately and what the title of this post is about. I want to be ahead of the curve and able to deal with parallelism. There are few <em>programming languages</em> in which that's even possible and that'll only become more pronounced and important in the coming years. Moreover, I know that whatever I end up doing with programming the language I write code in makes a difference to me in how much I enjoy it.<br><br>Some languages I like more than others, some paradigms feel more productive or sensible to me than others. Unfortunately, my tastes lean towards the esoteric which means that to work professionally in the languages I like it might require a Phd unless the market starts adopting them pretty quick. Or at least a Masters. There's a lot of mathematics involved and I could stand to brush up on my Calculus as it is. Ah, well. I really just need to shoot a sheepish e-mail to <a href="http://donsbot.wordpress.com/about/">Don Stewart</a> or <a href="http://www.serpentine.com/blog/">Bryan O'Sullivan</a> asking what I can do beyond getting my BS and writing Haskell and Lisp to be prepared to get jobs at a place like Galois.<br><br>Then again, I think part of my concern is that while getting a job writing High Assurance would at least be fun, challenging and use Haskell, I'm not sure my passion is in <em>somebody else's software</em>. On the other hand, I haven't figured out what I want software to do for me yet. Hopefully working through the BS will point to some ideas. I still have the idea of a social network for self-schooling or autodidacts lingering in the back of my head. School's fine but I've always wanted a bit more flexibility than I've been able to get at the institutions I've attended.<br><br>Speaking of the math involved, I've been harboring an interest in Category Theory lately due to Haskell and <a href="http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/motivating-learning-category-theory-for-non-mathematicians/">I really enjoyed this man's story</a>. I may be a theory learner myself. I definitely appreciate working through the abstract in SICP a lot more than working through some arbitrary example in CS class. Anyway, there's more to gather from this and maybe with a bit of work I'll actually be able to tackle Herstein's Topics in Algebra. It's been calling my name for a little while. Well, more later. I've got a midterm to finish.


title: Tutorials I’ve been meaning to do…
date: 2008-02-26 21:50:16.000000
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  as part of a getting things done streak. You know? Like, learn x y per z. Anyway, aside from reading SICP and writing code, getting it posted on here, and getting this essay up these are the other thing I've been lagging on:<br><a href="http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/emacs.html">An Emacs Tutorial</a><br><a href="http://smalltalk.gnu.org/blog/bonzinip/using-git-without-feeling-stupid-part-1">Git Tutorial Part 1</a><br><a href="http://smalltalk.gnu.org/blog/bonzinip/using-git-without-feeling-stupid-part-2">Git Tutorial Part 2</a><br><a href="http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/115/linux-unix-cheat-sheets---the-ultimate-collection/">A Much more focused collection of *nix &amp; associated utilities sheets</a><br><a href="http://www.cheat-sheets.org/">A Massive Index of Cheat Sheets</a><br><br>Also, I'm not sure I buy it but there was some <a href="http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.commentview&amp;comment_id=74">pretty optimistic news</a> about Concentrated Solar Power today. I'd love to see more detailed plans and a price/time-to-completion estimate.<br><br>Finally, if anyone has any insights about why I'm getting a bad EIP value and a kernel panic whenever I try to transfer large files (or dozens of songs) with my server, feel free to let me know. I will buy you a (coffee/beer/etc). It seems related to <a href="http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=64275&amp;pid=260356&amp;mode=threaded&amp;show=&amp;st=&amp;#entry260356">this issue from an openSuse user</a>. It could also be related to me using the 8139cp module instead of 8139too for my ethernet card. Whatever, I doubt i'll get anywhere but I'll be looking into it.<br><br>Now to grab dinner and finish that essay...


title: Twelfth Friday Refined Rant
date: 2007-08-10 04:46:06.000000
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  Okay, so my earlier post was a bit "La la la la. Look at all this crazy stuff I read today! Isn't it awesome?" and to be honest that's just not a critical enough take on everything. I mean, all that stuff I posted made me smile but that doesn't necessarily mean I should wave it in the air. With that in mind, I'd like to take a more serious look at the trends in those links and try to really address the issues that surround them. That's fairly challenging because these issues involve governance and law, technology and society, and plenty more. So I've decided since I'm not doing Linux Lessons I might as well do Steve Yegge-style rants. Just with much poorer writing, significantly less insight, and half as much alcohol. I'm by no means hammered. These will normally be on Fridays and this one was going to be on Friday but it's running a little late.<br><br><em>The Links</em><br>So, I posted about a lot of stuff. Web 2.0 and some of the associated blather about how open source addresses that through either Online Desktop or Open Services. Peer Production being supported by institutions/firms with examples of Wikipedia and Google Maps. The future of IT generally. Infrastructure challenges for the 21st century with regards to the internet and it's effects on business. Emerging worlds and the diminishing line between the virtual and the real. And some of the worldchanging issues, poverty, sustainability, climate change, political upheaval, etc. What can we really say about any of this? More importantly, what can we really take away from all those little blog snippets and links?<br><br><em>The Issues</em><br>There are a few things that I really take away. First of all there are a bunch of "World Issues". Things like Climate Change/Global Warming and the Energy Crisis, Developing Economies, Squatter Cities, and plenty else besides. I'm trying to get more informed on these fronts but right now the issues I can speak to tend to be technology issues rather than "World Issues". It's important to note that technology issues are a "World Issue" or are at least intertwined with "World Issues" when taken collectively. Technology has become too central a part of the modern world for technology's issues to not have vast repercussions. With that in mind I'd like to speak a bit more about what I can speak to, namely technology's issues. Specifically computing.<br><br><em>The Technology Issues</em><br>There are a few central issues or trends that jump out at me from what I posted the other day. One is that we are undoubtedly moving away from the desktop. However slowly, however gradually, it's happening. I don't know if the desktop will ever go away completely but it's diminishing in significance. Between PDAs and Smartphones, Laptops, Home Theater and Small Form Factor PCs, Amazon's Hardware as a Service efforts, and others the desktop market will continue to gradually erode. Second, we have a programming problem, specifically concurrency. This is emerging because everything is going massively parallel on both the local and network level. Between the rise of Multicore processors and the web services and datacenters popping up all over the place I'm convinced we need a better way to program for these sorts of systems. Third, Peer Production is making a big difference and this goes beyond software in many respects. There's a lot more to cover there so that's all I'll say for now. Fourth, the Law, Intellectual Property Law in particular, has a long way to go before it supports peer production models well. Our traditional notions of ownership and control are insufficient in the face of these new methods and as Steven Weber so elegantly described towards the close of <em>The Success of Open Source</em> we're going to have to find a way to bridge the gap there. Finally, I think it's important to note that there is a certain infrastructure that's critical today for technology to continue to operate in it's present fashion. We need energy and the electric grid, the telecommunications network, and the hardware and software stacks that make modern computing possible. For today, I'm mostly interested in covering the concurrency problem but next week I expect to write a bit about the infrastructure/stack and the gradual erosion of the desktop's significance.<br><br><em>The Concurrency Problem</em><br>Dijkstra was wrong, at least about concurrency, not that I blame him. I mean didn't he do concurrency research thirty years ago? For that matter, Simon Peyton-Jones is wrong too. Software Transactional Memory may in fact be the right solution but it's the solution to the wrong problem. Trying to figure out how to share state this way is a disaster. The only concurrency model I've seen that I think is at all valid is Erlang's message passing model. We need concurrency that is implicit. The most you should have to do is change a few "map"s to "pmap"s. That's it. I don't think Erlang is NBL. The syntax isn't too crazy but it's not C/Java-like enough either. The language generally is too much of a departure and not enough of an industry figure to really make it big besides. I'm not saying it doesn't have other problems I just feel like those are the ones that are going to hold it back. Could Haskell be more successful than Erlang? Well, first of all I'd have to come up with a good definition of success for programming languages. But excepting that I think the answer is yes. Hell, maybe Haskell is NBL and we'll struggle with shared state for another 30 years. I'm hoping for something a bit more drastic though. And Erlang isn't good enough. But it's the only thing I've seen that can solve the concurrency problem and that does appear to be the most prominent problem in programming from where I'm sitting. Does that mean we should have an OS written in Erlang and future applications should be written in Erlang? Do we need compositing window managers written in Erlang? Not necessarily. I suspect the desktop will be largely composed of C, C++, Python, etc for a good few years to come and probably longer, assuming the desktop sticks around another decade. That's a topic for another rant though.<br><br><em>The Punchline</em><br>What I'd really like to express is that I think that <em>The Concurrency Problem</em> is first and foremost <em>a language problem</em>. We need a language that makes concurrency implicit and easy. Concurrency needs to be assumed. Erlang is the only language I've seen that does that well. Whether or not something equivalent could be done with a non-message passing model such as Software Transactional Memory I don't know. Haskell may already scale from a single core system to a massively distributed or concurrent system with little or no changes to the code using a STM model. I'm not well read enough yet to know for sure. I don't think that we need to start over and re-write the OS, or desktop applications, or anything else for that matter. We need to be able to use the tools we already have. That doesn't mean that we might not benefit from parallelizing what we can but it's not our first priority. I don't believe that concurrency will be solved by getting the OS to handle threads or finding a framework or method to easily add concurrency to applications using current languages. Erlang isn't perfect either and ultimately not everything needs to be parallelized so Erlang has by no means invalidated C, Python, Ruby, Perl, Java, etc. It's just the best answer I see for one of the biggest problems programming has got.


title: Twelfth Monday Update
date: 2007-08-06 13:34:53.000000
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  Summer: Week 11: Finished<br><strike>Finish Music work on Zen Vision MP3 Player<br>Gym<br>Acquisition Laptop. Load Ubuntu Gutsy Alpha 3.<br>TVS<br>See Rick at Noon<br>Read Rebel Code</strike><br>Unexpected: See John Mayer play Covered In Rain, Hang out with Ren and Dani, A Certain Unnamed Drama.<br><br>Summer: Week 12: Schedule<br>Monday<br>Turn 21<br>Battery<br>TVS?<br>SPSU Career Services<br>Fix Ken Boa's Computer at 2.<br>Birthday Stuff?<br>Tuesday<br>TVS<br>Gym<br>Pick up a NVidia AGP card for Ken Boa.<br>Bria's Going Away party at 8.<br>Wednesday<br>TVS<br>Install Ken Boa's new video card at 4.<br>Burke should be in town. Hang out?<br>Thursday<br>TVS<br>Gym<br>Ren and Dani?<br>Friday<br>Kris<br>Anything unfinished from Monday.<br><br>News for 8/6/06:<br>I'm 21 and I don't feel like doing the news so there. Actually, it has nothing to do with this being my birthday and everything to do with me being lazy but because it's my birthday I'll let myself get away with that. ... Maybe I'll put it in later.


title: Twelfth Thursday Literary Lines
date: 2007-08-09 12:17:27.000000
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  More Neruda today. He's good stuff. From his work, <em>Canto General</em>, X: The Fugitive:<br>"XII"<br>To all, to you<br>silent beings of the night<br>who took my hand in the darkness, to you,<br>lamps<br>of immortal light, star lines,<br>staff of life, secret brethren,<br>to all, to you,<br>I say: there's no giving thanks,<br>nothing can fill the wineglasses<br>of purity,<br>nothing can<br>contain all the sun in the invincible<br>springtime's flags,<br>like your quiet dignity.<br>I only<br>think<br>that I've perhaps been worthy of so much<br>simplicity, of a flower so pure,<br>that perhaps I'm you, that's right,<br>that bit of earth, flour, and song,<br>that natural batch that knows<br>whence it comes and where it belongs.<br>I'm not such a distant bell<br>or a crystal buried so deep<br>that you can't decipher, I'm just<br>people, hidden door, dark bread,<br>and when you welcome me, you welcome<br>yourself; that guest<br>repeatedly beaten<br>and repeatedly<br>reborn.<br>To all, to all,<br>to whomever I don't know, to whomever never<br>heard this name, to those who dwell<br>all along our long rivers,<br>at the foot of the volcanoes, in the sulfuric<br>shadow of copper, to fishermen and farmhands,<br>to blue Indians on the shores<br>of lakes sparkling like glass,<br>to the shoemaker who at this very hour questions,<br>nailing leather with ancient hands,<br>to you, to the one who unknowingly has awaited me,<br>I belong and acknowledge and sing.


title: Twelfth Tuesday Quotables
date: 2007-08-07 14:42:02.000000
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  “Fail hard.  Fail with motherfucking gusto.  Succeeding, like flying, is throwing yourself to the ground and missing.” — <a href="http://www.somethingsimilar.com/wordpress" target="_blank">Jeff Hodges</a>, stolen from <a href="http://perkypants.org/blog/2007/08/07/qotd-jeff-hodges/">Jeff Waugh's Blog</a><br><br>"Computers can compute, but that's not what people use them for, mostly. Mostly, computers store and retrieve information." - Tim Bray<br><br>"Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lives. Bugs must be debugged. Changing requirements and the need for increased functionality mean the program itself may be modified on an ongoing basis. During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code; it is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer." - Yukihiro Matsumoto


title: Twelfth Wednesday Songs of Summer
date: 2007-08-08 15:14:55.000000
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  John Mayer - Sucker<br>Broken Social Scene - 7/4 (Shoreline)<br>Otis Redding - A Change Gonna Come<br>Andrew Bird - Fiery Crash<br>Gavin DeGraw - I Don't Want to Be<br>Perez Prado - Mambo #8<br>Ambulance LTD - Country Gentleman<br>Zero 7 - The Pageant of the Bizarre<br>John Mayer - I'm Gonna Find Another You<br>John Mayer - Comfortable


title: Two Good Quotes
date: 2009-09-08 14:26:38.000000
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  I stumbled onto these over the last few days and am pretty taken with both of them. The first comes from the first Paul Graham essay I've enjoyed in a while. The second comes from a discussion on Lambda the Ultimate, admittedly about Lisp. Still, I think whether you're a fan of Lisp or not the second quote is incredibly relevant and true. Especially if you're a CS student just learning whatever the hell they teach you.<br><br>Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline. - <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html">Paul Graham, The Anatomy of Determination</a><br><br>I was raised with a view of CS as having a kind of natural progress that inevitably culminated in the current popular technology. In fact, to a large degree, many of the existing technologies are more a product of fashion and historical accident than technical superiority. Keep an open mind, don't believe everything you've been taught, and to quote my research group's motto, always question your assumptions. - <a href="http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/992#comment-9947">Dave Herman on LtU</a>


title: Two Weeks Already?
date: 2009-09-02 21:17:28.000000
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  This semester is flying by. It's really hard to believe and, honestly, quite scary. Aside from my Computer Organization and Design class, I feel like I'm learning quite little. With regards to COAD, I feel like I've mostly learned interesting trivia to date with a few useful larger concepts.<br><br>I'm trying to keep in mind that I'm here for the degree and that even if SPSU teaches CS at a more superficial level than I'd like that I can teach myself both while at SPSU and for many years afterwards. That part is not new. The hard part remains motivating myself in such a fashion that I blaze through the SPSU (oftentimes) busywork and have time and energy for personal studies after. My gut tells me that it's my perspective on the SPSU work which causes it to demotivate me and drain my energy. Hence, it's my perspective I'll have to figure out how to change. But first...<br><br>Today, I'm going to do something I don't normally do. Bitch. I'm presently in my Introduction to Algorithms class. It's a subject I'm personally compelled to learn and learn well. Unfortunately, the lecturer is pretty bad. Part of this may be a language barrier issue. The professor is not a native English speaker. His enunciation is fine but his ability to elucidate the concepts is thoroughly lacking. The first week he was dismissive of certain students' questions without explanation but this has improved.<br><br>Perhaps the most disappointing aspect is that there are <a href="http://academicearth.org/courses/introduction-to-algorithms">free video lectures from MIT on this material</a> taught by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Leiserson"><em>one of the authors</em></a> of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms">textbook</a> we're using. They move at a faster pace than we do (3 lectures of ours ~= 1 of theirs) but their lectures remain substantially clearer and better motivated than those of my professor. Moreover, I gain more understanding more rapidly by simply <em>reading the textbook</em> than by listening to him. Sadly, I have a hard time doing this in class because of ambient noise and other factors.<br><br>Finally, our syllabus is simply intolerable. In this course, a 60 is a passing grade, a 70 is a B and a 40 is a D. I really have little more to say here. Either the assumption is that we won't grasp the material well yet should pass on unscathed so that graduates are produced to sate industry or the class is <em>so abysmally and impossibly difficult (or poorly taught)</em> that a70 denotes thorough understanding of the material. Either way, this was the class I was most looking forward to this semester. To date, it's quite a disappointment.


title: Two Years
date: 2011-05-20 02:07:42.000000
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  Yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of my father's death. It's hard to believe it's been that long. Appropriately, I had a dream the night before where I couldn't find him and didn't know his cell number or address. Luckily, I wound up spending most of the day relaxing, enjoying the weather and seeing people then had dinner with Mom and drinks with a friend after. There was a minimum of sulking and what memories Mom and I shared were, of course, fond ones. I think dad would be pretty proud of Mom and I. That might have been hard to say 6-12 months ago but it's a little easier now. I made myself go back to school and get a degree, I've got my first job lined up and it's a great one, Mom and I are closer than we've ever been and so on. All told, I'm pretty happy and maybe somewhere he is too. There's probably not a strong argument for this post but I feel compelled to make note of this day somewhere and if your own blog isn't the place, what is?


title: Undercooked
date: 2010-10-30 16:57:33.000000
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  I was never comfortable talking<br>about the soul of my generation.<br>I often feel I'm just growing<br>acquainted with them before<br>I decide there is no soul,<br>no essence. Never was.<br><br>Souls are just peculiarities, after all.<br>And I had to give up on undecidable<br>problems some years back.<br>The unknowable held my head<br>underwater until I relented, suffocating.<br><br>But I've been baring and burying bits<br>of my soul since I've been here.<br>I lost some to a splinter. And the hand<br>I squeezed as it was removed piece by piece.<br>I bared it to a pastor who I doubt understood<br>why I found myself so insufficient.<br><br>I left some with a drunk girl who taught<br>me compassion, a faithful girl who taught me<br>guilt, one made of tornadoes who forced me<br>to take a chance and another still who<br>showed me what it feels like to make<br>a home inside someone else.<br><br>I squandered some on drugs. Drugs which<br>stole from me both time and memory.<br>Crashing around inside my brain in<br>endless chemical nuptials.<br>Tweak. Tweak.<br><br>I spread this thing in bits, countless bits,<br>scattered on platters, fragments<br>littered along buses, planes, cars, trains,<br>in terminals and ports not of this world.<br><br>My soul is in all these places, hidden<br>or in plain view. I can't tell you<br>what it means. Or if there's meaning,<br>anyway. I only know that's how it happened.<br>Here I am. Where to next?


title: Unheard Of
date: 2007-05-14 08:20:00.000000
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  Oliver McFadden has made <a href="http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=mesa/mesa.git;a=summary">135 commits to the Mesa r300</a> code in a week. That's got to be some kind of record. I'm totally giving this guy a hand. Congratulations.


title: Unwind-Protect
date: 2009-12-10 03:33:41.000000
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  The semester is finally drawing to a close. I had my last class sessions today. Exams are on Monday and Wednesday followed by a much needed break. It's been a long 3-semester year with more twists and turns than I could've guessed. No matter what happens, the break will be here soon.<br><br>I have a variety of projects to work on over the break. I have <a href="http://kloudshare.com/">one code base</a> to get familiar with and <a href="http://gitorious.org/paktahn">another</a> to get features and bug fixes written for. I also need to finally get around to writing the successor post to <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=1134">On Minimalism</a>. Between the writings of <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=1134#comments">Brian Hurt</a>, <a href="http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/100#comment-1165">Paul Snively</a> and <a href="http://dynamicaspects.org/blog/">Roly Perera</a> I'm getting a better idea what my thoughts and issues are and can hopefully come up with something good to say. I also might push out another "redlinux" release for the hell of it and have various other pet projects.<br><br>Now, for the recreational stuff. I'm going through another exploratory phase in my music listening and need to filter through some of the stuff I've pulled down from the vastness of the net. I just finished the first fiction reading I've done since...oh...Summer 2007? It felt good to read for pleasure again. I read Vernor Vinge's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep">A Fire Upon the Deep</a> and was thoroughly impressed. I'm looking forward to reading <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky">A Deepness in the Sky</a> over the break.  Maybe Rainbow's End or Greg Egan's Diaspora if I'm feeling up to it. I can say that recharging my batteries will be my priority for whatever remains of December after finals. That and figuring out where I am in life and sensible goals for the next year. Of course, spending some time with Mom will figure prominently as well.


title: Upside Down
date: 2008-03-17 18:09:16.000000
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  I'll try to actually write something useful in here (be it technology ruminations, code, or an essay) soon. For now, I'm too busy working, having fun, and sharing content with you all.<br><br>Today, I'm posting an excerpt from Eduardo Galeano's <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=0mx599BqSKQC">Upside Down</a>. It's the first thing of Galeano's that I read (on recommendation from a friend) and I still think it's probably my favorite thing of his I've read. This excerpt is called Language and it's the first in a set of 3, taken from page 37.<br><br>"Companies are called multinationals because they operate in many countries at once, but they belong to the few countries that monopolize wealth; political, military, and cultural power; scientific knowledge; and advanced technology. The ten biggest multinationals today earn more than a hundred countries put together do.<br>"Developing countries" is the name that experts use to designate countries trampled by someone else's development. According to the United Nations, developing countries send developed countries ten times as much money through unequal trade and financial relations as they receive through foreign aid.<br>In international relations, "foreign aid" is what they call the little tax that vice pays to virtue. Foreign aid is generally distributed in ways that confirm injustice, rarely in ways that counter it. In 1995, black Africa suffered 75 percent of the world's AIDS cases but received 3 percent of the funds spent by international organization on AIDS prevention."<br><br>Well, what do you think?


title: Vacation Time
date: 2009-12-17 17:22:58.000000
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  At long last, this year is drawing to a close. I've ended my semester on a mostly positive note and am looking forward to the Christmas holidays. Why you ask? Well, for a few reasons.<br><br>There are people to catch up and hang out with. I've got books to read: A Deepness in Sky and maybe Diaspora. There may be some light video gaming between FFXII and Borderlands. But mostly, I have projects. I need to dive in to the code I'll be working with on my internship next semester...but not just to get a head start. The company I'll be working with is working on some pretty cool stuff and there are plenty of places where even a naive fellow like myself could be of help, provided I don't get in people's hair/workflow too much. I want to try to get a <a href="http://gitorious.org/paktahn">Paktahn</a> release out by Christmas with Leslie. That means giving a good read through of the analysis of <a href="http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=667471#p667471">why SBCL's PKGBUILD fails on x86_64</a>, fixing it and getting the result to juergen. Also for Paktahn, I want to start work on a branch using Unix-options for CLI argument handling and look over/improve a proxy branch I've been working on. Maybe a unit tests branch, as well. Besides that I have some programming books I'd like to read a bit of (and you <em><strong>have</strong></em><strong> </strong>to do the exercises!) and various other small projects to toy with.<br><br>All that has to wait until at least tomorrow though. I'm taking today off to be with <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/images/she_is_hardcore.jpg">my girlfriend</a> and relax a bit. She leaves Sunday at which point I'll go full into project-mode, I expect. :)<br><br>There's probably more to say here but I'm forgetting whatever it is...and my rice is ready. Cheers.


title: Wandering Flame
date: 2008-12-07 22:41:28.000000
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  It's official. I'm not dead. I mean, 4 weeks without posting? I'm pretty sure that's a personal record. A variety of things have been going on, mostly positive. I spent Thanksgiving meeting the parents of my girlfriend (you know, <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/images/teresa.jpg">Teresa</a>?) in Virginia. We had volunteered to cook while we were up which went smoothly, to my relief. One thing we cooked was particularly excellent, the <a href="http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2007/06/cinammon_rolls_/">Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Rolls</a>. They really are as good as she says. I also have finally found a <a href="http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-YGxoWg0zcrU.X3ejL9J5MPvLWyanfKuFDGBZkn_Knw--?cq=1&amp;p=4332">Fried Chicken recipe</a> that I'm happy with which is a plus as I'm hosting <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Rock">30 Rock</a> viewing parties on Thursdays and they make a good\simple meal.<br><br>I've been wrestling with financial aid a lot lately. I'm excited about going back to school in the Spring but figuring out money always seems to be a bear. That seems to be true out of school too though. Most of the financial aid paperwork is done though, I've accepted some federal aid and I'm waiting on some private loans. Oh, the debtors joy. Also, I've got my schedule worked out and it's Tuesday-Thursday only so I'll be able to spend the rest of my time learning and hopefully pick up a part time job! Observe:<br><br>Technical Writing - TCOM 2010<br>TR; 10am - 11:15am; Atrium Building J-213; Jonathan Arnett<br>Prog and Problem Solving II - CSE 1302<br>TR; 1pm - 2:15pm; Atrium Building J-217; Jon Preston<br>Same Class - Lab<br>T; 2:30pm - 4:15pm; Atrium Building J-201L; John Vande Ven<br>Global Issues - POLS 2401<br>TR; 4:30pm - 5:45pm; Atrium Building J-101; Jason Seitz<br>Discrete Mathematics - MATH 2345<br>TR; 6pm - 7:15pm; D-Classroom 235; Jennifer Vandenbussche<br><br>Of course, I have to look and recall all the lost credits from Oglethorpe. Why am I taking Global Issues again? Oh, right. Transfer <em><strong>fail</strong></em>. Moving on.<br><br>Speaking of...a <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=735">Lenovo X200</a> is on it's way to me and should arrive tomorrow. <a href="http://xkcd.com/281/">Damn you, online package tracking!</a> My Thinkpad A31 just wouldn't cut it for commuting to SPSU. I tried that in Fall 2007. 45 minutes of battery life and temperamental wireless doesn't make for a good student laptop. I've also been working on <a href="http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=723">RedLinux</a> a bit lately and should be making a dual 686 and x86_64 release of RedLinux version 0.14 sometime next week. I'm also hoping to read some Lessig/Benkler or maybe one of the Open Sources books soon. I'd be wise to work through some of Spivak's Calculus or Head First Java before starting back at SPSU. We'll see. That's all for now.


title: Way Behind
date: 2009-11-10 14:55:33.000000
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  So, I'm coming up on the two week mark since my last blog post. Sorry about that. A big reason why is that I have been working on a post that might actually have some substance to it. It's still about programming and CS but it might actually have something interesting to think about. Sadly, it's not done yet. In lieu of that, I'll post some quick bits of news.<br><ul><br>	<li>I've still been <a href="http://gitorious.org/~redline6561">hacking on paktahn like a fiend</a> whenever I can.</li><br>	<li> I've started playing Final Fantasy XII again. I love that game series. Also, it's soundtracks.</li><br>	<li> I finally <a href="http://twitter.com/redline6561">caved and got a twitter account</a>. I'm kind of embarassed but I was following a bunch of people by checking their twitter page a few times a day. It'll save time on that, at least.</li><br>	<li> It's rather hard to sum up all the music I'm into but <a href="http://www.last.fm/user/Redline6561/charts?subtype=artists">my top 15 artists on Last.fm</a> is a really good starting point. If there are any you haven't heard of, they're worth at least giving a shot.</li><br>	<li> I cannot wait to be done with school. Optimistically I can fanagle my way into getting credit for a literature course from my Oglethorpe days. If I do that and never get a D or F in any courses, I can graduate by December 2010. That's 5-6 courses a semester, 3 semesters a year. Otherwise, it's May 2011 for me. Blerg.</li><br>	<li> On Dad: I think I only really started missing him recently. I think in Summer I didn't even have time to process his death (or just didn't know what to think), August-September I was depressed and now I just miss him sometimes. It's not terrible but there's definitely a time or two a week where I'm all, "Man! I wish Dad was hear to {talk to, hang out with, listen to music with, play guitar with, play video games with, watch movies with, be a family with, etc, etc, etc}".</li><br></ul><br>I was going to add a number of different "newsy" things here such as: the recent successes about PATRIOT act and State Secrets reform, the enjoyable experience of working with the ECL compiler developers, some thoughts on my first Factor program (which still needs some touch up work) and various other things but I'll leave that til another day because sadly, I have a test tomorrow to study for. More coming your way soon, folks.


title: Weak Ties & Loose Ends
date: 2008-03-24 13:29:26.000000
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  I had a lovely weekend. Good conversations tend to do that. I wasn't actually productive but maybe my brain was just digesting all that talk during my leisure. Also, my <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1">OLPC XO</a> finally arrived. I've had some fun with it though there are things to get used to. I'm trying to get it set up to work with my needs a bit better which essentially means <a href="http://www.redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=878">getting Gambit-C and emacs-nox installed</a>. I'm also <a href="http://litenverden.org/?p=12">throwing XFCE on it</a> for a more conventional work environment. Also, I can confirm that The National's album <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(album)">Boxer</a> was the best album of 2007 that I've heard. It's phenomenal. I'll post more on all that later.<br><br>I really feel like I should read something tasty about Ontologies and Knowledge Representations or maybe Peer Production. I don't know. I need to empty my head out. Finally, here's a tasty Neruda poem to start off the week but it's behind a cut because I don't normally post poems this long.<!--more--><br><br><em>Ode To The Atom</em><br><br>Infinitesimal<br>star,<br>you seemed<br>forever<br>buried<br>in metal, hidden,<br>your diabolic<br>fire.<br>One day<br>someone knocked<br>at your tiny<br>door:<br>it was man.<br>With one<br>explosion<br>he unchained you,<br>you saw the world,<br>you came out<br>into the daylight,<br>you traveled through<br>cities,<br>your great brilliance<br>illuminated lives,<br>you were a<br>terrible fruit<br>of electric beauty,<br>you came to<br>hasten the flames<br>of summer,<br>and then<br>wearing<br>a predator's eyeglasses,<br>armor,<br>and a checked shirt,<br>sporting sulfuric mustaches<br>and a prehensile tail,<br>came<br>the warrior<br>and seduced you:<br>sleep,<br>he told you,<br>curl up,<br>atom, you resemble<br>a Greek god,<br>a Parisian modiste<br>in springtime,<br>lie down here<br>on my fingernail,<br>climb into this little box,<br>and then<br>the warrior<br>put you in his jacket<br>as if you were nothing but<br>a North American<br>pill,<br>and he traveled through the world<br>and dropped you<br>on Hiroshima.<br><br>We awakened.<br><br>The dawn<br>had been consumed.<br>All the birds<br>burned to ashes.<br>An odor<br>of coffins,<br>gas from tombs,<br>thundered through space.<br>The shape of punishment arose,<br>hideous,<br>superhuman,<br>bloody mushroom, dome,<br>cloud of smoke,<br>sword<br>of hell.<br>Burning air rose,<br>spreading death<br>on parallel waves,<br>reaching<br>the mother sleeping<br>with her child,<br>the river fisherman<br>and the fish,<br>the bakery<br>and the bread,<br>the engineer<br>and his buildings;<br>everything<br>was acid<br>dust,<br>assassin<br>air.<br><br>The city<br>crumbled its last honeycombs<br>and fell, fell suddenly,<br>demolished,<br>rotten;<br>men<br>were instant lepers,<br>they took<br>their children's hand<br>and the little hand<br>fell off in theirs.<br>So, from your refuge<br>in the secret<br>mantle of stone<br>in which fire slept<br>they took you,<br>blinding spark,<br>raging light,<br>to destroy lives,<br>to threaten distant existences,<br>beneath the sea,<br>in the air,<br>on the sands,<br>in every twist and turn<br>of the ports,<br>to destroy<br>seeds<br>to kill cells,<br>to stunt the corolla,<br>they destined you, atom,<br>to level<br>nations,<br>to turn love into a black pustule,<br>to burn heaped-up hearts<br>and annihilate blood.<br><br>Mad spark,<br>go back<br>to your shroud,<br>bury yourself<br>in your mineral mantle,<br>be blind stone once again,<br>ignore the outlaws,<br>and collaborate<br>with life, with growing things,<br>replace motors,<br>elevate energy,<br>fertilize planets.<br>You have no secret<br>now,<br>walk<br>among men<br>without your terrible<br>mask,<br>pick up your pace<br>and pace<br>the picking of the fruit,<br>parting<br>mountains,<br>straightening rivers,<br>making fertile,<br>atom,<br>overflowing<br>cosmic<br>cup,<br>return<br>the the peace of the vine,<br>to the velocity of joy,<br>return to the province<br>of nature,<br>place yourself at our service,<br>and instead of the fatal<br>ashes<br>of your mask,<br>instead of the unleashed infernos<br>of your wrath,<br>instead of the menace<br>of your terrible light, deliver to us<br>your amazing<br>rebelliousness<br>for our grain,<br>your unchained magnetism<br>to found peace among men,<br>and then your dazzling light<br>will be happiness,<br>not hell,<br>hope of morning,<br>gift to earth.


title: Web Site Names
date: 2007-06-17 19:42:00.000000
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  Okay, so britlit.com is taken by some stupid squatters who want $2,000 for it and I think that's bullshit. Of course, I don't have two grand but even if I did I wouldn't fork it over for a lousy domain name. .org and .net are taken as well. So, I need something else. I should note that if I do start a new site I won't stop writing here. I'll probably find a way to dual-post or something. I just need to think of a good domain that isn't taken yet and that's pretty tricky. To check and see if domains are available you can use this link if you want to:http://www.networksolutions.com/home.jsp?layoutIdIndex=1<br>Or just tell me your ideas and I'll check. HELP!


title: Weekly Reading
date: 2007-10-31 04:01:08.000000
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  These are a few of the things I've picked up from reddit or the blogosphere or elsewhere of late:<br><br>-A <a href="http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:p3uapxFN_1IJ:math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/godelnagel.pdf+godelnagel&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;cd=3&amp;gl=us">paper on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem</a> and some contentions Nagel had with it.<br><br>-A <a href="http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:p3uapxFN_1IJ:math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/godelnagel.pdf+godelnagel&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;cd=3&amp;gl=us">transcript of a talk by Alan Cox</a> at a Linux Conference on why Brooks' Laws of Software Development don't hold up under the open source model.<br><br>-An <a href="http://blog.danmcweeney.com/50">interesting post by Dan McWeeny courtesy of James Governor</a> over at Redmonk on "Synthesizers" a posited new category of software developer.<br><br>-An <a href="http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=320">interesting essay on the problems of programming</a>.<br><br>-A <a href="http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2007/10/26/37763">fantastic response to a recent article of Raganwald's about Object Oriented Programming</a> and the problems of information hiding. I especially like the leaning towards less stateful code.<br><br>-<a href="http://ifacethoughts.net/2007/10/19/learning-new-programming-languages//">Another good response to a Raganwald article, this time about learning new programming languages</a>. I've been going through this a bit myself lately with a recent Java assignment that I essentially tried to write in C. I need to be writing it in idiomatic Java but I'm lazy and don't like Java. I'm getting it together though.<br><br>-A <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3999952944619245780">Google Tech Talk on why the GIT source control repository should be used in lieu of any others</a>. This one is given by Randal Schwartz, it is not the already circulated talk by Linus Torvalds himself.<br><br>-An <a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=351659">interview with Joe Armstrong</a>, creator of Erlang, on the future of programming, object orientation, and statefulness.<br><br>-A design philosophy. <a href="http://freeshells.ch/~revence/simple.txt">If it's not simple, it's wrong</a>.<br><br>-Finally, I also found podcasts from the recent <a href="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/index.php?page=podcasts/">OOPSLA</a> and <a href="http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2007/speakers#RandallMunroe">ACM Reflections</a> conferences. Some of these would be <em>well</em> worth listening to.


title: Welcome to the Future
date: 2012-12-13 21:12:00.000000
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  It's late 2012. I'm writing this in a gaming bar watching hopefuls for the next National Street Fighter Tournament practice. The FBI have lost track of a modern political dissident, a [hacker vagabond](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/anon-on-the-run-how-commander-x-jumped-bai/) by the name of Commander X. Last night I attended an escapist lightshow of a concert, where kids burned their brains out "like neon novas". Drones police the New York skies. My online handle is more crucial to my professional career than my "True Name". I drive [a veritable supercar](http://redlinernotes.com/images/nsx.jpg) knowing that once self-driving cars are commercialized, classical driving could be a luxury if not slowly phased out altogether. I was born in the sea of information and raised by the sound of dial tones. The cyberpunk aesthetics of the 90s are quietly, imperceptibly interleaved into modern life. But like Alan Kay, I believe the computer revolution hasn't happened yet. My 10 year old self has everything he ever dreamed of. Time to come up with bigger dreams and see what's next.


title: What Kind of Day Has It Been
date: 2010-05-13 21:40:12.000000
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  It's been a hell of semester. And if you don't get the title reference, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Kind_of_Day_Has_It_Been">click here</a> and then watch lots of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_60_on_the_Sunset_Strip">Studio 60</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_West_Wing_(TV_series)">The West Wing</a>.<br><br>This semester had everything. There was a cash shortfall due to my not requesting enough Financial Aid loans because I was unaware that online courses cost almost twice as much per credit hour since the state won't subsidize them. I had a busier than usual course load. I reluctantly chose to graduate in May '11 rather than December '10 rather than trying to shove 32 credits into Summer and Fall. There was an internship that I much enjoyed though it was marred by some communication difficulties of mine the first two months or so. There was even a professor who had some communication difficulties, particularly in the specifications of his course project. <em>That</em> was lots of fun.<br><br>My grandfather died of the same non-smoker's lung cancer Dad died of. The anniversary of Dad's death, by the way, is next Tuesday. Strangest of all, I came to the realization that I wasn't prepared for a life long relationship with Teresa and, as a consequence, broke up with her on Monday. That part was terrifying and actually about a 6 month process. It's all still quite hard to explain. I tried to do the best I could once I was sure of my decision (late March/early April) to not cause all that upheaval before finals and graduation. It seemed like the most responsible decision at the time.<br><br>At this point, I've moved back in with my mother to house sit while she spends a month in Europe. She leaves May 22nd so this conveniently coincides with the anniversary of Dad's death. My 5 summer courses start next Monday and are: Distributed Computing, Programming Language Concepts, Information Security Administration, Astronomy (because I'm feeling worn out and lazy) and the corresponding lab. June 19th Mom will return from Europe and I'll move back into the Aventine to a 2-bedroom with a former college roommate of mine, Ben Minor.<br><br>Despite all the chaos, I feel oddly good about where I am. I got 2 As and 2 Bs this semester which is fine I suppose... but I learned a lot and that's good. I tried to handle the situation with Teresa with as much grace and respect as I could muster. In general, I've been faced with adversity and tried to demonstrate character and integrity as best I can. I'm not sure what Dad would say if he was around to see it but I'm trying to pat myself on the back and call it a job well done.<br><br>I do feel that I'm in the right place and have made many of the correct decisions. I am where I want to be. Now, it's a matter of keeping on, trying to relax just a little this week (which is tricky since I'm woken by hammers at 7:30 as Mom's house is being renovated and the roof redone...did I mention we can't use the stairs or top floor today?) and getting organized for summer courses and beyond. If you're reading this, keep doing your best. I love ya.


title: Wheels of the Chariot
date: 2007-12-31 15:20:00.000000
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  We are only what we are,<br>straining in the fog of an early morning.<br>Fearful but not yet unhinged,<br>we are waiting to spin in<br>an endless dance. Advance<br>and retreat, feints and<br>confessions. That the art of existence<br>is still an area of active research.<br>That the domain and range of man are<br>still a combative struggle. To be<br>simply is not so simple. Thoreau<br>deceived at least one. But<br>perhaps in a short time<br>we will not falter in<br>our waltz with death<br>and instead laugh,<br>like children do.<br><br>I sought in my sinew some struggle,<br>some measure of resistance, against<br>what even in youth I recognized as<br>the turmoils of a Jagannath. But my<br>vertebrae were not as strong as I<br>expected. Or dreaded maturation<br>has weakened once well-formed<br>resolve to fling my body<br>under the crushing, undulating<br>wheels of the chariot.


title: Why Computer Science?
date: 2010-07-18 01:56:03.000000
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  It's bedtime here but I couldn't help but post this <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cq2yv/women_in_computing_first_get_the_problem_right/c0uej6v">quote by kragensitaker</a> from reddit. I've always meant to get around to writing an explanation of why I think Computer Science is a lovely discipline. This addresses it in a very different way than I was hoping to but absolutely merits posting here.<br><blockquote>Well, a thousand years ago, geometry was the field holding those special secrets. Computers are just the automation and generalization of geometry. Everything except that generalization of geometry (now known as "mathematics") is contingent on the physical universe we happen to inhabit.<br><br>The most remarkable thing about all of this is that apparently that physical universe can be simulated, analyzed, and even predicted with mathematics. So, too, with all the universes we can imagine. And of course this is much easier to do with automated mathematics.<br><br>So a computer is not just a machine; it's not just a machine that imitates other machines; it's not just a machine with a universe in it; it's a machine with all possible universes in it.<br><br>Of course, this is not somehow discontinuous with the multi-millennium discipline of geometry, or for that matter writing and arithmetic. It's merely the current step.<br>That's part of what makes it such an extraordinary field, to me, and makes the bullshit worthwhile.<br><br>There's also, though, the human side. Computers are not merely simulators; they are also communicators, through which we can diffuse universal access to human knowledge. This is an educational and liberal achievement unparalleled in human history. The dream of Diderot is less and less a dream and more and more a reality. And thus even PHP is forgiven.</blockquote>


title: Work and School
date: 2010-08-30 15:16:37.000000
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  It's been 3 weeks since my last post and that is starting to become disappointingly normal. Summer has drawn to a close and the first week of school has flown by. I also got a part-time job during that first week. Friday was my first day and was pretty fun. I'm on a team of six in a company of ten so things are informal, productive and unbureaucratic which is nice. I'll be working about 20 hours a week mostly in PHP and Javascript writing Drupal module extensions. I'm not thrilled about the PHP but needing to use Javascript, CSS and SQL more while working on production web software can only do me good. I've been putting off banging my head against web development for some time now. Hopefully 20 hours a week is the right amount for work/school balance.<br><br>As for classes, combinatorics has a good teacher and students but I'm already a little behind. Last week was kinda crazy. My CS courses have been...um...disastrous but I've tweeted about that and don't particularly want to recount it here. Short version: I was told in a 4000-level CS Upper Elective that I should withdraw because there "wouldn't be very much programming" and heard my software engineering professor describe using Save As as "version control". Finally, I have a Chemistry course and lab which is predictably fine. Should be a pretty standard semester.<br><br>I didn't code much over the summer but I did fix a few paktahn bugs and just last weekend made a bugfix release with Leslie (<a href="http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=30242">0.91</a>). Of course, I've already found and fixed another bug. When no network connection is present and name resolution fails, a usocket:ns-try-again condition gets thrown and the user sees that error message and goes "huh?". Presently, our restarts only catch usocket:socket-error conditions which is a separate condition hierarchy. I lined up a fix in 5 minutes but there's a very little bit of code duplication that's bothering me. I'll come back to it in a day or two and either find a better way or commit it. On the bright side, Leslie says my lisp style is improving. Here's hoping. There's always so much more to learn. :)<br><br>I've been in a pretty heavy coma since breaking up with Teresa, not that it's all or even mostly attributable to that event. I've just been burnt out. Cooking, entertaining company (i.e. movie parties), listening to music and skateboarding are the main things I seem to be able to enjoy and make myself do lately. I've been trying to work my way out of it lately and, thanks in part to certain friends, looking at the metalevel of how I can be more organized, productive and happy. My friend Will, for example, sent me a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen which I've gotten in to the last week or so. There are very valid points in that book about energy, motivation and time management along with ideas that I'll try to apply in the coming weeks.<br><br>I can't think of much else to say for now. There's tons of high-level big stuff going on. Oracle is suing Google in a move that can only hurt everyone, Paul Allen apparently can't build working products with billions of dollars and bunches of patents but can sue half the tech world for violating them, etc. Privacy is still going in the trash, Religious Freedom may be in the gutter already as many Americans hopelessly believe that all Islamic people are violent extremists. The programming language world is busy as always with interesting activity I'm aware of in Factor, SBCL, Clozure, Clojure, GHC and more. I could tell you about the good things I've been listening to like Laura Veirs and the Morning Benders. But right now I need to stop and recharge a bit. Cheers.


title: XMas List
date: 2007-11-21 19:03:20.000000
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  Just for the heck of it, you know?<br><br>Hardware<br>It'd be pretty swell if I could get a <a href="http://computers.pricegrabber.com/flat-panel-lcd-monitors/m/32539308/search=FP222WH">BenQ FP222WH</a> Flatscreen Monitor. It takes HDMI input so I wouldn't need a TV in my first apartment!<br>Zareason is producing some <a href="http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16162&amp;cat=0&amp;page=1">Ubuntu keyboards</a> and I need a USB keyboard to hack on my PS3 so that would come in handy.<br><br>Content<br>Considering that I'm leaving school for a bit this list will mostly be books to study next semester but really anything off my <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/32H7I8DJX2WWE?reveal=unpurchased&amp;filter=all&amp;sort=priority&amp;layout=standard&amp;x=9&amp;y=3">Amazon wishlist</a> will do bookwise.<br>The following 12 books would be my 12 books of Xmas. They're of particular importance to me. And I say buy used.<br><br>Algebra by I.M. Gelfand (Author), Alexander Shen (Author)<br>Functions and Graphs (Dover Books on Mathematics) by I. M. Gelfand (Author), et al.<br>The Method of Coordinates by I.M. Gelfand (Author), et al.<br>Introduction to Linear Algebra, Third Edition by Gilbert Strang (Author)<br>Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen (Author)<br>Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science (2nd Edition) by Ronald L. Graham (Author), et al.<br>Calculus by Michael Spivak (Author)<br>Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition by Harold Abelson (Author), Gerald Jay Sussman (Author)<br>How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing by Matthias Felleisen (Author), et al.<br>Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong (Author)<br>Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen (Author), et al.<br>Watchmen (Absolute Edition) by Alan Moore (Author), Dave Gibbons (Illustrator)<br><br>Finally, you gotta have some useless stuff:<br>Like video games. Uncharted on the PS3 and Okami or Shadow of the Colussus or Rogue Galaxy on the PS2.<br>And wall art. I guess I should have something on at least one wall in the apartment next semester right?<br>Cool wall art includes <a href="http://www.imagekind.com/GalleryProfile.aspx?GID=3b76f798-e4ca-450c-990a-f9881d704eaf&amp;P=1">disassembly maps of famous old games</a> like Super Mario Bros and Pac-Man. Or some of the <a href="http://xkcd.com/store/">cool internet maps</a> from the XKCD store.<br><br>Yeah. That's about all I can think of. Be careful though. Give me all that stuff and some rice and you might not hear from me for another few months. Now then, what do you guys want for Christmas (or insert holiday here)?


title: Ye Olde Personal Update
date: 2010-02-17 05:32:19.000000
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  2010 has, to date, been an odd year. I'm not entirely sure what I expected but I had something more idyllic in mind. The last two weeks, I've been struggling mightily with some personal issues and come to recognize some character flaws in the process. That's never fun. In particular, I have some communication problems and there are scenarios in which I simply shut down. Without warning or even conscious recognition, I withdraw and disengage. There are some rough similarities in these scenarios but not enough for me to figure out something conclusive about causality. The flaws caused trouble in both my personal and academic life in late January and early February.<br><br>My actual school courses have been going well so far but I've been screwing up my internship and am in the process right now of getting caught back up in that department. It's quite embarrassing as this is something I had looked forward to and involves people that I look up to. Murphy's Law applies to timing of our character flaws and communications problems too, I suppose. Valentine's Day was nice at least. I enjoyed preparing some really lovely Steaks with a Cognac-Peppercorn sauce. Clearly, my life is not *too* hard.<br><br>To try and keep that positive note, I'll end with a few things that have made me happy lately:<br>- Music by Local Natives, Band of Horses, Ametsub, Massive Attack (Heligoland is pretty solid),  Fleet Foxes, Jon Hopkins, The XX and Miles Davis' Flamenco Sketches.<br>- Writing wrappers for web services/APIs is (so far) reasonably straightforward and fun. It's nice to know that there's a ton of good data out there waiting for neat uses to be made.<br>- I have ideas and a desire to contribute to way more programming projects than I have time for. Some are others' projects. Some I'd start myself. I maintain that this is a good thing as long as I stay focused on what's on my plate and finish one thing at a time.<br>- I have ideas for future blog posts and github uploads. Still, I'm sticking to my "no pressure blogging" schedule for 2010. There are more important things than...well, this self-aggrandizing whatever it is. That said, I've always been surprised that I find my blog so useful for remembering where I was, what I was thinking and what I was struggling with years later. Some days it's the only way I can convince myself I'm moving forward.<br>- <a href="http://factorcode.org/">Factor</a> is a nice language and I've spent a few hours playing with it again. There are trivial and non-trivial things I like. The biggest thing is the exceptional interactive nature of the language and how well integrated it all is. From a design standpoint, I just appreciate it. It seems to get a lot of things, compromises...right. More on that another time. <a href="http://factor-language.blogspot.com/2010/02/factor-092-now-available.html">Factor 0.92</a> was released today! It's been 2 years since the last release and I'll look forward to helping test a few things before 1.0 and keep hoping for native threading before 2.0. :)<br>PS: The Factor logo is a <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>raptor</strong></span>! How has Randall Munroe *not* written an <a href="http://xkcd.com/">XKCD</a> comic about this?<br>- I've finally found a few people (3) at school that are legitimately interested in programming and care about it. It's taken over a year. That's far too damn long.


title: Ye Olde Smorgasborg
date: 2011-05-06 21:18:23.000000
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  <h2>Updates</h2><br>This post may come off as a bit scattered. The main reason is that so much has been going on. I've finished my last semester at SPSU and should be picking up my diploma soon, I've been running around looking for a loft to move into with my friend Burke come late June and I've been working on getting a job. There's been progress on all of those fronts and I look forward to writing about them soon. Finally, I have a new Lisp project that I've been having fun hacking on and wanted to talk about. I was going to wait until I was ready to release version 0.1 but it's beginning to seem like that might be a few months out and I just can't help myself. I'll talk mostly about my motivations, design goals, some early results, my immediate plans and similar work others have begun recently.<br><br><h2>Motivations</h2><br>The project is a piece of Lisp blog software I've christened "Coleslaw". I've wanted to write my own blog for a while for a variety of reasons. The most significant is that it would be a good learning experience and fun. Additionally, then I could just run SBCL and PostgreSQL on my servers and scrap MySQL and PHP. I'd been putting it off for some time as I'm no web development expert but I had an opportunity to get course credit for working on it some this semester so I decided to get the ball rolling.<br><br>Lately a piece of Ruby blogware named <a href="http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll">Jekyll</a> became surprisingly popular. There are two interesting things about Jekyll to me. The first is that it uses a static-site compilation model rather than generating pages dynamically (as Wordpress does). The second is that it requires and provides no admin-interface as a result. It simply watches a directory for new posts and regenerates as much of the site as necessary.<br><br>The simplicity (and somewhat simpler security model) of writing blogware that didn't have an admin interface and just keeping everything in flat files really appealed to me but I knew many people still love admin interfaces and database backed webapps and for good reason. Though you should always have backups of course. Anyway, it's thanks to Jekyll and several <a href="http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/">similar</a> <a href="http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/hyde">clones</a> that I really started looking into the design of something that could support both options.<br><br><h2>Design Goals</h2><br>The original design goals were to support a *single-user* blog with either a dynamic backend that provided an admin interface and made use of a database or a static backend that simply compiled posts from a watched directory to an HTML output directory. Since then I've decided a bit more separation of concerns is in order. Down the line I'd like to support the following "large-scale" options with Coleslaw:<br>	<li>Where is the data? (mongodb, postgresql, flat files, lisp data persisted with cl-store or similar, etc)</li><br>	<li>How is the data served? (Static files, Dynamically generated w/optional caching)</li><br>	<li>How is the data edited? (web-admin-interface-p)</li><br>	<li>Who serves the data? (S3, Lisp server (hunchentoot/etc), System HTTPD (lighttpd/apache/etc)</li><br>	<li>How are comments handled? (Cloud service (disqus/etc), Stored and generated locally, disabled)</li><br>Above and beyond that I'd like to have a few bundled plugins for things like Analytics, Syntax Hightlighting, LaTeX support, Import from other blogs, Crossposting. Finally, Coleslaw should be easy to theme.<br><br><h2>Early Results</h2><br>The code is presently <a href="http://github.com/redline6561/coleslaw/">on github</a> and I haven't hacked on it for a few days because I've been relaxing post-finals. That said, I'm looking forward to getting back into working on it in the near future. At this time, only the static backend has been started and there's still no implementation for directory watching to update posts. Comment support also hasn't been completed. That said there's a preliminary theme (stolen from ckeen's hyde, thanks ckeen!) and an <a href="http://blog.clockwork-webdev.com/">example site</a> running backed by S3. Note that the posts shown are all imported from an XML export of my Wordpress blog. The current import plugin only supports wordpress and only handles posts, not comments. The code used to generate the example site was <a href="http://paste.lisp.org/display/121736">pasted here</a>.<br><br>I feel pretty solid about the internal API for indexes and posts and my plugin infrastructure as well as the theming situation. cl-fad, local-time, cl-closure-template, cl-docutils and cl-markdown are the current hard dependencies for the core because I'd like to support ReStructuredText, HTML or Markdown input for posts. Just for giggles my friend Neil also made a logo in large, medium and small. Here's medium: <img src="https://github.com/redline6561/coleslaw/raw/master/logo_medium.jpg" alt="Medium Coleslaw Logo" /><br><br><h2>Immediate Plans</h2><br>I started working on plugins for <a href="http://disqus.com/">disqus</a> comment support as well as <a href="http://mathjax.org/">mathjax</a> LaTeX support but the whole experience made me want to revamp my API for "injections" which allows plugins to throw various bits of JS in the page HEAD and BODY. I'd like to support arbitrary predicates (say, to only add the mathjax scripts when posts are tagged "math") and allow for distinguishing between whether something should be injected on post pages or index pages in addition to the current "should I inject this in the HEAD or BODY?" functionality. Once that's done, I'd like to support syntax highlighting via Python's pygments library. Then I'll get around to the directory watching/updating semantics. Once that's done I can work on the dynamic backend and start *THINKING* about a 1.0. That's the state of things today. I'd love to hear from you if you have thoughts, opinions or a desire to contribute patches/help. :D<br><br><h2>Recent Similar Efforts</h2><br>I've found it pretty comical that 2 other (more experienced and talented) lispers recently began writing lisp blog software shortly after I started working on coleslaw. Who knows, if they had gotten around to it 6-9 months earlier I might never have wound up working on coleslaw, but I'm glad I have. It's a lot of fun.<br><br>If you find coleslaw interesting it's worth looking at <a href="http://cyrusharmon.org/projects?project=nuclblog">nuclblog</a>(cl-store serialized data, dynamic, Markdown) by Cyrus Harmon (<a href="https://github.com/slyrus">slyrus</a>), <a href="https://github.com/billstclair/Lisplog">lisplog</a>(drupal import, custom flat file database, dynamic) by Bill St. Clair (<a href="http://github.com/billstclair">billstclair</a>) and <a href="https://github.com/archimag/arblog">arblog</a>(mongodb-backed, dynamic, ReStructuredText) by Andrey Moskvitin (<a href="https://github.com/archimag">archimag</a>).


title: Yevtushenko to match
date: 2008-03-11 12:01:05.000000
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  <p><i>I would like</i> by Yevgeny Yevtushenko</p><br><code>I would like<br>            to be born<br>                      in every country,<br>have a passport<br>               for them all<br>to throw<br>        all foreign offices<br>                           into panic,<br>be every fish<br>             in every ocean<br>and every dog<br>             in the streets of the world.<br>I don’t want to bow down<br>                        before any idols<br>or play at being<br>                a Russian Orthodox church hippie,<br>but I would like to plunge<br>                          deep into Lake Baikal<br>and surface snorting<br>                    somewhere,<br>                              why not in the Mississippi?<br>In my damned beloved universe<br>                             I would like<br>to be a lonely weed,<br>                    but not a delicate Narcissus<br>kissing his own mug<br>                   in the mirror.<br>I would like to be<br>                  any of God’s creatures<br>right down to the last mangy hyena--<br>but never a tyrant<br>                  or even the cat of a tyrant.<br>I would like to be<br>                  reincarnated as a man<br>                                       in any image:<br>a victim of prison tortures,<br>a homeless child in the slums of Hong Kong,<br>a living skeleton in Bangladesh,<br>a holy beggar in Tibet,<br>a black in Cape Town,<br>but never<br>         in the image of Rambo.<br>The only people whom I hate<br>                           are the hypocrites--<br>pickled hyenas<br>              in heavy syrup.<br>I would like to lie<br>                   under the knives of all the surgeons in the world,<br>be hunchbacked, blind,<br>                      suffer all kinds of diseases,<br>                                                   wounds and scars,<br>be a victim of war,<br>                   or a sweeper of cigarette butts,<br>just so a filthy microbe of superiority<br>                                       doesn’t creep inside.<br>I would not like to be in the elite,<br>nor, of course,<br>               in the cowardly herd,<br>nor be a guard dog of that herd,<br>nor a shepherd,<br>               sheltered by that herd.<br>And I would like happiness,<br>                           but not at the expense of the unhappy,<br>and I would like freedom,<br>                         but not at the expense of the unfree.<br>I would like to love<br>                    all the women in the world,<br>and I would like to be a woman, too--<br>                                     just once...<br>Men have been diminished<br>                        by Mother Nature.<br>Why couldn’t we give motherhood<br>                               to men?<br>If an innocent child<br>                    stirred<br>                           below his heart,<br>man would probably<br>                  not be so cruel.<br>I would like to be man’s daily bread--<br>say,<br>    a cup of rice<br>                 for a Vietnamese woman in mourning,<br>cheap wine<br>          in a Neapolitan workers’ trattoria,<br>or a tiny tube of cheese<br>                        in orbit round the moon.<br>Let them eat me,<br>                let them drink me,<br>only let my death<br>                 be of some use.<br>I would like to belong to all times,<br>                                    shock all history so much<br>that it would be amazed<br>                       what a smart aleck I was.<br>I would like to bring Nefertiti<br>                               to Pushkin in a troika.<br>I would like to increase<br>                        the space of a moment<br>                                             a hundredfold,<br>so that in the same moment<br>                          I could drink vodka with fishermen in Siberia<br>and sit together with Homer,<br>                            Dante,<br>                                  Shakespeare,<br>                                              and Tolstoy,<br>drinking anything,<br>                  except, of course,<br>                                    Coca-Cola,<br>--dance to the tom-toms in the Congo,<br>--strike at Renault,<br>--chase a ball with Brazilian boys<br>                                  at Copacabana Beach.<br>I would like to know every language,<br>                                like the secret waters under the earth,<br>and do all kinds of work at once.<br>                                 I would make sure<br>that one Yevtushenko was merely a poet,<br>                                 the second--an underground fighter<br>                                                             somewhere,<br>I couldn’t say where<br>                    for security reasons,<br>the third--a student at Berkeley,<br>                                 the fourth--a jolly Georgian drinker,<br>and the fifth--<br>               maybe a teacher of Eskimo children in Alaska,<br>the sixth--<br>       a young president,<br>                    somewhere, say, modestly speaking, in Sierra Leone,<br>the seventh--<br>             would still be shaking a rattle in his stroller,<br>and the tenth...<br>                the hundredth...<br>                                the millionth...<br>For me it’s not enough to be myself,<br>                                    let me be everyone!<br>Every creature<br>              usually has a double,<br>but God was stingy<br>                  with the carbon paper,<br>and in his Paradise Publishing Corporation<br>                                          made a unique copy of me.<br>But I shall muddle up<br>                     all God’s cards--<br>                                      I shall confound God!<br>I shall be in a thousand copies to the end of my days,<br>so that the earth buzzes with me,<br>                                 and computers go berserk<br>in the world census of me.<br>I would like to fight on all your barricades,<br>                                             humanity,<br>dying each night<br>                like an exhausted moon,<br>and resurrecting each morning<br>                             like a newborn sun,<br>with an immortal soft spot--fontanel--<br>                                      on my head.<br>And when I die,<br>               a smart-aleck Siberian Francois Villon,<br>do not lay me in the earth<br>                          of France<br>                                   or Italy,<br>but in our Russian, Siberian earth,<br>                                   on a still-green hill,<br>where I first felt<br>                  that I was<br>                            everyone.<br><br></code>


