Here is your Moist Towelette. It will clean and refresh your hands and face without soap and water. Self dries in seconds, leaving skin smooth and soft. Directions: Tear open packet, unfold towelette and use.Toddles and Teddles and I went "canvassing" in Pennsylvania yesterday. I don't know if you can even call it canvassing -- we just slipped this little leaflets under everyone's doors. Sometimes they'd hear you and open the door as you were walking away -- this gigantic and pretty much naked man picked up the pamphlet I'd slipped under the door as I was closing the door of his fence. I said, "Just wanted to make sure you knew how important it was to vote on Tuesday!" He looked exactly like the sexual predator in Stevie. Later, a small dog made a big dog bark and I fell off the top step of some stairs. It's important to vote, kind of. My thread shit doesn't work. So I'm implementing some other stuff in gzochi. Thinking about maybe getting going on ncurses bindings for XUL. That would be insane. Oh yeah, you guys can leave comments on my 'blog now. Try not to get, you know, too excited. What else. The gas bill is too high; the telephone does not work.
Monday, November 01, 2004
Roach In A Bottle
There really was a roach in a bottle! I saw it last week while I was dumping the recycling -- the roach was in a beer bottle with about a tablespoon of old beer in it and it was plinking and plunking around trying to get out. I knew it would 100% get away and upset the cat if it escaped, so I was, you know, picking up the bottle and shaking the roach back into the beer. I was hoping it would get sort of addled as the alcohol entered its spiracles, but that didn't happen, at least, not after one and a half minutes. So I dumped it into the toilet.
The other night, Mer cooked some salmon and the glass baking dish exploded. Well, it didn't explode, but as she took it out of the oven, it basically fell apart in her hands. (The fish survived without a scratch, somehow.) Apparently we weren't supposed to 'broil' with it. Well, I don't call 400 degrees boiling, do you?
Excuse me:
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
The Nude Pundit
I'm not kidding about this Rude Pundit thing, guys. You have got to read today's entry, for example:
Does Krasdale make anything that's not cheap and delicious? Their onion rings and seasoned fries: Delightful. Their frozen pizza: Sublime. Their waffles: Transcendant, and certainly light-years ahead of Eggo. Jesus. Their frozen mixed veggies: Gave me extremely painful mud-butt. So that's one thing.
I thought I whined about grad-school recommendations already in this thing, but going back through the archives, I can't find it. Well, I asked this professor of mine for a recommendation back in August, and he made me jump through all of these hoops, basically, to get it. So I finally e-mail him all the information he'd asked for, and I don't hear squat from him -- at all. Not even any indication that he'd received any of my hard-won information that he'd asked for. And I sort of forget about it for a while. And then I realize, I gave him Nov. 2nd as a deadline for it, and it's practically Nov. 2nd now. So I e-mail him to politely ask how things are going, and he writes back almost immediately explaining that he just had decided to ignore a bunch of his old e-mail but that he'd get right on my thing. Deek!
Oh yeah, and THE YANKEES WIN THE PENNANT!
So when Rehnquist tries to say he's thinking retirement now, too late for an appointment before the election, and with the potential loss of the Senate even if he wins, Cheney snaps. He pulls the tube out of Rehnquist's neck and whips out his cock. Rehnquist, wide-eyed, now wishing he had chosen death over the horror that is about to happen, gasps for air. "Gonna have to fuck your neck-hole, Bill," Cheney says, slapping his cock around, trying to get an erection, thinking about Mary and her partner 69ing, thinking about dismembered Iraqi children, all the things that usually make him hard.My fucking Guile thread cancellation thing doesn't work at all. I'm totally frustrated with it and stymied. Euchhh. I did, however, fix a database thing that wasn't working in gzochi. Whatever.
Does Krasdale make anything that's not cheap and delicious? Their onion rings and seasoned fries: Delightful. Their frozen pizza: Sublime. Their waffles: Transcendant, and certainly light-years ahead of Eggo. Jesus. Their frozen mixed veggies: Gave me extremely painful mud-butt. So that's one thing.
I thought I whined about grad-school recommendations already in this thing, but going back through the archives, I can't find it. Well, I asked this professor of mine for a recommendation back in August, and he made me jump through all of these hoops, basically, to get it. So I finally e-mail him all the information he'd asked for, and I don't hear squat from him -- at all. Not even any indication that he'd received any of my hard-won information that he'd asked for. And I sort of forget about it for a while. And then I realize, I gave him Nov. 2nd as a deadline for it, and it's practically Nov. 2nd now. So I e-mail him to politely ask how things are going, and he writes back almost immediately explaining that he just had decided to ignore a bunch of his old e-mail but that he'd get right on my thing. Deek!
Oh yeah, and THE YANKEES WIN THE PENNANT!
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Partisan Hackery
I don't feel like working on computer stuff just right now, so here is a 'blog entry. The laptop -- she is'a doing'a great! X Windows is not as 3-D accelerated as it could be, but it is accelerated, which is more than I could say for my old SiS. Also, I have to use Xine instead of all that fancy new GNOME Gstreamer stuff, because Gstreamer is... how you say. Not so good yet.
What is that I just quoted, right there? If you haven't seen it, I encourage you to click here. It is delightful. I'll quote some more of it in a bit. Go here, too: Rude Pundit. I recommend this one and this one and this one.
One computer thing I've been doing is working on this GNU system called Guile, which is an embeddable Scheme interpreter. I use Guile as the workhorse for gzochi's game-design language -- actually, Guile Scheme is gzochi's game-design language, and I embed Guile to make the games run. One problem, though, that I've had since day one, is that Guile's thread support is a bit shaky. Wait a second, have I explained threads in the blog before? Sometimes I like to explain some of this technical stuff so that if people like Devlin, for example, who are somewhat technically naive, but who have some vested interest in understanding stuff can know what I'm talking about.
So: Many times you will be writing a program, and you will want to start doing two things at once -- say, you want to listen for keys getting typed at the keyboard but you also want to be printing out messages you're getting from an Internet connection and you also want to be playing some music or something. Well, given that a program (as conceived of by most programming languages) is a sequential list of things to be done, it is hard to make more than one thing appear to happen at once. I mean, more than one thing cannot be done at once, but if you switch back and forth very quickly, you can give the user the impression that these things are happening at once. And if you want to do this yourself, you would have to say, in your program, "Okay, read a little bit from the keyboard, and now write some stuff to the screen, wait, go back to the keyboard, okay play a few notes of music, back to the screen, etc." That's a pain. So the operating system will very often give you a hand with this, in the form of "threads." You tell the operating system, via your program, that you have several disparate lists of instructions you want it to execute, several "mini-programs," say, called threads, and the system will start executing them all and will handle all of the switching between them for you. You don't have to worry about it, for the most part, until they have to interact with each other in any way, and then you have to worry a lot. But that's what threads are, anyway. Here's some more Jon Stewart:
See, sometimes one thread will be running and another thread will discover that there's no point in having the first thread keep going and that it should be shut down; for native Unix (and Windows) threads, this second thread can do just that, by telling the system to cancel the first thread. It gets a little bit complicated, though, because this first thread might be in possession of some resources that can only be held by one thread at a time -- for example, maybe a thread has exclusive rights to write to a particular file. If the thread is cancelled, the file stays inaccessible to everyone else. To get around this, most thread implementations allow you to install what're called cleanup handlers for threads, which are sections of code that get run when a thread is cancelled. So, for example, before you "lock" a file to write to it in a particular thread, you install a cleanup handler that unlocks the file, so that if the thread is cancelled in the middle of writing, the file gets unlocked for later use. More Stewart:
Every Scheme thread created by Guile has some information associated with it, such as a value to return to other threads that are waiting for it to finish, etc. I take that information, and add a little bit more to it: A list of expressions that need to be evaluated when the thread receives a cancellation signal. See, Scheme's what's known as a functional language, so expressions (instead of instructions in a so-called imperative language) are the basic unit of currency. So before you put a lock on some resource in your new Guile thread, you add a cleanup handler to my list of handlers -- so that you can clean up if you get cancelled while you're using the resource -- and then when you're done, you uninstall the handler. It wasn't super hard to do.
Here are the problems so far: Guile does this fancy dynamic library thing when it loads which makes it rather difficult to debug, so it took me a while even to begin to make progress debugging things. Also, threads that aren't created by Guile are not straightforward to cover with the cancellation cleanup policy I described above -- think of it like this: You embed Guile as an interpreter for Scheme code in your C program. You have a thread of C code initialize Guile and start intepreting Scheme for you. Your Scheme-interpreting-C-thread represents, in a way, Scheme-thread #1. Let's say the Scheme code you're interpreting launches another thread of Scheme code -- this thread is Scheme-thread #2, and will also, at it's core, be C code interpreting Scheme code, but this thread is covered by the cancellation policy, whereas Scheme-thread #1 is not. I think that's a feature, not a bug.
We'll see if they like it.
More computer shit: So Raymond Chen just posted this thing about how application developers chronically misuse the Windows API -- e.g., storing application data in like, undisplayed components of the widget set -- and then Microsoft had to go out of their way to work around this so their program would still work in the next version of Windows; he says (used without permission):
STEWART: See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there to mow our lawns.
BEGALA: By beating up on them? You just said we're too rough on them when they make mistakes.
STEWART: No, no, no, you're not too rough on them. You're part of their strategies. You are partisan, what do you call it, hacks.
What is that I just quoted, right there? If you haven't seen it, I encourage you to click here. It is delightful. I'll quote some more of it in a bit. Go here, too: Rude Pundit. I recommend this one and this one and this one.
One computer thing I've been doing is working on this GNU system called Guile, which is an embeddable Scheme interpreter. I use Guile as the workhorse for gzochi's game-design language -- actually, Guile Scheme is gzochi's game-design language, and I embed Guile to make the games run. One problem, though, that I've had since day one, is that Guile's thread support is a bit shaky. Wait a second, have I explained threads in the blog before? Sometimes I like to explain some of this technical stuff so that if people like Devlin, for example, who are somewhat technically naive, but who have some vested interest in understanding stuff can know what I'm talking about.
So: Many times you will be writing a program, and you will want to start doing two things at once -- say, you want to listen for keys getting typed at the keyboard but you also want to be printing out messages you're getting from an Internet connection and you also want to be playing some music or something. Well, given that a program (as conceived of by most programming languages) is a sequential list of things to be done, it is hard to make more than one thing appear to happen at once. I mean, more than one thing cannot be done at once, but if you switch back and forth very quickly, you can give the user the impression that these things are happening at once. And if you want to do this yourself, you would have to say, in your program, "Okay, read a little bit from the keyboard, and now write some stuff to the screen, wait, go back to the keyboard, okay play a few notes of music, back to the screen, etc." That's a pain. So the operating system will very often give you a hand with this, in the form of "threads." You tell the operating system, via your program, that you have several disparate lists of instructions you want it to execute, several "mini-programs," say, called threads, and the system will start executing them all and will handle all of the switching between them for you. You don't have to worry about it, for the most part, until they have to interact with each other in any way, and then you have to worry a lot. But that's what threads are, anyway. Here's some more Jon Stewart:
BEGALA: Let me get this straight. If the indictment is -- if the indictment is -- and I have seen you say this -- that...Right, so Guile, when I started investigating it, supported a form of threading, which I needed, because the games being hosted by the gzochi server would need to be able to evaluate Scheme code concurrently with each other, but it was a weird, custom kind that wouldn't interact well with the operating system's normal threads. But the Guile people are in the middle of writing a new version and they've fixed that aspect of their thread stuff, and I'm excited about it. However, it looked like they still hadn't fixed this other thing, which is that their thread support didn't entail letting you cancel running threads.
STEWART: Yes.
BEGALA: And that CROSSFIRE reduces everything, as I said in the intro, to left, right, black, white.
STEWART: Yes.
BEGALA: Well, it's because, see, we're a debate show.
STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great.
BEGALA: It's like saying The Weather Channel reduces everything to a storm front.
STEWART: I would love to see a debate show.
BEGALA: We're 30 minutes in a 24-hour day where we have each side on, as best we can get them, and have them fight it out.
STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great. To do a debate would be great. But that's like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.
See, sometimes one thread will be running and another thread will discover that there's no point in having the first thread keep going and that it should be shut down; for native Unix (and Windows) threads, this second thread can do just that, by telling the system to cancel the first thread. It gets a little bit complicated, though, because this first thread might be in possession of some resources that can only be held by one thread at a time -- for example, maybe a thread has exclusive rights to write to a particular file. If the thread is cancelled, the file stays inaccessible to everyone else. To get around this, most thread implementations allow you to install what're called cleanup handlers for threads, which are sections of code that get run when a thread is cancelled. So, for example, before you "lock" a file to write to it in a particular thread, you install a cleanup handler that unlocks the file, so that if the thread is cancelled in the middle of writing, the file gets unlocked for later use. More Stewart:
STEWART: But the thing is that this -- you're doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great.So Guile didn't have thread cancellation, which is something I needed, so that threads of Scheme evaluation that took too long wouldn't get the game "stuck." Well, I figured since the new version was in active development, I'd take a shot at it myself. Here's how I did it:
BEGALA: We do, do...
STEWART: It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.
CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're accusing us of partisan hackery?
STEWART: Absolutely.
CARLSON: You've got to be kidding me. He comes on and you...
STEWART: You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.
Every Scheme thread created by Guile has some information associated with it, such as a value to return to other threads that are waiting for it to finish, etc. I take that information, and add a little bit more to it: A list of expressions that need to be evaluated when the thread receives a cancellation signal. See, Scheme's what's known as a functional language, so expressions (instead of instructions in a so-called imperative language) are the basic unit of currency. So before you put a lock on some resource in your new Guile thread, you add a cleanup handler to my list of handlers -- so that you can clean up if you get cancelled while you're using the resource -- and then when you're done, you uninstall the handler. It wasn't super hard to do.
Here are the problems so far: Guile does this fancy dynamic library thing when it loads which makes it rather difficult to debug, so it took me a while even to begin to make progress debugging things. Also, threads that aren't created by Guile are not straightforward to cover with the cancellation cleanup policy I described above -- think of it like this: You embed Guile as an interpreter for Scheme code in your C program. You have a thread of C code initialize Guile and start intepreting Scheme for you. Your Scheme-interpreting-C-thread represents, in a way, Scheme-thread #1. Let's say the Scheme code you're interpreting launches another thread of Scheme code -- this thread is Scheme-thread #2, and will also, at it's core, be C code interpreting Scheme code, but this thread is covered by the cancellation policy, whereas Scheme-thread #1 is not. I think that's a feature, not a bug.
We'll see if they like it.
More computer shit: So Raymond Chen just posted this thing about how application developers chronically misuse the Windows API -- e.g., storing application data in like, undisplayed components of the widget set -- and then Microsoft had to go out of their way to work around this so their program would still work in the next version of Windows; he says (used without permission):
The moral of the story: Even if you change something that nobody should be relying on, there's a decent chance that somebody is relying on it.Some guy posted the following comment, which I think is a nice counterpoint (again, used without permission):
(I'm sure there will be the usual chorus of people who will say, "You should've just broken them." What if I told you that one of the programs that does this is a widly-used system administration tool? Eh, that probably wouldn't change your mind.)
Although it really is amusing to read all those stories about "bad guys" who did something wrong and nowadays we have a few megs of code only to catch them, what is the real moral in that?Raymond didn't have anything to say on that one, last time I checked. Imagine how good Windows could be if Microsoft didn't take this retarded tack when it came to developing it!
The only lesson I have learned is that I can use any dirty trick I want, if my app would be important enough that MS would test it (and then make sure it won't break). Why should I use ACT if MS will do that for me (and "repair" Windows accordingly)? (And if my app is not important enough, I'll just post some info about the trick to a newsgroup, someone else's important app will use it.)
Friday, October 15, 2004
The Inevitable Cave
Yeah, so I caved and bought a laptop, an IBM Thinkpad T41. It was killing me not being able to get any work done, and I told myself it would only be a waste of time not to get one now instead of like... later. I'm not going to say how much I paid for it, but I saved, say, $800 bucks, by buying it gently used off some dude on craigslist. He was getting rid of it because he wanted to buy a Thinkpad T41P or some shit. He wanted to talk my ear off about it and about this new GPS thing he bought for his car. I was lucky to get away.
Oh, one cool / irritating thing about this new thing is that it comes built-in with this hard drive shock-protection system, wherein this driver can detect when the laptop's being moved, so that... well, I don't know what practical application it actually has, but the Windows version of the software that come pre-installed seems to think that it's a great idea to literally suspend all PCI / IDE activity while the machine's getting moved around. Retarded. Fortunately, you can switch it off, and there's also this awesome display you can pull up with this little 3-D model of your laptop and if you tilt your laptop left, the little model tilts left, too. I could play with that all day.
So now I'm downloading a Knoppix CD that I boot off of to resize the Windows XP partition so that there's room for Debian (I'm keepin' XP this time around, for driver compatibility purposes and because the guy gave me Office 2003 and Photoshop for free). There's apparently this little unmarked, unpartitioned chunk of disk space at the end of the drive that I'm not supposed to overwrite because that's where IBM keeps a bunch of setup files and system restore data. What?! Retarded.
Umm... As soon as I get Linux set up, I'm going to set about adding thread cancellation support to Guile. That should be fun, if it's at all possible. Uh.
You talk big, little Devlin, but I think you'll find that even if people all deserve to be loved in some kind of intrinsic way, which I'm not really willing to take on faith, there's just too damn many of them out there, and their numbers are increasing all the time. Some of them have just got to go. And if one of them is me, so be it; just let me finish up this weblog entry first.
Today my usual Boss was having me take an inventory of sorts of every goddamn thing that we need to test in our software, and he was just sort of standing over my shoulder for a while not saying or doing anything, so I said, as a joke, "Are you jealous that I get to do all of this?" And I guess he wasn't really paying attention because he said, softly, "Hmmm. No." and just sort of wandered away.
Oh, one cool / irritating thing about this new thing is that it comes built-in with this hard drive shock-protection system, wherein this driver can detect when the laptop's being moved, so that... well, I don't know what practical application it actually has, but the Windows version of the software that come pre-installed seems to think that it's a great idea to literally suspend all PCI / IDE activity while the machine's getting moved around. Retarded. Fortunately, you can switch it off, and there's also this awesome display you can pull up with this little 3-D model of your laptop and if you tilt your laptop left, the little model tilts left, too. I could play with that all day.
So now I'm downloading a Knoppix CD that I boot off of to resize the Windows XP partition so that there's room for Debian (I'm keepin' XP this time around, for driver compatibility purposes and because the guy gave me Office 2003 and Photoshop for free). There's apparently this little unmarked, unpartitioned chunk of disk space at the end of the drive that I'm not supposed to overwrite because that's where IBM keeps a bunch of setup files and system restore data. What?! Retarded.
Umm... As soon as I get Linux set up, I'm going to set about adding thread cancellation support to Guile. That should be fun, if it's at all possible. Uh.
You talk big, little Devlin, but I think you'll find that even if people all deserve to be loved in some kind of intrinsic way, which I'm not really willing to take on faith, there's just too damn many of them out there, and their numbers are increasing all the time. Some of them have just got to go. And if one of them is me, so be it; just let me finish up this weblog entry first.
Today my usual Boss was having me take an inventory of sorts of every goddamn thing that we need to test in our software, and he was just sort of standing over my shoulder for a while not saying or doing anything, so I said, as a joke, "Are you jealous that I get to do all of this?" And I guess he wasn't really paying attention because he said, softly, "Hmmm. No." and just sort of wandered away.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Dawn Of The Shred
Guys, I don't know how strongly I can recommend Shaun of the Dead, but I will do my best: I heartily recommend that you go see Shaun of the Dead. There, that was easy! (It's really good.)
My goddamn fucking laptop is fucked up again. I tried to turn it on the other day and the Wireless card didn't pick anything up. So I checked the router, the modem, fucking everything, and it all turned out to be okay. Then I started poking around in the dmesg output, and it tells me that it's been "Disabling IRQ #11" during startup -- according to my fucking BIOS that's the fucking IRQ like all of my fucking PCI devices are listening to! The sound card, the PCMCIA slot, the onboard ethernet, the USB subsystem, the... fuck! So I start removing kernel modules, hoping that maybe it's a kernel problem, even though I haven't switched kernels in like a year, but no dice. I try to boot off a fresh Fedora Core 3 CD, and I get the same shit. I try to boot off a fresh Debian Sarge CD, I get a kernel panic. I install Windows XP, it makes functional the sound card and the onboard ethernet, but not the PCMCIA socket. I do an install of Fedora Core 3, and I'm back to square one again.
So here's what I've got: A 2.4 GHz laptop that can't get on the Internet and can't play sound. Oh yeah, and you can never unplug it because I had to superglue the power cord in place so it would stay charged after the fucking AC intake port just snapped in half. And the fucking case stopped latching 2 weeks after I got it. But I've got a 2.4 GHz laptop that pretty much works, except it doesn't work very much under Linux.
I need a new Linux machine so that I can continue my work. It's driving me crazy. The purchase anxiety... it's driving me crazy. These laptops, they're like... $1500! Jesus fuck. I don't know what to do. I need guidance. Any priests out there? Should I get a Thinkpad? Or a Dell? This is my one hobby. And I feel super-guilty getting rid of this laptop. Maybe Mer can use it?
My goddamn fucking laptop is fucked up again. I tried to turn it on the other day and the Wireless card didn't pick anything up. So I checked the router, the modem, fucking everything, and it all turned out to be okay. Then I started poking around in the dmesg output, and it tells me that it's been "Disabling IRQ #11" during startup -- according to my fucking BIOS that's the fucking IRQ like all of my fucking PCI devices are listening to! The sound card, the PCMCIA slot, the onboard ethernet, the USB subsystem, the... fuck! So I start removing kernel modules, hoping that maybe it's a kernel problem, even though I haven't switched kernels in like a year, but no dice. I try to boot off a fresh Fedora Core 3 CD, and I get the same shit. I try to boot off a fresh Debian Sarge CD, I get a kernel panic. I install Windows XP, it makes functional the sound card and the onboard ethernet, but not the PCMCIA socket. I do an install of Fedora Core 3, and I'm back to square one again.
So here's what I've got: A 2.4 GHz laptop that can't get on the Internet and can't play sound. Oh yeah, and you can never unplug it because I had to superglue the power cord in place so it would stay charged after the fucking AC intake port just snapped in half. And the fucking case stopped latching 2 weeks after I got it. But I've got a 2.4 GHz laptop that pretty much works, except it doesn't work very much under Linux.
I need a new Linux machine so that I can continue my work. It's driving me crazy. The purchase anxiety... it's driving me crazy. These laptops, they're like... $1500! Jesus fuck. I don't know what to do. I need guidance. Any priests out there? Should I get a Thinkpad? Or a Dell? This is my one hobby. And I feel super-guilty getting rid of this laptop. Maybe Mer can use it?
Thursday, October 07, 2004
And Now, Andy Rooney
A shot in the arm from my friend Billy, whom you all may know better as "Razor" or whatever it is you're always calling him:
It gets me really upset to see a lot of you fucking people saying that Cheney performed in any way well in that debate. What. Did. You. Watch? Are you insane? Edwards was a truth-telling (or relatively truth-telling) machine. Cheney had nothing to say. Did you just hear me? Nothing.
He had no answers. He mumbled. He looked like an evil villain. He muttered statistics that shouldn't have confused ANYBODY in their transparent bullshityness, but they did. He confused Amherst college kids. You fucking retards. Why are you buying into this even-handedness that the press is imposing on us? There is absolutely no time for that. Edwards squashed Cheney like a fucking bug, and all of America saw it, and in a few days, if all goes well, the real polls will come out (just like they did after the last Kerry/Bush debate) and they will show that 90% of fucking America concedes an all out victory for John Fucking Edwards. You fucking nitwits.
How the fuck can democrats think they have a chance of standing up to these bullies, these ogres, when all they do is give PUSSY FAGGOT ANSWERS AND EVEN-HANDED ANALYSES THAT AREN'T EVEN ACCURATE?! Why don't you fucking people out there who think that they fucking "split" or that Cheney had the "upper hand" watch the fucking debate again simply with an eye to who is more persuasive? With an eye to who is more correct?!
WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE? You're as bad as the fucking liberal, pussy, bitch-ass media, who are also rolling over backwards to suck Bush's cock while Cheney fucks them up the ass. You guys suck.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
In Which I Show My True Colors
Me: I mean jesus
Me: he blew it
Maggie: greater good julian. greater good.
Me: Can I vote for Kerry/Cheney?
Me: Cheney believes in gay marriage and hoarding money
Me: JUST WHAT I BELIEVE IN
Maggie: that's true
Maggie: we can't vote for president/vice-president seperately, can we?
Me: not unless you write it in
Maggie: do it
Maggie: make a statement
Me: he blew it
Maggie: greater good julian. greater good.
Me: Can I vote for Kerry/Cheney?
Me: Cheney believes in gay marriage and hoarding money
Me: JUST WHAT I BELIEVE IN
Maggie: that's true
Maggie: we can't vote for president/vice-president seperately, can we?
Me: not unless you write it in
Maggie: do it
Maggie: make a statement
Monday, October 04, 2004
Bloodweiser: King of Fears
Here's what I did on my first day of vacation, scallywags:
As far as I'm concerned, each of you falls into one of three categories:
- Tidied up the apartment
- Did the dishes, including getting that algae-like gunk off the baking tray
- Vacuumed the carpet, including fixing the fucking Dust-Buster knockoff thing we have because that rubber band thing inside it kept slipping off
- Baked cookies
- Played Morrowind
- Played Halo
- Played Final Fantasy Chronicles
- Donated some of my old books to the NYPL
- Made another goddamn vet appointment for the cat
- Programmed
As far as I'm concerned, each of you falls into one of three categories:
- People who want to read Rallmonster's latest screed against Spiegelman
- People who think Adam Cadre is teh awesome
- People who want to see Shaun of the Dead with me
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Eat Shit: I Am On Vacation
That's right, dick-lickers! A whole week. (I am literally going to kill myself, probably.)
To borrow some pages from Devlin's lexicon, it took them forever on Friday to get the goddamn build out. And the whole day, it was all, "Okay, don't get involved in any side projects, because the build is going to be out any second." And then the build came out and it was obviously bad and they didn't get it rebuilt until 7:30 PM. 7:30! I know that doesn't mean much to you guys who have to work until like 4:00 AM every day, but we... well, it's different. And that was too late to give us a build. So we actually just played Freeciv all day; I thought I'd kick everyone's ass, but this new QA guy apparently plays a lot of Freeciv and kicked my ass instead.
Then I went over to The Rase's place and she and I and the charming Asta peeped on some Bananas. Is it just me or does anyone else find those unevenly-cut slapstick moments in early Woody Allen movies (like in this one, the part where he's undressing to have sex with this revolutionary chick and he keeps waving his jacket around) kind of disturbing? It looks like you're watching a home video of someone about to commit a crime.
Okay, you guys remember that thing I wrote about that asshole guy yelling at the subway intercom? I'm pretty sure I saw the same fucking dude on the way home. He's this pudgy guy with a neat little beard / goatee and not too much hair on his head, but it's all curly and greasy, and he's got this ugly little crooked mushmouth of a mouth. So the F train was pretty crowded, and I'm standing next to this guy and he's hugging his girlfriend really close in this way that strongly suggests he's never had a girlfriend before, and what's more, he's fucking whispering all this shit to her. He's like -- and this guy is like a 70% vocal match for The Comic Book Guy -- he's like, "I am so sorry for those things I said at the party. I was tired and I wanted to go home and... it was rude... and selfish... I swear I will never behave that way ever again." Jesus Christ. And then at 2nd Ave., a couple of people got on that this guy and he's girlfriend seemed to know, and he starts talking to them real loud:
The thing is, I kept thinking, "Oh god, who is this girl who is going out with this monster?" And she looked pretty hot from behind, a little like my friend Emily from Amherst. But then she turned around, and you know what? She was ugly.
To borrow some pages from Devlin's lexicon, it took them forever on Friday to get the goddamn build out. And the whole day, it was all, "Okay, don't get involved in any side projects, because the build is going to be out any second." And then the build came out and it was obviously bad and they didn't get it rebuilt until 7:30 PM. 7:30! I know that doesn't mean much to you guys who have to work until like 4:00 AM every day, but we... well, it's different. And that was too late to give us a build. So we actually just played Freeciv all day; I thought I'd kick everyone's ass, but this new QA guy apparently plays a lot of Freeciv and kicked my ass instead.
Then I went over to The Rase's place and she and I and the charming Asta peeped on some Bananas. Is it just me or does anyone else find those unevenly-cut slapstick moments in early Woody Allen movies (like in this one, the part where he's undressing to have sex with this revolutionary chick and he keeps waving his jacket around) kind of disturbing? It looks like you're watching a home video of someone about to commit a crime.
Okay, you guys remember that thing I wrote about that asshole guy yelling at the subway intercom? I'm pretty sure I saw the same fucking dude on the way home. He's this pudgy guy with a neat little beard / goatee and not too much hair on his head, but it's all curly and greasy, and he's got this ugly little crooked mushmouth of a mouth. So the F train was pretty crowded, and I'm standing next to this guy and he's hugging his girlfriend really close in this way that strongly suggests he's never had a girlfriend before, and what's more, he's fucking whispering all this shit to her. He's like -- and this guy is like a 70% vocal match for The Comic Book Guy -- he's like, "I am so sorry for those things I said at the party. I was tired and I wanted to go home and... it was rude... and selfish... I swear I will never behave that way ever again." Jesus Christ. And then at 2nd Ave., a couple of people got on that this guy and he's girlfriend seemed to know, and he starts talking to them real loud:
(Indicating his girlfriend) "This is the first Friday night she's had off in years, and we just had the most random evening. We met this Taiwanese tourist and took him around all the downtown attractions. He's staying in an apartment in Chelsea, but he's afraid of all the gays. You know, all the gays in Chelsea. So we're drinking and talking about, you know, smoking pot, and he says he's afraid to smoke pot because when he does he feels like a giant Taiwanese penis. Yeah, he literally said that! So, I'm like, 'Hey man, that's cool. It's all good.'"You monster. Jesus Christ. Guess where he lives. That's right -- Carroll Gardens. One more reason to drop a nuke on all of us. Right. Now.
The thing is, I kept thinking, "Oh god, who is this girl who is going out with this monster?" And she looked pretty hot from behind, a little like my friend Emily from Amherst. But then she turned around, and you know what? She was ugly.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Sky Captain and the World of the Washed Out-Looking Two-Dimensional Harmless Robots
So, how were those debates, huh? Kerry totally won, right? Is it just me, or did Kerry come out ahead. Mark Shields agrees with me. But here's the thing -- I listen to Air America all the time, and they love to say, "This new study came out in The Washington Post," or "an article in The Nation claims," and, I mean, guys, these are left-wing newspapers. We're part of your base, so we definitely know this, and if you're trying to make us feel good, please quote something supportive from, oh, I don't know... like... David Brooks or that dumb fuck Friedman or something.
I... hmmm. My mind is bad tonight. I can't... remember things. Ugh.
Busy, busy, busy at work. Boy, I can't wait until [New software version] comes out! What a huge amount of personal pride I will take in the finished product! Some fucking salesperson scumbag told us all the other day, "I thank God every day for [other leathery salesperson, whose knowledge of computing is matched only by his success at being a non-awful non-scumsucking Willy Loman waste of space]." Jesus. Christ. People, I'm not taking anyone to task for not caring about something boring, but hey, I put in the time here -- in computer stuff, that is, not work. Thank God for me, because I care about boring shit so you don't have to.
Speaking of which, I'm still trying to get some developer docs for gzochi together. Plus, I'm trying to get more aggressive about actually implementing stuff now that will make it possible to get some game-like things working. I'm developing this sample "game" called "chat-example" that will hopefully be illustrative for new game designers, and I'm using it to help myself flesh out the Guile-to-C interface I want to implement; that is, I pretend that I have the entire API and XML parsing system that I need, and just go ahead and implement stuff and refer to not-yet-written procedures and stuff like that. This way I know what's necessary for when I go back and write the game management side of things. I've already discovered that I'll need to add at least some kind of minimal class/inheritance logic to make objects act the way you'd expect as a developer. Shit -- "logic." That's a business word for "the ideas in the algorithm." This shit is rubbing off on me.
Racist, racist, racist.
I gave some more money to Kerry yesterday. He didn't disappoint me tonight.
I... hmmm. My mind is bad tonight. I can't... remember things. Ugh.
Busy, busy, busy at work. Boy, I can't wait until [New software version] comes out! What a huge amount of personal pride I will take in the finished product! Some fucking salesperson scumbag told us all the other day, "I thank God every day for [other leathery salesperson, whose knowledge of computing is matched only by his success at being a non-awful non-scumsucking Willy Loman waste of space]." Jesus. Christ. People, I'm not taking anyone to task for not caring about something boring, but hey, I put in the time here -- in computer stuff, that is, not work. Thank God for me, because I care about boring shit so you don't have to.
Speaking of which, I'm still trying to get some developer docs for gzochi together. Plus, I'm trying to get more aggressive about actually implementing stuff now that will make it possible to get some game-like things working. I'm developing this sample "game" called "chat-example" that will hopefully be illustrative for new game designers, and I'm using it to help myself flesh out the Guile-to-C interface I want to implement; that is, I pretend that I have the entire API and XML parsing system that I need, and just go ahead and implement stuff and refer to not-yet-written procedures and stuff like that. This way I know what's necessary for when I go back and write the game management side of things. I've already discovered that I'll need to add at least some kind of minimal class/inheritance logic to make objects act the way you'd expect as a developer. Shit -- "logic." That's a business word for "the ideas in the algorithm." This shit is rubbing off on me.
Racist, racist, racist.
I gave some more money to Kerry yesterday. He didn't disappoint me tonight.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Tekeli-li!
Sky Captain? More like, "I Sky Crapped in my pants over how awful this movie is!" More like, "Sky Captain and The Non-Interactive Backdrop." More like, "Ia! Ia! Shub Niggurath!" Devin didn't like it neither, and he literally majored in liking things. Good boy, Dex.
Look at this, found on Jamie Zawinski's blog. It got me so paranoid and depressed that I printed out some Bertrand Russell to use as ammo should the need arise. Don't think it will -- the F's pretty secular.
Speaking of cockroaches, the roach problem here is bad tonight. I bought 4 new roach motels and put three of them in the kitchen, because those fuckers are getting bold. I saw a little one and a big waterbug in the cabinets wihin the span of like 15 minutes. Don't tell Mer. She'll find out when she reads this, anyway.
I went up to visit my old friend Asta last night -- yes, that's right, Sunday -- up in the 'Heights, round 187th or so. She was having a "hard liquor and boardgames" party, a premise dangerously close to hipsterism, but which turned out to be really sweet and nice. I saw a bunch of fairly acceptable people from high school, including, I'm pretty sure, a literal date-rapist, and got along pretty well with 'em all. The second best part, though, was coming home on the A. I was in the last car and it was empty and noisy -- perfect setting for a little singin' to one's self. And I sang all the way down to 145th, when this guy came into the car and wanted to sketch my portrait. "Not that you want or need a portrait," he said, "but I do the whole thing while the train is moving. I'm that good."
Look at this, found on Jamie Zawinski's blog. It got me so paranoid and depressed that I printed out some Bertrand Russell to use as ammo should the need arise. Don't think it will -- the F's pretty secular.
My house smells just like a zoo
It's chock full of shit and puke
Cockroaches on the walls
Crabs crawlin' on my balls
Aw, but I'm so clean cut -- I just wanna fuck some slut!
Speaking of cockroaches, the roach problem here is bad tonight. I bought 4 new roach motels and put three of them in the kitchen, because those fuckers are getting bold. I saw a little one and a big waterbug in the cabinets wihin the span of like 15 minutes. Don't tell Mer. She'll find out when she reads this, anyway.
I went up to visit my old friend Asta last night -- yes, that's right, Sunday -- up in the 'Heights, round 187th or so. She was having a "hard liquor and boardgames" party, a premise dangerously close to hipsterism, but which turned out to be really sweet and nice. I saw a bunch of fairly acceptable people from high school, including, I'm pretty sure, a literal date-rapist, and got along pretty well with 'em all. The second best part, though, was coming home on the A. I was in the last car and it was empty and noisy -- perfect setting for a little singin' to one's self. And I sang all the way down to 145th, when this guy came into the car and wanted to sketch my portrait. "Not that you want or need a portrait," he said, "but I do the whole thing while the train is moving. I'm that good."
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Chunk-Star
Don't drink, don't smoke, don't fuck -- fuck you!Listen to what happened. It's a computer thing, but it's crazy. I was fixing my sister's computer -- something I have to do every few months because she's always installing viruses and spyware and things like that. Usually it just means running AdAware and such, but this time I thought I'd install Windows XP Service Pack 2 in the hope that all the new security fixes would let me off the hook for this sort of thing in the future.
Straight-edge kids... fuck you!
Okay, so I get the laptop home and plug it into my network and it starts downloading SP2 automatically, which is nice. So that takes a while, and then it's 'validating' the download or some shit, so I go and start making some food. Well, I get back, and the laptop has turned itself off. This is where the crazy stuff begins. Guys, just so you know, I know next to nothing about any of this Windows shit, so keep it mind I am just guessing how to do all this stuff as I'm doing it.
Me: Oh, maybe SP2 needed to restart the laptop but it got turned off by accident. (Turns laptop back on.)
Laptop: (Begins to boot into Windows, then, accompanied by Blue Screen of Death) PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED.
Me: Hmmm... the laptop is awfully hot. Maybe some internal motherboard sensor is freaking out. (Waits 10 minutes. Starts laptop up again.)
Laptop: PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED.
Me: Gee, this looks bad. Let me search the Internet on my other computer to see what this means.
Internet: (Thinks for a while.) You are fucked. Format your hard disk and re-install Windows XP.
Me: Ack! No, I can't do that! This is my sister's laptop -- it's got all her MP3s on it and she needs it to write a paper for school tomorrow night! There's gotta be something I can do... oh, I know, I'll boot off a Windows XP CD and try to check the hard disk for errors. (Burns a copy of Windows XP Professional, Yale Academic Edition, and boots off of it.)
Laptop, via Windows XP CD: Do you want to start the Recovery Console?
Me: Ooh, that sounds good. Yeah!
Laptop: What's the Administrator password?
Me: Oh, fuck, I don't know. Hang on. (Makes a phone call to parents' house.) Hey, sister, what is the Administrator password?
Sister: There is no Administrator password!
Me: Okay, thanks. (Hangs up. Tries the CD-boot thing again.)
Laptop: What's the Administrator password?
Me: Ah, fuck.
Internet: Excuse me, but have you heard about these special programs you can use to reset Windows XP Administrator passwords? You burn them onto a CD and then you boot off the CD and then you can reset the password. Here, try this one.
Me: Oh, okay, thanks. (Burns the program onto a CD and boots the laptop off of it.)
Laptop, via Linux NTFS CD: Hey, you wanna try to reset the Administrator password?
Me: Yeah!
Laptop: Sorry, your registry files are corrupt! Peace!
Internet: Okay, that one didn't work out so well. You wanna try again with this one?
Me: Well... alright. (Burns the program onto a CD and boots the laptop off of it.)
Laptop, via Linux NTFS CD v2: Hey, you wanna try to reset the Administrator password?
Me: Yeah!
Laptop: Sorry, your registry files are corrupt! Peace! Oh, wait -- you wanna try to change the settings for the Recovery Console so it doesn't need the Administrator password?
Me: Uh... yeah, that sounds good. Let's do it. (Does it. Puts the Windows XP Boot CD back in the drive and reboots.)
Laptop: Okay, here's the Recovery Console. As you can see, it's a lot like DOS. You can type stuff and run a few programs.
Me: Well, I'm pretty sure this is all due to some kind of filesystem problem. Laptop, can we check the disk for errors?
Laptop: Sure. (Thinks for a while.) The disk is fine.
Me: Hmmm... what should we do now? Internet, any ideas?
Internet: Well, the registry, the giant configuration file for Windows, is divided into two big pieces. One's called SOFTWARE and has settings for installed programs; the other one's called SYSTEM and has all the settings for the hardware. There are backups of both files in "C:\WINDOWS\REPAIR."
Me: Okay, let's replace the SOFTWARE file with the backup one.
Laptop: PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILURE.
Me: That didn't work. Let's try replacing the SYSTEM file with the backup.
Laptop: (Reboots ad infinitum.)
Me: That's not good either. Well, I'm out of ideas again.
Internet: Excuse me, but I just found something that Microsoft's saying that might be helpful. Microsoft?
Microsoft: Yes, thanks, hmmm... well, you see, if you've got a bad Service Pack 2 installation, you can roll it back using the Recovery Console by typing 'batch spuninst.txt'.
Me: Okay, I'll try that. (Does. It works. The laptop is now back in the state it was in before the trouble started -- still with several viruses and spyware programs. It is 2:30 AM.)
And... scene.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Orance Juice Guerillas
Hey Bill, if you're reading this, check it out -- I had this dream last night that we were hanging out on the L.E.S. and went to get some Chinese food. You wanted dim sum; I wanted to get some broccoli with garlic sauce, but the chef or whoever it was we were ordering from was like, "No! Dim sum only!" He explained that it was close to closing time and that he had all this dim sum that he had to get rid of, so dim sum was what I had to get. And you know, I'm not even a hundred percent sure what dim sum is -- I think it's this little pancake thing you use to wrap up some other food items -- but in my dream, dim sum was like millions of little bright pink shrimp with their shells on, and you'd just get this little wooden drawer full of them all neatly stacked in rows, and you just had to reach in and put a handful in your mouth. They were crunchy, on account of the shells, and had this vaguely stale taste, like an attic. Not unpleasant, but not pleasant, either.
Also you mentioned that Laura was hassling you for child support for this kid that you said you two'd never had. I asked whether you were going to try to prove that she was scamming you, but you were like, "No. She's got a paternity test that says it's mine." Oh.
Also you mentioned that Laura was hassling you for child support for this kid that you said you two'd never had. I asked whether you were going to try to prove that she was scamming you, but you were like, "No. She's got a paternity test that says it's mine." Oh.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
"Who The Hell Is Elaine Stritch"
This is a great recipe -- I just made it. The culinarilly-inclined among you (Ted) may want to give it a shot. Takes about half an hour to prepare; cost like $15, serves two. For $7 more you could make enough for four, I'd wager.
Watching the Emmys for some reason. Tony Kushner, you are the original punk rocker.
I just solved this stupid synchronization problem that I'd been poking at all weekend and not getting. I say it's stupid because it looks obvious now that I've solved it, but, you know... ugh. And of course I'm going to explain because that's one of the things I like to do. So.
A semaphore is a synchronization primitive (well, it's not necessarily a primitive, but...) consisting of a condition variable and a counter. You can "wait on the semaphore" by attempting to decrement the value of the counter. If it's greater than zero when you do this, the counter gets decremented and the call returns immediately; if it's zero, your thread goes to sleep until another thread "posts the semaphore," incrementing the value of the counter, at which point your thread wakes up, decrements it, and the call returns.
Many semaphore implementations provide, in addition to the "wait" function, a "trywait" function, in which you merely check the value of the semaphore, and if it's zero, instead of sleeping, you just inform the calling thread that it would have slept. If it's not zero, you do what the normal wait function does, which is decrement the value of the counter and return. My semaphore implementation provides this function.
Here's what happened: I wanted to wait for an item to be added to this queue (the queue's embedded semaphore would get posted when this happened). I didn't want to wait forever, though, so I did a trywait on the queue's semaphore, and if it came back false, indicating that the value of the counter was zero, I would wait for a while to see if somebody added something to the queue -- and if they did, grab it and return it, otherwise just return NULL. Here's the problem: I'd do the trywait, it would come back false, so I'd sleep for a while, get woken up by somebody adding to the queue, grab the value, but hold on a sec -- the semaphore's counter never got decremented, because the trywait came back false initially and we never decremented when we got woken up! So the next person to wait for an item to get added to the list would see that the semaphore's counter was non-zero, decrement it, try to grab something off the list, get NULL, and, well... It showed up in my program as the server pinging the client over and over without waiting for the timeout period to pass.
Why do I post these boring explanations of boring stuff? Well, because it's not boring, fuckers -- it's awesome! It's totally a mind-blow the extent to which code can seem like this gaseous, chaotic stuff until you resolve a bug and all of a sudden it all coalesces into a beautiful, mechanically glorious whole. Three worlds, guys. Three worlds.
Starting to work on documentation; DocBook is real fun to work with, but the docbook2texinfo converter is super frustrating because it insists on naming your fucking info document with a normalized string it generates based on a bunch of mystery factors that I can't control. Like, for example, I can't make it produce 'gzochi-server.info' out of 'gzochi-server-manual.docbook.xml'. The best I can seem to do is 'gzochi_server_manual.info'. You hear that Steve Cheng? Insane. And don't get me started on how retarded automake can be when it comes to dynamically-generated documentation.
I didn't do anything this weekend.
Watching the Emmys for some reason. Tony Kushner, you are the original punk rocker.
I just solved this stupid synchronization problem that I'd been poking at all weekend and not getting. I say it's stupid because it looks obvious now that I've solved it, but, you know... ugh. And of course I'm going to explain because that's one of the things I like to do. So.
A semaphore is a synchronization primitive (well, it's not necessarily a primitive, but...) consisting of a condition variable and a counter. You can "wait on the semaphore" by attempting to decrement the value of the counter. If it's greater than zero when you do this, the counter gets decremented and the call returns immediately; if it's zero, your thread goes to sleep until another thread "posts the semaphore," incrementing the value of the counter, at which point your thread wakes up, decrements it, and the call returns.
Many semaphore implementations provide, in addition to the "wait" function, a "trywait" function, in which you merely check the value of the semaphore, and if it's zero, instead of sleeping, you just inform the calling thread that it would have slept. If it's not zero, you do what the normal wait function does, which is decrement the value of the counter and return. My semaphore implementation provides this function.
Here's what happened: I wanted to wait for an item to be added to this queue (the queue's embedded semaphore would get posted when this happened). I didn't want to wait forever, though, so I did a trywait on the queue's semaphore, and if it came back false, indicating that the value of the counter was zero, I would wait for a while to see if somebody added something to the queue -- and if they did, grab it and return it, otherwise just return NULL. Here's the problem: I'd do the trywait, it would come back false, so I'd sleep for a while, get woken up by somebody adding to the queue, grab the value, but hold on a sec -- the semaphore's counter never got decremented, because the trywait came back false initially and we never decremented when we got woken up! So the next person to wait for an item to get added to the list would see that the semaphore's counter was non-zero, decrement it, try to grab something off the list, get NULL, and, well... It showed up in my program as the server pinging the client over and over without waiting for the timeout period to pass.
Why do I post these boring explanations of boring stuff? Well, because it's not boring, fuckers -- it's awesome! It's totally a mind-blow the extent to which code can seem like this gaseous, chaotic stuff until you resolve a bug and all of a sudden it all coalesces into a beautiful, mechanically glorious whole. Three worlds, guys. Three worlds.
Starting to work on documentation; DocBook is real fun to work with, but the docbook2texinfo converter is super frustrating because it insists on naming your fucking info document with a normalized string it generates based on a bunch of mystery factors that I can't control. Like, for example, I can't make it produce 'gzochi-server.info' out of 'gzochi-server-manual.docbook.xml'. The best I can seem to do is 'gzochi_server_manual.info'. You hear that Steve Cheng? Insane. And don't get me started on how retarded automake can be when it comes to dynamically-generated documentation.
I didn't do anything this weekend.
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Marky Next
So... here's a funny thing: I was at Panchito's over in the most horrible part of New York on any night of the week, Minetta Lane, to celebrate Katharine's birthday last week, and Sophie's friend Lisa was there with her boyfriend Dan Slobbo. I hadn't seen her since graduation, so she was asking me about my job and everything, and I told her I worked for a company that made distributed computing software. She seemed sort of taken aback for a second, then she said, "Well, I hope you're doing your best to make it less stupid and confusing." See, she misheard me. Hah. It's not terribly confusing, but it is stupid, I tell you what.
Oh yeah, and going home on the F, the train was making express stops because of construction or something, so one of the conductors was announcing which stops were gonna get skipped, but the intercom system was characteristically crackly, and it just so happened that whoever was driving the train needed to honk the horn at that moment because we were trying to pass another train or something, and, well, those subway horns are loud, so you basically couldn't hear the stops that the woman was announcing. Anyway, this fat, pretentious-looking dude sitting next to his girlfriend yells at the top of his lungs, "We can't hear you when you're blowing the horn! Argh!" Man, that pissed me off. I mean, I've got no surplus of love for the MTA, but:
Wow, how much is it literally about to rain?
So I just came back from the laundromat, where there's this adorable fat old curly-haired golden retriever. Okay, so some of the dryers they have are missing these top panel pieces, so you can see the inner workings of the machine, and guess what -- it's on fucking fire! Is this how all dryers work? The first time I saw it I thought something had gone wrong, but all the dryers there seem to do that. I guess if you want to make something hot, fire's the way to go.
Oh yeah, and going home on the F, the train was making express stops because of construction or something, so one of the conductors was announcing which stops were gonna get skipped, but the intercom system was characteristically crackly, and it just so happened that whoever was driving the train needed to honk the horn at that moment because we were trying to pass another train or something, and, well, those subway horns are loud, so you basically couldn't hear the stops that the woman was announcing. Anyway, this fat, pretentious-looking dude sitting next to his girlfriend yells at the top of his lungs, "We can't hear you when you're blowing the horn! Argh!" Man, that pissed me off. I mean, I've got no surplus of love for the MTA, but:
- The person speaking over the intercom is not necessarily the person driving the train, moron.
- She's gonna read it at every stop.
- No one finds it plausible that you were so overcome with rage that you just had to vent your frustration in the most affronted-white person way in the middle of a crowded subway car on a Tuesday night.
- No one is impressed by your inability to control yourself.
- You are a fucking idiot.
Wow, how much is it literally about to rain?
So I just came back from the laundromat, where there's this adorable fat old curly-haired golden retriever. Okay, so some of the dryers they have are missing these top panel pieces, so you can see the inner workings of the machine, and guess what -- it's on fucking fire! Is this how all dryers work? The first time I saw it I thought something had gone wrong, but all the dryers there seem to do that. I guess if you want to make something hot, fire's the way to go.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Snapple-Grappling
I'm not much of a photog, but this sunset a couple of days ago was so pretty that I had to take a picture. That's our fire escape.
Man, was my stomach fucked up tonight! I was eating carrots all day at work and I guess that was too much fiber, because when I got home some things started churning around down there. It's funny because usually when I get sick to my stomach it's this awful whole-body thing where I just feel like I'm gonna die all over, but this time my mind was very clear and I was just thinking to myself that I'd better get to a shitter. And boy, did it stink. I'm sorry, but it's true. The thing is, I was in the middle of feeding the cat -- I'll get to that in a second -- when I had a real strong urge to go, and she was so intent on getting me to finish mixing her food that she tried to follow me to the bathroom. I'd left the bathroom door slightly ajar and she stuck her paw in and tried her hardest to open it. After warning her that she wasn't gonna like the smell, I cracked the door enough for her to poke her head in, and she did, but yanked it right back out as soon as she got a whiff in this really funny awkward way.
Oh yeah, so the vet thinks she might be chewing on herself because of a food allergy, so we're feeding her this 'limited ingredient' cat food, which apparently consists of naught but duck and peas. Sick, right? And the weird thing is, she's hungry all the time now. She can't wait to suck down her next serving of this greyish-green gelatinous puree.
Guess which of my many Bosses came back from two weeks of paternity leave that I'm pretty sure are in addition to his standard 4 weeks of vacation and opened our first meeting with, "I don't care [if] you got to stay late." Take as many guesses as you like.
As if you guys didn't have enough blogs to read, Raymond Chen over at Microsoft has a great and interesting blog about the reasons behind various Windows / Microsoft / x86 idiosyncrasies. Everyone praises it; now I'm praising it.
Jesus Fucking Christ: (link-a-dink)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China executed four people, including employees of two of its Big Four state-owned banks, for fraud totaling $15 million, the state Xinhua news agency said Tuesday....
The precise number of people executed for all crimes in China is a state secret. Reports range from 5,000 to 10,000 a year, many for murder, but they have also been killed for corruption and crimes as minor as bottom-pinching.Maggles has a 'blog. She didn't think I'd find it, but I did.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Red Hot Moon
Bill, when we were talking outside the club last night I kind of backed into Kevin's friend, that big guy John (or he crept up on me) and he was so... soft. Huge soft smiling weirdo.
I took The Rase out to dinner tonight and who should we see at Dojo but our old friends Asta and the loathsome Zeke. I hadn't seen Asta in years, literally. She is looking good, let me tell you. She once told this guy who was giving her a hard time "Suck my pussy!" and, you know, was pretty much able to sell that line in an earnest, non-sassy way, no easy task.
Um. What. Else. I am thoroughly bored and not bored with my job.
I took The Rase out to dinner tonight and who should we see at Dojo but our old friends Asta and the loathsome Zeke. I hadn't seen Asta in years, literally. She is looking good, let me tell you. She once told this guy who was giving her a hard time "Suck my pussy!" and, you know, was pretty much able to sell that line in an earnest, non-sassy way, no easy task.
Um. What. Else. I am thoroughly bored and not bored with my job.
Weilding His Hideous Sandwich
No new 'blog entries in a while -- sorry, guys!
Man, was it ever hard to get to work yesterday. I waited for like half an hour at the 7th Ave. F stop before someone on the opposite track yelled out to us that the East Broadway stop was flooded and that F trains were basically not going into Manhattan. So I got out of the station and grabbed the B67 to Flatbush and 7th Ave. for the 7th Ave. Q/B stop. A B came pretty quickly, and I thought my troubles were over until we got over the Manhattan bridge and then just... stopped. After about half an hour or 45 minutes or so, the radio twittered to us that there was a power outage at the West 4th St. stop and that trains who'd been trying to enter that station had decided to turn around and go back to Brooklyn. At first I thought that that's what we were going to do, which would have sucked, but it turned out we were just going to sit there and wait for them to get out of our way. That took about 30 more minutes. Finally they nudged our train just barely into Grand St. and we all had to walk through the train to the first car to exit. And there was a D train just sitting at Grand St. waiting to take me to work! And it did! That was great.
But the most irritating part of all of this was this very pear-shaped, baby-faced, acne ridden business-casual intern guy in our car who was or was acting like about 15 years old the whole goddamn time. He would take off his fucking discman headphones every few minutes and say things like, "They just can't do this to us. Fuck;" or, announcing to the whole car, "Okay, what I need right now is a fucking cigarette." Great, all the construction workers and part-time security guards trying to get to work are very impressed at what a grown-up smoker you are. They totally don't think you're a faggot. The more he said, "Fuck," the more ineffectual and irritating he sounded. Damn it. Oh yeah, and he totally wasn't cool with having to evacuate the train. While we were filing out, he kept asking everyone, "What are we doing? What are we doing? Are they going to make us walk through the tracks? Because I'm definitely not cool with that."
Anyway, what am I doing? I don't know. This laptop feels like it's ready to bite the dust. Yesterday I couldn't even get it to turn on.
Saw some Big Business last night. Happy Birthday, Chrittopher! With the help of Eric Prengel, I bought a delicious hero sandwich for only $4.50, and it lasted me all night!
Tom lent me a copy of Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, and it's really great, particularly the drawings. The reportage is, well, I don't know, it could use a good editor, most of it. But the drawings are fantastic, especially the ones Sacco does of himself. He looks totally creepy in his comic, even though he's actually kind of good looking in real life. I'm also reading W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
I miss you, too, little man!
What's going on with my programming project? Sorry guys, this has to be a part of every entry. Well, I got the ncurses interface for the little debug client I'm writing mostly off the ground. Ncurses is hard, but once you figure out how to do all the ncurses stuff in a single thread, it's cool. The only hard part is I can't figure out how not to force ncurses to busy-wait switching between listening for getch() input and listening to some other source (in my case, updates that show up in a synchronized queue). If you could do a select-based thing, it would be easy, since I could use a named pipe with the queue, but I don't know how to get getch() to write to an fd in the background. Crazy.
Man, was it ever hard to get to work yesterday. I waited for like half an hour at the 7th Ave. F stop before someone on the opposite track yelled out to us that the East Broadway stop was flooded and that F trains were basically not going into Manhattan. So I got out of the station and grabbed the B67 to Flatbush and 7th Ave. for the 7th Ave. Q/B stop. A B came pretty quickly, and I thought my troubles were over until we got over the Manhattan bridge and then just... stopped. After about half an hour or 45 minutes or so, the radio twittered to us that there was a power outage at the West 4th St. stop and that trains who'd been trying to enter that station had decided to turn around and go back to Brooklyn. At first I thought that that's what we were going to do, which would have sucked, but it turned out we were just going to sit there and wait for them to get out of our way. That took about 30 more minutes. Finally they nudged our train just barely into Grand St. and we all had to walk through the train to the first car to exit. And there was a D train just sitting at Grand St. waiting to take me to work! And it did! That was great.
But the most irritating part of all of this was this very pear-shaped, baby-faced, acne ridden business-casual intern guy in our car who was or was acting like about 15 years old the whole goddamn time. He would take off his fucking discman headphones every few minutes and say things like, "They just can't do this to us. Fuck;" or, announcing to the whole car, "Okay, what I need right now is a fucking cigarette." Great, all the construction workers and part-time security guards trying to get to work are very impressed at what a grown-up smoker you are. They totally don't think you're a faggot. The more he said, "Fuck," the more ineffectual and irritating he sounded. Damn it. Oh yeah, and he totally wasn't cool with having to evacuate the train. While we were filing out, he kept asking everyone, "What are we doing? What are we doing? Are they going to make us walk through the tracks? Because I'm definitely not cool with that."
Anyway, what am I doing? I don't know. This laptop feels like it's ready to bite the dust. Yesterday I couldn't even get it to turn on.
Saw some Big Business last night. Happy Birthday, Chrittopher! With the help of Eric Prengel, I bought a delicious hero sandwich for only $4.50, and it lasted me all night!
Tom lent me a copy of Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, and it's really great, particularly the drawings. The reportage is, well, I don't know, it could use a good editor, most of it. But the drawings are fantastic, especially the ones Sacco does of himself. He looks totally creepy in his comic, even though he's actually kind of good looking in real life. I'm also reading W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants.
I miss you, too, little man!
What's going on with my programming project? Sorry guys, this has to be a part of every entry. Well, I got the ncurses interface for the little debug client I'm writing mostly off the ground. Ncurses is hard, but once you figure out how to do all the ncurses stuff in a single thread, it's cool. The only hard part is I can't figure out how not to force ncurses to busy-wait switching between listening for getch() input and listening to some other source (in my case, updates that show up in a synchronized queue). If you could do a select-based thing, it would be easy, since I could use a named pipe with the queue, but I don't know how to get getch() to write to an fd in the background. Crazy.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Twitter And Tweep
Okay, this is the part where I talk about the United for Peace and Justice protest that I went to on the 29th. There will be some pictures included, too. So here's what happened:
Okay, that's the end of it. Afterwards Mer and I went back to my parents' house (they'd marched as well, though we hadn't met up with them) and had some red wine and hamburgers on the deck in proper limousine liberal style. Now back to boring bullshit:
I want to donate a lot of my old comics to this comics museum / archive thing, but for tax reasons, I think, they want me to figure out how much I think they're worth, so I bought a copy of Wizard yesterday and carried a box of comics home from my parents' house and looked them all up in the price guide. Turns out this one box was worth around $300! Career in philanthropy, here I come.
I also had lunch with Devin at this place called Paul's on St. Mark's. Devin can really eat a hamburger, I tell you what. That thing was like a medicine ball made of meat.
What else, what else. Oh, so I finished The Stranger and now I'm reading some Jean Cocteau plays. The Infernal Machine is the best so far. I beat that game Knights of the Old Republic, too, playing as a "Darkie" Jedi. The ending is not great for either alignment, but let me tell you, you can kick a lot more ass as a Sith than as one of those ass-sucking Jedi. Speaking of ass-sucking, have you guys seen that new building-sized Calvin Klein ad on Houston street? That slut is all over that dude's butt.
Shattered Glass is off the hook.
Believe it or not, I decided it would be a good idea to wear a suit to the march -- first of all because I look real snappy in a suit, but second and third because I wanted to demonstrate that young urban professionals (such as I am, I suppose) don't like Bush and, in case trouble broke out, the media might get some pictures of police arresting a guy in a suit. Well, there didn't turn out to be any trouble, but there did turn out to be a lot of heat. We got there -- there being the corner of 16th St. and 5th Ave., a location within this protest-assembly radius -- around 11:00 AM and then just pretty much stood around until 1:00 PM. (The thing was supposed to start at noon.) So there's the first picture, which I hope will convey something of how hot it was, since it doesn't really convey much else.
Oh yeah, so on the way to the thing, though, we ran into some UFP people who were giving away free signs to carry. We hadn't thought to make any signs, so we grabbed a couple but didn't really read what they said until it was too late to give them back. It turned out they were all about ending the occupation of Palestine, and, you know, I hate every goddamn country in the Middle East as much as the next Northeastern Elite, but I wasn't really feeling fired up over the concept of subhumanoid idol-worshippers fighting each other over a pathetic stretch of scorched earth, so after a few half-hearted death-to-Israels, Tom and Ted helped me turn my sign inside out. I wrote "Quagmire Accomplished" on mine; Cuntington did the same to his but ended up writing "Girlie Men 4 Kerry" on it, as you can see in that picture where Tom's holding it. That's a sentiment I can get behind, if you know what I mean.
Here's this inflatable pig thing that doesn't like Republicans.
So it was really hot, right? And I was wearing a suit, lest you all forget. And we were going like, fucking... one block an hour, literally. So at around 27th St., Katharine and I decided to take a little breather and stepped out of the march. I had to take a piss like nothin', so I roamed around until I found a wonderful, wonderful Starbucks that let me use the pisser without any questions. While I was waiting on line for the bathroom I heard this olive drab girl with a whole bunch of olive drab shit in her hair say, "This year I'm all about anti-corporate stuff. It's so freeing!" while she sipped on some kind of icy-pricy coffee drink. Irony, people: It's what we're fighting for. Irony: Is it the new... irony?
Katharine dropped out at this point. Wuss! A block later I saw an old woman with heatstroke throwing up a popsicle.
At around 30th St., we started seeing signs of the convention. First off, this hotel is apparently real happy to host the delegates. Well, Southgate & Affinia, if I ever have to stay at a luxury hotel in my hometown across the street from one of the most hectic awful transit hubs in the world, it ain't gonna be yours!
As we were getting close to the Garden, we saw all this black smoke from around 34th St. The local news later informed us that some "anarchists" had set this papier-mache dragon on fire to get a rise out of the cops. Bad, bad anarchists. Shame on you.
No, Republican National Convention; Thank you.
As we got to the garden, people started chanting "George Bush, go home!" Here's the thing, though -- nobody wanted to shout the whole thing, they either wanted to say "George Bush" or "go home!" and really nobody wanted to shout "George Bush." So I was the one who had to do the "George Bush" part, and I did it for about 5 minutes until my voice gave out. Here's a picture of all the cops hanging out around MSG; you can't really see too well, but there were a lot of them.
I don't have a picture of it, but that gigantic Fox News sign on 34th took a lot of verbal abuse as we rounded the corner towards 5th Ave.
Going across on 34th St. is where we started to meet some of the counter-protestors. The infamous Protest Warriors were the first ones we saw; they were all standing behind the barricades holding signs, most of which were concerned with various hypocrisies of Socialism. Hey, I'm a Federalist, guys. Don't waste your breath.
There were also like half a dozen garden variety religious wackos who had the typical array of signs and banners. I told the guy with the mangled fetus pictures that we should abort more babies, and this female protester next to me yelled out, "Leave my body out of this!" I'm not sure if she was agreeing with me or not. This other guy had this crude stenciled poster of a fighter jet that said "Support Bush, Support Jesus." I tried to get a round of "Fuck Jesus" going in response, but my fellow protesters pussed out; this dwarfy girl who looked like a real pain in the neck even told me not to go there. Christ, I hate women. Abort more babies!
Okay, last pictures -- this woman had a pretty sweet costume, but nobody was giving her any props. You liberals don't know a good thing when you see it.
This sign was cute, I guess. A bit too clever for its own good, though.
Another picture of cops, this time in this alley at around 30th St. and 5th Ave. One thing that's difficult to explain without better pictures is how many cops there were, especially on the 5th, which was a little weird, since that's where the protest started thinning out, actually. There would just be these huge banks of them, standing silently in formation, waiting for something to happen. And nothing did.
Okay, that's the end of it. Afterwards Mer and I went back to my parents' house (they'd marched as well, though we hadn't met up with them) and had some red wine and hamburgers on the deck in proper limousine liberal style. Now back to boring bullshit:
I want to donate a lot of my old comics to this comics museum / archive thing, but for tax reasons, I think, they want me to figure out how much I think they're worth, so I bought a copy of Wizard yesterday and carried a box of comics home from my parents' house and looked them all up in the price guide. Turns out this one box was worth around $300! Career in philanthropy, here I come.
I also had lunch with Devin at this place called Paul's on St. Mark's. Devin can really eat a hamburger, I tell you what. That thing was like a medicine ball made of meat.
What else, what else. Oh, so I finished The Stranger and now I'm reading some Jean Cocteau plays. The Infernal Machine is the best so far. I beat that game Knights of the Old Republic, too, playing as a "Darkie" Jedi. The ending is not great for either alignment, but let me tell you, you can kick a lot more ass as a Sith than as one of those ass-sucking Jedi. Speaking of ass-sucking, have you guys seen that new building-sized Calvin Klein ad on Houston street? That slut is all over that dude's butt.
Shattered Glass is off the hook.
Thursday, August 26, 2004
That Don't Matter, Joan
I went to go see a show by my friends Big Business on Monday and had a very nice time. I was a little worried that the whole thing was going to make me horribly jealous or depressed, but to my great surprise I enjoyed watching it without really wanting to be part of it. That's never really happened to me before. I saw Billy and Chris of course and also Bobby and my friend Emily from Amherst and my old friend Kim from high school who wants to be a 3-D animator, apparently. Bill's parents were glad to see me, which was nice, considering I haven't hung out with him in like 2 years. I bought a cool t-shirt that Billy's girlfriend Sarah made. The only downside was that I lost one of my awesome black Call of Cthulhu dice that I always carry around in my pocket -- I was taking my hand out to say hi to Bobby or Frank or somebody and it just fell out. Somebody must have pocketed it because I couldn't find it after the show.
Boy, am I glad I didn't go to Amherst, though. Maybe it wasn't a representative sampling, but the people at the show were pretty creepy.
Ted got us tickets to see this play Frozen on Friday, which was fun as always, except that Frozen is probably the least interesting play you could possibly make about murdering children. Also I got some kind of awful food poisoning before the show and missed like the first 15 minutes because I was crapping all my organs out in the bathroom. They played this series of chimes like 3 or 4 times to get people to quiet down, I guess, but I started wondering if maybe they were trying to get me to hurry up in the john.
I got home at 7:40 or something today, which is pretty horrible. I don't feel horrible, though. The cat is chasing a nickel under the couch. I'm reading The Stranger and loving it.
I want to do this on Saturday, but I can't figure out where in NYC it's going to happen.
Boy, am I glad I didn't go to Amherst, though. Maybe it wasn't a representative sampling, but the people at the show were pretty creepy.
Ted got us tickets to see this play Frozen on Friday, which was fun as always, except that Frozen is probably the least interesting play you could possibly make about murdering children. Also I got some kind of awful food poisoning before the show and missed like the first 15 minutes because I was crapping all my organs out in the bathroom. They played this series of chimes like 3 or 4 times to get people to quiet down, I guess, but I started wondering if maybe they were trying to get me to hurry up in the john.
I got home at 7:40 or something today, which is pretty horrible. I don't feel horrible, though. The cat is chasing a nickel under the couch. I'm reading The Stranger and loving it.
I want to do this on Saturday, but I can't figure out where in NYC it's going to happen.
Monday, August 16, 2004
My Name Is Brody, I'm From Melbourne
Man, why are all you liberals so negative? I think things are going great!
Woah, has anyone out there tried to program with ncurses? That thing is fucked. It's like trying to position text absolutely in pre-CSS HTML or relatively in post-CSS HTML. This is all fucked. God, I want to die.
Reading: Killing Time, by Caleb Carr. The guy's an okay writer, I guess, but he's not much good at developing the interior monologue of the narrator. You know what I mean? It's like, it's really hard to tell what kind of a guy it is that's tell you the story.
WLIB sings:
Woah, has anyone out there tried to program with ncurses? That thing is fucked. It's like trying to position text absolutely in pre-CSS HTML or relatively in post-CSS HTML. This is all fucked. God, I want to die.
Reading: Killing Time, by Caleb Carr. The guy's an okay writer, I guess, but he's not much good at developing the interior monologue of the narrator. You know what I mean? It's like, it's really hard to tell what kind of a guy it is that's tell you the story.
WLIB sings:
Are things really getting better,
Like the newspaper says?
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Vultures Circle Round
Not to lower the level of discourse on this "'blog," but how stupid and mean looking is Scott Peterson's "lover?" Man, it sure lowers your opinion of someone when you find out they're attracted to this awful, mundane person. 'Cause before that me and Scott Peterson were like this. This.
My fucking bike got stolen last weekend! I kind of knew it could happen when I chained them up outside, so I'm not exactly reeling with the shock, but you know, I actually liked my bike, and I'd been nagging myself for some time to take it to 'On The Move' over on 12th and 7th to get it fixed up. Maybe it's for the best -- if it was gonna get stolen no matter what, I'm glad I didn't pump an extra $40 into it before the fact. I took Mer's bike upstairs (they didn't take it even though the two were chained together -- where's the justice, I ask) and put it in the bedroom.
Mer bought us an XBox! She got it with the game Knights of the Old Republic, which is pretty great. She's playing it now. It kind of defused my plans to buy a fancy new computer to play Call of You-Know-Who-Hu: Dark Cronners of the Scurth, because that game is coming out for XBox. So is DOOM3! Eat a grinch.
Burned a copy of an older Distillers album, the one with Seneca Falls on it. It's okay, but not good enough to buy -- so I'm glad I didn't! Manifest destiny and all that.
My fucking bike got stolen last weekend! I kind of knew it could happen when I chained them up outside, so I'm not exactly reeling with the shock, but you know, I actually liked my bike, and I'd been nagging myself for some time to take it to 'On The Move' over on 12th and 7th to get it fixed up. Maybe it's for the best -- if it was gonna get stolen no matter what, I'm glad I didn't pump an extra $40 into it before the fact. I took Mer's bike upstairs (they didn't take it even though the two were chained together -- where's the justice, I ask) and put it in the bedroom.
Mer bought us an XBox! She got it with the game Knights of the Old Republic, which is pretty great. She's playing it now. It kind of defused my plans to buy a fancy new computer to play Call of You-Know-Who-Hu: Dark Cronners of the Scurth, because that game is coming out for XBox. So is DOOM3! Eat a grinch.
"At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is," McGreevey, a Democrat, said.Sounds like the guy wanted a piece of him:
The Associated Press reported that the man involved in the affair, a former government employee, demanded "an exorbitant sum of money to make it go away," a high-ranking administration official told wire service. Cabinet members and administration officials learned of that threat Wednesday night, the source said.First Alan Turing, now Jim McGreevey? You just can't have a gay affair this century without getting fucked.
Burned a copy of an older Distillers album, the one with Seneca Falls on it. It's okay, but not good enough to buy -- so I'm glad I didn't! Manifest destiny and all that.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
This Ain't No Mecca, Man -- This Place Is Fucked!
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.
The fact that until recently the word "shit" appeared in print as s--- has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can't claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Hang The Jerk Who Invented Work
Sometimes I hate my stupid job, I really do.
On the plus side, after oh-so-much fussing and tweaking randomly and praying for my bug to go away, I finally figured out exactly what was going wrong with the socket communication in gzochi. I'm going to explain it, in case it can prevent any of you from tearing your own hair out over something similar: Okay, so first off, TCP sockets, which are great, are stream-oriented, which means you can treat them like files. That is, you can say, "hey, you, file descriptor! Do you have any data for me to read? I want 1024 bytes!" And the socket will say, "well, here's 37 bytes" and maybe the call to read() will even block for a little while before the socket says this because no one has actually sent the bytes. So here's what was happening in my program -- the user sends a message asking to join a game on a gzochi server; then, the server decides whether or not this is okay and tells the client so; then, if the request was approved, the server asynchronously sends a "token delivery" message, which is the key that will allow the client to actually initiate a datagram conversation with the server. The token is delivered asynchronously so that game availability would not necessarily be closely wed to the client requesting to join the game -- that was just a design choice I made, and hopefully it'll make the server more flexible in the long run. Anyway, what was happening was that the client would report the receipt of the message from the server saying whether or not the request to join the game was approved, but would not always (but sometimes would) receive the token, which, again, was sent in a separate message. I had no idea why this was happening.
Then I figured it out, and here's where it gets interesting. You'll need to know a few things: First of all, when you're reading from a stream into a buffer, you have to make sure that the buffer is big enough to hold the stuff you're reading. If, in one shot, you read, for example, 16 bytes, and you want to store all of it, you need to have a 16-byte buffer ready. You might think it'd be a good idea, then, to resize your buffer each time you read a byte -- read, allocate, read, allocate, etc., until you're done. No! This is bad, because allocation is time- / processor-intensive. Instead, what you do is try to read a big chunk at a time and write it all to the buffer, which is allocated by chunks. In my case, the chunk size is 1024 bytes.
The other key thing I should mention is that my TCP communication is mitigated by the use of zlib, a free (as in freedom) and wonderful compression library. zlib is also stream-oriented, in that you point it at some bytes and tell it to decompress them, and it'll come back and say, "hey, give me more bytes, the decompression's not finished," or, "okay, the message is fully decompressed." It figures out when it's decompressed the whole thing based on the input stream itself. This is great, because the stream-orientedness of TCP means that it's hard to tell when you've sent an entire message, especially when your messages are in (relatively) English text like mine are. I mean, you can use a certain character to signal the end of one message and the beginning of the next, but what if someone needs to send that character as part of a messaage? So by compressing the messages, I not only save bandwidth but also make the boundaries between messages programatically obvious.
So I grab 1024 bytes at a time, and zlib tells me when I've got a whole message. Here's where the problem was happening: If I grabbed more than one message's worth of bytes inside my message-reception code, I wouldn't look at anything past the point at which zlib told me it had decoded the first message. So each compressed message weighs it at about 100 bytes. When the client requests to join a game, the server sends two messages, one for the yes / no response, one for the token. On the client side, I ask the socket for 1024 bytes, and it gives me about 200. After processing about 100 of them, zlib tells me that it's done, and I return the decompressed message to the application layer, discarding the rest. So. It hadn't come up before because the server and client messages were usually one-to-one, like ping pong. It was when the second ball entered the mix that things started to go wrong.
Anyway, I fixed it by buffering my message-receiving code. So I still return the first message when zlib's finished decompressing it, but now I hang onto the remaining bytes and put them towards the next call to the message-receiving layer. Phew. Now I have to get back to designing this thing. Ugh. What a bad (2 months of utter anguish) coding experience.
Maybe I'm just an idiot.
On the plus side, after oh-so-much fussing and tweaking randomly and praying for my bug to go away, I finally figured out exactly what was going wrong with the socket communication in gzochi. I'm going to explain it, in case it can prevent any of you from tearing your own hair out over something similar: Okay, so first off, TCP sockets, which are great, are stream-oriented, which means you can treat them like files. That is, you can say, "hey, you, file descriptor! Do you have any data for me to read? I want 1024 bytes!" And the socket will say, "well, here's 37 bytes" and maybe the call to read() will even block for a little while before the socket says this because no one has actually sent the bytes. So here's what was happening in my program -- the user sends a message asking to join a game on a gzochi server; then, the server decides whether or not this is okay and tells the client so; then, if the request was approved, the server asynchronously sends a "token delivery" message, which is the key that will allow the client to actually initiate a datagram conversation with the server. The token is delivered asynchronously so that game availability would not necessarily be closely wed to the client requesting to join the game -- that was just a design choice I made, and hopefully it'll make the server more flexible in the long run. Anyway, what was happening was that the client would report the receipt of the message from the server saying whether or not the request to join the game was approved, but would not always (but sometimes would) receive the token, which, again, was sent in a separate message. I had no idea why this was happening.
Then I figured it out, and here's where it gets interesting. You'll need to know a few things: First of all, when you're reading from a stream into a buffer, you have to make sure that the buffer is big enough to hold the stuff you're reading. If, in one shot, you read, for example, 16 bytes, and you want to store all of it, you need to have a 16-byte buffer ready. You might think it'd be a good idea, then, to resize your buffer each time you read a byte -- read, allocate, read, allocate, etc., until you're done. No! This is bad, because allocation is time- / processor-intensive. Instead, what you do is try to read a big chunk at a time and write it all to the buffer, which is allocated by chunks. In my case, the chunk size is 1024 bytes.
The other key thing I should mention is that my TCP communication is mitigated by the use of zlib, a free (as in freedom) and wonderful compression library. zlib is also stream-oriented, in that you point it at some bytes and tell it to decompress them, and it'll come back and say, "hey, give me more bytes, the decompression's not finished," or, "okay, the message is fully decompressed." It figures out when it's decompressed the whole thing based on the input stream itself. This is great, because the stream-orientedness of TCP means that it's hard to tell when you've sent an entire message, especially when your messages are in (relatively) English text like mine are. I mean, you can use a certain character to signal the end of one message and the beginning of the next, but what if someone needs to send that character as part of a messaage? So by compressing the messages, I not only save bandwidth but also make the boundaries between messages programatically obvious.
So I grab 1024 bytes at a time, and zlib tells me when I've got a whole message. Here's where the problem was happening: If I grabbed more than one message's worth of bytes inside my message-reception code, I wouldn't look at anything past the point at which zlib told me it had decoded the first message. So each compressed message weighs it at about 100 bytes. When the client requests to join a game, the server sends two messages, one for the yes / no response, one for the token. On the client side, I ask the socket for 1024 bytes, and it gives me about 200. After processing about 100 of them, zlib tells me that it's done, and I return the decompressed message to the application layer, discarding the rest. So. It hadn't come up before because the server and client messages were usually one-to-one, like ping pong. It was when the second ball entered the mix that things started to go wrong.
Anyway, I fixed it by buffering my message-receiving code. So I still return the first message when zlib's finished decompressing it, but now I hang onto the remaining bytes and put them towards the next call to the message-receiving layer. Phew. Now I have to get back to designing this thing. Ugh. What a bad (2 months of utter anguish) coding experience.
Maybe I'm just an idiot.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
I Put Her On The Guest List At The Show
...and now I get to watch her dance
Like the other weirdos do --
Ooh ooh-ooh-ooh ooh!
Implemented a full thread abstraction system for gzochi. It hasn't made me any happier. Maybe I'll port it to use dl*() instead of the preprocessor. I still can't figure out why this one block of code sometimes gets executed and sometimes doesn't -- valgrind doesn't report any memory problems, helgrind doesn't report any valid synchronization issues, and stepping through it in gdb makes the problem go away. Feels like a case of thread silliness / stack smashery, but I have no idea what to do about. Anyone, please, help me. Fuck.
Today was an easy day at work. I closed lots of bugs and made a concerted effort to make myself miserable by listening to Room On Fire. It worked!
Right now I'm watching some episodes of Bullshit! that Tom was kind enough to buy me. Yes, and I'm also wearing the Shrek 2 t-shirt, Tom, as a Dreamworks-gin scented tear rolls down my cheek. Katzenberg has won -- I love Shrek Brother.
Devlin, who's on the 12-to-12 right now, indicated that we'd rock out tonight. I'm pretty excited about that, since we're gonna try My Michelle, a song that rocks and, I think, is pretty easy to play on drums.
Like the other weirdos do --
Ooh ooh-ooh-ooh ooh!
Implemented a full thread abstraction system for gzochi. It hasn't made me any happier. Maybe I'll port it to use dl*() instead of the preprocessor. I still can't figure out why this one block of code sometimes gets executed and sometimes doesn't -- valgrind doesn't report any memory problems, helgrind doesn't report any valid synchronization issues, and stepping through it in gdb makes the problem go away. Feels like a case of thread silliness / stack smashery, but I have no idea what to do about. Anyone, please, help me. Fuck.
Today was an easy day at work. I closed lots of bugs and made a concerted effort to make myself miserable by listening to Room On Fire. It worked!
Right now I'm watching some episodes of Bullshit! that Tom was kind enough to buy me. Yes, and I'm also wearing the Shrek 2 t-shirt, Tom, as a Dreamworks-gin scented tear rolls down my cheek. Katzenberg has won -- I love Shrek Brother.
Devlin, who's on the 12-to-12 right now, indicated that we'd rock out tonight. I'm pretty excited about that, since we're gonna try My Michelle, a song that rocks and, I think, is pretty easy to play on drums.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Just Don't Make Fun Of Mr. Jenkins, Mark
Okay, you guys guessed it -- yesterday was my birthday. I'm 23! Thanks to the "friends" for taking me out to a lovely dinner at Long (Dong) Tan.
The other day I switched gzochi over to libpth, a user-space threading library, having bought the hype about it being a better choice for server systems and more portable than LinuxThreads pthreads. Well, more portable it may be, but the syscall-catching context switching it does is absolutely re. tard. ed. I don't want to have to write my entire application around a semi-working concurrency schema -- like, if I ever have to call *_yield(), something's wrong. I think I'm gonna switch it back to regular old retarded kernel pthreads... maybe. I don't know. I'm getting kind of sick of the whole thing.
I found a small bug in the glibc manual and they fixed it. My name's gonna be in the Changelog!
The other day I switched gzochi over to libpth, a user-space threading library, having bought the hype about it being a better choice for server systems and more portable than LinuxThreads pthreads. Well, more portable it may be, but the syscall-catching context switching it does is absolutely re. tard. ed. I don't want to have to write my entire application around a semi-working concurrency schema -- like, if I ever have to call *_yield(), something's wrong. I think I'm gonna switch it back to regular old retarded kernel pthreads... maybe. I don't know. I'm getting kind of sick of the whole thing.
I found a small bug in the glibc manual and they fixed it. My name's gonna be in the Changelog!
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
John McCain
YES:
NO:
YES:
"The constitutional amendment we're debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."
NO:
He said if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act or "state remedies to judicial activism fail," then amending the federal Constitution might be "appropriate."
YES:
...the decision in Massachusetts to legalize same-sex marriages does "not represent a death knell to marriage."
Monday, July 05, 2004
Fricative
Man, you guys like Six Feet Under? It's very pretty good.
I hung out with Kevin Wasserman for a while yesterday (Ed.: July 4th, actually). I love that guy! He's real into cigars now (don't worry, he still likes HDTV)
I'm happy because I made some thread improvements. They didn't fix the real fucking problem, which is driving me absolutely bananas, but more on that in a second.
It's been a while since I wrote anything here.
I'm struggling to pound out this e-mail to my old senior project adviser, asking for a grad school recommendation. Do I really deserve a recommendation? The project was supposed to be about molecular biology, and I didn't learn that much about molecular biology. I'm worried that he'll want me to come up to the 'Have to discuss it and want me to pour forth on whether or not I've ever had an original idea in my life, Richard Yang-style. These are the types of thoughts that are always sub-pathetic and irritating to hear from other people but that are no less completely consuming when you're having them yourself.
gzochi's got a Heisenbug. For the non-technorati among you:
I had lunch with an old acquaintance yesterday. I'd been kind of hoping to rekindle our friendship -- we hadn't spoken much since 10th grade, really, mostly my fault -- but she was pretty concertedly ambivalent on the prospects of hanging out as far as I could tell. Or maybe she was just really depressed. Oh well, that's just the way life works.
My birthday's coming up. I could use a new wristwatch; mine loses time all over the place.
I hung out with Kevin Wasserman for a while yesterday (Ed.: July 4th, actually). I love that guy! He's real into cigars now (don't worry, he still likes HDTV)
I'm happy because I made some thread improvements. They didn't fix the real fucking problem, which is driving me absolutely bananas, but more on that in a second.
It's been a while since I wrote anything here.
I'm struggling to pound out this e-mail to my old senior project adviser, asking for a grad school recommendation. Do I really deserve a recommendation? The project was supposed to be about molecular biology, and I didn't learn that much about molecular biology. I'm worried that he'll want me to come up to the 'Have to discuss it and want me to pour forth on whether or not I've ever had an original idea in my life, Richard Yang-style. These are the types of thoughts that are always sub-pathetic and irritating to hear from other people but that are no less completely consuming when you're having them yourself.
gzochi's got a Heisenbug. For the non-technorati among you:
Heisenbug is a term used in software programming to describe a computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when it is researched.In my case it's a TCP message -- specifically, the one that delivers a "game entry token" to a user -- that never gets sent when I run gzochi-server from the command line, sometimes gets sent under gdb, and always gets sent under valgrind. After making myself crazy with it for the past two weeks, I've decided to ignore it and forge ahead. Hopefully it will present itself in a more obvious way later. But like I said, I did fix some other important stuff.
A common example are bugs that occur in a release-mode compile of a program but do not occur when researched under debug-mode, or some bugs caused by a race condition. The name is a pun on the physics term "Heisenberg Uncertainty principle", which is popularly believed to refer to the way observers affect the observed in quantum mechanics.
I had lunch with an old acquaintance yesterday. I'd been kind of hoping to rekindle our friendship -- we hadn't spoken much since 10th grade, really, mostly my fault -- but she was pretty concertedly ambivalent on the prospects of hanging out as far as I could tell. Or maybe she was just really depressed. Oh well, that's just the way life works.
My birthday's coming up. I could use a new wristwatch; mine loses time all over the place.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Pony Keg
Okay, who hasn't seen Fahrenheit 9/11? While I was watching City Of God last week, I thought of this alternate title for it, but it'd do pretty good for Fahrenheit, too: Scum In Hell.
I'm crushing on this Distillers song Seneca Falls real hard right now, which is kind of gay, since it's about Women's Rights. The funny thing is, a lot of web sites will let you download it for free. Maybe it was one of their singles or something.
I've got this scratchy feeling in my throat, which makes me thing I'm getting sick. The past two summers, I've gotten a bad sore throat and a fever right around this time -- I think it has something to do with mucus building up in my throat -- but I'd prefer not to have it happen right this weekend because, well, I want to eat hamburgers and drink beer and all that.
Having just come off the early shift, I seem to have picked up a disturbing habit -- I've started writing these pseudo-shorthand sentences, like, "Thanks for the data. Will get back to you shortly." Sick.
I'm crushing on this Distillers song Seneca Falls real hard right now, which is kind of gay, since it's about Women's Rights. The funny thing is, a lot of web sites will let you download it for free. Maybe it was one of their singles or something.
I've got this scratchy feeling in my throat, which makes me thing I'm getting sick. The past two summers, I've gotten a bad sore throat and a fever right around this time -- I think it has something to do with mucus building up in my throat -- but I'd prefer not to have it happen right this weekend because, well, I want to eat hamburgers and drink beer and all that.
Having just come off the early shift, I seem to have picked up a disturbing habit -- I've started writing these pseudo-shorthand sentences, like, "Thanks for the data. Will get back to you shortly." Sick.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets
Have you ever had to flush butter down a toilet? On moving day, or I guess maybe it was the day after moving day, I found a stick of butter in our old fridge, and I was like, "This guy's not gonna make it." So, for want of a garbage can, I took it into the bathroom and flushed it. Of course this was a bad idea -- that even started to occur to me as I was pushing the handle down, but, you know... So the toilet got really clogged.
Last Saturday I went to this "Anyone, But Especially Kerry" fundraising party / event and saw a whole bunch of Harvard kids from my high school. Ugh -- now I remember why I don't hang out with them any more. This one guy kept trying to get me to dance, and I was like, hey, okay, so I started just waving my arms around and being silly, and he starts going, "Okay, but on the beat. Listen for the beat." What the fuck? Suck a cock, buster -- I'm a drummer, for fuck's sake. I'll do what I want. Plus, the one person I really even wanted to see didn't show. Oops, besides The Rase, that is -- always good to see her.
Having just written hundreds of lines of ugly, sloppy, UDP packet reorder / reassembly code, I started surfing around to see if there was maybe a stable, ubiquitous library that would do it for me. I happened across GNetLib, an outgrowth of GLib (not glibc, mind you), that does not stuff. It didn't do what I wanted, but the search kind of threw me into a panic about how I'm totally re-inventing the wheel a whole bunch in this stuff I'm doing on this project, and probably not in a very robust way. But then I calmed down and was like, well, this thing is kind of my hobby, my art, if you will, and I guess I'm kind of taking the same approach to it that I do for writing anything, code or not -- that approach being the polishing-a-turd approach. I like to create the turds from scratch and then slowly polish the fuck out of them. Not that I'm putting any of it down, mind you -- it all rocks, without exception -- it's just an expression. "Polishing a turd."
Then I totally jerked off.
That crippled kid who wrote all that poetry just died. Man, sometimes life's just so unjust -- like when you turn on the news and they're reading shit like this on the air:
Went running yesterday -- think I made it about 2/3 of the 3.8 miles without walking.
How excited is everyone about CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth? Very excited. I wish they'd publish some system requirements so I could start the upgrade process on the ol' desktop sooner.
Last Saturday I went to this "Anyone, But Especially Kerry" fundraising party / event and saw a whole bunch of Harvard kids from my high school. Ugh -- now I remember why I don't hang out with them any more. This one guy kept trying to get me to dance, and I was like, hey, okay, so I started just waving my arms around and being silly, and he starts going, "Okay, but on the beat. Listen for the beat." What the fuck? Suck a cock, buster -- I'm a drummer, for fuck's sake. I'll do what I want. Plus, the one person I really even wanted to see didn't show. Oops, besides The Rase, that is -- always good to see her.
Having just written hundreds of lines of ugly, sloppy, UDP packet reorder / reassembly code, I started surfing around to see if there was maybe a stable, ubiquitous library that would do it for me. I happened across GNetLib, an outgrowth of GLib (not glibc, mind you), that does not stuff. It didn't do what I wanted, but the search kind of threw me into a panic about how I'm totally re-inventing the wheel a whole bunch in this stuff I'm doing on this project, and probably not in a very robust way. But then I calmed down and was like, well, this thing is kind of my hobby, my art, if you will, and I guess I'm kind of taking the same approach to it that I do for writing anything, code or not -- that approach being the polishing-a-turd approach. I like to create the turds from scratch and then slowly polish the fuck out of them. Not that I'm putting any of it down, mind you -- it all rocks, without exception -- it's just an expression. "Polishing a turd."
Then I totally jerked off.
That crippled kid who wrote all that poetry just died. Man, sometimes life's just so unjust -- like when you turn on the news and they're reading shit like this on the air:
No matter who you are,Man, this makes me want to go murder someone. Also, there was that thing that kid said about not being able to ride the 7 train to Shea without some fag with AIDS dying all over him. Hero. Poet hero.
Say a prayer this season.
No matter what your faith,
Say a prayer this season.
No matter how you celebrate,
Say a prayer this season.
There are so many ways
To celebrate faiths,
There are so many faiths
To celebrate life.
No matter who,
No matter what
No matter how...
You pray.
Let's say a prayer
This season,
Together, for peace.
Went running yesterday -- think I made it about 2/3 of the 3.8 miles without walking.
How excited is everyone about CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth? Very excited. I wish they'd publish some system requirements so I could start the upgrade process on the ol' desktop sooner.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
I Will Go Down With This Ship
Man, I had a scary dream last night -- my old high school friends Billy and Chris and I had organized this Fight Club-esque fighting tournament, and I ended up killing this guy I was fighting. And it was one of those awful dreams where it's not just the violence (which I think was sort of mercifully elided), but the entire guilty aftermath, in which it becomes clearer and clearer that you are in deep shit until you finally jerk awake. The thing is, though, a tangential aspect of the dream was that I figured out how to get this stupid light on my answering machine to stop flashing -- which it's been doing since we moved -- and I was kind of disappointed when I woke up to see that it was back to not being fixed. I mean, who do I have to kill around here to... right?
One of the things that has begun to tick me off about working for a corporate software company is how customer-driven the design process is. What I like about UNIX libc, for example, is that from a user's point of view, it looks very much like they've (the designers / developers) taken the time to read the research on things, they've thought about all the possible ways in which a piece of software might and should be used -- and not just in a commercial sense, in a "What if I did this?" kind of academic sense -- and they've written a really adaptive piece of software that fits in as best it can philosophically with what's already out there and allows new stuff to be built on top of it in a sane way. (There are a few exceptions to this, such as the various GLIBC binary compatibility nonsenses and the awful, confusing ctime() / time() / gettimeofday() / etc. functions.) The business software people are totally the opposite of this. They've got these ridiculous systems that are set up in literally the worst-possible-but-still-able-to-function way, and their attitude is, "Well, whatever new thing we're going to develop / buy / whatever, it should just work with what we've got." That little credo about things "just working" is the reason behind all this Windows virus / worm / whatever bullshit, if I may get self-righteous for a moment. And when you're designing software that caters to this attitude, you wind up with something that's very niche and isn't very interesting, and really just isn't further developable after a certain point because it's such a lopsided monster and the processes / systems it depends on have eventually been phased out because somebody realized they were bullshit.
And don't tell me it's about money. I know it's about money, but it's gotta be more expensive to finally overhaul a car-crash of a system than it is to make short term re-arrangements that keep you on the path to sanity. Maybe they're just so sure that by the time they have to seriously rethink their software architecture, they'll be out of business or the company itself'll have been drastically re-organized anyway that it's not worth the trouble.
And that doesn't always happen -- listen to this paragraph from Joel On Software about Microsoft:
One of the things that has begun to tick me off about working for a corporate software company is how customer-driven the design process is. What I like about UNIX libc, for example, is that from a user's point of view, it looks very much like they've (the designers / developers) taken the time to read the research on things, they've thought about all the possible ways in which a piece of software might and should be used -- and not just in a commercial sense, in a "What if I did this?" kind of academic sense -- and they've written a really adaptive piece of software that fits in as best it can philosophically with what's already out there and allows new stuff to be built on top of it in a sane way. (There are a few exceptions to this, such as the various GLIBC binary compatibility nonsenses and the awful, confusing ctime() / time() / gettimeofday() / etc. functions.) The business software people are totally the opposite of this. They've got these ridiculous systems that are set up in literally the worst-possible-but-still-able-to-function way, and their attitude is, "Well, whatever new thing we're going to develop / buy / whatever, it should just work with what we've got." That little credo about things "just working" is the reason behind all this Windows virus / worm / whatever bullshit, if I may get self-righteous for a moment. And when you're designing software that caters to this attitude, you wind up with something that's very niche and isn't very interesting, and really just isn't further developable after a certain point because it's such a lopsided monster and the processes / systems it depends on have eventually been phased out because somebody realized they were bullshit.
And don't tell me it's about money. I know it's about money, but it's gotta be more expensive to finally overhaul a car-crash of a system than it is to make short term re-arrangements that keep you on the path to sanity. Maybe they're just so sure that by the time they have to seriously rethink their software architecture, they'll be out of business or the company itself'll have been drastically re-organized anyway that it's not worth the trouble.
And that doesn't always happen -- listen to this paragraph from Joel On Software about Microsoft:
I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.Oh my God. This is 100% absolutely the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. And fucking Spolsky thinks it's genius! The management people at Maxis who told Microsoft to do this should be fired, and the management people at Microsoft who agreed to this should be fired, too. When I first clicked his article on How Microsoft Lost the API War, I thought it was going to be about how no one writes Windows code because their API is such a convoluted disgusting mess and there's about 10 different, extremely complicated and varyingly buggy ways to do this tiny simple thing that you want; but it turns out that Microsoft lost the API "war" because their API isn't backwards-compatible any more. I mean, that's a problem, but the nicest thing I can think of to say about .NET is that at least it looks like they're trying to create a rational and consistent API for people to use, even if they had to rip it off wholesale from Sun. If they had done this to start out with, maybe you wouldn't have to pay people a million dollars to touch Windows code today.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
There But For The Grace Of God Goes Sherlock Holmes
Is everyone in the army a rapist or what? Props, Ted "Vicious" Rall -- you called it again.
I forgot to talk about the fucking massage I got: Mer and I went out for a walk to this little Gay Pride festival near our house, and one of the thousands of little tents was one of those Asian massage things where you sit in this weird chair and they give you a back rub. (Was it gay? Not sure.) Mer likes that sort of thing, so I offered to pay for her to get one, but once those crafty Orientals saw that we were interested, they started pulling me over to one of the chairs by my arm. I was like, "No, just her," pointing at Mer, but the lady pulling me was like, "No. Two. Two. You." So I had to get this stupid uncomfortable massage for ten minutes. I'm not one of those creepy people who's got some kind of thing about being touched -- I don't even have any Personal Space -- but I just flat out don't like back rubs. My back is fine, thanks. Anyway, at the end I had to pay for both of them.
One of my fucking Bosses, I'll let you guess which one, tried to suggest that I didn't know what IP multicast was. Wait, this is sounding like I'm being purposefully oblique. To qualify this, let's say that networks are like Shakespeare; it's like accusing someone of not having read Henry IV. Granted, not as popular as Hamlet, but if you're an English major, you've 100% probably fucking read it. "So, is it possible that [THE THING] is picking up the multicast address instead of the regular IP?" "You even know what multicast is?" Jesus Christ. And I was fucking totally on-the-money right, too. Anyway, he's incredibly rude. I don't like feeling like one of the whiny Executive Assistants I used to temp with; and I don't, really. I'm not going to say, "Dignity's more important than money." Please, humiliate me. I have to pay rent and save up for grad school. And hoard it, too, of course.
Kevin the Wass-man is having a 4th Of July party that I'm totally going to. With his usual degree of Mortal Kombat bombast, he claimed that he was going to have "1100 fireworks, at least." I haven't seen him in like 3 years. It's gonna be awesome.
Internet's still not working, but I successfully set up the wireless network last night. If you're in the area, the router's name is Goethe, but don't bother trying to connect, 'cause it's all WEP-secured, fags.
I'm reading the Live From New York book that I got Mer for Christmas. I knew everybody hated Chevy, but did you know that they also hated Nora Dunn, Victoria Jackson, and for cryin' out loud, Harry Shearer? Apparently Harry Shearer is a prick of tremendous proportions. And listen to this quote about Chris Farley, who I once saw in a restaurant:
I forgot to talk about the fucking massage I got: Mer and I went out for a walk to this little Gay Pride festival near our house, and one of the thousands of little tents was one of those Asian massage things where you sit in this weird chair and they give you a back rub. (Was it gay? Not sure.) Mer likes that sort of thing, so I offered to pay for her to get one, but once those crafty Orientals saw that we were interested, they started pulling me over to one of the chairs by my arm. I was like, "No, just her," pointing at Mer, but the lady pulling me was like, "No. Two. Two. You." So I had to get this stupid uncomfortable massage for ten minutes. I'm not one of those creepy people who's got some kind of thing about being touched -- I don't even have any Personal Space -- but I just flat out don't like back rubs. My back is fine, thanks. Anyway, at the end I had to pay for both of them.
One of my fucking Bosses, I'll let you guess which one, tried to suggest that I didn't know what IP multicast was. Wait, this is sounding like I'm being purposefully oblique. To qualify this, let's say that networks are like Shakespeare; it's like accusing someone of not having read Henry IV. Granted, not as popular as Hamlet, but if you're an English major, you've 100% probably fucking read it. "So, is it possible that [THE THING] is picking up the multicast address instead of the regular IP?" "You even know what multicast is?" Jesus Christ. And I was fucking totally on-the-money right, too. Anyway, he's incredibly rude. I don't like feeling like one of the whiny Executive Assistants I used to temp with; and I don't, really. I'm not going to say, "Dignity's more important than money." Please, humiliate me. I have to pay rent and save up for grad school. And hoard it, too, of course.
Kevin the Wass-man is having a 4th Of July party that I'm totally going to. With his usual degree of Mortal Kombat bombast, he claimed that he was going to have "1100 fireworks, at least." I haven't seen him in like 3 years. It's gonna be awesome.
Internet's still not working, but I successfully set up the wireless network last night. If you're in the area, the router's name is Goethe, but don't bother trying to connect, 'cause it's all WEP-secured, fags.
I'm reading the Live From New York book that I got Mer for Christmas. I knew everybody hated Chevy, but did you know that they also hated Nora Dunn, Victoria Jackson, and for cryin' out loud, Harry Shearer? Apparently Harry Shearer is a prick of tremendous proportions. And listen to this quote about Chris Farley, who I once saw in a restaurant:
Farley once stuck his ass out the window of the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock and took a shit. Another time, in front of twenty or twenty-five people in a very crowded writers' room -- mixed company, women, men -- Farley came in naked. He had his dick tucked between his legs and he was doing Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs. He took a golf club and shoved it about three inches up his ass, then pulled the golf club out and started licking it.Jesus Christ!
Friday, June 11, 2004
"Oh Fuck Off, Chris"
Apparently someone reads his referrer logs. So much for all the whining on the ol' blog.
How good is that second 'The Office' Christmas Special? I don't know. Pretty good. My emotions? Call them successfully manipulated.
Fixed some troublesome threading problems with gzochi; for one of the first times in the history of the world, I was right and the debugger was wrong -- though they've fixed it in CVS, which is what I'm using now. Now I'm working on the UDP subsystem. UDP, being the not-guaranteed-to-deliver but somewhat faster cousin of TCP, requires that my code handle packet fragmentation (though this only happens with packets larger than 64k) and out of order delivery, and to generally be tolerant of lossage. Establishing a UDP "connection" is particularly troublesome since it takes place over a different port than the administrative stuff and you can't ID clients by originating host, since the traffic is bound to come over NAT-performing routers if it occurs on the Internet at all. To get around this I've established a "token" system, in which "new" UDP clients present a token that's been previously delivered to them over TCP.
More later, I guess. I don't know.
How good is that second 'The Office' Christmas Special? I don't know. Pretty good. My emotions? Call them successfully manipulated.
Fixed some troublesome threading problems with gzochi; for one of the first times in the history of the world, I was right and the debugger was wrong -- though they've fixed it in CVS, which is what I'm using now. Now I'm working on the UDP subsystem. UDP, being the not-guaranteed-to-deliver but somewhat faster cousin of TCP, requires that my code handle packet fragmentation (though this only happens with packets larger than 64k) and out of order delivery, and to generally be tolerant of lossage. Establishing a UDP "connection" is particularly troublesome since it takes place over a different port than the administrative stuff and you can't ID clients by originating host, since the traffic is bound to come over NAT-performing routers if it occurs on the Internet at all. To get around this I've established a "token" system, in which "new" UDP clients present a token that's been previously delivered to them over TCP.
More later, I guess. I don't know.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Tune & Rhythm On A Bubbledome
Well, we made it through the move. Now I know why people hire movers -- it's very hard and really sucks to do it yourself. Mer was a star at driving the U-Haul, but we got a ticket on it from parking it in a residential neighborhood overnight, plus we turned it in a few hours too late so all the costs doubled -- including the insurance, bringing the total cost up to like... $200. Christ. Still cheaper than movers, still cheaper than movers, etc.
The new place is nice, much bigger. We're still sorting all the things out. It gets very moist in there. I don't know, is it the external humidity or... what?
How much does Verizon suck, by the way? The lady I talked to the week before the move was very gracious and even helped me select a catchy new phone number, but she also said she'd notify our DSL provider to switch the Internet to the new number and when I called Earthlink a week and a half later to see how they were doing on it, they claimed to have no knowledge of the request. Zero knowledge, even. So now we don't have any Internet for two weeks.
Maybe I'm still exhausted from all the hoisting, but maybe I'm depressed. I don't know; I haven't been able to work on gzochi at all -- so much stuff needs to be done, like setting up the datagram delivery system and the event queue and the whole god-damn Scheme API. Why am I even doing this, anyway? Why would anyone want to write an RPG in LISP? God, when I look at what other people are doing, I get so depressed and jealous. This fucker from Yale DSAC, look what he's doing. Suck a cock, Collin Dickweed Jackson.
At least I'm not Dean Stark
I've been playing Red Dead Revolver, a copy I got from Devin, who said it was absolutely awful, but I'm kind of getting into it. It's pretty hard, and, like I think he mentioned, the camera's behavior is pretty infuriating sometimes, but, you know.
Went to see The Dickies at Irving Plaza on the 19th for some kind of Joey Ramone birthday thing. It was okay, but there were so many too old / tool young people there and almost no one was dancing around. Their set was okay -- they added See My Way, which is not my favorite song, but they also added Going Homo, which is my favorite song. Not really. Is it just me or was Leonard a lot more fun when he was on junk? None of you are going to answer that question, probably.
Oh, apparently he wants "Tiny" out of the band. Not that I blame him. Those guys are cretins.
I did AIDSWalk.
That's about it.
The new place is nice, much bigger. We're still sorting all the things out. It gets very moist in there. I don't know, is it the external humidity or... what?
How much does Verizon suck, by the way? The lady I talked to the week before the move was very gracious and even helped me select a catchy new phone number, but she also said she'd notify our DSL provider to switch the Internet to the new number and when I called Earthlink a week and a half later to see how they were doing on it, they claimed to have no knowledge of the request. Zero knowledge, even. So now we don't have any Internet for two weeks.
Maybe I'm still exhausted from all the hoisting, but maybe I'm depressed. I don't know; I haven't been able to work on gzochi at all -- so much stuff needs to be done, like setting up the datagram delivery system and the event queue and the whole god-damn Scheme API. Why am I even doing this, anyway? Why would anyone want to write an RPG in LISP? God, when I look at what other people are doing, I get so depressed and jealous. This fucker from Yale DSAC, look what he's doing. Suck a cock, Collin Dickweed Jackson.
At least I'm not Dean Stark
I've been playing Red Dead Revolver, a copy I got from Devin, who said it was absolutely awful, but I'm kind of getting into it. It's pretty hard, and, like I think he mentioned, the camera's behavior is pretty infuriating sometimes, but, you know.
Went to see The Dickies at Irving Plaza on the 19th for some kind of Joey Ramone birthday thing. It was okay, but there were so many too old / tool young people there and almost no one was dancing around. Their set was okay -- they added See My Way, which is not my favorite song, but they also added Going Homo, which is my favorite song. Not really. Is it just me or was Leonard a lot more fun when he was on junk? None of you are going to answer that question, probably.
Oh, apparently he wants "Tiny" out of the band. Not that I blame him. Those guys are cretins.
I did AIDSWalk.
That's about it.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Felton Industries
Heyo. The weather gets hot, nobody wants to blog any more. I get it. It's hot. Let's keep this short.
Finished the Scheme core, I think -- had to relearn a lot of Scheme syntax. For some reason, I thought it would be okay to put parentheses around everything. Not cool. Sometimes, like when you're setting up a catch block or using 'begin', you don't want to over-evaluate. Of course, Guile won't tell you this until someone throws a type exception further down the line, so... so. Anyway, the Big Frustrating Thing I fixed this weekend was yet another COOP-threads SNAFU, this time that on account of the behavior of the garbage collector, Guile threads will hang if the Guile-controlling C thread goes to sleep. It is hard to make the C thread go dormant without busy-waiting and without making Guile sleep also. The epiphanous moment occurred while I was staring at this Guile console I'd opened to test out some threading stuff by hand -- I remembered that the little command-prompt interface (they call it PREC, I think), is written in Scheme, and that threads can run while it's waiting for input! So, in C, I created a named pipe (thank you, unistd.h) and had the work-submitting function put '0's into one end of the pipe and had Guile doing a blocking read on them, one at a time, semaphore-style, through a Scheme port wrapping the other end.
Good luck on your finals, M-biddy, if you have any more, even!
- My job is boring the shits off me. I've been slinking out at the earliest acceptable time every day.
- We're moving. Most of you already know, but yeah, we're getting a bigger place, down by the Park, on 12th St., it's $200 more per month for each of us. We're doing it June 1st. Hopefully we can keep our phone number. I like it.
- Took the cone off the cat's head because she'd figured out a way to get around it and she promptly chewed a hole in her stomach. We started slathering this bitter ointment on her, and it might be working. At the very least, she's is extremely ticked off.
- Way to go, Ogrish, on posting the head-chopping video. Some (nu-)media outlet just referred to them as "once-again courageous." I remember when their layout looked a heck of a lot like Stile's and their content was a heck of a lot more like Steak n' Cheese's.
Finished the Scheme core, I think -- had to relearn a lot of Scheme syntax. For some reason, I thought it would be okay to put parentheses around everything. Not cool. Sometimes, like when you're setting up a catch block or using 'begin', you don't want to over-evaluate. Of course, Guile won't tell you this until someone throws a type exception further down the line, so... so. Anyway, the Big Frustrating Thing I fixed this weekend was yet another COOP-threads SNAFU, this time that on account of the behavior of the garbage collector, Guile threads will hang if the Guile-controlling C thread goes to sleep. It is hard to make the C thread go dormant without busy-waiting and without making Guile sleep also. The epiphanous moment occurred while I was staring at this Guile console I'd opened to test out some threading stuff by hand -- I remembered that the little command-prompt interface (they call it PREC, I think), is written in Scheme, and that threads can run while it's waiting for input! So, in C, I created a named pipe (thank you, unistd.h) and had the work-submitting function put '0's into one end of the pipe and had Guile doing a blocking read on them, one at a time, semaphore-style, through a Scheme port wrapping the other end.
Good luck on your finals, M-biddy, if you have any more, even!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)