Java in a Nutshell

I just found out that the Morning Sedition Tea Lounge broadcast is gonna be at the Tea Lounge at 7th and Union, not the Tea Lounge at 7th and 10th. This is the worst day of my entire goddamn life.

Now it's Thursday.

Yesterday I was feeling kind of down, so I decided to go for a run after work. I was doing pretty well, but after about 2 miles the burrito I'd had for lunch started sloshing around in my stomach so I cut across the park and went home. But I felt a whole hell of a lot better.

I'd bought some mussels at C-Town on my way home, so when I got back from my run I sauteed some garlic and onions and steamed the mussels to put over some pasta. Then Mer and I hunkered down to watch the last 2 episodes of the second season of The Sopranos. The season finale was great -- Tony gets food poisoning from, what else, a bad plate of mussels (though Artie fuckin' Bucco tries to blame it on some chicken vindaloo from a different restaurant), and, in between trips to the bathroom, has a bunch of really weird dreams that kind of guide him through what he has to do to get his ducks in a row. Can't wait to start the third season.

And as luck (or slightly over/undercooked seafood) would have it, Mer and I both had some crazy dreams of our own last night. She can tell you what hers was about; here's what happened to me: Mer was having some irritating friends stay with us while they were in town. They'd brought us a gift of a boxed DVD set of some episodes of a TV show, possibly Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I'm not sure -- I think Bill Nighy was in it) and wanted to watch it with us, but they were still so aggravating that we decided to get out of the house on our own for a while. We wound up on a suburban high school football field -- it was dark out except for the stadium lights lighting up the grass -- and a friend of mine, possibly Chrissy Rodney, was chasing us around in a friendly way carrying a barrel of wine above his head and spraying wine into our mouths and all over our faces as we ran up and down the field. We ended up getting very drunk and the three of us went to the nearby restroom / locker room to clean ourselves up. You know how when you're drunk, sometimes you look in the mirror and you're like, "Echhhh! I look terrible!" Well, in the dream, I literally looked awful -- my eyes were really close together and my nose was all bulbous. For some reason I started spitting in the sink, trying to clear my throat, but I kept bringing up these thick strands of saliva and hair (!) that I had to pull out of my mouth with my fingers. So that was gross. And then I woke up.

As promised, pictures of the kitten:

The kitten looking	A girl and her kitten
Kitties in context

What else was I going to talk about. Oh yeah -- reading Don Quixote. One thing you guys may not know is that the book is basically vomit porn:

Sancho came so near as almost to thrust his eyes into his master's mouth; and that was the very moment when the balsam began to work in Don Quixote's stomach; so that just as Sancho drew close to peer into his mouth the knight threw up what was in him more violently than the shot from a gun and sent it all over the beard of his compassionate squire.

"Holy Mary!" cried Sancho. "What has happened to me? Sure, this poor sinner is mortally wounded, since he is vomiting blood."

But on examining things a little more closely, he realized, from its colour, taste, and smell, that it was not blood but the balsam from the can, which he had seen him drinking; and this so turned his stomach that he threw up his very guts over his master; and the pair of them were then in the same pickle.

Dicks Get Licked

I've already been carping about this to various people, but at around 3:30 today, CNN pulled its top story, that Terry Schiavo was fucking braindead the whole goddamn time, and replaced it with this, which, as far as I can tell, is not news at all. It is a portrait piece; the name of the potrait is "Trash in Hell." Is this some kind of conspiracy or what?

Okay, I started this entry last week and just didn't get around to finishing it. That's just how it goes sometimes. But there's some really big news about things, and I'm a little surprised that Meriwether hasn't posted yet: We got a kitten! I'll post some pictures as soon as we have them, but the story is thus. The wife of one of my bosses has gotten herself into the business of "fostering" cats, which means taking them off the hands of non-"No Kill" shelters until they can be officially adopted by other people. So she fostered this mother cat that came with three kittens, and the kittens were beginning to drive my boss crazy. We were at a brunch party at one of the sysadmins' house and I think I'm overhearing her ask if anyone can cat-sit for her, so I remind her that I live across the street from them, which is true. Turns out she was actually asking people about adopting the kittens, so I'd just volunteered us. But it's actually okay -- we went over to meet the one she'd said she had in mind for us, and then last Tuesday she just dropped him off.

He's what's called a "classic tabby," which means he's got very well-defined black stripes that kind of make him look like a tiger. Mer's christened him "Mikey," which is a sound-alike for "M.K.," which, according to her, is short for his real name, which is "Male Kitten." Weird. Anyway, he's been sequestered in the study for the past week because he's got a mild eye infection and because Mimi really doesn't like him much at all. We're going to let him out tonight, though, and that's just going to have to be that. (In part because when he's alone in the study, he cries non-stop, which is something that I didn't think would bother me, but I find it pretty upsetting. It's been fucking up my sleep and making me all wound up.)

Other stuff, other stuff... I read Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, which is pretty good -- a lot better than Gun, With Occasional Music. I read practically the whole thing in a single afternoon; I went up to the roof of our building, something I just realized we can do, and drank a gin and tonic in the hot sun while reading. It was really fun -- there was a nice breeze and I could see the trees blowing around in the park -- but I'd made the G&T way to strong and after about 30 minutes I nearly puked. But, you know.

I'm finally buckling down and trying to give Don Quixote a serious read; it's a fat one, that book.

Oh yeah, here's a fun thing: Morning Sedition on Air America has been doing their show from different places around NYC -- last month they did it from City Bakery, which is the place the staff buys food in the morning, I guess, and a few weeks ago, they did it at Snotty Dick Inc., The Strand bookstore. This Friday, though, they're doing the show from the Tea Lounge, which is literally like 2 block from my house. I could totally just wake up at 5:30 and go over there and hang out until 9:00 and yea, be earyl, even, for work. It's going to be awesome.

I just found out that not only are my old favorite bunch of ironic Republicans coming to play their first show in NYC in about 2 years, but they'll be playing at The Continental on my fucking birthday! How sick is that. Tickets aren't on sale yet, but who wants to go?

Kid, there are two kinds of bears in this world -- bears that dance, and bears that do not dance.

Remember... What the Doorman Said

Saw Chris tonight, which was fun. We went to the friends' place, where I thought they were having a barbecue, but I guess I'd been too waffly with Liz on the phone, so they didn't think we were coming and they ate all the food. So we got some Calexico instead, and it was great. My stomach was bothering me a bit so I didn't eat it all at the time, but I pounded it down as soon as I got home. It was good to see Chris; sounds like he's going out west to do his Master's at UCLA, which is sort of too bad for me, and probably Razor Lopez, too.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Mer and I both plowed through it in a couple of days. It's good, you know, but a little, I don't know, breezy. Now I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which is pretty goddamn scary. Finished Jade Empire; very satisfactory, except for one of those darn "choices" you make very near the end of the game basically swings your alignment completely in one direction, obliterating the results of all the choices you'd made earlier in the game. For me, the net result was that I turned into a pretty decent guy... and that's not so bad, I guess.

My new primary care physician sent me to a cardiologist and wants me to get an ultrasound, because I have, respectively, a heart murmur and a big fat varicose vein on one of my nuts. She said I really needed to start wearing something besides boxer shorts when I went running, so I bought a couple pairs of boxer briefs, which are not, you know, super-comfortable for me, but they stop the ol' oysters from hurting when I go 'round the park. So.

I think I may have found a place to donate my meagre comic book collection -- the Special Collections department of the VCU library system is apparently willing to receive any and all items I can send them. Even the Spawn / Underdog Christmas Special. I didn't think anyone wanted that one.

I Am Fucking Awesome

Well, hello there! I'm in a pretty great mood this morning, and I'll tell you why: First off, last night I got off the train at around 7:45 and it was still pretty light out, so I resolved to go for a run. I hadn't run last weekend -- I literally plain forgot to do it -- and I'd been feeling sheepish about that. Plus, I was feeling pretty full of energy despite having been stuck at my desk for the past 10 hours. So not only did I go for a run, but it was my best run ever! I only had to stop once, for only a few minutes, because my chest was getting pretty tight. But I ran up that last fucking hill like nobody's business. 3.4 miles, baby!

Also, just now, I finally got the CSS automatic table layout algorithm working in this rendering library I'm writing. Long story short, I'd gotten my renderer working passably a few months ago (jesus, 6 months ago?!), but there were some layout indiosyncrasies (like two elements only being able to get a few units away from each other before getting squished) that made me realize that I'd have to rewrite the whole thing to do layout according to the CSS algorithms. And that. took. a. long. time. The spec is worded in a pretty vague way, and a lot of times I had to spend a few days figuring out what it meant or even subject myself to the ridicule of people on IRC to get some help grokking it. At any rate, I fixed a trivial SIGSEGV just now and ran my test program, and what should I see but my three little test buttons layed out horizontally next to each other. Totally unexpected. I said, "Fuck yeah!" out loud as I used the TAB key to cycle the focus through each one, even though there's no one here to hear me except Kitty, and she's sick.

I got some books out of the Epiphany branch of the NYPL last week: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is really quite good, though it's got a completely different tone and focus from Blade Runner. The Darkest Part of the Woods I picked up on a whim while I was looking for a different book -- it's not bad; "pleasantly dull," might be the best way to describe it. Right now I'm reading The Road to San Giovanni by Italo Calvino.

Got into Jade Empire a whole bunch more. I still have the same complaint with it, though, which I also had with the Bioware Star Wars games, which is that the "choices" you get to make aren't terribly nuanced. That is, I don't really feel like I'm deciding between Way of the Closed Fist and Way of the Open Palm (or Dark vs. Light Side, as the case may be) as between rude and polite. I may subscribe to a Randian worldview (in the game, in the game), but I know how to say please, people.

UPDATE: It's Sunday now. As it happened, I had a kick-ass day at work on Friday, too, but I woke up at 2:00 AM Saturday with the shits and all this thick, unhorkable mucus in my chest. The worst part was, I was having a computer dream before I woke up and spent like 15 minutes half asleep trying to clear my throat by loading an Assembly in a custom AppDomain. Jesus. Tom dragged me out for a run, which did not go quite as well as the one on Thursday. Then I went to Ted's birthday party; I was the only attendee who didn't barf, apparently. This morning, Mer and I went to Cafe Steinhof; a fly died in my coffee, but the spaetzle was good. The humidity is making me irritable.

It's Literally Just Like 'The Shining'

So on Thursday night my friend Seung had a painting in this art show and stopped by the opening after work -- it was at one of her friends' apartments on Broadway, right above Yellow Rat Bastard (how's that for location?). She basically had the best thing in the show (and the only painting -- on canvas at least). The rest of the stuff was pretty... bad. It was mostly so-called "mixed media" pieces, including, but not limited to, a plywood crate attached to a set of a drapes and hanging from the ceiling. You know, like, stupid stuff.

Anyway, by the time I'd left the show it had gotten pretty dark, which was sort of disorienting, since it was totally light when I'd gotten there. I thought I should head for either the Delancey St. or East Broadway F stops, so I headed off Eastward and walked for like 6 blocks before I realized I had know idea where either of those stops was in relation to where I was. That, plus the fact that I kept thinking that Mer would be waiting for me and I hadn't called her to let her know where I was, and hadn't yet realized how sick I was with this shitty cold I've got now, led me to basically freak the fuck out. Pretty embarrassing, considering I'm supposed to have grown up in this city. Well, Jake, it was Chinatown.

I eventually made it to East Broadway, which, no kidding, is pretty East, and thus home to B'klyn. But I was still all wound up by the time I got back to the apartment, so I thought I'd do a few chores to calm myself down. The overhead light in the kitchen had been getting a lot dimmer, so I decided to remove the fixture and replace the bulb. One thing we'd always noticed about the fixture, which was one of those simple, screw-on glass dish dealies, was that it had a big splotch on the interior of one side, which we'd always assumed was paint. Well, when I finally got it down, I noticed that not only was it full of bug carcasses, a bunch of which had rained down on me as I was unscrewing it, but that splotch was actually a wasp's nest! Holy shit! Mind you, it was clearly devoid of actual wasps, but it definitely had a little hole in it for a wasp or wasp-like critter. So that didn't calm me down at all.

21 Days Later

Well, I haven't posted in this thing for a while. Sorry! I just haven't felt like it. Nothing's really happened. My fingernail is probably going to fall off; this realization is something that would have totally freaked me out when I was a kid, but now... not so much. It doesn't really hurt that much, it just feels sort of, you know, exposed. Which isn't even as bad as it sounds. My stomach's been shitty for the past week or so, too. Yesterday I decided to top my breakfast off with several handfuls of these japaleno potato chips that Mer brought home and the rest of the day I felt so crappy I couldn't eat anything.

Sometimes when I'm between books, I browse reviews on Amazon until I find something that sounds interesting, then I try to get it out of the library. I found this book called I Am Legend like this last week, but it totally sucked. The premise is awesome, though -- it's set in a future (1976 -- it was written in 1954) where a plague has turned the entire world except this one guy into vampires. Now I'm reading The Dante Club about a spate of Se7en-style murders in 1865 Boston -- also a rockin' premise with a lackluster execution.

I bought Jade Empire for Mer the day it came out. She had me go look for it in Manhattan since it was sold out at the GameStop on 7th Ave. It took me a while, but I found a copy at the GameStop on 8th St. & Broadway (Razor Lopez may remember it as a Software Etc.), and let me tell you -- that place is chock-a-block with dorks. As I was waiting in line, this creepy guy standing behind me turned to me unprovoked and said, in a halting, nasal voice, "I hear that game is like Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords except that there are more choices and the choices have deeper consequences." Neat. The only copy on the shelf was wedged into that display they have that shows you the current top 5 games, and I wasn't sure if it was for sale, so I asked the cashier when I got to the front of the line. He said, "Sure, but I don't know if we sell to Romulans." I was kind of nonplussed until I looked down and realized I was wearing my Star Trek shirt with the Romulan insignia on it. So we all had a good laugh, and one of the salespeople started going off about this guy he knew that bottles his own Klingon Blood Wine. The cashier was even nice enough to let me have the last copy of the Limited Edition version of the game, which was in the case behind the register. "Same price, but you get an extra playable character and an extra fighting style. It's basically a no-brainer." Indeed.

John Paul II's Greatest Hits

Good riddance to that disgraceful fascist.

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed to those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.”

"The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, if every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful. This teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable. Contraception is gravely opposed to marital chastity; it is contrary to the good of the transmission of life (the procreative aspect of matrimony) and to the reciprocal self-giving of the spouses (the unitive aspect of matrimony); it harms true love and denies the sovereign role of God in the transmission of life."

"The fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, received neither the mission proper to the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly shows that the non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them. Rather, it is to be seen as the faithful observance of a plan to be ascribed to the wisdom of the Lord of the universe.... In order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."

That Revolting Zombie In The Vatican

Seriously, I could not be "praying" harder for that disgusting old hate-monger to kick the incontinent-urine-filled bucket. What I don't get is the legions of monstrous ignoramuses swaying and gibbering like retards and wishing for him to hold on for, what, a few more days? Guys, your whole bullshit delusion is predicated on your infatuation with death; you should all be cheering for it harder than I am.

This week's been pretty fulfilling, Thanatos-wise, what with that Terri buying it and Jerry Falwell looking pretty close to it himself. (As far as prayers go, Marc Maron had the best one for Falwell: That he be pounded into the earth like a nail by a falling chunk of frozen blue airplane urine and have it slowly melt into his mouth as he lies dying.) Unfortunately, the week's fatalities also include comic prodigy Mitch Hedberg. I shit you not, guys -- he's fuckin' dead. MTV said heart attack, but, no offense, I feel like his heart was probably attacked by a bottle of pills and a couple of six packs.

I was goind to post the following on my Advogato diary, but I don't know how well it would go over there.

So, on the 26th, as I mentioned, I took the Chinatown Bus to Boston to attend the Free Software Foundation's annual Associate Member's meeting -- the price of membership buys you a day of lectures from the FSF's board. (For those of you who don't feel like to trying to grok their mission statement, you may think of the FSF as a kind of ACLU for software.) The first bus arrives in Boston at 11:00ish, so I missed the first couple of speakers, but here's what happened after I got there:

Henri Poole gave a short talk about the usefulness of community-building web tools for grassroots political campaigns, particularly as observed during the 2004 Howard Dean campaign. Interestingly enough, he recommended Drupal, the base system for CivicSpace; I'd evaluated it while trying to set up undecidable.net and found it to be the most polished but also, in some ways, the least featureful. Henri was careful to emphasize that the FSF is nonpartisan, but most of the questions from the audience were geared towards our currently uncomfortable political position; weirdly enough, several people asked about the "Dean scream."

Gerald Sussman was the next up; his talk was about the history of Engineering. The majority of it was devoted to historical data about the people behind various engineering innovations, as an illustration of the way in which scientists and engineers facilitate eachothers' work -- doing new science requires the invention of new tools, and the resulting discoveries themselves lead to further applications. Towards the end he introduced the problem of process patents, which interrupt this cycle by preventing research from feeding back into the scientific community. The audience didn't have many questions, except for a Russian-sounding guy in the first row who kept insisting that he could prove that all patents, not just process patents, were harmful -- Sussman disagreed, citing some of Edison's patents that led to the electrification of New York City, and required protection so that funding could be secured. (Not an subject I know that much about, admittedly...)

Then there was lunch -- I talked to a few people I was sharing a table with, including a guy who used to work on iPhoto at Apple (he's a GNOME hacker now).

After lunch, Eben Moglen gave a great speech about the legal and financial status of the FSF over the course of the past year. He made a number of interesting revelations, which I here re-reveal, in no particular order:

• The FSF was subpoenaed multiple times for various documents related to the SCO v. IBM trial; some of these subpoenas they took great care to respond to, others they simply ignored
• They've (the FSF) managed to acquire a few million dollars in the bank in gifts from some rather weathy corporate donors
• The latest threatening rumblings, as far as Free Software goes, have been related to patents, and, like the SCO debacle, are traceable back to Microsoft, though perhaps more directly this time than before -- he's been hearing reports of what he called "muggings" on the part of Microsoft, which go as follows: A CEO of a Fortune 500 company receives an invitation to dinner with Steve Ballmer or Craig Mundie; when he shows up, the CEO finds out that, in fact, he's having a meeting with a bevy of Microsoft lawyers who inform him that if his company goes with Free Software, they're opening themselves up to a range of patent-related lawsuits; the lawyers claim to have a detailed analysis of the legal liabilities faced by this CEO's company, but in order to see it, he's gotta sign an NDA -- and in some cases, this NDA says he can't discuss their findings with a lawyer -- any lawyer -- a stipulation that Moglen was pretty sure is illegal.
• Using some the money they've amassed this year, the FSF is opening a legal wing called the Software Freedom Law Center that's going to expand the Foundation's role in representing the developers of Free Software developers in cases dealing with things like GPL violations and patent infringement. He wants to recruit 15 young technically sophisticated law school graduates. The FSF is already assisting projects such as WINE, Plone, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Samba.

He also had some prognostications for what he'd be talking about at next year's meeting:

• He predicted that patent aggression from Microsoft would be the most significant concern for Free Software; a patent showdown of some sort, probably over XML document format interoperability (i.e., MS Office vs. OpenOffice.org), wouldn't be a matter of if but rather a matter of when.
• Fortunately, "when" would probably not be until 2008, owing to the precarious status of Windows Longhorn and vendor demand for "server" versions of their "desktop" offerings. By that time, Moglen said, the FSF would be well prepared to handle whatever Microsoft throws on the table.
• In the meantime, he said, they'd be working on the new version of the GPL, among other things.

Overall, his speech was very upbeat. The FSF was in great shape, he said, despite what it's been through over the past few years. His closing line drew lots of clapping and desk-pounding: "We have earned some political capital, and we intend to spend it."

One of the reasons I went to the meeting in the first place was to hear RMS, and he was next to take the podium. I was a bit surprised by his speech (not least of all by his voice -- it's actually kind of nasal, not at all like Goliath from Davey and Goliath like I imagined) -- the topic had been given beforehand as an explanation of the need for a Free BIOS, but he ended up just rattling off a list of bullet points:

• A Free BIOS is necessary to avoid the entanglements introduced by Treacherous Computing initiatives (Treacherous Computing is Stallman's name for Trusted Computing; he had to explain this to the Russian guy in the first row who couldn't believe an industry group would label their products 'Treacherous').
• Because of the refusal of most major GNU/Linux distributions to cease including non-Free Software, the FSF has heretofore been unable to endorse any particular distribution. Stallman announced that Ututo GNU/Linux, an all-Free Software distribution, would be the officially recommended FSF GNU/Linux distribution.
• The following improvements were on the table (but not set in stone) for the GPL v3.0:
  • Improved compatibility with other Free Software licenses
  • Better support for linking Free Software libraries with non-Free Software
  • A "retaliation clause" to punish licensees who participate in aggressive patent prosecution (this one seems kind of ill-advised to me)

After each sentence he had to clear his throat -- I feel like he might have been a bit under the weather. When he was finished, he opened the floor to questions. The vast majority were asinine what-if challenges to the language of the GPL (e.g., what if I license my program to someone under a non-Free license until they donate X dollars, at which point I release it to them under the GPL -- is that okay?), which Stallman rightly said he wasn't willing to discuss. Novalis, who, I think, is the FSF webmaster, piped up from the first row and fielded some of them whenever RMS started really laying into someone. Perhaps sensing that the discussion was straying a bit too much Henri Poole raised his hand in the back of the room and asked Stallman what his vision for the next 20 years was, seeing as how it was more or less the FSF's 20th anniversary. Stallman said he didn't have a "vision."

"Well, then, what do you see happening in the next 20 years?"
"Fascism."
"Fascism? That's your vision for the next 20 years?"

RMS had put his feet up on the desk so that he was reclining odelisque-like. He said that the U.S. government was basically obliterating everything that was good about life, period. "Doesn't the pendulum swing both ways?" someone asked. RMS didn't think it had ever swung this far right for so long before. At this point, the moderators thought it prudent to get the next speaker on stage.

It was Larry Lessig, who you may remember from his appearance on The West Wing, or his book Free Culture, or for just being an all-around genius. His talk was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation in which the slide transitions were fairly exactly synchronized with his spoken words -- neat! What he talked about was kind of a re-tread of the things he wrote about in Free Culture, basically that people who produce creative works are always building on what's come before them (a process he refers to as "remixing"), whether or not it's obvious from looking at their final product, and that we, as a society, are in a uniquely restrictive climate when it comes to the rights of creative producers to do this as a result of overly restrictive copyright laws (which stem, in part, he thinks, from the inability of lawmakers to address the fact that digital use of copyrighted materials unavoidably creates copies). He talked a bit about his Creative Commons project, which provides and promotes the use of custom and varyingly "free" licenses for creative work, to allow creators to permit selected "remixing" of their work without giving up other rights. He'd made a rather cryptic remark at the beginning of his speech about how he might have to run for the exit after the audience heard the claims he was going to make, which turned out to be:

• The Free Software movement should get more involved in the production of Free creative software products, to facilitate the creation of culture in the developing and third world
• We should promote the concepts of freedom to creative content producers all over the world, even if the creators are unwilling / unable to produce their work on Free Software platforms.

It was a very good speech, even if I'd already heard most of it before. When Lessig finished talking, Stallman stood up in the back and said, "The Free Software Foundation will never support the use of any non-Free Software platform."

Thus began a half-hour long argument between the two of them in which the audience and Eben Moglen eventually had to intervene. Lessig argued that you could certainly urge creative producers in parallel to support both Free licensing and Free Software, but it would be a mistake to write anybody off (and potentially lose out on the production of creative work) simply because they wanted to make their art in Macromedia Flash. Stallman said that freedom was more important that creativity and that there was no excuse, period, for endorsing non-Free Software in any context, even by looking the other way while promoting creative freedom. Their argument got fairly heated -- at one point, Stallman asked Lessig why he'd think it was a good idea to give a speech like this, and Lessig replied, "I'm going to a board meeting tomorrow and you said that the price of going to the board meeting was coming here and giving a talk." Rowr. So eventually Moglen stood up and said that he thought the intersection of creative freedom and Free Software was going to be a huge issue and that it might be a good idea for the FSF to devote a great deal more effort towards producing Free versions of popular pieces of creative software, like Flash. After some more back and forth between RMS and Lessig, the audience started to disperse and gather around each dude.

I packed up my stuff and hopped back on the bus. It was very cold when I got back to NYC; an aggressive bum at the East Broadway subway station asked if he could have the contents of my Au Bon Pain bag, and I gave it to him, but you know what? I wasn't done yet.

Waiter, More Gorp Please

I've been pushing myself pretty hard at work recently, in part because I'm working on something I actually want to finish, instead of some dead-end bit of test code that exposes at most one bug, once. The upshot of gunning it, though, is that I'm pretty worn out once I get home, and I'm constantly on edge with the fear of not making the deadlines and thus disappointing everyone.

Tomorrow I'm going, like I fucking said, to the FSF Associate Members Meeting, and I dare any and all of you to stop me. I ran like 2/3 of the way around the Park today, so just fucking try to catch me. Just try to stop me.

My fingernail was obscenely painful most of last week. Come Saturday, though, it all of a sudden felt a whole lot better and got a whole lot grosser-looking -- the nail's all purple and brown now. As a side-effect, I haven't been biting my other nails at all, and they've all grown out -- I look like a normal person. It's getting pretty difficult, though (I nibbled 'em a bit just now). I used to work with this mullet-head MCSE whose swore that he'd quit drinking and quit coke but couldn't stop biting his nails (and they were a mess).

Last week we saw The Ring 2, and it was not, you know, very good. Tonight we saw Melinda & Melinda, and that wasn't good, either, though comedian Will Ferrell and hacker Johnny Lee Miller both do very good Woody Allen impressions. Oh god, I just saw this comment on IMDB: "I hope they don't decide to make The Ring 3. If they do, I'll just wait for it to come out on video." But you'll still watch it, huh? Pathetic.

What do people think of the NBC version of The Office? I'm trying to stay open-minded about it.

Meanwhile, Jerkcity asks the important questions.

Rosario Dawson Touched My Arm

Seriously, she did; she's like... the hottest woman alive. I'm sorry, everyone -- it's true. But yeah, she totally wanted to look at my bingo sheet at Ted's thing last Monday.

Today at work I was peeling my customary orange and I guess it wasn't ripe enough or something, 'cuz when I dug my index finger under the cut I made in the peel it didn't give, and when I pulled really hard, the rind went right up underneath my fingernail. Wow -- it was (and is) very, very painful. It was bleeding copiously; now it's just oozing pus. My theory is that a piece of orange rind got stuck up in there and the acidity is what makes it so murderously hurty. The nail shows no sign of coming off at the moment, but we'll see. Jesus Christ. Makes it very difficult to type.

I vacuumed this morning; got a haircut before work. I'm so tired.

But Miff Dwifcoll, My Muvvah Just Died

Look, I just filed my tax return and I'm basically not getting any frickin' money back. In fact, if I hadn't given money to charity and itemized deductions this year, I'd owe money to the government. Am I member of that exploited "middle" class that get so much Air America-airplay? Jesus.

I was pruning the lemon tree a few days ago, and do you know what? Lemon tree sap smells like lemons!

Ugh, feces explosion. I didn't sleep well at all last night and was groggy and confused all day as a result.

Mer and I went to the best restaurant on Saturday night -- it's on 5th Ave. between 6th and 7th, and carries the rather unfortunate name Coco Roco. It's Peruvian food, which seems to be like, really tasty, fruity Mexican food with much, much more fish and seafood. We had (what I think were) deep-fried mashed potatoes filled with pico de gallo and a little shredded beef and then I had some bass and some very good paella-like thing; Mer had sweet-potato crusted snapper and plantains. $12-13 for an entree -- a steal considering how good the food is.

We rented a couple of movies, too: The Fisher King, which is, I'm sorry to say, a ponderous mess (although it was cool to see those shots of my old high school that they took while I was attending; they added this whole extra stone arch-way / entrance thing that totally isn't there in real life); and Tape, which was also a ponderous mess, though I should say Mer watched a lot of it without me.

Shadow Hearts continues to be retarded: The game referred, the last time I was playing it, to a series of "grizzly murders."

Further adventures in the search for a good portal system -- I don't think what I'm asking for is totally outside the realm of reasonability, but the fates seem to be allied against me on this one. Here's what I want:

• The ability to manage / publish / organize discrete documents, such as papers, photo essays, etc.
• The ability to do the same for web-logs hosted on the portal site itself
• A calendar that I could use to remember events like birthdays and things would be nice

...but the most important thing is

• Being able to import individual news items from external RSS feeds and seamlessly mingle them with content published locally

And nobody seems to be able to do that! If a package allows importing RSS feeds at all, it's always in a block of headlines kept separate from everything else. Like I think I said earlier, this package called Drupal *almost* lets me do what I want, but it requires a plugin that's no longer supported by its author. Then, today, I found what seemed to be the perfect package, something called ezPublish -- it would have been perfect, except that for some goddamn reason it requires 12 megs of RAM at runtime; the default configuration for PHP (which is in effect at our ISP) caps memory usage at 8 megs (for good reason). WTF?! Here's the thing, though -- I figured out how to override the ISP's default, but after reading our ISP's Terms of Service, it sounded like doing so might be pushing it (and the account is in M-Biddy's name), so I didn't do it. Fuck.

Snikt!

Mer's in Boston, but she's coming home now!

While she was gone, I rented Code 46, starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. TK. Samantha Morton is totally hot and you get to see her bush -- it's shaved! -- in this dirty little scene where she's trying to get away from Tim Robbins as her tries to put it to her. She wants it and also doesn't want it.

Ugh, so far the entire weekend has been spent programming. I need to... something.

You know, if I were a producer for the amateur shit on It's Showtime At The Apollo, I would stop booking white guys in sweater vests that play classical violin. Because even if they're really good, what's the audience supposed to say about it? Fuck, I'm just watching at home and I don't even know what to say. Wop, wop.

After breakfast today (Sunday), Mer went to get printer paper and I went to Gamestop, and while I was there, I made an impulse purchase: Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Mostly I got it because Tycho and Gabe liked it (word of mouth advertising!), and I can see why they did. The visual style definitely grows on you -- and the game is "fun," mind you -- but the dialog is just... ugh. Half of what the characters say to each other is throwaway gibberish, like, "He he" (I payed $30 to hear / read someone say "He he?"), and the other half is the most patently cliched "character development." Why, for example, does there need to be, in every stupid cookie-cutter Japanese role-playing game, a character who's got a tough, confident exterior (Squall Leonheart, I'm looking at you), but who gets thrown completely off guard when the needlessly bossy supporting female character gets up in his face? Japan's got girl trouble, I tell you what. The best part is, they used a third-party "localization" company to help them translate it -- to the extent that this company's logo comes up when you start the game -- and the fucking thing still sounds like it was written by one of the human characters in Pokemon.

I maintain there could be a totally sweet RPG that takes place in the context of WW1 (like Shadow Hearts) or, better yet, WW2 -- provided it's not written by idiots.

I am definitely, definitely doing this come March 26th.

Funny Banana At The Allergist

So I took the day off work to day to take the cat to the skin doctor. It was totally rainy and awful, just like when we brought her home for the first time, and the appointment took several hours and was very expensive, but she's now on this allergy therapy that has a pretty good chance of permanently solving her constant chewing / biting problems. Plus, they put this totally adorable little shirt on her to stop her chewing in the interim that she totally hates. She's acting like it makes it so she can't walk, but I'm pretty sure she's full of shit on that one. UPDATE: We had to take the shirt off her because it was time to go to work and we weren't sure if she'd be able to go to the bathroom.

I hung out with my friend Chris yesterday. It was great! We took a walk around Prospect Park and narrowly avoided some predatory brothers on the down-low.

Later on, in our continuing attempts to make vegetarian dishes that are un-revolting, I cooked up our recent favorite, spicy sausage with broccoli and pasta, using Gimme Lean imitation sausage in place of the real thing. It went over pretty well, even with Chris -- he says he's moving in vegetarian circles himself after getting the low-down on how cows get slaughtered in halal kitchens. Apparently it's pretty uncomfortable for them and they make a pretty awful noise. "Why do they have to do that? Why can't they just... shut up?" wonders Chris.

"...And die?"

"Yeah. Just shut up and die."

Mer and I went to the library last weekend and checked out a couple of books. I picked up Children of Cthulhu, which should do a lot towards sating my appetite for awful garbage. A lot of the stories are just the worst sort of... ugh. Just baldly expository nonsense that reveal exactly what was on the author's hack brain when he was writing it -- which is ironic, because the editors wrote this foreword about how uninspired most Lovecraftian fiction usually is. Well. It's a lonely world for people who really, really like Cthulhu.

So I've been trying out some web-portal software to get undecidable.net up and running -- here's what I'm thinking would be cool (this is mostly for M-Biddy's benefit): It's like a news portal that you can log into with your own account, and once you're inside, you can customize this, like, digest of RSS feeds come in, out of list of available sources. Basically anything that publishes a feed, so things like Slashdot but also like any blog on Blogspot, for example, or my Advogato diary. And you see it all in this continuously updated custom personal news page, kind of like Slashdot's front page, but with stories from all different sources all mixed in together. And for people who don't have accounts on the site, maybe the front page of the portal we can use for publishing little essays and things, like those wireless papers you were working on way back when. So. What do you think? I'm still evaluating different portal systems -- none of them seem to do exactly what I want.

Don't Call People 'Sweetie'

What are we, Harvey Fierstein? Seriously.

For fuck's sake -- FireFox just crashed and I lost a whole entry. And that was like, a week ago. I get sick of this thing sometimes. Long story short: Last weekend, Mer and I went ice-skating in Prospect Park and then had dinner at Junior's, cheesecake capitol of the world. We took the bus home, horribly stuffed and woozy. Mer said, on the bus, "Well, we'll always remember the time we ate dinner at Junior's."

Now it's a week later. I've moved my shit onto my new pad, undecidable.net. Kelly Clarkson just played some shit on SNL; she was wearing this top that was cut down to her pelvis and she has, like, no tits, which was sort of hot. It would also have been, you know, sorta if she had bigger tits. So, you know. Whatever.

Bill's at the Grannys. I mean the Grammys. I'm writing Scheme.

I Am Getting Kind Of Arrogant

I had this dream just this last night that I was at my dentist's office rescheduling an appointment I'd made for a cleaning and had showed up too late for, and who should I see in the waiting room but the hon. Rudy Giuliani! He sees me write my name down on a form and he goes, "So, Julian, what do you do for a living?" and I reply, no joke, "I enable the economy of this city, you creep" (whatever the fuck that means). He got kind of visibly flustered and muttered something about being careful about who I shoot my mouth off to and how I should hope nobody has a file on me, etc. I go, "Oh spare me, you fucking monster." Muh?

Later on in the dream I was at some kind of college graduation party, and happened to be standing near enough to the president and his daughters to hear him say that he'd selected the wine being served at the party because "it smoothly blended the lotion of childhood with the lotion of adulthood." WTF? I remember tittering to a group of faceless sardonic friends, "Lotion? There's lotion in the wine? The wine is poisoned!" I don't even get it, though. Lotion?

I am so goddamn sick of the pathetic antics of the assorted capons and centrists in the DNC and the Senate. Jesus Christ, people, either grow a pair like Barbara Boxer or... you know, get off the pot. I'll tell you one thing, though -- I'm not voting for them any more.

Creighton Sings the News

Okay, what's in the news? This, for one thing.

McCook County State's Attorney Roger Gerlach says the proposed ordinance is not an attempt to put him out of business: "As long as they have some opaque clothing over the crucial parts of the human body, they can dance all they want."

Jesus Christ that makes me mad. Look, I don't to live in your shitty little town if I can't see some goddamn titties when I damn well please. And you want me in your town: I'm rich; I shovel the walk when it snows; I can internet enable shit. Fuck.

How much are we all praying for the fuckhead Pope to die? The unwanted and uncared-for children of the Mary-worshippers and assorted savages to whom he forbade birth control should be given the privilege of pelting him to death with industrial waste as he lies wheezing and twitching like a monster in a filthy birdcage on the floor of the U.N.

M-Biddy and I have registered a domain together and are goin' in on some hosting together. So look for undecidable.net to make an appearance in the next couple of days. Yuh-harrr!

My grandma sent us a set of plates and cups with pictures of birds on them that she got as part of a donation to the Audubon Society about a month ago, and I just wrote her a thank-you note. I happened to be reading this Robert Penn Warren poem called Audobon in Norton on the ride home, so I quoted her the bit below, but I naively wrote that the name of the poem was "From Audubon." Oh well, envelope sealed:

Their footless dance

Is of the beautiful liability of their nature.

Their eyes are round, boldly convex, bright as a jewel,

And merciless. They do not know

Compassion, and if they did,

We should not be worthy of it. They fly

In air that glitters like fluent crystal

And is hard as perfectly transparent iron, they cleave it

With no effort. They cry

In a tongue multitudinous,often like music.

Look, I'm not some homo that quotes poetry in his 'blog all the time. I promise I won't do it again for a while.

Take It Sleazy

Sometimes its hard to get these little entries finished. You know, I start them, and then... I don't know. When I get home from work I don't really always feel like writing in the 'blog.

So the cat has been acting real suspicious around the kitchen, spending most of her time in there, always with her nose to the ground, peeking under the stove and refridgerator in particular. Well, the other day, she ran into the living room with real goddamn live mouse (well, mouse-baby) in her mouth. We didn't even think we had mice! Guess they came in from the cold. Anyway, though, she's chomping it and spitting it out and whacking around, and eventually, man, this mouse is fucking dead. But she's still batting it around, so Mer and I make a move to take it away from her -- I'm advancing on her with the broom and dustpan -- and she does not like this at all. So what she does is, she just fucking swallows the whole thing on the spot! The whole thing! I've never heard of a cat actually eating the things it kills. Yeah, but anyway, she also happens to be wearing this Elizabethan collar that's supposed to stop her from chewing on herself (it doesn't) but now it's got mouse guts all over it. So we had to pin her down, take off the collar and wash it, and then put it back on.

Apparently she threw up in the collar the other day and that was much worse, but it happened on Mer's watch, so I don't really have any salient details. Maybe she'll put it in her thing.

What else, what else... oh yeah -- if you like XML and you like Scheme, then you may or may not like my SDOM, but you should still help me out with it, because god damn it it's a lot of work.

Oh shit I just farted pretty loud, at work. I'm here real early though (it's 8:15 right now) so I don't think anyone heard. I'm gonna go take a shit, I think.

How good does this movie look?

Lizard 2005!

...I mean, blizzard... 2005. So the snow (and forecasts of doom) started at noon yesterday, and were finished promptly at noon today. I took a few pictures. We even trudged out to Prospect Park, where there was some marathon sledding shit going on, but the picture I took there didn't get recorded by my piece-of-crap camera.

Router, Care-Bear pillow, Kleenex, The Making of a Poem, and, oh yeah -- fuckin' snow!	The bathroom: We're snowed in!
Is this not the cutest thing you have ever seen?

My sister, genious (sic):

(19:41:53) [My Sister]: is grace an ugly fat girl name or a hot beautiful blonde name
(19:41:56) [My Sister]: in your opinion
(19:42:03) Nintendo Julian: depends
(19:42:07) Nintendo Julian: how fat is the girl
(19:42:27) [My Sister]: pretty fat id say
(19:42:36) Nintendo Julian: Mer and I say hot beautiful blonde
(19:43:00) [My Sister]: your wrong
(19:43:04) [My Sister]: its fat ugly girl
(19:43:07) [My Sister]: with braces
(19:43:08) Nintendo Julian: well... alright
(19:43:16) [My Sister]: that or old lady

Fucking Z-Bots!

Rebuilding for like... the 5th fucking time today, no joke. Jesus. The past week or so at work has been so profoundly boring that all I've been doing is reloading my HoTMaiL and Gmail windows in the hopes that someone will contact me. No one has! Fagits!

Some people don't like jerkcity, but I do. Here are some good ones:

• COOL AS ICE
• WINE AND CHEESE
• DEAR DOCTOR DONG
• ONE MORE TIME
• THERE ARE NO PRIZES INVOLVED

It's not for everyone, I guess.

I have decided to cut myself some slack, a little, on my spare-time programming, because it makes me really exhausted and headache-y. Like I know I've mentioned before, the language I'm writing in right now requires that you construct your code in a less... straightforward way, the end result being that at "execution" time, it "evaluates" like a beautiful blooming flower instead of coursely ejaculating like a hairy, sequentially-oriented gaijin Jew bastard. So.

Stallman goes for, does not get the girl.

• How To Draw A Bunny - Rocks!
• The Village - Sucks!
• The Distillers: Distillers - Rocks!

Reading the Larry Lessig book that the FSF sent me as part of my membership package -- persuasive to say the least. If you've ever wanted to let yourself off the hook for all the MP3s you download... well. No, that's not really what it's about. Let me know if any of y'all want it when I'm done (I actually just finished it right now at work), otherwise I'm givin' it to the liberry.

In other news, we got a rather baffling answering machine message a few days ago. Here's my best attempt at piecing it together. As you can tell from listening, the speaker had a rather heavy European accent.

Hey [Julian?]. Uh... It's Alex. How are you? Heh. How are you and where are you? Ah, I am in... uh... in Brooklyn, in... uh... York St. I'll call you back later, but [maybe I'll go now?] I was taking pictures of this bridge. Uh... I'll try you at your other num- other number, or uh... I'll try to find you... later. But it... [???] Little Italy or Chinatown. I'll find you. Bye.

The Death Of A Toad

I've been farting around with Norton a bit, and I like this Richard Wilbur poem in there that shares its name with this post:

       A toad the power mower caught,

Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got

   To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him

   Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade

      Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,

          Low, and a final glade.



       The rare original heartsbleed goes,

Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows

    In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies

    As still as if he would return to stone,

        And soundlessly attending, dies

           Toward some deep monotone,



       Toward misted and ebullient seas

And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia^Rs emperies.

    Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone

    In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear

        To watch, across the castrate lawn,

            The haggard daylight steer.

I thought I had other things to post, but I don't.

Krupps & Felt

I've been thinking about House of Leaves lately. I've read a whole lot of Internet things that say it's a load of pretentious hackery, which is, of course, all it takes to take the wind out of everyone else's sails. What I think is that the material devoted to the emotional motivation of the main character falls pretty flat (to the extent, I guess, that it necessitated the writing of a whole 'nother book), but that the rest of it is a truly nasty and extremely virulent little meme. I recommend it to all of you who are patient.

Mer rented Garden State and I just watched it. It's alright -- self-indulgent, wears a bit thin in the last act, but it's fairly genuine otherwise, it seems like. All those Jersey rich-kids reminded me of my friends from Wesleyan, none of whom read this.

Apparently Devil-Lynn got me this DVD for Christmas. Thanks, guy! (Does a 'blog "thank you" mean I don't have to write a note?)

Here are some tidbits from a story from Edge (as featured on /.) where they ask 120 experts from various fields about things they believe but cannot prove. Inneresting! Tor Nørretranders preaches to the choir:

It is important to have faith, but not necessarily in God. Faith is important far outside the realm of religion: having faith in other people, in oneself, in the world, in the existence of truth, justice and beauty. There is a continuum of faith, from the basic everyday trust in others to the grand devotion to divine entities.

Carlo Rovelli appeals to people who don't know anything about physics, like me:

I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like "the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air: if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality.

Chris Anderson gets plain mean:

The Intelligent Design movement has opened my eyes. I realize that although I believe that evolution explains why the living world is the way it is, I can't actually prove it. At least not to the satisfaction of the ID folk, who seem to require that every example of extraordinary complexity and clever plumbing in nature be fully traced back (not just traceable back) along an evolutionary tree to prove that it wasn't directed by an invisible hand. If the scientific community won't do that, then the arguments goes that they must accept a large red "theory" stamp placed on the evolution textbooks and that alternative theories, such as "guided" evolution and creationism, be taught alongside.

So, by this standard, virtually everything I believe in must now fall under the shadow of unproveability. Most importantly, this includes the belief that democracy, capitalism and other market-driven systems (including evolution!) are better than their alternatives. Indeed, I suppose I should now refer to them as the "theory of democracy" and the "theory of capitalism", to join the theory of evolution, and accept the teaching of living Marxism and fascism as alternatives in high schools.

I'm getting pretty sick of having to go to work -- especially when I make some critical breakthrough in something I'm working on and look at the clock and it's time to brush my teef and get on the subway before I have time to finish implementing it. I want to go on vacation again. Anyone want to sponsor me, Damian Conway-style? Right, didn't think so.

A funny Jerkcity, something of a rarity.

Aud Lang Sine Wave

Happy New Year, my little habichuelos! (My little habas!)

The way of the future.
The way of the... future.
The w-way of the future.

Peep it, creepits -- a letter from Knuth to Condi Rice, circa 2002. You may also enjoy some of his photographs.

Also of interest: John Gilmore (EFF)'s explanation of what's wrong with copy protection.

I've been frying my brain on computer shit lately. Luckily, Razor Lopez, with whom I spent a delightful NYE, lent me a whole bunch of XBox games that I'm totally gonna play. To whit:

• LOTR: The Two Towers (really hard, though apparently I'm already farther than Billy)
• Arx Fatalis
• The Simpsons: Hit & Run (utterly delightful)
• The Thing
• Believe it or not, Syberia the first!

In return we gave him Fable, which I think he'll enjoy. It's well-crafted, if not terribly expansive.

On the subway ride home from Roger Cumming Architecture, this young middle eastern guy puked up a whole bunch of brown crap like halfway down the car from us. Gross! The cat still has a little diarrhea. Mer cleaned literally everything in the whole house. We are becoming vegetarians for 2005; we are becoming vegetarians that can fish.

Come in with the milk.

Bitches!

I bought stamps at the post office before coming to work and affixed them to the remaining "holiday cards" on the subway. The guy I was sitting next to was very well-dressed -- leather, etc. -- but he smelled like feces. I mailed the cards before coming upstairs. Literally nobody is in the office today. Zero developers. 2 QA people (including me -- I am honorary QA manager). Nothing can get done.

Sounds like Mitch Hedberg's got a little dok-dok-dok problem (or his existing problem has gotten worse). His act actually sounds pretty punk rock, though.

Okay, I'm home now. Razor Lopez and Chrissy Rodney were supposed to come over to hang out / play Xbox, but one's feeling sick and the other may not be doing so great either, so right now it's looking like an evening of drinking wine and hacking LISP by candlelight.

Fuck Christmas

Mer has flown the coop, so to speak. I miss her already. But we made a bunch of totally awesome "holiday" cards and maybe some of you will get one in the mail once I can buy some stamps.

We have switched the cat to this dry food that's supposed to help her skin, but I'm not very good about measuring out how much to give her -- I just pour it into the bowl until she pushes my hand out of the way with her head -- and it's kind of upset her stomach. She just crapped an extremely noisy diarrheaic crap into her litter box. Think the ring-presentation scene in Henry Fool.

Look, I know crapping on people who whine about the discrepancies between the book and movie versions of Lord of the Rings is kind of passe these days, but take a gander at this site. See... there seem to be a lot of you out there who think these books are some kind of masterpiece, but you need to face facts: This Tolkien guy is positively a misogynist and extremely probably a homosexual. I shit you not, I have read his biography. All this bullshit people are always carping about -- platonic ideal of male friendship and all that -- it's just Tolkien crapping on women and wanting to fuck his WW1 buddies. There is no such thing as this innocent, affectionate male friendship that people won't shut up about -- Sam wants to fuck Frodo. Don't you get it? And when you people get all fussy about Peter Jackson tampering with this sacred, sacred little repressed love affair it means a) you are gay, which is fine; or, b) you are a tiny little immature baby-person, because that was the creepiest goddamn part of the whole trilogy of books -- books, which, by the way, are notable more for the obsessiveness of their author than for anything else. They represent a disorder on the scale of this, minus the little naked girls with dicks, of course.

I sarcastically cannot wait to hear everyone's wonderful opinions about this upcoming thing.

Mer and I have been doing this thing recently which I think is fun enough to recommend to others. Instead of going to the movies or buying CDs or whatever, once a week we have been going out to eat, usually for brunch, at a different shi-shi restaurant in our neighborhood. It usually comes out to around $30, which is why we only do it once a week, but now we have totally eaten at like every restaurant in our neighborhood. Places like

• The Cornbread Cafe
- Good cornbread, which is something of a rarity; roasted potatoes to die for
• Applewood - Good food, especially if you like apples; they have a real working fireplace, too
• Dizzy's - Expensive, so-so food, and they gave us the bum's rush when it started to get busy
• 2nd St. Cafe - Deelightful, if you don't mind the wait. Best "huevos rancheros" in the galaxy.

Mer's playing of the light-side Jedi guardian is mad finished, son. It's time for my guy, Dark Jedi Astor Speeris -- heck, that's Darth Speeris to you -- to really shine, or do whatever dark lords of the Sith do. Simmer, I guess? I'm awesome at naming these guys. My dude from the first game was named Telstar Schlitz. Now I gotta do some laundry and get some groceries.

Oh yeah, and I forgot -- I don't usually like Mac Hall that much, but this strip is a keeper.

Oh Bess

I realized that I was really on edge literally because I couldn't decide whether I should write a full DOM implementation (a big stupid programming task -- this 'blog is still going to try to stay non-technical, don't worry) in Scheme and try to get it included in guile-lib and then depend on it for my library or whether I should write my own DOM-like API and expose that to users. And that's a stupid thing to worry about. So for the past couple of days I have just been taking it easy on myself, brain-wise. And that's okay, as far as I'm concerned.

None of you are getting Christmas presents from me, because frankly I think it's silly.

Went to see a production of a play called "The Highwayman" that my friend Julia was putting on; a bunch of my other friends were in it -- hell, I was almost in it myself but I got bumped in a case of cruel casting-call caprice. It was great, except that the theater-space it was in was not heated at all, and I was wearing my All-Star low-tops. My toesies got been frozed.

The Worst Day Of Your Entire Life

Mer made this sausage pasta dish tonight that it totally the best thing you can possibly eat if you don't care about the environment or your health. Here's how to make it -- it's from Joy of Cooking, but since you can't copyright a recipe I think it's okay to talk about it here. You'll need:

• About 3 (spicy) italian sausages, torn into little chunks with your fingers
• Broccoli (or other steamable veggie) cut up however you like it
• Some garlic, chopped up small
• Some hot red pepper flakes if you want
• Olive oil, a third of a cup or so

Heat up the oil in a skillet and cook the sausage until it looks somewhat cooked. Put the garlic in there and keep cookin' until the garlic gets cooked and sprinkle the pepper if you've got it. Now add the veggie and get a piece of tinfoil and, with oven mitts, wrap it around the skillet and just leave it for 5 minutes. Now you're done -- put it on pasta and you've got a meal. Bam!

I've been reading some old textbooks on computability I had lying around and reviewing the proofs for shits and giggles -- it's like playing a videogame with a walkthrough. Among the amusing results, for the sake of review:

• It is not possible to write a program that can figure out whether or not a particular program will behave in a particular way given a particular input (call it "accepting" or "rejecting" a string)
• It is not possible to write a program to determine whether another program rejects all string
• Furthermore, it is not possible to write a program that can tell whether two programs have any properties related to string-acceptance in common at all
• It's not possible to write a program that can tell whether another program is as efficiently-written as possible

I had a meeting at work today that I was pretty on edge about, and it turned out to not really be anything. And of course I can't say anything else about it, this being the Internet and all, so you guys don't care. But I'm still kind of neither here-nor-there regarding how I feel about my job, which is stupid because they pay me more than I think is probably necessary for... well, for something for which I've basically put all the actually important things in life aside. So.

Taking a tip from Devin, who literally has a separate blogger.com account for each of the cartoon characters in Yu-Gi-Oh! with whom he's consumated a relationship, I've added a little sidebar that contains an HTML-ization of my Advogato RSS feed. What the fuck does that mean? Well, it means I don't have to write about computer stuff in this 'blog any more, because any interested parties (don't think there are any) can read about it there. It also means there'll be fewer entries in here, because I don't give a fuck about shit that doesn't compute, knowwha'msayin'? Now I just need to find a way to fix the stupid font color for those links.

Vacation Wrap-Up

So, the vacation's almost up. I didn't do that much stuff, or at least not as much as I expected to do. Let's see...

• On Sunday and Wednesday I went running. After that it got way, way too cold in the late afternoon, which is when I like to go
• Rented a couple of movies that I'd been wanting to see for a while: The Wicker Man and eXistenZ. The Wicker Man kind of dragged it's feet a bit when it came to making with the scary (make with the scary already!) but it was a fine character study, at least. And it has songs. Everyone (i.e., the back of the box) is always comparing eXistenZ to The Matrix, but that's stupid. I think the Matrix maybe had a cleverer premise, but not even. Whatever. Fuck talking about movies.
• Vacuumed and cleaned a whole bunch
• Partied out with Razor Lopez a bit
• I went shopping at the Target down at the Atlantic Center mall on Flatbush near our old place. Let me tell you something -- Target is some nice shit. It almost approaches the level of, like, a department store in Manhattan, where you feel like you're too dirty and poor to shop there. I bought some new boxers, a pitcher for juice, and a wonderful glass container for storing flour so that the larder beetles don't have babies in it any more.

I was thinking I wouldn't be able to talk about this at all -- for diplomatic reasons -- but since Mer wrote about it in her 'blog, you can just read all about it there: My mom thinks I live in a cave

After her mom left, Mer and I went out to brunch to celebrate at the 2nd Street Cafe (it's on 7th Ave.), and I had these huevos rancheros that were basically the most delicious thing I'd ever eaten. I mean, I've never had huevos rancheros before, but shit. I could eat 'em for god-damn forever. Anyway, on the way home we stopped at GameStop and Mer bought this game called Syberia II, which is like a sort of shitty version of Myst set in the colder parts of Europe -- an idea not without its charm, mind you.

So Mer and I have been playing this game, but it just sort of freezes up all the time, so this morning I re-played all this stuff that we'd played yesterday but lost. The funny thing about the game, though, is that by default there's a subtitle track that goes along with the voice acting, and whoever wrote out the script... well, they really wrote it out, so you've got characters whose dialogue comes up as something like, "Snigger. Sure seems like it, eh, pet? Snigger."

Okay, so you know how I said I wanted to post some screenshots of the XUL renderer I you all I was working on? Well, this afternoon I got it a to a point where I got something worth showing off, and I have promptly stopped working on it. Phew -- now I can finally enjoy my vacation! Oh, wait -- I go back to work on Wednesday. Anyway, the thing I'm rendering is the Preferences dialog window from this Mozilla XUL application called MozEdit. I've modified it slightly to compensate for the fact that my renderer doesn't deal well with explicit lengths that are specified in pixels. The one on the left is the output of my renderer, the one on the right is Gecko (i.e., FireFox):Note that for some weird reason, on my system my renderer even does a better job than Gecko because Gecko fails to render the radio buttons for those radio groups -- I think that has something to do with the way I was viewing the page, though.

Tonight I think I'll go see Bill's band over at Knitting Factory. Maybe there'll be an open bar.

UPDATE: Yeah, so I went to the show, and it was fine. Very nice. But before going I made this elaborate dinner -- it was spicy baked yams and eggs au gratin with asparagus tops. Totally delicious and I totally pulled it off in about an hour. But during the (terrible) band that came after Big Business, I was talking to Sam Huntington in the back by the bar and I farted this long awful fart; probably the stinkiest fart I've ever farted in my life. It just smelled like rotten garbage or something, and it hung around for freakin' forever. The female member of this couple that was standing next to us actually suggested that they go somewhere else. Sam was totally understanding, though, and said that he'd farted a worse fart earlier the same day. What a guy.

I On Vacation

That's right -- suck it up, bitches. I've been on vacation all week, just haven't been 'bloggin'. I've got things to talk about, but I don't feel like talkin' 'bout 'em right now. Maybe I'll add some stuff to this post later. My ncurses renderer's coming along nicely -- I was hoping to have some screenshots comparing it to the Gecko renderer, but I've been having some trouble with it. It does a whole bunch of sophisticated things, like matching HTML colors to ANSI ones, but there are some simple things that make it barf for some reason, like trying to render 0-size elements.

Set And Forget

It's almost Thanksgiving. I don't kee-yah 'bout dat.

My ncurses XUL renderer is coming along nicely. Too bad XUL sucks and only crazy people write programs for ncurses. I'm working on getting CSS properties imported and making colors work. Maybe I'll start a SourceForge project for it once it's a little more mature. Or a Savannah project.

Everyone's an idiot except for me.

Shitcock!

Okay, now you have to hear about some computer shit because I am proud of it. So you know how I was writing a constraint-based layout engine? Well, here's my algorithm, which Mike Bell can probably prove inefficient and wrong. You start by building a tree of elements that need to be rendered, some of which may specify their size explicitly, some of which may specify their size unreasonably, and some of which may not specify size at all. Here's how you decide how big they get to be:

• At every node in the tree, ask your children how much space they need to render themselves; offer each child node the maximum space available to you
• If the aggregate of requested sizes from your children exceeds one or both dimensions of your maximum size, scale all children to fit proportionally
• Set your size to the minimum between the aggregate of your child node requested sizes and the maximum space available to you

To calculate your own size requirements, do the following:

• If you have any text content, size the text according to a line-break-aware text-sizing algorithm (too boring to describe here)
• If you have child nodes, take the maximum width and the aggregate height (or vice versa, if you're orienting your elements horizontally) of your children
• If you have a specified min-width or min-height, ensure that your requested width and height are at least equal to these lower bounds; if you have a specified max-width or max-height, these should establish a cap for both dimensions

Here's a piece of good news -- I was getting really frustrated because I was running my renderer on a bit of sample XUL and getting a layout I didn't understand. So I got kind of depressed and figured I'd dick around with the built-in XUL renderer in Firefox. I run it on my sample XUL, and I get the same output as my renderer! So my renderer appears to work, even though I have no idea why it's doing what it's doing. Now it's more or less a question of figuring out how to render all of the elements, like checkboxes and radio buttons, etc.

Here's a piece of bad news. It turns out the reason that KeySpan's been asking us to pay $60 a month for cooking gas is that there's a gas leak in the building somewhere between our apartment and the incoming gas line in the basement. The KeySpan guy shut off the gas to our apartment and the landlord's got a plumber coming on Thursday, but it's not super clear when we're gonna have gas again.

In a moment of nostalgia, I went searching for this story that Bill and I had found on Stile Project a while back. I remember Billy originally remarking on it as a pretty dead-on characterization of how depressing and shitty (literally!) suburban life sounds -- it doesn't disappoint.

I'm on vacation on Thursday and Friday! Suck a dick, employers!

Yes. Right Into The Camera. Yes.

It seems congratulations are in order:

• All hail M-Biddy for getting a job -- at OpNet, the Pentagon's largest supplier of nuclear missiles and Arab-killing gases! No, that's not what it is; it's some boring god-damn networking thing
• All hail Devlin Smithers for making. more. money.

This ncurses project I'm working on is starting to get pretty interesting -- what I'm doing is creating an ncurses rendering target for XML-based user-interface toolkits. ncurses, by the way, stands for "new curses," and curses, by the way, is this fairly hoary UNIX library for doing low-level manipulation of terminal screens. Think text-mode graphics, basically. The problem with ncurses is that, while it makes it very easy to, say, draw a single character at particular place on the screen -- no easy feat with the standard set of system calls and libraries in UNIX, mind you -- it is horrendously difficult to render a full screen of "widgets," like boxes, buttons, text input controls, etc. On the other hand, though, you've got these XML user-interface-markup document types, like XUL, where you can quickly and easily specify things like buttons and check-boxes and whatever. Here's what a little piece of XUL might look like:

<box id="main-box" align="center" border-width="1">

  <label id="main-box-label" text="Click the button below"/>

  <button id="main-box-button" text="Click me!"/>

</box>

It's pretty obvious what that's gonna look like, right? And it was super-easy to write, too. Here's the problem: Currently, the only real renderer for XUL is called Gecko -- it's what renders HTML for Mozilla Firefox, too -- and so you need a raster-based GUI like X11 or Win32 to run it, and this doesn't help anyone at all if they're trying to develop text-based applications. So what I want to do is make it so that you can feed in that XUL to ncurses and have ncurses draw it in text mode. This is not an unreasonable proposition, since the majority of the widgets specified by XUL don't specifically require pixel-level control of the display device.

Where it gets interesting, though, is in trying to figure out where to draw these things on the screen. I found a little bit of information on this at the Gecko development page, but for the most part I have to figure it out myself. HTML, see, uses what's called a "flow" based layout paradigm, which means that you more or less assume that a "page" can be arbitrarily long, so that if there's an element that absolutely needs to be a certain size, then the other elements can wrap around it or go after it, and you basically can just put things in the next available space on your infinitely long or wide page. XUL, on the other hand, as well as other rendering kits like Gtk, are "constraint" based, which means that there's a certain maximum size (such as an application's window) and you're not allowed to exceed that size -- so if you give all your elements leeway to take up as much space as they want, you might not have room for all of them. So maybe you have to squish some of them a little, and even then you still might not have enough room. Basically, constraint-based layout algorithms are more likely to fail than flow-based ones; and that's okay -- it's interesting, even. So I'm trying to write some layout code now. We'll see what happens.

Adam Cadre finally got some essays up about the election -- it's a lot of material, but it took him like a week and a half, too! The more of his shit I read, the less I think I'd like to hang out with him personally, but that doesn't mean he doesn't make a mean bean dip.

I want to do something this weekend, but I think I'm getting sick. We'll see.

Oh yeah, here are links to some 'blogs that I found; I'm not gonna create permanent links to them because I'm not especially close friends with their respective authors, but some of you might be, so:

• Rachel "Dratch" Wasser's 'blog, The Asian Invasion. She's in Hong Kong right now?
• Sam Culp's 'blog, New Territories. She's also in Hong Kong.
• Justin Charles' 'blog.

People With Ultimatums

Rudy sez:

...commentators all over the political spectrum are saying that one of the reasons that Democrats lost the election is that they are "elitists" and "out of touch" with the "moral values" of Americans. But you know what? The problem is not that Democrats are out of touch with Americans. It's that these so-called "Americans" are out of touch with America as a concept. While all of these pundits are decrying the division of America as somehow the province of "liberals" and their misunderstanding of the middle and south of the country, how about just the occasional fucking word about how Bush's constant berating of "intellectuals" and "Massachusetts" is more divisive, as if somehow Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, and New York are filled with eggheads who only theorize and refuse to get their hands dirty in the real work that all those amazing "real" Americans engage in every day.

Apparently some of you think the south of this country deserves some sort of pass, because... God, I don't know, your reasons are so shitty and irritating that I can't even remember any of them. And neither, apparently, can this guy. But I could have told you that ignorance wasn't a fucking virtue before this election. And I know you guys think that ignorance plus poverty makes 'em okay, but look: When people get too poor, sometimes you just have to kill them, because clearly they didn't want it bad enough.

John Ashcroft resigns?! Apparently some of you saw this coming. Sez he:

The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.

Buh?!

I submitted my partially-working thread-cancellation patch to the Guile people. The more I think about it, the more I think my code was working and was actually exposing some SEGVs in their code. I mean, it was crashing when I pushed a quoted symbol into the list of cancellation expressions, and the crash happened in one of their symbol lookup functions, so... I don't know. Hopefully someone will look at it and get back to me before they release 1.8.

I also packaged and made preliminary releases for gzochi-client, gzochi-common, and gzochi-server. Peep it here. If you have any sort of UNIXy operating system, I encourage you to download it and give it a shot. Hell, even if you've got Windows, all you need to do is install Cygwin, and you should be able to use my stuff. Throw me a god-damn bone here.

I've also started working on that ncurses renderer for XUL -- after getting into a heated argument (well, not that heated) with some creeps at the Mozilla Foundation. For some asinine reason, they don't want to write a DTD for XUL, because then XUL wouldn't be "extensible" any more via this language they've got called XBL. This is retarded! If you develop a "technology," or whatever they're calling XUL, and you want developers to use it, you need to make them some kind of promise that it's safe to use -- this promise is called a "standard," and even if part of this standard is that core functionality can be extended. You just include the extensibility in the standard, so that your developers know the ways in which your thing can be extended. Fuck! God damn it. Their other rationale for not coming up with a standard is that "Mozilla is not a validating XML parser." Jesus Christ! These people who don't believe in DTD validation, much less don't believe in Schema validation... the horrible, anxiety-producing code you must write -- huge if-blocks scrabbling to figure out what to do if you come across an element that isn't a member of some array you put together somewhere. People: Whenever you write parsing code for a particular "document type," you are damn well writing a DTD / Schema validator from fucking scratch!

Okay, okay, you're bored -- I can read the writing on the wall. Fine, here's some more stomach acid, this time from The Register:

Your primary and secondary schools will continue to turn out third-rate pupils with limited opportunities, while you enjoy the satisfaction of making it on your own without health care when a catastrophic illness bankrupts your family.

Your agricultural universities will continue issuing Ph.D.s in football, and bogus Protestant Evangelical and Fundamentalist theology, and how to jerk off a bull safely. Your children will learn to borrow enough money to erect chicken houses so that they, like you, can take custody -- not possession, but custody -- of Tyson's chicks, feed them, rear them, assume losses from those that fail to thrive, and in the end earn just enough money to service their endless debt, and realize a profit of perhaps $12K a year. Your bank thanks you; Tyson thanks you; George W. Bush thanks you; and I thank you.

Americans Get The President They Deserve

Constructive solutions from some dude with a diary on DailyKos:

I also have a substantive recommendation to the Blue states: Do all that you can to shut off the spigots. Completely. Shut it down. All of it. No more sucking on the government's teat for the Red states. Transform the rhetoric of your Republican brothers into practice: Slash federal spending (is that still a Republican position?). Wipe out the farm subsidies. Eradicate all block grants to the states. End the transfer of thirteen cents out of every Blue State Tax Dollar to the Red states (call it "Real Welfare Reform".) Replace every dollar of reduced federal spending with a dollar of in-state spending.

Let Illinois, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington, California, and the rest of the Blue States keep their own damn money. Let the Red states keep out the gays, which is apparently their highest priority. Wait ten years and see who comes out ahead. And yes, this is bad policy. But it's clearly great politics. And winning on the political dimension is, sadly, a necessary condition for winning on the policy dimension.

My own solution -- don't know how easy it'll be to implement, but put my name on the paper if you submit anything to a conference: Read this; now this. Get it?

Or just listen to my friend "Razor":

The men, the revolting, shit-for-brains slobs who voted for Bush should be taken out behind some stripclub and stabbed in the back of the neck with a butter knife. Some of them should have their eyes popped out by the same knife before they're killed.

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:

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.