Sands Of Time, Sans Up-Time

What the fuck?

Well, Kerry took NH, and will probably take the nomination. He most certainly will not beat Bush in an election. This must make Ted Rall nigh-hysterical:

Bush is a disaster. He has nearly bankrupted the federal government and many states with his profligate spending policies. He has planted the seed of fascism in the highest levels of government with his concentration camp, red-baiting and increased surveillance powers for Das Homeland. And it's a fair bet that he's planning more unwinnable wars for 2005. The Democratic Party needs its best chance at defeating him this fall, and that chance isn't in the form of John Kerry.

I fear that too many Democrats, and too many Americans, don't get it. If Bush wins this election, there may never be another one.

No question about it. By the way, how wrong is Dean on this one:

At every turn when there has been an imbalance of power, the truth questioned, or our beliefs and values distorted, the change required to restore our nation has always come from the bottom up from our people.

Apparently last Sunday's Magazine was a bit off when it came to the sex-slave story. I didn't even read it, it sounded too depressing, but the title they ran for it was "Sex Slaves on Main St." What I want to know is: Is the title a joke on that Rolling Stones album? I asked Mer, and after a few minutes of trying to explain to me what a Main street was, she admitted that she'd never heard of the album.

So, here I am, fulfilling my duties as web-logger:

• PowerPoint Anthology of Literature
• Please read this. It is completely hilarious.
• An indirect primer on Computer Science and the nature of reality. Mindfuck!

That is all.

These Naked Women Love Animals!

Contempt, contempt, contempt

Maggles wanted a new 'blog thing so bad. What, Big Hot-Dog In Little China doesn't do it for you? I. Thought. Not.

(21:23:48) Nintendo Julian: it's just gonna be full of computer shit
(21:24:03) missmagsy: no there will also be some wry criticisms of reality
(21:24:10) Nintendo Julian: maybe
(21:24:13) Nintendo Julian: let me see what I can do
(21:24:35) missmagsy: yes, see what you can do

I'm so brave; I'm practically Todd Barry.

I finally tracked down the copy of George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails that's apparently been hiding out in the basement of the Brooklyn Central Library. NEAT. It's okay. He's kind of a hack, but I'm already kind of attached to the story, so it's going quickly. I keep seeing little EGA-color portraits of the characters in my mind. Man, this game Circuit's Edge, right, the one that's based on this book -- see, there's this bar named "Chiri's" that's basically a cathouse, and in the game you could pay to have sex with any of the girls even mentioned tangentially in the novel. Wild. That's how I found out what titties look like -- they are a dithered mix bright red and magenta, and the nipples on titties are always hard.

Ted graciously got us some tix to see a brilliant new work of contemporary theater. It was all about boners. And how the only thing that's important in life is making things expensive and beautiful. Oh wait, maybe that's a big waste of time; no, wait again, it's good. Ted, though. This guy! I hope to rock out with him on Friday at Ultrasound.

I kicked so much ass on the kit there last time. Did you know that almost all of Ringo's drum lines are pretty much the same? He has this fill that he really likes to do a lot, too. It goes "snare, snaresnare" -- pause -- "tomtomtomtomtomtom."

Okay, it's politics time for the 'blog. That surprises a lot of you. Okay, I'm going to come out and say it -- I think Wesley Clark might be a better candidate for the Democrats than Howard Dean. Don't get me wrong, I do like a candidate who looks very scary and seems to deliberately want to make me angry by defending the ass-shitting second amendment, but I don't feel like he can take on a nation of people who like their liberals like they like their minorities and women: Non-uppity.

I'm happy because the way Lua works finally got through my thick skull. I was worried because I knew people would want to be able to script objects in OpenRPG and I thought I'd have to Write My Own Scripting Language. Writing Your Own anything is always a bad idea; designing your own language is a real sink -- like for dishes, only for time. But Lua is nice, since the script is an object that you can manipulate, and from which can call certain C functions that you register. So an object would know how to try to move itself around, and maybe it could call this function to submit a command to the action queue. How to pace the scripts, though? Do we let scripted objects run as much as they want but only submit one action per "beat?" Or maybe we need to pace them so that the scripts can only execute a few lines per beat. I think the former, so that, for example, scripted AI can make as many calculations as it needs to. NEAT.

But I'm not even working on it, and haven't been for the past week -- just thinking about it. And you know what? That's just great. Ugh, this ramen that I ate makes me want to throw it up.

Out Come The Wolves, Man. Out Come The Wolves!

I started thinking, you know I started drinkin'.

Give 'em the boot, the roots radicals. Come on now.

I was feeling pretty down; I've been having what I guess you could call bad dreams. It's not so much that they're bad as it is that they leave me feeling completely miserable when I wake up. But then I spent some time talking up Konrath, who went sky-diving in Vegas for his birthday and seemed, for some reason, to be even more down than me. We went to get some Wendy's, and now I feel a bit better.

I also bought a bag of fun-size Clark bars. Those things taste like paint thinner.

I can't get motivated to do the work that needs to get done on OpenRPG. I'm trying to think of the best way to organize objects in the model world that the server has to maintain. A lot of similar pieces of software do it by creating "zones," in which a particular ruleset is active / particular script runs / etc. That might not be a bad idea, except that I'd want to have zones defined in three dimensions, like arbitrary shapes, and if ray-casting has taught us anything (and I do believe it has!) it's that testing for inclusion within an irregular 3-D solid is a place you don't want to go to, sister.

You know what would be interesting? A protocol-specification language for finite-state-based client-server / peer relationships. You could use it to jot down the relevant details of your protocol, and then people could write "compilers" that generate networking code in the language of your choice. Maybe that'll be my Master's thesis when I stop dicking around and get my life together.

Fuck Seabiscuit

I swear, that is the boringest snoringest movie I have ever seen in my mercifully short life. I mean, yes, the sets are very beautiful, but the fucking movie is about a horse. It's like the living, sweating equivalent of NASCAR. Hey Gary Ross, you need to make it clearer to people why a horse is interesting, especially to people like me who do not give a shit about how fast things can go around in a circle. Like, what about Jeff Bridges' dead son and his fucked-up marriage? What about the fucking jockey who's blind and has scabies? What ever happens to his parents? What about Chris Cooper's character? What about depression-era America? What a bunch of shit. God bless you, Seabiscuit. We didn't fix you, you fixed us. And the Work Projects Administration. That also fixed us. Come to think of it, you are just a fucking horse.

The more I read these IT trade magazines, the more hideously depressing they sound. People are inventing all these languages and platforms and blah blah blah and they all sound so stupid. I mean, who the fuck Christ needs another god-damn virtual machine, much less one based on Windows -- as if Windows gave you a reasonable abstraction of your computer. It won't even let you kill your own processes. It must be that all these creeps get hired as economists or Financial Professionals or some bullshit like that and then they have to learn how to program, and this is what they come up with. The World needs more actual by-choice Software Engineers writing software that is consistent with good ideas about the way computer systems ought to behave, and not about a billion more C++ export macros that make your palm pilot work with your Blackberry or another custom C++ compiler for Windows that encourages you to make unbelievably stupid design mistakes but comes with a Macromedia Flah IDE. I swear, the syntax is so shitty and the library overhead so huge in C++ I'm amazed that anyone gets anything done in it, ever.

How awesome is this, by the way? Also, how long before we set up strategic war bases on every planet in the solar system. Then we'll finally be Safe from a bunch of malnourished Arabs with box-cutters.

I've been tearing my few remaining hairs out over software design for the past week. Basically, all my client-server talking functionality was based around this XML DTD called "openrpg_message," which was an encapsulation for a bunch of type / value pairs. So a sample transmission from the client to the server might look something like:

<openrpg_message>
<content type="foo" value="bar" />
<content type="jibber" value="jubber" />
</openrpg_message>

Unfortunately, this format is insufficient for a lot of functionality that still should be using this type of messaging. For example, when the client sends an administrative command to the server -- a non-game command, like "send a private message to this user" or "show me who else is logged in" -- it should use the openrpg_message format, and so should the response. However, using the current DTD, there's no way to express an arbitrarily large set of discretely-indexable data. That is, suppose a user asks for a list of something, like a list of help commands or a list of other users on the server -- there's no good way to return that data, except as a comma-delimited list of values within a content tag. And what if each item in the set needs to have a corresponding item in another set. Extending the DTD is not a huge deal, except that I've written a bunch of functions that convert the incoming message to a hash (of all the type / values pairs), so that adding data types to the DTD would require a change in how I handle hashes. I was getting real depressed about having to do something that just didn't seem right, like adding a "list" field to my hash struct. Then it hit me -- I should be wrapping the entire message in its own struct. So now I have something like:

struct openrpg_common_message {
struct openrpg_common_hash *hash
struct openrpg_common_list *list

And in the future...

struct openrpg_common_object *object
};

So every message that gets sent will at least have a hash, since it is required to have at least one content element, but it might also have a list of values and/or an object -- so it's now suitable for "add_object" messages sent to the client. Not a 100% beautiful fix, but a fix. No doubt I'll have to revise it all again later.

I'm Just Guessing, Okay?

It's weird that The Onion A.V. Club had such a positive reaction to Paycheck. Don't get me wrong, it's an okay movie, but you know... so.

Free will is an illusion. Stop crying about it already -- ethically speaking, whether what you perceive as free will exists in the silly Cartesian sense (like, is it in here?) or is merely a side-affect of the complicated interconnection network of neurons in your brain does not really matter in terms of your day-to-day interactions with other human beings. However, it has big implications when it comes to your attempts to build a machine that can see into the future. See, if there actually is such a thing as free will, then you can avoid taking the actions taken by your avatar in a vision of your future self and thus the vision of the future provided by the machine is wrong and so such a machine cannot exist. If there isn't such a thing as free will, then you would almost be able to build this machine. But wait -- how could you see your own future and not be able to act to change it? Try not to let this fuck your mind: A future-viewing machine would need to be able to show you the outcome of a series of wave function collapses -- theoretically, each quantum superpositioning (you may comfortably abstract this into an "event," I think) produces a set of outcomes in the form of parallel universes in Hilbert space. Maybe your machine can enumerate all of them, and one is bound to match the resulting outcome of the collapse of your universe's cumulative wave-function combined with the outcome of your seeing a vision of the future. The result would be a vision of the future from which you would actually be unable to deviate. But to compute this, the machine would already have to have an accurate vision of the future with which to provide you -- something it wouldn't have until finishing the computation. It's an infinitely recursive function, like some kind of mega-quine. Point is, you can't build it. Sorry, Philip K. Dick -- Richard Feynman just fucked you with The Rabbit.

Don't think I'm saying that the mind's perception of free will has anything to do with quantum mechanics. I'm not. Anyone that thinks the two are related in a significant way is an idiot.

It’s Warm And Humid On Swanson Street

So, among other things, I burned the Distillers album this morning. Brody warned me not to, but I'm no longer really into buying CDs that I'm not sure I'm going to like. And, you know, this one is kind of a mixed bag. I pretty much agree with the critics -- the first few songs are pretty great, but the rest of the album is a bit of a drag, especially this fucking 15-minute feedback wank session at the end called "Death Sex." I mean, for fuck's sake. She's only 23, though, and, after all, what have I done with my life, really?

But I definitely like rock stars who call me a fucker and an asshole. You go to shows these days (well, I don't, really), and everyone's always like, "Oh, we love you guys so much, thank you so much for coming, we do all of this for you." It's so embarrassing. If you're not ready to have a combative relationship with your fans, you need to get of punk rock and become a party planner or something. You can cover Gary Glitter live and get everyone psyched for a hockey game.

Oh man, I got so much stuff done last night -- graded some worksheets for Mer, did the dishes, tidied up; I didn't even have time to play computer at all.

[Now it's Thursday]

Ugh. I feel like the crap parade. Tom was saying it was inequitable that he should be throwing up all day at work and I should be fine, but check it out, guy: I spent like 45 minutes to an hour on the toilet last night shivering and spraying out squishy Lincoln-logs of bean-flavored paste. Eugh.

Hey Dennis Miller -- if September 11th made you into some kind of reactionary psychopath, it doesn't mean you're "doing the right thing to protect your country" or "ensuring that freedom will not perish from the Earth" or whatever the crap. It means that when the going got tough, you got stupid and emotional. "Well, I guess on the farthest end of the left they'd say, 'That's our fault.'" I wonder where that leaves me? Oh yeah -- it's our fucking fault, asshole. If we can do that kind of shit in other countries for hundreds of years, they're not allowed to do it back to us? I guess the difference is we did it dressed to the nines. Can we please ship some expensive guns and stealth fighter jets over to Afghanistan or Korea or whatever so that the next time they kill 4,000 U.S. civilians it doesn't look like a 7th-grade science project that was slapped together the night before?

I was going to say something about the repulsive porcine jibbery-jubbery David Gelernter, but his awful, unusable software speaks for itself. I wonder if he likes to organize his screeds against women, gay marriage, and Arabs in a visual time-stream of system-resource-hogging floating solitaire cards. However he does it, he does it without a fucking right hand. Some people do not handle tragedy very well.

Ooh, look, they're re-releasing The Battle of Algiers. Wonder why?

In between bouts of nausea and burping, I managed last night to move OpenRPG's server-side client locking over to a more sensible model. The problem: The thread that broadcasts object updates during a game might select a large block of client objects from some table and start iterating through them; at the same time, the client listening thread might receive a command or a hangup or something from a client at the end of the other thread's list and kill and remove that client. So now the broadcast thread has a pointer to garbage and you're looking at a segfault. Solution: Include a mutex in each client and lock on it before you try to do anything to it; once you've got the lock, check the state field. If it's set to queued-for-deletion, then you know you've got a dead client and you can skip it. So who actually deletes the client? I don't know yet; whoever it is is going to have to lock on the global client list and then ping a function that removes the client from the game threads' client lists as well. Concurrency, huh? What a shit-shower.

All These Fiends Want Teenage Meat

Tom drew that picture of me while I was playing my Squier over at his place the other day. He was worried that my feelings would be hurt, but I think it looks awesome. Mer said, "Wow, your nose is huge. You look like a celebrity. That's what Tom can do. He can make people look like celebrities." Yes, it's true.

A truly horrifying cover shot for the Times the other day. I like how the new metrosexual Jew thing is to prove how much you love and understand what it means to be a Jew by moving from your cushy Manhattan apartment to some waste-pit of a region, joining their secret police force, and conducting raids on the houses of an ethnic / religious minority. I swear to god, they interview these people on the local news and they say things like, "It's every Jew's duty to protect the Fatherland and restore it to its former state of glory." Mmm, is that the taste of irony? No, that's just iron in the blood I'm coughing up because I want to throw them all in the gulag so bad.

Who else has it coming to them? Oh yeah, the repulsive Afghan extremists who don't want women on TV unless they're wearing those special suits that give them an electric shock whenever they menstruate. Please explain to me how treating women like dirt is an important part of a culture that needs to be preserved. Right, because it's a tradition. It would be nice if the Big 3 Anti-Human World Religions could be phased out like other ancient traditions, like, for example, like preparing your own food. Until then, can we please set up little Human Rights Tribunal franchises all over the Third World so that Muslim men who are serious about the religious tradition of women not being allowed to go to the doctor can be conveniently tried and gassed in the course of an afternoon? Kthx.

The Chinese are still behaving terribly.

I've been spending a lot of time trying to re-organize the OpenRPG server code so that I can shut down client threads and the server itself without creating memory leaks. It's a real problem. Maybe I'll try to work on it at work today. Maybe this is why people don't write Enterprise-Class Network Applications in C.

I think I saw the guy who plays the dad in Max Magician and the Legend of the Rings on the subway this morning.

Last Friday I went over to Ultrasound after work and played the drums for an hour. It cost $10.00 -- I'm not sure if that's a good price, but they have much better equipment than fucking Prince. I swear, the studios at Prince are like rooms in a flophouse. One time Igor took us to a room where all these busted-up bass drums were piled all the way up one wall and there were a bunch of guys just hangin' out and smoking. They didn't leave until like 10 minutes into our rehearsal. But it was so cold out Friday; that was one of the fucking cold days last week, and my hands were totally frozen because I didn't have any gloves. So maybe for that reason I didn't really notice it when I clipped one of my knuckles on the hi-hat. The dopey engineer guy came in to tell me I had five minutes, and I was like okay, and then I looked down for a second and there was this huge, like, 4-inch-in-diameter bloody wet spot on my jeans where my left hand had been daubing knuckle-blood everywhere. Gross.

Addendum: I forgot to mention it -- I found a copy of this sci-fi book I've been looking for for a long time called When Gravity Fails. Turns out my local library has it! I've wanted to read this one since I played a PC videogame adaptation of it called Circuit's Edge (what a stupid name for... anything). Every sci-fi author likes to predict some kind of shift in the balance of culture that happens in the near future -- Neal Stephenson has the Chinese taking over in a big way in The Diamond Age -- and this one's all about the Middle East, as far as I can tell. Neat.

Nook Nook!

Here are some excerpts from other web sites. I wish more people read my 'blog. Jerry from Penny Arcade remarks on the nature of fate -- I agree, except for the part about the manatee:

...you think, well, I was in the same physical place that person was and perhaps it could have been me instead. This doesn't make sense, I know. Life isn't some kind of cakewalk where the music stops and then they take the person on square 23 away to be a professional tennis player.

I don't really have any complaints about how things are going, at least, no legitimate complaints. I sometimes wish it were feasible to own a manatee. You make your peace with things like the manatee issue and you move on. But man, there is something about success in others that just kills a person.

Telsa Cox's diary offers adorable insight into marital bliss:

Alan now officially Does Not Approve of the intercom. He has decided we need a computer (or, more properly, an appliance) in the kitchen. This is all because I beeped it at him to tell him that I needed him to stir the sauce. He thought it meant tea was ready.

He is very good at stirring the sauce, though.

I have a huge crush on Brody Dalle / Armstrong and plan on burning her CD to listen to at work. Baby, I will write GPL'd software for you. But "Open up and let it flow / I'll make it yours, so here we go???" Come. on.

Scores please.

Screwing The Pooch

I am taking the GRE on February 7th at 8:00 AM. Christ in a potato pancake.

The Company Party was on Tuesday. The other QA guys and I got a cute, impromptu speech from our new manager who'd had a little bit too much to drink about how much he was looking forward to working with us. The thing is, though, he started off by talking about all the people he'd fired in his life and how bad they deserved it. No joke, it was pretty weird. Then I drank a bit more and dared Skov to go in on a deal with me wherein whoever got in first Wednesday morning would get to fire the other guy. He offered to just plain old fire me right then, but I was there like clockwork at 8:00 AM and he didn't make it in 'til 10:30. So I guess you're looking at the new Very Important Person of Software Engineering.

Speaking of work, the lone tech writer here, who's self-published a couple of novels, has created a cute little hypertext glossary of his life. This entry contains a pleasing description of an idol of mine:

His appearance is a bit offsetting [sic], because he looks and smells like someone who lives in a train tunnel.

Do you guys remember the Promise Keepers? What a depressing fucking joke that is. Imagine a football stadium seething with resentful, emasculated homonculi raising their fists in celebration of mediocrity. Please get really excited about staying with your ugly, ignorant wife and raising your mongoloid children -- you are all doing a great job to briefly stave off the implosion of the repulsive middle-American Christian working class. Which Promise are you guys Keeping exactly? Is it the one where Joseph Smith and his army of Native American super-hero angels decreed that there would never be a shortage of grandmas working at Waffle House?

I have become a slobbering devotee of Valgrind. Christ. This thing is less like a debugger than it is like a shiny metal box covered in razor blades that solves the Halting Problem. I mean, no, but it includes a fucking x86 emulator, generates 9 fucking bits of accounting data for every shitting byte that you allocate, and its various components are named after It's so comprehensive it makes my mind wander out to the edges of the giant gravastar bubble we live in just contemplating the possibilities.

Ultimately, though, even Valgrind was unable to get to the bottom of the free() problem I've been battling for the past week. See, all my debuggers had been telling me, in different ways, that this address foo that I had to keep allocating and freeing did not come from malloc(). I'm like, what the fuck?! I'm looking at the line where I malloc it! Well, it turns out that fucking dmalloc's fucking dmallocth library that I'd been linking with does not correctly annotate pointers that are malloc'd in space that comes from dereferencing other malloc'd pointers. That's just what I'm guessing. I have no idea.

Sounds like it's business-time in Creep Land -- i.e., the Office Kitchen.

I Don't Even Like It

Well, it's a New Year -- it's 2004, and nobody likes to make a web-log anymore. Least of all, me.

So Mer and I made our pilgrimage to Sarasota. I do not like that place at all. I was shitting explosions the whole time. Thank the fuck Christ it's over.

For New Year's we went to this guy Kevin's house over in the Heights, and we were drinking and you know, whatever, and everyone decides to go down to the courtyard for a cigarette. So I'm down there and you know, we'd been singing around the piano up in the apartment, and we're still singing some songs down in the courtyard. About 15 minutes after we get down there, this woman comes down and is like, "Don't you know how much noise you're making? This is a private apartment building and it's really late and blah blah blah." So we're all like, "Okay, we're sorry, we'll leave," but she says, "You're visiting someone in the building, aren't you? Who are you visiting?" When she says that, we're all like, "Booozht!" because Kevin's subletting, and if we get him in trouble it could be disastrous. So no one's saying a word, and the woman keeps asking us which tenant we're visiting. Finally, Mer goes, "Well, we wouldn't want our behavior to reflect poorly on our host, so I don't think we should get into that." The woman's like, "Well, then, I'll just consider all of you strangers on my property," and Mer's like, "Yes, I think that would be best." And the woman went back upstairs to her cushy waterfront apartment. Granted, group singing is kind of inherently lame, and I have certainly told groups of singers to shut the fuck up myself in the past, but, you know, we were very polite, and it's Christing New Year's for Christ's sake. Some people are plain old vindictive, I guess. Not me, though. Anyway, well handled, Mer. I was very impressed. She also had the good sense not to tell Kevin about it, so that he'd have plausible deniability later. S-M-R-T.

On Friday I went to a party at Alex Plakias' house. I totally didn't recognize her parents, since I hadn't seen there in like, what, 15 years? But they were all about hugging and kissing and "say hi to your family for us." Sure, I'll do that. She's pretty hot; that girl wanted to play dirty marriage with me all the time when we were kids. But now she's graduated from Hamilton -- and she's already in grad school! What the Christ. She's also got this library of pretentious books in her bedroom that I wish I had. Time to sign up for the GREs.

How do you guys feel about all this We-Know-What's-Good-For-You legislation? I mean, look, I'm practically a communist in terms of the size of government I prefer, but some of this stuff is pretty stupid, like this thing that got passed in Ohio that makes illegal the act of videotaping in a movie theater. Why is that the State's business? Private companies should have to take care of themselves. Mind you, I'm completely in favor of the anti-smoking-in-bars thing, because the burden of taking care of smokers falls almost directly on the State, via the cost of Medicare / Medicaid / whatever it is. I haven't really thought about it that much; maybe it's a bad precedent. No, wait, I like it.

Speaking of such issues, it amuses me to no end that noted Libertarian and prolific Open Source evangelist Eric Raymond thinks he has any chance of picking up girls at a movie screening, even if it's The Lord of the Rings. The man is a toad; physically, and, pursuant to that, on account of his aggressive enthusiasm for talking about sex. Going forward, let's agree that it's only okay to write about sex if you're sexy. Granted, that's a bit glib, but things are getting gross out there.

I have made my submission to Adam Cadre's Lyttle Lytton contest. No doubt it will bring me both fame and happiness.

I spent this weekend trying to iron out a couple of truly pesky bugs in OpenRPG. One of them, I got -- when you pass a a set of file descriptors to select(), it removes the file descriptors that didn't have input to read (or space for output or whatever), so if you're using it to calculate timeouts, like I was, you have to re-add the client's file descriptor in order to check to see if the ping that you sent got a response. That was stupid. I suspect that the other one, though, is a delicious malloc-overrun. For those not in the know, when you need to store something, anything, in C, you need to allocate memory for it. The memory allocator, malloc(), returns a block of memory for you to use, and stores, directly in the vicinity of that block, some accounting information. Unless this accounting information falls on a page boundary, you can easily overwrite it using any number of helpful string manipulation functions, and you won't know you screwed up until much, much later. This sucks. Fortunately, I've got this delightful little library called NJAMD by Mike Perry; unfortunately, it hasn't caught the error yet, and it really should have. Maybe I have to turn up the strictness or something.

Fuck Christmas

It being Christmas Eve and all, and considering the headlines in today's Times (AIDS orphans, Israelis, encephalopathy), I had an almost-compelling urge to quote the lyrics to the above song by the insightful troubadours of FEAR. The thing is, though, that song really kind of sucks. Here's an excerpt from a slightly better one, lyrically at least, that sums things up pretty well. (It's called "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones.")

New York's alright if you like saxophones
New York's alright if you wanna get pushed in front of the subway
New York's alright if you like tuberculosis
New York's alright if you like art and jazz
New York's alright if you're a homosexual

Truly delightful. My boss literally just called me over after I pasted those lyrics to tell me they're giving me less than half the money they said they were going to -- a real Christmas miracle. It's not like I really, you know, "deserve" any of it anyway, although I would like some shitting, fucking overtime. Here's another selection from FEAR's catalogue, this time from what's probably their most popular piece, "I Love Livin' In The City:"

My house smells just like the zoo,
It's chock full of shit and puke!
Cockroaches on the walls
Crabs crawlin' on my balls!
Ohhh, but I'm so clean cut,
I just wanna fuck some sluts!

This guy Zeke who I used to know in high school called me last night to tell me that his band is back together and playing on Tuesday night. This band... I don't know, it's kind of peopled by people who make me feel pretty bad about myself, and to tell you the truth I was kind of glad when they (temporarily, I guess) broke up -- not least of all because they all seemed to be able to get their act together and get along with each other better than I did with the guys in my band. That makes me a bitter doofus, I know -- to the extent that I don't even feel like linking their web site. So I don't think I'm going to go to their show. SORRY.

Adbusters posted some stupid blurb about how the left is dead. You know, because everyone's a reactionary asshole these days. Well, sorry, Adbusters, I guess all the people you thought were "liberal" just didn't have the cojones to stick with it. "Well, you know, you can't just attack the U.S. and not expect us come and kick your fuckin' ass. I mean, I think of myself as 'liberal', but not when it comes to shit that affects me and my kids, because that is something you just do not do, dude. Execute Saddam!" Scoundrels; scumbags. Anyway, good luck selling your hideous anti-swoosh sneaker to ghetto families who are willing to go without health insurance so that they can have genuine Nike merchandise.

Let me leave you with one that's not by FEAR, it's by The Anti-Nowhere League of London, who are equally if not more profound lyricists. Peep:

I hate people
I hate the human race
I hate people
I hate your ugly face
I hate people
It's such a fucking mess
I hate people...
And I hate you!

I know a lot of people on the Interweb, some of them even having 'blogs, mind you, say they "hate people." Let me assure you that I really actually honestly do hate people, to the extent that I get diarrhea all the time and am pretty much always shaking with rage and unable to make friends. I mean, read the fucking paper for fuck's sake. But, you know, a New Year is upon us, so maybe we should all just hold hands and pray for a world in which our blessed precious baby baby-daddies are free from the temptations of sex, drugs, rock and roll music and modern poetry. Eat a dick cupcake.

My Ears Hurt

Either I'm out of shape or my bike's parts were a bit contracted because of the cold while I was out riding just now in Prospect Park. I suspect it was the latter, since the bike was going pretty slow during the downhill parts, which are usually like that Sony game that Kate and Dade are playing in the Cyberdelia scene in Hackers. I don't know what that game is called. But man, it was really pretty out. The sun had just set, and when I got to the southern part of the park, there all these apartment buildings decked out with Christmas lights just kind of popped up. It reminded me of walking though Central Park after hours like Chris and I used to do and coming upon the Egyptian wing of the Met like some floating Mesopotamian castle hiding behind the trees. It was fairly warm out, but riding the bike made it windy, so you better believe snot rockets got blown.

I had to take Muffin / Mimi to the vet again today because she just won't fucking leave her stomach alone. It was pretty difficult to get her into the carrier. I had a pretty solid plan -- put the carrier end-up in the bedroom, grab her while she was sleeping on the couch, and dump her in -- but there was a single hitch that fouled it up -- she kicked the carrier door closed with her foot while I was trying to stuff her in. So I dropped her, and she managed to pry the bedroom door open and went straight for the bathroom, where she dove into her litter box and puffed herself out and started hissing and swiveling her head around to prevent me from getting the Vulcan neck-grip on her. But I got her and I got her in the box and I got her to the vet (he gave me some prednisone pills for her) and I got her back. I thought she was going to sulk for the rest of the day, but I gave her a salmon treat while she was under the couch and that seemed to cheer her up considerably. She's cuddling me as I type this.

I hate Zionists. On the rilla. Fuck 'em. If we don't support religious states for brown people (and rightly so), we shouldn't support religious states for swarthy, hairy white people, especially when they're so arrogant about encroaching on the territory of other countries. Hearing these people -- on both sides, mind you -- talk just makes me care less about what happens to them. Keep killing each other (please target the ones still within their reproductive heyday, please). It means fewer religious people in the world.

I fixed some irritating bugs in OpenRPG with the indirect help of the nice people in #c on FreeNode. It looks like the networking subsystem is going to require a design overhaul, but in a good way -- it'll be much more in line with the code-organization style I described in the previous entry.

I am not looking forward to going to Florida on Thursday. I do not fucking like old people, and I have much better things to do than visit them while they await death. All the old creeps in my family haven't done anything except spend money on themselves and go on vacation; I'm sure there are nice, productive geriatrics out there, but I haven't seen 'em. We need to legalize doctor-assisted suicide, and we need to make it mandatory, and we need to do it before Thursday morning.

My mom got me a book for Christmas, and that is very nice. But she wouldn't stop bugging me about gifts, so I told her she could write me a check if she needed to give things so badly. Was that rude? It's hard for me to tell. Maybe I'm autistic, I don't know.

Deal With It

Okay, computer time: For those who Don't Know: Writing in an essentially procedural language like C, your programs are basically structured like a list of instructions to the computer ("Do this, then do this, then do this," etc.). To break up the monotony, you're allowed to create "functions" that encapsulate blocks of frequently accessed code so that they can be run with a single command (e.g., "f(x)", where x is a parameter that presumably affects the behavior of the block of code represented by f). Conditional statements like "if (...)" aside, however, the execution of C code proceeds more or less the same regardless of whether you structure your program "functionally" or just do everything as an extended laundry list of tasks. Since function-structure is a just tool to help humans understand the flow of execution in a program, it's often difficult to decide how best to . For example, if you've got a complicated task to accomplish, like establishing a connection to a remote socket, is it best to write several re-usable functions that accomplish more general aspects of the task, or is it better to keep the number of functions small and write a large function that just sets everything up in one shot? I tend to lean towards the former, 'cuz I'm kind of an object-oriented kind of guy -- you build tiny specific tools and then link them into larger, general tools -- but what if you used a different metric to measure optimal "functionalization" of source code? I've often wondered what it would look like if some source I'd written were optimized, say, to be as compact as possible, so that any repeating block of two or more statements would be abstracted into a single function call. (As I mentioned above, that wouldn't imply a run-time optimization, and might even do some harm, since calling a function involves some overhead in terms of pushing arguments onto the internal stack.) Anyway, this is probably something that people have written papers about -- and that hence Mike Bell already has down pat -- but you know... grist for the mill.

So I saw Lord of the Rings: Rise of the Triad with the peeps and creeps yesterday. It was great! Ten dollars well spent, I think.

You know, if I were Strom Thurmand's illegitimate daughter, I wouldn't wait to show up until he was dead. Man, nothing would have been sweeter than ruining the reputation of that rotten old hypocrite. I like how everyone likes to talk about how much they respect the "service" he's done for the country. A senate full of bigotry-apologists -- truly disgusting; another notch in the old shame-belt for this repulsive country.

I was digging around in a box over in the Q.A. area of the office (also known, no joke, as the "Golf" area -- as many of you have suspected, my job bears a striking resemblance to Club Med), and I found a sound card for my Windows machine, so now I can listen to other peoples' music shares. Not surprisingly, they are mostly full of Belle & Sebastian MP3s; this place is hopping with metrosexuals. O MSN, not since eugenics has there been so effective a tool for simplifying the structure of our society.

Loath as I am to recommend a "web-comic," whatever that may be, the early episodes of Elf-Only Inn are kind of funny.

OpenRPG's server code is now able to process the messages required for a login from the routines in libopenrpg_client -- which don't quite exist yet. That should be easy, though. I still have to make it possible to register a new account on a server. I still have to fucking sketch out a design for how I'm going to handle playing a goddamn game with this thing. My latest anxiety: How to represent complex distance relationships of "Objects" to each other in terms of perceptibility? Like, maybe certain conditions have to be true on one object for it to be able to perceive another object? Do objects have absolute properties, or only properties relative to each other? Do I want to incorporate a scripting language like Lua to manipulate objects? Everyone else seems to be doing it...

I wrote this post at work, but I don't have anything else to say now that I'm home.

12:51

Yay, Saddam Hussein's been captured! Now we can get on with eliminating all those other oppressive dictatorial regimes -- I'm assuming that's what we're doing, okay? Like the one run by Kim Jong Il, or the king of China, or basically every fucking person who manages a country in Africa. You can start with that nationalist psychopath Mugabe, if you want.

Hey, fucking idiot who draws the awful web-comic Sara and David: World events affect you, creep; also, your web-comic sucks.

President Bush gave a press conference this morning: At least Hussein might get tried in a Hague-like institution. But can we please stop bringing up September the Christ-fucking 11th in our speeches and written correspondence? I'm going to invoke my snotty right of birth-city and forbid all you shitfucking Midwesterners from whining and crying about it. You know, I'm a Real New Yorker ®, and I don't even care about it all that much, except that it is unfortunate that a lot of poor people died trying to save some rich people. And if you didn't see it coming, then you're a real fucking idiot. Seriously. So please shut the fuck up and get back to preparing for the terrorists to bomb your worthless two-story mini-mall office park in Akron.

Kelly Brownell is on NPR talking about obesity. That guy sure is fat. But it sounds like he wrote a book.

I'm still on vacation. I was on vacation on Friday, too. This weekend, I saw:

• The Triplets of Belleville: It was okay, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty delightful, but it's real short and it's paced a bit too slow, and it's sometimes difficult to figure out what the directors are getting at -- I mean, it's definitely a wistful ode to the pastoral, but further than that...
• Something's Gotta Give: Well, this is an okay movie. It's not a real edge-of-your-seat, comedy, though, and it goes on literally twice as long as it should. And Diane Keaton's face is so weird and tightly-stretched that it looks like different parts of it are sliding around like tectonic plates whenever she smiles. And Jack Nicholson is a real fat ugly toad, but there's a very funny part where he's giggling and running around in a hospital with the back of his robe open. Sorry, I just ruined your Movie Experience.

On Saturday I went to a co-worker's Christmas party. He'd made some pretty delicious stuff called wassail, and he had three kitties, one of whom didn't like her tummy being rubbed and scratched me. I think it's infected because I've been squeezing pus out of it ever since. Delightful. I also cooked this delightful recipe I found on the venerable Adam Cadre's web site. I highly recommend it.

I have to spend a little bit of every blog entry talking about boring shit that none of you understand. So here goes: I spent some time figuring out what the best data structure for storing these active client records in OpenRPG. Everything that needs to do insertion these days is looking like a good case for a hash to me, so I started to write my own hash for doing this, but then I realized that you can store pointer values in a string (I already have a concurrency-managing string-based hash written) with sprintf and sscanf and the '%p' conversion specifier, so rox0r. What else... I wrote this gigantic ugly login-processing routine, and I'm still writing it. Hopefully I'll finish it today.

Scarlett Johansson's Ass In Underpants

NPR was talking about this piece of proposed legislation in France under which Muslim girls would be forbidden from wearing their head-shawls in public schools. If the referendum or whatever became law, these girls from devout Muslim families would have to transfer to special private schools. This is terrible! Does this also mean that the pre-selected husbands of girls from Orthodox Christian or Orthodox Jewish families wouldn't be able to sit behind them in class and throw glass tumblers full of acid at the backs of their heads whenever they raised their hands? These are deeply important religious traditions we're fucking with here, people? Do you want Parisian men to grow up to have fat, limp, British dinguses?

I bought tickets to Return of the King. I'll tell you, I really don't like buying movie tickets, because as I grow more and more obsessed with money, $10 just seems like too much to pay to see something, even if it's good. I would really like to download these movies from the Internet instead of paying to see them; can someone e-mail me a link to the .torrent file for Troy? Kthx. P.S. Fuck you, you set-painting shit sandwich! I hope your children starve while Jack Valenti jerks off to Donald Duck porn over the gaping hole in your roof.

Boring computer stuff: If there's no local console for a server instance, how do you set up the account for the administrative user? What about granting administrative access to whoever logs in first? Is there a significant security problem with that? Also, I've got this XML document type called "form," which is a list of questions that I want the recipient to answer. I'm trying to figure out if it'd be possible to use the same DTD on the recipient side when you're formatting the answers to send back. It's looking like... no.

It is super-hilarious that we are asking for debt relief from countries from whom we are witholding cronyism contracts. I don't have anything to say about that.

I would remiss in the web-log tradition if I didn't mention this wonderful Cruel Site.

Also, I'm on this mailing list for this open source MMORPG called Arianne. The whole project is pretty much a mess, but they've been restructuring and they've decided that the server that runs the game is going to be called "Arianne," but the game itself is going to be called "1001 Gladiators." What?! Anyway, I got this in my Inbox this morning from the lead developer for some reason. I guess they are evaluating similarly-themed game interfaces:

>http://www.armchairempire.com/images/previews/xbox/gladius/gladius-8.jpg
>
>
>BTW it is me or just the game looks a bit gay ( nothing bad with gays... )?

He may be a Brazilian white supremacist ("Arianne?!"), but that game does look a little bit gay.

Fraidy Cat

Let's talk about the news. The news is what's popular when you're writing a blog, right? This is what I saw on CNN today:

"Under the circumstances, it is difficult to envisage the United Nations operating with a large number of international staff inside Iraq in the near future unless there is an unexpected and significant improvement in the overall security situation," Annan said in a report released Wednesday.

"The security environment is unlikely to improve in the short to medium term and could deteriorate even further," he wrote.

You're darn tootin', Mr. Secretary General! What a clusterfuck of a situation this is. Iraq is so fucking fucked, and no one knows what the fuck to do about it. I can't even believe it. Someone is going to learn a very shitty lesson, and I would be filled with glee about that, except that it looks like only people that are going to get learned are economically disadvantaged Midwestern Christians who agreed to kill brown people so that they'd be able to go to college and major in Media Studies when they got back home. And that's a shame, pretty much. The whole thing is a shame. Media Studies degrees should pay for themselves. I mean that in almost the least sarcastic way possible.

Get Your War On is new, as of last night, maybe.

So here's another thing that's pissing me off: There was this piece on Ed Koch in the Metro section today, and they mention how he was criticizing Madeleine Albright for talking shit about our foreign policy while promoting a book overseas. Let's get a few things straight: The U.S. is not like some kind of magical secret that will disappear if everybody stop believing in it. Everybody already knows that our foreign policy is full of shit, and saying so is not going to be a revelation to anybody. In fact, if I were to go abroad, I would not fucking shut up about how stupid I think this administration is, just so people would know that I wasn't a fucking idiot.

The database initialization routines for OpenRPG are pretty much done. Apparently I only need one table for administrative purposes -- 'Users'. I'm wracking my brains trying to think of what else I might need to store.

Thank The Fuck Christ

I'm on vacation today! This is great. I already cleaned up the living room, shaved, and tied up some newspapers. Then I had pea soup. Later, I might bring some stuff over to the Salvation Army. But right now I am watching daytime T.V. shows about poor people.

Here's the thing about poor people: They don't know how to use birth control. Maybe you didn't know that. So imagine, if you can, that you're poor -- like embarrassing accent, mustache, way too much make-up poor. Now try to think of the one fucking thing that would make your shitty life worse, and then multiply it by like six. That thing is a kid. Now you have six fucking kids. Christ damn it. Judge Hatchett had this bundle of white trash on -- the husband was a physically abusive prick who'd been on and off welfare for the past decade, the wife was this big fat blubbery mess who couldn't stop having affairs with other white trash. See, the reason abortion has to be legal is so that poor people have the option of having abortions, because rich people will always have that option, regardless of the law. You just have to fucking use that option, guys! You will be much, much happier. But I guess that would offend God, who has already done so much for you. Bleed a holy bowl of milk. Jesus shit.

All the snow is melting now.

I saw Bad Santa on Saturday, even though I was still real sick. That movie is a delight. I feel like I should have some kind of critical reaction to it, but it's very difficult. I guess the thing I'd say about it is that it's very much the kind of thing you'd think was super funny in high school, but it's way smarter than anything you could have written when you were in high school. And it's still super funny. I only wish Hermione hadn't died. Flipendo!

Paris Hilton is so fucking ugly, I can't believe it. What a stupid, mean little face she has.

I finally got the socket-level communication for OpenRPG working with zlib. That was really a fucking nightmare. Now I'm trying to work out the details of the database back-end. libdbi should help with that.

But it won't do anything to help with Ryan Seacrest's new daytime talk show. Man, that looks awful.

Okay, one more thing. Here is a tip for people writing to or calling technical support: Please do not say that your problem is "urgent" or explain that you can't "go forward" on your new "project" until the problem is solved. I saw some people doing it on the libdbi mailing lists, and let me tell you, that is absolutely the wrongest way possible to go about asking for help with Free Software. It's also a pretty stupid way to ask for help with proprietary software, too. In my shameful experience "technically supporting" the latter, I can assure you that it does not in any way speed us up in getting back to you. The only thing that speeds things up is being crystal clear about what the problem is so we can figure out what the fuck you're talking about.

I think that I shall never see a web-comic with a disparity between quality of art and quality of writing as great as the one in this one. Woof!

Everyone Likes A Good Joke

Man, I just crapped out a salty sea of diarrhea. It's so uncomfortable, having stomach cramps. I don't know what to do when I have one. It's probably worse even than being nauseated. I'm still sick with whatever I picked up at the office. However, I am doing alright because I am home watching Time Bandits and later, Intacto. Last night, I watched 13 Ghosts. That movie is awful. I mean, it's not awful, but it's pretty disappointing. Check this premise: This guy wants to build a machine powered by fucking ghosts. Awesome. And what does the machine do? It tells the future. That's real cool. See, the movie's actually a remake, and you can tell that the writers really wanted to make it something more intense, like, "the machine can make a bomb that is more powerful than the sun and it's primed to explode," but they grudgingly stick to the original. I like the idea that seeing the future is something that only Satan, or, you know, whoever, can do. But after that, it's all downhill.

Here's a joke:

Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An Abelian grape.

So it snowed today. Pretty incredible -- looking outside my window some of the stuff was swirling around in a column, while some other bits were just falling in sheets. I was feeling too sick to go play in it, but it sure looked fun. Another joke courtesy of this Slashdot article.

Old programmers don't die, they're just cast into the void.

That's what I'd like to have happen to me, I know. I'm starting to feel too lousy to write in my blog any more, but are you guys aware of this clever attempt to sway the political willow tree in the direction of the left? For the non-technical, here's how it works: Actually, I just realized I don't really understand how it works. It has something to do with establishing a link between the desired concepts, optimally two specific phrases that haven't been paired before, and then promoting that novel pairing by searching for it a lot. That's right -- search queries do affect Google's PageRank system. Two more jokes:

In C++, you can see your friends' privates.

and

Two strings walk into a bar. The first says, "Barkeep, I'll have a whiskey sour."
The second string says, "Hey, that sounds good. I think I'll have one too.(&!@(**(#$^(*(*&@(*!$&(*@#&(*(!@#)(*(*@!$(&!@( *#&@!(#^$*#$_(*@!&#*&@!$#"
The first string says to the bartender, "Excuse my friend, he isn't null terminated."

Hey, when I was searching for the IMDB link for 13 Ghosts, I came across a little gem called 13 Erotic Ghosts. Apparently it doesn't have much to recommend it, except I do notice that one of the stars is Aria Giovanni, who is always bored and hot looking, and who is willing to do unbelievably filthy things on camera. I wonder if Royal Video has it for sale. Finally, one last joke:

Q: What did the webserver say to Slashdot?
A: HRRRRRNNNnnnnnnghhhh......

Okay, two more:

[A red sign posted on my professor's door]
If this sign looks blue... SLOW DOWN!

That one was for Ted. But I think we all need to slow down a little bit.

I'm Sick

That's right. I felt like such doo-doo this morning at work that I put some serious thought into going home and answering e-mails through the VPN. But now I'm feeling *slightly* better, so I may just stick it out. But you are all a'going to get sick, too, because I snuck into your kitchen last night and licked all the forks.

I got a lot done on OpenRPG since last we talked, Interweb. Producing output for my messaging format was made easy by libxml2's xmlwriter API, though using it means I have to require people to install at least version 2.6.0. I also solved the DTD problem -- that is, that there is no simple way, in libxml2, to construct a DTD in-memory with against which to validate documents. I solved the problem by keeping my DTDs in a special directory of my source distribution and then using a shell script to convert them into valid C files at compile time, using the

char foo[] = { 'a', 'b', 'c', ... };

style of array declaration. The script gets automagically invoked by the Makefile generated by Automake. Thank you, Automake -- I still have absolutely zero idea how to write a valid Makefile on my own. Finally, I also sketched out the network transmission system that's going to go in libopenrpg_common. I'm using zlib for compression, which has the added benefit that the receiving side can tell from the structure of the incoming compressed stream when the entire message has been sent. NEAT.

I was peeping the web site for Xouvert, which is the "people's" fork of XFree86, and I came across the home page of this guy, who is the project leader. His home page said he was married to a fairly prominent Philipino journalist and blah blah blah, so I peeped her page. Apparently, they got into a car accident together and she took the brunt of the injurious force and has since been pretty disabled. Though she's had two kids since then, and he's also apparently deserted her because he wanted white babies? What?! This guy sounds like a dick. Not that I really know anything about either of them. But he must not update his page very often.

Anyone want to see a movie with me today or tomorrow? I rilly rilly wanna see:

• Bad Santa (not to be confused with www.badsanta.com)
• The Triplets of Belleville

Tom pointed out that I was maybe a little bit hard on that play Clouds Hill -- that, e.g., the fanatical Navy intelligence guy was supposed to be a bit of a charicature. I'd argue that in the country we're living in today, such fanaticism is recognized by everyone as fanaticism, but it's become a kind of mark of true devotion. You know, like, that kind of behavior is what's called for these days. It's like those creepy housewives who go to those big Christian circus events and have seizures where they spin around on the floor, gibbering and dribbering. It means you really believe.

It Is Snowing, Cretins

Yeah, it just snowed. Incredible.

I dragged Tom to a reading of a really awful play last night. The play was called "Clouds Hill," and was a production of the Manhattan Theater Club, sponsored in part by the Sloan Foundation, who, for some reason, want to promote depictions of science in the arts. It was about two professors and a Middle Eastern visiting student at a small liberal arts college. One professor, a square-jawed ex-Navy chemist, thinks the student might be a terrorist in training; the other, a hysterical and hopelessly naive sociology professor won't believe him. Guess which is right. Well, the play is a mess and really doesn't have anything to do with chemistry, or any kind of science for that matter. However, you will learn that American men are pathetic because they're afraid to oppress women; that the desire to oppress women is something that we share with Middle Easterners, but we have to kill them because we have some tangential assets to protect; and that the United States Navy is MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN COMPREHEND, MOTHERFUCKER. At best, "Clouds Hill" is a poorly written "very special" episode of a sitcom; at worst, it's an inflammatory piece of jingoist bullshit.

However, I did recognize this guy in the audience who was in Hal Hartley's movie, Amateur. He played the wild-haired CPA who bites all the cops after he gets electrocuted by the porn-magnate's gangsters. He's merely an okay actor, but he is weird looking. It was almost as cool as when I saw Liev Schreiber at Han's Deli licking all the cinnamon off the rice pudding. That man is an animal.

Speaking of oppressing women, NPR was talking about Afghan women being prevented from voting in the upcoming democratic elections by their husbands / imams / whatever. I've said it before -- that whole country ought to be be razed and replaced by a Planned Parenthood or maybe a Doctors Without Borders clinic the size of a Wal-Mart -- but maybe we can start by summarily executing men who try to stifle the female vote. That probably means all of them. And that goes for the U.S., too: Those administrators in Florida who mislabeled all those black people as felons in the last election to keep the minority vote low should get the gun-clap, too, but maybe they should be put in a zoo first. Think about it -- it's pretty treasonous. It makes me as mad as the new Spy Kids / Silmarillion cross-over (forthcoming from New Line Cinema) makes Tom.

Flatliners is actually a pretty good movie.

***ITEM***: David Rees apparently does the lecture circuit, and he's gonna be in B-town next Sunday. Peep from his site:

Sunday, December 7
Brooklyn, NY
Sunny's Bar
253 Conover Street
(718) 625-8211
3:00 PM

Get your questions ready! ("What was in the briefcase? Was it Marcellus Wallace's soul?")