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.