Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Truth about high school

(via Miscellaneous Heathen)
Mr. Ironside, who had his own page in the yearbook, had been elected valedictorian in a vote carefully orchestrated by his peers and designed to embarrass him.

But when graduation night arrived, he gave a speech that transformed a malicious high school joke into an ad libbed sequel to Revenge of the Nerds.
Dissing your stupid high school classmates is always cool, but what the heck is going wrong with a world when Valedictorian is an elected position? Isn't that title supposed to be for the kid with the best grades?

Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Jackpot!

Hope you like reading about the Stofonians. When I visited my parents house this weekend, I found the mother-load of canonical "Robertson's Planet" material. Maps, illustrations, timelines, king lists, etc. Expect my conlang pages to get a lot of updates as I scan in artwork and type in data. I already know that a lot of what I have up on the web now was wrong. For instance:
  • The Last War did not end in E.Y.E. 1835, it ended in 1858.
  • My online maps of the Stofonian empire leave out the entire elikaln of Sibinni.
I promise that after getting this out of my system, I will return to something slightly more normal like bitching about Unicode or something.

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Scofield Reference Notes (1917 Edition)

The Scofield reference Bible is one of the main texts of dispensationalism in America.

More comments about Scofileld's comments here.

Friday, December 19, 2003

bad software never dies; it just gets an increasingly fanatical crowd. The BileBlog

Thursday, December 18, 2003

When did Microsoft officially embrace end-user registry editing?

Something I never noticed until just now: the built-in help for the Windows 2000 command prompt (and presumably XP) actually tells you to edit the registry in order to do things like changing the completion key. We've all been doing it for years, but I'm still surprised to find it in the online help. All this time I've felt like I was using an undocumented hack. But no, "cmd /?" says:
Command Extensions are enabled by default. You may also disable
extensions for a particular invocation by using the /E:OFF switch. You
can enable or disable extensions for all invocations of CMD.EXE on a
machine and/or user logon session by setting either or both of the
following REG_DWORD values in the registry using REGEDT32.EXE:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\EnableExtensions

and/or

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\EnableExtensions
and so on and so on.

Apparently regedt32 (why not regedit, btw?) is Microsoft's officially supported interface for customizing the behavior of the command prompt. (Would it have been so much harder for them to just put this stuff in control panel?)

It seems like back in my tech support and sysadmin days, any technet article that involved registry editing had a disclaimer like "we don't really support this and it might hose your machine". I see no such warning from cmd /?.


Wednesday, December 17, 2003

SelectSmart Selectors

(via gammatron)

My presidential candidates:
  1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)
  2. Libertarian Candidate (66%)
  3. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (54%)
  4. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (46%)
  5. Bush, President George W. - Republican (45%)
  6. Clark, Retired General Wesley K., AR - Democrat (45%)
  7. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (44%)
  8. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO - Democrat (42%)
  9. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT - Democrat (39%)
  10. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, OH - Democrat (37%)
  11. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (37%)
  12. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol, IL - Democrat (33%)
  13. Phillips, Howard - Constitution (21%)
Boy, am I in trouble next November..

My top ten religions:
  1. Mainline - Liberal Christian Protestants (100%)
  2. Mainline - Conservative Christian Protestant (79%)
  3. Orthodox Quaker (77%)
  4. Liberal Quakers (73%)
  5. Seventh Day Adventist (70%)
  6. Reform Judaism (68%)
  7. Unitarian Universalism (68%)
  8. Eastern Orthodox (66%)
  9. Roman Catholic (66%)
  10. Orthodox Judaism (51%)
The Seventh Day Adventist is surpringly high.

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

RFCs-in-HTML Development Page

This page collects some software and proposals aimed at developing an HTML submission format for RFCs, to supplement and (perhaps) eventually replace the traditional flat-text primary format.
Even without looking at the mailing list archives (it's apparently been nothing but spam since 1999), it's obvious that nothing has been done on this project in a while. Otherwise they'd at least be using newer buzzwords like XML.

Requests For Comments

HTML-ized versions of a lot of RCFs, but not including our friend 2616 (but they do have 2068). This archive seems to have stopped being updated somewhere around 2400 or so.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

Finally! An HTML version of this RFC, so that you can make links and bookmarks to chapter-and-verse. Generated by rfc2html, which somebody needs to run on every RFC in existence.

IMDB: Trivia for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

When an Elven Warrior falls off the Deeping Wall, the scream is the famous "Wilhelm Scream", commonly used in scenes where someone is hit or is falling to their demise.

Domain name of the month

Domain: LauraBush.info
Title: Website: Guns don't kill computers...
Content: shootin' stuff, NES, Goonies
there are some things that just need to be shot. Take soccer balls, for example. Nobody likes soccer balls. Sure, the Europeans pretend to like soccer, or "football" as they stubbornly insist on calling it. You know what? They're faking it. Why? Just to confuse the rest of the world. Also, 95% of all computers are practically begging to be shot. The last time your Compaq froze didn't you want to pump it full of hot lead? Of course you did.

The Wilhelm Scream

Apparently its even older than the Star Wars fans were able to dig up: 1951!

Monday, December 15, 2003

The Wilhelm Scream

So it didn't go unnoticed when a particular scream appeared once in each Star Wars movie -- The stormtrooper plummeting down the Death Star chasm; a trooper tossed from the freezing platform by an enraged Wookiee; a normally tight-lipped Weequay plunging into the grisly maw of the Sarlacc. It had to be more than coincidence. There had to be a story behind all this.

Watch the movie. After hearing that scream dozens of times, you'll think you're playing a video game. Which makes me wonder, where can I find a list of games that use this? I bet it's not limited to Star Wars or Lucas-related games, either.

Joel on Software - Biculturalism

Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.

I missed this when it actually happened, but ESR's online version The Art of Unix Programming reached 1.0 in September: "the content that went to Addison-Wesley's printers". I'll have to read more of it before I can tell what is different from the previous draft.

Accessible Header Images With CSS And XHTML

Offers a couple of different hacks around accessibility problems with classic "Fahrner Image Replacement". Plain old FIR is good enough for me, currently. If you only use it to replace the page header, the text of which is identical to what is in the <TITLE>, and the CSS to do all of this is marked as "@media screen" to make non-graphical devices ignore it, do you really care if it disappears in weird situations like when somebody is using a graphical browser set to not download images?

Friday, December 12, 2003

Again with Blockquotes

No, I haven't discovered some previously unknown CSS pseudo-element that lets you stick a ">" character at the start of every line in a blockquote. It's just a background image, unfortunately.

On platforms without fixedsys it will not look like the same font as the text, and will not line up one-to-one with the lines either, as shown by these screenshots. (Mac screenshot courtesy of iCapture).

I am going to start lobbying the W3C right now to correct this gaping hole in the CSS spec. Of course, MSIE wouldn't support it anyway.

Lorem Ipsum - All the facts - Lipsum generator

(possibly via Novarese)
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.
The apparent source of "lorem ipsum" is actually quite profound and wonderful.
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur? Cicero
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? Cicero

More Stylesheet Wankery

I've changed my mind about blockquotes. Now they look like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum Who Said It


Thursday, December 11, 2003

slacktivist: Left Behind Archives

(via Miscellaneous Heathen)
It's easy to dismiss these loopy ideas as a lunatic fringe, but that would be a mistake. The widespread popularity of this End Times mania has very real and very dangerous consequences, for America and for the church. ("Premillennial dispensationalism" -- the technical terms for what these prophecy freaks teach -- teaches that the Sermon on the Mount does not apply to Christians living today. It also undermines the core of Christianity -- Jesus' death and resurrection, and the hope of that resurrection. These are not tangential matters for Christians.)

The cultural standard bearer for these Very Bad Ideas is the "Left Behind" series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. These books have become so popular that every pastor in America is now confronted with the task of gently, pastorally explaining to their congregation why the theology of these books is misguided and misguiding.

I'm not a pastor, so I won't be pastoral here. These books are evil, anti-Christian crap.

The Limbaugh Lunch

Yesterday I took my first "Limbaugh Lunch" in a long time. This consists of getting in my gas-guzzling, environment-destroying car; crusing through a greedy capitalist fast food chain to load up on the greasy fried food that is making America's children so obese; and eating while driving around listening to Rush Limbaugh. The only way it could be more Rushtastic would be if I drove an SUV, or if I was smoking or taking prescription painkillers.

This used by my usual way to get roadgeeking and railfanning done. I used to do it about once a month. I had to stop for a long while because the windows of my old car got to the point where they wouldn't roll down anymore, so it was impossible to do the drive-through thing.

Among the things I saw while railfanning were a UP unit still in SP red and gray paint but with yellow and red road numbers that looked like they were just stuck on, and a CSX switcher near the ADM and Mead plants. I took a really crappy picture of the switcher with my cell phone. You can't even make it what road number it is. I have increased the brightness and contrast somewhat, at the expense of making it look even fuzzier.

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Hacking and Refactoring

The open-source movement and agile programming may be converging. While reading Martin Fowler's excellent book "Refactoring", I realized development by refactoring is a sharp description of the normal style of open-source hackers.

Bruce Eckel's Web Log

I love Bruce Eckel (I learned Java from him, after all) but I have to admit this is a strange format for a blog.

TechnoTourette: I don't want to hear about it Mr. dotnet

(via John D. Mitchell)
It is a MS marketing manager wetdream when all the people with the most traction on a competing community can't seem to be able but babble their heads off about csharp and dotnet in every public space they have the privilege (our duty) to appear.

Worse is worse

The notion that worse is better has become something of a truism in the programming industry. The usual examples are the C language (worse than lisp, but it dominated anyway), Unix (or more recently, Windows) as opposed to Multics or VMS, and (in a completely different arena) VHS tape over Beta. Each of the dominant technologies, it is pointed out, was worse than the alternative, but the worse technology became the standard anyway. The moral to the story, or the reason that people bring the principle up in argument, is to convince whoever is on the other side of the argument that we should set our sights on the quick and dirty, less elegant solution to a problem, because "worse is better."

Of course, this received wisdom is just so much crap.

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

I can hear a train going by, presumably on the Norfolk Southern line a few miles away in downtown Norcross. You can hear them pretty well when its cold outside, even over the sound of a computer, TV, furnace, and the omnipresent background roar of Spaghetti Junction. I actually can't remember the last time I went railfanning, its been so long. I better take advantage of my current work location in Midtown with its proximity to Howell Junction and even the Inman/Tilford area within a lunchhour's drive. I can actually look out my window every day and see NS and Amtrak trains going past Peachtree Station. Sometime in the next six months my employer will relocate and I'll really never get to go down there again.

Heal Your Church Web Site

"Design tips for church and charity websites and webpages."

Monday, December 08, 2003

Code Style: Font sampler

The Code Style font sampler is a reference point to the most common fonts available on Web users' computers.

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Permalinks

I don't know if this is a well-known design rule or not, but it should be, and I've just implemented it: the colors used for permalinks should be consistent with those used for "visited" links, even if they can't be automatically identified as such by the browser. A permalink never points to content that the user hasn't seen already (except in blogs where the permalink is also how you get to the comments... but that's a different issue). The permalinks here were previously way too prominent, and I couldn't reduce their font size without breaking my previous decision to use 100% for everything.

Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Font guide for webmasters

Ironically, for a site intended to help people write portable web pages, this looks a little funky in Mozilla.

How to Design a Commercial Website

  • Your website is an advertisement.
  • Make it enjoyable.
  • Actually sell something.
  • Give something away.
  • Gather email addresses.
  • Let your visitors contact you.
  • Optimize each page for the search engines.
  • Don't neglect the little things.
This is about as far from the academic/W3C/blogger/CSS-P culture as you can get. Pure, mercenary capitalism drives you to create text-based and accessible(er) websites. After all, the seach engine is the most common text-only browser.

Source Ordered Columns

I think I got this from Zeldman. Can't really remember, though. At first I thought this guy must be onto something revolutionary, until I got to the punchline:
Many site designers would like to have three source ordered columns, and have the two side cols be of a fixed width while allowing the center col to fluidly fill the remaining screen space. Sadly, this just isn't possible.
No miracles here, folks.

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Remember how on an audio tape recorder, in order to record you had to hold down the "record" button while you hit "play"? How many VCRs carry on that metaphor? I just realized how strange it is that I own one that does.

I recently become aware of the following:
  1. There exists a Sunday comic strip based on The Simpsons
  2. Simpsons fans tend to hate it
  3. It does not appear in the Atlanta Journal Constitution nor in any of the newspapers that I read when I visit relatives in other cities
Does anybody out there have The Simpsons in your paper? Does it suck?

Marissa Marchant - Music

(via Miscellaneous Heathen)
4 album set available for $2000.00 and $1000.00 for one cd. This is how much music should be worth, if there is talent there. They are cheapening music and talent, by selling it like it is fried chicken at kfc.


Wow. I haven't listen to enough of the music to make many comments about the presence or absence "talent", but anything is only worth the amount of money that someone will pay for it. Who is paying 1000 USD for this woman's music? This has to be some kind of joke, right?

Quote of the Day

The ascot is the new dickie.
Mo Rocca

My archive from June 22nd still can't be Googled for some reason. Maybe being re-linked from here will make the spider crawl over it, although you'd think that the archive index would do that. I was trying to find this posting and I had to go dig for it manually.

Monday, December 01, 2003

Computer illogic

Despite great promise, technology is dumbing down the classroom.


(via Slashdot)
Take the much vaunted effort to close the "digital divide." Popularized by the Clinton administration, this initiative was aimed at the poor, who were supposedly being shut out of social and economic opportunities because they had fewer computers than wealthy families do. This campaign has been so appealing that, according to a recent U.S. Department of Education report, computers are now more prevalent in poor schools than in wealthy ones. Yet political and education leaders haven't stopped crying about this terrible "divide." Meanwhile, the schools' new technology riches took the real divide between rich and poor children -- the educational divide -- and widened it.
One of the most common selling points for computers in schools, even in first and second grades, is to prepare youngsters for tomorrow's increasingly high-tech jobs. Strangely, this may be the computer evangels' greatest hoax. When business leaders talk about what they need from new recruits, they hardly mention computer skills, which they find they can teach employees relatively easily on their own. Employers are most interested in what are sometimes called "soft" skills: a deep knowledge base and the ability to listen and communicate; to think critically and imaginatively; to read, write and figure, and other capabilities that schools are increasingly neglecting.

Does anybody else find it easy to confuse those Weatherpixie images on people's blogs with something that is supposed to be a picture or representation of the blogger? If so, the most disturbing contrast can be had by comparing the image on the main page of Dreaded Purple Master with the real picture on his bio page.

ajc.com | Business | This little piggy's coming home

The only real picture of the old pig that I've been able to find is on this page. For some reason I read this article already and missed that photo. I didn't notice it until I found the link to it from Dreaded Purple Master.

Peachtree Street - Additional Footage

Video clip of an interview with one Cecil Alexander features some still photos of the Pink Pig.

I rode the Pink Pig

This article features what was apparently a Rich's ad, with a drawing of the Pig.

ajc.com | Photo gallery | Pink Pig

Why is it so hard to find decent pictures of this thing? This is a picture of the real pig, the old one, not the thing I rode.

My caption for this picture: 4-year-old Luke Woodall peered out from the inside of the giant pig monster that had swallowed him a few minutes earler, shortly before being dissolved by its gastric juices.

I wonder if that kid is related to the Woodall brothers I went to junior high school with, Chuck and Tony. Chuck was a huge Nelson-like bully of a kid. I can still remember the day that Chuck first grokked the concept of nerdness: "Man, all them retards is smart!". Before that, he had simply called all of his victims "retard".

Wal-mart Mob Tramples Shopper

A mob of shoppers rushing for a sale on DVD players trampled the first woman in line and knocked her unconscious at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

On Thanksgiving day, I went out and bought a paper so we could look at all the sake ads for Black Friday. There were ads for really cheap DVD players at several stores.

I heard about this on the MJ morning show (I know, I know, schlocky nationally syndicated corporate radio show and all... it was either that or listen to the regular guys make jokes about Ozzy's childhood abuse story.) Somebody called in to tell MJ about how they'd witnessed a guy in New Jersey pull off his own artificial leg to use as a weapon in a DVD-player-related confrontation.

We ended up sleeping in friday morning and going to Wal-mart and Lowes on friday night. Things seem to have died down a bit. Wal-mart was pretty busy, but Lowes was absolutely normal. The next day we went to Lenox Square, the throbbing heart of all Atlanta shopping. It was no more crowded than any other saturday. Later that night I went back to Wal-mart for 1-hour film that I dropped off the day before and forgot to pick up, and it was still much more crowded than The Mall. I wonder what this says about the economy.

Dahlia and I rode the Rich's Pink Pig. From the pictures that were on display, the original Pink Pig (at the long-defunct flagship Rich's store downtown) was a marvelously unique ride. The car was suspended from an overhead track, giving the illusion of flight. The new "pig" is basically an electric train, just like every other kiddie train ride at every other mall. Oh well. One of the things I planned to do this weekend was to take my daughter on her first train ride, and this was sorta close.

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Now I Wanna Sniff Some Paperwhites

We have been growing paperwhite flowers in our living room window. Today was the day when they finally started to bloom... and smell! They smell like the inside of an empty 35mm film can. I'm serious! Well, somewhere between that and permanent magic markers. And the frog you dissected in 7th grade. That window is right behind the couch where I am now sitting, and the smell is definately going to my head.

My wife's laptop finally got back from the people who do all the warranty-work for Circuit City.

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

What I Do About Font Sizes

Since I'm talking about font sizes, this is my own stylesheet's one and only rule for font sizes:
* { font-family: "fixedsys", "monaco", "vga", "fixed", monospace; font-size: 100% }

Yes, that's an selector of "*". That means everything. I want everything on my blog to be the same size. What size exactly? Whatever size your computer is configured to show it. I really don't know or care; all I want is for h1 and h2 and h3 and h4 and p and td to all be that size. This is weird. Most people don't want to do this. It's part of the "gimmick" of this blog. Just like there are rock bands who dress up like robots or astronauts or 18th-century aristocrats, this is a web page dressed up like a fixed-size text terminal. And just like those bands, some would argue that the gimmick actually gets in the way of the content. I'll eventually get tired of it and try a different gimmick.

A List Apart: Fear of Style Sheets 4: Give Me Pixels or Give Me Death

Zeldman's original uber-influential article in which he states that CSS font-size is simply broken in so many ways that you shouldn't even try to use it. This was back in 2000, and all subsequent research in this area (like the two previous blog entries) have been attempts to "prove me wrong, kids! prove me wrong!".

CSS Design: Size Matters: A List Apart

Lots of hackery to get around browser-specific bugs.

sane css typography

..wherein we present a method of text sizing in CSS that actually works consistently across our browsers without offending designers.

Well, at least without offending some designers. This kind of stuff can still cause quite a ruckus on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets.

Monday, November 17, 2003

1337 domain name roundup

ell three three tee
http://www.l33t.com (DNS error)
http://www.l33t.net (personal site. cars, photography, IM)
http://www.l33t.org (DNS error)

one three three tee
http://www.133t.com (looks like one of those search pages that typosquatters always send you to)
http://www.133t.net (DNS error)
http://www.133t.org (web design and hosting company)

ell three three seven
http://www.l337.com (store selling t-shirts that say "1 4/\/\ L337")
http://www.l337.net (personal site. includes blog. apparently intended only for IE users.)
http://www.l337.org (another squatter-style link farm)

one three three seven
http://www.1337.com (HTTP authentication required)
http://www.1337.net (page about "what is it and how to be 1337")
http://www.1337.org (ASCII art, web comics, anime, Star Trek)

three ell three three tee
http://www.3l33t.com (timed out)
http://www.3l33t.net (DNS error)
http://www.3l33t.org (DNS error)

three one three three tee
http://www.3133t.com (DNS error)
http://www.3133t.net (DNS error)
http://www.3133t.org (DNS error)

three ell three three seven
http://www.3l337.com (DNS error)
http://www.3l337.net (DNS error)
http://www.3l337.org (personal site. mostly photography. lots of pictures of someone named Anna)

three one three three seven
http://www.31337.com ("celebrating seven years of no content")
http://www.31337.net (timed out)
http://www.31337.org (redirect to "Hackerz.com - News from the hacking community!")

Saturday, November 15, 2003

The first Usenet appearance of the word choad.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Snyders of Hanover - Seasoned Potato Chips

I have tried the "Coney Island" flavor potato chips. They really taste like hot dogs! This is not neccessarily an endorsement. Its almost scary, how meaty they taste. I don't see "pig lips" or "beef by-products" on the ingredients label, so I assume the flavor is something else. Probably the same stuff they put in actual hot dogs to make them taste the way people expect them to taste.

Jargon File: Acme

Notice that the definition for ACME sums up the plot of all Road Runner episodes in one paragraph. Now why couldn't ESR have done the same for other Jargon-inspiring sources, such as Lord of the Rings and Star Trek?
This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of “Road-runner” cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Road-runner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices — rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large wooden crates labeled prominently with the Acme name — which, probably not by coincidence, was the trade name of a peg bar system for superimposing animation cels used by cartoonists since forever. Acme devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Laptop problems - power/battery or motherboard?

My wife's laptop (Toshiba 1905-S301) seems to be having similar problems to what is being discussed in this thread. Trying to decide if I should try to fix it myself or not.

1. While plugged into AC, it would suddenly switch onto the battery as if
it wasn't plugged in. Jiggling the AC adapter connection would start it
back on AC usually, at least at first.

2. After a while even when it indicated that it was on AC power, the
battery would slowly discharge. Again, jiggling with the connector would
get it so the battery would start to charge up very slowly.

3. Eventually, the battery would appear charged but go from 90% to 1% in a
matter of minutes. Even when plugged into AC it wouldn't work, either
running for a few minutes til it cut back to the battery (almost depleted).
Tried running it just on AC without the battery in, but that wouldn't even
start. If we leave it plugged it overnight sometimes it will charge up and
run for a while, other times it just sits dead.

Fortunately it has not yet reached "stage 3". When I was a desktop tech at Sprint, I cared for a sizeable fleet of Toshiba laptops and never saw anything like this. But that was 4 or 5 years ago and the laptops in question were top-of-line business class models for their day (Tecra models 440, 550, 720, 730, 7000, and 8000, and the occasional Satellite "Pro" 420... man I can't believe I remember that many model numbers!), not this crunchy herbal retail stuff. I seem to recall at least some of those models didn't even have an little DC jack soldered to the motherboard, but plugged straight into the AC. And they spent most of their time safe in their docking stations anyway, where jiggling their power chords wasn't a possible problem. Although I have to admit that if I had run across something like this at the time, I probably would've just copped out and replaced the whole computer.

Monday, November 10, 2003

In search of the ugliest guitar sound

(most of this is taken from a email conversation that occurred about a year ago)

Although I rarely if ever play electric guitar anymore, I've lately decided that it would be cool to be able to faithfully emulate the sound of a guitar plugged directly into the microphone jack of a Tascam PortaStudio analog cassette 4-track.

Anyone who has ever fooled around with this kind of equipment - which means most amateur or semi-pro musicians - would instantly recognize the sound. The distortion is so utterly unlike either tube distortion or 60s-germanium-tranistor-fuzz that it seems unlikely that even the cheapest commercial distortion pedal sounds as ugly and mid-range-y.

Literally, this is a sound that in the guitar world, everybody gets but nobody wants. Because everybody associates it with people too cheap or lazy to use a real "direct box" or mic up an amp, it sounds like incompetence. Or at least it did. In the digital age, this sound will be something that future generations will have to emulate, the same way that kids in the 80s bought distortion pedals to try to sound like an old tube amp!

You might be able to get a similar sound by using an analog pre-amp that was intended for microphones rather than guitars. Or just use a real 4-track, since they're pretty small and portable (hence that name "PortaStudio"). However, it would be more fun to have a special purpose effect pedal just for this! If I had time I would build one. Its probably just some op-amp circuits. I think I'd call it the Powercow. Anybody out there with enough time on your hands to try and hack together one of these?

I've also noticed something else from listening to my old mixes. The Tascam Porta02 has no built-in equalizer, but EQ can obviously be added during the mixdown stage by a separate mixing console. However, almost anything you do with the EQ tends to de-emphasize the rawness of the sound. For the real deal you need to lay off the EQ and let all the strange overtones created by the distortion show through in the mix.

Songs of my own which used the PortaSound as a distortion source:

Ain't Got a Woman
The City Is Dead
At Your Mercy (electric guitar panned hard left)
Friendly Martians, Julie (lead guitar on final fadeout solo, flanger added during mixdown)
Powercow (extreme distortion, but somewhat mitigated by EQ)
I Might Be a Nerd (lead guitar, mitigated by EQ)

The Four Eyes dot Com

(via Slashdot) "Sacramento's nerdest band!"

Sunday, November 09, 2003

Why Does Open Source Suck?l

You know the type I am talking about: This is the person that everyone goes to for advice, that can fix any problem in the system, that is the only person who truly understands the architecture, that knows how to get the builds to work, that feels that he/she is personally responsible for getting things done, and who always actually wants to quit and go work somewhere else where they might be able to become a nobody, which for them would be a permament vacation, because they could perform a typical job in their sleep and still do an exemplary job at it.

Now of course you are thinking this type of person is you.

Against TCPA | TCPA would TAKE your FREEDOM | This is NO FAKE

Why so many people and small to medium companies see one of the biggest dangers of this century in TCPA/TCG (Trusted Computing)?

We drafted a small text, after which you shoule be able to answer it for yourself.


Friday, November 07, 2003

"Rules are just things that somebody with an army made up"
-- Wanda Sykes

I have updated my OEM character chart page with some additional screenshots, comparing a "full screen" DOS running inside VMWare to a normal windows prompt. The VMWare version looks a lot more like real DOS.

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Today I went to the ATM in the lobby at work, to get money to pay for my flu shot (yay for cash only medicine!). For the first time, I got some of the new twenty dollar bills. They look like normal paper money that has had orange kool-aid spilt on it.

Interpreting the Dates From the Margins of your Bible

First of all, remember that editors and printers supplied any BC dates you may find in the margins or notes of your English Old Testament in modern times.

Windows update is finished, and is only waiting for me reboot. Strangely, in Mozilla pages that specify "Arial, sans-serif" as the font now look like "System" (see screenshot). IE seems to have stopped working at all.

As I write this, I am running Windows Update for the first time in a looong time. I wonder if my PC will ever work again..

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Programmer Indicted on Charges of Shady Code Accounting

Will software companies and perhaps even individual engineers one day be held accountable for egregious errors and poor development and testing methodologies?

In a way, I hope not. I don’t want creativity and innovation and all its necessary bleeding edges to be dulled for fear of attracting legal sharks. Yet at the same time, when tinkering becomes profession and cool creation becomes a critical set of business processes driving the world’s engines, I can imagine some sense of accountability enforced for the betterment of the craft and profession.

Contracts and Interoperability

Bill Venners: But if the contract is followed, shouldn't the most recent version work for all users of that DLL?

Anders Hejlsberg: In theory, yes. But any change is potentially a breaking change. Even a bug fix could break code if someone has relied on the bug. By the strictest definition you realize that you can do nothing once you've shipped.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Politics (Last Request)

Claim: Newspaper publishes death notice requesting that memorial gifts for the deceased "be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office."

Status: True.

Chukker's last hurrah melds angry punk rock with passed-out customers

And so it goes.

Friday, October 31, 2003

Steal This Flvxxvm Florvm Button

I went ahead and made a Flvxxvm Florvm button and uploaded it to Steal These Buttons just for yucks. Who knows, maybe it'll spread around the web.

Thursday, October 30, 2003

More Free Þorn!

I also remember that around 1995 or 1996 I scanned in a picture of either Jennifer Love Hewitt or Neve Campbell (I can't remember which) from TV Guide and put her into one of my railroad pictures so that it looked like I had an ultra-realistic model train layout so impressive that movie star chicks would come over to my dorm room look at it.

I don't seem to be able to find that one in the wayback machine.

At this point I can't possibly make things any worse by pointing out that during this period my "recording studio", where most of the Flvxxvm Florvm catalog was recorded, was decorated with a picture of Helen Hunt. This was later replaced by Drew Barrymore.

Damn this Google Images thing is fun.

Jeff's (Old) Picture Collection

Thanks to the wayback machine, I am able to recover some of the pictures that disappeared when the harddrive of job.cba.ua.edu died in 2000.

Includes a picture of a Soviet submarine (clearly marked CCCP) being repaired/scrapped in Bayou La Batre.

At that time, I was extremely pleased with my ability to scan pictures of girls I knew into photoshop and manipulate them until they looked like some kind of cheapass Andy Warhol ripoff.

¡Vive la Biblioteca!

Cloverleaf

The proprietor of us-highways.com has repaid me for linking to his site by not only linking back to me, but also by designing a Flvxxvm Florvm image! Gee, it's almost small enough to a steal-this-button.

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Why CAFEBABE?

Strangely enough the magic number for .class files was chosen long before the name Java was ever uttered in reference to this language. We were looking for something fun, unique and easy to remember. 0xcafebabe was better than the second runner-up, 0xdeadbabe. :-)

(see also Google's archive of the same discussion)

cat linux.words extra.words | sort | uniq | perl -lne "$_ = lc; tr/olzs/0125/; (length == 4 or length == 8) and /^[0-9a-f]+$/ and print"
abba
abbe
abed
abe1
ab1e
ab05
acce55ed
acce55e5
acc01ade
ace5
add5
a1a5
a1ba
a1ec
a1ee
a1fa
a10e
a150
a55e55ed
a55e55e5
babe
bade
ba1d
ba1e
ba11
ba5e
ba5eba11
ba5e1e55
ba55
bead
beda221e
bed5
beef
bee5
be1a
be11
be55
b1ab
b1ed
b10b
b10c
b0b5
b0ca
b0de
b01d
b01dface
b011
b00b
b005
b05e
b055
cab5
cafe
ca1f
ca11
ca11ab1e
ca5caded
ca5cade5
ca5e
cede
ce11
c1ad
c10d
c0a1
c0a1e5ce
c0bb
c0ca
c0c0
c0de
c0ed
c01d
c01e
c01055a1
c001
dada
dade
dad5
da1e
da2e
dead
deaf
dea1
decea5ed
decea5e5
deed
de11
d0dd
d0e5
d01e
d011
d05e
d02e
ea5e
ebb5
ee15
e1ba
e11a
e15e
face
fade
fa11
fa2e
feed
fee1
fee5
fe11
fe55
f1ea
f1ed
f1ee
f0a1
f0e5
f01d
f00d
f001
f055
1abe11ed
1ab5
1ace
1ad5
1a05
1a55
1ead
1eaf
1eaf1e55
1ee5
1e55
10ad
10af
10be
10eb
101a
105e
1055
0b0e
0dd5
0de5
0ff5
01af
002e
0510
5afe
5a1e
5a12
5cab
5caff01d
5ca1ab1e
5ea1
5ea5
5eed
5ee5
5e1f
5e11
51ab
51ed
510b
50b5
50da
50d5
50fa
501d
501e
5010
2ea1
2005

Take out the length restriction to get a much longer list, but 4 and 8 are valid for 16- and 32-bit integers.

Get rid of the tr/olz/012/ if you really want a short list, although its cool because it spells "trolls".

It's also weird that we get c0ca, but no c01a.

Of course, you can combine the short words. Some of the classics (you should know where you've seen these before) are of this type:

cafebabe
deadbeef

IBIBLIO: /public/ftp/pub/linux/libs

I often find myself wanting to get a *nix "words" file on a Windows box. They're useful for things like making a list of all possible English words that are valid hexadecimal numbers, finding all possible domain names that haven't been registered yet, and stuff like that.

The linked directory contains linux.words in tar.gz format, which any decent Windows compression program such as WinZip or WinRAR should be able to handle, assuming you don't already have tar and gzip on your machine.

The current version appears to be linux.words.2.tar.gz.

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Hip Hop in Your Dreams

Here the lyrics to the third verse of "Virgin Killer" by the Scorpions, as I heard them for years:

Fly like you fear!
Fly like you fear!
Feel it!
Fly to his cage!
Fly to his cage!
Taste it!
Know how to run away...
He's a virgin killer!

No, no, no, can't you see?
No, no, no, can't you see?
You're a demon's, you're a demon's,
You're a demon's desire!

Airforce screams
sadistic magazines.
Watch out!
Seems like every day,
dreams taken away!
Well, if you can find a way..
but he's a virgin killer!

No, no, no... (repeat chorus)

Garbage in the streets.
apocs in your dreams.
Look out!
Jocks in the picture.
Answers in the scriptures? Forget it!
Try to get a way from there,
he's a virgin killer!

(repeat chorus)

Now, read the real lyrics and tell me that they are better than mine.

Don't ask me what "apocs" are. The character from the Matrix (which links all of this to yesterday's postings)? Dude, I heard this in 1987. When I was a desktop technician at Sprint, the internal trouble ticket system used A.P.O.C. to mean "alternate point of contact"... but still, what did I think it meant when I was 12? Another interpretation that I've entertained, but never very seriously, over the years is "hip-hop in your dreams".

White Hot: Masters of Metal

This was the first "metal" album I ever bought, back in the 80's. I think I was in the sixth grade. This was the album from which I learned what heavy metal lead guitar was supposed to sound like. I think I finally lost the cassette during one of my past two moves. The track listing that I remember was:

Rock You Like A Hurricane – Scorpions
Run Runaway – Slade
Distant Early Warning – Rush
Tell Me What You Want – Zebra
Holy Diver – Dio
You Got Another Thing Comin’ – Judas Priest
Stayed Awake All Night – Krokus
Heaven and Hell – Black Sabbath
I Am (I’m Me) – Twisted Sister
Come on Feel the Noize – Quiet Riot

Before this, the only metal I'd heard were bands like Bon Jovi and Motley Crue that were played on top 40 radio at the time (WABB). This was before I got into Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix. This was the first time I had heard, or even heard of any of these bands. Including Black Sabbath and Rush! ("Distant Early Warning" was a relatively non-metallic introduction to Rush, and delayed my becoming a Rush fan by several years.) Ronnie James Dio features heavily on here, once with Dio and once with Black Sabbath (it would be years before I ever heard any Ozzy Osbourne period Sabbath).

After this, I bought a whole lot of similar metal compilation tapes. The first band on here that I "got into" was the Scorpions. I picked up the cassette of Virgin Killer at K-Mart.. but that's another story.

Internet searches have turned up some interesting variations. This is the google cache of a page from the apparently-defunct K-Tel records website.

It shows a couple of extra songs, which I presume were either on the LP or on some later CD version, but not on the cassette because I sure don't remember them:

Lay it On The Line – Triumph
Don’t Stop Runnin – Y&T

The cover is also shown on this Dio fan page. I actually had several of these things. Many of them share the same artists and even the same songs. Note especially Crazed: an all-out Metal Assault.

This page, from the discography of the Canadian rock band Kick Axe shows an album called White Hot: An All Out Metal Assault. This appears to be some kind of cross between the White Hot that I owned and the aforementioned Crazed. My only guess is that they mixed things up for the Canadian market, possibly throwing on the Kick Axe song to meet "Canadian content" regulations? (no Rush, though!)

Monday, October 27, 2003

Macromedia - JRun TechNotes: Macromedia JRun Server 3.x: Running JRun Server in Distributed Mode with IIS and JRun Server Each on Its Own Machine

Every time I think it's safe to forget how to set this up, it comes back and bites me again at work.

Horror, the Grotesque, and the Macabre: A Christian Appraisal

Interesting essay, especially since it provided me with the Gerard Jones links, but it mostly makes me ask: is Alien really a "horror" film?

What exactly is the difference between sci-fi and horror, anyway? When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein it was probably considered sci-fi, because there was nothing in the science of the day to refute it. By the time they got around to making movies out of it, it's genre had shifted to "horror" simply because it's science was so outdated as to now be the stuff of fantasy. But really, the story didn't change.

Will the same thing happen to Alien?

Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence

Amazon page for the book by Gerard Jones, who is also behind the interesting Media Power for Children organization.

achilles 0.27

Any security mavens out there? This is the only version of Achilles that I know anything about. Surely there must be a newer version that this, from August 2001.

ChildCare Action Project (CAP): Christian Analysis of American Culture

Nope... PluggedInOnline, in spite of its connection to Focus on the Family wasn't what I was thinking of. I was thinking of CapAlert.com, which I originally heard of from this thead on rec.arts.bools.tolkien.

Just comparing the HTML of this site to the other two lets you know that this is a much more hard-shelled form of Christianity. This site isn't maintained by people who care about making pretty websites; they have more important issues to tackle. Here is a direct link to a list of all of their movie reviews. Warning: all of their links will open in a new window unless you undermine it by forcing them into a new tab instead. If you're using IE, there's no hope for you.

Their Matrix page features the following ironic disclaimer. It sounds almost like somebody was out to get them!
The original of this report (1999) was posted under a domain owned by the Star-Telegram newspaper in Fort Worth, Texas. Since then, Star-Telegram has terminated their ISP services and their domain name has been taken over by a pornography site. The old version of this report still contained Star-Telegram's domain name in many links, thus taking today's users to the porn site.


And Speaking of Tolkien, the three sites I've just blogged have some pretty big disagreements amongst themselves about the LOTR movies (and presumably the book too).

Plugged In Online

More "Christian" reviews of popular movies. It seems like this one used to have little bar charts just like DecentFilms.com, but they seem to have gotten rid of them. Or I could be mixing it up with yet another site.

Is "The Matrix" Gnostic or Christian?

The Matrix is neither meaningfully gnostic nor meaningfully Christian. Rather, it is simply a sci-fi action-adventure tale told in a mythic mode. While influences from both biblical motifs and pop mysticism are in evidence, the film references these sources — along with many other sources, including classical Greek culture, Lewis Carroll, and Star Wars — in a way that is of aesthetic significance, not religious.
This main purpose of website is to review movies from a Christian (and apparently Catholic) perspective, including rating them for "moral and spriritual value". This article, separate from the main review of The Matrix, is much more interesting.

Sunday, October 26, 2003

Gadget may wreak traffic havoc

Via Slashdot.

I remember back in the early 90's the rumor was that traffic lights would change if you flashed your headlights with just the right time in between flashes. I'm still not sure if it worked.

Friday, October 24, 2003

The BileBlog | Death to GUIs

For a while I was afraid that Hani was getting soft. The Bile is Back!
I'm heartily sick of vendors pimping their latest gizmos with shiny demos and hordes of marketers squealing that 'people buy with their eyes'. I'd like to stab those people in their eyes with a butter knife. Let's see them buy 'with their eyes' then.

The Joel on Software Forum - Curse of the 4.0

We have a project in the works that would normally be released as v4.0. One manager insists that the number 4 be skipped for the reasons that other softwares with v4.0 have been poor, and the word for 4 in Japanese also means death, so Japanese people won't want to buy it.


People on this forum keep mentioning that Word for Windows skipped from 2.0 to 6.0 to compete with WordPerfect 5.1. While that may have been part of it, remember MS Word for DOS?

The last version of Word for DOS was also 5-point-something. I always thought that the Windows version skipped to 6 so that the DOS users who were being abandoned would feel like they were upgrading when they switched to Windows.

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Re: Why Bother (Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0)

A stack of reasons - mostly relating to adoption within the workplace. As soon as I fire up Mozilla in front of a newbie they comment along the lines of 'playing games huh' or similar.

Im not suggesting the monster gets replaced with some prick with a laptop looking serious while rubbing his chin as his foxy secretary takes notes in their walnut and leather office - but something a little more businessy wouldn't hurt.

Branding gives you things to hang onto. Some people like their jeans more because missy elliot wears then (or says she wears them). I'd like Mozilla more if I didnt look like a dinosaur geek everytime it starts up.

Sliding Doors of CSS: A List Apart

In addition to demonstrating an interesting use of background images, this makes a point about how CSS has actually led to a simplification in web design:
It’s no wonder that pure text-based navigation, styled with CSS, is leaping back into web design. But most CSS-based tab design so far is a step back in appearance from what we used to do — certainly nothing to be included in a design portfolio. A newly adopted technology (like CSS) should allow us to create something better, without losing the design quality of previous table hacks and all-image-based tabs.

mezzoblue § A Typeface Fantasy

This discussion of how the "fantasy" font family got to be included in CSS reminds me of my own wonderings about how various things got into Unicode.

Art 1992-2002: Émail aimé (duck-rabbit and rabbit-duck)

(via Novarese)
Duck season!
Wabbit reason!
Duck season!
Wabbit reason!

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

C++?? : A Critique of C++

Another in the series of anti-programming-language links. This was actually one of my Mozilla bookmarks, but it has apparently changed locations since the last time I used it.

In the course of bashing C++, a fair amount of criticism is also heaped upon C; or at least upon C++ for keeping so close to C. And when bad ideas have been taken from C++ into Java, this is pointed out.

It's from 1996, so it's at least one version of the ISO standard behind for both C++ and C, but really not all that much much has changed.

A List Apart

... is back!

Mailman Considered Harmful

by Jamie Zawinski.
I keep hoping that maybe someday the clue-elves will arrive in the night and sort this out, but it's been years, and it hasn't happened yet. (And yes, I've sent these complaints to the developers too. I'm still waiting for the elves.)

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

SamSpade.org

Long-standing web interface for running whois queries, traceroutes, and stuff like that.

I found this by Googling for the street address of a company. Google turned up their whois records from SamSpade!

In the interests of reverse voyeurism, I have uploaded a copy of the bookmarks.html file that I really do use every day at work, with only file:// URLs and links to internal sites removed. Probably contains lots of broken links.

Critical Dates and Signifcant Dates - J R Stockton

This is, fundamentally, a list of Critical and Significant Dates, which is not quite the same thing as a list of dates which ought to be used in testing


20 Year Archive on Google Groups

I don't see a link to this anymore on groups.google.com... I had to use Google to find it!

They never did add the suggestions that I sent to them for things to put on the timeline. I think I nominated the first mention of "Seinfeld" and the first use of "Java" to refer to the programming language rather than to the Asian country or to coffee.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE meets THE SHIEK OF ARABI

This is article is claimed by its writer to be the original use of the term "universe" in the sense that it is normally applied to comic books: Marvel Universe, DC Universe, etc.

Monday, October 20, 2003

Prince Valiant and Comics Revue

Apparently the homepage of Comics Revue, with a snail mail address for ordering.

Its been so long since I subscribed to a comic that $45 a year seems steep. But considering that the cover price appears to be $5.95, that's actually a pretty good deal. Now, the question of whether each issue is worth six bucks (or even the $3.75 that it works out to at the subscription rate) to I who last paid 75 cents a pop, is something that I'd like to be able to answer by checking out back issues at my local library. I bet they don't have it..

Don Markstein's Toonopedia: Comics Revue

Comics Revue is possibly the only sustained effort to reprint American comic strips on a regular basis, where the material has mostly been chosen according to aesthetic considerations rather than what was available or what was cheap. From the beginning, its editorial decisions have been driven mostly by knowledge and appreciation of the comics form on the part of the people putting it out
I haven't read comics on a regular basis since I cancelled my X-Men subscription in 1991 because I wanted to spend more time and money on computers. But this looks like something I could really get into.

When I was about ten years old, I got some junk mail from the Smithsonian Institutition offering me "membership" in their organization. My parents agreed to pay for it, which turned out to be the same thing as a subscription to Smithsonian magazine, and endless offers to buy various books published by them. The only book we bought was The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics ( see here and here, which I ended up reading cover to cover many times.

Reprints of pre-1950 strips are hard to find in the bookstores and even public libraries among the endless Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes collections. I had no idea that all this time there's been a monthly publication devoted to this sort of thing.

King Features Syndicate - Comics

Who knew that Katzenjammer Kids was still in print?

The interesting thing is that, after 106 years, loosely phonetic transcriptions of English spoken with extreme foreign accents (German in this case) is still funny enough to enough people to keep a comic strip going; since that has always been the main gag here.

Don Markstein's Toonopedia: Barney Google

The name "Barney Google" is familiar to anyone who ever watched a TV retrospective of comic strips — he's the guy with the "goo-goo-googly eyes" in the 1923 Billy Rose song they always play in such retrospectives. Many newspapers use his name in the title of one of their comic strips. And in 1995, he was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in its "Comic Strip Classics" series of commemorative stamps.

But how many people actually remember seeing Barney Google in a comic strip?

Don Markstein's Toonopedia: Snuffy Smith

Snuffy Smith, one of Hootin' Holler's more ornery and sawed-off residents, was introduced on November 17, 1934. Within a few weeks, he and Barney were pals, and not too long after that, he'd become co-star of the strip. By the late 1930s, the name of of the strip had become Barney Google & Snuffy Smith. In 1954, Google left the hill country but the strip's focus stayed, and Snuffy was its sole star. Today, Barney's name is still part of the strip's official title, but Barney himself is seldom seen.

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Why I Hate Personal Weblogs

As we can see, clearly weblogs are fucking retarded as a general rule. Most weblog authors either think they have something important to say (self-centered and egotistical authors), or believe that they have an audience that cares what they think (delusional and irrational authors.) What can be plainly seen is that most weblog authors need something to push them back into the real world from the self-centered and delusional world they have created for themselves.
I resemble these remarks.

UNIXUX: Click on the cursor.

(via JWZ) I haven't read enough of this to figure out if it is the entire classic "Unix Hater's Handbook" or what. No, I don't think so. But there's still some meat here.

The Java Hall of Shame

An even more outdated anti-Java page. Note that criticizing Java for performance is just too easy, so I'm only going to bother with pages that mainly bitch about something else.

java sucks

by Jamie Zawinski. Some of this is outdated, which is understandable since Jamie appears to have left Java never to return after writing this. Other things I flatly disagree with. And comparison with Kernighan on Pascal makes this look like the overgrown blog posting that it is. However, its interesting to find out that there's more to Mr. Zawinksi than hist oft-cited list of reasons for leaving Netscape. Here's a whole page of mostly nerdy rants.

The Art of Trashing Computer Programming Languages

Kernighan's paper is course one of the best and best known anti-language tracts, but it is far from the only one. The web is full of anti-C, anti-C++, anti-Java, anti-Perl, etc. critiques. Much of which the languages in question roundly deserve. But it can also be a challenge to strain out the FUD, especially when looking at Usenet and Slashdot and other "forums". So I won't look at those. I'm going to try to find good old fashioned papers or full-fledged web sites devoted to intelligently letting the air out of the tires of popular languages. It still might take me a while to sift them out.

Top Notchitude

Ken Arnold lists some of his favorite CS papers, including a link to the HTML version of "Why Pascal..."!

Lysator: Programming in C

Back in 1994, when I was first learning C, this was one of the first pages I found about it. Except for the addition of the C99-related links, it has not changed at all in either content or presentation.

Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

I found it on the first try. Why on earth does the mighty Ken Arnold insist on referring to the PS version?

The Pascal which this paper criticizes is of course long gone. Later versions of the language had few of these defects, and were used frequently for serious projects.

Now, of course, Pascal's role in education has been largely usurped, first by Ada and then Java (or so I hear); it's popularity in writing shrinkwrap applications for DOS/Windows has long since been lost to C++ (a fate shared with its old nemesis C); any role it might ever have had in internal business app development was lost to VB when companies switched from DOS to Windows; and as far as I know it never had much to do with the Web or "e-commerce" programming at all; and of course it lost out to C in the Unix hacker community and the open-source world, at least partly because of the influence of this paper.

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

Another classic.
Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will be any--no inventions that will do for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity what electronics, transistors, and large-scale integration did for computer hardware. We cannot expect ever to see twofold gains every two years.

Friday, October 17, 2003

Are Programmers People? And If So, What to Do About It?

If we accept that programmers are humans, one primary and interesting consequence is that human factors issues can be properly applied towards the tools they use. I'm not talking here about IDEs, which have GUIs that are clearly subject to human factors analysis. (Answer: They mostly suck.) I am speaking about the more basic tools programmers use every minute they do their work: programming languages and APIs.
Also includes a link to Kernighan's "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language" in PS format. This is one of the foundational texts of the Unix/C geek culture, and it isn't available in a HTML? Even a PDF would at least make it slightly more convenient to read.

SCons: a Software Construction tool

A Python-based alternative to make and ant. Looks interesting.

grieve with me, blue master chickenz

I have been working with SGML/XML stuff for a few years now, and have seen a number of uses for it "as a technology". Many of these were theoretically good ideas, some of them even worked, and a huge, overwhelming majority were just bad jokes. I will describe here the jokes, and what went wrong. I want to make it clear from the onset that I do like XML in general, and use it all the time, and have no problem with its continued adoption. I am merely making an argument about what I think people are doing wrong with it, and suggesting an alternative.
He goes on to say some pretty nasty things about, among others, MathML. SML (Spacecraft Markup Language) truly has to be seen to be believed.

The Sum of Ant

by Ken Arnold ( via Joel's forums)
First, let us give ant its due. Ant is designed to be a portable way to replace make. Ant was to be platform independent, so the obvious implementation choice was Java, which is fine, mostly. And the obvious data format for the project description -- saying what needs to be built -- was XML, which is not fine, as we shall see.

Ok. Quotes from other people:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
Get used to it.

First I decided to chuck useless "web safe" colors from my stylesheet. Then I realized that this allowed me to use more authentic "DOS" colors like #000080 instead of #0000CC. Then I realized that my stylesheet wasn't sufficiently DOS-like, since it had things like boldface headers and impossible background/foreground color combinations. After a few minutes of futzing around trying to make it be more prototypical, I decided to go to a real DOS app for inspritation. Borland's IDE products had one of the most successful DOS text-based interfaces of all time. So there you go. My blog now suggests Turbo Pascal as stronly I could stand to make it in half an hour.

The one thing I haven't figured out what to do about yet is using italics for blockquotes. Until I figure out a better way to set apart stuff that other people said from what I said, being consistent with Slashdot is more vital than being consistent with DOS.

oldfaithfulcomputer.com - Software and Supplies For That "Old" Computer

This site is dedicated to helping you find software and supplies for that "old" IBM compatible personal computer. No software listed on this site requires a computer faster than a Pentium 133. Many programs in the DOS section will even run on an 8088. Of course, they all will run on the newer, faster computers.

Thursday, October 16, 2003

Quit Slashdot.org Today!

Reasons to stop reading Slashdot and suggestions about what to read instead. Doesn't appear to have been updated any time recently, but then again not much has changed in this area.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Non-Dithering Colors in Browsers

The original inventor (well, popularizer, anyway) of the "Web-Safe Palette" declares it dead. I still maintain that limited color choices will stick around because people who write stylesheets by hand like to be able to type three-letter abbreviations like "#666".

Ok, this is the last thing I'm going to do with that OEM character set thingy. So much of our DOS heritage is being lost that I had to do something to preserve it. But now I'm done. I promise. Anyway, here it is in HTML.

  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0   ☺ ☻ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ • ◘ ○ ◙ ♂ ♀ ♪ ♫ ☼
1 ► ◄ ↕ ‼ ¶ § ▬ ↨ ↑ ↓ → ← ∟ ↔ ▲ ▼
2   ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
3 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
4 @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
5 P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
6 ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
7 p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~ ⌂
8 Ç ü é â ä à å ç ê ë è ï î ì Ä Å
9 É æ Æ ô ö ò û ù ÿ Ö Ü ¢ £ ¥ ₧ ƒ
A á í ó ú ñ Ñ ª º ¿ ⌐ ¬ ½ ¼ ¡ « »
B ░ ▒ ▓ │ ┤ ╡ ╢ ╖ ╕ ╣ ║ ╗ ╝ ╜ ╛ ┐
C └ ┴ ┬ ├ ─ ┼ ╞ ╟ ╚ ╔ ╩ ╦ ╠ ═ ╬ ╧
D ╨ ╤ ╥ ╙ ╘ ╒ ╓ ╫ ╪ ┘ ┌ █ ▄ ▌ ▐ ▀
E α ß Γ π Σ σ µ τ Φ Θ Ω δ ∞ φ ε ∩
F ≡ ± ≥ ≤ ⌠ ⌡ ÷ ≈ ° ∙ · √ ⁿ ² ■  


How about a table, so that we can use a prop-width font? Þe olde Times New Roman actually has the best male and female symbols, I must say. Nice big round ones, not those little shrunk up things like the other fonts.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
0
1 §
2 ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
3 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
4 @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
5 P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
6 ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
7 p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~
8 Ç ü é â ä à å ç ê ë è ï î ì Ä Å
9 É æ Æ ô ö ò û ù ÿ Ö Ü ¢ £ ¥ ƒ
A á í ó ú ñ Ñ ª º ¿ ¬ ½ ¼ ¡ « »
B
C
D
E α ß Γ π Σ σ µ τ Φ Θ Ω δ φ ε
F ± ÷ ° · ²  

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Ok, if you really really want to be able to run a program to produce this character chart on your own PC, here it is.

I re-wrote it in C so that I could get a compiled executable, since QBASIC is an interpreted language. (Yes, I know about the QB compiler, I even used it once, but even I don't have that anymore.) Compiled with Turbo C 2.01, tested on W2K. Source code provided.

There is really no way to do this thing justice in a "DOS window" you must run full screen DOS (alt+enter) to see the characters the way God and IBM intended them to look. There is as far as I can tell no way to get an exact pixel-for-pixel screen capture of a full screen DOS application, so I can't show you. You've got to run it yourself.

You will also notice that any attempt to copy and paste this character chart into a windows app will lose many of the characters, especially 0x07-0x0A and 0x0D. One more reason why people tend to not know about them.

Monday, October 13, 2003

Update on the Mystery Characters

Remember when I said I didn't have time to dork around with BASIC programs to demonstrate the IBM PC screen display codes?

Well, I lied. If you are lucky enough to be running a version of DOS or Windows that still comes with Qbasic (and if you aren't I can't help you), you can run this program to generate a complete chart. I have a screenshot, which because of Geocities' linking policies must be placed on a separate page.

Homer Simpson voice: "Heh heh, far out man. I haven't seen a POKE in years." (qv)

' INIT THE SCREEN
SCREEN 0
DEF SEG = &HB800
CLS
cols = 80

' DRAW THE VERTICAL INDEX
FOR i = 0 TO 15
POKE ((i + 1) * cols * 2), ASC(HEX$(i))
NEXT i

' HORIZONTAL INDEX
FOR j = 0 TO 15
POKE j * 4 + 4, ASC(HEX$(j))
NEXT j

' DRAW ACTUAL CHARACTERS
CHAR = 0
FOR i = 0 TO 15
FOR j = 0 TO 15
POKE ((i + 1) * cols * 2 + 2) + (j * 4 + 2), CHAR
CHAR = CHAR + 1
NEXT j
NEXT i


No, I don't want a T-shirt of this. It's incomplete. It omits the secret characters for codes 0x07-0x0A and 0x0D. It is apparently somewhat difficult to get Windows to display these, which probably explains their absense. Notepad, for instance, will display 7 and 8 if you use the Terminal font, but the rest are interpreted as literal control characters, which is of course what you would expect. If a program emits any of these characters to stdout, all four are intepreted as controls and no characters are displayed. Which leads me to believe that the afroementioned GIF is a screenshot of such a program running in a console window.

But they exist, and they have official Unicode mappings. See this document, which identifies the missing characters as:

• 2022 07 -- # BULLET
◘ 25D8 08 -- # INVERSE BULLET
○ 25CB 09 -- # WHITE CIRCLE
◙ 25D9 0A -- # INVERSE WHITE CIRCLE
♪ 266A 0D 02 # EIGHTH NOTE


The characters displayed above may or may not look like what was actually used on the IBM PC. I'm sitting here looking at pictures of the real deal in my Pink Shirt Book, and they are vaugely similar. On Windows, at least, the "Courier New" font does them better justice than our old friend Fixedsys.

Note that although the official Unicode name for U+266A is "eighth note", the actual glyph shown in the Pink Shirt Book looks more like a sixteenth note. Is this a genuine error in the mapping file supplied by Unicode.org?

The original way to display these character was to poke them directly into video memory with BASIC or assembly language, skipping stdout altogether. Mr. Price obviously didn't have time to make a program to do that, and so far neither have I. I have decided to cheat by consulting the Unicode specs.

JimPrice.Com - ASCII Chart and Other Resources

Where Joel apparently got his code chart GIF.

Joel on Software - The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
In this article I'll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. All that stuff about "plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits" is not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, and if you're still programming that way, you're not much better than a medical doctor who doesn't believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.
Very simple, and somewhat Windows-centric (what else would you expect from Joel), but still I'm included to agree with the above sentence.

Also includes this cute .gif of the entire cp437 encoding:

I'd like a T-shirt of that.


Common UNIX Printing System

The Common UNIX Printing System ("CUPS") is a cross-platform printing solution for all UNIX environments. It is based on the "Internet Printing Protocol" and provides complete printing services to most PostScript and raster printers.

Update to my dorkiest and most self-indulgent webpage. On my conlang page, I've added some older "non-canonical" text files. Read at your own risk.

Saturday, October 11, 2003

US Bureau of Engraving and Printing

What is it with so many U.S. government agencies with .com websites? They have the whole .gov to themselves, they are they only government in the world who can use it. (Same thing goes for .mil.) There seems to be some idea in the public sector that .gov and .mil domains are good enough for their employees to look at, but that anything viewed by the general public has to be a .com because all of us stupid citizens out here think that if it isn't a .com it isn't a real website.

Yesterday, at least one local radio station reported that it was the last day to use the old 20 dollar bills, before they ceased to be legal tender. I guess it could've been a joke. The words "hoax" and "shouting fire in a crowded theater" also come to mind. I think they really just didn't know what they were talking about.

Friday, October 10, 2003

141 Cinema

One of the hundreds (if not thousands) of websites with half-sarcastic reviews of movies both cool and lame. But unlike many of those, these are actually pretty funny. Part of the 141 Empire.

Thursday, October 09, 2003

Gallery of embarassingly stupid early sigs

These were originally done on a mainframe, and the EBCDIC characters actually made an Evil Grinn, with a backslash where the "›" is now. Apparently the translated-to-ASCII version actually messed up some people's terminals just by viewing it! Also notice the incorrect Latin. Not sure why its all uppercase, either.
 ______________________________________________
|  JEFF ROBERTSON   <JROBERT1@UA1VM.UA.EDU>    |
|----------------------------------------------|
|  UNIV. OF ALABAMA | EGO SUM ! |    ›   /     |
|  PO BOX CO        | COGNITO ! |   ›_____/    |
|  TUSCALOOSA, AL   | VOLO !    |              |
|  35487            |           |  EVIL GRINN  |
|___________________|___________|______________|


()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
() JEFF ROBERTSON     <JROBERT1@UA1VM.UA.EDU>   ()
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
() UNIV. OF ALABAMA () EGO SUM !  ()   ›   /    ()
() PO BOX CO        () COGNITO !  ()  ›_____/   ()
() TUSCALOOSA, AL   () VOLO !     ()            ()
() 35487            ()            () EVIL GRINN ()
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()


()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
() JEFF ROBERTSON   <JROBERT1@UA1VM.UA.EDU>   ()
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
() UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA              -_  _-  ()
() PO BOX CO   TUSCALOOSA, AL 35487   -____-  ()
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
THESE ARE SOMEBODY ELSE'S OPINIONS, NOT MINE....


--------------------------------------------
| JEFF ROBERTSON  <JROBERT1@UA1VM.UA.EDU>  |
| UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA                    |
| P.O. BOX CO, TUSCALOOSA AL, 35487        |
| (205) 348 - 5465                         |
--------------------------------------------
Here's to you, Vicki Robinson, Joltin' Joe has left and gone away !
Hey hey hey 

Per that last entry, here are some of my most embarassingly stupid early posts.

Q: logical or

people who think 3.5" is a "hard disk"

longest USENET thread ever

At Poobie's wedding, there was some discussion of people being embarrassed by their old Usenet posts found through Google. I figured I'd go ahead and air out all this dirty laundry now.

Here is approximately every post I have ever made, by email address. The addresses are roughly listed in order from most recently to least recently used, though there was a period in the mid 90's where the middle four all overlapped in usage.


jeff_robertson@yahoo.com
jrobert1@midgard.cba.ua.edu
jrobert1@job.cba.ua.edu
jrobert1@guardian.cba.ua.edu
jrobert1@ua1ix.ua.edu
jrobert1@ua1vm.ua.edu


Ardalambion

Of the Tongues of Arda, the invented world of J.R.R. Tolkien. The most comprehensive site about Tolkien's invented languages that you are likely to find on the net.

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

Early Music FAQ

The web's largest reference for European Medieval and Renaissance music since 1994.

Pythagorean Tuning and Medieval Polyphony - Table of Contents

Haven't read this yet, looks pretty long. The guy who wrote that last page I blogged says it's a "must read", though.

Understanding Temperaments

More temperment stuff, this time from the author of that last applet.
The need for temperament arises because it is impossible to have octaves, fifths, thirds, etc., all pure at once, or, in other words, because the ratios of the different pure intervals are incompatible.

JavaTuner

This Java applet demonstrates various historical tunings and temperaments and allows one to experiment with them. It was developed to accompany a text on Understanding temperaments

Java Applets Educational Physics

The page title is English, but the rest of it is German. Some of the applets don't seem to work. This one is interesting, but I have no idea what it does.

Fourier Synthesis

More Java applets for playing with sound.

The vOICe Sonification Applet - Draw your own Sound

(via mindprod) I don't know if I've ever blogged this before or not. I seem to recall seeing it before I ever had a blog. Java applet converts pictures to sound in real time.

The Just Intonation Primer

(from the Just Intonation Network) The first chapter of a book on this subject. Good reading.

A Tour Up The Harmonic Series

Of course, the harmonic series is infinite, but the most common just intervals are found among the lowest harmonics. As one goes farther up the series one finds more exotic intervals, until at some point the new intervals are no longer musically meaningful. This limit is not fixed, but is a matter of aural familiarity and personal taste. (For this article, we'll stop arbitrarily at 16.)

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Definitions of tuning terms: index, (c) 1998 by Joe Monzo


MF Bliki: MovingAwayFromXslt

I think this may raise some real questions about XSLT. There's still much I like about the power of XSLT, but I hate the syntax and the walls you keep running into. I'm not going to convert my whole site over to Ruby tomorrow - most of the XSLT works fine - but I can certainly see my way to doing that at some point in the future. But the bigger question is whether you're better off with scripting language for this kind of task than XSLT.
I might use this as ammo the next time somebody at work starts beating the use-XSLT-for-everything drum.

Ian Bourke - Code Rage

(via BileBlog)
A catalogue of examples of bad code gleaned from many projects over the years. Use these examples wisely and avoid the stinky patterns that they promote
If this is really the worst code that Mr. Bourke has ever seen, I envy him!

Just Intonation Explained

Our modern system of tuning, called equal temperament, is a compromise. We divide the octave into 12 equal intervals not because it sound better that way - it doesn't at all, it's slightly buzzy with audible beating between sustained pitches - but so we can transpose any music to any key.
Many recent composers have come to feel that the compromise of equal temperament was a mistake. They feel that the musical logic of moving from any key to any other key became a priority at the expense of music's sonic sensuousness.

Damn Hell Ass Kings

Blogworthy because its named after a great Simpsons quote.

WORST EPISODE EVER

In case anybody is wondering:

The Simpsons started to go downhill when they started to trying to change things permanently. You know, like Apu getting married in one episode and still being married in the next. Maude Flanders dying and staying dead. (Bleeding Gums Murphy and Marvin Monroe don't count because.. well you know whu). Lisa becoming a vegetarian or Buddhist and staying that way. Stuff like that.

The Simpsons being a cartoon, the characters don't have to age. Nobody has to die. They don't have to add new cute children when the existing ones grow up. In short, cartoons are inherently immune to most forms of shark jumping. The writers/producers decided to voluntarily afflict change - the curse of live-action TV - onto one of the best animated series ever. (Yes, voice actors can quit the show or die or something, and both have happened to the Simpsons, but you can't blame the Simpsons problems solely on that.)

This has been my oft-stated opinion for years, and I'm sticking to it. Sure, the show was inevitably getting old. Sure, its better than having no Simpsons at all. But almost anybody can tell you that the 4th or 5th season was better than the 8th or 9th, and you've gotta draw the line somewhere.

The Irony Maiden

Another Daria fan site.

There was a brief period in 1997 when Crutcher Dunnavant and I proclaimed that Daria was a better cartoon than the current season of the Simpsons. Of course, by that time "Worker and Parasite" was a better cartoon than the Simpsons..

What smart people can do

A couple of years ago I was googling for references to the Mallet Assembly when I came across a web diary (most people didn't call them "blogs" yet) with the words:
the idiotic Mallet Assembly. They think they're so great just because they're different, when what they do is really just plain dumb. They come off like they're better than the fraternities because they're "smarter," yet they still have the same drunk parties, the same stupid initiations... It's all a sham, just another way of pretending to be different. And the sad thing is, the people involved think they've found their niche, their raison d'être. And it's nothing more than another false image, just as bad as being a republican or a sorority sister. No, worse, because at least those don't pretend to be something they're not.
I was surprised to find that a non-Malleteer would actually take the time to go Mallet-bashing, and the words generated some interesting discussion on the Mallet general mailing list.

Today I decided to see what the author of those words is up to now. The original diary with its (occasionally deserved, and I'm saying this as a Malleteer) indictment of Mallet is long gone. This (garnetsigma.com) appears to be a website of the same person, though. Apparently her analysis of Fight Club is a well-respected and oft-cited resource for serious Fight Club scholars.

Also, I think she is the author of these Daria fan fiction stories.

A googling of her old handle Invisigoth Gypsy turns up mostly broken links, but does reveal that her interests also include Anime, MST3K, Tiny Toons, Beetlejuice, and My Little Pony. All in all, pretty geeky. Exactly the type of person who normally feels quite at home at Mallet.

What's even more interesting to me is not so much what smart people can do, but what triggers those of us without any time on our hands to make some time anyway.
-- Philip Segrest